The same spirit of religious mania which gave birth and sustenance to the Crusades animated other movements, more enduring in their results, if less romantic in their form. In 1198 the throne of St. Peter was filled by Innocent III., a young and zealous priest, fired with the lofty ambition to make Romanism the dominant creed over East and West, and himself the autocrat of a united Roman Catholic world. His genius was all but equal to this Titanic task, and in a reign of eighteen years Innocent, favoured by the convulsions and feuds which rent the whole of Europe, succeeded in raising the Papacy to a pinnacle of power only dreamt of by his predecessors, and attained by few of his successors. A worthy spiritual descendant of Gregory VII., he made and unmade Emperors and Kings at will, visiting the disobedience of princes upon whole nations, or compelling them to submission by releasing their subjects from their oath of allegiance. He exercised an absolute sway over the conscience and the mind of contemporary Christendom, and his pontificate was distinguished, in Gibbon’s scathing phrase, by “the two most signal triumphs over sense and humanity, the establishment of transubstantiation and the origin of the Inquisition.” ♦1200♦ It was he, who by a rigorous interdict laid upon the Kingdom of France, compelled the headstrong Philip Augustus to recall the wife whom he had dismissed; ♦1208♦ who by the ban of excommunication forced John, King of England, to lay his crown at the feet of his legate, ♦1211♦ and who by the execution of a like sentence against the Emperor Otho, John’s nephew, had humbled that mighty and haughty monarch to the dust. It was under his auspices that the Fifth Crusade was undertaken, ♦1203♦ and it was with his connivance that the forces, ostensibly recruited for the deliverance of the holy Sepulchre from the infidels, were employed to subjugate the Christian Empire of the East, and thus to pave the way for the advent of the Turk.