was the main support of the Popes as princes, at a time when many thinkers looked with Dante’s jealousy upon the union of temporal and spiritual functions in the Papacy.[2] Moreover, the whole of Italy, as we have seen in the previous chapters, was undergoing a gradual and instinctive change in politics; commonwealths were being superseded by tyrannies, and the sentiments of the race at large were by no means unfavorable to this revolution.  Now was the proper moment, therefore, for the Popes to convert their ill-defined authority into a settled despotism, to secure themselves in Rome as sovereigns, and to subdue the States of the Church to their temporal jurisdiction.

    [1] See history of Porcari’s Conspiracy (Muratori, vol. xxv.).

[2] Lorenzo Valla’s famous declamation against the Donation of Constantine, which appeared during the pontificate of Nicholas, contained these reminiscences of the ‘De Monarchia’:  ’Ut Papa tantum vicarius Christi sit et non etiam Caesaris ... tune Papa et erit et dicetur pater sanctus, pater omnium, pater ecclesae.’

The work was begun by Thomas of Sarzana, who ascended the Chair of S. Peter, as Nicholas V., in 1447.  One part of his biography belongs to the history of scholarship, and need not here be touched upon.  Educated at Florence, under the shadow of the house of Medici, he had imbibed those principles of deference to princely authority which were supplanting the old republican virtues throughout Italy.  The schisms which had rent the Catholic Church were healed; and finding no opposition to his spiritual power, he determined to consolidate the temporalities of his See.  In this purpose he was confirmed by the conspiracy of Stefano Porcari, a Roman noble who had endeavored to rouse republican enthusiasm in the city at the moment of the Pope’s election, and who subsequently plotted against his liberty, if not his life.  Porcari and his associates were put to death in 1453, and by this act the Pope proclaimed himself a monarch.  The vast wealth which the jubilee of 1450 had poured into the Papal coffers[1] he employed in beautifying the city of Rome and in creating a stronghold for the Sovereign Pontiff.  The mausoleum of Hadrian, used long before as a fortress in the Middle Ages, was now strengthened, while the bridge of S. Angelo and the Leonine city were so connected and defended by a system of walls and outworks as to give the key of Rome into the hands of the Pope.  A new Vatican began to rise, and the foundations of a nobler S. Peter’s Church were laid within the circuit of the Papal domain.  Nicholas had, in fact, conceived the great idea of restoring the supremacy of Rome, not after the fashion of a Hildebrand, by enforcing the spiritual despotism of the Papacy, but by establishing the Popes as kings, by renewing the architectural magnificence of the Eternal City, and by rendering his court the center of European culture.  In the will which he recited on his death-bed to the