Who was the parodist? No hint is given in the Omnia Opera of Bartolo, nor in the work from which the faked consilia in the Omnia Opera were drawn — the collection of opinions on criminal cases first published by Ziletti in 1572. But if one inspects the two consilia which, though attributed to Bartolo, never reappeared in the Omnia Opera, one finds the answer. These are the consilia in Ziletti’s collection of matrimonial cases, first published in 1563. In each the rubric states that, though written by Bartolo, the opinion has only now been brought to light by the illustrious doctor of both laws Joannes Baptista de Plotis.
Giovanni Battista Piotto, or de’ Ploti, as he is variously called by Italian historians, was a prominent citizen of Novara in the second half of the sixteenth century.(53) A nobleman and landed proprietor, he was also a respected jurist, a pupil of the celebrated Andrea Alciati. Novara was at that time under the protection of Milan, which was itself a dependency of the Spanish crown; and Piotto acted for many years as Novara’s spokesman in Milan. He was zealous in defending Novara’s rights and privileges — it was thanks to him that the Spaniards desisted from demolishing the suburbs; and in due course his fellow-citizens acknowledged his services by bestowing on him the title of padre della patria. He was also a great producer of consilia — those published number more than a hundred.
These consilia turn a near-certainty into a certainty: nobody who studies them can doubt that Piotto was the forger of the pseudo-Bartolean consilia and the creator of the witch of Orta. It is not simply that the Latin style is so similar — just like the pseudo-Bartolean consilia, some of the consilia which Piotto wrote over his own name deal with the affairs of his family, and with fictitious affairs at that.(54) To appreciate the spirit in which these documents were concocted one has only to compare No. 87 in Ziletti’s “matrimonial” collection, published first in 1563, with No. 15 in Piotto’s collection of his own consilia, published in I578.(55) The former tells how Giovanni Battista’s son, Francesco Maria, made his own daughter his sole heir on condition that, when she reached marriageable age, she should marry the worthiest member of the de Plotis family. When the time came, a furious dispute arose as to whether she had not infringed the condition by marrying a jurist de Plotis when she could have had a soldier de Plotis, or even a doctor of arts and medicine. As a good jurist Giovanni Battista naturally opines that his niece has done very right. In the 1578 volume the same consilium reappears — but the family is now called not de Plotis but Sempronius!
Piotto seems to have written many of his consilia simply to exercise his skill in resolving nice points of law, or maybe to display his legal erudition; while others are obviously meant to be read as jokes— sophisticated professional jokes, comparable with the great satire on legal pedantry, the judgement of Judge Bridoye, which occupies three chapters in the Third Book of Rabelais. The Piotto’s were a family of lawyers — Francesco Maria was one, and there were others. The existence of this captive audience is perhaps enough to account for the virtuoso displays and recondite fooleries which Giovanni Battista perpetrated in his own name. But by 1563 he had hit on a new idea: he stopped writing about his son and began, instead, to concoct consilia about imaginary ancestors of his, which he passed off as the work of Bartolo.
How did he manage to get them published? Above all, how did it come about that in the end they were even incorporated into new editions of Bartolo’s collected works? Here the role of the jurist, editor and compiler Giovanni Battista Ziletti must have been decisive. After all, six of the forgeries were first published in his collections. And when four of the six were taken into Bartolo’s Omnia Opera it happened in Venice, where Ziletti lived and worked: they do not figure in the Basel edition of 1589, but they do figure in the Venice edition of 1590, as they do also in the later Venice editions of 1603 and 1615. Indeed, the editors of the Omnia Opera explicitly acknowledge that these consilia had previously appeared in Ziletti’s collection. But even in the forgeries which appear for the first time in the Omnia Opera, the influence of Ziletti can be detected in the background: a consilium which mentions Marcus Aurelius de Plotis is immediately followed by a note by Ziletti, which in turn refers to a treatise by our Piotto.
There seems to have been a close understanding between the two men, and one feels that Piotto knew what he was doing when he described Ziletti as “that most learned doctor of Venice.... zealous for public rather than private profit, bringing together many things in civil law with great labour and with a genius which is divine rather than merely human, transmitting the consilia of various doctors… to print and so to immortality....”.(56) Certainly Piotto and Ziletti were jointly responsible for launching, in 1572, the text which has misled so many historians into believing that inquisitors were hunting witches in the diocese of Novara more than two centuries earlier.
It is true that the witch of Orta does not stand entirely alone. Around 1508 one Bernardo Rategno, who was then inquisitor for the neighbouring diocese of Como, wrote that “the sect of witches began to pullulate only within the last 150 years, as appears from the old records of trials by inquisitors, in the archives of our Inquisition at Como”.(57)This seemed to confirm that inquisitorial witch-hunting in that neighbourhood could indeed be traced back to the 1350s. However, no later writer has found any trace of the documents in question, though the archives of Como have been searched by historians who had these matters in mind.(58) The earliest witch-hunts established as having taken place in that area date from a full century later — from the 1450s in the Val Leventina, from the 1480s in Como itself. As for Rategno, otherwise known as Bernard of Como, he was appointed inquisitor only after a lifetime spent as a preacher, but during the years left to him he earned himself a reputation as a ruthless hunter of witches; indeed, the passage in question comes from a tract written specially to prove that witches exist and ought to be burned.(59) No serious modern historian would have taken the statement at its face value if it had not appeared to be supported by other evidence, Italian and French. With that evidence discredited, and no other evidence forthcoming, the fourteenth-century witch-hunt at Como loses all credibility.
Nevertheless Rategno’s comment is not irrelevant to the matter in hand. Though he himself died in 1516, his tract remained unknown for half a century. It was first published as an appendix to a larger work, also by Rategno, on the procedure to be adopted by inquisitors in dealing with heretics; and that was in 1566, at Milan. In the tract, witches are described as women who, in addition to killing adults and children, bow down to the Devil and — not an invariable characteristic of witches — trample on the cross. Now, Piotto lived and worked in Milan. As a lawyer who himself wrote several consilia about the treatment of heretics, he would hardly have overlooked an inquisitor’s manual published in that very city. In the manual he would have found an assurance that 150 years earlier — i.e. in Bartolo’s time — witch-hunts were taking place in the neighbourhood. Is it mere coincidence that that same year 1566 saw the publication of his pseudo-Bartolean consilium about the witch of Orta who killed children, bowed down to the Devil, trampled on the cross, and must pay for it by being burned alive? Instead of confirming the story of the witch of Orta, Rategno’s statement may very well have inspired it.