MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

  CHAPTER IX. FREDERICK I. [1178 — 1186.

Fall of Henry the Lion—Affairs of Germany—Affairs of Italy —Death of Alexander III—Lucius III—Peace of Constance —Affairs of Sicily—Marriage of the King of the Romans— Urban III. 

Upon the present occasion the business awaiting the Emperor was as painful as it was serious. During the war and the negotiations in Italy, the Duke of Saxony and Bavaria had as usual been at feud with his neighbours. Whether he had or had not meditated actual rebellion against his Imperial liege Lord and kinsman, is, and will probably ever remain, an unresolved question. But that, although engaged in war with some still unconquered Slavonians, he was much occupied with intrigues calculated to produce troubles in Swabia, seems tolerably certain. From both he was startled by the unexpected news of the reconciliation between the Emperor and Alexander. Upon hearing such tidings he sought the alliance and friendship of Casimir IV of Poland; an able prince, who, upon the death of his eldest brother, Boleslas IV, superseding an intermediate brother, Mieczyslaf, had just succeeded as Duke of Cracow, and as Grand-Duke over his co-Dukes. He applied likewise to Waldemar—now his near connexion by the actual marriage of the Crown-Prince Canute with Richenza, the widowed Duchess of Swabia—for aid against his various enemies, against the Emperor should need be. This last the King of Denmark would agree to afford him only if he, the Duke, first made compensation to, and peace with the prelates whose possessions he had wrongfully seized; observing, a It was always ill fighting the Emperor; and with Heaven angered, would be impossible.” But, as it was against those very prelates that the Lion wanted auxiliaries, he rejected the conditions upon which alone could this aid be hoped for, and all he could obtain from Waldemar was a promise to keep his refusal secret. Upon the strength of this secrecy, when three of the offended bishops invaded his dominions, he ventured to encourage his friends and vassals, and to alarm the prelates, with the prospect of Danish, and also of Polish succours, which last were as little forthcoming as the first.

The origin of this Saxon civil war may be briefly stated. Gero Bishop of Halberstadt, whom Henry had placed in that see, when with or without the Emperor’s concurrence he had expelled the Alexandrian Bishop Ulrich, was one of the few German anti-papal prelates, not confirmed by the treaty of Venice. Alexander formally deposed him, reinstalling Ulrich, who at once cancelled all Gero’s acts, including his grants of episcopal fiefs; some of those grants having been to his Ducal patron. The Lion immediately concluded a peace with the Slavonians, to turn his full force against Bishop Ulrich. Upon this fresh outbreak of civil war, other Saxon Prelates and Nobles revived their old claims and complaints, which the Emperor had rather suspended, as the punishment of their attempted self-redress, than rejected. The Bishop of Munster joined Ulrich in arms. The Archbishop of Cologne, upon his return from Italy in the autumn of 1177, demanded in addition to the immediate evacuation of his principality, compensation for inroads upon the territory, and oppression exercised upon the vassals, of his see. It was refused, and the Archbishop joined the two Bishops. These were the prelates with whom the Duke now had to contend, and they are accused by Guelphs of having marked their invasion of the duchy by sacrilege as well as by great cruelty.

In this state Frederic, upon his arrival, found the affairs of the Duke of Saxony and Bavaria; and he did not immediately interfere; whilst the Duke so fully relied upon the dread he inspired, or still perhaps, even after the scene at Partenkirch or Chiavenna and its melancholy consequences, upon the Emperor’s regard, that he boldly attended the first Diet, held at Spires, to complain of aggression upon himself. He was met by counter-complaints from the invaders, from their allies, and from divers prelates and nobles whom he had in some manner wronged or injured. As a sample of these counter-complaints, that of the Bavarian Bishop of Freising, though not relating to one of the Lion’s most recent outrages, may be given. It was, that the Duke had, without provocation or notice, in the midst of peace and friendship, surprised his town of Veringen by night, burnt bridges and houses, seized his great salt magazine, destroyed his salt works, made prisoners of all his salt manufacturers, and dragged them away to Munich, thus to transfer the salt trade from the episcopal to the ducal domain. A nearly similar outrage he had perpetrated years before at saltworks belonging to the Earl of Holstein: but for that some sort of compensation had ultimately been made, and the Earl now acted as his faithful vassal, instead of appearing amongst his enemies. But against accusers and accusations, Henry could not now, as of yore, reckon upon a protector, kind as powerful, in the Emperor, who, if he laid no offence to his charge, certainly forbore to shield him.

From the accusations of his enemies, the Duke of Saxony and Bavaria was required to vindicate himself at the next Diet, appointed to be held at Worms, in January 1179. The Diet was so held, but the Duke did not appear. In fact, whilst his pride revolted from owning the Princes of the Empire as his peers and judges, he w as conscious of having provoked the ill will of so many of them, as left him little hope of favour to temper justice. The Princes w ere wroth at his non-appearance; but the Emperor listened to a plea advanced on his behalf; to wit, that princes of the Empire could be judged only in their own country; and he gave him a second chance, by summoning him to the Whitsuntide Diet, convoked, conformably to this pretension, to meet at Magdeburg, in Saxony.

Again, at this Diet, Henry the Lion appeared neither in person, nor by deputy, envoy, or advocate, sent thither to plead his cause: and now the number and virulence of his accusers increased. The Margrave of Landsberg came forward to charge him with having incited Slavonian tribes to ravage his Lusatian margraviate; and he offered to maintain the truth of this and the other charges in single combat. To have accepted the challenge would have been to own the Margrave his peer, and the Duke took no notice of it. But to allow of his accepting this trial by judicial combat, if so minded, the investigation of the complaints was deferred to a third Diet, convoked to meet again in Saxony, at Goslar.

During the interval between the Magdeburg Diet, and that appointed to meet at Goslar, Henry sought to profit by those old feelings of kindred and friendship that he had himself so rudely wounded. He solicited a secret interview with the Emperor, who consented, and privately met him at Haldensleben. But the Duke would make no concession. He would neither agree to pay the fine of 5000 marks demanded by the Emperor, rather in acknowledgment of his default, than as damages for the calamities that default had caused, nor submit his various quarrels to the decision of the Diet, or even to the arbitration of the Emperor. The interview had no result.

At Goslar Henry no more appeared, either in person or vicariously, than at the preceding Diets; and now the Emperor formally put the question: a What is the punishment denounced by the laws of the Empire against him, who, thrice regularly summoned by the Diet, refuses to appear, thus scorning the jurisdiction of the Estates of the Empire?” The original question here, as on former occasions, merging, as it were, in this contumacy, which was held to imply a greater crime—revolt against the authority of the Emperor and the Diet. The answer was prompt and decided. “The ban of the Empire!”—Anglicè, “outlawry, forfeiture of fiefs, loss of dignities.” The Duke’s partisans in the Diet protested against this sentence, and urged that Henry, being of Swabian descent, could only in Swabia be judged; a sort of corollary from the former admitted plea. The Diet rejected it, nevertheless, as an ab­surd innovation; and one of the members offered to prove again, in single combat, that the Emperor and Diet of the Empire conjointly, could try, and, if convicted, condemn any prince, at any place within the realm. As before, no notice was taken of the challenge. But still the Emperor delayed to ratify the sentence of the Diet. Bent upon giving his refractory kinsman every possible chance of returning to his duty as a vassal of the Empire, he resisted the importunity of the Lion’s enemies, and summoned him for the fourth time to appear, in person or by proxy, before an Imperial Diet, now to sit at Wurzburg in Franconia, in January 1180, and there vindicate his conduct. Diets were likewise convoked to meet at Ulm, and at Ratisbon, but respecting these Diets some obscurity exists. Whether they were convoked simultaneously with, or, as is more likely, subsequent to the assembling of the Wurzburg Diet, whether they were Imperial Diets, there held either to comply with every imaginable claim of the Duke’s, or in order to dispose of fiefs within the states to which those fiefs appertained, or were merely Provincial Diets of Bavaria and Swabia, as forms indispensable to the contemplated changes, appears to be altogether uncertain, and luckily is not very material.

The enemies with whom the Duke of Saxony and Bavaria had surrounded himself, waited not for the further proceedings of these later Diets. The chief of these enemies, the Landgrave of Thuringia, the Archbishops of Cologne and Magdeburg, and the Bishop of Halberstadt, impatient of the Emperor’s delays, and mistrustful of some lingering cousinly regard, now took the execution of the Diet’s unratified sentence into their own hands. Upon the rising of the Goslar assembly, they invaded Saxony in concert, and were joined by offended Saxon vassals; when again the invaders are said, especially the troops of Archbishop Philip, to have wrought unspeakably atrocious and sacrilegious destruction in the duchy: an accusation too often repeated by the partisans of Henry the Lion, to be fully credited, at least as meaning anything beyond what was then unhappily usual. But all the princes together were no match for the Lion, so truly formidable had he made himself. They were unsupported by the force of the Empire, and he speedily cleared his dominions of them.

The fourth summons, the Duke, elated by his triumph over those whom he was entitled to regard as the Diet’s officers, slighted, as he had the three preceding. The Pope and the Kings of England and France now interposed in his behalf; but in vain. The patience of the Emperor was exhausted, and he gave way to the indignant Princes; at another Wurzburg Diet, the Duke of Saxony and Bavaria was formally laid under the ban of the Empire. But the laws of the Empire allowed the prince under its ban a period of grace, during which he might by submis­sion, if not quite avert, yet greatly alleviate the confiscation that sentence imported. But the period of grace elapsed, and still Henry stood in haughty defiance of the Emperor and the Empire. His forfeiture was now complete; such contumacious resistance to the sentence, as should render arms requisite for its enforcement, adding, ipso facto, the forfeiture of allodia to that of fiefs.

At the Easter Diet, held this year at Gelnhausen, a favourite residence of Frederic’s, this final forfeiture was pronounced, and the possessions lost by the Lion were ordered to be assigned anew. But the Emperor, much as Guelphs execrate his malignant enmity to the bead of the Welfs, forbore to execute the sentence in its full severity; and still, whilst he disposed of the forfeited duchies and fiefs, left the princely outlaw a chance of redeeming his allodial property. Taught by bitter experience the danger of making any prince formidably powerful, the monarch, with the concurrence of the Diet, not only severed, but diminished the two duchies, ere granting them anew. The fiefs situated within the province of Cologne, that is to say the Westphalian fiefs, he granted, with ducal rights over Westphalia, to Archbishop Philip, to be permanently attached to that archiepiscopal see. The Landgrave of Thuringia, the Archbishops of Magdeburg and Bremen—the defaulter, Hartwig, was dead, and his successor, Baldwin, of course, entitled to all temporalities—the Bishops of Minden, Halberstadt, Hildesheim, Verden, Paderborn, with other prelates and nobles of less note, severally recovered whatever had been wrested from them, with additions. The Dukes of Mecklenburg—the now really Christian sons and heirs of the Heathen Obodrite Princes—and the Earls of Holstein, were raised to the rank of immediate vassals of the Empire; Lübeck, and a few other thriving towns, to that of Free Imperial cities. The duchy of Saxony, thus curtailed, but retaining some of its Slavonian acquisitions, and still powerful, the Emperor assigned to the descendants of the eldest of the Billung co-heiresses, Elike. Her son, Albert the Bear, had died in 1170, dividing his dominions between his sons,—unluckily for German nationality, a then growing practice;—he left his margraviate to his eldest son Otho; Anhalt, with his Slavonian conquests upon the middle Elbe, to the younger, Bernard. To have reunited the margraviate and the duchy would have been to reconstruct such a power as had just been found noxious: and the Emperor, therefore, so far modified the law of hereditary right, as to invest Bernard with the duchy of Saxony, attaching to it the Imperial household office of Arch-Marshal; that of Arch-Chamberlain being already assigned to the Margraves of Brandenburg, now the more powerful princes of the two.

The affairs of Saxony thus ordered at Gelnhausen in Thuringia—still part of Saxony, though the Landgrave seems a very great prince to be under a duke—the Emperor proceeded to hold a Diet at Ratisbon, probably that already mentioned, for the regulation of those of Bavaria; and this already curtailed duchy he in like manner further diminished. To Carinthia and Styria, independence of the Dukes of Bavaria was severally assured, with ducal rights and title to the vassal prince of each. He granted some southern Tyrolese counties to the Bishops in whose dioceses they lay, to prevent their absorption by Lombardy; and others, more considerable, to the Earls of Andechs, descended, like the house of Wittelsbach, from the Scyren, or Schyren; and, upon this augmentation of their already extensive, though most inconveniently scat­tered, dominions, he authorized the Earl’s retention of their unauthorizedly assumed title of Duke—an assumption requiring some words of explanation. An Earl of Dachau, taking part in a civil war in Hungary, had, as the reward of his assistance, been created Duke of Dalmatia by Boris, the pretender he had served. But Boris proving unsuccessful, the Earl lost Dalmatia; and, returning to Germany, a Hungarian Duke without a dukedom, his new title was not recognized by the German Diet. Upon the death of the last of these Dachau Dukes, leaving neither child nor brother, the son of his sister,—who had married an Earl of Andechs,—succeeded to his county and empty ducal title, which, in this series of changes, was now sanctioned by the Emperor and Diet. The Earls henceforward lawfully entitled themselves Dukes of Meran; having still, it might almost be said, only a dukedom in partibus since it has never been clearly ascertained where Meran is, or, rather, of what Meran they were dukes. To return to Frederic’s operations in the Ratisbon Diet. He added a few fiefs to those of the Duke of Spoleto, with which (whether here or at Ulm seems doubtful) he incor­porated all those remaining to the Lion in Swabia; he made Ratisbon, and a few other towns (in Bavaria, Swabia, and Franconia), immediate, or Free Imperial cities; he then invested his tried friend and champion, Otho von Wittelsbach, with the duchy. Is it worth mentioning that this Otho is a lineal ancestor of the Elector Palatine, husband to Elizabeth of England, and thus an ancestor of the present sovereign of the British Empire? The Bavarians exultingly hailed the representative of one of their oldest families, the Scyren, as their Duke; and Otho, upon acquiring the higher dignity, transferred his Bavarian palatinate to his younger brother. Finally, the burgraviate of Nuremberg was given to the Earls of Zollern, or Hohenzollern, and if not from the first hereditary, was soon afterwards made so. The army of the Empire, destined to effect all these transfers and changes, was appointed to assemble upon St. James’s day, in the ensuing month of July; the princes and nobles who were to profit by them of course supplying a large proportion of the force.

But the Lion had not waited to be attacked. Upon receiving information of the sentence pronounced against him, and the allotment of Saxony, which he did soon after his repulse of his first invaders, he resumed hostilities. He surprised and burnt Halberstadt, numbered the Bishop amongst his prisoners, and constrained him to sign a treaty, which was afterwards cancelled by both Pope and Emperor. He took and burnt Nordhausen, defeated the newly invested Duke of Saxony, captured the Landgrave of Thuringia, and laid siege to that object of his ambition, Goslar, after destroying all the mining and smelting establishments located under its protection. During these operations, his faithful vassal, Adolph Graf von Holstein, was gallantly and successfully doing battle with the invaders, and driving them out of the western provinces of the duchy. Not a single advantage had those enemies gained; and Henry, though he left Goslar untaken, returned to Brunswick, his favourite residence, crowned with success and glory. But, in the exultation of triumph, the Duke forgot that his whole strength lay in the fidelity of his vassals. He quarrelled with the greatest of them, the Earl of Holstein,—who had nearly exhausted his own resources in his zealous service of his liege Lord,—respecting some prisoners of war taken by the Earl, but whom, or whose ransom, the Duke, as his suzerain, claimed, and the Earl refused to surrender. He next accused the Graf von Ratzeburg of plotting the assassination of himself and his Duchess. Once more, however, his great abilities and leonine daring gave success to his irrational presumption; he expelled Earl Adolf from Holstein, threw the Earl of Ratzeburg into prison, and triumphed in the possession of the fiefs of both.

Thus, throughout the year 1180, Henry was victorious; but it was for the last time. During the period in which he had thus prosperously maintained his position against his brother princes, and increased his power by seizing the possessions of his vassals, the Emperor, occupied by the settlement of Bavaria, had, in Saxony, left the execution of the Diet’s decree to those who were to reap the benefit, but who proved unable to cope with the Lion. In the course of the following year, 1181, he took it in hand himself, and the scene changed. He fixed a day, Martin­mas, upon or before which all Saxon vassals must submit to the decree of the Diet, or be declared traitors, and forfeit their fiefs. Al the head of an army of the Empire, unaccompanied by any troops of his own, he then entered the duchy. And now, whether influenced by respect for the Head of the Empire enforcing the known will of the Empire, or by anger at the deposed Duke’s treatment of the Earls of Holstein and Ratzeburg, Henry’s hitherto staunchest adherents, with scarcely an exception, fell off from him. His strongest towns and castles surrendered almost as soon as summoned; Ratzeburg was, upon Henry’s leaving it, recovered by the friends of the imprisoned Earl in his name; the Imperialists took Bardewyck and Haldensleben by storm, and besieged Brunswick. The young Duchess, Matilda of England, was in the town, still confined to her bed by the sufferings entailed upon maternity, and she sent a request to the Emperor, that wine, for her use, might be permitted to enter. He not only granted the request, but added to his permission a complimentary message, that, rather than disturb a lady in her critical condition, he would make her a present of Brunswick. And he instantly raised the siege.

Frederic’s chivalrous courtesy did not further interrupt his victorious career. The only power from which, as an ally of Henry’s, he apprehended serious opposition was Denmark; Waldemar having faithfully kept his promise not to make his purposed neutrality public. To conciliate this connexion of the Lion’s, the Emperor now proposed a marriage between two of his own sons and two of the Danish monarch’s daughters. The proposal was thankfully accepted; Waldemar visited the Emperor in his camp, and all fear of his interposition in aid of his ducal neighbour and connexion thus vanishing, Frederic proceeded confidently. With the King’s consent he invested the Pomeranian Princes—who since the year 1168 had been Danish vassals—with their dominions, as Princes of the Empire; though still it should seem, owing homage to the King of Denmark, as their mesne Lord. He next laid siege to Lubeck. The citizens, through their Bishop, represented to the Emperor that their city owed its prosperity, if not its existence, to the deposed Duke of Saxony, who had annihilated Heathenism and established Christianity throughout the neighbouring districts; and that they were bound, by gratitude for such benefits, to defend the city for him to the uttermost, unless authorized by him to surrender; wherefore they solicited permission to communicate with him. The Emperor replied that the deposed Duke had held Lubeck as a fief of the Empire; and all his fiefs having, by his Co-Estates of the Empire, been confiscated, as the penalty of his contumacy and rebellion, it was wrong in the citizens of Lubeck to resist the Imperial authority; nevertheless he granted their petition. The deputation, sent to Henry, brought back leave from him to make terms for themselves, as he had not the means of rescuing them. Lubeck thereupon surrendered, and became a Free Imperial city, with all its chartered rights and commercial privileges confirmed and augmented.

Henry had retreated to Stade, a strongly fortified town, where he prepared for a desperate resistance. But Frederic marched upon Lüneberg, where the Duke’s family then was; and the double fear of seeing his children in his enemies’ hands, and of losing the very cradle of his maternal Saxon ancestry, conquered his stubborn resolution. He released the captive Landgrave of Thuringia, requesting him to announce his submission to the sentence of the Diet, and prepare the offended Emperor to receive him. Frederic, who apparently needed little preparation, at the first word sent the repentant rebel a safe-conduct. Protected by this Imperial document, the haughty Lion traversed dominions so lately his own; and, in November, presented himself before the Diet, then sitting at Erfurt. He fell at the feet of the sovereign, whom at Partenkirch he had seen at his own, clasped his knees, and sued for pardon.

Frederic was inly moved, and tears bedewed his cheeks, as he exclaimed: “But thou thyself hast been the sole author of thy misfortunes!” All who bore the Lion ill will for past wrongs, and all who dreaded his ambition or his vengeance, trembled lest this deep emotion should forbode a full pardon. But Frederic neither would nor perhaps could, materially alter the sentence of the Diet; nor would he, now that affection no longer hoodwinked his judgment, sacrifice the interests of the Empire to his private feelings. He contented himself with restoring to Henry, in recompense of his final, however late, submission, the whole of the allodial heritage of his two grand­mothers, Wulfhilda and Richenza, which his contumacy under the ban of the Empire, had forfeited, together with some few of their fiefs, the title of Duke of Brunswick, and such imperfect ducal rights as appertained to what have been designated dukedoms in opposition to the original duchies, and even to later duchies constituted by Emperor and Diet conjointly; the dukedom being apparently what the Emperor could singly confer. The lands assigned the Duchess on her marriage, as her dower, Frederick likewise assured to her. But, either as a balance to these concessions, or to guard the new occupants of the Lion’s late possessions from disturbance, till they could be somewhat securely established therein, he banished the Duke of Brunswick from the Empire for the space of seven years; a period which, at the intercession of Henry’s former mediating protectors, the Pope and the Kings of France and England, he reduced to three. The princes and prelates were again alarmed, and now obtained a solemn promise from the Emperor to grant no further remission of the sentence without their consent.

The following spring, Henry passed over into England with his family, to spend the period of his banishment at the court of his royal father-in-law. Upon his road through his forfeited duchy, he was far from meeting with the respect and consideration due to his misfortunes—a proof as much of the harshness of his government, as of the rudeness of the age. At Bardewyk—which owed him much, which, before he obtained possession of Lubeck, he had endeavoured to exalt into a rival of that thriving city, and where he now intended to rest for a night—not only were the gates closed against him, but the citizens assembled upon the walls for the purpose of grossly insulting him by an indecent exposure of their own persons. The Lion swore that on his return he would make it impossible for the men of Bardewyk again to insult a prince. An oath he did not forget.

About this time Canute VI succeeded his father Waldemar upon the Danish throne. The Emperor summoned him to do homage, and required him to send, with her promised wedding portion, the affianced bride of the Duke of Swabia, to be educated at the Court of her future mother-in-law, the Empress. Why he asked only for one of the little brides—whether the second was dead, or too mere a baby to be deprived of maternal care—does not appear. Canute, who more than his father, seemingly, sympathized with his Lion father-in-law, eluded or deferred the doing homage; and though he sent his sister as required, he sent her so ill-equipped, carrying with her so poor an instalment of her promised portion, that the Emperor was scarcely less angered by this half compliance, than he might have been by a positive refusal. Apprehensions were conceived that Canute meant to arm on behalf of the Duke of Brunswick. Frederic, however, wished just then to avoid a war with Denmark, and for the moment overlooked the affront; whilst he suffered the matter of homage to remain in some sort in suspense. It is said that, to avert the danger of his arming for his father-in-law, Frederic encouraged Prince Bogislaf of Pomerania to attempt making himself master of Rügen. Whether so stimulated or not, Bogislaf certainly did make the attempt, and Canute’ arms were occupied in Slavonian wars.

Whilst these things were passing in Germany, Archbishop Christian, whom the Emperor had left in Italy to watch over and enforce the observance of the treaty, and to maintain peace, had offered his services to the Pope. They were gladly accepted: whereupon he had assisted Alexander thoroughly to subjugate the Romans, and was next employed to extort the submission of the deserted Anti­Pope; who even when given up by his only powerful sup­porter, still asserted the legality of his own pretensions. Coerced by the Archbishop, Calixtus III now presented himself as Giovanni di Struma to his triumphant rival. But Alexander, however haughty, was wise enough to control his exultation; and unlike Calixtus II, in similar circumstances, adopted every conciliatory measure that could finally heal the schism, by winning the good will of his defeated opponents. He received his forsaken and humbled competitor with all kindness; invited him to dinner—thus, in papal etiquette, really treating him as ait equal—and, conformably to his convention with the Emperor, provided liberally for him at Benevento.

In March 1179, a general Council convoked by Alexander, had met at Rome, consisting of three patriarchs, three hundred prelates, and crowds of inferior clergy. The first measures of the Pope and his Council referred to the complete closing of the schism. For this purpose most of the anti-popes’ ecclesiastical appointments were solemnly confirmed; only such prelates as had simoniacally, or by other incorrect means, attained their dignities, being ejected; some of the anti-popes’ regulations touching discipline were annulled, and others, of which the Pope and Council approved, were rendered valid by a solemn sanction. (It may be observed by the way that these deliberate sanctions go far to acquit the better Romish authorities, of dictating the idle Romish vituperation, that represents every anti-pope not merely as a lawless usurper, but as an actual monster of vice and infidelity.) An attempt was made to prevent future schism, by prohibiting such engagements, as those entered into prior to the double election of Alexander and Victor; and by enacting that a Papal Election by two thirds of the Cardinals should be valid, by less than two thirds invalid, and a protest by no more than one third of the Conclave null and void. The principal matter of discipline originating in this Council, was a regulation of the expense to which a bishop might put abbeys and parish priests in his visitation of his diocese. A sufficient escort he was bound to take, but the attendance of a hunting establishment was forbidden, and his train was restricted to forty or fifty horsemen.

Complaints were laid before this Council of the prevalence of heresy, as well in northern Italy—where it may have been connived at whilst the Pope wanted the support of the Lombards—as in the south of France. Similar complaints appear to have been previously made at the Council held by Alexander in France; but little attended to at the time, engrossed as all then were with the schism. Now Pope and Council were at leisure to attend to the doctrine of the Church, and a sentence of excommunication was pronounced against heretics; but as no especial laws were made respecting them, this may for the moment be sufficient notice, reserving all details for the chapter, which, early in the history of the next century, must be devoted to the subject of heresy.

With this general Council, closed the pontificate of Alexander III, which was mainly occupied by the contest with anti-popes. Shortly after the dissolution of the Council, upon the 30th of August, 1181, he died, and was succeeded by Cardinal Ubaldo di Ostia, who took the name of Lucius III. The new Pope was a worthy man, of a ripe old age, and is by many held cheap; though deficient in intellect he could hardly be, since he is said to have been habitually employed by his able predecessors in the most ticklish affairs of the Church. But he bad none of the energy of those predecessors, and against him, therefore, Roman turbulence broke out even more fiercely, more insolently than usual; and the Pope, at once indignant and terrified, appealed to the Archbishop of Mainz for protection.

That martial prelate had himself been for some short time in trouble. Whilst actively employed in reducing refractory portions of the Estates of the Church to obedience under Alexander III, he had found himself vigorously opposed by Marquess Conrad, a younger son of the Marquees of Montferrat. As no mention is made of that loyal Marquess’s continued adherence to Calixtus, after the imperial nephew of his wife had acknowledged Alexander; or, of any enmity borne by him to any Pope, save as to an enemy of the Emperor; it is to be presumed that his son, who subsequently displayed in the East a very ambitious and adventurous spirit, had engaged independently, as a leader of mercenaries,—perhaps the first noble Condottiere—in the service of the papal rebels. But however that may be, he defeated Christian, took him prisoner, demanded an exorbitant ransom, and kept him in close custody till it should be paid. It appears that neither Pope nor Emperor came forward upon this occasion, and the ingenuity of modern historians has been tasked to discover the motive of their conduct. With respect to the Emperor it may however be presumed that he, who was then engrossed by the rebellion of Henry the Lion, deemed it the Pope’s business to ransom a prisoner taken in battle for Papal sovereign rights against Papal rebels, and saw no reason why he should pay Alexander’s debt. Why Alexander did not ransom his valuable champion, it is more difficult to say: but, without adopting the suggestion that Christian’s services to himself had not quite obliterated those to his rivals, it may be conjectured that he had served him too well for his further service, at least while the Romans were amused with the Council, to be worth so heavy a drain upon an exchequer exhausted by war and intrigue, as the large sum Marquess Conrad demanded. Soon after Alexander’s death the Archbishop managed to ransom himself; and immediately was again at the head of an army. Nor does he appear to have thought that he had any ungrateful neglect to resent, for he hastened to obey the call of Lucius, and once more reduced the Romans to submission.

In Lombardy affairs now began to assume an aspect more decidedly favourable to the Emperor. The exasperation generated by long-continued hostilities had had time to subside, leaving room for calm reflection. Venice had never heartily joined the League, and did not renew the connexion after she broke it to co-operate in the siege of Ancona. Some of the members held to be most innately Guelph, even Alessandria, sought the Emperor’s favour by entire submission. And gradually the Heads of the League, Milan herself included, reluctantly admitted an apprehension that, without a prospect of support from either the Pope, the King of Sicily, or the Greek Emperor, or some chance of such a diversion in their favour as had arisen from the self-willed obstinacy of the Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, they could not really hope to triumph over the German Emperor. Of the last, there was now no German prince powerful enough to afford them a hope; Lucius III was as unable, as William II was unwilling, to engage in war with Frederic Barbarossa; and the able, powerful, and enterprising Manuel had ceased to exist, leaving no successor who could carry out his plans.

By his first marriage Manuel had only a daughter, Maria, who had grown up to womanhood as his presumptive heir, when her mother's death, and his second marriage with Maria of Antioch produced a son to cut her out. Manuel had appointed his widow and a cousin, named Alexius Comnenus, regents for his minor son; but his daughter, and her husband Rinieri, a son of the Marquess of Montferrat, contended with them for the supreme authority; and when overpowered, invited the exiled Andronicus Comnenus, the ablest perhaps, and certainly the most unprincipled of the family, to join them. Andronicus had been a favourite companion of Manuel’s in their youth, and the confidant of his transient illicit amours. A rivalry in some of these had alienated the kinsmen; and Andronicus became a traitor. For two plots against Manuel’s life, and a treasonable correspondence with the King of Hungary, he was arrested, escaped from prison, and fled to the Russian principality of Halitsch; where he managed to render Manuel some service that induced his pardon and recall. His subsequent adventures belong rather to the history of the Syro-Frank States, where they will find their place. They had ended in his confinement to a town on the shore of the Euxine. Thence he hastened at the Princess’s invitation; accused the Regents of a treasonable correspondence with Bela III of Hungary, who had married Princess Agnes of Antioch, the Empress Maria’s sister; convicted them by a sort of trial, and doomed Alexius to blindness. None would sentence the Empress mother; but she was found one morning a corpse on the sea-shore. The Princess Maria and Rinieri were soon afterwards poisoned, and Andronicus remained Regent. His government disappointed the Greeks, his abilities being smothered, apparently in cruelty, tyranny and profligacy. Neither during the struggle, nor as acknowledged Regent, did he seem to care for the recovery of Italy, and the League speedily saw that from Constantinople there was nothing to hope.

This view of their position induced the Lombards, for the sake of perpetuating the advantages which they then enjoyed, to drop some of their most republican pretensions, and thus to convert the truce into a permanent peace. On the other hand, Frederic’s resentment, amidst the affairs in which he was immersed, had similarly had leisure to subside; and he too, perhaps, had reluctantly confessed to himself, that the attainment of his ideal, the perfect re-establishment of the Empire of Charlemagne, was, for the moment at least, impossible. He saw the German princes daily more averse to Italian expeditions, success in which would strengthen the Head of the Empire against their own ambitious aspirings; whilst his son, the King of the Romans, who shrank from finding his accession embarrassed by apprehensions of a civil war, perceived in existing circumstances such an opportunity of recommending himself to Italy, and even to the Pope, as might secure the support of both to the Empire, and the Empire uncontested to himself. Henry therefore zealously interposed his mediation to effect the object that the Lombards now desired, namely, such improvement of the truce into a peace.

The fruit of all these altered views was the memorable Peace of Constance, signed in that city upon the 25th of June, 1183, which long remained the basis of public law in northern Italy. Its leading provisions were, that, reserving the right of investing and confirming Consuls and Podestas to the Bishop, wherever he had habitually exercised that right, to the Emperor and his Vicars elsewhere, (and the right of confirming must needs include that of rejecting whenever there was power to assert it,) it allowed every town to elect its magistrates, and to purchase all other rights and royalties for a yearly payment of 2000 lb. of silver into the Imperial treasury, which payment, should it be proved exorbitant, the Emperor promised to reduce. The contributions to the Emperor’s Italian expeditions were definitively settled. The vassal’s oath of allegiance was to be taken by all Vassals (Consuls and other Magistrates included), the citizen’s oath by all male inhabitants between the ages of seventeen and seventy, and both oaths were to be decennially repeated. All classes were further to swear to respect and preserve the Emperor’s fortifications, and to maintain his Imperial rights against the world. The citizens in return were authorized to wall and otherwise fortify the towns; to raise troops, and to form confederations; this last, a privilege which, as an adjunct of what he was constantly labouring to repress, viz., the right of waging private war, Frederic was always reluctant to grant, and which in his German charters he habitually withheld. An appeal lay to the Emperor from all Italian tribunals, and a supreme Imperial Judge was appointed, to hear and decide upon such appeals when the Emperor should be in Germany. This treaty, granting all that the Lombards had as yet learned really to desire was received with unbounded delight in Lombardy, and the idea of an independent, federal republic, seems for a time to have died away.

The Peace of Constance was signed as before said, June 25, 1183, and as though he had lived only whilst the Emperor wanted his military services in Italy, that day two months Archbishop Christian died, probably of a fever; and the marvel seems to be that his German constitution had so long borne such an active life in a southern climate. Conformably, however, to the usual accusation in such cases of premature decease, contemporary Chroniclers affirm that the Romans poisoned the prelate to deprive the Pope of his championship. And it must be confessed the charge is somewhat corroborated by the fact that the Romans were no sooner relieved, whether by the course of nature or by their own crime, from all fear of this formidable antagonist, than they again rose against their pontifical sovereign. Without his deceased protector, he was again unequal to the contest; and though he could not be compelled to yield to their demands, he could be, and was, again driven from Rome.

The see of Mainz did not lose much in its warlike Archbishop, whom it rarely beheld, and whose place was immediately supplied by the reinstalment of his formerly successful competitor, Conrad von Wittelsbach. To the Emperor and Empire the loss of such a public servant was grievous. In Italy, indeed, it was very much compensated by the gain of a race that was daily rising in power. Ezzelino da Romano, who had commanded the forces of the Lombard League against the Emperor, now solicited a reconciliation with him, and became thenceforward the Head of the Italian Ghibelines.

In Germany, some disturbances had arisen from an attempt of the new Duke of Saxony to tread in his predecessor’s footsteps, in regard to vassals and neighbours. But Bernard was as deficient in the immense power and the influence arising from old habitual relations of sovereign and vassal, as in the lofty qualities that had enabled the Lion to trample on all around him. Neither the great Saxon vassals nor Lubeck would submit to his pretensions; and the Emperor’s intervention between Duke, vassals, and Free Imperial City, was required to quell the troubles, and reconcile all parties. He judged all to be, one way or another, in the wrong, and fined the opposers of ducal usurpation for having taken redress into their own hands, whilst he forbade the Duke again to encroach upon their rights.

Peace now reigned throughout the Empire, and Frederic Barbarossa resolved to celebrate it by a festival of such Imperial magnificence as had not been seen for centuries, and should strike his contemporaries with admiration. The occasion he selected for this festival, was the tournament proclaimed to celebrate the knighting of his elder sons; and he appointed for its time and place the Whitsuntide Diet of 1184, to be held at Mainz; as the solemn restoration of that city to its original rank, after undergoing the due punishment of its crimes, in years of desolation and desertion.

There, at the appointed season, the princes, prelates, and nobles of Germany, Italy, and Burgundy assembled; the laity accompanied by their wives and daughters, and all attended by trains calculated to display their wealth and consequence. That Philip Earl of Flanders led thither 600 knights, has been carefully recorded by Flemish chronicles; though we might conceive they should rather have suppressed such a proof of his inferior power; inasmuch as the trains are reported to have amounted in many instances to 1000 knights, in some to 4000; the largest, the Archbishop of Cologne’s, it is said, to 4060. Thither also flocked princes, nobles and knights, from England, France, and Spain, from Illyria, and many Slavonian states, attracted by the fame of the tournament at which the Emperor’s sons were to win their golden spurs, and when they should have received, to approve themselves worthy of them. Troubadours, scalds, bards, minstrels of all countries presented themselves to enliven the banquet, and to sing the praises of the victor in the lists. According to the lowest computation 40,000, according to the highest 70,000 knights of all ranks were here gathered together; of the number of ladies, “whose bright eyes rained influence” no estimate is given; and of the lower orders, the throng attracted by curiosity and cupidity is described as innumerable. It being evident now, as it had been some sixty years before, at Lothar’s election, that Mainz could not lodge such a host, accommodation was provided without the walls. A pleasure house, with an adjoining chapel, was built for the Emperor upon the bank of the Rhine, environing which arose analogous dwellings for the princes, and, further off, tents for the lesser nobles, till a goodly city appeared to have been created by the touch of a fairy’s wand. Measures had been taken for ensuring an adequate supply of provisions by the river, and this entire multitude was entertained, with due distinction of ranks and tables, at the Emperor’s expense, as long as the festival lasted. Whilst in the temporary Imperial palace the chief Princes of the Empire, in proof of the supreme dignity of the Emperor, performed the functions of their several household offices: the Rhine Palsgrave as Arch-Sewer, the Duke of Saxony as Arch-Marshal, the Margrave of Brandenburg as Arch-Chamberlain, and the King of Bohemia as Arch-Butler or Cup-bearer. Whatever they had been before, these offices were now inseparably annexed to those titles and principalities.

Some public business was necessarily transacted at so , grand a Diet: but none, it should seem, worth mentioning except the determination taken to enter Poland in arms, and forcibly reinstall the supplanted elder brother, Mieczyslaf, in his duchy of Great Poland and his suzerainty. The execution of this decree was to be the first adventure of the young knight, Henry King of the Romans. And this expedition may at once be preliminarily disposed of, by stating that Kassimir, upon hearing that it was projected, hastened to do homage to the Emperor, and acknowledge the authority of the Diet; whereupon the Princes of the Empire contented themselves with obtaining from him a younger brother’s appanage for Mieczyslaf; who, some years later, upon Kasimir’s sudden death, recovered his birthright.

The real business of the Mainz assemblage was the tournament. Tiltings, joustings, the melée, under the eyes of the Empress, and the ladies forming her court, occupied the mornings: when the lists glittered with golden or gilded shields, armour, and helmets, radiant with precious stones, as if in emulation of the silks, satins, and jewellery of the admired and admiring, if anxious, spectatresses. In these chivalrous pastimes, Frederic himself took part, and the elder three of his sons, Henry, Frederic, and Conrad, successfully exhibiting their prowess received knighthood from the hand of their Imperial father. Magnificently profuse banquets refreshed the tourneyers after the fatigues of the mimic war, and, in the evenings, minstrelsy and gay dances closed the pleasures of the day.

The splendours of this festival, and the presence of the noblest as of the most poetical of the votaries of the pluses and of the patrons of those votaries, are believed to have awakened the genius of some at least of those German bards, who then, or soon afterwards, began to draw the attention of their nation to vernacular poetry, and will be more particularly noticed in a chapter dedicated the progress of the age in intellectual culture and civilization. It is also believed and averred that these splendours have remained pretty nearly as unparalleled as they were unprecedented. Frederic Barbarossa’s was, from his own character, a chivalrous magnificence, and the age was one of profusion, if not of real luxury.

Only one incident threatened to mar the harmony of the good meeting with what would indeed, in modern days, “most admired disorder,” though nothing extraordinary in the Middle Ages. At the very opening of either the Diet or the festival, some solemnity having congregated the magnates present in the Cathedral, the Emperor took his seat and the Princes were arranging themselves in proper order. The Archbishops of Mainz and Cologne upon his right and left, when the Abbot of Fulda stood forth to oppose them latter prelate. Reasserted that the place on the Emperor’s left hand belonged at Mainz, by prescription of centuries to the Fulda Abbot, and had been unjustly usurped by the Archbishop of Cologne. Frederic, well aware that the Abbot had right on his side, requested the Archbishop, as a tried and valued friend, to give way. But this was too much for Philip von Heinsberg. Starting up in wrath, he said, that he yielded to his sovereign’s wish, but requested permission at the same time to withdraw from the court festival. As he spoke he was departing, followed by his vassals, amongst whom were the Duke of Brabant, the Earl of Nassau, and even the Emperor’s brother, Rhine-Palsgrave Conrad, who, as he rose, said, “I am the Cologner’s man [i. e. vassal], and, with your leave, Lord Emperor, bound to follow him.’’ The Landgrave of Thuringia, a vassal of Fulda, cried sneeringly to the Earl of Nassau, “Well have you earned your fief today, Sir Earl!” “I have,” retorted the Earl; “and, if need be, yet better will I this day earn it!”

Under Henry IV, such a broil had led to bloodshed; and from the temper displayed by Philip, and the numerical strength of his vassalage and train, a similar result might well be apprehended. The alarm was general, when the young King of the Romans, springing from his seat, clasped the angry Archbishop in his arms, and implored him not thus at once to destroy all the enjoyment anticipated at the festival. The prelate, in reply, exclaimed against so ungrateful a return for his many and arduous services, as the exaltation of a monk over his head. The Emperor himself now came forward, to assure the Archbishop that he had so acted by no means through favour to his antagonist, but regretfully, and solely from his knowledge that the Abbot’s claim was well-founded; and he was lifting up his hand to attest the truth of this assertion by oath, when the Archbishop, whom such Imperial condescension had at length appeased, stopped him, saying the Emperor’s word was equal to any oath. He was now about, in compliance with the request that had so enraged him, to take a lowlier seat, when the Abbot, satisfied with this public recognition of his right, gave way, yielding the contested place to the Archbishop, and tranquillity was restored.

The festival over, the Emperor wished to revisit Italy; and, considering Germany in a perfectly satisfactory state, committed the government north of the Alps to the young King of the Romans, who seems, in truth, to have had little of youth about him except its physical advantages. His government, though, upon this occasion, short, was not, however, wholly undisturbed. A feud presently broke out between Conrad Archbishop of Mainz, and Lewis Landgrave of Thuringia, upon the old quarrel, touching the archiepiscopal claim to tithes and other ecclesiastical dues, in Thuringia. King Henry wished to arbitrate between them, and assembled them, with many more princes, prelates, and nobles as assistant arbitrators, in the Chapter House at Erfurt. It had not, apparently, been built with a view to such uses, and, in the midst of the discussion, the overweighted floor of the hall where they sat gave way, precipitating great part of the company into a drain underneath. Henry and the Archbishop, chancing to have been placed upon firmer beams or joists, escaped the general disaster, and the Landgrave was safely extricated; but some princes and nobles were actually crushed or smothered. Henry had, it may be presumed, already discovered that the idea of compromising the quarrel was hopeless: so, affecting to consider the accident as a divine warning against interference, he abandoned the attempt, and the feud proceeded.

A double election to the metropolitan see of Treves had occurred upon the death of Archbishop Arnold, in 1183, and, according to the Calixtine Concordat been referred to the Emperor, who ordered a new election. But Folcmar, one of the pretenders, who was accused of having simoniacally obtained the votes given him, appealed to the Pope: and King Henry, whether in resentment of this attempted evasion of the Imperial authority, or in punishment of his alleged simony, attacked his partisans, expelled them, and seized their lands. But the most serious trouble of the young King’s administration was a quarrel with Archbishop Philip. This self-willed prelate, in wanton revenge, rather than retaliation, of some offence given him in times long past at Augsburg, ordered his people to fall upon and plunder a company of Augsburg travelling merchants. The unlucky traders appealed to the King, who desired the Archbishop to procure the restitution of the stolen property. Philip refused, and Henry in arms extorted compliance. The Archbishop thereupon, as if to mark a withdrawal from worldly concerns, undertook a pilgrimage to the tomb of Thomas a Becket, at Canterbury. In England he was honourably received by Henry II, and reconciled to his old enemy, Henry the Lion. It has been asserted that he negotiated a treaty of marriage between a daughter of the Emperor’s and the heir of England, Normandy, Aquitaine, Anjou and Poitou, Richard Coeur de Lion; but, as Richard was then affianced to Princess Alice of France, if the prelate proposed anything of the kind, it must have been an unauthorized scheme, designed either to give himself diplomatic consequence in England, or to increase his power in Germany, by the appearance of influence in England.

Frederic meanwhile had crossed the Alps in the autumn of 1184, but without an army; Lombardy was pacified, and he went as undisputed Sovereign amongst vassals and subjects. At Verona he was met by Lucius III, in the character of a suppliant for Imperial assistance against the insurgent Romans; who, since his expulsion from his pontifical residence, had ill-used many of the clergy, had, accidentally meeting a party of priests, put out the eyes of all but one, leaving that single one his, to guide the rest to their master the Pope. As far as Imperial influence might act, the request was readily granted: but the Emperor had no German troops with him to lend the Holy Father, and could hardly feel such confidence in the Lombards, as should induce him to raise an unmixed Lombard army for his service. Nor was he, it may be conjectured, very anxious to see a Pope, of the disposition presently discovered by Lucius, in undisturbed possession of the Papal sovereign power. For, when this pontiff was disappointed of the effective protection upon which be had calculated, divers irreconcilable differences arose between the two Heads of Christendom. This really helpless Pope proved yet more intractable than his predecessor. He refused to confirm any ecclesiastical appointment by an anti-pope, except those of the deceased Christian to the see of Mainz, and of Philip to that of Cologne. He refused to admit the Emperor’s right of interference in the double election at Treves, arbitrarily adjudging the see to Folcmar. He refused to sanction, even to pardon, King Henry’s coercion of the Archbishop of Cologne, in behalf of the plundered Augsburg traders; and finally he refused to crown the son unless the father first abdicated the Empire. Frederic was indignant, and though he did not break off the negotiation, he suffered it to languish, whilst he made trial of the temper of his now reconciled subjects, the Milanese.

Eagerly were they, the Milanese, expecting the promised Imperial visit; and when the Emperor appeared, delighted with the confidence he placed in them, they received him with the highest honours, with all imaginable demonstrations of the most devoted loyalty. It might almost seem that a real attachment had sprung up between the sovereign and the subjects who had so long opposed each other in arms. He granted them additional privileges, amongst others that of electing their own Podesta, whom they continued nevertheless to consider and to treat as an Imperial officer; he freed them from all those restrictions upon the sports of the field, which had ever been such a topic of complaint and irritation; and yet further, he gratified them by consenting to the reconstruction of Crema. The Milanese, enchanted with his condescension to their wishes, swore in return to assist him in upholding and recovering all Imperial rights, especially in regard to the Matildan heritage; the conflicting claims to which were esteemed a main ground of papal enmity. Lucius, on the other hand, persisted in all his refusals, notwithstanding Frederic’s conciliatory overtures and visits to the Holy Father at Verona, where, during his exclusion from Rome, he had fixed his residence.

It was not without sufficient cause that the Emperor was now endeavouring to conciliate the Pope, whose good or ill will might prove of great importance to the project then occupying him. He was negotiating a marriage for the King of the Romans, which, if Lombardy frankly acknowledged her vassalage, would unite the whole of Italy indissolubly with Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, and which, therefore, could hardly fail of being distasteful to the Pope. But prior to explaining this scheme, it will be well to learn the condition of Sicily and Apulia under William II.

The lenient measures of the Queen Mother had tranquillized the country, and her regency was unstained with blood; whilst, Alexander III’s constant need of Sicilian support against anti-popes and the Emperor rendering him more indulgent than he would naturally have been, he had closed his eyes to her offenceful conduct, in causing her son to be crowned without reference to his paramount authority. Both mother and son remained his faithful allies and partisans. But Margaretes government, if bloodless, was far from untroubled, her court and council being distracted with ceaseless cabals. Her French and her Spanish kinsmen—as a Princess of Navarre she had both—intriguing against each other and against her ministers; her ministers against each other and against both parties of her kinsmen; whilst all combined against Pietro Gaeta—one of those Harem guardians already mentioned as habitually employed in the royal household of Sicily—who possessed her entire confidence. These cabals ended in the flight of Pietro Gaeta to seek an asylum in Morocco; leaving his chief rival, the English Bishop of Syracuse, master of the field, as far as he could be so whilst the crafty Matteo retained his influence, and his post of Vice or Sub-Chancellor, from which he is said to have been subsequently advanced to that of Proto-Notajo: whilst Margaret increased the general confusion and exasperation by making a French cousin Grand-Chancellor and Archbishop of Palermo.

Other cabals succeeded, and continued to do so after William II had himself assumed the government. To such a degree did they harass both court and country, as not only to prevent the King taking any active part in the general affairs of Italy, but to determine his French preceptor, Pierre de Blois, though sincerely attached to his royal pupil, to decline the highest ecclesiastical dignity in the kingdom, and take his chance as a Professor at the High School of Paris. He subsequently, as a learned man, obtained the archdeaconry of Bath, with the chancellorship of the see of Canterbury; and being thus settled in England, negotiated the marriage of the Sicilian monarch with Henry II of England’s third daughter, Joanna, AD 1176. But the union proved unfruitful, and intrigues, now relative to the succession as well as for present power, multiplied around William, an apparently amiable but weak prince, who yielded unresistingly to all priestly encroachment; whence, perhaps, as much as in contrast to his father, his surname of the Good.

It has been seen that, from the vague, the indefinite, state of the law in regard to collateral succession, the failure of royal children habitually produced conflicting pretensions, and consequent civil war. Upon the present occasion the cabals to which the prospect of William’s dying childless, however remote—he was still in the prime of life—gave occasion, were prosecuted the more unscrupulously, because the now only legitimate heir of the once numerous house of Hauteville was a female. There were indeed lawful descendants of Robert Guiscard, through Bohemund at Antioch; but they seem to have been considered from the first as an illegitimate branch. The heiress in question was Constance, a posthumous daughter of King Roger, by his third wife, and aunt to William II. Originally, when there was no fear of any deficiency of heirs, she had been destined for the cloister. But whether she had, or had not, entered even upon her novitiate, whether in short any step towards fulfilling this destination beyond placing her for education in a nunnery, had been taken, and even whether she were so destined and educated, were and are questions much disputed by the partisans and the enemies of her son. But as even Cardinal Baronius admits that she never had actually pronounced her vows, so much may be accepted as certain. Upon Princess Constance (although no longer in the bloom of youth—she was then 31 years of age—and the illegitimate sons of her father, and of her brothers, were by no means disposed to acknowledge her birthright), Frederic had fixed for the consort of his son.

Lucius III, naturally endeavoured to prevent a marriage calculated to enclose the papal dominions within those of the Swabian Emperors. He fomented the opposition offered to it at Palermo, by the illegitimate princes and their faction; but does not appear to have had resource to extreme measures; and pending the matrimonial negotiations, in November 1185, he died. His successor was Uber to Crivelli, a Milanese by birth, and Archbishop of Milan; who took the name of Urban III, and as Pope chose to retain his archbishopric. This clearly not altogether disinterested pontiff had not, with his fellow citizens, changed his old hatred of the Emperor into love; and prepared, with every prospect, as he hoped, of success, vigorously to obstruct the marriage treaty. The Sicilian Court was in fact much divided upon the subject. The proposed nuptials were violently opposed by Maione’s creature and, in some measure, successor, the Vice­Chancellor, Matteo di Salerno, the craftily factious partisan of the illegitimate pretenders to the succession; but were favoured by his own superior, Gualtiero della Pagliara, Bishop of Troja, and Grand-Chancellor, whom Matteo most especially hated, and by the Archbishop of Palermo, seemingly another Englishman, and as such patronised by Queen Joanna, herself a warm friend of the Princess. Before Urban had time to set bis engines in action, this party had persuaded William, both to accept the Emperor’s proposals for the hand of his aunt, and to cause her, ere she left Palermo, to be formally recognized as his heir, in case he should continue childless. The Princess was then despatched to journey—the humiliating course which few Queens or Empresses escape-—to her expecting bridegroom. She was attended by 150 sumpter cattle, carrying her wedding portion, and was ceremoniously conducted to Milan. There the Emperor and the King of the Romans received her;—the Empress Beatrice had died since the Mainz festival—and there, to the rapturous delight of the now loyal Milanese, the wedding was solemnized upon the 27th of January, 1186. Upon this occasion the Arelat Archbishop of Vienne crowned the Emperor; the Patriarch of Aquileia, King Henry; and a German Bishop, Queen Constance. A general amnesty was proclaimed in honour of the bridal, which was celebrated with festivities of all descriptions then usual. German Princes, Siculo-Norman Barons, Italian Ghibeline Nobles, and Lombard Consuls, revelled together; and such was the throng of visitors that, as at Mainz, wooden houses were constructed without the walls for their accommodation.

Frederic had flattered himself that when once his son and the Norman heiress were indissolubly united, the Pope, seeing the perfect harmony that reigned between him and the Milanese, would desist from his opposition and enmity. But Urban individually hated him, in resentment of the evils suffered by some of his family at the fall of Milan. He now solemnly deposed the Patriarch of Aquileia, and all the other prelates who had officiated at either the conjoint marriage and coronation ceremonies, or at Henry’s subsequent coronation with the iron crown of Lombardy, at which the same Patriarch is said, in defiance of the Papal prohibition, to have officiated. Urban further made bitter complaints of the detention of the Matildan heritage—although the period of occupation conceded by the treaty with Alexander III had not yet expired—and of divers alleged Imperial encroachments upon episcopal, monastic, and other ecclesiastical privileges. He stirred up rebellion against the Emperor in Italy, and found in Tuscany materials ready prepared to his hand. Florence, emulating Milan, had now subjugated so many of her neighbours, and so tyrannized over the enthralled, that a Tuscan deputation, headed by envoys from Sienna, had waited upon the Emperor at Milan, with complaints of her aggressions, and he had pronounced her charters forfeited. Florence, irritated by the sentence, hardly required the spur of Papal encouragement, to revolt. In Lombardy, by stimulating Cremonese jealousy of the favour shown to Milan, especially in the rebuilding of Crema, he, who called himself the spiritual father of all Christians, excited the habitually Ghibeline Cremona to follow the example of Florence. In Germany he at least stirred up broils: and in despite of all remonstrances, and representations of the Imperial rights as confirmed by the Calixtine Concordat, he took upon himself to consecrate Folcmar, the pretender whom the Emperor the most decidedly rejected, to the see of Treves.

Frederic saw that the master’s hand was wanted on both sides of the Alps; and now committing to his son the government of Italy, and the contest with the Pope, he returned to Germany. Henry, who to the energy and much of the ability of his father, united the inordinate ambition, the implacability, and ruthlessness, falsely ascribed to that father, performed the part assigned him so far successfully, that he held Urban blockaded, and well-nigh a prisoner at Verona; where this Pope, like his predecessor, had established his court, for so long as Rome should be inaccessible to her pontifical sovereign. These audacious operations, and yet more, perhaps, the harshness of his language and demeanour, exasperated the half­captive Pope beyond all bounds; and he was proceeding to excommunicate both him and his father. But the Veronese declared that no such sentence against the Emperor should be fulminated within their walls; and, for the moment, the sole object of Urban’s thoughts was how to escape from Verona without falling into Henry’s hands.

In Germany, Frederic found Henry the Lion, his reduced term of exile having now expired. But whether his leonine temper were partially tamed by past calamities, or that he were silently preparing to avenge them, he appeared to be quietly residing at Brunswick, engrossed by the business of his restored property, and uninterested in the feuds or the intrigues around him.

The Emperor’s first measure was to convoke a Diet at Gelnhausen: in which, by reasoning and remonstrance, by a detail of Urban’s hostile conduct and usurpations, and somewhat by concessions, he won back most of those, most even of the bishops, whom the Pope had excited against him. Then, sanctioned by the Diet, and secure of the fidelity of the chief temporal princes, he proceeded to compel the obedience of the few still contumacious prelates. Amongst these, with painful surprise, he found the much favoured Archbishop of Cologne; who, unable to forgive his coercion by King Henry, had returned from England a thorough Guelph, and instantly declared for Urban against the Emperor. The defalcation of a prelate upon whose active loyalty he had long relied, grieved Frederic, but could no otherwise alter his course, than by adding to his labours. He first expelled Folcmar from the archiepiscopal palace and see of Treves, as wrongfully occupying them, and installed in them his rival, rejected (by the Pope) Rudolph. He then turned his arms against Archbishop Philip; laid an embargo upon the Rhine, and was proceeding to yet stronger measures of hostility; when tidings arrived from Palestine, such as, in all European heads and hearts, whether clerical or lay, superseded every thought, alien to what seemed, at once, the sole and the common concern of Christendom.

Jerusalem had surrendered to the Moslem! The Holy Sepulchre, so arduously recovered, was again in the hands of the enemies of God! Private and public hatreds and rivalries were forgotten. A new Crusade was, or seemed to be, the one business of life.

CHAPTER X.

KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM. BALDWIN III AMALRIC. [ 1152-1169.