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 lamentation and complaint, but to no purpose. In the thirteenth century Bishop Grosseteste and St Louis assailed it in vigorous terms; in the fourteenth, Bishop Alvar Pelayo, a penitentiary of John XXII, was equally fearless and unsparing in his denunciation. In 1385 Charles V of France asserted in an ordonnance that the Cardinals had absorbed all the preferment in the kingdom—benefices, abbeys, orphanages, hospitals etc.—exacting revenue to the utmost and leaving the institutions disabled and the fabric to fall into ruin. At the Council of Siena, in 1423, the French prelates declared that all the benefices in France were sold by the Curia, so that the churches were reduced to desolation. In 1475 the Abbot of Abbots of the great Cistercian Order complained that all the abbeys in France were held in commendam, and consequently were laid waste. England in self-defence had enacted, in the fourteenth century, the Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire; while in 1438 France protected herself with the Pragmatic Sanction, but other nations lacked the strength or the resolution to do likewise and the resultant irritation continued to grow ominously. In Spain, which refused to throw off the yoke as late as 1547, the Primate Siliceo of Toledo asserted, in a memorial to Charles V, that there were then in Rome five or six thousand Spaniards engaged in bargaining for benefices, “such being, for our sins, the present custom”; and he added that in every cathedral chapter in the land the majority of canons had been either hostlers in Rome or traders in benefices who scarce knew grammar enough to read their hours.

In this absorption of patronage the feature most provocative of friction with the sovereigns was the claim gradually advanced to nominate bishops; for these prelates were mostly temporal lords of no little influence, and in the political schemes of the papacy the character of its nominees might well create uneasiness in the State. Quarrels over the exercise of this power were of frequent occurrence. Venice, for instance, which was chronically in open or concealed hostility to Rome, was very sensitive as to the fidelity of its acquisitions on the mainland, where a bishop who was the agent of an enemy might be the source of infinite mischief. Thus, in 1485, there was a struggle over the vacant see of Padua, in which Venice triumphed by sequestrating other revenues of Cardinal Michiel, appointed by Innocent VIII. Again, in 1491, a contest arose over the patriarchate of Aquileia, the primatial see of Venetia, resulting in the exile of the celebrated humanist Ermolao Barbaro, on whom Innocent had bestowed it, and the see remained vacant until Alexander VI accepted Niccolò Donato, the Venetian nominee. In 1505 Julius II refused to confirm a bishop appointed by the Signoria to the see of Cremona, as he designed the place for his favourite nephew Galeotto della Rovere; he held out for two years and finally compromised for a money payment to the Cardinal. So, when the latter died in 1508, Venice filled his see of Vicenza with Jacopo Dandolo, while Julius gave it to another nephew, Sisto Gara della Rovere, and the