The historian might almost venture to say that the Papacy was not evolved, but created. It has assuredly, in its varying fortunes, reflected as faithfully as any other institution the changes of its human environment, yet for each new adaptation to favouring circumstances it has had to await the advent of a great Pope. Seven men, one might say, created the Papacy: Gelasius I., Leo I., Gregory I., Hadrian I., Nicholas I., Gregory VII., and Innocent III. Each one of these deepened the foundations and enlarged the fabric of the great religious principality. They have had illustrious successors, and, in some respects, the frame of the Papacy has been further strengthened; but, on the whole, the last five hundred years have been filled with a mighty and unavailing struggle against disintegration. Of the seven men I have enumerated Gregory VII., or Hildebrand as historians still like to call him, was the most romantic and the most singularly creative. He was born about the year 1025, of humble parents, in a Tuscan village near Sovana. An uncle of his was abbot of a monastery on the Aventine at Rome, and young Hildebrand was at an early date sent to be educated under his direction. We recognize in this accident the chief clue to the personality and achievements of Gregory VII. A century earlier a group of monks at Cluny had reformed their ways, and their stricter ideas had slowly spread from one isolated monastery to another. The monastery of St. Mary on the Aventine was one of these rare centres of sincere asceticism, and in it the boy would hear talk of the appalling degradation which had come over the Church of Christ. It seems, however, very doubtful whether he ever made the vows of a monk. He certainly wore the monk's habit, and no epithet is more common on the lips of his opponents than "vagabond monk"; while, on the other hand, his admirers accept the monastic title, and justify the "vagabondage," by various unreliable stories about his connexion with the Benedictines. But he never describes himself as a monk, and he is not so described in the most reliable documents. The point is of slight importance, since Hildebrand certainly adopted the sentiments of the monastic reformers, and I will not linger over the extensive and conflicting evidence.[200] Gregory's fiery and aggressive nature would not suffer him to contemplate the triumph of evil from the remote impotence of a monastery, but he learned his lesson from monks and would rely on them throughout life.