burned at the stake in Athens about twenty years after the death of Pericles. The Emperor Augustus
subjected slanderous publications (libelli famosi) to legal prosecution and destruction by fire.
Christian emperors employed their authority against heathen, heretical, and infidel books. Constantine
the Great, backed by the Council of Nicaea, issued an edict against the writings of Porphyry and
Arius; Accadius, against the books of the Eunomians (398); Theodosius, against the books of the
Nestorians (435). Justinian commanded the destruction of sundry obnoxious works, and forbade
their re-issue on pain of losing the right arm (536). The oecumenical synod of 680 at Constantinople
burned the books which it had condemned, including the letters of the Monothelitic Pope Honorius.
Papal Rome inherited this practice, and improved upon it. Leo I. caused a large number of
Manichaean books to be burnt (446). The popes claimed the right and duty to superintend the
religious and moral literature of Christendom. They transferred the right in the thirteenth century
to the universities, but they found little to do until the art of printing facilitated the publication of
books. The Council of Constance condemned the books of Wiclif and Hus, and ordered the bishops
to burn all the copies they could seize (1415).
The invention of the printing-press (c. 1450) called forth sharper measures in the very city
where the inventor, John Gutenberg, lived and died (1400–1467). It gave rise also to the preventive
policy of book-censorship which still exists in some despotic countries of Europe. Berthold,
Archbishop of Mainz, took the lead in the restriction of the press. He prohibited, Jan. 10, 1486, the
sale of all unauthorized German translations of Greek and Latin works, on the plea of the inefficiency
of the German language, but with a hostile aim at the German Bible. In the same year Pope Innocent
VIII. issued a bull against the printers of bad books. The infamous Pope Alexander VI. prohibited
in 1498, on pain of excommunication, the printing and reading of heretical books; and in a bull of
June 1, 1501, which was aimed chiefly against Germany, he subjected all kinds of literary
publications to episcopal supervision and censorship, and required the four archbishops of Cöln,
Mainz, Trier, and Magdeburg, or their officials, carefully to examine all manuscripts before giving
permission to print them. He also ordered that books already printed should be examined, and burnt
if they contained any thing contrary to the Catholic religion. This bull forms the basis of all
subsequent prohibitions and restrictions of the press by papal, imperial, or other authority.^745
Leo X., who personally cared more for heathen art than Christian literature, went further,
and prohibited, in a bull of March 3, 1515, the publication of any book in Rome without the
imprimatur of the magister sacri palatii (the book-censor), and in other states and dioceses without
the imprimatur of the bishop or the inquisitor of heretical depravity.^746 Offenders were to be punished
by the confiscation and public burning of their books, a fine of one hundred ducats, and
excommunication. Archbishop and Elector Albrecht of Mainz was the first, and it seems the only,
German prince who gave force to this bull for his own large diocese by a mandate of May 17, 1517,
a few months before the outbreak of the Reformation. The papal bull of excommunication, June
15, 1520, consistently ordered the burning of, all the books of Luther."^747 But he laughed it to scorn,
and burned in revenge the pope’s bull, with all his decretals, Dec. 10, 1520.
(^745) The bull is not given in the Bullarium, but by Raynaldus ad a. 1501, No. 36, Zaccaria, and Reusch (I. 54), in part also by Kapp (l.c.
p. 530).
(^746) The bull "Inter solicitudines" was promulgated in the fifth Lateran Council. Labbe, XIV. 257, and Reusch, I. 55 sq.
(^747) The bull "Exurge, Domine," is printed in full, p. 235 sqq.