FREDERICK THE SECOND. provisions and ships for all the throng:' the heats of summer came on with violence, and fever hroke out. But the fleet sailed, with Frederick. Three days afterwards his ship came hack. He was ill, and could not go. · Old Pope Gregory saw his opportunity. He would use his power. Frederick was not ill, but only pretending illness. He preached from the text, " It must needs be that offences come, but woe unto him through whom they come." He pronounced the sentence of excommunication. Frederick wrote, on hearing of this, in perfect good temper, calmly stating the fact of his illness : he took no notice of the excommunication ; but, after holding a Diet of the Barons of Apulia, he issued an appeal to Christendom, calling on all the sovereigns of Europe to shake off the intolerable yoke of the priests, and declaring his own innocence in the matter of the broken covenant. He called to witness the ill-treatment and ingratitude with which the Church had always repaid those who submitted—the malice and bitterness with which the Church had always persecuted those who refused to submit ; and he pointed to the power and wealth of Borne as contrasted with the poverty of the early Church. In the long history of the world's revolt against the pretensions of the priesthood, which has never for a moment ceased since these pretensions first began to make themselves heard, no more remarkable document has ever been issued, save only the famous theses of Luther. Frederick was rewarded by a second excommunication, and the pope placed every town in which he might be under interdict. Then the people of Borne rose in insurrection, and the pope fled. Frederick went to the Holy Land. If he wished to avoid fighting with his friends, the Saracens, he had certainly succeeded ; because the Crusaders, forty thousand in number, on hearing of Frederick's return to Italy, all reembarked and went home again. The king, notwithstand