1376).

The diminution of its influence in the peninsula, that had thus occurred, gave opportunity for the memorable intellectual movement which soon manifested itself in the great commercial cities of Upper Italy.
Contemporaneously, also, there were other propitious events.

The result of the Crusades had shaken the faith of all Christendom.

In an age when the test of the ordeal of battle was universally accepted, those wars had ended in leaving the Holy Land in the hands of the Saracens; the many thousand Christian warriors who had returned from them did not hesitate to declare that they had found their antagonists not such as had been pictured by the Church, but valiant, courteous, just.

Through the gay cities of the South of France a love of romantic literature had been spreading; the wandering troubadours had been singing their songs--songs far from being restricted to ladye-love and feats of war; often their burden was the awful atrocities that had been perpetrated by papal authority--the religious massacres of Languedoc; often their burden was the illicit amours of the clergy.