To settle his power in Burgundy, he summoned a Diet of the Empire to meet at Besancon, in October, 1157. This Diet was numerously and splendidly attended, not only by German but by foreign princes and ambassadors from all parts of Europe; among the rest, by two cardinals, namely, Roland and Bernard, as legates from the pope. The emperor received their credentials in his oratory, where he gave them a special audience; at which they also presented him a letter from Adrian, who complained in it of the impunity with which Frederic had allowed certain marauding knights to detain and plunder Eskill, Archbishop of Lund, while travelling through Burgundy to his diocese. In chiding him for so faithless a discharge of his duty, as sworn champion of the Roman Church, the pope reminded the emperor of the favours he owed that Church, especially mentioning among them his imperial crown: "not that she repented of having so far obliged him, on the contrary, she would rejoice if she could confer on him still greater benefits." As Frederic listened to this letter, which his chancellor Raynald read up to him, he reddened with anger at that part of it which spoke of his crown as a gift of the Church; but at the word "benefits" he could not control himself, for, by this word he insisted, in the blindness of passion, that the pope meant to assert that the empire was a feoff of the Holy See. The fact was, the original word _beneficium_ did signify, in the corrupt Latin of the middle ages, a feoff as well as a benefit in general; and this was enough for the emperor's humour, who would listen to no explanation from the legates, that the word was used, not in its technical, but its classical sense. In the heat of the dispute which ensued, Cardinal Roland,--afterwards Pope Alexander III.--exclaimed: "From whom then hath the Emperor his dignity, if not from the Pope?" Whereupon, the Count Palatine, Otho of Bavaria, one of the courtiers present, seized by a fit of fury, drew his sword, and rushed towards the cardinal; but was checked in his purpose by Frederic, who threw himself between the two; and then closed the audience by ordering the legates to be escorted back to Rome, with injunctions not to deviate from the directest line of route, nor to tarry in any ecclesiastical domain through which they might pass. Historians are agreed that Adrian had no intention, in the present case, of practically asserting,--as Frederic in his politic wrath said he did,--the feudal superiority in question. The English pope, however, was not the less a stickler for that superiority in theory, as well as Cardinal Roland and the rest of the hierarchy;--a superiority which Pope Gregory VII. supported by the feelings and convictions of Christendom at his day, taught as follows: that the Pope, as Vicar on earth of our Lord in heaven, ought to stand superior over every human power; and sought to realize it as the only means of reforming the frightful disorders of that age.