toleration, the Venetians steadily tolerated in their several
sorts of worship Jews and Greeks, Mohammedans and Armenians, with
Protestants of every sort who came to them on business. When the
Roman Index forbade the publication of most important works of
leading authors, Venice demanded and obtained for her printers
rights which were elsewhere denied.

As to the religious restrictions which touched trade, the
Venetians in the public councils, and indeed the people at large,
had come to know perfectly what the papal theory meant,--with
some of its promoters, fanaticism, but with the controlling power
at Rome, revenue, revenue to be derived from retailing
dispensations to infringe the holy rules.

This peculiar antithesis--nowhere more striking than at Venice,
on the one side, religious fears and hopes; on the other, keen
insight into the ways of ecclesiasticism--led to peculiar
compromises. The bankers who had taken interest upon money, the
merchants who had traded with Moslems and heretics, in their last
hours frequently thought it best to perfect their title to
salvation by turning over large estates to the Church. Under the
sway of this feeling, and especially of the terrors infused by
priests at deathbeds, mortmain had become in Venice, as in many
other parts of the world, one of the most serious of evils. Thus
it was that the clergy came to possess between one fourth and one
third of the whole territory of the Republic, and in its Bergamo
district more than one half; and all this was exempt from
taxation. Hence it was that the Venetian Senate found it
necessary to devise a legal check which should make such
absorption of estates by the Church more and more difficult.