No more councils were held during the fifteenth century, and the popes were left to the task of reorganizing their dominions in Italy. They began to turn their attention very largely to their interests as Italian princes, and some of them, beginning with Nicholas V (1447-1455), became the patrons of artists and men of letters. There is probably no period in the history of the papacy when the head of the Church was more completely absorbed in forwarding his political interests and those of his relatives, and in decorating his capital, than in the seventy years which elapsed between 1450 and the beginning of the German revolt against the Church. General Reading.--CREIGHTON, _History of the Papacy_ (Longmans, Green & Co., 6 vols., $2.00 each), Vol. I, is perhaps the best treatment of the Great Schism and the Council of Constance. PASTOR, _History of the Popes_ (Herder, 6 vols., $18.00), Vol. I, Book 1, gives the most recent and scholarly account from the standpoint of a Roman Catholic. CHAPTER XXII THE ITALIAN CITIES AND THE RENAISSANCE [Sidenote: Italy the center of European culture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.] 117. While England and France were settling their differences in the wretched period of the Hundred Years' War, and the little German principalities, left without a leader,[212] were busied with their petty concerns, Italy was the center of European culture. Its cities,--Florence, Venice, Milan, and the rest,--reached a degree of prosperity and refinement undreamed of beyond the Alps. Within their walls learning and art made such extraordinary progress that this period has received a special name,--the _Renaissance_,[213] or new birth. The Italian towns, like those of ancient Greece, were really little states, each with its own peculiar life and institutions. Of these city-states a word must be said before considering the new enthusiasm for the works of the Romans and Greeks and the increasing skill which the Italian artists displayed in painting, sculpture, and architecture. [Sidenote: Map of Italy in the fourteenth century.] The map of Italy at the beginning of the fourteenth century was still divided into three zones, as it had been in the time of the Hohenstaufens. To the south lay the kingdom of Naples. Then came the states of the Church, extending diagonally across the peninsula. To the north and west lay the group of city-states to which we now turn our attention. [Sidenote: Venice and its relations with the East.]