III. Early Statesmanship

A series of uneventful, though not inactive, years followed in Germany the exuberance of Frederick’s youthful debut. He had solemnly dedicated himself to the Empire and indicated thereby the direction his future thought and activity would take. Anyone who was looking for spectacular effects, however, must have been disappointed in the new King’s methods. It would be wearisome and purposeless to recount in detail the history of the next few years. Squabbles and differences with the Duke of Lorraine, with a certain Egeno of Urach about some questions of inheritance arising from the dying out of the Zahringen—these and similar trifles—are irrelevant to the tasks and duties of an Emperor, and have, as purely internal German affairs, no interest beyond their own narrow borders. Even the Welf struggle, which had at one point been a matter of European importance with world principles at stake, had sunk to the level of a casual feud, since Otto IV had abandoned Cologne and the lower Rhine and retreated into his Brunswick domains. Frederick attacked him again in the summer of 1217, but it was scarcely necessary, for no one now seriously questioned the Hohenstaufen rule. Nevertheless Otto’s death at the Harzburg in May 1218 cleared up the general situation and brought a certain feeling of relief to Frederick. It was a remarkable coincidence that—so at least the legend runs—just a few days before the death of the Welf Goliath, the Hohenstaufen King stood godfather to a boy who was destined in Germany’s darkest hour to rescue the remains of the shattered Empire and to restore some fraction of the old pomp and glory to his ancient house: Rudolf of Hapsburg.

The only events of these days were insignificant feuds whose origin and name are alike forgotten: more or less important diets accompanying the King’s presence in various parts of his dominions, weddings, awards, gifts, confirmations of title, arbitrations—all the routine attaching to the daily duty of a king.

Frederick’s favourite residence in those days was in Alsace, on the Rhine at Worms or Speyer. He had the body of the murdered Philip of Swabia brought from Bamberg and buried in the cathedral of Speyer beside the Hohenstaufen matron Beatrice, Barbarossa’s consort. His other favourite German headquarters was Hagenau, where he could hunt in the extensive forests and yet slake his thirst for knowledge in the rich library of ancient manuscripts. He was also often to be found in Franconia and Swabia, in Würzburg and Nuremberg, in Augsburg and Ulm, and business took him now and then to Thuringia, Saxony and Lorraine, so that he acquired a wide knowledge of Germany.

These have been called his “Wanderjahre”; their importance lies less in what he achieved than in the goal he set himself. We know nothing of his personal self-education in those days. He was fortunate enough not to feel the need of an amateurish search for suitable mental food that drove Napoleon, for instance, at the corresponding age, to writing philosophical essays. He was perfectly clear in his own mind what he wanted—hesitation indeed never haunted him—and we can accept as correct his own later statement that from his earliest youth he had kept before him one lofty aim: to devote himself unreservedly, body and soul, to the exaltation of the Roman Empire. He therefore directed his policy solely with an eye to the Empire as a whole: a whole of which Germany was merely one important constituent. This is the key to his German policy: he took a passive line towards the German princes, interfered as little as possible, and surrendered one royal right after another, looking only to the good of the Empire. The princes, for the most part, were supremely indifferent to the wider imperial issues, and Frederick II sought at any cost to secure their loyalty and attach them to himself in order to divert at least a fraction of their vigour to his task.

Frederick’s position towards the princes was a peculiarly delicate one. To maintain his rights, let alone seek to enlarge them, that is: to attempt to rule himself, without the mediation of the princes of the Empire, could only have been achieved in battle against them. Never would they have voluntarily consented to any curtailment of their independence or of the rights they had won during the long wars of succession. But these were the very men who had summoned Frederick to Germany, by whose aid he had overcome the Welf. Moreover, the most numerous amongst them, as well as the most powerful, were spiritual princes who had given him their help as the protégé of the Pope. Any step of Frederick against the princes would infallibly embroil him with the Church, the other power to which he owed his elevation. Such measures were not to be thought of; he who had come as a beggar to Germany was in no position to exercise compulsion or persuasion on its princes. His enfeebled Swabian dukedom did not of itself offer sufficient resources to embark on a fight against the whole body of German princes. Even if Frederick had wanted to confine his activities to Germany, and to build up a strong, national German kingdom, no opportunity for this was offered him. This particular ambition was in any case foreign to the philosophy of his race with its leaning towards the universal. Moreover, he was himself a Sicilian as well as a Hohenstaufen.

We have various indications that Frederick’s one instinct was to shelve for the moment the miscellaneous German problems—which finally stirred him to unconcealed annoyance—even at the cost of surrendering many a privilege. By the indirect expedient of building up a powerful Roman empire, rather than by civil war, Frederick hoped to strengthen the royal power in Germany.

So during these German years Frederick systematically sought out and turned to account whatever benefited the Roman Empire, whatever he could find in Germany that would be valid or valuable in a wider world and not only within the frontiers of Germany. He exploited not German peculiarities but German world forces, and these, in addition to serving the Empire, brought advantage to the incoherent loosely-knit Germany herself. The only way to consolidate Germany was first to extend it until it embraced enough material to weld into a compact whole. As yet no German spirit existed, but only a Roman spirit which was gradually civilising the Germanic. It was not common German tradition which bound the Northerners together, but Roman form and culture. The German races had nothing in common but their blood, and the call of the blood was rarely vocal. Just now and then, on some auspicious occasion, in solemn moments of enthusiasm, when they assembled for crusade or pilgrimage, they felt with a thrill of pride that they—Saxons and Franks, Swabians and Bavarians—were one. But they did not even then feel “German.” At most they felt that they stood together as heirs of the Empire of the Caesars, they prided themselves on being descendants of the Trojans, or styled themselves “Roman” citizens. The word “German” is reserved for our use to-day.

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Frederick therefore in seeking out whatever struck him as most “Roman” in Empire and Church was also fostering whatever was most nearly “national.” Awakening Germany offered scope enough in the dawn of the thirteenth century when she welcomed in her young king, the Child of Apulia, the personification of her own youth. For in that wonderful Hohenstaufen age, warmed through and through by southern light, Germany was experiencing within her borders for the first time (and for the only time in any such many-sidedness) a real blossoming of song and vision, of fairy tale and epic, of painting, building and sculpture. Despite world wars and political tension she was displaying that cheerful serenity, that emancipation and freedom which breathes from the creations of the time—almost incredible as German products. The existence of these works is the justification of Nietzsche’s statement made at a time when freedom had reached its nadir: “There is a touch of something in them that might almost be Hellenic, which awakes in contact with the South.” This fertilisation by the South did not necessarily entail a journey thither. The spirit can modify the climate, and by the spirit of the Roman Empire and the Roman Church Germany was southernised as far up as her Baltic coasts. Not that the essentially Germanic was surrendered or eliminated. These southern forces absorbed, without excluding, all that was most characteristic, as the thirteenth century, the most Roman century, abundantly proves. For all the Middle High German heroic epics took their final form in the Hohenstaufen period: the Nibelungen, Gudrun, the cycle of Dietrich of Bern, with the Rose Garden of Worms, Laurin, the Battle of Ravenna and Hugdietrich. Further, the epics of Duke Ernest and Ortnit, these and others belong to this period. Side by side with the great epic monuments—echoes of the Germanic heroic age—we find the stirring new lyrics of the courtly Minnesänger, Hartmann of Aue, Henry of Veldeke, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide, whose voices blended with the solemn Latin hymns of the Christian ritual. The chivalrous epics of the Minnesänger, the Eneïde, Poor Henry, Tristan, Parzival show the complete blending of heroic tale and Christian spirit. It was the Roman Imperium which imposed a sure, cultivated touch alike on German heroics and on Christian chivalry—the like of which Germany has never seen again.

We recall Bishop Conrad of Hildesheim writing of the marvels of South Italy: “We do not need to go beyond the borders of our own German Empire to see all that the Roman poets have been at such pains to describe.”

Throughout the length and breadth of the Roman Empire the German felt at home, and on a sudden the Roman poets made a direct and personal appeal, and were no longer only the cultural and educational stock-in-trade of the Roman Church. The effective assimilation of such Roman spoils is shown by the now repeated attempt to translate a Roman poet into German—the first since Notker’s Vergil in Carolingian times. Albert of Halberstadt translated Ovid—he did not find a successor till the days of the Humanists—and proved that at the time an interest in classical literature was beginning to be felt in circles not conversant with classical Latin, probably amongst those knightly laymen in the entourage of the Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia at whose instance the translation was undertaken. The Hohenstaufen were also responsible for the introduction of Roman Law, the most vital and permanent invasion of the Roman spirit into secular Germany.

The most remarkable manifestation of the German-Roman-Antique time—felt to be “most strange”—was the architecture of Bamberg, followed by Naumburg, in which for the first time a real German figure was portrayed. The surprising and stimulating thing about the plastic art which belongs to the later days of Frederick, the Sicilian-Italian Hohenstaufen, is this, that in works like the “Horseman” of Bamberg or Magdeburg the possibility is for the first time revealed—not yet in song or story, but to the eye in chiselled stone—of a work showing a German subject and yet making a world-wide appeal. This intermingling of the music and motion of Germany with (imperial and papal) Rome has produced as by a miracle an almost Mediterranean type, restrained, yet withal free and unfettered, a type hitherto foreign to German art, for which until then only the Italian had had an eye. The Bamberg master worked of course under French influence and the tradition of ancient Roman plastic art, but while this fact is not without importance it does not alter the certain inference that this nobly beautiful and chivalrous human type must have existed in the Germany of the day.

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Two figures of aristocratic life gave tone to the whole period and gave Germany a share in the happenings of the world outside: knight and monk. These were cosmopolitan figures and German figures both. The monk exercised so dangerous a monopoly in Germany that no other characteristic type was developed on at all an equal footing. France on her side, since the days of Erigena, Ivo and Abelard, in the schools of Paris, Chartres and Orleans, produced the scholar; Italy by the commerce of the coast towns, Pisa, Venice and Genoa, evolved the merchant. For Germany all paths into the distance lay open before the knight and the monk, the two visible representatives of the two great powers: Empire and Church. Prince and bishop were tied to their domains, but knight and monk, rejoicing in greater freedom of movement and more varied range of activity, mirrored like them, on a smaller scale and a more modest plane, the figures of Emperor and Pope.

This fact successfully solved a problem which had never before been solved in German history: for the first time, throughout all the many and diverse provinces of Germany, the aristocratic youths who overflowed the monasteries and religious foundations were offered a career which would be valid not only within the narrow limits of their immediate homeland but in the wider world beyond. It was the only time in history that the German became—in the best sense of the word—cosmopolitan. This prepared the ground for a great period of plastic art which was, alas, abruptly terminated when the fall of the Empire severed German knighthood from the rest of the world and condemned it to blunt itself in bourgeois stupidity or to seek service outside Germany in foreign pay.

There were two powers which Frederick courted during those German years, and courted not in vain: a monks’ and a knights’ Order. A few weeks after the coronation at Aix his close association with the Cistercians was remarked. The Order to which St. Bernard of Clairvaux belonged, in which at that time “the Church of Christ had broken into bloom,” had not in fact been founded by St. Bernard himself, but the community owed its importance to his zeal and fire. Like almost all orders of the Roman Church it had its roots in the need to reform abuses, and Bernard had emphasised the stern asceticism and discipline of the Order, but these were balanced in the doctor mellifluus by the passion of a great love. Hence Dante chooses Bernard as his final guide to the Throne of God:

The Queen of Heaven, enthroned above,

Knowing my heart’s devotion, will not fail,

For am I not her Bernard, her true love…

He was the first to breathe into the Order a passionate devotion to the Virgin, just at the time the outer world was singing the earliest lyrics of the troubadours. And he was the first also who sanctified “the work of the chaste earth” and so gave a new direction to monastic ambition, the combination of an active with a contemplative life. “Free from earthly disturbance and earthly broils the Order enjoys earthly peace,” wrote Frederick once, and so it was. The Order sought out the remotest and quietest valleys for its settlements, and there set up its monasteries and its extensive farm-steadings, its simple churches, towerless and unadorned, bearing only, instead of other decoration, the first rose blossoms of Burgundian Gothic. Maulbronn and Ebrach are our witnesses for these early days when the Grey Monks “lived amongst, but yet above, their fellow-men.”

The obligation to till the soil ensured the rapid geographical extension of the Order. The Cistercians became a quiet, steady pioneer influence, cultivating the ancient tracts and opening up new ones, especially for Germany. It was they who first Christianised and colonised Prussia. The whole organisation of their monasteries anticipated growth. There was never to be more than one abbot and twelve brothers, with twelve lay brothers, in one cloister. If the numbers grew beyond this, the excess hived forth to seek a new abiding place. This self-sufficing restriction of their numbers to the number of the apostles was the origin of the innumerable daughter-establishments which were subordinate to the mother-cloisters, as they in turn were related—like the branches of a genealogical tree—to the parent settlement at Citeaux. Thus the cohesion of all the monasteries was secured, and the Cistercians gradually grew to form one single world-wide institution which never split asunder. This organisation was without parallel, for with the Benedictines each monastery was entirely independent of the others.

The unity and the monarchic graduation of the whole Cistercian Order were still further developed. Once a year the Abbots from each settlement from Syria to Sweden assembled in a General Chapter. This statesmanlike assembly, which put the resources of all at the disposition of each, breathed the same spirit from southern Burgundy to Pomerania and Prussia, as the Cistercian churches in the north-east of Germany (nearly all of which date from the thirteenth century) clearly testify. This centralisation was as much an innovation as the agriculture and horticulture which the monks introduced into the newly opened districts, in improving the tillage and domesticating wild crops.

These brothers, pushing ever forward, colonising the valleys with their Virgin-led hosts, spreading the teaching of Christ and ever planting daughter-settlements, evoked a late Christian reflex of the ver sacrum of earlier times.

The Cistercian Order, with its landed properties, its disciplined constitution, its immense extension, was the most patrician of the monkish orders under the Hohenstaufen Empire and the aristocratic medieval Church, contrasting with the plebeian Mendicant Orders who were just then emerging, and who were really at home only in the towns. The wide distribution and the monarchic constitution of the Cistercians had the result that they were directly under the leaders of the Christian world; no territorial prince, no individual bishop appointed or influenced the governors of their monasteries; they were ruled directly, in spiritual matters by the Pope, in worldly affairs by the Emperor alone. Earlier Emperors had made generous gifts to the Cistercians, but none to the same extent as Frederick II, especially in those German years of his. The tokens of favour with which he honoured the Order and at times almost overwhelmed it, are well-nigh innumerable. The warmth of feeling, the reverence, which the records show he felt for the Order, “the shady grove of Christ,” exceed all that any other community can boast, and till his dying day Frederick loved to consider himself intimately bound to them.

After taking the Cross Frederick got himself received into a prayer-community of Cistercians, and his curiously humble petition addressed to the Abbot of this powerful Order is still reminiscent of his crusading mood. The pious and edifying style of this letter—in which Frederick pictures himself as a sinner in the weakness of the flesh—served its purpose. He was received into the community, a fact of which in later years he did not fail to take advantage. This sort of thing was of course a regular custom of the Emperors, and Frederick II followed in their footsteps the more readily that he was anxious to secure adherents in the clerical camp. The Cistercians were to act as “Preservers of the harmony between Emperor and Pope,” a scheme which had often proved fruitful under Barbarossa and Otto IV. But Frederick had yet another axe to grind. Their experience made the Cistercians masters of agriculture. Caesarius of Heisterbach, himself a Cistercian monk, proudly records that the lay brothers of the grey brotherhood had been recommended to the Archbishop of Cologne as the best household administrators. Frederick could turn such men as that to good account. He loved to gather round him Cistercian lay brothers trained in agriculture and cattle-breeding and set them to organise and administer his imperial estates in Apulia and the Capitanata. He used others as architects and overseers for his castles and pleasure palaces, while in his most important and handsome buildings in South Italy Cistercian builders played a distinguished part.

We have written evidence of the Cistercians’ activities as the Emperor’s builders. It is clear from a statute of the General Chapter that lay brothers and monks were later told off in great numbers for the Emperor’s service. The Pope even complained that Frederick was using too many of them for his building projects. The evidence of the Apulian castles and palaces themselves is plainer still. As far as can still be traced they all have in common the new Gothic style of the Cistercians which was supplanting more and more the native Norman-Byzantine architecture. Not of course the “broken forms” of later Gothic, but the principle of utilising piers and buttresses to denote strength and striving—just what makes the magic of the transition period. The late-Roman forms are touched and penetrated by the young Gothic strength, so that for a few decades of conflict and exuberant wealth the two—both fruit and blossom—are found side by side. It was in such a “fulness of time” that Frederick was destined to rule.

People have designated the whole Hohenstaufen culture of Germany as “knightly,” and knightly too the crude early-Gothic of the Cistercian monasteries. There was something of the knight in these monks, and indeed in the days of the knightly orders the antithesis between monk and knight was almost obliterated. The epic poet—by a slight anachronism—makes the monk Ilsan, who in the suite of Dietrich of Bern burst so devastatingly into the Rose Garden of Worms, a Cistercian. The connection between the Grey Monks and the spiritual knights goes back in fact to very early times. People even say that the first knightly Order of the West was founded by Spanish Cistercians who courageously flew to arms when Calatrava was threatened by the Moors. And the interplay of the two types of Order can be easily explained, for the spiritual knight, like the monk, loved to trace his origin back to St. Bernard. It may not be strictly true that—as the legend will have it—Bernard himself dictated the Rule of the Templars to the knights Hugo of Payens and Godfrey of St. Omer, but the original spirit of the Templars was closely akin to the spirit of romantic devotion and stern sobriety which animated St. Bernard and his Order. It was Bernard who, in the time of the second Crusade, recruited with zeal and eloquence for the Templars, and who wrote a tract, “In Praise of the New Chivalry of Christ”: “These warriors are gentler than lambs and fiercer than lions, wedding the mildness of the monk to the valour of the knight, so that it is difficult to decide which to call them: men who adorn the Temple of Solomon with weapons instead of gems, with shields instead of crowns of gold, with saddles and bridles instead of candelabra; eager for victory not for fame; for battle not for pomp; who abhor useless speech, unnecessary action, unmeasured laughter, gossip and chatter as they despise all vain things: who in spite of their being many live in one house according to one rule, with one soul and one heart.”

St. Bernard, when he pointed the Templars to a spiritual life, as he had the Cistercians to an active life, had really the same, or a very similar picture of an ideal community in mind, but while he recommended to the monks the honourable and self-denying service of the Queen of Heaven, the Order of Templars was dedicated to the service of Christ himself, for whom the brothers bore in common their strife and suffering; the Saviour himself was the spiritual head of their State.

People have often exalted St. Bernard because of his miracles. Not the least of these was the foundation of the first knightly Order. What a revolution was there! The restless, vacillating secular knight errant, who flew from adventure to adventure, or sacrificed himself in the service of his lady-love, leading his own individual life and entirely destructive to the firm fabric of the State, was thus induced to fit himself into the strict bonds of the Order, to give a social value, instead of a personal value, to his battles, to seek the inspiration of his noblest deeds not from his mistress but from God himself, under whose law and in whose service the Order fought.

For the first time in post-Christian days warriors and men of the vita activa, not merely monks, banded themselves together for an idea, and for a spiritual Lord, and assimilated themselves to each other. Uniformitas was the principle, the final keynote of the German knightly orders, emphasised again and again, and extending far beyond the mere question of dress—the mantle with the cross. The Templar, serving like the monks a common master, evolved that virile, knightly, rigorous constitution which later statesmen inevitably took as their model, developing it each in his own way for his own material advantage and placing himself in the place of the transcendental Master. One of such earthly state knighthoods is the Teutonic Order, founded a bare century after the Templars, which devoted its powers solely to the terrestrial state.

The feeling for spiritual knighthood was almost extinct in the East, when at the turn of the twelfth-thirteenth century in Acre the nursing community of the German Knights of St. Mary bound themselves into a third spiritual Order beside the Templars. The Templars were mainly French, and the Knights of St. John were largely English and Italian. Pope Innocent III gave to the Teutonic Knights the Rule of the Templars, whom they were to emulate in everything spiritual and knightly as they were to emulate the Knights of St. John in care for the poor and the sick. The Order was to be strictly national; only knights of German birth were to enter it.

The story of the new Order is much tamer than that of the Templars. Its origin, lacking the blessing of St. Bernard, lacks fire and inevitability; its battles lack the glamour of the distant East; its end the mystery of early death which always overtakes the heroes of myth. The German Knights never enjoyed such lavish wealth, their temptations were not so great, they never sank into the same corruption, but never did they inspire tale or legend with the glory and mystery that surround the heroes of the Temple, the secret guardians of the Grail. The history of the Teutonic Order, however, is all the more real because it was neither born in myth nor buried in mystery, and because its battles were fought on familiar fields near home. When Frederick II came to Germany the Teutonic Order was still an insignificant body. Henry VI had turned his attention to them while he was planning the Crusade, but, in spite of many benefactions, the confusion that followed his death hampered this purely German movement in its development.

The Church and older rivals looked at it with no friendly eye, and its real prosperity began with Frederick II. After he had taken his crusading vow a definite opportunity presented itself for the employment of the Teutonic Knights, and Frederick at once got into touch with them. Numerous gifts in this and the ensuing years bear witness to Frederick’s determination to strengthen the Order by every means in his power. He even granted its members privileges which encroached on his own imperial rights, or which robbed him of considerable royal revenues. He was here even more open-handed than towards the princes. He had at first primarily the Crusade in view, but beyond the needs of the moment Frederick sought to enlist their enthusiasm and their strength for other tasks. He created out of them a little corps d’élite, free from feudal fetters and extraneous influences whether of temporal or spiritual lords, independent, reliable, unconditionally loyal to himself—a small body, but one immediately at the service of the Empire as sword and weapon, and in spiritual matters subject to the Pope alone. To increase the authority of the Order in Church affairs Frederick applied personally to the Pope, with the result that the notaries in the papal Chancery were busy night and day preparing nothing but charters for the—hitherto sorely neglected—Order of Teutonic Knights.

In other ways, too, Frederick always showed a great affection for the Teutonic Knights. He encouraged and assisted young noblemen like the three Hohenlohe brothers who were seeking admission to the Order, just as later he did his best to dissuade young noblemen from joining the Mendicant Orders. In the early days especially, when he wanted probity and trustworthiness, he turned to the Teutonic Knights: whether to oversee the building of his ships or to carry important despatches. In the Holy Land he hardly employed any others, and in later years he entrusted the administration of Alsace to Berthold of Tannenrode, one of the brethren, and even placed the German regent for a while to a large extent under the influence of the Teutonic Knights, so that a chronicler was not unjustified in exclaiming that the whole Empire is ruled according to the counsels of the Order. He was overstating the case of course, but it is remarkable how much attention Frederick devoted to attaching the Order to himself. One of the first privileges accorded to them was that the Grand Master of the day, whoever he might be, when attending court, should form part of the royal household and belong to the familia, while his escort also should enjoy the hospitality of the court. Further, two brethren of the Order were to be in permanent attendance on the royal person. The Spanish king Alfonso VIII had shown similar favours to the Order of Calatrava, but this only goes to show that these knightly orders, in proportion as they became national institutions, tended to become “courtly.” It is common knowledge that the knightly orders of the late Middle Ages, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were purely court affairs, and preserved an aristocratic form of life that had perished elsewhere.

Frederick liked to attribute to the earlier Hohenstaufen, indeed to Barbarossa himself, the founding of the Teutonic Order, so as to lend age and dignity to the institution. He also liked to talk of it as his own creation. It was in fact the work of his own hands, his and the first great Grand Master’s: Hermann of Salza. For over twenty years Hermann of Salza was always to be met in Frederick’s court and camp, his most trusted counsellor, his most valued intimate, not in virtue of his office as Master, but on account of personal qualities which made him practically indispensable.

It seems probable that Hermann of Salza was a Thuringian and there is something Thuringian in his whole personality. He was dignified and thoughtful by nature, and he possessed in every department of life that manliness, righteousness and good faith which distinguished the Order that he ruled. His faithfulness had become proverbial; it was with him no passive virtue but—as from the dawn of time you find it only in Germans—a positive driving force. There is something almost tragic in this great man’s fate. For Hermann of Salza had two masters; he had sworn an oath of fealty to both Pope and Emperor, and every conflict between them exposed him to an intolerable strain. So we see him, bent on keeping faith with both, flying hither and thither from court to Curia, and from Curia to court, again and again during those years of incessant quarrelling seeking to keep or to restore the peace. He once described his life work as “to strive for the honour of Church and Empire,” and when the breach between the two powers became final and complete, life became for him impossible. On Palm Sunday 1239 Frederick II was excommunicated for ever, and on the same day the great Grand Master, Hermann of Salza, breathed his last.

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Amongst Frederick’s courtiers the distinctly older Master represented at all times the calm, practical wisdom which more than once deterred the hot-headed young monarch from wantonly provoking his foes. Hermann of Salza’s long experience had made him acquainted with the state of affairs in the East no less than in Italy, in the papal Curia no less than in the German court, and this experience combined with most unusual diplomatic and political skill gave him a unique value in every branch of imperial policy. The collaboration of Frederick with the Grand Master, whom he met for the first time in the Nuremberg court of 1216, had most significance for north-east Germany.

Frederick had been—to quote a Livonian chronicler—“so deeply preoccupied with the varied and lofty duties of the Empire” that, truth to tell, he had felt scant interest in the affairs of north-east Germany. With Hermann of Salza it was different. The politics of his Order had a very lively concern with the north-east, and so it came about that all important matters concerning regions round the Baltic Sea from Denmark to Livonia passed through his hands or were confirmed by him.

Waldemar, King of the Danes, was a man of some importance; he had extended his rule—at the expense of the Empire—along the Baltic towards Livonia and Esthonia, as far as the mouth of the Dvina. Finally he was taken prisoner by a vassal of the Empire, and the envoy whom Frederick sent to treat with him was Hermann of Salza. He concluded peace with the Danish king, and in 1226—probably at the Grand Master’s instance—Frederick created Lübeck, the most important port on the Baltic, an imperial town, thus putting an end to all Danish rights over the Elbe country and to all claims of the Roman Curia which stood behind Denmark. Hermann of Salza called the Emperor’s attention to Prussia also, where the Roman Curia with the aid of the Cistercians had been founding colonies and missions.

We may here anticipate the events of the ensuing year. In the winter of 1225–26 Conrad of Masovia, Duke of Poland, finding himself unable to repulse the Prussian heathen, applied to the Teutonic Knights for help, and provisionally gave a verbal promise—not yet confirmed in writing—to hand over his territories of Kulm to the Order in return for their services. This offer came at an opportune moment, for the Order had just been unsuccessful in a somewhat similar enterprise in the Burzen country of Hungary.

The Birth of Prussia, 1226

With wisdom and foresight and a fortunate appreciation of the whole situation the Grand Master took up the scheme, talked it over with Kaiser Frederick, who at once gave it firm and final shape by granting weighty privileges to the undertaking. So thoroughly had they thought matters out that the memorable Golden Bull of Rimini of 1226 lays down the future tasks and aims of the Teutonic Order, draws up the constitution of the future State in a scheme complete down to minutest details. All this is in order before negotiations have begun, before an agreement has been reached with the Polish Duke, before a single Teutonic knight has set foot or eye upon the land of Kulm. This great charter that founded the Prussian State under the Order of the Teutonic Knights has justly been called a “plan of campaign,” for the territories granted by it to the Order had still to be won, and the Order therefore knew for years ahead just where its duty lay. This Charter indeed secured the future of the Teutonic Order: it was so comprehensive that whatever the Order did was done under the special aegis of the Emperor and was covered by imperial privilege. It is expressly laid down in this document that “all gifts and conquests are to be the free property of the Order, which is to exercise full territorial rights and be responsible to none. The Grand Master is to enjoy all the privileges that pertain to a prince of the Empire, including all royal privileges, and the Order shall be in Prussia free from all imperial taxes, burdens and services.” Thus Frederick permitted the Order to found an autonomous State, owning no territorial master save the Order itself, “to be an integral part of the monarchy of the Empire” as the Charter says. This position of the Order was assured not only by earlier privileges granted under the immediate protection of the Empire, but by a most remarkable attitude taken up by Frederick.

Since the days of Charlemagne the warfare against the heathen had been one of the tasks of a Roman Emperor, and Charlemagne had demonstrated that it must be waged in two directions: first, against Islam, as in his Spanish campaign, and, secondly, against the heathen of eastern Europe as in his Saxon wars. The Crusades had concentrated attention on the war with Islam, but the other task had lost its full importance after the time of Barbarossa but was not yet quite forgotten. Frederick II revived this East European mission.

The Empire had been chosen by God to preach the gospel. This was Frederick’s conviction, frequently reiterated; he found room to incorporate it in the Charter of the Order: “For this end has God uplifted our Empire above the kingdoms of the earth, and extended the limits of our power beyond the various zones, that our care may be to glorify his name and diligently to spread his faith among the peoples, for he hath chosen the Roman Empire for the preaching of his gospel: let us therefore bend our minds to the conquest, no less than the conversion, of the heathen peoples…”

These sentences contain an unmistakable challenge to the Pope. For the Church, with the help of the Cistercians, had already begun to christianise Prussia, and there was a very real danger that Prussia might become a feudal appanage of the Roman Curia as Sicily had done, though it was the Normans who had won it from the infidel. The Pope indeed had signalised his intentions, styling the conversion of the heathen as “emancipation,” since the new converts were to “owe obedience to none save Christ and the Roman Church”—not, therefore, to the Empire. As a counter-move Frederick now came on the scene with his theory of an imperial mission and spoke expressly of “conquest” as the goal—indicating an intention of ruling the heathen peoples. He incorporated the land belonging to the Teutonic Order in the “monarchy of the Empire,” and supported this line of action by reference to an old royal right. Heathen land was lordless land and thus belonged, not to the conqueror, but to the ruler, to the Emperor who, like the Pope, was here the vicegerent of Christ. Thus Frederick planned to save Prussia for the Empire.

The importance of this plantation of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia needs no emphasis. The spiritual Order had thereby acquired, as it were, a physical body; it had exchanged landless ubiquity for territorial possession, and it quickly metamorphosed itself into a real state which preserved the standards and ideals of chivalry through days when these elsewhere were being degraded or urbanised. It is highly characteristic of Frederick that he thus founded the Prussian State more or less fortuitously. We shall observe again and again, what we here note for the first time, that his hand possessed some magic, as people later contended, that brought life into whatever he happened even accidentally to touch. Things forthwith assumed an importance he could not possibly have foreseen, out of all proportion to the slight effort he had expended. The Charter of the Order, the Golden Bull of Rimini, which was drawn up more or less casually in a busy moment when the Emperor was occupied with innumerable more important questions, is a proof of his happy touch. The godfather of the Hapsburg was the godfather also of Prussia.

The Order of the Cistercians and the Order of the Teutonic Knights were the two most weighty allies that Frederick won during his German years; nothing else approaches them in importance. The power of the German towns was still slight; moreover, the princely towns and the episcopal towns were wholly outside his influence, and privileges which he granted now and then to one or another—Cambrai and Basel for instance—might have to be revoked if the imperial princes so decided. For the body of princes were swift to resent any encroachment and acted together as one man to resist any interference with their rights. Only the Swabian towns and those immediately under the Empire were under Frederick’s care, and here he bestirred himself to improve communications, to secure safe convoy for the merchants throughout the Roman Empire, and to protect the highways against robbers, measures which were much appreciated.

Apart from what he actually did for them, Frederick contrived to inspire his towns with the faith that he had their interests peculiarly at heart, and he strengthened this belief by gifts and privileges. He turned villages into towns, presented towns with market-places, gathered scattered rights and privileges into one charter which formed a code of justice for the town. Later, when the days of tribulation came, it was the towns who rallied to the cause of the Hohenstaufen and of the Empire against the princes.

The laborious methods of natural cultivation practised in Germany made it an unsuitable sphere for the wonderful experiments in state agriculture which Frederick later made so brilliant a success in Sicily, and the German feudal system permitted no direct interference in administration. Frederick’s strength was frittered away in handling all the various minor internal affairs of Germany without any visible advantage to the whole, and soon after his coronation at Aix he seems to have aimed at evolving some scheme for delegating minor German business to others, retaining the decision only in major matters. “Wherever the Roman Empire and some of the princes meet—there is Germany” became the dictum, showing that the whole Imperium—not only the countries north of the Alps—could be German through the German Imperator.

Many adjustments were gradually made to organise a subsidiary government for internal German affairs so as to set the Emperor free for larger issues. Frederick never hustled. All his big undertakings can be traced back through years of quiet preparation, and he never sought to conceal what he was aiming at. What he did, he did coram publico, and he always announced beforehand what his intentions were. Yet his actions always contained an element of suddenness and surprise, either because no one had taken him seriously, or because he carried out his intention at a moment when people had ceased to expect it. His first great diplomatic victory over the Church exemplifies this.

Honorius III had been since 1216 the occupant of the papal throne. Whoever had succeeded Innocent III would necessarily have appeared something of a pigmy by comparison; certainly Honorius did. He was a jurist, primarily an administrative official. Cencio Savelli had been, before his elevation, the Pope’s Chamberlain, and had edited the famous “liber censuum,” the tax-book of the Roman Church. Later, when the battle between the Emperor and Pope had become an economic one, the fact that the Church could take the field as a first-class financial power was due in no small measure to Honorius. For the rest he was old and frail, and inclined therefore to be placable and gentle rather than bellicose, though he asserted on occasion the lofty claims which were nowadays part and parcel of the Papacy. If the peace of the world were to depend on a balance between these two great forces Honorius was the very best make-weight for Frederick, and for a good ten years the two held the balance fairly even. The most absorbing affair which in those days engrossed the two heads of Christendom was unquestionably the Crusade, and Honorius regarded the recapture of Jerusalem as the loftiest and most personal ambition of his pontificate.

Frederick’s assumption of the Cross had at first awakened little enthusiasm in Rome. Innocent, who had been planning to march into the Holy Land at the head of the peoples, completely ignored Frederick’s action, and without consulting his youthful rival fixed the day of the start of the Crusaders for 1st July, 1217—a date which completely ruled Frederick out, for Otto IV was still alive and the Hohenstaufen could not possibly leave Germany.

Honorius III seemed at first oblivious of Frederick’s existence as a Crusader, and a legate of the Pope’s directed the arrangements for the Crusade as an exclusively papal affair. The first rendezvous of the warriors was not to be the Holy Land but Egypt, by the conquest of which it was hoped to engineer the fall of Jerusalem. The whole undertaking was badly organised and sorely mismanaged. Damietta fell at the first onslaught, but an ill-advised penetration into the interior brought the entire crusading army into the greatest danger. When the Crusaders began to feel the pinch they spontaneously turned for help to Kaiser Frederick, and the Roman Curia suddenly bethought itself that he too was a Crusader. Pope Honorius took up the general cry and painted in the most glowing colours the opportunity that now opened for Frederick to fulfil his vow, and addressed him prophetically as “the victorious king before whose countenance the heathen fly and who in fighting God’s battles wins his own eternal salvation.”

Frederick, however, had not awaited the summons from the Pope. He had already declared himself ready to promote the cause of the Crusade in Germany, and to arrange the date of departure at the Diet he was immediately about to hold. He requested Honorius kindly to excommunicate dilatory Crusaders, for if any delay occurred it would be due to the Roman Curia and not to him. Further, would the Pope be so good as to take the Empire under his protection during Frederick’s absence, and with it the imperial regent whom he was about to appoint.

In the days of Innocent, Frederick had almost always styled himself “King by the Grace of God and of the Pope.” He dropped the phrase in writing to Honorius; it no longer fitted the facts. He adopted in other ways also an entirely new tone towards the Curia; the note though perfectly courteous had in it a ring of decision that must have quickened many an ear in Rome. The Pope’s need, however, was great. In spite of reinforcements the position of the Crusaders before Damietta grew daily more critical, and Pope Honorius’s one anxiety was to send Frederick to their assistance with all speed. Francis of Assisi had accompanied the forces to preach Christianity to the Egyptian Sultan. Before finally setting out on the Crusade the Staufen was to receive the imperial crown from the hands of the Pope in Rome. And Honorius impatiently awaited the moment. Though Frederick was no less eager, circumstances compelled him to postpone his Roman journey and with it his Crusade: from the Feast of St. John in 1219 the date was changed to Michaelmas, and then to March 1220, then to May, and finally adjourned sine die. The vow could not be wholly cancelled without a dispensation from the Pope.

What was detaining Frederick in Germany? Apart from trifles he had much to arrange before he could leave Germany. First, it was imperative to come to some understanding with the Pope on the “Sicilian question”; secondly, to arrange for the administration during his absence; thirdly, to secure the election of his son Henry as King of the Romans. In defiance of the Pope’s impatience Frederick made his Roman journey and his Crusade contingent on these questions.

Pope Innocent III had strenuously sought to guard against the danger of a union of the Empire and Sicily, and in pursuance of this policy had demanded securities: Frederick’s son Henry had been crowned King of Sicily at the express request of Innocent. In several documents Frederick had recognised the Church’s feudal rights over Sicily, had solemnly undertaken not to unite the kingdom with the Empire, had promised, on the day of his coronation as Emperor, to waive his rights over Sicily in favour of his son. During King Henry’s minority a regent jointly appointed by Pope and Emperor would rule the south Italian kingdom.

The day of the Crusade and of the imperial coronation was drawing on, and therewith the day on which Frederick must formally renounce all claims to the government of Sicily… but the Emperor, who had very definite views about his hereditary kingdom, made no attempt to disguise from the Pope that while recognising his own earlier renunciation of Sicily as valid he intended to take over the regency himself. The Curia was anything but satisfied. Frederick must renew all his earlier promises—this he did willingly enough. But he did not give up his intention of ruling Sicily. His hereditary kingdom was going to mean for him the beginning and the end of his Imperium. He must achieve his goal by an indirect route, and the Curia in its excessive foresight had pointed out the way when it had demanded the coronation of his infant son as King of Sicily.

The other important matter that Frederick had to arrange was the administration of Germany during his absence. A complicated system was elaborated, but it was soon perfectly clear what Frederick had in mind and was determined to accomplish. Immediately after his coronation in Aix he had, most naturally, sent for his Queen, Constance, and his little son Henry to join him in Germany. In 1217 he installed the boy, who was already King of Sicily, as Duke of Swabia; in 1219 he entrusted to him the regency over the Kingdom of Burgundy, and since then he had been busily winning over the German princes to the idea of electing Henry King of the Romans. There was nothing unprecedented in all this, and the dangers of a Crusade to which he was now about to expose himself gave a sufficient colour to Frederick’s desire. He wished during his own lifetime to secure the succession to his house, as many an Emperor before him had done. Technically, however, Frederick was not yet Emperor, and difficulties confronted him on every side. The important thing was first to get the princes to agree to his plan, and his immediate efforts were directed to that end.

Negotiations were being carried on at the turn of the year 1219–20: first about the Crusade, then about the Roman journey, thirdly about the Sicilian question, fourthly about the German regency, fifthly about the election of the infant Staufen, negotiations that were all interdependent and ought all to be concluded in the shortest possible time. For matters were nearing a crisis; the Pope urged Frederick to hasten his departure and began to show ill-humour over his procrastinations, while the longer the negotiations were drawn out the more hopelessly the skein became entangled. All possibility of a solution seemed past when Frederick finally succeeded with one stroke in cutting all the knots. By weighty concessions and a fresh abandonment of many royal prerogatives he purchased the acquiescence of the princes, and at the farewell Diet which he held in Frankfurt on his departure for Rome in the spring of 1220 the Sicilian King Henry was elected King of the Romans. Frederick had won the game. The Hohenstaufen dynasty was established, the regency arranged for, and the Sicilian question solved exactly as he had planned. Sicily had of course not been legally incorporated in the Empire, the feudal overlordship of the Church over Sicily still stood, but that personal union of the two crowns which Frederick had had to renounce on his coronation as Emperor became suddenly an accomplished fact, when Henry, long since the crowned King of Sicily, was elected King of the Romans by the German princes. The personal union had come to life again without any breach of all the treaties with the Pope, for they were all made in the name of Frederick II, and contained not a syllable about Henry. All the rights and powers which Frederick was debarred by treaty and agreement from claiming for himself he had now passed on boldly to his son. The one flaw in the treaties had been exploited. For even if the Curia had insisted on Henry taking the reins himself—at eight years old—his father’s “advisership” could not be prevented, which meant that Frederick was himself the de facto ruler of the two realms of Sicily and Germany. In short, from the papal point of view, there would have been a perfectly futile insistence on mere appearances if they had attempted to exclude Frederick from Sicily.

The Roman Curia, though gravely annoyed, at once recognised the real state of affairs, and finally had to accept the fact that the cherished parchments which Frederick had so recently confirmed, and even added to, had become so much waste paper. Frederick meantime had won his first great victory over curial diplomacy. He had succeeded in uniting Sicily and the Empire—in however roundabout a way. That union, to avoid which Pope Innocent had literally set the whole world in motion, had exalted and had debased the Welf, was now restored; the States of the Church were again shut in on north and south. The only difference was that Henry VI had never acknowledged Sicily’s feudal dependence on Rome, which Frederick II for the moment at least upheld, and once more confirmed in writing. Nothing now stood in Frederick’s way, and a few months later he set out for Rome.

It was one of the most characteristic gifts of Frederick to win a whole series of positions with one skilful move. He raised it to a high art. His taking of the Cross at Aix was prophetic, he now gave his first serious demonstration of this typical procedure. Apart from the advantages already mentioned, King Henry’s election gave Frederick just the opportunity he wanted to set up at the court of the young King of the Romans a subordinate government which could deal with all the minor questions of German internal administration. This was arranged provisionally with a view to the Crusade and was afterwards made permanent, so that henceforth Germany was ruled by King Henry while the Emperor himself had his headquarters in Italy, the centre of the world. All this followed from the one well-judged manoeuvre.

The taking of the Cross in Aix had had far-reaching consequences in many directions, but it had been the outcome of an almost delirious enthusiasm and it had nothing of the usual transparency of the air of Frederick II’s court, in which men far superior to their spiritual opponents played a subtle game with gentle irony. The election of the Sicilian king was more typical and showed the unstudied ease with which Frederick met even the most complicated situations.

Frederick kept this light and happy touch in similar delicate situations for years to come, and in spite of occasional ruthlessness, of occasional severe violence, he succeeded on the whole with a minimum of actual force. To sever Gordian knots with the sword was not his way—nor did he think it his mission; his great skill lay in allowing the loose threads to twist themselves into a seemingly inextricable tangle, and then at the decisive moment with firm hand and unerring eye to seize the whole and secure it in a knot which only Alexander could have cut in two. And in his day there was no Alexander.

In this connection Frederick’s first victory over the Curia may serve as something more than a sample, though he had not yet reached the heights of later years. The Roman Curia had seen plainly enough what he was aiming at. He had made no secret of the fact that he would have liked to retain Sicily. The Curia knew that Frederick’s son was to be chosen King in Germany and had at once perceived all that this implied. None the less they were entangled in Frederick’s skilful web and were not able to extricate themselves.

Frederick was able to preserve throughout an air of childlike innocence, for it was not he but the princes who were responsible for this election of King Henry. The better to keep up this convenient fiction the election was arranged to take place in Frankfurt at a moment when Frederick happened to be absent, so that he was able to maintain with perfect truth that everything had taken place “without his knowledge and actually during his absence.” The Curia had probably foreseen the issue, but had to confess that this German royal election was none of her business. In the background Honorius had done his best with the help of the spiritual princes to prevent the election, and this accounted for the initial opposition Frederick had met with. The Pope could not plausibly complain that there had been any breach of previous agreements; he could only hope that the threatened fate might in some way be averted after all.

Fate itself seemed to walk the earth incarnate in this Hohenstaufen, not sinister or menacing but smiling, innocently playful, with buoyant dancing step. In later years this fateful quality assumed terrifying proportions, the smile became a cynical witticism, the dance a dance of death. An atmosphere of magic played round this Hohenstaufen, some wholly-German Germanic emanation which Napoleon for instance conspicuously lacked, an immeasurably dangerous emanation, as of a Mephisto free of horn and cloven hoof, who moves among men disguised as a golden-haired Apulian boy, winning his bloodless victories with weapons stolen from the Gods. Already without effort of his own the Puer Apuliae had played Nemesis to a giant like Innocent III, till the most mighty opponent of a Hohenstaufen dynasty became so mysteriously entangled in the coils of fate that he had no option but to elevate to the throne of the Roman Empire the Sicilian king whom he had failed to crush.

It rounds off the picture of Frederick’s German years that he paid for his victory over the Curia and for his Sicilian inheritance with a number of royal prerogatives and rights which he lightheartedly abandoned to the German princes. The spiritual princes had at first stood out against the election of Henry, but when Frederick offered them the free testamentary disposal of their wealth, rights of custom and coinage in the bishops’ lands, even the free disposal of the feudal fiefs in their domains; when, finally, he limited in their favour his own freedom by promising that henceforth the ban of the Empire should automatically follow the ban of the Church, they could resist no longer. For such a bait they were ready to throw over the Pope and his Sicilian policy. The royal rights were already subject to many exceptional grants of privilege, so that Frederick’s actual surrenders were not so very serious. The gravity of the “Constitution in favour of the spiritual princes” was, that what had been the exception now became the rule. Frederick has often been reproached on account of these concessions, but the possession of Sicily weighed more with him, and most rightly, than sundry royal prerogatives.

It might with equal or greater justice be cast in the princes’ teeth that their support for any cause, however great, could only be won by bribes, and that they for the sake of a brewing tax would follow their Emperor or betray him.

*

Frederick II could not play the statesman amid such conditions; he needed raw material to work with and great foes to fight; perhaps he was not equal to these hucksterings. All thought for princely greed and princely bickering he thankfully handed over to the subordinate government which he set up, and which during the minority of King Henry was in the first place entrusted to Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne, who was to be Germany’s Gubernator. To himself he drew all the virile manhood of Germany.

A topical poem of Walther von der Vogelweide’s sketches the position of the day with bitter irony and acumen. The princes’ delay in electing Henry was holding up Frederick’s departure for Rome and for the Holy Land. To influence the election in the direction of Frederick’s wishes Walther offers the princes a piece of advice; they are at all times eager enough “to be rid of the king”; he shows how, by merely electing Henry, they will be able to despatch him “a thousand miles and more away to Trani:”

Ye foes! Just let him have his way and go,

Perhaps he thus will never vex you more!

If he dies there—which Heaven forfend—you score;

If he return to us, his friends, the more

We praise the fate that doth our lord restore.

My plan will profit both the friend and foe.

Walther von der Vogelweide was in close touch with Frederick, and the verses were intended to assist his plans. The poet at length received “his fief,” for which he had so long and vainly petitioned Kaiser Otto. Thus Frederick attached the Minnesänger to his cause; the best that Germany had was his. On the whole, however, it was time for him to quit the North. The same year found him in Sicily displaying his prowess and adding a second more brilliant success to his first.

In August 1220 he started out with a smallish force from the Lechfeld at Augsburg, the usual rallying point for armies marching to Italy. He was accompanied by Queen Constance and a number of princes, chiefly those who like their King wore the Crusaders’ Cross. Slowly he marched southwards, following the Brenner Road that had seen so many German Emperors march to Rome, past Innsbruck, Bozen, Trent—where eight years before as an adventurer he had turned aside into the pathless mountain tracts—and on to Verona.

He did not enter the town, but camped outside in tents during those September days, beside the Lake of Garda, with his court. The first letter that he wrote on Italian soil was addressed to Pope Honorius, thanking him for all his kindness, and informing him that the writer had, for the good of his soul, submitted to the penances prescribed by the Church and been freed from the ban which might have fallen on him as a dilatory Crusader. He had acted thus, he hastened to add, not because he felt himself at fault, but solely to testify his reverence for Pope and Church. He sent in advance his Court Chancellor and the Archbishop Conrad of Metz as royal legates to see that all was quiet in imperial Italy, a country always easily roused.

The towns of Lombardy had all recognised Frederick II, even his hereditary enemy Milan. Nevertheless, the country was seething with excitement, and people were just waiting in momentary quiet to see which of the parties in upper Italy Frederick would elect to join. A reputation for extraordinary vigour, courage and shrewdness had preceded the King, spread during the recent years by the songs of the troubadours, as they travelled from court to court of the north Italian nobility. They seem to have been a little disappointed when they saw their future Emperor, for in spite of his six and twenty years he still struck them as too boyish looking.

Frederick II most scrupulously avoided taking sides amongst the towns, and even carried this reserve so far that on the whole journey to Rome he never entered any town but always camped outside. The only exception he made was in favour of Bologna, famous for its Roman Law, and his retinue was presently increased by the addition of the famous lawyer Roffredo of Benevento, who had formerly been a teacher of law at Bologna and was now posted in Arezzo.

It was remarked that while Frederick, as was the Emperor’s custom on entering Italy, confirmed in their rights all the Italian towns, he only confirmed such freedoms and privileges as they enjoyed vis-à-vis the Empire, and no allusion was made to Sicily. The Pope had not yet made an authoritative pronouncement about the crown of Sicily; this served as a welcome and valid excuse for Frederick II’s careful reservation. The truth was, however, that he was anxious not to part with any of the privileges pertaining to his hereditary kingdom. The Genoese were most bitterly disappointed over this, for their envoys had hastened with high hopes to the royal camp at Modena. Genoa, the town that had so warmly espoused Frederick’s cause on his journey to Germany, and had boasted herself his “Gate of Empire” (Genoa—Janua), had been hoping for favoured treatment in respect of Sicily. Frederick, however, confirmed only her imperial rights, and announced that in no circumstances would Sicilian concessions be made prior to his arrival in the kingdom. What he was planning soon became apparent.

Frederick had announced his approach to the Pope in the early days of October, sending as ambassador—for the first time—the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Hermann of Salza. Travelling by the Via Flaminia across the Apennines, the King followed at his leisure, and a month later when he drew near Rome he received a counter-embassy from the Pope, who on the eve of Frederick’s coronation as Emperor was anxious to receive final assurances: that the Imperium as such had no claims at all on Sicily, that Sicily was exclusively the hereditary possession of the Empress-Mother Constance, that Frederick must instal no foreign officials in Sicily and must employ a separate royal seal. All this suited Frederick admirably. So long as Sicily was his, he was supremely indifferent as to the precise legal phraseology under which he possessed it. A far weightier point was that the Curia by this agreement showed itself officially reconciled to the personal union. A few other points in connection with the Crusade were agreed on, and, finally, the date of the coronation was fixed for the 22nd of November, the last Sunday before Advent.

The early days of his success were far behind, yet Frederick constantly recalled them to the world’s remembrance. Providence had preserved him through all the perils of his boyhood that the tempests of the storm-tossed Empire might obey him. He early conceived his personal fate to be under the immediate law of a higher power, a point of view which later became of immense importance. Earlier emperors had sought to base the immediacy of their imperial office under God on theories and doctrines of law—always disputed by the Popes from Gregory VII onwards. Frederick seldom troubled to seek legal proofs. With far greater effect he simply pointed to his own personal good fortune, which marked him in the sight of all the world as one chosen by the providence of God. It is true this did not demonstrate the immediate derivation from God of the imperial power in general, but all the more cogently that of the present Emperor—which was vastly more to the point. For thus every glorification of the Emperor’s office became a glorification of himself, and the general mission of the Empire became a personal mission of just this particular Emperor, or, to use the phrase which Frederick himself minted, “our unconquerable will became fused in the imperial dignity.” Person and office began to merge in one.

Frederick’s assumption of the imperial dignity with all the ancient ceremonial pomp was to be the closing scene of the first act, the climax of these years of earliest successes. On the great day Frederick rode with the Queen Constance from the Monte Mario down into Rome along the ancient coronation way, the Via Triumphalis. Halting at a little bridge outside the town the future Emperor had to confirm the Roman people in their lawful rights, and thereupon he received at the Porta Collina, near the Baths of Diocletian, the homage of the clergy of the city, who escorted him in solemn procession with censers and crucifixes to the Church of St. Peter. Chamberlains scattering largesse paced ahead, and the praefectus urbi bearing the sword. In the space before St. Peter’s the escort was changed: Roman Senators now strode on the King’s right hand to take his horse at the steps of the church. Meanwhile the Pope had likewise issued in solemn procession from the Sacristy of St. Peter and on the topmost stair awaited in state the arrival of the King. On his right were the cardinals—bishops or priests—on his left the cardinal-deacons, the remaining clergy on a lower stair. The King with his retinue drew near. With reverence Frederick kissed the Holy Father’s feet and brought him golden tribute as the vicegerent of Christ. Pope Honorius received him graciously with kiss and embrace; the King rose again, and the Pope, with the King on his right hand, moved towards the Chapel of Santa Maria in Turribus. Here Frederick was to take the oath: to be the defender and protector of Pope and Church in every hour of weal or woe. While the Pope proceeded to the altar to pray and then took his seat the King remained behind to be received into the brotherhood of the Canons of St. Peter.

In earlier days it had been the custom to receive the King at his coronation into Holy Orders, and dress him in a priest’s robes. They made him a cleric of the Roman Church, for the standpoint was that in spiritual things the Emperor “could not be quite a layman.” The course of history had found expression in a change in the coronation ceremonial; with the growing power of an imperial Papacy the priestly prerogatives of the Emperor were very considerably weakened though not quite eliminated.

The Emperor no longer received a bishop’s ring, he was no longer anointed on the head but only on the arm and between the shoulder blades; no longer was chrism used for his anointing, simple consecrated oil was considered good enough; instead of the consecration as bishop there was substituted this reception into the brotherhood of the Canons of St. Peter. The ritual of prayer and litany remained nevertheless very similar to a bishop’s. Clad in the imperial vestments Frederick now entered St. Peter’s through the silver gate, where cardinals met him with blessing and prayer. He halted to do reverence at Peter’s tomb and in front of the tomb of St. Maurice he was anointed by a cardinal. Not till this was accomplished did he advance to the altar of Peter to make confession and receive from the Pope the kiss of peace. Then with his retinue he sought his appointed place. The Pope rehearsed the prayer, adding a special intercession for the King, whereupon Frederick approached the Pope to receive the insignia. The Pope crowned him with mitre and with crown, and thereupon handed him the sword which Frederick was lustily to brandish three times to show that he was now a miles Beati Petri, after which he received sceptre and imperial orb. The choir now burst into song: “To Frederick ever glorious, of the Romans the unconquered Emperor, be Life and Victory!” The coronation of Queen Constance was completed in corresponding style. High Mass followed, in which the Emperor, laying aside crown and mantle, ministered as subdeacon to the Pope. Then he and the Empress received the communion at the Pope’s hands and finally the papal kiss of peace. The Pope then pronounced the blessing and with the Emperor quitted St. Peter’s to mount his horse outside the cathedral. Frederick held the Pope’s stirrup and led him a few paces forward before mounting his own white horse. At Santa Maria Transpadina Pope and Emperor parted after exchanging one more embrace, and Frederick returned to his camp at Monte Mario.

At his coronation Emperor Frederick had once more taken the Cross—from the hand of Cardinal Hugo of Ostia, later Pope Gregory IX—and had promised to proceed to the Holy Land in August 1221. Further, he issued a number of new laws: first and foremost an edict against heretics, and another which laid down the indissoluble connection between the ban of the Church and the ban of the Empire. Bologna was the only one of the Italian towns which he had visited on his journey south; he now commanded the doctors and students of the “Holy Laws” to enter his new coronation laws in the codices of Roman Law and to incorporate them for ever in their teaching. The coronation laws were in fact embodied in the Corpus, following immediately on the laws of Barbarossa; Frederick and his grandfather being the only two German Emperors whose names are immortalised in Roman Law.

All the coronation solemnities and festivities went off without disturbance—a very rare phenomenon. For there was usually serious friction between the imperial troops and the citizens of Rome. Barbarossa had had to be crowned in secret, and pitched battles had accompanied the coronation of Otto IV, for both of them had refused the usual largesse to the Romans. A similar parsimony would have been wholly out of character in Frederick’s case. Moreover, he considered himself as the chosen of the Romans despatched by them to Germany to seek his imperium. He had not less pride or independence than his predecessors, but he scorned to raise a protest against stirrup-ceremonies or coronation gifts or mere material costs. He reserved his fighting powers for larger issues.

*

Immediately after the coronation Frederick turned to Sicily. He felt the lure of Sicily partly because it was his home, but even more because it offered to his hand the raw material for his statesmanship. Here he could fashion what he would. Germany had denied him all opportunity. Every step he took in Germany had in one way or another to be accommodated to the princes’ wishes; he could not stir a finger in any direction without coming up against some constitutional obstacle. The feudal system excluded all immediacy of the overlord. These formalities and obstacles were deep-rooted in the customs of centuries; they could not be altered without immense revolutions. So Frederick could draw on the strength of Germany only in a very limited degree; her constitution, though anything but perfected, was too set and well established. She could serve him only to the same extent and in the same manner as she had served innumerable Emperors before him, but it would be far too great a risk to depend on her alone for support in any far-reaching measure.

Conditions in Sicily were more favourable. The Norman kings had only held Sicily for two or three generations. Frederick’s grandfather, King Roger II, had wrought indeed with great intensity and a wisdom and statesmanship amounting to genius, but all that he had built up had been shattered beyond recognition in nearly thirty years of uninterrupted war and strife. During Frederick’s childhood it had been the scene of anarchy and confusion. After his long absence Frederick found now the same picture of woeful ruin and neglect that he had left behind him. Chaos reigned in Sicily, but chaos pregnant with possibilities of every kind. Everything was in movement, and for decades all the various forces of the known world had tossed and tumbled there. The real statesman can only reach his full stature in fluid circumstances—all great men have needed revolutions—and this very chaos offered the most favourable possible conditions without the fear of organised opposition. Another point: for an Emperor who wished effectively to play the Roman Imperator, Sicily, from her geographical position, offered the required basis of power. The three great Hohenstaufen Emperors all turned persistently to Sicily precisely because they knew exactly what Sicily had to offer that Germany denied. In the time of the Crusaders Sicily was in fact the “port and navel of all the kingdoms of the world,” just as Spain was to be in the age of discovery. As Charles V was one day to take Holland for his northern base and make Germany an Atlantic state, the Hohenstaufen was now to create a Mediterranean state including Swabia and south Germany.

Frederick’s personal affection for Sicily is undeniable and in the given conditions was pure advantage. But he loved it also because he needed it. It is characteristic that this affection was not chiefly directed to the luxuriant half-tropical Palermo, which he never visited in the latest years at all, but Apulia, Campania and the Capitanata, the provinces marching with the States of the Church, and the territories nearest to Roma caput mundi.

The data in North and South were radically different; so was Frederick’s method of approach. In Germany Frederick had set free all the cosmopolitan forces he could, to fuse Germany into the Roman Empire. In Sicily, on the other hand, there was cosmopolitanism enough and to spare, and no fear of stagnation. Sicily was more likely to tear herself to pieces from over-vitality, and Frederick had to tame and bind those very forces which he had sought to loose in Germany. Thus ultimately the two kingdoms would be drawn together and each would in its own way be “romanised.” The sensitive and educative statesmanship of Frederick was so successful that Germany in his day gave birth to a plastic art and—for the first time since the days of her tyrants—song was heard again in Sicily. In both cases these periods of artistic creation were the product of incomparably daring, almost foolhardy, experiments which none but a master, and he for a limited period, could have dared to try.

The Sicilians had been anticipating the Emperor’s arrival with justifiable anxiety; for almost all had at one time or another betrayed the boy king. A number of the Sicilian barons appeared already at the coronation in Rome to do homage to Frederick and draw, as far as possible, a veil over the past. Frederick had carefully and thoughtfully planned every step beforehand, and had even begun his preparations during his years in Germany. They well might have divined from one straw or another how the wind was blowing. One of the usurpers, Count Rainer of Manente, who was reputed to have on one occasion attempted Frederick’s life, had rashly entered Germany and approached the King without a safe conduct. Frederick secured his person. It is true that, at the Pope’s request, he ultimately released his prisoner, but the Count was made to disgorge the entire crown property which he had appropriated and which his relations with the help of bandit allies sought to retain. The fact also that on his march through Upper Italy Frederick granted no privileges relating to Sicily, indicated well-defined plans. His first aim was to bring together again all the crown property which had been scattered and squandered by each temporary wielder of power. His second to eradicate all the little nests of secondary powers dotted over his kingdom and so to establish a central government once more. With all his fiery lust for action (which Pope Honorius mentions, more in blame than praise) Frederick II set himself to his task.

The Roman Curia had seen Frederick’s happy faculty for solving many difficult issues by one well-judged move. This, however, was in the diplomatic sphere and might have indicated merely a skill in casuistry. Frederick was now in the thick of real life. One single simple law, almost ludicrously simple, brought in a moment to a standstill all the hurly-burly of strife and disaffection in Sicily, precisely in the way most useful to Frederick personally. The last legitimate Norman king, William II, had died in 1189, and for the succeeding thirty years sheer confusion had prevailed. Royal prerogatives and rights, crown lands and fiefs had been recklessly squandered, abandoned, given away, some by Henry VI, with the full intention of ultimately recovering them, some by the many fleeting regents of Frederick’s youth, till the Crown was completely impoverished and had lost all power. The evil of these thirty years must be undone. The strong position which the Norman Kings had upheld was largely grounded on the extensive crown domains; the Demanium must be restored to the ruler. By a law which he had long before excogitated “de resignandis privilegiis” Frederick declared to be null and void all grants, gifts, donations, privileges, confirmation of titles and the like of the last thirty years. Every man must bring his documents, except those relating to purely private property, within the next few months and table them in the imperial chancery. Here they would be examined and, if it seemed desirable, renewed.

Every possessor therefore of crown lands, crown fiefs, royal grants, tolls, privileges and what not, was suddenly reduced to beggary, and at the Emperor’s option would retain or forfeit his possession. We cannot speak with certainty about the distribution of such property, as the vital Chancery records have been destroyed; but we know that nobles and monasteries and towns, and even numerous simple citizens (as farmers of petty taxes or holders of certain privileges perhaps), were hit by this enactment. The decisive consideration for the cancellation of privileges was, broadly, whether the Emperor needed the castle, the land, the tax or the special prerogative at the moment for the construction of his state, or whether he did not. If wanted by the Emperor, the property whose titles had been submitted to the inquisitorial eyes of the imperial court was simply confiscated, otherwise the holder received his diploma back again, new-issued and with an added formula by which the Emperor reserved the right to recall the new title at any time.

A further advantage had been secured by the imperial Chancery—an exact knowledge of all grants of every kind and their distribution, by which the Crown could at any moment lay hands on anything it wanted. Further, the Emperor could at his own good pleasure cancel at least the special separate privileges of any disaffected persons or powers. Further yet, the Crown—that is the King and State, for no separation of the two was dreamt of—regained possession of its extremely extensive property, and, finally, the Emperor was provided with a legal backing for the measures he directed against the various petty powers. This was a characteristic device of Frederick’s. He took the stage not as a conqueror, but as a fulfiller of the law. He was quick to point this out and warn all against putting their trust in illegal evasions; these would be valueless, for he had come to place justice on her throne once more and let her light shine again under his rule.

“Justice” for Frederick meant no rigid code, but the rights of a living state determined by the ever-changing necessities of the hour. In defiance of well-known medieval theories justice thus became a living thing, moving, progressive, capable of development and change—as we shall expound more fully later. From this chameleon justice sprang the Emperor’s legal “Machiavellianism” in the service of the state (not of the prince) which made its abrupt appearance in the first application of the Law of Privileges which in the manifold ramifications of its operations was the basis on which the whole new order in Sicily was founded.

A considerable number of the Sicilian barons had attended the coronation in Rome. The most powerful of them all, Thomas of Celano, Count of Molise, who alone could put some 1400 knights and esquires in the field, had sent his son to meet Frederick to do him homage and to enlist his favour. Like most of the other nobles the Count of Molise had played the traitor, and his father had been one of the chief supporters of Kaiser Otto. In spite of the weighty advocacy of the Pope and of Cardinal Thomas of Capua, Frederick refused to accept the proffered submission. There is no reason to suppose that Frederick cherished any special ill-will towards this particular count. He was determined to subdue the entire body of continental nobles, and he was exactly obeying that first and simplest rule—which Machiavelli later preached as a doctrine—by boldly declaring war against the most powerful and playing off the lesser barons against him. When the big man was disposed of by their help he would find it an easy matter to rid himself of the small ones in their turn. Frederick accepted the homage of the minor nobles in Rome; at least he immediately found a means of utilising Counts Roger of Aquila, Jacob of San Severino, Richard of Ajello, Richard of Celano and many another. On the ground of the Law of Privileges which he was just about to promulgate, and other orders which he issued immediately after the coronation, he commanded them to hand over certain castles which they possessed. For it was all-important to be in control of fortified positions in the kingdom.

It was a happy chance that the barons had been witnesses of the coronation ceremonies and the entente between Emperor and Pope; overcome by all they had seen, they obeyed him without protest. The Emperor cared nothing for individuals, only for the cause. The Abbot of Monte Cassino, who had also come to the coronation in Rome, had always been loyal and submissive; nevertheless he had to surrender, under the same law, not only certain revenues, but also, most surely against his will, two important border fortresses, Rocca d’Evandro and Atina. These with three more castles, Suessa, Teano and Mondragone (which Count Roger of Aquila was compelled to hand over), covered Frederick’s entrance into the kingdom and secured the road to Capua. Frederick crossed the border at Monte Cassino in December 1220.

These first castles were chosen for confiscation solely on account of their strategic importance. They were the same positions which the Romans had fortified of old against the Samnites. The same considerations applied to Sora and Cajazzo, which he next seized. These castles would strengthen his front towards the South-East. His first immediate goal was Capua.

Thus before he had entered his kingdom he had firm ground under his feet. There were a few entirely trustworthy families of the royal nobility on whose strength he could rely: the Cicali, the Eboli, above all the lords of Aquino. Immediately on entering Sicily Frederick created Landulf of Aquino Justiciar of the Terra Laboris, roughly the modern Campania; while another, the elder Thomas of Aquino, he named Chief Justice of the same district and of Apulia and created him Count of Acerra. He had, further, at his disposal the fighting forces of the erstwhile traitor barons mentioned above, who had now done homage. Relying solely on the barons, Frederick set out to fight the barons. He had brought very few troops with him from Germany to Italy and most of these were crusaders, so he entered Sicily almost without an army, but, on the other hand, accompanied by Roffredo of Benevento, sometime professor of law in Bologna. Frederick was anxious to conquer his country with the forces of the country itself.

In December 1220 he held a great Diet in Capua and promulgated a number of laws. The most important was the Law of Privileges; another, also directed against the barons, was closely allied: all castles and fortified places erected by vassals in the course of the last thirty years were to be surrendered to the crown or, alternatively, razed to the ground. The right of fortification was a royal prerogative, and from time immemorial vassals had therefore been forbidden to build castles even on their own land. So the new law was only the re-assertion of an ancient royal right. The Diet of Capua created the legal basis for Frederick’s future procedure, for which the struggle with the barons, the resumption of crown lands and castles, formed only the lever de rideau. The Emperor did not even conduct these operations in person. If the surrender was peaceful the two ad hoc officials were sufficient; if resistance was offered the submissive barons were delegated to break it. Thomas of Aquino, for instance, was presently put in command of the campaign against the Count of Molise. Frederick thus kept his hands free for other work: for many things were happening simultaneously.

We must now follow in detail the two years’ campaign for the reduction of the continental barons. Within a few months the Emperor was in possession of quite a number of fortresses in the north of the kingdom. The Count of Ajello surrendered the castle from which he took his name. The Rocca d’Arce, a border fortress against the States of the Church, was quickly conquered by Roger of Aquila. Diepold of Schweinspeunt’s brother surrendered the castles of Cajazzo and Allifae, and Diepold himself, whom Frederick had for years held prisoner as hostage for these castles, was finally released and ostensibly received into the Teutonic Order. The county of Sora with its castle of Sorella was attached; it had been at one time pledged to Pope Innocent III and by him handed over to his brother Richard. During the next few years a whole series of further fortresses were conquered, destroyed or newly fortified, amongst them Naples, Gaëta, Aversa, Foggia. The Alsatians had coined a phrase about the Hohenstaufen, Duke Frederick, “He always has a castle tied to his horse’s tail,” and this would equally be applicable to his later namesake.

The spring of 1221 saw the beginning of the campaign against the Count of Molise. He had entrenched himself in two almost impregnable Abruzzi fortresses, Bojano and Roccamandolfi, and was beleaguered by the imperial generals. Bojano was taken by assault. Roccamandolfi was forced to surrender; the count himself escaped to a third stronghold, Ovindoli, whose resistance was not lightly overcome. After lasting the better part of two years the campaign was finally ended by a treaty under which Ovindoli was surrendered. The Count went into banishment; his personal possessions in Molise were for the present secured to him, or rather to his countess. Before long, however, a pretext was made that he had broken the treaty; he failed to obey the summons to appear before the imperial court, and Frederick confiscated the entire Molise property, as he had doubtless all along intended to do. Celano was the most important town in the Count’s domains; on account of a treacherous attack on a detachment of imperial troops it was razed to the ground and the inhabitants scattered. Later they were re-assembled and deported to Sicily, where Frederick had a scheme for utilising them. Years afterwards they were permitted to return home and rebuild Celano under the name of Caesarea. Thus the home town of Thomas of Celano, the Franciscan, suffered in some degree a dies irae in his lifetime.

That, however, was the end of the Molise campaign, and the most powerful of the continental barons had now been overcome, but the action against the body of feudal lords as a whole was not yet completed. Frederick had not the smallest intention of remaining so dependent on the smaller barons as he had been during these years. They also must be crushed. Frederick seized the first convenient opportunity after the Molise campaign. The Counts Roger of Aquila, Jacob of San Severino and some others had been summoned to war against the Saracens; some had not appeared at all, some had come with scanty forces. The Emperor ordered their arrest and the confiscation of their lands. On the Pope’s intervention he released the prisoners but sent them into exile. They followed the Count of Molise to Rome.

This blow was the last. The resistance of the feudal nobility was at an end, except for a few trifling episodes, for the duration of Frederick’s rule—the moral of which is that stern and ruthless measures are also the most humane if the person who employs them is sure of his aim. Plato saw no alternative line of conduct for a “Tyrant” who is of necessity compelled to “purge the State” by slaying and exiling. It is disconcerting to see with what prophetic insight Emperor Frederick obeyed the rules of Machiavelli, who demands under all circumstances that the earliest allies must be got rid of, otherwise they will later prove the most dangerous opponents, for they will allow themselves liberties towards their master and their demands on his gratitude will be insatiable. Machiavelli’s counsels would have struck a more sympathetic chord in Frederick than the actual advice of his contemporary, Thomas of Gaëta. This old Sicilian official, who had been entrusted with numerous missions to the papal court, shared in many things the point of view of Rome. He was horrified at the new state of affairs and advised the Emperor “rather to build churches and cloisters”—an occupation which offered Frederick no attractions—“than to fortify hills and crown the mountain heights with castles. Better to win men’s hearts than their bodies, for the love of his subject is the only impregnable bulwark of a king.” Frederick did not take this greatly to heart. He displayed a wonderful lust for building, but during his whole life built only one single insignificant little church—and that with extreme reluctance.

The power of the great nobles had thus been broken and, like other statesmen, Frederick found it convenient to enlist in his service the minor nobility—taking care for the most part not unduly to enrich them. All his actions in these matters are part and parcel of his strong dislike of the feudal system on principle, for it made the direct action of the overlord practically impossible. The most powerful fief-holders had now been forcibly eliminated, but the legislation of the Diet of Capua had prepared the way for a complete re-modelling of the whole feudal fabric. The fighting forces of the nobility were to be greatly increased and put immediately at the ruler’s disposition. Frederick was not driven to “inventing” new laws. He called to mind certain ancient Norman laws and gave them wider application and a definite direction. He first recalled as many feudal grants as possible and did not again renew them.

All vassals were forbidden to marry without the Emperor’s special permission; children of a fief-holder could only inherit their father’s fief with the Emperor’s consent. These two laws of marriage and inheritance were rigidly enforced. This hastened the reversion of fiefs to the Crown. All vassals were to re-assert any rights that had been filched from them during the years of chaos, just as the Emperor himself was doing, to avoid the sub-division of the fief. This measure was not conceived in the interests of the fief-holder himself, but in the interest of the Crown, in case of reversion. For the same reason all arbitrary creation of under-fiefs on tenure without express permission was most sternly forbidden, because a fief was greatly weakened by a train of under-vassals, and if the main fief fell again to the Crown a host of duties towards the under-vassals arose. Moreover, any independence of the subject, such as was implied by the sub-division of fiefs, was contrary to Kaiser Frederick’s principles of government.

The new feudal order in short laid down: that with reference to fiefs and their distribution no alteration was to be made in the status quo as existing at the death of the last Norman king—no marriage, no inheritance, no sub-letting without express permission from the Emperor. What had been an independent, living, moving, fluid form of life became in a moment petrified by one single edict into rigid permanence. Henceforth modifications could emanate from the Emperor alone, and he was put in a position from which he could review the whole detailed situation and exert his direct influence through the most distant ramifications of the system. Every independent, natural development was checked and—what entirely suited Frederick’s whole conception—every impulse, every activity must derive from him personally and have its source in his imperial will.

The loosely-knit framework of a feudal kingdom, held together by land-tenure alone, was to be succeeded by the firm architecture of a state: neither land nor fief would in future bind the noble to his lord—these now imposed duties on him, without entailing corresponding rights, nothing but personal service. Thus matters henceforth remained. The possession of a fief gave the nobleman no weight, only his personal service rendered directly to the King, either as warrior or, what Frederick valued more, as official. This paved the way to the foundation of a “Court Nobility,” such as developed later under absolutism.

Another measure ran parallel with this state-organisation of the nobles and the knights. Frederick II was the first to place castles and fortresses under the immediate administration of the Crown and State, which was in effect to transform knightly castles into national strongholds. Over two hundred of these national towers, castles and fortresses date back to Frederick’s time. This entailed the creation of a new government department of “national defence,” which was made responsible for the administration, construction and upkeep of the fortresses, for the supervision of the necessary staff, the payment of the garrison and the like. The castles carried naturally no garrison in times of peace—a custom never known elsewhere—or at most a chatelain and a couple of men-at-arms. In time of war it was the duty of the neighbouring fief-holders and districts, who were also normally drawn on for construction and repair, to man the forts at command and to bear the costs of so doing. A type of national defence was thus organised, based on the old but considerably simplified feudal substructure. This was a unique creation for the period, especially because it was the unified product of systematic thought.

Attention should here be drawn to a very important implication of this transformation of knightly castles into state fortresses: an entirely new style of architecture was evolved for the new imperial castles that soon began to spring up. These were no residential castles, as were otherwise the norm, in which the knight lived with his wife and family; these were state strongholds which served as men’s quarters only. They could therefore be built, as were the Roman castra, according to one single uniform ground plan with slight variations—representing the last word in simplicity, economy and rectangularity: a stone square or rectangle with a tower at each of its four corners similar to the well-known specimen in Naples. Certain sportive variations, especially in the interior and in the ornamentation and artistic accessories, are of course distinguishable; many modifications also due to the site; but the same principle underlay them all and the pure form may be seen in plains and on the coast. People have justifiably seen in these Sicilian castles of Frederick II the prototype of the Prussian strongholds of the Teutonic Knights which show the same stark simplicity of plan. The conditions of the early Prussian state under the Order corresponded in many particulars to the Hohenstaufen state in Sicily. The Prussian castles housed no family life but served only as soldiers’ barracks and arsenals. Both entirely lacked any element of the “picturesque”; they are characterised by massiveness and stern straight lines, by their utilitarian plan and the mathematically simple form. In the interior there might be groined vaults or cloisters with pointed arches: Gothic windows and Gothic portals would also not be lacking; but the outside, with flat roofs and squat towers, showed nothing but right angles—gigantic stone blocks and cubes.

*

The arrival of the Emperor had been anticipated with some anxiety; after a few months Frederick II was feared. “In the kingdom all bowed the neck before the Emperor,” announces the chronicler. After the Diet of Capua, followed by a short stay in Apulia and Calabria, Frederick crossed in May 1221 to the island of Sicily, leaving his generals and the loyal barons to prosecute the Molise campaign. He held a new Diet in Messina and issued new laws, not in brief judicial form but in a style which later he made his own. The law was accompanied by a statement of the causes that led up to it and the needs it was designed to meet. The Assizes of Capua had sketched out the ground plan and the primary organisation of the Sicilian state, the edicts of Messina regulated the affairs of subjects who were outside the feudal framework. Frederick sharply divided them off from his own citizens. There were laws dealing with players and blasphemers, with Jews and whores and wandering minstrels. These constituted a potential danger, and Frederick II set limits to their activities. Players were wont to curse and blaspheme. It was most unsuitable for them to keep company with clerics, since it was the churchman’s duty to “uphold the standard of right living in conduct and in speech.” The Jews were to stitch the yellow patch on their clothing and to let their beards grow… in imitation of the Lateran edict of 1215 against Muslims. Without such distinctive marks “the duties and the practices of the Christian faith will be confused.” Whores might not live in the town or frequent the bath with respectable women, “for one sick sheep infects the herd.” Players and wandering minstrels should be outlaws “if they dare to disturb the Emperor’s peace with ribald songs.” So the Emperor strove to separate out his own, according to the precept of the Church.

The necessity to cleanse his land of foreign powers decided the next blow that Frederick struck on the island. On the ground of the Law of Privileges he withdrew their prerogatives from foreign sea-powers and hunted them from the ports of Sicily. Amalfi and Pisa, Genoa and Venice had formerly acquired numerous trading rights in the fertile island. Sicily was not only as of old one of the great “granaries” from which the merchant could fetch his corn and perhaps sugar too, and dates, hemp and flax, silk and wool. The harbours of Sicily were also important as dockyards and ports of call for sailors of the Levant, who on their outward or homeward voyage could sell their Eastern wares or exchange them for Sicilian corn. Since being sacked by the Normans in 1135 Amalfi had lost her share of world trade. Venice made use of the harbour of Brindisi—the island of Sicily lay off her direct route to the East—so it was Genoa and Pisa who were chiefly interested in Sicilian commerce. The geographical contiguity of the two mighty north Italian republics destined them to be rivals, and rivals they were in every sphere; at home, in the Ligurian Sea, in Sardinia and Corsica, in Provence, in the Holy Land, and also in Sicily. In Sicily they enjoyed almost identical privileges; each had a special quarter in all important harbours, a consulate, a warehouse—the “fondaco” taken over from the Arabs—and the enjoyment of free trade, which exonerated their merchants from the payment of taxes, duties, dues, levies, etc.

In political matters the rivalry of the two towns had resulted in the Genoese allying themselves with their neighbours the Lombards as anti-Emperor, while the Pisans were correspondingly pro-Emperor. Pisa had always placed her fleet at the Emperor’s disposal. In Frederick’s youth, therefore, Pisa had supported Kaiser Otto, while Genoa had had leanings towards the young King of Sicily. By this connection with the Sicilian king the Genoese had gained ascendancy in the island, and in those early years had helped the young king against Pisa. When Otto IV came to grief, and Pisan politics with him, the predominance of Genoa in Sicily seemed assured.

An episode that took place during the fighting in Frederick’s youth will illustrate the conduct of the sea-towns. Warlike Pisan merchants or seamen—corsairs at any rate—had taken advantage of the confusion prevailing in the kingdom to make themselves masters of Syracuse and had driven out bishop and people. Syracuse became a pirate fortress under the protection of Pisa, who used it as a base, at the same time that she officially disclaimed all responsibility for what happened there. In the summer of 1204 a body of homeward-bound Genoese chanced to meet in Crete others returning from Alexandria, so that a very considerable Genoese merchant fleet was accidentally assembled there. They took counsel together and decided to take Syracuse from the Pisans. The far-famed Genoese corsair, Alaman da Costa, who had just captured a Pisan ship laden with arms, was the originator of this scheme. He put himself at the head of the Genoese fleet. They sailed for Syracuse, via Malta, which was then a Genoese dependency, received the reinforcement of several war-galleys, attacked Syracuse, and in eight days were masters of the town. Alaman da Costa was their lord and signed all documents as “by the grace of God, of the king, and of the town of Genoa, Count of Syracuse and Officer of the King.” He proceeded to enlarge his Syracuse domain and to assert his influence in Sicilian politics. This Sicilian Corsair-Tyrant was subject to the mother-city of Genoa, who could raise certain other claims to Syracuse, based on a grant of Barbarossa’s. So Genoa held Malta, Syracuse and Crete, the most important bases on the route to the East.

Genoa had thus built her nest in Sicily. Frederick had the kindliest feelings towards the Genoese, and was not unmindful that they had stood by him on his march to Germany. But there was no place in his new state either for a Genoese dukedom of Syracuse, or for preferential treatment of foreign commerce, be it Genoese or Pisan. Pisa was now in many respects better off, for Frederick treated the two rival sea-towns exactly alike. Pisans and Genoese had done him homage on the death of Kaiser Otto, and he had confirmed both parties in their imperial, while cancelling their Sicilian, rights and privileges. The Pisans, having a much smaller stake in Sicily, were well content, and preserved their traditionally loyal attitude, remaining faithful to Frederick throughout his whole reign, as they had once been faithful to the Welf. The Genoese, however, once the most highly-favoured sea-power in Sicily, were extraordinarily hard hit.

Frederick II set at once to work. Count Alaman da Costa and his Genoese were driven out of Syracuse, a palace in Palermo which Genoa had used as a warehouse was confiscated under the Law of Privileges, and similar events took place in Messina, Trapani and elsewhere. The Sicilian admiral, William Porcus, was by birth a Genoese; he prudently saved himself by flight. The Law of Privileges, which cancelled all advantages, bore heavily enough on the Genoese, but they were still more severely hit by a law of the Capua Assizes which forbade all favours to foreigners at the expense of the native population, such as freedom from taxes and dues. All this was most painful to Genoa, who naturally accused Frederick of crass ingratitude. Frederick, however, could not imperil the structure of his state at the dictates of private gratitude, and he had to resign himself to the ever-growing ill-humour of the Genoese, which ultimately, in spite of his repeated efforts to placate them, developed into open hostility. The needs of Sicily came first: the state revenues from duties and harbour dues necessarily sank to a minimum when the most important commercial towns were untaxed. How considerable these losses to the state had been in the past is best proved by a Genoese writer, who complains in his chronicle that the Sicilian taxes on goods amount now to 10 per cent. and over.

Frederick had broken the power of the feudal barons on the Italian continent, and set up a definite counter-force in his national defence; he now took corresponding measures in maritime affairs. The banishment of the foreign sea-powers made some new creation absolutely imperative: he must himself create a Sicilian fleet. Here again he utilised his Law of Privileges: previous exemptions were cancelled and an old Norman ordinance again enforced, which laid on certain districts the obligation to furnish seamen, and on the barons the duty of supplying wood for shipbuilding. The Emperor erected state wharves and shipyards without delay; but in any circumstances the building of ships takes time, so he created his first fleet chiefly by hire and by purchase. His methods were not a little inconsiderate: ship masters from the Italian coast-towns or other merchant seamen who happened to call at Sicilian ports were invited to hire or sell their vessels voluntarily; failing this the ships were taken by force. The Venetians warned their captains who were touching in Apulia against such sales, and prosecuted those who sold. War galleys as well as merchant ships were thus commandeered—since merchantmen need warships for their protection—and the Emperor also set about building galleys for himself.

Frederick must have strained every nerve over his shipbuilding, for by 1221 two considerable squadrons sailed to Egypt to help the crusading army, and his intention was to have fifty transports and one hundred galleys ready for sea by 1225. Gradually he created a strong merchant fleet and a powerful fleet of war, which did him valiant service in his Italian campaigns and brought him many a welcome victory.

It was of course at first a purely Sicilian fleet and was not to become an imperial fleet for some time to come. From the beginning it flew the banner of the Hohenstaufens—the imperial Roman eagle on a golden field. In Frederick’s day, for the first time in history, a German-Roman imperial fleet sailed the Tyrrhenian, Aegean and Ionian Seas, and for the first time merchants traded to Syria, Egypt and Tunis under imperial eagles. One of these ships was styled Aquila, another went by the name of “the half world,” Nisfu’d Dunya. The like was not seen again for three hundred years, till the time of Charles V. Frederick gave his new fleet a new admiral, Count Henry of Malta, like his runaway predecessor a Genoese by birth. He had been a daring pirate and was likely to prove dangerous; the Emperor forestalled his possible hostility by this appointment.

Simultaneously with all this Frederick began to take over the island castles and put them under the Crown, and to establish a coastguard service both as a protection against hostile ships and in preparation for the future war against the Saracens, which he was not yet ready to attempt. The purging of Sicily from the foreigner had increased the unity of that country; the re-creation of the fleet had extended its authority. The new independence from foreign commerce and foreign shipping secured through the fleet made possible a new economic policy. With great versatility and clearsightedness Frederick immediately began to foster an active Sicilian trade which had no longer to compete against the crushing privileges of foreign powers. The full development of Kaiser Frederick’s much admired and wonderfully organised policy is not attained till later, but even in these early days it is possible to recognise in various occurrences Frederick’s passionate and indefatigable pursuit of unity and the uncompromising forcefulness and directness of his methods.

In spite of the rigid enforcement of the Law of Privileges, which took cognisance of the last thirty years, the Pisans and Genoese still enjoyed many privileges and prerogatives dating from earlier times, so that the Sicilians were still handicapped in trade competition with them. Frederick might have rectified this by conferring on his own subjects corresponding rights and favours, and thus putting them on an equal footing with the foreigner. This expedient, however, would have stultified his entire policy, which had suppressed most of the privileges of the harbour towns. Foreign commerce had suffered somewhat by Frederick’s forcible purchase of ships belonging to the sea-powers—particularly because he thus withdrew for his own use tonnage from the foreign corn trade. He now drove them from the field without infringing their ancient Norman charters. The Emperor, at a later date, contrived to divert to his own coffers the enormous profits which accrued to the foreign sea-states from the purchase of relatively cheap Sicilian corn, by conveying the corn himself to the foreign markets in his state ships and selling it there himself at the high local prices. In these early years, however, while the imperial fleet was still in the making, and, moreover, subject to heavy claims on it in connection with the Crusade, the Emperor devised another scheme for preventing excessive gains by foreign profiteers.

In 1224 he for a time forbade all export of corn, foodstuffs and cattle. The commercial powers might only purchase their corn direct from the Crown, and Frederick took care to fix the price so high that the old privileges were of no avail, while the Crown benefited most handsomely. The immediate result in Sicily itself was such a fall in food prices that the producers scarcely recovered their costs. The Emperor immediately seized this opportunity of making large purchases for the Crown. This had been a by-product—pleasant or unpleasant—of the embargo; it had not been the motive of the imperial measure, which was directed in the first place against the ancient privileges. Private trade (which, however, recorded the very next year considerable shipments to Venice) was inevitably injured by this arbitrary interference, a fact which will not greatly have disturbed the Emperor. For his emergency measure was necessary at the time unless the greatest gains were to be lost to the country, and the individual was not, in any case, in a position to reap them.

The sea-powers were driven out, their warehouses abolished, and the supervision of the Sicilian harbours became possible. The Emperor did not fail to avail himself of the fact. In order to attract as large a supply of food into the island as possible during the Saracen war Frederick granted in 1222 complete freedom from import duties in Palermo. By the opening of this one port (together with the closing of the others, which we may assume) Frederick once more attracted trade and directed it to the very point which was most advantageous for his military operations. This proved most successful; the feeding of the army was assured.

Similar autocratic measures are observable in other departments, though we have not always the clue to their interpretation. The export of the precious metals was sternly forbidden, and all payments to foreigners had to be made in the coarse newly-coined silver “imperials,” which became legal tender. Frederick guaranteed that this currency would be maintained and he watched carefully over it. Numerous fairs were abolished, which indicates an attempt to centralise trade, for the local fair frittered it away and brought advantage only to a few great folk. For the first time in 1223 Frederick began to impose a direct tax which was repeated every three, two or one years according to need, but in his later days became a regular annual tax. These “collections,” which were originally an extra-ordinary source of revenue, were thus conducted: the Emperor named the total sum required, and probably also dictated how it was to be distributed over the separate provinces; the further sub-division was then left to the provincial governors, the justiciars, who with the tax-collectors were responsible for actually getting the money in. Only when taken in conjunction with the Emperor’s later measures do these scattered individual ordinances give a complete picture of his economic policy. Even by themselves, however, they show a definite tendency: to seek a state unity even in commercial affairs, and to institute as far as possible a state trading-monopoly with the outside world.

*

The Saracen war has several times been mentioned. Frederick began it in 1222, his second Sicilian year. It was not his task to combat an independent Muslim amirate dating from the days of the Aghlabites, who had from Tunis conquered Sicily in the ninth century as heirs, in the second degree, of the Phoenicians. That had already been done by the Normans. He had to fight the scattered remnants of originally independent Saracens who still maintained themselves in the inaccessible highlands of the interior. They were strengthened by numerous fugitives from Palermo, who with a few of their big men had escaped a bloody massacre which the Christians of the capital had indulged in in 1190. Runaway Saracen serfs joined them, perhaps some clansmen also from Africa; be that as it may, they constituted a very considerable power, which for decades had owned allegiance to none, and had gradually got the whole centre of the island into their power.

In the days of Pope Innocent’s guardianship these Saracens, like the continental knights and the corsairs of the coasts, had been redoubtable foes and much-coveted allies. They had been uniformly hostile to Frederick, the Pope’s ward, and in various ways had more than once sought his life. Just as the Genoese had established themselves in Syracuse, the Saracens had made themselves a base at Girgenti, probably in order to maintain their communications with Africa. They had also taken the bishop prisoner and driven out a portion of the population, and had finally pursued their robber-raids northwards almost to the coast as far as Monreale just south of Palermo. A struggle with them was inevitable, for the Emperor’s writ ran only round a narrow strip of coast.

The campaign developed into a weary and expensive petty war against these enemies in their mountain fastnesses. The details are little known. At the very outset, in the first summer, the chief Saracen fortress Yato had been besieged and even temporarily occupied. The Amir, Ibn Abbad, had abandoned all hope of victory and had set out with his sons to go to Frederick and sue for peace. The Emperor was in the highest degree incensed against Ibn Abbad—who had maltreated some imperial messengers. So enraged was he that a scene followed which recalls the passionate outburst of the seven-year-old Frederick. Ibn Abbad entered the imperial tent and flung himself at the Emperor’s feet; on the instant Frederick plunged his spur into the Amir and tore his side open. Frederick had him removed from the tent and a week later hanged him and his sons as rebels. Two merchants from Marseilles who happened to be captured at the same time as the Amir shared his fate. Ten years before they had hawked boys and girls of the Children’s Crusade in the slave markets of Tunis and Cairo, and had now been just in the act of betraying Frederick to the Amir.

After this initial success the Emperor spent the winter in continental Sicily. But the garrison he had sent to Yato was betrayed and massacred by the Muslims to the last man, and the Admiral, Henry of Malta, who had been left in charge of the island had been powerless to prevent another rally of the Saracens. The Admiral’s excuse that his forces had been too small to risk an attack was rejected. He fell into disfavour and forfeited Malta. Later Frederick restored him again to favour and gave back his possessions—all but the fortress of Malta. Frederick had to re-open the Saracen war next summer, for its continuation was imperative. By a raid on the islands of North Africa, in which the fleet was employed for the first time as a fighting force, Frederick sought to sever communication with Africa and establish the imperial authority there. In spite of this and further successes the Emperor was compelled for many years to come to keep imperial troops in the island, and the war flared up again from time to time, but the outbreaks were always of short duration.

Such is, in brief, the tale of the subjugation of the Saracens of Sicily, of which all the chroniclers speak with admiration. The most amazing thing is Frederick’s method of dealing with the situation. After the second campaign the Emperor decided to remove as many Saracens as possible from the island. They gave no peace in the mountains of Sicily; he transplanted them to the plains of Apulia. Some 16,000 Muslims, in the beginning mostly agricultural serfs—all Muslims were in any case slaves of the king, servi, just as were the Jews—were gradually transferred to Lucera, which was transformed into a military colony. The town thus resumed its original function: for in the oldest Roman times Lucera had been a military colony. It lay in the Capitanata near Monte Gargano and Foggia, the favourite dwelling-place of Kaiser Frederick in later days. During Hohenstaufen times it had sunk into a half-depopulated town of the demanium. Frederick soon strengthened Lucera with a large imperial fortress, and here the Muslims lived entirely amongst their own kind. They had their own chief, the Qâ‘id, with their own Shaikhs and Faqîhs. Thus there grew up in the heart of the oldest Christian country near the frontier of the papal patrimonium a genuine Muhammadan town with all its characteristic mosques and minarets, visible afar across the levels of Apulia. The duty of the new inhabitants was to cultivate the neglected land, and they proved remunerative citizens also through the special taxes imposed on Muslims: a poll-tax, jizya, for toleration of their faith, and the terragium, for enjoyment of the soil. Frederick transported to Lucera all the Saracen serfs on whom he could lay hands, whether they had fought against him or not, and the landowners of the island were thus robbed of labour. To replace this the Emperor sent them the exiled citizens of Celano, and later some people from Lombardy, but these probably did not suffice to make up the deficiency. The Emperor, however, needed labour for his extensive domains more than anyone else could. Moreover, he had another and far more important use for his Lucera colonists. These peaceful agriculturists could leap in a moment to their home-made arms, bows and arrows, and take the field as an ever-ready military force. They could serve as light infantry or, with no change of weapons, as light-armed cavalry, drawing their excellent horses from their own studs. It was an extraordinarily dangerous troop, obeying the Emperor alone, unheeding the Pope or his ban, whom Frederick thus collected round him. He succeeded in an incredibly short time in changing the savage hate of the conquered into that fanatical devotion which the Oriental is ready to bestow on the master who protects him, the lord of whom he is the slave. In later years Frederick never felt so safe as among his Saracens, and it was a Saracen bodyguard who permanently watched over this German emperor or—as they called him in Lucera—this “Sultân.” There were always numerous Saracen servants in Frederick’s household, while in the imperial quarters in Lucera, the notorious “harem,” the industrious Saracen maidens had to weave and work for their master.

It is impossible to withhold admiration from the wisdom with which Frederick—still scarcely thirty—knew how to tackle all the forces of opposition, and liberate their hidden strength for the benefit of the state. No material came amiss to his hand. He had in him more than a little of an Eastern despot, hence this idea of transplanting the Saracens, cutting them adrift from all connection with their past, demonstrating to them that they were wholly dependent on their master for weal or woe. Finally, taking advantage of their resignation, their natural joy in servitude, he cultivated in them systematically a fanatical devotion to his person. This is the constantly recurring principle in the East, which reached its culmination in the Janissaries of the Osmanli Sultans.

It can easily be surmised that this Muslim colony in the middle of a Christian country was a rock of offence to the Church—a matter of complete indifference to Frederick. For he had in his Saracens what no other western monarch of the day could boast: a standing army, a body of men ever ready for action, unreservedly devoted to him as the protector of their faith. This was the tie which bound the Saracens to Frederick II. Exiles as they were in a foreign land, they found protection for their faith in him alone. Frederick was careful not to loose the bond. The last thing he desired was their conversion to Christianity. Only for a very short time, at a moment of acute tension in his relations with the Pope, did he, most reluctantly, give permission to a few Dominicans to undertake a mission in Lucera. It was scarcely necessary, he added, for a few of them were already converts. The conversion of the Muslims had another disadvantage from his point of view—he lost the poll-tax. Muhammad’s own hordes of Arabs had, for the same good reason, looked on it with no great enthusiasm when the conquered embraced Islam. The whole idea of a poll-tax on unbelievers was an inheritance which Sicily owed to the Saracens.

The deportation of the Saracens had as a consequence the purging of Sicily from “heathen and heathen households,” as a chronicler expressly remarks. Frederick was the first who, by this weeding out of the Muhammadans, made the kingdom of Sicily almost uniformly Christian—with the exception of a few Jews. The Greeks counted only as schismatics. This cleared the way for a new development: the conceptions of purity of faith and purity of race, topics on which Frederick later found remarkable things to say. His Saracen war was the end of the struggle with Islam on Italian soil. The only spot in Europe in which the faith of Muhammad still flourished was Spain.

*

In less than three years Frederick II had thus converted the Sicilian chaos into some semblance of a state. His methods and his weapons had varied with the adversary; more unscrupulous than the shifty barons, politically more far-sighted than the coast towns, or at least fully their equal. The goal was always the same: the abolition of unjust privilege in favour of national unity. Here for the first time we note the uncompromising directness of Frederick’s action; he always chose the shortest road through the jungle; the immediate practical need of the state was his guide and over-rode all moral, sentimental or other considerations whatsoever.

A highly important institution owed its foundations to state necessity. The rough work was hardly complete when Frederick issued, in the spring of 1224, the edict that called the University of Naples into being. At the Diet of Capua the Emperor had most sternly forbidden lay or clerical nobles to administer justice themselves or empower others to do so. It was the Emperor’s business, and his alone, to set up justices and courts of law. The justices’ business was to provide themselves with such legal knowledge as was necessary for the administration of the law. The University of Naples was now created to supply them with such knowledge.

The Emperor stated most explicitly in the charter of the university that its first function was to train shrewd and intelligent men for the imperial service; men to whom the practice of the law could be entrusted throughout the kingdom. It was not Frederick’s way to do things by halves; he established not only a Law School in Naples but a studium generale which embraced every sort of intellectual training, including medicine, on the model of the adjacent Salerno. Naples thus became the first utilitarian State University, distinguished from all existing high schools and Church universities by the fact that teaching was to be carried out not for the sake of knowledge merely but for the advantage of the state, that it was to be a nursery for imperial officials and not for priests. There had hitherto been no demand for such a school: counts and bishops had sufficed to supervise the country, of whom we may state Barbarossa’s two paladins to be characteristic types: Otto of Wittelsbach and Archbishop Reginald of Dassel. Frederick II’s state was the first to feel the need of enlisting intellectual, well-educated laymen, skilled in the law, to undertake the administration. Alongside Church universities and town universities there now springs up this university whose teachers are appointed and paid by the state. Clearly the new university was founded with one fighting front towards the Church and one towards Bologna. Frederick had from of old great respect and affection for Bologna and had no wish to injure it by competition, but he was anxious to protect his budding officials from the rebellious, free-thinking atmosphere of the north Italian communes, for which he had less than no sympathy. So Naples was to educate and train men who would be not only intellectually equal to Church and commune, but who should embody the exactly opposite spirit to that animating the two powers who were ultimately to prove Frederick’s deadly enemies, and who even thus early were causing him uneasiness.

Apart from these larger issues the foundation of this university was justified by domestic considerations. Frederick was determined forcibly to win control over men’s minds and bring them within the unity of the state. The charter states that the courses of general study shall be so organised that those who hunger and thirst after wisdom may find what they seek within the kingdom itself, and need not be forced to leave the country to pursue their studies abroad. The scholars will be released from long journeyings and free to study under their parents’ eyes. Frederick forthwith ordained—to make it clear to students that they had in no wise the option of accepting or rejecting the Emperor’s benevolence—that in future no Sicilian subject might attend any university other than that of Naples, and those Sicilians at present studying elsewhere must transfer their work to Naples before a certain date. The first object of this ordinance was to ensure for the newly-founded university, which had behind it no long and gradual development, the greatest possible number of students. To the same end Frederick sought to entice foreigners to Naples by every means in his power. All inhabitants of the Roman Empire were permitted to study at the Emperor’s university which he had founded in “pleasant Naples”; lodgings, security, money advances, cheap living conditions, everything had been provided for; the country had abundant supplies of corn and wine, meat and fish. A highly-qualified teaching staff was assembled in Naples, for the Emperor had appointed his judge, Roffredo of Benevento, and several other eminent men, professors at the new university. All other universities being out of bounds for his subjects, Frederick’s new creation at once enjoyed a monopoly; no one in the kingdom might undertake to teach any subject taught at the university. Any existing schools of this sort were closed.

A further consideration underlies all these arrangements. However much the Emperor rejoiced in the “joy of the road” that possessed the wandering scholars in the Empire, he had no sympathy or patience with it in his kingdom. Wandering knights, wandering scholars, and even wandering singers “who with ribald songs disturb the Emperor’s peace” had no legitimate place in his concentrated, severely-organised society. As far therefore as lay in his power he cut their wanderings short, unless they were directly employed in his own service. Frederick’s intention was, by his university, to retain in the country the best brains it possessed, to educate them in his own spirit, free from outside distractions, and to enlist their unlimited and undivided devotion in his service and the state’s. It was his task to see that Sicily herself offered to his subjects all that they had hitherto gone abroad to seek. Frederick was as thorough in this as in his other enterprises; he is the first Emperor who consciously and deliberately set himself to establish an empire over the minds of men.

Frederick II had thus rapidly tackled every department of life in his state and had left his mark upon them all. There was to be practically no activity which did not emanate from him, and none which did not in its turn advantageously react upon the state. The feudal system had become static: the more important nobility were in the direct service of the Emperor; the castles had become national fortresses; trade had been to a large extent nationalised; markets and fairs reduced in number and concentrated; a stately fleet created, in comparison with which private merchant ships were almost negligible; unity of faith had been approximately achieved; the Saracens herded into one single colony; a standing army established; independent justice assured; and now, finally, those halls of learning opened which would spread the imperial spirit and attract collaborators. It was no small achievement for a man of thirty, and all had been accomplished with joy and zest, almost in play, on the basis of one single law. All had been set in motion almost simultaneously; indeed only the immediate successful interlocking of the various cogs made the wheels turn. Only one power, not a Sicilian but a world power, the Church, still resisted every onslaught of Frederick’s.

*

For some years Frederick had worn the imperial crown, but his achievements had been confined to one relatively restricted sphere: he had been playing the king only, and though these kingly deeds would presently serve the Emperor they had not yet assumed any importance for Christendom at large. Frederick could already, as Roman emperor, hold the balance even against a world power like Church and Pope, but before he could seriously challenge it he must himself become a “world power” too. This position could not be achieved all in a moment, nor could Frederick in his progress have overleaped the king stage. Pope Honorius still wrote to him during these years that he was overlooking occasional trespasses as natural to “the fiery spirit of your youth,” by which phrase he drew the sting from Frederick’s attacks. The political relation was parallel to the human. Frederick had not yet got a unified, consolidated World Empire to oppose to the World Church. The Empire was still in the making. Frederick had only mediate authority in Germany, and had not even shown himself there since his formal coronation in Rome. He had indeed conquered Sicily, but the fruits of his new constitution had naturally not yet been harvested. He had not even tackled imperial Italy. So every attempt he made to exercise definite pressure on the Church was doomed as yet to failure, though he was able successfully to best her in diplomacy—no contemptible achievement. He had not yet redeemed his crusader’s vow and had been able, again and yet again, to postpone the date of his departure and gain time for his Sicilian reforms. Many circumstances had favoured him.

On the occasion of his coronation Frederick had promised to start on the Crusade in the late summer of 1221. He had only sent two imperial squadrons to Damietta under Admiral Henry of Malta and the ex-Chancellor Walter of Palear, now Bishop of Catania; he himself remained at home. The imperial reinforcements arrived in Egypt too late, mistakes were made, the catastrophe of the Nile delta was not to be averted. Without waiting for the reinforcements, and with wholly inadequate means, the crusaders had advanced up the Nile from Damietta to conquer Cairo. The Nile was just beginning to rise. The Egyptians breached the dams, and finally the Christian army had to capitulate and surrender Damietta. The Emperor’s presence would have been of no avail.

All Christendom was affected by the defeat of the crusading army; most heavily of all Pope Honorius, who had himself initiated the Crusade. Frederick II was not unaffected by the failure either. His correspondence and some meetings with Pope Honorius had reference to the events in the East. New extensive preparations were agreed upon, arrangements for which made further postponement inevitable, and this in turn secured further respite for Frederick II’s work in Sicily.

He pleaded, not without justification, that he was waging war against the infidel Saracen just as much in Sicily as in the Holy Land. Fresh recruiting for the Crusade must be begun (Hermann of Salza undertook it for Germany) and for three successive years laymen and clerics had to submit to extraordinary taxes for the new enterprise. Success was everywhere slight, Crusade-enthusiasm seemed to have evaporated for ever, protracted preparations were needed. The reports sent by the German Grand Master, and corroborated by others, at last convinced Honorius of the general apathy and discontent, and he decided to grant Frederick a further respite till 1227. This was agreed on at San Germano in 1225 and laid down in a treaty after earlier conferences on Eastern affairs between Pope and Emperor (in 1222 at Veroli, in 1223 at Ferentino). At each of these meetings Frederick had succeeded in winning a further delay, which, in the circumstances, the Pope was unable to refuse. Pope Honorius showed considerable annoyance, which was not to be wondered at, for the Crusade was the very breath of his nostrils to this ailing, aged man.

The San Germano agreement gave Honorius the necessary securities for the ultimate undertaking of the Crusade, but he had the vexation of seeing the whole organisation of it slip from the fingers of the papal Curia and pass into the Emperor’s hands—where many people thought it should have rested all along. The conditions of the agreement were certainly not light, for Frederick shouldered sole and only responsibility. It is a testimony to the capacity of his kingdom that he swore on his soul to set out for the Holy Land in August 1227 with 1000 knights; to maintain this force there for two years; to hold ships in readiness for the transport of a further 2000, each knight with his following and three horses. He promised finally before crossing over to deposit in five instalments 100,000 ounces of gold to be forfeited for the cause of the Holy Land if for any reason the Emperor failed to go on the Crusade. Hermann of Salza was to be the trustee for this immense sum. Apart from the money penalty the Emperor declared himself ready to incur the papal ban as a dilatory crusader if he failed to start on the appointed date or in any other way played false, and he allowed the ban to be provisionally suspended over him.

In spite of these heavy commitments the Emperor was the gainer. He had again secured two years’ respite for Sicily and could turn the Crusade to imperial advantage. Frederick’s present complaisance obliterated for the moment the annoyances of the last five years. In his first meeting with the Pope in 1222 the Emperor seems to have sought to get back into his power by some means or other the old imperial territories of central Italy, the “Recuperations” which he had been compelled to renounce in favour of the Church. He coveted in particular Spoleto and the Ancona March. Pope and Cardinals incontinently refused what the Pope termed “these unseemly requests.” This central Italian complex of territory cut Frederick’s empire in half, and drove a wedge between Sicily and imperial Italy. It was an unendurable thorn in Frederick’s side, and sooner or later the question would have to be thrashed out. Frederick absolutely needed at least the Adriatic coast districts, the March and Spoleto, as a corridor between Sicily and Lombardy. The time for forcible annexation had, however, not yet come and Frederick had prematurely disclosed his plans. The Roman Curia was on the qui vive. Not long after this the imperial governor, Gunzelin of Wolfenbüttel, committed certain encroachments, drove out papal officials and demanded that people should take the oath of allegiance to the Emperor. In vain the Emperor protested his innocence and declared that the Governor had exceeded his instructions; his assurances fell on deaf ears. Nothing short of the disgrace of Gunzelin and the intercession of Hermann of Salza sufficed. With that the storm blew over.

The heavy obligations which Frederick had assumed at San Germano were in the spirit of his original vow: the Emperor was the Sword of the Church and the Leader of Christendom, and on him fell by right the conduct of the Crusade. Other reasons were operative as well. The Empress Constance had died in 1222 in Catania. Frederick acceded to a wish of the Pope and of the German Grand Master, and in order “the better to conduct the affairs of the Holy Land” declared himself ready to contract a fresh marriage with the daughter of King John of Jerusalem. The intention of the Curia was to strengthen the Emperor’s connection with Jerusalem, and the plan was successful. Isabella of Jerusalem was penniless, but she brought as her dowry the sceptre of the Holy Land, and the lustre this would lend the Empire was unique.

The hereditary succession of the Syrian kingdom was such that on the death of her mother Isabella became the heir; while her father, Count John of Brienne, merely bore the honorary title of king. The marriage was celebrated in Brindisi in the beginning of November 1225, and the barest recitation of the events flashes a momentary light on the glamour and the glory of crusading times. The Emperor sent a squadron of ships with his notables to Acre, and there in the Church of the Holy Cross the princess was solemnly betrothed, to the wonderment of all, to the absent Emperor, whose ring was placed on her finger by a Sicilian bishop. In Tyre the bride received from the hands of the Patriarch the crown of the Holy Land, and the Knights of Jerusalem did homage to their Queen. The Franco-Syrian child of fourteen, escorted by a knight of the Teutonic Order, embarked on the imperial galley and sailed across the sea to wed the Emperor of the West. The poets of the day could not resist a theme so ready to their hand; the German epic Ortnit makes this Syrian bridal—adorned with many a fable, worked up almost into a fairy tale—the centre of the plot, while other touches hint at Frederick’s story. The hero after many adventures wins his Syrian bride—a worshipper of Apollo and Muhammad—but not without the help of Zacharias the King of the Sicilian Saracens, the “wise heathen of Apulia.” A thread of chivalrous romance—hard to reconcile in appearance with the sober, statesmanlike sense of the Sicilian autocrat—runs through the whole life of this last Hohenstaufen, who must in person have lived through all the saga episodes of the medieval world of knights. If one sought out and wove together the marvellous adventures of the imperial story, as reported in history and in legend, the tale would be the typical biography of a crusading knight as recounted by current romances.

This magic spell for a moment hid political realities; their recrudescence marred the marriage feast. On the wedding day Frederick, as was his right, adopted the title, King of Jerusalem, which appears henceforth in all his documents after the title of Roman Emperor, and before that of Sicilian King. Immediately he demanded that John of Brienne, titular King of Jerusalem, should formally renounce his royal rights. King John was a personal friend of Frederick’s, like him one of the earliest poets to write in the Italian tongue. He had been for months the Emperor’s guest. He had reckoned on being at least the Viceroy of Jerusalem. He was deeply hurt, and after a wordy quarrel with the Emperor he fled to Rome. The Emperor received without delay the homage of the Syrian grandees. Little is known of Isabella’s fate. The Emperor’s quarrel with King John gave rise to many a tale. A Frenchman relates that Frederick spent his wedding night with a Syrian niece of King John’s, beat Isabella, threw her into prison and never went near her. But facts give this tale the lie. Frederick assigned the castle of Terracina near Salerno to his consort, and took her with him to Sicily. The young girl certainly exercised no influence on Frederick, and she died in 1228 at the birth of her son Conrad. The crown of Jerusalem had suddenly lent a tangible political value to the Crusade in Frederick’s eyes. He must win a new kingdom in the East. State and personal factors were thus combined; when World Church, World Empire and World Politics were intermingled the Crusade gained in importance. Nothing further was needed but the opportune moment to achieve success.

Pope and Emperor, being in the matter interdependent, were in the main at one about the Crusade, though it was inevitable that misunderstandings and differences should arise from time to time in the intricate negotiations entailed. On both sides every effort was made to avoid friction, and for the moment they even steered clear of the rock of the “Recuperations.” The first serious conflicts arose over Sicilian questions, for Frederick in the new organisation of his state began to regulate Church matters after his own fashion. At the Diet of Capua he had urged on his subjects the punctual payments of tithes to the Church. Soon after he revived a Norman edict which forbade the accumulation of lands under mortmain: churches and monasteries might purchase land and receive it as gifts—later the Emperor forbade this also—but they must part with it again within a year a month a week and a day, otherwise, as Frederick later expressed it, “the Church would ere long have bought up the entire kingdom.” These laws were quite customary and roused no hostility against the Emperor.

Matters assumed a different complexion, however, when Frederick threw down the gauntlet to the Sicilian episcopacy. He was always ready to apply the surgeon’s knife and cauterising iron to get rid of sores and ulcers—the metaphor was a favourite with him—and he embarked according to these principles on a purification of the Sicilian clergy. He suspended Bishop Arduin of Cefalù for his general conduct in squandering Church property—the records of the trial prove that the accusations were well founded—and soon after Archbishop Nicholas of Taranto on similar grounds. The ex-Chancellor Walter of Palear, Bishop of Catania, whom Frederick had mistrusted of old and whom he had sent out of the kingdom ostensibly with reinforcements for the crusading army, did not venture to show his face again in Sicily. He went from Damietta probably first to Rome and on to Venice, where he finally died, it was said, in utter poverty. The irregularities of the Sicilian clergy were probably extreme: Frederick was obliged to imprison a large number of the inferior clergy, and even the Pope had to remove individual bishops such as those of Carinola and Squillace. The bishops deposed by Frederick took refuge in Rome, which gradually became the asylum of exiled Sicilians. In addition to the three bishops, Count Thomas of Molise was there, Roger of Aquila, Jacob of San Severino and the other barons, presumably also the Count of Syracuse, Alaman da Costa and King John of Jerusalem. These episodes contributed to Honorius’s irritation. He had acquiesced in the Emperor’s proceedings against the bishops at the time, but they did not cease to rankle, and on occasion formed a subject of reproach. The thing that ultimately provoked a heated correspondence on both sides was the question of the episcopal elections in Sicily.

It has already been explained how vital was the so-called “freedom of episcopal elections.” One further consideration should be added: at the same moment that the Curia set out to tighten up the relationship between itself and the bishops throughout the Christian world, and convert them into immediate dependants of the Pope and his direct representatives, a parallel movement was at work in the West, a development of strong national self-consciousness in the various countries. The Church’s endeavour to subject episcopacy in each country to the direct and immediate control of Rome ran violently counter to this new tendency of the ancient Roman world to resolve itself into individual nations.

On the other hand it also stood in the way of each individual nation as it strove to consolidate itself into a unified state, for everywhere the Church was a “state within a state.” The more because she was in no wise a purely spiritual force, but a very material one, endowed with land and possessions, and in the most important matters refusing allegiance to the state. This situation led sooner or later to serious friction in every country in Europe. Things came to a head in Sicily first, because Frederick II was not only King of Sicily but also Emperor. As Emperor he had a dual rôle to sustain. For the preservation of world unity the Church’s aims were the Emperor’s, for the Roman Emperor felt himself just as responsible for the oneness of the world as any Pope, but their views diverged in this, that the Emperor fully recognised national individuality—nay, was in the act of creating a new and well-knit nation. Frederick’s dual attitude had been latent from the first; its full, extent began to be revealed when the evolution of the Sicilian state made the question a vital one for him. A permanent conflict that haunted Frederick all his days is here seen in its beginning: it may be summed up in the formula “an empire—and yet—nations.” A tension which Dante felt in yet acuter form: “individuals and yet a Roman Empire.”

It is interesting to note that in Germany, where national feeling was less developed, the time was not yet ripe for conflict with Rome, and Frederick was content to leave the Curia unmolested in its bishops’ elections. But in Sicily, where he was not only Emperor but King, he fought the Pope most strenuously. As a mere boy he had crossed swords with Innocent III about the Palermo elections. Episodes of this sort were bound to multiply with time, and a glance at the constitution of the Sicilian Church will show what importance these elections assumed in Sicily. There was no other country where new elections were so frequent, for this tiny land boasted 21 archbishops and 124 bishops. The disproportion of this becomes more manifest when we realise that at the Lateran Council of 1215, which was graced by all the spiritual dignitaries in Christendom, 105 out of 405 participants came from the Sicilian kingdom. The enormous number of archbishops is probably rightly traced to the Byzantine influence in southern Italy. The Greek archpriest develops into the Roman archbishop, though the two are radically different, and “archpriest” connoted no more than a priest independent of the Patriarch of Constantinople. Vacancies occurred in Sicily with extraordinary frequency, and it was absolutely vital to the Emperor to keep his bishoprics in trusty hands, that the bishops might be as they had been in Norman days, organs of the king and of the state. The excessive number of the bishops made this in one way easier to achieve. The Sicilian bishop was not, like his German brother, a mighty prince of the Empire, holding extensive territories, but of humbler status, well suited to be a Church or state official.

The episcopal type dear to Frederick’s heart is well represented by the Primate of the Sicilian Church, Berard of Castacca, Archbishop of Palermo. To forestall an election squabble with Frederick, over Palermo, Pope Innocent III had entrusted the church of the capital to Berard, formerly Archbishop of Bari. From Frederick’s point of view no more fortunate choice could have been made. Archbishop Berard of Palermo became quite indispensable to the Emperor, a second Hermann of Salza. He had not the statesmanship of the German Grand Master, but he was his superior in learning and culture. He enjoyed the respect of the Roman Curia while being whole-heartedly devoted to the Emperor. Ultimately no weighty negotiation with the Pope could be conceived in which the shrewd and reverend prelate did not represent the Emperor. There was indeed no weighty event of any kind in which Berard had not his share, so completely did he command the Emperor’s confidence. The services he rendered are innumerable. Frederick himself wrote “… in danger of every sort he stood by our side and many things hath he endured on our behalf.” Berard was one of the few churchmen who could breathe the intellectual atmosphere of Frederick’s court and was able to hold his own in the literary activities of the courtiers. Indeed it was he who discovered Piero della Vigna and brought him to the imperial court. His greatest service, however—and it was no slight one—was that he lived through the whole of Frederick’s life in closest proximity with him. As Bishop of Bari he had been one of the household officers of the boy king. He had accompanied him on his adventurous journey to Germany. It was on Berard’s summons that the Bishop of Constance had opened the city gates; it was Berard who represented Frederick at the Lateran Council. He lived almost continuously at the imperial court, and was destined to outlive his master and administer to him the final sacrament. We have no detailed knowledge of Berard’s personality—he was the Emperor’s instrument and clung to his master through ban and curse—but as the faithful and honourable priest who stood by the Emperor from his boyhood to his dying bed he is one of the most human of the secondary figures in the picture of Frederick’s life. No astounding achievement immortalises his name; it is enough that when great deeds were doing he was there.

Such will be roughly the type of prelate which Frederick II liked to have, and there always were a considerable number of such in Sicily, though none enjoyed the same intimacy as Berard of Palermo. The only right remaining to the Emperor under the Concordat was that of choosing such adherents for episcopal vacancies—or rather of giving his concurrence only to such candidates. The Concordat of the Empress Constance had reduced the King’s right to simple concurrence in the choice made by the Chapter. The bishop thus chosen by the Chapter and confirmed by the King could only officiate after final approval by the Pope. Even this meagre privilege of the King’s was further whittled away by the Pope’s revival of an ancient “right of devolution.” According to this a vacancy which lasted over six months entitled the Pope to fill it immediately himself, without reference to either King or Chapter. A favourite practice of the Roman Curia was therefore to postpone on the flimsiest pretexts the final confirmation of the bishop till the six months had elapsed, and then simply to appoint another man, whom neither King nor Chapter wanted, but who best suited Rome. The Emperor, conversely, sought to exceed his rights, and by promises or pressure to induce the Chapter to choose a candidate of his proposing, an imperial physician it might be, or notary—a procedure which the Curia did not fail to challenge.

Things gradually came to such a pass that the mere recommendation of the Emperor damned any candidate in the eyes of the Curia. In Capua, for instance, a certain dean, Hugo by name, had been unanimously chosen and was recommended to the Pope by Frederick—who did not apparently even know the man personally—as “an educated, suitable man and a native of the country.” Thereupon the Pope rejected him.

In Nola Master Peronnus, a notary of the Emperor’s, was chosen, but a minority dissented and his appointment was not confirmed. On the other hand the long vacancy in Salerno is to be thus explained: Archbishop Nicholas of Ajello had proposed his own successor. Now Nicholas was some relation of Count Richard of Ajello, no great friend of Frederick’s, and had himself been an adherent of Kaiser Otto’s and had rebelled against the Law of Privileges. He had therefore fallen into disfavour, sufficient grounds for Frederick on his part to reject the proposed successor.

In Brindisi matters reached a climax. The unanimous choice fell on a notary and household officer of the Emperor’s, John of Trajetto, a man well known to the Roman Curia. Frederick had exerted himself most eagerly to secure this candidate’s appointment by the Pope, had even sent a special deputation to Rome. It had, however, become almost a point of honour at Rome to reject the Emperor’s candidate. Honorius made the excuse of a technical error in the election—it had taken place three months after the death of the previous incumbent—and refused John of Trajetto even when Frederick wrote again. A similar state of affairs prevailed in Aversa, Acerno, Sarno, Conza, Bari: as far as can be judged the Emperor never succeeded in carrying the day.

Bitterness increased on both sides. Honorius reproached Frederick with interference in the election in just such words as Innocent had used to the boy of years ago: he had better be warned to avoid the evil practices of his ancestors whose trespasses had brought it about that he, Frederick, was the last scion of his race. The Emperor replied that Honorius was seeking his destruction: this papal protection was not protection but extinction. With extreme incisiveness he declared that if the Pope would not confirm in office the bishops nominated by the Emperor he might save himself the trouble of sending other persons as bishops into the Sicilian kingdom, for the Emperor on his side would henceforth refuse to receive the men chosen by the Pope. He would give orders to close not only the churches but the towns against them. That had all the ring of an ultimatum, yet Honorius did not so interpret it, but turned it aside with the comment that the young Emperor was misled by evil counsellors, and swept off his feet by his own youth. Such procedure, however, was bound to cause unpleasantness. He requested the Emperor to apologise for the unseemly utterances of his messengers—by which was meant the unseemly tenor of the imperial letter itself. Whether the Pope received his apology or not we do not know.

The Pope, however, set about filling the vacant sees after a further warning to Frederick not to interfere with Church affairs—a dangerous thing for laymen. Witness the Bible example of Uzzah who put forth his hand to the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord when the oxen shook it and God smote him there for his error and there he died by the Ark of God. The Pope would henceforth appoint his own shepherds for his flocks. Even when the persons chosen were not in themselves unwelcome to Frederick—Marinus Filangieri, for instance, was a brother of the Emperor’s marshal Richard Filangieri—he nevertheless forbade their admission. The correspondence between Pope and Emperor grew steadily more hostile, till at last the hoarded wrath burst forth simultaneously on both sides, just at the moment least convenient to the Emperor when he was busy restoring order in Lombardy.

*

Frederick’s early days were not to pass without his learning the bitterness of his other enemies, the Lombard towns, for whom he was as yet no match—largely because the Roman Curia of the time was behind the Lombards.

The Treaty of San Germano had granted Frederick two years’ respite before the Crusade. He intended to utilise this interval to round off all Western affairs before tackling the problems of the Orient. The reorganisation of Sicily was already more or less complete, and German problems were to be regulated at a Diet which Frederick decided to hold in Lombardy, so as to give full weight to his imperial authority in those regions. He therefore invited the German princes and King Henry to Cremona for Easter 1226, “and if you come for no good reason but to see ourself, ourself will be well pleased by sight of you,” so he concluded his letter of invitation. The Court agenda mentioned only very general topics: Restoration in Italy of Imperial Rights: Eradication of Heresy: Prosecution of the Crusade. Frederick particularly stressed the last two items, which concerned Church affairs. Backed by the united armed forces of Germany and Sicily he had good hope of finding the Lombards docile and complacent.

The Lombards, however, had unfortunately noted the recent re-assertion of royal rights in Sicily, and Frederick’s “Restoration of Imperial Rights” rang ominously in their ears. The normal status quo for Lombardy was laid down in Barbarossa’s Peace of Constance dating from 1183. For several decades no Emperor’s eye had been upon the Lombard towns, and there was no question that they had quietly encroached on imperial properties and on imperial rights, quite as seriously as the minor powers had in Sicily usurped royal rights and property. The Lombards might well dread another Law of Privileges with more far-reaching effects than the Sicilian one. They had no wish to take risks. Exaggerated reports reached them of the mighty army that Frederick was gathering for his Lombard Diet. This was decisive. With quick distrust the Lombards, under the leadership of Milan, formed themselves into a League which was joined by the majority of north Italian communes.

It is most unlikely that Frederick had had any such Law of Privileges in mind, for he was well aware that the Lombard problem was very different from the Sicilian. He was here opposed, not by a multitude of disconnected, mutually warring, minor powers, but by a large number of homogeneous foes, territorial powers who, not unlike the German princes, would immediately rally to a common banner to repulse a common enemy, all their mutual jealousies and squabbles notwithstanding. The Peace of Constance did not forbid a union of the towns, but this revival of the ancient Lombard League was a manifest act of hostility, provoked it is true by Frederick’s attitude, which in Lombard politics had gradually become more and more obviously that of a partisan. Lombardy was in fact split into two camps, and a non-party Emperor was scarcely possible. Traditional as well as personal bias determined his choice of party.

Cremona and Milan strove for the hegemony of Lombardy, just as Genoa and Pisa disputed the supremacy of the Mediterranean. Milan was of old the most powerful of the Lombard towns. The arrogance of the bishops who sat in the seat of St. Ambrose rose in the eleventh century to actual rivalry with Rome, as Frederick reminded the Romans, to spur them on to humble the pride of Milan. Milan, moreover, was an ancient coronation town. In quite recent times Henry VI had worn there the crown of the Italian King. The people of Milan, with justifiable pride, had been the first among the communes to fight for freedom. Here for the first time the burghers and the humbler aristocracy made common cause against the Great, and had in the motta* achieved municipal unity. Milan was the first town which quite early dared to defy imperial authority. Having once talked of freedom, Milan under its consuls strove for political independence and submitted only with extreme distaste to any law, spiritual or temporal, emanating from a higher power. This attitude on the part of its powerful citizens of dual rebellion—against Church and Empire—made Milan the focus of heresy and insurrection. Its territories were the size of a dukedom, and no other Lombard town could compete with it in wealth or power. The other towns also early developed a taste for freedom, for independence and for territorial aggrandisement. In spite of endless wars amongst themselves they all willingly acknowledged the primacy of “the central town” if outside aggression threatened their liberties and challenged them to common resistance. This did not preclude them from occasionally banding themselves together against the oppressive superiority of Milan, or even lending Barbarossa a helping hand when he destroyed the town in 1162. Such alliances between the towns did not denote any dream of a larger unity. The polis was all in all to the Lombards as to the Greeks, and this narrow-minded pre-occupation with solely municipal affairs militated against all serious political thought, and against any wish to subordinate their town to the overlordship of the Roman Empire.

Not all the towns, however, followed Milan; a proportion held to Cremona. Tacitus’s judgment seemed for many a long day to hang like a curse over this town: bellis externis intacta, civilibus infelix. But from the ninth century on Cremona became powerful and rich and her ships sailed down the Po to trade with Venice and even directly with Byzantium. The first Italian town to be granted a town charter, as far as is known, was Cremona, and since then the burghers whom Otto III protected had in the main stood by the Empire. A hundred years later, in 1098, the final seal was put for all time on Cremona’s loyalty. The Margravine Matilda, who had in her lifetime witnessed the great Canossa struggle, threw down an apple of discord between Cremona and Milan when she amplified a gift to the Cremonese by including the land between the Adda and the Serio, the so-called “insula Fulcherii,” and the town of Crema. “In this year the fight for Crema began,” declares the chronicler, and from this time onwards Cremona was always on the side of the Emperors, for only they could secure to the Cremonese the possession of the bequest by protecting them against Milan who also laid claim to Crema. It was important therefore for the Emperors to strengthen the loyal communes, and those towns which from time to time for one reason or another were enemies of Milan or of Milan’s satellites. The political groupings in Lombardy altered often, and altered suddenly. But however greatly the following of the two rival towns might change, one thing remained unchanged in Lombardy: the hate between Cremona and Milan.

Frederick II had to take up his position. Two ways were theoretically open: he could hold himself aloof and above the quarrels of the towns, if he could have found a formula to satisfy all rivals, and thus have won the Lombard towns for himself. This might in fact have been possible if Frederick instead of ever and again seeking reconciliation with the aristocratic Church had made common cause with the Lombards against the common enemy—the papacy. But an alliance of the Empire with the tiers état against the clergy—in other spheres the greatest of Frederick’s great achievements—had for many reasons not yet risen above the Hohenstaufen’s horizon in the sphere of world politics. So only the second path lay open: to take sides; to espouse the cause of Cremona, and with her help and her allies, in addition to the resources of Sicily—which earlier emperors had not had at their disposal—and with German backing, to intimidate the opposite party, if possible without fighting, and so to restore imperial rights. The personal factor was not wanting. Frederick on his first journey to Germany at seventeen had been hunted by Milan, whereas Cremona had helped him in his need. He had pledged his faith to her, confirming her title to Crema and the Isola Fulcheria. Frederick apparently considered this old attachment to Cremona still of value; at any rate he professed to feel himself still bound by his early promise—by no means always his case—and accepted now her friendly demonstration with a graciousness he rarely showed at any time to any town. “This faithful town, hereditarily loyal to the Empire,” as he called it, was later even permitted to play the godmother to Frederick’s son, Conrad.

Yet another factor carried weight. The Emperor nourished an instinctive constitutional hate against rebels in general, and an inherited hate against Milan in particular. “No sooner had we ascended against all the expectation of men, by the aid of Divine Providence alone, the highest peaks of the Roman Empire, in the years of our ripening adolescence, in the glowing power of mind and body… than all the acuteness of our mind was continually directed to one end… to avenge the injury offered (by the Milanese) to our Father and our Grandfather and to trample under foot the offshoots of abhorred freedom already carefully cultivated in other places also.” Thus the Emperor, ten years later. Such abysmal hate, such lust for vengeance, admits no argument. It is simply a fact to be reckoned with. As early as 1219 in Germany Frederick had vowed to the Cremonese never to receive Milan into favour without their concurrence. He soon delegated to Cremona control over the affairs of Lombardy.

This was the major schism in northern Italy, and the Emperor’s attitude to it was already laid down. The mere fact that he summoned his Diet to meet in Cremona showed the enemy his hand. But in the tangle of divisions and feuds the rivalry of the two groups of towns only represented one of many cleavages. From somewhere about the turn of the century the inhabitants of the towns had been divided by internal faction. In the eleventh century burgher and inferior noble had made common cause against margrave and count, and had wrung from the great landowners the territories of the town. And now the plebeians had risen against the inferior noble and the town knight. In most towns two factions had developed, the knightly party and the popular party, and in some cases the similar parties of different towns had formed alliances.

This quarrel divided Lombardy horizontally into two factions, between whom the Emperor must needs make his choice. His attitude could not be merely to support the knights, though in general of course they were pro-Emperor, while the plebeians as the revolutionary section seemed naturally the Emperor’s foes. Matters were not however so straightforward and simple as that. The knights were frequently anti-Emperor and the plebeians the opposite. It even happened now and then—as later once in Siena—that one of the Emperor’s men cleverly contrived to place himself at the head of the popular movement and that the victorious popular party was thus the Emperor’s. In spite of the confusion, however, we can trace certain well-defined principles that guided Frederick’s conduct: in the traditionally loyal towns like Cremona, Parma, Pavia he tried to smooth out differences and establish peace, so as to secure the support of these imperial cities as a whole. In the towns which he felt to be wavering, and whose population as a whole he could not hope to win, he sided with the knights. In Piacenza, for instance, he broke up the plebeian party, declared them rebels and outlawed them, while he recognised and protected the potentially loyal knightly party and issued orders to the neighbouring towns to support the knights of Piacenza. A short-lived alliance even came to birth between the knights of Piacenza and the imperial commune of Cremona. In the actively hostile towns the Emperor set himself to fan the discord as far as possible. It was a complicated policy, since Frederick had to treat each town individually and could never bring his direct, wholesale straightforward methods into play, unless he were prepared to fight.

A sample correspondence will illustrate the radically different points of view of the pro- and anti-Kaiser towns. If it is a fabrication it is all the more illustrative. Florence wrote during these years to the imperial town of Siena: “It is true that the Emperor’s Majesty being bound by no law enjoys the fulness of power. Yet it is dependent on the law for life and must not hanker after what is alien, lest it break the law and be itself accused of injustice at the very time that it enforces obedience upon others.” Whereupon Siena writes: “Whereas it is the property of the Roman Princeps to tower above others in peace or war as victor, it is not to be tolerated that his subjects should crave equally to be his equals. For if the condition of all men were equal the name of Princeps would be an empty sham; there can be no superior without inferiors. And the law of nations would have accomplished nothing, whereas it has established inequality and arranged ranks and grades.”

It would not be easy to formulate more sharply the contrasts in which the question of the Church’s attitude to the parties is bound up. For the aristocratic Church of the Middle Ages must of necessity be as hostile as the Emperor to the popular movement, which was asserting the freedom of the individual alike against temporal and against spiritual authority. And so in fact it was. Just before this, when the populace of Milan rose against the bishop, the papal legate in Lombardy, Cardinal Hugo of Ostia, assisted the knightly party against the people. Frederick II, like his predecessors, always strove to preserve, as far as he could, the feeble remnants of episcopal power in the Lombard towns. In these matters he was, to all appearance, hand in glove with the Pope, who went so far as to excommunicate Milan and stigmatised it as “saturated with the poison of heresy.” Frederick had demonstrated his unanimity with the Church on such matters by stiffening up, in March 1224, the edict against heretics which he had already issued on the occasion of his coronation. Those condemned as heretics by the bishop were summoned before a secular tribunal, and the punishment for heresy was death by burning or the amputation of the tongue, that further blasphemy might be forestalled. These edicts were no mere “courtesies” from Emperor to Pope; they represented, as will be seen later, the innermost conviction of Frederick, for whom the heretic was synonymous with the rebel, who blasphemed the divine majesty of the Emperor. Being at one with the Church on questions of rebels and heretics Frederick had counted on considerable support from the Church for his Lombard Diet, the more so as his agenda especially stressed the two items of heresy and Crusade.

The Curia had to stand by him over the Crusade, but that by no means implied taking an anti-Lombard line; quite the reverse; politically the Church was driven into the Lombards’ arms. For if the Emperor were to succeed in establishing in north Italy a power similar to that he had organised in Sicily, the states of the Church would be hemmed in, north and south, by imperial territories, and the Curia could foresee his next move. The papal “Recuperations,” the central Italian provinces of the Church, were menaced; at a very minimum the Adriatic strip, the March and Spoleto, but probably other sections of the Church’s land as well, would be commandeered to give Frederick a corridor from south to north. Frederick had let it be seen how sorely he craved these lands.

As long as the Lombards, however, resisted the Emperor, and stood out against any reproduction in northern Italy of the Sicilian monarchy, the Church was safe. The Curia therefore could not possibly take the risk of helping the Emperor to break down the opposition of the Lombard towns. Politically the Church found the Lombard Confederation a valuable ally, and in Rome the fact was welcomed that the League was organising itself into a semi-state. The Confederation was renewed for twenty-five years. All the confederate towns had annually to renew the oath; none were to conclude independent peace; and resignation from the league was to be considered as “rebellion” and dealt with accordingly. The Emperor saw in the Confederation a rebel state within a state; the Church hailed it as a bulwark against imperial encirclement.

In questions relating to heresy and popular movements the views of Emperor and Curia were by no means identical. As regards the recalcitrant Roman plebeians they saw eye to eye on many points, but the Curia was in touch with the Roman populace in a way in which the Emperor was not. The Curia too was willing enough to use the Emperor’s sword for the eradication of heresy, but felt by no means so exclusively dependent on his good offices in the matter as Frederick liked to think. Here quite a new factor enters in. The two new mendicant orders aimed at reaching these two classes, plebeian and heretic, and either luring them back into the Church or rendering them innocuous. The democratic Franciscans and the heresy-hunting Dominicans had recently sprung from the womb of the Church in her old age. These two Orders lent a significance, beyond the merely political, to the alliance between Lombards and Curia. Without here pursuing the very varied activities of the Orders in detail we may quote an episode which legend records, that illustrates the sympathy existing between a man like St. Francis and various strata of the populace. One day when the saint was preaching in Perugia before a large crowd the knights of the town invaded the piazza and began to joust and to manoeuvre their horses, doing their best to disturb the saint’s discourse, whereupon the populace set upon them. For the message of St. Francis was directed to the humbler townsfolk who enthusiastically clung to the apostle of poverty.

*

Such was in rough outline the tangled state of affairs in northern Italy when Frederick set out to hold his diet in Lombardy. To add to existing difficulties Frederick’s quarrel with the Curia over the episcopal elections in Sicily was just then at its height. And, finally, his march to the north provoked a quarrel with the Curia that nearly amounted to a final breach. Without asking permission Frederick marched his troops right through central Italy and, acting as if the Church only held these territories from the Empire in fee, he enlisted auxiliaries for his Lombard Diet. This procedure was no doubt a little brusque. Frederick II, however, had not acted without reflection. If the Pope had denied him permission the breach would have been even more inevitable, and he would have created a dangerous precedent for himself by appearing to acknowledge that the Emperor had no right to march his troops from Sicily into north Italy without papal sanction. Pope Honorius now taxed Frederick with this march, reproached him for ingratitude to the Church, and at last the long-repressed resentment on both sides burst forth. Quousque tandem patientia mea abutetur pontifex! Such was the gist of Frederick’s answer, if we may anticipate an expression attributed to him later in a reply in which he likened the Pope to Catiline.

Frederick poured out in a violent letter all his grievances against the Curia: for his own part he owed the Church no thanks; in any help she had at any time accorded him she had sought solely her own advantage. He on his side had met every wish the Pope expressed. The Pope had welcomed to Rome every enemy of the Emperor and every exile from Sicily; he had curtailed the Emperor’s rights in Sicily; he had obstructed the Emperor’s procedure against licentious priests; he had “lifted no finger” to ease the burdens of the Crusade that rested on the Emperor’s shoulders—and so forth.

Pope Honorius replied in a long document, refuting the imperial letter point by point, a document that was a masterpiece of style, beginning “strangely our letter smote upon thy mind—so writest thou—… more strangely yet thy letter smote on ours.” Honorius omitted nothing, and when he came to speak of the treatment Frederick had meted out to those who were now refugees in Rome, especially the unfortunate King John of Jerusalem, “whose only crime has been that they are still alive,” he took occasion to remind Frederick of his great prototype: “Thou wilt have read no parallel to these things in the deeds of Julius Caesar, who spared Domitius in his own despite and held Metellus to be unworthy of his wrath when Metellus offered his breast to the sword. …” For all the perfection of its form it was a spiteful document, into which the Pope poured the full measure of his anger. The ill-will of both reached its climax in these two letters—and its end. Frederick answered very briefly, though he could not refrain from a few sarcasms over the inordinate length of the epistle. The Pope’s long-winded letter had disinterred from the papal storehouses so much material, old and new, that if a womb so teeming should, from fresh imperial replies, again conceive, it would bring forth another foetus like unto the first. Frederick cherished the feelings of a pious son to an angry father, and therefore preferred to let the matter drop, if only because the Pope had the advantage of him in the multitude of his scholars and his scribes.

The Emperor’s thus “coming to heel” coincided with the complete failure of his Lombard adventure. A few words will suffice to narrate the events. Frederick first sought to counter the unexpectedly hostile attitude of the League by emphasising his peaceful intentions and placing in the foreground his anxiety about the Crusade. On the whole march he scrupulously avoided coming into contact with any of the towns. This self-restraint emboldened the Lombards; they were no doubt also informed of the serious friction with the Curia and so were reassured that their worst foreboding was groundless—the Pope and the Emperor were not going to proceed as one man against them. They promptly exercised their sense of power. As the German army under King Henry, approaching along the Brenner road, had just reached Trent, the confederate towns—of which Verona was one—closed the narrow defile and denied passage to any person bearing arms. The German army, which was wholly composed of cavalry, was probably not strong enough to fight its way through, but in any case the use of force would have been contrary to the Emperor’s intentions—he had no wish, nor indeed the means, to embark at the moment on a Lombard war—he preferred to lodge a complaint against the Lombards with the Pope. Meantime King Henry awaited events in Trent. Without his German knights the Emperor’s forces were too weak to exercise even moral suasion, still less serious practical pressure. So Frederick opened negotiations with the Rectors of the Confederation, especially with reference to the passage of the German party. Before opening the road—the closing of which was an unprecedented arrogance—the Lombard towns proposed such inacceptable terms that the Emperor refused to negotiate further, in which he was unanimously backed by the big men about him and numerous bishops from Germany, Italy, Sicily and Burgundy. As repeated summonses to give in were in vain, the Emperor induced the bishops assembled with him to excommunicate all the confederate towns for hindering the Crusade, and for his part exercised the imperial ban and declared the Lombards outlaws and traitors to the Empire. By this he forbade all intercourse with them and declared all schools and institutions closed—including the University of Bologna. After months of delay that was the only thing he was able to accomplish. He could only save his face in the whole affair by consistently posing as the simple-hearted crusader who had come to Lombardy not on his own private business but on a mission for God and for the Church. The Lombards’ opposition had thus been directed not against him but against the Church. By skilfully playing this rôle he compelled the Church eventually to take his part. But for the time being he had to let outlawry and excommunication suffice him, and vengeance for many a deed of treachery—in Faënza a knight had been murdered in mistake for Frederick—had to be adjourned till another day. The Diet was never held at all. A few German princes had joined him by way of Venice, but King Henry and the bulk of the other German nobles had had to return home from Trent after months of fruitless waiting. The confusion in Lombardy was greater than ever and Frederick had accomplished nothing. In July 1226 he began the return journey to Sicily. His route was already threatened; finally Pisan troops came to fetch him and escorted him safely to their town, where he halted a short time.

*

In spite of everything Frederick II found time during his stay in Pisa to converse with a scholar whose writings were already known to him. They discussed at length a number of problems in Geometry and Algebra which were occupying Frederick’s mind. The scholar was Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa, the greatest mathematician of his time, indeed the greatest mathematician of the Middle Ages, whom a Spanish scholar, one Dominicus, introduced to the Emperor. Leonardo had pursued his studies in Egypt and Syria, Greece and Spain, and was trying to introduce a new style of reckoning into Europe “after the manner of the Indians”: reckoning with the Arabic numerals and the zero. The problems which Frederick laid before him through his court philosopher, Master John of Palermo, are so difficult and technical that even to-day only a mathematician can follow them. To the Emperor’s admiration and delight Leonardo was able to solve them. He wrote them down in a book for the Emperor, and henceforth maintained contact with the scholars of the court—with Master Theodore for instance, and, in particular, with Michael Scot, who arrived shortly after at the imperial court.

These intellectual friendships were not the only outcome of the stay in Lombardy. A number of German princes had come round by Venice to join Frederick, and their presence had brought the Emperor again into closer touch with German affairs, with which, however, he did not attempt to interfere except corroboratively. The year before, in 1225, Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne, till then the Gubernator of Germany, had been murdered, and Duke Lewis of Bavaria, one of the guardians of young King Henry, had been appointed his successor.

Further, without any connivance of the Emperor, the Danish power had crumbled, and North Albingia as far as the Eider had fallen to the Empire. This is the period, too, of the Golden Bull of Rimini, which established the Order of Teutonic Knights in Prussia to extend the power of the Empire in those regions. For the moment, however, nothing was so vital to Frederick II as to get the Lombard business disposed of, and for this he needed the co-operation of the Roman Curia.

Many contemporaries contended that Pope and Curia were solely responsible for the failure of the Lombard Diet. That is to put the case too crudely. It is clear that Rome had watched the progress of events not without malicious satisfaction, especially as she reaped direct advantage from Frederick’s embarrassment. Frederick now acceded to every wish of the Pope’s; acquiesced without a murmur in his choice of Sicilian bishops, as if they had never had a difference of opinion on the subject, and when famine broke out in Rome eagerly came to his assistance with Sicilian corn.

With his characteristic adaptability Frederick changed his tactics in a night, and leaped without transition from downright brusquerie to affectionate docility. Nevertheless the Pope’s position was delicate. It seemed possible that the Emperor’s whole Crusade would be wrecked by the intransigence of the Lombards if Frederick were to make the new developments a pretext for further delay. The Pope was anxious to clear even imaginary obstacles from the Emperor’s path, so he bestirred himself to achieve some workable compromise in Lombardy by feting as go-between. It was no easy task. Honorius did not want to forfeit the Lombards’ support against the Emperor; on the other hand they were most manifestly in the wrong and had had no shadow of justification for the closure of the Brenner road. After lengthy negotiation a temporary accommodation was arrived at, thanks to Frederick’s placability. The Pope would release the confederate towns from his ban, the Emperor would rescind his edict of outlawry, and the Lombard League would keep the peace with the imperial towns, Cremona and the rest. The status quo ante which the Emperor had before found unsatisfactory was thus in effect restored, and Frederick had received no reparation or apology for the insult offered him.

The Emperor shut his eyes for the moment to this flaw in the Pope’s arbitration and declared himself—in the interests of the Crusade—willing to accept this provisional award. He could, however, no longer blind himself to the political alliance of Lombards and Pope, whose embrace drew closer and closer in proportion to the growth of the Emperor’s power. From the imperial standpoint he justifiably regarded this alliance of the Pope with heretics and rebels, enemies alike of Church and Empire, as treason to the Church herself—treason that is to the aristocratic medieval Church. Frederick could not feel otherwise, and in his wrath at this betrayal he could justify to himself and to the world his fight against the papacy. Indeed his faith in his mission and in the justice of his cause was mainly based on the conviction that this “incestuous” coalition of Church and heretic undermined the God-ordained constitution of the world. This was a purely aristocratic constitution founded on the unity of the two Swords—the spiritual and the temporal—and the unity of the two monarchs: Emperor and Pope.

Frederick would have been unreservedly in the right in talking of treachery if nothing but papal aggrandisement had prompted this unnatural rapprochement between the Curia and the townsfolk of Lombardy, for which the Pope finally threw over the Emperor and therewith the unity of the spiritual and temporal worlds. Political advantage certainly held the foreground; but behind the scenes, behind Lombards and papacy, a new world-power was at work, a power against whose visible warriors Frederick II consciously fought, against which itself he fought his life long all unknowing, and growing thereby in stature: Francis of Assisi and the new Christ image he had evoked.

Frederick grew in the conflict with Francis of Assisi, and the course of his imperial life will demonstrate the manner of his growth. Francis of Assisi, the greatest contemporary of this last Hohenstaufen, was the bearer of the strange, mysterious power which Frederick in his cradle was destined to rebel against, and in reaction against which he was to mobilise all the forces of the world. Abbot Joachim of Flora had years ago prophesied the coming of power and counter-power: the founder of an order should bring again the age of Christ and the Apostles. The Church should renew her youth and an Emperor should be the Church’s scourge. Following the myth, Abbot Joachim had hailed the son of Henry VI as the future Castigator, and Confusion-bringer, the herald of Anti-Christ. The inference was clear—a renewal of Christ must necessarily beget the Anti-Christ.

Legend tells us of a meeting of the two great foes. Somewhere about 1222, as Frederick II held court in Bari, St. Francis had come thither with holy exhortation to warn the people of the dangers of sin, and to warn the nobility of the dangers of the court. The encounter between the young victorious king and the man who had taken Lady Poverty to wife is humanly akin to the meeting of Alexander the Great with the Cynic Diogenes. Legend assigns to Frederick the rôle of the tempter. He sought to undermine the celebrated continence of the holy man by the wiles of a lovely woman, but when this attempt was vain, and the Emperor saw that “his practice was even as his precept,” he dismissed his imperial retinue and spent many hours in an earnest tête-à-tête, listening attentively to what the saint had to tell for the salvation of the soul.

Not long after, in 1223, the final Rule of the Brothers Minor was confirmed by the Pope, and when Francis of Assisi died three years later in 1226 the zeal that fired him had communicated itself to tens of thousands. What Francis of Assisi brought was heresy dressed in canonicals; his first appearance was closely allied to that of the heretics, “The Poor Men of Lyons,” and indeed to the Albigensians, with whom the Church for many years waged bloody war in Provence. The heretics had spread a dangerous doctrine summed up in the famous phrase “to obey God rather than men,” maintaining the communion of the individual soul with God without the mediation of the Roman priest, without the need of sacrament. To combat this heretical doctrine Pope Innocent III had magnified the position of the priest, and reasserted the principle that the layman could not forego the priest’s mediation. The only difference between St. Francis and the heretics was that he recognised the mediation of the priest as of right, though no man had less need of priest than he. He even brought “these heretical tendencies” into the service of the Church by himself bringing the supreme sacrifice of submitting to the church universal.

Francis of Assisi was canonised in 1228, a couple of years after his death. Uncounted were the miracles that he performed. The miracle with which we are here concerned seems to lack heavenly magic and seraphic glamour, but in compensation it reveals Francis to us as a man, a complete man, a figure which to-day is frequently forgotten in mawkish sentimentalizing over the tender, childlike saint. And this in spite of his “royally independent” attitude to the Pope—the word is Dante’s—in spite of his manly opposition to the Church; in spite of his forbidding the Brothers to read the Holy Scriptures for beauty—for the holy is above and beyond both the ugly and the beautiful; in spite of his belonging to that company of the great whose holiness lies in spartan discipline against the “all too venal flesh.”

The wounds of the Saviour, which he bore in the body, were less painful to him than the terrible oppression which weighed on him when he compelled his free soul, dwelling in free and direct communion with God, into the rigid, ruthless formalism of the Roman hierarchy. This constriction which the heretics escaped by forming independent groups outside the Church, Francis voluntarily accepted—though he felt it more profoundly and suffered under it more severely than others. He knew that the personal immediate one-ness of the Soul with God was the loftiest aim, but held that nevertheless the Papacy was the necessary means. None of his contemporaries was so full as was St. Francis of high explosive forces to disrupt the Church, but though at first he would hear nothing of the hierarchy and forbade his brothers to accept privilege from her or exercise her offices, yet he recognised, in contrast to the heretics, one universal Church, and forced his wide, nature-loving, sublime spirit into the narrow, rigid legalism of the hierarchy. This opposition corresponds to that which Frederick, his worldly counterpart, had begun to conjure up in the worldly sphere: the tension between the individual and the world-wide Roman Empire. With Dante the man is born who consciously suffers in both conflicts.

Francis found a means of incorporating in the Church and utilising for her service the hitherto decried egotistical tendencies of the heretics. The founder of the Franciscans might not easily have accomplished this single-handed. He had a friend at hand, a Cardinal of the Roman Church whom he placed as Protector over the Order, Hugo of Ostia. The Cardinal, a priest almost overladen with scholastic wisdom and learned lore, was poles asunder from the original, creative Francis. What drew him to the saint was his yearning for simplicity, for abandonment, for mystic rapture which the cares of this world and the duties of a Cardinal’s office put continually and ever further beyond his reach. The mystic vein was still alive in Hugo of Ostia: in his youth he had been filled with admiration for Abbot Joachim of Flora—the “John” of the Franciscan gospel—and had founded two monasteries in Florence out of his private means. It was Hugo of Ostia who by his drafting of the last Rule of the Order introduced the founder’s spirit into the Roman Church. It was he who skilfully kept the Franciscan spirit that filled north Italy alive in the penitential brotherhoods lest it should evaporate or—what was even more probable—in that dangerous north Italian soil, degenerate into heresy, from which indeed it ultimately sprang. Hugo of Ostia arranged and organised, created centres for the brotherhoods in all the towns, and so turned to the Church’s advantage that passion for individuality that was a feature of the time and affected by the heretics. The alliance between Papacy and Lombards on other sides than the merely political was therefore a product of Cardinal Hugo’s labours: a man whose influence can often be traced in the later measures of the aged Pope Honorius.

The truce effected between Kaiser Frederick and the Lombards was destined to be the last act of Honorius III. He died shortly after, in March 1227, while the Emperor was about to start on the Crusade. Cardinal Hugo of Ostia, the friend of Francis of Assisi, sometime Legate in Lombardy, succeeded him. He was a Conti, a near relative of Innocent III, under whose influence he had grown up. As Pope he chose the suggestive name of Gregory IX. With the coming of this elderly opponent, who united in his person all the anti-imperial forces of his time, Frederick II’s youth ended. He must prepare for the worst and strain every nerve to build up speedily an all-embracing imperial world, ready to face the foe.

* Motta is roughly: the revolutionary popular party.—Tr.