It has been pointed out already that the rapid diffusion of Protestantism was due to economic and political causes as well as to those narrowly religious. It may be said with equal truth that political and economic causes co-operated with the religious developments that we have just noted in maintaining the supremacy of the Catholic Church in at least half the countries over which she had exercised her sway in 1500. For one thing, it is doubtful whether financial abuses had flourished as long or as vigorously in southern as in northern Europe. For another, the political conditions in the states of southern Europe help to explain the interesting situation. [Sidebar: Italy] In Italy was the pope's residence and See. He had bestowed many favors on important Italian families. He had often exploited foreign countries in behalf of Italian patronage. He had taken advantage of the political disunity of the peninsula to divide his local enemies and thereby to assure the victory of his own cause. Two popes of the sixteenth century belonged to the powerful Florentine family of the Medici--Florence remained loyal. The hearty support of the Emperor Charles V preserved the orthodoxy of Naples, and that of Philip II stamped out heresy in the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. [Sidenote: France] In France, the concordat of 1516 between pope and king had peacefully secured for the French monarch appointment of bishops and control of benefices within his country,--powers which the German princes and the English sovereigns secured by revolutionary change. Moreover, French Protestantism, by its political activities in behalf of effective checks upon the royal power, drove the king into Catholic arms: the cause of absolutism in France became the cause of Catholicism, and the latter was bound up with French patriotism to quite the same extent as English patriotism became linked with the fortunes of Anglicanism. [Sidenote: Spain and Portugal] In Spain and Portugal, the monarchs obtained concessions from the pope like those accorded the French sovereigns. They gained control of the Catholic Church within their countries and found it a most valuable ally in forwarding their absolutist tendencies. Moreover, the centuries-long struggle with Mohammedanism had endeared Catholic Christianity alike to Spaniards and to Portuguese and rendered it an integral part of their national life. Spain and Portugal now remained fiercely Catholic. [Sidenote: Austria] Somewhat similar was the case of Austria. Terrifying fear of the advancing Turk, joined with the political exigencies of the Habsburg rulers, threw that duchy with most of its dependencies into the hands of the pope. If the bishop of Rome, by favoring the Habsburgs, had lost England, he had at least saved Austria. [Sidenote: Poland and Ireland]