Its immorality was matched by its enthusiasm.

It was not the decay of an old age dying, so much as the fermentation of a new age coming into life, that bred the monstrous paradoxes of the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries.

The contrast between mediaeval Christianity and renascent Paganism--the sharp conflict of two adverse principles, destined to fuse their forces and to recompose the modern world--made the Renaissance what it was in Italy.

Nowhere is the first effervescence of these elements so well displayed as in the history of those Pontiffs who, after striving in the Middle Ages to suppress humanity beneath a cowl, are now the chief actors in the comedy of Aphrodite and Priapus raising their foreheads once more to the light of day.
The struggle carried on between the Popes of the thirteenth century and the House of Hohenstauffen ended in the elevation of the Princes of Anjou to the throne of Naples--the most pernicious of all the evils inflicted by the Papal power on Italy.

Then followed the French tyranny, under which Boniface VIII.