Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  The mood prevailing in the Roman Curia was dangerous for the Pope. The condemnation of his policy by the “pillars of the Church” soon received a public confirmation which could not easily have been more annihilating. When Frederick II sent to the Roman people the Milan carroccio, the spoil of a victory which spelt the Pope’s defeat, many cardinals of the Roman Church joined the Senate and people of Rome in escorting the standard-bearing chariot in festive procession to the Capitol, Gregory having strained every nerve to prevent its entry. They attended the solemn installation of the imperial trophy, and thus gave in some measure the Church’s benediction to the ancient Roman celebration of victory. The Pope, deserted by the discontented cardinals and by the Romans, who were intoxicated by the gift from their Triumphator, was suddenly alone in Rome, “grieved unto death.” This Rome the Emperor was about to make the capital of the Empire and of Italy, “as soon as we have first reduced to peace the seat of our Empire, Italy.” This reduction of Italy to peace—or to subjection—could not, after the Emperor’s recent successes, be far off; to hinder it, the beginning and the end of papal policy, was scarce now possible. Yet the old man, reaching in these last years an almost eerie grandeur, indomitably daring, fate-defying, did not despair. Opportunity might come: the Emperor might trip. He waited, ready for a counter-thrust with sword and ban, to break though the fatal encirclement.

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  The Emperor’s victory over the Lombard armies had, in fact, dissolved the League. Ten days after his triumph in Cremona Frederick was able to enter Lodi; a little later, in January 1238, he received the submission of Vigevano at a Diet in Pavia; soon after that the submission also of Novara and Vercelli. In February he entered Piedmont. In Turin he held a second Diet at which the nobles of these regions did him homage, Savoy, Montferrat and others. Hereupon Savona, Albenga and other towns of the Riviera were occupied, so that western Lombardy, the upper reaches of the Po, were obedient to the Emperor. The influence of the victory immediately spread southwards. The legate Gebhard effected an agreement with Florence: the Florentines dismissed their Milanese podesta and took instead a Roman, Angelo Malabranca, one of those proconsuls whom Frederick had designated for imperial office. Imperial Tuscany was now in Frederick’s hand. “As when new waters stream into a dried-up river-bed and all the fish begin to live again, the Emperor’s supporters sprang everywhere to life…” so spoke a chronicler on a similar occasion. The success of Frederick’s arms had been potent throughout Italy for intimidation or good cheer.

  The war was not yet over. No peace had yet been made with Milan. The Emperor’s behaviour since the victory had stiffened instead of breaking the resisting power of this commune. Frederick imagined that a Triumphator should not stoop to treat with rebels: they must offer unconditional submission. To preserve this attitude, which was bound up with his abysmal hate of Milan he flung to the winds all political expediency. The Emperor had indeed defeated the Milanese army, and there had been severe disturbances in the city itself after the battle: the heretic rabble had stormed the churches, defiled the altars, hung the crucifixes upside down… but the kernel of Milan’s strength, her impregnable city, was unimpaired. For the sake of peace at last Milan would have offered conditional surrender: Lodi had submitted on demand to accepting an imperial captain, to delivering hostages, and had been prepared to undertake yet other obligations. Frederick, however, appears to have rejected all suggestions from Milan, and obstinately demanded complete and unconditional surrender. The conquered must put themselves and their town unquestionably at his mercy. He sent the Milanese the equivocal oracle: he would do only what he must.

  What punishment the imperial judge destined for Milan was not to be guessed at. Other towns that had surrendered at discretion Frederick had spared, displaying his imperial indulgence, but it was at least questionable whether the specially-hated Milan could count on clemency. The Milanese would not take the risk. Mindful how Barbarossa had destroyed their town, and reflecting accurately that an unconditional peace could be concluded any day, Milan rejected the Emperor’s demand. They instructed their messengers to say that “their wits sharpened by experience, they feared the Emperor’s savagery.” Faith in their own strength and in their trusty walls enabled this single town successfully to bid defiance to the victorious Emperor. Five other towns, scattered fragments of the Lombard Confederation, followed the heroic example of Milan: Alessandria, Brescia, Piacenza in Lombardy, and Bologna and Faënza in the Romagna.

  The war went on, and the Emperor was now faced with the necessity of overcoming these six towns or taking them by storm, a difficult feat, though not impossible, if Frederick had only had to do with the townsfolk. No sane political reason explains what urged the Emperor to such severity towards Milan that he would not content himself with a humiliation of the town, especially as he knew that by far his most dangerous enemy was in Rome. If Milan was his, on any terms whatsoever, the whole of Italy was his, and the Pope remained in very deed merely Bishop of Rome. But hate for rebels in general and for Milan in particular animated him, and the inexorable sternness of a judge who had come to exercise justice, and the arrogance of a victor in the first flush of triumph who saw himself a tool in the hands of Providence. These things may all have contributed to the Emperor’s attitude. He had, moreover, good reason to hope that another successful campaign would break the resistance of the six remaining cities. If the imperial arms were again victorious the Pope need no longer be feared, he was dangerous only in conjunction with the Lombards.

  Frederick at once set about unprecedented preparations for the new campaign. The whole world was laid under contribution to chastise the few rebellious towns. Frederick II even begged friendly foreign monarchs for assistance, on the remarkable plea that the Lombards were attacking and endangering not so much Frederick himself as the whole principle of monarchy. It was usual enough for an intractable noble to revolt against his overlord, but the Emperor was right in detecting a far graver menace in a rebellion of his subjects the town-dwellers, seeking independence. “This matter touches you and all the kings of earth,” he wrote to the King of France. “Keep open, therefore, your sharp eyes and ears and studiously take heed what encouragement to revolt would be given to all them that would fain throw off the yoke of authority, if the Roman Empire were to suffer loss through this kind of insurgence.” The Lombards were for Frederick no commonplace insurgents. He scented in their recalcitrance a principle hostile to monarchy and majesty, pregnant with heresy which it should be “the desire and the honour of all rulers in common to combat and to extirpate.” Woe worth the day when such aspiration, such craving for “abhorred freedom,” confined as yet to Italy, should flood the world!

  All monarchs must stand shoulder to shoulder with reciprocal obligation to help each other against such overthrows of the State, and, therefore, was the Emperor asking support from the kings, not because he was himself too weak, but in order that “sheer terror may pursue rebellious subjects far and wide when they see that royal armies re-enforce imperial troops and feel that in similar case imperial help will be due unto the kings.” “Therefore, if the imperial arm,” runs the message to King Bela of Hungary, “is supported by the power of the kings, if various allied princes are voluntarily bound together for mutual help: then every impulse to revolt and conspiracy will cease among the subjects. So seriously had this increased in the provinces of Italy that though they failed to tear up our sovereignty by the roots, the rebels carried their vicious example into the most remote and distant regions, more especially amongst our neighbours!”

  It is idle to contend that Frederick missed the deeper meaning of the Lombard insurrection. It was precisely because he fully plumbed the danger that he at all times sought by the natural alliance of nobility and clergy to rear a bulwark against the emergence of the tiers état. Hence the emphasis he laid on his community of interest with the monarchical, aristocratic Church. He did not succeed in realising the unity of Empire and Papacy. It lived on in letter
s and in formulas only. To meet the menace that threatened the principle of monarchy, Frederick was, therefore, now obliged to turn to the secular rulers of Europe in default of the Church. He now sought to unite all the monarchs of the world in an alliance under the primacy of the Empire, and win them for a crusade against the unbelievers and infidels of the State and of Justitia. The enterprise did not lack a religious element, for the rebels were setting themselves against the reign of peace which God had willed: were, therefore, in a sense heretics. Frederick, logically, re-issued his edicts against heretics. The alliance of monarchs to combat the principle of freedom from authority which had come to birth earlier amongst the enlightened Lombards—the Alemanni at the southern base of the Alps—constituted the first SECULAR OECUMENICAL ACTION FOR POLITICAL ENDS in history: a forerunner of the coalitions of hereditary monarchs against the Jacobins.

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  Frederick’s warning and Frederick’s demand met with response. Extraordinary auxiliaries would be forthwith at his disposal, first and foremost the forces of the Empire itself which he had called up at the beginning of the year. Sicily and Germany were arming, and Diets in Turin, Cremona and Verona had set everything in motion from Burgundy to the March of Treviso. King Conrad with his German contingent reached Verona from the North in the Spring of 1238, and by the summer an enormous mass of troops had assembled, the largest and the most heterogeneous army that Frederick ever commanded. There were the mercenaries, the feudal knights and the Saracens from Sicily, King Conrad’s German Knights, the forces of Florence and Tuscany, the knights of Northern Italy, warriors from imperial Lombardy, from Rome, the Marches, the Romagna, besides foot-soldiers from the imperial towns, and an army of Burgundian knights who, under the Count of Provence, were to fight for the first time in the service of the Empire. In addition to these almost all the monarchs of the world had sent auxiliaries: troops from the kings of England and of France, from King Bela of Hungary, and from the King of Castile. The eastern monarchs were not to be outdone, John Vatatzes, Emperor of Nicaea, had sent his Greeks, and the Sultan his Arabs to fight in the Emperor’s armies.

  This mass of troops was followed by the entire, exotic train of the imperial court, with its menagerie of strange beasts. People said that since the old days of the circus the like had not been seen in Italy, and they recalled the war-elephants of Alexander and Antiochus which they had read of. This was not the army of a Roman general in whose wake followed the thunderous tramp of well-drilled legions, but the levy of a Cosmocrator who commanded men and animals from every corner of the earth, comparable perhaps to the hordes which the mighty Persian led of old against the towns of Greece. Frederick II first led his hosts against the small, high-lying town of Brescia. A siege was contemplated, and the Emperor boasted his great stores of siege implements. He had, moreover, commandeered the services of a Spanish engineer, Calamandrinus, who was pre-eminently inventive in the construction of battering-rams and the like. Eccelino had despatched him to the Emperor: in fetters, so that he might not escape. Fate willed, however, that the captive should fall into the hands of the Brescians. They made him welcome with gifts of hearth and home and a Brescian bride, and he was forthwith employed in exercising his skill in the service of the beleaguered town against the Emperor.

  The campaign had begun with this stroke of ill-luck and the Emperor sought in vain to bring about a change of fortune. In spite of successful skirmishes near Brescia, in spite of great gallantry amongst individual contingents—the English particularly distinguished themselves—the siege made no progress. Numerous assaults were made, none were successful. The missiles of Calamandrinus, which found their mark with great accuracy, destroyed the Emperor’s siege equipment. In order to protect his instruments of war Frederick tied captured Brescians to his attacking towers. The townsmen showed no weak consideration for their fellow-citizens, but retaliated in similar wise on their imperial prisoners. The fighting continued savagely for weeks. After a fortnight of it, the Emperor, who had counted on the rapid victory of his immense army, opened negotiations, but the townsfolk refused to treat. A plague broke out amongst the cattle in the imperial camp, bad weather and deluges of rain made the enterprise more difficult. Frederick’s peace-envoy, Bernardo Orlando di Rossi of Parma, appears to have betrayed his master: instead of persuading the Brescians to surrender he encouraged them to hold out. After two months of useless sacrifice, and a final unsuccessful attack, the Emperor finally broke off the siege in October.

  The failure of this elaborate undertaking was almost equivalent to a defeat. A crisis was imminent. Frederick dismissed all his foreign auxiliaries and retained only the German knights. Success had recently emboldened the Emperor’s friends, failure now offered encouragement to his foes. The Lombards perceived how strong their towns were to resist such forces, and trusted more than ever in their strength. All Italy had breathlessly awaited the outcome of the struggle, none with greater attention than Pope Gregory IX. As long as the siege of Brescia was in progress he prudently refrained from siding openly with the Lombards. He had even seemed to lean towards a reconciliation with Frederick, had sent the Minister-General of the Franciscan Order, Brother Elias of Cortona, a friend of Frederick’s, to the Emperor’s court with assurances that the Pope was anxious to be unus et idem with Frederick. Scarcely, however, was the end of the siege known than the Pope threw off his preceding restraint. Frederick II had skilfully been stirring up all anti-papal forces and gathering them round him. Pope Gregory was now able to repay him handsomely in kind.

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  The imperial fiasco released the Pope from an extremely unpleasant position, and in spite of his great age he developed an amazing activity. He must provide what Frederick’s foes had hitherto lacked: a rallying-point and a great common idea. With fiery zeal Pope Gregory set about retrieving the delay. The fuse had long since been surreptitiously laid. The intimate sympathy of the Pope with the Lombard heretics, rebels and enemies of the Emperor, was an open secret. He now appointed Frederick’s bitterest enemy, Gregory of Montelongo, as Legate of Lombardy. This prelate had begun his career as a notary of the Roman Curia, and was to end it as Patriarch of Aquileia. He was cunning and resourceful, well-versed in every type of political intrigue and subterfuge, and possessed a knowledge of war unsurpassed in his day. His skilful manipulations succeeded in uniting all the anti-Kaiser elements in Lombardy and reconciling the most varied interests.

  His great achievement was the creation of a consolidated opposition to the unified imperial power in Italy. All aspirations of the towns and the town parties, by whatever name they might be called, which were hostile to the Emperor, could be sure of his assistance, and their short-sighted and hitherto self-centred squabblings of every kind suddenly gained dignity and import by being associated on equal terms with a great world idea, the Papacy. The miscellaneous imperial enemies of all camps and ranks and strata were no longer rebels and revolutionaries, but champions and defenders of the oppressed Church. The name of “Guelf” became a general term for all enemies of the empire under the leadership of the Church: patrician and plebeian, heretic and orthodox, layman and priest rallied together, so that the party division of Ghibelline and Guelf by no means tallied with the natural, social, religious, or national cleavages. Very much the reverse: as people rightly felt, the whole world was involved: no order, no town, no rank, no family, no individual even, but was rent asunder by the warring principles of Empire versus Papacy, as the one or the other in turn prevailed.

  The anti-imperial coalition under the Church’s leadership was not merely defensive. Frederick II was, of course, the challenger, because his very existence was war and battle, though he sought peace; but the aggressor who repudiated every compromise, who aimed at war to the knife was, as has been generally recognised, the hasty, hot-headed Pope Gregory. Before he declared himself as an open enemy he had effected in the Lateran an offensive alliance between Venice and Genoa against the Emperor. The two maritime towns who had so often been at wa
r undertook to render reciprocal assistance, and swore to make no peace with the Emperor without the Pope’s consent. The papal party, under their Milanese podesta, had the upper hand in Genoa at the time, and, apart from the threat to the Trevisan March, the Venetians were feeling peculiarly embittered by Frederick II’s treatment of their Doge’s son, who had been captured at Cortenuova, dragged in Frederick’s triumph, and was still, to the disgrace of Venice, prisoner in an Apulian dungeon.

  Pope Gregory exploited the resentment against the Emperor to the full. When he had left the capital in July 1238 to go to Anagni, at the very moment that the Emperor’s powerful army was marching on Brescia, Rome was almost wholly pro-Emperor. On his return in October the papal party was dominant once more. Pope Gregory hastily made up his mind to breathe more securely by destroying a number of castles belonging to the Emperor’s adherents, palaces dating from ancient Roman days that were now flying the colours of Antichrist. Their marbles and mosaics were destroyed. Later, Frederick II commanded a Sicilian official to restore as far as possible the ruined buildings at his expense.

  Although the Pope was undisguisedly bent on war and working up for a breach he nevertheless resumed negotiations with the Emperor, not with any intention of an agreement but to gain time. After the Brescia failure nothing could be less opportune for Frederick than a resumption of open hostilities with the Curia. He did all that in him lay to avoid a fresh rupture until a new victory should have altered the situation to his advantage. He, therefore, displayed the greatest self-restraint. He called a halt to the organisation of the Italian State already begun in Western Lombardy, and submitted to an enquiry before a number of prelates. The Pope lodged a complaint against the Emperor under fourteen heads. Though the suspension of hostilities was to depend on their being disposed of not one of them dealt with the questions at issue. From the beginning of his arbitration Pope Gregory had deliberately forgotten that the Lombards’ support of King Henry had been the fons et origo of the new strife between Court and Curia. He had preferred to ignore the Emperor’s justifiable complaints, and pick holes in the administration of Sicily. The issue was at first perfectly clear, but Pope Gregory had contrived, as of yore in the Crusade question, to conceal and distort it, and had even been able to lend a religious colour to the purely political question: who should be master in Italy.