princes of the Church, he set forth all that he had done for the secular and ecclesiastical architecture of Rome, explaining his deep sense of the necessity of securing the Popes from internal revolution and external force, together with his desire to exalt the Church by rendering her chief seat splendid in the eyes of Christendom.  This testament of Nicholas remains a memorable document.  Nothing illustrates more forcibly the transition from the Middle Ages to the worldliness of the Renaissance than the conviction of the Pontiff that the destinies of Christianity depended on the state and glory of the town of Rome.  What he began was carried on amid crime, anarchy, and bloodshed by successive Popes of the Renaissance, until at last the troops of Frundsberg paved the way, in 1527, for the Jesuits of Loyola, and Rome, still the Eternal City, cloaked her splendor and her scandals beneath the black pall of Spanish inquisitors.  The political changes in the Papacy initiated by Nicholas had been, however, by that date fully accomplished, and for more than three centuries the Popes have since held rank among the kings of the earth.

    [1] The bank of the Medici alone held 100,000 florins for the
    Pope.  Vespasiano, Vit, Nic.  V.

Of Alfonso Borgia, who reigned for three years as Calixtus III., little need be said, except that his pontificate prepared for the greatness of his nephew, Roderigo Lenzuoli, known as Borgia in compliment to his uncle.  The last days of Nicholas had been imbittered by the fall of Constantinople and the imminent peril which threatened Europe from the Turks.  The whole energies of Pius II. were directed towards the one end of uniting the European nations against the infidel.  AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini, as an author, an orator, a diplomatist, a traveller, and a courtier, bears a name illustrious in the annals of the Renaissance.  As a Pope, he claims attention for the single-hearted zeal which he displayed in the vain attempt to rouse the piety of Christendom against the foes of civilization and the faith.  Rarely has a greater contrast been displayed between the man and the pontiff than in the case of Pius.  The pleasure-loving, astute, free-thinking man of letters and the world has become a Holy Father, jealous for Christian proprieties, and bent on stirring Europe by an appeal to motives which had lost their force three centuries before.  Frederick II. and S. Louis closed the age of the Crusades, the one by striking a bargain with the infidel, the other by snatching at a martyr’s crown.  AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini was the mirror of his times—­a humanist and stylist, imbued with the rhetorical and pseudo-classic taste of the earlier Renaissance.  Pius II. is almost an anachronism.  The disappointment which the learned world experienced when they discovered that the new Pope, from whom so much had been expected, declined to play the part of their Maecenas, may be gathered from the epigrams of Filelfo upon his death[1]:—­