A Terrible Tale of Necromancy from the Inquisition Archive of Siena

Skyline of Siena, by Zairon. Released under the Creative Commons Atttribution 4.0 International license.

Hey folks! I’ve been busy a few weekends, so I haven’t gotten my blogging done. It’s time to get back to it.

I often grapple with material in different languages, thanks to online machine translation (which, I know, cannot be trusted completely, so I try to be careful and methodical with it). Nonetheless, when I opened *Siena e i figli del segreto incantesimo : diavoli, streghe e inquisitori all’ombra del Mangia* by Maria Assunta Ceppari Ridolfi, I immediately recognized that one chapter was entitled “The Night of the Living Dead.” Given that Halloween was getting close at the time, I decided to take a closer look — and it’s going to get very gruesome.

The chapter begins in March 1541, with the gruesome hanging and burning of one Serafino di Filippo Bazini in the Piazza del Campo, along with his books of magic. This might not surprise those who aren’t familiar with the workings of the Italian Inquisition. As I discussed in my review of Barbierato’s In the Room of the Circles, although the Inquisition in Venice could have a life-changing impact on those accused of practicing ritual magic, they rarely went so far as to execute anyone. I assumed (correctly) the situation was similar in Siena… so this guy had to have done something absolutely terrible.

Serafino, a.k.a. Brother Sixtus, was an Augustinian friar, with a special papal dispensation allowing him to live in secular society. Serafino was quite popular in Sienese society, especially with the ladies, but he wanted to learn the secrets of summoning spirits to gain treasure. He pestered visiting scholars for magical operations, tried them, found they didn’t work, and returned for more pestering.

Finally, one German scholar named Paolo told him that what he needed was a familiar spirit. Serafino continued to bother him about the details, until Paolo supposedly wrote a fake ritual that involved acquiring the spirit of a man condemned to die as a magical assistant.

Paolo maintained afterward that this was a joke in poor taste. Nonetheless, the British magical literature, which often overlaps with the Italian, had multiple procedures for contacting the ghost of a condemned person as a familiar. The most famous example of these is the one from Reginald Scot’s *Discoverie of Witchcraft*, but others exist in the manuscript tradition.

At this point, the narrative becomes contested, with Serafino and the witnesses having different accounts. The friar decided that the ritual could be used by anyone who had had a “bad end” (my words). He considered using the body of an executed criminal, but the three or four days of rituals required near the corpse would be too dangerous. He talked with a grocer friend of his about killing a person and burying the body in the basement of his friend’s countryside villa, but this was also objected.

Finally, Serafino took advantage of his own circumstances. On January 10, 1541, he lured a beggar girl, Maria da Petroio, into his house. She never came out alive.

If you’re going to ask your friends if they want to be party to a child murder conducted for dubious reasons, they need to be really good friends. Serafino seems to have had very few associates in that category, so soon the authorities put together the missing girl and the reports of his concerned fellow scholars. After his arrest, Serafino claimed that the murder itself was performed by a fellow monastic from Crema who just happened to be staying at his house, but no one seems to have bought it. He also claimed to have used the poor girl’s heart with the blood of two executed criminals in order to command the devil, with no success.

Serafino confessed under threat of torture, was tortured anyway, tried to do away with himself through inducing massive nosebleeds, and was finally executed. Thus one of the saddest chapters in the history of magic came ot the end.