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Chapter 1. Spain and Naples
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11 C h a p t e r 1 Spain and Naples Beginning no later than the mid-fifteenth century and intensifying spectacularly after the Sack of Rome followed in 1536 by Charles V’s hectoring of the pope in his own palace, the papacy suffered from strained relations with the Hapsburg powers, above all Spain. This situation arose partly as a natural reaction to the preponderance that country enjoyed throughout this period, in Rome as well as over most of the rest of the Italian peninsula, including the most dangerous case, the Spanish dependency of Naples.1 Beginning in the early seventeenth century, the popes, especially Paul V and Urban VIII, tried to escape Spanish tutelage. Urban achieved more than his predecessors, but the specter of Spain lurked constantly in the shadows behind the Roman Inquisition ’s operations, especially during Urban’s protracted struggle with Cardinal Inquisitor (and sometime Spanish ambassador to Rome) Gaspar Borja y Velasco. From the first, the Roman Inquisition had a peculiar status in Naples. Barely a decade after the founding of the Roman Inquisition in 1542, it appointed a commissary in Naples.2 It arrived precociously relative to other Italian states, for example, Mantua, where it did not manage to establish its tribunal until the 1570s.3 From the first, the nuncio was also deeply involved, a model of local inquisition tribunals eventually extended elsewhere, especially to Venice and Florence.4 More than in Mantua or anywhere else except Venice, the Inquisition in Naples found itself hedged in by the local political authorities.5 Thus, not until the late 1630s did its agent regularly call himself inquisitor, a signal indication of the success of Urban’s pressure and of earlier failure. Even odder, there were always two inquisitions in Naples, archiepiscopal and papal, distinguished in no way as to competence or even often as to personnel since it was usual in the sixteenth century to make the archiepiscopal vicar general chapter 1 12 the Roman Inquisition’s commissary. Unlike every other diocese in Italy, the archbishops succeeded in keeping their own inquisition not only in being but also healthy, handling for a long time a vastly greater volume of business than its papal counterpart.6 Despite the Congregation’s own construction in 1596 of the situation as meaning there was only one “ordinary tribunal” of the Inquisition in Naples, the archbishop’s, together with a “manner of extraordinary provision for the service of this [Roman] Inquisition,” the second was explicitly not a “tribunal” (the delegated papal one), reasonably quickly Rome asserted and gained ascendancy over the archbishop.7 Luigi Amabile, whose Santo Officio . . . in Napoli remains the basic work, thought the corner had been turned already in 1564 when Giulio Antonio Santoro, one of the key figures in the Inquisition’s history, became commissary “even though he was not the archbishopric of Naples’ lieutenant” (meaning vicar general as Amabile clarified elsewhere) with the right to further subdelegate his authority.8 Amabile also thought that Santoro’s appointment began an unbroken string of officials with the same status. As Giovanni Romeo has shown, Amabile’s first claim is not true—Santoro had indeed been “luogotenente” of the archdiocese —nor is the second.9 The process by which the Roman Inquisition established itself in Naples was much more drawn out and conflicted than Amabile thought. Romeo also, probably rightly, sees a difference in status between “minister” or commissary and inquisitor, and thinks the second may have had more power. This seems plausible, even if lack of documents makes it impossible to demonstrate the point.10 During the tenure of the longest-serving sixteenth-century commissary , Carlo Baldino (in post, according to Romeo, from 1585 to 1598), Romeo found a number of disputes between him and the archiepiscopal court, including an effort by one archbishop to have the delegated inquisition withdrawn.11 Instead of the the smooth arc Amabile saw, interrupted only by brave but futile local resistance, Romeo finds a contradiction internal to Rome’s drive to centralization which intensified just at the time of Baldino’s appointment.12 The next fifteen years marked the period “perhaps most intense in the whole history of the Roman Inquisition,” in terms of both volume of cases and effectiveness of Rome’s control over both Neapolitan courts.13 Romeo places the crucial moment in 1622, when the otherwise little-known Giovanni Girolamo Campanile asked Rome for guidance in the use of the title “inquisitor” that others had applied to...