Savonarola proceeds to say, however, that then the case was appealed to Rome and that by intervention of the pope peace was at last made between Peter and the Dominicans; and that in his testament, “which is held in great veneration by many Paduans,” Peter left his body to be interred among the Dominicans as a sign to God and the world how he had kept the peace with them. As a matter of fact, however, it is in the church of St. Anthony the Confessor belonging to the Friars Minor or Franciscans of Padua that Peter’s will directs he shall be buried, while two Franciscans and no Dominicans are listed among the witnesses to his confession of faith. Again therefore we find Savonarola’s account unreliable. He concludes, “But the Dominican Inquisitor, full of venom and breaking the truce to which he had sworn—an action the more detestable in a clergyman, in the silence of the night opened the sepulcher, burned the body, and gave the ashes to the wind. O unspeakable crime!”
Scardeone’s account.
As we recede further from Peter of Abano’s own time to Scardeone in the sixteenth century, more specific details concerning his life accumulate. Scardeone perverts Savonarola’s statement that Peter’s astrological predictions won him a reputation as a magician and that this got him into trouble with the Dominicans at Paris, into the assertion that Peter’s devotion to mathematical disciplines at Paris caused him on his return to Padua to be suspected of magic. He adds that a rival physician, Peter of Reggio, jealous of Abano’s science and fame, reported him to the Inquisition as a heretic and necromancer. That the Inquisition twice instituted proceedings against him: in 1306, when three illustrious men, whom Scardeone mentions by name,[2948] were his patrons and, since nothing was proved against him at the trial, he was freed from this calumny; and again in 1315, when he died during the trial—Scardeone, however, says nothing to suggest that this was due to application of torture—and was buried in the church of St. Anthony. The Inquisition, however, went on to condemn him upon the basis of his writings, but meanwhile either his friends or his housekeeper Marietta had removed and hidden his body, which the inquisitors had to be content to burn in effigy. “This,” coolly continues Scardeone, “is why Thomas of Strasburg wrote that he saw the bones of Peter of Abano burned in the square of Padua.” Thus Scardeone not merely makes new assertions based upon no one knows what, but contradicts statements of Savonarola who was nearer to the events and Thomas of Strasburg who claims to be an eye-witness. It is on Scardeone’s account, nevertheless, that most modern allusions to Peter of Abano and his fate are based.
Naudé’s statement.
It is hardly worth while to pursue the matter further in later writers except perhaps to note an inscription upon a statue of Peter of Abano in Padua which Naudé mentions in 1625.[2949] “Petrus Aponus of Padua, 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.” Thus only one trial is mentioned and that resulting in an acquittal.
[2934] Conciliator, Diff. 9.
[2935] See, for instance, Conciliator, Diffs. 9, 13, 64, 135, 156.
[2936] Verci (1787) VII, Documenti, 118-9.
[2937] CE, “Inquisition.”
[2938] The doubtful passage is, “Item reliquit domine Marie quondam Bartolomei a Sancto Gregorio de contrata Sancte Lucie de Padua libras centum parvorum et pro quolibet anno libras vigintiquinque parvorum pro suo labore dispensandi domum et pueros suos dum vixerit.”