Page:Vactican as a World Power.djvu/181

 AND CONSTANCE 167

England, and sent his preachers throughout all Christendom. A new crusading army was formed, but the results gained from this under- taking did not repay the cost. Barbarossa lost his life on the expedi- tion; the leaders disagreed and only an unsatisfactory treaty with the Sultan remained as the mutilated part of the achievement that had been planned.

Henry VI was now lord of the Empire. He did not possess the pathos or the sympathetic personality of his father, but his ambitions were the same. Indeed they were even more daring. This young, sombre Hohenstaufen, unscrupulous in the sense in which that word is usually employed when speaking of great politicians, seemed des- tined therefore to build up a world monarchy. The Papacy had rea- son to be afraid of him. His reign did not open auspiciously: when William II of Sicily died without heirs in 1189, it became necessary to determine upon a successor. The lords of the kingdom sponsored, possibly not without the connivance of the Pope, the candidacy of Count Tancred of Lecce, an illegitimate scion of the Norman house. Henry marched on Rome with an army and in 1191 received from Celestine III (1191-1198) the Imperial crown that had long since been promised him. The first attack upon his heritage failed. An international league, which of necessity the Pope was compelled to favour, threatened to hedge in the Emperor; its members were Sicily, the Guelphs and England. In this situation he was aided by fortune. Richard of the Lion Heart, then King of England, had fallen into the hands of his personal enemy the Duke of Austria, while returning from the Crusade. Fostering his own ends, Henry ransomed the King and then gave him freedom after he had paid a large sum of money, had withdrawn from the league with Tancred, and had promised to aid the Emperor as his vassal in all dealings with the Guelphs. Then Tan- cred died and the Emperor could occupy the Sicilian Kingdom un- opposed.

While the coronation was taking place at Christmas, 1194, Con- stance, then forty years old, bore him a long desired son and heir who was christened Frederic Roger. The aged Pope Celestine, then ninety, faced a troubled future. He and his Curia were so powerless that they could consider only a policy based on secret diplomacy. It

168