help against England and the Empire.  Philip did not get the expected political advantages from the new connection, and at once took a strong dislike to the lady.  On the day after the marriage Philip refused to have anything more to do with his bride.  Within three months, he persuaded a synod of complaisant French bishops of Compiegne to pronounce the marriage void by reason of a remote kinship that existed between the two parties.

Ingeborg was young, timid, friendless, helpless, and utterly ignorant of the French tongue, but King Canute took up her cause, and, from her retreat in a French convent, she appealed to Rome against the wickedness of the French King and clergy.  Celestine III proved her friend, and finding protestations of no avail, he finally quashed the sentence of the French bishops and declared her the lawful wife of the French King.  But Philip persisted in his repudiation of Ingeborg, and Celestine contented himself with remonstrances and warnings that were utterly disregarded.  In 1196 Philip found a fresh wife in Agnes, a lady of the powerful house of Andechs-Meran, whose authority was great in Thuringia, and whose Alpine lordships soon developed into the country of Tyrol.

Innocent at once proved a stronger champion of Ingeborg than the weak and aged Celestine.  He forthwith warned Philip and the French bishops that they had no right to put asunder those whom God had joined together.  “Recall your lawful wife,” he wrote to Philip, “and then we will hear all that you can righteously urge.  If you do not do this, no power shall move us to right or left, until justice be done.”  A papal legate was now sent to France, threatening excommunication and interdict, were Ingeborg not immediately reinstated in her place.  For a few months the Pope hesitated, moved, no doubt, by his Italian and German troubles, and fearful lest his action against a Christian prince should delay the hoped-for crusade.  But he gradually turned the leaders of the French clergy from their support of Philip, and at last, in February, 1200, an interdict was pronounced forbidding the public celebration of the rites of the Church in the whole lands that owed obedience to the King of France.

Philip Augustus held out fiercely for a time, declaring that he would rather lose half his lands than be separated from Agnes.  Meanwhile he used pressure on his bishops to make them disregard the interdict, and vigorously intrigued with the cardinals, seeking to build up a French party in the papal curia.  Innocent so far showed complacency that the legate he sent to France was the King’s kinsman, Octavin, Cardinal-bishop of Ostia, who was anxious to make Philip’s humiliation as light as possible.  His labors were eased by the partial submission of Philip, who in September visited Ingeborg, and promised to take her again as his wife, and so gave an excuse to end the interdict.  Philip still claimed that his marriage should be dissolved; though here again he suddenly abandoned a suit which