wish to penetrate the '_reserve ed altre arcane
arti_,' the '_renunzie_', '_pensioni_' and '_altri stratagemmi_,' by
means of which the Papal Curia, during the half-century after the
Tridentine Council, managed to evade its decrees, and to get such
control over Church property in Italy that 'out of 500 benefices not one
is conferred legally.' Compare the passage in the 'Trattato delle
Materie Beneficiarie,' p. 163. There Sarpi says that five-sixths of
Italian benefices are at the Pope's disposal, and that there is good
reason to suppose that he will acquire the remaining sixth.]

After the termination of the Council there was nothing left for Pius but
to die. He stood upon a pinnacle which might well have made him
nervous--lest haply the Solonian maxim, 'Call no man fortunate until his
death,' should be verified in his person. During the two years of peace
and retirement which he had still to pass, the unsuccessful conspiracy
of Benedetto Accolti and Antonio Canossa against his life gave point to
this warning. But otherwise, withdrawn from cares of state, which he
committed to his nephew, Carlo Borromeo, he enjoyed the tranquillity
that follows successful labor, and sank with undiminished prestige into
his grave at the end of 1565. Those who believe in masterful and potent
leaders of humanity may be puzzled to account for the triumph achieved
by this common-place arbiter of destiny. Not by strength but by pliancy
of character he accomplished the transition from the mediaeval to the
modern epoch of Catholicism. He was no Cromwell, Frederick the Great, or
Bismarck; only a politic old man, contriving by adroit avoidance to
steer the ship of the Church clear through innumerable perils. This
scion of the Italian middle class, this moral mediocrity, placed his
successors in S. Peter's chair upon a throne of such supremacy that they
began immediately to claim jurisdiction over kings and nations.
Thirty-eight years before his death, when Clement VII. was shut up in S.
Angelo, it seemed as though the Papal power might be abolished.
Forty-five years after his death, Sarpi, writing to a friend in 1610,
expressed his firm opinion that the one, the burning question for Europe
was the Papal power.[50] Through him, poor product as he was of ordinary
Italian circumstances, elected to be Pope because of his easy-going
mildness by prelates worn to death in fiery Caraffa's reign, it happened
that the flood of Catholic reaction was rolled o