Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

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  There is no doubt that service under a ruler like Frederick II was anything but a sinecure. All private life came to a standstill for the imperial vicars as it did for the marshals of Napoleon. Their life was consecrated wholly to the service of the State and of the Emperor, and that service was wearing, difficult and dangerous. The relationship of vicar to Emperor was one of extreme delicacy. On the one hand the vicar had the fullest responsibility and almost unlimited powers, on the other Frederick never abandoned towards any man a certain suspicion, all officials were watched, and the Emperor would intervene at any moment in the administration. Considering the great independence of the officials and the precariousness of Frederick’s exalted position this was most natural, but friction was inevitable. Sometimes the Emperor was over vigorous; sometimes the official was unduly sensitive. Most of the vicars had known their master from their youth up; they knew his distrust, they knew his watchfulness, and on their side they brought suspicion to bear, often most unfairly, on every utterance of the Emperor’s. The nagging and the eternal discontent of the Napoleonic marshals offer a parallel. The sensitiveness and querulousness of his trusty intimates indulged even at critical moments aroused at times Frederick’s impatient wrath. In a letter referring to some question of accounts the Emperor wrote to Piero della Vigna the innocent words “be diligent and attentive in the matter as is thy wont.” Della Vigna was deeply hurt by the phrase and wrote back that all the praise contained in the imperial letter amounted to the exact opposite. Frederick would seem to consider him lazy and careless, which must be based on slander. … Whereupon Frederick only threatened his friend with his serious anger for daring to bring such ridiculous accusations against his Emperor.

  It is quite possible, however, that the Emperor was at times really unjust to one or another, especially in those years of strain and stress. This was only to be expected, but there often reigned at Court a dangerous atmosphere, and visitors used with foresight to inform themselves about the current temperature. Frederick was neither obstinate nor petty. He never clung to a mistake, and there is something deeply moving in the words he writes at a time of terrible anxiety to a well-beloved Captain of Sicily, Andrew Cicala, soothing and encouraging him, acknowledging a blunder and apologising for it unreservedly and with gracious dignity: “The unfortunate words which caused you pain and so suddenly upset the calm of your firm mind, sprang from a mood of wrath and irritation. We are all the more rejoiced that thy well-tried uprightness and good-faith remained unshaken by such idle words. The more strongly thou feelest such unjust phrases the more steadfast and sure is thy constancy, one of the bastions of thy incorruptible loyalty, the proof whereof lies with thine own memorable deeds and with our pure and constant trust—more solemn testimony than any outside witness! Need we say more… canst thou still find room to doubt… apart from the subtle signs of affection which the eyes cannot see, thou must be conscious of our trust since we leave our cares in thy hands and rely on thee as on a second self. If aught of thy vexation still remain banish the last remnants thereof, and when the rust of doubt has been polished away, believe in the constancy of our unaltered regard. As we on our side trust that thy good faith to us is immutable, thou for thy part must not doubt that our favour and our grace are thine unchangeably.”

  The distrust of his officials! The fact that distrust was possible! In this Frederick saw the greatest menace of all. Nothing is recorded of the Emperor’s grief at the petty irritability of his friends, the deeper underlying causes of which he did not fail to fathom; we are not told how often he comforted them by a letter like the foregoing, or oftener yet by a talk, many a time by a mere glance, and once again renewed the spell that bound them to him, the charm by which he first had won them. It is one of the fateful penalties of greatness that the magic of a personality by becoming a daily commonplace loses its power most readily over the nearest intimates. The spell that still can bind the stranger plays false at home. No great monarch but has been the victim of a friend’s treachery. Such treachery springs not from hostility and hate but from weakness and cowardice. The traitor too incompetent to sustain for long the demands of office; too weak to bear the continuous presence of the great man; too cowardly to avow weakness and incompetence; and, again, too vain and self-seeking to resign the service, not lacking withal in genuine love, admiration, reverence for the Master—the intolerable burden of such a conflict drives sometimes the nearest to deceit and treachery. One renegade who at a critical moment thus throws scruple to the winds easily becomes the seducer of the wavering. Such was Orlando di Rossi’s rôle.

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  From Parma Frederick II had taken steps to avert the threatening defection of Reggio. He had then embarked on a campaign of devastation against Milan, but he did not succeed in coming to grips with the Milanese army, and during the winter of 1245–46 he made Grosseto on the coast of Tuscany his headquarters for several months. The district of the Maremma promised good hawking, and at the same time the Emperor could supervise Tuscany more closely. Various irregularities had appeared in the administration, and the venality of several authorities had come to light. Frederick was obliged first to recall the Apulian Pandulf of Fasanella, who for many years had been Vicar General of the difficult province of Tuscany, and to replace him by the imperial bastard Frederick of Antioch, whom people soon styled King of Tuscany. Frederick of Antioch must have then been a youth of about twenty: competent, energetic, cautious, equal to the delicate conditions in Tuscany, a courageous warrior, a poet who could write tender canzones, a man of such gracious and charming personality that people forgot that he was lame. Men liked to believe that his mother had been the sister of al Kamil, a lady whom the Emperor had met on his first Crusade, but who had refused his advances until Frederick arranged for a black-sailed ship to sail into the Syrian harbour bearing news of the Empress’s death. … This was pure fiction. Nothing was known of Frederick of Antioch’s mother.

  The following events stand in intimate relation to the removal of Pandulf. The preceding year he and Orlando di Rossi, who was then podesta of Florence, had worked together in Tuscany. It was the custom that the higher officials when temporarily unemployed should take up their quarters at Frederick’s court and place themselves at the Emperor’s disposal. Pandulf, therefore, betook himself to court after his recall. Some weeks passed. In March 1246 a boat arrived in Grosseto, sent in haste by Count Richard of Caserta, the Emperor’s son-in-law. It brought word of a widespread conspiracy against the life of Frederick and King Enzio. It arrived at the eleventh hour. The crime was scheduled for the morrow. Natural phenomena were already foretelling some monstrous catastrophe, which the astrologer Guido Bonatti claimed also to have foreseen. Sun and moon disappeared, the stars turned pale, the heavens rained blood, the earth was enveloped in thick darkness amidst lightning and thunder, the sea ran mountains high. Terror seized those of the conspirators who were at court. Before the Emperor could institute investigations they fled to Rome, having been warned in time. Amongst them were two of the most distinguished leaders, Pandulf of Fasanella and Jacob of Morra. The latter was one of Frederick’s most trusted intimates, Vicar General of the March, a son of the recently deceased Chief Justice, Henry of Morra.

  The flight of the two conspirators confirmed Count Caserta’s warning. The Emperor learnt at the same time that the conspiracy had spread through much wider circles. The prime mover in the plot was Orlando di Rossi. He had not only enlisted Pandulf of Fasanella beforehand in Florence, but had induced the imperial podesta of Parma, Tebaldo Francisco, to join them. Francisco, who had been for years Vicar General of the March of Treviso, one of the most eminent of Frederick’s officials and one of his most intimate friends, was generally considered to be the head of the conspirators. When Tebaldo got news that the Grosseto scheme had failed he fled to Sicily, being in secret correspondence with Andrew of Cicala, Captain of Sicily. Apparently Roger de Amicis, Captain of the Island, was also in league with the conspirators
. Like Jacob of Morra he was famous as one of the first poets in the Sicilian vernacular. The conspirators were thus one and all men who had for years discharged the highest offices in the State, and ruled the most important provinces, men who on the human side stood nearest to the Emperor and enjoyed his fullest confidence. A few were subordinate officials, relations for the most part of the bigger men: Richard and Robert of Fasanella, William Franciscus, Godfrey of Morra. In Sicily itself some non-officials had joined the plot from personal motives: the Counts of San Severino; they had unquestionably always been badly treated by the Emperor.

  The discovery that his nearest friends had been seeking his life had, naturally, a profound effect on Frederick. It made him shudder, he wrote, to think that these men were actually plotting the deed of shame at the very moment that they were dining at the same table with him and conversing amiably with him in his rooms at court. With a father’s pride he had watched them grow up, he had exalted them from the lowliest stations to the highest posts of honour at Caesar’s court, he had treated them with so much affection that he kept no secrets from them, he trusted them as fully as he trusted the sons of his body, he had even chosen them to be his bodyguard, and many a time had laid his head in their lap. “Parricides” he called the recreants, stepsons, not sons. … They were men recognising no human tie, miscreants who criminally plotted the death of their benefactor. With them a new human type had come to birth: a human form with animal instincts only.

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  Faced with danger the Emperor showed himself possessed of all his old vigour and power: as he had need to be. The plan had wide ramifications. Frederick and Enzio and Eccelino were to have been murdered at a banquet; Parma was to have gone over to the enemy. Already the Emperor’s old foe, Rainer of Viterbo, called in by one of the traitors, had invaded the imperial territories at the head of a papal army. He was completely defeated with heavy losses at Spello by Marinus of Eboli, Vicar General of Spoleto, who had remained faithful. The worst was, however, that the traitors had stirred up an insurrection and produced general confusion throughout Sicily by the news which they spread broadcast that the Emperor was dead. They had got possession of the fortresses of Sala and Capaccio and the town of Altavilla. Thus the centre of the revolt was in the heart of Frederick’s hereditary kingdom in southern Campania between Paestum and Salerno.

  Frederick immediately hastened southward from Tuscany: “the apple of his eye must not suffer harm!” The loyal Sicilians, even before their master’s arrival, had independently cut off the two fortresses, so that Sala surrendered to the Emperor after a few days. Altavilla was taken by storm and razed to the ground, and anyone related even remotely to the conspirators was blinded and burnt alive. The Emperor’s arrival in person immediately quelled what remained of the revolt. Only the citadel of Capaccio, which the ringleaders were defending, still held out, although the town was in the Emperor’s hands. The heat of July was extreme, water supplies gave out, and the besiegers’ catapults began to do greater and greater execution. The citadel could not be saved; the garrison surrendered. To his amazement Frederick found amongst the hundred and fifty prisoners the leaders of the conspiracy themselves, especially Tebaldo Francisco. Frederick seems to have expected that they would have fallen on their own swords or leapt from the crags, preferring self-chosen death to the vengeance of their outraged master. Since they did not, he felt them at his mercy.

  Their punishment fitted their crime. They were blinded with red-hot irons that they might not see their lord, and mutilated in noses, hands and legs, and thus the sometime friends were brought before their ruthless judge. According to the Lex Pompeia Frederick had them condemned for murder and treated them as parricides. They had committed a crime “against nature” and therefore were put to death by all four elements. Some were dragged to death by horses over stony ground, others burnt alive, others were hanged, the rest sewn up in leather sacks and thrown out into the sea, following the Roman treatment of parricides. Frederick added a symbolical refinement by having poisonous snakes sewn up in the sacks with them.

  Frederick made an exception of Tebaldo Francisco, the arch-villain of the piece. He and five others were to be blinded and mutilated and dragged through all the countries of the earth from town to town to all kings and princes so that the earth might see the monster. “Let the punishment of this accursed criminal instruct your minds and spirits by the sight of the eye which makes more impression than what is heard by the ear. Let no forgetfulness obliterate what ye have seen, let the memory of a just judgment be remembered.” A papal bull was tied to the traitor’s forehead so that all the world might know the instigator of the murderous plot: Innocent IV.

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  Frederick had long had no doubts left in his mind that the High Priest was the ultimate assassin. The threads of the conspiracy were spun in Lyons. “We would fain,” he wrote, “have kept silence about the name and title of our foe, but transparent facts make the accusation, and public opinion lays it bare and declares the name our silence is shielding, and the cloak of our words excusing.” The Emperor was able to announce that the first prisoners, not under torture but voluntarily in making their last confession, had admitted that they had taken the cross against Frederick from the hands of mendicant monks, and that they had been authorised to act as they did by letters from the Pope.

  The Emperor further made known that his enemy the Bishop of Bamberg, coming from the Pope at Lyons, had openly declared in Germany that Frederick II was about to die a shameful death at the hands of his friends and intimates. Other indications: Orlando di Rossi’s leading part; the participation of the podesta of Parma, the instantaneous invasion of Cardinal Rainer, and many another thing pointed clearly to the papal Curia’s being implicated. The extant documents of the cardinals leave no doubt alive to-day that Innocent IV, who had been inviting everyone “to wash his hands in the blood of this sinner,” had at the very least minute knowledge of the plan. No one else could so promptly profit by the Emperor’s death.

  It is unprecedented in medieval history that a pope should actually set out to have an Emperor murdered. Within the framework of Innocent’s total policy this attempt on Frederick’s life is only one ingredient in a great scheme. The spring of 1246 was to mark the opening of a general papal offensive destined to smash the Hohenstaufen influence simultaneously in every country of the Empire: in Sicily, in Germany, in Italy. With the battle-cry “to free the oppressed” papal legates with troops furnished by the citizens of Rome were to invade the kingdom of Sicily immediately on Frederick’s death—an easy matter since the Vicars General and the highest officials were among the conspirators. Parma was the centre for Italy, where Tebaldo Francisco was the faithless imperial podesta. He had been promised the rule of Sicily, ostensibly in the Pope’s name. The inclusion of Enzio and Eccelino in the plan shows that the fall of the Hohenstaufen rule was the real goal. The murder of the Emperor himself was the task allotted to the nobles remaining at court. In Germany the establishment of a rival king was expected to produce the fall of Conrad. No one seems to have reckoned with a possible miscarriage of the plot.

  The Pope’s whole elaborate plan was wrecked by the timely discovery of the conspiracy, at least as far as Sicily and Italy was concerned. In Germany the Pope had a momentary success. Gregory IX’s efforts to set up a rival king had all fallen to the ground. Innocent IV had now set the election to work. He had closed the decree of deposition with the request that the electors should forthwith proceed to choose another prince to fill the place of the deposed Emperor. Pope Innocent even found an aspirant: the Thuringian Landgrave Henry Raspe, whom the Emperor had appointed a few years before to succeed the Archbishop Sigfrid of Mainz as Regent of the Empire. Raspe at first protested, but Innocent appears to have overcome his reluctance by the news of the impending murder of Frederick. The Landgrave ultimately consented to his elevation, and in May 1246, while the Emperor was still fighting in Campania against the conspirators, Henry Raspe was elected in
Veitschochheim, near Würzburg, King of the Romans, or Rex Clericorum as the people mockingly said, for no single secular elector was present, and only a small number of spiritual princes.

  The Landgrave was never either anointed or crowned. For his acceptance of the crown the rival king had received from the Pope the not inconsiderable sum of 25,000 silver marks. The number of his supporters was negligible, but with further subsidies from the Curia he contrived to achieve a surprising though short-lived success. A few months after his elevation the “Battle of the Kings” took place near Frankfurt. The Thuringian king, Henry Raspe, and the Hohenstaufen king, Conrad IV, strove for victory. King Conrad’s army was superior in numbers. But immediately before the onslaught two-thirds of the Hohenstaufen forces, led by a Swabian noble, went over to the enemy. The Pope had bought them for 6000 marks and promised them the Dukedom of Swabia, as he also promised Sicily to the unhappy Tebaldo Francisco. The Landgrave won the battle of Frankfurt, and forthwith a victory proclamation on the imperial model went forth to “our faithful Milan,” prophesying a speedy victory over King Conrad’s father. It concluded with a familiar turn of phrase “we shall triumph as the Emperors of Rome are wont to do.” Even the puppet king had “learnt.”