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Until the end, the hooded men from the "Brotherhood of the Beheaded St. John" tried to convert him with prayers and discussions.
But the little man, emaciated by the rigors of imprisonment, “remained in his damned stubbornness until the end”.
On the morning of February 17, 1600 Giordano Bruno was led from the prison in Rome to the Campo de 'Fiori.
There was a pyre piled around a stake to which the convict was tied.
He likes to die a martyr;
Bruno's last words in the fire are said to have been his soul will rise with the smoke into paradise.
Born in 1548 in Nola in Campania, Bruno is considered a Renaissance thinker par excellence.
He wrote about the arts of memory, cosmology, physics, magic and geometry, composed sonnets, didactic poems and a play and didn’t even stop at Aristotle with his sarcasm.
Historian Bernd Roeck wrote in his "History of the Renaissance" that he was just as confident in command of ancient mythology as he was of the art of allegorical ciphering.
Bruno's memorial on Campo de Fiori in Rome, the place where he was burned
Source: picture alliance / Bildagentur-o
Even as a youth, Bruno clashed with the church authorities.
In 1565 he entered a Dominican monastery in Naples, where he was ordained a priest in 1572.
But soon his unorthodox ideas earned him the charge of heresy.
He had to give up his plan to ask the Pope's forgiveness when it became known that he had thrown the writings of the Church Father Jerome into a latrine.
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So he fled north across the Alps.
London, Paris, Marburg, Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstedt, Frankfurt / M., Zurich and Padua were other stops.
He always hoped to get a chair.
But the project always failed because of Bruno's ideas and ardor.
He compared Aristotle with a donkey, called the Christian religion “donkeyism” and caricatured Christ as a monkey, whose miracles were at best sleight of hand.
Likened Aristotle to a donkey: Giordano Bruno
Source: picture alliance / Heritage-Imag
Bruno countered the geocentric view of the world with the vision of an infinite universe with an infinite number of (inhabited) stars.
In this creatorless universe there should only be transformation and rebirth.
It says something about the spirit of the Renaissance that Bruno did not find a chair, but found high-ranking patrons who could withstand him, at least as long as he did not exaggerate it with arrogance and ridicule.
But also in Venice in 1592 he fell out with his patron, who then denounced him to the Roman Inquisition.
The republic handed him over as a heretic.
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Bruno did nothing to avert the impending death sentence after eight years in prison.
When it was announced, he is said to have responded with the famous bon mot: "Perhaps with more fear you impose it on me than I receive it." His writings were placed on the "Index of Forbidden Books".
They stayed there until 1966. In 2000, Pope John Paul II finally declared that Bruno had been wronged with the death sentence.
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