Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

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  All these instincts of his culminated in his passion for the chase which cost him the gravest defeat of his career—before the walls of Parma. For Frederick’s ancestors the chase had been a peacetime substitute for war; for Frederick it was more, it was an art “entirely born of love” (totum procedit ex amore), an intellectual exercise on a par with his natural science studies. Only hawking, of course. The charm lay in the mysterious power of the falconer over the freest, most elusive of all birds—the eagle, the buzzard, the falcon. When six, eight, or even ten falcons circled free in the air, almost out of sight and yet bound as it were by some invisible thread, compelled by some mysterious power that brought them with infallible certainty back to the falconer’s wrist, scorning the proffered liberty, it was not only an exciting marvel, it was for Frederick the ne plus ultra of perfect discipline. The discipline Frederick would have liked to see equally developed in man.

  He despised the hunter who hunted with snares or nets or quadrupeds. The noble sport was hawking, because it is an art that can only be learnt from a teacher. “Hence it comes that while many men of noble birth learn the art, the uneducated rarely do so. Hounds and hunting-leopards can be tamed by force, falcons can only be caught and trained by human skill. Hence a man learns more of the secrets of nature from hawking than from other kinds of hunting,” thus Frederick writes in his Book of Falconry. This saying of his explains why, after the decay of hawking, intellectual monarchs like Frederick the Great or Napoleon had no love for the chase. It is also the revelation of what Frederick sought in the chase: the secret workings of nature.

  Frederick’s great work is the product of years of observation: de Arte venandi cum avibus. “Thanks to his amazingly penetrative glance, directed especially to the observation of nature, the Imperator himself wrote a book about the nature and care of birds, in which he showed how deeply imbued he was with a love of knowledge,” wrote a chronicler. This comprehensive zoological treatise is anything but the superficial indulgence of a princely caprice. Down to the minutest detail it is based on his own observations or those which friends and experts had made at his instigation. For twenty or thirty years the Emperor had meditated the writing of this Ornithology—for it is no less—and all the time he had been amassing first-hand material till at last, urged by his son Manfred, he set about the actual task of writing the six books in this branch of Zoology. “He must be reckoned the greatest expert who ever lived,” so judged Ranke. And the statement is not unjustified. In the most vital points the book has not even yet been superseded. The most astonishing thing about it is its absolute accuracy and matter-of-factness, which contains more knowledge of the mysteries of nature than do the cosmic astral encyclopaedias of the court philosophers at which the Emperor was wont to smile, even though on occasion he participated in the current superstitions. In that age of intellectual starvation, which speculated how many angels could dance on the point of a needle, Frederick summed up his programme in the introduction in the clear-cut phrase: “Our intention is to set forth the things which are, as they are (manifestare ea quae sunt sicut sunt).” This stern sobriety, that seeks nothing before things or behind things, but the things themselves, when exercised by a wise man, contains the vision of all visions. Everything is, first and foremost, itself. Neither the philosophers of the East nor the philosophers of the West had taught this to Frederick. We reflect that, a century ago, when the rest of Germany was celebrating orgies of emotion and philosophy, many a one quitted Weimar in disillusionment because there everyone was “busy counting the legs of cockchafers.”

  The Emperor’s book Concerning the Art of Hunting with Birds contains far more than its title promises. The first part is a general survey of birds, a classification of species, their habits, their breeding, their feeding, their distribution, their methods of nesting. The migration of birds is described in detail, their skeletal structure, the organs and their functions; every detail of the plumage, the number and position of the wing feathers, the flight itself; in what relation the hardness of the wing feathers stands to the frequency of the wing beat. It is surprising to note that here Frederick seeks explanation in the various works known to him, and refers, for instance, to the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanics. Each beat of the wing, we learn, moves through a segment of a circle, in which movement the outer feather describe the largest circle. According to the laws of the Mechanics the larger roller lifts the greater weight. Since the outer feathers have the greatest burden to support and the greatest circle to describe they are correspondingly stronger in build, and the hardness of the feathers decreases in given proportions.

  In the second of the six books the Emperor talks of the different types of hunting falcons, their capture, their training, their temporary blinding, by sewing the lids, the way to carry them and the way to cast them. Frederick used to get falcons sent or fetched from all corners of the earth. He once took a condemned criminal and sent him down into an abyss to fetch the nest of a white falcon. When he speaks of the birds of prey which were sent to him from Spain and Bulgaria, the Near East and India, Britain and Iceland (which he locates between Norway and Greenland), his immense knowledge of plant and animal geography is displayed. He remarks that the birds of the Arctic regions who are nearer to the North Pole are stronger, braver, quicker and more beautiful than those of more southern lands. He explains precisely why this should be so, and recognises that two falcons generally considered to be of two different species are really identical, and their differences are due only to climatic variations.

  He collected observations from all countries. He got experts sent to him from Arabia and other places and he used their information where they “knew better.” He only claimed to set forth “what our own experience has taught, or the experience of others,” and he held that “no certainty is attained by the ear.” Whatever he knows only by hearsay he seeks to verify. He institutes enquiries, for instance, about the “barnacle-geese,” which is said to hatch out of worms or shells or the rotting ships’ wood in the northern regions. He specially sent envoys to the north to fetch such wood and demonstrated the baselessness of the tale. From this he concluded that this type of wild goose had her nest in remote regions which were rarely visited by man. Reports which he could not check he quoted only with reservations; when he writes about the Phoenix described by Pliny he adds: “We cannot, however, believe this.”

  Frederick II rated Aristotle very high as a philosopher, but considers him a scholar wholly dependent on book-learning, and does not hesitate to dismiss his statement with a curt “It is not so.” “We have followed Aristotle where necessary, but we have learnt from experience that he appears frequently to deviate from the truth, especially in writing of the nature of certain birds. We have therefore not followed this Prince of Philosophers in everything… for Aristotle seldom or never hunted with birds, while we have ever loved and practised hawking.” The Emperor frequently corrects Aristotle: “But we, who have had some practice in the chase, think otherwise.” After he has minutely described how the chain or triangle of flying waterfowl change their leader he adds “It is therefore improbable that the leader should remain unchanged as Aristotle maintains. …”

  The Emperor’s book contains thousands of separate observations which are marshalled formally, clearly, and logically, passing always from the general to the particular as scholastic method demanded. The sentence construction is usually lucid, the language—in contrast to the rhetorical manifestos of his Chancery—is simple, straightforward, matter-of-fact, but always stately, always couched in the pluralis majestatis, and clothed with a certainty that defies refutation. It was often difficult—as the Emperor says—to find Latin synonyms for the Arabic or Provençal technical terms. The eye is appealed to by many hundred drawings of birds which are unquestionably from the Emperor’s own hand. It has been expressly recorded that he knew how to draw. One of the first two-volume éditions de luxe of this book, which in 1248 at Parma fell into the enemy’s hands, and
later came to the Anjous, contains illuminations which are repeated in later copies. The drawings are true to life down to the tiniest details, and the style of picture, the birds in flight, in various phases of movement, point unmistakably to the eager observer himself, though the magnificently coloured versions may have been prepared by some court artist or other. It is possible that Persian or Saracen drawings influenced Frederick, perhaps ancient codices also. However this may be, experts pronounce the drawings of the Falcon Book to be as amazingly “before their time” as is Sicilian plastic art.

  The Emperor’s book soon appeared in several French versions, and ousted all similar works. Short Instructions to Falconers of Norman and other origin had preceded the imperial Falcon Book, but they had not the same thoroughness or zoological knowledge, and were not nearly so comprehensive. Frederick justifiably dismissed them as “inaccurate and inadequate.” What he was aiming at was to lift hawking to the level of an exact science, which none of the existing books was competent to do. The Emperor was doubtless acquainted with oriental works. A Persian falcon book was translated at King Enzio’s command, an Arabic book of healing for hunting-birds was certainly not unknown to Frederick. He can scarcely have utilised them, however, since his own book was based entirely on personal observation. Wherever opportunity offered the Emperor worked at the writing of his book “in spite of the unspeakable number of claims upon our time,” as he writes, and we learn incidentally that during the siege of Faënza he corrected Master Theodore’s translation of an Arabic essay on hunting, written by the imperial falconer Muamin. A Cremonese translated the same essay for King Enzio into French. The Emperor wrote the book only a few years before his death, and King Manfred out of his own knowledge and from loose sheets of the Emperor’s, posthumously filled many lacunae.

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  The most important thing about the Falcon Book is not the fact that Albertus Magnus for instance used it, nor the fact that other hunting books sprang up, like one by a German knight who called as witnesses to his prowess in the chase “especially the huntsmen of the illustrious Lord Frederick, Emperor of the Romans.” Vastly more important was it that the courtiers of the Emperor and his sons (who resembled their father) acquired an eye for Nature so that they learned the imperial art of seeing, whatever they might choose to apply it to. The new element in the Falcon Book is the idea of seeing and telling “the things that are, as they are,” and that this should be done not by an unknown settler or scholar but by the Emperor of the Roman-Christian world: a remarkable parergon of a great statesman. The Emperor’s immediate influence asserted itself further in another work which was widely circulated, translated into many languages, and which acted as a model for succeeding generations: the Horse Healing of a Calabrian nobleman and official, Jordanus Ruffus. This was the first book of veterinary lore that the West produced, and it was written at the suggestion of the Emperor. The author expressly declares that he received instruction to a very large extent in all the matters treated, from the Emperor who was himself an expert.

  It is a significant fact that the great scholars of della Vigna’s circle, those of the type of Michael Scot, all failed completely when it came to the use of the eye. The Emperor, King Manfred, Enzio, the noble official Jordanus Ruffus, the Arab falconer Muamin, are the men with seeing sight. We may say that seeing “begins” once more with them; not that the gift had been entirely lost; even in the Middle Ages the peasant and the huntsman had used their eyes as shrewdly as in other ages. But those who could put in words what they had seen, the intellectual, the learned of every kind, the “educated” had in those days no eyes for the material world. Frederick II, the predecessor of the great empiricists of the thirteenth century, of the Dominican Albertus Magnus and the Franciscan Roger Bacon, was the first man to make his appearance who was at once a master of all current learning, and as a hunter had from infancy the use of his eyes. It has often been asserted that the Falcon Book marks a turning point in Western thought, the beginning of experimental science in the West. And here we must recall the Emperor’s opposite, Francis of Assisi, back to whom they trace the new feeling for Nature. It is true that the two approached Nature with different sense organs. If we reckon Frederick II the first open-eyed mind who traced the eternal unvarying Law of Nature and of life in type and species and gradation, we may with equal justice account Francis of Assisi, the first open-eyed soul who spontaneously experienced Nature and Life as magic and emotion, and traced the same divine pneuma in all that lived. Dante was both in one.

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  TRANSFORMER OF THE WORLD! This was what contemporaries named Frederick. Not least “transformer” of men. For this intellectual court of his reared a new human species in whom philosophy was no kingly caprice, but a begetter of life. The spiritual knight of the epoch of the Crusade was gradually superseded by the intellectual knight who was to prevail in the ensuing centuries. Naturally the Founder was himself the first of the new species who undertakes a type of battle for centuries forgotten, which from later ages earned for the Hohenstaufen Tyrant of Sicily the name of “Herakles Musagetes.”

  Frederick II was a warrior and a fighter rather than a knight, and we miss the glamour of joust and tournament which surrounded Barbarossa even in his old age; the “game” for Frederick was not the shock of knightly weapons, but the clash of noble minds. When actual fighting was afoot, however, he shirked no danger. Seizing a shield he led the attack against a besieged town; in open battle he charged the enemy at the head of his horsemen, especially when wrath and vengeance stirred his blood. From boyhood he had trained his body in the use of weapons; no hardships were too great for him, and to the last he was equal to all the varied demands made on his physique by camping in hot weather or in cold. He never even betrayed signs of fatigue. His body, though but of medium height was kept in perfect condition, strong and muscular, not thin, inclining rather to stoutness, never flagging in alertness, achievement or endurance. Apart from an occasional indisposition and the one attack of plague he had no serious illness, and with all his love of other types of luxury he maintained a Spartan regime that allowed him only one meal a day. He had learnt from the Orient a refined cult of the body which to his contemporaries appeared simply satanic: a mendicant monk querulously reports that he did not forego his bath even on the days of Church festivals. This will have helped to preserve a certain freshness, elasticity and youthfulness which characterised him. His mode of life also assisted: he spent not less than one-third of his time in the saddle, and of that full half was given to hunting. To the very end he felt equal to any exertion. Two years before his death he was on his horse for fully twenty-four hours. His black horse, “Dragon,” carried him at dawn to the chase, at midday into battle, and then all through the night at top speed from Parma to Cremona. He was so little fatigued that immediately on arrival in the terrified town, though it was still dark, he started assembling troops with which he set out to battle two days later. Similar exploits were frequent. Just as the Puer Apuliae swam a river on a barebacked horse, the Emperor at the opening of his Lombard campaign accomplished a forced march of eighty-seven miles with his heavy cavalry in two nights and a day, and at the end of his ride surprised and took Vicenza: a feat to which his contemporaries paid a due tribute of admiration.

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  There was nothing soft about Frederick for all his intellect. His limbs were as powerful as they were well built. He tore open the side of the rebel Saracen Amir with a blow of his foot, and his beautiful and powerful hands will have been equally terrible in their grip. They were famed also for their skill and neat fingeredness. Shapely fingers may well have been part of Frederick’s Hohenstaufen inheritance. Even the twelfth century had noticed and admired Barbarossa’s unwontedly well-formed hands!

  We have no evidence of the changes Frederick’s appearance underwent with the lapse of years, especially as the most valuable witness, the great marble statue of the Emperor seated on his throne that adorned the gate of the bridge at Capua has
come down to us only as a fragment. Apart from scanty literary allusions we have nothing to go on but the golden coins, the Augustales, in particular the very perfect coins of the later mintages. Every reference we have confirms the fact that the Emperor retained throughout the “cheerful brow and the radiant cheerfulness of the eyes” which had characterised the Puer Apuliae. To the very last all the chroniclers boast of the cheerfulness of his open gaze, and all western observers agree that he was handsome, with a noble and distinguished countenance. They all seek to define the extraordinary fascination which he exercised, and which perhaps was not unconnected with his mixed blood; a brown-tinted skin with rosy cheeks and auburn-blonde hair, which grew thinner with the years. An indefinable something clung to him, and, since he remained always cleanshaven, a something unaging, of eternal youth. The lack of beard or moustache let all his features be clearly seen, the short powerful arrogant nose, the remarkably strong chin, the mouth with its full lips tightly drawn in (so at least the coins imply), and its frequently mocking impression. The countenance of a Caesar worthy of the sculptor’s chisel, of which no details recall the accustomed God-the-Father type of earlier German Emperors as Barbarossa embodied it, and as the Renaissance Emperors revived it after Frederick II.

  One of his enemies described him as sudden, sensual, subtle, crafty and evil, but adds “if he wished to show favour he could be friendly, cheerful and gracious.” A feeling of insecurity overtook everyone in his presence. Whether his countenance was expressing the most charming and winning friendliness or the most terrifying severity and sternest cruelty, the glance of his eye never varied, or at most varied by an imperceptible shade. Part of his magnetism must have lain in this disturbing effect of his timeless, soulless gaze, which let no man guess his true feelings; it was not dissimulation; it was something much more deadly. One of his friends said he had the eyes of a snake, thereby expressing this uncanny fascination. No flashing penetrating eye, but probably that serene reposeful glance which perceived unwaveringly, and—in most unchristian wise—was not directed inward. This unwaveringness must have been more cruel and alarming, and a thousand times more uncanny, than a sparkling, lightning glance. It was probably the amazing calm of two eyes set perfectly parallel, working perfectly in accord, which at times produces almost the same effect as mal occhio; it is interesting to note that one Oriental described him as “squinting.”