Читать книгу The Empire and the Papacy, 918-1273. Investiture Contest, Crusades & The Famous Conflicts онлайн

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Henry III. was now two-and-twenty years of age, and had been carefully educated for his great position. Gisela had procured for him the best of literary teachers, while Conrad himself had taken care that he should excel in all knightly exercises, and go through a sound drilling in war, law, and statecraft. He had already won martial glory against the Poles and Hungarians, while he had acquired political experience as virtual, if not formal, co-regent with his father. He was now able to take up his father’s work, and while carrying it on essentially in the old lines, to infuse it with a new spirit. For the gifted young king, though inheriting to the full the practical wisdom of his father, soared far above the cold self-seeking and hard selfishness of the least attractive of the great German Emperors. Under his strong and genial rule, the Holy Empire again became a great ideal, though it was now an ideal that had little that was visionary or fantastic about it. The seventeen years of his reign witnessed the culminating point of the power of the mediæval Empire. Under him Germany effectively ruled the destinies of the world. The early troubles that had attended the building up of the kingdom were over. The later troubles that sprang from the struggle of the ecclesiastical and temporal power had not yet begun.