Leopold von Ranke was born at Wiehe, on December 21, 1795, and died on May 23, 1886. He became Professor of History at Berlin at the age of twenty-nine; and his life was passed in researches, the fruits of which he gave to the world in an invaluable series of historical works. The earlier of these were concerned mainly with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--in English history generally called the Tudor and Stuart periods--based on examinations of the archives of Vienna and Rome, Venice and Florence, as well as of Berlin. In later years, when he had passed seventy, he travelled more freely outside of his special period. The "History of the Popes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries" here presented was published in 1834-7. The English translation by Sarah Austin (1845) was the subject of review in one of Macaulay's famous essays. It is mainly concerned with the period, not of the Reformation itself, but of the century and a quarter following--roughly from 1535 to 1760, the period during which the religious antagonisms born of the Reformation were primary factors in all European complications. _I.--The Papacy at the Reformation_ The papacy was intimately allied with the Roman Empire, with the empire of Charlemagne, and with the German or Holy Roman Empire revived by Otto. In this last the ecclesiastical element was of paramount importance, but the emperor was the supreme authority. From that authority Gregory VII. resolved to free the pontificate, through the claim that no appointment by a layman to ecclesiastical office was valid; while the pope stood forth as universal bishop, a crowned high-priest. To this supremacy the French first offered effectual resistance, issuing in the captivity of Avignon. Germany followed suit, and the schism of the church was closed by the secular princes at Constance and Basle. The papacy was restored in form, but not to its old supremacy. The pontificates of Sixtus IV. and the egregious Alexander VI. were followed by the militant Julius II., who aimed, with some success, at making the pope a secular territorial potentate. But the intellectual movement challenged the papal claim, the direct challenge emanating from Germany and Luther. But this was at the moment when the empire was joined with Spain under Charles V. The Diet of Worms pointed to an accord between emperor and pope, when Leo X. died unexpectedly. His successor, Adrian, a Netherlander and an admirable man, sought vainly to inaugurate reform of the Church from within, but in brief time made way for Clement VII.