Christendom Destroyed

14. Churches and the World

CHURCHES AND STATES

The Protestant Reformation fractured the Christian Church into believing congregations, each claiming to be the inheritor of the ‘true Church’. That was a recipe for ongoing debates which were sharpened by the belief that salvation depended on belonging to the true Church. The alternatives were elaborated for ordinary people in the emerging confessional apparatus of liturgies, catechisms, confessions, biblical translations, ecclesiastical disciplines and programmes of religious education. They all emphasized to ordinary people the emerging divisions in Europe.

Protestantism had, in addition, a double logic which affected the role of the Church. The first was its impact on the latter’s material fabric. Wherever it took root, the Protestant Reformation broke established patterns of landed wealth, tithe income and spiritual dues. Secular authorities were no longer anxious about being charged with sacrilege in attacking Church wealth. Protestant reformers had provided them with the pretext to appropriate it under the guise of attacking abuses. In 1525, Luther assured the Elector of Saxony that the revenues of the Church belonged to the state and that, after paying the clergy and establishing schools and charities, the surplus was the Elector’s. In 1534, Duke Ulrich of Württemberg confiscated monastic properties for his own purposes. His example was followed by a string of others. King Henry VIII dissolved the English monasteries, yielding the crown a profit of about £1.3 million between 1536 and his death in 1547. That was accompanied by the transfer of advowsons (i.e. rights to nominate to benefices) to the crown. These rights were – along with the chantry foundations (1547) and church plate (1549–53) – sold on to laymen. In Denmark, the monarchy began to alienate Church property to its nobility in the 1520s, even before its official Reformation. By the end of the 1530s, episcopal property had been appropriated by the monarchy and the monasteries secularized. In 1527, the Swedish king Gustav Vasa held 3,724 domain estates and the Church 14,340. By 1549, the Church had none. Although Zwingli and Bucer maintained that Church property should be vested in the community, secular rulers being merely its administrators, magistrates discharged their responsibilities stingily. The Protestant Reformation marked a large transfer of wealth and the partial dismantling of the clerical estate.

The material and social change in the role of the Church in Protestant lands was the more marked because it did not happen to the same extent in Catholic Europe. Some Catholic princes used the Protestant threat to extract resources from their clerical estates. In France, the papacy agreed to the partial alienation of Church wealth (with the possibility of its being repurchased) in order to fund royal campaigns in the civil wars. The dukes of Bavaria threatened to give concessions to their Protestant minority in order to extract more revenue from the clergy. Olivares included the Spanish Church in taxation in the 1630s, the opposition from Rome and from within its own ranks being met with reprisals. Yet in Mediterranean Europe the Catholic Church maintained its material wellbeing. Catholic reinvigoration had its foundation in clerical wealth and privilege, the unsolved dilemma being how to release them to support the Church’s endeavours where they were most needed.

The second logic of the Protestant Reformation reformulated the relationships between Church and state. Its critique of the theological foundations of sacerdotal authority meant adding a sleeve of spiritual dignity to the ‘secular arm’. Among the emerging Protestant political entities, the affairs of churches – from the appointment of pastors to parochial life – came to be managed (in Lutheran Europe) through a branch of the princely council and its representatives, nominated Church officials (‘superintendants’). Luther’s insight on such matters was that all Christians are, at the same time the subjects of two divinely established realms (zwei Reiche). One was the spiritual kingdom of faith, ruled by Christ and his Word, over which secular rulers had no jurisdiction. The other was the kingdoms of this world, ruled by princes who owed their authority to God and who were responsible for the peace and wellbeing of the subjects entrusted to their charge, but not for their consciences. In practice, however, the demands of the Reformation and the inclinations of its princely adherents eroded Luther’s idiosyncratic interpretation. Other Protestant reformers were more inclined to accept the humanist notion of a commonwealth as a moral space in which the godly ruler had the ‘office’ to promote faith, piety and right behaviour among his subjects. More important, then, was to provide rulers with examples to encourage them to discharge their obligations. Pious Old Testament rulers and early Christian emperors became models of how the godly ruler should root out impiety and establish true worship in accordance with God’s law.

That was all very well so long as the ruler was godly and understood where the limits of this public obligation lay. The difficulty was that the Protestant Deborahs and Hezekiahs of the age often failed to live up to the mark, seeming to behave more like the Old Testament’s dissemblers and tyrants. In addition, the separate jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts was mainly abolished in Protestant Europe. Church courts had dealt with, among other things, blasphemy, witchcraft and conjuring, and marriage. New laws and tribunals had to be established by magistrates and enforced in courts that were more civil than ecclesiastical. When Calvin (following the lead of Johannes Oecolampadius in Basel and Martin Bucer in Strasbourg) tried to define more precisely the authority of the Church through establishing a consistory court in Geneva and vesting in it the power of excommunication, he was criticized by other Protestants, more favourable to secular authority, as wanting to create a ‘new popery’. Thomas Lüber (Erastus), a physician in Heidelberg, gave his name to the notion that civil magistrates, or rulers, exercised sovereignty in their states, and that Churches possessed no coercive power. That in fact became the norm in Protestant Europe.

The godly ruler was not the preserve of Protestant Europe. Catholic princes also successfully asserted their control over the Church, despite their need to acknowledge the authority of Rome and to respect the jurisdictions of bishops. In France, the Concordat of Bologna (1516) gave the French monarchy the right to appoint the incumbents of the 106 episcopal sees and 800 abbeys of the kingdom, a right exercised with scant regard to the religious or reforming credentials of candidates. In Spain, Savoy, the hereditary lands of the Austrian Habsburgs and elsewhere, monarchs treated the rights to nominate to senior benefices in the Church as an extension of royal patronage, and faced down the papacy in controversial appointments. Only in the Italian peninsula did the pope still nominate directly to episcopal sees.

Throughout Catholic lands there were ecclesiastical autonomies – autochthonous traditions deriving their strength from their foundation myths and saint cults. These proved delicate to harmonize within the claims to universality of a reinvigorated Roman Catholic Church and also resistant to state control. Only in France did they coalesce into something approaching a movement (‘Gallicanism’) with roots in the Church, academy (the Sorbonne) and judiciary (the Parlement of Paris). Gallicanism drew on Conciliarism, and had an agenda to protect the liberties of the French Church from royal and papal intrusion. It served as a focus for those in Catholic Europe who feared a resurgent caesaro-papalism in Rome.

The relationship between Church and state was one part of the relationship of the Church to the world. Protestant and Catholic clerical establishments had to respond to the challenge from the wider world, to the new confessional politics, to the uncomfortable reality of more powerful states and to new ways of understanding the physical environment. Both had to inculcate a sense of what religious belief and observance should be.

MISSIONS ABROAD

Europe’s expansion globalized Christianity. As many as 10 million people may have been baptized as Catholic Christians in the Americas by 1550. Perhaps 2 million Filipinos had been baptized by 1620 and over 200,000 in Japan. This endeavour was independent of movements for Catholic renewal in Christendom. It relied on the patronage of the Hispanic monarchies and the competitive efforts of Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars. Only gradually, especially after 1550, did the new religious orders like the Jesuits make their mark. The figures for conversions are not to be taken at face value. Enthusiastic missionaries overestimated their success, evaluating their achievement in accordance with a preconceived view as to who was capable of being converted, and to what degree. Most converts had little understanding of the religion they were adopting, and the arguments used to encourage conversion were elementary. In Mexico, and later in the Philippines, locals were often encouraged not to attend the Mass because they might not understand it. In Japan, the Jesuit Francisco Cabral was reluctant to go into theological details with his Japanese neophytes lest they became experts and created heresies.

Europeans were struck by the contrasts between Catholic Christianity and the indigenous societies with which they came into contact. In Peru, for example, the custom was that no man would marry a woman without a trial sexual engagement first. It was hard for missionaries to persuade the Peruvians to abandon premarital sex in favour of a Catholic marriage pattern that outlawed it. Taking those difficulties seriously meant accepting that conversion was a long, slow process. The Jesuit José de Acosta (in On Procuring the Salvation of the Indians, 1588) distinguished three levels of non-Christians. The first were those whose level of civility he equated with Europeans (the Chinese and the Japanese). They could understand and commit themselves rationally to Christianity. Second were those peoples, such as Aztecs and Incas, who had no literacy but had a civil society, and whose religious rituals were intermingled with grotesque departures from natural law (for example, human sacrifice). They needed both persuasion and a firm hand. Finally, there were the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of southern and northern America, and imported African slaves, who were scarcely human and had to be treated as children, weaned from their nomadic ways, ‘reduced’ into villages before they could be evangelized. Christian civilization – its language, civility and morality – limited Acosta’s ethnography. He saw missionaries’ duty as ‘to advance a step at a time, educating Indians in Christian customs and discipline, and silently removing superstitious and sacrilegious rites and habits of rude savagery’.

Mission involved understanding native cultures and traditions. That resulted in an appreciation of difference. The pioneering Franciscan ethnographer Bernardino de Sahagún spent fifty years conducting fieldwork among the Aztecs. He recorded his findings in the General History of the Things of New Spain. It included over 2,000 illustrations by native artists trained in European representational techniques. Philip II, aware of the dangers that such study of native culture and history might cause, confiscated the manuscript and ordered its return to Spain. The limits to ethnographic understanding were set by the assumption that Christianity was the only true religion. Missionaries were therefore inclined to regard other religions as the products of ignorance, or worse. Francis Xavier’s first reactions to Japan in 1549 were: ‘this land is full of idolatries and enemies of Christ’. The Portuguese Jesuit Diogo Gonçalves, who arrived in Goa in 1590 and worked in Malabar from 1597 until his death, wrote a comprehensive guide to mission which he despatched to Rome in 1615. When he described Hindu religious traditions he repeatedly referred to their deities as ‘demons’ and their beliefs as ‘diabolic superstitions’. Yet such an attitude created a dilemma. The more native beliefs were regarded as pagan, the more urgent was the task to eradicate them, and the larger became the task of Christianization.

The number of missionaries was tiny in comparison with the task. The latter’s enormity was emphasized by opposition from local peoples, more likely when missionary campaigns sought to obliterate the traces of pre-Christian civilization. In the violent Mixtón rebellion of 1541 in New Galicia (Mexico), monasteries and churches were targeted, friars mutilated and converts had their heads washed to ‘de-baptize’ them. Christianity became the religion of the conqueror. Two decades later, highland Peruvian Christianity was rejected in a rebellion known as the ‘Dance Sickness’ (in Quechua: Taqui Unqoy), adherents wanting to restorate ancient spirits (huacas) and end Spanish rule. The revolt was suppressed with terror, culminating in the execution of Tupac Amaru, the last claimant to the Inca throne. Violence did not win Christian converts but it was never far below the surface in the European colonial world.

The earliest missionaries overseas were the friars in Central America who concentrated on the settled areas of the Mexican plateau. Mass conversions were the norm, with Franciscans and Dominicans encouraging encampments for Christianized Indians that integrated Indian and Spanish ways of living. Natives provided a percentage of their labour and tribute, through which churches were constructed, often on the site of pre-conquest temples. By 1650, the Catholic Church was an established presence in Spanish colonial society. The five archbishoprics and twenty-five bishoprics of Spanish America became rich landlords, more so than the archbishopric and two bishoprics of Portuguese Brazil by that same date. The basilicas that graced American vice-regal capitals suggest a comfortable transplantation of Catholic clerical society to the colonial New World.

Underneath the surface, however, the story was of compromise between local religious systems and Christian doctrine. Mexicans fused Christian and pre-Christian beliefs and practices, especially in their households and attitudes to the surrounding natural environment. It proved difficult to eradicate the sacred topography, ritual calendar and older Andean deities. By placing churches in pre-conquest temple locations, and adopting open chapels looking onto a platform crowned with a cross at the centre of an enclosed patio, they resembled former sacrifice sites. Confraternities, public feasts and saint cults coalesced with pre-conquest traditions of feasts of the dead, dressed in Christian clothing. Saint cults invited appropriation as part of a continuing ancestral memory. For their part, African slaves in Brazil identified Christian saints with their own spirits (orishas) and protectors, adapting Christian rituals to their own calendar. It was European notions of ‘idolatry’ and ‘witchcraft’ which paradoxically provided the evidence for the survival of pre-Christian ancestors and deities. Hernando de Santillán explained in his Relation of the Origin, Descent, Politics and Government of the Incas (1563) that it was ‘the Devil who speaks through them [spirits]’ and recounted how over 400 temples had recently been found within reach of Cusco at which offerings were still being made. The implication was clear: the Americas needed an Inquisition. Two generations later, and almost fifty years after the establishment of the Mexican Inquisition, Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón (Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions that today live among the natives of New Spain, 1629) documented continuing beliefs in the nahualli (mountain spirits). Like the officers of the Inquisition, however, he could not distinguish between those to be ascribed to native credulity and those attributable to the Devil.

Where there was no sedentary native population and no basis for ranch labour or parishes, missions adapted the monastic tradition to minister to Amerindians. The latter were ‘reduced’ to live in a compound, a defensive space for a community, protected from settlers on the look-out for native labour. Missions began in New Mexico and then spread to Brazil, Paraguay and among the Canadian Hurons. The history of the reductions in the middle and upper Paraná, Uruguay and Tape rivers in the first half of the seventeenth century was recounted by the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in The Spiritual Conquest of Paraguay (1639). He described how a handful of Jesuits corralled over 100,000 natives into almost forty mission compounds. Indians were encouraged to cultivate tea (yerba mate), cotton and wool, and their products were sold at Santa Fé or Bogotá. In these compounds, the New World became the Church (and vice versa) as Jesuits forged a mission-led reformed commonwealth. Contemporaries who read Montoya’s work thought it was a fantasy.

Published mission narratives fed the European market for travel literature, geography and natural history. Francis Xavier’s first Letter from India (1545) began reports on flora, fauna, climate and native customs by missions. By the time of José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590), Jesuit natural history and geography had grown considerably. Ignatius Loyola, the Society of Jesus’s founder, insisted from the beginning that a means of advancing the Jesuits’ work was through ‘having much inter-communication’. By the time of his death, the circulating of newsletters had become normal practice, the purpose being that ‘each region can learn from the others whatever promotes mutual consolation and edification in our Lord’.

Europe’s communicative energies are exemplified by its missions. Their linguistic achievements were phenomenal. Over 120 languages, all spoken rather than written, were in existence in Mexico on the eve of the conquest. Within two generations, the Franciscans produced phonetic alphabets using Latin characters, which made possible grammars and dictionaries in twenty-two of them. In Mexico, as in other parts of America and in India, the strategy was to promote the use of one language as the vehicle for missionary literature. The first catechism in Nahuatl was published in 1539, in Tamil in 1554, in Chinese characters in 1584, in an African language in 1624. These books were then deployed in church and school environments, reprinted with colonial presses. The Flemish Franciscan Pieter van der Moere founded the first European school in the Americas in 1523 at Texcoco, and went on to direct the San Francisco school in Mexico City, which in its heyday had almost 1,000 students. He also developed a hieroglyphic-based catechism for use with Indians, first published about 1548.

Humanist educational methods depended on acculturating the pupil to the processes of learning. Missionaries had similarly to adapt Christianity to present it in a form that could be assimilated. In the Philippines, for example, the Ten Commandments, the Creed and Christian prayers were turned into verses which could be chanted. Missionaries equally chose to adopt local clothing, or observe local etiquette. Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit who worked in China from 1583 until his death in 1610, accepted the dress and social rituals of a Confucian scholar and acquired a knowledge of Mandarin. He adapted the Christian liturgy to the Chinese calendar, omitting parts which might lead to offence, while (with Chinese assistance) translating Confucian classics into Latin. For Ricci, Catholic Christianity was not alien to Confucian values. In his Mandarin explanation of The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (1603), he combined Aristotelian logic, Christian doctrine and Confucian concepts to provide a basis for assimilating the two. Meanwhile, in India, Robert de Nobili adapted Christianity to local customs. He dressed like a local high-caste Hindu scholar and shaved his head, keeping only a tiny tuft. He studied Sanskrit and Tamil, and composed Christian catechisms and apologia in Tamil, adapting its vocabulary to Christian concepts. As with Ricci, however, he caused controversy both among fellow Jesuits and with missionaries from other orders and the archbishop of Goa. The disputes were resolved only by a ruling from Rome in his favour in 1622. The debate over ‘accommodation’ did not greatly impact on Europe’s mission abroad; but it revealed the tensions within a globalizing Catholic Christianity back home.

MINISTRY AT HOME

For Catholic apologists the success of mission abroad was a sign of divine favour. What could Protestants point to by way of comparison? The lack of Protestant mission was a charge that those in the Dutch Republic and England (both with colonies) answered with difficulty. Adrian Saravia, a Dutch refugee deacon at Westminster, argued that Protestants had a duty to respond to Christ’s injunction to preach the Gospel to every creature. Dutch preachers took up the cause, and a seminary was founded for would-be missionaries at Leiden in 1622. But it did not last long. Protestant missionary endeavour was the result of private initiative rather than public commitment. Protestantism saw itself as engaged in a fight for truth and survival back home. Localized and fragmented, Protestant Churches lacked the organization for mission abroad, which, in any case, was redolent of popish hegemony. If natives did not respond to the Word, it must be because God did not want them to hear it.

So Protestant Europe focused its energies on ‘ministry’, which was what replaced sacrificial priesthood. Ministry was a public office, connected to a specific congregation – the parish – which the magisterial reformers accepted as the base unit. That office required a special vocation but not celibacy. That was how Melanchthon, Bullinger, Bucer and Calvin sidestepped the implications of Luther’s initial pronouncements that we were all our own priests. How was one called to that vocation? It was, said the magisterial reformers, a reflection of the order in God’s divine will. Luther’s preference was for a succession of ministers through ordination, which he understood as the apostolic succession in the Church, albeit not a conferring of grace but a confirmation of its already being present. In Zürich, by contrast, Zwingli divided the vocation of ministers into an ‘internal’ (spiritual) one and an ‘external’ (magisterial) one, thus allowing the state or its representatives a legitimate say in who should be appointed to the ministry. Protestant Churches generally accepted their obedience to the powers that be as the price of order and decorum. Calvin followed Martin Bucer in Strasbourg in expanding the offices of the Church into a variety of vocations.

In the English Protestant Church, the changes were more ambiguous. The clergy could marry, though many (including Queen Elizabeth I) found it unseemly. An ambivalent theology denied the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist, but Anglican ministers remained priests. Within European Protestantism’s variable ecclesiastical geometry, there was a greater insistence that the validity of this new ministry was determined by what the individual in question did and, even more importantly, said. The minister’s educational attainments and learning, family life and local standing, preaching abilities and ‘good conversation’ – these became the outward and visible signs of his vocation. But these were ideals, and inclined to inflate. And since ministry was in a relationship to those being ministered to there were always doubts. Protestant anxiety about uprightness and vocation began early on.

Finding ministers to fit these demands was not easy. In German and Swiss lands, old priests were mostly declared new ministers, but incumbents had little idea of what to preach and how to hold the new services. A whole generation had to be educated for a different ministry. In the first generation, there were not enough adequately trained Reformed ministers, and salaries were inadequate. Even in Elizabethan England, the supply of well-trained clergy was problematic. Very gradually, however, the Protestant investment in higher education paid dividends. By 1600, only about 25 per cent of Lutheran clergy entering the ministry in the empire did not have a university degree.

Educational attainment was not a passport to effective ministry. The relationship between ministers and their congregations was ambivalent, and educated pastors in the rural world created suspicions. In rural Electoral Saxony and Brandenburg, as in English shires, the proportions of those with a degree among the rural clergy were lower than in urban environments. Not only was there a hierarchy of posts, with urban ones attracting the more highly qualified candidates, but rural patrons looked for other qualities in their local pastors than their academic attainments. The more the Protestant clerical ministry stabilized, the higher the levels of ministerial career and family endogamy, such that the sons of ministers in their turn married into the clergy and became clergymen themselves. That increased the focus on the parsonage as the place where Christian good conduct was exemplified. Such an exemplification was more important, given the focus on the family in Protestant life and culture. But repeatedly the unrealistic expectations of ministers put them at odds with their congregations. Communities not only expected their ministers to be learned, sober, upright and modest, but they also wanted them to preserve local traditions.

The clergy therefore were under contradictory pressures. Visitors and superintendants in German Protestant lands wanted them to catechize everyone, but not be too harsh with those who could not learn the catechism by heart. They wanted the minister to maintain harmony with his congregation, and yet abstain from revelry and threaten unrepentant parishioners with exclusion. They wanted him to preach, but then found church wardens complaining when sermons were too long. The problem was that the stabilization of a Protestant ministry made it the focus for precisely the same anticlerical suspicions which had fuelled the Reformation in the first place. The lesson from a century of attempting to put in place a new ministry was that it could be done properly only with the assistance of secular authorities. But in many places Protestantism was not the religion of state; and in those where it was rulers did not offer the support required.

As Protestant Churches embedded themselves in society, so ‘discipline’ (the shaping of public behaviour and morality) became part of an underlying anxiety about order. Protestants abolished confession and penance, but they had yet to identify the ways by which the Reformation could become more than an aspiration. Luther and his collaborators began with the hope that it would happen on its own as part of God’s providence. Their subsequent disillusionment was the reverse side of the coin to the naive enthusiasm that elementary education would change people’s convictions. Second-generation Lutheran pastors lamented that the heroic age was over and that the Reformation’s opportunities had been squandered. Calvin, a second-generation reformer, sought to root discipline in the Protestant polity. The disciplining of the laity was driven by the unease that religious change had made little impact on the population at large.

In Lutheran Germany, ecclesiastical discipline became based around marriage courts, consistories and parish visitations. By the second half of the sixteenth century, the last of these were regular affairs. The visiting committee subjected pastors, sextons, schoolmasters and local officials to a detailed questionnaire, focusing on church attendance, catechism and ungodly living. Visitations in urban environments were often greeted with sullen uncooperativeness. In rural parishes, however, the visitors found what they were looking for, and it was an unedifying spectacle. Nobles often set the tone by ‘holding the servants of God’s word in contempt’. Attendance on Sundays was poor, and even worse at catechism classes. ‘You will find more of them out fishing than at service,’ said one protocol. Parents held their children back, claiming that they could not afford the school fees, or shirts and clogs. There were endless reports of those for whom gambling was a profession, of ‘epicureans who do not believe in the resurrection of the dead’, of Anabaptists and gypsies, and of those who swore, quarrelled, fought and drank too much. Threats, said the pastors, were useless. We warn them, reported one protocol, but the reply comes: ‘Why pray? The Turks and the Pope are not after us.’ The only remedy was to use the instruments which had already proved inadequate, and which would turn up more information of what seemed like failure. Protestant confessional Christianity was a complex message. To understand it required literate skills and an investment of time and energy.

In Reformed (Calvinist) Protestant environments, discipline became the mark of the true Church. In Geneva, it took the form of the consistory, composed of lay elders, a syndic and the ministers of the city, meeting each Thursday. Thousands of pages of registers record its intrusions into private lives. In the years after Calvin’s death, one in fifteen of the population of the city appeared before it; 681 individuals were ‘suspended’ from being members of the congregation, the most common sanction it applied. Excommunication was rarer, reserved for those who had treated suspension with contempt or had been found guilty of serious breaches of public morality. To the degree that suspension incurred social penalties, it worked. But Geneva was a small place, one where the magistrates took their role seriously, supporting the consistory.

At first sight, the Genevan consistory is evidence for the increasing importance of moral regulation in the Protestant Reformation, proof that social discipline was part of confessionalization. Yet the consistory was as much interested in religious uniformity as in moral uplift. The persistence of Catholic rituals, and the ease with which the city’s ordinances were evaded, led Calvin to propose in January 1546 the institution of an annual visitation of Geneva’s rural parishes, followed by domestic visitations by members of the consistory in 1551. In Geneva, and elsewhere, the Protestant Reformation heightened the significance of religious conformity, which in turn increased anxieties about the degree to which God would visit his anger on a city for its immorality. The anxiety about social discipline arose from a concern for religious purity.

The consistory court often tried to reconcile the parties in cases of marital breakdown, the elders being concerned to uphold the dignity of marriage and the sanctity of a promise before God. Almost a quarter of the cases involving sexual misdemeanour that came before the Geneva consistory in the years 1568–82 involved couples who, having made promises of marriage, had sex before being actually married. The consistory insisted that betrothals be honoured but it had little interest in making men and women marry who had shared physical intimacy, even if the result had been an illegitimate child. Elders knew the complexities of interpersonal disputes and the vulnerability of individuals, especially women. They appreciated that people lied in their testimonies, that their stories were one-sided, and that the consistory was fed tittle-tattle as evidence. They understood that there might be little to be gained from an exclusion or excommunication of an individual, and nothing at all from passing some cases on to the civil magistrates. Where the consistory was disposed to take a judgemental view, it weighed up carefully the need to minister to individuals (particularly women) in difficulties, against that of preventing scandal. Even in Geneva, the consistory was not part of a top–down supervision of moral reform. Genevans found ways to cover up their sexual transgressions from the consistory. Their womenfolk knew how to exploit the court as a weapon in defence of their own honour. There were always limits to the ‘godly reformation’.

CATHOLIC REINVIGORATION

Protestant pessimism was inspired partly by the revival of Catholicism as a religious and political force in Europe. In eastern and central Europe, the balance of confessional forces tilted back towards the Roman Catholic Church in the first half of the seventeenth century. To Protestants, this was inexplicable. How was it that a Church whose incapacity to reform itself had been evident for centuries, and which they believed to have been deserted by God, could find the energy and will to declare that it had been right all along? The concept of a ‘Counter-Reformation’ (Gegenreformation) was first articulated by nineteenth-century German Protestant historians who needed a name for whatever it was that had begun as a reaction to Luther and continued through to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which was when they thought it came to an end. For other Catholic historians, the idea of a Counter-Reformation accorded too much weight to the forces of reaction to Protestantism, to its politico-ecclesiastical manifestations, and to its overall coherent orchestration. What happened was not simply reactive, but animated by movements in the Church that predated Luther, and which had local roots and lacked coordination, but which inspired a revived spirituality that survived beyond the Peace of Westphalia into the eighteenth century. For that, the term ‘Catholic Reformation’ has often been preferred.

That revival went beyond ‘Tridentine Catholicism’, which suggests an ecclesiastical programme of reform, put in place by the Council of Trent (1545–63) and then implemented across the Catholic world in accordance with some central directive. The Catholic Church was a complex organism which responded in contradictory ways to the changes around it. To speak of ‘Catholic revival’ suggests an emphasis on the ‘missionary church’ which, despite the importance of the overseas engagements as well as those in eastern Europe and the Levant, does not do justice to the way the Roman Catholic Church came to stand for a certain sort of stability and relationship to the past, a particular kind of spiritual authority, and a way of communicating truth to its believers. Catholic reinvigoration proceeded on the basis of that appeal.

New and reformed religious orders were essential to that reinvigoration as it affected ordinary men and women. As missioners, preachers, educators, confessors, catechists, hospital-workers and ministers to the dispossessed, the vagrant and abandoned, they reconfigured the Catholic pastoral landscape. The success of Catholic confessionalization cannot be understood without them. As with overseas mission, the older orders remained significant. The Dominicans probably doubled their numbers between 1500 and 1650. The Franciscans in their various branches grew at approaching the same rate. Although there was official reluctance to create new orders, the pressure to do so came from below, from the charismatic figures and groups that responded to the changing world around them.

Among the plethora of new congregations and orders, the most significant and numerous were the Capuchins, the Jesuits and (of the many new congregations for women) the Ursulines. From the tiny initial group around the young Italian Observant friar Matteo Serafini, the Capuchins grew to a company approaching 30,000 by 1650, a major influence in the Italian peninsula as preachers and workers in times of plague. In 1574, the congregation had crossed the Alps to France, Spain and Germany, active wherever re-Catholicization was underway and with a reputation for accompanying people in times of uncertainty. The Basque nobleman and ex-soldier Ignatius Loyola had only nine companions when the bull establishing the Society of Jesus was issued in 1540. By his death, the Jesuits numbered about 1,000, divided into twelve provinces, and they had established thirty-three colleges. A decade later, there were 3,500, and 13,000 by 1615. Their churches, houses, colleges and universities were scattered unevenly across southern and western Europe but they were especially present in urban centres. In smaller towns, their buildings often stood out as the most imposing and distinctive.

The Ursulines began as a community of single women and widows around Angela Merici from near Brescia. They devoted themselves to helping in hospitals for incurables, looking after orphans, and instructing girls in the elements of Christianity and literacy. Protected by Archbishop Carlo Borromeo of Milan, they became a common sight in North Italy, many residing at home and taking only private vows to their congregation, but increasingly conventualized. The papal territory of Avignon provided the bridgehead into France, where, from the early years of the seventeenth century, there were communities of Ursulines in most cities, serving the sick, working with prostitutes, and teaching the catechism and rudiments of reading and writing to young girls.

The charismatic founding figures of these new orders had little in common. The orders which they founded were very different from one another in their constitution, their relationship to the rest of the Church and their internationalism. Their own contribution to their foundations was disparate. In one key respect, however, they are alike. Ecclesiastical reform was not part of their vocabulary; ‘Spirit’, ‘God’, ‘the world’ and ‘works of mercy’ were. Matteo Serafini was from a modest background in the duchy of Urbino and became a Franciscan at the age of seventeen. Like Angela Merici, he drew on late-medieval Franciscan spirituality and in 1525 left his monastery to become a drop-out, finding refuge in Ancona and Calabria, begging for daily bread and turning up in towns to preach repentance. When he and his companions arrived, they were greeted as ‘hermits’ (scapuccini) and the name stuck. The Capuchins would not have existed, however, without support in high places. Their patrons included Catarina Cibo (duchess of Camerino and niece of Pope Clement VII) and Vittoria Colonna (widow of Ferrante Colonna and friend of Michelangelo), through whose influence the Capuchins obtained papal recognition in 1528. Matteo was elected its first vicar-general in 1529, but his relationship with the order he had founded was ephemeral. He resigned his office to return to his alternative lifestyle. In Venice, where he died in 1552, he entered a law court with his cowl over his head and a pole with a lantern on it. When asked what he was looking for, he replied: ‘I am looking for Justice.’ The reinvigoration of Catholic spirituality drew on the uneasy consciences of those in the urban world.

Ignatius Loyola dictated his life story in around 1553–5 to his Portuguese confidant in Rome, Luis Gonçalves da Câmara. It began in 1521 with a great turning-point, when he was wounded at the battle of Pamplona, and ended, equally abruptly, with his arrival in Rome in November 1538, before the founding of the order. He furnishes us with an aseptic account of his own spiritual journey that began with slow recuperation in the family castle at Azpeitia, reading the lives of the saints, and took him to the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat in Catalonia, where after a night in vigil he laid down his sword and dagger and took up a pilgrim’s staff and beggar’s clothing. At nearby Manresa in 1523 he discovered the Imitation of Christ, a work of late-medieval spirituality. He surrendered himself to prayer, fasting and self-flagellation, abandoning conventions and letting his hair and fingernails grow. Little by little he tempered these austerities as his soul-searching, accompanied by strong visions, produced a renewed sense of serenity.

His notes on these experiences formed elements of the Spiritual Exercises, published in Rome with papal approval in 1548. The Exercises offered a ‘way of proceeding’ in a series of ‘weeks’ for those facing an important crossroads in their lives. They centred around a particular approach to meditative prayer with Gospel texts in which individuals enter into dialogue with Christ, Mary and God the Father, feel acutely their sins, acknowledge the disorder in their lives, accept all that is wrong with the world, and put themselves in a new relationship towards it. As an exercise in spiritual communication, it was unique. Its impact on the Jesuit Order and beyond was profound.

Dressed as a pilgrim, Ignatius lived for the next fifteen years from begging, much of it on the streets. Occasionally he fell foul of the Inquisition for his unconventionality. He became a student in Paris and made friends with like-minded souls. They decided to go to Jerusalem or, if that did not work out, to Rome to offer themselves to the pope for whatever he judged ‘for the greater glory of God and the good of souls’. They met up in Venice in January 1537 where, waiting for a ship to Palestine, they worked in hospitals. By now informally referring to themselves as the ‘Company of Jesus’, they appeared in Rome in November 1538 where, as with the Capuchins, it was through a contact in high places (the Venetian Gasparo Contarini) that they secured assent for the ‘Formula of the Institute’, the background document for the papal bull of September 1540, developed into the ‘Constitutions’ by Loyola and his secretary, Juan Alfonso de Polanco. Unlike the founder of the Capuchins, Matteo da Bascia, Ignatius continued to play a decisive role in the Jesuits until his death in 1556.

The Jesuits were the ‘Church Militant’. The Formula opened by describing a member of the society as ‘a soldier of God beneath the banner of the Cross’. The ‘Christian soldier’, however, was a familiar metaphor and had no specifically military connotations. When the Constitutions referred to the ‘Superior General’ of the order (of which Ignatius was the first), it was not in the sense of a military general. Only some years after Ignatius’s death did Jesuits (notably Jerónimo Nadal) begin to compare him directly with Luther, a new David against Goliath, called to God the same year that Luther hitched himself to the Devil. The Jesuits dedicated themselves to absolute obedience to the pope because their rule forbade them from becoming involved in the diocesan life of the Church. Unlike other regular orders, they were not bound to celebrate the canonical hours in common, so they could be free for preaching, teaching or tending the sick and dying. They could go ‘anywhere in the world where there was hope of God’s greater glory and the good of souls’. Their ministry was, for several decades in the sixteenth century, unique, offering a new relationship between the regular orders and the world at large, recruiting and operating on an international scale. Loyola and his successors as generals of the order reflect the talent which the Jesuits recruited.

The Formula envisaged their role as itinerant preachers to include teaching outside as well as inside churches. They exported Spanish traditions of setting religious texts to simple tunes, sung by the children in the streets. Printed colloquial catechisms in the Protestant fashion were adopted by the Jesuits too. Jesuit preaching was part of teaching, both being blood-brethren to the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist, the well-springs of activity in the world. That activity included assistance to those suffering from disasters, accompanying convicted prisoners to the scaffold, establishing orphanages and rehabilitation centres for prostitutes, and mediating in local quarrels. Although divided over the persecution of Jews in Europe, the Jesuits continued to accept New Christians (conversos) into their ranks (Ignatius was never more radical than when he said that he would have liked to be of Jewish blood in order to be of the same race as Christ) and ministered in the ghettoes of Venice, Rome and Avignon. They instituted lay confraternities, the student society established at the Roman College in 1564 under the auspices of the Virgin Mary being the model for the Marian congregations that became fashioners of lay piety and a ‘Third Order’ adjunct of the Jesuits. Their engagements with the world posed moral dilemmas. From the beginning, the Jesuits treated casuistry (non-pejoratively ‘the study of cases of conscience’) as an essential subject of study – as vital as its complement, rhetoric, to the ministry of the Word. Taking the best of the confessors’ manuals as their texts, they entered the minefield of older theological battles about how human inadequacies (‘sins’) were to be handled by the Church and the extent to which human beings, if at all, could participate in their own salvation.

Nothing was more challenging to both Catholic and Protestant Churches than the humanist notion that education could create pious and responsible citizens and change the world. By 1560, the Jesuits’ commitment to education began to dwarf their other responsibilities. Polanco, writing in the name of the second general, Diego Laínez, declared: ‘every Jesuit must bear his part of the burden of the schools’. A burden it was, one that the Jesuits took on without foreseeing its consequences when they opened their first school, in Messina, Sicily. It was a great success. By the 1550s, Jesuit schools opened at the rate of almost five a year; and the rhythm continued throughout the rest of the century. The Protestant Latin schools could not match that achievement. The Jesuits did not charge tuition fees but relied on endowments and foundations from aristocratic patrons and city councils, the latter relieved to hand over educational provision to a professionally competent body. Students were divided into classes, moving after examination from one class to a higher one, and skills graded accordingly. Pupils were offered a progressive curriculum that emphasized relevance to the contemporary world. Active learning was encouraged through homework, composing and delivering speeches, memorizing and reciting poetry, playing musical instruments and acting in theatrical dramas. With a good range of teachers, Jesuit schools could aim to provide a broad education. They defined what a Catholic upbringing for boys should be. Jesuit colleges were not seminaries but the training grounds for the more diverse social élites of Catholic Europe. They became the principal driving force for re-Catholicization.

Educational endeavour cost the Jesuits dearly. ‘The Society is being ruined by taking on so many schools,’ wrote Gioseffo Cortesono, the rector of the German College in the late 1560s, the most expensive of all the Jesuits’ educational establishments, founded to spearhead re-Catholicism in Germany. By that date there were too few Jesuits for the number of its colleges, not to mention other commitments. Not all those who joined the order had done so to become college teachers. The more the Jesuits concentrated on that objective, the more problems they discovered. Some schools were only marginally viable and had to close, with debts and rancour on all sides. As the society came to grips with these difficulties, it became more worldly-wise. That widened the door to critics who argued that the Jesuits were too popular and accommodating for their own good. There was common ground between those who, in the early seventeenth century, criticized Jesuit moral theology for its ‘probabilism’ (the belief that, in difficult matters of conscience, one could safely follow a doctrine which was ‘probably’ true – attacked by critics as an open door to laxity), attacked prominent Jesuits for arguing that there were occasions when it might be legitimate to resist a prince, and intimated that it was an ambitious society, promoting its own wealth and interests at the expense of everything else.

The impact of Catholic reinvigoration owed a great deal to women. Here, however, the contradictions between the challenges of the world and the ecclesiastical response became more marked. Of the thirty or so new religious orders and congregations, the majority had female branches, and nine were devoted exclusively to women. All of these new foundations, with the exception of the Discalced (‘bare-foot’) Carmelites, founded by Teresa of Ávila and the only one founded by a woman that included men, stressed active ministry in the world. But how was active ministry by women to work in practice? There was no shortage of women entering convents. Some defied their own families to do so, drawn to the alternative lifestyle that it afforded, the opportunity for independent female space, the chance to follow pursuits that would not have been theirs, and a spiritual domain towards which they felt drawn. Contemplative nuns were, although theoretically brides of Christ and dead to the world, in discreet and regular touch with it, through their families, their correspondence and their prayer. Teresa of Ávila was the most remarkable contemplative nun of her generation, but she would have denied that her form of meditation and prayer did not engage with the world. As she travelled around Spain promoting her Carmelite order, she repeatedly complained about the tension in her life. ‘On the one hand, God was calling me,’ she reflected. ‘On the other, I was following the world.’

The ecclesiastical response to the female religious was increasingly restrictive. At the final session of the Council of Trent, the reform of monasteries and the religious life was debated. Celibate and monastic life had been a Protestant target and the subject could not be ignored. The council reaffirmed female enclosure, reinforced in 1566 when Pius V decreed that all female religious communities not practising enclosure must be suppressed. The primary motive was to control sexuality, both women’s and men’s. Chastity was the definition of the female religious life, and the only way to protect nuns’ virginity was through strict enclosure.

As things turned out, however, the Tridentine decree was not completely enforced. The Ursulines exploited their connections with Archbishop Borromeo, gradually accepting enclosure but maintaining devout activity. Jeanne de Chantal and François de Sales’s Order of the Visitation (‘Visitandines’) briefly flourished in Savoy and France in the early seventeenth century as a community of female widows, whose family commitments or fragile health prevented them from entering religious orders but who wanted their dedication to God to be reflected in social mission. Mary Ward emigrated to the Catholic Low Countries in 1606 and was inspired by the Jesuits to establish her own order (the Institute of Mary) in 1609. The growing presence of Mary Ward’s sisters, coupled with their association with the Jesuits and their refusal to accept enclosure and use a regular habit, earned Sister Mary many enemies. Her ladies were dismissed as ‘noxious weeds’ and ‘galloping girls’ and she was condemned as a heretic in 1631, her order being suppressed the following year. But, as Louis XIV was later to discover with the nuns of Port Royal, putting women behind bars did not isolate them. Religion empowered women in various ways. François de Sales became a father-confessor by letters to godly widows whom he encouraged to follow their consciences and devote themselves to God. His correspondence was published in his Introduction to the Devout Life (1609), a book which showed how men and women could participate in religious life. Only the most misogynist of religious reformers could ignore the role of women, especially when they so often showed themselves more pious than their male counterparts.

THE COUNCIL OF TRENT AND THE PAPAL PRINCE

On 4 December 1563, Cardinal Giovanni Morone asked the conclave of 268 prelates at the Council of Trent if they accepted its closure. Cardinal Charles of Lorraine then pronounced the acclamations, beginning ‘to the blessed Pope Pius, our Lord, pontiff of the Holy, Universal Church’ and ending with: ‘Anathema to all Heretics!’ The Auditor of the Sacra Rota (the papal Supreme Court), Gabriele Paleotti, reported that many wept for joy, while those who had opposed one another in its deliberations now congratulated one another. They celebrated the end of the longest-running Church council for a millennium.

The council began its work eighteen years before in December 1545. Its convocation had been delayed by the papacy’s reluctance to commit itself to a body whose authority might become a challenge to the papal monarchy. It was further hampered by politicking between the Valois and the Habsburgs, the emperor seeking a council that would keep the door open to Protestant mediation. Once it was in session, its proceedings were delayed by issues of protocol, who presided (papal legates), who could speak and vote (the legates conceded freedom of speech but gained a victory on limited proxy voting) and differences over the agenda. The emperor wanted disciplinary reforms to be treated first and doctrine later. The papacy wanted clarity on doctrine and no further compromises. The upshot was a compromise in which both issues were treated hand-in-hand. That formula guaranteed that the council was not about achieving a reconciliation of Christendom but a refutation of Protestant schism.

The politicking continued after the first session (from December 1545 to March 1547), delaying the second until May 1551, by which time the council moved to Bologna in the Papal States in order to satisfy the papacy’s anxiety about imperial influence at Trent. That session in turn was brought to a halt for almost a decade, during which time Gian Pietro Carafa was elected to the papal throne as Pope Paul IV in May 1555. Paul IV drew his inspiration from the caesaro-papalism of medieval popes. He mistrusted councils, especially one so far from his control, and hated the Habsburgs, berating them for signing the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and briefly involving the papacy in a disastrous war with Philip II in 1556. Ascetic and autocratic, Paul lavished his attentions on the Roman Inquisition. Former papal legates at the Council of Trent (Morone and Pole) were among its suspects. Not the least of the battles fought out at Trent was the endgame of the influence of spirituali among Italian churchmen and theologians.

Paul IV died in 1559 and his successor, Giovanni Angelo Medici (Pope Pius IV), signalled a change of direction from his predecessor, whose two cardinal-nephews were eliminated, one strangled and the other hanged. Pius IV’s acknowledgement of the need for the council to finish its work was that of a realist who recognized that the world was changing. Catherine de Médicis, the regent in France, as well as Emperor Ferdinand I, wanted a fresh start. Philip II preferred it to resume where it had left off, and that was the view which prevailed under Pius IV. When the council reconvened in Trent for its final session in January 1563, its greatest crisis was yet to come. The most contentious debate of all concerned the residential requirement of bishops in their sees. Spanish bishops championed the position that the right of residence was demanded by divine right and God’s law. If that was the case, it ruled out papal dispensations and threatened the role of the cardinals in Rome as well as papal authority. Eustache du Bellay, bishop of Paris, joined the Spanish in protesting that the real novelty was papal supremacy, which created a ‘temporal tyranny’ in the Church. The Jesuit Laínez supported the Roman Curia, saying that the pope was the successor of the Apostles and that anyone who claimed authority otherwise was a heretic. The view won the order few friends, especially among the French.

The deadlock hastened the death of two papal legates in rapid succession in May 1563. Only the recall to Trent of the papal diplomat Cardinal Morone saved the day. He secured the support of Cardinal Charles of Lorraine and the voting power of the French and imperial delegations for his compromise proposal by which the residence of bishops was required because they were representatives of God’s vicar on earth (the pope), who, by implication, could also issue dispensations as and when he needed to. This was just one part of the wide-ranging decisions, agreed on 11 November 1563, which constituted the kernel of the institutional changes proposed at Trent. They included new norms for the appointment of bishops and an injunction about preaching. Bishops were required to hold diocesan synods annually and provincial councils every three years, and to visit every parish in their diocese once a year, and they were accorded increased authority over ecclesiastical corporations and orders, especially cathedral chapters.

What had the fathers at Trent achieved? In the case of doctrine, they had a clear target in Protestant theology. Protestants never doubted that its canons were aimed against them. In reality, however, the delegates at Trent knew next to nothing about Zwingli and Calvin. Luther was the enemy, viewed through the eyes of his Catholic theological critics. Yet the confrontational presentation of Trent’s theological decisions masked the reality that its decrees were, in many respects, statements of an agreed middle ground, avoiding areas where there would be disagreement. So Trent’s decrees broadened the sources of Revealed Truth beyond the Bible to include apostolic traditions, but then refused to state precisely what those traditions were. In the long decree on Original Sin (sixteen chapters and thirty-three canons), the fathers skirted round the difficulty of defining the nature of grace and its efficacy, as well as free will. This laid a long fuse that would in the next century detonate acrimonious division. It began at Louvain in the 1560s with the teachings of Michel de Bay and exploded with those of his pupil and successor Corneille Janssens (Jansenius). The council had nothing to say on Marian worship. It discussed the issue of vernacular translations of the Bible, but made no recommendations. Although various decrees called for ‘superstitious’ uses of religious ritual to be abolished, they did not specify where the lines were to be drawn. There was no overall Tridentine theological system though there were some themes, of which the most notable was that the clergy should act as a conduit of theological truth. Somewhere at Trent, the humanist dream of a direct experience of the Word of God gave way to ecclesiastical mediation and the reinvigoration of a clerical order, separate and special in the world.

The fathers at Trent worked within the limits of their experience. Their decrees reflected their sense of what was possible. No bishop of the New World was present and the Americas were never discussed. Delegates saw no alternative to the benefice system. There were canons about clerical decency and ecclesiastical order but no Tridentine aesthetic, musical or artistic. The churchmen recognized the importance of education, especially seminaries for the clergy, but failed to provide the necessary resources. Trent offered conservative renewal. Above all, its impact depended on its implementation and, as with the Protestant Reformation, this pushed the burden downwards, towards the locality. Tridentine reform became episcopal reform, and specifically Borromean reform.

That was because of the dominant presence of Carlo Borromeo, the model episcopal reformer, even in his own lifetime. He was promoted to the archdiocese of Milan in 1560, one of the largest and richest in Christendom. The loyal adjunct of his uncle Pius IV, he appeared at Trent in its last sessions among the Curialists. When the council ended, and following the death of his brother Federico and the election of Pope Pius V, he returned to Milan in 1566 and dedicated himself to his pastoral duties. Already in 1564 and with the aid of Nicolas Ormaneto (a disciple of Cardinals Ghiberti and Pole), his vicar-general, he had organized a meeting of 1,200 parish priests at a synod to promote Trent. He went on to conduct eleven diocesan synods and six provincial councils, and a campaign of parochial visitations that was not quite yearly (the Tridentine decrees were unrealistic) but enough to see a new level of clerical oversight of the laity. Confessors were instructed not to give absolution until penitence was really in evidence. New confraternities (‘of Christian Doctrine’) channelled the energies of the devout laity in ways that complemented the Borromean reinvigoration of religious life.

Borromeo’s obsessive campaigning was partly derived from his Milanese locale. Although he was accorded latitude by the papacy, Rome was wary of his tendency to be his province’s pontiff. The Spanish authorities were exasperated by his confrontational attitudes. The cathedral canons hated him and there was at least one attempt on his life. He accepted the new regular orders only on his own terms and his relationships with the Jesuits were bad. In reality, Borromeo was neither the first, nor the only, reforming bishop of his age. Nor was his authoritarianism the only style for Tridentine episcopal reformers. However, Borromeo’s flair for publicity and his close relations with Popes Pius IV and V ensured that his version of clerical authority prevailed towards 1600.

By then, the holding of diocesan councils and synods was reaching its apogee across the Catholic world. Even so, only a minority of bishops could be seen as zealous reformers. In France, for example, of the 108 bishops in office in 1614, a quarter had not been ordained, thirteen were under-age by Tridentine definitions, a sizeable minority had other posts that regularly took them away from their dioceses, and only thirty-eight ever held a diocesan synod. Although Rome played a greater part in validating episcopal nominations (especially through the nuncios), it could hardly gainsay local princely and aristocratic influence. In Germany, for example, many prince-bishops were political as well as ecclesiastical appointments. So Prince-Bishop Ernst of Bavaria had a glittering career in the Tridentine Church, becoming a bishop at twelve years of age in 1566, and going on to enjoy being prince-bishop of Liège, Hildesheim and Münster with no acknowledgement that Trent had happened. Bishops readily identified Catholic reform as the enforcement of their own authority and traditional ecclesiastical structures. Since the benefice system was so entrenched, and secular courts could (as in France) intervene to protect parish priests, bishops had an uphill task to establish effective control over their diocesan clergy. Even so, the education of the parish clergy did gradually improve. Diocesan visitations reflected a Sisyphean effort to embed religious change, especially in rural areas. As the clerical order confronted different local conditions and problems, ecclesiastical reform became more variegated.

Tridentine reform acquired Rome’s imprimatur thanks to a succession of energetic pontificates: Pope Pius V, Gregory XIII and Sixtus V. It was complemented by the evolution of the papacy towards something that resembled a monarchy. That implied a different relationship towards the Papal States, the ‘Lands of St Peter’ that constituted the principalities of the bishop of Rome in the middle of Italy. Because of its elective nature, the evolution was uneven. Nonetheless, under the Medici popes (Leo X and Clement VII) and the influence of the wars in the Italian peninsula in the first half of the century, the papacy’s concern became to increase its political authority in the peninsula. At the same time, it consolidated its hold within its own dominions, reducing the privileges conceded to communes and nobility, and acquiring new territories in the rough and tumble of the Italian Wars. Papal households grew in scale, matching its pretensions.

Essential to the emergence of the papal prince was the changing role of the College of Cardinals. The latter had been the senate of the Latin Christian Church, theoretically an inseparable and indistinguishable component of papal authority. During the ‘Luther Affair’, the college still met in consistory several times a week, considering all matters relating to the Church throughout the world. With the growth in power of the papal prince, that of the College of Cardinals waned. It met twice a month to rubber-stamp decisions. The number of cardinals grew as pontiffs shored up their position within the college by making new appointments to secure a loyal majority. Cardinals became mainly chosen from a small number of powerful Roman and northern Italian families, who lost their autonomy while retaining their authority as power-brokers. Their palaces were as large as their retinues, their furnishings and cuisines equipped for the social events that occasioned their soaring expenditures. Rome was still a world of gossip and intrigue in which the material issues of the Church such as property, income and pensions continued to weigh heavily.

On hand to nurture the friendships of cardinals, play upon their enmities and lubricate their lifestyles were the papal nephews. Under the pontificates of Pius IV, Pius V and Gregory XV the cardinal-nephew became a ‘favourite’. As with favourites to secular princes, however, the cardinal-nephew’s position was a delicate one. Sooner or later, the uncle would die. To assure his own future, the nephew had to keep on good terms with as many cardinals as possible, even while he sought to maintain the interests of his uncle. And secular rulers, especially the Spanish Habsburgs, had a large purse and tempting ecclesiastical offerings in Spanish Italy to offer cardinals who were prepared to play their tune. That was important because the cardinals elected the next pope. At the Conclave, the factions which emerged were complicated, the politics labyrinthine and the outcomes difficult to predict. The Spanish Habsburgs took to influencing matters by declaring openly who would be unacceptable (the exclusiva), a veto that reinforced their presence until the revival of French influence in the seventeenth century and the reform of the Conclave procedure by Gregory XV in 1621.

Little by little, cardinals became handmaids of papal power. The process began with the establishment of the Congregation of the Holy Office, the committee of cardinals which supervised the Roman Inquisition. Further placed under papal direction by Paul IV and reorganized by Pius V, the Inquisition became a weapon in the armoury of papal hegemony. Other congregations were added until, when regularized by Sixtus V in January 1588, they totalled fifteen. Through these committees the cardinals were closely involved in papal executive decision-making, both in the Papal States and in the wider Church.

The Council of Trent became essential to the emerging double sovereignty of the papal monarchy – of the Papal States on the one hand, and of the Church Universal on the other. With the ending of the Italian Wars, the risk had been that the papal monarchy would become a client of the Spanish Habsburgs. Trent offered the papacy a larger religious and ideological justification, the instrument for Catholic reinvigoration in the world at large. Pius IV and his successors seized the opportunity, realizing that, in so doing, they subsumed the reform of the Curia (their own backyard) into something wider. In issuing the bull confirming the council’s decrees, Pius IV used for the first time the title ‘Bishop of the Universal Church’ which had been accorded him in its last session.

The implication was immense. All ecclesiastical jurisdictions henceforth derived from the papacy and all bishops were simply his vicars. The new Index of Prohibited Books of 1564 reworked that of Paul IV. A new Profession of Faith was declared in November of that year, incorporating an oath of obedience to the pope, to which everyone entering office in the Church was required to subscribe. The Roman catechism of 1566 was issued on the basis of Tridentine decrees. It was followed by the Breviary (1568), Missal (1570) and Sixto-Clementine Bible (1590–1604) – just a few examples of Rome’s capacity to use the printing press to sustain its enlarged claims. These were encapsulated by the reform of the calendar by Gregory XIII in 1582. By harnessing cosmography and mathematics to its Universalist claims, Rome changed the calendar by ten days and, with it, the liturgical year. It invited the rest of the world (the Persians, the Chinese) to adopt it. In Protestant Europe, however, it was rejected. Christendom became divided by chronology as well as by confession.

The papacy’s image changed. Essential to the consecration of a new pope was the ceremonial procession from Saint Peter’s to St John Lateran, his episcopal seat, a triumphal coronation parade in which the new incumbent was carried with the symbols of his power (throne, crown and canopy) on a litter across the city along the Via Sacralis. The ceremony highlighted the pope’s sovereignty in his own state and in the world at large. In the triumphal procession of Sixtus V in 1585, the canopy was carried by Japanese envoys who understood the message: that the Catholic Church put Christendom in a global context. St Peter’s, extended with a nave in the form of a Latin cross to accommodate the crowds, was consecrated by Clement VIII in 1594. It was the biggest church in Christendom and, by the mid-seventeenth century, it was complemented by the colonnaded piazza in front of it. Pope Urban VIII commissioned Gian Lorenzo Bernini to construct the baldachin over the high altar. Above its twisted bronze columns and canopy sat a cross on top of a golden globe.

The archaeological explorations of the Roman catacombs at the end of the sixteenth century provided further evidence for the historic continuity of Catholicism against Protestant innovation. The bodies and relics of saints supplied new objects of devotion for churches in Rome and for export elsewhere. From the Jubilee of 1600 onwards, papal programmes catered for the growing numbers of pilgrims, including an improved road system, public fountains and obelisks. Rome’s literary salons began to refer to the new papal governing style as ‘absolutism’ under the pontificate of Clement VIII. For aficionados, the History of the Council of Trent, published pseudonymously in London in 1619, was required reading. It did not take long for them to divine that it was written by the Venetian Paolo Sarpi, a natural philosopher, Galileo’s friend and a considerable theologian. The subtitle to the work hinted at its anti-papal objective: ‘. . . and particularly the practices of the court of Rome to hinder the reformation of their errors & to maintaine their greatness’. Using original documents, Sarpi developed the theme that had already won him the hostility of Rome during the Venetian Interdict (the censure of the city by the Vatican in the years 1606–10). Rome’s absolutism had ruined the efforts of ‘godly men’ to ‘reconcile’ the Reformation through a council, and turned it into an instrument that made Christendom’s divisions ‘irreconcilable’. Worse, papal absolutism subverted the efforts of bishops to regain their authority and arrogated to Rome ‘an unlimited excesse’ of power. Sarpi’s clever work cemented a hostile image of papal absolutism.

The sovereign popes of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries set about reforming the Curia, Christendom’s most elaborate bureaucracy. That they did not succeed is not surprising, but it was not for want of trying. It was a revenue stream in its own right with the sale of offices and ‘reversions’ (transfers to another incumbent). While spiritual revenues (the income from the Church at large) grew sluggishly, the temporal revenues (the income from Papal States’ taxes) rose, contributing three quarters of papal revenues by 1600 and making the Papal States one of the most heavily taxed parts of Europe. Contemporaries recognized, however, that the papal monarchy was not a strong military power; it was a medium-sized player sheltering under Spanish Habsburg overlordship. The papacy remained a clerical state which benefited the few. The Borghese pope, Paul V, the Barberini pope, Urban VIII, and the Pamfili pope, Innocent X, would consolidate their family’s fortunes as in a dynastic monarchy, but that did not sit comfortably with the Tridentine spirit which Rome had appropriated.

THE CHURCHES AND THE SUPERNATURAL

Belief in the supernatural was a social reality. It explained what happened by way of good and evil in the world. It was especially a way of understanding misfortune. It linked the present with the past and the future in ways that gave coherence to time and space, and accorded God a central place in the direction of affairs. Within an overwhelmingly Aristotelian metaphysic, the learned had been taught to expect that there were spirits in the cosmos. In a world view dominated by ultimate stasis, that was how the permanent motion of the sun and planets was explained. Equally, human beings had souls as well as bodies. Explaining how the two were linked was the essence of moral theology.

Beyond the central premise of the supernatural and its accompanying social reality lay a series of debates that had preoccupied intellectuals before the Protestant Reformation, and also coloured the way in which they understood the beliefs of the unlearned. The debates crossed disciplinary divides. Physicians questioned the experiential evidence relating to the cures that cunning men and wise women supposedly worked. Lawyers cross-examined suspected impostors and fraudsters. Theologians established the distinction between beneficent and malevolent uses of the supernatural. They tried to define the limits within which Church liturgical apparatus (holy water, incantatory prayers, exorcism, crucifixes and so on) could be used to access the power of the supernatural, and by whom. The Church claimed that such power existed and that it was there to wield it.

The second change was the result of the Protestant Reformation. By focusing on the immediacy and presence of God in the world, Protestants magnified the reality and menace of the Devil. Among Catholics too, the sense of living in a world in which God’s ongoing and proximate battle with the Devil was also made more immediate by the emphasis on heresy as a form of maleficium. Crucially, however, the debates that had preceded the Reformation about when and how it was legitimate to deploy supernatural power, and by whom, became polemicized as between Protestants and Catholics. By radically shifting the grammar (the understanding) and the semiotics (what things stood for) of salvation, Protestant theologians created a platform from which to criticize the Catholic Church as ‘superstitious’. Catholic theologians responded in kind, purging traditions of elements for which there seemed no adequate theological grounds or experiential evidence on the one hand, but defending the power of Catholic rites against their critics on the other. The controversies became ones that were not between ‘learned’ understandings of the power and danger of the supernatural, and how these differed from unlettered or ‘popular’ ones, but between and across the learned, each side demonizing the other. These broad-ranging controversies made it more difficult to fabricate hard and fast rules to regulate the supernatural and establish acceptable behaviour. The toughest confessional battles of this period were over the theology, reality, efficacy and appropriateness of prodigies, providences, possession, exorcism, apparitions, prophecies, dreams, magic and witchcraft. Only towards the middle of the seventeenth century did those skirmishes retreat into less confessionalized debate.

Such arguments fed through into theologically led campaigns or magisterially mediated prosecutions of those seen to be falsely claiming access to supernatural power, or doing so with the intention of making money for themselves or doing other people harm. In parts of Europe such campaigns turned into missionary terrain for the reordering of popular culture, aiming (in the case of Catholic reinvigoration) to suppress pilgrimages and healing shrines, and eliminate magical and protective rites. Such zeal was evident in the case of witches. There may have been more witchcraft victims than there were victims of religious persecution in this period. Estimates vary, but there were perhaps between 32,000 and 38,000 witches executed in the period from 1450 to 1715, the majority of them before 1650. It was not principally a misogynist campaign, linked to changing attitudes to women. Most of the victims were accused by their neighbours, and many of their accusers were themselves women, while about a quarter of those convicted were men. Whether a witch was convicted depended on all sorts of local elements, which included the existence or otherwise of forms of local reconciliation, the determination of local élites to prosecute such cases, and the nature of the juridical framework in which such prosecutions took place. Witches were prosecuted only when states, magistrates, local notables and clerics took such matters seriously. That they did so reflected the fact that witchcraft became a state offence, prosecutable before secular courts, as well as an ecclesiastical offence. That change occurred partly as a result of the Reformation, but also because of the heightened anxieties raised by those confessionalized debates.

Local patterns varied enormously. They depended in part on how those tensions were focused by political and social divisions. But witch-hunts were also set in motion by those in authority who projected their anxieties in this particular direction. In Scotland and elsewhere, the new judicial presence of the state in localities provided an avenue for prosecutions that had not existed previously. On the other hand, the Italian and Spanish Inquisitions were sceptical towards witchcraft and made few accusations. In the fervour of Tridentine visitation and the attempt to win converts to Catholicism, Cardinal Borromeo proved an energetic witch-hunter, despairing at the leniency of the Inquisition. His precedent was followed by some Catholic prince-bishops in Germany in the Thirty Years War, under whom some of the worst witch crazes occurred. Already before 1650, the debates among the élites in western Europe about the nature and reality of supernatural power were beginning to have an impact on the willingness of those in authority to entertain such prosecutions. Magistrates began to be more cautious in the face of the criticism they might incur for pursuing them. Christendom needed to be protected from the malevolence of the Devil. Europe was not so sure.