For ten long years Germany was devastated by their civil wars. Otto, as the Guelf representative, gained the support of Innocent the Great, to whom the claimants at one time appealed for arbitration; but Philip refused to submit to this judgement in favour of his rival, believing that he himself had behind him the majority of the German princes and of the official class. ‘Inasmuch,’ declared Innocent, ‘as our dearest son in Christ, Otto, is industrious, prudent, discreet, strong and constant, himself devoted to the Church ... we by the authority of St. Peter receive him as King and will in due course bestow on him the imperial crown.’ Here was papal triumph! Rome no longer patronized but patron, with Otto on his knees, gratefully promising submission and homage with every kind of ecclesiastical privilege, to complete the picture. Yet circumstances change traditions as well as people, and when the death of Philip of Suabia left him master of Germany, the Guelf Otto found his old ideals impracticable: he became a Ghibelline in policy, announced his imperial rights over Lombardy, even over some of the towns belonging to the Pope, while he loudly announced his intention of driving the young Hohenstaufen from Naples. Innocent’s wrath at this _volte-face_ was unbounded. Otto, no longer his ‘dearest son in Christ’, was now a perjurer and schismatic, whose excommunication and deposition were the immediate duty of Rome. Neither, however, was likely to be effective unless the Pope could provide Italy and Germany with a rival, whose dazzling claims, backed by papal support, would win him followers wherever he went. In this crisis Innocent found his champion in the Hohenstaufen prince denounced by Otto, a lad educated almost since infancy in the tenets and ambitions of the Catholic Church. [Sidenote: Frederick II] Frederick, King of Naples and Sicily, was an interesting development of hereditary tastes and the atmosphere in which he had been reared. To the southern blood that leaped in his veins he owed perhaps his hot passions, his sensuous appreciation of luxury and art, his almost Saracen contempt for women save as toys to amuse his leisure hours. From the Hohenstaufen he imbibed strength, ambition, and cruelty, from the Norman strain on his mother’s side his reckless daring and treachery. With the ordinary education of a prince of his day, Frederick’s qualities and vices might have merely produced a warrior king of rather exceptional ability; but thanks to the papal tutors provided by Innocent, the boy’s naturally quick brain and imagination were stirred by a course of studies far superior to what his lay contemporaries usually enjoyed, and he emerged in manhood with a real love of books and culture, and with an eager curiosity on such subjects as philosophy and natural history.