The Emperor’s law-giving aroused the most profound mistrust in Gregory IX. Even before the publication of the Constitutions the Pope addressed himself to the Emperor in a letter which clearly shows how accurately he appraised the danger of the work. “It has reached our ears that thou hast it in mind to promulgate new laws, either of thine own impulse, or led astray by the pernicious counsels of abandoned men. From this it follows that men call thee a persecutor of the Church, an overthrower of the freedom of the State: thus dost thou with thy own forces rage against thyself. … If thou, of thine own motion, hast contemplated this, then must we gravely fear that God hath withdrawn from thee his grace, since thou so openly underminest thine own good name and thine own salvation. If thou art egged on thereto by others, then we must marvel that thou canst tolerate such counsellors who, inspired by the spirit of destruction, are bent on making thee the enemy of God and Man.” Gregory expressed himself not less sharply in writing to the Archbishop Jacob of Capua who had co-operated in collecting the laws. He reproved the Archbishop sternly because instead of publicly protesting he had allowed himself to be used as the Emperor’s “writing reed” for these laws “which have renounced salvation and conjured up immeasurable ill,” and which the Pope “will by no means calmly tolerate.” The Pope’s anxieties were well-founded enough, but the Emperor was in so strong a position that Gregory was presently compelled to placate him, for he had been stirred to profound anger by the papal letter: it had been no public reproof but a confidential remonstrance such as no son could take amiss on a father’s part. Pope Gregory had no illusions, however, about the Liber Augustalis.
It might well seem as if the new secular state, based on Law, Nature and Reason, and entirely self-contained, formed so independent and complete a whole that it had neither need nor room for the Church. Wherever Frederick II held sway, however, his motto was: a secular state plus the Church. One reason—apart from a thousand others—was the simple and personal; the authority of the Church was well-nigh indispensable to him. Reason made clear the necessity for a Ruler, but Reason in no wise proved the necessity of this particular Hohenstaufen’s being that Ruler. The belief in Frederick’s person was certainly at that moment still bound up in the authority of the Church. The Emperor had it is true to a large extent emancipated himself from unconditional dependence on the Church, by calling to witness the wonders done on his behalf, which proved his immediate call by God to his high office, the amazing rise to power for instance of the Puer Apuliae, which he once more recalled in the Preface to the Book of Laws. It was impossible, however, to sever faith in his providential call from the credulity demanded by the Church, for the age was not ripe to grasp the Hero as such, and the Emperor’s power singlehanded to evoke faith in his own person was strictly limited. To enhance his unconditional claim, especially for more distant regions where people rarely saw his face, the consecration and endorsement of the Church were necessary. It was a sufficient miracle, and a proof of the personal magic of this Frederick that after the second excommunication, when the Curia sought by every means in her power to shake the faith in the mysterious person of the Hohenstaufen, one half the world still clung—in defiance of the Church—to its faith in Frederick II as the Chosen. But in those later days, when he strained to the uttermost the powers at his command to outweigh the lack of the Church’s consecration and support, and when in public he had to minimise the importance thereof, his whole conduct proclaims how grievously he missed the Church’s backing. The fact that, sorely against his will, Frederick II provided the proof that the Church’s blessing was not in fact indispensable, was a staggering blow to the Papacy.
The Church was to strengthen faith in the Emperor’s person. More: the bulk of Frederick’s laws, the whole cult of Justitia, presupposed the subjects’ religious faith; however much the Emperor might appeal to Nature and Reason as non-dogmatic axioms, these yet were one with the God of the Church’s worship. Thus it came about that in a certain sense the Emperor felt a heretic to be more dangerous than a rebel. The rebel in his folly offended against a law of Reason and of Nature by revolting against the imperial government, which every wise man must acknowledge to be necessary. The heretic, in shaking the foundation of the Catholic Faith, shook also the faith in the Emperor’s person and the basis of the Emperor’s laws. The Emperor’s rôle of Defender of the Faith, Protector and Guardian of the Church, was dictated by immediate state necessity.
Frederick II felt himself at one with the Church in virtue of this office of Defender of the Faith. In the Preface he writes: “The King of Kings and Lord of Lords demands this above all at the hand of a Ruler, that he should not permit the most holy Roman Church, the Mother of the Christian covenant, to be bespattered by the secret faithlessness of those who distort the faith, and should protect her by the might of the secular sword against the attacks of the enemies of the State.” Following the example of Justinian, Frederick II opened his work by an edict against the heretics, the enemies of the state. At the first glance it would be easy to overlook the skill and thought which introduced this sole and only allusion in the whole Liber Augustalis to the relation between Church and State. Otherwise it contains only casual instructions about the Sicilian clergy. It has been held that the heresy edict was a courteous gesture toward the Pope: it was in fact almost the exact opposite. It was intended to demonstrate to the Church that she could not dispense with the protection of the State. This reminder of the princely protectorship brought into relief the one and only relation in which the Church showed dependence on the State. The Emperor studiously avoided mention of any other relationship, for every other would have impaired the self-contained integrity of the State. There could be no graver misconception than to read into the frequent emphasising of the imperial protectorship a weak amiability towards the Pope, or, worse, to interpret as hypocritical zeal Frederick II’s campaign of fire and sword against the “plague of heresy.” Other things were here decisive. The Catholic Faith was conceived by Frederick as a State Religion in an almost classical sense: it might be in a wider sense a universal faith, immediately, however, it was the religion of the State. Frederick followed Justinian in opening his Lawbook with an edict against heretics; in each case Hohenstaufen and Byzantine meant no more than to set a seal on the religion whereon State and Laws alike were founded. The strictly state-conception of religion is brought out much more strongly in the phrasing of the edicts designed for Sicily than in those relating to the Empire. Frederick II always emphasised the co-existence of Imperium and Sacerdotium in the Roman Empire—for here the Church was primarily the tie that bound in spiritual unity the many-peopled Empire—while for self-contained Sicily the State was not dependent on the universal Church, nor was the Church even co-ordinate with the State, but the State embraced the Church as a protégée and absorbed her. In the Sicilian edict, therefore, the Papacy is not even alluded to, and the Roman Church is only casually mentioned as the orthodox one, which is to be considered the head of all other churches. For heresy was for Frederick II not a crime against the Church, but a blasphemy against God and therefore treason against the King’s Majesty, and a crime against the State.
Frederick’s great predecessor as verus imperator, Pope Innocent III, who was to the marrow an imperial statesman, equated heresy and treason when he said it was a graver thing to offend against heavenly than earthly majesty. There is an echo of the Pope’s words in Frederick’s Coronation edicts of 1220, but this is the first occasion of his translating the doctrine into state action. In the Sicilian edict it runs: “We condemn most severely the increase of heretics in Sicily and we command for the present: that the crime of heresy, the heresy of any and every accursed sect—under whatever name the sectaries are known—shall be accounted a crime against the State, as it is in the ancient Roman laws. It must be condemned as a yet more heinous offence than a crime against our own Majesty, because it is a manifest attack on the matter of the Divine Majesty, though when the sentence is pronounced the one punishment does not exceed the other.” In the whole edict there is no question of the identity of the two powers. Heresy is a direct crime against the State, against God, against the injured Majesty of the Emperor. The boundary lines between God and Emperor are indeed even more fluid than usual; even the slight rise from the imperial to the divine majesty is neutralised by the anti-climax that in each case the penalty is the same, and, finally, the imperial majesty is not even directly balanced against the Majesty of God. For the phrase is the “matter of the Divine Majesty”! Was God to be understood by this?—or the Emperor himself? The suggestion that the Emperor was meant must have been possible, for Pope Innocent IV when he revived the imperial heresy-edict in 1254 changed the word “materiam” into “injuriam,” whereby the whole point was lost. The clause now read “an attack to the injury of the Divine Majesty” instead of “against the matter of the Divine Majesty.” It is very clear that the one-sided relation of the State to God was now counterbalanced by the Deity’s being imported into the State: the heretic injures God and thereby the Emperor, the rebel in injuring the Emperor commits, at the same time, a crime directly against God.
This position is not nearly so clear when set forth in the imperial laws against heretics; the corresponding passage simply runs: “When our Illustriousness is incensed against contemners of our name, when we condemn in their own person and by the disinheritance of their children those accused of treason, it is both just and seemly that we should be the more incensed against those who blaspheme the Divine Name and those who lower the Catholic Faith. …” And even when the Emperor poses as the God of Vengeance who punishes the guilt of the heretic unto the second generation, “… so that the children, in memory of their father’s crime may pine in misery and know in truth that God is a Jealous God, powerful to visit the sins of the father upon the children…,” he is here an image only of the Deus zelotes, not “the matter of the Divine Majesty.” The method of heretic hunting demonstrates more clearly than words that it was only in Sicily that heresy was directly treated and pursued as a crime against the State; for the Sicilian Inquisitors were not agents of the Church but imperial officials, who interpreting Frederick’s wishes did not split hairs over the distinction between heretics, who through God injured the Emperor, and rebels who through the Emperor blasphemed God, but consigned both alike to the flames till Pope Gregory himself was horrified, and intervened to mitigate Frederick’s zeal. There is no basis for the supposition that the “liberal-minded and freethinking” Hohenstaufen persecuted the luckless heretics only at the instigation of the Church: the “accursed sectaries whatever they like to call themselves” had nothing to hope for but a fiery death. It happened that this was one of the few laws of Frederick’s that really pleased the Church, and Frederick II had no hesitation in gratifying the Church in the matter on all occasions. In 1238 the severer Sicilian edict was extended to the whole Empire, and in 1254 incorporated at the Pope’s command in the Statute Books and Town Laws.
As the Emperor himself pointed out, his whole heresy legislation was closely modelled on Roman law. Heresy was treason, for God and Emperor were one. In imperial Rome there was no crimen laesae Romanae religionis (Tertullian first evolved this conception); under the Emperors religious crime is treason. In accordance with this idea Frederick II described heresy as “perduellio,” high treason against the State—in Sicily only. The word is used here only, and the imperial Chancery was well skilled, as has always been acknowledged, in its choice of words.
The heretics were guilty of high treason, plague-carriers, enemies of the State, as their interpretation of Scripture proved: for they held that God was to be obeyed, rather than man; a doctrine ill adapted to Frederick’s state, whose dogma ran “over men a MAN is set.”
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People have detected in this an inner contradiction, “the Freethinker legislates against heresy.” Even if there is something in common between the free mind of the Emperor and the mind of the heretic, in that both release certain vital forces, the Emperor was lord over these forces, and in his hands under well-defined conditions subject to well-defined laws they could prove potent and beneficent. The same forces released by unauthorised persons were dangerous and destructive. For the Emperor personally the dictum might be valid: the Emperor must obey God and not man, but no lesser individual had the right to arrogate to himself this, or any other, imperial privilege. His whole life long, therefore, even in his last and bitterest struggle with the Church, Frederick strenuously repudiated any and every sympathy with heretics. When he was besieged on one occasion they approached and offered help, but were spurned on the instant. They were destroyers in his eyes of that world unity which he represented, though in order to preserve it he often had recourse to anti-dogmatic allies. Dante assigns to Frederick therefore a place, not among the sectaries, but among the Epicureans, those who despise a future life.
Another contradiction of Frederick’s has been detected in his persecuting heresy at the same time that he ‘tolerated’ Muhammadans, Jews, and orthodox Greeks. Frederick’s relation to the non-Christian elements in his State is one of the most instructive items in his statesmanship, more especially when we study the limits of his complaisance. Compared with the mixture of races and religions and the peaceful co-existence in Norman times of Christians, Saracens, and Jews, living side by side in harmony, the freedom of the non-Christians had been very considerably curtailed under Frederick—not for the sake of religion, or of the Pope or of the Church, but for the sake of the State. Frederick’s sympathy for professors of another faith, in which he displayed a broadmindedness shared by very few of his contemporaries, extended only so far as they were serviceable to the State and laid no hand upon its sanctities. To avoid any penetration by non-Christians he had, as we have seen, segregated them completely from the very first. He removed the Saracens from the island of Sicily and planted them in Lucera. After he had thus neutralised the Muslim poisons that threatened hostility and confusion to the State, he could afford to be tolerant of their religious observances, as he always showed himself tolerant of any good customs of conquered rebels.
The same principle governed his conduct towards the Jews. In one of his first ordinances, issued after his return from Germany, Frederick laid down that Jews must be distinguished from Christians by their dress and must grow their beards “so that the rites of the Christian faith may not be confused.” Any offender was punished by the confiscation of his goods, or, if he was poor, by branding on the forehead—not from religious intolerance but to preserve order in the State. For the rest the Jews were permitted, nay obliged, to live according to their own religious laws unless these were harmful to the State. Many of their religious practices were even advantageous and some were therefore specified in the Liber Augustalis: “We exempt the Jews from obedience to our usury laws. They are not to be accused of usury forbidden by God, since—as is well known—they are not subject to the laws of the blessed Fathers of the Church.” The moment injury accrued to the State the Emperor’s toleration was at an end. An alleged ritual murder by Jews was brought up before the Emperor. Thanks to his astounding knowledge of foreign rites he immediately saw the baselessness of the accusation, but he declared that if it had proved that the Hebrew ritual demanded such human sacrifice he would be prepared immediately to massacre every Jew in the Empire. On the other hand, he constantly intervened against the Church on behalf of the Jews, but there was a special reason for that. In the age-old dispute whether the Jews as foreigners came under the jurisdiction of the State, or as infidels under the jurisdiction of the Church, Frederick II naturally decided for the former—to the intense annoyance of Pope Gregory. On the same principle he brought the Jews into the scheme of the State. In Norman days they had been mainly attached as serfs to churches and monasteries. Frederick II emancipated them almost entirely from this relationship, and rarely or never again farmed out his rights over the Jews any more than his other crown rights; he insisted all the more strongly on their direct private bond to his own person. Even in the Empire the elected bishop of the Jews was replaced by an appointed Jewish master, who was practically a state official. In order that the State might gain the maximum advantage from its Jewish subjects, Frederick II, with unerring instinct contrived to link the Jew-monopoly with the renewed trade-monopolies, particularly the dye and silk works. To his private Jewish serfs the Emperor entrusted the state dyeworks, the manufacture of silk and the commerce in silk—matters in which the Jews had traditional skill and experience—with advantage to both parties, Emperor and Jew. This had nothing whatever to do with tolerance; it was simply part of Frederick’s usual policy to turn even the smallest force to the advantage of the State and to let nothing be wasted.
This solution meant, in fine, that the servitude of the Jews should be so organised and utilised, that their own industrial life might directly benefit the State. The non-Christians, on the other hand, being thus incorporated in the State, enjoyed in Sicily and in the other imperial territories, a State protection, such as rarely fell to their lot elsewhere. It was clearly stated “the master shall be honoured in his servants,” and again “no innocent man shall be oppressed because he is a Jew or a Saracen.” There was no suggestion of equal citizenship. An assassination cost the guilty community 100 Augustales if the victim was a Christian and 50 if he were a Saracen or a Jew. Conversion from Catholicism to Islam or to Judaism was severely punished according to existing laws. It was of course permissible for Jews or Muslims to seek baptism. We may be permitted to doubt whether Frederick II encouraged the step, for he lost his serf tax and his poll tax and the birth and marriage tax and many another imposition. Whatever the underlying reasons, the fact is incontestable: the Emperor was, on the whole, averse to changes of faith. Frederick’s whole policy in the Jew and Saracen questions may be summed up by saying that the true statesman finds no material without its uses.
Frederick II persecuted no man for his belief. He had his hands full persecuting rebels and heretics for their unbelief. It is illogical to argue that toleration of other genera should involve a toleration of degenerates—for heretics were degenerates in Frederick’s eyes—who rent the “coat without seam” and tore asunder the unity of the State. The contradiction lies not with the Emperor, but in the failure to recognise that heretics were for Frederick enemies of the State, much more than enemies of religion. The misunderstanding is based secondly on a false and arbitrary application of post-Reformation ideas of toleration originating in the days when Protestantism was an independent religion and included sectaries. The misapplication of these ideas to Frederick in his relations with sectaries and non-Christians, is all the more dangerous as it tempts to false generalisations about Frederick’s character, representing him as an enlightened and tolerant potentate—an artificial picture that does not fit the facts.
In regard to his personal inclinations—especially wherever the sanctities of the State were at stake—Frederick II was in fact probably the most intolerant Emperor that ever the West begot. No Emperor was ever, both in claim and in act, so uncompromisingly the JUDGE as Frederick II. As judge he lived for centuries in the memories of men, as judge they awaited his second coming as the avenger of human degeneracy. A tolerant judge is like luke-warm fire.
The Emperor, who felt no hate to the non-Christian, showed himself in very deed a “Jealous God” towards rebels and heretics, offenders against the Deity Justitia and the sanctified order of the State; a very fanatic, obsessed by a primeval hate that pursued its victim remorselessly to the second and third generation. The most appalling punishments seemed too mild for such offenders. The edict against those heretics who—to quote the Emperor—called themselves “Sufferers” Patarenes, after the “passion” of the heroic martyrs, closes with a bloodcurdling taunt: “We therefore command by this our law that these accursed ‘Sufferers’ shall in fact suffer the passion of that death they lust for: that they be condemned to the flames and burnt alive in the sight of all men; nor shall we regret that we thus fulfil their own desire.”
The Emperor’s mission as Protector of the Church gave him his only opportunity to draw the universal Roman Church into his State, even to subordinate her to the State as in need of protection. On the other hand, the Church was indispensable to him, for his whole State with its laws was founded on the Catholic faith. This relationship of mutual dependence was quite in harmony with Frederick II’s conception of all human and divine relationships, and however greatly he might magnify his protective office till he even filled the rôle of the Avenging God, he never hesitated freely to admit that the Pope stood to the Emperor as the father to a child, or as the Sun to the Moon. Even in the heat of battle Frederick always conceded the position, though reiterating that the moon was none the less an independent heavenly body. This was no sign of weakness. It testifies to a higher degree of inner freedom, security and highmindedness, calmly to acknowledge a superior than to deny him. Dante devotes a special book to depicting a World-monarch whose independence of the Pope and immediate relationship to God the poet seeks to prove. It might be a portrait of Frederick. He concludes with words that might easily be Frederick’s own: “Let Caesar evince that respect for Peter which the first born son must display towards his father, that he, in the light of the paternal favour, may more radiantly illumine the earth, over which he is set by Him alone who is the Director of all that is spiritual and of all that is worldly.”
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The “once and for all” factor in Frederick’s imperial metaphysics has already been pointed out. They were centred in the person of just this one Emperor and were valid only in just this one moment of time. What the world, however, seized upon, and what each of the European states sooner or later, directly or indirectly, adopted was the technique of statecraft which Frederick had deduced from his metaphysics: the administrative body of jurists; the bureaucracy of paid officials; the financial and economic policy.
This is not the place to pursue the development of all this nor its gradual modification. The maxims of State in time asserted themselves everywhere; first, of course, in the neighbouring Romance kingdoms, in France and Aragon as well as in divided Italy, perhaps in Castile too, even before the end of the century. The new system of administration with its officials in the king’s pay was inevitable in time to come. Such a scheme, immeasurably more amenable to the ruler than the feudal degrees, gave a security hitherto undreamt of and the possibility of developing a comprehensive well-planned organisation deriving from one central authority. The feeling was never wholly absent that the Jurist State had had its origin in reaction against the Church while utilising Church methods throughout. What unholy danger threatened the Church in this spiritually independent bureaucracy was acutely expressed by Napoleon during his own struggle against Pope and Church: “II faut faire agir les tribunaux, opposer robe à robe, esprit de corps à esprit de corps. Les juges sont, dans leur genre, une espèce de théologiens comme les prêtres; ils ont aussi leurs maximes, leurs règles, leur droit canon. On a toujours vu l’administration échouer dans ses luttes contre les prêtres; la monarchie n’a pu résister au clergé qu’en lui opposant les parlements.” This mighty soldier with his eye for the essential, got to the root of things when he called on the judges for help against the clergy, as the only group of state officials in his day bound together by a common spirit.
This gives us a measure of Frederick’s genius. He was the first to create this intellectual order within the state and to make it an effective weapon in his fight with the Church—bound together from its birth by sacred ties in the priestly-Christian spirit of the age, and uplifted to the triumphant cult of the Deity Justitia.
The organisation of this first western bureaucracy, this priesthood of Justitia, is necessarily hieratic. Frederick himself styles the body of officials the “Order of Justitia” or the “Order of Officials.” Rigid precedence is clearly marked in the most important department, that of the Justiciaries, as is indicated by the Latin nomenclature of the highest grades which are traditionally called the Magister Justitiarius and the Magnae Curiae Magister Justitiarius. According to the new orders of 1239, three grades are recognised; the Justiciars, governors of the ten provinces; Master-Justiciars, governors of the two halves of the kingdom—peninsula and island—and the Grand Master Justiciar, the head of the whole judicial administration who acted in place of the divine Emperor as Grand Master of the Order, much as the German Grand Master of the Teutonic Order in place of Christ. There is no question of Sicily’s having “copied” the Order-organisation. In those days it was inevitable that any intellectual body of men of the vita activa must approximate their organisation to that of the knightly orders. It was in fact the case that the Prussian State under the Teutonic Order was more akin than any other to imperial Sicily, because Sicily and Prussia were the only two States whose constitution was based on a rational system. It is not irrelevant to compare the far-off State of the Teutonic Order; if the Sicilian bureaucracy was modelled on similar lines to the Order, the office-holders amongst the Teutonic Knights were speedily officialised under the influence of the Sicilian model, with which the German Grand Master, Hermann of Salza, was of course intimately conversant. In complete contrast to the Templars and the Knights of St. John, the bearers of high office amongst the Teutonic Knights—Marshals and Commanders for instance—soon became “officials” whose functions were quite obviously in certain things under Sicilian influence. The Sicilian bureaucracy, itself the earliest intellectual state corporation of the Middle Ages, is at least as closely related to the knightly orders as to the modern state services to which people have retrospectively compared it.
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Frederick II endeavoured to inspire the new body of officials with something akin to the esprit de corps of the Orders. The Justiciars were to know no other ties than those that bound them to the Emperor and the service of Justitia, they must have no private interests in their own province. They were most sternly forbidden therefore to possess money or land within their official district, to take part in any sale or purchase, exchange or presentation. Even a son might not possess property in his father’s province. The justiciars must be “clean handed,” they must not seek to enrich themselves, by venality or bribery, oppression or any other variety of corruption, but must be content with the salary allotted to them by the Emperor’s grace. When they were holding courts in remote corners of their province they must accept no hospitality except purely official hospitality. For the duration of their office they must enter into no contract in their province, nor betrothal, nor marriage, nor any other. Inasmuch as most of the Justiciars were also fief-holders they could not, in any case, marry without the Emperor’s permission. They were not even permitted—certainly not in later times—to bring their wives with them into their official districts.
The principle that the official must be free from all private obligations is emphatically stressed. The justiciar must not be a native of the province under his jurisdiction, after his appointment he must draw no servant from his province, and, in order to prevent any kind of settling down, the offices must be yearly interchanged. Later it was generally laid down—in accordance with ancient Roman custom and the practice of the Lombard towns—that all officials held office for one year only, at the end of which they had to render an account, after which it was in the Emperor’s competence to reappoint these pro-consuls and propraetors for a further term of office.
This had many advantages: on the one hand the authority of the official was enhanced and his position magnified by this aloofness. He became the reflection of the Emperor. On the other hand every possibility of treachery or venality was eliminated by the “wholesome forethought” of the Emperor. Arrangements were made in such a way that the officials constituted a mutual check on each other, and this reciprocal vigilance extended down to the humblest grades. Frederick II almost always took further guarantees of various kinds for the good faith of his officials—who were in their degree omnipotent. They almost all had landed possessions or relations in other provinces, whom the Emperor could lay hands on if they played him false.
Except on Sundays and holidays, the justiciars had to sit daily—courts had previously been held only once a month. They had no permanent headquarters, for their main duty was continuously to tour their provinces, to hold courts, to oversee the land, to keep a lookout for suspicious characters, to pursue traitors or secret rebels. It was no light task to be an imperial official. All private life ceased for the duration of the office. In addition to the current work of their circuits, the speedy despatch of which was their first duty—no case was allowed to extend over more than two months—almost every justiciar constantly, at times almost daily, received a mass of special orders and special instructions from the Emperor relating to every department of life: law, finance, army, administration, university, agriculture, building, punishment, investigation, feudal affairs, marriage negotiations, and finally purely personal affairs of the Emperor’s, to do with his hunting, his falcons, his horses, the game, the extermination of wolves and vermin, and the like. There were no sinecures in Frederick’s service: Frederick II kept the whole State breathlessly on the run even when he himself was at a distance. The omnipotence of the officials and their very considerable independence was to a certain extent limited and bridled by these direct interventions of the Emperor; they were responsible moreover with life and property for any injury to the State. In addition to the check exercised by the one official on the other, the subjects had, twice a year, the right to present complaints and each official was under the supervision of his superior. The functions of each were clearly defined and strict subordination enforced.
The Emperor strove in every conceivable manner to forestall any official arrogance. It is doubtful whether he was always successful, especially in the later times, and people have sought to make despotism responsible for the corruptness of the officials. The critics forget that the existence of a depotism and the need of it presuppose a corrupt and undisciplined people. If dishonesty and bribery took place in spite of all Frederick II’s precautions, that proves nothing in a country that had been for thirty years without any ruler or any government. This exacting service was no longer the quid pro quo of the vassal in enjoyment of his fief (feudal duties and even direct taxes rested on the officials’ shoulders in addition) and the salaries were extremely modest. Some other attraction than gain must have been offered to these Sicilian officials to tempt them to take service: the honour it may be of serving the King; the opportunity of exercising power; the prospect of fame and the special favour of the Emperor expressed in praise and at times no doubt in rewards: above all the privilege of belonging to the entourage of the Ruler: for the most part immaterial benefits. And this in a country where the aristocracy was radically corrupt and the populace of unreliable hybrid stock! Frederick had first to awaken an appreciation of such imponderable advantages and create the conditions essential to every Service: official honour and official discipline. It is remarkable how all the well-known phenomena of bureaucracy suddenly make their appearance here though still rooted in primitive conditions and sanctities. “Contempt of court” was based on the theory that the official was the mirror of the Emperor, consequently any insult to an official was an insult to the Emperor and punishable as such. The general theory held that any crime against a person in the Emperor’s employment—whether serving as soldier or official or in whatever capacity—was to be twice as severely punished as the same crime against a private individual. Underlying this was the principle of Roman law, that an officer of the Emperor was more worthy than a private person. The official was further protected by the edict which affirmed: “It is sacrilege to debate whether that man is worthy whom the Emperor has chosen.” An intangible something was incorporate in the official, with which he was endowed by the Emperor.
This carried the converse obligation on the officials’ side to protect his special endowment by worthy behaviour. No gambler might hold office. No one might permit another to officiate for him: the penalty for both was death. The protection of the official against injury was only extended to him by the Emperor while he was in discharge of his duties, it was not valid in private quarrels. On the other hand if an official “under cloak of his office commits injustice” he is to be driven from it cum perpetua infamia, because he has placed the Emperor’s person in a false light in order to mask his own wrong doing. The idea of perpetua infamia was borrowed from Roman Law: it was the regular Roman penalty for unfaithfulness in office and carried with it confiscation of property. Here official honour is clearly outlined. Each official is instructed by the Emperor in the duties of his office.
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“The justiciar’s name and title are compounded of Jus and Justitia, and the closer the justiciar’s relation to these the more truly and zealously he will honour them.” Similarly with respect to the highest officer of all, the Grand Master Justiciar: let him be the “mirror of Justice” and let him be not merely in name the Master of the other justiciars, but also their model “that the lower ranks may see in him what standards they should themselves observe.” Here is a hint of the importance of official precedence which is expounded elsewhere in terms of the stars: “To preserve the special honour due to our High Court we have commanded: ‘when at any time the Grand Master Justiciar visits any town there to sit with our Court Judges, the justiciars of the provinces who may happen at the same time to be there, shall maintain silence as the lesser light is dimmed when it is overtaken by the greater.’” This was indeed a new departure and the commentator remarks of this law that it offends against common law, because a lower officer is by no means bound to silence by the presence of a higher.
The justiciars, as the King’s commissioners and plenipotentiaries, and indeed his viceroys, in the provinces, united not only the administrative and judicial functions, but also the military: they had to summon the feudal knights, to recruit the mercenary knights, and in Frederick II’s last decade when a permanent state of siege had resulted from the great war, they were army commanders in their own province. It is no cause for surprise that these branches of the service were not differentiated; that the justiciars even on occasion led troops to battle. Apart from the fact that in those days there was no recognised “art of war,” provincial governors must always be in supreme command. It was so in ancient Rome and with Napoleon’s Marshals, and is always found where State discipline is highly developed. The merum imperium, power to command, cannot be separated from the gladii potestas, the executive power, or can only so be separated in peaceful bourgeois times.
The justiciars had also to exercise the highest powers of police. Their police subordinates were presumably the comestabuli. Special attention to political police, such as Frederick displayed, is a phenomenon observable under every dictatorship. The detective service was, of course, developed to the minutest detail, so that even when Frederick was far from Sicily on a campaign, he was often better informed about events in the provinces than the justiciars themselves. He required the aura of omniscience as urgently as that of omnipresence. In order to keep political suspects under constant state surveillance, the Emperor introduced a unique system which had the merit of publicity, but for that very reason was unquestionably far more cruel than the most suspicious secret surveillance. Every person on whom suspicion fell—of intrigues with the Roman curia, with exiles, with heretics, or with rebels—received from the authorities, a small notebook in which the details of the accusation were entered, and also the name of the denouncer. This procedure no doubt simplified the supervision of suspects, the accused was left in the dark about nothing; but we can well believe the chronicler who tells us that this publicity led to acute discord and mutual hate between accuser and accused.
As regards legal matters, the justiciars represented the royal jurisdiction and were presidents of the law courts. There was no room left for feudal courts—except for a few insignificant survivals. Now though the justiciars must frequently have acquired considerable legal knowledge, it was rare that they were jurists by education—any more than a military governor to be the highest legal authority, needs to be a professional lawyer. They were empowered to maintain order and preside in the courts. Legal experts, professional lawyers, were associated with them who formed the curia of the justiciar, the real law court. There thus existed a second service side by side with the justiciar service, composed of a very large number of judges and counsel, as well as notaries and chancery clerks. In this the lower courts were small-scale models of the High Court. The Emperor himself was always surrounded by a large number of law scholars who acted as his permanent chancellors, his consiliarii and were employed in all kinds of State work: professional lawyers instead of feudal retainers!
The Grand Master Justiciar as President of the High Court had four High Court judges assigned to him, the Master Justiciars had two judges, each justiciar had one judge. Other assistant judges were to be found wherever there was a court, since every town had three town judges and six notaries: big towns like Messina, Naples, Capua had more. Notaries existed in great numbers down to the humblest posts in the departments of finance, army, fortifications, domains, forestry and harbours, and had to perform all the clerical work of an administration entirely based on written documents. Each official had to keep a considerable number of account books, registers, diaries, many of them in duplicate, for they had to be submitted at stated intervals for examination by the later-instituted Chief Auditor’s Department. Every judgment had to be recorded in clear legible handwriting, not in signs or symbols of any special script which were most explicitly forbidden. As the judgments were filed, only parchment was used for them, though paper was permitted for everyday vouchers.
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There were corresponding ranks and degrees in the legal profession, from the High Court Judges and Counsellors of the King down to the humblest local judges, but all were appointed and sworn in directly by the Emperor or his representative. No one might independently set up as a judge, notary or advocate. The judges had to be men of culture and education, and the Emperor kept careful watch that no unsuitable person was entrusted with the post of judge.
Lists of personnel were kept in every department, and the Emperor kept himself informed at all times of the personalities of his staffs and could usually avoid unfortunate appointments. He wrote to Sicily, for instance, from his camp before Lodi:
“To Thomas of Montenero
Justiciar of the Principato and of Benevento—
An amazing rumour has recently reached our illustrious ears which makes a severe accusation of slackness against you and justly challenges our attention. We learn namely that our last edict about the appointment of the annual judges has not borne fruit in our town of Salerno, where thou hast permitted the appointment of one, Matthew Curialis, as judge, who is an illiterate merchant and wholly unsuited to the position. And this though amongst the population of such a town which chiefly produces cultured people there must assuredly be, we are certain, an educated man to be found to exercise the office. This displeases us all the more because firstly mischief to the town may arise therefrom, and further our command has not been obeyed as it was fitting that it should be. As we do not wish that the legal affairs of our faithful subjects should be bought and sold for a price by any of thy merchants, whose fingers are deft for money making, we hereby command thee to remove the above named Matthew from his office and to instal in his place another man competent, trusty, sufficiently educated…”
In the whole Sicilian State, there was no department of life in which the Government did not directly intervene to establish order. Minor authorities lost all their independence, not only the feudal ranks but the towns and—after the second breach with the Pope—also the churches and monasteries. The headmen of the towns were appointed annually by the Emperor, and since Frederick II had a hard fight against the independence of the Lombard towns, it was most natural that he strictly forbade the Sicilian towns to appoint their own heads: the penalty was the destruction of the offending town. He did not hesitate to give effect to this law, as he shortly proved. A year after the publication of the Constitutions some Sicilian towns rebelled; the Emperor suppressed the rebellion with the utmost rigour. The ringleaders whom he captured—having promised them immunity—were hanged or burned as heretic rebels. This took place in Messina, Syracuse, and Nicosia, while the smaller towns which had taken part in the insurrection, Centorbi, Traina, Capizzi, and Monte Albona, were completely destroyed. The inhabitants were reduced to slavery and deported to a newly-founded town, which the Emperor called Augusta, for the site of which rebellious Syracuse was compelled to cede some of her territory. This method was so successful that during the lifetime of Kaiser Frederick the Sicilian towns made no second attempt to achieve municipal independence.
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The entire kingdom was to be uniformly administered by imperial officials. The necessity for this ruthless clearing up can only be appreciated by the student who bears in mind the usual type of government prevailing in the Middle Ages: the confused tangle of legal and economic relations; the innumerable petty and pettiest authorities; feudal lords, bishops, monasteries, towns whose rights and claims endlessly crisscrossed each other and in every department of life cut in between the ruler and his people, and who remembers further the kaleidoscopic welter of privileges, immunities, special rights peculiar to each grade of society, to each calling, to each town, to each hamlet, causing obstruction and hesitation a thousandfold on every side.
The measures by which Frederick II extended one unified system of administration throughout his whole kingdom, ultimately throughout the whole of Italy, making Sicily in very truth, the “pattern of states,” were often cruel enough, but they brought in their train a most admirable simplification of the whole machinery of government. His influence on the legal situation was exerted externally. He embraced the whole tangle in one uniform system of law, but he left unmolested the private and civil rights of his subjects in their mutual relations. He was supremely indifferent whether their private affairs were to be decided according to Frankish, Lombard, Roman, Jewish, or Saracen codes, provided these did not run counter to the state laws.
This imperial administration was the first that had ever achieved uniformitas over an area so large, hitherto it had been possible only in the tiniest territories. The geographical conformation of his hereditary kingdom was a factor highly favourable to Frederick. Nature had provided the kingdom with a defined outline, with only one land boundary which he had strengthened by every known device. He had got possession of almost all border fortresses—often by very shady means. A certain abbot, for instance, owned a fort; he was hospitably invited and then detained while his castle was annexed. Frederick next founded several towns himself in the North, Flagella for instance, and Aquila, which he equipped as arsenals. The method of foundation was simplicity itself: a certain piece of land was marked out; the scattered inhabitants of this area were gathered into the new arsenal, they were released from all obligations to their previous lords, and in return for their freedom were compelled to work on building the fortifications.
The fortified zone of the northern land boundary prevented egress as effectively as ingress. All boundaries of the kingdom could now be watched. Thanks to an ingenious and skilful harbour administration, Frederick was able to bolt and bar all the ports of Sicily, so that all communication—economic, political or intellectual—with the outer world could at will be completely cut off. The Emperor controlled, as it were, a gigantic dam, or a castle with a hundred well-guarded gates, and could regulate all external relations. With a word he could transform the whole kingdom into a fortress, or economically into one “closed trading centre.” Sicily thus approximated to a walled-in medieval town, and Frederick II’s much admired economic policy is most easily understood if it is conceived as a medieval town-administration extended to a whole kingdom. The Italian communes had been before Frederick, in fiscal matters, monopolies, currency and finance, and in many administrative details too: the yearly tenure of office, the justiciar a stranger in his own district, the initiation of the successor by his predecessor in office; all these things they had introduced in various forms. It must, moreover, be remembered that the communes had long since ceased to be simple towns surrounded by a wall. Cities like Milan, Cremona, Piacenza, Ravenna, embraced landed property as large as a dukedom. The Lombard cities taught Frederick much of his municipal technique, as in other spheres the Church had taught him. He learned eagerly, not least eagerly from his foes.
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We need here only dwell on the principles underlying the Sicilian constitution. Its prime characteristic is the overriding of all private interests by the interest of the State. The Emperor’s phrase: “Sicily is the mother of tyrants” recalls the history of Dionysius of Syracuse, whose procedure in-his day evoked not less amazement than Frederick II’s. The complete fiscal independence of the one was as great as that of the other, and the principle of centralisation grew more and more marked in the course of Frederick’s reign. One of the first measures to attract attention was the Emperor’s creation in 1231 of State Monopolies. Norman and Byzantine precedents may have had weight with him, but the idea was not foreign to his own policy of utilising to the utmost all crown rights and royal prerogatives. A monopoly of salt, steel, and iron is readily deducible from royal mountain-rights. Hemp and tar monopolies had no doubt some other pretext—the needs of the imperial fleet were here decisive. The right of dyeing was of old a crown prerogative and was now converted into a monopoly; only the silk monopoly is a clear case of borrowing from Byzantine models. The working of the monopoly is most clearly seen in the case of salt—which remains a state monopoly to this day. Some of the salt mines were under state management, some were in the hands of private people who had to deliver the salt to the revenue department. On a certain day the entire trade in salt was transferred to the State. In every centre suitable people were entrusted with the selling of it, a uniform price was fixed for the whole kingdom: wholesale four times, retail six times the purchase price. The same method was applied to iron and steel, while the silk and dye monopolies were handed over to the Jews. The manufacture of silk had originally been a prerogative of the Byzantine emperors: King Roger having taken a number of silk weavers prisoners—among them many Jews—in Thebes, Corinth, and Athens, brought them to Palermo and introduced it into Sicily. Here the royal “tirâz” (silk manufacture) won world-wide fame. Frederick entrusted the trade in raw silk to the Jews of Trani. No one else was allowed to purchase silk, and they were obliged to make a profit of at least one-third on the re-sale, for that was the tax they had to pay the exchequer. The manufacture of the silk was also in their hands, and the existing state dyeworks, together with many new ones which Frederick built, were handed over to them.
In the domain of economics, Frederick’s greatest organising triumph was his magnificent customs system. The name of his customs officials, “doana,” points to the Arab origin (diwan) of the system. The state warehouses, “fondachi,” which were particularly important for the levy of frontier customs were also of Arab origin. Frederick had reduced to a minimum internal customs and tolls, which only benefited individual nobles or towns, and in their stead had increased the frontier customs and manipulated them in a way that created a standard for the whole western world. The customs revenues no longer enriched the insignificant middleman, the seaport or trading town; they flowed into the coffers of the State. In all seaports and on all highroads of the northern frontier, Frederick II established state warehouses. Everyone, whether native or foreign, who wanted to import goods by sea or land into this closed kingdom, had to store them in the State magazine, where they were sold under the supervision of imperial officials.
The import duty which, apart from some special trade contracts with foreign powers, amounted to 3 per cent of the value, fell on the seller, the slightly higher warehouse fee on the buyer. When customs duty and storage fees had once been paid the goods could, on production of the voucher, be transferred by sea or land to any other place in Sicily without further payment.
The export procedure was similar. The warehouse charges were the same, but the export duty varied for the different products and the tariff sometimes fluctuated. For exports were regulated according to the needs of the country itself and in war time all export of weapons, horses, mules, and cattle might be forbidden.
Warehouses, which also served as inns for the merchants, had long been traditional in the East. Venetians, Pisans, Genoese, and later Florentines also had all, for instance, their own fondachi in Alexandria. Before Frederick’s day these were common in all Italian seaports; the famous Fondaco dei Tedeschi in the Rialto was first recorded in a document of 1228. In inland Italy they were still almost unknown at the end of the thirteenth century. It almost seems as if these fondachi reappeared in the merchants’ quarters of the German Hansa, which began to spread in the second half of the century in close connection with the Order of Teutonic Knights. At first these warehouses were the private property of foreign traders. Frederick made them state property throughout the kingdom, and compelled all merchants to use the state magazines by forbidding all sale of goods outside them. The merchants, moreover, were practically compelled to put up in these state inns, for the charge for bed, light and fuel, was included in the heavy warehouse fee. When this system was first introduced, the existing warehouses were insufficient and the merchants had to seek lodgings elsewhere. They were nevertheless compelled to pay the full fee, and their lodging bill was paid by the State. The system had the advantage of permitting the supervision of all imports and exports. Everything was exactly registered and had to be accounted for at regular intervals, the lower officials reporting to the provincial treasurer and he to the Court of Exchequer. Several copies of all customs-ledgers and warehouse-ledgers had to be kept. The customs officer, the magister doanae, was a different person from the warehouse master, the fundicarius, and so one constituted a check on the other. Further, all wares had to be weighed on the state balances at a considerable fee, or measured, in the case of cloth, etc., by the state measure. After anchor dues, landing dues, and harbour dues there were many other minor fees to pay.
The exchange, the baths, the slaughter-houses, the weights and measures, all belonged to the State. As Frederick had unified the coinage by his golden Augustales, he also established units of weight and measure, thus bringing order out of confusion. His aim in everything was simplification and practical convenience, as is obvious from his new regulation of markets and fairs. He decided to get rid of the distraction, overlapping and confusion, created by the clashing of dates and the like. Fairs were held each month in a different province. They began in the Abruzzi in the north; they proceeded to Campania, the Principato, the Capitanata, Apulia, the Basilicata, they ended in Calabria. No fairs were held for a couple of months in the winter, during which time the merchants could replenish their stocks and travel north again to begin the year’s circuit once more in the Spring.
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The rigorous customs system admitted practically no privileges or exceptions; only the Emperor himself and the Revenue Department were exempt. This had most practical importance in relation to the export of food stuffs, of which Sicily produced a superfluity. The Emperor was not only free from export duties, he was also the largest landed proprietor in the kingdom, and consequently the greatest corn producer. He had first the Crown lands, farmed by himself, which were frequently organised by Cistercian monks, who no doubt also worked them, the final supervision only being in the hands of imperial procurators. In less fertile districts sheep-farming was extensively carried on. The harvests both of wool and corn under this skilled administration must have yielded immense profits. The Emperor was himself an agricultural expert. He once amazed the Italians in Lombardy by investigating the type of soil and then advising them whether to sow corn or beans or some other crop. He tried every sort of experiment with new crops: he made plantations of henna and indigo, improved date groves, or encouraged the use of sugar cane in Palermo by establishing sugar refineries. He gave instructions for the prevention of pests. When a plague of caterpillars threatened the harvest he gave orders that every inhabitant should furnish daily a certain measure of caterpillars. He had more faith in this method, he said, than in the efficacy of the prayers of the priests as they perambulated the stricken fields. He admitted that harvests might suffer from the weather, but he saw the major danger in the laziness of the population. He therefore gave orders that any landless person who was willing to work should be given land at the expense of any who had land lying idle.
Such measures must greatly have increased the productiveness of his own estates, but he did not draw corn solely from his crown lands. He also received a twelfth of the products of the Demanium and a tax in kind on all corn destined for export was paid to the Treasury unless a money payment was made instead. No private person could compete with the quantity of State corn, especially as the Crown with its immense money resources could buy up private supplies. And the Emperor was not only able to export his corn free of tax, but to load it up on his own ships of the imperial fleet. Hence arose a virtual, though veiled, monopoly in corn, for the State possessed every means of crippling competition. One example may be quoted to show how Frederick exploited these possibilities. He was waging war in Northern Italy when the news came that there was a famine in Tunis and that Genoese merchants were buying corn with Tunisian money in the Sicilian ports. The Emperor forthwith despatched his Arabic-speaking court philosopher, Master Theodore, from Pisa, as ambassador to Tunis, and at the same time gave orders to close all Sicilian ports, to let no private vessel sail, and to load with the utmost haste 50,000 loads of corn on the imperial fleet. The corn was to come from the imperial granaries or to be bought from private owners and immediately shipped to Tunis. Not till after the imperial fleet had sailed was any private boat free to proceed with her lading and quit Sicilian harbours. The imperial fleet reached Africa safely. The State made about £75,000. The record of this transaction happens to have come down to us.
Such dealings as these recall the mercantile theories of Colbert, but there lies a world of difference between the calm, state-rationalism of the later capitalistic centuries, and the passionate adventures of the Hohenstaufen, whose measures were always the immediate product of some actual State necessity. In this matter of the Tunisian corn, the Emperor had at first refused to interfere; but his coffers were empty, he was himself deeply in debt to the Romans and his war with the Pope was at its height; so he had no option but to seize the opportunity.
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Frederick’s collection of direct revenue was always by extraordinary taxes. Though in later years he raised them annually, they were always explained afresh as due to the present imminens necessitas of the State. Imperial finance operations were always dictated by a present need, they never served for the mere accumulation of wealth. The moment his position improved, the Emperor reduced the taxes or pretermitted the collection of them altogether. Frederick had no lack of shrewd commercial instinct, but he did not use it systematically to amass riches.
The Emperor busied himself in these years in opening foreign markets by means of commercial treaties. We have already noticed the commercial link with Tunis. Abu Zakaria Yahya, hitherto the representative of the Sultan of the Almohades, established a kingdom of his own in 1228 which embraced Tunis, Tripoli and a part of Morocco, and founded the dynasty of the Hafsids. Three years later, in 1231, Frederick II concluded a commercial treaty with Abu Zakaria for ten years, which fixed their reciprocal customs duties at 10 per cent, and guaranteed protection to each other’s merchants. Following the precedent set by the sea towns, the Emperor appointed his own Sicilian consuls for Tunis: this was the first time in history that a Western monarchy maintained a permanent representative overseas. The first imperial consul in Tunis was a Saracen, Henricus Abbas, after him a Christian, Peter Capuanus from Amalfi. Embassies to Tunis were frequent. Each side endeavoured to gratify the other, and the Emperor drew supplies for himself from Tunis, not only of Barbary horses, hunting leopards and baggage camels, but also at times of Tunisian warriors to supplement his Saracen body-guard. In return the imperial ships undertook, on occasion, to carry Tunisian envoys to Spain. Sicilian officials were sent as the Emperor’s messengers to the Khalif of Granada, the “Commander of the Faithful.” No doubt Muhammadan Spain proved at times a valuable market for Sicilian corn.
While still in Syria, Frederick had concluded a commercial agreement with his friend al Kamil, Sultan of Egypt. He did not succeed in negotiating complete freedom from customs dues for Sicilian merchants in the harbours of Alexandria and Rosetta—which he appears to have aimed at—but trade with Egypt remained vigorous. An imperial ship, the “Half World,” aroused the greatest excitement amongst the Egyptians by its enormous size when it sailed into the port of Alexandria with a crew of three hundred men. It is said that Frederick II stood in direct communication with India through his agents travelling by way of Egypt. We have no means of verifying the assertion, but it transpires in another connection that Frederick was extremely well-informed about India. The fascination which the word East Indies was later to exercise on the explorers is here foreshadowed. It was only a few decades after the end of the Hohenstaufen period that Marco Polo heralded the joyous age of discovery which shattered to fragments the Roman-Mediterranean world.
Meanwhile the revenue department of Sicily fulfilled its purpose. Whatever was to be extracted from the rich country was appropriated by the imperial official. Before the outbreak of the great war, Frederick II was reckoned the wealthiest monarch of Europe since the days of Charlemagne. The Emperor’s principle was well understood: Germany’s business was to keep him supplied with fighters and Sicily’s to find the funds. The war was being waged against the financially most prosperous powers of the known world: the Church and the Italian towns. It has been the fashion to admire Frederick’s economic system, but at the same time to reproach him with having been guilty of exploitation by unduly increasing his demands during the war years. But every ruler of Frederick’s stature has exploited the resources of the world, and the Sicilian kingdom, which, in return, enjoyed uninterrupted peace, could not expect to be immune. Without such exploitation—to the very limit of exhaustion—nothing really great has ever been accomplished. Consider France during, and after, the Napoleonic Wars.
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Frederick II’s new constitution, opening with the imperial Proœmium, had gently descended from the sublimest spiritual heights and settled on the land of Sicily, seizing the country in its iron grasp. Uniform administration, uniform law, uniform finance: the constitution of the State was complete. The way was paved for the Sicilians to feel themselves one unified people, to realise their cohesion as a nation; but the goal was not yet reached. Except in a very few points the laws scarcely touched the elementary unities which make the inhabitants of a country feel themselves one and bind them into a nation: the essentials are: community of speech, of blood, of history and of festivals. These common elements were lacking in the Sicilian welter of peoples more than in most other countries. Happily for the Emperor, the other countries of Europe had scarcely yet begun to be conscious of the existence of these natural ties. For centuries it had been the Church’s aim to stifle these natural forces, to displace folk-customs by the rites of the Church, local history by Holy Scripture, native festivals by the Church’s feasts, while for every intellectual utterance the sacred Latin was preferred to the vernacular, and the blood of the race was of less account than the Blood of the Redeemer. The awakening of national consciousness in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was the emancipation of the people’s natural instincts from the spiritual bonds of the Church.
Frederick II in his capacity as Emperor dared not sever the ecclesiastical fetters that held the people in bondage, for the Church was the guarantor of his position and of the existence of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, he awakened and stimulated the “national” impulses more than anyone before him, and in Sicily he not only called out latent forces and feelings, but set about creating them in his chosen people and welding that people into a nation.
With his coming a new epoch began for Sicily. Frederick continually emphasised the fact: again and again in his Book of Laws he calls himself (with deliberate intent) “the New King.” With him the Sicilian race-mixture begins to be a people with a history of its own. In a remarkable document of this time Frederick summarises the History of Sicily for his faithful subjects and conjures up the past, with the present intention of making the Sicilians conscious of their common history. Under the Greeks and Romans, Sicily had suffered great injustice, because the country was divided up and rent asunder. The Normans were the first to create a unity: “Since when this noble country… under the firm and heroic settlement of our ancestors rose to be called a KINGDOM and the inhabitants learned to love their kingdom and their throne of royal dignity.” The zenith of Sicilian history came when “Divine Providence, in its wisdom, granted in our day this great happiness to your king, whom you had nourished with the milk of your love and weaned at your breast, that he should scale the heights of the Roman Empire.” They were now living under the rule of the Sicilian Hohenstaufen, “this offshoot of a new stem,” who had grown up amongst the native born of the kingdom. … The valour of the Sicilians would grow ever greater under their Emperor, “for already in the early days of that heroic age our ancestors’ noble plantations bore ample fruit.” In such terms the Emperor spurred on his faithful to fight against the Lombard faithlessness: they should follow the example of their ancestors who conquered distant peoples and “feared not to face the dangers of the sea nor the buffetings of fate on land.”
Such appeals presupposed a people for the Emperor to address, a people on whom such words would act. The Normans had certainly made the first “firm settlement,” but Guiscard’s successors could not have spoken in such terms to the mixture of Arabs, Greeks, Latins and Jews, nor by such words have hoped to fire any but the few noble Norman kinsmen who were round them. Frederick treated the Sicilians as a nation with its own glorious history, and he was the first to attempt to point the Sicilians to their common traditions, to address to them a common appeal. He was able to do so because he was no usurper, but “an off-shoot from the new Sicilian planting,” who felt a bond with the new people amongst whom he had grown to manhood, a community of race between the ruler and the ruled, which had hitherto been lacking. The Emperor’s allusions to race and nurture were no accident. We quote another pronouncement.
The Emperor had once explained the sacrament of marriage as a natural necessity for the maintenance of the human race. Not every marriage, however, was calculated to secure the “better nature” of mankind. The Emperor therefore published a law which paid more heed to breed than to sacramental considerations, so that a commentator, long after, was moved to indignation, remarking “this discloses the whole spiritual degeneracy of this Emperor Frederick who would hinder the just and free marriage instituted by God in Paradise. Such a law is not binding before the judgment-seat of God.” Frederick II had forbidden, on pain of confiscation of property, any Sicilian man or maid to contract a marriage with a foreigner (that is anyone born outside Sicily) without special permission from the Emperor. He explains the reasons with profound wisdom: “It has often grieved us to see how the righteousness of our kingdom has suffered corruption from foreign manners by the mixture of different peoples. When the men of Sicily ally themselves with the daughters of foreigners, the purity of the race becomes besmirched, while evil and sensual weakness increases, the purity of the people is contaminated by the speech and by the habits of the others, and the seed of the stranger defiles the hearth of our faithful subjects.” Hence, as a remedy against “degeneracy of race,” against “racial confusion in the kingdom,” the law forbids marriage with foreigners.
Nothing could demonstrate more clearly than this law the intention of the Emperor to create, even from the racial standpoint, a unified nation out of the Sicilian people. It was a measure which, aiming with wholesome severity at something higher, frankly ran counter to every custom of the Church and was always felt as a monstrosity, as the commentator shows. Though the same writer adds, not without admiration, “This Emperor, however, strove most diligently to preserve his people pure from corruption by the customs and conversation of strangers.” Everything in this stern State aimed at unity, not only in theory but in practice, based on the necessitas rerum. For unity was of God and multiplicity was of the Devil.
History proves that Frederick II achieved his aim, and succeeded in awakening amongst the Sicilians respect for the dignity of their own race. Some sixty years after the death of their only Emperor the Sicilians rose (the most mongrel population of Palermo first of all) against the Anjous at the Vespers and slaughtered the French garrison in an unexampled massacre. They fought under the unfurled eagles with the cry “Death to the Gauls!”, and when they found Sicilian women pregnant by the French they ripped open their wombs with the sword to trample under foot the foreign brood.
The history of Frederick II demonstrates how much a lawgiver can accomplish by force and compulsion, so long as he knows what his aims are, and so long as those aims are just. Nevertheless, certain limits are set to the direct spiritual influence of a ruler on the masses of his people, and his wishes, thoughts and opinions are for the most part handed on with necessary and inevitable dilution through intermediaries, those intimates who stand under the ruler’s personal influence, the court, the entourage, the hierarchy of imperial employees. A picture of the Emperor himself can best be formed by studying his human influence on those most closely associated with him.