was his humble suppliant. Poland was equally obedient.
The Duke of Bohemia accepted the papal reproof for allying himself
with Philip of Swabia.

Despite his vigor and his authority, Innocent's constant interference
with the internal concerns of every country in Europe did not pass
unchallenged. Even the kings who invoked his intercession were
constantly in conflict with him. Besides his great quarrels in
Germany, France, and England, Innocent had many minor wars to wage
against the princes of Europe. For five years the kingdom of Leon lay
under interdict because its king Alfonso had married his cousin,
Berengaria of Castile, in the hope of securing the peace between the
two realms. It was only after the lady had borne five children to
Alfonso that she voluntarily terminated the obnoxious union, and
Innocent found it prudent, as in France, to legitimize the offspring
of a marriage which he had denounced as incestuous. Not one of the
princes of the peninsula was spared. Sancho of Navarre incurred
interdict by reason of suspected dealings with the Saracens, while the
marriage of his sister with Peter of Aragon, the vassal of the Pope,
involved both kings in a contest with Innocent. Not only did the
monarchs of Europe resent, so far as they were able, the Pope's
haughty policy; for the first time the peoples of their realms began
to make common cause with them against the political aggressions of
the papacy. The nobles of Aragon protested against King Peter's
submission to the papacy, declared that his surrender of their kingdom
was invalid, and prevented the payment of the promised tribute. When
John of England procured his Roman overlord's condemnation of Magna
Charta, the support of Rome was of no avail to prevent his indignant
subjects combining to drive him from the throne, and did not even
hinder Louis of France, the son of the papalist Philip II, from
accepting their invitation to become English king in his stead. It was
only by a repudiation of this policy, and by an acceptance of the
Great Charter, that the papacy could secure the English throne for
John's young son, Henry III, and thus continue for a time its
precarious overlordship over England.

For the moment Innocent's iron policy crushed opposition, but in
adding the new hostility of the national kings and the rising nations
of Europe to the old hostility of the declining empire, Innocent was
entering into a perilous course of conduct, which, within a cen