What a scene of unrest and disturbance met him--a world
filled with dangerous tensions. He came into an atmosphere
heavy like the air before a downpour, with the first thunderclaps
rumbling in the distance, announcing the approaching storm.
The German nation, full of defiance, lay helpless like a captured
giant, bound by the unwieldiness of its own limbs (in
Machiavelli's mocking words), only waiting for the liberator
who would unleash the eruptive forces imprisoned there.

The great dream of the universal hierarchy of the papal
dominion over the states of the West had long since been
shattered. Long since, the great nation states of the European
West had raised themselves to their full stature and, conscious
of their independent secular power, had shaken off the yoke of
Peter's seat. It was Francis I, the Renaissance prince who stands
at the beginning of the history of Royal Absolutism in France,
who made a treaty with the Pope in which the Curia and the
State divided the control of the Church, but in such a way that
the State had the lion's share. Similarly the English Church
had to accept the position of a national church under the
supremacy of the monarchy. Even the bigoted Spanish
monarchy, the most faithful, if also the most embarrassing,
friend of the Papacy, used the Church of Spain as the sharpest
weapon of its secular power. Italy, on the other hand, with
its colourful collection of states, was basking in the glory of a
new, highly secular culture which threatened to drive away the
secretive shadows and candle-light of the medieval Church.
Only the 'dumb, fat' Germans, as Hutten complained, still

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