The superiority of Councils over Popes, though it continued to be asserted by France in the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, and from time to time by Germany, gradually sank into an academic question, and the Popes were finally able to treat it with contempt. In 1459, at the Congress of Mantua, Pius II (r. 1458-1464), in his speech to the French envoys, took occasion to assert his irresponsible supremacy, which could not be limited by general councils and to which all princes were subject.

The incompatibility between the papal pretensions and the royal prerogative was intensified not only by the development of the monarchies but by the increasing secularisation of the Holy See. It had been weighted down by its territorial possessions which led it to subordinate its spiritual duties to its acquisitive ambition....The earlier half of the fifteenth century was occupied with the Great Schism and the struggle between the papacy and the General Councils; but on the final and triumphant assertion of papal absolutism, the Popes became to all intents and purposes mere secular princes, to whom religion was purely an instrument for supplementing territorial weakness in the attainment of worldly ends....the levying of annates and tithes and the sale of dispensations, absolutions, and indulgences....were exploited in every way that ingenuity could suggest, draining Europe of its substance for the maintenance of papal armies and fleets and a Court unrivalled in its sumptuous magnificence, until the Holy See was everywhere regarded with detestation.

During the half-century preceding the Reformation there was constant shifting of scene; enemies were converted into allies and allies into enemies, but the spirit of the papacy remained the same, and, whatever might be the political combination of the moment, the Christian nations at large regarded it as a possible enemy, whose friendship was not to be trusted, for it was always fighting for its own hand....Under the circumstances the Holy See could inspire neither respect nor confidence. Universal distrust was the rule between the States, and the papacy was merely a State whose pretensions to care for the general welfare of Christendom were recognised as diplomatic hypocrisy.

. . . Rome had become a centre of corruption whence infection was radiated throughout Christendom. . . . In fact, one of the most urgent symptoms of the necessity of a new order of things was the complete divorce between religion and morality. There was abundant zeal in debating minute points of faith, but little in evoking from it an exemplary standard of life....The sacerdotal system, developed by the dialectics of the Schoolmen, had constructed a routine of external observances through which salvation was to be gained not so much by abstinence from sin as by its pardon through the intervention of the priest, whose supernatural powers were in no way impaired by the scandals of his daily life. Except within the pale of the pagan Renaissance, never was there a livelier dread of future punishment, but this punishment was to be escaped, not by amendment but by confession, absolution, and indulgences. . . . Society was thoroughly corrupt--perhaps less so in the lower than in the higher classes--but no one can read the Lenten sermons of the preachers of the time, even with full allowance for rhetorical exaggeration, without recognizing that the world has rarely seen a more debased standard of morality than that which prevailed in Italy in the closing years of the Middle Ages. Yet at the same time never were there greater outward manifestations of devotional zeal. . . . At no period was there greater faith in thaumaturgic [miracle-working] virtue of images and saintly relics; never were religious solemnities so gorgeously celebrated; never were processions so magnificent or so numerously attended; never were fashionable shrines so largely thronged by pilgrims. . . . In his Encheirridion Militas Christiani, written in 1502 and approved by Adrian VI, then head of the University of Louvain, Erasmus had the boldness to protest against this new kind of Judaism which placed its reliance on observances, like magic rites, which drew men away from Christ; and again, in 1519, in a letter to Cardinal Albrecht of Mainz, he declared that religion was degenerating into a more than Judaic formalism of ceremonies, and that there must be a change.

That a reform of the Church in its head and its members was necessary had long been generally conceded. For more than a century Europe had been clamouring for it. . . . While thus the primary cause of the Reformation is to be sought in the all-pervading corruption of the Church and its oppressive exercise of supernatural prerogatives, there were other factors conducing to the explosion. . . . The shackles which for centuries had bound the human intellect had to be loosened, before there could be a popular movement of volume sufficient to break with the traditions of the past and boldly tempt the dangers of a new and untried career for humanity. The old reverence for authority had to be weakened, the sense of intellectual independence had to be awakened, and the spirit of enquiry and of more or less scientific investigation had to be created, before pious and devout men could reach the root of the abuses which caused so much indignation, and could deny the authenticity of the apostolical deposit on which had been erected the venerable and imposing structure of Scholastic Theology and papal autocracy.

It was the new Learning and the humanistic movement which supplied the impulse necessary for this, and they found conditions singularly favourable for their work.

The dissemination of the Scriptures and the propagation of the anti-sacerdotal views of the humanists naturally led to questioning the conclusions of scholastic theology and to increased impatience of the papal autocracy, these being regarded as the source of the evils so generally and grievously felt. The new teachings found a wide and receptive audience, fully prepared to carry them to their ultimate conclusions, in the numberless associations, partly literary and artistic, partly religious, which existed throughout the Teutonic lands.

The combination of all these factors rendered an explosion inevitable, and Germany was predestined to be its scene. The ground was better prepared for it there than elsewhere, by the deeper moral and religious earnestness of the people and by the tendencies of the academies and associations with which society was honeycombed. In obedience to these influences the humanistic movement had not been pagan and aesthetic as in Italy, but addressed itself to the higher emotions and had sought to train the conscience of the individual to recognize his direct responsibility to God and to his fellows. But more potent than all this were the forces arising from the political system of Germany and its relations with the Holy See. The Teutonic spirit of independence had early found expression in the Sachsenpiegel and Sächsische Weichbild--the laws and customs of Northern Germany--which were resolutely maintained in spite of repeated papal condemnation. Thus not only did the Church inspire there less awe than elsewhere in Europe, but throughout the Middle Ages there had been special causes of antagonism actively at work. If Italy had suffered bitterly from the Tedeschi, Germany had no less reason to hate the papacy. The fatal curse of the so-called Holy Roman Empire hung over both lands. It gave the Emperor a valid right to the suzerainty of the penninsula; it gave the papacy a traditional claim to confirm at its discretion the election of an Emperor. Conflicting and incompatible pretensions rendered impossible a permanent truce between the representatives of Charlemagne and St. Peter. Since the age of Gregory VII the consistent policy of Rome had been to cripple the Empire by fomenting internal dissension and rendering impossible the evolution of a strong and centralized government, such as elsewhere in Europe was gradually overcoming the centrifugal forces of feudalism. The policy had been successful and Germany had become a mere geographical expression--a congress of sovereign princes, petty and great, owing allegiance to an Emperor whose dignity was scarce more than a primacy of honour and whose actual power was to be measured by that of his ancestral territories. The result of this was that Germany lay exposed defenceless to the rapacity and oppression of the Roman Curia. . . .Germany was the ordinary resource of a Pope in financial straits. . . .