CHAPTER VIII

THE COUNTER-REFORMATION

SECTION 1. ITALY

It is sometimes so easy to see, after the event, why things should have taken just the course they did take, that it may seem remarkable that political foresight is so rare. It is probable, however, that the study of history not only illumines many things, and places them in their true perspective, but also tends to simplify too much, overemphasizing, to our minds, the elements that finally triumphed and casting those that succumbed into the shadow.

[Sidenote: Italy]

However this may be, Italy of the sixteenth century appears to offer an unusually clear case of a logical sequence of effects due to previously ascertainable causes. That Italy should toy with the Reformation without accepting it, that she should finally suppress it and along with it much of her own spiritual life, seems to be entirely due to her geographical, political and cultural condition at the time when she felt the impact of the new ideas.

In all these respects, indeed, there was something that might at first blush have seemed favorable to the Lutheran revolt. Few lands were more open to German and Swiss influences than was their transalpine neighbor. Commercially, Italy and Germany were united by a thousand bonds, and a constant influx of northern travellers, students, artists, officials and soldiers, might be supposed to carry with them the contagion of the new ideas. Again, the lack of political unity might be supposed, as in Germany, so in Italy, {372} to facilitate sectional reformation. Finally, the Renaissance, with its unparalleled freedom of thought and its strong anti-clerical bias, would at least insure a fair hearing for innovations in doctrine and ecclesiastical ideals.

And yet, as even contemporaries saw, there were some things which weighed far more heavily in the scale of Catholicism than did those just mentioned in the scale of Protestantism. In the first place the autonomy of the political divisions was more apparent than real. Too weak and too disunited to offer resistance to any strong foreign power, contended for by the three greatest, Italy became gradually more and more a Spanish dependency. After Pavia [Sidenote: 1525] and the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis [Sidenote: 1529] French influence was reduced to a threat rather than a reality. Naples had long been an appendage of the Spanish crown; Milan was now wrested from the French, and one after another most of the smaller states passed into Spain's "sphere of influence." The strongest of all the states, the papal dominions, became in reality, if not nominally, a dependency of the emperor after the sack of Rome. [Sidenote: 1527] Tuscany, Savoy and Venetia maintained a semblance of independence, but Savoy was at that time hardly Italian. Venice had passed the zenith of her power, and Florence, even under her brilliant Duke Cosimo de' Medici [Sidenote: Cosimo de' Medici, 1537-1574] was amenable to the pressure of the Spanish soldier and the Spanish priest.

Enormous odds were thrown against the Reformers because Italy was the seat of the papacy. In spite of all hatred of Roman morals and in spite of all distrust of Roman doctrine, this was a source of pride and of advantage of the whole country. As long as tribute flowed from all Western Europe, as long as kings and emperors kissed the pontiff's toe, Rome was still in a sense the capital of Christendom. An example of how {373} the papacy was both served and despised has been left us by the Florentine statesman and historian [Sidenote: Guiccidardini, 1483-1540] Guiccidardini: "So much evil cannot be said of the Roman curia," he wrote, "that more does not deserve to be said of it, for it is an infamy, an example of all the shame and wickedness of the world." He might have been supposed to be ready to support any enemy of such an institution, but what does he say?

No man dislikes more than do I the ambition, avarice and effeminacy of the priests, not only because these vices are hateful in themselves but because they are especially unbecoming to men who have vowed a life dependent upon God. . . . Nevertheless, my employment with several popes has forced me to desire their greatness for my own advantage. But for this consideration I should have loved Luther like myself, not to free myself from the silly laws of Christianity as commonly understood, but to put this gang of criminals under restraint, so that they might live either without vices or without power.

From this precious text we learn much of the inner history of contemporary Italy. As far as the Italian mind was liberated in religion it was atheistic, as far as it was reforming it went no further than rejection of the hierarchy. The enemies to be dreaded by Rome were, as the poet Luigi Alamanni wrote, [Sidenote: Alamanni, 1495-1556] not Luther and Germany, but her own sloth, drunkenness, avarice, ambition, sensuality and gluttony.

The great spiritual factor that defeated Protestantism in Italy was not Catholicism but the Renaissance. [Sidenote: Renaissance vs. Reformation] Deeply imbued with the tincture of classical learning, naturally speculative and tolerant, the Italian mind had already advanced, in its best representatives, far beyond the intellectual stage of the Reformers. The hostility of the Renaissance to the Reformation was a deep and subtle antithesis of the interests of this world {374} and of the next. It is notable that whereas some philosophical minds, like that of the brilliant Olympia Morata, who had once been completely skeptical, later came under the influence of Luther, there was not one artist of the first rank, not one of the greatest poets, that seems to have been in the least attracted by him. A few minor poets, like Folengo, [Sidenote: Folengo, 1491-1544] showed traces of his influence, but Ariosto and Tasso were bitterly hostile. [Sidenote: Ariosto, 1531] The former cared only for his fantastic world of chivalry and faery, and when he did mention, in a satire dedicated to Bembo, that Friar Martin had become a heretic as Nicoletto had become an infidel, the reason in both cases is that they had overstrained their intellects in the study of metaphysical theology, "because when the mind soars up to see God it is no wonder that, it falls down sometimes blind and confused." Heresy he elsewhere pictures as a devastating monster.

{375} But there was a third reason why the Reformation could not succeed in Italy, and that was that it could not catch the ear of the common people. If for the churchman it was a heresy, and for the free-thinker a superstition, for the "general public" of ordinarily educated persons it was an aristocratic fad. Those who did embrace its doctrines and read its books, and they were not a few of the second-rate humanists, cherished it as their fathers had cherished the neo-Platonism of Pico della Mirandola, as an esoteric philosophy. So little inclined were they to bring their faith to the people that they preferred to translate the Bible into better Greek or classical Latin rather than into the vulgar Tuscan. And just at the moment when it seemed as if a popular movement of some sort might result from the efforts of the Reformers, or in spite of them, came the Roman Inquisition and nipped the budding plant.

[Sidenote: Christian Renaissance]

But between the levels of the greatest intellectual leaders and that of the illiterate masses, there was a surprising number of groups of men and women more or less tinctured with the doctrines of the north. And yet, even here, one must add that their religion was seldom pure Lutheranism or Calvinism; it was Christianized humanism. There was the brilliant woman Vittoria Colonna, who read with rapture the doctrine of justification by faith, but who remained a conforming Catholic all her life. There was Ochino, the general of the Capuchins, whose defection caused a panic at Rome but who remained, nevertheless, an independent rather than an orthodox Protestant. Of like quality were Peter Martyr Vermigli, an exile for his faith, and Jerome Bolsec, a native of France but an inhabitant of Ferrara, whence he took to Geneva an eccentric doctrine that caused much trouble to Calvin. Finally, it was perfectly in accordance with the Italian genius that the most radical of Protestant dissenters, the unitarians Lelio and Fausto Sozzini, should have been born in Siena.

Among the little nests of Lutherans or Christian mystics the most important were at Venice, Ferrara and Naples. As early as 1519 Luther's books found their way to Venice, and in 1525 one of the leading canon lawyers in the city wrote an elaborate refutation of them, together with a letter to the Reformer himself, informing him that his act of burning the papal decretals was worse than that of Judas in betraying, or of Pilate in crucifying, Christ. The first sufferer for the new religion was Jerome Galateo. [Sidenote: 1530] Nevertheless, the new church waxed strong, and many were executed for their opinions. A correspondence of the brethren with Bucer and Luther has been preserved. In one letter they deeply deplore the schisms on the doctrine of the eucharist as hurtful to their cause. The {376} famous artist Lorenzo Lotto [Sidenote: 1540] was employed to paint pictures of Luther and his wife, probably copies of Cranach. The appearance of the Socinians about 1550, and the mutual animosity of the several sects, including the Anabaptist, was destructive. Probably more fatal was the disaster of the Schmalkaldic war and the complete triumph of the emperor. The Inquisition finished the work of crushing out what remained of the new doctrines.

[Sidenote: Naples]

That Naples became a focus of Protestantism was due mainly to John de Valdes, a deeply religious Spaniard. From his circle went out a treatise on justification entitled The Benefit of Christ's Death, by Benedict of Mantua, of which no less than 40,000 copies were sold, for it was the one reforming work to enjoy popularity rivalling that of Luther and Erasmus. Influenced by Valdes, also, Bartholomew Forzio translated Luther's Address to the German Nobility into Italian.

[Sidenote: Ferrara]

At the court of Ferrara the duchess, Renée de France, gathered a little circle of Protestants. Calvin himself spent some time here, and his influence, together with the high protection of his patroness, made the place a fulcrum against Rome. Isabella d'Este, originally of Ferrara and later Marchioness of Mantua, one of the brilliant women of the Renaissance, for a while toyed with the fashionable theology. Cardinal Bembo saw at her castle at Mantua paintings of Erasmus and Luther. [Sidenote: 1537] One of the courtly poets of Northern Italy, Francis Berni, bears witness to the good repute of the Protestants. In his Rifacimento of Boiardo's Orlando Inamorato, he wrote: "Some rascal hypocrites snarl between their teeth, 'Freethinker! Lutheran!' but Lutheran means, you know, good Christian."

[Sidenote: Roman prelates affected by Luther]

The most significant sign of the times, and the most ominous for the papacy, was that among those affected by the leaven of Lutheranism were many of the leading {377} luminaries in the bosom of the church. That the Florentine chronicler Bartholomew Cerratani expressed his hope that Luther's distinguished morals, piety and learning should reform the curia was bad enough; that the papal nuncio Vergerio, after being sent on a mission to Wittenberg, should go over to the enemy, was worse; that cardinals like Contarini and Pole should preach justification by faith and concede much that the Protestants asked, was worst of all. "No one now passes at Rome," wrote Peter Anthony Bandini about 1540, "as a cultivated man or a good courtier who does not harbor some heretical opinions." Paul Sarpi, the eminent historian of Trent, reports that Luther's arguments were held to be unanswerable at Rome, but that he was resisted in order that authority might be uphold. For this statement he appeals to a diary of Francis Chieregato, an eminent ecclesiastic who died on December 6, 1539. As the diary has not been found, Lord Acton rejects the assertion, believing that Sarpi's word cannot be taken unsupported. But a curious confirmation of Sarpi's assertion, [Sidenote: Sarpi's assertion] and one that renders it acceptable, is found in Luther's table talk. Speaking on February 22, 1538, he says that he has heard from Rome that it was there believed to be impossible to refute him until St. Paul had been deposed. Ho regarded this as a signal testimony to the truth of his doctrines; to us it is valuable only as an evidence of Roman opinion. It is not too much to say that at about that time the most distinguished Italian prelates were steering for Wittenberg and threatened to take Rome with them. How they failed is the history of the Counter-reformation.

SECTION 2. THE PAPACY. 1522-1590

Nothing can better indicate the consternation caused at Rome by the appearance of the Lutheran revolt than {378} the fact that for the first time in 144 years and for the last time in history the cardinals elected as supreme pontiff a man who was not an Italian, Adrian of Utrecht. [Sidenote: Adrian VI, 1522-September 1523] After teaching theology at Louvain he had been appointed tutor to Prince Charles and, on the accession of his pupil to the Spanish throne was created Bishop of Tortosa, and shortly thereafter cardinal and Inquisitor General of Spain. While in this country he distinguished himself equally by the justness of his administration and by his bitter hatred of Luther, against whom he wrote several letters both to his imperial master and to his old colleagues at Louvain.

[Sidenote: December 1521]

The death of Leo X was followed by an unusually long conclave, on account of the even balance of parties. At last, despairing of agreement, and feeling also that extraordinary measures were needed to meet the exigencies of the situation, the cardinals, in January, offered the tiara to Adrian, who, alone among modern popes, kept his baptismal name while in office. The failure of Adrian VI to accomplish much was due largely to the shortness of his pontificate of only twenty months, and still more to the invincible corruption he found at Rome. His really high sense of duty awakened no response save fear and hatred among the courtiers of the Medicis. When he tried to restore the ruined finances of the church he was accused of niggardliness; when he made war on abuses he was called a barbarian; when he frankly confessed, in his appeal to the German Diets, that perchance the whole evil infecting the church came from the rottenness of the Curia, he was assailed as putting arms into the arsenal of the enemy. His greatest crime in the eyes of his court was that he was a foreigner, an austere, phlegmatic man, who could understand neither their tongue nor their ways.

{379} Exhausted by the fruitless struggle, Adrian sank into his grave, a good pope unwept and unhonored as few bad popes have ever been. On his tomb the cardinals wrote: "Here lies Adrian VI whose supreme misfortune in life was that he was called upon to rule." A like judgment was expressed more wittily by the people, who erected a monument to Adrian's physician and labeled it, "Liberatori Patriae."

[Sidenote: Clement VII, 1523-34]

The swing of the pendulum so often noticed in politics was particularly marked in the elections to the papacy of the sixteenth century. In almost every instance the new pope was an opponent, and in some sort a contrast, to his predecessor. In no case was this more true than in the election of 1523. Deciding that if Adrian's methods were necessary to save the church the medicine was worse than the disease, the cardinals lost no time in raising another Medici to the throne. Like all of his race, Clement VII was a patron of art and literature, and tolerant of abuses. Personally moral and temperate, he cared little save for an easy life and the advancement of the Three Balls. He began that policy, which nearly proved fatal to the church, of treating the Protestants with alternate indulgence and severity. But for himself the more immediate trouble came not from the enemy of the church but from its protector. Though Adrian was an old officer of Charles V, it was really in the reign of Clement that the process began by which first Italy, then the papacy, then the whole church was put under the Spanish yoke.

[Sidenote: Spanish influence, 1525-6]

After Pavia and the treaty of Madrid had eliminated French influence, Charles naturally felt his power and naturally intended to have it respected even by the pope. Irritated by Clement's perpetual deceit and intrigue with France, Charles addressed to him, in 1526, a document which Ranke calls the most {380} formidable ever used by any Catholic prince to a pope during the century, containing passages "of which no follower of Luther need be ashamed."

[Sidenote: Sack of Rome, May and September 1527]

Rather to threaten the pope than to make war on him, Charles gathered a formidable army of German and Spanish soldiers in the north under the command of his general Frundsberg. All the soldiers were restless and mutinous for want of pay, and in addition to this a powerful motive worked among the German landsknechts. Many of them were Lutheran and looked to the conquest of Rome as the triumph of their cause. As they loudly demanded to be lead against Antichrist, Frundsberg found that his authority was powerless to stop them. [Sidenote: March 16, 1527] When he died of rage and mortification the French traitor Charles, Constable of Bourbon, was appointed by the emperor in his place, and, finding there was nothing else to do, led the army against Rome and promised the soldiers as much booty as they could take. Twice, in May and September, the city was put to the horrors of a sack, with all the atrocities of murder, theft and rapine almost inseparable from war. In addition to plundering, the Lutherans took particular pleasure in desecrating the objects of veneration to the Catholics. Many an image and shrine was destroyed, while Luther was acclaimed pope by his boisterous champions. But far away on the Elbe he heard of the sack and expressed his sorrow for it.

The importance of the sack of Rome, like that of other dramatic events, is apt to be exaggerated. It has been called the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Catholic reaction. It was neither the one nor the other, but only one incident in the long, stubborn process of the Hispanization of Italy and the church. For centuries no emperor had had so much power in Italy as had Charles. With Naples and {381} Milan were now linked Siena and Genoa under his rule; the states of the church were virtually at his disposal, and even Florence, under its hereditary duke, Alexander de' Medici, was for a while under the control of the pope and through him, of Charles.

Nor did the fall of the holy city put the fear of God into the hearts of the prelates for more than a moment. The Medici, Clement, who never sold his soul but only pawned it from time to time, without entirely abandoning the idea of reform, indefinitely postponed it. Procrastinating, timid, false, he was not the man to deal with serious abuses. He toyed with the idea of a council but when, on the mere rumor that a council was to be called the prices of all salable offices dropped in a panic, he hesitated. Moreover he feared the council would be used by the emperor to subordinate him even in spiritual matters. Perhaps he meant well, but abuses were too lucrative to be lightly affronted. As to Lutheranism, Clement was completely misinformed and almost completely indifferent. While he and the emperor were at odds it grew mightily. Here as elsewhere he was irresolute; his pontificate, as a contemporary wrote, was "one of scruples, considerations and discords, of buts and ifs and thens and moreovers, and plenty of words without effect."

[Sidenote: Paul III, 1534-49]

The pontificate of Paul III marks the turning point in the Catholic reaction. Under him the council of Trent was at last opened; the new orders, especially the Jesuits, were formed, and such instrumentalities as the Inquisition and Index of prohibited books put on a new footing. Paul III, a Farnese from the States of the Church, owed his election partly to his strength of character, partly to the weakness of his health, for the cardinals liked frequent vacancies in the Holy See. Cautious and choleric, prolix and stubborn, he had a real desire for reform and an earnest wish to avoid {382} quarrels with either of the great powers that menaced him, the emperor and France. The reforming spirit of the pope showed itself in the appointment of several men of the highest character to the cardinalate, among them Gaspar Contarini and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. In other cases, however, the exigencies of politics induced the nomination of bad men, such as Del Monte and David Beaton. At the same time a commission was named to recommend practical reforms. The draft for a bull they presented for this purpose was rejected by the Consistory, but some of their recommendations, such as the prohibition of the Roman clergy to visit taverns, theaters and gambling dens, were adopted.

[Sidenote: May, 1535 Consilium delectorum cardinalium et aliorum praelatorum]

A second commission of nine ecclesiastics of high character, including John Peter Caraffa, Contarini, Pole and Giberti, was created to make a comprehensive report on reform. The important memorial they drew up fully exposed the prevalent abuses. The root of all they found in the exaggeration of the papal power of collation and the laxity with which it was used. Not only were morally unworthy men often made bishops and prelates, but dispensations for renunciation of benefices, for absenteeism and for other hurtful practices were freely sold. The commission demanded drastic reform of these abuses as well as of the monastic orders, and called for the abolition of the venal exercise of spiritual authority by legates and nuncios. But the reform memorial, excellent and searching as it was, led to nothing. At most it was of some use as a basis of reforms made by the Council of Trent later. But for the moment it only rendered the position of the church more difficult. The reform of the Dataria, for example, the office which sold graces, privileges, indults, dispensations and benefices, was {383} considered impossible because half of the papal revenue, or 110,000 ducats annually, came from it. Nor could the fees of the Penitentiary be abolished for fear of bankruptcy, though in 1540 they were partially reduced. [Sidenote: 1538] The most obvious results of the Consilium was to put another weapon into the hands of the Lutherans. Published by an unauthorized person, it was at once seized upon by the Reformers as proof of the hopeless depravity of the Curia. So dangerous did it prove to simple-minded Catholics that it was presently put on the Index!

Paul's diplomacy tried to play off the Empire against France and to divert the attention of both to a crusade against the Turk. Hoping to advance the cause of the church by means of the war declared by Charles V on the Schmalkaldic League, the pope, in return for a subsidy, exacted a declaration in the treaty, that the reason of the war was religious and the occasion for it the refusal of the Protestants to recognize the Council of Trent's authority. But when Charles was victor he used his advantage only to strengthen his own prerogative, not effectively to suppress heresy. Paul now dreaded the emperor more than he did the Protestants and his position was not made easier by the threat of Charles to come to terms with the Lutherans did Paul succeed in rousing France against him. In fact, with all his squirming, Paul III only sank deeper into the Spanish vassalage, while the championship of the church passed from his control into that of new agencies that he had created.

[Sidenote: Julius III, 1550-55]

It was perhaps an effort to free the Holy See from the Spanish yoke that led the cardinals to raise to the purple, as Julius III, Cardinal John Mary Ciocchi del Monte who as one of the presidents of the oecumenical council had distinguished himself by his opposition to {384} the emperor. Nevertheless his pontificate marked a relaxation of the church's effort, for policy or strength to pursue reform he had none.

[Sidenote: Marcellus II, April 9-May 1, 1555]

Marcellus II, who was pope for twenty-two days, would hardly be remembered save for the noble Mass of Pope Marcellus dedicated to him by Palestrina.

With the elevation of Cardinal Caraffa to the tiara Peter's keys [Sidenote: Paul IV, 1555-9] were once more restored to strong hands and a reforming heart. The founder of the Theatines was a hot-blooded Neapolitan still, in spite of his seventy-nine years, hale and hearty. Among the reforms he accomplished were some regulations relating to the residence of bishops and some rules for the bridling of Jews, usurers, prostitutes, players and mountebanks. But he was unable to reform himself. He advanced his young kinsmen shamelessly to political office. His jealousy of the Jesuits, in whom he saw a rival to his own order, not only caused him to neglect to use them but made him put them in a very critical position. Nor did he dare to summon again the council that had been prorogued, for fear that some stronger power should use it against himself. He chafed under the Spanish yoke, coming nearer to a conflict with Charles V and his son Philip II than any pope had ventured to do. He even thought of threatening Philip with the Inquisition, but was restrained by prudence. In his purpose of freeing Italy from foreign domination he accomplished nothing whatever.

[Sidenote: Pius IV, 1560-5]

Pius IV was a contrast to the predecessor whom he hated. John Angelo Medici, of Milan, not connected with the Florentine family, was a cheerful, well-wishing, beneficent man, genial and fond of life, a son of the Renaissance, a patron of art and letters. The choice of a name often expresses the ideals and tendencies of a pope; that of Pius was chosen perhaps in imitation {385} of Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the most famous humanist to sit on the fisherman's throne. And yet the spirit of the times no longer allowed the gross licentiousness of the earlier age, and the cause of reform progressed not a little under the diplomatic guidance of the Milanese. In the first place, doubtless from personal motives, he made a fearful example of the kinsmen of his predecessor, four of whom he executed chiefly for the reason that they had been advanced by papal influence. This salutary example practically put an end to nepotism; at least the unfortunate nephews of Paul IV were the last to aspire to independent principalities solely on the strength of kinship to a pope.

[Sidenote: Reforms]

The demand for the continuation and completion of the general council, which had become loud, was acceded to by Pius who thought, like the American boss, that at times it was necessary to "pander to the public conscience." The happy issue of the council, from his point of view, in its complete submissiveness to the papal prerogative, led Pius to emphasize the spiritual rather than the political claims of the hierarchy. In this the church made a great gain, for, as the history of the time shows plainly, in the game of politics the papacy could no longer hold its own against the national states surrounding it. Pius leaned heavily on Philip, for by this time Spain had become the acknowledged champion of the church, but he was able to do so without loss of prestige because of the gradual separation of the temporal from the spiritual power.

Among his measures the most noteworthy was one regulating the powers of the college of cardinals, while their exclusive right to elect the pontiff was maintained against the pretensions of the council. The best Catholic spirit of the time was represented in {386} Cardinal Charles Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, an excellent prelate who sought to win back members of Christ to the fold by his good example, while he did not disdain to use the harsher methods of persecution when necessary. Among the amiable weaknesses of Pius was the belief, inherited from a bygone age, that the Protestants might still be reunited to the church by a few concessions, such as those of the marriage of the clergy and the use of the cup by the laity.

[Sidenote: Pius V, 1566-72]

With Pius V a sterner spirit entered into the councils of the church. The election of the Dominican and Chief Inquisitor Michael Ghislieri was a triumph for the policy of Borromeo. His pitiless hatred of the heretics hounded Catharine de' Medici against the Huguenots, and Philip II against the Dutch. Contrary to the dictates of prudence and the wishes of the greatest Catholic princes, he issued the bull deposing Elizabeth. But he was severe to himself, an ascetic nicknamed for his monkish narrowness "Friar Wooden-shoe" by the Roman populace. He ruthlessly reformed the Italian clergy, meting out terrible punishments to all sinners. Under his leadership Catholicism took the offensive in earnest and accomplished much. His zeal won him the name of saint, for he was the last of the Roman pontiffs to be canonized.

But the reign of sainthood coupled with absolutism is apt to grow irksome, and it was with relief that the Romans hailed the election of Hugo Buoncompagno as Gregory XIII. [Sidenote: Gregory XIII, 1572-85] He did little but follow out, somewhat weakly, the paths indicated by his predecessors. So heavily did he lean on Spain that he was called the chaplain of Philip, but, as the obligations were mutual, and the Catholic king came also to depend more and more upon the spiritual arms wielded by the papacy, it might just as well have been said that Philip was the executioner employed by Gregory. The {387} mediocrity of his rule did not prevent notable achievement by the Jesuits in the cause of the church. His reform of the calendar will be described more fully elsewhere.

Gregory XIII offers an opportunity to measure the moral standard of the papacy after half a century of reform. His policy was guided largely by his ruling passion, love of a natural son, born before he had taken priest's orders, whom he made Gonfaloniere of the church and would have advanced to still further preferment had not his advisers objected. Gregory was the pope who thanked God "for the grace vouchsafed unto Christendom" in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. He was also the pope who praised and encouraged the plan for the assassination of Elizabeth.[1]

[Sidenote: Sixtus V, 1585-90]

In the person of Sixtus V the spirit of Pius V returned to power. Felix Peretti was a Franciscan and an Inquisitor, an earnest man and a hard one. Like his predecessors pursuing the goal of absolutism, he had an advantage over them in the blessing disguised as the disaster of the Spanish Armada. From this time forward the papacy was forced to champion its cause with the spiritual weapons at its command, and the gain to it as a moral and religious power was enormous. In some ways it assumed the primacy of Catholic Europe, previously usurped by Spain, and attained an influence that it had not had since the Great Schism of the fourteenth century.

The reforms of Sixtus are important rather for their comprehensive than for their drastic quality. The whole machinery of the Curia was made over, the routine of business being delegated to a number of standing committees known as Congregations, such as the Congregation of Ceremonies to watch over matters of precedence at the papal court, and the Congregation {388} of the Consistory to prepare the work of the Consistory. The number of cardinals was fixed at seventy. New editions of the breviary and of the Index were carefully prepared. At the same time the moral reforms of Trent were laxly carried out, for while decrees enforcing them were promulgated by Sixtus with one hand, with the other he sold dispensations and privileges.

[1] Ante, p. 338.

SECTION 3. THE COUNCIL OF TRENT

While the popes were enjoying their jus incorrigibilitatis--as Luther wittily expressed it--the church was going to rack and ruin. Had the safety of Peter's boat been left to its captains, it would apparently have foundered in the waves of schism and heresy. No such dangerous enemy has ever attacked the church as that then issuing from her own bosom. Neither the medieval heretics nor the modern philosophers have won from her in so short a time such masses of adherents. Where Voltaire slew his thousands Luther slew his ten thousands, for Voltaire appealed only to the intellect, Luther appealed to the conscience.

[Sidenote: Decline of Protestantism]

The extraordinary thing about the Protestant conquests was their sudden end. Within less than fifty years the Scandinavian North, most of Germany including Austria, parts of Hungary, Poland, most of Switzerland, and Great Britain had declared for the "gospel." France was divided and apparently going the same road; even in Italy there were serious symptoms of disaffection. That within a single generation the tide should be not only stopped but rolled back is one of the most dramatic changes of fortune in history. The only country which Protestantism gained after 1560 was the Dutch Republic. Large parts of Germany and Poland were won back to the church, and Catholicism made safe in all the Latin countries.

{389} [Sidenote: Spanish revival]

The spirit that accomplished this work was the spirit of Spain. More extraordinary than the rapid growth of her empire was the conquest of Europe by her ideals. The character of the Counter-reformation was determined by her genius. It was not, as it started to be in Italy, a more or less inwardly Christianized Renaissance. It was a distinct and powerful religious revival, and one that showed itself, as many others have done, by a mighty reaction. Medievalism was restored, largely by medieval methods, the general council, the emphasis on tradition and dogma, coercion of mind and body, and the ministrations of a monastic order, new only in its discipline and effectiveness, a reduplication of the old mendicant orders in spirit and ideal.

[Sidenote: Preparation for calling a council]

The Oecumenical Council was so double-edged a weapon that it is not remarkable that the popes hesitated to grasp it in their war with the heretic. They had uncomfortable memories of Constance and Basle, of the election and deposition of popes and of decrees limiting their prerogatives. And, moreover, the council was the first authority invoked by the heretic himself. Adrian might have been willing to risk such a synod, but before he had time to call one, his place was taken by the vacillating and pusillanimous Clement. Perpetually toying with the idea he yet allowed the pressure of his courtiers and the difficulties of the political situation--for France was opposed to the council as an imperial scheme--indefinitely to postpone the summons.

The more serious-minded Paul III found another lion in his path. He for the first time really labored to summon the general synod, but he found that the Protestants had now changed their position and would no longer consent to recognize its authority under any conditions to which he could possibly assent. Though {390} his nuncio Vergerio received in Germany and even in Wittenberg a cordial welcome, it was soon discovered that the ideas of the proper constitution of the council entertained by the two parties were irreconciliable. Fundamentally each wanted a council in which its own predominance should be assured. The Schmalkaldic princes, on the advice of their theologians, asked for a free German synod in which they should have a majority vote, and in this they were supported by Francis I and Henry VIII. Naturally no pope could consent to any such measures; under these discouraging circumstances, the opening of the council was continually postponed, and in place of it the emperor held a series of religious colloquies that only served to make the differences of the two parties more prominent.

[Sidenote: Summons of Council, November 19, 1544]

After several years of negotiation the path was made smooth and the bull Laetare Hierusalem summoned a general synod to meet at Trent on March 15, 1545, and assigned it three tasks: (1) The pacification of religious disputes by doctrinal decisions; (2) the reform of ecclesiastical abuses; (3) the discussion of a crusade against the infidel. Delay still interfered with the opening of the assembly, which did not take place until December 15, 1545.

[Sidenote: First period, 1545-7]

The council was held at three separate periods with long intervals. The first period was 1545-7, the second 1551-2, the third 1562-3. The city of Trent was chosen in order to yield to the demand for a German town while at the same time selecting that one nearest to Italy, for the pope was determined to keep the action of the synod under control. Two measures were adopted to insure this end, the initiative and presidency of the papal legates and packing the membership. The faculties to be granted the legates were already decided upon in 1544; these lieutenants were to be, according to Father Paul Sarpi, angels of peace to preside, make {391} all necessary regulations, and publish them "according to custom." The phrase that the council should decide on measures, "legatis proponentibus" was simply the constitutional expression of the principal familiar in many governments, that the legislative should act only on the initiative of the executive, thus giving an immense advantage to the latter. The second means of subordinating the council was the decision to vote by heads and not by nations and to allow no proxies. This gave a constant majority to the Italian prelates sent by the pope. So successful were these measures that the French ambassador bitterly jested of the Holy Ghost coming to Trent in the mailbags from Rome.

[Sidenote: Membership]

At the first session there were only thirty-four members entitled to vote: four cardinals, four archbishops, twenty-one bishops and five generals of orders. There were also present other personages, including an ambassador from King Ferdinand, four Spanish secular priests and a number of friars. The first question debated was the precedence of dogma or reform. Regarding the council chiefly as an instrument for condemning the heretics, the pope was in favor of taking up dogma first. The emperor, on the other hand, wishing rather to conciliate the Protestants and if possible to lure them back to the old church, was in favor of starting with reform. The struggle, which was carried on not so much on the floor of the synod as behind the members' backs in the intrigues of courts, was decided by a compromise to the effect that both dogma and reform should be taken up simultaneously. But all enactments dealing with ecclesiastical irregularities were to bear the proviso "under reservation of the papal authority."

[Sidenote: Dogmatic decrees]

The dogmatic decrees at Trent were almost wholly oriented by the polemic against Protestantism. {392} Practically nothing was defined save what had already been taken up in the Augsburg Confession or in the writings of Calvin, of Zwingli and of the Anabaptists. Inevitably, a spirit so purely defensive could not be animated by a primarily philosophical interest. The guiding star was not a system but a policy, and this policy was nothing more nor less than that of re-establishing tradition. The practice of the church was the standard applied; many an unhistorical assertion was made to justify it and many a practice of comparatively recent growth was sanctioned by the postulate that "it had descended from apostolic use." "By show of antiquity they introduce novelty," was Bacon's correct judgment.

[Sidenote: Bible and tradition]

Quite naturally the first of the important dogmatic decrees was on the basis of authority. The Protestants had acknowledged the Bible only; over against them the Tridentine fathers declared for the Bible andthe tradition of the church. The canon of Scripture was different from that recognized by the Protestants in that it included the Apocrypha.

[Sidenote: Justification]

After passing various reform decrees on preaching, catechetical instruction, privileges of mendicants and indulgences, the council took up the thorny question of justification. Discussion was postponed for some months out of consideration for the emperor, who feared it might irritate the Protestants, and only gave his consent to it in the hope that some ambiguous form acceptable to that party, might be found. How deeply the solifidian doctrine had penetrated into the very bosom of the church was revealed by the storminess of the debate. The passions of the right reverend fathers were so excited by the consideration of a fundamental article of their faith that in the course of disputation they accused one another of conduct unbecoming to Christians, taunted one another with {393} plebeian origin and tore hair from one another's beards. The decree as finally passed established the position that faith and works together justify, and condemned the semi-Lutheran doctrines of "duplicate justice" and imputed righteousness hitherto held by such eminent theologians as Contarini and Cajetan.

Having accomplished this important work the council appeared to the pope ready for dissolution. The protests of the emperor kept it together for a few months longer, but an outbreak of the spotted fever and the fear of a raid during the Schmalkaldic war, served as sufficient excuses to translate the council to Bologna. [Sidenote: March 1547] Though nothing was accomplished in this city the assembly was not formally prorogued until September 13, 1549.

[Sidenote: Second period, 1551-2]

Under pressure from the emperor Pope Julius III convoked the synod for a second time at Trent on May 1, 1551. The personnel was different. The Jesuits Lainez and Salmeron were present working in the interests of the papacy. No French clergy took part as Henry II was hostile. The Protestants were required to send a delegation, which was received on January 24, 1552. They presented a confession, but declined to recognize the authority of a body in which they were not represented. Several dogmatic decrees were passed on the sacraments, reasserting transubstantiation and all the doctrines and usages of the church. A few reform decrees were also passed, but before a great deal could be accomplished the revolt of Maurice of Saxony put both emperor and council in a precarious position and the latter was consequently prorogued for a second time on April 28, 1552.

[Sidenote: Third period, 1562-3]

When, after ten long years, the council again convened at the command of Pius IV, in January, 1562, it is extraordinary to see how little the problems confronting it had changed. Not only was the struggle {394} for power between pope and council and between pope and emperor still going on, but hopes were still entertained in some quarters of reconciling the schismatics. Pius invited all princes, whether Catholic or heretical, to send delegates, but was rebuffed by some of them. The argument was then taken up by the Emperor Ferdinand who sent in an imposing demand for reforms, including the authorization of the marriage of priests, communion in both kinds, the use of the vulgar tongue in divine service, and drastic rules for the improvement of the convents and of the papal courts.

[Sidenote: Jesuits present]

The contention over this bone among the fathers, now far more numerous than in the earlier days, waxed so hot that for ten whole months no session could be held. Mobs of the partisans of the various factions fought in the streets and bitter taunts of "French diseases" and "Spanish eruptions" were exchanged between them. For a time the situation seemed inextricable and one cardinal prophesied the impending downfall of the papacy. But in the nick of time to prevent such a catastrophe the pope was able to send into the field the newly recruited praetorian guards of the Society of Jesuits. Under the command of Cardinal Morone these indefatigable zealots turned the flank of the opposing forces partly by intrigue at the imperial court, partly by skilful manipulation of debate. The emperor's mind was changed; reforms demanded by him were dropped.

The questions actually taken up and settled were dogmatic ones, chiefly concerning the sacrifice of the mass and the perpetuation of the Catholic customs of communion in one kind, the celebration of masses in honor of saints, the celebration of masses in which the priest only communicates, the mixing of water with the wine, the prohibition of the use of the vulgar tongue, and the sanction of masses for the dead. Other {395} decrees amended the marriage laws, and enjoined the preparation of an Index of prohibited books, of a catechism and of standard editions of missal and breviary.

[Sidenote: Subjection to papacy]

How completely the council in its last estate was subdued to the will of the pope is shown by its request that the decrees should all be confirmed by him. This was done by Pius IV in the bull Benedictus Deus. [Sidenote: January 26, 1564] Pius also caused to be prepared a symbol known as the Tridentine Profession of Faith which was made binding on all priests. Save that it was slightly enlarged in 1877 by the pronouncement on Papal Infallibility, it stands to the present day.

[Sidenote: Reception of decrees]

The complete triumph of the papal claims was offset by the cool reception which the decrees received in Catholic Europe. Only the Italian states, Poland, Portugal and Savoy unreservedly recognized the authority of all of them. Philip II, bigot as he was, preferred to make his own rules for his clergy and recognized the laws of Trent with the proviso "saving the royal rights." France sanctioned only the dogmatic, not the practical decrees. The emperor never officially recognized the work of the council at all. Nor were the governments the only recalcitrants. According to Sarpi the body of German Catholics paid no attention to the prescribed reforms and the council was openly mocked in France as claiming an authority superior to that of the apostles.

To Father Paul Sarpi, indeed, the most intelligent observer of the next generation, the council seemed to have been a failure if not a fraud. Its history he calls an Iliad of woes. The professed objects of the council, healing the schism and asserting the episcopal power he thinks frustrated, for the schism was made irreconciliable and the church reduced to servitude.

But the judgment of posterity has reversed that of {396} the great historian, [Sidenote: Constructive work] at least as far as the value of the work done at Trent to the cause of Catholicism is concerned. If the church shut out the Protestants and recognized her limited domain, she at least took appropriate measures to establish her rule over what was left. Her power was now collected; her dogma was unified and made consistent as opposed to the mutually diverse Protestant creeds. In several points, indeed, where the opinion of the members was divided, the words of the decrees were ambiguous, but as against the Protestants they were distinct and so comprehensive as rather to supersede than to supplement earlier standards.

Nor should the moral impulse of the council be underestimated, ridiculed though it was by its opponents as if expressed in the maxim, "si non caste, tamen caute." Sweeping decrees for urgent reforms were passed, and above all a machinery set up to carry on the good work. In providing for a catechism, for authoritative editions of the Vulgate, breviary and other standard works, in regulating moot points, in striking at lax discipline, the council did a lasting service to Catholicism and perhaps to the world. Not the least of the practical reforms was the provision for the opening of seminaries to train the diocesan clergy. The first measure looking to this was passed in 1546; Cardinal Pole at once began to act upon it, and a decree of the third session [Sidenote: 1563] ordered that each diocese should have such a school for the education of priests. The Roman seminary, opened two years later, [Sidenote: 1565] was a model for subsequent foundations.

SECTION 4. THE COMPANY OF JESUS

If the Counter-reformation was in part a pure reaction to medievalism it was in part also a religious revival. If this was stimulated by the Protestant {397} example, it was also the outcome of the rising tide of Catholic pietism in the fifteenth century. Still more was it the answer to a demand on the part of the church for an instrument with which to combat the dangers of heresy and to conquer spiritually the new worlds of heathenism.

Great crises in the church have frequently produced new revivals of monasticism. From Benedict to Bernard, from Bernard to Francis and Dominic, from the friars to the Jesuits, there is an evolution in the adaptation of the monastic life to the needs of Latin Christianity. Several new orders, [Sidenote: New monastic orders] all with more or less in common, started in the first half of the sixteenth century. Under Leo X there assembled at Rome a number of men united by the wish to renew their spiritual lives by religious exercises. From this Oratory of Divine Love, as it was called, under the inspiration of Gaetano di Tiene and John Peter Caraffa, arose the order of Theatines, [Sidenote: 1524] a body of devoted priests, dressing not in a special garb but in ordinary priest's robes, who soon attained a prominent position in the Catholic reformation. Their especial task was to educate the clergy.

The order of the Capuchins [Sidenote: c. 1526] was an offshoot of the Franciscans. It restored the relaxed discipline of the early friars and its members went about teaching the poor. Notwithstanding the blow to it when its third vicar Bernardino Ochino became a Calvinist, it flourished and turned its energies especially against the heretics.

Of the other orders founded at this time, the Barnabites (1530), the Somascians (1532), the Brothers of Mercy (1540), the Ursulines (1537), only the common characteristics can be pointed out. It is notable that they were all animated by a social ideal; not only the salvation of the individual soul but also the {398} amelioration of humanity was now their purpose. Some of the orders devoted themselves to the education of children, some to home missions or foreign missions, some to nursing the sick, some to the rescue of fallen women. The evolution of monasticism had already pointed the way to these tasks; its apogee was reached with the organization of the Company of Jesus.

[Sidenote: Typical Jesuit]

The Jesuit has become one of those typical figures, like the Puritan and the buccaneer. Though less exploited in fiction than he was in the days of Dumas, Eugene Sue and Zola, the mention of his name calls to the imagination the picture of a tall, spare man, handsome, courteous, obliging, but subtle, deceitful, dangerous, capable of nursing the blackest thoughts and of sanctioning the worst actions for the advancement of his cause. The Lettres Provinciales of Pascal first stamped on public opinion the idea that the Jesuit was necessarily immoral and venomous; the implacable hatred of Michelet and Symonds has brought them as criminals before the bar of history. On the other hand they have had their apologists and friends even outside their own order. Let us neither praise nor blame, but seek to understand them.

[Sidenote: Loyola, c. 1493-1556]

In that memorable hour when Luther said his ever-lasting nay at Worms one of his auditors was--or might have been for she was undoubtedly present in the city--Germaine de Foix, the wife of the Margrave John of Brandenburg. The beautiful and frivolous young woman had been by a former marriage the second wife of Ferdinand the Catholic and at his court she had been known and worshipped by a young page of good family, Iñigo de Loyola. Like the romantic Spaniard that he was he had taken, as he told later, for his lady "no duchess nor countess but one far higher" and to her he paid court in the genuine spirit of old chivalry. Not that this prevented him from addressing {399} less disinterested attentions to other ladies, for, if something of a Don Quixote he was also something of a Don Juan. Indeed, at the carnival of 1515, his "enormous misdemeanors" had caused him to be tried before a court of justice and little did his plea of benefit of clergy avail him, for the judge failed to find a tonsure on his head "even as large as a seal on a papal bull," and he was probably punished severely.

Loyola was a Basque, and a soldier to his fingertips. When the French army invaded Spain he was given command of the fortress of Pampeluna. Defending it bravely against desperate odds he was wounded [Sidenote: May 23, 1521] in the leg with a cannon ball and forced to yield. The leg was badly set and the bone knit crooked. With indomitable courage he had it broken and reset, stretched on racks and the protruding bone sawed off, but all the torture, in the age before anaesthetics, was in vain. The young man of about twenty-eight--the exact year of his birth is unknown--found himself a cripple for life.

To while away the long hours of convalescence he asked for the romances of chivalry but was unable to get them and read in their place legends of the saints and a life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony. His imagination took fire at the new possibilities of heroism and of fame. "What if you should be a saint like Dominic or Francis?" he asked himself, "ay, what if you should even surpass them in sanctity?" His choice was fixed. He took Madonna for his lady and determined to become a soldier of Christ.

As soon as he was able to move he made a pilgrimage to Seville and Manresa and there dedicated his arms in a church in imitation of the knights he had read about in Amadis of Gaul. Then, with a general confession and much fasting and mortification of the flesh, began a period of doubt and spiritual anguish {400} that has sometimes been compared with that of Luther. Both were men of strong will and intellect, both suffered from the sense of sin. But Luther's development was somewhat quieter and more normal--if, indeed, in the psychology of conversion so carefully studied by James, the quieter is the more normal. At any rate where Luther had one vision on an exceptional occasion, Loyola had hundreds and had them daily. Ignatius saw the Trinity as a clavichord with three strings, the miracle of transubstantiation as light in bread, Satan as a glistening serpent covered with bright, mysterious eyes, Jesus as "a big round form shining as gold," and the Trinity again as "a ball of fire."

But with all the visions he kept his will fixed on his purpose. [Sidenote: 1523] At first this took the form of a vow to preach to the infidels and he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, only to be turned back by the highest Christian authority in that region, the politically-minded Franciscan vicar.

[Sidenote: 1524]

On returning to Spain he went to Barcelona and started to learn Latin with boys, for his education as a gentleman had included nothing but reading and writing his own tongue. Thence he went to the university of Alcalá where he won disciples but was imprisoned for six weeks by the Inquisition and forbidden to hold meetings with them. Practically the same experience was repeated at Salamanca where he was detained by the Holy Office for twenty-two days and again prohibited from holding religious meetings. Thus he was chased out of Spain by the church he sought to serve. Turning his steps to Paris he entered the College of Montaigu, and, if he here was free from the Inquisition he was publicly whipped by the college authorities as a dangerous fanatic. Nevertheless, here he gathered his first permanent disciples, Peter Le Fèvre of Savoy, Francis Xavier of Pampeluna and two Castilians, {401} James Laynez and Alfonso Salmeron. The little man, hardly over five feet two inches high, deformed and scarred, at the age of thirty-five, won men to him by his smile, as of a conqueror in pain, by his enthusiasm, his mission and his book.

[Sidenote: The Spiritual Exercises]

If one reckons the greatness of a piece of literature not by the beauty of the style or the profundity of the thought but by the influence it has exercised over men, the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius will rank high. Its chief sources were the meditation and observation of its author. If he took some things from Garcia de Cisneros, some from The Imitation of Christ, some from the rules of Montaigu, where he studied, far more he took from the course of discipline to which he had subjected himself at Manresa. The psychological soundness of Loyola's method is found in his discovery that the best way to win a man to an ideal is to kindle his imagination. His own thought was imaginative to the verge of abnormality and the means which he took to awaken and artificially to stimulate this faculty in his followers were drastic in the extreme.

The purpose of the Exercises is stated in the axiom that "Man was created to praise, reverence and serve God our Lord and thereby to save his soul." To fit a man for this work the spiritual exercises were divided into four periods called weeks, though each period might be shortened or lengthened at the discretion of the director. The first week was devoted to the consideration of sin; the second to that of Christ's life as far as Palm Sunday; the third to his passion; and the fourth to his resurrection and ascension. Knowing the tremendous power of the stimulant to be administered Ignatius inserted wise counsels of moderation in the application of it. But, subject only to the condition that the novice was not to be plied beyond what he could bear, he was directed in the first week of {402} solitary meditation to try to see the length, breadth and depth of hell, to hear the lamentations and blasphemies of the damned, to smell the smoke and brimstone, to taste the bitterness of tears and of the worm of conscience and to feel the burnings of the unquenchable fire. In like manner in the other weeks he was to try to picture to himself in as vivid a manner as possible all the events brought before his mind, whether terrible or glorious. The end of all this discipline was to be the complete subjection of the man to the church. The Jesuit was directed ever "to praise all the precepts of the church, holding the mind ready to find reasons for her defence and nowise in her offence." There must be an unconditional surrender to her not only of the will but of the intelligence. "To make sure of being right in all things," says Loyola, "we ought always to hold by the principle that the white I see I should believe to be black if the hierarchical church were so to rule it."

Inspired by this ideal the small body of students, agreeing to be called henceforth the Company of Jesus--a military term, the socii being the companions or followers of a chief in arms--took vows to live in poverty and chastity [Sidenote: August 15, 1540] and to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. With this object they set out to Venice and then turned towards Rome for papal approbation of their enterprise. Their first reception was chilling, but they gradually won a few new recruits and Ignatius drafted the constitution [Sidenote: September 27, 1540] for a new order which was handed to the pope by Contarini and approved in the bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae, which quotes from the formula of the Jesuits:

Whoever wishes to fight for God under the standard of the cross and to serve the Lord alone and his vicar on earth the Roman pontiff shall, after a solemn vow of perpetual chastity, consider that he is part of a society instituted chiefly for these ends, for the profit of souls in {403} life and Christian doctrine, for the propagation of the faith through public preaching, the ministry of God's word, spiritual exercises and works of charity, and especially for the education of children and ignorant persons in Christianity, for the hearing of confession and for the giving of spiritual consolation.

Moreover it is stated that the members of the new order should be bound by a vow of special obedience to the pope and should hold themselves ready at his behest to propagate the faith among Turks, infidels, heretics or schismatics, or to minister to believers.

[Sidenote: April 1547]

Ignatius was chosen first general of the order. The pope then cancelled the previous limitation of the number of Jesuits to 60 [Sidenote: 1544] and later issued a large charter of privileges for them. [Sidenote: 1549] They were exempted from taxes and episcopal jurisdiction; no member was to be allowed to accept any dignity without the general's consent, nor could any member be assigned to the spiritual direction of women. Among many other grants was one to the effect that the faithful might confess to them and receive communion without permission of their parish priests. A confirmation of all privileges and a grant of others was made in a bull of July 21, 1550.

[Sidenote: Organization of the Society of Jesus, 1550]

The express end of the order being the world-domination of the church, its constitution provided a marvellously apt organization for this purpose. Everything was to be subordinate to efficiency. Detachment from the world went only so far as necessary for the completer conquest of the world. Asceticism, fasting, self-discipline were to be moderate so as not to interfere with health. No special dress was prescribed, for it might be a hindrance rather than a help. The purpose being to win over the classes rather than the masses, the Jesuits were particular to select as members only robust men of agreeable appearance, calm minds and {404} eloquence. That an aspirant to the order should also be rich and of good family was not requisite but was considered desirable. Men of bad reputation, intractible, choleric, or men who had ever been tainted with heresy, were excluded. No women were recruited.

After selection, the neophyte was put on a probation of two years. He was then assigned to the class of scholars for further discipline. He was later placed either as a temporal coadjutor, a sort of lay brother charged with inferior duties, or as a spiritual coadjutor, who took the three irrevocable vows. Finally, there was a class, to which admission was gained after long experience, the Professed of Four Vows, the fourth being one of special obedience to the pope. A small number of secret Jesuits who might be considered as another class, were charged with dangerous missions and with spying.

[Sidenote: General]

Over the order was placed a General who was practically, though not theoretically, absolute. On paper he was limited by the possibility of being deposed and by the election, independently of his influence, of an "admonitor" and some assistants. In practice the only limitations of his power were the physical ones inherent in the difficulties of administering provinces thousands of miles away. From every province, however, he received confidential reports from a multitude of spies.

The spirit of the order was that of absolute, unquestioning, blind obedience. The member must obey his superior "like a corpse which can be turned this way or that, or a rod that follows every impulse, or a ball of wax that might be moulded in any form." The ideal was an old one; the famous perinde ac cadaver itself dates back to Francis of Assisi, but nowhere had the ideal been so completely realized as by the companions of Ignatius. In fact, in this as in other respects, the {405} Jesuits were but a natural culmination of the evolution of monasticism. More and more had the orders tended to become highly disciplined, unified bodies, apt to be used for the service of the church and of the pope.

[Sidenote: Growth]

The growth of the society was extraordinarily rapid. By 1544 they had nine establishments, two each in Italy, Spain and Portugal and one each in France, Germany and the Netherlands. When Loyola [Sidenote: July 31, 1556] died Jesuits could be found in Japan and Brazil, in Abyssinia and on the Congo; in Europe they were in almost every country and included doctors at the largest universities and papal nuncios to Poland and Ireland. There were in all twelve provinces, about 65 residences and 1500 members.

Their work was as broad as their field, but it was dedicated especially to three several tasks: education, war against the heretic, and foreign missions. Neither of the first two was particularly contemplated by the founders of the order in their earliest period. At that time they were rather like the friars, popular preachers, catechists, confessors and charitable workers. But the exigencies of the time called them to supply other needs. The education of the young was the natural result of their desire to dominate the intellectual class. Their seminaries, at first adapted only to their own uses, soon became famous.

[Sidenote: Combating heresy]

In the task of combating heresy they were also the most successful of the papal cohorts. Though not the primary purpose of the order, it soon came to be regarded as their special field. The bull canonizing Loyola [Sidenote: 1623] speaks of him as an instrument raised up by divine providence especially to combat that "foulest of monsters" Martin Luther. Beginning in Italy the Jesuits revived the nearly extinct popular piety. Going among the poor as missionaries they found many who knew no prayers, many who had not confessed for {406} thirty or forty years, and a host of priests as blind as their flocks.

In most other Catholic countries they had to fight for the right to exist. In France the Parlement of Paris was against them, and even after the king had granted them permission to settle in the country in 1553, the Parlement accused them of jeoparding the faith, destroying the peace of the church, supplanting the old orders and tearing down more than they built up. Nevertheless they won their way to a place of great power, until, sitting at the counsels of the monarch, they were able to crush their Catholic opponents, the Jansenists, as completely as their Protestant enemies were crushed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

In the Netherlands the Jesuits were welcomed as allies of the Spanish power. The people were impressed by their zeal, piety, and disinterestedness, and in the Southern provinces they were able to bear away a victory after a fierce fight with Calvinism.

In England, where they showed the most devotion, they met with the least success. The blood of their martyrs did not sow the ground with Catholic seed, and they were expelled by statute under Elizabeth.

[Sidenote: Jesuit victories]

The most striking victories of the Jesuits were won in Central Europe. When the first of their company, Peter Faber, entered Germany in 1540, he found nearly the whole country Lutheran. The Wittelsbachs of Bavaria were almost the only reigning family that never compromised with the Reformers and in them the Jesuits found their starting point and their most constant ally. Called to the universities of Ingolstadt and Vienna their success was great and from these foci they radiated in all directions, to Poland, to Hungary, to the Rhine. One of their most eminent missionaries was Peter Canisius, whose catechism, published in 1555 in three forms, short, long and middle, and in two {407} languages, German and Latin, became the chief spiritual text-book of the Catholics. The idea and selection of material was borrowed from Luther and he was imitated also in the omission of all overt polemic material. This last feature was, of course, one of the strongest.

[Sidenote: Missions to heathens]

But the conquests of the Company of Jesus were as notable in lands beyond Europe as they were in the heart of civilization. They were not, indeed, pioneers in the field of foreign missions. The Catholic church showed itself from an early period solicitous for the salvation of the natives of America and of the Far East. The bull of Alexander VI stated that his motive in dividing the newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal was chiefly to assist in the propagation of the faith. That the Protestants at first developed no activity in the conversion of the heathen was partly because their energies were fully employed in securing their own position, and still more, perhaps, because, in the sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal had a practical monopoly of the transoceanic trade and thus the only opportunities of coming into contact with the natives.

Very early Dominican and Franciscan friars went to America. Though some of them exemplified Christian virtues that might well have impressed the natives, the greater number relied on the puissant support of the Toledo sword. Though the natives, as heathen born in invincible ignorance, were exempt from the jurisdiction of the inquisitor, they were driven by terror if not by fire, into embracing the religion of their conquerors. If some steadfast chiefs told the missionaries that they would rather go to hell after death than live for ever with the cruel Christians, the tribes as a whole, seeing their dreaded idols overthrown and their temples uprooted, embraced the religion of the stronger God, as they quailed before his {408} votaries. Little could they understand of the mysteries of the faith, and in some places long continued to worship Christ and Mary with the ritual and attributes of older deities. But nominally a million of them were converted by 1532, and when the Jesuits arrived a still more successful effort was made to win over the red man. The important mission in Brazil, served by brave and devoted brothers of Ignatius, achieved remarkable results, whereas in Paraguay the Jesuits founded a state completely under their own tutelage.

In the Far East the path of the missionary was broken by the trader. At Goa the first ambassadors of Christ were friars, and here they erected a cathedral, a convent, and schools for training native priests. But the greatest of the missionaries to this region was Francis Xavier, [Sidenote: Xavier, 1506-52] the companion of Loyola. Not forgetting the vow which he, together with all the first members of the society, had taken, [Sidenote: April 1541] he sailed from Lisbon, clothed with extraordinary powers. The pope made him his vicar for all the lands bathed by the Indian Ocean, [Sidenote: May, 1542] and the king of Portugal gave him official sanction and support. Arriving at Goa he put himself in touch with the earlier missionaries and began an earnest fight against the immorality of the port, both Christian and native. His motto "Amplius" led him soon to virgin fields, among the natives of the coast and of Ceylon. In 1545 he went to Cochin-China, thence to the Moluccas and to Japan, preaching in every place and baptizing by the thousand and ten thousand.

Though Xavier was a man of brilliant endowments and though he was passionately devoted to the cause, to neither of his good qualities did he owe the successes, whether solid or specious, with which he has been credited. In the first place, judged by the standards of modern missions, the superficiality of his work was {409} almost inconceivable. He never mastered one of the languages of the countries which he visited. He learned by rote a few sentences, generally the creed and some phrases on the horrors of hell, and repeated them to the crowds attracted to him by the sound of a bell. He addressed himself to masses rather than to individuals and he regarded the culmination of his work as being merely the administration of baptism and not the conversion of heart or understanding. Thus, he spent hours in baptizing, with all possible speed, sick and dying children, believing that he was thus rescuing their souls from limbo. Probably many of his adult converts never understood the meaning of the application of water and oil, salt and spittle, that make up the ritual of Catholic baptism.

[Sidenote: Use of force]

In the second place, what permanent success he achieved was due largely to the invocation of the aid of the civil power. One of the most illuminating of Xavier's letters is that written to King John of Portugal on January 20, 1548, in which he not only makes the reasonable request that native Christians be protected from persecution by their countrymen, but adds that every governor should take such measures to convert them as would insure success to his preaching, for without such support, he says, the cause of the gospel in the Indies would be desperate, few would come to baptism and those who did come would not profit much in religion. Therefore he urges that every governor, under whose rule many natives were not converted, should be mulcted of all his goods and imprisoned on his return to Portugal. What the measures applied by the Portugese officers must have been, under such pressure, can easily be inferred from a slight knowledge of their savage rule.

It has been said that every organism carries in {410} itself the seeds of its own decay. The premature corruption [Sidenote: Decay of Jesuits] of the order was noticed by its more earnest members quite early in its career. The future general Francis Borgia wrote: [Sidenote: 1560] "The time will come when the Company will be completely absorbed in human sciences without any application to virtue; ambition, pride and arrogance will rule." The General Aquaviva said explicitly, [Sidenote: 1587] "Love of the things of this world and the spirit of the courtier are dangerous diseases in our Company. Almost in spite of us the evil creeps in little by little under the fair pretext of gaining princes, prelates, and the great ones of the world."

A principal cause of the ultimate odium in which the Jesuits were held as well as of their temporary successes, was their desire for speedy results. [Sidenote: Efficiency] Every one has noticed the immense versatility of the Jesuits and their superficiality. They produced excellent scholars of a certain rank, men who could decipher Latin inscriptions, observe the planets, publish libraries of historical sources, of casuistry and apologetic, or write catechisms or epigrams. They turned with equal facility to preaching to naked savages and to the production of art for the most cultivated peoples in the world. And yet they have rarely, if ever, produced a great scholar, a great scientist, a great thinker, or even a great ascetic. They were not founded for such purposes; they were founded to fight for the church and they did that with extraordinary success.

[Sidenote: Failure]

But their very efficiency became, as pursued for its own sake it must always become, soulless. In terms suggested by the Great War, the Jesuits were the incarnation of religious militarism. To set up an ideal of aggrandizement, to fill a body of men with a fanatical enthusiasm for that ideal and then to provide an organization and discipline marvellously adapted to conquest, that is what the Prussian schoolmaster who {411} proverbially won Sadowa, and the Jesuits who beat back the Reformation, have known how to do better than anyone else. Their methods took account of everything except the conscience of mankind.

Moreover, there can be no doubt that in their eager pursuit of tangible results they lowered the ethical standards of the church. Wishing to open her doors as widely as possible to all men, and finding that they could not make all men saints, they brought down the requirements for admission to the average human level. One cannot take the denunciations of Jesuitical "casuistry" and "probabilism" at their face value, but one can find in Jesuit works on ethics, and in some of their early works, very dangerous compromises with the world. [Sidenote: Jesuitical compromises] One reads in their books how the bankrupt, without sinning mortally, may defraud his creditors of his mortaged goods; how the servant may be excused for pilfering from his master; how a rich man may pardonably deceive the tax-collector; how the adulteress may rightfully deny her sin to her husband, even on oath.[1] Doubtless these are extreme instances, but that they should have been possible at all is a melancholy warning to all who would, even for pious ends, substitute inferior imitations for genuine morality.

[1] Substantiation of these statements in excerpts from Jesuit works of moral theology, printed in C. Mirbt: Quellen zur Geschichte des Papst-tums[3], 1911, pp. 447 ff.

SECTION 5. THE INQUISITION AND INDEX

Not only by propaganda appealing to the mind and heart did the Catholic church roll back the tides of Reformation and Renaissance, but by coercion also. In this the church was not alone; the Protestants also persecuted and they also censored the press with the object of preventing their adherents from reading the arguments of their opponents. But the Catholic {412} church was not only more consistent in the application of her intolerant theories but she almost always assumed the direction of the coercive measures directly instead of applying them through the agency of the state. Divided as they were, dependent on the support of the civil government and hampered, at least to some slight extent, by their more liberal tendencies, the Protestants never had instrumentalities half as efficient or one-tenth as terrible as the Inquisition and the Index.

The Inquisition was a child of the Middle Ages. For centuries before Luther the Holy Office had cauterized the heretical growths on the body of Mother Church. The old form was utilized but was given a new lease of life by the work it was called upon to perform against the Protestants. Outside of the Netherlands the two forms of the Inquisition which played the largest part in the battles of the sixteenth century were the Spanish and the Roman.

[Sidenote: Spanish Inquisition]

The Inquisition was licensed in Spain by a bull of Sixtus IV of 1478, and actually established by Ferdinand and Isabella in Castile in 1480, and soon afterwards in their other dominions. It has sometimes been said that the Spanish Inquisition was really a political rather than an ecclesiastical instrument, but the latest historian of the subject, whose deep study makes his verdict final, has disposed of this theory. Though occasionally called upon to interfere in political matters, this was exceptional. Far more often it asserted an authority and an independence that embarrassed not a little the royal government. On the other hand it soon grew so great and powerful that it was able to ignore the commands of the popes. On account of its irresponsible power it was unpopular and was only tolerated because it was so efficient in crushing out the heresy that the people hated.

{413} [Sidenote: Procedure]

The annals of its procedure and achievements are one long record of diabolical cruelty, of protracted confinement in dungeons, of endless delay and browbeating to break the spirit, of ingenious tortures and of racked and crushed limbs and of burning flesh. In mitigation of judgment, it must be remembered that the methods of the civil courts were also cruel at that time, and the punishments severe.

As the guilt of the suspected person was always presumed, every effort was made to secure confession, for in matters of belief there is no other equally satisfactory proof. Without being told the nature of his crime or who was the informant against him, the person on trial was simply urged to confess. An advocate was given him only to take advantage of his professional relations with his client by betraying him. The enormous, almost incredible procrastination by which the accused would be kept in prison awaiting trial sometimes for five or ten or even twenty years, usually sufficed to break his spirit or to unbalance his mind. Torture was first threatened and then applied. All rules intended to limit its amount proved illusory, and it was applied practically to any extent deemed necessary, and to all classes; nobles and clergy were no less obnoxious to it than were commons. Nor was there any privileged age, except that of the tenderest childhood. Men and women of ninety and boys and girls of twelve or fourteen were racked, as were young mothers and women with child. Insanity, however, if recognized as genuine, was considered a bar to torture.

Acquittal was almost, though not quite, unknown. Sometimes sentence was suspended and the accused discharged without formal exoneration. Very rarely acquittal by compurgation, that is by oath of the accused supported by the oaths of a number of persons that they believed he was telling the truth, was allowed. {414} Practically the only plea open to the suspect was that the informers against him were actuated by malice. As he was not told who his accusers were this was difficult for him to use.

[Sidenote: Penalties]

The penalties were various, including scourging, the galleys and perpetual imprisonment. Capital punishment by fire was pronounced not only on those who were impenitent but on those who, after having been once discharged, had relapsed. In Spain, heretics who recanted before execution were first strangled; the obstinately impenitent were burned alive. Persons convicted of heresy who could not be reached were burnt in effigy.

Acting on the maxim ecclesia non sitit sanguinem the Inquisitors did not put their victims to death by their own officers but handed them over to the civil authorities for execution. With revolting hypocrisy they even adjured the hangmen to be merciful, well knowing that the latter had no option but to carry out the sentence of the church. Magistrates who endeavored to exercise any discretion in favor of the condemned were promptly threatened with excommunication.

If anything could be wanting to complete the horror it was supplied by the festive spirit of the executions. The Auto da Fe, [Sidenote: Auto da Fe] or act of faith, was a favorite spectacle of the Spaniards; no holiday was quite complete without its holocaust of human victims. The staging was elaborate, and the ceremony as impressive as possible. Secular and spiritual authorities were ordered to be present and vast crowds were edified by the horrible example of the untimely end of the unbeliever. Sundays and feast days were chosen for these spectacles and on gala occasions, such as royal weddings and christenings, a special effort was made to celebrate one of these holy butcheries.

The number of victims has been variously estimated. {415} An actual count up to the year 1540, that is, before Protestantism became a serious factor, shows that 20,226 were burned in person and 10,913 in effigy, and these figures are incomplete. It must be remembered that for every one who paid the extreme penalty there were a large number of others punished in other ways, or imprisoned and tortured while on trial. When Adrian of Utrecht, afterwards the pope, was Inquisitor General 1516-22, 1,620 persons were burned alive, 560 in effigy and 21,845 were sentenced to penance or other lighter punishments. Roughly, for one person sentenced to death ten suffered milder penalties.

[Sidenote: Crimes punished]

Heresy was not the only crime punished by the Inquisition; it also took charge of blasphemy, bigamy and some forms of vice. In its early years it was chiefly directed against the Jews who, having been forced to the baptismal font, had relapsed. Later the Moriscos or christened Moors supplied the largest number of victims. As with the Jews, race hatred was so deep an ingredient of the treatment meted out to them that the nominal cause was sometimes forgotten, and baptism often failed to save "the new Christian" who preserved any, even the most innocent, of the national customs. Many a man and woman was tortured for not eating pork or for bathing in the Moorish fashion.

As Protestantism never obtained any hold in Spain, the Inquisition had comparatively little trouble on that account. During the sixteenth century a total number of 1995 persons were punished as Protestants of whom 1640 were foreigners and only 355 were Spaniards. Even these figures exaggerate the hold that the Reformation had in Spain, for any error remotely resembling the tenets of Wittenberg immediately classed its maintainer as Lutheran. The first case known was found in Majorca in 1523, but it was not until 1559 {416} that any considerable number suffered for this faith. In that year 24 Lutherans were burnt at Rodrigo and Seville, 32 in 1562, and 19 Calvinists in 1569.

The dread of the Spanish Inquisition was such that only in those dependencies early and completely subdued could it be introduced. Established in Sicily in 1487 its temporal jurisdiction was suspended during the years 1535-46, when it was revived by the fear of Protestantism. Even during its dark quarter, however, it was able to punish heretics. In an auto celebrated at Palermo, [Sidenote: May 30, 1541] of the twenty-two culprits three were Lutherans and nineteen Jews. The capitulation of Naples in 1503 expressly excluded the Spanish Inquisition, nor could it be established in Milan. The Portuguese Inquisition was set up in 1536.

[Sidenote: New World]

The New World was capable of offering less resistance. Nevertheless, for many years the inquisitorial powers were vested in the bishops sent over to Mexico and Peru, and when the Inquisition was established in both countries in 1570 it probably meant no increase of severity. The natives were exempt from its jurisdiction and it found little combustible material save in captured Protestant Europeans. A Fleming was burned at Lima in 1548, and at the first auto held at Mexico in 1574 thirty-six Lutherans were punished, all English captives, two by burning and the rest by scourging or the galleys.

[Sidenote: Roman Inquisition]

The same need of repelling Protestantism that had helped to give a new lease of life to the Spanish Inquisition called into being her sister the Roman Inquisition. By the bull Licet ab initio, [Sidenote: July 21, 1542] Paul IV reconstituted the Holy Office at Rome, directing and empowering it to smite all who persisted in condemned opinions lest others should be seduced by their example, not only in the papal states but in all the nations of Christendom. It was authorized to pronounce {417} sentence on culprits and to invoke the aid of the secular arm to punish them with prison, confiscation of goods and death. Its authority was directed particularly against persons of high estate, even against heretical princes whose subjects were loosed from their obligation of obedience and whose neighbors were invited to take away their heritage.

[Sidenote: Procedure]

The procedure of the Holy Office at Rome was characterized by the Augustinian Cardinal Seripando as at first lenient, but later, he continues, "when the superhuman rigor of Caraffa [one of the first Inquisitors General] held sway, the Inquisition acquired such a reputation that from no other judgment-seat on earth were more horrible and fearful sentences to be expected." Besides the attention it paid to Protestants it instituted very severe processes against Judaizing Christians and took cognizance also of seduction, of pimping, of sodomy, and of infringment of the ecclesiastical rules for fasting.

[Sidenote: Italy]

The Roman Inquisition was introduced into Milan by Michael Ghislieri, afterwards pope, and flourished mightily under the protecting care of Borromeo, cardinal archbishop of the city. It was established by Charles V, notwithstanding opposition, in Naples. [Sidenote: 1547] Venice also fought against its introduction but nevertheless finally permitted it. [Sidenote: 1544] During the sixteenth century in that city there were no less than 803 processes for Lutheranism, 5 for Calvinism, 35 against Anabaptists, 43 for Judaism and 199 for sorcery. In countries outside of Italy the Roman Inquisition did not take root. Bishop Magrath endeavored in 1567 to give Ireland the benefit of the institution, but naturally the English Government allowed no such thing.

[Sidenote: Censorship of the press]

A method of suppressing given opinions and propagating others probably far more effective than the {418} mauling of men's bodies is the guidance of their minds through direction of their reading and instruction. Naturally, before the invention of printing, and in an illiterate society, the censorship of books would have slight importance. Plato was perhaps the first to propose that the reading of immoral and impious books be forbidden, but I am not aware that his suggestion was acted upon either in the states of Greece or in pagan Rome. Examples of the rejection of certain books by the early church are not wanting. Paul induced the Ephesian sorcerers to burn their books; certain fathers of the church advised against the reading of heathen authors; [Sidenote: c. 496] Pope Gelasius made a decree on the books received and those not received by the church, and Manichaean books were publicly burnt.

[Sidenote: Fourth century]

The invention of printing brought to the attention of the church the danger of allowing her children to choose their own reading matter. [Sidenote: Printing] The first to animadvert upon it was Berthold, Archbishop of Mayence, the city of Gutenberg. On the 22d of March, 1485, he promulgated a decree to the effect that, whereas the divine art of printing had been abused for the sake of lucre and whereas by this means even Christ's books, missals and other works on religion, were thumbed by the vulgar, and whereas the German idiom was too poor to express such mysteries, and common persons too ignorant to understand them, therefore every work translated into German must be approved by the doctors of the university of Mayence before being published.

[Sidenote: June 1, 1501]

The example of the prelate was soon followed by popes and councils. Alexander VI forbade as a detestable evil the printing of books injurious to the Catholic faith, and made all archbishops official censors for their dioceses. This was enforced by a decree of the Fifth Lateran Council setting forth that {419} although printing has brought much advantage to the church [Sidenote: May 4, 1515] it has also disseminated errors and pernicious dogmas contrary to the Christian religion. The decree forbids the printing of any book in any city or diocese of Christendom without license from the local bishop or other ecclesiastical authority.

This sweeping edict was supplemented by others directed against certain books or authors, but for a whole generation the church left the censorship chiefly to the discretion of the several national governments. This was the policy followed also by the Protestants, both at this time and later. [Sidenote: Protestant censorship] Neither Luther, nor any other reformer for a long time attempted to draw up regular indices of prohibited books. Examples of something approaching this may be found in the later history of Protestantism, but they are so unimportant as to be negligible.

[Sidenote: National censorship, 1502]

The national governments, however, laid great stress on licensing. The first law in Spain was followed by an ever increasing strictness under the inquisitor who drew up several indices of prohibited books, completely independent of the official Roman lists. The German Diets and the French kings were careful to give their subjects the benefit of their selection of reading matter. In England, too, lists of prohibited books were drawn up under all the Tudors. Mary restricted the right to print to licensed members of the Stationers' Company; Elizabeth put the matter in the hands of Star Chamber. [Sidenote: 1559] A special license was required by the Injunctions, and a later law was aimed at "seditious, schismatic or libellous books and other fantastic writings." [Sidenote: 1588]

[Sidenote: Catalogues of dangerous books]

The idea of a complete catalogue of heretical and dangerous writings under ecclesiastical censure took its rise in the Netherlands. After the works of various authors had been severally prohibited in distinct {420} proclamations, the University of Louvain, at the emperor's command, drew up a fairly extensive list in 1546 and again, somewhat enlarged, in 1550. It mentions a number of Bibles in Greek, Latin and the vernaculars, the works of Luther, Carlstadt, Osiander, Ochino, Bullinger, Calvin, Oecolampadius, Jonas, Calvin, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Huss and John Pupper of Goch, a Dutch author of the fifteenth century revived by the Protestants. It is remarkable that the works of Erasmus are not included in this list. Furthermore it is stated that certain approved works, even when edited or translated by heretics, might be allowed to students. Among the various scientific works condemned are an Anatomy printed at Marburg by Eucharius Harzhorn, H. C. Agrippa's De vanitate scientiarum, and Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia universalis, a geography printed in 1544. The Koran is prohibited, and also a work called "Het paradijs van Venus," this latter presumably as indecent. Finally, all books printed since 1525 without name of author, printer, time, and place, are prohibited.

[Sidenote: Roman Index]

Partly in imitation of this work of Louvain, partly in consequence of the foundation of the Inquisition, the Roman Index of Prohibited Books was promulgated. Though the bull founding the Roman Inquisition said nothing about books, their censure was included in practice. Under the influence of the Holy Office at Lucca a list of forbidden works was drawn up by the Senate at Lucca, [Sidenote: 1545] including chiefly the tracts of Italian heretics and satires on the church. The fourth session Council of Trent [Sidenote: April 8, 1546] prohibited the printing of all anonymous books whatever and of all others on religion until licensed. A further indication of increasing severity may be found in a bull issued by Julius III [Sidenote: 1550] who complained that authors licensed to read heretical {421} books for the purpose of refuting them were more likely to be seduced by them, and who therefore revoked all licenses given up to that time.

[Sidenote: September, 1557]

When the Roman Inquisition issued a long list of volumes to be burnt publicly, including works of Erasmus, Machiavelli and Poggio, this might be considered the first Roman Index of Prohibited Books; but the first document to bear that name was issued by Paul IV. [Sidenote: 1559] It divided writings into three classes: (1) Authors who had erred ex professo and whose whole works were forbidden; (2) Authors who had erred occasionally and some of whose books only were mentioned; (3) Anonymous books. In addition to these classes 61 printers were named, all works published by whom were banned. The Index strove to be as complete as possible. Its chief though not its only source was the catalogue of Louvain. Many editions and versions of the Bible were listed and the printing of any translation without permission of the Inquisition was prohibited. Particular attention was paid to Erasmus, who was not only put in the first class by name but was signalized as having "all his commentaries, notes, annotations, dialogues, epistles, refutations, translations, books and writings" forbidden.

[Sidenote: Tridentine censorship, February 26, 1562]

The Council of Trent again took up the matter, passing a decree to the effect that inasmuch as heresy had not been cured by the censorship this should be made much stricter, and appointing a commission in order, as, regardless of the parable,[1] it was phrased, to separate the tares from the wheat. The persons appointed for this delicate work comprised four archbishops, nine bishops, two generals of orders and some "minor theologians." After much sweat they brought forth a report on most of the doubtful authors though {422} the most difficult of all, Erasmus, they relinquished to the theological faculties of Louvain and Paris for expurgation.

[Sidenote: 1564]

The results of their labors were published by Paul IV under the name of the Tridentine Index. It was more sweeping, and at the same time more discriminating than the former Index. Erasmus was changed to the second class, only a portion of his works being now condemned. Among the non-ecclesiastical authors banned were Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Boccaccio. It is noteworthy that the Decameron was expurgated not chiefly for its indecency but for its satire of ecclesiastics. Thus, a tale of the seduction of an abbess is rendered acceptable by changing the abbess into a countess; the story of how a priest led a woman astray by impersonating the angel Gabriel is merely changed by making the priest a layman masquerading as a fairy king.

The principles upon which the prohibition of books rested were set forth in ten rules. The most interesting are the following: (1) Books printed before 1515 condemned by popes or council; (2) Versions of the Bible; (3) books of heretics; (4) obscene books; (5) works on witchcraft and necromancy.

In order to keep the Index up to date continual revision was necessary. To insure this Pius V appointed a special Congregation of the Index, which has lasted until the present day. From his time to ours more than forty Indices have been issued. Those of the sixteenth century were concerned mainly with Protestant books, those of later centuries chiefly deal, for the purposes of internal discipline, with books written by Catholics. One of the functions of the Congregation was to expurgate books, taking out the offensive passages. A separate Index expurgatorius, pointing out the passages to be deleted or corrected was {423} published, and this name has sometimes incorrectly been applied to the Index of prohibited books.

[Sidenote: Effect of the censorship]

The effect of the censorship of the press has been variously estimated. The Index was early dubbed sica destricta in omnes scriptores and Sarpi called it "the finest secret ever discovered for applying religion to the purpose of making men idiotic." Milton thundered against the censorship in England as "the greatest discouragement and affront that can be offered to learning and learned men." The evil of the system of Rome was, in his opinion, double, for, as he wrote in his immortal Areopagitica, "The Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition engendering together brought forth and perfected those catalogues and expurging indexes that rake through the entrails of many an old good author with a violation worse than any that could be offered to his tomb." When we remember that the greatest works of literature, such as the Divine Comedy, were tampered with, and that, in the Spanish Expurgatorial Index of 1640 the list of passages to be deleted or to be altered in Erasmus's works takes 59 double-columned, closely printed folio pages, we can easily see the point of Milton's indignant protest. But, to his mind, it was still worse to subject a book to the examination of unfit men before it could secure its imprimatur. Not without reason has liberty of the press been made one of the cornerstones of the temple of freedom.

Various writers have labored to demonstrate the blighting effect that the censorship was supposed to have on literature. But it is surprising how few examples they can bring. Lea, who ought to know the Spanish field exhaustively, can only point to a few professors of theology who were persecuted and silenced for expressing unconventional views on biblical criticism. He conjectures that others must have {424} remained mute through fear. But, as the golden age of Spanish literature came after the law made the printing of unlicensed books punishable by death, [Sidenote: 1558] it is hard to see wherein literature can have suffered. The Roman Inquisition did not prevent the appearance of Galileo's work, though it made him recant afterwards. The strict English law that playwrights should not "meddle with matters of divinity or state" made Shakespeare careful not to express his religious and political views, but it is hard to see in what way it hampered his genius.

And yet the influence of the various press laws was incalculably great and was just what it was intended to be. It affected science less than one would think, and literature hardly at all, but it moulded the opinions of the masses like putty in their rulers' hands. That the rank and file of Spaniards and Italians remained Catholic, and the vast majority of Britons Protestant, was due more to the bondage of the press than to any other one cause. Originality was discouraged, the people to some degree unfitted for the free debate that is at the bottom of self-government, the hope of tolerance blighted, and the path opened that led to religious wars.

[1] Matthew xiii, 28-30.

{425}

CHAPTER IX

THE IBERIAN PENINSULA AND THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE

SECTION 1. SPAIN

[Sidenote: Reformation, Renaissance and Exploration]

If, through the prism of history, we analyse the white light of sixteenth-century civilization into its component parts, three colors particularly emerge: the azure "light of the Gospel" as the Reformers fondly called it in Germany, the golden beam of the Renaissance in Italy, and the blood-red flame of exploration and conquest irradiating the Iberian peninsula. Which of the three contributed most to modern culture it is hard to decide. Each of the movements started separately, gradually spreading until it came into contact, and thus into competition and final blending with the other movements. It was the middle lands, France, England and the Netherlands that, feeling the impulses from all sides, evolved the sanest and strongest synthesis. While Germany almost committed suicide with the sword of the spirit, while Italy sank into a voluptuous torpor of decadent art, while Spain reeled under the load of unearned Western wealth, France, England and Holland, taking a little from each of their neighbors, and not too much from any, became strong, well-balanced, brilliant states. But if eventually Germany, Italy and Spain all suffered from over-specialization, for the moment the stimulus of new ideas and new possibilities gave to each a sort of leadership in its own sphere. While Germany and Italy were busy winning the realms of the spirit and of the mind, Spain very nearly conquered the empire of the land and of the sea.

{426} [Sidenote: Ferdinand, 1479-1516 and Isabella, 1474-1504]

The foundation of her national greatness, like that of the greatness of so many other powers, was laid in the union of the various states into which she was at one time divided. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile was followed by a series of measures that put Spain into the leading position in Europe, expelled the alien racial and religious elements of her population, and secured to her a vast colonial empire. The conquest of Granada from the Moors, the acquisition of Cerdagne and Roussillon from the French, and the annexation of Naples, doubled the dominions of the Lions and Castles, and started the proud land on the road to empire. It is true that eventually Spain exhausted herself by trying to do more than even her young powers could accomplish, but for a while she retained the hegemony of Christendom. The same year that saw the discovery of America [Sidenote: 1492] and the occupation of the Alhambra, was also marked by the expulsion or forced conversion of the Jews, of whom 165,000 left the kingdom, 50,000 were baptized, and 20,000 perished in race riots. The statesmanship of Ferdinand showed itself in a more favorable light in the measures taken to reduce the nobles, feudal anarchs as they were, to fear of the law. To take their place in the government of the country he developed a new bureaucracy, which also, to some extent, usurped the powers of the Cortes of Aragon and of the Cortes of Castile. [Sidenote: Francis Ximénez de Cisneros, 1436-1517] In the meantime a notable reform of the church, in morals and in learning if not in doctrine, was carried through by the great Cardinal Ximénez.

[Sidenote: Charles V, 1516-1556]

When Charles, the grandson of the Catholic Kings, succeeded Ferdinand he was already, through his father, the Archduke Philip, the lord of Burgundy and of the Netherlands, and the heir of Austria. His election as emperor made him, at the age of nineteen, the {427} greatest prince of Christendom. To his gigantic task he brought all the redeeming qualities of dullness, for his mediocrity and moderation served his peoples and his dynasty better than brilliant gifts and boundless ambition would have done. "Never," he is reported to have said in 1556, "did I aspire to universal monarchy, although it seemed well within my power to attain it." Though the long war with France turned ever, until the very last, in his favor, he never pressed his advantage to the point of crushing his enemy to earth. But in Germany and Italy, no less than in Spain and the Netherlands, he finally attained something more than hegemony and something less than absolute power.

[Sidenote: Revolt of the Communes]

Though Spain benefited by his world power and became the capital state of his far flung empire, "Charles of Ghent," as he was called, did not at first find Spaniards docile subjects. Within a very few years of his accession a great revolt, or rather two great synchronous revolts, one in Castile and one in Aragon, flared up. The grievances in Castile were partly economic, the servicio (a tax) and the removal of money from the realm, and partly national as against a strange king and his foreign officers. Not only the regent, Adrian of Utrecht, but many important officials were northerners, and when Charles left Spain to be crowned emperor, [Sidenote: 1520] the national pride could no longer bear the humiliation of playing a subordinate part. The revolt of the Castilian Communes began with the gentry and spread from them to the lower classes. Even the grandees joined forces with the rebels, though more from fear than from sympathy. The various revolting communes formed a central council, the Santa Junta, and put forth a program re-asserting the rights of the Cortes to redress grievances. Meeting for a time with no resistance, the rebellion disintegrated {428} through the operation of its own centrifugal forces, disunion and lack of leadership. So at length when the government, supplied with a small force of German mercenaries, struck on the field of Villalar, the rebels suffered a severe defeat. [Sidenote: April, 1521] A few cities held out longer, Toledo last of all; but one by one they yielded, partly to force, partly to the wise policy of concession and redress followed by the government.

In our own time Barcelona and the east coast of Spain has been the hotbed of revolutionary democracy and radical socialism. Even so, the rising in Aragon known as the Hermandad (Brotherhood) [Sidenote: The Hermandad] contemporary with that in Castile, not only began earlier and lasted longer, but was of a far more radical stamp. Here were no nobles airing their slights at the hands of a foreign king, but here the trade-gilds rose in the name of equality against monarch and nobles alike. Two special causes fanned the fury of the populace to a white heat. The first was the decline of the Mediterranean trade due to the rise of the Atlantic commerce; the other was the racial element. Valencia was largely inhabited by Moors, the most industrious, sober and thrifty, and consequently the most profitable of Spanish laborers. The race hatred so deeply rooted in human nature added to the ferocity of the class conflict. Both sides were ruined by the war which, beginning in 1519, dragged along for several years until the proletariat was completely crushed.

[The Cortes]

The armed triumph of the government hardly damaged popular liberties as embodied in the constitution of the Cortes of Castile. When Charles became king this body was not, like other parliaments, ordinarily a representative assembly of the three estates, but consisted merely of deputies of eighteen Castilian cities. Only on special occasions, such as a coronation, were nobles and clergy summoned to participate. Its great {429} power was that of granting taxes, though somehow it never succeeded, as did the English House of Commons, in making the redress of grievances conditional upon a subsidy. But yet the power amounted to something and it was one that neither Charles nor Philip commonly ventured to violate. Under both of them meetings of the Cortes were frequent.

Though never directly attacked, the powers of the Cortes declined through the growth of vast interests outside their competence. The direction of foreign policy, so absorbing under Charles, and the charge of the enormous and growing commercial interests, was confided not to the representatives of the people, but to the Royal Council of Castile, an appointative body of nine lawyers, three nobles, and one bishop. Though not absolutely, yet relatively, the functions of the Cortes diminished until they amounted to no more than those of a provincial council.

What reconciled the people to the concentration of new powers in the hands of an irresponsible council was the apparently dazzling success of Spanish policy throughout the greater part of the sixteenth century. No banner was served like that of the Lions and Castles; no troops in the world could stand against her famous regiments; no generals were equal to Cortez and Alva; no statesmen abler than Parma, no admirals, until the Armada, more daring than Magellan[1] and Don John, no champions of the church against heretic and infidel like Loyola and Xavier.

[Sidenote: The Spanish Empire]

That such an empire as the world had not seen since Rome should within a single life-time rise to its zenith and, within a much shorter time, decline to the verge of ruin, is one of the melodramas of history. Perhaps, in reality, Spain was never quite so great as she looked, nor was her fall quite so complete as it seemed. But {430} the phenomena, such as they are, sufficiently call for explanation.

First of all one is struck by the fortuitous, one might almost say, unnatural, character of the Hapsburg empire. While the union of Castile and Aragon, bringing together neighboring peoples and filling a political need, was the source of real strength, the subsequent accretions of Italian and Burgundian territories rather detracted from than added to the effective power of the Spanish state. Philip would have been far stronger had his father separated from his crown not only Austria and the Holy Roman Empire of Germany, but the Netherlands as well. The revolt of the Dutch Republic was in itself almost enough to ruin Spain. Nor can it be said that the Italian states, won by the sword of Ferdinand or of Charles, were valuable accessions to Spanish power.

[Sidenote: Colonies]

Quite different in its nature was the colonial empire, but in this it resembled the other windfalls to the house of Hapsburg in that it was an almost accidental, unsought-for acquisition. The Genoese sailor who went to the various courts of Europe begging for a few ships in which to break the watery path to Asia, had in his beggar's wallet all the kingdoms of a new world and the glory of them. For a few years Spain drank until she was drunken of conquest and the gold of America. That the draught acted momentarily as a stimulant, clearing her brain and nerving her arm to deeds of valor, but that she suffered in the end from the riotous debauch, cannot be doubted. She soon learned that all that glittered was not wealth, and that industries surfeited with metal and starved of raw materials must perish. The unearned coin proved to be fairy gold in her coffers, turning to brown leaves and dust when she wanted to use it. It became a drug in her markets; it could not lawfully be exported, and no {431} amount of it would purchase much honest labor from an indolent population fed on fantasies of wealth. The modern King Midas, on whose dominions the sun never set, was cursed with a singular and to him inexplicable need of everything that money was supposed to buy. His armies mutinied, his ships rotted, and never could his increasing income catch up with the far more rapidly increasing expenses of his budget.

The poverty of the people was in large part the fault of the government which pursued a fiscal policy ideally calculated to strike at the very sources of wealth. While, under the oppression of an ignorant paternalism, unhappy Spain suffered from inanition, she was tended by a physician who tried to cure her malady by phlebotomy. There have been worse men than Philip II, [Sidenote: Philip II, 1556-98] but there have been hardly any who have caused more blood to flow from the veins of their own people. His life is proof that a well-meaning bigot can do more harm than the most abandoned debauchee. "I would rather lose all my kingdoms," he averred, "than allow freedom of religion." And again, to a man condemned by the Inquisition for heresy, "If my own son were as perverse as you, I myself would carry the faggot to burn him." Consistently, laboriously, undeterred by any suffering or any horror, he pursued his aim. He was not afraid of hard work, scribbling reams of minute directions daily to his officers. His stubborn calm was imperturbable; he took his pleasures--women, autos-da-fe and victories--sadly, and he suffered such chagrins as the death of four wives, having a monstrosity for a son, and the loss of the Armada and of the Netherlands, without turning a hair.

Spain's foreign policy came to be more and more polarized by the rise of English sea-power. Even under Charles, when France had been the chief enemy, {432} [Sidenote: Spain vs. England] the Hapsburgs saw the desirability of winning England as a strategic point for their universal empire. This policy was pursued by alternating alliance with hostility. For six years of his boyhood Charles had been betrothed to Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's sister, to whom he sent a ring inscribed, "Mary hath chosen the better part which shall not be taken away from her." His own precious person, however, was taken from her to be bestowed on Isabella of Portugal, by whom he begot Philip. When this son succeeded him, notwithstanding the little unpleasantness of Henry VIII's divorce, he advised him to turn again to an English marriage, and Philip soon became the husband of Queen Mary. After her death without issue, he vainly wooed her sister, until he was gradually forced by her Protestant buccaneers into an undesired war.

Notwithstanding all that he could do to lose fortune's favors, she continued for many years to smile on her darling Hapsburg. After a naval disaster inflicted by the Turks on the Spaniard off the coast of Tripoli, the defeated power recovered and revenged herself in the great naval victory of Lepanto, in October 1571. The lustre added to the Lions and Castles by this important success was far outshone by the acquisition of Portugal and all her colonies, in 1581. Though not the nearest heir, Philip was the strongest, and by bribery and menaces won the homage of the Portuguese nobles after the death of the aged king Henry on January 31, 1580. For sixty years Spain held the lesser country and, what was more important to her, the colonies in the East Indies and in Africa. So vast an empire had not yet been heard of, or imagined possible, in the history of the world. No wonder that its shimmer dazzled the eyes not only of contemporaries, but of posterity. According to Macaulay, {433} Philip's power was equal to that of Napoleon, and its ruin is the most instructive lesson in history of how not to govern.

How hollow was this semblance of might was demonstrated by the first stalwart peoples that dared to test it, first by the Dutch and then by England. The story of the Armada has already been told. Its preparation marked the height of Philip's effort and the height of his incompetence. Its annihilation was a cruel blow to his pride. But in Spain, barring a temporary financial panic, things went much the same after 1588 as before it. The full bloom of Spanish culture, gorgeous with Velasquez and fragrant with Cervantes and Calderon, followed hard upon the defeat of the Armada.

[Sidenote: War with the Moors]

The fact is that Spain suffered much more from internal disorders than from foreign levy. The chief occasion of her troubles was the presence among her people of a large body of Moors, hated both for their race and for their religion. With the capitulation of Granada, the enjoyment of Mohammedanism was guaranteed to the Moors, but this tolerance only lasted for six years, when a decree went out that all must be baptized or must emigrate from Andalusia. In Aragon, however, always independent of Castile, they continued to enjoy religious freedom. Charles at his coronation took a solemn oath to respect the faith of Islam in these lands, but soon afterwards, frightened by the rise of heresy in Germany, he applied to Clement to absolve him from his oath. This sanction of bad faith, at first creditably withheld, [Sidenote: 1524] was finally granted and was promptly followed by a general order for expulsion or conversion. Throughout the whole of Spain the poor Moriscos now began to be systematically pillaged and persecuted by whoever chose to do it. All manner of taxes, tithes, servitudes and fines {434} were demanded of them. The last straw that broke the endurance of a people tried by every manner of tyranny and extortion, was an edict ordering all Moors to learn Castilian within three years, after which the use of Arabic was to be forbidden, prohibiting all Moorish customs and costumes, and strictly enjoining attendance at church.

As the Moors had been previously disarmed and as they had no military discipline, rebellion seemed a counsel of despair, but it ensued. The populace rose in helpless fury, and for three years defied the might of the Spanish empire. But the result could not be doubtful. A naked peasantry could not withstand the disciplined battalions that had proved their valor on every field from Mexico to the Levant and from Saxony to Algiers. It was not a war but a massacre and pillage. The whole of Andalusia, the most flourishing province in Spain, beautiful with its snowy mountains, fertile with its tilled valleys, and sweet with the peaceful toil of human habitation, was swept by a universal storm of carnage and of flame. The young men either perished in fighting against fearful odds, or were slaughtered after yielding as prisoners. Those who sought to fly to Africa found the avenues of escape blocked by the pitiless Toledo blades. The aged were hunted down like wild beasts; the women and young children were sold into slavery, to toil under the lash or to share the hated bed of the conqueror. The massacre cost Spain 60,000 lives and three million ducats, not to speak of the harm that it did to her spirit.

[1] A Portuguese in Spanish service.

SECTION 2. EXPLORATION

[Sidenote: Division of the New World between Spain and Portugal]

When Columbus returned with glowing accounts of the "India" he had found, the value of his work was at once appreciated. Forthwith began that struggle for colonial power which has absorbed so much of the {435} energies of the European nations. In view of the Portuguese discoveries in Africa, it was felt necessary to mark out the "spheres of influence" of the two powers at once, and, with an instinctive appeal to the one authority claiming to be international, the Spanish government immediately applied to Pope Alexander VI for confirmation in the new-found territories. Acting on the suggestion of Columbus that the line of Spanish influence be drawn one hundred leagues west of any of the Cape Verde Islands or of the Azores, the pope, with magnificent self-assurance, issued a bull, Inter caetera divinae, [Sidenote: May 4, 1493] of his own mere liberality and in virtue of the authority of Peter, conferring on Castile forever "all dominions, camps, posts, and villages, with all the rights and jurisdictions pertaining to them," west of the parallel, and leaving to Portugal all that fell to the east of it. Portugal promptly protested that the line was too far east, and by the treaty of Tordesillas; [Sidenote: 1494] it was moved to 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, thus falling between the 48th and 49th parallel of longitude. The intention was doubtless to confer on Spain all land immediately west of the Atlantic, but, as a matter of fact, South America thrusts so far to the eastward, that a portion of her territory, later claimed as Brazil, fell to the lot of Portugal.

[Sidenote: Spanish adventurers]

Spain lost no time in exploiting her new dominions, during the next century hundreds of ships carried tens thousands of adventurers to seek their fortune in the west. For it was not as colonists that most of them went, but in a spirit compounded of that of the crusader, the knight-errant, and the pirate. If there is anything in the paradox that artists have created natural beauty, it is a truer one to say that the Spanish romances created the Spanish colonial empire. The men who sailed on the great adventure had feasted {436} on tales of paladins and hippogrifs, of enchanted palaces and fountains of youth, and miraculously fair women to be rescued and then claimed by knights. They read in books of travel purporting to tell the sober truth of satyrs and of purple unicorns and of men who spread their feet over their heads for umbrellas and of others whose heads grew between their shoulders. No wonder that when they went to a strange country they found the River of Life in the Orinoco, colonies of Amazons in the jungle, and El Dorado, the land of gold, in the riches of Mexico and Peru! It is a testimony to the imaginative mood of Europe, as well as to the power of the pen, that the whole continent came to be called, not after its discoverer, but after the man who wrote the best romances--mostly fictions--about his travels in it.

[Sidenote: Exploitation of natives]

In the Greater Antilles, where Spain made her first colonies, her rule showed at its worst. The soft native race, the Caribs, almost completely disappeared within half a century. The best modern authority estimates that whereas the native population of Española (Haiti) was between 200,000 and 300,000 in 1493, by 1548 hardly 5000 Indians were left. In part the extinction of the natives was due to new diseases and to the vices of civilization, but far more to the heartless exploitation of them by the conquerors. Bartholomew de las Casas, the first priest to come to this unfortunate island, tells stories of Spanish cruelty that would be incredible were they not so well supported. With his own eyes he saw 3000 inoffensive Indians slaughtered at a single time; of another batch of 300 he observed that within a few months more than half perished at hard labor. Again, he saw 6000 Indian children condemned to work in the mines, of whom few or none long survived. In vain a bull of Paul III declared the Indians capable of becoming {437} Christians and forbade their enslavement. In vain the Spanish government tried to mitigate at least some of the hardships of the natives' lot, [Sidenote: 1537] ordering that they should be well fed and paid. The temptation to exploit them was too strong; and when they perished the Spaniards supplied their place by importing negroes from Africa, a people of tougher fibre.

Spanish exploration, followed by sparse settlement, soon opened up the greater part of the Americas south of the latitude of the present city of San Francisco. Of many expeditions into the trackless wilderness, only a few were financially repaying; the majority were a drain on the resources of the mother country. In every place where the Spaniard set foot the native quailed and, after at most one desperate struggle, went down, never again to loose the conqueror's grip from his throat or to move the conqueror's knee from his chest. Even the bravest were as helpless as children before warriors armed with thunder and riding upon unknown monsters.

But in no place, save in the islands, did the native races wholly disappear as they did in the English settlements. The Spaniards came not like the Puritans, as artisans and tillers of the soil intent on founding new homes, but as military conquerors, requiring a race of helots to toil for them. For a period anarchy reigned; the captains not only plundered the Indians but fought one another fiercely for more room--more room in the endless wilderness! Eventually, however, conditions became more stable; Spain imposed her effective control, her language, religion and institutions on a vast region, doing for South America what Rome had once done for her.

The lover of adventure will find rich reward in tracing the discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto, of Florida by Ponce de Leon, and of the whole course of {438} the Amazon by Orellana who sailed down it from Peru, or in reading of Balboa, "when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific." A resolute man could hardly set out exploring without stumbling upon some mighty river, some vast continent, or some unmeasured ocean. But among all these fairly-tales [Transcriber's note: fairy-tales?] there are some that are so marvellous that they would be thought too extravagant by the most daring writers of romance. That one captain with four hundred men, and another with two hundred, should each march against an extensive and populous empire, cut down their armies at odds of a hundred to one, put their kings to the sword and their temples to the torch, and after it all reap a harvest of gold and precious stones such as for quantity had never been heard of before--all this meets us not in the tales of Ariosto or of Dumas, but in the pages of authentic history.

[Conquest of Mexico]

In the tableland of Mexico dwelt the Aztecs, the most civilized and warlike of North American aborigines. Their polity was that of a Spartan military despotism, their religion the most grewsome known to man. Before their temples were piled pyramids of human skulls; the deities were placated by human sacrifice, and at times, according to the deicidal and theophagous rites common to many primitive superstitions, themselves sacrificed in effigy or in the person of a beautiful captive and their flesh eaten in sacramental cannibalism. Though the civilization of the Aztecs, derived from the earlier and perhaps more advanced Mayans, was scarcely so high as that of the ancient Egyptians, they had cultivated the arts sufficiently to work the mines of gold and silver and to hammer the precious metals into elaborate and massive ornaments.

When rumors of their wealth reached Cuba it seemed at last as if the dream of El Dorado had come true. Hernando Cortez, a cultured, resolute, brave and {439} politic leader, gathered a force of four hundred white men, with a small outfit of artillery and cavalry, and, on Good Friday, 1519, landed at the place now called Vera Cruz and marched on the capital. The race of warriors who delighted in nothing but slaughter, was stupefied, partly by an old prophecy of the coming of a god to subdue the land, partly by the strange and terrible arms of the invaders. Moreover their neighbors and subjects were ready to rise against them and become allies of the Spaniards. In a few months of crowded battle and massacre they lay broken and helpless at the feet of the audacious conqueror, who promptly sent to Spain a glowing account of his new empire and a tribute of gold and silver. Albert Dürer in August, 1520, saw at Brussels the "things brought the king from the new golden land," and describes them in his diary as including "a whole golden sun, a fathom in breadth, and a whole silver moon of the same size, and two rooms full of the same sort of armour, and also all kinds of weapons, accoutrements and bows, wonderful shields . . . altogether valued at a hundred thousand guidon. And all my life," he adds, "I have never seen anything that so rejoiced my heart as did these things."

[Conquest of Peru]

If an artist, familiar with kings and courts and the greatest marts of Europe could write thus, what wonder that the imagination of the world took fire? The golden sun and the silver moon were, to all men who saw them, like Helen's breasts, the sun and moon of heart's desire, to lure them over the western waves. Twelve years after Cortez, came Pizarro who, with a still smaller force conquered an even wealthier and more civilized empire. The Incas, unlike the Mexicans, were a mild race, living in a sort of theocratic socialism, in which the emperor, as god, exercised absolute power over his subjects and in return cared {440} for at least their common wants. The Spaniards outdid themselves in acts of treachery and blood. In vain the emperor, Atahualpa, after voluntarily placing himself in the hands of Pizarro, filled the room used as his prison nine feet high with gold as ransom; when he could give no more he was tried on the preposterous charges of treason to Charles V and of heresy, and suffered death at the stake. Pizarro coolly pocketed the till then undreamed of sum of 4,500,000 ducats,[1] worth in our standards more than one hundred million dollars.

[Sidenote: Circumnavigation of the globe, 1519-22]

But the crowning act of the age of discovery was the circumnavigation of the globe. The leader of the great enterprise that put the seal of man's dominion on the earth, was Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese in Spanish service. With a fleet of five vessels, only one of which put a ring around the world, and with a crew of about 275 men of whom only 18 returned successful, he sailed from Europe. [Sidenote: September 20, 1519] Coasting down the east of South America, [October 21, 1519] exploring the inlets and rivers, he entered the straits that bear his name and covered their 360 miles in thirty-eight days. After following the coast up some distance north, he struck across the Pacific, the breadth of which he much underestimated. For ninety-eight days he was driven by the east trade-wind without once sighting land save two desert islands, while his crew endured extremities of hunger, thirst and scurvy. At last he came to the islands he called, after the thievish propensities of their inhabitants, the Ladrones, making his first landing at Guam. Spending but three days here to refit and provision, he sailed again on March 9, [Sidenote: 1521] and a week later discovered the islands known, since 1542, as the Philippines. {441} In an expedition against a savage chief the great leader met his death on April 27, 1521. As other sailors and as he, too, had previously been as far to the east as he now found himself, he had practically completed the circumnavigation of the globe. The most splendid triumph of the age of discovery coincided almost to a day with the time that Luther was achieving the most glorious deed of the Reformation at Worms.

[Sidenote: September 1522]

Magellan's ship, the Vittoria, proceeded under Sebastian del Cano, and finally, with thirty-one men, of whom only eighteen had started out in her, came back to Portugal. The men who had burst asunder one of the bonds of the older world, were, nevertheless, deeply troubled by a strange, medieval scruple. Having mysteriously lost a day by following the sun in his westward course, they did penance for having celebrated the fasts and feasts of the church on the wrong dates.

[Sidenote: Portuguese Exploration]

While Spain was extending her dominions westward, little Portugal was building up an even greater empire in both hemispheres. In the fifteenth century, this hardy people, confined to their coast and without possibility of expanding inwards, had seen that their future lay upon the water. To the possessor of sea power the ocean makes of every land bordering on it a frontier, vulnerable to them and impervious to the enemy. The first ventures of the Portuguese were naturally in the lands near by, the North African coast and the islands known as the Madeiras and the Azores. Feeling their way southward along the African coast they reached the Cape of Good Hope but did not at once go much further. [Sidenote: 1486 or 1488] This path to India was not broken until eleven years later, when Vasco da Gama, after a voyage of great daring [Sidenote: 1497-8]--he was ninety-three days at sea on a course of 4500 miles from the Cape Verde Islands to South Africa--reached Calicut on May 20, 1498. This city, now sunken in the sea, was {442} then the most flourishing port on the Malabar Coast, exploited entirely by Mohammedan traders. Spices had long been the staple of Venetian trade with the Orient, and when he returned with rich cargo of them the immediate effect upon Europe was greater than that of the voyage of Columbus. Trade seeks to follow the line of least resistance, and the establishment of a water way between Europe and the East was like connecting two electrically charged bodies in a Leyden jar by a copper wire. The current was no longer forced through a poor medium, but ran easily through the better conductor. With more rapidity than one would think possible in that age, the commercial consequences of the discovery were appreciated. The trade of the Levant died away, and the center of gravity was transferred from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. While Venice decayed Lisbon rose with mushroom speed to the position of the great emporium of European ocean-borne trade, until she in her turn was supplanted by Antwerp.

Da Gama was soon imitated by others. [Sidenote: 1500] Cabral made commercial settlements at Calicut and the neighboring town of Cochin, and came home with unheard-of riches in spice, pearls and gems. [Sidenote: 1503] Da Gama returned and bombarded Calicut, and Francis d'Almeida was made Governor of India [Sidenote: 1505] and tried to consolidate the Portuguese power there on the correct principle that who was lord of the sea was lord of the peninsula. The rough methods of the Portuguese and their competition with the Arab traders made war inevitable between the two rivals. To the other causes of enmity that of religion was added, for, like the Spaniards, the Portuguese tried to combine the characters of merchants and missionaries, of pirates and crusaders. When the first of Da Gama's sailors to land at Calicut was asked what he sought, his laconic answer, "Christians {443} and spices," had in it as much of truth as of epigrammatic neatness.

[Sidenote: Portuguese cruelty to Indians]

Had the Portuguese but treated the Hindoos humanely they would have found in them allies against the Mohammedan traders, but all of them, not excepting their greatest statesman, Alphonso d'Albuquerque, pursued a policy of frightfulness. When Da Gama met an Arab ship, after sacking it, he blew it up with gunpowder and left it to sink in flames while the women on board held up their babies with piteous cries to touch the heart of this knight of Christ and of mammon. Without the least compunction Albuquerque tells in his commentaries how he burned the Indian villages, put part of their inhabitants to death and ordered the noses and ears of the survivors cut off.

[Sidenote: Trade]

Nevertheless, the Portuguese got what they wanted, the wealthy trade of the East. Albuquerque, failing to storm Calicut, seized Goa farther north and made it the chief emporium. But they soon felt the need of stations farther east, for, as long as the Arabs held Malacca, where spices were cheaper, the intruders did not have the monopoly they desired. Accordingly Albuquerque seized this city on the Malay Straits, [Sidenote: 1511] which, though now it has sunk into insignificance, was then the Singapore or Hong-Kong of the Far East. Sumatra, Java and the northern coast of Australia were explored, the Moluccas were bought from Spain for 350,000 ducats, and even Japan and China were reached by the daring traders. In the meantime posts were established along the whole western and eastern coasts of Africa and in Madagascar. But wherever they went the Portuguese sought commercial advantage not permanent settlement. Aptly compared by a Chinese observer to fishes who died if taken from the sea, they founded an empire of vast length out of incredible thinness.

{444} [Sidenote: Brazil]

The one exception to this rule, and an important one, was Brazil. The least showy of the colonies and the one that brought in the least quick profit eventually became a second and a greater Portugal, outstripping the mother country in population and dividing South America almost equally with the Spanish. In many ways the settlement of this colony resembled that of North America by the English more than it did the violent and superficial conquests of Spain. Settlers came to it less as adventurers than as home-seekers and some of them fled from religious persecution. The great source of wealth, the sugar-cane, was introduced from Madeira in 1548 and in the following year the mother country sent a royal governor and some troops.

[Sidenote: Decadence of Portugal]

But even more than Spain Portugal overtaxed her strength in her grasp for sudden riches. The cup that her mariners took from the gorgeous Eastern enchantress had a subtle, transforming drug mingled with its spices, whereby they were metamorphosed, if not into animals, at least into orientals, or Africans. While Lisbon grew by leaps and bounds the country-side was denuded, and the landowners, to fill the places of the peasants who had become sailors, imported quantities of negro slaves. Thus not only the Portuguese abroad, but those at home, undeterred by racial antipathy, adulterated their blood with that of the dark peoples. Add to this that the trade, immensely lucrative as it seemed, was an enormous drain on the population of the little state; and the causes of Portugal's decline, almost as sudden as its rise, are in large part explained. So rapid was it, indeed, that it was noticed not only by foreign travellers but by the natives. Camoens, though he dedicated his life to composing an epic in honor of Vasco da Gama, lamented his country's decay in these terms:

{445} O pride of empire! O vain covetise Of that vain glory that we men call fame . . . What punishment and what just penalties Thou dost inflict on those thou dost inflame . . . Thou dost depopulate our ancient state Till dissipation brings debility.

Nor were artificial causes wanting to make the colonies expensive and the home treasury insolvent. The governors as royal favorites regarded their appointments as easy roads to quick wealth, and they plundered not only the inhabitants but their royal master. The inefficient and extravagant management of trade, which was a government monopoly, furnished a lamentable example of the effects of public ownership. And when possible the church interfered to add the burden of bigotry to that of corruption. An amusing example of this occurred when a supposed tooth of Buddha was brought to Goa, to redeem which the Rajah of Pegu offered a sum equal to half a million dollars. While the government was inclined to sell, the archbishop forbade the acceptance of such tainted money and ordered the relic destroyed.

[Sidenote: 1521-80]

Within Portugal itself other factors aided the decline. From the accession of John III to the amalgamation with Spain sixty years later, the Cortes was rarely summoned. The expulsion of many Jews in 1497, the massacre and subsequent exile of the New Christians or Marranos, [Sidenote: 1506-7] most of whom went to Holland, commenced an era of destructive bigotry completed by the Inquisition. [Sidenote: The Inquisition established, 1536] Strict censorship of the press and the education of the people by the Jesuits each added their bit to the forces of spiritual decadence.

For the fury of religious zeal ill supplied the exhausted powers of a state fainting with loss of blood and from the intoxication of corruption. Gradually her grasp relaxed on North Africa until only three {446} small posts in Morocco were left her, those of Ceuta, Arzila and Tangier. A last frantic effort to recover them and to punish the infidel, undertaken by the young King Sebastian, ended in disaster and in his death in 1578. After a short reign of two years by his uncle Henry, who as a cardinal had no legitimate heirs, Portugal feebly yielded to her strongest suitor, Philip II, [Sidenote: 1580-1640] and for sixty years remained a captive of Spain.

[Sidenote: Other nations explore]

Other nations eagerly crowded in to seize the trident that was falling from the hands of the Iberian peoples. There were James Cartier of France, and Sebastian Cabot and Sir Martin Frobisher and Sir Francis Drake of England, and others. They explored the coast of North America and sought a Northwest Passage to Asia. Drake, after a voyage of two years and a half, [Sidenote: 1577-80] duplicated the feat of Magellan, though he took quite a different course, following the American western coast up to the Golden Gate. He, too, returned "very richly fraught with gold, silver, silk and precious stones," the best incentive to further endeavor. But no colonies of permanence and consequence were as yet planted by the northern nations. Until the seventeenth century their voyages were either actuated by commercial motives or were purely adventurous. The age did not lack daring explorers by land as well as by sea. Lewis di Varthema rivalled his countryman Marco Polo by an extensive journey in the first decade of the century. Like Burckhardt and Burton in the nineteenth century he visited Mecca and Medina as a Mohammedan pilgrim, and also journeyed to Cairo, Beirut, Aleppo and Damascus and then to the distant lands of India and the Malay peninsula.

[Sidenote: Russia]

It may seem strange to speak of Russia in connection with the age of discovery, and yet it was precisely in the light of a new and strange land that our English ancestors regarded it. Cabot's voyage to the {447} White Sea in the middle of the century was every whit as new an adventure as was the voyage to India. Richard Chancellor and others followed him and established a regular trade with Muscovy, [Sidenote: 1553] and through it and the Caspian with Asia. The rest of Europe, west of Poland and the Turks, hardly heard of Russia or felt its impact more than they now do of the Tartars of the Steppes.

But it was just at this time that Russia was taking the first strides on the road to become a great power. How broadly operative were some of the influences at work in Europe lies patent in the singular parallel that her development offers to that of her more civilized contemporaries. Just as despotism, consolidation, and conquest were the order of the day elsewhere, so they were in the eastern plains of Europe. Basil III [Sidenote: Basil III, 1505-33] struck down the rights of cities, nobles and princes to bring the whole country under his own autocracy. Ivan the Terrible, [Sidenote: Ivan IV, 1533-84] called Czar of all the Russias, added to this policy one of extensive territorial aggrandizement. Having humbled the Tartars he acquired much land to the south and east, and then turned his attention to the west, where, however, Poland barred his way to the Baltic. Just as in its subsequent history, so then, one of the great needs of Russia was for a good port. Another of her needs was for better technical processes. Anticipating Peter the Great, Ivan endeavored to get German workmen to initiate good methods, but he failed to accomplish much, partly because Charles V forbade his subjects to go to add strength to a rival state.

[Sidenote: Europe vs. Asia]

While Europe found most of the other continents as soft as butter to her trenchant blade, she met her match in Asia. The theory of Herodotus that the course of history is marked by alternate movements east and west has been strikingly confirmed by {449} subsequent events. In a secular grapple the two continents have heaved back and forth, neither being able to conquer the other completely. If the empires of Macedon and Rome carried the line of victory far to the orient, they were avenged by the successive inroads of the Huns, the Saracens, the Mongols and the Turks. If for the last four centuries the line has again been pushed steadily back, until Europe dominates Asia, it is far from certain that this condition will be permanent.

In spiritual matters Europe owes a balance of indebtedness to Asia, and by far the greater part of it to the Semites. The Phoenician alphabet and Arabian numerals are capital borrowed and yielding how enormous a usufruct! Above all, Asiatic religions--albeit the greatest of them was the child of Hellas as well as of Judaea--have conquered the whole world save a few savage tribes. Ever since the cry of "There is no God but Allah and Mahomet is his prophet" had aroused the Arabian nomads from their age-long slumber, it was as a religious warfare that the contest of the continents revealed itself. After the scimitar had swept the Greek Empire out of Asia Minor and had cut Spain from Christendom, the crusades and the rise of the Spanish kingdoms had gradually beaten it back. But while the Saracen was being slowly but surely driven from the western peninsula, the banner of the Crescent in the east was seized by a race with a genius for war inversely proportional to its other gifts. [Sidenote: The Turks] The Turks, who have never added to the arts of peace anything more important than the fabrication of luxurious carpets and the invention of a sensuous bath, were able to found cannon and to drill battalions that drove the armies of nobler races before them. From the sack of Constantinople in 1453 to the siege of Vienna in 1529 and even to some extent long after that, the {449} majestic and terrible advance of the janizaries threatened the whole fabric of Europe.

[Sidenote: Selim I, 1512-20]

Under Sultan Selim I the Turkish arms were turned to the east and south. Persia, Kurdistan, Syria and Egypt were crushed, while the title of Caliph, and with it the spiritual leadership of the Mahommetan world, was wrested from the last of the Abassid dynasty. But it was under his successor, Suleiman the Magnificent, [Sidenote: Suleiman 1520-6] that the banner of the prophet, "fanned by conquest's crimson wing," was borne to the heart of Europe. Belgrade and Rhodes were captured, Hungary completely overrun, and Vienna besieged. The naval exploits of Khair-ed-din, called Barbarossa, carried the terror of the Turkish arms into the whole Mediterranean, subdued Algiers and defeated the Christian fleets under Andrew Doria.

On the death of Suleiman the Crescent Moon had attained the zenith of its glory. The vast empire was not badly administered; some authorities hold that justice was better served under the Sultan than under any contemporary Christian king. A hierarchy of officials, administrative, ecclesiastical, secretarial and military, held office directly under the Sultan, being wisely granted by him sufficient liberty to allow initiative, and yet kept under control direct enough to prevent the secession of distant provinces.

The international position of the infidel power was an anomalous one. Almost every pope tried to revive the crusading spirit against the arch-enemy of Christ, and the greatest epic poet of the sixteenth century chose for his subject the Delivery of Jerusalem in a holy war. On the other hand the Most Christian King found no difficulty in making alliances with the Sublime Porte, and the same course was advocated, though not adopted, by some of the Protestant states of Germany. Finally, that champion of the church, Philip {450} II, for the first time in the history of his country, [Sidenote: 1580] made a peace with the infidel Sultan recognizing his right to exist in the society of nations.

The sixteenth century, which in so much else marked a transition from medieval to modern times, in this also saw the turning-point of events, inasmuch as the tide drawn by the Half Moon to its flood about 1529, from that time onwards has steadily, if very slowly, ebbed.

[1] Allowing $2.40 to a ducat this would be $10,800,000 intrinsically at a time when money had ten times the purchasing power that it has today.

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