Servitude of Professors—­Greek dies out—­Muretus and Manutius in Rome—­The Index and its Treatment of Political Works—­Machiavelli—­Ratio Status—­Encouragement of Literature on Papal Absolutism—­Sarpi’s Attitude—­Comparative Indifference of Rome to Books of Obscene or Immoral Tendency—­Bandello and Boccaccio—­Papal attempts to Control Intercourse of Italians with Heretics.

In pursuing the plan of this book, which aims at showing how the spirit of the Catholic revival penetrated every sphere of intellectual activity in Italy, it will now be needful to consider the two agents, both of Spanish origin, on whose assistance the Church relied in her crusade against liberties of thought, speech, and action.  These were the Inquisition and the Company of Jesus.  The one worked by extirpation and forcible repression; the other by mental enfeeblement and moral corruption.  The one used fire, torture, imprisonment, confiscation of goods, the proscription of learning, the destruction or emasculation of books.  The other employed subtle means to fill the vacuum thus created with spurious erudition, sophistries, casuistical abominations and false doctrines profitable to the Papal absolutism.  Opposed in temper and in method, the one fierce and rigid, the other saccharine and pliant, these two bad angels of Rome contributed in almost equal measure to the triumph of Catholicism.

In the earlier ages of the Church, the definition of heresy had been committed to episcopal authority.  But the cognizance of heretics and the determination of their punishment remained in the hands of secular magistrates.  At the end of the twelfth century the wide diffusion of the Albigensian heterodoxy through Languedoc and Northern Italy alarmed the chiefs of Christendom, and furnished the Papacy with a good pretext for extending its prerogatives.  Innocent III. in 1203 empowered two French Cistercians, Pierre de Castelnau and Raoul, to preach against the heretics of Provence.  In the following year he ratified this commission by a Bull, which censured the negligence and coldness of the bishops, appointed the Abbot of Citeaux Papal delegate in matters of heresy, and gave him authority to judge and punish misbelievers.  This was the first germ of the Holy Office as a separate Tribunal.  In order to comprehend the facility with which the Pope established so anomalous an institution, we must bear in mind the intense horror which heresy inspired in the Middle Ages.  Being a distinct encroachment of the Papacy upon the episcopal jurisdiction and prerogatives, the Inquisition met at first with some opposition from the bishops.  The people for whose persecution it was designed, and at whose expense it carried on its work, broke into rebellion; the first years of its annals were rendered illustrious by the murder of one of its founders, Pierre de Castelnau.  He was canonized, and became the first Saint of the Inquisition.  Two other Peters obtained the like honor through their zeal for the Catholic faith:  Peter of Verona, commonly called Peter Martyr, the Italian saint of the Dominican order; and Peter Arbues, the Spanish saint, who sealed with his blood the charter of the Holy Office in Aragon.