Volume 3, Chapter 5

'FACILIS DESCENSUS. . .' 1471-1517

Section 1: A PAPACY OF PRINCES

Section 2: CHRISTIAN LIFE AND THOUGHT, 1471-1517

Section 3: LUTHER

A PAPACY OF PRINCES

THE title of this chapter is melodramatic; it is exaggerated; and, as a summary description of the life of the Church during the next forty years, too inexact, of course, to be true. But the Virgilian line summarises fairly correctly the impression which the reader usually retains from his study of the period; from one, quite understandable, point of view, it may even be said to describe the period very well.

The history of the Church, if history indeed describes the flowing stream of time, bears no relation to that tapestry of the ' full fed river winding slow mid herds upon an endless plain"; it is rather, and it must ever be, a stream in flood, driving over a hard bed and through a resisting channel, where the rapids are frequent, and where, once in a while, there comes a sudden gigantic alteration of the level over which the waters pour in a very Niagara. It is so, and it must be so, because the Church is not just humanity socially ordered for ends that are natural, and to be attained very largely by a harmony of action that need be no more than external. The Church is a divine creation, imposing an order whose ends are supernatural, where the needed harmony is utterly unattainable except by action that is rooted in personal conviction, and based on assents that are, of their nature, internal. Herein lies all the promise of the Church to labouring and expectant humanity; and herein lies the whole tragedy of its long history. For assents such as these lie wholly within the uncontrollable power of the individual; the Church, whose good fortune largely depends on these internal assents, cannot compel them. The Church continues through time, and must face its task, whatever the generosity, or the rarity, at any given period of these needed internal assents to its teaching and direction; and in all ages it never ceases, and can never cease, to demand such assents, and to demand that all else be subordinated to them. Temporal rulers, kings and princes -- the State -- are no doubt bound, in their function, by the same moral law that binds the spiritual ruler; but the spiritual ruler does not only need to keep the moral law, it is the primary function of his office continually to profess and to proclaim it. Kingdoms do not suffer, except accidentally, from the scandal of the ruler's bad life, but when the spiritual ruler falls it is, necessarily, the very institution and notion of the spiritual that the scandal harms. His wrong doing compromises immediately the very raison d'etre of the institution. It is, in a way, contrary to the very nature of his office and of the institution. It is disintegration in what only exists in order to promote integrity; in order to preach that integrity as the inescapable condition of human happiness, and to minister the divinely devised means of achieving integrity. Disintegration here must, always, have about it the air of catastrophe -- no matter how slight the degree in which it is allowed. And in this sense it is true to say that, over the history of the fortunes of the supernatural moving visibly among mankind, there ever hangs something of this dark possibility. "The gates of hell" shall never, indeed, prevail -- but where was it ever promised that they should cease to trouble? and was it not also mysteriously said " When the Son of Man cometh think you shall He find faith on earth?" The temporal kingdom can not only survive the sins of its rulers, it can even, for a time, profit from them; the wicked, here too, flourishing like a green bay tree. But in the spiritual kingdom sin tolerated, fostered, made an instrument of power, is fatal, instantaneously, to all that it touches. Sin in the actual ruling of that kingdom is necessarily not only blacker to the sight but more mischievous in fact; and so too, are all the personal sins of the rulers, whether these be such surrenders to the material as sexual licence, worldliness and avarice, or the still more grievous " spiritual" sins of ambition, libido dominandi, [986] mental sloth, indifference to the development and spread of truth.

SIXTUS IV

With the advent of Sixtus IV, in 1471, the flood does, indeed, seem to pour over the edge of the abyss; the failures and the surrenders are suddenly more grossly material -- and, being this, they are more evidently shocking, shocking now to the least reflective, and perhaps, to these, the most shocking of all. The age of the della Rovere, Borgia, and Medici popes has become, in popular repute, the most scandalous age of all. But sinfulness of this kind -- whether, in the manner of old-fashioned Protestant controversy, we gloat over it as a final proof that the papacy is the Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse, or whether, horror stricken, we strive to minimise it in a new apologetic -- was chiefly important in its distraction of the ruler from activities that would have made Protestantism impossible, from the devising of ways, for example, through which good bishops would have filled the sees of Christendom, a true philosophy and a live theology informed its universities, and a clergy, spiritually trained and equipped with professional knowledge been provided for all its parishes. It is a very easy mistake, and a fairly fatal mistake, to concentrate on the dramatic details of these personal sins of la papaute princiere [987] while their graver, if more humdrum, faults of omission go by unconsidered. Such concentration -- as common as it is natural -- wrecks the real proportions of the event.

When Paul II died, so suddenly, July 26, 1471, there was not any obvious successor to him among the cardinals. They were fairly evenly divided into two rival parties and it was only after a certain amount of manoeuvring that, on August 10, they managed to agree on Cardinal Francesco della Rovere. The conclave had begun on the feast of St. Sixtus II, the pope who was the patron of the great Roman martyr St. Lawrence, and the new pope, appropriately, called himself Sixtus IV. He was now fifty-seven years of age, a Friar Minor (but not one of the new Observants) from the Genoese town of Savona, and sprung from so poor a family that it had not even a surname. In his order the friar had had a great career, as lecturer in theology in various Italian universities, as a preacher and administrator. Bessarion had followed the lectures he gave at the university of Pavia and had brought him to the notice of Paul II. In 1464 the Franciscans had chosen him for their minister-general, and in 1467 he had been created cardinal. As minister-general of the Friars Minor, Francesco della Rovere had shown himself a reformer, and in the great theological dispute of the day -- the question of the Immaculate Conception -- he had risen high above the ordinary level of the controversy with his thesis that the views of Duns Scotus and St. Thomas were complementary rather than antagonistic.

It was a curious combination of forces that had secured his election as pope. Bessarion's high opinion of him as a scholar and a religious had done much. The wishes of the Duke of Milan -- Galeazzo Maria Sforza -- had been no less effective. And of a like nature with this political influence was the support of the cardinal vice-chancellor, Rodrigo Borgia, who now, forty-one years of age, after fifteen years of comparative seclusion in the routine of his office, makes his first steps in the public policies of the Holy See. A further element was the skill as negotiator of Francesco's young Franciscan nephew, Piero Riario, whom he had taken into the conclave as a kind of secretaryattendant. It was this young friar who, at the critical moments, did the actual work of binding together and keeping together the heterogeneous majority that made his uncle pope.

Francesco della Rovere, whose strong, intelligent face the genius of Melozzo and Pollaiuolo have made familiar to us, had immense energy; as pope he was to show himself strongwilled, and even imperious, but to be betrayed, time and again, by his lack of knowledge about the political world in which, almost exclusively, he now chose to be active. The one-time reformer of the Friars Minor was determined to make the Papal State secure, once and for all, against the princes who threatened its life, by developing its political resources to the full, and by making the papal sovereignty a reality everywhere within it. But over and over again he blundered, and after thirteen years of rule he left the papacy hated as a power, where before it had merely been mistrusted, and saddled with a new and most disastrous precedent of nepotism, aggressive war and even crime, to say nothing of unconcealed luxurious living and moral laxity. No charge against the pope's own morals -- in the narrow sense of that word -- has ever been seriously sustained. He was regular and attentive to his priestly duties, and noted indeed for his deep devotion to all that affected the cult of the Mother of God. But banquets of a crazy extravagance, hunting parties, gambling bouts, nightly revels began, in his time, and without any interference from him, to be part of the common order of high ecclesiastical life in Rome; and in all this departure of new unseemliness and wickedness the pioneers were the pope's own near relatives, young friars for the chief part, upon whom throughout his pontificate, he heaped one undeserved promotion after another. Never had pope such a horde of needy, insignificant, and incompetent kinsfolk for whom to provide; and never was any pope so lavish in the provision.

Sixtus IV was one of five children, and it was his eleven nephews and two nieces who were the main instruments through which whatever ideals he began with were brought to nought, and through whom a new poison was injected into the none too healthy system of the Renaissance papacy. Of the eleven nephews six were clerics -- it was a simple matter to make five of them cardinals, while the sixth became Bishop of Ferrara and Patriarch of Antioch. Two of his lay nephews the pope married to daughters of the King of Naples, a third to the heiress of the reigning Duke of Urbino, and a fourth to a daughter of the Duke of Milan. A sixth red hat went to one of his niece's sons.

The ablest of this small army -- the only one in fact who proved ultimately to have any real ability at all -- was Giuliano della Rovere, but far more influential in the policies of the reign were the two brothers, Girolamo and Piero Riario. To Piero, the manager of the conclave, a young friar of twenty-five, the pope gave the see of Treviso within a month of his election (September 4, 1471); on December 15 he made him a cardinal; in September 1472 next he gave him the see of Valence, and in 1473 the archbishoprics of Spoleto (April 28), Seville (June 25), and Florence (July 20), with the wealthy French see of Mende (November 3) -- all of which sees the young cardinal was allowed to hold simultaneously. [988] He was, by now, as nearly the equivalent of a millionaire in the life of the time as it is possible to conceive. The story of his extravagances, and his profligacy, is writ large in all the diaries and diplomatic correspondence of the time, a subject of cynical mirth, where it does not provoke disgust. But Cardinal Piero did not last long. The pace soon killed him, and he died, "while he gave promise of still better things," said his uncle, in the first days of 1474. But in the two short years or so of his course he had been the pope's most confidential adviser and agent. This place was now taken by his brother Girolamo, one of the worst men of all this bad time, a typical Renaissance bravo and bully, for whom the moral law can scarcely be said to have held any meaning at all. For Girolamo, his uncle, when he married him to Caterina Sforza, had established a little principality in the north of the Papal State, centring round the episcopal city of Imola. The territory was small, but it was meant to extend, and its strategic importance was already considerable.

The Papal State [989] could hardly have been less conveniently designed for popes who meant to be effective rulers. It may be described as made up of two roughly rectangular territories, one to the south based on the Mediterranean coast of Italy, and the other to the north based on the Adriatic. From the southern tip of the southern rectangle where it touched the kingdom of Naples, to the northernmost point of the state is, in a direct line, 260 miles. The Apennines, in their steepest and least easily traversable masses, are a prohibitive natural barrier between the rectangles in the central part of the state where, for seventy miles, these overlap. During the whole of the Middle Ages, down to the time when the Avignon residence began, the popes were never really masters of much beyond the southern rectangle, the district whose natural centre is Rome and that runs from, say Orvieto to the neighbourhood of Gaeta. By the time of Sixtus IV they were also, fairly securely, masters of the district beyond the Apennines called the Marches, the southern half of the northern rectangle, a region whose chief cities were Fermo Camerino and the port of Ancona. But the richest part of the State, and the wealthiest cities, were in the district to the north of the Marches, the territory called Romagna, the lands to the south of the Po, the ancient Roman Aemilia. Here was Bologna, the most important city of the whole State after Rome -- always violently anti-papal -- and Ferrara, and Ravenna. All this valuable territory was parcelled out into half a score of city states, some republican in their form of government, others ruled by families descended from the successful condottieri. The most important of these states was the Duchy of Ferrara, held by the d'Este family, who were also lords of Modena and Reggio, territories that formed a buffer state between the pope's territory and the Duchy of Milan. Imola lay twenty-five miles to the south-east of Bologna, and almost midway in the narrow part [990] of the long neck that joined the Romagna to the half of the Papal State where the popes were really masters. Imola in strong, trustworthy hands would be a check to Ferrara, a good starting point if ever the pope planned to reduce Bologna, and an excellent centre from which to conduct the lengthy business of destroying the petty tyrants of the Romagna, at Faenza for instance, or Forli, Cesena, and Rimini. [991] Hence the determination of Sixtus to plant his nephew at Imola as its lord, his insistence that Milan (in whose power it then lay) should restore it, and his willingness to pay the Milanese the heavy price asked, 100,000 ducats. And as the pope thus secured -- or hoped to secure -- this key city at the northern end of the " neck," so, by marrying another nephew, Giovanni della Rovere, brother of Cardinal Giuliano, to the heiress of the Montefeltre, he meant to make sure of the entrance to the " neck " from the south, their ducal city of Urbino. Giovanni's son did, in fact, live to inherit Urbino; he is the duke, Francesco Maria, who plays a part in the history of the second della Rovere pope, his uncle, Julius II. And Girolamo, the Count of Imola, lived to make himself master of Forli, and Cesena, and Rimini, and even of Sinigaglia, before, in 1488, some of his subjects found the courage to avenge a hundred crimes by assassinating him.

The other princes of Italy were not slow to realise that a new spirit was influencing the policy of the ruler of the Papal State. At the death of Paul II, Naples, Florence and Milan had stood leagued together against Rome. Now, by his marriage alliances, the pope had detached Naples and was, seemingly, about to make himself master of the all-important lands in the north. It was Florence -- the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici -- that first grew definitely uneasy about this unmistakable threat on her north-eastern border; there was a succession of " incidents " between Lorenzo and the pope and then a great crime, a terrible repression, and war (1478). Florence was still, in name, a republic where the Medici family were no more than private citizens, but in fact they had now, for half a century, been its all-powerful rulers, through their immense wealth and their skilfully exercised technique for the secret management of public affairs. Lorenzo was much more truly the ruler of Florence, than the pope was ruler of Rome. When the reign of Sixtus IV opened, relations had been friendly, and presently the pope made the Medici the Holy See's banking agents. But he would not consent to make Lorenzo's younger brother Giuliano a cardinal, and then Lorenzo made difficulties about advancing the money that Sixtus needed to buy Imola from Milan for Count Girolamo; he even did his best to prevent the sale, not at all wanting to see the pope's nephew strategically installed on his flank. Then Sixtus changed his financial policy. The Medici were dismissed, and the papal business was given to their rivals, the Pazzi. Next, in 1474, there came a vacancy in the see of Florence. The pope named one of his own kinsmen, Francesco Salviati, but the Medici protested so strongly that he had to give way. When, some months later, he named the disappointed candidate to the vacant see of Pisa, the Medici again protested. This time, however, the pope held firm; but the Medici kept the new bishop out. Now came the conspiracy, a plot to overthrow the Medici regime in Florence in which Count Girolamo, the Pazzi, and the Archbishop of Pisa were the ringleaders. They also proposed to murder Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano. And, such was the pitch to which six years of the political game had brought the Roman mind, the conspirators, as a matter of course, laid the whole matter before the pope for his approval.

Sixtus was not at war with Florence, but he had only one objection to make to the plot -- there must be no murder of the two Medici. The count, the banker, the archbishop, and the assassin whom they had hired, laboured long to convince the pope that their death was unavoidable in the kind of thing that a revolution is, and argued that, since the Medici were bound to die, it could not much matter how exactly this happened. But Sixtus would have none of it. He did not indeed countermand the plot, but he explicitly commanded that the princes should not be murdered; it is, nevertheless, hard to believe that, after the interview as we have it recorded, he can have been under any illusion about what the conspirators were determined to do.

The visit to Florence of Count Girolamo's nephew, the newly- created Cardinal Raffaelle Sansoni (a lad of seventeen) provided the opportunity. The cardinal, brought to Florence by his desire to see the wonders of the Medici palaces, was to preside at a High Mass in the cathedral on Sunday, April 26, 1478, and afterwards be entertained by the Medici. The mass seemed to offer a most suitable moment for the murder; the two victims and all the notables of the city would be safely contained and held by the confusion in the great church while, outside, the main body of the conspirators would seize the seat of government and all the controls. At the last moment the bravo hired to do some of the killing -- Montesecco -- did indeed object, some scruple about the place and time of the deed was, it seems, troubling him. But a couple of priests, "patriotic" enemies of the Medici tyrants, were found to take his place. The cardinal entered and the mass began. Then -- at the elevation, or the priest's communion -- the signal was given and the murderers made for their victims. Giuliano de Medici, was killed with a dozen wounds or so in his body, but Lorenzo, only slightly wounded by the clerical enthusiasts who had undertaken to despatch him, managed to gain the sacristy and to barricade himself. Meanwhile in the church there was the expected pandemonium, but the fury was all against the assassins, and the young cardinal -- thought to be in the plot -- came so near to death that, in all the forty years of life that remained to him his face never lost the pallor which came into it that day. While, in the cathedral, the murderers were taken, the chiefs of the conspiracy outside had also failed. Something in the manner of the archbishop as he essayed to bluff the Gonfaloniere into surrender put that officer on his guard. He arrested the archbishop and those with him, and when, presently, the mob came streaming by, mad with the news, he acted very promptly, putting ropes round the necks of the prisoners and thrusting them out from the windows of the palace. When the ropes were cut the mob amused itself with the corpses, [992] as we have seen happen again in that same land within these last few years. All that day, and the next, the vengeance continued. Whoever was thought a supporter of the Pazzi was mercilessly slain. Scores were thus hanged out of hand and thrown to the mob. The cardinal, meanwhile, was kept under close arrest.

The conspiracy then had failed, and except Count Girolamo, who all this time had not stirred from Rome, the conspirators had all of them been taken and executed. When the news reached him the count was beside himself, and the Florentines in Rome were for a time in great danger. The pope took no immediate public action. He regretted the crime of Giuliano's murder and wrote to Florence a letter, which has disappeared, to say so. He also demanded the release of the unoffending cardinal. The Florentine envoy in Rome wrote to support the pope's demand, and Naples and Venice gave their advice that Florence should not add fuel to the fire by keeping the prelate in prison. On May 24 an envoy from Sixtus appeared in Florence with a formal written demand and the threat that, unless the cardinal were released, the pope would punish the republic. The Florentines were, however, not to be moved, and eight days later the bull appeared excommunicating Lorenzo and all who adhered to him, and threatening the republic with an interdict if, within three weeks, it had not obeyed the pope's commands. The pope's case is set out fully: all the political grievances of the years before the conspiracy, the excessive vengeance for the conspiracy itself, the hanging of an archbishop and other ecclesiastics, the imprisonment of the cardinal; the republic must accept the pope's sentence that neither Lorenzo nor anyone who supported him should be capable of ever holding any office in Church or State, or of performing any legal acts; their property must be confiscated, their houses torn down, and Lorenzo handed over to the pope; all this within a month. Again the Florentines refused to be moved, and on June 24 the interdict was declared.

The Pazzi Conspiracy, scandalous as is its history, is of course no more than one of a score of similar events in the complicated story of fifteenth-century Italian politics. It needs, however, to be told in some detail not only because, in this particular feud, the pope was one of the protagonists, but also because of the contrast between the high tone of the pope's demands before he knew he was going to be beaten, and his subsequent tacit surrender of all but the appearances of submission. Here is something which is, for a time, going to pass into the political habits of the papacy, and to be yet another potent cause of that alienation from the popes of their greatest natural resource, the sympathy of instructed Catholic opinion. No power has so rightly been expected to make war on the haughty and successful, to yield to none but the needy. With these political popes the Roman maxim began to be reversed, to the great hurt of their spiritual hold on their children everywhere.

Florence replied to these anathemas by skilfully-written manifestos which all Italy read. The clergy acknowledged that Sixtus was indeed helmsman of the barque of Peter, but complained that it was to Circe's island that he was steering it; while the republic broadcast the confession of Montesecco, in which that scrupulous assassin told the story of the ambiguous interview with the pope. The finished irony of the humanist is now, for the first time, set to mock the solemnities of the papal remonstrance and its awful sentence, and to call in question, by its reasoned moderation, the assumption that the pope is telling the truth. "Collect yourself, we pray you, Holy Father," say the Florentines, " and return to those sentiments which become the gravity of the Holy See."

In August the war began, Florence isolated and the pope leagued with Naples and Florence's eternal foe Siena. The Florentines turned for help to Louis XI of France, and not in vain. The king, already bitter because Sixtus had refused the red hat to the prelates he had nominated, was only too happy at the chance of harassing the pope into new concessions of jurisdiction in ecclesiastical affairs. He had already, in 1475, begun to proclaim himself the champion of the "liberties of the Gallican Church" and begun to speak of the need of a General Council to reform the Church and to elect a lawful pope in the place of the simonist Sixtus IV. [993] Then, in March 1476, he had ordered all the French cardinals and prelates in Rome to return home for a great national council that would discuss the best way of bringing about the needed General Council. Now, upon the Florentine appeal, the French envoys to the Holy See were instructed to join with those of Florence, Milan, Venice, and Ferrara in a protest that the pope's conduct towards Florence and Lorenzo was a scandalous hindrance to the unity of Christendom. Since the pope would not listen to the ambassadors' petition for a removal of the interdict from Florence, a General Council must be summoned (July 11, 1478). [994]

The pope did not find it hard to answer Louis XI, but the emperor -- Frederick III -- was no less pressing that Florence should be treated more mercifully, and most of the cardinals were anxious for peace. But Florence would not accept the only terms the pope offered and presently, her allies not venturing more against Sixtus than threats of a General Council, and her territories ravaged by the papal and Neapolitan armies, the situation of the republic grew desperate indeed. It was saved by the boldness and diplomatic skill of Lorenzo. In December 1479 he made his way uninvited, unannounced, to Naples and won over the king. The terms were hard, but Florence was delivered from the dilemma it faced of destruction or a humiliating submission to the pope. Some submission indeed there was to be, but it came now from the initiative of the republic, and at a time when all other questions were stilled by the recent descent of the Turks on the Italian mainland and their capture of Otranto. [995] On Advent Sunday, 1480, [996] twelve leading citizens of Florence knelt before the pope in the portico of St. Peter's, acknowledged the city's guilt, and humbly besought forgiveness. The pope lectured them, mildly enough, and absolved the city from all the spiritual censures laid upon it. As a penance Florence was to provide fifteen galleys for the war against the Turks. But not a word was said about the position of Lorenzo de' Medici, who, and not Florence, so Sixtus had repeatedly declared, was the real enemy and the reason for the war. Nor, of course, was Lorenzo among the twelve who knelt before the pope.

For a short eighteen months there was peace, but Count Girolamo, who had opposed the peace party in Rome in 1479, now made himself master of Forli on the death of the last of the Ordolaffi who had ruled it for a century or so (1481). And he planned to take Faenza also. In this he had the support of Venice; and the great republic was willing to encourage also a much bolder design, nothing less in fact than that Girolamo should make himself King of Naples. Venice, as payment for its aid, was to be allowed to take Ferrara.

The King of Naples [997] began the war, invading the Papal State (April 1482) when the pope's preparations had scarcely begun, and at a moment when a miniature civil war -- Orsini against Colonna - - was raging. Soon Rome itself was threatened with siege, and though the arrival of a Venetian general, Roberto Malatesta, to command the pope's troops, and his victory over the Neapolitans at Campo Morto (August 21, 1482), delivered the city, the general's death three weeks later, and the departure of the Venetian contingents, soon renewed the danger. For the next few months the Neapolitans ravaged the pope's lands with little hindrance, while in the north the pope's allies conquered Ferrara almost at their ease. To add to the papal misfortune a half-mad Dominican archbishop had re-inaugurated (if that be the word) the Council of Basel, and though, as yet, he was the only bishop present, Florence and Milan were beginning to wonder whether they had not here a useful weapon with which once more to beat the pope. It was Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, seemingly, who finally decided the pope to break with Venice and make peace. On December 12, 1482, the treaty was signed between Sixtus and the King of Naples. All conquests were to be restored and the Duke of Ferrara was to be reinstated; also a pension was guaranteed to Count Girolamo. The Venetians -- with whom the war was going well -- had not been consulted about all this, but the pope now informed them of what had been done, and ordered them to ratify the treaty. Not very surprisingly they utterly refused, and warned the pope not to use spiritual weapons to coerce them, threatening, if he did so, to call in the Turks and plunge all Italy into war.

The pope's diplomacy had not brought him peace. Instead of fighting Naples as the ally of Venice, he was now to fight Venice as the ally of Naples. Immense sums had to be raised and a fleet equipped -- an essential condition for success against the great naval power, the pope declared. [998] The 50,000 ducats needed were got by the creation of new posts, and the sale of the appointments. The immediate problem was to relieve Ferrara, and meanwhile (May 25, 1483) the Venetians were excommunicated, and their state placed under an interdict.

The war went very slowly. The Venetians used their sea power to capture towns on the Apulian coast of Naples, but they failed to take Ferrara. Soon, feeling the strain of their isolation, for the pope's diplomacy had momentarily leagued all Italy against them, they sued for peace (March 1484); but Count Girolamo succeeded in hardening the pope against them. Then the Colonna troubles burst out afresh in Rome, with greater violence than ever (April-June). The pope was successful against the great clan in Rome itself, but the incompetent Girolamo was baffled time and again in the fights for their various strongholds in the surrounding country. Sixtus IV was beginning to feel his age, the unlookedfor strength of the rebels depressed him, and then the great league began to break up -- after all, it had held together for nearly eighteen months. At what seemed the last hour for Venice, the Duke of Milan withdrew, and secretly came to the aid of the republic, and presently the Peace of Bagniolo was arranged (August 7, 1484). Once again all conquests were mutually restored; and this time without any gain at all to Count Girolamo. The news was brought to the pope as he lay dying, and the disappointment of such a peace finished him. On August 12, the feast of St. Clare, one of the two greatest saints of the order he had once governed, he passed away.

So died this first of the popes who showed what a difference the pope could make as a prince in this delicately balanced world of petty Italian states. Sixtus IV had indeed established his family among the reigning houses of Italy, but with all these years of war and of realist diplomatic practice he had not really developed the pope's hold on his own state, nor given that state any new security against the greedy and treacherous princes who surrounded it; while, in Rome itself, the habit of war and the sudden new insistence on the material aspects of the papal office, had given new life to the old habits of riot and feud and had indeed "revived a barbarous past." The cardinals' palaces were now strongholds where each lived surrounded by his own guards, centres of bloody tumult only too often, sanctuaries for bravoes and assassins. The degree of this sharp return to the ages of violence was shown very markedly during the interregnum that now followed the death of Sixtus IV, and the proceedings in the conclave are evidence how greatly he had secularised the college of cardinals.

No sooner was it known that the pope had died, than the mob rose, and with shouts of "Colonna for ever," stormed and sacked the palace of Count Girolamo, and the houses of all his hated Genoese compatriots. The count hastened back to Rome from his operations against the Colonna fortresses, and while he lay encamped outside the city, his wife, Caterina Sforza, the classic type Or the Renaissance virago, boldly installed herself as commandant of the all-important stronghold of Castel St. Angelo. Then, for a fortnight nearly, the rival bands of soldiery fought and plundered in the streets of the city. The Colonna had returned in force, and the different cardinals sent out in haste for reinforcements for their private armies. The funeral services of the dead pope began with hardly a cardinal present; few could have made their way to St. Peter's without fighting their way through the armed forces of their colleagues. Finally the strong statesmanship of one of the few cardinals whom all respected, the Venetian Marco Barbo, a nephew of Paul II, brought peace. He prevailed on the count to surrender St. Angelo, and to leave Rome; and he prevailed on his ally Virginio Orsini, the count being magnificently compensated in money and promises. The Colonna, the Savelli, and the Conti also agreed to march out from Rome. There was to be a truce, not to expire before two months from the day of the new pope's coronation. This was on August 22, and four days later the conclave began.

Sixtus IV had created cardinals lavishly, thirty-four in all, [999] and in the conclave of 1484 no fewer than nineteen of the twenty-five present were of his naming. All but four of the twenty-five were Italians. [1000] The short-lived period of a more or less international college was over: [1001] even had the other seven cardinals then living [1002] been present, the Italians would have been twenty-two to ten. On the other hand, there was not between these Italians, subjects of half a dozen distinct and independent sovereign states, the modern bond of a common national feeling. The twenty-one were fairly evenly divided between the states only lately at war, and always mutually hostile. Venice had five cardinals, Milan four, Naples two; there were four Romans (Colonna, Orsini and Savelli), one from Siena, a Genoese and -- a new element -- four nephews of the late pope who formed a faction apart.

This is the first conclave of the type to be classic henceforward for a good three hundred years and more, where political considerations played a leading part, the first to which different princes sent instructions through their agents and at which, through cardinals who were their subjects, they even felt strong enough to declare to the Sacred College that there were certain cardinals who must not be elected. It was also a conclave in which bribery played a great part. The cardinals began by making a pact that whichever of them was elected would give the poorer cardinals -- those whose income from benefices was below 4,000 ducats -- an allowance of 100 ducats a month, and that he would compensate them for any benefice they lost through failing in their votes to oblige the various princes. The two leading figures in the conclave were Giuliano della Rovere and Rodrigo Borgia. The first wanted a pope he could control, and so maintain the influence on affairs he had begun to possess during his uncle's last years. The other wanted to be pope himself. All were agreed that the new pope must be acceptable to the league whose action had recently imposed the Peace of Bagniolo, and so a friend to Venice. Borgia was the leader of the cardinals who stood actively by the league, a small group that included such powerful personages as Ascanio Sforza, brother of the Duke of Milan, and Giovanni of Aragon, a son of the King of Naples. Borgia made certain he would be elected. But his actual following was small, and he was not trusted. The other leader was hardly more fortunate. In the first scrutiny a Venetian, Marco Barbo, came within five votes of election. Whereupon the skill of Giuliano della Rovere prevailed upon Borgia, and his associates, to abandon his candidature. The election of Barbo would mean an era of reform, and a restoration of ecclesiastical discipline. So Borgia and della Rovere combined forces, and through the night of August 27-28 they worked hard upon their colleagues, directing their minds towards the most complete nullity of them all, Giovanni Battista Cybo. They managed to secure for him eighteen votes in all, and on August 28, at nine in the morning, he was proclaimed as Innocent VIII. [1003]

INNOCENT VIII

The new pope was a Genoese, fifty-two years of age, a bishop since 1467, created cardinal by Sixtus IV in 1473. All contemporaries agreed to praise his kindly nature, his inability to refuse requests, but the different ambassadors noted also -- what events soon showed to be equally true of him -- that he had no judgment of his own, and little understanding of the problems that faced him. It was Giuliano della Rovere who would really reign, "the cardinal of St. Peter. . . pope and more than pope." Innocent VIII, it has also to be recorded, has the unfortunate distinction in the history of this time that he made no secret of the fact that he was the father of a family. [1004] "He was the first of the popes," says the grave Augustinian, Giles of Viterbo, [1005] " openly to make a show of sons and daughters, the first who openly arranged marriages for them, the first to keep up the weddings in his own palace. His predecessors had left him no such example. Would that he had not found successors to imitate him." As Sixtus IV had used the marriages of various nephews to assist his diplomacy, so Innocent VIII now made play with the marriage of his son and his granddaughters.

The pope was all but bankrupt as a result of the wars of his predecessor, the bitter Colonna-Orsini feud was still seething and yet, in the first twelve months of his reign, he, or his adviser- in-chief, drifted into yet another war. The enemy this time was Naples, and once again the papacy was almost without allies, while the rest of Italy stood by, neutral towards the pope and sympathetic to his foes. The cause of the war was the refusal of Naples to pay the annual tribute due to the pope as suzerain of the kingdom. It was another grievance that the king -- Ferrante -- was filling vacant sees without any reference to Rome. The war dragged on for nine months or so (October 1485-August 1486), each side helping the rebels in the territory of the other. Innocent appealed to one after another of the Catholic sovereigns for help, but all were deaf to him. Then Giuliano della Rovere revived the ancient remedy of calling in the French claimant to the Neapolitan kingdom. He went to Genoa to negotiate with the claimant -- Rene II of Anjou -- and to arrange a naval alliance with the republic. But by the time he returned Innocent, terrified by the disorders in Rome, and the damage done his territory by the marauding Neapolitans, scenting disapproval and treachery everywhere among his own commanders, had made peace. Ferrante too was alarmed, at the prospect of a Franco-Genoese invasion. He gladly made terms, giving way on all points to the pope -- it was merely a matter of making promises -- and then going home to glut his vengeance on the Neapolitan barons who had been the pope's allies.

For the next twelve months -- while Cardinal Giuliano sulked in his fortress at Ostia -- the papal diplomacy feebly plunged hither and thither, seeking allies, until it fell under the strong influence of Lorenzo de' Medici. The new alliance was sealed by the marriage of the pope's son Franceschetto to Lorenzo's daughter Maddalena -- a marriage where there was twenty years' difference between the age of bride and groom; and Innocent consented to give the red hat to Lorenzo's second son, Giovanni, a boy of thirteen. It was, however, provided that the young cardinal should not wear the insignia of his rank for another four years, nor be admitted to consistories. Meanwhile the disorders in the Papal State mounted higher and higher. In April 1488 at Forli, Count Girolamo, the once all-powerful bravo, was murdered, and a few weeks later the lord of Faenza met the same fate. At Perugia and Foligno, Ancona and Ascoli there were like troubles, and everywhere the King of Naples was busy aiding the rebels.

The one gleam of success that relieved the tale of ignoble drifting and its sorry fruit was the pope's securing, in the face of great competition, the person of the brother of the Sultan, Prince Djem. Here, it was felt, was a hostage possession of whom could be used to keep the Turks quiescent. The Turks, for their part, were willing to pay the pope handsomely [1006] to keep Djem under lock and key. He cost the pope a cardinal's hat to the grand-master of the Knights of St. John, and another to the French king's counsellor, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, and also a promise not to grant without delay the dispensation that would enable Alain d'Albret to marry the heiress or Brittany -- a bride desired for the boy king of France. The story of Djem's adventures, of his reception by the pope, his haughty, undisguised contempt for the whole paraphernalia of the Vatican etiquette, and the spectacle it all was for years to come, to Rome and all its visitors, makes pleasant reading after the petty, sordid chicanery to which the public activities of the papacy had now shrunk.

Towards 1488 a new kind of scandal was discovered, when high officials of the Chancery were arrested on a charge of forging papal bulls. The whole administration of justice had fallen into a bad way. It was a rare crime indeed that could not be atoned for by a money payment. The semi-bankruptcy in which Innocent had found the administration never really improved. Continually the pope created new posts to sell to the highest bidder, twenty-six new secretaryships in 1486, and fifty-two plumbatores whose duty was to affix the leaden seals to the bulls. These last paid, each, [1007] ,500 ducats on appointment: an immense sum which they would recoup from the fees paid by those for whose affairs the bulls were issued. There were obviously better ways still of compensating oneself, and in September 1489 two secretaries and four minor officials were arrested. In two years, they confessed, they had put out fifty bogus bulls, liberal grants and dispensations. For which the pope had them burned alive.

To the very end of the reign, the King of Naples continued to sap and mine the weak pope's authority. Innocent even spoke of leaving Rome, and taking refuge at Avignon. Then suddenly, in the last weeks of 1491, Ferrante veered round completely. Once more he made a treaty in which he accepted the pope's terms, and sealed it with an offer to marry his grandson Luigi of Aragon to the pope's granddaughter, Battistina.

The new year 1492 thus opened well, but in March, Innocent -- rarely free from illness -- began to fail. On April 18 Lorenzo de' Medici died, and all Italy waited in apprehension, for the son who succeeded him had none of his father's political genius. By the end of June it was known that Innocent was slowly dying, and the end came on July 25. [1008] Just nine days later one of his fellow countrymen set sail from Pelos on that voyage which was to discover the New World.

Innocent's reign left the papacy in worse case even than he had found it. He had been cautious in one respect, the creation of new cardinals, though in this he was yet again his own yielding, compliant self. For the existing cardinals had strongly objected to any substantial increase in their numbers. Innocent VIII had had but one creation, March 9, 1489, and added only eight cardinals to the college. Thirteen cardinals had died during his reign, and at his death the total number was twenty-seven. Of these, twenty-three made up the conclave that was to elect his successor, all but two of them Italians; and of the total there were still twelve of the creation of Sixtus IV.

In this conclave of 1492 there was hardly any unity of national groups. There was no Cybo faction, and the four della Rovere cardinals were almost the only party when the election began (August 6, 1492). But there was a strong reaction against Giuliano della Rovere, held responsible for the disasters of the late reign. His rival of 1484, Rodrigo Borgia, so an ambassador hinted to his sovereign, might now achieve much, through the great array of wealthy benefices which h s election would cause to be vacant. The spoil, to a share in which his electors might look, would be tremendous. For four days the election hung fire, three scrutinies taking place without any sign which way the election would go. Then Ascanio Sforza, one of the undoubtedly bad men among the cardinals, doubting his own chances of election, went over to Borgia. Bargains were struck, the spoil apportioned out, and gradually -- counting Borgia's own vote -- he was only short of one vote to make the needed sixteen. Finally the confederates gained the promise of the ninety-six years old Patriarch of Venice, "hardly in possession of his faculties". [1009] Rodrigo Borgia was pope, at sixty years of age, Alexander VI. Such is the story as Pastor tells it, [1010] and it seems to be the true story.

ALEXANDER VI

Alexander VI reigned for eleven years. He had won the name of a good administrator during the thirty-five years he had served the various popes, as cardinal and vice-chancellor. But no more than the weak Innocent VIII, or the technically inexperienced Sixtus IV, did this bureaucrat show himself a statesman in his handling of the grave political problems of the time. His solution, the same miserable superficial business of installing his own family and personal dependants in the chief posts, could, if it succeeded, only add to his successor's difficulties the presence within the curia and the state of yet another powerful faction of well-placed and experienced kinsmen of the last pope, determined to surrender as little as possible of the influence they had wielded. Alexander had to fight, as it were for his life, with the della Rovere. Was the next pope to have against him the Borgia as well? It was a policy that could only have succeeded had the papacy been hereditary, and even then it would have called for a higher degree of statesmanship than any of these papal families were ever able to boast.

The pope's own kin was numerous. In addition to various nephews, he had at least four children of his own who now came into prominence. The eldest son, Juan, betrothed to a cousin of the King of Spain, left Rome for his marriage and his Spanish duchy of Gandia in the first year of the reign. The second, Cesare, a lad of seventeen, was already, thanks to his father's influence, Bishop of Pampeluna. This see he now gave up, and was instead made Archbishop of Valencia, the see his father had held for thirty-six years, ever since the election to the papacy of Cesare's great- uncle, as Calixtus III, had vacated it. [1011] For the youngest son, Jofre, [1012] Alexander secured as a wife Sancia, a granddaughter of the King of Naples. The third of these children was a girl, that Lucrezia Borgia all too famous in the Borgia legend that was later developed by the innumerable enemies that the success of the family produced. Lucrezia, perhaps fourteen years old at the date of Alexander's election, was already engaged, but the marriage was immediately broken off, and a much more distinguished match arranged with a kinsman of the Duke of Milan, namely Giovanni Sforza, [1013] the Count of Cotignola and Lord of Pesaro.

The alliance of Alexander with Milan was far from welcome to Ferrante of Naples. Hostile to Alexander's candidature in the late conclave, and suspicious from the moment of his election, he now strove to avert the marriage. Once the contract was signed he began to work upon the hostility to Alexander of the disappointed Giuliano della Rovere. But the pope's diplomacy produced an anti- Naples combination, and yet another war seemed about to begin when Ferrante made the offer of a royal marriage for the boy Jofre. Upon which a general reconciliation took place, even between the pope and Cardinal Giuliano. Only a few weeks later the brittle peace was again all but broken when, in the first great creation of cardinals, Alexander gave hats to the nominees of almost all the princes of Europe except the King of Naples (September 20, 1493).

Ferrante did not live long enough again to trouble Alexander's peace. He died in the first weeks of 1494. [1014] The King of France, Charles VIII (1483-1498), immediately laid claim to the kingdom, and thereby not only brought to an end the first, easy part of Alexander's reign, but began the first chapter of the history of modern Europe, the long rivalry of France and Spain for the control of European affairs, that was to fill the next hundred and fifty years. The eleven years of Alexander's reign are thus a link between the older world when all the rivalries and wars of Europe are civil wars between small states which are, consciously, parts of a single Christian whole, and the modern age when princes and states strive for a position whence they may dominate the life of the whole world. The accident that Italy was the battle-ground of the first of these great national duels, and that it continued to be so for the next seventy years nearly, gave the popes of the new age a new kind of importance in international politics; they were, in all this game, extremely important figures, but they were not now important as the recognised spiritual chiefs of a christendom where a common religious faith produced a common public estimate of international right and wrong, but important principally as the rulers of a state centrally situated in the territories contended for, a state whose independence was one of the few indubitably fixed and stable elements of European life, and yet a state that might change sides at any moment, since its rulers were elected -- a state that might change sides often, since its rulers were rarely so young when elected as to be likely to reign for long. a

The French invasion of Italy in 1494 was a wholly new kind of thing, and this is the crucial year of Alexander's reign. He was now to meet the supreme test of the administrator promoted to rulership. Meanwhile, his first creation of cardinals was an indication that in his use of high ecclesiastical patronage he would follow faithfully the tradition of his last two predecessors. Unlike Innocent VIII, he was to be lavish in his creations, adding forty-seven in all to the Sacred College in the nine years of his reign, where Innocent had but added eight in almost the same length of time. Alexander's first cardinal, created five days after his coronation, [1015] was his nephew, Juan Borgia, who since 1483 had been Archbishop of Monreale. [1016] Now, in September 1493, the pope created another twelve, six of them from outside Italy. Seven were by favour to the different princes, namely the Roman ambassadors of the Kings of France and Spain, a confidential agent of the emperor, the Archbishop of Canterbury, [1017] the sons of the King of Poland, of the Doge of Venice and of the Duke of Ferrara. There was also a small family group, Cesare Borgia, Giuliano Cesarini (brother to a son-in-law of Alexander) and Alessandro Farnese, whose sister stood to Alexander in a relation that may most politely be described as equivocal. Cesarini and Farnese were both very young, Cesare Borgia was still in his teens and so too was the Ferrarese Ippolito d'Este. [1018]

The French king's claim to succeed Ferrante in Naples met with no support from the papal suzerain. Alexander recognised Ferrante's son Alfonso as king, and sent a papal legate to crown him. But the young Charles VIII was utterly carried away by the desire of military glory, and the opposition to him was welcome. He began to prepare the mightiest army Italy had seen for hundreds of years, and meanwhile his diplomacy was busy "softening" the papal resistance. The threats now usual on the lips of princes determined to wring concessions from the pope were made, namely to withdraw the nation's obedience from him, and to confiscate all benefices held by his appointment. And, on the suggestion possibly of the Duke of Milan -- Charles's Italian partner in the coming expedition -- the services were enlisted of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. On April 24, 1494, Giuliano fled from Rome, first to his bishopric of Avignon, and then to the French camp. Soon Charles was proclaiming the need to call a General Council which should judge the pope, the Colonna -- worked upon by France -- began to move, and by the middle of June Alexander had passed from alarm almost to despair. He even turned to beg aid from the Turks. The pope's sole ally was his cruel, cowardly and treacherous vassal of Naples, Alfonso II.

In September Charles VIII crossed the French frontier. The Dukes of Milan and Ferrara joined him and so, publicly, did Cardinal Giuliano. By October 14 he had reached Pavia, whither Piero de' Medici journeyed from Florence, and surrendered to him -- whereupon the Florentines drove out the Medici and restored the old government of the republic. On November 17 Charles was at Florence, and presently moving against Rome. The French -- thanks to the Colonna -- were already in Ostia and their galleys menaced the mouth of the Tiber. Alexander began to send legates to the king. But Charles refused to treat with anyone but the pope. He had a vow to visit the Holy Places, he said, and must spend his Christmas at Rome. But the legates also reported to Alexander that, everywhere, the French were announcing their mission to reform the Church. And the advance continued, relentlessly. For a brief moment Alexander's hopes rose, for on December 10 the army of the King of Naples marched into Rome. But a closer view of all that his ally could do depressed him to the extreme of preparing for flight. By December 18 " everything in the Vatican down to the bedding and table service " had been packed. It was, however, too late. The very next day the French pickets made their appearance, and from the windows of his palace the pope could see them exercising their horses in the Prati. The Neapolitans retired, glad to be away before the army itself arrived. That same night -- December 25 -- Alexander made terms with the French king's commissioners, and on New Year's Eve his armies marched in.

Charles VIII remained in Rome almost for a month. He was fascinated by the wealth and the beauty and the luxury of the city -- as, indeed, he had been fascinated by all he had seen of Italy since the invasion began. He was also fascinated, and overcome, by the pleasant-mannered pope. No one has ever accused Alexander of haughtiness or awkwardness. His was, it would seem, a gay and gentlemanly spirit, good-humoured, witty, a kindly, talkative man of the world, and his charm worked wonders with the raw, awkward, misshapen little man who was the offspring of that oddest of kings, Louis XI.

Once king and pope had met informally, and Alexander, with no more than a graceful gesture of assent, had admitted two of his friends to the college of cardinals, the murders and rapes and plunderings of the troops in Rome ceased to matter. The army would soon be out of the city and on its way to Naples.

The pope managed to keep possession of St. Angelo, and he was not to be forced into any recognition of Charles as King of Naples. But he had to grant free passage to the French armies through his state, and to surrender his main port, Civita Vecchia; also he must appoint as legates and governors in all the chief cities prelates approved by Charles. He had, next, to surrender to Charles the invaluable brother of the Sultan, and also (as a hostage, though this was not expressly stated) his son Cesare. All the cardinals and barons who had supported Charles were to be forgiven, and especially Giuliano della Rovere. There was no more talk of reforming the Church. The eight cardinals who had gone over to Charles saw their leader become as papal as the pope himself. At the crucial moment of the audience, with Alexander in their toils, Charles had ruined it all by a sudden unconditional profession of obedience and homage, of recognition that Alexander was the true Vicar of Christ and successor of St. Peter. On January 28, 1495, the French marched out from Rome.

Charles had got no further than Marino, ten miles to the south, when the news came that Alfonso of Naples, terrified, had abdicated, leaving the chaos to the management of his young son Ferrantino. At the same time the French king received his first hint that even the cynical Europe of the Renaissance would not allow the papacy to become any one prince's tool, when the Spanish ambassadors brought him the strong protest of Ferdinand and Isabella against the invasion of the papal state and the occupation of Rome. And now Cardinal Cesare neatly gave him the slip. But, on February 22, Charles entered Naples, without opposition, the populace frantically enthusiastic for the novelty, more suo.

While the French gave themselves to the manifold pleasures of their new southern possession, the Italian diplomacy knit together a new league that would bar the king's return to France, the pope, Milan, and Venice joining with Spain and the emperor, the pope being pledged to use his spiritual powers for the objects of the alliance (March 31, 1495). Charles was mad with anger and alarm. He might make a parade of himself, crowned as King of Naples, in the cathedral of his new capital, but prudence bade him look to his communications, and only a week later (May 20), with half of his army, he began the return towards France. Alexander, this time, evaded, by a timely flight to Orvieto, the meeting Charles desired. Rome was stripped of its valuables in anticipation of a sack. But the French passed through without any delay. They got over the Apennines safely, and at Fornovo, on July 6, beat off the attack of the allied army without great difficulty. By October Charles VIII was back in France, and the great expedition was over, although it still remained for the allies to clear out the garrisons the king had left behind in the south, ten thousand men in all. It was not until July 1496 that the last of these surrendered, to the Spanish commander Gonsalvo of Cordova.

While the Spaniards were thus engaged, Alexander turned to punish the barons who had sided with the French. The chief of these were the Orsini. They were now excommunicated, and all their possessions declared confiscated. But the execution of the sentence was put into the hands of the pope's eldest son, the Duke of Gandia, and it proved a task beyond his powers. The main fortress, Bracciano, defied all his efforts, and sorties of the Orsini even descended as far as Rome, where the rebels joined forces with their supporters in the city. The fortress was still untaken when, on January 25, 1497, the Orsini completely routed the pope's army at Soriano. Alexander now had to make peace on their terms, and restore their castles. Then, for a moment, fortune smiled on the papal cause, and on March 9 the Spaniards drove the French from Ostia.

And now began a series of extraordinary events in the family life of the pope that kept Rome interested and alert for a year and a half. In Holy Week (March) 1497, Lucrezia's husband, Giovanni Sforza, suddenly disappeared from Rome. The question had been raised of declaring his marriage null, on the ground that he was impotent. Sforza had refused to let the case go against him undefended, and he now fled to his city of Pesaro to escape the anger of the pope. Lucrezia, it seems, stood by her husband. In May the pope created a third Borgia cardinal, another Juan Borgia, [1019] the son of one of his sisters and on June 7 he granted to the Duke of Gandia and his descendants for ever the Duchy of Benevento with Terracina and Pontecorvo; the next day Cesare was named legate for the coronation of the new King of Naples, Federigo. [1020] Then, on June 14, the Duke of Gandia mysteriously disappeared. For two days he was missing, and then his body, slashed with a score of wounds, the throat cut, was fished out of the Tiber. Was it the Orsini or some jealous lover or husband? The mystery has never been resolved, but the murder roused even the Rome of 1497, and it shook Alexander to the point that he solemnly promised to amend his life, and even named a commission to plan a complete reform of the curia and the Church.

It is after the murder of his elder brother that Cesare Borgia first comes into the public life of the reign. He returned from crowning the King of Naples meditating a dramatic change in his status. He now wished to break off his ecclesiastical career, and he thought an exchange might be arranged between himself and Jofre, his youngest brother. Cesare would be freed from all his obligations, and resign his archiepiscopal see of Valencia and his cardinal's hat; the marriage between Jofre and Sancia would be dissolved, on the ground that it had not been consummated; Cesare would marry Sancia and become a prince, while Jofre would succeed to his cardinalate and all his other benefices. Alexander was slow to agree, but by December he had got so far as to say that the change of status must be so arranged as not to give scandal. While the best way to do this was carefully considered, the other domestic problem, Lucrezia's marriage, was successfully solved. Her husband's long resistance ceased, and under pressure from his two kinsmen, the Duke of Milan and Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, Giovanni Sforza now swore that he had never consummated the marriage and that he was unable to do so, and on December 20, 1497, a decree of nullity was published. Lucrezia had broken with him in June, and in August negotiations were begun for her second marriage to a son of the Prince of Salerno. [1021]

Cesare's scheme still moved slowly, the first fantastic plan was abandoned, but a few months after the disgraceful tinkering with matrimonial justice on behalf of his sister, on April 7, 1498, the King of France, Charles VIII, died. He left no son to succeed him, and the crown passed to his cousin the Duke of Orleans, Louis XII. This change in the succession was, in time, to make all the difference to Cesare's future. The new king had a claim on Milan, as a descendant of the ancient Visconti dukes; he was as eager to distinguish himself in the field as his predecessor had been; a second invasion of Italy was, then, to be looked for soon. Meanwhile, Louis sought the annulment of his own marriage with Jeanne de Valois, sister of Charles VIII, a poor invalid and a cripple, his wife for many years but who had not borne him any family; and he also sought a dispensation to marry Anne, the widow of his predecessor, and Duchess of Brittany in her own right (June 1498). The grounds on which the annulment of the marriage was sought were that Louis had married her through fear of his terrible father-in-law, Louis XI, and that the marriage could not be consummated. While a new chapter in French -- and indeed in papal history -- was thus beginning, the Borgia family's matrimonial history was also enlarged. Lucrezia was married on July 21 to Alfonso of Bisceglia, a son of the late King of Naples, [1022] and an effort was made to secure Carlotta, daughter of the reigning king, for Cesare, when his several resignations should have been allowed. But the lady refused, afraid, so she said, of the time it would take her to live down what her husband had been; she did not want to be known as the cardinal's wife. But on August 17, 1498, Cesare was at last free of his ecclesiastical rank, his orders [1023] and their obligations. The French king -- his nullity suit not yet terminated -- was granted the dispensation to wed the Duchess of Brittany, should his marriage to Jeanne be declared null, and he soon agreed to find a wife for Cesare, whom he created Duke of Valentinois, from among the women of his own family. On October 1 the new duke set out for France, with an outfit that cost his father 100,000 ducats, and a vulgar parvenu display that brought amused smiles to the face of the parsimonious French king. Louis offered him the choice between two ladies, and Cesare chose Charlotte d'Albret, the sister of the King of Navarre. In December Louis XII's marriage with Jeanne was declared null, he was free to marry Anne and rivet Britanny anew to the crown of France. The Colonna might once more rise against Alexander, and combine with Naples against him; the Spanish and Portuguese ambassadors might, to his face, reproach him for his evil worldliness, and utter threats; the King of France was now his fixed and most powerful ally, and even his kinsman. When next the French invaded Italy, they would come to conquer Alexander's enemies too. When the news reached Rome, on May 24, 1499, of Cesare's marriage, the pope's joy knew no bounds. His Italian policy was reversed, the full half circle, but this time to his certain profit. In July a French army again crossed the Alps.

The four years between the invasion of 1499, and Alexander's death, four years packed with incident, are wholly dominated by the pitiless craft and violence of Cesare Borgia. It had been agreed that Louis XII would aid his new cousin's campaign to subdue the Romagna. The pope issued a series of bulls declaring forfeited the fiefs of Rimini, Pesaro, Imola, Faenza, Forli, Urbino and Camerino, and in the autumn of this same year Imola and Forli fell to the Duke. In the spring of 1500 Louis' victory at Novara [1024] secured his hold on Milan and the North, and in the autumn Cesare opened his second campaign in the Romagna. The lords of Pesaro and Rimini did not await his attack; he took Faenza (April 1501) and had its lord and his heir murdered. The pope now created him Duke of Romagna; he and his descendants were to be lords of the finest province in the Papal State. Cesare next turned his power against the barons of the Campagna, and in June 1501 he forced the surrender of the Colonna fortresses and confiscated the possessions of the Savelli. When he threatened Florence the republic hastily bought him off with 36,000 ducats and an engagement not to hinder his attack on the maritime principality of Piombino. This, with its great fortress of Orbetello, fell to Cesare in September.

Alexander now divided the spoil. Piombino went to Cesare, and the Colonna lands were formed into two new duchies, Sermoneta, which went to Lucrezia's son Rodrigo, and Nepi, given to another tiny child of three or four, a Juan Borgia who may have been Cesare's son or perhaps Alexander's. [1025] Lucrezia herself was about to make a third marriage, [1026] to the heir to the Duchy of Ferrara, so that there also the future dukes would be Borgia. Practically the whole territory of the states of the Church had now been made hereditary in this family, and future popes, if all went well, would rule their states by grace of the descendants of Alexander VI.

Cesare's next objective was Tuscany, the republics of Siena and Florence, and the reduction of the great Romagna city of Bologna. In March 1502 he began his elaborate operations. But success, this time, was to be conditioned by the circumstance that the French king was no longer the sole great military power in Italy. Eighteen months before Cesare began his preparations for these new conquests Louis XII in November 1500, had had no alternative but to accept Ferdinand of Spain as a partner in the enterprise of conquering Naples. [1027] The two had agreed to partition the kingdom, and in the following June [1028] Alexander had ratified the treaty, and had obliged the partners by declaring the King of Naples, Federigo, deposed. Federigo, understanding perfectly that there was now no hope at all, abdicated in August. And now, six months later, the two robber powers were at issue over the spoil. In July 1502 war began between them, a momentous new war, the first of many, between France and Spain for the possession of Italy and fought on Italian soil.

By the time this war had begun, Cesare, drawing huge sums from the papal treasury for arms and munitions of war, had opened his own campaign in Central Italy. Such was the terror his cruelties inspired that, as his army advanced, the people fled, "as from a hydra". He was soon master of Spoleto, and of Urbino too, and of Camerino, and he began to plan the attack on Bologna. But now, October 1502, his captains conspired to put him out of the way, before he had murdered them. For a moment Cesare was in great danger. But the help of Louis XII, and his own craft and courage, saved him. He captured Sinigaglia, on the last day of the year, and massacred there those of the conspirators whom he had induced to desert. Then he made for Perugia to deal with the rest (January 1503).

In Rome, meanwhile, Alexander dealt with the Orsini. He had the Orsini cardinal arrested, and so many of the clan's supporters with him, that Rome was panic-stricken and the pope had to reassure the civil authorities personally that he meant to do no more. On February 22 the cardinal died; not improbably he was poisoned. In the country the Orsini, as always, made a good fight. They lost their fortress of Cere (April 4, 1503), but Bracciano held out once again. Alexander had to consent to an armistice. And while the pope and his son were thus striking down the last of their enemies, the Spaniards were beginning to defeat the pope's French ally in battle after battle. From the beginning Ferdinand's generals had profited from the traditional Aragonese command of the western Mediterranean. It was a great blow to Louis when, in March 1503, his fleet was destroyed in a great battle at sea. Then followed two more French defeats, at Seminara (April 20) and Cerignola (April 28), and on May 16 the Spaniards entered Naples, to be rulers there for the next two hundred years and more.

Cesare's fortune, built so far on the favour of the French, was gravely menaced. But he now planned to play off France against Spain. All he needed was a better army of his own and -- of course -- more money. One way to get the money was for Alexander to create, on March 29, eighty new court offices to be sold at 760 ducats apiece; another was to poison the extremely wealthy Venetian cardinal Giovanni Michele and seize his possessions (April 10); [1029] a third way was to repeat the iniquity of the consistory of 1500 [1030] and, by the creation of nine new cardinals for a consideration -- bring into the treasury some 120,000 ducats. Alexander began to negotiate, with the emperor, Cesare's nomination as sovereign of Pisa and Siena and Lucca, while the duke made himself master of Perugia. The future seemed once more secured. But though Alexander at seventy was, like Queen Elizabeth, just a hundred years later, active, gay and even frisky, his end was near. "Il papa sta benissimo, " a Mantuan correspondent told his sovereign in May. But ten weeks later he was dead (August 18, 1503) and Cesare, at the same time, so ill as to be in danger of death. For the circumstance of Alexander's death Cesare was prepared, and had, no doubt, his arrangements made. But, as he told Machiavelli later, [1031] the one contingency for which it had never crossed his mind he need prepare was, that when the pope died, he, too, would be at the point of death. This was surely the providence of God.

JULIUS II

Four weeks and a day after Alexander's death thirty-seven cardinals went into conclave. Two were French, there was a block of eleven Spaniards, and twenty-two very divided Italians. Had Cesare Borgia been able to act, he might have imposed a pope of his own choice. But the cardinals, aided by the ambassadors of France, Spain and the emperor, were able to induce the sick man to make terms. His army was but one of three in the neighbourhood of Rome, and, the cardinals guaranteeing him his possessions and a free passage to them with his forces, and the French and Spanish ambassadors pledging that the armies of their sovereigns would not move nearer to Rome while the conclave debated, this most dangerous enemy of religion left Rome on September 2, still so ill that he was carried in a litter. Two days later the solemnities of the late pope's funeral began. On September 5 Giuliano della Rovere came back to Rome, after his long exile, and on the sixteenth the conclave began.

Giuliano made no secret that he meant to be pope himself. Two other powerful men were equally determined to be elected; Ascanio Sforza and the French king's chief minister, Georges d'Amboise, Archbishop of Rouen. For the cardinals, after the disgraceful history of the last thirty years, to elect another Italian or Spaniard and disregard the wishes of Louis XII would, so the French considered, be an unbearable insult. "Our generals, said this French Wolsey, "are aware of these intrigues, and they will not patiently endure such a slight to their king. "

For five days the conclave was hopelessly deadlocked, despite Giuliano's success in winning the Spanish cardinals to his side. Then d'Amboise and Ascanio joined forces to propose a quiet, neutral man against whom none had a word to say, the senior member of the college, Francesco Piccolomini, the nephew of Pius II. The whole college rallied to him, and on September 22 he was proclaimed as Pius III. He was indeed a colourless personage, though not a weakling of the type of Innocent VIII, and he was a man of unblemished life. [1032] Hopes of reform accordingly ran high, especially when he promptly announced that he would summon a General Council. But Pius III, sixty-five years of age, and like his uncle a lifelong martyr to gout, was indeed a very feeble old man. The long ceremonies that followed his election -- his ordination (for he was only a deacon), [1033] his consecration as bishop and his coronation -- and the first rush of routine business, were too much for him. He very soon fell ill, and in less than four weeks after his election he was dead. In October 1503 the competitors of September took up again their round of busy intrigue and, this time, of bribery and simony too. Cesare Borgia had now returned to Rome. On the eve of the conclave he made his bargain with Giuliano della Rovere. The cardinal was to have the votes of the Spaniards, and he was to confirm Cesare in his possessions, and in his post of commander-in-chief. A short conclave of a few hours' duration sufficed to elect Giuliano, and on November 1 he was proclaimed as Julius II.

The new pope had reached just to the end of his sixtieth year. He was notoriously violent and self-willed, restless, a politician who, when not in office, had always been a rebel; and during the greater part of the reign of Alexander VI he had been the pope's most dangerous enemy. What his contemporaries saw in the election was the emergence of a strong pope, and they looked forward to a time of order, good government and peace. This last hope was not to be fulfilled, and Giuliano della Rovere was to show himself in a new role as Pope Julius II, for his immense energy was to work itself out in military expeditions quite as much as in diplomatic manoeuvres. There was, of course, little that was lamblike in such of the pope's contemporaries as Ferdinand of Spain, Louis XII of France, our own Henry VII, the Emperor Maximilian or the Venetian Senate. It was a world of hard lying, of perfidy, of cruelty and violence that the pope had known, and worked in, during the thirty years since, at the invitation of his uncle, Sixtus IV, he had left his Franciscan cell to become a cardinal and man of affairs. He did not propose to retire from that world now, nor to shrink from using in defence of his rights the only argument whose force that world would appreciate.

Julius II found Cesare Borgia installed as the actual ruler of the greater part of his state, a vassal more powerful than his suzerain; and what cities of the Romagna were not in Cesare's power, Venice, in these late disturbed years, had laid hands on. But, in fact, Cesare Borgia's position was critical. His French patron's star had declined; and he was not himself well established, as yet, with the Spaniards. When the terrible condottiere betook himself to Naples, as a first step towards making himself once again a reality in Italian politics, his admiring friend the viceroy, Gonsalvo de Cordova, was nevertheless compelled, by Ferdinand's instructions, to arrest him. When the pope now suggested to the King of Spain that Italy would be a happier place for all its princes were Cesare out of it, Ferdinand readily agreed, and under a strong guard the most dangerous of the Borgia returned in 1504 to his native land. Like many another of his kind he ceased to be terrible from the moment he came up against superior force and equal determination.

By this time Julius II had regained the most of the Romagna towns where Cesare Borgia had been lord. But the Venetians, with a polite kind of contempt, refused to take seriously the pope's repeated demands for a restoration of what they held, such great cities as Rimini, Faenza and Ravenna. And their intrigues to seduce from him the newly-acquired Romagna never ceased. The pope began to look round for allies; Venice was a power far beyond what his slight resources could hope to subdue. And the pope no longer looked to the other Italian states. Naples was now ruled by Spain, Milan by France. The new papal diplomacy must be international; the next war, if war there must be, would be a general European war. But while France and Spain were still at war about Naples, the pope's great schemes had to wait.

In the next two years (1504-1506) the pope secured from Venice a few small towns -- surrenders made in a manner that emphasised the Venetian determination to keep the main strongholds, and also the Venetian sense of the pope's helplessness -- and he took back the papal fiefs in the Campagna which Alexander VI had granted to the Borgia. Then, by three diplomatic marriages, he sought to bind to the Holy See the most turbulent of his own barons; one of his nieces married a Colonna, while, for a nephew and for one of his own daughters he arranged marriages with the Orsini. In October 1505 France and Spain finally came to an accord about Naples, [1034] the pope's diplomacy completed his alliances with the Italian states, [1035] his last preparations were made, and in the summer of 1506 he announced his plan. It was to reduce his own two cities of Perugia and Bologna, neither of which had ever been more than nominally subject to the popes. Despite the opposition of Venice, and of France, the expedition started, August 26, 1506, and Julius II led it in person. It was almost three years since his election. The remaining six years of his reign were to see almost continuous war.

The pope was absent from Rome for just seven months, and the event justified his courage. As had more than once happened in the days of the ruthless Cesare Borgia, the tyrants did not wait to try a fall with fate. While Julius halted at Orvieto (September 5-9), the Baglioni came in from Perugia to surrender at discretion. The pope took possession of the town four days later. He reached Imola by October 20, and while he planned there his last moves against Bologna, the news came that the tyrant -- Bentivoglio -- had fled. On November 10 Julius entered the city, the first pope to be really its lord. He remained at Bologna, reorganising the government, until after the New Year and returned to Rome on March 27, 1507. It was the eve of Palm Sunday, and the next day Julius made his ceremonial entry in the most magnificent procession known for years, under triumphal arches, and amid showers of flowers, with choirs singing in his honour the hymns from the day's great liturgy -- to the unconcealed scandal of the pope's master of ceremonies, who said openly to Julius that this was a scandalous way for a pope to begin Holy Week. [1036]

The next objective of the victorious pope was Venice. But a new obstacle now blocked the plan of a grand alliance. Ferdinand of Spain was introducing into his new kingdom of Naples that system of royal control over Church affairs which was one of the characteristics of his rule in Spain, where the king was all- powerful in appointments to sees, and where without his leave none dared, under pain of death, bring in any bulls or other documents from the Holy See. And while this trouble was yet unsettled Ferdinand, to the pope's chagrin, not only made his peace with Louis XII in a personal interview at Savona (June 1507), but refused to meet the pope. However, by the end of the next year, 1508, the needs of the Emperor Maximilian had brought about the long desired league against Venice. On December 10, 1508, the emperor and the King of France signed a pact of alliance at Cambrai -- a peace-treaty between the two powers and a league against the Turks. But secretly they had come to an agreement to attack Venice and to partition the republic's possessions on the European mainland, offering an appropriate share of the spoil to all interested. If the pope joined the league -- he was not represented at Cambrai -- he was to bring against Venice his spiritual powers also, and he would receive at the peace his own Romagna cities that Venice still detained. It was not until nearly four months later that Julius joined the league, until after the Venetians had repeatedly, and with their usual scorn, refused his new demands for the return of his territories. When the news came that the pope had joined the alliance they offered restitution. But Julius now stood by the pact, and on April 27 he laid an interdict on the republic.

The first act of the long war which followed was soon over. On May 14, 1509, the Venetian army was scattered like chaff at the battle of Agnadello. Venice was, for the moment, at the mercy of the league, and evacuating immediately the papal cities of Ravenna, Cervia, Rimini, and Faenza, the republic appealed to the pope for mercy. The envoys had a grim reception (July 1509), for almost the last act of Venice before the disastrous battle was to appeal against the pope to a future General Council. Before the pope would discuss the desired absolution from excommunication and interdict, the Venetians must accept his terms, promise to abandon their habit of installing bishops without the pope's consent, for example, or of levying taxes on the clergy. Moreover, the Venetians must restore. all their Italian conquests of the last eight years and more. While the pope held out, the fortunes of war suddenly changed; Venice, within a few weeks, had regained Padua and captured the pope's chief general. Julius, at the news, went off into one of his rages, throwing his biretta to the ground, cursing and swearing violently. The republic broke off the negotiations. And then the pope set them going once more. What brought the pope to approach Venice was a new fear of France, not only dominant now in northern Italy, but showing itself unpleasantly able to force from the pope new concessions in jurisdiction. On February 15, 1510, the pope made peace with Venice, and so deserted the league. The Venetians gave way on all points, and Julius reduced the humiliating ceremony of the reconciliation to a thin formality. But, in their hearts, the Venetians still held out. Nine days before the act of submission, the Council of Ten had drawn up a secret declaration that they would not hold themselves bound by what, so they declared, they only signed under compulsion. The gains of the war would be the pope's only so long as he had strength to keep them; and meanwhile he had mortally offended his allies, especially the French.

To Julius II this last particular was welcome rather than otherwise, for the pope now proposed to crown his career by driving the French out of Italy once and for all. If he did not actually utter the famous words "Out with the barbarians, " the sentiment was, from now, for ever on his lips. The year 1510 opened with the certainty of a speedy new war between the pope and France. He could not eat nor drink, nor sleep, he said, for the thought of the French. It was obviously the will of God that he should punish their ally, the Duke of Ferrara, and free Italy from their power. The first stage in the business was for the pope to destroy this powerful vassal, the Duke of Ferrara, who had disregarded the papal command to desert his French ally, and who was still harassing the Venetians. On August 9, 1510, Julius II excommunicated him, in a bull of staggering severity, and declared his fief forfeited. Then, at the end of the month, the pope once more left Rome at the head of an army marching north.

The French king had not passively awaited the pope's assault, but he was gravely handicapped by the loss of the shrewdest of his advisers, the cardinal Georges d'Amboise, [1037] whom a personal hatred of the pope stimulated to brave any extremity, and who was the one force that could keep the king's own vacillating will fixed and true to its purpose. And while the pope made an alliance that secured him the invaluable Swiss -- rightly reputed the finest soldiers of the day -- Louis XII fell into the abysmal mistake of attacking the pope through the spiritual arm. It was perhaps a natural kind of reprisal for Julius II's lavish use of excommunications to forward his plans. But all history was there to show how, in the hands of a Catholic prince, this weapon breaks sooner or later. To such contests there is but one end, submission and retraction on the part of the prince -- unless the prince turns heretic and leaves the Church, in which case all hope of dominating the Church is at an end.

But Louis XII was ill-advised, and Julius knew it. While the pope watched the French cardinals narrowly, imprisoning one of them and threatening to behead him, Louis, so Machiavelli, now Florence's ambassador in France, wrote home, was resolved to renounce obedience to the pope "and to hang a council round his neck. " Julius II was to be annihilated, in spirituals as well as in temporals, and another set in his place. This was on July 21, 1510, and nine days later the French king sent out to the bishops of France a summons to meet and arrange the preliminaries of the council. The technique for dealing with awkward popes invented by Philip the Fair, and by now a tradition with the French kings, was beginning to function. On August 16 a royal edict forbade French subjects to visit Rome, and in September, at a great meeting at Tours, the bishops gave Louis their support, and voted a generous subsidy to help the expedition that was to invade Italy once more and, this time, depose the pope.

By now Julius II was nearing Bologna, and there misfortunes crowded upon him. On October 17 he heard that five of his cardinals had gone over to Louis, and the next day the sickness, under which he had been labouring for some time, took a sudden turn for the worse. He fell into a delirium and raved that rather than fall into the hands of the French he would kill himself. The cardinals expected his death, and began to think of the conclave. Meanwhile the French were within ten miles of the city, and Cardinal Alidosi, the pope's favourite, was treasonably negotiating with them.

But the old pope recovered as speedily as he had collapsed. He managed to keep the French away by a feint of negotiations and then, as the Venetians and Spaniards arrived, the French fell back. By the end of the year 1510 the initiative had once again passed to the pope, his armies were besieging the fortresses of Concordia and Mirandola that were the keys to Ferrara, and, scorning the doctors, he pressed on to take his place in the front of the attack (January 2, 1511). Never was the fiery spirit of Julius II so satisfied as in these weeks. Since his dangerous illness the pope had grown a great beard, and wearing his armour he stamped through the deep snow before the walls of Mirandola, delighting the soldiers with his familiarity as he mixed with them round the camp fires, and by the blunt, coarse language in which, from time to time, he raged at the incompetence and over- cautiousness of his generals. Men were killed at his side and the roof of the farmhouse where he lodged was shot away as he sat there. But the pope hung on, promising the soldiers the sack of the city once they had taken it. On January 20 Mirandola fell, and Julius made his way in with the troops up the scaling ladders and through the newly-opened breach.

But soon the Duke of Ferrara had beaten the papal army in open battle (February 28), the French were once more masters in Bologna, and the pope only just got away in time to Ravenna. Here there were violent scenes between Julius and his nephew, the Duke of Urbino, whom the pope blamed for the loss of Bologna, and who in turn blamed the favourite Alidosi. On May 27 the duke and cardinal met in the streets and, as the cardinal smiled contemptuously at him, the passionate young man cut him down and finished him off with a dozen wounds. The pope had, however, no time to indulge his sorrow, or his rage, nor to repress the unconcealed delight of all his court and cardinals at the disappearance of the wretched traitor. He had now to fly to Rimini, and there he found, fixed to the doors of the church with due formality, a summons from the rebellious cardinals citing him to a council which would meet at Pisa in the coming September; and not only the King of France, but the emperor too, supported them. The glories of Mirandola were ended indeed, and with all possible speed the pope made his way back to Rome. [1038] It was a dark hour in his life; Julius II was isolated, and the coming council would no doubt "depose" him.

But the religious situation was not so bad as it seemed. Although, in France, the University of Paris was once again stirred up to popularise that theory of the pope's subordination to General Councils which had already done the French kings such service, and although, along with this, a campaign was organised, in the press and on the stage, of anti-papal calumny and ridicule, the scheme for a great council at Pisa died almost at birth. The emperor found it impossible to persuade Hungary and Poland to join him; the English held aloof, and so did Spain. But it was the reply which the pope made to the rebels that killed the movement. For, on July 25, 1511, just a month after his return to Rome, Julius II made the plan of the rebels his own, and summoned a General Council which should meet at Rome on April 19, 1512. And during the summer his diplomacy managed to knit a new combination against France -- the Holy League, for the protection and defence of the pope. This was signed on October 4. On November 17 the new young King of England, Henry VIII, joined it and in the first week of the New Year the war began again.

Meanwhile, on November 1, 1511, the four rebel cardinals arrived at Pisa, with a dozen or so French bishops in support, to find that no one in the town would lodge them and that the canons had locked up the cathedral. In the next fortnight they managed to hold three pretentious sessions, where, with a wealth of declamation, they reaffirmed the ideals of the famous fifth session of Constance, and then, all but chased out by the townsfolk, they declared the council transferred to Milan, where Louis XII still reigned as duke.

The new anti-French offensive opened well. The Venetians took Brescia (February 2, 1512) and the Spanish and papal army laid siege to Bologna (January 26). But there now appeared one of the greatest military geniuses of all time, Gaston de Foix, a kinsman of Louis XII, twenty-three years of age, and in a few brief weeks he all but destroyed the league. He managed to make his way into Bologna (February 5) and forced a raising of the siege. On February 18 he retook Brescia, and on April 11 -- Easter Sunday -- he inflicted on the Venetians and Spaniards the terrible defeat of Ravenna. It was the bloodiest battle fought in Italy for a thousand years. The vanquished lost 10,000 killed, and a vast horde of prisoners, among them the Papal Legate Cardinal de' Medici. But the victor was himself slain in the battle.

When the news of the defeat reached Rome there was universal panic. Even the pope' for a moment, gave way. The French were masters of the key' province of his state. How long would it be before Julius was in their hands? And at Milan the rebel cardinals, on April 21, declared him suspended from his office, that all his acts henceforth were void in law, his appointments also; and they explicitly forbade him to create any new cardinals.

The ultimately decisive event, however, was not the victory at Ravenna, but the death of Gaston de Foix. This the Cardinal Legate shrewdly foresaw, and he managed to send his cousin, Giulio de' Medici [1039] to the pope to impress upon him the difference this must make. While the emperor recalled the troops he had sent to serve under Gaston -- the German professional mercenaries who had been a main element in the victory -- the Swiss now descended on Verona. The French, utterly disordered, led now by a weak and incompetent commander, and beyond the reach of reinforcements, were forced to retreat or see their line of communications cut. The pope now looked on at the most amazing spectacle of a victorious army in full retreat. Like mist before the sun the great threat disappeared. The Romagna, Bologna, Pavia, Milan itself, were abandoned, and in ten weeks after the victory of Ravenna the victors were back in France, a broken remnant. Somewhere in the rout were the cardinals and bishops of the rebel council. " Papa Bernadin" [1040] was finished. Meanwhile, on May 3, only a fortnight after the appointed date, the General Council which the pope had summoned, assembled in the basilica of the Lateran.

In August the allies met at Mantua to regulate the future of Italy. Milan, now recovered from the French, was given back to the Sforza, and Florence to the Medici. But from Milan were detached Parma and Piacenza, handed over to the pope, who also received Reggio. One awkward question defied settlement, the claim of the emperor on Venice for Verona and Vicenza. The pope was most anxious to win Maximilian's support for the council and he now, for the third time in his short reign, reversed his policy. On November 19, 1512, he made a treaty with Maximilian against Venice, his late ally. The emperor was to support the council, and to hand over Modena to the pope -- whose new territories were thus linked to the old -- while Julius was to join in compelling Venice to give up the fiefs which the emperor claimed, and to use on behalf of his new ally spiritual weapons too. This treaty was made public on November 25. Its effect, of course, was to drive Venice to seek help from France, and in March 1513 a new alliance was negotiated between them and a new war began. But by that time Julius II was no more.

Towards the end of 1512 the pope -- he was close on seventy -- began to fail rapidly, and he was apparently the first to realise that, this time, it was the end. His last days were harassed by the realisation that while he had destroyed the hold of the French on Italy, the Spaniards had very effectively taken their place. "If God grants me life, " he had been heard to say, "I will free the Neapolitans from the yoke which is now upon their necks. " Whether such feats were a proper occupation for popes, whether indeed, Julius seriously meditated such a war, death found him still restless and anxious about the menace of Spain. One thing he impressed on the cardinals who stood round his bed, that they should observe the new law he had just made about simony in the conclave. In the night of February 20-21, 1513, he passed away.

Julius II had died at a critical moment in the complicated international life of which the pope was now a principal figure. There was no certitude that his successor, even if faithful to his ideals, would choose the same alliances through which to realise them. All Europe would watch the conclave with even more interest than usual. The dead pope was sincerely mourned by his subjects, a new feature of papal obsequies, and it was a testimony to his administration that, for the first time in fifty years, the cardinals assembled in a city of unbroken calm.

There were twenty-five of them, in all, to go into conclave on March 4, 1513. Those lately in active rebellion against the pope were excluded. There were no outstanding personalities among the cardinals, no intriguers of genius, and no well-defined groups. In a leisurely way they first drew up the usual pact to secure from the new pope what they thought their due share of money and offices and privileges. On March 7 the impatient guardians of the conclave reduced their rations of food, to hasten their deliberations, and reduced them still further three days later. The only line of conflict in the college was, seemingly, that of age, the older cardinals against the younger men, Riario Sansoni, a cousin of the late pope, against Giovanni de' Medici. It was evident that no Venetian could be chosen, still less a Frenchman. At the first ballot -- March 10 the votes were well scattered. Then Sansoni and Medici met, the son of the all-but-murdered Lorenzo de' Medici and the cardinal whom the murderers had used as a decoy and in whose presence the crime had been committed. The older man had too many personal enemies for his own election to be possible. He agreed that his friends should support Medici. A second scrutiny, pro forma, confirmed the pact, and on March 11 Medici was proclaimed as Pope Leo X, to the surprise of Rome and of the whole Christian world.

LEO X

The new pope was only thirty-seven, but a chronic invalid, operated on in the very conclave for a fistula, popular for his easy-going ways and his generosity, likely to strengthen the international position of the papacy for the next few years since he was virtually the ruler of Florence. Pomponius Laetus, Poliziano, and Marsilio Ficino had been his tutors, and in the wealthy cultural palaces of Lorenzo de' Medici he had been fashioned after all the literary and artistic ideals of the age. Though he was not yet a priest he had been a churchman from babyhood. At eight he had been given an archbishopric, [1041] at thirteen he was a cardinal. Then, when he was barely nineteen, the revolution of 1494 had driven his family from Florence, and the cardinal for some years wandered about France and Germany. Alexander VI's court he had only known in the last two or three years of the reign. To Julius II he had been of great political importance, once the Florence dominated by his family's enemies had supported the schismatical Council of Pisa. It was Julius II who had restored the Medici rule in Florence, and now Giovanni, the eldest surviving son of Lorenzo, was pope.

Only twelve days after the election the threatened alliance between France and Venice (against the new Papal-Imperial pact made by Julius II) was published. How would Leo X react? Muratori has well described his general line of conduct, saying that he always steered by two compasses. A more recent Italian scholar, more familiarly, sees him as an eel slippery beyond belief, ever writhing and twisting to escape the hand that would grasp it. Hardly ever, in fact, was Leo X to make an agreement with any power without simultaneously coming to an understanding with its rivals. He realised fully how weak in resources his state really was, and even at the last extremity he shrank from definitely committing himself to political action. Even in the last agonies of a crisis, he would decide and reverse his decision, and reverse yet again. Secretive, bland, affable, every one's friend, he strove to maintain himself by smiling in silence as the inevitable awkward questions were put.

So now, when Henry VIII and Maximilian formed a new league that would check the Franco-Venetian alliance, the pope did not join it at once, although he approved, and sent subsidies. Whichever side won he proposed to have claims on its gratitude. On June 6, 1513, the French were heavily defeated on that field where so many armies met, at Novara, and their armies were once more driven out of Italy. Leo exerted himself to prevent their foes from being too completely victorious. But the English also had invaded France. They had taken Terouanne and Tournai, and they had won the battle of Spurs, and also, against the French king's Scots allies, the bloody fight of Flodden. Then in the autumn, Louis XII made his peace with the pope, repudiated the schism and acknowledged the council in session at the Lateran (December 19, 1513).

But when Louis, exhausted now, proceeded to make with Spain a peace that was definitive, and to offer Ferdinand, as dowry with one of his daughters, the French claims on Milan and Genoa, and to renounce in his favour the French claim on Naples, the shock to the pope was paralysing. The sole result for him would be King Stork in place of King Log. The Spaniards would be masters of Italy in the North as well as in the South. Hence the eagerness of the pope, now, to see peace made between Louis and Henry VIII, his despatch to England and to France of the most experienced diplomatist in his service, [1042] and his joy at the treaty that followed, the peace sealed by the marriage of Henry's youngest sister to the French king. Louis was now tied to the English instead of to Spain (October 1514). But by this treaty of London the English king acknowledged his brother-in-law's rights in Italy ! So, once again, a new anxiety for the pope. Would Louis XII plan yet another invasion of Italy, with the security, this time, that the English would not attack his rear? However, on New Year's day, 1515, Louis XII died, killed by his endeavours to live up to the gaiety of a wife thirty years his junior; and it is on record that the superficial, short-sighted politician in the Vatican rejoiced. In the nature of things no relief could be more than momentary to so folly-ridden a ruler. Louis XII had no son, and so it was that, instead of that elderly broken man, Leo X had now to face a young king of twenty, valorous, ambitious, and capable, Francis I.

There is not space here to set out in detail all the sinuous writhings of the pontifical diplomacy in these years. The pope's chief confidant was Bernardo Dovizzi, called the Cardinal Bibbiena, his one-time tutor and secretary, a humanist of distinction, but utterly inexperienced in affairs of state, and as cocksure as he was incompetent. While Francis I was preparing a greater army than ever for the conquest of Italy the cardinal laughed at the news as mere gossip, and spoke of the lesson which his new league would soon be teaching the king. But when Francis moved, in July 1515, the pope, whose squandermania had already in two years exhausted the treasure Julius II had left behind, was soon at his wits' end. As to the league, Leo had at last brought himself to sign the pact, but would not have it published, in a desperate hope that he might still, somehow, charm away the advancing French. On August 12, however, by the victory of Villa Franca, they drove a wedge between the Swiss armies that were Italy's only hope. Ten days later Alessandria fell to them; and still the pope, while writing urgent commands to advance, to Bibbiena's twin in incompetence, the Cardinal Giulio de' Medici -- legate with the army -- was sending secret apologies to the French. First he sent an envoy to Francis, and then he hoped the legate would detain the envoy; and then the envoy, and his papers, fell into the hands of the pope's allies. Never was there such incompetent tergiversation since first priests set themselves to play the politician and the soldier.

But on September 8 the crushing victory of Francis I in the bloody two days' battle of Marignano tore these preposterous activities to shreds. All the north and centre of Italy lay at the mercy of the French, and the pope knew it. The king's terms were hard, but Leo had no choice. In December the two met at Bologna. What passed between them in their several long interviews has never transpired. But the pope lost all the conquests of Julius II, Piacenza, Parma, Reggio, and Modena. He had to forbid the Swiss to molest the king in his duchy of Milan, and he even offered the king a hope of the succession to Naples -- Ferdinand of Aragon lay dying at this moment [1043] -- Francis pledging himself to maintain the Medici in Florence; and the pope came to that arrangement about French ecclesiastical affairs, the Concordat of 1516, which practically placed at the king's mercy the whole system of appointments to abbeys and sees; that the pope also gave the king the right to tax the clergy -- a crusade tithe ! -- to the tune of 400,000 livres in two years is, beside this, a detail. To such disaster had the Medici finesse brought the Church in three short years. [1044]

Leo's own war was not yet over, however. His vassal the Duke of Urbino had failed to support him against the French, being in secret communication with Francis. At Bologna the victorious king had to leave him to the mercy of the pope. Leo -- despite the debt his family owed the duke, who had given them shelter in the days of their exile from Florence -- determined to destroy him, and to give the duchy to his nephew Lorenzo. The duke, Francesco Maria della Rovere, did not wait to be defeated by the combined forces of the pope and Florence, but fled to Mantua, where the duke his father-in-law took him in. By the end of June 1516, the Medici were lords of Urbino and Pesaro and Sinigaglia. The King of France had been too caught up with other affairs to be able to prevent it, but he warned Leo not to make any attempt on the other great papal vassal at Ferrara, reminding him that Reggio and Modena were to be surrendered to Ferrara. Then, in January, 1517 the dispossessed Duke of Urbino returned, with a force of Spanish and German mercenaries, unemployed since the recent general peace. Everyone helped him who hated the Medici, the French viceroy in Milan, the Gonzaga in Mantua, the Duke of Ferrara too. The pope was by now all but bankrupt, his army mutinous for lack of pay, and he had no real generals. Nor did Cardinal Bibbiena avail greatly as a peacemaker among the papal mercenaries. And at this moment, at Rome, a plot was discovered to murder the pope, and the chief plotters were cardinals.

Leo X had been pope now (April 1517) for a little more than four years; he was half-way through his reign. The whole spirit of the papal court had already, in that short time, been transformed. Under Julius II, if it had not been religious and spiritual, it had at least become decorous. The wild scandals of the previous twenty years had been checked, and the pope's understanding of the gravity of the tasks before him effected a certain seriousness everywhere. With the election of Giovanni de' Medici there was a rapid return to the days of Alexander VI, and the young pope led the rout. He had indeed been born, and he now showed it, one of the spoiled darlings of fortune. The years of wandering and exile that had followed upon his brilliant introduction to the high places of life, were now to find their compensation. "Everything unpleasant was removed as far as possible from him, for an insatiable thirst for pleasure was his leading characteristic." [1045] His chosen friends were the young cardinals who had brought about his election. Hardly one of them led a life that was not disreputable, and of the friends whom later he himself promoted to the Sacred College the greater part were, like himself, worldly triflers, wealth-devouring amusement hunters. [1046] Leo was passionately fond of music, and he loved equally that newest of cultural amusements, the theatre. In the Vatican the revels were indeed more seemly than in the heyday of the Borgia -- sexual irregularity was not among Leo's vices -- but the comedies performed before the pope could include such indecencies as the Mandragola of Machiavelli and the Calandria of Leo's bosom friend Cardinal Bibbiena. In the summer the pope would leave Rome for the country, and sport was now the all-absorbing occupation. To give, to scatter money indiscriminately to all who asked for it, was one of his greatest pleasures. Merit, well-studied needs, played little part in the directing of this largesse. Buffoons, comedians, the chance passer-by, the beggar who happened to move his sympathy, the servant who attracted his notice, all these were welcome to whatever the pope had in his pocket. And others too, with real claims upon the money, if they happened to be there at the lucky moment.

This was the setting against which the new papal game of false and double-dealing diplomacy was played which, to the great world of Christendom, was now the papacy in action. The pope, says Pastor, "was not a man of deep interior religion." This would seem likely. But he fasted three days each week, and if he said mass more rarely than, for generations now, has been the normal practice of all priests, he was careful to hear mass every day, and whenever he did celebrate he prepared himself by first making his confession.

The Petrucci conspiracy of 1517 is a violent reminder of the truth that morality is a single whole, and that to tamper with one particular precept is to risk bringing down the whole arch. . .One of the many mischievous novelties in papal practice since the election of Sixtus IV was the way in which the kinsmen of reigning princes were made cardinals simply as an act of favour to the prince. At the death of Alexander VI, in 1503, there was hardly a state in Italy whose ruler had not a son or brother who was a cardinal. Siena was one of the few states to lack such a court cardinal, and Julius II brought Siena into the system when, in 1512, he gave the red hat to Alfonso Petrucci, twenty years of age, the brother of the lord of Siena. Petrucci, a few months later, played a great part in the election of Leo X and he was soon one of the new pope's intimates. But Leo, who was nothing if not false, was soon intriguing to displace Petrucci's brother in Siena, and to instal in his place another member of the family, who would be less of a hindrance to the Medici ambitions. [1047] The revolution succeeded, and the cardinal turned against the pope (1516).

He began to intrigue with the dispossessed Duke of Urbino, and to express his mind to other cardinals already discontented with Leo X. In 1516 he left Rome for the country, but continued to keep his party together, it would seem, through his steward in Rome, Marco Nino. Suddenly the steward was arrested, suspected of being a link in intrigues with the Duke of Urbino. A letter in cipher was found on him, and when put to the torture the steward surrendered the key. Cardinal Petrucci, so it was alleged the cipher made known, was arranging with a physician to poison the pope. This doctor was, or claimed to be an expert in the treatment of fistula. He was to be introduced to the pope as a specialist and then make away with him. By a trick the pope now induced Petrucci to come back to Rome. He was immediately arrested and with him another cardinal, his friend Sauli, also young, and a one-time intimate of Leo. This was on May 19, 1517, and that same day the pope explained to the consistory what had happened and appointed three cardinals to study and report on the findings of the enquiry that would now open. The enquiry itself was in the hands of the pope's law officers.

Meanwhile Florence had obligingly arrested the physician and handed him over to the pope. He was speedily put to the torture, and so, it would seem, were the two cardinals. On May 29 there was a second consistory, to hear the interim report of the three cardinals; and now a third cardinal was arrested and thrown into St. Angelo. This was Riario Sansoni, that great-nephew of Sixtus IV whose life had already been so tragically interwoven with that of Leo X. Petrucci and Sauli had confessed that he was in the business too. Ten days later still, there was a third consistory. The pope had now before him fresh admissions from the prisoners, and the names of two more cardinals. He did not immediately announce these, but craftily tried by promises and threats and a general accusation -- "Some of you sitting here were in it too, and I know who," was the line he took -- to gain yet more information. None was forthcoming, however, and the names of the two new accused had to be read out. They were Soderini and Adriano de Castello, two cardinals of Alexander VI's last promotion in 1503. Soderini, with tears, confessed his guilt and asked for mercy. The other admitted that Petrucci had spoken to him of his wish to see the pope put out of the way, but said that from the way the young man spoke he had not taken it seriously. The three cardinals of the commission decided that these two should be fined, each of them, 12,500 ducats; and on their pledging themselves to pay this, and not to leave Rome until they had done so, the pope forgave them.

This seems an extraordinary way for a sovereign to deal with accessories in a plot to murder him. But still stranger was the fact that, when the cardinals paid the enormous fines, they were told that the pope now wanted as much again from each of them. This was on June 18, and two days later the two cardinals, no doubt unable to raise the new fines, fled from Rome.

On June 22, in a fourth consistory, the result was announced of the trial [1048] of the three cardinals imprisoned in St. Angelo. The pope declared that they had been found guilty of treason: for plotting during a pope's lifetime to make one of their number pope, for plotting the pope's murder, and for their dealings with the Duke of Urbino. The debates in the consistory were very long and stormy. For nine or ten hours pope and cardinals remained together, the sound of their voices, as they shouted and interrupted one another, heard by the attendants in the anticamera without. Finally the cardinals [1049] voted that the guilt of the three accused had been proved, and asked the pope to show them mercy. But Leo was inexorable, and confirmed the sentence demanded by the prosecution. Their goods were to be confiscated, they were to be degraded, and to be put to death.

Five days after this scene the lesser fry of the plot, the physician and the steward, were put to death, their flesh torn from their bones with red hot pincers at intervals during the procession to the place of execution, where finally they were hanged, drawn and quartered. On July 4 Petrucci was secretly put to death in St. Angelo, a Moor being employed for the purpose.

Now came another strange circumstance. The other two cardinals who lay under the same sentence were pardoned, and even restored to their dignities, and all in a generous, even lighthearted way, confessing their guilt and that they were even more guilty than they had told already, but agreeing to pay enormous fines cash down. Sauli paid 25,000 ducats; but Riario, one of the wealthiest of the cardinals -- as he was one of the most venerated -- entered into a bond to pay really staggering sums. There was a fine of 150,000 ducats [1050] -- 50,000 of it to be paid immediately and the rest within six months -- and a bail of like amount to be found that he would not leave Rome without the pope's permission. These bonds [1051] were signed on July 17 and in a consistory seven days later Riario was restored, Leo receiving him almost affectionately. But Riario was finished. He lingered on in a kind of chronic melancholia until he died, July 7, 1521. Five months later Leo also died, so deeply in debt, so well and truly plundered in the short interval between death and burial, that the only lights they could find to burn round his coffin were the remains of the candles that had served for Riario. [1052]

The conspiracy, and the judicial proceedings at Rome, extremely scandalous surely, have also this interest that they fall between the closing scenes of the General Council and the appearance of Luther. [1053] They are, indeed, almost the last thing to occupy the pope's attention before the Reformation came to force purely religious questions violently upon it. But one last political problem there was. It coincided with the beginnings of Luther's demonstration, and such was its importance that the politically- minded pope hoped, by solving it, to settle also the little matter of Luther. The problem was who should be emperor when Maximilian, old beyond his years and now obviously breaking up, should come to die. In many respects the high office had, for centuries now, been little more than a great ceremonial distinction. An emperor was effective just to the extent that he could persuade the myriad princes of Germany to support him. The dignity was not hereditary, but for the last eighty years it had remained in the family of Habsburg, which as yet was not of any great territorial importance. It was indeed so poor a family that the contrast between Maximilian's pretentions and his resources had been one of the jokes of Europe during all the time he reigned (1493-1519). His only son had died in 1506 and the old emperor greatly desired, and was actively working for, the election of his eldest grandson Charles. This was the young man of eighteen who, since 1506, had been Duke of Burgundy, ruler that is of the Low Countries and of Franche Comte, and since 1516 King of Spain and of Naples. Upon Maximilian's death he would inherit the German domains of the Habsburgs, not only Austria proper but provinces which, for a hundred miles or more, had a common frontier with Venice. Were a prince so splendidly dowered with hereditary possessions to become emperor, who could say what new reality might not be infused into the ancient title? And how could the future of Italy not lie entirely in his hands? No pope could be indifferent to such a possible menace, nor could the Medici pope be indifferent to the effect upon his family's precarious hold on Florence of the appearance of an emperor who was already such a power in Italy.

It was, then, inevitable that Leo X should work against the candidature of the young King of Spain. The event was a striking demonstration how weak was the pope's political influence. Maximilian died on January 20, 1519, there followed six months packed with diplomatic manoeuvre, and on June 28 Charles was unanimously elected. As the emperor Charles V he was to reign for thirty-seven momentous years.

In these manoeuvres Leo played his wonted part. The new King of France, Francis I, was also a candidate for the succession, and when, in April 1518, it became evident that there was some opposition in Germany to the election of the King of Spain, the pope began to negotiate with Francis and to persuade him to offer himself in opposition to Charles. On January 20, 1519, he made a treaty with Francis that was really a pledge of support; and, characteristically, he made a secret treaty, of the same kind, at the same time, with Charles. But from the moment when Maximilian's death made the matter urgent, Leo gave up his pretence and began strongly to oppose the King of Spain. He still, however, had a double game to play. The pope did not in reality wish to see the imperial prestige in the hands of France. This would have been as dangerous a combination as the other. The pope had a candidate of his own, the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, ever since, in September 1518, this prince had declared himself opposed to the election of Charles. And since that date Leo had been secretly working for him. He still, in the spring of 1519, worked for Francis, offering the cardinalate to two of the electors should the King of France be chosen, and a legateship for life to the third archbishop-elector -- the Archbishop of Mainz -- who was already a cardinal. He even went so far as to say that if they alone should vote for Francis -- three out of the seven electors - - he would recognise the election as valid. But he only received snubs from these ecclesiastical princes, who denied his power to interfere with the procedure of the election.

By the end of May the pope realised that there was no chance for Francis I. By now it was hardly safe for a Frenchman to show himself in Germany, and the pope's nuncio had to flee for his life from Mainz. Leo turned to work for his own candidate. On June 7 he wrote declaring that if the Elector of Saxony could persuade two others to vote for him, and would add to these his own vote, the pope would recognise him as emperor. The Elector was Luther's sovereign, and nine months before this he had firmly refused the pope's request to arrest Luther and send him to Rome. The imperial dignity was now to be his through the pope's intervention -- such was Leo's really childish plan -- and Frederick, in gratitude, would hand over the heresiarch. And to keep Frederick in good humour all these nine critical months, the pope had, to all seeming, let the business of Luther fall into the limbo of forgotten cases.

Nevertheless Frederick was not to be caught. By June 17 Leo understood how powerless he was. He would not, he said, run his head against a stone wall. He removed the long-standing papal prohibition -- it went back to Clement IV and the now far-off days of Charles of Anjou -- that his vassal the King of Naples should accept the imperial crown, and when the news of the election reached him, he offered the accustomed words of approbation and good will. What had he effected, except to root in the young king's mind an idea which he would never lose that popes were politicians, to be treated as such? and in the minds of Catholics in Germany a suspicion that religion, for the pope, was secondary to the needs of politics? Nor was this, even yet, the end of Leo's duplicity. In September (1519) he made yet another secret treaty with France, pledging himself not to recognise Charles as King of Naples so long as he retained the imperial crown. Then, relations with Francis -- youthful, arrogant, bullying, and as crafty as the pope -- growing steadily worse, the pope again negotiated simultaneously contradictory treaties with him and with the emperor (January-April 1521). The problem of Luther could not possibly be solved without the emperor's cooperation. The Spanish ambassador in Rome explained to Charles how useful the pope's fear of "a certain monk known as Brother Martin" might be to extort concessions; and, indeed, for the last eighteen months of the pope's life, anxiety about the new heretic wholly filled his mind.

Leo's death found him again at war, despite all diplomacy, and the ally of Charles V against France. The war began in the summer of 1521, and after some setbacks and delays that greatly tried the pope's anxious soul, the French were driven from Milan, and Piacenza and Parma were reconquered. This was better news, said Leo, than even the news of his election as pope. Arrangements were in progress for a great thanksgiving service, when the pope fell ill (November 26). He had taken a chill as he sat watching the fireworks with which his Swiss were celebrating the victory. In the evening of December 1 he suddenly collapsed, and by midnight he was dead, at forty-six.

The pope's sudden death caused a financial panic. For nearly nine years he had lived with the utmost extravagance; there had been the expenses of the war of Urbino to meet; and now the still heavier expenses of the war against France. To cover the deficit every expedient had been used. Over 1,300 new offices and distinctions had been created, the sale of which brought in a sum equal to two years of the annual revenue. By 1521 the total number of these saleable offices was 2,150, their capital value 3,000,000 ducats -- seven times the annual revenue. [1054] Great sums had been raised at the creation of the numerous cardinals, there had been the astronomical fines of the cardinals involved in the conspiracy of 1517. Then the pope borrowed -- from his friends, his officials, his cardinals, and the banks, paying as high an interest as 26 per cent for six months. And he pawned whatever he could, plate from his table, jewels, the silver statues from his chapel. Meanwhile the troops went unpaid, the brilliant corps of scholars recruited for the pope's university, the artists, even Raphael and San Gallo. The pope died 850,000 ducats in debt, owing amongst others the Bini bank 200,000, and -- one is glad to know it -- his friend and kinsman, and evil genius, Cardinal Lorenzo Pucci [1055] 150,000.

CHRISTIAN LIFE AND THOUGHT, 1471-1517

Just one hundred years separate the beginning of Martin Luther's assault on the papacy from the election of Martin V at Constance, the first pope for forty years recognised as such by the whole Church. During the last fifty years of that century, of the major anxieties which, from the time of that pope, never ceased to menace the peace of religion, one in particular, the problem how to make the Papal State a real guarantee of papal freedom of action, had thrust the rest well into the background. But the preoccupation of all the five popes from Sixtus IV to Leo X with this undoubtedly critical matter is not, of course, the whole history of the Church in their time. It will perhaps make that history more intelligible as a unity if, as we pass from the story of the diplomatic and military activities of these popes, something is said of all this as it appears related to the general political life of the t; me. For impatient as we may be at the spectacle of the pope turned prince, and impatient that the pope yielded so much to the pressure of the time, to be aware of the spirit of the time, and of its reality as a compelling force, is a first condition for understanding the gravity of that papal surrender.

That spirit was not a papal creation; the papacy is victim, here, of something older than itself. In these last generations of the Middle Ages there had thrust into the life of Christendom a force very well aware of its own nature, very clear about its objective, and which now began to impose upon the whole of that life its own peculiar pace and rhythm. " The stubborn persevering progress of the State in its slow reconquest of its attribute of sovereignty is, as the sixteenth century rises above the horizon, the essential phenomenon of public life. This is the sign under which the Reformation is born." [1056]

The hold upon the human spirit of its ancient enemy, the absolute state, had been loosened and then shaken off, once the Catholic Church overcame the empire of the Caesars. From time to time there had been desperate attempts by one prince or another to restore that state and reimpose its yoke, but always, so far, those attempts had been foiled. Now, from the end of the fifteenth century, the attempt to renew it became a more serious menace than ever, because the attempt was made under conditions more than ever favourable; the atomised states of the Middle Ages were now coalescing into the great monarchies of modern times. Since the marriage of the King of Aragon to the Queen of Castile in 1479 there was a united kingdom of Spain, and since 1505 its ruler was also King of Naples; since Louis XI (1461-1483) the French king was really master of all France; since the battle of Bosworth in 1485 there was a new monarchy in England. There still remained in face of the new assault the three great obstacles on which the earlier assaults had broken, the fifteen hundred years-old Catholic habit of mind, more especially the peculiarly Christian ideal of the sacredness of human personality, and finally the organisation of Christianity in that Catholic Church whose sovereign independence all princes and states acknowledged. But in the new states, leaders of new boldness and of a new political capacity are about to appear -- Charles V and Henry VIII for example, and their counsellors of genius. The scale of the conflict is suddenly magnified. It is in the modern world that the duel will be fought out. And popes of a new boldness and a new political capacity will also appear, popes also of a new personal rectitude and with something of the purer spirit of St. Gregory VII. [1057]

This needed combination, of courage and capacity and otherworldliness, neither the Renaissance popes had possessed, nor the most part of their predecessors for two hundred years. It ought not to need proving that once the administrative system created by the medieval popes was permanently established, the presence of very great natural gifts in the popes was imperative for the well-being of religion. [1058] The pope is now very truly Dominus Ecclesiae, chef d'orchestre and composer too, since he has so centralised his administration and taken so much even of local affairs into his hands. Lacking a commanding intelligence in its chief, a machine so elaborate tends to become the sport of officials, its operation a matter of precedent merely and routine. In a state called into existence solely to promote the spiritual, such mechanisation means stagnation akin to death. Of the thirty- four popes whose reigns cover this period between St. Thomas and Luther, how many are there who rise above the mediocre? What has the office a right to demand of them? Holiness -- of course; then competent learning, in the sacred doctrine first of all, and next in the traditional lore of the religious ruler's art, the canon law; then judgment, and ability. Of all these thirty-four popes none has, so far, been canonised, [1059] but four have their place in the calendar as beatified. [1060] That almost all these popes are recruited from officials in the curia is but the continuance, in the closing centuries of the Middle Ages, of a most ancient, and very natural, tradition. The time had not yet come when the cardinalate was regularly conferred on resident diocesan bishops. It is only now, in the fifteenth century, that we see the beginning of this practice. The cardinal was still, in fact, the actual counsellor and trusted man of the pope, and the cardinal lived where the pope lived. [1061] And of course the overwhelming majority of the popes were chosen from among the cardinals. [1062] Of the first popes in our period, those who close the great century of Innocent III, four had risen to fame in the great world of Scholasticism. [1063] Boniface VIII, renewing the tradition of the first half of his century, is an eminent canonist; and so are almost all the French popes whose reigns make up the tale of Avignon. The great exception here is Benedict XII -- one of the most competent theological scholars of his generation; and he is the last constructive legislator among the popes, on the grand scale, until the Council of Trent. With the Schism the decline in personality is very marked. The only really outstanding figures of the century that follows it are the two humanist popes, Nicholas V and Pius II; and their reigns are too short, and their bodies too broken, for their personality to be really effective. Then comes the lamentable time at which the story has arrived, an age inaugurated indeed -- such is the incredible fact -- by a Franciscan [1064] who was also a theologian of real merit, to whom succeed in turn the weakling Giovanni Cybo, a competent bureaucrat -- Rodrigo Borgia, a lifelong political intriguer of no particular training -- Giuliano della Rovere, and the superficial dilettante Leo X, who closes the series.

Reviewing all this history the impression deepens that consistently, in one generation after another, the popes fail to read the signs of the times, and a study of the papal personalities helps to explain the failure. They do indeed discern a mortal foe of all they stand for in, for example, Marsiglio of Padua (though, so it would seem, they judge Ockham, as a speculative thinker that is to say, far too lightly). Repeatedly they do indeed point out to the faithful, with unmistakable clarity and vigour, how dangerous to faith Marsiglio's theories are; and to the best of their ability they prevent the circulation of his highly mischievous book. But never do they meet, with any constructive organisation of Catholic thought, the important fact which the Defensor Pacis and its sequel should surely have revealed to them, the fact namely that lay resentment at the cleric's desire to control the public life of Christendom is now beginning to crystallise into a system of "philosophy," a Weltanschauung even; and that Marsiglio speaks for a whole multitude of disgruntled, and educated, Catholic contemporaries. We are, in fact, here making early acquaintance with what is to become for centuries one of the permanent diseases of Christendom, the anti-clerical (and even anti-religious) spirit of the educated middle classes, burning somberly below deceptive ashes, its existence ignored, and implicitly denied, by a clerical regime that seems only aware of the surface of Catholic life.

Thinkers of Marsiglio's calibre have always been rare, in any generation. And among those who, in his own age and the succeeding century, fed their discontent on his theories, there were no doubt far more who bandied about the catchwords of his doctrine than had ever stud; ed the learned evangel itself -- as, in our own time, there are far more Marxists than there were ever actual students of Das Kapital. Such " Marsiglini " as these last would have disappeared speedily enough if the visible abuses in the ecclesiastical system which bred their discontent had really been corrected. Heresy, or a professed sympathy with the heretical reformer, is, in its early stages, only too often, no more than a readily-snatched-at chance to "rationalise" the concrete grievance against those in authority. It was the terrible, and lasting, misfortune of the Church that in these centuries, even when sincere reformers sat on the papal throne they merely tinkered with the trouble; reform rarely went beyond trite exhortations, and new decrees that re-enacted the old decrees; and never did it explore the roots of the abuses, consider the question whether the whole ecclesiastical machine did not stand in some need of re- designing. These popes, it is often said, had other things to do, they lived with a hundred crises crowding upon them. This is true; and it is the whole tragedy, that amid the welter of urgent daily business, with the danger of a real disruption of Christendom threatening for several generations, they had to make a choice where best to be active, and -- allowing them the best intentions and a real good will -- their choice too often relegated to the secondary what is the principal task of popes at all times.

In some respects, one is tempted to think, the medieval pope had an impossible task before him. Nothing could, of course, be further from reality than the picture of the Middle Ages as a golden time of universal peace and charity. The turbulence is chronic, and it is by the immense progress realised since the dark chaos of the ninth and tenth centuries that the achievement should be judged. Nor was the Holy See ever really able to exert all the needed control. The eleventh-century popes successfully drew closer the links that bound to Rome the local episcopate, as a first means of purifying it and of strengthening the local religious leader against the local tyrant. But communications -- the most material factor of all -- were never, in all these centuries, as good as they needed to be for the centralisation really to function steadily and regularly. What was accomplished is, indeed, more than remarkable. But it was not enough; and more was scarcely possible. So, for generations, the huge affair creaked and groaned, and it broke down continually. Nor did the episcopate, as a whole, ever come up to what Rome desired -- and indeed needed -- that it should be. It was never, as a whole, so able or so apostolic as its Roman chiefs. The popes were far indeed from having that freedom in appointing to sees the men of their choice which, to-day, we take for granted. Time and again vested interests were too strong for them, the will of the princes in Spain and France and England, the determination of the nobles in the chapters of Germany. All through the Middle Ages the popes are building a system -- and finding, all the time, opposition to their plans from vested interests, not infrequently the episcopate. Some popes are less able than others, than fifty sees were given to youths below the canonical age for consecration. These included the primatial sees of Poland, Hungary, and Scotland. Leo X gave Lisbon (and two other sees at the same time) to a child of eight, and Milan to another of eleven: both were children of reigning princes. [1065] Of the eighteen cardinals who elected Sixtus IV in 1471, four were non-resident diocesan bishops. At the next conclave (1484) the absentees were ten out of twenty-five, in 1492 they were eleven out of twenty-three, and in 1503 twenty-six out of thirty-seven. This grave abuse was, in the Sacred College, fast becoming the rule. Everywhere, by this time, there were powerful clerical vested interests to oppose reforms, not indeed by voting them down, but by systematically neglecting to put the decrees into execution. This is particularly true of the prince-bishops of Germany, of the episcopate in France, of the College of Cardinals and the Roman Curia, which last institution was to defy for years even the zeal of the reforming popes of the Counter Reformation. [1066]

Nothing could be more important than that there should be good bishops in all the seven hundred sees of the universal Church -- and that the popes should concern themselves with the quality of the men nominated would seem the most elementary duty of their universal administration. [1067] But the popes must first of all enjoy, in fact, a real freedom to appoint whom they chose. The sphere in which they were thus free was, all through the fifteenth century, steadily shrinking; and it shrank in part through the acts of the popes themselves. To free the future of the episcopate from the malign influence of such close corporations as the cathedral chapters had very often become, the popes built up the new system of appointment by papal provision. And now, as the rights of chapters to elect became a dim memory, the princes began to covet the power to name bishops which princes of the age before Hildebrand had enjoyed. At times the popes granted the right -- well limited -- as a favour or a privilege, and at times they did so in scarcely veiled surrender to threats. The period of the princely popes was naturally rich ill such surrenders.

Already, in England, by the middle of the fifteenth century, the Statute of Provisors had paved the way for a system where the popes always came to name as bishop the man whom the king recommended. And the emperor had gained from Eugene IV in the last days of the Council of Basel, and its anti-pope, extensive rights over half a dozen important sees. [1068] In France the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, often condemned and ceaselessly reprobated, functioned nevertheless, and the popes had to put up with it, since to fight the king would have renewed all the chaos of the forty years' Schism, and possibly lost France to Catholic unity in the fifteenth century as so much of Germany was lost to it in the sixteenth.

Sixtus IV was then, once more, only typical of his decadent century when in 1473 he made over to the emperor the right to present to some three hundred benefices, and in 1478 increased the number of sees in his patronage. In 1476 the Dukes of Saxony were similarly favoured and in 1479 the city of Zurich. Three years later, in 1482, the new Spanish monarchy also, after a fight in which the Catholic kings threatened to revive the Council scheme, was given new rights to name bishops. The next pope, Innocent VIII, although he fought off the claims of Portugal to hold up papal decisions and appointments, was defeated in his battle with Florence and other Italian states about the right to tax church revenues; and he further extended the rights of Spain when he gave to the crown rights to name bishops in the kingdom of Granada and in Sicily too, and indulged them in Sicily with that right to veto episcopal appointments which was to harass the popes in that kingdom down to our own time. [1069] Alexander VI has not to his charge, it would seem, any such surrenders; but Julius II, caught in the toils of political necessity, gave Spain extensive rights of patronage (in the West Indies) in 1508; and Portugal also profited from the mistaken liberality of Leo X, who gave the king various rights over the three military orders of the kingdom. The Lutheran crisis, in which Leo's reign ran out, was of course a golden opportunity for the princes of Germany to extort concessions.

The newest phase of this surrender of direct control over the life of the local church, the most mischievous of all, was the appointment of one of its bishops, a cardinal, as legate a latere for the whole country, with faculties so ample that he became a kind of vice-pope and a final court of appeal. So Georges d'Amboise, Archbishop of Rouen, was appointed for France by Julius II in 1503; and so Wolsey, Archbishop of York, was appointed for England by Leo X and re-appointed, for life, by Clement VII. And Albrecht of Brandenburg was offered a like appointment for Germany. This mischief was all the greater because these prelates were the principal ministers of their sovereigns; it was the king's prime minister who was made the vice-pope, and he received his powers at the king's request. The one man was, locally, supreme in Church [1070] and state, free to manage the whole as a unity, for the king's profit. And meanwhile the local church would grow accustomed to the Roman authority being no more than a distant splendour.

It was upon a papacy already slowly stripping itself -- under compulsion -- of its control of the distant provinces, that the new blow from Germany would presently fall. The most striking surrenders, however -- because not made to satisfy powerful prelates but creative of new institutions -- are those of Sixtus IV to Spain and of Leo X to France, the establishment in 1479 of the Spanish Inquisition, and the Concordat of 1516 with Francis I.

The story has already been told [1071] of the first establishment of the Inquisition, two hundred and fifty years before the time of Sixtus IV -- a special new tribunal set up, for the detection and punishment of concealed heretics, in a place and at a time when the doctrines propagated and the hidden organisation of believers were considered, and correctly, to be a real danger to civilised life, and a menace to be destroyed before it destroyed all that was good and natural and free. The Spain of 1470-1500 was, in some ways, such another land as the Languedoc of the Albigensian wars. Here, too, was a large body with non-Christian traditions, Jews and Mohammedans; and here, too, it was suspected, there were among the Catholic population, and amongst those highly placed, many who at heart were still, like their ancestors, Jews and Mohammedans. For centuries, a] most from the morrow of the Moorish conquest of Spain in the eighth century, the great effort of Christian Spain to throw out the infidels had never really ceased. Never had the various Christian races accepted the conquest as a permanent state of things to which they must now be resigned. For nearly seven hundred years, in that grim land, the fight had gone on, with very varying fortunes, of course, but with steady recovery of territory from the Moors. It was the great national achievement, the epic and the boast of a proud and military people. By the end of the fifteenth century only the Kingdom of Granada remained in Mohammedan hands, a strip of territory across the south-east corner of Spain, Granada its capital. In 1492 the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada too. For the first time since 711 the whole of Spain was under Christian rule.

The reorganisation of the Inquisition in Spain as a means to rid the country of crypto-Jews and crypto-Moors -- Marranos and Moriscos -- was the act of Sixtus IV, [1072] done at the request of Ferdinand and Isabella. The chief novelty was that it left the choice of the inquisitors to the sovereign. In September 1479 the new tribunal began its operations, and very soon appeals against the way it worked began to pour into Rome. Whereupon the pope protested [1073] to the Catholic Kings, and reminded them of their duty to be merciful. But he did not refuse their petition for the extension of the system to Castile and Leon, and he consented that, for the future, the appeals to his own tribunal should be heard and finally decided in Spain, by the Archbishop of Seville (1483). But any decisions given in Rome were to be valid in Spain. The next step was the appointment of a Grand Inquisitor, who should be the pope's representative, and hear the appeals made to Rome from the tribunals in Spain. On the presentation of Ferdinand, the pope named to the new office the Dominican Thomas Torquemada, whose name has since been, for many people, almost a synonym for the tribunal he directed. Then the kingdom of Aragon, also, was brought under its authority. The Inquisition was by now an ecclesiastical machine set up by the pope's authority, and manned by ecclesiastics -- but at the king's service and, in fact, very much what the king wanted it to be. The day would come when the king would use it for all purposes that seemed good to him.

Once the new tribunal got to work there was a steady exodus of Jews from Spain, to Portugal and to Rome, where the popes received them kindly enough, to the no small discontent of the Spanish sovereigns. In Spain there was for a time a state of war, the high peak of which was the skilfully planned murder of one of the inquisitors, a Canon Regular, Peter Arbues (September 15, 1485). [1074] Then, in 1492, it was determined to expel from Spain all the Jews who were not Catholics. They were given four months to choose between conversion and exile. Whereupon there was another exodus, and a certain number of conversions, whose sincerity no doubt varied from case to case.

The year that followed this edict saw the election of one of Ferdinand's own subjects as pope -- Alexander VI. For a time the spirit of Spain seemed about to take hold of Rome too. There were arrests of suspected crypto-Jews and trials. But all the accused cleared themselves, or recanted, and there were no severities save the imprisonment of a bishop and his son. Alexander VI was far from being a persecutor; the reason for this activity was political, the need to reassure Ferdinand of the pope's sympathy for Spain. But Alexander stands recorded as granting to the king for his Inquisition, privileges that went far beyond what a pope should have granted. [1075] His successor, Julius II, had to see Ferdinand introduce the new system into his kingdom of Sicily (1500). But when the king went a step further, and in 1510 brought Naples, too, under it, the people resisted violently and successfully, and the pope is thought secretly to have encouraged the resistance. So great a diminution of papal authority so near to Rome would hardly have been welcome to such a pope as Julius II. Leo X, however, returned to the policy of surrender to Spain, and after the election of the new king, Charles, to be emperor also, he withdrew (though very reluctantly) those briefs of his predecessors which hampered the king's use of the Inquisition in Aragon.

It was to matter enormously to the fortunes of the Catholic Church that, in the coming century of the Reformation, the monarch who ruled Spain and the Low Countries and a good half of Italy, and who was also emperor in Germany, remained true to the old religion. But it was a very real tragedy that, from the beginning of his reign, Charles V had reason to expect from popes, compliance, and, indeed, subservience on the grand scale. And had Leo X -- for example -- persisted in his first refusal of concessions about the Inquisition, Charles could have pointed to the pope's recent surrender to France, the greatest surrender of direct control which the papacy has ever made, the Concordat of 1516.

The Concordat, a great papal surrender, it is true, but one that was balanced by an important royal renunciation, was a kind of sequel to the political revolution in northern Italy that followed on the great French victory of Marignano in 1515. The unlucky Leo X had been on the wrong side yet once again, as his cousin Clement VII was to be on the wrong side when, ten years late at Pavia, the French were beaten. The meeting with Francis I at Bologna in December 1515 was arranged, as Leo explicitly said, so that the pope could throw himself on the French king's mercy and remind him of the pope's claims on a victor who was yet a Catholic. But when, on December 11, Francis I suddenly asked the pope to confirm the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, the scope of the negotiations, and their tone, was changed entirely. The great question that had divided one council after another -- the question of the relation of the papacy to the episcopate -- and which ever since the days of Peter de Luna had seethed and fermented in the churches of France especially, was now placed fairly and squarely before the pope. To confirm the act of Bourges was to acknowledge as good in law all those decrees of Basel which the popes had never confirmed and always repudiated, and it was to accept explicitly the theory that in the Church the General Council is the pope's master; it would also be an acknowledgment of the right of the king to regulate Church affairs -- without any authorisation from the pope. Not even Leo X could confirm such an usurpation, not even for Francis I after Marignano. The pope countered the embarrassing demand with the offer of a concordat -- a treaty about ecclesiastical matters. Francis accepted the idea, and soon the legal experts of both parties were busy discussing the bases of the pact, the king's chancellor, Antoine Duprat, one of the most celebrated jurists of the day [1076] and, for Leo, the two cardinals Lorenzo Pucci and Pietro Accolti.

By February 1516 the principles of the arrangement were mutually agreed; and no sooner were they known than opposition began to show, from all sides. The king was to abrogate the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, and the pope was to grant him the full right to nominate to all the sees and abbeys of the kingdom; the whole system of rights to future appointments -- expectations, reservations -- was to be abolished entirely. From the French side came strong protests, the jurists objecting to the surrender of the position assumed in 1438, the university hostile to the implied repudiation of what it had achieved at Constance and Basel, the higher clergy opposed to the final disappearance of the system of elections. The pope had to face at Rome criticism that was just as strong, from the cardinals, who thought the scale of the concessions to the King of France extravagant and dangerous. For another six months both the principals laboured hard to persuade their own supporters, and the opposition from the other camp; and in the interval, the pope won the important concession that the Concordat would contain the king's explicit repudiation and annulment of the Pragmatic Sanction.

On August 18, 1516, the Concordat was signed: it regulated the religious life of France down to the Revolution. As finally agreed it gave the king the right to present to the pope for his confirmation the future bishops of the ninety-three sees of the kingdom and the abbots and priors of the 527 monasteries. Those presented for bishoprics were to be twenty-seven years of age and graduates in theology or law, those nominated for the monastic benefices were to be at least twenty-three and to belong to the religious order to which the abbey or priory belonged. If the nominee was a blood relation of the king, or a nobleman, he need not possess the stipulated qualifications. So there passed into the hands of the king, the all but absolute control of nomination to posts whose total income was almost equal to that of the state itself -- and to the French state this was, in 1516, the most important element in its victory. But it was not by virtue of any royal presentation that the bishop was bishop; the bishop's right still came through his appointment by the pope. If the pope, henceforward, placed his authority in this matter at the service of the king he did not, for all that, abdicate that authority; nor did the king deny that authority. Concession may have been pushed to the full extent of grave abuse, but there was never -- on the part of king or pope -- even a hint of the graver matter of a breach in the doctrinal trust. The difference between a system such as this and that which, twenty years later, the English king who saw the Concordat signed was to erect for his own realm, is one of kind, not of degree.

The system of expectations and reservations was abolished, and it was agreed that, save for causae maiores, all appeals from episcopal tribunals were to be heard in France. There were, however, two notable omissions in the text. Nothing was said about the proposed abolition of that papal tax on collations to benefices called annates; and there was no mention of the theory of the supremacy of the General Council, no explicit repudiation of it, and therefore every chance for those who later would wish to revive the theory.

At the end of the year, on December 19, 1516, the pope brought the Concordat before the General Council then sitting at Rome. It was now set out in the form of a bull -- Divina Disponente Clementia - - and the pope had the bull read in the council, meaning that it should go to the world as the council's act also. Even now, and in Leo's very presence, opposition showed itself. But a speech from the pope on the advantages that must come from the French king's surrender of such a weapon as the act of 1438, won general assent to the bull. And of no less effect was the fact that, in the same session of the council, immediately after the bull ratifying the Concordat, there was read a second bull -- Pastor Aeternus -- which condemned and utterly annulled the Pragmatic Sanction, repudiated the claim that a General Council (Basel) had sanctioned it, and took occasion to affirm with great energy that the pope's sole and supreme right to control General Councils was the age- long traditional belief of the Church. [1077]

These bulls were sent to Francis I together, and the king, in the next fourteen months, had to fight hard before he finally beat down the alliance of jurists, the university and the higher clergy -- the university of Paris even going so far as to demand an appeal to a future council, the infallible council now in session not being of the university's opinion. However, under the strongest pressure from the king, the Parlement of Paris finally gave way, and on March 22, 1518, registered the Concordat as law. Three weeks later, on April 14, the king by royal edict repealed the Pragmatic Sanction.

On balance, was the Concordat loss or gain for the cause of religion? We inevitably study the act through our knowledge of the way the French kings abused it -- and were by compliant, necessity-driven popes, allowed to abuse it. Had the scheme been fairly worked, by kings not necessarily saints like Louis IX but even faintly interested in the spiritual, or had the times been such that popes could have refused the impossible names presented to them, the new system might not have done more harm than the old arrangement under which, for a good hundred years and more, the elective regime in France had bred a rich progeny of feuds, riots and schisms. [1078] There was never again to be a St. Louis, few indeed were the kings who in the next two hundred years were even respectably religious, and for the first fifty years of the new system [1079] the kings were allowed to name whom they would, with disastrous results to more than one French see and with indescribable results to the life of the religious houses. These are results which concern rather the later history of the Church, and which cannot, of course, be laid to the charge of Leo X. One last remark may be allowed which also concerns that later history, namely that the story of the French opposition to the Concordat of 1516 reveals the strong, deep-rooted attachment of many powerful interests in France to the idea that the pope ought to be controlled and managed in his government of the Church. This is an idea that never disappears; it continues to be active, indeed to be a dominant force in French life, down to 1789, and beyond.

The tale of what these popes of the generation that bred Luther and Zwingli and Crammer and Henry VIII, as well as Fisher and More and Erasmus and Cajetan, did for the reform of abuses and the regeneration of the life of the Church is, alas, soon told. In the work of their classic historian the religious activities of Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, Alexander VI, Julius II and Leo X fill but a few dozen pages out of thousands. The thirteen years' reign of Sixtus IV, whose chief achievement was the bull Quoniam regnantium cura that never got beyond the stage of being drafted, produced some half-dozen briefs to various monasteries bidding them amend their ways, "isolated decrees", and that was all. Under Innocent VIII there was no reform of ecclesiastical abuses.

Alexander VI, it may be thought, was hardly in a position to inspire belief that reform was necessary or that good living mattered. The great event of his reign, from this point of view, was the appointment in 1497, on the morrow of the murder of the Duke of Gandia, of a commission of cardinals to draft a scheme of general reforms. That scheme, worked out in detail through months of competent labour, was indeed never put into force, but it survives and, in the long train of curial weaknesses listed for correction, it is a terrible indictment. In the crucial business of episcopal appointments simony is to be put down, reservations abolished and also the bogus coadjutorships by which bishops secured, in their lifetime, that their see would pass to a relative; and bishops, it is laid down, are not to be translated against their will. The cardinals' way of life is to be altered; gaming and hunting are to cease, and none is to have a household of more than eighty, nor more than thirty of a mounted escort. Musicians, actors and youths are to be banished from their palaces, and there is to be no corruption in the conclave. Then the various curial offices are scrutinised, and in all of them, the bull insists, the opportunities for "graft" are to be abolished. Absentee bishops are to be punished and so are those who keep concubines. A new severity awaits "apostate" religious -- that is to say those who have abandoned their monasteries -- while, on the other hand, it is provided that monastic vows made by children are not binding. Princes are no longer to be granted tithes. Other evils noted are the granting of abbeys in commendam, the overriding of the rights of the patrons of livings, the changing of the destinations of pious legacies, and the alteration of conditions laid down in wills about pious foundations. So the list goes on, 127 headings in all, that cover every aspect of curial practice. The programme of things to be put right might have daunted St. Gregory VII himself. Alexander VI went no further than to read it.

Julius II is the author of one really great reform, the bull (1503) which declared that simony in the election of a pope invalidated the election. [1080] He, too, appointed a reform commission of six cardinals, in 1504; but it is not known whether they even got so far as to draft a scheme. And finally, Julius, who was originally a Friar Minor, gave some attention to the condition of the religious orders. He encouraged Cajetan in his efforts to reform the Dominicans, and he strove, unsuccessfully, to reunite the warring parties in his own order.

Leo X, it may well be, "never gave a thought to reform on the great scale which had become necessary." But like Sixtus IV and Julius II, he did give some attention to the state of the monasteries and convents. Nine of his briefs that treat of this most serious weakness are listed and many more await publication. [1081] And, successful where Julius II had failed, Leo X in 1517 brought to a final end the contentions about the rule which had divided the sons of St. Francis ever since the death of the founder. It has been told how John XXII cut the knot by measures which amounted almost to a new foundation of the order, a remodelling in which that attitude to ownership which was the speciality of St. Francis had no longer any official standing. But the spirit of St. Francis it was beyond the power of any regulation utterly to extinguish. Very soon a new movement for the primitive observance had begun within the remodelled order. It had the great advantage over the older " Spiritual" movement that it was not bound up with such unorthodox theories as the reveries of Joachim of Flora. Nor did those attached to it maintain that their special way of living the Franciscan life was the sole way of salvation. The new Observants -- as they were called -- were in nothing more truly the brethren of the first friars than in their charity. Their more rigorous interpretation of the ideal was never a stick with which pleasantly to belabour the rest of their brethren, and gradually the new movement gained a permanent hold in one convent after another. Whole convents were gained over to it, great saints appeared in its ranks, Bernadine of Siena, for example, and John of Capistrano, and James of the March, preachers and itinerant missionaries of immense power and wide influence. The friars who followed the Observance were gradually allowed to be organised, within the order, under a special vicar of their own, and the independence of their General was now carefully protected by one pope after another. By the end of the fifteenth century the majority of the Friars Minor were Observants, and the problem before the order now was rather the fate of the Conventuals, the official Franciscans -- one might say -- ever since the time of John XXII. Here was a paradoxical state of things indeed. Leo X solved it by separating the two types of friars, and organising each in a separate religious order, both of which were to be called, and with equal right, Friars Minor. But it was to the General of the Observants that he ordered that the seal of the order should be made over, and the title "successor of St. Francis" be given.

This reorganisation of the great order was perhaps the most beneficent act of Leo's reign. Two other laws that call for mention are his bull forbidding the Latins in the East to change or suppress or hinder the Greek ritual of the Catholics of the eastern churches, and the bull against the enslavement of the natives of the newly discovered Americas.

More spectacular than any of these, however, was the General Council held in the Lateran 1512-1517. Its most important act was a dogmatic definition, about the immortality of the human soul, which explicitly referred to the relations between natural knowledge and revealed, a vital topic with Christian thinkers for centuries now, and one on which St. Thomas had long ago -- all too unheeded -- said the decisive word. Of the plight that befell Catholic thought, once it went back on the great progress realised by the Dominican saint's theory of knowledge and his careful distinction of the spheres of reason and faith, something has already been said. And before we come to the Lateran definition, and to the other activities of the council, that account needs to be supplemented by some reference to the last phases of the philosophical and theological decline, in the century since the Council of Constance, and to a new birth of the thought of St. Thomas.

For the generation to which the fathers of Constance belonged, and to its successor, it was Gerson who, undoubtedly, stood out as the great religious thinker and preacher and writer. [1082] No other had anything like the prestige of this most attractive man who had been Chancellor of the university of Paris in the hour when the university really dominated the whole life of Christendom. He had played his part faithfully at Constance, he had shown himself a man of really pious life and marvellously void of ambition. All through the last twelve years of his life, when, an exile at Lyons, his chief occupation was the religious formation of the children he gathered round him from the streets, Gerson continued to influence the whole Church. As a thinker he must be classed, like Peter d'Ailly, among the Nominalists. But Gerson was not by nature a speculative. It was the practical aspect of religious truth that most attracted him, the rules of good Christian living, the itinerary of the soul's way to God. Hence in Gerson's sermons and in his writings there is a great deal of needed correction of current popular errors and superstitions, and a merciless exposure of bogus saints and mystics.

This practical direction was his greatest service to the spiritual life of his own time, and indeed of all the following century. The forty years of the Schism had been a very springtime of false visionaries and crazy doctrines about the mystical life -- about the inner life of the soul in communion with its Creator and its relation to ordinary conduct. The tide of false mysticism was, indeed, rising so high as to threaten to swamp the ideas of genuine Christian piety. And, usually, the danger was a development of that Beghard teaching which, through all the later Middle Ages, was at work, secretly and persistently, never really out of sight, a kind of caricature of the classic Christian idea of asceticism and prayer as the way to union with God.

What the Beghards were can be read in the great condemnation of their doctrines decreed at the General Council of Vienne in 1311. Man can in this life, they taught, attain to such a degree of perfection that he becomes unable to sin. When he reaches this stage, man is no longer bound to pray nor to fast, his sense nature being now so perfectly subjected to his spirit and his reason that he can freely grant his body all it desires. Again, once man has reached this stage he is not bound to obey any human authority, nor to keep any commandments of the Church. Where there is the spirit of God there is liberty, and the practice of the virtues is a mark of the imperfect man: the perfect soul emancipates itself from the virtues. From which seemingly remote abstractions the Beghard comes down to everyday life with a practical illustration and example, also condemned by the Council, to wit that whoever kisses a woman, unless led by sexual impulse, sins mortally, while no sexual act is sinful if it is done from a sexual impulse; such acts are especially free from blame if they are a yielding to temptation. [1083]

These are ideas that have never ceased to have a certain vogue in out-of-the-way places, giving life to a host of cults that might be called "curious". In Gerson's time, and for long after, they were much more than that. The early years of the Reformation were to see such theories the inspiration of armed hordes and carrying all before them, the basis of the new Jerusalem, established in concrete fact in the lands beyond the Rhine.

Gerson [1084] has left behind a mass of writing about this urgent matter. There are works of instruction and direction for those who feel called to set all else aside but the life of prayer, and there are treatises which criticise and attack the false mysticism and explain by what signs the tendencies towards it are to be recognised. To the exaggeration of those who declare "We can know nothing about God", he opposes the fact that the Faith teaches us much about Him. He will not allow that the contemplative life is meant for all; the divinely created differences of temperament are facts that must be reckoned with and allowed for, and differences also of duties. He notes acutely, as a matter that can be observed every day, the contemplative's temptation to be his own guide. Everyone knows, he says, how obstinately they hold to their own ideas, to false and absurd ideas at times; and how much more easily than others they fall victims to such ideas. The great examples here are the Beghards. Another pitfall is sentimentality. There are many who tend to imagine themselves devot, and called to the life of contemplation by experiences that are nothing else than their own emotional upheavals; if such is the basis of their spiritual life the end is certain, and Gerson notes how often false mysticism and a certain looseness about sex-morality go together. At the other extreme are those interested with a merely intellectual interest in the activities of the spiritual life, in prayer, and devotion; and contemplation as human activities and for their own sake, experts in the art of conversing on these topics, hard, proud, insubordinate amid all their spiritual learning. There are the quietists who neglect everything to drift in their spiritual day dreams, and those who assert that the last thing there is any need to be anxious about is one's own salvation.

Against all these chronic maladies -- now for the first time studied, as it were systematically, on the grand scale, and therapeutically, Gerson's remedies are simple. The first need of the contemplative is knowledge; true knowledge, to be got from the approved doctors and the teaching of the Church. As for the credentials of the new prophets, the moral standard of the disciples is one good test of the master's orthodoxy. But the only real judge whether the mystic's ideas are orthodox is the theologian. Finally, Gerson constructs a whole theology of practical spiritual direction, basing himself largely on St. Bonaventure [1085] -- whom he so closely resembles -- and on the writer still held to be Denis the Areopagite.

Nothing could be wiser, more orthodox, than this practical apostolate of Jean Gerson. He was by nature practical -- not a speculative. His speculative ideas he took from his age, and, like his age, in one fundamental matter Gerson was seriously in error. The essence of morality, for him as for others of the family of Ockham, was in the divine will. Actions that are good are only good because God has so decreed. Gerson was not the only theologian to be saying this in the early years of the fifteenth century, but no other had anything like his prestige, and none, for generations, had his influence as a moralist and spiritual guide. It is very rare that active minds who turn their back on speculative thought -- who, for one reason or another, refuse to think things out, or to have things thought out for them -- escape serious blunders; and these, only too often, vitiate all that their generous practical activity produces. Gerson was not alone in his error of enthroning the practical reason above the speculative, and in every age since there have been hundreds to imitate him. In his case this mistaken line of conduct made it impossible for the greatest spiritual force of the time really to be certain about the bases of his own action (and of the action he urged upon others); and it helped on, very considerably, the attitude to speculative theology now becoming fashionable among men who proposed to lead a holy life.

Jean Gerson died in 1429, living just long enough to hear of the marvellous events that centred round St. Joan of Arc and to express his belief in the reality of her visions. Four years later, at the Council of Basel, the new genius appeared who was to carry on his work as an apostle, a reformer and a Catholic thinker. This was the Rhinelander, Nicholas of Cusa, and here was another to whom the best traditions of scientific theology had not spoken, or had spoken in vain. Of the work of reform which this great ecclesiastic accomplished, some account has been given already. What of his role as a teacher and guide of the Christian intelligence?

Nicholas of Cusa is the first complete species of the Renaissance man born and bred north of the Alps. Though his first formation, his professional equipment, is juristic, there is no learning that he has not sampled and delighted in. He sympathises with all the anxieties of his age, and willingly slaves to remove them. He possesses the new cult for the ancient literatures, and he has distinguished himself beyond measure by discovering twelve lost comedies of Plautus. He is a scientist also, and perhaps the first to put out the complete hypothesis of the revolution of the earth round the sun. In his writings all the elements of the varied intellectual life of the time find their place.

The two leading, original, ideas in what -- yet once again -- is a practical doctrine, a programme to be followed, a methodology rather than a philosophy, are the docta ignorantia as the beginning of wisdom and the vision of the " coincidence of contradictories " as its peak. The intelligence -- the reasoning reason -- is the lowest of man's powers of knowledge, and it is not able to grasp reality. Knowledge of its own powerlessness is the highest knowledge it can achieve -- this is docta ignorantia. Why this powerlessness? Such is the nature, in the first place, of truth, and next, of knowledge. All knowledge can but be approximation and conjecture. But in God all can be known, and in Him can be seen the ultimate coincidence of contradictories. The great good for man, then, is to come to the point where he will see this coincidence, and thus really know; and man arrives at this by rising above the reasoning intelligence, and by knowing through his higher faculty of intuition. How is all this to be? Nicholas does not know; but he continues to "speculate," to gather views, to try out ideas; and, in a matter where words are of so little service, he makes use of symbols, and especially of geometrical symbols. All things are in God, and what is implicit in God becomes explicit in His creation. Every thing is a reflection of every other thing, all is contained in all. Of no creature is this so true as of man; and man, if ever he comes to a full understanding of himself, will know and possess all else. There are many ideas suggested here that will have a famous history in later centuries, but it will be a history well outside the tradition of thought that is Christian. From Nicholas of Cusa as a thinker the cause of the classic synthesis of Faith and Reason, labouring now all these years in adversity, had not much to hope.

Nicholas of Cusa is the last great "original" of the Middle Ages. Next, in order of time, there appear those Florentine Platonists [1086] who have been noted in their more fundamental character as men of letters. And the century closes with Gabriel Biel, [1087] who would be a celebrity for this, if for nothing else, that he is the one scholastic for whom Luther seems to have had a good word, the master indeed of Luther's own masters. It cannot be said that there is anything strikingly new about Master Gabriel, but he is beyond all doubt an Ockhamist; and, a teacher of great personality, he imposed the via moderna upon the new university of Tubingen when, in 1484, a very old man, he was appointed its rector and began to teach theology there.

Gabriel Biel, in whose commentary on the Sentences Ockham's theology yet once again makes its appearance, "so openly, so systematised, and so completed," [1088] the chief theological luminary of the last half of the fifteenth century, is, however, the last Catholic theologian of his school; and this is perhaps his real significance for whoever studies the history of Catholic thought. The revolution was indeed already preparing, in the very years when Biel so successfully "Ockhamised" the theological teaching at Tubingen, that was to destroy the via moderna once and for all, so that it sank from Catholic theology with scarcely a trace. What was, in fact, imminent was the return of St. Thomas, and the first sign of the coming event was the substitution of the Summa Theologica for Peter Lombard, as the basic text of all theological teaching, by the Dominican masters in the University of Pavia in 1480, and the sanction given to this by the Dominican Chapter-General at Cologne in 1483. [1089]

Meanwhile the via moderna continued in the enjoyment of its primacy, and for a long time yet such all-important principles as, for example, what has been called Voluntarism, continued to dominate fashionable theological thought. As we are about to see this principle developed in quite a new way, by another professor of theology, in yet another new German university, Brother Martin Luther, and fashioned into an evangel that really is something new in Christian experience, the mention of Gabriel Biel is an opportunity to recall how the principle appeared in the last years before it was associated with the great heresiarch and his new kind of religion. And lest these controversies seem to be about abstractions, and remote from human life, the reminder may be allowed that they in fact concern the very basis of religious life, and that theology, however speculative, is in fact the science of salvation. [1090]

We can take as a fair statement of the essence of the Voluntarist's view of God and man's relation with Him, the proposition of Duns Scotus, Omne aliud a Deo est bonum quia a Deo volitum. [1091] In all the Divine Life where This is directed towards created reality, it is the Divine Will which gives character and colour to the Divine Activity. And it is by means of his own will -- rather than by means of his intelligence -- that man will enjoy, once he is saved, the happiness of the absolute good that God is. Ockham -- in as full revolt against Scotus as the arch-Nominalist can be against such a realist -- maintains, however, and develops, this adherence to the general theory of "will rather than intelligence"; and he sums up in a marvellously concise phrase the relation of God as Creator to the goodness of created reality, eo ipso quod ipse vult bene et iuste factum est. [1092] The attention of the theologians all through the next hundred and fifty years after Ockham is more and more directed to the role of the Divine Will (and, indeed, of the human will, too) as against the intelligence. It becomes a general state of mind; another aspect of which is the revival of the ancient notion -- long ago condemned -- that, in the matter of salvation there is nothing beyond the power of man's will to accomplish. Man, say the theologians -- Gabriel Biel notably in this generation -- has a natural capacity for loving God above all else; for to love God thus is what reason rightly instructed bids man do; and to all the commands of reason rightly instructed the will, by its own natural forces, is able to conform itself. Against this point of contemporary teaching -- and the state of mind that goes with it - - and against Master Gabriel by name as an eminent promoter of it, Luther will now, very soon, violently revolt. It will be, for him, one reason to reject "the scholastic theology" outright.

If the tendencies of fashionable theological teaching in the latest and newest schools -- developments indeed of ideas now nearly two centuries old -- were thus to aid the coming age of heresy, the erroneous philosophical doctrines held by many orthodox theologians, and their superficial grasp of the relation between theology and philosophy, were to prove a serious weakness in another way. Again we approach a vital doctrine, and again we need to go back some centuries and to see first a false view of it; then the error corrected thanks to a mind philosophically well formed; and finally, as this last philosophical position is abandoned, a chronic malaise in the mind of the theologian who, believe he never so sincerely, yet must continue, being a man, to think.

The point at issue is the extent of man's share in the business of his salvation, of man's responsibility -- should he lose his soul -- for his own damnation; it is one of the topics on which Luther's divergence from Catholicism will be most evident and most far-reaching. Peter Lombard had taught, in the twelfth century, that the all-important grace which makes man pleasing to God, which "justifies" man as later theologians were to say, was charity dwelling in the soul, and that this divinely given, supernatural, charity was nothing else than God Himself, the Holy Ghost. [1093] "So highly," says St. Thomas, about to criticise the theory, "did the Master [1094] esteem charity." St. Thomas would have none of this theory. It was an impossibility. It could not ever be true. And for this reason, that man's love for God if it proceeded from such a Source and in such a way would be in no way spontaneous, his voluntary act; and therefore it would be devoid of merit. The act of any nature, says the saint, is perfect in so far as it proceeds from within that nature. Were the act of loving God, man's supreme activity, not to proceed from that free will which is at the heart of all that is human in man, it would be less perfect than man's other acts. Here, it is evident, the criticism of the Lombard and the solution of the difficulty that is offered, are wrapped up in a philosophy.

From that solution subsequent theologians did not move away. But they moved far indeed, the most of them, in the next two centuries, both from the philosophy and from St. Thomas's conception of the relation between philosophy and theology. While they maintained the solution as true, because it was of faith, they nevertheless declared that, philosophically speaking, it was no more than probable. God had acted this way; he might have acted otherwise; that he had not acted otherwise was at any rate probable; and no more than probable. There is no need to labour the point that sooner or later such a division in the mind of the thinker must end either in the destruction of his belief, or the sterilisation of his power of thought. What is more nearly our business is to note that here is one of those philosophical speculations about what God might have done which we see taken, in Luther's mind, as what God actually did. What theologians of this type were doing was to fill the mind of the time with a host of such "probabilities," accompanying and associated with the certitudes of faith. It was only a matter of time before, in the mind of one or another of their hearers, the probability gained over what was only certain because taught authoritatively by the Church -- victory not for the probability which coincided with the faith as taught, but for its contrary which philosophically, was always probable so long as, in the mind of the thinker, the doctrine of faith was less than certain philosophically too.

On this most important point -- where Luther's divergence was to create the key doctrine of all Protestantism -- the Catholic theologians, of all schools, continued to teach that it is a nature that God has saved, and that it is saved not through a grace which works outside it, but through an activity of grace in which it has a real share. Charity is a virtue, through which man's salvation is operated by man's action too. Sanctifying grace -- the grace which, making man pleasing to God, justifies man -- is a real vital principle, whence acts proceed that really are man's acts; man's merit before God is a reality, as man's freedom to posit these acts is a reality, and as the supernatural efficacy of those acts when posited is real. And all the theologians defend too the great principle Naturalia manent integra: [1095] sin does not destroy human nature, because nothing can destroy a nature but God who called it into being by creation. Nothing could be more striking than this theological agreement, or than the general movement of theologians away from the immense authority of Peter Lombard when once he had gone wrong on this point. Nothing could be more directly opposed to all that was about to come in the wake of Luther. But it was a great misfortune that, for so long, so many theologians had testified to their faith, and to the traditional teaching, in an atmosphere vitiated by their enslavement to the probable.

In the early years of that dead time which followed the disappearance from the scene of Nicholas of Cusa and Pius II, and within a short two years of one another, five very remarkable men were born. At Gouda in Holland in 1467 Desiderius Erasmus was born; at Rome in 1468 Alessandro Farnese, who, as Pope Paul III, was one day to sanction the Jesuits and to assemble the Council of Trent; in 1469 Machiavelli was born at Florence, Thomas de Vio -- Cardinal Cajetan -- at Gaeta, and at Beverley, in Yorkshire, St. John Fisher, the solitary bishop in the hundred years that lay between St. Antoninus of Florence and St. Thomas of Villanueva to attain canonisation. Nine years later, in London, St. Thomas More was born. From four of these men, in the last few years before Luther's entry into world history, came the most characteristic work of their genius, four books which have influenced all subsequent thought: Cajetan's commentary on the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas began to appear in 1507, Machiavelli's The Prince was composed in 1513, Thomas More's Utopia was printed in 1516, and Erasmus's edition of the Greek Testament that same year. With these works of these great men the tableau is complete of Christian thought as Luther's revolt found it. Erasmus and Cajetan are priests and religious; More and Machiavelli laymen. Erasmus and Cajetan are ecclesiastically learned, though after a very different manner; More and Machiavelli are directly interested in the common life of men, in the Commonwealth. Let us begin with the laymen.

The Utopia and The Prince are classics too well-known to need much description. Some study of them has been part of the general culture of western Europeans for centuries. The authors are finished humanists, both of them; More is the English character at its very best, Machiavelli the Italian almost at its basest. The Italian is already, however, a figure in the public life of the time, a diplomatist who knows by long experience the great world of princes that is the subject of his meditations: More is but on the threshold of his career.

At this moment the future martyr is thirty-eight years of age, by profession a lawyer and one of the most successful advocates in the English capital. He is a scholar of the new type, a wit, a family man, and a man of deeply religious life, about whose ways with God there has clung something of the Carthusian spirit ever since the years when, as a young man, he lived as a guest in their London cloister. More fasts regularly, he has regular hours for prayer, he wears a hair shirt, he spends the midday hours of every Friday in meditation on the Passion of Our Lord, he not only hears mass daily but very frequently receives Holy Communion. Such is the man who in the Utopia uses brilliant and kindly satire to criticise the very foundations of his world. This he sees as a place where wickedness and greed flourish unchecked, and where the poor are more and more oppressed, despite the fact that rich and poor alike profess themselves believers in the doctrine that they are brothers in Christ, and that this fraternity is the one thing that matters. What a mess Christians are making of this Christian world, he seems to say. Even from pagans who knew only of God that He existed, more than this might be rightly expected. The book appeared in Latin, at Louvain in 1516, and it had from the beginning a great popularity. [1096] Thomas More was already known to humanists everywhere through the praise of his friend Erasmus; henceforward he was known, and as among the foremost of the humanists, in his own right.

Few books have suffered more from serious misunderstanding. This has been due, in part, to lack of knowledge about its author, and also to the prejudgment with which the critics -- friendly for the most part to More -- have begun their study of it. It is not a visionary book, nor an unpractical scheme of real living, but a philosophical satire upon the contemporary abuses of Catholic Europe, written by a passionately sincere Catholic. It does not discuss Catholicism, but it attacks the neglect of Catholics really to put into practice the faith which is their boast. As for the religion -- the natural religion -- of these Utopians, the remarkable thing is how closely, in some important points, it resembles Catholicism. Against two contemporary fashionable aberrations on the part of thinkers who are Catholics the Utopia is in violent reaction -- against Pomponazi's philosophical trifling with the doctrine that man's soul is immortal, and against the a-moralism whose representative figure is Machiavelli. " Parts of Utopia read like a commentary on The Prince". [1097] More is all against the new emancipation from fundamental dogma, against the new statesmanship, against the autocratic prince, and against the idea of "nations as totally independent, gladiators in the European arena." He is filled with horror at such ideas, and at their practical consequence that there are now Christian states that will look on as spectators, with complacency and even with satisfaction, while the Turks destroy the power of their own Christian neighbours.

The author of the Utopia is not blind to the acute general problem of religious disorder. But he is no destructive revolutionary. What he desiderates when, for example, considering the vexed business of the clergy's immunity from the law of the state, is not the abolition of the system -- which is a check on the tendency of the state to absorb the whole life of its people -- but a better clergy, " of exceeding holiness" indeed, and more carefully recruited and trained, who shall not need so frequently to shelter behind such immunities. As to another clerical matter, generally regarded as one of the great sores of the time, the condition of the monasteries, once again More is conservative. Monasteries -- good ones, of course -- are necessary; Monasticism is, indeed, the one European institution that the Utopians approve of.

There is hardly a single aspect of contemporary life -- even to the matter of colonising the newly discovered Americas -- that More's keen, kindly, humorous eye does not light upon. For each he has the appropriate comment, and for the innumerable victims of the social system, the new landless, rightless, proletariat, infinite pity. In Utopia there are no class distinctions, [1098] no slaves, no serfs, all men are free men, are workers, are students; and all at need are soldiers. By comparison with what is there pictured -- and with what could be, in this Catholic Christendom, were all really Catholic -- the commonwealths of the day are indeed "a conspiracy of rich men". [1099]

The Prince, written three years earlier than More's Utopia, [1100] 8 and addressed to Leo X's nephew, Lorenzo de' Medici, lately become the ruler of Florence, was the work of a man whose political career had just come to an end, at the age of forty- four. In that career of nearly twenty years in the service of Florence, his native state, Niccolo Machiavelli had risen to be the head of a leading branch in what we might call the Ministry of the Interior, and he had also been employed in half a dozen most important diplomatic missions. He had been sent to Cesare Borgia in the duke's great hour when he was all but King of the Romagna; he was at Rome when disaster came to the duke with the death of Alexander VI; he was with Julius II in the famous march on Perugia and Bologna in 1507, and three years later he was with Louis XII of France, fanning the king's hatred of Julius and advising him to stir up the Roman barons against the pope. With the restoration of the Medici at Florence, in 1513, Machiavelli fell. He was for a time imprisoned and tortured, but his life was spared. No public man is resigned, at forty-four, to the idea that his life is over, and The Prince, the first of Machiavelli's works, is in intention a first move to capture the good will of the Medici " tyrant" and gain a place in his counsels -- employment and money. For Machiavelli was not one of those philosophers who live only for thought. He was the Italian humanist at its best and worst, all the literary scholarship and skill, all the brilliance, all the scepticism, and all the vices, the deceit, the extravagance, the profligacy, and the cult of personal glory to the point of mania; the very antithesis in character of Thomas More.

The Prince is a slight pamphlet written in a new classical Italian prose, to be read in an hour or two, and meditated on for the rest of a lifetime. Its main theme is the way a prince ought to act who has lately become the master of a state which has previously been under the rule of another. The model for such a prince's imitation is, Machiavelli declares, Cesare Borgia; and the book is, substantially, an analytical account of the rise and fall of tyrants, with special reference to this hero, and with the moral always carefully drawn. The style is simple, unimpassioned, and for its power of irony beneath ordinary language and unimpeachable sentiments, the forerunner of Swift and Voltaire. Here is the political practice of contemporary rulers -- the state of things that provoked some of the most telling passages in the Utopia -- not now condemned for the bad thing it is, nor for the menace it holds for coming ages, but built into a doctrine, a kind of political religion, with villainy analysed and classified, its practice set out in appropriate maxims and precepts, and with warnings against using the right villainy at the wrong time. Well, indeed, may it be said that the little tract "marks the culminating point of the pagan renaissance." Here is the new gospel that, since the world is full of bad men, it is useless for the good to waste time considering what men ought to be, and dangerous to treat the wicked as only the good deserve to be treated. Bad men cannot be governed except by descending to their own level. Treachery, bad faith, cruelty, the careful affectation of the appropriate goodness, all these are called for, and must be studiously employed by the ruler who, in a wicked world, wishes to survive. And Machiavelli calmly debates the comparative usefulness of these vices, and explicitly enjoins his prince to make use of them.

States need, too, a religion: there is no instrument more useful to the ruler than the religion accepted by his subjects. Whether the ruler himself believes in that religion or not, and even if he knows it not to be true, it is an elementary duty to his welfare to foster it. This ideal national religion, whose importance -- from the ruler's point of view -- lies in its power to unify the nation and serve as a means through which to govern it, could hardly be Catholicism. Nor does Machiavelli mean that it shall be. Catholicism, as the religion not of the hated popes merely but of Jesus Christ, a religion that teaches mankind to look elsewhere than in the state for the abiding city, can never serve the ends of the prince. Moreover its doctrines of love, of self-denial, of pity and of compassion tend to form a type of character than which nothing could be more hostile, nay fatal, to the state he has in mind. The ideal religion is that of pagan antiquity and Machiavelli explicitly says this. [1101] Paganism alone will, by deifying the state, crown the achievement of the good prince.

A later generation of Catholics was to see the by then notorious treatise placed upon the Index of books forbidden to be read. But addressed to the nephew of Leo X it brought no immediate reprobation on its author, and in 1515 the pope was asking him for advice in the dilemma caused by the schemes of the new King of France and the shifting papal diplomacy. The pope's cousin -- the Cardinal Giulio who was afterwards to be Pope Clement VII -- still stood between Machiavelli and a new employment at Florence, but in 1519 he too was consulting him, asking for a statement on the best way of governing the state, and in 1520 he obtained for him, from Leo X, the commission which produced the great History of Florence.

The Prince is, evidently, in every line and turn of phrase a Renaissance product, and the worst feature of the book, the final pessimism about human nature, [1102] is no doubt the effect upon a well-placed observer of the sight of such universal cynical indifference to the elements of morality in the conduct of public affairs. Even the popes, as rulers, had now descended to the level of the condottieri princes. But there is another, and more enduring reason, for the pessimism. It is a reflection in the political writer of the contemporary revival of Aristotle according to Averroes, of the movement which at Padua, under the influence of Pietro Pomponazzi, was now carrying all before it with the youth of the university. Here, rooted in stern and compelling logic, was the old curse of the theory that man is wholly at the mercy of an impersonal world force, held in the grip of a fixed, unchanging, eternal cosmos. Everything has always been the same; it will always be so. Since this is the truth about life, and man's destiny, it is best to arrange life accordingly, and to crush out all talk of ideals and betterment and what we should call "progress," for beliefs of this kind can only cause activities in the state that are futile, fated to futility indeed, and a necessary cause of mischievous instability. Averroism, indeed, had never died despite St. Albert and St. Thomas, and Duns Scotus. And now, in the general disintegration, it was again in the forefront of life, threatening as always the very fundamentals of Christian belief. Its most evident assault was against the belief that the human soul is destined for a separate, personal immortality. [1103]

A French scholar of our own time has linked Erasmus, with Machiavelli and Thomas More, as a pioneer in political philosophy, for Erasmus also wrote his Prince. [1104] But, without demurring for a moment to the great Dutchman's right to figure prominently in such a history, his main importance in Catholic history lies elsewhere. In 1516 Erasmus was close on fifty, and he had reached that position as an influence in European life which no man of letters before, and none since -- not even Voltaire -- has ever attained. [1105] For what was he known, in these last hours before the Lutheran controversies began? and whither did his influence upon educated Christians tend?

He had begun as an eager, and unusually gifted, student of classical Latin literature, in that monastery of Steyn where, in a kind of despair, this unwanted child of a long-dead priest had been over-persuaded, by guardians only too anxious to get him off their hands, to vow himself for life as an Austin Canon-Regular. The monastery was one of that congregation of Windesheim whose ideals and outlook have been described; its spirit for good, and for the less than good, was that of the Devotio Moderna. Erasmus was continuing here in the way of his early schooling under the Brothers of the Common Life, and there is no reason to doubt that he simply set down the facts when, in later days, he said of his brethren that among them "the least inclination for literature was then looked upon as little better than a crime." However, Erasmus was professed, in the way then general, solemn vows after a novitiate of twelve months, at the age of nineteen or twenty.

It cannot have been long before he realised the scale of the mistake he had made. The patronage of the Bishop of Cambrai provided a first way out, and after serving some time in his household, Erasmus presently found himself in the schools of Paris. Then came the momentous first visit to England, in 1498, the meeting with Colet and Thomas More, and the realisation of what must henceforth be his life's work, the restoration of a religious spirit in the clergy through their better education; and to better their education the preparation of improved editions of the classic Christian literature. This was, in the end, to be the main work of his most industrious life, and it is by what he achieved here, and by the spirit that directed his efforts, that Erasmus must be judged. One of the great ideals of Nicholas V -- the new humanism perfected by religion, religion still more splendidly set out and defended by the new humanism, the application of the new scholarship to Christian literature -- was to be realised at last, in the face of a thousand difficulties and anxieties, by the genius and enthusiasm of this obscure religious.

Those difficulties left a permanent searing mark upon his spirit. Penury, first of all; dependence on patronage for the very freedom which the task called for; the utter inability to understand, on the part of those in whose power it lay to arrest the work at any moment -- to understand not only his own competence for it, but religion's need that the work should be done; and hanging over him, through all these years, the possibility of a recall to the unsuitable monastic life and its sterility, where his talent must run to seed for lack of intelligent employment by superiors, and his mind turn in on itself; of a recall which would leave, as the only alternative, disobedience and disgrace, the terrible fate which then awaited the apostate religious, a life of concealment and an ultimate return to the religious life via the monastic prison. Erasmus knew his age thoroughly. Not Machiavelli, nor Thomas More, was more familiar with the spectacle of clerical disorder in the high places, the spectacle of church revenues squandered on worldliness, and neither was so well placed for the contrasts to be such a torment. [1106] That it was the friendship of Thomas More which made all the difference to this refined and much-tried spirit, no one will doubt. The meeting of 1498 was a turning point for Erasmus in more respects than one.

The first of Erasmus's books, the Adagia, appeared in 1500. It was a new kind of introduction to Latin studies, and an important factor in the development of a better method of teaching the classical language. Then, in 1502, studying Valla, the idea came to him of preparing a critical edition of the New Testament text, and Erasmus set himself to the study of Greek. It was not, however, until 1516 that the long awaited work appeared, dedicated not to his friend, the Bishop of Rochester, St. John Fisher, as Erasmus first intended, but to Leo X, who willingly accepted the dedication and wrote the famous enthusiastic praise of it which prefaces the third edition. Here was a critical edition of the text, with notes and a new Latin translation, and in the twenty years between its first appearance and the death of Erasmus, the bulky folio was reprinted sixty-nine times. And now, in succession, there appeared a series of new editions of the Fathers, St. Jerome, St. Athanasius, St. Basil and St. Cyprian (1516-1520), Arnobius, St. Hilary, Prudentius, St. John Chrysostom, St. Irenaeus, St. Ambrose and Origen, St. Augustine, Lactantius and St. Gregory of Nazianzen (1520-1531). And, of course, wherever he was, Erasmus formed others in the same way of scholarship.

But long before the tale of this gigantic work was completed, Luther had appeared, and Erasmus had become involved in the controversies about the new doctrines. In these controversies he satisfied neither side; and he won for himself the reputation as a doubtful kind of Catholic which he has, perhaps even yet, not lost. That reputation, which has too long over-shadowed his immense services, is also bound up with his strong, published criticisms of the abuses in the practice of Catholicism in his time. The most famous of the books in which these chiefly appear was The Praise of Folly dedicated to More, and published long before Luther had been heard of: but the other, a book designed to teach boys Latin conversation, the Colloquies, though also written in early life was only published, as a manual, in 1522. Here, in places, there is set out with biting satire the seamy side of ecclesiastical life in all its unpleasantness; here are all the scandals about which reforming councils, and outspoken popular preachers, have been occupying themselves for generations, unworthy clerics, ignorant clerics, sinful clerics -- and monks, the debasing popular superstitions, the mechanical unintelligent use of religion; here it all is, in words of one syllable, set out in condemnation, and in warning; abuses smiled at, sometimes politely, sometimes ironically, sometimes with the bitterness of a good man not a saint who has come nigh to despair of the only human force that can correct it all; and the moral is continuously pointed out that true religion is far different from all this, that what now obtains needs to be purified and simplified, and that what a man needs is to know Christ as the Bible speaks of Him and to follow His way. On its positive side [1107] the spiritual direction is that of the Devotio Moderna; but, allied now with the hostile critique of so many Catholic practices and institutions, and lacking the needed reference to man's need of sacraments and of Church-taught doctrine, and with the seeming theory that private study of the Bible is all-sufficient, and given to the world under the author's name barely two years after Luther's condemnation and with all northern Europe now in convulsion, the book, henceforward, lined up Erasmus as Luther's ally in the minds of a host of the Catholic partisans. Erasmus crying "Back to Christ in the Bible" was too like Luther crying "The Bible only "

But the most fatal weaknesses of all arose from the total absence in the great scholar's own formation of anything at all of the classic theology of the schools. To Scholasticism, indeed, Erasmus was as much opposed as Luther himself, and with perhaps less understanding of what it was that he was opposing. It would be a waste of time to belabour Erasmus for this lack of knowledge, of time better spent in enquiring where a religious of his antecedents could have got the kind of knowledge of scholastic theology that would really have informed his mind. What kind of a spectacle, in fact, did the world of Scholasticism present to a young Austin Canon in a Dutch priory of the Windesheim group, in the closing years of the fifteenth century? or to the student in the grim College de Montaigu of the Nominalist-rotted university of Paris? In a sense there was too much Scholasticism, Thomists, Scotists, Ockhamists of a score of schools, all disputing against each other. Which was in the right? And with what else were the most of them busy but with sterile inter-scholastic disputation? A young Friar Minor studying in the convents of his order with an unusually good master might be made into a useful Scotist thinker; or a young Dominican, if so lucky as to be taught by some Cajetan, might prove an effective Thomist. But outside these rare cases?

The life had, in fact, gone out of the business, and almost everywhere the philosophers and theologians of the via antiqua did little more than repeat their predecessors. A new world of literature and imagination had developed, and they ignored its existence. Their own technical Latin had actually declined in quality, and taken on a new barbarity, in the very age when nothing was so characteristic of the educated man as a carefully polished, classical Latinity. And the scholastics made no use at all of the new literary forms of the vernacular languages. The new humanism had brought to the West, not only new texts of Plato and Aristotle, but the means whereby all might read the masters in their own tongue. But the scholastics were too indifferent to their own origins to seize the great opportunity. And despite the fourteenth and fifteenth century critics who had already demonstrated the inadequacy of the Aristotelian physics, the universities clung to them with a truly stupid determination, refusing utterly to consider the new sciences, deliberately ignoring the way of experiment. The once great movement was now, by its own choice, cut off from all that was alive in the world of thought; and the needed systematisation, the constant relating of the old knowledge to the new which is the real life of the mind, had long since ceased.

Erasmus was by nature anything rather than a metaphysician, but in an age of more reasonable Scholasticism he could have been taught enough of this first of the sciences to understand why it is the first, and how all else depends on it, and that, without it, the theologian soon finds himself in difficulties once he is beyond wading-depth in his speculation. For Erasmus the consequences were disastrous. He had too great a mind not to suffer cruelly wherever he was deficient, and his role was too high for his mistakes to be small matters. For his theological insufficiency, and his own unawareness of it, he paid again and again. Luther's theories of the will as enslaved, for example, filled him with horror. Erasmus attacked the German unsparingly, but with what weapons? Here was a philosophical question, and the humanist had done nothing about philosophy, all his life, but ridicule the miserable philosophers of his experience.

"Caught unprovided with any such technical formation," says a theological historian, [1108] of the controversy about Free Will, " [these humanists] had only their personal tastes to trust to, and their own powers of initiative, seeking shelter, for good or ill, behind such Greek writers as Origen and St. John Chrysostom, whose scattered views had never been formed into a systematic theory about these problems, nor enjoyed any appreciable prestige in the Church. The intervention of such improvised theologians had the effect of creating, inside the theological system of Catholicism, a new antithesis whose consequences were to be far reaching indeed. . . ." And Mandonnet instances Erasmus [1109] who; "without any study of the classical theology of the Church, improvises solutions, and despite his circumspection he comes to affirm such enormities as this ' That nothing comes about without the will of God, I readily allow; but, generally, the will of God depends on our will'." [1110]

These controversies were however, in 1516, hidden in the unknown future. The pope had blessed the new work on Scripture and enthusiastically recommended it, and the only critics Erasmus had had to face, as yet, were obscurantist Catholics. But what these now were muttering, others, once the Lutheran storm broke, would soon be proclaiming loudly, and declaring that Erasmus, by his teaching about the role of Scripture, and his criticism of monastic life and devotional practices, was no better than Luther himself.

Under all the varied activity of this most industrious scholar, the single persisting aim is always evident, namely to bring men back to Christ; and this, Erasmus is persuaded, can best be done by setting before men Christianity as it first existed. His method is that of the humanist who would reconstruct Cicero's Rome or Plato's Athens, namely the critical use of the oldest literary monuments of the time that have survived. The one way back to Christ, in fact, is through study of the New Testament, and if our idea of Christ's doctrine gains in simplicity the more we read, this is a sure indication that we are on the right way. Here, in this craving for simplification, in a violent impatience with whatever is not grammatically self-evident, we have one leading motif of Erasmus's theological activity. He posits, in fact, of the inexhaustible content of revelation, the simplicity which belongs to the assent of faith through which the content is made accessible. This simplicity of statement for which Erasmus yearns, he does not find in the theologians. What has destroyed it there, so he thinks, is the theologians' use of philosophy, of metaphysics, in their task of exposition. With the theologians as they face their eternal problem -- the need to determine what doctrines actually mean, to solve the apparent contradictions, to resolve the seeming opposition between them and what is reasonably known -- Erasmus has no sympathy at all. From such problems he shrinks; and he has a marked antipathy for those who face them, and immense scorn for their barbarous, unclassical Latinity, their carefully devised technical terminology, and their methods of logical analysis, and of strict definition.

His own method will not give any doctrinal precision, and he does not desire it from any other method. Doctrinal precision is, in fact, not necessary; zeal for it is a mark of Christian decadence, not of progress in knowledge of God. In the hands of Erasmus, Catholic dogma thins out until it vanishes to nothing; and he would meet the problem of the real need, of even the most ordinary of mankind, for knowledge of the mysteries appropriate to the level of their intelligence, by scrapping technical language on all sides. Precision in these matters, he thought, was not worth what it cost; and even, for example, such a vitally necessary tool as the term homoousion ought to go, ought never to have been devised. It is not surprising if, in his theology, there are mistakes, inexactitudes, contradictions, and this especially in the matters then so violently controverted, doctrines about marriage, confession, the monastic life, the Roman primacy. [1111] Nor is it surprising if the next generation, its theological mind formed by the greatest of scholastic revivals, and its adherence to the scholastic method intensified by the Church's life and death struggle with the Reformation divines, should come to hold in abhorrence the great mind which, in these important matters, seemed stricken so perversely. Upon Catholic theology Erasmus, then, left no lasting mark; nor did his failure to appreciate its importance do any damage or lessen its prestige. Here the contemptuous blows he struck fell upon the air. For one thing the revival had begun; and next, theology had already become what it has since remained, a technique that only interested theologians and clerics. The sole effect of his excursions into theology was to discredit Erasmus with the theologians for ever. But the effect of Erasmus on the future of philosophy was very different. Philosophy had once been the occupation of all the educated, and it would in time become that again. Here, the scornful mockery of Erasmus for the Scholastics as he had known them, barbarous in diction, futile and sterile in act, came as a last blow from humanism in its classical age; and Erasmus, in this, helped enormously among educated men everywhere the prejudice from which, only in our own time, is the philosophy of the schools recovering. [1112]

As we review the personalities and the effective work, of Machiavelli and Erasmus and St. Thomas More, we seem to have parted company entirely from the medievals and to have rejoined our own contemporaries. Cajetan, their contemporary, was undoubtedly a medieval; [1113] and yet, in him also, we make a contact with later times, with our own time indeed in the strictest sense, for the spirit we encounter in Cajetan is the Catholic intellectualism of this mid-twentieth century, the age of Maritain and Gilson, of Leo XIII and Pius XII. Here, in Cajetan, is a rebirth of St. Thomas; here are the beginnings of his effective primacy in the Catholic schools as doctor communis.

Cajetan is, by birth, James de Vio -- Thomas in religion; and, born at Gaeta, made a Dominican at Gaeta, Bishop of Gaeta, Cajetanus inevitably for all time. He entered the Friars Preachers at the age of sixteen, in that very year when the Chapter-General made the momentous decision that the lectors should use St. Thomas as the basis of their teaching instead of Peter Lombard. In 1488 he was sent to Bologna, still a student; and after his ordination in 1491, to Padua, then exceedingly alive not only with the contention between the Dominicans and the great Scotist, Antonio Trombetta, but with the controversies that centred round the revival of Averroism and the graceful culture of its high priest Pietro Pomponazzi.

It was at Padua that Cajetan began his career as a teacher, and that he finally received that form of the complete metaphysician which was henceforth to be the vital principle of all his intellectual activity. [1114] In 1494 he made a brief appearance before a greater world when, in the theological tourney which, in those days, enlivened the meetings of the General Chapter, he met and brilliantly jousted with Pico della Mirandola, the hero, it will be recalled, of the early manhood of St. Thomas More. Cajetan was given the chair of Theology at Pavia in 1497; he went thence in 1499 to Milan, and in 1501 he was named Procurator-General of the order, its representative at the Roman Curia. Although, along with this, he obtained a chair in the Roman university, his career as a teacher was over, he was more important now as one of the order's superiors. [1115] In 1508, at the age of thirty-nine, he was elected Master-General of his order.

Cajetan held this office for nearly ten years, and showed himself in it as a reformer of great constructive power. Two things above all, he told his brethren, must be attended to, the restoration of a life that was genuinely a life in common -- a restoration, therefore, of monastic poverty -- and, at the same time, [1116] the raising of the level of Dominican studies. For other orders, he said, studies might be an ornament: for the Friars Preachers, they were life itself. "Once we cease to carry weight as teachers of theology," he said grimly, "our order's day is over"; and every novice has heard that other reported dictum that the Dominican who fails to study four hours a day is in a state of mortal sin.

But the Master-General was not kept exclusively to the service of his order. Julius II made all possible use of his genius in the theological controversy with the pseudo-council of Pisa, [1117] and Cajetan was a leading figure in the General Council of the Lateran, and not only as a theologian but also, once again, as a man who saw the rotten state of the spiritual city and how urgently drastic reform was needed. [1118]

At the end of the council Leo X made him a cardinal. [1119] and in May 1518 sent him to Germany as Papal Legate. One of his tasks was to unite the princes into an effective opposition to the new Turkish offensive; after a respite of thirty years a great soldier had again arisen among the Ottomans, and Christendom was once more in danger. An equally important commission was sent on to him some four months later. [1120] It concerned Luther, by this time cited to answer at Rome a charge of heresy. Luther's sovereign -- Frederick III of Saxony -- had persuaded Leo X to allow the enquiry to be held in Germany, and Cajetan was now put in charge of it, with power to give a definitive sentence, and to absolve Luther should he retract; with orders to have him arrested and sent on to Rome did he prove obstinate.

The two met at Augsburg, October 12, 1518, Dominican and Augustinian, Thomist and Ockhamist, the Papal Legate and the rebel. Much has been written about that celebrated interview, amongst others by Luther himself. Nothing came of it in the way of reconciliation. No reconciliation was possible; and Cajetan did not succeed in having the heresiarch arrested. But at the interview he spoke to Luther as one scholar to another, as one religious to another, laying aside his high rank and treating Luther -- we have the Augustinian's word for it -- with marked kindliness. But at Rome the legate seems, henceforward, to have been, for his superficial superiors, the man who had failed. One of his brethren of our own day has surely judged his action truly. "From the outset [Cajetan] realised, what many Catholics even after four hundred years have not grasped, that this was not just any kind of a revolt, but a revolt of the mind; that these demands of Luther were not a mere claim that the flesh should be emancipated, but demands in the domain of the spiritual, and, more particularly, demands in the domain of the theological. Cajetan was taken advantage of, and he was beaten; how could he possibly not have been? But this much at least must be said, that he did not touch the already gaping wounds of Christendom with hands that were not respectful and clean." [1121]

But it is Cajetan's influence as a thinker that is our subject, his permanent influence on his own and later ages. [1122] Cajetan's chief importance to Catholic history lies not only in this that he was the first to publish a commentary [1123] on the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, the classic masterpiece of Catholic theology, but in the spirit which informed that great commentary, still the classic commentary after four hundred years. Cajetan, considered in his own right, is the greatest theologian of his own time, and one of the greatest the Church has known. [1124] It was also his great merit that he understood the needs of his age, and that old methods must be adapted accordingly. His commentary on the Summa is the work of an original mind and it proved, from the first, a great originating work. What it first of all accomplished was the long needed reconciliation of the scholastic learning and the new culture of the humanists. The commentator understood his own time, realised fully the gross error of only too many theologians, to wit their indifference to the new critical scholarship and to the new positive sciences, and, so much a metaphysician himself that he was scarcely anything more, he yet brought the new learning to the assistance of the old. In this he is indeed a second Aquinas, bringing into synthesis humanism and Aristotelianism as the thirteenth-century doctor had brought together Aristotelianism and the theology of St. Augustine.

It is in the long series of Scripture commentaries to which the last years of his life were given that the flexibility of Cajetan's genius is most evident, his readiness to use the new learning and his skill in its use. But this spirit is already to be seen, fully at work, in the great commentary on the Summa. Like the best of the humanists he makes a critical use of the Scriptures in his argumentation, keeping rigorously to the literal sense, and observing scrupulously his own critical rule of not mixing the literal and spiritual senses indiscriminately -- a fault to which the classic theologians of the Middle Ages often tended, [1125] and which was never more evident than in the works of the great encyclopaedist of the generation before Cajetan -- Denis the Carthusian. [1126] And wherever he can do so he makes it his business to study the whole work in which his opponents' views are expressed, by no means content to judge them on the mere opposition of a text. Cajetan again shows himself of the new age in his scrupulous re-thinking of the author he is explaining. Nothing, not even unanimity among other theologians, will dispense him from this. And in nothing else does he separate himself more from his contemporaries, and his immediate predecessors, than in his violent repudiation of their formalist treatment of St. Thomas. [1127] This, and his candour, make Cajetan a singularly attractive author. There is about him an independence and an objectivity that is new. Here is the wisdom of St. Thomas given new life, and speaking to the Renaissance in an idiom it can understand. Here at last among the scholastic theologians was a great thinker, sensitive to all the life of his time, his work free from all those faults which drew upon his profession the wrath of Erasmus and the mockery of Rabelais. It is something to know that Erasmus was not only aware of Cajetan's existence, but of the different kind of thing his great work was, that he praised it highly -- and disinterestedly -- only wishing that books of this sort could be written by the score. [1128]

Cajetan was not an isolated figure in his own order. The Renaissance of St. Thomas's doctrine had begun about the time he entered the order, he was one of its earliest fruits. But almost his contemporary was the gifted Francis de Sylvestris of Ferrara (1474-1528) who published in 1525 the first, and greatest, commentary on the Contra Gentiles; and only ten years younger than Cajetan was Francis of Vittoria (1480-1546), [1129] the Spaniard whose lectures on the State and on the moral aspects of political life are a main foundation of the modern science of International Law. [1130] It is Cajetan's work, however, which is the real foundation of all the later achievement; it is due to him above all others that there was a new living theology in the university world of the later sixteenth century, ready when the great opportunity came to serve those two great inventions of that time which have especially formed the modern Church, the diocesan seminary and the Society of Jesus. [1131] And if Cajetan is the progenitor of the theological scholarship of modern Catholicism, Erasmus too has his Catholic progeny, no less distinguished, no less necessary to the fullness of Catholic life, the critical scholars and historical theologians and the exegetes, the Benedictines of St. Maur for example and the Bollandists, Petavius, Mabillon and Papebroch.

The General Council summoned by Julius II (in what circumstances has already been described) [1132] to meet in the Lateran Basilica of Rome, came together on May 3, 1512, and it was not dissolved until almost five years later, March 12, 1517. Many things in its history make the Fifth Lateran a thing apart among General Councils. It met very rarely -- seven times only in the last four years; its activities are recorded not in the usual list of canons and decrees but in a series of papal bulls; the attendance was never large, and the eighty or ninety bishops present were almost all Italians, from the Papal State and the kingdom of Naples; and, finally, the reform decrees it enacted were often openly ignored, sedente concilio, by the pope himself. "Au total rien de serieux" says a French scholar, truly enough; and it is hard to see what more could have been expected of such a character as Leo X, upon whom the conduct of the council fell from March 1513.

The most immediate practical effect of the council was that it broke the nascent schism fostered by the King of France and the, emperor; it reaffirmed the declaration of earlier popes that General Councils are instruments of government subordinate to the pope, primate and ruler of the whole Church of Christ; and it secured the assent of the French king to the condemnation of the Pragmatic Sanction as unlawful, null and void. [1133] And the council did a great service to the cause of the faith, and of right thinking, by its condemnation of the new Averroism of Pomponazzi, "pernicious errors concerning the nature of the rational soul, namely, that it is mortal and that it is the same [soul] in all men, and that this is true at least in philosophy." [1134] The bull goes on to say, " Since truth does not contradict truth, we declare that every assertion contrary to truth illuminated by faith is absolutely false," and it orders that those who lecture on these subjects in universities shall set themselves to refute the arguments of these philosophers, all of which will yield to reasoning. No cleric in holy orders shall, for the future, give himself in his first five years at the university to the exclusive study of philosophy or the poets; after that time, he may, as it were, specialise in them, provided always that, at the same time, he continues his study of theology and canon law.

There are two other acts of the council which show concern for the welfare of the Catholic mind, the bull on censorship [1135] and that on preaching. [1136] The first begins with a paean of thanksgiving to God for the recent marvellous invention of printing, and a recital of the new prospects thereby opened out to learning and to religion. The new art, however, is lending itself also to less worthy causes. Books are appearing filled with mistakes about the faith, and with all manner of harmful teaching, the very opposite of Christianity; and also books filled with slander, even of eminent personages. Whence this new law that, for the future, no one is to print anything before it has been sanctioned by ecclesiastical authority -- by the pope's officials in Rome, by the bishop or his diocesan officials elsewhere. Those who ignore this law risk a heavy complexity of penalties; the book will be confiscated, publicly burned, the printer fined 100 ducats, suspended from printing for a year and excommunicated.

The decree about preachers is interesting for what it reveals of current practices in the all-important office. It is indeed almost wholly taken up with them. Preachers are not to put their own personal interpretations on Sacred Scripture; they are expressly forbidden to predict future calamities in any definite way, or the coming of anti-Christ, or the end of the world. Those who have done this already are liars, and their wickedness is one reason for the contempt that has come upon preachers in general. Let no one, for the future, preach that any particular future event is foretold in Holy Scripture, nor say that he has a revelation from the Holy Ghost to state this, or any other like inane divination. Preachers must keep to the Gospel, teach a hatred of vice and a love of virtue. They must be a source of peace, not sowers of dissension. Especially must they abstain from scandalous denunciation of the faults of bishops and other superiors, "whom not only imprudently, but intemperately, they lecture and worry in sermons before the common people and laity"; and they must abstain from open declarations of the wrongdoing of superiors, even mentioning their names. It is, of course, always possible that a preacher may really have a special revelation, and a divine commission to make it known. But it belongs to the pope's authority to judge whether this really is so, and before anything of this kind is publicly preached it must be submitted either to the pope or, if there is no time to consult the pope, to the local bishop, who, along with three or four theologians, will carefully examine the matter. For those who ignore the law there awaits the penalty of an excommunication from which only the pope can release them.

Three decrees treat of reform. The lengthy bull Supernae dispositionis arbitrio [1137] recalls and renews all the old legislation, going back to 1179, designed to ensure good bishops in all the sees of Christendom. The pope's responsibility is stressed, and the bull explicitly reminds him that at the last day he will answer to God for his appointments. All the vices which, at this moment, disfigure the system are listed, and it is announced that the law that bans from the episcopate minors and the ignorant, and that forbids favouritism, the use of commendams, appointments of administrators -- and, in fact, everything that Leo X was at the moment doing and would continue to do to the end of his reign -- is henceforward to be enforced. The decree makes no difficulty about saying that the failure to observe these ancient laws has brought the papacy into disrepute throughout the Church; and it also renews all the laws designed to prevent monasteries from being made a means to give prelates and cardinals an income, while the monks starve and religious life dries up. The cardinals are then mildly admonished, in stereotyped language that merely repeats what was said at Constance and after Constance, about their duty to live pious and sober lives, and a vast amount of space is given to regulations about their dress and that of their households, and to set a limit to the expenses of their funerals -- 1,500 florins. There is a new law to punish blasphemy in clergy and laity, the obstinate sinner going to the galleys if he is a commoner, losing his nobility if he is a noble and, if a cleric, losing all his benefices. Concubinage, yet once again, figures as a custom that still flourishes, and bishops are warned not to let offenders off lightly on the plea that the custom is after all so general. There is a renewal of the old laws against simony, against encroachment on the rights and property of the Church, and against violation of the privilege of clerics. All this is, once again, little more than repetition. The legislation merely forbids and enacts penalties; the way has not yet been found to secure that the law will actually be put into force. [1138] And there is a special clause denouncing witchcraft and punishing those who resort to it, clerics and laity; and another clause calling for strict application of the heresy laws against pseudo-Christians.

A second bull [1139] strengthens the bishop's hand against the chapters and canons who resist his endeavours to correct them, on the plea that they are exempt from his authority; and it strengthens the prestige of the episcopal courts. Finally, the bishops are bidden to observe the law, which has long been a dead letter over four-fifths of the Church, that a provincial council should be held every three years.

The law that the bishops of every ecclesiastical province should meet in provincial council every three years was first made at the Fourth General Council of the Lateran -- the greatest of all the medieval councils -- by Innocent III ill 1215. In the period 1270- 1517 there were held, for the 74 provinces then effectively existing, 235 provincial councils: had the law been observed everywhere, throughout that time, there would have been more than 6,000 councils held. The purpose of the provincial council -- it must be remembered -- was not merely to make laws: it was designed by Innocent III as the instrument by which episcopal slackness and shortcomings were to be corrected by the bishops of the province. Herein lay the chief usefulness of Innocent III's invention; and in the utter inability of the popes to enforce this law lay, undoubtedly, one of the chief reasons for the steady decline of religion and the ultimate corruption of such masses. It is not without interest to note that never were fewer councils held than in the years of the so-called conciliar movement -- 63 councils in 30 provinces. In many provinces no council was ever held. So, notably in Italy, where there were 29 provinces, councils were never held at all in 22 of them; in the rest there was one council in Benevento in 1378, one in Palermo in 1388, the fourth and last of Aquileia (i.e. held during these 247 years) took place in 1339, of Ravenna in 1317, of Grado in 1320, of Spoleto in 1344, of Padua in 1350. Of the 16 metropolitan provinces of France, most held councils, many of them at least once in an average man's lifetime; though at Arles, Embrun and Aix there was none after 1365, nor at Auch after 1387, though at Bordeaux the series ended in 1327, and at Toulouse in 1368, though Lyons (the primatial see) had but one council (after 1300) in 1376, and Reims only one in 111 years (1344-1455), and Rouen none in 140 years (1304-1445). The tale is much the same in Spain, although, at Toledo and Tarragona, councils were really frequent (six at Toledo and fourteen at Tarragona). In Germany, where there were seven provinces, councils were only regularly held at Prague and Magdeburg; Cologne had none from 1324 to 1423, Salzburg none from 1310 to 1409; Bremen had none at all after 1292, and Treves none after 1310. In Poland between 1285 and 1420 there was but one council, held in 1375; and there was but one in Portugal, held in 1436, in all the period 1270-1464. In Scotland, too, the law was a dead letter; a council was held in 1280 and the next was in 1436. Sweden went for 120 years without any provincial council (1275-1396), and Hungary for 130 years (1318-1449). Norway did not fare so badly until half-way through the fourteenth century, the council of 1351 being the last until 1436. In Denmark the series ends in 1389. In Ireland (where there were 4 provinces) there are only the two councils of Dublin in 1348 and 1351.

The third bull, [1140] of December 19, 1516, brings to an end the latest, and most clamorous, of all the struggles between the bishops and the mendicant orders, a quarrel so violent that the pope had to put off the next session of the council for months. "We are in the heart of a terrific storm," the general cf. the Augustinians [1141] wrote, " the attack upon us and upon all the mendicant orders by the bishops has now raged furiously for three years in the very council." The cause was the old, old cause -- the privilege which the Mendicants enjoyed of exemption from all authority but that of the pope. The bishops charged the friars with using the privilege to make money out of the laity at the expense of the parish and diocese, and charged them also with an abundance of wicked living; let them be brought under the common law of the Church. The regulars riposted by a staggering catalogue of episcopal sins. "Before you call upon us to observe the common law of the Church," they said, "why not begin to observe it yourselves?" If it were not for the regulars, they boldly declared to the pope, the very name of Christ would be forgotten in Italy. Who else but the friars ever preached? The bishops pressed for the abolition at least of the privileges lately showered on the Mendicants by the Franciscan pope Sixtus IV, the bull called Mare magnum.

It was only the personal action of Leo X that saved the friars. [1142] He arranged a compromise, and the bull Dum intra mentis arcana of the eleventh session sets it out. Bishops were to have the right to make visitations in parish churches held by the friars and to enquire into all that concerned their parochial activity. Friars would need the bishop's approval before they could hear the confessions of his subjects. Friars were not to absolve from episcopal excommunications or other censures, nor were they, without leave of the parish priest, to administer Extreme Unction to the dying or give them Holy Viaticum. Laymen who wished to be buried in the habit of a religious order could be buried in the order's churches and cemeteries if they so desired. Bishops had the right to examine a friar's suitableness before they gave him Holy Orders; and it is the bishop of the diocese who must be asked to give this sacrament, and also to consecrate the friars' churches, bless their bells, and perform all other episcopal functions they may need. Friars are not to marry any of the faithful without the leave of the parish priest; they are to be careful to remind those who come to confession to them of their duty to pay tithes to the parish priest; and, if the priest asks it of them, they are to make a point of this in their sermons. Members of the Third Orders who live in their own houses have no right to receive from the friars of their order the so-called parochial sacraments (that is Easter Communion, Extreme Unction, and Holy Viaticum), though they may confess to the friars, and be buried with them, and by them, should they choose. Such tertiaries are bound by the same obligations as other layfolk, and they are not free from the jurisdiction of lay judges. Nor can they, in times of interdict, hear mass in the churches of the order to which they belong. But if the members of the Third Order live a common life, in a convent, they enjoy all the rights and privileges of the order.

The recital of the details of the compromise shows how the life of the orders had, by now, penetrated minutely into every nook and cranny of the Christian republic. At every turn there was room for friction between the two systems of jurisdiction, the episcopal and the exempt. And even the roughest survey of the lives of the saints and holy people of the century between Constance and this act of Leo X, shows the mendicant orders as the great active source of almost all the sanctity of the time -- so far as sanctity is known to us.

A biographical catalogue of saints [1143] gives a total of 150 saints and beati/ae who "flourished" between the beginning of the Schism and the end of the reign of Leo X (1378-1521). The "causes" of the great majority have so far not proceeded beyond the stage called beatification: only 26 out of the 150 have been canonised. Of these 150, the mendicant orders can claim as many as 115. Four of these were bishops, 35 nuns, 9 lay men and women members of the various Third Orders, and the rest priests and lay brothers; Franciscans and Dominicans account for over two-thirds of them. [1144] This huge lead the mendicant orders maintain to the end of the period. In the fifty years which this last chapter covers, this age of Sixtus IV and Alexander VI and Leo X, 76 saints and beati/ae "flourished", and 55 of them belonged to the mendicant orders, 19 women and 36 men. This ultimate glory of so many of their subjects -- their Italian subjects [1145] -- was hidden indeed from the generals of the orders- at that time, but how history has justified their reply to the bishops' assault made in the Fifth General Council of the Lateran !

There is yet another decision given by Leo X in the council which is of interest, not only in itself, but as the most important sign so far of the Church's recognition that the world has reached a new age in social and economic organisation; this is the bull Inter Multiplices [1146] which declares the new charitable pawnshops to be lawful, and protects them against the critics who had been denouncing the system as nothing else than usury. No crime, throughout the whole of the Middle Ages had been more continuously denounced by the Church than usury, and no sinners more severely punished. Nor did Leo X's sanction, given to pawnshops so organised that, while no interest was asked for the loan, a small charge was made to cover administration costs, alter in any way the definition of usury or moderate the condemnation of the crime. But while reviewing once again the nature of the reprobated "contract of usury", the pope explicitly reproved old- fashioned theologians who declared that whatever accrued to those who lent money must, in all circumstances, be usury.

Great changes, in progress by this time for a hundred years and more, had brought it about that money now had another use beyond that which all thinkers so far had considered could be its only use, namely, to be a means of making payments. In an economic system where, if money was not used to make a payment it was not, and could not, be used at all, all loans of money were necessarily unproductive loans. The money lent was as truly consumed in the borrower's use of it, as was ever a loaf of bread or a bottle of wine. Any charge made for any loan of money was, then, necessarily a usurious charge, the charge being inevitably a gain accruing directly from the mere act of loaning, and claimed as such.

But once industries began to be specialised and commerce to spread over a wider field, to pass from the transactions confined to one village, or town, and to take in first a whole country, then a continent and finally other lands at the very extremities of the world as known, a new use for money gradually developed. Any man could lend his money to these industrial and commercial pioneers, and legitimately qualify for a share in their profits -- as he also incurred a share in their risks. What such a man received from those to whom he lent his money was a share in what their use of the total moneys they controlled brought in; it was a fruit of industry and business capacity, not any longer a payment exacted simply for the loan of what could not be productive. To profits accruing from money used in this new way that the growth of commerce had made possible, the criticisms directed against usury could not apply. And it became necessary, in such a system as the Catholic religion, that those whose business it was -- whether by private or public direction of men's consciences -- to keep a clear idea of moral obligations before mankind, should take note of the new institutions which the changing circumstances of life were calling into existence.

The fourteenth century, which produced so much activity of a scientific kind -- and minds that, by preference, studied facts (and here, of course, Ockham's insistence on the importance of the fact told very favourably indeed) -- saw the first reflections of these new developments in what has come to be called Moral Theology. Durandus of Saint-Pourcain, for example, studied the nascent credit system and raised the question, which increasingly agitates our minds to-day, whether the state should not organise so important an element of man's well being. Francois de Mayronnes pointed out how money was beginning to have more than one use, and asked the great question if interest could not therefore sometimes be lawful. Jean Buridan sketched a theory of value, of exchange, and of money. Nicholas of Oresme, whose place in the history of other sciences has been referred to already, wrote his book on Money, its origin, nature, rights and exchange in which Gresham's Law makes its first appearance. All these men were clerics, and their first interest was the ultimate end of their fellows. They did not study Political Economy for the mere interest of the subject, but to clarify doubts whether certain commercial activities were lawful or sinful. It is not surprising that these questions, from now on hotly debated in the country that was the centre of the new finance, Italy, attracted the attention of the missionaries of the new Franciscan reform movement -- the Observants -- who, for the moment, were there carrying all before them as reformers of Christian moral life. In their sermons, and notably in those of St. Bernadine of Siena, there is a new precision in what is said on these questions which so vitally affect man's chances of salvation: questions of usury, of interest, of mortgages. But the crown of all this new movement was the work of a Dominican, St. Antonino, Archbishop of Florence from 1446-1459, in the very height of the career of Cosimo de' Medici.

St. Antonino [1147] was a disciple of Bl. Giovanni de Dominici, the Dominican who organised the great reform in his order that produced the famous Congregation of Lombardy, and who as a cardinal stood by Gregory XII, almost alone, in the dark days of the Council of Pisa. The saint grew up in the new, reformed monasteries of Fiesole and St. Marco; he had served as a missionary, as prior and as the head of his group of houses, and he had won a great name as a canonist, when Eugene IV gave him the see of Florence in 1446. It was one of those rare appointments where the man was ideally right for the place and the time, thinker, ruler, saint, and understanding his age from life-long contact with all its actuality.

The great work for which St. Antonino is chiefly known, the four volumes of the Summa Moralis, was written while he was archbishop, and it was meant, of course, for the use of his clergy. It is a new kind of work in two respects. First it treats exclusively of theology as this relates to conduct -- it is the pioneer work of the science that has come to be called Moral Theology. And next, it is specially devoted to these new anxieties about commercial morality and the use of money, and the ultimate moral import of what we should call economic doctrines. Here is to be found dispassionate analysis and discussion of all manner of problems that are still with us; poverty in itself is an evil, though it may be an occasion for good; possessions are good and ordained by God for the service of man; to serve God as God wills He shall be served, man needs a certain freedom from anxiety, a certain leisure -- and possessions secure this for him. The saint considers wealth in its production, distribution, and consumption, and discusses the comparative importance of labour and capital in the production of wealth. There is a careful detailed study of various methods of commercial fraud, of the question of usury, of interest on bills of exchange, of the distinction between money as coin and money as capital, and of the lawfulness of taking interest for money lent to the state. There is an attempt to state a principle whereby to determine the just price of goods, just to the seller and to the buyer; an examination of monopolies, and trusts; of the duties of the state to its citizens, its duty to provide for the poor, the aged, the sick -- and even its duty to provide, for the poor, doctors paid by the state; of the duty of employers to pay a just wage.

Florence, in St. Antonino's time, was as much the financial capital of the world as New York or London has been in our own. The evils which he analyses and deplores are the product of the last two hundred years or so before the Reformation; and already, in the Low Countries as in Italy, and in western Germany too, "there was sometimes a capitalism as inhuman as anything which the world has seen, and from time to time ferocious class wars between artisans and merchants." [1148] It was not the least of scandals to the poor as Catholics that, among their oppressors, were highly-placed clerics. St. Thomas More, in the Utopia, notes, for example, that monasteries too are prominent in that wicked development that is turning farms into sheep runs and thereby increasing the horde of wretched proletarians and vagabonds in the towns.

And it was another scandal that the popes had, for generations, made such use of the bankers. [1149] It was the skill of the French pope Urban IV, negotiating an agreement with the bankers of Siena in 1263, that had made possible the expedition of Charles of Anjou and the final defeat of the Hohenstaufen. Bankers played a great part in the supreme days of la fiscalite pontificale, during the Avignon regime. "In the first half of the fifteenth century the Medici or their representatives were always in attendance on the popes." [1150] John XXIII had Cosimo with him when he made the fatal journey to Constance in 1414, and he raised 15,750 florins from the firm on a magnificent mitre. Twenty-five years later Eugene IV, during the Council of Florence, raised a further 25,000 from the Medici on pledges of plate and jewels. Under Nicholas V the bank received the 100,000 gold florins which the pilgrims contributed at the Jubilee of 1450. By this time the great Florentine firm had branches everywhere, at Rome, Venice, Pisa and Milan in Italy; at Antwerp and Bruges; at London, Lyons, Avignon, Geneva, Valencia and Barcelona, and at Lubeck; and thereby it offered the pope a means to gather in revenues that was no doubt lawful enough in itself, but a means that lent itself easily to scandal. For example, " Fees had to be paid by any nominee to a bishopric or an archbishopric. The Roman house accepted the bull of nomination, dispatched it to that branch of the business which had, or was likely to have, business connexions with the new bishop, and this branch then delivered the bull on payment of the dues. If the dues were not paid, the bull was sent back." [1151]

The bankers were also used to collect the money offered by those who sought to gain some of the indulgences, [1152] and the classic example of scandal here is the indulgence of Leo X as it was preached in Germany in 1516, the indulgence which gave Luther his opportunity to secure for the new theology its first notoriety outside the universities of Wittenberg and Erfurt.

The movement called the Reformation, when it came, was but one of several revolutions simultaneously active, and the latest of them in time. This attempt to picture the setting in which the first events of the Reformation took place needs, in order to complete it, some mention of the new importance of the middle classes, and for this I should like to borrow the words of a recent French writer. The only "class to make any progress" -- he is speaking of the fifteenth century -- "is the middle class. The development of banking and industry, all that blossoming of capitalism which characterises the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries makes for the advantage of this class alone. On a par with this economic strength, is the hold which the middle class gains, little by little, on political life, the municipal authority and the parliaments. Well-established families dominate the municipal councils; in the Low Countries they take an ever-increasing part in public affairs, in Italy more than one of them rises to be ruler of the state. The other side of the picture is that, in all the large towns, a wretched proletariat already exists with no means to express itself in the national life; and this section of the community the great social and religious changes will toss about mercilessly. There is thus in formation, within the great industrial cities, a powerful commercial aristocracy, independent, critical of authority, with a tincture of literary tastes, of interest in law and theology, ambitious to exert its strength, to enforce its claims, a middle class seeking power and privileged status -- and there is a considerable mass of poor people, raw material for any revolutionary movement, just as ready to support the ambition of the middle classes, or the king's authority, or a peasant rebellion; to turn and sack the possessions of the clergy to-day or, to-morrow, to change sides and become a church- enthusiastic mob." [1153]

Here the veil is lifted that still hangs over too much of medieval history, and something shows of the life and thought of the ordinary man, not only of him at whose expense history is so largely made, but of him whose scarcely recorded reaction to the direction of his betters often, at the turning points, makes history. It was to help this class that the Franciscan Observants had come with their invention of the Monts de Piete, protected now by Leo X in the General Council of the Lateran. What of the religious life of the ordinary man at this moment?

The movement of theology away from philosophy, more and more marked as the fourteenth century drew to an end, was more closely followed by a movement of devotional life away from theology -- though not, as yet, of devotional life away from the faith. It was not to the depths of the mysteries that men now turned for food for their souls, but to the mysteries as they had been shown to the senses. There is, from now on, an increasing familiarity in the tone of men's commerce with the supernatural world, and they make greater use of their imagination in their effort to make a contact with that world. Their meditation on it is more colourful, the emotions play a greater part in their spiritual life than ever before. The change is reflected in a new development in religious art; there are new subjects for the painters and sculptors and a new treatment of the old subjects. It matters much now that the representation shall be picturesque. And the great catastrophe which came half way through the fourteenth century, the Black Death, gave a sudden impulse, more powerful than all the new philosophical developments, to man's new preoccupation with emotions and imagination, to the attainment of a new stage in his devotional life, and to hasten the coming age of Pathos. On the one hand new luxury and new lusts, and on the other a new deep- rooted melancholy. Then came the terrible trials of the Schism and of the long-drawn-out uncertainties of the duel of the popes with the councils. Here are catastrophes and crises that remind men violently how brittle a thing is worldly glory, how short-lived man's happiness and how far from Christian perfection most Christians are, even the most highly-placed. The new age is much preoccupied with the thought of sin and its consequences, and with death as the moment when merited punishment will begin. As well as being the age that created the new moving iconography of the Passion, such devotions as the Stations of the Cross and the Five Wounds, and such touching images as that of Our Lord awaiting the last torture of the cross or of the Pieta, this is also the age of the Danses Macabres. "It is only Death who dances, in the procession; the rest follow unresisting, drawn along wherever the fatal cortege goes. The buffoon who zig-zags at its head is more than man can bear to look upon closely, with his strips and scraps of rotting flesh, his mockery of likeness to a man, and the irreverent display of ' what should be covered up in the earth'. " Here are the extremes of the new plane in which the popular religion lives and moves, skirting too often the fringes of the morbid, through the hundred and fifty years between the Schism and Luther.

Meanwhile the Third Orders flourished, and in the towns the guilds continued to build their corporate life around the means of grace -- prayer, the sacraments, almsgiving, and works of charity. New monastic foundations were extremely rare -- how could more be needed, all possible wants were surely long ago supplied? The charity of the munificent went now to colleges rather, to schools and to hospitals and to "homes" for the unfortunate; " homes " for orphans and foundlings and nursing mothers, for repentant street walkers; for old sailors, for pilgrims and for the poor of every sort. [1154] The poor are indeed not lacking. It is an age of "commercial expansion" and the tale of the ruined victims is considerable.

Another sign of spiritual vitality is the vast number of religious books, of all kinds, in the vernacular languages, diffused now through the new invention of printing, Soul's Guides, Ways to Heaven, Christian Missions and the rest. More important still are the Catechisms and handbooks of doctrine, such for example as the Libretto della doctrina christiana, Kalendrier des Bergers, Espeio de bien vivre, Instructions for Parish Priests. [1155] It is an age of preachers, in every country; and pious Christians make provision in their wills for the preaching of sermons and the maintenance of the preachers, "to assure them the leisure for the study they need." [1156] Sermons begin to be collected and printed. In Germany we know of a hundred such. But of all books (everywhere but in England) it is the Bible that is the most popular. It was translated into Italian by a Camaldolese monk Nicholas Malermi, and in Germany, by 1517, nineteen editions of German translations had appeared. " All Christians," say the editors of a Cologne edition, "should read it with devotion and reverence and in union with God."

An account of Christian life during these years when ideals were so gravely compromised by the bad example given in high places, would be singularly misleading did it say nothing of the violent reaction, open, at times defiant, when good men protested against the scandals of ecclesiastical life. In Italy "the upper and middle classes were in a ferment of hostility" [1157] to this papacy of princes. The " racket " was evident and bitterly resented. One who for years lived at its centre, and upon it, the servant of both the Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII, has expressed in bitter words that resentment which, in all ages, is the most dangerous product of the ecclesiastic's unwillingness to allow that his administration can need criticism or reform -- namely that whatever the layman's loyalty to the Catholic faith, his impatience with clerical incapacity and self-sufficiency may lead him to welcome any movement which promises to shake up the clergy. Guicciardini -- for it is the great historian's words we are about to quote -- was no doubt an embittered man when he put together his Reminiscences and, like many another educated Italian of his time, not too sure of his religion. But here he only says more forcibly what, in all such times and circumstances, men naturally say. After speaking of the clerical wickedness he had witnessed -- ambition, covetousness, excesses -- and the scandal it must give, he says that his relations with various popes made him prefer their greatness to his own interests. "Had it not been for this consideration" -- he is writing now in 1529, after the event -- "I would have loved Martin Luther as myself; not that I might set myself free from the laws imposed on us by Christianity, as it is commonly interpreted and understood, but that I might see this scoundrelly rabble (questa caterva di scelerati) confined within due limits, so that they might be forced to choose between a life without crime or a life without power." [1158]

Guicciardini did not stand alone. Others of his contemporaries, who explicitly declare their attachment to the papacy, do not hesitate to complain about the scandal given by the contrast between what the office demands and the way those who hold the office conduct themselves. [1159] In England there are the profound criticisms scattered through the works of St. Thomas More; and St. John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, made his protest too. If the pope did not presently reform his court, said the future martyr, God would find a means to reform it for him. [1160]

But by far the most striking protestation was that of the Dominican Jerome Savonarola, a very great figure indeed, and still the centre of lively controversy among Catholic scholars. [1161] Savonarola was born at Ferrara in 1452 and after a good humanist education in that centre of the Italian renaissance, sickened by the renascent paganism of life, and somewhat morbidly preoccupied already with the sinfulness of human nature, he offered himself to the Dominicans in 1475, joining, at Bologna, the austere reformed congregation of Lombardy. Fifteen years later, as the newly- appointed prior of San Marco at Florence, he broke into the Italian scene with the force of a thunderbolt. Yet once again the combination of a passionate austerity of life, of utter and absolute disinterestedness to all but the salvation of the hearer, of clear and exact theological understanding, and of the very perfection of the oratorical temperament and gifts, proved irresistible. Savonarola was, after St. Bernadine of Siena, the greatest preacher of the Italian middle ages; and he was a pioneer in the new apologetic, the apologetic now beginning to be urgently necessary if the educated Catholics exposed to the seduction of the newly discovered pagan ideals were to be kept true to their belief. Within a couple of years the Dominican had conquered Florence. The gay, licentious capital had become a convent, said its cynical neighbours.

In no matter had Savonarola showed himself more outspoken and independent than in his condemnation of the Medici -- the founders and patrons of the very monastery he ruled, but, for the prior, the primary source of the city's sins, and the tyrannical oppressors of its liberties. And it was when the revolution of 1494 drove them out and Savonarola began, as the oracle of God, to be the inspiration of the new government of the republic, that there began also the stage in his career that could only end in tragedy. All Italy now -- save only Florence -- was combining to resist the French invader. The pope -- Alexander VI -- was naturally the leader in this combination, for Charles VIII not only menaced the Papal State, but, so it seemed, threatened immediately the pope's hold on the papacy itself. The king was urged on all sides to call a General Council, whose main business would be to depose the pope as a simonist and a man of evil life. And Savonarola, who had before this already begun to denounce in his sermons the pope's heinous sins, now began to preach that it was God's will -- revealed to him, Savonarola -- that Florence should be the French king's ally.

Alexander now summoned him to Rome (July 25, 1495) and when the Dominican managed to evade the summons, the pope forbade him to preach (September 8 and October 16). He even offered to make him a cardinal. [1162] For a while Savonarola was quiet, but after four months of silence he returned to his pulpit and took up again his mission to rebuke the sins of the pope. On May 12, 1497, Alexander excommunicated him. Whereupon the sermons against Alexander took a new turn. "Whoever excommunicates me," said the friar, " excommunicates God." In a series of letters prepared for the princes of Europe, [1163] he invited them to correct the pope's life and to thrust him out, for he was no pope, being elected by simony, and indeed not even believing in God; and the friar repeated the claim that his own mission was divine and that the excommunication was, therefore, void in the sight of God. "If ever I ask absolution from this excommunication," he said, in sermons preached about this time, [1164] " may God cast me into the depths of hell, for I should, I believe, have committed thereby a mortal sin"; and again he declared that those who allowed that the excommunication had any force were heretics.

The illusion that had been the weakness of Savonarola's whole career was working out to the very fullness of its terrible possibilities. For, from the beginning, although his doctrine v. as always orthodox, Savonarola, in the whole of his preaching, gave himself out as a man directly inspired by God to say what he said and to direct the action of others. There must not ever be contradiction, or opposition, to what he proposed or ordered. He recounted in his sermons, as warrant for his assumption, his dreams and his visions, and he foretold in what events God would chastise this disobedient generation. Lorenzo de' Medici was shortly to die, and Innocent VIII also -- which came to pass. The French would come in and overthrow the sinful Medici tyranny; his own mission would last just eight years and he would then die at the stake and his ashes be cast into the Arno. This also came to pass. But the Turks were not converted in ten years, as he also had foretold, nor was Rome taken and sacked and filled with desolation.

This burning conviction of his divine call -- which no man must question -- had been the main force of all Savonarola's public action. It was the main secret of the amazing ascendancy over his own followers, which by 1497 had filled San Marco with a host of new Dominican recruits, [1165] and riveted upon Florence a kind of moral dictatorship, in which the prophet's followers were organised to observe and correct the vices of their neighbours, and children were trained to report the sins of their parents. All the exaggerations in Savonarola's views of human misconduct, and the crazy severity imposed indiscriminately for some years under his influence, bred of course an immense resentment. Under the surface Florence was seething with discontent. The Dominican's want of prudence, his wild, unmeasured denunciations, had been a source of anxiety to his own brethren -- and not merely to the relaxed monasteries of his order -- and his success had been extremely galling to the traditional rivals of his order, the Friars Minor. If ever his ascendancy were shaken, it would go hard with the Prior of San Marco. Long before the time when he was convoking the Christian princes, half the city was watching for the chance to dethrone him. One defeat, and he would have no friend save his immediate disciples. And at Rome the pope knew, now, that when he chose to strike he could, with impunity, make an end of the embarrassing prophet.

In March 1498 the government of Florence -- threatened with an interdict by the pope -- induced Savonarola to desist from preaching. Alexander was not too pleased; they should have given an order, to which the friar ought obediently to have submitted. It was the scandal of his flagrant, rebellious -- and successful - - disobedience which, to the pope's mind, was the real crime. But although the Dominican was now silent, the controversy in Florence still raged, the Franciscans keeping up the attack and the Dominicans replying. Out of this pulpit warfare the final crisis suddenly flared. A Friar Preacher declared himself ready to go through fire to prove, by his survival, that his master was the prophet of God. A Franciscan publicly took his words at their literal value. He too would go through the fire. He would, he knew, be burned, but so would the other, and it was worth a life to expose the impostor. And so, on April 7, 1498, the government arranged the ordeal. An immense crowd gathered to watch. There were disputes about the procedure -- the Franciscans alleging that Savonarola might put a spell upon his champion; the Dominican demanding that he be allowed to carry the Blessed Sacrament as he walked through the flames. Out of this a theological dispute developed, and then came a storm and rain. Finally, to the disappointment of the crowds, the whole affair was put off.

The following day -- Palm Sunday -- the disappointed faction stormed the Dominican priory of San Marco, the authorities intervened, and arrested the prior and his two chief supporters in the community. When they sent the news to the pope, Alexander demanded that the accused should be sent to him for trial. This the republic refused, but they allowed Alexander's demand that the final sentence should be left to him. The prisoners were tortured, and on the admissions thus obtained -- Savonarola, it was said, confessing that he was an impostor -- condemned them. Then the pope sent to Florence as his commissaries Francisco Remolini, a Spanish canonist, who was his own kinsman, and Jerome Torrigiani, the aged and vacillating Master-General of Savonarola's order. Once more -- May 19 -- the prisoners were tortured; once more there were admissions. The final scene took place on May 23, 1498. In the Piazza della Signoria, along with the scaffold, three platforms were erected. At the first Savonarola's fellow religious, the Bishop of Vaison, [1166] degraded the three [1167] from their priestly rank and religious status. Then the papal commissaries declared them proved guilty of schism and heresy -- and announced that the pope, in his mercy, offered them a plenary indulgence. Savonarola bowed his head in sign of acceptance. At the third platform were the civil authorities, to sentence the three to death. They were immediately hanged, their corpses burnt, and the ashes thrown into the Arno.

It was, of course, a terrible retribution for the wild, unmeasured language in which the Dominican had attacked the evil life of the monstrously bad man who then disgraced the chair of St. Peter, and for the endeavours he had made to dislodge him from it. But such were the ideas then, and for centuries yet to come, of the punishment appropriate to acts even less harmful socially than the calling in question of a ruler's right to the position he filled. Nevertheless, to choose the heresy process as the convenient instrument of the destruction of the friars was a scandalous perversion of justice -- it was the case of the Templars and of St. Joan all over again, but with the pope a leading agent in the wickedness.

There was no reaction to follow the death of the Prior of San Marco. A faithful few clung fast to all he had taught them, but the great commercial city continued on its even way, corrupted and contented, as did, for many years yet, the papal curia against whose scandals the great Dominican had witnessed.

The Church, in these opening years of the sixteenth century, is by no means a body devoid of spiritual life. In the seething Renaissance activity, spiritual forces are active, too; the supernatural finds a generous response. Abuses are extensive and no doubt a more potent cause of scandal in their actuality than can be realised by those who only know them in the two dimensions of the literary record -- but reform has definitely begun in more than one place; among the reformers there are serious men, high in authority? and the promise is good.

In Spain, for twenty years, there has been the great Franciscan primate Ximenes; in England St. John Fisher. If, in a monastery of the Austin Friars in Germany, Martin Luther is growing up to be the genius who will draw all the disease and discontent to a single blazing-point of revolt, in another house of the same order in Spain the young religious is maturing who, as St. Thomas of Villanueva, and Primate of Aragon, will atone for the long Borgia oppression of that see. In other centres in Spain other saints too are being formed, who will presently come forth to astound the world by their spiritual achievement, heroes of the authentic Christian type, men of prayer, utterly careless of self-interest or self-comfort (even in religion), wholly devoted to God, infinite in charity as in zeal: St. Peter of Alcantara, who will renew in all its splendour the authentic ideal of the Franciscans; St. Luis Bertrand, who will do as much for the Order of Preachers; St. John of God, who will found a new order of charitable workers; Blessed John of Avila, whose life as an evangelist will put new heart into the parochial clergy of Spain; and the Basque soldier in the service of Spain, now approaching the great moment of his conversion, Inigo Loyola. In England, in these same years, there is growing to maturity the generation of bishops which will presently apostatise, but the generation also of More and of Fisher, of the heroic Carthusians and the Friars Minor of the Observance. The weakest places are France and Germany and Italy. But in Italy there are signs of better things -- other signs besides those of indignation at the continued presence of abuses. In various cities of the north the saints are maturing who, within the next ten years, will found the much-needed new religious orders to face the new problems and needs: St. Jerome Aemilian founding the Somaschi, St. Antony Maria Zaccaria the Barnabites, St. Cajetan of Thiene -- from the very court of Julius II -- the Order of Theatines, whence was to come a whole new episcopate to be the chief executant of the reform. And, associated with this last saint, there has begun, so quietly that its early history is hard to trace, the as yet all but unknown Oratory of Divine Love. It is a brotherhood of priests and laymen, pledged to works of charity, meeting regularly for prayer in common. It began in Genoa in 1497, and now, in 1519, it is at work in Rome, where -- the happiest augury of all -- it has gathered in leading members of the curia of Leo X. In what seems universally agreed is the chief centre of all the mischief, there is set a pledge of better days. With all this, and with Cajetan and Erasmus and More in full active maturity of mind, what prospects might not seem at last to be opening, after the dark days since Sixtus IV?

"Alors se leva Luther." [1168]

LUTHER

In no part of Europe was this flood of Christian life more turbulent than in Germany. Here indeed the waters were stormy, swirling over rocks scarcely hidden, and over deeps that no one suspected. Germany was tormented by its own special political problems: the fact of the hundreds of petty independent sovereigns who divided up the vast territories between the Meuse and the Vistula, and, its necessary consequence, the ceaseless ambitious rivalry of the half-dozen leading princely families to dominate the whole. In the countrysides there was the old social problem of an economy still based on serf labour; [1169] and in the towns the new social problem of a growing urban proletariat. In Germany, as in Italy and in the Low Countries, the new estate of the capitalist was rising rapidly to a place of first importance. [1170] Humanism was in its lusty springtide, a practical Humanism, impatient of old ways, eager -- with some -- to refashion the world by re-educating mankind after the model of the ancients, and in full emancipation from Christian restraints; while -- with others -- Humanism was going the way of Erasmus, planning a Christian revival in which the scandals that everywhere disfigured religious life should be made for ever impossible.

Nowhere, however -- so a practical man might have thought -- were the chances of religious revival more slender. Nowhere, for example, was there such anarchy in the lives of churchmen as in Germany. Here were two worlds of clerics, clearly marked off by a chasm hardly ever to be bridged: the bishops, abbots, prelates and beneficiaries of the innumerable chapters, princes and nobles always -- and the vast horde of the clerical proletariat. If we judged the lives of the generality of all these clerics by what, for hundreds of years now, has been the standard practice of the average cleric, we might feel it impossible to find words too black to describe its disorder. Certainly the situation was worse than in contemporary England or France, and even more dangerous than in Italy because it lacked the Italian levity about sacred things. In Germany all were in deadly earnest: the good men earnest against the wicked indifference of the ecclesiastical rulers, against their greed and their simony; the bad men earnest against the system which held them to obligations they had for years neglected and broken through. As to the German attitude towards the Holy See, the whole nation, for generations now, had been consumed with resentment at what, seemingly, was now almost Rome's sole interest in Germany, its possibilities as a source of revenue for curial dignitaries. And if the German effort to reform the Roman Curia by shaking off its hold on Church revenues and Church appointments had ended long ago, so, too, the papacy had had to abandon, for the time, its long effort to break the monopoly of the German princes over nominations to high ecclesiastical office -- a first and main obstacle to religious reform, and one never finally overcome until the armies of the French Revolution swept away for ever all the last decayed remnants of the old medieval world.

When, from the depths of such a world, Martin Luther in 1517 came forth to address the Church universal, he also brought a new strength to the growing movement of Germany's consciousness of itself as a nation with a unique destiny; to the princes he offered not only the chance of taking to themselves, once and for all, the vast properties of the Church and its many states, but all the opportunity that must come to the State when religion ceases to be universal and supra-national and becomes a local thing; most of all was his appearance appropriate to the condition of German politics in that he brought a new kind of support and propaganda for a theory about the place of the Church in the State that offered advantages to all -- except to the clergy -- and to none more than to the princes. No setting could have been more appropriate for the appearance of the great anarch; nor could any man living have better typified the most serious aspects of the general disorder and decadence of Catholicism at that time than this Austin Friar, professor of theology in a Catholic university, and now about to offer the Church as a solution for its troubles a version of Christian teaching that would empty it of all Christian significance, making man, not God, the real focus of religious activity, divorcing morality from piety, and present conduct from the prospects of future salvation. Luther as a Christian force was to prove sterile; there would not follow upon his activities any betterment of the moral lives of his disciples, any advance in learning, any new peace through social renewal. Here again, the heresiarch is true to the forces that bred him, and to his generation. [1171]

The occasion of the false prophet's appearance in the public life of his time was a scandal that derived directly from Rome and the curia of Leo X, the preaching of a plenary indulgence proclaimed in aid of the fund to rebuild the Roman basilica over St. Peter's tomb. The uproar about indulgences which now, by reason of Luther's act, suddenly filled all central Germany in the winter of 1517, was not due to any one single cause. Luther's fire fell upon a train long laid. With the bishops of Germany, for example, the preaching of Roman indulgences within their jurisdiction had long been a sore subject; more than once, during the previous hundred years, this matter had brought them into conflict with the Holy See. And the particular indulgence which now proved Luther's great opportunity, was one which bishops outside Germany too had opposed, even before the indulgence had been made available to Germany; the primate of Spain, for example, the great reforming Franciscan, Cardinal Ximenes, had forbidden it to be preached there.

Indulgences -- it perhaps needs to be said -- are not a forgiveness of sins, nor have they ever been understood to be such; it was not as though this was claimed for them that they were criticised by these bishops or attacked by Luther. Indulgences are a remission of punishment justly due to sin, punishment to which sinners may remain liable even when the mercy of God has forgiven the sin. According to Catholic teaching such punishment would in part be "worked off" by the sinner's willing performance of good actions that went beyond the goodness to which he was bound. In the indulgence system the Church associated herself officially and solemnly with a man's willingness to make such special and "unobliged" exertions; the Church made these good actions her own, and making over to the forgiven sinner, to supply for his own deficiency, some part of the treasure of the infinite merits of the Passion of our Lord and of the satisfaction made by the saints, [1172] declared him relieved, by the authority divinely committed to her, from some of the punishment due. Indulgences -- remissions only of temporal [1173] punishment due for sin, and never of eternal punishment -- are also "applicable" to the souls in Purgatory; that is to say, they can profit the dead who, preparatory to entering Heaven, are purging the imperfections in which they died. But the Church has only authority to remit guilt and punishment over those of its members who are still alive. Indulgences, therefore, are not applied to the dead by a judicial act of direct absolution from punishment; they are profitable to the dead as an official suffrage on the part of the Church, an intercession in which the Church offers for the dead the treasury of merits just described. Indulgences indeed -- so far as the dead are concerned -- are then, truly, no more than "a solemn form of prayer for the dead." [1174]

Now, although it is the whole point of the system that, by means of it, man profits from the infinite merits of Our Lord and the goodness of his brethren the saints, realising thereby (in the most literal sense) "the communion of saints," man does not so profit without an exertion that is also his own activity; and this exertion, in the nature of things, cannot be any merely material, or purely natural exertion. It must be the act of a man united and reconciled to God by repentance and forgiveness and his own determination to persevere as God's friend; an act informed and enlivened by the supernatural virtue of charity -- whence the condition generally laid down explicitly in grants of plenary indulgences that the good act to the performance of which the indulgence is attached shall be accompanied by a sacramental confession of sins and the receiving of Holy Communion.

That "good act," the work of super-erogation -- to give it its technical name -- varies with the indulgence. It may be the recitation of prescribed prayers, or a pilgrimage, or some act of penitential austerity such as fasting, or it may be -- what since the Council of Trent it has never been -- the giving of a money alms to some specified work of piety.

The Council of Trent, some forty-six years after the Lutheran explosion, [1175] reformed the practical working of the indulgence system. Had one, at least, of the practices then reprobated been abolished a century earlier, Luther would have lacked his great opportunity. For the scandal of the great indulgence of 1517 arose in part from its association with money, though also, in part, from a wrong theory about indulgences held and taught by the priest commissioned to preach that indulgence.

Wittenberg -- the little town in whose newly-founded university [1176] Luther was already, in 1517, a great figure -- lay in the diocese of Brandenburg and in the ecclesiastical province of Magdeburg. The Archbishop of Magdeburg was Albrecht of Hohenzollern, [1177] a young and dissolute prince of the reigning family of Brandenburg. He was, at the same time, Bishop of Halberstadt, and he had also managed to acquire the greatest Church dignity in Germany, the archiepiscopal see of Mainz, which made him not only the titular primate of Germany but one of the seven prince-electors of the empire.

The expenses cf. this last success had, however, been enormous. For his dispensation to hold the see of Mainz while retaining Magdeburg and Halberstadt, Albrecht had had to pay the Roman Curia 10,000 golden ducats, and for the appointment to Mainz another 14,000. For these immense sums [1178] the young archbishop turned to the great banking house of the Fugger. [1179] And when he then had to face the problem how to pay the banker, it was a simple expedient to come to terms with the Holy See about the indulgence for the rebuilding of St. Peter's. Albrecht had, so far, not allowed this to be preached in his jurisdiction. This, now, covered a good third of Germany, [1180] and when the archbishop offered to lift the ban, on condition that he received one half the alms offered -- which half should go to the Fugger in repayment of the money borrowed to settle Albrecht's account with the Roman Curia -- the pope, Leo X, agreed. Presently the new indulgence began to be preached throughout central Germany.

But it was not yet preached in Wittenberg. Here there stood in its way another vested interest, another complication of popular piety and revenues accruing by reason thereof. The ruler in Wittenberg was the Elector of Saxony, Frederick III called the Wise, and when the cavalcade of the indulgence preacher reached the frontiers of his state it found them barred against it. In the castle church at Wittenberg, which was also the university church, there was preserved one of the most famous of all collections of relics. The Elector -- like the Archbishop of Mainz -- was, in fact, a keen collector of relics and the church was a great centre of pilgrimages; for Frederick had secured for the relics rich indulgences, that amounted [1181] up to 127,000 years. For the Elector -- Luther's sovereign -- the new indulgence was simply a rival attraction against which local interests must be strongly protected. However, by the end of October 1517, the rival attraction was in the neighbourhood of Wittenberg, just across the frontier in fact; the indulgence was the burning topic of the hour, and the greatest feast in the Wittenberg calendar was fast approaching, All Saints' Day, the patronal feast of the castle- church, when the pilgrims would come in to the city in their thousands. This church served also, as has been said, as the church of the university; it was here that degrees were conferred and the great university sermons preached. When, therefore, on the eve of the feast, October 31, 1517, Luther, Professor of Theology in the university, nailed to the door of the church a sheet challenging all comers to dispute a series of ninety-five theses [1182] on the subject of indulgences, his routine professorial gesture -- an academic contribution to the morrow's festivities -- summed up and brought to a point, and symbolised, a whole complex of exciting events and interests, local, general, social, political, religious.

There were local circumstances about the preaching of this particular indulgence which might have shocked many at the time, which gave any critic of the system an obvious opportunity, and which certainly shock the Catholic of later days as he looks back upon them. Great indulgences [1183] were so preached -- at that time -- that the affair closely resembled what later times have called a "mission." The actual announcement of the indulgence was preceded by a series of sermons calling sinners to repentance, sermons on the moral evils of the time, on God as the reward of the good and the vindicator of unrepented sin, on hell and heaven, on prayer and the means of persevering in grace. Then came an explanation of the doctrine of indulgences, the details of the indulgence now offered and an invitation to make use of it. What was shocking about the indulgence of 1517 was that upon the preacher's platform, by the side of the great coffer into which the alms were placed, there was also placed the desk where sat the representative of the bank, noting down what went into the chest and the appropriate amount due to the Fugger. And also, the archbishop lent his authority to a theory of the day about indulgences which was false; and the official preacher of the indulgence, a Dominican John Tetzel, published this theory broadcast. If the indulgence was to be gained for one who was dead it was not necessary -- according to this theory -- that the person who gained it should be in a state of grace; [1184] again, it was said that nothing but an offering of money was required to gain the indulgence for the dead; and Tetzel also taught [1185] that indulgences gained by the living for the benefit of the dead were gained infallibly -- that is to say, once the specified indulgenceact was accomplished, the soul of the deceased profited from it to the full, infallibly and immediately. [1186]

Conditions could hardly have been more favourable for such a public onslaught on the indulgence-system as now began. But the famous ninety-five theses were not, by any means, the starting point of Lutheranism. They were little more than a kind of particular practical conclusion to propositions already advanced as true, and already the subject of violent discussion in the narrow world of two minor German universities. And to those fundamental propositions Luther had come, not by any activity of pure speculation, but as one driven to speculate by his own inner conflicts. The private lives of great men have scarcely any place in text books of general history, but exception needs to be made for the Augustinian Friar who now accomplished the revolution of the ages by producing a version of Christianity in which piety was divorced from morality. On that day of the memorable gesture, October 31, 1517, Luther was within eleven days of his thirty- fourth birthday; he had been a professed religious for something more than eleven years, a priest for something more than ten. How he came to enter the monastery, the way in which he lived the monastic life, the whole character and temperament of the man who gave himself to religion, the intellectual formation he had then - - at twenty-one years of age -- achieved, and the quality of that which followed: some knowledge of all these is vital to the understanding of what was now about to begin. For although Luther did not create the conditions [1187] that made possible the dramatic success of his great assault, that assault, like others before it, would have been no more than a great historical incident, had it not been that the rebel, this time, was one of the Titans of history. The question what manner of man the Titan was is all important; and for more than fifty years now a vast new literature has been endeavouring to answer it.

At the time of Luther's birth [1188] his father, Hans Luther, was only a poor copper miner; but long before the son had found his monastic vocation, the father had left poverty behind and was a flourishing mine-owner. Nevertheless, Martin Luther really knew poverty as a child, and hardship and, the greatest hardship of all, an over-severe parental discipline. Nowhere, it is believed, does he ever speak of his mother with affectionate reminiscence. He was sent to various schools, and at one time to the school kept by the Brothers of the Common Life at Eisenach, which gives him a certain kinship with Nicholas of Cusa and with Erasmus too. In 1501 he was entered at the university of Erfurt, his father resolute to make his son a lawyer. Here, for a while, he continued his education in polite letters, reading Ovid and Virgil and Horace, Juvenal and Terence and Plautus, but no Greek. And he now made his first acquaintance with Aristotle, studying the works on logic, the physics and the De Anima. In August 1502, Luther took his bachelor's degree; and then, in preparation for the master's degree, he spent a further two years in philosophical study, ethics now and politics, metaphysics, natural philosophy and general mathematics -- all according to the Via moderna, as might be expected in one of the new universities. Luther has come down to us reputed a good, hard-working student, moody, and something of a musician. In January 1505 he took his M.A. and entered the Law School.

Of Luther's studies in the Corpus Iuris Civilis we know nothing, except that they were to him uncongenial studies. They did not last long however, for in the July of that same year, to the dismay of his family and friends, and despite their strong opposition, Luther became a novice in the Erfurt house of the Austin Friars. It was, perhaps, the rashest act of his whole life, and certainly the most serious. There is not, so far as we know, anywhere, any hint of an inclination in Luther, either to the priesthood or to the monastic life, prior to July 2, 1505, on which day as this young law-scholar of twenty-one was riding back to Erfurt, after a visit to his home, now in Magdeburg, there was a sudden violent thunderstorm, and a bolt falling in a nearby field threw him to the ground. The moody, highly-strung Luther vowed to St. Anne in his terror that if he lived he would become a monk. The Augustinians, at that time, dominated the university of Erfurt. It was natural enough that Luther should offer himself to them, and -- incredible as the thing sounds to modern ears -- just fifteen days after the rash, and certainly invalid vow, they accepted the promising young man as a novice.

Luther, says the sympathetic and experienced religious who is one of the greatest of his biographers, [1189] was not made for the monastic life. He was, indeed, highly-gifted, he was generous, impulsive and his life as a student had been good and orderly and pious. But there was about him a permanent inclination to melancholy; he was fear-ridden, guilt-haunted, a natural depressive. It is the last temperament to find the monastic life congenial, let alone helpful; and what if the motive for embracing that life is the wholly mistaken motive of fear, and fear that is natural and temperamental only? How long would such a subject last in the novitiate of any order to-day? How long would any order be willing to retain him?

Luther entered the novitiate dominated by his recent terrible, psycho-physical experience. His life-long agitation did not cease; the terrors that afflicted him did not disappear; the friar's habit worked no miracle of changing the material fabric of the unfortunate man. The moody, highly-strung student was a moody, highly-strung novice, with the violent alternations of hope and despair, of joy and depression, which characterise the type; and, always, his anxieties about himself were the main activity of his inner life.

One year after his reception the novice took the solemn vows that bound him for life (July 1506); in the autumn following he received the subdiaconate, and, on April 3, 1507, he was ordained priest, nine months after his profession, and less than two years after his first reception as a novice. He then began his theological studies. [1190] They really lasted no longer than eighteen months, for in the autumn of 1508 Luther was sent to Wittenberg, where, only six years before, a university had been founded, to lecture on Aristotle's Ethics, continuing to study theology at the same time. He was, however, given his bachelor's degree in theology in March 1509; and in the autumn of that same year he began himself to lecture in theology, as an assistant to the professor. He thus lectured as a bachelor for twelve months (1509-1510), first at Erfurt and then at Wittenberg. In the winter of 1510-1511 he made his famous visit to Rome, and upon his return he took up once more his Wittenberg appointment. On October 19, 1512, he received his doctor's degree, and was given entire charge of the Wittenberg school of divinity: he was now twenty-nine.

We are approaching the decisive moment of Luther's life. He is about to lecture, as a doctor, not on the text of Peter Lombard in the spirit of the via moderna but, according to his commission and in imitation of his predecessor and fellow-religious -- Johann Staupitz -- upon the text of Holy Scripture. It is not Ockhamist theology that will occupy him now, but more practical matters. Luther had found law uncongenial and philosophy too, and also theology in the technical sense of the term -- sciences, all of them, which call for an activity that is intellectual. Luther, however, is the artist, the poet, the musician; he is the orator, the fascinating lecturer, the man of impulse and creative imagination. He has turned from the repugnant intellectualism, shirked the discipline by which alone man's mind can come to a knowledge of natures and essences, and of reasons why. And, like every other rational and sentient being, he has his difficulties and perplexities, fruit of his rational and sentient nature. Like many another Catholic thinker [1191] who is deaf to theology he is now about to look to a mysticism divorced from theology for the answers he stands in need of. His reading, henceforth, is the text of Holy Scriptures and the writings of the mystics, the one interpreted by the other, and the whole read, studied and understood by the light of the conflicting fires burning within his own breast; they are researches, also, where it is urgent for the student to have his answer quickly. The personal contrast with -- say -- St. Thomas could not be greater.

The way out, it seems to Luther, is through "mysticism", the "mystical" use of Holy Scripture. The amateur theologian -- for so, by any standard, Luther must surely be judged -- is about to use the mystics as a guide to life, and, inevitably, he is about to make a mess of the business. He will not use the only key, the theologian's explanation of the doctrines the mystics express in their own personal and more vivid fashion; and so, with the characteristic first vice of the imprudent man, he precipitates himself into Gerard Groote and the Theologia Germanica, [1192] into Tauler and pseudo-Denis. There will result a mysticism in which the cross has no place, a mysticism ordered to Luther's own most burning need, namely assurance and consolation felt and experienced in the heart; and ultimately -- the inevitable end of any such system -- he will fall victim to the spiritual fallacy called presumption, to the belief and even obsession that "I am called by a special way." It was with such an attention to "my special case" that the great and anxious research began. It is with this that it ends. But now what was at first an anxiety has been discovered to be, in reality, the foundation of God's system to save mankind; Luther's case is the case of all mankind, and the saved all pass through the same set of crises, viz., conviction of sin, temptation to despair, conviction and assurance: "I am saved".

By 1517, when the indulgence crisis arose, Luther's religious position was all but complete. It is gradually worked out in his Wittenberg lectures of the previous five years, lectures on the Psalms, on the Epistle to the Romans and on the Epistle to the Galatians. Before we come to the great principles in which that position is summed up, it needs to be pointed out against what a background of active life they were developed. Always one of the most striking characteristics of Luther is his tireless energy, the way in which he throws himself into a host of simultaneous and often unrelated activities. It was so in these critical last years of his Catholic life. As a student of theology he can never be said to have enjoyed over-much leisure to reflect on what he was learning; as a commentator discovering the true meaning of some of the stiffest books of Holy Scripture he was in no better case. The letter in which Luther himself describes the multiplicity of occupations with which his witless Augustinian superiors allowed this popular figure to burden himself, may be quoted once more. " I really ought to have two secretaries or chancellors. I do hardly anything all day but write letters. . . . I am at the same time preacher to the monastery, have to preach in the refectory, and am even expected to preach daily in the parish church. I am regent of the house of studies and vicar, that is to say prior eleven times over; I have to provide for the delivery of the fish from the Leitzkau pond and to manage the litigation of the Herzberg friars at Torgau; I am lecturing on Paul, compiling lectures on the Psalter, and, as I said before, writing letters most of the time. . . . It is seldom that I have time for the recitation of the Divine Office or to celebrate Mass, and then, too, I have my peculiar temptations from the flesh, the world, and the devil." [1193]

Luther is not, here, writing a statement meant for the critical examination of a hostile court. It is a friendly letter to a friend, in which there is room for the exaggeration that will not deceive and that is not meant to deceive. Luther was, no doubt of it, as active as he was capable, but the groans are not, therefore, all to be taken at their full face-value. Nor need we fasten on the reference to the flesh, and, oversimplifying a very complex business, see in this the key that explains all. Luther was, later on, to coin the phrase Concupiscentia invincibilis and to say Pecca Fortiter, and to marry in despite of his monastic vow, and to speak with the most revolting coarseness of sex life in general and of his own relations with his wife. [1194] Nevertheless, in his life as an Austin Friar, it was not in his body [1195] that the trouble was seated which, at times, all but drove him crazy, nor in his intelligence, but rather in his intensely active imagination. What never ceased to haunt him, seemingly, was the thought of eternal punishment; and not so much the thought that he might in the end lose his soul, as that he was already marked out for hell by God. Here was the subject of the long, often-repeated, discussions with Staupitz, his friend and one-time master and present superior. And it is, once again, a measure of the theological decadence in certain university circles that this professor was not able to dispel the young monk's fears by an exposition of the traditional teaching that no man loses his soul except by his own free deliberate choice, that God is not and cannot be the cause of the sin that merits hell. All Staupitz could do was to remind Luther of the infinite mercy won for man by the merits of the passion of Christ. But to the mind which, unaware of the nature of the problem, was wrestling, unequipped, with the mystery of man's predestination to grace and to glory, these counsels availed little. To one whose mind held the notion of a divine reprobation -- that those who went to hell went there, in ultimate analysis, because God destined them to hell when He created them -- the very thought of the Passion was an additional torture, and Luther has told us how, at times, he could not look upon the crucifix.

Here too, no doubt, is the secret of those terrible scenes, the convulsive panics that seized on him from time to time as a friar: the attempted flight from his first mass; the horror and terror in which he said mass, or walked in procession beside the priest who carried the Blessed Sacrament. [1196] It became the great anxiety and need of Luther's life that he should know that he was among those predestined to be saved, be free from all doubt that he could not lose his soul.

Once again, we must beware of over-simplifying. The genesis of the specifically Lutheran doctrines is, no doubt, not wholly to be sought in this dominant characteristic. But Luther's own needs -- which he came to see as the common problem of all mankind -- went undoubtedly for much, as he studied and put together the lectures on such classic treatises about God's grace as the Epistles of St. Paul to the Romans and to the Galatians. And once he had found his doctrine, if it was as an emancipator of mankind that he published it, it was, at the same time, with his great cry of personal liberation that he gave it to the world.

Luther did not, of course, come to his study of St. Paul with a mind devoid of theological notions. His conception of God for example -- as a Being omnipotent and arbitrary -- he derived from his Ockhamist masters. [1197] And what they stated and discussed as ways through which God might have arranged the work of sanctification and salvation, Luther proposed as the ways God actually chose. " From the moment when Luther learnt Ockham's doctrine, he necessarily lost all definite notion of what the supernatural is, all understanding of the necessity, the essence and the efficaciousness of sanctifying grace and, in a general way, of the supernatural virtues." [1198] Nor could it have been otherwise. The whole of Ockham's influence is the history of the disappearance of certitude; of the end of all grasp of reality, and of clear, distinct thought. And it was from Ockham, also, that Luther derived one of the two main elements of his own peculiar system, the idea, namely, that the whole work of grace and of salvation is something altogether external to man -- in cause and in effect. It is, for Luther, wholly and purely the act of God. Man's action can have no share in it, except in so far as God accepts that action as meritorious. As things are, so Ockham declares, such human acts must be the acts of a personality united to God by supernatural charity, acts of a soul possessed by sanctifying grace; but only as things are. For God could, in His Omnipotence, just as well accept as meritorious acts done by his enemies, the acts of souls devoid of sanctifying grace, the acts of souls given over to unrepented mortal sin. From Ockham the tradition had come down through a succession of masters. Gregory of Rimini has the same teaching, so has Peter d'Ailly, so has Gabriel Biel. [1199] It is not inherently impossible for man -- so they all concur -- to be accepted by God as meriting, even though he does not possess charity. Man could, on the other hand, be God's enemy even though he does possess charity. And he could pass from the state of enmity to friendship without any change in himself -- for the whole basis of man's relations with God is God's arbitrary attitude of acceptance or non-acceptance of his acts.

All this -- said the Ockhamist tradition -- was possible; this could be the way in which all would happen. Luther, meditating the mystery, and his own problem, thought he saw that, if this possible way were indeed the actual way, his problem was solved. He first seized on the notion of sanctification as a thing external to the soul; it resolved the difficulty arising from his position that man, by original sin, was wholly and for ever corrupted in his essence, [1200] incapable therefore for ever of any works really good. How could fallen man -- if this were his state -- do aught towards his sanctification? But, were sanctification something external to man's action, the cloak of the infinite merits of Christ thrown in pity around man's infinite wretchedness, to cover over his truly hopeless state -- did this indeed suffice, then the problem of man's own condition under the cloak would cease to be. Man's own sinfulness, the necessary effect of the poison of original sin working in him, can have no effect upon his eternal destiny once, clad in the robe of Christ's merits, he is accepted by God as justified. No sin, committed by such a man, would give the devil any hold upon him.

The Lutheran theory is not yet complete -- the all-important element is lacking which shall give man assurance, from outside the theory, that it is something more than a theory that seems to solve the terrible problem. But, even so, the logical, practical consequences of the theory are evident. If this doctrine be true, then the whole elaborate fabric of the theory and practice of good works as necessary for salvation is but a sham. Works of penance, in particular, are not only useless but blasphemous; they are acts based on a false theory, they are a standing contradiction to the saving truth. There is no point in prayer as a petition, and the whole sacramental system goes -- except as a sign or gesture affirming belief in God as Saviour. With the sacramental system there must disappear too, the clerical body, as a priesthood; as propagandists and teachers they may yet survive individually, and be organised. The very Church ceases to have any raison d'etre as such.

Not all these consequences were immediately drawn out, either by Luther or by his opponents. The immediate discussion centred around the fundamental principles, and in the twelve months that preceded the appearance of Tetzel and the great indulgence drive, Wittenberg was filled with conflict. There was, for example, the disputation of September 1516, when a pupil of Luther officially defended theses to the effect that man's nature is utterly powerless to do good; there were the lectures on Galatians in which Luther developed his views, and more lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews; there was, above all, the great disputation of September 4, 1517, on ninety-seven theses directed against Scholasticism, when " the bitterness of innumerable priests, monks, preachers and university professors that, for two centuries at least, had been accumulating against the Scholastic philosophy found at last its complete expression." [1201] Luther was carrying all before him; none could compete with him as a speaker, and the publication of the theses against Indulgences, only eight weeks later, is a measure of his success, no less than it is a testimony to his boldness; their publication also served, and it is the real importance of the event, to bring Luther's new version of the Christian dispensation before the whole Christian world. Long before Rome's solemn condemnation of it (June 15, 1520) [1202] Luther's theory was discussed and fought over in every university of Christendom.

And long before that -- within a few months, indeed, of the move against the doctrine of Indulgence -- Luther had found the last vital element for his teaching. How shall a man know whether he is accepted of God, predestined, and not marked for hell? This acceptation is something external to him; justification does not change him; he is not any better, once he has gained it. That he is no better is, indeed, no proof that he is not justified. But how can man know with certainty that he is justified, accepted? The test is simple; the touchstone is his possession of faith. For the just man lives by faith alone -- not by faith which is the assent of the intelligence to God revealing the sacred doctrines, but by faith which is a firm confident belief that God has predestined one to glory as one of the accepted. It is this faith alone, so Luther henceforth held, [1203] which makes man accepted by God. Possession of this faith is the proof that one is accepted. Possessed of this faith man lives. For those who so believe, salvation is certain. And all men who come to attain this belief come to it through a stage of anxious tormenting doubt and temptations to despair. Luther's case is the case of all mankind. The religious reflection of his almost congenital phobia is a stage in his understanding that he is saved. The "dark night" has not issued in any purification of sense, but in an assurance that impurities do not matter, in the certitude that whatever happens one is saved. The great discovery is complete. "Christianity is nothing but a perpetual exercise in feeling that you have no sin, although you committed sin, but that your sins are attached to Christ" -- Luther's own summary of the matter. [1204]

This is not an attempt to sketch even the outline of Protestantism, the religion of the churches that issued from the Reformation [1205] -- still less, of course, is it meant as a critique of Protestants. It is no more than an endeavour to explain Luther's own personal doctrinal invention; [1206] the starting point of his career as a destroyer of Catholicism and as one of the founders of the later Reformed Churches, the source of his strength and confidence and courage. The history of what he accomplished, of the evolution of a new church, of its immediate and willing subordination to the state, of the development of Lutheranism into Protestantism, cannot be separated from the later story of Catholicism, the story of the Catholic revival, of the Council of Trent and of the movement that has been called -- not too happily -- the Counter-Reformation; nowhere does the seamless web of history suffer greater harm than when the story of Luther is separated from that of our own modern age. It must therefore find its place in the concluding volume of this work. But something also needs to be said about Luther as the last of the medievals -- none the less truly a medieval man for being a great heretic.

There has never been any disposition, whether among Luther's critics or his supporters, from the reformer's time down to our own, to deny that he did much more than change people's purely religious beliefs and practices. Never, in fact, has there been a more striking demonstration than the Reformation that religion is the central activity of all human life. There is a lyrical description of Luther's accomplishment in one of the greatest of modern German historians, [1207] that will serve as an example of this view. It will also serve to introduce what still needs to be said in order to explain the monstrosity which Lutheranism seemed to the Catholics of Luther's time. "A new world," says this historian, "has come into being. One of the twin peaks of Christendom has crumbled away. . . . The spiritual power has disappeared. . . . Never before did man see such an overturning of political and juridical ideas. . . . All those ideas from which the State of modern times derives -- autonomy of the State's law, final sovereignty of the lay authority, the State's recognised exclusive hold on public action -- find in the Lutheran reformation their religious foundation and, thereby, their power to spread. The Reformation was not only a renewal of religion: it was a rebirth of the world in every respect."

The final importance of Luther, indeed, did not lie in the new theological ideas he invented, but in the fact that by combining with them existing theologico-social ideas he gave to these last the authority proper to religious belief; they are as fatal to the full natural development of the human personality, as the theological invention was fatal to Christianity itself. The anti- Christian social ideas and ideals of the last two hundred years and more were now presented as Christianity itself, and were presently organised in a new Christian Church, which was the active rival and bitter foe of the traditional Church whose president was the Roman pope. To that new conception of Christianity first of all, and then to that new Church, Luther rallied the greater part of Germany and Scandinavia; in the next generation -- under other reformers of kindred spirit, attached to the same fundamental theological discovery -- Switzerland and Holland and Scotland and England were likewise "reborn," while a powerful attempt was made to secure France also for the new world.

What were the distinguishing principles of this world, what was the* relation to the essence of Lutheranism, and what was the first appeal of the system to the nation among which it was first published?

That appeal was something much more lasting than any implied mere general invitation to monks and nuns and priests to throw over their religious obligations, something much more fundamental than the prospect of unhindered moral licence; to such saturnalia -- and, of course, there followed in Germany an indescribable saturnalia [1208] -- there always succeeds a period of reaction; even the loosest of mankind is in the end too bored to keep it up. Nor was it by publishing broadcast his theological lectures on the Epistles of St. Paul, that Luther roused Germany to his support. He did it by attacking, with new skill, with humour, and new boldness, the pope's hold on Germany as a source of income; he satirised the pope's claim to be the Holy Father of Christendom while presiding over such an establishment as the Roman Curia and Court of those days could be made to seem, and in great part actually was; and he offered the ruling classes of Germany a practical programme that would make them supreme in German life, and that appealed explicitly to the notion that it is Germany's destiny to rule mankind for mankind's greater good and happiness. It was in half a dozen writings put out chiefly in the years 1520 and 1521, that Luther laid the foundation of all that construction which the historian just quoted sees to have been built by later times. In the Sermon on Good Works, for example, the pope is denounced as the real Turk, exploiting the simplicity of Germans and sucking the marrow out of the national life. The Church, Luther explained in another tract -- On the Roman Papacy -- cannot need a visible head, for it is itself an invisible thing. That "power of the keys," possession of which is the basis of the pope's position, is in reality the common possession of all true believers; nor is it at all a power of government, but the assurance which Christians give to one another that their sins are not held against them, and thereby administer to one another the consolation and encouragement that sinners need as they face the fact of the divine moral law which it is beyond man's power to observe. This tract, like almost everything that Luther was now writing, is salted with vigorous, crude invective. But the classic instruments of this first propaganda were three pamphlets which appeared in 1520, the Address to the Nobility of the German Nation, the Babylonian Captivity of the Church and the Liberty of the Christian Man. [1209]

The first of these [1210] sketches the main lines which the needed Reformation ought to follow. Annates are to be abolished and no more money sent out of Germany to Rome; no more foreigners are to be named to German benefices, and all papal jurisdiction in Germany, spiritual or temporal, is to be abolished; pilgrimages to Rome are to be abolished also, along with religious guilds, indulgences, dispensations, holidays that are feasts, and masses for the dead. All believers are priests -- Scripture says so -- and this principle is developed to show that the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the clerical state, are merely human inventions and have no real place in the Christian Church. Excommunication, therefore, is but a meaningless word. Again, since the special institution of ecclesiastical authority has no justification (is, indeed, contrary to Scripture), it is the prince who must preside over the believers. It is the prince who will protect the true interests of the Church, reforming and correcting as is found necessary, and taking over the property held by the usurped authority of the self-styled ecclesiastical power. For centuries this ecclesiastical power, in the person of the popes, has claimed certain rights over the emperors. The truth is that the empire alone is a reality, and the pope ought to surrender to it even Rome itself. If Christendom and the empire are, indeed, one, it is the emperor who is supreme and the imperial power is the heritage of the German race. The noble princes then must regain by force those benefices which the popes have " unjustly " taken to themselves; the monks must free themselves from their vows; the priests must "steal from the pope" their right to marry and live like laymen. Here we can see how Luther, the reformer of abuses in religion, incidentally makes provision for "all those immense, disorderly dreams which, for more than a hundred years, have been troubling the German heart: reform of the Church in head and members in the sense of a return to its spiritual, purely evangelical principle; reform of the empire in the sense of a State which shall be stronger, more organic, and capable, if not of dominating Europe, at least of guaranteeing to Germany full economic and cultural independence." [1211]

The Babylonian Captivity, subject of the second pamphlet named, [1212] is the tyranny of the papacy over the Church of Christ. Its origins lie in the long falsification of Christian doctrine; and Luther sets out, in systematic opposition, his own teaching on the meaning of the Sacraments and their place in a Christian's life. There are but three sacraments in the real sense of the word, Baptism, the Holy Eucharist, and Penance, and their effectiveness is wholly a matter of the faith of the recipient. There is no sacrifice in the second of these sacraments, and the Mass is simple devilish wickedness.

More important, however, than the detail either of the abuses which Luther recommends the nobles to sweep away, or of the traditional doctrines and practices he now repudiates, is the teaching of the third and shortest of these tracts, The Liberty of a Christian Man. [1213] This is an eloquent plea for the central Lutheran doctrine that one thing alone is needed for justification-faith; [1214] that without this faith nothing avails. Luther's first target had been good works done in a Pelagian spirit, done, that is to say, with the idea that the mere human mechanic of the action secures of itself deliverance from sin. No one had had more to say about the spiritual worthlessness of such works than Luther's own contemporary and adversary Cajetan, and what Cajetan had to say was no more than a commonplace with Catholic preachers and writers then as now, and indeed always. [1215] But Luther went far beyond this. Although the just man would do good works -- as a good tree brings forth good fruit [1216] -- there was not, and there could not be, any obligation on the justified believer to do good works. He did good works -- but freely, out of love for his neighbour, or to keep his body subject to his soul; he did them as the natural acts of a soul that was justified. To omit them -- a possibility which Luther, in this part of his theory, did not envisage -- would not have entailed sin: "It is solely by impiety and incredulity of heart that a man becomes guilty, and a slave of sin, deserving condemnation; not by any outward sin or work." [1217] This goes far beyond any mere reaction against such a false theory as that mechanical religious activities are sufficient to reconcile a sinner with God whom he has offended.

Here we touch again what one of Luther's German editors [1218] has called the divorce between piety and morality; for "Sin we must, while we remain here; this life is no dwelling place of justice. The new heavens and earth that shall be the dwelling place of righteousness we yet await, as St. Peter says. It is enough that we confess through the riches of God's glory the Lamb that taketh away the sins of the world; from Him sin will not tear us away, even if thousands and thousands of times a day we fornicate or murder." [1219] Here is a truly revolutionary mischief, and it has its reflection in the new theory which Luther came to put out -- in the name of religion and as a part of Christian teaching -- about the kind of thing the State is, about man's relation to the State and the obedience he owes it; for in this theory there is a divorce between law and morality.

Luther is impatient of the old distinction between the spheres of what is known naturally and what can be known only by a divine revelation, as he is impatient of the careful scholastic delimitation of the spheres of nature and grace. He would, indeed, abolish the philosophical study of natures and causes and ends; Aristotle, because the chief inspiration here of such thinkers as were Christians, was the greatest of all mischiefs, "an accursed, proud, knavish heathen. . . . God sent him as a plague for our sins." [1220] His ethics, and his metaphysics, ought to be everywhere destroyed. [1221] The Christian, for an answer to his questionings about these matters, should go to Sacred Scripture and to Sacred Scripture only. Thither now went Luther. [1222] Like every other Catholic who has committed the blunder of refusing the natural reason its proper place, and its rights within that place, he fell into the most egregious confusion between the natural and the supernatural and so, necessarily, proceeded to a catastrophic misunderstanding of the supernatural. Taking the Bible as a divinely meant source of knowledge about natural reality, and consulting it about that natural thing, the State Luther proceeded to apply what it had to say about the religious law of the ancient Hebrews to the civil affairs of Germany in his own time. He read in St. Paul that "The law is not made for the just man, but for the unjust and the wicked" [1223] and, combining what he thought to be the application of this text with his own theory about man becoming just by faith alone, he henceforth saw the state as made up of two kinds of men: the believers who were just, the good men, subject to no authority but that of the Holy Spirit -- and the unbelieving wicked. It was because of these last that there had to be princes and States and civil government. The good would always remain good, because justified. The wicked would never be anything else but wicked, and they would be in the majority always. Wickedness, in fact, is for Luther supreme in human life, and must be so; it is the very nature of things, mankind having by original sin become the possession of the devil and human nature wholly corrupt. States, then, there must be, not only for the protection of the good against the wicked, but for the conservation of some external moral order amongst the unbelieving wicked upon whom the Holy Spirit has no effect. The State is, in fact, God's agent -- His sole agent -- for the work of ruling mankind and keeping it from growing morally worse; [1224] it is the divinely founded guide of man in morals, and it is divinely authorised to punish man for his infractions of morality as the State proclaims it. If we look closer at this Lutheran State, it closely resembles the state of Marsiglio's ideal, in this at least that power is its very essence. The State is Authority; whatever it decrees is, by the fact, right and must not ever be resisted; and wherever there is power, there is authority. Authority is always right; the fact of punishment is a proof of guilt; and the prince has a duty to be habitually merciless, since his role is that of "God's executioner." The most fitting symbol of his authority is the naked sword: ". . . Christians are rare people on earth. Therefore stern, hard, civil rule is necessary in the world, lest the world become wild, peace vanish, and commerce and common interests be destroyed. . . . No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody." [1225] Here, in all its simplicity, is the theory of the State as essentially a policeman, [1226] with its whole activity concentrated between the courthouse and the gallows; it is a theory that will dominate the political thought of all the Reformers. [1227]

Let it be said that Luther did not work out this theory, which so exalts the State that its subjects must fall below the human level of responsible freedom, merely as so much compliment and flattery to the princes his protectors; any more than he worked it out as believing these princes to be men of personally holy, or even reputable, lives. It is all disinterested; it flows from the new truth; Luther is "sincere." And if the tiny minority of the just, almost lost among the wicked subjects for whom this monstrous power has been divinely devised, suffer from the severity of the prince -- it is always unjust in regard of the just -- they must be content to suffer, and reverently to see in it a manifestation of the just anger of God.

This is a barbarous notion of the State indeed; and what a regression it represents by comparison with the theories of Luther's contemporaries Erasmus and More. Its effect, in practice, must be the same as the effect of Machiavelli, but, in one highly important respect, Luther is more effective by far than the Italian atheist. For Luther is, in his own mind, and in the mind of the century that follows, a religious teacher. He does not so much devise political theories as present Christians with a new notion of their civic obligations as Christians, and present the princes with a new religious conception of their office as rulers. Once Luther saw all this as a main truth of religion, a truth closely related to and in part flowing from the doctrines he held to be central, he riveted it on all his people, as he won them over to the new conception of Christianity.

What will be the nature and office of law, in the Christian State as Luther conceives this? The new doctor will have nothing to do with the traditional Catholic conception of earthly justice as the reflection of -- and man's share in -- the objective eternal order of the Divine Intelligence, an order first communicated to man's intelligence through the natural law. The Lutheran doctrine that Original Sin has wholly corrupted man's nature makes any such sharing an impossibility: man is nothing but sin, enmity towards God and, moreover, his will is not a free will but a will definitely enslaved, and captive to the devil. For such a being, the law in the Divine Intelligence is something too perfect ever to be fulfilled.

The order of justice divinely established is not an objective reality, not an actual equilibrium of actions objectively considered, belonging ad esse rei. [1228] And because it is wholly a matter of divine acceptation, the centre of all morality is the arbitrary will of God directing as it pleases the passive human hand. This notion of the will of God, as no less arbitrary than supreme, is reflected in Luther's ideas about human positive law.

Law is not subject to any consideration of morals or of reason. What it commands cannot be wrong nor unreasonable. Law only needs to be stated to have, immediately, all its power to oblige. As justice is whatever God likes, so law is whatever the prince likes; and, because it is the prince's act as prince, law is always an expression of the divine action upon the world, and so, sacrosanct -- although it remains no more than "a power to command and to compel" [1229] , and cannot ever oblige a man in conscience. It can never be wrong for the prince to command wrongdoing, and to his commands the subject must always render external obedience at any rate. There is -- in this system -- no means by which the human reason can relieve the human subject of his obligations to submit to whatever the State decrees. Ius divinum quod est ex gratia non tollit ius humanum quod est ex lege naturali -- so the great synthesis of St. Thomas had proclaimed. Luther denied that there was such a thing as natural law; there could not exist any human right deriving therefrom. And as for the role, in human affairs, of the divine, Luther roundly stated the very converse of St. Thomas's liberating concept, declaring that "the Gospel does nothing to lighten human law." [1230]

What we are now given, in fact, is a theory of the divine right of the fait accompli in public affairs, and of the duty of Christian man to put up with whatever is ordained for him. What an answer -- and a final one -- in the name of the newly-discovered evangelical Christianity, to the long claim of religion to fix a standard for princely conduct ! The ghosts of the Ghibelline legists must have rejoiced at the triumph of the new servitude, and smiled to see the State freed now from the control of Christian morality in the very name of Christian revelation ! The religious peculiarities of Luther's revolution would, in the course of the centuries, suffer more than a sea change. They would pass, and be accounted of no importance, even to those heirs of Luther who continued, gratefully, to reverence his work and even his personality. But this at least would endure, the notion namely that the State, a lay thing, is exclusively sovereign because it stands alone as an authority representing the social order. As such the State has a moral and religious character and role, rendering needless the Church as a public thing. Here is the Reformation's essential political idea, [1231] the sole positive idea to we that vast transformation any real unity.

Throughout the fifteenth century the demand for the reformation of the Church had, in Germany, gone hand in hand with desire for political change. It was, then, in keeping with the spirit of the time, that the prophet, when ultimately he appeared, should be also something of a political philosopher. Quite apart from the undoubted fact that Luther, brought face to face with the papacy as a force bound to work for his destruction, realised that in the State was the papacy's own born enemy, [1232] there was a kind of inevitability in this development.

The State also could serve -- and could alone serve -- as an agent for the reform of religion. Here is the last element that completes the Lutheran new world, the subjection of religion to the State, the transformation of the State, indeed, into a kind of Church. To understand it we need to recall a distinction which Luther made between the real Church which is invisible (and subject to none but God) and all that organisation which comes into existence from the moment when a score of believers meet for worship, and by the very fact of their meeting, if only for the time of their meeting.

So far, down to these opening years of the sixteenth century, religion, in spite of many defeats and the constant hostility of the princes, had successfully maintained its place as the rightful, ultimate inspiration of the whole social order -- And by religion is meant an institution whose rights and supremacy as an institution were acknowledged by all princes, in all states, the Catholic Church; an independent, sovereign thing, to which all belonged, by which all were effectively ruled. This independence of religion was bound up with the admitted real distinction between the two authorities, the temporal and the spiritual, both of them sovereign over mankind, each in its own domain; and although the conflicts between the two were frequent, even continuous along the frontier where they met, no State ever contested the principle that the Church, within its own sphere, was as truly sovereign as the State itself. In practice this meant that the State could never claim a sovereignty that was absolute; it must always take account of the rights of religion, and avoid action that would trespass on functions considered as indispensable to the Church's spiritual mission. [1233] It is this sovereign independence of religion as a visible public power, this place of the Church in the life of the community, that Luther attacks and, wherever his theories gain a hold, destroys. And he does this by denying the validity of the traditional distinction between the two authorities, and by his new theory that the State is absolute by right divine.

The real Church, for Luther, is an invisible thing and purely spiritual. It is subject to God alone and within it there is no law but only love. True enough, the Church is made up of men and women who are visible, and these come together and perform each his own appointed ritual part. But since all believers are priests, those who officiate are not clergy in the Catholic sense but only a corps of preachers and ministers of sacraments, chosen for convenience's sake to do for all what, in fact, each could do for himself. All believers are equal in their freedom to follow grace as they understand it, all are equal in control of their inner life. There is none who is the spiritual sovereign of his fellows, nor is the whole body a sovereign body. The Church -- as an external organisation -- does not possess authority; it cannot even make laws, still less enforce them. The control needed to keep it in being must come from some other source than the fact that the Church is thus organised; and this control is the business of the prince, part of his general duty to care for morality and good order. The Church -- in this new scheme of things -- really does quit this world, except as an indefinite number of individual believers. It has no existence as such, no authority of its own, no rights, no property. For all these matters it is the State which will now function; the great era of secularisation of Church property and usurpation of Church jurisdiction opens, the State lays hands on the monasteries, for example, and on all that relates to marriage. The State also controls worship and ritual, teaching and preaching; these are but external manifestations of the Spirit. What about heretics? can there be such? Undoubtedly there can be those who openly contradict the articles of faith. Such men are public criminals, and it is the duty of the prince to punish them. As to the standard of orthodoxy -- what is the meaning of the faith -- it is for the prince to say what accords with Scripture and what does not. Who else, indeed, can decide, what other public authority is there but the State which, in virtue of its temporal power, is the temporal guardian of the divine law. Also, it is explained -- this will be readily understood -- that the State does the Church a service in undertaking these cares, for all these charges are material things, attention to which is fatal to the spirit.

So much, then, for the role of the prince as prince. But the prince has also his place in religion as an individual believer. He too is, thereby, a priest with the rest; and as all are priests in the measure of their gifts, the prince -- who has the unique gift, to wit his divine charge of ruling the State -- is most of all a priest, and in all crises and unusual circumstances it is he who will take the lead. He is not, indeed, the head of the Church -- no human being can be that -- but he is its principal member. [1234] As such, yet once again, it is for him to inaugurate needed reforms, and to organise the external appearance of the Church. In practice, the ancient maxim of St. Ambrose that sums up the whole long Christian tradition is wholly reversed, imperator enim intra ecclesiam, non supra ecclesiam est, and the dream of countless Ghibellines and legists is realised at last, "The State is the only legitimate authority the world knows. The State is truly sovereign." [1235]

Below all the forces that make the Reformation a success is the powerful swell of the lay revolt against the cleric; it is wholly victorious wherever the Reformation triumphs, and in those other countries where, for yet another two centuries, the Catholic Church retains its precarious hold as a recognised sovereign power, the lay revolt is greatly heartened by that triumph. This hold of the State on the religious life of man is the most valuable conquest of all, and the last which any of these States will ever relinquish. [1236] The Reformation does bring freedom from the rule of the pope and his bishops and his clergy, from the sovereign spiritual state which the Catholic Church is. But, ultimately, the main freedom it establishes is the freedom of the State to do what it likes with man: and all in the name of God. In place of the Catholic dogmas man must now accept -- wherever the Reformers triumph -- the new reformed dogmas; even the morality of private life will be brought under public control. In his heart man is indeed free to function as priest and prophet and consciously chosen and elected, justified, the friend whom no sin can separate from his Saviour -- and he is free to be faithful in his heart while yet, in obedience to the divinely established prince, going the other way to all appearances. It is the only freedom he does enjoy. Everywhere man is soon grouped in new churches; his religious life is as much regimented as ever; [1237] and in his life as a citizen he is -- unless he be wealthy -- little more than a pawn, whether the sovereign be the absolute Lutheran prince or the absolute Calvinist oligarchy. Of all who benefit from the destruction inaugurated by Luther's explosive thought, it is the prince who benefits most, and most lastingly. "None since the Apostles," said the Reformer, speaking of himself, "has done so much to give the civil authority a conscience; none, whether teacher or writer, theologian or jurist, has spoken so clearly, or in so masterly a fashion." [1238] The brag is characteristic, and not least in the naive innocent simplicity apparently all unconscious that the speaker comes at the end of four hundred years of the most intense discussion of human rights and political theory. And in the very years while Luther's exegesis is thus riveting the absolute State on Protestant Germany as a part of divine revelation, the Dominican Vittoria, in the absolute Spain of Charles V, is freely lecturing on the limitations of princely power, a task to be just as freely continued, a generation later, in that same country, under the absolutist Philip II by the Jesuit Suarez. [1239] In the most unlikely places, and at the most unlikely seasons, the true Church of Christ never ceases to battle for the real independence of the Gospel from every human fetter.

Luther, undoubtedly, scored a great initial victory. Then he was, definitely, checked. But not before that victory had produced an effect that still endures -- still dividing western Europe, and into two kinds of men, [1240] whom for convenience's sake we may call Protestants and Catholics. The story of the fortunes of the Reformation must be told elsewhere, and nowhere will any such impossible task be undertaken as to compare these Protestants and Catholics, in their lives at least. But at the risk of digressing into a much controverted theological matter, something needs to be said of Lutheranism as being the very inversion of Christianity and of this as providing the main source of difference between Protestants and Catholics. The kind of difference this was must be stated, for it explains why henceforth they never really understood each other, and why with Luther all previous Christian history is brought up sharp; it explains how, to Catholics, Luther is most of all a revolutionary, and the new reformed religion not religion at all in the sense that Catholicism is a religion.

Briefly, what Luther did was to make man and not God the centre of those activities to the sum of which we give the term religion -- man's need of God and not God's glory. And the Scriptural paradox was once again fulfilled that he who would save his life must lose it. From the beginning of his own career as a friar at least, the human subject was to Luther of more concern than God -- not as a theory, but practically, that is to say in the order of mystical experience, in the conduct of what is called, in the special technical sense, the spiritual life. Luther's great achievement, from this point of view, was, in effect, the translation of his own, more or less native, " mystical egocentreism" into a foundation dogma of Christian belief.

His first mystical awakening was anxiety about the judicial wrath of the Almighty (as Luther misconceived Almighty God), a practical anxiety how, despite the invincible concupiscence that poisons -- wholly corrupts -- human nature itself and not merely Martin Luther, (again an enormous misconception of the effect of Original Sin) man can escape that wrath. The reformer's first pre- occupation is to work out a theological doctrine of salvation, and in the new scheme of things theological the main purpose of religion is precisely this, that it is the means by which man escapes from the devil. "Saving faith", and not charity, is now the first, principal, and characteristic virtue of the model Christian. And this faith -- an instrument divinely provided, by which man takes hold of the imputed justice of Christ our Saviour -- is not presented as (and it cannot ever be) a real participation in the Divine Life such as is sanctifying grace. Man's life is not thus grafted on to the Divine Life, in the Lutheran scheme of things; it remains a thing apart, and man is forever locked within himself. Man cannot make God the centre of his life, if he cannot believe that his life is actually one with God's life. From all possibility of such a union man is also cut off by his own ineradicable sinfulness, that fatal, inevitable state of corruption, the effect of Original Sin, which not even divine grace can cure. And God being barred out from man's innermost self, who there is ruler and supreme if not man himself?

Of the resulting principle that a man's self is the ultimate standard by which all else must be judged, who better than Luther is the classic example? The exaltation of self bred in his contemporaries by that Renaissance of letters and the arts for which Luther had such bitter words, [1241] is as nothing to the exaltation of self bred by his own new theology. To the spirit of man justified by saving faith, found free as none was ever free before, all external constraint or law is an unendurable wrong. There is posited an essential opposition between the liberty newly revealed in Luther, between the interior life, between the " spirit" -- and all that comes to man from without himself. And so all those things which are in reality links between the inner man and the truth outside him, must henceforth be barriers -- or not realities, except with such reality as the inner man chooses to confer upon them. The Church and the sacraments, the hierarchy, the teaching papacy, the objective doctrine -- these are considered as so many barriers between the inner man and God. Faith and works are in opposition for Luther, the Gospel and the law, the inner spirit and the external authority. From without there is, then, no hope; and once the emotional alternations cease of spiritual terror and spiritual exaltation, or once they are seen for what they are, merely temperamental reactions, acts not wholly human, what remains? The intelligence was long ago expelled by the prophet from the garden of spirituality, with bitter curses indeed, and the most obscene revilings. Faith, true faith, the assent of the intelligence to truth divinely made known, has no place there.

And what when man is through with the tragi-comedy of the interior emotional gymnastic? It is the deepest criticism of Luther's famous theory -- and the explanation of the unending, ever- developing miseries that have come from it, and were bound to come from it -- that it goes against the nature of things, and against nothing more evidently than against the nature of the spiritual. The new religion introduced, or rather established as part of the permanent order of things, a whole series of vital antagonisms to perplex and hinder man already only too tried by his own freely chosen wrong-doing, to fill his soul with still blacker thoughts about the hopeless contradiction and futility of all existence, to set him striving for centuries at the hopeless task of bringing happiness and peace out of a philosophy essentially pessimistic and despairing. It cut him off from all belief in the possibility of external aids, and in the very generation when Christian man needed nothing so evidently as a delivery that was divine, it handed him over to his own corrupt self, endowed now, for the task of self correction, with an innate omniscience and infallibility such as no cleric or pontiff or church had ever devised. [1242]

For the many terrible evils from which Christian life was suffering, Luther brought not a single remedy. He could do no more than exhort and denounce and destroy. There was the problem of clerical worldliness: Luther, heir to the long line of faux mystiques for whom clerical ownership was sinful, abolished the cleric altogether. There was the problem of the scandal caused by rival philosophies and the effect of the rivalry on theology and mysticism: Luther, again the term of a long development, drove out all philosophy, and theology with it. The very purpose of the intelligence is knowledge, to enquire is its essential act: but in the sphere of all but the practical and the concrete and the individual, Luther bade the Christian stifle its promptings as a temptation and a snare; once again Luther is not a pioneer in the solution he offers. There was the problem of the Church itself; how it could best be kept unspotted, despite its contacts with the world: Luther's solution is to abolish the Church.

It is the surrender to despair -- in the name of greater simplicity, which "simplicity" is presented as the road back to primitive truth and the good life; to despair: as though true religion was incompatible with the two great natural necessities, the ownership of material goods and the activity of the speculative intelligence; as though material destitution and contented, uncritical ignorance were conditions sine quibus non for the preservation on earth of the work of that Incarnate Wisdom through Whom the Creator called the earth into being.

All those anti-intellectualist, anti-institutional forces that had plagued and hindered the medieval Church for centuries, whose chronic maleficent activity had, in fact, been the main cause why -- as we are often tempted to say -- so little was done effectively to maintain a generally higher standard of Christian life; all the forces that were the chronic distraction of the medieval papacy, were now stabilised, institutionalised in the new reformed Christian Church. Enthronement of the will as the supreme human faculty; hostility to the activity of the intelligence in spiritual matters and in doctrine; the ideal of a Christian perfection that is independent of sacraments and independent of the authoritative teaching of clerics; of sanctity attainable through one's own self-sufficing spiritual activities; denial of the truth that Christianity, like man, is a social thing; -- all the crude, backwoods, obscurantist theories bred of the degrading pride that comes with chosen ignorance, the pride of men ignorant because unable to be wise except through the wisdom of others, now have their fling. Luther's own special contribution -- over and above the key doctrines which set all this mischief loose -- is the notion of life as radically evil.

When all has been said that can be said in Luther's favour, (and admittedly there is an attractive side to the natural man) [1243] the least harmful of all his titanic public activities was his vast indignation roused by abuses -- and by the sins of others. He gave it full expression and he did so very courageously. But the time needed more than this from one who was to restore it to health and to holiness, to holiness indeed first of all, in order that it might have health.

Endnotes

986: cf. St. Bernard De Consideratione ad Eugenium Papam, Bk. IV, ch. iii [back]

987: A. DUFOURCQ (Vol. VII, pp. 224-335) from whom I borrow the phrase, applies it to the whole period 1447-1527. [back]

988: Except Treviso, which he resigned on receiving Spoleto. No mention is made in all these references to pluralists of the monastic benefices which they also held for some of which cf. the notes in Eubel's great catalogue [back]

989: cf. Map of Italy at the end of the book [back]

990: From the Florentine frontier to the frontier with Ferrara was here only twenty-four miles [back]

991: These Romagna towns are to be the centre around which a great deal of the history of the next forty years will turn (1473-1513). [back]

992: Three weeks afterwards the corpse of Jacopo de' Pazzi was still being dragged round the streets; cf. PASTOR IV, 313. [back]

993: Jan. 8, 1475; cf. PASTOR IV, 321 [back]

994: id. 324 [back]

995: July 28, 1480 [back]

996: December 3 [back]

997: Ferrante [back]

998: Ut valida classis maritima instrueretur sine qua nullus bonus rerum sucessus vix sperari posset. . . . Sixtus IV to the Duke of Milan, April 3, 1483. PASTOR IV, 520. [back]

999: More than any previous pope, except Urban VI, who, in 1378, having lost thewhole Sacred College at a blow, was obliged to create an entire new body. [back]

1000: The four included one Frenchman, one Portuguese two Spaniards [back]

1001: For details about the nationality of the cardinals 1270-1520 cf. Appendix II [back]

1002: Three French, two Spaniards, a Genoese and Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury [back]

1003: For the conclave cf. PASTOR V, 233-9, who thinks it undoubted that Innocent was elected through simony [back]

1004: A son and a daughter, born before Battista Cybo was old enough to receive holy orders, while he was indeed yet in his teens [back]

1005: Quoted CREIGHTON, Book V, ch. V, in fine. Giles, a contemporary, was later the General of his order. Leo X made him a cardinal in 1517 [back]

1006: No less than 45,000 ducats annually [back]

1007: Between 1492 and 1555 there were ten changes of ruler in the papacy; there were two changes in the empire, there were three in France, there were three in England, there was one in Spain. [back]

1008: "The pope's end ", says the English version of Pastor, " was that of a pious Christian [back]

1009: PASTOR V. 385 " So old that he could scarcely speak or walk, his head never still so that he seemed always to be nodding assent," Infessura's Diary, 279 [back]

1010: Vol. V, pp. 378-89 [back]

1011: After Cesare had finished with it, the see was to pass to his cousin Juan, and after his death to yet another cousin Pedro Luis cardinals, both these, of Alexander's creation. [back]

1012: Twelve years of age; marriage celebrated August 16, 1493, PASTOR V, 413 [back]

1013: The prior engagement (? marriage) was broken by a deed dated November 8, 1492 (Tomasini's INFESSURA, editor's note 5, p. 285, citing GRECOROVIUS Lucrezia Borgia doc. no. 7); marriage contract with Sforza signed February 2, 1493 (FERRARA p. 128), the marriage celebrated 12 June the same year [back]

1014: January 27 [back]

1015: i.e. on August 31, 1492 [back]

1016: In 1494, while keeping this see, he was given the see of Ferrara, and the titular Patriarchate of Constantinople [back]

1017: John Morton the second of his line to receive the red hat as Archbishop of Canterbury and to continue as its archbishop [back]

1018: To whom, as a child of eleven, Innocent VIII had given the primatial see of Hungary. He was now fifteen [back]

1019: Bishop of Melfi (1494), Archbishop of Capua (1496), Archbishop of Valencia (1498) [back]

1020: Brother to Alfonso who had abdicated in 1495, and uncle to the deceased king Ferdinand 11, called Ferrantino uncle also, by marriage, to Cesare's brother Jofre. [back]

1021: For all this cf. PASTOR V, 520-1 and CREIGHTON IV, 300 [back]

1022: i.e. Alfonso II, he who had abdicated in 1495 [back]

1023: Though not a priest he was in Holy Orders, a sub-deacon since March 26, 1494 PASTOR V, 417, note + quoting Burchard's Diarium II, 99 [back]

1024: April 5 [back]

1025: cf. PASTOR VI, 104-7 [back]

1026: On July 15, 1500, as Lucrezia's (second) husband Alfonso was returning from the Vatican, he was set upon by bravos in the Piazza before St. Peter's and, though he escaped death, was severely wounded. He was carried in to the palace and nursed there by his wife and his sister Sancia, the wife of Lucrezia's brother Jofre. Rightly or wrongly, Alfonso was convinced that Cesare was the author of the attempt on his life. Little more than a month later, on August 18, the sick man looking from his window saw Cesare walking in the garden below. Alfonso took his bow, and launched an arrow at him. But he missed his aim unfortunately for himself, for Cesare sent his guards and had him killed out of hand. Lucrezia's marriage to the Duke of Ferrara's heir Alfonso d'Este was arranged in September, 1501, the King of France compelling the duke to consent. The marriage took place, with great pomp, in the Vatican on December 30 [back]

1027: Treaty of Granada, November 11, 1500 [back]

1028: June 25, 1501 [back]

1029: cf. PASTOR VI, 128 for Michele [back]

1030: Two of the thirteen created in 1500 were Borgias; a third was the young brother of Cesare's wife. There was also one of the Borgia clan among the nine created in 1503 i.e. Francesco Lloris. Another of the creation of 1503 was the Italian, Adrian de Castello, to whom, as a kind of king's agent in the curia, our own Henry VII had, in 1502, given the see of Hereford. In 1504 Adrian received the much more valuable see of Bath and Wells [back]

1031: The Prince Ch. 7. The most melodramatic story in the Borgia legend is that of Alexander and Cesare being poisoned at a banquet by the viands they had prepared for others. For a survey of the whole circumstances of the pope's last illness and death cf. PASTOR VI, 131-137. [back]

1032: For the slander in Gregorovius (repeated most uncritically strangely enough by CREIGHTON V, 65) cf. PASTOR VI, 199 note. [back]

1033: It is surely significant testimony to the degree in which the most elementary pastoral ideals and principles of Church law had been by now obscured, that such a man as Pius III, universally acclaimed as pious and even holy, could remain for forty-three years Archbishop of Siena and never even receive priestly ordination [back]

1034: Treaty of Blois, October 12. [back]

1035: Siena, Florence, Mantua, Ferrara, Urbino [back]

1036: cf. the quotation in CREIGHTON V, 106, note 2. Erasmus had been present at the entry into Bologna and has recorded his disgust at seeing the Vicar of Christ the central figure in the military display [back]

1037: He died, May 25, 1510 [back]

1038: Where he arrived June 26, 1511. [back]

1039: The future Pope Clement VII (1523-34) [back]

1040: Cardinal Bernadin Carvajal, the president of the rebel council [back]

1041: Which he had had to refuse the news of the archbishop's death being inexact. It was in compensation that the pope made him abbot of Monte Cassino [back]

1042: Ludovico di Canossa [back]

1043: He died January 23,1516 [back]

1044: Articles of peace signed at Viterbo, October 3, 1515, confirmed at Bologna December; for the Concordat cf. infra. pp. 446-50 [back]

1045: PASTOR VIII, 77 [back]

1046: id. ch. iii, Personality and Manner of Life of Leo X [back]

1047: The republic of Siena lay wholly surrounded by the pope's two domains, Florence and the Papal State: cf. map of Italy. [back]

1048: If trial it was [back]

1049: Grimani, the Venetian (the patron of Erasmus), alone dissenting [back]

1050: Equal to a third of the total annual revenue of the papacy. [back]

1051: For the text of this extraordinary document cf. PASTOR Vol. 7, pp. 470-488. There are no fewer than 170 individual bondsmen, each for specified sums, 14 of them bishops, (pledged for 95,000 ducats in all), and also ten cardinals and the ambassadors of England, Spain, Portugal, France, the Emperor and Venice, pledging their sovereigns [back]

1052: The full truth about the Petrucci conspiracy is not yet known. Contemporaries were not wanting who thought the whole thing a plot of the pope's to make money at a crisis where he was badly in need of vast sums. They linked it with the great creation of 31 new cardinals that took place in the closing stages of the tragedy and by means of which Leo X did undoubtedly make large sums. The questions raised are whether there really was a plot to murder the pope, and whether the pope believed in the reality of the plot. Creighton, it seems to me, would answer both questions with a negative. His account and Pastor's need to be carefully read together. Pastor's documentation is better sources are open to him to which Creighton never had access. But Pastor, at times, does not make use of the whole of the source which he and Creighton are using as their main authority. Let the reader compare their accounts of the consistory of June 8, 1517 (CREIGHTON V, pp. 283-9; PASTOR VII, p. 179) and compare Pastor's short extract from the source (VII, pp. 463-4), which gives no indication that it is not the whole of the entry, with the full passage in Creighton's Appendix pp. 316-19. I do not, by any means accept all of Creighton's comments, but the story of the plot, so far as it is known does not convince me that there was a murder plot. There is something as repulsive as it is inexplicable, about the pope's lightheartedness when, Petrucci strangled and the others horribly done to death, having secured the equivalent of more than half a year of his revenues from the other conspirators, he receives them back and restores their rank. The only one not ultimately restored was Adrian of Castello. Here Wolsey his enemy for many years was active. He desired the disgraced man's benefice, the rich see of Bath and Wells, and he secured it. [back]

1053: Final session of the Council (Fifth Lateran) 12 March, execution of Petrucci July 4; Luther publishes his ninety-five theses October 31, of this same year, 1517. [back]

1054: These were a kind of investment, interest being paid on the heavy sums demanded as fees. The 3,000,000 ducats bore an interest-charge of 328,000. cf. PASTOR VIII, 96-7 [back]

1055: An expert canonist, notorious for his avarice and for making money out of indulgences; also for the bad advice he gave the pope that all ways of raising money were lawful to him. For an instance of Leo's scruples, and his disregard of the cardinal's schemes cf. CREIGHTON VI, 211. As for " jubilees and indulgences . . . multiplied to excess . . . [and often] a mere financial jobbery," cf. PASTOR VII, 82 and VIII, 97 (who does not give particulars, however). [back]

1056: DE LAGARDE, Recherches, 90 [back]

1057: Who will now at last, in this new age, be canonised 1582 [back]

1058: But cf. BARRACLOUGH Papal Provisions, 64. "The popes were only men: we must be on our guard against expecting them to be supermen." [back]

1059: Celestine V is canonised not as a pope but as Peter de Murrone. [back]

1060: Gregory X (1271-6), Innocent V (1276), Benedict XI (1303-4), Urban V (1362-70) [back]

1061: cf. Leo X in the General Council of the Lateran (5th): Et cum cardinalis officiumin primis versetur in frequenti Romani Pontificis assistentia. . . statuimus ut omnes cardinales in Romana Curia resideant. Bull Supernae, 5 May, 1514. [back]

1062: All the thirty-four but five, i.e. Gregory X (1271-76), Celestine V (1294), Clement V (1305-14), Urban V (1362-70), Urban VI (1378-89) [back]

1063: Innocent V, 1276 (Peter of Tarentaise, O.P.); John XXI 1276-7 (Peter of Spain); Nicholas IV, 1288-92 (Jerome of Ascoli, O. Min.); Benedict XI, 1303-4 (Nicholas Boccasini, O.P.). [back]

1064: The first pope from the mendicant orders for 170 years. Sixtus IV and the three other, later, Franciscan popes, Julius II, Sixtus V, and Clement XIV,; were from the Conventual branch of the order [back]

1065: Alfonso of Portugal (whom, at the age of nine, Leo made a cardinal), and Ippolito d'Este of Ferrara. In 1530 the cardinal lean de Lorraine was allowed to resign Metz to a nephew of five, and Verdun to another aged nine [back]

1066: For Germany cf. PASTOR VII, 293 and foll. and the sources there quoted; for France IMBART DE LA TOUR op. cit., As for the last point, it is the burden of all Pastor's volumes from 1513 onwards. [back]

1067: But Barraclough's warning needs to be borne in mind. "Disorders in the fourteenth and fifteenth century church cannot be ascribed to any single group of causes, and any attempt to-day to saddle the whole responsibility on the papacy and its administration of benefices and finances is doomed to failure," Papal Provisions, 70. [back]

1068: PASTOR I, 388 note [back]

1069: 'Not renounced by the government until the Lateran Treaties of 1929. [back]

1070: i.e. in administration only. There is no question of a repudiation of the papal authority, or of a change in the age-long belief in its divine origin the whole system rests, indeed, upon the general acceptance of that authority. It is the authority of the pope that has created this novelty and that maintains it in being. [back]

1071: Vol. II [back]

1072: Brief of November 1, 1478 PASTOR IV, 399. [back]

1073: Brief of January 29, 1482 id. [back]

1074: Canonised by Pius IX in 1867 [back]

1075: PASTOR VI, 157 [back]

1076: A legist pure and simple and a layman; lately President of the Parlement de Paris and 52 years of age. In 1527 Clement VII made him a cardinal, in 1530 Legate a Latere and Archbishop of Sens; he died 1535, and at his funeral entered his cathedral for the first time yet another sample of the generality of episcopal careers at this time. [back]

1077: The full text of the bull is in H-L VIII, pt. ii 528-32; HARDOUIN IX, 1826-31, as well as in the Bullarium. DENZINGER no. 740 prints the passage on the relation of the Pope to General Councils [back]

1078: cf. IMBART DE LA TOUR II, 215-27; b. 446-84 for the Concordat [back]

1079: Until St. Pius V began to call a halt [back]

1080: Given more solemn form when read in the General Council of the Lateran, Feb. 16, 1513 [back]

1081: So PASTOR. VIII, note on p. 455. [back]

1082: Jean Charlier, born at Gerson, a hamlet close to Rethel on the Aisne, 14 December 1363; pupil of Pierre d'Ailly, Chancellor of the University of Paris 1395, an Armagnac supporter in the civil war and responsible for the Council of Constance's decree against tyrannicide (the Armagnac leader had been murdered by the Burgundians, and Gerson exiled once the Burgundians were victorious). [back]

1083: Text of the condemnation in DENZINGER, NOS. 471-478. [back]

1084: For this cf. POURRAT II, 410-421. [back]

1085: Not canonised as yet [back]

1086: Whom Professor Taylor somewhat impatiently, but not unreasonably, describes as "fantastic." [back]

1087: 1410-1495. Ordained priest 1432 at Spires; M.A., Heidelberg, 1438, vicar-general to the Archbishop of Mainz, 1460 called to Rome by Pius 11, 1462 had a great name as a preacher, and all through his career in close contact with the Brothers of the Common Life. cf. article in D.H.G.E. VIII (1935), 1429-35, by M. Cappuyns, O.S.B. [back]

1088: "Franc, systematise, et complete." CAPPUYNS, op. cit., c. 1433. [back]

1089: cf. MANDONNET, O.P. D.T.C. VI (1920), col. 907. [back]

1090: All who know PAUL VIGNAUX La Pensee au Moyen Age will realise that what follows could Not have been written but for the last en pages of that masterly book. [back]

1091: Whatever is other than God is good because God has willed that other thing [back]

1092: By the very fact that He it is that wills it, it comes to being well and rightly [back]

1093: Ponit quod caritas non est aliquid creatum in anima, sed est ipse Spiritus Sanctus mentem inhabitans. Summa Theologica, 2a-2ae, q. 23, a 2. [back]

1094: i.e. Peter Lombard. [back]

1095: Natures remain whole [back]

1096: 2nd edition Paris, 1517; 3rd and 4th at Basel, 1518; 5th Venice, 1519; 6th Basel, 1520. [back]

1097: CHAMBERS, 132 [back]

1098: This, says Chambers, is "epoch-making," (p. 143). [back]

1099: For St. Thomas More and his Utopia see, above all, R. W. CHAMBERS Thomas More (London 1935) esp. pp. 125-144, and 256-267: here summarised, not (I hope) unfaithfully. [back]

1100: Though not published until 1532 it circulated in manuscript, cf. the story of Thomas Cromwell recommending Reginald Pole to study it, c. 1530. [back]

1101: For Machiavelli's ideas on religion cf. the Discourses on Livy, Bk. I, ch. XII, and Bk. II, ch. II [back]

1102: For a contemporary description of the disastrous effect of The Prince on English public life cf. Cardinal Pole's Apologia to Charles V (1536) in Quirini's edition of Pole's letters I, 133- 137, quoted in JANELLE, 247; and cf. ib., 246-250, for a picture of Henry VIII as " The Prince." [back]

1103: For which cf. infra, pp. 478-9. [back]

1104: Institutio principis christiani, March 1516: the prince is Erasmus' own sovereign, Charles, Duke of Burgundy, lately (January 1516) become King of Spain and soon to become Emperor. [back]

1105: cf. MESNARD 86-7: Comment comprendre alors cette royaute spirituelle, cette absolue suprematie que cet ecrivain isole, ce moine pauvre et vagabond a neanmoins exercee sur son siecle? L'histoire nous jette comme un defi l'influence la plus considerable qu'homme de lettres ait jamais exercee en Europe, et dont Voltaire meme n'a connu qu'un reflet affaibli. Il faut bien, pour l'expliquer, admettre que cet homme apporte a l'opinion du temps autre chose que critiques et qu'incertitudes, et qu'il y a dans son bagage une oeuvre et une idee." [back]

1106: "Cette conscience active et tourmentee, creatrice d'elans et de savoir." MESNARD 86 [back]

1107: The positive side of Erasmus's teaching is to be found in works nowadays by no means so famous nor so often translated as the Colloquies and the Praise of Folly but which served in his own time as spiritual reading for thousands, e.g. the Enchiridion Militis Christiani (The Christian Soldier's Handbook), the De Contemptu Mundi (On Contempt of Worldliness) and, above all, the De Preparatione ad Mortem (Preparing oneself for Death). The last book had a vogue only equalled by the Imitation of Christ. The criticism of devotional abuses which is never wholly absent from any of these works and how could it be, granted the scale of some of the abuses and the generality of all told in the end, in later times, against them. It is less than doubtful whether, at the moment they were written, and in the generation for which they were written, these denunciations gave the kind of scandal which a modern pious reader might take from them. There were gross superstitions; there was a danger of people thinking that fidelity to certain practices ensured salvation; there were bad priests and bad monks and bad monasteries, and the faithful had to be warned about these dangers. Nothing, perhaps, better illustrates the practice of that very different world than a sermon (reported in Professor Jacob's Essays in the Conciliar Epoch, p. 136) preached to a congregation of schoolboys, pupils of one of the most famous of the schools directed by the Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer in 1460, by the most celebrated Franciscan missionary of the day, John Brugmann, in which he begs the boys, before they make up their minds to become religious, to consult the good Brothers for they know " which monasteries are good and which are bad ". Such sermons would be inconceivable in the post-Reformation years, with the convention operating against public mention of even the possibility of ecclesiastics doing wrong. In an age when saintly men could preach such sermons, and to boys, Erasmus cannot have been the scandal that he was to a later generation. On the place of Erasmus in the history of Catholic Spirituality cf. POURRAT III, 76-90. [back]

1108: MANDONNET, O.P., in D.T.C. VI (1920), col. 907 [back]

1109: Sadolet also [back]

1110: Ib. 911 [back]

1111: For the matters mentioned in this paragraph see the article Erasme by p. GODET in D.T.C. V (1913) the work of a scholar to whom the personality of Erasmus is far from congenial. [back]

1112: For a discussion of those weaknesses in the work of Erasmus which perhaps unfairly have kept him from any great place in Catholic estimation cf. MANDONNET and GODET as quoted; but, the words of M. J. CONGAR, O.P. (CAJETAN, p. 23, note 69) should be carefully noted. " The question of humanist theology and of its opposition to scholastic theology has not yet been dealt with in a way that is wholly satisfactory, despite the work of A. HUMBERT (Les Origines de la theologie moderne, Vol. I, La Renaissance del'antiquite chretienne, Paris 1911) CH. GOERUNG (La theologie d'apres Erasme et Luther, Paris 1913), p. POLMAN (L'element historique dans la controversie religieuse du XVIme siecle, Gembloux 1932." [back]

1113: M. J. CONGAR, O.P., in CAJETAN, p. 21 [back]

1114: To this period belongs his first work, the commentary on the De Ente et Essentia of St. Thomas [back]

1115: Some of his court sermons survive: On the Power of Prayer preached before Alexander VI and On the Origin of Evil, also before the same pope; On the Immortality of the Soul before Julius II. [back]

1116: Cajetan s own words; CAJETAN, p. 9, simul insisteremus [back]

1117: Whence the important treatise De Comparatione authoritatis Papae et Concilii. Rome, 1511. [back]

1118: cf. the address delivered at the 2nd Session of the council, May 17, 1512 also his words to Adrian VI (Dedication of the Commentary on the Tertia Pars of the Summa, 1522 Rome 1903), where the Church is described as turpissimis moribus foedata, bonis spiritualibus destituta, ignorantiae tenebris obsessa, and the wickedness of Catholics is said to be a scandal to the very Turks, the wickedness of priests especially. Five years later came the terrible sack of Rome, in which Cajetan suffered with the rest. "And now we, also, the prelates of the Roman Church, are going through this experience, given over to theft and plunder and captivity, not at the hands of infidels but of Catholics, and this by the most just sentence of God. For we who should have been the salt of the earth, have decayed until we are good for nothing beyond outward ceremonials, and external good fortune. . . . " So he wrote, commenting the text in St. Matthew: "If the salt lose its savour. . . it is good for nothing any more but. . . to be trodden of men." [back]

1119: On July 1, 1517, one of the thirty-one then created. Cajetan's own words of thanks for the great honour say much, in what they do not say, about the ways in which the cardinalate usually came to be given. He thanks the pope and expresses his astonishment that " You called me into the ranks of the Sacred College, not as a favour to the intervention of another, nor in answer to another's petition, and not moved thereto by any benefits I could confer. . . . Of your own spontaneous volition you gave it to me, who did not seek for it, who did not expect it, who had scarcely given it a thought." (Cajetan to Leo X Dedication of the Commentary on the Secunda Secundae; Rome edition, 1895.) This is very like St. John Fisher's account of his own surprising appointment to the see of Rochester, fourteen years before. [back]

1120: Briefs of August 23 and September 11,1518. [back]

1121: M. J. CONGAR, O.P., in CAJETAN, p. 21 [back]

1122: His career did not end with the tragic legation to Germany he took part in the Roman discussions in which Luther's condemnation, the bull Exsurge Domine, was prepared, and it was largely his strength that brought the vacillating Leo X to the decisive act; it was Cajetan again who brought before the conclave of 1522 the name of Adrian of Utrecht; it was Cajetan who in the end brought the timorous Clement VII to his duty of giving judgment in the marriage suit of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon in 1534; Cajetan's standing with his brethren in the college of cardinals was now high indeed; had he lived but a few months more, not Alessandro Farnese but Thomas de Vio might have been pope; but all this is history later than this volume knows it. Cajetan died August 10, 1534. [back]

1123: Prima Pars, 1507; Prima Secundae, 1511; Secunda Secundae, 1517; Tertia Pars, 1522 [back]

1124: MANDONNET, O.P., article Cajetan in D.T.C. II, col. 1313- 1321. [back]

1125: cf. ALLGEIER in CAJETAN p. 414 [back]

1126: 1402-1471. His works (forty-five volumes) have been reprinted in our own time (1896-). [back]

1127: J. MAYER, Cajetan Moraliste, ib. 344, 352 [back]

1128: cf. CAJETAN, 354, which quotes from Erasmus Epist. lib I, fol. 5 of t. III in the Basel edition of 1540. The work so highly praised for its learning and its tone in totum abstinens a personis, a conviciis omnibus temperans, nudis argumentis et auctorum testimoniis rem agens, non minore cura, quam ingenio is Cajetan's De divina institutione pontificatus Romani Pontificis published in 1521 at Rome and reprinted that same year at Milan also and Cologne: Opus Classicum for its subject so Hurter and of which a critical edition was published by Fr. Lauchert at Munster in 1925 [back]

1129: Who was, also, a friend and disciple of Erasmus; cf. MESNARD, 455 [back]

1130: MAYER makes an interesting claim for Cajetan as a pioneer. " Je ne crois pas exagerer en appelant Cajetan le precurseur de la psychologie morale moderne et de la reforme du code penal." Cajetan Moraliste in CAJETAN, p. 351 [back]

1131: Who shall say the difference made to history by St. Ignatius Loyola's decision that the Jesuits should be trained in the theology of St. Thomas? [back]

1132: cf. supra, p. 421 [back]

1133: None was better placed than Cajetan to appreciate this aspect of the council's activity and the role of Leo X. The decree Pastor Aeternus so he tells the pope, is a fruit of the immense power of the papacy for good, and all will profit from it. Long experience had shown what serious disputes, dangerous to the Church, arose from the action of those who wickedly and arrogantly set the authority of the General Council above that of the pope. These dissensions experience also showed drew nourishment and support from the Pragmatic Sanction which, indeed, was a kind of perpetual schism. But Leo X had done away with the act of Bourges, and by abolishing the Pragmatic Sanction he had restored to the Apostolic See the fullness of its right: Pragmatica Sanctione extincta integrum Sedi Apostolicae ius suum restituisti (Cajetan to Leo X, Dedication of Commentary on Secunda Secundae, 1517; Rome, edition of 1895). [back]

1134: Bull Apostolici Regiminis, Session VIII, December 19, 1513; text in SCHROEDER 639-1; translation ib. 487-8; DENZINGER, no. 738. Schroeder gives extracts only from these lengthy bulls; his English version (often only a good paraphrase) needs to be checked. [back]

1135: Inter Solicitudines, May 4, 1515, Session X; text in SCHROEDER, 644, translation ib., 504 [back]

1136: Supernae Maiestatis Praesidio, December 19, 1516, Session XI; ib. 645 for text, 505 for translation [back]

1137: May 5, 1515, Session IX; text in SCHROEDER, 631-9; translation ib., 488-98 [back]

1138: Discussion of the admitted inability of the popes to secure obedience to their disciplinary laws must take account of the fact that such ineffectiveness was characteristic of medieval life a time when the fact of legislation is far from being a proof of effective control, or that what the law intends was actually realised. Sir William Ashley's remark about the difficulties which beset the government of England in the fourteenth century may be quoted, as one of many similar judgments, that apply generally to medieval government. " For the parliamentary movement of the fourteenth century was premature: the increase in the quantity of legislation was certainly not accompanied by an equal increase in the control of local by central authorities." (Economic History and Theory, Pt. II, p. 9 edition of 1912). cf. also Dom Schmitz: "Or, l'impuissance de l'autorite, quelle qu'elle soit, est un fait general au Moyen Age," art. Benedictin (Ordre) in D.H.G.E. VII, c. 1109. [back]

1139: Regimini Universalis Ecclesiae, May 4, 1515; text in SCHROEDER, 641-4; translation ib., 500-3. [back]

1140: Dum intra mentis arcana, Session XI; text in SCHROEDER, 646- 9; translation ib., 506-9 [back]

1141: Aegidius Canisius (i.e. Giles of Viterbo). [back]

1142: Cajetan, Master-General of the Dominicans, and at the heart of the struggle, says this explicitly: Tu tamen solus, Dedication to Leo X, etc., 1517, already quoted [back]

1143: HOLWECK [back]

1144: Franciscans 48 (7 canonised), Dominicans 31 (3 canonised), Augustinians 17 (3 canonised), Carmelites 12, Servites 7. Whence came the " non-friar " holy persons? Four from the older orders of the days before the friars; 13 belong to new orders founded since the close of the thirteenth century 6 are from the secular clergy; and there are 12 layfolk pure and simple (7 men and 5 women) a group which includes St. Thomas More and St., Joan of Arc [back]

1145: The personnel of the Council was almost entirely Italian, and Italian bishops were attacking Italian religious, It is, then, interesting to note that of these 76 as many as 59 are Italians. This preponderance of Italians in the catalogue is characteristic of the saints who have lived since the close of the thirteenth century. For example, of the 150 personages already noticed who " flourished " between 1378 and 1521, 104 were Italians; and of the 130 who " flourished " between 1274 and 1378 (the first half of the period covered by this book) 97 were Italians. On the other hand in the central period of the Middle Ages (1049-1274) this was not the case. For this period I have at hand only the figures of those who were canonised. The total of these is 191 and the Italians number only 60. [back]

1146: Sess, X May 4, 1515; for text cf. SCHROEDER 639-41, translation ib. 498-500. [back]

1147: Born 1389 [back]

1148: TAWNEY, p. 25 [back]

1149: TAWNEY, 44. " Popes regularly employed the international banking houses of the day, with a singular indifference, as was frequently complained, to the morality of their business methods, took them under their special protection, and sometimes enforced the payment of debts by the threat of excommunication." [back]

1150: GUTKIND, 177 [back]

1151: ib., 178, note 1, quoting Letter no. 8 of the Grunsweig edition Piero de' Medici and Partners to the Cardinal of York, dated 5 December 1448, from Bruges (!) via London. [back]

1152: For an early example in the time of Boniface IX (1389-1404) that caused much scandal cf. supra. pp. 258-9. [back]

1153: MESNARD, p. 11. [back]

1154: For all this see DUFOURCQ VII, 274 and foll. The quotation is GILLET, 153. [back]

1155: GASQUET, Eve of the Reformation, Ch. IX, gives an account of some English specimens of this literature. [back]

1156: Of these " endowed pulpits " the best known, perhaps, are the Lady Margaret preacherships, founded in England by the mother of Henry VII, under the inspiration of her director St. John Fisher. [back]

1157: PASTOR VIII, 178-9. [back]

1158: PASTOR VIII, 178-9 [back]

1159: Ib., 179-82, quoting the Milanese, G. A. Prato, the Florentine, B. Cerretani, the Roman jurist, M. Salomoni and the Sienese, Tizio. [back]

1160: cf. also Cajetan, already quoted supra p. 474 n. 4 [back]

1161: For the latest word cf. M. M. GORCE, O.P., in D.T.C. XIV art. Savonarole (1939), and compare this with the critical study of F. VERNET in D.A.F.C. t. IV. [back]

1162: So VERNET, as cited, c. 1224 [back]

1163: To the emperor and to the kings of France, Spain, England and Hungary [back]

1164: 2 February 11 and 18, 1498. [back]

1165: Two hundred in all. [back]

1166: Benedict Paganozi, S.T.M. (bishop from 1485-1522) [back]

1167: Who had, that morning, been allowed to receive Holy Communion [back]

1168: DUFOURCQ VII, 316 [back]

1169: Since 1476 hardly a decade had gone by without a revolt among the peasants; TAWNEY, 81. Their condition was by no means so promising as in England, where that peculiarly Christian institution the English common law had, for generations now, been steadily abolishing serfdom. "But, while in England the customary tenant was shaking off the onerous obligations of villeinage, and appealing, not without success, to the royal courts to protect his title, his brother in south Germany, where serfdom was to last till the middle of the nineteenth century, found corvees redoubled, money-payments increased, and common rights curtailed, for the benefit of an impoverished noblesse, which saw in the exploitation of the peasant the only means of maintaining its social position in face of the rapidly growing wealth of the bourgeoisie, and which seized on the now fashionable Roman law as an instrument to give legal sanction to its harshest exactions "; the last italics are not in the original. [back]

1170: TAWNEY notes how Germany, in the generation which saw the Reformation begin, was already the centre of a "swift rise of combinations controlling output and prices by the power of massed capital." p. 87. [back]

1171: "The whole age is crying out that the rot is too universal and too deeply seated for it to be possible to root it out." Luther " codifies " this tendency, whence in part his success; so PAQUIER, art. Luther in D.T.C. IX (1926), c. 1217 [back]

1172: That is to say, some part of what in the sight of God had accrued from the generous goodness of the saints' response to God's grace the saints habitually, in their service of God, going far beyond what God strictly demands of them. [back]

1173: "Temporal" punishment is punishment that will have an end, either in this world or in the world to come. [back]

1174: PASTOR VII, 335. [back]

1175: Session V, June 17, 1546, Reformation Decree, cap. 2 (at the end); Session XXV, Dec. 3 and 4, 1563: DENZINGER (no. 989) merely gives the dogmatic statement from the second of these. [back]

1176: Population 2-3,000; the university was founded in 1502 the last but one to be founded before the Reformation by the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise (1486-1525), Luther's future protector. It was the first university founded without a papal charter [back]

1177: Appointed to Magdeburg and to Halberstadt Dec. 2, 1513, with a dispensation because below the required age: he was in his twenty-fourth year only. He was appointed to Mainz nine months later, Aug. 18, 1514, and on March 24, 1518 Leo X created him cardinal. (EUBEL III p. 232.) Later, that same year, Leo offered to make him legate for life for Germany a kind of vice-pope if he would vote for the pope's candidate as emperor (cf. supra, p. 433). The two sees of Magdeburg and Halberstadt remained from this time a kind of appanage in the house of Brandenburg; Albrecht in 1523 giving place to his cousin John Albrecht (aged twenty- three and merely a tonsured cleric), and he to Frederick in 1552 (subdeacon only, who died before consecration), and Frederick in 1553 to Sigismund, aged fifteen. We are now nearly forty years past the appearance of Luther, and Trent is half over. Eubel adds after the last entry Archiepiscopatus mox cessit. Sigismund, in fact, went over to Protestantism in 1561. [back]

1178: It is notoriously impossible to give anything like exact equivalents of the purchasing power of money so far back: perhaps 500,000 pounds would not be far out [back]

1179: cf. TAWNEY, p. 79. " The Fuggers, thanks to judicious loans to Maximilian, had acquired enormous concessions of mineral property, farmed a large part of the receipts drawn by the Spanish Crown from its estates, held silver and quicksilver mines in Spain, and controlled banking and commercial businesses in Italy, and above all, at Antwerp. They advanced the money which made Albrecht of Brandenburg archbishop of Mainz; repaid themselves by sending their agent to accompany Tetzel on his campaign to raise money by indulgences and taking half the proceeds provided the funds with which Charles V bought the imperial crown, after an election conducted with the publicity of an auction and the morals of a gambling hell; browbeat him, when the debt was not paid, in the tone of a pawnbroker rating a necessitous client; and found the money with which Charles raised troops to fight the Protestants in 1552. The head of the firm built a church and endowed an almshouse for the aged poor in his native town of Augsburg. He died in the odour of sanctity, a good Catholic and a Count of the Empire, having seen his firm pay 54 per cent for the preceding sixteen years." [back]

1180: cf. Map of the Empire [back]

1181: So GRISAR p. 91 [back]

1182: For their text cf. WACE AND BUCHHEIM, also BETTENSON, 260- 268. KIDD prints, besides the Latin text of the theses, extracts from the Archbishop's instructions to the sub-commissaries who were to preach the indulgence, from Tetzel's instructions to the parish priests and from a specimen sermon written by Tetzel for the parish priests to preach; also Luther's letter of Oct. 31 to the Archbishop of Mainz, and extracts from his sermon on Indulgences and Grace preached that same day. [back]

1183: For all this cf. PASTOR VII, 333-343; and cf. BETTENSON 257- 60, for the instructions of the Archbishop of Mainz to the indulgence preachers. [back]

1184: GRISAR, 92 and PASTOR VII, 335 quoting PAULUS, Die Deutschen Dominikaner im Kampfe gegen Luther 1518-1563 (1903), p. 294. It also must be noted that the official instructions about this indulgence expressly stated that from the poor an alms was not expected their prayers would suffice. [back]

1185: PASTOR ib., 349 quoting PAULUS ib. [back]

1186: "There is no doubt that his doctrine was virtually that of the drastic proverb 'As soon as the money in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory's fire springs'," PASTOR VII, 349 and GRISAR, 92. Pastor notes that there is no warrant for such a theory in the bull conceding the indulgences, and that contemporary theologians criticised bitterly the exaggerations of popular preachers on this subject. The difference between such popular preaching and the official teaching of the Church is yet another instance showing to what an extent Catholic life was by this time, " out of hand ". As for the phrase quoted by Pastor, it actually figures as the twenty-seventh of Luther's theses. [back]

1187: cf. TAWNEY, p. 66. " The religious revolution of the age came on a world heaving with the vastest economic crisis that Europe had experienced since the fall of Rome." [back]

1188: November 11-12, 1483, at Eisleben in Saxony. [back]

1189: HARTMANN GRISAR, S.J., op. cit., p. 39: this section of the chapter is largely based on pp. 112 [back]

1190: Few things, it seems to me, more powerfully suggest the world of difference between the now and the then of ecclesiastical life than these details of Luther's career. To-day there would be between his reception and sacerdotal ordination two years of a novitiate, three years study of philosophy and four years of theology [back]

1191: " Thinker " is hardly the word to describe Luther. He is of another type altogether. "I have a ready pen " he says himself "and a good memory. I do not express my thought; it flows " (quoted DE LAGRADE, Recherches p. 95 from ENDERS, Briefwechsel. II, 320). Tawney's comments on Luther as a social philosopher (op. cit., 88) have still wider application. " Luther's utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine. . . impetuous but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness." The question Tawney asks (p. 99) is final. " Is emotion really an adequate substitute for reason, and rhetoric for law? " [back]

1192: A delight to Luther, who called it a golden book and said he owed more to it than to any other book after the Bible and St. Augustine, because " of its complete indifference to speculative theology," GILSON, Reason and Revelation, p. 94: the same writer's comment is well worth repeating, " If the New Devotion [the Devotio Moderna] can be truly considered as having, if not caused, at least occasioned the Lutheran spirituality on the one hand, and the Christian humanism of Erasmus on the other. . . " ib. For a theologian's judgment that the work is orthodox and that Luther, publishing it, tampered with the text cf. PAQUIER, Luther in D.T.C. IX, 1259-74. [back]

1193: GRISAR, p. 62: the letter, dated April 15, 1516, is addressed to his friend John Lang, prior of the Augustinian house at Erfurt [back]

1194: " Il a ete le Rabelais de l'Allemagne." PAQUIER, art. Luther in D.T.C., IX, 1170. [back]

1195: For this cf. MARITAIN in Three Reformers, p. 8-9; and GRISAR, op. cit., 62, 259, 290, 294, 356-8, 470, to the effect that Luther was never a drunkard nor an immoral man. [back]

1196: GRISAR, 63. [back]

1197: Gabriel Biel's lectures on Peter Lombard had recently (1501) been printed for the first time. It was " the great arsenal whence Luther drew his theological knowledge"; PAQUIER, art. Luther in D.T.C., IX, C. 1108. [back]

1198: DENIFLE PAQUIER III, 202 [back]

1199: cf. Vignaux's study Justification et Predestination au 14me siecle, Paris, 1934 [back]

1200: Luther's theory that Original Sin is a radical corruption of human nature is the basis of all his theology, the source from which all that is destructive in Lutheranism derives (cf. PAQUIER, Luther in D.T.C. IX, 1209 and following,) the theory of "justification by faith alone" provides a way of escape from the abyss (ib. 1221); the theory of the enslaved human will is the crown of this last. Whence did Luther gain his theory of Original Sin? Here we approach the delicate and much discussed question of his study of St. Augustine, and of the line of theologians who professed to be the saint's theological offspring. From about 1510, Luther is more and more under the influence of these " Augustinisers " to call them Augustinians is to concede the point at issue. It is from Luther's study of them lectures non dirigees ou mal dirigees that, for PAQUIER, ib. D.T.C., 1190 (very valuable on all this), the Lutheran theory of justification emerges. The subject is still obscure. [back]

1201: GILSON, Reason and Revelation, 93. [back]

1202: DENZINGER, nos. 741-781, prints the Errores condemned in that bull, Exsurge Domine [back]

1203: From the end of 1518. GRISAR, 108 [back]

1204: Luther's Lectures on Isaias (liii, 5) in Opera Exegetica Latina XXIII, (1861) p. 142; Weimar edition, (1902) XXV, 331, 7- 16. Luther, speaking of the hearer's personal sins says: "Dices enim peccata mea non sunt mea, quia non sunt in me, sed sunt aliena, Christi videlicet, non ergo me laedere poterunt. . . ." Then, "Non autem sum frustra in hoc loco verbosus, scio, quantum mihi profuerit. Neque est Christianismus aliud quam perpetuum huius loci exercitium, nempe sentire te non habere peccatum, quamvis peccaris, sed peccata tua in Christo haerere, qui est salvator in aeternum a peccato, morte et inferno, secundum illud Agnus Dei qui tollit peccata mundi." [back]

1205: M. de Lagarde's words are timely, " La Reforme ne se definit pas, elle est diverse comme l'erreur. Dieu nous garde donc de toute formule definitive". Recherches p. 461 [back]

1206: Nor is any picture offered of Luther's character as it developed; we are here concerned only with the young friar thirty- four to thirty-seven years of age, his faith indeed already sapped but his character still largely supported by the Catholic discipline and habits. [back]

1207: SOHM, who is not a Catholic; quoted in DE LAGARDE, ib. 63-4. The italics are not in the original text [back]

1208: cf. Maritain's note on the heyday of the Lutheran libido in Three Reformers, pp. 183-6 [back]

1209: Translated, along with the ninety-five theses against indulgences, in First Principles of the Reformation, edited by Henry Wace, D.D., and C. A. Buchheim, Ph.D., London, 1883, for extracts from the first two cf. BETTENSON 269-276, 276-279 [back]

1210: WACE, op. cit., pp. 17-92. It is addressed to the nobles "in case it may please God to help His Church by means of the laity, inasmuch as the clergy whom this task rather befits, have become quite careless " so Luther (in WACE, 17 [back]

1211: MESNARD, 190-191 [back]

1212: WACE, op. cit., pp. 141-245 [back]

1213: WACE, op. cit., pp. 95-137 [back]

1214: i.e. in the Lutheran sense of confidence that one's sins are not held against one thanks to the imputation of the merits of Christ [back]

1215: On the other hand the doctors of the Ockhamist school Ockham himself Durandus and Gabriel Biel, for example so exaggerated the power of good works as to obscure the role of grace: so POHLE, Justification, in Catholic Encyclopaedia VIII (1910) 573-8. It was this school which, to Luther, was Catholic doctrine, and he was now in full reaction against some of its most characteristic doctrines while others provided him with the very foundations of his new system. It is interesting to note how St. Thomas, in the article where he teaches the very opposite to Luther's first principle that grace is something wholly external to man's soul teaches also in dealing with an objection to what he is establishing the complete gratuitousness of the gift of grace. Man is justified, says St. Thomas, by being created according to grace: ". . . men are created according to grace, that is to say they are constituted in a new being from being nothing, i.e. not from their merits. . . " (Summa Theologica 1-2, 110,2 ad. 3.) [back]

1216: Although, for Luther, man is wholly corrupt and incapable of any really good action [back]

1217: Luther, in WACE, op. cit., 107. [back]

1218: Paul Joachimsen in his introduction (p. xv) to Vol. VI of Luther's Ausgewahlte Werke (ed. Borcherdt, Munich, 1923) quoted MESNARD, p. 184. [back]

1219: Luther to Melanchthon, Aug. 1, 1521, ENDERS, Luther's Briefwechsel III, 208; for which cf. MARITAIN, op. cit., 204 and foll. [back]

1220: To the Nobility of Germany in WACE, op. cit., 78-9. [back]

1221: Ib., 78. Luther continues: " My friend, I know of what I speak. I know Aristotle as well as you or men like you. I have read him with more understanding than St. Thomas or Duns Scotus; which I may say without arrogance, and can prove if need be." Ib., 79. [back]

1222: D'Entreves' remark is worth much reflection: " The Reformation, it is said brings to fulfilment the work of Nominalism, in utterly destroying the hierarchical conception of the world, and supplanting reason by will as the foundation of ethics. Hence its insistence upon Scripture, the revealed law of God, as the sole rule of human action; hence its distrust of the whole mass of rational arguments embodied in the law of nature." op. cit., 94-5. As the " disillusioned" Nominalist theologian of the fourteenth century, Nicholas of Autrecourt, say, counselled reliance on Faith (i.e. the teaching of the Church) alone as the one source of certitude about the sole rule of human action, so the Reformer of the sixteenth century counselled reliance on Sacred Scripture only. [back]

1223: I Tim i.9. [back]

1224: Kulturstaat [back]

1225: TAWNEY, p. 101. The words quoted are Luther's, in Von Kaufhandlung und Wucher, 1524, (Vol. XV, p. 302, of the Weimar edition of Luther's works). [back]

1226: Obrigkeitstaat [back]

1227: Dr LAGARDE, op. cit., p. 222. This author says, truly, that the surest way to distort history is through the desire to " annex ' it to the struggles of our own time. With this warning before me, I cannot, however, resist quoting from MESNARD, op. cit., (p. 235): " Les gendarmes ou les dragons de l'Obrigkeitstaat charges de persuader aux sujets la superiorite absolue des fins du Kulturstaat telle est la conclusion normale de la conception lutherienne." [back]

1228: " Magis pendet ab imputatione Dei " says Luther, commenting the Epistle to the Romans "quam ab esse rei "; in DE LAGARDE, ib. 161; cf., also ib., 165. [back]

1229: DE LAGARDE, op. cit., 185 [back]

1230: " Das Evangelion nichts widder die weltliche Recht leret": quoted DE LAGARDE ib., 186, note 3. [back]

1231: DE LAGARDE, op. cit., 272 also MESNARD, 181. The sole constructive unity the Reformation brings is a political idea, a new conception of the State [back]

1232: "Antithese vivante says DE LAGARDE, ib. 93 [back]

1233: DE LAGARDE, ib. 278. [back]

1234: Membrum praecipuum the phrase is Melanchthon's. DE LAGARDE, ib. 342, quoting Corpus Reformatorum III, 244-251. [back]

1235: SOHM, Kirchenrecht I, 542, quoted DE LAGARDE, ib. 304 [back]

1236: cf. DE LAGARDE, ib. 460. [back]

1237: M. de Lagarde notes the paradox that the new subjection of Christian man to his fellows derives from the new doctrine of Original Sin. "The reformers, humbling themselves a l'exces before God, freely attribute to God their own views, and next bow down before these in an ecstasy of reverence as though they were an emanation of Divinity." So, for Luther and the rest, they may very well seem to be. Actually " What is now standing up in opposition to the papacy is no longer the Bible, but Luther, Zwingli, Calvin all three equally and most intimately convinced of the eternal truth of their conflicting doctrines "; while " the Protestants of the sixteenth century found themselves in the end bent under a yoke of doctrinal authority that was no less external, no less absolute, and no less human than the yoke they had cast off." op. cit., 398, 400, 401. [back]

1238: DE LAGARDE, ib., 196, quoting Von Kriege wider die Turken (1529); Weimar edition Vol. XXX, p. 109 [back]

1239: cf. MESNARD, op. cit., Francois de Vittoria et la liquidation de l'imperialisme, pp. 454-472, and Francois Suarez: la Souverainte nationale dans l'Ordre internationale pp. 617-662 [back]

1240: About the reality of the difference cf. Canon Simpson in HASTINGS, Ency. of Religion and Ethics, Vol. III, p. 619 (1914) article on Justification. " The distinction [between the Catholic and Lutheran views] is not merely a matter of terms, but has an important bearing upon the Christian character. The provision of aids, however powerful, for the attainment of justification must have an entirely different effect upon the daily life of the believer from the assurance of a reconciliation already freely won. [back]

1241: The evidence here is overwhelming and no one denies it. MESNARD, op. cit., 88 sums it up " Here, in the wake of an Austin Friar, a revolutionary Christianity is rising which reprobates reason as possessed by the devil, condemns without chance of appeal the whole culture of antiquity, and in place of the Christian philosophy, sets the image of a God who is jealous and arbitrary. It now becomes a necessity to defend culture and the Renaissance humanism against the radicalism of the Reformers." [back]

1242: On all this cf. MARITAIN, op. cit., especially 34-50 [back]

1243: For which cf. GRISAR, Ch. XVI, Personal and Domestic Affairs 1 Engaging Characteristics [back]