To relish Walther’s love-songs, one need not know whether she was dark or fair, kept forest-tryst or listened by some castle’s hearth, or in what German land that castle stood. Likewise in his _Sprüche_, which have other bearing, the roll of his protesting voice carries the universal human. To comprehend them it were well to know that life was then as now niggardly in rewarding virtue; beyond this, one needs to have the type-idea of the Empire and the Papacy, those two powers which were set, somewhat antagonistically, on the decree of God; both claiming the world’s headship; the one, Roman in tradition, but in strength and temper German, and of this world decidedly. The other, Roman in the genius of its organization, and Christian in its subordination of the life below to the life to come, if not in the methods of establishing this consummation; Christian too, but more especially mediaeval, in its formal disdain for whatever belonged to earth. In Germany these two partial opposites were further antagonized, since the native resources recoiled from the foreign drain upon them, and the struggling patriotism of a broken land resented the pressure of a state within and above the state of duke and king and emperor. In Walther’s time Innocent III. swayed the nations from Peter’s throne. Just before Innocent’s accession, Germany’s able emperor, Henry VI., died suddenly in Sicily (September 1197), leaving an heir not two years old. The queen-mother, dying the next year, bequeathed this child, Frederick, to the paternal care of Innocent, his feudal as well as ghostly lord, since the queen, for herself and child, had accepted the Pope as the feudal suzerain of their kingdom of Sicily. In Germany (using that name loosely and broadly) Philip Hohenstauffen, Henry’s brother and Duke of Suabia, claimed the throne. His unequal opponent was Otto of Brunswick, of the ever-rebellious house of Henry the Lion. The Pope opposed the Hohenstauffen; but was obliged to acknowledge him when the course of the ten years of wasting civil war in Germany decided in his favour--whereupon, alack! Philip was murdered (1207). Quickly the Pope turned back to Otto; but the latter, after he had been crowned king and emperor, became intolerable to Innocent through the compulsion of his position as the head of an empire inherently hostile to the papacy. To thwart him Innocent set up his own ward, Frederick. Soon this precocious youth began to make head against pope-forsaken Otto; and then the excommunicated emperor was overthrown in 1214 by Philip Augustus of France, who had intervened in Frederick’s favour. So Otto passed away, and, some time after, Frederick was crowned German king at Aix-la-Chapelle.[18] In the meanwhile Innocent died (1216), and amity followed between Frederick and the gentle Honorius III., who crowned Frederick emperor at Rome in 1220. This peace ended quickly when the sterner Gregory IX. ascended the papal throne on the death of Honorius in 1227.