Il marchese di Oria e Donato Rullo, due eretici salentini del '500 tra trasgressioni valdesi ed erasmiane

In the study Il marchese di Oria e Donato Rullo, due eretici italiani del '500 tra trasgressioni valdesi ed erasmiane (Studies conference "Lutero in Terra d'Otranto") we note the activity of two characters from the sixteenth century in Puglia, the merchant Donato Rullo and the nobleman Gian Bernardino Bonifacio, Marquis of Oria, seen in the context of the vast reform unleashed in Europe by Martin Luther. They represent the galaxy of people en route with Roman orthodoxy, coming from the Terra d'Otranto, but both wanderers, the first for the needs of its businesses and especially following the English cardinal Reginald Pole, the latter looking for a minimum of "Erasmian" tolerance, a great bibliophile devourer of books, which he bought or printed throughout Europe. The dealer Rullo had an epistolary with Girolamo Seripando, prior general of the Augustinians and cardinal, former student of Juan de Valdès. He traveled a lot and for his acquaintances he stumbled, after many vicissitudes, on May 6, 1566, in the Inquisition, betrayed by his broad correspondence and by testimonies of heretics inquisitive in great trials celebrated in Italy. Bonifacio, Marquis of Oria, showed traits of a complex personality according to the epistolary of Bonifacio Amerbach, jurist and executor of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Just fifteen years old, he was sent by his father, accompanied by a guardian, to travel to Rome, France and Spain. Taken from the spirit of the Reformation, he lived as a young pagan full of the joy of life of the humanists. Drawn from Bern, he was exiled to Basel, where Aegypsius was appealed, due to the availability of money and the two women, Giulia and Tisiphone. Cited as a heretic by the Inquisition in 1557 and confiscated his property by Philip II, he traveled to Strasbourg, Worms, Augsburg, Trieste and Aquileia and other centers of the book market. Finally he repaired in the city of Gdansk, far enough from the persecutory ferocity of the Jesuits, living, until March 24, 1597, in a Franciscan convent made available by the Council of the Polish city, to which he had donated all his books and where he had found " tranquility ", far from any intolerance. Two characters of the sixteenth century, therefore, Rullo and Bonifacio, Apulian witnesses of the Lutheran reformist storm in Italy.