Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/454

 438 SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. We have seen astrology classed as one of the liberal arts by Alonso the Wise of Castile, and the implicit belief universally ac- corded to it throughout the Middle Ages caused it to be so gener- ally employed that its condemnation was difficult. I have alluded above to the confidence reposed by Frederic II. in the science, and to the Dominican astrologer who accompanied the Archbishop of Ravenna when as papal legate he led the crusade against Ezze- lin da Romano. Ezzelin himself kept around him a crowd of astrologers, and was led to his last disastrous enterprise by their mistaken counsel. So thoroughly accepted were its principles that when, in 1305, the College of Cardinals wrote to Clement V. to urge his coming to Rome, they reminded him that every planet is most powerful in its own house. Savonarola assures us that at the end of the fifteenth century those who could afford to keep astrologers regulated every action by their advice : if the question were to mount on horseback or to go on board ship, to lay the foundation of a house or to put on a new garment, the astrologer stood by with his astrolabe in hand to announce the auspicious moment — in fact, he says that the Church itself was governed by astrology, for every prelate had his astrologer, whose advice he dared not disregard. It is observable that astrology is not in- cluded, as a forbidden practice, in the inquisitorial formulas of interrogation during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Xo books on astrologv seem to be enumerated in the condemnation pronounced in 1290 by the Inquisitor and Bishop of Paris and the Archbishop of Sens, aided by the Masters of the University, on all books of divination and magic — treatises on necromancy, geo- mancy, pyromancy, hydromancy, and chiromancy, the book of the Ten Rings of Yenus, the books of the Greek and German Babylon, the book of the Four Mirrors, the book of the Images of Tobias ben Tricat, the book of the Images of Ptolemy, the book of Hermes the Magician to Aristotle, which they say Aros, or Gabriel, had from God, containing horrible incantations and detestable suffumigations. Astrology does not appear for con- demnation in the Articles of the University of Paris in 1398, and the great learning of the irreproachable Cardinal Peter d'Ailly was employed in diffusing belief in its truths. On the xviii. 2. — Prudent, contra Syrnmach. n. 449-57.— Bedae opp. Ed. Migne I 96C- 66. — Augustin. de Civ. Dei Lib. v. c. 1-7.