Lothario de'Conti di Segni was born about the year 1160. His father was Count Trasimondo of Segni: his mother belonged to the noble Roman family of the Scotti, which included several cardinals of the anti-Imperialist school. After receiving an elementary education at Rome, he was sent to Paris for theology, and to Bologna for law. The scholastic movement was now stimulating Europe and creating great schools; indeed Pope Alexander III. had, though not from cultural motives, fostered the movement by favouring the activity of free teachers. Profane letters were, however, still little cultivated. Lothario took a degree in the liberal arts, but he was soon wholly absorbed in theology and canon law; the correct and virile Latin of his letters is very far from the classical models. Under the Pontificate of his maternal uncle, Clement III., he returned to Rome a young man of the most ascetic character and most finished ecclesiastical culture. He was made a canon of St. Peter's, and, in his twenty-ninth year, a cardinal of the Roman Church. The Pontificate of Clement ended, apparently, the long struggle of the Popes and the Romans. The Roman nobles were as turbulent as ever, but one finds a more respectable element of dissension in the city at this time. The democratic ideas of that brilliant and too little appreciated thinker, Arnold of Brescia, had taken root in Rome, and a Republic, with a Senate of fifty-six members, had been established in the Capitol. Hadrian IV. had blighted this premature experiment by an interdict in 1155, but the struggle continued and the Popes lived little in the capital until the year 1188. Clement, a courtly and diplomatic Roman, made peace with his countrymen, and damped the democratic ardour by a shower of gold and of ecclesiastical favours. The Papacy resumed the government of the city, and the nominal power of the Senate was allowed to pass into the hands of one man, "the Senator." Clement died in 1190, and, as his successor, Celestine III., was a member of the Orsini family, which was bitterly hostile to the Scotti, there was no room in the Lateran for Lothario Conti. Nepotism was now so far accepted in the Papal palace that we shall find Innocent himself following the tradition. The leisure was fortunate in one respect, as Lothario used it for the purpose of writing a book, _On Contempt of the World_, which gives us a most interesting revelation of his innermost thoughts at the time when he became Pope. The book is a distillation of the extreme monastic views of the time; it is full of fables, and it depicts man as the very vilest thing in a world which was made solely for the disdain of the ascetic. It was from this morbidly tinted sanctuary that Lothario Conti surveyed the life of his time, which he was soon summoned to rule. In September, 1197, Henry VI., who had duly incurred the imperial legacy of excommunication, died and left his kingdom to his baby-boy Frederic: and on January 8, 1198,