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was made permanent by the opposition of France and Spain. The "most Christian King" had the greatest interest in keeping the Ger- man upheaval from subsiding. He supported Protestant princes be- cause they were opponents of the Emperor, and was thus logically compelled to accord a certain toleration to a new faith which was soon to endanger the French national monarchy when it produced the re- publican movement of the Hugenots. Meanwhile Charles V, though obliged to cherish the Catholic unity which held the many peoples under his dominion together in an Empire which had no other bond, came into conflict both with the nationalism of the new teaching and also with the universalism of the Papacy, then as always the natural antagonist of his universal Empire. Therefore he had to outlaw Lu- ther and yet to take arms against the Curia, which used France against him in order to protect its own territorial power. The paradoxical spectacle of troops of a Catholic Empire inimical to heretics burning and plundering the city of the Pope (the sack of Rome) re-emphasized more impressively than ever had been done in the Middle Ages the irreconcilability of a real Empire with a politically powerful Papacy. This irreconcilability was and remained the source of misfortune in the Church regardless of whether the ancient rights of the patrimonium Petri were defended or whether the nationalistic ideal of Italy and its cultural hegemony were served. Once the temporal possessions of the Papacy had had a great significance and mission; but for a long rime this had not been the case. The Popes were harassed by con- cern over their power, and therewith lost the superior claim to uni- versal respect which alone could have unified the great powers against the threat of Tartar and Mohammedan invasions. The idea of the Crusades had still been alive in the fourteenth century. For the central powers it was part and parcel of any plan for world dominion. Intel- lectual leaders like Dante, Petrarch and subsequent humanists sum- moned all to battle against the "Egyptian hound" Islam, in the name of that great spiritual affiliation between Christian peoples which they wished to conserve as the legacy of the Middle Ages. But it con- stantly proved less possible to throw back the Turkish heirs of the Byzantine Empire as decisively as Spain had done. Francis I even negotiated with the Sultan in order to curb the power of Charles V.

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