Renaissance in Italy Volume VI Part 7

Meanwhile, the Inquisition rapidly took shape. In 1483 Thomas of Torquemada was nominated Inquisitor General for Castile and Aragon.

Under his rule a Supreme Council was established, over which he presided for life. The crown sent three a.s.sessors to this board; and the Inquisitors were strengthened in their functions by a council of jurists. Seville, Cordova, Jaen, Toledo, became the four subordinate centers of the Holy Office, each with its own tribunal and its own right of performing _autos da fe_. Commission was sent out to all Dominicans, enjoining on them the prosecution of their task in every diocese.

In 1484 a General Council was held, and the const.i.tution of the inquisition was established by articles. In these articles four main points seem to have been held in view. The first related to the system of confiscation, fines, civil disabilities, losses of office, property, honors, rights, inheritances, which formed a part of the penitentiary procedure, and by which the crown and Holy Office made pecuniary gains.

The second secured secrecy in the action of the tribunal, whereby a door was opened to delation, and accused persons were rendered incapable of rational defense. The third elaborated the judicial method, so as to leave no loophole of escape even for those who showed a wish to be converted, empowering the use of torture, precluding the accused from choosing their own counsel, and excluding the bishops from active partic.i.p.ation in the sentence. The fourth multiplied the charges under which suspected heretics, even after their death might be treated as impenitent or relapsed, so as to increase the number of victims and augment the booty.

The two most formidable features of the Inquisition as thus const.i.tuted, were the exclusion of the bishops from its tribunal and the secrecy of its procedure. The accused was delivered over to a court that had no mercy, no common human sympathies, no administrative interest in the population. He knew nothing of his accusers; and when he died or disappeared from view no record of his case survived him.

The Inquisition rested on the double basis of ecclesiastical fanaticism and protected delation. The court was _prima facie_ hostile to the accused; and the accused could never hope to confront the detectives upon whose testimony he was arraigned before it. Lives and reputations lay thus at the mercy of professional informers, private enemies, malicious calumniators. The denunciation was sometimes anonymous, sometimes signed, with names of two corroborative witnesses. These witnesses were examined, under a strict seal of secrecy, by the Inquisitors, who drew up a form of accusation, which they submitted to theologians called Qualificators. The qualificators were not informed of the names of the accused, the delator, or the witnesses. It was their business to qualify the case of heresy as light, grave, or violent.

Having placed it in one of these categories, they returned it to the Inquisitors, who now arrested the accused and flung him into the secret prisons of the Holy Office. After some lapse of time he was summoned for a preliminary examination. Having first been cautioned to tell the truth, he had to recite the Paternoster, Credo, Ten Commandments, and a kind of catechism. His pedigree was also investigated, in the expectation that some traces of Jewish or Moorish descent might serve to incriminate him. If he failed in repeating the Christian shibboleths, or if he was discovered to have infidel ancestry, there existed already a good case to proceed upon. Finally, he was questioned upon the several heads of accusation condensed from the first delation and the deposition of the witnesses. If needful at this point, he was put to the torture, again and yet again.[84] He never heard the names of his accusers, nor was he furnished with a full bill of the charges against him in writing.

At this stage he was usually remanded, and the judicial proceedings were deliberately lengthened out with a view of crushing his spirit and bringing him to abject submission. For his defence he might select one advocate, but only from a list furnished by his judges; and this advocate in no case saw the original doc.u.ments of the impeachment. It rarely happened, upon this one-sided method of trial, that an accused person was acquitted altogether. If he escaped burning or perpetual incarceration, he was almost certainly exposed to the public ceremony of penitence, with its attendant infamy, fines, civil disabilities, and future discipline. Sentence was not pa.s.sed upon condemned persons until they appeared, dressed up in a San Benito, at the place of punishment.

This costume was a sort of sack, travestying a monk's frock, made of coa.r.s.e yellow stuff, and worked over with crosses, flames, and devils, in glaring red. It differed in details according to the destination of the victim: for some ornaments symbolized eternal h.e.l.l, and others the milder fires of purgatory. If sufficiently versed in the infernal heraldry of the Holy Office, a condemned man might read his doom before he reached the platform of the _auto_. There he heard whether he was sentenced to relaxation--in other words, to burning at the hands of the hangman--or to reconciliation by means of penitence. At the last moment, he might by confession _in extremis_ obtain the commutation of a death sentence into life-imprisonment, or receive the favor of being strangled before he was burned. A relapsed heretic, however--that is, one who after being reconciled had once again apostatized, was never exempted from the penalty of burning. To make these holocausts of human beings more ghastly, the pageant was enhanced by processions of exhumed corpses and heretics in effigy. Artificial dolls and decomposed bodies, with grinning lips and mouldy foreheads, were hauled to the huge bonfire, side by side with living men, women, and children. All of them alike--_fantoccini_, skeletons, and quick folk--were enveloped in the same grotesquely ghastly San Benito, with the same hideous yellow miters on their pasteboard, worm-eaten, or palpitating foreheads. The procession presented an ingeniously picturesque discord of ugly shapes, an artistically loathsome dissonance of red and yellow hues, as it defiled, to the infernal music of growled psalms and screams and moanings, beneath the torrid blaze of Spanish sunlight.

[Footnote 84: The Supreme Council forbade the repet.i.tion of torture; but this hypocritical law was evaded in practice by declaring that the torture had been suspended. Llorente, vol. i. p. 307.]

Spaniards--such is the barbarism of the Latinized Iberian nature--delighted in these shows, as they did and do in bull-fights.

Butcheries of heretics formed the choicest spectacles at royal christenings and bridals.

At Seville the Quemadero was adorned with four colossal statues of prophets, to which some of the condemned were bound, so that they might burn to death in the flames arising from the human sacrifice between them.

In the autumn of 1484 the Inquisition was introduced into Aragon; and Saragossa became its headquarters in that State. Though the Aragonese were accustomed to the inst.i.tution in its earlier and milder form, they regarded the new Holy Office with just horror. The Marranos counted at that epoch the Home Secretary, the Grand Treasurer, a Proto-notary, and a Vice-Chancellor of the realm among their members; and they were allied by marriage with the purest aristocracy. It is not, therefore, marvelous that a conspiracy was formed to a.s.sa.s.sinate the Chief Inquisitor, Peter Arbues. In spite of a coat-of-mail and an iron skullcap worn beneath his monk's dress, Arbues was murdered one evening while at prayer in church. But the revolt, notwithstanding this murder, flashed, like an ill-loaded pistol, in the pan. Jealousies between the old and new Christians prevented any common action; and the Inquisition took a b.l.o.o.d.y vengeance upon all concerned. It even laid its hand on Don James of Navarre, the Infant of Tudela.

The Spanish Inquisition was now firmly grounded. Directed by Torquemada, it began to encroach upon the crown, to insult the episcopacy, to defy the Papacy, to grind the Commons, and to outrage by its insolence the aristocracy. Ferdinand's avarice had overreached itself by creating an ecclesiastical power dangerous to the best interests of the realm, but which fascinated a fanatically-pious people, and the yoke of which could not be thrown off. The Holy Office grew every year in pride, pretensions, and exactions. It arrogated to its tribunal crimes of usury, bigamy, blasphemous swearing, and unnatural vice, which appertained by right to the secular courts. It depopulated Spain by the extermination and banishment of at least three million industrious subjects during the first 139 years of its existence. It attacked princes of the blood,[85] archbishops, fathers of the Tridentine Council. It filled every city in the kingdom, the convents of the religious, and the palaces of the n.o.bility, with spies. The Familiars, or lay brethren devoted to its service, lived at charges of the communes, and debauched society by crimes of rapine, l.u.s.t, and violence.[86] Ignorant and bloodthirsty monks composed its provincial tribunals, who, like the horrible Lucero el Tenebroso at Cordova, paralyzed whole provinces with a veritable reign of terror.[87] Hated and worshiped, its officers swept through the realm in the guise of powerful _condottieri_. The Grand Inquisitor maintained a bodyguard of fifty mounted Familiars and two hundred infantry; his subordinates were allowed ten hors.e.m.e.n and fifty archers apiece. Where these black guards appeared, city gates were opened; magistrates swore fealty to masters of more puissance than the king; the resources of flourishing districts were placed at their disposal. Their arbitrary acts remained unquestioned, their mysterious sentences irreversible. Shrouded in secrecy, amenable to no jurisdiction but their own, they reveled in the license of irresponsible dominion. Spain gradually fell beneath the charm of their dark fascination. A brave though cruel nation drank delirium from the poison-cup of these vile medicine-men, whose Moloch-worship would have disgusted cannibals.

[Footnote 85: Llorente, in his introduction to the _History of the Inquisition_, gives a long list of ill.u.s.trious Spanish victims.]

[Footnote 86: See Llorente, vol. i. p. 349, for their outrages on women.]

[Footnote 87: For the history of Lucero's tyranny, read Llorente, vol.

i. pp. 345-353. When at last he had to be deposed, it was not to a dungeon or the scaffold, but to his bishopric of Almeria that this miscreant was relegated.]

Torquemada was the genius of evil who created and presided over this foul instrument of human crime and folly. During his eighteen years of administration, reckoning from 1480 to 1498, he sacrificed, according to Llorente's calculation, above 114,000 victims, of whom 10,220 were burned alive, 6,860 burned in effigy, and 97,000 condemned to perpetual imprisonment or public penitence.[88] He, too, it was who in 1492 compelled Ferdinand to drive the Jews from his dominions. They offered 30,000 ducats for the war against Granada, and promised to abide in Spain under heavy social disabilities, if only they might be spared this act of national extermination. Then Torquemada appeared before the king, and, raising his crucifix on high, cried: 'Judas sold Christ for thirty pieces of silver. Look ye to it, if ye do the like!' The edict of expulsion was issued on the last of March. Before the last of July all Jews were sentenced to depart, carrying no gold or silver with them.

They disposed of their lands, houses, and goods for next to nothing, and went forth to die by thousands on the sh.o.r.es of Africa and Italy. Twelve who were found concealed at Malaga in August were condemned to be p.r.i.c.ked to death by pointed reeds.[89]

The exodus of the Jews was followed in 1502 by a similar exodus of Moors from Castile, and in 1524 by an exodus of Mauresques from Aragon.

To compute the loss of wealth and population inflicted upon Spain by these mad edicts, would be impossible. We may wonder whether the followers of Cortez, when they trod the teocallis of Mexico and gazed with loathing on the gory elf-locks of the Aztec priests, were not reminded of the Torquemada they had left at home. His cruelty became so intolerable that even Alexander VI. was moved to horror. In 1494 the Borgia appointed four a.s.sessors, with equal powers, to restrain the blood-thirst of the fanatic.

[Footnote 88: Llorente, vol. i. p. 229. The basis for these and following calculations is explained _ib._ pp. 272-281.]

[Footnote 89: _Ibid._ vol. i. p. 263.]

After Torquemada, Diego Deza reigned as second Inquisitor General from 1498 to 1507. In these years, according to the same calculation, 2,592 were burned alive, 896 burned in effigy, 34,952 condemned to prison or public penitence.[90] Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros followed between 1507 and 1517. The victims of this decade were 3,564 burned alive, 1,232 burned in effigy, 48,059 condemned to prison or public penitence.[91]

Adrian, Bishop of Tortosa, tutor to Charles V., and afterwards Pope, was Inquisitor General between 1516 and 1525. Castile, Aragon, and Catalonia, at this epoch, simultaneously demanded a reform of the Holy Office from their youthful sovereign. But Charles refused, and the tale of Adrian's administration was 1,620 burned alive, 560 burned in effigy, 21,845 condemned to prison or public penitence.[92] The total, during forty-three years, between 1481 and 1525, amounted to 234,526, including all descriptions of condemned heretics.[93] These figures are of necessity vague, for the Holy Office left but meager records of its proceedings. The vast numbers of cases brought before the Inquisitors rendered their method of procedure almost as summary as that of Fouquier Thinville, while policy induced them to bury the memory of their victims in oblivion.[94]

[Footnote 90: Llorente, p. 341.]

[Footnote 91: _Ibid._ p. 360.]

[Footnote 92: Llorente, p. 406.]

[Footnote 93: _Ib._ p. 407.]

[Footnote 94: I know that Llorente's calculations have been disputed: as, for instance, in some minor details by Prescott (_Ferd. and Isab._ vol. iii. p. 492). The truth is that no data now exist for forming a correct census of the victims of the Spanish Moloch; and Llorente, though he writes with the moderation of evident sincerity, and though he had access to the archives of the Inquisition, does not profess to do more than give an estimate based upon certain fixed data. However, it signifies but little whether we reckon by thousands or by fifteen hundreds. That foul monster sp.a.w.ned in the unholy embracements of perverted religion with purblind despotism cannot be defended by discounting five or even ten per cent. Let its apologists write for every 1000 of Llorente 100, and for every 100 of Llorente 10, and our position will remain unaltered. The Jesuit historian of Spain, Mariana, records the burning-of 2000 persons in Andalusia alone in 1482.

Bernaldez mentions 700 burned in the one town of Seville between 1482 and 1489. An inscription carved above the portals of the Holy Office in Seville stated that about 1000 had been burned between 1492 and 1524.]

Sometimes, while reading the history of the Holy Office in Spain, we are tempted to imagine that the whole is but a grim unwholesome nightmare, or the fable of malignant calumny. That such is not the case, however, is proved by a jubilant inscription on the palace of the Holy Office at Seville, which records the triumphs of Torquemada. Of late years, too, the earth herself has disgorged some secrets of the Inquisition. 'A most curious discovery,' writes Lord Malmesbury in his Memoirs,[95] 'has been made at Madrid. Just at the time when the question of religious liberty was being discussed in the Cortes, Serrano had ordered a piece of ground to be leveled, in order to build on it; and the workmen came upon large quant.i.ties of human bones, skulls, lumps of blackening flesh, pieces of chains, and braids of hair. It was then recollected that the _autos da fe_ used to take place at that spot in former days. Crowds of people rushed to the place, and the investigation was continued. They found layer upon layer of human remains, showing that hundreds had been inhumanly sacrificed. The excitement and indignation this produced among the people was tremendous, and the party for religious freedom taking advantage of it, a Bill on the subject was pa.s.sed by an enormous majority.' Let modern Spain remember that a similar Aceldama lies hidden in the precincts of each of her chief towns!

[Footnote 95: Vol. ii. p. 399.]

I have enlarged upon the details of the Spanish Inquisition for two reasons. In the first place it strikingly ill.u.s.trates the character of the people who now had the upper hand in Italy. In the second place, its success induced Paul III., acting upon the advice of Giov. Paolo Caraffa, to remodel the Roman office on a similar type in 1542. It may at once be said that the real Spanish Inquisition was never introduced into Italy.[96] Such an inst.i.tution, claiming independent jurisdiction and flaunting its cruelties in the light of day, would not have suited the Papal policy. As temporal and spiritual autocrats, the Popes could not permit a tribunal of which they were not the supreme authority. It was their interest to consult their pecuniary advantage rather than to indulge insane fanaticism; to repress liberty of thought by cautious surveillance rather than by public terrorism and open acts of cruelty.

The Italian temperament was, moreover, more humane than the Spanish; nor had the refining culture of the Renaissance left no traces in the nation. Furthermore, the necessity for so Draconian an inst.i.tution was not felt. Catholicism in Italy had not to contend with Jews and Moors, Marranos and Moriscoes. It was, indeed, alarmed by the spread of Lutheran opinions. Caraffa complained to Paul III. that 'the whole of Italy is infected with the Lutheran heresy, which has been embraced not only by statesmen, but also by many ecclesiastics.'[97] Pius V. was so panic-stricken by the prevalence of heresy in Faenza that he seriously meditated destroying the town and dispersing its inhabitants.[98] Yet, after a few years of active persecution, this peril proved to be unreal.

The Reformation had not taken root so deep and wide in Italy that it could not be eradicated. When, therefore, the Spanish viceroys sought to establish their national Inquisition in Naples and Milan, the rebellious people received protection and support from the Papacy; and the Holy Office, as remodeled in Rome, became a far less awful engine of oppression than that of Seville.

[Footnote 96: Naples and Milan pa.s.sionately and successfully opposed its introduction by the Spanish viceroys. But it ruled in Sicily and Sardinia.]

[Footnote 97: McCrie, p. 186.]

[Footnote 98: Mutinelli, _Storia Arcana_, vol. i. p. 79.]

It was sufficiently severe, however. 'At Rome,' writes a resident in 1568, 'some are daily burned, hanged, or beheaded; the prisons and places of confinement are filled, and they are obliged to build new ones.'[99] This general statement may be checked by extracts from the despatches of Venetian amba.s.sadors in Rome, which, though they are not continuous, and cannot be supposed to give an exhaustive list of the victims of the Inquisition, enable us to judge with some degree of accuracy what the frequency of executions may have been.[100]

[Footnote 99: McCrie, p. 272.]

[Footnote 100: Mutinelli's _Storia Arcana_, etc. vol. i., is the source from which I have drawn the details given above.]

On September 27, 1567, a session of the Holy Office was held at S. Maria sopra Minerva. Seventeen heretics were condemned. Fifteen of these were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, the galleys for life, fines, or temporary imprisonment, according to the nature of their offenses. Two were reserved for capital punishment--namely, Carnesecchi and a friar from Cividale di Belluno. They were beheaded and burned upon the bridge of S. Angelo on October 4. On May 28, 1569, there was an Act of the Inquisition at the Minerva, twenty Cardinals attending. Four impenitent heretics were condemned to the stake. Ten penitents were sentenced to various punishments of less severity. On August 2, 1578, occurred a singular scandal touching some Spaniards and Portuguese of evil manners, all of whom were burned with the exception of those who contrived to escape in time. On August 5, 1581, an English Protestant was burned for grossly insulting the Host. On February 20, 1582, after an Act of the Inquisition in due form, seventeen heretics were sentenced, three to death, and the rest to imprisonment, etc. We must bear in mind that Mutinelli, who published the extracts from the Venetian dispatches which contain these details, does not profess to aim at completeness. Gaps of several years occur between the doc.u.ments of one envoy and those of his successor. Nor does it appear that the writers themselves took notice of more than solemn and ceremonial proceedings, in which the Acts of the Inquisition were published with Pontifical and Curial pomp.[101] Still, when these considerations have been weighed, it will appear that the victims of the Inquisition, in Rome, could be counted, not by hundreds, but by units. After ill.u.s.trious examples, like those of Aonio Paleario, Pietro Carnesecchi, Giordano Bruno, who were burned for Protestant or Atheistical opinions, the names of distinguished sufferers are few. Wary heretics, a Celio Secundo Curio, a Galeazzo Caracciolo, a Bernardino Ochino, a Pietro Martire Vermigli, a Pietro Paolo Vergerio, a Lelio Socino, escaped betimes to Switzerland, and carried on their warfare with the Church by means of writings.[102] Others, tainted with heresy, like Marco Antonio Flaminio, managed to satisfy the Inquisition by timely concessions. The Protestant Churches, which had sprung up in Venice, Lucca, Modena, Ferrara, Faenza, Vicenza, Bologna, Naples, and Siena, were easily dispersed.[103] Their pastors fled or submitted. The flocks conformed to Catholic orthodoxy. Only in a few cases was extreme rigor displayed. A memorable ma.s.sacre took place in the year 1561 in Calabria within the province of Cosenza.[104] Here at the end of the fourteenth century a colony of Waldensians had settled in some villages upon the coast. They preserved their peculiar beliefs and ritual, and after three centuries numbered about 4000 souls. Nearly the whole of these, it seems, were exterminated by sword, fire, famine, torture, noisome imprisonment, and hurling from the summits of high cliffs. A few of the survivors were sent to work upon the Spanish galleys. Some women and children were sold into slavery. At Locarno, on the Lago Maggiore, a Protestant community of nearly 300 persons was driven into exile in 1555; and at Venice, in 1560-7, a small sect, holding reformed opinions, suffered punishment of a peculiar kind. We read of five persons by name, who, after being condemned by the Holy Office, were taken at night from their dungeons to the Porto del Lido beyond the Due Castelli, and there set upon a plank between two gondolas. The gondolas rowed asunder; and one by one the martyrs fell and perished in the waters.[105]

[Footnote 101: It is singular that only one contemporary writes from Rome about Bruno's execution in 1600; whence, I think, we may infer that such events were too common to excite much attention.]

[Footnote 102: The main facts about these men may be found in Cantu's _Gli Eretici d'Italia_, vol. ii. This work is written in no spirit of sympathy with Reformers. But it is superior in learning and impartiality to McCrie's.]

[Footnote 103: For the repressive measures used at Lucca, see _Archivio Storico_, vol. x. pp. 162-185. They include the prohibition of books, regulation of the religious observances of Lucchese citizens abroad in France or Flanders, and proscription of certain heretics, with whom all intercourse was forbidden.]

[Footnote 104: An eye-witness gives a heart-rending account of these persecutions: sixty thrown from the tower of Guardia, eighty-eight butchered like beasts in one day at Montalto, seven burned alive, one hundred old women tortured and then slaughtered. _Arch. Stor._, vol. ix.

pp. 193-195.]

[Footnote 105: McCrie, _op. cit._ p. 232-236. The five men were Giulio Gherlandi of Spresian, near Treviso (executed in 1562), Antonio Rizzetta of Vicenza (in 1566), Francesco Sega of Rovigo (sentenced in 1566), Francesco Spinola of Milan (in 1567), and Fra Baldo Lupatino (1556).

McCrie bases his report upon the _Histoire des Martyrs_ (Geneve, 1597) and De Porta's _Historia Reformationis Rhaeticarum Ecclesiarum_.

Thinking these sources somewhat suspicious, I applied to my friend Mr.

H.F. Brown, whose researches in the Venetian archives are becoming known to students of Italian history. He tells me that all the above cases, except that of Spinola, exist in the Frari. Lupatino was condemned as a Lutheran; the others as Anabaptists. In pa.s.sing sentence on Lupatino, the Chief Inquisitor remarked that he could not condemn him to death by fire in Venice, but must consign him to a watery grave. This is characteristic of Venetian state policy. It appears that, of the above-named persons, Sega, though sentenced to death by drowning, recanted at the last moment, saying, 'Non voglio esser negato, ma voglio redirmi et morir buon Christiano.' Mr. Brown adds that there is nothing in the archives to prove that he was executed; but there is also nothing to show that his sentence was commuted. Two other persons involved in this trial, viz. Nic. Bucello of Padua and Alessio of Bellinzona, upon recantation, were subjected to public penances and confessions for different terms of years. Sega's fate must, therefore, be considered doubtful; since the fact that no commutation of sentence is on record lends some weight to the hypothesis that he withdrew his recantation, and submitted to martyrdom. I will close this note by expressing my hope that Mr. Brown, who is already engaged upon the papers of the Venetian Holy Office, will make them shortly the subject of a special publication. Considering how rare are the full and authentic records of any Inquisition, this would be of incalculable value for students of history. The series of trials in the Frari extends from 1541 to 1794, embracing 1562 _processi_ for the sixteenth century, 1469 for the seventeenth, 541 for the eighteenth, and 25 of no date. Nearly all the towns and districts of the Venetian State are involved.]

The position of the Holy Office in Venice was so far peculiar as to justify a digression upon its special const.i.tution. Always jealous of ecclesiastical interference, the Republic insisted on the Inquisition being made dependent on the State. Three n.o.bles of senatorial rank were chosen to act as a.s.sessors of the Holy Office in the capital; and in the subject cities this function was a.s.signed to the Rectors, or lieutenants of S. Mark. It was the duty of these lay members to see that justice was impartially dealt by the ecclesiastical tribunal, to defend the State against clerical encroachments, and to refer dubious cases to the Doge in Council. They were forbidden to swear oaths of allegiance or of secrecy to the Holy Office, and were bound to be present at all trials, even in the case of ecclesiastical offenders. No causes could be avvocated to Rome, and no crimes except heresy were held to lie within the jurisdiction of the court. The State reserved to itself witchcraft, profane swearing, bigamy and usury; allowed no interference with Jews, infidels and Greeks; forbade the confiscation of goods in which the heirs of condemned persons had interest; and made separate stipulations with regard to the Index of Prohibited Books. It precluded the Inquisition from extending its authority in any way, direct or indirect, over trades, arts, guilds, magistrates, and communal officials.[106] The tenor of this system was to repress ecclesiastical encroachments on the State prerogatives, and to secure equity in the proceedings of the Holy Office. Had practice answered to theory in the Venetian Inquisition, by far the worst abuses of the inst.i.tution would have been avoided. But as a matter of fact, causes were not unfrequently transferred to Rome; confiscations were permitted; and the lists of the condemned include Mussulmans, witches, conjurors, men of scandalous life, etc., showing that the jurisdiction of the Holy Office extended beyond heresy in Venice.[107]

[Footnote 106: See Sarpi's 'Discourse on the Inquisition,' _Opere_, vol.

iv.]

[Footnote 107: I owe to Mr. H.F. Brown details about the register of criminals condemned by the Holy Office, which substantiate my statement regarding the various types of cases in its jurisdiction.]

The truth is that the Venetians, though they were willing to risk an open rupture with Rome, remained at heart sound Churchmen devoted to the principles of the Catholic Reaction. The Republic conceded the fact of Inquisitorial authority, while it reserved the letter of State-supervision. Venetian decadence was marked by this hypocrisy of pride; and so long as appearances were saved, the Holy Office exercised its functions freely. The n.o.bles who acted as a.s.sessors had no sympathy with religious toleration, being themselves under the influence of confessors and directors.