The influence which the Father Inquisitor of a Dominican monastery was able habitually to exercise in the city where it was situated, was in the latter part of the fifteenth century just considerable enough to hamper and irritate cultivated people, but not strong enough to extort any lasting fear or obedience.It was no longer possible to punish men for their thoughts, as it once was, and those whose tongues wagged most impudently against the clergy could easily keep clear of heretical doctrine.Except when some powerful party had an end to serve, as in the case of Savonarola, or when there was a question of the use of magical arts, as was often the case in the cities of North Italy, we seldom read at this time of men being burnt at the stake.The Inquisitors were in some instances satisfied with the most superficial retraction, in others it even happened that the victim was saved out of their hands on the way to the place of execution.In Bologna (1452) the priest Niccolo da Verona had been publicly degraded on a wooden scaffold in front of San Domenico as a wizard and profaner of the sacraments, and was about to be led away to the stake, when he was set free by a gang of armed men, sent by Achille Malvezzi, a noted friend of heretics and violator of nuns.The legate, Cardinal Bessarion, was only able to catch and hang one of the party; Malvezzi lived on in peace.
It deserves to be noticed that the higher monastic orders-- e.g.
Benedictines, with their many branches--were, notwithstanding their great wealth and easy lives, far less disliked than the mendicant friars.For ten novels which treat of 'frati' hardly one can be found in which a 'monaco' is the subject and the victim.It was no small advantage to these orders that they were founded earlier, and not as an instrument of police, and that they did not interfere with private life.They contained men of learning, wit, and piety, but the average has been described by a member of it, Firenzuola, who says: 'These well-fed gentlemen with the capacious cowls do not pass their time in barefooted journeys and in sermons, but sit in elegant slippers with their hands crossed over their paunches, in charming cells wainscoted with cyprus-wood.And when they are obliged to quit the house, they ride comfortably, as if for their amusement, on mules and sleek, quiet horses.They do not overstrain their minds with the study of many books, for fear lest knowledge might put the pride of Lucifer in the place of monkish simplicity.'