The Jesuists acting in concert with Spain, as well-informed historians held certain, first inspired Camillo Borghese with his ill-considered attempt upon the liberties of Venice.[133] It was now the Jesuits, after their expulsion from the Republic, who opened the batteries of literary warfare against the Venetian government.  They wrote and published manifestoes through the Bergamasque territory, which province acknowledged the episcopal jurisdiction of Milan, though it belonged to the Venetian domain.  In these writings it was argued that, so long as the Papal interdict remained in force, all sacraments would be invalid, marriages null, and offspring illegitimate.  The population, trained already in doctrines of Papal supremacy, were warned that should they remain loyal to a contumacious State, their own souls would perish through the lack of sacerdotal ministrations, and their posterity would roam the world as bastards and accursed.  To traverse this argument of sarcerdotal tyranny, exorbitant in any age of the Latin Church, but preposterous after the illumination of the sixteenth century in Europe, was a citizen’s plain duty.  Sarpi therefore supplied an elegant Italian stylist, Giambattista Leoni, with material for setting forth a statement of the controversy between Venice and Rome.  It would have been well if he had taken up the pen with his own hand.  But at this early period of his career as publicist, he seems to have been diffident about his literary powers.  The result was that Leoni’s main defense of the Republic fell flat; and the war was waged for a while upon side issues.  Sarpi drew a treatise by Gerson, the learned French champion of Catholic independence, forth from the dust of libraries, translated it into Italian, and gave it to the press accompanied by an introductory letter which he signed.[134] Cardinal Bellarmino responded from Rome with an attack on Sarpi’s orthodoxy and Gerson’s authority.  Sarpi replied in an Apology for Gerson.  Then, finding that Leoni’s narrative had missed its mark, he poured forth pamphlet upon pamphlet, penning his own Considerations on the Censures, inspiring Fra Fulgenzio Micanzi with a work styled Confirmations, and finally reducing the whole matter of the controversy into a book entitled a Treatise on the Interdict, which he signed together with six brother theologians of the Venetian party.  It is not needful in this place to institute a minute investigation into the merits of this pamphlet warfare.  In its details, whether we regard the haughty claims of delegated omnipotence advanced by Rome, or the carefully studied historical and canonistic arguments built up by Sarpi, the quarrel has lost actuality.  Common sense and freedom have so far conquered in Europe that Sarpi’s opinions, then denounced as heresies, sound now like truisms; and his candid boast that he was the first to break the neck of Papal encroachments upon secular prerogative, may pass for insignificant in an age which has little to fear from ecclesiastical violence.