In 1479, Pope Sixtus IV makes Jenson, printer-publisher of Venice, Count Palatine, the first nobleman among publishers. In 1503, the Venetian Senate charged Musurus (the friend and literary associate of Aldus and professor of Greek in Padua) with the censorship of all Greek books printed in Venice, with reference particularly to the suppression of anything inimical to the Roman Church. This constitutes one of the earliest attempts made in Italy to supervise the work of the printing-press. The action of the Senate was doubtless instigated by the authorities of the Inquisition. It was natural that the ecclesiastics should have dreaded the influence of the introduction into Italy of the doctrines of the Greek Church, while it was doubtless the case that the refugees from Constantinople brought with them no very cordial feeling towards Rome. The belief was very general that if the Papacy had not felt a greater enmity against the Greek Church than against the Turk, the Catholic States of Europe would have saved Constantinople. The sacking of Constantinople by the armies of the Fourth Crusade was still remembered by the Christians of the East as a crime of the Western Church. There were, therefore, reasons enough why the authorities of Rome should think it necessary to keep a close watch over the new literature coming in from the East, and should do what was practicable to exclude all doctrinal writings, and the censorship instituted in 1503 was but the beginning of a long series of rigorous enactments. The censorship measures undertaken by the Government of Venice (as was true of the measures of other States in which the business of publishing became of importance) were more largely concerned with the supervision of the press for the safety of the State than for the interests of the Church. For the century between 1407–1528, this censorship in Venice was carried on without the aid of any general law, and was based simply upon a series of precedents evolved from the individual action taken by the Government in each instance as it arose. The responsibility for the censorship of the press rested with the Council of Ten, which, in its capacity of a standing committee, assumed a general charge of the morals of the community. An application from a printer for a privilege must, according to the usual routine, be accompanied by a certificate or _testamur_ from the examiners who were willing to certify as to the soundness and the importance of the work in question.