The last years: Bonn, arrest in France and death at Grenoble

Agrippa's last years are those of a man both famous and isolated. From 1532 he lived in Bonn, the residence of the Archbishop of Cologne, Hermann von Wied, who offered him protection after his fall from favour at the court of the Netherlands. There he completed the printing of the De occulta philosophia and wrote his last polemics against the Louvain theologians. In 1535, however, he decided to leave Germany and set out for France, where he found prison and then death.

The refuge in Bonn

Hermann von Wied was a prince of the Church open to reforming ideas, who years later would try to introduce the Reformation into his diocese and end up deposed. He welcomed Agrippa into his circle and accepted the dedication of the occult philosophy. In Bonn the young Johann Weyer also lived with him for a time; he would become a celebrated physician and author and left us direct testimony about his master's domestic life.

In these years Agrippa published an Apologia against the accusations of the Louvain theologians and a Querela, a complaint about the slanders he had suffered. He corresponded with several humanists, including Erasmus of Rotterdam, who advised him to be cautious in his polemics. His financial situation nonetheless remained difficult, and his third marriage, contracted in the Low Countries, ended in separation in 1535.

Arrest in France

We do not know for certain why Agrippa decided to return to France in 1535. Perhaps he hoped for new patrons, perhaps he was trying to collect debts. Once in the kingdom, he was arrested by order of Francis I because of insulting writings and words against the late queen mother, Louise of Savoy, who had died in 1531. The resentment born in Lyon, never quelled, now cost him his freedom, in a kingdom where insults to the royal family were severely punished even after the death of its members.

The imprisonment was brief. Thanks to the intervention of friends and patrons, Agrippa was released. But by then he was a man worn down by years of travel, debt and conflict, and his health must have been impaired. The sources are scarce and partly contradictory about these final weeks, and modern biographers prefer not to go beyond the few certain facts.

Death at Grenoble

Agrippa died at Grenoble in 1535, at about forty-nine years of age. The precise date is not certain: some reconstructions point to the early months of the year, others to a later period. According to tradition he was given hospitality in his last days by influential people of the city and buried in the convent of the Dominicans, the order he had clashed with so many times, from Cologne to Metz. No trace of the tomb remains.

Paolo Giovio, a few years later, placed his death instead at Lyon and accompanied it with the legendary tale of the black dog, which Weyer himself would refute. Agrippa's obscure end thus favoured the birth of the myth. Instead of a physician and philosopher who died poor in a provincial city, the European imagination preferred to see a magician paying the price of his secret pacts, and that image survived for centuries.