r in
the eyes of the pope, was accepted by Germany. He virtually abdicated
the imperial claim to rule in Italy; but by his "Golden Bull" he
terminated the old source of quarrel, the question of the authority by
which emperors were elected. The "Babylonish captivity" ended when
Gregory XI. left Avignon to die in Italy; it was to be replaced by the
Great Schism.

For thirty-eight years rival popes, French and Italian, claimed the
supremacy of the Church. The schism was ended by the Council of
Constance; Latin Christianity may be said to have reached its
culminating point under Nicholas V., during whose pontificate the Turks
captured Constantinople.

* * * * *

LEOPOLD VON RANKE

History of the Popes

Leopold von Ranke was born at Wiehe, on December 21, 1795, and
died on May 23, 1886. He became Professor of History at Berlin
at the age of twenty-nine; and his life was passed in
researches, the fruits of which he gave to the world in an
invaluable series of historical works. The earlier of these
were concerned mainly with the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries--in English history generally called the Tudor and
Stuart periods--based on examinations of the archives of
Vienna and Rome, Venice and Florence, as well as of Berlin. In
later years, when he had passed seventy, he travelled more
freely outside of his special period. The "History of the
Popes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries" here
presented was published in 1834-7. The English translation by
Sarah Austin (1845) was the subject of review in one of
Macaulay's famous essays. It is mainly concerned with the
period, not of the Reformation itself, but of the century and
a quarter following--roughly from 1535 to 1760, the period
during which the religious antagonisms born of the Reformation
were primary factors in all European complications.

_I.--The Papacy at the Reformation_

The papacy was intimately allied with the Roman Empire, with the empire
of Charlemagne, and with the German or Holy Roman Empire revived by
Otto. In this last the ecclesiastical element was of paramount
importance, but the emperor was the supreme authority. From that
authority Gregory VII. resolved to free the pontificate, through the
claim that no appointment by a layman to ecclesiastical office was
valid; while the pope stood forth as univ