delusive oath of allegiance to his child, that was a thing which in those days no one so much as thought of keeping. The inactivity of the forces of the Empire was thus accounted for; the holders of imperial fiefs in Italy were left to fight their own battles, and thus the Pope with very moderate forces, and the cities of Tuscany and Umbria, each for its own hand, were able to assert themselves, and drive out the oppressors. And there was a period of hopefulness and comparative peace. Innocent, however, who had the affairs of the world on his hands, and could not long confine himself to those of St. Peter's patrimony, was soon plunged into the midst of those ever-recurring struggles in Germany, too important in every way not to call for his closest attention. The situation was very much, the same as that in which Gregory VII. had found himself involved: with this great difference, however, that both competitors for the German crown were new men, and had neither any burden of crime against the Church nor previous excommunications on their head. Philip of Suabia, the brother of Henry VI., had been by him entrusted--with that curious confidence in the possibility of self-devotion on the part of others, which dying men, though never capable of it themselves, so often show--with the care and guardianship of his child and its interests, and the impossible task of establishing Frederic, as yet scarcely able to speak, upon a throne so important and so difficult. Philip did, it is said, his best to fulfil his trust and hurried from Sicily to the heart of Germany as soon as his brother was dead, with that object; but the princes of his party feared an infant monarch, and he was himself elected in the year 1199 to the vacant seat. There seems no criminality in this in the circumstances, for the little Frederic was in any case impossible; but Philip had inherited a hatred which he had not done anything personally to deserve. "So exasperated were the Italians against the Germans by the barbarous government of Frederic I. and Henry VI. his son, that wherever Philip passed, whether through Tuscany or any other district, he was ill-used and in danger of his life, and many of his companions were killed," says Muratori. He had thus a strong feeling against him in Italy independent of any demerit of his own. It is a little difficult, however, to understand why Pope Innocent, so careful of the interests of the little king in Sicily, should have so strongly and persistently opposed his uncle. Philip had been granted possession of the duchy of Tuscany, which the Pope claimed as his own, and some offence on this account, as well as the shadow of an anathema launched against him for the same reason by one of Innocent's predecessors, may have prepossessed the Pope against him; but it is scarcely possible to accept this as reason enough for his determined opposition.