After this initial success the Emperor spent the winter in continental Sicily. But the garrison he had sent to Yato was betrayed and massacred by the Muslims to the last man, and the Admiral, Henry of Malta, who had been left in charge of the island had been powerless to prevent another rally of the Saracens. The Admiral’s excuse that his forces had been too small to risk an attack was rejected. He fell into disfavour and forfeited Malta. Later Frederick restored him again to favour and gave back his possessions—all but the fortress of Malta. Frederick had to re-open the Saracen war next summer, for its continuation was imperative. By a raid on the islands of North Africa, in which the fleet was employed for the first time as a fighting force, Frederick sought to sever communication with Africa and establish the imperial authority there. In spite of this and further successes the Emperor was compelled for many years to come to keep imperial troops in the island, and the war flared up again from time to time, but the outbreaks were always of short duration.
Such is, in brief, the tale of the subjugation of the Saracens of Sicily, of which all the chroniclers speak with admiration. The most amazing thing is Frederick’s method of dealing with the situation. After the second campaign the Emperor decided to remove as many Saracens as possible from the island. They gave no peace in the mountains of Sicily; he transplanted them to the plains of Apulia. Some 16,000 Muslims, in the beginning mostly agricultural serfs—all Muslims were in any case slaves of the king, servi, just as were the Jews—were gradually transferred to Lucera, which was transformed into a military colony. The town thus resumed its original function: for in the oldest Roman times Lucera had been a military colony. It lay in the Capitanata near Monte Gargano and Foggia, the favourite dwelling-place of Kaiser Frederick in later days. During Hohenstaufen times it had sunk into a half-depopulated town of the demanium. Frederick soon strengthened Lucera with a large imperial fortress, and here the Muslims lived entirely amongst their own kind. They had their own chief, the Qâ‘id, with their own Shaikhs and Faqîhs. Thus there grew up in the heart of the oldest Christian country near the frontier of the papal patrimonium a genuine Muhammadan town with all its characteristic mosques and minarets, visible afar across the levels of Apulia. The duty of the new inhabitants was to cultivate the neglected land, and they proved remunerative citizens also through the special taxes imposed on Muslims: a poll-tax, jizya, for toleration of their faith, and the terragium, for enjoyment of the soil. Frederick transported to Lucera all the Saracen serfs on whom he could lay hands, whether they had fought against him or not, and the landowners of the island were thus robbed of labour. To replace this the Emperor sent them the exiled citizens of Celano, and later some people from Lombardy, but these probably did not suffice to make up the deficiency. The Emperor, however, needed labour for his extensive domains more than anyone else could. Moreover, he had another and far more important use for his Lucera colonists. These peaceful agriculturists could leap in a moment to their home-made arms, bows and arrows, and take the field as an ever-ready military force. They could serve as light infantry or, with no change of weapons, as light-armed cavalry, drawing their excellent horses from their own studs. It was an extraordinarily dangerous troop, obeying the Emperor alone, unheeding the Pope or his ban, whom Frederick thus collected round him. He succeeded in an incredibly short time in changing the savage hate of the conquered into that fanatical devotion which the Oriental is ready to bestow on the master who protects him, the lord of whom he is the slave. In later years Frederick never felt so safe as among his Saracens, and it was a Saracen bodyguard who permanently watched over this German emperor or—as they called him in Lucera—this “Sultân.” There were always numerous Saracen servants in Frederick’s household, while in the imperial quarters in Lucera, the notorious “harem,” the industrious Saracen maidens had to weave and work for their master.
It is impossible to withhold admiration from the wisdom with which Frederick—still scarcely thirty—knew how to tackle all the forces of opposition, and liberate their hidden strength for the benefit of the state. No material came amiss to his hand. He had in him more than a little of an Eastern despot, hence this idea of transplanting the Saracens, cutting them adrift from all connection with their past, demonstrating to them that they were wholly dependent on their master for weal or woe. Finally, taking advantage of their resignation, their natural joy in servitude, he cultivated in them systematically a fanatical devotion to his person. This is the constantly recurring principle in the East, which reached its culmination in the Janissaries of the Osmanli Sultans.
It can easily be surmised that this Muslim colony in the middle of a Christian country was a rock of offence to the Church—a matter of complete indifference to Frederick. For he had in his Saracens what no other western monarch of the day could boast: a standing army, a body of men ever ready for action, unreservedly devoted to him as the protector of their faith. This was the tie which bound the Saracens to Frederick II. Exiles as they were in a foreign land, they found protection for their faith in him alone. Frederick was careful not to loose the bond. The last thing he desired was their conversion to Christianity. Only for a very short time, at a moment of acute tension in his relations with the Pope, did he, most reluctantly, give permission to a few Dominicans to undertake a mission in Lucera. It was scarcely necessary, he added, for a few of them were already converts. The conversion of the Muslims had another disadvantage from his point of view—he lost the poll-tax. Muhammad’s own hordes of Arabs had, for the same good reason, looked on it with no great enthusiasm when the conquered embraced Islam. The whole idea of a poll-tax on unbelievers was an inheritance which Sicily owed to the Saracens.
The deportation of the Saracens had as a consequence the purging of Sicily from “heathen and heathen households,” as a chronicler expressly remarks. Frederick was the first who, by this weeding out of the Muhammadans, made the kingdom of Sicily almost uniformly Christian—with the exception of a few Jews. The Greeks counted only as schismatics. This cleared the way for a new development: the conceptions of purity of faith and purity of race, topics on which Frederick later found remarkable things to say. His Saracen war was the end of the struggle with Islam on Italian soil. The only spot in Europe in which the faith of Muhammad still flourished was Spain.
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In less than three years Frederick II had thus converted the Sicilian chaos into some semblance of a state. His methods and his weapons had varied with the adversary; more unscrupulous than the shifty barons, politically more far-sighted than the coast towns, or at least fully their equal. The goal was always the same: the abolition of unjust privilege in favour of national unity. Here for the first time we note the uncompromising directness of Frederick’s action; he always chose the shortest road through the jungle; the immediate practical need of the state was his guide and over-rode all moral, sentimental or other considerations whatsoever.
A highly important institution owed its foundations to state necessity. The rough work was hardly complete when Frederick issued, in the spring of 1224, the edict that called the University of Naples into being. At the Diet of Capua the Emperor had most sternly forbidden lay or clerical nobles to administer justice themselves or empower others to do so. It was the Emperor’s business, and his alone, to set up justices and courts of law. The justices’ business was to provide themselves with such legal knowledge as was necessary for the administration of the law. The University of Naples was now created to supply them with such knowledge.
The Emperor stated most explicitly in the charter of the university that its first function was to train shrewd and intelligent men for the imperial service; men to whom the practice of the law could be entrusted throughout the kingdom. It was not Frederick’s way to do things by halves; he established not only a Law School in Naples but a studium generale which embraced every sort of intellectual training, including medicine, on the model of the adjacent Salerno. Naples thus became the first utilitarian State University, distinguished from all
existing high schools and Church universities by the fact that teaching was to be carried out not for the sake of knowledge merely but for the advantage of the state, that it was to be a nursery for imperial officials and not for priests. There had hitherto been no demand for such a school: counts and bishops had sufficed to supervise the country, of whom we may state Barbarossa’s two paladins to be characteristic types: Otto of Wittelsbach and Archbishop Reginald of Dassel. Frederick II’s state was the first to feel the need of enlisting intellectual, well-educated laymen, skilled in the law, to undertake the administration. Alongside Church universities and town universities there now springs up this university whose teachers are appointed and paid by the state. Clearly the new university was founded with one fighting front towards the Church and one towards Bologna. Frederick had from of old great respect and affection for Bologna and had no wish to injure it by competition, but he was anxious to protect his budding officials from the rebellious, free-thinking atmosphere of the north Italian communes, for which he had less than no sympathy. So Naples was to educate and train men who would be not only intellectually equal to Church and commune, but who should embody the exactly opposite spirit to that animating the two powers who were ultimately to prove Frederick’s deadly enemies, and who even thus early were causing him uneasiness.
Apart from these larger issues the foundation of this university was justified by domestic considerations. Frederick was determined forcibly to win control over men’s minds and bring them within the unity of the state. The charter states that the courses of general study shall be so organised that those who hunger and thirst after wisdom may find what they seek within the kingdom itself, and need not be forced to leave the country to pursue their studies abroad. The scholars will be released from long journeyings and free to study under their parents’ eyes. Frederick forthwith ordained—to make it clear to students that they had in no wise the option of accepting or rejecting the Emperor’s benevolence—that in future no Sicilian subject might attend any university other than that of Naples, and those Sicilians at present studying elsewhere must transfer their work to Naples before a certain date. The first object of this ordinance was to ensure for the newly-founded university, which had behind it no long and gradual development, the greatest possible number of students. To the same end Frederick sought to entice foreigners to Naples by every means in his power. All inhabitants of the Roman Empire were permitted to study at the Emperor’s university which he had founded in “pleasant Naples”; lodgings, security, money advances, cheap living conditions, everything had been provided for; the country had abundant supplies of corn and wine, meat and fish. A highly-qualified teaching staff was assembled in Naples, for the Emperor had appointed his judge, Roffredo of Benevento, and several other eminent men, professors at the new university. All other universities being out of bounds for his subjects, Frederick’s new creation at once enjoyed a monopoly; no one in the kingdom might undertake to teach any subject taught at the university. Any existing schools of this sort were closed.
A further consideration underlies all these arrangements. However much the Emperor rejoiced in the “joy of the road” that possessed the wandering scholars in the Empire, he had no sympathy or patience with it in his kingdom. Wandering knights, wandering scholars, and even wandering singers “who with ribald songs disturb the Emperor’s peace” had no legitimate place in his concentrated, severely-organised society. As far therefore as lay in his power he cut their wanderings short, unless they were directly employed in his own service. Frederick’s intention was, by his university, to retain in the country the best brains it possessed, to educate them in his own spirit, free from outside distractions, and to enlist their unlimited and undivided devotion in his service and the state’s. It was his task to see that Sicily herself offered to his subjects all that they had hitherto gone abroad to seek. Frederick was as thorough in this as in his other enterprises; he is the first Emperor who consciously and deliberately set himself to establish an empire over the minds of men.
Frederick II had thus rapidly tackled every department of life in his state and had left his mark upon them all. There was to be practically no activity which did not emanate from him, and none which did not in its turn advantageously react upon the state. The feudal system had become static: the more important nobility were in the direct service of the Emperor; the castles had become national fortresses; trade had been to a large extent nationalised; markets and fairs reduced in number and concentrated; a stately fleet created, in comparison with which private merchant ships were almost negligible; unity of faith had been approximately achieved; the Saracens herded into one single colony; a standing army established; independent justice assured; and now, finally, those halls of learning opened which would spread the imperial spirit and attract collaborators. It was no small achievement for a man of thirty, and all had been accomplished with joy and zest, almost in play, on the basis of one single law. All had been set in motion almost simultaneously; indeed only the immediate successful interlocking of the various cogs made the wheels turn. Only one power, not a Sicilian but a world power, the Church, still resisted every onslaught of Frederick’s.
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For some years Frederick had worn the imperial crown, but his achievements had been confined to one relatively restricted sphere: he had been playing the king only, and though these kingly deeds would presently serve the Emperor they had not yet assumed any importance for Christendom at large. Frederick could already, as Roman emperor, hold the balance even against a world power like Church and Pope, but before he could seriously challenge it he must himself become a “world power” too. This position could not be achieved all in a moment, nor could Frederick in his progress have overleaped the king stage. Pope Honorius still wrote to him during these years that he was overlooking occasional trespasses as natural to “the fiery spirit of your youth,” by which phrase he drew the sting from Frederick’s attacks. The political relation was parallel to the human. Frederick had not yet got a unified, consolidated World Empire to oppose to the World Church. The Empire was still in the making. Frederick had only mediate authority in Germany, and had not even shown himself there since his formal coronation in Rome. He had indeed conquered Sicily, but the fruits of his new constitution had naturally not yet been harvested. He had not even tackled imperial Italy. So every attempt he made to exercise definite pressure on the Church was doomed as yet to failure, though he was able successfully to best her in diplomacy—no contemptible achievement. He had not yet redeemed his crusader’s vow and had been able, again and yet again, to postpone the date of his departure and gain time for his Sicilian reforms. Many circumstances had favoured him.
On the occasion of his coronation Frederick had promised to start on the Crusade in the late summer of 1221. He had only sent two imperial squadrons to Damietta under Admiral Henry of Malta and the ex-Chancellor Walter of Palear, now Bishop of Catania; he himself remained at home. The imperial reinforcements arrived in Egypt too late, mistakes were made, the catastrophe of the Nile delta was not to be averted. Without waiting for the reinforcements, and with wholly inadequate means, the crusaders had advanced up the Nile from Damietta to conquer Cairo. The Nile was just beginning to rise. The Egyptians breached the dams, and finally the Christian army had to capitulate and surrender Damietta. The Emperor’s presence would have been of no avail.
All Christendom was affected by the defeat of the crusading army; most heavily of all Pope Honorius, who had himself initiated the Crusade. Frederick II was not unaffected by the failure either. His correspondence and some meetings with Pope Honorius had reference to the events in the East. New extensive preparations were agreed upon, arrangements for which made further postponement inevitable, and this in turn secured further respite for Frederick II’s work in Sicily.
He pleaded, not without justification, that he was waging war against the infidel Saracen just as much in Sicily as in the Holy Land. Fresh recruiting for the Crusade must be begun (Herma
nn of Salza undertook it for Germany) and for three successive years laymen and clerics had to submit to extraordinary taxes for the new enterprise. Success was everywhere slight, Crusade-enthusiasm seemed to have evaporated for ever, protracted preparations were needed. The reports sent by the German Grand Master, and corroborated by others, at last convinced Honorius of the general apathy and discontent, and he decided to grant Frederick a further respite till 1227. This was agreed on at San Germano in 1225 and laid down in a treaty after earlier conferences on Eastern affairs between Pope and Emperor (in 1222 at Veroli, in 1223 at Ferentino). At each of these meetings Frederick had succeeded in winning a further delay, which, in the circumstances, the Pope was unable to refuse. Pope Honorius showed considerable annoyance, which was not to be wondered at, for the Crusade was the very breath of his nostrils to this ailing, aged man.
The San Germano agreement gave Honorius the necessary securities for the ultimate undertaking of the Crusade, but he had the vexation of seeing the whole organisation of it slip from the fingers of the papal Curia and pass into the Emperor’s hands—where many people thought it should have rested all along. The conditions of the agreement were certainly not light, for Frederick shouldered sole and only responsibility. It is a testimony to the capacity of his kingdom that he swore on his soul to set out for the Holy Land in August 1227 with 1000 knights; to maintain this force there for two years; to hold ships in readiness for the transport of a further 2000, each knight with his following and three horses. He promised finally before crossing over to deposit in five instalments 100,000 ounces of gold to be forfeited for the cause of the Holy Land if for any reason the Emperor failed to go on the Crusade. Hermann of Salza was to be the trustee for this immense sum. Apart from the money penalty the Emperor declared himself ready to incur the papal ban as a dilatory crusader if he failed to start on the appointed date or in any other way played false, and he allowed the ban to be provisionally suspended over him.
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