Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  Frederick had again and again deprecated a campaign against Syria till he should be free to lead the crusade, from which only the quarrel with Pope Gregory was detaining him. And the crusaders well knew that without the Emperor they would be “as sand without lime or a wall without mortar.” Nevertheless he put no obstacles in their way and helped them where he could. He urged them to travel by way of Sicily, where they would find shipping facilities, and he gave immediate instructions to his Sicilian officials to look after the pilgrims, many of whom had to winter in Sicily waiting for the new date proposed. The imperial marshal in Syria, Richard Filangieri, received the necessary instructions. In the spring of 1240 the pilgrims set forth for Syria, where, as was to be expected, they increased the existing confusion. The lack of a common leader, the proverbial disunion of Christians in the Holy Land, the untrustworthiness of the Knights of St. John and of the Temple, contributed to a severe defeat in November 1240, which was immediately followed by the conquest of Jerusalem by the Muslim prince of Kerak.

  Frederick II was encamped before Faënza. He bestirred himself to salvage what he could. He hastened to get into touch with the Sultans of Damascus and Egypt and to negotiate at least the release of the prisoners. He despatched his Sicilian captain Roger de Amicis to Egypt to conclude a treaty with the Sultan Malik Salih, the son of al Kamil. For al Kamil had died in 1238, deeply mourned by Frederick, who wrote to the English king: “Many things would have been very different in the Holy Land if only my friend al Kamil had been still alive.” England was to espouse his cause in the East. Despite the Pope the Emperor’s brother-in-law, Richard Earl of Cornwall, sailed to Palestine with the English pilgrims. Frederick provided him with plenary powers and instructions, and he succeeded, thanks to dissensions no less acute in the Saracen ranks, in renewing the truce and in recovering Jerusalem for the Emperor and for Christendom. In the eyes of the world Frederick was once more the protector of the Holy Land and Pope Gregory its destroyer, and the pamphlets of the time openly express this view.

  Meantime, in the face of the Mongol peril, Frederick had been striving to reach an understanding with the Pope. When this failed he invaded the Papal States to compel the Pope by force to make peace. When the Earl of Cornwall returned from the Holy Land negotiations seemed possible once more. He landed in Trani in July 1241, met the Emperor and betook himself to Rome with full credentials to act as mediator. Frederick had no hope of success, but the Englishman would not be dissuaded. After a short time he returned empty-handed, and much annoyed by the stiff-necked obstinacy of the Bishop of Rome. Richard of Cornwall, not improbably, met Count Rudolf of Hapsburg at the Emperor’s court on this occasion. If so it was a remarkable rencontre: for these two noblemen were later the two chosen successors of Frederick II in the tarnished splendour of the Roman throne.

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  Frederick now gathered all his strength for a final thrust against Rome. His prospects were on the whole better than last year; the Pope’s position was hopeless. To add to his misfortunes, one of his cardinals, John of Colonna, had openly deserted to the Emperor and was prepared now to take arms against the Pope, of whose policy he had long disapproved. While Colonna’s adherents in Rome fortified themselves in their towers and palaces, the Baths of Constantine and the Mausoleum of Augustus, against the papalists, who at the moment had the upper hand in the city, the cardinal betook himself to Palestine, and besieged several positions in the Emperor’s name. Frederick hastened to comply with his call to join him. The Emperor wrote to the cardinal that he had at first been surprised to find in him an upholder of plans for renewing the Imperium. No cardinal and no priest had previously given such encouragement to the Eques and Imperator of the Romans, and he attributed this “to the noble anxiety of a noble race and the fire of noble blood.” It proved to be the fact that in many particulars the Colonna were the inheritors of Frederick II’s plans for the rebirth of Rome.

  Nothing now lay between the Emperor and his longed-for Roman triumph. He had now determined, whatever might be the outcome, to use open force against the Pope, and he had no lack of fighting strength. In June he had captured Terni and then lay before Rieti, and was now advancing nearer to Rome itself. In August Tivoli opened its gates to him, and his troops were laying waste the country up to the walls of Rome. Frederick was already comparing himself to the “Libyan Hannibal” before the gates of Rome. By the middle of August his headquarters were in Grottaferrata, nine miles south of Rome. Piero della Vigna wrote “the path of peace which base obstinacy has hitherto kept closed will now be opened by the pressure of the Pope’s advancing enemies.” At this moment, when Frederick was about to strike the final blow, news came from Rome that Pope Gregory IX was dead. The Pope had for the second time snatched the certain conquest of Rome from the hand of his hated foe: Frederick’s sword a second time smote empty air. Pope Gregory had played his last card. No enemy was left, for the Emperor was fighting neither Church, nor Pope, nor Rome, but only Gregory: and Gregory was dead.

  The Pope’s advanced age had long since made his death a contingency to be reckoned with. The fever-laden air and the burning heat of a Roman August, and the impossibility of seeking healing in the baths of Viterbo or elsewhere, may have hastened the end. There were some who did not hesitate to dub Frederick the murderer of Gregory, and others who said the Pope had died “unable to bear the sorrow he had brought upon himself.” Just as the Pope refused till the last moment to grant peace to the foe, so Frederick’s hate against this “disturber of the world’s peace” lasted beyond the grave. “And so he who refused to make peace or to treat of peace, who took upon himself to challenge Augustus, was fated to fall a prey to the avenger August. And now is dead indeed! Through him the earth lacked peace, the strife was great and how many perished!”

  Such was Frederick’s epitaph on his dead foe. He had little cause to feel magnanimous towards Gregory IX, who had persecuted him till his last breath as the “Beast of the Apocalypse.” One of the Pope’s last letters had been directed to the prelates imprisoned through his fault, bidding them take courage though they languished in the hands of Pharaoh, of the snare-devising Satan. His very last conjured the Genoese “to arise with the might of their galleys, and avenge the new injustice which the Church was suffering.” Hate was Gregory’s greatness and he hated to the end, though it seemed as if his hate might wreck the Church. Frederick returned his hate. During the fourteen-year war in which the two monarchs strove each with every nerve to wrest the world-crown from the other they had both grown in stature. These deadly enemies were the incarnation of two hostile worlds who in each encounter outvied and re-outvied each other. Gregory IX was never so great as in his last years, and Frederick II would never have attained the heights he did without his abysmal hatred of the Pope. Nothing less than Gregory’s double power, as Caesar-Pope and disciple of St. Francis, would have compelled Frederick to put forth his utmost effort. Even in his age we can only picture Gregory with eyes flashing in the passion of unbridled wrath, and yet this savage obstinate old man was attuned to the sublime ecstasy and mystic rapture of St. Francis. As an aged man he wrote beautiful hymns in praise of his friend, in one of which he celebrates Francis as the Archangel Michael who slays the mighty dragon. Both as St. Francis’ friend and as the papal politician of the decretals, Gregory was bound to consider Frederick II as the dragon whom the Devil had sent to the confusion of the Christian world. The weapons Gregory used had little resemblance to those of St. Francis, nor was he destined to become the papa angelicus for whom the world was waiting. The fact that Gregory wielded the “dragon weapon” transformed Frederick in the eyes of the world into a “saint,” and Frederick, stung by the power of such a hate, had Gregory to thank for his elevation.

  The death of Gregory brought relief from intense strain. Frederick II abandoned his attack on Rome and marched into Sicily, which he scarcely quitted again for the next two years. He had no remaining enemy, but neither was there any Pope to release him from the ban. For
two and twenty months the orphaned chair of St. Peter remained empty and no absolution was possible. No warlike events demanded Frederick’s presence in Italy. People always feel respect for well-proved force, and the capture of Faënza, the victory at sea, the conquest of a further part of the Patrimonium had all had an intimidating effect. Finally, Gregory’s death had produced calm. King Enzio was able to hold the Lombards in check, and the imperial fleet inflicted injury on Genoa’s trade. A strange repose brooded over Italy. From his Apulian castles Frederick watched events. Without the Pope the Emperor was sole Lord of the West, in very fact the Dominus Mundi.

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  As such he needed to find a responsive world. The imperial mantle with its heavy folds, embroidered with the symbols of the Macrocosm, was no mere ornamental robe, accidental perhaps, or even burdensome. Being what he was and honoured as he was, he might have been lord of a few hundred acres and yet he would have dominated the world. Everything, from the conception of a re-birth of Rome down to Sicilian sculpture, was interwoven with the Empire and the Emperor: “Our influence is felt to the remotest corners of the earth. …” The suzerainty of the Macrocosm is in its nature spiritual. Frederick’s task was now to translate into reality this spiritual overlordship.

  The conception of a spiritual overlordship is a commonplace in the ages of the Church, though it may seem strange in relation to an Emperor. Frederick II had been the ward and pupil of the great Innocent, founder of the Church as a State. He was an intellectual man, and we need not wonder to find in his conception of Empire a reflection of the Church. The whole Italian-Sicilian State which the Popes coveted as their Patrimony of Peter became as it were the Patrimony of Augustus for this gifted monarch, who sought to release the secular and intellectual powers that were fused into the spiritual unity of the Church and to build a new empire based on these. The Popes with their encyclicals summoned the whole of Christendom to arms, and now Frederick II with his circulars stirred the whole Roman world to battle with the Pope. The priesthood had laid claim to men or money from the kings, but Frederick begged rather the moral backing of the European rulers against the clergy. Each of the opposing powers, Empire and Papacy, sought what it needed to complete itself, no longer representing moon and sun, but the “two suns” that Dante styled them. The empire of the sword, however, was uplifted by becoming an intellectual State, while the Church degraded herself by “secularisation.” The Hohenstaufen sought to rouse and rally round him all the statesmanlike instincts of his fellow-kings against the ever-spreading organisation of a world-church, to lead the Empire to battle as a spiritual, not as a political unity. Such was the sum of all Frederick’s communications to the Christian kings of Europe.

  Up till about 1236 Frederick’s relations with the Christian rulers of the West had been confined to casual interchanges. The first excommunication and the Crusade, events which touched the whole of Christendom, made the Christian kings appear to form a sort of forum. When Frederick took rank as a world ruler by entering on the Lombard war his relation to the kings of Europe assumed another colour. Active diplomatic exchanges took place between the imperial and the various royal courts, a regular interchange of news concerning the most diverse affairs became established, imperial envoys often remained a considerable time at foreign courts, and Frederick could count on the sympathy of the kings in his actions and in his plans; for what concerned the Emperor of the West now concerned also the western kings. The theatre was enlarged and all the world was touched by whatever happened in the imperial sphere.

  Frederick did not cultivate “foreign politics.” He would not have recognised their existence. For him there was one “Europa imperialis,” one res publica universae christianitatis, one Imperium Romanum embracing the whole of Christendom. He held himself aloof from all quarrels of the kings amongst themselves. England distrusted him when with the help of France he won the Empire at the battle of Bouvines. France distrusted him when he married the Englishwoman. They were both unjust. Not that he observed “neutrality”; this idea also was foreign to him. As Roman Emperor he had a super-national character which he prudently would not forego. England offered him an alliance which he steadfastly refused. It would have been treachery to the still-valid conception of a universal empire to form an alliance with one of the European kings. It would also have been unwise, for a counter-alliance would inevitably have followed, and the world which should be one would have split in twain. An alliance would have been to fling away the Empire and descend to the level of a territorial king of Germany, Italy and Sicily, as inevitably happened with the later Emperors, even Charles V. Frederick II’s task was rather that of Dante’s Emperor: to command sufficiently superior force to preserve peace and with it the unity of Europe. Such ideas were powerful in an age in which the idea carried as much weight as the fact, or more. The feeling never arose that there was a discrepancy between the Empire as a divine world-embracing institution and the actual imperial territory of political realities.

  For Frederick and for the world at large the hegemony of the Roman Emperor was a matter of course: suzerainty and leadership, but not by any means the exercise of ruling power. All his contemporaries, kings included, acknowledged the imperial superiority, but they would all have instantly and vigorously repulsed any attempt by him to interfere in the life of their states. The Emperor could issue no orders to the kings of Europe, in which his position was inferior to the Pope’s, as a chronicler has shrewdly remarked who puts these words into the Emperor’s mouth apropos of the Council: “The Pope is my inveterate foe and open enemy, and he moreover has the power to deprive any man of his dignity who opposes him, and even to fetter the deposed person with the bonds of his curse, and to hurl him into the abyss of yet more terrible punishment. Our position is endangered, the position of the Emperor is that of all the princes, and I alone stand as the champion of all. The kings of the earth and the princes whose cause I defend, who have made me their counsellor and representative, would not answer my summons nor obey my command. They are not my subjects that I could compel them or could punish the disobedient.”

  The earlier Hohenstaufens had, indeed, attempted to compel the kings to obedience. Barbarossa called his fellow-monarchs “heads of provinces,” Henry VI considered them his vassals, and both sought to trample on the petty kings to augment thereby their own greatness. Things had changed by Frederick’s time: the “nations” had come to birth, and the stronger national feeling grew in the western dominions, the more difficult it became to maintain at all a universal empire: even in the abstract. If Frederick II had shown hostility to the national impulses and sought to limit the independence of the kings, he would infallibly have come to grief and had the royal pack at his heels as well as the Pope. He had to take another line if he was to bridge the gulf implied in the challenge: a Roman Empire and yet nations.

  Frederick’s policy towards the kings was not unlike that which he pursued towards the German princes or the Roman citizens: instead of swimming against a powerful living current he sought to turn it to account, to let it sweep him on to greater greatness. Far from suggesting, as his forefathers had done, that the western kings should sacrifice their national independence on the altar of a universal empire, Frederick used his most eloquent manifestos to adjure them jealously to guard their independence, their nations and their separate states, not against the Emperor, who “filled with highest happiness and content with his own lot, envies the life of none,” but in cooperation with the Emperor to defend them against the two enemies of all kings and of all states: the rebel and the priest.

  A common cause against the attacks made by rebels and by clerics on the majesty of the State is the beginning and the end of all the political relations of Frederick with the kings of Europe. Instead of trampling on the kings Frederick sought to enhance their self-consciousness. He considered them as, like himself, immediate under God. He sought to enlist them in the same cause and be himself merely their leader, their counsellor, their champion. Th
is solved the question of peace amongst the kings themselves. By compelling them continually to keep their minds on world-questions which equally affected all, he left them no opportunity for strife, so that apart from a peripheral quarrel, even the eternal war between England and France was laid for a time to rest. “By God, most well-beloved brother,” he wrote to the King of England, who was despatching money to the Curia, “let not such procedure take place, least of all against us, that monarchs should voluntarily fight against monarchs. Let not the yoke of papal authority press so heavily on the neck of kings!” Frederick rallied the kings against the common foe: first against the rebels who threatened monarchy itself; next against the Pope, who was in league with the rebels and undermined the independence of the secular power, even challenging secular by spiritual jurisdiction. There was no western ruler who was not entangled in similar conflict with his church and with the Roman Curia, none who had not to protect himself against similar encroachments on his royal power. The question of lordship in Italy merely provoked the quarrel earlier and more fiercely between Frederick II and the Pope. “All of us kings and princes, especially those of us who are jealous for the true religion and the true faith, suffer from the open and secret hate of our peoples, and the special but secret strife with the princes of our Church. For our peoples hunger to abuse this pestilential freedom, but the priests misuse our benevolence to injure us in our possessions and in our privileges.” Hence Emperor and king had the same interests to defend, and all the monarchs should form a “sodality” under imperial leadership. If Frederick had insisted on claiming imperial power and titles he would have accomplished nothing, and assuredly have awakened resistance. On the path he chose he achieved much. He had flung a new idea to the dynasts: the corporate unity of kings. The echo of the ancient Roman Imperium was still clearly to be heard and lent breadth and meaning and cohesion to the idea. This community of kings was something new, non-hieratic, non-feudal, independent of force, firmly based on the common secular interests of the State and on the ever-growing national power and consciousness. This separate power of the several nations might prove the ideal cement for a super-national Empire—or its solvent. Universal monarchy was almost on its deathbed, but Frederick II at the beginning of the thirteenth century was able to give it again, for the last time, a short new lease of life, a complete, practical and genuine raison d’être, by converting it into a voluntary co-operation. He could only succeed by emphasising the contrast between Church and State and rallying all secular forces to his banner.