At this moment, indeed, Henry stood only second to the Emperor among the princes of Christendom, and his aim seems to have been to rival in some sort the Empire of the West, and to reign as an over-king, with sub-kings of his various provinces, and England as one of them, around him.  He was connected with all the great ruling houses.  His eldest son was married to the daughter of the King of France; the baby Richard, eighteen months old, was betrothed during the war of Toulouse to a daughter of the King of Aragon.  He was himself a distant kinsman of the Emperor.  He was head of the house of the Norman kings in Sicily.  He was nearest heir of the kings of Jerusalem.  Through his wife he was head of the house of Antioch, and claimed to be head of the house of Tripoli.  Already in these first years of his reign the glory of the English king had been acknowledged by ambassadors from the Emperor, from the King of Jerusalem, from Norway, from Sweden, from the Moorish kings of Valencia and Murcia, bearing the gifts of an Eastern world—­gold, silk, horses, and camels.  England was forced out of her old isolation; her interest in the world without was suddenly awakened.  English scholars thronged the foreign universities; English chroniclers questioned travellers, scholars, ambassadors, as to what was passing abroad.  The influence of English learning and English statecraft made itself felt all over Europe.  Never, perhaps, in all the history of England was there a time when Englishmen played so great apart abroad.  English statesmen and bishops were set over the conduct of affairs in Provence, in Sicily, in Gascony, in Britanny, in Normandy.  English archbishops and bishops and abbots held some of the highest posts in France, in Anjou, in Flanders, in Portugal, in Italy, in Sicily.  Henry himself welcomed trained men from Normandy or Sicily or wherever he could find them, to help in his work of administration; but in England foreigners were not greatly welcomed in any place of power, and his court was, with but one or two exceptions, made up of men who, of whatever descent they might be, looked on themselves as Englishmen, and bore the impress of English training.  The mass of Englishmen meanwhile looked after their own affairs and cared nothing about foreign wars fought by Brabancon mercenaries, and paid for by foreign gold.  But if they had nothing to win from all these wars, they were none the less at last drawn into the political alliances and sympathies of their master.  Shut out as she was by her narrow strip of sea from any real concern in the military movements of the continental peoples, England was still dragged by the policy of her Angevin rulers into all the complications of European politics.  The friendships and the hatreds of her king settled who were to be the allies and who the foes of England, and practically fixed the course of her foreign policy for seven hundred years.  A traditional sympathy lingered on from Henry’s days with Germany, Italy, Sicily, and