The danger to Rome roused the country. A Christian league was effected between the Imperial forces in Italy, the Pope, and the coast cities of the south,--Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi. Pope Leo himself blessed the fleet, and the Christians beat the infidels in a great sea-fight not far from the Tiber's mouth (849). Some of the prisoners were brought to Rome and set to work on the walls which Pope Leo was building round the Vatican hill to protect St. Peter's; and Rome, imitating the days of Scipio Africanus, celebrated another triumph over Africa. The fighting was kept up all over the south. The Greek Emperor made common cause with his fellow Christians, and the immediate danger of conquest was arrested; but throughout this dismal ninth century, and all the tenth, southern Italy continued to suffer from Saracen marauders. The tales told of their cruelty are fearful, and match our tales of Indian raids in the old French-English war. Separate villages and lonely monasteries suffered most. Some good came out of the evil, however, for the chroniclers relate how the abbots and their terrified brethren spent days and nights fasting and in prayer. Such was the condition of Italy when the Imperial Carlovingian line came to an end. The omnipresence of anarchy was a permanent argument for the need of an Imperial restoration. But the country did not know how to go to work to restore the Empire. At first various claimants asserted various titles, and Italian dukes and neighbouring kings fought one another like bulls, but none were able to establish any stable power. In the midst of these ineffectual struggles one real effort was made. Arnulf, king of the Germans, who regarded himself as the true successor of the great Frankish house and of right Imperial heir, marched down into Italy at the invitation of Pope Formosus, as we have seen, and assumed the Imperial crown (896). The expedition was barren of consequences, but it gives us another glimpse of the anomalous nature of the Papacy, and the different views entertained of it on the two sides of the Alps. The German king wished to be Emperor, and felt that an Imperial coronation at Rome by the Pope was essential. To him and to his German subjects the papal invitation was of high authority. When he reached Rome, however, the seat of the Papacy, he found the gates barred and the walls manned by rebellious citizens, who had locked the Pope in the Castle of Sant' Angelo, and had seized the government of the city. Arnulf easily carried the defences by storm and liberated the Pope. The incident illustrates the contrast between Teutonic respect and Roman disobedience, and describes the papal situation as it was half the time throughout the Middle Ages. Honoured and reverenced by the pious ultramontanes, the Popes were insulted, robbed, imprisoned, and deposed by their immediate subjects. This local disobedience, or, as it should be called, Roman republicanism, was often the insignificant cause of