INNOCENT III AND THE STATES OF EUROPE 461 monarchs we turn to his interference in Italian and German politics. The year before his election a disaster Italian had befallen the Holy Roman Empire and the policy of •House of Hohenstaufen in the untimely death Henry VI 'of the emperor, Henry VI (1190-1197). This son of Fred- ierick Barbarossa, through a marriage which his father had arranged for him with Constance, the Norman heiress of Sicily and southern Italy, had acquired that well-organized kingdom. And the party strife and interurban wars, which
- had at once begun again in the communes of Lombardy
|as soon as their danger from Barbarossa was over, gave jHenry a chance to renew the influence of the Empire there. Thus he threatened to crush the political power of the ipope in central Italy as if between two millstones. He had ialready made his brother, Philip of Suabia, Duke of Tus- cany, and had planted garrisons in Romagna, the March of Ancona, and Umbria, when death put an end to his ambi- tious designs. Immediately his power in Italy went to pieces. Philip was lucky to escape from Tuscany and across the Alps with his life. The Tuscan towns, aided by Innocent's _ „ . . Its collapse predecessor, formed a federation to maintain jtheir independence after the model of the Lombard League. The cities of Romagna and Ancona also united against jGerman rule, and, assisted by Innocent, forced the imperial igovernor to retire to the southern kingdom. There, too, however, the widowed queen-mother Con- stance was hostile to German influence. She had her three- year-old son Frederick crowned King of Sicily, innocent and recognized that Innocent was feudal over- and Slclly lord of the kingdom. Her Norman ancestors, too, had done this much, but Innocent was able to induce her to surren- der the right which they had secured from the Papacy of being themselves the sole papal legates in their lands and thus maintaining complete control over their clergy. After making this great concession, Constance died before the first year of Innocent's reign was over, but not before she had made a will leaving the guardianship of her infant son
