Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  The only events of these days were insignificant feuds whose origin and name are alike forgotten: more or less important diets accompanying the King’s presence in various parts of his dominions, weddings, awards, gifts, confirmations of title, arbitrations—all the routine attaching to the daily duty of a king.

  Frederick’s favourite residence in those days was in Alsace, on the Rhine at Worms or Speyer. He had the body of the murdered Philip of Swabia brought from Bamberg and buried in the cathedral of Speyer beside the Hohenstaufen matron Beatrice, Barbarossa’s consort. His other favourite German headquarters was Hagenau, where he could hunt in the extensive forests and yet slake his thirst for knowledge in the rich library of ancient manuscripts. He was also often to be found in Franconia and Swabia, in Würzburg and Nuremberg, in Augsburg and Ulm, and business took him now and then to Thuringia, Saxony and Lorraine, so that he acquired a wide knowledge of Germany.

  These have been called his “Wanderjahre”; their importance lies less in what he achieved than in the goal he set himself. We know nothing of his personal self-education in those days. He was fortunate enough not to feel the need of an amateurish search for suitable mental food that drove Napoleon, for instance, at the corresponding age, to writing philosophical essays. He was perfectly clear in his own mind what he wanted—hesitation indeed never haunted him—and we can accept as correct his own later statement that from his earliest youth he had kept before him one lofty aim: to devote himself unreservedly, body and soul, to the exaltation of the Roman Empire. He therefore directed his policy solely with an eye to the Empire as a whole: a whole of which Germany was merely one important constituent. This is the key to his German policy: he took a passive line towards the German princes, interfered as little as possible, and surrendered one royal right after another, looking only to the good of the Empire. The princes, for the most part, were supremely indifferent to the wider imperial issues, and Frederick II sought at any cost to secure their loyalty and attach them to himself in order to divert at least a fraction of their vigour to his task.

  Frederick’s position towards the princes was a peculiarly delicate one. To maintain his rights, let alone seek to enlarge them, that is: to attempt to rule himself, without the mediation of the princes of the Empire, could only have been achieved in battle against them. Never would they have voluntarily consented to any curtailment of their independence or of the rights they had won during the long wars of succession. But these were the very men who had summoned Frederick to Germany, by whose aid he had overcome the Welf. Moreover, the most numerous amongst them, as well as the most powerful, were spiritual princes who had given him their help as the protégé of the Pope. Any step of Frederick against the princes would infallibly embroil him with the Church, the other power to which he owed his elevation. Such measures were not to be thought of; he who had come as a beggar to Germany was in no position to exercise compulsion or persuasion on its princes. His enfeebled Swabian dukedom did not of itself offer sufficient resources to embark on a fight against the whole body of German princes. Even if Frederick had wanted to confine his activities to Germany, and to build up a strong, national German kingdom, no opportunity for this was offered him. This particular ambition was in any case foreign to the philosophy of his race with its leaning towards the universal. Moreover, he was himself a Sicilian as well as a Hohenstaufen.

  We have various indications that Frederick’s one instinct was to shelve for the moment the miscellaneous German problems—which finally stirred him to unconcealed annoyance—even at the cost of surrendering many a privilege. By the indirect expedient of building up a powerful Roman empire, rather than by civil war, Frederick hoped to strengthen the royal power in Germany.

  So during these German years Frederick systematically sought out and turned to account whatever benefited the Roman Empire, whatever he could find in Germany that would be valid or valuable in a wider world and not only within the frontiers of Germany. He exploited not German peculiarities but German world forces, and these, in addition to serving the Empire, brought advantage to the incoherent loosely-knit Germany herself. The only way to consolidate Germany was first to extend it until it embraced enough material to weld into a compact whole. As yet no German spirit existed, but only a Roman spirit which was gradually civilising the Germanic. It was not common German tradition which bound the Northerners together, but Roman form and culture. The German races had nothing in common but their blood, and the call of the blood was rarely vocal. Just now and then, on some auspicious occasion, in solemn moments of enthusiasm, when they assembled for crusade or pilgrimage, they felt with a thrill of pride that they—Saxons and Franks, Swabians and Bavarians—were one. But they did not even then feel “German.” At most they felt that they stood together as heirs of the Empire of the Caesars, they prided themselves on being descendants of the Trojans, or styled themselves “Roman” citizens. The word “German” is reserved for our use to-day.

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  Frederick therefore in seeking out whatever struck him as most “Roman” in Empire and Church was also fostering whatever was most nearly “national.” Awakening Germany offered scope enough in the dawn of the thirteenth century when she welcomed in her young king, the Child of Apulia, the personification of her own youth. For in that wonderful Hohenstaufen age, warmed through and through by southern light, Germany was experiencing within her borders for the first time (and for the only time in any such many-sidedness) a real blossoming of song and vision, of fairy tale and epic, of painting, building and sculpture. Despite world wars and political tension she was displaying that cheerful serenity, that emancipation and freedom which breathes from the creations of the time—almost incredible as German products. The existence of these works is the justification of Nietzsche’s statement made at a time when freedom had reached its nadir: “There is a touch of something in them that might almost be Hellenic, which awakes in contact with the South.” This fertilisation by the South did not necessarily entail a journey thither. The spirit can modify the climate, and by the spirit of the Roman Empire and the Roman Church Germany was southernised as far up as her Baltic coasts. Not that the essentially Germanic was surrendered or eliminated. These southern forces absorbed, without excluding, all that was most characteristic, as the thirteenth century, the most Roman century, abundantly proves. For all the Middle High German heroic epics took their final form in the Hohenstaufen period: the Nibelungen, Gudrun, the cycle of Dietrich of Bern, with the Rose Garden of Worms, Laurin, the Battle of Ravenna and Hugdietrich. Further, the epics of Duke Ernest and Ortnit, these and others belong to this period. Side by side with the great epic monuments—echoes of the Germanic heroic age—we find the stirring new lyrics of the courtly Minnesänger, Hartmann of Aue, Henry of Veldeke, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide, whose voices blended with the solemn Latin hymns of the Christian ritual. The chivalrous epics of the Minnesänger, the Eneïde, Poor Henry, Tristan, Parzival show the complete blending of heroic tale and Christian spirit. It was the Roman Imperium which imposed a sure, cultivated touch alike on German heroics and on Christian chivalry—the like of which Germany has never seen again.

  We recall Bishop Conrad of Hildesheim writing of the marvels of South Italy: “We do not need to go beyond the borders of our own German Empire to see all that the Roman poets have been at such pains to describe.”

  Throughout the length and breadth of the Roman Empire the German felt at home, and on a sudden the Roman poets made a direct and personal appeal, and were no longer only the cultural and educational stock-in-trade of the Roman Church. The effective assimilation of such Roman spoils is shown by the now repeated attempt to translate a Roman poet into German—the first since Notker’s Vergil in Carolingian times. Albert of Halberstadt translated Ovid—he did not find a successor till the days of the Humanists—and proved that at the time an interest in classical literature was beginning to be felt in circles not conversant with classical Latin,
probably amongst those knightly laymen in the entourage of the Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia at whose instance the translation was undertaken. The Hohenstaufen were also responsible for the introduction of Roman Law, the most vital and permanent invasion of the Roman spirit into secular Germany.

  The most remarkable manifestation of the German-Roman-Antique time—felt to be “most strange”—was the architecture of Bamberg, followed by Naumburg, in which for the first time a real German figure was portrayed. The surprising and stimulating thing about the plastic art which belongs to the later days of Frederick, the Sicilian-Italian Hohenstaufen, is this, that in works like the “Horseman” of Bamberg or Magdeburg the possibility is for the first time revealed—not yet in song or story, but to the eye in chiselled stone—of a work showing a German subject and yet making a world-wide appeal. This intermingling of the music and motion of Germany with (imperial and papal) Rome has produced as by a miracle an almost Mediterranean type, restrained, yet withal free and unfettered, a type hitherto foreign to German art, for which until then only the Italian had had an eye. The Bamberg master worked of course under French influence and the tradition of ancient Roman plastic art, but while this fact is not without importance it does not alter the certain inference that this nobly beautiful and chivalrous human type must have existed in the Germany of the day.

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  Two figures of aristocratic life gave tone to the whole period and gave Germany a share in the happenings of the world outside: knight and monk. These were cosmopolitan figures and German figures both. The monk exercised so dangerous a monopoly in Germany that no other characteristic type was developed on at all an equal footing. France on her side, since the days of Erigena, Ivo and Abelard, in the schools of Paris, Chartres and Orleans, produced the scholar; Italy by the commerce of the coast towns, Pisa, Venice and Genoa, evolved the merchant. For Germany all paths into the distance lay open before the knight and the monk, the two visible representatives of the two great powers: Empire and Church. Prince and bishop were tied to their domains, but knight and monk, rejoicing in greater freedom of movement and more varied range of activity, mirrored like them, on a smaller scale and a more modest plane, the figures of Emperor and Pope.

  This fact successfully solved a problem which had never before been solved in German history: for the first time, throughout all the many and diverse provinces of Germany, the aristocratic youths who overflowed the monasteries and religious foundations were offered a career which would be valid not only within the narrow limits of their immediate homeland but in the wider world beyond. It was the only time in history that the German became—in the best sense of the word—cosmopolitan. This prepared the ground for a great period of plastic art which was, alas, abruptly terminated when the fall of the Empire severed German knighthood from the rest of the world and condemned it to blunt itself in bourgeois stupidity or to seek service outside Germany in foreign pay.

  There were two powers which Frederick courted during those German years, and courted not in vain: a monks’ and a knights’ Order. A few weeks after the coronation at Aix his close association with the Cistercians was remarked. The Order to which St. Bernard of Clairvaux belonged, in which at that time “the Church of Christ had broken into bloom,” had not in fact been founded by St. Bernard himself, but the community owed its importance to his zeal and fire. Like almost all orders of the Roman Church it had its roots in the need to reform abuses, and Bernard had emphasised the stern asceticism and discipline of the Order, but these were balanced in the doctor mellifluus by the passion of a great love. Hence Dante chooses Bernard as his final guide to the Throne of God:

  The Queen of Heaven, enthroned above,

  Knowing my heart’s devotion, will not fail,

  For am I not her Bernard, her true love…

  He was the first to breathe into the Order a passionate devotion to the Virgin, just at the time the outer world was singing the earliest lyrics of the troubadours. And he was the first also who sanctified “the work of the chaste earth” and so gave a new direction to monastic ambition, the combination of an active with a contemplative life. “Free from earthly disturbance and earthly broils the Order enjoys earthly peace,” wrote Frederick once, and so it was. The Order sought out the remotest and quietest valleys for its settlements, and there set up its monasteries and its extensive farm-steadings, its simple churches, towerless and unadorned, bearing only, instead of other decoration, the first rose blossoms of Burgundian Gothic. Maulbronn and Ebrach are our witnesses for these early days when the Grey Monks “lived amongst, but yet above, their fellow-men.”

  The obligation to till the soil ensured the rapid geographical extension of the Order. The Cistercians became a quiet, steady pioneer influence, cultivating the ancient tracts and opening up new ones, especially for Germany. It was they who first Christianised and colonised Prussia. The whole organisation of their monasteries anticipated growth. There was never to be more than one abbot and twelve brothers, with twelve lay brothers, in one cloister. If the numbers grew beyond this, the excess hived forth to seek a new abiding place. This self-sufficing restriction of their numbers to the number of the apostles was the origin of the innumerable daughter-establishments which were subordinate to the mother-cloisters, as they in turn were related—like the branches of a genealogical tree—to the parent settlement at Citeaux. Thus the cohesion of all the monasteries was secured, and the Cistercians gradually grew to form one single world-wide institution which never split asunder. This organisation was without parallel, for with the Benedictines each monastery was entirely independent of the others.

  The unity and the monarchic graduation of the whole Cistercian Order were still further developed. Once a year the Abbots from each settlement from Syria to Sweden assembled in a General Chapter. This statesmanlike assembly, which put the resources of all at the disposition of each, breathed the same spirit from southern Burgundy to Pomerania and Prussia, as the Cistercian churches in the north-east of Germany (nearly all of which date from the thirteenth century) clearly testify. This centralisation was as much an innovation as the agriculture and horticulture which the monks introduced into the newly opened districts, in improving the tillage and domesticating wild crops.

  These brothers, pushing ever forward, colonising the valleys with their Virgin-led hosts, spreading the teaching of Christ and ever planting daughter-settlements, evoked a late Christian reflex of the ver sacrum of earlier times.

  The Cistercian Order, with its landed properties, its disciplined constitution, its immense extension, was the most patrician of the monkish orders under the Hohenstaufen Empire and the aristocratic medieval Church, contrasting with the plebeian Mendicant Orders who were just then emerging, and who were really at home only in the towns. The wide distribution and the monarchic constitution of the Cistercians had the result that they were directly under the leaders of the Christian world; no territorial prince, no individual bishop appointed or influenced the governors of their monasteries; they were ruled directly, in spiritual matters by the Pope, in worldly affairs by the Emperor alone. Earlier Emperors had made generous gifts to the Cistercians, but none to the same extent as Frederick II, especially in those German years of his. The tokens of favour with which he honoured the Order and at times almost overwhelmed it, are well-nigh innumerable. The warmth of feeling, the reverence, which the records show he felt for the Order, “the shady grove of Christ,” exceed all that any other community can boast, and till his dying day Frederick loved to consider himself intimately bound to them.

  After taking the Cross Frederick got himself received into a prayer-community of Cistercians, and his curiously humble petition addressed to the Abbot of this powerful Order is still reminiscent of his crusading mood. The pious and edifying style of this letter—in which Frederick pictures himself as a sinner in the weakness of the flesh—served its purpose. He was received into the community, a fact of which in later years he did not fail to take advantage. This sort of thing was of
course a regular custom of the Emperors, and Frederick II followed in their footsteps the more readily that he was anxious to secure adherents in the clerical camp. The Cistercians were to act as “Preservers of the harmony between Emperor and Pope,” a scheme which had often proved fruitful under Barbarossa and Otto IV. But Frederick had yet another axe to grind. Their experience made the Cistercians masters of agriculture. Caesarius of Heisterbach, himself a Cistercian monk, proudly records that the lay brothers of the grey brotherhood had been recommended to the Archbishop of Cologne as the best household administrators. Frederick could turn such men as that to good account. He loved to gather round him Cistercian lay brothers trained in agriculture and cattle-breeding and set them to organise and administer his imperial estates in Apulia and the Capitanata. He used others as architects and overseers for his castles and pleasure palaces, while in his most important and handsome buildings in South Italy Cistercian builders played a distinguished part.