rival communities of the Lombard plain.  But his most immediate and brilliant triumph was in establishing his authority over Rome and the Patrimony of St. Peter.  On his accession he found his lands just throwing off the yoke of the German garrisons that had kept them in subjection during Henry VI’s lifetime.  He saw within the city power divided between the praefectus urbis, the delegate of the Emperor, and the summus senator, the mouthpiece of the Roman commune.

Within a month the prefect ceased to be an Imperial officer, and became the servant of the papacy, bound to it by fealty oaths, and receiving from it his office.  Within a year the senator also had become the papal nominee, and the whole municipality was controlled by the Pope.  No less complete was Innocent’s triumph over the nobility of the Campagna.  He drove Conrad of Urslingen back to Germany, and restored Spoleto to papal rule.  He chased Markwald from Romagna and the March of Ancona to Apulia, and exercised sovereign rights even in the most remote regions that acknowledged him as lord.  If it was no very real sway that Innocent wielded, it at least allowed the town leagues and the rustic nobility to go on in their own way, and made it possible for Italy to work out its own destinies.  More powerful and more feared in Italy than any of his predecessors, Innocent could contentedly watch the anti-imperial reaction extending over the Alps and desolating Germany by civil war.

Despite the precautions taken by Henry VI, it was soon clear that the German princes would not accept the hereditary rule of a child of three.  Philip of Swabia abandoned his Italian domains and hurried to Germany, anxious to do his best for his nephew.  But he soon perceived that Frederick’s chances were hopeless, and that it was all that he could do to prevent the undisputed election of a Guelf.  He was favored by the absence of the two elder sons of Henry the Lion.  Henry of Brunswick the eldest, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, was away on a crusade, and was loyal to the Hohenstaufen, since his happy marriage with Agnes.  The next son Otto, born at Argenton during his father’s first exile, had never seen much of Germany.  Brought up at his uncle Richard of Anjou’s court, Otto had received many marks of Richard’s favor, and looked up to the chivalrous, adventurous King as an ideal of a warrior prince.  Richard had made him Earl of Yorkshire, and had invested him in 1196 with the country of Poitou, that he might learn war and statecraft in the same rude school in which Richard had first acquainted himself with arms and politics.  Even now Otto was not more than seventeen years of age.  Richard himself, as the new vassal of the Empire for Aries and England, was duly summoned to the electoral diet, but his representatives impolitically urged the claims of Count Henry, who was ruled ineligible on account of his absence.  Thus it was that when the German magnates at last met for the election on the 8th of March, 1198, at Muehlhausen, their choice fell on Philip the Arabian, who took the title of Philip II.