He escaped, however, with banishment.
Nor must it be forgotten that the inquisitorial power of the Dominicans
was exercised less uniformly in Italy than in the North. Tyrants and
free cities in the fourteenth century treated the clergy at times with
such sovereign contempt that very different matters from natural
science went unpunished. But when, with the fifteenth century,
antiquity became the leading power in Italy, the breach it made in the
old system was turned to account by every branch of secular science.
Humanism, nevertheless, attracted to itself the best strength of the
nation, and thereby, no doubt, did injury to the inductive
investigation of nature. Here and there the Inquisition suddenly
started into life, and punished or burned physicians as blasphemers or
magicians. In such cases it is hard to discover what was the true
motive underlying the condemnation. But even so, Italy, at the close of
the fifteenth century, with Paolo Toscanelli, Luca Pacioli and Leonardo
da Vinci, held incomparably the highest place among European nations in
mathematics and the natural sciences, and the learned men of every
country, even Regiomontanus and Copernicus, confessed themselves its
pupils. This glory survived the Counter-reformation, and even today the
Italians would occupy the first place in this respect if circumstances
had not made it impossible for the greatest minds to devote themselves
to tranquil research.
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