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.
