Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/244

226 Sicily, England, Aragon, and all the other countries, in exchange for an adequate pension to the pope, their present sovereign. Lombardy itself, it is explained, although legally subject to the king of Germany, should offer no insuperable difficulties; since its nominal ruler is well aware of the hopelessness of undertaking its reduction to a state of real vassalage, and therefore everything might be easily arranged by a secret treaty either with himself or his electors. This being secured it would perhaps be necessary to conquer the Lombards; any expedient would be lawful against them since nothing could authorise them to refuse obedience to their prince; and it is clear that they would in time yield to the force of arms assisted by the ravaging of their lands and the ruin of their commerce. The conquest of Lombardy would create so powerful an impression among other nations that the king of France could not fail soon to receive the submission of the rest of Europe; and thus a lasting peace would be secured for society.

A visionary scheme like this, the work of a layman and a lawyer, even with all its national vanity and exaggeration, is sufficiently indicative of the new horizon of political ideas that opened upon men in the end of the thirteenth century, to be deserving of comment. It shews us that the conception of the empire had already dwindled in the eyes of foreigners into that of a German kingdom, and that the temporal sway of the popes was seen to be the cause of endless mischief both to society and to the spiritual basis of the papacy itself. Nor can it escape notice that our theorist enunciates, as it were in a parenthesis, as a doctrine to which no one would think of objecting, that principle of necessary obedience to the temporal ruler which papal advocates had always been inclined to throw into the background or even formally to deny. It is in cases like this that the limitations of