When Richard of England had yielded before Henry VI., the national state gave way before the universal authority of the lord of the world. But Innocent claimed that he alone was lord of the world. The Empire was but a German or Italian kingdom, ruling over its limited sphere. Only in the Papacy was the old Roman tradition of universal monarchy rightly upheld. Filled with these ambitions of universal monarchy, Innocent III.’s survey took in both the smallest and the greatest of European affairs. Primarily Innocent’s work was that of an ecclesiastical statesman, and entrenched far upon the authority of the state. We shall see him restoring the papal authority in Rome and in the Patrimony, building up the machinery of papal absolutism, protecting the infant King of Sicily, cherishing the municipal freedom of Italy, making and unmaking kings and emperors at his will, forcing the fiercest of the Western sovereigns to acknowledge his feudal supremacy, and the greatest of the Kings of France to reform his private life at his commands, giving his orders to the petty monarchs of Spain and Hungary, and promulgating the law of the Church Universal before the assembled prelates of Christendom in the Lateran Council. Nevertheless, the many-sided Pontiff had not less near to his heart the spiritual and intellectual than the political direction of the universe. He had the utmost zeal for the extension of the Kingdom of Christ. The affair of the Crusade was, as we shall see, ever his most pressing care, and it was his bitterest grief that all his efforts to rouse the Christian world for the recovery of Jerusalem fell on deaf ears. He was strenuous in upholding orthodoxy against the daring heretics of Southern France. He was sympathetic and considerate to great religious teachers, like Francis and Dominic, from whose work he had the wisdom to anticipate the revival of the inner life of the Church. As many-sided as strong, and successful as he was strong, Innocent III. represents the culmination of the papal ideal of the Middle Ages, and represents it worthily and adequately. [Sidenote: Innocent III. and Italy.] Even before Innocent had attained the Chair of Peter, the worst dangers that had so long beset the successors of Alexander III. were over. After the death of Henry VI. the Sicilian and the German crowns were separated, and the strong anti-imperial reaction that burst out all over Italy against the oppressive ministers of Henry VI. was allowed to run its full course. The danger was now not so much of despotism as of anarchy, and Innocent, like Hildebrand, knew how to turn confusion to the advantage of the hierarchy. [Sidenote: The Sicilian Succession and the minority of Frederick.]