Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  Gregory IX, however, was not; and the final reconciliation between the two was a long and painful process. In the following months the emperor made concession after concession, knowing as he did that the obstinate old pope still retained his most damaging weapon. Frederick was still excommunicate: a serious embarrassment, a permanent reproach, and a potentially dangerous diplomatic liability. As a Christian, too—insofar as he was one—Frederick would have had no wish to die under the ban of the Church. But still Gregory prevaricated; it was not until July 1230 that, very reluctantly, he agreed to a peace treaty—signed at Ceprano at the end of August—and lifted his sentence.

  Some weeks later, the two men dined together in the papal palace at Anagni. The dinner, one feels, must have been far from convivial, at least in its early stages, but Frederick was capable of enormous charm when he wanted to use it, and the pope seems to have been genuinely gratified that the Holy Roman Emperor should have taken the trouble to pay him an informal visit. So ended, for the time being, yet another of those Herculean struggles between pope and emperor on which the history of medieval Europe seems so frequently to have turned.

  THE TRUCE PROVED, inevitably, uneasy; but it lasted for nine years, during which time each party rendered the other useful service. When, in 1234, the Romans staged one of their periodic revolts, demanding the abolition of clerical immunities as well as the right to raise taxes and strike coinage, Frederick instantly answered Gregory’s appeal for aid and forced their submission. In return the emperor sought papal assistance in his difficulties with the Lombard cities; Gregory did his best to mediate and obligingly excommunicated Frederick’s refractory son Henry, King of the Germans, who was plotting with the Lombards against his father. All too soon, however, the rifts began to appear. His attempts at mediation having failed, the pope was seriously concerned when Frederick summoned the help of German princes in subduing the Lombard cities by force; he clearly could not allow the emperor to ride roughshod over North Italy and impose on it the same degree of autocracy as prevailed in the South. Were he to do so, what was to prevent an imperial invasion of the Papal States and the consequent absorption of the whole of Italy into the empire?

  Then, in November 1237, Frederick smashed the Lombards at Cortenuova. They fled by night, leaving behind the splendid Milanese carroccio, the ceremonial war chariot that carried the standards and served as a rallying point for the army. To heighten the impact of his victory, the emperor then entered Cremona, where he awarded himself a triumph on the ancient Roman pattern. Behind him and his victorious soldiers marched the captured Lombard commanders in fetters; the carroccio itself was drawn through the streets by an elephant from the menagerie which accompanied Frederick on all his travels, with Pietro Tiepolo, a son of the Doge of Venice and sometime podestà (governor) of Milan, bound to its central flagpole. For Gregory, this was additional proof that the Papacy was in mortal danger, and when in the following year Frederick sent his bastard son Enzio to Sardinia—a papal fief—arranging for him to marry a noble Sardinian girl and designating him king, his worst suspicions were confirmed.

  By 1239 relations between the two were once again as bad as they had ever been. Papal agents were sowing dissension in Germany; others were working on the Lombards, stiffening their resolve after Cortenuova. Meanwhile, the emperor was secretly intriguing with the cardinals to get rid of Gregory once and for all. The inevitable result was yet another sentence of excommunication. Frederick was quite accustomed to this by now, but it served as a useful excuse for war. Insults flew back and forth: the pope was “a Pharisee seated on the chair of pestilence, anointed with the oil of wickedness,” who should be deposed forthwith; the emperor was the forerunner of Antichrist, the monster of the Apocalypse, “the furious beast from the sea.”6 Then Frederick marched. In 1240 his troops surrounded Rome, though they did not enter the city. The pope retaliated by summoning a General Council of the Church, to convene at Easter 1241. It was, in a sense, a challenge: would or would not those attending be allowed unrestricted passage? But the emperor called his bluff. The German churchmen were forbidden to attend. With all land routes closed, the French cardinals and bishops were obliged to travel by sea; their ships were intercepted by the imperial fleet, and over a hundred distinguished churchmen were taken prisoner.

  For Pope Gregory, now in his late eighties, this last blow was too much. His spirit was unbroken, but his old body was ravaged by kidney disease. He struggled on as best he could, but the Roman summer proved too much for him and on August 22 he died. Frederick, who was probably well aware that his old enemy’s end was near, had remained outside Rome. He had always maintained that he had no quarrel with the Church, only with the pope personally; on Gregory’s death, therefore, he quietly returned to Sicily.

  The pontificate of Gregory IX was completely overshadowed by his battle with the emperor. He did, however, make one significant contribution to canon law, publishing in 1234 what was known as the Liber Extra, the first complete collection of papal decretals, which was to remain the fundamental authority until the early twentieth century. Like his predecessor, he looked benevolently on the mendicant orders, canonizing Francis in 1228 and Dominic six years later. It was unfortunate that he should have entrusted to those orders—and particularly the Dominicans—the administration of the papal Inquisition, which, among the Albigenses in the Languedoc, was becoming increasingly brutal.

  If Gregory’s successor, the hopeless old Celestine IV, had lived, Frederick’s worries might have been almost at an end, but after just seventeen days Celestine followed Gregory to the grave. For the next year and a half the emperor, while simultaneously preparing a huge fleet to sail against Genoa and Venice, did everything he could to influence the next election, but in vain; the Genoese Cardinal Sinibaldo Fieschi, who in June 1243 became Pope Innocent IV, though he lacked his predecessor’s vehement intemperance, was to prove, if anything, an even more determined adversary than Gregory had been. Only two years after his accession, at a General Council in Lyons, he declared the already excommunicated Frederick deposed, stripping him of all his dignities and titles.

  But emperors could not be thrown out so easily. The Hohenstaufen name retained immense prestige in Germany, while in Frederick’s own kingdom his endless peregrinations had ensured him a consistently high profile, to the point where he seemed omnipresent—part of life itself. Loftily ignoring the papal pronouncement, he continued the struggle; Innocent fought back, supporting two successive antikings whom he had had elected by the German princes, using the mendicant orders to preach a Crusade against the emperor, and even at one point conniving in a plot to assassinate him. He spent considerable amounts of money on bribes and would have spent more if the papal treasury had not been virtually empty; on his accession he had been besieged by a mob of creditors demanding the repayment of debts incurred by Pope Gregory.

  King Louis IX of France did his best to mediate, but the quarrel was too deep, and the two were still at daggers drawn when, in December 1250 during a hunting trip in Apulia, Frederick suffered a violent attack of dysentery. He died a few days later at Castel Fiorentino, just thirteen days short of his fifty-sixth birthday. His body was taken to Palermo Cathedral, where, at his request, it was consigned to the magnificent porphyry sarcophagus that had been prepared for his grandfather Roger II and can still be seen there today.

  AS HIS HEIR in Germany and the Regno—as his South Italian and Sicilian kingdom was now called—Frederick had named Conrad, son of Yolande of Jerusalem, and during Conrad’s absence in Germany he had entrusted the government of Italy and Sicily to Manfred, the favorite of his eleven illegitimate children. Manfred proved a worthy scion of his father. He re-created Frederick’s brilliant court, founded the Apulian port of Manfredonia, and—by marrying his daughter to the Despot of Epirus—acquired for the empire the island of Corfu and a considerable stretch of the Albanian coast. Before long he had absorbed much of the Papal States, the March of Ancona, Spoleto, and the Romagna. He did not,
to the pope’s inexpressible relief, claim authority over North Italy; nevertheless, his increasing power in the South could not but reawaken anxieties in Rome, and these became greater still when, in August 1258, the Sicilian baronage proclaimed him king.

  Ever since Frederick’s theoretical deposition, Innocent IV—and, after his death in 1254, his successor (and Gregory IX’s nephew), the gentle, easygoing, and ultimately ineffectual Alexander IV—had been seeking an “athlete of Christ” who would rid South Italy once and for all of the House of Hohenstaufen and lead the army of the Church to victory in the peninsula. Richard, Earl of Cornwall, a brother of the English King Henry III, had seemed at one moment a possibility, but had finally refused to take up the challenge; so too—after the pope had actually invested him with the southern kingdom—had King Henry’s son Edmund. In 1261, however, Alexander died at Viterbo, where, to avoid the factional strife in Rome, he had spent most of his pontificate, and after three months of inconclusive deliberations the cardinals elected a rank outsider, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who happened to be visiting the Curia at Viterbo in his official capacity. Jacques Pantaléon was a Frenchman, the son of a poor cobbler in Troyes. He took the name of Urban IV; and his eye soon fell on a compatriot, Charles of Anjou.

  The brother of King Louis IX, Charles was now thirty-five. In 1246 he had acquired through his wife the county of Provence, which had brought him untold wealth; he was also lord, inter alia, of the thriving port of Marseille. To this cold, cruel, and vastly ambitious opportunist the pope was now offering a chance not to be missed. In return for a lump sum of 50,000 marks and the promise of an annual tribute of 10,000 ounces of gold, together with military aid as required, Charles would be enfeoffed with the Kingdom of South Italy and Sicily. The army which he was to lead against Manfred, and which began to assemble in North Italy in the autumn of 1265, would be officially designated a Crusade—which meant that it would be, as always, something of a rag-bag, with the usual admixture of adventurers hoping to secure fiefs in South Italy, pilgrims seeking the remission of their sins, and ruffians simply out for what they could get. With them, however, was an impressive number of knights from all over western Europe—French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Provençal, with even a few Englishmen thrown in for good measure—who, Charles firmly believed, would be more than a match for anything that Manfred could fling against them.

  On January 6, 1266—Epiphany—a group of cardinals in Rome crowned Charles of Anjou with the crown of Sicily. (Neither Pope Urban nor his successor, Clement IV, ever went near the Holy City, preferring to remain at Anagni or Viterbo.) Less than a month later, on February 3, Charles’s troops crossed the frontier into the Regno and met Manfred’s outside Benevento on the twenty-sixth. It was all over quite quickly. Manfred, courageous as always, stood his ground and went down fighting, but his troops, hopelessly outnumbered, soon fled from the field. The battle had been decisive: the Crusade was over.

  And so—or very nearly—was the House of Hohenstaufen. Two years later Manfred’s son Conrad IV, better known as Conradin, made a last desperate attempt to save the situation, leading an army of Germans, Italians, and Spaniards into the Regno. Charles hurried up and met them on August 23, 1268, at the border village of Tagliacozzo. This time the battle proved a good deal harder, resulting in hideous slaughter on both sides, but the Angevins again won the day. Conradin escaped but was captured soon afterward. There followed a show trial in Naples, after which, on October 29, the young prince—he was just sixteen—and several of his companions were taken down to the marketplace and publicly beheaded.

  Manfred and Conradin were both, in their different ways, heroes. It was hardly their fault that they were overshadowed by their father and grandfather; so, after all, was much of the known world. The fact remains that, politically, Frederick had been a failure. Like virtually all the Hohenstaufen, he had a dream of making Italy and Sicily a united kingdom within the empire, with its capital at Rome; the overriding purpose of the Papacy, aided by the cities and towns of Lombardy, was to ensure that that dream should never be realized. It was unfortunate for the emperor that he should have had to contend with two such able and determined men as Gregory and Innocent, but in the long run the struggle could have had no other outcome. The empire, even in Germany, had lost its strength and cohesion; no longer could the loyalty of the German princes, or even their deep concern, be relied upon. As for North and Central Italy, the Lombard cities would never again submit to imperial bluster. Had Frederick only accepted this simple truth, the threat to the Papacy would have been removed and his beloved Regno might well have been preserved. Alas, he rejected it; and in doing so he not only lost Italy, he signed his dynasty’s death warrant.

  The Hohenstaufen were defeated; but it would be a mistake to see the Papacy as victorious. Urban and Clement were both Frenchmen; they had done everything they could to support their compatriot Charles of Anjou. Clement had not even protested at the cruel and vindictive execution of young Conradin. It had been the intention of both popes, however, that Charles’s authority should be confined to his new Sicilian kingdom; instead, his early victories had awakened far greater ambitions in him. These now encompassed the domination of all Italy, the reduction of the pope to the status of a submissive puppet, the reconquest yet again of Constantinople—now once more in Greek hands—its return to the Latin faith, and, ultimately, the establishment of a Christian empire that would extend the length and breadth of the Mediterranean. With every day that passed it was becoming clearer that his threat to the independence of the Holy See was potentially as great as Frederick’s had ever been.

  In November 1268 Pope Clement died at Viterbo, and it says much for Charles’s influence in the Curia that he was able to keep the papal throne unoccupied for the next three years, conveniently covering the period that he was away Crusading in Tunisia with his brother Louis IX. The vacancy ended only when the authorities at Viterbo, where the conclave was being held, actually removed the roof from the palace in which the cardinals were deliberating. Their hasty choice had then fallen on Tedaldo Visconti, Archdeacon of Liège, who as Gregory X proved from Charles’s point of view distinctly unhelpful, thwarting his attempts to have his nephew Philip III of France elected Holy Roman Emperor and allying himself with Byzantium to the extent of actually effecting, at the Council of Lyons in 1274, a temporary union of the Eastern and Western churches. Only in 1281, after four more popes had come and gone,7 did Charles get his way at last with the election of another Frenchman, Simon de Brie, who was crowned at Orvieto as Pope Martin IV. Already master of Provence and the greater part of Italy, titular King of Jerusalem,8 and by a long way the most powerful—and dangerous—prince in Europe, Charles was now free to realize his greatest ambition by marching against Constantinople—whose emperor, Michael VIII Palaeologus, Pope Martin had obligingly redeclared schismatic. It was only twenty years since the Greeks had recovered their capital from the Franks; as 1282 opened, their chances of keeping it looked slim indeed.

  They were saved by the people of Palermo. The French were already hated throughout the Regno for both the severity of their taxation and the arrogance of their conduct; and when, on the evening of March 30, a drunken French sergeant began importuning a Sicilian woman outside the church of Santo Spirito just as vespers were about to begin, her countrymen’s anger boiled over. The sergeant was set upon by her husband and killed; the murder led to a riot, the riot to a massacre. Two thousand Frenchmen were dead by morning. Palermo, and soon afterward Messina also, was in rebel hands. And now Peter III of Aragon, husband of Manfred’s daughter Constance, saw his chance to make good his somewhat shadowy claim to the Sicilian crown. He reached Palermo in September and by the end of October had captured Messina, where the French had made their last stand.

  For Charles of Anjou, who had established his court in Naples, the War of the Sicilian Vespers and the consequent loss of Sicily spelled disaster. His kingdom was split down the middle, his reputation gone. His vaunted M
editerranean empire was seen to have been built on sand; he had ceased to be a world power. There could no longer be any question of an expedition against Byzantium. Little more than two years later he died at Foggia. But it was not only the reputation of the House of Anjou that had suffered. There was also the fact that Sicily and the Regno had been granted to Charles by the pope; the Papacy too had to look to its prestige. Martin had promptly proclaimed a Crusade against the Aragonese, but nobody took it very seriously; and it was a sad and disappointed pontiff who—having in March 1285 dined too well on milk-fed eels from Lake Bolsena—followed his friend Charles to the grave.

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  THE PRINCIPAL TASK of the next two popes was to expel the House of Aragon from South Italy and to restore that of Anjou. The first of the two, Honorius IV,9 being of a distinguished Roman family, was at least allowed to take up residence in the palace he had recently built on the Aventine; but he was already seventy-five on his accession and almost paralyzed by gout. He could hardly stand, let alone walk; he said Mass sitting on a stool, while his hands needed a mechanical contrivance to raise them from the altar. He reigned for only two years, and nearly a year was to pass before his successor was elected. The summer of 1287 was stiflingly hot and killed off no fewer than six cardinals. The rest fled to the hills, returning in the autumn for their conclave. Even now they took their time: it was not till February 1288 that they elected, as a compromise, the first Franciscan pope, a former general of the order, Girolamo Masci. As Nicholas IV, he was no more successful at restoring the Angevins than Honorius had been; nor, in 1291, could he do anything to prevent the Mameluke Sultan Qalawun from capturing Acre, thus putting an end, after 192 years, to Crusader Outremer. From its beginnings it had been a monument to intolerance and territorial ambition, its story one of steady physical and moral decline accompanied by monumental incompetence. Few people in western Europe were sorry to see it go.