The century before the Reformation in Italy has generally been treated with either neglect or recrimination. Protestants tended to see the Church becoming ever more corrupt; Roman Catholics assumed that it was 'paganised' by the Renaissance. Indisputably it was becoming more Italian in its leadership. This book attempts a dispassionate survey of the popes and the clergy of the peninsula during the hundred years prior to Luther and the Sack of Rome. There is no book in Italian (or in any other language) which tries to describe what the Italian clergy and their parishioners were like at this time. The resulting picture will perhaps offend traditionalists; it will give no comfort to 'modernists'. It aims to be about 'life as it was lived'. There are many saints and sinners, and if there are more of the latter, there always are in history books, for that is how the historian invariably finds his material.