From the death of Benedict XI., in 1303, to the death of Alexander VI., in 1503, the night was dark before the inevitable dawn; and in every phase of human depravity, in every development of human turpitude, in arrogance, in venality, in cruelty, in licentiousness, medieval Popes may be found pre-eminent among contemporary potentates. Thus, if the wickedness of Alexander was extravagant, it was by no means unparalleled, even among the Popes of a single century. His cruelty was no greater than that of Urban VI., or of Clement VII., or of John XXII. His immorality was, at least, more human than that of Paul II. and of Sixtus IV., nor were his amours more scandalous than those of Innocent VIII. His sacrilege was less dreadful than that of Sixtus IV. His covetousness could hardly have exceeded that of Boniface IX.; his arrogance was less offensive than that of Boniface VIII. If he was unduly subservient to Ferdinand and Isabella in his toleration of the enormities of Torquemada, his necessities as an Italian sovereign rendered the Spanish alliance a matter of capital importance. As a civil potentate and as a politician, he was not only wiser, but far less corrupt than Sforza, less rapacious than Ferdinand, more constant than Maximilian of Germany, less reckless than Charles of France. His administrative ability, his financial enlightenment, his energy as regards public works, were no less remarkable than his personal liberality, his affability, and his courage. His division of the New World by a stroke of the pen was an assumption of imperial power which was at least justified by the magnitude of its success. As he sat in his palace on the Mons Vaticanus, he was the successor, not of Caligula, but of Tiberius--not of Commodus, but of Diocletian. Of the misfortunes of his eldest son, created by Ferdinand Duke of Gandia; of the wickedness of his second son, the fifteenth century Cæsar, who succeeded his father as Cardinal Archbishop of Valencia; of the profligacy of his daughter, so unhappily named Lucretia; of the marriage of his youngest son Geoffrey to a daughter of Alfonso of Naples, as a part of the treaty of alliance between the kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the States of the Church, in 1494; of the alliance between Alexander and Bajazet, and the poisoning of the Sultan’s brother, Zem, after thirteen years’ captivity, on receipt of an appropriate fee; of the elevation of a facile envoy to the full rank of Cardinal, to please the Grand Turk; of all these things nothing need be said in this place. We are more immediately concerned to know that on New Year’s Day, 1495, Pope Alexander VI., a refugee, if not actually a prisoner, in the Castle of St. Angelo, was fain to accept the terms that were imposed upon him by the victorious Frenchmen--masters for the nonce of Italy and of Rome.