predecessors and the Church, the ecclesiastical States were kept in a
continual ferment of expropriation and internal revolution. Yet it is
difficult to conceive how a spiritual Power like the Papacy could have
solved the problem set before it of becoming a substantial secular
sovereignty, without recourse to this ruinous method. The Pope, a
lonely man upon an ill-established throne, surrounded by rivals whom
his elevation had disappointed, was compelled to rely on the strong arm
of adventurers with whose interests his own were indissolubly connected.
The profits of all these schemes of egotistical rapacity eventually
accrued, not to the relatives of the Pontiffs; none of whom, except the
Delia Roveres in Urbino, founded a permanent dynasty at this period; but
to the Holy See. Julius II., for example, on his election in 1503,
entered into possession of all that Cesare Borgia had attempted to grasp
for his own use. He found the Orsini and Colonna humbled, Romagna
reduced to submission; and he carried on the policy of conquest by
trampling out the liberties of Bologna and Perugia, recovering the
cities held by Venice on the coast of Ravenna, and extending his sway
over Emilia. The martial energy of Julius added Parma and Piacenza to
the States of the Church, and detached Modena and Reggio from the Duchy
of Ferrara. These new cities were gained by force; but Julius pretended
that they formed part of the Exarchate of Ravenna, which had been
granted to his predecessors by Pepin and Charles the Great. He pursued
the Papal line of conquest in a nobler spirit than his predecessors, not
seeking to advance his relatives so much as to reinstate the Church in
her dominions. But he was reckless in the means employed to secure this
object. Italy was devastated by wars stirred up, and by foreign armies
introduced, in order that the Pope might win a point in the great game
of ecclesiastical aggrandizement. That his successor, Leo X., reverted
to the former plan of carving principalities for his relatives out of
the possessions of their neighbors and the Church, may be counted among