The invention of printing1 (1440?) multiplied books. The flight of learned Greeks into Italy spread the study of their ancient classical language. France, Germany, and England received in turn the impulse of Italy, which has been the instructress of modern Europe in commerce, manufactures, arts, and literature. Her painters, sculptors, architects, scholars, and poets of this age and the preceding, reached the highest spheres of excellence. No less important in their results are the geographical discoveries of Spain and Portugal in this period. The former, in the expedition of Columbus (1492), added a new world to the globe, and the latter by Vasco de Gama's surmounting the storms of the Cape of Good Hope (1497) opened a direct road to those rich and extensive oriental regions of which occasional adventurous travellers had revealed the wonders, and whose lucrative commerce had reared the greatness of Venice and Genoa.3

MODERN HISTORY.

The expedition of Charles VIII. of France into Italy, for the assertion of his claim to the Sicilian kingdom (1494), is the point fixed by historians as the termination of the Middle Ages, and the commencement of Modern History. The league formed by the states of Italy to resist that prince in his retreat is the first of those combinations among states for the maintenance of a "balance of power," which, in the progress of the art of diplomacy, has extended from Italy over all Europe. The twenty years after this expedition are occupied by wars of a similar character,-that, for example, arising from the great confederacy against Venice, termed the League of Cambray (1508); and that between Louis XII. and Ferdinand VI. of Spain, for the occupation of Naples, which terminated in the expulsion of the French from Italy; while the period concludes with the conquest of the Milanese and Genoa by Francis I. (1515).

At the beginning of the sixteenth century the thrones of Europe were filled by princes all youthful, and of great and

1 Printing was introduced into England by William Caxton, a London merchant, in

1471.

2 The compass had been discovered in the fourteenth century,-it is alleged in 1340, at Amalfi, in Naples,-but its practical results in navigation appear to have been slow. 3 Steam is restoring the old route to India by the Red Sea.

4 Hallam, Middle Ages, vol. i. preface.

various talent: Francis I. of France (1515-1547), Henry VIII. of England (1509-1547), Charles I. of Spain1 (15161556), Pope Leo X. (Giovanni de Medici, 1513-1521), the Turkish Sultans, Selim I. (1512-1520), and Solyman II. the Magnificent (1520-1566), the two Jameses of Scotland, IV. (1488-1513) and V. (1513-1542), all proved princes of ability, and some of them rise to the dignity of genius. As the growth of royalty in the Middle Ages, and its development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, form a leading feature in European history, we deem it appropriate here to transcribe Guizot's admirable synopsis of the progress of that principle. "In the fifth century, at the period of the great invasion of the Germans, two royalties are before us-the barbarian royalty and the imperial royalty that of Clovis and that of Constantine,-each very different in principles and consequences.

"The barbarian royalty was essentially elective: although the election of the German kings was not accompanied by the forms to which we are accustomed to attach that idea; they were, in fact, military chiefs, bound to render their power freely acceptable to a great number of companions who obeyed them as the bravest and ablest. Election, therefore, was the primitive and essential characteristic of the barbarian royalty: the predominance of certain families gradually infused into the institution the hereditary principle.

"Another idea or element had also previously been infused into the barbarian royalty, springing from religious feelings. We find amongst some of the barbarian nations-for example amongst the Goths-the conviction that the families of their kings were descended from the gods, or from the heroes whom they had made gods-from Odin for instance. It is the situation of the kings of Homer, who had sprung from gods or demigods, and were the objects of a sort of religious veneration, notwithstanding the narrow limits of their power.

"The Roman or imperial royalty was the impersonation of the State, the inheritor of the sovereignty and majesty of the Roman people: the emperor was the representative of the senate, of the comitia, of the entire republic: he exer

1 More familiarly known by his title Charles V. as emperor of Germany; in this dignity he succeeded his grandfather Maximilian in 1519, and added to the House of Spain the dominions of that of Austria.

cised the whole power of the people,' and in the most formidable intensity.1

"Christianity had laboured for three centuries to introduce the religious element into the empire: under Constantine it succeeded, not in making it paramount, but in enabling it to act an important part. Then royalty presented itself in a different aspect; its origin ceased to be of the earth; the prince was not the representative of the public sovereignty, but the image of God, the delegate and representative of Heaven. Power came down to him from on high, while in the imperial royalty it had come up to him from below.

"But a new power seated itself by the side of this religious royalty, a power more connected with God (and therefore with the source whence royalty emanated) than royalty itself. This was the ecclesiastical power, which came forward to interpose between God and kings, and between kings and people; so that royalty, the image of the Divinity, ran the chance of sinking to a mere instrument of human interpreters of the Divine will.

"Such were the various orders of royalty which manifested themselves amidst the wreck of the Roman empire. Their fortunes were as diverse as their principles.

"In France, under the first race, the barbarian royalty prevailed. There were several attempts of the clergy to impress on it the imperial or the religious character; but election in the royal family, with some mixture of hereditary right and religious ideas remained predominant.

"In Italy, among the Ostrogoths, the imperial royalty overcame the barbarian manners. Theodoric asserted himself the successor of the emperors.

"In Spain royalty assumed the religious type more than elsewhere. The religious character held the sway, if not in the government, properly so called, of the Visigothic kings, at least in the laws with which the clergy inspired them.

"In England, among the Saxons, the harbarian manners subsisted almost entire. The kingdoms of the Heptarchy were no more than the domains of different bands having each its chief. Military election was more clearly displayed there than any where else. The Anglo-Saxon royalty was the most faithful type of the barbarian.

"Thus from the fifth to the seventh century, while the three

1 M. Guizot compares this fact with the sovereignty of Napoleon, as the professed elected head of the French Republic.

sorts of royalty manifested themselves in general affairs, some one prevailed, according to circumstances, in each of the States of Europe."

After alluding to the progress of the religious royalty in the reigns of Pepin, and of Louis, Charlemagne's son, M. Guizot proceeds :—

"At the death of Louis le Debonnaire, the three sorts of royalty almost equally disappeared amidst the anarchy into which Europe was plunged. After a certain interval, when the feudal system prevailed, a fourth royalty presented itself, different from all those we have hitherto contemplated, namely, the feudal royalty. This species is confused and difficult to define. In theory the king, in the feudal system, was the suzerain of suzerains, the chief of chiefs: he was held by fixed ties, through the different degrees of vassalship, to the whole society; but this was a mere theory which never governed facts. The majority of the feudal lords, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, were completely independent of royalty, and had very trifling relations with it. All the sovereignties were local and separate. name of king, borne by one of the feudal chiefs, expressed a thing past rather than present."

The

M. Guizot goes on to shew the gradual extrication of royalty from feudalism, till it assumed more distinctly the form of a superior and public authority. "It was not in the relation either of a barbarian, religious, or imperial royalty, that it exercised its empire: the power it possessed was very limited, imperfect, and occasional; the power, in some degree (I know not any expression more exact), of a great Justice of Peace for the whole country. This is the veritable origin of modern royalty—its vital principle. It is as the depositary and protector of the public order, of general justice, and of the common interests-under the features of a great magistracy-the centre and nucleus of society-that royalty has exhibited itself to the eyes of nations, and has monopolized their force by obtaining their adhesion."

This outline of the history of royalty will shew the importance of the personal characters of princes as the directors of national movements, and the wielders of national resources in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

1 This is less true with respect to England for the reason assigned in p. 254. It must be remembered that in his " History of Civilisation," M. Guizot takes France as his leading type of European history.

The great event of the sixteenth century is the Reformation. Christianity had long been held in the Babylonish captivity of the papacy; the least popular movement of religious freedom had been sternly repressed. In the thirteenth century, when the thunder of Innocent III. rolled unresisted over Europe, a crusade of savage soldiery, and the establishment of the Inquisition, had almost exterminated the unhappy Albigenses of Southern France (1210). The Lollards, the followers of Wicklif, had, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, been doomed to the stake by the edicts of an English Parliament. His doctrines had found their way to Bohemia, and the Council of Constance (1417) perjured an imperial safe-conduct to extirpate the leaders2 of the movement. The Hussite war that followed this crime had ended. The "Schism of the West" had been healed. The failure of contests with princes had taught the Papacy to keep in abeyance its claims to universal empire, and the Pope was content to share with the emperor the ecclesiastical power of Germany. Popular movements for the freedom of the church had been violently stifled; œcumenical councils, which may be viewed as movements of the church aristocracy in the same direction, had been warded off. Amidst the profligate and effeminate civilisation of Italy, surrounded by the progress of learning and arts, the Papacy, with unwithdrawn claims, slumbered on the pillow of past power. Her exactions were habitual, and her corruptions had assumed the same complexion of custom; but her policy managed to elude the complaints of German diets or ecclesiastical bodies. Yet the popular movement though stifled was not extinguished; free-thinking in good and bad forms was abroad among ecclesiastics themselves; the scholastic philosophy, the basis of her theology, had been superseded by more solid learning; scholars, her own children, who shrunk from being reformers, satirized her whole system; and though Luther had never been born, the state of the European mind was such, that the principle of freedom of inquiry, of which the Reformation is the practical expression, would soon have burst the antiquated fetters in which the human intellect was bound. Luther, viewing him apart

1 See p. 259.

* John Huss and Jerome of Prague: their martyrdom precedes the commencement of Luther's movement (1517) exactly a century. Some men have been fond of apparently discovering the retributive principle of the government of Providence in analogies among the dates of chronology.