The alliance between renovated Hellenism and the Papacy was ratified a few years later, when the most intelligent of the Italian Humanists, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini of Siena, was raised to the throne under the name of Pius II, and became the most modern of medieval Popes. He was one of those Churchmen in whom the classical spirit of the time predominated over the ecclesiastical. Twice there was a breach, and a momentary reaction; but on the whole the contract was observed, and the ancient pagans made their way under the shadow of St. Peter's better than the early Christians. Humanists of the type of Valla were domesticated by the prizes held out to them, from the pen of the secretary to the tiara of the pontiff. The apprehended explosion never came; the good and evil that was in the new scholars penetrated the court and modified its tone. Bibbiena's comedies were applauded at the Belvedere; The Prince was published by the Pope's printer, with the Pope's permission; a cardinal shrank from reading St. Paul, for fear of spoiling his style; and the scandals in the family of Borgia did not prevent bishops from calling him a god. Calixtus III said that he feared nothing from any hostile Powers, for he had 3000 men of letters to rely on. His successor, Aeneas Sylvius, considered that the decline of the empire was due to the fact that scholarship had gone over to the Papacy. The main fact in the Italian Renaissance is that an open conflict was averted at the cost of admitting into the hierarchy something of the profane spirit of the new men, who were innovators but not reformers. Ficino declares that there was no place where liberty prevailed as it did at Rome. Poggio, the mocking adversary of the clergy, was for half a century in the service of the Popes. Filelfo was handsomely rewarded by Nicholas for satires which would now be considered scarcely fit for publication. Aeneas Sylvius laughed at the Donation of Constantine, and wrote an account of his own Conclave in the tone of a fin de siecle journalist. He is indeed the founder of freedom of speech in History. When his History of his own time was published, a great number of passages injurious to his countrymen and to his ecclesiastical brethren had to be suppressed. They have been printed lately, and contain, in fifty pages, the concentrated essence of the wickedness of Italy. Platina wrote an angry and vindictive History of the Popes, and presented it to Sixtus IV, who made him librarian of the Vatican. Erasmus, who had a sort of clerical bias, warmly extols the light and liberty which he found at Rome in 1515, at the very eve of the Reformation.