Curione himself was surprised. The thought that he had escaped not only from the hands of his guards, but also from the terrible condemnation of the sovereign pontiff, whose support the bishop had gone to solicit, still further magnified in his eyes the greatness of his deliverance. He had felt, and severely too, the power of his enemies; but he saw that however keen the hatred of the world, a breath of heaven was sufficient to frustrate its plots. He hastened to leave Turin, and took refuge in a secluded village in the duchy of Milan, where his family joined him. His reputation as a man of letters had spread through that country, and certain Milanese gentlemen who came to pass the summer in the villas near the lonely house which he inhabited, entertained a high opinion of him. One of them, happening to meet him, recognized him; he spoke of him to others of his friends, who made his acquaintance, and all of them, delighted with his amiable character and cultivated mind, were unwilling that such fine talents should remain buried in a sequestered village. They got him invited to the university of Pavia, where he was soon surrounded by an admiring audience. The inquisition, for a time at fault, discovered at last that the daring heretic who had escaped from his prison at Turin was teaching quietly at Pavia; it issued an arrest against him, being determined to put an end to the harassing warfare which this independent man was waging against the darkness of the Middle Ages. The familiars of the Holy Office lay in ambush with the intention of seizing the Piedmontese professor as he was leaving his house to go to the lecture-room. But the plot got wind; the students, who were very numerous, supported by some of the chief people of the town, formed a battalion which surrounded Curione as he left his house, conducted him to the Academy, and when the lecture was over, escorted him home again.[[830]] Public opinion declared itself so strongly in favor of liberty of teaching and against Romish tyranny, that three years elapsed without the inquisitors being able to seize the professor, which caused great joy all over the city. The pope, irritated at such resistance, threatened to excommunicate the senate of Pavia; and Curione, unwilling to imperil his friends, quitted that town for Venice, whence he proceeded to Ferrara to live under that enlightened protection which the Duchess Renée extended to all who loved the Gospel.
Renée Of France.
Ferrara was in truth a centre where the Gospel found a firm support. Renée, who was daughter of Louis XII., and would have succeeded him if (as she used to say) ‘she had had a beard on her chin,’ had inherited, not the catholic ardor of her mother, Anne of Brittany, but the reforming and anti-popish spirit of her father, who had taken for his device: Perdam Babylonis nomen. Deprived of the throne by ‘that accursed Salic law’—to use her own words—but brought up at the court of Francis I., she was closely attached to her cousin Margaret, and although her junior by eighteen years, had eagerly embraced the Gospel which that ‘elder sister’ had preached to her with so much earnestness. Renée was not one of those people who are simply the disciples of others. Less beautiful than Margaret, she resembled her in possessing a great soul, a generous heart, and, more than that, a sound judgment and firm will. While clouds gathered round the mild and brilliant luminary which presided over the destinies of Navarre and obscured the end of its course, hardly a passing vapor dimmed for an instant the pure star of Ferrara and Montargis.
There had been a talk of marrying Renée, as there had been of marrying Margaret, to Charles V., and also to Henry VIII.; but the politic Francis had preferred giving his predecessor’s daughter to a prince who would cause him no umbrage. She was therefore married to Hercules of Este, Duke of Ferrara, grandson of pope Alexander VI. by Lucrezia Borgia, and vassal of the Holy See. Such gloomy antecedents did not promise a sympathetic union to the friend of Margaret of Valois.
Although surrounded at Ferrara with all the splendors of a court, Renée delighted in the associations of literature and art, and loved above everything to retire to her closet and seek ‘the one thing needful.’ There was in her piety at this period of her life a slight trace of Margaret’s mystical spirit. A contemplative life, however, was not in keeping with her active character; she had rather a practical turn; she loved to attract to her small court the learned men of Italy, and particularly welcomed the evangelicals who had been driven out of France. She was thus beginning to be the object of the most opposite remarks. All were agreed as to her extreme beneficence; but the adherents of the papacy complained that her intellect, which enabled her to excel in philosophy, inclined her, unfortunately, to investigate religious questions; they added, however, that if she came to the aid of certain persons in bad odor among Roman catholics, it was because her inexhaustible goodness filled her with compassion for those whom she thought unjustly treated.[[831]] ‘She desires to do good to everybody,’ it was said; ‘in one year she assisted ten thousand of her fellow-countrymen. And when the stewards of her household represented to her the excessive expense of this, she only answered: “What would you have?—they are poor people of my own country, all of whom would be my subjects but for that wicked Salic law!”’[[832]] She was at once a Mæcenas and a Dorcas.
Resurrection Of Christianity.
The time had gone by in Italy when the fanaticism of pagan antiquity had misled the mind, and preachers were to be heard speaking from the pulpit of Minerva, Christ, and Jupiter in the same breath. At the very moment when celebrated professors, commissioned to teach philosophy even at the university of Ferrara, were exclaiming, as Voltaire and others did after him: ‘Christianity is dying out, and its end is near!’ Christianity on the contrary was reviving at Wittemberg, Zurich, Cambridge, and even in France, and the cry which it uttered as it issued from the tomb, re-echoed through Italy and awoke many souls there. In 1528, and perhaps earlier, the evangelical doctrines had been professed at Ferrara. In 1530, the inquisition of that city wrote to the pope, that there were many Lutherans, both laymen and ecclesiastics, within its walls.[[833]] In fact, the duchess was calling round her, either for the education of her children, or simply for love of learning and the Gospel, professors skilled in the study of the classics, among whom were men enlightened about the superstitions of the Roman Church, and often sincerely attached to the Gospel. Of their number were Celio Calcagnini, Lilio Giraldi Bartholomeo Riccio, Marzello Palingenio, and the two brothers Sinapi. Giovanni Sinapi in particular was full of zeal to spread around him the doctrine of the Scriptures. Many of the most eminent men of Italy, such as Curione, Occhino, Peter Martyr, and the famous poet Flaminio, lived for a time at Ferrara. From that centre evangelical doctrines were propagated in the neighbouring cities; and particularly in Modena, where they spread so widely in the university and among the townspeople, that it was soon called the Lutheran city.[[834]]
CHAPTER XIX.
THE GOSPEL IN THE CENTRE OF ITALY.
(1520 TO 1536).
While Venice, Turin, Milan, Ferrara, Modena, and other cities of Upper Italy were listening to the voice of the Gospel, the centre and south of the peninsula had also their witnesses to the truth.
Character Of Occhino.