sh
advance was fairly checked. Even as it was, in the complicated policy
and intrigues of Europe its different sovereigns could not trust one
another; their common faith had ceased to be a common bond: in all it
had been weakened, in some destroyed. Aeneas Sylvius, speaking of
Christendom, says, "It is a body without a head, a republic without laws
or magistrates. The pope or the emperor may shine as lofty titles, an
splendid images; but they are unable to command, and no one is willing
to obey." But, during this period of Turkish aggression, had not the
religious dissensions of Christendom been decently composed, there was
imminent danger that Europe would have been Mohammedanized. A bitter
experience of past ages, as well as of the present, had taught it that
the Roman Church was utterly powerless against such attacks. Safety was
to be looked for, not in any celestial aid, but in physical knowledge
and pecuniary resources, carried out in the organization of armies and
fleets. Had her authority been derived from the source she pretended,
she should have found an all-sufficient protection in prayer--indeed,
not even that should have been required. Men discovered at last that her
Litanies and her miracles were equally of no use, and that she must
trust, like any other human tyranny, to cannon and the sword.

[Sidenote: Effect of the Turkish invasion.] The Turkish aggression led
to the staying of the democratic outbreak in the bosom of the
Church--the abstaining for a season from any farther sapping of the
papal autocracy. It was necessary that ecclesiastical disputes, if they
could not be ended, should, at all events, be kept for a time in
abeyance, and so indeed they were, until the pent-up dissensions burst
forth in "the Reformation." And thus, as we have related, by Mohammedan
knowledge in the West, papal Christianity was well-nigh brought to ruin;
thus, by a strange paradox, the Mohammedan sword in the East gave it for
a little longer a renewed lease of political power, though never again
of life.

[Sidenote: Nicolas V. a patron of art.] To Nicolas V., a learned and
able pope, the catastrophe of Constantinople was the death-blow. He had
been the intimate friend of Cosmo de' Medici, and from him had imbibed a
taste for letters and art, but, like his patron, he had no love for
liberty. It was thus through commerce that the papacy first learned to
turn to art. The ensuing development of Europe was really based on the