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Complaints were made of the tyranny of the Papal hierarchy, and of their encroachments on social and civil life, as well as of the worldliness and gross immorality of the priests and monks. The Papacy had reached its lowest depth of moral degradation under Pope Alexander VI. We hear nothing, however, of the impressions produced on Luther, in this respect, in the circumstances of his early life.
A traveller acquainted with the fully papal Rome, coming back any time during the past winter, must have immediately noticed that something momentous had happened something hostile to the elements of picture and colour and "style." My first warning was that ten minutes after my arrival I found myself face to face with a newspaper stand.
He defined the destiny of Italian literature in the Middle Ages, and began the great era of the Renaissance. His father was the personal friend of Dante, and a partaker of the same exile. While at Avignon, then the seat of the papal court, on one occasion he made an excursion to the fountain of Vaucluse, taking with him his son, the future poet, then in the tenth year of his age.
However, we had not long been on our way before the morning air blew away all our troubles, and we rumbled cheerfully onward, ready to encounter even the papal custom-house officers at Ponte Centino. Our road thither was a pretty steep descent. I remember the barren landscape of hills, with here and there a lonely farm-house, which there seemed to be no occasion for, where nothing grew.
Their ingeniously compiled legend runs in this wise: Clement's death in the castle of Roquemaure occurred while he was on his way homeward from the Council of Vienne; where keeping with the King the bargain which had won for him the Papal throne he had abolished the Order of the Templars and had condemned their Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, to be burned alive.
Do this, and we shall have had a jubilee such as the world has not seen for many a long year. But ah! you but mock us, bitterly, cruelly mock us, when you deny us blessings which it is in your power to give, and offer us those which are not yours to bestow. But it is a mockery which will return, and at no distant day, in sevenfold vengeance upon, we say not Pio Nono, but the papal system.
Having thus secured the papal alliance, Henry of France was by no means disposed to so easy a compromise as had been looked for. The conference collapsed. If Philip really had hoped, as rumour said, to be enabled by the peace to introduce Spanish troops into England for his own ends, he was doomed to disappointment. So it was also with his hopes of an heir to secure him the English succession.
It may be readily imagined that this restitution of a debt incurred by Florence when she was fighting for her liberties, to which act of justice her victorious tyrant was compelled by his Papal kinsman, did not soften Alessandro's bad feeling for the creditor.
Ten years after our farewell to Sister Maria Colomba behind the bars of the convent-parlor we saw her again, and, armed with a papal permission, were shown by her over the whole convent. Those rare occasions when a stranger is allowed to penetrate the "enclosure" are always gala-days for the nuns.
It followed from this assumption of the supreme legislative power that, in the first place, the Pope himself claimed not to be bound by the laws which he made. Thus in the thirteenth century papal writers denied that the Roman Church could commit simony.
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