Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  Pope Innocent was not to be troubled with the boy much longer. Like the other Hohenstaufens Frederick matured extremely early, but it was not that unhappy precocity (so often observed in Germans) which precedes a rapid exhaustion of strength after the prime. That old saying, which Pope Innocent once quoted of his ward, “the manhood of a Caesar sets in before its time” might apply to the whole house of Hohenstaufen. The country of his boyhood and the self-reliance which his severe youth imposed on Frederick as a child probably accentuated this natural tendency. The Pope at any rate reported that the boy was striding to the threshold of maturity with winged feet, and that day by day he grew in wisdom and efficiency. Men praised his clearheadedness and shrewdness and remarked that you must not judge Frederick by the tale of his years, for in knowledge he was already a man and in dignity already a ruler. In spite of his almost superhuman ability Frederick was no artificially-reared phenomenon, but merely the best that can be hoped from youth. It was the thoroughness and completeness of his development, his absolute normality that was remarkable; he was completus they said. Similarly of his stature: “You must not picture the King as exactly small, but neither must you imagine him taller than befits his years.” And another writes: “So completely has the King developed the knowledge and strength suited to his age that you will find in him only what would grace a perfect man.” Thus the moment rapidly approached when Frederick could shake off the yoke of guardianship. In accordance with the feudal law of Sicily he came of age as King of Sicily with the completion of his fourteenth year.

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  Pope Innocent was anxious completely to fulfil his duties as guardian before finally releasing his ward. He married the boy. The Empress Constance had had in view a matrimonial alliance with the royal house of Aragon, and when Frederick at seven fell into the hands of Markward of Anweiler the Pope for practical reasons took up the scheme again. In 1202 he negotiated a betrothal between his ward and Sancha, the sister of King Peter of Aragon. The Pope’s calculation in the matter was that King Peter would have to send a body of Spanish knights to Sicily to free Frederick from the power of Markward the German. He hoped, moreover, that the Spanish Queen-Mother would go to live in Sicily to bring the boy and girl together. For the Pope did not consider wholly suitable or desirable the exclusively male atmosphere in which Frederick was growing up. But the Pope’s plans fell through and the betrothal was cancelled. During the following years, however, Innocent did not lose sight of an alliance that would spell no small advantage to the Church—Aragon, like Sicily, was a feudal fief of the Holy See. After lengthy criss-cross negotiations he brought about another betrothal—which irresistibly recalls the fables of the patriarchs and other fairy tales. Frederick is now to marry, not the young Sancha, to whom he was originally engaged, but her much older sister, Constance. Constance had been married to the King of Hungary, had just recently been widowed and was a full ten years older than the Hohenstaufen lad. The Pope had considerable difficulty in gaining the consent of the fourteen-year-old Frederick to this match, but here for the first time he bowed to immediate State necessity. Constance of Aragon promised to bring him as her dowry five hundred Spanish knights to help him to reconquer his completely disintegrated Sicilian kingdom. And this troop of warriors—who ultimately were to prove a bitter disillusionment—seemed to the boy so invaluable that he was willing to accept the wife into the bargain. For, although he had made some most promising attempts, he could scarcely hope unaided to establish order in the whirlpool of anarchy that had been raging for so many years. Pope Innocent had, it is true, during the last years of his guardianship, seriously bestirred himself to establish a passable state of affairs in Sicily, though he hoped that the really essential work would be done by the Aragon contingent. He had, however, himself crossed the frontier into the kingdom and had assembled the Sicilian nobles in San Germano (near Monte Cassino on the border of the States of the Church) and had proclaimed a general peace throughout the land. To maintain this peace he appointed the two most powerful vassals of continental Sicily as Grand-Captains, hoping thus to neutralise their dangerous power. The papal efforts were not of any very decisive value, but, nevertheless, after the years of chaos the hand of authority began to be felt in the northern half of the kingdom, the Sicily that marched with the States of the Church. In the island itself, on the other hand, everything remained in a bad way until the young King, soon after attaining his majority, began to tackle matters himself with zeal and vigour. As soon as he was independent the boy—only just fourteen—displayed extreme daring. He issued challenges simultaneously in several directions against those who actually or apparently infringed his royal rights. On the 26th of December, 1208, the king’s fifteenth birthday, the Pope formally laid down his guardianship. From this moment Frederick ruled alone. Two weeks later followed his first brush with the Pope, the mighty Innocent—a beginning full of promise. The point at issue was the appointment of a new incumbent to the Archbishopric of Palermo. With the King’s approval the Cathedral Chapter proposed an election. Three of the Chapter, however, objected, for reasons unknown, and appealed to the Pope. The King considered this appeal a direct infringement of his authority. He banished the appellants from the kingdom, and wrote to the astonished Pope that the moderation of his action was solely due to the respect he felt for the Pope personally and for the Church in general. Innocent III, one of the most powerful rulers the world has known, was at that moment recognised by all the monarchs of Europe as the verus Imperator of Christendom. He by no means shared his ward’s view of the situation. According to the Concordat which Constance had signed with him the right of the Sicilian king in episcopal elections was confined to one single point: the Chapter elected the Bishop without royal interference, but the King’s consent was necessary before the enthronement could take place. The final word, however, remained with the Church, for even after his enthronement the Bishop could officiate only after the Pope in final instance had ratified the election. Thus, even if the King and Chapter were at one in their choice of the future Bishop, the Pope retained the right to reject a persona ingrata—and the persona grata of the King was almost invariably ingrata to the Pope. According to this Concordat, therefore, Frederick had only the right of consent. He had not the shadow of a right to prevent a direct appeal to the Pope, even if this would have been contrary to the older, now abrogated, privileges of the Norman Kings. Pope Innocent was wise enough to dismiss this affair with a long exhortation couched in paternal terms, the gist of which was that Frederick had lent an ear to unwise counsellors. He must let secular business suffice him and not stretch out a hand towards affairs of the spirit which were reserved for the Pope alone. “It would have beseemed thee to reflect, and to have been warned thereby,” he wrote, “how by the evil-doing of thy forefathers in seeking to arrogate to themselves spiritual authority, thy kingdom was plunged into the chaos and confusion that thou wottest of.” A detailed exposition of the Empress’s Concordat followed, and Innocent concluded his homily with the command that the banished members of the Cathedral Chapter should be forthwith summoned back to Palermo.

  Frederick was unquestionably in the wrong and had no option but to obey. The interesting point is this: that in his very first act of government Frederick had put his finger with unerring instinct on the vital question of episcopal election which was for decades to provide the ostensible bone of contention in his quarrels with the Curia. In compensation for this setback Frederick had greater success in another direction. We cannot be quite sure what the first measures were which the young King took to restore order in his kingdom, but he must have accomplished much more in this way than it has till recently been the fashion to recognise. One thing is certain: in the spring of 1209 he undertook a royal progress “with great force” through Sicily, by way of Nicosia to Catania and on to Messina. We learn from his own words that this was no peaceful pilgrimage: he quelled “the sons of disturbance who hated peace, so that they bent their necks under his yoke.” Within a f
ew months the fourteen-year-old King had more than half subdued the North-East of the island and was evolving further plans of action. Individual proclamations, whose authoritative tone leaves nothing to be desired, indicate clearly that he was intending to cross to the mainland and re-establish there his royal authority. For that he wanted Aragon assistance.

  While Frederick was still a minor his marriage with Constance had been celebrated in the cathedral of Saragossa, a Sicilian Bishop acting as the King’s proxy. The Queen’s arrival in Palermo was planned for March 1209, but she did not reach the Sicilian capital till August. She was accompanied by her brother, Count Alfonso of Provence, and the five hundred promised knights. Frederick, who was still in Messina, hastened to Palermo, where the wedding ceremonies were solemnised forthwith. Immediately after the festivities Frederick wanted to set out for Messina, to undertake without delay his projected campaign on the mainland. A year before, the Pope, on the day of San Germano, had gathered together several hundred feudal knights, and these with the Spanish contingent would have constituted a very considerable force. All the hopes of the young King were doomed. The Spaniards, on whose help he had so eagerly counted, were struck down—either during their preparations for the start, or immediately after leaving Palermo—by an epidemic of plague, which slew the majority of them, including Count Alfonso the Queen’s brother. This tragedy rendered the projected campaign impossible. Worse still, the discontented Sicilian barons seized the opportunity of their King’s embarrassment to form a conspiracy to rid themselves of their inconvenient master: a prelude to many a similar occurrence. In the most amazing manner Frederick contrived to quell the revolt. The ringleader was a Calabrian count. He was taken prisoner, and Frederick on his side seized the opportunity to wring from the conspirators a part of the Demanium, the royal demesne, which they had unjustly seized during the days of the Regency.

  This success demonstrated the determination and forcefulness of the young King, but also, alas, the full hopelessness of his position. He was irredeemably impoverished, and without foreign aid he could never succeed in accomplishing anything in Sicily. It had been decreed by his “two mothers,” the Roman Church, his spiritual mother, and the Empress Constance, his mother in the flesh, that he was to wear out his life in his Sicilian inheritance and in Palermo, the “fortunate city”; but the decree was theirs alone. Other tasks were to be laid on him. While he was still pluckily pitting himself against the Sicilian chaos, important events had been taking place in Germany. More than a year before, in June 1208, King Philip of Swabia had been treacherously murdered in Bamberg by the Count Palatine, Otto of Wittelsbach. Frederick, the Pope’s ward, was now the last of the Hohenstaufen. A new vista opened before him: the mothers could no longer hold him down, the call had come to rise and join his fathers.

  * The German feud of Welf v. Waibling crossed the Alps and lay beneath the Italian struggle of Guelf and Ghibelline, which Italianised forms are more familiar to some.—Tr.

  † The taren was the gold coin current at the time in Sicily. 30 tarens = 1 gold ounce; 1 taren = 20 grains. Tarens were minted in the royal mints of Messina, Brindisi and Naples.—Tr.

  ‡ The non-specialist reader will remember the existence of Two Sicilies.—Tr.

  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

  II. Puer Apuliae

  Pope Innocent III—by birth Lotario dei Conti—presided over the Christian world with a plenitude of actual power which many a bishop of Rome has claimed, but none other before or since has exercised. This learned priest, with his aristocratic Roman features, his majestic and distinguished air, was favoured in no common measure by the moment of his birth. He studied theology and law in Paris and Bologna and was completely master of the learning of the day. He was barely thirty-seven when in 1198 he mounted the papal throne, three months after the death of Henry VI.

  The world which that great Hohenstaufen Emperor had welded into temporary unity immediately fell to pieces at his death, and no single power was competent seriously to challenge the papal claims still inspired by the spirit of Gregory VII. It was generally recognised as the particular business of the Roman Emperor to hold the balance of power against the Pope, but in the Imperium of that day there was no Caesar. It was rent asunder by the Welf-Waibling faction-fight, and so—since the world needs must look to an overlord—Pope Innocent held sway within the Empire as almost the verus imperator which he was called by his contemporary, Gervase of Tilbury.

  The phrase was no idle curial flattery: Innocent’s own figures of speech were more arrogant still, though it was reserved for Dante’s pope, Boniface VIII, nearly a century later to coin the classic formula of papal-imperial majesty: “Ego sum Caesar, ego imperator,” before with him there passed away the two centuries of papal claim to world dominion initiated by Gregory VII.

  Innocent III, holding a place in time half way between Gregory and Boniface, was the actual fulfiller of the papal claim to universal rule. A chronicler writes: “The Church in his day, in the glory of her bloom and the zenith of her power, held sway over the Roman Empire and over all Kings and Princes of the universe.” As cardinal, Innocent had written a book On the Contempt of the World; in spite of this and of his own Spartan mode of life—which he was fond of holding up as an example to others—his whole being was permeated by a profound belief in the sanctity and dignity of his priestly office, a belief which dictated the display on occasion of majestic and imperial pomp. Thus, for instance, contrary to custom, he delayed his enthronement for many weeks after his election in order to add to the glory of the ceremony by taking his seat in the chair of St. Peter on the very festival of St. Peter’s Chair. No doubt he wanted to play the part of Peter on that day—as at times he liked to take the rôle of Christ. A witty story is told that he had once donned the “coat without a seam,” preserved in the Lateran, to see whether the Master had not been a smaller man than he; but, alas, it proved too big. He felt himself to be completely the Emperor of Christendom, and in fact he was so in a quite peculiar way. As ruler and statesman of the first water he was the first to make the Church, in its narrower sense of the hierarchy of priests and bishops, really an effective “State,” an Absolute Monarchy in which he himself as sole autocrat was sole fountain of power, justice and mercy.