denied the Virgin Birth; and said of the Eucharist: 'How long will this hocus-pocus continue?’ He was ‘a beast filled with blasphemous words ... with the feet of a bear, the mouth of an outraged lion, the rest of the body shaped like a panther the creator of lies, oblivious of modesty, untouched by the blush of shame a wolf in sheep's clothing a scorpion with a sting in its tail ... A dragon formed to deceive us the hammer of the earth.’ He wanted to turn the whole world into a desert, and rejoiced when he was called Antichrist. He denied the faith, and his aim was to smash up Christian doctrine. He was ‘the master of cruelty ... the corrupter of the whole world ... a poisonous serpent ... the fourth beast in the book of Daniel, whose teeth are of iron and whose nails are of brass’. From the twelfth century we can date the beginnings of anti-papal literature, inspired by the deepening gulf between the claim to spiritual (and therefore material) power, and the spiritual poverty of so many of its own actions. If the Church had a monopoly of education, it had never really possessed a monopoly of literature. Or, to put it another way, the secular element in society found expression even if the hand was strictly a cleric's. A long line of thought and half-memory stretched back to the imperial Roman concept of earthly authority before the total impress of Christianity was received. In a way, reversion to imperial Rome was one line of escape from an all-enclosing, compulsory Christian society. In the tenth century, shortly after the revival of the imperial title by Otto | at Rome in 962, a nun from the royal monastery of Gandersheim, Hrotswitha, produced a number of ideological verse-histories, and six ‘dramas’ in metrical prose, supposedly to provide a Christian alternative to Terence, which included Gallicanus, set in the court of Constantine. In the latter part of the twelfth century, we have an imperial Staufen propaganda play, the Ludus de Antichristo, written for Frederick Barbarossa - Otto of Freising may have had a hand in it - which is not merely pro-German (and anti-French and anti-Greek accordingly) but distinctly anti-papal. Reflecting on the way in which the papacy switched from one emperor to an anti-emperor and back again, under Innocent Ill, the poet Walther von der V ogelweide denounced papal duplicity: 'Two tongues fit badly into one mouth.’ Frederick || fought back against the ferocious assaults of Gregory IX and Innocent IV with his own propaganda: a materialist papacy, a ‘temporal’ Church was against reason, contrary to nature. Writing of the German ecclesiastical princes, he denounced priests 'who grasp the spear instead of the crosier ... one calls himself duke, another margrave, and another count. One of them organizes phalanxes, another cohorts. another incites men to war. ... Such today are the pastors of Israel: not priests of the church of Christ, but rapacious wolves, wild beasts, who devour Christian folk.' As for the Pope: 'From him in whom all men hope to find consolation of body and soul comes evil example, deceit and wrongdoing.' In Frederick's propaganda we find, for the first time, the assertion that the monstrous growth of papal power made a fundamental reform of the Church necessary. He appealed to the cardinals (1239) as ‘successors of the apostles’, on an equality with the Pope, to demand ‘equal participation in whatever he who presides over the see of Peter proposes as law or promulgates officially’. Frederick thus anticipated the attempts to revert to the conciliar system as a counterweight to the regal pontiff. He also argued, especially in his letters to other princes, that the papal claims were not directed at the emperor alone but were an assault on the whole concept of secular authority and the freehold monarch. Excommunicated, he wrote to the kings of Europe, warning them that the papacy threatened them all: 'Has not the King of England seen his father. King John, held in excommunication until both he and his kingdom were made tributary?’ The Clergy were ‘insatiable leeches’. Innocent Ill had used the barons against King John, then deserted them and helped to crush them. 'Disguised in sheep's clothing, these ravenous wolves send legates hither and thither to excommunicate, to suspend, to punish - not as sowers of seed, that is the word of God, but to extort money, to harvest and reap that which they did not sow.’ He appealed to the idea of primitive Christianity: 'No man can erect a church other than on the foundation laid down by the Lord Jesus himself: and he warned the princes to unite: 'Look to your own Mouse when your neighbor's has been set on fire.’ To Richard of Comwall, his brother-in-law, he wrote: 47