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By Root 1277 0

into one of the most fervent and inventively radical priests of the Counter-Reformation. His elder brother, Federico Borromeo, died suddenly in 1562. Carlo, who was administrator of the pope’s native diocese, the Archbishopric of Milan, was widely expected to give up his career in the Church, renounce his vows of piety and continue the family line by marrying in order to father a son and heir. Instead, he concluded that all man’s earthly hopes and aspirations amounted to no more than a handful of dust. He gave up the trappings of wealth, sacked the majority of his household staff and forbade those remaining in his service to wear garments of silk or to indulge in any other luxuries. He took holy orders and briefly considered retreating from the world altogether, to a monastery. Eventually he decided that it was his role in the divine plan to revive and reform the Roman Catholic Church – and he set about the task with the evangelical zeal of a man convinced that he had God on his side.

It was only after the death of his brother that Carlo Borromeo’s influence would really be felt in Milan. In 1565 he was consecrated Archbishop of Milan. He signalled his intentions by making his triumphal entry into the city wearing archbishop’s robes, rather than dressed as a cardinal. It was his way of indicating that he came with his own sense of duty and purpose, not as the mere servant of papal Rome. He was determined to make the city and its provinces into the crucible for an extraordinary socio-religious experiment. Under his steely control and watchful gaze, the 900,000 souls of the Duchy of Milan were to be systematically indoctrinated in the ways of his own, deeply ascetic brand of piety. What he attempted was nothing less than a form of forced mass conversion to what he saw as the real and true tenets of Christian faith.

The archbishop had a darkly pessimistic view of human nature. He passionately opposed the doctrine of free will favoured by so many Protestants, and by some within his own church. To him, the idea that man had a God-given ability to choose between good and evil was a pernicious lie. He had a revealing disagreement with another prominent figure in the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church, the Bolognese theologian Gabriele Paleotti. Paleotti argued that ‘Since God created human volition free and its own arbiter, it can be forced by no chains, but only sparked with the help of God’s grace.’ In Borromeo’s bleaker view, human nature is ‘already tainted by sin’ – the Original Sin of Adam and Eve – and ‘is by itself so inclined to evil that we easily neglect and forget to do good’. Borromeo’s stern conclusion was that ‘we need help and stimulants to live well, and always someone to remind us of it.’16 What that sentence portended, for the people of Milan, was a systematic attempt to change their way of life and transform their habits of thought. Borromeo saw himself as a spiritual successor to St Ambrose. Just as Ambrose had defied the Roman emperor, so Borromeo challenged the Spanish governors of Milan with the aim of asserting his own authority as the city’s spiritual leader.

One of his first acts was to reassert the ancient right of the Archbishop of Milan to maintain a private army. Borromeo’s so-called famiglia armata, or ‘armed family’, which was a corps of armed men drawn from his own household, became a key weapon in his fight to reform what he regarded as the rotten state of the city. The archbishop claimed wide-ranging powers, so that those suspected of any offence that he judged to touch on public morality – such as heresy, blasphemy or sodomy – were liable to receive the not so tender attentions of his ‘family’. He revived the defunct civil and criminal tribunals of the archiepiscopal curia, and reopened ancient prisons for the confinement of those found guilty in Milan’s ecclesiastical courts. Borromeo’s insistence on the unrestricted use of his famiglia armata, and his extension of ecclesiastical authority into areas of life long regulated by the secular courts and justice system, led to numerous clashes