In the year 1216 Innocent III died--the most powerful of all Popes, a striking personality whose life by kindly fate did not outlast his glory. In estimating Innocent’s ability as a statesman there stands one blot against his record in the clear light shed by after-events, namely, the short-sighted policy that once again united the Kingdom of Naples to the Empire, and laid the Papacy between the upper millstone of Lombardy and the nether millstone of southern Italy. Excuse may be found in Innocent’s desperate need of a champion with Otto IV threatening his papal heritage, added to his belief in the promises of the young Hohenstaufen to remain his faithful vassal. He also tried to safeguard the future by making Frederick publicly declare that he would bequeath Naples to a son who would not stand for election to the Empire; but in trusting the word of the young Emperor he had sown a wind from which his successors were to reap a whirlwind. The new Emperor was just twenty years old when Innocent died. Either to please his guardian, or moved by a momentary religious impulse, he had taken the Cross immediately after his entry into Aachen; but the years passed and he showed himself in no haste to fulfil the vow. Much of his time was spent in his loved southern kingdom, where he completed Innocent’s work of reducing to submission the Saracen population that had remained in Sicily since the Mahometan conquest.[20] As infidels the Papacy had regarded these Arabs with special hatred; but Frederick, once assured that they were so weak that they would be in future dependent on his favour, began protecting instead of persecuting them. He also encouraged their silk industry by building them a town, Lucera, on the Neapolitan coast, where they could pursue it undisturbed; while he enrolled large numbers of Arab warriors in his army, and used them to enforce his will on the feudal aristocracy, descendants of the Norman adventurers of the eleventh century. So successful was he in playing off one section of his subjects against another, opposing or aiding the different classes as policy dictated, that he soon reigned as an autocrat in Naples. Many of the nobles’ strongholds were levelled with the dust: their claim to wage private war was forbidden on pain of death: cases were taken away from their law-courts and those of the feudal bishops to be decided by royal justices: towns were deprived of their freedom to elect their own magistrates, while crown officials sent from Palermo administered the laws, and imposed and collected taxes.