On his death, he was succeeded by one of the more rigid school, Pius V. (1563-1572). This pope continued to maintain the monastic austerity of his own life; his personal virtue and piety were admirable; but, being incapable of conceiving that anything could be right except on the exact lines of his own practice, he was both extremely severe and extremely intolerant; especially he was, in harmony with Philip of Spain, a determined persecutor.
But to his idealism was largely due that league which, directed against the Turk, issued in one of the most memorable checks to the Ottoman arms, the battle of Lepanto.
Gregory XIII. succeeded him immediately before the massacre of St. Bartholomew. It was rather the pressure of his surroundings than his personal character that gave his pontificate a spiritual aspect. An honourable care in the appointment of bishops and for ecclesiastical education were its marks on this side. He introduced the Gregorian Calendar. He was a zealous promoter of war, open and covert, with Protestantism, especially with Elizabeth; his financial arrangements were effective and ingenious. But he failed to obtain control over the robber bands which infested the Papal States.
Their suppression was carried out with unexampled severity by Sixtus V. Sixtus was learned and prudent, and of remarkable self-control; he is also charged with being crafty and malignant. Not very accurately, he is commonly regarded as the author of much which was actually due to his predecessors; but his administration is very remarkable. Rigorous to the verge of cruelty in the enforcement of his laws, they were themselves commonly mild and conciliatory. He was energetic in encouraging agriculture and manufactures. Nepotism, the old ingrained vice of the popes, had been practised by none of his three immediate predecessors, though he is often credited with its abolition. His financial methods were successful immediately, but really accumulated burdens which became portentously heavy.
The treatment of public buildings in Rome by Sixtus V., his destruction of antiquities there, and his curious attempts to convert some of the latter into Christian monuments, mark the change from the semi-paganism of the times of Leo X. Similarly, the ecclesiastical spirit of the time opposed free inquiry. Giordano Bruno was burnt. The same movement is visible in the change from Ariosto to Tasso. Religion had resumed her empire. The quite excellent side of these changes is displayed in such beautiful characters as Cardinal Borromeo and Filippo Neri.
III.--The Counter Reformation: First Stage
Ever since the Council of Trent closed in 1563, the Church had been determined on making a re-conquest of the Protestant portion of Christendom. In the Spanish and Italian peninsulas, Protestantism never obtained a footing; everywhere else it had established itself in one of the two forms into which it was divided--the Lutheran and the Calvinistic. In Germany it greatly predominated among the populations, mainly in the Lutheran form. In France, where Catholicism predominated, the Huguenots were Calvinist. Calvinism prevailed throughout Scandinavia, in the Northern Netherlands, in Scotland, and--differently arrayed--in England.
In Germany, the Augsburg declaration, which made the religion of each prince the religion also of his dominions, the arrangement was favourable to a Catholic recovery; since princes were more likely to be drawn back to the fold than populations, as happened notably in the case of Albert of Bavaria, who re-imposed Catholicism on a country whose sympathies were Protestant. In Germany, also, much was done by the wide establishment of Jesuit schools, whither the excellence of the education attracted Protestants as well as Catholics. The great ecclesiastical principalities were also practically secured for Catholicism.
The Netherlands were under the dominion of Philip of Spain, the most rigorous supporter of orthodoxy, who gave the Inquisition free play. His severities induced revolt, which Alva was sent to suppress, acting avowedly by terrorist methods. In France the Huguenots had received legal recognition, and were headed by a powerful section of the nobility; the Catholic section, with which Paris in particular was entirely in sympathy, were dominant, but not at all securely so--a state of rivalry which culminated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, while Alva was in the Netherlands.
Nevertheless, these events stirred the Protestants both in France and in the Netherlands to a renewed and desperate resistance. On the other hand, some of the German Catholic princes displayed a degree of tolerance which permitted extensions of Protestantism within their realms. In England, the government was uncompromisingly Protestant. Then the pope and Philip tried intervention by fostering rebellion in Catholic Ireland and by the Jesuit mission of Parsons and Campion in England, but the only effect was to make the Protestantism of the government the more implacable.