Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  Except for his own servants Enzio’s only friends were the Ghibellines of Bologna, the Lambertacci, who frequently visited him and with one of whom, Pietro Asinelli, he formed an intimate friendship. Visitors of the other sex were not lacking. People tell how the beautiful Lucia Viadagola took pity on him, and his two natural daughters probably belong to the twenty-three years of his captivity.

  In the early days his imprisonment was quite endurable. He bore it with unclouded serenity and was often able to cheer his guards or visitors by singing his songs to them. He guarded the volume of his poems as a treasure and mentioned it in his will. His songs were pretty if not profound, such as befitted this gifted but simple warrior, singer and king. Gradually, as all hope of freedom died away, they lost their lightheartedness. There is a sad sonnet about the ever-changing demands of changing time… there is a still sadder canzone which Enzio sent to Tuscany, the land of noble living, where he had worked in the most brilliant days of his father’s reign, in the days when Faënza fell and the prelates were caught at sea.

  Va, canzonetta mia…

  Salutami Toscana

  Quella che de sovrana

  In cui regna tutta cortesia,

  E vanne in Puglia piana

  La magna Capitana

  La dov’ è lo mio core nott’ e dia.

  Enzio was probably familiar with Apulia and the Capitanata from childhood, for these were his father’s favourite provinces. Here the captive king’s brothers and nephews were presently to fight a losing fight against Frenchmen and priests, and were to succumb one after another while still scarcely out of boyhood.

  *

  Enzio had to witness, from his prison, the whole tragic disappearance of the imperial House of Hohenstaufen, ever hoping for freedom, ever doubly disappointed and deceived. A year after the Emperor’s death the news reached him that his half-brother, King Conrad, the heir of the Empire, was coming to Italy. Conrad had been spending Christmas night in the monastery of St. Emmeram in Ratisbon, and had only by a miracle escaped a treacherous attempt on his life by the abbot, his host. He had abandoned the lonely, hopeless fight in the north, had precipitately mortgaged, sold, or given away all his German possessions and come south. He hoped to make Sicily a base, as his father had done, for war against the Church on behalf of the Empire. From the first the cause was lost. The burden of intolerable responsibility on his young shoulders had made the boy prematurely bitter and gloomy. He knew very little about Sicilian conditions. Though he was the son of the Syrian Isabella and had been born in Apulia he was unaccustomed to the climate. After more than two years of joyless undistinguished activity he died of fever at scarcely twenty-six. The corpse was taken to Messina and before the consecration was consumed in a great conflagration. Other people said that Manfred was jealous and had poisoned his brother, and that enemies had thrown the body into the sea. In those first years, when the Emperor was no longer there to bear the brunt of fate, other Hohenstaufen sons fell victims to the doom of their house. King Henry, the son of the English Isabella, had died at the age of fifteen, and here the rumour ran that King Conrad had had his brother assassinated by the black Grand Chamberlain, Johannes Maurus. Two years after Conrad’s death Frederick of Antioch, who had had to give up the attempt to maintain himself in Tuscany, was killed in battle against Foggia (1256), which Cardinal Ottaviano degli Ubaldini had garrisoned.

  Just at this time Manfred’s star began to mount. He was prince of Taranto. With the help of relatives and friends he won by force or cunning or genius, with or without right, the crown of Sicily. With snow-white skin and pink cheeks and eyes like stars (Dante calls him “comely and fair and gentle of aspect,” and praises him as the pattern of an Italian prince) he restored something of the old brilliance to his father’s court. Hohenstaufen wit sparkled once more; Hohenstaufen hospitality and joie de vivre blossomed again in the southern kingdom; again the royal falcons rose and stooped; the king conversed again with oriental and western philosophers. Almost more numerous than the warriors were the minstrels and fiddlers who hummed around the irresponsible young prodigal, who with his friend Manfred Maletta himself composed airs and canzones, crowding the fulness of a lifetime into the space of a few years. Manfred seemed to be reviving the Italico-Sicilian rule of the Hohenstaufens as well as the brilliance of the court. The victory at Montaperti on the Arbia was full of promise and made Manfred dream even of the imperial crown. He did not know, however, how to follow up the victory, and before long he was busy defending his kingdom against Anjou, whom the Church had called in.

  The young king was said to possess a magic ring with which he could conjure demons (Pope Boniface used later to wear it); but this did not avail. If the Hohenstaufens loved life they also knew how to die. The battle of Benevento was as good as lost when Manfred, armed by a tearful aged servant of the Emperor’s, plunged into the fray in which he perished. Not for some days was his body found under the pile of corpses. They knew it by its beauty. His friends, captives now themselves, drew it forth with trembling hands and covered their dead king’s feet and hands with kisses. Victorious Anjou gave King Manfred a grave beside the bridge over the Liris at Benevento. But the revengeful Pope, so runs the tale, would not permit the body to rest there. The archbishop of Cosenza dug up the royal corpse and gave it shallow burial in the sand close by the river, so that the remains were washed away:

  … but the rain now drenches them

  And the wind drives, out of the kingdom’s bounds,

  Far as the stream of Verde, where, with lights

  Extinguished, he removed them from their bed.

  Thus Manfred in Purgatory tells the poet.

  Manfred’s consort, Helena, was some twenty-four years of age. With three sons and her one daughter she fell into the hands of Anjou and died after five years’ imprisonment. The daughter, Beatrice, after eighteen years of confinement in the Castel dell’ Ovo at Naples was set free by the Sicilian Vespers. The sons grew up literally in chains. They were unfettered after thirty years but still kept prisoner. Half-starved, reduced to beggary, driven to madness one after another, the two heirs of Manfred died in prison: “the brood of poison-swollen adders.”

  *

  Before leaving his wife Elizabeth behind in Bavaria King Conrad begot a son called Conradin. This nephew of Enzio’s now came to Italy. Once more the Ghibellines took heart. The tall slight boy was hailed as “the most handsome child a man could find.” He was received with enthusiasm in the quondam imperialist towns of northern Italy, Verona and Pavia, Pisa and Siena. He was fifteen when he left his Swabian home with his friend Francis of Baden, who was three years older. “In order that the glorious race to which we belong may not degenerate in our person,” the proud boy said as he journeyed south. It seemed as if the ancient Hohenstaufen dreams were to be at last fulfilled. What had lured on the Puer Apuliae from afar, but what the giant Emperor and Caesar Frederick II had never achieved, was granted to young Conradin. He rode beside his friend into Ghibelline Rome as Felix Victor ac Triumphator. His cousin, Henry of Castile, Senator of the Eternal City, handed over the town to him. Triumphal arches stretched across his path all the way from the Bridge of S. Angelo to the Capitol, ropes were slung across the streets from house to house, on which carpets, silks and purples were hung. Choirs of Roman women sang songs of welcome to the last Hohenstaufen king, while the men already acclaimed him Emperor as they led him to the Capitol. It was Ghibelline Rome welcoming the Hohenstaufen, and the Romans whom the thunder-voice of Frederick had so often roused from their lazy slumber remembered now that they were of the blood of Romulus, remembered the triumphs and the laurels Frederick won for them of old, and did homage to his grandson. In Sicily the Saracens of Lucera revolted against the hated Angevin as soon as they heard that a Hohenstaufen was coming again to his hereditary kingdom.

  Less than four weeks later catastrophe followed triumph. Conradin had scarcely entered Sicily when he was defeated by cunning at Tagliacozzo and betrayed as he fled.
He fell a captive into the hands of Anjou, and with him the rest of his family, Conradin of Caserta, Thomas Aquino, Henry of Castile, whose brother Frederick had educated at his court, and several Lancias. Only Conrad of Antioch escaped and carried on a relentless guerilla war against the French. All the others were victims of a cruel fate. Aquino was condemned to death. Conradin of Caserta spent thirty-two years in prison at Castel del Monte, Henry of Castile was captive for twenty years, the Lancias, Galvano and Frederick, were executed, the father after his son; a half-brother of Conradin’s, yet another Conradin, was hanged in Lucera. Conradin, sitting playing chess with his friend Frederick of Baden, learned the fate reserved for them both. An unheard-of decision of Anjou’s—to send to the scaffold a king taken in battle. The majority of the judges refused to concur in the sentence. The execution took place in the Frenchman’s presence in the market square of Naples, witnessed by a thronging crowd, curious to see a king’s decapitation. As the head fell to the ground an eagle swooped to earth, trailed his right wing in the blood of the last of the Hohenstaufen kings, and thus stained soared again to heaven—so men said.

  “How can the Germans bear to live”—queries a Venetian troubadour—“when they think upon this end! They have lost their bravest and their best and have reaped disgrace! Unless they avenge themselves they are dishonoured!” The night after the death of Conradin the earth trembled; but the Germans felt no earthquake. They thought not of revenge. Nay, Rudolf of Hapsburg, to gratify the Pope, solemnly renounced the right of vengeance on Anjou. Never has the blood-stained eagle yet been purged; never have German vespers followed the Sicilian. “The southern peoples seemed more moved and grieved than the Germans,” the German chronicler confesses with surprise, when the royal corpses were shovelled into the shallow sand “as if the sea had spewed them forth.” The German princes shuddered, and Conradin was mourned in Worms and Strasburg on the Upper Rhine, but all the great body of Germany lay dull and stupid and unmoved. Better this, perhaps, than imitating the Meissner poet, who patted as it were the fallen king patronisingly on the shoulder with a “pride goeth before a fall” and a “why fly so far afield,” or the schoolmaster who wrote a comic poem on Conradin who had been playing the children’s game of “peep” and “heads off” with Anjou and had lost it. This characteristically German obtuseness in face of greatness, fate, and human dignity, makes the miracle the more astounding that such heroes could have sprung from such a people.

  The hapless Enzio, forgotten in his Bologna prison, lived to hear the tale of Conradin. He was now himself the last of all that brilliant race. He must take up the thread again and spin it on, avenge the blood of the slain, sacrifice himself and die like them. He had been twenty years a captive, he was over fifty, but he must escape since there was no Staufen left alive but he. He negotiated with friends and bribed a gigantic cellarer named Filippo to carry him forth one evening in an empty cask. Pietro Asinelli was to be in waiting with horses for the king. Everything worked according to plan. Filippo had reached the street with his burden when a woman spied a long lock of golden hair flowing from the bung. In all Bologna was no such hair but Enzio’s! She shrieked; all was discovered; the cellarer was beheaded and King Enzio more strictly watched. Not for long. He died within two years, in 1272.

  The Bolognese accorded him a royal funeral. In scarlet robes, with sceptre, sword and diadem, he was buried in San Domenico according to his own request. The curse on the Staufen house did not perish with him. His children were swept into the tragedy of another race. His only legitimate daughter was married to Guelfo da Donoratico della Gherardesca of Pisa. An old nobleman, a relation of Guelfo’s, had already shared Conradin’s fate. A grandson of Enzio’s shared the fate of his father’s father and perished with Count Ugolino in the dreaded hunger-tower of Pisa.

  The unforgiveable sin was Staufen blood. Never in historic times had a jealous God demanded through his priesthood such expiation: “Root out the name and fame, the seed and sapling of this Babylonian!” Frederick had no presentiment of what Fate had in store for his sons. If he had he could scarcely have challenged Nemesis by writing to cheer his family after the battle of Fossalta and the capture of Enzio: “Though this misfortune—since we must call it so—seems as in fairytale or nightmare terribly severe, yet is our cause not lost. We accept this reverse as slight or even negligible, nor is our proud head bowed. The accidents of war are manifold but OUR ILLUSTRIOUS QUIVER IS FILLED WITH MANY SONS. We learn such news therefore with calm; and our powerful right arm is thereby strengthened the more vigorously to pursue the destruction of our rebels.”

  The doom of the house of Hohenstaufen is comparable to the fate of the children of Niobe. Frederick was spared the sight of his sons’ long martyrdom. One of the uncanny “Antichristian” things about him is that in spite of the heavy blows fate dealt him in the later years the arch-offender himself escaped anything like adequate expiation of his guilt. His life and strife to the last hour did not lack glory.

  *

  “Nor is our proud head bowed,” Frederick had written. It is a fact that his last year showed neither weariness nor dejection, nor any relaxation of his tense activity. An actual rejuvenation seems rather to have renewed his powers. He wrote in friendly wise to his contemporary Eccelino how fully he realised that Eccelino’s loyalty grew warmer with the years “as a renewal of mental vigour accompanies the ageing of the body.” In reply to Eccelino’s kind enquiries he could assure his friend that while thoughts of the Empire and the rebels were ever with him, he was happy, and his physique which had been somewhat severely taxed by the Italian campaigns was now responding to the comfort and treatment of home.

  Frederick was even contemplating a new marriage with the daughter of Duke Albert of Saxony. His return to Sicily had had a double purpose, first to restore order in the administration and finance which under Piero della Vigna had of late fallen into confusion, and, secondly, to make the necessary preparations for the following year “to turn his steps joyfully to Germany” as he expressed it. He had long been promising King Conrad a visit.

  The political situation seemed every month to favour such plans more. A few ugly items of news had followed King Enzio’s capture: the defection of Como, the capitulation of Modena, which the Bolognese took after a siege, the renewed loss of the Cisa Pass. The beginning of 1250, however, saw the fortune of war set again in the Emperor’s favour. It began in the Romagna. Ravenna, which had twice proved false, had once more been won for the Emperor by the loyal Counts of Bagnacavallo and the March of Ancona was following suit. The papal legate of the March, Peter Capoccio, had been instructed to invade Sicily, but before the banner of the Keys could cross the Sicilian frontier he was utterly defeated with a loss of two thousand dead. Two of his nephews were taken prisoner. A few months later the imperial troops took Cingoli in the March and the Cardinal escaped capture by the skin of his teeth. A whole series of towns returned to their allegiance, so that Frederick was able to announce to his Byzantine son-in-law that Spoleto, the Romagna, and the March were his once more.

  Frederick of Antioch’s position in Florence was not so happy. The imperial government of Tuscany could only be maintained by perpetual petty fighting. Some Florentine troops in Frederick’s service were surprised by the Guelfs on a campaign in the Arezzo neighbourhood, and in the autumn of 1250 a distinct change of atmosphere was noticeable in Florence. Not that the Florentines went over to the Pope or rebelled against the Emperor, but they were the first commune to form a non-party popolo regardless of Ghibelline or Guelf. Henceforth all the forces which Frederick had hitherto sacrificed on the altar of the Empire should be diverted to the service of the town itself. The imperial podesta, however, remained for the duration of Frederick’s life. The very night following the Emperor’s death the house fell in and the imperial official was buried in the ruins.

  *

  Central Lombardy was the scene of really big successes. The one-eyed Margrave, Hubert Pallavicini, was proving a most d
istinguished successor to King Enzio. Possibly Hubert’s despotic savagery was more effective than Enzio’s chivalrous battle-loving bonhomie. Hubert was famous as the inventor of new tortures: he would hang a victim up naked by his feet and break his teeth one by one.

  Frederick knew just how to handle this most ambitious man. Eccelino enjoyed practical independence and guaranteed the Brenner; similarly, the Count of Savoy was guardian of the passes into Burgundy; Hubert Pallavicini was in like manner to cover the Cisa Pass. Frederick, therefore, made over to him some fifty small villages and hamlets in the neighbourhood, so that the Emperor’s cause was his own. A number of these estates lay in the Parma domain, and the Margrave took the field with his Cremonese against this hated town. On the very spot where the Emperor’s care-free town of Victoria had stood a battle was fought in which Parma lost three thousand dead and captured and lost also their standard-bearing chariot, Cremona was avenged for the carroccio she had lost at Victoria. Parma long remembered this “Black Thursday.” Dante once, in a letter to Florence, exhorting his townsmen not to oppose the advancing Henry of Luxemburg, recalls the episode: “Let not yourselves be lured to foolhardiness by the incredible good fortune of the people of Parma who in ill-advised passionate greed… burst into Caesar’s camp in Caesar’s absence. They brought home victory from Victoria but they also drew down on themselves sorrow from sorrow.” The effects of this victory of Pallavicini were felt also in the Bologna direction. The men of that city sent messengers to Frederick to treat of peace. But Frederick refused to negotiate about anything save Enzio’s release.

  Hubert Pallavicini was successful in other matters. He reduced the political confusion of Cremona by a firm reorganisation of the imperial partisans who called themselves “the Beardless” Barbarasi. He soon got into touch with Piacenza also, a town traditionally anti-Kaiser. Ere long it renounced its old alliance with Milan and elected to be ruled by Pallavicini, whose strength men feared and trusted.