The year 1602 put the Unity of the Brethren to a severe test. Three years before, the long and systematic efforts of the papal nuncio in Bohemia had resulted in the fall of Chancellor Charles Želinský, and the highest offices of the realm had passed into the hands of Catholics— representatives, for the most part, of the new aggressive generation, who made no secret of their intention to wipe out the evangelical faith in Bohemia, and who had indeed begun energetically to work in that direction. Zdeněk Lobkovic, more of a Spaniard than a Czech, had been put at the head of the government, and at his side were Jaroslav Martinic and the convert William Slavata.

There are four men whom popular tradition, and the builders of Luther's monument in Worms, have grouped around the figure of the Wittenberg reformer as his greatest forerunners: Peter Waldo, Savonarola, Wyclyf and Hus. Luther himself considered only the last named as a man to whom he was indebted, and with whose teachings he could increasingly identify himself, at least after he wrote that famous letter to Spalatin in February 1520 in which he claimed, half-correctly, that he had always held the whole doctrine of Hus without having even been aware of it. But what, in the consciousness of present historiography, is the relation between the heritage of Hus, the whole vast movement called Hussitism, and the Lutheran reformation?

The power that impelled Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini from his first insignificant clerkship at the Council of Basel to the height of papal dignity resided less in himself than in the cross-currents of fifteenth-century European politics through which he moved. The particular currents that Aeneas Sylvius exploited were those emanating from German resistance to Rome, from the Hauspolitik of the Hapsburgs, from the entrenched Hussitism of Bohemia, and in general from the cultural differential between backward-Gothic Central Europe and the new life of Renaissance Italy. Amply endowed with energy and the kind of rich but not first-rate talent that never has to sacrifice effectiveness to an original vision of truth, Aeneas carefully made himself useful to the dignitaries of Basel, to the Council's pope, then to the Emperor Frederick III, and finally to the Roman papacy. His good style, facetious imagination, and worldliness helped him throughout his career, and when it became possible for him to look forward to high office in the church he experienced a mild spiritual conversion and took the necessary holy orders; as Bishop first of Trieste (1447), then of his own Siena (1449), he served both the Emperor and the Roman Pope; in 1456 his service to both parties was rewarded with the dignity of Cardinal Priest of Santa Sabina, and in 1458, on the death of Calixtus III, he was elected to the papacy.

If in our previous section, we attempted to show how the Papacy discovered the possibilities which the East-West alliance possessed with regard to the healing of the schism, this final section will indicate how the East-West alliance became pregnant with menace for the Roman Church and thus destructive of all hopes for a reconciliation between Rome and Constantinople. Indeed, as we shall show, all plans for church union, on either side, now disappear into a welter of conflicting ambitions whose focus was southern Italy and the Norman Kingdom of Roger II.