THE THRONE OF THE WORLD
stroy the temporal power o the Pope. This seemed to him impera- tive also by reason of the development in Germany. True enough, he suppressed the revolt of his son Henry. But die growing partic- ularism of the territorial princes, their opposition to the municipal bourgeoisie which the Emperor had sought all too late to aid, and the estrangement of the episcopacy over which the Curia had gained the upper hand in so far as it had not joined forces with the princes, undermined the medieval Imperial idea in the north while it was being automatically hollowed out in the south by the antique character of Frederic's own idea of the state. The victor over Milan warmed himself in the light of an already sinking sun. There was not room enough, he said, to bury the enemies he had conquered. He bestowed upon himself the aura of a just judge of heretics, and in his letters vented all his spleen upon the Pope and the car-dinals. Gregory, long since irritated by the fact that the Papal fief of Sardinia had been bestowed on Enzio, one of Frederic's bastard sons, renewed the ban over the "beast, the so-called Emperor," and declared him deposed. There followed a ghastly literary row between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Finally, after Frederic had conquered the Papal States, the issue was fought out with arms. Gregory induced the Venetians to attack Apulia, but the Hohenstaufen gained the victory. He made the Pope a prisoner and ordered crosses cut on his breast and on his brow. The tonsures of the Papal priests were similarly adorned with crosses. The Pope, now threatened in his own city, which Fred- eric hoped to declare the metropolitan See of his Sicilian State, also made no headway in his efforts to find a German anti-king. Then he summoned a General Council to Rome. The Emperor himself had previously suggested this as a way out, but now he ordered Enzio to seize a hundred prelates who came on Genoese ships, drag them to Naples, and subject them to the torture of imprisonment. When Frederic himself stood before Rome with his army, the Pope died, in 1241.
Celestinc IV, a sick man, succeeded Gregory and reigned only fif- teen days. With the aid of the Roman Senator Mattheus Rubeus, Frederic succeeded in keeping two cardinals imprisoned and so de- layed the election for twenty months. Fieschi, Count Lovagna, a Genoese, was then chosen as Pope Innocent IV (1243-1254) . This
FREDERIC
