§ 96.18. King Philip Augustus II. of France, had in A.D. 1193 married the Danish princess Ingeborg, but divorced her in A.D. 1196, and married the beautiful Duchess Agnes of Meran. Innocent compelled him in A.D. 1200 to put her away by issuing against him an interdict, but it was only in A.D. 1213 that he again took back Ingeborg as his legitimate wife.--From far off Spain the young king Peter of Arragon went in A.D. 1204 to Rome, laid down his crown as a sacred gift upon the tomb of the chief of the apostles, and voluntarily undertook the payment of a yearly tribute to the Holy See. In the same year a crusading army, by founding a Latin empire in Constantinople, brought the schismatical East to the feet of the pope (§ 94, 4). In England, when the archbishopric of Canterbury became vacant, the chapter filled it by electing their own superior Reginald. This choice they had soon cause to rue. They therefore annulled their election, and at the wish of the usurping king John Lackland made choice of John, bishop of Norwich. Innocent refused to confirm their action, and persuaded certain members of the chapter staying in Rome to choose the cardinal priest Stephen Langton, whose election he immediately confirmed.[279] When the king refused to recognise this appointment, and on an interdict being threatened swore that he would drive all priests who should obey it out of the country, the pope issued it in A.D. 1208 against all England, excommunicated the king, and finally, in A.D. 1212, released all his subjects from their oath of allegiance and deposed the monarch, while he commissioned Philip Augustus of France to carry the sentence into effect. John, now as cringing and terrified as before he had been proud and despotic, humbled himself in the dust, and at Dover, in A.D. 1213, placed kingdom and crown at the feet of the papal legate Pandulf, and received it from his hands as a papal fief, undertaking to pay twice a year the tribute imposed. But in A.D. 1214 the English nobles extorted from their cowardly tyrant as a safeguard against lordly wilfulness and despotism the famous _Magna Charta_, against which the pope protested, threatening excommunication and promising legitimate redress of their grievances, though in consequence of confusion caused by the breaking out again of the civil wars he was unable to enforce his protest. And now his days were drawing to an end. At the famous =Fourth Lateran Council of A.D. 1215=, more than 1,500 prelates from all the countries of Christendom, along with the ambassadors of almost all Christian kings, princes and free cities, gave him homage as the representative of God on earth, as visible Head of the Church, and supreme lord and judge of all princes and peoples. A few months later he died.--As in Italy and Germany, in France and England, he had also in all other states