From the intellectual point of view Frederick’s new secular State was a triumph of that lay culture which, for the last century, had been spreading in wider and wider circles. This was the first time that profane learning had been concentrated and organised. The pillars of the state were now educated laymen, no longer clerics, and it is only natural that the Founder of the State was himself the most highly cultured layman of them all. By his organisation of the emancipated “secular” spirit Frederick II broke once and for all the spell which the Church had laid on the whole domain of the nonmaterial as an intellectual and spiritual unity. Even more clearly than by the state philosophy, the complete mental independence of the new State was demonstrated by the fact that the clergy ceased to play a part in the administration of Sicily, and their spiritual influence on it gradually ceased.
The Sicilian state itself is the proof that lay education had made great strides in Frederick’s century, for the Emperor was able to risk basing his whole new kingdom on it. On the other hand the existing supply of educated laymen was not sufficient, and in order to be able to draw on larger numbers Frederick founded the University of Naples. In the Charter of the University Frederick stated: “We propose to rear many clever and clearsighted men, by the draught of knowledge and the seed of learning; men made eloquent by study and by the observation of just law, who will serve the God of all and will please us by the cult of Justice. … We invite learned men to our service, men full of zeal for the study of Jus and Justitia, to whom we can entrust our administration without fear.” The Emperor thus made clear what spirit was to govern his state—the legal spirit. This need not surprise us. For, since Justice was the Emperor’s mediator with God the same must apply to his followers and servants.
The whole state was thick-sown with lawyers. Ousting the clergy, hitherto the only representatives of education and culture, the jurists now had the entry to the Emperor’s court, and the replacing of a clerical atmosphere by an emancipated secular atmosphere was pregnant with momentous change even in the highest politics. The Church had long been striving to enlist to her side the newly-awakened town-dweller. Frederick II now entered the lists, and while the Church, with the support of the mendicant orders, was successful in capturing the masses the Emperor won over the educated classes, the new intellectual aristocracy. These were usually inclined to support the Government. It was, therefore, of the greatest importance that Frederick II, recognising their vigour and their potentialities, enlisted the town lawyers in his service, gave them the widest possible scope, in administration, in his chancery work, and in his court circles, and by this means within a few years revolutionised the whole central government of Sicily and even of the Empire. The two administrations of Sicily and of the Empire were originally to be kept apart, in accordance with the agreement with Rome, but they were afterwards amalgamated.
The University of Naples was to rear professional jurists, judges, and notaries with legal training. Hard and fast “careers” were unknown in Frederick’s state, as was any systematic promotion by seniority which the one-year tenure of office made impossible. The factors making for success were the personal qualities of the individual, an opportunity of distinguishing himself, and luck in happening to attract the attention of the Emperor and the court. The number of officials was relatively small, and it was possible to keep them all under observation. It was probably rare for a really able man to be passed over, for the Emperor was quick to seize a suitable man for a given post, whether a precedent was thereby followed or created. Certain general tendencies can, however, be traced: the judge’s career, for instance, was usually distinct from the notary’s, though occasional interchanges took place.
Having completed his studies at the University of Naples (we have no clue to the length of the course; in Northern Italy three to six years was prescribed) the new judge was selected by some town to act as town-judge. On this the candidate betook himself to court with a certificate, to receive his appointment from the Emperor or his representative, to take the oath and, if necessary, to be tested by the High Court in his literary and legal attainments. In this way the Emperor and the Court Judges kept in touch with the rising generation of lawyers, except so far as during the Emperor’s absence appointments were made by his provincial representatives, the justiciars. The young judge next had an opportunity of entering the narrower State service as judex to one of the justiciars, or, later, in Northern Italy, to one of the numerous vicars, vicars general or podestas. With good fortune he might ultimately reach the office of High Court Judge. This was not the only avenue to the High Court bench, for we know of High Court Judges who had never officiated as ordinary judges: the famous Thaddeus of Suessa, for example, a courtier and one of Frederick’s intimates. It is worth noting that quite a number held the title of High Court Judge without having officiated at all. These were the consiliarii, the counsellors who were employed in the imperial Chancery and on diplomatic missions and formed part of the Emperor’s immediate following. This is the first time that professional lawyers figure in the permanent personnel of an Emperor’s court, not merely as occasional experts. The judges of lower degree could find many niches for themselves in the service; we find them as chamberlains, as tax collectors, as overseers of the accounts departments, as keepers of the King’s treasury and in other capacities; in offices which might perfectly well have been filled by non-legal nobles or burgesses. It is important to note how the lawyers were thrusting into posts of every sort.
The second important group of educated lawyers were the notaries. They had to pursue a course of study, and probably to win the degree of master, before seeking further training as registrar of some chancery. After examination by the High Court the notary received the imperial nomination and appointment. For a notary as for a judge service at court was the desirable goal. A man might begin at the court of a provincial justiciar or in some branch of the finance department, and then get an opening at court and become Court Notary at the High Court, or President of some section of the imperial Chancery: Current Business or Feudal Affairs, for instance. As a general rule the supply of court notaries and chancery clerks was supplemented in other ways with which we shall deal later. The state, as we have already seen, was full of notaries who had to deal with the ever increasing mass of written documents which gave the administration so modern an air. The immense number of orders issued by the Court, most of them required in several copies, demanded in every grade of the services a highly skilled staff of clerks not subject to annual displacement. Other departments, notably Finance, also required the services of notaries.
This penetration of the secular state by the legal spirit was only a reflection of what had already taken place within the bosom of the Church. A knowledge of Canon Law was indispensable for every cleric of any position. The carefully cultivated style of the notaries was also originally a product of the Church. It followed that a course of study at Naples and employment in the imperial Chancery might be the opening of a clerical career. There was the possibility of Church promotion for anyone who had mastered both laws, and if this did not offer the Chancery was a safe refuge. We have already alluded to the Emperor’s efforts to secure the appointment of his notaries to vacant bishoprics. In the early days these efforts always failed, but after the second excommunication the Emperor flung aside all restraint and began to appoint Sicilian bishops of his own choice, or allow Archbishop Berard of Palermo to do so, except in cases where he preferred to keep a vacancy. The Ottos and the Salians long ago in Germany used to rear up their private chaplains to be their future bishops, and the Chancery of the Imperial Court now served the same purpose as of old the private chapel of the Emperor. The radical innovation was that these clerical Chancery officials, never very numerous, were appointed not because they were clerics but because they were jurists, and in spite of their being clerics. The Emperor found them in no way indispensable, and their priestly character was a matter of indifference to him, fraught with no danger. Walter of Ocra, notary and chaplain of the Emperor, and one of his busiest officials, rose to be Sicilian Chancellor, but he was on an entirely different footing from the bishop-chancellors of earlier days: he was simply an imperial official who happened to be a cleric. The higher clergy were still represented at Court, especially by prelates who were able to adapt themselves to the new spirit of the times. The Archbishops Berard of Palermo, and Jacob of Capua, belonged to the most intimate circle of the Emperor. Frederick had utilised the latter as collaborator in the Constitutions of Melfi, especially in those sections which dealt with the Church and the Sicilian clergy. A few other bishops were intimate with the Emperor, Archbishop Berard of Messina and Bishop Peter of Ravello. These prelates had weight in the intellectual life of the court only in so far as they accommodated themselves to the literary and mental pursuits around them. They were no longer themselves the independent purveyors of spiritual life as bishops had been wont to be. Still we must not undervalue the fact that the mental atmosphere of the Court was sufficiently catholic to give scope even to canonistic culture. It was inevitable that the University of Naples should have a number of clerical students, since all Sicilian subjects were compelled to attend it. One of the greatest of all churchmen was a product of Naples: Thomas Aquinas, the doctor angelicus of the Roman Church.
Two years after founding the University of Naples Frederick II had closed the University of Bologna on account of the fiasco of the Cremona Diet in 1226. In so doing he had a special intention of his own. He wrote to the professors as well as to the scholars of Bologna: the last thing he wished was that learned men should suffer through the recalcitrance of the rebellious Bolognese who had joined the Lombard League. He invited them, therefore, to quit Bologna and come to Naples, “where instituted by us with much care, study flourishes… the beauty of the neighbourhood attracts, no less than the lavish supplies of everything, and the reverend community of doctors.” This great plan of transferring to Naples the famous Law School of Bologna fell through. The Pope’s intervention secured a truce with the Lombard League, and the Emperor had to retract his outlawry of Bologna and permit the reopening of the University. The scholars of Bologna made merry over the imperial University of Naples: this ambitious home of all sciences was at best an embryo, and one not likely to thrive. For it depended on the caprice of its founder, who had no obligations and whose mood might easily change. The Bolognese were not far wide of the mark. For better or worse the fate of this suddenly-founded University was linked with the fate of the Emperor and his State. When the Papal troops invaded the kingdom all study ceased in Naples, though only for a few years. In 1234 Frederick re-established the University and attracted a really excellent teaching staff. At first Roffredo of Benevento taught Civil Law; the Canon Law scholar, Bartholomew Pignatellus, the Decretals; Master Terrisius of Atina gave instruction in Arts; a Catalonian, Master Arnaldus, lectured on Aristotle’s natural philosophy. The grammarian, Walter of Ascoli, was secured, and completed in Naples his great Etymological Encyclopaedia, begun in Bologna. Finally, Peter of Ireland, the teacher of Thomas Aquinas, whom his contemporaries called gemma magistrorum et laurea morum, represented natural science.
Frederick II’s severe struggles with the Church compelled certain retrenchments of study to be made at a later date, but the university was never again dissolved. After its re-establishment in 1234 its administration was in the hands of a Justiciar of Students, so that the University enjoyed a certain independence, though it remained immediately connected with the High Court and with the imperial Chancery. Students and professors were well aware who was the determining personality; when they begged, in 1234, for the opportunity of resuming their studies, they did not appeal direct to the Emperor but to the “Master,” who was even then considered as “the expounder of the sole truth for the ears of the Emperor,” the High Court Judge, Piero della Vigna.
*
We know all too little about this famous scholar and writer, who, like a second St. Peter, “held both keys to Frederick’s heart,” and who even in Dante’s Hell, in the ghostly wood of the Suicides, maintained that his fall was solely due to “envy’s cruel blow,” that “harlot of courts.” He is sometimes supposed to represent a frequently recurrent type, so much so that Conrad Ferdinand Meyer had no difficulty in painting from him his picture of the English Thomas à Becket. Yet Piero della Vigna is radically different, by his whole position, and his human relation to his master, from Chancellors like Cassiodorus or Reginald of Dassel. He was not the complementary brain of a warrior king, but an instrument which a most intellectual Emperor had consciously fashioned for him-himself: the spokesman and the mouthpiece of his master.
As Logothetes, “one who places words,” this greatest Latin stylist of the Middle Ages was, both in writing and speaking, the mouthpiece of imperial thought and act, the creator of the imperial diction and the majestic utterance; as jurist, probably the author of all the Emperor’s laws; as scholar and humanist of the first water, the counsellor and intimate, nay the friend of the Emperor. He was quite indispensable to Frederick, this master of expression, who had at his command the most telling phrase for each phase of the versatile Emperor’s activity, who supplied the most convincing explanation of his master’s acts, and often in so doing helped to determine the next step, whose duty it was to announce and make plausible Frederick’s constant changes of front. Frederick had raised him up from nothing to the first position in the state, and made him the confidant of all his schemes, and was finally compelled to destroy him when the servant began, unaccountably, to stumble. With another man, reproof or banishment would have sufficed; a blunder of della Vigna’s merited extinction. His was a life which Fate entangled in the tragedy of the House of Hohenstaufen.
Legend ascribed the basest origin to Piero della Vigna, son of an unknown father, and an abandoned mother, who miserably supported herself and her infant by beggary. He was, in fact, of reputable family, his father probably a town judge in Capua, where Piero was certainly born. The boy seems to have gone to Bologna without the family approval, and to have carried on his studies in canon law and civil law amid considerable hardships. At last he addressed a petition to Archbishop Berard of Palermo. It is a testimony to both that on the strength of this one letter, so the story goes, Berard of Palermo immediately commended the petitioner to the Emperor’s attention. When Frederick returned in 1221 he installed the young man as notary in his Chancery, and, recognising his outstanding ability, speedily promoted him to be High Court Judge, then Chief Notary of the Sicilian kingdom, till he finally created for him the post of Logothetes, who should actually speak for the Emperor in the High Court, as well as write for him. As High Court Judge Piero della Vigna was one of the legal Counsellors in the closest attendance on the Emperor. In this capacity he formulated the whole body of Laws that comprised the Constitutions of 1231. So amply did he play “Tribonian to the Justinian of Sicily” that posterity inserted his name at the end of the Liber Augustalis. Later, della Vigna took over the sole direction of the imperial Chancery, and his fame rested more especially on his stylistic accomplishment. His art, however, was rooted in human things, and his facility of expression grew with the Emperor’s growth. When the Crusades had given the Emperor new horizons the manifestos of the Capuan began to expand and to swell into a rhythmic emotion which, year by year, surrounded the majesty of Frederick II with more magnificent and more awe-inspiring eloquence.
His Latin was an artificial language, highly perfected in form, often difficult to understand, so that contemporaries complained of his highest style as “intentionally obscure.” Only by a measure of obscurity was it possible, without sacrificing its living vigour, to extort from Latin, for centuries traditionally mishandled, the notes of height and depth required. When the humanists a little later revivified the classical Latin of Cicero they discovered—alas—a dead language, and brought it again to birth. Piero della Vigna is the last creative writer of living Latin. It was a living language that spoke with pomp and pride and smooth-flowing magnificence from his obscure periods. Its comprehensiveness and joy in style bore within them the seeds of classic humanistic Latin. Della Vigna’s speech, a Summa in its own domain, exhausted every possibility of Latin-Christian linguistics in the realms of Church and Empire.
For centuries to come, long after the Christian Roman world that had begotten them was dead, his collected letters lived on in the Chanceries of Europe as masterpieces of style, and preserved the image of that Emperor who had imposed it on his spokesman. How much in these letters is Piero della Vigna, and how much Frederick, will never be known, but the composite result dictated the style of all the other imperial secretaries. The Capuan’s elaborate and emotional forms of expression would have rung false and hollow without the living reality that underlay them, without the wide circle of the Roman Empire, and in the background the Emperor holding the pen. King Manfred’s letters in della Vigna’s style disclose a painful discrepancy.
The information we crave about Piero della Vigna’s personal and private life is not forthcoming, but his poems, letters and manifestos betray him as one of those highly-cultured literati whom humanism, awaking with Petrarch, later produced in numbers. Piero della Vigna was the most eminent amongst the few existing in the early thirteenth century. On the one hand he was master of the old: the formalism of the time, canon and civil law, scholastic and ancient philosophy, ancient authors and church divines, rhetoric, versifying, letter-writing. On the other hand he was zealous to face the new with an elemental fire and passion that flash from his writings. He was ready to turn his hand to anything: scholar and judge, philosopher and artist, stylist, diplomat and courtier, ambassador and go-between, even warrior when occasion demands, drawing up the lines of battle, perhaps even taking part in the fight. He wore himself out in service. He says himself that he had grown very old—in contrast to the ever-youthful Emperor. Little is known about his appearance. The so-called della Vigna bust of the bridge gate at Capua cannot represent the celebrated High Court Judge of Frederick II, but more likely portrays a late classical philosopher. Nevertheless, the contemporary identification of this bust with a judge of the Hohenstaufen Court indicates that this human type, was not unfamiliar amongst the law scholars of the Court; a heavy, serious, learned face it is, with supercilious, even mocking expression; vigorous and strong, however, and massive, with the mighty beard which lends added dignity to the head—the very antithesis of the picture we form of the Emperor himself.
Piero della Vigna’s duties to the Naples University and to the imperial Chancery and High Court were not confined to the administration, but extended also to the personnel. For one thing, Court officials gave lectures at the University; amongst them the High Court Judge, Roffredo of Benevento, and later an imperial Court Notary, Nicolas of Rocca, who started rhetorical courses in Naples. The relation of the Chancery to the students was even more important, for the budding jurist, especially the young notary, received the groundwork of his training at the University, but the final polish at the Emperor’s court. The literary education of the favoured few was more or less directly in the hands of Piero della Vigna, in whose Chancery they acquired the stilum supremum. Piero della Vigna was in this the upholder of a tradition which lingered, not in the Court, but in his native town of Capua. For the art of style, the ars dictandi, had been so specially cultivated in this town that one may fairly talk of a Capuan School, the peculiar character of which was its direct reversion to late classical prose. Piero della Vigna very possibly learnt his own skill in Capua, whereas the stylists of preceding generations had adopted the famous epistolary manner of the Roman Curia under the great Innocent. Piero della Vigna quite probably owed the Archbishop of Palermo’s recommendation to the fact that the Emperor was anxious for his Chancery to attain the same distinction of style as the Curia. Della Vigna’s first petition must have displayed remarkable skill to lead to his reception in the High Court. The value which Frederick II attached to the style of his letters, and his ambition to compete in this with the Curia, would have combined with his own artistic appreciation to perceive the political significance of such unusual ability. The Emperor had to win public opinion by his manifestos, which supplied in the Christian world the place of the ancient Forum. Epistolary art replaced the forensic eloquence of Rome and the Greek cities. People justly compared Piero della Vigna, the orator of Capua, to Cicero.
There was at the beginning of the thirteenth century, in Capua a flourishing school of written rhetoric, of which Piero della Vigna himself was a product. It was extremely significant that he established a close connection between it and the High Court and even transplanted it to the imperial Chancery. The Chancery itself thus became a school of rhetoric, the focus of the literary life of the Court. Everything about the Emperor’s Court which seems a foretaste of Humanism: the reversion to classic models; the Emperor’s cult of Rome; his echo of the Caesars in formula and title, simile and metaphor, all this had its roots in the learned circles of Piero della Vigna, who were inspired on their side by the presence of a living Caesar. The two reinforced each other: Frederick II could pose as Caesar because his entourage could accept him in such a rôle, and he was driven to pose as Caesar because rhetorical and literary style proclaimed him such. The same applied to his Christian attitude: for the imperial art of letter-writing sprang from the curial style which provided all the Biblical comparisons, including the comparisons with Christ. This blend of the Christian and the ancient Roman which prevails in Frederick’s writing and smacks of the Renaissance, is the product of this group of stylists to whom a knowledge of the Bible was as necessary as a knowledge of the classics. This does not explain their vigour. The many private letters of these imperial chancery officials that have come down to us are convincing proof of the passion for knowledge that possessed these men, when once they had breathed the strong intellectual atmosphere of the imperial court. A wretched notary writes from prison to his friends to send him a Livy or some other historian, feeling convinced that he was “not worthy to unloose the latchet of their shoes.” These officials shared the view the Emperor loved to inculcate: that “fame comes through knowledge, honour comes through fame, and riches come through honour.”
The High Court and the Chancery itself distributed to the widest possible circles this knowledge which the Emperor so highly prized and his courtiers coveted. “The breasts of rhetoric have suckled many eminent minds at the imperial court,” writes Piero della Vigna to a younger friend, whom he later brought to court and with whom, as with others, he kept up a correspondence that served the purpose also of exercises in style. This may have been a usual way of giving lessons in letter-writing, so that the letter served a double purpose. It is no matter for surprise that the later stylists were, for the most part, della Vigna’s compatriots: Campanians if not Capuans. A number of his pupils are known, who themselves became the instructors of literary youth. John of Capua calls himself the pupil of Piero della Vigna. In a letter of consolation addressed to two of the Emperor’s secretaries about the death of a third (all three having also been disciples of the great High Court Judge) he paints a very vivid picture of della Vigna’s human methods: “Well I know how our master and only benefactor Piero della Vigna is shocked by the death of such a friend. For he had, with good reason, cherished the greatest hopes that his vineyard (vinea) would have brought forth three shoots from a fruitful vine and that he might have presented to the Emperor from the womb of his beloved, three worthy disciples, three wooers of his own worth, three followers of his own life. The unknowing would have sought to ascertain, the knowing would have marvelled, how all three had received the same teaching in the same manner from such a teacher, and how one affection had united all the three. Happy indeed this community of three in one, where domestic love unites teacher and pupils.” This indicates the school-like character of the Capuan tradition. The inevitable jealousy of the courtiers is hinted at when we read that Piero della Vigna wins fame and praise, and envy too, when his pupils “find grace in the eyes of the Prince” and receive posts from him “who loveth the tribe of the young.” Della Vigna is constantly alluded to in court circles with a pun on his name as the “fruitful vineyard.” He was the centre and soul of all this courtly activity, and they turned to him for enlightenment when the courtiers “fell to merry quarrelling” over one problem or another, as intellectual men are wont to do in company.
Della Vigna enjoyed the Emperor’s complete confidence. There was no lack of sycophants who flattered “the Master’s Vineyard.” One prelate wrote: “Vinea was the Petrus on whose rock the Emperor’s Church was founded when the Emperor refreshed his spirit by a meal with his disciples.” They called him “the Emperor’s Vicar,” corresponding to the Prince of the Apostles, Peter, Vicar of Christ, and as such the “Bearer of the Keys” of this world’s empire, of the Emperor’s heart, a simile of which Dante later made use. Della Vigna’s indirect influence on Court society was no less great. Men hummed round him as Frederick’s favourite; the highest dignitaries of Church and State inquired of him the general temper of the Court, the mood of the “Dominus” or the “Caesar.” They reproached him for his long silence, or forwarded requests and recommendations for the Emperor, begging his support. All these letters seek to attain the lofty style of the master, and his answers often show a touch of delicate irony as he couches them in even more pompous phrase and metaphor. Piero della Vigna maintained intercourse with the law professors of Bologna for some time. But whereas in earlier days Roman Emperors turned to Bologna to enquire the interpretation or application of a law, the doctors of Bologna now betook themselves to Frederick II to enquire from him about some enactment peculiar to Sicily, and right gladly Frederick answered them. Piero della Vigna’s Constitutions of Melfi represent one of the greatest legal achievements of the century. Commentaries on the Liber Augustalis began to appear almost at once, and many of the commentators were alumni of the University of Naples. Thus one creation reacted on the other.
The art of writing Latin verse was part of the school routine for students of style and rhetoric; it was practised almost exclusively in legal stylistic circles. Secular Latin literature was a relatively late growth in Italy, and one of the earliest goliard compositions in Italy is ascribed to Piero della Vigna. It is a long satirical poem, directed against the greed of prelates and mendicant monks, and differs from the other songs of vagrant poets by its positive political importance. Piero’s pupils also wrote Latin verse: Master Terrisius of Atina, author of a lengthy poem, was counted among his friends. The Chronicler, Richard of San Germano, who interwove a number of poems with the text of his chronicle, was also a notary, but he did not belong to the actual della Vigna circle. Nor did the judge, Richard of Venusia, who composed a comedy in distichs full of topical allusions to imperial officials. He dedicated his comedy to the Emperor. It was the first effort of its kind.
Works in Greek verse were not unheard of in official circles. Calabria was still largely Greek in speech, and is said to have been the means of introducing a knowledge of ancient Greek to Renaissance scholars. Barlaam, who is the reputed Greek teacher of both Petrarch and Boccaccio, was a Calabrian. The Constitutions of Melfi were soon translated into Greek, and we possess a number of Greek letters from Frederick (who was a master also of that language) to his son-in-law John Vatatzes, Emperor of Nicaea. They were probably drafted by the same Greek-speaking notary as was usually employed to translate Greek documents into Latin, John of Otranto. An iambic poem of his on the Siege of Parma has been preserved. This episode also formed the subject of a long poem by the Chartophylax, Georgios of Gallipoli in Calabria, together with an enthusiastic encomium on Frederick II in which the Emperor figures as Zeus, the Thunder God and Lightning-Wielder of Greek mythology. A supernatural atmosphere thus surrounded the Hohenstaufen, which was revealed in a remarkable manner to the later humanists. The story goes that in 1497 a carp was caught in a pond at Heilbronn, in whose gills, under the skin, a copper ring was fastened, with a Greek inscription which stated that Frederick II, with his own hand, had released this fish. The humanists were much struck by “the remarkably life-giving quality of the hand Friderici Secundi” and particularly stirred by the inscription’s being in Greek, and they decided that Frederick’s intention must have been to quicken to new life the study of Greek in Germany by this message of a dumb fish.
The intellectual influence exercised in foreign countries by the Hohenstaufen’s court is revealed in a Latin poem of the Englishman, Henry of Avranches, who offered his services to the Emperor about this time. The poet shows himself a man well skilled in every branch of stylistic art, master of all the early humanistic culture of his day like John of Salisbury. He writes at great length on the origin of Latin poetry, which came from the Hebrews to the Greeks, through Adonis and Sappho, and from the Greeks passed to the Latins, and which he himself venerates and practises. Verse is the divine form of speech, and the man who can convert prose into verse can also transform the caves of a savage country into dwelling-houses. He, therefore, the Englishman, would fain live at the Emperor’s court and be his comrade in the art of poetry or renounce his honour as the king of song.
The Emperor himself did not write Latin verse—if we except the verse inscriptions on imperial castles and forts, and a few occasional couplets which tradition ascribes to him. Nevertheless, he was in close touch with the stylists and their work. He shared their scholarship to a very large extent, and we are told in many places that he was able himself to speak with great eloquence and skill, though he later preferred to allow Piero della Vigna to make his speeches for him, taking a verse of Ovid for a text as readily as a messianic saying from the Bible. The Emperor had no craving for displaying his skill, and shrewdly refrained from over-much public speaking. Popular opinion averred: “He speaks little, knows much and can do much.” It must have had all the more immense effect when, on really important occasions, the Emperor himself spoke after Piero della Vigna. A report informs us what a shudder of amazement seized the people on one occasion, when, from his throne, raised high above the heads of the multitude, the Sacred Majesty of the Emperor solemnly spoke down and defended itself against the Bishop of Rome. Perhaps the custom of princely ceremonial speeches dates from Frederick II, who has been called the “mirror of the world in speech and custom.” With the great Hohenstaufen such speeches were provoked only by stern necessity; no prince of the Renaissance will have been able to evoke the magic shudder that greeted Frederick’s voice.
*
The magnificent gestures of a world-monarch came naturally to Frederick. Not less natural was his readiness to relax in the company of his intimate friends, when he could feel sure that none of his words would be misunderstood. Above all other things he loved good conversation; witty and intellectual talk, in which he joined with an indescribable charm of his own, was an absolute necessity to him. He had no need to summon a Voltaire from abroad to provide the dilicato parlare that he loved. There were, it is true, many foreign scholars at his court, but their business was to conduct research in definite philosophic or scientific subjects and to expound these afresh, communicating their results to the court, most frequently through the medium of Frederick himself.
The whole court shared his spirit. There was none who did not, to the measure of his ability, respond to the intellectual stimulus of the Emperor’s personality, and a very considerable proportion of his knowledge and modes of thought communicated itself to the court officials, notaries, and stylists of his entourage. Years after his death it is still possible to tell with almost absolute certainty whether the writer of a given letter had been in touch with one of those sucklings “of the milk of rhetoric at the imperial court.”
Certain philosophical lines of thought which were simply dubbed “Ghibelline ideas” in later times were a product of the spirit that flowed from Frederick II and his circle: The recurrence of Nature, Reason, Necessity in certain connections, the belief in Fortune instead of Providence, the disappearance of threadbare Bible tags in favour of quotations from the classics. Frederick’s contemporaries were ripe for these things. Della Vigna’s activity has shown, however, how conscious, intentional and well-thought-out was the intellectual preparation of the ground.
It was something like a new gospel that emanated from the court, and one of the tokens of it was the inrush of a youthful spirit into an age of decadence and decay—a living something that drew into itself all that was actively alive. Outworn mental attitudes had no place in this State. The whole imperial group was young, not only in spirit but in years, incomparably young, full-blooded and alive. Aged, aged Pope Gregory had good reason to feel afraid; he even lodged a complaint against the excessive youthfulness of the imperial officials. The Emperor curtly retorted that it was none of the Pope’s business, and begged to call the Pope’s attention to the fact that, according to the Sicilian Book of Laws, to debate about the suitability of imperial officers was sacrilege. That was fairly cynical. Indeed an immeasurable cynicism, a sign of vigorous life, prevailed in the circle of Frederick and his friends, especially in reference to their opponents. Not towards opponents only. Frederick always found it hard to repress his acid wit and probably gave it free rein amongst his intimates, pouring scorn not only on the Pope but on friends and contemporaries. He made merry over the envoys of his faithful Cremona and mimicked their absurd way of speaking, how they must first indulge in reciprocal flatteries before one of them would open his business. He said of his friend, the Margrave of Montferrat, that you would need a pickaxe to hew money out of him—a saying that a troubadour swiftly seized on and wove into his sirventes. He even indulged in mockery of Chingiz Khan, who had proposed (what would scarcely have been conceivable save for the Asiatic perspective) that Frederick II should do him homage and accept appointment at the Court of the Great Khan. The Emperor’s prompt repartee was that he would apply for the post of falconer. On the other hand, the Emperor was only amused when one of his friends aimed a shaft at him. The chronicler remarks that Eccelino of Romano would have visited such a jest with instant death.
These are all signs of the intellectual freedom and detachment of the Emperor himself and his court. It was freedom on a large scale. Each of the imperial jests, each of the blasphemies which frequently leaked out, was a challenge to an entire world. These cynicisms would have been wholly unjustified had not Frederick himself been able to build up a new world with its own new sanctities. If anyone dared to breathe against the holy things of the State, Frederick took umbrage immediately: “He who provokes the Emperor with words is punished with deeds.” The officials were not slow to catch their master’s tone. One of his underlings speaks words that might be Frederick’s own: some Guelf prisoners were to be executed, and confession was refused them with the taunt that it was quite supererogatory for them; as friends of the Pope they were all holy together and would alight forthwith in Paradise. Before the days of Frederick II no one would have ventured such a jest. It presupposes an inexpressible contempt for the accepted dogmas of a future life and a complete fearlessness of death. This effect of Frederick’s influence was inevitable and would certainly have been fraught with extreme danger had it not been for the restraints of the State. On Frederick’s own lips such remarks, provoked by sheer defiance, are merely a by-product of his free-ranging mind that shrank from no breadth or depth or height.
People have often praised Frederick for his disregard of position and parentage in his choice of officials. His appointment of town-bred lawyers and his reinforcement of official cadres by outsiders seem to support this view. He was actuated not so much by freedom from snobbery as by a love of playing the oriental despot, who can take his scullion of to-day for his Grand Wazir of to-morrow—a trait which is quite in character. A whole army of slaves, male and female, were attached to the imperial establishment, many of them Moors—who were mainly employed in divers duties in the imperial residences. Frederick had quarters in a number of places: Lucera, Melfi, Canosa, Messina, to which special interest attaches. Until recently it was the fashion to consider these arsenals and clothing stores as imperial harems, and this belief was strengthened by some instructions of the Emperor, that the girls employed there should be provided with clothing and should be kept at their spinning when not otherwise occupied. People affected to consider this a humane and domestic trait of the Emperor in relation to his concubines. It is clear from the wording of his orders that the Saracen girls were in charge of eunuchs, but this would have been necessary for the discipline of Saracen slave women, employed at the looms and in the workshops which supplied the needs of the court, the clothing for the army, woollen coverlets and costly saddlecloths and trappings for horses, camels and hunting leopards; we have no ground for assuming that the women were the odalisques of their lord. In these same quarters weapons and armour were manufactured, machines of war, riding and pack saddles. Frederick frequently fetched craftsmen from a distance to teach his slaves: a Syrian master perhaps for cross-bows, or a Pisan for chain mail.
Apart from the staffs of these provincial quarters there was a personal retinue which accompanied the Emperor on all his campaigns, baggage train and staff and everything appertaining, an immense following which was permanently in attendance. A most amazing cavalcade—such as the West had never seen—like the state of an oriental monarch, always followed Frederick on his journeys after his return from the East. Apart from administrative officials, High Court Judges and the Saracen bodyguard, a complete menagerie was in his train, that brought people crowding in from miles around: strange beasts, unseen before, some of which were useful in hunting, but whose chief function was to add to the glamour and mystery of imperial majesty. Costly four-in-hand teams drew mighty wagons laden with treasure, richly caparisoned camels bearing burdens were escorted by uncounted slaves, gaudily arrayed in silken tunics and linen gear. Leopards and lynxes, apes and bears, panthers and lions, were led on the chain by Saracen slaves. The Emperor even possessed a giraffe. Add to these countless dogs, hawks, barn owls, horned owls, eagles and buzzards, every type of falcon, white and coloured peacocks, rare Syrian doves, white Indian parakeets crowned with yellow tufts of feathers, African ostriches, and, finally, the elephant with his wooden tower on his back, in which were seated Saracen marksmen and trumpeters. On triumphal occasions, once in Cremona for instance, the Emperor himself rode at the head of this procession: the God-man visibly elevated above all the creatures of the world.
The number of animals alone, many of which people scarcely knew by name, let alone by sight, thrilled the world with excitement. All chroniclers give complete details about the imperial procession. Brunetto Latini, Dante’s teacher, lets himself go about the elephant in Cremona which had dashed a donkey to the ground with its trunk; apart from what he had actually seen he retails all sorts of marvellous tales: that the elephant, which was a present to the Emperor from King John of Jerusalem, would never step on to a ship until it had been promised a safe return, and that before copulation it must eat a mandragora root which grows only in the neighbourhood of the earthly paradise. When the elephant entered at last, the spectators waited breathlessly to see its bones turn into ivory. Others gave their attention to other animals; the Frenchman, Villard de Honnecourt, who once saw this zoological collection on his travels, sketched the lion and wrote underneath: “Ci lions fu contrefais al vif.”
The rest of the Emperor’s escort aroused nearly as much speculation as the exotic animals. For the court retinue included Saracen women and eunuchs, as people never failed to note when the train passed through the Italian towns. Nothing was more obvious—even without the hints of the Pope’s letter—than to see in these veiled women the favourite concubines of the already legendary harem. The very uncertainty was stimulating. Whether these girls, like the acrobats, conjurors and rope dancers who were often in attendance, were kept by the Emperor merely for the entertainment their skill provided (as Kaiser Frederick protested in innocent surprise to the reproaches of the Pope) or whether Frederick made use of them on occasion in other ways (“swept away by their charms,” as the Pope preferred to imagine) could not be ascertained. “Who could testify in the matter?” as the Emperor’s ambassador later said to the Council of Lyon. They were simply part of the court staff, maidservants and slave-girls, perhaps also dancers and singing-girls, which fitted in with the oriental arrangements of the Emperor’s court.
The Emperor’s staff included also numerous male slaves, whose duties were very various, and ranged from personal attendance on the monarch to the most menial tasks. The Emperor provided suitable education and training on the most varied lines for the abler ones. Many were taught to read and write Arabic. Another time he selected negro boys between sixteen and twenty to form a musical corps; they were magnificently clad and taught to blow large and small silver trumpets. We may assume that the duty of this imperial band was to play at meal times, since the courts of Anjou and Aragon, whom Frederick copied in every way, indulged this custom. Black page boys are frequently mentioned; one pair of these servitelli nigri* were called Muska and Marzukh, and they brought down on the Emperor from the Pope the reproach of “scarcely veiled sodomy.” When Frederick’s wrath fluttered his accusers they later tried to take the sting out of this by returning to the innuendoes about the Saracen girls and the harem of Gomorra. One of these boys will probably be the slave who grew up at the imperial court and rose to hold the highest offices of state, Johannes Maurus. The slave-woman’s son attracted the Emperor’s attention; he became guardian of the Emperor’s chamber, rose to still more important positions, received a barony, and later, under King Conrad, became Chief Chamberlain, Commandant of the fortress of Lucera, and finally Lord Treasurer of the Sicilian kingdom. Ultimately he was overtaken by the usual fate of the slave who attains great office: he turned traitor and paid the penalty. The Pope took him into favour, but he was murdered by the Saracens who had remained faithful to Manfred. This was another of the types represented at the Court of Frederick II. There were isolated Saracen officials under Frederick, as under the Normans, especially in the departments of Customs and Finance, but they tended to disappear and no other had so brilliant a career as Johannes Maurus.
*
Beside the town-bred literati who grouped themselves round Piero della Vigna and the foreigners, there was a third group of officials, the aristocratic knights. Though Frederick looked more to the efficiency than to the origin of his officers, yet the posts of Justiciar, or, as they were later called in Northern Italy, the posts of Vicar and Vicar-General, were reserved almost exclusively for the lower, less wealthy nobility. The mere possession of a fief was not as in Norman times a qualification for office; the decisive factor was the person. The nobleman could achieve distinction only by his personal service and according to his individual ability. It is the more remarkable that not only the circle of stylists who surrounded della Vigna, but the overwhelming majority of knightly aristocratic officials were drawn from Beneventan or Campanian stocks, were supplemented to a certain extent from Apulia. The Morra family to which the Grand Master Justiciar belonged came from Benevento. They liked to trace their descent, which, however, shared the uncertainty common to all Italian genealogies, back to a certain Gothic Chieftain, King Totila. The Lords of Aquino, who boasted a Lombard descent, came from Campania. They espoused the Emperor’s cause more warmly than any of his other supporters, and Frederick even took a wife from among them. The only untypical scion of the house was the saint, Thomas Aquinas. A third famous family, the Filangieri, claimed to be of Breton lineage and to have come to Sicily with the Normans; they had their seat in the ancient principality of Benevento. The house of Eboli were also reputed to be Lombards. The Montefusculi and the Monteneri came from Benevento, and also the Counts of Caserta, into whose family also Frederick married. Other celebrated servants of the Emperor were the Cicala, probably originally from Genoa, the Acquaviva, settlers in the Abruzzi, the Caraccioli from Naples, the Ruffi from Calabria. The kernel of the kingdom was undoubtedly the Campanian-Beneventan strip, which was full of Lombard blood and had been early conquered by the Normans. It had been less exhausted by racial admixtures than other regions: one is reminded of the similar importance of the Lombard factor in the culture of Tuscany. What influenced the Emperor was the fact not of their Germanic descent but of their undegenerate quality. Frederick liked to boast himself “the offshoot of a new breed” and never counted in the South as a northern foreigner. Nothing, therefore, was further from Frederick’s intention than to create antagonisms where none existed, by re-awakening half-forgotten Germanic memories.
Frederick had, at first, to make use of the Sicilian-Italian nobility as he found them. Gradually, as time went on, this aristocracy, having breathed the air of the court, began to mould itself to a given model, as new generations arose both under Frederick and after him. We gain a vivid insight into all the chivalrous activities of the court—for the court was still strong in knightly tradition—by following out the education and evolution of the nobly born official. The men who were later to attain the highest posts had nearly all served in their boyhood as pages in the Emperor’s immediate circle, and enjoyed that knightly education which is familiar from the court poetry of the time. This education now had a new direction, for it combined knightly culture with the hope of future official employment.
In Frederick’s vicinity we meet at every turn the noble pages, or, to use the French phrase inherited from Norman days, the valetti imperatoris. No nobleman could become a knight unless he had served as page to some great man, Emperor or Pope, or to some spiritual or secular prince. It was customary for the Sicilian nobility to pass the years of boyhood at the imperial court. Service began at the age of fourteen. Prior to this boys of noble birth will have been taught in one of the monasteries. We know of Thomas Aquinas that “as a small boy he had to share the lot of the other noble youths who received instruction in Monte Cassino, as was customary in the country of the saint.” Having once come to court the pages belonged to the Emperor’s familia, received from him a salary of six ounces of gold a month, were entitled to two shield-bearers and three horses (which, like themselves, were maintained by the court), and for the rest formed the lowest rung of the ladder of chivalry, as they are styled in the Sicilian Book of Laws. If a page insults a knight who is of higher rank than himself his hand is cut off. The pages, while at court and not employed on special service, were under the orders of the Seneschal. They fought under his flag, and they had to keep him informed of their comings and goings, even though the Emperor might be already aware of them.
The Emperor took a personal interest in the pages: one who was sick was sent to Apulia for change of air; another at court expense to the baths of Pozzuoli and Salerno. The pages’ duties were very various. Some were told off for personal attendance on the Emperor; one was despatched for the honourable duty of meeting the messenger of Michael Comnenus, another for the reception of the Duke of Carinthia. Their more particular duties concerned all matters of chivalry. We find imperial pages employed in the royal stables, others in the kennels, another in attendance on the hunting leopard, a large number busied about Frederick’s favourite pastime: falconry. Frederick’s passion for hawking is well known. People were so well accustomed to see the Emperor in hunting dress that green became the fashionable colour amongst the Ghibelline partisans in Northern Italy. A papal chronicler writes mockingly that: “Frederick degrades his majestic title to huntsman’s work, and instead of adorning himself with laws and weapons, he surrounds himself with panthers, hounds and screeching birds, and converts the Emperor into a follower of the chase. He exchanges his illustrious sceptre for a spear and disputes with eagles their triumph in bird-slaying.” The imperial hunstman needed numerous pages at hand, and kept them fully employed. There were hawks to be conveyed to the Apulian barons, to be cared for during their mewing; there were the Emperor’s sacri falcones to be fetched from Apulia; other pages were sent to Malta, others again as far as Lübeck, to bring back certain types of falcon. It was probably exceptional for the lads to be permitted to take any actual part in the hawking. The Emperor’s standard for an “ideal falconer” was high. He draws a picture of one in his book on falconry: quick wit, sharp sight, good memory, acute hearing, courage and endurance are essential, and the perfect falconer must be of medium height—long-legged ones are useless. Folk who were only half or quarter-qualified were not allowed near the birds, and the over-young must first grow useful in the Emperor’s service. It is expressly stipulated: “The falconer must not be too boyish in behaviour, lest his boyishness lead him to transgress against the art; for boys are wont to be impatient, and delight chiefly in seeing beautiful flights and many of them. But we do not banish boys completely, for even they will grow wiser. …”
The pages remained at court till they won their knightly girdle, often with the Emperor’s direct assistance. Some of them then left the court and returned to live in their own baronies, or enlisted as mercenary knights in the imperial armies and are thus lost to sight. Others entered the state service, and this possibility may well have been one of the main attractions of coming as a page to court. The Apulian families sent nearly all their sons. Two lords of Aquino, several Morras, one Caraccioli, one Count Caserta, one Filangieri, one Acquaviva; the sons of captains of fortresses, of nonofficial feudal barons, and many others served as pages. Sometimes the Emperor commanded the attendance of a boy at court, and he often sought out those who would be “responsive to the imperial discipline” in order to “receive them into the arms of his education” and interest himself like a father in their fortunes, though they had been begotten by another. He writes once to the father of one of his pages: “We have heaped on him the beginnings of all the virtues, so that he may grow worthy of himself, useful to others and may bear fruit for us,” and, further, that these young men “who live in our service with honour and die in joy of great deeds may not pine away in feeble vices or anaemic anxieties.” Sicily was not the only country represented by pages at the imperial court; Northern Italians came also, and when Frederick II was in Cyprus he took a son of John of Ibelin into his service as a page. Similarly, during a short stay in Vienna at a later date, he brought back Berthold and Godfrey, two sons of the Margravine of Hohenburg, as pages to Italy, for whom a brilliant career was in store, almost the only Germans in the Sicilian State.
We hear nothing of any special instruction of the pages in administrative work, and probably there was none. The Emperor might well reflect that these young noblemen would see and hear enough during their years in his immediate entourage to be ready to take over even the highest office. A lad of twenty who had served for years at court, even though nominally in charge merely of falcons and leopards, must have acquired as much savoir vivre as many an aged bishop. What they lacked in experience was richly compensated for by complete loyalty and eagerness to serve. In this connection we may recall Goethe’s dictum: “If I were a prince, I should never give the first places to people who had come gradually into prominence merely on account of birth and seniority. … I should have YOUNG MEN… then it would be a joy to reign.” Under Frederick II we often find, in fact, quite young noblemen who had been pages holding the highest posts as his representatives. The Hohenburg brothers can scarcely have reached the middle twenties when they were Captains General in Northern Italy. Count Richard of Caserta and Thomas of Aquino junior were younger still when the Emperor entrusted similar posts to them. We know with considerable certainty that Landolfo Caraccioli, who afterwards became Justiciar of the students at Naples, was in 1239 a sixteen-year-old page, yet before Frederick’s death he was officiating as Vicar in a most difficult post in Tuscany in the upper valley of the Arno.
Other nobles who appear as pages of the Emperor at a later date reappear in responsible posts under King Manfred: Berard of Acquaviva, as Justiciar of the island of Sicily, the younger Richard Filangieri as Captain of the Mainland, and many others. We cannot be sure whether noble pages attended the University of Naples, but the imperial page Nicholas of Trani, for instance, later entered the judicial service and was High Court Judge in Manfred’s time. This is the first example of the infusion of the spirit of the town-bred jurist into the knightly nobility; later jurists were sometimes raised to knightly rank, and their sons were received as pages by the Angevin kings.
*
The Emperor’s own sons, whether legitimate or not, mostly grew up among the young nobles at court, and the sons of foreign princes were frequently educated with them. There appears to be no record of what became of the two orphaned sons of King John of Jerusalem, the young brothers-in-law of the Emperor, whom he invited to his court. His cousin Frederick, son of the King of Castile, was sent to grow up under Frederick’s tutelage. The offspring of the Staufen-Castilian breed† were, however, neither to hold nor to bind. Frederick of Castile ran away from the Emperor after a few years: so did his brother, Henry of Castile, a wilder dare-devil still, who, after an adventurous life, was to exert a potent influence in Italian politics in late Hohenstaufen times. King Enzio must have spent some of his boyhood at the Sicilian court, and Frederick of Antioch, too, another natural son of the Emperor. We have considerable detail about Manfred’s education at this intellectual court. He was eighteen when his father died, and Kaiser Frederick, in his later years, loved him more than any of his other sons. “A host of learned doctors” gave him lessons and taught him “about the nature of the world, the origin and development of the body, the creation of souls, their immortality and the methods of perfecting them, the transitory nature of matter, the security of eternal things.” From his childhood Manfred clung to the ways of thought of his father, who was both nurse and mother to him. It was in response to Manfred’s urgent entreaties that Frederick II composed his Falcon Book.
Manfred is said to have later been put under the special care of Berthold of Hohenburg, the sometime page. The heir of the Empire, on the other hand, King Conrad, left his father’s court at the age of seven, nominally to take over the Government of Germany. His tutor was a Neapolitan knight, “to whom Conrad’s education was entrusted on account of his noble race, his great wisdom and eloquence, and his high character, in order that the lad by the elevating example of such a master might be thoroughly educated in every type of virtue, wisdom and self-control.” This Neapolitan was presumably a Caraccioli, since Landolfo Caraccioli, himself then sixteen, accompanied the young king to Germany as a page. We also learn that Conrad was taught with a large number of other boys of noble birth, and the story goes that whenever the young king was at fault his teacher used to thrash one of the other boys, for if the young king had a generous heart it would be particularly painful to him to see others, who were innocent, punished for his guilt.
Some didactic letters of the Emperor to this son are preserved in which Frederick II strives to explain the true dignity of a king. Although Conrad is addressed as a “divine scion of the race of the Caesars,” the letters show how soberly and clearly people at the imperial court thought about the Ruler’s office, for all their hero-worship of the Ruler. “Famous extraction alone is not sufficient for kings nor for the great men of the earth, unless noble personal character is wedded to illustrious race, unless outstanding zeal reflects glory on the prince’s rank. People do not distinguish Kings and Caesars above other men because they are more highly placed, but because they see farther and act better. As men they stand equal to other men by their humanity, they are associated with them in life, and have nothing to pride themselves on, unless by virtue and by wisdom they outshine other men. They are born as men, and as men they die.” Only by wisdom of the spirit—Frederick writes again—are kings distinguished from other men, and it is incomparably more vicious for a prince to fail in serving wisdom and to remain in ignorance than for a private individual, “for the nobility of his royal blood has made a king more susceptible to the teachings of wisdom by inspiring him with a noble and fastidious soul… hence it is necessary and seemly that thou shouldest love wisdom, and for her sake it is fitting that thou lay aside the Caesars’ dignity, and under the master’s rod and the ferule of the teacher be neither king nor emperor but pupil.” And again: “We do not forbid thee to practise with skilful people in due time and place the wonted royal pastime of hawking and the chase. But we adjure thee and wish to warn thee that in hunting and hawking thou do not indulge in too familiar converse with beaters and keepers and huntsmen, that they with presumptuous words impair the royal dignity, or with chatter demean it and corrupt good morals.”
*
It is easy to forget that for all its learning and law-plying Frederick’s court was none the less a knightly medieval court, which for many decades was a focus of chivalry. This was of prime importance for Italy and enabled her to develop the life of courts and kings. Frederick II and his court belonged far more to Italy than the remote Norman Court had done. For years the Emperor’s headquarters camp wandered round central and northern Italy, and even when the Emperor returned to his southern home he still remained in full view of Italy, since he resided wholly in the north of his peninsular territory. It may cause surprise that the Emperor so rarely sought in Palermo, the old Norman capital, the joys and delights of Sicily which he loved to extol.
The tales of a brilliant Hohenstaufen court at Palermo belong to the realm of myth. During the last ten years of his reign Frederick II only once set foot on the island, to suppress the insurrection of 1233 in Messina. Palermo was still the capital of the kingdom, but only in name; with Frederick II it had lost for practical reasons the privileged position of a royal residence. It could only be reached direct by a long sea journey or by a wearisome land march from the Straits, and was much too far out of the world for the Ruler of an Empire. Frederick had to shift the focus of his State to the spot where its main strength was to be found: his most northern provinces.
Frederick had praised Apulia (the Adriatic coast provinces) and the Terra Laboris (the Campania of our day) above the Land of Promise, had boasted himself a “man of Apulia,” and his actual home was now the land lying between these two—the Capitanata surrounding the Gulf of Manfredonia. Up to Frederick’s day the Capitanata had possessed no particular importance, and the fact that for close on a century the threads of world politics met here in this god-forsaken Tavoliere di Puglia, and that the town of Foggia became renowned throughout the lands of East and West, was solely due to the Emperor’s personal preference for this province. The political factor was undoubtedly the decisive one in Frederick’s choice of these northern regions. He was close to the scene of his northern and central Italian battles and ready at any moment to take a hand personally, to set out for the north, to keep an eye on Rome. Other considerations, however, also carried weight in choice of this sterile region. To-day’s stony desert, serving at best for sheep runs, must in Hohenstaufen times, when all was more fruitful and better wooded, have possessed some amoenitas such as the ancient world had an eye for: that pleasant alternation of mountain and hill, of forest and plain and the neighbourhood of the sea. At no period of history, however, can the Capitanata have been able to compete with the colourful Palermo in its exotic almost tropical luxuriance, or with the marvels of the Bay of Naples. Possibly the hunting possibilities attracted Frederick and compensated for other shortcomings; there will be at least a grain of truth in that hypothesis. Italy certainly had the impression that Frederick lingered for the winter in Foggia and spent the summer in the adjacent hills for the sake of hawking. The very barrenness of the region, so obviously unexhausted, probably had more charm for him than the thousandfold fertility of ever-pregnant Sicily, and offered him, moreover, more raw material for creative effort. And what a transformation Frederick succeeded in producing in these northern provinces of his!
He visited the Capitanata oftener than his other provinces, he wrote, because of his castles. He had found no castles there. In 1221 he saw the Capitanata for the first time, and he must have forthwith resolved to make this part of his kingdom his imperial headquarters. As early as 1223 he began the construction of his big castle of Foggia, the inscription on which stated that Frederick had elevated the royal town into a far-famed imperial residence. Soon there arose at reasonable distances pleasure palaces, hunting lodges, and rural hamlets to which there was usually attached a farm or dairy farm. These solatia of the Emperor seemed to grow as simply and naturally out of the soil of the Great Capitanata—to use Enzio’s phrase—as the neighbouring holy places of ancient days. The Castel del Monte, on its lofty site near Barletta, is the best preserved and the best known of these Hohenstaufen castles. Its ground-plan is unique, and like many other of the Emperor’s buildings it was probably sketched by Frederick himself: a regular octagon of yellowish limestone; its smooth perfectly-fitting blocks showing no joins and producing the effect of a monolith: at each of the eight corners a squat octagonal tower the height of the wall; two storeys identical in height, each containing eight large equal rooms, trapezium-shaped; an octagonal central courtyard adorned with antique sculptures and imitations of the antique, in the centre of which a large octagonal basin served as bath. Every fraction of the structure displays the mental catholicity of the Hohenstaufen court: oriental massiveness of the whole, a portal foreshadowing the Renaissance, Gothic windows and rooms with groined and vaulted roofs. The defiant gloom of the tiny-windowed rooms was mitigated by the furnishings; the floors were of mosaic, the walls covered with sheets of reddish breccia or white marble, the groined vaults supported on pilasters with Corinthian capitals, or by delicate clustered columns of white marble. Majesty and grace were fused in one.
Frederick II never stinted well-chosen splendour, and the exotic luxury and magnificence probably produced a more powerful effect in these sterner northern regions than in the half-African half-Saracen Palermo. What mysteries, what unimagined revelries contemporaries pictured taking place behind the mute walls of these castles! What amazing brilliance they caught a glimpse of now and then! In the rambling castle of Foggia, which is described as a palace rich in marble, with statues and pillars of verd-antique, with marble lions and basins, those legendary banquets will have taken place amid riot and revelry the glamour of which still clings round the memory of the Hohenstaufen Court.
“Every sort of festive joy was there united. The alternation of choirs, the purple garments of the musicians evoked a festal mood. A number of guests were knighted, others adorned with signs of special honour. The whole day was spent in merriment, and as the darkness fell, flaming torches were kindled here and there and turned night into day for the contests of the players.” So tells the chronicler, and yet another reports the wonders of the inner courts which the English prince Richard, Earl of Cornwall, was privileged to see. The English noble was returning home from the crusade in summer heat: they first with baths and blood-lettings and strengthening draughts made him forget the toils and hardships of the journey and the war, and then entertained him with every type of sport. He listened in amazement to strange airs on strange instruments, saw the jugglers display their skill, was ravished by the sight of lovely Saracen maidens, who to the rhythm of cymbals and castanets came dancing in, balanced on great balls that rolled across the many-coloured polished floor. Tales and romances tell of the feasts of Frederick and the glories of his court: how hundreds of knights from all nations were entertained in silken tents, how minstrels streamed in from every corner of the earth and foreign embassies displayed the rarest jewels. The messengers of Prester John brought an asbestos garment, an elixir of youth, a ring of invisibility, and, lastly, the philosopher’s stone. Further, people told how the Emperor’s court astrologer, Michael Scot, whose name was named with shuddering curiosity, on a hot day at a feast assembled thunderclouds at the Emperor’s command and performed other miracles.
*
Apulia was never to see again such chivalrous display as flourished under Frederick II and Manfred. Chivalry itself, bound up as it was with crusade and Minnesang, was already growing dim in the later Staufen days. Moreover, the Anjous who followed the Hohenstaufen in Sicily were joyless bigots, and, although themselves Provençal, were far less in sympathy than the Swabian dynasty with the lighthearted, almost pagan spirit and the joie de vivre of the southern troubadours.
New love poetry came to birth in the chivalrous, not in the learned, atmosphere of Frederick’s court. The much-debated question how, and through whom, Frederick learned to know the lyrics of Provence, and how their “transference” to the Sicilian court is to be explained, is otiose. It would have been inexplicable if Frederick had remained in ignorance of such poetry. He was quite as fully in touch with the whole world of French and Provençal culture as with the culture of the East. He knew both languages from boyhood, was, acquainted with their literature, and will most assuredly have read the novels which were familiar to his court: Tristan, Lancelot and the rest. We have evidence that he knew Merlin and the Palamedes of Guiron de Courtois. The troubadours sang the praise of the Puer Apuliae, and legend located at the court of the fifteen-year-old king the first poet-coronation of the Middle Ages, the travelling singer crowned rex versuum who later became the Franciscan, Fra Pacifico.
The poetry of the imperial court was imitated from the Provençal, both in form and content. The foreign language was not used, however, as was customary at the courts of North Italian nobles, such as Saluzzo and Montferrat. Here, for the first time, poetry was written in an Italian vernacular, the popular speech of Sicilian Apulia. There must have been isolated forerunners writing in Sicilian—the legendary Alkamo perhaps—but every history of Italian literature begins with the songs of the Sicilian court. The concentration of the “Sicilian School of Poets” which here sprang up helped immensely to increase the influence and spread the popularity of the new vernacular poetry, as Petrarch recalls, “in a very short time this type of poetry, which had been born amongst the Sicilians, spread throughout all Italy and beyond.” As late as Dante all non-Latin poetry in Italian was dubbed “Sicilian,” which Dante in his book De Vulgari Eloquentiâ explains by saying “because, as is well known the royal throne was in Sicily.”
The times were ripe for Frederick’s experiment. Starting in Provence, the popular love poetry had spread to the other European communities, especially the French and German, and had been warmly welcomed. Only when its zenith was almost overpast did it find its way to Italy, for Italy had lagged far behind the other European countries in evolving a native language of its own, probably because no other country had remained so closely in touch with Latin. The realisation that the spoken tongue had ceased to be the speech of Rome, and had become an independent idiom, scarcely came before the thirteenth century. A feeling of Italian nationality, whose prophet Dante was to be, began to dawn about the same time—later than in other countries, delayed by the same misconception that Italian and Latin were one. Since the rise of a national self-consciousness and a national language are closely related we need not wonder that an Italian dialect first attained the dignity of a popular language in the South Italian State of Frederick II, that is, in that section of Italy in which national feeling had been first and most strongly awakened.
The question what “put it into Frederick’s head” to utilise the native Sicilian dialect of Apulia for his poems in the Provençal style is childish. The sufficient explanation is that he was a statesman, and the founder of a nation. It is reported of the Normans, those highly gifted statesmen, that they had made the attempt, albeit prematurely and unsuccessfully, to unify the Sicilian people by introducing French: gens efficiatur ut una. Their hope was to introduce uniformity of speech by popularising the language of the court, for in the middle of the twelfth century French was the language of the royal capital of Palermo. Frederick had transferred the focus of his kingdom from the polyglot island with its confusion of tongues to the mainland of one speech, and it was characteristic of him that he did not seek to import a foreign language for courtly poetry and festivity, but seized for his experiment the raw material that lay to hand, and moulded it to his purpose. Dante is the witness for his success: “For although the native born Apulians in general speak coarsely, some of their distinguished people spoke in a refined manner, blending courtly turns of speech into their songs.” By the refinement and cultivation of the common speech Frederick and his school elevated the local dialect to that volgare illustre of court and literature. He thus recognised Sicilian as an independent tongue, and established a common tie between the people and their ruler “of the new breed.” How far Frederick acted with the conscious intention of establishing a unity of speech and race is unimportant beside the fact itself that he was the most important pioneer, as Dante was the actual creator, of modern Italian. Such an achievement by an Emperor is unique.
The problems created by the existence of two languages, which was, of course, a commonplace in other countries (Frederick was the first to issue an imperial decree in German as well as Latin) still remained in the southern Hohenstaufen State. The sacred Latin was indispensable to the Roman Imperator on account of its universal validity, and Frederick did not dream of using for his “Holy Constitution,” his “Revelations,” his imperial decrees, any but the language of the Caesars, which his Chancery handled with such consummate skill. The vernacular was not stately enough for the eternal verities; even Dante still distinguishes between the immutable Latin, the master, and the changeable, ephemeral vernacular, the servant. The imperial sanctities were meant for immortality, but attempts were already being made in Italy to lend a consecration to the vulgar tongue which Dante’s poema sacro finally achieved. Almost simultaneously with the first songs of Frederick, Francis of Assisi, the “minstrel of the Lord” had begun to sing. His was a rude vernacular, still strongly Latin-ridden, but he was writing from an inner compulsion which the Sicilians lacked. Frederick II used Sicilian as a light and living speech for secular and courtly merriment, he did not ask of it seriousness or solemnity. His songs are nothing more than an expression of joie de vivre and courtly life, born of the moment and serving the moment. In comparison with Provençal there is scarcely a new thought or feeling in the Sicilian songs: their sole aim was to sound merry at the festive gathering; the important thing was not what was sung, but that there should be singing in the speech of the people and the language of one’s neighbours. Frederick borrowed from the singers of Auvergne, Limousin and Provence not only metre and content, but—what was even more vital—their joy in life, which awakened a response in people, court and Emperor.
*
Nothing gives Frederick such unique distinction in the gallery of famous monarchs as the unruffled cheerfulness which he maintained through all vicissitudes: that intellectual cheerfulness of the man who feels himself equal to every emergency, whose glance scans the earth from Olympian heights and shrinks not from contemplation of himself. This quality derives its name from Jupiter. It is called “jovialitas” or “serenity” in the official language of the court. This cheerful serenity demands, beside a princely spirit, a certain maturity, and a complete, established, measurable world. It is rare amongst rulers: amongst monarchs of this stature perhaps only to be met with in Julius Caesar. After Frederick II none of the great men of action have displayed it to the same degree. Clever and witty kings are not uncommon; lighthearted merry ones are found in France; Henry IV, drawing with his first breath the bouquet of the wines of Gascony. They are far removed from the lofty, imperial cheerfulness of Frederick. Cheerfulness, and joy in living, a sense of song and rhythm in spite of the burdens of responsibility. No other German stock achieved this lighthearted freedom of spirit so fully as the Hohenstaufen, and no other Hohenstaufen in the same measure as Frederick II, who even retained it in the midst of Empire. Frederick handed on this quality to his handsome sons, none destined to be Emperors. They also sang, even when tragic fate was overtaking them. Henry, the first born, the rebel who ended his life in his father’s dungeon, did not cease his singing even as the chamberlain stripped him of the royal insignia he had wantonly forfeited—“In the morning he sang, and in the evening wept.” Manfred, with irresponsible folly, forgot his kingdom for his song. The old Occursius, who had served both the imperial father and the son, turned to Manfred shortly before they both were slain in the battle of Benevento, reproachful yet moved: “Where now are your fiddlers, where your poets, whom you loved more than knights and esquires, who hoped the foe would dance to their sweet tones!” Enzio, in the Bologna dungeon, touched and cheered his very gaolers with his cheerful songs. And the amiable and knightly Frederick of Antioch, whom men called the King of Tuscany, sang like his brothers; and, lastly, his grandson Conradin sang his own death and the death of his house in a sweet song of mourning. Not frivolity nor royal fashion is here, but an incomparable vigour of the blood, which even in ruin demands glory and fame. Their very beauty betrayed Manfred and Enzio to the foe. The whole of Hohenstaufen art and all Frederick’s own compositions are steeped in this joy of living: a happy harvest of the world he ruled and represented, a poetry of love springing from the joy of the happy man “who understood the art of making and of singing songs.”
The new poetry was not confined to the Hohenstaufen family, though without them it would have been unthinkable. The art exercised wide influence because Frederick the poet was Frederick the Emperor, and the court provided a responsive audience on festive occasions. The personality of Frederick II and of Manfred counted for much, and cannot better be explained than by Dante’s praise when he breaks forth in wrath against his contemporary nobles, especially the successor of the Sicilian Hohenstaufen, Frederick II of Aragon and Charles II of Anjou. “The (literary) fame of Trinacria, if we read the signs aright, remains only to the shame of the Italian princes who, unlike heroes but like plebeians, follow their own conceit. The illustrious heroes Kaiser Frederick, and Manfred his not unworthy son, revealed the nobility and rightness of their mind, and as long as fortune favoured them they pursued the truly humane and despised the bestial. Hence all such princes as were of noble heart and lofty spirit clung to them, and in their time all the distinguished minds of the day amongst the Latins first blossomed forth at the court of such kings. And since Sicily was the royal seat everything which our predecessors produced in the vulgar tongue has been called Sicilian; and we continue to say Sicilian, and our successors will not be able to alter this. But alas! alas! what poetry do we hear from this later Frederick? What tinkle of bells from this second Charles? What sound of horns from John and Azzo the mighty margraves? save ‘Come, ye oppressors! Come, ye double-dealers! Come, ye disciples of greed!’”
When a poet of Dante’s rank and courage celebrates in such language the humanity of the “illustrious heroes” this must have been an unusual phenomenon, as indeed it was. Not the least remarkable thing was the school of poets itself. Princes of taste have frequently “patronised poetry” at their courts, attracting players and travelling singers by largesse. This was not Frederick’s way. Rather the reverse. Frederick distrusted the nomad minstrel, did not encourage him in his kingdom, and at a feast in Germany actually commanded that not so much money should be wasted on the wandering folk. The amazing thing was that Frederick produced all these early poets without exception at his own imperial court. Following the Emperor’s example, the officials suddenly burst into rhyme. The Renaissance Princes bestowed office on poets, painters and sculptors, so also Karl August on Goethe. This was the exact opposite of Frederick’s procedure: Frederick made no man a state official because he happened to be a poet, but the “compelling necessity of things” evoked poetic skill from the officials of this Emperor. Surely a phenomenon unique in history: one of the greatest statesmen and lawgivers creates the literary language of a whole people, and not that alone, but during two or three generations evoked the poets of a century. This reinforces the essential truth of Damon’s saying that the laws of a State cannot be altered without altering those also of the Muses.
It was natural that although the impetus of the new poetry was given by the Emperor it was primarily the younger generation, not Frederick’s own contemporaries, who practised the new art. None of the officials seem to have written verse before 1231, and the heyday of the movement was a full ten years later. The Emperor’s own songs, which were more important in influence than in number, must have dated from before the Crusade. The King of Jerusalem, John of Brienne, Re Giovanni, was then at Frederick’s court, and a poem of his in the Sicilian vernacular is preserved, which cannot well be of later date. The chronology is best established by considering who the poets were. And since it is not a question of learned art, but of courtly and knightly verse, we must seek the authors amongst the aristocratic officials, especially those who, during their impressionable years, had come most strongly under the influence of the Court.
*
No less than three members of the noble family of Aquino are amongst the poets: Reginald, Jacob and Monaldo. Reginald was page and falconer of the Emperor in 1240 and a few years later held a certain post at Court. He wrote numerous poems, a line of which Dante once quoted. We have no record of his cousin Jacob’s having been a page, but Jacob’s elder brother certainly was. When the father was killed in the Emperor’s service Frederick expressly wrote that he proposed to make himself specially responsible for the two boys, so we may safely assume that Jacob of Aquino also belonged to the group of noble boys educated at Court. We know nothing of Monaldo beyond the fact that he belonged to the school of poets. Reginald of Aquino vainly sought to lure to court his younger brother Thomas—by far the most gifted of the family. Piero della Vigna seconded his efforts, but the young Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, was not to be enticed. Even Frederick himself secretly supplemented their attempts, for he liked to dissuade gifted young noblemen from joining the mendicant orders, which were attracting them in scores. We know that he similarly sought to influence a young noble of Parma.
The name of Jacob of Aquino is linked by an interchange of canzones with that of Jacopo Mostacci, one of the younger poets, who with his brother is recorded as a page of Frederick’s, about 1240. He was later in Manfred’s service as ambassador at the Court of Aragon. A Morra, son of the Grand Justiciar, and elder brother of one of the pages of 1240, also appears among the court poets. Jacob of Morra was already, at this date, Captain of the duchy of Spoleto, and on account of his father’s high position was one of the most trusted intimates of Frederick II, one of those whom the Emperor had “brought up as sons and from whom nothing was concealed.” Jacob of Morra had made a thorough-going study of Provençal. One of the troubadours, probably Hugh of St. Circq, wrote for him the earliest Provençal grammar that we possess, and some of the loveliest lyrics of the Sicilian School bear the name of “Giacomino Pugliese.” He was entrusted with one of the highest posts in Frederick’s gift, reserved for his special favourites, and made Vicar General of the Ancona March. In this position he betrayed his master and allowed himself to be entangled in a conspiracy.
Another poet, Roger de Amicis, met a similar fate. He also was amongst the highest officials, Grand Justiciar or Captain of Sicily, and amongst other verses of his we know an interchange of poems between him and his younger friend, Reginald of Aquino. Roger de Amicis, one of the Emperor’s intimates, was a nobleman of Calabria. He was sent on one occasion as ambassador to Cairo to the Egyptian court. Folco Ruffo, also a poet, came from the same neighbourhood. He is frequently mentioned in the later days as in Frederick’s train, and must still have been quite a young man when he witnessed the dying Emperor’s last will and testament. He belonged to the famous family of the Ruffi, one of whom was head of the imperial stables, and another of whom wrote, at the Emperor’s request, a book on veterinary science. Lastly, we meet Reginald of Palermo, also a page in 1240, a Sicilian feudal baron, and perhaps he is the author of the poems preserved under the name of Rainer of Palermo of whom nothing is known.
Numerous members of the Beneventan family of the Monteneri were amongst Frederick’s higher officials. Reginald of Montenero was one of the poets, and is described in a novel which relates his adventures as a minstrel in Sardinia as “kavaliere di corte.” The kingdom of Sardinia belonged to Enzio, and so this Montenero must, in some capacity or other, have been his subordinate. As the imperial administration gradually extended to the whole of Italy, and Sicilian officials were in charge everywhere, the northward spread of vernacular poetry is no matter for surprise. It is noteworthy that at first only the imperial, that is Ghibelline towns, like Pisa, Arezzo, Siena, Lucca and Florence, produced poets.
The story goes that the cultured youth of Bologna used frequently to visit King Enzio when he was imprisoned there. It is unlikely that Enzio made any secret of his poems, which he valued enough to mention in his will. Guido Guinizelli may well have been one of the visitors who will have heard them read. Enzio’s name is often quoted in relation to the poems of the notary, Semprebene of Bologna, one of the earliest vernacular poets of northern Italy, and who is also counted of the Sicilian school. A few other North Italians belong to the same school, aristocratic officials of the Emperor, who were closely in touch with the court. Arrigo Testa is one, a knight of Arezzo, who was frequently posted as podesta in imperial towns, and then spent some time in prison in Florence, where Frederick of Antioch lived when officiating as Vicar General of Tuscany. Frederick of Antioch was most exceptionally gifted, and his poems signed “Re Federigo” have often been confused with his father’s. Percival Doria, podesta in Avignon, and later in Parma under Frederick, was a Genoese. He was Captain of the March under Manfred till he was drowned on active service in one of Manfred’s campaigns. None of King Manfred’s songs have been preserved, though he was always surrounded by a horde of German “fiddlers” (in Tuscany they used to sing a song that ran: “Horses we get from Spain, and clothes from France, and here we sing and dance in Provençal style to new instruments from Germany”). The songs of his High Chamberlain have fared no better, Count Manfred Maletta, “who was great and powerful at the court of the king, rich and beloved of Manfred… who was the best (poet) and perfect in inventing canzones and melodies and had not his like in the world for playing of stringed instruments.”
The town-bred jurists took a hand with the princely and knightly singers in this vernacular verse-making, the first courtly art which really united royalty, aristocracy and citizens. These lawyer poets were fewer in number than their princely rivals, but carried the more weight, for Piero della Vigna was one of the first to write songs in Sicilian. He may even have been the rallying point of the poetical school, and numbers of the younger poets exchanged poems with him. As he had not come into prominence much before the Crusade, and this verse-mongering belongs to his later period, it is not unlikely that he too owed his inspiration to the Emperor. Whether or not, he is one of the rare poets of Frederick’s own generation. In this, as in other matters, Frederick and della Vigna are closely bound together.
Through Piero della Vigna the new art spread to the jurists. They were intellectually the most highly trained, and linguistically the most expert men of their time, and the most qualified to make this new art their own and to carry it on, when after a time the knightly poets found no disciples in their own ranks. Thus poetry began in Italy to find its home in the towns, just as it had in Germany, where knightly Minnesang was succeeded by the burghers’ Meistersang, until at last it became wholly wooden and mechanical. The same danger existed in Italy. We have probably to thank the lawyers’ cultivated sense of style for the discovery of new strophe forms—Piero della Vigna is said to have constructed the first sonnet—but the increasing ossification and emaciation of poetry were due no less to their excessive learning. At last the barren waste of legal and philosophical versification that flooded northern and central Italy was forgotten in the “sweet new style” of Dante.
Next to Piero della Vigna, one of the best-known representatives of the Sicilian school, was another lawyer of the imperial court, Notary Giacomo da Lentini. He also stood in close relation with most of the young aristocrats, and in quantity his output exceeds that of any other poet of the time. He is so typical of the school that Dante in the important conversation with Bonagiunta di Lucca picks out “the Notary” as a sample of the old tendencies. Lastly, we should mention the later judge Guido Colonna whose poems, like Reginald of Aquino’s, Dante quotes on occasion.
*
Thus in the famous, and infamous, State of Frederick II (the “first modern bureaucracy”!) we find amongst the officials an inner circle of scholars, poets and artists round the Emperor, all men of greater or lesser intellectual gifts, living in considerable intimacy, sharing each other’s many-sided knowledge, and each stimulated by the rest. How widely the Sicilian poets differ from the troubadours in being neither wandering nor professional minstrels! The Sicilian poets, as later the Sicilian sculptors, were bound to the State, were one with it. The pillars of the new poetry were pillars of the State, which claimed the whole of each official, his private gifts as well as his public service. Frederick II had the great art of enlisting everything in his service and letting nothing waste itself in space: but this imposed on the individual an unrelaxing tension, not easy to be borne, from which the wandering minstrel was entirely free. There was no lack of poetic rivalry in Sicily, but it was on a higher plane than the troubadours’ bread-and-butter competition, for the Sicilian poets had no anxiety about their livelihood; they were one and all imperial officials.
The imperial school of poetry differed in another point from the poetry of other courts: at Frederick’s court the Lady was not the centre of chivalrous devotion. According to oriental custom the Empress, with her own court pomp, lived apart from the Emperor in the “harem,” and even Frederick’s many lady-loves played no rôle in the life of his court; we scarcely even know their names. There was only one centre—the Emperor. In this matter Frederick’s court more nearly resembles the papal court than any other of the time. The Emperor’s life amongst his cultured courtiers and officials, in spite of its intellectual recklessness, begot a tensely stimulating mental atmosphere that had not its like in the West, a new virile spirit which would have split everything asunder if it had not been held in the iron grip of the State. This intellectual stimulus was further quickened by the new knowledge of the natural sciences which Frederick himself, supported by many foreign scholars, introduced into his court.
*
The appearance of the doctrine of Necessitas, the doctrine of natural laws inherent in things themselves, shows how daringly advanced thought was in those days, how closely in touch with the living and the actual. We can determine this in yet another way. The ancients, starting from the primitive natural world of their Gods and Heroes, rose by a study of natural laws and of “Anankê” to a recognition of “Nous”; then higher and ever higher till at last only one single World “Nous” ruled the universe. After many hundred years the human mind was now descending from the repose of these spiritual heights in which all form was dissolved, retracing again in a downward direction the path by which it had climbed up. Once again a recognition of the living laws of nature, more especially those which were valid throughout the universe, a further descent of the mind to concern itself with earth and the creatures of earth, till Nature, Soul and Spirit, interpenetrated each other on earth in the age of the Medicis in Florence. Each epoch of the Middle Ages found its own time already lived through in the past. Otto III sought to renew the days of Constantine, and his teacher Gerbert, when he became Pope, took the name of Sylvester II to correspond with the bishop of Rome under Constantine. The whole thirteenth century was conscious of a most intimate kinship with the first century of the Christian era, introduced by the prophecy of Abbot Joachim of Flora: the new era which was dawning would resemble that of the first Christians under the apostles. St. Francis as a direct disciple of the Lord seemed to fulfil the prophecy.
Frederick II sought to bring in again the age of Augustus, and the sum of his speculation ultimately reduced itself to a belief that just before the end of the world everything must exactly correspond with the fulness of time of the first century. True, the actual moment, the Day of Redemption, was in a new sense not experienced till Good Friday of the anno santo, the jubilee year 1300, when Dante led by Vergil entered on the path to Paradise.
The philosophico-scientific impulses of the time revert to the early Christian or late classical epochs. The same ancient authors who formerly lured men up into a spiritual world of intellectual abstractions now enabled men gropingly to feel their way down again into the corporeal world. The whole phantom world of late classical philosophy was rediscovered on the way. The normal course of organic growth, to arrive at the general law by abstraction from the individual, was reversed in the Scholastic age. The Scholastic mind, always focussed on the Universal as the first given premiss, the thought accustomed to daily converse with the “Universal,” was able more readily to grasp a general law about the collective Cosmos than the simplest single thing on Earth, and people learned to know Nature in her individual manifestations through intellectual speculation about Law and Species. Anything related to Eternity and the Universal was quickly grasped by the trained mind: Astronomy and Mathematics were, therefore, more immediately understood than Botany and Zoology, and these in their turn more rapidly than the science of men. Plastic art shows every step of the road.
The recent fashion of ascribing to the Middle Ages a feeling for or observation of Nature is simply playing with words. The Middle Ages certainly considered Nature holy as the eternal order of the world, but no one before at earliest 1200 conceived it speculatively and yet intellectually as a live thing, moved by its own forces, throbbing with its own life. No importance attached to it in itself; men preferred to grasp natural phenomena abstractly as allegory and to interpret them transcendentally. A late Alexandrine work, the Physiologus, which was translated into all the vernaculars, reinforced this tendency. It was almost the only source of natural science which the Middle Ages possessed except Pliny and the Encyclopaedia of Isidore of Seville, and it was by far the most popular. The Physiologus was a natural history which gave little anecdotes about the various animals and their habits, and recorded, at great length, their allegorical significance. What the Lion, the Bull and the Unicorn denoted from the moral, astral or cosmic point of view, awakened much more interest than what they, in fact, were.
Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, who was sent in the days of the Ottos as ambassador to Byzantium, exemplifies this type of nature study. He was shown an imperial zoological park in which there was a herd of wild asses. The bishop immediately began to excogitate what significance these wild donkeys might have for the universe. A sibylline saying occurred to him: “Lion and Cat shall conquer the Wild Ass.” Liutprand first thought that this indicated a joint victory of his master Otto I and the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus, over the Saracens. Then it seemed, however, that the two equally potent monarchs could not well be represented by the mighty lion and the little cat, where upon a little further reflection the true interpretation flashed on him: Lion and Cat were his masters Otto the Great and his young son Otto II, while the wild ass whom they should overcome, as was proved by the zoological garden, was no other than the Emperor Nicephorus himself! Thus Bishop Liutprand, one of the most learned of clerics, envisaged Nature. And yet he was familiar with an immense number of ancient authors: Cicero, Terence, Vegetius, Pliny, Lucretius, Boëthius, to name only a few, and to mention Ovid, Vergil, Horace not at all. In these things the classics carried no weight; people got from them what they brought to them—a moral or an adventure. Even the adventures that you experienced yourself you interpreted intellectually if you were sufficiently learned. The letter of the Chancellor Conrad who describes his Sicilian journey in which he had seen Scylla and Charybdis, and the wonders of the Magician Vergil and the like, shows this projection of the already-known on to the world of fact. In the age of the Crusaders men’s fantasy took colour from the fabled animals and mythical beings of Ovid and Apuleius, the tales of Alexander, the wanderings of Aeneas and Odysseus. Gradually, however, from using their fancy men learned to use their eyes.
*
It is remarkable what the ancients, who give to each age according to its need, provided for the Middle Ages. It is probably the only time they have been called on to waken men’s senses to magic and formlessness. The Middle Ages, fast bound in forms and formulas, had enough and more than enough of these. Men who received their real life from another world, a life that revealed itself in unalterable forms which were holy, and beautiful and eternal, had naught to do with transitory life that expressed itself in its own forms. For them the ancients needed to bring no new forms—they often produced effects actually hostile to form—their mission was rather to awaken and set free the hidden smouldering forces. The authors who, among the ancients, had a message for those times were a motley crew, to many of whom access nowadays is almost barred. The favourite works were those innumerable pseudo-Aristotelian writings which seek to make Aristotle “more comprehensible” by neo-platonic speculations. Men, unaccustomed to use their eyes, who were seeking the inner meaning of things from the starting point not of life and man, but of universal thought, could only find an approach to the ancients through such authors as made most appeal to the mind and least to the eye, and for them the Arabs were the best interpreters. The Arabs had sifted ancient literature with but one end in view, and had transplanted everything purely intellectual that would bear transplanting, but their minds were entirely closed to anything that bore the special imprint of Greek and Roman life. Not one single historian did they take over, not one single poet! What were the tragic dramatists to them, the great lyricists! What was Homer to them! They only recognised one line of his as of any value:
εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω· εἷς βασιλεύς
On the other hand they had borrowed all the writings about Natural Science and Medicine, and all the philosophers since Alexander, and of the early philosophers only Plato’s Timaeus, Phaedo and the Republic.
After the natural history writers the Neo-Platonists appealed most to them, and in the neo-platonist version they learned to know the great systematist Aristotle. Even to the great Arab philosophers of the tenth and eleventh centuries, al Kindi, al Farabi and Avicenna, Aristotle was only accessible in the garbled neo-platonist disguise. The great interpreter of the real Aristotle, the Spaniard Averroes, did not appear till the twelfth century. One of the greatest achievements of this great scholar was to reveal to the West in translation and with commentaries a purer Aristotle, and to retranslate other ancient authors from Arabic into western tongues. Averroes died in the year which saw the four-year-old Frederick crowned King of Naples in Palermo, though legend relates that he lived at the court of Frederick.
Translations from the Arabic on an extensive scale began to be made in the twelfth century principally, indeed almost exclusively, in Spain in the school of Toledo, which in the Middle Ages was accounted the headquarters of the magic arts: astrology, necromancy, chiromancy, pyromancy and every other sort of divination. North Italians like Gerard of Cremona worked here alongside Spaniards like Dominicus Gundissalinus. About the turn of the century the first translations of Averroes’ works must have begun to issue from Toledo, and along with them the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle. As early as 1209 these works were forbidden by Pope Innocent III. A second, but less important, collecting place for such works was the Norman court of Palermo, the second entrance gate of Eastern culture. Here men like Eugene of Palermo and Admiral Henry Aristippus were at work, but, as far as is known, the sole translation from the Arabic that here appeared was the Optics of Ptolemy. Palermo was already far more important as a link with Byzantium, and it was chiefly Greek works which were there translated even into Latin: sayings of the Erythraean Sibyl, the Syntax of Ptolemy, the Optics as well as the Elements of Euclid, the writings of Proclus, the Pneumatica of Hero of Alexandria, the logical and meteorological works of Aristotle, Plato’s Meno and Phaedo, etc. Chalcidius’ Latin translation of the Timaeus and the never-lost translations by Boëthius of the Aristotelian Topica, Analytica and Categorica.
We may assume that Frederick was acquainted with the majority of these works. It is also probable that through his intimacy with the Saracens in Palermo he had learned in his boyhood to know the scientific-philosophic writings of the Arabs; he certainly learned to know the Arab mind. In the thirty years of Sicilian chaos which followed on the death of the last Norman king the scholarly activities of the court came to a standstill. Frederick II on every occasion renewed old traditions, and on his return from Germany to his Sicilian kingdom, still more on his return from the East, a period of intellectual activity began at the imperial Court the results of which no longer lagged behind those of Toledo. When Constantinople was conquered by the Crusaders in 1204, and a Latin Empire established there, the interest of Byzantium decreased considerably and Greek studies began to be ousted by Arabic. What the Emperor himself enjoyed at first hand he now proceeded to interpret to the Western world through his numerous scholars.
It was probably when Frederick II visited Bologna on his coronation journey that he first met the most celebrated of all the scholars of his later court: Michael Scot. Little is known with certainty about the Scottish scholar’s life. He began his career at Toledo, where he translated the Spherics of Alpetragius in 1217. Three years later he appears in Bologna, then was for some time in correspondence with the papal Curia, which recommended him to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he probably came to Frederick about 1227. He had probably made Frederick’s acquaintance first at the same time that the Emperor had made friends with the mathematician, Leonardo of Pisa. Michael Scot, translator, astrologer, philosopher, mathematician and augur, was reckoned a wizard by his age, and Dante consigns to Hell this master of magic and necromancy “practised in every slight of magic wile,” and introduces him as a false prophet of the future with his head turned backwards on his shoulders. Innumerable marvellous and uncanny stories were current about him and the Emperor, and can still be found in the novels and tales of the Romantics. The shuddering awe which Frederick II inspired was shared by his Court Astrologer, whom people called a “second Apollo.” They related that, knowing beforehand the manner of his own death, he always wore an iron cap, and that in spite of it he was killed by a falling stone, exactly as he had foretold. His death probably occurred in 1235 as he was accompanying the Emperor to Germany.
Michael Scot is credited with a considerably larger number of writings than he actually produced. It is, however, certain that he translated Aristotle’s De Caelo and De Anima with the commentaries of Averroes, and also the Aristotelian zoological writings which Avicenna had grouped under the title of Liber animalium: Historiae animalium, De partibus animalium, and other treatises—nineteen books in all. This work was dedicated, like most of his others, to the Emperor. It introduced the Aristotelian zoology for the first time to the West. Master Henry of Cologne made a transcript of the Emperor’s copy in 1232, and this may well have been the copy used by Albertus Magnus. Translations of the Physics and Metaphysics were also ascribed, probably incorrectly, to Michael Scot. His authorship of some obscure philosophical treatises such as the Quaestiones of Nicolas the Peripatetic and a Systematic Philosophy is more probable.
Other Aristotelian writings were known at the Court: the Nicomachaean Ethics, Rhetoric and Meteorology, and, decades later, the Politics also. Pseudo-Aristotelian writings were on the other hand even more numerous. King Manfred later had the treatise De Pomo translated into Latin (Frederick had already had it translated into Hebrew) and presented the Magna Moralia to the University of Paris. Frederick himself quotes in his Falcon Book the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanics. The so-called Problemata, which a scholar staying in Greece had translated from the Greek, were dedicated to the Emperor. The so-called Theology or περὶ βασιλείας of Aristotle was also presumably familiar.
Another scholar, Master Theodore, prepared for the Emperor extracts from the Secretum Secretorum which was also ascribed to Aristotle. Master Theodore, like Michael Scot, bore the title of Court Philosopher, and probably succeeded to the latter’s post at Court. He was later even granted a fief. Michael Scot represented the spirit of Spain and Toledo, Theodore rather that of the Arab East. He probably came from Antioch, was said to have studied in Baghdad and Mosul, and had been sent to the Emperor in 1236 by the “Great Khalif,” probably al Kamil of Egypt. He was not allowed to be idle: in the course of a few months he was employed as astrologer to cast the Emperor’s horoscope; as chancery clerk to conduct correspondence with Arab rulers; he was sent to Tunis as ambassador; as a scholar he was set to translate an Arabic treatise, and, lastly—a less intellectual but not less important employment—he had to prepare violet sweetmeats for the court, some of which the Emperor sent to Piero della Vigna who was sick.
Peter the Spaniard described himself in a medical treatise as a pupil of Master Theodore. Nothing further is known about him, nor about the two other men who are styled Court Philosophers: Master John of Palermo and Master Dominicus, probably a Spaniard. Almost all these court scholars maintained close relations with the circle of Leonardo of Pisa, who introduced the system of Arabic numerals to the West. We know that Frederick II met this greatest of all medieval mathematicians in Pisa and conversed with him at length.
Leonardo never actually entered the Emperor’s service, but he sent a revised version of his most important work, the Abacus, to Michael Scot, referred to the “great philosopher” Master Theodore, and dedicated his Liber Quadratorum to the Emperor, who it seems had in earlier years completely mastered the great mathematician’s other writings. The Sultan, al Kamil, had sent a mathematician and astronomer, the learned al Hanifi, to the Emperor, for mathematics were very highly valued by the Emperor personally. The court scholars all found mathematics absolutely indispensable for their astronomical and astrological calculations.
The immense importance of astrology for this century is rarely appreciated. A hard and fast conception of “Time” prevailed, and to astrology fell the task of determining the right moment, the feeling for which was imperfectly developed or had been undermined by a belief in Providence. Hers also was the task of proving directly from an eternal source, the metaphysical necessity of a given event’s happening at a given moment. There was as yet no room for the conception that events themselves bring their own moment with them and that the event gives the moment its eternal significance. Even Dante assured himself of the position of the planets at the time of every important occurrence, thus linking time with eternity. In this his position was akin to Michael Scot’s, who declared: “The heavenly bodies are not the cause of events, but the sign thereof, as the compasses in front of the tavern are the sign that wine is within.”
Astronomy and astrology played an important part in court life. One of the sultans had sent Frederick that costly astrolabe which, with his son and heir Conrad, was the thing dearest to him on earth. The Egyptian Sultan sent as a gift an Arab work on astrology, the Book of the Nine Judges. His son Manfred later had the Centiloquium of Hermes translated, another astrological work; and, finally, Michael Scot in his Liber Introductorius and his Liber Particularis compiled a wonderful encyclopaedia of the collective astronomical and astrological knowledge of his time. Michael, not undeservedly, ranked as THE ASTROLOGER of the Middle Ages, and the Italian towns were swamped with spurious prophecies supposed to emanate from him.
Wherever the Emperor appeared he was accompanied by a number of his astrologers, and there was nothing the Italian princes were so ready to learn from him as the use of the astrological art. How far Frederick really believed in his stargazers remains a question. Though he frequently inquired what would be the propitious moment for a certain weighty enterprise, the founding of a city or the start of a campaign, he may very well have reflected, like the Renaissance princes, that if the stars cannot lie the astrologers can. He puts them again and again to the test. Michael Scot had recommended: “When you seek advice from a wise man, consult him by a waxing moon,” and had also adjured him to be mindful of the ancient medical maxim to avoid blood-letting when the moon is in the sign of the Twins. The Emperor wanted to prove him a liar, and sent for the surgeon on a forbidden day. The blood-letting went off successfully, but when all was over the surgeon accidentally dropped his lancet and pierced the Emperor’s foot. For several days the swelling caused him extreme pain. Another time Frederick asked his astrologer how far the sky was from the palace. Whatever this exactly meant, Michael Scot promptly calculated the distance. The Emperor sent him away and had the floor of the room or courtyard of his palace sunk a hand’s breadth, and when Michael returned requested him to reckon out the distance once again. His calculation at once revealed that either the sky had moved a hand’s breath further off or else the palace had sunk. These anecdotes are characteristic of Frederick, and manifest his scepticism not towards things but towards people. His astrologers, like his “harem,” must often have simply formed part of his mise en scène. Mystery, like magnificence, was to contribute its quota to the impression he created.
*
The Hebrew scholars of Spain and of Provence with whom Frederick established relations, or whom he even brought to court, contributed rather to the astronomical and philosophical than to the astrological interests of the court. Through them he became acquainted with Jewish philosophy, which then had reached its zenith with Maimonides. Frederick was said to be able to express himself orally in nine languages and to write seven; it is quite probable that among them he knew Hebrew. He certainly had numerous works translated into Hebrew. At the age of eighteen Juda ben Salomon Cohen came to his court, and there compiled an Encyclopaedia on the works of Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy and the Spaniard Alpetronius. A Jew is mentioned as secretary to Michael Scot; it was the custom in Spain for Jews to collaborate with Latinists in translations from the Arabic. Jacob ben Abbamari, who translated five books of the Logic of Aristotle with the Isagoge of Porphyry and the commentaries of Averroes, came from Provence. He prepared a Hebrew translation of Ptolemy in Naples, and translated al Fargani’s Elements of Astronomy into Hebrew. These translations are dedicated to the Emperor, and express the hope that under Frederick “this friend of wisdom who maintains me,” the Messiah, may appear. This wish was not mere rhetoric, for the year 1240 was, according to Hebrew chronology the year 5000, and people were looking for the coming of the Messiah. Frederick II was held in such high repute by the Jews that in a Hebrew Mirror of Manners anecdotes and sayings of his are recorded as models, alongside those of Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Porphyry and Theophrastus.
Frederick was introduced to the works of Maimonides, who died in 1205, by another scholar, Moses ben Salomon from Salerno, who had written a commentary on the Guide of the Perplexed. Other works of this great Aristotelian were known to the Emperor, and some of his conversations prove that he knew them intimately. The talk turned on Maimonides one day, and his chief work was stated to be his Interpretation of the Old Testament and of the Talmud. The Emperor remarked that he missed in it any explanation of the origin of the curious Jewish ritual according to which the ashes of a red cow were potent for purification. For his part he believed the rite had its origin in India, where a red lion was burnt for a similar purpose, as he had read in the Book of Indian Sages. The Lawgiver Moses, reflecting on the great danger involved in catching a lion, had substituted a cow as a burnt-offering for the Jews. Possibly astrological considerations might have had something to do with it, which would be akin to those of Egyptian magicians and conjurers of spirits! Another time they were discussing why, according to Bible precept, only domestic animals, never wild animals, were offered as sacrifices, whereupon the Emperor gave as his explanation that sacrifices are, as it were, gifts to heaven, and a man can only give his own property, not the free beast of the field that belongs to none.
It is suggestive to note how, in this “republic of scholars,” each knew the other and all mutually assisted each other in work. The Jew, Jacob ben Abbamari, was a friend of Michael Scot and often appealed to him. He had leagued himself with the Scot, he writes, and received many learned suggestions from him about various Bible passages, mainly connected with questions of natural science. Moses ben Salomon of Salerno again conducted learned conversations with Margrave Berthold of Hohenburg, who in 1240 was a page in the Emperor’s service, and to whom, later, young Manfred was entrusted. So it is clear that the scientific curiosity of the court infected the young nobles also. Another courtier questioned the Jew, Jehuda ben Salomon, about the construction of five bodies from a given sphere and was directed to Euclid. The Hebrew scholar from Salerno disputed with Peter of Ireland, the famous teacher at the University of Naples, who afterwards held an extraordinarily learned conversation about most varied topics with Manfred and his friends.
This Renaissance-like “Academy,” with its head the Emperor as primus inter pares, demonstrated how the free human mind, bridging all gulfs of race, religion and rank, acted as a levelling agency in the secular world just as—in a quite different direction—the faith of the Church acted in the spiritual world. In his Charter, drawn up on the foundation of the University of Naples, and modelled in many of its features on that of Bologna, the Emperor had pointed to the uniting action of the mind. The proffered gifts of learning bring nobility and possessions in their train which make the affections and graciousness of friendship flourish. To characterise the free human spirit as friendship-building struck a new and humanistic note, which indicated that the clerical spirit had already been conquered. A new power was dawning here, and the Emperor valued on that account scholars and learned men who, as a courtier writes, “inhabit the circle of the earth from sea to sea.” When Frederick sent to the teachers and scholars of Bologna the manuscript of a treatise of Aristotle on logic and mathematics, which with other manuscripts filled the coffers of his treasuries and which he had found again in pursuing his linguistic and mathematical studies, he wrote in the covering letter: “The recipients should accept these writings gratefully as a gift of their friend the Emperor… amici caesaris.” They would know how to use them and “to draw new water out of the ancient well.”
*
This is the happiest interpretation of the learned activity of the dawning Renaissance at the Hohenstaufen court. With the high value attached to everything intellectual a new problem presented itself to the court circle, one which had occupied men’s minds since the troubadour days began, and the stirrings of unfettered secular thought: what is the true nobility amongst men? Nobility of race or of the spirit? The question was debated with quite peculiar zest at the Emperor’s court, where town-bred scholars and lawyers worked in common with knightly and aristocratic officials, and mixed with and argued with Christian, Jewish and Muslim philosophers. On one occasion the courtiers turned to Piero della Vigna and Thaddeus of Suessa, the two High Court Judges, and requested them to decide it. The reply may have been given in the Emperor’s own quotation from Aristotle. Nobility consists in ancient possessions wedded with noble conduct. Frederick expressed himself on similar lines in his foundation charter of Naples. To him, himself the grandson of emperors and kings, nobility of mind apart from nobility of race was inconceivable, and Dante took the same position in his De Monarchia. In his Convivio it is true he had sought to demonstrate the emptiness of “ancient possessions,” and in his great educational treatise and the canzones that accompany it he had taken Frederick II’s maxim as a text only to refute it, although he styled the Emperor “a great logician and a great scholar.” However much people might dispute over the definition, the fusion of an aristocracy of blood and an aristocracy of brain had already been realised at the imperial court.
A conversation of King Manfred and his friend with Peter of Ireland has just been mentioned. Though it took place ten years after Frederick’s death this conversation vividly reveals the type of question which occupied the court. The problem is the significant one: of a “purpose in Nature.” Are the limbs present because of the functions they perform, or are the functions the result of the limbs, or, more exactly—someone may have asked—are the claws of the vulture, the fangs of the wolf, the teeth of the lion, provided by nature to tear other animals to death? A devilish question, full of pitfalls. For if it is answered in the affirmative, that implies that Nature recognises the principle of destruction—recognises evil—that this is the will of nature, the will of God. According to this theory Providence would not be aiming at the “Good” in the Christian sense, and that hoped-for dispensation where lion and lamb would play together in the fields of Paradise would no longer be the order of the world as willed by Nature and by God. That is conceivable enough… for every statesman would feel a sabbath fraternisation of all animals, and the equalisation of all created things a hideous disorder, not least Frederick II himself who always pictured Adam as the “King.”
The Emperor held very strong views about the due observance of rank and precedence even in the animal world. An anecdote illustrates this: he loosed one day a favourite falcon, “whom he loved more than a city,” on a crane. The falcon rose and was above the crane, when far below he spied an eaglet, stooped and slew it. When the Emperor saw this he wrathfully summoned a justiciar and had his favourite falcon beheaded perk’ avea morto lo suo signiore, because he had killed an animal of higher rank than himself and his master, a young eagle, king of the birds! This does not stultify Frederick’s dream of bringing in the “golden age.” He dreamt not of listless peace, idyllic absence of desire, but the tension of supreme control and discipline, under which the lion would if necessary abstain from devouring the adjacent rabbit. Such was the Emperor’s vision of a Paradise in which he could then himself relax.
Peter of Ireland rejected the dangerous enquiry whether claws and fangs were created for the rending of other animals. He added: “The secret potency of this question has led many to recognise two principles in everything, the principle of evil and the principle of good. This, however, is heresy and bad taste to boot.” He directs attention instead to the necessity inherent in matter which provides for everything that is necessary. The learned man may have had more particularly in mind the spreading heresy of Neo-Manichaeism. Everywhere sects of devil worshippers were springing up, amongst them the Luciferians, who were said to maintain that God had unjustly condemned Satan to Hell—for Satan was the true Creator of all things.
Another set of problems—indirectly suggested by Aristotle—are touched on in a talk of the Emperor’s about the interpretation of a passage in the Bible. They were discussing why Maimonides had described earthly matter as snow. The Emperor opined: because white takes every other colour readily, as matter takes the form imposed on it. Snow is, therefore, a symbol of the malleability of matter. The moulding of matter was a subject frequently present to the Emperor’s mind. It is touched on in the preface to the Book of Laws, where God is presented not as the Creator but as the Moulder of pre-existent matter. This problem was interrelated with another: Whether the World, as Aristotle taught, existed “from eternity” or whether it had been created by God. Frederick sought light on these and other metaphysical questions from the learned men of Islam—on certain discrepancies between Aristotle and his commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias (whom the Emperor therefore also knew). The Emperor despatched his queries to Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Asia Minor, Yemen. Ultimately, through the medium of the Sultan of the Almohades, they reached Ibn Sabin, a Moroccan scholar in Ceuta, who, as he himself writes, “smilingly undertook to answer the Emperor.” He refused to accept Frederick’s numerous gifts; he intended thereby to bring home his insignificance to the Christian Emperor, “to the triumph of Islam.” His answers themselves did so too. The Emperor had asked, amongst other things, “What is the proof of the immortality of the soul, and is her existence eternal?” Whereupon Ibn Sabin, in most mysterious language, gave the Emperor to understand that he did not even know how to formulate a question correctly. “O prince, thou who seekest truth,” he wrote, “thou hast posed thy question about the nature of the soul without exactly indicating what type of soul is the object of thy questioning. Thou hast thus neglected the essential and hast regrettably confused many things which should have been treated separately. It is thine inexperience in treating of speculative matters and instituting enquiries in an independent branch of science which has led thee into such confusion. Hadst thou but known the number of separate types which are comprised under the one word ‘soul’! Hadst thou but been acquainted with Dialectics and the manner of distinguishing the Finite from the Infinite, between the Particular and the General, between the conceptions of ambiguous homonyms and that which is consecrated by the terminology of speech!—thou wouldest never have so phrased thy question. For when thou askest: ‘What is the proof for the immortality of the soul?’ thy question may be understood to apply to the vegetable soul, the animal soul, the rational soul, the soul of wisdom, the soul of prophecy. To which of these souls does thy question apply?”
Ibn Sabin continues in this strain, proud of his immense knowledge and powers of hair-splitting and incapable of giving a real answer. He writes a separate dissertation on each type of soul and explains his position with regard to Plato and Moses, Avicenna and the Brahmins; finally, in a feeble anti-climax maintaining that Islam is the only true religion. There was a certain value in all this harangue, the reference, for instance, to the teaching of the Brahmins. Much of Frederick’s knowledge about India must have reached him in this sort of way.
It was not merely as an intellectual pastime that Frederick directed such questions to learned men. He was seeking proofs for the rightness of his own way of life, and he often established such proofs by violent and remarkable methods. To prove the mortality of the soul he had a man imprisoned in a perfectly tight-fitting wine vat and left to perish, to demonstrate that the soul which could not escape from the vat must have perished with the body: such at least is the tale. Maimonides to a certain extent encouraged this type of speculation in so far as he, like the Averroists, though on other grounds, denied any general immortality, and only accorded immortality to the truly wise. Frederick’s correspondence with oriental scholars was certainly not all so fruitless as that with Ibn Sabin of Ceuta. We learn from the Arabs themselves that Frederick sent astronomical and geometrical questions to Mosul, one of which, for instance, was to construct a quadrilateral of the same superficial area as a segment of a given circle. Books were even exchanged. The Emperor made a collection of the prophecies of Merlin and had it translated into Arabic for the Sultan of Egypt, and he himself received from Tunis the novel Sidrach and the Book of all Knowledge. Envoys of the Emperor, remarking the immense wisdom of the Ruler of Tunis, and learning that he owed it to Sidrach, called Frederick’s attention to this work. The Emperor at once begged permission to have a copy made of this book, which in the form of question and answer deals with every sphere of heaven and of earth. Much of it must have stimulated the Emperor to further questioning.
*
This impulse to inquire was Frederick’s most dangerous quality, for he had a gift of dissolving fast-frozen axioms by a casual question. As he once sought to undermine the spiritual basis of papal rule by the maliciously-innocent enquiry whether Pope Gregory, like himself the Hohenstaufen, could trace his claims back through his father and grandfather. He attacked the very roots of medieval faith by a series of trustful, innocent-sounding questions addressed on occasion to Michael Scot. Michael Scot in his encyclopaedia relates as follows:
“Once, when Frederick, Emperor of Rome, the ever-illustrious, had reflected long in accordance with the order he had himself established on the differences of the whole earth, what they are and how they appear on, over, in and under the earth, he then sent secretly for me, Michael the Scot, the most faithful of his astrologers, and laid a number of questions before me, secretly, as it pleased him to do, about the foundations of earth and the marvels thereof, speaking as follows:
‘My dearest Master, we have often and in divers ways heard question and answer from one and another about the heavenly bodies, about sun and moon and the fixed stars, about the elements, the world soul, about heathen and Christian peoples and other created things that exist on and in the earth, such as plants and metals. Yet we have heard naught of those secrets which delight the mind that is wedded to wisdom: about Paradise, Purgatory, Hell, the foundations and the wonders of the world. Therefore we beg thee by thy love of wisdom and thy loyalty to our throne to explain to us the structure of the earth.
How is the earth fastened above the abyss of space?
And how is this abyss fastened beneath the earth?
Is there aught else that bears the earth save air and water?
Or does the earth stand fast of itself?
Or does it rest on the heavens below it?
And how many heavens are there?
Who is their director?
Who mainly inhabit the heavens?
How far is one heaven distant from another by our measure?
And if there be many heavens what is there out beyond the last?
By how much is one heaven greater than another?
In which heaven is God Substance, that is in his divine majesty, and in what wise doth he sit upon the throne of heaven?
And in what wise is he accompanied by the angels and the saints?
And what do the angels and the saints do uninterruptedly in the presence of God?
Likewise tell us: How many Hells are there?
Who are the spirits who dwell in them?
And by what names are they called?
Where is Hell, and Purgatory where?
And where the Heavenly Paradise? Under the earth? Over the earth? In the earth?
And what is the difference between the souls who go to Hell and the spirits which fell from Heaven? And how many torments are there in Hell?
And does one soul know another in the next life? And can a soul return to this life to speak or to show itself to anyone?
And what of this: that when the soul of a living man passes over into that other life, naught can give it power to return, neither first love nor even HATE as if naught had ever happened? Or does it seem that the soul careth naught for what is left behind, whether it be blessed or whether it be damned?’”
These questions at once recall the apparently similar questions of the Scholastics; but theirs are mostly pure mental gymnastics of this type: how would mankind have spread over the earth according to God’s wish if there had been no Fall? or whether at the Resurrection the toothless will again grow teeth and the bald grow hair? Frederick II, however, asks about the appearance of that other world. He directs the same practical curiosity to the conditions of that other world as dictated his questions to the messengers of Muslim princes about the conditions of their various foreign countries. The kingdom of God was for him just such another. The thought of the future life, which disturbed Frederick’s contemporaries to the core and hunted terrified men to penances and flagellations, was to Frederick in the most amazing way simply an innocent object of knowledge and “a delight of the mind.” He inquires because the tectonics of the world-structure seems to him immeasurably interesting; he longs to know just how God sits upon his throne, because he must sit in like fashion; it is unquestionably useful to him as a judge to know the punishments of Hell; and the statesman in him enquires for practical reasons about the precedence of saints, angels and spirits.
Mysticism is entirely foreign to this method of approach, which seeks objective representation. There is not a trace of any personal, emotional interest, nor in the imperial soul the faintest shadow of anxiety. Eternal bliss, everlasting contemplation of God offer no allurements: “What do the angels do uninterruptedly in the presence of God?” That other question, whether a return to this life is not possible “not even for hate,” corresponds to the Emperor’s saying on the defection of a certain town: “If I had one foot in Paradise I would withdraw it to take vengeance on Viterbo!” Dante answered all these questions soberly and practically too, but interested in every fibre in that world which he never ceased to picture tangibly and visibly to himself day and night. His questions are often the same as Frederick’s.
People tell of Frederick II, himself the master of so many tongues, that he was anxious to discover by research what the primeval human speech had been. He, therefore, had a number of infants reared by nurses who were most strictly forbidden to speak to them. “He wanted to discover whether the children could speak Hebrew, or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic as the original of all languages, or whether they would speak the speech of their parents who had borne them.” The experiment failed, for the children died. This problem also attracted Dante, who deals with it in his treatise on popular speech. Dante also, in another little essay, de Aqua et terra, discusses just such hydrological phenomena as Frederick II had cross-examined Michael Scot about. “How does it come,” asked the Emperor, “that sea-water is so salt, and that in many places far from the sea salt water is found and in other places sweet water, although they all derive from the living sea? And how comes it that sweet waters are often spewed out by the earth and often drop from stones and trees, like grape vines when they are cut in spring? And how is it that many waters are sweet and mild and sparkling clear, and many are wild and others again viscous and thick? We marvel much about all these things although we know long since that all waters come from the sea and that they flow through lands and caves of many kinds, returning to the sea which is the bed and womb of all the streaming waters.” Dante and his age shared this conception of the unity of all earthly waters.
This “much marvelling” of the Emperor’s is the vital point. Things which for centuries everybody had seen and accepted as facts challenged him to curious enquiry. When he was staying at a place like Pozzuoli or Montepulciano he immediately wanted to know all about the remarkable springs. “Where do the salt and bitter springs come from, which in many places gush forth with violence, and the foul-smelling waters which are found in many baths and pools. Do they spring up themselves? Do they come from elsewhere? And those waters which in some places are hot or at least very warm and sometimes even boiling as if they had been in a vessel over a fire? Has the earth a hole in its centre, or is it a solid body like a living stone?” The world was, as it were, a new discovery to him fraught with questions. He must have observed the winds on his crusading voyage: “Whence comes the wind which blows from different parts of the circle of the earth?” He probably means the regular wind-currents. Volcanoes are another subject of inquiry: “Whence comes the fire which the earth vomits forth both out of plains and mountain tops? Smoke too appears now there, now here. Where is it generated and what causes it to burst forth? We see it in many parts of Sicily and near Messina, as in Etna, Vesuvius, the Lipari islands and Stromboli.” He is probably thinking of submarine volcanoes when he asks: “How does it come that such flaming fire appears to issue not only from the earth but in many parts of the Indian Sea?”
Other things that occupied the Emperor’s mind were the secret forces inherent in matter, in things themselves, forces which Frederick II was so skilful in liberating in his State. He had a particular love for precious stones that was not unconnected with their magic properties, and he would purchase them even when the treasury was exhausted. Prester John was said to have given him wonderful stones; and he was brought the legendary jewels from the crown of the Babylonian dragon which a fisherman had found. He was intimately acquainted with the magnetic needle and its mysterious power, that wonderful instrument of which Brunetto Latini wrote at the end of the century to Guido Cavalcanti: “The seafarer can steer correctly thanks to this magnet, but for the present he must use it secretly… for no shipmaster would dare to employ him lest he be suspected of witchcraft. Sailors would refuse to serve on the ship if they knew that their captain had in his possession such inventions of the devil.” Michael Scot had minutely instructed the Emperor about the different properties of minerals and metals, a lore which verged on alchemy, an art by no means unknown at court. He learned, for instance, that quicksilver, the wonderful argentum vivum, makes a man deaf if dropped into his ear. He also got Michael Scot to teach him the properties of herbs and drugs (the Botany of Dioscorides was known in Sicily) and the wonderful qualities of lakes and rivers, and he sent special messengers to Norway to investigate the petrifying properties of a certain spring.
*
Frederick’s great resource in all his questionings was the enormous work of Michael Scot, which was not only an astronomical, astrological encyclopaedia, but a compendium of all the secret sciences. It was based in many points on dangerous sources, a Liber perditionis animae et corporis for instance, which contained the names, dwelling-places and powers of the demons, and the Liber auguriorum of which Michael Scot (otherwise a most obedient son of the Church) writes that he has seen and owned the book although the Roman Church had banned it. His work does not neglect the symbolism of numbers and their mystic values: the number seven rules the world, for seven is the number of the planets, metals, arts, colours, tones and smells. Everywhere we detect him striving to relate everything in the Cosmos according to law to everything else. Michael Scot treats of the music of the spheres and expounds en passant the old musical doctrines of Boëthius, and the newer ones of Guido of Arezzo; on another occasion he explains the calendar. His immense astrological and astronomical knowledge he owes not only to the Almagest and to al Fargani, but much also to the ancients, to the obscure Scholia of Germanicus, for instance, in which again Nigidius and Fulgentius, Hyginus, Pliny, Martianus Capella and Aratus are included. Michael Scot took over the star pictures of the ancient Scholia, and these astrological figures of Mars and Jupiter, the Archer and the Centaur, which followed the ancient representations, exercised in their turn an influence on Renaissance painting, as can be demonstrated from Giotto’s frescoes at Padua. For his astrology Michael Scot draws largely on the Arabs, above all on Albumazar in whom more ancient works were collected, Hermes, Dorotheus, the Babylonian Teucer and also Indians and Persians. In short, at the imperial court all the superstitions of the late Roman empire, a prey as it had been to the stream of oriental influences, came to life again, just as Gnostic teaching reawakened amongst the heretics of this same period.
Frederick knew all these things, or had learned in conversation all that was worth knowing about them. “O fortunate Emperor!”—wrote Michael Scot—“I verily believe if ever a man in this world could escape death by his learning, thou wouldest be the one. …” Frederick’s knowledge must have been stupendous. His mind enbraced every line of culture in the contemporary world: Spanish, Provençal, French, Roman, Italian, Arab, Greek and Jew. Add to this his knowledge of tongues, of jurisprudence, of ancient literature, of Roman educational literature and the literature of Scholasticism, whose methods were entirely familiar to him as his Falcon Book shows. His contemporaries, amazed and fearful, called him STUPOR MUNDI.
More admirable even than the fulness of his knowledge was the fact that with it all the Emperor never for a moment lost his clarity of vision. Even in scientific matters he knew exactly what things were of importance for research. He was himself at home in the mysterious twilight of the prophets and stargazers and could not value their sphere too highly as, in a certain sense, a training ground. His own aims, however, were far too simple and straightforward to be understood by any of these over-learned folk. He depended only on first hand ocular observation. “No certainty comes by hearsay” was one of his maxims. He acted up to it. To let people know the Emperor’s methods he once sent mutilated and blinded conspirators on a tour of all countries, for “the sight of the eyes makes more impression on men than the hearing of the ear.” He by no means despised the mental training that served to sharpen the sight. An Arab scholar Shahabu’d Din has preserved in an essay on Optics: Attentive Observation of What the Eye Perceives, some questions of the Emperor’s. He asked why Canopus looked larger at his rising than at his zenith; why eyes afflicted with cataract could see black streaks and spots; why a lance plunged in water should appear broken. Deceptions of the eye had a disturbing importance for the man who relied preponderantly on visual observation.
The sense in which Frederick believed that knowledge was dependent on seeing is clear from his laws about doctors. The Constitutions of Melfi lay down: “Since the science of medicine cannot be mastered without a preliminary knowledge of logic, we command that none shall study medicine who has not first studied logic for at least three years.” All medical students of Salerno were obliged to devote five years to reading Hippocrates and Galen concurrently with their surgical and anatomical studies, for the purposes of which corpses were on occasion placed at their disposal. After they had passed their examination the Emperor did not grant them an appointment as doctor until “they had practised for a full year beside an experienced physician.” After that they became state officials. The apothecaries were also state officials, and were obliged to study physics for one year. The Emperor himself had a very exact knowledge of anatomy, both animal and human, and of medicine. The Arabs had a great admiration for his medical knowledge, and he quotes Hippocrates in his Falcon Book. Michael Scot wrote a medical treatise, so also did Master Theodore, who, when he was instructed to work out a new scheme of dietetics, wrote to the Emperor: “Your Majesty has commanded me to prescribe certain rules for the preservation of your health… but you are long since in possession of that most ancient letter from the ‘Secrets’ of Aristotle, which he sent to the Emperor Alexander when the latter asked to be instructed about the health of the body. All that your Majesty desires to know is completely contained in that letter.” A certain Adam of Cremona also worked out medical instructions for the Emperor. And in Italy for many a day powders, prescriptions and healing lotions passed under Frederick’s name. In addition to anatomy and medicine the Emperor sought to master the science of human physiognomy. At his request Michael Scot compiled from Arab-Hellenistic sources an essay on Physiognomies which forms the third part of his great Handbook. In the dedication he assures the Emperor that with this knowledge in mind a ruler may know the vices and virtues of his entourage as surely as if he were himself in their skins.
Slowly people were progressing from mental blinking to physical seeing. Seeing, observing, exploring and researching into Nature and her laws became a passion with Frederick II. The innumerable anecdotes, the countless questions all betray the same craving to explore the living newly-discovered world, all disclose the same passionate curiosity concerning the laws of cause and effect, the how and the why of every sort of life. He shares this passion for knowledge, this curiosity, with Leonardo da Vinci, to whom Nietzsche compares him: he at the beginning, Leonardo at the end of the same epoch. Where mere observation was insufficient Frederick II proceeded to scientific experiment, which, like every attempt at experiment, seemed to the Middle Ages abhorrent or insane. They tell that he was anxious to discover which of two men had better digested his food, the one who had rested after his meal or the other who had taken exercise: he cut them open to see. To ascertain the length of a fish’s life Frederick inserted a copper ring in a carp’s fin and set it free. The story of the “Diver” is told about Frederick. He made the man dive into the Faro to learn about sea animals and plants. He organised the most original experiments on his Apulian estates, where he bred horses and sought to improve the breed by importing Barbary mares. In Malta he established a camel-breeding station, not to mention his breeding of hounds, poultry and pigeons. To study the chick’s emergence from the egg, the embryo’s position in the egg, etc., he built artificial incubating ovens. Having heard that ostrich eggs are hatched by the sun in hot sand he procured ostrich eggs from al Kamil and experienced people along with them, and tried to hatch them out in the heat of the Apulian summer. Al Kamil also sent him Indian cockatoos and pelicans, in return for which Frederick sent him presents of white peacocks and a polar bear. He tried to determine whether birds of prey detect their quarry by sight or smell. “We have often experimented in various ways. For when the falcons are completely blinded (by stitching the eyelids) they do not even detect the meat that is thrown to them, though nothing impedes their power of smell.” He was the first to institute systematic cultivation of game; he established close seasons, based on an accurate observation of the times of pairing and breeding, for which the animals of Apulia were supposed to have written him a letter of thanks. He had animal reservations in various parts of his kingdom, and the larger part of his menagerie, when not in actual attendance on him, was kept in Lucera. On occasion he would divide a number of captured cranes among his various castles. His large vivarium was symbolical. Close to Foggia he had a big marsh laid out with ponds and walled water-conduits which was alive with all descriptions of waterfowl. A fantastic picture—the great palace with its columns of marble and serpentine, with bronze and marble statues, the Emperor within attended by Moorish slaves and noble pages, visiting his pools to study pelicans, cranes, herons, wild geese and exotic marsh fowl!
*
All these instincts of his culminated in his passion for the chase which cost him the gravest defeat of his career—before the walls of Parma. For Frederick’s ancestors the chase had been a peacetime substitute for war; for Frederick it was more, it was an art “entirely born of love” (totum procedit ex amore), an intellectual exercise on a par with his natural science studies. Only hawking, of course. The charm lay in the mysterious power of the falconer over the freest, most elusive of all birds—the eagle, the buzzard, the falcon. When six, eight, or even ten falcons circled free in the air, almost out of sight and yet bound as it were by some invisible thread, compelled by some mysterious power that brought them with infallible certainty back to the falconer’s wrist, scorning the proffered liberty, it was not only an exciting marvel, it was for Frederick the ne plus ultra of perfect discipline. The discipline Frederick would have liked to see equally developed in man.
He despised the hunter who hunted with snares or nets or quadrupeds. The noble sport was hawking, because it is an art that can only be learnt from a teacher. “Hence it comes that while many men of noble birth learn the art, the uneducated rarely do so. Hounds and hunting-leopards can be tamed by force, falcons can only be caught and trained by human skill. Hence a man learns more of the secrets of nature from hawking than from other kinds of hunting,” thus Frederick writes in his Book of Falconry. This saying of his explains why, after the decay of hawking, intellectual monarchs like Frederick the Great or Napoleon had no love for the chase. It is also the revelation of what Frederick sought in the chase: the secret workings of nature.
Frederick’s great work is the product of years of observation: de Arte venandi cum avibus. “Thanks to his amazingly penetrative glance, directed especially to the observation of nature, the Imperator himself wrote a book about the nature and care of birds, in which he showed how deeply imbued he was with a love of knowledge,” wrote a chronicler. This comprehensive zoological treatise is anything but the superficial indulgence of a princely caprice. Down to the minutest detail it is based on his own observations or those which friends and experts had made at his instigation. For twenty or thirty years the Emperor had meditated the writing of this Ornithology—for it is no less—and all the time he had been amassing first-hand material till at last, urged by his son Manfred, he set about the actual task of writing the six books in this branch of Zoology. “He must be reckoned the greatest expert who ever lived,” so judged Ranke. And the statement is not unjustified. In the most vital points the book has not even yet been superseded. The most astonishing thing about it is its absolute accuracy and matter-of-factness, which contains more knowledge of the mysteries of nature than do the cosmic astral encyclopaedias of the court philosophers at which the Emperor was wont to smile, even though on occasion he participated in the current superstitions. In that age of intellectual starvation, which speculated how many angels could dance on the point of a needle, Frederick summed up his programme in the introduction in the clear-cut phrase: “Our intention is to set forth the things which are, as they are (manifestare ea quae sunt sicut sunt).” This stern sobriety, that seeks nothing before things or behind things, but the things themselves, when exercised by a wise man, contains the vision of all visions. Everything is, first and foremost, itself. Neither the philosophers of the East nor the philosophers of the West had taught this to Frederick. We reflect that, a century ago, when the rest of Germany was celebrating orgies of emotion and philosophy, many a one quitted Weimar in disillusionment because there everyone was “busy counting the legs of cockchafers.”
The Emperor’s book Concerning the Art of Hunting with Birds contains far more than its title promises. The first part is a general survey of birds, a classification of species, their habits, their breeding, their feeding, their distribution, their methods of nesting. The migration of birds is described in detail, their skeletal structure, the organs and their functions; every detail of the plumage, the number and position of the wing feathers, the flight itself; in what relation the hardness of the wing feathers stands to the frequency of the wing beat. It is surprising to note that here Frederick seeks explanation in the various works known to him, and refers, for instance, to the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanics. Each beat of the wing, we learn, moves through a segment of a circle, in which movement the outer feather describe the largest circle. According to the laws of the Mechanics the larger roller lifts the greater weight. Since the outer feathers have the greatest burden to support and the greatest circle to describe they are correspondingly stronger in build, and the hardness of the feathers decreases in given proportions.
In the second of the six books the Emperor talks of the different types of hunting falcons, their capture, their training, their temporary blinding, by sewing the lids, the way to carry them and the way to cast them. Frederick used to get falcons sent or fetched from all corners of the earth. He once took a condemned criminal and sent him down into an abyss to fetch the nest of a white falcon. When he speaks of the birds of prey which were sent to him from Spain and Bulgaria, the Near East and India, Britain and Iceland (which he locates between Norway and Greenland), his immense knowledge of plant and animal geography is displayed. He remarks that the birds of the Arctic regions who are nearer to the North Pole are stronger, braver, quicker and more beautiful than those of more southern lands. He explains precisely why this should be so, and recognises that two falcons generally considered to be of two different species are really identical, and their differences are due only to climatic variations.
He collected observations from all countries. He got experts sent to him from Arabia and other places and he used their information where they “knew better.” He only claimed to set forth “what our own experience has taught, or the experience of others,” and he held that “no certainty is attained by the ear.” Whatever he knows only by hearsay he seeks to verify. He institutes enquiries, for instance, about the “barnacle-geese,” which is said to hatch out of worms or shells or the rotting ships’ wood in the northern regions. He specially sent envoys to the north to fetch such wood and demonstrated the baselessness of the tale. From this he concluded that this type of wild goose had her nest in remote regions which were rarely visited by man. Reports which he could not check he quoted only with reservations; when he writes about the Phoenix described by Pliny he adds: “We cannot, however, believe this.”
Frederick II rated Aristotle very high as a philosopher, but considers him a scholar wholly dependent on book-learning, and does not hesitate to dismiss his statement with a curt “It is not so.” “We have followed Aristotle where necessary, but we have learnt from experience that he appears frequently to deviate from the truth, especially in writing of the nature of certain birds. We have therefore not followed this Prince of Philosophers in everything… for Aristotle seldom or never hunted with birds, while we have ever loved and practised hawking.” The Emperor frequently corrects Aristotle: “But we, who have had some practice in the chase, think otherwise.” After he has minutely described how the chain or triangle of flying waterfowl change their leader he adds “It is therefore improbable that the leader should remain unchanged as Aristotle maintains. …”
The Emperor’s book contains thousands of separate observations which are marshalled formally, clearly, and logically, passing always from the general to the particular as scholastic method demanded. The sentence construction is usually lucid, the language—in contrast to the rhetorical manifestos of his Chancery—is simple, straightforward, matter-of-fact, but always stately, always couched in the pluralis majestatis, and clothed with a certainty that defies refutation. It was often difficult—as the Emperor says—to find Latin synonyms for the Arabic or Provençal technical terms. The eye is appealed to by many hundred drawings of birds which are unquestionably from the Emperor’s own hand. It has been expressly recorded that he knew how to draw. One of the first two-volume éditions de luxe of this book, which in 1248 at Parma fell into the enemy’s hands, and later came to the Anjous, contains illuminations which are repeated in later copies. The drawings are true to life down to the tiniest details, and the style of picture, the birds in flight, in various phases of movement, point unmistakably to the eager observer himself, though the magnificently coloured versions may have been prepared by some court artist or other. It is possible that Persian or Saracen drawings influenced Frederick, perhaps ancient codices also. However this may be, experts pronounce the drawings of the Falcon Book to be as amazingly “before their time” as is Sicilian plastic art.
The Emperor’s book soon appeared in several French versions, and ousted all similar works. Short Instructions to Falconers of Norman and other origin had preceded the imperial Falcon Book, but they had not the same thoroughness or zoological knowledge, and were not nearly so comprehensive. Frederick justifiably dismissed them as “inaccurate and inadequate.” What he was aiming at was to lift hawking to the level of an exact science, which none of the existing books was competent to do. The Emperor was doubtless acquainted with oriental works. A Persian falcon book was translated at King Enzio’s command, an Arabic book of healing for hunting-birds was certainly not unknown to Frederick. He can scarcely have utilised them, however, since his own book was based entirely on personal observation. Wherever opportunity offered the Emperor worked at the writing of his book “in spite of the unspeakable number of claims upon our time,” as he writes, and we learn incidentally that during the siege of Faënza he corrected Master Theodore’s translation of an Arabic essay on hunting, written by the imperial falconer Muamin. A Cremonese translated the same essay for King Enzio into French. The Emperor wrote the book only a few years before his death, and King Manfred out of his own knowledge and from loose sheets of the Emperor’s, posthumously filled many lacunae.
*
The most important thing about the Falcon Book is not the fact that Albertus Magnus for instance used it, nor the fact that other hunting books sprang up, like one by a German knight who called as witnesses to his prowess in the chase “especially the huntsmen of the illustrious Lord Frederick, Emperor of the Romans.” Vastly more important was it that the courtiers of the Emperor and his sons (who resembled their father) acquired an eye for Nature so that they learned the imperial art of seeing, whatever they might choose to apply it to. The new element in the Falcon Book is the idea of seeing and telling “the things that are, as they are,” and that this should be done not by an unknown settler or scholar but by the Emperor of the Roman-Christian world: a remarkable parergon of a great statesman. The Emperor’s immediate influence asserted itself further in another work which was widely circulated, translated into many languages, and which acted as a model for succeeding generations: the Horse Healing of a Calabrian nobleman and official, Jordanus Ruffus. This was the first book of veterinary lore that the West produced, and it was written at the suggestion of the Emperor. The author expressly declares that he received instruction to a very large extent in all the matters treated, from the Emperor who was himself an expert.
It is a significant fact that the great scholars of della Vigna’s circle, those of the type of Michael Scot, all failed completely when it came to the use of the eye. The Emperor, King Manfred, Enzio, the noble official Jordanus Ruffus, the Arab falconer Muamin, are the men with seeing sight. We may say that seeing “begins” once more with them; not that the gift had been entirely lost; even in the Middle Ages the peasant and the huntsman had used their eyes as shrewdly as in other ages. But those who could put in words what they had seen, the intellectual, the learned of every kind, the “educated” had in those days no eyes for the material world. Frederick II, the predecessor of the great empiricists of the thirteenth century, of the Dominican Albertus Magnus and the Franciscan Roger Bacon, was the first man to make his appearance who was at once a master of all current learning, and as a hunter had from infancy the use of his eyes. It has often been asserted that the Falcon Book marks a turning point in Western thought, the beginning of experimental science in the West. And here we must recall the Emperor’s opposite, Francis of Assisi, back to whom they trace the new feeling for Nature. It is true that the two approached Nature with different sense organs. If we reckon Frederick II the first open-eyed mind who traced the eternal unvarying Law of Nature and of life in type and species and gradation, we may with equal justice account Francis of Assisi, the first open-eyed soul who spontaneously experienced Nature and Life as magic and emotion, and traced the same divine pneuma in all that lived. Dante was both in one.
*
TRANSFORMER OF THE WORLD! This was what contemporaries named Frederick. Not least “transformer” of men. For this intellectual court of his reared a new human species in whom philosophy was no kingly caprice, but a begetter of life. The spiritual knight of the epoch of the Crusade was gradually superseded by the intellectual knight who was to prevail in the ensuing centuries. Naturally the Founder was himself the first of the new species who undertakes a type of battle for centuries forgotten, which from later ages earned for the Hohenstaufen Tyrant of Sicily the name of “Herakles Musagetes.”
Frederick II was a warrior and a fighter rather than a knight, and we miss the glamour of joust and tournament which surrounded Barbarossa even in his old age; the “game” for Frederick was not the shock of knightly weapons, but the clash of noble minds. When actual fighting was afoot, however, he shirked no danger. Seizing a shield he led the attack against a besieged town; in open battle he charged the enemy at the head of his horsemen, especially when wrath and vengeance stirred his blood. From boyhood he had trained his body in the use of weapons; no hardships were too great for him, and to the last he was equal to all the varied demands made on his physique by camping in hot weather or in cold. He never even betrayed signs of fatigue. His body, though but of medium height was kept in perfect condition, strong and muscular, not thin, inclining rather to stoutness, never flagging in alertness, achievement or endurance. Apart from an occasional indisposition and the one attack of plague he had no serious illness, and with all his love of other types of luxury he maintained a Spartan regime that allowed him only one meal a day. He had learnt from the Orient a refined cult of the body which to his contemporaries appeared simply satanic: a mendicant monk querulously reports that he did not forego his bath even on the days of Church festivals. This will have helped to preserve a certain freshness, elasticity and youthfulness which characterised him. His mode of life also assisted: he spent not less than one-third of his time in the saddle, and of that full half was given to hunting. To the very end he felt equal to any exertion. Two years before his death he was on his horse for fully twenty-four hours. His black horse, “Dragon,” carried him at dawn to the chase, at midday into battle, and then all through the night at top speed from Parma to Cremona. He was so little fatigued that immediately on arrival in the terrified town, though it was still dark, he started assembling troops with which he set out to battle two days later. Similar exploits were frequent. Just as the Puer Apuliae swam a river on a barebacked horse, the Emperor at the opening of his Lombard campaign accomplished a forced march of eighty-seven miles with his heavy cavalry in two nights and a day, and at the end of his ride surprised and took Vicenza: a feat to which his contemporaries paid a due tribute of admiration.
*
There was nothing soft about Frederick for all his intellect. His limbs were as powerful as they were well built. He tore open the side of the rebel Saracen Amir with a blow of his foot, and his beautiful and powerful hands will have been equally terrible in their grip. They were famed also for their skill and neat fingeredness. Shapely fingers may well have been part of Frederick’s Hohenstaufen inheritance. Even the twelfth century had noticed and admired Barbarossa’s unwontedly well-formed hands!
We have no evidence of the changes Frederick’s appearance underwent with the lapse of years, especially as the most valuable witness, the great marble statue of the Emperor seated on his throne that adorned the gate of the bridge at Capua has come down to us only as a fragment. Apart from scanty literary allusions we have nothing to go on but the golden coins, the Augustales, in particular the very perfect coins of the later mintages. Every reference we have confirms the fact that the Emperor retained throughout the “cheerful brow and the radiant cheerfulness of the eyes” which had characterised the Puer Apuliae. To the very last all the chroniclers boast of the cheerfulness of his open gaze, and all western observers agree that he was handsome, with a noble and distinguished countenance. They all seek to define the extraordinary fascination which he exercised, and which perhaps was not unconnected with his mixed blood; a brown-tinted skin with rosy cheeks and auburn-blonde hair, which grew thinner with the years. An indefinable something clung to him, and, since he remained always cleanshaven, a something unaging, of eternal youth. The lack of beard or moustache let all his features be clearly seen, the short powerful arrogant nose, the remarkably strong chin, the mouth with its full lips tightly drawn in (so at least the coins imply), and its frequently mocking impression. The countenance of a Caesar worthy of the sculptor’s chisel, of which no details recall the accustomed God-the-Father type of earlier German Emperors as Barbarossa embodied it, and as the Renaissance Emperors revived it after Frederick II.
One of his enemies described him as sudden, sensual, subtle, crafty and evil, but adds “if he wished to show favour he could be friendly, cheerful and gracious.” A feeling of insecurity overtook everyone in his presence. Whether his countenance was expressing the most charming and winning friendliness or the most terrifying severity and sternest cruelty, the glance of his eye never varied, or at most varied by an imperceptible shade. Part of his magnetism must have lain in this disturbing effect of his timeless, soulless gaze, which let no man guess his true feelings; it was not dissimulation; it was something much more deadly. One of his friends said he had the eyes of a snake, thereby expressing this uncanny fascination. No flashing penetrating eye, but probably that serene reposeful glance which perceived unwaveringly, and—in most unchristian wise—was not directed inward. This unwaveringness must have been more cruel and alarming, and a thousand times more uncanny, than a sparkling, lightning glance. It was probably the amazing calm of two eyes set perfectly parallel, working perfectly in accord, which at times produces almost the same effect as mal occhio; it is interesting to note that one Oriental described him as “squinting.”
None can say how the daring dauntless spirit, which ranged through all the distances of East and West, lay behind those all-perceiving eerie eyes, nor how the mighty brain shaped the head and cheerful brow. The total impression, in spite of its broad-necked power and steel-like strength, is one of something lyrical and inspiring, which breathes even from the half-Romanised Augustales—a German trait to which neither a Caesar nor a Napoleon could lay claim.
* The Middle Ages were little interested in ethnology: Moors, Arabs, Negroes were indiscriminately nigri.—Tr.
† Elisabeth, daughter of Philip of Swabia was Frederick II’s first cousin, she married Ferdinand of Castile: this Frederick and Henry are her sons.—Tr.