We shall recur to the subject of astrology when we come to
speak of the moral and religious character of the people.
The Church treated this and other pseudo-sciences nearly always with
toleration; and showed itself actually hostile even to genuine science
only when a charge of heresy together with necromancy was also in
question--which certainly was often the case. A point which it would be
interesting to decide is this: whether and in what cases the Dominican
(and also the Franciscan) Inquisitors in Italy were conscious of the
falsehood of the charges, and yet condemned the accused, either to
oblige some enemy of the prisoner or from hatred to natural science,
and particularly to experiments. The latter doubtless occurred, but it
is not easy to prove the fact. What helped to cause such persecutions
in the North, namely, the opposition made to the innovators by the
upholders of the received official, scholastic system of nature, was of
little or no weight in Italy. Pietro of Abano, at the beginning of the
fourteenth century, is well known to have fallen a victim to the envy
of another physician, who accused him before the Inquisition of heresy
and magic; and something of the same kind may have happened in the case
of his Paduan contemporary, Giovannino Sanguinacci, who was known as an
innovator in medical practice.
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