the French husband of Tancred's daughter Albina, and now a claimant
for the hereditary fiefs of Tancred, Lecce, and Taranto, from which,
despite Henry VI's promise, he had long been driven. For almost the
first time in Italian history, Frenchmen were thus called in to drive
out the Germans. But it was then as afterward a dangerous experiment.
Walter of Brienne and his small French following invaded Apulia, and
fought hard against Diepold of Acerra, another of King Henry's
Germans. Meanwhile Markwald, now in open alliance with the Bishop of
Troja, made himself master of Sicily and regent of the young King. His
death in 1202 removed the most dangerous enemy of both Innocent and
Frederick. But the war dragged on for years in Apulia, especially
after Diepold had slain Walter of Brienne. The turbulent feudal barons
of Apulia and Sicily profited by this long reign of anarchy to
establish themselves on a permanent basis. At last Innocent sent his
own brother, Richard, Count of Segni, to root out the last of the
Germans. So successful was he that, in 1208, the Pope himself visited
the kingdom of his ward, and arranged for its future government by
native lords, helped by his brother, who now received a rich Apulian
fief. It was Innocent's glory that he had secured for Frederick the
whole Norman inheritance. It was amid such storms and troubles that
the young Frederick grew up to manhood.
In Central and Northern Italy, Innocent III was more speedily
successful than in the South. On Philip of Swabia's return to Germany,
Tuscany and the domains of the Countess Matilda fell away from their
foreign lord, and invoked the protection of the Church. The Tuscan
cities formed themselves into a new league under papal protection.
Only Pisa, proud of her sea power, wealth, and trade, held aloof from
the combination. It seemed as if, after a century of delays, the
papacy was going to enjoy the inheritance of Matilda,[55] and Innocent
eagerly set himself to work to provide for its administration. In the
north the Pope maintained friendly relations with the rival
communities of the Lombard plain. But his most immediate and brilliant
triumph was in establishing his authority over Rome and the Patrimony
of St. Peter. On his accession he found his lands just throwing off
the yoke of the German garrisons that had kept them in subjection
during Henry VI's lifetime. He saw within the city power divided
between the _præfectus urbis_, the delegate of the Emperor, and the
_summus senator,_ the mouthpiece of the Roman commune.
Within a month the prefect ceased to be an Imperial officer, and
became the servant of the papacy, bound to it by fealty oaths, and
receiving from it his office. Within a year the senator also had
become the papal nominee, and the whole municipality was controlled by
the Pope. No less complete was Innocent's triumph over the nobility of
the Campagna. He drove Conrad of Urslingen back to Germany, and
restored Spoleto to papal rule. He chased Markwald from Romagna and
the March of Ancona to Apulia, and exercised sovereign rights even in
the most remote regions that acknowledged him as lord. If it was no
very real sway that Innocent wielded, it at least allowed the town
leagues and the rustic nobility to go on in their own way, and made it
possible for Italy to work out its own destinies. More powerful and
more feared in Italy than any of his predecessors, Innocent could
contentedly watch the anti-imperial reaction extending over the Alps
and desolating Germany by civil war.
Despite the precautions taken by Henry VI, it was soon clear that the
German princes would not accept the hereditary rule of a child of
three. Philip of Swabia abandoned his Italian domains and hurried to
Germany, anxious to do his best for his nephew. But he soon perceived
that Frederick's chances were hopeless, and that it was all that he
could do to prevent the undisputed election of a Guelf. He was favored
by the absence of the two elder sons of Henry the Lion. Henry of
Brunswick the eldest, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, was away on a
crusade, and was loyal to the Hohenstaufen, since his happy marriage
with Agnes. The next son Otto, born at Argenton during his father's
first exile, had never seen much of Germany. Brought up at his uncle
Richard of Anjou's court, Otto had received many marks of Richard's
favor, and looked up to the chivalrous, adventurous King as an ideal
of a warrior prince. Richard had made him Earl of Yorkshire, and had
invested him in 1196 with the country of Poitou, that he might learn
war and statecraft in the same rude school in which Richard had first
acquainted himself with arms and politics. Even now Otto was not more
than seventeen years of age. Richard himself, as the new vassal of the
Empire for Aries and England, was duly summoned to the electoral diet,
but his representatives impolitically urged the claims of Count Henry,
who was ruled ineligible on account of his absence. Thus it was that
when the German magnates at last met for the election on the 8th of
March, 1198, at Muehlhausen, their choice fell on Philip the Arabian,
who took the title of Philip II.
Many of the magnates had absented themselves from the diet at
Muehlhausen, and an irreconcilable band of partisans refused to be
bound by its decisions. Richard of England now worked actively for
Otto, his favorite nephew, and found support both in the old allies of
the Angevins in the Lower Rhineland and the ancient supporters of the
house of Guelf. Germany was thus divided into two parties, who
completely ignored each other's acts. Three months after the diet of
Muehlhausen, another diet met at Cologne and chose Otto of Brunswick
as King of the Romans. Three days afterward the young prince was
crowned at Aachen.
A ten-years' civil war between Philip II and Otto IV now devastated
the Germany that Barbarossa and Henry VI had left so prosperous. The
majority of the princes remained firm to Philip, who also had the
support of the strong and homogeneous official class of
_ministeriales_ that had been the best helpers of his father and
brother. Nevertheless, Otto had enough of a party to carry on the
struggle. On his side was Cologne, the great mart of Lower Germany, so
important from its close trading relations with England, and now
gradually shaking itself free of its archbishops. The friendship of
Canute of Denmark and the Guelf tradition combined to give him his
earliest and greatest success in the North. It was the interest of the
baronage to prolong a struggle which secured their own independence at
the expense of the central authority. Both parties looked for outside
help. Otto, besides his Danish friends, relied on his uncle Richard,
and, after his death, on his uncle John. Philip formed a league with
his namesake Philip of France. But distant princes could do but little
to determine the result of the contest. It was of more moment that
both appealed to Innocent III, and that the Pope willingly accepted
the position of arbiter. "The settlement of this matter," he declared,
"belongs to the apostolic see, mainly because it was the apostolic see
that transferred the Empire from the East to the West, and ultimately
because the same see confers the Imperial crown."
In March, 1201, Innocent issued his decision. "We pronounce," he
declared, "Philip unworthy of empire, and absolve all who have taken
oaths of fealty to him as king. Inasmuch as our dearest son in Christ,
Otto, is industrious, discreet, strong, and constant, himself devoted
to the Church and descended on each side from a devout stock, we, by
the authority of St. Peter, receive him as king, and will in due
course bestow upon him the imperial crown." The grateful Otto promised
in return to maintain all the possessions and privileges of the Roman
Church, including the inheritance of the countess Matilda.
Philip of Swabia still held his own, and the extravagance of the papal
claim led to many of the bishops as well as the lay magnates of
Germany joining in a declaration that no former pope had ever presumed
to interfere in an imperial election. But the swords of his German
followers were a stronger argument in favor of Philip's claims than
the protests of his supporters against papal assumptions. As time went
on, the Hohenstaufen slowly got the better of the Guelfs. With the
falling away of the North, Otto's cause became distinctly the losing
one. In 1206, Otto was defeated outside the walls of Cologne, and the
great trading city was forced to transfer its obedience to his rival.
In 1207 Philip became so strong that Innocent was constrained to
reconsider his position, and suggested to Otto the propriety of
renouncing his claims. But in June, 1208, Philip was treacherously
murdered at Bamberg by his faithless vassal, Otto of Wittelsbach, to
whom he had refused his daughter's hand. It was no political crime,
but a deed of private vengeance. It secured, however, the position of
Otto, for the ministeriales now transferred their allegiance to him,
and there was no Hohenstaufen candidate ready to oppose him. Otto,
moreover, did not scruple to undergo a fresh election which secured
for him universal recognition in Germany. By marrying Beatrice, Philip
of Swabia's daughter, he sought to unite the rival houses, while he
conciliated Innocent by describing himself as King "by the grace of
God and the Pope." Next year he crossed the Alps to Italy, and bound
himself by oath, not only to allow the papacy the privileges that he
had already granted, but to grant complete freedom of ecclesiastical
elections, and to support the Pope in his struggle against heresy. In
October, 1209, he was crowned Emperor at Rome. After ten years of
waiting, Innocent, already master of Italy, had procured for his
dependent both the German kingdom and the Roman Empire.
Despite his preoccupation with Italy and Germany, the early years of
Innocent's pontificate saw him busily engaged in upholding the papal
authority and the moral order of the Church in every country in
Europe. No consideration of the immediate interests of the Roman see
ever prevented him from maintaining his principles even against
powerful sovereigns who could do much to help forward his general
plans. The most conspicuous instance of this was Innocent's famous
quarrel with Philip Augustus of France, when to vindicate a simple
principle of Christian morals he did not hesitate to abandon the
alliance of the "eldest son of the Church" at a time when the fortunes
of the papacy were everywhere doubtful. Philip's first wife, Isabella
of Hainault, the mother of the future Louis VIII, had died in 1190,
just before her husband had started on his crusade. In 1193 Philip
negotiated a second marriage with Ingeborg, the sister of Canute VI,
the powerful King of Denmark, hoping to obtain from his Danish
brother-in-law substantial help against England and the Empire. Philip
did not get the expected political advantages from the new connection,
and at once took a strong dislike to the lady. On the day after the
marriage Philip refused to have anything more to do with his bride.
Within three months, he persuaded a synod of complaisant French
bishops of Compiègne to pronounce the marriage void by reason of a
remote kinship that existed between the two parties.
Ingeborg was young, timid, friendless, helpless, and utterly ignorant
of the French tongue, but King Canute took up her cause, and, from her
retreat in a French convent, she appealed to Rome against the
wickedness of the French King and clergy. Celestine III proved her
friend, and finding protestations of no avail, he finally quashed the
sentence of the French bishops and declared her the lawful wife of the
French King. But Philip persisted in his repudiation of Ingeborg, and
Celestine contented himself with remonstrances and warnings that were
utterly disregarded. In 1196 Philip found a fresh wife in Agnes, a
lady of the powerful house of Andechs-Meran, whose authority was great
in Thuringia, and whose Alpine lordships soon developed into the
country of Tyrol.
Innocent at once proved a stronger champion of Ingeborg than the weak
and aged Celestine. He forthwith warned Philip and the French bishops
that they had no right to put asunder those whom God had joined
together. "Recall your lawful wife," he wrote to Philip, "and then we
will hear all that you can righteously urge. If you do not do this, no
power shall move us to right or left, until justice be done." A papal
legate was now sent to France, threatening excommunication and
interdict, were Ingeborg not immediately reinstated in her place. For
a few months the Pope hesitated, moved, no doubt, by his Italian and
German troubles, and fearful lest his action against a Christian
prince should delay the hoped-for crusade. But he gradually turned the
leaders of the French clergy from their support of Philip, and at
last, in February, 1200, an interdict was pronounced forbidding the
public celebration of the rites of the Church in the whole lands that
owed obedience to the King of France.
Philip Augustus held out fiercely for a time, declaring that he would
rather lose half his lands than be separated from Agnes. Meanwhile he
used pressure on his bishops to make them disregard the interdict, and
vigorously intrigued with the cardinals, seeking to build up a French
party in the papal curia. Innocent so far showed complacency that the
legate he sent to France was the King's kinsman, Octavin,
Cardinal-bishop of Ostia, who was anxious to make Philip's humiliation
as light as possible. His labors were eased by the partial submission
of Philip, who in September visited Ingeborg, and promised to take her
again as his wife, and so gave an excuse to end the interdict. Philip
still claimed that his marriage should be dissolved; though here again
he suddenly abandoned a suit which he probably saw was hopeless. The
death of Agnes of Meran in July, 1201, made a complete reconciliation
less difficult. Next year the Pope legitimated the children of Agnes
and Philip, on the ground that the sentence of divorce, pronounced by
the French bishops, gave the King reasonable grounds for entering in
good faith on his union with her. Ingeborg was still refused the
rights of a queen, and constantly besought the Pope to have pity on
her forlorn condition. The Pope was now forced to content himself with
remonstrances. Philip declared that a baleful charm separated him from
Ingeborg, and again begged the Pope to divorce him from a union based
on sorcery and witchcraft.
The growing need of the French alliance now somewhat slackened the
early zeal of Innocent for the cause of the Queen. But no real
cordiality was possible as long as the strained relations of Ingeborg
and Philip continued. At last, in 1213, in the very crisis of his
fortunes, Philip completed his tardy reconciliation with his wife,
after they had been separated for twenty years. Henceforth Philip was
the most active ally of the papacy.
While thus dealing with Philip of France, Innocent enjoyed easier
triumphs over the lesser kings of Europe. It was his ambition to break
through the traditional limits that separated the church from the
state, and to bind as many as he could of the kings of Europe to the
papacy by ties of political vassalage. The time-honored feudal
superiority of the popes over the Norman kingdom of Sicily had been
the first precedent for this most unecclesiastical of all papal
aggressions. Already others of the smaller kingdoms of Europe,
conspicuous among which was Portugal, had followed the example of the
Normans in becoming vassals of the holy see. Under Innocent at least
three states supplemented ecclesiastical by political dependence on
the papacy. Sancho, King of Portugal, who had striven to repudiate the
former submission of Alfonso I, was in the end forced to accept the
papal suzerainty. Peter, King of Aragon, went in 1204 to Rome and was
solemnly crowned king by Innocent. Afterward Peter deposited his crown
on the high altar of St. Peter's and condescended to receive the
investiture of his kingdom from the Pope, holding it as a perpetual
fief of the holy see, and promising tribute to Innocent and his
successors. In 1213 a greater monarch than the struggling Christian
kings of the Iberian peninsula was forced, after a long struggle, to
make an even more abject submission.
The long strife of Innocent with John of Anjou, about the disputed
election to the see of Canterbury, was fought with the same weapons
which the Pope had already employed against the King of France. But
John held out longer. Interdict was followed by excommunication and
threatened deposition. At last the English King surrendered his crown
to the papal agent Pandulf, and, like Peter of Aragon, received it
back as a vassal of the papacy, bound by an annual tribute.
Nor were these the only kings that sought the support of the great
Pope. The schismatic princes of the East vied in ardor with the
Catholic princes of the West in their quest of Innocent's favor. King
Leo of Armenia begged for his protection. The Bulgarian prince John
besought the Pope to grant him a royal crown. Innocent posed as a
mediator in Hungary between the two brothers, Emeric and Andrew, who
were struggling for the crown. Canute of Denmark, zealous for his
sister's honor, was his humble suppliant. Poland was equally obedient.
The Duke of Bohemia accepted the papal reproof for allying himself
with Philip of Swabia.
Despite his vigor and his authority, Innocent's constant interference
with the internal concerns of every country in Europe did not pass
unchallenged. Even the kings who invoked his intercession were
constantly in conflict with him. Besides his great quarrels in
Germany, France, and England, Innocent had many minor wars to wage
against the princes of Europe. For five years the kingdom of Leon lay
under interdict because its king Alfonso had married his cousin,
Berengaria of Castile, in the hope of securing the peace between the
two realms. It was only after the lady had borne five children to
Alfonso that she voluntarily terminated the obnoxious union, and
Innocent found it prudent, as in France, to legitimize the offspring
of a marriage which he had denounced as incestuous. Not one of the
princes of the peninsula was spared. Sancho of Navarre incurred
interdict by reason of suspected dealings with the Saracens, while the
marriage of his sister with Peter of Aragon, the vassal of the Pope,
involved both kings in a contest with Innocent. Not only did the
monarchs of Europe resent, so far as they were able, the Pope's
haughty policy; for the first time the peoples of their realms began
to make common cause with them against the political aggressions of
the papacy. The nobles of Aragon protested against King Peter's
submission to the papacy, declared that his surrender of their kingdom
was invalid, and prevented the payment of the promised tribute. When
John of England procured his Roman overlord's condemnation of Magna
Charta, the support of Rome was of no avail to prevent his indignant
subjects combining to drive him from the throne, and did not even
hinder Louis of France, the son of the papalist Philip II, from
accepting their invitation to become English king in his stead. It was
only by a repudiation of this policy, and by an acceptance of the
Great Charter, that the papacy could secure the English throne for
John's young son, Henry III, and thus continue for a time its
precarious overlordship over England.
For the moment Innocent's iron policy crushed opposition, but in
adding the new hostility of the national kings and the rising nations
of Europe to the old hostility of the declining empire, Innocent was
entering into a perilous course of conduct, which, within a century,
was to prove fatal to one of the strongest of his successors. The more
political the papal authority became, the more difficult it was to
uphold its prestige as the source of law, of morality, of religion.
Innocent himself did not lose sight of the higher ideal because he
strove so firmly after more earthly aims. His successors were not
always so able or so high-minded. And it was as the protectors of the
people, not as the enemies of their political rights, that the great
popes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries had obtained their
wonderful ascendency over the best minds of Europe.
The coronation of Otto IV did not end Innocent's troubles with the
Empire. It was soon followed by an open breach between the Pope and
his nominee, from which ultimately developed something like a general
European war, between a league of partisans of the Pope and a league
of partisans of Otto. It was inevitable that Otto, as a crowned
emperor, should look upon the papal power in a way very different from
that in which he had regarded it when a faction leader struggling for
the crown. Then the support of the Pope was indispensable. Now the
autocracy of the Pope was to be feared. The Hohenstaufen
ministeriales, who now surrounded the Guelfic Emperor, raised his
ideals and modified his policy. Henry of Kalden, the old minister of
Henry VI, was now his closest confidant, and under his direction it
soon became Otto's ambition to continue the policy of the
Hohenstaufen. The great object of Henry VI had been the union of
Sicily with the Empire. To the alarm and disgust of Innocent, his
ancient dependent now strove to continue Henry VI's policy by driving
out Henry VI's son from his Sicilian inheritance. Otto now established
relations with Diepold and the other German adventurers, who still
defied Frederick II and the Pope in Apulia. He soon claimed the
inheritance of Matilda as well as the Sicilian monarchy. In August,
1210, he occupied Matilda's Tuscan lands, and in November invaded
Apulia, and prepared to despatch a Pisan fleet against Sicily.
Innocent was moved to a terrible wrath. On hearing of the capture of
Capua, and the revolt of Salerno and Naples, he excommunicated the
Emperor and freed his subjects from their oaths of fealty to him. But,
despite the threats of the Church, Otto conquered most of Apulia and
was equally successful in reviving the Imperial authority in Northern
Italy.
Innocent saw the power that he had built up so carefully in Italy
crumbling rapidly away. In his despair he turned to France and Germany
for help against the audacious Guelf. Philip Augustus, though still in
bad odor at Rome through his persistent hostility to Ingeborg, was now
an indispensable ally. He actively threw himself into the Pope's
policy, and French and papal agents combined to stir up disaffection
against Otto in Germany. The haughty manners and the love of the young
King for Englishmen and Saxons had already excited disaffection. It
was believed that Otto wished to set up a centralized despotism of
court officials, levying huge taxes on the model of the Angevin
administrative system of his grandfathers and uncles. The bishops now
took the lead in organizing a general defection from the absent
Emperor. In September, 1211, a gathering of disaffected magnates,
among whom were the newly made king Ottocar of Bohemia and the dukes
of Austria and Bavaria, assembled at Nuremberg. They treated the papal
sentence as the deposition of Otto, and pledged themselves to elect as
their new king Frederick of Sicily, the sometime ward of the Pope. It
was not altogether good news to the Pope that the German nobles had,
in choosing the son of Henry VI, renewed the union of German and
Sicily. But Innocent felt that the need of setting up an effective
opposition to Otto was so pressing that he put out of sight the
general in favor of the immediate interests of the Roman see. He
accepted Frederick as emperor, only stipulating that he should renew
his homage for the Sicilian crown, and consequently renounce an
inalienable union between Sicily and the Empire. Frederick now left
Sicily, repeated his submission to Innocent at Rome, and crossed the
Alps for Germany.
Otto had already abandoned Italy to meet the threatened danger in the
North. Misfortunes soon showered thick upon him. His Hohenstaufen
wife, Beatrice, died, and her loss lessened his hold on Southern
Germany. When Frederick appeared, Swabia and Bavaria were already
eager to welcome the heir of the mighty southern line, and aid him
against the audacious Saxon. The spiritual magnates flocked to the
side of the friend and pupil of the Pope. In December, 1212, followed
Frederick's formal election and his coronation at Mainz by the
archbishop Siegfried. Early in 1213 Henry of Kalden appeared at his
court. Henceforward the important class of the ministeriales was
divided. While some remained true to Otto, others gradually went back
to the personal representative of Hohenstaufen.