It would not be just to condemn Spain and the Papacy because, being reactionary powers, they quenched for three centuries the genial light of Italy.  We must rather bear in mind that both Spain and the Papacy were at that time cosmopolitan factors of the first magnitude, with perplexing world-problems confronting them.  Charles bore upon his shoulders the concerns of the Empire, the burden of the German revolution, and the distracting anxiety of a duel with Islam.  When his son bowed to the yoke of government, he had to meet the same perplexities, complicated with Netherlands in revolt, England in antagonism, and France in dubious ferment.  A succession of Popes were hampered by painful European questions, which the instinct of self-preservation taught them to regard as paramount.  They were fighting for existence; for the Catholic creed; for their own theocratic sovereignty.  They held strong cards.  But against them were drawn up the battalions of heresy, free thought, political insurgence in the modern world.  The Zeitgeist that has made us what we are, had begun to organize stern opposition to the Church.  It was natural enough that both the Spanish autocrat and the successor of S. Peter should at this crisis have regarded Italian affairs as subordinate in importance to wider matters which demanded their attention.  Yet if we shift our point of view from this high vantage-ground of Imperial and Papal anxieties, and place ourselves in the center of Italy as our post of observation, it will be apparent that nothing more ruinous for the prosperity of the Italian people could have been devised than the joint autocracy accorded at Bologna to two cosmopolitan but non-national forces in their midst.  An alien monarchy greedy for gold, a panic-stricken hierarchy in terror for its life, warped the tendencies and throttled the energies of the most artistically sensitive, the most heroically innovating of the existing races.  However we may judge the merits of the Spaniards, they were assuredly not those which had brought Italy into the first rank of European nations.  The events of a single century proved that, far from being able to govern other peoples, Spain was incapable of self-government on any rational principle.  Whatever may have been the policy thrust upon the chief of Latin Christianity in the desperate struggle with militant rationalism, the repressive measures which it felt bound to adopt were eminently pernicious to a race like the Italians, who showed no disposition for religious regeneration, and who were yet submitted to the tyranny of ecclesiastical discipline and intellectual intolerance at every point.