We do not fully appreciate the strength of Innocent unless we realize how, while his eyes wandered over the globe, Rome itself demanded so much attention. But he was not merely concerned with its misconduct. He organized the work of charity in the city and did something to promote its commerce. He built a foundling hospital, trusting to reduce the infanticide which he found so common at Rome, and was very generous to the churches and the clergy. From his time the Popes began to use more and more the Palace beside St. Peter's, which he enlarged and fortified, and he spent large sums in adorning other churches and enhancing the splendour of the worship. But these and the other Roman reforms I have mentioned are the mere incidents of his domestic life, so to say. His work was the ruling of the world, and assuredly we must recognize a mind of high quality and prodigious energy when we read the volumes of letters that poured from the Lateran during those eighteen years, and imagine the vast crowds that came from every part of the world to do homage, to ask counsel, and to report the minutest circumstances of their abbeys or bishoprics or principalities.
Italy alone might have absorbed a weaker man during his earlier years. Papal rule was acknowledged--in the manner we have seen--only in the immediate neighbourhood of the city. Over the south and Sicily the widow of Henry VI. ruled in the name of her child: in the north were the leagues of free cities, and the isolated free cities, which had won independence: and the whole country apart from these was falling into the hands of the German generals whom Henry VI. had left there at his death. Innocent, like all the Popes after Hadrian, believed in the Donation of Constantine, to say nothing of the Donations of Pippin and Charlemagne and Otto and Mathilda. Italy belonged almost entirely to the Papacy, and must be recovered. Some historians hail Innocent as a great apostle of the "Italia Una" ideal, and he sometimes presses on particular towns "the interests of the whole of Italy." It is, however, absurd to associate his feeling with the later ideal of Italian unity. He cared for the unity of Italy only in the sense that the Pope was to be its unique ruler. Those Germans--he scorns them--must be driven out. Those free cities, always at war with each other, must be persuaded that the Papal seal will be their best protection. Even that kingdom of Naples and Sicily must somehow pass under Rome; in spite of the fact that Innocent had solemnly accepted the guardianship of the young king.