Second Interlude
Julius III, the growth of the League, The Inquisition
and Tomasso Mazzola
Following the sack of Rome in 1527, Paul III, elected in 1534, set about trying to rebuild the credibility of the Papacy but prolonged family quarrels undermined both his skilful balancing of France and Spain and his health. Paul died, aged 82, on November 10 1549. The Conclave which gathered to elect the new incumbent was one of the longest and bitterest ever held. The carefully preserved neutrality of the Papacy towards France and Spain crumbled as both countries sought to influence the outcome. The Conclave lasted eleven weeks and resulted in the election of a compromise candidate, Cardinal Del Monte, as Pope Julius III.
Julius III came from a bourgeois background, a family of lawyers, but he looked and behaved like a peasant. He was so ugly that painters found it difficult to depict him favourably. He was a great eater with a quick and violent temper, a gambler, a lover of festivals and celebrations of all kinds, banquets, music, theatre, carnivals, and he was a reckless spender. But he balanced these characteristics with dedication to his calling and the restoration and reform of the Church, shrewd business sense, and a skill in dealing with both France and Spain. He was a patron of Palestrina, whom he appointed Director of the choir of St Peter's, and employed Vasari and others to construct the magnificent Villa Giulia on the Via Flaminia. Above all, he was, like his namesake, a fervent admirer of Michelangelo and in 1552 he renewed his predecessor's pledge to develop the tradition of humanistic enquiry, learning and artistic endeavour in the spirit of Renaissance tolerance and appointed the energetic Cardinal Tomasso Mazzola as Justiciar to the League of Julius founded in 1512. This appointment ultimately secured the movement's survival but, tragically, Julius III died suddenly in 1554 after only five years in office. He was laid to rest in a tomb designed especially for him by the great architect and sculptor Giulio Pippi (or Giulio Romano).
And then came Paul IV. Determined to return the Church to its pre-Lutheran state, and to destroy heresy entirely, he used the Inquisition with increasing frequency, extending the definition of heresy to cover any form of immorality or sin, persecuted the Jews and founded the Index of Prohibited Books in 1558, placing at the top of his list Jewish books and works by Erasmus, who, whilst supporting the broad aims of Luther and the Reformation remained vigorously opposed to the resultant bloodshed and repression. A reign of terror began in Rome and many people were tried in secret for crimes they did not commit, or for minor misdemeanours. "Heresy," the Pontiff declared, "Must be rigorously crushed, like the plague, because it is plague of the soul. If we burn infected houses and clothes, we must annihilate heresy with the same severity."
J.A.S.ON, the secret movement founded in 1512 as Julius' League and given fresh impetus in 1552, watched the terrorising of fellow Christians with dismay. Comparisons with the Calvinist Consistory in Geneva were made and several of its members protested, only to be persecuted in turn. The Beadkeeper, the now aged Cardinal Giordano, confronted Paul IV with a series of reproaches based on the principles of Christian Humanism and the Julius' League. Paul tore the paper to shreds and flung them into the privy. Giordano was promptly arrested by the Inquisition. His books and his house were burned to ashes and he himself, almost deaf at seventy-six, died under the most brutal torture (his limbs and testicles were crushed in an iron mangle) as a traitor and heretic.
All of a sudden, with freedom of speech under attack from its own side, the League felt itself to be in mortal danger, having survived both the Sack of Rome and the Lutheran Reformation, albeit as an underground movement for several of those turbulent years. The Justiciar decided the best course of defence was attack and revenge. They abducted and murdered one of the administrators of the Index of Prohibited Books. His tongue was slit and his eyes were gouged from their sockets. The corpse was flung in the piazza outside St Peter's with the initials JASON carved with a dagger on his chest.
Late one night, Mazzola entered the Pope's chambers and poisoned him with arsenic. As Paul choked and thrashed, Mazzola whispered that the "Jay had come" and that Paul "should jump (i.e. die) or the Devil would have him." When the news that the Pope was dying reached the streets, J.A.S.On's members provoked a riot. A mob stormed the offices of the Inquisition, liberated the prisoners and burned the palace and all the evidence that had been gathered. The mob rushed to the Capitol and tore down the statue of Paul IV. They smashed its jaw and hammered at its eyes with chisels, mallets and other blunt instruments, dragging it through the streets and flinging it into the Tiber. Cardinal Mazzola decreed that the arms of the Carafa family should be removed or defaced and so severe was the people's rage that Paul's corpse had to be hurried into a grave in the deepest part of St Peter's in the dead of night under armed guard. Rumours swept Rome that the Pope had been slain by the spirit of Julius and that the corpse had since been desecrated, the word JASOn having been carved into its thigh.
The dead Pontiff's cousin, however, struck back swiftly. Angelo, Duke of San Gimignano, abducted Mazzola's young nephew from the University at Bologna, where the young man was studying law, and spirited him away to a castle high in the mountains near Cortina, putting him to work as a rock-breaking slave.
A furious Cardinal Mazzola sent for Nicolas Vigevano, a soldier in the Vatican's Swiss Guard and a member of J.A.S.On, and sent him to Cortina. Vigevano disguised himself as a washerwoman and gained entry to the castle late on the evening of March 14 1559 to rescue Antonio Mazzola. He was too late. He found the student concealed under a canvas in a damp dank cellar, hacked and mutilated, a dagger thrust through his genitals. The Cardinal's secret assassin moved silently through the castle until he reached the Great Hall where Angelo and his young son Hieronimo sat at dinner. Nicolas Vigevano butchered them both, showing neither mercy nor pity, even for the boy who squeaked out his pleas even as Vigevano slit his tongue. One of Angelo's servants, an eye witness, described "Old Nick" as "the Devil Incarnate", (perhaps initiating the use of "Old Nick" as a familiar name for the Devil). But the murders served their purpose. J.A.S.On. had defended one of its own - not for the last time - and shown it was a force in the land.
Julius III stood by the main principles of Christian Humanism, and encouraged the League to do likewise. These principles were free enquiry, open mindedness and religious tolerance. Reflecting the original meaning of "heresy" as "freedom to choose", the Pope echoed the words of Saint Augustine that "credere non potest homo nisi volens" ("no man can believe against his own will"). But under his successor, heresy was something to be crushed. However, it has to be said that the awesome power of the Inquisition stemmed largely from the Catholic Church's need to construct an appropriate response to the zeal of Protestant reformers who were intolerant to a degree unknown even in the Vatican of Paul IV.
Extracts from From the Vatican to Janiculum: Politics, the Papacy and the Reformation (Jackdaw Press), pages 75-83
by Jurat Jarkman, reproduced with the author's permission
Part Three:
Jervaulx
J. Page 33