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Frederic was a splendid Emperor, distinguished, right-minded, cul- tured and brave. He was a genuine Christian of temperate mind who looked backward toward the splendour of Charlemagne's rule. Ger- man dissatisfaction with the weakness of the monarchy and German sorrow over all the blood and treasure which had perished in the Syrian deserts made it easier for him to conjure up a vision of a greater past. The spiritual aristocracy, too, was more than willing to recover inside the prosperous Imperial Church the position it had lost. Archbishops like Reinald von Dassel of Cologne, who was the Chancellor, or Christian of Mayence, who was the General, spoke and fought for the dominance of the German Church. The resurrection of Roman law and the new emphasis placed upon the great Justinian, the C&sar Papa, supplemented the lofty conception which had been formed of the Emperor and his sovereign authority. But the Popes of this era were no less able to look back upon the past greatness of the Papacy; and they looked also into a future already discernible in the omens of the present. It was not the movement towards municipal liberty which Rome had to fear, for this did not interfere in essential functions of the Church; it was the Emperor, for whoever he might be was the enemy. If Frederic said, as he already did in the first years of his rule, that in his hands had been placed the government of Rome and the wide world, urbis et orbis, that his Imperial authority proceeded from God, that he had been appointed by the Holy Spirit and placed above all men, as the viceroy of the King of Kings, then the Pope (and not he alone) was forced to issue a challenge.
This conflict of ideas, which at bottom was only a conflict between battlers for the same idea who lived in different orders of being, was necessarily followed by a political struggle over power, property and sovereign rights. The contest was concerned first and last with Italy. If the Emperor was to give his dominion world-wide significance he needed Italy, which since the First Crusade had once again become a land of central importance. The Pope needed it too, if he was not to be merely a vassal or an official of the Emperor, like any of the bishops of the Empire. As a result of its whole history the spiritual freedom and influence of the Papacy were so fatefully bound up with the exercise of worldly power that any increase of the majesty of the Ger- man Imperial authority necessarily implied a weakening of the Pope's
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