g his report,
in the month of January 1606, they appointed him Theologian and Canonist
to the Republic, with a yearly salary of 200 ducats. This post he
occupied until his death, having at a later period been raised to the
still more important office of Counselor of State, which eventually he
filled alone without a single coadjutor.

From the month of January 1606, for the remaining seventeen years of his
life, Sarpi was intellectually the most prominent personage of Venice,
the man who for the world at large represented her policy of moderate
but firm resistance to ecclesiastical tyranny. Greatness had been thrust
upon the modest and retiring student; and Father Paul's name became the
watchword of political independence throughout Europe.

The Jesuists acting in concert with Spain, as well-informed historians
held certain, first inspired Camillo Borghese with his ill-considered
attempt upon the liberties of Venice.[133] It was now the Jesuits, after
their expulsion from the Republic, who opened the batteries of literary
warfare against the Venetian government. They wrote and published
manifestoes through the Bergamasque territory, which province
acknowledged the episcopal jurisdiction of Milan, though it belonged to
the Venetian domain. In these writings it was argued that, so long as
the Papal interdict remained in force, all sacraments would be invalid,
marriages null, and offspring illegitimate. The population, trained
already in doctrines of Papal supremacy, were warned that should they
remain loyal to a contumacious State, their own souls would perish
through the lack of sacerdotal ministrations, and their posterity would
roam the world as bastards and accursed. To traverse this argument of
sarcerdotal tyranny, exorbitant in any age of the Latin Church, but
preposterous after the illumination of the sixteenth century in Europe,
was a citizen's plain duty. Sarpi therefore supplied an elegant Italian
stylist, Giambattista Leoni, with material for setting forth a statement
of the controversy between Venice and Rome. It would have been well if
he had taken up the pen with his own hand. But at this early period of
his career as publicist, he seems to have been diffident about his
literary powers. The result was that Leoni's main defense of the
Republic fell flat; and the war was waged for a while upon side issues.
Sarpi drew a treatise by Gerson, the learned French champion of Catholic
independence, forth from the dus