held the commissioner accountable for the moneys collected. The precaution was justified. When the dreaded news of the capture of Constantinople (May 29, 1453) was received, John de Castro, thinking that Cyprus had also been taken, squandered the money he had collected. De Castro was arrested, convicted and sent to prison, but the scandal that had been created by the embezzlement greatly injured the sale of the indulgences. As the permission to sell indulgences expired by limitation on May 1, 1455, Zappe, the chief commissioner, made renewed and more vigorous efforts to promote the sale. It was found that, in the limited time allowed for sale, the customary process of copying was entirely too slow. There was, also, the liability that a hurried copyist would produce inexact copies; that an unscrupulous copyist or seller would issue spurious copies. These seem to have been the reasons that led Zappe to have the documents printed, which was accordingly done, with blank spaces for the insertion of the name of the buyer and the signature of the seller.
The typography of this Letter of 31 lines is much better than that of the Donatus, but it has many blemishes. The text is deformed with abbreviations; the lines are not evenly spaced out; the capital letters of the text are rudely drawn and carelessly cut. The white space below the sixteenth line, and the space and the crookedness in the three lines at the foot, are evidences that the types were not securely fastened in the chase. These faults provoke notice, but it must be admitted that the types were fairly fitted and stand in decent line. They were obviously cast in moulds of metal; it would be impracticable to make types so small in moulds of sand.
Eighteen copies of these Letters of Indulgence are known, all bearing the printed date of 1454 or of 1455. The places where they were sold having been written on the document by the seller, we discover that they must have been sold over a large territory, for one was issued at Copenhagen, another at Nuremberg, and another at Cologne. The large number of copies preserved is evidence that many copies must have
