Frontiere di giustizia nell'Impero spagnolo: le avventure transatlantiche di Agostino Boasio

The essay focuses on the frontiers of justice in the Spanish Empire as seen in the ‘outsider’ career of Italian merchant Agostino Boasio. Boasio was first arrested in 1558 at Zacatecas, on the northern frontier of Mexico, for distributing heretical books and disseminating heretical ideas. He was condemned and sent to serve his sentence in Spain. However, during the sea voyage to Castile, he took advantage of a last stop in the Azores to escape. Thereafter, the Seville inquisitors pursued him relentlessly throughout Europe. In Antwerp the Boasio affair became the object of a harsh dispute between Philip II and the town authorities immediately before the 1567 revolt. He died in London in 1571. In 1569 his refusal to subscribe to the strict Confession of Faith of the French Church led to his exclusion from the community of London refugees. Boasio’s incredible, almost novelistic adventures can be reconstructed through six Inquisitorial and judicial trials and by Philip II’s numerous letters about the case.