on the south, held the States of the Church as in a vice, and
thereby dominated the politics of the peninsula. After Henry IV.
had taken Paris at the price of a mass, it became possible for
the popes to play off the Bourbons against the Habsburgs;
but the transfer of favour was made so gradually that the
opposition of the papacy to Spain did not become open till just
before Clement VIII. passed off the stage. His successor,
Leo XI., undisguisedly French in sympathy, reigned but
Leo XI.,
1605.
twenty-seven days—a sorry return for the 300,000
ducats which his election is rumoured to have cost
Henry IV. Under Paul V. Rome was successful in
some minor negotiations with Savoy, Genoa, Tuscany and Naples;
but Venice, under the leadership of Paolo Sarpi (q.v.), proved
unbending under ban and interdict: the state
defiantly upheld its sovereign rights, kept most of the
clergy at their posts, and expelled the recalcitrant
Paul V.,
1605–1621.
Jesuits. When peace was arranged through French mediation
in 1607 the papacy had lost greatly in prestige: it was evident
that the once terrible interdict was antiquated, wherefore it
has never since been employed against the entire territory of
a state.
During the second and third decades of the 17th century
the most coveted bit of Italian soil was the Valtelline. If Spain
could gain this Alpine valley her territories would touch those
of Austria, so that the Habsburgs north of the Alps could send
troops to the aid of their Spanish cousins against Venice, and
Spain in turn could help to subdue the Protestant princes of Germany
in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). From the Grisons,
who favoured France and Venice, Spain seized the Valtelline in
1620, incidentally uprooting heresy there by the massacre of
six hundred Protestants. Paul V. repeatedly lamented that he
was unable to oppose such Spanish aggressions without extending
protection to heretics. This scruple was, however, not
Gregory XV.,
1621–1623.
shared by his successor, Gregory XV., who secured
the consent of the powers to the occupation of the
Valtelline by papal troops, a diplomatic victory
destined, however, to lead ere long to humiliation. Gregory’s
brief but notable pontificate marks nevertheless the high-tide
of the counter Reformation. Not for generations had the
prospects for the ultimate annihilation of Protestantism been
brighter. In the Empire the collapse of the Bohemian revolt
led ultimately to the merciless repression of the Evangelicals
in Bohemia (1627), and in the hereditary lands of
The Counter-Reformation.
Austria (1628), as well as to the transference of the
electoral dignity from the Calvinistic elector of the
Palatinate to the staunchly Catholic Maximilian of Bavaria.
In France the Huguenots were shorn of almost all their military
power, a process completed by the fall of La Rochelle in 1628.
In Holland the expiration of the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1621
forced the Dutch Protestants once more to gird on the sword.
England, meanwhile, was isolated from her co-religionists.
King James I., who had coquetted twenty years previously
with Clement VIII., and then had avenged the Gunpowder
Plot (1605) by the most stringent regulation of his Roman
Catholic subjects, was now dazzled by the project of the Spanish
marriage. The royal dupe was the last man in the world to
check the advance of the papacy. That service to Protestantism
was performed by Catholic powers jealous of the preponderance
of the Habsburgs. In view of these antipathies the treaty of 1627
between France, Spain and the pope is but an episode: instructive,
however, in that the project, originated apparently by the
pope, provided that England should be dismembered, and that
Ireland should be treated as a papal fief. The true tendency of
affairs manifested itself in 1629, when the emperor Ferdinand II.
(1619–1637), at the zenith of his fortunes, forced the Protestant
princes of Germany to restore to the Roman hierarchy all the
ecclesiastical territories they had secularized during the past
seventy-four years. Then France, freed from the fear of domestic
enemies, arose to help the heretics to harry the house of
Habsburg. Arranging a truce between Poland and Sweden,
she unleashed Gustavus Adolphus. Thus by diplomacy as well
as by force of arms Catholic France made possible the continued
existence of a Protestant Germany, and helped to create the
balance of power between Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed
within the Empire, that, crystallized in the Peace of Westphalia,
fixed the religious boundaries of central Europe for upwards of
two centuries.
If it was Richelieu and not the pope who was the real arbiter
of destinies from 1624 to 1642, Urban VIII. was usually content.
In Italy he supported France against Spain in the
controversy over the succession to Mantua (1627–1631).
In the Empire he manifested his antipathy
to the overshadowing Habsburgs by plotting for a time to carry
Urban VIII.,
1623–1644.
the next imperial election in favour of Bavaria. He is said to
have rejoiced privately over Swedish victories, and certainly
it was unerring instinct which told him that the great European
conflict was no longer religious but dynastic. Anti-Spanish to
the core, he became the greatest papal militarist since Julius II.;
but Tuscany, Modena and Venice checkmated him in his
ambitious attempt to conquer the duchy of Parma. Like most
of the papal armies of the last three centuries, Urban’s troops
distinguished themselves by wretched strategy, cowardice in
rank and file, and a Fabian avoidance of fighting which, discreet
as it may be in the field of diplomacy, has invariably failed to
save Rome on the field of battle.
The States of the Church were enlarged during this period by the reversion of two important fiefs—namely, Ferrara (1598) and Urbino (1631). Increase of territory, so far from filling the papal treasury, but postponed for the moment the progressive pauperization of the people. After annexation, the city of Ferrara sank rapidly The Papal States. from her perhaps artificial prosperity to the dead level, losing two-thirds of her population in the process. The financial difficulties of Italy were due to many causes, notably to a shifting of trade routes; but those of the papal states seem caused chiefly by misgovernment. Militarism may account for much of the tremendous deficit under Urban VIII.; but the real cancer was nepotism. The disease was inherent in the body politic. Each pope, confronted by the spectre of feudal anarchy, felt he could rely truly only on those utterly dependent on himself; consequently he raised his own Nepotism. relations to wealth and influence. This method had helped the House of Valois to consolidate its power; but what was tonic for a dynasty was death to a state whose headship was elective. The relations of one pope became the enemies of the next; and each pontiff governed at the expense of his successors. Under Clement VIII. the Aldobrandini, more splendidly under Paul V. the Borghesi, with canny haste under the short-lived Gregory XV. the Lodovisi, with unparalleled rapacity Urban’s Barberini enriched themselves from a chronically depleted treasury. To raise money offices were systematically sold, and issue after issue of the two kinds of monti-securities, which may be roughly described as government bonds and as life annuities, was marketed at ruinous rates. More than a score of years after the Barberini had dropped the reins of power Alexander VII. said they alone had burdened the state with the payment of 483,000 scudi of annual interest, a tremendous item in a budget where the income was perhaps but 2,000,000. For a while interest charges consumed 85% of the income of the government. Skilful refunding postponed the day of evil, but cash on hand was too often a temptation to plunder. The financial woes of the next period, which is one of decline, were largely the legacy of this age of glory.
The common people, as always, had to pay. The farming of exorbitant taxes, coupled as it was too often with dishonest concessions to the tax farmer, made the over-burdened peasantry drink the doubly bitter cup of exploitation and injustice. Economic distress increased the number of highway robberies, these in turn lamed commercial intercourse.
The tale of these glories, with their attendant woes, does not exhaust the history of the papacy. Not as diplomatists, not as governors, but as successive heads of a spiritual kingdom, did the popes win their grandest triumphs. At a time when the non-Catholic theologians were chiefly small fry, bent on
