' reign of
Pius III, was a warlike man. "He engaged in the boldest operations,
risking all to obtain all. He took the field in person, and having
stormed Mirandola, he pressed into the city across the frozen ditches
and through the breach; the most disastrous reverses could not shake his
purpose, but rather seemed to waken new resources in him." "He wrested
Perugia and Bologna from their lords. As the powerful state of Venice
refused to surrender her conquests, he resolved at length, albeit
unwillingly, to avail himself of foreign aid; he joined the League of
Cambrai, concluded between France and the Emperor, and assisted with
spiritual and temporal weapons to subdue the republic. Venice, now hard
pressed, yielded to the Pope, in order to divide this overwhelming
alliance. Julius, already alarmed at the progress of the French in
Italy, readily granted his forgiveness, and now commenced hostilities
against the French and their ally, Alphonso, Duke of Ferrara. He
declared that the king of France had forfeited his claim on Naples, and
invested Ferdinand the Catholic with the solo dominion of his realm. He
issued a sentence of condemnation against the Duke of Ferrara. Lewis XII
strove in vain to alarm him by the National Council of Tours,--Germany,
by severe gravamina (complaints of national grievances against the Papal
See), and by the threat of the Pragmatic Sanction (an imperial order to
confirm the decrees of such reform councils as that of Basel). Not even
a General Council, summoned at Pisa by the two monarchs for the first of
September, 1511, with the dread phantom of a reform of the Church, could
bend the violent Pope." The Council of Pisa the Pope neutralized by
convening a Lateran Council, which at the Pope's bidding hurled its
thundering manifestos in the name of the Almighty against the Pope's
enemies. He died while this conflict was raging. Luther was in Rome
while the Pope was engaged as just related.

What elements of appalling greed and levity had entered the holiest
transactions of the Church can be seen from the following summing up of
the situation daring Luther's time: "A large amount of worldly power was
at this time conferred in most instances, together with the bishoprics;
they were held more or less as sinecures according to the degree of
influence or court favor possessed by the recipient or his family. The
Roman Curia thought only of how it might best derive advantage from the
vacancies and present