Michael Servetus
Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and humanist
1511 CE to 1553 CE
Michael Servetus (also Miguel Servet or Miguel Serveto; 29 September 1511 – 27 October 1553) 9s a Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and humanist.
He is the first European to describe the function of pulmonary circulation.
His interests include many sciences: mathematics, astronomy and meteorology, geography, human anatomy, medicine and pharmacology, as well as jurisprudence, and the scholarly study of the Bible in its original languages.
He is renowned in the history of several of these fields, particularly medicine and theology.
He participates in the Protestant Reformation, and later develops a nontrinitarian Christology.
Condemned by Catholics and Protestants alike, he is arrested in Geneva and burnt at the stake as a heretic by order of the Protestant Geneva governing council.
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Michael Servetus, condemned by both Catholics and Protestants for the antitrinitarian philosophy he had expressed in his 1531 treatise, has gone to France, here studying medicine and natural sciences.
From 1540, the Aragonese theologian, physician, and humanist practices medicine in Vienne, where he is one of the first to describe the pulmonary transit of the blood.
The Spanish theologian, physician, and jurist Michael Servetus, in his De Trinitatis erroribus (1531; “On the Errors of the Trinity”) and Christianismi restitutio (1553; “The Restitution of Christianity”) has provided important stimulus for the emergence of Unitarianism.
His principal work, Christianismi Restitutio, published under the pseudonym Michel de Villeneuve, is denounced on all sides for anti-trinitarian heresy.
Arrested by the Inquisition for his philosophy, he escapes from Vienne to ...
...Geneva to see French Protestant reformer Jean Calvin, to whom he had sent an earlier manuscript of his work.
Geneva’s libertines, resistant to Calvin’s reforms of the past fourteen years, offer backhanded support to Servetus, but Calvin orders his arrest.
He is tried and burned as a heretic on October 27, 1553.
Many prominent Protestant leaders of the day approve of the execution.
Philipp Melanchthon writes to Calvin: "To you also the Church owes gratitude at the present moment, and will owe it to the latest posterity....I affirm also that your magistrates did right in punishing, after a regular trial, this blasphemous man.”