Michael Servetus Biography Abstract
 Michael
Servetus is in more than one respect one of the most remarkable
men of the sixteenth century; while the tragic death which
he suffered made him the first and most conspicuous martyr
to the faith whose history we are following. Records of the
life of Servetus are scanty and inconsistent, and the gaps
in them have often been filled up by conjectures which have
later proved to be mistaken.
Servetus, Michael, in Spanish, Miguel Serveto (1511-1553),
Spanish physician and theologian, who was executed for his
beliefs by the Calvinist government of Geneva. He was born
in Villanueva de Sijena, Huesca Province. He studied law at
the University of Toulouse, medicine at the universities of
Paris and Montpellier. Beginning in 1540 he practiced medicine
in Vienne, France, where he also served as the personal physician
to the archbishop. About 1545 he began a correspondence with
the French Protestant theologian John Calvin.
Although still a nominal Catholic, he described his heretical
opposition to the concept of the Trinity. He wrote to Calvin
in 1545 about his desire to go there, but Calvin did not answer
and in a letter to one of his ministers he condemned him to
death, a goal he got in 1553. He was arrested while attending
church in Geneva, convicted of heresy and blasphemy against
Christianity, and burned at the stake on October 27, 1553.
Servetus's religious opinions were strongly opposed by Catholics
and Protestants of his time. In 1531 he repudiated, in his
De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Error of the Trinity), the
tripartite personality of God. In 1532 he wrote Dialogorum
de Trinitate Libri Duo (Second Book of Dialogues on the Trinity).
His scientific contributions were also notable; his Christianismi
Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity), published shortly
before his death in 1553, included the first accurate description
of the pulmonary circulatory system.
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