Paris, the secret fellowship and the adventure in Catalonia

Between the end of his studies in Cologne and the lectures at Dole lies one of the haziest periods of Agrippa's life. The only sources are a few letters, written by him and his friends, which allude to shared plans, journeys and dangers. Historians have read them carefully, but many details remain obscure. What emerges with some certainty is a stay in Paris around 1507 and an expedition to Spain in 1508.

A pact among young scholars

In Paris Agrippa formed ties with a group of students and young men of letters from various nations. The letters show that they had bound themselves by an oath of friendship and mutual help, a kind of fellowship devoted to the study of the secret arts and to common advancement. Some nineteenth-century interpreters saw in it the embryo of an occult society, but this is a hypothesis without documentary foundation.

More cautiously, modern scholars recognise in it a widespread form of humanist friendship: small circles that exchanged books, manuscripts and recommendations to the powerful. The coded language of certain letters, with allusions to secrets to be kept, reflects the period's taste for literary esotericism, but it does not prove the existence of a structured organisation.

The Catalan venture of 1508

In 1508 Agrippa was in Spain, in Catalonia, apparently involved in a military or political action linked to imperial service. The letters speak of an enterprise against some rebellious peasants and of refuge in a fortress called, in Latin, Arx Nigra, the Black Fort. The friends then supposedly escaped in adventurous fashion, and Agrippa passed through Barcelona, Valencia and the Balearic Islands.

No Spanish document confirms this account, and the exact chronology remains uncertain. Agrippa may well have embellished the episode to present himself as a man of action as well as of study. We do know, however, that soon afterwards we find him in southern France and then in the Franche-Comté, a sign that the Iberian journey was short and ended without success.

Between Avignon and Lyon

After Spain, the letters place Agrippa in the south of France, between Avignon and Lyon, where he met some companions of the fellowship again. There new plans and possible patrons were discussed. It was during these months that the move to Dole took shape, a university town in the Franche-Comté under the government of Margaret of Austria, daughter of Emperor Maximilian. The encounter with that courtly world would give his career its first real public opportunity.

The Parisian and Catalan period already shows the traits of Agrippa's whole life: the search for patrons, the taste for secrecy, constant mobility, and the tendency to narrate himself in adventurous terms. Anyone studying his biography must always distinguish between what the documents attest and what the author wished people to believe. In these youthful years the gap between the two is particularly wide, and caution is essential, above all when the only sources are the words of the protagonists themselves.