ABSTRACT

The death of the crusading-motive was but one of three great convictions of failure which made the end of the fifteenth century one of the most lugubrious epochs of European history. The other two need longer study and more detailed explanation. I mean the definite and well-proved failure of the two great rival institutions on which the political and religious organization of the Middle Ages had been based—the moral supremacy of the Papacy, and the legal supremacy of the Holy Roman Empire. Both had reached their lowest pitch of degradation about the year 1492–93—a date which combines the death of Frederick III, the most helpless and hapless of Holy Roman Emperors, and the election to the Papacy of Rodrigo Borgia, the most infamous wearer of the triple crown in all the annals of the Roman Church—not excepting any of the wretched Johns—the fifteenth-century pirate or the tenth-century degenerates.