Secular and Religious Power: Innocent III

The church was a major influence in international politics, in the internal affairs of regions, in fostering a sense of identity at the level of local communities, and in giving individuals a sense of location and purpose within a greater scheme of things. The church had always played an important international role in European society. Medieval Europe bore little relation to its modern counterpart, composed of individual well-defined nation-states. In the Middle Ages, Europe consisted of an aggregate of generally small principalities, city- states, and regions, often defined and given a shared sense of identity more by language and historical factors than by any sense of common political identity.

At the start of the fourteenth century, for example, Italy was little more than a patchwork of independent city-states and petty principalities. These were consolidated into six major political units during the fifteenth century: the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, the Papal States and the three major city-states of Florence, Venice, and Milan. The modern nation- state of Italy was the result of the Risorgimento of the nineteenth century. In much the same way Germany, destined to play a particularly significant role in the events of the age, consisted of a myriad of tiny territories. Even as late as the opening of the nineteenth century, there were still thirty-two German states and territories, which were only finally united into the German empire in the later nineteenth century