Using the print technology that it hopes to control, the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition, in charge of censorship for the Catholic Church, begins publication of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohjbited Books). This will be updated through 32 editions, the last of which will appear in 1948. "The various editions also contain the rules of the Church relating to the reading, selling and censorship of books. The aim of the list was to prevent the reading of immoral books or works containing theological errors and to prevent the corruption of the faithful. The list was not simply a reactive work. Catholic authors had the possibility to defend their writings and could prepare a new edition with the necessary corrections or elisions either to avoid or to limit a ban.. Pre-publication censorship was encouraged."

"In the 18th century, amazingly enough, many of the books printed by Raimondi were still in the Palazzo Vecchio stacked in wardrobes. An inventory taken at the time shows that 1,039 copies of the Arabic-Latin Gospels, 566 of the Arabic Gospels, 810 of the Avicenna, 1,967 of the Euclid, 1,129 of the Idrisi, still remained unsold, along with several other titles. But early in the 19th century - the Age of Enlightenment - the government sold the remaining books for a derisory sum to a bookseller who destroyed the bulk of them to increase the rarity of the remainder. The remaining type and matrices wound up in the Pitti Palace, where Napoleon was able to loot them at his ease when he conquered Italy. In 1808 Napoleon ordered the punches and matrices to be taken to Paris, where they were used to print Arabic proclamations for distribution in the Near East eight years later, after Napoleon's exile, they were brought back to Florence."