He doubtless continued his cruel work with the rest of his prisoners, but details are lacking for our next source of information is a letter of June 27th, written from Montalto by Luigi d’Appiano (apparently an official of the Archbishop of Reggio) to the Abate Parpaglia. Rome had taken alarm at the butchery of June 11th and had commissioned the archbishop, then returning to Naples, to take charge of the affair and conduct it in more regular fashion. D’Appiano explains that the prisoners from La Guardia were regarded as relapsed (and consequently to be abandoned to the secular arm), because they had abjured, while those from San Sisto, who had not, were simple heretics, whom the Church would receive back on their submission. He tells us that Bucchianico, with the commissioner and the archiepiscopal vicar of Cosenza, had concluded to impose a salutary penance on the least guilty; those more obstinate were to be sent to the galleys, and the ministers and leaders to the stake; of these five had already been sent to Cosenza to be burnt alive, after smearing them with pitch so as to prolong their sufferings and serve as a terrifying example. A reward of ten crowns a head had been offered for the capture of fugitives and they were being daily brought in. Many women prisoners, who were instruments of the devil, were to be burnt and of these five, who had confessed to the nocturnal orgies attributed to the heretics, would be executed at Cosenza the next day.[151] All children under fifteen years of age were scattered among Catholic families, at a distance of at least eight miles from the Waldensian settlements and were forbidden to intermarry.[152] How long the persecution lasted does not appear, but a letter of December 12, 1561, from the viceroy, alludes to prisoners whose trials he ordered to be expedited.[153]
That the persecution was religious and not political is seen in the fact that the people of San Sisto, who had risen in arms and had defended themselves, were treated with much less harshness than those of La Guardia whose offence was technically construed as relapse into heresy. The conditions imposed on those who were spared the galleys or the stake confirm this. The Roman Inquisition prescribed that all should wear the yellow habitello with the red cross; that all should hear mass every day, before going to labor, under heavy fines; that confession and communion should be observed on the prescribed feast-days by all of proper age; that for twenty-five years there should be no intermarriage between them; that all communication with Piedmont and Geneva should cease, together with various other prescriptions looking to the training of the children in the faith and the instruction of the elders. To these Fra Valerio added that not more than six persons should assemble together and that their native tongue, which they had sedulously preserved, should be abandoned for Italian.[154]
In the exigencies of the moment the papal Inquisition had thus obtained a recognition in Neapolitan territory for which it had hitherto been vainly struggling, but it was intermingled with the episcopal and royal jurisdictions in a manner indicating how little organization there was for action in an emergency. The royal jurisdiction, moreover, asserted itself still further when, November 13, 1561, the viceroy issued a commission to Fra Valerio as inspector of heretical books throughout the kingdom, authorizing him to go to the points of importation and empowering him to summon to his aid the secular magistrates—a commission which was renewed May 8, 1562.[155] The viceroy also enforced one of the provisions of the Spanish Inquisition, for he laid claim to the confiscations and, on September 17, 1561, he commissioned Dr. Antonio Moles to proceed to the spot and take possession of all the property of those convicted, including the debts due to them. Apparently there had been general plunder, for he was empowered to enforce the surrender of what had been taken. Dr. Moles seems to have had much trouble with clerics, who had been active in the spoiling and had committed many enormous offences; as clerics they were beyond his jurisdiction, but the vicar of Cosenza sent him an assistant to exercise the necessary spiritual jurisdiction.[156] As La Guardia and San Sisto had both been burnt and the country laid waste, there cannot have been much left to confiscate, but Dr. Moles seems to have conscientiously stripped the land bare, for when the results were sent to Naples and sold at auction they produced a handsome amount of money.[157] This evidently represents only the movable property; the real-estate seems to have been granted by Philip II to the Confraternity for the redemption of captives; it was valued at 5000 ducats and was sold for 2500 by the Confraternity to Salvatore Spinello. He had been created Marquis of Fuscaldo in recompense for the zeal with which he had aided the Inquisition in destroying his vassals, and he finally sold the lands to the communities for an annual revenue of 180 ducats.[158] Strenuous as were the methods of the Inquisition, however, deeply rooted faiths have power of protracted resistance, and some correspondence of the Roman Congregation with the Duchess of Montesalto, in 1599 and 1600, would indicate that there were still remnants of these heretics in Calabria and that there was talk of establishing a school for their conversion.[159]
The Waldenses of Apulia had a milder fate. The ruin and butchery in Calabria was a warning to all parties. Their lords were powerful nobles—the Prince of Molfetta, the Duke of Airola, the Count of Biccari and others—who did not wish to see their lands laid waste and depopulated. Fra Valerio was not called in, but a papal commission was procured for Ferdinando Anna, Bishop of Bovino, in whose diocese most of the infected district lay; less inhuman measures were employed and doubtless the savage work in Calabria led the heretics to be accommodating. Only a few of the more zealous were prosecuted; the mass of the population submitted and seem to have been taken to the bosom of Mother Church without severe penalties.[160]
Possibly Fra Valerio may have been engaged in more congenial occupation in the province of Reggio, where at this time there were discovered some survivors of those who had embraced the doctrines taught by Juan de Valdés. The viceroy sent thither the Commissioner Panza, fresh from his labors at Montalto. He must have had inquisitorial assistance and though, in the fragmentary records, Fra Valerio’s name does not appear, he was the most probable collaborator in the active work which ensued. Four citizens of Reggio and eleven of San Lorenzo were burnt, while a number abjured and escaped with imposition of the habitello.[161]
In all these proceedings there is an incongruous intermingling of jurisdictions—papal, episcopal and secular—which shows how well the people had thus far succeeded in preventing the establishment of an organized Inquisition. They looked with complacency on the sufferings of the heretics and offered no opposition to the measures adopted, satisfied with the participation of the civil and episcopal powers. They had, however, lost none of their horror of the Spanish institution and, when Philip II endeavored to force it upon Milan, their fears were aroused that it might be imposed upon Naples. In 1564 there was much popular excitement; the Piazze assembled and adopted strong declarations; Pius IV, who did not wish to see the Spanish Inquisition in Italy, seconded these efforts and peremptorily ordered the Theatin Paolo d’Arezzo—subsequently cardinal and archbishop of Naples—to accept the mission with which the city charged him to Philip, to remonstrate against the threatened introduction of the Inquisition and also to ask for the revival of the brief of Julius III abolishing confiscations. The latter request Philip refused but, in letters of March 10, 1565, he assured his subjects that he had no intention of introducing the Spanish Inquisition and that trials for heresy should be conducted in the ordinary way as heretofore.[162]
The “via ordinaria” meant episcopal jurisdiction exercised in accordance with the practice of the spiritual courts in other criminal trials as distinguished from the secret procedure of the Inquisition, which denied to the accused almost every means of defence. This in the subsequent struggles was constantly cited by the Neapolitans as their protection, but it was easily evaded. The Roman Inquisition, it is true, was not allowed to organize a tribunal with an inquisitor at its head and commissioners in all the cities, as was the case in the northern provinces of Italy, and to exhibit its power with the spectacle of autos de fe, but it had its agents more or less openly and its victims were transmitted to Rome for trial and execution. Alongside of this, for a time at least, the episcopal jurisdiction over heresy was fully recognized and a number of vice-regal letters of the period show that it was vigorously exercised by some of the prelates, though whether by the via ordinaria or not does not appear.[163] This gratified the Neapolitans who, in 1571, sent a deputation to Archbishop Carafa to congratulate him on his holy labors against the heretics and Jews and to ask him to express to the pope their satisfaction that these people should be punished and extirpated by the episcopal Ordinaries, according to the canons and without the interposition of the secular court.[164] This is a scarcely veiled hint of the popular detestation of the Inquisition, whether Spanish or papal, and that this continued unabated is manifested by the Venetian envoy, Girolamo Lippomani who, in his relation of 1575, describes the Neapolitans as most religious and filled with zeal for the love of God, but nevertheless they will not endure the very name of the Inquisition and would be ready to rise against it as they have done in the past.[165]
The occasion of this address to the archbishop presumably was a lively persecution of Judaizers then on foot. There had been many abjurations, some burnings, and the archbishop was preparing to build cells attached to the walls of his palace to provide for the confinement of those sentenced to perpetual prison. There was considerable popular excitement because an inquisitorial deputy, with the title of vicar, had been sent from Rome, and there was faction among the citizens, for the number of accused was large, with kinships ramifying throughout the community. Cardinal Granvelle, then recently appointed viceroy, in a letter of July 31, 1571, to the Cardinal of Pisa, head of the Roman Inquisition, expressed his fears of a tumult; he had asked the archbishop to suspend the prosecutions and postpone building the cells; it would be better to send, as the pope desired, the accused to Rome, where they would be vigorously punished. In effect, towards the end of December, four women and three men were sent as Judaizers to Rome, where they were duly strangled and burnt on February 9, 1572.[166]
This sending of the accused to the Roman Inquisition, whether for trial or execution, gradually became the accepted custom, as a sort of compromise between the pretensions of the Holy Office and the settled repugnance of the people. It was not, however, without some complications. Of old, no arrests by the Inquisition were permitted without the royal assent in each case, but in the absence of an organized Inquisition this salutary rule seems to have been forgotten and it evidently was not observed in the Calabrian persecutions. When, however, in 1568, the authorities of Reggio were ordered by the Sicilian tribunal to arrest and forward two individuals charged with heresy, obedience was refused and the Duke of Alcalá, still viceroy, was notified. He approved the position taken but instructed the officials to arrest the parties and hold them until the Sicilian tribunal should report whether the alleged offences were committed in Sicily or in Naples; in the former case he was to forward them; in the latter to hold them until it should be determined whether they were justiciable by the Ordinary or by the Roman Holy Office, and such was to be the rule hereafter. The Sicilian tribunal did not relish this interference with its arbitrary methods and the next month there came news that two of its emissaries had landed at Reggio, gone inland and carried off to Messina a friar from an Augustinian convent; moreover they were now endeavoring to do the same with another of the brethren. Thereupon the viceroy ordered the utmost watchfulness to be observed and, if any attempt of the kind were made, the inquisitorial agents were to be thrown in prison and held for his instructions.[167]
If this caution was necessary in dealing with a province under the same crown, much more was it applicable to the Roman Congregation of the Inquisition. No independent state could permit its citizens to be abducted, without the knowledge of the authorities, at the bidding of a foreign prince whose policy at any moment might be hostile. To submit to such a claim was an abdication of sovereignty.[168] Moreover, nearly all Catholic kingdoms had been forced, by the perpetual meddling of the papacy with their internal affairs, to adopt the rule that no papal rescript of any kind should be enforced without first submitting it to the government for its exequatur. Naples, as especially exposed to papal encroachments, was particularly careful as to this, and no brief, however trivial, was allowed to take effect without being submitted to the authorities for approval.[169] In 1567 we find Pius V exhaling his indignation to Philip II at the violation of the rights of the Holy See because a bishop, whom he had sent to Naples as visitor to report on the condition of the clergy, was not allowed to exercise his functions without the exequatur.[170]