Library of the Anti-Trinitarians

ANTI-TRINITARIANS

...to God because of things he had uttered differently in a certain sermon. Specifically (as others have recorded in writing), on Palm Sunday, he sharply criticized the pomp of the Roman Pope in his very presence from the pulpit—making a comparison with the Lord Jesus entering Jerusalem in a state of poverty—and the life of the Roman Pontiffs. When the sermon ended, one of the Cardinals indicated to him that the Pope was offended and persuaded him to escape the immediate danger by flight at once. Thus, he soon set out on a journey and withdrew to Venice. The Duchess of Ferrara aided his flight by supplying him with clothing and other necessities, as Bzovius Abraham Bzovius (1567–1637), a Polish Dominican historian and hagiographer testifies in the aforementioned place. For at that time in those regions, his authority—gained through his teaching, eloquence, and above all, the integrity of his character—was great. This is clear even from a single eulogy by Bzovius himself, which he did not hesitate to offer him; for he says of Ochino in that same place: He was held in such high esteem then that he was considered the one best preacher in all of Italy, as one who, by his admirable delivery as well as the eloquence of his tongue, could carry the minds of his listeners wherever he wished, and all the more so because his life resonated with his teaching.

To this also belongs the testimony given to him by Fulvia Morata Olympia Fulvia Morata (1526–1555), an Italian Protestant scholar of great renown in Book II of her letters to her sister Victoria Morata, in a letter written on the 7th of the Ides of August in the year 1555 (as I gather from the immediately preceding letters), where she relates these things: I hear that Bernardino Ocellus that is what Ochinus sounds like in the Italian language of Siena, a sincerely Christian man, has fled from England to Geneva. So everywhere must the cross be borne by him who wishes to be a Christian.

In the year 1563, at the age of 76 (according to the testimony of Petrus Perna A famous printer in Basel who specialized in Italian Reformers in a letter to Czechowic), he was expelled by the Zurichers. In the bitterest winter, with all roads blocked by snow and ice—as Bzovius relates from a letter of Dudith to Beza Andreas Dudith, a humanist diplomat, and Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor in the aforementioned place, section 28—he went from there to Poland.

Regarding his death, various authors write in different ways. Budzinius testifies in his manuscript History of the Polish Churches of His Time, chapter 26, that due to mandates issued in 1564 against foreigners who harbored opinions on the Trinity differing from the common one, he was driven out of Poland. Having lost two sons and his eldest daughter to the spreading plague, he withdrew to Moravia, and died there in Slavkov original: "Slavcoviæ" after three weeks had passed. Some (such as Hoornbeek), having misunderstood a passage by Zarnovecius in his book against Fausto Sozzini Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), a founding figure of Socinianism, thought that he [died in the company of] Lælius Socinus...