Nevertheless, it continued to prosper during the whole course of the twelfth, and up to the middle of the thirteenth century. This was the period in which the church possessed its greatest power and splendour. Yet I do not think it can be strictly said to have made at that epoch any very great progress. To the end of the reign of Innocent III., it had rather been parading than extending its glory and power. It was at the moment of its greatest apparent success that a popular reaction arose against it in a considerable portion of Europe. In the south of France, the heresy of the Albigenses exploded, which carried off a numerous and powerful society. About the same period, ideas and desires of a similar nature were broached in the north and in Flanders. A little later, Wickliffe, in England, made a talented attack upon the power of the church, and founded a sect which is not yet extinct. The sovereigns were not long in entering upon the same course as the people. It was at the commencement of the thirteenth century that the most powerful and able monarchs of Europe, the emperors of the house of Hohenstaufen, succumbed in their contest with the Papacy. Before that century was over, Saint Louis, the most pious of kings, proclaimed the independence of the temporal power, and promulgated the first pragmatic sanction, which became the base of all the succeeding ones. At the opening of the fourteenth century, the quarrel between Philip the Handsome and Boniface VIII. began to rage, whilst the king of England, Edward I., was not more docile towards Rome. It is clear, therefore, that at this epoch the attempt at theocratic organisation had failed, that the church was thenceforth put upon the defensive, and had so much difficulty in preserving what it had conquered, as to stop all further endeavour to impose its system on Europe. Hence the true date of the emancipation of the lay European society is from the end of the thirteenth century; it was then that the church ceased its pretensions to monopolise it. For a long time previously, it had renounced that attempt in the very sphere in which it seemed to have the best chance of success. At the very threshold of the church, around its throne in Italy, theocracy had been completely discomfited, and given place to a very different system, to that attempt at democratic organisation of which the Italian republics are the type, and which played so distinguished a part in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century.