Conversos in Counter-Reformation Italy

Abstract

The New Christians who arrived in Naples at the beginning of the sixteenth century believed that they had come to a place very different from Spain and Portugal. Italy lacked the tribunals of the Inquisition which had persecuted them in Spain and sent them looking for safe refuge. However, by the 1540s, the situation took a dramatic turn. Under Paul III, the papacy began the slow process of rebuilding after the devastation of the sack of Rome and of developing a response to the Protestant Reformation. Rather than seeking common ground with evangelicals or innovating in ways that would respond positively to the protests against the church, the papacy took a turn towards a more austere ethic, one that emphasized the most traditionalist and authoritarian strains in the Church’s past. The biblical division of the wheat from the chaff (Matthew 3: 12) became the guiding metaphor for the church as the Roman curia searched for more precise definitions of its guiding doctrines and marginalized those, including cardinals, who sought compromise with heresy and irreligion. The Roman Inquisition (1542), the Society of Jesus (1540), and the first Index of Prohibited Books (1549) were all founded in a relatively brief span of time, as instruments which at least in part served the goal of opposing the spread of evangelical teaching in Italy and reinforcing the authority and image of the clergy.