advanced civilization to be seen nowhere else in Europe, except in the Moorish principalities of Spain. The system of taxation not only embraced regular assessments, but authorized such extraordinary contributions as might be required for the construction of great public works or demanded by the exigencies of war. A powerful and well-equipped navy enforced the authority and protected the rights of the Norman kings in the Mediterranean. In the classification of orders, ecclesiastics were not, as elsewhere, granted extraordinary privileges by reason of their sacred profession. Those of rank were enrolled among the feudatories; the inferior clergy were relegated to the intermediate grade of subjects placed between the noble and the serf; all were, equally with the laity, responsible for infractions of the laws. The monarch was the head of the Church under the Pope; the office of Papal legate, which he usurped, was assumed, by a convenient fiction, to have been transmitted by inheritance; he exercised the rights of the erection of bishoprics, the presentation of benefices, the translation of prelates, the exemption of abbeys; he imposed taxes on the priesthood, and, when occasion demanded, did not hesitate to seize and appropriate property set aside for the uses of public worship. In his dominions, the Pope, while the nominal head of Christendom, was merely a personage of secondary importance, with little real influence and with no prestige save that derived from his venerated title and from his residence in that city which had once given laws to the world. The Papacy, it is true, had not yet fully established those portentous claims to empire which subsequently brought the most remote countries under its jurisdiction; but its aspiring pontiffs had already laid the foundations of their despotism; and this defiance of their authority, at the very gates of the capital of Christendom, was fraught with the most vital consequences to the future peace and welfare of Europe.