of a new era.  These changes were more apparent in Italy than elsewhere, through the revival of arts and letters early in the fourteenth century.  Cimabue, Giotto, and the Pisani, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, set culture forward on fresh paths divergent from previous mediaeval tradition.  The gradual enfeeblement of the Empire and the distraction of the Church during the Great Schism prepared the means whereby both Renaissance and Reformation were eventually realized.  The Council of Constance brought the Western nations into active diplomatical relations, and sowed seeds of thought which afterwards sprang up in Luther.

Meanwhile a special nidus had been created in the South.  The Italian communes freed themselves from all but titular subjection to the Empire, and were practically independent of the Papacy during its exile in Avignon.  They succumbed to despots, and from Italian despotism emerged the Machiavellian conception of the State.  This conception, modified in various ways, by Sarpi’s theory of Church and State, by the Jesuit theory of Papal Supremacy, by the counter-theory of the Divine Right of Kings, by theories of Social Contract and the Divine Right of Nations, superseded the elder ideal of Universal Monarchy.  It grew originally out of the specific conditions of Italy in the fifteenth century, and acquired force from that habit of mind, fostered by the Classical Revival, which we call humanism.  Humanism had flourished in Italy since the days of Petrarch, and had been communicated by Italian teachers to the rest of Europe.  As in the South it generated the new learning and the new culture which I have described in the first five volumes of my work, and acted as a solvent on the mediaeval idea of the Empire, so in the North it generated a new religious enthusiasm and acted as a solvent on the mediaeval idea of the Church.  All through the middle ages, nothing seemed more formidable to the European mind than heresy.  Any sacrifices were willingly made in order to secure the unity of the Catholic Communion.  But now, by the Protestant rebellion, that spell was broken, and the right of peoples to choose their faith, in dissent from a Church declared corrupt, was loudly proclaimed.

So long as we keep this line of reasoning in view, we shall recognize why it is not only uncritical, but also impossible, to separate the two movements severally called Renaissance and Reformation.  Both had a common root in humanism, and humanism owed its existence on the one hand to the recovery of antique literature, on the other to the fact that the Papacy, instead of striving to stamp it out as it had stamped out Provencal civilization, viewed it at first with approval.  The new learning, as our ancestors were wont to call it, involved, in Michelet’s pregnant formula, the discovery of the world and man, and developed a spirit of revolt against mediaevalism in all its manifestations.  Its fruits were speedily discerned in bold exploratory studies, sound methods