Few lands were more open to German and Swiss influences than was their transalpine neighbor.

Commercially, Italy and Germany were united by a thousand bonds, and a constant influx of northern travellers, students, artists, officials and soldiers, might be supposed to carry with them the contagion of the new ideas.

Again, the lack of political unity might be supposed, as in Germany, so in Italy, {372} to facilitate sectional reformation.

Finally, the Renaissance, with its unparalleled freedom of thought and its strong anti-clerical bias, would at least insure a fair hearing for innovations in doctrine and ecclesiastical ideals.
And yet, as even contemporaries saw, there were some things which weighed far more heavily in the scale of Catholicism than did those just mentioned in the scale of Protestantism.

In the first place the autonomy of the political divisions was more apparent than real.