ce and John of England. It is significant of the
change of the times, that Innocent sees his chief antagonist, not so
much in the empire as in the limited localized power of the national
kings. When Richard of England had yielded before Henry VI, the
national state gave way before the universal authority of the lord of
the world. But Innocent claimed that he alone was lord of the world.
The empire was but a German or Italian kingdom, ruling over its
limited sphere. Only in the papacy was the old Roman tradition of
universal monarchy rightly upheld.

Filled with these ambitions of universal monarchy, Innocent's survey
took in both the smallest and the greatest of European affairs.
Primarily his work was that of an ecclesiastical statesman, and
intrenched far upon the authority of the State. We shall see him
restoring the papal authority in Rome and in the Patrimony,[53]
building up the machinery of papal absolutism, protecting the infant
King of Sicily, cherishing the municipal freedom of Italy, making and
unmaking kings and emperors at his will, forcing the fiercest of the
western sovereigns to acknowledge his feudal supremacy, and the
greatest of the kings of France to reform his private life at his
commands, giving his orders to the petty monarchs of Spain and
Hungary, and promulgating the law of the Church Universal before the
assembled prelates of Christendom in the Lateran Council.

Nevertheless, the many-sided Pontiff had not less near to his heart
the spiritual and intellectual than the political direction of the
universe. He had the utmost zeal for the extension of the kingdom of
Christ. The affair of the crusade was, as we shall see, ever his most
pressing care, and it was his bitterest grief that all his efforts to
rouse the Christian world for the recovery of Jerusalem fell on deaf
ears. He was strenuous in upholding orthodoxy against the daring
heretics of Southern France. He was sympathetic and considerate to
great religious teachers, like Francis and Dominic, from whose work he
had the wisdom to anticipate the revival of the inner life of the
Church. As many-sided as strong, and successful as he was strong,
Innocent III represents it worthily and adequately.

Even before Innocent had attained the chair of Peter, the worst
dangers that had so long beset the successors of Alexander III were
over. After the death of Henry VI, the Sicilian and the German crowns
were separated, and the strong anti-imperial r