Although the object of the Inquisition was the purification of the land from Judaism, it was not confined to this, and it early proved that it could exercise its blighting influence on the intellectual development as well as on the material prosperity of Portugal. Among the learned foreigners whom André de Gouvêa, at the request of João III, brought to Portugal, in 1547, to found a college of arts in his University of Coimbra, was George Buchanan, as professor of Greek. Gouvêa died within a year, and soon afterwards the foreigners were driven out to be replaced by Jesuits, who were becoming the dominant power in the land. The process was a simple one. Buchanan and two others were prosecuted by the Inquisition and thrown in prison. The accusation against the former was that he had written a poem against the Franciscans, that he had spoken disrespectfully of the friars, that he had eaten meat in Lent, that he had said that St. Augustin's views on the Eucharist were akin to those condemned by Rome, and generally that he was thought to be ill-affected towards the Holy See. After incarceration for eighteen months, he was sentenced to reclusion in a monastery for instruction by the monks, whom he describes as good-natured enough but wholly ignorant. On his liberation João offered to retain him, but he took the earliest opportunity to escape to England.[733]
A still more effective deadening of intellectual aspiration was the persecution of Damião de Goes, the foremost scholar of Portugal in the sixteenth century. When a youth of 22, he had been sent to Flanders as secretary to the Portuguese factory. It was not until 1528 that his thirst for learning was awakened, he studied Latin, went to Padua, and speedily made himself known to scholars throughout Europe. In 1545, João recalled him to Portugal, where rivalry arose between him and Simon Rodríguez the Jesuit Provincial, who had met him in Padua and now accused him to the Inquisition for heretical utterances made there nine years before, the details of which he could not remember, but had a general impression that they were Lutheran. Nothing came of this and, in 1550, Rodríguez repeated his accusation, with the same result. Goes made enemies in his literary career and, in 1571, the denunciation of Rodríguez, made twenty-six years before, was resuscitated. He was now seventy years old, he had been an invalid for twenty years, and was scarce able to stand, but he was cast into a dungeon, April 4, 1571, while his trial dragged on. No further evidence of any account could be found against him, but he freely confessed that, when he went to Flanders, he fell into the errors of considering indulgences of little value, and that general confession sufficed, that after learning Latin and studying, he had abandoned these errors and had since been strictly orthodox, at the request of Cardinal Sadoleto he had written to Melanchthon, in hopes of winning him over, and he had given a letter of introduction to Luther to Frei Roque de Almeida, whose object was to acquire a knowledge of the heresy so as to confute it. On this confession exclusively was based the sentence, which declared him to be a Lutheran heretic, but considering that it was when he was an ignorant youth of 21 and that, on learning Latin, he had abandoned his errors, he was mercifully condemned only to reconciliation, confiscation, and perpetual prison, the abjuration to be private in view of his quality and his reputation abroad. The monastery da Batalha was assigned as his prison, and the certificate of his delivery there is dated December 16, 1572; on the 9th the _juez do fisco_ had already received the certificate of confiscation. The "perpetual" prison of the Portuguese Inquisition must have been temporary, like the Spanish, for Goes is said to have died in his own house, either by apoplexy or killed by his own servants, at a date which is not known.[734] If forty years of orthodoxy could not atone for a youthful vacillation on one or two points of faith, it can readily be estimated how potent an instrumentality was the Holy Office in stunting the development of Portuguese intellect.