On This Day In History: Vatican Began 7-Year-Long Trial Against Giordano Bruno – On Jan 27, 1593

AncientPages.com - On January 27, 1593, the Vatican began a seven-year trial against an Italian Dominican cleric, Giordano Bruno.

Bruno was born in Nola, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, in 1548, and at the age of 17, he joined the convent of San Domenico Maggiore in nearby Naples.

Background image: The trial of Giordano Bruno by the Roman Inquisition. Bronze relief by Ettore Ferrari, Campo de' Fiori, Rome. Image credit: Jastrow - Public Doman (original image - here)

Bruno spent much of his life heralding views contrary to those held by the Church. He was also a mathematician, philosopher, and astrologer. Throughout his life, Bruno supported the Copernican system of astronomy, which placed the sun, not the Earth, at the center of the solar system.

He opposed the stultifying authority of the Church and refused to withdraw his philosophical beliefs throughout his eight years of imprisonment by the Venetian and Roman Inquisitions.

His cosmological theories were difficult to accept, and he was constantly in trouble with his superiors for questioning orthodoxies.

Bruno proposed that the stars were just distant suns surrounded by their exoplanets; he raised the possibility that these planets could harbor their own life. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no celestial body at its "center."

In 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on several charges, including denial of several critical Catholic doctrines.

The Inquisition found him guilty; he was declared a heretic, and finally, in 1600, he was burned at stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori.

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