Yet even in the midst of these distractions and schisms, when the actual life of the Head of the Church was sometimes in danger, we still see the Church's power steadily increasing--for one reason, because, in the tumult of the times, it was the one force which knew its own purpose and pursued that purpose in all places and at all times unchangeably. By the end of the fourteenth century it stands at last supreme in its own city and country--in Rome itself. Rome as a republic exists no longer: it has become the Papal State. {171} CHAPTER XIX THE MOSLEMS IN SPAIN It is curious to note the different modes of government which prevailed in the different States of Italy in the fifteenth century. There was, nearly halfway down the long peninsula, this Papal State or State of the Church, firmly established by 1450. In the extreme south was the kingdom, that is to say a State governed by a monarchy, of Naples, with which the island of Sicily was at one time included, while at another time the kingdom was separated from it. In the extreme north there was Milan, of which the Duke was the head. Another of the five great States by which all Italy at that time was held was Florence, under a republican government, and there was the powerful naval State of Venice, also in name a republic, though its mode of government differed from the mode of Florence. In Italy more than in any other country, although conditions everywhere were constantly changing, we find what we may call experiments in ways of government being attempted. I do not think that there is any form of government, or even of anarchy--which is absence of all government--under which mankind ever has tried to live that was not put upon its trial in Italy during these years. Yet, through all the shifting scene, so unsettled that even the Pope himself had to fly from the Holy City, the power of the Church still increased and increased. And one of the means of its {172} increase we have to recognise in the Crusades. Although the later Crusades lost much of the high spiritual motives which had inspired the first Crusades, even the worst of them was waged with the underlying idea in the minds of the warriors that they were fighting in the sacred cause of religion.