from
end to end of it without opposition. Religion seemed dying there, and
love of country dead.

Florence underwent an extravagant though brief religious revival. The
monk Savonarola preached against wickedness in high places, and thundered
at the Florentines for their presumption and vanity. The impressionable
people wept, they appointed a "day of vanities" and laid all their rich
robes and jewels at Savonarola's feet. They made him ruler of the city.
But, alas! they soon tired of his severities, sighed for their vanities
back again, and at last burned the reformer at the stake.[23]

In Rome itself there arose popes, Lorenzo's followers, who preferred
art to Christianity, or others like the terrible Alexander Borgia, who
adopted the maxims of the new statecraft. Alexander, a worthy disciple of
Louis XI, admired falsehood before truth, and sought to win his aims by
poisoning his enemies. The career of his nephew Caesar Borgia has supplied
history with its most awful picture of successful crime, and the book
written in his praise by Macchiavelli has given us a new word for Satanic
subtlety and treachery. We call it Macchiavellian. The rest of Europe
shrank from Italy in fear, and named it "poisoning Italy."[24]

Against the spiritual dominance of such a land the world was surely ready
for revolt. The mind of man, so long and slowly awakening, and at last so
intensely roused, seeing great discoveries on every hand, was no longer
to be controlled by authority. The time was ripe for the Reformation.

[FOR THE NEXT SECTION OF THIS GENERAL SURVEY SEE VOLUME IX]

[Footnote 1: See _Origin and Progress of Printing_, page 5.]

[Footnote 2: See _Beginning and Progress of the Renaissance_, vol. ix, p.
110.]

[Footnote 3: See _Rebuilding of Rome by Nicholas V_, page 46.]

[Footnote 4: See _Mahomet II Takes Constantinople_, page 55.]

[Footnote 5: See _John Hunyady Repulses the Turks_, page 30.]

[Footnote 6: See _Ivan the Great Unites Russia_, page 109.]

[Footnote 7: See _Establishment of Swiss Independence_, page 336.]

[Footnote 8: See _Culmination of the Power of Burgundy_, page 125.]

[Footnote 9: See _Death of Charles the Bold_, page 155.]

[Footnote 10: See _Wars of the Roses_, page 72.]

[Footnote 11: See _Murder of the Princes in the Tower_, page 192,]

[Footnote 12: See _Conspiracy, Rebellion, and Execution of Perkin
Warbeck_, page 250.]

[Footnote 13: See _Conquest of Granada_, page 202.]

[Footnote 1