ὃ 92. THE PRINTING-PRESS AND THE REFORMATION. 565
religion. This bull forms the basis of all subsequent prohibitions and restrictions of the press by papal, imperial, or other authority.!
Leo X., who personally cared more for heathen art than Christian literature, went further, and prohibited, in a bull of March 3, 1515, the publication of any book in Rome without the imprimatur of the magister sacri palati (the book-censor), and in other states and dioceses without the -imprimatur of the bishop or the inquisitor of heretical depravity.2 Offenders were to be punished by the confiscation and public burning of their books, a fine of one hundred ducats, and excommunication. Archbishop and Elector Albrecht of Mainz was the first, and it seems the only, German prince who gave force to this bull for his own large diocese by a mandate of May 17, 1517, a few months before the outbreak of the Reformation. The papal bull of excommunication, June 15, 1520, consistently ordered the burning of “all the books of Luther.”* But he laughed it to scorn, and burned in revenge the pope’s bull, with all his decretals, Dec. 10, 1520.
Thus, with the freedom of conscience, was born the freedom of the press. But it had to pass through a severe ordeal, even in Protestant countries, and was constantly checked by Roman authorities as far as their power extended. The German Empire, by the Edict of Worms, made itself an ally of the pope against free thought and free press, and continued so until it died of old age in 1806.4 Fortunately,
1 The bull is not given in the Bullarium, but by Raynaldus ad a. 1501, No. 36, Zaccaria, and Reusch (I. 54), in part also by Kapp (l.c. p. 530).
2 The bull “‘ Inter solicitudines”’? was promulgated in the fifth Lateran Council. Labbe, XIV. 257, and Reusch, I. 55 sq.
8 The bull “‘ Zxurge, Domine,’ is printed in full, p. 235 sqq.
4 Kapp, l.c., p. 536 sqq., shows that the Edict of Worms, drawn up by the papal legate Aleander, is the beginning of the German book-censorship, and not, as usually supposed, the recess of the Niirnberg Diet of 1524. ‘* Wie Rom,”’ he says (539), “‘ die Wiege der Biichercensur fiir die ganze Welt, so ist Worms ihre Geburtsstdtte fiir Deutschland.’’ The restriction of the press, however, was begun in Germany, as we have seen, already in 1486, by Elector Berthold of Mainz.
566 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1580.
the weakness of the empire and the want of centralization prevented the execution of the prohibition of Protestant books, except in strictly papal countries, as Bavaria and Austria. But unfortunately, the Protestants themselves, who used the utmost freedom of the press against the Papists, denied it to each other; the Lutherans to the Reformed, and both to the Anabaptists, Schwenkfeldians and Socinians.1 Protestant princes liked to control the press to protect themselves against popery, or the charges of robbery of church property and other attacks. The Elector John Frederick was as narrow and intolerant as Duke George on the opposite side. But these petty restrictions are nothing compared with the radical and systematic crusade of the Papists against the freedom of the press. King Ferdinand of Austria ordered, | July 24, 1528, all printers and sellers of sectarian books to be drowned, and their books to be burnt. The wholesale burning of Protestant books, including Protestant Bibles, was a favorite and very effective measure of the Jesuitical re-action which set in before the middle of the sixteenth century, and was promoted by the political arm, and the internecine wars of the Protestants. Pope Paul IV. published in 1557 and 1559 the first official Index Librorum prohibitorum ; Pius IV. in 1564, an enlarged edition, generally known as Index Tridentinus, as it was made by order of the Council of Trent. It contains a list of all the books forbidden by Rome, good, bad, and indifferent. This list has been growing ever since in size (1590, 1596, 1607, 1664, 1758, 1819, etc.), but declining in authority, till it became, like the bull against the comet, an anachronism and a brutum fulmen.?
1 ἐς Derselbe Luther,’? says Kapp, p. 552, “‘welcher das Papstthum fir noch lange nicht genug zerscholten, zerschrieben, zersungen, zerdichtet und zermalet hielt, rief schon 1525 die Censur fiir seinen nunmehrigen Standpunkt zur Hilfe.’ He refers to his attempt to secure a prohibition of Carlstadt’s writings in Saxony.
2 Fr. Heinrich Reusch (Old Catholic Prof. at Bonn): Der Index der verbotenen Biicher, Bonn, 1883-85, 2 vols. Of older works we mention, Fr. Zaccaria, Storia polemica delle proibizioni de’ libri, Rom., 1777; and