An Unlikely Soil
In an Italy of pagan climate and polytheistic temper, congenial to a joyous and artistic faith, home of immortal saints whose awesome or tender images filled the streets in every season, an Italy fed by the golden flood that a number of vassal countries sent to its ecclesiastical center, no one would have expected to find men and women who, with great courage and their lives in their hands, tried to remove that spiritual and radiant faith and put a dry and gloomy creed in its place, a creed whose political support was the reluctance of the northern nations to fatten Italy with the taxes of their piety. Nevertheless, everywhere in Italy there were people who understood, even more shrewdly and sincerely than the Germans, Swiss and English, the corrupting excesses of the Church, and who suffered from them (the source text is damaged here and the sense was reconstructed). In Italy, more than anywhere else, the educated classes, though they already enjoyed freedom of learning and thought, still insistently wished to free the power of thinking even from the outward obedience to the myths and old beliefs that so bewitched and overpowered the minds of the masses. Some of Luther's writings were found in the bookshops of Milan in 1519 and of Venice in 1520.
In the church of San Marco itself a friar dared to preach on Luther's principles. In 1532 Cardinal Carafa reported to Pope Clement VII that religion in Venice was declining: very few of the inhabitants kept the fasts and went to confession, and heretical publications had spread through the city. Clement himself described (1530) how the heretical Lutheran teaching had taken hold in the minds of the majority of the people, among clergy and laity alike (the passage is garbled), and in 1535 the German reformers claimed to have 30,000 faithful followers in the cradle of the Church (the book's figure).
Renee of Ferrara
The highest-ranking woman of Ferrara was a believing Protestant. Renee, daughter of Louis XII, had taken her new religious ideas partly from Margaret of Navarre and partly from her tutor, Madame de Soubise. After her marriage (1528) to Ercole d'Este, who became Duke Ercole II, ruler of Ferrara, in 1534, the princess brought Madame de Soubise with her to Italy. Calvin visited her in that city (1536) and strengthened the foundations of her Protestant faith. Later Clement Marot and Hubert Languet (the name as the source gives it), propagators of Huguenot ideas, also came to see Renee. Duke Ercole received them all with the courtesy characteristic of the Renaissance, until one of them, watching the ceremony of the veneration of the cross on Holy Saturday (1536), cried out "Idolatry!" After that the duke gave the Inquisition leave to arrest and examine them. Calvin and Marot fled; the others seem to have been released after affirming their loyalty to the true Christian faith.
But after 1540 Renee gathered around her a new circle of Protestants and no longer took part in Catholic worship. Ercole calmed the pope's anger by banishing his wife to his summer castle at Consandolo on the Po; but even there the princess took Protestant friends into her company and brought up her daughters in the reformed faith. Ercole, who knew that on the chessboard of political marriages Protestant daughters would be useless pawns, sent them to a convent, and at last allowed the Inquisition to arrest Renee together with twenty-four of her household servants. The princess was found guilty of heresy and sentenced to life imprisonment (1554). She repented of her error, received the consecrated bread and wine and was pardoned religiously and politically, but her inner beliefs showed through the silence and mournful seclusion of the rest of her life. After the death of Duke Ercole II (1559), Renee returned to France, and her house at Montargis became a refuge for Huguenots.
The Modena Academy and Lucca
The city of Modena, in Ercole's domain, once faced a crisis born of Protestantism. The academy of scholars and philosophers there allowed wide freedom to all kinds of debate, and some members were suspected of heresy, among them Vesalius's pupil and successor Gabriele Fallopio. Paolo Ricci, a former friar, preached openly against papal rule, and Lutheran ideas were discussed in shops, squares and churches. Ricci and some others were arrested. Cardinal Sadoleto defended the members of the academy, called them loyal to the Church and held that freedom of thought and immunity from inquisition were requisites of the scholars' standing. Pope Paul III was content with their signed pledge of piety, but Ercole dissolved the academy and scattered its members (1546); later a Lutheran in Ferrara who refused to repent was executed (1550). In 1568, as the Catholic reaction hardened, thirteen men and one woman were put to death at Modena for heresy.
At Lucca, Peter Martyr Vermigli, head of the council of Augustinian canons, founded an academy of sciences, gathered distinguished teachers there and encouraged freedom of debate. Even in his church sermons he reminded worshipers that they need not take the Eucharist as a miraculous transformation of substance, but as a religious memorial of Christ's sufferings, which went beyond Luther's own words. When the general chapter of the Augustinians summoned him to Genoa for examination, Vermigli fled Italy and began denouncing the false doctrines and wrongdoings of Catholicism; he accepted a chair of theology at Oxford (1548). He took part in drawing up the Book of Common Prayer but became caught in controversy (1552); when Catholicism returned to power in England he left the country, and in 1562 he died at Zurich as professor of Hebrew. Eighteen of the Augustinian canons at Lucca, who had been under his supervision, followed him out of their order and out of Italy.
Juan de Valdes and the Neapolitan Circle
Vermigli, Soranzo (bishop of Bergamo) and many others had been drawn to these new ideas through Juan de Valdes. He and his brother Alfonso, of a noble Castilian family, have perhaps rightly been counted the most gifted twins in history. Alfonso, a devotee of Erasmus, became private secretary to Charles V and wrote a book, the Dialogue of Lactantius (1529), defending the sack of Rome; he also argued that if the Church, instead of condemning Luther, had listened to his reasonable objections and corrected its errors, Luther would have remained a faithful servant and never left the Church. Juan followed it with another volume, the Dialogue of Mercury and Charon, which contained his own heresies and political blasphemies: the rich must be made to work for their living; the poor must share in the income of the rich; the treasury of every ruler belongs to the people and must not be spent on political or religious wars. Clement VII naturally preferred Juan de Valdes to Alfonso and at thirty made him papal treasurer. Yet Juan moved to Naples and devoted his life to writing and teaching there. He stayed loyal to the Church, but agreed with Luther's idea of man's salvation by pure faith and valued purity of mystical spirit above any outward religious ceremony.
Chosen men and women gathered around Juan and accepted his leadership: Vermigli, Ochino, Marcantonio Flaminio (the great poet), Pietro Carnesecchi, Vittoria Colonna, Costanza d'Avalos (duchess of Amalfi), Isabella Manrique (sister of the Inquisitor General of Spain), and Giulia Gonzaga, whose beauty we mentioned earlier. After the death of Juan de Valdes (1541) his disciples scattered across Europe. Some, like Vittoria Colonna, remained relatively loyal to the Church, but others turned his teaching into heretical statements and spread them. In 1564 three of his lesser disciples were put to death at Naples; in 1567 Carnesecchi was executed at Rome (the manner of these deaths is omitted here). Giulia Gonzaga escaped by the chance of the death of the cruel Pope Paul IV and became a nun in a convent (1566), and so the reform group of Naples came to its end.