1210, he occupied Matilda's Tuscan lands, and in November invaded
Apulia, and prepared to despatch a Pisan fleet against Sicily.
Innocent was moved to a terrible wrath. On hearing of the capture of
Capua, and the revolt of Salerno and Naples, he excommunicated the
Emperor and freed his subjects from their oaths of fealty to him. But,
despite the threats of the Church, Otto conquered most of Apulia and
was equally successful in reviving the Imperial authority in Northern
Italy.

Innocent saw the power that he had built up so carefully in Italy
crumbling rapidly away. In his despair he turned to France and Germany
for help against the audacious Guelf. Philip Augustus, though still in
bad odor at Rome through his persistent hostility to Ingeborg, was now
an indispensable ally. He actively threw himself into the Pope's
policy, and French and papal agents combined to stir up disaffection
against Otto in Germany. The haughty manners and the love of the young
King for Englishmen and Saxons had already excited disaffection. It
was believed that Otto wished to set up a centralized despotism of
court officials, levying huge taxes on the model of the Angevin
administrative system of his grandfathers and uncles. The bishops now
took the lead in organizing a general defection from the absent
Emperor. In September, 1211, a gathering of disaffected magnates,
among whom were the newly made king Ottocar of Bohemia and the dukes
of Austria and Bavaria, assembled at Nuremberg. They treated the papal
sentence as the deposition of Otto, and pledged themselves to elect as
their new king Frederick of Sicily, the sometime ward of the Pope. It
was not altogether good news to the Pope that the German nobles had,
in choosing the son of Henry VI, renewed the union of German and
Sicily. But Innocent felt that the need of setting up an effective
opposition to Otto was so pressing that he put out of sight the