Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  The pages remained at court till they won their knightly girdle, often with the Emperor’s direct assistance. Some of them then left the court and returned to live in their own baronies, or enlisted as mercenary knights in the imperial armies and are thus lost to sight. Others entered the state service, and this possibility may well have been one of the main attractions of coming as a page to court. The Apulian families sent nearly all their sons. Two lords of Aquino, several Morras, one Caraccioli, one Count Caserta, one Filangieri, one Acquaviva; the sons of captains of fortresses, of nonofficial feudal barons, and many others served as pages. Sometimes the Emperor commanded the attendance of a boy at court, and he often sought out those who would be “responsive to the imperial discipline” in order to “receive them into the arms of his education” and interest himself like a father in their fortunes, though they had been begotten by another. He writes once to the father of one of his pages: “We have heaped on him the beginnings of all the virtues, so that he may grow worthy of himself, useful to others and may bear fruit for us,” and, further, that these young men “who live in our service with honour and die in joy of great deeds may not pine away in feeble vices or anaemic anxieties.” Sicily was not the only country represented by pages at the imperial court; Northern Italians came also, and when Frederick II was in Cyprus he took a son of John of Ibelin into his service as a page. Similarly, during a short stay in Vienna at a later date, he brought back Berthold and Godfrey, two sons of the Margravine of Hohenburg, as pages to Italy, for whom a brilliant career was in store, almost the only Germans in the Sicilian State.

  We hear nothing of any special instruction of the pages in administrative work, and probably there was none. The Emperor might well reflect that these young noblemen would see and hear enough during their years in his immediate entourage to be ready to take over even the highest office. A lad of twenty who had served for years at court, even though nominally in charge merely of falcons and leopards, must have acquired as much savoir vivre as many an aged bishop. What they lacked in experience was richly compensated for by complete loyalty and eagerness to serve. In this connection we may recall Goethe’s dictum: “If I were a prince, I should never give the first places to people who had come gradually into prominence merely on account of birth and seniority. … I should have YOUNG MEN… then it would be a joy to reign.” Under Frederick II we often find, in fact, quite young noblemen who had been pages holding the highest posts as his representatives. The Hohenburg brothers can scarcely have reached the middle twenties when they were Captains General in Northern Italy. Count Richard of Caserta and Thomas of Aquino junior were younger still when the Emperor entrusted similar posts to them. We know with considerable certainty that Landolfo Caraccioli, who afterwards became Justiciar of the students at Naples, was in 1239 a sixteen-year-old page, yet before Frederick’s death he was officiating as Vicar in a most difficult post in Tuscany in the upper valley of the Arno.

  Other nobles who appear as pages of the Emperor at a later date reappear in responsible posts under King Manfred: Berard of Acquaviva, as Justiciar of the island of Sicily, the younger Richard Filangieri as Captain of the Mainland, and many others. We cannot be sure whether noble pages attended the University of Naples, but the imperial page Nicholas of Trani, for instance, later entered the judicial service and was High Court Judge in Manfred’s time. This is the first example of the infusion of the spirit of the town-bred jurist into the knightly nobility; later jurists were sometimes raised to knightly rank, and their sons were received as pages by the Angevin kings.

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  The Emperor’s own sons, whether legitimate or not, mostly grew up among the young nobles at court, and the sons of foreign princes were frequently educated with them. There appears to be no record of what became of the two orphaned sons of King John of Jerusalem, the young brothers-in-law of the Emperor, whom he invited to his court. His cousin Frederick, son of the King of Castile, was sent to grow up under Frederick’s tutelage. The offspring of the Staufen-Castilian breed† were, however, neither to hold nor to bind. Frederick of Castile ran away from the Emperor after a few years: so did his brother, Henry of Castile, a wilder dare-devil still, who, after an adventurous life, was to exert a potent influence in Italian politics in late Hohenstaufen times. King Enzio must have spent some of his boyhood at the Sicilian court, and Frederick of Antioch, too, another natural son of the Emperor. We have considerable detail about Manfred’s education at this intellectual court. He was eighteen when his father died, and Kaiser Frederick, in his later years, loved him more than any of his other sons. “A host of learned doctors” gave him lessons and taught him “about the nature of the world, the origin and development of the body, the creation of souls, their immortality and the methods of perfecting them, the transitory nature of matter, the security of eternal things.” From his childhood Manfred clung to the ways of thought of his father, who was both nurse and mother to him. It was in response to Manfred’s urgent entreaties that Frederick II composed his Falcon Book.

  Manfred is said to have later been put under the special care of Berthold of Hohenburg, the sometime page. The heir of the Empire, on the other hand, King Conrad, left his father’s court at the age of seven, nominally to take over the Government of Germany. His tutor was a Neapolitan knight, “to whom Conrad’s education was entrusted on account of his noble race, his great wisdom and eloquence, and his high character, in order that the lad by the elevating example of such a master might be thoroughly educated in every type of virtue, wisdom and self-control.” This Neapolitan was presumably a Caraccioli, since Landolfo Caraccioli, himself then sixteen, accompanied the young king to Germany as a page. We also learn that Conrad was taught with a large number of other boys of noble birth, and the story goes that whenever the young king was at fault his teacher used to thrash one of the other boys, for if the young king had a generous heart it would be particularly painful to him to see others, who were innocent, punished for his guilt.

  Some didactic letters of the Emperor to this son are preserved in which Frederick II strives to explain the true dignity of a king. Although Conrad is addressed as a “divine scion of the race of the Caesars,” the letters show how soberly and clearly people at the imperial court thought about the Ruler’s office, for all their hero-worship of the Ruler. “Famous extraction alone is not sufficient for kings nor for the great men of the earth, unless noble personal character is wedded to illustrious race, unless outstanding zeal reflects glory on the prince’s rank. People do not distinguish Kings and Caesars above other men because they are more highly placed, but because they see farther and act better. As men they stand equal to other men by their humanity, they are associated with them in life, and have nothing to pride themselves on, unless by virtue and by wisdom they outshine other men. They are born as men, and as men they die.” Only by wisdom of the spirit—Frederick writes again—are kings distinguished from other men, and it is incomparably more vicious for a prince to fail in serving wisdom and to remain in ignorance than for a private individual, “for the nobility of his royal blood has made a king more susceptible to the teachings of wisdom by inspiring him with a noble and fastidious soul… hence it is necessary and seemly that thou shouldest love wisdom, and for her sake it is fitting that thou lay aside the Caesars’ dignity, and under the master’s rod and the ferule of the teacher be neither king nor emperor but pupil.” And again: “We do not forbid thee to practise with skilful people in due time and place the wonted royal pastime of hawking and the chase. But we adjure thee and wish to warn thee that in hunting and hawking thou do not indulge in too familiar converse with beaters and keepers and huntsmen, that they with presumptuous words impair the royal dignity, or with chatter demean it and corrupt good morals.”

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  It is easy to forget that for all its learning and law-plying Frederick’s court was none the less a knightly medieval court, which for many decades was a focus of chivalry. This was of prime importance for Italy and enabl
ed her to develop the life of courts and kings. Frederick II and his court belonged far more to Italy than the remote Norman Court had done. For years the Emperor’s headquarters camp wandered round central and northern Italy, and even when the Emperor returned to his southern home he still remained in full view of Italy, since he resided wholly in the north of his peninsular territory. It may cause surprise that the Emperor so rarely sought in Palermo, the old Norman capital, the joys and delights of Sicily which he loved to extol.

  The tales of a brilliant Hohenstaufen court at Palermo belong to the realm of myth. During the last ten years of his reign Frederick II only once set foot on the island, to suppress the insurrection of 1233 in Messina. Palermo was still the capital of the kingdom, but only in name; with Frederick II it had lost for practical reasons the privileged position of a royal residence. It could only be reached direct by a long sea journey or by a wearisome land march from the Straits, and was much too far out of the world for the Ruler of an Empire. Frederick had to shift the focus of his State to the spot where its main strength was to be found: his most northern provinces.

  Frederick had praised Apulia (the Adriatic coast provinces) and the Terra Laboris (the Campania of our day) above the Land of Promise, had boasted himself a “man of Apulia,” and his actual home was now the land lying between these two—the Capitanata surrounding the Gulf of Manfredonia. Up to Frederick’s day the Capitanata had possessed no particular importance, and the fact that for close on a century the threads of world politics met here in this god-forsaken Tavoliere di Puglia, and that the town of Foggia became renowned throughout the lands of East and West, was solely due to the Emperor’s personal preference for this province. The political factor was undoubtedly the decisive one in Frederick’s choice of these northern regions. He was close to the scene of his northern and central Italian battles and ready at any moment to take a hand personally, to set out for the north, to keep an eye on Rome. Other considerations, however, also carried weight in choice of this sterile region. To-day’s stony desert, serving at best for sheep runs, must in Hohenstaufen times, when all was more fruitful and better wooded, have possessed some amoenitas such as the ancient world had an eye for: that pleasant alternation of mountain and hill, of forest and plain and the neighbourhood of the sea. At no period of history, however, can the Capitanata have been able to compete with the colourful Palermo in its exotic almost tropical luxuriance, or with the marvels of the Bay of Naples. Possibly the hunting possibilities attracted Frederick and compensated for other shortcomings; there will be at least a grain of truth in that hypothesis. Italy certainly had the impression that Frederick lingered for the winter in Foggia and spent the summer in the adjacent hills for the sake of hawking. The very barrenness of the region, so obviously unexhausted, probably had more charm for him than the thousandfold fertility of ever-pregnant Sicily, and offered him, moreover, more raw material for creative effort. And what a transformation Frederick succeeded in producing in these northern provinces of his!

  He visited the Capitanata oftener than his other provinces, he wrote, because of his castles. He had found no castles there. In 1221 he saw the Capitanata for the first time, and he must have forthwith resolved to make this part of his kingdom his imperial headquarters. As early as 1223 he began the construction of his big castle of Foggia, the inscription on which stated that Frederick had elevated the royal town into a far-famed imperial residence. Soon there arose at reasonable distances pleasure palaces, hunting lodges, and rural hamlets to which there was usually attached a farm or dairy farm. These solatia of the Emperor seemed to grow as simply and naturally out of the soil of the Great Capitanata—to use Enzio’s phrase—as the neighbouring holy places of ancient days. The Castel del Monte, on its lofty site near Barletta, is the best preserved and the best known of these Hohenstaufen castles. Its ground-plan is unique, and like many other of the Emperor’s buildings it was probably sketched by Frederick himself: a regular octagon of yellowish limestone; its smooth perfectly-fitting blocks showing no joins and producing the effect of a monolith: at each of the eight corners a squat octagonal tower the height of the wall; two storeys identical in height, each containing eight large equal rooms, trapezium-shaped; an octagonal central courtyard adorned with antique sculptures and imitations of the antique, in the centre of which a large octagonal basin served as bath. Every fraction of the structure displays the mental catholicity of the Hohenstaufen court: oriental massiveness of the whole, a portal foreshadowing the Renaissance, Gothic windows and rooms with groined and vaulted roofs. The defiant gloom of the tiny-windowed rooms was mitigated by the furnishings; the floors were of mosaic, the walls covered with sheets of reddish breccia or white marble, the groined vaults supported on pilasters with Corinthian capitals, or by delicate clustered columns of white marble. Majesty and grace were fused in one.

  Frederick II never stinted well-chosen splendour, and the exotic luxury and magnificence probably produced a more powerful effect in these sterner northern regions than in the half-African half-Saracen Palermo. What mysteries, what unimagined revelries contemporaries pictured taking place behind the mute walls of these castles! What amazing brilliance they caught a glimpse of now and then! In the rambling castle of Foggia, which is described as a palace rich in marble, with statues and pillars of verd-antique, with marble lions and basins, those legendary banquets will have taken place amid riot and revelry the glamour of which still clings round the memory of the Hohenstaufen Court.

  “Every sort of festive joy was there united. The alternation of choirs, the purple garments of the musicians evoked a festal mood. A number of guests were knighted, others adorned with signs of special honour. The whole day was spent in merriment, and as the darkness fell, flaming torches were kindled here and there and turned night into day for the contests of the players.” So tells the chronicler, and yet another reports the wonders of the inner courts which the English prince Richard, Earl of Cornwall, was privileged to see. The English noble was returning home from the crusade in summer heat: they first with baths and blood-lettings and strengthening draughts made him forget the toils and hardships of the journey and the war, and then entertained him with every type of sport. He listened in amazement to strange airs on strange instruments, saw the jugglers display their skill, was ravished by the sight of lovely Saracen maidens, who to the rhythm of cymbals and castanets came dancing in, balanced on great balls that rolled across the many-coloured polished floor. Tales and romances tell of the feasts of Frederick and the glories of his court: how hundreds of knights from all nations were entertained in silken tents, how minstrels streamed in from every corner of the earth and foreign embassies displayed the rarest jewels. The messengers of Prester John brought an asbestos garment, an elixir of youth, a ring of invisibility, and, lastly, the philosopher’s stone. Further, people told how the Emperor’s court astrologer, Michael Scot, whose name was named with shuddering curiosity, on a hot day at a feast assembled thunderclouds at the Emperor’s command and performed other miracles.

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  Apulia was never to see again such chivalrous display as flourished under Frederick II and Manfred. Chivalry itself, bound up as it was with crusade and Minnesang, was already growing dim in the later Staufen days. Moreover, the Anjous who followed the Hohenstaufen in Sicily were joyless bigots, and, although themselves Provençal, were far less in sympathy than the Swabian dynasty with the lighthearted, almost pagan spirit and the joie de vivre of the southern troubadours.

  New love poetry came to birth in the chivalrous, not in the learned, atmosphere of Frederick’s court. The much-debated question how, and through whom, Frederick learned to know the lyrics of Provence, and how their “transference” to the Sicilian court is to be explained, is otiose. It would have been inexplicable if Frederick had remained in ignorance of such poetry. He was quite as fully in touch with the whole world of French and Provençal culture as with the culture of the East. He knew both languages from boyhood, was, acquainted with their li
terature, and will most assuredly have read the novels which were familiar to his court: Tristan, Lancelot and the rest. We have evidence that he knew Merlin and the Palamedes of Guiron de Courtois. The troubadours sang the praise of the Puer Apuliae, and legend located at the court of the fifteen-year-old king the first poet-coronation of the Middle Ages, the travelling singer crowned rex versuum who later became the Franciscan, Fra Pacifico.

  The poetry of the imperial court was imitated from the Provençal, both in form and content. The foreign language was not used, however, as was customary at the courts of North Italian nobles, such as Saluzzo and Montferrat. Here, for the first time, poetry was written in an Italian vernacular, the popular speech of Sicilian Apulia. There must have been isolated forerunners writing in Sicilian—the legendary Alkamo perhaps—but every history of Italian literature begins with the songs of the Sicilian court. The concentration of the “Sicilian School of Poets” which here sprang up helped immensely to increase the influence and spread the popularity of the new vernacular poetry, as Petrarch recalls, “in a very short time this type of poetry, which had been born amongst the Sicilians, spread throughout all Italy and beyond.” As late as Dante all non-Latin poetry in Italian was dubbed “Sicilian,” which Dante in his book De Vulgari Eloquentiâ explains by saying “because, as is well known the royal throne was in Sicily.”