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Medieval Europe by H. W. C. (Henry William Carless) Davis
page 90 of 163 (55%)
was compelled, as the prisoner of his own son, not only to abdicate but
also to sign a confession of infamous offences against religion and
morality. Henry V, reviving the plans of the father whom he had betrayed
and entrapped, was reduced through very weariness to conclude the
Concordat of worms (1122)--a renunciation which only ended in something
less than absolute defeat for the Empire, because the imperial
concessions were interpreted with more regard to the letter than the
spirit. In the second struggle the immediate issue was the freedom of
papal elections, the ultimate question whether Pope or Emperor should
shape the Church's policy; and Frederic Barbarossa was compelled, after
a schism of seventeen years' duration to surrender claims which dated
from the time of Charles the Great, and to make peace with Alexander
III, whom he had sworn that he would never recognise (Treaty of Anagni,
1176). Henry VI, the son of Barbarossa, when he joined the kingdom of
Sicily to the Empire through his marriage with Constance, the heiress of
the Norman throne, sowed the seed of a new conflict, and bequeathed to
Frederic II the perilous ideal of an Italy united under a Hohenstauffen
despotism. Ecclesiastical freedom now became a euphemism for the
preservation of the temporal power, and for the project of a federal
Italy, owning allegiance to a papal suzerain. Frederic II, who came
nearer to success in a more far-reaching policy than any of his
predecessors, was worn out by the steady alternation of successes with
reverses, and left his sons and grandson to reap the bitter harvest of a
failure which he had barely realised.

The moral issue dwindles to smaller proportions in each successive stage
of this titanic duel between the titular representatives of State and
Church; and from first to last the Papacy depended largely upon allies
who were pursuing their own objects in the Church's name. The German
princes, the Normans of Lower Italy and Sicily, the Lombard communes,
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