Enlightened Absolutism 339
Jesuits being expelled from Spain, 1764.
Portugal in 1759. Ten years later, Pombal ended the Inquisition’s status as
an independent tribunal, making it a royal court. Other rulers followed
suit, including Louis XV of France in 1764. The expulsion of the Jesuits
from some of the most powerful Catholic states reflected the diminishing
power of the papacy in the face of absolute monarchs determined to retain
control over what they considered to be national churches.
In Spain, Charles III (ruled 1759—1788) ordered universities to include
instruction in science and philosophy. In 1781, Spain carried out its last
execution of a person accused of heretical religious beliefs. Charles then
reduced the feared Spanish Inquisition to a series of legal hurdles govern
ing publishing. Like the kings of Portugal and France, Charles III in 1776
expelled the Jesuits in part because their near-monopoly on education
seemed to pose a threat to the monarchy’s control over the Church. In Italy,
Leopold II also reduced the authority of the Church in Tuscany, ending the
tithe and crippling the Inquisition. Catherine the Great’s enlightened
approach to religion could be seen in her termination of official (or “govern
ment”) persecution of Old Believers, the dissident sect within the Russian
Orthodox Church. And when Jews came under tsarist rule for the first time
after the first Partition of Poland in 1772 (see Chapter 11), she initially
placed Jewish merchants and other townspeople on an equal basis with
their Christian neighbors. However, protests brought Catherine to adopt
more restrictive measures. In 1794 she introduced double taxation for Jews.
Louis XVI granted French Protestants most civil rights in 1787. And in
Great Britain the following year Parliament reduced some restrictions on
