1534-72] Paul III— The Counter-Reformation in Italy 33

twenty-five, in 1493, invested with the purple by Alexander VI, he had taken part in all phases of the humanistic movement, and shared its glories and its sins. Now the sky had become overcast, but a clear sunny gleam from the best time of the Renaissance still lay over him, though his pontificate was to witness the inroad of Lutheranism on Italy, the appearance of the doctrine of justification by faith, and on the other hand the foundation of the Society of Jesus (September 3, 1539), the convocation of the long wished-for Ecumenical Council of Trent (1542), and also the reorganisation of the Inquisition (1541).

The last Pope of the Renaissance, as we must call Farnese, left as the brightest memory of his reign the record of an effort, which proved fruitless, to unite the last and noblest supporters of the Renaissance who still survived in the service of the Church, for an attempt at reformation. This is celebrated as the Consultum delectorum Cardinalium et aliorum prelatorum de emendanda Ecclesia, and bears the signatures of Contarini, Caraffa, Sadoleto, Reginald Pole, Federigo Fregoso, Giberti, and Cortese. Contarini must be acknowledged to have been the real soul of the movement, which aimed at an inward reconciliation with the German party of reform. All these ideas had root in the conception represented by the scheme of Julius II. The greater number of those who worked at the Consultum of 1538 must be regarded as the last direct heirs of this great inheritance. The Religious Conference of Ratisbon in 1541 forms the crisis in the history of this movement: it was wrecked, not, as Reumont states, by the incompatibility of the principle of subjective opinion with that of authority, but quite as much, if not more so, by the private aims of Bavaria and France. So ended the movement towards reconciliation, and another came into force and obtained sole dominion. This regarded the most marked opposition to Protestantism as the salvation of the Church, and to combat it summoned not only the counter-reformation of the Tridentinum, but every means in its power, even the extremest measures of material force, to its assistance. The representatives of the conciliatory reform movement, Contarini, Sadoleto, Pole, Morone, became suspect and, despite their dignity of Cardinal, were subject to persecution. Even noble ladies like Vittoria Colonna and Giulia Gonzaga were not secure from this suspicion and persecution.

Paul IV (1555-9) and Pius V (1566-72) carried out the CounterReformation in Italy. While the pagan elements of humanism merged in the Antitrinitarian and Socinian sects, the Inquisition was stamping out the sola fides belief, but its terrorism at the same time crushed culture and intellectual life out of Italy. The city of Rome recovered from the Sack of 1527; but from the ruin wrought by Caraffa, the nation, or at any rate Papal Rome, never recovered. Whatever intellectual life still remained was forced in the days of Paul III to shrink more and

C. M. H. II.

3

more from publicity. The sonnets which Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo exchanged, the converse these two great minds held in the garden of the Villa Colonna, of which Francesco d' Ollanda has left us an account, were the last flickerings of a spirit which had once controlled and enriched the Renaissance.

What comparisons must have forced themselves on Michelangelo as all the events since the days of Lorenzo il Magnifico, his first patron, whom he never forgot, passed in review before his great and lonely spirit, now sunk in gloom. We know from Condivi that the impressions Buonarotte had received in his youth exercised a renewed power over his old age. Dante and Savonarola were once his leaders, they had never entirely forsaken him. Now the favole del mondo, as his last poems bear witness, fell entirely into the background before the earnest thoughts that had once filled his mind at the foot of the pulpit in San Marco. His Giudizio Universale sums up the account for his whole existence, and is at the same time the most terrible reckoning, made in the spirit of Dante, with his own nation and its rulers. All that Italy might have become, had she followed the dictates of Dante and Savonarola, floated before his eyes as his brush created that Judge of all the world whose curse falls on those that have exiled and murdered His prophets, neglected the Church, and bartered away the freedom of the nation. His Last Judgment was painted at the bidding of the Pope. Paul III can scarcely have guessed how the artist was searching into the consciences of that whole generation, which was called to execute what Julius had bidden Raffaelle and Michelangelo depict for all Christendom, and which had ignored and neglected its high office.

Since 1541 the Schism was an accomplished fact, a misfortune alike for North and South. The defection of the Germanic world deprived the Catholic Church of an element to which the future belonged after the exhaustion of the Latin races. Perhaps the greatest misfortune lay and still lies, as Newman has said, in the fact that the Latin races never realised, and do not even yet realise, what they have lost in the Germanic races. From the time of Paul III, and still more from that of Paul IV onwards, the old Catholicism changes into an Italianism which adopts more and more the forms of the Roman Curialism. The idea of Catholicity, once so comprehensive, was sinking more and more into a one-sided, often despotic insistence on unity, rendered almost inevitable by the continual struggle with opponents. And this was due, not to the doctrines of the Church, but to her practice. Romanism alone could no longer carry out a scheme such as that of which Julius II had dreamed. It is now clear to all minds what intellectual, moral, and social forces the schism had drawn away; this is manifest even in the fate of Italy. The last remnant of Italian idealism took refuge in the idea of national unity and freedom which had been shadowed forth in the policy of Alexander VI and Julius II, and which Machiavelli had

written on the last wonderful page of his Principe as the guiding principle for the future. This vision it was which rose dimly in Dante's mind; for its sake the Italian people had forgiven the sins of the Borgia and of della Rovere; it had appeared to Machiavelli as the highest of aims; after another three hundred years of spiritual and temporal despotism it burst forth once more in the minds of Rosmini, Cesare Balbo, Gioberti, and Cavour, and roused the dishonoured soul of the nation.

CHAPTER II

HABSBURG AND VALOIS (I)

THE secular struggle between the Houses of Burgundy and Valois reaches a new stage in the era of the Reformation. The murder of the Duke of Orleans in the streets of Paris in 1407 involved at first only a junior branch of the French royal House in the blood feud with Burgundy. The alliance of Orleans and Armagnac in 1410, and of both with Charles the Dauphin in 1418, swept in the senior branch, and led to the retributive murder of John of Burgundy at Montereau in 1419. Steadily the area of infection widens. A relentless Ate dominates all the early years of Philip the Good, and then, laid for a while to sleep at Arras (1435), reappears in the days of Charles the Bold. Not only political and national aims, but an hereditary dynastic hatred might have inspired Louis XI in his campaigns of war and intrigue until the crushing blow at Nancy. The grandson of Charles the Bold, Philip the Fair, seemed, in his jealousy of Ferdinand and his devotion to the interests of the Netherlands, to have forgotten the ancestral feud. But his son and heir, whom we know best as Charles the Fifth, inherited, together with the inconsequent rivalries of Maximilian, and the more enduring and successful antagonism of Ferdinand, the old Burgundian duty of revenge. Thus the chronic hostility between the Kings of Valois-Angoulême and the united line of Burgundy, Austria, Castile, and Aragon has a dramatic touch of predestined doom, which might find a fitting counterpart in a Norse Saga or the Nibelungenlied.

But greater forces than hereditary hate drove Europe to the gulf in which the joy of the Renaissance was for ever extinguished. The territorial consolidation of the previous age in Europe, though striking, had been incomplete. The union of the French and Spanish kingdoms had gone on natural lines. But Italy had been less fortunate. At the death of Ferdinand her fate was still uncertain. The Spaniards stood firm in Sicily and Naples, the French seemed to stand secure in Milan. Venice had withstood the shock of united Europe. Florence seemed strengthened by the personal protection of the Holy Father. But so long as two rival foreign Powers held their ground in Italy, consolidation had gone

1516-9] Rivalry and resources of the two Powers

37

too far or not far enough. Italy must be either Italian or Spanish or French. The equilibrium was unstable. No amicable arrangement could permanently preserve the status quo. The issue could only be solved by the arbitrament of arms.

re

In Germany the case was different. Their consolidation seemed to be out of the question. Neither the preponderance of any single Power, nor that of any combination of Powers, held out hopes of successful conquest. And the German nation, inured to arms, could offer a very different resistance to that which any of the Italian States could maintain. Thus the history of Europe in this period falls into two well marked sections. The Teutonic lands work out their own development under the influence of the new religious thought, unaffected as a whole by the competition for supremacy in Europe. They had their own dangers from the Turk and in civil strife. But the struggle, although ostensibly between the Emperor and the King of France, was in reality between Spain and France for hegemony in western Europe, supremacy in Italy. The struggle was dynastic, but dynasties are the threads about which nations crystallise.

At the outset the forces were not ill-matched. On the death of Ferdinand in 1516 the Archduke Charles succeeded by hereditary right to the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and their dependencies, to the kingdoms of the two Sicilies, to the Franche-Comté of Burgundy, and to the provinces of the Netherlands. On the death of Maximilian

in 1519, he added to these the Habsburg inheritance in eastern Europe, which he wisely resigned before long to his brother Ferdinand. For soldiers he could rely on his Spanish dominions, on the regular forces organised by Charles the Bold in the Netherlands, on the less trustworthy levies of Germany and Italy. The Netherlands and Spain gave him a considerable revenue, which exceeded in gross the revenue of the French King, but was not equally available for common dynastic purposes, owing to the difficulty of exporting and transporting treasure, and the cogent necessities of internal government. The Sicilies might pay for their own government, and provide an occasional supplement, but the resources of these kingdoms hardly compensated for the needs of their defence. The maritime resources of Spain were considerable, but ill-organised and therefore not readily available.

The French King on the other hand, though his dominions were less extensive, had manifest advantages both for attack and defence. His territory was compact, and almost all capacity for internal resistance had been crushed out by the vigorous policy of Louis XI and Anne of Beaujeu. His subjects were rich and flourishing, and far more industrious than those of Spain. All their resources were absolutely at his control. Even the clergy could be relied upon for ample subsidies. His financial system was superior to that of any other existing State. He could make such laws and impose such taxes as suited his sovereign