The disciples of literature, and the scholastic theologians, soon came to an open rupture. The latter were in dismay when they saw the movement which was taking place in the domain of intellect, and thought that immobility and darkness were the best safeguards of the Church. Their object in contending against the revival of letters was to save Rome, but they helped to ruin it. Here Rome had much at stake. Forgetting herself for an instant under the pontificate of Leo X, she abandoned her old friends, and clasped her young adversaries in her arms. The papacy and letters formed an intimacy which seemed destined to break up the ancient alliance between monasticism and the hierarchy. At the first glance the popes perceived not that what they had taken for a whip was a sword capable of inflicting a mortal wound. In the same way, during the last century, princes were seen receiving at their court political and philosophic systems, which, if carried into full effect, would have overturned their thrones. The alliance was not of long duration. Literature advanced without troubling itself about the injury which it might do to the power of its patron. The monks and schoolmen were aware that to abandon the pope was just to abandon themselves; and the pope, notwithstanding of the passing patronage which he gave to the fine arts, was not the less active when he saw the danger, in adopting measures, how much opposed soever they might be to the spirit of the time. The universities defended themselves as they best could against the invasion of new light. Cologne expelled Rhagius; Leipsic, Celtes; Rostoch, Herman von dem Busch. Still the new doctors, and with them the ancient classics, gradually and often even by the aid of princes, made good their footing in these public schools. Societies of grammarians and poets were soon established in spite of the schoolmen, and every thing, even to the name of the Literati, behoved to be converted into Latin and Greek; for how could the friends of Sophocles and Virgil have such names as Krachenberger or Schwarzerd? At the same time, a spirit of independence breathed in all the universities. Students were no longer seen in schoolboy fashion, with their books under their arms, walking sagely and demurely with downcast eye behind their masters. The petulance of a Martial and an Ovid had passed into the new disciples of the Muses. It was transport to them to hear the sarcasms which fell in torrents on the dialectical theologians, and the heads of the literary movement were sometimes accused of favouring, and even of exciting, the disorderly proceedings of the students. Thus a new world, emerging out of antiquity, was formed in the very heart of the world of the middle ages. The two parties could not avoid coming to blows, and the struggle was at hand. It began with the greatest champion of literature, with an old man on the eve of finishing his peaceful career.