he probably saw was hopeless.  The death of Agnes of Meran in July, 1201, made a complete reconciliation less difficult.  Next year the Pope legitimated the children of Agnes and Philip, on the ground that the sentence of divorce, pronounced by the French bishops, gave the King reasonable grounds for entering in good faith on his union with her.  Ingeborg was still refused the rights of a queen, and constantly besought the Pope to have pity on her forlorn condition.  The Pope was now forced to content himself with remonstrances.  Philip declared that a baleful charm separated him from Ingeborg, and again begged the Pope to divorce him from a union based on sorcery and witchcraft.

The growing need of the French alliance now somewhat slackened the early zeal of Innocent for the cause of the Queen.  But no real cordiality was possible as long as the strained relations of Ingeborg and Philip continued.  At last, in 1213, in the very crisis of his fortunes, Philip completed his tardy reconciliation with his wife, after they had been separated for twenty years.  Henceforth Philip was the most active ally of the papacy.

While thus dealing with Philip of France, Innocent enjoyed easier triumphs over the lesser kings of Europe.  It was his ambition to break through the traditional limits that separated the church from the state, and to bind as many as he could of the kings of Europe to the papacy by ties of political vassalage.  The time-honored feudal superiority of the popes over the Norman kingdom of Sicily had been the first precedent for this most unecclesiastical of all papal aggressions.  Already others of the smaller kingdoms of Europe, conspicuous among which was Portugal, had followed the example of the Normans in becoming vassals of the holy see.  Under Innocent at least three states supplemented ecclesiastical by political dependence on the papacy.  Sancho, King of Portugal, who had striven to repudiate the former submission of Alfonso I, was in the end forced to accept the papal suzerainty.  Peter, King of Aragon, went in 1204 to Rome and was solemnly crowned king by Innocent.  Afterward Peter deposited his crown on the high altar of St. Peter’s and condescended to receive the investiture of his kingdom from the Pope, holding it as a perpetual fief of the holy see, and promising tribute to Innocent and his successors.  In 1213 a greater monarch than the struggling Christian kings of the Iberian peninsula was forced, after a long struggle, to make an even more abject submission.

The long strife of Innocent with John of Anjou, about the disputed election to the see of Canterbury, was fought with the same weapons which the Pope had already employed against the King of France.  But John held out longer.  Interdict was followed by excommunication and threatened deposition.  At last the English King surrendered his crown to the papal agent Pandulf, and, like Peter of Aragon, received it back as a vassal of the papacy, bound by an annual tribute.