the gates of heaven and purgatory.  In the midst of crime he believes himself to be the representative of Christ on earth.  These anomalies, glaring as they seem to us, and obvious as they might be to deeper thinkers 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 energies of Sixtus and of Alexander.

    [1] See Mach. Ist.  Fior. lib. i.