make him completely independent of papal support. As a result, Frederick and his court persuaded Otto to revise his gloomy prognostication. He not only altered the text of his Chronicle but, more important, set to work to write a biography of Frederick, the Gesta Frederici Imperatoris, in which he described the beginning of a new renaissance in the life of mankind, made possible by the glorious emergence of the Staufen family. In total contrast to his Chronicle, he wrote in his preface: '1 considered those who write at this time as in a certain manner blessed, because after the turbulence of the past, there has dawned the unheard calm of peace’. The progress of Otto of Freising's historical and political thought indicates the importance men attached to the idea of harmony in the regulation of the Christian world. Nor is this surprising. If there was something wrong in the top direction of the total Christian society, how could the organism as a whole function? Must not breakdown impinge on every aspect of human life? That would be the prelude to total dissolution, the end of the world. But Otto was foolishly optimistic in assuming a new royal house could reconstruct world order on a permanent basis. The Staufen were immensely gifted. But they were human, and therefore vulnerable. Their flesh and blood was no match for the impersonal institution of the papacy. Accident, death, minorities: these fatal weaknesses of medieval secular power did not hold the same terrors for the elderly tiara-men. It is no accident that the contest began as the result of an imperial minority; or that the papacy pursued a personal vendetta against members of the Staufen clan, on at least two occasions stooping to plans for assassination. Frederick Barbarossa died by drowning, his even more magisterial son, Henry VI, of that relentless Mediterranean killer, dysentery. The popes were not always willing to wait for God to strike. Unspeakable ferocity was throughout the hallmark of these death-struggles between popes and emperors. In 1197 the Pope engaged in a conspiracy to murder Henry VI, in conjunction with his estranged wife Constance of Sicily; the plot was detected and some of its agents arrested: Henry forced Constance to watch their deaths - Jordanus of Sicily had a red-hot crown placed on his head and fixed to his skull with nails; others were burnt at the stake, flayed alive or covered in tar and ignited. But Henry VI himself died the same year; and the minority of his son, Frederick II, coincided with the pontificate of Innocent III, the most formidable of all the medieval lawyer-popes. He took the final Steps in the subtle evolutionary process which stretched back to late Roman times, and progressed through Gelasius I, Nicholas | and Gregory VII. After Innocent III, the triumphalist pontification of Boniface VIII and others were mere hyperbole. Innocent Ill placed the papacy in the centre of the world's motions. He quoted Nicholas |: ‘The world is an ecclesia.’ The Pope had not merely a right but an obligation to examine the person chosen as king of the Romans and emperor-elect. The Roman Church enunciated the fundamental law for the whole of Christendom. He, not the emperor, was Melchisadech, who ‘with the Lord at his right hand doth crush kings in the day of his wrath’. Italy, by divine dispensation, was pre-eminent over all other regions. The authority of the central government of Rome extended over all the societas Christiana, whose subordinate rulers, in their conflicts with one another, must submit to the judgments of the Pope. The universal Church, he wrote in his Deliberatio, exercised plenary powers in all aspects of government, since temporal matters were of necessity subservient to the spiritual: 'By me king’s reign and princes decree justice.’ In the realization of these goals, the papacy was entitled to use all the spiritual weapons at its command, especially excommunication and interdict, and to employ all the resources of spiritual privilege. Thus the world tended to be divided not into good and bad men, but into papalists and antipapalists . Markward of Anweiler, loyally trying to uphold Staufen claims in Italy and Sicily during the minority of his royal master, was excommunicated by Innocent as follows: We excommunicate, anathematize, curse and damn him, as oath breaker, blasphem er, incendiary, as faithless and as a criminal and usurper, in the name of God the almighty Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, by the authority of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul. 45