Hello and welcome to the history of the Germans.

Episode 75 Wet Pants and Other Miracles.

Otto the 4, sign of one of the oldest and most aristocratic families in the world,

had achieved what so many of his ancestors had craved, ruling

the empire.

This week we'll follow him to his coronation and the sequence of Eros that will leave him

back home in Brunswick alone and forgotten.

At the same time his nemesis, the child of Poulli, the impoverished 15-year-old king of Sicily and son of Emperor Henry VI, young Frederick II, rises to the imperial crown on a wing and some very potent prayer.

Before we start, just a reminder.

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All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com slash history of the Germans or on my website,

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Sanjay, Jason and Quitchris who've already signed up. Now last week we saw Philip of Swabia

grinding towards ultimate victory against his arrival

for the imperial title, Otto the fourth.

Otto had run out of money, when his English sponsor King John Lackland cut off the flow

of subsidies.

The endorsement by Pope Innocent III also proved to be worth a lot less than he had hoped

for, and finally he had managed to alienate

his two most important allies, his brother Henry, the Count Palatinate on the Rhine,

and Archbishop Adolf of Cologne. Otto the 4th had rejected a last, very generous offer

...