“Come s’egli non fusse al mondo”. Paolo IV e l’Europa

In 1555 the peace of Augsburg was concluded and pope Paul IV was elected. The legalization of biconfessionalism turned European society into a space where different denominations coexisted and the papal envoys had to operate in a new world shaped by “religious peaces”. How did Pope Inquisitor react to these radical trasformations? What did he understand of this epochal change, considering the priority he assigned to prosecuting heretics and to a top-down rigid reformation of the Church? What were the relations between the pope and his diplomatic network within the Holy Roman Empire and Poland?