We have spoken of the constitutional opposition to the papacy by the fifteenth-century councils. Parallel with this and often combined with it had gone an opposition growing out of national interests. This, too, the papacy seemed to have overcome by the same policy of adjustment. It had allowed the largest scope to national control of the Church consistent with its supreme leadership, and had even given emphasis to the national idea by pushing to the utmost its claim to be one among the powers of Europe. The whole political activity of the papacy during this most active generation was based upon a recognition of the national states and a steady aim to gain their recognition in turn for its own well developed sovereignty. A pope's "niece" or "nephew" was as good a _parti_ for a royal house as the offspring of any princely family in Europe. So complete, apparently, was this adjustment of all the forces of European society that the great outbreak of the Lutheran reform movement was a complete surprise and an incredible shock to all established institutions. The historian can, indeed, trace with perfect continuity the lines of development which centre in that wonderful movement, when a monk, in an obscure town in the remote north of Germany, drew the eyes of all Europe to himself by gathering up into one passionate expression the long-suppressed protest against the tyranny of the dominant church system. But, on the surface of things, in the year 1517, there was little to point to this historic continuity. To all appearance the great impulse of Wiclif in England had died out with the suppression of open Lollardry just a hundred years before. John Hus, the spiritual heir of Wiclif, had been sacrificed at Constance in 1415 to a combination of forces, some of which were to prove themselves in reality the stoutest allies of the ideas he represented. True, the fires at Constance had kindled a flame in Bohemia, which defied all efforts of pope and emperor to put it out until dissensions within the party of revolt scattered and quenched the material on which it fed. But after the Council at Basel (1431-1443) the great readjustment carried Bohemia, too, along into the general scheme of conciliation. At that moment a party, henceforth to be known as the party of enlightenment, seized upon the papacy, and with Thomas Parentucelli (Nicholas V., 1447-1455) began that series of humanistic popes, Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II., 1458-1464), Giuliano delle Rovere (Julius II., 1503-1513), and Giovanni de' Medici (Leo X., 1513-1521), who were ready to sacrifice all other interests to the aggrandisement of their personal power and the advancement of a higher cultivation and refinement of life.