_ and by our own. We order that henceforth anyone who gives him help or favor, or supplies fim and his troops with food, clothing, ships, arms or anything else which he can benefit from, shall be bound by the same sentence; any cleric, moreover, of whatever order or dignity, who shall presume to say the divine service for him, may know he has incurred the penalty due to one of his rank and order.’ such sentences could still inspire terror. In the thirteenth century, medieval men, fighting for the great prizes, often oscillated unpredictably between gross, barbarous impiety and violence, and the most craven superstition. We have a picture of the wretched Emperor Otto IV, created as a papal puppet, then a renegade and papal victim, dying of dysentery; in his horror of Hell flames, he caused his weak and emaciated body to be ‘vigorously scourged'’; but he still clung, gibbering, to the imperial insignia which were also potent relics, radiating spiritual forces - the crucifix-standard presented to Henry Il, the crown, the Holy Lance, which had a nail of the True Cross embedded in it, and which had been mended with a silver band by Henry IV, and the golden cased tooth of John the Baptist. But the net effect of the excommunications and counter-excommunications, the hurling of spiritual power into the mundane battle, was to produce a certain confusion in the participants, especially the minor agents or the innocent, who did not know which to fear most - an armed imperialist or a cursing papalist cleric. And then, legitimate spiritual power so often appeared to fail. Thus the anti-imperialist troops of Milan, mysteriously beaten at Cortenuovo by the excommunicate troops of Frederick Il, ‘raised their heels against God' in consequence; they turned the crucifixes upside down in their churches, hurled sewage on the altars, threw out the clergy, and gorged themselves on meat throughout Lent. In an increasing number of ways, the contest appeared to be subversive of the whole natural and moral order. Thus, to devalue the emperor, Innocent III built up the power of the German princes, especially the ecclesiastical ones; they ceased to be one of the chief supports of the central authority and looked, instead, to the selfish advancement of their principalities. Again, other monarchs and powers were brought into papal coalitions, the humbling of the imperial authority being considered to justify any arrangement, however artificial. But then, the theory of papal plenary power meant that all moral or written laws were suspended, inoperative, in the Pope's case, since he was subject only to heavenly judgment. Thus Gregory IX, who became Pope in 1227, and persecuted heretics, antinomians and deviants with relentless ferocity, said that the moral law did not apply to his anti-imperial campaign: his conduct towards Frederick II could not be judged as immoral or unethical, his methods being unrelated to the standards of conduct common to mankind since they were subject only to God's estimation of their acceptability. To emphasize the point, in 1239 he produced the relics of the two unassailable guardians of the papal city: ‘the heads of the apostles Peter and Paul’ were carried 'in solemn procession’ through Rome, and in front of a huge crowd Gregory removed his tiara and placed it on the head of St Peter. * The Pope was acting on Peter's instructions - and how could Peter do wrong? A few years later, in 1246, Gregory's successor, Innocent IV, was almost certainly a party to the attempted murder of the Lord's Anointed, Frederick |I; the plot misfired - the conspirators were blinded, mutilated and burned alive - but there was no let-up in the papal campaign. Observers, participants indeed, saw it as an eschatological conflict, as in the apocalyptic books of the Old Testament; Antichrist was loose on the earth; here was no question of nuance, of political tactic, of give or take, compromise and maneuver, but a final conflict between absolute good and absolute evil. In creedal terms, Frederick was strictly orthodox, though his wide reading, knowledge of the world ~ especially the East and Islam - had bred in him a spirit of speculative tolerance. But papal propaganda, concocted not by hack clerical scribes but by the popes personally, presented the head of the earthly society as incarnate wickedness. Frederick, the Pope claimed, had turned a holy altar in an Apulian church into a public latrine, he had used churches as brothels and had practiced sodomy openly; blasphemed by calling Christ, Moses and Mohammed ‘three impostors’; 46