No man was less likely than Frederick to submit to these encroachments. He was a sort of imperialist Hildebrand, strenuously proclaiming the immediate dependence of his office on God's gift, and holding it every whit as sacred as his rival's. On his first journey to Rome, he refused to hold the Pope's stirrup[181], as Lothar had done, till Pope Hadrian the Fourth's threat that he would withhold the crown enforced compliance. Complaints arising not long after on some other ground, the Pope exhorted Frederick by letter to shew himself worthy of the kindness of his mother the Roman Church, who had given him the imperial crown, and would confer on him, if dutiful, benefits still greater. This word benefits--_beneficia_--understood in its usual legal sense of 'fief,' and taken in connection with the picture which had been set up at Rome to commemorate Lothar's homage, provoked angry shouts from the nobles assembled in diet at Besançon; and when the legate answered, 'From whom, then, if not from our Lord the Pope, does your king hold the Empire?' his life was not safe from their fury. On this occasion Frederick's vigour and the remonstrances of the Transalpine prelates obliged Hadrian to explain away the obnoxious word, and remove the picture. Soon after the quarrel was renewed by other causes, and came to centre itself round the Pope's demand that Rome should be left entirely to his government. Frederick, in reply, appeals to the civil law, and closes with the words, 'Since by the ordination of God I both am called and am Emperor of the Romans, in nothing but name shall I appear to be ruler if the control of the Roman city be wrested from my hands.' That such a claim should need assertion marks the change since Henry III; how much more that it could not be enforced. Hadrian's tone rises into defiance; he mingles the threat of excommunication with references to the time when the Germans had not yet the Empire. 'What were the Franks till Zacharias welcomed Pipin? What is the Teutonic king now till consecrated at Rome by holy hands? The chair of Peter has given, and can withdraw its gifts.' [Sidenote: With Pope Alexander III.]