Part 2 — Chapter III. (These four articles abrogated by the four articles following them, 118-122.) Article 118. The Federal Constitution may at any time be amended. (continued 34)

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In 1421 a second crusading army, 200,000 strong, invaded Bohemia and was scattered like chaff by Ziska (now blind) and his peasant soldiery. The next year they defeated the Emperor again; but in 1424 Ziska died, and a priest called Procopius the Great took his place. Under their new leader, the fierce Taborites were as invincible as they had been under Ziska. They routed an imperial army in 1426, and then carried the war into Austria and Silesia, committing fearful ravages. Still another crusade was set in motion against them by the Pope, and still another disastrous failure was made of it. Then Germany again suffered a more frightful visitation from the vengeful Hussites than before. Towns and villages were destroyed by hundreds, and wide tracks of ruin and death were marked on the face of the land, to its very center. Once more, and for the last time, in 1431, the Germans rallied a great force to retaliate these attacks, and they met defeat, as in all previous encounters, but more completely than ever before. Then the Pope and the Emperor gave up hope of putting down the indomitable revolutionists by force, and opened parleyings. The Pope called a council at Basel for the discussion of questions with the Hussites, and, finally, in 1433, their moderate party was prevailed upon to accept a compromise which really conceded nothing to them except the use of the cup in the communion. The Taborites refused the terms, and the two parties grappled each other in a fierce struggle for the control of the state. But the extremists had lost much of their old strength, and the Utraquists vanquished them in a decisive battle at Lipan, in May, 1434. Two years later Sigismund was formally acknowledged King of Bohemia and received in Prague. In 1437 he died. His son-in-law, Albert of Austria, who succeeded him, lived but two years, and the heir to the throne then was a son, Ladislaus, born after his father's death. This left Bohemia in a state of great confusion and disorder for several years, until a strong man, George Podiebrad, acquired the control of affairs.

Meantime, the Utraquists had organized a National Church of Bohemia, considerably divergent from Rome. It failed to satisfy the deeper religious feelings that were widely current among the Bohemians in that age, and there grew up a sect which took the name of "Unitas Fratrum," or "Unity of the Brethren," but which afterwards became incorrectly known as the Moravian Brethren. This sect, still existing, has borne an important part in the missionary history of the Christian world.

The Papacy.—The Great Schism.

The Papacy, at the time of its conflict with the Hussites, in Bohemia, was rapidly sinking to that lowest level of debasement which it reached in the later part of the fifteenth century. Its state was not yet so abhorrent as it came to be under the Borgias; but it had been brought even more into contempt, perhaps, by the divisions and contentions of "the Great Schism." The so-called "Babylonish Captivity" of the series of popes who resided for seventy years at Avignon (1305-1376), and who were under French influence, had been humiliating to the Church; but the schism which immediately followed (1378-1417), when a succession of rival popes, or popes and antipopes, thundered anathemas and excommunications at one another, from Rome and from Avignon, was even more scandalous and shameful. Christendom was divided by the quarrel. France, Spain, Scotland, and some lesser states, gave their allegiance to the pope at Avignon; England, Germany and the northern kingdoms adhered to the pope at Rome. In 1402, an attempt to heal the schism was made by a general Council of the Church convened at Pisa. It decreed the deposition of both the contending pontiffs, and elected a third; but its authority was not recognized, and the confusion of the Church was only made worse by bringing three popes into the quarrel, instead of two. Twelve years later, another Council, held at Constance,—the same which burned Huss,—had more success. Europe had now grown so tired of the scandal, and so disgusted with the three pretenders to spiritual supremacy, that the action of the Council was backed by public opinion, and they were suppressed. A fourth pope, Martin V., whom the Council then seated in the chair of St. Peter (1417), was universally acknowledged, and the Great Schism was at an end.

But other scandals and abuses in the Church, which public opinion in Europe had already begun to cry loudly against, were untouched by these Councils. A subsequent Council at Basel, which met in 1431, attempted some restraints upon papal extortion (ignoring the more serious moral evils that claimed attention); but was utterly beaten in the conflict with Pope Eugenius IV., which this action brought on, and its decrees lost all effect. So the religious autocracy at Rome, sinking stage by stage below the foulest secular courts of the time, continued without check to insult and outrage, more and more, the piety, the common sense, and the decent feeling of Christendom, until the habit of reverence was quite worn out in the minds of men throughout the better half of Europe.

Rome and the last Tribune, Rienzi.

The city of Rome had fallen from all greatness of its own when it came to be dependent on the fortunes of the popes. Their departure to Avignon had reduced it to a lamentable state. They took with them, in reality, the sustenance of the city; for it lived, in the main, on the revenues of the Papacy, and knew little of commerce beyond the profitable traffic in indulgences, absolutions, benefices, relics and papal blessings, which went to Avignon with the head of the Church. Authority, too, departed with the Pope, and the wretched city was given up to anarchy almost uncontrolled. A number of powerful families—the Colonna, the Orsini, and others—perpetually at strife with one another, fought out their feuds in the streets, and abused and oppressed their neighbors with impunity. Their houses were impregnable castles, and their retainers were a formidable army.

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It was while this state of things was at its worst that the famous Cola di Rienzi, "last of the Tribunes," accomplished a revolution which was short-lived but extraordinary. He roused the people to action against their oppressors and the disturbers of their peace. He appealed to them to restore the republican institutions of ancient Rome, and when they responded, in 1347, by conferring on him the title and authority of a Tribune, he actually succeeded in expelling the turbulent nobles, or reducing them to submission, and established in Rome, for a little time, what he called "the Good Estate." But his head was quickly turned by his success; he was inflated with conceit and vanity; he became arrogant and despotic; the people tired of him, and after a few months of rule he was driven from Rome. In 1354 he came back as a Senator, appointed by the Pope, who thought to use him for the restoration of papal authority; but his influence was gone, and he was slain by a-riotous mob.

The return of the Pope to Rome in 1376 was an event so long and ardently desired by the Roman people that they submitted themselves eagerly to his government. But his sovereignty over the States of the Church was substantially lost, and the regaining of it was the principal object of the exertions of the popes for a long subsequent period.

The Two Sicilies.

In Southern Italy and Sicily, since the fall of the Hohenstaufens (1268), the times had been continuously evil. The rule of the French conqueror, Charles of Anjou, was hard and unmerciful, and the power he established became threatening to the Papacy, which gave the kingdom to him. In 1282, Sicily freed itself, by the savage massacre of Frenchmen which bears the name of the Sicilian Vespers. The King of Aragon, Peter III., whose queen was the Hohenstaufen heiress, supported the insurrection promptly and vigorously, took possession of the island, and was recognized by the people as their king. A war of twenty years' duration ensued. Both Charles and Peter died and their sons continued the battle. In the end, the Angevin house held the mainland, as a separate kingdom, with Naples for its capital, and a younger branch of the royal family of Aragon reigned in the island. But both sovereigns called themselves Kings of Sicily, so that History, ever since, has been forced to speak puzzlingly of "Two Sicilies." For convenience it seems best to distinguish them by calling one the kingdom of Naples and the other the kingdom of Sicily. On the Neapolitan throne there came one estimable prince, in Robert, who reigned from 1309 to 1343, and who was a friend of peace and a patron of arts and letters. But after him the throne was befouled by crimes and vices, and the kingdom was made miserable by civil wars. His grand-daughter Joanna, or Jane, succeeded him. Robert's elder brother Caribert had become King of Hungary, and Joanna now married one of that king's sons—her cousin Andrew. At the end of two years he was murdered (1345) and the queen, a notoriously vicious woman, was accused of the crime. Andrew's brother, Louis, who had succeeded to the throne in Hungary, invaded Naples to avenge his death, and Joanna was driven to flight. The country then suffered from the worst form of civil war—a war carried on by the hireling ruffians of the "free companies" who roamed about Italy in that age, selling their swords to the highest bidders. In 1351 a peace was brought about which restored Joanna to the throne. The Hungarian King's son, known as Charles of Durazzo, was her recognized heir, but she saw fit to disinherit him and adopt Louis, of the Second House of Anjou, brother of Charles V. in France. Charles of Durazzo invaded Naples, took the queen prisoner and put her to death. Louis of Anjou attempted to displace him, but failed. In 1383 Louis died, leaving his claims to his son. Charles of Durazzo was called to Hungary, after a time, to take the crown of that kingdom, and left his young son, Ladislaus, on the Neapolitan throne. The Angevin claimant, Louis II., was then called in by his partisans, and civil war was renewed for years. When Ladislaus reached manhood he succeeded in expelling Louis, and he held the kingdom until his death, in 1414. He was succeeded by his sister, Joanna II., who proved to be as wicked and dissolute a woman as her predecessor of the same name. She incurred the enmity of the Pope, who persuaded Louis III., son of Louis II., to renew the claims of his house. The most renowned "condottiere" (or military contractor, as the term might be translated), of the day, Atteridolo Sforza, was engaged to make war on Queen Joanna in the interest of Louis. On her side she obtained a champion by promising her dominions to Alfonso V., of Aragon and Sicily. The struggle went on for years, with varying fortunes. The fickle and treacherous Joanna revoked her adoption of Alfonso, after a time, and made Louis her heir. When Louis died, she bequeathed her crown to his brother René, Duke of Lorraine. Her death occurred in 1435, but still the war continued, and nearly all Italy was involved in it, taking one side or the other. Alfonso succeeded at last (1442) in establishing himself at Naples, and René practically gave up the contest, although he kept the title of King of Naples. He was the father of the famous English Queen Margaret of Anjou, who fought for her weak-minded husband and her son in the Wars of the Roses.

While the Neapolitan kingdom was passing through these endless miseries of anarchy, civil war, and evil government, the Sicilian kingdom enjoyed a more peaceful and prosperous existence. The crown, briefly held by a cadet branch of the House of Aragon, was soon reunited to that of Aragon; and under Alfonso, as we have seen, it was once more joined with that of Naples, in a "Kingdom of the Two Sicilies." But both these unions were dissolved on the death of Alfonso, who bequeathed Aragon and Sicily to his legitimate heir, and Naples to a bastard son.

The Despots of Northern Italy.

In Northern Italy a great change in the political state of many among the formerly free commonwealths had been going on since the thirteenth century. The experience of the Greek city-republics had been repeated in them. In one way and another, they had fallen under the domination of powerful families, who had established a despotic rule over them, sometimes gathering several cities and their surrounding territory into a considerable dominion, and obtaining from the Emperor or the Pope a formally conferred and hereditary title. Thus the Visconti had established themselves at Milan, and had become a ducal house. After a few generations they gave way to the military adventurer, Francesco Sforza, son of the Sforza who made war for Louis III. of Anjou on Joanna II. of Naples. In Verona, the Della Scala family reigned for a time, until Venice overcame them; at Modena and Ferrara, the Estes; at Mantua, the Gonzagas; at Padua, the Carraras.

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The Italian Republics.

In other cities, the political changes were of a different character. Venice, which grew rich and powerful with extraordinary rapidity, was tyrannically governed by a haughty and exclusive aristocracy. In commerce and in wealth she surpassed all her rivals, and her affairs were more shrewdly conducted. She held large possessions in the East, and she was acquiring an extensive dominion on the Italian mainland. The Genoese, who were the most formidable competitors of Venice in commerce, preserved their democracy, but at some serious expense to the administrative efficiency of their government. They were troubled by a nobility which could only be turbulent and could not control. They fought a desperate but losing fight with the Venetians, and were several times in subjection to the dukes of Milan and the kings of France. Pisa, which had led both Venice and Genoa in the commercial race at the beginning, was ruined by her wars with the latter, and with Florence, and sank, in the fourteenth century, under the rule of the Visconti, who sold their rights to the Florentines.

Florence.

The wonderful Florentine republic was the one which preserved its independence under popular institutions the longest, and in which they bore the most splendid fruit. For a period that began in the later part of the thirteenth century, the government of Florence was so radically democratic that the nobles (grandi) were made ineligible to office, and could only qualify themselves for election to any place in the magistracy by abandoning their order and engaging in the labor of some craft or art. The vocations of skilled industry were all organized in gilds, called Arti, and were divided into two classes, one representing what were recognized as the superior arts (Arti Major, embracing professional and mercantile callings, with some others); the other including the commoner industries, known as the Arti Minori. From the heads, or Priors, of the Arti were chosen a Signory, changed every two months, which was entrusted with the government of the republic. This popular constitution was maintained in its essential features through the better part of a century, but with continual resistance and disturbance from the excluded nobles, on one side, and from the common laboring people, on the other, who belonged to no art-gild and who, therefore, were excluded likewise from participation in political affairs. Between these two upper and lower discontents, the bourgeois constitution gave way at last. The mob got control for a time; but only, as always happens, to bring about a reactionary revolution, which placed an oligarchy in power; and the oligarchy made smooth the way for a single family of great wealth and popular gifts and graces to rise to supremacy in the state. This was the renowned family which began to rule in Florence in 1435, when Cosimo de' Medici entered on the office of Gonfaloniere. The Medici were not despots, of the class of the Visconti, or the Sforzas, or the Estes. They governed under the old constitutional forms, with not much violation of anything except the spirit of them. They acquired no princely title, until the late, declining days of the house. Their power rested on influence and prestige, at first, and finally on habit. They developed, and enlisted in their own support, as something reflected from themselves, the pride of the city in itself,—in its magnificence,—in its great and liberal wealth,—in its patronage of letters and art,—in its fame abroad and the admiration with which men looked upon it.

Through all the political changes in Florence there ran an unending war of factions, the bitterest and most inveterate in history. The control of the city belonged naturally to the Guelfs, for it was the head and front of the Guelfic party in Italy. "Without Florence," says one historian, "there would have been no Guelfs." But neither party scrupled to call armed help from the outside into its quarrels, and the Ghibellines were able, nearly as often as the Guelfs, to drive their opponents from the city. For the ascendancy of one faction meant commonly the flight or expulsion of every man in the other who had importance enough to be noticed. It was thus that Dante, an ardent Ghibelline, became an exile from his beloved Florence during the later years of his life. But the strife of Guelfs with Ghibellines did not suffice for the partisan rancor of the Florentines, and they complicated it with another split of factions, which bore the names of the Bianchi and the Neri, 01' the Whites and the Blacks.

For two or three centuries the annals of Florence are naught, one thinks in reading them, but an unbroken tale of strife within, or war without—of tumult, riot, revolution, disorder. And yet, underneath, there is an amazing story to be found, of thrift, industry, commerce, prosperity, wealth, on one side, and of the sublimest genius, on another, giving itself, in pure devotion, to poetry and art. The contradiction of circumstances seems irreconcilable to our modern experience, and we have to seek an explanation of it in the very different conditions of mediæval life. It is with certainty a fact that Florence, in its democratic time, was phenomenal in genius, and in richness of life,—in prosperity both material and intellectual; and it is reasonable to credit to that time the planting and the growing of fruits which ripened surpassingly in the Medicean age.

The Ottomans and the Eastern Empire.

So little occasion has arisen for any mention of the lingering Eastern Empire, since Michael Palæologus, the Greek, recovered Constantinople from the Franks (1261), that its existence might easily be forgotten. It had no importance until it fell, and then it loomed large again, in history, not only by the tragic impression of its fall upon the imaginations of men, but by the potent consequences of it.

For nearly two hundred years, the successors of Palæologus, still calling themselves "Emperors of the Romans," and ruling a little Thracian and Macedonian corner of the old dominion of the Eastern Cæsars, struggled with a new race of Turks, who had followed the Seljuk horde out of the same Central Asian region. One of the first known leaders of this tribe was Osman, or Othman, after whom they are sometimes called Osmanlis, but more frequently Ottoman Turks. They appeared in Asia Minor about the middle of the thirteenth century, attacking both Christian and Mahometan states, and gradually extending their conquest over the whole. About the end of the first century of their career, they passed the straits and won a footing in Europe. In 1361, they took Hadrianople and made it their capital. Their sultan at this time was Amurath.

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As yet, they did not attack Constantinople. The city itself was too strong in its fortifications; but beyond the walls of the capital there was no strength in the little fragment of Empire that remained. It appealed vainly to Western Europe for help. It sought to make terms with the Church of Rome. Nothing saved it for the moment but the evident disposition of the Turk to regard it as fruit which would drop to his hand in due time, and which he might safely leave waiting while he turned his arms against its more formidable neighbors. He contented himself with exacting tribute from the emperors, and humiliating them by commands which they dared not disobey. In the Servians, the Bosnians, and the Bulgarians, Amurath found worthier foes. He took Sophia, their principal city, from the latter, in 1382; in 1389 he defeated the two former nations in the great battle of Kossova. At the moment of victory he was assassinated, and his son Bajazet mounted the Ottoman throne. The latter, at Nicopolis (1396), overwhelmed and destroyed the one army which Western Europe sent to oppose the conquering march of his terrible race. Six years later, he himself was vanquished and taken prisoner in Asia by a still more terrible conqueror,—the fiendish Timour or Tamerlane, then scourging the eastern Continent. For some years the Turks were paralyzed by a disputed succession; but under Amurath II., who came to the throne in 1421, their advance was resumed, and in a few years more their long combat with the Hungarians began.

Hungary and the Turks.

The original line of kings of Hungary having died out in 1301, the influence of the Pope, who claimed the kingdom as a fief of the papal see, secured the election to the throne of Charles Robert, or Caribert, of the Naples branch of the House of Anjou. He and his son Louis, called the Great, raised the kingdom to notable importance and power. Louis added the crown of Poland to that of Hungary, and on his death, leaving two daughters, the Polish crown passed to the husband of one and the Hungarian crown to the husband of the other. This latter was Sigismund of Luxemburg, who afterwards became Emperor, and also King of Bohemia. Under Sigismund, Hungary was threatened on one side by the Turks, and ravaged on the other by the Hussites of Bohemia. He was succeeded (1437) by his son-in-law, Albert of Austria, who lived only two years, and the latter was followed by Wladislaus, King of Poland; who again united the two crowns, though at the cost of a distracting civil war with partisans of the infant son of Albert. It was in the reign of this prince that the Turks began their obstinate attacks on Hungary, and thenceforth, for two centuries and more, that afflicted country served Christendom as a battered bulwark which the new warriors of Islam could beat and disfigure but could not break down. The hero of these first Hungarian wars with the Turks was John Huniades, or Hunyady, a Wallachian, who fought them with success until a peace was concluded in 1444. But King Wladislaus was persuaded the same year by a papal agent to break the treaty and to lead an expedition against the enemy's lines. The result was a calamitous defeat, the death of the king, and the almost total destruction of his army. Huniades now became regent of the kingdom, during the minority of the late King Albert's young son, Ladislaus.

He suffered one serious defeat at the hands of the Turks, but avenged it again and again, with help from an army of volunteers raised in all parts of Europe by the exertions of a zealous monk named Capistrano. When Huniades died, in 1456, his enemies already controlled the worthless young king, Ladislaus, and the latter pursued him in his grave with denunciations as a traitor and a villain. In 1458, Ladislaus died, and Mathias, a son of Huniades, was elected king. After he had settled himself securely upon the throne, Mathias turned his arms, not against the Turks, but against the Hussites of Bohemia, in an attempt to wrest the crown of that kingdom from George Podiebrad.

The Fall of Constantinople.

Meantime, the Turkish Sultan, Mohammed II., had accomplished the capture of Constantinople and brought the venerable Empire of the East—Roman, Greek, or Byzantine, as we choose to name it—to an end. He was challenged to the undertaking by the folly of the last Emperor, Constantine Palæologus, who threatened to support a pretender to Mohammed's throne. The latter began serious preparations at once for a siege of the long coveted city, and opened his attack in April, 1453. The Greeks, even in that hour of common danger, were too hotly engaged in a religious quarrel to act defensively together. Their last preceding emperor had gone personally to the Council of the Western Church, at Florence, in 1439, with some of the bishops of the Greek Church, and had arranged for the submission of the latter to Rome, as a means of procuring help from Catholic Europe against the Turks. His successor, Constantine, adhered to this engagement, professed the Catholic faith and observed the Catholic ritual. His subjects in general repudiated the imperial contract with scorn, and avowedly preferred a Turkish master to a Roman shepherd. Hence they took little part in the defense of the city. Constantine, with the small force at his command, fought the host of besiegers with noble courage and obstinacy for seven weeks, receiving a little succor from the Genoese, but from no other quarter. On the 29th of May the walls were carried by storm; the Emperor fell, fighting bravely to the last; and the Turks became masters of the city of Constantine. There was no extensive massacre of the inhabitants; the city was given up to pillage, but not to destruction, for the conqueror intended to make it his capital. A number of fugitives had escaped, before, or during the siege, and made their way into Italy and other parts of Europe, carrying an influence which was importantly felt, as we shall presently see; but 60,000 captives, men, women and children, were sold into slavery and scattered throughout the Ottoman Empire.

Greece and most of the islands of the Ægean soon shared the fate of Constantinople, and the subjugation of Servia and Bosnia was made complete. Mohammed was even threatening Italy when he died, in 1481.

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Renaissance.

We have now come, in our hasty survey of European history, to the stretch of time within which historians have quite generally agreed to place the ending of the state of things characteristic of the Middle Ages, and the beginning of the changed conditions and the different spirit that belong to the modern life of the civilized world. The transition in European society from mediæval to modern ways, feelings, and thoughts has been called Renaissance, or new birth; but the figure under which this places the conception before one's mind does not seem to be really a happy one. There was no birth of anything new in the nature of the generations of men who passed through that change, nor in the societies which they formed. What occurred to make changes in both was an expansion, a liberation, an enlightenment—an opening of eyes, and of ears, and of inner senses and sensibilities. There was no time and no place that can be marked at which this began; and there is no cause nor chain of causes to which it can be traced. We have found signs of its coming, here and there, in one token of movement and another, all the way through later mediæval times—at least since the first Crusades. In the thirteenth century there was a wonderful quickening of all the many processes which made it up. In the fourteenth century they were checked; but still they went on. In the fifteenth they revived with greater energy than before; and in the sixteenth they rose to their climax in intensity and effect. That which took place in European society was not a re-naissance so much as the re-wakening of men to a day-light existence, after a thousand years of sunless night,—moonlighted at the best. The truest descriptive figure is that which represents these preludes to our modern age as a morning dawn and daybreak.

Probably foremost among the causes of the change in Western Europe from the mediæval to the modern state, we must place those influences that extinguished the disorganizing forces in feudalism. Habits and forms of the feudal arrangement remained troublesome in society, as they do in some measure to the present day; but feudalism as a system of social disorder and disintegration was by this time cleared away. We have noted in passing some of the undermining agencies by which it was destroyed: the crusading movements; the growth and enfranchisement of cities; the spread of commerce; the rise of a middle class; the study of Roman law; the consequent increase of royal authority in France,—all these were among the causes of its decline. But possibly none among them wrought such quick and deadly harm to feudalism as the introduction of gunpowder and fire-arms in war, which occurred in the fourteenth century. When his new weapons placed the foot-soldier on a fairly even footing in battle with the mailed and mounted knight, the feudal military organization of society was ruined beyond remedy. The changed conditions of warfare made trained armies, and therefore standing armies, a necessity; standing armies implied centralized authority; with centralized authority the feudal condition disappeared.

If these agencies in the generating of the new movement of civilization which we call Modern are placed before the subtler and more powerful influence of the printing press, it is because they had to do a certain work in the world before the printing press could be an efficient educator. Some beginning of a public, in our modern sense, required to be created, for letters to act upon. Until that came about, the copyists of the monasteries and of the few palace libraries existing were more than sufficient to satisfy all demands for the multiplication of ancient writings or the publication of new ones. The printer, if he had existed, would have starved for want of employment. He would have lacked material, moreover, to work upon; for it was the rediscovery of a great ancient literature which made him busy when he came.

Invention of Printing.

The preparation of Europe for an effective use of the art of printing may be said to have begun in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the great universities of Paris, Bologna, Naples, Padua, Modena, and others, came into existence, to be centers of intellectual irritation—disputation—challenge—groping inquiry. But it was not until the fourteenth century, when the labors and the influence of Petrarch and other scholars and men of genius roused interest in the forgotten literature of ancient Rome and Greece, that the craving and seeking for books grew considerable. Scholars and pretended scholars from the Greek Empire then began to find employment, in Italy more especially, as teachers of the Greek language, and a market was opened for manuscripts of the older Greek writings, which brought many precious ones to light, after long burial, and multiplied copies of them. From Italy, this revival of classic learning crept westward and northward somewhat slowly, but it went steadily on, and the book as a commodity in the commerce of the world rose year by year in importance, until the printer came forward, about the middle of the fifteenth century, to make it abundant and cheap.

Whether John Gutenberg, at Mentz, in 1454, or Laurent Coster, at Haarlem, twenty years earlier, executed the first printing with movable types, is a question of small importance, except as a question of justice between the two possible inventors, in awarding a great fame which belongs to one or both. The grand fact is, that thought and knowledge took wings from that sublime invention, and ideas were spread among men with a swift diffusion that the world had never dreamed of before. The slow wakening that had gone on for two centuries became suddenly so quick that scarcely more than fifty years, from the printing of the first Bible, sufficed to inoculate half of Europe with the independent thinking of a few boldly enlightened men.

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The Greek Revival.

If Gutenberg's printing of Pope Nicholas' letter of indulgence, in 1454, was really the first achievement of the new-born art, then it followed by a single year the event commonly fixed upon for the dating of our Modern Era, and it derived much of its earliest importance indirectly from that event. For the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, was preceded and followed by a flight of Greeks to Western Europe, bearing such treasures as they could save from the Turks. Happily those treasures included precious manuscripts; and among the fugitives was no small number of educated Greeks, who became teachers of their language in the West. Thus teaching and text were offered at the moment when the printing press stood ready to make a common gift of them to every hungering student. This opened the second of the three stages which the late John Addington Symonds defined in the history of scholarship during the Renaissance: "The first is the age of passionate desire; Petrarch poring over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio in his maturity learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period. They inspired the Italians with a thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of acquisition and of libraries. Nicholas V., who founded the Vatican Library in 1453, Cosmo de' Medici, who began the Medicean Collection a little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolani, who ransacked all the cities and convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek, who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the heroes of this second period." "Then came the third age of scholarship—the age of the critics, philologers, and printers. … Florence, Venice, Basle, and Paris groaned with printing presses. The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben, toiled by night and day, employing scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty brain, whose work it was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place beyond the reach of monkish hatred or of envious time, that everlasting solace of humanity which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labours of these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for the accomplishment of their titanic task. Virgil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1512. They then became the inalienable heritage of mankind. … This third age in the history of the Renaissance Scholarship may be said to have reached its climax in Erasmus [1465-1536]; for by this time Italy had handed on the torch of learning to the northern nations" (Symonds).

Art had already had its new birth in Italy; but it shared with everything spiritual and intellectual the wonderful quickening of the age, and produced the great masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, in Italy, the Brothers Van Eyck in Flanders, Holbein and Dürer, in Germany, and the host of their compeers in that astonishing age of artistic genius.

Portuguese Explorations.

A ruder and more practical direction in which the spirit of the age manifested itself conspicuously and with prodigious results was that of exploring navigation, to penetrate the unknown regions of the globe and find their secrets out. But, strangely, it was none of the older maritime and commercial peoples who led the way in this: neither the Venetians, nor the Genoese, nor the Catalans, nor the Flemings, nor the Hansa Leaguers, nor the English, were early in the search for new countries and new routes of trade. The grand exploit of "business enterprise" in the fifteenth century, which changed the face of commerce throughout the world, was left to be performed by the Portuguese, whose prior commercial experience was as slight as that of any people in Europe. And it was one great man among them, a younger son in their royal family, Prince Henry, known to later times as "the Navigator," who woke the spirit of exploration in them and pushed them to the achievement which placed Portugal, for a time, at the head of the maritime states. Beginning in 1434, Prince Henry sent expedition following expedition down the western coast of Africa, searching for the southern extremity of the continent, and a way round it to the eastward—to the Indies, the goal of commercial ambition then and long after. In our own day it seems an easy thing to sail down the African coast to the Cape; but it was not easy in the middle of the fifteenth century; and when Prince Henry died, in 1460, his ships had only reached the mouth of the Gambia, or a little way beyond it. His countrymen had grown interested, however, in the pursuit which he began, and expeditions were continued, not eagerly but at intervals, until Bartolomew Diaz, in 1486, rounded the southern point of the continent without knowing it, and Vasco da Gama, in 1497, passed beyond, and sailed to the coast of India.

Discovery of America.

Five years before this, Columbus, in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, had made the more venturesome voyage westward, and had found the New World of America. That the fruits of that surpassing discovery fell to Spain, is one of the happenings of history which one need not try to explain; since (if we except the Catalans among them) there were no people in Europe less inclined to ocean adventure than the Spaniards. But they had just finished the conquest of the Moors; their energies, long exercised in that struggle, demanded some new outlet, and the Genoese navigator, seeking money and ships, and baffled in all more promising lands, came to them at the right moment for a favorable hearing. So Castile won the amazing prize of adventure, which seems to have belonged by more natural right to Genoa, or Venice, or Bruges, or Lubeck, or Bristol.

The immediate material effects of the finding of the new way to the Asiatic side of the world were far more important than the effects of the discovery of America, and they were promptly felt. No sooner had the Portuguese secured their footing in the eastern seas, and on the route thither, which they proceeded vigorously to do, than the commerce of Europe with that rich region of spices and silks, and curious luxuries which Europe loved, abandoned its ancient channels and ran quickly into the new one. There were several strong reasons for this: (1) the carriage of goods by the longer ocean route was cheaper than by caravan routes to the Mediterranean; (2) the pestilent Moorish pirates of the Barbary Coast were escaped; (3) European merchants found heavy advantages in dealing directly with the East instead of trading at second hand through Arabs and Turks. So the commerce of the Indies fled suddenly away from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic; fled from Venice, from Genoa, from Marseilles, from Barcelona, from Constantinople, from Alexandria; fled, too, from many cities of the arrogant Hanse league in the North, which had learned the old ways of traffic and were slow to catch the idea of a possible change. At the outset of the rearrangement of trade, the Portuguese won and held, for a time, the first handling of East Indian commodities, while Dutch, English and German traders—especially the first named—met them at Lisbon and took their wares for distribution through central and northern Europe. But, in no long time, the Dutch and English went to India on their own account, and ousted the Portuguese from their profitable monopoly.

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Commercially, the discovery of America had little effect on Europe for a century or two. Politically, it had vast consequences in the sixteenth century, which came, in the main, from the power and prestige that accrued to Spain. But perhaps its most important effects were those moral and intellectual ones which may be attributed to the sudden, surprising enlargement of the geographical horizon of men. The lifting of the curtain of mystery which had hung so long between two halves of the world must have compelled every man, who thought at all, to suspect that other curtains of mystery might be hiding facts as simple and substantial, waiting for their Columbus to disclose them; and so the bondage of the mediæval mind to that cowardice of superstition which fears inquiry, must surely have been greatly loosened by the startling event. But the Spaniards, who rushed to the possession of the new-found world, showed small signs of any such effect upon their minds; and perhaps it was the greedy thought of their possession which excluded it.

Nationalization of Spain.

The Spaniards were one of half-a-dozen peoples in Western Europe who had just arrived, in this fifteenth century, at a fairly consolidated nationality, and were prepared, for the first time in their history, to act with something like organic unity in the affairs of the world. It was one of the singular birth-marks of the new era in history, that so many nations passed from the inchoate to the definite form at so nearly the same time. The marriage of Isabella of Castile to Ferdinand of Aragon, in 1469, effected a permanent union of the two crowns, and a substantial incorporation of the greater part of the Spanish peninsula into a single strong kingdom, made yet stronger in 1491 by the conquest of Grenada and subjugation of the last of the Spanish Moors.

Louis XI. and the Nationalizing of France.

The nationalizing of France had been a simultaneous but quite different process. From the miserably downfallen and divided state in which it was left by the Hundred Years War, it was raised by a singular king, who employed strange, ignoble methods, but employed them with remarkable success. This was Louis XI., who owes to Sir Walter Scott's romance of "Quentin Durward" an introduction to common fame which he could hardly have secured otherwise; since popular attention is not often drawn to the kind of cunning and hidden work in politics which he did.

Louis XI., on coming to the throne in 1461, found himself surrounded by a state of things which seemed much like a revival of the feudal state at its worst, when Philip Augustus and Louis IX. had to deal with great vassals who rivalled or overtopped them in power. The reckless granting of appanages to children of the royal family had raised up a new group of nobles, too powerful and too proud to be loyal and obedient subjects of the monarchy. At the head of them was the Duke of Burgundy, whose splendid dominion, extended by marriage over most of the Netherlands, raised him to a place among the greater princes of Europe, and who quite outshone the King of France in everything but the royal title. It was impossible, under the circumstances, for the crown to establish its supremacy over these powerful lords by means direct and open. The craft and dishonesty of Louis found methods more effectual. He cajoled, beguiled, betrayed and cheated his antagonists, one by one. He played the selfishness and ambitions of each against the others, and he skilfully evoked something like a public opinion in his kingdom against the whole. At the outset of his reign the nobles formed a combination against him which they called the League of the Public Weal, but which aimed at nothing but fresh gains to the privileged class and advantages to its chiefs. Of alliance with the people against the crown, as in England, there was no thought. Louis yielded to the League in appearance, and cunningly went beyond its demands in his concessions, making it odious to the kingdom at large, and securing to himself the strong support of the States-General of France, when he appealed to it.

The tortuous policy of Louis was aided by many favoring circumstances and happenings. It was favored not least, perhaps, by the hot-headed character of Charles the Bold, who succeeded his father, Philip, in the Duchy of Burgundy, in 1467. Charles was inspired with a great and not unreasonable ambition, to make his realm a kingdom, holding a middle place between France and Germany. He had abilities, but he was of a passionate and haughty temper, and no match for the cool, perfidious, plotting King of France. The latter, by skilful intrigue, involved him in a war with the Swiss, which he conducted imprudently, and in which he was defeated and killed (1477). His death cleared Louis' path to complete mastery in France, and he made the most of his opportunity. Charles left only a daughter, Mary of Burgundy, and her situation was helpless. Louis lost no time in seizing the Duchy of Burgundy, as a fief of France, and in the pretended exercise of his rights as godfather of the Duchess Mary. He also took possession of Franche Comté, which was a fief of the Empire, and he put forward claims in Flanders, Artois, and elsewhere. But the Netherlanders, while they took advantage of the young duchess' situation, and exacted large concessions of chartered privileges from her, yet maintained her rights; and before the first year of her orphanage closed, she obtained a champion by marriage with the Archduke Maximilian of Austria, son of the Emperor, Frederick III. Maximilian was successful in war with Louis; but the latter succeeded, after all, in holding Burgundy, which was thenceforth absorbed in the royal domain of France and gave no further trouble to the monarchy, while he won some important extensions of the northwestern frontiers of his kingdom.

Before the death of Louis XI. the French crown regained Anjou, Maine, and Provence, by inheritance from the last representative of the great second House of Anjou. Thus the kingdom which he left to his son, Charles VIII. (1483), was a consolidated nation, containing in its centralized government the germs of the absolute monarchy of a later day.

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Italian Expedition of Charles VIII.

Charles VIII. was a loutish and uneducated boy of eight years when his father died. His capable sister Anne carried on the government for some years, and continued her father's work by defeating a revolt of the nobles, and by marrying the young king to the heiress of Brittany—thereby uniting to the crown the last of the great semi-independent fiefs. When Charles came of age, he conceived the idea of recovering the kingdom of Naples, which the House of Anjou claimed, and which he looked upon as part of his inheritance from that House. He was incited to the enterprise, moreover, by Ludovico il Moro, or Louis the Moor, an intriguing uncle of the young Duke of Milan, who conspired to displace his nephew. In 1494 Charles crossed the Alps with a large and well-disciplined army, and met with no effectual opposition. The Medici of Florence and the Pope had agreed together to resist this French intrusion, which they feared; but the invading force proved too formidable, and the Florentines, then under the influence of Savonarola, looked to it for their liberation from the Medicean rule, already oppressive. Accordingly Charles marched triumphantly through the peninsula, making some stay at Rome. On his approach to Naples, the Aragonese King, Alfonso, abdicated in favor of his son, Ferdinand II., and died soon after. Ferdinand, shut out of Naples by an insurrection, fled to Sicily, and Charles entered the city, where the populace welcomed him with warmth. Most of the kingdom submitted within a few weeks, and the conquest seemed complete, as it had been easy.

But what they had won so easily the French held with a careless hand, and they lost it with equal ease. While they revelled and caroused in Naples, abusing the hospitality of their new subjects, and gathering plunder with reckless greed, a dangerous combination was formed against them, throughout the peninsula. Before they were aware, it had put them in peril, and Charles was forced to retreat with haste, in the spring of 1495, leaving an inadequate garrison to hold the Neapolitan capital. In Lombardy, he had to fight with the Venetians, and with his protege, Louis the Moor, now Duke of Milan. He defeated them, and regained France in November. Long before that time, the small force he left at Naples had been overcome, and Ferdinand had recovered his kingdom.

In one sense, the French had nothing to show for this their first expedition of conquest. In another sense they had much to show and their gain was great. They had made their first acquaintance with the superior culture of Italy. They had breathed the air beyond the Alps, which was then surcharged with the inspirations of the Renaissance. Both the ideas and the spoil they brought back were of more value to France than can be easily estimated. They had returned laden with booty, and much of it was in treasures of art, every sight of which was a lesson to the sense of beauty and the taste of the people among whom they were shown. The experience and the influence of the Italian expedition were undoubtedly very great, and the Renaissance in France, as an artistic and a literary birth, is reasonably dated from it.

Italian Wars of Louis XII.

Charles VIII. died suddenly in 1498 and was succeeded by his cousin, of the Orleans branch of the Valois family, Louis XII. The new king was weak in character, but not wicked. His first thought on mounting the throne was of the claims of his family to other thrones, in Italy. Besides the standing Angevin claim to the kingdom of Naples, he asserted rights of his own to the duchy of Milan, as a descendant of Valentina Visconti, heiress of the ducal house which the Sforzas supplanted. In 1499 he sent an army against Louis the Moor, and the latter fled from Milan without an attempt at resistance. Louis took possession of the duchy with the greatest good will of the people; but, before half a year had passed, French taxes, French government, and French manners had disgusted them, and they made an attempt to restore their former tyrant. The attempt failed, and Louis the Moor was imprisoned in France for the remainder of his life.

Milan secured, Louis XII. began preparations to repeat the undertaking of Charles VIII. against Naples. The Neapolitan crown had now passed to an able and popular king, Frederick, and Frederick had every reason to suppose that he would be supported and helped by his kinsman, Ferdinand of Aragon, the well-known consort of Isabella of Castile. Ferdinand had the power to hold the French king in check; but instead of using it for the defense of the Neapolitan branch of his house, he secretly and treacherously agreed with Louis to divide the kingdom of Naples with him. Under these circumstances, the conquest was easily accomplished (1501). The betrayed Frederick surrendered to Louis, and lived as a pensionary in France until his death. The Neapolitan branch of the House of Aragon came to an end.

Louis and Ferdinand speedily quarreled over the division of their joint conquest. The treacherous Spaniard cheated the French king in treaty negotiations, gaining time to send forces into Italy which expelled the French. It was in this war that the Spanish general, Gonsalvo di Cordova, won the reputation which gave him the name of "the Great Captain"; and it was likewise in this war that the chivalric French knight, Bayard, began the winning of his fame.

The League of Cambrai and the Holy League.

Naples had again slipped from the grasp of France, and this time it had passed to Spain. Louis XII. abandoned the tempting kingdom to his rival, and applied himself to the establishing of his sovereignty over Milan and its domain. Some territory formerly belonging to the Milaness had been ceded to Venice by the Sforzas. He himself had ceded another district or two to the republic in payment for services rendered. Ferdinand of Spain had made payments in the same kind of coin, from his Neapolitan realm, for Venetian help to secure it. {1053} The warlike Pope Julius II. saw Rimini and other towns formerly belonging to the States of the Church now counted among the possessions of the proud mistress of the Adriatic. All of these disputants in Italy resented the gains which Venice had gathered at their expense, and envied and feared her somewhat insolent prosperity. They accordingly suspended their quarrels with one another, to form a league for breaking her down and for despoiling her. The Emperor Maximilian, who had grievances of his own against the Venetians, joined the combination, and Florence was bribed to become a party to it by the betrayal of Pisa into her hands. Thus was formed the shameful League of Cambrai (1508). The French did most of the fighting in the war that ensued, though Pope Julius, who took the field in person, easily proved himself a better soldier than priest. The Venetians were driven for a time from the greater part of the dominion they had acquired on the mainland, and were sorely pressed. But they made terms with the Pope, and it then became his interest, not merely to stop the conquests of his allies, but to press them out of Italy, if possible. He began accordingly to intrigue against the French, and presently had a new league in operation, making war upon them. It was called a Holy League, because the head of the Church was its promoter, and it embraced the Emperor, King Ferdinand of Spain, King Henry VIII. of England, and the Republic of Venice. As the result of the ruthless and destructive war which they waged, Louis XII., before he died, in 1515, saw all that he had won in Lombardy stripped from him and restored to the Sforzas—the old family of the Dukes of Milan; Venice recovered most of her possessions, but never regained her former power, since the discovery of the ocean route to India, round the Cape of Good Hope, was now turning the rich trade of the East, the great source of her wealth, into the hands of the Portuguese; the temporal dominion of the Popes was enlarged by the recovery of Bologna and Perugia and by the addition of Parma and Piacenza; and Florence, which had been a republic since the death of Savonarola, was forced to submit anew to the Medici.

The Age of Infamous Popes.

The fighting Pope, Julius II., who made war and led armies, while professing to be the vicar of Him who brought the message of good-will and peace to mankind, was very far from being the worst of the popes of his age. He was only worldly, thinking much of his political place as a temporal sovereign in Italy, and little of his spiritual office as the head of the Church of Christ. As the sovereign of Rome and the Papal States, Julius II. ran a brilliant career, and is one of the splendid figures of the Italian renaissance. Patron of Michael Angelo and Raphael, projector of St. Peter's, there is a certain grandeur in his character to be admired, if we could forget the pretended apostolic robe which he smirched with perfidious politics and stained with blood.

But the immediate predecessors of Julius II., Sixtus IV. and Alexander VI., had had nothing in their characters to lure attention from the hideous examples of bestial wickedness which they set before the world. Alexander, especially, the infamous Borgia,—systematic murderer and robber, liar and libertine,—accomplished practitioner of every crime and every vice that was known to the worst society of a depraved generation, and shamelessly open in the foulest of his doings,—there is scarcely a pagan monster of antiquity that is not whitened by comparison with him. Yet he sat in the supposed seat of St. Peter for eleven years, to be venerated as the Vicar of Christ, the "Holy Father" of the Christian Church; his declarations and decrees in matters of faith to be accepted as infallible inspirations; his absolution to be craved as a passport to Heaven; his anathema to be dreaded as a condemnation to Hell!

This evil and malignant being died in 1503. poisoned by one of his own cups, which he had brewed for another. Julius II. reigned until 1513; and after him came the Medicean Pope, Leo X., son of Lorenzo the Magnificent,—princely and worldly as Julius, but in gentler fashion; loving ease, pleasure, luxury, art, and careless of all that belonged to religion beyond its ceremonies and its comfortable establishment of clerical estates. Is it strange that Christendom was prepared to give ear to Luther?

Luther and the Reformation.

When Luther raised his voice, he did but renew a protest which many pure and pious and courageous men before him had uttered, against evils in the Church and falsities and impostures in the Papacy. But some of them, like Arnold of Brescia, like Peter Waldo, and the Albigenses, had been too far in advance of their time, and their revolt was hopeless from the beginning. Wyclif's movement had been timed unfortunately in an age of great commotions, which swallowed it up. That of Huss had roused an ignorant peasantry, too uncivilized to represent a reformed Christianity, and had been ruined by the fierceness of their misguided zeal. The Reformation of Savonarola, at Florence, had been nobly begun, but not wisely led, and it had spent its influence at the end on aims less religious than political.

But there occurred a combination, when Luther arose, of character in himself, of circumstances in his country, and of temper in his generation, which made his protest more lastingly effective. He had high courage, without rashness. He had earnestness and ardor, without fanaticism. He had the plain good sense and sound judgment which win public confidence. His substantial learning put him on terms with the scholars of his day, and he was not so much refined by it as to lose touch with the common people. A certain coarseness in his nature was not offensive to the time in which he lived, but rather belonged among the elements of power in him. His spirituality was not fine, but it was strong. He was sincere, and men believed in him. He was open, straightforward, manly, commanding respect. His qualities showed themselves in his speech, which went straight to its mark, in the simplest words, moulding the forms and phrases of the German language with more lasting effect than the speech of any other man who ever used it. Not many have lived in any age or any country who possessed the gift of so persuasive a tongue, with so powerful a character to command the hearing for it.

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And the generation to which Luther spoke really waited for a bold voice to break into the secret of its thoughts concerning the Church. It had inherited a century of alienation from quarreling popes and greedy, corrupted priests and now there had been added in its feeling the deep abhorrence roused by such villains as the Borgia in the papal chair, and by their creatures and minions in the priesthood of the Church. If it is crediting too much to the common multitude of the time to suppose them greatly sickened by the vices and corruptions of their priests, we may be sure, at least, that they were wearied and angered by the exactions from them, which a vicious hierarchy continually increased. The extravagance of the Papacy kept pace with its degradation, and Christendom groaned under the burden of the taxes that were wrung from it in the name of the lowly Saviour of mankind.

Nowhere in Europe were the extortions of the Church felt more severely than in Germany, where the serfdom of the peasants was still real and hard, and where the depressing weight of the feudal system had scarcely been lifted from society at all. Feudalism had given way in that country less than in any other. Central authority remained as weak, and national solidification as far away, as ever. Of organic unity in the heterogeneous bundle of electoral principalities, duchies, margravates and free cities which made up the nominal realm of the King of the Romans, there was no more at the beginning of the sixteenth century than there had been in the twelfth. But that very brokenness and division in the political state of Germany proved to be one of the circumstances which favored the Protestant Reformation of the Church. Had monarchical authority established itself there as in France, then the Austro-Spanish family which wielded it, with the concentrated bigotry of their narrow-minded race, would have crushed the religious revolt as completely in Saxony as they did in Austria and Bohemia.

The Ninety-five Theses.

The main events of the Reformation in Germany are so commonly known that no more than the slightest sketching of them is needed here. Letters of indulgence, purporting to grant a remission of the temporal and purgatorial penalties of sin, had been sold by the Church for centuries; but none before Pope Leo X. had made merchandize of them in so peddlar-like and shameful a fashion as that which scandalized the intelligent piety of Europe in 1517. Luther, then a professor in the new University of Wittenberg, Saxony, could not hide his indignation, as most men did. He stood forth boldly and challenged the impious fraud, in a series of propositions or theses, which, after the manner of the time, he nailed to the door of Wittenberg Church. Just that bold action was needed to let loose the pent-up feeling of the German people. The ninety-five theses were printed and went broadcast through the land, to be read and to be listened to, and to stir every class with independent ideas. It was the first great appeal made to the public opinion of the world, after the invention of printing had put a trumpet to the mouths of eloquent men, and the effect was too amazing to be believed by the careless Pope and his courtiers.

Political Circumstances.

But more than possibly—probably, indeed—the popular feeling stirred up would never have accomplished the rupture with Rome and the religious independence to which North Germany attained in the end, if political motives had not coincided with religious feelings to bring certain princes and great nobles into sympathy with the Monk of Wittenberg. The Elector of Saxony, Luther's immediate sovereign, had long been in opposition to the Papacy on the subject of its enormous collections of money from his subjects, and he was well pleased to have the hawking of indulgences checked in his dominions. Partly for this reason, partly because of the pride and interest with which he cherished his new University, partly from personal liking and admiration of Luther, and partly, too, no doubt, in recognition of the need of Church reforms, he gave Luther a quiet protection and a concealed support. He was the strongest and most influential of the princes of the Empire, and his obvious favor to the movement advanced it powerfully and rapidly.

At first, there was no intention to break with the Papacy and the Papal Church,—certainly none in Luther's mind. His attitude towards both was conciliatory in every way, except as concerned the falsities and iniquities which he had protested against. It was not until the Pope, in June, 1520, launched against him the famous Bull, "Exurge Domine," which left no alternative between abject submission and open war, that Luther and his followers cast off the authority of the Roman Church and its head, and grounded their faith upon Holy Scripture alone. By formally burning the Bull, Luther accepted the papal challenge, and those who believed with him were ready for the contest.

The Diet of Worms.

In 1521, the reformer was summoned before a Diet of the Empire, at Worms, where a hearing was given him. The influence of the Church, and of the young Austro-Spanish Emperor, Charles V., who adhered to it, was still great enough to procure his condemnation; but they did not dare to deal with him as Huss had been dealt with. He was suffered to depart safely, pursued by an imperial edict which placed the ban of the Empire on all who should give him countenance or support. His friends among the nobles spirited him away and concealed him in a castle, the Wartburg, where he remained for several months, employed in making his translation of the Bible. Meantime, the Emperor had been called away from Germany by his multifarious affairs, in the Netherlands and Spain, and had little attention to give to Luther and the questions of religion for half-a-dozen years. He was represented in Germany by a Council of Regency, with the Elector of Saxony at the head of, it; and the movement of reformation, if not encouraged in his absence, was at least considerably protected. It soon showed threatening signs of wildness and fanaticism in many quarters; but Luther proved himself as powerful in leadership as he had been in agitation, and the religious passion of the time was controlled effectively, on the whole.

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Organization of the Lutheran Church.

Before the close of the year 1521, Pope Leo X. died, and his successor, Adrian, while insisting upon the enforcement of the Edict of Worms against Luther and his supporters, yet acknowledged the corruptions of the Church and promised a reformation of them. His promises came too late; his confessions only gave testimony to the independent reformers which their opponents could not impeach. There was no longer any thought of cleansing the Church of Rome, to abide in it. A separated—a restored Church—was clearly determined on, and Luther framed a system of faith and discipline which was adopted in Saxony, and then accepted very generally by the reformed Churches throughout Germany. In 1525, the Elector Frederick of Saxony died. He had quietly befriended the Lutherans and tolerated the reform, but never identified himself with them. His brother, John, who succeeded him, made public profession of his belief in the Lutheran doctrines, and authoritatively established the church system which Luther had introduced. The Landgrave of Hesse Cassel, the Margrave of Brandenburg, and the Dukes of Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Zell, followed his example; while the imperial cities of Frankfort, Nuremberg, Bremen, Strasburg, Brunswick, Nordhausen, and others, formally ranged themselves on the same side. By the year 1526, when a diet at Spires declared the freedom of each state in the Empire to deal with the religious reform according to its own will, the Reformation in Germany was a solidly organized fact. But those of the reform had not yet received their name, of "Protestants." That came to them three years later, when the Roman party had rallied its forces in a new diet at Spires, to undo the declaration of 1526, and the leaders of the Lutheran party recorded their solemn protest.

The Austro-Burgundian Marriage.

To understand the situation politically, during the period of struggle for and against the Reformation, it will be necessary to turn back a little, for the noting of important occurrences which have not been mentioned.

When Albert II., who was King of Hungary and Bohemia, as well as King of the Romans (Emperor-elect, as the title came to be, soon afterwards), died, in 1439, he was succeeded by his second cousin Frederick III., Duke of Styria, and from that time the Roman or imperial crown was held continuously in the Austrian family, becoming practically hereditary. But Frederick did not succeed to the duchy of Austria, and he failed of election to the throne in Hungary and Bohemia. Hence his position as Emperor was peculiarly weak and greatly impoverished, through want of revenue from any considerable possessions of his own. During his whole long reign, of nearly fifty-four years, Frederick was humiliated and hampered by his poverty; the imperial authority was brought very low, and Germany was in a greatly disordered state. There were frequent wars between its members, and between Austria and Bohemia, with rebellions in Vienna and elsewhere; while the Hungarians were left to contend with the aggressive Turks, almost unhelped.

But in 1477 a remarkable change in the circumstances and prospects of the family of the Emperor Frederick III. was made by the marriage of his son and heir, Maximilian, to Mary, the daughter and heiress of the wealthy and powerful Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold. The bridegroom was so poor that the bride is said to have loaned him the money which enabled him to make a fit appearance at the wedding. She had lost, as we saw, the duchy of Burgundy, but the valiant arm of Maximilian enabled her to hold the Burgundian county, Franche Comté, and the rich provinces of the Netherlands, which formed at that time, perhaps, the most valuable principality in Europe. The Duchess Mary lived only five years after her marriage; but she left a son, Philip, who inherited the Netherlands and Franche Comté, and Maximilian ruled them as his guardian.

In 1493, the Emperor Frederick died, and Maximilian, who had been elected King of the Romans some years before, succeeded him in the imperial office. He was never crowned at Rome, and he took the title, not used before, of King of Germany and Emperor-elect. He was Archduke of Austria, Duke of Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, and Count of Tyrol; and, with his guardianship in the Low Countries, he rose greatly in importance and power above his father. But he accomplished less than might possibly have been done by a ruler of more sureness of judgment and fixity in purpose. His plans were generally beyond his means, and the failures in his undertakings were numerous. He was eager to interfere with the doings of Charles VIII. and Louis XIII. in Italy; but the Germanic diet gave him so little support that he could do nothing effective. He joined the League of Cambrai against Venice, and the Holy League against France, but bore no important part in either. His reign was signalized in Germany by the division of the nation into six administrative "Circles," afterwards increased to ten, and by the creation of a supreme court of appeal, called the Imperial Chamber,—both of which measures did something towards the diminution of private wars and disorders.

The Austro-Spanish Marriage.—Charles V.

But Maximilian figures most conspicuously in history as the immediate ancestor of the two great sovereign dynasties—the Austrian and the Austro-Spanish—which sprang from his marriage with Mary of Burgundy and which dominated Europe for a century after his death. His son Philip, heir to the Burgundian sovereignty of the Netherlands, married (1496) Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Two children, Charles and Ferdinand, were the fruit of this marriage. Charles, the elder, inherited more crowns and coronets than were ever gathered, in reality, by one sovereign, before or since. Ferdinand and Isabella had united by their marriage the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, and, by the conquest of Granada and the partial conquest of Navarre, the entire peninsula, except Portugal, was subsequently added to their joint dominion. Joanna inherited the whole, on the death of Isabella, in 1504, and the death of Ferdinand, in 1516. She also inherited from her father, Ferdinand, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies—which he had reunited—and the island of Sardinia. Philip, on his side, already in possession of the Netherlands and Franche Comté, was heir to the domain of the House of Austria. Both of these great inheritances descended in due course to Charles, and he had not long to wait for them. His father, Philip, died in 1506, and his mother, Joanna, lost her mind, through grief at that event. The death of his Spanish grandfather, Ferdinand, occurred in 1516, and that of his Austrian grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian, followed three years later. {1056} At the age of twenty years (representing his mother in her incapacity) Charles found himself sovereign of Spain, and America, of Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, the Low Countries, Franche Comté, Austria, and the duchies associated with it. The same year (1519) he was chosen King of Germany and Emperor-elect, after a keen contest over the imperial crown, in which Francis I. of France and Henry VIII. of England were his competitors. On attaining this dignity, he conferred the Austrian possessions on his brother Ferdinand. But he remained the most potent and imposing monarch that Europe had seen since Charlemagne. He came upon the stage just as Luther had marshalled, in Germany, the reforming forces of the new era, against intolerable iniquities in the Papal Church. Unfortunately, he came, with his vast armament of powers, to resist the demands of his age, and to be the champion of old falsities and wrongs, both in Church and State. There was nothing in the nature of the man, nor in his education, nor in the influences which bore upon him, from either the Spanish or the Austrian side of his family, to put him in sympathy with lifting movements or with liberal ideas. He never formed a conception of the world in which it looked larger to his eyes, or signified more to him, than the globe upon his scepter. So, naturally enough, this Cæsar of the Renaissance (Charles V. in Germany and Charles I. in Spain) did his utmost, from the day he climbed the throne, to thrust Europe back into the murk of the fourteenth century, which he found it pretty nearly escaped from. He did not succeed; but he gave years of misery to several countries by his exertions, and he resigned the task to a successor whom the world is never likely to tire of abhorring and despising.

The end of popular freedom in Spain.

The affairs which called Charles V. away from Germany, after launching his ineffectual edict of Worms against Luther and Luther's supporters, grew in part out of disturbances in his kingdom of Spain. His election to the imperial office had not been pleasing to the Spaniards, who anticipated the complications they would be dragged into by it, the foreign character which their sovereign (already foreign in mind by his education in the Netherlands) would be confirmed in, and the indifference with which their grievances would be regarded. For their grievances against the monarchy had been growing serious in the last years of Ferdinand, and since his death. The crown had gained power in the process of political centralization, and its aggrandizement from the possession of America began to loom startlingly in the light of the conquest of Mexico, just achieved. During the absence of Charles in Germany, his former preceptor, Cardinal Adrian, of Utrecht, being in charge of the government as regent, a revolt broke out at Toledo which spread widely and became alarming. The insurgents organized their movement under the name of the Santa Junta, or Holy League, and having obtained possession of the demented Queen, Joanna, they assumed to act for her and with her authority. This rebellion was suppressed with difficulty; but the suppression was accomplished (1521-1522), and it proved to be the last struggle for popular freedom in Spain. The government used its victory with an unsparing determination to establish absolute powers, and it succeeded. The conditions needed for absolutism were already created, in fact, by the deadly blight which the Inquisition had been casting upon Spain for forty years. Since the beginning of the frightful work of Torquemada, in 1483, it had been diligently searching out and destroying every germ of free thought and manly character that gave the smallest sign of fruitfulness in the kingdom; and the crushing of the Santa Junta may be said to have left few in Spain who deserved a better fate than the political, the religious and the intellectual servitude under which the nation sank.

Persecution of the Spanish Moriscoes.

Charles, whose mind was dense in its bigotry, urged on the Inquisition, and pointed its dreadful engines of destruction against the unfortunate Moriscoes, or Moors, who had been forced to submit to Christian baptism after their subjugation. Many of these followers of Mahomet had afterwards taken up again the prayers and practices of their own faith, either secretly or in quiet ways, and their relapse appears to have been winked at, more or less. For they were a most useful people, far surpassing the Spaniards in industry, in thrift and knowledge of agriculture, and in mechanical skill. Many of the arts and manufactures of the kingdom were entirely in their hands. It was ruinous to interfere with their peaceful labors. But Charles, as heathenish as the Grand Turk when it suited his ends to be so, could look on these well-behaved and useful Moors with no eyes but the eyes of an orthodox piety, and could take account of nothing but their infidel faith. He began, therefore, in 1524, the heartless, senseless and suicidal persecution of the Moriscoes which exterminated them or drove them from the land, and which contributed signally to the making of Spain an exemplary pauper among the nations.

Despotism of Charles V. in the Netherlands.

In his provinces of the Low Countries, Charles found more than in Spain to provoke his despotic bigotry. The Flemings and the Dutch had been tasting of freedom too much for his liking, in recent years, and ideas, both political and religious, had been spreading among them, which were not the ideas of his august mind, and must therefore, of necessity, be false. They had already become infected with the rebellious anti-papal doctrines of Luther. Indeed, they had been even riper than Luther's countrymen for a religious revolution, when he sounded the signal note which echoed through all northern Europe. In Germany, the elected emperor could fulminate an edict against the audacious reformers, but he had small power to give force to it. In the Netherlands, he possessed a sovereignty more potent, and he took instant measures to exercise the utmost arbitrariness of which he could make it capable. The Duchess Margaret, his aunt, who had been governess of the provinces, was confirmed by him in that office, and he enlarged the powers in her commission. His commands practically superseded the regular courts, and subjected the whole administration of justice to his arbitrary will and that of his representative. At the same time they stripped the States of their legislative functions and reduced them to insignificance. {1057} Having thus trampled on the civil liberties of the provinces, he borrowed the infernal enginery of the Inquisition, and introduced it for the destruction of religious freedom. Its first victims were two Augustine monks, convicted of Lutheranism, who were burned at Brussels, in July, 1523. The first martyr in Holland was a priest who suffered impalement as well as burning, at the Hague, in 1525. From these beginnings the persecution grew crueler as the alienation of the stubborn Netherlanders from the Church of Rome widened; and Charles did not cease to fan its fires with successive proclamations or "placards," which denounced and forbade every reading of Scripture, every act of devotion, every conversation of religion, in public or private, which the priests of the Church did not conduct. "The number of Netherlanders who were burned, strangled, beheaded, or buried alive, in obedience to his edicts, … have been placed as high as 100,000 by distinguished authorities, and have never been put at a lower mark than 50,000."

Charles V. and Francis I. in Italy.

These exercises of an autocratic piety in Spain and the Low Countries may be counted, perhaps, among the pleasures of the young Emperor during the earlier years of his reign. His more serious affairs were connected mainly with his interests or ambitions in Italy, which seemed to be threatened by the King of France. The throne in that country was now occupied by Francis I., a cousin of Louis XII., who had succeeded the latter in 1515, and who had taken up anew the Italian projects in which Louis failed. In the first year of his reign, he crossed the Alps with an army, defeated the Swiss whom the Duke of Milan employed against him, and won the whole duchy by that single fight. This re-establishment of the French at Milan was regarded with exceeding jealousy by the Austrian interest, and by the Pope. Maximilian, shortly before his death, had made a futile effort to dislodge them, and Charles V., on coming to the throne, lost no time in organizing plans to the same end. He entered into an alliance with Pope Leo X., by a treaty which bears the same date as the Edict of Worms against Luther, and there can be little doubt that the two instruments were part of one understanding. Both parties courted the friendship of Henry VIII. of England, whose power and importance had risen to a high mark, and Henry's able minister, Cardinal Wolsey, figured notably in the diplomatic intrigues which went on during many years.

War began in 1521, and in three months the French were expelled from nearly every part of the Milanese territory. Pope Leo X. lived just long enough to receive the news. His successor was Adrian VI., former tutor of the Emperor, who made vain attempts to arrange a peace. Wolsey had brought Henry VIII. of England into the alliance against Francis, expecting to win the papal tiara through the Emperor's influence; but he was disappointed.

Francis made an effort in 1523 to recover Milan; but was crippled at the moment of sending his expedition across the Alps by the treason of the most powerful noble of France, the Constable, Charles, Duke of Bourbon. The Constable had been wronged and affronted by the King's mother, and by intriguers at court, and he revenged himself basely by going over to the enemies of his country. In the campaigns which followed (1523-1524), the French had ill-success, and lost their chivalrous and famous knight, Bayard, in one of the last skirmishes of their retreat. Another change now occurred in the occupancy of the papal throne, and Wolsey's ambitious schemes were foiled again. The new Pope was Giulio de'Medici, who took the name of Clement VII.

Once more the King of France, in October, 1524, led his forces personally into Italy and laid siege to Pavia. It was a ruinous undertaking. He was defeated overwhelmingly in a battle fought before Pavia (February 24, 1525) and taken prisoner. After a captivity in Spain of nearly a year, he regained his freedom disgracefully, by signing and solemnly swearing to a treaty which he never intended to observe. By this treaty he not only renounced all claims to Milan, Naples, Genoa, and other Italian territory, but he gave up the duchy of Burgundy. Released in good faith on these terms, in the early part of 1526, he perfidiously repudiated the treaty, and began fresh preparations for war. He found the Italians now as ready to oust the Spaniards from their peninsula with French help, as they had been ready before to expel the French with help from Spain. The papal interest was in great alarm at the power acquired by the Emperor, and Venice and Milan shared the feeling. A new "Holy Alliance" was accordingly formed, with the Pope at its head, and with Henry VIII. of England for its "Protector." But before this League took the field with its forces, Rome and Italy were stricken and trampled, as though by a fresh invasion of Goths.

Sack of Rome, by the army of the Constable.

The imperial army, quartered in the duchy of Milan, under the command of the Constable Bourbon, was scantily paid and fed. The soldiers were forced to plunder the city and country for their subsistence, and, of course, under those circumstances, there was little discipline among them. The region which they terrorized was soon exhausted, by their robberies and by the stoppage of industries and trade. It then became necessary for the Constable to lead them to new fields, and he moved southwards. His forces were made up in part of Spaniards and in part of Germans—the latter under a Lutheran commander, and enlisted for war with the Pope and for pillage in Italy. He directed the march to Rome, constrained, perhaps, by the demands of his soldiery, but expecting, likewise, to crush the League by seizing its apostolic head. On the 5th of May, 1527, his 40,000 brigands arrived before the city. At daybreak, the next morning, they assaulted the walls irresistibly and swarmed over them. Bourbon was killed in the assault, and his men were left uncontrolled masters of the venerable capital of the world. They held it for seven months, pillaging and destroying, committing every possible excess and every imaginable sacrilege. Rome is believed to have suffered at their hands more lasting defacement and loss of the splendors of its art than from the sacking of Vandals or Goths.

The Pope held out in Castle St. Angelo for a month and then surrendered. The hypocritical Charles V., when he learned what his imperially commissioned bandits had done, made haste to express horror and grief, but did not hasten to check or repair the outrage in the least. Pope Clement was not released from captivity until a great money-payment had been extorted from him, with the promise of a general council of the Church to reform abuses and to eradicate Lutheranism.

{1058}

Spanish Domination in Italy.

Europe was shocked by the barbarity of the capture of Rome, and the enemies leagued against Charles were stimulated to more vigorous exertions. Assisted with money from England, Francis sent another army into Italy, which took Genoa and Pavia and marched to Naples, blockading the city by sea and land. But the siege proved fatal to the French army. So many perished of disease that the survivors were left at the mercy of the enemy, and capitulated in September, 1528.

The great Genoese Admiral, Andrea Doria, had been offended, meantime, by King Francis, and had excited his fellow citizens to a revolution, which made Genoa, once more, an independent republic, with Doria at its head. Shortly before this occurred, Florence had expelled the Medici and reorganized her government upon the old republican basis. But the defeat of the French before Naples ended all hope of Italian liberty; since the Pope resigned himself after that event to the will of the Emperor, and the papal and imperial despotisms became united as one, to exterminate freedom from the peninsula. Florence was the first victim of the combination. The city was besieged and taken by the Emperor's troops, in compliance with the wishes of the Pope, and the Medici, his relatives, were restored. Francis continued war feebly until 1529, when a peace called the "Ladies Peace" was brought about, by negotiations between the French King's mother and the Emperor's aunt. This was practically the end of the long French wars in Italy.

Germany.

Such were the events which, in different quarters of the world, diverted the attention of the Emperor during several years from Luther and the Reformation in Germany. The religious movement in those years had been making a steady advance. Yet its enemies gained control of another Diet held at Spires in 1529 and reversed the ordinance of the Diet of 1526, by which each state had been left free to deal in its own manner with the edict of Worms. Against this action of the Diet, the Lutheran princes and the representatives of the Lutheran towns entered their solemn protest, and so acquired the name, "Protestants," which became in time the accepted and adopted name of all, in most parts of the world, who withdrew from the Roman communion.

The Peasants' War and the Anabaptists.

Before this time, the Reform had passed through serious trials, coming from excesses in the very spirit out of which itself had risen and to which it gave encouragement. The long suffering, much oppressed peasantry of Germany, who had found bishops as pitiless extortioners as lords, caught eagerly at a hope of relief from the overthrow of the ancient Church. Several times within the preceding half-century they had risen in formidable revolts, with a peasants' clog, or bundschuh for their banner. In 1525 fresh risings occurred in Swabia, Franconia, Alsace, Lorraine, Bavaria, Thuringia and elsewhere, and a great Peasants' War raged for months, with ferocity and brutality on both sides. The number who perished in the war is estimated at 100,000. The demands made by the peasants were for measures of the simplest justice—for the poorest rights and privileges in life. But their cause was taken up by half-crazed religious fanatics, who became in some parts their leaders, and such a character was given to it that reasonable reformers were justified, perhaps, in setting themselves sternly against it. The wildest prophet of the outbreak was one Thomas Münzer, a precursor of the frenzied sect of the Anabaptists. Münzer perished in the wreck of the peasants' revolt; but some of his disciples, who fled into Westphalia and the Netherlands, made converts so rapidly in the town of Münster that in 1535 they controlled the city, expelled every inhabitant who would not join their communion, elected and crowned a king, and exhibited a madness in their proceedings that is hardly equalled in history. The experience at Münster may reasonably be thought to have proved the soundness of Luther's judgment in refusing countenance to the cause of the oppressed peasants when they rebelled.

At all events, his opposition to them was hard and bitter. And it has been remarked that what may be called Luther's political position in Germany had become by this time quite changed. "Instead of the man of the people, Luther became the man of the princes; the mutual confidence between him and the masses, which had supported the first faltering steps of the movement, was broken; the democratic element was supplanted by the aristocratic; and the Reformation, which at first had promised to lead to a great national democracy, ended in establishing the territorial supremacy of the German princes. … The Reformation was gradually assuming a more secular character, and leading to great political combinations" (Dyer).

Progress of Lutheranism in Germany.

By the year 1530, the Emperor Charles was prepared to give more attention to affairs in Germany and to gratify his animosity towards the movement of Reformation. He had effectually beaten his rival, the King of France, had established his supremacy in Italy, had humbled the Pope, and was quite willing to be the zealous champion of a submissive Church. His brother Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, had secured, against much opposition, both the Hungarian and the Bohemian crowns, and so firmly that neither was ever again wrested from his family, though they continued for some time to be nominally elective. The dominions of Ferdinand had suffered a great Turkish invasion, in 1529, under the Sultan Solyman, who penetrated even to Vienna and besieged the city, but without success, losing heavily in his retreat.

In May, 1530, Charles re-entered Germany from Italy. The following month he opened the sitting of the Diet, which had been convened at Augsburg. His first act at Augsburg was to summon the protesting princes, of Saxony, Hesse, Brandenburg, and other states, before him and to signify to them his imperial command that the toleration of Lutheranism in their dominions must cease. He expected the mandate to suffice; when he found it ineffectual, he required an abstract of the new religions doctrines to be laid before him. This was prepared by Melancthon, and, afterwards known as the Confession of Augsburg, became the Lutheran standard of faith. {1059} The Catholic theologians prepared a reply to it, and both were submitted to the Emperor. He made some attempt to bring about a compromise of the differences, but he demanded of the Protestants that they should submit themselves to the Pope, pending the final decisions of a proposed general Council of the Church. When this was refused, the Diet formally condemned their doctrines and required them to reunite themselves with the Catholic Church before the 15th of April following. The Emperor, in November, issued a decree accordingly, renewing the Edict of Worms and commanding its enforcement.

The Protestant princes, thus threatened, assembled in conference at Schmalkald at Christmas, 1530, and there organized their famous armed league. But fresh preparations for war by the Turk now compelled Charles to make terms with his Lutheran subjects. They refused to give any assistance to Austria or Hungary against the Sultan, while threatened by the Augsburg decree. The gravity of the danger forced a concession to them, and by the Peace of Nuremberg (1532) it was agreed that the Protestants should have freedom of worship until the next Diet should meet, or a General Council should be held. This peace was several times renewed, and there were ten years of quiet under it, in Germany, during which time the cause of Protestantism made rapid advances. By the year 1540, it had established an ascendancy in Würtemberg, among the states of the South, and in the imperial cities of Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, Constance, and Strasburg. Its doctrines had been adopted by "the whole of central Germany, Thuringia, Saxony, Hesse, part of Brunswick, and the territory of the Guelphs; in the north by the bishoprics of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, and Naumburg … ; by East Friesland, the Hanse Towns, Holstein and Schleswig, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Anhalt, Silesia, the Saxon states, Brandenburg, and Prussia. Of the larger states that were closed against it there remained only Austria, Bavaria, the Palatinate and the Rhenish Electorates" (Hausser). In 1542, Duke Henry of Brunswick, the last of the North German princes who adhered to the Papal Church, was expelled from his duchy and Protestantism established. About the same time the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne announced his conviction of the truth of the Protestant doctrines.

The Schmalkaldic War.

Charles was still too much involved in foreign wars to venture upon a struggle with the Lutherans; but a few years more sufficed to free his hands. The Treaty of Crespy, in 1544, ended his last conflict with Francis I. In the same year, Pope Paul III. summoned the long promised General Council of the Church to meet at Trent the following spring—by which appointment a term was put to the toleration conceded in the Peace of Nuremberg. The Protestants, though greatly increased in numbers, were now less united than at the time of the formation of the Schmalkaldic League. There was much division among the leading princes. They yielded no longer to the influence of their wisest and ablest chief, Philip of Hesse. Luther, whose counsels had always been for peace, approached his end, and died in 1546. The circumstances were favorable to the Emperor, when he determined to put a stop to the Reformation by force. He secured an important ally in the very heart of Protestant Germany, winning over to his side the selfish schemer, Duke Maurice of Saxony—now the head of the Albertine branch of the Saxon house. In 1546 he felt prepared and war began. The successes were all on the imperial side. There was no energy, no unity, no forethoughtfulness of plan, among the Lutherans. The Elector, John Frederick, of Saxony, and Philip of Hesse, both fell into the Emperor's hands and were barbarously imprisoned. The former was compelled to resign his Electorate, and it was conferred upon the renegade Duke Maurice. Philip was kept in vile places of confinement and inhumanly treated for years. The Protestants of Germany were entirely beaten down, for the time being, and the Emperor imposed upon them in 1548 a confession of faith called "the Interim," the chief missionaries of which were the Spanish soldiers whom he had brought into the country. But if the Lutherans had suffered themselves to be overcome, they were not ready to be trodden upon in so despotic a manner. Even Maurice, now Elector of Saxony, recoiled from the tyranny which Charles sought to establish, while he resented the inhuman treatment of Philip of Hesse, who was his father-in-law. He headed a new league, therefore, which was formed against the Emperor, and which entered into a secret alliance with Henry II. of France (Francis I. having died in 1547). Charles was taken by surprise when the revolt broke out, in 1552, and barely escaped capture. The operations of Maurice were vigorous and ably conducted, and in a few weeks the Protestants had recovered all the ground lost in 1546-7; while the French had improved the opportunity to seize the three bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun. The ultimate result was the so-called "Religious Peace of Augsburg," concluded in 1555, which gave religious freedom to the ruling princes of Germany, but none whatever to the people. It put the two religions on the same footing, but it was simply a footing of equal intolerance. Each ruler had the right to choose his own creed, and to impose it arbitrarily upon his subjects if he saw fit to do so. As a practical consequence, the final division of Germany between Protestantism and Catholicism was substantially determined by the princes and not by the people.