I^ETARE JERUSALEM
lection of sentences o excommunication, which had expanded during the centuries a code of ecclesiastical criminal law. Even Catholic states, though it is true they were such which, like Spain and Venice tended toward a State Church, protested against this action.
Great visions do not grow from little visions, nor do they visit peace- ful and harmonious men. Pius V proved himself half a Don Quixote when he crowned the anachronism of his pontificate with a deed of secular importance. Always he saw Europe not as it was, but as it ought to be according to his plans; and often the fact that the goal he sought was unobtainable wearied him and made him contemptuous of man. But his greatest political intuition, which was nothing short of an order that history reverse itself, was borne out by fortune. This was his Crusade against Islam. Already for decades France, as the protector of the Holy Places in Syria, had flirted with the people of Mohammed. Diplomacy had become accustomed to look upon Cross and Crescent as political factors having an equal right to exist, but the Pope was still a man of the Middle Ages and thought and acted otherwise. Like Pius II he looked upon the Moslem as the inevitable and eternal enemy of the Christian order, the law of the West. He refused to debate the matter with the powers and per- suaded Spain and Venice to join with the forces of Italy and the fleet of the Papal States in the attack which at Lepanto destroyed Ottoman rule in the Mediterranean. This victory encouraged the dying Saint to feel confident, when in his last days on earth he knelt once more to kiss the steps of the Scala Sancta, that the Papacy which had as- sembled the Christian galleys to war against the infidel would also overpower the anti-Christ of heresy.
Gregory XIII (15721585) was only half fitted to inherit the spirit of his predecessor. He took life far less seriously, and had become the father of a natural son before entering the priesthood. Now, under the influence of the Jesuits and the Theatines at his court, he adjusted his conduct and his outlook to the increased strictness of the demands that were made upon the Papal dignity. These his pedagogues were rewarded an hundred fold. Twenty-two colleges of the Society of Jesus owe their foundation to him. The renovation of the Collegium Gennanicum and the Collegium Romanum, which still clings to the name of Universitas Gregoriana in so far as its highest department is
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