3 1822 01152 8056 ill lifornia onal lity il I HI II llifl II llllll II VRY : I SAJ. ■ "\ UNI\ * y "^ Cm Cporfjs of Ctmrct) ^ustorp (EtitteD by * To!. YIL BX 1325 V3 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO 3 1822 01152 8056 THE AGE OF THE RENASCENCE AN OUTLINE SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF THE PAPACY FROM THE RETURN FROM AVIGNON TO THE SACK OF ROME (1377-1527) BY PAUL VAN DYKE WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY VAN DYKE (tleto Tgorft Coffee ^v';n6tter'8 |&m« Copyright, 1896, 1897, bt THE CHRISTIAN LITERATURE CO. Printed in the United States of America AN INTRODUCTION Bf HENRY VAN DYKE AN INTRODUCTION. HEN the writing of this book was pro- posed to me, some years ago, I under- took it with alacrity, on account of the interest in the subject which I had long cherished, and yet with some grave mis- givings lest the pressure of other work, already prom- ised, but not performed, should rob me of the time needed to accomplish this task with thoroughness and precision. For I knew the Age of the Renascence well enough, through previous studies from the lit- erary, artistic, and philosophic points of view, to see that a man could not hope to make even an outline sketch of the Church in this complex period without much labor and steady thought. The very brevity of the book proposed was an added difficulty. It is hard to be concise without be- coming inaccurate. To make the results of study clear when the lack of space compels the omission of its processes; to justify conclusions without giving au- thorities; to condense volumes of reading into a chapter of writing, and that chapter again into a paragraph, and that paragraph into a single sentence; to select the characters of men who really embody vii- viii An Introduction. the tendencies of their age ; and to find adjectives which shall be equivalent to biographies, distinct and vivid, without being unjust or violent; — in short, to draw a convincing picture, not of a single generation only, but of a movement which pervaded many gen- erations and races, and to do this within the compass of a few hundred pages, is an enterprise not to be effected without serious toil. Facing such a task as this, realizing its difficulties more and more sharply as the plan of the book took shape, and feeling at the same time the ever-increas- ing demands of other duties and literary engage- ments, I sought and gratefully welcomed the consent of my brother to make this volume a joint labor of fraternal authorship. Together we surveyed the field, marked out its limitations, rejoiced in the rich- ness of its promise, and groaned a little, yet not de- spondently, at the prospect of the many hard places and obstacles. On this preliminary journey of exploration we found ourselves in the full harmony of intellectual comradeship. The purpose, the method, the guiding principles of such a book as we wished to write seemed to us plain and self-evident. Abstract theo- ries of the nature of the Church troubled us little. Special pleading for or against the Papacy disturbed us even less. The question of absorbing interest was not, What ought the Church to be in a correct scheme of doctrine ? but, What was the Church in the actual unfolding of human life? What part did the eccle- siastical institution play in the conflicts of the Renas- cence ? What did the idea of the Papacy mean as a An Introduction. ix positive force, cooperating or conflicting with the other forces of the age? How far did it affect, and how far was 'it affected by, the influences which pro- duced the great awakening of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? What was the real relation of the Church as an organization to Christianity as a spiritual life? How potently did that spiritual life make itself felt in the progress of the world ? The answer to these questions was not a matter of theory, but of fact. We felt sure that it was not to be found in the books of dogmatic theology or ecclesiastical history, nor in the decrees of councils, nor in the bulls of Popes, nor in the theses of reformers — except in so far as all of these were veritable details in the great panorama of life. Their value lay, not in what they professed or claimed, but in what they actually rep- resented. They were worth precisely what they expressed, reduced to the terms of reality. The answer to our questions must be sought chiefly in the character of men and the history of nations. The type of ecclesiastical society produced by the contests between Pope and Antipope, the fashion of moral amelioration effected by the Reforming Coun- cils, the style of humanity in which the spreading tree of Humanism bore its fruit — these were the things which we were drawn to study, and from which we hoped to derive some real and definite knowledge, to clarify our conception of the past, to broaden our judgment of the present, and to enlighten our vision of the future. But as the work proceeded it became evident that An Introduction. the lion's share of it must fall to my brother. And of this, for several reasons, I was very glad ; chiefly because I was sure that his leisure, his industry, and his long previous studies in the special department of ecclesiastical history fitted him for the more careful and complete accomplishment of our design. More- over, there was a mortgage of other engagements, particularly in connection with the Lectures on Preaching at Yale University, in 1896, which more than covered all my time and strength. To his hands, therefore, the final execution of our plan was committed. The collection of materials, the workmanship, the filling in of the outline, are all his. Such consultations as we have held in regard to the work are not to be considered as in any sense edi- torial or executive. The book as it stands belongs altogether to him. Whatever credit it deserves for scholarship, for clearness, for candor (and I hope that is not small), must be given entirely to him. For myself, it remains only to add this brief intro- duction, which I gladly do at his request, in order that the formative ideas of the work may not be mis- understood, nor its limitations overlooked. It is a serious misfortune for a book when people come to the reading of it without a perception of what it offers to them. But it is a still greater misfortune when they come with an expectation of finding what it was never meant to offer; for in the latter case they are inclined to lay upon the author the blame of a disappointment which belongs more properly to the reader, and to criticise as defects those necessary omissions which belong to a consistent plan. An Introduction. xi Let it be understood, then, at the outset, that this was not intended to be a small church history in the technical sense, nor even a fragment of a larger church history. The plan of the book was of a dif- ferent nature. It was to give as graphic a view as possible of a single act in the great life- drama of humanity. This act was the crisis of the Papal Church in that period of intellectual and social reconstruction called the Age of the Renascence, which transformed the mediaeval into the modern world. The scene opens with the return of the Pope from Avignon to Rome in 1377. It closes with the sack of Rome by the Spanish-German army, under the Due de Bourbon, in 1527. Between these two points lies the dramatic story of a corrupt ecclesiastical body stubbornly resisting all attempts at reform from within and without, and at last succumbing to the pressure of great social and moral world-forces, which it was too prejudiced to comprehend, too proud to acknowledge, except for brief intervals, and too im- potent to withstand, save with the fatal obstinacy of inherent weakness. In sketching this story it was not intended to give full details of the various events and the manifold conflicts between nations and dynasties and parties and schools which entered into it. The exigencies of space would not permit this, even if the nature of the plan demanded it. Nor was it intended that the book should present references and lists of authori- ties to support its conclusions. Much as this might have been desired, it would be manifestly impossible xii An Introduction. in such a brief compass. Not even all of the great features of the Age of the Renascence could be in- cluded. The development of university life has been barely touched; the artistic revival has been alto- gether passed over — to my own regret, but doubtless for good reasons. This wholesale process of omission was necessary in order to make room on the small canvas for the picture which we had in mind. Details which were not essential must be left out, lest they should ob- scure the vital features. A process of negative ex- aggeration must be used to arrive at a clear view of the positive truth. It would be better, for example, to omit the ar- ticles of many treaties, and the chronicles of many dynastic wars, and the records of many synods and councils, than to fail to give a vivid presentment of such men as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poggio, and Filelfo, in Italy; Pierre d'Ailly, John of Gerson, and Faber Stapulensis, in France ; Wiclif, Colet, More, and Tyndale, in England ; Reuchlin and Ulrich von Hut- ten, in Germany ; and Erasmus, that great intellec- tual cosmopolite. These men, and others like them, were, in fact, the makers of a new world in letters, in morals, in manners. It is impossible to know any- thing about the Age of the Renascence without get- ting at least a glimpse of these men as they lived and moved and had their intellectual being. Nor can the varying and tragic fortunes of the Papacy during that eventful period be understood without a clear, though swift, glance into the interior life and personality of such popes as Nicholas V., the An Introduction. xiii first Humanist Pontiff; Pius II., the clever litterateur and diplomatist ; Sixtus IV., the terrible man with many nephews'; Alexander VI., the Pontifex Maximus of gallantry, whose patron goddess was Venus ; Julius II., who ruled and fought under the sign of Mars; and Leo X., whose tutelary deity was Pallas Athene. From the first conception of this book it was intended to give more space to the graphic depiction of these and other like typical figures than to the formal narration of what is ordinarily called ecclesiastical history. But it was foreseen at the outset that the actors in the drama would be found divided, by the crisis of events, into two classes, antagonistic, irreconcilable, and often apparently incapable of understanding each other. And so, in fact, it has proved to be in the writing of the book. Here they stand, distinctly marked — the two great parties that have always contended for the guidance of mankind : the men of institutions, and the men of ideas; the men whose supreme allegiance binds them to an organization, and the men whose ultimate loy- alty is to the truth ; Wiclif and Huss and Savonarola and Hutten and Luther and Zwingli, against the Roman Curia and its defenders. Many of the men whose intellectual sympathies drew them to the party of ideas were bound by the deeper links of character to the party of institutions. To this class belong Reuchlin and Erasmus, Colet and More, Gerson and d'Ailly, and most of the elder Humanists. They were too fond of ancient order, too timid of change and confusion and possible misrule, ever to break with xiv An Introduction. the Church, which obstinately resisted the reforming influence of ideas. But their personal hesitations were impotent to prevent the inevitable results of their work. Reuchlin might plead with his nephew Melancthon to beware of friendship with the heret- ical Martin Luther, but the affectionate solicitation went for nothing against the irresistible impulses of an awakened reason, a new-born scholarship, and a liberated conscience. The younger Humanists, almost to a man, de- serted the party of institutions for the party of ideas. The Bible was set free from the bondage of tradition and given to the common people — in German by Luther (1522), in French by Faber Stapulensis (1523), and in English by William Tyn- dale (1525). Thus the issue was clearly defined: Must a man believe what the Church teaches, no matter what the Bible says? or must the Church teach what men really believe, reading the Bible anew in the light of reason and the moral sense? Around this point the warfare of the Reformation was waged. It was the chief service of the Renascence as an in- tellectual and social movement that it brought this point of irrepressible conflict into distinct view, made it plain and distinct, and produced, in the service of literature and philosophy, the weapons which were at last used for the emancipation of faith. In tracing the preliminary skirmishes of this mighty conflict, and describing the preparation of the arma- ment with which it was to be fought, it was intended that this book should be impartial without being in- vertebrate. Our intention was to lay aside prejudices, An Introduction. xv but not to conceal convictions; to do justice to the character of men like Hadrian of Corneto, and the Cardinal Ximenes, and Adrian VI., without justify- ing their position. For, both in its conception and in its execution, this book proceeds from the stand- point that ideas are above institutions, and that lib- erty of reason and conscience is more precious than orthodoxy of doctrine. Glancing forward over the contents of the volume as my brother has written it, I see that the composi- tion of the picture, under his hands, has taken such a simple and natural form that it may be easily de- scribed in a few paragraphs. First we have a brief review of the three forces which had changed the face of the world when the Pope came back to Rome from the Babylonian Cap- tivity in France. The new patriotism, the new de- mocracy, and the new learning — these were the equipollent and inseparable factors of the Renascence, now fully in action ; and with these the Catholic Church had to reckon, if she would maintain her su- premacy, or even her existence. Then we have an account of the earnest efforts which were made to reform the Church from within. These efforts proceeded from four chief springs : 1. The revivals of religion in Italy, under the lead- ership of such enthusiasts as St. Catherine of Siena and Savonarola. 2. The national movement for reform in England, inspired by the teaching and influence of Wiclif and the Lollards. 3. The powerful after-echo of this movement in XVI An Introduction. Bohemia, under the guidance of John Huss and Je- rome of Prague. 4. The party of Conciliar Supremacy in the Catholic Church, resisting the encroachments of Papal absolution, and demanding, through men like Gerson and d'Ailly, " the reform of the Church in head and members." At the Council of Constance we see the last two of these forces falling foul of each other; and in the stories of Huss and Savonarola and the followers of Wiclif we read the fate of the men who dreamed that the Papacy could be reformed without the shedding of blood. The four movements for the purification of the Church from within failed because they were essen- tially ecclesiastical. The tremendous momentum of the corrupt machine was too great to be checked by any resistance, save one which should have a firm foothold outside of the body to be checked, and abun- dant sources of independent strength. The ground for such a resistance was being prepared in Germany, in France, and in England during all the years of turmoil and shame and despair while the Papacy was punishing the passionate endeavors of the best mem- bers of the Church to reform it, and rewarding the successful conspiracies of its worst members to dis- grace it. The instrument of this preparation was the Re- nascence. It was not so much a mechanical alteration of the structure of human thought and society as it was a chemical change in the very elements of their composition. It transformed the scattered fragments An Introduction. xvii of knowledge into the solid rock of scholarship. It metamorphosed the thoughts and feelings of men with the ardent heat of the love of learning, and crystallized their imaginations by the introduction of the historic spirit. It loosened, at least for a time, the solidarity of European Christendom ; but it substituted for the treacherous debris of the failing sentiment of universal brotherhood, which no longer afforded a trustworthy footing, new points of coher- ence and support, in the sentiments of nationality and the patriotic enthusiasms which were begotten and intensified by the spread of historic knowledge and by the increase of once barbarous countries in wisdom, wealth, and power. The book traces this process — hastily, of course, and in mere outline, and yet, it seems to me, with a true comprehension of its deep significance and far- reaching results. The endeavor of the writer is not to show what the Reformation added to the Renas- cence ; that is another story, and belongs to a later volume. But this book is an attempt to exhibit what the Renascence did for the Reformation. There can be no question whatever, and I think it can be seen from this book, that the two movements which were actually crowned with some measure of success in the purification of Christian faith and life — namely, the Protestant Reformation under Luther and Zwingli and Calvin, and the Catholic Reaction in the latter half of the sixteenth century — were both the legitimate offspring of the Renascence. If there had been no liberty of scholarship there never would have been an open Bible. If there had been no re- xviii An Introduction. vival of patriotism the Germans never would have backed Luther against the world to defend his right of interpreting the Scriptures. And so if the book is to have a lesson drawn from it, it must be this: The fortunes of the Church as an institution depend upon the same laws which God has implanted in all human society, and through which He continually manifests His presence and power. There is no ecclesiastical history apart from secular history. The Church which rests upon authority alone must take its chances with the other dynasties. No appeal to the supernatural can shield its preten- sions from the searching tests of reason and conscience. The Christianity which is to survive and maintain its claims in the face of the world must be in harmony with the primal moral forces, love of liberty, love of truth, love of real goodness. Henry van Dyke. New York, July 32, 1897. CONTENTS. PERIOD I. From the Return from Avignon to the Accession of Nicholas V. 0377-1447). Introductory Retrospect. PAGE CHAP. I. — The Growth of Patriotism or the Sense of Nationality i CHAP. II. — New Theories of the Seat of Sovereignty and the Rising Tide of Democracy u CHAP. III. — The New Learning — Petrarch, the Pro- totype of the Humanists 20 CHAP. IV — The Condition in which the Returning Pope Found Italy and the Patrimony of St. Peter — The Beginning of the Great Schism — Two Vicars of Christ Fight for the Tiara 35 CHAP. V. — John Wici.if of England, and his Protest against Papal War 46 CHAP. VI. — Pope and Antipope — The White Penitents at Rome — The Siege of Avignon — The Followers of Petrarch, the Humanists, or Men of the New Learning 59 xix xx Contents. PAGE CHAP. VII.— Orthodox Demands for Union and Re- form : (i) Catherine of Siena and the Ascetic Pro- phets of Righteousness; (2) The Party of Conciliar Supremacy 69 CHAP. VIII. — The Council of Pisa Makes the Schism Triple — The Protest of John Huss of Bohemia 79 CHAP. IX. — The Council of Constance and Triumph of the Party of Conciliar Supremacy: (i) They Depose the Popes and Force Union; (2) They Repudiate the Bohemian Protest and Burn Huss; (3) They Fail to Determine the Reform of the Church in Head and Members 90 CHAP. X. — The Papal Reaction — The Struggle for the Patrimonium — Martin V. and Eugenius IV. Reestab- lish the Papal Supremacy without Granting Re- form — The Protest and Abortive Schism of the Council of Basle m CHAP. XI. — The Spread of Humanism 122 PERIOD n. From the Accession of the First Humanist Pope to the French Invasion of Italy (J447-J494). CHAP. XII. — Nicholas V., the First Humanist Pope, Makes Rome the Home of the Muses — The War of the Monks and the Humanists 151 CHAP. XIII. — Calixtus III., the Old Spaniard, his Family Pride and his Zeal against the Infidel — Pius II., the Cultured Man of the World who Died a Crusader — Paul II., the Splendor-loving Vene- tian Nepot 164 CHAP. XIV. — The New Learning Crosses the Alps — Its Spread in France — The Forerunners of German Humanism 1 76 CHAP. XV. — The Man of the Renascence on the Throne of St. Peter— Sixtus IV., the Terrible 193 CHAP. XVI.— Innocent VIII., the Sultan's Jailer- Alexander VI., the Handsome Spanish Nepot — The French Invasion 206 Contents. xxi PAGE CHAP. XVII. — Savonarola and Freedom 317 PERIOD m. From the French Invasion to the Sack of Rome (1494-1527), CHAP. XVIII.— The Household of Alexander VI.— The Prophet of Righteousness and the Vicar of Christ 299 CHAP. XIX. — The Fall of the House of Borgia 248 CHAP. XX. — Humanism in Europe from the Accession of slxtus iv. to the death of alexander vi. (147i— 1503) — The Florentine Academy and the Oxford School — Faber Stapulensis and his Pupils at Paris — John Reuchlin and the Older Humanists of Ger- many — Erasmus 262 CHAP. XXI. — Julius II. and Leo X. — The Nephew of slxtus iv. and the son of lorenzo the magnificent become Popes 286 CHAP. XXII. — Transalpine Humanism under Julius and Leo — (1) The Battle of the Books about John Reuchlin ; (2) The Three Disciples of the Philosophy of Christ; (3) The Pupils of Faber Stapulensis; (4) Ulrich Zwingli 302 CHAP. XXIII. —The Court of Leo X.— Humanism in Italy and Spain — The Three Boy Kings 321 CHAP. XXIV. — The North Loses Patience with the Papacy — The Leaders of Revolt in Germany, Switzerland, France, and England 339 CHAP. XXV. — Adrian VI., the Honest Orthodox Ec- clesiastic — The Older Humanists of the North Stand by the Church — The Younger Appeal to the New Testament — Clement VII., the Heir of the Medici 356 CHAP. XXVI.— The Sack of Rome 366 A List of the Popes and Antipopes 379 A List ok the Humanists Mentioned 380 PERIOD I. FROM THE RETURN FROM AVIGNON TO THE ACCESSION OF NICHOLAS V. (1377-1447). INTRODUCTORY RETROSPECT. (CHAPTERS I., II., III.) THE FORCES THAT HAD CHANGED THE CONDI- TIONS OF POWER DURING THE SEVENTY YEARS OF THE PAPAL ABSENCE FROM ROME. CHAPTER I. THE GROWTH OF PATRIOTISM OR THE SENSE OF NATIONALITY. N the 17th of January, 1377, all Rome was early afoot, and a great crowd streamed across the fields of Mount Aventinus to the gate of St. Paul, open- ing toward the sea. There the clergy of the city were gathered in festal array to receive the Pope. Landing from his galley, which had ascended the river from Ostia and lain at anchor all night just below the great Basilica of St. Paul without the Walls, Gregory XI. heard mass, and the festal procession started to enter the gate. Two thousand men-at- arms, commanded by his nephew, Raymond. Vicomte The Age of the Renascence. of Turenne, guarded the gorgeous train. Behind the great banner of the Church, borne by the gray-haired Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, came the Pope, riding on a splendidly caparisoned palfrey be- neath a baldachin carried by Roman nobles. Around him moved a glittering cavalcade of cardinals and bishops, and a company of white-robed clowns and tumblers, the usual companions of all stately proces- sions, heralded his approach. In the gate stood the Senator of Rome in full armor, with the councillors and captains, waiting to put into Gregory's hands the keys of the city. As he passed on his long journey through the fields and streets to the other side of the circle of walls, the entire population greeted him with shouts of joy. Every bell was ringing, and from the crowded roofs and windows of the houses wreaths and flowers were showered into streets hung with tapestry and banners. It was evening before the slow procession reached St. Peter's, brilliant with eighteen thousand lamps, and the exhausted Pope could at last kneel by the tomb of the apostles to give thanks to God for his return to the city of the Church. So after a willing exile of seventy years the successor of St. Peter came back from the huge new palace on the banks of the Rhone to the ancient Vatican on the banks of the Tiber. It was the end of the alliance of the Papacy with the house of France, called by all but those who caused and profited by it the " Babylonian Captivity of the Church." Five successive Popes, each bishop of the bishops because he was Bishop of Rome, had never entered their cathedral of the Lateran, and Introductory Retrospect. Christendom rejoiced when Gregory had returned to his first duty. But while the Popes had been neglecting their own city to become the allies and then the vassals of the kings of France, three generations had made a new world, and the opportunities and conditions of power were changed. Old institutions were decayed, and new social, political, and religious forces were finding expression. The first of these great forces limiting the power of the Papacy was the newly developed sense of na~ tionalit j^ In order to appreciate the bearing of this new force on problems of the government of the Church we must recall by suggestion the past rela- tions of the Papacy to the political organization of Europe. When Christianity was made the religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine it became part of an ideal in which all nations were to form a single social organism holding one faith and obeying one government. And even when the barbarian inva- sion had broken the wall of Trajan and overrun Gaul, Spain, Italy, and Africa, men still mistook memories for hopes and looked to see order brought out of chaos by the reestablishment of the law of the empire. The very conquerors gazed with awe upon the mighty social organization they had overthrown. Able to destroy, but not to create, they respected the Roman law and the Roman Church, and permitted their sub- jects to be judged by the one and consoled by the other. And as successive waves of invasion poured in till it seemed as if the richest and most civilized lands of the ancient world were to become the desolate The Age of the Renascence. possessions of predatory tribes, the thoughts of men turned with increasing desire toward the unity and peace which had been the ideal of the empire. So when the Franks had beaten back the Saracens from the plain of Tours, saving Europe, like the Greeks before them, from slavery to Asia, they aspired to the yet greater task of reestablishing the Empire of the West to give peace and justice from the Medi- terranean to the Baltic and from the ocean to the Danube. Charles the Great, perhaps the one most necessary and indispensable man in the history of the Western races, gathered together all the forms of law and religion in which there seemed a pos- sibility of life, and on Christmas day of the year 800 was crowned by Pope Leo III. Emperor of the West. The ideal which this ceremony expressed is clearly shown in a mosaic designed by order of the Pope. Christ appears in it twice : above, as Saviour, surrounded by the apostles, whom he is sending forth to preach ; below, seated as ruler of the world. On his right kneels Pope Sylvester, on his left the Em- peror Constantine ; to the one he is handing the keys of heaven and hell, to the other the banner of the Cross. In the opposite arch the Apostle Peter sits, with Leo and Charles kneeling on either hand to re- ceive the pallium of an archbishop and the banner of the Church militant. The circumscription is, " Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to all men of good will." The makers of that mosaic hoped they had founded a divine institution with two heads, one supreme in spiritual, the other in temporal things, and both holding their power of God. The Church and the Empire. But the double eagle of Russia is not more impos- sible in the animal kingdom than the realization of this ideal in the realm of practical politics. The mediaeval Church was so much of an empire, and the mediaeval empire so much of a church, that neither seems to have been able to maintain its power for any long period without the aid of the other. But in spite of this common need it is difficult to find any pair of a great Pope and a great emperor who could dwell together in peace. When the empire was weak the undefended Papacy became the prey of the fierce factions of the Roman nobility, and Popes who disgraced the throne of St. Peter sank to every conceivable depth of infamy. When a strong emperor defended by Teutonic sol- diers the purity of elections and placed upon the throne a man worthy the office, he or his successor began a desperate struggle to secure those rights of appointing or investing bishops and abbots which the Emperor claimed for himself. In this struggle the Papacy had two favorite weapons: first, to stir up rebellion in the empire by means of the interdict and excommunication ; and second, to create out- side of the bounds of the empire a system of states whose rulers were willing to acknowledge, what the successors of Charles always denied, that the Popes not only consecrated, but conferred their authority and crowns. This policy, begun under Sylvester II. (999-1003), created, by direct gift of the crown through the Pope as the Vicar of Christ and ruler of rulers, a tier of kingdoms between the borders of the Eastern and Western empires: Hungary, 1000, Po- The Age of the Renascence. land soon after, Croatia, 1076, Servia and Bulgaria in the thirteenth century. Then the Popes turned to the south and west to create the kingdoms of Naples, Aragon, Portugal, the Island of Man, the kingdoms of Scotland, Norway, the double kingdom of Corsica- Sardinia, and the kingdom of Trinacria. The Eng- lish King became a feudal vassal of the Pope, and some of his successors paid tribute in a subjection considered so complete that a legate who took off his cap in the presence of the King was much blamed at the Papal court. Clement VI., going out into the unknown, even created (1344) for Louis of Castile a kingdom of the yet undiscovered Fortunate Isles. The swords of the vassals of the Papacy and the power to give the sanctions of religion to every re- bellious vassal of the empire made the Popes too strong for the emperors. The last members of the imperial house of Hohenstaufen died in a vain attempt to maintain their power over the kingdom of Sicily, which the Popes had given to Charles of Anjou to be held as a fief of the Church. For sixty years there was no emperor, and when Henry VII., half by force and half by entreaty, received the crown at the Lat- eran from the hands of a cardinal in a ceremony shorn of many of its ancient rites, his rebellious Italian subjects held St. Peter's, and the bolts of their crossbows fell among the guests at the imperial banquet. The end and aim of the Papal policy was clearly shown when Boniface VIII. changed the ancient mitre for the modern triple Papal crown and appeared before the pilgrims of the jubilee of 1300 one day in Papal Servitude to France. the Papal, the next in the imperial robes, shouting aloud, " I am Caesar — I am Emperor ["■}/ But in destroying the empire and trusting their defence to the system of Papal States they had cre- ated, the Popes had prepared a weapon that could be turned against themselves. Kings, once grown strong, were as unwilling as emperors to submit to Papal control. France, from whom came the blow which revealed the hollowness of this Papal politics, was not, indeed, a member of the system of Papal States. Her kings had grown great without becom- ing vassals of the throne of St. Peter. But as against the empire she had always been closely allied to it, and the brother of King Louis had done homage to Clement IV. (1265) f° r the kingdom of Sicily, and become the protagonist in the fight against the em- pire which extinguished the race of Hohenstaufen. r Philip the iHa«ry> however, cared little for past A alliances, and his final answer to the pretensions of Boniface was to assault him in his own palace at Anagni (1303) by a band of mercenaries — a degrada- tion so bitter to the proud old man that he died in a few weeks. His successor ruled a little more than a year, and after a conclave of nine months, the lobbying of Philip elected a Pope who transferred the chair of St. Peter to the banks of the Rhone. During the seventy years it remained there the preponderance of French 1 There is some doubt as to the exactness of this anecdote, but none about the bull Unam Sanctam, which in 1302 asserted: " There are two swords, the temporal and the spiritual ; both are in the power of the Church, but one is held by the Church herself, the other by kings only with the assent and by sufferance of the Sovereign Pontiff. Every human being is subject to the Roman Pontiff, and to believe this is necessary for salvation." 8 The Age of the Renascence. influence became steadily more evident. The pro- portion of Frenchmen in the College of Cardinals in- creased. Now it was thirteen out of eighteen, now it rose to twenty-five out of twenty-eight, and again to nineteen out of twenty-one. In one short space of a few years the Papacy and the Pope's brother lent 3,500,000 florins (probably equal in purchasing power to $40,000,000) to the French court. From a Vicar of Christ who had abandoned the ancient capital of the world to become the tool of a French king men turned instinctively to the eternal King he represented, and the victorious English sol- diers at Poictiers showed the error of the Papacy and the drift of events when they sang: " If the Pope is French, Christ is English." In England this Papal subservience to the interests of France strengthened the ancient opposition to the interference of the Pope in English affairs. And in particular Englishmen resented the sale of ecclesias- tical offices to foreign incumbents, who without ever visiting their charges drew the rents and incomes by proxies and spent them in the luxurious Papal court at Avignon. England had thrilled at the letter of good old Robert of Lincoln protesting against the order of the Pope bestowing a canonry in his cathedral upon an Italian, Frederick of Lavagna (1^3). He declined to obey it as unapostolic, declaring it to be, " not a cure, but a murder of souls," " when those who are appointed to a pastoral charge only use the milk and the wool of the sheep to satisfy their own English and German Patriotism. 9 bodily necessities." And one hundred years later the Parliament (1351-53) forbade by statute the in- troduction into England of provisors or Papal bulls which interfered with the filling of English ecclesias- tical offices by Englishmen, and forbade appeals to Rome by which causes involving the persons or prop- erty of ecclesiastics could be freed from the law of England. It was that revol t jpf^pa triot ism against ecclesi astical encroachment, often felt by those en- tirely faithful to the spiritual teaching of the Catholic Church, which found its classic expression, eight generations later, in the words which Shakespeare put into the mouth of King John : " No Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions ; But as we under Heaven are supreme head, So under him, that great supremacy, Where we do reign we will alone uphold, Without the assistance of a mortal hand. So tell the Pope ; all reverence set apart, To him and his usurped authority." Even in Germany, a prey to the greed of rapacious princelings whose people were to wait five hundred years for national unity, the assumptions of a Pope who seemed to use temporal control as a tool of the French King called out the spirit of patriotism with- out the form thereof. Pope John XXII. (1316-34) longed to free Italy from foreign influence and unite the entire peninsula under the political headship of the Papacy. He endeavored to accomplish this by diplomacy, and as a move in his deep and dangerous game of politics it became needful to depose Lewis of Bavaria from the kingship of Germany. Taking io The Age of the Renascence. advantage of the party strifes of the German princes, the Pope drove him by ban and interdict to the utmost straits. But when Lewis, in despair, was on the point of surrendering his claim to the crown, the publication of a single fact put all Germany for the moment behind him. His rival had secretly agreed to pledge the ancient kingdom of Arelat to France as security for costs incurred by the King in acting as mediator between the empire / and the Pope. A storm of wrath denounced the bargain. Then the Pope issued a bull separating the Italian lands of the empire from all connection with the kingdom of Germany. All Germany rose at the insult, and for the first time in generations almost every German city and prince and bishop joined in common action. By the vote of six of the great princes, confirmed by a Reichstag at Frankfort, dis- ordered and disunited Germany declared that " the imperial dignity and power proceeded from of old directly through the Son of God. . . . Because, nevertheless, some, led by ambition and without understanding of Scripture, . . . falsely assert that the imperial dignity comes from the Pope, . . . and by such pestiferous dogmas the ancient enemy moves discord . . . and brings about seditions, therefore we declare that by the old right and custom of the empire, after any one is chosen emperor ... he is in consequence of the election alone to be called true king and emperor of the Romans, and ought to be obeyed by all subjects of the empire." INTRODUCTORY RETROSPECT. CHAPTER II. NEW THEORIES OF THE SEAT OF SOVEREIGNTY AND THE RISING TIDE OF DEMOCRACY. HIS political change, by which during the thirteenth century the peoples became conscious of their national aspirations, found expression in theories concerning the seat of authority and the nature of power. Literature, which in the hands of the school- men had become the advocate of Papal claims, be- gan to express the strongest and most searching criticism of them. About the court of the Emperor gathered a little knot of men of different nations, whose brilliant polemic writings attracted attention by the boldness and skill with which they attacked the whole logical edifice of the scholastic theory of Papal Supremacy. The English Franciscan, William of Occam, the most distinguished philosopher of his day; the Fleming, Jean of Jandun, celebrated dia lectician of the Paris schools; the Italian, Michael of Cesena, General of the Franciscans ; Brother Bona- gratia, the distinguished theologian and jurist ; the German, Henry of Thalheim, and others, formed the strongest literary coterie of the age, with Marsilius ii 1 2 The Age of the Renascence. of Padua, a well-known lawyer and physician, as their brightest star. His book, " The Defender of Peace against the Usurped Jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff," was a daring arraignment and reversal of traditional judgments about the source of authority in Church and State. For instance, he asserts that " church " in its apostolic use means the entire body of Christian men, and that all Christians, be they clergy or laymen, are churchmen. Temporal pains and penalties do not belong to the law of the Gospel, which is not a law at all, but a doctrine. "Bishop" and "priest" are used interchangeably in the New Testament. The popedom, a useful symbol of the unity of the Church, is an institution begun later than the apostolic age, whose historical growth is clearly traceable. The bishops of Rome gained pre- eminence, not as St. Peter's successors, but from the connection of their see with the ancient capital of the Roman Empire. The sovereignty of the State rests with the people. By them the laws are properly made, and their "validity comes from the people's sovereignty. The community of the citizens, or their majority, expressing its will by representatives, is supreme. Government requires a unity of office, not necessarily of number. But if, as is usually wisest, a king be chosen, he must be supported by enough force to overpower the riotous few, but not the mass of the nation. In the ecclesiastical organization, also, the authority rests not with the hierarchy, but is derived from the whole Church, and the priestly class are only their executives, responsible to a General Council formed of clergy and laity alike. The clergy The Tide of Democracy. 13 are the executives of the Church only in spiritual affairs. Their property and incomes are as much subject to the civil law as those of their lay brethren. His office does not change the responsibility of a clergyman to the civil law, for if he should steal or murder, who would say that these were to be re- garded as spiritual acts? These opinions were formally condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities, and Marsilius was denounced as a radical innovator who would destroy Church and State. Such bold denials of the theories which had been formed to support the social and ecclesiastical insti- tutions of the middle ages had but little direct effect outside of the circle of clerks and theologians to whom they were addressed, but they were dimly felt and half-unconsciously formulated during the fourteenth century in political changes by which the feudal power and privileges of civil and ecclesi- astical lords were in some places checked, in others destroyed, by the efforts of a middle class of burgher merchants or manufacturers and small landed freeholders. And behind and beneath these politi- cal changes there could be heard the half-articulate murmur of the r ising tide of democracy, with its claim that men are equal before God and the laws, and its hope of a society so organized and governed that none should ever want but the idle and vicious. It has been well said that mediaeval man was chiefly occupied with the acquisition or defence of privileges. Feudal society was divided into very strictly separated classes, and the unwritten principle at its foundation was that all rights not ex - 14 The Age of the Renascence. pressly granted to a lower class were reserved for the higher. Time had been when the enjoyment of these privileges meant the performance of certain necessary duties. The castle of the lord, around which the wattled mud huts of the peasants clung like swallows' nests, may have been the abode of tyranny, but it was also a refuge from robbery. To be unbound to any community, large or small, which thus possessed a leader and the means of self-protection, was to be exposed to unlimited outrage in a time when every man did that which was right in his own eyes to all who did not belong to his own community. And it came to pass that to be a landless^ man was to be thpjught_an_outlaw, and to be a lordiess man a thief. But as society became more orderly and private war less incessant, these privileges became oppressive to a people no longer bound to their superiors by perils shared, or grateful for defence against danger. And peasant and burgher, chafing under the bondage of those to whom they were compelled to render ser- vices without service in return, began everywhere to long passionately for legal equality or freedom. A single circumstance gave force to this long- cherished desire. Misery alone is sterile, and the dead weight of injustice will either crush a people to a servile temper or provoke a despair that perishes by its own ferocity. The conscious- ness of power is needed to animate a useful revo- lution. And during the fourteenth century this consciousness was diffused among the common people in some parts of western Europe by the demonstration of the irresistible force on the battle-field of a properly The Flemish Burghers. 15 drilled and handled infantry. So long as the knight, with a couple of esquires and a score of professional men-at-arms cased in steel, mounted on heavy horses, and trained to ride and fence, was more than a match for the men of a dozen villages who had never learned how to march or to hold the simplest formation, re- volt among the lower classes meant only the treach- erous and useless murder of some isolated oppressors. It was just at the turn of the thirteenth century (1302) when the shock of Courtrai sounded through the world. Twenty thousand Flemish artisans were brought to bay in a great plain by the much larger army of France. The few dispossessed nobles who were their military leaders killed their horses and knighted thirty merchants as a sign of fellowship, and shouting their war-cry of " Shield and friend!" the solid mass of men stood stoutly with boar-spears and iron-shod clubs against the French charge. In two hours fifteen thousand fallen men-at-arms choked the ditch which guarded their front, or were scattered over the plain. They covered the walls of the ca- thedral of Courtrai with the gilded spurs of the knights, and the roll of the dead sounds like a mus- ter of the nobility of France — " fallen," as the chroni- cler laments, " by the hands of villeins." This con- sciousness of power gave hope, and from hope came effort. Therefore the fourteenth century is marked in many parts of the world by desperate struggles for liberty on the part of the peasant and artisan classes rising out of a half-servile condition. The relation of this struggle to religion, and to the social and moral conditions with which religion 1 6 The Age of the Renascence. {is concerned, may best be illustrated by the English (peasant revolt of 1 38 1 , which, long misjudged through the reports of its enemies, apparently a failure, is now jrecognized as one of the most remarkable and success- ful of revolutions. In the middle of the century the ipowerof the English peasant was suddenly increased by a singular cause. The black death, starting in those crowded cities of Asia which have always been the homes of pestilence, spread slowly but steadily over Europe. It is difficult to appreciate the horror of its visit in an age when the simplest rules of sanitary science were unknown and medical practice little more 1 than superstition. Cautious judges concede that twenty-five millions of people perished. In England alone a conservative estimate allows that eight hun- dred thous^nd^eoj>lc^j^thi^^ of the_lotai jpopula- 1 tio n, died by a ." foul death.," which smote the children of the king and the children of the slave, so that there was not a house where there was not one dead. As a consequence labor became so scarce that the price of it rose at once. The noble whose crop cost to harvest £$ 13s. gd. the year before the plague had to pay £12 igs. lod. the year after. This situation hastened the process of freeing the nativi, or serfs, which had begun years before. For those personal services, such as ploughing one day every week in the year, gathering the lord's nuts, making the lord's park walls over against his land, carrying the lord's corn home every fortnight on the Saturday, which reminded the tenants of their descent from bondsmen and thralls, were then quite largely commuted by the impoverished lords for money payments. But the landowners who farmed by bailiffs were The English Peasants. 1 7 not disposed to see their profits impaired and their rents lowered without a struggle. And as soon as the cessation of the plague enabled Parliament to meet, they passed the Statute of Laborers, which stood on the books for two hundred and fifty years. It provided that every able-bodied man or woman under sixty must work for any employer who sought him for suitable service at the wages of the year 1347, prohibited him from leaving his employer be- fore the end of his term of service, forbade his em- ployer to pay him higher wages, and provided penalties of fine or imprisonment for disobedience. It even forbade the employer to fulfil contracts for higher wages made before the passing of the act. This law was met by the establishment of a vast secret combination of artisans and peasants, — the first trade-union, — which was so successful that twenty years after the plague the price of harvest labor was double that enforced by the statute. Then the lords, in despair, attempted to reverse the com- mutations to their ancient equivalents in forced labor. The result was to them a tremendous astonishment. The villeins of all England rose in revolt. For this they had been partly prepared by preaching, which gave the sanction of religion to their demand for justice. Men like John Ball, a priest of Kent, out of whose sermons were made such popular rhymes as : " When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? " had for years been denouncing the wickedness of the rich and the injustice of social and political con- ditions. They were now reinforced by priests armed 1 8 The Age of the Renascence. with the new knowledge of the Bible which was spreading rapidly from the teaching of the friends and pupils of Wiclif. And many a hamlet heard the stern appeals of the prophets from tyranny to God applied to their own times. So it was that when the southern force of the insurgents, entering London by the help of their sympathizers among the citizens, fired the palace of the Duke of Lancaster, they flung a plunderer caught with a silver cup back into the flames saying " they were seekers of truth and justice, not thieves." It was this moral and religious basis of the rising which made the northern army of insurgents, when London lay at their mercy, receive the simple promise of their boy King to " free them and their lands forever, that they should be no more called serfs," with shouts of joy, and to quietly disperse to their homes with charters which, before the ink was dry, their King was secretly promising his councillors to wash out in blood. But though the insurrection was conquered by treachery, and its leaders died by hundreds on the gallows, it did not fail. Parliament revoked the concessions of the King and professed a willingness to perish all together in one day rather than grant " liberties and manumis- sions to their villeins and bond-tenants," but the peril had been too great for a second risk. From that day to this many English-speaking men have ground the face of the poor; but since 1381, when the peasants were taught by the Poor Priests l to use 1 It is not established that Wiclif gave any personal encouragement to the rising, but rather the contrary. There is, however, an unmis- takable spiritual resemblance between it and his teaching. The Tide of Democracy. 19 their power in the demand for the rights of humanity in the name of God and justice, no one has attempted to make serfs of the English laborers. And this spirit of democracy, the desire for freedom or equal rights before God and the laws, appealing against every caste and privilege in Church or State to con- science and the Bible, had during the seventy years of the Papal absence from Rome become a force which had everywhere to be reckoned with. INTRODUCTORY RETROSPECT. CHAPTER III. THE NEW LEARNING. PETRARCH, THE PROTOTYPE OF THE HUMANISTS. HE general movement of the human spirit during the fourteenth century, producing patriotism, new theories of the seat of authority, and the desire for freedom, found a special expression for itself in Italy in the beginnings of the New Learning or the movement of the Humanists. This used, by a nar- rowness of thought and diction, to be called the Renascence, but is now rightly regarded as only the intellectual centre of that broad movement which affected every side of life. To define so complex a movement as the New Learning is impossible. It can best be made clear in a sketch of the work and character of Petrarch, the prophet and prototype of Humanism, who died at Arqua, near Padua, three years before the return of the Papacy from Avignon. His father was a Florentine notary, banished by the same decree with Dante, who finally settled at Avignon to practise his profession in the neighbor- 20 Petrarch and Virgil. 21 hood of the Papal court. In the jurists' library were some manuscripts of Cicero, and as soon as Petrarch could read he loved them. Doubtless his father, who destined the lad for the law, smiled approval at such appropriate tastes. But he soon found out his mistake. This youngster with a voice of extraordinary power and sweetness, who loved to play his lute and listen to the song of the birds, was not seeking in the works of the great Roman lawyer legal information. It was the majestic swing, the noble music, of the Ciceronian Latin which charmed him, and as the years went on he suffered the pangs which have been common in all ages to the lovers of the Muses held by parental worldly wisdom to the study of the law. Bad reports came back from the tutors of Montpellier and Bologna. Reproaches and excuses ended in a parental raid, which discovered under the bed a hidden treasure of tempting manu- scripts. They were promptly condemned to the flames, and only the tears of the lad saved a Virgil and one speech of Cicero, to be, as the father said, smiling in spite of himself at the desperate dismay of the convicted sinner, one for an occasional leisure hour, the other a help in legal studies. And Virgil and Cicero became to Petrarch lifelong companions. The copy of the yEneid thus saved from the flames had been made by his own hand, and he wrote in it the date of the death of his son, his friends, and the woman he loved. It was stolen from him once, and returned after ten years, and he wrote in it the day of its loss and the day of its return. To Petrarch Virgil was " lord of language," a chai- 22 The Age of the Renascence. acter noble as his genius, half poet and half saint, a divine master. But to say this was only to repeat Dante, and Petrarch did little for the influence of the Mantuan — could not, indeed, escape from that habit of allegorical interpretation which thought of a poet as a riddle- maker whose object was not to make truth clear and beautiful, but obscure. But Petrarch may with truth be called the modern discoverer of Cicero. Not, indeed, that Cicero's name was before unknown, but that Cicero's works were little read and still less understood. Many of his finest pieces had not been seen for generations. And from his youth up Petrarch followed like a sleuth- hound every possible trace of a lost manuscript. When, riding along the roads, he caught sight of an old cloister, his first thought was, " Is there a Cicero manuscript in the library?" In the midst of a journey he suddenly determined to stop at Liege, because he heard there were many old books in the city, and his reward was two unknown speeches of Cicero. He not only hunted himself, but as his circle of friends and his means increased, he spread his efforts to Germany, Greece, France, Spain, and Britain — wherever any chance of a find was suggested. Of course he had his disappointments. Once he imagined he had secured the lost " Praise of Philos- ophy " ; but though the style was Cicero's, he could read nothing in it to account for Augustine's enthu- siasm, which had first put him on the track. At last the doubt was ended, for he found a quotation in another writing of Augustine's which was not in his manuscript. He was the victim of a false title. And Petrarch and Cicero. 23 when he discovered that what he had was an extract of the " Academica," he always afterward rated it as one of the least valuable of Cicero's works. Then he thought that he had found the treatise on " Fame." He loaned the volume which contained it, and neither he nor the world has ever seen it since — surely the costliest book loan on record. 1 But no disappointment damped his enthusiasm. When the manuscript of Homer was sent to him as a present from Constantinople, though he could read no word of Greek, nor find any one who could, he knew that this was the book beloved of Horace and Cicero. He took it in his arms and kissed it. How great must have been his joy when, in the cathedral library of Verona, he unexpectedly stumbled on an old half-decayed manuscript of some of Cicero's let- ters! He was sick and tired, but he would trust his frail treasure to no copyist. He announced his find to Italy in an epistle to Cicero himself, and hence- forth he enriched literature by a stream of citations whose source, warned by experience, he never trusted out of his own hands. Why he never allowed it to be copied during his lifetime can best be explained by those collectors who dislike to have replicas made of their pictures. Nor was he content with the writings of antiquity. The portraits of Roman emperors on coins excited his imagination. Others had collected coins and medals as rarities, but he was the first modern to understand their value as historical monuments. 1 Voigt says there is no proof that it really was the treatise on " Fame." Rut his douht seems based only on the general principle that a lost fish increases in size — which is not always true. 24 The Age of the Renascence. From the great men of the past he learned to ex- ercise a common-sense criticism on the methods and results of the traditional learning of his time. In scorn and enthusiasm he flung himself with all his powers on the scholastic system of instruction, and denounced the universities as nests of ignorance, adorning fools with pompous degrees of master and doctor. In particular he objected to the division of disciplines. If he were asked what art he professed he would answer that there was but one art, of which he was a humble disciple : the art of truth and virtue, which made the wisdom of life. But he was not content with vague denunciation. The professors of every discipline — history, arithmetic, music, astron- omy, philosophy, theology, and eloquence — heard his voice accusing them of an empty sophistry with- out real relation to life. The objects of his first and bitterest attacks were astrology and alchemy, whose pretensions then flat- tered the ear of princes and dazzled the hopes of peasants. He denounced astrology, stamped with the authority of a teacher's chair at Bologna and Padua, as a baseless superstition, and, in the very spirit of Cicero toward the augurs, related with glee how a court astrologer of Milan had told him that, though he made a living out of it, the whole science was a fraud. He accused the physicians also of being charlatans. When Pope Clement VI. was ill, Petrarch wrote a letter warning him against them. He was wont to say that no physician should cross his thresh- old, and when custom compelled him to receive them in his old age, wrote with humor of his persistence in Petrarch the Critic of Scholasticism. 25 neglecting all their orders and his consequent return to health. But he made far more effective attacks than any mere witty expression of a personal mood. To his friend the distinguished physician Giovanni Dondi he gave strong reasons for his scorn of the ordinary practitioner. He did not deny that there might be a science of medicine. He suggested that the Arabs had made the beginnings of it. But he denied to the empirics and pretenders who were imposing on the people by wise looks and long words every title of real learning. And he pointed out as the path to a science of health and disease the entirely different method of modern medicine. The lawyers so hated in his youth felt the lash of his invective. He called them mere casuists, split- ting hairs in a noble art once adorned by the learn- ing and eloquence of Cicero, but sunk to a mere way of earning bread by clever trickery in the hands of men ignorant and careless of the origin, history, and relations of the principles of law. And he took a keen delight in pointing out the blunders in history and literature made by the greatest jurist of his time. But it was in philosophy that he came into sharp- est conflict with the scholastic method, which hung like a millstone around the neck of leamine. To make dialectics an end instead of a means he called putting the practice of boys into the place of the fin- ished wisdom of men. Logic was only an aid to rhetoric and poetry, and ideas worth far more than the words which the schoolmen put in their place. When they hid behind the shield of Aristotle, Petrarch was not dismayed. In the pamphlet " Concerning 26 The Age of the Renascence. his Own Ignorance and that of Many Others " he dared to say that Aristotle was a man and there was much that even he did not know. And he finally asserted that, while no one could doubt the great- /-.ness of Aristotle's mind, there was in all his writings v no trace of eloquence — a word which took as much | courage to cast as the stone from the shepherd's sling P that freed Israel. It was the word of an independent. And this in- dependence, this assertion of his personal individual judgment, marks the second service of Petrarch. _He was _notj3nly a critic of scholastic methods and an instaurator of learning, but he threw a high light on t he valu e of the Individual. We have seen why the mediaeval man instinctively regarded himself as one of a class. The serf or bur- gher, noble or ecclesiastic, was a member of a great cor- poration, and his chances and duties were limited not only by circumstances and abilities, but by obligations joining him to his fellows in every direction. The ne- cessities of a half-barbarous condition had made the social unit, not the man or his family, but the com- munity. And the ideal of the feudal system was a single great organization, ruled in ascending stages by a civil hierarchy of overlords, with every detail of life guided and directed by the spiritual hier- archy of the clergy, who bound or loosed the oaths that held society together, directed consciences by the confessional, and, by denying the means of grace in the sacrament, could cast any man out from the fellowship of God and man in this world and the next. Hence mediaeval society lacked the mobility Petrarch and Individuality. 27 and freedom needed to develop individuality. In those days travelling was difficult. For the most part a man expected to die where he was born, and do his duty in that rank of life to which God had called him, unless, indeed, his relation to the social corporation drew him from his home on war or pilgrimage. As against the overwhelming pressure of this corporate sense there was little to develop the consciousness of the ego. Even if the man of the middle ages went to the university, travelled, and mingled with his fel- lows, his mind was still confined. He found there no chance or impulse to measure the heights and depths of his own nature, or to investigate freely the world without. The authority of tradition defined the objects and methods of study, and in every uni- versity of the middle of the thirteenth century the " freedom of academic teaching " was limited with a strictness from which even the narrowest denomi- national institutions of learning would shrink to-day. The organized discipline of study had largely sunk into a base mechanic exercise, a mere gymnastic of the mind. In this social and intellectual atmosphere it was difficult for man to know himself. The literary instinct of Petrarch has presented in dramatic form the moment when he first broke these bonds and realized the value of self. That love of nature which appears in his sonnets in such close connection with his power of self-analysis gave the occasion. So far as we know, Petrarch was^ the first modern man to climb a mountain for the/\ sake of looking at the view. About the year 1336, when he was thirty-two years old, he and his brother 28 The Age of the Renascence. Gerard set out from Vaucluse to climb Mount Ventoux. Gerard was evidently very much bored, and remained all day in that state of subacute ir- ritation common to men who have been seduced by the enthusiasm of a friend into a tiresome ex- pedition for which they have no taste. But Petrarch wrote : " I stood astonished on the top. Under my feet floated the clouds ; before my eyes the snow- covered heads of the Alps towered over the beloved plains of Italy. I knew them, alas! far from me, and yet they seemed so near that I could almost touch them. Then I remembered the past. I ran over in thought my student years in Bologna, and saw how wishes and tastes had indeed changed, but vices and faults remained unchanged or were grown worse. Again I turned my gaze on the wonderful spectacle of nature that had drawn me to the top of the mountain, saw round about me mountains and valleys, land and sea, and rejoiced at the view. Thus gazing, now singling out some single object, now letting my sight range far into the distance, now raising eyes and soul to heaven, I unconsciously drew out of my pocket Augustine's ' Confessions,' a book I always carry with me, and it opened at this passage : ' Men go to wonder at the peaks of the mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad rivers, the great ocean, the circles of the stars, and for these things forget themselves.' I trembled at these words, shut the book, and fell into a rage with myself for gaping at earthly things when I ought to have learned long ago, even from heathen philosophers, that the soul is the only great and astonishing thing. Silent I left Petrarch the Poseur. 29 the mountain and turned my view from the things without me to .that within." And this dramatic announcement marks the be- ginning of the modern habit of introspection. Nat- urally he developed the defects of his qualities, and complains constantly of a spiritual malady he calls acedia. Melancholy, the mood of heavy indifference to all objects of thought and feeling, — the malaria of the soul, — had long been known. The early fathers denounced it, and the mediaeval theolo- gians, who saw much of it in the cloisters, ranked it among the deadly sins. But a single trait of Pe- trarch's character developed this old-fashioned mel- ancholy into the modern Weltschmerz. He was the victim of a ceaseless appetite for fame which no praise could satisfy — a passion which tormented most of the early Humanists and spread from them to the whole society of Italy during the fifteenth century. This passion led him constantly to do things he de- spised and made such a gulf between his knowledge of what he was and his ideal of what he ought to be that he despaired at times of himself and the world. For no sketch of Petrarch is complete which fails to show him not only as an instaurator of learning and an asserter of individuality, but also as a hum- bug. Even Napoleon, with the resources of France to help him, could not pose with the ceaseless sub- tlety and variety of Petrarch. Every strong and true passion of his soul was mingled with self-seeking and self-consciousness. He was a lover of nature and of solitude ; but he always took care to se- lect an accessible hermitage and to let all the 30 The Age of the Renascence. world know where it was. When lie dwelt in his house by the fountain of Vaucluse, with an old house- keeper and two servants to look after him, and an old dog to lie at his feet, he describes his life among the simple peasants as that of one busily content with watching the beauties of nature and reading the words of the mighty dead, who was willing to let the striving world wag on as it will. But in reality it was that of a scholar listening eagerly to every echo of his fame which reached him from the outer world, and counting the pilgrims drawn to his solitude by his growing reputation. He was fond of beginning his letters, " In the stillness of dusky night," or, " At the first flush of sunrise," and perfectly conscious of the interest aroused by the suggested figure of the pale student bent over his books in mysterious and noble loneliness. With that curious weakness which leads inveterate vanity to find pleasure in betraying itself, Petrarch has written that when he fled from cities and society to his quiet houses at Vaucluse or Arqua, he had done it to impress the imaginations of men and to increase his fame ; which, like all the acts and words of a pose?tr, was probably about half true and half false. One who thus enthroned and adored his own genius demanded, of course, tribute from his friends. And in all the letters he exchanges with his inti- mates we find that the topic is never their concerns, but always the concerns of Petrarch. He is fond of decorating his epistles to them with Ciceronian phrases on the nobility of friendship. All the great men of antiquity had friends. But he who stepped Petrarch Serving Two Masters. 3 1 aside from the part of playing chorus to Petrarch's role of hero did so at his peril. To criticise his writ- ing even in the smallest was to risk a transference to the ranks of his enemies. His love for Laura was undoubtedly genuine. There is a breath of real pain in his answer to a teas- ing friend : " Oh, would that it were hypocrisy, and not madness!" But Petrarch was not unaware that all the world loves a lover. No one felt more acutely than he did the patient dignity conferred by a hopeless passion for an unattainable woman. As his fountain of Vaucluse became more beautiful to him because he had made it famous, so he loved Laura more because he had sung his love for all the world to hear. Petrarch was religious, and in spite of his admira- tion for Plato and Cicero, wrote that he counted the least in the kingdom of heaven as greater than they. He is continually denouncing the profligacy of the Papal court at Avignon, whose members deserted 1 their duties at home to live in luxury on the income 'I of benefices they never visited. But Petrarch him- self was priest, canon, and archdeacon without ever [ preaching a sermon or saying a mass, residing near his cathedral, or caring for the poor. And no man of his time was more persistent in the attempt to I increase his income by adding new benefices to the ones whose duties he already neglected. He who runs may read this in a mass of begging letters, where pride and literary skill ill conceal the eagerness of the request and the wrath and bitterness of disappoint- ment. He was a lover of freedom, whose praises he 3 2 The Age of the Renascence. sang with all his skill. But he shocked even his most faithful friends by accepting the hospitality and mak- ing gain of the favor of the Visconti, whose unscrupu- lous power was threatening every free city of North Italy. His devouring ambition, the appetite for success as symbolized by fame or wealth, appears perhaps most plainly in his attitude to the memory of Dante. This became so notorious that it was openly ascribed to envy, and his friend Boccaccio bravely wrote to tell him of the slander, expressing in the letter his own boundless admiration for the great dead. Petrarch's reply is cold. He does not use Dante's name. It is the charge of envy which troubles him. How could he be charged with envy of one who had written nobly, indeed, but in the common speech and for the common people, while he had only used it in his youth and half in play? How could he who did not envy even Virgil envy Dante? This egotism was fed by such a banquet of admi- ration as has been spread for few men. The cities of Italy did not wait for his death to rival each other in honoring him. A decree of the Venetian Senate said that no Christian philosopher or poet could be compared to him. The city of Arezzo greeted him with a triumphal procession and a decree that the house of his birth might never be altered. Florence bought the confiscated estates of his father and pre- sented them to the man " who for centuries had no equal and could scarcely find one in the ages to come," " in whom Virgil's spirit and Cicero's elo- quence had again clothed themselves in flesh." Petrarch Crowned at Rome. 33 Wherever he went men strove who should do him most honor. An old schoolmaster made a long journey to Naples to see him, and, arriving too late, followed over the Apennines to Parma, where he kissed his head and hands. Letters and verses in basketfuls brought admiration from every part of Italy, from France, Germany, England, and even from Greece. Per- haps the most prized of all these symbols of admira- tion was the bestowal of the poet's crown — a re- vival of a traditional and seldom-practised rite. At the age of thirty-six two invitations to receive it reached him on the same day : one from the Uni- versity of Paris, and one from the Roman Senate He chose Rome as the inheritor of imperial dig- nity, the true centre of Christendom. Led by a stately procession through the city to the Capitol, he received the crown from the hand of a Senator, delivered a festal speech, and went in procession to St. Peter's, where he knelt before the altar of the apostles and laid his wreath upon it. The day closed with a great banquet in the house of the chief of the Roman nobles. And these distinctions, sentimental as was their form, exaggerated as was the rhetoric in which they were phrased, were the tributes for great service to humanity. Not that Petrarch discovered anew classic literature, the rights of criticism, or the value of the individual. He ac- complished little that was definite in criticism or history. Roger Bacon was a more original reformer of the methods of science, and there were men before Petrarch. But he came in the fulness of time, and by the force of genius gathered together and ex- c 34 The Age of the Renascence. pressed the tendencies of his own age in a work and a personality strong enough to break the road which was to be followed by four generations of the New Learning. And they were to be the spirit- ual centre of the great social movement of the Renascence, and the strongest of those forces which were to limit the new opportunities and duties of the Papacy, returned to the dignity of its ancient seat in the Eternal City. PERIOD I. CHAPTER IV. THE CONDITION IN WHICH THE RETURNING POPE FOUND ITALY AND THE PATRIMONY OF ST. PETER — THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT SCHISM — TWO VICARS OF CHRIST FIGHT FOR THE TIARA. HE Pope had come back to Rome not simply out of veneration for the ancient seat of the Papacy, but because he was forced to defend to the utmost his tem- poral authority in Italy. During his absence the cities of Italy had been ^exposed to two dangers. The first was the presence of great bands of mercenary soldiers with just discipline enough to hold together and fight. The loosely ruled kingdom of Naples, swarm- ing with brigands, was the regular school of leaders for these bands, and their ranks were recruited by adventurers from France, Germany, and England. When unemployed they plundered, and when hired for war they were equally dangerous to friend and foe. Werner of Urslingen, one of the earliest of their commanders (1348), had this inscription on his sword : " I am Duke Werner, leader of the Great 35 36 The Age of the Renascence. Company, the enemy of God, of mercy, and of pity." The second danger which threatened the Italian cities was the power of tyrants, who, with the help of mercenaries, absorbed or seized the rights of many municipalities and turned them into personal posses- sions. These men everywhere refused to pay their tributes to the Pope as their feudal overlord. And to defend its own rights and answer the cry of the suffering cities the Papacy had, in 1353, sent the Spaniard Gil d'Albornoz as legate to Italy. The situation taxed even his abilities, for the Free Com- panies roamed like human locusts, devouring what the tyrants spared. Bernabo Visconti, the greatest of these tyrants, serves as their type. He was the nephew of that Giovanni Visconti who, as Arch- bishop of Milan, completed the long process of usur- pation by which his family had become lords of the city and a great tributary territory. Bernabo's power was unlimited, his wealth enormous, and he used both in a way which suggests the worst of the old Roman emperors. The central object of the administration of home affairs was the Prince's hunt- ing, and his people were compelled to keep five thousand boar hounds and be responsible for their health. To interfere with the savage brutes meant death by torture ; and the unfortunates upon whose hands one of these unwelcome guests died ran no small danger of being fed to the rest of the pack. He it was who gave a Papal messenger carrying a bull of excommunication the choice of being thrown off the bridge into the river or swallowing his owic The Unjust Stewards. i>7 parchment ; and answered the Archbishop of Milan, who refused hjs commands : " Know you not that I am Pope, emperor, and king in my country, and that God himself can't do anything in it against my will ? " Against this big tyrant Albornoz could do little, even with the help of Florence, the type and ideal of those cities that were struggling to maintain their ancient privileges as chartered municipalities of the Holy Roman Empire. But the horde of little tyrants felt his hand, and at his death in 1367 a large num- ber of the cities of the Papal States, defended by new citadels filled with Papal garrisons, enjoyed some measure of local privilege as vassals of the Pope. But he found no successor. And his death let loose on Italy a horde of hungry legates who used his citadels for oppression and plunder. For the most part Frenchmen, they trampled not only on the chartered liberties, but also on the feelings, of their cities and provinces. Gerard von Puy, for instance, Abbot of Montma- jeur and Legate of Perugia, held the city by the terror of his mercenaries as with a hand of iron. He himself banished and killed and extorted money. His nephew and favorite openly carried off two noble- women of the city. The Governor answered the protests of the burghers in the first case with an in- decent jest, and in the second by condemning his nephew to death unless he returned the woman in fifty days. And the facts would seem to justify the words of that ardent lover of the Church, St. Cather- ine of Siena, who, in a letter to Gregory XL, called his legates " incarnate demons." 38 The Age of the Renascence. The year before Gregory started to return to Rome, the city of Florence, which through the long strife with the empire had been a faithful ally of the Popes, raised a blood-red banner with the word Libertas in silver letters, and united eighty cities of Tuscany in a League of Freedom against " the bar- barians who have been sent to Italy by the Papacy to grow fat on our goods and blood." City after city rose at the call of the League. Citta di Castello, Montefiascone, and Narni were up in November. Viterbo threw open her gates to the Florentine Prefect, and the burghers joined his troops in storming the citadel. The first week in Decem- ber the streets of Perugia rang with shouts: "The people! the people! Death to the abbot and the pastors!" In quick succession, Spoleto, Assisi, Ascoli, Forli, Ravenna, all the cities of the Mark, the Romagna, and the Campagna caught the flame of enthusiasm, drove the garrisons from their cita- dels, and raised the red banner of the League. And finally in March, Bologna, mightiest of the Papal vassals, rose, crying, " Death to the Church! " Al- most all Italy, except the great maritime states of Genoa and Venice, stood united against the Pope in a league whose watchwords were " Freedom " and "Italy for the Italians." From Avignon the alarmed Gregory struck with all his power at the head of the League. He thundered at Florence the sternest anathema on the Papal records. It declared every single burgher of Florence outlawed in goods and person, bade every Christian country banish all Florentines, and gave the right to any one who A Dangerous Conclave. 39 wished to seize their property and make slaves of them and their families. But Florence would not give way. When the bull was read in full conclave to their ambassador, he fell on his knees before a crucifix in the audience-room, and appealed to Jesus Christ, the Judge of the world, against this sentence of his Vicar. It was this spirit that had brought Gregory back to Italy to save the patrimony of St. Peter. And he found himself at once plunged in a miserable and desperate game of war and diplomacy. For he could put no dependence except on brutal mercenaries whose plundering and massacres under his banners foretold the miseries which Italy was to suffer from their kind for a hundred and fifty years. Gregory sickened under the anxieties and horrors of his position, and on the 27th of March, 1378, he died, longing for France and regretting his return. The dangerous position of the Papacy at once be came apparent when the cardinals met to elect his successor. The lack of any true political basis for its governmental authority over Rome exposed it con- stantly to the danger of mob violence ; and the house thus shaken by storm from without was divided against itself. For the Papacy was not even in theory a despotism, but an oligarchy of ecclesiastical princes. And the Pope was supposed to seek con- stantly the advice and assistance of those whom Urban V. (1362-70), in a letter to the Roman people, called "our brothers the cardinals." The cardinals were the leaders of the Roman clergy, and bore the titles of the principal bishoprics, parish churches, and deaconries in and around Rome. In the election of 40 The Age of the Renascence. the Bishop of Rome, as in that of every other bishop, there had been originally, according to the ancient phrase, three elements : the will of God, the choice of the people, the vote of the clergy. The choice of the turbulent Roman populace had no weight for centuries ; but now they were determined to exert their power at least far enough to prevent the choice of any one born out of Italy. Sixteen cardinals went into the palace of the Vatican to hold the election. Four were Italians, one a Spaniard, and the rest French- men. Already an embassy from the city magistrates had represented to the College their need of a Roman, at least of an Italian, Pope, that the city might not be again sunk into poverty and dishonor by the withdrawal of the Papacy. They had promised a quiet election, but they either could or would not keep their promises. The great square in front of St. Peter's was filled with a mob, and as the cardinals entered the Vatican the Roman populace entered with them. For there was a report that the cardinals were bringing in French troops, and suspicious eyes searched every room from garret to cellar, and even poked halberds and swords under the beds to make sure that no soldiers were hidden there. At last they left, but only to pass the night in the square drinking, sounding trumpets, and calling for a Pope. The next morning, after mass, the cardinals began to vote. Instantly the bells of the city rang storm ; and again the whole populace, in arms, flooded the square and surged against the very doors of the pal- ace. Under these auspices twelve votes were cast for the Archbishop of Bari, a good canonist, who had The Ciirial Machine. 41 for a time served as vice-chancellor at Avignon. Ten days later, for the first time in ninety years, a Pope was crowned in Rome. The new Pope, who took the name of Urban VI., was a man of strict personal morals and stern ideas of the duty of ecclesiastical princes, and he had his work cut out for him. St. Bridget, a highly honored ascetic reformer, in a letter to his prede- cessor, Gregory XL, thus concisely expressed the prevalent opinion of the Papal court: "To be sent to the court of Avignon is like being sent to hell. There rules the greatest pride, an insatiable greed, the most horrible voluptuousness. It is a dreadful sink of awful simony. A house of ill fame is already more honored than the Church of God." And making due allowance for the exaggerations usual both in the compliments and invectives of the time, the statement is probably a fair one. But, after all, the men of the Papal court were only the results of a system of abuses so inveterate that they regarded its wrongs as rightful privileges. The ad- ministration of the Church, steadily centralized by the great Popes from Hildebrand to Boniface for pur- poses of reform and to humble the empire, had dur- ing the Babylonian Captivity grown into a great ecclesiastical bureau, the profits of whose patronage were enormous and its corruption notorious. The Papal court was to a great extent flooded by the scions of noble houses spending the incomes of accu- mulated benefices in luxury, and finding in the pur- ple of a prince of the Church only the opportunity to advance the fortunes of their friends by ecclesiastical 42 The Age of the Renascence. politics. The reformer Urban was forced without supporters upon this corrupt old machine by an uprising of the people, and the stout, red-faced little man, with his rash temper and his unforgiving mood, honest and brave as he was, possessed neither the breadth nor the self-control for his task. Within a week of the day when he set the crown on his head Urban publicly called the Cardinal Orsini a " ninny." He fell upon the Cardinal La Grange in full conclave, accusing him of having be- trayed France for gold and of trying to betray the Church. Finally La Grange rose. " You are Pope now," he said, " and I cannot answer you. But if you still were what you were a few days ago, a little Arch- bishop of Bari, I would say to you, ' Little Archbishop,' you are a shameless liar.' " And turning on his heel, he left the room. " Holy Father," said Robert of Geneva, " you show little honor to the cardinals, which is against the customs of your predecessors. Perhaps our turn will come to show little honor to you." It seemed an evil hour for dissension, when Urban had to guide the ship of St. Peter through so great a storm. The war with the League of Freedom still dragged along its fruitless horrors. And yet this outward danger seemed greater than it was. For the centre of the revolt was broken when the Pope came back to Rome. The power of the splendid ideal of the Papacy over the minds of men could only be obscured by the most pressing abuses, and the return from Avignon had changed the Domini- um Temporale itself from 3 =vmbol of French tyranny The House Divided against Itself. 43 into a centre and visible expression of that moral and religious headship of Rome which was a pride to every Italian. The people of the Italian cities had neither the patience nor the self-control to be worthy of freedom. They would not accept military disci- pline and could do nothing but street fighting; and their local hatreds were so strong that nothing but the pressure of unbearable suffering could unite them. When the chief cause of their revolt was thus re- moved, religious feeling, jealousy, and diplomacy began to break the League. Urban did not play his part badly, and three months after his coronation he made peace with Florence, the last antagonist of the Church. But civil war was breaking out in the Curia. By the end of June all but the four Italian cardinals were assembled in Anagni, and the Papal treasurer joined them with the tiara and the crown jewels. Negotiations were in vain. On the 9th of August the thirteen non-Italian cardinals announced that the election of Urban was forced and uncanonical. And on the 31st of October, 1378, having been joined by three of the Italians, they elected and crowned a new Pope, who took the name of Clement VII. He was the Cardinal Robert of Geneva, a little pale-faced man of distinguished manners and a defect in gait which he strove sedulously to hide. The second son of the Duke of Savoy, he was connected by blood or marriage with many of the greatest houses of Europe, understood four languages, spoke eloquently, and dressed magnificently. The impending schism had everywhere horrified 44 The Age of the Renascence. the faithful churchmen, who hoped for better days. St. Catherine of Siena wrote beseeching Cardinal Pedro de Luna to avert the danger of a quarrel be- tween "the Christ on earth and his disciples." " Everything else, war, shame, sorrows of all kinds, were only a straw and a shadow compared to this misfortune." But the schism once made, in spite of its horror, the world promptly chose sides. Flanders, England, the greater number of the states of the German Empire, and all North Italy renewed their allegiance to Urban. But France, Savoy, Scotland, Spain, and Naples received the legates of the Antipope. And two Vicars of Christ waged pitiless war with mer- cenary troops around the walls of Rome. To sustain his falling cause, Urban, deserted by all the Princes of the Church, appointed twenty-nine cardinals at one creation, of whom twenty-two were Italians. But five refused the dignity ; and the rest could hardly bear the harsh temper of the Pope who made them. In the winter of 1385 Urban was in the strong castle of Lucera, 1 perched among the great chestnuts of the hills between Salerno and Naples. Seven cardinals suspected of conspiracy languished half clad and fed in the cold dungeons. One of them, broken by disease and age, was brought into the great arched hall and tortured until the Papal secretary who has left the description, unable to bear the sight, begged permission to leave the castle because of a pretended headache. But Urban, walking up and down on the terrace below, read 1 Now Noccra. The Popes Revenge. 45 aloud the office for the day, that the execution- ers, reminded gf his presence by the sound of his voice, might not be slack in their work. When a Neapolitan army camped among the vineyards around the castle, the besiegers might see how the fierce old Pope, his face flaming with impotent rage, hurled out every day another anathema that devoted them to perdition, even as the lights borne at his side were hurled into darkness at the end of the curse. Freed by a sudden attack of mercenaries collected by his allies, Urban sought refuge in Genoa. One of his wretched captives, unable to bear the rapid journey, was put out of the way on the road. An Englishman among them owed his freedom to the intercession of his King. Five others were carried into the gates of the building of the Knights of St. John, assigned by the city for Urban's residence. One tradition says they were sewn up alive in sacks and cast into the harbor by night ; another that they were starved or strangled and buried in the cellar. It is only certain that men never saw them come out of those gates into the light of day. / PERIOD I. CHAPTER V. JOHN WICLIF OF ENGLAND, AND HIS PROTEST AGAINST PAPAL WAR. HE scandal of open war for the Papal crown, between a ruthless tyrant and a jaded man of the world who loved the game of ecclesiastical politics, aroused in- dignant protest in the hearts of all lovers of religion. And one great churchman was driven by the shock of it to change his lifelong demand for reform into an attack on the organization of the Church and the theory of the Papacy. John Wiclif, a doctor of Oxford, was acknowledged to be the most learned man of England, and his fame abroad would probably have ranked him in the international guild of scholars as the most distin- guished university teacher of his day. In addition to this fame as a scholar he possessed great popular influence as a bold and powerful preacher in the mother tongue. In each of these two characters he had protested against the abuses of the Papacy at Avignon. As a scholastic he expressed his protest in the treatises " De Dominio Civili " and " De Dominio Divino," which were probably intended, 4 6 WicCif the Scholastic. 47 under the single title " De Dominio," to form the introduction to his great work, " Summa in Theologia." The prologue to the treatise "De Dominio Divino" announces his intention of beginning a course of di- vinity by an exposition of the doctrine of Lordship based upon Scripture proofs ; and the author at once proceeds, with unlimited learning, to seek a base for his doctrine in scholastic metaphysics. He discusses, in passing, the nature of being; the relation of uni- versal to sensible objects; the different stages of being, such as essentia and esse, pro se esse, esse Intel- ligibile, and esse actuate, and their mutual relations ; the possibility of demonstrating faith, and the right of free inquiry; the eternity of the world, with a criticism of various opinions on the subject; the question of necessity and free will, and the relation of the persons of the Trinity; and the demonstration of such ideas as " The process by which the primary ens is specificated is substantiation, rendering it capa- ble of acquiring accidents " makes it rather difficult reading for these degenerate days. It is only in the last chapter that he becomes practical and to us readable. For he then develops the idea that God being the immediate Lord of all things, human prop- erty and authority are always held as vassals of God by a tenure tested by due service to him. When this conclusion was again fed into the mill of scholastic logic there was ground out the conclusion that prop- erty and authority were forfeited by sin — a conclusion which, when applied, not as a practical judgment to any given unendurable wrong, but held as an abstract 48 The Age of the Renascence. principle, was fatal to the existence of every institu- tion of human society. But when Wiclif stepped out of his study he showed the man behind the great scholastic. The traditional logic of his class bore him at times, with the clumsy gallop of an animated hobby-horse, whither he would not. But when he dismounted he could give effect to the keen common sense of his practical judgment in phrases which spoke to the noble and the ploughboy — phrases which smote spiritual wickedness in high places like winged arrows of the wrath of God. What gave point to these weapons was the knowledge of the Bible which he was spreading among the common people of England. The art of preaching had sunk very low. Large numbers of the parish priests had given it up altogether, and those who practised it were apt to inflict upon their hearers the linked dulness, long drawn out, by which syllogism gave birth to syllogism in the endless genealogies of scholastic discussion. The popular begging friars, on the other hand, amused and demoralized their hearers by coarse jests and old wives' fables, drawn from the legends of the saints, from the Gesta Romanorum, or even from the dis- torted stories of Greek and Roman mythology. These abuses were flagrant, and known of all men ; and Wiclif, the most celebrated teacher in England, ex-memberof Parliament and royal ambassador, volu- minous author and faithful parish priest, who had voiced, amid the applause of a people, the nation's protest against Papal aggression, set himself to the task of showing a better way. He was too much a child of his age to be free in the pulpit from some of Wiclif and the Bible. 49 the very faults he condemned. But beneath the rhetorical ornaments and cumbrous construction of the celebrated scholastic, his parishioners and the chapels of Oxford heard a new tone of manly direct- ness denouncing sin and calling them to the life of faith. And from chapel and lecture- room went an organized band of " Poor Priests," clad in coarse red garments, barefoot, and staff in hand, to carry the sacred fire now into a town market-place, now to the village church of a friendly rector, and, when that was closed, standing upon some convenient tomb to preach to the living among the graves of the dead. Selecting the best of these friends and pupils, Wiclif began and, by their help, finished a transla- tion of the Latin Bible. The noble who read Nor- man French had long known the Bible in that tongue ; so long as the churl had spoken Anglo- Saxon he could read much of it ; but now for gener- ations there had been no version intended for the men and women of England who worked with their hands. And Wiclif, laying aside the hindrance of a Latinized style formed in the practice of the subtle hair-splitting of his traditional metaphysics, made or inspired one which, together with the poems of Chaucer, exerted on Middle English the same crea- tive power that Shakespeare and the King James version had on Modern English. To the man who was thus passing from the dis- cussion of the Church to the truth she symbolized, behind the official to the idea of his duty, through worship and theology to religion as a new life, the fires of war blazing between two cursing Popes D 50 The Age of the Renascence. seemed the very blast of hell. He had hailed with joy the election of Urban as a " Catholic head, an evangelical man, a man who, in the work of reform- ing the Church, follows the due order by beginning with himself and the members of his own household. From his works, therefore, it behooves us to believe that he is the head of our Church." But when Urban, going from bad to worse, called England to arms for his cause, and the Bishop of Norwich used the authority of the Vicar of Christ to urge all Christians to bring fire and sword among the mea- dows and cities of Flanders, Wiclif poured out pam- phlets of protest in Latin and English. And his wrath, slowly gathering head and finding ever sterner and clearer expression, bore him where his logic had never carried him, through indignant appeal to the Pope to obey Christ, to the total rejection of the whole system which made such a perversion possi- ble, and, finally, to a denunciation of the Papacy as Antichrist. For this revolt made by Wiclif the man, Wiclif the scholar had been slowly preparing by progressive changes in theology. Not that these changes ever carried him entirely outside the limits of mediaeval thought in regard to the teaching of the Bible. The great system of Catholic theology had come into being, to use the mixed metaphor of Paul, as a growth and a building, owing much to the uncon- scious logical development which led the thoughts of men from age to age, as the novelty of one genera- tion became the orthodoxy of another, and much to the labor of the great thinkers who served the Church. Wiclifs Heresy, 5 1 Wiclif was led to criticise parts of this edifice, but he never rejegted the chief corner-stone — the idea that Christ was a second Moses, a divine Lawgiver, and the Gospel a new law. Of the three elements of the relation of the soul to God, knowledge, trust, and obedience, he emphasizes the first and last, but scarcely touches the second. He does not image sal- vation as a gift of God's love, coming to whosoever will receive it in the childlike confidence which gives to all life a filial character, but is fain to regard it as given by God in some sort as an exchange for the effects wrought in a man's thought, feeling, and deeds by faith. He ought not, therefore, to be ranked ac- cording to our modern nomenclature among " Prot- estants." For, disregarding the isolated heresies ultimately condemned by the Church, his theological system as a whole is to be classified as " Catholic." His most important attack upon the theology of his time was in that point where the doctrines of God as the Author, man as the object, Christ as the Mediator, of salvation, and the Church as his visible representative, meet — the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Stripped of technical language, the process which led him to this may be briefly indicated as follows. So far as that department of theology which discussed the Church was concerned, the Catholic theory had its logical base in the idea that clergy were a distinct order of men. They might differ among themselves in honor through all the ascending scale of a complex hierarchy, but between all of them and the laity there was a great gulf fixed. The impulse which developed this idea, and de- 52 The Age of the Renascence. fended it by the practice of celibacy and the doctrine of the sacrament of ordination, was the desire to give to the clergy a superior sanctity because they were priests ministering at the altar of God in the sacrifice of the eucharist, in which they made sacrifice for the sins of the people and were the mediators of the grace needed for daily living. Upon the clergy the Church rested, not, indeed, in the fully and clearly developed doctrines of Catholic theology, but in those phrases and conceptions which were popularly taught and accepted as representing that theology. In opposition Wiclif taught that the centre of gravity of the Church was not in earth, but in heaven, in the counsel of God; for the Church consisted of "the whole body of the elect." So, while he nowhere uses the Pauline phrase, " the universal priesthood of believers," he asserts the duty of believers to rebuke an unworthy priest, nay, if need be, to judge and depose him ; and he defended this assertion by such precedents from the canon law as the order of Greg- ory VII. that congregations should not hear mass from married priests. He even asserts, " Nor do I .'see but that the ship of Peter may be filled for a time with laity alone." It is easy to understand that one who wrote thus for the early chapters of his " Sum- mary of Theology " should be led, just before the end of his life, to criticise the doctrine of the sacra- ments. In the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, as Wiclif received it from the Church, were involved a practice and two ideas not found in the New Testament: 1 the 1 This is, of course, denied by Roman Catholic apologists. Wiclif and Transubstantiation. 53 withholding of the cup from the laity, transubstan- tiation, and >the sacrifice of the mass. And he was the first of three successive protesters, each of whom rejected one of these things. John Huss (burned 141 5) was to bequeath to his followers a pro- test against the withholding of the cup. Martin Luther (protested 151 7), passing for the first time entirely outside of mediaeval theology, was to attack the fundamental conception of the mass, as a repeti- tion of the death of Christ — to deny that the sacra- ment was a sacrifice offered to God to make continually renewed propitiation for those sins by which the peo- ple break the law of salvation. Wiclif attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation. This doctrine was formed by the schoolmen, and can only be stated in the technical terms of their logic. It asserts that after the words of consecration the bread and wine are changed, not in their accidents, but in their sub- stance, into the body and blood of Christ. The accidents of a thing are the phenomena by which it is perceived, such as taste, smell, hardness. The substance is a non-sensible something, only to be laid hold of by the mind, which is behind all accidents. And the doctrine of transubstantiation asserts that, while the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper taste and look like bread and wine, they are actually and substantially the flesh and blood of Christ. Before the Papal schism Wiclif certainly accepted this teach- ing, as when, for instance, he wrote of Christ, " He was a priest when in the supper he made his own body." But the mood induced by what seemed to him a flagrant reductio ad absurdum of the Papal 54 The Age of the Renascence. theory, led him to reexamine and reject the doctrine oi transubstantiation on threefold grounds : of Scrip- ture, which never suggests the idea and by implica- tion several times denies it ; of tradition, because it originated in the later and corrupt ages of the Church and was unknown to Jerome and Augustine ; of rea- son, because it assumes ideas which, tested by the very logic it employs, are false and self-contradictory. And he drew his argument to a point in a stern denunciation of the " idolatry of the priests of Baal, who worship gods they have made," and the pre- sumption of attributing to " synners the power to make God." Members of the Church were, as in the Roman communion they still are, trained by the whole drift of the usual discipline and by every act of their public worship to centre the expression of belief and religious feeling in this sacrament. And her apologists instinctively feel that it is the means by which the mediaeval theology summarized by Thomas Aquinas passes over into the religious life of the people. It is easy to understand, there- fore, that all who reverenced the ancient and ac- cepted forms of learning and piety felt a shock of horror at this attack and the words in which it was expressed. And all the hirelings and greedy place- men who had fought Wiclif so long were quick to take advantage of this revulsion of honest religious feeling. When he had been summoned before the Bishop of London for resisting Papal aggression upon the rights of England, he had walked into court between the Grand Marshal of the realm and the The Defenders of Orthodoxy. 5 5 King's uncle, and they could do nothing against him, because the people held him for a prophet. When a bull from Rome had summoned him to trial on a charge of heresy based on nineteen theses drawn from his writings, the organized scholarship of England, as represented by Oxford University, rose in his defence, the burghers of London filled the court-room with menacing murmurs, and Sir Henry Clifford, in the name of the Princess of Wales, peremptorily de- manded a suspension of judgment. But from the time when he passed beyond demands for the reform of abuses to an attack upon the organization of the Church, his enemies and her defenders began to gain upon him. Groan as men might under ecclesiastical abuses, peremptory as were the demands for reform from every quarter of Europe, the love of the ancient mother was still strong and tender, and the power of the great ideal of a visible Vicar of Christ still un- broken over the human heart. There was as yet no social institution whose ruling powers were willing to defend any one whose protest involved a clear denial of any essential or fundamental element of Church doctrine or organization. William Courtenay, Bishop of London, fourth son of the Earl of Devon- shire, and on his mother's side a great-grandson of Edward I., had been made Primate of England after the murder of the mild Sudbury by the insurgent peasants. He was an able, stern, and zealous ec- clesiastic, and a court under his presidency, in the spring of 1382, condemned ten theses as heretical. One, " that God ought to obey the devil," was prob- ably only Wiclif's statement, in the form of one of 56 The Age of the Rcnasce?ice. those paradoxes loved by the schoolmen, that God permitted evil and Christ suffered himself to be tempted. The rest related, directly or indirectly, to the sacrament of the altar. Armed with this general condemnation, which mentioned no names, the Arch- bishop silenced first Wiclif's scholars. By the help of the young King he repressed the itinerant preach- ing, and with the aid of the conservative minority of Oxford, frightened, arrested, or silenced the ablest of Wiclif's friends. He was too cautious to attack Wiclif himself, who, defended by the gratitude of the people, the power of a skilful appeal to Parlia- ment, and their jealousy of the abuse of the royal prerogative in the proceedings, remained untouched in his rural parish of Lutterworth. The net was drawing round him, and he lectured no more at Ox- ford. But in the English speech, to which he had given form, he spoke by sermon and tract to the people of England. And then he passed suddenly from strife to peace. His assistant has told how a stroke of paralysis, falling on him at the moment of the elevation of the host, while he was hearing mass in his own church, lamed that powerful tongue and, three days later, stilled the brain and heart. It is impossible to say how numerous his followers, who came to be called Lollards, were. At all events, though spared for nearly twenty years by most of the bishops, and protected by a party in Parliament, they never gained cohesion and power enough to make any effective move for the reforms demanded by their teacher. The accession of the house of Lancaster to the throne seems to have been accom- Dead, yet Speaketh. 57 panied by an ecclesiastical reaction, strengthening the conservative hierarchy. In 1401 Parliament passed the statute De Haeretico Comburendo, which for the first time made all heretics guilty of death by the law of England. And under its pressure Lollardy rapidly sank out of sight, emerging dimly behind the abortive revolt for which Sir John Oldcastle suffered death in 1414. After that its doctrines, practices, and protests may have lived secretly among the peasants, but it never appears again as a recognized force in life or an effective power in Church or State. It was Wiclif the scholar whose work lived on most clearly from age to age. His English Bible was a lasting appeal from all tradition back to the earliest records of the source of Christianity, an assertion that the knowledge of religion belongs to the common people, and that its plainest and most direct appeals must always be submitted to the common judgment and conscience of mankind. His other writings also lived when he was dead. Adalbert Ranconis, a great teacher of the recently founded University of Prague, bequeathed a foundation for travelling scholarships, to enable Bohemian students to visit Oxford and Paris. Their transcriptions of Wiclif s later manu- scripts are still in existence, and through them his ideas became the source of the first truly national reform, the first demand for the abolition of ecclesi- astical abuses which united a whole people in willing- ness to resist the authority of Rome to determine doctrine and rule the conscience. Five years later Urban died, fighting to the last for the possessions of the Church and his own au- 58 The Age of the Renascence. thority. Theodoric of Niem, the vivid chronicler of the schism, says, " He had a hard heart," and quotes upon him the proverb, " Sudden honor always makes a poor man over-proud." He took up with rash and obstinate self-confidence the tremendous burden of the Papacy, before which the good have always shrunk and the strong and wise trembled. And he died hated even by those who obeyed him. The proud puritan, with narrow sympathies and intolerant temper, was not large enough for his opportunity. Because he could not distinguish between his per- sonal animosity and zeal in the cause he fought for, he brought upon the Church evils greater than those from which he tried, with the sternest honesty of intent, to save her. PERIOD I. CHAPTER VI. POPE AND ANTIPOPE — THE WHITE PENITENTS AT ROME — THE SIEGE OF AVIGNON — THE FOL- LOWERS OF PETRARCH, THE HUMANISTS, OR MEN OF THE NEW LEARNING. HE death of Urban did not check in the least the struggle for the Papal tiara, which was to drag its slow length along amid treachery, bloodshed, and bribery for forty years. The Popes on either side are distinguished by nothing but their names and the varying degrees of skill with which they avoided yielding to the growing demand of Christendom for a General Council to allay the schism. The record of their intrigues is dull and unprofitable, and even the steady discharge of their mutual anathemas has a stereotyped and unreal tone, like stage thunder. About the only things in the story of the Papacy during these years which the muse of history can record without yawning are, perhaps, the scattered evidences of the deep religious feeling of Europe, and the firm attachment of men to the institu- tions and customs of the Church, which remained unshaken through all confessed abuse, and un- 59 6o The Age of the Renascence. rebuffed by the steady refusals of the demand for reform. Boniface IX. proclaimed, in 1390, a jubilee pil- grimage to Rome, and the gifts of the pilgrims from Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, and England filled up the empty treasury. In advance his agents had sold all over the world vast numbers of indul- gences, which secured to the purchasers all the spiritual benefits of the pilgrimage for the price the journey would have cost. Ten years later the cen- tury jubilee brought crowds of pilgrims, some even from France, which obeyed the other Pope. More remarkable evidences of attachment to relig- ion were the processions of the White Companies of Flagellants. The habit of flagellation grew up in the cloisters as a means of keeping the flesh under, an ex- pression of penitence for sin, and a method of prepay- ing the penalties of purgatory. It was strongly de- fended as a useful discipline and a pious exercise by the celebrated Peter Damiani in the eleventh century. Mutual public flagellation by companies of laity had, however, been discountenanced by Church and State. But when the black death desolated Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century such companies had appeared, journeying through the cities of Germany, beating one another in the market-places, and reading a letter from Christ, which they said had dropped from heaven. Nine thousand of them passed through the city of Strassburg in three months. At first the clergy were powerless to stop the custom, but in six months the hysteric excitement was repressed by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, and before the end The White Flagellants. 61 of the year a Papal bull forbade it as schismatic. It thus became' a method of expression for heretic and anti-hierarchical spirits, and a number of its secret practisers perished at the stake. But in the year 1397 there suddenly appeared in Genoa companies of people clothed in white and wearing great masks with holes cut for the eyes. They marched in pro- cession, singing hymns, and beating each other in pairs with scourges. The habit spread over all Italy. The Flagellants of Florence were reckoned at forty thousand. Some cities forbade their entrance, and when they approached Rome the Pope sent four hundred lancers to turn them back. But the Captain and all his men joined the procession, which included also many priests and bishops, and as they marched forward the inhabitants of Orvieto, ten thousand in number, joined them. The day after their entry into Rome most of the inhabitants put on the white robe. All the prisons were opened and the prisoners set free. The most precious relics of the city were exposed in special services, and the Pope gave the apostolic benediction to an immense multitude crying out, " Mercy ! Mercy ! " while he was moved to tears. Two contemporaries wrote that all Italy prayed and took the sacrament, while everywhere injuries were forgiven and deadly feuds healed. But these effects passed as swiftly as they had come. The opening of the prisons, the enormous crowd of strangers in the city, the intense excitement, brought their natural evils. The Pope forbade the flagellation processions. The leader of a new train of pilgrims was arrested and afterward executed for frauds, and the move- 62 The Age of the Renascence. ment dissipated itself, leaving behind a bad outbreak of the plague. The Antipope, Benedict XIII., was facing a dif- ferent sort of pilgrimage. Marshal Boucicault led the royal army against the castle of Avignon in the summer of 1398. But the huge pile that still towers on its rock above the Rhone was not easy to take, and the obstinate Spaniard, apparently giving way in straits, and breaking his convention as soon as he was reprovisioned, maintained his position until 1403, when, in disguise, and carrying only the consecrated host, " the prisoner of Avignon " escaped. But meanwhile, in all stillness, the new intellectual force whose first exponent was Petrarch was finding broader expression. Its development may be briefly indicated in the slow increase of the numbers and influence of the Humanists, or followers of the New Learning. Among the thousands of these men who for several generations loved letters or sought the glory of them there was every variation in character, but marked common traits betray a secret law by which they must have drawn their being from the spirit of the age. They can be arranged, without too much forcing, around groups of three in succes- sive generations. Boccaccio was a contemporary of Petrarch's, for he was only nine years younger and died only one year later; but he took toward his friend so entirely the attitude of a disciple that he is always looked upon as a follower and successor. He had neither the greatness nor the meanness of his master. He did not, because he could not, do as much, but he Boccaccio the Man. 63 did nothing for effect. He longed for fame, but he scorned -riches, not in words alone, but with the pride which several times refused to change the independence of a scholar and a citizen of free Florence to become the favorite of a court. Once only he tried to sit at the table of Maecenas. When the rich Florentine, Niccola Acciaijuoli, became Grand Seneschal of Naples, Boccaccio accepted a pressing invitation " to share his luck " and become his biographer. But when he was given in the splendid palace of his patron a room and service far below that of his own simple house, the proud poet resented the insult by leaving at once, and answered a sarcastic letter from the Seneschal's steward by the only invective which, in an age of quarrels, ever came from his pen. The plump little man, with his merry round face, and twinkling eyes never dimmed by envy, and a clear wit untinged with malice, lived all his life among the bitterest party and personal strifes, he became a distinguished citizen, and con- ducted with success three important embassies, but he died without an enemy. His enthusiasms were deep and self-forgetful. When he spoke of Dante, whose poem, by a vote of the City Council, he ex- pounded in the cathedral every Sunday and holy day, his eyes moistened and his voice trembled with won- der and love. He writes to Petrarch with a humble and touching joy in his friendship to one so un- worthy, which asks for no return. Petrarch used this feeling, which he accepted as if it were a homage due to him, as incense to burn on the altar of his insatiable egotism ; but, after all, he loved the faith- 64 The Age of the Renascence. ful Florentine, and left him by will fifty gold florins to buy a fur-lined coat to wear cold nights when he read late. Boccaccio is known to the untechnical reader only as the author of the Decameron. The book is the beginning and still a model of Tuscan prose, and ranks him forever among the rarest masters of the art men love best — the art of story- telling. He took his material wherever he could, and it is difficult to believe that to offer some of the ten- der and pure stories of the collection to those who were willing to enjoy some of the others was not casting pearls before swine. But we must remember that it was written for a princess by a man of the world, who gives no sign that he is offending against good manners. For there existed in that and for succeeding generations an incredible freedom of speech. Whether this of itself indicates a larger license in living than that which prevails among the idle and luxurious of this age, in which vice is spoken of chiefly by double entendre, is hard to decide — at least for those who know the vast distinction between essential morality and soc al custom. But whatever may be the truth of this comparison, it is certain that Boccaccio had lived openly, after the fashion of the age, the life of a libertine, and it is difficult to see how any moral defense of the Decameron as a whole can be accepted by a serious-minded per- son. The only consolation under the brand-mark of a Philistine which is certain to follow the confes- sion of such a judgment is that Boccaccio himself thought so ; for he begged an old friend not to give Boccaccio the Scholar. 65 the book to his wife, who would certainly judge him unfairly by it ; or, if he insisted on doing it, at least to explain that he wrote that sort of thing only in his youth. In his vulgarity, and also to some extent in his repentance, he is a representative of the Hu- manists. In every generation, from Petrarch down, many of their leaders were willing to use the utmost skill of their pens in promoting the worship of the goddess of lubricity amid the laughter and applause of Italy. Nothing could have astonished Boccaccio more than to know that fame would come to him as the writer of the Decameron, and not through his great service to scholarship. Not, indeed, that his work marks any real advance in scholarship. Although he offered hints valuable to the future, like the idea of correcting texts by collating manuscripts, he lacked strength to cut out the paths to which he pointed. He never shook himself free from reverence for tradition and awe before all that was written. When, for instance, he finds in Vincentius Bellova- censis that the Franks were descended from Franko, a son of Hector, he does not believe it, but he is un- willing to denounce it as a fable, because " nothing is impossible with God." His service was to give the inspiration of an example and to spread by the contagious influence of personality the enthusiasm for letters. Petrarch, when he left his dying gift, knew the real Boccaccio, the man who showed Italy the image of the student happy in the companionship of his books, a living picture of scholarship powerful to hold and fire the imagination, like Diirer's beauti- E 66 The Age of the Renascence. ful little etching of St. Jerome in his cell. When the first teacher of Greek came to Italy Boccaccio has- tened to meet him at Venice, took him to Florence, and kept the dirty old cynic in his house, learning from him the Greek letters and the elements of grammar. He never seemed to get farther, and knew Homer only in the stiff translation of the master which he copied with his own hand, buried under the extraordinary comments of the old man as he read it. Enthusiasm like this could not fail of a strong impression among the Florentines, and soon after his death we find his friends organized into a learned club for stated discussion. The place of meeting was in the convent of the Augustins, San Spirito, to which Boccaccio had left all his books and in whose church he wished to be buried. The soul and leader of the association was Luigi de' Marsigli, an Augustinian monk, son of a noble Florentine family. At first a student of the University of Pavia, he took his master's degree in theology at Faris. But the meetings under his guidance used no scho- lastic methods of discussion. It was more a free con- versation between the finest spirits of Florence on Livy and Ovid, Augustine, or some question of archaeology as to the origin of Florence, or a histori- cal personage like Ezzelin or Frederick II. We do not know much about this club, except that in it for the first time men could get the elements of educa- tion and the tone of scholarship outside of the Church and the university, still in bondage to the ghost of a mediaeval Aristotle and a mediaeval theology. Coluccio Salutato. 67 The most striking of these younger men who formed the centre of -learning in Florence for their generation was Coluccio Salutato. Trained in the University of Bologna as a notary, he spent two years as an under- secretary of the Curia, and carried from the service a lasting hatred for the corruptions of the Papal court. Afterward he led for several years the wan- dering life of a knight-errant of the pen seeking for fortune, and finally settled in Florence as a clerk in the service of the government. At the age of forty- five he rose to be Chancellor of State, having charge of the records and correspondence of the Republic. And during all his life there streamed out from the government house of Florence upon the eyes of a weak and restless generation the light of a stead- fast soul that loved liberty and feared only God. It was his ideal for Florence that she should be a city not only " hating and cursing tyranny within her own walls, but always ready to defend with all her strength the privileges of the other cities of Italy." He put this eloquence of sincere and bold conviction into the letters and proclamations of the Republic, clothed in swinging rhetoric and ornamented by the phrases of Seneca and Petrarch. They were copied and circu- lated even beyond the Alps, while men wondered to find life and beauty in State documents. Gian Gale- azzo Visconti, the most dangerous enemy of the Republic, who hid like a spider in the palace at Milan, strove to draw all the cities of Italy into the meshes of his crafty tyranny, said, " One letter of Salutato's can do me more harm than a thousand Florentine men-at-arms." 68 The Age of the Renascence. Salutato died in the harness at the age of seventy- six, honored by all his neighbors ; for he had brought up ten sons to be honest and honorable, and, except forty-five florins and his collection of manuscripts, this man, who had for thirty years dealt with the rich tyrants of Italy and known all the secrets of the State, left neither house nor property outside his paternal inheritance. He has one lasting claim to the endur- ing gratitude of posterity : he was the first man to make an index to a book. Over his head as it lay on the bier, wreathed by public order with the laurel of the scholar and poet, the banners of the city and all its guilds were dipped, and a marble monument told to coming generations the gratitude of the Repub- lic to the honest chancellor who had brought the power of the New Learning into the service of the State. He had to defend his love of letters against ascetics, to whom all beauty was a snare, he was accused of being a heathen philosopher by those who could not reconcile piety with the continual quotations of Seneca and Cicero, but his letters show the spirit of one who loved religion. And therefore some of the strongest of them denounce the party strife and personal ambition which was degrading the ideal of the Papacy, devastating Italy with wild mercenaries, and threatening to destroy the liberties of Florence and her allies. PERIOD I. CHAPTER VII. ORTHODOX DEMANDS FOR UNION AND REFORM: (i) CATHERINE OF SIENA AND THE ASCETIC PROPHETS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS; (2) THE PARTY OF CONCILIAR SUPREMACY. HE corruption of the Curia, now so ap- parent in the schism it caused, — this war between two factions of the Princes of the Church fiercely contending for wealth and power, while the hungry sheep looked up and were not fed, — aroused not only the root and branch dissent of Wiclif, but also created two distinct classes of protesters loyal to the Church and of an orthodoxy never seriously questioned. The prototype of the first class is Catherine of Siena, canonized soon after her death. She was the daughter of a dyer, and from her earliest youth began to scorn delights and live days of prayer and praise, visiting the prisoners, clothing the poor, and tending the sick. Visions and dreams came to her. She had seizures in which she lay without speech or feeling, to awake and tell of conversations with Mary and the angels, whether in the body or out of it she knew not. At an early age she gained the privilege of 69 70 The Age of the Renascence. wearing the robe of the order of St. Dominic as an associate sister without a vow. She became an ambassador of the Florentine Republic and a corre- spondent of princes. When Gregory, largely at her intercession, came back from Avignon and at once began to answer the revolt of his misgoverned cities by war, she poured out a flood of letters throbbing with righteous wrath and grief. " Peace, peace, peace, my sweet father," she wrote; " no more war; war against the enemies of the cross by the sword of the holy Word of God, full of love." In two things she never wavered : her loyalty to the Pope as the visible Vicar of Christ, and her readiness to rebuke the sins and follies of Papal policy ; as when she told Gregory to his face that she found in Rome " the stench of intolerable sins." The holiness of her life and the earnest piety of her intent, symbolized in that extreme asceticism which, comparatively uninfluential upon the mind and heart of Teutonic peoples, has always appealed forcibly to the more intense and artistic temperament of the South, gave her enormous power. All Italy held her for a prophet ; and a vigorous intellect and a strong com- mon sense woven through all the mystic web of her visions enabled her to use her influence well. She died a few years before Urban, at the age of thirty- three (1380), worn out by privations, labors, and the griefs and ecstasies of a fervent spirit, exclaiming with her last breath, " I come not because of my merits, but through thy mercy — only through the power of thy blood." And Italy did not lack in any generation faithful witnesses in her likeness— Conciliar Supremacy. 71 ascetic, mystical, given to visions, mingling patriot- ism with religion, denouncing sin with a fervid eloquence that swayed the people like leaves in the wind, or reasoning of righteousness, temper- ance, and judgment to come with a courage before which the most reckless tyrant or the greediest ecclesiastical politician secretly quailed. Lack of space compels the omission of the portraits of these prophets fallen on evil days until we come to Savo- narola, the most splendid of their line. From the earliest days of the schism voices had been heard calling for a General Council of the Church to heal the schism and check the corruption and demoralization which had followed in its train. This demand created an unorganized party, and the party formulated a theory of the church reject- ing the Papal Supremacy, and maintaining that the source of ecclesiastical and dogmatic authority was in a General Council. They were, of course, at liberty to do this without transgressing the bounds of ortho- doxy, for, however strenuously the Infallibility and Supremacy of the Pope were maintained by argument and force, they were not dogmatically defined as a portion of the Catholic faith until our own generation. The party of Conciliar Supremacy can best be seen in the centre where it found a voice, the University of Paris. And its best spirit is incarnate in two Rectors of that famous school, which had been the alma mater of so many Popes and owed its income and most of its privileges to the Curia. Pierre d'Ailly was the son of an artisan, born in 1350. When he came up to the University of Paris at twenty-two he 72 The Age of the Renasce?ice. was a pious and able youth, much given to the study of the Bible. His ability was soon noted. The students elected him a procurator, and the authorities appointed him preacher to open a Synod at Amiens. He chose as his theme the corruptions of the clergy, and laid on the lash well. But the zeal of the youth for reform went hand in hand with a zeal for ortho- doxy, and the same year he published his " Letter to the New Jews." It sternly rebukes those who dared to question the finality of the Vulgate, the translation of a holy man used by the infallible Church; and concludes that if we question this translation we might question any other and the Catholic would be set afloat on a devil's sea of doubt. It was in 1380 that he came up for his doctor's degree, and his thesis discussed the Church. He defended the whole hierarchical organization, but claimed that the power of the Church was not mate- rial, but spiritual. Christ answered before Pilate and bade us give to Caesar the things that are Csesar's. The foundation of the Church was Christ, and Peter was a pillar of the great building, which consisted of the fellowship of believers in Christ. These conclu- sions he based on the Scriptures, which pointed to Christ as the only foundation, and plainly taught in Galatians ii. that Peter had erred. The new law of Christ was therefore the law of God's kingdom. But that new law of Christ recorded in the Holy Scriptures was not to be understood by the human intellect and accepted by the human will. The King- dom of God could only enter into a man by the supernatural gift of faith. To give this God had A n Intolerable Situation. 73 founded his visible Church, and without her none could hear or obey the law of Christ. Outside the Church, therefore, none could be saved. When he came to define how the Church expressed the final authority given her for salvation he fell into embar- rassment. He mentions several opinions : that the Universal Church cannot err, nor a General Council, nor the Roman Diocese, nor its representative, the College of Cardinals, nor a canonically elected Pope. Of these he expresses approval only of the first. In regard to the second he seems to be in doubt, and the general impression of his thesis is that the infal- lible Church has no infallible organ of expression. But he rather indicates this conclusion as the abstract result of a scholastic discussion than as a distinct practical judgment. On the burning question of the day, how to get rid of the schism, he showed himself a man of compromise, standing half way between the Papalists, who thought the Pope independent of the Council, and the Conciliarists, who thought that a General Council would be independent of the Pope. The demoralization of the schism was complete, and the condition of the French Church was now unbearable. The churches were empty, the hos- pitals closed, parish priests begging in the streets, while the hungry cardinals at Avignon consumed the ecclesiastical funds. In 1 38 1 an assembly of the University voted unanimously to demand a Council. The Regent of France was enraged, and imprisoned the delegates who presented the request. The University protested, and appointed the young 74 The Age of the Re?tascence. Professor Pierre d'Ailly as their advocate before the Duke. He did his dangerous duty like a man and came off safe, but the plan for a Council was stifled at its beginning. Then d'Ailly took to the pen and wrote a Letter from Hell. It was signed by Leviathan, the Prince of Darkness, ordering his vassals, the prelates, to be careful for the maintenance of the schism. " I had worked in vain," he writes, " to injure the Church while her sons loved one another, when suddenly her prelates brought the whole heavenly Jerusalem into confusion and began to cry, ' I am for Clement,' ' I for Urban,' ' I for the General Council,' ' I for a union,' ' I for the resignation of both,' ' I for the Lord,' ' I for the King,' ' I for the rich benefices I have got from so-and-so.' Oh, what joy for all my true subjects to see the city thus surrendered to me ! Therefore have I crowned my true servants, the prelates of the Church, with glory and honor, and made them rulers of all the work of my hands, giving them all the kingdoms of this world and the glory thereof. But now, behold, a miserable remnant like mice crawling out of their holes dare to challenge my prelates to battle, and cry, 'General Council! let the people of Christ come together.' If they do not recant, kill them, my sons. Let no one take your crown. No sympathy must soften your heart, no pity cause it to tremble ; be hard as rock and let the whole earth perish rather than give your honor to another. Stand by your advantage till the last breath. I count on you, for I know your obstinacy and stiff-neckedness. Blessed be your wrath, that is so strong, and your hate, that is so fixed. Make broad your phylacteries, The " Eagle of France" 75 and the borders of your garments great. Love the first places at feasts and the chief seats in synagogues. Tithe mint and anise and cummin, but neglect the weightier matters of the law. Make proselytes that are worse than yourself. Be wise in your own con- ceits. Be strong and steadfast, for I am your shield and great reward. Run, that ye may receive the prize. Amen." But these brave words were scarcely heard in the storm of ecclesiastical politics. The University, de- spairing of a Council, gave in its obedience to Clement VII., and in 1384 d'Ailly became Rector of one of its best colleges. There he soon gathered round him a band of distinguished scholars who all loved him and became Gilles Deschamps, the " Sovereign Doctor of Theology," Jean of Gerson, " the Most Christian Teacher," and Nicolas of Clemanges, the " Cicero of his Age." D'Ailly's reputation as a wise and forceful speaker grew, and in 1387 he was chosen as head of a deputation to defend before the Pope the action of the University in condemning as heretical the theses of a Dominican applicant for a degree who had attacked the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. His mission was difficult, for Thomas Aquinas had denied the Immaculate Conception and Urban V. had approved Thomas as the teacher of the Church. But, nevertheless, Clement condemned the denial of Immaculate Conception as heretical, and the Dominican transferred his obedience to the other Pope. There was wide rejoicing at this triumph. D'Ailly received the name of the " Eagle of France," and at almost the same time the young j 6 The Age of the Renascence. King chose him as confessor, and the University elected him Rector. He soon had a second mission to Clement. A certain Prince Peter of Luxembourg, having been made Bishop of Metz at fourteen, and Cardinal at sixteen, died two years later, in 1387, and d'Ailly was sent to advocate his canonization. He preached twice to the Pope, once from the text, " Father, the hour is come ; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee." The preacher proved Peter's holiness by a catalogue of 2 1 28 miracles ; e. g., dead raised, 73 ; blind healed, 57; cured of gout, 6, etc; his faith was illustrated by the zeal with which he flung into the fire a Dominican writing attacking the Immacu- late Conception ; and it was suggested as the perora- tion that God had given these wonderful powers to show that Clement was the rightful Pope and thus heal the schism. In 1394 the University asked the written opinion of all its members on the schism. The result was — negotiations. And d'Ailly, being sent to the new Pope, was made to believe he would resign in due time and appointed Bishop of Cambrai. He was succeeded in the rectorship of the Univer- sity by his favorite scholar, John, born at Gerson in 1363. He had gained under his master a tendency to mysticism, a good training in theology, a love of the Scriptures, and a thorough devotion to the Church, Catholic and visible. He added to these a deep piety and an intense love of the young. The five folio volumes of his works, moral, mystic, exegetic, dogmatic, ecclesiastical, polemic and homiletic, show Jean Char Her of ' Gerson. 77 how laboriously he used his powers and how faith- fully he followed the bent of his genius. There is a practical turn to all his mystical and keenly critical mind thinks and feels. This Chancellor of the Uni- versity used to devote much time to hearing the con- fessions of little boys. This learned theologian thought that all learning was only to teach the clergy to preach better. This skilful writer on ecclesiastical law was a stern preacher against the sins of the clergy, and his criticism and piety moved entirely within the self-chosen limits of the Catholic orthodox faith, which was to him a supernatural gift of God, through the Church, to every man who was obedient to God's servants. The system of faith the Church preserved, the system of government by which she preserved it, was more important to him than any opinion or any reform. Hence, like d'Ailly, in spite of the sceptical spirit he inherited with his nominal- istic philosophy, he was always a safe theologian. And he shared not only his master's reforming zeal, but also his love for a " middle-of-the-road " policy, " It is better," he wrote, " that many truths should be unknown or concealed than that charity should be wounded by speaking of them." He anxiously warned every theological teacher to use the old forms, even if, in his judgment, he could find better. He even wished that, as the Church had one Head and one faith, so it might have only one theological fac- ulty and be kept "safe." Naturally this was to be the faculty of Paris. He loved the Bible, but he op- posed its translation into French, as full of danger of spreading heresy among unlearned folk, " as an 78 The Age of the Renascence. injury and a stumbling-block for the Catholic faith." All these early utterances are prophecies of his trac- tate written over Jerome of Prague, that, when it comes to " obstinacy in heresy against the command of the Church, the conscience must be laid aside." While this able successor followed him as Rector and first orator of the University, d'Ailly was inau- gurating reforms in his new diocese. He found need, for in his first synodical sermon he said that, while in our Lord's day there was one devil among the twelve apostles, to-day among twelve baptized there were eleven. It was from this herculean task of cleansing, which he sketches in his convocation sermons, that he was summoned to try and persuade both Popes to resign. The double embassy was a double failure, and France withdrew obedience from both. But only for a while. Five years later d'Ailly was summoned to preach the sermon at the celebration of the return of France to the obedience of Benedict — an obedience which in five years was again withdrawn. PERIOD I. CHAPTER VIII. THE COUNCIL OF PISA MAKES THE SCHISM TRIPLE — THE PROTEST OF JOHN HUSS OF BOHEMIA. HEN, on the death of Innocent VII. in 1406, the fourteen cardinals of the Italian party met, they were evidently sincerely touched by the desperate condition of Christendom. The simple and honest way to express this feeling was to refuse to elect a Pope until it could be done by the representatives of the whole Church. For this they were not large enough. They feared lest their party should lose some advantage in the union, and after a short hesi- tation entered into conclave. But they bound them- selves by a solemn agreement that if any of them were elected Pope he would at once begin to nego- tiate for union, and lay down the tiara whenever the interests of the Church demanded it. Then they chose the noble Venetian, Angelo Coraro. He was nearly eighty years old, and they thought that one so near death would not be tempted to forget duty for self — a singular want of knowledge of human nature, for all experience teaches that egotism is 79 80 The Age of the Renascence. never so all-engrossing as in the few last years left to an ambitious or avaricious man for the exercise of passion. And the world soon became aware that behind all the edifying and friendly messages sent to his rival there was the fixed will of a crafty old man neither to promote nor permit a union which did not secure the gains of his party and leave him Pope. When the pressure of France compelled both Popes to agree to meet at Savona in September of 1408, there began a double-sided comedy. Each ap- proached the place of meeting, but neither would go there, and by letters curiously mingled of piety and malice each tried to lay the whole blame for the schism at the door of the other. Then the French authorities forbade any one to obey either Pope unless the schism were ended by a certain day. The enraged Benedict XIII., of the old French faction, threatened excommunication, and the Parliament of France and University of Paris declared him deposed. Gregory, triumphing over the loss of his rival's strongest supporter, seized the opportunity for breaking his oath to create no new cardinals, by naming two of his nephews and two of his partisans for the scarlet hat. He already suspected his electors and kept them surrounded by soldiers. Remember- ing the fate of the cardinals of Urban VI., most of them fled and appealed to a Council. Benedict had already summoned one to his native place of Perpignan, whither he fled for refuge. Greg- ory called another to assemble near Ravenna. Meantime some cardinals of both parties, Frenchmen and Italians, met and called a Council, to be held at The Triple Schism. 81 Pisa, to arrange a basis of union and reform; and Christendom/ which had so long asked for a Council, found itself overwhelmed with three. It was a brilliant assembly that convened at Pisa in 1409 : twenty-three cardinals, the prelates and ambas- sadors of kings, princes, and nations, the representa- tives of the universities, and one hundred doctors of law and theology. But in spite of its splendor and author- ity the councif knew that its assemblage against Papal authority was an innovation, and hailed with gladness the tractates of d'Ailly and Gerson, claiming that as Christ was the corner-stone of the Church, she had power to exercise her authority without any visible Vicar if it were necessary to preserve her life. They added the characteristic and wise advice not to run the risk of adding schism to schism by electing a Pope until they were sure that Christendom would unanimously obey him. The Council proceeded to depose and excommuni- cate both Gregory and Benedict as schismatics and heretics. The Cardinals then took oath that whoever was made Vicar of Christ would not dissolve the Council until the Church was reformed. And the Conclave elected Pietro Filargo. He was seventy- nine years old, came from the island of Candia, had no living relatives, and, report said, had been a beg- gar boy adopted by the monks to whose order he belonged. He was crowned under the name of Alexander V. ; and, to use the words of a contem- porary pamphleteer, the world saw " that infamous duality, now, indeed, become a trinity, not blessed, but accursed, fighting in the Church of God." F 82 The Age of the Renascence. For the two Antipopes, each backed by his Synod, returned with interest the excommunications of the Council. Benedict was supported by Aragon and Scotland, Gregory in Naples, Friauli, Hungary, and Bohemia. Alexander could not conciliate them, and he had no resources to crush them. For, as he said, " I was rich as a bishop, poor as a cardinal, but a beggar as Pope." Baldassar Cossa, Cardinal Legate of Bologna, who succeeded him under the title of John XXIII., was popularly reported to have been a pirate in his youth and to have poisoned Alexander. But these ought probably to be regarded as mythical details suggested by better authenticated facts of his career and char- acter. For these the day of judgment was approach- ing. Driven by the exigencies of the triple contest to seek help from Sigismund, ruler of Germany, the Pope had no resource but to join him as emperor elect in calling a General Council at Constance in November, 1414. And at last the middle-of-the-road policy of d'Ailly and his scholar Gerson triumphed in the call for a General Council issued by a Pope. Meanwhile in the opposite corner of Europe another party of reform had been taking shape. It also was national, headed by a university, and represented by two protagonists, a master and his scholar. But nation and university were new and feeble, and both were divided on the question of reform into bitter factions. Bohemia was a section of the empire which, by the force of the tendencies of the age, was fast ac- quiring an independent national feeling and existence. A New Nation. 83 It was a bilingual land, whose original German popu- lation, driven but in the eighth century by an irrup- tion of Slavs, had since the thirteenth century been returning and mingling with them. Germans formed the bulk of the burghers, or city dwellers, engaged in commerce, manufactures, and mining, while the peas- ant farmers and the nobles were Slavs. In the middle of the century the growing national feeling had re- ceived, by the efforts of the King, two centres of ex- pression. The Bohemian Church was freed from the control of the Archbishopric of Mayence, whose seat was on the Rhine, and given its own Primate by the erection of a new Archbishopric in Prague ; and in 1348 Bohemia became a centre of learning by the foundation of the University of Prague ; the first university in Germany. John Huss, born of a peasant family about 1369, first appears in close connection with these two organs of the national feeling. He gained no special distinction at the University while a student, but rose steadily through the academic grades till he became a master of the liberal arts. As a lecturer and teacher he won the respect of his fellows, and in 1402 was chosen to act as Rector or chief executive of the Uni- versity for the usual term of six months. In the same year he was ordained a priest in order to take charge of the Bethlehem Chapel, built some ten years before by a wealthy merchant of Prague, and endowed by one of the royal councillors, for the maintenance of preaching to the common people in the Slavic tongue. He soon showed himself a not unworthy successor of the two great folks' preachers of Prague, 84 The Age of the Renascence. dead about a generation before, Konrad and Miltitz. Konrad, because there was no church large enough to hold his congregation, had preached often in the great open square of the city. He became, by the appointment of the Bishop, pastor of the largest parish in Prague, and preached repentance to the German burghers and to the clergy, denouncing sin with tremendous power. His successor was Miltitz, a Slav, whose success was so great that he was some- times compelled to preach five times a Sunday — thrice in Slavic and once each in German and Latin. He was so powerful in the truth that the worst street of the city, known because of its houses of prostitution as Little Venice, was abandoned by its inhabitants. The King bought and gave it to him, and he tore down the houses and built a Magdalen asylum named Little Jerusalem. He did not hesitate in a great assembly to point out the King, his friend, and after- ward still more his friend, as an antichrist who needed instant repentance. It is not to be wondered at that one who preached in this apocalyptic strain got into trouble in those days with his ecclesiastical superiors. But he boldly went to Rome to meet his accusers. After vainly waiting for a hearing he posted on the door of St. Peter's the notice of a sermon on " The Present Antichrist." Arrested by the inquisitor, he lay for some time in prison ; but on the arrival of the Pope was released, treated with honor, and sent home in triumph. As a preacher Huss lacked the ability, but not the courage, of these two men. He formed his style and borrowed much of his material from the works of Wiclif. He had already Huss the Preacher. 85 sat eagerly at the feet of the great scholastic, some of whose tractates he copied with his own hand. And now, following in the footsteps of Wiclif the preacher, he began to call men to repentance by the law of Christ, obedience to which was the only sign of membership in the true church of God's chosen ones. Wiclif, it will be remembered, passed through three stages of thought in regard to the Church, which would be labelled by the enormous majority of his contemporaries reform, revolution, heresy. Huss fol- lowed him in two of these stages. And while he remained in the first stage, exhorting all ranks of the church to do their duty and rightly use their au- thority, he came into close connection with the second centre of national feeling, the new Archbishopric. The new incumbent, the descendant of a noble Slavic family, and skilled in everything except theology, was an honest man, for whose moral character Huss kept until the end the highest respect. He at once asked the new preacher's assistance in the reform of his province, applauded Huss's sermon before the Synod on the sins of the clergy, which did not spare even himself, and appointed him one of the commis- sion to investigate the miracles of the blood of Christ at Wilsnach. Accepting the report upon that fraud, he forbade all pilgrimages from his province to the shrine of the alleged miracles. But within six years, either because the Archbishop began to grow more conservative, or because Huss was becoming more radical in his criticism of the Church, a coolness arose between the two which ere until the Archbishop removed his favorite Irom the 86 The Age of the Renascence. position of synodical preacher. But the final break with the hierarchy came when, under the lead of Huss, the Bohemian teachers and students of the University stood against the Bishops, and with the King, in favor of remaining neutral in the schism of the Church and awaiting the decision of a Council. The three other nations of the University voted, with the clergy, to obey Alexander V., and the King issued a decree giving hereafter three votes to the Bohemian nation, and one to the Polish, Bavarian, and Saxon nations together. Whereupon the German students aban- doned Prague and founded the new University of Leipzig, while the triumphant Bohemians elected Huss as rector. Meanwhile the Archbishop had ob- tained two bulls from Pope Alexander V., command- ing the surrender of all writings of Wiclif's and forbidding preaching in any places which had not acquired the right by long usage. When these orders were published, Huss, before a large assembly in the Bethlehem Chapel, entered his protest against both points, and appealed to the Pope. A month later the Archbishop excommunicated Huss, and two months later two hundred volumes of Wiclif's writings were publicly burned. The students resented the first by singing mocking songs about an " A B C archbishop who burned books and didn't know what was in them." And the people resented the condemnation of their favorite preacher in sterner fashion. A tumult in the cathedral broke up the high mass and compelled the Archbishop to withdraw. And in St. Stephen's Church six men with drawn swords fell upon the priest as he read the excommunication of Huss Denounces Papal War. 87 Huss and drove him from the pulpit. Then the Arch- bishop used.his last weapon, the dreaded interdict that forbade baptism, burial, marriage, and the Lord's Supper in the rebellious city of Prague. But Huss stood by his post, and the sudden death of the Arch- bishop, and the appointment of the King's physician and trusted friend as his successor, brought peace. A new cause for war soon followed. John XXIII. proclaimed a crusade against Gregory XII., and an agent of the Curia appeared in Prague to cause the proclamation from every pulpit of a sale of indulgences to raise funds, and an enlistment of soldiers for a holy war in the name of the Vicar of Christ. Huss, like Wiclif before him, sprang to his spiritual arms. His pulpit rang with denunciations, and in university disputation he and his friends, notably the eloquent Jerome of Prague, attacked the crusade and the sale of indulgences against the majority of the theological faculty. The excitement spread. A mock proces- sion, organized by a well-known nobleman, drew through the streets a wagon on which sat a woman of the town with the Pope's bull around her neck. Halting for a while before the palace of the Arch- bishop, the huge rude train went to the market-place, where the bull was laid on a scaffold and publicly burned. The King did not punish the act, but for- bade all disorder in future, under pain of death. Three young men of the common people, in spite of this edict, interrupted the services of several churches by denouncing the indulgence as a cheat and lie. They were arrested by the magistrates and beheaded. The people gathered the bodies, and in a procession, 88 The Age of the Renascence. headed by a band of students chanting the song of the breviary for the commemoration of the martyrs, " Isti sunt sancti," bore them to the Bethlehem Chapel for a solemn funeral service. The German City Council endeavored to suppress Huss's preach- ing by force, and his congregation appeared in arms for his defence. Then, to relieve the city from the interdict and avoid the chances of riot in the streets, Huss, at the request of his King, withdrew to volun- tary exile, leaving behind an open letter in which he appealed from the Curia to Christ. Soon after he was visited by two messengers from Sigismund, who invited him, under promise of a safe- conduct, to appear before the General Council at Con- stance, where he might have an opportunity to clear himself of the charge of heresy and save the ecclesi- astical honor of Bohemia. Nothing could have pleased Huss more. He had himself appealed from the Pope to a Council, and his one desire had always been to persuade the Church to accept his ideas, or at least permit them. Nevertheless, forebodings of evil haunted his prophetic soul. His letter to the Emperor spoke of his desire to confess Christ, and if need be suffer death for his true law. He wrote his will and gave it to a favorite scholar, with directions not to break the seal until he heard of his death. And he left a farewell letter to his friends in Bohemia, in which he asked for their prayers that he might stand firm, and if need be suffer death without fear. They shared his anxiety. A shoemaker of the city bade him, " God-speed ; I think you will not come back, dear, true, and steadfast knight. May the The Appeal to the Council. 89 heavenly King, not the Hungarian, give you the eternal reward for the faithful care you have given to my soul." Sigismund appointed three Bohemian nobles as imperial deputies to enforce the safe-conduct which protected him against illegal violence, and Huss set out for Constance. PERIOD I. CHAPTER IX. THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE AND TRIUMPH OF THE PARTY OF CONCILIAR AUTHORITY: (i) THEY DEPOSE THE POPES AND FORCE UNION; (2) THEY REPUDIATE THE BOHEMIAN PRO- TEST AND BURN HUSS; (3) THEY FAIL TO DE- TERMINE THE REFORM OF THE CHURCH IN HEAD AND MEMBERS. LMOST the first to arrive at the fair little city by the lake was the Pope, who had ridden up from Italy with a splendid train of nine cardinals and many prelates. He entered the gates in state, with two great nobles walking at the bridle-reins of his palfrey, while the burgomaster and rulers of the city carried the glittering baldachin over his head. And for three months the boys of Constance must have revelled in the almost daily spectacle of some stately entry. The legates of Gregory and Benedict, who had been courteously invited to come to the Council, princes, ambassadors, great nobles, archbishops and splendid prelates, little companies of University doctors, all with as many horses and servants in their train as 90 The Method of Voting. 9 1 they could muster, straggled through the streets in spasmodic parade. The Emperor came by torch- light on Christmas eve. He was accompanied by the Empress and several Princes of the Empire, and followed by a thousand horses laden with articles of luxury, from his service of table silver down to many pack-loads of embroidered pillows, silk bolsters, and carpets. Before midnight, clothed in the dalmatic and with his crown on his head, he read the Gospel for the day as deacon, while the Pope conducted mass in the cathedral. One meeting had already been held, but noth- ing done, except formally open the Council, arrange for proper secretaries, and discuss the order of busi- ness. The first important question was the man- ner of voting, and its discussion plunged the Council into the troubled sea of curial politics. The Italian prelates numbered almost half the voters, for Italy was cut up into many petty bishoprics. If the Council voted in a mass, the Pope held the balance of power. The friends of union and reform therefore rejected this usual custom, and it was decided that all present should be divided into four nations, German, English, French, and Italian. (The Spanish was added after- ward.) Each nation was represented by a fixed number of deputies, with a president, changed every month. All questions were first discussed in national assemblies. The results were communicated and discussed in common meetings of the deputies. Any point on which all agreed was then discussed in a general congregation and, if adopted, solemnly affirmed in the next General Session of the Council. 92 The Age of the Renascence. Armed with this conclusion, the friends of union proceeded to deal with John. They had no easy task to force him to face the situa- tion. It was hard for such a man, an adventurer fight- ing for his own hand, to whom the idea of duty was unknown, to get any glimpse of what it meant to be head and servant of a great institution. He knew no better than to keep on as Pope doing what he had done all his life — use every circumstance and event as something to be squeezed for his own gain. Nor was he without support. The cardinals probably had no illusions in regard to him as a man, but it was natural they should stand by him as Pope. For when men have risen by work or fortune to the top of any institution, it takes unusual greatness of mind or character to be very much dissatisfied with it ; and they are always apt to be disinclined to any changes not absolutely necessary to its life. D'Ailly, there- fore, stood almost alone among the Princes of the Church in desiring thoroughgoing reform — reform checked and guarded at every point, but reform based, if need be, on amendment of the constitution. He stood by his order, of course, but Gerson working without and he within, soon forced upon John, in spite of every subterfuge and attempt to dissolve the party by personal diplomacy, the solemn declaration " to give peace to the Church by the method of simple cession of the Papacy whenever Benedict and Greg- ory, either in person or by proper procurators, shall do the same." But already the report was in the air that John would break up the Council by flight. Several princes warned the Archduke of Austria, The Flight of the Pope. 93 whose dynastic ambition would be flattered by hav- ing a Pope to protect and control, to keep out of any such plot, and Sigismund visited John and bluntly told him of the current suspicions. It is even said that the Bishop of Salisbury, who was in the Em- peror's train, forbade the Pope to his face to dare any such rebellion against the authority of the Coun- cil. John promised " not to leave before the disso- lution of the Council " ; which his party afterward ex- cused by the statement that the absence of the Pope ipso facto dissolved the Council. Two days later the evasion was skilfully carried out. By this time a crowd of one hundred thousand strangers, with thirty thousand horses, was assembled at Constance. It was a mixed assembly of members of the Council and idle sight-seers, and was anxious to be amused. Musicians and jugglers, estimated at seven- teen hundred, ministered to the pleasure of the visitors, and a great crowd of the victims and tempters of the vices of society served its sins in a commerce of evil which, to the great scandal of all honest men, even involved some of the worldly prelates of the Church. The princes, in the spirit of perpetual circus day which was common to the time, vied with one another in display at feasts and processions ; and when the Duke of Austria gave his great tournament on the 20th of March all Constance went to see. At nightfall the Pope, dressed like a groom, mounted on a mean horse with an arquebuse at the saddle-bow, and, covered with a coarse gray cloak, coolly rode out of the gates with only one boy in his train. Two hours later a hungry traveller asked food of the village 94 The Age of the Renascence. pastor of Ermatingen, and getting into a little boat, was carried across the sea to Schaffhausen, where he was joined the next day by the Duke, its Sovereign. The news of this evasion, brought by a letter from John to the Emperor, threw all Constance into panic. The timid members of the Council prepared for in- stant flight. The mob began to plunder, and rumor reported an army at the gates. It seemed as if the Council would break up at once. Sigismund first rallied the terror-stricken city. Riding through the swarming streets, he put down disorder with a strong hand, scoffed at the idea of an assault, and bade every one be of good cheer. He called two assemblies, one of the German princes, and another of the four nations. In the first he announced his purpose to hold the Council together if it cost his life, and by deputation obtained from the cardinals the promise to join in conducting business, if necessary, without the Pope. They even agreed to abandon him alto- gether in case his continued absence prevented union and reform. Meanwhile they asked that all action against him be suspended until an embassy could confer and report. The Council itself was steadied by a sermon from Gerson on John xii. 35, which maintained that the Church might take counsel without the presence of the Pope and, if need be, force him to close the schism. The cardinals refused to be present at the sermon, and the Council, after waiting in vain for their co- operation, proceeded to a General Session without them. Only two of them seemed to have been aware of the danger. The Council at Pisa had The Pope Deposed. 95 met without a Pope, but here was the more fatal innovation of a Council without cardinals. D'Ailly, the most progressive, and Zabarella, one of the more conservative of the body, were alike too old and trained ecclesiastics to be so caught. It was bad to be outvoted ; it was worse to be ignored. While their brother princes sulked in their tents, they rushed at once to the Hall, where one acted as President, and the other read the conclusions of the Nations. In the next two sessions, under presidence of the cardinals, and after heavy debating carried on amid a double fire of pamphlets, it was decided that the Council of Constance, as a true Ecumenical Council, held its power direct from God ; that every Christian, even the Pope himself, was bound to obey it in all that concerned faith, the destruction of the schism, and reform in head and members; and therefore " it was not dissolved by the blameworthy and scandalous flight of the Pope, but remained in all its integrity and authority, even though the Pope should declare the contrary." Thus the party of union and reform threw down the glove before the defenders of an autocratic Papacy. Their victory was certain. As long negotiations made plainer and plainer the un- willingness of John to forget himself in his duty, even the cardinals, who wanted to stand by him as long as possible, yielded to the pressure of circumstances or the logic of events, and in the eleventh sitting, on the 29th of May, the President of the College of Car- dinals added their placet to the decree by which John XXIII. was solemnly deposed from the Papacy as a notorious simoniac, a squanderer of the goods of the g6 The Age of the Renascence. Church, an evil steward, and a man whose horrible life and indecent manners both before and after his election had given scandal to the Church of God and all Christian people. The first stumbling-block on the way to union and reform was removed. Then the Council proceeded to remove the second : the heresy so wide-spread in Bohemia. For though Huss hoped to appear at the Council as a man slan- dered by a charge of heresy, but really representing a great body of true Catholics desiring to persuade the Church to necessary reforms, his Bohemian ene- mies and the leaders of the other parties were too clever to let him appear in any such light. They did not propose to have a discussion, but a trial, and they made up their minds that, in spite of the imperial safe-conduct, Huss's first public appearance must be as a prisoner. The 2 1st of November, three weeks after his arrival, two bishops appeared in Huss's lodgings to lead him to an audience with the cardinals. Baron von Chlum, as the representative of the royal honor, at once in- terfered and declined to allow anything to be done in Huss's case until Sigismund had arrived. The Bishop of Trent replied that no harm was intended to Huss ; the invitation was simply a friendly one. Whereupon Huss at once agreed to go. They took him to the palace of the Pope, where he had an audience with the cardinals, and in the after- noon the Baron von Chlum was informed that he might withdraw whenever he desired, but Magister Huss must remain. The knight at once demanded to see the Pope, and using the respectful forms of ad- Huss a Prisoner. 97 dress due to his office, accused him of treachery and falsehood. For he did not fail in duty or friendship. Influential noblemen, prelates, and burghers of Con- stance were shown the safe-conduct, and begged to defend the royal honor. Then, unable to do more, he nailed his public protest, in Latin and German, on the door of the cathedral. Meanwhile Huss was put into a cell of the Dominican cloister so unwhole- some that in a short time he fell ill, poisoned by sewer-gas. When Sigismund, met on the road to Constance by John von Chlum, heard of Huss's arrest without any legal process, he flamed into wrath and sent an order for his instant release, with a threat to break the doors of his prison and fetch him. But before the resistance of the Curia his purpose melted, and even when the flight of John put the keys of Huss's prison into his hands, he simply sent them to the Bishop of Constance, and the prisoner, worn by illness, was thrust into the tower of the episcopal castle at Gottlieben, near Constance, badly fed, com- pelled to carry chains by day, and to sleep with his hands fastened to the wall beside his bed. Mean- time the Council had condemned forty- five proposi- tions drawn from the works of Wiclif, and declared him a hardened heretic whose body ought not to rest in consecrated ground ; a sentence carried out twelve years later by the Bishop of Lincoln, who dug up his bones. Then, as soon as the Pope was deposed, Huss was summoned before the Council for his first public hearing. Public rumor and the efforts of the emissaries of the Bohemian clergy, the majority of whom were gS The Age of the Renascence. contributors to a fund to pay the costs of Huss's prosecution, had surrounded him with such an air of heresy and violent revolution that in the minds of the Council he was condemned before he appeared, and they listened with scant patience at his first in- formal hearing. He was interrupted by exclamations. When he claimed that he had been misquoted they cried, "Stop your sophistry; answer yes or no." When he kept silence they said, " Silence gives con- sent." And such an uproar finally arose that it was thought best to dismiss the assembly. In future hearings there was fair play, for the presence of Sigismund kept order. But his words told strongly against Huss ; for he declared that any single one of the propositions from his books on which he was arraigned was enough to prove him a heretic, and demanded that if he did not recant he should be burned. He warned them not even to trust his re- cantation, for if he was not forbidden to preach or see his friends he would resume his heresy on his return to Bohemia. If there was any lingering doubt about his fate this speech sealed it. John von Chlum stood by him like a man, and as he left the assembly seized him boldly by the hand and bade him be of good cheer. There were others who would have saved him if they could. He was visited again and again in his prison, and the utmost was done to frame a formula of adjuration he would accept. The final result was skilful and fair, for it .\imited his recantation to literal transcriptions of prop- ositions from his books, and, embodying his denial of utterances put into his mouth by witnesses, simply Huss Condemned to Die. 99 rejected them hypothetically. To lead him to accept this formula- the leaders of the Council sought the intercession of John von Chlum and his companion, von Duba. John visited Huss in company with many prelates, and said : " See, Magister John, we are lay- men and cannot advise you. But if you are guilty you must not be ashamed to be taught and recant. If, however, you do not feel yourself guilty, you must on no account disobey your conscience and lie before God, but rather stand steadfast in the truth till death." These words of honest friendship were good to the prisoner who had written to the University of Prague that he was determined to retract nothing unless it were proved to be false by the Word of God, and fail- ing acquittal, he would appeal from the Council to the judgment-seat of Christ. Such an attitude, denying the authority of the Church to determine belief and rule conduct, was in itself heresy and, according to the law, a sufficient ground of condemnation. Huss was brought before the Council for sentence the 6th of July, 141 5. He was clad in the garments of a priest about to say mass, and the pieces were taken from him by the bishops, according to the usual for- mula. When they took from his hand the cup they said, " Judas, who hast left the councils of peace and joined thyself to the council of the Jews, we take from thee the cup of salvation." To which Huss answered with firm voice, " I trust in the Lord, the Almighty God, for whose name's sake I patiently bear these blasphemies. He will not take from me the cup of salvation, and I hope to drink it with him even to-day in his Kingdom." ioo The Age of the Renascence. Arrived at the place of execution, he fell on his knees at sight of the stake, crying, " Lord Jesus Christ, I will bear this horrible and shameful death humbly and patiently for the sake of thy gospel and for the preaching of thy Word." He was bound to the stake, and wood and straw piled around him as high as his chin. Pappenheim, the Marshal of the Empire, begged him to recant and save his life. Huss refused, and the fire was lighted. The smoke rolled up, and before his Latin prayer, " Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy upon me," could be three times intoned he died. They gathered the ashes from around the stake and cast them into the Rhine. Eleven months afterward Jerome of Prague, hav- ing once recanted and anathematized the works of Wiclif and Huss, was called to a second trial on new charges. He closed his defence by declaring that " the writings of his master were holy and right, like his life," and, refusing to recant, was burned as " a sharer in the errors of Huss and Wiclif." Huss and Jerome died when they were condemned, because heresy was as much a crime by the law as stealing or murder. Their condemnation was inevi- table, because, when they met d'Ailly and Gerson, two types of men stood face to face. Huss and Je- rome were not, indeed, wanting in reverence for inheritance of the past and the institutions of society. Their defence was full of quotations from the men of old, and they came to Constance of their own free will, because they loved the Church. But to them the truth was greater than the symbol and religion more The Antagonists. 101 vital than any of its institutions. They felt that Christ had left in the world a teaching, not a visible authority, and it was the duty of every man to do and believe what his mind and conscience told him was in accord with that teaching. D'Ailly, Gerson, and their followers were, on the other hand, not in- different to truth. Gerson's mystic piety was deep, and we may well believe that he would have died for the truth as freely as the two Bohemians. But he did not believe that the truth could continue to exist apart from the visible authority of the institution he served. Neither Huss nor d'Ailly were without personal am- bition. The acute Frenchman tried to catch the debate-loving Hungarian in a scholastic dilemma over universals and prove him a heretic on the doctrine of the Trinity. And Huss writes with unmistakable glee to his friends how he escaped the subtle snare and silenced "the chief Cardinal of them all." D'Ailly was so well contented to be the chief Cardinal that he was willing to give a despised heretic the last word. But after all, both judge and prisoner, in spite of the weakness of the flesh and the gandium ccrtaminis, stood resolutely and honestly for their convictions. Both believed in reason and conscience ; but the one submitted his reason and conscience to the invisible Christ, the other to the visible Christ, the Holy Church. What was expected of Huss had he been an ortho- dox Roman Catholic has been plainly exemplified in this generation by those prelates who, after combat- ing the dogma of Infallibility at the Vatican Council, afterward felt it their duty to accept it for the sake 102 The Age of the Renascence. of chanty and on the authority of the Church. The Bohemians died for refusing this authority. They indignantly asserted their fidelity to the entire re- ceived doctrine of the mass. Jerome began his de- fence by invoking the Virgin Mary and all the saints, and when bound to the stake sang the creed as a proof that he died in the true faith. Huss was not a great thinker. The parallel column has shown unmistakably that the chief of his new opin- ions, and even the forms of their expression, were bor- rowed from Wiclif. It has been mistakenly claimed that he shared in the theological scheme afterward as- serted by Luther, Xhesolafidcan. But his writings refute the claim, and his dying assertion of faith in Jesus Christ, a quotation from the prayer-book, is no more a proof that theologically he was an " evangelical " than the similar dying confession of St. Catherine of Siena, or a score of other orthodox Roman Catholic worthies of all ages. He did not possess the force or origi- nality of intellect needed to express religious experi- ence in new theological formulas. And this makes clear his courage and illuminates the significance of his death. He sealed his fate when he cried, " I ap- peal from the Council to Christ." More plainly, per- haps, than any man in the history of the Church, he and his friend died for the dignity of the individual soul and the idea that, in the last analysis, religion is a personal matter between the Teacher sent from God and every disciple. The result of the death of Huss and Jerome was the revolt of Bohemia against the commands of the Church Sigismund 's Dishonor. 103 and the Empire. When their King died the peasants and nobles refused to receive his brother Sigismund as King because he had broken his word and betrayed Huss to death. He has never lacked for apologetes, and they have a case, because the formal safe-con- duct was not intended to protect against the law, but only against violence. But the instant they step outside of those formalities by which gentlemen of every age and people have always declined to limit their honor, Sigismund's defenders are in great embarrass- ment. Huss came to Constance on reliance on his word. The least Sigismund could have done was to secure fair play, to defend him against being cast into a noisome dungeon without due process of law, to have stood by h m to the end, and not to have sealed his fate even before he was condemned. Charles V., when he was urged to permit the arrest of Luther, who came to Worms under his protection, refused because he did not care to blush like Sigismund. For it is said that Huss, before he left the cathedral on his way to the stake, turned and looked at Sigis- mund, who looked down and colored. History finds no basis for the anecdote, but the judgment of most honest men is that if Sigismund did not blush he ought to have blushed. The war in Bohemia, animated by the two forces of race hatred and religious zeal, soon took on a character of singular ferocity. When the crusade was pro- claimed against the heretics, adventurers of all na- tions, led by the offer of indulgences and the promise of plunder, joined the German army. The Bohemians 104 The Age of the Renascence. met the cross, now become the sign of oppression and cruelty, with the symbol of the cup. It signified their habit of communing in both kinds. In the orthodox Roman Catholic communion only the bread is given to the people, and the wine is drunk by the priest. This custom, originally caused by the fear lest the blood of Christ should be spilled, had come to be associated with the special privileges of the clergy as priests needed to mediate between the people and God. The habit of giving the cup to the laity started in Bohemia during Huss's captivity. After some hesi- tation it was approved by him as agreeable to the example of our Lord and his apostles. It soon be- came to the people the visible expression of that appeal from the authority of tradition to the word of Christ found in the Scriptures and interpreted by reason and conscience, for which he had died. Under this rallying signal they hurled back five crusades in slaughterous defeat; and crossing the borders, ravaged Germany almost to the Rhine with fire and sword, so that the name Bohemian or Hus- site remained for generations in German villages a word to frighten children. It was eighteen years before the Bohemians came back again to the fel- lowship of the Church. The Council, having thus decided that the centre of ecclesiastical authority was in itself, having deposed one Pope and received the resignation of another, hav- ing cut off the heresy which denied the supreme au- thority of the Church, was free to proceed to that task for which all these things were only the preparation — the reform of the Church in head and members. An Unconquerable Old Man. 105 The general good will for this work is suggested in three sermons, preached in the end of August and beginning of September, 14 16. The first one asserted that the Roman Curia is diabolic and almost all the clergy of the Church subject to the devil. The sec- ond, by Professor Theobald, going into particulars, accuses the clergy of open vices, and sums up the situation in the phrase, " Praelati nutriunt tot mere- trices quot familiares." The third, delivered by the representative of the University of Vienna, on the word of Christ to the leper, " Go show thyself to the priests," cited the entire clergy, patriarch, archbishops, bishops, etc., as being afflicted with the leprosy of worldliness, dissoluteness, avarice, and simony, and called on the Council to heal this foul disease. They began with the deposition of Benedict XIII. An embassy was sent to his mountain fortress of Paniscola to announce it. The old Spaniard's will was unbroken by isolation and the weight of over ninety years. He received the embassy of assembled Christendom in full regalia, and they began to read the sentence of the Council. The words " her- etic " and "schismatic" brought an outburst of wrath. "It is not true; you lie. Here," he cried, beating the arm of his chair with his hand, " here is the. ark of Noah. I am the true follower of the unity of the Church. Those at Constance are here- tics and schismatics, not I." For eight years longer the unconquerable graybeard held his empty state, and bound his two remaining cardinals, under penalty of his dying curse, to elect a successor. They sol- emnly shut themseves into conclave and elected the 106 The Age of the Renascence. Canon Mugnos, who maintained the pomp and cir- cumstance of the little mountain Papacy for four years more and then resigned, A.D. 1429. The evils which demanded reform at the hands of the Council were of two kinds : the unworthy char- acter and irregular lives of the clergy, and the exac- tions and corruption of the administration of the Church by the Roman Curia. To meet these evils the party of which Gerson was the ablest spokesman demanded the reform of the Church in head and members. The cause of this corruption, so far as it exceeded that measure of weakness and personal ambition which may be expected in all institutions managed by men, was the same as that which lies at the root of the worst corruptions of our politics, the temptations of an enormous patronage. The Church was a very wealthy institution. Its property was not dispersed by inheritances, and grew constantly by gift and bequest. The ecclesiastical lands in England, for instance, were reckoned at a third of the entire real estate of the kingdom. Much of this wealth was honestly spent in the care of the poor and the building of those mediaeval churches which are among the most beautiful things ever made by human hands. Much of it was spent in luxury and display, by which numbers of unworthy men were tempted to enter the priesthood and the manners and morals of the clergy corrupted. By steady usurpation of privileges the Roman Curia had succeeded in im- posing a heavy burden of complicated taxes on the ecclesiastical salaries and incomes of the world. The foundation of direct taxes was the so-called right of The Papal Taxes. 107 reservation, by which the Popes had acquired the right to fill vacancies in a large number of bishoprics and abbacies by direct appointment. All such ap- pointees were compelled to pay heavy taxes — the first year's income of the benefice, and various other sums — to the Papal treasury. A second kind of tax, direct and indirect, was indulgences; by which the Pope, usurping the rights of local discipline, sold by his agents all over the world dispensations from the Church penance imposed upon various sins. The right of appeal to Rome in all ecclesiastical causes was another great source of revenue. For dispensa- tions were sold through the dioceses of the world, by which a clergyman of lower rank was freed from some given claim or right of his superior, and made secure of acquittal in the event of an appeal to Rome. Then exemptions against these exemptions were sold to the ecclesiastical overlord, until the rights of some of the bishops were so tied up with a tangle of Papal bulls that it would have puzzled the shrewdest canonical lawyer to define just what power remained to them in many cases. To these abuses of the power of provisors and indulgence were at- tached two scandals which everybody had denounced and no one dared to defend for generations, and yet which had steadily increased — plurality of benefices, resulting in absenteeism and simony or the sale of the offices of the Church. It was common for one man to hold several offices and perform the du- ties of none. There were bishops who knew noth- ing of the state of religion in their dioceses, and cared less, canons who had never seen the cathedral 108 The Age of the Renascence. to which they belonged, and priests who had never entered the bounds of their parishes. And the sale of the salaried positions of the Church, from the Papacy and the red hat of a cardinal down to door- keepers of the churches, was notorious. To drive out these tables of the money-changers from the house of God the Council needed something more than invective. The times demanded the repression of the usurpations by which the Curia had encroached upon episcopal rights, and the restora- tion of local government throughout the dioceses ; an absolute prohibition of pluralities, and rules strictly regulating absenteeism ; the devising of some means to convict simoniacs and enforce upon them the stern penalties of the canon law, so long mere dead letters. But ecclesiastical assemblies, always apt to be cautious, are often cowardly. And against the advocates of a thorough and sure reform, those whose principles or whose interests led them to de- fend the privileges of the Curia could appeal to the fears of the conservatives that reform would become revolution. They had two arguments to use. The Papal States were in rebellion and but little income came from them. If the Papal taxes were reduced, how could the Church have any Pope and cardinals at all? Secondly, though the Council had rightly deposed the Pope for the preservation of the Church, the Church was only rightly constituted when she had a head, and reform ought to be preceded by the election of a Pope. After long discussion the twenty-three cardinals, accompanied by six deputies from each of the The New Pope. 109 five nations, Spain, Italy, France, England, and Germany, Went into conclave on the 4th of No- vember, 141 7. The great hall of the merchants' house had been divided into fifty-three little rooms by canvas walls. All access to doors or windows was shut off by guarded barriers, and no ship might ap- proach within bowshot of the walls. Two bishops sat before the door to inspect all food carried in, lest notes might be concealed in it ; but the ancient rule that after three days they were to receive only two meals a day, and after eight more only one, was sus- pended — perhaps out of consideration for the carnal weakness of the deputies associated with the cardinals in the conclave. On the third day the anxious city learned that after a long strife between the five na- tions, each of which wanted a Pope of its own tongue, the unanimous choice had fallen upon the Cardinal Deacon Otto, of the ancient Roman house of Colonna, a man of ability and honorable record, with a fine personal appearance and dignified manners. The Emperor rushed into the conclave and kissed his feet, hailing him as the morning star that at last had risen out of darkness, and all Christendom rejoiced that the schism was safely closed. Five months later the Cardinal Deacon Raynald called out, " Domini ite in pace," all answered, " Amen," and the great Council was over. But the reform of the Church in head and members was scarcely begun. For the curial party, under the lead of Martin V., had but little difficulty in foiling every attempt to unite the nations in any plan of general reform. Amid distrust and despair, each began to scramble for national privi- no The Age of the Renascence. leges, secured to them in a series of concordats signed by the Pope. And these compromise reforms recognized the rights of the Pope in the matter of the very usurpations and abuses they abated. The Council of Constance has involved the ortho- dox Roman Catholic theologian and canonist of this century in considerable embarrassment. The Papal succession depends upon its ecumenical authority, for it deposed two Papal claimants as schismatics, compelled a third to resign, and elected a new Pope by an untraditional method. But the decree neces- sary to its work, that the authority of a General Council was greater than the authority of a Pope, is of course a denial of that dogma by which the Vat- ican Council of 1870 completed the Catholic system and defended it against all change — the Infallibility of the Pope. The judgment of the learned Bishop Hefele, in his great " Conciliengeschichte," is char- acteristic : " There can, therefore, be no doubt that, according to the ecclesiastical law of to-day, which considers the approbation of the Pope upon General Councils necessary to constitute them such, all con- clusions of Constance which do not prejudice the Papacy are to be considered ecumenical, but all, on the other hand, which infringe upon the privilege, the dignity, the preeminence of the apostolic chair are to be held for reprobated." PERIOD I. CHAPTER X. THE PAPAL REACTION — THE STRUGGLE FOR THE PATRIMONIUM — MARTIN V. AND EUGENIUS IV. REESTABLISH THE PAPAL SUPREMACY WITH- OUT GRANTING REFORM — THE PROTEST AND ABORTIVE SCHISM OF THE COUNCIL OF BASLE. HE new Pope was face to face with a situa- tion that might well have daunted a bolder man. He entered Rome by streets almost impassable, past ruined churches and empty or fallen houses, through a crowd as wild and miserable-looking as their city. The States of the Church were all but dissolved into strange or hostile municipalities and communes, while petty tyrants and soldiers of fortune were striving to make principalities for themselves out of the patri- mony of St. Peter. And behind this was the task of the reform of the Church in head and members, to which he was solemnly pledged. To meet his political difficulties he was fitted by many characteristics. He was firm, clever, had an engaging personality that inspired confidence, and lived simply ; for he desired the reality and not the shows of power. Rome began to become prosper- iii 1 1 2 The Age of the Renascence. ous ; the citizens rebuilt their houses, streets and bridges were repaired, and, led by his example, some of the cardinals rebuilt their titular churches. Order was restored around the walls of the city by the destruction of robbers, and an annalist exclaims with wonder that one could go through the country with gold in the open hand. Teachers of religion began to appeal with success to the people. Bernardino of Siena, for instance, came to Rome three years after Martin's return, preaching repentance. He was the son of a noble family, who, feeling in his heart the call to preach Christ, entered the order of St. Francis while still a youth. He had acquired great influence throughout various cities of Italy, and his success at Rome was striking. Many blood-feuds were recon- ciled by him. He was accustomed to denounce the luxury of the times as a chief cause of sin, and on the 25th of June, 142 1, he publicly set fire to a great scaffold on which was piled false hair, cosmetics, in- struments of music, worldly books, and many other articles of luxury. Three days later another pyre was lighted in the presence of all Rome, which was crowned by a living woman, burned for witchcraft. In the attempt to recover the Papal State lost to tyrants and rebellious vassals, Martin's chief opponent was Braccio Fortebraccio, a condottiere, or soldier of fortune. For the Breton or German leaders of the Free Companies of the fourteenth century were now quite largely replaced by Italians trained in their troops and rising from the ranks. The two most celebrated of these were Jacopo Sforza and Braccio Fortebraccio. Sforza, the son of a peasant, had run The Sins of Martin V. 113 away from home and enlisted at the age of thirteen. Rising to fame, he had used his twenty brothers and sisters to extend and hold his power. His frank manners, strict honesty in all money engagements, the care with which he protected the peasants from pillage, and his reluctance to destroy conquered cities made him respected even while feared, and he was called "the common father of the men-at-arms." His rival, Braccio, seems to have been a rougher sort — a breaker of his word, a layer of plots, and a burner of harvest-fields, who put the country-side in terror. But he was firmly fixed in his usurpations, and the Pope could only get into Rome by receiving him at Florence and naming him Vicar for the rule of some of his best cities. Two traits prevented Martin from having a good will for the reform of the Church — pride and the greed of gold. The latter was so notorious that a celebrated writer among the curial secretaries hesi- tated to publish an essay " On Avarice," lest it should be thought an attack on the Pope. No avari- cious Pope could honestly desire reform. Nor would the head of the Colonna consent to lessen the wealth and power of the city which was the background of the dignity of his race. His nepotism was as marked as that of poorer Popes, who thought it neces- sary to create great relatives for their own support. And during his life the family of Colonna were everywhere advanced and enriched. The sale of benefices and the whole system of fees and perquisites, which crushed all poor appellants to the justice of the Papal court, increased, and the Papal usurpations H 1 1 4 The Age of the Renascence. of episcopal rights on which these abuses were founded were silently maintained, in spite of the pro- tests and agreements of Constance. It was not to be supposed that this was done without opposition. It had been agreed at Constance that a new Synod was to be assembled at Pavia within five years, but its temper was so dangerous when it met that the Pope adjourned it to Siena, and then closed it to await the General Council which had been appointed for the tenth year after Constance. Meantime he pleased Christendom by appointing to the College of Cardinals half a dozen men whose wisdom or piety fitted them in the eyes of all for the dignity of Princes of the Church. Then, just on the eve of the assembly of an Ecumenical Council at Basle, he died (143 1). Martin had in every way repressed the powers of the cardinals, and before they proceeded to a new election, the College, the most weighty and dignified for many years, passed the first of the capitulations which hereafter every Pope was compelled to accept. It was an attempt to preserve the Papacy in the form of an aristocratic oligarchy where the Pope was the first of the cardinals, and to defend their rights as a senate governing the Church with him. In practice, however, it always failed of its purpose and never seri- ously checked the growing absolutism of the Papacy. The so-called rhythm of the Papacy, by which the opposition party generally elects the new Pope, gave the votes to the candidate of the Orsini, the Roman family which rivalled the Colonna. Eugenius IV. was forty-eight years old and had been made Cardinal by his uncle, Gregory XII., in 1408. His appearance, The Generous Eugenius. 115 writes a chronicler, was so majestic that once, when he appeared upon a platform to intone the prayer in a service at Florence, the people who crowded the great square were moved to tears before the figure " of the Vicar of Christ, who seemed to be he whom he represented." His pious habit never varied. Amid all his business, four monks, two of his own order, were always with him to conduct the proper offices of day and night, in which he never failed to join. He was free from nepotism and avarice. His relatives, who flocked to him, received nothing from the goods of the Church. He answered that he could not give away what was not his. But many stories are told of his generosity. Once he offered to a poor Florentine who begged for help a purse of gold pieces and told him to help himself. The abashed man took only two or three. " Oh," laughed Eugenius, " put your hand in. You are welcome to the gold." The nepotic and avaricious Martin had ruled Rome in peace, but the generous and unworldly Eugenius lived in the midst of civil war. For the sins of his predecessor were visited on his head. The castles and cities of the patrimonium were garrisoned by the soldiers of the Colonnas ; the Papal jewels and a large part of the treasure of St. Peter were in their hands. When summoned they declined to surrender them to a Pope who had been the candidate of the rival family of Orsini. When Eugenius became peremptory they assaulted the city, seized and held one of the gates, and the slaughter and burning of civil war filled the streets of a part of Rome for a month. 1 1 6 The Age of the Renascence. Scarcely was this bloody trouble ended by the en- tire submission of the Colonna and the surrender of everything claimed by the Pope than the Council met at Basle, and the Papacy had to face again that great episcopal system whose rights it had so continuously usurped. The prelates reaffirmed the decision of Constance that the Council was independent, indis- soluble, except by its own consent, and superior to the Pope, and summoned Eugenius to appear within three months for trial. These things strengthened the local enemies of the Pope. Different bands of condottieri, the chief of whom called himself General of the Holy Council, besieged him in Rome. Thus driven to a corner, Eugenius recalled the bulls dis- solving the Council, acknowledged it as the highest authority, and put himself under its protection. By this time many prelates, including seven cardi- nals, were assembled ; the Council was supported by all the powers, and it seemed that the principle of Conciliar Authority had obtained a second and lasting victory over Papal absolutism. But Eugenius could not make his peace with the Romans. Wearied by the endless war which wasted their lands, they rose with the old cry of " The folk, the folk and freedom!" established the Republic, and forced the captive Pope to renounce the worldly power. Then Eugenius fled. A reformed pirate, Vitellius of Ischia, had recently been taken into the Papal service, and his galley lay at Ostia. Disguised as a Domini- can monk, the Pope slipped out of the back door, while some bishops appeared to wait his immediate coming to the audience-chamber. A mule brought The Pope Flees. 1 1 7 him to the river-bank, and a servant of the ex-pirate carried the Pope on his back through the shallow water to a boat. But suspicion was aroused, for it was full daylight, and a great crowd pursued. They put the Pope in the bottom and covered him with a shield, and the seamen of Vitellius rowed down the river amid a storm of stones and arrows until they distanced the cursing Romans and landed their pas- senger on the galley. The Romans had often driven the Popes from Rome and called them back again, for they were a folk impatient of authority and in- capable of self-rule; but it might have comforted Eugenius, as he lay under the shield, could he have known that none of his successors for four hundred years would again be compelled to flee before an insurrection of their own people. In June, 1434, the Pope sought the protection of the Republic of Florence and took up his residence in that city. Every petty tyrant in the Papal States, suppressed or appeased by the policy or strength of the family of Martin, now seized the opportunity given by the rebellious Colonna. And once more it was evident that if the Vicar of Christ was to be ruler of a kingdom of this world, the Church had need of a prince who could hide the silk glove of a cardinal in the gauntlet of a man-at-arms. He was at hand in the person of Giovanni Vitelleschi, who began life as the clerk of a condottiere, afterward went into ecclesiastics, and had become Bishop of Recanati. He had already been Papal legate in the march of Ancona, where he had displayed skill in war and a ruthless temperament. Eugenius gave him the task 1 1 8 The Age of the Renascence. of destroying petty tyrants, rooting out the condot- tieri and subduing Rome. The terrible priest, who had already shown himself not slow to shed blood, fought fire with fire. One by one the fierce barons were bribed or forced to peace. The Prefect of Vico, descendant of a family which had been a thorn in the side of the Popes for three hundred years, was besieged, forced to surrender, and beheaded. Re- bellious Rome, half frightened, longing for the money spent by the Curia, and envious of the glory given to Florence by the presence of the Pope, invited him to return. And Vitelleschi, reporting his successes to Eugenius, was made Archbishop of Florence and Patriarch of Alexandria. Then he was sent back to finish his work. He hung, beheaded, and strangled the tyrants wherever he could lay hands on them, and with patient destructiveness levelled the walls, churches, and houses of some of the feudal strong places whence the fierce nobility had for generations threatened the supremacy of law and made stable government all but impossible. The head of a second conspiracy in Rome was drawn through the streets on a hurdle, torn with red-hot pincers, and then quartered. Thus a stern will made stillness rest upon a land of wasted fields and the ruins of thirty de- stroyed cities. The thoroughly cowed Roman burghers voted him an equestrian statue on the Capitol, inscribed to " Giovanni Vitelleschi, Patriarch of Alexandria, the third father of the State after Romulus." The Colonna were humbled to the very dust, and of their family city fortress not one stone was left upon another. Then the riches and power of The Fighting Bishop. 1 1 9 the man who had done this work excited suspicion. Vitelleschi, now become a Cardinal, was on his way to Tuscany, and crossed the bridge of San Angelo in the rearof his army. The portcullis was suddenly dropped on one end and a chain drawn across the other. The men-at-arms from the castle of San Angelo fell upon him, and, in spite of a desperate defence, carried him a wounded prisoner into the castle. When his army turned back in rage at the news, they were met by the closed gates and cannon of the castle, while the governor waved over the battlements the parchment order for their general's arrest, stamped with the Papal seal. A month later Vitelleschi was dead. He was a striking representative of the class created by the Dominium Temporale, the fighting priest whose prototype was the fighting Pope Julius II., who at the beginning of the next century was to set up over the church door of a conquered city a statue of himself cast from captured cannon. Meanwhile, strengthened by the iron hand of his servant, Eugenius had resumed resistance to the Council of Basle with great success. At first the party of reform had things all their own way. But for reasons which seem not at all clear, their sweeping de- crees for reform produced a powerful reaction. And the Papacy found able and worthy defenders in Juan Torquemada, who asserted its infallibility, Ambrogio, Travasari, and the noble Cardinal Cesarini. Eugenius had been in negotiation for union with the Eastern Church, and had succeeded in procuring submission to the Chair of St. Peter as a condition of the military aid of Western Christendom in resisting the Turk. 1 20 The Age of the Renascence. The necessity of having a meeting-place more con- venient for the embassy of Constantinople enabled him to carry off the most influential, though the smaller, part of the Council to Ferrara and then to Florence. There, in July, 1439, the Patriarch of Constantinople kissed his hand, and the Emperor formally acknowledged that the Patriarch of Rome was the Vicar of Christ and the supreme head of the entire Church. This reconciliation was merely a political necessity, shortly after renounced by the entire Greek Church, but for the time it strengthened the cause of Eugenius. And when the Council of Basle, having deposed him, elected a new Pope, Felix V., in November, 1439, the powers of Europe, shrinking in horror from a new schism, refused to recognize him. France, indeed, had the courage to adopt all the decrees of Basle in the Pragmatic Sane- tion passed by a national Synod at Bourges, and to compel from Eugenius as the price of her support the recognition of the episcopal rights of the national Church. Germany tried to do the same thing. She declared her neutrality in the schism, and demanded needed reforms before she would declare obedience to Eugenius. The embassy from the princes and prince bishops obtained an acknowledgment of the preeminence of the Council and the promise of re- forms ; but the Pope, before he handed the bulls to the ambassadors from his death-bed, had signed a previous bull providing that his concessions, which were made at a time when his judgment was weak- ened by illness, should be null if they in any way injured the teaching of the fathers and the rights of A Weak Surrender. 121 the Holy Chair of St. Peter. But his successor did not need to appeal to it. The jealous strife between the petty German princes gave too broad an opening for the diplomacy of clever legates. The Roman King (title of the Emperor elect) had already sold his sup- port for a paltry bribe in money and patronage ; the princes and bishops were only too ready to be bribed, and in the concordats of Aschaffenburg and Vienna (1447-1448) they signed away the national rights which the French episcopate had successfully de- fended. PERIOD I. CHAPTER XI. THE SPREAD OF HUMANISM. HILE the Papacy, using an ecclesiastical reaction and the skilful diplomacy which surrendered individual aggressions to re- serve the principle of Papal autocracy, had resisted reform and weakened the power both of the College of Cardinals and the advocates of Conciliar Authority, the movement of the New Learn- ing was finding broader and stronger expression. The light centred in Florence by the three first followers of Petrarch — Boccaccio, Marsigli, Salutato — and their friends had been spread over all North Italy by the efforts of a race of wandering teachers. These pioneers of learning may be represented in short sketches of two, the most characteristic of their generation. Giovanni di Conversino was a poor boy who won distinction in the school of Donato at Venice, and was sent to Petrarch to act as copyist. He left that barren employment because he wanted to learn Greek and see the world, and led henceforth a rest- less life, whose hopes and pride were always larger than its fortunes. The poor fellow never fulfilled his 122 Ch rysoloras. 123 early ambition to learn Greek, but went to Florence, to Rome, to Belluno, Padua, Ragusa, Udine, to Padua again, and back to Florence. Now he was private secretary, now notary, now lecturer on Cicero, now master of a Latin school. He must have had some of the elements of a great teacher, for we are told by one of his scholars that he " led the way to virtue not only by showing the examples of the ancients, but by his own walk and conversation." Two of the greatest teachers Italy ever had, Guarino and Vit- torino, sat at his feet, and it is a pity to think of the impossible man passing through so many good posi- tions to earn the scanty bread of his old age as a giver of lessons in Venice to any scattered pupils he could pick up. A still more striking figure is Chrysoloras, the first of the line of learned men who were to flee from Constantinople, then tottering to its fall be- fore the assaults of the Turk. The Greek scholar- ship of Constantinople does not seem to have had within itself the seed of growth ; but it possessed by inheritance the manuscripts in which were recorded the origins of our poetry, our philosophy, and our religion, and the knowledge of the language in which they were written. Italy had long desired to know Greek, and when news came that Chrysoloras, a dis- tinguished teacher of rhetoric and philosophy, had landed in Venice to seek aid for the Empire against the Turk, two noble Florentines went at once to see him. One of them returned with him to Constanti- nople. The other brought to Florence so glowing a report of his learning and personality that Salutato 124 The Age of the Renascence. induced the city to call him for ten years as a teacher of Greek, with a salary of one hundred florins and fees. In 1396 he came. A great crowd went to hear his instruction, but it is melan- choly to find that none of the older men, like Salutato, who had longed so earnestly for this trea- sure, were able to master the difficulties of the tongue. Chrysoloras formed in Florence some able young scholars, and wandered to Pavia, then back again to Byzantium, and returned once more to Venice and Florence on his way to Rome. From thence he visited France, Spain, and England, came back to Rome, and was sent by the Pope on a mission to Byzantium. Returned, he was despatched to Ger- many, and finally died at the Council of Constance. Thus the long beard and flowing garments of the Greek reminded the students of the world that the tongue of Homer, Plato, and John might be learned and its lost treasures recovered. A little army of such scouts of learning, most of whose names are long forgotten, wandered from city to city, seeking or giving knowledge. And through their labors there were soon scattered over Italy knots of men who loved to live laborious days in the pur- suit of truth and beauty. The leaders in this love of learning were of the country of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and the capital of their little state was not only the defender of liberty, but the Athens of Italy. Florence, like London to-day, was the centre of trade and the financial exchange of the world. The most remarkable of her merchant princes and rich bankers was Cosimo de' Medici. His father, Giovanni Cos into de Medici. 125 de' Medici (died 1428), left to his two sons, Cosimo and Lorenzo, a fortune acknowledged as 179,221 gold florins. This wealth was enormously increased by Cosimo's skill as a merchant and banker. The figures will indicate what this means. Lorenzo, who died in 1440, left 253,000 florins. Piero, Cosimo's son, who died in 1469, left 238,000; and, besides the expenses of living, the family had spent between 1434 and 147 1 in taxes, benefactions, and public buildings 664,000 florins, of which Cosimo, who died in 1464, paid 400,000. So that, besides the expenses of living, the 180,000 florins of the grandfather had in less than fifty years gained for his descendants 1,000,000 florins, or one half the total coined money circulating in the Republic in 1422. J It was the rule, so well illustrated in the historv of some American families, that money skilfully handled breeds money ; but more than two thirds of the increase of two gen- erations of the Medici accrued to the public benefit in taxes, charities, and gifts to learning or the arts. The relation of Cosimo to his city can be easily appreciated by the Americans of to-day. He was the boss of the little Republic of Florence, then a city of about ninety thousand inhabitants. His family were among the hereditary leaders of the democracy against the party of millionaire manufac- turers and middle-class merchants who desired to retain power in order to control the tariff. And they had been very influential in the uprising of 1 These figures do not mean much to the modern reader. The florin was worth about $2.50. but thi id scale of living are dif- ficult to estimate. In 1460 the Patriarch of Aquileja was called the richest man in Italy. He left 200,000 florins. 1 26 The Age of the Renascence. 1378, which resulted in the extension of suffrage to the working-man. Cosimo was simple in his habits, given to hospitality, liberal in sharing the enjoyment of the treasures of art and learning with which his palace was filled, generous where it would do the most good, reserved, but affable of speech. Hiding his secrets behind an impenetrable veil of in- variable courtesy, he gathered into his hands all the wires that moved Florentine politics, and, seeking no public honors for himself, was nearly always able to control the City Council and quietly shape the policy of the Republic. His hands were free from taking bribes, though he did not scruple to handle for its full value the patronage he controlled. And doubt- less one great cause of his success as a money-lender and merchant was his early and intimate knowledge of political movements. His commercial correspon- dents were scattered over all Europe, the Levant, and even in Egypt. He had loaned money on the security of the public income to the State of Florence and to every burgher who wished to borrow of him. And yet he used his power so gently that he con- quered envy and received by public decree the title of "Father of the Fatherland." The Florentine merchant nobility had long been in the habit of protecting and enjoying art and literature. It was natural, therefore, that Cosimo should employ his striking critical taste, trained by reading and dis- cussion, his enormous wealth, his knowledge of men, finished by travel and the conduct of affairs, his cor- respondence, spread over all countries of the world, in forming collections of books and manuscripts, in Niccolo de* Niccoli. 127 employing men of genius, and becoming the leading patron of art and letters in Italy. The most efficient of his friends and proteges in this work was Niccolo de' Niccoli. He was the son of a small merchant of the city, who, inheriting a very modest fortune, abandoned business and gave himself up to the pro- fession of a connoisseur and collector of manuscripts and objects of art. The stout little man who always dressed with scrupulous care was very fond of society, and the soul of every company ; but somewhat feared withal, because of a touch of sarcasm in his irresistibly funny speeches. He was a good deal of a beau in his younger days, and we learn from letters that he and his friend Bruni used to wait round the doors of the churches to see the pretty girls come out. But he never married, be- cause he knew that if he had a wife he must give up collecting books. He was more than consoled by forming out of his moderate income the best library in Florence — eight hundred manuscripts, all rare, some of them unique. When an over-enthusiastic purchase, as, for instance, the library of Salutato, had reduced him for the time to poverty, he hung on to the books and economized until he could pay for them. He had, besides, a small but good collec- tion of gems, statues, coins, and pictures. But he lived no comfortless life of the traditional old bachelor. He loved to see a piece of fine linen, a crystal goblet, an antique vase, some bits of choice pottery on his table. He was the centre of correspondence for the Hu- manists of his day, and not to know Niccoli was to be 128 The Age of the Renascence. unknown in the realm of letters. He was the great- est living authority on manuscripts, with an infallible eye for an old codex, and an extended practical knowledge of the then unknown science of diplo- matics. He was the first collector who let his uniques be copied, and showed a liberality in regard to his treasures absolutely unequalled. At his death it was found that two hundred of his volumes were loaned. His house was always open and was the meeting-place of the literati and artists of Florence. It was also a sort of free school, for sometimes there were ten or twelve young men reading quietly in the library, while Niccoli walked about the room, giving instructions or asking now one and then another his impressions of what he read. And yet he was no easy man to get on with. His spirit was intensely critical, and a friend writes that even of the dead he never praised any but Plato, Virgil, Horace, and Jerome. He was neglectful of formalities toward others and exceedingly touchy in regard to himself, and the later years of the peppery old man were filled with quarrels. Cosimo did everything for him. His word was law in regard to appointments and dismissals at the High School of Florence. And it was understood that whenever he was unable to pay for a book he had only to send a note to Cosimo's cashier, who had standing orders to discount it at once — a graceful way of making a gift, for Niccoli died five hundred florins in his patron's debt. He had always been wont to rebuke the jests against religion of the free-thinkers among his literary friends, and he made an edifying end. His last words gave Book-hunting. 129 directions as to what was to be done with his books. Men like these — for Cosimo and Niccoli were only the most skilful of many connoisseurs of art and let- ters in Florence — searched the world for the remains of classical antiquity. And there was no lack of patient explorers who gladly gave their years to this service. We have a suggestion of such toils and pleasures in letters describing the book-hunts of three young secretaries at the Council of Constance. One day, for instance, they took boat to the Benedictine abbey on the island of Reichenau. On another they crossed to the north shore of the lake and rode eighteen or twenty miles inland to the old abbey of Weingarten. Sometimes they got much, sometimes little ; but, like fishermen, they never let success suffer in the telling of it. Their best trip was to the abbey of St. Gall. This abbey, founded in the seventh century, had been for generations, through its convent school, a centre of light, but the degenerate monks were so forgetful of the ancient glories of their house that the library was thrust into a dusty tower and left to worms and decay. Doubtless much was already gone, but the indignant friends found something to fill Florence with joy — a^ perfect Institutes of Ouintilian, only known to Italy in fragments. Poggio got permission to carry it to Constance, and spent fifty-three days copying it. Their net took other smaller fish. Some books of Valerius, Flaccus, a commentary on five speeches of Cicero, Statius's Woods, a book of Manilius, and a short work A Priscian. And they 130 The Age of the Renascence. copied these too. But it was the news of the Quintilian that drew from Bruni, soon to be chosen as the worthiest successor of Salutato in the Chan- cellorship of Florence, the answer, " O vast gain ! O unhoped-for joy ! " Another very useful man in this book-collecting was Giovanni Aurispa, not much of a scholar, but a skilful buyer,particularly of Greek manuscripts. There was great excitement in Florence when he landed in Venice with two hundred and thirty-eight books in his chests. To pay for them he had sold all he had except the clothes he wore, and still owed fifty florins for freight and other debts. Cosimo's brother im- mediately advanced the money. But the shrewd Aurispa would not visit Florence till, by sending an occasional volume and an imperfect list of his trea- sures, he had roused the appetite of the literati to fever-heat. Then he doubtless came well out of his speculation. What these men and their patrons were doing for the writings of antiquity Ciriaco of Ancona did for its art. Having picked up Latin while clerk of har- bor repairs in his native city, he was seized, while on a visit to Rome, by the passion of the antiquary, and gave his life to gratify it. Sailing in the Levant as supercargo, he bought in a convent a manuscript of the Iliad and learned Greek out of it. When he came to Rome to visit Pope Eugenius his chests were laden with interesting things : splendid bronze vases with silver inlay, a complete Greek manuscript of the New Testament, marble heads, cut gems, gold coins of Philip and Alexander, Indian water-cans of Ciriacds Travels. 131 porcelain decorated in gold, and a long list of copies of ancient inscriptions. He saw and was seen by the literati of Rome, and went to Florence, where he settled down in the library of Niccoli as the choicest spot in the world. But he never stayed long in any place. He visited every important ruin in Italy merely in the intervals of journeys that carried him to the limits of travel. He went to the pyramids, where he copied an inscription in an unknown tongue to send to his friend Niccoli. Then he turned back, lingering, and longing to go farther up the mysterious river. For his dearest plans always failed. At Damascus he was very anxious to accompany the son of a rich merchant to Ethiopia and India, but could not. He was also obliged to give up a trip to Persia with a Genoese merchant he met in Adrianople. And he tried in vain to get money from the Pope and Cosimo for a visit to the Atlas Mountains and the Island of Thule at the end of the world. But Cosimo did give him an open credit at the Medici bank to invest in antiques. And Ciriaco must have spent on his heavy chests more than he earned, for he was no mere trader, but loved to give a gold coin of Trojan to the Emperor, a bit of amber with a fly in it to the King of Naples, drawings of temples and copies of "< Vatican, found the Pope superintending an inventor** of his movable property in the hall. On the 18th o' May the Pope's secretary, Troccio, fled from the city He was overtaken by a ship at Corsica, brought back and strangled by Micheletto in prison, while Caesai looked on through a window. He was accused ol betraying the Borgias to France. His estate was confiscated. On the 8th of June the body of Jacopc Santa Croce, with the head beside it, lay all day on the bridge of San Angelo. His property was con- fiscated and his wife and children left penniless. On the 5th of August the Cardinal Monreale, nephew ol the Pope, died suddenly. Alexander was his heir, and the Venetian ambassador reported that Rome estimated the estate at one hundred thousand florins, and said, " The Cardinal has also been sent the way that all the other well-fattened ones have gone." These were violent or crafty men, but a great part of their crimes had been committed to serve the Borgias, and it is small wonder that a great fear fell on Rome. No man of prominence could die of the malignant malarial fever which raged that summer that awe-struck gossip did not whisper, " The poison of the Borgias " ; and all rich men be- gan to tremble for their lives. In the midst of triumph, when their feet were on The Full Cup. 259 the necks of their enemies and they had swept all the gains of victory into their own coffers by de- stroying the servants who knew its secrets, the end suddenly came. On the night of his nephew's death Alexander went with Caesar to sup in the garden of Cardinal Hadrian of Corneto.and on the 12th of August both fell ill. The next morning Alexander was bet- ter and played cards a part of the day. It was only a brief rally for the debauchee of seventy-three. Whether the report is true that the Borgia had drunk by mistake of the poison they had prepared for their rich host, who was also violently ill, cannot now be determined. Most probably they all caught in the night air a malignant malarial fever. At all events, Alexander's cup was full, and on the 18th of August he died. All Rome spoke in joy and horror of his death, of the awful appearance of the swollen corpse, of the little black dog that ran ceaselessly to and fro through the halls of the Vatican the night before he died. The Marquis of Mantua wrote to his wife that Alexander was heard in his last illness to murmur, " I am coming. It is right ; only wait a little." The bystanders remembered that he had made a bargain with the devil to give his soul for twelve years of the Papacy, and the bond was four days overdue. The story was widely accepted, and even among those who rejected it the pious every- where felt with shuddering relief that the Pope must have gone to hell. Alexander really died after confession, the com- munion, and extreme unction, and if he called on any one, it was doubtless the Virgin Mary ; for he 260 The Age of the Renascence. had always considered himself as under her special protection. He had a picture painted of her, with the face of his mistress, the beautiful young Julia Farnese ; and three years before had presented her altar with three hundred florins at a special service of thanksgiving for saving his life when a fireplace fell on him. For Alexander was not an atheist, and in all probability never once thought of himself as an unbeliever. 1 Caesar said afterward to Machiavelli that he had made preparations for every possible contingency except that he should be ill when his father died. As it was, he could only be carried by the six Span- ish cardinals into the Vatican. From his sick-bed he issued orders to concentrate all his mercenaries at Rome and keep them under arms. He was the first to hear of his father's death, and his trusty hangman, Micheletto, put a dagger to the throat of Cardinal Casanova and compelled the surrender of the key of the Papal treasure. Two chests full of gold pieces were instantly carried off to Caesar's bedside. Even before he had recovered, he held court, surrounded by his six Spanish cardinals, as if he were a sovereign, and finally promised the College of Cardinals to leave Rome in three days, on condition of keeping the title of General of the Church. On the 22d of September, 1503, the Conclave 1 In this connection a section from the preface of Richardson's " Clarissa Harlowe" (1749) might be pertinent: " It will be proper to observe, for the sake of such as may apprehend hurt to the morals of youth from the more finely written letters, that the gentlemen, though professed libertines, . . . are not, however, infidels or scoffers." Quoted in " Ten-Minute Sermons." How are the Mighty Fallen / 261 elected the nephew of Pius II., who took the title of Pius III. He was broken in health, and died in less than a month. Meantime Caesar had come back to press his fortune. But his foes among the Roman nobility demanded his trial, his mercenaries began to fall away to richer lords, and when Pius died Caesar was only saved from death by the strong walls of San Angelo. For the Pope's son was so hated that an enemy killed one of his servants to wash in his blood. He still remained, however, a power to be reckoned with, and the Cardinal della Rovere visited him in the castle, and they made a bargain. Caesar was to give the votes of the six Spanish cardinals, and in return to be named Standard-bearer of the Church. Della Rovere bought the rest of the votes, and was unani- mously elected Pope, taking the name of Julius II. Then the fortunes of Caesar sank lower and lower. The once haughty nepot begged an interview with the Duke of Urbino, whose inheritance he had seized, stood cap in hand before him, fell on his knees and begged pardon, promised with many excuses to give back all he had stolen from his palace, and even re- ceived his chamberlain with a bearing as servile as it had once been proud. He feared for his life. Vol- unteering for the service of Spain, he was carried to Madrid and thrown into prison. Escaping two years later, he found refuge at the court of his brother-in- law, King of Navarre, and in three months, at the age of thirty-one, fell in petty battle with a rebellious crown vassal. PERIOD III. CHAPTER XX. HUMANISM IN EUROPE FROM THE ACCESSION OF SIXTUS IV. TO THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER VI. (1471-1503) — THE FLORENTINE ACADEMY AND THE OXFORD SCHOOL — FABER STAPU- LENSIS AND HIS PUPILS AT PARIS — JOHN REUCHLIN AND THE OLDER HUMANISTS OF GERMANY — ERASMUS. HREE chief tendencies are observable in the history of Italian Humanism. They can be traced from the first, but be- come very distinct with each succeed- ing generation. There were the pagan Humanists, like Valla and Filelfo — the men who lived in the moral atmosphere of heathenism and practised not only the style, but the vices, of anti- quity. We have seen in the person of Savonarola a learned puritanism which desired to take from the New Learning only what might help to renew reli- gion and purify morals. We must now consider a middle Humanism, which hoped to make the world better by uniting the New Testament and the phi- losophy of antiquity. The origin of this party is plainly marked in the 262 Gemistos Platon. 263 visit of Gemistos Platon to the Council of Florence in 1438. He came in the train of the Greek Em- peror, to arrange a union between the Greek and Latin Church as the price of help against the Turks. He was a native of Constantinople, eighty-three years old, and reputed the most learned man who spoke the Greek tongue. He did but little for the cause of union, but much for that cause which lay nearest his heart — the inauguration of a new religion, founded on the teaching of Plato, which was to unite East and West, Mohammedan and Christian. 1 Plato was then almost unknown in Italy, and the charm of the old man's conversation carried away Cosimo de' Medici. He determined to educate Mar- siglio Ficino, the six-year-old son of his physician, to become the translator and interpreter of Plato to Western Christendom. Platon published in Italy several works pointing out 'the superiority of Plato over Aristotle. In these it appeared that Platon's system of the world was antichristian, for his idea of the eternal existence of an abstract, unchangeable necessity seemed to leave no place for miracle, re- sponsibility, or redemption. Such opinions awoke a storm of opposition, and the defenders of Aristotle used to the fullest the charge of heresy against the assailer of the philosophy of all the orthodox. Pla- ton returned to Greece, and died in the middle of the century, nearly a hundred years old. Some ten years later Sigismondo Pandelfo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini and General of Venetian mercenaries against the Turk, brought the bones of Platon to Rimini, and 1 As he is reported to have said in Florence. 264 The Age of the Renascence. buried them in the Church of San Francesco, which was his family tomb. From Platon proceeded two schools of thought which, despite their common origin, grew to diamet- rical opposition ; even as the hierarchical tendency which formed the Papal system, and the predestina- tion theology which the Protestant Reformers opposed to it, were both justly supported by the authority of Augustine. Pomponius Leto, one of Platon's scholars, became the founder of the Roman Academy and the centre of the neopagans. Under the patronage of Lorenzo, the grandson of Cosimo, the Florentine Academy, led by Marsiglio Ficino, became the centre of true Platonic influences. For Ficino did not stop with the half-Platonism of Platon. In the original he found the spiritual philosophy with which he Platonized the New Testament, but did not destroy it. The great festival of the Florentine Academy on the birthday of Plato was usually held in the beautiful villa Careggi, in whose rooms, open- ing on one side into the shady porticoes of the court with its gently running fountains, and looking out on the other upon Florence and the Tuscan hills, Lo- renzo entertained the little company with a dinner and music, followed by reading and discussion of Plato's works. In the summer heat they sought refuge in the woods, and under the shade of the lofty planes beside the mountain brook discussed the things of the soul while their eyes traversed the vale of the Arno, seeking vainly the gleam of the distant sea. Ficino lectured on Plato from the pulpit of the Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. 265 cathedral, " discussing the religious philosophy of our Plato here in the midst of the church, and medi- tating in the holy places on the holy truth." For to him the ideas of Plato were prophecies in philo- sophic form of the teaching of Christ, and he found in the life of Socrates types of the life of Jesus; such as the cock he offered before death, the cup he drank, and his last words. At the age of forty he was ordained priest, and though he Platonized the Gospel, there is little doubt that he ardently desired to promote the influence of Christ in the world by training men who, like Him, were followers of truth. This personal relation to Christ, which grew upon the head of the Florentine Academy in spite of the mystic thinking and allegorizing interpretation that made Jesus teach the theology of Plato, appears very plainly in Giovanni Pico, Prince of Mirandola (1463-94). From his youth he evinced great apti- tude for study, and came to Rome at the age of twenty-four, a heralded prodigy of learning. He posted nine hundred theses for discussion, offering in princely fashion to pay the expenses of any dispu- tants who desired to come from a distance. But Innocent VIII. was moved to prohibit the discussion, and a theological commission pronounced thirteen of the propositions heretical. Pico published an apol- ogy written in twenty days, marked by wide learning and a superficial subtlety. Rut he was not declared free from heresy till just before his death. This ex- perience was for the youth the end of licentious and frivolous living. He turned to virtue, burned his 266 The Age of the Renascence. book of wanton verses of love and other like fanta- sies, and gave himself fervently to the study of Holy Scripture. He undertook it under the burden of profound erudition. He had read libraries of the old fathers of the Church; he had mastered all the cognition of philosophy both of the old teachers and the new schools ; he knew many languages ; he was very learned in all the subtle and cunning disputa- tions of the Cabala. He became a master of alle- gorical interpretation, and found all the philosophy of Plato in the books of Moses. He made a cipher system, apparently somewhat similar to that by which a Western student has drawn the secret his- tory of the times of Elizabeth from the plays c*f Shakespeare. For by manipulations of the Hebrew letters of the first word of Genesis he concludes that Moses meant to say by it, " The Father, in the Son and by the Son, the beginning and end, or rest, cre- ated the supercelestial, the empyrean, and the sub- lunary sphere, fitly joined together." That he might be undiverted from his studies he sold his princedom to his nephew and gave great part of the price to the poor. He was content with mean fare, but retained somewhat of his old state in the use of silver plate. He prayed often, and gave plenteously to relieve the miseries of such needy people as he came by the knowledge of. In Holy Week he scourged himself for the cleansing of his old offences and in the remembrance of the great benefit of the passion and death of Christ suffered for our sake. To a man accustomed to vice, who sought discourse with him on the nature of virtue, he said, England and Humanism. 267 " If we had ever before our eyes the painful death of Christ which' he suffered for love of us; and then if we would again think upon our own death, we should surely beware of sin" ; and the man forsook his evil ways. Pico once told his nephew, as they walked in an orchard at Ferrara, that when he had finished certain books he meant to give all his substance to the poor, and with the crucifix in hand to walk bare- foot about the world, preaching Christ. When he came to die, in the flower of his youth, the priest, holding up the crucifix, inquired whether he firmly believed it to be the image of him that was very God and very man, together with the other doctrines that belong to the faith of the Church. Pico an- swered that he not only believed, but certainly knew it, and said he was glad to die, because death made an end of sin. He lay then with a pleasant and merry countenance, and in the very pangs of death spoke as though he saw the heavens opened. He made the poor of the hospital of Florence heir of all his lands. 1 About the close of the fifteenth century another transalpine land began to feel the impulse of the New Learning. It was carried to England by men like Linacre, physician to Henry VIII., and Grocyn, who, having studied Greek in Italy, was the first to give good instruction in it at Oxford. Rut it was first made widely effective by John Colet. He was descended on both sides from gentlefolk and inherited 1 In this account of Pico T have borrowed the diction of Sir Thomas More's translation of his " Life" by his nephew, Giovanni Francesco Pico; published in the Tudor Library with an introduction by J. M. Rigg, Esq., of Lincoln's Inn, to which I am also indebted. 268 The Age of the Renascence. a large fortune. On finishing his course at Oxford he went to Italy in 1493, and came home in 1496. We have no details of his travels and studies. He returned apparently unimpressed by the arts of Italy, except music, which he loved, and possessed of the spirit which had mastered the Florentine Platonists — the spirit of intense devotion to the Bible and per- sonal loyalty to Christ. He settled at Oxford, where he began to lecture on the Epistle to the Romans. These expositions were very different from the scholia in isolated texts, or the diffuse discussion of logical distinctions unknown to the writers, which formed the common method of interpretation of the books of the Bible. His philological remarks are illustrated from his reading, including patristic, classic, and contem- porary writings. But he does not stop short with such comments. He is continually turning aside into practical applications ; no " threads of nine days long drawn from an anti-theme of half an inch," but true parentheses of passionate feeling. He had a keen historical sense, also, and tries constantly to keep the readers in touch with the personality, the thought, and the feeling of Paul and the Romans, and thus make the sentences vivid and potent. A man of Colet's power and learning gathered scholars round him, not only hearers, but friends. The most noted of these was Thomas More, born in 1478. His father, Sir Thomas More, placed him in the household of the Lord Chancellor, the Arch- bishop Morton. There his wit soon distinguished him, and his master was wont to say to his guests, " This child here waiting at table will prove a mar- Thomas More. 269 vellous man." At Morton's wish he was sent to Oxford, where Colet formed such a high opinion of his powers that he was afterward accustomed to speak of him as the one genius in England. More was admitted to the bar in 1500, and began practice in London. He used the right of teaching conferred by his degree to give a course of lectures on Augus- tine's " City of God " in the Church of St. Lawrence, of which Grocyn was Rector. They attracted much attention and were well attended, and at the age of twenty-five he was sent to Parliament. When the royal grant for the wars was about to be passed in silence, young More, daring to attack it, so rallied the House that the final vote was only a fourth of the amount asked. Because of the King s displea- sure, he found it wise to retire from public life. He thought of a monastery, but by the advice of Colet, who came up to London about this time to take the duties of Dean of St. Paul's, he married and remained, as the phrase was, "in the world." He occu- pied his enforced leisure with study, being chiefly attracted by the life and works of Pico della Miran- dola. Thus he remained in obscurity, solacing him- self with his family, his books, and his friends, until the accession of Henry VIII. (1 509) set him free from fear and idleness. Of all the transalpine lands, France was the first to begin the study of Greek — an unmistakable si of the stirring of the spirit of the New Learning. But the first Frenchman who learned enough Greek to do anything with it seems to have been Faber Stapulensis (Jacques Lefevre d' Etaples), \A^-\^lb- 270 The Age of the Renascence. Having acquired the title of Doctor at Paris, he went to Italy in 1492, and probably spent two years there, visiting Florence, Rome, and joining in the circle of scholars who gathered round the printing- house of Aldus Manutius in Venice. The knowledge which he brought back he devoted more and more to the study of the Bible, abandoning in its favor the classic authors who had once been his favorites. He was a frail little man, bent over by much study, with a beautiful face, at once earnest and gentle. The scholars who came to learn of him in Paris all loved him, and of the opponents he soon aroused, none seems to have felt anything but respect for the purity and honesty of his life and the natural kindli- ness of his disposition. For whether among poor begging scholars, or with his friend, the scion of the great house of Briconnet, whose forefathers had been officers of State and Church for generations, or as court chaplain to the princes of Navarre, Faber bore himself " at manhood's simple level." He was firmly devoted to the system and worship of the Church, by principle opposed to schism, and by nature averse to revolution. But the more he studied the Scrip- ture the more it became evident to him that the preaching of the clergy and the method of training them needed reform, and during the closing years of the fifteenth century, while he was teaching in Paris or making a pious pilgrimage to Rome, his know- ledge of the Bible and his convictions that the world and the Church were ignorant of it grew steadily. Very likely he may have already formed the hope of giving the Bible to the people of France in their Education in Germany. 271 own tongue. At all events he was forming that clearer method of exegesis which was the inheritance of his spiritual descendants. Afterward, developed by the genius of Calvin, it was the contribution of the French to the Protestant Reformation, of univer- sal influence even upon Anglicans, Lutherans, and Arminians who rejected the characteristic French theology. But it was in Germany that Humanism was to find its second home. Before the end of the fifteenth century, while the New Learning in France and England was scarcely more than the possession of a little group of scholars at one university, the spirit of Humanism was appearing here and there through the cities, the universities, and the pulpits of the whole north and centre of the German Empire. The " forerunners " had, for the most part, brought it over the Alps as a help in their efforts to promote the better study of theology and the reform of religion. But by the seventies it had become in Germany the educational mode for all active spirits to train the human mind, not according to the narrow rubrics of the scholastic system, but to give it a liberal educa- tion. How broad that ideal was may be seen by the book which the Emperor Maximilian (born in 1459 and afterward the idol and patron of the Humanists) caused to be made to describe his education. The pictures of the Weiss Konig show the Prince study- ing everything, from theology to magic and from fortification to astrology. How prevalent the ideal was is apparent in the single observation that this first generation of German Humanists, men born 272 The Age of the Renascence. about the middle of the fifteenth century, found at Oxford, at Paris, and in the universities along the Rhine and the Danube that impulse which the Fore- runners had crossed the Alps to find in the valleys of the Arno and the Tiber. They were conscious also of a strong national and patriotic feeling, and were worthy successors of Gregor of Heimburg. This patriotic feeling began to appear in a tendency to write in German and speak to the common people. Yet it was not a polemic age. Those of the Older German Humanists who lived over into the sixteenth century were sum- moned to range themselves in two great intellectual wars ; but the last third of the fifteenth century was a time of comparatively quiet labor, when the new leaven was slowly leavening the whole lump. This secret process appears plainly in two signs : the suc- cessive creation at the more progressive universities, like Erfurt, Heidelberg, Freiburg, and Basle, of the new chair of " Eloquence and Poetry"; and in the foundation of learned societies, which were either local, uniting the Humanists of a single city, or of wider range, like the two great societies of the Rhine and the Danube. These societies kept alive their common feeling by an extensive learned correspon- dence, and expressed their common purpose by the attempted publication of literary monuments of classic antiquity or the ancient Latin chronicles of Germany. Among the Older Humanists of Germany the three tendencies which we have observed among the men of the New Learning in Italy make themselves Conrad Celtes. 273 apparent, but not in the same proportion. For, while the pagan jtendency ruled almost absolutely at Rome, and perhaps prevailed everywhere in Italy except in Florence, it is much less prominent in Germany. Its best representative is Conrad Celtes (1459-1509). He finished the education he had received at various German universities by six months in Italy, and on his return received from the city of Nuremberg the poet's crown. The next ten years he spent in wandering over Germany, teaching eloquence and poetry, now in one and now in an- other university, until at last he received a longed-for call to the University of Vienna, where he spent ten years as head of the new College of Mathematics and Poetry. There he died at the age of fifty, worn out by the excesses of an evil life. He wrote oc- casionally on theological themes, and even made pil- grimages in hope of being cured of disease, but he cared little for religion. He was a true epicurean, bent on enjoying in this life, " which before was nothing, and shall again become nothing," " sleep, wine, friendship, and philosophy." Patriotism was his master passion. His wanderings were partly caused by the wish to see all parts of the fatherland, and he divides his poem " Amores," which seems to have been as promiscuously inspired as the love poetry of Burns, into four books, named, indeed, after four heroines, but arranged " according to the four provinces of Germany." He advises his coun- trymen not to flock over the Alps, and proudly calls the Italians to come and study in that Germany which had given to letters the glorious discovery of 274 The Age of the Renascence. printing, was the seat of the Empire and therefore the true home of laws, and would soon surpass Italy in poetry and eloquence. The great unfinished work of his life, " Germania Illustrata," an historical and geographical description of the German Empire, was the praise of the fatherland ; and his pleasure in it never flagged. The second tendency of Humanism, the ecclesias- tical, whose carriers desired to use the New Learn- ing as a better tool for the reform of morals and religion, was more powerful in the first generation of German Humanism than it ever was in Italy. It is well represented by three men who lived as friends in and about the city of Strassburg. Jacob Wim- pheling (1450-1528) was educated at the University of Erfurt, the first in Germany to establish a chair of " Eloquence and Poetry." There he found the New Learning in full tide, and received from the inscrip- tion in a church of the city, " Noli peccare Deus videt," an ineradicable impression. Returning to the University of Heidelberg, he pursued the study of the classics without direction from the professors ; and when Johann von Dalburg, just returned from Italy, was made Bishop of Worms (1482), and began to re- form the discipline and instruction of the University, Wimpheling became his right-hand man. He also published a defence of the Elector Frederick, whose efforts to reform the clergy of his state had brought against him an accusation of disrespect to the Pope. Soon after Wimpheling became cathedral preacher at Speyer, where he attacked the sins of the clergy and people, formed association and correspondence Geiler of Kaisersberg. 275 with all the men of the New Learning within reach, and plunged into the long debate over the Virgin Mary, as a defender of the Immaculate Conception. From these labors he was called to the chair of Elo- quence and Poetry at Heidelberg. He relinquished his work there to fulfil his promise made to an old friend to retire with him to a hermitage. But the plan was stopped. His friend was suddenly elected Bishop of Basle, and Wimpheling was persuaded to settle in Strassburg to finish an edition of the works of Gerson and promote the cause of letters and re- ligion in South Germany. The active persuader to this resolution was Geiler of Kaisersberg (1445-15 10). He was educated at the new University of Freiburg, where he seems to have been too much of a dandy, for it is recorded that when he became a magister he was obliged to solemnly swear that for two years he would not wear either pointed shoes or a certain kind of neckwear. When he had finished his studies at Basle, having learned gravity as well as theology, he became a preacher at the cathe- dral, and soon after lectured on theology at Freiburg. This position he relinquished to become cathedral preacher at Strassburg. There he gave himself for the rest of his life to the attempt to reform the morals of the city. In his sermons, where language so frank and popular as sometimes to shock even that rude age is sprinkled with quotations from the classics, he lashed every sort of sin and every rank of sinner. The prince neglecting religion and plun- dering the people; the small tradesman in the City Council afraid to vote according to his conscience for 276 The Age of the Renascence. fear of losing some one's custom ; the young nobles who stroll into church with falcon on wrist and dogs at their heels ; the big merchants who form trusts to destroy weak rivals and raise prices ; the citizens who live extravagantly and fail to pay their bills ; the grocers who give short weight ; the artisans who glibly promise work by a certain day and never intend to keep their word ; the luxury of the rich who dine on bears' claws or beavers' tails and let the sick poor die in misery and hunger ; the bishops who are bish- ops of purses, not of souls ; the priests who heap up benefices and think only of usury; the canons who gossip in the cathedral during mass, and wear fine, clean linen, while the altar-cloth is dirty ; the monks who keep the rule of mixing water with their wine by pouring a drop of water into a cask, and the pen- ance of flagellation by putting on a heavy jacket and beating themselves with foxes' tails, or whose young men give a banquet and a dance for the neighboring convent in honor of their first celebration of mass — all these are vigorously painted in his discourses. He preached little but morality, for he shared in the opinion that doctrine was not for the laity ; but he was a fervently orthodox Catholic and a stern de- fender of the rights and privileges of the Church. It was to aid in this work of reformation that he stopped Wimpheling on his way to a hermitage, and secured the appointment of their common friend, Sebastian Brant ( 1 45 7- 1 5 2 1 ), as Chancellor of the city of Strassburg. Brant had for some years been pro- fessor of Latin and semi-official poet of the city of Basle, and all three, Gciler in the pulpit, Wimpheling The Ship of Fools. 277 by his efforts to improve the education of the clergy, and Brant by his satiric writings, began a crusade for the purification of society, the reform of ecclesiastical abuses, and the renewal of religion. Brant was the poet of the trio. Like his friends, he was warmly devoted to the doctrine of the Im- maculate Conception of the Virgin, and plunged hotly into the controversy, which, in spite of the bull of Sixtus IV. forbidding the two parties to accuse each other of heresy because the point was one on which the dogma of the Church was not explicit, had reached a very high degree of bitterness. Brant as a defender of the glory of the Virgin led all the rest in zeal and wrath. The most influential of Brant's writings was his satiric poem of the " Narren- schiff," or "Ship of Fools." It is called a poem, though it is of the kind of poetry which has been de- scribed as only a more difficult way of writing prose. It is an inchoate collection of separate pieces of verse, imperfectly held together by the vague image of a ship filled with fools and sailing without chart or compass for the land of Cocagne. Passages from the Bible, from Plutarch, from Latin authors, popu- lar proverbs, sage reflections, sketches of character, are thrown together with no regard to art. He describes all kinds of fools. Book-collectors who never read, adulterers, the proud, those who waste their time in hunting, lovers of money, those who cannot keep a secret, the sick who will not obey their physicians, blasphemers and de- spisers of the Holy Scriptures, drunkards, -luttons, gamblers, and harlots, the envious, the mockers, the 278 The Age of the Renascence. lazy, the ungrateful — all to whom God or a philos- opher might say, " Thou fool," are sketched in a style which appears now both rude and weak, but which was very effective in its day. The book was pub- lished at Basle in 1494, and in 1498 it had appeared from the press of six cities in five original and three stolen and interpolated editions. It was received with a storm of applause by the Humanists, and the Latin translation of it ran through three editions and was translated twice into French within two years of its appearance. Ten years later it was put into Eng- lish verse by Alexander Barclay and into English prose by Henry Watson. It was preached upon and imitated until "The Fool" became a stock figure in the literature of the early fifteenth century. Between men like this trio of friends and the pagan Humanists like Celtes stood the Middle Party, who hoped to demonstrate the reasonableness of virtue and religion. The core of the party was composed of men who, like the Florentine Academy, strove to unite the mystic philosophy of Greece and the New Tes- tament. Their best representative is Johann Reuchlin. He was educated at the city school of Pforzheim, his birthplace, went to the University of Freiburg, and afterward to Paris as the companion of the younger son of his Prince. Paris was then the chief univer- sity of the world, and her degrees conferred a special distinction. She had appointed a Greek teacher, the first north of the Alps, and Reuchlin was able to make the poor beginnings of a knowledge of that language. From Paris he went to Basle in 1475, where, under the private instructions of a wandering Johann Reuchlin. 279 Greek, he learned enough to write a Greek letter to a friend in Strassburg, who wrote to his fellow-stu- dent Brant that he could understand, but could not answer it. Reuchlin's education as a doctor of laws being completed, he entered into the service of Count Eberhard of Wurtemberg, an uneducated prince with a love for learning, who kept scholars employed in translating for him the chief works of classic antiquity. Reuchlin was one of the retinue that accompanied Eberhard to Rome, and until the death of the good Prince he served as councillor and ambassador in many affairs of State. He then passed into the service of Philip of the Pfalz, also a patron of the Humanists, for whom he made a third trip to Italy. On his previous journey he had met Marsiglio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, and on this third trip he completed in Rome the studies in Hebrew which he had begun with a Jewish court physician during an embassy to the Emperor Maximilian. It was in 1 502 that he received an appointment as one of the three judges of the Swabian League, a very honorable post which he filled for twelve years. But while he had been acquiring the reputation as a clever jurist and able statesman which gained this appointment, he had also been earning greater fame as a scholar. His first work, at the age of twenty, was a small Latin lexicon, which in thirty years went through twenty-five editions. A succession of translations from Greek into Latin showed his know- ledge of Greek. His comedy of " Henno," written for the students of Heidelberg, showed a clear Latin style and held the boards of student theatricals for 280 The Age of the Renascence. many years. And his work " On the Wonder-work- ing Word " had made known his knowledge of Hebrew and the mystic teaching of the Cabala. For he followed Pico della Mirandola, whom he called the most learned man of the day, in the exposition of the Platonic and rabbinic mysticism, feeling that in it was to be found the best illustration and de- fence of Christianity. These labors had in the early nineties brought such renown that the Emperor Maximilian offered to ennoble his family, to make him an imperial Pfalzgraf, with the power of acting as judge on all imperial questions, and, further, of conferring, on his own responsibility, ten doctor's degrees. Reuchlin refused the title with thanks, in which his younger brother, an honest scholar and clergyman of moderate abilities, joined him. He preferred not to disturb by material decoration that spiritual dignity which by the beginning of the six- teenth century was conferred upon him by the com- mon consent of all who loved letters ; the leadership of the learned men of Germany. From them he received an affection and admiration whose honesty cannot be hidden even by the overloaded compliment of the reigning epistolary style. For by the new century the Humanists of Germany were a large and resolute body, conscious of their power, known to one another, and needing only the call of a proper leader to form a closed phalanx that would stand firm against all forces of ignorance, tyranny, and reaction. Meanwhile, under the influences of a cosmopolitan education, another northern student had come to the Desiderius Erasmus. 281 maturity of his powers, whose strength as a scholar and whose genius as a w r riter were much greater than those of Reuchlin. Desiderius Erasmus was born at Rotterdam eleven years later than Reuchlin, in 1466. He was educated at the school of Deventer, where he had some teaching in Greek from Alexander Hegius. He left at the age of thirteen, knowing Terence by heart and able to read Horace easily. The boy was soon after left an orphan, and fell on evil days ; for one of his guardians lost the larger part of the estate by careless investment, the second died of the plague, and the third, an ignorant and fanatic schoolmaster, was possessed with the idea of forcing Erasmus into a monastery. After two years of struggle he became an inmate of the Augustinian house of Steyn. The monks were coarse men, car- ing nothing for literature, and understanding by re- ligion the discipline of their order, with its vigils and fasts, which they varied by drinking-bouts. Eras- mus's delicate constitution could not endure the fasts, and his fastidious spirit shrank from the drinking- bouts ; but in spite of every repugnance, the poor lad, with no friend to turn to, was finally persuaded to become a monk. He spent six years in the convent. The example of the monks was bad, and he tells us he was inclined to great vices; but he studied much, and gained among all who knew him the report of a very accomplished writer of verse and prose. It was this private reputation which led the Bishop of Cambray, then contemplating a journey to Italy, to offer Erasmus the post of secretary. He accepted, and was ordained priest in the following year. The 282 The Age of the Renascence. Bishop deferred his journey, and sent Erasmus to study theology at Paris. There he settled, with the idea of pursuing his studies and maintaining himself as a private tutor to young gentlemen of fortune. It was thus that he became acquainted with Lord Mountjoy, one of those patrons whose gifts and pen- sions became afterward a chief source of his income. After five or six years at Paris, his skill in Latin letter-writing having gained him much reputation among " the men who know," he went to Oxford with introductions to the head of St. Mary's College. In England he fell in at once with the Grecians, of whom Colet was leader. He met Thomas More, then just of age. One of those stories which are entirely true even if they never happened shows us at a glance the position of the two men in the little circle of elect spirits in which each moved. Having conversed brilliantly for some time without knowing each other's names, Erasmus suddenly cried, " You are either More or nobody," to which the other re- plied, "And you are either Erasmus or the devil." But it was Colet who exercised the greatest influence over Erasmus and in whose society he took the greatest delight. They had much pleasant intercourse and many discussions, scholarly and grave, but full of fire. Erasmus has told how Colet's eye would flash and his quiet countenance appear transfigured as they discussed at dinner " why Cain's offering was rejected," or some similar topic. His whole tone was filled with vehemence as he finally broke in on Eras- mus's commonplace praise of the " Aurea Catena" of Aquinas with a denunciation of one who had The " Enchiridion" 283 " contaminated the whole doctrine of Christ with his own profane philosophy." It was doubtless the friendship of Colet, Platonist and biblical student, that fixed Erasmus's bent to the study of the New Testament rather than to the classics, and formed in him the determination to revive the "true philosophy of Christ." When he had returned to his studies at Paris this serious inclination of his mind appeared in the first of his writings, which carried his fame outside the circle of Humanistic students among whom his letters and his praise had been circulated : the " Enchiridion," or " Christian Soldiers' Dagger," printed at Louvain in 1503. It was written at the request of a wife to awaken her husband to a sense of religion, and against " the error that makes re- ligion depend on ceremonies and a more than Judaic observance of bodily acts, while neglecting true piety." It is a skilful mixture of the teaching of the New Testament and the Platonic philosophy. The end of life, he says, is Christ, and that is " no un- meaning word, but love, simplicity, patience, purity, in short, whatever Christ taught." He then refers to the usages of religion, and exhorts to an effort to find their spiritual meaning. "If you worship the bones of Paul locked up in a casket, worship also the spirit of Paul which shines forth from his writings." " For it is not charity to be constant at church, to prostrate yourself before the images of the saints, burn candles, and chant prayers. What Paul rails charity is to edify your neighbor, to rejoice at your brother's welfare and help his misfortune as if it 284 The Age of the Renascence. were your own, to instruct the ignorant, to comfort the cast down, to do good in Christ to all to whom you can do good, that, as he gave himself wholly for us, so we also may serve our brothers' need and not our own." He then shows how the life of the monks, " who have set themselves apart for the service of religion," is not lived in this happiness, being " filled with Jewish superstitions and the vices of the world." " And when they are grown gray in the observance of the rules of their order you shall find that they have nothing of the temper of Christ, but are alto- gether unspiritual and unsocial, peevish, and scarce supportable even to themselves ; cold in charity, hot in anger, obstinate in hatred, ready to fight for the most trifling cause, and so far from the perfection of Christ that they have not even the natural virtues of the heathen. Unteachable and sensuous, they turn with disgust from the Scriptures. They never show kindness, but are full of foul suspicion and vain con- ceit." This attack upon the errors and vices of monasticism did not in the least hinder his intimacy with the Franciscan monk John Vitrarius, who urged its publication. For the noble man, of whom Eras- mus has left a pen-picture done with the skill of affection, had suffered from these errors and vices of his fellows. Having endeavored to reform a convent of dissolute nuns, the Suffragan Bishop of Boulogne laid a plot by which eight of the worst lured him into a secret place and would have strangled him with their handkerchiefs had they not been accidentally interrupted. And at the risk of excommunication, and in face of two citations from his Bishop, he had Humanism in the North. 285 denounced the sale of indulgences and " the silly credulity of those who thought their sins would be pardoned if they put their money in the box." When the " Enchiridion " was published a witty friend wrote, " There is more religion in the book than in the author " ; but the friendship of Vitrarius, who knew the writings of Paul by heart and though " he preached seven times a day never lacked words or learning when his theme was Christ," must have still further increased the concentration of Erasmus's studies upon the aim of promoting " the pure phi- losophy of Christ." The "Enchiridion" went through many editions with great rapidity. Twenty years after its publication the Archdeacon of Alcor, in Spain, wrote : " There is no other book of our time which can be compared to the ' Enchiridion ' for the extent of its circulation. There is not even a coun- try inn that has not a copy of it in Spanish, and this short work has made the name of Erasmus a house- hold word." Thus at the death of Alexander VI. (1503) a little group of English scholars, represented by Colet, of Frenchmen, represented by Faber Stapulensis, joined in spiritual friendship by the citizen of the world of letters, Erasmus, were bending all the resources of the New Learning to the study of the Bible ; while in Germany a large and resolute body of Humanists, spread through the cathedral chapters and universi- ties of the Empire, were giving unanimous homage to John Reuchlin and applauding his labors to pro- mote the study of Greek and Hebrew. PERIOD III. CHAPTER XXI. JULIUS II. AND LEO X. — THE NEPHEW OF SIXTUS IV. AND THE SON OF LORENZO THE MAGNIFI- CENT BECOME POPES. ULIUS II., the lifelong foe and now the successor of Alexander VI., had the fiery- temper and stern will of the " terrible " Sixtus IV. But his ambition was higher than his uncle's, for though he advanced his nephews and made a great marriage for his nat- ural daughter, his heart's desire was not to enrich his family, but to make the Church State strong among the powers of Italy. There were no luxurious nepots at Rome in his day. He avoided even the appear- ance of the riotous living of Alexander, and the ex- penses of his household were only fifteen hundred florins a month. The income of the Church (a single monk brought back twenty-seven thousand florins from the sale of indulgences) was spent in adorning the city of Rome or maintaining his army. His treasury was never allowed to be empty, and so good was his financial management that, in spite of his great outlays in the arts of peace and war, he left his suc- cessor a treasure of seven hundred thousand florins. 286 Julius Poliorcetes. 287 Julius had to face a difficult situation for one who desired to make the patrimonium a strong and inde- pendent state. France had seized Milan and Genoa in the north, Spain had conquered the kingdom of Naples in the south, and these two were ever threat- ening to renew their long and deadly duel for the spoils of Italy. Venice, the only really strong power in the peninsula, sat aside, secure behind her lagoons, and anxious only to draw her own gain out of the general ruin. He who would play in such a game must be strong, and in one of the first bulls of his reign Julius announced that he felt it his duty to re- gain the lost lands of the Church. But he waited two years and a half before he moved from Rome, with twenty-two cardinals and a long train of bishops and prelates, to occupy the chief cities of Romagna, Perugia and Bologna. The host was carried in front of the Pope, and only five hundred men-at-arms were at his back. The tyrant of Perugia, stained with every crime, was awed by the cool will of Julius, who came into the city, leaving his little army outside. Instead of murdering or imprisoning the Pope, which Machiavelli despised him for not doing, he entered the Papal service as a mercenary sol- dier. Then, with a larger army, to which eight thousand French troops were joined, Julius turned against Bologna. The Bentivogli fled, and the Pope entered in triumphal procession under an arch in- scribed "To Julius, the Expeller of Tyrants." A still more splendid triumph awaited him in Rome. But crafty Venice, who had so long drawn profit from her neighbors' misfortunes, was now to suffer. 288 The Age of the Renascence. Spain claimed some conquered cities on the Apulian coast; Austria demanded Friuli ; France the return of Brescia, Cremona, and other cities of her Duke- dom of Milan; the Empire, Verona; the Florentines were promised Pisa. Ferrara, Mantua, and Urbino followed the Pope. And so in the spring of 1509 the Republic of San Marco saw all Italy and three fourths of Europe in arms against her. It was Julius's vengeance on the Venetians for the four cities of the Church they had seized and their resistance to his appointments of aliens to Venetian benefices. " I tell you," he cried one day, in rage, to the Republic's ambassador, " I will make Venice once more a little fishing- village." " And we, Holy Father," he was answered, " will make you once more a little priest." The League was blessed by the Pope and Venice cursed by the interdict. Two months laid the proud Republic at his feet asking for mercy. Then Julius's heart misgave him. He could not destroy the bul- wark of Italy against the Turk, the only state as yet unconquered by the foreigner. In January, 15 10, while France and the allies still called for war, the ambassadors of the Republic knelt before the Pope as he sat on the steps of St. Peter's, in the presence of all Rome, and lightly struck them with a rod at every verse of the intoned Miserere. Then they finished the penance by a pilgrimage to the churches of the city. What the Venetian ambassador wrote home was plain to all the world : " At sixty-five years of age the Pope, suffering from gout and other results of the free life of his youth, is still in A Fighting Pope. 289 the fullness of strength and activity, and wishes to be lord and master of the play of the world." Peace with Venice was followed by war with France, and to carry it on Julius made a Holy League with Spain and Venice to drive the French over the Alps, hoping also for the aid of England and the Empire. The Bishop of Sitten raised twelve thousand Swiss to come down into the plain of the Po for good pay, and Julius put into the field every mercenary he could afford. At the siege of Miran- dola he himself was seen in the trenches cheering on the soldiers. He took up his quarters in the kitchen of an old cloister, and when a cannon-ball killed two of his servants while he slept, refused to abandon it. When the town surrendered he could not wait for the gates to open, but mounted by a scaling-ladder over the breach. It was this spectacle which caused Hutten to write in vitriolic satire, bidding the world look at Julius : " His terrible brow, hiding fierce eyes, with threats of hell-fire blazing in his mouth. Behold him, the author of such destruction and so much crime, born a bitter pest of the human race, whose work and whose recreation is death. Unlike Christ, unlike Peter, what does he do or what is there about him worthy the name of Roman Pontiff?" By the spring of 15 12 the French, in spite of their brilliant victory at Ravenna, had lost every foothold in Italy and were almost overwhelmed by the simul- taneous attacks of Spain, Germany, England, and the Netherlands. The Pope had let slip the dogs of war 290 The Age of the Renascence. to some purpose, and it is easy to believe that in the pride of his victory he should have wished, as Vasari says, to be painted with a sword in his hand. Nor was Julius the only Prince of the Church who took the sword. The Cardinal Ippolito of Este had his brother's eyes put out because his mistress praised their beauty ; and when the Pope's nephew, the young Duke of Urbino, fell upon the Papal fa- vorite, Cardinal Alidosi, and killed him with a dagger in the streets of Ravenna, there were other cardinals who said, "Well done." Some of those who ap- proved the Papal policy of " thorough " gained by it. In August, 15 12, the Spanish commander appeared in Florentine territory by order of the Holy League. He was accompanied by Cardinal Medici. Prato was stormed and horribly sacked, and the frightened Republic of Florence agreed to receive the Medici once more within her walls. The government was in their hands within a year. France had not looked idly on while all Europe was raised against her. Taking advantage of a temporary disagreement between the Emperor and Julius, she proposed a Council for reform, and in the spring of 15 11 a call was issued from a Synod at Lyons for a General Council of the Church, under the protection of the Emperor and the King of France. It was signed by three cardinals, and claimed the unexpressed support of six others, Frenchmen, Italians, and Spaniards. The call was fastened on the doors of the chief cathedrals of Italy and spread through Europe. But only eighteen prelates met in Pisa, and even this poor assembly The Council of the Lateran. 291 began almost immediately to dissolve, as its members sought, one by one, to make their peace with a Pope who was too strong for them. For Julius had met this move of French politicians, using the desire for the revival of religion to check- mate a hostile Pope and keep the patronage of the French national Church in their own hands, by a skilful counter-move. In the summer he called a General Council to meet at the Lateran the following spring. On the 21st of April, 15 12, the Council of Pisa, now transferred for the sake of French protec- tion to Milan, suspended Julius from the Papacy. Ten days later the Pope opened the Council of the Lateran with a solemn procession closed by a company of men-at-arms and nine cannons. There were almost none except Italian prelates present, but England, Spain, and Germany were soon to declare their allegiance to the decrees. The tone of them was given in the sermons and orations which opened the first sessions. Egidius of Viterbo, General of the Augustinians, spoke on the need of the reform of the Church. He declared the defeat of Ravenna a sign from heaven to turn the Church from the sword with which she had just suffered defeat to her own weapons, piety, prayer, the breastplate of faith and the sword of light. " Hear," he cried, " O thou Head and De- fender of the city of Rome, hear into what a deep sea of evils the Church thou hast founded by thy blood is fallen ! Dost thou behold how the earth has drunk up this year more blood than rain ? Help us ! Raise the Church! The people, men and women of 292 The Age of the Renascence. every age — yea, the entire world — are praying and be- seeching; the fathers, the Senate, the Pope himself, beseech you to preserve the Church, the city of Rome, these temples and altars, and to endow this Lateran Synod with the aid of the Holy Ghost for the healing of all Christendom. We beseech thee, teach the Christian princes to make peace among them- selves, and to turn their swords against Mohammed, the open enemy of Christ, that the love of the Church may not only survive these storms and waves, but, through the merits of the Holy Cross and the power of the Holy Ghost, may be cleared of every stain and brought back again to its early purity and glory." The next preacher spoke of the unity of the Church, which consisted in the oneness of the members with each other and their subordination to the head, the Vicar of Christ ; whence arose the plain duty of the Council to punish all schismatics who refused to obey this head of the whole body. The third sermon, by the General of the Domini- cans, was on the Catholic doctrine of the Church and her synods. Its conclusion condemned the opposi- tion Council as from hell — no heavenly Jerusalem, but rather an earthly Babel, full of strife and confu- sion of tongues. The doctrine of Conciliar Supremacy was denounced as an innovation no older than Con- stance and Basle, and the preacher exhorted the Pope to gird on his two swords of spiritual and tem- poral power and set himself to the work of destroy- ing heresy and schism. All these utterances were emphasized and sum- marized in the address of the Apostolic Notary, Julius the Patron of Art. 293 Marcello of Venice, who (December, 15 12) praised the Pope for 'having borne heat and cold, sleepless- ness, illness, peril, to defeat his enemies in a holy war, to free Bologna, to conquer Reggio, Parma, and Piacenza, to drive the Frenchmen from Italy. And he prophesied that Julius would gain even greater glory in the works of peace, the reform and glorifi- cation of the Church, now threatened by foes from without and stained by sin and treachery within. "The Pope," he concluded, "must be physician, helmsman, cultivator, in short, all in all, like a sec- ond God on earth." In this spirit the Council condemned all acts of the schismatics at Pisa and Milan, laid France under the interdict, condemned the Conciliar theory of the constitution of the Church, suspended the Pragmatic Sanction, and summoned the clergy of France to an- swer for their conduct within sixty days. Julius had not only founded by arms a Papal monarchy in Italy, but secured the regular indorsement of the Church for the theory and practice of that absolute Papal Supremacy which the last two Councils had denied. During the years when he was thus bringing his plans to triumph Julius was active in enlarging and adorning his palace and cathedral. He determined early in his pontificate to cover his rooms with mural paintings, to complete the decoration of the chapel of his uncle, to build a superb tomb for himself, and to rebuild St. Peter's on its present gigantic scale. For these works three of the great- est artists of our race were at his command. Neither 294 The Age of the Renascence. Alexander, Caesar, nor Napoleon had such power to adorn their achievements as the Pope to whom it was given to immortalize his conquest of rebellious vassals and his triumphant manipulation of the squab- bling politics of Italy by the genius of Michael An- gelo, Raphael, and Bramante. There is no reason to suspect in Julius any artistic ability. The learning which supplied the young Raphael with the information for the wonderful pre- sentation of the ideals of the Platonized Christianity of the Florentine Academy in the pictures of the Stanza della Segnatu a was certainly not his. But there was a certain largeness and power about him which encouraged great conceptions, and he had been dowered with that first quality of a strong ruler, the ability to recognize a servant of distinction and to use genius without hampering it. He laid the corner-stone of a new St. Peter's, in spite of the opposition of all his counsellors, and inspired such restless energy into the work on all his architectural plans that he was said to demand of his contractors, not to build, but to make buildings grow. With ruthless haste he destroyed the monuments and pillars of the old Basilica to make room for his new creation, as if he felt himself to be racing with death, which overtook him on the 16th of February, 15 13. On the 6th of March, 15 13, Giovanni de' Medici was elected Pope, and assumed the name of Leo X. His appearance was not in his favor. His legs were very weak and his body very heavy, and when say- ing mass he was compelled to constantly wipe the perspiration from his hands and neck; but he had a Leo X. 295 sweet voice and charming manner. He was thirty- seven years oid, and this youngest of the Popes had a precocious ecclesiastical career from the start, for he was an abbot and an archbishop at seven, and a cardinal at fourteen. He had been educated under the care of his father, Lorenzo the Magnificent, in the midst of the best thinkers, writers, and artists of Italy, and his hereditary love of music, literature, and art was guided by refined tastes. It was to these he had always turned for his pleasures, and when he said to his brother, " The Papacy is ours ; let us en- joy it," he was thinking of the measureless opportuni- ties to patronize the arts which were now in his hands. The first act of his government made this plain. So superb an inaugural procession had never been seen. He spent on it one hundred thousand florins. And all Rome was adorned to match. Festal deco- rations in every street and house showed the joy of the city and the wealth of the resident prelates. Some of these were erected to honor the Pope, and bore figures of the apostles or ecclesiastical mot- toes ; but more were to please the new Maecenas, the patron of classic art and literature. Whoever had a beautiful bit of old marble, a statue of Venus or Apollo, or the head of an emperor, placed it in front of his palace. Agostino Chigi, the rich Papal banker, had erected a huge arch covered with mythological devices. It had this reference to the two preceding Popes (Alexander and Julius): "Ve- nus held rule before ; then came Mars ; but now Pallas Athena mounts the throne"; and on the other side of the street his neighbor put out the 296 The Age of the Renascence. statue of Venus with this inscription : " Mars fuit ; est Pallas; Venus semper ero." For the mode of Rome was classic, not to say heathen. A poet handed the Pope an elegy on the death of a friend, in which he called on the dead " to beg the King of Heaven and all the Gods to give Leo the years which the Fates had cut from his life." Another litterateur tells us how he madea funeral mound be- side the sea for a drowned friend, and called thrice on his manes with a loud voice ; and in a time of pestilence a Greek actually offered a public sac- rifice in the Colosseum to appease the demons of death. Leo wanted peace and the arts, but war was forced upon him. Spain and France had already begun their long struggle for the possession of Italy and the leadership of the world, and Leo was drawn into it. The league of Spain, England, the Empire, and the Pope attacked Venice and France, and in the battle of Novara (June 6, 15 13) France was driven once more out of Italy. But the Pope longed to make for his brother Giuliano a powerful princi- pality in Central Italy, and the French King was will- ing to meet him half way. The schism begun under Julius was healed by the return of the French prelates to obedience and the hand of a royal princess offered to the Pope's brother. But Leo wanted two strings to his bow, and at the very hour he was negotiating with France he was considering a new secret league with Spain and his old allies ; for it was said of him that the only thing to which he ever remained true was his own maxim that " to have made a treaty A Good Bargain. 297 with one side was the best of all reasons for begin- ning negotiations with the other." It was in the midst of these intrigues that Francis I., a beautiful and talented young prince, full of ro- mantic dreams of knightly glory, came to the French throne. He married his aunt to Giuliano de' Medici, and the Pope spent one hundred and fifty thousand florins for presents to the bride and her entry into Rome. (This was more than double the estimated yearly income of the richest merchant banker in Italy.) But when the Pope asked that a principality be formed for his brother out of four cities on the southern border of Milan, the King sharply refused ; he wanted them for himself. And Leo joined the old league of everybody against France. The French army crossed the Alps by a forced march, and in September, 15 15, a two days' fight at Mari- gnano made the young King master of North Italy. The Swiss, in spite of all the efforts of the Cardinal of Sitten, were terribly defeated by the French artil- lery, their hereditary formation in solid squares shown to be useless in the new warfare, and their reputa- tion as the first soldiers of Europe destroyed. Leo and Francis met in Bologna. The young conqueror kissed the Pope's foot and the two embraced. Their treaty recognized all Francis's claims to the Duchy of Milan, placed the States of the Church under his protection, and divided the liberties of the French Church, secured by the Pragmatic Sanction, between the King, who was to name the bishops, and the Pope, who was to draw the first year's income of all vacancies. 298 The Age of the Renascence. After the battle of Marignano a solemn peace was signed between France, Spain, and the Empire ; and the Pope seized the opportunity to create his nephew Lorenzo Duke of Urbino, at the cost of the nephew of Julius, who was driven into exile. But the pow- ers really agreed on only one thing, suspicion of the Pope, who had deceived each in turn ; and when the exiled Duke of Urbino suddenly reentered his dominions with five thousand mercenaries, all stood by to watch Leo get out of the difficulty as best he could. Money was scarce, and it was only by con- tracting huge debts at enormous interest that he could put an army into the field to defend his nepot. And in the midst of this struggle internal troubles came upon him. A conspiracy to murder the Pope was formed among the cardinals. Its chief was Pe- trucci, son of the famous tyrant of Siena. The Pope had permitted the Cardinal's brother to be driven from Siena in favor of a cousin who stood closer to his plans and likings. The young Cardinal kept a costly hunting retinue of dogs and horses, which was limited by the loss of the family lands. He swore vengeance against Leo, and at first meditated killing him on a hunting-party. He even carried a dagger into the consistory, hid under his cardinal's robe. But he finally determined, in counsel with Cardinal Sauli, to poison the Pope by means of a physician recommended to him in the temporary absence of his own. The plot was betrayed by the capture of letters of Petrucci written to his secretary, and it appeared that three other cardinals besides the active conspirators had known of the plot and Murderous Cardinals. 299 kept silence. Riario, Dean of the College, of which he had been a> member forty years, was disappointed over his defeat by Medici in the last election. Ha- drian of Corneto had been told by a fortune-teller that Leo would die young and an old man of un- known origin named Hadrian would succeed. So- derini was angry because his brother Gonfalonier, of the Republic, had been driven from Florence by the Medici. The plot was betrayed and Petrucci con- demned to death. The announcement of the sen- tence raised such a storm of indignation in the consistory that the dispute was heard in the streets outside. Nevertheless he was strangled in prison. Sauli was deposed. Hadrian fled to Venice and was deposed for contumacy. The other two were hea- vily fined. Afterward the Pope said high mass under armed guard to protect him against the dagger of a cardinal. He also named thirty-nine new cardinals, and the five hundred thousand florins thus brought in were used to end the war of Urbino. After offering in vain ten thousand ducats to one captain for the sur- render of the Duke, alive or dead, Leo finally did succeed in bribing all his generals to desert him, and the Duke was compelled to give up the struggle in consideration of the return of his personal property. Lorenzo de' Medici, thus settled on a ducal throne, was then married to a princess of France, and in 15 17 the Pope, with one nepot ruler of Florence, another of Urbino, and the College of Cardinals filled with his friends, held the balance of power in the strife of the young kings of Spain and France so 300 The Age of the Renascence. soon to break out, first in rivalry for the throne of the German Empire, and then in war for the posses- sion of Italy. Meanwhile the Council of the Lateran had been moving in the matter of the so long desired reform of the Church. Leo proposed to establish it by a bull, but the Council demanded detailed regulations for bishops and all clergy, and Pico della Mirandola sent a memorial suggesting that the Church needed not better laws, but better men. The bishops of the Council proposed to effect reform by reestablish- ing, as against the privileges of the cardinals and monastic orders, the ancient episcopal powers ; and when a reform bill was introduced which failed to reestablish these episcopal rights, they threatened to withdraw from the Council. The Pope had to act constantly as mediator, and several compromises were introduced which attempted to establish re- form while still retaining as much as possible of the privileges and patronage which belonged to each class of the clergy represented in the Council. The ancient laws against immorality among the clergy were reiterated with emphasis. " Ringing resolutions " denouncing simony and abuses in the bestowal of benefices were passed unanimously. Discipline was made easier by the removal of cer- tain exemptions from episcopal control enjoyed by priests. Bishops were ordered to supervise clerical education and see to it that the preaching in their dioceses was strong and true ; and arrangements were made for the holding of regular diocesan synods. This last decree would have been really The Triumph of the Papacy. 301 influential for reform, but unfortunately it remained almost a dead letter. In 15 16 appeared a book by Pietro Pomponazzi, a distinguished professor of Bologna, to prove that the soul was mortal. And the Council thought it wise, in view of the prevailing heathenism, to sol- emnly decree that human souls are individual, im- mortal, and unmaterial. The closing ceremony in March was a triumph for the Papacy. All the world was returned to obedi- ence, and Cardinal Carvajal, once head of the schis- matic Council at Pisa, conducted the mass and closed a Council which had reaffirmed the entire claim of the mediaeval Popes, condemned the asser- tion of Conciliar Supremacy made at Constance, and asserted the absolute Papal Supremacy. They sym- bolized these decrees by calling all Christendom to a crusade under the lead of the Pope, and laid a tax for its expenses on all lands of the world. Already a Papal messenger had written to Leo (15 16): "In Germany they are only waiting until some fellow once opens his mouth against Rome." He was now sent back as Legate with a paper reform and the demand for a new ecclesiastical tax. PERIOD III. CHAPTER XXII. TRANSALPINE HUMANISM UNDER JULIUS AND LEO — (i) THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS ABOUT JOHN REUCHLIN ; (2) THE THREE DISCIPLES OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHRIST; (3) THE PUPILS OF FABER STAPULENSIS ; (4) ULRICH ZWINGLI. |T is rather a suggestive division of the history of German Humanism to desig- nate its three periods as the Theological (the Forerunners, ending 147 1), the Teaching (the Older Humanists), and the Polemic, which, beginning with the century, was broken in the middle by the Protestant revolt. And it implies a characteristic distinction between north- ern and southern Humanism that across the Alps the whole Humanistic body should have become so soon involved in such a serious discussion as the con- troversy we are about to follow. The forces of ultra-conservatism and reaction were as strong in Italy as in Germany, but the Humanists were less zealous and determined, and when conflict arose they were much inclined to say, with Lauren- tius Valla : " Mother Church does not know anything 302 Christian Art. 303 about criticism, but in this matter I think just as Mother Church does." In the north the common temper of scholars was sterner and more serious. Italian Humanism never displayed any efficient in- terest in the New Testament, and by the middle of the fifteenth century was the contented servant of privileged abuse. But scarcely had the New Learn- ing passed the Alps before we find its adherents turning to biblical studies and attacking traditional privileges in the name of common justice. While the presses of Venice and Rome were pouring out editions of the classics and erotic poems, the presses of the Rhine were busy with biblical and patristic works, satires, and moral treatises. This contrast between the spirit of Germany and Italy is remarkable even in the sphere of art, where it shows least upon the surface. Certain general contrasts between the works of Diirer and Holbein and those of Raphael and Michael Angelo, all four of whom did their best-known work in the first quar- ter cf the sixteenth century, suggest it. The north- erners made cheap prints to go into the houses of the common people, while the Italians were decorat- ing the tombs, the chapels, and the palaces of princes. The Italians were philosophic, moral, and aesthetic ; the Germans religious and evangelic. Michael Angelo painted the creation and prophecy, carved a Moses out of Homer and a David who is one of Plutarch's men ; but Holbein cut " Thus saith the Lord " into the lines of the Samuel that meets Saul in his little woodcut for Bible illustration. Raphael made some perfectly drawn pictures out of the life 304 The Age of the Renascence. of Christ, that are as much like the four gospels as the fighting Pope with his Humanistic cardinals, for whom he did them, was like the Master and his apostles ; Diirer put the spirit of the New Testament into his rude woodcuts of him who preached the gospel to the poor. Raphael painted for all ages das eivig WeiblicJie; Diirer drew for the people of his own age the Man of Sorrows. There is probably as much provincialism in Ruskin's phrase of " kicking prettinesses," applied to Raphael's "Transfiguration," as in Pater's reference to " the grim inventions of Albrecht Diirer " ; but it may not jar upon the broad and gentle temper of history to suggest that the greater rudeness and fidelity to the New Testament of the Germans were both, perhaps, the outcome of the spirit of their people. These reflections may illustrate the deepest reason why the whole New Learning of Germany, applauded by all the northern Humanists, became involved in a desperate battle with the party of orthodoxy over the relation of scholarship to the Bible and the Church. The protagonist was John Reuchlin, and the oc- casion was the zeal of John PfefTerkorn, a converted Jew and master of the hospital of St. Ursula in Cologne. With the help of the Dominicans of Co- logne he published a series of pamphlets against the Jews, very much in the tone and temper of the anti- Catholic publications with which we are familiar in this country. He followed the Emperor to Italy, and as a result of his impassioned appeals Reuchlin, as imperial councillor, received the request for a The Battle is Joined. 305 formal opinion on the question, " Ought all the books of the Jews to be taken away from them and burned ? " He made a most painstaking answer, in which he advised the destruction only of certain blasphemous parodies of Christianity, two of which he cited as disavowed by the better Jews. He defended the rest of their literature as highly useful to science and theology, and guaranteed to the Jews by the laws of the Empire. This opinion, which was sent under seal, was seen in transit by Pfefferkorn, who immediately published a pamphlet entitled " The Hand-glass," in which he caricatured Reuchlin's official opinion, at- tempted to show him as a poor scholar and a worse Christian, and ended up by calling all patrons of Jewish learning Ohrenblaser, Stuboistencker, Plippen- plapper, Bentelfeger, Hinterschiitzer, Scitenstecher. Reuchlin answered with " The Eye-glass," a pam- phlet abounding in similar flowers of speech, which bloomed freely over the whole field of contemporary polemics. The original report of Reuchlin was already pigeonholed and forgotten, but the conflict between the Old Learning and the New, so long impending, was begun, and all Germany flamed into literary war, amid which the threats of the heretic's stake gleamed darkly. For the party of reactionary orthodoxy, headed by the Dominicans and the theologians of Cologne, proposed now to extend to Reuchlin the policy of thorough they had wished for the Jews. But the case was appealed to Rome, and while Hu- manistic cardinals were stirred up by letters to block the efforts of zealous inquisitors, the cross-fire of satires, poems, and pamphlets raged in Germany. 306 The Age of the Renascence. All three classes of Humanists rallied around Reuch- lin as a common leader. Johann Eck (1486-1543), the young professor of theology at Ingolstadt, at- tacked a reactionary theologian at Vienna as a fool and a sophist ; for which we cannot help feeling there was some ground when we learn that, as Rector of the University, he forbade a young professor to lec- ture because he had dared to use the classic tu instead of the barbarous but customary vos. For it was a cause of much horror to the Old School as the Humanists mockingly put it, " Quod simplex socius deberes tibisare unum rectorem universitatis qui est magister noster." But the most energetic defender of Reuchlin was Ulrich von Hutten, a young representative of the pagan Renascence. He was placed by his father, a South German knight, in a convent at Fulda to be educated, whence he ran away at sixteen to go to the Humanistic University of Erfurt. Then for years he lived the wild and studious life of a wan- dering student, subsisting by the charity of friends who admired his talents. Italy, the loadstar of all who loved the New Learning, drew him also, and he learned in the South land not only a deeper love of let- ters, but a deeper hatred of the abuses of the Papacy. Epigrams written at this time, but published later, show it plainly. For instance, here is one: O71 the Indulgence of Ju litis. " See how the world of the faithful is guided by the merchant Julius, who sells what he does not possess — heaven. " Epistolcs Obscurorum Virorum!' 307 " Offer me at a bargain what you have ! How shameless it is' to sell what you are most in want of yourself! If the giants came back Jupiter would be done for. Julius would certainly sell them Olympus. But so long as another reigns and thunders above, I shall never take the trouble to bid for property in heaven." Hutten came back from his travels a bold and fluent satirist, German to the core, and plunged with fresh zeal into the ranks of the Reuchlinists. They were already a marshaled army with pub- lished lists of names. One of their most distin- guished muster-rolls was found in the volume printed at Tubingen, 15 14, entitled " Clarorum Virorum Epistolae, Latinae, Graecae et Hebriacae variis tem- poribus missae ad Joannem Reuchlin." It was with the aid of Hutten that a little company of the Erfurt Humanists published anonymously a parody entitled " Epistolae obscurorum virorum ad venerabilem virum M. Ortuinum Gratium variis et locis et temporibus missae et demum in volumen coactae." It is a work so characteristic of its age that, by the confession of its best commentators, translation is impossible and paraphrase difficult. Its humor, whose tone has been well compared to that of " Don Quixote," is stained by the filthy jesting, its hatred of ignorant intolerance by the reckless slander universal among scholars of the day, and it is written in a wild but most clever caricature of the dog-Latin of the monks. The letters and poems in it were supposed to be ad- dressed to Ortuin Gratius, of the theological faculty 308 The Age of the Renascence. of Cologne, by a series of friends who bore such names as Eitelnarrabianus, Kukuk, Buntemantellus, Dollenkopfius, Schaffmulius. They propounded learned questions for discussion, or reported journeys to other universities. Through them all runs a thread of allusion to Reuchlin and the advance of the New Learning. They suggest absurd arguments for his discomfiture, or they tell of how his friends at other universities turned the narrator out of the inn as an enemy of the Muses. One reports that the chief preacher in Wiirzburg is a dangerous man who an- nounces that he belongs to no school except the school of Christ ; that he preaches plainly, without the tricks of rhetoric and logic, and the people like it. He even dared to say, when Brother Jacob announced the sale of indulgences, that if a man bought a hun- dred indulgences, and did not live well, he will be damned, and the indulgence will not help him in the least. Another reports a disputation over a passage of prophecy in which his adversary asserted that the light of truth was about to be cast upon the dirty, dark, and senseless theology which had been brought into vogue a few hundred years before by men igno- rant of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. God was sending new doctors with lights, like Reuchlin and Erasmus, who had just put out a true edition of Jerome, a real theologian ; and he was working at the text of the New Testament, which was worth more than to have twenty thousand Scotists and Thomists disputing for a hundred years over ens and essentia. A single one of these letters will serve as a favor- able specimen. It is from Thomas Langschneider to A Specimen Letter. 309 his old master Gratius, asking an opinion upon a learned question. With many quotations from Aris- totle and the Bible, he describes a feast at Leipzig, given, according to custom, by one who had just become master in theology ; and after they had enjoyed the roast capons, fish, Malvoisie and Rhine wine, Eimbecker, Torgauer, and Neuburger beer, they began to discuss learned themes. And finally Magister Warmsemmel, a reputable Scotist, and Magister Delitzsch, a doctor of medicine and law, became involved in an insoluble dispute as to whether one who was about to become a doctor of theology {Magister Noster) should be called Magister Nos- trandus or Noster Magistrandns. Warmsemmel points out that magistrare is a verb, but nostro, nostrare, is not to be found in any dictionary. To which his antagonist replied that in Horace's " Ars Poetica " the right to make new words was clearly established. The correspondent asks Gratius to de- cide which was right, and, in closing, inquires how the war comes on with that scoundrel Reuchlin, who, he understands, obstinately refuses to recant. This mildest of all the letters seems like fairly strong sar- casm, but it needed coarse point to touch its victims, for a Dominican prior in the Low Countries was so pleased with this new defence of the labors of his order on behalf of orthodoxy that he ordered a large number of copies to be sent to friends in high rank. History does not record what he said when he dis- covered his mistake on reading the last letter of the second part, which even the most Boeotian wits could not misunderstand. 3 1 o The Age of the Renascence. The learned farce was received with Homeric laughter. We can well imagine that, even in Co- logne, the student body was delighted with it, and if anything was needed to bring youngest Germany to the side of the New Learning, the " Epistolae Ob- scurorum Virorum " did it. But as subsequent edi- tions became diffused and coarsened the judicious grieved. Reuchlin thought it vulgar, and tradition says he remonstrated sharply. A young professor of theology at Wittenberg, Martin Luther, though counted among the Reuchlinists, said it was imperti- nent, and called the author " Hans Sausage." Eras- mus, though he liked it at first, finally spoke of it with asperity as an injury to the Humanistic cause. For Erasmus was working on altogether different lines. Colet and his two younger friends, More and Erasmus, were united in a more or less unconscious cooperation at a common work — reform by the dem- onstration of a reasonable Christianity ; the philos- ophy of Christ applied to the problems of the world. With Colet this desire took a more personal and religious form, and as time went on the thoughts of the Dean of St. Paul became more and more centred on Christ. He had arranged Christ's sayings into groups to remember them better and planned a book upon them. His preaching, the most influential in England, dwelt more and more on the blessings and example of Christ. He loved children, quoting the example of our Lord, and bent his learning to write a little Latin grammar for them, that they might " grow to perfect literature and come at last to be great clerks." He gave his whole private fortune Thomas More. 311 to found St. Paul's School for the free education of one hundred and fifty-three boys, with the " intent by this school specially to increase knowledge and worshipping of God and our Lord Jesus Christ, and good Christian life and manners in the children." With Thomas More, greatest advocate, and finally Lord Chancellor of England, the desire to propagate the philosophy of Christ expressed itself naturally in the direction of social and political reforms. His " Utopia " was a description of an ideal common- wealth, described by an old traveler he met in Ant- werp through the introduction of Peter Giles, a well- known merchant of that city. It ridicules the passion for war then ruling the hearts of all Christian princes ; skilfully denounces by comparison the crying injus- tices done to the laboring classes by society and the laws which " confer benefits on the gentry and care to do nothing at all for peasants, colliers, servants, wagoners, and mechanics, without whom no state could exist." He points out that in England only four people in ten could read, and proposes as a better ideal, not an ignorant nation divided into jealous classes of rich and poor, but a true commu- nity, comfortable and educated throughout. He suggests as one means of accomplishing this to so repress idleness, restrict luxury, and manage work that the hours of labor should be confined to six a day for each male. He proposed sanitary reform to stop the plagues, and hints at other improvements which have become matters of course to us of these latter days. Through all the work he shows the firm faith that the teachings of Christ and the guidance 312 The Age of the Renascence. of reason are workable, fitted, if men would only live by them, to establish a Kingdom of God upon earth. With Erasmus this desire to propagate the philos- ophy of Christ turned in the direction of scholarship. Not, indeed, that the acute writer, who had learned from books and letters a thorough knowledge of the world, neglected the idea of political reform. His " Praise of Folly," which ran through seven editions in a few months, was a classic treatment of the theme handled by Brant in the chaotic " Ship of Fools " ; and his " Christian Prince," written for the young Charles, afterward Emperor of Germany, is, as has been well suggested, the opposite to " The Prince " of Machiavelli, then lying in manuscript. He bids the Prince secure " the favor of God by making him- self useful to the people, for the duties between a prince and his people are neutral." But these were simply the pastimes of a hard worker. The labor of his life was the New Testament in Greek ; not the first Greek Testament finished by the New Learning, — for the Complutensian polyglot was ready a few months earlier, — but the first to be put in circulation. His preface to the great work makes clear his hope to oppose two evils : first, the pagan tendency of the age, which, while straining the human mind to master all subtleties and toiling to overcome all difficulties, neglects, derides, and treats with coldness the philos- ophy of Christ; second, the tendency of the Old Learning to substitute the schoolmen for the gospels- " What are Albertus, Alexander, Thomas, ^gidius, Ricardus, Occam, compared to Christ or Peter or The Fears of the Orthodox. 313 Paul or John ? If the footprints of Christ be anywhere shown to us, we kneel down and adore. Why do we not rather venerate the living and breathing picture of him in these books ? If the vesture of Christ be exhibited, where will we not go to kiss it? Yet his whole wardrobe could not represent him more vividly than these writings. We decorate statues with gold and gems for the love of Christ. These books present us with a living image of his holy mind." The publication of this New Testament, which was also a sort of commentary, had been much opposed by the party of orthodoxy, and the grounds of oppo- sition are clearly expressed in a letter of Martin Dor- pius, of the University of Louvain, which beseeches Erasmus, " by our mutual friendship and your wonted courtesy, to desist from this attempt to supplement the Latin New Testament with a Greek version which amends the Vulgate." Dorpius asserts the folly of such an attempt to correct a version which has in it no errors or mistakes. " For this is the version used and still used by the unanimous Universal Church, and it cannot be that she is mistaken." " How could it be possible that the heretic Greeks could have pre- served a truer text than the orthodox Latins? " " Be- sides," he continues, " there is great harm in your attempt. If you discuss the integrity of the Scrip- tures many will doubt ; for, as Augustine said to Jerome, ' If any error should be admitted to have crept into the Holy Scriptures, what authority would be left to them?' Therefore, I beseech you, limit your corrections to those passages of the New Testa' 3 1 4 The Age of the Renascence. ment in which you can substitute better words with- out altering the sense." 1 In spite of these alarmed remonstrances the book appeared with a dedication, by permission, to the Pope, and was received with acclaim. Letters came to Erasmus from all sides ; among them a poem from Philip Melancthon, a young student of Tubingen, who was already known among his fellows as " the second Erasmus." To this chorus of praise there was strong dissent. The reactionary orthodox party of course objected bitterly, and Erasmus's enemies were loud against him. Edward Lee, an Englishman, attacked him for many errors, among them the omission of the text on " the three that bear witness in heaven " — which must, Lee said, result in a revival of Arianism and schism in the Church. And there were other objections in a more kindly spirit. Martin Luther, a young professor of theology at Wittenberg, wrote to his friend Spalatin how much he regretted the evident preference of Erasmus for following Jerome in seeking the historical (he calls it the dead) sense of Scripture rather than the spiritual method of Augustine. " The more I study the book, the more I lose my liking for it. Erasmus, with all his learning, is lacking in Christian wisdom. The judgment of a man who attributes anything to the human will is one thing, but the judgment of one who recognizes anything but grace is another." 1 In 1512 Faber Stapulensis had felt obliged to defend himself, in the preface to his commentary on Paul's Epistles, against the charge of temerity because he had dared in comments to add to the text of the Vulgate the sense of the Greek. Criticisms. 3 1 5 " Nevertheless," he continues, " I carefully keep the opinion to myself, lest I should play into the hands of his enemies." Dr. Eck, the young professor of theology at In- golstadt and a correspondent of Luther, wrote also to their common friend Spalatin his objections to the Novum Instrurnentum. They applied not so much to its theology as to its critical method. Erasmus had pointed out that the apostles, quoting from mem- ory, were not always exact in citing the Old Testa- ment. He had also said that their Greek was not classic. Eck objects to the first remark on the Augustinian ground that to admit error destroys authority, and to the second because it attributes negligence or ignorance to the Holy Spirit. In con- clusion he hopes that Erasmus would read Augustine more and Jerome less. Spalatin sent this letter to Erasmus, who replied in a friendly tone to the friendly remonstrance. He was publishing a splendid new edition of Jerome for the purpose of showing that the methods and results of his interpretation were not novelties, but had the authority of the father who gave the Church the Vulgate. Of course he could not surrender his deliberate preference, but he hoped that, as Jerome and Augustine had differed without ceasing to be friends, he and Dr. Eck might imitate their holy example. Faber Stapulensis, who, when Erasmus settled at Basle in 15 13, had written him a letter, brief but full of congratulations, praying that his life might be prolonged to enlighten the world with his labors, accused Erasmus of folly, ignorance, and vanity be • 3 1 6 The Age of the Renascence. cause he had suggested that doubts had been enter- tained as to the Pauline authority of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Erasmus had criticised points in Faber's commentary on the Pauline Epistles, pub- lished in 15 12, and the bitterness of this tone was doubtless due to the touchy vanity which is always the weakness of scholars, and which the most distin- guished men of the sixteenth century had no shame in displaying. Erasmus himself too often whines like a spoiled child over the injustice of fate or the lack of appreciation of a world which flattered him inces- santly. Faber was by this time a great figure among men of letters. In 15 13 Reuchlin had written to him as the " restorer of Aristotle, the glory of whose works is everywhere," begging that he would present to the Sorbonne his defence against the charge of heresy brought by the theologians of Cologne. He had been gathering around him in Paris a little knot of scholars, chief among whom was Guillaume Farel, born of a noble family of Dauphine in 1489. Faber led these in pious exercises, frequently going with Farel to pray in the churches and make offerings of flowers at the shrines of the saints. His best lectures were upon the Psalms and the Epistles of Paul, on which he published a commentary, in 1502, which empha- sizes the doctrine of justification by faith. Though his devotion to the Church and his hatred of schism remained unbroken, there grew upon Faber a con- viction of the evilness of the times and a hope of better things. He seems to have shared the convic- tion of his correspondent, Erasmus, that reason and Ulrich Zwingli. 317 the Word of God would dispel the reigning darkness ; for Farel has' told us how earnestly he used to say, " William, the world is to be renewed, and you will see it." Among his favorite scholars was the son of Briconnet, a great officer of state who, on the death of his wife, took orders and became a cardinal. Guillaume Briconnet became bishop and abbot while still young, and made his abbey a seat of letters de- voted to religion. It was there that Faber finished, in 1509, his commentary on the Psalms. Bound to this circle of French Humanists and to Erasmus and his friends at Basle by a lively corre- spondence was a Swiss who at an early age began to win distinction in letters. Ulrich Zwingli had been born in 1484 in the Alpine village of Toggenburg, of which his father was chief magistrate. His uncle, dean of the cathedral of a small city near by, took the boy into his house and directed his education at the newly opened school. At the University of Vienna he fell under the power of the New Learning, and at the age of twenty-three was called to be pastor of the city of Glarus. He displayed power as a preacher, and strove to use in that exercise of his office all his knowledge, even learning the history of Valerius Maximus by heart to furnish historical illus- trations. He soon became possessed of the best library in the vicinity, and as learning was scarce, the fame of his scholarship spread. He also made himself much beloved by the charm of his personality, which was heightened by skill in music ; and a young friend, inviting him to his magister banquet at Basle, playfully addressed him as " the Apollonian lute- 3 1 8 The Age of the Renascence. player and recognized Cicero of our age " — a jest only in form, for he was already hailed as " the first to acclimatize Humanistic studies in Switzerland," and Erasmus wrote to him as one " who, with his friends, would raise the Fatherland to a higher grade of education and morals." These great labors and pleasures were broken by sterner duties when Zwingli marched as chaplain with the city company to sup- port the banner of the Pope at Novara (15 13) and Marignano ( 1 5 1 5 ). It was just before the last battle that his powerful sermon in the market-place of Monza hindered the main body of the confederates from accepting the bribes of France and deserting the League on the eve of battle. Amid all these labors there had been growing in him an ever-increasing devotion to the study of the New Testament. The writings of two men were especially influential in directing his thoughts in this direction. He had the works of Pico della Mirandola in the edition published by Wimpheling at Strass- burg in 1504. Even as a student at Basle, Zwingli had gotten into trouble by confessing his agreement with some of the condemned theses of Pico, and now, as a man, he busied himself much with his writings. The works of Erasmus were all in his hands as fast as they appeared ; the " Enchiridion," the " Praise of Folly," the "Adages," and all the tractates, were his familiar companions ; and when he visited Erasmus in Basle in 15 15 he could greet him as an old friend and master. Zwingli said afterward that Erasmus first made him aware of the evils which had gathered around the worship of saints and relics, and pointed Straightforward Preaching. 3 1 9 out the absence of all allusion to such practices in the Bible. It was from these suggestions that Zwingli became sure, about the year 15 15, that "Christ is the only Saviour, comfort, and treasure of our poor souls." Soon after, his outspoken condemnation of the French alliance, which, in his judgment, put the free confederacy in the hands of the French King, so offended some of the magistrates of Glarus, whom he denounced as takers of bribes, that he accepted a call to be preacher at the abbey of Einsiedeln. Since the fifteenth century the wonder-working statue of Einsiedeln had made it the centre of annual pilgrim- ages from all South Germany. The riches thus brought to the cloister coffers had wrought great in- roads in the simple life of the monks. ^But the officials by whom Zwingli was called had repressed open scandals, and the abbot, while taking little personal interest in religion, was glad to have good sermons, and pleased that the abbey should become, under Zwingli and his friends, a centre of Humanism in Switzerland. It was very straight preaching the pilgrims heard from the new incumbent ; not polemic, but the proclamation of positive truths whose accep- tance would have closed the shrines and stopped the pilgrimages. The administrator of the cloister was in entire sympathy with the straightforward preach- ing, and also joined Zwingli in his literary studies, for which he made large purchases of books from Paris, Basle, and the other German presses. An extensive correspondence united the little circle of learned men with the literati of Basle, at whose head 320 The Age of the Renascence. was Erasmus, and the circle of Faber Stapulensis, whose comment on the Psalms was one of Zwingli's favorite working books. But when the New Testa- ment of Erasmus appeared Zwingli turned to it, and we are told by one of his friends that he learned the Greek text of Paul's Epistles by heart. He was able to be quite a buyer of books, because since his sermon at Monza he received from the Pope a yearly present of fifty florins, which he used, per- haps by Leo's wish, for the increase of his library. PERIOD III. CHAPTER XXIII. THE COURT OF LEO X. — HUMANISM IN ITALY AND SPAIN — THE THREE BOY KINGS. OR Leo shared his good fortune with generous hand. His life was mirthful and splendid. He ate little himself, fast- ing three times in the week, but he enter- tained royally, and his table cost him ninety-six thousand florins, or more than half the yearly income of the estates of the Church and seven times the total yearly salary of all the professors of the University of Rome. But he gave no banquet as splendid as that to which he was invited by his banker, Chigi, in honor of the christening of an il- legitimate daughter. At the end of every course of the feast the gold and silver plate was thrown out of the windows into the river — to be caught by nets hidden beneath the water. These Papal banquets were adorned by poetry. The recital of extempore verses was a common amusement of Leo, and he often joined in the con- tests himself. A perfect swarm of poets lived on him, and, like Nicholas, he gave even to the bad ones. With the latter he was not above a practical joke ; o 3 ai 322 The Age of the Renascence. for a certain Baraballo, who recited atrocious verses to his own unbounded delight, was crowned poet and led in mock triumph through the city mounted on an elephant, the gift of the Portuguese King, whose navigators had brought it round the Cape from India. Leo would not allow the train to approach the Vat- ican, but his zest in the colossal joke, in which the whole court joined, is marked by the figure of the elephant on the door between two of the rooms dec- orated by Raphael. The Pope's favorite amusement was music. He sang well himself, and often joined in the concerts, to which he listened as in a dream of delight. It was at such times that he was most unbounded in his gifts. He took great pleasure also in acting, and his friends and household presented comedies before him, for which Raphael sometimes painted scenes and arranged decorations. These were frequently of a free tone, and the Pope's presence at them often gave offence to the ambassadors and other visitors. Leo applauded and rewarded successful authors and actors, but he had a monk whose piece was a failure severely tossed in a blanket before him. He was very fond of cards also, and his losses and the pres- ents he made amounted to sixty thousand florins a year — more than twelve times the amount Raphael was paid for his work in the four great frescoed rooms of the Vatican, and ten times what Michael Angelo had received for painting the Sistine Chapel. Of course no finances could stand such a strain as this. Leo had a regular income of between four and five thousand florins. In addition he sold between The Augustan Age of the Papacy. 323 twenty-five and twenty-six hundred offices, which brought during eight years and a half a total of nearly three million florins. But he left debts amounting to nearly twelve hundred thousand ducats. Under his successor the ordinary expenses of the Roman State were reckoned at three hundred and fifty thousand florins, so that in eight years and a half the Pope spent on the conquest of Urbino, and other personal and family expenses, about four million florins, or an average of seven times the income of Agostino Chigi, who, with seventy thousand florins a year, was reckoned the richest merchant banker of Italy. For part of this huge shower of gold scattered with liberal hand Leo received an extraordinary return. The age of Augustus is not rendered more illustrious by the writings of the men he patronized than the age of Leo by the works of the masters of the arts of design whom he employed ; and in the popular mind he is remembered, not as the Pope under whom Switzerland and Germany broke away from the Papacy, but as the Pope for whom Bramante, Michael Angelo, and Raphael worked. Neither the glory nor the blame can be laid at his door. He found the immortal three in Rome when he ascended the throne, and he only continued to employ them on the designs of Julius II. ; and the revolt of Ger- many and Switzerland was the outcome of European movements working in England, France, and Ger- many, which we have seen beginning years before. Another glory of the court of Leo, which, unlike the undimmed pictures of Raphael, has now faded, 324 The Age of the Renascence. was the fame of the litterateurs and scholars who surrounded him. Rome usurped, under his rule, that unquestioned literary supremacy which she had for some years shared with Florence. His generous patronage made the Eternal City a veritable paradise of the Humanists. Next to a well-filled purse a skilled pen was the best recommendation to ecclesi- astical preferment. The chief novelists and historians of Rome were bishops or at least apostolic secretaries, and among the cardinals and their friends were many men distinguished for literature. These Roman lovers of letters and the arts fall naturally into the three classes we have noted before among the Humanists. It is difficult to label the most distinguished stylist of his day — Pietro Bembo, Leo's secretary, and twenty-five years later cardinal under Paul III. — as anything but a pagan. His learning was never turned in the direction of the fathers or the Bible, nor were his philosophical discussions directed toward any of the questions of the day in Church or State. For every exhortation he turns, not to the New Testa- ment, but to the holy character and teachings of a Socrates or a Plato. It is quite in keeping with all we know of him that he should write to his friend Sadoleto, begging him to hurry up his work on St. Paul's Epistles and turn to Hortensius ; for, he adds, " The barbaric style of Paul will ruin your taste. Stop this child's play, which is unworthy of an ear- nest man." This Jacopo Sadoleto, Bishop of Carpentras, after- ward, like Bembo, cardinal under Paul III., is a good Hadrian of Come to. 325 representative of the Middle Party, whose effort was to reconcile ancient philosophy and the Bible. He answered his friend Fregoso, who blamed him for diverting any time from the study of the Holy Scrip- tures : " The knowledge of liberal arts and philosophy must be regarded as a distinguished part of true wisdom, as steps for those who will mount to God." " For," he asks, " do you believe you will find in the nature of things or in any branch of science anything which escaped the all-embracing knowledge of Plato or the intellectual sharpness of Aristotle? " But he finds the stay of his life, not " in the teaching which we owe to Aristotle and Plato, but to God, the teacher and Creator of all." " In him alone is the hope of life." " Only God can help and hold in trouble. Only in gratitude to him can we lead a happy and useful life." Out of this double love of philosophy and religion came his two chief works, " The Praise of Philosophy " and " The Commentary on the Epistle of Paul to the Romans." It is probable that among the cardinals Contarini and Caraffa shared his views and hopes of a philosophy of Christ. Sannazaro, the famous Neapolitan, called the Christian Virgil, who crowned his popular eclogues of love and friend- ship with a poem on the birth of Christ, over which he spent twenty years and his best energies, was much admired by this circle. We find the representative of that conservative and strictly orthodox Humanism which desired to use the New Learning only as a weapon for the defence of Christianity and the Church in the person of Hadrian of Corneto. It is a puzzle as yet unsolved by the 326 The Age of the Renascence. writers who have alluded to it (e.g., Janitschek, Gebhardt, Springer, Grimm, et al.) why Hadrian of Corneto wrote the book " On True Philosophy," which was published in 1507. He had long been the friend and follower of Rodrigo Borgia, and when his patron had become Pope rose rapidly in the scale of curial promotion until he obtained the red hat. Bramante built him a magnificent palace, and his riches caused the report that Alexander and Caesar died from changing the cups in an attempt to poison him in his own garden. He mingled in curial politics, had to flee from the wrath of Julius II., and was aware of the plot to assassinate Leo X. In consequence of this complicity he fled from the city, was deposed in contumaciam, lived in Venice, and, returning to the conclave at Leo's death, was murdered on the road by his servant. He was the author of a poem on "The Hunt," which was much admired, and a book on "The Method of Speaking Latin," which went through many editions and is called one of the most solid productions of Italian Humanism. It is difficult to understand why such a cardinal should write a book opposing worldly learning and the study of philosophy, except to confess an inner conviction denied in his life. But such is the purpose of his " De Vera Philosophia," a catena of quotations from Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. He begins by asserting that the source of faith and knowledge is the Bible — that there can be no true knowledge without faith and that human reason is powerless for divine things. He goes on to demand an implicit faith in the word of Scripture and to The Spirit of the Catholic Reaction. 327 limit all knowledge by it : " For what Scripture leaves hidden human presumption may not attempt to understand by conjecture." Scripture is a field on which, if we wish to build, we must dig steadily until we reach the rock which is Christ. None but those who have received God's Spirit understand his Word. Dialectics must be cast aside, and the ornaments of rhetoric are to be despised. " If you ask me the cir- cumference of the earth, I gladly confess I do not know, and it would do me no good to know. The free arts do not deserve the name, for only Christ makes free. The works of the poets, the wisdom of the worldly, the pomp of style, are the devil's food. What has Aristotle to do with Paul, or Plato with Peter? At the last judgment the foolish Plato and his scholars will be summoned, and the proofs of Aristotle will avail him little. Not by the philos- ophers is true wisdom. Though they count and measure the stars, though they labor at grammar, rhetoric, or music, it is of no avail. They are only truly wise when they believe on Christ. There is no middle ground. Who stands not by Christ stands by the devil. Whoso is not in the kingdom of God ,s lost. Why shall I speak of physics, ethics, or logic? All that human tongue can say is in Holy Scripture. Its authority is greater than the power of the whole human spirit." Already, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, there was stirring in Roman Humanism the spirit of the Catholic Reform. For in Sadoleto we see the complete union of letters and religion afterward to be shaped into the elaborate educational system oi 328 The Age of the Renascence. the Jesuits, while Hadrian's book foretells the fiery- zeal of implicit orthodoxy, despising all things in comparison to the fathers, the Church, and the Bible, which was to mount the throne in Paul IV. This type of prelate, using knowledge in the ser- vice of an orthodoxy which loved existing institutions and desired to reform them, appears at this time in two men illustrious in the service of Spain. Both were learned, one in the Old Learning, the other in the New ; one thought Humanism dangerous, the other welcomed it ; but both were alike in their de- votion to the Church and their desire for reform. Hadrian Dedel was born in Utrecht in 1459. He received his education at Deventer and Louvain, where he studied especially Thomas Aquinas and Peter Lombard. As a young licentiate his lectures and skill in disputation won him a large fame, which led the Grand Duchess Margaret to give him money to take his degree and become professor of theology. The fruit of his studies appeared in a commentary on Peter Lombard and in a collection of scholastic dis- cussions entitled " Questiones Quodlibeticae " — a love of the Old Learning which he never lost, for in 1 5 1 5 he wrote advising the destruction of the books of Reuch- lin. Hadrian's reputation for learning and piety induced the Emperor Maximilian to appoint him tutor to his grandson Charles. The other grandfather, Ferdinand the Catholic, to whom he was sent as ambassador, appointed him Bishop of Tortosa in 1 5 1 5. He had won the affection of his pupil in spite of his steady opposition to Charles's desire to spend more time in knightly exercises than upon books. For Cardinal Ximenes. 329 the young Prince, not being endowed by nature with a pleasing presence, labored hard to attain the per- fect horsemanship which he displayed in his stately entries. When Charles succeeded to the throne of Spain he associated Hadrian with Cardinal Ximenes in the management of the affairs of his kingdom, and shortly afterward Leo X. made him a cardinal. This Cardinal Ximenes, now eighty years old, was one of the ornaments of the College, though his honors and duties kept him from Rome. He dis- played that union of patriotism, zeal for the Church, and love of letters which during the next century, the blooming-time of the Spanish race, was to be characteristic of its greatest men. He was born in 1436, of a noble family of fallen fortunes, and graduated in theology from the Uni- versity of Salamanca, where he lived for six years as a private tutor. At the age of twenty-two he went to Rome, where his knowledge of canon law enabled him to live as a consistorial advocate. He returned after six years with letters expectivce, which gave him a claim upon the first vacant benefice in the see of Toledo. These letters had frequently been de- nounced as an abuse, and were suppressed by the Council of Basle, but as the Pope denied its authority, they were still granted. The historic objections to the abuse of the expectivce strengthened the Arch- bishop of Toledo, who wished to confer the first vacant benefice upon an ecclesiastic of his household, in resisting the Papal grant. He imprisoned Ximenes for six years, vainly endeavoring to wrest from him the surrender of the benefice. At the end of that 330 The Age of the Renascence. time, despairing of bending the will of the prisoner, the Archbishop gave him freedom and permitted his induction. Ximenes wisely exchanged his benefice for one in another diocese, where he soon rose to be vicar-general. But, displeased by the care of the details of the episcopal jurisdiction, he joined the strict Franciscans, and dwelt for many years in a hermitage, where he formed the ascetic habits which he practised all his life. From this retreat he was called to be confessor of the Queen, and shortly after was elected provincial of his order for Castile. In his new dignity he kept to the strictest letter of the rule of St. Francis, traveling on foot, and often begging his food. He soon received the appointment to the Archbishopric of Toledo, which made him at once Pri- mate of Spain, head of the nobility, and the richest sub- ject in the kingdom. He gave great offence by refus- ing to assume the state usual to his office, and still traveling on foot or by a mule, with one attendant. A letter was obtained from the Pope commanding him " outwardly to conform to the dignity of your state of life in your dress, attendants, and everything else relating to the promotion of that respect due to your authority." Henceforth his state was royal, but he always wore a hair shirt under his robes, and he used the monkish scourge so severely on himself that his friends had to procure another letter of remonstrance from the Pope. He first signalized himself by zeal for the conver- sion of the Moors, but recently become Spanish subjects under the treaty of Granada. He frequently invited to his palace the Moorish teachers and con- The Conversion of the Moors. 331 ferred with them on religion. " To impress his instructions upon their sensual minds, he did not hesitate to make them presents of costly articles of dress, etc., and to do this encumbered his revenues for years. The conversion of some of these alfaquis was quickly followed by the conversion of great numbers of other Moors, so that after laboring only two months Ximenes was able to baptize four thou- sand people, in December, 1499." * He also burned eighty thousand Moorish books in the market-place of Granada, sparing only the works on medicine, and defended his action against those who condemned it as a violation of the treaty of surrender made with the Moors, and the edicts of the Synod of Toledo, by which no Moor was to be forced to embrace Christianity. He felt himself restrained by no treaty against the descendants of renegades who had been converted to Mohammedanism from Christianity dur- ing the Moorish dominion. The children of all such though in a remote generation, he seized, carried off, and forcibly received them into the Church. An attempt to thus arrest a Moorish young woman raised a mob which killed the Archbishop's officer. The courage of the Governor allayed the tumult, and Ximenes persuaded the King to offer to the inhabi- tants of the guilty city the choice of being baptized or suffering the penalties of treason. They chose the former, and thus in about a year Ximenes con- verted Granada. His associate in these labors, the Archbishop of 1 " Cardinal Ximenes," by Dr. von Hefele, afterward Roman Catholic Bishop of Rothenburg. 332 The Age of the Renascence. Granada, had caused the Holy Scriptures and other religious works to be translated into Arabic. But Ximenes drawing his attention to the danger likely to arise in the minds of the rude and ignorant from the reading of the Bible, it was decided to withdraw the Arabic Scriptures and circulate only the safer literature of devotion and edification. Meanwhile the Primate had been turning his energies to the direction of the reform of education, and became the most munificent of the long roll of patrons and founders of schools which adorns the reign of Isabella. His great University of Alcala, begun in 1500, was opened about ten years later. The head college of San Idlefonso had thirty-three professors, one for each year of the life of Christ/and twelve chaplains, one for each of the twelve apostles. Ample provision was made for the study of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew according to modern methods, and the whole University was magnificently endowed. Within twenty years it numbered seven thousand students. It was with the aid of this corps of scholars that Ximenes began the Complutensian polyglot. The ideas which moved him to the work are set forth in its preface : " No translations represent perfectly the sense of the original. The transcripts of the Vulgate differ so much from one another that it is necessary for us to correct the Old Testament by the Hebrew text and the New Testament by the Greek text. Every theologian should be able, also, to drink of that water which springeth up to everlast- ing life at the fountainhead itself. This is the reason, The Complutensian Polyglot. 333 therefore, why we have ordered the Bible to be printed in the -original language with different trans- lations. Our object is to revive the hitherto neg- lected study of the Sacred Scriptures." Upon this work he is said to have spent one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, whose purchasing value was perhaps five times what it is now. It was dedi- cated to Leo X. The New Testament appeared be- fore Erasmus's, but did not circulate outside of Spain until after his. One of the editors, Zuniga, having sharply attacked the notes of Erasmus and spoken contemptuously of the northern scholar in the presence of Ximenes, the Cardinal said : " God grant that all writers may do their work as well as he has done his. You are bound either to give us something better or not to blame the labors of others." The New Testament volume contains the Vulgate and a Greek text, with a system of notation indicating corresponding words in the two languages. The four volumes of the Old Testament contain the Hebrew, the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Targum of the Pentateuch, and Latin translations of the Septuagint and the Targum. The work is accom- panied by Hebrew, Chaldee, and Greek lexicons and grammars. Only six hundred copies were printed, and it soon became rare ; but its influence passed on through the Antwerp and Paris polyglots, until all were replaced by the London polyglot of 1657. But the work of Ximenes was not confined to missions, education, or patronage of sacred literature. He spent his enormous income freely in public works, churches, convents, and a great aqueduct for 334 The Age of the Renascence. his native town. It was not long after he became Primate of Spain that he conceived the idea of a new crusade, and tried to rouse the kings of Spain, Por- tugal, and England. But he was obliged to content himself with a small crusade, which he led himself against Oran, a Moorish town of North Africa grown rich by piracy. He equipped the expedition of four- teen thousand men at his own expense. The city was taken at the first assault, and the inhabitants, men, women, and children, put to the sword. The expedition returned with five hundred thousand florins and eight thousand captives, having added a new province to the Spanish crown. On the death of Ferdinand it was natural, there- fore, that Ximenes should be appointed Regent of Spain until Charles should return from Flanders to be crowned. But scarcely had the new King reached Spain than he retired the great Cardinal from the service of State, and a few weeks later Ximenes died. The exact cause of his abrupt dismissal is not known, but probably the old man of eighty-two was not flexible to the plans of a new government headed by an ambitious boy. For the destinies of Europe were at this time mingled with the ambitious dreams of three boys, each anxious to display his skill and the power of his new kingdom. The ablest of the three was Charles I., King of Spain. His grandfather, Ferdinand, had married Isabella of Castile, conquered Navarre, expelled the Moors from Granada, and thus united Spain from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean. And in the partition The Boy Kings. 335 of Italy he had added to the possessions of his house the crown of Naples and Sicily, while the discoveries of Columbus and the bull of the Pope made him master of the gold-mines of the New World. Through his paternal grandmother, daughter of Charles the Bold, Charles was heir to the Netherlands, whose cities had succeeded Venice as the centre of European trade, and Burgundy, which is now the northwest corner of France. He was also the heir of his grand- father, the Archduke of Austria. Thus in 15 16, at the age of sixteen, he inherited a power greater than any prince since Charlemagne. England, whose terrible civil War of the Roses closed with the fifteenth century, was ruled by Henry VIII., a beautiful and talented Prince of twenty-five, the patron of More, Erasmus, and Holbein, but self-in- dulgent and possessed, in spite of his common sense, by a restless thirst for distinction. France, to which the great vassal duchy of Brit- tany had just been organically united, was in 15 15 inherited by Francis I., at the age of twenty-one. He was an apt pupil of the culture of the Renascence, and not slack in the practice of its vices, from which his two predecessors died. He was a skilful jouster, and aspired to be the first knight of Europe. This desire was flattered in the battle of Marignano, which, as we have seen, resulted in restoring French rule over the duchy of Milan and bartering the liberties and income of the French Church to Leo X. At the death of Maximilian, King of the Romans (a title borne by the Emperor elect of Germany until he was crowned at Rome), all three of these young 336 The Age of the Renascence. kings became candidates for the imperial dignity which gave the honor of the headship of Europe. It was a dignity to which none but a powerful and wealthy prince could venture any longer to aspire, for the office had almost no revenue and little more power to enforce authority than the incumbent could raise from his personal resources. The German Empire was simply a congeries of states and com- monwealths, bishoprics, free cities, and dynastic principalities, under an elective head, counselled by a diet of princes and ambassadors, but possessed of no organ of government by which any class of the German body politic, except its jealous and warring princes, could rightly form or express a common pur- pose. Among the hundreds of members of this loose confederation smaller leagues arose, which, as we have seen in the life of Reuchlin, sometimes main- tained common tribunals, sometimes oppressed a weaker member of the Empire. Strife between these dynasties and commonwealths was incessant, nor was it looked upon as civil and unnatural war that Nurem- berg should fight with a neighboring city, or a great noble repress with arms the ambition of some usurp- ing bishop. Just before the end of the century, indeed, the Reichstag had endeavored to establish a perpetual land peace, but within ten years a war between the Swabian and the Swiss Leagues deso- lated South Germany, and another contest over the will of the petty Duke of Baiern-Landshut laid waste the rich provinces of the Rhine. The choice of the Emperor of this confederation was in the hands of seven electors : the Archbishops Bought and Sold. 337 of Mainz, Cologne, and Treves, the King of Bohemia, the Duke of Saxony, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, and the Margrave of Brandenburg. These princes knew the value of their votes in this crisis, and the French agents went into Germany followed by a pack-train of gold. When the ambassador protested that such a way to the imperial crown was beneath his King, Francis answered, " If you had to do with people who possessed even a shadow of virtue your counsel would be good ; but in these times whoever wants the Papacy or the Empire, or anything else, can only get it by bribery or force." Henry of Eng- land had no chance against his wealthier antagonists. But the Spanish agents were not behind in offering coin and good marriages, which served as well. The bargaining was sharp. The Count Palatine was said to have changed sides six times, and finally wrote that " we cannot do anything better, worthier, more agreeable to Christ, or more wholesome for all Chris- tians than to elect Francis." When the Spanish ambassador told the Archbishop of Mainz that it was a shame to sell himself to France, he replied that Spain could have him by giving more, and, starting at one hundred thousand gulden additional, finally took twenty thousand after three days of chaffering. To this willingness to sell his vote there was only one exception, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, whose honest patriotism finally brought him from three of the electors the offer of the crown. The Pope urged him to accept, but Frederick was too modest or too wise to do so. For the Pope did not want either of the great competitors lo gain the prize. Francis 33& The Age of the Renascence. held the key of North Italy in Milan. Charles was King of Naples, and it was Leo's policy to keep the balance of power between them, to play one off against the other and make his profit out of the game. He who had power to crush the other would be too powerful for a safe neighbor to the house of the Medici or the states of the Church. Charles won the prize, partly because the German people preferred the grandson of Maximilian to an emperor who spoke a foreign tongue ; partly, also, because the agents of Francis had put too much weight on the power and wealth of their monarch, his personal strength and skill in arms, his splendid army, and his obedient kingdom. And the electors, who thought little of the Turkish war, but much of their own independence, preferred the weak and silent Charles. So the able, strong-willed, close- mouthed, and zealously pious lad was crowned Em- peror of Germany at nineteen, to the wrath of Francis and the despair of the Pope. PERIOD III. CHAPTER XXIV. THE NORTH LOSES PATIENCE WITH THE PAPACY — THE LEADERS OF REVOLT IN GERMANY, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, AND ENGLAND. OTH triumphant Emperor and furious Pope were confronted by a force neither was large enough to understand. For, great as Charles was to become in politics and statecraft, he was not one of the rare men, born and not made, who are capable of appre- ciating or directing the play of those primal social forces whose appearance foretells the change of ancient institutions and the beginning of a new era of history. He could handle skilfully jealous dy- nastic interests, but he never understood the meaning of patriotism. He could rule well in peace and war as the head of the greatest house in Europe and the God-anointed King of many lands, but he never knew the force of national feeling struggling half unconsciously for liberty. He was a zealous child of the Church, who in his old age turned aside from the glories of earth to prepare his soul for heaven, but he never felt a thrill of the passion for truth which in- spires the voices of those who cry in the wilderness. 339 34-0 The Age of the Renascence. This great man of a narrow type, and the Pope, whose highly cultivated taste was without a touch of creative power, were confronted by a movement whose violence can be compared to nothing else in European history but the Barbarian Invasion and the French Revolution. The Reformation of Religion in the sixteenth cen- tury was a European movement, the result of forces which had been working for generations, and the men who made it were also made by it. It varied almost immediately into separate ecclesiastical insti- tutions and produced different types of theology, but it was not in any sense sectarian. The influence of it is nowhere more visible than in the reform within the ancient Church, known as the Catholic Reaction. This emerged nearly a generation later, at a time beyond the limits of this sketch, but its spiritual source has been briefly indicated in the Humanistic orthodoxy of Spain and Rome. Neither was the Reformation in any sense a national move- ment. For one hundred years the transalpine world had asked again and again for that " reform of the Church in head and members " which the Council of Constance had left to the Popes. And when Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII., Alexander VI., Julius II., and Leo X. had demonstrated the unwillingness of the Papacy to reform itself, the Council of the Lateran chose that instant to revoke the decrees of Constance and deny the right of the Church to reform the Papacy. The loyalty with which the nations of the north had clung, in spite of almost unbearable rebuffs and disappointments, to the venerable institution of Martin Luther. 341 their fathers was exhausted. They were weary of patience. At'last they were reluctantly compelled to admit that they were confronted, not by an ec- clesiastical theory, but by an intolerable religious situation. They abandoned all hope of reform and ripened rapidly for revolution. And the men who could give voice and form to this new desire were at hand among the Younger Humanists. They spoke almost simultaneously in four places where we have seen the New Learning firmly established. By 1525 the demand for revolt against the traditional institution of the Papacy, on the ground of the New Testament and the con- science, had been heard from Martin Luther in Germany, from Zwingli in Switzerland, from spiritual descendants of Colet in England, from the friends of Faber Stapulensis in France. And all of these men read the New Testament, on which they based their criticism of existing institutions, in the edition of Erasmus. Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk who taught theology in the new University of Wittenberg, founded by Frederick the Wise of Saxony. In 1 5 1 7, when a Dominican by the name of Tetzel came up through Germany selling indulgences for the triple benefit of the Archbishop of Mayence, the banking- house of Fugger in Augsburg, his creditor, and the Papal fund of St. Peter's, Luther was roused, as many men of his day had been, by this abuse of a traditional custom of the Church. Tetzel was forbidden to enter Saxony by the Elector, who had endowed the Uni- versity by impounding the money gained by a similar 34 2 The Age of the Renascence. traffic sixteen years before. But Tetzel approached as near to the Saxon boundary as he dared and set up his booth. Luther, who had already preached twice to warn the people against buying, published in October, 15 17, ninety-five theses in Latin, in- tended to provoke an academic disputation upon the virtue of indulgences. These theses were addressed to the learned. They were heard by the people. Translated at once, in fourteen days they were read by all Germany. Two of the chief prosecutors in the affair of Reuchlin, which was still dragging its course through the courts of the Church, immediately attacked Luther as a heretic, though as a matter of fact his theses denied no proposition which had ever been authoritatively established by the Church as de fide. And his acquaintance, Johann Eck, like himself trained in the New Learning, vigorous, able, with a prodigious memory and great dialectic skill, denounced him in a pamphlet entitled " Obe- lisks." Then Luther dropped Latin, always a Saul's armor to him, and came out in his sermon on " Indulgences and Grace " in rough, virile German. For he was evidently of the opinion of his contemporary, the Humanist Glarean, of Basle, who said that it was not possible to describe Tiberius in Latin, but in German it was easy to call him " ein abgefeimter, ehrloser, znichtiger Bosewicht." With this swinging weapon, which he forged himself (he was the first German to write great things in his native tongue), Luther smote his enemies, hip and thigh, from the Baltic to the Alps. And when Charles was elected Emperor he Luther and the German People. 343 was become, by the testimony of friend and foe, the most noted man in Germany. In particular the Humanists had rallied to his side, seeing in the assaults made on him a continuation of the battle against Reuchlin. Early in 15 19 Christo- pher Scheurl, a common friend of Eck and Luther, wrote to remonstrate with Eck for attacking Luther : " Thou wilt draw upon thyself the disfavor and hatred of almost all Erasmians and Reuchlinists, all friends of classic studies, as well as the modern theologians. I have just been through several of the chief bishop- rics, and find everywhere stately hosts of Martinists." But had these been the only allies Luther found there can be no doubt that he would have perished at the stake like Huss and Savonarola. It was well for him that he found the support of the German people, rejoicing that at last they had a man after their own heart, who could speak their wrath at a system by which Italian prelates drained their gold for a luxurious court. To this support of the Ger- man people Luther soon began to make direct ap- peal. For slowly in these years he passed through the feeling of a prophet protesting against traditional abuses in a venerable institution, and became pos- sessed by the idea that he was the defender of the truth of the Gospel and the liberty of a Christian people against the false tyranny of a foreign Anti- christ. He thus united to the desire for reform that patriotic feeling, speaking to the people in their own tongue, which we have marked as one of the three tendencies observable among German men of letters for the last two generations. 344 The Age of the Renascence. There can be little doubt that progress in this direction was made easier to him by the example of Ulrich von Hutten. Before he left Italy, some months before the posting of Luther's theses, Hutten had arranged to receive a copy of the pamphlet of Lau- rentius Valla on the so-called Donation of Con- stantine. This was the first full exposition that the document on which the Dominium Temporale had long been canonically based was a forgery (a fact now universally recognized by all scholars, Roman Catholic and Protestant alike). Hutten printed the manuscript with an ironical dedication to the Pope, who would of course rejoice at the proof that the temporal power, which evil Popes had so frequently misused, was founded in error. He followed this by his " Address on the Turkish War " to the princes assembled at the Reichstag in Augsburg in 15 18, in which appears the consciousness that Germany had been drained by Papal taxes for crusades which never marched, when the Germans, if they would, could defend themselves against the infidel. " Therefore," he ends, " if I may say boldly what I think, you must in this war be on your guard against Rome as much as against Asia." Luther was in Augsburg at this time, but Hutten gave little thought to him, re- garding the discussion of his theses as only a monk's quarrel. But as the conflict deepened around Luther, Hutten, who cared nothing for the religious questions at issue, began to see in him a German oppressed by the great foe of Germany, and in two pamphlets of the spring of 1520 led the way in the path of an appeal to the nation. '•'The Romish Triads." 345 " The Romish Triads " is a dialogue in the course of which one of the speakers repeats the triads of Vadiscus, a traveler returned from Rome. Three things, he says, are banished from Rome — simplicity, temperance, and piety. Three things are demanded by every one in Rome — short masses, old gold, and a licentious life. Of three things no one in Rome cares to hear — of a General Council, of the reforma- tion of the clergy, and of the beginnings of common sense among the Germans. With three things the Romans can never be satisfied — money for bishops' palliums, Papal monthly taxes, and annates. Three things pilgrims are wont to bring from Rome — stained consciences, spoiled stomachs, and empty purses, etc. The hearer listens with applause and closes the dia- logue thus : " See in Rome the great storehouse of the world, in which is heaped up what is robbed from all lands. In the middle of it is the great weevil, surrounded by his fellow-devourers, who destroy huge heaps of fruit. They have first sucked our blood, then gnawed off the flesh ; now they have come to the marrow and are mashing up our very bones. Will not the Germans take themselves to their weapons and rush on with fire and sword? We give them our gold ; we pay for their horses and dogs and mules and the instruments of their vices. With our money they nourish their wickedness, pass pleas- ant days, robe in purple, bridle their horses and mules with gold, build marble palaces. When shall we gain sense and revenge our shame and the universal ruin ? " The pamphlet entitled " The Spectators " was even stronger. It represents Phoebus and his driver Phae- 346 The Age of the Renascence. thon halting the chariot of the sun at midday to look down through the clouds on the earth. They see in Germany a great gathering in a city. It is a proces- sion bringing in the Papal Legate to the Reichstag at Augsburg. Phoebus explains to Phaethon what is hap- pening, and describes the weakness and the strength of the different orders of the German people as they appear in the procession. He finds something to blame in each, but thinks the priests worst of all. They own half Germany, do nothing, and spend their days in idleness. It is a shame for the nation, out of mistaken piety, to tolerate them longer. Suddenly they notice that some one is calling up to them angrily out of the procession. It is the Papal Legate scolding the sun for not having shone for ten days. " Don't you know that, as the representative of the Pope, I have power to bind and loose not only on earth, but in heaven?" Phoebus answers that he has heard some such thing, but does not believe it. Whereupon the Legate calls him a bad Christian and threatens to excommunicate him unless he makes confession. Phcebus wants to know what would happen then, and the Legate suggests several pen- ances. Phcebus begins to laugh, and the Legate, in a towering rage, excommunicates him. Phcebus tries to soothe him by suggesting that he thought it kind- ness not to shine too brightly, because the Legate might have things to do which he would not care to have the Germans see. He answers that he cares nothing for the Germans, and begs the sun to start a pestilence among them, that there may be many empty benefices, so that he and the cardinals can J acta est A lea. 347 make some money. Whereupon Phaethon breaks in to call him a cursed scoundrel, and bids him tell the Pope that if he does not send better legates to Ger- many the sheep will rise against so unrighteous and bloodthirsty a shepherd. Whereupon the Legate answers with an excommunication. Phaethon con- signs him to the ridicule of the Germans, perhaps to something worse than their ridicule. Then Phcebus bids him drive on. Hutten followed this modernized bit of Aristoph- anes by a collection of writings from the end of the fourteenth century, the time of the great schism : protests against Papal abuses, assertions of Conciliar Supremacy, and assertions of academic freedom. They were prefaced by a " Letter to all German Freemen," in which Hutten begged them not to let Luther suffer as other protesters had suffered. " The axe is laid at the foot of the tree. Therefore be of good courage, ye German men, and stand by one another. Do not be frightened, neither fail in the midst of the battle. For in the end we shall win through — we shall win through. Freedom forever! The die is cast." Within a few weeks of these words appeared Luther's " Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation," a deeper note of the same tone, and in the heart of the people there was formed a fixed resolve that, come what might, Martin Luther should not be burned. The Papal Nuntius to the Reichstag at Worms in 152 1 wrote : "Nine tenths of Germany cries, 'Luther,' and the other, ' Death to the Roman Curia,' while 348 The Age of the Renascence. everybody calls, ' General Council.' Compared to this, the trouble between Henry and Gregory [Ca- nossa] was an affair of roses and violets." Luther's journey to Worms, to answer before the Reichstag on a charge of heresy, was a triumph. Cities threw open their gates, universities crowned him with honor, and he entered the hall the elected champion of German freedom. There was none of the pomp of Constance in the crowded and noisy Reichstag, but the situation was the same. To Luther, as to Huss, the word of the Church was, " Retract or be burned," and, like Huss, Luther chose death. Then, according to the agree- ment, the Emperor gave him a safe-conduct for twenty-one days, and launched against him the ban of the Empire. Luther started home, was taken out of his wagon the second day by five men disguised as robbers, who rode off with him, and for two years not a hundred people knew where he was. Meanwhile Ulrich Zwingli had also been slowly drifting into revolt against the Papacy. In his case the schism did not begin with any sudden accusation of heresy. When he thundered from the pulpit of Einsiedeln against a vender of indulgences, he had the approval of his Bishop and the Papal Legate. It was shortly after this successful protest that (in the fall of 15 18) his name was suggested as preacher of the cathedral of Zurich. But the appointment was opposed, as Zwingli's friends wrote him, because he was accused of the seduction of the daughter of a respectable man near Einsiedeln. Zwingli denies the seduction of an honorable woman by acknow- Zwingli Attacks Indulgences. 349 ledging with shame that he has not kept himself free from the company of concubines ; and this confession of a fault common to all the clergy of the time was considered so unimportant that he was elected cathe- dral preacher of Zurich, though in his penitent letter he had begged his friend to withdraw his name if it were thought that by his election " the cause of Christ would suffer." He began at once a style of preaching new to the city. Instead of commenting on texts, he took up a book of the Bible and expounded it in course from beginning to end. In this way he went through the whole New Testament in six years. He was a most skilful speaker, and had carefully trained his weak voice until it was flexible and penetrating. To the logical exposition of the text he added practical reflections upon the duties of the city at home and abroad, and attacks upon the abuses of the times. He had already protested against indulgences, and when, early in 15 19, a certain Samson brought the traffic into the neighborhood, Zwingli attacked it fiercely in the pulpit and by protest to the ecclesias- tical authorities. The result was an inhibition against the preaching of Samson by the Bishop of Constance, an edict refusing him entrance to the country from the Council of Zurich and the assembled deputies of the Swiss Confederates, and the whole was crowned by a Papal letter censuring him for misstatements of the doctrines of absolution and ordering him to obey the orders of the Pope's beloved sons, the Swiss Confeder- ates. Such utterances brought to Zwingli the hatred of the extreme conservatives, but the love of northern 350 The Age of the Renascence. Switzerland ; and when the report of his death by the plague spread in the fall of 15 19, he was mourned in Basle as " the hope of the whole Fatherland," " the trumpet of the gospel." It was soon after his recovery from this illness that Zwingli received the writings of Luther which as- serted that faith was not bound by any human authority. He was filled with joy to find another stating so bravely and clearly convictions to which he had himself arrived, and he wrote to Luther, calling him David and Hercules in a breath, and mixing up Cacus and Goliath in the approved fashion of an evangelical Humanist. It was not longbeforethe preacherof Zurich became involved in direct opposition to the will of Leo. When he first went to the city he had desired to surrender his small Papal pension, but the Legate had persuaded him to keep it, on the express condition that it was simply the present of the Pope, who loved learning, to a distinguished scholar, and bound him in no wise to the suppression of opinion. In view of the con- demnation of Luther it seemed impossible to receive it, and Zwingli wrote to the Legate positively de- clining to accept another payment. The next year a Papal ambassador obtained from the Council of Zurich the hire of a legion of mercenaries. Zwingli instantlv denounced this sale of lives, which ought to be risked only in defence of the Fatherland to" the wolves who eat men." "Well do these cardinals wear red hats and mantles," he said, " for if you shake them gold pieces fall out, but if you wring them there runs out the blood of your sons and brothers and fathers Zurich Revolts from Rome. 351 and friends." And the next year, horrified by a narrow escape- from a conflict between their men and another body of Swiss in the army of France, and cheated out of their pay, the Council forbade foreign service to all inhabitants of the canton. It was soon after this that Zwingli, having in vain sent in a petition to the Bishop, signed by ten priests, asking to be released from the priestly vow of celibacy, as not required by the gospels or practised by the early Church, married the widow of a dead noble- man who lived near him. In the middle of the year he published his first attack upon the principle of unlimited ecclesiastical authority. An attempt by the monks to forbid Zwingli from preaching on certain topics and disturbing the opinions which had the authority of approved theologians, resulted in a resolution of the City Council that the city pastor must preach only what was in the Bible and pay no attention to Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas. Five days later the assembled clergy of the canton passed unanimously a resolution to preach only what was in the Word of God. Then, in a pamphlet entitled " Beginning and End," addressed to his Bishop, Zwingli defended the liberty of preaching the Word against all traditional authority. And he closed with the hope that " we may unite as the bride of Christ, without spot or wrinkle, leaving the Church that is nothing else but spot and wrinkle, because the name of God is defamed by her." This was followed by a " Counsel concerning the Message of the Pope to the Princes of Germany," in which he besought them not to surrender Luther, with whose destruction the 352 The Age of the Renascence. Pope would fasten his power upon Germany and tho whole world. Meanwhile, at Paris, even the quiet Faber had fallen into trouble with the orthodox theologians. He published in 151 8 a short treatise to prove that Mary, the sister of Lazarus, Mary Magdalene, and the woman who was a sinner were not one and the same person. But the lessons appointed to be read on fast-days implied that they were, and he was at- tacked for heresy. On the 9th of November, 152 1, the theological faculty of Paris declared that any defender of Faber's proposition was a heretic. And a letter of that fall, from a monk of Annecy to a friend at Geneva, reported a conversation of Domini- can monks, in which they concluded that there were four Antichrists in the Kingdom of Christ — Erasmus, Luther, Reuchlin, and Faber. Meantime Faber had been fortunately called out of the neighborhood of the heresy-hunters. Briconnet invited him and several friends to reside at Meaux, the capital of his diocese, and aid in his pastoral labors for the reform of religion. Among those who went with him was Guillaume Farel.who resigned his position of professor of philosophy in order to go. Confident in the friendship and sympathy of the mother and sister of the King, and supported by these scholars, Briconnet began a reform of the Church in miniature. The neglected pulpits of the city were regularly filled, and Faber began the translation of the Bible into French. The people flocked eagerly to the churches, but the conservatives were filled with wrath to hear the use of holy water for the dead denounced, and the doc- William Tyndale. 353 trine of purgatory rejected as resting only on tradi- tion and not found in the New Testament. Farel recalled a dozen years later how, on one occasion, Faber, pleased with the reception of his new com- mentary on the Gospels, prophesied in company that the Gospel would spread through all France to repress human tradition, and a certain monk named De Roma answered him, " I and the other members of my order will preach a crusade, and drive the King from his kindgom by his own subjects, if he permits your evangelical preaching." And scarcely had the work begun at Meaux before the defenders of the faith at Paris were taking steps to recall this erring bishop from his dangerous paths. Meantime, in England, a man of about the same age as Luther and Zwingli was treading in spirit the paths that led to revolt from the authority of the Church and an appeal to the New Testament as the final definition of religion. William Tyndale wrote of having been educated at Oxford in the days when " the old barking curs, Duns' disciples, and like draff called Scotists, the children of darkness, raged in every pulpit against Greek and Latin and Hebrew, giving great sorrow to the schoolmasters who taught true Latin ; some, beating the pulpit with their fists for madness, and roaring out with open and foaming mouth that if there were but one Terence or Virgil in the world, and that same in their sleeves, and a fire before them, they would burn it, though it should cost them their lives, affirming that all good learning decayed and was utterly lost since men gave them unto the Latin tongue." But through Colet and the w 354 The Age of the Renascence. little knot of Grecians who had just left when Tyn- dale entered he somehow received the seed of the New Learning. From Oxford he went to Cambridge, where he may have heard Erasmus, and probably fell in with a student named Bilney, who has recorded that he formed the views for which he died at the stake by reading the New Testament of Erasmus soon after its publication. About 1521 Tyndale left the University an ordained priest, to act as chaplain to " Sir John Walsh, a knight of Gloucestershire." The manor church of Little Foxbury was under an Italian bishop who had never been inside his diocese. The clergy were therefore more given to comfortable orthodoxy than to work, and it is not surprising that at suppers in the hall of the manor this man of the New Learning became involved in debates with them. It being objected by Madam Walsh that those who differed with him were great beneficed clergy, spending from one to three hundred pounds a year, and that it did not stand to reason that a poor clerk like himself, however well he might argue, could really be right in opposing the authority of such dignitaries, Tyndale was put upon some other means of quieting the conscience of his worthy host- ess. And he bethought him of translating the " Enchiridion " of Erasmus, which he presented to her in English as the work of a man high in favor with the Archbishop and King of England. This seems to have maintained his standing in the manor, and he was able to free himself from a charge of heresy brought against him by neighboring clergy- men before the Chancellor of the diocese. Tyndale Translating the Bible. 355 These troubles, which he perceived grew out of the ignorance of his accusers, suggested to him the idea of translating the Bible, not, as Wiclif had done, from the Vulgate, but from the original text. It is re- ported that when a certain disputant said to him, about this time, " It were better to be without God's laws than the Pope's," Tyndale answered, " I defy the Pope and all his laws." And then added, quoting Erasmus, " If God spare me, ere many years I will cause that the boy who driveth the plough shall know more of Scripture than thou." Such utterances soon made the country-side dangerous for him, and Tyndale went to London in the summer of 1523, hoping to obtain for his translation of the New Testament the patronage of Tunstal, the young Bish- op, a friend of More and Erasmus. But Tunstal received him coldly, and despairing of obtaining the episcopal sanction, without which his translation could not be printed in England, he sailed in the spring of 1524 for Hamburg. PERIOD III. CHAPTER XXV. ADRIAN VI., THE HONEST ORTHODOX ECCLESIAS- TIC — THE OLDER HUMANISTS OF THE NORTH STAND BY THE CHURCH — THE YOUNGER AP- PEAL TO THE NEW TESTAMENT — CLEMENT VII., THE HEIR OF THE MEDICI. N the 1st of December, 1 52 1, Leo died suddenly, of malarial fever, in the midst of the triumph of his politics, having just received the news that of all Italy only Genoa still held to France. The first thought of the conclave of cardinals was for the privileges of their order and the patronage of the new pontificate. An agreement was drawn up, that no cardinal might be arrested without a two-thirds vote of his peers; that their property should be free from tax ; that every cardinal having less than six thousand florins a year should receive two hundred a month from a tax levied upon the cloisters ; and that the offices of the cities of the patrimonium should be divided according to a detailed schedule among the cardinals. All having signed the agree- ment, they proceeded to election. It was difficult. England, France, and Spain had 356 A Reforming Pope. 357 their part in the struggle, the great nepots were working each for his own hand, the " younger " cardinals were united in common jealousy of the " older," and the better men were disgusted with the whole situation. When, for instance, Cardinals Farnese, Ancona, and Grassi offered the tiara to Zwingli's old friend, the Cardinal of Sion, he an- swered, " I do not want to be Pope, but I will vote for no Pope that has a wife " — a threat that silenced the three politicians. In the midst of a frightful wrangle, the Cardinal Medici, pointing out that after so many failures it was manifest that no one present could be elected, nominated the absent Cardinal of Tortosa, Hadrian Dedel. The conclave stampeded, and, to their own astonishment, unanimously elected the former tutor of Charles V. The world was filled with amazement that one with no hand in Roman politics, known for his theological learning of the old school and his ascetic life, should have been made Pope. Everywhere the election was hailed with joy by men who hoped for the conservative reform of the Church. But in Rome there was mourning. The people were enraged at the choice of a " bar- barian," and the cardinals could not forgive them- selves for electing one who had not signed the agreement concerning patronage and privileges. As they came from the conclave one by one, a howling mob led them to their palaces ; and when he reached his door the Cardinal of Mantua bowed politely and thanked them for having used only words instead of stones against one who had been guilty of such a stupidity. A deep gloom settled upon the Papal 358 The Age of the Renascence. court as the four thousand officials of Leo, who had paid big prices for their offices, looked forward to the coming of this strict churchman from the barbarous north. When the Pope (Adrian VI.) arrived in the city, August 31, 1522, he found that he had a difficult task before him. The extravagance of Leo had left the trea- sury so empty that the cardinals had to pawn the tapestries of Raphael and the silver statues out of the Sistine Chapel to raise funds for the journey of the Legates who informed him of his election, and the mass of Leo's debts, at huge interest, was an almost ruinous burden upon the income of the Church. Rome was also in a frightful state of disorder. The Duke of Camerino had been murdered just outside the gates, and a few weeks before two bravos had been exe- cuted who were accounted guilty of one hundred and sixteen assassinations. To bring order out of this chaos Adrian depended on Spain. He came into the city guarded by Spanish troops and accompanied by Spaniards and Flemings to fill the household offices of the Vatican and be his counsellors. The luxurious life of Leo ceased instantly. Adrian's old housekeeper took charge of the cooking, and the Papal table expenses were at once cut down to a florin a day, which he took every night out of his own purse. The palefreniers (grooms to lead the horses) were reduced in number from one hundred to ten. Two French chamberlains and two Spanish pages completed the household. The Pope's first speech in conclave was ominous to the splendid cardinals of Leo. Its refrain was reform of the open Adrians Tasks. 359 and great scandals in the Curia, of which all the world spoke. Such -economy made the Romans, whose trade had flourished on the luxury of Leo, hate the ascetic and taciturn foreigner; and his speech set every cardinal who loved the politics and patronage of the ecclesiastical machine entirely against the re- former. Four things claimed Adrian's attention : the reform of the Curia, the heresy in Germany, the crusade against the Turks, and the rivalry of Francis and Charles, which threatened to fill Italy and the world with war. His papers were carried to the Nether- lands after his death and lost ; but from what we know of his intentions he tried to manage all of these like an honest churchman, an old-school theologian, and a loyal Spaniard. He would gladly have taken up reform first, and he believed that the clergy ought to receive from the Church incomes only living ex- penses and clothes ; but a short time convinced him that, with the debts of Leo to handle and a hostile College of Cardinals, he must go slowly. And the other matters pressed. In Germany he was disposed to make every con- cession consistent with his ultra-orthodoxy. The abuses connected with the sale of indulgences were open, and admitted even by those who accepted the principle of them. Ximenes had limited the sale in Spain, and even the cardinals had agreed before the election that the privilege of selling should be taken from the Franciscan friars. No one recognized the abuses which had gathered round the Roman institu- tions better than Adrian. To the complaints which 360 The Age of the Renascence. came from the German Reichstag at Nuremberg he sent an answer confessing the great sins of the Papacy, promising reform, and urging the princes to let Luther be dealt with according to the ban which had declared him guilty of death. The Reichstag's answer hailed with joy the promises of the Pope to reform the Church and to unite Christendom against the Turk, regretted the discussions aroused by Luther, but said that nothing but civil war could enforce the ban of the Empire upon him. It suggested that, under the circumstances, a General Council of the Church should be called in Germany, where every delegate might speak his opinion without fear or favor. This answer meant a deadlock, for it seemed to Adrian that there remained nothing for a Council to adjudi- cate. Scarcely had Adrian been inaugurated before Charles began to foreclose the mortgage on the Pa- pacy which his ready support of his old tutor gave him, and his demands showed that there had been some reason in the thought of those who feared, be- fore Adrian started for Rome, that the Church was threatened with a Spanish Babylonian Captivity. He demanded twenty-eight concessions. They in- cluded the grant of large parts of the regular income of the Spanish Church, the use for the defence of his Moorish conquests of all the money raised in Spain for the crusade, the management of the three great Spanish orders of Spiritual Knights, and such other changes in patronage as made the crown absolute master of the Spanish Church. In addition he asked that the Pope should censure all who went to the Adrians Death. 361 great fair at Lyons, because Julius and Leo had ordered it removed to Genoa with the purpose of weakening the trade of France. Finally he demanded that the Pope should join the league of England, Venice, and Spain against France. To be able to support these demands intelligently, his ambassador filled the Vatican with spies ; and so successful was his bribery that every word spoken in the secret counsels of the Church was reported to him. Against this claim Adrian stood out long, in the vain hope that he might preserve the peace of Europe and unite France and Spain against the Turk. Sultan Selim in his will had left to his son the duty of taking first Belgrade and then the island of Rhodes, and from these points of departure on land and sea, of finishing the conquest of Europe. Belgrade fell in 1521, the first year of his reign. And after a heroic defence of eight months by the Knights Hospitallers, the Janizaries entered Rhodes on Christmas day, 1522. A few months later, despairing of making peace between the three young kings thirsty for glory, Adrian entered into the league to defend Italy against the invasion of Francis. Then, on the 14th of Sep- tember, having seen the Turk capture the outer bul- warks of Christendom on land and sea, he died amid the clash of arms between the Defender of the Faith, the most Catholic King, and the most Christian King. The cardinals pressed into his room as he lay dying and roughly demanded the key to his treasure-room. But they found only a few silver pieces, some rings of Leo's, and several hundred florins ; for Adrian had been penurious, not for himself, but for the Church. 362 The Age of the Renascence. Rome rose in joy at the news of the death of a Pope who was too good, even as they had rejoiced before at the death of one who was too bad. The wits crowned the doors of the honest old man's physician with laurel and the inscription, " To the Liberator of the Fatherland, from the Senate and People of Rome." But the election of Adrian, though it did not reform the Curia, was at least of service to the Church in hastening the break between the Older Humanists and the men of the radical reform. At his first pro- test the Humanists of Germany had stood by Luther almost to a man ; but when Luther revolted entirely from the Papacy, and began to defend himself from the stake and his cause from extinction by war to the knife, one by one the Older Humanists — all the men whom we have mentioned in that class and many more — fell away from him. But their successors of the next generation were more unanimous in stand- ing by the protest that grew to revolt than their fathers in abandoning it. Reuchlin died shortly after the election of Adrian, having tried in vain to prevent his nephew, Melancthon, from making close friends with Luther, but his younger brother became a firm Lutheran. None hailed the election of Adrian with more joy than Erasmus. " We have a theologian for Pope," he wrote to Zwingli, " and we shall soon see a turn in the Christian cause " ; and soon afterward, in answer to Adrian's request, he was sending to Rome his counsel on the situation of the Church and the German schism. In February, 1523, he wrote one of his private letters, which became the property of the world, to explain that he had nothing The Bible for the People. 363 to do with Luther. He had already broken with Zwingli, and within two years he was at sword's points with both the reformers. But the men of the radical reform had by that time gone too far to care for lukewarm adherents. In France, in Germany, in Switzerland, even in England, the line had been drawn, and the world was asked to choose between the Christian institutions which had grown into authority by tradition and custom, and the record of the origins of Christianity as inter- preted by reason and the conscience. In January, 1523, Zwingli defended, in a public disputation before the great Council of Zurich, sixty- seven theses, of which the first was: "All who say that the Gospel is nothing without the authentication of the Church err and revile God." And at the con- clusion the Council ordered that, " as no heresy had been proved, he and the other preachers of Zurich should continue to proclaim the true divine Scripture according to the Spirit of God." Already Luther had issued the New Testament in a translation readable by North Germans and South Germans — the first great monument of their common speech and the foundation of a new literature. In the fall of the following year, 1523, the New Testa- ment appeared in French from the pen of Faber Stapulensis, and in the fall of 1525 Tyndale printed at Worms six thousand copies of his English New Testament. Thus in the three chief transalpine tongues the appeal was made to the individual reason and conscience to test the Roman authority by the record of the origins of Christianity. The result 364 The Age of the Renascence. among each of these three peoples was schism and revolt, leading to a century of religious war which convulsed all Europe. In this great conflict Spain was to be the champion of the Papacy, ever striving to maintain or reestablish its authority. But the able and pious youth of twenty-three who was King of Spain and Emperor of Germany at the death of Adrian did not realize at first the greatness of the spiritual force which was to destroy the power of the Papacy over half Europe. His attention was concentrated upon the prospects of a new and desperate struggle with his rival, the King of France, for the possession of North Italy. It seemed to him of the greatest importance, therefore, to have not only a good Pope, but a Pope friendly to Spain ; and at the end of fifty days of conclave, when Giulio de Medici was elected and took the title of Clement VII., his ambassador wrote, " Medici is your creature." The new Pope, though without any of Adrian's ascetic tendencies, led a very strict life. The Vatican was ruled by the utmost ecclesiastical decorum, and the Pope's musical taste was chiefly indulged in im- proving the ceremonies of the Church. He also listened gladly to learned discussions at table upon theology or philosophy. He kept himself from simony and was just and punctual in fulfilling his promises. His long experience in ecclesiastical affairs made all men who thought that diplomacy could save the Church expect great things of his pontificate. For it was only after he had obtained power that he displayed the curious mixture of obstinacy and lack The Wisdom that Became Foolishness. 365 of self-reliance which was in him. It was the mis- fortune of Clement to have been trained in an arti- ficial school and then plunged into a field of action where primal passions of the soul were at work. The maxims of the politics of Machiavelli were made for a world where men were moved chiefly by ap- petites and the secondary considerations of a highly artificial system. Around Clement were moving the forces of national hatred and patriotic pride, the love of religious freedom, and the spirit of self-sacrifice for venerable institutions. What wonder, then, that his wisdom was worse than ignorance and his trained cleverness the most fatal blundering? PERIOD III. CHAPTER XXVI. THE SACK OF ROME. HE war between the League and France was pushed with vigor, and in May, 1524, the French General was driven across the Alps. To this victory the Pope, in spite of the pressure of the Spanish ambassador, contributed little, because he did not wish it to be too complete. The Papacy had erected the French kingdom of Sicily to prevent North and South Italy being in the hands of one power, which would then be too strong for it. By the same policy it had gladly seen the kingdom of Naples pass to Spain. If now Charles, Emperor and King of Spain, was to rule in Naples and Milan, would it not be at the cost of that political independence of the Papal States which for fifty years had been the chief aim of all Popes except the barbarian Adrian? So Clement gave but little aid, and secretly urged Venice to follow his example. Then, filled with fright at the triumph of the Emperor, he turned to him with expressions of loyalty and demands for a share in the conquests. But when Francis crossed the Alps the next year with the most powerful army of the generation, fifty 366 Intrigues. 367 thousand men, the Pope closed a secret treaty with him and Venice. All in vain ; for in the frightful defeat of Pavia the army of France was destroyed and the King taken prisoner. A month later Clement entered again into alliance with the Emperor, agree- ing to join in the defence of Milan against every assailant. But scarcely was the King of France back in his kingdom before Clement was active in favoring the League of Cognac, in which the Pope, England, Florence, and Venice joined to support Francis in breaking the oaths by which he had secured his re- lease from prison. The Emperor made every effort to withdraw the Pope from the League ; offered to give up Milan if Clement and the Italian states would pay the costs of conquering it. He even offered to leave all ques- tions which could not be agreed on by treaty to the decision of the Pope. But Clement was now bent on war, for he had heard that the position of the Spanish army was desperate. They were living in a wasted and hostile country without any line of communica- tion, and serving a crown which, with all its wealth, was in a chronic state of bankruptcy. It seemed to the weak obstinacy of Clement a good time to bring pressure to bear on the Emperor. So the imperial ambassador left the Vatican with threats and sar- casms, and the Emperor fell back on the ancient plan of raising insurrection in the Papal States. Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, with his brothers and relations, descendants of the old Ghibelline nobility, collected four thousand men and suddenly fell on Rome to seize the Pope. With them came the 368 The Age of the Renascence. Spanish ambassador. The herald proclaimed, as they rode without a shot into the heart of Rome, that no one need fear, for the Colonna were only come to free Rome from the tyranny of an avaricious Pope. Clement proposed to meet them on the throne like Boniface, but was persuaded without much difficulty to take refuge in the castle of San Angelo. Co- lonna's men plundered St. Peter's and the Vatican, making a booty reckoned at three hundred thousand florins. The castle was unprovisioned for a siege, and the Pope sent for the Spanish minister to make terms. He threw himself at Clement's feet, and, ex- pressing his regret for the plundering, gave back the staff and tiara. There was nothing for Clement to do but to grant all that was asked, which he promptly did, but without the smallest intention of keeping his word ; and with full absolution the Colonna retreated. Meantime Charles had slackened much in his efforts to suppress the Lutheran heresy ; for he was finding out the wisdom of that ambassador who wrote from Rome, in 1520, that he should show some favor secretly to a certain monk Martin, for he might be useful in case the Pope refused to join the anti-French alliance or threatened to withdraw from it. And when the Reichstag at Speyer, in the summer of 1526, demanded a General Council of the Church, and meanwhile left it to each prince and city " to act in regard to the Edict of Worms [which ordered the surrender of Luther and the suppression of heresy] as he hoped and trusted to answer to God and the Emperor," Charles probably did not mourn very much at this disobedience to the sentence of the The Pious Lands knee hts. 369 Church and the ban of the Empire. At all events he had neither-leisure nor means to divert from his contest with Francis and his ally, the Pope. And so the German Reformation gained time to develop the strength which enabled it a few years later to defend its life on the field of battle against Church and Empire. Within a month the Pope had broken the forced convention, excommunicated Colonna and all his house, and put an army in the field against him. Meantime from two sides the Emperor was strength- ening his force in Italy. A fleet landed seven thou- sand Spaniards on the coast of Tuscany, and in the north, Georg von Frundsberg, organizer of the German professional soldiers, was raising an army. These mercenaries, whose fame was now beginning to surpass that of the Swiss, were called the pious Landsknechts, though it is difficult to see why. The original members of these bands had been military retainers of the knights whose employment was lost by the decay of the feudal system. They had de- veloped a loose organization, bound by unwritten laws, undisciplined, but with great powers of cohe- sion. However much they might quarrel among themselves, they stood in thick phalanx, bristling with eighteen-foot spears, against all outside inter- ference. Their rough affection had nicknamed Frundsberg " the father of all Landsknechts," and he had little difficulty in raising among the mountains of Tyrol and South Germany thirty-five companies, amounting to twelve thousand men. The necessary funds he got by mortgaging his own estates for x 370 The Age of the Renascence. thirty-eight thousand florins. For future pay he trusted to the Emperor or to plunder. They were a band of wild veterans, commanded by tried captains of the lesser nobility who had won fame and skill in the ceaseless wars of a lifetime, and, from the ranks to the General, hatred of the Pope was almost as strong as love of plunder. With forced marches Frundsberg hurried this army over the Alps by untrodden paths, his men hauling the stout old General up the rocks with their long spears, while their comrades took turns in shoving behind. He had neither horses, provisions, artillery, nor money ; but he struck off boldly into the valley of the Po, and, fighting his way through the Papal mercenaries, scarcely touched by the inhabitants of the rich and thickly populated states he traversed, safely formed a junction with the garrison of Milan, which put the Duke of Bourbon, its commander, at the head of thirty thousand men. He held the roads to Rome and Florence, threatening to pour his army, mad- dened by lack of pay and long-whetted appetite for plunder, now on one city, now on the other. Then Clement tried to make peace. It did not seem a desperate situation. The League had thirty thousand men in the field. The Spanish army was penniless, cold, and starving. Long stretches of hostile country lay between them and the strong walls of Rome ; the burgher militia of the city was fourteen thousand strong; it was still possible to squeeze money out of the resources of the Church ; and Italy hated the Spaniard as she hated the Frenchman. If Clement had seen the real forces in his own chosen game of politics he might at least The Threatening Cloud. 371 have lost with honor; but he was one of those poli- ticians who always try to evade realities in the hope that something will turn up. Five days he remained undecided between the ambassador of France and Spain. Then he agreed to a truce. The news was received in the army of Bourbon with indescribable wrath. The soldiers, cheated of the prospect of plunder which alone had made them bear their desperate hardships and total lack of pay, rose in mutiny. The Spaniards sacked the quarters of the Duke of Bourbon, and threw the golden tabard with his coat of arms into the ditch. Meantime he had taken refuge with Frundsberg and was hidden in a stall of the stable. Three days later it was the turn of the Landsknechts to mutiny. Frundsberg assembled them by beat of drum into a great ring, and. stood in the centre to speak to them. He bade them have patience for a month. They answered with shouts of "Gold! Gold! " and lowered their spear-points against him. The insult broke the old soldier's heart. He staggered and would have fallen, but they caught him and helped him to a seat on a drum, while the wrath of the men quickly melted to pity. They laid him across the ass on which he rode during the march, and brought him to an inn near by, but Georg von Frundsberg was done. A year later they got the paralyzed veteran across the Alps to his mortgaged castle of Mindelheim, and he died in a week. The wild mass of fighting men, as frightful in peace as in war, was left, half starved and unpaid, with no leader who could control them except in battle. Rome was their goal ; for in Rome lay the enemy of 372 The Age of the Renascence. Germany, the insulter of the Spanish King, the Pope; and in Rome were the wines and the women, the gold and jewels, the silks and satins which would make up for all hardships and replace their lost pay. It was a force that was not to be played with for an instant. It must be bought off and turned back to the north, or fought desperately like a herd of wild beasts. Poor Clement did neither. Two hundred and fifty thousand florins would have paid the first instalment of the men's wages and halted them. He was unwilling to raise it; and having made a truce with the Spanish Vice-King of Naples, he dismissed four thousand mercenaries, and sent a message to the army of Bourbon to offer sixty thousand florins if they would retreat. The generals ordered the captains to ask the men if they were willing. The Spanish regiments made answer that they were deeply laden with sins and must go to Rome to get absolu- tion, and finally Germans and Spaniards bound themselves by an oath not to intermit the march. Bourbon sent word to the Pope and the Vice-King that he was helpless in the hands of his men, and came on toward Rome. Then, too late, the Pope found a desperate courage, entered once more into league with France, England, and Venice, and made efforts to arm the Romans and raise mercenaries. He filled the city with tardy energy and Italy with futile appeals for aid. And that ragged and hungry host rolled steadily along, eating unripe fruit by the wayside, plundering and burning every city which did not feed them. On the 4th of May Clement proclaimed a crusade The Storming of Rome. 2>7Z against them as Lutherans and heretics, and on the next day, forty thousand strong, they pitched their camp before Rome. Their situation was desperate. They had made the country behind a desert, they were in the direst want, the walls were strong, the city was capable of putting fourteen thousand fight- ing men in the field, and the army of the League was gathering to fall on their rear. It was with the mind of one who dared not fail that Bourbon marshalled the men at midnight. At daybreak, without artillery or proper scaling-ladders, they made the assault. The first rush failed, and the Landsknechts lost six ban- ners. Then Bourbon sprang from his horse, and seizing a ladder made of vineyard staves, started to mount. A ball struck him, and with the cry, " Our Lady ! I am dead," he fell. The news only roused the fury of his men. In another wild assault Span- iards and Germans planted their flags on top of the wall in two places at the same moment, and a desper- ate massacre began. A company of Roman militia lost nine hundred out of a thousand. The Swiss guard of the Pope perished almost to a man ; and a maddened band of Spaniards even broke into the hospital of San Spirito and massacred the patients. The Pope was saying mass in St. Peter's when some fleeing Swiss rushed in at the great doors, with the killers hard after them. The attendants hurried him by the covered passage toward the castle of San Angelo, and the cries of his guardsmen cut down at the high altar pursued him. The portcullis of the castle fell upon the stream of fugitives, and two cardinals were afterward drawn up in baskets. Mean- 374 The Age of the Renascence. while Bourbon had died in the church of Campo Santo, crying in his last delirium, "To Rome! To Rome!" That frightful army was loose in the Eter- nal City, with no one who could hold it in check for a moment. According to the laws of war which remained un- questioned for generations later, a city taken by assault belonged to the soldiers. They could hold every man, woman, and child in it to ransom, or, if they chose, put them to the sword. And when, the next day, the army, which with all its disorganization was still a frightful fighting-machine, passed from the Leonina over the walls of the city proper, a sack began more pitiless than that of Alaric and the Goths. At the end of three days the Prince of Orange, now ostensibly in command, ordered plundering to cease. But the order was unheeded, and when the soldiers were through it was said that no one over three years was left alive, unless their lives were bought by ransom. A certain bishop bought himself three times, and at last was murdered. The prisoners were dragged about with ropes to beg ransom from their friends, like Cardinal Cajetan, who was hauled and kicked through the streets until he had collected what his captors demanded. When the money was not to be had came torture. A Florentine, un- able to endure longer, snatched a dagger from one of his tormentors, killed him and then himself. A Venetian threw himself backward out of a window to escape pain by death. Nothing was sacred to the crowd of Spaniards, Germans, and Italians, drunk with wine, lust, and blood. They stabled their horses The Sack of Rome. 375 in the chapels of St. Peter's, broke open and plun- dered the coffin'of Julius II., played dice on the high altar, and got drunk out of the vessels of the mass. The relics were insulted. A Landsknecht fastened the holy lance-head on his own spear, and a captain carried the cord on which Judas hanged himself back to Germany, where he exhibited it in his village church. One cardinal was taken from his bed, laid out on a bier with wax candles in his hands, and carried to an open grave, where a funeral oration was delivered and the threat made to bury him alive unless he paid the demanded ransom. In one of the market-places drunken soldiers tried to force a poor priest to give the consecrated host to an ass, and he died under their torture. So the smoke of Rome's agony went up to heaven, and the long-hoarded riches of her luxurious palaces became the spoil of the cruel soldiers of Spain and Germany. The booty was reckoned conservatively at over eight million florins ; some put it as high as twenty millions. One month after the storm the Pope surrendered the castle of San Angelo, agreeing to pay as a ransom four hundred thousand florins in addition to the losses of the city. But it was the middle of June be- fore the soldiers could be induced to leave the city, not by commands of their officers, but from fear of famine and the beginnings of the plague. Their new won wealth availed little. By the 1st of September half of the Landsknechts were dead of malarial fever, hunger, and debauchery. The sack of Rome sent a thrill of horror through the world, for it shocked even that age, when war 376 The Age of the Renascence. knew no mercy. But it appears from letters and pamphlets that everywhere earnest men, Protestants and orthodox alike, held it to be a judgment of God upon the sins of the Curia and that policy with which every Pope since Sixtus IV., except the short-lived Adrian, had used the power of the Vicar of Christ in the dangerous game of dynastic politics. Radically revolutionary thoughts were not wanting to minds which had no connection with the move- ments of Luther or of Zwingli. From more than one side the counsel came to Charles to abolish the Papacy, to rule himself as Emperor in Rome, and to shape the unity of Christendom into a confederation of national hierarchies which should establish the reforms demanded by the laity under the direction of a General Council. It is not to be supposed that Charles seriously considered this plan. As a pupil of Adrian, who had said that " if by the Roman Church is understood its head, the Pope, it is certain that he can err even in matters of faith," 1 Charles did not believe in the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, which did not become a test of orthodoxy for two hundred and fifty years. But he was too much a man of in- stitutions and too little a man of ideas to make it possible that his zeal for religion should turn toward a plan flattering to his pride, but destructive of so many venerable and sacred forms and sanctions of religious authority. And he was too much of a diplomat to try anything which would have met such powerful opposition from jealous interests. When he he^d of the plundering of Rome he put on 1 " Schaff Creeds," p. 177. The Triumphant Emperor. $77 mourning, and wrote to princes and cardinals dis- claiming all responsibility and laying the blame upon the treacherous Papal politics and the long curial corruption which had drawn down this judgment of God. But he made no move to free the Pope from the presence of the mutinous army constantly threatening to plunder the city again unless they re- ceived the promised pay. To the protests of Eng- land and France, fearing that a Council under the lead of Charles would make him too strong for their interests, he paid but little attention; and in Novem- ber he closed a treaty by which Clement received back the States of the Church in return for a promise of neutrality in the wars of Spain and the League, secured by hostages and the payment of the wages of the army which had sacked Rome. In addition it was agreed that the reform of the Church in head and members should be undertaken by a General Council. Before the sum agreed was fully paid the Pope escaped the power of the half-mutinous imperial soldiers by fleeing in disguise from the castle of San Angelo, and took up his residence in Orvieto, in want almost of the necessaries of life. Meanwhile Italy was wasted by war from the Alps to the sea, and her cities plundered by all the professional soldiers of the world. In this frightful duel between France and Spain for the possession of Italy the Emperor steadily won. His generals held the fast- nesses of the north against every effort of the League, and the French army in the south perished by sword and pestilence before the walls of Naples. 378 The Age of the Renascence. Then, on the 6th of October, 1528, the Pope came back to the city, escorted by a detachment of Spanish soldiers. The streets were burned, ruined, and empty, for the population, which numbered eighty-five thou- sand under Leo X., counted now but thirty-two thousand. Many of these were beggars. The minds of all were filled with memories of loss or insult. The glory of the Eternal City was dimmed. The whole brilliant company of artists and litterateurs which had made Rome the centre of the cultured world was scattered in poverty through Italy, or had died miserably of hunger, the plague, or the abuse of avaricious captors. Clement rode through the city under a chill twilight rain, while the people watched him in silence, broken only by reproaches or com- plaints. He reached St. Peter's in tears. One hundred and fifty years after Gregory had entered the Eternal City on his return from Avignon, the descendant of the typical family of the Italian Renascence, the inheritor of Cosimo and Lorenzo de* Medici, looked out of his plundered palace to see Rome in ruins, Italy wasted by fire and sword, and all transalpine Europe threatening revolt against the Church. List of Popes and A ntipopes. 3 79 a S o oi O ro <; W C/3 Pm w O H t— 1 O H £ > Q — £ a. -< < C/5 55 W Ph < £ O Ph CQ < H Id 35 PH H O O H O C/5 53 53 55 O w n w X H S O <* .5 J St 4*? Si "> « 5 & 1 & & k •-c X > ** r X C fl) _- >-• o 5 o c o S w) 1 IS 2 u £ & o 5 > S X I. X tj S a a o Am •*> **. 2. St 7 V « ?& 4 4 >-* ~ C „ •• i—3 .W *«*, ►"< l-H •^ 2 s 1- s »— ^H < 1—1 1—1 X > S.J 1 fi 0) TT •X! 4* S 6 p— . cj «J — u « M U I s * § .5 O w> —> — o o o « $ «; > s 4) "O c CO X 1> X a ^ H cr. 00 -* «, X M »— 1 > 0) u a ca — B In O « * 5? 4j> 2. o ~ 2" > X « b 8 o o to a JJ £ a 380 The Age of the Renascence. a; *> k 5 x w a "i o fcu. CO ~ !>. f *■< — < <*> fO s> I "«*■ Vj ***. »-» « I«H M •* . •<5 t~* > ^ H-4 3 > 3 a s H fij) O 3 2 W N O *"" "^ T*- « "- 1 ^ *"■ • J. i#» Si -■ 00 Wh J^o 1 ^ . S r r ~ c -a ^ E -> ~ CO H 00 1— 1 < w H O H C/3 4, \r\ r^. | 4 s O ■ — S3 u V O u u pa a ■ a •—i .lj m *rz *_i t: "*> <" :Z ^-v •- cs .2 at .5 s r5 -S 13 u ^ H> L ist of Humanists. 381 0) DC >- VJ rl- 00 O . ft 8 ?s ^ § ^ f 2 Z * " § q £ « 3 g - £ £ -s § e si iMn 3 - ^ 7 fe e «* S * 5j o B xn a u m O vO ^ 4 ^$ 2" 1 E- '5 3.33S 5 c 0"> o >£> !2 *• IT) M *> _ 00 v £. V "* 00 00 il **•* 7>* I ^^ W il *^ ^-> ■ 11 01 o c* 2? > rt s SJUs s .2 *• 13 ca n m t- « 8 Oh •2 .2 o i03n"i> ■S 8 S^ §83S.2 U£-)< p, fe ^ < « 3^2 The Age of the Renascence. ^ tn ■*-» . *> OO jC ►h bij I* IK bo bo a .s ca > "-> c a X ~ •* en at ^J l O O < i-l t— >•— Q §s .SP 6 OO OO " 1 V. O 4> %'* M >— « 41 qi 10 !=* 4) ^ | I ■v £ a, o M s M Ci s 4) M OO "^ ^ IT) I • "> 7 Th N N ►, & w « in vO £ ! *• ^ vn m ^" ir> 2" fc2 4> (J ol ki O O U & 5 3 V u O OQ 3 s w in .3 41 4> Q >3 « £ N « XT, «« A A d *S i/l IX ►» 4 £* y <* M 2 o b •" O J 4) liam imas o u a te £ 1 f*5 vo — > CO r» ■<*• ►« «T i- o s s e o ^ 3 o >-^ a •— 09 £ 4> .2 r • ^1 1— i •& $ 4) c 4> Ih O h4 T T3 4) a -8 o S e o a c3 S O •a g o u List of Humanists. 383 J^ <» .<-> ** fO vO « XO Tf « M s 4 1 * 00 00 ^0 "So c 5S N 3 e \> U £ 5 rt 2 f*5 if 12 o in ir» 00 H „ 00 1 7 - "* Tj- c M >-> 2 ,* c 3 » O a w ■£ •a § J • * f) N >d Wi I-. in T3 XT, l-l 1 ir> A T 1^ 1 vr> m l J 1^ >*• O c 00 V i » *H <-» Vi ■k ►H c M O O O O 4) a O U 1 (SI a 13 c In pq -a «*- &■ gj od O rt 1) u PC C/3 c .2 (55 £ 3 3 O a, "C CTJ rt _rt *-* u 9 •— . '3 O 'p O INDEX. Abbreviators, College of, 174. Absenteeism, 107, 108. Academy, Florentine, 264. Academy, Roman, 175, 202, 264. Acciaijuoli, Niccola, relation to Boccaccio, 63. Adalbert Ranconis, 57. Adrian VI., election, 357; condi- tion of Rome, 358; attitude toward Germany,359 ; demands of Charles I., 360, 361 ; league against Francis, 361 ; death, 361 ; Erasmus on, 362. For events previous to election, see Dedel, Hadrian. ^Eneas Sylvius, 165 ; on Ger- mans, 177, 181 ; acquaintance with Gregor von Heimburg, 181 sq. See Pius II. Agliotti, Girolamo, 157. Ailly, Pierre d'. See d'Ailly. Albergati, Cardinal, 166. Alberto da Sarteano, 157, 158. Albornoz, Gil d', Papal legate, 36, 37- Alcala, University of, 332. Alchemy in Petrarch's time, 24, 25- Alcor, Archdeacon of, on the "Enchiridion," 285. Alexander V., 81, 82 ; attitude of University of Prague toward, 86. Alexander VI., election, 212; characteristics, 212 sq. ; reform- ations, 214.; family life in Vati- can, 229, 230 ; controversy with Savonarola, 231 sq., 239, 240; with the Orsini, 233 ; excom- municates Savonarola, 235; grief at murder of Juan, 236 ; reform of Church, 236, 237 ; letter from Savonarola, 237; backslidings, 238 ; renews warfare on Savo- narola, 239, 240; plots with France and Venice, 251 sq. ; described in letter to Sylvius de Sabellis, 254; lewd amuse- ments, 256 ; rejoices at Caesar's triumphant treachery, 257; im- prisonment and death of Orsini, 257; supposed murders, 258; death and alleged cause, 259; not an atheist, 259, 260. For references previous to election, see Borgia, Roderigo. Alfonso of Naples, relation to Poggio, 138. Alidosi, Cardinal, murdered, 290. Ambrogio, 1 19. Ancona, Cardinal, 357. Andrea Mantegna on Prince Djem, 210. Andreas, Bishop of Crain, call for General Council, 242. Angelico, Fra, 159. Antipope. See Benedict XIII., Clement VII., Felix V. Aquinas, Thomas, on Immacu- late Conception, 75 ; condemned by Colet, '282. Aragon, kingdom created by Papacy, 6. 385 3 86 Index. Aristotle, criticised by Petrarch, 25, 26; study of in early six- teenth century, 316. "Arrabbiati " in Florence, 231, 232, 241. Ascanio Sforza. See Sforza, Ascanio. Aschaffenburg, concordat of, 121. Astorre Manfredi. See Man- fredi. Astrology in Petrarch's time, 24, 25. Augsburg, importance of, 183. Augustine, methods contrasted with Jerome's, 314, 315. Aurispa, Giovanni, 130. Austria, Italian claims, 288. Avignon, return from, 1 sq. ; power of court at, 8 ; St. Bridget on, 41 ; condition in 1381, 73. "Babylonian Captivity," 2. Bacon, Roger, more original than Petrarch, 23- Ball, John, 17. Baptista Mantuanus, in Rome under Alexander VI., 230. Barabello, poet, 322. Barbo, Pietro, 172. See Paul II. Bari, Archbishop of, 40. See Urban VI. Basle, Council of, 116, 119; de- poses Eugenius IV., 120; sup- presses letters expectiva, 329. Basle, University of, 272, 275. Beccadelli, " Hermaphroditus," 143- Belgrade, fall of, 361. Bembo, Pietro, a pagan, 324. Benedict XIII., 62, 80; deposed by Pisa, 81; his support, 82; deposed by Constance, 105. Benefices, plurality of, 107. Bentivogli, 287. Bernabo Visconti, 36. Bernardino of Siena, 112; attacks the " Hermaphroditus," 143; ridiculed by Bruni, 155. Bessarion, 164, 173. Bible, in Germany, 303 sq. See New Testament, Faber Stapu- lensis, Colet, Erasmus, Tyn- dale, Wiclif. Bienveni, friend of Savonarola, 232. Black death, 16 Boccaccio, letter to Petrarch on Dante, 32 ; character, 62, 63 ; relations to Petrarch, 63 ; De- cameron, 64; place in letters, 65; against monks, 155; on Spaniards, 176. Bohemia, 82, 83; revolt, 102. See Huss, John. Bologna revolt against Papacy, 38; occupied by Julius II., 287. Bonagratia, II. Boniface VIII., pretensions, 6, 7. Boniface IX., jubilee pilgrimage, 60. Borgia, Alfonso, 164. See Calix- tus III. Borgia, Csesar, 213, 229; re- ceives palm from Alexander VI., 234; suspected of murder of Juan, 238 ; marriage and plots, 251 sq. ; murder of Lu- crezia's husband, 253 ; new honors and his supremacy, 254 ; murder of a Venetian, 254 ; described in a letter to Sylvius de Sabellis, 254 ; other sup- posed murders, 255, 258; later campaigns, 255 sq. ; revolt of captains, 256 ; overcomes them, 256; treachery at Sinigaglia, 257; most noted man in Italy, 257; illness, 259; sinking for- tunes and death, 261. Borgia, Jofr£, 213, 229. Borgia, Juan, 213, 229; defeated by the Orsini, 233 ; receives palm from Alexander VI., 234; prince, 235 ; murdered, 235 sq. Borgia, Lucrezia, 213, 229; divorced, 238; married, 251. Borgia, Roderigo, nephew of Calixtus III., 195; instru- Index. 387 mental in election of Sixtus IV., 198; head of opposition to Innocent VIII., 207; life as a cardinal, 208 ; elected Pope, 212. See Alexander VI. Borgia, Sancia, 253. Borgia, family, typical of bad tyrants of the age, 248 sq. Boucicault, Marshal, 62. Boulogne, Suffragan Bishop of, 284. Bourbon, Duke of, 371 sq. Bourges, national Synod of, 120. Braccio Fortebraccio, 112, 113. Bracciolini, Poggio. See Poggio. Bramante at court of Leo X., 323, 326. Brant, Sebastian, 276 sq. ; "Ship of Fools," 277, 278. Brescia claimed by France, 288. Briconnet, Guillaume, 317, 352. Bridget, St., on court of Avignon, 41. Brothers of the Common Life, 188, 189. Browning, "My Last Duchess," type of Borgias, 249. Bruni, Leonardo, 127, 130, 136; a Christian, 141 ; letter from Poggio, 146 sq. Bulgaria under Papal power, 6. Burckhardt, quoted, 250. Cabala, 266, 280. Cajetan, Cardinal, 374. Calixtus III., 164, 165, 193. Cambray, Bishop of, 281. Cambridge, University of, 354. Capponi, Piero de', 217, 2 18. Capranica, Domenico, 164, 166. Caraffa, Cardinal, 325. Cardinals. See Curia. Carvajal, Cardinal, 170, 173, 303-. Catherine of Siena, denounces Papal legates, 37 ; letter on Papal schism, 44; career, 69 sq. Catholic Reaction, 340. Celtes, Conrad, 273. Cesarini, Cardinal, 119; Human- ist, 180. Charlemagne. See Charles the Great. Charles I., Spain, relations to Hadrian Dedel, 328, 329 ; re- tires Ximenes, 334; greatness of kingdom, 334, 335; wins emperorship, 338 ; confronted by Reformation, 339 sq. ; strength and weakness, 339, 377; demands on Adrian VI., 360; triumphs, 366; relations to Clement VII., 367, 369 sq. ; to Luther, 368 ; unbelief in Papal Infallibility, 376 ; treaty with Pope, 377; triumphs over France, 377. Charles VIII. , France, 215. See Savonarola. Charles of Anjou holds Sicily as fief of Church, 6. Charles the Great, importance of,4. Chigi, banker of Leo X., 295, 321, 323- Chrysoloras, 123, 124. Church. See Papacy, etc. Ciriaco of Ancona, 130 sq. Clement IV., homage from France, 7. Clement VI., creates kingdom of the Fortunate Isles, 6. Clement VII., election, 364; errors, 365, 367; policy toward Charles and Francis, 366 sq. ; attacked, 368 ; surrenders, 375 ; treaty with Emperor, 377 ; flees, 377; return, 378. Clement VII., Antipope, 43; obedience of University of Paris, 75 ; condemns denial of Immaculate Conception, 75. Clifford, Sir Henry, relation to Wiclif, 55. Cognac, League of, 367. Colet, John, 267 sq. ; influence on Erasmus, 282, 283 ; evan- gelicalism, 310; St. Paul's school, 311; spiritual descen. 3 88 Index. dants, English leaders in Ref- ormation, 341. Colonna.Otto, 109. See Martin V. Colonna, Pompeo, Cardinal, 367, 369- Colonna, family, opposes Eugenius IV., 115, 117 sq. ; opposes Sixtus IV., 201 ; feud with Orsini, 201, 205. Commerce, confederacy of, 183. Compagnacci of Florence, 241. Complutensian polyglot, 332, m. Conrad of Prague. See Konrad. Constance, Council of, 82 sq., 91 sq. ; close, 109; Hefeleon, no. Constantinople, fall of, 161. Contarini, Cardinal, 325. Conversino, Giovanni di, 122. Coraro, Angelo, 79. See Gregory XII. Corsica-Sardinia, kingdom created by Papacy, 6. Cosimo de' Medici. See Medici, Cosimo de'. Cosimo, Rosselli. See Rosselli. Cossa, Baldassar, 82. See John XXIII. Council, General, appeal for, 71 sq. ; by Savonarola, 241 ; by Andreas, 242 ; by France, 290 ; by Germany, 360, 368 ; agreed to by Charles I., 377. See d'Ailly, Pisa, Constance, Basle, Lateran, etc. Courtenay, William, president of Council condemning Wiclif, 55, 56. Courtrai, effect of, 15. Cremona claimed by France, 288. Croatia under Papal power, 6. Crusades, under Calixtus III., 165; under Pius II., 170; under Leo X., 301. Curia, 41 ; dissensions, 43, 69 sq. ; reforms urged at Constance, 106, 108 ; plots, 109 ; under Martin V., 114; Paul II., 172; Innocent VIII., 207 sq. ; Adrian VI., 357 so. Da Feltre, Vittorino, pupil of Conversino, 123, 132 sq. ; a Christian, 141. D'Ailly, Pierre, at University of Paris, 71, 72; thesis, 72, 73; advocate of University of Paris, 74; Letter from Hell, 74; Rec- tor of college, 75 ; of University, 76; reputation, 75; defends Immaculate Conception, 75 ; advocates canonization of Peter of Luxembourg, 76 ; Bishop of Cambrai, 76, 78 ; triumph of policy,82; at Constance, 92-95 ; contrasted with Huss and Jerome, 100, 101. D'Albornoz, Gil, Papal legate, 36, 37- Dalburg, Johann von, 274. Damiani, Peter, defends flagella- tion, 60. Daughter of Cicero, finding of the so-called, 209. Dedel, Hadrian, 328, 357. See Adrian VI. De Hseretico Comburendo, 57. Delia Rovere, family, 198 sq. See titles under Rovere. De Luna, Pedro, letter from Cath- erine of Siena, 44. Democracy, rise of, 13 sq. De Montreuil, Jean, 177. De Roma, defiance of Faber, 353. Deschamps, Gilles, 75. Deventer, school, 187, 281. Djem, Prince, 210. Domenico, Fra, ordeal, 243, 244. Dominicans, reactionaries in Ger- many, 305. Donation of Constantine, 344. Dondi, Giovanni, 25. Dorpius, Martin, opposed to Erasmus, 313. Dringenberg, Ludwig, 187. Diirer contrasted with the Ital- ians, 303, 304. " Eagle of France," 75. Eberhard of Wurtemberg, Count, 279. Index. 389 Eck, Johann, attacks a reaction- ary, 306 ; criticism on Erasmus, 315; on Luther, 342; remon- strated with by Scheurl, 343. Egidius of Viterbo at the Council of the Lateran, 291. Einsiedeln, 319. Enea Sylvio Piccolimini. See ;Eneas Sylvius. England, under Papacy, 6 ; op- position, 8, 9 ; peasant revolu- tion, 16; black death, 16; Statute of Laborers, 1 7 ; Human- ism in, 267 sq. ; league with other powers against France, 296; under Henry VIII. , 335. " Epistolae Obscurorum Viro- rum," 307, 308. Erasmus, Desiderius, 281 sq. ; influences at Oxford, 282, 283 ; '* Enchiridion," 283 sq. ; trans- lated by Tyndale, 354; op- posed to " Epistolae Obscuro- rum Virorum," 310; "Praise of Folly," 312; "Christian Prince," 312; his real labor, 312 sq. ; opposition to his work, 313 sq. ; on Zwingli, 318; his edition of New Tes- tament read by reformers, 341 ; Antichrist, 352 ; on Adrian VI., 362; breaks with Luther and Zwingli, 363. Erfurt, University of, 272, 274, 306. Este, house of, relations to Bor- gias, 252. Eugenius IV., 1 14 ; characteristics and troubles, 115; surrenders to Basle, 116; flees, 116; em- ploys Vitelleschi, 117 sq. ; re- lations to Eastern Church, 119, 120; deposed by Basle, 120; death, 151. Eversus, Count, 174. Expectiva, letters, 329. Faber Stapulensis, Bible student, 269, 270; on Erasmus, 315; work, 316, 317, 320; friends, French leaders in Reformation, 341 ; on the three Marys, 352 ; Antichrist, 352 ; at Meaux, 35 2 > 353 > hi s New Testament, 3(>3- Farel, Guillaume, 316, 317; at Meaux, 352, 353. Farnese, Cardinal, 357. Farnese, Julia, 213. Felix V., 120, 166. Feltre, Vittorino da. See da Fel- tre. Ferdinand the Catholic, 328, 334. Ferrante of Naples on crooked streets, 203. Ferrara follows Julius II., 288. Ferrari, Cardinal, death and epi- grams concerning, 255. Feudalism, 13, 14, 26, 171. Ficino, Marsiglio, Platonist, 263 sq. Filargo, Pietro, 81. See Alex- ander V. Filelfo, Francesco, 137, 139 sq. ; a pagan, 141 ; against monks, 155; against Pius II., 169, 170. Flagellants, 60, 61. Florence, in Renascence, 37 sq., 43, 124 sq., 200, 201 ; sup- ports King of Naples, 206 ; under Piero de' Medici, 214; promised Pisa, 288 ; in reign of Julius II., 290. See titles under Medici, Savonarola. For novo, battle of, 216. Fortebraccio, Braccio, 112, 1 13. France, alliance with Papacy, 2, 3, 7, 8 ; adopts decrees of Basle, 120; New Learning in, 177, 269; invasion of Italy, 214 sq. ; Gallicanism, 241 ; re- lations to Borgias, 251 sq. ; second invasion of Italy, 251; under Francis L, 335; Italian claims, reign of Julius II., 287, 288 ; war with Papacy, 289, 296, 297 ; calls for Genera) Council, 290 ; peace with Spain 390 Index. and the Empire, 298 ; struggle for Italy, 364, 366 sq., 377. See d'Ailly. Francesco of Puglia challenges Savonarola, 243. Francis I., 297, 335 sq. ; bids for emperorship, 337; defeated, 338, 367- Franciscans (Strict), attacked by Humanists, 155, 156; oppose Savonarola, 243 sq. Frederick III., Germany, *66, 167. Frederick of Lavagna, 8. Frederick the Pfalzgraf, 184, 186. Frederick the Wise of Saxony, 337, 34i- Fregoso, friend of Sadoleto, 325. Freiburg, University of, 272, 275, 278. French alliance, 319. Friuli claimed by Austria, 288. Froissart, no desire for individual fame in peers to whom he ad- dressed his book, 195. Frundsberg, Georg von, 369. Fuggers, family, 183. Geiler of Kaisersberg, 275, 276. Gemistos Platon, Humanist, 263. Genoa, ally of Innocent VIII., 206; time of Julius II., 287. Gerard von Puy, 37. Germany, opposition to Papal usurpation, 9, 10, 241 ; Human- ism in, 178 sq., 271 sq., 302 sq. ; Italian claims, 288 ; league against France, 296 sq. ; peace after Marignano, 298 ; in six- teenth century, 336. See Adrian VI., Luther. Gerson, John of, 75 ; learning and character, 76-78 ; triumph of policy, 82 ; at Constance, 92 ; sermon after Pope's flight, 94; contrasted with Huss and Jerome, 100, 101. Gil d'Albornoz, Papal legate, 36, 37. Giles, Peter, 311. Gilles, Deschamps, 75. Glarean of Basle on the Ger- man tongue, 342. Gonzaga, family, influential in election of Sixtus IV., 198; relations to Borgias, 252. Gossembrot, Sigismund, 183, 184. Granada under Ximenes, 330 sq. Grassi, Cardinal, 357. Gratius, Ortuin, 307. Gravina, Duke of, strangled, 257- Greek, study of, in England, 267; in France, 269. Gregor von Heimburg, acquain- tance with ^Eneas Sylvius, 181 sq. Gregory XI., return to Rome from Avignon, 1 sq. ; reasons, 35 s q- ; death, 39. Gregory XII., 79, 80; deposed by Pisa, 81 ; his support, 82 ; war of John XXIII. against, 87. Greys in Florence, 241. Grocyn, teacher of Greek at Ox- ford, 267, 269. Guarino da Verona, 123, 133, 133; respect of Poggio, 139; a Christian, 141. Gurk, Cardinal of, on Alexander VI., 230. Hadrian of Corneto, 299, 325 sq. Hebrews, Epistle to the. See Erasmus. Hefele on Constance, no. Hegius, master of Deventer, 187; teacher of Erasmus, 281. Heidelberg, University of, 272, 274, 275. Heimburg, Gregor von, acquain- tance with jEmeas Sylvius, 181 sq. Henry VII., Emperor, corona- tion, 6. Henry of Thalheim, II. Hercules, Duke, 201. Index. 39i Holbein contrasted with the Italians, 303.. Holy lance, 21 I. Holy League, 289, 290, 361, 366 sq. Humanists. See New Learn- ing. Hungary under Papal power, 5. Huss, John, against withholding the cup, 53, 104; career, 83; inferior as a preacher to Konrad and Miltitz, 84; pupil of Wiclif, 84, 85 ; relations to Archbishop of Prague, 85, 86; Rector of Leipzig, 86 ; excom- municated, and writings burned, 86, 87 ; against indulgences, 87 ; voluntary exile, 88 ; goes to Constance, 88, 89 ; a pris- oner, 96 sq. ; sentenced, 99 ; death, 100; what he stood for, 100 sq., 145; not a grea: thinker, 102. Hutten, Ulrich von, on Julius II., 289, 306; career, 306, 307; prints Donation of Constantine, 344; "Address on the Turkish War," 344; " The Romish Triads," 344, 345; "The Spectators," 344 sq. ; other writings, 347. Immaculate Conception, Aqui- nas on, 75 ; defenders of, 275, 277. Indulgences, 87, 107, 285, 286, 308, 341 sq., 349, 359. Infallibility, 376. Innocent VIII., 206; character- istics and rule, 207, 208 ; three great excitements, 209 sq. ; death, 212; prohibits discus- sion of Pico, 265. Ippolito, Cardinal, of Este, 290. Italy, French invasion, 214 sq., 251 ; divided into two parties under Alexander VI., 233; moral condition, latter half of fifteenth century, 249 sq. ; po- litical condition, time of Julius II., 287; the Landsknechts, 369 sq. ; devasted, 377 ; Human- ism — see individual titles under New Learning. Jacopo Santa Croce murdered, 258. Jean de Montreuil, 177. Jean of Jandun, 11. Jerome, methods contrasted with Augustine's, 314, 315. Jerome of Prague, 87 ; death, 100 ; what he stood for, 100, 146; Poggio's letter, 146 sq. Jews in Germany, writings, 305. Johann of Wesel, 188, 190. John XXII. , policy, 9. John XXIII. , 82; war against Gregory, 87 ; at Constance, 90, 92, 93 ; flight, 93 ; deposed, 95. Julius II., 119; elected Pope, 261 ; career, 286 sq. ; wars, 287 sq. ; at Mirandola, 289 ; Councils of Pisa and the Lateran, 290, 291 ; patron of art, 293 sq. For titles previous to election, see Rovere, Giuliano della. Konrad of Prague, 83, 84. La Grange, Cardinal, 42. Lance, holy, 21 1. Landsknechts, Pious, 369 sq. Lateran, Council of the, 291 sq., 300; Papal Supremacy, 301. Laura. See Petrarch. Law in Petrarch's time, 25. League, Holy, 289, 290, 361, 366 sq. Lee, Edward, attacks Erasmus, 314- Leipzig, University of, 86. Leo III. crowns Charles the Great, 4. Leo X., epigram of Sarpi, 194; election, 294; early career, 295 ; magnificence of inaugura- tion, 295; court of, 296, 321 sq. ; wars, 296 sq. ; deceitful policies, 296, 297, 298 ; con- spiracies against him, 298 ; 392 Index. nepotism, 299 ; Council of the Lateran, 300, 301 ; policy in regard to emperorship, 338 ; confronted by Reformation, 339 sq. ; death, 356. Leonardo da Vinci on Caesar Borgia, 257. Leto, Pomponius, 175, 202, 264. Lewis of Bavaria, conflict with Pope, 9, 10. Linacre, physician to Henry VIII. , 267. Lincoln, Bishop of, disinters bones of Wiclif, 97. Literature. See New Learning. Lollards, 56, 57. Lord's Supper. See Huss, Luther, Wiclif. Louis XII., negotiations with Borgias, 251 sq. ; on Caesar Borgia, 257. Louis of Castile, 6. Luder, Peter, 185, 186. Luna, Pedro de, letter from Catherine of Siena, 44. Luther, Martin, against the mass, 53; on Johann of Wesel, 190; surprise at hospitals in Italy, 250; opposed to " Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum," 310; criticism of Erasmus, 314; German leader, 341 ; career, 341 sq. ; on indulgences, 341, 342 ; Eck and Scheurl, 342, 343 ; evolution, 343 sq. ; in- fluence of Hutten, 344 sq. ; " Address to the Christian No- bility,"347 ; strength, 347, 348 ; disappearance, 348 ; influence on Zwingli, 350; Antichrist, 352; Older Humanists desert him, 362 ; his New Testament, 363 ; not pressed by Emperor, 368. Lyons, Synod of, calls for Gen- eral Council, 290. Machiavelli on Caesar Borgia, 257. Mainz, Archbishop of, bribed by, Spain, 337. Malatesta, Sigismondo Pandelfo, buries Platon at Rimini, 263. Man, Island of, kingdom created by Papacy, 6. Manfredi, Astorre, supposed victim of Caesar Borgia, 255. Manfredi, Octavian, supposed victim of Caesar Borgia, 255. Mantegna, Andrea, on Prince Djem, 210. Mantua follows Julius II., 288. Mantua, Cardinal of, 357. Mantua, Marquis of, on dying words of Alexander VI., 259. Mantuanus, Baptista, on Rome under Alexander VI., 230. Marcello of Venice at Council of the Lateran, 293. Mariano, Fra, Florentine preacher, 218. Marignano, battle of, 297, 318, 335- Marsigli, Luigi de', 66, 135. Marsiglio Ficino, Platonist, 263 Marsilius of Padua, his great treatise, 12. Marsuppini, plot of Filelfo, 140. Martin V., 109; conditions meet- ing him, in, 112; defects of character, 113; adjourns Synod of Pavia, 114; death, 114; re- lations to Curia, 114. Mass. See Huss, Luther, Wiclif. Maximilian, 271. Medici, Cosimo de', 124 sq. ; helps Ciriaco, 13 1 ; relations to Filelfo, 140; to Platon, 263. Medici, Giovanni de', father of Cosimo, 125. Medici, Giovanni de', 290, 294. See Leo X. Medici, Giuliano de', grandson of Cosimo, 200. Medici, Giuliano de', son of Lorenzo, 296, 297. Medici, Giuliode', 357, 364. See Clement VII. Medici, Lorenzo de', 125, 200: Index. 393 confesses to Savonarola, 222 ; patron of Florentine Academy, 264. Medici, Lorenzo de' (II.), 298 ; Duke of Urbino, 299. Medici, Piero de', 214; opposition to Savonarola, 223 ; weakness, 225 ; in Rome, 235. Medici family in control of Florence in reign of Julius II., 290. Medicine in Petrarch's time, 24, 25. Melancthon, Philip, poem to Erasmus, 314 ; friend of Luther, 362. Michael Angelo, contrasted with German artists, 303 ; in court of Leo X., 323. Michael of Cesena, n. Micheletto, hangman of Caesar Borgia, strangles Troccio, 258 ; compels surrender of Papal treasures, 260. Michiel, Cardinal, supposed murder, 258. Milan, supports Naples, 206 ; time of Alexander VI., 214; of Julius II., 287; Council of Pisa transferred thither, 291 ; under Francis L, 297; offered Pope by Charles, 367. Miltitz of Prague, 84. Mirandola, siege of, 289. Mirandola, Pico della, influence on Zwingli, 318. Mission preachers, 219. Mohammed II., defeated at Belgrade, 165; victories, 170; death, 201. Monreale, Cardinal, supposed murder, 258. Montrcuil, Jean de, 177. Moors, conversion of, under Ximenes, 330 sq. More, Thomas, 268 sq. ; meets Erasmus, 282; " Utopia," 311. Morton, Archbishop, 268. Mountjoy, Lord, 282. Mugnos, Canon, 106. Naples, kingdom created by Papacy, 6 ; wars, 206 ; in time of Alexander VI., 214; of Julius II., 287; in Spanish power, 366. Neopagans, 264. New Learning, 20 sq., 62 sq., 122 sq. ; most typical Human- ists, 137 sq., 141 sq. ; relation to Reformation, 145 sq. ; first Humanist Pope, 151 sq. ; its effect on feeling for liberty, 161, 272; spread beyond Italy, 176 sq. ; in France, 177, 269; Germany, 178 sq., 271 sq., 302 sq. ; desire for distinction, 194 sq. ; three chief tendencies in Italian Humanism, 262 sq. ; in England, 267 sq. ; in Switzer- land, 318 sq. See Petrarch, Wiclif, da Feltre, Boccaccio, Marsigli, Salutato, Medici, Cosimo, Niccoli, Guarino, Aurispa, Ciriaco, Traversari, Bruni, Poggio, Filelfo, Bec- cadelli, Valla, Nicholas V., Pius II., Cesarini, Erasmus, Faber, Farel, Zwingli, Leo X., Ximenes, Luther, etc. New Testament, Zwingli's stud- ies, 318; in Germany, 303 sq., 363 ; in France, 363 ; England, 363. See Erasmus, Luther. Niccoli, Niccolo de', 127, 136; helps Poggio, 137; a Christian, 141. Nicholas V., career and charac- teristics, 151 sq., 159 sq. ; plots against, 160, 161; death, 162; criticism, 162 ; limitations, 193. Nicolas of Clemanges, 75, 177. Norway, kingdom created by Pa- pacy, 6. Novara, battle of, 296,318. "Obelisks," 342. Oldcastle, Sir John, 57. Orsini, Cardinal (under Urban VI.), 42. 394 Index. Orsini, Cardinal (under Alexan- der VI.), leads revolt against Cwsar Borgia, 256; imprison- ment and death, 257. Orsini, Paolo, strangled, 257. Orsini, the, feudwith Colonna,20i. Ortuin Gratius, 307. Oxford University, relations to Wiclif, 55, 56; time of Colet, 267 sq., 353, 354. Papacy, past relations to political organizations, 3 sq. ; French influence, 7, 8; taxes, 107; Re- nascence Popes, 193 sq. ; tem- poral dominion, 344 ; Infallibil- ity) 37°- See Curia, Lateran, Council of the, Wiclif, etc. Pappenheim, Marshal of the Em- pire, at Constance, 100. Parentucelli, Tommaso, 151, 167. See Nicholas V. Paris, University of, centre of Conciliar party, 71, 73; obedi- ence to Clement VII., 75; on the schism, 76, 80; leading uni- versity, 278, 282, 283. Paul II., 172 sq. ; relations to Humanists, 174, 175; league against the Turks, and death, 175; limitations, 193. Pavia, French defeat of, 367. Pavia, Synod of, 1 14. Peace Congress, 170, Peasant revolution, 16 sq. Pedro de Luna, letter from Cath- erine of Siena, 44. Perugia occupied by Julius II., 287. Peter of Luxembourg, canoniza- tion proposed, 76. Petrarch, parentage, 20 ; at Avig- non, 21 ; services to classical literature, 2 1 sq. ; as a collector, 23 ; attacks universities, 24 ; at- titude toward various studies, 24, 25 ; individuality, 24-29 ; criticism of Aristotle, 25, 26 ; climbs Mount Ventoux, 27, 28 ; acedia, 29 ; faults, 29 sq. ; love of Laura, 31 ; honors, 32 ; crowned, ^>Z '< true position, ^3t 34, 145 ; relations to Boccaa io, 32, 63; to monks, 154; visit to Cologne, 176; on Frenchmen, 176. Petrucci, conspiracy against Leo X., 298, 299. Pfefferkorn, John, anti-Jewish writer, 304, 305. Philip of the Pfalz, 279. Philip the Hardy assaults Boni- face, 7. Pico, Giovanni della Mirandola, 265 sq. ; studied by More, 269 ; Reuchlin on, 280; memorial to Council of the Lateran, 300 ; influence on Zwingli, 318. Piero de' Capponi, 217, 218. Pisa, yoke of Florence, 226, 288. Pisa, Council of, 81 ; abortive Council of 1511,290, 291. Pius II., career, 165 sq. ; relation to Humanists, 168 sq. ; Peace Congress, 170; crusade and death, 170; limitations, 193; on Sforza, 197; on Borgia, 213; against General Council, 242. For events previous to election, see ^neas Sylvius. Platina, 174, 175, 202. Plato in New Literature, 263 sq., 266. Platon, Gemistos, Humanist, 263. Plurality of benefices, 107. Poggio, carries "Institutes" of Quintilian to Constance, 129, 137 sq. ; paganism, 141 ; letter to Bruni, 146 sq. ; attacks monks, 155, 156; personal re- lations to monks, 156; on Lon- doners, 177. Poland under Papal power, 5« Polyglot, Complutensian, 333. Pomponazzi, Pietro, book on the soul, 301. Pomponius Leto, 175, 202, 264. Pontano on a cardinal of Alexan- der VI. 's, 230. Index. 395 "Poor Priests," 1 8, 49. Porcaro, Stefano, conspiracy, 160, 161. Portugal, kingdom created by Pa- pacy, 6; Alexander VI. divides new West between it and Spain, 213. Pragmatic Sanction, 120, 241, 293. 297. Prague, Archbishop of, 83, 85, 86. Prague, University of, 57, 83, 86. Prato sacked, 290. Printing, 185, 274. Puy, Gerard von, 37. Ramiro, agent of Caesar Borgia, 256. Ranconis, Adalbert, 57. Raphael, 294, 321, 323; con- trasted with the Germans, 303, 3°4- Ravenna, French victory at, 289. Raymond, Vicomte of Turenne, I. Raynald, Cardinal, at Constance, 109. Reformation, characteristics, 339 sq. ; attitude of Adrian VI., 359- Renascence. See New Learning. Reservation, right of, 107. Reuchlin, Johann, 278 sq. ; works, 279, 280; on Jewish writings, 304 sq. ; intellectual warfare, 304-310; on Faber, 316; op- posed by Hadrian Dedel, 328 ; Antichrist, 352 ; death, 362. Riario, Pietro, 198, 199. Robert of Geneva, 42, 43. See Clement VII. Robert of Lecce, missioner, 219. Robert of Lincoln, 8. Rome sacked, 367 sq., 373 sq. See Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII., Leo X., Adrian VI. Rosselli, Cosimo, patronized by Sixtus IV., 203. Rovere, Francesco della, 198. See Sixtus IV. Rovere, Giuliano della, 198, 206, 209 ; candidate for Papacy, 212 ; second effort of Sforza for French invasion of Italy, 215; call for General Council, 242 ; reconciled to Borgias, 252; elected Pope, 261. See Julius II. Sadoleto, Jacopo, 324, 325, 327. St. Paul's School, 311. Saldner, Conrad, 184. Salisbury, Bishop of, at Constance, 93- Salutato, Coluccio, 67, 68, 123, 124; helps Poggio, 137; con- trasted with Poggio, 138. Samson attacked by Zwingli, 349- Sannazaro, the Christian Virgil, 325- Santa Croce, Jacopo, murdered, 258. Sardinia, kingdom created by Pa- pacy, 6. Sarpi on Leo X., 194. Sarteano, Alberto da, 157, 158. Sauli, Cardinal, 298, 299. Savonarola, addresses Charles VIII., 217, 225; career, 218 sq. ; his great theme, 219, 220, 245, 246 ; fame, 220; know- ledge of Bible, 220; interpreta- tions and sermons, 221, 225; visions, 222, 223, 224; courage, 222 ; confession of Lorenzo, 222 ; opposes Piero, 223 ; re- forms in monastery, 223 ; "grand Council," 226; con- troversy with Pope, 231 sq., 239, 240; reforms carnival, 231, 232, 233; burning of "vaniti. 233, 234; a Puritan, but not a Philistine, 234 ; excommuni- cated, 235 ; letter to Pope, 237; defiance of Pope, 239, 240 ; in- tercepted letter to France, 243 ; opposition of Franciscans, 243 ; ordeal by fire, 243, 244; in hands of mob, 244, 245 ; tor* ture, 245 ; death, 247. 39^ Index. Scarampo, Cardinal, 173. Schedel, Hartmann, 187. Schedel, Hermann, 184. Scheurl, to Eck, on Luther, 343. Schlettstadt school, 187. Scholasticism, 11 sq. ; attacked by Petrarch, 25 sq. Schools, German, 187. Scotland, kingdom created by Pa- pacy, 6. Selim, Sultan, 361. Servia under Papal power, 6. Sforza, Ascanio, 209 ; candidate for Papacy, 212; bribed, 212; plots against Savonarola, 231. Sforza, Francesco, career, 196 sq. ; cynosure of Italy, 197. Sforza, Giovanni, 234, 235. Sforza, Jacopo, 112, 113, 196. Sforza, Lodovico, 214 sq. Sicily, kingdom under Papal power, 6, 7, 366. Siena, Synod at, 1 14. Sigismund, Emperor, 82, 86, 87 sq. ; at Constance, 91 sq. ; firm- ness after flight of Pope, 94 ; betrayal of Huss, 97, 103; crowns Beccadelli, 143 ; only nominal head of Europe, 179, 180. Simony, 107, 108, 300. Sinigaglia, Caesar Borgia's treach- ery at, 257. Sion, Cardinal of, 357. Sistine Chapel built by Sixtus IV., 203. Sitten, Bishop of, 289, 297. Sixtus IV., election, 198; nepo- tism, 198 sq. ; plots against Medici, 200; wars, 201, 202; power, 202 ; patron of culture, 202, 203 ; disorders in Rome, 203, 204 ; death, 204 ; bull on Immaculate Conception, 277. Soderini, Cardinal, 299. Spain, Alexander VI. divides new West between it and Por- tugal, 213; Italian claims, 287, 288; league with Julius II. against France, 289 ; league with Leo X., 296 sq. ; peace after Marignano, 298 ; under Ferdinand the Catholic, 334, 335 ; champion of Papacy, 364. See Adrian VI., Charles I., Ximenes. Spalatin, letters from Luther and Eck on Erasmus, 314, 315. Stapulensis, Faber. See Faber. Switzerland, New Learning in, 318 sq. Sylvester II., policy, 5. Tetzel, 341, 342. Theobald, sermon at Constance, 105. Theodoric of Niem on Urban VI., 58. Tommaso of Sarzano, 151, 167. See Nicholas V. Torquemada, Juan, 119; patron of printing, 185. Transubstantiation. See Huss, Luther, Wiclif. Travasari, 1 19. Traversari, 136, 157, 180. Trent, Bishop of, at Constance, 96. Trinacria, kingdom created by Pa- pacy, 6. Troccio, secretary of Alexander VI., strangled, 258. Tunstal, Bishop of London, 355. Turks, the, 161, 170, 171, 175, 201, 360, 361. Tyndale, William, 353 sq. ; his New Testament, 363. Unam Sanctam, 7. Universities in middle ages, 185, 187. See under separate titles. Urban V., approval of Aquinas, 75- Urban VI., 41, 42 ; election pro- nounced uncanonical, 43 ; war- fare, 44, 45 ; death, 5 7 ; char- acter, 58. Urbino follows Julius II., 288. Urbino, Duke of, kills Alidosi, 290. Index. 397 Valla,Laurentius,' ' De Voluptate," 142; career, 143, 144; on the Donation of Constantine, 344 ; on the Church and criticism, 302. Vannozza, mistress of Borgia, 213. Venice, ally of Sixtus IV., 201 ; of Innocent VIII., 206; time of Alexander VI., 214, 249, 251 sq. ; of Julius II., 2S7, 288, 289; Leo X., 296. See titles under Sforza. Verona claimed by Empire, 288. Vespasiano da Bisticci, 152. Vienna, concordat of, 121. Vienna, University of, 274. Visconti, Bernabo, 36. Visconti, Filippo Maria, 197. Visconti, Gian Galeazzo, 67. Visconti, Giovanni, 36. Vitelleschi, Giovanni, 117 sq. Vitellius of Ischia, 116. Vitrarius, John, 284, 285. Vittorino. See da Feltre. Von Chlum, Baron, at Constance, 96 ; friend of Huss, 98, 99. Von Dalburg, Johann, 274. Von Duba, friend of Huss, 99. Von Frundsberg, Georg, 369 sq. Von Heimburg, Gregor, acquain- tance with ^Eneas Sylvius, 181 sq. Von Hutten, Ulrich. See Hut- ten, Ulrich von. Von Puy, Gerard, 37. Vulgate. See Jerome. Webster, John, " Duchess of Main," type of Borgias, 248. Werner of Urslingen, 35. Wessel, Johann, 188 sq. White Companies of Flagellants 60, 61. Wiclif, John, 18 ; power, 46 sq. ; teaching, 47 ; as a preacher, 48, 49 ; Bible, 49 ; denounces Pa- pacy, 50; theological views, 51 ; on Eucharist, 5 1 sq. ; death, 56 ; influence, 57, 58; writings con- demned at Constance, 97 ; bones disinterred, 97. William of Occam, 11. Wimpheling, Jacob, 274, 275, 276. Wittenberg, University of, 341. Ximenes, Cardinal, 329 sq. ; im- prisonment, 329 ; joins Fran- ciscans, 330 ; Archbishop of To- ledo, 330 ; conversion of Moors, 330 sq. ; University of Alcala, 332 ; Complutensian polyglot, 33 2 > 3331 varied labors, 333; crusade against Oran, 334 ; re- gent and death, 334 ; limits sale of indulgences, 359. Zabarella at Constance, 95. Ziirich, Council of, 363. Zwingli, Ulrich, career, 317 sq. ; influence of Pico della Miran- dola and Erasmus, 318 ; against French alliance, 319; at Ein- siedeln, 319 ; Swiss leader, 341 ; against indulgences, 348 ; Ca- thedral Preacher, 348, 349 ; ill- ness, 350; on Luther, 350; re- fuses Papal pension, 350; against hire of mercenaries, 350; marries, 351 ; "Beginning and End," 351 ; his sixty-seven theses at Zurich, 363. [] University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 305 De Neve Drive - Parking Lot 17 • Box 951388 LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90095-1388 Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. 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