France, a regenerated France, turned upon the popes of the Council of Constance, and, remembering how long she had held the papacy within her own borders, asserted at least a qualified independence of the Romans by the "Pragmatic Sanction" which established the Gallican Church.[36] This semi-defiance of the Pope was encouraged by King Charles, who, in fact, made several shrewd moves to secure the power which his good-fortune, and not his abilities, had won. Among other innovations he established a "standing army," the first permanent body of government troops in Teutonic Europe. By this step he did much to alter the mediaeval into the modern world; he did much to establish that supremacy of kings over both nobles and people which continued in France and more or less throughout all Europe for over three centuries to follow. Another sign of the coming of a new and more vigorous era is to be seen in the beginning of exploration down the Atlantic coast of Africa by the Portuguese, and their discovery and settlement of the Canary Isles. As a first product of their voyages the explorers introduced negro slavery into Europe[37]--a grim hint that the next age with increasing power was to face increasing responsibilities as well. An even greater change was coming, was already glimmering into light. In that same year of King Charles' Pragmatic Sanction (1438), though yet unknown to warring princes and wrangling churchmen, John Gutenberg, in a little German workshop, had evolved the idea of movable type, that is, of modern printing. From his press sprang the two great modern genii, education and publicity, which have already made tyrannies and slaveries impossible, pragmatic sanctions unnecessary, and which may one day do as much for standing armies. DANTE COMPOSES THE "DIVINA COMMEDIA" A.D. 1300-1318 RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH Out of what may be called the civil and religious storm-and-stress period through which the Middle passed into the modern age, there came a great literary foregleam of the new life upon which the world was about to enter. From Italy, where the European ferment, both in its political and its spiritual character, mainly centred, came the prophecy of the new day, in a poet's "vision of the invisible world"--Dante's _Divina Commedia_--wherein also the deeper history of the visible world of man was both embodied from the past and in a measure predetermined for the human race. Dante's great epic was called by him a comedy because its ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine." It is in three parts--_Inferno_ (hell), _Purgatorio_ (purgatory), and _Paradiso_ (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and others, and in the excellent prose version (_Inferno_) of John Aitken Carlyle, brother of Thomas Carlyle.