In the second place, he derived his income from certain estates situated on the other side of the Alps and the Tuscan authorities had given him a hint that it might be just as well for one suspected of “Lutheran leanings” not to be too bold while dealing with subjects which were held in disfavor by the Inquisition. Hence he used a number of pseudonyms and never printed a book unless it had been passed upon by a number of friends and had been declared to be fairly safe.
Thus it happened that his books were not placed on the Index. It also happened that a copy of his life of Jesus was carried all the way to Transylvania and there fell into the hands of another liberal-minded Italian, the private physician of a number of Milanese and Florentine ladies who had married into the Polish and Transylvanian nobility.
Transylvania in those days was the “far east” of Europe. A wilderness until the early part of the twelfth century, it had been used as a convenient home for the surplus population of Germany. The hard working Saxon peasants had turned this fertile land into a prosperous and well regulated little country with cities and schools and an occasional university. But it remained a country far removed from the main roads of travel and trade. Hence it had always been a favorite place of residence for those who for one reason or another preferred to keep a few miles of marsh and mountain between themselves and the henchmen of the Inquisition.
As for Poland, this unfortunate country has for so many centuries been associated with the general idea of reaction and jingoism that it will come as an agreeable surprise to many of my readers when I tell them that during the first half of the sixteenth century, it was a veritable asylum for all those who in other parts of Europe suffered on account of their religious convictions.
This unexpected state of affairs had been brought about in a typically Polish fashion.
That the Republic for quite a long time had been the most scandalously mismanaged country of the entire continent was even then a generally known fact. The extent, however, to which the higher clergy had neglected their duties was not appreciated quite so clearly in those days when dissolute bishops and drunken village priests were the common affliction of all western nations.
But during the latter half of the fifteenth century it was noticed that the number of Polish students in the different German universities was beginning to increase at a rate of speed which caused great concern among the authorities of Wittenberg and Leipzig. They began to ask questions. And then it developed that the ancient Polish academy of Cracow, administered by the Polish church, had been allowed to fall into such a state of utter decay that the poor Polanders were forced to go abroad for their education or do without. A little later, when the Teuton universities fell under the spell of the new doctrines, the bright young men from Warsaw and Radom and Czenstochowa quite naturally followed suit.
And when they returned to their home towns, they did so as full-fledged Lutherans.