Venice had already recovered most of the territories on the mainland of Italy wrenched from her by the League of Cambrai, but in the East the Turks steadily took away city, island, and province. After a long period of war, one gallant exploit gilded the fortunes of the losing side. A league against the Turks was effected between Spain, the Papacy, and Venice, and the united fleets, under the supreme command of Don John of Austria, won the renowned sea-fight off Lepanto (1571); but except for chopping off a goodly number of infidel heads and limbs, little was accomplished. In this battle a young Spanish soldier, Miguel de Cervantes, lost an arm. Soon afterwards peace was made on terms hard for the Venetians, but beneficent in that it was destined to last for seventy years.
We now come to the Papacy, and there, in extraordinary contrast to the degeneration and decay all around, we find militant vigour and energy. This phenomenon is so remarkable that we must glance back at the perils through which the Papacy had passed. Ever since the fall of the Empire (when the political union of Italy and Germany broke in two) disruptive forces had been at work to break the ecclesiastical union, until at last, in the pontificate of Leo X, Martin Luther affixed his theses concerning indulgences to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, burnt the papal bull, and threw off his allegiance. The North of Europe followed him. The record of the Papacy had been utter failure and worse. It had smeared itself from head to foot with simony, nepotism, and vice; it had cast religion to the winds. No expression of indignation would have been adequate without the sack of Rome. A statesman might well have predicted that all Europe would dismember and suppress the Papacy and adopt a system of national churches. Nevertheless, at the end of the century the Papacy stood erect and vigorous, shorn indeed of universal empire, but reëstablished, the Order of Jesus at its right, the Holy Inquisition at its left, draped in piety by the Council of Trent, and hobnobbing on even terms with kings. The process which effected this change is called the Counter-reformation, or the Catholic Reaction. That process was a happy blending of virtue, bigotry, and policy. Borne upward and onward by the forces of reform and conservatism, the Modern Papacy rose triumphant on the ruins of the Papacy of the Renaissance.
The same spirit that caused the Reformation in the North started the Catholic Revival in the South. A wave, comparable to the old movement for Church reform in Hildebrand's time, swept over the Catholic Church, and lifted the reformers within the Church into power. The South emulated the North. Catholic zeal rivalled Protestant ardour. Bigotry followed zeal. Moreover, a reformed Papacy found ready allies. The logical consequence of Protestantism was personal independence in religion, and the next logical step was personal independence in politics. Protestant subjects, more especially where their rulers were Catholics, tended to become disobedient; and monarchs, who stood for absolutism and conservatism, found themselves drawn close to an absolute and conservative Pope. The kings of Spain and the Popes of Rome became friends and allies.
Within three years after the sack of Rome, Clement crowned Charles V with the Imperial crown in Bologna, where, for the last time in Italy, proclamation was made of a "Romanorum Imperator semper Augustus, Mundi totius Dominus;" and the Papacy, strengthened at once by its league with Spain, lifted its head. Further strength came from other sources. The brilliant young Spaniard, Ignatius Loyola, founded the Order of Jesus, which vowed itself to poverty, chastity, and obedience to the Papacy (1534). Spain, too, by the moral effect of example, procured the Inquisition for Italy. From the time of Innocent III, the Dominican monks had had charge of preserving the purity of the faith and of punishing heretics, and they had performed this function with what might appear to a sceptic sufficient zeal, but during the great racial and religious struggle in Spain which ended in the capture of Granada, more zeal was deemed necessary and the Spanish Inquisition was established. Its fame spread far and wide. The Spanish viceroys introduced it in a modified form in Naples, and Cardinal Caraffa, a zealous reformer, urged the need of such an institution in Rome. The Holy Office of Rome was established, and Caraffa put at its head (1542). Heretics were frightened into conformity or punished; some were driven out of the country, a few were burned to death. Freedom of thought was vigorously attacked; and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum was decreed. The great and growing power of the reformers may be measured by the fact that the Pope who sanctioned these great bulwarks of the papal system was the once gay Alexander Farnese, Paul III, whom we otherwise know as a brother and a father. The culminating exhibition of the power of the reformers, however, was in the Council of Trent (1545-63).
Europe had been too long accustomed to the idea of ecclesiastical unity to sit still without some attempt at reconciliation between the Catholics and Protestants. It was hoped that a Council would heal all wounds, smooth all difficulties, and bring back the irrevocable past. The Popes, however, had come to regard Councils as inimical bodies with dangerous tendencies towards investigation and with hostile canons, and were inclined to take the risk of losing the tainted parts of Christendom altogether, rather than make use of so perilous an instrument to recover them. But the Emperor, Charles V, was insistent; his Empire, as well as the Church, was cracked, and in great danger of breaking in two. The Council was convoked, and met at Trent. The primary object was reconciliation; but everybody knew that no reconciliation was possible without radical reforms in the Church, so the papal party played its cards with exceeding wariness. The Lutherans did not attend, and the papal party, in order to forestall practical reforms, plunged into the comparatively safe matter of defining dogma, and defined it in such a way as to fence out all the Lutheran schismatics. The reformers, nevertheless, managed to sandwich in between the definitions of dogma various decrees for the reform of Church discipline. In Catholic theory an Ecumenical Council acts under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost; but looking at this Council from a purely secular point of view, it is hard to find other guidance than the quarrelling interests of Pope, bishops, Emperor, Spaniards, French, and Italians. In fact, the Council was twice broken up. The first time the Pope, having taken alarm, declared the Council adjourned to Bologna. The second time the Lutherans, then at war with the Emperor, swooped down near Trent and frightened the Council away. It met again, for the third time. All hope of reconciliation with the Protestants had then passed away, and the Council set to work as a purely Roman Catholic partisan body. A striking change of attitude within the Council showed that since the early sessions the reforming party had won complete control. Paul IV (1555-59), a man of high character, formerly Cardinal Caraffa, head of the Roman Inquisition, had promulgated many edicts concerning reforms; and his successor Pius IV, Giovanni Angelo Medici of Milan (not of the Florentine family) (1559-66), who was Pope during the final sessions of the Council, followed his lead. Pius, a clever man who had received a legal training, instead of wasting efforts in persuading disputatious bishops, first made diplomatic arrangements with the Catholic sovereigns of Spain, France, and Austria, and then secured the embodiment of those arrangements in decrees by the Council. Nothing, however, could have been accomplished without the reforming spirit within the Church; Pius removed obstacles in its way and let it have full play. Stern rules were made against the corrupt practices, which had given Luther his strength. Canons regulated the conduct of the clergy, the duties of bishops, the affairs of monasteries and nunneries, and all matters connected with the great organization of the Roman Church. These reforms came too late to affect Protestant opinion, but they rallied the doubting, confirmed the faithful, and gave the Papacy wide-reaching moral support. The dogmas of the Church were cast in adamant, and secured the immense advantage of definiteness and fixity. The Council of Trent remains the principal monument of the Catholic Revival, and that Revival is certainly the most important event for Italy in the period immediately following the Renaissance. Pius IV, the clever lawyer, had a great share in the work of the Council, but his most skilful achievement was to maintain and confirm the doctrine of the subordination of Councils to the Papacy. This great stroke, as well as his share in the reforms, has won for him the title of founder of the Modern Papacy.
In this manner the Papacy prospered during the very generations in which the greatness of Italy dwindled away. The fortunes of the two had wholly parted company. The Papacy, indeed, had made itself an Italian institution,—never again would it seat a foreigner on the chair of St. Peter,—but in all other ways it had ceased to have any national affections. Italy, her genius faded, her vigour faint, not only deprived of what might have been a great support, but even pushed down and held under by the help of her own greatest creation, the Church, ceased to be a country. She had become, in Metternich's famous phrase, a mere geographical expression, an aggregate of little states, with no tie between them except that of juxtaposition and of common subservience to foreigners. If we look at a map drawn at the close of the sixteenth century, we shall find the following political divisions:—
The Duchy of Savoy,
The Spanish province of Lombardy,
The Republic of Venice,
The little Duchy of Parma, under the Farnesi,
The little Duchy of Mantua, under the Gonzaga,
The little Duchy of Modena, under the Este family,
The little Duchy of Urbino, under the della Rovere
who had succeeded to the Montefeltri,
The Republic of Genoa,
The Republic of Lucca,
The Grand Duchy of Tuscany, under the Medici,
The Papal States,
The Spanish province of Naples,
The Spanish province of Sicily.
Over them all, Spanish provinces, independent republics, Italian duchies, and Papal States, falls the shadow cast by the royal standard of Spain. Next to our consciousness of that dreaded banner, the most vivid impression which we take away is the contrast between the vigour of the Papacy and the weakness of Italy, and we draw the necessary inference that the fortunes of the two not only have wholly parted company, but also are wholly irreconcilable.