That king having put away his wife, Innocent commanded him to take her back, and forced him to submission by means of an interdict. "This submission of such a prince," says Hallam, "not feebly superstitious like his predecessor Robert, nor vexed with seditions, like the Emperor Henry IV., but brave, firm, and victorious, is perhaps the proudest trophy in the scutcheon of Rome."
Pope Innocent III. and King John of England.—Innocent's quarrel with King John (1199–1216) of England will afford another illustration of the power of the Popes. The See of Canterbury falling vacant, John ordered the monks who had the right of election to give the place to a favorite of his. They obeyed; but the Pope immediately declared the election void, and caused the vacancy to be filled with one of his own friends, Stephen Langton. John declared that the Pope's archbishop should never enter England as primate, and proceeded to confiscate the estates of the See. Innocent III. now laid all England under an interdict, excommunicated John, and incited the French king, Philip Augustus, to undertake a crusade against the contumacious rebel.
The outcome of the matter was that John, like the German Emperor before him, was compelled to yield to the power of the Church. He gave back the lands he had confiscated, acknowledged Langton to be the rightful primate of England, and even went so far as to give England to the Pope as a perpetual fief. In token of his vassalage he agreed to pay to the Papal See the annual sum of 1000 marks. This tribute money was actually paid, though with very great irregularity, until the seventeenth year of the reign of Edward I. (1289).
The Mendicants, or Begging Friars.—The authority of the immediate successors of Innocent III. was powerfully supported by the monastic orders of the Dominicans and Franciscans, established early in the thirteenth century. They were named after their respective founders, St. Dominic (1170–1221) and St. Francis (1182–1226). The principles on which these fraternities were established were very different from those which had shaped
