It does not enter into the scope of the present chapter to enlarge upon a subject treated elsewhere in this volume,—the causes which led up to the Protestant Reformation. But, as was made clear by the rise of the Jesuits, the decrees of Trent, the acts and virtues of a multitude of Saints, the renewed austerity of the papal Court, and the successful resistance to a further advance on the part of Lutheranism in Germany, and of Calvinism in France and the Belgic Provinces, there also existed a Catholic Reformation, within the Church, not tinged with heresy, but founded on a deeper apprehension of the dogmas in dispute, and on a passionate desire for their triumph. In one sense, this great movement might be described as a reaction, since it aimed at bringing back the past. In another, it was merely a development of principles or a more effectual realisation of them, whose beginnings are discernible long before Trent. Thus we may regard the fifteenth century as above all an era of transition. It exhibits violent contrasts, especially among the high clergy and in religious associations, between a piety which was fruitful in good works and a worldliness which has never been surpassed. Corruption on a scale so wide as, in the opinion of many, to justify revolt from Pope and bishops, was matched by remarkable earnestness in preaching necessary reforms, by devotion to learning in the service of religion, by an extraordinary flow of beneficence, attested by the establishment of schools, hospitals, brotherhoods, gilds, and asylums for the destitute, no less than by the magnificent churches, unrivalled paintings, and multiplied festivals, and by the new shrines, pilgrimages, miracle-plays, and popular gatherings for the celebration of such events as the Jubilees of 1475 and 1500, which fling over the whole period an air of gaiety and suggest that life in the days of the Renaissance was often a public masquerade.
Catholic tradition, in the shape of an all-pervading and long-established Church, towered high above the nations. It was embodied in a vast edifice of laws. It kept its jurisdiction intact, its clergy exempt, and held its own Courts all over Christendom. It owned from a fifth to a third of the soil in mortmain. It had revenues far exceeding the resources of kings, to which it was continually adding by fresh taxation. It offered enormous prizes to the well-born in its bishoprics, abbacies, and cathedral Chapters, which carried with them feudal dominion over lands, serfs, and tribute-yielding cities. It opened a career to clever ambitious lads of the middle and lower class. Within its cloisters women might study as well as pray, and rule their own estates, wielding the crozier and equalling prelates in dignity and power. The Church, too, maintained her pre-eminence, though shaken once and again, in the old Universities, at Paris, Oxford, and Bologna, while founding new seats of learning at Louvain (1426) or along the Rhine; as far east as Ingolstadt (1472) or even Frankfort-on-the-Oder (1506), and as far south as Alcalä (1499). Her authority was still strong enough to put down the Hussites for a time, though not without conceding to them points of discipline. It showed no dismay at the light which was dawning in humanism. And it gave back to ruined and desolate Rome the Augustan glory of a capital in which letters, arts, manners, attained to a fulness of life and splendour of expression, such as had not been witnessed in Europe since the fall of the Empire.
From the days of Nicholas V down to those of Leo X, Rome was the world’s centre. The Popes held in their hands the key of religion; they aspired to possess the key of knowledge. Along every line of enterprise and from every point of the compass, except one, they were visible. They would not dedicate themselves to the long-sought reformation in head and members, although they allowed its necessity again and again in the most emphatic terms. The plans which were laid before them by ardent churchmen like Cesarini we shall consider as we proceed. But they declined to take those measures without which no lasting improvement of the Curia was to be anticipated. They were loth to summon a representative Council; they refused to cross the Alps and meet the German people, or to listen when it drew up its grievances in formal array. Had the Fifth of Lateran fulfilled its task, instead of leaving it to the Council of Trent half a century later, the Diet of Worms might have never met, and Luther would perhaps have lingered out his years in a cell at Wittenberg.
Two series of considerations may explain why the papacy shrank from calling a fresh parliament of Western prelates and sovereigns, and why it relegated these questions of discipline to a secondary place. One was that the Holy See felt itself engaged in the necessary and therefore just enterprise of recovering its temporal independence, shattered since the migration to Avignon. That plea has been urged on behalf of Sixtus IV, and still more of Julius II. The other was that it had not long emerged from a period of revolution. In Rome the Church had been constantly regarded as a monarchy with the Pope at its head; he was the supreme judge of spiritual causes, from whom there could be no appeal. But in the fourth and fifth sessions of Constance (1415) another view had prevailed,—a view unknown to earlier ages and impossible to carry out in practice,—that of the superiority to the Pope of the Church in Council assembled. This doctrine, put forward by Cardinal d’Ailly, by Gerson, and by the followers of William Occam, might be welcome to lawyers; but it had no roots among the people; it had never flourished in the schools deemed orthodox; and it irritated as much as it alarmed the Pontiff. At Basel it led to repeated and flagrant violations of the ancient canons. During the eighteen years of its existence (1431-49) this convention had deposed one Pope, Eugenius IV, elected by lawful scrutiny; it had chosen another, Felix V, Duke of Savoy, who was hardly recognised beyond the valley of the Rhone. It had compelled bishops to sit and vote, not only with simple priests but with laymen, on questions which concerned the Catholic faith. It had submitted to the feeble Emperor Sigismund; its president was D’Allemand, the Cardinal of Avignon-an ominous title; and for ten years it sat in permanent schism. Professing to do away with abuses, it enacted them once more in the shape of commendam, annates, and pluralities. When the large-minded reformers, Cardinal Julian Cesarini and Nicholas of Cusa, forsook its tumultuous sittings; when Aeneas Sylvius, that politic man of letters, looked round for a wealthier patron and joined himself to Eugenius; and when the German prelates could no longer hold it up as a shield against the strokes of the Curia, the Council came to an end, and with it all hopes of reform on the parliamentary system. Felix V, last of the anti-Popes, laid down the keys and the tiara (April, 1449) in the house called La Grotte at Lausanne, under the roof of which Gibbon was afterwards to complete his History of The Decline and Fall. Henceforth it was evident that the spiritual restoration of Christendom would come, if ever it came, from the zeal of individuals. For the Council had failed; no Pope would risk his supreme authority by a repetition of Basel; and the rules of the Roman Chancery which Martin V had confirmed were, as a matter of course, approved by his successors.
Private effort could do much, so long as it refrained from calling dogma in question or resisting the legal claims of Pope and bishops. But the creed was not in danger. So far as we can judge from the local Councils and the literature of the years before us, in no part of Europe did men at this time cast away their inherited beliefs, with the exception of a humanist here and there, like Pomponazzo at Rome-and even these kept their denials to themselves or acquiesced in the common practices of religion. In 1466 groups of the Fraticelli were discovered and put down by Pius II at Poli near Palestrina. In the same year a German sect, of which the chiefs were Brothers Janko and Livin von Wirsberg, was denounced to Henry, Bishop of Ratisbon, by the papal Legate. The Fraticelli appeared again in 1471 on the coast of Tuscany; and notices are extant of heretics in the diocese of Reims and at Bologna. The Maranos, or crypto-Jews, in Spain deserve separate consideration. Nor did the Waldensians ever cease to exist in Italy. But obstinate unbelief was rare: even a reprobate like Sigismondo Malatesta, the monstrous tyrant of Rimini, would not die without the last Sacraments. Machiavelli, who writes as if the Christian faith were an exploded superstition, had a priest with him when he expired. Of Caterina Sforza, whose crimes and profligacies were notorious, it is on record that, while she sinned, she endowed convents and built churches. Other examples of repentant humanists are Giovanni Pontano and Antonio Galatea. Among Germans who, after quarrelling with the papal authorities or questioning articles of the creed,