| | Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence: CHAPTER SEVEN |
 | | A war against the papacy was thus transformed into a referendum on the place of religion and the church within the Florentine community itselfagain, one of the most literate and sophisticated in pre-Reformation Europe. |
 | | The war was not against the church, he assured Galeazzo Malatesta, but was "with barbarians, with foreigners who, born of the vilest parents and raised on filth," had been turned loose by the church to plunder misera Italia. |
 | | Further, the financial devastation wrought by the war did to church government in Florence what the schism did to the papacy: it precipitated a constitutional struggle that lasted beyond the schism to the mid-fifteenth century, in which the traditional principle of episcopal hierarchical authority was challenged by clerical experiments with corporate self-government. |
| www.ucpress.edu /books/pages/9634/9634.ch07.html (10860 words) |