35 6
ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
mediæval independence, and of monarchical absolutism at the expense of mediæval freedom. Both of these tendencies asserted themselves in the States of the Church. The liberties of the towns were gradually destroyed. This ,vas accomplished by Clement VII. in Ancona, in I H ; by Paul III. in Perugia, in 1540. Ravenna, Faenza, J esi had, under various pretexts, undergone the same fate. By the middle of the sixteenth century all resistance was subdued. In opposition, however, to this centralising policy, the nepotism introducted by Sixtus IV. led to dismemberment. Paul III. gave Parma and Piacenza to his son Pier Luigi Farnese, and the duchy' was lost to the Holy See for good. Paul IV. made a similar attempt in favour of his nephew Caraffa, but he was put to death under Pius IV.; and this species of nepotism, which subsisted at the expense of the papal territory, came to an end. Pius V. forbade, under pain of excommunication, to invest anyone with a possession of the Holy See, and this law was extended even to . I tern porary concessions. In the eighteenth century a time came when the temporal po\ver was a source of weakness, and a \veapon by which the courts compelled the Pope to consent to measures he ,vould otherwise never have approved. It was thus that the suppression of the Jesuits ,vas obtained from Clement XIV. Under his successors the world had an opportunity of comparing the times when Popes like Alexander III. or Innocent IV. governed the Church from their exile, and now, when men of the greatest piety and conscientiousness virtually postponed their duty as head of the Church to their rights as temporal sovereigns, and, like the senators of old, awaited the Gauls upon their throne. There is a lesson not to be forgotten in the contrast between the policy and the fate of the great mediæval pontiffs, who preserved their liberty by abandon- ing their dominions, and that of Pius VI. and Pius VII., who preferred captivity to flight. The nepotism of Urban VIII. brought on the war of Castro, and in its train increase of debt, of taxes,
