Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ?1] THE EARLIEST MODERN STATE 5 The system worked only so long as there was not much for kings to do, and while society was constituted on this basis, it produced some very splendid results. The moment, however, that governments, royal or not, began to be conscious of their rights and duties, the weakness of it became unendurable. It is obviously impossible to fix upon any point of time as marking the beginnings of modern government. 1??? go well Earliest back into the period commonly described as " medi- "Modern" seval," but wherever they appear, we may be quite ' "3I sure that the mediaeval character is disappearing from the society that produces them. One of the earliest attempts at creating a modern out of a mediaeval government is that made by the emperor Frederic II in his hereditary kingdom in southern Italy and Sicily. Frederic was the grandson of Barbarossa and the son of that emperor Henry VI who had married Constance, the heiress of the Norman kingdom. He had had ample opportunity in the years between his accession to the Empire in 1215 and the year 1231 to learn all the weaknesses of the mediaeval system. He was an ambitious, energetic young prince, filled with the vast schemes of his Hohenstaufen ancestors for building up a real monarchy in Germany and Italy. Like his father and his grandfather he had found himself checked at every point by the Church. The Papacy had made itself the champion of local, especially of municipal, rights, and had fostered every combination against the Hohenstaufen policy. In 1230 the peace, or rather truce, of San Germano, had been patched up between the pope and the emperor, and Frederic improved the opportunity to carry out his idea of what a state ought to be in the only part of his dominion where he could have free hand, in his o...