Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  By his own behaviour Otto wantonly squandered the attachment of people of all ranks, certainly in the South. Towards the princes he showed himself inopportunely stern, arrogant, unjust. He embittered the lower clergy by the favouritism which awarded rich livings to Englishmen and Saxons instead of to the Swabian candidates; he irritated the higher ranks by his lack of courtesy, addressing them all as shavelings or priestlings. In short, by the multiplication of almost negligible trifles he unnecessarily queered his own pitch. Even when his edicts were wise and just, his unhappy touch prevented his winning affection by his righteousness. His excommunication was hailed with malicious delight by all who boasted “a different standard of manners.” “A burden to the Italians, a worse burden to the Swabians, unpopular amongst his own,” such was the judgment of the South on the Welf Emperor whose brusquerie was a symptom of self-distrust rather than of legitimate pride. For this son of Anak lacked that genuinely royal dignity which enabled Barbarossa without losing prestige to kneel before the mightiest of his own vassals. Otto’s feudal pride which only force could bend turned all too easily into its opposite. A cruel Nemesis awaited him. He was barely thirty-six when he died a gruesome death at the Harzburg: deposed, dethroned, he was flung full length on the ground by the Abbot, confessing his sins, while the reluctant priests beat him bloodily to death with rods. Such was the end of the first and last Welf Emperor.

  The times were growing too intellectual and clearsighted for a mere champion, however lion-hearted, to rule the Holy Roman Empire. The ancient myth appointed to the two races their two tasks with a merciless exactitude: the Welfs, though mighty and great their Dukes, for ever vassals; the Waiblings for ever Emperors. For there was room in the Waibling state for giants who preserved the might and prowess of ancient heroes, but never in a Welf state would there be mental room for Waibling brains. The relationship had held since Carolingian times, even since the Wanderings of the Peoples. Again and yet again the Welfs had tried to break the evil spell, again and yet again had met the inexorable doom: the pride of the rebellious vassal had ended in ruin and a lonely death.

  A breath of mystery and horror surrounds these luckless Welfs, like the atmosphere of northern myth: Ethico, one of the first of them, vanished full of sorrow into bleak mountain fastnesses when his son—unknown to the father—had fulfilled his fate and done homage to the Waibling emperor of the Franks… Henry the Proud after fighting long and vainly against his Staufen foe died suddenly as victory lay within his grasp… Henry the Lion fell and was banished… Otto, the only Welf who reigned as Emperor—not by any means the greatest of his race—seemed to have belied the fateful prophecy, seemed about to found a Welf Empire of the North—which would assuredly have met a warm welcome from the Pope—and paid the penalty of his trespass into the Hohenstaufen empire with this shameful, grisly death. Perhaps we should add to the series that uncrowned founder of a northern kingdom, the lonely fallen vassal in the Saxon forest, Bismarck, the most sublime of all these giants, who stands in fate so near the Welfs. It is easy to understand why the Church took the Welfs under her wing—her short flirtation with the Sicilian boy was accidental—she wanted as her “Sword” a docile warrior-giant, not an intellectual Emperor. Danger lurked in the free, independent, unclerical mind of the Hohenstaufen.

  It was the famous duel between Otto and Frederick—extreme types of the two races—that gave Italy the two party battle-cries that echo for centuries through her history: Welf and Waibling, Guelf and Ghibelline. It was no chance that allied Guelfdom and Popedom. For in the thirteenth century the Ghibelline spirit stood for that secular and intellectual light that often bordered on heresy, and which, even when it found room for itself within the Church, was yet able to take a detached view of the Church from outside and see it as a whole. Boccaccio said of Dante that he would have been ill able to create his work had he not been a Ghibelline. The first appearance of the two cries as party names would seem to have been in Florence on the occasion of the Amidei-Buondelmonti wedding in 1216 when the family feud developed into party strife. The Buondelmonti party called themselves Guelfs, as supporters of the Emperor, the Amidei dubbed themselves Ghibelline after the rival King. The papal and imperial element had not yet entered in (at that moment the papal would have been the Ghibelline). Later, under the empire of Frederick, Ghibelline became synonymous with the imperial, and Guelf with the papal party.

  The struggle between Welf and Hohenstaufen was felt in all directions beyond the borders of Germany, not alone in Italy. England and France were intimately involved by the alliance of Kaiser Otto with King John and of Frederick with Philip Augustus. For these two western powers the German succession was only an episode in their everlasting weary quarrellings, but for Otto, who had little chance of winning the day against Frederick on German soil, the interference of these powers offered a hope of success. The Welf rightly reckoned that any English victory over France would at least seriously damage the Hohenstaufen’s uncertain position in South Germany and might even completely undermine it. A simultaneous English-Welf attack on France was therefore planned. Philip Augustus’s position was precarious. In the spring of 1214 the English king landed at La Rochelle, and simultaneously Otto, in alliance with the Duke of Brabant, invaded France from the north-east.

  Frederick had waged an unsuccessful campaign against Quedlinburg in the preceding year, and at Easter in 1214 he availed himself of a Diet which he held at Coblenz to summon the South German army to a concerted attack on the lower Rhine, and thus, by diverting Kaiser Otto’s attention, relieve the pressure on his French ally. But fate forestalled him. He had no need to take a hand in the French-English-Welf campaign, he had only to garner the fruits of a French victory. The French heir apparent inflicted a crushing defeat on King John in Poitou and Philip Augustus made short work of the hostile coalition. On the 27th of July, 1214, the memorable battle of Bouvines was fought which decided the fate of three countries.

  The Battle of Bouvines, 1214

  Victorious France, whose oriflamme was the rallying point of the levies from the various towns, laid the foundation of her internal unity. John’s defeat furnished the opportunity for the English barons to rise against the King and wring from him the great charter of liberty, the “Magna Charta” of 1215. And Germany displayed for the first time in the arena of European politics her complete internal disintegration. The Empire, for one short brilliant moment, was to enjoy unity under this great Hohenstaufen, who received from the hand of France the golden eagle wrenched from the defeated Otto, but the clear-sighted Philip Augustus had not failed to note—and repair—its broken wings. “From this time forward the fame of the Germans sank ever lower amongst foreigners” reports a chronicler. Kaiser Otto never recovered from this defeat: the trifling campaigns which Frederick undertook against him, now here, now there, finally in alliance with the king of Denmark, are without interest or significance.

  *

  Philip Augustus and Frederick II were not the only victors of Bouvines. Pope Innocent made a third. The promises and assurances of his ward matured for him, now that Frederick had the power to redeem them. Innocent had not lent his potent aid gratis. Six months after Frederick’s arrival in Germany, as he celebrated Whitsuntide at Eger, he had surrendered, with the concurrence of the numerous princes there assembled, valuable privileges and territories. He secured to the Pope the internal Church powers he sought, he handed over the disputed domains of Central Italy which Otto had conceded before his coronation. For Frederick could ill refuse to his “Benefactor and Protector”—as he now styled him—what his rival predecessor had accorded. The weighty thing was that the famous Golden Bull of Eger, which the German Church delivered to the Pope, took the form—at the express wish of the Curia—of an imperial grant, not of a personal promise. The princes as a body, and each prince individually, had to countersign and confirm it. For the personal promises of one—though he were an Emperor—gave inadequate security, as the Pope had learned from his experience wi
th Kaiser Otto.

  The papal power was slowing mounting by such successes to its zenith. Like every great ruler Innocent III craved to give himself and the world a visible sign of his greatness. No more impressive demonstration could have been devised than the great Church Council which he convened for 1215 at the Lateran. It was to be the biggest Council that ever Pope had held since the Church had come to birth. And Innocent saw with satisfaction representatives of the whole of Christendom pouring into Rome and rallying round him, the Vicegerent of the one true God: 71 archbishops with the patriarchs of Jerusalem and Constantinople, over 400 bishops, 800 abbots, and the envoys of unnumbered princes and towns, with the ambassadors of almost every western king. Otto the Welf had sent his messenger; Frederick II was represented by the Archbishop Berard of Palermo: the Council was to decide the question of the German succession. On the whole nothing could be expected from its decision but the deposition of the Welf Emperor—a decision immediately favourable to Frederick II. But a precedent fraught with omen: the deposition of a Roman Emperor by a Church Council.

  The remaining decisions of the Lateran Council concerned matters of internal ecclesiastical discipline. Pope Innocent did not live to see them carried out. Within a few months of this triumph, in July 1216, he died, at the age of fifty-six, in Perugia. And men remembered that he had opened the Council with the prophetic scriptural words: “With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer.” Under the protection of this mighty Pope the two greatest men of the immediate future had been reared: Francis of Assisi and Frederick II.

  *

  Before the Council met in the palace of the Lateran the cause of the Hohenstaufen had triumphed, and Frederick had performed a most valuable service for the Church, which the Pope, however, sedulously ignored. The Pope had devoted all his energies during the last year of his life to the promotion of a new Crusade, which should be this time the work not of a secular power but of the Church Militant. Innocent had even toyed with the idea of placing himself as the verus imperator at its head. Encyclicals had been despatched to the whole Christian world, and preachers of the Cross had been appointed for each diocese to fan to fresh flame the fire kindled in German bosoms by St. Bernard. Signs from heaven accompanied the steps of the preachers and encouraged the waverers, as the Pope’s heralds journeyed to towns and villages and hamlets. But enthusiasm flagged, fanaticism had faded to lukewarmness, damped not a little by the fiasco of the Children’s Crusade. Still, a few of the princes, like the Duke of Bavaria, had taken the Cross, when Frederick II in the spring of 1215 was preparing for the campaign to Aix and to Cologne. For when he had marched along the lower Rhine after Bouvines he had not ventured to attack Cologne even with his considerable army, and he had made a fruitless attempt on Aix. His only success had been in winning over Otto’s ally, the Duke of Brabant. So in May at Andernach he decided on a new Rhine campaign. But in July, just as he was about to quit Alsace, the situation on the lower Rhine suddenly cleared up. The citizens of Aix themselves drove out the governor, and they now invited the Hohenstaufen to come in peace and permit them to receive him as their lawful lord.

  So in the last days of July 1215 Frederick made his triumphal entry into the sacred Roman town, not with the clash of weapons but with all the pomp of a Roman emperor coming to be crowned, escorted by princes and nobles in gorgeous array. Frederick called Aix “the capital and seat of the kingdom of Germany,” and praised it beyond all other towns, “because in this town the Roman kings are sanctified and crowned and it shines out in glory second only to Rome herself.” No German king in those days could claim his full rights or his title to the imperial crown of Rome till he had been anointed and crowned in Aix and had taken his seat on the throne of Charlemagne. Frederick, indeed, himself reckoned the years of his reign from the day of his coronation in Aix. Other solemnities took place during the coronation days. Fifty years before, in 1165, Barbarossa, though then under the ban of the Church, had disinterred the bones of Charlemagne, and in the presence of bishops and princes had had them consecrated by the—also banned—imperial Anti-Pope of the day “to the honour and glory of Christ and the strengthening of the Roman Empire.” Barbarossa hoped by thus canonising the first Christian German Imperator to sanctify also the sacrum imperium (in Charlemagne’s own phrase) of the said empire and the office of emperor itself, just as he had previously emphasised the biblical sanctity of kingship by transferring the relics of the Three Holy Kings from Milan to Cologne. In Barbarossa’s time the solemn sequence had been composed in honour of Charles and his capital, whose words of praise rang, full alike of challenge and of promise, in the ears of Barbarossa’s son:

  Hic est Christi miles fortis,

  Hic invictae dux cohortis,

  as he entered the great cathedral to lay to rest the remains of the first German Emperor.

  The people of Aix had wrought a magnificent silver shrine the sides of which were adorned with figures of the Emperors, like images of the apostles. The apostolic duty of converting the heathen was part of the imperial office. Frederick II was represented on the shrine, which was to be closed in his presence. The day after his coronation the young King flung off his heavy robe, climbed the scaffolding which bore the shrine and with his own hand drove the first nails into the lid. No wonder that Frederick’s mind was filled in those days, as never before or after, with visions of Charlemagne, Destroyer of the Heathen, and of the aged Barbarossa, his grandfather, who lost his life on a Crusade. He solemnly declared that it appeared to him “ both reasonable and seemly to follow the example of the Great and Holy Charles and of his other ancestors.” The deed had in fact preceded these words, for immediately on receiving the Diadem with which Sigfrid, Archbishop of Mainz, had crowned him, Frederick had suddenly, to the amazement of the onlookers, taken the Cross, and by fervent prayers and exhortations, reinforced by promises and gifts, had eagerly recruited the knights and princes for the new Crusade. Many of the princes followed the King’s example. Frederick spent the whole of the next day from early morning till night listening to the Crusade sermons in the cathedral, and persuaded many to pin the token of the Cross upon their shoulders.

  Did people hope that the boy, so recently compared to King David, would really lead the hosts to David’s royal city of Jerusalem? Frederick himself had every hope of it. It was an almost inspired masterstroke of diplomacy that prompted the young King to set himself at the head of the crusading movement. Unwittingly he thus took the leadership and direction of the Crusade out of the hands of the papal Imperator and took up again the noblest task of an Emperor—by common consent the imperial prerogative—to lead the knights of Christendom to the Holy Land. Pope Innocent was most painfully disturbed by this inopportune zeal on the part of his quondam ward and made no single allusion to Frederick’s act. This wise political move was, however, only the inevitable outcome of the mental attitude of the man and the king, and it would be cynical to let its shrewdness blind us to the unique greatness of that moment. It is a scene that lives: the proud impetuous boy in the full flush of his amazing triumph and success, immediately after the Coronation Mass, when he has but just received the imperial diadem, dedicating himself in the noble enthusiasm of youth to the service of God and of the Empire with his crusader’s vow. Frederick knew and felt the act as a sacrifice, a surrender of himself to his office and his calling: “With pure and spotless heart he had not only dedicated his body and his powers to God, but offered them up in the devouring flame, as it were a holocaust.” Vow and consecration followed. The young Hohenstaufen is now twenty-one years old. With his coronation and his sacrifice the years of his boyhood had ended, the Puer Apuliae is no more.

  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

  III. Early Statesmanship

  A series of uneventful, though not inactive, years followed in Germany the exuberance of Frederick’s youthful debut. He had solemnly dedicated himself to the Empire and indicated thereby the direction his future thought and activity would take. Anyone who was looking for spectacular effects, however, must have been disappointed in the new King’s methods. It would be wearisome and purposeless to recount in detail the history of the next few years. Squabbles and differences with the Duke of Lorraine, with a certain Egeno of Urach about some questions of inheritance arising from the dying out of the Zahringen—these and similar trifles—are irrelevant to the tasks and duties of an Emperor, and have, as purely internal German affairs, no interest beyond their own narrow borders. Even the Welf struggle, which had at one point been a matter of European importance with world principles at stake, had sunk to the level of a casual feud, since Otto IV had abandoned Cologne and the lower Rhine and retreated into his Brunswick domains. Frederick attacked him again in the summer of 1217, but it was scarcely necessary, for no one now seriously questioned the Hohenstaufen rule. Nevertheless Otto’s death at the Harzburg in May 1218 cleared up the general situation and brought a certain feeling of relief to Frederick. It was a remarkable coincidence that—so at least the legend runs—just a few days before the death of the Welf Goliath, the Hohenstaufen King stood godfather to a boy who was destined in Germany’s darkest hour to rescue the remains of the shattered Empire and to restore some fraction of the old pomp and glory to his ancient house: Rudolf of Hapsburg.