Frederick
The Second
ERNST KANTOROWICZ (1895–1963) was a German-American historian of medieval political and intellectual history. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
FREDERICK THE SECOND
Wonder of the world: 1194-1250
Ernst Kantorowicz
AN APOLLO BOOK
www.headofzeus.com
Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (Hauptband) first published
in 1927 by Georg Bondi, Berlin
This English translation first published in 1931 by Constable & Co
Authorised English version by E.O. Lorimer
This hardback edition published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Klett-Cotta – J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung
Nachfolger GmbH, Stuttgart, 1927, 1994
Introduction © Dan Jones, 2019
The moral right of Eric Kantorowicz to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781789540833
ISBN (E): 9781789540840
Design: Steve Marking
Cover images and endpapers: Alamy Stock Photo
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Introduction
On Sunday 18 March 1229 Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor, tyrant of Sicily, ruler of Italians and Germans and bane of the popes, marched into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, snatched the crown of Jerusalem from the high altar and placed it on his own head. He was thirty-five years old: in the prime of his life and at the peak of his powers. This was, writes Ernst Kantorowicz, ‘the most memorable self-coronation of an Emperor that the world was to see till the days of Napoleon’. Like the little Corsican, Frederick had risen as if by sheer force of personality to stand, imperious and apparently invincible, astride the Western world. Unlike Napoleon, however, Frederick’s personal imperium realized the greatness not of France, but of Germany.
Kantorowicz published Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (Frederick the Second) in March 1927. He was 31. His whole academic career lay ahead of him, but in other areas of his life he was already a veteran. He had served with distinction in the First World War, being awarded the Iron Cross on the Western Front and the Iron Crescent in Anatolia. He had fought Communists during the uprisings in Germany that followed the war. Natty, snobby and obsessed with aristocrats, he had conducted love affairs with women and men, including the mistress of his commanding general in Asia Minor and a boggle-eyed young nobleman called Count Woldemar Uxkull, to whom Frederick the Second is dedicated. He had become a disciple of the nationalist poet-prophet Stefan George, an intolerant and charismatic maven whose devoted followers referred to him as Der Meister. He had never taken a single medieval history class.
Ahead of Kantorowicz lay escape from the Nazis and a distinguished career in American academia, which embraced him – sometimes uncomfortably – in exile. He would write two more, important, books: Laudes Regiae (1946), a composite study of liturgical acclamations of monarchy, and The King’s Two Bodies (1957), which examined medieval theories of statecraft.1 Neither resembled Frederick in the slightest. Late in life Kantorowicz distanced himself from Frederick, refusing to autograph copies and declaring that ‘the man who wrote that book died many years ago’.2 But he could not escape the work that made his name, even as he grew to regret it. Controversial in its historical methods, problematic in its politics and brilliantly, dazzlingly written, Frederick is a biographical epic in the old style: a masterpiece of grandiloquent, overblown prose steeped in learning broad and deep. It is both an inexcusable celebration of revanchist Teutonic autocracy, written by a young man who once stated that the highest goal of German foreign policy should be the obliteration of France, and a staggeringly great piece of writing. Neither of those things should overshadow the other.
The facts of Kantorowicz’s life are so improbable as to defy easy summation. A minutely researched and highly favourable biography by Robert E. Lerner, published in 2017, should be consulted for the full story. Suffice it to say here that Kantorowicz was born in 1895 in Posen (Poznán) to a Jewish family of liqueur and cordial manufacturers. He fell into George’s orbit during his twenties, following the war, and it was the poet who encouraged him to write Frederick, envisaging it as one of a series of ‘great man’ biographies that included works by other acolytes of the George circle on Nietzsche, Napoleon and Caesar.3 Kantorowicz’s ultra-nationalism and yearning for the Kaiser at the time he wrote Frederick is impossible to deny; so is the fact that the first German edition of this book carried a swastika on the cover – an emblem embraced by the publishing house, Bondi, for its oriental, spiritual origins but which in 1927 was obviously associated with Nazism. Adolf Hitler was said to have read Frederick twice. Hermann Göring gave Benito Mussolini a copy for his birthday.
But Kantorowicz was – contrary to claims made by serious people, including the historian Norman Cantor – no Nazi.4 His Jewish roots and a bold 1933 lecture given against Nazism ensured that he was ejected from the German academy once Hitler took power. He was sheltered from arrest or worse during Kristallnacht. He managed to escape the Third Reich only because a friend pulled strings with the Berlin police department. His elderly mother died in a concentration camp during the Second World War. His colleagues in the Stefan George circle were the Stauffenberg brothers, who tried to assassinate Hitler. His American career was nearly derailed in 1950 when he refused to take an oath of loyalty at the University of Berkeley; Kantorowicz likened McCarthyism to Nazism and was lucky to be awarded a post at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, where he saw out his days until his death in 1963. He was not a Nazi. But the verdict of the journalist and critic Jacob Heilbrunn, that Kantorowicz was an ‘imperious mandarin who viewed the passions of the vulgar multitude, whether in Germany or the United States, with contempt and disdain’, is harder to gainsay.5
To Frederick. The man who rose to rule his world was born in Jesi, near Italy’s Adriatic coast, in 1194. His father was the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, and his mother Constance was queen of Sicily. His grandfathers, therefore, were Frederick I Barbarossa and King Roger II: a diabolical combination. The thought of a single king who could master the states above the Alps and below the central Apennines tortured the papacy throughout the middle ages. Frederick – blond-bearded and somewhat cherubic in countenance – grew up to give the nightmare human form. He was excommunicated four times; Pope Gregory IX spoke of him as the devil. Frederick thought himself not a demon – that was a self-image dearer to his near-contemporary Richard the Lionheart – but the lineal descendant of the Roman emperors a thousand years before him. Kantorowicz shared and entirely approved this view, and correctly understood Frederick’s self-coronation as king of Jerusalem in 1229 as the logical end of his antique ambition, although as is the case throughout Frederick the Second, the scene in the Holy Sepulchre is presented in more than political terms.
For Kantorowicz Frederick’s coronation on the very spot where Christ achieved his own crown – that of martyrdom – was the completion of destiny. Frederick the Second is distinguished (or, in
the view of its critics down the years, fatally marred) by its jut-jawed anti-positivism. Myth, legend, prophecy, poetry, melodrama and fatalism are all marshalled alongside the more familiar tools of careful source analysis, charter-reading, chronicle-testing and diligent, methodical plod. In no sense is it the work of the cautious scholar who does his homework and nothing beyond. Frederick the Second begins by quoting Virgil. It ends with a lament for the once and future king. In the seven hundred pages that lie between we see at work a great historian who has bigger things than history on his mind. This is why Kantorowicz is worth reading. This is why he must be handled with care.
Frederick II Hohenstaufen was known by contemporaries as stupor mundi – the wonder of the world. A renaissance man, we might call him, had he died in 1450 and not 1250. Besides being a mighty politician, a warrior, a negotiator, a tyrant and an emperor, he was an expert in falconry – on which he wrote a definitive text – and a polymath. His Sicilian blood and upbringing lent him a rare understanding of the Islamic world – Latin chroniclers tutted at the sight of ‘Saracen’ dancing girls in his entourage, but this was the man whose close relations with the Ayyubid sultan Al-Kamil brokered peace in the Middle East at the height of the Crusades. He was by no means a paragon of tolerance or multiculturalism. Quite the opposite: he forced the Jews of Sicily to wear yellow stars and conducted ethnic cleansing of the Sicilian Arabs. Nevertheless, it is salutary to consider that while successive popes threw Frederick out of the community of the faithful and Dante placed him among the heretics in Hell, today Frederick might well have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The first English translation of Frederick the Second was published in 1931. It has for many years been out of print, available only in large or specialist libraries. This new edition returns a mercurial, bravura work to the bookshelves, from which it has been absent too long.
DAN JONES
Staines-upon-Thames
January 2019
Notes
1 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., Laudes regiae: a study in liturgical acclamations and mediaeval ruler worship (Berkeley, 1946); Kantorowicz, Ernst H., The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957).
2 Lerner, Robert E., Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life (Princeton and Oxford, 2017), p. 115.
3 Bertram, Ernst, Nietzsche. Versuch einer Mythologie (Berlin, 1918); Vallentin, Berthold, Napoleon (Berlin, 1923); Gundolf, Friedrich, Caesar. Geschichte seines Ruhms (Berlin, 1925).
4 Cantor, Norman F., Inventing The Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991), p. 95.
5 Heilbrunn, Jacob, ‘The Kantorowicz Conundrum’ in The National Interest, 16 April 2017.
To My Friend
Woldemar Count Uxkull-Gyllenband
In Grateful Acknowledgment
Contents
Welcome Page
Copyright
Introduction
Dedication
Prefatory Note
Translator’s Note
List of Maps
Chronological Table
Summary Of Sources
I. Frederick’s Childhood
Prophecies
Birth in Jesi, Dec. 26, 1194
Character of Henry VI
Hohenstaufen conception of Empire
Baptism
Death of Henry VI
Philip of Swabia; Otto of Brunswick
Sicilian hatred of Germans
Papal policy towards Sicily
Constance’s Concordat with Rome; death, 1198
Innocent: Deliberatio super facto imperii
The Sicilian myth
Markward of Anweiler; Walter of Palear; Walter of Brienne
The Saracens of Sicily
Pisa and Genoa
San Germano
Frederick of age, 1208
Episcopal elections
Wedding with Constance of Aragon, 1209
Death of Aragon knights
Revolt of island barons
II. Puer Apuliae
Innocent III becomes Pope
Theories of the Papacy
The Priest-State
Murder of Philip of Swabia
Otto of Brunswick crowned in Rome, 1209
Revolt of Apulian nobles
Otto deposed
Frederick sets out for Rome, March 1212
Genoa, Cremona, Chur, Constance
The Children’s Crusade
Alliance with French
Re-elected German King, Dec. 1212
Crowned in Mainz, 1212
The regia stirps of the Hohenstaufen
The Welf-Waibling feud
Guelf and Ghibelline in Italy
The Ghibelline spirit
Bouvines, 1214
Golden Bull of Eger
Lateran Council, 1216
Innocent’s death, 1216
Frederick’s entry into Aix; coronation
Barbarossa’s re-interment of Charlemagne, 1165
Frederick takes the Cross
III. Early Statesmanship
Death of Otto
Dawn of national consciousness in Germany
Knight and Monk
The Cistercians
The Templars
The Teutonic Order: Hermann of Salza
War with Denmark
The Golden Bull of Rimini, 1226
Pope Honorius III
King Henry elected King of the Romans
Diplomatic victory over the Papacy
Coronation in Rome; ceremonial
De resignandis privilegiis
The Sicilian barons
Diet of Capua
Count of Molise
Deportation of people of Celano
Remodelling of the Feudal System
Architecture
Diet of Messina, 1221
Syracuse
Measures against foreign trade
Creation of Sicilian fleet
Saracen war
Lucera
University of Naples
Crusading disasters; San Germano
Death of Constance of Aragon, 1222
Marriage with Isabella of Jerusalem, 1225
Birth of Conrad
Berard of Palermo
Lombard League
Feud of Cremona and Milan
Franciscans and Dominicans
Diet of Cremona prevented by Lombards, 1226
Leonardo of Pisa
St. Francis
Death of Honorius III
Gregory IX
IV. The Crusade
Rendezvous in Brindisi, 1227
Plague
Frederick falls ill and turns back
Hostility of Gregory IX
Excommunication
Gregory’s entente with Lombards
Loyalty of Rome to Frederick
Frederick’s first manifesto
Frederick sails for East, June 1228
Gregory attacks Sicily
Frederick recovers Cyprus
Lands at Acre
Treaty with al Kamil; 10-year truce
Saracen chivalry
Treachery of Templars
Influence of East on Frederick
Entry into Jerusalem, March 17, 1229
Self-Coronation, March 18
Jerusalem manifesto
Last scenes in Palestine
Frederick lands at Brindisi, June 1229
Exeunt papal troops from Sicily
Attitude of Gregory IX; truce
Peace of Ceperano
V. Tyrant of Sicily
Influence of Eastern success
Affection for Sicily
Three emperor models
Constitutions of Melfi, 1231
Expectation of Golden Age and End of World
Augustales minted
Frederick’s birthday a public holiday
I
Liber Augustalis
Cult of Justitia
Invocation of imperial name
“Crown Prosecution”
Theory
of the “Fall”
Necessitas
Dante’s de Monarchia
The Divine Comedy
II
Pope Gregory and the Liber Augustalis
Relation of Church and State
Zeal against heretics
Muslims and Jews
State organisation: justiciars, notaries
Conditions of service
Treatment of suspects
Rebellious towns
Augusta
Uniformity and simplification of government
Town-creation; frontier protection
Monopolies
Customs and revenue
Weights and measures
Fairs and markets
The Emperor as trader
Taxation
Commercial agreements
Overseas consuls and embassies
A Sicilian nation
Marriage ordinances
III
Triumph of lay culture
Petrus de Vinea (Piero della Vigna)
Frederick’s public speaking
Frederick amongst intimates
Youthfulness of Sicilian court
Frederick’s retainers; menagerie
Famous families in his service
Thomas Aquinas
Valetti imperatoris
Frederick’s sons
Chivalry at court
Foggia: banquets, revelry
Michael Scot
Sicilian poetry; use of vernacular
Intellectual thought at court
Learning at court
Astronomy and Astrology
Hebrew scholars
Spirit of Enquiry; Ibn Sabin of Ceuta
Research and experiment
De arte venandi cum avibus
The art of seeing “things that are, as they are”
Frederick’s personal appearance
VI. German Emperor
Pope and Emperor in harmony
Diet of Ravenna, 1231
King Henry; Diet of Worms, 1231
Diet of Friuli, 1232
Growing autonomy of German Princes
Theory of German Empire
Burgundy
Loss of Cyprus
Frederick aids Pope against Romans
Ideal relation of Empire and Papacy
Inquisition
Dominicans and Franciscans
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