It was in fact at this moment of seeming triumph that the great struggle of her reign began. In 1565 a pontiff was chosen to fill the Papal chair whose policy was that of open war between England and Rome. At no moment in its history had the fortunes of the Roman See sunk so low as at the accession of Pius the Fifth. The Catholic revival had as yet done nothing to arrest the march of the Reformation. In less than half a century the new doctrines had spread from Iceland to the Pyrenees and from Finland to the Alps. When Pius mounted the throne Lutheranism was firmly established in Scandinavia and in Northern Germany. Along the Eastern border of the Empire it had conquered Livonia and Old Prussia; its adherents formed a majority of the nobles of Poland; Hungary seemed drifting towards heresy; and in Transylvania the Diet had already confiscated all Church lands. In Central Germany the great prelates whose princedoms covered so large a part of Franconia opposed in vain the spread of Lutheran doctrine. It seemed as triumphant in Southern Germany, for the Duchy of Austria was for the most part Lutheran, and many of the Bavarian towns with a large part of the Bavarian nobles had espoused the cause of the Reformation. In Western Europe the fiercer doctrines of Calvinism took the place of the faith of Luther. At the death of Henry the Second Calvin's missionaries poured from Geneva over France, and in a few years every province of the realm was dotted with Calvinistic churches. The Huguenots rose into a great political and religious party which struggled openly for the mastery of the realm and wrested from the Crown a legal recognition of its existence and of freedom of worship. The influence of France told quickly on the regions about it. The Rhineland was fast losing its hold on Catholicism. In the Netherlands, where the persecutions of Charles the Fifth had failed to check the upgrowth of heresy, his successor saw Calvinism win state after state, and gird itself to a desperate struggle at once for religious and for civil independence. Still farther west a sudden revolution had won Scotland for the faith of Geneva; and a revolution hardly less sudden, though marked with consummate subtlety, had in effect added England to the Churches of the Reformation. Christendom in fact was almost lost to the Papacy; for only two European countries owned its sway without dispute. "There remain firm to the Pope," wrote a Venetian ambassador to his State, "only Spain and Italy with some few islands, and those countries possessed by your Serenity in Dalmatia and Greece." [Sidenote: Pius the Fifth.]