Abstract
In the second half of July 1598, Campanella set out for Calabria. At the end of the month he reached Nicastro, where he had the opportunity of seeing once again some old friends - the brothers Ponzio and Giovan Battista da Pizzoni. Immediately, he became involved in the complex jurisdictional conflicts between ecclesiastical and state authorities. In the course of several months of relative tranquillity at Stilo, he was able to complete some works that were later lost (fifty Articoli against the doctrines of Luis de Molina, a tragedy about Mary Stuart, representing her as a martyr for Catholicism, and a short work entitled De episcopo). He was also able to work on the Monarchia di Spagna once again. On 11 November he sent a short letter to Cardinal Giulio Antonio Santori. He asked that at Christmas the remaining period of punishment be remitted, in view of the six years of ‘trials’ that he had endured. He declared himself ready to obey, although he was very ‘tired.’ But in the first months of 1599 a tumultuous and difficult period began. It would continue to intensify in the spring and summer, and concluded with the catastrophe of the accusation of conspiracy, the tragic consequences of which would mark the rest of Campanella’s life.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Firpo, Bibliografia, pp. 182-184.
- 2.
The letter is in Baldini and Spruit, p. 185. On Santori, see Saverio Ricci, Il sommo inquisitore. Giulio Antonio Santori tra autobiografia e storia (1532-1602) (Rome, 2002).
- 3.
Amabile, Congiura, I, pp. 226-228; III, doc. 7, pp. 15-17.
- 4.
In 1887, Amabile published his two-volume Castelli which was intended to complete Campanella’s biography. The second volume included texts and short works, most of which had never been published before.
- 5.
Michele Baldacchini, Vita e filosofia di T. Campanella (Naples, 1840) with subsequent revised and augmented editions; on Alessandro D’Ancona, see the Discorso della vita e delle dottrine di Tommaso Campanella, a good 320 pages, added to the first of the two volumes of the collected Opere di Tommaso Campanella edited by him (Turin, 1854); Domenico Berti, ‘Tommaso Campanella,’ Nuova Antologia di scienze, lettere ed arti, s. II, vol. XL (1878), pp. 201-227, 605-616; vol. XLI, 1878, pp. 391-415.
- 6.
Vito Capialbi, Documenti inediti circa la voluta ribellione di F. Tommaso Campanella raccolti ed annotati (Naples, 1845).
- 7.
Many documents are drawn from the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, where the Strozzi papers conserve a precious if uneven collection of documents belonging to Jacopo Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII and Nuncio of Naples from 1592 to 1605. Other documents are drawn from the correspondence of residents and ambassadors (from Florence, Venice, and Constantinople) with their governments; those conserved in the Archives of Simancas, which include the correspondence between the court of Madrid and the Viceroy of Naples, are of particular interest.
- 8.
Appendix ad amicum, in Art. proph., p. 295.
- 9.
Amabile, Congiura, III, doc. 244, pp. 130-131.
- 10.
On Scipione Cicala - who was born at Messina to a Genoese father in 1544, taken prisoner as a young boy by the Turks and raised as a Muslim, and went on to have a brilliant military career in the service of the Sultan - see the entry by Gino Benzoni in DBI, vol. XXV (Rome, 1981), pp. 320-340. Regarding the role that he played in the Calabrian conspiracy, see Amabile, Congiura, I, p. 134ff. On the relationship between the Turks and the City of the Sun, see Noel Malcolm, ‘The Crescent and the City of the Sun: Islam and the Renaissance Utopia of Tommaso Campanella,’ Proceedings of the British Academy, 125 (2004), pp. 41-67.
- 11.
On Brother Cornelio, see Firpo, Ricerche, pp. 33-36.
- 12.
But three years later, he would break out prison in Naples, heading for Constantinople, where he would die a short time later in a brawl with a Janissary.
- 13.
Amabile, Congiura, III, doc. 319, p. 272; I, p. 327.
- 14.
Ibid., III, doc. 181, p. 93.
- 15.
Vita Christi, Theologicorum liber XXI, ed. R. Amerio (Rome, 1962), p. 118; Romano Amerio, Il sistema teologico di Tommaso Campanella, p. 229.
- 16.
See note 33.
- 17.
Amabile, Congiura, III, doc. 184, p. 94.
- 18.
Amerio, Il sistema teologico di Tommaso Campanella, p. 230.
- 19.
Amabile, Congiura, III, doc. 184, 94.
- 20.
Luigi Firpo, ‘Appunti campanelliani. XXXI. Tre relazioni contemporanee sulla congiura calabrese del 1599,’ GCFI, 41 (1962), p. 386ff.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 395.
- 22.
Ibid., pp. 392, 397-98. The third report is taken from the unpublished Istorie veneziane of the Doge Nicolò Contarini (1553-1631); for the reactions to the conspiracy of the Venetian government, see Gino Benzoni, ‘Campanella e Venezia: qualche appunto, qualche spunto,’ in Congiura di Calabria, p. 43-60.
- 23.
Amabile, Congiura, III, doc. 278, pp. 200-201; doc. 279, pp. 204-205.
- 24.
Narrazione, p. 301.
- 25.
See ch. 7, note 72; see also Vittorio Frajese, ‘L’Atheismus triumphatus come romanzo filosofico di formazione,’ B&C, 4 (1998), pp. 313-342.
- 26.
Dichiarazione, p. 102.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 108; on the signs, see also Prima delineatio,p. 133ff; Poesie, p. 496; Art. proph., pp. 295-296. On the prophecy of Arquato, see Germana Ernst, ‘Aspetti celesti e profezia politica. Sul Prognosticon di Arquato,’ B&C, 11 (2005), pp. 635-646, and the bibliography indicated there.
- 28.
Prima delineatio, pp. 123ff.
- 29.
Poesie, n. 62, pp. 259-260; Rhetorica, p. 839.
- 30.
Poesie, n. 72, p. 291; n. 62, p. 260. On the relationship between Giona and Campanella, see Germana Ernst, ‘“Nascosto in ciclopea caverna.” Natura e condizione umana in Campanella,’ in Il Neoplatonismo nel Rinascimento (Rome, 1993), pp. 65-81 and then in Ead, Il carcere, il politico, il profeta. Saggi su Tommaso Campanella (Pisa-Rome), 2002, p. 11-34, esp. pp. 31-34.
- 31.
Firpo, Processi, pp. 265, 267: ‘Che si pensavano che io era coglione, che voleva parlare?’
- 32.
Medicina, p. 590. For his entire life, Campanella would bear on his body the signs of the violence he had suffered, as testified to in the famous lines of the Curiosites inouyes by Jacques Gaffarel: see ch. 11, note 40.
- 33.
Quaest. morales, I, p. 8.
- 34.
Prima delineatio,p. 163.
- 35.
Firpo, Bibliografia, n. 76, p. 187. On the theme of prophecy, see Ernst, Il carcere, il politico, il profeta, pp. 61-102; Ead., ‘profezia,’ in Enciclopedia, vol. 1, coll. 303-317; the collected volume Tommaso Campanella e l’attesa del secolo aureo (Florence, 1998); Lina Bolzoni, ‘Prophétie litteraire et prophétie politique chez T. Campanella,’ in La prophétie comme arme de guerre des pouvoirs (XV-XVII siècles), ed. A. Redondo (Paris, 2000), pp. 251-263.
- 36.
Poesie, p. 71: ‘Chi si conosce degno di servire,/persegue chi par degno da imperare:/di virtù regia è segnale il martire./ Questi regnan pur morti, a lungo andare: vedi i tiranni e lor leggi perire,/e Pietro e Paulo in Roma or comandare.’
- 37.
Lettere, p. 67.
- 38.
Ibid., p. 79.
- 39.
See Lina Bolzoni, ‘Le città utopiche del Cinquecento italiano: giochi di spazi e di saperi,’ L’Asino d’oro, 4 (1993), pp. 64-81: 69ff.
- 40.
Anton Francesco Doni, I Mondi e gli Inferni, ed. P. Pellizzari (Turin, 1994), pp. 158-161.
- 41.
Poesie, pp. 63-64: ‘Talché, sforzati i savi a viver come/gli stolti usavan, per schifar la morte,/ché ’l più gran pazzo avea le regie some,/vissero sol col senno a chiuse porte,/in pubblico applaudendo in fatti e nome/all’altrui voglie forsennate e torte.’
- 42.
Girolamo Cardano, De sapientia, III, in Opera omnia, cura C. Sponii, 10 vols. (Lugduni: I.A. Huguetan & M.A. Ravaud, 1663), I, p. 556; see now the edition of De sapientia by M. Bracali (Florence, 2008), p. 207. For Bruto see Livius, I, 56, 7; there is praise for the simulation of madness in Nicolò Machiavelli too, Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio, III, 2.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ernst, G. (2010). The Conspiracy. In: Tommaso Campanella. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 200. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3126-6_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3126-6_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-3125-9
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-3126-6
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)