when his father died. His capable sister Anne carried on the
government for some years, and continued her father's work by
defeating a revolt of the nobles, and by marrying the young
king to the heiress of Brittany--thereby uniting to the crown
the last of the great semi-independent fiefs. When Charles
came of age, he conceived the idea of recovering the kingdom
of Naples, which the House of Anjou claimed, and which he
looked upon as part of his inheritance from that House. He was
incited to the enterprise, moreover, by Ludovico il Moro, or
Louis the Moor, an intriguing uncle of the young Duke of
Milan, who conspired to displace his nephew. In 1494 Charles
crossed the Alps with a large and well-disciplined army, and
met with no effectual opposition. The Medici of Florence and
the Pope had agreed together to resist this French intrusion,
which they feared; but the invading force proved too
formidable, and the Florentines, then under the influence of
Savonarola, looked to it for their liberation from the
Medicean rule, already oppressive. Accordingly Charles marched
triumphantly through the peninsula, making some stay at Rome.
On his approach to Naples, the Aragonese King, Alfonso,
abdicated in favor of his son, Ferdinand II., and died soon
after. Ferdinand, shut out of Naples by an insurrection, fled
to Sicily, and Charles entered the city, where the populace
welcomed him with warmth. Most of the kingdom submitted within
a few weeks, and the conquest seemed complete, as it had been
easy.
But what they had won so easily the French held with a
careless hand, and they lost it with equal ease. While they
revelled and caroused in Naples, abusing the hospitality of
their new subjects, and gathering plunder with reckless greed,
a dangerous combination was formed against them, throughout
the peninsula. Before they were aware, it had put them in
peril, and Charles was forced to retreat with haste, in the
spring of 1495, leaving an inadequate garrison to hold the
Neapolitan capital. In Lombardy, he had to fight with the
Venetians, and with his protege, Louis the Moor, now Duke of
Milan. He defeated them, and regained France in November. Long
before that time, the small force he left at Naples had been
overcome, and Ferdinand had recovered his kingdom.
In one sense, the French had nothing to show for this their
first expedition of conquest. In another sense they had much
to show and their gain was great. They had made their first
acquaintance with the superior culture of Italy. They had
breathed the air beyond the Alps, which was then surcharged
with the inspirations of the Renaissance. Both the ideas and
the spoil they brought back were of more value to France than
can be easily estimated. They had returned laden with booty,
and much of it was in treasures of art, every sight of which
was a lesson to the sense of beauty and the taste of the
people among whom they were shown. The experience and the
influence of the Italian expedition were undoubtedly very
great, and the Renaissance in France, as an artistic and a
literary birth, is reasonably dated from it.
Italian Wars of Louis XII.
Charles VIII. died suddenly in 1498 and was succeeded by his
cousin, of the Orleans branch of the Valois family, Louis XII.
The new king was weak in character, but not wicked. His first
thought on mounting the throne was of the claims of his family
to other thrones, in Italy. Besides the standing Angevin claim
to the kingdom of Naples, he asserted rights of his own to the
duchy of Milan, as a descendant of Valentina Visconti, heiress
of the ducal house which the Sforzas supplanted. In 1499 he sent
an army against Louis the Moor, and the latter fled from Milan
without an attempt at resistance. Louis took possession of the
duchy with the greatest good will of the people; but, before
half a year had passed, French taxes, French government, and
French manners had disgusted them, and they made an attempt to
restore their former tyrant. The attempt failed, and Louis the
Moor was imprisoned in France for the remainder of his life.
Milan secured, Louis XII. began preparations to repeat the
undertaking of Charles VIII. against Naples. The Neapolitan
crown had now passed to an able and popular king, Frederick,
and Frederick had every reason to suppose that he would be
supported and helped by his kinsman, Ferdinand of Aragon, the
well-known consort of Isabella of Castile. Ferdinand had the
power to hold the French king in check; but instead of using
it for the defense of the Neapolitan branch of his house, he
secretly and treacherously agreed with Louis to divide the
kingdom of Naples with him. Under these circumstances, the
conquest was easily accomplished (1501). The betrayed
Frederick surrendered to Louis, and lived as a pensionary in
France until his death. The Neapolitan branch of the House of
Aragon came to an end.
Louis and Ferdinand speedily quarreled over the division of
their joint conquest. The treacherous Spaniard cheated the
French king in treaty negotiations, gaining time to send
forces into Italy which expelled the French. It was in this
war that the Spanish general, Gonsalvo di Cordova, won the
reputation which gave him the name of "the Great Captain"; and
it was likewise in this war that the chivalric French knight,
Bayard, began the winning of his fame.
The League of Cambrai and the Holy League.
Naples had again slipped from the grasp of France, and this
time it had passed to Spain. Louis XII. abandoned the tempting
kingdom to his rival, and applied himself to the establishing
of his sovereignty over Milan and its domain. Some territory
formerly belonging to the Milaness had been ceded to Venice by
the Sforzas. He himself had ceded another district or two to
the republic in payment for services rendered. Ferdinand of
Spain had made payments in the same kind of coin, from his
Neapolitan realm, for Venetian help to secure it.
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The warlike Pope Julius II. saw Rimini and other towns
formerly belonging to the States of the Church now counted
among the possessions of the proud mistress of the Adriatic.
All of these disputants in Italy resented the gains which
Venice had gathered at their expense, and envied and feared
her somewhat insolent prosperity. They accordingly suspended
their quarrels with one another, to form a league for breaking
her down and for despoiling her. The Emperor Maximilian, who had
grievances of his own against the Venetians, joined the
combination, and Florence was bribed to become a party to it
by the betrayal of Pisa into her hands. Thus was formed the
shameful League of Cambrai (1508). The French did most of the
fighting in the war that ensued, though Pope Julius, who took
the field in person, easily proved himself a better soldier
than priest. The Venetians were driven for a time from the
greater part of the dominion they had acquired on the
mainland, and were sorely pressed. But they made terms with
the Pope, and it then became his interest, not merely to stop
the conquests of his allies, but to press them out of Italy,
if possible. He began accordingly to intrigue against the
French, and presently had a new league in operation, making
war upon them. It was called a Holy League, because the head
of the Church was its promoter, and it embraced the Emperor,
King Ferdinand of Spain, King Henry VIII. of England, and the
Republic of Venice. As the result of the ruthless and
destructive war which they waged, Louis XII., before he died,
in 1515, saw all that he had won in Lombardy stripped from him
and restored to the Sforzas--the old family of the Dukes of
Milan; Venice recovered most of her possessions, but never
regained her former power, since the discovery of the ocean
route to India, round the Cape of Good Hope, was now turning
the rich trade of the East, the great source of her wealth,
into the hands of the Portuguese; the temporal dominion of the
Popes was enlarged by the recovery of Bologna and Perugia and by
the addition of Parma and Piacenza; and Florence, which had
been a republic since the death of Savonarola, was forced to
submit anew to the Medici.
The Age of Infamous Popes.
The fighting Pope, Julius II., who made war and led armies,
while professing to be the vicar of Him who brought the
message of good-will and peace to mankind, was very far from
being the worst of the popes of his age. He was only worldly,
thinking much of his political place as a temporal sovereign
in Italy, and little of his spiritual office as the head of
the Church of Christ. As the sovereign of Rome and the Papal
States, Julius II. ran a brilliant career, and is one of the
splendid figures of the Italian renaissance. Patron of Michael
Angelo and Raphael, projector of St. Peter's, there is a
certain grandeur in his character to be admired, if we could
forget the pretended apostolic robe which he smirched with
perfidious politics and stained with blood.
But the immediate predecessors of Julius II., Sixtus IV. and
Alexander VI., had had nothing in their characters to lure
attention from the hideous examples of bestial wickedness
which they set before the world. Alexander, especially, the
infamous Borgia,--systematic murderer and robber, liar and
libertine,--accomplished practitioner of every crime and every
vice that was known to the worst society of a depraved
generation, and shamelessly open in the foulest of his
doings,--there is scarcely a pagan monster of antiquity that
is not whitened by comparison with him. Yet he sat in the
supposed seat of St. Peter for eleven years, to be venerated
as the Vicar of Christ, the "Holy Father" of the Christian
Church; his declarations and decrees in matters of faith to be
accepted as infallible inspirations; his absolution to be
craved as a passport to Heaven; his anathema to be dreaded as
a condemnation to Hell!
This evil and malignant being died in 1503. poisoned by one of
his own cups, which he had brewed for another. Julius II.
reigned until 1513; and after him came the Medicean Pope, Leo
X., son of Lorenzo the Magnificent,--princely and worldly as
Julius, but in gentler fashion; loving ease, pleasure, luxury,
art, and careless of all that belonged to religion beyond its
ceremonies and its comfortable establishment of clerical
estates. Is it strange that Christendom was prepared to give
ear to Luther?
Luther and the Reformation.
When Luther raised his voice, he did but renew a protest which
many pure and pious and courageous men before him had uttered,
against evils in the Church and falsities and impostures in
the Papacy. But some of them, like Arnold of Brescia, like
Peter Waldo, and the Albigenses, had been too far in advance
of their time, and their revolt was hopeless from the
beginning. Wyclif's movement had been timed unfortunately in
an age of great commotions, which swallowed it up. That of
Huss had roused an ignorant peasantry, too uncivilized to
represent a reformed Christianity, and had been ruined by the
fierceness of their misguided zeal. The Reformation of
Savonarola, at Florence, had been nobly begun, but not wisely
led, and it had spent its influence at the end on aims less
religious than political.
But there occurred a combination, when Luther arose, of
character in himself, of circumstances in his country, and of
temper in his generation, which made his protest more
lastingly effective. He had high courage, without rashness. He
had earnestness and ardor, without fanaticism. He had the
plain good sense and sound judgment which win public
confidence. His substantial learning put him on terms with the
scholars of his day, and he was not so much refined by it as
to lose touch with the common people. A certain coarseness in
his nature was not offensive to the time in which he lived,
but rather belonged among the elements of power in him. His
spirituality was not fine, but it was strong. He was sincere,
and men believed in him. He was open, straightforward, manly,
commanding respect. His qualities showed themselves in his
speech, which went straight to its mark, in the simplest
words, moulding the forms and phrases of the German language
with more lasting effect than the speech of any other man who
ever used it. Not many have lived in any age or any country
who possessed the gift of so persuasive a tongue, with so
powerful a character to command the hearing for it.
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And the generation to which Luther spoke really waited for a
bold voice to break into the secret of its thoughts concerning
the Church. It had inherited a century of alienation from
quarreling popes and greedy, corrupted priests and now there
had been added in its feeling the deep abhorrence roused by
such villains as the Borgia in the papal chair, and by their
creatures and minions in the priesthood of the Church. If it
is crediting too much to the common multitude of the time to
suppose them greatly sickened by the vices and corruptions of
their priests, we may be sure, at least, that they were
wearied and angered by the exactions from them, which a
vicious hierarchy continually increased. The extravagance of
the Papacy kept pace with its degradation, and Christendom
groaned under the burden of the taxes that were wrung from it
in the name of the lowly Saviour of mankind.
Nowhere in Europe were the extortions of the Church felt more
severely than in Germany, where the serfdom of the peasants
was still real and hard, and where the depressing weight of
the feudal system had scarcely been lifted from society at
all. Feudalism had given way in that country less than in any
other. Central authority remained as weak, and national
solidification as far away, as ever. Of organic unity in the
heterogeneous bundle of electoral principalities, duchies,
margravates and free cities which made up the nominal realm of
the King of the Romans, there was no more at the beginning of
the sixteenth century than there had been in the twelfth. But
that very brokenness and division in the political state of
Germany proved to be one of the circumstances which favored
the Protestant Reformation of the Church. Had monarchical
authority established itself there as in France, then the
Austro-Spanish family which wielded it, with the concentrated
bigotry of their narrow-minded race, would have crushed the
religious revolt as completely in Saxony as they did in
Austria and Bohemia.
The Ninety-five Theses.
The main events of the Reformation in Germany are so commonly
known that no more than the slightest sketching of them is
needed here. Letters of indulgence, purporting to grant a
remission of the temporal and purgatorial penalties of sin,
had been sold by the Church for centuries; but none before
Pope Leo X. had made merchandize of them in so peddlar-like
and shameful a fashion as that which scandalized the
intelligent piety of Europe in 1517. Luther, then a professor
in the new University of Wittenberg, Saxony, could not hide
his indignation, as most men did. He stood forth boldly and
challenged the impious fraud, in a series of propositions or
theses, which, after the manner of the time, he nailed to the
door of Wittenberg Church. Just that bold action was needed to
let loose the pent-up feeling of the German people. The
ninety-five theses were printed and went broadcast through the
land, to be read and to be listened to, and to stir every
class with independent ideas. It was the first great appeal
made to the public opinion of the world, after the invention
of printing had put a trumpet to the mouths of eloquent men,
and the effect was too amazing to be believed by the careless
Pope and his courtiers.
Political Circumstances.
But more than possibly--probably, indeed--the popular feeling
stirred up would never have accomplished the rupture with Rome
and the religious independence to which North Germany attained
in the end, if political motives had not coincided with
religious feelings to bring certain princes and great nobles
into sympathy with the Monk of Wittenberg. The Elector of
Saxony, Luther's immediate sovereign, had long been in
opposition to the Papacy on the subject of its enormous
collections of money from his subjects, and he was well
pleased to have the hawking of indulgences checked in his
dominions. Partly for this reason, partly because of the pride
and interest with which he cherished his new University,
partly from personal liking and admiration of Luther, and
partly, too, no doubt, in recognition of the need of Church
reforms, he gave Luther a quiet protection and a concealed
support. He was the strongest and most influential of the
princes of the Empire, and his obvious favor to the movement
advanced it powerfully and rapidly.
At first, there was no intention to break with the Papacy and
the Papal Church,--certainly none in Luther's mind. His
attitude towards both was conciliatory in every way, except as
concerned the falsities and iniquities which he had protested
against. It was not until the Pope, in June, 1520, launched
against him the famous Bull, "Exurge Domine," which left no
alternative between abject submission and open war, that
Luther and his followers cast off the authority of the Roman
Church and its head, and grounded their faith upon Holy
Scripture alone. By formally burning the Bull, Luther accepted
the papal challenge, and those who believed with him were
ready for the contest.
The Diet of Worms.
In 1521, the reformer was summoned before a Diet of the
Empire, at Worms, where a hearing was given him. The influence
of the Church, and of the young Austro-Spanish Emperor,
Charles V., who adhered to it, was still great enough to
procure his condemnation; but they did not dare to deal with
him as Huss had been dealt with. He was suffered to depart
safely, pursued by an imperial edict which placed the ban of
the Empire on all who should give him countenance or support.
His friends among the nobles spirited him away and concealed
him in a castle, the Wartburg, where he remained for several
months, employed in making his translation of the Bible.
Meantime, the Emperor had been called away from Germany by his
multifarious affairs, in the Netherlands and Spain, and had
little attention to give to Luther and the questions of
religion for half-a-dozen years. He was represented in Germany
by a Council of Regency, with the Elector of Saxony at the
head of, it; and the movement of reformation, if not
encouraged in his absence, was at least considerably
protected. It soon showed threatening signs of wildness and
fanaticism in many quarters; but Luther proved himself as
powerful in leadership as he had been in agitation, and the
religious passion of the time was controlled effectively, on
the whole.
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Organization of the Lutheran Church.
Before the close of the year 1521, Pope Leo X. died, and his
successor, Adrian, while insisting upon the enforcement of the
Edict of Worms against Luther and his supporters, yet
acknowledged the corruptions of the Church and promised a
reformation of them. His promises came too late; his
confessions only gave testimony to the independent reformers
which their opponents could not impeach. There was no longer
any thought of cleansing the Church of Rome, to abide in it. A
separated--a restored Church--was clearly determined on, and
Luther framed a system of faith and discipline which was
adopted in Saxony, and then accepted very generally by the
reformed Churches throughout Germany. In 1525, the Elector
Frederick of Saxony died. He had quietly befriended the
Lutherans and tolerated the reform, but never identified
himself with them. His brother, John, who succeeded him, made
public profession of his belief in the Lutheran doctrines, and
authoritatively established the church system which Luther had
introduced. The Landgrave of Hesse Cassel, the Margrave of
Brandenburg, and the Dukes of Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Zell,
followed his example; while the imperial cities of Frankfort,
Nuremberg, Bremen, Strasburg, Brunswick, Nordhausen, and
others, formally ranged themselves on the same side. By the
year 1526, when a diet at Spires declared the freedom of each
state in the Empire to deal with the religious reform
according to its own will, the Reformation in Germany was a
solidly organized fact. But those of the reform had not yet
received their name, of "Protestants." That came to them three
years later, when the Roman party had rallied its forces in a
new diet at Spires, to undo the declaration of 1526, and the
leaders of the Lutheran party recorded their solemn protest.
The Austro-Burgundian Marriage.
To understand the situation politically, during the period of
struggle for and against the Reformation, it will be necessary
to turn back a little, for the noting of important occurrences
which have not been mentioned.
When Albert II., who was King of Hungary and Bohemia, as well
as King of the Romans (Emperor-elect, as the title came to be,
soon afterwards), died, in 1439, he was succeeded by his
second cousin Frederick III., Duke of Styria, and from that
time the Roman or imperial crown was held continuously in the
Austrian family, becoming practically hereditary. But
Frederick did not succeed to the duchy of Austria, and he
failed of election to the throne in Hungary and Bohemia. Hence
his position as Emperor was peculiarly weak and greatly
impoverished, through want of revenue from any considerable
possessions of his own. During his whole long reign, of nearly
fifty-four years, Frederick was humiliated and hampered by his
poverty; the imperial authority was brought very low, and
Germany was in a greatly disordered state. There were frequent
wars between its members, and between Austria and Bohemia, with
rebellions in Vienna and elsewhere; while the Hungarians were
left to contend with the aggressive Turks, almost unhelped.
But in 1477 a remarkable change in the circumstances and
prospects of the family of the Emperor Frederick III. was made
by the marriage of his son and heir, Maximilian, to Mary, the
daughter and heiress of the wealthy and powerful Duke of
Burgundy, Charles the Bold. The bridegroom was so poor that
the bride is said to have loaned him the money which enabled
him to make a fit appearance at the wedding. She had lost, as
we saw, the duchy of Burgundy, but the valiant arm of
Maximilian enabled her to hold the Burgundian county, Franche
Comté, and the rich provinces of the Netherlands, which formed
at that time, perhaps, the most valuable principality in
Europe. The Duchess Mary lived only five years after her
marriage; but she left a son, Philip, who inherited the
Netherlands and Franche Comté, and Maximilian ruled them as
his guardian.
In 1493, the Emperor Frederick died, and Maximilian, who had
been elected King of the Romans some years before, succeeded
him in the imperial office. He was never crowned at Rome, and
he took the title, not used before, of King of Germany and
Emperor-elect. He was Archduke of Austria, Duke of Styria,
Carinthia and Carniola, and Count of Tyrol; and, with his
guardianship in the Low Countries, he rose greatly in
importance and power above his father. But he accomplished
less than might possibly have been done by a ruler of more
sureness of judgment and fixity in purpose. His plans were
generally beyond his means, and the failures in his
undertakings were numerous. He was eager to interfere with the
doings of Charles VIII. and Louis XIII. in Italy; but the
Germanic diet gave him so little support that he could do
nothing effective. He joined the League of Cambrai against
Venice, and the Holy League against France, but bore no
important part in either. His reign was signalized in Germany
by the division of the nation into six administrative
"Circles," afterwards increased to ten, and by the creation of
a supreme court of appeal, called the Imperial Chamber,--both
of which measures did something towards the diminution of
private wars and disorders.
The Austro-Spanish Marriage.--Charles V.