in their
master's dominions. The king's court begins to rule the land; and proud
of its young strength it enters the lists against Boniface VIII, the
great prophet of the Church Universal, who proclaimed that every human
creature was subject to the Roman pontiff. The collapse of Boniface at
Anagni in 1303 is the traditional date of the final defeat of the
mediaeval papacy. Everywhere, indeed, the tide seemed on the turn at the
close of the thirteenth century. The Crusades ended with the fall of
Acre in 1291. The suppression of the great international order of the
Templars twenty years later marked a new leap of the encroaching waves.
The new era of the modern national State might seem already to have
begun.

But tides move slowly and by gradual inches. It needed two centuries
more before the conditions in which the modern State could flourish had
been fully and finally established. Economic conditions had to change--a
process always gradual and slow; and a national economy based on money
had to replace the old local economy based on kind. Languages had to be
formed, and local dialects had to be transformed into national and
literary forms, before national States could find the means of
utterance. The revival of learning had to challenge the old clerical
structure of knowledge, and to set free the progress of secular science,
before the minds of men could be readily receptive of new forms of
social structure and new modes of human activity. But by 1500 the work
of preparation had been largely accomplished. The progress of discovery
had enlarged the world immeasurably. The addition of America to the map
had spiritual effects which it is difficult to estimate in any proper
terms. If the old world of the Mediterranean regions could be thought
into a unity, it was more difficult to reduce to the One the new world
which swam into men's ken. Still more burdened with fate for the future
generations was the vast volume of commerce, necessarily conducted on a
national basis, which the age of discoveries went to swell. Meanwhile,
men had begun to think and to write in national languages. Already by
the reign of Richard II the dialect of the East Midlands, which was
spoken in the capital and the universities, had become a literary
language in which Chaucer and Wyclif had spoken to all the nation. Still
earlier had come the development of Italian, and a little more than a
century after the days of Wyclif, Luther was to give to Germa