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new Pontiff was a brave and able man. As a cardinal he had been the Emperor's friend, as a Pope he was to become the Emperor's enemy. Negotiations were begun and a treaty of peace was drawn up, but when the time came to put this into force everything went wrong. The Pope was willing to release the Emperor from the ban if the Papal States were restored to him. The Emperor was willing to evacuate, but only after he had been freed from the ban. The Lombard question also remained unsettled. Frederic suggested a personal meeting, but when the Pope came to this he found that Frederic had gathered three hundred knights to lend emphasis to what he said. Innocent fled to Genoa and thence to Lyons. There he spent the next six years, and in 1245 summoned a great Council to the city. Frederic's supreme justice, Thaddeus of Suessa, defended his master. The Emperor was ordered to appear personally or to send a plenipotentiary within a given it was far too brief length of time. At the third session the curse of the ban was renewed in the cathedral and Frederic's removal from the throne was decreed. The Council declared that he had broken his oath, that he was guilty of heresy and of having scoffed at ecclesiastical punishments, that he had robbed property devoted to the service of God, that he had ex- ercised cruelty in the treatment of cardinals, that he had tortured priests inhumanly, and that he had broken his oath of loyalty to his Liege Lord. Therefore he was deprived of all honours and dignities, and his subjects were freed from the oath. The clergy threw their candles on the floor and extinguished them as a sign that the Emperor, too, was extinguished.

Frederic took up the gauntlet. A manifesto publicly revealed his determination to separate the Church from the State, to secularize Church property, and to make easier for the Church the way that led to the apostolic condition of poverty. He realized that he was the champion of the independence of every form of secular power, and warned the kings and princes that he was merely at the head of a list on which their names would eventually figure. Therein the Pope was at one mind with him. Once the dragon has been bound or destroyed, he said, then the lesser reptiles must be trodden under foot as well. In spite of the French King's attempt to bring about a re- conciliation, Innocent sent the Mendicant Orders to preach a cm-

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