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 preached at Brescia in Lent, 1527, and others elsewhere. There were three "heretics" at Mirandola in 1524 of whom nothing else is known; but the Florentine physician Girolamo di Bartolommeo Buonagrazia, when proceeded against in 1531, confessed that he had been in correspondence with Luther in 1527, and accepted his doctrine. Nor was Zwingli without supporters. The letters of Egidio délia Porta, an Austin friar of Como (a centre of heresy as early as the time of Julius II), prove that he and some of his fellows were ready to leave Italy and throw in their lot with Zwingli in 1525-6. In 1531 a native of Como who had spent three years beyond the Alps was preaching against the current doctrine of the Eucharist. About the same time priests at Como were laying hands on others, who were to administer the Eucharist in both kinds: one of them, Vincenzio Massaro, is said to have taken a fee of fifteen ducats from all whom he ordained. And a letter written in 1530 by Francesco Negri of Bassano, who had fled from a Benedictine House at Padua and joined Zwingli, and who afterwards drifted to Anabaptism, gives the names of many priests in North Italy whom he reckoned as "brethren."

The disaffected were very numerous. According to the ambassador Francesco Contarini, the Lutherans of Germany boasted in 1535 that their sympathisers in Italy alone would make an army sufficient to deliver them from the priests, and that they had enough friends in the monastic orders to intimidate all who were opposed to them. This of course is a violent exaggeration, and in Italy also popular rumour magnified the danger; yet even so it was not slight. The Reforming movement was especially strong in certain well-defined centres, the chief being Venice and its territories, Ferrara, Modena, Naples, and Lucca.

In VENICE, where foreigners were many and toleration was a principle of the State, the Reform soon made its appearance, and before long found a home. Measures of precaution or repression were demanded by the Patriarch on behalf of the Roman Curia; but as late as 1529 the Signory was able to certify that, excepting for the tolerated German conventicles, the city was free from heresy. Soon afterwards however, in a report to Clement VII on the subject, Caraffa mentions, amongst other evils, the fact that many friars had fallen into heresy, and in particular the disciples of " a certain Franciscan now dead." Of these he names Girolamo Galateo, Bartolommeo Fonzio, and Alessandro da Piero di Sacco. The Bishop of Chieti was thereupon commissioned, by a brief of May 9, 1530, to proceed against Galateo; and from this time forward the extirpation of heresy was the ruling passion of his life. He it was who procured from Pope Paul III the bull Licet ab initia (July 21, 1542) reorganising the Roman Inquisition on the basis of that of Spain. He was its first head, and in 1555, as Pope Paul IV, he completed the extension of its power over the whole of Italy.