In the royal charter by which he founded the University of Naples Frederick expressed his intention that here ‘those within the Kingdom who had hunger for knowledge might find the food for which they were yearning’; and his court at Palermo, if from one aspect dissolute and luxurious, was also a centre for men of wit and knowledge against whose brains the King loved to test his own quips and theories. When Frederick reached Rome, on Innocent’s hasty summons to unsheath the sword of the Hohenstaufen against Otto, much of his character was as yet a closed book even to himself. Impulsive and eager, like any ambitious youth of seventeen called to high adventure, and with a genuine respect for his guardian, he did not look far ahead; but kneeling at the Pope’s feet, pledged his homage and faith before he rode away northwards to win an empire. In Germany a considerable following awaited him, lifelong opponents of Otto on account of his Welf blood, and others who hated him for his churlish manners. Amongst them Frederick scattered lavishly some money he had borrowed from the Republic of Genoa, and this generosity, combined with his Hohenstaufen strength and daring, increased the happy reputation that papal legates had already established for him in many quarters. In December 1212 he was crowned in Mainz. Civil war followed, embittered by papal and imperial leagues, but in 1214 Otto IV was decisively beaten at Bouvines in the struggle with Philip II of France that we have already described,[19] and the tide which had been previously turning against him now swept away his few friends and last hopes. With the entry of his young rival into the Rhineland provinces the dual Empire ceased to exist, and Frederick was crowned in Aachen, the old capital of Charlemagne. Innocent III had now reached the summit of his power, for his pupil and protégé sat on the throne of Rome’s imperial rival. In the same year he called a Council to the Lateran Palace, the fourth gathering of its kind, to consider the two objects dearest to his heart, ‘the deliverance of the Holy Land and the reform of the Church Universal’. Crusading zeal, however, he could not rouse again: to cleanse and spiritualize the life of the Church in the thirteenth century was to prove a task beyond men of finer fibre than Innocent: but, as an illustration of his immense influence over Europe, the Fourth Lateran Council with its dense submissive crowds, representative of every land and class, was a fitting end to his pontificate.