THE NEW SPIRIT OF NATIONALITY. The new spirit moving in western Europe
also found expression in the evolution of the modern European States,
based on the new national feeling. As the kingly power in these was
consolidated, the developing States, each in its own domain, began to curb
the dominion of the universal Church, slowly to deprive it of the
governmental functions it had assumed and exercised for so long, and to
confine the Pope and clergy more and more to their original functions as
religious agents. The Papacy as a temporal power passed the maximum period
of its greatness early in the thirteenth century; in the nineteenth
century the last vestiges of its temporal power were taken away.

New national languages also were coming into being, and the national epics
of the people--the Cid, the Arthurian Legends, the _Chansons_, and the
_Nibelungen Lied_--were reduced to writing. With the introduction from the
East, toward the close of the thirteenth century, of the process of making
paper for writing, and with the increase of books in the vernacular, the
English, French, Spanish, Italian, and German languages rapidly took
shape. Their development was expressive of the new spirit in western
Europe, as also was the fact that Dante (1264-1321), "the first literary
layman since Boethius" (d. 524), wrote his great poem, _The Divine
Comedy_, in his native Italian instead of in the Latin which he knew so
well--an evidence of independence of large future import. New native
literatures were springing forth all over Europe. Beginning with the
_troubadours_ in southern France (p. 186), and taken up by the _trouveres_
in northern France and by the _minnesingers_ in German lands, the new
poetry of nature and love and joy of living had spread everywhere. [1] A
new race of men was beginning to "sing songs as blithesome and gay as the
birds" and to express in these songs the joys of the world here below.