Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  Frederick had allowed his followers to worship him as the Son of God; his loyal adherents captured in Parma implored him to set them free with “his sacred hands,” for they were suffering for him “as the martyrs for Christ’s sake.” He had shared the honour and the glory of the Son of God. There was a pitiless logic in the fact that at the end of his life he had to a certain degree to share Christ’s fate. It was probably from Cremona that he wrote to the King of France that he felt it particularly embittering that the Pope should send Crusaders against Sicily, “as if the mystery of the life-giving cross had been wafted from the Holy Land to Sicily, as if Christ were crucified again in Apulia.” This mournful comparison is uncannily close to facts: Judas Iscariot’s rôle had just been played by his most trusted friend, Piero della Vigna.

  The details of the occurrences at Cremona are obscure. The Emperor drew a veil over them and gossip distorted them. Contemporaries heard little more than the fact of della Vigna’s sudden fall and his arrest. The obvious guess was that the Protonotary and Logothetes of Sicily had been bought by the Pope, like so many others. So much, however, seems certain that della Vigna was not conspiring with the Pope. No change of thought prompted his treachery, no suddenly awakened papalist spirit, no fanatical love of freedom stirred him against the Tyrant whom yet he reverenced and loved: della Vigna was no Brutus. Neither was he guiltless. It was not only envy, “that harlot of courts,” that brought the Capuan to his fall. He sinned not as the defender of a lofty idea but as one who sold his master for thirty pieces of silver.

  As far as the evidence goes, it seems that the inconceivable repeated itself: della Vigna betrayed his Lord for a handful of silver by selling justice for money. Only once did the Emperor quite briefly, in a confidential letter to Count Richard of Caserta, betray his feeling about della Vigna’s guilt, calling him a “second Simon,” who “that he might fill his purse or keep it full, turned the rod of justice into a serpent.” Della Vigna had always been exposed to terrific temptation. All letters and petitions went through his hands, he decided what must be referred and what might be independently disposed of. Princes and kings, prelates and popes who had business to transact with Frederick approached him through della Vigna. Abusing his absolute discretion Piero della Vigna may have taken money to let things pass which at this highly critical moment involved danger to the Emperor. Or, perhaps, as overseer of the entire accounts of the Sicilian kingdom he may have connived at embezzlements by his subordinates, or himself committed them. He left an immense fortune, and how far it was honourably acquired the Emperor must have known pretty exactly. Embezzlement at such a time of money-famine would not be far short of treason. Apart from the major defalcation, della Vigna may well, as Frederick further wrote to Caserta, “by systematic swindling have driven the Imperium into such danger that Empire and Emperor like the Egyptian chariots and the hosts of Pharaoh might have been drowned in the depths of the sea.”

  Bribery and embezzlement must have been indulged in by the majority of the officials, but this does not lighten della Vigna’s guilt; it aggravates it rather. The other officials were merely disobeying the laws. Della Vigna had himself in the Emperor’s name promulgated those laws. He had formulated and defined them; with his own words as the mouthpiece of the Emperor he had condemned the bartering of Justice and stigmatised it as “simony.” He had for money betrayed the whole worship of the imperialis ecclesia which was based on “the lawbringer Moses” and the “Vicar Petrus” which he, like a very apostle had evolved and represented. If Piero della Vigna himself could not preserve clean hands, could not himself live the laws that he proclaimed, it was calculated to shake the world’s faith in the Emperor, as the shortcoming of a justiciar or a vicar could not do. A crime that an ordinary official might unobtrusively expiate by loss of office became in della Vigna’s case a fall that shook the world.

  There is no doubt that Frederick would have overlooked many little irregularities as long as it was possible to do so in order to retain his nearest counsellor, his ablest intimate. Arrest will not have occurred until Piero della Vigna’s behaviour had become a danger to the State, and the jealousy of the other courtiers may well have precipitated the climax. What amazes the observer is the disproportion between the advantage gained and the advantages lost by this treachery. On the one hand the master, honoured as the Saviour, perhaps at last believed and proclaimed a Saviour by della Vigna alone… on the other the silver. … There is something grotesque in this incommensurability: there is something sinister. The power and magic of great men are shattered not by the world’s great resistances, on these they thrive, but by the pettiness of human frailty.

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  The discovery of Piero della Vigna’s breach of faith and the arrest were terrible for Frederick, the more because at this same moment he escaped poison by a hair’s breadth, poison proffered by one of his entourage. His physician, whom he completely trusted, and whom he had ransomed from Parma because he could not do without him, prepared a poisoned bath and a poisoned draught to meet some trifling indisposition. At the last moment the Emperor was warned. When the doctor handed him the goblet Frederick said—so the story goes—that they must be careful not to give him poison instead of medicine. The doctor sought to reassure him. Frederick looked at him: “Drink to my health and share the draught with me.” The doctor feigned to stumble, and, falling, contrived to spill most of the contents of the goblet. The Emperor’s guards seized him. What was left was given to a condemned criminal to drink. He died on the instant. The Emperor is said then, reflecting on what had passed, to have wrung his hands and groaned aloud: “alas for me, my very bowels fight against me! Whom can I trust! Where can I again be happy and secure!” And his friends sat round and sighed with him and wept. After this the words of Job were often in the Emperor’s mouth: “All my inward friends abhorred me, and they whom I loved are turned against me.”

  Contemporaries associated the doctor’s attempt with Piero della Vigna’s sudden fall. They were two quite independent episodes which happened to occur at the same time. The doctor had been captured at Parma and had been won over by the Pope’s legate; “the Pope’s reputation was blackened not a little,” a chronicler writes. Frederick informed the kings and people of the world of this new effort of the Pope’s. “This priest, this shepherd, this peace-loving director of our faith is not content with the innumerable intrigues and shameful machinations with which he has disgraced the rule of his order to do us injury but—O shame!—he has just attempted to murder us by secret means!” After the events of the last few days the Emperor can no longer doubt that the end of the times is near. The doctor’s fate matched his crime. Blinded and mutilated, with continuous torture, so that no rest was given him even on Sundays or on holy days, he was taken to Sicily for execution.

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  A similar fate hung over Piero della Vigna. When the Cremonese heard of his treachery they nearly tore and hacked in pieces the man so lately feared. But Frederick prevented mob justice and had the prisoner taken by night to the neighbouring Borgo San Donnino. In March when the Emperor started for Tuscany he took Piero della Vigna with him mounted on a donkey, amongst the baggage train. They took him to San Miniato. They say that Frederick made use of his former friend for a stratagem. The Guelfs in San Miniato would not permit the entrance of armed men. They were assured that only the prisoners and the imperial exchequer were being brought to the fortress. The baggage animals were, however, loaded with weapons instead of treasure, and the ostensible prisoners were imperial men-at-arms whose fetters could easily be struck off. To disarm the Guelfs’ suspicion, however, Piero della Vigna had to lead the procession of prisoners. If the tale is true, it was Frederick’s last vengeance on his friend. Piero della Vigna knew his master well enough to know that some terrible death awaited him. He put himself beyond the fear of torture: he, also, “went and hanged himself.” The story is that when the blinded prisoner was being led into the dungeon of San Miniato he asked the guards whethe
r anything lay between him and the wall. They said not. The blind man forthwith flung himself with such violence against the prison wall that he split his skull. After these days of horror Frederick proceeded to Pisa. On the Arno he embarked on his Sicilian galleys to return to his mother country: for ever. He never saw Italy again.

  For more than a decade Frederick II had reigned and ruled and raged in Italy as the Judge, the Caesar, the Antichrist, and he had left his mark indelibly on the land. He had left a legacy of “the majestic and the terrible.” Italy had altered more in those ten years than sometimes in a century. The times had gone mad with the intensity of life, with the enormous expenditure of power, and Italy stood under the shadow of Dante in the sign of the rising Renaissance. The Hohenstaufen had not only a share in the change: he had been himself the immutator mirabilis who dared to alter laws and times, a fact which the Church cast in his teeth. It was high time that he should now pass on. His mission was fulfilled. The sap was in circulation. Condottieri, signori, tyrants, as well as the wise, learned and magnificent dukes of Florence, Urbino and Ferrara, finally the towns and the city-states also, were all the heirs and inheritors of Frederick II.

  The image of Frederick as ruler and the image of Frederick’s state survived actually only in miniature. Spiritually they received immense extension through Dante: in the de Monarchia as well as in the state structure and cosmogony of the Divine Comedy. It has often enough been demonstrated that Dante only proclaims what Frederick II had lived. Since the heretic Frederick II, his life, his acts, his thought, all determined Dante’s picture of a State, it was inevitable that the poet should also be reckoned as a heretic. The implications of his poem were not wholly understood, but the de Monarchia was clear to all, especially as this dangerous Ghibelline document seemed about to be fulfilled by Louis the Bavarian seven years after the poet’s death. The papal legate thereupon condemned the treatise as heretical and burnt it publicly, and they even wanted to take the poet’s remains out of their Franciscan vault at Ravenna and burn them to “the eternal disgrace and the ruin of his memory.” The de Monarchia was put on the Index of Forbidden Books and was not removed therefrom till the days of Leo XIII in 1897.

  Frederick II had created in Sicily the “mirror of likeness for those who admire it,” a visible mirror of princes for the days to come. It was the structure of the State that was the vital thing. The kingdom of Sicily itself lost all importance for the world at large. This last Emperor was not destined, like Caesar or like Charlemagne, to be the heros eponymos of a new epoch, which bore his stamp on its secular statecraft and was irradiated by his indwelling spirit. Frederick II dominated the Renaissance anonymously and illegitimately. The establishment of the Norman despotism itself had been illegitimate, and so, therefore, were the small Italian town-states which were offshoots of the Sicilian parent state. The tyrants, too, were illegitimate: the bodily or spiritual bastards, sons or grandsons, of the Hohenstaufen, had each to win anew sua virtute the Emperor’s immediacy, since Frederick had only usurped it by right of genius through an illegitimate priestship.

  The Emperor’s rule in Italy might easily have become legitimate if the Lombards had been complaisant. It rested, however, in fact, not on the privileges or rights of the excommunicate monarch but on his genius: what Machiavelli called virtu, this combination of strength and talent, not incompatible with evil. After this each of the Renaissance tyrants had to show virtu or genius if he was to maintain his illegitimate rule over his tiny State. Frederick II, statesman and philosopher, politician and soldier, general and jurist, poet and diplomat, architect, zoologist, mathematician, the master of six or it might be nine languages, who collected ancient works of art, directed a school of sculpture, made independent researches in natural science, and organised states, this supremely versatile man was the Genius of the Renaissance on the throne of the Emperors, was the Emperor of Genius. It is not without deeper significance that this first genius of the Renaissance wore the actual diadem of a world ruler, which in a sense still crowned the later geniuses but no longer kept them within the Empire.

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  So Frederick left Italy. The year of horror did not end with his friends’ death. He had lost within one year his two best statesmen and most trusty comrades, in whose company he had had his image carved over the triumphal gate of Capua, Thaddeus of Suessa and Piero della Vigna. Now he lost two sons. Soon after the Emperor’s arrival in Naples, Count Richard of Theate seems to have died. He had been Vicar General of the Romagna and of Spoleto, and had just recently distinguished himself by his victories over Hugo Novellus. We do not know how much attached the Emperor was to him. The news about King Enzio which shortly followed certainly touched Frederick more.

  Enzio had remained behind, as usual, to represent his father in Lombardy. His marriage with the Sardinian heiress Adelasia had been declared void, and Frederick had been present at his marriage to a niece of Eccelino’s at Cremona. This relationship set the seal on the comradeship in arms of two gallant men. The ceremony had taken place just about the time of Piero della Vigna’s arrest. The active young king had no idea in life except fighting; for ten years he had been continuously crossing swords with the Lombards, and soon after his wedding, in January 1249, he marched against the Guelfs of Reggio to undertake a campaign in the neighbourhood of Parma. He had returned to his headquarters at Cremona when he got an appeal from Modena for help against the Bolognese. Off he hastened with his bodyguard, his “cohort” and the knights of Cremona across the Po by his own bridge at Bugno in the direction of Modena. At Fossalta in the frontier of the Modena territory he got entangled in a small skirmish; suddenly the main forces of Bologna arrived and took a hand. In the mêlée Enzio’s horse was killed under him, his troops began to waver, and he was taken prisoner with four hundred knights and twelve hundred foot-soldiers. Marinus of Eboli, well-known as podesta and vicar, shared his fate.

  The skirmish had in itself no serious importance, but the loss of Enzio was for Frederick more severe than the loss of an army or a province. The later battles of the Hohenstaufen heirs might have worn a different complexion if King Enzio had been there to keep the Ghibelline flag flying in Lombardy. The Emperor at once set about procuring his son’s release. He first wrote a beautiful letter to the people of Bologna about the Goddess Fortuna. “We read in the most various writings that Fortuna knows many final acts. The evil fortune that now weighs a man to earth may presently lift him to the heights. And fortune often smiles on those she raises and yet casts them down at last and scourges them and pierces them with wounds incurable. If ye, therefore, on this day, see fortune smiling on you with unclouded brow ye would yet be wise to refrain from being puffed up, for he who rises to the greater heights is the worse broken by the fall. Fortuna often promises success at first… but overfills the middle and concludes the end with manifold misfortune.” There breathes here a spirit of foreboding. There is no longer any word of the Fortuna Augusti, the Goddess who obeys the Caesar. The Emperor, however, is not bankrupt of proud words as he demands Enzio’s liberty. “Ask ye of your fathers and they will tell how our grandfather of most happy and glorious memory, the all-conquering Frederick, drove out that generation of Milan from their lares and divided up their town into three parcels. If ye surrender Enzio our beloved son, King of Sardinia and Gallura, from his prison, we shall exalt your town above every town in Lombardy. But if ye hearken not to the voice of our commandment then expect our triumphant and unnumbered army. The traitors of Liguria shall not avail to deliver you out of our hands, but ye shall become a fable and a disgrace to the nations and this shall be held as a reproach against you for ever.”

  The Emperor’s letter bore no fruit. Bologna’s answer was that a cane non magno saepe tenetur aper, and Frederick must know that they had held, and did hold, and would continue to hold, King Enzio. The suggestion of exchanging Enzio for the son of the Count of Montferrat whom Frederick had captured was not acceptable, neither was the offer to buy his freedom by layin
g a ring of silver round the town for ransom. King Enzio was fated to live and die a prisoner. The early fame of the young warrior formed henceforth a halo round the royal captive. The people of Bologna had chained the imperial king with golden fetters when they led him in triumph through their town, following the fashion set by the Emperor. Legend tells us that the young king in his royal dress, with his long golden hair under the flashing helmet-crown, set the hearts of the populace afire, not only of the beautiful womenfolk. The men of Bologna no less met with admiration and respect the young hero who bore with justice a lion in his shield. His confinement was strict but never degrading. A large hall in the podesta’s palace was assigned to him, in which he and his well-born fellow-prisoners could spend the day. Only at night he was shut into a small chamber of wood and iron that had been erected in the middle of the apartment. This is the origin of the legend that he was kept in an iron cage. He was allowed to correspond freely with the outside world and to receive as many visitors as he would. In later times he lived at the expense of the commune, for he was so extravagant that in spite of his large means he was presently reduced to poverty. His fellow-prisoners soon left, and only one German count, Conrad of Solimburg, shared his captivity. The Bolognese themselves counted Conrad an intolerably effeminate little creature. The king found him at last so wearisome that he begged his captors to spare him this companionship.