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In response to the growth of the Protestant movement, the Catholic Church instituted its own reforms. In 1545 the Council of Trent was called under Pope Paul III to reform the Church and to refute Lutheranism. However, in a defensive measure, the full fury of the Church was also unleashed on anybody who continued to challenge its authority. The Council endorsed the establishment of the Roman Inquisition that hunted down and executed heretics in the most gruesome of ways. An index of books deemed heretical was published in the first attempt at mass censorship, and to read them was to run the risk of excommunication, which was to many a fate worse than death.
In 1543 the Polish astronomer, Nicolai Copernicus, had been condemned for daring to suggest that the Earth, far from being the centre of the universe, actually rotated around the sun. 72 years later, Galileo Galilei was called to Rome by the Inquisition for daring to agree with Copernicus. While agreeing that the Bible was infallible, he had suggested that the people who interpreted it might not be. As a result, he was forced to state publicly that the Earth did not revolve around the sun and was sentenced to imprisonment in his own home. As David Landes states, ‘The Protestant reformation gave a big boost to literacy, spawned dissent and heresies, and promoted scepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of the scientific endeavour. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure.’71
Exhausted by wars on all fronts, Charles abdicated in 1555, only to die in a monastery two years later. The German-speaking Habsburg lands passed to Charles' younger brother, Ferdinand, who became Holy Roman Emperor – now a virtually hereditary Habsburg title. The Spanish Empire, including the Netherlands, the Habsburg Italian possessions and, for a time, Portugal, passed to his fanatical son, Philip II. In this way, the minor branch of the Austrian Habsburgs and the major branch of the Spanish Habsburgs were founded.