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The fourteenth century was chiefly stimulated by the writings of Cicero, who, though in fact an eclectic, yet, by his habit of setting forth the opinions of different schools, without coming to a decision between them, exercised the influence of a sceptic. Next in importance came Seneca, and the few works of Aristotle which had been translated into Latin. The immediate fruit of these studies was the capacity to reflect on great subjects, if not in direct opposition to the authority of the Church, at all events independently of it.

In the course of the fifteenth century the works of antiquity were discovered and diffused with extraordinary rapidity. All the writings of the Greek philosophers which we ourselves possess were now, at least in the form of Latin translations, in everybody’s hands. It is a curious fact that some of the most zealous apostles of this new culture were men of the strictest piety, or even ascetics (p. 273). Fra Ambrogio Camaldolese, as a spiritual dignitary chiefly occupied with ecclesiastical affairs, and as a literary man with the translation of the Greek Fathers of the Church, could not repress the humanistic impulse, and at the request of Cosimo de’Medici, undertook to translate Diogenes Laertius into Latin.¹¹²⁷ His contemporaries, Niccolò Niccoli, Griannozzo Manetti, Donato Acciajuoli, and Pope Nicholas V.,¹¹²⁸ united to a many-sided humanism profound biblical scholarship and deep piety. In Vittorino da Feltre the same temper has been already noticed (p. 213 sqq.). The same Matthew Vegio, who added a thirteenth book to the ‘Æneid,’ had an enthusiasm for the memory of St. Augustine and his mother Monica which cannot have been without a deeper influence upon him. The result of all these tendencies was that the Platonic Academy at Florence deliberately chose for its object the reconciliation of the spirit of antiquity with that of Christianity. It was a remarkable oasis in the humanism of the period.¹¹²⁹

This humanism was in fact pagan, and became more and more so as its sphere widened in the fifteenth century. Its representatives, whom we have already described as the advanced guard of an unbridled individualism, display as a rule such a character that even their religion, which is sometimes professed very definitely, becomes a matter of indifference to us. They easily got the name of atheists, if they showed themselves indifferent to religion, and spoke freely against the Church; but not one of them ever professed, or dared to profess, a formal, philosophical atheism.¹¹³⁰ If they sought for any leading principle, it must have been a kind of superficial rationalism—a careless inference from the many and contradictory opinions of antiquity with which they busied themselves, and from the discredit into which the Church and her doctrines had fallen. This was the sort of reasoning which was near bringing Galeottus Martius¹¹³¹ to the stake, had not his former pupil, Pope Sixtus IV., perhaps at the request of Lorenzo de’Medici, saved him from the hands of the Inquisition. Galeotto had ventured to write that the man who walked uprightly, and acted according to the natural law born within him, would go to heaven, whatever nation he belonged to.

Let us take, by way of example, the religious attitude of one of the smaller men in the great army. Codrus Urceus¹¹³² was first the tutor of the last Ordelaffo, Prince of Forlì, and afterwards for many years professor at Bologna. Against the Church and the monks his language is as abusive as that of the rest. His tone in general is reckless to the last degree, and he constantly introduces himself in all his local history and gossip. But he knows how to speak to edification of the true God-Man, Jesus Christ, and to commend himself by letter to the prayers of a saintly priest.¹¹³³ On one occasion, after enumerating the follies of the pagan religions, he thus goes on: ‘Our theologians, too, fight and quarrel “de lana caprina,” about the Immaculate Conception, Antichrist, Sacraments, Predestination, and other things, which were better let alone than talked of publicly.’ Once, when he was not at home, his room and manuscripts were burnt. When he heard the news he stood opposite a figure of the Madonna in the street, and cried to it: ‘Listen to what I tell you; I am not mad, I am saying what I mean. If I ever call upon you in the hour of my death, you need not hear me or take me among your own, for I will go and spend eternity with the devil.’¹¹³⁴ After which speech he found it desirable to spend six months in retirement at the house of a wood-cutter. With all this, he was so superstitious that prodigies and omens gave him incessant frights, leaving him no belief to spare for the immortality of the soul. When his hearers questioned him on the matter, he answered that no one knew what became of a man, of his soul or his body, after death, and the talk about another life was only fit to frighten old women. But when he came to die, he commended in his will his soul or his spirit¹¹³⁵ to Almighty God, exhorted his weeping pupils to fear the Lord, and especially to believe in immortality and future retribution, and received the Sacrament with much fervour. We have no guarantee that more famous men in the same calling, however significant their opinions may be, were in practical life any more consistent. It is probable that most of them wavered inwardly between incredulity and a remnant of the faith in which they were brought up, and outwardly held for prudential reasons to the Church.

Through the connexion of rationalism with the newly born science of historical investigation, some timid attempts at biblical criticism may here and there have been made. A saying of Pius II.¹¹³⁶ has been recorded, which seems intended to prepare the way for such criticism: ‘Even if Christianity were not confirmed by miracles, it ought still to be accepted on account of its morality.’ When Lorenzo Valla calls Moses and the Evangelists historians, he does not seek to diminish their dignity and reputation; but is nevertheless conscious that in these words lies as decided a contradiction to the traditional view taken by the Church, as in the denial that the Apostles’ Creed was the work of all the Apostles, or that the letter of Abgarus to Christ was genuine.¹¹³⁷ The legends of the Church, in so far as they contained arbitrary versions of the biblical miracles, were freely ridiculed,¹¹³⁸ and this reacted on the religious sense of the people. Where Judaising heretics are mentioned, we must understand chiefly those who denied the Divinity of Christ, which was probably the offence for which Giorgio da Novara was burnt at Bologna about the year 1500.¹¹³⁹ But again at Bologna in the year 1497 the Dominican Inquisitor was forced to let the physician Gabrielle da Salò, who had powerful patrons, escape with a simple expression of penitence,¹¹⁴⁰ although he was in the habit of maintaining that Christ was not God, but son of Joseph and Mary, and conceived in the usual way; that by his cunning he had deceived the world to its ruin; that he may have died on the cross on account of crimes which he had committed; that his religion would soon come to an end; that his body was not really contained in the sacrament, and that he performed his miracles, not through any divine power, but through the influence of the heavenly bodies. This latter statement is most characteristic of the time, Faith is gone, but magic still holds its ground.¹¹⁴¹

A worse fate befell a Canon of Bergamo, Zanino de Solcia, a few years earlier (1459), who had asserted that Christ did not suffer from love to man, but under the influence of the stars, and who advanced other curious scientific and moral ideas. He was forced to abjure his errors, and paid for them by perpetual imprisonment.¹¹⁴²

With respect to the moral government of the world, the humanists seldom get beyond a cold and resigned consideration of the prevalent violence and misrule. In this mood the many works ‘On Fate,’ or whatever name they bear, are written. They tell of the turning of the wheel of Fortune, and of the instability of earthly, especially political, things. Providence is only brought in because the writers would still be ashamed of undisguised fatalism, of the avowal of their ignorance, or of useless complaints. Gioviano Pontano¹¹⁴³ ingeniously illustrates the nature of that mysterious something which men call Fortune by a hundred incidents, most of which belonged to his own experience. The subject is treated more humorously by Æneas Sylvius, in the form of a vision seen in a dream.¹¹⁴⁴ The aim of Poggio, on the other hand, in a work written in his old age,¹¹⁴⁵ is to represent the world as a vale of tears, and to fix the happiness of various classes as low as possible. This tone became in future the prevalent one. Distinguished men drew up a debit and credit of the happiness and unhappiness of their lives, and generally found that the latter outweighed the former. The fate of Italy and the Italians, so far as it could be told in the year 1510, has been described with dignity and an almost elegiac pathos by Tristano Caracciolo.¹¹⁴⁶ Applying this general tone of feeling to the humanists themselves, Pierio Valeriano afterwards composed his famous treatise (pp. 276-279). Some of these themes, such as the fortunes of Leo, were most suggestive. All the good that can be said of him politically has been briefly and admirably summed up by Francesco Vettori; the picture of Leo’s pleasures is given by Paolo Giovio and in the anonymous biography;¹¹⁴⁷ and the shadows which attended his prosperity are drawn with inexorable truth by the same Pierio Valeriano.

We cannot, on the other hand, read without a kind of awe how men sometimes boasted of their fortune in public inscriptions. Giovanni II. Bentivoglio, ruler of Bologna, ventured to carve in stone on the newly built tower by his palace, that his merit and his fortune had given him richly of all that could be desired¹¹⁴⁸—and this a few years before his expulsion. The ancients, when they spoke in this tone, had nevertheless a sense of the envy of the gods. In Italy it was probably the Condottieri (p. 22) who first ventured to boast so loudly of their fortune.

But the way in which resuscitated antiquity affected religion most powerfully, was not through any doctrines or philosophical system, but through a general tendency which it fostered. The men, and in some respects the institutions of antiquity were preferred to those of the Middle Ages, and in the eager attempt to imitate and reproduce them, religion was left to take care of itself. All was absorbed in the admiration for historical greatness (part ii. chap. iii., and above, passim). To this the philologians added many special follies of their own, by which they became the mark for general attention. How far Paul II. was justified in calling his Abbreviators and their friends to account for their paganism, is certainly a matter of great doubt, as his biographer and chief victim, Platina, (pp. 231, 331) has shown a masterly skill in explaining his vindictiveness on other grounds, and especially in making him play a ludicrous figure. The charges of infidelity, paganism,¹¹⁴⁹ denial of immortality, and so forth, were not made against the accused till the charge of high treason had broken down. Paul, indeed, if we are correctly informed about him, was by no means the man to judge of intellectual things. He knew little Latin, and spoke Italian at Consistories and in diplomatic negotiations. It was he who exhorted the Romans to teach their children nothing beyond reading and writing. His priestly narrowness of view reminds us of Savonarola (p. 476), with the difference that Paul might fairly have been told that he and his like were in great part to blame if culture made men hostile to religion. It cannot, nevertheless, be doubted that he felt a real anxiety about the pagan tendencies which surrounded him. And what, in truth, may not the humanists have allowed themselves at the court of the profligate pagan, Sigismondo Malatesta? How far these men, destitute for the most part of fixed principle, ventured to go, depended assuredly on the sort of influences they were exposed to. Nor could they treat of Christianity without paganising it (part iii. chap. x.). It is curious, for instance, to notice how far Gioviano Pontano carried this confusion. He speaks of a saint not only as ‘divus,’ but as ‘deus;’ the angels he holds to be identical with the genii of antiquity;¹¹⁵⁰ and his notion of immortality reminds us of the old kingdom of the shades. This spirit occasionally appears in the most extravagant shapes. In 1526, when Siena was attacked by the exiled party,¹¹⁵¹ the worthy canon Tizio, who tells us the story himself, rose from his bed on the 22nd July, called to mind what is written in the third book of Macrobius,’¹¹⁵² celebrated mass, and then pronounced against the enemy the curse with which his author had supplied him, only altering ‘Tellus mater teque Juppiter obtestor’ into ‘Tellus teque Christe Deus obtestor.’ After he had done this for three days, the enemy retreated. On the one side, these things strike us an affair of mere style and fashion; on the other, as a symptom of religious decadence.

CHAPTER IV.
MIXTURE OF ANCIENT AND MODERN SUPERSTITION

BUT in another way, and that dogmatically, antiquity exercised a perilous influence. It imparted to the Renaissance its own forms of superstition. Some fragments of this had survived in Italy all through the Middle Ages, and the resuscitation of the whole was thereby made so much the more easy. The part played by the imagination in the process need not be dwelt upon. This only could have silenced the critical intellect of the Italians.

The belief in a Divine government of the world was in many minds destroyed by the spectacle of so much injustice and misery. Others, like Dante, surrendered at all events this life to the caprices of chance, and if they nevertheless retained a sturdy faith, it was because they held that the higher destiny of man would be accomplished in the life to come. But when the belief in immortality began to waver, then Fatalism got the upper hand, or sometimes the latter came first and had the former as its consequence.

The gap thus opened was in the first place filled by the astrology of antiquity, or even of the Arabians. From the relations of the planets among themselves and to the signs of the zodiac, future events and the course of whole lives were inferred, and the most weighty decisions were taken in consequence. In many cases the line of action thus adopted at the suggestion of the stars may not have been more immoral than that which would otherwise have been followed. But too often the decision must have been made at the cost of honour and conscience. It is profoundly instructive to observe how powerless culture and enlightenment were against this delusion; since the latter had its support in the ardent imagination of the people, in the passionate wish to penetrate and determine the future. Antiquity, too, was on the side of astrology.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century this superstition suddenly appeared in the foreground of Italian life. The Emperor Frederick II. always travelled with his astrologer Theodorus; and Ezzelino da Romano¹¹⁵³ with a large, well-paid court of such people, among them the famous Guido Bonatto and the long-bearded Saracen, Paul of Bagdad. In all important undertakings they fixed for him the day and the hour, and the gigantic atrocities of which he was guilty may have been in part practical inferences from their prophecies. Soon all scruples about consulting the stars ceased. Not only princes, but free cities¹¹⁵⁴ had their regular astrologers, and at the universities,¹¹⁵⁵ from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, professors of this pseudo-science were appointed, and lectured side by side with the astronomers. It was well known that Augustine and other Fathers of the Church had combated astrology, but their old-fashioned notions were dismissed with easy contempt.¹¹⁵⁶ The Popes¹¹⁵⁷ commonly made no secret of their star-gazing, though Pius II., who also despised magic, omens, and the interpretation of dreams, is an honourable exception.¹¹⁵⁸ Julius II., on the other hand, had the day for his coronation and the day for his return from Bologna calculated by the astrologers.¹¹⁵⁹ Even Leo X. seems to have thought the flourishing condition of astrology a credit to his pontificate,¹¹⁶⁰ and Paul III. never held a Consistory till the star-gazers had fixed the hour.¹¹⁶¹

It may fairly be assumed that the better natures did not allow their actions to be determined by the stars beyond a certain point, and that there was a limit where conscience and religion made them pause. In fact, not only did pious and excellent people share the delusion, but they actually came forward to profess it publicly. One of these was Maestro Pagolo of Florence,¹¹⁶² in whom we can detect the same desire to turn astrology to moral account which meets us in the late Roman Firmicus Maternus.¹¹⁶³ His life was that of a saintly ascetic. He ate almost nothing, despised all temporal goods, and only collected books. A skilled physician, he only practised among his friends, and made it a condition of his treatment that they should confess their sins. He frequented the small but famous circle which assembled in the Monastery of the Angeli around Fra Ambrogio Camaldolese (p. 463). He also saw much of Cosimo the Elder, especially in his last years; for Cosimo accepted and used astrology, though probably only for objects of lesser importance. As a rule, however, Pagolo only interpreted the stars to his most confidential friends. But even without this severity of morals, the astrologers might be highly respected and show themselves everywhere. There were also far more of them in Italy than in other European countries, where they only appeared at the great courts, and there not always. All the great householders in Italy, when the fashion was once established, kept an astrologer, who, it must be added, was not always sure of his dinner.¹¹⁶⁴ Through the literature of this science, which was widely diffused even before the invention of printing, a dilettantism also grew up which as far as possible followed in the steps of the masters. The worst class of astrologers were those who used the stars either as an aid or a cloak to magical arts.

Yet apart from the latter, astrology is a miserable feature in the life of that time. What a figure do all these highly gifted, many-sided, original characters play, when the blind passion for knowing and determining the future dethrones their powerful will and resolution! Now and then, when the stars send them too cruel a message, they manage to brace themselves up, act for themselves, and say boldly: ‘Vir sapiens dominabitur astris’—the wise man is master of the stars,¹¹⁶⁵ and then again relapse into the old delusion.

In all the better families the horoscope of the children was drawn as a matter of course, and it sometimes happened that for half a lifetime men were haunted by the idle expectation of events which never occurred. The stars¹¹⁶⁶ were questioned whenever a great man had to come to any important decision, and even consulted as to the hour at which any undertaking was to be begun. The journeys of princes, the reception of foreign ambassadors,¹¹⁶⁷ the laying of the foundation-stone of public buildings, depended on the answer. A striking instance of the latter occurs in the life of the aforenamed Guido Bonatto, who by his personal activity and by his great systematic work on the subject¹¹⁶⁸ deserves to be called the restorer of astrology in the thirteenth century. In order to put an end to the struggle of the Guelphs and Ghibellines at Forli, he persuaded the inhabitants to rebuild the city walls and to begin the works under a constellation indicated by himself. If then two men, one from each party, at the same moment put a stone into the foundation, there would henceforth and for ever be no more party divisions in Forli. A Guelph and a Ghibelline were selected for this office; the solemn moment arrived, each held the stone in his hands, the workmen stood ready with their implements, Bonatto gave the signal and the Ghibelline threw down his stone on to the foundation. But the Guelph hesitated, and at last refused to do anything at all, on the ground that Bonatto himself had the reputation of a Ghibelline and might be devising some mysterious mischief against the Guelphs. Upon which the astrologer addressed him: ‘God damn thee and the Guelph party, with your distrustful malice! This constellation will not appear above our city for 500 years to come.’ In fact God soon afterwards did destroy the Guelphs of Forli, but now, writes the chronicler about 1480, the two parties are thoroughly reconciled, and their very names are heard no longer.¹¹⁶⁹

Nothing that depended upon the stars was more important than decisions in time of war. The same Bonatto procured for the great Ghibelline leader Guido da Montefeltro a series of victories, by telling him the propitious hour for marching.¹¹⁷⁰ When Montefeltro was no longer accompanied by him¹¹⁷¹ he lost the courage to maintain his despotism, and entered a Minorite monastery, where he lived as a monk for many years till his death. In the war with Pisa in 1362, the Florentines commissioned their astrologer to fix the hour for the march,¹¹⁷² and almost came too late through suddenly receiving orders to take a circuitous route through the city. On former occasions they had marched out by the Via di Borgo S. Apostolo, and the campaign had been unsuccessful. It was clear that there was some bad omen connected with the exit through this street against Pisa, and consequently the army was now led out by the Porta Rossa. But as the tents stretched out there to dry had not been taken away, the flags—another bad omen—had to be lowered. The influence of astrology in war was confirmed by the fact that nearly all the Condottieri believed in it. Jacopo Caldora was cheerful in the most serious illness, knowing that he was fated to fall in battle, which in fact happened.¹¹⁷³ Bartolommeo Alviano was convinced that his wounds in the head were as much a gift of the stars as his military command.¹¹⁷⁴ Niccolò Orsini Pitigliano asked the physicist and astrologer Alessandro Benedetto¹¹⁷⁵ to fix a favourable hour for the conclusion of his bargain with Venice (1495). When the Florentines on June 1, 1498, solemnly invested their new Condottiere Paolo Vitelli with his office, the Marshal’s staff which they handed him was, at his own wish, decorated with pictures of the constellations.¹¹⁷⁶ There were nevertheless generals like Alphonso the Great of Naples who did not allow their march to be settled by the prophets.¹¹⁷⁷

Sometimes it is not easy to make out whether in important political events the stars were questioned beforehand, or whether the astrologers were simply impelled afterwards by curiosity to find out the constellation which decided the result. When Giangaleazzo Visconti (p. 12) by a master-stroke of policy took prisoners his uncle Bernabò, with the latter’s family (1385), we are told by a contemporary, that Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars stood in the house of the Twins,¹¹⁷⁸ but we cannot say if the deed was resolved on in consequence. It is also probable that the advice of the astrologers was often determined by political calculation not less than by the course of the planets.¹¹⁷⁹

All Europe, through the latter part of the Middle Ages, had allowed itself to be terrified by predictions of plagues, wars, floods, and earthquakes, and in this respect Italy was by no means behind other countries. The unlucky year 1494, which for ever opened the gates of Italy to the stranger, was undeniably ushered in by many prophecies of misfortune¹¹⁸⁰—only we cannot say whether such prophecies were not ready for each and every year.

This mode of thought was extended with thorough consistency into regions where we should hardly expect to meet with it. If the whole outward and spiritual life of the individual is determined by the facts of his birth, the same law also governs groups of individuals and historical products—that is to say, nations and religions; and as the constellation of these things changes, so do the things themselves. The idea that each religion has its day, first came into Italian culture in connexion with these astrological beliefs, chiefly from Jewish and Arabian sources.¹¹⁸¹ The conjunction of Jupiter with Saturn brought forth, we are told,¹¹⁸² the faith of Israel; that of Jupiter and Mars, the Chaldean; with the Sun, the Egyptian; with Venus, the Mohammedan; with Mercury, the Christian; and the conjunction of Jupiter with the Moon will one day bring forth the religion of Antichrist. Checco d’Ascoli had already blasphemously calculated the nativity of Christ, and deduced from it his death upon the cross. For this he was burnt at the stake in 1327, at Florence.¹¹⁸³ Doctrines of this sort ended by simply darkening men’s whole perceptions of spiritual things.

So much more worthy then of recognition is the warfare which the clear Italian spirit waged against this army of delusions. Notwithstanding the great monumental glorification of astrology, as in the frescos in the Salone at Padua,¹¹⁸⁴ and those in Borso’s summer palace (Schifanoja), at Ferrara, notwithstanding the shameless praises of even such a man as the elder Beroaldus,¹¹⁸⁵ there was no want of thoughtful and independent minds to protest against it. Here, too, the way had been prepared by antiquity, but it was their own common sense and observation which taught them what to say. Petrarch’s attitude towards the astrologers, whom he knew by personal intercourse, is one of bitter contempt;¹¹⁸⁶ and no one saw through their system of lies more clearly than he. The novels, from the time when they first began to appear—from the time of the ‘Cento novelle antiche,’ are almost always hostile to the astrologers.¹¹⁸⁷ The Florentine chroniclers bravely keep themselves free from the delusions which, as part of historical tradition, they are compelled to record. Giovanni Villani says more than once,¹¹⁸⁸ ‘No constellation can subjugate either the free will of man, or the counsels of God.’ Matteo Villani¹¹⁸⁹ declares astrology to be a vice which the Florentines had inherited, along with other superstitions, from their pagan ancestors, the Romans. The question, however, did not remain one for mere literary discussion, but the parties for and against disputed publicly. After the terrible floods of 1333, and again in 1345, astrologers and theologians discussed with great minuteness the influence of the stars, the will of God, and the justice of his punishments.¹¹⁹⁰ These struggles never ceased throughout the whole time of the Renaissance,¹¹⁹¹ and we may conclude that the protestors were in earnest, since it was easier for them to recommend themselves to the great by defending, than by opposing astrology.

In the circle of Lorenzo the Magnificent, among his most distinguished Platonists, opinions were divided on this question. That Marsilio Ficino defended astrology, and drew the horoscope of the children of the house, promising the little Giovanni, afterwards Leo X., that he would one day be Pope,¹¹⁹² as Giovio would have us believe, is an invention—but other academicians accepted astrology. Pico della Mirandola,¹¹⁹³ on the other hand, made an epoch in the subject by his famous refutation. He detects in this belief the root of all impiety and immorality. If the astrologer, he maintains, believes in anything at all, he must worship not God, but the planets, from which all good and evil are derived. All other superstitions find a ready instrument in astrology, which serves as handmaid to geomancy, chiromancy, and magic of every kind. As to morality, he maintains that nothing can more foster evil than the opinion that heaven itself is the cause of it, in which case the faith in eternal happiness and punishment must also disappear. Pico even took the trouble to check off the astrologers inductively, and found that in the course of a month three-fourths of their weather prophecies turned out false. But his main achievement was to set forth, in the Fourth Book—a positive Christian doctrine of the freedom of the will and the government of the universe, which seems to have made a greater impression on the educated classes throughout Italy than all the revivalist preachers put together. The latter, in fact, often failed to reach these classes.

The first result of his book was that the astrologers ceased to publish their doctrines,¹¹⁹⁴ and those who had already printed them were more or less ashamed of what they had done. Gioviano Pontano, for example, in his book on Fate (p. 503), had recognised the science, and in a great work of his own,¹¹⁹⁵ the several parts of which were dedicated to his highly-placed friends and fellow-believers, Aldo Manucci, P. Bembo, and Sandazaro, had expounded the whole theory of it in the style of the old Firmicus, ascribing to the stars the growth of every bodily and spiritual quality. He now in his dialogue ‘Ægidius,’ surrendered, if not astrology, at least certain astrologers, and sounded the praises of free will, by which man is enabled to know God.¹¹⁹⁶ Astrology remained more or less in fashion, but seems not to have governed human life in the way it formerly had done. The art of painting, which in the fifteenth century had done its best to foster the delusion, now expressed the altered tone of thought. Raphael, in the cupola of the Cappella Chigi,¹¹⁹⁷ represents the gods of the different planets and the starry firmament, watched, however, and guided by beautiful angel-figures, and receiving from above the blessing of the Eternal Father. There was also another cause which now began to tell against astrology in Italy. The Spaniards took no interest in it, not even the generals, and those who wished to gain their favour¹¹⁹⁸ declared open war against the half-heretical, half-Mohammedan science. It is true that Guicciardini¹¹⁹⁹ writes in the year 1529: ‘How happy are the astrologers, who are believed if they tell one truth to a hundred lies, while other people lose all credit if they tell one lie to a hundred truths.’ But the contempt for astrology did not necessarily lead to a return to the belief in Providence. It could as easily lead to an indefinite Fatalism.