Simple Lutheranism, however, seems to have been the usual limit of heresy among those burned. Aonio Paleario (originally Antonio della Paglia or de’ Pagliaricci) of Veroli[34]—poet and professor of rhetoric at Milan, hanged in 1570 (in his seventieth year) either for denouncing the Inquisition or for Lutheranism—was an extreme heretic from the Catholic point of view. His Actio in Romanos Pontificos et eorum asseclas is still denounced by the Church.[35] If, however, he was the author of the Trattato utilissimo del beneficio di Giesu Crocifisso verso I Christiani, he was simply an evangelical of the school of Luther, exalting faith and making light of works; and its “remedies against the temptation of doubt” deal solely with theological difficulties, not with critical unbelief.[36] This treatise, immensely popular in the sixteenth century, was so zealously destroyed by the Church that when Ranke wrote no copy was known to exist.[37] The Trattato was placed on the first papal Index Expurgatorius in 1549; and the nearly complete extinction of the book is an important illustration of the Church’s faculty of suppressing literature.
The Index, anticipated by Charles V in the Netherlands several years earlier, was established especially to resist the Reformation; and its third class contained a prohibition of all anonymous books published since 1519. The destruction of books in Italy in the first twenty years of the work of the Congregation of the Index was enormous, nearly every library being decimated, and many annihilated. All editions of the classics, and even of the Fathers, annotated by Protestants, or by Erasmus, were destroyed; the library of the Medicean College at Florence, despite the appeals of Duke Cosmo, was denuded of many works of past generations, now pronounced heretical; and many dead writers who had passed for good Catholics were put on the Index. Booksellers, plundered of their stocks, were fain to seek another calling; and printers, seeing that any one of them who printed a condemned work had every book printed by him put on the Index, were driven to refuse all save works officially accredited. It was considered a merciful relaxation of the procedure when, after the death of Paul IV (1555), certain books, such as Erasmus’s editions of the Fathers, were allowed to be merely mutilated.[38] The effect of the whole machinery in making Italy in the seventeenth century relatively unlearned and illiterate cannot easily be overstated.
In fine, the Reformation failed in Italy because of the economic and political conditions, as it failed in Spain; as it failed in a large part of Germany; as it would have failed in Holland had Philip II made his capital there (in which case Spain might very well have become Protestant); and as it would have failed in England had Elizabeth been a Catholic, like her sister. During the sixty years from 1520 to 1580, thousands of Italian Protestants left Italy, as thousands of Spanish Protestants fled from Spain, and thousands of English Protestants from England in the reign of Mary.[39] To make the outcome in Italy and Spain a basis for a theory of racial tendency in religion, or racial defect of “public spirit,” is to explain history in a fashion which, in physical science, has long been discredited as an argument in a circle.
McCrie, at the old standpoint, says of the Inquisition that “this iniquitous and bloody tribunal could never obtain a footing either in France or in Germany”; that “the attempt to introduce it in the Netherlands was resisted by the adherents of the old as well as the disciples of the new religion; and it kindled a civil war which ... issued in establishing civil and religious liberty”; and that “the ease with which it was introduced into Italy showed that, whatever illumination there was among the Italians ... they were destitute of that public spirit and energy of principle which were requisite to shake off the degrading yoke by which they were oppressed.” The ethical attitude of the Christian historian is noteworthy; but we are here concerned with his historiography. A little reflection will make it clear that the non-establishment of the Inquisition in France and Germany was due precisely to the fact that the papacy was not in these countries as it was in Italy, and that the native Governments resented external influence.
As to the Netherlands, the statement is misleading in the extreme. The Inquisition set up by Charles V was long and fully established in the Low Countries; and Motley recognizes that it was there more severe even than in Spain. It was Charles V who, in 1546, gave orders for the establishment of the Inquisition in Naples, when the people so effectually resisted. The view, finally, that the attempt to suppress heresy caused the Dutch revolt is merely part of the mythology of the Reformation. Charles V, at the outset of his reign, stood to Spain in the relation of a foreign king who, with his Flemish courtiers, exploited Spanish revenues. Only by making Madrid his capital and turning semi-Spanish did he at all reverse that relation between the two parts of his dominions. So late as 1550 he set up an exceptionally merciless form of the Inquisition in the Low Countries, and this without losing any of the loyalty of the middle and upper classes, Protestantism having made its converts only among the poor. In 1546 too he had set up an Index Expurgatorius with the assistance of the theological faculty at Louvain; and there was actually a Flemish Index in print before the papal one (McCrie, Ref. in Italy, p. 184; Ticknor, Hist. of Spanish Lit. 6th ed. i, 493).
What set up the breach between the Netherlands and Spain was the failure of Philip II to adjust himself to Dutch interests as his father had adjusted himself to Spanish. The sunderance was on lines of economic interest and racial jealousy; and Dutch Protestantism was not the cause but the effect. In the war, indeed, multitudes of Dutch Catholics held persistently with their Protestant fellow-countrymen against Spain, as many English Catholics fought against the Armada. As late as 1600 the majority of the people of Groningen were still Catholics, as the great majority are now in North Brabant and Limburg; and in 1900 the Catholics in the Netherlands were nearly a third of the whole. From first to last too the Dutch Protestant creed and polity were those set up by Calvin, a Frenchman.
To those accustomed to the conventional view, the case may become clearer on a survey of the course of anti-papalism in other countries than those mentioned. The political determination of the process in the sixteenth century, indeed, cannot be properly realized save in the light of kindred movements of earlier date, when the “Teutonic conscience” made, not for reform, but for fixation.
§ 3. The Hussite Failure in Bohemia
That the causal forces in the Reformation were neither racial religious bias nor special gift on the part of any religious teachers is made tolerably clear by the pre-Lutheran episode of the Hussites in Bohemia a century before the German movement. In Bohemia as elsewhere clerical avarice, worldliness, and misconduct had long kept up anti-clerical feeling; and the adoption of Wiclif’s teaching by Huss[40] at the end of the fourteenth century was the result, and not the cause, of Bohemian anti-papalism.[41] The Waldensians, whose doctrines were closely akin to those of Huss, were represented in Bohemia as early as the twelfth century; and so late as 1330 their community was a teaching centre, able to send money help to the Waldensians of Italy. So apparent was the heredity that Æneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius II, maintained that the Hussites were a branch of the Waldenses.[42]