THE THRONE OF THE WORLD
secular dominion. The rise of the municipalities was the factor needed to effect a solution of what would otherwise have been an unending conflict. The democratic spirit, especially in Lombardy, slowly but surely undermined the basis of the universal monarchy the feudal system. By joining forces with the new spirit of the communes, the Papacy escaped from the toils of worldly empire and harnessed the liberated energies to the work of building up its spiritual reign. Only the national kingdoms, France and England in particular, remained aloof.
Hadrian IV (1154-1159) was an Englishman of humble origin the only one of his countrymen ever to have worn the tiara. As or- ganizer of the Norwegian Church, he had demonstrated his energy and prudence. The first action of this Pope was to call upon die city of Rome to establish order. When the followers of Arnold slew a cardinal in the street, he imposed the interdict in order to force Arnold to leave the city. The Emperor, who had set off on his first trip to Rome, seized the "Apostle of the masses" in Tuscany and upon request of the Curia turned him over to the Papal prefect. There the first herald of the awakening self-consciousness of the poor paid on the gallows for the violence of the passion with which he had preached a Church of the spirit that would go about clad as a beggar. When his corpse had been burned, the mob which had followed Arnold plundered the treasury of the Papacy.
In June 1155, Frederic met Hadrian in Sum. He was annoyed to find that in accordance with a hallowed custom inaugurated in Carolingian rimes, he was required to hold the stirrup when the Pope mounted his horse. In retaliation the Pope refused to give Frederic the kiss of peace. The Emperor was furthermore displeased with a picture in the Lateran because this, in representing the acquisition by Emperor Lothar of the right over territories of Mathilda, bore an in- scription which called the German Emperor a vassal of the Pope. But in spite of all these difficulties, Barbarossa vastly preferred receiving the crown from the hands of Hadrian to getting it from the Romans, who had offered it to him for a goodly sum of money.
The peace was not destined to last long. When the Emperor was forced by the situation in Germany to go back home, and so could not fulfill the promise given Pope Eugene at the Treaty of Constance
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