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.
