went to Verona. Whilst living there, in frequent intercourse with the venerable bishop Giberti, he received a citation to appear before the newly-founded Roman Inquisition. He set out in August, and on his way through Bologna paid a visit to Contarini, who lay dying there. The accounts of their interview differ; but Ochino gathered that if he went to Rome he would be forced " to deny Christ or be crucified." At Florence he met Vermigli, and resolved forthwith to fly, to throw in his lot with the Swiss Reformers, and to disseminate his doctrine by his pen. He reached Geneva, being then at the age of fifty-five, passing afterwards to Zurich, Augsburg, England, and back to Zurich. But his restless mind could not easily find satisfaction. Before long the Swiss expelled him because of his views on marriage, and he began to turn to the party amongst his compatriots which had abandoned not only the historic system but the historic faith of the Church. As early as September, 1550, a secret Anabaptist meeting had been held at Venice, attended by 60 deputies, which had rejected the divinity of Christ. Many who shared these views had taken refuge amongst the Swiss, including Giorgio Blandrata, formerly physician to Sigismund I of Poland, Niccolo Gallo, Giovanni Paolo Alciati, Matteo Gribaldi, and Valentine Gentile, all of whom fled to Geneva, and Lelio Sozzini, who went to Basel in 1547 and lived there unsuspected till his death in 1562. Calvin at length grew suspicious, and on May 18, 1558, put forth a confession of faith to be signed by all the members of the Italian congregation as a test of orthodoxy. Gribaldi managed to clear himself; Blandrata and Alciati, finding themselves unable to do so, fled to Poland; Gallo and Gentile signed, but afterwards retracted and were proceeded against for heresy: the last-named was ultimately beheaded at Bern, in 1556, as a perjured heretic. After 1558, Poland and Transylvania became the head-quarters of this extreme school, which remained the prey of vague and mutually contradictory theories, Arian and Anabaptist, until Fausto Sozzini (1539-1604), the nephew of Lelio, came to Transylvania (1578) and little by little organised a definite " Unitarian Church," the doctrinal manual of which was the Rakovian Catechism. To this party, in its earlier stages, Ochino had made approaches (in his Dialogi published in 1563 in Poland); but even the Polish anti-trinitarians thought him unsound; and he died in 1564, forsaken and alone, at Schlackau in Moravia.
Ochino's flight made a great sensation. To Caraffa it suggested the fall of Lucifer. Some attributed it to disappointed ambition, some to a sudden temptation. Vittoria Colonna, hitherto a frequent correspondent, broke with him entirely; but Caterina Cibô, in whose house he had renounced the cowl, appears to have corresponded with him still. In the records of the Roman Inquisition she figures as doctrine monialium haeretw-arum, the nuns being those of St Martha outside Florence. But she does not seem to have been proceeded against, and died at Florence in 1555.
