Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/694

 638 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Leo X, a son of Lorenzo de' Medici, who through his father's Francis I influence had been made a cardinal at the age and Leo X f fourteen, was the new pope. Francis I, a young man of fine manners and cultured taste but of loose and selfish morals, came to the throne of France, crossed the Alps, and by the startling victory of Marignano over the highly reputed Swiss troops regained Milan. He then agreed with the pope to support the rule of the Medici in Florence, which was soon transformed into a hereditary grand duchy. Leo ceded Parma and Piacenza to Francis, and in place of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, which had made the Gallican Church pretty in- dependent, pope and king, in the Concordat of Bologna, increased their own influence and revenues at the expense of the local French churches. The power of France thus seemed once more in the as- cendant, when Ferdinand, dying in 1516, bequeathed all his possessions in Spain, Italy, and a new world to his grandson, who, though educated in the Netherlands, now became Charles I of Spain. Charles was really a Hapsburg, since his father had been the son of Maxi- milian; and upon that emperor's death in 1519 Charles added to his titles and territories the Hapsburg family lands in Austria and the Tyrol and the Burgundian possessions inherited from Charles the Bold. He was also elected Holy Roman Emperor to succeed Maximilian and thereby ac- quired imperial claims in northern Italy as well as a vague authority over Germany. His imperial title was Charles V and by this rather than his Spanish title he is usually known in history. He had causes for conflict with Francis I in Italy, in the Pyrenees, and along the eastern frontier of France. These two young monarchs were by far the most powerful in Europe, and the central political interest of the next half-century lies in their succession of wars with each other. Indeed, for long after that the struggle of France and Hapsburg was to be the chief feature of European politics. Charles V had not merely France to deal with. In Germany a monk named Martin Luther had just aroused