Juan de Segovia and the Fight for Peace: Christians and Muslims in the Fifteenth Century

Epilogue

Epilogue I t is humbling to observe that Juan de Segovia, who was one of Europe’s finest intellects and who had personally known and addressed popes, kings, and emperors, had so little impact after death on the goals most important to him. Sometime before 1658, someone commissioned a proper tomb to house Segovia’s remains. A description of it from that year offered that in the sculpture of the reclining man, the deceased wore a cardinal ’s cap under a bishop’s mitre. In what may have been an effort by the artist or patron to defend Segovia’s worthiness for such honors, and perhaps the duke’s right to bestow them, an angel positioned behind his head supported the mitre with both hands. The anonymous writer said that he was not able to learn who had ordered the tomb built. He reported that the man whose remains it housed was reputed a saint by the parishioners, one of whom told him that he never slept except under the saint’s vine branches (par les paroissiens dont l’un me dit qu’il ne couchait que sur des sarments). This 1658 description made no mention of an inscription concerning Juan de Segovia having been exiled to Aiton by the persecution he suffered at the hands of the Roman cardinals, which a visitor several decades earlier had noted. The report made by ecclesiastical visitor Antonius Cortailius in 1592, which recorded this commentary, mentioned a tomb with many candles, but 223 it did not mention this seemingly skillfully sculpted tomb. It seems possible that this was the same tomb that Cortailius saw and that the sculpture itself was added sometime between 1592 and 1658. In any case, it was no longer to be found in 1890, when an anonymous scholar recorded having seen this description in an archive, but said that he could find no sign of the tomb itself.1 The tomb was not mentioned in a history of the diocese of Maurienne written in 1680 by a local canon. Chapter 15 is a history of the bishops of Maurienne, an office Juan held for about a year. In contrast to the sections devoted to Louis de La Palud and Guillaume de Estouteville, Juan’s predecessor and successor respectively, the section on Juan de Segovia is nothing but a three-line entry, which mentions that he had been appointed to the see of Maurienne by Nicholas V, but not that Felix V had made him a cardinal. One wonders whether the author had seen the tomb sculpture with the cardinal’s cap in the village church in Aiton.2 Although the author of this history offered no hint of continuing local devotion to him, another author writing over a century later included this information. He also mentioned Felix V and noted that Juan was greatly revered.3 The chronicles of Savoy, published in the nineteenth century, perpetuated Segovia’s reputation as a posthumous miracle worker. He appears there, along with colleague Louis Aleman, at the end of the section dedicated to Amadeus VIII, the powerful first duke of Savoy who was elected pope (Felix V) by the delegates at Basel after they had declared Eugene IV deposed. After recording the most sorrowful death and burial of Amadeus, the chronicler commented that “to this day” miracles occurred at the duke’s tomb. He added that miracles also graced the tombs of two cardinals who had been faithful to Amadeus during his pontificate and afterwards, namely, Louis Aleman and Juan de Segovia.4 Segovia’s peers in Europe’s most exalted circles certainly did not treasure his memory. If his plans for peaceful dialogue with Muslims had any influence on others’ thinking, the most likely place to find it would be in Nicholas of Cusa, whose Cribratio had the same broad goals as Segovia’s efforts: to persuade Muslims that the Qur’ān was unreliable and that Christian teaching was credible. Still, there is no reason to think that Cusa derived the ideas developed in the Cribratio 224 Juan de Segovia and the Fight for Peace from things he heard from his Castilian colleague. As we have seen, his own ideas were similar enough to Segovia’s even before he knew of the other’s work on these matters. All of the other Christian thinkers that Juan de Segovia tried to enlist as supporters preceded him in death (Cardinal Cervantes) or rejected his line of reasoning (Jean Germain and Pius II...