If we look more closely at Italy and Rome we find that in Italy, which comprised within its limits the seat of the supreme authority in the Church and of which the influence on civilisation everywhere was so important, complete religious indifference had taken root among many of the most highly cultured. The Renaissance, the famed classic regeneration, had undergone a change for the worse, and, in the name of education, was promoting the most questionable tendencies. After having been welcomed and encouraged by the Papacy with over-great confidence it disappointed both the Popes and the Church with its poisonous fruits. At the time that the Holy See was lavishing princely gifts on art and learning, the pernicious system of Church taxation so often complained of by the nations was becoming more and more firmly established. This taxation, which had started at the time of the residence of the Popes at Avignon in consequence of the real state of need in which the central government of the Church then stood, became more and more an oppressive burden, especially in Germany. It was exploited by Luther in one of his earliest controversial writings where, voicing the popular discontent in that spiteful language of which he was a master, he joined his protest to that of the German Estates of the realm. Combining truth and fancy, the administration of the Papal finances became in his hands a popular and terribly effective weapon. It has frequently been pointed out how much the authority of the Holy See suffered in the preceding age, not only on account of the Western Schism when three rival claimants simultaneously strove for the tiara, but also through the so-called reforming councils and their opposition to the constitution of the Church, through the political mistakes of the Popes since they established their headquarters in France, through the struggle they waged to assert their power in Italy, that apple of discord of rising nations, and also, in the case of the Avignon Popes, through their lack, or, at any rate, suspected lack, of independence. To this we must add the shocking behaviour of the Curial officials and of several of the cardinals in the Eternal City, especially at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, also the disgraceful example of Alexander VI and the Borgia family, the bearing of his successor Julius II, more befitting a soldier than an ecclesiastic, and the very worldly spirit of Leo X and his Court. Ostentation and the abuse of worldly possessions and Church revenues which Alvarez Pelayo, the Spanish Franciscan, had already bewailed in his “_De planctu ecclesiæ_” had risen to still greater heights at Rome. The work of this severe critic, who, in spite of his fault-finding, was nevertheless well disposed to the Curia, was in general circulation just previous to Luther’s appearance on the field; it was several times reprinted, for instance, at Ulm in 1474, and again at Lyons in