The crusades against the Eastern Infidels inspired audacity and presumption in the church, which suggested crusades elsewhere. Whoever was not Catholic was regarded as the Christians’ prey. Preachers authorized by Rome stirred up the faithful in Saxony and Denmark to convert by the sword the pagans living along the shores of the Baltic. An army of one hundred and fifty thousand, wearing upon their breasts a red cross on the background of a circle, symbolizing the universality of Christ’s kingdom, devastated pagan cities and burned idolatrous temples, and after three years secured from the leaders a promise to make their people Christian—a task more difficult than it had been before, since the half-savage people had now learned that Christianity could be as cruel as their own paganism. Indeed, everything that was not consecrated to Roman Christianity became the lawful spoil of whoever, wearing the cross upon his breast, dared to take it. The crusading zeal became thus a habit of the Christian mind, and led to the horrors of the Inquisition in later days. While Rome thus profited in many ways by the crusades, it must also be noted that the Papacy failed to maintain to the end the prestige it had acquired in the earlier period of the movement. Pope Innocent III. (1198-1216) carried the Hildebrandian policy to its highest realization. The emperor was forced to accept his crown from the hands of the Holy Father, and also to demit the right he had long contended for of electing the papal incumbent. The entire episcopacy in Europe was in the Pope’s control and wrought his will, even in England. But with Gregory IX. (1227-41) the pile of papal autocracy began to totter. This Pope, notwithstanding he had twice excommunicated the emperor, was ultimately obliged to yield to the secular will. His unchristian hauteur, and the rancor with which his successor, Innocent IV., pursued the emperor, lost the papal chair much of the respect of the Catholic world. Soon the various governments came to resent the absolutism of the throne on the Tiber. In 1253 Robert Grosseteste protested against the papal exactions in England, notwithstanding the king was utterly subservient to Rome, and thus he merited the title, which history has given him, of one of the great fathers of English liberty. Twenty-six years later (1279) England enacted the Statute of Mortmain, which forbade the alienation of property to religious bodies without the consent of the secular authority. A similar sentiment was working in France. Probably what is known as the Pragmatic Sanction of Louis IX. (1268) is not genuine, but the revolt of that royal saint against the assessments of Rome without consent of the throne is undoubted, and Louis may be said to have revived the ancient Gallican liberties, which for a century and a half had apparently been dead. A bull of Boniface VIII. in 1298 caused open rupture between France and Rome.