The election of Sinibald of Fiesque to the papacy, seemed to promise some years of peace between the priesthood and the empire: Sinibald had for a long time been connected by friendship with Frederick; but the cardinal friend became a pontiff enemy, even as the emperor had foretold. Innocent IV. the name of this pope, having placed on the absolution of Frederick, conditions which he would not accept, war was rekindled, and the pope, compelled to fly from Genoa, his country, came thence to solicit an asylum in France. Louis IX. consulted his barons, who maintained, that the court of Rome was always expensive to its guests, that a pope would obscure the royal dignity, and would form in the state another independent one.²³⁷ Rejected by the King of France, refused also by the King of Arragon, Innocent addressed himself to the English, whose reply was not more favourable. What! they say, have we not already simony and usury, wherefore then need a pope, who would come in person to devour the kingdom and our churches. Very well! cried the pontiff incensed at this triple affront; we must finish with Frederick; when we have crushed or tamed this great dragon, these petty serpents will not dare to raise their heads, and we shall crush them under our feet.²³⁸ To attain this object, he holds a general council at Lyons, a city which at that time belonged neither to France nor the emperor: the archbishops usurped to themselves the sovereignty in it, and maintained that it had ceased to be a fief of the empire.²³⁹ There Frederick II. was deposed: “In virtue, says the pope, of the power to “bind and to loose, which Jesus Christ has given “us in the person of St Peter, we deprive the late “emperor, Frederick, of all honor and dignity; we “prohibit obedience to him, to consider him as em− “peror or king, or to give aid or counsel to him, “under the penalty of excommunication by the act “alone.” ²³⁸ Velly, vol. iv. p. 306, 307. ²³⁹ Matt. Paris, p. 600. ²⁴⁰ While Innocent was at Lyons, some prebends of the church of this city became vacant, and he attempted to bestow them, in the plenitude of his authority, on foreigners, his relatives; but the people, and even the clergy of Lyons, resisted him to his face, and compelled him to relinquish this undertaking. To annihilate the house of Swabia had been for a long time the most ardent wish of the popes, especially of Innocent IV.; but he proclaimed almost fruitlessly, a crusade against Frederick: real crusades occupied them at the time, that is, expeditions into the East, and the fugitive Innocent IV. did not inherit the omnipotence of Innocent III.. The low clergy itself no longer adored the pontifical decrees: a curate of Paris, announcing to his parishioners that which deposed Frederick, addressed them in these remarkable words;: