²⁷⁰ Innocent VI. sent Philip de Cabassole into Germany, to raise the tenth penny on all the ecclesiastical revenues. The following were the complaints of the Germans at the news of this exaction: “The Romans have always looked on Germany as a mine of gold, and have invented various ways of exhausting it. What does the pope give to this kingdom but letters and words? Let him be master of all the benefices as far as the collation; but let him relinquish their revenue to those who do the duty of them. We send money enough into Italy for various merchandize, and to Avignon for our children, who study there or stand for benefices, without mentioning their having to purchase them. None of you are ignorant, my lords, that every year large sums of money are taken from Germany to the pope’s court, for the confirmation of prelates, the obtaining of benefices, the prosecution of suits and appeals to the Holy See; for dispensations, absolutions, indulgences, privileges, and other favours. At all times the archbishops confirmed the elections of their suffragan bishops. It is pope John XXII. alone who, in our time, has taken this right from them by violence. And yet this pope further demands of the clergy, a new and unheard of subsidy; threatening with censures those who will not give it, or who oppose it. Check this evil in its outset, and do not permit the establishment of this shameful servitude.” Vita 2, Lrnoc. VI. and Bahiz. Vit. Pap. A veiv. 1. p. 350. Charles IV., a prince as weak as he was ambitious, was commonly surnamed the emperor of the priests.: “You have then,” Petrarch writes to him, “you have promised with an oath never to return to “Rome. What a shame for an emperor, that priests “should have the power or rather the audacity to “compel him to such a renunciation! What pride “in a bishop to deprive a sovereign, the father of “liberty, of liberty itself! And what opprobrium in “him whom the universe should obey, to cease to “be his own master, and obey his vassal!” This Petrarch, who beheld too nearly the court of Avignon, compares it to²⁷¹ “a labyrinth in which an “imperious Minos casts into the fatal urn the lot of “humanity, where bellows a rapacious Minotaur, “where triumphs a lascivious Venus. There is no “guide, no Ariadne; to chain the monster, to bribe his “hideous porter, there is no means but gold. But “gold there opens heaven, gold in that place buys “Jesus Christ, and, in this impious Babylon, a “future existence, immortality, the resurrection, the “last judgment, are placed with Elysium, Acheron “and the Styx, in the class of fables imposed upon “the grossest credulity.” ²⁷¹ Petrarc. Op. Epist. s. tit 7. 8.10. 11.16.—Three sonnets against the Roman Coart—Et, De Vita Solitar. 1.3. 4. c. 3.