Such a condition could not exist forever. The turning-point came in 1527, when Charles the Fifth, engaging in war with Pope Clement VII., captured and sacked the city of Rome. After that event everything was changed. Not only had the scholars lost their influence, but many of them had lost their lives. Valeriano, who returned to Rome after the siege, pathetically exclaims: “Good God! when first I began to enquire for the philosophers, orators, poets and professors of Greek and Latin literature, whose names were written on my tablets, how great, how horrible a tragedy was offered to me! Of all those lettered men whom I had hoped to see, how many had perished miserably, carried off by the most cruel of all fates, overwhelmed by undeserved calamities; some dead of plague, some brought to a slow end by penury in exile, others slaughtered by a foeman’s sword, others worn out by daily tortures; some, again, and these of all the most unhappy, driven by anguish to self-murder”. Such was the end of the men who made the Italian Renaissance. The Spaniards, the Inquisition, and the changed policy of the Church prevented a second revival of Humanism. While the sack of Rome marks the end of the Humanists, the Revival in Medicine continued to grow in vigor and extent. Many of the greatest discoveries in anatomy were made, and most of the important books on this subject were written, in the middle and latter part of the sixteenth century. Italian history is rich in contradictions. While peace, ease and comfort are generally considered to be necessary to the development of science and culture, Italy offers the strange spectacle of the steady increase in medical knowledge in spite of wars and alarms. The Inquisition, which had been introduced from Spain in 1224, was given a new and horrible impetus when, in 1540, Paul III. appointed six cardinals to add to its tortures. One of them, Caraffa, became Pope Paul IV. in 1555, and four years later originated the _Index Expurgatorius_. Torn by civil and foreign wars, and terrorized by the Inquisition, which was not abolished until late in the eighteenth century, Italy gradually lost her commercial and intellectual supremacy. That she should have accomplished so much under such unfavorable circumstances, is now a matter of wonderment.