The case, however, did not end here. The Emperor vowed if ritual murders were possible he would slay every Jew in the Empire, and he instituted a full and complete enquiry to elucidate the truth. His first step was to apply to princes, nobles, great men, abbots, and various Church dignitaries in the Empire to ask their opinion. The complete contempt, however, which the autocrat and the scholar felt for the findings of such a body finds voice in his ultimate decision: “These men, being different all, expressed different opinions in the matter, but showed themselves incompetent to give an adequate judgment in the case. We, therefore, out of the secret depths of our own knowledge perceived that the simplest method of procedure against the Jews, who were alleged guilty of the aforementioned crime, would be through such men as had been Jews and had been converted to the Christian faith. They, being opponents, would not conceal what they might know against Jews or against the books of Moses or through the Old Testament. Now, though we ourselves in our wisdom, acquired from many books which our Majesty has learned to know, intelligently consider that the innocence of these Jews has been proved, yet we are anxious both to satisfy the law and to appease the unlettered populace. Hence we have decided with wholesome foresight and in concurrence with the princes, nobles, great men, abbots and Church dignitaries, to despatch special messengers to all the kings of the Western lands, and request them to send us from out their realms the greatest possible number of newly-baptised who are learned in Jewish law.”
This really took place. King Henry III wrote from Windsor that he had received the Emperor’s messenger, an imperial marshall, joyfully and with honour as was seemly. His illustrious and imperial Majesty had earned the king’s deepest thanks since His Majesty had been pleased to impart this hitherto unheard-of case which had recently occurred in his imperial territories. So far as in him lay the King of England would endeavour to meet the imperial desires, and he was therefore sending the two most eminent of the newly-baptised whom he had been able to find in England, who would be happy to obey all imperial commands. The other European monarchs must have replied in much the same strain. It was a case which concerned them all. This “royal commission,” assuredly the first that any Emperor ever summoned, expended no little time in consultations, of whose tenor the Emperor kept himself exactly informed. Finally, they announced as their certain conclusion that, as the Emperor had supposed, the Hebrew scriptures contained no such suggestion, that they rather forbade all blood sacrifices, and that the Talmud and the Bereshith laid heavy penalties on bloody animal sacrifices. On the basis of this finding the Emperor granted the Jews a pronouncement which severely forbade any similar accusation in future throughout the entire Empire.
Frederick’s main purpose in all this inquiry was to summon as Emperor a judicial court for the western world, and, secondly, to display before such a gathering his own immense learning, which he was never at pains to conceal, well knowing that the European kings would hear of it from their delegates. It made no small impression in Germany, though in some quarters they took it ill that the Emperor had given his decision against the Christians. With what curiosity and amazement these foreigners must have made the acquaintance of the Emperor who showed himself not only surrounded by exotic brilliance and luxury, but who held discussions about the Talmud, who seemed more completely master of Arabic than of German, and who gave visible proof of the truth of those reports that he made use “of these Saracen augurs and soothsayers whom people call mathematicians and astronomers.” Philosopher in those days meant much the same as wizard and magician, master of all secret arts, and even a man like Albertus Magnus was reputed to deal in magic. Later German legends relate that Kaiser Frederick visited Albertus in his magic garden at Cologne, as others tell that Averroes lived at his court. The Germans, indeed, always felt the Emperor to be somewhat uncanny; but their awe was blent on the whole with profound admiration rather than repugnance, and with a secret yearning to love him.
Frederick II spent the winter in Hagenau, a place he preferred to all the others. He always designated Alsace, in climate and in customs the most southern German province, as the favourite of his German hereditary lands. He stayed here for months with short interruptions, surrounded by numerous princes, settling quarrels, making agreements, receiving ambassadors. Some came from Spain, bringing valuable horses, and the Russian Duke (of Kiev?) had sent messengers with gifts. During this period in his own personal German domains where he was “Lord of the Land” he seems to have carried through some constitutional measures and at least established a centralised customs department, probably not very different from his Sicilian one. Otherwise he occupied himself with increasing his private and imperial possessions. With Sicilian money he redeemed certain claims on Swabia exercised by the King of Bohemia, and he acquired imperial rights in Uri which were so far important as they gave him the land at this end of the newly-opened St. Gothard Pass and thus secured him an alternative passage across the Alps. It was scarcely possible yet to use the pass for troops to attack Milan in the rear, for instance. Frederick will have had the ancient route over the Septimer or Julier passes in mind when he conceived the plan, at the beginning of the Lombard campaign, of invading Lombardy with two armies at once. The Rhenish and Low Country knights were to assemble in Basel, and those who were crossing by the Brenner Pass in Augsburg; perhaps the first great strategic conception of the Middle Ages.
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The Lombard War could no longer be averted. At Mainz the German princes had unanimously voted for the campaign against the Lombards, whose alliance with King Henry was treachery to the Empire. According to German custom they pledged themselves by shout and lifted hand, instead of oath, to be ready for war in the spring. Frederick had not only right but might on his side. Pope Gregory suddenly found himself completely deserted. He had informed himself by a courier of German affairs. His position was desperate. An alliance with the Emperor against the Lombards meant the strangulation of the Papacy as a political power: the States of the Church would be wedged into an imperial Italy and would in all likelihood soon fall an easy prey to the Emperor. Neither could Gregory declare openly for the Lombards. They had undeniably offended in the highest degree against the majesty of the Empire, and when the Pope sought to treat with them the towns cared as little about his commands as about the Emperor’s. Gregory himself now began to complain of their “insolence.” To maintain neutrality was practically to declare for Frederick and to abandon the towns to the imperial vengeance.
Pope Gregory’s first effort was, therefore, directed to trying to postpone for a little the punishment threatening his Lombard friends. There was suddenly nothing so urgently vital for the Christian world as a new crusade and the regulation of affairs in general in the Holy Land, where the Christians, to the Emperor’s detriment rather than to that of the Curia, were mutually fighting each other. The Pope wrote to the princes still assembled in Mainz and begged them to abandon the Lombard War for the sake of the Holy Land. He begged in vain. Frederick would not, in any circumstances, have consented to breaking the ten years’ truce with his friend al Kamil, which was not to terminate till 1239. Nevertheless, he gave the Pope one more chance. If he, as arbitrator, could persuade the Lombards between the August and Christmas of 1235 to offer terms satisfying to the honour of Emperor and Empire no armed intervention need take place. Whereupon Pope Gregory made the utterly impossible demand that Frederick should pledge himself beforehand to accept unconditionally the Pope’s award in the matter, whatever it might be. The Emperor, in view of his previous experience, returned an emphatic refusal, but sent the German Grand Master as negotiator to the Pope, to rejoin Piero della Vigna who had been for a long time in charge of the imperial cause in Rome.
Hermann of Salza now began his great rôle of go-between. He enjoyed a high reputation with Pope Gregory, who always recognised his honourable disinterestedness, and he was almost Frederick’s friend. The Pope had untruthfully asserted the Lombards’ unconditional readiness to abide by his arb
itration, but week after week the Grand Master awaited their messengers in vain. At length he returned to his master—not wholly empty-handed. Pope Gregory had been endeavouring to wean Verona from her imperial allegiance by suddenly installing there, without the shadow of right, a papal podesta. Hermann of Salza, accompanied by the imperial legate, Gebhard of Arnstein, had arrived in the nick of time, and rescued the most important town for the Emperor, of which Gebhard now took control. No sooner had Hermann quitted Italy than the ambassadors of the Lombard League appeared before the Pope, in no wise minded to submit. Gregory despatched an express messenger to urge the Grand Master’s return! Hermann of Salza’s reply was that his master’s orders were to proceed, and he went on his way to Germany. The period allotted by Frederick II had meantime run out, and all hope of peace was wrecked by the intransigence of the Lombards, who were fully aware how dire was the Pope’s need of them and took liberties with the Curia accordingly.
Pope Gregory now had recourse to another weapon which had served him at the time of Frederick’s first excommunication. Then the real cause of friction, the delay of the Crusade, was pushed into the background and Sicilian politics were made the rock of offence. Similarly now the Pope dropped the Lombard question. He unexpectedly made complaints about the conduct of Sicilian officials, about Sicilian taxes on churches and clerics, about the Saracen colony of Lucera, and other kindred topics: he joined battle on another field. The complaints now raised bore no relation to the burning Lombard question and, right or wrong, had not arisen since Frederick had quitted Sicily in complete harmony with the Pope a few months ago. As if nothing had been on the tapis for a long time past but the state of affairs in Sicily, Pope Gregory closed his letter with the ominous words: “We can no longer lock such matters in our breast without injury to the majesty of God, without detriment to our reputation and our conscience.”
Ere long a second letter followed. This time it was the Crusade which had to serve the Pope’s turn. Pope Gregory suddenly found it absolutely essential and wrote in conclusion: “The Church cannot, with equanimity, be a witness of any oppressive measures towards the Lombards, who have trusted themselves to her protection, for in this way the Crusade is being delayed. … In a case where the glory of the Redeemer is at stake the Pope cannot be a respecter of persons.” This was the flimsiest of pretexts. When the Crusade later was in progress, and it seemed that the result might strengthen the Emperor, Pope Gregory was the first to prevent its setting forth.
The German princes were solid behind Frederick, and this time the Pope had tried their patience once too often. In a letter of unspeakable bitterness Frederick goes through the Sicilian complaints point by point and seeks to refute them. But even if, in his absence, irregularities had taken place, it was not possible for him from Germany to keep the eyes of a lynx on his Sicilian kingdom and make himself heard there in the thunder! He would be coming soon enough to Italy, and would then be ready to discuss such matters. The imperial reply to the second letter stated briefly that foreign excursions were excluded until peace was restored within the Empire. This cast the die for an imperial campaign against the Lombards.
As Frederick’s relations with the Roman Curia grew tenser and more doubtful he seemed to wish visibly to demonstrate once more the essential unity of Church and Empire, Emperor and Pope. At his coronation in Aix as a mere boy he had set the seal of sanctity on his German-Roman kingdom by unexpectedly taking the Cross and by the solemn re-interment of the sainted Charlemagne. Now that he was about to leave Germany he closed the circle with a kindred ceremony. He went to Marburg to exhume and re-inter the childlike St. Elizabeth, Landgravine of Thuringia.
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St. Elizabeth, the chaste and beautiful princess of the Wartburg, is still remembered. The greatest miracle she wrought was to combine a tender love for husband and children with a life devoted to the poor and the sick; to temper dignity and pride of race with gentleness and humility. The memory of the penitent of Marburg, clad in the robe of a Brother Minor, girt with a cord, flogging herself, is forgotten in the picture of the gracious lady. Elizabeth was a daughter of the King of Hungary, she had spent her childhood at the Thuringian court and was, at an early age, betrothed to the Landgrave Lewis. Later centuries related miracles of her childish days. The generous-hearted girl had filled a basket with food for the poor; some one reproved her severely for her generosity, and lo! beneath its covering cloth the basket was full of fragrant roses. When Elizabeth first met the disciples of Francis of Assisi in Eisenach she was fifteen years old. The teaching of the Tuscan-Umbrian saint fell on well-prepared soil. His demand for chastity and humility, and above all for poverty, pointed the path which the princess resolved to tread when presently she found herself a widow. Landgrave Lewis had always been benevolently tolerant to her enthusiasms, and when he fell a victim to the plague in Brindisi on his way to Frederick II’s Crusade, Elizabeth ardently desired to exchange her life as a princess for that of a beggar woman. Her confessor was Conrad of Marburg, the same who, after her death, developed into the nightmare-haunted fanatic of the Inquisition. He persuaded her to avoid excess. She quitted the Wartburg, renounced her children, and built herself a hut of wood and mud, as St. Francis had commanded his followers to do; but she retained her princely rank and used her widow’s riches to help and to feed the poor and suffering. She housed diseased and leprous children, washed their wounds and cared for them, and even kissed them, overcoming her revulsion with a smile. One Good Friday in an ecstacy she was granted heavenly visions. She did not abandon herself to visions, however, still less gave them publicity and she claimed no miracles in her short life of twenty-four years. When she was about to die, and lay on her pallet in an intensity of joy, people said that the sweetest sounds of angelic music were heard from her throat though her lips were tightly closed. The very day after her burial the saint began to work miracles, and people came from far to secure scraps of her garment, of her hair and nails as relics. Not long afterwards the Pope canonised her at the request of Landgrave Conrad of Thuringia, who himself entered the Teutonic Order. Kaiser Frederick came to Marburg in May 1236 to give his sainted kinswoman royal burial.
An uncounted multitude—people spoke of twelve hundred thousand!—had streamed into Marburg when Frederick II, in the presence of many bishops and princes and especially knights of the Teutonic Order, lifted the first stone from the grave of the young saint. Forthwith from the sacred body oil began to flow, which the Teutonic knights collected and distributed to churches and monasteries. The corpse was then enclosed in an oaken casket overlaid with skilfully wrought gold, and richly adorned with silver figures and antique gems. Frederick presented the saint with the golden beaker from which he was wont to drink, and crowned the head of the Landgravine with a golden crown, thus doing homage to the saint and princess, his kinswoman. The foundation stone of the Church of St. Elizabeth in Marburg was laid at this time; its stained-glass windows represent their patron saint as the daughter of the Queen of Heaven, receiving a crown from the Virgin Mother, while St. Francis at her side is being crowned by the Son of God himself. They give no picture of the barefoot servant of the poor, clad in white flowing garments, distributing alms.
Frederick’s interest in the exhumation of any chance mendicant saint would have been scarcely seemly. People seem to have hinted this, for Frederick defends himself against the innuendo that his homage was paid less to the saint than to the princely kinswoman. The two things—he wrote—are not easy to dissociate: “For it fills us with joy to know that our Saviour, Jesus of Nazareth, was a shoot of King David’s royal stem; and the tables of the Old Testament bear witness that the Ark of the Covenant might be touched only by the hand of the nobly-born.” Thus Frederick expressed himself in a letter about the Marburg ceremonies to the Minister-General of the Franciscan Order.
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Marburg marked the close of this German period. They were days of solemn festival, happy days of brilliance and of peace, a peace which lay
over the whole of Germany and over almost all the lands of the Roman Empire. An atmosphere of world peace prevailed; the chroniclers report an overwhelming wine harvest and a mild warm winter; all signs which seemed to prove that the Prince of Peace, the Emperor of Justitia, was reigning. It might well seem so, for Frederick had always succeeded in conquering without weapons; all the great successes that had raised him to these heights had been won by peaceful means, at most by a threatening gesture. If the Lechfeld this summer was echoing to the clash of arms as the warriors assembled round their Emperor this army was to bring the world the gift of peace. The Emperor called the coming campaign an “Execution of Justice,” and he failed to understand how Pope Gregory could damn with so ugly a word as “war” the “peace-restoring intentions” of the imperial Judge. The peace which God designed to fill the world under the Emperor of Justice was nigh at hand, disturbance flickered here and there only in the Lombard corner. It was now his duty to bring peace to this quarter also, this easily-excited, bloodthirsty region which had brought on itself the punishment of the Judge and the Avenger. He was bringing peace with the sword—but only because the Lombards would not have it otherwise.
Frederick the Second Page 49
