Otto the Great was the first _German_ King who took this momentous step.

It involved him and his successors in a quarrel with the Bishops of Rome, who wished to be not only Heads of the Church, but lords of Italy, and did not hesitate to falsify archives in order to prove their pretended title to that country.
[Footnote A: German (Deutsch=diutisk) signifies originally "popular," opposed to "foreign"-- _e.g._, the Latin Church dialect.

It was first used as the name of a people, in the tenth century A.D.] The Popes made good this right, but they did not stop there.

Living in Rome, the sacred seat of the world-empire, and standing at the head of a Church which claimed universality, they, too, laid hold in their own way of the idea of universal imperium.

The notion was one of the boldest creations of the human intellect--to found and maintain a world-sovereignty almost wholly by the employment of spiritual powers.
Naturally these Papal pretensions led to feuds with the Empire.