one series of disasters for religion. This was prevented by the resolve of Pope Nicholas, that the Holy See should sanction and encourage the movement with its influence, its immense patronage, and all its opportunities. Therefore Valla, who had narrowly escaped alive from the Inquisition, became a functionary at the Vatican, and received 500 ducats from the Pope to translate Thucydides. Scholars were attracted by the papal collection of 5000 manuscripts, which were the foundation of the Vatican library, the first in the world after the fall of Constantinople.
The alliance between renovated Hellenism and the Papacy was ratified a few years later, when the most intelligent of the Italian Humanists, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini of Siena, was raised to the throne under the name of Pius II., and became the most modern of medieval Popes. He was one of those Churchmen in whom the classical spirit of the time predominated over the ecclesiastical. Twice there was a breach, and a momentary reaction; but on the whole the contract was observed, and the ancient pagans made their way under the shadow of St. Peter's better than the early Christians. Humanists of the type of Valla were domesticated by the prizes held out to them, from the pen of the secretary to the tiara of the pontiff. The apprehended explosion never came; the good and evil that was in the new scholars penetrated the court and modified its tone. Bibbiena's comedies were applauded at the Belvedere; The Prince was published by the Pope's printer, with the Pope's permission; a cardinal shrank from reading St. Paul, for fear of spoiling his style; and the scandals in the family of Borgia did not prevent bishops from calling him a god, Calixtus III. said that he feared nothing from any hostile Powers, for he had three thousand men of letters to rely on. His successor, Aeneas Sylvius, considered that the decline of the empire was due to the fact that scholarship had gone over to the Papacy. The main fact in the Italian Renaissance is that an open conflict was averted at the cost of admitting into the hierarchy something of the profane spirit
