on the path of modern culture,
he is the last Pope of the Renaissance period whom we can regard with
real respect. Those who follow, and with whose personal characters,
rather than their action as Pontiffs, we shall now be principally
occupied, sacrificed the interests of Christendom to family ambition,
secured their sovereignty at the price of discord in Italy, transacted
with the infidel, and played the part of Antichrist upon the theater of
Europe.

[1] Rosmini, _Vita di Filelfo_, vol. ii. p. 321.

It would be possible to write the history of these priest-kings without
dwelling more than lightly on scandalous circumstances, to merge the
court-chronicle of the Vatican in a recital of European politics, or to
hide the true features of high Papal dignitaries beneath the masks
constructed for them by ecclesiastical apologists. That cannot, however,
be the line adopted by a writer treating of civilization in Italy during
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He must paint the Popes of the
Renaissance as they appeared in the midst of society, when Lorenzo de'
Medici called Rome 'a sink of all the vices,' and observers so competent
as Machiavelli and Guicciardini ascribed the moral depravity and
political decay of Italy to their influence. It might be objected that
there is now no need to portray the profligacy of that court, which, by
arousing the conscience of Northern Europe to a sense of intolerable
shame, proved one of the main causes of the Reformation. But without
reviewing those old scandals, a true understanding of Italian morality,
and a true insight into Italian social feeling as expressed in
literature, are alike impossible. Nor will the historian of this epoch
shrink from his task, even though the transactions he has to record seem
to savor of legend rather than of simple fact. No fiction contains
matter more fantastic, no myth or allegory is more adapted to express a
truth in figures of the fancy, than the authentic well-attested annals
of this period of seventy years, from 1464 to 1534.

Paul the Second was a Venetian named Pietro Barbi, who began life as a
merchant. He had already shipped his worldly goods on board a trading
vessel for a foreign trip, when news reached him that his uncle had been
made Pope under the name of Eugenius IV. His call to the ministry
consisted of the calculation that he could make his fortune in the
Church with a Pope for uncle sooner than on the high seas by his wits.
So