GUELF AND GHIBELLINE. (I)
[Sidenote: Hadrian IV.]
Hadrian IV is interesting to us as the only Englishman who has ever
sat upon the throne of St. Peter. As Nicholas Brakespeare he had led
the life of a wandering scholar, chiefly in France. He entered the
house of Canons Regular of St. Rufus near Avignon, and when Abbot of
this monastery attracted the attention of Eugenius III, who made him
Cardinal Bishop of Albano, and employed him as papal legate in freeing
the Church in Scandinavia from its dependence on the Bishops in
Germany. The prestige which he acquired in this work marked him out as
the successor of the shortlived Anastasius. Hadrian was a much abler
man than either of his predecessors, and, while fully conscious of the
difficulties of his office, he did not let these deter him from the
fulfilment of its obvious duties. We have seen how he drove Arnold
from Rome. He found, however, a new danger in Sicily. Roger's son
William, known as "the Bad," took up an attitude of hostility, and
when the Pope asserted his overlordship, William's troops overran the
Campagna. The Pope retorted by excommunicating his refractory vassals
and looking for help from the new German King.
[Sidenote: The new contest.]
With the accession of Frederick I the quarrel between Empire and
Papacy enters on a new phase. On the death of Henry V the natural
candidate of the papal party for the German throne was Henry the Black
Duke of Bavaria, the head of the family of Welf or Guelf. But he was
old, and related by marriage to the Hohenstaufen. He was, however,
bribed to acquiesce in the election of Lothair by the offer of
Lothair's daughter and heiress, Gertrude, as a wife for his son Henry
the Proud. This marriage determined the whole course of German
history. Henry the Proud obtained the duchy of Bavaria from his father
and the duchy of Saxony from his father-in-law. Thus, if the
Hohenstaufen family were the heirs of the Franconian Emperors, the
Guelfs became the representatives of the opposition to that line which
had centred in Saxony; and for the old contest between Papacy and
Empire, Saxon and Franconian, there was now substituted a dynastic
struggle between Weiblingen or Ghibelline and Guelf. The Guelfs were
the papal party only in the sense that, like the Saxons, they were in
opposition to the dynasty which occupied the German throne and claimed
the imperial title. The name, however, was extended to Italy: it was
applied to the collective opposition to the imperial power, and
therefore came to denote the friends of the Papacy.
[Sidenote: Frederick I.]
So far the contest had been confined to Germany; for Lothair had
sacrificed the claims of the empire to his own immediate interests,
while Conrad had never set foot in Italy after his accession to the
German throne. But as the attempt of Lothair to crush the acknowledged
Ghibelline leaders had been thwarted, so Conrad had failed to render
the Guelf harmless; and it was the pretensions of Henry the Lion, the
son of Henry the Proud, which determined Conrad to waive the claims of
his young son to the succession, and to recommend to the nobles the
choice of his nephew Frederick. But Conrad's nomination would have
been of little account. Frederick's claims were largely personal.
Already before he succeeded his father as Duke of Suabia he had shown
a combination of boldness in action with a conciliatory disposition
which marked him out as a leader and a statesman. To this was added,
as with Conrad, the prestige of a crusader; while in view of the
bitter rivalries of the last two reigns, it was a recommendation that
Frederick united in his person the two families whose strife had
divided the kingdom. Two years elapsed from his accession before
Frederick was free to set out for Italy. As the heir of the
Franconians his probable attitude was a matter of some anxiety at Rome
and in Italy generally. He was no enemy of the Church. His first act
after his coronation at Aachen (March 9th, 1152) was to announce his
accession to the Pope, who sent him a return message of goodwill. But
from the outset Frederick showed his intention of taking a high line,
for, in a disputed election at Magdeburg he obtained a party for a
nominee of his own who was already a bishop, and therefore ineligible,
and by virtue of the Concordat he decided for his own candidate in
defiance of all ecclesiastical laws, and straightway invested him with
the regalia.
[Sidenote: Imperial rights.]
Moreover, he had a high idea of the imperial mission. It was seventeen
years since any emperor had crossed the Alps; and it is difficult to
say whether the selfish policy of Lothair or the non-appearance of
Conrad must have been the more detrimental to the maintenance of
imperial interests. But during the first few months of his reign
appeals poured in from the Pope against his various enemies, from some
barons of Apulia against the great Roger of Sicily, from the citizens
of Lodi against the tyranny of Milan. These, together with the
ridiculous proffer of the imperial crown from the lately formed
Republic of Rome, seemed to open an opportunity for the successful
recovery of imperial rights. And, much as the Italians resented the
spasmodic interferences of the Emperor, they were proud of their
imperial connection. The commerce of the East, largely increased by
the Crusades, flowed into Western Europe chiefly through Italy. As a
result, the north and centre of the peninsula were studded with a
number of compact, self-governing communities inclined to resent any
outside interference, however lawful in origin. But the larger cities
were ever trying to group the smaller round them as satellites; and
the constant quarrels which resulted, often produced a party which was
ready to welcome the interposition of the Emperor. There was this
common ground, then, between these cities and the Papacy that, whereas
they found it equally necessary to invoke the aid of the Emperor as an
outside power against their foes, each was threatened by the assertion
of those imperial rights which it was the sole object of Frederick's
journey to Italy to assert.
But the results of Frederick's first expedition to Italy were of a
very doubtful kind. It is true that he was crowned at Rome, that he
asserted his imperial rights both positively in a great assembly on
the plains of Roncaglia and, as it were, negatively by the destruction
of three refractory towns, and that he got rid of Arnold of Brescia.
But, on the other hand, his assertion of power provoked hatred instead
of fear; and although, despite some sharp differences, he parted
amicably from the Pope, his return to Germany left Hadrian in an
impossible position. The republican party in Rome remained untouched:
William of Sicily was unsubdued.
[Sidenote: Papal defiance.]
Shortly after his accession Frederick had made an agreement with the
then Pope that neither should make peace with the Romans or the
Sicilian King without consent of the other. But now Hadrian, deserted,
accepted the Commune as the civil authority in Rome, and even came to
a treaty with William of Sicily, who engaged to hold all his lands as
a vassal of the Pope. Frederick was naturally angry at the repudiation
of the mutual obligation with regard to peace and of the imperial
suzerainty of William's duchy of Apulia. But he was too much occupied
in Germany to do more than protest. And before he was able to assert
his power in Italy again Pope Hadrian had, as it were, thrown down a
challenge to him. At the Diet of Besançon in Burgundy in 1157 two
papal envoys appeared with a complaint of Frederick's conduct in some
particular. The letter which they bore spoke of the late coronation of
the Emperor by the Pope and used the equivocal word _beneficia_
to describe the papal act. When the assembled nobles resented the
expression as implying a feudal relation between Pope and Emperor, the
papal representative, the Chancellor Roland, boldly asked, "From whom,
then, does the emperor hold the empire if not from the Pope?"
Frederick's authority alone saved the envoys from violence, and
Hadrian found himself obliged to explain away the objectionable
expressions.
[Sidenote: The breach.]
But the papal position had been formulated, and that before a German
assembly. The Pope was no longer a suppliant: he claimed to be more
than an equal. He had thrown down a challenge. Frederick proceeded to
pick it up. In fact, it was this second expedition of Frederick to
Italy which opened the long contest between Ghibelline and Guelf, a
contest only to be ended by the practical destruction of one or other
of the parties. It was the complaints of the other cities against the
oppression of Milan, which were the immediate cause of Frederick's
appearance in Italy in 1158; and the reduction of the Milanese was
followed by the holding of an assembly on the plain of Roncaglia, to
which Frederick summoned the most famous lawyers of Italy. By their
decision rights and powers were given to him, which placed all the
communes at his mercy. Moreover, these were not compatible with the
rights asserted since the time of Gregory VII by the papal supporters:
the regalia were given to the Emperor at the expense of ecclesiastical
as well as lay landowners and corporations. If the papal investiture
of Apulia infringed the imperial rights, the investiture of
Frederick's uncle, Welf VI of Bavaria, with the inheritance of the
Countess Matilda openly ignored the oft-repeated claim of the Papacy.
Neither side seemed to take especial pains to avoid a breach. The
acrimonious correspondence which ensued centred round the relations of
the Italian bishops to the Emperor, the respective claims of each
party to Rome, and the restoration of the Tuscan inheritance and all
the other lands which it claimed, to the Papacy. The excommunication
of the Emperor--the open declaration of war--was prevented by
Hadrian's death on September 1, 1159.
[Sidenote: The papal schism.]
A schism was inevitable. The majority of the Cardinals elected the
papal Chancellor Roland who had defied Frederick at Besançon, and who
would be likely to maintain Hadrian's high claims: he was afterwards
consecrated as Alexander III. The minority got possession of St.
Peter's and proclaimed an imperialist Cardinal as Victor IV. Neither
Pope could be consecrated or could remain in Rome: both appealed by
legates and letters for the recognition of Christendom. Frederick as
Emperor summoned both candidates to submit their claims to the
decision of a Council at Pavia. Alexander entirely repudiated the
Emperor's implied claim to be the arbiter of Christendom in a
spiritual matter, and found support in the fact that only fifty
bishops, almost entirely from Germany and Lombardy, assembled at
Pavia. The Council, of course, decided in favour of Victor IV.
Alexander, however, excommunicated the Emperor, and bent all his
energies to gain the adherence of France and England. Not only was he
successful in this, but he was also recognised by the Latins of the
East and the lessor Christian kingdoms. Victor IV's only supporter was
the Emperor.
Nor did Frederick gain anything by his successes in Lombardy. It cost
him seven months to subdue the little town of Crema; while it was
three years (1159-62) before Milan surrendered and was destroyed. It
is true, Alexander could no longer maintain himself in Italy, but in
1162 sought refuge in France. Frederick's attempts to drive him from
his new asylum failed. Alexander carried on skilful negotiations with
Louis VII of France and Henry II of England; and at Whitsuntide, 1163,
a Council assembled at Tours, composed of a large number of cardinals,
bishops, and clergy, and acknowledged Alexander with the utmost
solemnity, while at the joint invitation of the two Kings the Pope
took up his abode at the city of Sens.
[Sidenote: Fredericks's chance.]
The death of the anti-Pope was a further blow to Frederick's cause,
for the action of his representative in Italy committed him to
recognise a second anti-Pope and laid him open to the accusation of
desiring to perpetuate the schism. It seemed, however, as if his
chance had come when the quarrel between Henry II and Thomas Becket
drove the English Archbishop to take refuge with the Pope at Sens.
Alexander was in a difficulty. Henry was perhaps the most powerful
monarch in Europe, and his support was of the utmost importance to the
Pope. But the rights for which Thomas was contending were part of the
rights which Alexander himself was claiming against the Emperor--the
right of the Church to manage her own concerns without lay
interference. While, therefore, prudence forbade him to throw down a
distinct challenge to the English King, it was impossible that he
should comply with Henry's demand for the condemnation of the
refractory Archbishop. Frederick took advantage of Henry's ill-humour
to propose a marriage alliance between the royal houses and to sound
Henry on the question of a change of alliance. The marriage thus
arranged--of Frederick's cousin, Henry the Lion, to Henry II's
daughter--ultimately took place. But both clergy and people in England
were for the most part in sympathy with Becket and unwilling to
prolong the schism. The altars used by Frederick's envoys in England
were purified after their departure; and although Henry's
representatives appeared at the Diet of Würzburg in May, 1165, and
even took an oath to acknowledge the anti-Pope, the English King did
not dare to ratify their action.
[Sidenote: Frederick's momentary triumph.]
Nor was this the only time when success seemed possible to Frederick.
This failure to move the English allegiance and the defection of a
number even of the German clergy emboldened Alexander to assume the
aggressive, and he ventured to leave France and to take up his abode
at Rome. (December, 1165.) Again the discontents of Lombardy were the
occasion for the Emperor's visit. In the autumn of 1166 he crossed the
Alps, and after spending some months in Lombardy he forced an entrance
into Rome, enthroned his own Pope in St. Peter's, and himself wore his
imperial crown. Frederick refused to treat with Alexander except on
the basis of the resignation of both existing Popes and the election
of a third. Alexander's position was unbearable and he fled to
Benevento. The Romans accepted Frederick as their lord. The Emperor's
triumph seemed complete: Charlemagne's successor had indeed arrived.
But the triumph was short-lived. The summer pestilence, which so often
attacked a German army in Italy, fell more fiercely than ever before.
Frederick fled northwards before it, and found so much hostility in
Lombardy that it was only by bypaths and in disguise that he was able
to make his way out of Italy.
[Sidenote: The Lombard League.]
It was seven years (1167-74) before Frederick was able to return to
Italy; and although by that time his position in Germany was
unquestioned and the mutual relations of Louis VII and Henry II
precluded any likelihood of interference from France or England, the
Italian foes of the Emperor had gathered strength and combined their
forces. Chief among these were the cities of Lombardy. Divided as they
were into imperialist and anti-imperialist, or, to use the terms
coming into vogue, Ghibelline and Guelf, they at first followed no
common policy. Milan had taken the lead of the anti-imperialists.
After the destruction of Milan a league formed by the cities of the
Veronese March helped to force Frederick for a time to abandon his
designs upon Italy (1164). During his expedition of 1166-7 a Lombard
League sprang up and coalesced with the Veronese League; a common
organisation was set up, Milan was restored, many of the staunchest
imperial towns were forced to become members, and the crowning work of
the League was the foundation of a common stronghold which in
compliment to the Pope was named Alessandria.
[Sidenote: Alliance with the Pope.]
The real danger to the Emperor came from alliance of this League with
the Pope. The Lombard cities were the Pope's natural enemies. Some of
them were the rivals of Rome--Pavia as the capital of the kingdom of
Italy; Milan the quondam champion of the cause of the married clergy;
Ravenna as the rival patriarchate in Italy. Strong local feeling made
them resent all outside interference, of Pope no less than of Emperor.
It was among these free, self-governing communities that heresy found
its chief adherents. But for the moment the common danger from the
Emperor overshadowed all other differences. The old imperial rights
which Frederick designed to recover included the power of appointing
local officers whether consuls or bishops. Alone, neither Pope nor
Lombard cities could look for success. In 1162, when all the cities
fell before Frederick, Alexander remained practically untouched. But
although his position was immensely strengthened since then,
experience had shown that the Pope could not hold his own in Italy or
Rome without the help of some secular power. At the same time, in
Europe at large he had proved a most potent force, since he wielded
weapons which were independent of time and place for their action, and
such as the most powerful secular prince had found it impossible to
ignore. It was under direct encouragement from Alexander that the
cities concluded their League in 1167. Before the next imperial
expedition it had become all-powerful in Northern Italy; not only the
chief Ghibelline cities, including Pavia itself, had joined, but even
the remaining feudal nobles had found it impossible to stand outside.
[Sidenote: Submission of Henry II.]
Nor was this Alexander's only triumph. So long as Archbishop Thomas
Becket remained unreconciled to Henry II, the English King had done
all in his power to influence Alexander. A marriage alliance was
carried out between the royal families of England and Sicily, solely
with the object on Henry's side of neutralising one of the chief papal
supporters, and Henry scattered his bribes among the Lombard cities
with the same intent. But the reconciliation to which the attitude of
his own people forced Henry in 1170 robbed him of all excuse for
harassing the Pope, and the murder of the Archbishop by four of the
King's knights in Canterbury Cathedral isolated Henry and forced him
to a humiliating treaty with Alexander.
[Sidenote: Final failure of Frederick.]
Frederick entered Italy in 1174 with small chance of success, for his
army was composed of mercenaries, and many of the leading German
nobles, notably his cousin Henry the Lion, refused to accompany him.
He exhausted all the resources of his military art in a vain attempt
to take the new fortress of Alessandria. The jealousies within the
League made negotiations possible, but these broke down because
Frederick refused to recognise Alessandria as a member of the League
or to include Pope Alexander in any peace made with the cities. But
the end was at hand. When at length the forces met at Legnano on May
29, 1176, the militia of the League won a decisive victory. All
possibility of direct coercion was gone, and Frederick was forced to
consider seriously a change of policy. His only chance of good terms
lay in dividing his enemies. He applied to Alexander, who refused to
separate his cause from that of his allies, though he allowed that the
terms might be arranged in secret. This was done. Frederick undertook
to recognise Alexander and to restore all the papal possessions. For
the allies, peace would be made with Sicily for fifteen years; the
Lombards should have a truce for six years. After much negotiation
Venice was agreed upon for a general congress of all the parties to
the contest, and Frederick was forced to promise that he would not
enter the city without the Pope's consent. Up to the last he hoped
that mutual suspicion would divide his allies. But the terms of peace
were agreed upon among the allies on the bases already mentioned; then
Frederick was admitted into Venice, and a dramatic reconciliation
between Pope and Emperor was enacted (July 25, 1177). Frederick
returned to Germany at the end of the year.
[Sidenote: Triumph of Alexander.]
The schism was over, the anti-Pope submitted, and Alexander's
conciliatory policy opened the way for his return to Rome. The Pope
signalised the close of the long schism of eighteen years by gathering
in 1179 a General Council, distinguished as the Third Lateran Council,
to which came nearly a thousand ecclesiastics from various parts of
Christendom. The chief canon promulgated placed the papal election
exclusively in the hands of the cardinals, and ordained that a
two-thirds majority of the whole College should suffice for a valid
election. During the rest of his reign Alexander was occupied in
mediating between Henry II and his sons, and between Henry and Louis
of France. He died, again an exile from Rome, on August 30, 1181. His
long pontificate is one of the most eventful in papal history. He was
matched against an opponent who not only aimed at reviving the
imperial claims, but was himself a man of imperial character. The
difficulties of the situation might have seemed overwhelming. Where
Gregory VII failed Alexander succeeded. Tact, not force, was the
quality required. The infinite patience and long tenacity of Alexander
met their reward. The Emperor was forced to violate the solemn oath he
had sworn at Wurzburg in 1165, never to acknowledge Alexander or his
successors, and never to seek absolution from this oath. The Pope had
successfully asserted his claim to the civil government of Rome and to
many other purely temporal possessions.
[Sidenote: Frederick's new move.]
Once more Frederick crossed the Alps. He had crushed his formidable
cousin, Henry the Lion, and banished him from Germany; he had turned
the truce with the Lombards into the Peace of Constance by acquiescing
in the loss of the imperial rights for which he had fought. His eldest
son, Henry, had been crowned King of Germany as long ago as 1168.
Frederick was now anxious to secure for him the succession to the
imperial title, and hoped to find the Pope willing to crown Henry as
his father's colleague in the Empire. But although Lucius III,
Alexander's successor (1181-5), had been driven from Rome, and was
dependent on the Emperor's help, it was impossible for him or for any
Pope to agree to Frederick's wish. Two emperors at once were a
manifest absurdity, and Frederick was not likely to accept the Pope's
suggestion that he should resign in favour of his son. Moreover, there
lay between Pope and Emperor the still unsettled question of the
inheritance of the Countess Matilda. It was clear that the quarrel
must shortly be renewed. By the nature of the respective claims there
could never be more than a temporary truce. Lucius died, but his
successor, Urban III, was yet more irreconcilable. Meanwhile Frederick
had resolved on an act which would make the breach between Papacy and
Empire irreparable. The King of Sicily was William II "the Good." His
marriage to a daughter of Henry II of England (1177) had proved
childless, and the succession seemed likely to fall to Constance,
daughter of King Roger and aunt of the reigning King. She was over
thirty years of age. Frederick's defeat in 1174 had been due to his
failure to divide his enemies. Now, however, he had his chance. The
Lombards, having got all that they wanted, were quite favourable to
him. He planned to win Sicily also by a marriage between his youthful
son Henry and the almost middle-aged heiress Constance. A party in
Sicily helped him; and the marriage and the coronation of the happy
pair as King and Queen of Italy took place at Milan in January, 1186.
Not only had the Emperor knocked away the staff upon which the Papacy
had been disposed to lean its arm for more than a century; but he had
actually picked it up and proposed to use it in the future for the
purpose of belabouring the Popes. Moreover, he had really secured his
object of a hereditary empire; for Henry, now King with his father in
Germany and in Italy, must needs succeed to all the paternal honours.
In vain Urban tried to raise up a party against the Emperor; and the
sentence of excommunication, which at length he had determined to
pronounce, was stopped only by the death of the Pope on October 20,
1187.
[Sidenote: Frederick's death.]
It was, however, chance and not the policy of the Emperor that averted
the inevitable conflict. On July 5 the Christians of Palestine had
suffered a crushing defeat at the battle of Hittim or Tiberias at the
hand of Saladin, and on October 3 the Mohammedan conqueror entered
Jerusalem. The quarrel was necessarily suspended, and a new crusade
was preached with such success that in May, 1189, Frederick set out
for Palestine, to be followed a year later by the Kings of France and
England. But the Emperor never reached the Holy Land. He made his way
by Constantinople and Iconium into Cilicia, and there not far from
Tarsus he disappeared, apparently drowned while crossing or bathing in
a river.
[Sidenote: The new contest.]
With the great Emperor's death the contest between Papacy and Empire
enters on a new phase. It is typical of this phase that the one
outstanding question between the two powers after the Peace of Venice
was the question of Tuscany. For the quarrel was now almost entirely
political, and was becoming more and more confined to Italian
politics. The imperial attempt to subdue Italy to Germany had failed,
and it remained for the Emperor to make it impossible for the Pope to
live at Rome except as a dependant of the German King. With Tuscany,
Lombardy, and Sicily under the imperial control, there was no room for
papal action in Italy. In a contest of abstract principles the Emperor
had entirely failed to subdue the Pope; and the interest and
importance of the contest between Frederick and Alexander lay in the
fact that each was the representative of an idea. This is no doubt the
reason why Frederick's failure did not damage his prestige. But he had
learnt that he could not set the abstract claims of the Empire against
those of the Papacy. The former did not appeal to any one beyond the
limits of Germany; whereas the latter could count on sympathy in every
country of Western Europe. Frederick, therefore, made no more appeals
to Europe. His disputes with the Papacy were now individual matters:
they were contests of policy, not of principle, and he would not
hesitate to turn circumstances to his advantage. Perhaps, fortunately
for Frederick's reputation, he did nothing more than inaugurate this
policy. But it was a policy which essentially suited the peculiar
genius of his successor.
[Sidenote: Henry VI.]
As soon as Frederick had started for Palestine Henry was plunged in
difficulties. Henry the Lion returned from banishment and raised a
disturbance. A few months later William II of Sicily died, and Pope
Clement III (1187-91) immediately invested with the kingdom Tancred,
Count of Lecce, an illegitimate member of the Hauteville family, who
had been elected by the party opposed to the German influence. On the
top of these difficulties came the news of Frederick's death. There
was thus a double reason for an expedition to Italy--Henry must assert
his wife's claim to the throne of Sicily, and he must do this without
quarrelling with the Pope, from whom he must obtain the imperial
crown. His first expedition was only a formal success. Pope Celestine
III (1191-8), who took office just after Henry entered Italy, dared
not refuse to crown him emperor, nor could he prevent Henry from
either courting the Roman Commune with success or prosecuting his
claim to the Sicilian crown. But Henry failed before Naples: his army
was decimated by the plague, and his wife fell into Tancred's hands.
[Sidenote: His success in Italy.]
This ill-success revived the Guelf opposition in Germany, whose most
powerful supporter was Henry the Lion's brother-in-law, Richard of
England. Richard on his way to Palestine had made an alliance with
Tancred against the common Hohenstaufen enemy. But returning from
crusade Richard fell into the hands of Leopold of Austria. Leopold was
forced to hand him over to the Emperor, and the anti-Hohenstaufen
alliance fell to pieces. For whatever reason, Henry kept the English
King for more than a year, and turned a deaf ear to the papal
remonstrances against his detention of a crusader. Fortified by the
failure of the threatened combination against him, and by the money
from Richard's ransom, Henry returned to Italy. Fortune favoured him
at every turn. Since he left Italy Tancred and his eldest son had
died, and Henry found no difficulty in getting hold of the youthful
son of Tancred, who had been placed upon the throne under his mother's
regency. Apulia and Sicily were overrun. The toils were closing round
the Pope. Celestine had excommunicated all concerned in Richard's
imprisonment until they should have restored his ransom. Thus by
implication Henry was excommunicate. The money had been spent in
subduing the papal fief of Sicily; while Henry further made his
brother Philip Marquis of Tuscany, and planted his followers about in
the lands of the Church. Yet Celestine did not dare to pronounce the
fatal sentence against the Emperor directly.
[Sidenote: His imperial schemes.]
Henry meditated one more step which would have rendered the Pope
powerless. Frederick, with the mere prospect of the Sicilian
succession for his son, desired to make the imperial title hereditary;
much more was Henry, the active sovereign of Sicily, anxious to
accomplish this. The lay princes could have been bribed to consent by
the recognition of hereditary succession to their fiefs. But the
German ecclesiastics, with the Pope at their back, had no desire to
increase the power of the Emperor, and the utmost that Henry could
secure was the election as German King, and therefore King of the
Romans, of his two-year-old son Frederick.
[Sidenote: His death.]
Henry's projects stretched out beyond the lands under his rule. The
death of Saladin encouraged the idea of a new crusade. Henry as
crusader might propitiate the Pope. But such an expedition once
started might have been diverted, as indeed happened a few years
later, for an attack upon Constantinople, which should lead to the
union of both empires under the ambitious Hohenstaufen. Pretexts were
not wanting. Henry collected a number of German crusaders upon the
coast of Italy, and many of these had actually sailed for Palestine
when everything was changed by Henry's sudden death on September 28,
1197. He had reigned eight years, and was only thirty-two years of
age. Despite his youthful age and his short reign he had raised the
imperial power to a height which it had scarcely ever touched before
and which it was never to reach again. Endowed with ability at least
equal to his father's, his very selfishness and ruthlessness gave him
a success denied to his predecessor. All Henry's acts were associated
with his own aggrandisement, and the result shows that the Papacy no
less than the Empire was dependent for its influence chiefly upon the
personality of the holder of the office. Henry had to deal at Rome
with Popes of inferior capacity. Had Innocent III been elected a few
years earlier, the tragedy of Anagni--the maltreatment of Boniface
VIII by the emissaries of the King of France--might have been
anticipated by a century.