Pro magna parte vetustas
  Creditur; acceptam parce movere fidem.

It is only this incurable indifference that renders Machiavelli’s comic portraits of Fra Alberigo and Fra Timoteo at all intelligible.  They are neither satires nor caricatures, but simple pictures drawn for the amusement of contemporaries and the stupefaction of posterity.

The criticism of the Italian writers, so far as we have yet followed it, was directed against two separate evils—­the vicious worldliness of Rome, and the demoralization of the clergy both in their dealings with the people and in their conventual life.  Contempt for false miracles and spurious reliques, and the horror of the traffic in indulgences, swelled the storm of discontent among the more enlightened.  But the people continued to make saints, to adore wonder-working shrines, and to profit by the spiritual advantages which could be bought.  Pius II., mindful of the honor of his native city, canonized S. Bernardine and S. Catherine of Siena.  Innocent VIII consecrated a chapel for the Lance of Longinus, which he had received from the Turk as part-payment for the guardianship of Djem.  The Venetian Senate offered 10,000 ducats for the seamless coat of Christ (1455).  The whole of Italy was agitated by the news that S. Andrew’s head had arrived from Patras (1462).  The Pope and his Cardinals went forth to meet it near the Milvian bridge.  There Pius II. pronounced a Latin speech of welcome, while Bessarion delivered an oration when the precious member was deposited in S. Peter’s.  In this passion for reliques two different sentiments seem to have been combined—­the merely superstitious belief in the efficacy of charms, which caused the Venetians to guard the body of S. Mark so jealously, and the Neapolitans to watch the liqifaction of the blood of S. Januarius with a frenzy of excitement—­and that nobler respect for the persons of the mighty dead which induced Sigismondo Malatesta to transport the body of Gemistus Pletho to Rimini, and which rendered the supposed coffin of Aristotle at Palermo an object of admiration to Mussulman and Christian alike.  The bones of Virgil, it will be remembered, had been built into the walls of Naples, while those of Livy were honored with splendid sepulture at Padua.

Owing to the separation between religion and morality which existed in Italy under the influence of Papal and monastic profligacy, the Italians saw no reason why spiritual benefits should not be purchased from a notoriously rapacious Pontiff, or why the penalty of hell should not depend upon the mere word of a consecrated monster.  The Pope as successor of S. Peter, and the Pope as Roman sovereign, were two separate beings.  Many curious indications of the mixed feeling of the people upon this point, and of the advantage which the Pope derived from his anomalous position, may be gathered from the historians of the period.  Machiavelli, in his narrative of the massacre