In Rome the Inquisition pursued its course and speedily disposed of all who clung to the new and hated opinions. Persecution was incessant under succeeding popes, Paul III, Julius III, Paul IV and Pius IV. During their rule many learned and pious men were sacrificed by the Inquisition in Rome and beyond it. Fannio was hanged at Florence in 1550 and then burned on the demand of Julius. The following year Galeazzo Treccio was imprisoned, tortured and burned alive in a prison of the Milanese. Giovanni de Monteleiro, professor of metaphysics in the University of Bologna, was burned in Rome in 1551. Francesco Gambia, who had been present at a Protestant service in Geneva, was seized when crossing Lake Como, strangled, beheaded and his body burned; Pomponio Algieri of Padua, was found to be a heretic, was carried prisoner to Venice, but not being a Venetian was surrendered to the cardinal inquisitors, removed to Rome and burned alive in the presence of Paul IV; Giovanni Luigi Paschali, an eminent Protestant preacher in Calabria, was taken to Rome, tried, condemned and burned just outside the castle of St. Angelo, at which ceremony Pope Pius V presided. Paschali was a learned theologian, and after he had been tortured and was on the brink of execution, he maintained a long disputation with a great controversialist in the presence of a galaxy of cardinals, bishops and distinguished clerics assembled in his cell. Venice was always ready to curry favour with the Inquisition. An Italian, Altieri, attached to the British Legation, wrote from Venice about 1550 to Martin Luther: “Many have been seized and are pining away in perpetual imprisonment.... All conspire together to oppress the Lord and his anointed, and nowhere is this calamity more cruel and prevalent than in Venice itself.” The spies of the Inquisition were active in denouncing the secret worshippers according to the new faith who still lurked in the city, and they were forthwith tried and condemned. The form of execution was usually by drowning in the lagoons. Paul IV entertained the gravest fears regarding the end of the Reformation, and was the most strenuous in urging the inquisitors to root out the deadly heresy. The prisons of the Inquisition but just erected were crowded to overflowing. Informers were ever busy in denouncing people to the Holy Office. The slightest suspicion was enough to bring about arrest and consignment to some foul dungeon. No one ventured to breathe a word of protest against the severity of the tribunal. To betray sympathy for the sufferers would have been held an offence which would surely lead to punishment as an abettor of the heresy. Even the college of cardinals trembled, for one of their august body had been incarcerated by the pope in the castle of St. Angelo, from which he was handed over to the inquisitors.