Conversion to Catholicism in Early Modern Italy

Peter A. Mazur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317265672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, conversion took on a new importance within the Catholic world, as its leaders faced the challenge of expanding the church's reach to new peoples and continents while at the same time reinforcing its authority in the Old World. Based on new archival research, this book details the extraordinary stories of converts who embraced a new religious identity in a territory where papal authority and Catholic orthodoxy were arguably at their strongest: the Italian peninsula. Through an analysis of both the unique strategies employed by clerics to attract and educate converts, and the biographies of the men and women—soldiers, aristocrats, and charlatans—who negotiated new positions for themselves in Rome and the other cities of the peninsula, a new image of Italy during the Counter-reformation emerges: a place where repression and toleration alternated in unexpected ways, leaving room for negotiation and exchange with members of rival faiths.

1 The Catechumen Houses in Italy, 1543–1797

The history of conversion in Counter-Reformation Italy begins with the foundation of a series of institutes which had little if any precedent and which were intended, like many others created by ecclesiastical élites, to regulate and bureaucratize aspects of religious life that had previously been left to the discretion of individual members of the clergy. In the middle decades of the sixteenth century, the members of Roman curia and their collaborators throughout the peninsula began to insist that conversion, like miraculous visions or exorcisms, be subjected to rules that could restrain the dangerous, even anarchic subjectivity that these experiences were capable of unleashing and ensure that they were guided by specially trained members of the clergy at every step. The solution that they devised for this particular problem was the Casa dei Catecumeni, or catechumen house, an institute that provided refuge and instruction for converts from Islam and Judaism who were preparing for baptism.

The houses were in theory entirely charitable, as their apologists have long emphasized, but behind this mask of indulgent paternalism lay an institution that sought to oversee and negotiate every aspect of the delicate passage from one faith to another. From the converts’ separation from their families to the negotiation of a new place in society as Catholics, to the resolution of unsettled scores and unpaid debts, the catechumen houses became the essential link between converts and the society that surrounded them. Their officials were forbidden to use force or coercion, though they sometimes condoned it, and were expected to certify as far as possible the intentions of the convert before allowing him or her to approach the initiatory sacrament of baptism and join the church. The following chapter traces the development of this institute, from its beginnings in Rome to its imitations in other cities throughout Italy, the alliances between Italian élites and clergy that supported the houses financially, and the debates that divided the administrators of the houses and civil authorities in the Italian states. Over the course of two and a half centuries, the catechumen houses became a common feature of urban life in Northern and Central Italy, guaranteeing a substantial uniformity in the treatment of converts and creating an influential model that was imitated elsewhere in Europe.

* * *

The casa was first conceived in Rome in the midst of debate over the legitimacy and implications of forced conversions, over whether and to what degree baptism without the consent of its recipient could be considered valid. During the same years that the members of the curia began a halting response to the challenges of Luther and Zwingli, they also confronted the no less vexing legacy of the forced baptisms of Jews and Muslims in Spain and Portugal that had reached their apex during the last two decades of the fifteenth century. The effects of this violent past, a restive and unassimilated population of formerly Jewish and Muslim conversos and moriscos, many of whom continued to practice their former religions, and the forms of social exclusion employed by the population of Old Christians to prevent them from obtaining offices, titles, and professional qualification, most notoriously the statutes of blood purity, or limpieza de sangre, had become widespread by the end of the fifteenth century and showed no signs of abating.

For many members of the Roman curia, who viewed these events from afar, the events in the Iberian kingdoms represented an error that was not to be repeated. Paul III (1534–1549), who had become interested in Hebrew learning as a young man and valued the economic contributions of Jews to his territory, offered new privileges to the Jews of Rome and the Papal States and shelter for refugees who continued to arrive from Iberia and from the Kingdom of Naples, from which they had been expelled in 1541. In the halls of the papal palaces, he surrounded himself with critics of the ideology of forced conversion and purity of blood. Among them was Pietro Paolo Parisio (1473–1545), a former professor of law who he named to the College of Cardinals. Parisio was the author of several influential opinions that questioned the legitimacy of the forced baptism of the Portuguese Jews and the principal author of a bull issued by Clement VII that declared the baptisms of the Portuguese New Christians null and void if they had been in any way coerced and offered them temporary protection from the Inquisition.¹ The pope also found a kindred spirit in Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), the founder of the Jesuit order, who had vocally opposed the prevailing tendency to exclude those of Muslim and Jewish heritage from the religious orders and made strong statements in their favour. Not by chance, many of Loyola’s closest assistants were themselves New Christians. Among them were his secretary, Juan de Polanco, and his successor as general of the order, Diego Laìnez.²

It was in the context of this debate over the Iberian past and its reverberations in the present that Paul crafted two pieces of legislation that were to serve as touchstones for Catholic policy towards Jews and Muslims in the following centuries. The first, Cupientes Judaeos (1542), guaranteed converts rights over their property, prohibited any form of punitive taxation or confiscation following baptism, and granted them a series of fiscal privileges that created an incentive to convert. It also indicated that both before and after baptism priests should ‘instruct [neophytes] in the articles of the faith, and in the precepts of the new law and of the rites of the Catholic Church’.³ The following year, Illius provided an even more solid framework for these policies through the foundation of the Casa dei Catecumeni, an institute where catechumens, adults born outside of the Christian religion who had chosen to undergo baptism, would be housed, fed, and educated in the basic elements of Christianity.⁴

In a house near the church of San Giovanni in Mercatello, at the base of the Capitoline Hill, Loyola established a small institute for the converts and soon after began to report news of its first guests, which included the son of the pope’s physician, who had fled to the East to avoid conversion and recently returned to Rome ‘with many saintly desires placed in his heart by the holy spirit’. Though the imperative to provide instruction and charity for converts had been evoked since the beginnings of the church, there are few precedents for an institution with the expressed goal of isolating would-be converts to Catholicism from their families and former religious community and preparing them for baptism.⁵

However, like many policies hatched in the Roman curia, its auspicious beginnings were not to last. After Paul IV came to power in 1555, he reversed many of the policies installed by his predecessor in favour of a more resolutely antagonistic stance towards the Jewish communities of Italy. He expelled the Jews from much of the Papal States, with the exception of Rome and Ancona, and placed the remaining Jews of Rome in a ghetto, a harsh regime of exclusion and highly regulated living that was explicitly justified by the need to humiliate Jews in order to bring them to convert. The Spanish and Portuguese New Christians fared no better. In 1556, the pope ordered an inquisitorial campaign against a group of conversos in Ancona that ended in twenty-five capital sentences: the harshest punishment ever handed down by an ecclesiastical tribunal in Italy, and a clear sign of the pope’s view that too little, rather than too much, repression had led to the intolerable situation of unfinished assimilation, apostasy, and social conflict in Iberia.⁶

Though the extreme religious intolerance of Paul IV was never again reached during the course of the early modern papacy, neither was there a complete restoration of the policies enacted by his predecessor, Paul III. Instead, as one pope replaced another, periodic expulsions (under Pius V, 1566–1572 and Clement VIII, 1592–1605) and crackdowns punctuated periods of laxity, amnesty, and return to the status quo. And through all of them, the casa, with its temptations of money and protection, existed alongside the stick of the ghetto, punitive taxation, and social exclusion in an attempt to convince Jews, who could neither be compelled to convert nor entirely ignored, to embrace the Catholic Church.⁷

* * *

No individual illustrates the protean character of the new institution better than the man who guided it from its beginnings to maturity and transformed the casa into a model to be imitated elsewhere in Italy and throughout the Catholic world. Cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto (1514–1585) became cardinal protector of the neophytes and catechumens in 1565, a role that encompassed both judicial authority over converts and financial and social patronage of them; its holders were expected to act as benevolent patriarchs who could correct the errors of their charges and ease their transition from the blindness of Judaism into a new life as Christians.⁸ The professor of rhetoric who gave an oration at Sirleto’s funeral compared him to Elijah, the Old Testament prophet whose foretelling of the coming of Christ and the abrogation of the Mosaic Law made him a favourite subject of Catholic apologetics.⁹

One of Sirleto’s main responsibilities was the stabilization of the finances of the casa, which forced him to search for a steadier source of income than those on which it had relied in the past. While his early correspondence is filled with letters seeking unpaid taxes from Jewish communities and individuals in the Papal States, this later gave way to more a resolute focus on the problems of individual converts themselves. According to Giovanni Botero’s On the Office of the Cardinal, ‘when Gregory XIII saw how ready he was to benefit others, he provided [Sirleto] with large amounts of money, so that he could continue in the honourable exercise of liberality’.¹⁰ Botero was probably referring to the events of 1580, when a miraculous image of the Madonna was discovered in a hayloft in the Roman neighbourhood of Monti, fostering a rapidly expanding and lucrative cult. When a dispute broke out over who possessed the rights to the image, the pope, in the words of the chronicler who recorded the event, ‘desired to please no one other than the Catecumeni, and so he ordered that [the image] be granted to them immediately’.¹¹

Gregory ordered the construction of a sanctuary on the site where the image had been found and granted Sirleto the authority to consecrate a new church there. On June 23, 1580, the cardinal led a procession to the site of the image, where he planted a cross and the foundation stone ‘to the great satisfaction of the entire populace’. The cult of the image, which performed almost daily miracles, from healing of wounds to resurrections and exorcisms, developed rapidly and spread beyond the boundaries of this heavily populated quarter (immediately northeast of the Roman Forum) to the highest ranks of the Roman aristocracy and beyond; the bishop of Narbonne, François de Joyeuse, made a donation of one hundred scudi to the sanctuary when he arrived in Rome in 1581, and gifts arrived from as far as Spain. Its connection to one of the most intensely visited devotional sites in Rome seems to have placed the institute on a far more solid financial base than it had possessed in the past.¹² The church was quickly completed, and its chapels were adorned with images that illustrated the same themes of Catholic apology that formed the basis for instruction in the casa itself. In 1637, the Casa dei Catecumeni, along with two other institutes that had grown out of it, the College of Neophytes and a female convent exclusively occupied by nuns converted from Judaism, were moved into a single complex adjacent to the church.¹³

The emphasis of many contemporaries on Sirleto’s liberality and paternalism were not misplaced; they were often the only means he possessed to exert his authority over converts. In the years that he governed the Casa dei Catecumeni, a series of complex and often contradictory relationships bound Sirleto and other high-ranking prelates and aristocrats to the converts in his care. The letters between Sirleto and his charges are a constant negotiation in which the cardinal’s money, privileges, and protection could be sought at the price of a sincere conversion, the maintenance of Christian faith, or the procurement of the conversion of a relative, friend, or acquaintance. A Muslim who was baptized in Rome in the 1570s implored the cardinal to send her a dowry she had been promised, writing ‘Monsignor, if you don’t remember my name, I am the one who came from Tunis in Barbary in a pilgrim’s cloak … I was called Stella, and now I am named Margarita, and I was baptized last year on Pentecost in San Giovanni’.¹⁴ Carlo de Illuminatis, a convert who described himself as ‘once a Jew’ and ‘now by the goodness of Blessed Jesus a Christian’, reminded the cardinal of the promises of assistance that he had made at the time of his baptism and informed him that both his mother and one of his brothers were ready to convert.¹⁵

On one side stood the converts, driven by a range of personal motives, and on the other the cardinal, determined to keep his charges within a network of personal relationships and patrons in which they could be watched over and, to whatever extent possible, controlled. Though he would admit that ‘these neophytes are persons who have plenty of imperfections coming from Judaism, and because I am their protector I learn this lesson every day in expenses and annoyance’, the cardinal was willing to overlook bad behaviour or pardon it when it was in the interest of maintaining a recent conversion or procuring a new one.¹⁶ Sirleto’s protection ensured that the converts remained under his control, or that of a trusted correspondent, and that as long as they depended on his indulgence and patronage, he could also hope to prevent them from committing the gravest of sins and most heinous of crimes, apostasy.

The cardinal had the upper hand when the convert or potential convert was in the grip o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Catechumen Houses in Italy, 1543–1797
• 2 Superabundant Charity: The Conversion of Protestants
• 3 The Jewish Sons of the Holy Roman Church
• 4 The Strange Tale of the Alpine Turncoat: Johann Heinrich Ruegg and the Roman Inquisition
• 5 A Mercenary Faith: Conversions of Northern Soldiers, 1600–1750
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Documents from the Italian Archives
• Works Cited
• Index