The rivals appealed to the sword, and Innocent bitterly complained that Philip did not ask his arbitration.[242] He alone, he declared to the princes and prelates of Germany, was the judge of such high causes: to which the princes and prelates replied, in very firm and dignified language, that they would have no Papal interference in the secular concerns of Germany.[243] As the war proceeded, Innocent made it clear that he favoured Otto. He warned the German prelates not to choose an Emperor on whom he could not bestow the crown, and in a letter to the Eastern Emperor he afterwards boasted that he alone kept Philip from the throne. But the war went in favour of Philip, and even when, in 1200, both men sent representatives to Rome, Innocent would not commit himself to more than an eloquent proof that priests were exalted above kings.[244] At the beginning of the following year, however, he declared openly for Otto. He sent Cardinal Pierleone to Germany with the Bull _Interest Apostolicæ Sedis_, in which he drew up a violent and unjust indictment of Philip and awarded the crown to the loyal and virtuous Otto. The Bull is painfully casuistic, and would have been better if it had stopped at the bold declaration that the Papacy had created the Empire and could bestow it according to its pleasure. While, for instance, it charges Philip with treachery to the interests of his young nephew, it exonerates all others from the oath of fidelity to Henry's son on the ground that an oath to an unbaptized infant was invalid.[245] The imperial crown was, in plain terms, allotted in the interests of the Church, in defiance of the wishes of the majority of the German nation. Otto hastened to swear that he would defend the Papal possessions (including Sicily), and was proclaimed by a Papal Legate in Cologne cathedral on July 3, 1201.
Innocent now sent out a flood of letters on behalf of his candidate, but the result was irritating. Philip of France roughly refused to recognize Otto; and a letter signed by two German archbishops, ten bishops, and other clerics and nobles, sternly rebuked the Pope for his "audacity" in meddling with things which did not concern him.[246] Innocent's Legates vainly scattered threats of excommunication in Germany. Hardly a single prelate recognized Otto, and, after seven years of the most brutal civil warfare, he was driven out of the country. We are not impressed by the Pope's feverish protests that he was not responsible for this desolation. In 1208, however, Philip, who had been reconciled with Rome in the previous year, was assassinated, and Otto, with Innocent's approval, mounted the throne. To the intense indignation of the Pope, the new Emperor at once cast his oaths of fidelity to the wind and told Innocent to confine himself to spiritual matters. He annexed Tuscany and Spoleto, in spite of all the Pope's entreaties and threats, and was about to march against Naples and Apulia when Innocent launched against him a sentence of excommunication and deposition. Otto was, for the time, an excellent ruler: he had been educated in the English ideas of government. But he had refused to be subservient to the clergy, and the German prelates now summoned Frederic from Sicily. Innocent approved the election of Frederic as easily as he had approved that of Philip and of Otto, but he did not live to see how that Emperor in turn defied the Papacy and scorned its political pretensions.[247]