Within seventy years the families of Borgia, Piccolomini, Rovere, and Medici were each represented by more than one pontiff, and a majority of the others were nearly related by blood or marriage to one of these great stocks.

The cardinals were appointed from the pontiff's sons or nephews, and the numerous other {16} offices in their patronage, save as they were sold, were distributed to personal or political friends.
Like other Italian princes the popes became, in the fifteenth century, distinguished patrons of arts and letters.

The golden age of the humanists at Rome began under Nicholas V [Sidenote: Nicholas V 1447-55] who employed a number of them to make translations from Greek.

It is characteristic of the complete secularization of the States of the Church that a number of the literati pensioned by him were skeptics and scoffers.

Valla, who mocked the papacy, ridiculed the monastic orders, and attacked the Bible and Christian ethics, was given a prebend; Savonarola, the most earnest Christian of his age, was put to death.
[Sidenote: 1453] The fall of Constantinople gave a certain European character to the policy of the pontiffs after that date, for the menace of the Turk seemed so imminent that the heads of Christendom did all that was possible to unite the nations in a crusade.