The correspondence with the picture painted by Lamothe-Langon is striking. Just as Lamothe-Langon’s inquisitor was supposed to have found witches at work in the foothills of the Pyrenees, so an Italian inquisitor was supposed to have found a witch at Orta, which is a village in the foothills of the Alps, north-west of Novara. It was natural tliat historians should have seen each source as a confirmation of the other. Yet in reality the similarity between the two throws no light at all on historical fact, for both sources are equally spurious.
Bartolo’s legal opinions, or consilia, were greatly esteemed, and it is quite true that he supplied them to all sorts of eminent persons, including at least one bishop. After his death in 1357 collections of his consilia were made, and with the invention of printing these were published as books. The earliest edition, printed in Rome in 1473, contains only 244 consilia; but after years of patient research Thomas Diplovataccio was able to add a further 117, and the whole 361 are given in the Venice edition of 1521 and in all subsequent editions.(42) But one looks in vain, amongst these 361, for the consilium concerning the witch of Orta. That first appears in a collection or anthology of consilia on criminal cases by various authors, published by Giovanni Battista Ziletti (or Zileti) in Venice in 1566.(43) It figures there as one of five consilia attributed to Bartolo; and in the later Venice editions of Bartolo’s collected works — from 1590 onwards — these five consilia are included, along with another consilium printed by Ziletti in an earlier collection, and twenty-eight not previously printed at all.(44) To examine the first dozen of the thirty-four new consilia is to realize that we are dealing with another ingenious hoax. The great medieval jurist has been used as a vehicle for a private joke.
There never was a bishop of Novara called Joannes de Plotis. Yet in committing this name to print, Ziletti was not misreading his manuscript source.(45) Three of the four other consilia which he ascribes to Bartolo in the same collection also refer to individuals with the surname of de Plotis. Even more surprisingly, out of the first eleven of the additional consilia which appear in Bartolo’s Omnia Opera from 1590 onwards, no less than eight are concerned with various de Plotis — i.e. the four taken from Ziletti, plus four not previously published. And if, finally, one pursues the enquiry backwards, to the collection of consilia on matrimonial cases published by Ziletti in 1563, one finds yet another two opinions ascribed to Bartolo, and both of those involve members of the de Plotis family.(46) To sum up: over a period of twenty-seven years, from 1563 to 1590, Bartolo was gradually credited with more and more legal opinions concerning a family called de Plotis, of the town of Novara — ten opinions in all, and not one of them known until two centuries after Bartolo’s own time.
As portrayed in the consilia, the de Plotis were a very queer lot indeed, plagued by the strangest worries and dilemmas. Joannes, bishop of Novara, appears four times, and not always as a pursuer of witches. He is, for instance, disturbed to find that a notary, in drawing up a legal document, after originally referring to him as the most reverend lord Joannes de Piotis, has then altered the name to “de Plotis”; and he asks whether the man can be punished for fraud. Bartolo opines that he cannot — partly because in a Latin document it is more correct to use the Latin form, but also because that great and noble family is known to be descended from an ancient Roman, Gnaeus Plancus Plotus.(47) On another occasion the bishop is uncertain whether he ought to dissolve a marriage between a rapist and the woman he raped. Here Bartolo is less helpful, and ends by advising the bishop to refer the question to the Holy See. Yet the tone is encouraging: Bartolo is sure that his friend lord Joannes, to whom he owes so much, will himself weigh all aspects of the matter; for he well remembers the acuteness of mind which the lord Joannes displayed when, together with his brother lord Marcus Plotus, he was studying law at Bologna.(48) — All this to a bishop who never existed at all.
Other de Plotis appear in roles scarcely less exalted than the bishop’s. When the emperor Charles IV wished to ask Bartolo’s opinion on a delicate matter of blasphemy, he employed Marcus Aurelius de Plotis to convey the enquiry.(49) As for Count Joannes Baptista de Plotis, he was one of the emperor’s councillors. When a German nobleman claimed that Germans were more honourable and noble than Italians, Joannes Baptista called him a liar; and when the emperor asked Bartolo whether this amounted to legally insulting behaviour, Bartolo replied that it would have been unworthy of an Italian, and an imperial councillor at that, to have done otherwise. But the same Count Joannes Baptista had domestic problems: he had married a girl from another noble family of Novara, only to find later that she was related to him within the forbidden degrees. In view of the fact that the count, constantly travelling on the emperor’s service, had had little opportunity to look into such matters, the pope declared the marriage legitimate. Nevertheless, when the count died the question arose as to whether his children could inherit; Bartolo opined that they could.(50) Yet not all de Plotis were above reproach. Bartolo is sharp with Joannes Aloysius de Plotis, mayor of Milan, who had wrongfully imprisoned Hector de Mapamundis (meaning “Map of the World”) for an offence committed by Hector’s brother.(51) Moreover, in challenging Joannes Maria de Plotis to a duel, Count Sebastianus de Plotis undoubtedly offended against the ancient statutes of Novara, which Petrus de Plotis in his day had helped to draw up. It was fortunate for him that Fabianus de Plotis heard him say that he had forgotten about the challenge; for this enabled Bartolo to take a lenient view.(52)
Such is the true background of the witch of Orta: for some three centuries, until medievalists and anti-papal propagandists discovered her and found in her what they wanted to find, she was simply a minor character in a preposterous family saga. How this saga was ever accepted as the work of Bartolo is a mystery. Even apart from the absurdity of most of the incidents, the Latin style is utterly unlike his, and even the signature appended to each consilium — “Ego, Bartolus de Saxoferrato” — is one he never used. One can only assume that no scholar ever read these fragmented materials with enough attention to realize that they form a whole, and that that whole is a parody.