The long struggle between the Mediaeval Church and the Mediaeval Empire, between the priest and the warrior, ended in the earlier half of the thirteenth century, in the overthrow of the Hohenstaufens and left the Papacy sole inheritor of the claim of ancient Rome to be sovereign of the civilised world. The picturesque religious background of this conception of the Church of Christ as a great temporal empire had been furnished by St. Augustine although probably he would have been the first to protest against the use made of his vision of the City of God.