‘True, it begins with Us [the empire], but it will end with all the other Kings and princes ... Kings, therefore. defend the justice of your own cause in ours.’ Frederick's arguments directly foreshadowed the development of secularist theory in the next century by Marsilio of Padua, in which, as he argued in his Defensor Pacis, the ambitions of the papacy had become the prime cause of war and the dissolvent of Christian social unity: ‘The singular cause which in the past has produced civil discord in princedoms and communities, and which will soon spread to other states unless checked, is the belief, the desire and the effort by means of which the Roman bishop and his clerical associates, in particular, aim to seize each secular sovereignty and so gain possession of its temporal wealth.’ But Frederick || was before his time in his almost desperate efforts to erect defenses, ecclesiastical and secular, against the papal exploitation of spiritual power to conjure up divisive forces within society. The papal victory over the Staufen was total. Frederick II died still at liberty, but thereafter the 'viper's brood’ as the popes called it, was exterminated. His son Manfred had been defeated and killed at the battle of Benevento, 1266, and buried without religious ceremony; on the orders of the Pope, Clement IV, what he referred to as ‘the putrid corpse of that pestilential man' was dug up again, and reburied outside the borders of the Sicilian kingdom, now a papal fief. Conradin, the last emperor, aged sixteen, fell into the Pope's hand two years later, and (according to one account) Clement remarked, when ordering his death: 'Vita Conradini, mors Caroli [Charles of Anjou, the papal agent]. Vita Caroli, mors Conradini.' The boy was executed in Naples. The end of the Staufen was pitiless. Manfred's daughter Beatrice was kept in prison for eighteen years; his three bastard sons never emerged - one was still alive in 1309, having been in papal custody forty-five years. Of Frederick's children and grandchildren, ten died by papal violence or in papal dungeons. We must not imagine that the battle between Church and State took place only at the highest level. The popes fought the Staufen not merely as rival claimants to supreme rule, but as the heads of a caste. The clerical challenge to the layman ran right down through society. It is no accident that Gregory VII spoke, and wrote, of laymen with peculiar bitterness. Of course there had been tension between the clerical and secular elements in Christianity since very early times. The exaltation of the clerical caste had always been connected with the development of authority in Church discipline, and orthodoxy in dogma. Montanism, in the second century, had been a protest against all three, and Tertullian, in embracing it in the third, became the first articulate Christian anti-clerical. In Dark Age Europe the antagonism appears to have subsided almost completely. The clergy were playing a salient role in the reconstruction of society, as we have seen; their attitudes were integrated with those of society, economically, legally, constitutionally. Yet signs of strain were beginning to appear. One of the healthiest characteristics of Carolingian society was the attempt, using the resources of the Church, to produce the educated layman - Charlemagne himself trying to set the example. Not long after his death we hear of complaints from monasteries that it was not their job to educate men unless they intended to be monks. But monastic and cathedral schools were virtually the only ones available. The failure of lay education to develop at the same pace as clerical was, perhaps, the prime cause of the cleavage. What increasingly differentiated clerics and laity was the use of Latin. In the East, where similar clerical-secular tensions never developed, the social, and the liturgical, languages were the same, and developed together. In the West they diverged. By the eighth century, nobody learned Latin as his vernacular language; but no learned, devotional or liturgical work was written in any other. Latin became the clerical language. Thus proof of ability to speak or write it became the usual test of a claim to clerical status (and privilege). It became the mark of civilization, and so the badge of arrogance. In the eyes of the self-conscious Clericalist, the laity were either laboring louts or armed thugs. It was galling for clergy who could read Augustine to find their affairs ordered, at the highest level, by Conrad Il, an illiterate. Of course by illiterate’ they meant having no knowledge of Latin. Thus, Henry | of England, who knew Latin, was known as ‘beauclerc' - a fine priest. Behind the clericalist movement was a terrific amount of cultural snobbery and also, in a more realistic way, a sense of superiority: clerics carried out the whole administrative side of 48