like Machiavelli or Savonarola, did not shock the mass
of men who witnessed them. The Renaissance was so dazzling by its
brilliancy, so confusing by its rapid changes, that moral distinctions
were obliterated in a blaze of splendor, an outburst of new life, a
carnival of liberated energies. The corruption of Italy was only equaled
by its culture. Its immorality was matched by its enthusiasm. It was
not the decay of an old age dying, so much as the fermentation of a new
age coming into life, that bred the monstrous paradoxes of the fifteenth
and the sixteenth centuries. The contrast between mediaeval Christianity
and renascent Paganism--the sharp conflict of two adverse principles,
destined to fuse their forces and to recompose the modern world--made
the Renaissance what it was in Italy. Nowhere is the first effervescence
of these elements so well displayed as in the history of those Pontiffs
who, after striving in the Middle Ages to suppress humanity beneath a
cowl, are now the chief actors in the comedy of Aphrodite and Priapus
raising their foreheads once more to the light of day.

The struggle carried on between the Popes of the thirteenth century and
the House of Hohenstauffen ended in the elevation of the Princes of
Anjou to the throne of Naples--the most pernicious of all the evils
inflicted by the Papal power on Italy. Then followed the French tyranny,
under which Boniface VIII. expired at Anagni. Benedict XI. was poisoned
at the instigation of Philip le Bel, and the Papal see was transferred
to Avignon. The Popes lost their hold upon the city of Rome and upon
those territories of Romagna, the March, and S. Peter's Patrimony which
had been confirmed to them by the grant of Rodolph of Hapsburg (1273).
They had to govern their Italian dependencies by means of Legates,
while, one by one, the cities which had recognized their sway passed
beneath the yoke of independent princes. The Malatesti established
themselves in Rimini, Pesaro, and Fano; the house of Montefeltro
confirmed its occupation of Urbino; Camerino, Faenza, Ravenna, Forli,
and Imola became the appanages of the Varani, the Manfredi, the
Polentani, the Ordelaffi, and the Alidosi.[1] The traditional supremacy
of the Popes was acknowledged in these tyrannies; but the nobles I have
named acquired a real authority, against which Egidio Albornoz and
Robert of Geneva struggled to a great extent in vain, and to break which
at a future period taxed the whole energi