THE NORMAN 153
Clairvaux, his pleasant valley. All praised him as the Father of the Fatherland. A letter to his monks preceded him, closing with a cry of joy: "So then we are coming! We are coming in joy, in the raiment of peace. Surely these are beautiful words, but the reality is still more beautiful. It is so beautiful that anyone who does not rejoice in it must be a fool or a scoundrel." A year later he was to sense the fate of all political master-minds. Letters from the Pope he had protected let him feel how deeply the Curia resented his inter- ference in its activities. But doubtless it is only a glowing fragment of his always very emotional style which one sees in his reply that now he has been completely and unexpectedly cast off. His courage and zeal did not leave him, nor did the power fade from the mission with which his soul was aglow.
In 1139 Innocent II assembled a General Council in the Lateran and hurled the ban against Roger, his unflinching opponent. Then he himself took the field against the Normans, because there was no help to be expected from the Hohenstaufen King, Conrad III, who had succeeded Lothar in 1138, and who was now hard pressed by the warring Guelphs. The expedition failed as miserably as had that which Leo IX once led against the Normans. The Pope was made a prisoner. He had to free the Sicilian from the ban and recognize his right to the crown.
Signs that Rome was strengthening its opposition to the German Imperial idea were visible during the final year of this eventful pontifi- cate. The city was not uninterested in the powerful Lombard move- ment in favour of municipal freedom and civil autonomy. This demo- cratic struggle against feudal powers now began to alarm both the Empire and the Papacy because it was a threat to undermine their common basis the theocratic conception of the two powers, an ecclesiastical hierarchy and a dependent secular hierarchy. This was a real innovation in the life of mediseval society, cutting deeper than any previous change, and the Romans joined forces with it, though to be sure they merely trotted along far in the wake of the Lombard revolu- tion. They rebelled against the Papal rule of the city, and against Innocent's refusal to permit the destruction of Tivoli, the most im- portant southern bulwark of Rome, in punishment for a rebellion which had broken out there. To the indignation of the Romans, the
154
