having Calixtus for his uncle, he was made Cardinal and then Vice-Chancellor:  in which high place he continued till his papacy, with great revenue, good fame, and peace.  Having become Pope, he made Cesare, his bastard son and bishop of Pampeluna, a Cardinal, against the ordinances and decrees of the Church, which forbid the making of a bastard Cardinal even with the Pope’s dispensation, wherefore he brought proof by false witnesses that he was born in wedlock.  Afterwards he made him a layman and took away the Cardinal’s dignity from him, and turned his mind to making a realm; wherein he fared far better than he purposed, and beginning with Rome, after undoing the Orsini, Colonnesi, Savelli, and those barons who were wont to be held in fear by former Popes, he was more full master of Rome than ever had been any Pope before.  With greatest ease he got the lordships of Romagna, the March, and the Duchy; and having made a most fair and powerful state, the Florentines held him in much fear, the Venetians in jealousy, and the King of France in esteem.  Then having got together a fine army, he showed how great was the might of a Pontiff when he hath a valiant general and one in whom he can place faith.  At last he grew to that point that he was counted the balance in the war of France and Spain.  In one word he was more evil and more lucky than ever for many ages peradventure had been any pope before.

APPENDIX IV.

Religious Revivals in Mediaeval Italy. See Chap. viii. p. 491 above.

It would be unscientific to confound events of such European importance as the foundation of the orders of S. Francis and S. Dominic with the phenomena in question.  Still it may be remarked, that the sudden rise and the extraordinary ascendency of the mendicants and preachers were due in a great measure to the sensitive and lively imagination of the Italians.  The Popes of the first half of the thirteenth century were shrewd enough to discern the political and ecclesiastical importance of movements which seemed at first to owe their force to mere fanatical revivalism.  They calculated on the intensely excitable temperament of the Italian nation, and employed the Franciscans and Dominicans as their militia in the crusade against the Empire and the heretics.  Again, it is necessary to distinguish what was essentially national from what was common to all Europeans in the Middle Ages.  Every country had its wandering hordes of flagellants and penitents, its crusaders and its pilgrims.  The vast unsettled populations of mediaeval Europe, haunted with the recurrent instinct of migration, and nightmare-ridden by imperious religious yearnings, poured flood after flood of fanatics upon the shores of Palestine.  Half-naked savages roamed, dancing and groaning and scourging their flesh, from city to city, under the stress of semi-bestial impulses.  Then came the period of organized pilgrimages.