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,