Contraccolpi antiluterani: la normalizzazione della popolazione di etnia bizantina nella Grecìa salentina

In the extreme necessity of the Catholic Church to fight the various heresies born throughout Europe under the pressure of the millenarian instances born at the end of the fifteenth and again the Lutheran reformist, the Grecìa salentina, where they still resist language, customs and customs of Byzantine origin, is forced to undergo the inexorable process of 'normalization' to the remaining Latin area. The records preserved in the Archiepiscopal Curia of Otranto, in the first surviving personal records of the various parishes of the aforementioned ethnic minority and in the State Archives of Lecce, document the affirmation of the new way of thinking resulting from the new requests brought by the Dominican fathers and from Msgr. Nicola Maiorano for the affirmation of the existence of Purgatory, of the cult of the Madonna del SS. Rosary and the relative practice of indulgences in suffrage of the soul of the deceased. In order to fully implement all of this in the area under examination according to the dictates of the Council of Trent, during the sixteenth century, the impositions by the papal and archbishopric ecclesiastical authorities, encouraged also by the local feudal power, against which the possible resistance of the population are being stifled in the general magma of threats of excommunication against it.