Thus drew to a close a century which had witnessed a vital dislocation in the course of Russian history, which had been fraught with important changes in Europe generally. The House of Hohenstaufen, which had played so bold a part in the affairs of Germany, Italy, and Palestine, had gone down in the death-struggle with the Papacy, and out of the ashes of its ruin had risen, phœnix-like, the House of Habsburg, which one day was to prove the surest bulwark against the enemies of the Holy See; in Rudolf, petty Count of Habsburg and Kyburg, the Empire had found the strongest master it had known since the death of its founder. In that other Empire, whose luxurious capital seemed to enervate and paralyse the manhood of its rulers, the Catholic dynasty had drooped and shrivelled, and when the trade jealousies of Genoa led her to strike with the Greeks against the Latin allies of her hated rival, Venice, the end was at hand; the House of Courtenay gave way to that of Paleologus, and the formula “proceeding from the Father by the Son” re-echoed once more in the high places of S. Sofia. In Hungary died out with the century the male line of the princely House of Arpad, which had given sovereigns to that country since the first erection of the Magyar State; from this point the crown of S. Stefan became the ambition and prize of the surrounding princes, a fate similar to that which overtook the neighbouring kingdom of Bohemia a year or two later. The Livlandish debatable lands still seethed and bubbled with the wars of the rival immigrants. The gentlemen of God maintained a vigorous contest with the See of Dorpat, with the city and Archbishop of Riga, and with the Lit’uanians. In Riga the burghers burnt the church and chapel of the Order and killed sixty of the convent brothers (1297). On the other hand their Archbishop, Johann of Schwerin, was besieged in his castle of Treiden and taken prisoner by the Order, to the scandal of Pope Boniface VIII. The heathen Lit’uanians, headed by their Prince, Viten, and allied with the Church troops of Riga and Dorpat, fought against the knights “in eighteen months nine bloody battles.” In 1298 they won a decisive victory over the Landmaster Bruno, in which the latter and many of his knights lost their lives. The Komthur Berthold, with reinforcements from Prussia, wiped out this reverse by a victory at Neuermühlen, and later the new Landmaster ravaged the archiepiscopal territory. Ultimately the release and withdrawal of the militant Archbishop and the appointment of Isarnus Tacconi, the Pope’s chaplain, to the See of Riga, relieved the situation and gave some measure of peace to this over-apostleised land.[55]