Filled with these ambitions of universal monarchy, Innocent’s survey took in both the smallest and the greatest of European affairs.  Primarily his work was that of an ecclesiastical statesman, and intrenched far upon the authority of the State.  We shall see him restoring the papal authority in Rome and in the Patrimony,[53] building up the machinery of papal absolutism, protecting the infant King of Sicily, cherishing the municipal freedom of Italy, making and unmaking kings and emperors at his will, forcing the fiercest of the western sovereigns to acknowledge his feudal supremacy, and the greatest of the kings of France to reform his private life at his commands, giving his orders to the petty monarchs of Spain and Hungary, and promulgating the law of the Church Universal before the assembled prelates of Christendom in the Lateran Council.

Nevertheless, the many-sided Pontiff had not less near to his heart the spiritual and intellectual than the political direction of the universe.  He had the utmost zeal for the extension of the kingdom of Christ.  The affair of the crusade was, as we shall see, ever his most pressing care, and it was his bitterest grief that all his efforts to rouse the Christian world for the recovery of Jerusalem fell on deaf ears.  He was strenuous in upholding orthodoxy against the daring heretics of Southern France.  He was sympathetic and considerate to great religious teachers, like Francis and Dominic, from whose work he had the wisdom to anticipate the revival of the inner life of the Church.  As many-sided as strong, and successful as he was strong, Innocent III represents it worthily and adequately.

Even before Innocent had attained the chair of Peter, the worst dangers that had so long beset the successors of Alexander III were over.  After the death of Henry VI, the Sicilian and the German crowns were separated, and the strong anti-imperial reaction that burst out all over Italy against the oppressive ministers of Henry VI was allowed to run its full course.  The danger was not so much of despotism as of anarchy, and Innocent, like Hildebrand, knew how to turn confusion to the advantage of hierarchy.

No real effort was made to obtain for the little Frederick the crowns of both Germany and Sicily, While Philip of Swabia, her brother-in-law, hurried to Germany to maintain, if he could, the unity of the Hohenstaufen empire, Constance was quite content to secure her son’s succession in Naples and Sicily by renewing the homage due to the Pope.

Having thus obtained the indispensable papal confirmation, Constance ruled in Naples as a national queen in the name of the little Frederick.  She drove away the German bandits, who had made the name of her husband a terror to her subjects.  Markwald of Anweiler left his Apulian fiefs[54] for Romagna.  But the Pope joined with Constance in hostility to the Germans.  Without Innocent’s strong and constant support she could hardly have carried out her policy.  Recognizing in the renewal of the old papal protection the best hopes for the independence of Sicily, Constance, on her death in 1198, called on Innocent III to act as the guardian of her son.  Innocent loyally took up her work, and struggled with all his might to preserve the kingdom of Frederick against his many enemies.  But the contest was a long and a fierce one.