Like all who begin revolutions, Luther was not at all aware of the extent to which his opposition to the court of Rome might be carried: he at first began by attacking some abuses of the pontifical authority, and soon finished by attacking the authority itself. The opinions he had kindled by his eloquence, the passions he had given birth to among his disciples, led him himself much further than he could possibly have foreseen: those who had the greatest reason to combat the doctrines of the reformers saw, no more than he did, what those doctrines were to bring with them. Germany, divided into a thousand different states, and given up to all kinds of disorders, had no authority sufficiently strong and sufficiently prescient to anticipate the effects of a schism. At the court of Rome nobody could have believed that a simple monk could ever shake the pillars of the Church. Amidst the pomp and the splendour of the arts which he patronized, and diverted by the cares of an ambitious policy, Leo X. perhaps was too neglectful of the progress of Luther. Above all, he was wrong in entirely abandoning the expedition against the Turks, which he had announced to the Christian world, and which might, at least at the first, have offered a useful distraction to minds agitated by ideas of reformation. The undertaking of a holy war which he had followed up with so much warmth at the beginning of his pontificate and for which the poets promised him eternal glory,—this enterprise, at his death, no longer engaged his thoughts, or those of his contemporaries. In the mean time Soliman, the successor of Selim, had recently taken possession of Belgrade, and threatened the isle of Rhodes. This isle was then the last colony of the Christians in Asia. As long as the Knights of St. John remained masters of it, the sultan of the Turks had reason to fear that some great expedition might be formed in the West for the recovery of Palestine and Syria, or even for the conquest of Egypt, which had lately been united to the Ottoman empire. The grand-master of the Hospitallers sent to solicit the assistance of Christian Europe. Charles V. had just united, in his own person, the imperial crown with that of the Spains. Entirely occupied with opposing the power of France, and anxious to draw Pope Adrian VI. into a war against the most Christian king, the emperor was very little affected by the danger which threatened the Knights of Rhodes. The sovereign pontiff did not dare to succour them, or solicit for them the support of Christendom. Francis I. exhibited more generous sentiments; but in the situation in which his kingdom was then placed, he was unable to send them the assistance he had promised.