290 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY a force which threatened to destroy them all. Had they not been enfeebled by jealousies, corruption, and superstition, they must have learned long before the end of the sixteenth century to combine in such force as to prohibit the further advance of Islam. But in the fifteenth century the darkness of the Middle Ages was still upon them. Gibbon, in relating the fall of Constantinople, quotes from neas Silvius, afterwards Pope Pius II., who thus describes the state of Christendom: *' It is a body," he says, ** without a head; a republic without laws or magistrates. The Pope and the Emperor may shine as lofty titles, as splendid images ; but they are unable to command, and none are willing to obey ; every state has a separate prince, and every prince has a separate interest. What eloquence could unite so many discordant and hostile powers under the same standard ? Could they be assembled in arms, who would dare to assume the office of general? What order could be maintained ? What military discipline ?

Who would undertake to feed such an enormous multitude ? Who would understand their various languages, or direct their stranger and incompatible manners ? What mortal could reconcile the English with the French, Genoa with Arragon, the Germans with the natives of Hungary and Bohemia? If a small number enlisted in the Holy War, they must be overthrown by the infidels ; if many, by their own weight and confusion." This picture of the weakness of Europe in the fifteenth century needs no amplifying touches. It may, however, be recalled that at the very moment that Mohammed II. was engaged in besieging and sacking Constantinople, a private German citizen of the name of John Gutenberg was no less absorbed in the work of perfecting at Mentz an invention of cut metal types from which he printed, in the years between 1450 and 1455, the first typed copy of the Latin Bible. If the work of Mohammed tended to consolidate Christendom