A History of the Reformation (Vol. 2 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

Cardinal Caraffa (afterwards Pope Paul IV.), the relentless enemy of the Reformation, seeing the success of this Spanish Inquisition in its extermination of heretics, induced Pope Paul III. to consent to a reorganisation of the papal Inquisition in Italy on the Spanish model, in 1542. The Curia had become alarmed at the progress of the Reformation in Italy. They had received information that small Protestant communities had been formed in several of the Italian towns, and that heresy was spreading in an alarming fashion. Caraffa declared that “the whole of Italy was infected with the Lutheran heresy, which had been extensively embraced both by statesmen and ecclesiastics.” Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits highly approved of the suggestion, and they were all-powerful with the Cardinal Borromeo, the pious and trusted nephew of the Pope. In 1542 the Congregation of the Holy Office was founded at Rome, and six Cardinals, among them Cardinals Caraffa and Toledo, were named Inquisitors-General, with authority on both sides of the Alps to try all cases of heresy, to apprehend and imprison suspected persons, and to appoint inferior tribunals with the same or more limited powers. The intention was to introduce into this remodelled papal Inquisition most of the features which marked the thoroughness of the Spanish institution. But the jealousy of the Popes prevented the Holy Office from exercising the same independent action in Italy as in Spain. The new institution began its work at once within the States of the Church, and was introduced after some negotiations into most of the Italian principalities. Venice refused, until it was arranged that the Holy Office there should be strictly subject to the civil authorities.

Although modelled on the Spanish institution, the work of the Holy Office in Italy never exhibited the same murderous activity; nor was there the same need. The Italians have never showed the stern consistency in faith which characterised the Spaniards. It was generally found sufficient to strike at the leaders in order to cause the relapse of their followers. Still the records of the Office and contemporary witnesses recount continuous trials and burnings in Rome and in other cities. In Venice, death by drowning was substituted for burning. The victims were placed on a board supported by two gondolas; the boats were rowed apart, and the unfortunate martyrs perished in the waters. The Protestant congregations which had been formed in Bologna, Faenza, Ferrara, Lucca, Modena, Naples, Siena, Venice, and Vicenza were dispersed with little or no bloodshed. A colony of Waldenses, settled near the town of Cosenza in the north-central part of Calabria, were made of sterner stuff. Nothing would induce them to relapse, and they were exterminated by sword, by hurling from the summits of cliffs, by prolonged confinement in deadly prisons, at the stake, in the mines, in the Spanish galleys. One hundred elderly women were first tortured and then slaughtered at Montalto. The survivors among the women and children were sold into slavery. Such was the work of the Counter-Reformation in Italy, and the measures to which it owed much of its success.

§ 3. The Index.

Leaders of the Counter-Reformation in Italy like Popes Paul IV. and Pius V. were determined on much more than the dispersion of Protestant communities and the banishment or martyrdom of the missionaries of Evangelical thought. They resolved to destroy what they rightly enough believed to be its seed and seed-bed—the cultivation of independent thinking and of impartial scholarship. They wished to extirpate all traces of the Renaissance. In the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries, Italy had been “the workshop of ideas,” the officina scientiarum for the rest of Europe. The Inquisition, in Italy as in Spain, attacked the Academies, the schools of learning, above all the libraries in which the learning of the past was stored, and the printing-presses which disseminated ideas day by day. They had the example of Torquemada before them, who had burnt six thousand volumes at Salamanca in 1490 on pretence that they taught sorcery.

It was no new thing to order the burning of heretical writings. This had been done continuously throughout the Middle Ages. The episcopal Inquisition, the Universities, the papal Inquisition, had all endeavoured to discover and destroy writings which they deemed to be dangerous to the dogmas of the Church. After the invention of printing such a method of slaying ideas was not so easy; but the ecclesiastical authorities had tried their best. The celebrated edict of the Archbishop of Mainz of 1486, prompted by the number of Bibles printed in the vernacular, and trying to establish a censorship of books, may be taken as an example.[725]

Pope Sixtus IV. in 1547 had ordered the University of Köln to see that no books (libri, tractatus aut scripturæ qualescunque) were printed without previous licence, and had empowered the authorities to inflict penalties on the printers, purchasers, and readers of all unlicensed books. Alexander VI. had sent the same order to the Archbishops of Köln, Mainz, Trier, and Magdeburg (1501). In a Constitution of Leo X., approved by the Lateran Council of 1515, it was declared that no book could be printed in Rome which had not been expressly sanctioned by the Master of the Palace, and in other lands by the Bishop of the diocese or the Inquisitor of the district; and this had been homologated by the Council of Trent.[726] From its reorganisation in 1543 the papal Inquisition in Rome had undertaken this work of censorship.

Outside the States of the Church the suppression of books and the requirement of ecclesiastical licence could only be carried out through the co-operation of the secular authorities; and they naturally demanded some uniformity in the books condemned. This led to lists of prohibited books being drawn up—as at Louvain (1546 and 1550), at Köln (1549), and by the Sorbonne, who managed the Inquisition for the north of France (1544 and 1551). Pope Paul IV. drafted the first papal Index in 1559. It was very drastic, and its very severity prevented its success.[727] It was this Index Librorum Prohibitorum which was discussed by the Commission appointed at the Council of Trent.[728]

The Commission drafted a set of ten rules to be followed in constructing a list of prohibited books, and left the actual formation of the Index to the Pope. This new Index (the Tridentine Index) was published by Pope Pius IV. in 1564. His successor, Pius V., appointed a special Commission of Cardinals to deal with the question of prohibited books. It was called the Congregation of the Index, and although distinct from the Inquisition, worked along with it. Its work was done very thoroughly. Italian scholarship was slain so far as the peninsula was concerned. The scholarship of Spain and Portugal was also destroyed. Learning had to take shelter north of the Alps and the Pyrenees. So thoroughly was the work of prohibition carried out, so many difficulties beset even Roman Catholic authors, that Paleario called the whole system “a dagger drawn from the scabbard to assassinate all men of letters”; Paul Sarpi dubbed it “the finest secret which has ever been discovered for applying religion to the purpose of making men idiots”; and Latini, a champion of the Papacy, declared it to be a “peril which threatened the very existence of books.”

The rules for framing the Index, drafted by the commission of the Council of Trent, are curious reading. The writings of noted Reformers, of Zwingli, Luther, and especially of Calvin, were absolutely prohibited. The Vulgate was to be the only authorised version of the Scriptures, and the only one to be quoted as an inspired text. Scholars might, by special permission of their ecclesiastical superiors, possess another version, but they were never to quote it as authoritative. Versions in the vernacular were never to be quoted. Bible Dictionaries, Concordances, books on controversial theology, had to pass the strictest examination at the hands of the censors before publication. The censors were directed to examine with the utmost care not merely the text, but all summaries, notes, indexes, prefaces, and dedications, searching for any heretical phrases or for sentences which the unwary might be tempted to think heretical, for all criticisms on any ecclesiastical action, for any satire on the clergy or on religious rites. All such passages were to be expunged.