Antonio degli Albizzi and Lutheran Propaganda in Early Seventeenth-Century Italy

In the early 1610s, some Italian Lutheran propaganda came to the attention of the Holy Office. Such propaganda is an anomaly for the period, and questions the current scholarship on the topic. Via the bibliographic study of pamphlets previously neglected or unknown, this article investigates this activity, mostly attributing it to Antonio degli Albizzi (1547–1627), sometime secretary to the Cardinal of Austria. This curious case elucidates the longevity of interest in Lutheranism in the Italian peninsula, and, even if in the mind of just one man, the belief that seventeenth-century Italians could still turn to Protestantism.

The Letter, of which Millini also sent a transcript to his correspondent, was believed until recently to be lost. However, an original copy, belonging to a private collection, has lately appeared on the antiquarian market. The booklet is printedanonymously, and without locationin four pages, in octavo, on laid paper but without a visible watermark. This is the only exemplar known today, despite (at least according to Millini) an entire 'pile' of them reaching Italy. A small success, therefore, for the Roman Holy Office, committed to patrolling the borders to stop 'this plague of books … that could infect these our parts of Italy', as Cardinal Bellarmine put it to the inquisitor of Modena on  July of that same year.  He encouraged him to to be vigilant and zealous 'at least to extirpate [the plague] from those places where we can'.  The inquisitorial correspondence shows that in the early s, via the Brenner, Venice and the Tyrrhenian sea ports, heretical booklets and pamphlets were still, by clandestine means, reaching Italy, enabling what was by this date only a feeble current of Protestant proselytism.  This trade was also intended to support heterodox congregations, at least those few which had survived more than half a century of watchful Catholic surveillance and repression. Apparently one such tiny conventicle still existed in the Kingdom of Naples, as we learn from Millini's letter. It is unlikely that this was connected with the heterodox spiritualist tradition inaugurated in Naples by Juan de Valdés in the s;  it is also improbable that it was the remnant of a continuing presence of Reformed Waldensians  'È stata inviata a questa santa Inquisitione una scrittura in stampa Lettera di N. ad un amico nella quale brevemente racconta le cause perché egli sia partito dalla religione romana, che contiene il ristretto di tutte l'heresie de' moderni tempi contra la santa fede catholica, come vedrà dalla lettura di essa. E tal lettera è stata distribuita a diversi da un mercante heretico del Palatinato venuto alla fiera di Bolzano che n'havea un fascio, e sopra la quale vi era tale inscrittura: Pro fratribus nostris Neapolitanis. E si presume che per via di pieghi di lettere e di merciari che vanno attorno per le fiere et altrove ne siano stati mandati molti essemplari in diverse città d'Italia': A. Rotondò, 'Nuovi documenti per la storia dell'«Indice dei libri proibiti» (-)', Rinascimento iii (), -.  Ibid. -.  Ibid.  For example, on  March , the Congregation of the Holy Office discussed the action to be taken as the nuncio in Venice had informed them that some Venetian in Apulia and Calabria: they had been wiped out over fifty years before.  More realistically, this dissenting community was probably the result of the development of new maritime connections between the Mediterranean and the North Sea, and of the arrival in Southern Italy of ships from England and the Netherlands. A Note of the books burned in Naples on the festivity of St Peter and St Paul in the year  indicates the presence of catechisms and biblical texts translated into Italian, some of them recently printed, others probably handed down from previous generations.  In the s and 's a concerned archbishop of Naples still ordered raids and requisitions of books in the city's port.  Whatever its identity, it is only Millini's letter that makes an explicit reference to an actual dissenting group congregating at the foot of Vesuvius in the early s; and the cardinal himselfat least according to the sources available to us did not even believe it necessary to inform the archiepiscopal vicar of Naples of its existence, for he held the office of inquisitor. Millini also did not tell the vicar of the arrival in Italy of the Lettera di N. ad un amico (see Figure ). Nor indeed did he tell him about a longer text, also mentioned in his letter: a forty-eight-page booklet, entitled Ragionamento in materia di religione accaduto novamente tra due amici italiani passando da Roma a Napoli l'anno  [Debate in matters of religion that recently has taken place between two Italian friends whilst they were going from Rome to Naples in the year ]. This too was a text full of 'many pernicious heresies': this is why Millini had already written about it in October  to the inquisitor of Modena.  The Ragionamento was not included in the Index of prohibited books until .  The brief Lettera di N. ad un amico (see Appendix ) is a folio of .cm x .cm, with a cut of cm on the top. A Lutheran document, it was undoubtedly printed in Germany shortly before Millini's letter; the cardinal was able to announce its discovery thanks to the unearthing of one of the usual channels of Protestant propaganda, either those of trade and contraband, or those of active colportage. It is not impossible to think that its title, Lettera, was chosen as a reference to the religious turmoil that had shaken Venice in the aftermath of the Interdict crisis of , which led to a real 'war of words'.  Many pamphlets published in those days had used the rhetorical device of the 'letter': for example the  Lettera di Eulogio teologo romano [Letter of Eulogy, Roman theologian], and the Letter of a baker of Boulogne sent to the pope, versions of which, in English, Dutch and French (but not in Italian), have survived.  Even if they did not contain any explicit reference to Venice's troubles, we can be sure that the primary destination of many texts of Protestant propagandaoften stemming from the book market of Frankfurt, or coming Recent works on religious propaganda in Counter-Reformation Italy have shown a constant, albeit weak, attempt at Protestant proselytism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  At the very end of the so-called 'Italian Reformation', between the s and s, quite a few Reformed publications written by Italian exiles in the Valtellina and in Switzerland had reached the peninsula: these were mostly underpinned by the hope of involving Italy in the confessional struggles of the French wars of religion.  Such ambitions were soon to be frustrated, and by the late s, with the first generation of Italian Protestant exiles disappearing, a calm before the storm was perceivable within Italian Protestant dissent. A storm was certainly to come over the Venetian Interdict crisis of : somein Venice and abroadbelieved that the Republic, having broken off relations with the pope, might turn to Protestantism, or at least might allow Protestant congregations to function within the city. Venice was soon flooded with pamphlets.  The authors of this initiative found a spokesperson in the theologian and jurist Paolo Sarpi, the protagonist of the struggle for Venice's autonomy. Books and preachers involved in this episode were distinctly Reformed, and the product of an international network of Calvinists that encompassed French Huguenots, Dutch merchants, English preachers and ambassadors, Germans from the Palatinate, and Italian exiles in Switzerland. By the mid-s, however, none of the expected outcomes had come to pass: Venice was solidly back in the Catholic fold. Of course, a sprinkling of Protestant writings, combined with the presence of Reformed merchants and travellers in the peninsula, kept appearing in Italy, particularly during the Thirty Years War, but this was less and less the result of a concerted enterprise, and more the product of individual and isolated actions.  All the scholarship on the subject of Protestant propaganda in Italy in this period has shown that at its heart were the networks of international Calvinism.  The publications so far studied are clearly Reformed in their theology and provenance. Until now, scholars have believed that organised Lutheran Italian proselytism had most definitely concluded decades before our story: Lutheran activism would be unheard of at the time of the publication of the Lettera di N. ad un amico. It is therefore the first purpose of this article to account for the surprising existence of a series of Lutheran propaganda texts directed at Italy in the s, and to investigate their authorship. But further questions are also in order. Who was behind this ambition to convert Italians to Lutheranism? Was this a concerted plan, or just a one-off? What were the hopes of their authors? And, were the worries of the Inquisition in any way justified? Was there any space for a 'Lutheran option' in early seventeenth-century Italy?

II
In those same weeks when he was expressing concern about the Letter and the Ragionamento, Cardinal Millini urged the inquisitor of Florence to watch out for another booklet that had recently 'come to light' in Kempten, a Lutheran town in Allgäu, between Münich and Konstanz.  Millini explained that this was entitled Tractatus brevis continens decem principia doctrinae christianae [Brief treatise containing ten principles of Christian doctrine], 'whose author is Antonio Albizzi, a Florentine resident in Kempten, and is full of heresies'.  Only ten days later, the cardinal also wrote to the inquisitor of Modena, adding some details concerning the author of the Tractatus: a 'Florentine nobleman … sometime counsellor to some princes in Germany, that has since turned heretic'.  Further, in that same letter, Millini had also explained that 'We have got news that in Tübingen an heretical catechism was printed in the Italian language, and many copies of it have been sent to Italy, and especially to Venice.'  On  October  an internal document of the Holy Office had already clarified that such news had been received directly from Augsburg by Cardinal Bellarmine.  The concentration of Protestant publications around  (the Letter, the Tractatus, the Ragionamento, in addition to an earlier Lutheran Catechism) can perhaps be explained by the sharp turn in religious policy that Emperor Mathias had imposed on his territories after he succeeded his brother on  January . Not least because of the weakening of France after the death in  of Henry IV, the new emperor was able to reposition the staunch Catholic credentials of the House of Habsburg: the previously moderate Habsburg policy had been very close to the position of the author of the Tractatus and of the Letter. After , a reinvigorated season of confessional conflict was opening up. It may not be a surprise, then, that Antonio degli Albizzi, an Italian who for thirty years had been in the service of the Habsburg family, might have thought that this was the time for him to act, and to oppose the new Counter-Reformation fervour: he wanted to do something at least for his homeland, one he had left some thirty-five years previously.
To better understand the anomaly of such Lutheran propaganda in Italy it is first necessary to consider the 'heretical Catechism in the Italian language' published in Tübingen in . The circulation of this text worried the inquisitors, albeit in December  the Holy Office was relieved to learn from Venice that no copy had yet turned up in the city.  There is no doubt that this was a new reprint of the Italian version of Luther's  Kleiner Catechismus, translated by the Istrian priest Antonio D'Alessandro (also known as Antonio Dalmata), and originally published in Tübingen in  thanks to Pier Paolo Vergerio (-) by the widow of the printer Ulrich Morhart.  Morhart had already printed a few polemical pamphlets on behalf of Vergeriothe former bishop of Capodistria (today Koper, in Slovenia) turned virulent Lutheran polemicistand in  a complete collection of his works had also appeared.  In that same year Vergerio also encouraged the publication of two editions of the Beneficio di Cristo, the key text of the Between  and , many Protestant books had actually appeared in Italian, Slovenian and Croatian thanks to cooperation between Vergerio and Primož Trubar, the father of the Slovenian Reformation and of the modern Slovenian language: all this was happening in a printing workshop set up in Urach (Tübingen) by the Styrian baron Hans von Ungnad, a counsellor to the duke of Württemberg.  The  edition of Luther's Small catechism, overall a faithful translation of the text, contains a curious typo: the title reads Catechismo piocciolo, instead of piccolo (or even picciolo) as it should. When the booklet was reprinted in Tübingen in  (in thirty-two pages, with numeration only on the recto), the typo was not amended, perhaps a sign of the loss of any real knowledge of Italian among these Lutheran circles. According to the Edit catalogue, this  edition can be attributed to Ulrich Morhat's stepson, Georg Gruppenbach, whohaving inherited the family businessin  and again in  also published an Italian version of Luther's Large catechism, in a translation by Solomon Swiggert, sometime Lutheran minister in Constantinople.  Gruppenbach had been for some years the unofficial printer to Tübingen's evangelical Church: he died in , after having gone bankrupt in . His entire warehouse was bought by a bookseller from Frankfurt, Johann Berner, but it is not known whether he also purchased the printing equipment.  Georg Gruppenbach was not therefore the printer of the  Italian reprint of Luther's Small catechism; of this edition only three copies are preserved today, one in the British Library, one in the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, and one in the National and University Library in Strasbourg. Many years had passed between the  edition and that of , years of silence on the Italian Lutheran front. But some curious links can be found. First, a copy of the  Catechism now at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna (MS .L.) has in its conclusion a short gothic inscription that dates its purchase to  (the same year of the edition here examined). Secondly, a similar ornament with a grotesque mask was placed at the end of the  Italian edition (see Figure ), as well as on the Lettera di N. ad un amico (see Figure ).
Although the images of the grotesque mask are copies, the engraving is not the same, as can be seen by the differences among the curls at the top, to mention just one contrast; both of them were inspired by the figure of the Mask of Truth. The issue of attributing this ornament to a specific printer is further complicated by the fact that (in a smaller format, and therefore also as the result of a further engraving) the grotesque mask appears to have been in the typographic tool-kit of another Lutheran printer, Johann Steinmann, certainly a member of the Steinmann publishing house who had worked in Leipzig between  and . Unfortunately, no Johann Steinmann appears in the Short title catalogue of German books preserved at the British Library, nor in the Universal short title catalogue: they instead mention Hans Steinmann (active until ), followed by his heirs until , and a Tobias Steinmann, active in  Leipzig between  and .  We are only aware of Johann Steinmann because in  he printed in Latin cum gratia et privilegio the  pages of the Lutheran Concordia, a crucial collection of the founding documents of Lutheranism that was to be reprinted many a time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  It was also published in Dresden, in German, in the same year. Between pages  and  of Steinmann's Latin Concordia appears a lavishly illustrated reprint of Luther's Catechismus minor; at the bottom of its final page the grotesque mask appears again.
Any involvement by Steinmann in the  reprint can probably be discounted. This edition was in all likelihood published by a German printer (perhaps one from Tübingen, as Millini suggests), but he was clearly unable to amend 'piocciolo' to the correct piccolo or picciolo. The printer did not hesitate instead to make explicit the name of Martin Luther both on the frontispiece of his edition, and in the running heads, something that surely did not make the book very exportable to Italy. The primary use for this catechism was probably for some small Italian congregation in Germany or nearby. Unfortunately, there is no further evidence concerning either the publisher and the promoter of this edition, or its final destination. The -page-long booklet, numbered both on the recto and the verso, was a simple translation of Luther's text, albeit without his introduction. It included brief comments on the ten commandments, the Creed, the Pater Noster, summaries on the sacraments of baptism, confession and the eucharist, and morning and evening blessings; as a conclusion, there are 'certain passages of the Scriptures, selected for various orders and conditions of men, wherein their respective duties are set forth'.  The content, format and language choices of the Letter show instead that Italy was its intended destination. It is of course perplexing that its anonymous author still believed that in the early seventeenth century the Lutheran cause in Italy still had traction. Was this a simple individual action of Christian witness, or the result of an organised plan for proselytism? There is no information about the author or where the Letter was printed. But everything points to the Florentine exile Antonio degli Albizzi, author of the Tractatus printed in Kempten in , whose distribution in Italy had been very much feared by Cardinal Millini.

III
Antonio degli Albizzi was born in  to an illustrious Florentine patrician family which had long fought against the Medicis.  He studied logic and law in Venice and Padua under Carlo Sigonio, before moving to Bologna and then to Florence, where he attended Pietro Vettori's lectures on ethics. He finally completed his education in Pisa, where in  he became 'regent' of the local Accademia degli Alterati. Still young, Antonio was the author of writings on Dante,  of Carnival poems and of a biography of Pietro Strozzi (a leading opponent of the Medici), which clearly points to Albizzi's own political persuasions.  Nevertheless, he was soon named 'consul' of the Accademia Fiorentina, and was called to give a lecture in the presence of Johanna of Habsburg, grand-duchess of Tuscany, on Aristotle's Rhetoric.
Thanks to this connection, in  he moved to the Habsburg lands, and into the service of Andreas von Habsburg (-), whohaving just turned eighteenhad recently been made cardinal by Gregory XIII. Andreas, margrave of Burgau, was the child of a morganatic marriage between Philippine Welser, daughter of a rich family of Augsburg merchants, and Ferdinand II, archduke of Further Austria and count of Tirol, brother to Emperor Maximillian II. Andreas was soon appointed coadjutor bishop of Bressanone (Brixen) in , commedatory abbot of Murbach in  and bishop of Konstanz in , all of which he held in plurality.  The young cardinal was rarely resident in his benefices, and did not show much Tridentine zeal.  Actually, he was mostly occupied as governor of Further Austria, of Carinthia and on one occasion of Alsace. And it was in these political roles that Andreas found Albizzi to be his faithful righthand man: Antonio acted as his secretary, counsellor and camerarius aulicus. A close bond was surely established between the two, proof of which can be found in the fact that the cardinal's two illegitimate children, born respectively in  and , were given the names Hans Georg and Susanna degli Albizzi: the Florentine aristocrat had taken on their official paternity, and responsibility for their education.  Albizzi was soon named by Andreas as governor of Klausen (today Chiusa di Val Gardena, near Bressanone, in Italy), but was later sent by the cardinal to be a commissary of the Habsburg duchy of Carniola (Slovenia). There Albizzi administered the justice system for five years. And it was probably in Carniolawhere Primož Trubar had been superintendent of the Lutheran church, and that still knew a significant Lutheran presencethat around  the cautious and mysterious conversion of Antonio Albizzi to Protestantism took place. His conversion was prompted by an illness: even better, according to his biographers, it occurred because of 'the reading of Paul's letters to the Romans and the Galatians' to him by a Jesuit.  Under the protective wing of Cardinal Andreas (or perhaps even with his complicity), Albizzithe legal father of Andreas's childrenstarted a long and serene nicodemitic life: one that undoubtedly brought him, and without much drama, to attend the Catholic ceremonies and rites celebrated by his protector. In his theological works, written more than twenty years later, there would be no mention or condemnation of religious simulation. These were actually very different days from those in which John Calvin's Exhortation to martyrdom was written; indeed, not even among Italian Protestant dissenters did many seem willingly to embark on such a path.
There is very probably a key Slovenian connection informing Albizzi's Lutheran experience: by  Primož Trubar was already in Germany, where he collaborated with Pier Paolo Vergerio and baron von Ugnad in Urach's printing shop. But before that, between  and , Trubar had served as the minister of Kempten, the small neglected town where Antonio degli Albizzi would find refuge in the later years of his life.
Albizzi was tasked with a number of delicate diplomatic missions in the service of his master, whom he always served 'summa cum laude'.  These brought him to Ferrara, Mantua, Florence and Rome, where he was received by popes Gregory XIII and Clement VIII. His biographer, Jacob Zemann, described him as a 'very cautious but at the same time very devout politician'.  It was in those years, spent in the library of his protector and in frequent travels, that Albizzi collected the rich heraldic and genealogical materials on European princely families that would allow him to publish his sumptuously decorated Principum christianorum stemmata, printed in Augsburg in , and dedicated to Cardinal Andreas (in the year of his death). The publication was updated and reprinted several times, culminating in two  editions, in German and Latin.
As much as Albizzi's faith was practised in private and circumspectly, and despite the protection he received thanks to his Habsburg master, Albizzi's religious identity must have been known to some. In fact, circumstances changed fairly swiftly for him in  after the death of the cardinal: Andreasthen only aged forty-twowas at the time in Rome to attend the Jubilee, having surrendered the governership of the Low Countries to undertake the pilgrimage. In that same year, the Holy Office began an inquiry into Albizzi, forcing him to rush through the sale of his family properties in Tuscany, and to move to Augsburg, at the time a bi-confessional city.
In Augsburg Albizzi was part of the circle of Marcus Welser, an astronomer and correspondent of Galileo, a learned man and politician who later became a member of the Accademia dei Lincei.  He was also a relative of Cardinal Andreas's mother. To Welseramong other possible attributionsis often credited the authorship of the Squittinio della libertà veneta () [The scrutiny of Venetian freedom], a key conservative pamphlet that opposed Venice's claims to political independence, and argued for its submission to imperial authority after the struggles of the Interdict crisis.  Pierre Gassendi, probably aware of Antonio's links with the Habsburgs, suggested that Albizzi himself might also have been a possible author of the booklet, an idea that should be discarded by scholars. Indeed, by  Albizzi was most certainly removed from imperial politics, and had become a committed Lutheran: surely, he would have never suggested the imposition of a strong Catholic imperial hand on Venice?  In keeping with his political connections, Albizzi moved to Innsbruck; but when in  Rudolf II forbade Protestants to be in his service, he relocated to Kempten, a Lutheran town within the territories of the elector of Saxony, and therefore exempt from imperial and inquisitorial jurisdiction.
Albizzi's case had no little resonance in Italy; twice he was summoned by the Holy Office. Both the nuncio in Lucerne and Albizzi's family attempted to have him brought back to Italy in order to abjure his Lutheranism. On  June  his second inquisitorial subpoena was nailed to the door of a monastery not far from Kempten, but by then Albizzi was already senile.  He died in , leaving his patrimony and library to the town, his refuge, where he had passed twenty quiet years. There he enjoyed music, and gave afternoon concerts. Albizzi also offered his expertise to the town, advising its senate on political and legal matters; he was also a patron of the parish school, and a philanthropist: activities that kept him in high esteem. It is interesting to note that even today Albizzi is remembered in a modern fresco (see Figure ), painted by a certain Franz Weiß (-) on the external wall of a Kempten pharmacy. He is depicted with his Principum christianorum stemmata under his arm. It is an imaginary portrait that does not take into account the one that appears in the first volume of Albizzi's Exercitationes theologicae (see Figure ), where he is portrayed with the respectable long beard of a seasoned imperial servant and elder of the Church.  The Exercitationes (see Figure ) were published in two lengthy volumes by Albizzi in Kempten in  and  respectively, as a summa of Lutheran doctrine: his own image was flanked by reminders of the two key Protestant principles: sola fide and sola Scriptura.  The title page page of the Exercitationes shows the four evangelists at the corners, heaven and hell top and bottom, and a justified man opposite a sinner. Albizzi was introduced as 'a heroic man of splendid virtue'. The book was dedicated to Duke Johann Georg I of Saxony, and was a catalogue of quaestiones on original sin, salvation, justification, free will, the role of Scripture, the doctrine of the Spirit and, most important, the role of civil and ecclesiastical authority. Given their length and density, the Exercitationes were most certainly not a work of propaganda. They were probably intended by Albizzi as a way of establishing himself as a theologian.  Conversely, Marcantonio De Dominis's Epistola in qua causas discessus a suo episcopatu exponit [Letter in which he explains the reasons of the renunciation to his episcopate] was surely intended as a propaganda tool.  Also printed in Kempten in  by Christopher Kraus, it was one of many editions, common all over Europe at the time, but the role played in it by Antonio Albizzi can only be speculative. The Epistola was a sort of anti-Roman manifesto, written by the former Catholic bishop of Split (now in Croatia) who later became dean of Windsor and a courtier to James I, before he recanted and returned to Rome. The religious content of the Epistola, its anti-papalism, common connections in Istria and Dalmatia, andmost importanta shared belief in the primacy of civil authority over the ecclesiastical, make Albizzi's involvement in its printing credible rather than certain.

IV
Most significantly, Antonio Albizzi was the author of the explicitly Lutheran Tractatus brevis continens decem principia doctrinae christianae, printed in Kempten, again by Christopher Kraus, in . Kraus's anti-Catholic sentiments were hardly concealed, as can be seen from his emblem: an image of Judith holding in her hands the hair of the beheaded Holofernes, surrounded by the verse 'Eripit Deus suos e manibus impiorum' ('God rescues his own from the hands of the ungodly') (see Figure ). It was probably the reprint of the Tractatus in  (with a new frontispiece) that had worried Cardinal Millini (see Figure ). Nevertheless, there is not much evidence of its spread in Italy, albeit the decision to print it in Latin inevitably limited its ambitions. The text followed the classic scheme of loci communes, listing the fundamental doctrines of the Church followed by scriptural evidence. According to Albizzi, the only purpose of Scriptures was to show how faith in the sacrifice of the cross alone is the road to salvation: the booklet is very much focused on the 'benefit of Christ', and on Jesus' salvific atonement.  In Albizzi's prose it is almost possible to detect evidence of early Lutheranism, echoes of Luther's early writings: a sort of nostalgic religion, far indeed from the harsh debates between Philippists and Gnesio-Lutherans that had split the Augsburg Confession. The Tractatus was the work of an isolated man, confined to a small provincial town, working on the margins of the theological debates of his times: it was full of the moderate tones, the spiritual commitment and the enthusiasm of early sixteenth-century piety.
The Tractatus opens with a dedication to Martin Aichmann, sometime right-hand man to the duke of Wüttemberg in Tübingen who in  had become the secret counsellor to the elector of Saxony until his death in  in Dresden. Aichmann was described as a strenuous upholder of apostolic truth, and as a pious philanthropist who had worked to enhance popular literacy and knowledge of the Gospel. The author of the dedicatory letter of the Tractatus was Joseph König, Kempten's 'scholarca and bibliotecarius meritissimus' (at least according to Zemann, the Lutheran pastor of Kempten who would later record Albizzi's biography). König would also serve as the town mayor between  and . One of Albizzi's closest friends, König was clearly appreciated by the locals, as his coat of arms is one of the two held by a statue of a Roman general that, standing on top of a column, to this day oversees Kempten's Rathaus.
It is also worth observing that the Tractatus twice includes the identical grotesque mask of the Lettera di N. ad un amico, proving once again the publication of the Letter by Christopher Kraus in Kempten, and making Albizzi almost certainly its author (see Figure  and ).
Albizzi's authorship was a fact possibly even known to Cardinal Millini, who, despite his concerns, failed to notify the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books of the existence of both pamphlets. Was this a way to avoid irritating those close to the Habsburgs (after all, Albizzi had been a family confidant for a long time)? According to Decio Memmoli, Millini's secretary and biographer, 'the Cardinal always acted in his affairs with two purposes in mind: one to preserve and defend papal dignity and aims, the other to avoid any breakdown in relations with the princes'.  In its brevity and simplicity, and like the Tractatus, the Letter was also an echo of the beginnings of the Reformation, avoiding any temptation to enter in the storms of theological controversies so typical of the age. Its text insisted exclusively on the contraposition between the Christ of the Scriptures and the pope in Rome, using various bible quotations to show the contrast between Catholicism and the true apostolic Church, and to illustrate the apostasy of popery. Sentences like 'The true Church was the apostolic one, and well before anybody ever heard of the papacy' and 'He who leaves the Roman Church … trusts not his intellect, but the word of God' were effective and direct. This was a simple, clear, argument, that did not lose itself in quarrels which would have been difficult for most readers to understand.
The Letter was centred on the core of the conflict that divided Christians: the schism between true and false faith, gospel preaching and papal authority, Christ and AntiChrist. In this sensemore than the Latin Tractatusthe Letter's style was very effective. It was a simple re-presentation of a trope of the early Reformation, one that had been a key part of the visual identity of Lutheranism, and that had produced some of its most famous images. It is enough to think of Lucas Cranach the Younger's Principal differences between the true religion of Christ and the false, idolatrous religion of the AntiChrist (c.) (see Figure ).  'Ne' negotii camminava sempre con due mire, una di serbar illesa la dignità e ragioni pontificie, l'altra di schivar le rotture con i prencipi': Memmoli, Vita, . To the left, in front of a congregation in which some German princes can be recognised, Luther preaches his theology of the cross; underneath, the sacraments of baptism and eucharist are administered. To the right, a portly Franciscan preaches to a crowd of priests, monks and soldiers, inspired by the devil sitting on his shoulder. The corruption of the Church of Rome is evident from the coins dropping out of the pockets of a friar, whilst on the floor lie bags and coffers full of money. The pope, sitting to the right at a table with the tiara, spends his time accruing wealth, thanks to the sale of indulgences and ecclesiastical benefices. In the background, a series of superstitious rites are practised: mass, the anointing of the sick, the blessing of bells. From above, God and even St Francis himself are witnessing the scene angrily, sending down lightning and thunderclaps onto this fake Church.
Similar in content was the Passional Christi und Antichristi printed by Luther and Melanchthon in . This was a short commentary on images by Lucas Cranach the Elder that juxtaposed and contrasted the figures of Christ and of the pope-AntiChrist. One, for example, compared Jesus kicking the merchants out of the temple with the pope selling  Figure ) shows Christ washing the feet of his disciples while the pope commands rulers to kneel at his feet.  A century after these images, the text of the Letter was repeating the same tropes. Was this, perhaps inadvertently, a call to go back to the enthusiasms of the first years of the Reformation? Was it an invitation to restart from the day when, in Worms, Luther proclaimed in front of Charles V and Cardinal Aleandro that his conscience was prisoner only to the Word of God? Nobody, back then, would have imagined it possible that only thirty years later someone would have written that 'not only in Italy is Satan, not only in Italy is the Antichrist', arguing that the authoritarianism of the papacy was now well spread also among Protestants.  'Christ versus AntiChrist' was a rhetorical trope destined for the longue durée, even without the involvement of images: it was even included in the Antitheses Pseudochristi, edited by Giorgio Biandrata and Ferenc Dávid in Alba Iulia (Transylvania) in  as part of the anthology De vera et falsa unius Dei patris, filii, et spiritus sancti cognitione, that would later become a true pillar of Unitarian antiTrinitarism. V Without any doubt, it is a similar simplified theology that characterises the Ragionamento in materia di religione accaduto novamente tra due amici italiani passando da Roma a Napoli l'anno . This pamphlet, which also alarmed Cardinal Millini, is centred once again on justification by faith alone, and on the 'benefit of Christ'. This can now confidently be attributed to Antonio Albizzi.
The Ragionamento is a small booklet in octavo, without date or place of publication, but can be ascribed to Christopher Kraus in Kempten as publisher as the ornaments in its frontispiece (see Figures  and ) are the same as those used by Kraus in the decorative strips subdividing the chapters of the Tractatus brevis (see Figure ).
The Ragionamento is also an extremely rare text; only three copies are known today. The first, preserved at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, is so damaged that no access to it (physical or via reproduction) is currently given to scholars. The second, held at Zürich's Zentralbibliothek, is missing the last  of its  pages. The third, despite being in the catalogue of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek, appears to have been lost by the library. Analysis, therefore, can only be based on the partial Zürich copy.
The text is structured as a dialogue between Pistophilo (lover of the faith) and Erasto, whose name nevertheless appears in full only once, at the start, to be then always abbreviated as 'Erg.'. This poses some problems: it is in fact impossible to identify Erasto with Basel's theologian and doctor Thomas Erastus (-), author of a famous treatise (published in England by Giacomo Castelvetro in ) that denied the validity of ecclesiastical excommunications and argued for the primacy of state power over the Church. The hypothesis of a typo in the first line (a sort of involuntary hypercorrection by Kraus) seems credible; we would argue that it is correct to call our imaginary character Ergasto, as the abbreviation actually suggests (this is also what he is called in the fifth page of  Celio Secondo Curione, Francisci Spierae, qui quod susceptam semel evangelicae veritatis professionem abnegasset damnassetque in horrendam incidit desperationem, historia, n. p., , *v. the Ragionamento). A militant Catholic character, the name Ergasto was probably taken by Albizzi from a certain Ergastus, the protagonist of a  eponymous drama written by the learned Jesuit and classicist Francesco Benci, a professor at the Roman College who used to compose pious plays for the graduation of his students.  There is further proof of this hypothesis in the fact that another of Benci's dramas, published in Rome in , was called Philotimus, a name that might well have suggested Pistophilo to Albizzi.
It is not necessary to devote much time to the actual content of the Ragionamento, a didactic script and a sort of catechism in all but name. Despite the title, no mention of Naples is made in the part of the text available to us. The text is structured as a dialogue between the defence of the authority of the Bible by Pistophilo, a position supported by a huge number Church believes, might it be in the Bible or not'.  For Ergastus, the Church corresponds to pope and priests, whose purpose is to teach all Christian people. This would exclude 'the people and the magistrate, that are respectively more numerous and the most important part of it', Pistophilo promptly objects.  Pistophilo's argument is rather erastian, that 'the Church's ministers … are therefore servants of the common good, and chiefly of the magistrate'.  To Pistophilo, papal authority has no foundation in the Bible, that instead is 'the only rule and norm of faith and of Christian worship'.  In case of doctrinal disagreements, patient examination of Scripture alone, according to Pistophilo, can resolve any controversy. This was the rather hopeful and naïve certainty that Albizzi clearly still held to, despite the conflicts that were dividing Lutheranism at the time.
How the argument between Ergasto and Pistophilo continues in the remaining pages of the Ragionamento is not known, but it presumably

VI
This article has shed some light on a previously neglected series of Lutheran publications in Italian that appeared in the s, clarifying their provenance, and identifying in the curious figure of the Florentine exile Antonio Albizzi their main author. It seems impossible to illuminate further Albizzi's networks in Germany, Italy and, crucially, in Slovenia, a place that has surprisingly proved to be a key, albeit largely ignored, connection. Research in the archives of Florence, Rome, Vienna, Ljubljana and Kempten has brought no further result. Unresolved also is the identity of the promoter of  edition of the Catechismo piocciolo, as any involvement by Antonio Albizzi appears improbable (he would have at least corrected its title). There are two sets of conclusions that can nevertheless be drawn from these materials: the first concerns the aims and ambitions of Antonio Albizzi himself; the second addresses the place of these Lutheran works in the larger picture of Protestant propaganda in Counter-Reformation Italy.
Albizzi's commitment to Lutheran propaganda directed to Italy in the s remains puzzling. A country, Italy, whose unsuccessful Reformation had been inspired more by Swiss Calvinism (thanks to many urban, mercantile and financial links) than German Lutheranism, could hardly be thought likely to be receptive to this message. With a pope-inquisitor like Paul V in Rome, with a country fully under the grip of the Counter-Reformation and with the last fires of hope brought by the Venetian Interdict now expired, what might have been the reason behind Albizzi's moderate Lutheran publications? Who might have been the interlocutors of these pamphlets, sent by an old Florentine patrician from his small provincial refuge? At this time most had probably forgotten the philo-Lutheranism of the emperor Maximilian II, and the humanistic syncretism of Rudolf II's Prague, two projects to which Albizzi had probably subscribed in his youth. We do not have any evidence that would offer us an answer. We can only register the personal and political isolation of Antonio Albizzi in his later life, the result of his strong religious convictions, one that would take him far away from the wealthy, peaceful and bigoted Florence of the seventeenth-century Medicis. Albizzi made a coherent Lutheran choice, both in its political implications (he was after all a strong believer in the subordination of the Church to the State), and for its staunch belief in salvation  A N T O N I O D E G L I A L B I Z Z I A N D L U T H E R A N P R O P A G A N D A by faith alone. This was an article full of doctrinal and social consequences, whose complexity had divided subscribers to the Augsburg confessionthus Philippists and Gnesio-Lutherans: theological debates of which there is no echo in Albizzi's works. With his moderation, he seemed not to realise that the days of the early Reformation had long gone, and that far from an expansion of Lutheranism, what was on the cards was a powerful Catholic reaction, one thaton the eve of the Thirty Years' Warcan also explain the spreading in the Habsburg lands of an esoteric Rosicrucian utopia.  Albizzi was keen to testify to the core beliefs of early Lutheranism, to Luther's interpretation of St Paul's writings and to his call to sola fides and sola Scriptura. It was a commitment, in certain respects, far from the reality of his age. In , the year of his death, the armies of Tilly and Wallenstein had conquered Silesia, Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland for Austria and the Catholic faith, and were ready to flood much of the Baltic coast, posing a dreadful menace to the Lutheran cause itself.
All this notwithstanding, Albizzi's case actually complicates our knowledge of Italian seventeenth-century Protestant propaganda, adding a previously unknown Lutheran component, no matter how small and individual this was. Scholars of our subject might have to accept that, for a variety of reasonsfrom the paucity of the materials to the 'success' of repressionthe puzzle lacks many pieces. Sources are often thin, and limited in their numbers. Of course Albizzi's initiative, despite being that of a very learned man, and indeed a former politician, was rather Quixotic in its ambition. In some way, it was a throw-back to an earlier age. But nevertheless these writings worried the Inquisition in Rome, and might have been able to circulate the peninsula, side by side with Calvinist devotional materials. Clearly, some dissenting conventicles were still in existence. But, we have to be clear on their limits. After the solution to the Interdict crisis, the Reformation had ceased to offer Italians a real political alternative to the rampant throne and altar alliance of the Counter-Reformation. Of course, for a variety of individual reasons, Protestantsand Albizzi was one of themkept dreaming of converting the land of the pope; but their numbers were diminishing, and they would almost completely disappear by the end of the iron century, not to resurface for a long while. Protestantism was starting to lose its political appeal too, and Protestant textsas has been already demonstrated were feeding other kinds of dissent, more often aligned with individual libertinism than a clear Calvinist or Lutheran identity. With his Lutheranism, Albizzi represents  R. J. Evans, Rudolf II and his world: a study in intellectual history, -, Oxford .  F. Barbierato, 'La rovina di Venetia in materia de' libri prohibiti': il libraio Salvatore de' Negri e l'Inquisizione veneziana (-), Venice ; Maghenzani, 'Stranieri eretici'. an eccentric case, but in this larger context there is no divergence between his works and the Reformed pamphlets circulating in Italy: by that time it was too late for them to have any real effect. Indeed, the Holy Office was well aware of this: during the Thirty Years War, and in general in the s, the increasing control exercised over foreign publications and Protestant texts helped feed the rhetoric of confessional conflict and fear of the enemy. Not even in Rome did anyone believe that in their generation the Reformation could take hold in Italy: that threat, no matter how serious it had been in Venice at the start of the decade, had been seen off much earlier, in the mid-sixteenth century. In some ways, Millini and Albizzi, first and foremost two highly capable politicians, are like two mirrors, reflecting into each other their individual quests for legitimation. For Millini, fretting about Protestant pamphlets was a way to justify the omnipresent actions of the Holy Office, and its reach within, as much as without, the Catholic Church. For Albizzi, writing theological pamphlets, and proclaiming the Gospel that he had discovered, was perhaps a wayafter all those years of nicodemismto justify his life in exile, and to be accepted in the small community of Kempten, at least as much as to convert his fellow Italians.