Certainly the Pope was not interfering in Languedoc because he had nothing better to do. It is true that the Empire was not threatening or even in a position to threaten. That huge, ill-knit mass, stretching from the Rhône to the Oder, from Holstein to the Sicilies, and including both Lille and Vienna, was taking one of its periodical sudden plunges from glittering dreams of world power into civil war and blank anarchy. When Innocent was elected, the terrible Emperor Henry VI was barely three months dead and already his work was in ruins and the Italian cities were busily driving out his German officials whom he had put to rule them. It was not that they had a scrap of anything approaching national Italian feeling; the modern reader needs to have it repeated again and again that the twelfth century had not even the idea of nationality except for the glimmering of it in France. They acted because they disliked Germans as such, and because they preferred to pay municipal salaries and perquisites to someone born and bred among themselves. Like all popes since Hildebrand, Innocent welcomed this sort of thing and aided and abetted them in it. A well-organized Empire which included Italy would have been in a position to put pressure upon popes. In his letters to the cities Innocent even speaks sometimes of “The Interest of all Italy,” but that great phrase died away without contemporary echo. In Rome itself the imperial prefect swore homage to the Pope without even a protest. The municipality of Rome was a different matter. Even in the tenth century, long before the Papacy had set itself up against the Empire, the turbulent nobles of the Eternal City had several times driven out popes in fear and trembling. The twelfth century communal movement made matters worse from the papal point of view. Even a pope like Innocent could be insulted in the streets by the Roman mob, so that he feared for his life and quitted the place, to return only after nearly a year. From his consecration until the year 1208, when again he brought the citizens to terms by temporarily leaving town, he had on his hands the most explosive sort of political situation in his own city.