Portrait of Pietro d'Abano, circa 1476
Born in the 13th century, Pietro d'Abano was referred to variously as “the Great Lombard,” “the Conciliator,” and, in at least one case, a “great necromancer.” This scholar and physician faced various troubles relating to heresy or sorcery, and stories swirl around him of calling on demons or magically making spent coins return to his purse.
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Sources:
Browning, Robert. The Complete Works of Robert Browning. Ohio University Press, 2007.
Garin, Eugenio. History of Italian Philosophy, Volume 1. Translated by Giorgio Pinton. Rodopi, 2008.
Hasse, Dag Nikolaus. "Pietro d'Abano's 'Conciliator' and the Theory of the Soul in Paris," After the Condemnation of 1277: Philosophy and Theology at the University of Paris in the Last Quarter of the Thirteenth Century. Edited by Jan A. Aertsen, Kent Emery, and Andreas Speer. Walter de Gruyter, 2013.
Prioreschi, Plinio. A History of Medicine: Medieval Medicine. Horatius Press, 1996.
Tafu, Pedro. Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439). Translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental Science Volume 2. Columbia University Press, 1923.
Touwaide, Alain. "Pietro d'Abano, De venenis: Reintroducing Greek Toxicology in Late Medieval Medicine." Toxicology in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Edited by Philip Wexler. Academic Press, 2017.
Script:
In the early 17th century, today’s character would be described as a man “from a rural locality, of auspicious cognomen, a man most illustrious in genius, doctrine, and merits, [who] in a rude and unhappy age became the most fortunate and learned physician. Now he shines with rays eternal, investigator of all natural forces.”
“He gave the secrets of the Greek tongue to the Latin idiom by his power of assiduous practice and constant reading,” continued Giacomo Tomasini. He employed the virtues of herbs and stones, and the sure aspects of the sky. He opened the arcana of the medical arts and reconciled the conflicts of the past, uniting medicine, philosophy, astrology, and magic. He was obviously quite an accomplished fellow.
He was an early reader of the Greek classics, early at least in western Europe where his work predated that of Petrarch, the “father of the renaissance.” He was also a reader of ibn Rushd and ibn Sina, or Averroes and Avicenna, though the degree of their influence upon him has been debated. He is credited with the astrological symbols that decorated Padua’s Palazzo della Ragione before being burnt and repainted. He wrote at least 10 texts, as well as further translations, many of which were held to be authoritative for centuries after his death.
He was an instructor and scholar sometimes referred to as “the Great Lombard,” “the Conciliator,” and, in at least one case, a “great necromancer.” He may or may not have had dealings with demons or else denied their existence—it’s somewhat confusing, but either way it was a problem. He would be brought to trial for such transgressions, but it was only his body that would be burned and maybe not even that, perhaps just an effigy.
Today, we’re going to be talking about him.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast which mostly journeys around that world in the footsteps of its travellers but sometimes doesn’t go very far in the footsteps of those who didn’t travel all that much. It is a podcast with a Patreon, where the listening is earlier, more often, and in the blissful absence of advertising, and that can be found at patreon.com/humancircus. Thank you, all of you who have already done so.
And now that I’ve said all of that, let’s get back to the story.
It’s a standalone story today, though one that takes its starting point from a traveller who we’ve already covered and have done so quite recently, the 15th-century Castilian Pedro Tafur, whose writing was where I first encountered a mention of today’s character. I came across it in a few lines around the entry for Padua, where Pedro wrote of the great hall there and of its sculptured marbles. Two of them, he said, were dedicated to people of science from that city. The first of those was “Titus Livius, the historian,” and the second was a “Magister [Pietro] d'Abano” who Pedro would refer to as “a great necromancer.”
I was intrigued, obviously. That historian Titus Livius, or Livy as you may know him, was a Roman, a little before our period here, clocking in around the year 59 BCE and out in 17 CE, but as for the other man, Pietro d' Abano, his early 14th-century death put him right in our wheelhouse, and the promise of necromancy was pretty compelling too. Would it make a good Halloween episode, I wondered at the time. Our Pedro said that he’d been burned by the friars “for doing strange and wonderful things, such as drawing straight away to the harbour of Venice the ships of Constantinople, and other matters falling within the province of witchcraft.” But was any of that true? And who was this great necromancer, this practitioner of witchcraft, this unnatural mover of many ships?
The short answer, as you might have anticipated, is that he probably was not a necromancer, hence the whole not being the subject of a Halloween episode thing. There’s no risen dead here, no evil spirits or matters of that sort, or at least there probably weren’t. The longer answer begins in the 1250s, probably—I’ve seen as late as 1257 and as early as 1246, with 1250 being most common as the date of birth. It begins in the town of Abano, where the son of Constantius the notary was born, but it quickly moves to the city of Padua where Livy had started life and would return to from Rome in his later years, where Pedro saw and remarked upon the statues of the two of them there in the great hall.
Pietro studied medicine in Padua before travelling to Constantinople, to study Greek, I’ve seen it said, and possibly Arabic, or else to escape trouble from involvement in a murder though that doesn’t seem to be widely believed or even mentioned as a possibility. I’ve seen in one source the thought that maybe he never went to Constantinople at all, but rather spent his time on islands possessed by Venice, though that doesn’t appear to be a common thought either.
Pietro was away some 20 years at this point, and even if we accept, as most do, that he was there in Constantinople, the two decades do form a bit of lacuna in his story. It is known that he gained access to what historian Alain Touwaide has called the “most important scientific centre in Constantinople in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Hospital of King Milutin,” a scholarly complex constructed by the Serbian king who had once married the then emperor’s daughter.
There, he would have read the Problemata of Aristotle’s school, the work of Galen, and that of Dioscorides. He would have read the Greek classics since translated into Arabic in the centuries before. But did he stay there and read in the city that whole time, or did he travel elsewhere, perhaps going on to make pilgrimage or to some other destination, for learning or some other purpose entirely? I have seen it said that he may have travelled to Spain, England, and Scotland at some point, but it was probably not at this point. They are obviously not easily accessible locations for a quick outing from Constantinople. And speaking of travel, as we do here, what was the basis of his familiarity with Marco Polo? They apparently did speak, and would have to do so between Marco’s return in 1295 and Pietro’s reference to him in a 1303 text, not during this stretch of Pietro’s life then but in his next location.
The next we hear of Pietro, he was in Paris, studying, teaching, and gaining a reputation as “the great Lombard,” thriving apparently, though said to charge unusually high fees for his services. Indeed, there are various anecdotes from throughout his life of his asking a great deal from people, from those who he travelled out of the city out to treat to the popes themselves. And I’m not sure whether said anecdotes should be filed under “where there’s lots of smoke” or not, but they do tend to be judged as just another myth among the many that were attached to his person.
Pietro was in Paris in 1293 completing a translation from the French of an originally Hebrew astrological treatise, in 1295 alluding to himself in writing as Pietro of Padua in the city of Paris, and in 1303 recording that he had been in some measure of difficulty there. The Dominicans of St Jacques in Paris had accused him of 55 errors, which sounds like a lot, but the grace of god and the apparent assistance of the pope, or else someone in the papal sphere, had seen him safely through. He had powerful friends or admirers, and there would not be any burning, or not just yet.
By the end of the decade, he would be back in Padua, where he was again teaching and twice under trial. Around 1314, he may or may not have been brought to Treviso to aid in the establishment of a university there, though the evidence seems to lean toward not, with him perhaps falling ill before he could do so. And by 1315 or 16 he was dead, still owed for a few years of teaching and leaving behind three sons, one of whom we know to later be involved in a 1325 street fight. But what about those accusations against Pietro, and what had happened to him as a result? The question has been the topic of some discussion over the years, but there are sources which claim to know the answers.
There is Pedro, who we’ve already heard from. He had Pietro as being burned for his strange and wonderful magics, but then he was just passing through the city a century after and was hardly a scholar on the subject.
There is the 16th-century Paduan, Bernardino Scardeone, who wrote of Pietro’s situation having involved heresies, necromancy, and rivalry with a fellow physician who sought to bring him down. Scardeone wrote that Pietro had been investigated in 1306, but was defended by a trio of famous men and soon freed. He wrote that in 1315, he again was accused, and this time he died before anything could come of it and before any punishments were handed down.
Then there is the theologian Thomas of Strassburg, a contemporary of Pietro’s though a younger man. He wrote that our Pietro was a skilled physician but also that he’d mocked the miracles of Christ and the saints in regards to resurrection. Thomas claimed to have actually been present in the city of Padua, to have been there when Pietro’s bones were dug up and burned for this and other errors, or maybe they were his bones.
Going back to Scardeone, we find the story that someone, whether Pietro’s servants or friends, had already dug up his remains and spirited them away before the burning. The angry authorities were left with nothing to do but instead burn him in effigy. Believing this story means you’re taking the word of someone writing more than 200 years after the fact over someone who claims to have been there, but then the person who claims to have been there may just have been taking part in a long tradition of unreliable remembrance where saints or heretics were concerned. The Pietro story takes on layers over time, and they certainly add interest, but they hardly add up to ironclad knowledge.
So there’s all of that—it seems he was accused and died before any conclusions were reached, that something was burned after, whether his remains or an effigy—but questions remain as to what exactly people were accusing Pietro of. It’s all a little confusing. Was it just heresy, incorrect beliefs as to Christ and other matters, or was it witchcraft? Was it that he was a magician who had dealings with spirits, or did he deny their effect upon this world? Was it that he did not believe in the existence of demons, or was it that he put devils to use in retaliating against those who annoyed him? One source, who also credits him with a very quick temper, has him gaining the devil’s assistance to do away with a neighbour’s bothersome garden spring, which is an odd example but gives you some idea of what he was sometimes thought to have been capable of.
As the historian of philosophy Dag Nikolaus Hasse notes, Pietro may have made revisions to his writing after being subject to unwanted attention, clouding the waters for those of us looking for answers in his texts, or maybe he was persecuted not for what he had written but what he had taught and said, in among his instruction on astronomy, medicine, and philosophy. Maybe it was his mastery of astronomy which allowed him to make predictions that seemed magical in nature. That’s what one near contemporary of his said, a Michele Savonarola whose grandson was the famous Florentine reformer who would be publicly burnt for his efforts.
We will dig further into the story of our “great necromancer,” but first, a quick break.
…
When the 17th-century French scholar Gabriel Naudé wrote of our Pietro, he referred to him as “the Reconciler” for his most famous work, which I have seen roughly translated as Conciliation of Debated Medical Questions or else the more long winded Conciliator of the Differences of the Philosophers and Especially the Physicians. Naudé would also write of the intellectual backwater that Peitro had been born into before coming to Paris, and he gets a little long-winded about it here, but I do find it pretty amusing in its dismissal of Italy as a place of intellectual life, so I’ll include the full passage here.
“It is certain that physic lay buried in Italy,” began Naudé, “scarce known to any one, uncultivated and unadorned, till its tutelar genius, a villager of [Padua], destined to free Italy from its barbarism and ignorance, as Camillus once freed Rome from the siege of the Gauls, made diligent enquiry in what part of the world polite literature was most happily cultivated, philosophy most subtly handled, and physic taught with the greatest solidity and purity; and being assured that Paris alone laid claim to this honour, thither he presently flies; giving himself up wholly to [that city’s] tutelage, he applied himself diligently to the mysteries of philosophy and medicine; obtained a degree and the laurel in both; and afterwards taught them both with great applause: and after a stay of many years, loaden with the wealth acquired [in Paris], and, after having become the most famous philosopher, astrologer, physician, and mathematician of his time, returns to his own country, where, in the opinion of the judicious Scardeone, he was the first restorer of true philosophy and physic.”
The Scardeone in question would be the Bernardo Scardeone we just heard from a moment ago, describing Pietro’s death prior to any punishment. As for the Camillus, that would have been Marcus Furius Camillus, a hero of the Roman republic said to have been summoned back from exile to save Rome from the Gallic sack just in the nick of time, a legend of that republic I should say, and partly known to us through the work of Livy, that other Paduan whose statue Pedro saw.
But going back to Naudé, we read:
“The general opinion of almost all authors is, that he was the greatest magician of his time; that by means of seven spirits, familiar, which he kept enclosed in crystal, he had acquired the knowledge of the seven liberal arts, and that he had the art of causing the money he had made use of to return again into his pocket. He was accused of magic [and] before his trial was over, he was condemned to the fire; and a bundle of straw … representing his person, was publicly burnt at Padua.”
Naudé does not appear to have actually gone along with that “general opinion,” seeming to have been more in agreement with an inscription found on a statue of Pietro, which read that d’Abano was, quote, “most learned in philosophy and medicine, and on that account winner of the name of Conciliator; in astrology indeed so skilled that he incurred suspicion of magic, and, falsely accused of heresy, was acquitted,” that mention of acquittal being a reference, I suppose, to the first of his brushes with legal trouble in Padua.
Naudé wrote of Pietro as a brilliant scholar in times which were sadly lacking in brilliance, working very much within a “dark ages” framework that seems to have been common for those looking back on Pietro from the centuries that followed. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Pietro’s standing as a scholar and physician, combined perhaps with his persecution by the church, had him lauded as "a man most illustrious, in genius, doctrine, and merits, in a rude and unhappy age,” and so on to that effect.
As for what Pietro actually had written of, I won’t attempt to take in the full range of his interests in medicine, science, and philosophy here, but we will touch on a few aspects.
One way to dip into his writing is to take notice of the many questions he posed for discussion, referral to authority, and conclusion, starting with matters like whether medicine was a science or whether astronomy was of any use to a physician, and moving on from there, all part of his attempt to reconcile Aristotle with the 2nd-century physician Galen.
Is the number of the elements four or otherwise, he would ask and address. Does air have weight in its own sphere? Does marrow nourish the bones? Should heavy food be taken before light? Is the brain of hot or moist complexion? Is blood-letting from the left hand a proper treatment for gout in the right foot? There were just so many such issues to be raised and hashed out once you got going.
Matters such as these aside, Pietro wrote on astronomy and on the connection between the celestial bodies and the world below. He translated and commented upon the “problems of Aristotle,” or pseudo-Aristotle, a 6th-century text, it is sometimes thought, though perhaps as many as seven centuries older in its origins. He wrote quite extensively on the topic of poisons, venoms, and their remedies, covering mineral, vegetable, and animal sources.
The text On Poisons was apparently written for the pope and appears in 73 manuscripts, 5 of them from the 14th century. It was printed in 1472 and in three different editions the year after that. It was printed in 26 editions in the century that followed. It was quite a popular book.
The text, historian Alain Touwaide tells us, is actually “in large part a translation and adaptation of two Greek treatises on the … topic, On Poisons and On Venomous Animals [respectively], which were, until that point, unknown in the west.”
In the text, you can read that, quote, “If anyone is bitten and stung by a venomous animal and ignores which animal stung, then it is necessary to tighten the place of the sting, to put cups upon it together with cuts, and to have the part of the body sucked by slave.” That last word may actually better read as “servant,” but either way there was a pretty clear understanding that this was for someone who certainly had such people at hand.
You can read that “He who will be given a sea hare or sea frog in a draught will have a greasy vomit and all his body will be congested and swollen as if in dropsy, and his breath will be fetid.” I didn’t know about sea hares, but “sea slug” would seem more accurate though it apparently isn’t quite the same thing. I will say that their rather noodle-like eggs are mildly disturbing.
You read that “He, who will be given a draught of cursed crowfoot, goes out of his mind and laughs continuously, and this is why it is called sardonic laughter,” the similarity between the words for the plant and the laughter more apparent in the original Greek.
And you read, most amusingly for a cilantro enjoyer like myself, though I know it’s not everyone’s favourite taste, that, quote, “He who has been given coriander juice, suffers from a [near] destruction of the intellect, seems as though drunk, and finally dies struck senseless.” So that’s a new excuse you might be able to put to use, and I guess I can say that I’m doing surprisingly well under the circumstances, kind of like when my son was going through his Simpsons phase and realized that I was the same age as Homer.
As Touwaide observes, On Poisons and Conciliation, the texts Pietro is best known for, “both aimed to rebuild science on a new basis and to provide it with a solid theoretical foundation.” Conciliation aimed to do so by collecting theories together in a process of comparison, confrontation, and establishment of a common ground. On Poisons, as Touwaide writes, “simply and more radically omitted current knowledge to replace it with the results of centuries of experience attained in the Greek world,” and doing so with treatises attributed to a recognized authority in Dioscorides, a sort of “guarantee of quality.”
Pietro’s was the kind of life that would fascinate people for centuries, making stops in the 16th and 17th as we have, and of course all the way up to the 21st. Through the years, he’s borne all many depictions of the mysterious magician sort as well as those of a kind of proto-enlightenment figure who had fallen victim to the superstitious times in which he lived. During the 19th, you again find him cropping up, like in the 1880 Dramatic Idylls of the English poet and playwright Robert Browning, where one of the poems began with this verse.
“[Pietro d’Abano]—there was a magician!
When that strange adventure happened, which I mean to tell my hearers,
Nearly had he tried all trades—beside physician,
Architect, astronomer, astrologer,—or worse:
How else, as the old books warrant, was he able,
All at once, through all the world, to prove the promptest of appearers
Where was prince to cure, tower to build as high as Babel,
Star to name or sky-sign read,—yet pouch, for pains, a curse?”
Browning would also write about our scholar/sorcerer in a letter, referring to him as “Poor dear wonderful persecuted Pietro” and to “people’s plaguing him about his mathematical studies and wanting to burn him.” “When there is a storm the mothers tell the children that he is in the air,” Browning wrote. They believed “his pact with the evil one obliged him to drink no milk, no natural human food.”
Pietro, in an odd detail, was said to have suffered a terrible aversion to milk, unable to see others consuming it without nausea, unable to smell or even see it without fainting.
Browning went on in that letter to produce a quatrain said to have been found in a well in Padua 50 years previously, or about 500 after the death of Pietro, its supposed author.
“Studying my figures with the compass,” Pietro was to have written, “I note that I will soon be buried. Because there is a lot of uproar about my knowledge, and the ignorant have made war on me.”
As I think I’ve established here, if nothing else, Pietro was the type of person that stories really sprouted up around. But cutting away all of that, at an absolute minimum we find a widely respected and wildly successful scholar in his field who would still be read for centuries after his death and commemorated in the great hall of the city in which he may or may not have been burned in effigy.
And maybe that’s not quite as exciting as if he had committed some of those other deeds that he is credited with. If he discovered the philosopher’s stone or kept a different familiar for each day of the week inside a bottle. If he turned the devil on those who slighted him or moved fleets by magic. If he used that magic to make sure that any money he spent simply returned to his possession, a handy trick which I’m sure, when paired with his already allegedly high fees, would have seen him doing pretty well for himself. So maybe these more mundane achievements aren’t all that, but they still represent a pretty accomplished life of the kind that could see you also credited with all those other, more dangerous and exciting acts.
As one 17th-century eulogizer would conclude as to Pietro: born for studying, he died studying. It’s a pretty great way to end.
And we will also end there. I hope you’ve enjoyed this somewhat murky view of our Paduan friend. I’ll be back next time, next time with a bonus episode on the Patreon and a little after that with the next full-length episode. I’ll talk to you then.