Bruno himself insisted that he should be elected legally by the clergy and people of Rome and, though of royal blood, he entered the city barefoot as a penitent. Unlike the haughty Roman nobles to whom the title ‘Pope’ had merely seemed an extra means of obtaining worldly honour and pleasure, he remained after his consecration gentle and accessible to his inferiors, and devoted his whole time to the work of reform. At his first council he strongly condemned the sin of simony, and he insisted on the celibacy of the clergy as the only way to free them from worldly distractions and ambitions. In order that his message might not seem intended for Italy alone, he made long journeys through Germany and France. Everywhere he went he preached the purified ideal of the Church upheld by the monks of Cluni; but side by side with this he and his successors set another vision that they strove to realize, the predominance of the Papacy in Italy as a temporal power. It was Leo IX who, dreading the Norman settlements in southern Italy as a menace to the states of the Church, formed a league against the invaders, but after his defeat at their hands, followed shortly by his death, his successors, as we have seen, wisely concluded a peace that left them feudal overlords of Apulia and Calabria.[11] Realizing that to dominate the affairs of the peninsula they must remain at home, future Popes sent ambassadors called ‘Legates’ to express and explain their will in foreign countries; while in 1059, in a further effort towards independence, Pope Nicholas II revolutionized the method of papal elections. Popes, it was decreed, were no longer to be chosen by the voice of the people and clergy of Rome generally, but only by the ‘Cardinals’, that is, the principal bishops of the city sitting in secret conclave. This body, the College of Cardinals, was to be free of imperial interference. [Sidenote: Pope Gregory VII] Behind Pope Nicholas, in this daring policy of independence, stood one of the most powerful figures of his age, Hildebrand, Archdeacon of Rome. The son of a village carpenter, small, ill formed, insignificant in appearance, he possessed the shrewd, practical mind and indomitable will of the born ruler of men. It is said that in boyhood his companions found him tracing with the chips and shavings of his father’s workshop the words, ‘I shall reign from sea to sea’, yet he began his career by deliberately accepting exile with the best of the Popes deposed by the Council of Sutri; and it was Leo IX, who, hearing of his genius, found him and brought him back to Rome. Gradually not only successive Popes but the city itself grew to lean upon his strength, and when in 1073 the Holy See was left vacant, a general cry arose from the populace: ‘Hildebrand is Pope.... It is the will of St. Peter!’