Prussia;
its adherents formed a majority of the nobles of Poland; Hungary seemed
drifting towards heresy; and in Transylvania the Diet had already
confiscated all Church lands. In Central Germany the great prelates
whose princedoms covered so large a part of Franconia opposed in vain
the spread of Lutheran doctrine. It seemed as triumphant in Southern
Germany, for the Duchy of Austria was for the most part Lutheran, and
many of the Bavarian towns with a large part of the Bavarian nobles had
espoused the cause of the Reformation. In Western Europe the fiercer
doctrines of Calvinism took the place of the faith of Luther. At the
death of Henry the Second Calvin's missionaries poured from Geneva over
France, and in a few years every province of the realm was dotted with
Calvinistic churches. The Huguenots rose into a great political and
religious party which struggled openly for the mastery of the realm and
wrested from the Crown a legal recognition of its existence and of
freedom of worship. The influence of France told quickly on the regions
about it. The Rhineland was fast losing its hold on Catholicism. In the
Netherlands, where the persecutions of Charles the Fifth had failed to
check the upgrowth of heresy, his successor saw Calvinism win state
after state, and gird itself to a desperate struggle at once for
religious and for civil independence. Still farther west a sudden
revolution had won Scotland for the faith of Geneva; and a revolution
hardly less sudden, though marked with consummate subtlety, had in
effect added England to the Churches of the Reformation. Christendom in
fact was almost lost to the Papacy; for only two European countries
owned its sway without dispute. "There remain firm to the Pope," wrote a
Venetian ambassador to his State, "only Spain and Italy with some few
islands, and those countries possessed by your Serenity in Dalmatia and
Greece."

[Sidenote: Pius the Fifth.]

It was at this moment of defeat that Pius the Fifth mounted the Papal
throne. His earlier life had been that of an Inquisitor; and he combined
the ruthlessness of a persecutor with the ascetic devotion of a saint.
Pius had but one end, that of reconquering Christendom, of restoring
the rebel nations to the fold of the Church, and of stamping out heresy
by fire and sword. To his fiery faith every means of warfare seemed
hallowed by the sanctity of his cause. The despotism of the prince, the
passion of the populace, the sword o