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 catastrophe in the north would not have been averted. For there an inward alienation from Rome had long been going on, ever since the days of Ludwig the Bavarian; little was needed to make it externally also an accomplished fact. Neither Leo nor his Lateran Council had the slightest conception of this state of affairs north of the Alps.

The government of the Church was entirely in the hands of Italians; the Curia could count scarcely more than one or two Germans or English in their number. Terrible retribution was at hand. Leo X had seen no trace of the coming religious crisis, although its forerunners Reuchlin and Erasmus, Wimpheling and Hutten, and the appearance of Obscurorum Virorum Epistolae might well have opened his eyes. His announcement in the midst of all this ferment of the great Absolution for the benefit of St Peter's was a stupendous miscalculation, due to the thoughtless and contemptuous treatment vouchsafed to German affairs in Rome. Instead of directing his most serious attention to them Leo had meantime made his covenant with Francis I at Bologna (December, 1515), on which followed directly the French treaty of 1516. At Bologna the King had renounced the Pragmatic Sanction, in return for which the Pope granted him the right of nomination to bishoprics, abbeys, and conventual priories. It was the most immoral covenant that Church history had hitherto recorded, for the parties presented each other with things that did not belong to them. The French Church fell a victim to an agreement which delivered over her freedom to royal despotism; in return Francis I undertook that the Pope's family should rule in Florence, and as a pledge of the treaty gave a French Princess to the Pope's nephew Lorenzo in marriage.

The hour in which this compact was made was the darkest in Leo's pontificate. North of the Alps this act undermined all confidence in him or in his cousin Clement VII. No further reform of the Church was expected of two Popes who cared more for their dynasty than for the welfare of Christendom. The short interregnum of Adrian VI was, as we have seen, not equal to the task of carrying out the reformation. But it must be remembered that in his reign the worthiest representative of the Church's conscience during the Medicean era came forward once more with a plea for reform. The great document, laid before the Pope at his command, by Aegidius of Viterbo, revealed the disease, when it pointed to the misuse of papal power as the cause of all the harm, and demanded a limitation to the absolutism of the Head of the Church. This tallied with the Pope's ideas, and the celebrated instruction issued to the Nuncio Chieregato (1522), which announced that the disease had come from the head to the members, from the Pope to the prelates, and confessed, "We have all sinned, and there is not one that doeth good."

Alessandro Farnese came forth from the Conclave of 1534 on October 12 as Paul III. A pupil of Pomponio Leto, and at the age of