The truce was scarcely made when politics of a wider range began to claim the attention of both the rival kings. The Emperor Henry VI was still under sentence of excommunication for his treatment of the captive king of England and for other violations of international right and justice committed in his pursuit of a dream of world-conquest in which he seems to have curiously anticipated a much later bearer of the Imperial title. The aged Pope Celestine had warned him in 1195—“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”[1239] and the warning came back to him when on his way to Holy Land in autumn 1197 he fell sick unto death at Messina. He hurriedly restored to the Roman See the property of which he had robbed it, and despatched an envoy to Richard, offering to refund his ransom in the form of either money or lands. Before an answer could be received he died, on Michaelmas eve. The Pope ordered that he should not be buried, unless with Richard’s expressed consent, until this offer was fulfilled. While Richard was keeping Christmas at Rouen, envoys from the archbishops of Cologne and Mentz and other German princes came to tell him that all the magnates of Germany were to assemble at Cologne on February 22 to elect an Emperor; “and they bade him, in virtue of the oath and fidelity by which he was bound to the Emperor and to the Roman Empire, come to Cologne at the aforesaid time without fail, in order that he, as a chief member of the Empire, might be with them to elect, by God’s help, an Emperor fit for the imperial office.” After some consideration and consultation Richard sent back with the envoys some bishops and nobles to be present at the election in his stead. “He,” says Roger of Howden, “greatly feared to go there himself, lest he should again fall into their hands, unless security were given him of a safe-conduct for the journey there and back; and no wonder, for he had not yet paid to the German magnates all that he had promised them for helping to his liberation; and it was on account of him that the Emperor’s body was still unburied.”[1240] The German electors were much divided among themselves. The late Emperor’s only son was already, by the Pope’s consent, crowned king of Sicily;[1241] but he was a child; nobody wanted an infant Emperor. Some of the magnates seem to have thought that jealousy and rivalry among themselves might be best appeased by setting, or at least proposing to set, over all of them a sovereign of another nationality; certain of them nominated King Richard of England. It was probably merely in opposition to this party that some others—“but they were few”—proposed Philip of France.[1242] The majority inclined to Duke Henry of Saxony, Richard’s sister’s son, who by birth was head of the most illustrious of the princely houses of Germany, and had in 1196 succeeded his father-in-law as Count Palatine. For Henry Richard, [Sidenote: