378

The

papacy of Adrian VI

[1522-3 would separate them from the communion of the Church; as Carnesecchi expressed it, the Catholic religion was theirs already, and all that they desired was that it should be better preached. Others however felt compelled to withdraw from the fellowship of a corrupt society, still strenuously affirming that by so doing they had in no way departed from the unity of the Church. Of the former, many were influenced by the doctrinal movement in its most extreme forms, and some even died for their opinions without giving way. Of the latter, many recognised that their action could only be justified by the immediate claims of Christian truth. But in spite of individual divergences, here was a real line of division, in southern Europe as in the north.

I

THE REFORMATION IN ITALY

So far as the movement was one of protest against practical abuses, the need for Reform was not less widely felt in Italy than in Germany. Rodrigo Niño, the imperial ambassador to the Doge and Signory, wrote in 1535 that there were few in Venice who were not more Lutheran than Luther himself with regard to such matters as the reform of the clergy and their secular state. Venice was no doubt exceptional, and the state of feeling there was not that of Italy as a whole. Nevertheless, vigorous efforts after practical reform had begun in other parts of Italy long before this. Adrian of Utrecht, Bishop of Tortosa, the friend of Erasmus, and the former tutor of Charles V, ascended the papal throne in 1522 with a firm resolve to set the Church in order, and to begin with his own household. In many ways he seemed well fitted for the task. A student of distinction, his uprightness, personal piety, and strictness of life were known to all men; and already, as Legate in Spain, he had taken a vigorous part in the reform of the Religious Houses there. But in Rome he proved to be quite helpless. Satisfied with the scholastic theology in which he was so great an adept, he did not understand the questionings which were beginning to stir the minds of others. The Romans had no fellow-feeling for a man who never gave way to anger or to mirth, and to whom the treasures of sculpture in the Vatican were no more than "pagan idols." The scholar who had done so much to foster learning at Louvain was to them only a stranger who knew no Italian, though he spoke Latin very well" for a barbarian." Moreover, the Curia was determined not to be reformed. Thus Adrian achieved nothing; he died unregretted in 1523, not without the usual suspicion of poison; and from that time forward every Pope has been an Italian. But already an important movement had been inaugurated. Just before or shortly after the accession of Adrian VI, a number of earnestminded men, clergy and laity, had banded themselves together at Rome

1524-59]

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in the famous "Oratory of Divine Love," to work and pray for the purification of the Church. Their leaders were Giovanni Pietro Caraffa, afterwards Pope Paul IV, and the Count Gaetano da Thiene, who was subsequently canonised. The society consisted of fifty or sixty distinguished men, including amongst others Jacopo Sadoleto, Giammatteo Giberti, Latino Giovenale, Girolamo and Luigi Lippomano, and Giuliano Dati. They held their spiritual exercises in the Church of Santi Silvestro e Dorotea, of which Dati was curate, and consulted together on the evils of the day. In 1524 Gaetano withdrew to form a new Order of Clerks Regular, who were presently joined by Caraffa, and came to be known as Theatines from his see of Theate (Chieti in the Abruzzi); but the original society still continued to meet until it was dispersed by the Sack of Rome in 1527. Many of its former members, including Caraffa and Giberti, met again at Venice, where they came under the influence of the senator Gasparo Contarini. By degrees others were admitted to their consultations, including Gregorio Cortese, the Abbot of San Giorgio Maggiore, Pietro Bembo, and Luigi Priuli, and subsequently Brucioli, the Florentine exile, the learned scholar Marcantonio Flaminio, and the Englishman Reginald Pole. Contarini, still a layman, became from this time forward the leading spirit amongst them.

When the enlightened Alessandro Farnese became Pope as Paul III (1534), he found this group of zealous men ready to his hand. Contarini was made a Cardinal at his first creation, and Sadoleto, Caraffa, and Pole

received the purple in the following year. In 1537, when he appointed a commission to suggest measures for the reform of the Church, most of its members were chosen from this quarter, the names being those of Contarini, Caraffa, Sadoleto, Pole, Fregoso, Aleander, Giberti, Cortese, and Tommaso Badia. The fruit of their labours, the famous Consilium de emendanda Ecclesia, was unsparing in reprobation of abuses and rich in practical suggestions. But although a few efforts were made to simplify the procedure of the Curia, the forces of inertia proved too strong, and the Consilium was little more than a dead letter. In after years it fell into bad odour, partly owing to its damaging admissions, partly because the Lutherans had taken it up. Moreover Caraffa came in time to suspect many of his former associates of heresy; and after he became Pope the work was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of 1559. But, even had it been otherwise received, it could not have stayed the tide. The revolt against abuses had already opened the way to movements of a more destructive character; the new opinions were already making their appearance south of the Alps.

Italy, always a land of popular movements, was in many ways predisposed to welcome the new opinions. Some of them had been foreshadowed there, and revolt against the Papacy was to its peoples no new thing. The Cathari of the north, with their Manichean and antitrinitarian tendencies, had long died out; but the Waldenses, although

380

German influence in Italy

[1519-43

by no means so numerous as formerly, were still to be found in the valleys of Piedmont and Calabria. The movements of the sixteenth century in Italy were however entirely unconnected with these, and the impulse as a whole came from without. There is indeed one notable exception. Pietro Speziale of Cittadella finished his great work De Gratia Dei in 1542; but he tells us, with obvious sincerity, that he had formulated his theory of Justification and Grace thirty years earlier, before Luther had begun to preach. In the main he agrees with that of Luther, but he resolutely asserts the freedom of the will, and repudiates the Lutheran teaching on this subject; and although he speaks strongly against particular abuses, he does not undervalue the Church system of his day. The old man was thrown into prison in 1543, escaped six years afterwards by the help of two Anabaptists and joined their party, and subsequently made a formal recantation in prison. But Speziale stands alone; and it is clear that the doctrinal revolt as a whole came from the north.

The intercourse between Italy and Germany was very close; and a continual stream of traders and students flowed in both directions. At Venice there was a large Teutonic colony, having its centre in the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. The imperial army which invaded Italy in 1526 contained a large number of Lutherans; and with Georg von Frundsberg's Landsknechte there came the scholar Jakob Ziegler, later known in Venice as Luther's lieutenant. The commonwealth of letters ignored national boundaries; and there was a brisk correspondence between Luther and Zwingli and their admirers in Italy. So early as 1519 Luther's works were being sold in Lombardy by Francesco Calvi or Minicio, a bookseller of Pavia, who had procured a stock from Froben at Basel. In the following year, as we learn from a letter of Burchard von Schenk, they were eagerly purchased at Venice; and Marino Sanuto notes in his Diary that a seizure of them had been made at the instance of the patriarch, though not until part of the stock had been disposed of. Writings of Luther, Melanchthon, and others were presently translated into Italian; and being issued anonymously or under fictitious names, they circulated widely. Thus Luther's sermons on the Lord's Prayer appeared anonymously before 1525, and Melanchthon's Loci Communes about 1534 under the title I Principii della Teologia by "Ippofilo da Terra Nigra"; while other tracts of Luther's were subsequently tacked on to the posthumously issued works of Cardinal Federigo Fregoso.

In ways such as these the opinions of Luther spread, and in a less degree those of Zwingli. There were many who were ready to adopt them, in whole or in part. A hermit who inveighed against "priests and friars" at Venice in 1516 can hardly be called a Lutheran; but Fra Andrea of Ferrara, who preached at Christmas, 1520, at San Marco and in the open air, is expressly said to have "followed the doctrine of Martin Luther." So did a Carmelite friar, Giambattista Pallavicino, who

1524-55]

The Reform at Venice

381

preached at Brescia in Lent, 1527, and others elsewhere. There were three "heretics" at Mirandola in 1524 of whom nothing else is known; but the Florentine physician Girolamo di Bartolommeo Buonagrazia, when proceeded against in 1531, confessed that he had been in correspondence with Luther in 1527, and accepted his doctrine. Nor was Zwingli without supporters. The letters of Egidio della Porta, an Austin friar of Como (a centre of heresy as early as the time of Julius II), prove that he and some of his fellows were ready to leave Italy and throw in their lot with Zwingli in 1525-6. In 1531 a native of Como who had spent three years beyond the Alps was preaching against the current doctrine of the Eucharist. About the same time. priests at Como were laying hands on others, who were to administer the Eucharist in both kinds: one of them, Vincenzio Massaro, is said to have taken a fee of fifteen ducats from all whom he ordained. And a letter written in 1530 by Francesco Negri of Bassano, who had fled from a Benedictine House at Padua and joined Zwingli, and who afterwards drifted to Anabaptism, gives the names of many priests in North Italy whom he reckoned as "brethren."

The disaffected were very numerous. According to the ambassador Francesco Contarini, the Lutherans of Germany boasted in 1535 that their sympathisers in Italy alone would make an army sufficient to deliver them from the priests, and that they had enough friends in the monastic orders to intimidate all who were opposed to them. This of course is a violent exaggeration, and in Italy also popular rumour magnified the danger; yet even so it was not slight. The Reforming movement was especially strong in certain well-defined centres, the chief being Venice and its territories, Ferrara, Modena, Naples, and Lucca.

In VENICE, where foreigners were many and toleration was a principle of the State, the Reform soon made its appearance, and before long found a home. Measures of precaution or repression were demanded by the Patriarch on behalf of the Roman Curia; but as late as 1529 the Signory was able to certify that, excepting for the tolerated German conventicles, the city was free from heresy. Soon afterwards however, in a report to Clement VII on the subject, Caraffa mentions, amongst other evils, the fact that many friars had fallen into heresy, and in particular the disciples of "a certain Franciscan now dead." Of these he names Girolamo Galateo, Bartolommeo Fonzio, and Alessandro da Piero di Sacco. The Bishop of Chieti was thereupon commissioned, by a brief of May 9, 1530, to proceed against Galateo; and from this time. forward the extirpation of heresy was the ruling passion of his life. He it was who procured from Pope Paul III the bull Licet ab initio (July 21, 1542) reorganising the Roman Inquisition on the basis of that of Spain. He was its first head, and in 1555, as Pope Paul IV, he completed the extension of its power over the whole of Italy.

382

Galateo and Fonzio

[1538-62

Galateo was already in prison on suspicion of heresy for certain sermons preached "Bible in hand" at Padua; but under the lenient system of the Venetian Inquisition he was soon at liberty. Caraffa now commenced a new process against him; he was found guilty, and sentenced to degradation and death. This led to a contest with the Signory, who delivered him from Caraffa's hands and consigned him to prison. Here he had been for seven years, when, on the intercession of a friendly senator, he was allowed to make his defence in writing. This Confession is remarkable. It is Augustinian rather than Lutheran in doctrine. It affirms the doctrine of saving faith without any extravagant depreciation of free-will or of good works; the system of the Church as a whole is defended, and the Pope is "the chief of shepherds." Galateo was allowed out on bail, but directed to amend his Confession on some points. He refused to do this, and three years later was cast into prison again, where he died in 1541.

Of Galateo's two companions, Alessandro was already in prison, and is not heard of again. Bartolommeo Fonzio had already incurred the enmity of Caraffa by his advocacy of Henry VIII's divorce; he managed however to clear himself of heresy, and soon left Venice for Germany, where he was employed as a papal agent. But he fell under the suspicion of Aleander and others by his intercourse with the Lutherans; and not without reason, for it was probably he who translated Luther's letter An den christlichen Adel into Italian. On retiring from the papal service he was transferred by Clement VII from the Order of Friars Minor to the Third Order of St Francis and permitted to return to Venice; but he was still an object of suspicion, which was not diminished by a little Catechism which he produced. After years of wandering he settled as Padua and opened a school; but it was broken up by order of Caraffa, now Inquisitor-General. Thence he passed to Cittadella, where reformed opinions were widespread, and again began to teach, soon winning the love of the people. But in May, 1558, he was again arrested, by order of the Dieci, and condemned after four years' examination for the general unsatisfactoriness of his teaching. He was called upon to abjure but refused; then gave way to persuasion and recanted; then recanted his recantation. At length he was sentenced to death at the stake; the sentence was as usual commuted into one of drowning, and he was cast into the sea on August 4, 1562.

Meanwhile, other teachers were going further in the direction of Lutheranism than Galateo and Fonzio. Giulio della Rovere, an Austin Friar of Milan, got into trouble at Bologna in 1538 for a course of sermons preached there. Three years later he came to Venice, and preached at San Cassiano in Lent, staying in the house of Celio Secondo Curione, of whom more presently. His doctrine was attacked; he abjured, and was sentenced to be imprisoned and then banished. He escaped and fled to the Grisons, where the Reform movement had already