uent increase of the precious metals; and, last but not least,
Vasco da Gama's discovery of the new trade route from the East by way
of the Cape--all these were indications of the fact that the
death-knell of the old order of things had struck.

Notwithstanding the apparent outward integrity of the system based on
land tenures, land was ceasing to be the only form of productive
wealth. Hence it was losing the exclusive importance attaching to it
in the earlier period of the Middle Ages. The first form of modern
capitalism had already arisen. Large aggregations of capital in the
hands of trading companies were becoming common. The Roman law was
establishing itself in the place of the old customary tribal law which
had hitherto prevailed in the manorial courts, serving in some sort as
a bulwark against the caprice of the territorial lord; and this change
facilitated the development of the bourgeois principle of private, as
opposed to communal, property. In intellectual matters, though
theology still maintained its supremacy as the chief subject of human
interest, other interests were rapidly growing up alongside of it, the
most prominent being the study of classical literature.

Besides these things, there was the dawning interest in nature, which
took on, as a matter of course, a magical form in accordance with
traditional and contemporary modes of thought. In fact, like the
flicker of a dying candle in its socket, the Middle Ages seemed at the
beginning of the sixteenth century to exhibit all their own salient
characteristics in an exaggerated and distorted form. The old feudal
relations had degenerated into a blood-sucking oppression; the old
rough brutality, into excogitated and elaborated cruelty (aptly
illustrated in the collection of ingenious instruments preserved in
the Torture-tower at Nuernberg); the old crude superstition, into a
systematized magical theory of natural causes and effects; the old
love of pageantry, into a lavish luxury and magnificence of which we
have in the "field of the cloth of gold" the stock historical example;
the old chivalry, into the mercenary bravery of the soldier, whose
trade it was to fight, and who recognized only one virtue--to wit,
animal courage. Again, all these exaggerated characteristics were
mixed with new elements, which distorted them further, and which
foreshadowed a coming change, the ultimate issue of which would be
their extinction and that of the life of which they