the
Papacy to stamp out heresies and to stifle the earlier stirrings of
antagonistic culture. Thus the precursory movements to which I alluded
in the first chapter of my 'Age of the Despots,' seemed to be abortive;
and no less apparently abortive were the reformatory efforts of Wyclif
and Huss. Yet Europe was slowly undergoing mental and moral changes,
which announced the advent of a new era. These changes were more
apparent in Italy than elsewhere, through the revival of arts and
letters early in the fourteenth century. Cimabue, Giotto, and the
Pisani, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, set culture forward on fresh
paths divergent from previous mediaeval tradition. The gradual
enfeeblement of the Empire and the distraction of the Church during the
Great Schism prepared the means whereby both Renaissance and Reformation
were eventually realized. The Council of Constance brought the Western
nations into active diplomatical relations, and sowed seeds of thought
which afterwards sprang up in Luther.

Meanwhile a special nidus had been created in the South. The Italian
communes freed themselves from all but titular subjection to the Empire,
and were practically independent of the Papacy during its exile in
Avignon. They succumbed to despots, and from Italian despotism emerged
the Machiavellian conception of the State. This conception, modified in
various ways, by Sarpi's theory of Church and State, by the Jesuit
theory of Papal Supremacy, by the counter-theory of the Divine Right of
Kings, by theories of Social Contract and the Divine Right of Nations,
superseded the elder ideal of Universal Monarchy. It grew originally
out of the specific conditions of Italy in the fifteenth century, and
acquired force from that habit of mind, fostered by the Classical
Revival, which we call humanism. Humanism had flourished in Italy since
the days of Petrarch, and had been communicated by Italian teachers to
the rest of Europe. As in the South it generated the new learning and
the new culture which I have described in the first five volumes of my
work, and acted as a solvent on the mediaeval idea of the Empire, so in
the North it generated a new religious enthusiasm and acted as a solvent
on the mediaeval idea of the Church. All through the middle ages,
nothing seemed more formidable to the European mind than heresy. Any
sacrifices were willingly made in order to secure the unity of the
Catholic Communion. But now, by the Protestant rebellio