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
Pope Paul III signed this bull on 21 July 1542, founding the Roman Inquisition. That summer Bernardino Ochino, the most popular preacher in Italy, was summoned to Rome. He did not go. At fifty-six he crossed the Alps into Switzerland and never preached in Italy again. Peter Martyr Vermigli fled a few days after 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 one, and why. The number is how much harder it hits than usual — ×4 is four times the normal force.
The bull offers silence or death. The Protestants it drove out found a third way: flee, and keep preaching. In 1542 Ochino went to Geneva and Vermigli to Strasbourg, and both kept teaching the gospel.
The bull cannot answer the book. It was never written to have an argument — only cardinals and a warrant.
The bull did not answer the book, and never tried. Licet ab Initio arrests, imprisons and confiscates. It has no argument against justification by faith. The Benefit of Christ asked a different question: not who may forbid this, but whether it is true. Tens of thousands of Italians read it before the Inquisition could stop it.
Il Beneficio di Cristo, Chapter III; Licet ab initio (1542), as narrated in Schaff, History of the Christian Church VIII §129 (1892).