the Papacy manifested more clearly than in Germany. This was due
partly to the growing feeling of antipathy between the Teutonic and
the Latin races, partly to the tradition of the great struggle of the
thirteenth century in which the Emperors were worsted by the Popes,
and partly also to the discontent excited amongst all classes of the
German people, lay and cleric, by the taxations of the Curia. The
attitude of the three ecclesiastical electors in 1455, the complaints
of the clergy in 1479, and the list of /Gravamina/ presented to
Maximilian in 1510 were harbingers of the revolution that was to come.

Besides, the growth of absolutism in Europe was likely to prove
dangerous to the liberties of the Church. Rulers, who aimed at
securing for themselves unlimited authority, were not blind to the
importance of being able to control the ecclesiastical organisation,
and to attain this result their legal advisers quoted for them the
maxims of the old Roman Code, according to which the king was the
source of all spiritual as well as temporal power. Their predecessors
had usurped already a strong voice in the appointments to benefices,
but now civil rulers claimed as a right what those who had gone before
were glad to accept as a privilege. Hence they demanded that the Holy
See should hand over to them the nomination of bishops, that it should
modify the old laws regarding exemption of ecclesiastical property
from taxation, trial of clerics, and right of sanctuary, and that it
should submit its pronouncements for the royal /Exequator/ before they
could have the force of law in any particular state. The Pragmatic
Sanction of Bourges (1438) and the Concordat wrung from Leo X. by
Francis I. of France in 1516, the Concordat of Princes in 1447, and
the new demands formulated by the Diet of the Empire, the Statutes of
/Provisors/ and /Praemunire/ in England (1453), and the concessions
insisted upon by Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain (1482), were clear