Frederic I. succeeded to the imperial throne in 1152. The increasing opulence and power of the Italian and Lombardine cities owing allegience to Germanic authority, the ambitious aspirations of the Papal See for illimitable dominion, and the insidious operations of its machinery in producing public taste and opinion in harmony with its desires, had, at the beginning of the reign of Frederic I., produced revolts and usurpations in Lombardy and Italy, which obliged the emperor to visit and chastise the insurrectionary districts. Pope Alexander III., the chief source of the public discord, fled on the approach of Frederic to France, and excommunicated him. A league was then formed between the pope, Venice, and the Greek empire against Frederic; and for twenty years the calamities of war were protracted. The cruelty which the emperor had exercised towards the rebellious cities created a desperate opposition to his authority, and exercised an important influence in stimulating the valor and energy of the people, by which their freedom was finally achieved in the treaty of Venice in 1177. The spiritual and temporal crown of the world which the Roman See attempted to manufacture out of the fishhooks of St. Peter, however visionary it might originally have appeared, assumed in the progress of the papal political intrigues, the appearance of a stubborn, formidable and frightful reality. With the profound policy which it elaborated, and the systematic course of measures which it adopted, accommodated to all exigencies and pursued through all periods, and at all places; with its' machinery ramifying the political, social, and literary institutions of Christendom; with its confessors transmitting to Rome every important fact; with its inquisition extorting from victims an admission of every false charge of which ecclesiastical interests required the establishment; with its preachers and spiritual guides manufacturing, private and public opinion suitable to its demands by perverted facts and false statements; and with its army of monks, knights, sycophant princes, servile kings, and deluded devotees; it had at the period of Pope Innocent III. subjugated Christendom under its despotic authority. During the progress of its aggressive course the voice of reason and patriotism had often lifted up remonstrances against its advancement; but the eloquent tones died away unheeded amid the clamorous chaunts of superstitious rites. But now, after supineness had allowed it to amass supreme and despotic power, and fortify itself by every means of defence, the antagonism of the people began to be energetically manifested. It is the fate of despotism of every form, when it has developed the full strength of its all-blasting power, to awaken another power destined to trample it in the dust. That power is the strength which slumbers in the popular arm. When the papal despotism was no more a pretension, but a fact, when it stood distinctly before the world