Ever since the quarrel between Frederick II. and Wenceslaus, that King had been a devoted champion of the Pope; and in the growing weakness of the Empire, the Pope became more and more the one great Power to which a rising and ambitious king could appeal. Ottakar II. became distinguished as a friend of the Church, not only by his strong support of the Papal power, but by his endowment and development of the monasteries. In this, indeed, he was carrying on that revival of Bohemian life which Wenceslaus had begun after the repulse of the Tartars. But it was evident that these ecclesiastical exemptions must sometimes come into collision with those civic liberties of which we have spoken. This contradiction was evidently felt by Ottakar; and it showed itself in three different ways. The freedom of trade, which, under certain limitations, was so welcome to the towns, was by no means in accordance with the claims of the abbots. They wished that certain occupations should be carried on under their control; and not that there should be any exchange of the articles connected with those occupations. Thus we find in some of the grants to the monasteries that, while the monks and their dependants are relieved from certain forms of taxation, the exemption is specially limited to those who are not engaged in trade. Secondly, there was an obvious risk of a conflict of authority between the monastic tribunals and those of the city. Thirdly, the records of Brünn, and of its imitators, show that the growing ideas of equality before the law did not always seem to the citizens quite consistent with the privileges claimed by the clergy. Nor must it be supposed that charters to monasteries and charters to towns represented, in the same degree, the ordinary idea of human liberty. The dependants of the abbot were as much at his mercy as those of any feudal lord; and though it might be an advantage for them to escape from the oppressions of the Z̆upani, it was not always certain that the abbot would be a gentler master.