THE THRONE OF THE WORLD
sade against Frederic and established a rival German kingdom. But then he realized that the Hohenstaufen monarch would oppose him to the end. Many a misfortune darkened the last years of Frederic and fanned his desire for revenge, but nothing could alter his will to obtain power. Even that, however, aided him no longer. His star declined. A struggle with the Guelphs in Parma ended in his de- feat. He lived to witness the treason of his Chancellor and council- lor, Peter of Venea, who despite all that he had done to glorify the new superman, paid for his disaffection by having his eyes put out. The blind prisoner dashed his skull against the walls of a dungeon. When Enzio, his most loyal aid against the Popes and the Guelphs, was made a prisoner in Bologna, Frederic stood quite alone. He was mastering a new army when he died in the arms of his illegitimate son, Manfred, in Apulia during 1250. The friendly Archbishop of Pa- lermo gave him absolution.
Innocent returned to Italy. Frederics son and heir, Conrad IV, carried on the policy of his father with Manfred's assistance. After a few years he died and Manfred became regent for the infant boy Conradin. The Pope's attempt to gain control of his Sicilian fief ended in a severe defeat. No blessing had ever rested on a Papal war. The message of that disaster broke Innocent's heart.
The idea of force, which had borne the Papacy a long way and boded no good ending, had meanwhile also gained the upper hand in the realm of morals. Saints of the fourth century had voiced their horror at the execution of Spanish pantheists; and though Augustine had appealed to the secular arm for help against the heretics, he had insisted that these must not be put to death. Bernard of Clairvaux had still believed that the utmost which could lawfully be done against intractable heretics was to shun them absolutely. The canonists and Popes who followed these saints agreed with the temporal rulers that heresy was a crime against the Church and culture which must be rooted out of the world by force. Every form of heresy is based upon the right o man to form his religious life and thought according to the dictates of his own conscience; and this right was considered by the medieval world to mean apostasy from the order established on earth. Those desiring that all things human be arranged in a cosmos specifically their own, noted with horror the stir of chaos in the spirit-
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