Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  The immense importance of astrology for this century is rarely appreciated. A hard and fast conception of “Time” prevailed, and to astrology fell the task of determining the right moment, the feeling for which was imperfectly developed or had been undermined by a belief in Providence. Hers also was the task of proving directly from an eternal source, the metaphysical necessity of a given event’s happening at a given moment. There was as yet no room for the conception that events themselves bring their own moment with them and that the event gives the moment its eternal significance. Even Dante assured himself of the position of the planets at the time of every important occurrence, thus linking time with eternity. In this his position was akin to Michael Scot’s, who declared: “The heavenly bodies are not the cause of events, but the sign thereof, as the compasses in front of the tavern are the sign that wine is within.”

  Astronomy and astrology played an important part in court life. One of the sultans had sent Frederick that costly astrolabe which, with his son and heir Conrad, was the thing dearest to him on earth. The Egyptian Sultan sent as a gift an Arab work on astrology, the Book of the Nine Judges. His son Manfred later had the Centiloquium of Hermes translated, another astrological work; and, finally, Michael Scot in his Liber Introductorius and his Liber Particularis compiled a wonderful encyclopaedia of the collective astronomical and astrological knowledge of his time. Michael, not undeservedly, ranked as THE ASTROLOGER of the Middle Ages, and the Italian towns were swamped with spurious prophecies supposed to emanate from him.

  Wherever the Emperor appeared he was accompanied by a number of his astrologers, and there was nothing the Italian princes were so ready to learn from him as the use of the astrological art. How far Frederick really believed in his stargazers remains a question. Though he frequently inquired what would be the propitious moment for a certain weighty enterprise, the founding of a city or the start of a campaign, he may very well have reflected, like the Renaissance princes, that if the stars cannot lie the astrologers can. He puts them again and again to the test. Michael Scot had recommended: “When you seek advice from a wise man, consult him by a waxing moon,” and had also adjured him to be mindful of the ancient medical maxim to avoid blood-letting when the moon is in the sign of the Twins. The Emperor wanted to prove him a liar, and sent for the surgeon on a forbidden day. The blood-letting went off successfully, but when all was over the surgeon accidentally dropped his lancet and pierced the Emperor’s foot. For several days the swelling caused him extreme pain. Another time Frederick asked his astrologer how far the sky was from the palace. Whatever this exactly meant, Michael Scot promptly calculated the distance. The Emperor sent him away and had the floor of the room or courtyard of his palace sunk a hand’s breadth, and when Michael returned requested him to reckon out the distance once again. His calculation at once revealed that either the sky had moved a hand’s breath further off or else the palace had sunk. These anecdotes are characteristic of Frederick, and manifest his scepticism not towards things but towards people. His astrologers, like his “harem,” must often have simply formed part of his mise en scène. Mystery, like magnificence, was to contribute its quota to the impression he created.

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  The Hebrew scholars of Spain and of Provence with whom Frederick established relations, or whom he even brought to court, contributed rather to the astronomical and philosophical than to the astrological interests of the court. Through them he became acquainted with Jewish philosophy, which then had reached its zenith with Maimonides. Frederick was said to be able to express himself orally in nine languages and to write seven; it is quite probable that among them he knew Hebrew. He certainly had numerous works translated into Hebrew. At the age of eighteen Juda ben Salomon Cohen came to his court, and there compiled an Encyclopaedia on the works of Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy and the Spaniard Alpetronius. A Jew is mentioned as secretary to Michael Scot; it was the custom in Spain for Jews to collaborate with Latinists in translations from the Arabic. Jacob ben Abbamari, who translated five books of the Logic of Aristotle with the Isagoge of Porphyry and the commentaries of Averroes, came from Provence. He prepared a Hebrew translation of Ptolemy in Naples, and translated al Fargani’s Elements of Astronomy into Hebrew. These translations are dedicated to the Emperor, and express the hope that under Frederick “this friend of wisdom who maintains me,” the Messiah, may appear. This wish was not mere rhetoric, for the year 1240 was, according to Hebrew chronology the year 5000, and people were looking for the coming of the Messiah. Frederick II was held in such high repute by the Jews that in a Hebrew Mirror of Manners anecdotes and sayings of his are recorded as models, alongside those of Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Porphyry and Theophrastus.

  Frederick was introduced to the works of Maimonides, who died in 1205, by another scholar, Moses ben Salomon from Salerno, who had written a commentary on the Guide of the Perplexed. Other works of this great Aristotelian were known to the Emperor, and some of his conversations prove that he knew them intimately. The talk turned on Maimonides one day, and his chief work was stated to be his Interpretation of the Old Testament and of the Talmud. The Emperor remarked that he missed in it any explanation of the origin of the curious Jewish ritual according to which the ashes of a red cow were potent for purification. For his part he believed the rite had its origin in India, where a red lion was burnt for a similar purpose, as he had read in the Book of Indian Sages. The Lawgiver Moses, reflecting on the great danger involved in catching a lion, had substituted a cow as a burnt-offering for the Jews. Possibly astrological considerations might have had something to do with it, which would be akin to those of Egyptian magicians and conjurers of spirits! Another time they were discussing why, according to Bible precept, only domestic animals, never wild animals, were offered as sacrifices, whereupon the Emperor gave as his explanation that sacrifices are, as it were, gifts to heaven, and a man can only give his own property, not the free beast of the field that belongs to none.

  It is suggestive to note how, in this “republic of scholars,” each knew the other and all mutually assisted each other in work. The Jew, Jacob ben Abbamari, was a friend of Michael Scot and often appealed to him. He had leagued himself with the Scot, he writes, and received many learned suggestions from him about various Bible passages, mainly connected with questions of natural science. Moses ben Salomon of Salerno again conducted learned conversations with Margrave Berthold of Hohenburg, who in 1240 was a page in the Emperor’s service, and to whom, later, young Manfred was entrusted. So it is clear that the scientific curiosity of the court infected the young nobles also. Another courtier questioned the Jew, Jehuda ben Salomon, about the construction of five bodies from a given sphere and was directed to Euclid. The Hebrew scholar from Salerno disputed with Peter of Ireland, the famous teacher at the University of Naples, who afterwards held an extraordinarily learned conversation about most varied topics with Manfred and his friends.

  This Renaissance-like “Academy,” with its head the Emperor as primus inter pares, demonstrated how the free human mind, bridging all gulfs of race, religion and rank, acted as a levelling agency in the secular world just as—in a quite different direction—the faith of the Church acted in the spiritual world. In his Charter, drawn up on the foundation of the University of Naples, and modelled in many of its features on that of Bologna, the Emperor had pointed to the uniting action of the mind. The proffered gifts of learning bring nobility and possessions in their train which make the affections and graciousness of friendship flourish. To characterise the free human spirit as friendship-building struck a new and humanistic note, which indicated that the clerical spirit had already been conquered. A new power was dawning here, and the Emperor valued on that account scholars and learned men who, as a courtier writes, “inhabit the circle of the earth from sea to sea.” When Frederick sent to the teachers and scholars of Bologna the manuscript of a treatise of Aristotle on logic and mathematics, which with other manuscripts filled the coffers of his treasuries
and which he had found again in pursuing his linguistic and mathematical studies, he wrote in the covering letter: “The recipients should accept these writings gratefully as a gift of their friend the Emperor… amici caesaris.” They would know how to use them and “to draw new water out of the ancient well.”

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  This is the happiest interpretation of the learned activity of the dawning Renaissance at the Hohenstaufen court. With the high value attached to everything intellectual a new problem presented itself to the court circle, one which had occupied men’s minds since the troubadour days began, and the stirrings of unfettered secular thought: what is the true nobility amongst men? Nobility of race or of the spirit? The question was debated with quite peculiar zest at the Emperor’s court, where town-bred scholars and lawyers worked in common with knightly and aristocratic officials, and mixed with and argued with Christian, Jewish and Muslim philosophers. On one occasion the courtiers turned to Piero della Vigna and Thaddeus of Suessa, the two High Court Judges, and requested them to decide it. The reply may have been given in the Emperor’s own quotation from Aristotle. Nobility consists in ancient possessions wedded with noble conduct. Frederick expressed himself on similar lines in his foundation charter of Naples. To him, himself the grandson of emperors and kings, nobility of mind apart from nobility of race was inconceivable, and Dante took the same position in his De Monarchia. In his Convivio it is true he had sought to demonstrate the emptiness of “ancient possessions,” and in his great educational treatise and the canzones that accompany it he had taken Frederick II’s maxim as a text only to refute it, although he styled the Emperor “a great logician and a great scholar.” However much people might dispute over the definition, the fusion of an aristocracy of blood and an aristocracy of brain had already been realised at the imperial court.

  A conversation of King Manfred and his friend with Peter of Ireland has just been mentioned. Though it took place ten years after Frederick’s death this conversation vividly reveals the type of question which occupied the court. The problem is the significant one: of a “purpose in Nature.” Are the limbs present because of the functions they perform, or are the functions the result of the limbs, or, more exactly—someone may have asked—are the claws of the vulture, the fangs of the wolf, the teeth of the lion, provided by nature to tear other animals to death? A devilish question, full of pitfalls. For if it is answered in the affirmative, that implies that Nature recognises the principle of destruction—recognises evil—that this is the will of nature, the will of God. According to this theory Providence would not be aiming at the “Good” in the Christian sense, and that hoped-for dispensation where lion and lamb would play together in the fields of Paradise would no longer be the order of the world as willed by Nature and by God. That is conceivable enough… for every statesman would feel a sabbath fraternisation of all animals, and the equalisation of all created things a hideous disorder, not least Frederick II himself who always pictured Adam as the “King.”

  The Emperor held very strong views about the due observance of rank and precedence even in the animal world. An anecdote illustrates this: he loosed one day a favourite falcon, “whom he loved more than a city,” on a crane. The falcon rose and was above the crane, when far below he spied an eaglet, stooped and slew it. When the Emperor saw this he wrathfully summoned a justiciar and had his favourite falcon beheaded perk’ avea morto lo suo signiore, because he had killed an animal of higher rank than himself and his master, a young eagle, king of the birds! This does not stultify Frederick’s dream of bringing in the “golden age.” He dreamt not of listless peace, idyllic absence of desire, but the tension of supreme control and discipline, under which the lion would if necessary abstain from devouring the adjacent rabbit. Such was the Emperor’s vision of a Paradise in which he could then himself relax.

  Peter of Ireland rejected the dangerous enquiry whether claws and fangs were created for the rending of other animals. He added: “The secret potency of this question has led many to recognise two principles in everything, the principle of evil and the principle of good. This, however, is heresy and bad taste to boot.” He directs attention instead to the necessity inherent in matter which provides for everything that is necessary. The learned man may have had more particularly in mind the spreading heresy of Neo-Manichaeism. Everywhere sects of devil worshippers were springing up, amongst them the Luciferians, who were said to maintain that God had unjustly condemned Satan to Hell—for Satan was the true Creator of all things.

  Another set of problems—indirectly suggested by Aristotle—are touched on in a talk of the Emperor’s about the interpretation of a passage in the Bible. They were discussing why Maimonides had described earthly matter as snow. The Emperor opined: because white takes every other colour readily, as matter takes the form imposed on it. Snow is, therefore, a symbol of the malleability of matter. The moulding of matter was a subject frequently present to the Emperor’s mind. It is touched on in the preface to the Book of Laws, where God is presented not as the Creator but as the Moulder of pre-existent matter. This problem was interrelated with another: Whether the World, as Aristotle taught, existed “from eternity” or whether it had been created by God. Frederick sought light on these and other metaphysical questions from the learned men of Islam—on certain discrepancies between Aristotle and his commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias (whom the Emperor therefore also knew). The Emperor despatched his queries to Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Asia Minor, Yemen. Ultimately, through the medium of the Sultan of the Almohades, they reached Ibn Sabin, a Moroccan scholar in Ceuta, who, as he himself writes, “smilingly undertook to answer the Emperor.” He refused to accept Frederick’s numerous gifts; he intended thereby to bring home his insignificance to the Christian Emperor, “to the triumph of Islam.” His answers themselves did so too. The Emperor had asked, amongst other things, “What is the proof of the immortality of the soul, and is her existence eternal?” Whereupon Ibn Sabin, in most mysterious language, gave the Emperor to understand that he did not even know how to formulate a question correctly. “O prince, thou who seekest truth,” he wrote, “thou hast posed thy question about the nature of the soul without exactly indicating what type of soul is the object of thy questioning. Thou hast thus neglected the essential and hast regrettably confused many things which should have been treated separately. It is thine inexperience in treating of speculative matters and instituting enquiries in an independent branch of science which has led thee into such confusion. Hadst thou but known the number of separate types which are comprised under the one word ‘soul’! Hadst thou but been acquainted with Dialectics and the manner of distinguishing the Finite from the Infinite, between the Particular and the General, between the conceptions of ambiguous homonyms and that which is consecrated by the terminology of speech!—thou wouldest never have so phrased thy question. For when thou askest: ‘What is the proof for the immortality of the soul?’ thy question may be understood to apply to the vegetable soul, the animal soul, the rational soul, the soul of wisdom, the soul of prophecy. To which of these souls does thy question apply?”

  Ibn Sabin continues in this strain, proud of his immense knowledge and powers of hair-splitting and incapable of giving a real answer. He writes a separate dissertation on each type of soul and explains his position with regard to Plato and Moses, Avicenna and the Brahmins; finally, in a feeble anti-climax maintaining that Islam is the only true religion. There was a certain value in all this harangue, the reference, for instance, to the teaching of the Brahmins. Much of Frederick’s knowledge about India must have reached him in this sort of way.

  It was not merely as an intellectual pastime that Frederick directed such questions to learned men. He was seeking proofs for the rightness of his own way of life, and he often established such proofs by violent and remarkable methods. To prove the mortality of the soul he had a man imprisoned in a perfectly tight-fitting wine vat and left to perish, to demonstrate that the soul which could not escape from the vat must
have perished with the body: such at least is the tale. Maimonides to a certain extent encouraged this type of speculation in so far as he, like the Averroists, though on other grounds, denied any general immortality, and only accorded immortality to the truly wise. Frederick’s correspondence with oriental scholars was certainly not all so fruitless as that with Ibn Sabin of Ceuta. We learn from the Arabs themselves that Frederick sent astronomical and geometrical questions to Mosul, one of which, for instance, was to construct a quadrilateral of the same superficial area as a segment of a given circle. Books were even exchanged. The Emperor made a collection of the prophecies of Merlin and had it translated into Arabic for the Sultan of Egypt, and he himself received from Tunis the novel Sidrach and the Book of all Knowledge. Envoys of the Emperor, remarking the immense wisdom of the Ruler of Tunis, and learning that he owed it to Sidrach, called Frederick’s attention to this work. The Emperor at once begged permission to have a copy made of this book, which in the form of question and answer deals with every sphere of heaven and of earth. Much of it must have stimulated the Emperor to further questioning.

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  This impulse to inquire was Frederick’s most dangerous quality, for he had a gift of dissolving fast-frozen axioms by a casual question. As he once sought to undermine the spiritual basis of papal rule by the maliciously-innocent enquiry whether Pope Gregory, like himself the Hohenstaufen, could trace his claims back through his father and grandfather. He attacked the very roots of medieval faith by a series of trustful, innocent-sounding questions addressed on occasion to Michael Scot. Michael Scot in his encyclopaedia relates as follows: