Sardinian scholar Sigismondo Arquer was burned at the stake in Toledo, Spain, on this date in 1571.

Born in the capital of Spanish-governed Sardinia, this gentleman had a hereditary imperial knighthood but also an interest in humanism and religious heterodoxy well-calculated to annoy in Counter-Reformation Spain.

Arquer’s map of his native city of Cagliari, for the Cosmographia universalis, for which compendium he also composed an entry on “dark Sardinia” that “in its blend of ancient sources, personal observations and original narrative structure … played a critical role, even when not explicitly acknowledged, in the development of the image of Sardinia in European culture.” (Source) Today, one of the streets in this very historical core the man once sketched is called Via Sigismondo Arquer.

Exploiting Arquer’s associations with Swiss Protestants as well as his talent for making powerful enemies — skewering clergy in the Cosmographia, nettlesome lawsuits against Spanish oligarchs — the Inquisition bagged him for heresy in 1563. He was 33.

In between bouts of interrogation, Arquer used his long confinement to knock out a Passion in Catalan, heavy with personal resonance. The Christ parallels ran all the way to the Plaza de Zocodover, where a soldier — motivated by anger at the heretic or pity for the sufferer, only God can say — speared him through the side during his death throes.

On this day..

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• 1718: A horse thief and two travelers, "the worst rideing that ever I rid"
• 1886: A day in the death penalty around the U.S. South
• 1867: Gottlieb Williams, eyeballed
• 1886: Tabby Banks and Tom Honesty, for election rejection
• 1155: Arnold of Brescia
• 1937: Helmut Hirsch, secret bomber
• 2008: Curtis Osborne, poorly represented
• 1516 and 1530: Autos de fe in the Spanish Canary Islands
• 1999: Dole Chadee, crime lord
• 1814: Four of five deserters, in Buffalo
• 1913: Antonio Echazarreta, defending Matamoros