READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION IN EUROPE

THE PAPACY

1. Claim to Universal Supremacy.

The long struggle between the Medieval Church and the Mediaeval Empire, between the priest and the warrior, ended, in the earlier half of the thirteenth century, in the overthrow of the Hohenstaufens, and left the Papacy sole inheritor of the claim of ancient Rome to be sovereign of the civilised world.

Roma caput mundi regit orbis frena rotundi.

Strong and masterful Popes had for centuries insisted on exercising powers which, they asserted, belonged to them as the successors of St. Peter and the representatives of Christ upon earth. Ecclesiastical jurists had translated their assertions into legal language, and had expressed them in principles borrowed from the old imperial law. Precedents, needed by the legal mind to unite the past with the present, had been found in a series of imaginary papal judgments extending over past centuries. The forged decretals of the pseudo-Isidor (used by Pope Nicholas I. in his letter of 866 A.D. to the bishops of Gaul), of the group of canonists who supported the pretensions of Pope Gregory VII (1073—1085),—Anselm of Lucca, Deusdedit, Cardinal Bonzio, and Gregory of Pavia,—gave to the papal claims the semblance of the sanction of antiquity. The i>Decretum< of Gratian, issued in 1150 from Bologna, then the most famous Law School in Europe, incorporated all these earlier forgeries and added new ones. It displaced the older collections of Canon Law and became the starting-point for succeeding canonists. Its mosaic of facts and false­hoods formed the basis for the theories of the imperial powers and of the universal jurisdiction of the Bishops of Rome.

The picturesque religious background of this conception of the Church of Christ as a great temporal empire had been furnished by St. Augustine, although probably he would have been the first to protest against the use made of his vision of the City of God. His unfinished master­piece, De Civitate Dei, in which with a devout and glowing imagination he had contrasted the Civitas Terrena, or the secular State founded on conquest and maintained by fraud and violence, with the Kingdom of God, which he identified with the visible ecclesiastical society, had filled the imagination of all Christians in the days immediately preceding the dissolution of the Roman Empire of the West, and had contributed in a remarkable degree to the final overthrow of the last remains of a cultured paganism. It became the sketch outline which the jurists of the Roman Curia gradually filled in with details by their strictly defined and legally expressed claim of the Roman Pontiff to a universal jurisdiction. Its living but poetically indefinite ideas were transformed into clearly defined legal principles found ready-made in the all-embracing jurisprudence of the ancient empire, and were analysed and exhibited in definite claims to rule and to judge in every department of human activity. When poetic thoughts, which from their very nature stretch forward towards and melt in the infinite, are imprisoned within legal formulas and are changed into principles of practical jurisprudence, they lose all their distinctive character, and the creation which embodies them becomes very different from what it was meant to be. The mischievous activity of the Roman canonists actually transformed the Civitas Dei of the glorious vision of St. Augustine into that Civitas Terrena which he reprobated, and the ideal Kingdom of God became a vulgar earthly monarchy, with all the accompaniments of conquest, fraud, and violence which, according to the great theologian of the West, naturally belonged to such a society. But the glamour of the City of God long remained to dazzle the eyes of gifted and pious men during the earlier Middle Ages, when they contem­plated the visible ecclesiastical empire ruled by the Bishop of Rome.

The requirements of the practical religion of everyday life were also believed to be in the possession of this ecclesiastical monarchy to give and to withhold. For it was the almost universal belief of mediaeval piety that the mediation of a priest was essential to salvation; and the priesthood was an integral part of this monarchy, and did not exist outside its boundaries. “No good Catholic Christian doubted that in spiritual things the clergy were i the divinely appointed superiors of the laity, that this power proceeded from the right of the priests to celebrate the sacraments, that the Pope was the real possessor of this power, and was far superior to all secular authority.” In the decades immediately preceding the Reformation, many an educated man might have doubts about this power of the clergy over the spiritual and eternal welfare of men and women; but when it came to the point, almost no one could venture to say that there was nothing in it. And so long as the feeling remained that there might be something in it, the anxieties, to say the least, which Christian men and women could not help having when they looked forward to an unknown future, made kings and peoples hesitate before they offered defiance to the Pope and the clergy. The spiritual powers which were believed to come from the exclusive possession of priesthood and sacraments went for much in increasing the authority of the papal empire and in binding it together in one compact whole.

In the earlier Middle Ages the claims of the Papacy to universal supremacy had been urged and defended by ecclesiastical jurists alone; but in the thirteenth century theology also began to state them from its own point of view. Thomas Aquinas set himself to prove that submission to the Roman Pontiff was necessary for every human being. He declared that, under the law of the New Testament, the king must be subject to the priest to the extent that, if kings proved to be heretics or schismatics, the Bishop of Rome was entitled to deprive them of all kingly authority by releasing subjects from their ordinary obedience.

The fullest expression of this temporal and spiritual supremacy claimed by the Bishops of Rome is to be found in Pope Innocent IV’s Commentary on the Decretals (1243­-1254), and in the Bull, Unam Sanctam, published by Pope Boniface VIII in 1302. But succeeding Bishops of Roma in no way abated their pretensions to universal sovereignty. The same claims were made during the Exile at Avignon and in the days of the Great Schism. They were asserted by Pope Pius II in his Bull, Execrabilis et pristinis (1459), and by Pope Leo X on the very eve of the Reformation, in his Bull, Pastor Aeternus (1516); while Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), acting as the lord of the universe, made over the New World to Isabella of Castile and to Ferdinand of Aragon by legal deed of gift in his Bull, Inter caetera divinae (May 4th, 1493).

The power claimed in these documents was a twofold supremacy, temporal and spiritual.

2. The Temporal Supremacy.

The former, stated in its widest extent, was the right to depose kings, free their subjects from their allegiance, and bestow their territories on another. It could only be enforced when the Pope found a stronger potentate willing to carry out his orders, and was naturally but rarely exercised. Two instances, however, occurred not long before the Reformation. George Podiebrod, the King of Bohemia, offended the Bishop of Rome by insisting that the Roman See should keep the bargain made with his Hussite subjects at the Council of Basel. He was summoned to Rome to be tried as a heretic by Pope Pius II in 1464, and by Pope Paul II in 1465, and was declared by the latter to be deposed; his subjects were released from their allegiance, and his kingdom was offered to Matthias Corvinus, the King of Hungary, who gladly accepted the offer, and a protracted and bloody war was the consequence. Later still, in 1511, Pope Julius II excommunicated the King of Navarre, and empowered any neighbouring king to seize his dominions—an offer readily accepted by Ferdinand of Aragon.

It was generally, however, in more indirect ways that this claim to temporal supremacy, i.e. to direct the policy, and to be the final. arbiter in the actions of temporal sovereigns, made itself felt. A great potentate, placed over the loosely formed kingdoms of the Middle Ages, hesitated to provoke a contest with an authority which was able to give religious sanction to the rebellion of powerful feudal nobles seeking a legitimate pretext for defying him, or which could deprive his subjects of the external consolations of religion by laying the whole or part of his dominions under an interdict. We are not to suppose that the exercise of this claim of temporal supremacy was always an evil thing. Time after time the actions and interference of right-minded Popes proved that the temporal supremacy of the Bishop of Rome meant that moral considerations must have due weight attached to them in the international affairs of Europe; and this fact, recognised and felt, accounted largely for much of the practical acquiescence in the papal claims. But from the time when the Papacy became, on its temporal side, an Italian power, and when its international policy had for its chief motive to increase the political prestige of the Bishop of Rome within the Italian peninsula, the moral standard of the papal court was hopelessly lowered, and it no longer had even the semblance of representing morality in the international affairs of Europe. The change may be roughly dated from the pontificate of Pope Sixtus IV (1471—1484), or from the birth of Luther (November 10th, 1483). The possession of the Papacy gave this advantage to Sixtus over his contemporaries in Italy, that he “was relieved of all ordinary considerations of decency, consistency, or prudence, because his position as Pope saved him from serious disaster.” The divine authority, assumed by the Popes as the representatives of Christ upon earth, meant for Sixtus and his immediate successors that they were above the requirements of common morality, and had the right for themselves or for their allies to break the most solemn treaties when it suited their shifting policy.

 3. The Spiritual Supremacy.

The ecclesiastical supremacy was gradually interpreted to mean that the Bishop of Rome was the one or universal bishop in whom all spiritual and ecclesiastical powers were summed up, and that all other members of the hierarchy were simply delegates selected by him for the purposes of administration. On this interpretation, the Bishop of Rome was the absolute monarch over a kingdom which was called spiritual, but which was as thoroughly material as were those of France, Spain, or England. For, according to mediaeval ideas, men were spiritual if they had taken orders, or were under monastic vows; fields, drains, and fences were spiritual things if they were Church property ; a house, a barn, or a byre was a spiritual thing, if it stood on land belonging to the Church. This papal kingdom, miscalled spiritual, lay scattered over Europe in diocesan lands, convent estates, and parish glebes—interwoven in the web of the ordinary kingdoms and principalities of Europe. It was part of the Pope’s claim to spiritual supremacy that his subjects (the clergy) owed no allegiance to the monarch within whose territories the is resided; that they lived outside the sphere of civil legislation and taxation; and that they were under special law imposed on them by their supreme spiritual ruler, an paid taxes to him and to him alone. The claim to spiritual supremacy therefore involved endless interference with the rights of temporal sovereignty in every country in Europe and things civil and things sacred were so inextricably mixed that it is quite impossible to speak of the Reformation as a purely religious movement It was also an endeavour to put an end to the exemption of the Church and its possessions from all secular control, and to her constant encroachment on secular territory.

To show how this claim for spiritual supremacy trespassed continually on the domain of secular authority and created a spirit of unrest all over Europe, we have only to look at its exercise in the matter of patronage to benefits, to the way in which the common law of the Church interfered with the special civil laws of European State and to the increasing burden of papal requisitions of money.

In the case of bishops, the theory was that the dean and chapter elected, and that the bishop-elect had to be confirmed by the Pope. This procedure provided for the selection locally of a suitable spiritual ruler, and also for the supremacy of the head of the Church. The medieval bishops, however, were temporal lords of great influence in the civil affairs of the kingdom or principality within which their dioceses were placed, and it was naturally an object of interest to kings and princes to secure me who would be faithful to themselves. Hence the tendence was for the civil authorities to interfere more or less in episcopal appointments. This frequently resulted in making these elections a matter of conflict between the head of the Church in Rome and the head of the State in France, England, or Germany; in which case the rights of the dean and chapter were commonly of small account. The contest was in the nature of things almost inevitable even when the civil and the ecclesiastical powers were actuated by the best motives, and when both sought to appoint men competent to discharge the duties of the position with ability. But the best motives were not always active. Diocesan rents were large, and the incomes of bishops made excellent provision for the favourite followers of kings and of Popes, and if the revenues of one see failed to express royal or papal favour adequately, the favourite could be appointed to several sees at once. Papal nepotism became a byword; but it ought to be remembered that kingly nepotism also existed. Pope Sixtus V insisted on appointing a retainer of his nephew, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, to the see of Modrus in Hungary, and after a contest of three years carried his point in 1483; and Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, gave the archbishopric of Gran to Ippolito d’Este, a youth under age, and after a two years’ struggle compelled the Pope to confirm the appointment in 1487.

During the fourteenth century the Papacy endeavoured to obtain a more complete control over ecclesiastical appointments by means of the system of Reservations which figures so largely in local ecclesiastical affairs to the discredit of the Papacy during the years before the Reformation. For at least a century earlier, Popes had been accustomed to declare on various pretexts that certain benefices were vacantes apud Sedem Apostolicam, which meant that the Bishop of Rome reserved the appointment for himself. Pope John XXII (1316—1334), founding on such previous practice, laid down a series of rules stating what benefices were to be reserved for the papal patronage. The ostensible reason for this legislation was to prevent the growing evil of pluralities; but, as in all cases of papal lawmaking, these Constitutiones Johanninae had the effect of binding ecclesiastically all patrons but the Popes themselves. For the Popes always maintained that they alone were superior to the laws which they made. They were supra legem or legibus absoluti, and their dispensations could always set aside their legislation when it suited their purpose. Under these constitutions of Pope John xxii, when sees were vacant owing to the invalidation of an election they were reserved to the Pope. Thus we find that there was a disputed election to the see of Dunkeld in 1337, and after some years’ litigation at Rome the election was quashed, and Richard de Pilmor was appointed bishop auctoritate apostolica. The see of Dunkeld was declared to be reserved to the Pope for the appointment of the two succeeding bishops at least. This system of Reservations was gradu­ally extended under the successors of Pope John XXII, and was applied to benefices of every kind all over Europe, until it would be difficult to say what piece of ecclesiastical pre­ferment escaped the papal net. There exists in the town library in Trier a MS. of the Rules of the Roman Chancery on which someone has sketched the head of a Pope, with the legend issuing from the mouth, Reservamus omnia, which somewhat roughly represents the contents of the book. In the end, the assertion was made that the Holy See owned all benefices, and, in the universal secularisation of the Church which the half century before the Reformation witnessed, the very Rules of the Roman Chancery contained the lists of prices to be charged for various benefices, whether with or without cure of souls; and in completing the bargain the purchaser could always procure a clause setting aside the civil rights of patrons.

On the other hand, ecclesiastical preferments always implied the holders being liferented in lands and in monies, and the right to bestow these temporalities was protected by the laws of most European countries. Thus the ever-extending papal reservations of benefices led to continual conflicts between the laws of the Church—in this case latterly the Rules of the Roman Chancery—and the laws of the European States. Temporal rulers sought to protect themselves and their subjects by statutes of Praemunire and others of a like kind, or else made bargains with the Popes, which took the form of Concordats, like that of Bourges (1438) and that of Vienna (1448). Neither statutes nor bargains were of much avail against the superior diplomacy of the Papacy, and the dread which its supposed possession of spiritual powers inspired in all classes of people. A Concordat was always represented by papal lawyers to be binding only so long as the good­will of the Pope maintained it; and there was a deep-seated feeling throughout the peoples of Europe that the Church was, to use the language of the peasants of Germany, “the Pope’s House,” and that he had a right to deal freely with its property. Pious and patriotic men, like Gascoigne in England, deplored the evil effects of the papal reservations; but they saw no remedy unless the Almighty changed the heart of the Holy Father; and, after the failures of the Conciliar attempts at reform, a sullen hopelessness seemed to have taken possession of the minds of men, until Luther taught them that there was nothing in the indefinable power that the Pope and the clergy claimed to possess over the spiritual and eternal welfare of men and women.

To Pope John XXII (1316-1334) belongs the credit or discredit of creating for the Papacy a machinery for gathering in money for its support. His situation rendered this almost inevitable. On his accession he found himself with an empty treasury; he had to incur debts in order to live; he had to provide for a costly war with the Visconti; and he had to leave money to enable his suc­cessors to carry out his temporal policy. Few Popes lived so plainly; his money-getting was not for personal luxury, but for the supposed requirements of the papal policy. He was the first Pope who systematically made the dispensa­tion of grace, temporal and eternal, a source of revenue. Hitherto the charges made by the papal Chancery had been, ostensibly at least, for actual work done—fees for clerking and registration, and so on. John made the fees proportionate to the grace dispensed, or to the power of the recipient to pay. He and his successors made the Tithes, the Annates, Procurations, Fees for the bestowment of the Pallium, the Medii Fructus, Subsidies, and Dispensations, regular sources of revenue.

The Tithe—a tenth of all ecclesiastical incomes for the service of the Papacy—had been levied occasionally for extraordinary purposes, such as crusades. It was still supposed to be levied for special purposes only, but necessary occasions became almost continuous, and the exactions were fiercely resented. When Alexander VI levied the Tithe in 1500, he was allowed to do so in Eng­land. The French clergy, however, refused to pay; they were excommunicated; the University of Paris declared the excommunication unlawful, and the Pope had to withdraw.

The Annates were an ancient charge. From the begin­ning of the twelfth century the incoming incumbent of a benefice had to pay over his first year’s income for local uses, such as the repairs on ecclesiastical buildings, or as a solatium to the heirs of the deceased incumbent. From the beginning of the thirteenth century prelates and princes were sometimes permitted by the Popes to exact it of entrants into benefices. One of the earliest recorded instances was when the Archbishop of Canterbury was allowed to use the Annates of his province for a period of seven years from 1245, for the purpose of liquidating the debts on his cathedral church. Pope John XXII began to appropriate them for the purposes of the Papacy. His predecessor Clement V (1305-1314) had demanded all the Annates of England and Scotland for a period of three years from 1316. In 1316 John made a much wider demand, and in terms which showed that he was. prepared to regard the Annates as a permanent tax for the general purposes of the Papacy. It is difficult to trace the stages of the gradual universal enforcement of this tax; but in the decades before the Reformation it was commonly imposed, and averages had been struck as to its amount. “They consisted of a portion, usually computed at one-half, of the estimated revenue of all benefices worth more than 25 florins. Thus the archbishopric of Rouen was taxed at 12,000 florins, and the little see of Grenoble at 300; the great abbacy of St. Denis at 6000, and the little St. Ciprian Poitier at 33; while all the parish cures in France were uniformly rated at 24 ducats, equivalent to about 30 florins.” Archbishoprics were subject to a special tax as the price of the Pallium, and this was often very large.

The Procurationes were the charges, commuted to money payments, which bishops and archdeacons were authorised to make for their personal expenses while on their tours of visitation throughout their dioceses. The Popes began by demanding a share, and ended by often claiming the whole of these sums.

Pope John XXII was the first to require that the incomes of vacant benefices (medii fructus) should be paid over to the papal treasury during the vacancies. The earliest instance dates from 1331, when a demand was made for the income of the vacant archbishopric of Gran in Hungary; and it soon became the custom to insist that the stipends of all vacant benefices should be paid into the papal treasury.

Finally, the Popes declared it to be their right to require special subsidies from ecclesiastical provinces, and great pressure was put on the people to pay these so-called free-will offerings.

Besides the sums which poured into the papal treasury from these regular sources of income, irregular sources afforded still larger amounts of money. Countless dispensations were issued on payment of fees for all manner of breaches of canonical and moral law—dispensations for marriages within the prohibited degrees, for holdings pluralities, for acquiring unjust gains in trade or otherwise. The demoralising traffic made the Roman treasury the partner in all kinds of iniquitous actions, and Luther, in his address To the Nobility of the German Nation respecting the Reformation of the Christian Estate, could fitly describe the Court the Roman Curia as a place “where vows were annulled, where the monk gets leave to quit his Order, where priest can enter the married life for money, where bastards ca become legitimate, and dishonour and shame may arrive at high honours; all evil repute and disgrace is knighted and ennobled.” “There is,” he adds, “a buying and selling, a changing, blustering and bargaining, cheating an lying, robbing and stealing, debauchery and villainy, an all kinds of contempt of God that Antichrist could no reign worse.”

The vast sums of money obtained in these ways do no represent the whole of the funds which flowed from a parts of Europe into the papal treasury. The Roma Curia was the highest court of appeal for the whole Church of the West. In any case this involved a large amount of law business, with the inevitable legal expenses; but the Curia managed to attract to itself a large amount of business which might have been easily settled in the episcopal or metropolitan courts. This was done in pursuance of a double policy—an ecclesiastical and a financial one. The half century before the Reformation saw the overthrow of feudalism and the consolidation of kingly absolutism, and something similar was to be seen in the Papacy as well as among the principalities of Europe. Just as the kingly absolutism triumphed when the hereditary feudal magnates lost their power, so papal absolutism could only become an accomplished fact when it could trample upon an episcopate deprived of its ecclesiastic independence and inherent powers of ruling and judging .The Episcopate was weakened in many ways,—by exempting abbacies from episcopal control, by encouraging the mendicant monks to become the rivals of the parish clergy, and so on,—but the most potent method of degrading it was by encouraging people with ecclesiastical complaints to pass by the episcopal courts and to carry their cases directly to the Pope. Nationalities, men were told, had no place within the Catholic Church. Rome was the common fatherland, and the Pope the universal bishop and judge ordinary. His judgment, which was always final, could be had directly. In this way men were enticed to take their pleas straight to the Pope. No doubt this involved sending a messenger to Italy with a statement of the plea and a request for a hearing; but it did not necessarily involve that the trial should take place at Rome. The central power could delegate its authority, and the trial could take place wherever the Pope might appoint. But the conception undoubtedly did increase largely the business of the courts actually held in Rome, and caused a flow of money to the imperial city. The Popes were also ready to lend monies to impoverished litigants, for which, of course, heavy interest was charged.

The immense amount of business which was thus directed into the papal chancery from all parts of Europe required a horde of officials, whose salaries were provided partly from the incomes of reserved benefices all over Europe, and partly from the fees and bribes of the litigants. The papal law-courts were notoriously dilatory, rapacious, and venal. Every document had to pass through an incredible number of hands, and pay a corresponding number of fees; and the costs of suits, heavy enough according to the prescribed rule of the chancery, were increased im­mensely beyond the regular charges by others which did not appear on the official tables. Cases are on record where the briefs obtained cost from twenty-four to forty-one times the amount of the legitimate official charges. The Roman Church had become a law-court, not of the most reputable kind,—an arena of rival litigants, a chancery of writers, notaries, and tax-gatherers,—where transactions about privileges, dispensations, buying of benefices, etc., were carried on, and where suitors went wandering with their petitions from the door of one office to another.

During the half century which preceded the Reformation, things went from bad to worse. The fears aroused by the attempts at a reform through General Councils had died down, and the Curia had no desire to reform itself. The venality and rapacity increased when Popes began to sell offices in the papal court. Boniface IX (1389—1404) was the first to raise money by selling these official posts to the highest bidders. “In 1483, when Sixtus IV (1471—1484) desired to redeem his tiara and jewels, pledged for a loan of 100,000 ducats, he increased his secretaries from six to twenty-four, and required each to pay 2600 florins for the office. In 1503, to raise funds for Caesar Borgia, Alexander VI (1492—1503) created eighty new offices, and sold them for 760 ducats apiece. Julius II formed a ‘college’ of one hundred and one scriveners of papal briefs, in return for which they paid him 74,000 ducats. Leo X (1513—1521) appointed sixty chamberlains and a hundred and forty squires, with certain perquisites, for which the former paid him 90,000 ducats and the latter 112,000. Places thus paid for were personal property, transferable on sale. Burchard tells us that in 1483 he bought the mastership of ceremonies from his predecessor Patrizzi for 450 ducats, which covered all expenses; that in 1505 he vainly offered Julius II (1503— 1513) 2000 ducats for a vacant scrivenership, and that soon after he bought the succession to an abbreviatorship for 2040.” When Adrian VI (1522—1523) honestly tried to cleanse this Augean stable, he found himself confronted with the fact that he would have to turn men adrift who had spent their capital in buying the places which any reform must suppress.

The papal exactions needed to support this luxurious Roman Court, especially those taken from the clergy of Europe, were so obnoxious that it was often hard to collect them, and devices were used which in the end increased the burdens of those who were required to provide the money. The papal court made bargains with the temporal rulers to share the spoils if they permitted the collection. The Popes agreed that the kings or princes could seize the Tithes or Annates for a prescribed time provided the papal officials had their authority to collect them, as a rule, for Roman use. In the decades before the Reformation it was the common practice to collect these dues by means of agents, often bankers, whose charges were enormous, amounting sometimes to fifty per cent The collection of such extraordinary sources of revenue as the Indulgences was marked by even worse abuses, such as the employ­ment of pardon-sellers, who overran Europe, and whose lies and extortions were the common theme of the denuncia­tions of the greatest preachers and patriots of the times.

The unreformed Papacy of the closing decades of the fifteenth and of the first quarter of the sixteenth century was the open sore of Europe, and the object of execrations by almost all contemporary writers. Its abuses found no defenders, and its partisans in attacking assailants contented themselves with insisting upon the necessity for the spiritual supremacy of the Bishops of Rome.

THE POLITICAL SITUATION.

During the period of the Reformation a small portion of the world belonged to Christendom, and of that only a part was affected, either really or nominally, by the move­ment. The Christians belonging to the Greek Church were entirely outside its influence.

Christendom had shrunk greatly since the seventh century. The Saracens and their successors in Moslem sovereignty had overrun and conquered many lands which had formerly been inhabited by a Christian population and governed by Christian rulers. Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, and North Africa westwards to the Straits of Gibraltar, had once been Christian, and had been lost to Christendom during the seventh and eighth centuries. The Moslems had invaded Europe in the West, had conquered the Spanish Peninsula, had passed the Pyrenees, and had invaded France. They were met and defeated in a three days’ battle at Tours (732) by the Franks under Charles the Hammer, the grandfather of Charles the Great. After they had been thrust back beyond the Pyrenees, the Spanish Peninsula was the scene of a struggle between Moslem and Christian which lasted for more than seven hundred years, and Spain did not become wholly Christian until the last decade of the fifteenth century.

If the tide of Moslem conquest had been early checked in the West, in the East it had flowed steadily if slowly. In 1338, Orchan, Sultan of the Ottoman Turks, seized on Gallipoli, the fortified town which guarded the eastern entrance to the Dardanelles, and the Moslems won a footing on European soil. A few years later the troops of his son Murad I had seized a portion of the Balkan peninsula, and had cut off Constantinople from the rest of Christendom. A hundred years after, Constantinople (1453) had fallen, the Christian population had been slain or enslaved, the great church of the Holy Wisdom (St. Sophia) had been made a Mohammedan mosque, and the city had become the metropolis of the wide-spreading empire of the Ottoman Turks. Servia, Bosnia, Herzegovina (the Duchy, from Herzog, a Duke), Greece, the Peloponnesus, Roumania, Wallachia, and Moldavia were incorporated in the Moslem Empire. Belgrade and the island of Rhodes, the two bulwarks of Christendom, had fallen. Germany was threatened by Turkish invasions, and for years the bells tolled in hundreds of German parishes calling the people to pray against the coming of the Turk. It was not until the heroic defence of Vienna, in 1529, that the victorious advance of the Moslem was stayed. Only the Adriatic separated Italy from the Ottoman Empire, and the great mountain wall with the strip of Dalmatian coast which lies at its foot was the bulwark between civilisation and barbarism.

  Consolidation.

In Western Europe, and within the limits affected directly or indirectly by the Reformation, the distinctive political characteristic of the times immediately preceding the movement was consolidation or coalescence. Feudalism, with its liberties and its lawlessness, was disappearing, and compact nations were being formed under monarchies which tended to become absolute. If the Scandinavian North be excluded, five nations included almost, the whole field of Western European life, and in all of them the principle of consolidation is to be seen at work. In three England, France, and Spain, there emerged great united kingdoms; and if in two, Germany and Italy, there was no clustering of the people round one dynasty, the same principle of coalescence showed itself in the formation of permanent States which had all the appearance of modern kingdoms.

It is important for our purpose to glance at each and show the principle at work.

England

By the time that the Duke of Richmond had ascended the English throne and ruled with “politic governance” as Henry VII, the distinctively modern history of England had begun. Feudalism had perished on the field of the battle of Bosworth. The visitations of the Black Death, the gigantic agricultural labour strike under Wat Tyler and priest Ball, and the consequent transformation of peasant serfs into a free people working for wages, had created a new England ready for the changes which were to bridge the chasm between mediaeval and modem history. The consolidation of the people was favoured by the English custom that the younger sons of the nobility ranked as commoners, and that the privileges as well as the estates went to the eldest sons. This kept the various classes of the population from becoming stereotyped into castes, as in Germany, France, and Spain, It tended to create an ever­increasing middle class, which was not confined to the towns, but permeated the country districts also. The younger sons of the nobility descended into this middle class, and the transformation of the serfs into a wage-earning class enabled some of them to rise into it. England was the first land to become a compact nationality.

The earlier portion of the reign of Henry VII was not free from attempts which, if successful, would have thrown the country back into the old condition of disintegration. Although the king claimed to unite the rival lines of York and Lancaster, the Yorkists did not cease to raise difficulties at home which were eagerly fostered from abroad. Ireland was a Yorkist stronghold, and Margaret, the dowager Duchess of Burgundy, the sister of Edward IV, exercised a sufficiently powerful influence in Flanders to make that land a centre of Yorkist intrigue.

Lambert Simnel, a pretender who claimed to be either the son or the nephew of Edward IV (his account of himself varied), appeared in Ireland, and the whole island gathered round him. He invaded England, drew to his standard many of the old Yorkists, but was defeated at Stoke-on-Trent in 1487. This was really a formidable rebellion. The rising under Perkin Warbeck, a young Burgundian from Tournay, though supported by Margaret of Burgundy and James IV of Scotland, was more easily suppressed. A popular revolt against severe taxation was subdued in 1497, and it may be said that Henry’s home difficulties were all over by the year 1500. England entered the sixteenth century as a compact nation.

The foreign policy of Henry VII was alliance with Spain and a long-sighted attempt to secure Scotland by peaceful means. It had for consequences two marriages which had far-reaching results. The marriage of Henry's daughter Margaret with James IV of Scotland led to the union of the two crowns three generations later; and that between Katharine, the third daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and the son of Henry VII came to be the occasion, if not the cause, of the revolt of England from Rome. Katharine was married to Arthur, Prince of Wales, in 1501 (November 14th). Prince Arthur died on January 14th, 1502. After protracted negotiation, lengthened by the unwillingness of the Pope (Pius III) to grant a dispensation, Katharine was contracted to Henry, and the marriage took place in the year of Prince Henry’s accession to the crown. Katharine and Henry were crowned together at Westminster on June 28th, 1509.

England had prospered during the reign of the first Tudor sovereign. The steady increase in wool-growing and wool-exporting is in itself testimony to the fact that the period of internal wars had ceased, for sheep speedily become extinct when bands of raiders disturb the country. The growth in the number of artisan capitalists shows that money had become the possession of all classes in the community. The rise of the companies of merchant adventurers proves that England was taking her share in the world-trade of the new era. English scholars like Grocyn and Linacre (tutor in Italy of Pope Leo X and in England of the Prince of Wales) had imbibed the New Learning in Italy, and had been followed there by John Colet, who caught the spirit of the Renaissance from the Italian Humanists and the fervour of a religious revival from Savonarola’s work in Florence. The country had emerged from Medievalism in almost everything when Henry VIII, the hope of the English Humanists and reformers, ascended the throne in 1509.

France.

If England entered on the sixteenth century as the most compact kingdom in Europe, in the sense that all classes of its society were welded together more firmly than anywhere else, it may be said of France at the same date that nowhere was the central authority of the sovereign more firmly established. Many things had worked for this state of matters. The Hundred Years’ War with England did for France what the wars against the Moors had done for Spain. It had created a sense of nationality. It had also made necessary national armies and the raising of national taxes. During the weary period of anarchy under Charles VI every local and provincial institution of France had seemed to crumble or to display its inefficiency to help the nation in its sorest need. The one thing which was able to stand the storms and stress of the time was the kingly authority, and this in spite of the incapacity of the man who possessed it. The reign of Charles vii had made it plain that England was not destined to remain in possession of French territory; and the succeeding reigns had seen the central authority slowly acquiring irresistible strength. Charles VII by his policy of yielding slightly to pressure and sitting still when he could—by his inactivity, perhaps masterly,—Louis XI by his restless, unscrupulous craft, Anne of Beaujeu (his daughter) by her clear insight and prompt decision, had not only laid the foundations, but built up and consolidated the edifice of absolute monarchy in France. The kingly power had subdued the great nobles and feudatories; it had to a large extent mastered the Church; it had consolidated the towns and made them props to its power; and it had made itself the direct lord of the peasants.

The work of consolidation had been as rapid as it was complete. In 1464, three years after his succession, Louis XI was confronted by a formidable association of the great feudatories of France, which called itself the League of Public Weal. Charles of Guyenne, the king’s brother, the Count of Charolais (known as Charles the Bold of Burgundy), the Duke of Brittany, the two great families of the Armagnacs, the elder represented by the Count of Armagnac, and the younger by the Duke of Nemours, John of Anjou, Duke of Calabria, and the Duke of Bour­bon, were allied in arms against the king. Yet by 1465 Normandy had been wrested from the Duke of Guyenne; Guyenne itself had become the king’s in 1472 ; the Duke of Nemours had been crushed and slain in 1476; the Count of Charolais, become Duke of Burgundy, had been overthrown, his power shattered, and himself slain by the Swiss peasant confederates, and almost all his French fiefs had been incorporated by 1480; and on the death of King RenÉ (1480) the provinces of Anjou and Provence had been annexed to the Crown of France. The great ' feudatories were so thoroughly broken that their attempt to revolt during the earlier years of the reign of Charles VIII was easily frustrated by Anne of Beaujeu acting on behalf of the young king.

The efforts to secure hold on the Church date back from the days of the Council of Basel, when Pope Eugenius was at hopeless issue with the majority of its members. In 1438 a deputation from the Council waited upon the king and laid before him the conciliar plans of reform. Charles VII summoned an assembly of the French clergy to meet at Bourges. He was present himself with his princi­pal nobles; and the meeting was also attended by members of the Council and by papal delegates. There the cele­brated Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges was formally pre­sented and agreed upon.

This Pragmatic Sanction embodied most of the cherished conciliar plans of reform. It asserted the ecclesiastical supremacy of Councils over Popes. It demanded a meeting of a Council every ten years. It declared that the selection of the higher ecclesiastics was to be left to the Chapters and to the Convents. It denied the Pope’s general claim to the reservation of benefices, and greatly limited its use in special cases. It did away with the Pope’s right to act as Ordinary, and insisted that no ecclesiastical cases should be appealed to rome without first having exhausted the lower courts of jurisdiction. It abolished the Annates, with some exceptions in favour of the present Pope. It also made some attempts to provide the churches with an educated ministry. All these declarations simply carried out the proposals of the Council of Basel; but they had an important influence on the position of the French clergy towards the king. The Pragmatic Sanction, though issued by an assembly of the French clergy, was nevertheless a royal ordinance, and thereby gave the king indefinite rights over the Church within France. The right to elect bishops and abbots was placed in the hands of Chapters , and Convents, but the king and nobles were expressly permitted to bring forward and recommend candidates, and this might easily be extended to enforcing the election of those recommended. Indefinite rights of patronage on the part of the king and of the nobles over benefices in France could not fail to be the result, and the French Church could scarcely avoid assuming the appearance of a national Church controlled by the king as the head of the State. The abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction was always a bait which the French king could dangle before the eyes of the Pope, and the promise to maintain the Pragmatic Sanction was always a bribe to secure the support of the clergy and the Parlements of France.

In 1516, Francis I and Leo X agreed on a Concordat, the practical effect of which was that the king received the right to nominate to almost all the higher vacant benefices in France, while the Popes received the Annates. The results were not beneficial to the Church. It left the clergy a prey to papal exactions, and it compelled them to seek for promotion through subserviency to the king and the court; but it had the effect of ranging the monarch op the side of the Papacy when the Reformation came.

It can scarcely be said that France was a compact nation. The nobility were separated from the middle and lower classes by the fact that all younger sons retained the status and privileges of nobles. In ancient times they had paid no share of the taxes raised for war, on the ground that they rendered personal service, and the privilege of being free from taxation was retained long after the ser­vices of a feudal militia had disappeared. The nobility in France became a caste, numerous, poor in many instances, and too proud to belittle themselves by entering any of the professions or engaging in commerce.

Louis XI had done his best to encourage trade, and had introduced the silkworm industry into France. But as the whole weight of taxation fell upon the rural districts, the middle classes took refuge in the towns, and the peasantry, between the dues they had to pay to their lords and the taxation for the king, were in an oppressed condition. Their grievances were set forth in the petition they addressed, in the delusive hope of amelioration, to the States-General which assembled on the accession of Charles VIII. “During the past thirty-four years,” they say, “troops have been ever passing through France and living on the poor people. When the poor man has managed, by the sale of the coat on his back, and after hard toil, to pay his taille, and hopes he may live out the year on the little he has left, then come fresh troops to his cottage, eating him up. In Normandy, multitudes have died of hunger. From want of cattle, men and women have to yoke themselves to the carts; and others, fearing that if seen in the daytime they will be seized for not having paid their taille, are compelled to work at night. The king should have pity on his poor people, and relieve them from the said tailles and charges.” This was in 1483, before the Italian wars had further increased the burdens which the poorest class of the community had to pay.

The New Learning had begun to filter into France at a comparatively early date. In 1458 an Italian of Greek descent had been appointed to teach Greek by the University of Paris. But that University had been for long the centre of medieval scholastic study, and it was not until the Italian campaigns of Charles VIII, who was in Italy when the Renaissance was at its height, that France may be said to have welcomed the Humanist movement. A Greek Press was established in Paris in 1507, a group of French Humanists entered upon the study of the authors of classical antiquity, and the new learning gradually displaced the old scholastic disciplines. French Humanists were perhaps the earliest to make a special study of Roman Law, and to win distinction as eminent jurists. Francis, like Henry viii. of England, was welcomed on his accession as a Humanist king. Such was the condition of France in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

  Spain.

Spain had for centuries been under Mohammedan domination. The Moslems had overrun almost the whole country, and throughout its most fertile provinces the Christian peasantry lived under masters of an alien faith. At the beginning of the tenth century the only independent Christian principalities were small states lying along the southern shore of the Bay of Biscay and the south-western slopes of the Pyrenees. The Gothic and Vandal chiefs slowly covered the northern districts, while the Moors retained he more fertile provinces of the south. The political conditions of the country at the close of the fifteenth century inevitably reflected this gradual reconquest, which lad brought the Christian principalities into existence, in 1474, when Isabella (she had been married in 1469 to Ferdinand, the heir to Aragon) succeeded her brother Henry IV in the sovereignty of Castile, Spain was divided into five separate principalities: Castile, with Leon, containing 62 per cent.; Aragon, with Valencia and Catalonia, containing 15 per cent.; Portugal, containing 20 per cent.; Navarre, containing 1 per cent.; and Granada, the only remaining Moslem State, containing 2 per cent, of the entire surface of the country.

Castile had grown by almost continuous conquest of lands from the Moslems, and these additions were acquired in many ways. If they had been made in what may be termed a national war, the lands seized became the property of the king, and could be retained by him or granted to his lords spiritual and temporal under varying conditions. In some cases these grants made the possessors almost independent princes. On the other hand, lands night be wrested from the aliens by private adventurers, and in such cases they remained in possession of the conquerors, who formed municipalities which had the right of choosing and of changing their overlords, and really formed independent communities. Then there were, as was natural in a period of continuous warfare, waste lands. These became the property of those who settled on them. Lastly, here were the dangerous frontier lands, which it was the policy of king or great lord who owned them to people nth settlers, who could only be induced to undertake the perilous occupation provided they received charters (fueros), which guaranteed their practical independence. In such a condition of things the central authority could not be strong. It was further weakened by the fact that the great feudatories claimed to have both civil administration and military rule over their lands, and assumed an almost regal state. Military religious orders abounded, and were possessed of great wealth. Their Grand Masters, in virtue of their office, were independent military commanders, and had great gifts, in the shape of rich commandries, to bestow on their followers. Their power overshadowed that of the sovereign. The great ecclesiastics, powerful feudal lords in virtue of their lands, claimed the rights of civil admini­stration and military rule like their lay compeers, and, being personally protected by the indefinable sanctity of the priestly character, were even more turbulent. Almost universal anarchy had prevailed during the reigns of the two weak kings who preceded Isabella on the throne of Castile, and the crown lands, the support and special protection of the sovereign, had been alienated by lavish gifts to the great nobles. This was the situation which faced the young queen when she came into her inheritance. It was aggravated by a rebellion on behalf of Juanna, the illegitimate daughter of Henry IV. The rebellion was successfully crushed. The queen and her consort, who was not yet in possession of the throne of Aragon, then tried to give the land security. The previous anarchy had pro­duced its usual results. The country was infested with bands of brigands, and life was not safe outside the walls I of the towns. Isabella instituted, or rather revived, the Holy Brotherhood (Harmandad) a force of cavalry raised by the whole country (each group of one hundred houses was bound to provide one horseman). It was an army of mounted police. It had its own judges, who tried criminals on the scene of their crimes, and those convicted were punished by the troops according to the sentences pro­nounced. Its avowed objects were to put down all crimes of violence committed outside the cities, and to hunt criminals who had fled from the towns’ justice. Its judges superseded the justiciary powers of the nobles, who protested in vain. The Brotherhood did its work very effectively, and the towns and the common people rallied round the monarchy which had given them safety for limb and property.

The sovereigns next attacked the position of the nobles, whose mutual feuds rendered them a comparatively easy foe to rulers who had proved their strength of government. The royal domains, which had been alienated during the previous reign, were restored to the sovereign, and many of the most abused privileges of the nobility were curtailed.

One by one the Grand Masterships of the Crusading Orders were centred in the person of the Crown, the Pope acquiescing and granting investiture. The Church was stripped of some of its superfluous wealth, and the civil powers of the higher ecclesiastics were abolished or curtailed. In the end it may be said that the Spanish clergy were made almost as subservient to the sovereign as were those of France.

The pacification and consolidation of Castile was followed by the conquest of Granada. The Holy Brotherhood served the purpose of a standing army, internal feuds among the Moors aided the Christians, and after a pro­tracted struggle (1481—1492) the city of Granada was taken, and the Moorish rule in the Peninsula ceased. All Spain, save Portugal and Navarre (seized by Ferdinand in 1512), was thus united under Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Sovereigns as they came to be called, and ther civil unity increased the desire for religious uniformity. The Jews in Spain were numerous, wealthy, and influential. They had intermarried with many noble families, and almost controlled the finance of the country. It was resolved to compel them to become Christians, by force if necessary. In 1478 a Bull was obtained from Pope Sixtus IV establishing the Inquisition in Spain, it being provided that the inquisitors were to be appointed by the sovereign. The Holy Office in this way became an instrument for establishing a civil despotism, as well as a means for repressing heresy. It did its work with a ruthless severity hitherto unexampled. Sixtus himself and some of his successors, moved by repeated complaints, endeavoured to restrain its savage energy; but the Inquisition was too useful an instrument in the hands of a despotic sovereign, and the Popes were forced to allow its proceedings, and to refuse all appeals to Rome against its sentences. It was put in use against the Moorish subjects of the Catholic kings, notwithstanding the terms of the capitulation of Granada, which provided for the exercise of civil and religious liberty. The result was that, in spite of fierce rebellions, all the Moors, save small groups of families under the special protection of the Crown, had become nominal Christians by 1502, although almost a century had to pass before the Inquisition had rooted out the last traces of the Moslem faith in the Spanish Peninsula.

The death of Isabella in 1504 roughly dates a formid­able rising against this process of repression and consolidation. The severities of the Inquisition, the insistence of Ferdinand to govern personally the lands of his deceased wife, and many local causes led to widespread conspiracies and revolts against his rule. The years between 1504 and 1522 were a period of revolutions and of lawlessness which was ended when Charles V, the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, overcame all resistance and inaugurated a reign of personal despotism which long distinguished the kingdom of Spain. Spanish troubles had something to do with pre­venting Charles from putting into execution in Germany, as he wished to do, the ban issued at Worms against Martin Luther.

  Germany and Italy.

Germany and Italy, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, had made almost no progress in becoming united and compact nations. The process of national consolidation, which was a feature of the times, displayed itself in these lands in the creation of compact principalities rather than in a great and effective national movement under one sovereign power. It is a commonplace of history to say that the main reason for this was the presence within these two lands of the Pope and the Emperor, the twin powers of the earlier medieval ideal of a dual government, at once civil and ecclesiastical. Machiavelli expressed the common idea in his clear and strenuous fashion. He says that the Italians owe it to Rome that they are divided into factions and not united as were Spain and France. The Pope, he explains, who claimed temporal as well as spiritual juris­diction, though not strong enough to rule all Italy by himself, was powerful enough to prevent any other Italian dynasty from taking his place. Whenever he saw any Italian power growing strong enough to have a future before it, he invited the aid of some foreign potentate, thus making Italy a prey to continual invasions. The shadowy lordship of the Pope was sufficient, in the opinion of Machiavelli, to prevent any real lordship under a native dynasty within the Italian peninsula. In Germany there was a similar impotency. The German king was the Emperor, the mediaeval head of the Holy Roman Empire, the “king of the Romans.” Some idea of what underlay the thought and its expression may be had when one reads across Albert Dürer’s portrait of Maximilian, “Imperator Caesar Divus Maximilianus Pius Felix Augustus,” just as if he had been Trajan or Constantine. The phrase carries us back to the times when the Teutonic tribes swept down on the Roman possessions in Western Europe and took possession of them. They were barbarians with an un­alterable reverence for the wider civilisation of the great Empire which they had conquered. They crept into the shell of the great Empire and tried to assimilate its jurisprudence and its religion. Hence it came to pass, in the earlier Middle Ages, as Mr. Freeman says, “The two great powers in Western Europe were the Church and the Empire, and the centre of each, in imagination at least, was Rome. Both of these went on through the settlements of the German nations, and both in a manner drew new powers from the change of things. Men believed more than ever that Rome was the lawful and natural centre of the world. For it was held that there were of divine right two Vicars of God upon earth, the Roman Emperor, His Vicar in temporal things, and the Roman Bishop, His Vicar in spiritual things. This belief did not interfere with the existence either of separate commonwealths, principalities, or of national Churches. But it was held that the Roman Emperor, who was the Lord of the World, was of right the head of all temporal States, and the Roman Bishop, the Pope, was the head of all the Churches.” This idea was a devout imagination, and was never actually and fully expressed in fact. No Eastern nation or Church ever agreed with it; and the temporal lordship of the Emperors was never completely acknowledged even in the West. Still it ruled in men’s minds with all the force of an ideal. As the modern nations of Europe came gradually into being, the real headship of the Emperor became more and more shadowy. But both headships could prevent the national consolidation of the countries, Germany and Italy, in which the possessors dwelt. All this is, as has been said, a commonplace of history, and, like all commonplaces, it contains a great deal of truth. Still it may be questioned whether the mediaeval idea was solely responsible for the disintegration of either Germany or Italy in the sixteenth century. A careful study of the conditions of things in both countries makes us see that many causes were at work besides the mediaeval idea—conditions geographical, social, and historical. Whatever the causes, the disintegration of these two lands was in marked contrast to the consolidation of the three other nations.

  Italy.

In the end of the fifteenth century, Italy contained a very great number of petty principalities and five States which might be called the great powers of Italy—Venice, Milan, and Florence in the north, Naples in the south, and the States of the Church in the centre. Peace was kept by a delicate and highly artificial balance of powers. Venice was a commercial republic, ruled by an oligarchy of nobles. The city in the lagoons had been founded by trembling fugitives fleeing before Attila’s Huns, and was more than a thousand years old. It had large territories on the mainland of Italy, and colonies extending down the east coast of the Adriatic and among the Greek islands. It had the largest revenue of all the Italian States, but its expenses were also much the heaviest. Milan came next in wealth, with its yearly income of over 700,000 ducats. At the close of the century it was in the possession of the Sforza family, whose founder had been born a ploughman, and had risen to be a formidable commander of mercenary soldiers. It was claimed by Maximilian as a fief of the Empire, and by the Kings of France as a heritage of the Dukes of Orleans. The disputed heritage was one of the causes of the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. Florence, the most cultured city in Italy, was, like Venice, a commercial republic; but it was a democratic republic, wherein one family, the Medici, had usurped almost de­spotic power while preserving all the external marks of republican rule.

Naples was the portion of Italy where the feudal system of the Middle Ages had lingered longest. The old kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Naples and Sicily) had, since 1458, been divided, and Sicily had been politically separated from the mainland. The island belonged to the King of Aragon; while the mainland had for its ruler the illegitimate son of Alphonso of Aragon, Ferdinand, or Ferrante, who proved a despotic and masterful ruler. He had crushed his semi-independent feudal barons, had brought the towns under his despotic rule, and was able to hand over a compact kingdom to his son Alphonso in 1494.

The feature, however, in the political condition of Italy which illustrated best the general tendency of the age towards coalescence, was the growth of the States of the Church. The dominions which were directly under the temporal power of the Pope had been the most disorganised in all Italy. The vassal barons had been turbulently inde­pendent, and the Popes had little power even within the city of Rome. The helplessness of the Popes to control their vassals perhaps reached its lowest stage in the days of Innocent VIII. His successors Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, 1492—1503), Julius II (Cardinal della Rovere, 1503-1513), and Leo X (Giovanni de Medici, 1513— 1521), strove to create, and partly succeeded in forming, a strong central dominion, the States of the Church. The troubled times of the French invasions, and the continual warfare among the more powerful States of Italy, furnished them with the occasion. They pursued their policy with a craft which brushed aside all moral obligations, and with a ruthlessness which hesitated at no amount of bloodshed. In their hands the Papacy appeared to be a merely temporal power, and was treated as such by contemporary politicians. It was one of the political States of Italy, and the Popes were distinguished from their contemporary Italian rulers only by the facts that their spiritual position enabled them to exercise a European influence which the others could not aspire to, and that their sacred character placed them above the obligations of ordinary morality in the matter of keeping solemn promises and maintaining treaty obligations made binding by the most sacred oaths. In one sense their aim was patriotic. They were Italian princes whose aim was to create a strong Italian central power which might be able to maintain the independence of Italy against the foreigner; and in this they were partially successful, whatever judgment may require to be passed on the means taken to attain their end. But the actions of the Italian prince placed the spiritual Head of the Church outside all those influences, intellectual, artistic, and religious (the revival under Savonarola in Florence), which were working in Italy for the regeneration of European society. The Popes of the Renaissance set the example, only too faithfully followed by almost every prince of the age, of believing that political far outweighed all moral and religious motives.

Germany.

Germany, or the Empire, as it was called, included, in the days of the Reformation, the Low Countries in the north-west and a large part of what are now the Austro-Hungarian lands in the east. It was in a strange condition. On the one hand a strong popular sentiment for unity had arisen in all the German-speaking portions, and on the other the country was cut into sections and slices, and was more hopelessly divided than was Italy itself.

Nominally the Empire was ruled over by one supreme lord, with a great feudal assembly, the Diet, under him.

The Empire was elective, though for generations the rulers chosen had always been the heads of the House of Hapsburg, and since 1356 the election had been in the hands of seven prince-electors—three on the Elbe and four on the Rhine. On the Elbe were the King of Bohemia, the Elector of Saxony, and the Elector of Brandenburg; on the Rhine, the Count Palatine of the Rhine and the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Koln.

This Empire, nominally one, and full of the strongest sentiments of unity, was hopelessly divided, and—for this was the peculiarity of the situation—all the elements making for peaceful government, which in countries like France or England supported the central power, were on  the side of disunion.

A glance at the map of Germany in the times of the Reformation shows an astonishing multiplicity of separate principalities, ecclesiastical and secular, all the more bewildering that most of them appeared to be composed of patches lying separate from each other. Almost, every ruling prince had to cross some neighbour’s land to visit the outlying portions of his dominions. It must also be remembered that the divisions which can be represented on a map but faintly express the real state of things. The territories of the imperial cities—the lands outside the walls ruled by the civic fathers—were for the most part too small to figure on any map, and for the same reason the tiny principalities of the hordes of free nobles are also invisible. So we have to imagine all those little mediaeval republics and those infinitesimal kingdoms camped on the territories of the great princes, and taking from them even the small amount of unity which the map shows.

The greater feudal States, Electoral and Ducal Saxony, Brandenburg, Bavaria, the Palatinate, Hesse, and many others, had meetings of their own Estates,—Councils of subservient nobles and lawyers,—their own Supreme Courts of Justice, from which there was no appeal, their own fiscal system, their own finance and coinage, and largely controlled their clergy and their relations to powers outside Germany. Their princes, hampered as they were by the great Churchmen, thwarted continually by the town re­publics, defied by the free nobles, were nevertheless actual kings, and profited by the centralising tendencies of the times. They alone in Germany represented settled central government, and attracted to themselves the smaller units lying outside and around them.

Yet with all these divisions, having their roots deep down in the past, there was pervading all classes of society, from princes to peasants, the sentiment of a united Germany, and no lack of schemes to convert the feeling into fact. The earliest practical attempts began with the union of German Churchmen at Constance and the scheme for a National Church of Germany; and the dream of ecclesiastical unity brought in its train the aspiration after political oneness.

The practical means proposed to create a German national unity over lands which stretched from the Straits of Dover to the Vistula, and from the Baltic to the Adriatic, were the proclamation of a universal Land’s Peace, forbidding all internecine war between Germans; the establishment of a Supreme Court of Justice to decide quarrels within the Empire; a common coinage, and a common Customs Union. To bind all more firmly together there was needed a Common Council or governing body, which, under the Emperor, should determine the Home and Foreign Policy of the Empire. The only authorities which could create a governmental unity of this kind were the Emperor on the one hand and the great princes on the other, and the two needed to be one in mutual confidence and in intention. But that is what never happened, and all through the reign of Maximilian and in the early years of Charles we find two different conceptions of what the central government ought to be—the one oligarchic and the other autocratic. The princes were resolved to keep their independence, and their plans for unity always im­plied a governing oligarchy with serious restraint placed on the power of the Emperor; while the Emperors, who would never submit to be controlled by an oligarchy of German princes, and who found that they could not carry out their schemes for an autocratic unity, were at least able to wreck any other.

The German princes have been accused of preferring the security and enlargement of their dynastic possessions to the unity of the Empire, but it can be replied that in doing so they only followed the example set them by their Emperors. Frederick III, Maximilian, and Charles V invariably neglected imperial interests when they clashed with the welfare of the family possessions of the House of Hapsburg. When Maximilian inherited the imperial Burgundian lands, a fief of the Empire, through his marriage with Mary, the heiress of Charles the Bold, he treated the inheritance as part of the family estates of his House. The Tyrol was absorbed by the House of Hapsburg when the Swabian League prevented Bavaria seizing it (1487). The same fate fell on the Duchy of Austria when Vienna was recovered, and on Hungary and Bohemia; and when Charles V got hold of Wurtemberg on the outlawry of Duke Ulrich, it, too, was detached from the Empire and absorbed into the family possessions of the Hapsburgs. There was, in short, a persistent policy pursued by three successive Emperors, of despoiling the Empire in order to increase the family possessions of the House to which they belonged.

The last attempt to give a constitutional unity to the German Empire was made at the Diet of Worms (1521)—the Diet before which Luther appeared. There the Emperor, Charles V, agreed to accept a Reichsregiment, which was in all essential points, though differing in some details, the same as his grandfather Maximilian had proposed to the Diet of 1495. The Central Council was composed of a President and four members appointed by the Emperor, six Electors (the King of Bohemia being ex­cluded), who might sit in person or by deputies, and twelve members appointed by the rest of the Estates. The cities were not represented. This Reichsregiment was to govern all German lands, including Austria and the Netherlands, but excluding Bohemia. Switzerland, hitherto nominally within the Empire, formally withdrew and ceased to form part of Germany. The central government needed funds to carry on its work, and especially to provide an army to enforce its decisions; and various schemes for raising the money required were discussed at its earlier meetings. It was resolved at last to raise the necessary funds by imposing a tax of four per cent, on all imports and exports, and to establish custom-houses on all the frontiers. The practical effect of this was to lay the whole burden of taxation upon the mercantile classes, or, in other words, to make the cities, who were not represented in the Reichsregiment, pay for the whole of the central government. This Reichsregiment was to be simply a board of advice, without any decisive control so long as the Emperor was in Germany. When he was absent from the country it bad an independent power of government. But all important decisions had to be confirmed by the absent Emperor, who, for his part, promised to form no foreign leagues involving Germany without the consent of the Council.

As soon as the Reichsregiment had settled its scheme of taxation, the cities on which it was proposed to lay the whole burden of providing the funds required very natur­ally objected. They met by representatives at Speyer (1523), and sent delegates to Spain, to Valladolid, where Charles happened to be, to protest against the scheme of taxation. They were supported by the great German capitalists. The Emperor received them graciously, and promised to take the government into his own hands. In this way the last attempt to give a governmental unity to Germany was destroyed by the joint action of the Emperor and of the cities. It is unquestionable that the Reformation under Luther did seriously assist in the disintegration of Germany, but it must be remembered that a movement cannot become national where there is no nation, and that German nationality had been hopelessly destroyed just at the time when it was most needed to unify and moderate the great religious impulses which were throbbing in the hearts of its citizens.

Maximilian had been elected King of the Romans in 1486, and had succeeded to the Empire on the death of his father, Frederick III, in 1493. His was a strongly fascinating personality—a man full of enthusiasms, never lacking in ideas, but singularly destitute of the patient practical power to make them workable. He may almost be called a type of that Germany over which he was called to rule. No man was fuller of the longing for German unity as an idea); no man did more to perpetuate the very real divisions of the land.

He was the patron of German learning and of German art, and won the praises of the German Humanists: no ruler was more celebrated in contemporary song. He protected and supported the German towns, encouraged their industries, and fostered their culture. In almost everything ideal he stood for German nationality and unity. He placed himself at the head of all those intellectual and artistic forces from which spread the thought of a united Germany for the Germans. On the other hand, his one persistent practical policy, and the only one in which he was almost uniformly successful, was to unify and consolidate the family possessions of the House of Hapsburg. In this policy he was the leader of those who broke up Germany into an aggregate of separate and independent principalities. The greater German princes followed his example, and did their best to transform themselves into the civilised rulers of modern States.

Maximilian died somewhat unexpectedly on January 12th, 1519, and five months were spent in intrigues by the partisans of Francis of France and young Charles, King of Spain, the grandson of Maximilian. The French party believed that they had secured by bribery a majority of the Electors; and when this was whispered about, the popular feeling in favour of Charles, on account of his German blood, soon began to manifest itself. It was naturally strongest in the Rhine provinces. Papal delegates could not get the Rhine skippers to hire boats to them for their journey, as it was believed that the Pope favoured the French king. The Imperial Cities accused Francis of fomenting internecine war in Germany, and displayed their hatred of his candidature. The very Landsknechten clamoured for the grandson of their “Father” Maximilian. The eyes of all Germany were turned anxiously enough to the venerable town of Frankfurt-on-the-Main, where, according to ancient usage, the Electors met to select the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. On the 28th of June (1519) the alarm bell of the town gave the signal, and the Electors assembled in their scarlet robes of State in the dim little chapel of St. Bartholomew, where the conclave was always held. The manifestation of popular feeling had done its work. Charles was unanimously chosen, and all Germany rejoiced, —the good burghers of Frankfurt declaring that if the Electors had chosen Francis they would have been “playing with death.”

It was a wave of national excitement, the desire for a German ruler, that had brought about the unanimous election; and never were a people more mistaken and, in the end, disappointed. Charles was the heir of the House of Hapsburg, the grandson of Maximilian, his veins full of German blood. But he was no German. Maximilian was the last of the real German Hapsburgs. History scarcely shows another instance where the mother’s blood has so completely changed the character of a race. Charles was his mother’s son, and her Spanish characteristics showed themselves in him in greater strength as the years went on. When he abdicated, he retired to end his days in a Spanish convent. It was the Spaniard, not the German, who faced Luther at Worms.

I 

MEDICEAN ROME