Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  The Friuli Diet, which dragged on till the end of May (being transferred from Cividale to Udine, and then to Pordenone so that the whole burden might not fall on one town), was immensely important to the German constitution. It is a commonplace that the results of decisions there taken are still to be felt. Since King Henry had allowed the Privilege of Worms to be wrung from him, the Emperor had no option but to confirm this “Edict in favour of the Princes.” It thus came about that Frederick II, the last of the German Emperors who had been elected as Duke of a race in the old sense, saw the end of the Germanic kingship based on race and armies. From the point of view of constitutional history Germany may henceforth be styled a Confederation of Princes or a Princely Oligarchy.

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  Every German statesman is faced by the same problem: to establish the ideal relation between the Empire and its members. Each preceding answer seems to have been suitable as a momentary, but questionable as a permanent solution: each has been big with fate. In Frederick’s day the problem might have been stated somewhat as follows: everywhere each state was pressing on towards immediacy; the absolutism of such a state as the Kingdom of Sicily, for instance, must in some way be reconciled with the existing kingship of the Germans based on race and feudal force. Contrary to what might have been expected Frederick II never even contemplated the attempt to transform the whole of Germany into a unified officialised Germany, comparable to the Sicilian monarchy. It is true that in later days Frederick from his Italian base pushed forward his Sicilian bureaucratic regime as far as Burgundy and the Tyrol, and even in a modified form as far as Austria, so that the thesis might be sustained that Frederick had simply been unable to complete the “Sicilianisation” of the Empire, which was creeping steadily from South to North, because he died prematurely before he was sufficiently master of Lombardy. There is no sign, however, that the Emperor was planning to push his Sicilian official system further northwards. All historical and spiritual forces in the country would at once have failed him, and one essential was lacking: the cultivated layman and the cultivated townsman who existed in Italy; the whole great stratum of lay jurists which replaced the feudal system as the basis of the Sicilian-Italian State. Frederick II never contemplated undermining the feudal forces of extensive and deeply subdivided Germany, and ruling through officials without the intervention of the princes. The German princes, moreover, were not Sicilian barons and duodecimo clerics, they were the Emperor’s peers.

  Since the Emperor renounced all intention of exercising in Germany his new methods of rule, the task of ruling must fall on the German princes who were in any case striving for greater independence, and whose rights were long since steadily increasing at the expense of the rights of the Crown. Frederick II allowed the princes to continue in this path, nay even supported them, because this exactly fitted his imperial policy which was narrowing down into a Lombard policy. More than any preceding Emperor, Frederick was first and foremost the super-national Roman Imperator, whose great mid-European Imperium stretched from Syracuse to Friesland and the Baltic. To strengthen the Empire his first need was an utterly submissive Lombardy. Without this the Empire was rent in two. To reduce Lombardy, Frederick needed the forces of Germany, but needed even more—as security also against the Pope—an assurance of peace in the North and the protection of his rear by the trusty princes of Germany, both spiritual and temporal. By the sacrifice of his own revenues and prerogatives he could purchase all this from the powerful nobles who had clipped the wings of so many victorious Emperors before him. For the sake of the cause he did not hesitate to make the sacrifice, the less because his Sicilian wealth and resources were ample compensation. Sicilian gold was potent in money-lacking Germany, and Frederick’s generosity won the attachment of the princes to his person, an attachment which withstood amazingly the protracted intrigues and machinations of the Church.

  It cannot be doubted that practical considerations and the higher necessities of the Roman Empire prompted Frederick to these sacrifices in favour of the princes. What followed, whether with or against his will, was the almost sovereign independence of each individual prince in his own territory. The concessions which Frederick in his early days had made to the spiritual princes were extended by the new charters of Worms and Friuli to the temporal princes also, so that a certain uniformity prevailed throughout Germany. The princes, being thus all on more or less the same footing, began to feel themselves more of a corporate body than formerly, and became aware of a community of interest, advantageous or disadvantageous for the Emperor as the case might be. Renouncing most of the Crown rights in the princes’ territories, Frederick, according to the new privileges, had agreed to abandon royal rights of coinage, the right of building imperial fortifications, the royal jurisdiction throughout all the lands of the princes, or, as they now came to be significantly called, the “Lords of the Land.” The princes’ authority vis-à-vis their subjects was enhanced, for the inferior courts of law were placed under the immediate jurisdiction of the princes, and jurisdiction other than theirs was abolished or greatly limited. Other clauses pointed in the same direction, so that the princes exercised almost autocratic power in their own domains, or were on the high road to acquiring it. An intensification of state organisation was thus set on foot in Germany as in Sicily, not emanating from and re-enforcing the central royal authority, but strengthening the separate parts, the princes. It was now possible for them to consolidate their states, and the constructive forces inherent in unity of race and country were immensely easier to release, develop, exploit under the direct thorough-going rule of a minor monarch than under mediate rule of an Emperor hampered by the princes, or of a prince hampered by the existence of intrusive royal rights. This clean sweep of all the powers that interfered between the lord of the land and his territories made it possible for the individual states to begin government in earnest.

  From this point of view the Emperor’s policy of strengthening the prince appears as a simplication of the whole German state, and of untold importance for the consolidation of the loosely-strung widely-spreading German lands, in which from of old all strength and statesmanship had lain in the individual clans and not in the congeries of German races. It was, however, a policy fraught with immense danger. The stronger the constituent states grew the less hope there was of unifying them into one German super-state, and Frederick’s course of action prolonged the subdivision of Germany. He definitely hindered the amalgamation of the German people into one “German State.” The policy, moreover, reacted injuriously on the Empire as a whole, for the princes, each immersed in the development of his own domains, displayed little active interest in the fate of the Empire. The important gain for Frederick was that the princes kept the peace and were ready at need to stand behind him to a man; a state of affairs that lasted twenty years and more. It is common knowledge how disastrous this increased independence proved. With the decline of the Roman Imperium the last unifying impulse was gone. Each lord of the land pursued the aims and interests of his own territory, and developed a narrow provincial outlook which took no heed of the world at large, of Germany, or Emperor, or Empire. Cleavages and clefts that the pressure of the Empire had kept closed now yawned and widened.

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  However ready Frederick was to subordinate Germany’s advantage to the World Empire, it is scarcely conceivable that a statesman of his calibre can have failed to visualise one united northern kingdom, suited to the conditions of the expiring Middle Ages. He would gain nothing from a mere semblance of power, and if this was to be avoided he must re-organise the whole kingdom on a new basis, with due regard to the new conditions. A few individual measures destined to enhance the central imperial power show that he had some definite scheme in mind. If the Lombard struggle had ended quickly and happily we can imagine that the Emperor would have introduced some uniform method of administration for all territories. While preserving their sovereignty intact he might have metamorphosed the princes into viceroys, parallel
to the later Vicars General of Italy, with their princely, even royal state. Frederick is credited with the intention of making a collection of imperial law and legal procedure. He must certainly have had such a work in mind which would have guided the princely governments into definite lines. It was not long after this time that Frederick appointed a Grand Justiciar for Germany, thereby implying that the Emperor’s supreme jurisdiction should be asserted, while the normal administration of justice in each country should remain with the individual princes.

  The essential thing, however, was that the Emperor should have some positive force at his disposal to guarantee the good faith of the princes and to compensate for the securities he had foregone. He required a sufficient force to compel obedience at need and enforce the unity of the Empire. It is of the utmost interest to note what deductions Frederick II drew from the reshuffling of the German powers. The Emperor had divested himself of so many prerogatives that he could no longer claim to be the foremost and the mightiest in virtue of his privileges; he must prove himself so by actual strength. The personal private resources of the monarch had to fill the place of the impersonal imperial property and crown rights. This change is foreshadowed in the efforts of the Hohenstaufens to secure for themselves a firm working basis in the south. Now for the first time Sicily provided an Emperor with just such a personal possession. It lay wholly outside the range of the German princes, and, secure in his Sicilian resources, Frederick had been able to abandon his German prerogatives. In securing Sicily the Hohenstaufen Emperors had not had this policy in view. Sicily, like the other countries, was there to serve the Empire as a whole. Frederick II, standing on the borderline between the two epochs, was the first to feel the need of founding a personal power in the North within Germany itself: setting the precedent which the Hapsburg was so happily to follow—a remarkable coincidence. In 1236 the Emperor crushed the rebellion of the last of the Babenbergs, Frederick the Fighter, of Austria and Styria. The Emperor confiscated his dukedoms and retained them under the immediate administration of the Empire, instead of granting them to some new fiefholder after a year and a day, as custom was. Thus in the south-eastern corner of the kingdom, where Bohemia, Hungary and the dukedom of Austria still offered large unbroken stretches of territory, the Hohenstaufen Frederick, whose Swabian patrimony, though scattered, was still of considerable extent, sought to build up a new power. The war against the Austrian Duke was only a minor action in larger campaigns, and the Duke ultimately succeeded in recovering the bulk of his lands. An agreement was reached later, and at one stage the Dukedom of Austria was to be elevated into a kingdom. This plan, however, fell through. Frederick the Fighter, last of the Babenbergs, ultimately died childless in 1246 and his vacant fief fell to the Empire. Frederick II forthwith revived his original scheme, retained the dukedom for himself, entrusted its administration to Sicilian Captains General, and bequeathed it as hereditary Hohenstaufen property to his grandson. The Emperor’s fighting was, in future, mainly confined to Italy, and the importance of the Hohenstaufen personal Austrian domain was slight. The amazing thing is the astounding foresight of this world-statesman and his unerring intuition of what was to come.

  The Emperor thus sought to forestall the dangers conjured up by his own surrender of innumerable safeguards and by his strengthening of the imperial princes. Frederick’s greatest power lay, nevertheless, in his own personality. At the zenith of his glory Frederick II, most Roman of all German Emperors, possessed not only the armed force, but the personal magic, to sway the princes to his will and direct their gaze to the great problems of the Roman world. In these glorious years the strengthened princes and the double renown of the ancient kingdom-in-arms and the new Empire brought about that unique fulfilment which preluded the end: that full perfection of the German Empire, a mighty Emperor surrounded by his mighty princes. The dream of their return lulled anaemic generations for centuries to come. Germany as Imperium was at that moment the symbol and embodiment of the great conception of a Roman Empire embracing and unifying all peoples and races of the world, conterminous and identical with a great Christian Empire. This was possible because Germany preserved, for weal or woe, the multitude of races and princes which corresponded to that ideal and imaginary community of Europe’s peoples and kings. In contrast to her shrewd, practical neighbours in the West, Germany remained always “the Empire.”

  The ideal World-Empire of the Middle Ages did not involve the subjection of all peoples under the dominion of one. It stood for the community of all kings and princes, of all the lands and peoples of Christendom, under one Roman Emperor, who should belong to no nation, and who, standing outside all nations, should rule all from his throne in the one Eternal City. Only thus could the perfect Germany arise, setting before princes and races the idea: the Imperium Romanum—and yet: nations.

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  The domination of one race over the other would, therefore, have been a betrayal in favour of one peculiar type—Saxon or Frank, Swabian or ultimately Prussian. For in the State dominated by one race (in spite of the attainment of a genuine non-national unity) the best powers of all the races could never flourish equally, to produce the one world-embracing German. Less fortunate, perhaps, than Ionians and Dorians, no single race, whether Saxon or Swabian or Frank, possessed a world-sense, though each alone was well-equipped with state-sense: the feeling for the universal—divorced alas from the feeling for the state—was incorporate only in the super-national German whole. Frederick never contemplated such a betrayal, never aimed at ruling Germany with Swabian knights and esquires. He was no Swabian Duke, no German King, he was solely Roman Caesar and Imperator, he was Divus Augustus—as none before him and none since. As Roman Caesar, centring in himself and in his own person the German whole, he became the symbol, foreign though it was, which supplied the one possible form of the self-fulfilment Germany was then seeking: self-fulfilment within the Roman Empire.

  The great Empire of this great Emperor was not a German National State on the model of Sicily, or of France under the Capets. The true statesman does not apply one hard and fast scheme to all countries. Yet in a higher sense Frederick II perfected and completed the unified German Empire. He did not here pose as the priest-like Emperor and imperial Mediator who figured in the Sicilian bureaucratic State, nor yet as the Demi-God sent from heaven, nor yet as the Son of God. The oriental love of hero-worship is radically foreign to the Germanic mind, especially while the hero is still in the flesh. Amongst the Germans he aimed rather at creating the impression of the King soaring to heaven, borne aloft on the shoulders of the princes. The release of the princes from feudal fetters and their unlimited powers (which now for the first time united them in the “voluntary unity” of the late Middle Ages) made the Hohenstaufen autocrat, in literal truth, amongst his autocrats, primus inter pares—the first amongst his peers. Further, since all royal authority and all royal rights had been withdrawn throughout the princes’ territories, his imperial throne had no longer any basis upon earth. As the German princes themselves phrased it at the Friuli Diet: “The imperial throne, to which we are attached as the limbs are attached to the head, rests like the head upon our shoulders and is firmly upheld by our body, so that the Majesty of the Emperor shines forth in glory and our princely rank reflects the glory back again.” This is the traditional conception of the Empire, which at last finds ultimate expression and literal realisation; for a brief span, and almost against the ruler’s desire. Unlike his predecessors Frederick never weakened or oppressed the princes to make his own greatness look the greater by contrast with their weakness. He strengthened the princes’ power, even created a new dukedom, with more exalted statesmanship believing that the power and the glory and the brilliance of his own imperial sceptre would not pale in giving forth light, but would gain in radiance and would shine the brighter the more mighty and brilliant and majestic were the princes whom Caesar Imperator beheld “as equals round his judgment seat.” The princes are no longer columns bearing as a bu
rden the weight of the throne. Like the officials of the South, and yet very differently, they become piers and pillars expressive of upward-soaring strength, preparing the glorious elevation of the “prince of princes and king of kings” who is borne aloft on the shoulders of his peers, and who in turn exalts both kings and princes.

  Life was always unthinkable for Frederick without the sense of tension; here is an incomparably daring gamble, in which the slightest reshuffling of the cards will mean ruin. Frederick faced the situation unflinching, with wide-open eyes. He wrote later: “Germania’s princes on whom hangs our elevation—and our fall.” The danger was proportional to the elevation, no more. The Germans recognised Frederick II as fate incarnate and as doom; they yearned for him, they shrank from him. With him the Empire fell; but more enduring than a century of safety were the few hours during which a German Emperor was privileged to tread such dangerous heights. The increased power of the princes was a necessary factor therein. If the correct balance was to be maintained in Germany feeble limbs could not support an over-weighty head: princes and Emperor together represented that supernational German, symbolised the “illustrious body of the Holy Empire,” the corpus mysticum of the “German-as-a-Whole,” which Frederick II justifiably identified with his own body. For this stranger, this Roman of Swabian race, embodied that European-German personage whom men had dreamt of, who combined the triple culture of Europe: the cultures of the Church, the East, the Ancients. The Church was to Frederick II something complete and finished, which he had in himself outgrown, which lay behind him. Nietzsche called Frederick “to my mind the FIRST EUROPEAN,” and wrote of “that magic, intangible, unfathomable Riddle of a man predestined to victory and betrayal.” The type was one most difficult for the Germans to assimilate by reason of just that Roman chiselling, that secretiveness, that complete self-sufficingness.