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472 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the local clergy and this filling of church positions with foreigners and place-hunters aroused a local, Effect on & V . . ... papal popular, or national opposition which mani- prestige fested itself at this time especially in England and which in the end was to cost the Papacy dear. More- over, the popes had shown themselves too bitter and unre- lenting against the Hohenstaufens and thereby lost some- thing of the moral support which public opinion had hitherto almost invariably accorded to the Church in its quarrels with the State. Finally, the popes had not been able to put down the Hohenstaufens unaided ; they had sought the aid of England and France; they had fled to Lyons them- selves and had brought Charles of Anjou into Italy. They had blighted in the bud, it is true, the promising beginning toward a strongly centralized state made by Frederick II in Sicily, but the Angevin rulers of the Kingdom of Naples were not destined to get on with their papal neighbors much more harmoniously than their predecessors had done. It was also now evident that in Italy at large and in Germany there was no longer any hope of national states Effect on developing in the Middle Ages, although the the states vigorous municipal life of the Italian communes was to bring forth great social, economic, and artistic progress in the succeeding centuries, and for a time sweep the Papacy away with it. But for the present what the Papacy had to face was the growth of royal and national institutions in France and England. To these new forces, which were independent of pope and Church, and which also mark a development away from the feudal states and conditions of the preceding centuries, we shall next turn our attention.