The problem would have been insoluble had not the prestige of Rome declined considerably since the Middle Ages, a prestige which sprang from the fact that she was the capital of two Empires--the spiritual Empire of the Papacy, and the secular Empire founded by Charles the Great. The former had suffered from the Reformation and the rise of the great Protestant nations, the latter had been growing feebler and feebler for centuries, until it was abolished as an institution by Napoleon. Yet Italy in 1814 still lay helpless and divided at the feet of Rome. The Pope held under his immediate sway a large zigzag-shaped territory running across the centre from sea to sea, and, as spiritual leader of half Europe, he could at any moment summon to his assistance the Catholic chivalry of the world. "The Roman emperor" no longer existed, but "the Austrian emperor" was another title for the same man, holding much the same territory; and the fact that he had renounced his vague suzerainty over the rest of Europe did not prevent him exercising a very real suzerainty in Italy, not merely over the eastern half of the Lombard Plain which definitely belonged to Austria, but also over the other States of the peninsula which were, in theory at least, independent. The kingdom of the two Sicilies in the South, the grand duchy of Tuscany on the West, and the smaller duchies of Parma, Modena, and Lucca were only stable in so far as Austria bolstered up their corrupt and unpopular governments. Even the Papal States themselves, equally undermined with corruption and unpopularity, ultimately rested upon the same support. Thus Austria represented for Italy all that evil past of which she wanted to be rid: the foreign yoke against which her newly conscious spirit of nationality revolted, the dynastic frontiers which were abhorrent to her desire for unity, the absolute _régime_ under which her soul, after feeding on the principles of the French Revolution, lay gagged and bound. The first step to be taken towards the creation of Italy was the expulsion of the Austrians.