The city where it had flourished so long, and where it had effected so much of enduring value for European culture, was gagged in scarcely a less degree than Rome.  We have full right to insist upon these facts, and to draw from them a stringent corollary.  If Venice allowed the trade in books, which had brought her so much profit and such honor in the past, to be paralyzed by Clement’s Index, what must have happened in other Italian towns?  The blow which maimed Venetian literature, was mortal elsewhere; and the finest works of genius in the first half of the seventeenth century had to find their publishers in Paris.[110] But these reflections have led me to anticipate the proper development of the subject of this chapter.

[Footnote 108:  The document in question, prepared for the use of the Signoria, exists in MS. in the Marcian Library, Misc.  Eccl. et Civ.  Class.  VII.  Cod.  MDCCLXI.]

[Footnote 109:  This edict is dated August 24, 1596.]

[Footnote 110:  This will be apparent when I come to treat of Marino and Tassoni.]

In Italy at large, the forces of the Inquisition were directed, not as in Spain against heretics in masses, but against the leaders of heretical opinion; and less against personalities than against ideas.  Italy during the Renaissance had been the workshop of ideas for Europe.  It was the business of the Counter-Reformation to check the industry of that officina scientiarum, to numb the nervous centers which had previously emitted thought of pregnant import for the modern world, and to prevent the reflux of ideas, elaborated by the northern races in fresh forms, upon the intelligence which had evolved them.  To do so now was comparatively easy.  It only needed to put the engine of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum into working order in concert with the Inquisition.

Throughout the Middle Ages it had been customary to burn heretical writings.  The bishops, the universities, and the Dominican Inquisitors exercised this privilege; and by their means, in the age of manuscripts, the life of a book was soon extinguished.  Whole libraries were sometimes sacrificed at one fell swoop, as in the case of the 6000 volumes destroyed at Salamanca in 1490 by Torquemada, on a charge of sorcery.[111] After the invention of printing it became more difficult to carry on this warfare against literature, while the rapid diffusion of Protestant opinions through the press rendered the need for their extermination urgent.  Sixtus IV. laid a basis for the Index by prohibiting the publication of any books which had not previously been licensed by ecclesiastical authority.  Alexander VI. by a brief of 15O1 confirmed this measure, and placed books under the censorship of the episcopacy and the Inquisition.  Finally, the Lateran Council, in its tenth session, held under the auspices of Leo X., gave solemn ecumenical sanction to these regulations.