The peculiar conception, that from the earliest times Italy had formed, of the Kingdom of God and of the way in which this Kingdom was to be reached, the astounding freedom of spirit with which (during the middle ages) it handled matters of dogma and of discipline, the serenity that it was able to maintain in the face of the great mystery of life and death, the marvellous way with which it brought into accord faith and rationalism, its indifference for heresies and for the temerities of its mystical imagination, the ardent affection with which it accepted the highest ideals of Christianity, and finally, the indignation with which from time to time it denounced the feebleness, the violence, the corruption of the Church of Rome,--this is the religion of Italy, the faith of Peter Damien, of Arnold of Brescia, of St. Francis, of John of Parma, of St. Catherine of Siena, of Savonarola, and of Ochino; but it was also the faith of Dante and of Petrarch, of Giotto, of Fra Angelico, and of Raphael, of Vittoria Colonna and of Michael Angelo.[104] =4. Spain.=--In Spain as in Italy, the Church did not at once realise the risks to orthodoxy that were to be associated with the work of the printers. German printers coming to Spain as early as 1474 were received with favour and found opportunities for profitable work. Even Hebrew printers were at the outset welcomed. Between the years 1499–1510, Cardinal Ximenes (following in the footsteps of Turrecremata) paid fifty thousand crowns for the production of a series of classics. It was not until 1510 that the Church began, through the organisation of its censorship, to hamper the work of the printers. Pütter is authority for the statement[105] that for a term of two years (1484–1486) Christopher Columbus served as a bookseller’s apprentice and as a colporteur. An ecclesiastic named Bernaldes writes in 1487: “I have recently seen a man named Christofero Colombo who comes from Genoa and who is a dealer in printed books that he has brought to this city (Cogolludo) from Andalusia.”