triumph, with their feet resting on the prostrate bodies of their vanquished secular enemies. AS a matter of fact, Gregory was not entirely happy with the Donation: it was presented as the gift of Constantine, and therefore was capable of an imperialist interpretation. In his view, the primacy, and all that followed from: it, came from Christ himself. Some time in the late 1070s, he caused to be inserted in his letter-book a statement of papal claims which he seems to have dictated to his secretary. It amounted to a theory of papal world-government. It is significant that it began with a statement that the Pope could be judged by no one. He was, in fact, the only truly free man because, while his own jurisdiction was universal and unqualified, the only court in which he was obliged to sue was that of Heaven. From this proposition world theocracy inevitably followed. The Roman Church, continued Gregory, has never erred and never can err. It was founded by Christ alone. The Pope, and only the Pope, can depose and restore bishops, make new laws, create new bishoprics and divide old ones, translate bishops, call general councils, revise his own judgments, use the imperial insignia, depose emperors and absolve subjects from their allegiance. All princes should kiss his feet, and his legates took precedence over bishops. Appeals to the papal court automatically inhibited judgments from any other court. Finally, a duly ordained pope was made a saint ex officio by the merits of St Peter. Gregory was a colossal innovator in terms of papal theory but in this one respect he was old-fashioned: he still believed in the almost physical presence of St Peter brooding over the papal fortunes. Thus, when he excommunicated Henry IV he wrote: ‘Blessed Peter ... it is your good pleasure that the Christian people, who have been committed to you, should specially obey me, because you have given me your authority.’ Papal claims had a natural tendency to inflate themselves, and soon the Petrine vicariate, on which Gregory insisted so hotly, did not seem impressive enough. By the 1150s, the popes had stolen the old imperial title of Vicar of Christ; and by the 1200s, Innocent III was insisting: 'We are the successors of the Prince of the Apostles, but we are not his vicar, nor the vicar or any man or apostle, but the Vicar of Jesus Christ himself.’ The aggressive presentation of the new papal theory of world government amounted to a physical assault on the office of the emperor, and of the politico-religious structure on which it was based. The structure was a flimsy affair; it was crumbling anyway. It could not, and in the end did not, withstand a determined papal war of destruction. There did not exist any real ground for compromise. Either the Pope was the emperor's chief bishop; or the emperor was the Pope's nominee and puppet. The first arrangement was workable; had, in fact, worked. The second was not: a puppet-emperor could not acquire the financial and military means to maintain the imperial system of government. It was a war of attrition one or other institution, as an effective instrument, had to go. Uncommitted contemporaries watched the contest with dismay. It fitted into pessimistic theories of the universe, based on the traditions of Jewish prophecy, which circulated in various forms, and were incorporated into works of historical analysis. Around the mid-twelfth century, for instance, the most learned German of the day, Otto, Bishop of Freising, wrote a huge chronicle of world history, The Two Cities. As the name implies, the thought behind the book was Augustinian, and Otto accepted Augustine's view that history was a series of phases, reflecting God's plan for man's destiny, culminating in an apocalypse and the final judgment. Otto thought the long period between Constantine and the reign of Henry III had been one of godliness and harmony because empire and papacy had been able to work together. Then Gregory VII and Henry IV had destroyed the unitary structure; heresy and schism had followed; and Otto detected other portents of impending dissolution. Obviously the power of evil was increasing, the. world was in its deaththroes, and the last trump would soon sound : ‘We are here,’ he wrote, ‘set down as it were at the end of time.’ Otto, however, was open to conviction. In 1152, his young nephew, Frederick Barbarossa, head of the house of Staufen, became emperor. A few years later he and his advisers confided to Otto their grand design for the reinvigoration of the Germanic empire, based on the creation of a new series of territorial fiefs directly administered by imperial agents, which would give the emperor the economic and political power to 44