Final Report Summary - CARAFAMCP (The Origins of the Roman Inquisition Reconsidered: the Diplomatic Career of Gian Pietro Carafa in England and Spain (1513-19)) This project aimed to revise our understanding of the figure of Gian Pietro Carafa (1476-1559) who became Pope Paul IV in 1555 by considering his early diplomatic career, several months of which Carafa spent in England. Although the IEF was unable to discover any previously unknown relevant archival documentation in either England or the Low Countries, (as was originally hoped), he did discover some unpublished material in Madrid. This, in combination with his re-reading of both primary and secondary material kept in Rome, (principally but not only the Vatican library and archives), has enabled him to construct a fresh picture of Carafa's career. Given Carafa's immense importance for our understanding of the validity of the categories 'Counter Reformation' and 'Catholic Reformation', this is of more than simply passing or antiquarian significance. When published, the IEF's biography of Carafa - which is now almost half-written - will constitute the first comprehensive study of its subject in over a century. In the meantime, since beginning the fellowship, the IEF has written and researched five papers, one annotated bibliography and one substantial dictionary article. In addition, he has participated in several international conferences in the UK, Spain, Belgium and Germany. This included organising one panel at the largest conference held for scholars in his field (The Renaissance Society of America annual meeting, which in April 2015 was attended by over 3,600 scholars) as well as co-organising the international workshop: The Origins of the Inquisition on comparative perspective here at York (21 May 2015). The cumulative significance of Vanni's research as an IEF has been to enable us to push back the 'origins' of the Counter Reformation to the 1510s (i.e. twenty years earlier than before). This constitutes nothing far short of a radical revision of the widespread view which sees Carafa as gradually groping his way from his position as a moderate reformer (as represented by his activity spent working with collaborators in the context of the Oratory of Divine love in Rome in the late 1510s and 1520s). Instead Vanni argues that already at the outset of his ecclesiastical career Carafa was pursuing an uncompromising policy of reform which matched inflexibility and fearlessness in equal measure. In putting forward this argument, Dr Vanni is revising his own findings as published in his monograph 'Per fare diligente inquisizione' (2010) which had dated the shift in Carafa's view to the period he spent in exile in Venice, in the immediate aftermath of the Sack of Rome by imperial troops in 1527. Vanni's goal is to affirm that there are not two Carafas, one of the Counter Reformation and the other of the Catholic Reform, but one single figure who pursued the same aims from the 1520s onwards; in other words, from when he started working in the Curia, as a collaborator with the short-lived pope Adrian VI. It aims to reconstruct the path that brought him to the leadership of the tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The cumulative effect of his research has been to highlight the key moments of this path, such as his participation in 1524 in the reform of the ordination of priests and the foundation of the Theatine Order, his writing in 1532 of the Memorial to Clement VII, his role in the discussions that led to the outline of top-down reform in the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia (1537), and his appointment in 1542 as cardinal-prefect of the congregation of the Holy Office. Vanni also links Carafa’s initial ecclesiastical activities, such as his role in the reform of the ordination of priests, with his later Inquisitorial undertakings to show how his primary goal, together with the promotion of his ecclesiastical career, was the preservation and defence of the dignity of the Holy See, its rules and its hierarchies. His passionate hatred of heretics was conjoined with a hatred for those clergymen, especially priests, who broke the rules and destroyed the order that should have governed the harmony of the Church. In this context, long regarded by scholars as the starting point for the formulation of Carafa’s inquisitorial thought, the Memorial of 1532 (also called Informatione mandata a papa Clemente dal vescovo Teatino or, by Carafa himself, Memorialaccio – “the worthless Memorial”) is nothing else but a deep reflection by a man approaching what he probably thought was the close of his career on how corruption and the loss of values in Christian society could open the doors to advanced heresy among the faithful. At first, all of the solutions the Memorial proposed were frustrated because of Carafa’s profound criticism of the Pope, his counselors and the ecclesiastics of the Curia, especially the ones who controlled the apostolic tribunal of the Penitentiary. Nevertheless, in the long term, most of the scenarios Carafa envisaged in the Memorial were to come to pass and, thanks to their anti-Habsburg bias, which he shared with Paul III Farnese (who was at the time creating for his family a hereditary territory – the Duchy of Piacenza and Parma – in the teeth of opposition from Charles V), he managed to receive from the hands of that pope the title of Prefect of the new Congregation of the Holy Office.With his new task as Prefect of the Holy Office, Carafa was able to utilize the repressive capacities intrinsic in the instrument of the Inqusition to promote his idea of Church reform and complete his rise through the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In his hands, thanks to the successes of the campaigns against heretical groups and, above all, against the pro-Reform movements, the new Congregation of the Holy Office became one of the most powerful institutions of the Church of Rome: during the trial against the Bishop of Bergamo Vittore Soranzo (1550-1558), who was a member of the Venetian high aristocracy and accused of being in contact with numerous heterodox preachers, Pope Julius III tried without success to ask of the inquisitors a more moderate approach. The Pope then found himself in the position of having to personally justify himself against the verbal assault of the Venetian ambassador, exclaiming, “I couldn’t do otherwise, since these cardinals were all over me, and especially the Theatine, such that I had to tell them: ‘It seems to me that you want to put me on trial and not the Bishop of Bergamo!’” Carafa’s was engaged in a tireless struggle against those he considered to be the enemies of Roman orthodoxy, in particular against those in the Roman Curia who were members of the imperial faction. In the shadow of the enormous political difficulties which Charles V encountered when attempting to cope with the German emergency, this faction had all too obviously made themselves promoters of religious pacification based on doctrinal compromise with the Lutheran position In order to meet this challenge, Gian Pietro Carafa brought together in his creation of the Inquisition, enormous power, from which he himself directly benefited. But if by the 1550s the game was over and the Inquisition had wholly taken its place at the head of the Church hierarchy, with all that would follow from this, including notably the rise to prominence of several of its key members, such as Michele Ghislieri and Felice Peretti who would become popes as Pius V and Sistus V, this result was the fruit of a slow and tenacious strategy conducted by Carafa as its principal promoter. o tackle the religious crisis without those compromises that in his view were weakening the mission and teaching of the Church of Rome. Probably already in the 1510s, when during his sojourn in Flanders at the court of Charles of Habsburg he had the opportunity to exchange letters with the great inquisitor and regent of Castile Jiménes de Cisneros, Carafa had realized the power that a centralized tribunal of the faith, subject to the immediate control of a limited elite, could have. While in that period his interests lay elsewhere, oriented towards the political promotion of his family and, after the death of Ferdinand of Aragon in 1516, the rights of the Neapolitan nobility, it is also possible that his closeness to Adrian Florisz, elected Pope Hadrian VI in 1522, whom he had probably met in Flanders before Florisz’s nomination as inquisitor of all Spain, only served to fuel these convictions. This project is not only of interest to academics who study the history of the Roman Catholic Church, but also, given Carafa's key role as an inquisitor, the history of censorship and that of persecution. It is also of direct interest to those both within and outside Italy who want to consider how the Catholic church sought to control ideas by means of censorship.
