Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/458

 442 SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. of a man or tell what he carried in his closed hand by knowing his nativity and comparing it with the position of the stars at the moment, for no one could help doing or thinking what the stars at the time rendered inevitable. All this was incompatible with free-will, it limited the intervention of God, it relieved man from responsibility for his acts, and it thus was manifestly heretical. So his numerous predictions, which we are told were verified, as to the fortunes of Louis of Bavaria, of Castruccio Castrucani, of Charles of Calabria, eldest son of Robert of Xaples, won him great applause in that stirring time, yet, as they were not revealed by the divine spirit of prophecy, but were foreseen by astrologic skill, they implied the forbidden theory of fatalism. Cecco became official astrologer to Charles of Calabria, but his confidence in his science and his savage independence unfitted him for a court. On the birth of a princess (presumably the notorious Joanna I.), he pronounced that the stars in the ascendant would render her not only inclined, but absolutely constrained, to sell her honor. The unwelcome truth cost him his place, and he betook himself to Bologna, where he publicly taught his science. Unluckily for him, he developed his theories in commentaries on the Sphcera of Sacrobosco.* Villani tells us that in this he taught how, by in- cantations under certain constellations, malignant spirits could be constrained to perform marvels, but this manifestly is only popu- lar rumor ; such practices were wholly inconsistent with his con- ceptions, and there is no allusion to them in the inquisitorial pro- ceedings. Cecco's audacity, however, rendered the book amply offensive to pious ears. To illustrate his views he cast the horo- scope of Christ, and showed how Libra, ascending in the tenth degree, rendered his crucifixion inevitable ; as Capricorn was at all that was known, in the thirteenth century, about the earth in its cosmical relations. Although it accepts, of course, the current theory of the nine spheres, it indulges in no astrological reveries as to the influence of the signs and planets on human destiny. It remained for centuries a work of the highest authority, and §o lately as 1604, sixty years after the death of Copernicus, and on the eve of the development of the new astronomy by Galileo, it was translated, with a copious commentary, by a professor of mathematics in the University of Siena, Francesco Pifieri, whose astrological credulity offers a curious contrast to the severe simplicity of the original.
 * The Sphcera of Sacrobosco is a remarkably lucid and scientific statement of