clear through innumerable perils.  This scion of the Italian middle class, this moral mediocrity, placed his successors in S. Peter’s chair upon a throne of such supremacy that they began immediately to claim jurisdiction over kings and nations.  Thirty-eight years before his death, when Clement VII. was shut up in S. Angelo, it seemed as though the Papal power might be abolished.  Forty-five years after his death, Sarpi, writing to a friend in 1610, expressed his firm opinion that the one, the burning question for Europe was the Papal power.[50] Through him, poor product as he was of ordinary Italian circumstances, elected to be Pope because of his easy-going mildness by prelates worn to death in fiery Caraffa’s reign, it happened that the flood of Catholic reaction was rolled over Europe.  In a certain sense we may therefore regard him as a veritable Flagellum Dei, wielded by inscrutable fate.  It seems that at momentous epochs of world-history no hero is needed to effect the purpose of the Time-Spirit.  A Gian Angelo Medici, agreeable, diplomatic, benevolent, and pleasure-loving, sufficed to initiate a series of events which kept the Occidental races in perturbation through two centuries.

[Footnote 50:  Lettere, vol. ii. p. 167.]

A great step had been taken in the pontificate of Pius IV.  That reform of the Church, which the success of Protestantism rendered necessary, and which the Catholic powers demanded, had been decreed by the Council of Trent.  Pius showed no unwillingness to give effect to the Council’s regulations; and the task was facilitated for him by his nephew, Carlo Borromeo, and the Jesuits.  It still remained, however, to be seen whether a new Pope might not reverse the policy on which the Counter-Reformation had been founded, and impede the beneficial inner movement which was leading the Roman hierarchy into paths of sobriety.  Should this have happened, it would have been impossible for Romanism to assume a warlike attitude of resistance toward the Protestants in Europe, or to have rallied its own spiritual forces.  The next election was therefore a matter of grave import.

Nothing is more remarkable in the history of the Papacy at this epoch than the singular contrast offered by each Pontiff in succession to his predecessor.  The conclave was practically uncontrolled in its choice by any external force of the first magnitude.  Though a Duke of Florence might now, by intrigue, determine the nomination of a Pius IV., no commanding Emperor or King of France, as in the times of Otto the Great or Philip le Bel, could designate his own candidate.  There was no strife, so open as in the Renaissance period, between Cardinals subsidized by Spain or Austria or France.[51] The result was that the deliberations of the conclave were determined by motives of petty interests, personal jealousies, and local considerations, to such an extent that the election seemed finally to be the result of chance