Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  Frederick poured out in a violent letter all his grievances against the Curia: for his own part he owed the Church no thanks; in any help she had at any time accorded him she had sought solely her own advantage. He on his side had met every wish the Pope expressed. The Pope had welcomed to Rome every enemy of the Emperor and every exile from Sicily; he had curtailed the Emperor’s rights in Sicily; he had obstructed the Emperor’s procedure against licentious priests; he had “lifted no finger” to ease the burdens of the Crusade that rested on the Emperor’s shoulders—and so forth.

  Pope Honorius replied in a long document, refuting the imperial letter point by point, a document that was a masterpiece of style, beginning “strangely our letter smote upon thy mind—so writest thou—… more strangely yet thy letter smote on ours.” Honorius omitted nothing, and when he came to speak of the treatment Frederick had meted out to those who were now refugees in Rome, especially the unfortunate King John of Jerusalem, “whose only crime has been that they are still alive,” he took occasion to remind Frederick of his great prototype: “Thou wilt have read no parallel to these things in the deeds of Julius Caesar, who spared Domitius in his own despite and held Metellus to be unworthy of his wrath when Metellus offered his breast to the sword. …” For all the perfection of its form it was a spiteful document, into which the Pope poured the full measure of his anger. The ill-will of both reached its climax in these two letters—and its end. Frederick answered very briefly, though he could not refrain from a few sarcasms over the inordinate length of the epistle. The Pope’s long-winded letter had disinterred from the papal storehouses so much material, old and new, that if a womb so teeming should, from fresh imperial replies, again conceive, it would bring forth another foetus like unto the first. Frederick cherished the feelings of a pious son to an angry father, and therefore preferred to let the matter drop, if only because the Pope had the advantage of him in the multitude of his scholars and his scribes.

  The Emperor’s thus “coming to heel” coincided with the complete failure of his Lombard adventure. A few words will suffice to narrate the events. Frederick first sought to counter the unexpectedly hostile attitude of the League by emphasising his peaceful intentions and placing in the foreground his anxiety about the Crusade. On the whole march he scrupulously avoided coming into contact with any of the towns. This self-restraint emboldened the Lombards; they were no doubt also informed of the serious friction with the Curia and so were reassured that their worst foreboding was groundless—the Pope and the Emperor were not going to proceed as one man against them. They promptly exercised their sense of power. As the German army under King Henry, approaching along the Brenner road, had just reached Trent, the confederate towns—of which Verona was one—closed the narrow defile and denied passage to any person bearing arms. The German army, which was wholly composed of cavalry, was probably not strong enough to fight its way through, but in any case the use of force would have been contrary to the Emperor’s intentions—he had no wish, nor indeed the means, to embark at the moment on a Lombard war—he preferred to lodge a complaint against the Lombards with the Pope. Meantime King Henry awaited events in Trent. Without his German knights the Emperor’s forces were too weak to exercise even moral suasion, still less serious practical pressure. So Frederick opened negotiations with the Rectors of the Confederation, especially with reference to the passage of the German party. Before opening the road—the closing of which was an unprecedented arrogance—the Lombard towns proposed such inacceptable terms that the Emperor refused to negotiate further, in which he was unanimously backed by the big men about him and numerous bishops from Germany, Italy, Sicily and Burgundy. As repeated summonses to give in were in vain, the Emperor induced the bishops assembled with him to excommunicate all the confederate towns for hindering the Crusade, and for his part exercised the imperial ban and declared the Lombards outlaws and traitors to the Empire. By this he forbade all intercourse with them and declared all schools and institutions closed—including the University of Bologna. After months of delay that was the only thing he was able to accomplish. He could only save his face in the whole affair by consistently posing as the simple-hearted crusader who had come to Lombardy not on his own private business but on a mission for God and for the Church. The Lombards’ opposition had thus been directed not against him but against the Church. By skilfully playing this rôle he compelled the Church eventually to take his part. But for the time being he had to let outlawry and excommunication suffice him, and vengeance for many a deed of treachery—in Faënza a knight had been murdered in mistake for Frederick—had to be adjourned till another day. The Diet was never held at all. A few German princes had joined him by way of Venice, but King Henry and the bulk of the other German nobles had had to return home from Trent after months of fruitless waiting. The confusion in Lombardy was greater than ever and Frederick had accomplished nothing. In July 1226 he began the return journey to Sicily. His route was already threatened; finally Pisan troops came to fetch him and escorted him safely to their town, where he halted a short time.

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  In spite of everything Frederick II found time during his stay in Pisa to converse with a scholar whose writings were already known to him. They discussed at length a number of problems in Geometry and Algebra which were occupying Frederick’s mind. The scholar was Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa, the greatest mathematician of his time, indeed the greatest mathematician of the Middle Ages, whom a Spanish scholar, one Dominicus, introduced to the Emperor. Leonardo had pursued his studies in Egypt and Syria, Greece and Spain, and was trying to introduce a new style of reckoning into Europe “after the manner of the Indians”: reckoning with the Arabic numerals and the zero. The problems which Frederick laid before him through his court philosopher, Master John of Palermo, are so difficult and technical that even to-day only a mathematician can follow them. To the Emperor’s admiration and delight Leonardo was able to solve them. He wrote them down in a book for the Emperor, and henceforth maintained contact with the scholars of the court—with Master Theodore for instance, and, in particular, with Michael Scot, who arrived shortly after at the imperial court.

  These intellectual friendships were not the only outcome of the stay in Lombardy. A number of German princes had come round by Venice to join Frederick, and their presence had brought the Emperor again into closer touch with German affairs, with which, however, he did not attempt to interfere except corroboratively. The year before, in 1225, Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne, till then the Gubernator of Germany, had been murdered, and Duke Lewis of Bavaria, one of the guardians of young King Henry, had been appointed his successor.

  Further, without any connivance of the Emperor, the Danish power had crumbled, and North Albingia as far as the Eider had fallen to the Empire. This is the period, too, of the Golden Bull of Rimini, which established the Order of Teutonic Knights in Prussia to extend the power of the Empire in those regions. For the moment, however, nothing was so vital to Frederick II as to get the Lombard business disposed of, and for this he needed the co-operation of the Roman Curia.

  Many contemporaries contended that Pope and Curia were solely responsible for the failure of the Lombard Diet. That is to put the case too crudely. It is clear that Rome had watched the progress of events not without malicious satisfaction, especially as she reaped direct advantage from Frederick’s embarrassment. Frederick now acceded to every wish of the Pope’s; acquiesced without a murmur in his choice of Sicilian bishops, as if they had never had a difference of opinion on the subject, and when famine broke out in Rome eagerly came to his assistance with Sicilian corn.

  With his characteristic adaptability Frederick changed his tactics in a night, and leaped without transition from downright brusquerie to affectionate docility. Nevertheless the Pope’s position was delicate. It seemed possible that the Emperor’s whole Crusade would be wrecked by the intransigence of the Lombards if Frederick were to make the new developments a pretext for further delay. The Pope w
as anxious to clear even imaginary obstacles from the Emperor’s path, so he bestirred himself to achieve some workable compromise in Lombardy by feting as go-between. It was no easy task. Honorius did not want to forfeit the Lombards’ support against the Emperor; on the other hand they were most manifestly in the wrong and had had no shadow of justification for the closure of the Brenner road. After lengthy negotiation a temporary accommodation was arrived at, thanks to Frederick’s placability. The Pope would release the confederate towns from his ban, the Emperor would rescind his edict of outlawry, and the Lombard League would keep the peace with the imperial towns, Cremona and the rest. The status quo ante which the Emperor had before found unsatisfactory was thus in effect restored, and Frederick had received no reparation or apology for the insult offered him.

  The Emperor shut his eyes for the moment to this flaw in the Pope’s arbitration and declared himself—in the interests of the Crusade—willing to accept this provisional award. He could, however, no longer blind himself to the political alliance of Lombards and Pope, whose embrace drew closer and closer in proportion to the growth of the Emperor’s power. From the imperial standpoint he justifiably regarded this alliance of the Pope with heretics and rebels, enemies alike of Church and Empire, as treason to the Church herself—treason that is to the aristocratic medieval Church. Frederick could not feel otherwise, and in his wrath at this betrayal he could justify to himself and to the world his fight against the papacy. Indeed his faith in his mission and in the justice of his cause was mainly based on the conviction that this “incestuous” coalition of Church and heretic undermined the God-ordained constitution of the world. This was a purely aristocratic constitution founded on the unity of the two Swords—the spiritual and the temporal—and the unity of the two monarchs: Emperor and Pope.

  Frederick would have been unreservedly in the right in talking of treachery if nothing but papal aggrandisement had prompted this unnatural rapprochement between the Curia and the townsfolk of Lombardy, for which the Pope finally threw over the Emperor and therewith the unity of the spiritual and temporal worlds. Political advantage certainly held the foreground; but behind the scenes, behind Lombards and papacy, a new world-power was at work, a power against whose visible warriors Frederick II consciously fought, against which itself he fought his life long all unknowing, and growing thereby in stature: Francis of Assisi and the new Christ image he had evoked.

  Frederick grew in the conflict with Francis of Assisi, and the course of his imperial life will demonstrate the manner of his growth. Francis of Assisi, the greatest contemporary of this last Hohenstaufen, was the bearer of the strange, mysterious power which Frederick in his cradle was destined to rebel against, and in reaction against which he was to mobilise all the forces of the world. Abbot Joachim of Flora had years ago prophesied the coming of power and counter-power: the founder of an order should bring again the age of Christ and the Apostles. The Church should renew her youth and an Emperor should be the Church’s scourge. Following the myth, Abbot Joachim had hailed the son of Henry VI as the future Castigator, and Confusion-bringer, the herald of Anti-Christ. The inference was clear—a renewal of Christ must necessarily beget the Anti-Christ.

  Legend tells us of a meeting of the two great foes. Somewhere about 1222, as Frederick II held court in Bari, St. Francis had come thither with holy exhortation to warn the people of the dangers of sin, and to warn the nobility of the dangers of the court. The encounter between the young victorious king and the man who had taken Lady Poverty to wife is humanly akin to the meeting of Alexander the Great with the Cynic Diogenes. Legend assigns to Frederick the rôle of the tempter. He sought to undermine the celebrated continence of the holy man by the wiles of a lovely woman, but when this attempt was vain, and the Emperor saw that “his practice was even as his precept,” he dismissed his imperial retinue and spent many hours in an earnest tête-à-tête, listening attentively to what the saint had to tell for the salvation of the soul.

  Not long after, in 1223, the final Rule of the Brothers Minor was confirmed by the Pope, and when Francis of Assisi died three years later in 1226 the zeal that fired him had communicated itself to tens of thousands. What Francis of Assisi brought was heresy dressed in canonicals; his first appearance was closely allied to that of the heretics, “The Poor Men of Lyons,” and indeed to the Albigensians, with whom the Church for many years waged bloody war in Provence. The heretics had spread a dangerous doctrine summed up in the famous phrase “to obey God rather than men,” maintaining the communion of the individual soul with God without the mediation of the Roman priest, without the need of sacrament. To combat this heretical doctrine Pope Innocent III had magnified the position of the priest, and reasserted the principle that the layman could not forego the priest’s mediation. The only difference between St. Francis and the heretics was that he recognised the mediation of the priest as of right, though no man had less need of priest than he. He even brought “these heretical tendencies” into the service of the Church by himself bringing the supreme sacrifice of submitting to the church universal.

  Francis of Assisi was canonised in 1228, a couple of years after his death. Uncounted were the miracles that he performed. The miracle with which we are here concerned seems to lack heavenly magic and seraphic glamour, but in compensation it reveals Francis to us as a man, a complete man, a figure which to-day is frequently forgotten in mawkish sentimentalizing over the tender, childlike saint. And this in spite of his “royally independent” attitude to the Pope—the word is Dante’s—in spite of his manly opposition to the Church; in spite of his forbidding the Brothers to read the Holy Scriptures for beauty—for the holy is above and beyond both the ugly and the beautiful; in spite of his belonging to that company of the great whose holiness lies in spartan discipline against the “all too venal flesh.”

  The wounds of the Saviour, which he bore in the body, were less painful to him than the terrible oppression which weighed on him when he compelled his free soul, dwelling in free and direct communion with God, into the rigid, ruthless formalism of the Roman hierarchy. This constriction which the heretics escaped by forming independent groups outside the Church, Francis voluntarily accepted—though he felt it more profoundly and suffered under it more severely than others. He knew that the personal immediate one-ness of the Soul with God was the loftiest aim, but held that nevertheless the Papacy was the necessary means. None of his contemporaries was so full as was St. Francis of high explosive forces to disrupt the Church, but though at first he would hear nothing of the hierarchy and forbade his brothers to accept privilege from her or exercise her offices, yet he recognised, in contrast to the heretics, one universal Church, and forced his wide, nature-loving, sublime spirit into the narrow, rigid legalism of the hierarchy. This opposition corresponds to that which Frederick, his worldly counterpart, had begun to conjure up in the worldly sphere: the tension between the individual and the world-wide Roman Empire. With Dante the man is born who consciously suffers in both conflicts.

  Francis found a means of incorporating in the Church and utilising for her service the hitherto decried egotistical tendencies of the heretics. The founder of the Franciscans might not easily have accomplished this single-handed. He had a friend at hand, a Cardinal of the Roman Church whom he placed as Protector over the Order, Hugo of Ostia. The Cardinal, a priest almost overladen with scholastic wisdom and learned lore, was poles asunder from the original, creative Francis. What drew him to the saint was his yearning for simplicity, for abandonment, for mystic rapture which the cares of this world and the duties of a Cardinal’s office put continually and ever further beyond his reach. The mystic vein was still alive in Hugo of Ostia: in his youth he had been filled with admiration for Abbot Joachim of Flora—the “John” of the Franciscan gospel—and had founded two monasteries in Florence out of his private means. It was Hugo of Ostia who by his drafting of the last Rule of the Order introduced the founder’s spirit into the Roman Church. It was he who skilfully ke
pt the Franciscan spirit that filled north Italy alive in the penitential brotherhoods lest it should evaporate or—what was even more probable—in that dangerous north Italian soil, degenerate into heresy, from which indeed it ultimately sprang. Hugo of Ostia arranged and organised, created centres for the brotherhoods in all the towns, and so turned to the Church’s advantage that passion for individuality that was a feature of the time and affected by the heretics. The alliance between Papacy and Lombards on other sides than the merely political was therefore a product of Cardinal Hugo’s labours: a man whose influence can often be traced in the later measures of the aged Pope Honorius.

  The truce effected between Kaiser Frederick and the Lombards was destined to be the last act of Honorius III. He died shortly after, in March 1227, while the Emperor was about to start on the Crusade. Cardinal Hugo of Ostia, the friend of Francis of Assisi, sometime Legate in Lombardy, succeeded him. He was a Conti, a near relative of Innocent III, under whose influence he had grown up. As Pope he chose the suggestive name of Gregory IX. With the coming of this elderly opponent, who united in his person all the anti-imperial forces of his time, Frederick II’s youth ended. He must prepare for the worst and strain every nerve to build up speedily an all-embracing imperial world, ready to face the foe.