Licet ab Initio
the papal bull founding the Roman Inquisition (21 July 1542)
Pope Paul III, at the urging of Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa (later Pope Paul IV)
Six cardinals and a warrant, answering a book with an arrest instead of an argument.
- Catch rate
- Not found in the wild
- Base research
- 340
- Stat total
- 362
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Six cardinals, plenary power, and no expiry date. It stayed in force for the rest of the century.
It does not refute a single doctrine. It gives six men the power to arrest, imprison, and confiscate the property of anyone suspected of holding one.
A properly sealed instrument of an actual pope. There is no procedural flaw to find in it — the flaw is what it is for.
Ochino was cited to Rome within weeks of it being signed. He never arrived.
Cited for this book
Signed 21 July 1542 after Carafa persuaded Paul III that Rome, which had conquered the first arch-heretic, must conquer all his successors. Bernardino Ochino — General of the Capuchins, the most popular preacher in Italy — was preaching his last course of sermons at Venice that same Lent, cited to Rome that August, and never went: he crossed the Alps into Switzerland instead, at fifty-six, gray-haired, and never preached in Italy again. Peter Martyr Vermigli, an Augustinian prior, left days behind him.
Moves learned
This book learns nothing new by levelling — everything it knows, it knew from the start or brought with it through development.
What answers it
The specific move or chapter of Scripture that cuts through this argument, and why.
The bull did not answer the book — it could not, and did not try. Licet ab initio arrests, imprisons, and confiscates; it has no argument against justification by faith because it was never written to have one. Il Beneficio di Cristo answers a different question, the one the Inquisition’s own violence conceded it could not win in the open: not "who has the authority to forbid this," but "is it true." Tens of thousands of Italians read it before a single cardinal laid a hand on it, and no bull ever un-reads a book.
Il Beneficio di Cristo, Chapter III; Licet ab initio (1542), as narrated in Schaff, History of the Christian Church VIII §129 (1892).