Nor were these the only kings that sought the support of the great Pope.  The schismatic princes of the East vied in ardor with the Catholic princes of the West in their quest of Innocent’s favor.  King Leo of Armenia begged for his protection.  The Bulgarian prince John besought the Pope to grant him a royal crown.  Innocent posed as a mediator in Hungary between the two brothers, Emeric and Andrew, who were struggling for the crown.  Canute of Denmark, zealous for his sister’s honor, was his humble suppliant.  Poland was equally obedient.  The Duke of Bohemia accepted the papal reproof for allying himself with Philip of Swabia.

Despite his vigor and his authority, Innocent’s constant interference with the internal concerns of every country in Europe did not pass unchallenged.  Even the kings who invoked his intercession were constantly in conflict with him.  Besides his great quarrels in Germany, France, and England, Innocent had many minor wars to wage against the princes of Europe.  For five years the kingdom of Leon lay under interdict because its king Alfonso had married his cousin, Berengaria of Castile, in the hope of securing the peace between the two realms.  It was only after the lady had borne five children to Alfonso that she voluntarily terminated the obnoxious union, and Innocent found it prudent, as in France, to legitimize the offspring of a marriage which he had denounced as incestuous.  Not one of the princes of the peninsula was spared.  Sancho of Navarre incurred interdict by reason of suspected dealings with the Saracens, while the marriage of his sister with Peter of Aragon, the vassal of the Pope, involved both kings in a contest with Innocent.  Not only did the monarchs of Europe resent, so far as they were able, the Pope’s haughty policy; for the first time the peoples of their realms began to make common cause with them against the political aggressions of the papacy.  The nobles of Aragon protested against King Peter’s submission to the papacy, declared that his surrender of their kingdom was invalid, and prevented the payment of the promised tribute.  When John of England procured his Roman overlord’s condemnation of Magna Charta, the support of Rome was of no avail to prevent his indignant subjects combining to drive him from the throne, and did not even hinder Louis of France, the son of the papalist Philip II, from accepting their invitation to become English king in his stead.  It was only by a repudiation of this policy, and by an acceptance of the Great Charter, that the papacy could secure the English throne for John’s young son, Henry III, and thus continue for a time its precarious overlordship over England.