I have enlarged upon the details of the Spanish Inquisition for two reasons.  In the first place it strikingly illustrates the character of the people who now had the upper hand in Italy.  In the second place, its success induced Paul III., acting upon the advice of Giov.  Paolo Caraffa, to remodel the Roman office on a similar type in 1542.  It may at once be said that the real Spanish Inquisition was never introduced into Italy.[96] Such an institution, claiming independent jurisdiction and flaunting its cruelties in the light of day, would not have suited the Papal policy.  As temporal and spiritual autocrats, the Popes could not permit a tribunal of which they were not the supreme authority.  It was their interest to consult their pecuniary advantage rather than to indulge insane fanaticism; to repress liberty of thought by cautious surveillance rather than by public terrorism and open acts of cruelty.  The Italian temperament was, moreover, more humane than the Spanish; nor had the refining culture of the Renaissance left no traces in the nation.  Furthermore, the necessity for so Draconian an institution was not felt.  Catholicism in Italy had not to contend with Jews and Moors, Marranos and Moriscoes.  It was, indeed, alarmed by the spread of Lutheran opinions.  Caraffa complained to Paul III. that ’the whole of Italy is infected with the Lutheran heresy, which has been embraced not only by statesmen, but also by many ecclesiastics.’[97] Pius V. was so panic-stricken by the prevalence of heresy in Faenza that he seriously meditated destroying the town and dispersing its inhabitants.[98] Yet, after a few years of active persecution, this peril proved to be unreal.  The Reformation had not taken root so deep and wide in Italy that it could not be eradicated.  When, therefore, the Spanish viceroys sought to establish their national Inquisition in Naples and Milan, the rebellious people received protection and support from the Papacy; and the Holy Office, as remodeled in Rome, became a far less awful engine of oppression than that of Seville.

[Footnote 96:  Naples and Milan passionately and successfully opposed its introduction by the Spanish viceroys.  But it ruled in Sicily and Sardinia.]

[Footnote 97:  McCrie, p. 186.]

[Footnote 98:  Mutinelli, Storia Arcana, vol. i. p. 79.]

It was sufficiently severe, however.  ‘At Rome,’ writes a resident in 1568, ’some are daily burned, hanged, or beheaded; the prisons and places of confinement are filled, and they are obliged to build new ones.’[99] This general statement may be checked by extracts from the despatches of Venetian ambassadors in Rome, which, though they are not continuous, and cannot be supposed to give an exhaustive list of the victims of the Inquisition, enable us to judge with some degree of accuracy what the frequency of executions may have been.[100]

[Footnote 99:  McCrie, p. 272.]

[Footnote 100:  Mutinelli’s Storia Arcana, etc. vol. i., is the source from which I have drawn the details given above.]