A little before Germany gave herself up to theological strife, the conjunction at Basel of the great printer Johann Froben and the great scholar Erasmus temporarily raised that city to importance as an intellectual centre. Froben had begun printing at Basel in 1491, but until he formed his friendship with Erasmus in 1513 published only a few editions of the Bible, some of the papal Decretals, the works of S. Ambrose, and a few other books of no special interest. From 1513 onwards his output increased rapidly both in quantity and importance, so that by the time of his death in 1527 he had printed over three hundred books, including almost all the works of Erasmus and many books in Greek. During this period, also, border-pieces and initials were designed for him by the two Holbeins (Hans and Ambrosius) and other skilful artists, and he was entitled to rank as the greatest printer-publisher in Europe in succession to Aldus. After his death in 1527 the supremacy of European printing rested for the next generation indisputably with France. During the fifteenth century printing in France had developed almost entirely on its own lines. Vernacular books of every description had poured from the presses of Paris and Lyon, and many of them had been charmingly illustrated in a style worthy of the great French school of illustrators of manuscripts. In the first half of the sixteenth century the publication of these popular books--romances, poetry, and works of devotion--still continued, though with some loss of quality, the print and paper being less good and the illustrations often consisting of a medley of old blocks, or where new ones were made being executed in a coarser and heavier style. But to the vernacular literature there was now added a learned and scholarly literature which soon rose to great importance. As early as 1492 Johann Trechsel, a printer of Lyon, had possessed himself of sufficient Greek type to print quotations in that language, and in the following year he issued the profusely illustrated edition of _Terence_, the cuts in which were imitated by Gruninger at Strassburg. Trechsel's press corrector and general editor was a young scholar named Josse Bade, of Asch, near Ghent, better known by the Latin form of his name as Jodocus Badius Ascensius, or Ascensianus. In 1503, after Trechsel's death, Ascensius started business for himself in Paris, and his editions of the classics, well known from the device of a printing-press found on many of their titlepages, obtained a considerable reputation. Almost simultaneously, in 1502, Henri Estienne, the first of a famous family of scholar-printers, had started in business by an expedient of which we hear a great deal in the annals of English printing, that of marrying a printer's widow. Of Henri Estienne's three sons the eldest, Francois, became a bookseller, Robert a scholar-printer, and Charles, in the first instance, a physician. In