The reader of medieval history cannot fail to be impressed with the suddenness with which the culmination of the Holy Roman Empire, in the thirteenth century, was followed by a swift decline. The imperial position of the Hapsburgs was far less splendid than that of the Hohenstauffen; it rapidly became more German and less European, until by and by people began to forget what the empire originally meant. The change which came over the papacy was even more remarkable. The grandchildren of the men who had witnessed the spectacle of a king of France and a king of England humbled at the feet of Innocent III., the children of the men who had found the gigantic powers of a Frederick II. unequal to the task of curbing the papacy, now beheld the successors of St. Peter carried away to Avignon, there to be kept for seventy years under the supervision of the kings of France. Henceforth the glory of the papacy in its political aspect was to be but the faint shadow of that with which it had shone before. This sudden change in its position showed that the medieval dream of a world-empire was passing away, and that new powers were coming uppermost in the shape of modern nationalities with their national sovereigns. So long as these nationalities were in the weakness of their early formation, it was possible for pope and emperor to assert, and sometimes to come near maintaining, universal supremacy. But the time was now at hand when kings could assert their independence of the pope, while the emperor was fast sinking to be merely one among kings.