At the very outset, Clement was compelled to lend his countenance to the suppression of the Knights Templars by the temporal power.  Philip forced the pope and the Consistory to listen to an appalling and incredible arraignment of the dead Boniface; then he was rewarded for abandoning the persecution of his enemy’s memory by abject adulation:  the pope had been spared from publicly condemning his predecessor.

John XXII. was not, in the same sense, a tool of the last monarchs of the old House of Capet, of which, during his rule, a younger branch succeeded in the person of Philip of Valois.  John was at constant feud with the Emperor Louis of Bavaria, and also, within the ecclesiastical pale, with the Franciscan Order.  Louis of Bavaria died during the pontificate of Clement VI., and Charles of Bohemia, already emperor in the eyes of the pope, was accepted by Germany.  He virtually abdicated the imperial claim to rule in Italy; but by his “Golden Bull” he terminated the old source of quarrel, the question of the authority by which emperors were elected.  The “Babylonish captivity” ended when Gregory XI. left Avignon to die in Italy; it was to be replaced by the Great Schism.

For thirty-eight years rival popes, French and Italian, claimed the supremacy of the Church.  The schism was ended by the Council of Constance; Latin Christianity may be said to have reached its culminating point under Nicholas V., during whose pontificate the Turks captured Constantinople.

* * * * *

LEOPOLD VON RANKE

History of the Popes

Leopold von Ranke was born at Wiehe, on December 21, 1795, and died on May 23, 1886.  He became Professor of History at Berlin at the age of twenty-nine; and his life was passed in researches, the fruits of which he gave to the world in an invaluable series of historical works.  The earlier of these were concerned mainly with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—­in English history generally called the Tudor and Stuart periods—­based on examinations of the archives of Vienna and Rome, Venice and Florence, as well as of Berlin.  In later years, when he had passed seventy, he travelled more freely outside of his special period.  The “History of the Popes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” here presented was published in 1834-7.  The English translation by Sarah Austin (1845) was the subject of review in one of Macaulay’s famous essays.  It is mainly concerned with the period, not of the Reformation itself, but of the century and a quarter following—­roughly from 1535 to 1760, the period during which the religious antagonisms born of the Reformation were primary factors in all European complications.

I.—­The Papacy at the Reformation