VI. German Emperor

Frederick II had spent more than a year in reorganising and consolidating the monarchy in Sicily. In August 1230 he had made peace with Pope Gregory, in August 1231 the collection of the Constitutions had been concluded, and a few months later the Emperor felt free to quit his hereditary kingdom and devote his attention to the affairs of the Empire. His rule in the south seemed secure and would not easily be shaken, and he could now consider the measures necessary to restore imperial power and prestige throughout the Empire, and could carry his forcefulness and fame north into Northern Italy and Germany.

The Lord of the Empire must perforce sail under very different colours from the Tyrant of Sicily. The favour or hostility of the Pope was a matter almost of indifference in the Sicilian state, which indeed throve best in open fight: the whole constitution of the Empire, on the other hand, was based on the harmony of the two powers, and the Empire at its best required a perfect balance of the two in good will and in peace. The Imperium, pillared on its secular and spiritual princes, was not incorporate in the monarch alone, as was the Sicilian state with its officials, but in the dual power of Pope and Emperor, who together constituted “a species of individual”: “two swords in one scabbard,” two vicegerents of the true King.

The picture which Frederick II strove to present to the world during the next few years was that of a Christian Imperator cooperating with the Pope in outward friendship. Never again did he so closely resemble his imperial ancestors, never was he so truly the heir of Charlemagne, Otto and Barbarossa as in these years of peace. His power, not spending its strength in threats of war, was able to make itself felt far and wide through all the countries of the Roman Empire, “whose length was vast and whose breadth ended only at the ends of the earth.” The days of the noble emperors were drawing to a glorious close; with Frederick II came the sudden crash. Just once more before the end, the world was to see what the Middle Ages considered the “correct conditions” established; once again Pope and Emperor in unison, once again the Emperor amid his princes as primus inter pares. For one last time those ideals were realised in all their fullness and maturity and clothed in classic phrases which echo pitifully as empty catchwords in later days of petty Kaisers and tiara-crowned mid-Italian landlords. For one brief moment Frederick II appeared radiant in the full majesty of the ancient Holy Roman Empire; once more, in the Palatinates of the Neckar and the Rhine, the brilliance of imperial glory lit with southern light flared dazzlingly, then was for ever quenched. Only: the Germans kept a yearning for it all.

From Foggia the Emperor moved northwards to Ravenna. He took a very modest Sicilian retinue. Berard of Palermo and Count Thomas of Aquino were the only well-known nobles who accompanied him. His immediate task was to put Lombard and German affairs in order, and the German princes had been long since invited to a Diet at Ravenna, to be held in November 1231. Frederick’s first intention had probably been to march into Northern Italy at the head of his armies; but the Pope offered him guarantees for the Lombards’ behaviour, and he abstained from any military steps, with the result that the Cremona fiasco of 1226 was, as nearly as possible, repeated. Although the Emperor announced himself as the Pope’s ambassador on a mission to suppress heresy, and although Gregory really endeavoured to influence the Lombards, the towns made not the slightest move to send envoys to the Diet which was to serve “the honour of God, of the Church and of the Empire, and the prosperity of Lombardy.” Quite the reverse. On the approach of the Emperor the League which had been gradually disintegrating immediately reconstituted itself, the mountain passes were again seized by the rebels, and passage denied to the German forces.

The Emperor was not, at the moment, in a position to intervene effectively. The Diet was adjourned till Christmas, and the Emperor killed time in the ancient town of Gothic Kings and Byzantine Emperors. He collected valuable building materials, ancient columns and statues, and despatched them to Sicily. With remarkable antiquarian zeal he instituted the first systematic excavation. This revealed the mausoleum of Galla Placidia, and brought to light the beautiful mosaics of this building which had been completely submerged under boulders and rubble. Three alabaster sarcophagi were also unearthed, containing the remains of this Empress, of her consort Theodosius II and of St. Elisha. Antiquarian research had not, however, been the Emperor’s purpose in Ravenna. Gradually German princes began to assemble in considerable numbers. Some had come by sea from Venice, some had evaded the Veronese and crossed the passes in disguise. The German Grand Master, Hermann of Salza arrived, and Gebhard of Arnstein, a Thuringian nobleman, an old acquaintance of Frederick’s who had recently been appointed imperial legate in Tuscany, came from Central Italy. The person, however, for whom more especially the Diet had been summoned was still missing: the Emperor’s son, King Henry.

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For some time past misunderstandings had been talked of between Frederick II and the young German King, now some twenty years of age. Frederick had no serious crime with which to reproach his son, whom he had not seen for over ten years. But he had noticed a certain general indocility in the German King’s attitude, both in personal matters towards his father and in political matters towards the Emperor. He had been under the tutelage, first of Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne, and, after the archbishop’s assassination, under Duke Lewis of Bavaria; but three years ago, at the age of eighteen, he had begun to reign independently. He took after his father perhaps, who at twelve considered it “disgraceful” to be still under guardianship, and who had the good fortune to be his own master at fourteen. King Henry’s first ambition was to get quit of every sort of wardship, and to enlarge his own independence, not in the first place at the expense of the Emperor but rather at the expense of the princes who were thorns in the side of every German king. To this end he necessarily leagued himself with their opponents, with the townsfolk who were increasing in importance in Germany, as elsewhere (the days of the town leagues were not far off), with the ministeriales, the lower nobility who with knightly minstrels were always to be found in great numbers in his entourage. If King Henry had in this choice been prompted by political acumen, realising that Germany’s strength and hope lay in the knights and in the towns, he would have been able to come to some agreement with his father, or at least profitably to consult with him. Any such flair for a political situation was, however, wholly foreign to his nature. He had all the amiability and charm of the Hohenstaufens, but with it an inconsequence and aimlessness which people called “frivolity.” If he favoured townsfolk and ministeriales he did so from no better reason than opposition and hostility to the princes who hemmed him in.

It was not long until this line of action on King Henry’s part became embarrassing. When the princes were staying in Italy in 1230, arranging the Peace of Ceperano between Emperor and Pope, at a moment, therefore, when Frederick was more especially beholden to the German nobles, Henry made an unmistakably hostile move. The citizens of Liège were engaged in a quarrel with their bishop, and King Henry took the townsfolk under his protection. The occasion itself was unimportant, but there was a principle at stake, and in a moment the princes turned on him to a man. Immediately after their return from Italy, in January 1231, forgetting all their mutual quarrels, united in resistance, they compelled the King to hold the unfortunate Diet at Worms in May 1231, and, confident in the Emperor’s support, forced him to surrender a great privilege. Except for a few honorary royal rights the “lords of the land” were to have well nigh unrestricted sovereignty in their own territories, especially over the towns. King Henry, who had been so eager to strengthen the Crown against the growing encroachments of the princes, had thus succeeded in weakening it beyond all precedent.

The Emperor’s policy was diametrically opposed to his son’s at every point. Frederick II could not approve Henry’s general attitude of hostility to the princes, still less this particular manifestation of it, directed against the princes who were absent in Italy in the Emperor’s service. Nothing could be less opportune for him than unrest beyond the Alps, and his son’s behaviour was calculated to conjure up an anti-Staufen alliance of the princes. On the other hand, by allowing the Privilege of Worms to be wrung from him, King Henry had wantonly flung away valuable prerogatives. Frederick himself had frequently, and that without undue regret, surrendered royal rights in favour of the princes, but never without an adequate quid pro quo. The King by his lack of address had on this occasion secured nothing. There were personal matters in question also. Henry wanted to divorce his queen, Margaret of Austria, although he had issue by her, and marry a youthful flame, Agnes of Bohemia. This had been mooted against the Emperor’s will, for Frederick had had definite political combinations in view when he negotiated the Austrian alliance. The question soon became otiose, for Agnes of Bohemia, to escape further discussion, took the veil. The affair contributed, however, to the general unpleasantness. On all these counts the Emperor considered a personal talk with his son to be necessary, and had therefore invited him to Ravenna. Whether King Henry was right or wrong his failure to accept the Emperor’s invitation was unwise. So far he might simply have passed for a somewhat unskilful diplomatist; his absence from Ravenna (though he later excused it on the pretext of the closure of the passes) made him in his father’s eyes a disobedient son. And disobedience, as he might have been aware, was not the road to Frederick’s heart.

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In the meantime Frederick had been negotiating in Ravenna with the German princes and numerous Italian bishops, and finally had again banned the Lombard League when it continued to bar the passage over the Alps. The Emperor may not have been altogether sorry to see the Pope embarrassed by the unjustifiable recalcitrance of the confederate towns, for whose good behaviour he had gone bail while secretly fomenting their resistance. The Lombard action had clearly demonstrated that it was impossible here to assert the authority of the Empire without resort to force. The tangled skein of Northern Italy was obviously not to be unravelled by peaceful measures, for every edict of the Emperor’s introduced fresh complications. He had, for instance, given orders when outlawing the League, that the loyal towns of Lombardy should not elect their annual podesta from any of the rebel towns. This immediately caused friction with Genoa, who had just done him exceptional honour by sending a magnificent embassy; for the Genoese had appointed a podesta from Milan, and were now faced by the delicate choice of offending the League by rejecting the Milanese or offending the Emperor by retaining him. The Emperor could not permit an exception immediately after issuing his command. In spite of the strong imperial feeling in Genoa the Milanese was installed. Though he was reluctant to disturb his good relations with Genoa the Emperor at once retaliated by measures which injured the Genoese trade in Sicily. It was frankly impossible to conduct politics in Lombardy without an army.

Pope Gregory had again volunteered to mediate between Frederick and the League. The Emperor cannot have built much on his offer, for he had had some experience of papal mediation and arbitration. His misgivings were not unjustified. Though Gregory ostensibly supported the Emperor his choice of arbitrators and their line of action showed clearly in whose favour the so-called impartial verdict was to be given. The arbitrators were declared enemies of the Emperor, cardinals who were natives of the League towns. Instead of bearing to the rebels the terms proposed by the aggrieved Emperor they treated first with the confederate revolutionaries, and finally set out for Ravenna with the cut-and-dried proposals of the Leaguers. The Emperor did not wait to hear their award: he knew perfectly what to expect, but he was unwilling at the moment to fall out with the Pope. When the papal arbitrators arrived in Ravenna at the beginning of March they were surprised to find the Emperor gone. He rode out to the town one afternoon, as he was in the habit of doing. A fully-equipped galley was at anchor off the coast ready to sail; he embarked with a few attendants and disappeared. He had made all preparations long before. Foreseeing a protracted absence he had sent Thomas of Aquino back to Sicily as Captain of the kingdom, had dismissed the other participants in the Ravenna diet, only retaining the German princes, and adjourned his Court till Easter in Aquileia. He did not invite his son’s presence; he commanded his attendance in Aquileia, and betook himself thither by sea.

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The princes who had been left behind in Ravenna soon heard the unexpected news that the Emperor was on his way first to Venice. Most of them made haste to follow him by land. As Frederick’s relations with Verona were for the moment unsatisfactory he now sought to secure Venice for his ally, and to take advantage for his own purposes of the rivalry between the two towns in the East. He had other weighty incentives. As the mountain passes were under a constant threat the road via Venice and Friuli was the only certain route to Germany, and a good understanding with the Venetians was therefore of the utmost importance. He sailed by Comacchio, Loreto and Chioggia. He halted for a short time in Loreto, and there received the envoys of the independent Republic (no appanage of the Empire) who hastened thither to greet him. To them he confided his desire to visit Venice to worship St. Mark, their patron saint. The Venetians immediately convened their Grand Council and decided to grant the Emperor’s request. Frederick, therefore, continued his journey to Chioggia. When Frederick landed on the shores of St Mark and stood beside the Doge, Jacopo Tiepolo, he brought all his charm and amiability into play. The Venetians received him with pomp and ceremony; he presented costly gifts of gold and precious stones to their saint, and received from their rich store of relics a splinter of the True Cross: he loaded them, almost against their will, with privileges and trade prerogatives for Sicily; but nothing dispelled the distrust of these traders and seafarers, a distrust equalled only by their unlimited arrogance. Thanks to their immense possessions in the Levant, especially in the Latin Empire, the Venetians felt themselves almost the Emperor’s equals. They did not intend to be under any obligation to the Hohenstaufen. A Venetian goldsmith was commissioned by Frederick to make him a crown; the Grand Council granted permission, only on the condition that no harm should arise from it to the Republic. The Emperor’s power alarmed Venice; they wanted no dealings with him. On the first opportunity the Republic joined Frederick’s Lombard enemies: on the other hand, Venice was the first town to conclude Peace with the Emperor, when a Genoese became Pope.

At Easter 1232 the German princes were assembled in unusual numbers round Frederick II in Aquileia. King Henry at first attempted to evade his father’s command. Some of the princes, however, who were on their way back from Ravenna met the king in Augsburg, and told him of the Emperor’s mood. Their urgent representations induced Henry to appear, however reluctantly, at the Diet summoned expressly for him. The Emperor appointed the adjacent Cividale for his residence with some attendants, but ordered Aquileia to be closed to him. In a business-like way, as if negotiating with a foreign prince, Frederick conducted from Aquileia the discussions with his son. After Henry had submitted to the imperial conditions, and not before, he was permitted to see his father face to face, for the first time in ten years. As father he reproved the son; as Emperor he made heavy demands on the disobedient king. In Cividale, where the Court repaired after some weeks, King Henry was compelled solemnly to swear, in the presence of his princely opponents, to obey all commands of the Emperor in future, and to treat the German princes henceforward with due respect, as “lights and protectors of the Empire” and “apples of the Emperor’s eye.” The oath was further reinforced by a written document in which Henry himself released the princes from their oaths of fealty in case of fresh disobedience, and adjured them in that event to rise against him on the Emperor’s behalf. The Emperor pressed his advantage further, and compelled King Henry to write also to the Holy Father and inform him what oath he had sworn to the “divine Augustus,” and beg Pope Gregory to excommunicate without further notice the German King if he should break the promise made to his father. Frederick II had thus harnessed to his will the two forces which were wont to strive against the Roman Emperor—at the expense, it is true, of his recalcitrant son. For Henry the Lighthearted, under the supervision of Princes and Pope, was granted only a period of probation: an intolerable position, in comparison with which deposition would have been kinder and less severe. All royal freedom of action was denied him, who had sought to be independent and self-sufficing. The Emperor treated him as he was wont to treat a rebellious town: demanding unconditional surrender to his will, an oath of obedience, and submission to imperial supervisors. King Henry would have been no Hohenstaufen if this end of his dreams had not proved the beginning of his tragedy.

The Friuli Diet, which dragged on till the end of May (being transferred from Cividale to Udine, and then to Pordenone so that the whole burden might not fall on one town), was immensely important to the German constitution. It is a commonplace that the results of decisions there taken are still to be felt. Since King Henry had allowed the Privilege of Worms to be wrung from him, the Emperor had no option but to confirm this “Edict in favour of the Princes.” It thus came about that Frederick II, the last of the German Emperors who had been elected as Duke of a race in the old sense, saw the end of the Germanic kingship based on race and armies. From the point of view of constitutional history Germany may henceforth be styled a Confederation of Princes or a Princely Oligarchy.

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Every German statesman is faced by the same problem: to establish the ideal relation between the Empire and its members. Each preceding answer seems to have been suitable as a momentary, but questionable as a permanent solution: each has been big with fate. In Frederick’s day the problem might have been stated somewhat as follows: everywhere each state was pressing on towards immediacy; the absolutism of such a state as the Kingdom of Sicily, for instance, must in some way be reconciled with the existing kingship of the Germans based on race and feudal force. Contrary to what might have been expected Frederick II never even contemplated the attempt to transform the whole of Germany into a unified officialised Germany, comparable to the Sicilian monarchy. It is true that in later days Frederick from his Italian base pushed forward his Sicilian bureaucratic regime as far as Burgundy and the Tyrol, and even in a modified form as far as Austria, so that the thesis might be sustained that Frederick had simply been unable to complete the “Sicilianisation” of the Empire, which was creeping steadily from South to North, because he died prematurely before he was sufficiently master of Lombardy. There is no sign, however, that the Emperor was planning to push his Sicilian official system further northwards. All historical and spiritual forces in the country would at once have failed him, and one essential was lacking: the cultivated layman and the cultivated townsman who existed in Italy; the whole great stratum of lay jurists which replaced the feudal system as the basis of the Sicilian-Italian State. Frederick II never contemplated undermining the feudal forces of extensive and deeply subdivided Germany, and ruling through officials without the intervention of the princes. The German princes, moreover, were not Sicilian barons and duodecimo clerics, they were the Emperor’s peers.

Since the Emperor renounced all intention of exercising in Germany his new methods of rule, the task of ruling must fall on the German princes who were in any case striving for greater independence, and whose rights were long since steadily increasing at the expense of the rights of the Crown. Frederick II allowed the princes to continue in this path, nay even supported them, because this exactly fitted his imperial policy which was narrowing down into a Lombard policy. More than any preceding Emperor, Frederick was first and foremost the super-national Roman Imperator, whose great mid-European Imperium stretched from Syracuse to Friesland and the Baltic. To strengthen the Empire his first need was an utterly submissive Lombardy. Without this the Empire was rent in two. To reduce Lombardy, Frederick needed the forces of Germany, but needed even more—as security also against the Pope—an assurance of peace in the North and the protection of his rear by the trusty princes of Germany, both spiritual and temporal. By the sacrifice of his own revenues and prerogatives he could purchase all this from the powerful nobles who had clipped the wings of so many victorious Emperors before him. For the sake of the cause he did not hesitate to make the sacrifice, the less because his Sicilian wealth and resources were ample compensation. Sicilian gold was potent in money-lacking Germany, and Frederick’s generosity won the attachment of the princes to his person, an attachment which withstood amazingly the protracted intrigues and machinations of the Church.

It cannot be doubted that practical considerations and the higher necessities of the Roman Empire prompted Frederick to these sacrifices in favour of the princes. What followed, whether with or against his will, was the almost sovereign independence of each individual prince in his own territory. The concessions which Frederick in his early days had made to the spiritual princes were extended by the new charters of Worms and Friuli to the temporal princes also, so that a certain uniformity prevailed throughout Germany. The princes, being thus all on more or less the same footing, began to feel themselves more of a corporate body than formerly, and became aware of a community of interest, advantageous or disadvantageous for the Emperor as the case might be. Renouncing most of the Crown rights in the princes’ territories, Frederick, according to the new privileges, had agreed to abandon royal rights of coinage, the right of building imperial fortifications, the royal jurisdiction throughout all the lands of the princes, or, as they now came to be significantly called, the “Lords of the Land.” The princes’ authority vis-à-vis their subjects was enhanced, for the inferior courts of law were placed under the immediate jurisdiction of the princes, and jurisdiction other than theirs was abolished or greatly limited. Other clauses pointed in the same direction, so that the princes exercised almost autocratic power in their own domains, or were on the high road to acquiring it. An intensification of state organisation was thus set on foot in Germany as in Sicily, not emanating from and re-enforcing the central royal authority, but strengthening the separate parts, the princes. It was now possible for them to consolidate their states, and the constructive forces inherent in unity of race and country were immensely easier to release, develop, exploit under the direct thorough-going rule of a minor monarch than under mediate rule of an Emperor hampered by the princes, or of a prince hampered by the existence of intrusive royal rights. This clean sweep of all the powers that interfered between the lord of the land and his territories made it possible for the individual states to begin government in earnest.

From this point of view the Emperor’s policy of strengthening the prince appears as a simplication of the whole German state, and of untold importance for the consolidation of the loosely-strung widely-spreading German lands, in which from of old all strength and statesmanship had lain in the individual clans and not in the congeries of German races. It was, however, a policy fraught with immense danger. The stronger the constituent states grew the less hope there was of unifying them into one German super-state, and Frederick’s course of action prolonged the subdivision of Germany. He definitely hindered the amalgamation of the German people into one “German State.” The policy, moreover, reacted injuriously on the Empire as a whole, for the princes, each immersed in the development of his own domains, displayed little active interest in the fate of the Empire. The important gain for Frederick was that the princes kept the peace and were ready at need to stand behind him to a man; a state of affairs that lasted twenty years and more. It is common knowledge how disastrous this increased independence proved. With the decline of the Roman Imperium the last unifying impulse was gone. Each lord of the land pursued the aims and interests of his own territory, and developed a narrow provincial outlook which took no heed of the world at large, of Germany, or Emperor, or Empire. Cleavages and clefts that the pressure of the Empire had kept closed now yawned and widened.

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However ready Frederick was to subordinate Germany’s advantage to the World Empire, it is scarcely conceivable that a statesman of his calibre can have failed to visualise one united northern kingdom, suited to the conditions of the expiring Middle Ages. He would gain nothing from a mere semblance of power, and if this was to be avoided he must re-organise the whole kingdom on a new basis, with due regard to the new conditions. A few individual measures destined to enhance the central imperial power show that he had some definite scheme in mind. If the Lombard struggle had ended quickly and happily we can imagine that the Emperor would have introduced some uniform method of administration for all territories. While preserving their sovereignty intact he might have metamorphosed the princes into viceroys, parallel to the later Vicars General of Italy, with their princely, even royal state. Frederick is credited with the intention of making a collection of imperial law and legal procedure. He must certainly have had such a work in mind which would have guided the princely governments into definite lines. It was not long after this time that Frederick appointed a Grand Justiciar for Germany, thereby implying that the Emperor’s supreme jurisdiction should be asserted, while the normal administration of justice in each country should remain with the individual princes.

The essential thing, however, was that the Emperor should have some positive force at his disposal to guarantee the good faith of the princes and to compensate for the securities he had foregone. He required a sufficient force to compel obedience at need and enforce the unity of the Empire. It is of the utmost interest to note what deductions Frederick II drew from the reshuffling of the German powers. The Emperor had divested himself of so many prerogatives that he could no longer claim to be the foremost and the mightiest in virtue of his privileges; he must prove himself so by actual strength. The personal private resources of the monarch had to fill the place of the impersonal imperial property and crown rights. This change is foreshadowed in the efforts of the Hohenstaufens to secure for themselves a firm working basis in the south. Now for the first time Sicily provided an Emperor with just such a personal possession. It lay wholly outside the range of the German princes, and, secure in his Sicilian resources, Frederick had been able to abandon his German prerogatives. In securing Sicily the Hohenstaufen Emperors had not had this policy in view. Sicily, like the other countries, was there to serve the Empire as a whole. Frederick II, standing on the borderline between the two epochs, was the first to feel the need of founding a personal power in the North within Germany itself: setting the precedent which the Hapsburg was so happily to follow—a remarkable coincidence. In 1236 the Emperor crushed the rebellion of the last of the Babenbergs, Frederick the Fighter, of Austria and Styria. The Emperor confiscated his dukedoms and retained them under the immediate administration of the Empire, instead of granting them to some new fiefholder after a year and a day, as custom was. Thus in the south-eastern corner of the kingdom, where Bohemia, Hungary and the dukedom of Austria still offered large unbroken stretches of territory, the Hohenstaufen Frederick, whose Swabian patrimony, though scattered, was still of considerable extent, sought to build up a new power. The war against the Austrian Duke was only a minor action in larger campaigns, and the Duke ultimately succeeded in recovering the bulk of his lands. An agreement was reached later, and at one stage the Dukedom of Austria was to be elevated into a kingdom. This plan, however, fell through. Frederick the Fighter, last of the Babenbergs, ultimately died childless in 1246 and his vacant fief fell to the Empire. Frederick II forthwith revived his original scheme, retained the dukedom for himself, entrusted its administration to Sicilian Captains General, and bequeathed it as hereditary Hohenstaufen property to his grandson. The Emperor’s fighting was, in future, mainly confined to Italy, and the importance of the Hohenstaufen personal Austrian domain was slight. The amazing thing is the astounding foresight of this world-statesman and his unerring intuition of what was to come.

The Emperor thus sought to forestall the dangers conjured up by his own surrender of innumerable safeguards and by his strengthening of the imperial princes. Frederick’s greatest power lay, nevertheless, in his own personality. At the zenith of his glory Frederick II, most Roman of all German Emperors, possessed not only the armed force, but the personal magic, to sway the princes to his will and direct their gaze to the great problems of the Roman world. In these glorious years the strengthened princes and the double renown of the ancient kingdom-in-arms and the new Empire brought about that unique fulfilment which preluded the end: that full perfection of the German Empire, a mighty Emperor surrounded by his mighty princes. The dream of their return lulled anaemic generations for centuries to come. Germany as Imperium was at that moment the symbol and embodiment of the great conception of a Roman Empire embracing and unifying all peoples and races of the world, conterminous and identical with a great Christian Empire. This was possible because Germany preserved, for weal or woe, the multitude of races and princes which corresponded to that ideal and imaginary community of Europe’s peoples and kings. In contrast to her shrewd, practical neighbours in the West, Germany remained always “the Empire.”

The ideal World-Empire of the Middle Ages did not involve the subjection of all peoples under the dominion of one. It stood for the community of all kings and princes, of all the lands and peoples of Christendom, under one Roman Emperor, who should belong to no nation, and who, standing outside all nations, should rule all from his throne in the one Eternal City. Only thus could the perfect Germany arise, setting before princes and races the idea: the Imperium Romanum—and yet: nations.

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The domination of one race over the other would, therefore, have been a betrayal in favour of one peculiar type—Saxon or Frank, Swabian or ultimately Prussian. For in the State dominated by one race (in spite of the attainment of a genuine non-national unity) the best powers of all the races could never flourish equally, to produce the one world-embracing German. Less fortunate, perhaps, than Ionians and Dorians, no single race, whether Saxon or Swabian or Frank, possessed a world-sense, though each alone was well-equipped with state-sense: the feeling for the universal—divorced alas from the feeling for the state—was incorporate only in the super-national German whole. Frederick never contemplated such a betrayal, never aimed at ruling Germany with Swabian knights and esquires. He was no Swabian Duke, no German King, he was solely Roman Caesar and Imperator, he was Divus Augustus—as none before him and none since. As Roman Caesar, centring in himself and in his own person the German whole, he became the symbol, foreign though it was, which supplied the one possible form of the self-fulfilment Germany was then seeking: self-fulfilment within the Roman Empire.

The great Empire of this great Emperor was not a German National State on the model of Sicily, or of France under the Capets. The true statesman does not apply one hard and fast scheme to all countries. Yet in a higher sense Frederick II perfected and completed the unified German Empire. He did not here pose as the priest-like Emperor and imperial Mediator who figured in the Sicilian bureaucratic State, nor yet as the Demi-God sent from heaven, nor yet as the Son of God. The oriental love of hero-worship is radically foreign to the Germanic mind, especially while the hero is still in the flesh. Amongst the Germans he aimed rather at creating the impression of the King soaring to heaven, borne aloft on the shoulders of the princes. The release of the princes from feudal fetters and their unlimited powers (which now for the first time united them in the “voluntary unity” of the late Middle Ages) made the Hohenstaufen autocrat, in literal truth, amongst his autocrats, primus inter pares—the first amongst his peers. Further, since all royal authority and all royal rights had been withdrawn throughout the princes’ territories, his imperial throne had no longer any basis upon earth. As the German princes themselves phrased it at the Friuli Diet: “The imperial throne, to which we are attached as the limbs are attached to the head, rests like the head upon our shoulders and is firmly upheld by our body, so that the Majesty of the Emperor shines forth in glory and our princely rank reflects the glory back again.” This is the traditional conception of the Empire, which at last finds ultimate expression and literal realisation; for a brief span, and almost against the ruler’s desire. Unlike his predecessors Frederick never weakened or oppressed the princes to make his own greatness look the greater by contrast with their weakness. He strengthened the princes’ power, even created a new dukedom, with more exalted statesmanship believing that the power and the glory and the brilliance of his own imperial sceptre would not pale in giving forth light, but would gain in radiance and would shine the brighter the more mighty and brilliant and majestic were the princes whom Caesar Imperator beheld “as equals round his judgment seat.” The princes are no longer columns bearing as a burden the weight of the throne. Like the officials of the South, and yet very differently, they become piers and pillars expressive of upward-soaring strength, preparing the glorious elevation of the “prince of princes and king of kings” who is borne aloft on the shoulders of his peers, and who in turn exalts both kings and princes.

Life was always unthinkable for Frederick without the sense of tension; here is an incomparably daring gamble, in which the slightest reshuffling of the cards will mean ruin. Frederick faced the situation unflinching, with wide-open eyes. He wrote later: “Germania’s princes on whom hangs our elevation—and our fall.” The danger was proportional to the elevation, no more. The Germans recognised Frederick II as fate incarnate and as doom; they yearned for him, they shrank from him. With him the Empire fell; but more enduring than a century of safety were the few hours during which a German Emperor was privileged to tread such dangerous heights. The increased power of the princes was a necessary factor therein. If the correct balance was to be maintained in Germany feeble limbs could not support an over-weighty head: princes and Emperor together represented that supernational German, symbolised the “illustrious body of the Holy Empire,” the corpus mysticum of the “German-as-a-Whole,” which Frederick II justifiably identified with his own body. For this stranger, this Roman of Swabian race, embodied that European-German personage whom men had dreamt of, who combined the triple culture of Europe: the cultures of the Church, the East, the Ancients. The Church was to Frederick II something complete and finished, which he had in himself outgrown, which lay behind him. Nietzsche called Frederick “to my mind the FIRST EUROPEAN,” and wrote of “that magic, intangible, unfathomable Riddle of a man predestined to victory and betrayal.” The type was one most difficult for the Germans to assimilate by reason of just that Roman chiselling, that secretiveness, that complete self-sufficingness.

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The solemn speech-making of Friuli was the prelude to Frederick II’s personal intervention in German affairs, and it was German business which here chiefly engaged attention. Counsel was taken, however, about other countries of the Empire, and much important business transacted. A favourable turn was given to the Lombard question by Frederick’s success in winning over the brothers Eccelino and Alberigo of Romano, who were just then acquiring great importance in the March of Treviso. By a skilfully-engineered rising they succeeded in making Frederick master of Verona, so that the Alpine passes were now open to the Germans. The kingdom of Burgundy also, which was very loosely attached to the Empire, was drawn into closer relationship, and before long Burgundian forces were, for the first time, commandeered for imperial purposes. Envoys of the French King, Louis IX, St. Louis, arrived to conclude a pact of friendship. And here the ambassadors of the “Old Man of the Mountain,” the head of the Assassins, came to find Frederick, and the ambassadors of the Sultan of Damascus, who brought a planetarium made of gold and jewels to the Maliku ’l Umara¯, the King of the Amirs. The Feast of the Hijra came round. In honour of the Muslim envoys the Emperor celebrated the day of the Prophet’s Flight by a brilliant banquet, attended by German princes and bishops.

After an absence of many months from Germany the princes were finally loaded with costly gifts and dismissed in the middle of May, amongst them King Henry, on whose behaviour the peace of the North now hung. Frederick himself, with his oriental escort, took ship to Apulia. On his way he made a successful attack on the Dalmatian pirates, took many prisoners and flung them into chains. His next immediate affairs were negotiations with the Pope.

*

The outward vision of concord did not alter the fact that the peace between the Emperor and Pope was a secret battle, conducted with the weapons of an infinitely delicate diplomacy. The tension between Frederick II and Gregory IX, just veiled for the moment, had reached a height unprecedented in the long warfare between Empire and Papacy. Henry VI and Innocent III had not held the stage together; equal powers now existed simultaneously and stood face to face awaiting the outburst of the final battle; but both postponing it a while and both willing for expediency to exercise moderation and control. Deadly enemies, each as capable as the other of savage passion, but for the moment unable to dispense with each other, and each benefiting by the momentary truce. The Emperor benefited perhaps even more than the Pope, his wish for peace with Gregory was certainly more sincere, was even too sincere, though his hate for the old man in Rome was deep.

No sooner was peace concluded than an amazing diplomatic game began between Court and Curia, a game which was to last for some years yet, though with ever-growing embitterment. In the eyes of the world the two powers still figure as Father and Son, and while both weigh each several step with utmost caution, and each watches lynx-like to exploit any chance of weakness on the other’s part, each is equally eager to seize opportunities of offering civility and assistance, so as to place the other under an obligation. Each side had difficulties and to spare. Pope Gregory was openly at war with the Romans. He had had to quit the town because the citizens had risen against their bishop, as had been occurring long since in the other communes of Italy. The thought of the ancient republican freedom of Rome was not without influence on men’s minds, and they craved territorial expansion. The Romans always cast covetous glances on the Campagna and the Patrimonium. As enemies of their bishop they were the natural allies of the Emperor, yet Frederick, at the Pope’s request, had sent a detachment of troops to Viterbo, which was usually the first point of their attack.

Frederick on his side was not without serious embarrassments. Apart from Lombard problems he had to assure himself of the Pope’s concurrence in all questions relating to his son Henry, so as to be secure against surprise. The kingdom of Syria, too, provided endless difficulties. Not that the Saracens had broken the truce, but because the Christians raged against each other. The Syrian-Cypriot nobles, under the leadership of the sometime administrator of Cyprus, John of Ibelin, and supported by the Patriarch Gerold and the people, had inflicted a severe defeat on the imperial marshal, Richard Filangieri, who had enjoyed some initial successes. It ended within a year with the loss of Cyprus. Pope Gregory had now at last granted the Hohenstaufen Emperor the long-withheld title of King of Jerusalem. It cost him nothing to take the Emperor’s part on the distant, now indifferent, oriental scene, and it laid on Frederick the obligation of some return service. So Pope Gregory loudly denounced Patriarch Gerold, whom we know of old, and abruptly recalled him; the Curia having been suddenly assailed with misgivings about his behaviour during the Crusade. “People whisper in secret and openly proclaim that the Syrian kingdom of our well-beloved son in Christ, Frederick, the ever-exalted Emperor of the Romans, King of Jerusalem and Sicily, has been unsettled by thy means, for thy hand has lain behind the hands of the disturbers of the peace.” This was the new note in the Pope’s letters to Gerold, whom he replaced by the Patriarch Albert of Antioch. The Pope was similarly ready to go to any lengths against King Henry; his reasons were transparent. The ruin of the German King, if skilfully exploited, might mean the collapse of the whole Hohenstaufen rule north of the Alps. On Frederick’s side it was the usual game of harnessing opposition forces, when he himself requested the Pope, nay even—to enhance the effect—compelled King Henry to request the Pope to excommunicate the son if he should prove rebellious to the father. Emperor and Pope were here able to indulge in the amusement of mutually obliging each other—each secure in the faith that he would ultimately outwit his foe—and of presenting to the world the edifying spectacle of their affectionate harmony.

Frederick was perfectly aware that this untroubled amity would not last a day longer than Gregory’s Roman embarrassment, and he was therefore in no hurry effectively to end this, hoping to derive some advantage for himself in his Lombard affairs from the present favourable situation. The Romans themselves increased the pressure on the Pope so greatly that by the end of July 1232, shortly after Frederick’s return from Aquileia, Pope Gregory decided definitely to request the Emperor’s help against the Romans, though knowing well that he would have to requite his imperial ally by concessions in other spheres. The Emperor received the papal letter exhorting him “to dash to the ground the pride of these overweening Romans with his triumphant and illustrious right hand, to scatter the demon hosts and break the horns of the ungodly.” Frederick was obliged, most reluctantly he said, to refuse. He had, in fact, the luck to hear at the same moment of the rebellion in Messina, which imperatively recalled him to Sicily, and claimed all the fighting forces of his kingdom. So the most the Emperor could do was to place his good friends the Romans under the imperial ban. But he immediately summoned the Germans, the feudal knights of Provence, and of the whole kingdom of Burgundy, to come to the assistance of the harassed Pope. The imperial diplomat killed several birds with this one stone. It was the first time in history that the feudal army of Burgundy had been summoned for service in Italy, and Frederick created this weighty precedent not in his own but ostensibly in the Pope’s sole interest. Further, this summons gave Frederick an opportunity of sending an imperial plenipotentiary to the Burgundian court, with the remark that it was a very long time since Burgundy had performed any service for the Empire; not indeed that he wished to cast this fact in her teeth, since she had not been offered the opportunity. Thirdly, Frederick had great hopes that, though he personally had displayed the utmost promptitude, it would be a considerable time before help actually reached the Pope. Meantime, he had not antagonised the Romans whose friendship might at any moment be valuable, and amongst whom he had built up a strong aristocratic party. Finally, he could now devote himself in peace to restoring order in Messina and the other towns in the island of Sicily.

The Pope had hoped that Frederick, the King of Sicily, the feudal vassal of the Holy See, would appear in person before the walls of Rome; he expressed himself, however, grateful for the assistance promised. A remarkable correspondence now set in between Pope and Emperor, taking its rise in the immediate circumstances, but laying down in the most perfect form the ideal relationship between Empire and Papacy and the principles of their mutual assistance. It was a remarkable feature of the time that in treating any question of the moment the eternal order of the universe was always included. Pope Gregory expressed his thanks that “the Emperor’s spirit had been illuminated and rightly directed by a ray of divine radiance and the inspiration of God himself, who had united the son to his mother (the Church) and the mother to her son, to restore the rights of Church and Empire.” The wily Gregory supplied precisely the phrases that Frederick had long and eagerly awaited; for in view of the triangular struggle of Emperor, Pope and Lombards, nothing was so dear to Frederick’s heart as a rapprochement with Gregory that would loosen the Pope’s disastrous attachment to the towns. Frederick hastened, therefore, to answer in similar style in a lengthy letter, which the writer, Piero della Vigna and the Grand Justiciar Henry of Morra, both of them negotiators in Lombard affairs, were entrusted to carry to the Pope. This masterly composition, enriched by all possible resources of style and playing on words, formulated a universal doctrine: God, the all-foreseeing physician, had in time diagnosed the double oppression of the Church by heretics and rebels, and to combat these two diseases had prepared not two separate medicines but a double treatment: “The ointment of the priestly office by which the inner infirmity of false servants is spiritually healed, and the might of the imperial sword which cleanses with its edge the suppurating wounds, and with its whetted blade of worldly Empire hews off from the conquered foe all that is infected and decayed.” Again: “This, Most Holy Father, is in truth the one, yet dual, healing for our sickness. Although Holy Empire and Holy Priesthood from their names appear two separate entities yet they are in the effective sense one and the same, being of like origin, consecrated by the divine power. They are to be guarded by the same reverent homage and—I shudder to say it—annihilated by the same overthrow of their common faith.”

It is worth noting that there, in writing to the Pope, as elsewhere in speaking to the princes, Frederick alludes to the downfall of the Empire. He was perfectly aware that his throne was a volcano. His statecraft in Sicily is based on a knowledge of the insecurity of existing institutions. The interdependence of Empire and Papacy has never been more clearly expressed than by Frederick II. It is Dante’s vision of the two Suns of Rome, based on the immediate relation of the Emperor to God, which Frederick here emphasises, and which the Church never recognised. We shall see later that Frederick’s picture of the ideal Pope anticipates Dante’s most exactly. This doctrine, however, apart from its general, eternal, universal validity, had a very present practical application: “Therefore, Most Blessed Father, since we are one, and assuredly feel alike, let us take thought as one for the common service: let us restore the Church’s impaired freedom, and while we renew the rights of Church and Empire let us sharpen the swords entrusted to us against the underminers of the faith and the rebels of the Empire. …” This return to present affairs meant, in fact, would the Pope be so good as to enforce obedience on the Lombard rebels with the same zeal as Frederick showed against heretics—“for time is pressing and quibbling out of place!”

Frederick II had entrusted to the Pope the mediation in Lombardy. The Emperor’s general position, after the Friuli Diet, and after the alliance with Eccelino and Verona, and after various imperial successes in Northern Italy, seemed so unusually favourable that the Lombards were prepared to make many concessions. Only on two points were the parties irreconcilable: the Emperor demanded satisfaction for the closure of the Verona passes, and refused to recognise the Lombard League as such. For the confederation was to him a rebel state within the State, which split the Empire in two and severed Sicily from Germany. This was why the Lombard question was the fountain head of all quarrels between Court and Curia: Frederick needed an unconditionally submissive Lombardy to round off his Empire; while the Pope, to stave off this encircling power, was bound in defiance of right or custom to look with favour on such a buffer as the League provided. Since the Pope at the moment wanted Frederick’s help he skilfully evaded contentious matters and put off the whole Lombard question. This expedient was probably not unwelcome to the Emperor, for it left all possibilities still open. They were thus partially at one on the subject of Lombards and rebels, and even of heretics, though they held different views on the methods of the Inquisition. After the Sicilian insurrection Frederick permitted his imperial officials and a few docile clerics to carry on an Inquisition of a markedly political type, but he excluded all papal assistants; whereas in Lombardy the Inquisitors were all the Pope’s creatures, Dominicans for the most part. The Pope was none too well pleased with the imperial methods of heretic-hunting, while Frederick strongly objected to the Lombard Inquisition’s proceeding without the presence of imperial officials, for he had sound reason to fear disturbance of the loyal towns. For Emperor and Pope alike utilised the edicts against heretics as a welcome political weapon, and ere long the papal interdict lay heavy on Verona, with her new imperial leanings, and on her ruler, Eccelino. Anyone, in fact, who failed to accommodate himself to the papal or the imperial will was a heretic: for this was manifest rebellion against God.

*

While Pope and Emperor, each in his own way, persecuted the heretics, an event suddenly took place which can only be compared to some great natural cataclysm. The entire North of Italy succumbed simultaneously to the madness and confusion of the penance mania. This movement is probably not unconnected with the Dominican persecutions in the North. Dominicans were amongst the chief leaders of the penitents, and rivalry with the Franciscan Order may have been another factor. Francis of Assisi had long since been canonised, and in July 1232 another Franciscan, Anthony of Padua, had been beatified, whereas twelve years had elapsed since the death of Dominic, and no one had yet officially recognised his saintliness or honoured him by canonisation. A bishop who was in close touch with the preaching monks even challenged the brothers: “Now that ‘Brothers Minor’ have a saint of their own, get yourselves one somehow, even if you have to throw him together out of wooden stakes.” People took saints very seriously in Italy. The penance-movement was so successful that the other great Founder, Dominic, was presently canonised too (in 1234).

The most natural ambition of the Dominicans, to know that their Founder was a Saint, set no doubt a certain goal for some of the leaders. Other impulses, however, underlay the movement as a whole. For over thirty years prophetic sayings had stirred and terrified Italy with words of dread, and the populace here more than in any other region was kept in a state of continuous excitement in anticipation of the Last Trump. Abbot Joachim of Flora had introduced the turn of the century with terrifying visions of the Last Day, which profoundly influenced the whole thirteenth century till Dante. The greatest effect was exercised by his remarkable doctrine of the three ages: the first begins with the Creation of the World and the creation of Adam; the second with the birth of Christ; the third was just about to dawn. Similar divisions of time were not new. Joachim, however, referred the three ages to the Trinity and named the first the Age of the Father, the second the Age of the Son on which should follow the third, the Age of the Spirit. As the three members of the Trinity are coequal it follows that the three ages must be essentially identical and the courses of the three must correspond. The world situation at the opening of the third age must resemble that of the dawn of the first and second, the ages of Creation and Redemption. This was the same conception as Frederick had employed in order to place himself on a par with Adam and with Christ as the bringer of the third and last age.

From this starting point people began to reinterpret the Bible. If the three ages were exactly to reproduce each other, the prophets of the Old Covenant who associated all the terrors of destruction with the coming of the Saviour, must again be valid for the present age which was once more expecting the Messiah. The sayings of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Daniel, prophesying destruction and salvation, raged once again through the towns of Italy; the awe-inspiring visions of John’s Revelation and other apocryphal Apocalypses broke in upon the terror-stricken world, which took all these sayings as applying to itself and to the immediate future. Abbot Joachim, with his interpretations of the Apocalypse and the Commentary on Jeremiah which was ascribed to him, had set the ball rolling, and in a short time he found innumerable imitators, especially amongst the mendicant monks. Matters reached such a pitch that every occurrence on earth was interpreted as the “fulfilment” of a Bible dictum, and the chronicles of the mendicants are full of such interpretations: this and that word of Scripture was accomplished in this and that event, the Law has been fulfilled. When Frederick II announced that he had come to fulfil the Law, and found the salvation of the world in the fulfilment of the Law, he was speaking to an age that was craving this fulfilment.

Where Abbot Joachim’s sayings were insufficient other joachite promises and interpretations were speedily invented. Genuine and false sibylline verses, magic sayings of Merlin, prophecies of Michael Scot, oriental oracles, Spanish forebodings, all contributed to confuse and excite minds which were already living in terror of the imminent coming of Anti-Christ, the End of the World and the Day of Judgment, and were yet buoyed up by lingering hopes of the approach of the Messiah, the peace of the world and the golden age of Apollo. For though Anti-Christ would woefully assail the Church he would yet be overcome by the effective intervention of an Order, living a life of Apostolic simplicity. Such was the promise. And not long after Abbot Joachim Francis of Assisi made his appearance: the fulfilment of the prophecy. With similar weapons Dominic took up the war against heretics. In Padua Anthony was worshipped as a Saint. The Italian people were thirsting for peace and weary of never-ending feuds. In this time of crisis and confusion, tortured with the throes of a new birth, all spiritual and other forces were tense and at fever heat, and men fell an eager prey to any miracle that promised easier and better things. In the midst of all this the preachers appeared everywhere simultaneously, calling to penance, and coupling their terrifying words with the message of peace they stung the people to raving and madness. The epidemic spread like wildfire. “All were drunk with heavenly love, for they had quaffed of the wine of the spirit of God after testing which all flesh begins to rave.” The peace and penance mania of the year 1233 is known as the “Great Halleluja!” because the penance-preachers overran the country with this cry in praise of the Three-in-One. Externally it was everywhere the same. In Parma a preacher appeared in fantastic garb who belonged to no Order: wearing a black beard and with a high Armenian cap on his head, shrouded in a sacklike garment and bearing a gigantic red cross on breast and back. The brother played on a little copper trumpet, from which he drew now sweet now terrifying sounds. He lured the people, especially children, after him like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. They followed with boughs and burning tapers through streets and market-places, joining loudly in the brother’s Halleluja. On his arrival all enmities were suddenly forgotten, all battles abandoned: “A time of happiness and joy began; knights and people, burghers and peasants struck up hymns and songs in praise of God; people fell on each other’s necks, there was no wrath, no strife, no confusion: only Love and Peace.”

Almost the whole of Italy fell under the spell of the Halleluja. Sicily was an exception: one such penance-monger was ejected across the border by imperial officials. Florence also greeted these proceedings with witticism and merriment, and met the miracle-working of the preachers with practical jokes. In Milan the multitude was led by the Dominican Peter of Verona, the same who was later murdered and honoured by the title of “Martyr”; in Piacenza by Leo the Franciscan; the Dominican, John of Vicenza, worked north from Bologna upwards, and in Parma Brother Gerard, a Minorite, took the apostolic office, performing many miracles. Another Minorite brother, Salimbene of Parma, relates vividly the manner of these miracles. Every here and there all the great preachers must have held conferences and agreed on the day, hour, place and theme of their sermons, and then gone their several ways and preached. “There stood Brother Gerard in the Piazza of Parma on a wooden stair which he had had made for his addresses as I saw with my very eyes, and while the people hearkened he ceased and drew his hood over his head, as if he sank himself in God. After a long time, to the admiration of the people, he removed the hood and continued his speaking, as who should say ‘I was in the spirit on the Lord’s day.’” And then he informed the amazed populace he had been hearing Brother John in Bologna speaking on such and such a text, and Brother Leo on such another. The people of Parma assured themselves by messengers of the truth of his visions and many entered the Order. What the preachers achieved, by whatever means, was, in fact, a complete and sudden cessation of all hostilities.

In some towns matters went so far that mendicant monks snatched the reins of authority, like the Dominican Savonarola 250 years later, and ruled according to mendicant principles. The Minorite Brother Gerard, who was an admirer and supporter of Frederick II, did so in Parma, for instance, and Brother John of Vicenza, the Emperor’s foe, who was worshipped as a saint in Bologna, cast the whole town under a spell, and thereupon continued his campaign of peace in the March of Treviso. Finally, at Verona he mounted the carroccio of the town and preached to the multitude who streamed in from Padua, Treviso, Ferrara and Mantua; thousands were assembled, who acclaimed him Duke and Rector of Verona. None dared oppose the will of the excited populace and their leader. The authorities were impotent. In a moment the rule of Eccelino in Verona was at an end: he, “Satan in person,” was compelled to swear obedience to the Brother, and did so with tears in his eyes—tears of emotion, opined the multitude.

The service of penance of 1233 was only a foretaste of the much wilder and more savage outburst of the Flagellants in 1260 after Frederick’s death, fanatic figures who are not far removed from the cycle of legend that centres round Frederick. For the still living Emperor the Great Halleluja had the most inconvenient political consequences. The only person who profited was Pope Gregory. With the loss of Verona Frederick had again lost his mountain pass; the Pope had seized this opportunity of making peace with the Romans. He was now triumphant in Rome without the Emperor’s help, and had now not the smallest intention of meeting Frederick half-way in the Lombard question, just at the moment when it was peculiarly acute. The Lombards did not stand by their concessions, and though the Pope did not accede to their more outrageous demands he evolved an expedient. He revived in essentials the treaty, none too favourable to Frederick, that had been concluded by his predecessor Honorius III, and instead of achieving a settlement everything was, as before, in the melting-pot. This procedure of the Pope’s stirred to bitterness and resentment not only Frederick but several of the Cardinals. The Cardinals made no secret of their feelings; they refused to follow Gregory to Rome, but remained in Anagni, and when the Pope returned to Anagni they immediately betook themselves to Rieti. To everyone’s amazement the Emperor, though not recognising the League, acquiesced in the Pope’s proposals, partly for expediency, partly because he had other schemes brewing. He had not yet received satisfaction for the interference with his Diet.

The Halleluja came to an abrupt conclusion. At the last and greatest feast of peace in Paquera 400,000 North Italians, it was computed, assembled round Brother John of Vicenza. Solemnly a pact of eternal peace was sworn. Four days later in Lombardy and the March of Treviso the war of the towns broke out again. All flew at each other’s throats, and Brother John, “Duke” of Verona, sat in the dungeon of one of his innumerable foes. The balance between Emperor and Pope was gradually restored when the Romans had sobered again after their orgy of peace. In 1234 Luca Savelli was elected Senator of Rome. He declared papal Tuscany and the Campagna to be the property of the Roman people, and he demanded homage from the towns of these areas. The Pope fled to Rieti, and excommunicated the Romans, who were looting the Lateran and the cardinals’ houses, and called the whole Christian world to his relief.

*

Now was Frederick’s opportunity. In the sight of the whole world he could pose as Advocatus of Rome and Protector of the Pope. He could draw the temporal sword to defend the Church, exactly as world-ideals demanded, exactly as he had pictured in his recent letter to the Pope. He offered active assistance to the Pope and joined him in Rieti, taking his six-year-old son Conrad with him to hand over to the Pope as a hostage for the purity of his motives. Then he entered Viterbo with his troops to besiege the Roman fortress of Rispampani from this base. The gesture was here the thing. The Pope, of course, could not accept the hostage, and the Emperor, who had no desire for a fight with the Romans, preferred to loose his falcons in the Campagna and hunt in papal purlieus. As the siege grew protracted he returned to Sicily, while his troops, after a while, forced the Romans to make peace. The Emperor had accomplished all he wanted. It was no trifle. The latest news from Germany indicated that the moment had arrived to assign to the Pope his rôle in the coming events.

The Sicilian Book of Laws depicted the Emperor as Fate itself. The Emperor’s own son was the first victim. Since the day when King Henry opposed his father’s wishes by absenting himself on the first occasion from Ravenna his fate had been sealed; slowly, steadily, inevitably he moved towards his doom. When decision was forced on him at Cividale he had no choice but to bow unconditionally before his father’s might, to swear obedience, and to treat the princes with respect. When once he had returned to Germany he felt the full pressure of the fetters he had donned. He sought, cautiously at first, to slip them from him. It was not long till circumstances compelled him to defy Princes, Pope and Emperor. There is no riddle here to read! In forfeiting his father’s confidence he had forfeited his own freedom of action. Spied upon by a host of hirelings, looked upon with suspicion and often thwarted by the Emperor, the very aimlessness of his movements often lent them a compromising air. Henry himself felt insecure, he gave orders, countermanded them; whatever he did, right or wrong, turned at once to his own destruction.

It is unnecessary here to pursue in detail the successive phases of his fall. One episode will show the luckless star under which the young king sailed. Roughly about the time that the Hallelujas of the penance preachers were echoing through the towns of Northern Italy, the German Inquisitor, Conrad of Marburg, a narrow gloomy fanatic, distinguished himself in the papal service as a heretic-hunter. The chief German heretics appear to have been the various sects of Luciferians who magnified Satan as the Creator. The Emperor, in the edicts we already know, had commanded the eradication of heresy, and King Henry and the German princes were at first whole-heartedly on the side of the Inquisition. Before long, however, Conrad of Marburg began to behave like an irresponsible maniac; he accepted every denunciation and accusation as a proof of guilt; he declared burghers heretics and flung them to the flames till the Rhine towns gazed in paralysed horror at his rage, not knowing how to avert it. Finally, Conrad without rhyme or reason accused several of the German nobles of heresy: the Counts of Arnsberg and Solms, and, especially, Henry of Sayn, thus trespassing on the jurisdiction of the bishops. At this point King Henry, with the concurrence of the princes, called a halt to the increasingly savage behaviour of the Inquisitor and sent a protest to the Pope in Rome. This document unfortunately reached Pope Gregory at the same moment as the news that Conrad of Marburg had meantime been murdered by embittered enemies. The Pope, in a fury, tore up King Henry’s letter. In the meantime Henry at a Diet in Frankfurt had declared himself opposed to all such courts as Conrad’s, and had complained that the Bishop of Hildesheim was preaching a heretic-crusade.

In all this the King’s procedure had been above reproach, but the fact that he should just at this moment draw down on himself the Pope’s wrath was in the highest degree inopportune for the Emperor. Just at this moment the consequences of the penance epidemic had given the Pope an advantage over the Emperor, and he had been able to return to Rome, while Frederick saw his whole position in North Italy undermined by the activity of the preachers, and he was particularly anxious to be on good terms with Gregory. He, therefore, strongly disapproved of his son’s course. At the same time King Henry had most unhappily mixed himself up in almost treasonable doings, had made friends with the Emperor’s enemies, and had contrived, most unjustly, to injure his father’s special friends, the brothers Godfrey and Conrad of Hohenlohe, and the Margrave of Baden. Finally, something very like anarchy was beginning to spread through Germany. The princes compelled Henry to proclaim a Public Peace: which altered nothing. Just as Frederick was taking the field against the Romans the son, after having been severely reproved by his father, raised the standard of insurrection. He was in Boppard with a handful of trusty friends, a heterogeneous group of all ranks, united only by the most various impulses of opposition. Some townsfolk and ministeriales and a few bishops, such as Augsburg, Würzburg and Worms, the Abbot of Fulda, and a few secular lords, were on his side. It is hard to see what success King Henry can have hoped for. The Emperor had all the real power behind him, the Princes and the Pope. Frederick designated his son’s behaviour as “boyish defiance,” and his son as “a madman who imagined he could hold the northern throne in our despite.” It was really an act of utter despair when Henry was tempted to a further and final folly. In the late autumn of 1234, in order to hinder or delay the Emperor’s return to Germany, he allied himself with the deadly enemies of his father and his forefathers and of the whole house of Hohenstaufen: with Milan and the confederate Lombard towns. After this no accommodation was possible.

King Henry could no longer stem the tide of events. Frederick II wrote once: “The power of the Empire takes no account of individuals. …” Foreseeing the future he had long since prepared the net for his son, he now drew it slowly in, mesh by mesh, without speed or haste. King Henry’s alliance with the Lombards was rendered valueless before it was concluded. When the first disturbing rumours from Germany reached Frederick, just as he was visiting the Pope in Rieti, and offering his youngest son as a hostage, he himself negotiated the excommunication of his eldest. Pope Gregory IX was pleased, only too eager, to accede to Frederick’s wish, and issued the papal ban. With that move Gregory lost the game. He sat firm in the Emperor’s snare just when he was preparing a trap for Frederick. For when the alliance of his Lombard friends, Milan and her train, with King Henry became known, the Pope was in an extremely delicate position. He could not join this Lombard-German conspiracy to overthrow the Emperor or gravely endanger him, for by his excommunication of King Henry he had declared himself his enemy. Far from being able to stand by the Lombards he ought by rights to have damned them also as the allies of the excommunicated king. He did not go quite so far as this; nor did the Emperor press the point. Frederick, however, was not slow to take advantage of the Pope’s embarrassment. It was impossible now for the Pope to uphold his Lombard friends, guilty of high treason. Frederick could find no delegate more apt to his purpose than the astonished Pope, so he entrusted to the faithful hands of the High Priest himself the task of exacting satisfaction and inflicting punishment for the new treachery of the League, which could not this time be explained away. The Pope was paying dearly for Frederick’s help against the Romans. And Frederick could set out for Germany with an easy mind. He had already written to the German nobles “there is no doubt of our fortunate arrival.”

*

The news of the Emperor’s arrival in Ratisbon was enough. The quite considerable insurrection in Germany at once collapsed, and King Henry was quickly persuaded by Hermann of Salza to unconditional surrender. Fear of the Judge, though approaching alone from the south, exercised a paralysing effect. Without an army, without a train of Sicilian nobles (whom he dismissed at the frontier), Frederick had set out in the spring of 1235, using his galleys to convey him from Rimini to Aquileia, northwards through Friuli and Styria. He took the seven-year-old Conrad with him and his personal exchequer, whose coffers he had replenished by a new tax, well knowing what means would avail him best in Germany. Just as on that former occasion when the Puer Apuliae arrived almost alone in Constance to be soon surrounded by thousands, so now the Emperor’s following grew from day to day, and the number of adherents who streamed to him. As often before, in Germany, in Syria, in Sicily, Frederick II trusted once again to his personal presence, the glory and the magic of his name. He was master of the various arts that cast men under a spell, and according to circumstances used now one method, now another. In Syria he had captivated the Orientals by learned talk about mathematics and astronomy; in Sicily he conjured up the fear of the Divine Power, incarnate as Law upon the earth, charms which were too close and immediate to be potent in Germany, which unfailingly reacted to the magic of the far-away. The marvel of southern strangeness had helped the Puer Apuliae whom men called David to victory, and now the great Charlemagne of tale and story seemed bodily risen again, and came as one of the wise kings of the East, wealthy, magnificent, the Emperor of the End, with his train of exotic animals—and conquered once again.

The German chroniclers tell of Frederick’s magnificence with bated breath. “As befits the imperial majesty, he progressed with the utmost pomp, and many quadrigae, chariots, followed him laden with gold and with silver, with byssus and with purple, with gems and costly vessels. He had with him camels, mules, dromedaries, apes and leopards, with Saracens and dark-skinned Ethopians skilled in arts of many kinds, who served as guards for his money and his treasure.” All the fairy-tale magnificence of the south, the exotic treasures and the marvels of his treasury, “of which the west has scanty store,” the Emperor displayed in the towns of the Danube, the Neckar and the Rhine. And when by chance the uncanny monarch flung to his leopard-keeper a few commands in Arabic, the foreign words were not without effect on the people nor on his train of princes, knights and nobles. This picture of the Emperor stamped itself indelibly on the German mind: In the days of Rudolf of Hapsburg a “false Frederick” arose: he sought to prove his authenticity by possessing three Moorish attendants and some heavily-laden mules. And the pictures of the divine majesty in Berthold of Ratisbon’s sermons are unquestionably coloured by memories of that triumphant imperial progress.

When Frederick with his magnificent escort rode from Wimpfen into the Swabian Palatinate on one of his noble Andalusian or Barbary steeds he found that King Henry had hastened thither before him, to cast himself at his father’s feet. His life was forfeit for insurrection. The Emperor did not permit his son to enter his presence. Henry was first compelled to accompany as prisoner his father’s triumphal progress down the Neckar valley to Worms. Frederick was solemnly welcomed by the people, and twelve bishops waited at the portals of the cathedral to greet him. The Emperor saw amongst them Landulf of Worms, one of the chief supporters of the rebellious king. He ordered him out of his presence and commanded them to strip his bishop’s robes from him. King Henry was flung into prison, and the troubadours tell that in the morning when his armour was taken from him he was still singing; but when at evening they brought him food he wept.

Not till some days later did Frederick sit in judgment on his son. In the presence of many nobles, counts and princes, the Emperor sat enthroned in sacra majestas. King Henry entered the hall and flung himself at the feet of his judge, and as a traitor to his sovereign who sues for pardon bowed his forehead to the ground before the Emperor’s unchanging glance. Amidst an oppressive silence he was obliged to retain this position for a long time, and no one bade him rise. At last, on the prayer of several of the princes, the Emperor allowed the command to be given that he should stand up. Shocked and bewildered he stood and commended himself to the Emperor’s mercy, renouncing his kingly dignity and all that he possessed. His submission saved his life, but he had forfeited his freedom. He had made all hope of this impossible by at first refusing to surrender the castle of Trifels which his supporters were defending and in which the crown jewels were lodged; he had even attempted flight. He was first imprisoned in Heidelberg and then despatched to Apulia. Any rebels who had not yet surrendered were defeated. Frederick showed great leniency to all; he even took Bishop Landulf into favour again and released, after a short time, the Lombard envoys captured in Trifels. Only the son felt the full severity of father, emperor and judge. For weary years he remained a prisoner in Rocca San Felice near Melfi; then he was transferred to Nicastro. After a further six years of imprisonment he was to be again transferred. The story is that he was about to be released but had not yet been so informed. Weary of life and fearing yet severer treatment King Henry on the road from Nicastro to his new place of confinement rode his horse over a mountain precipice. He was thirty years of age. He was buried in the church of Cosenza in a marble sarcophagus, clad in a shroud of gold and silver tissue into which eagles’ feathers were woven. A Minorite preached the funeral sermon, according to Apulian custom, and chose as his text: “And Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son.” The sermon concluded with a peroration in praise of Justitia, the God of the State, to whom Frederick had had to sacrifice his first-born. We must not forget how severely Frederick himself suffered. In the mourning letter he wrote when giving orders for the obsequies there echoes still the sorrow of that judgment day in Worms, when the father had, to pass sentence on the son according to his own saying: human nature must of necessity bow to justice. “The pity of a tender father must yield to the judgment of the stern judge: we mourn the doom of our first-born. Nature bids flow the flood of tears, but. they are checked by the pain of injury and the inflexibility of justice.”

*

To describe the imperial stay in Germany is to describe a series of most brilliant festivities. For when the great attain the summit of their fame they love to hold stately review of all the forces and the spirits they command. The first celebrations honoured the occasion of the Emperor’s re-marriage. Conrad, King of Jerusalem, was now the sole remaining legitimate heir to the throne, and Frederick determined to take him a third wife. Pope Gregory, like his predecessors, chose the bride. She was Isabella, sister of King Henry III of England. Soon after the Emperor’s meeting with Pope Gregory in Rieti, Piero della Vigna had been despatched to London to negotiate the marriage treaty. It was a most important step in view of both home and foreign politics, for Frederick had hitherto on strictly German grounds always inclined to the side of France against England, lover of the Welfs. The marriage with the English Isabella was the first step in the solemn renunciation which was soon to follow, of the ancient Welf-Hohenstaufen feud.

While King Henry was still a prisoner in Worms awaiting his sentence people were already making preparations. It was the beginning of July, and Isabella had been in Cologne since May awaiting the Emperor’s arrival in Germany. Matthew Paris, the English chronicler, with the Englishman’s love for the “intimate” details about the great, cannot relate with sufficient minuteness the whole story of the wedding of the beautiful young Empress of scarcely twenty-one, scion of the ancient house of Plantagenet. He begins even before the engagement. After the English King had given his consent to his sister’s wedding the imperial envoys had begged to be allowed to see the princess, and Isabella was escorted from her home in the Tower of London to the Palace of Westminster to show herself to them. They had gazed long upon her with delight, esteeming her in all ways worthy of the Emperor’s bed, had placed the engagement ring on her finger in Frederick’s name, and greeted her as Empress of the Roman Empire. All the details are now recorded of her jewellery and the individual items of her clothing and of her plenishing, down to the gay silken counterpanes and soft cushions of the bridal bed, and the cooking pots which were of unalloyed silver, “a thing that seemed to all superfluous.” Then the Empress’s journey and sea-voyage are described, and especially the festive and joyous reception which the people of Cologne prepared for her. Tens of thousands flocked out to welcome her with flowers and palm branches and music. Riders on Spanish horses had performed with their lances the nuptial breaking of staves, while in ships which appeared to sail upon dry land, but were drawn by horses concealed under silken coverings, the clerks of Cologne played new airs upon their instruments. The matrons seated on their balconies sang the praises of the Empress’s beauty, when Isabella at their request laid aside hat and veil and showed her face. Six weeks later, on the fifteenth of July, with all conceivable pomp and ceremony, the wedding was celebrated in Worms.

People told each other with amazement that the Emperor did not consummate the marriage the first night, but waited till early the next morning till the hour which the astrologers had indicated as the most favourable for procreation. Then Frederick handed over his consort to the care of Saracen eunuchs (a state measure as important as, but no more significant than any other) telling her that she was pregnant of a son, a fact which he also set in writing in a letter to the English King. In contrast to his predecessors Frederick II looked on his consorts simply as mothers of his legitimate heirs and successors; they had no importance as Empresses. His imperial forefathers, especially in making pious foundations, habitually drew up their charters in the name of the royal pair: Henry and Kunigunde for instance, Frederick I and Beatrice, even Henry VI and Constance. With the sole exception of the few documents relating to marriage settlements the records of Frederick II, the last Emperor, contain no allusion to his consorts. Frederick II stands alone, a fact that was not without influence on his sons. Although he himself frequently referred to his parents, and celebrated his Divine Mother in phrases such as no German ruler had ever used before, his sons called themselves only Divi Augusti Imperatoris Filius. This cold-blooded attitude to his wives has often been made responsible for Frederick’s “lack of sentiment.” Be that as it may: any other relation was unthinkable. For Frederick was in an unprecedented way on the pinnacle of the world, which none could share with him. The picture of an imperial pair was possible for a German Emperor, but inconceivable for a Tyrant of Sicily or for a Roman Caesar. Even the appearance of sentiment and domesticity was out of the question for Frederick, who could more readily be seen in company with a Saracen beauty than with his royal consort. The English King complained that after years of wedlock the Empress had never worn the crown in public. Enemies accused the Emperor of imprisoning his wives in the “labyrinth of his Gomorrah” (that is in his harem, as contrasted with Sodom), rendering them almost invisible and making them strangers to their children. This was all true enough. There was no room round Frederick in which a woman could strike root. All his wives died after a few years of marriage, and, as far as we know, his mistresses shared the same fate: none of them survived him. In the rarefied atmosphere of these brilliant heights no human being but himself could thrive: none even of his friends could hold out for long; no woman could have breathed there. Hence, the English Isabella, surrounded by her imperial household and dignities, watched by eunuchs, disappeared forthwith into the “harem.”

*

The happy Hohenstaufen days saw an unprecedented outburst of artistic creativeness in Germany in which all races in common found their own characteristic expression: human forms were created in a perfection never since attained: it is the only period in which German plastic art spontaneously and unconsciously approaches the antique. In August 1235, soon after the wedding festivities of Worms, Kaiser Frederick held a great Diet at Mainz. Never was the “better nature” of the Germans, the reconciliation of their great eternal contradictions, so strikingly realised as on this occasion. This great imperial celebration must have awakened many memories of that “incomparable festival” in which Barbarossa celebrated the sword-investiture of his sons with a noble and chivalrous ceremonial never before seen in Germany. Barbarossa, though well over sixty, had himself taken part in the tournament, and was hailed by the minstrels as a new Alexander, Caesar, King Arthur. The fresh glory of this beginning of courtly chivalry in Germany was happily symbolised by the exchange of greeting and handclasp between Henry of Veldeke, one of the earliest of German singers, and a French troubadour. The next fifty years, the period of Gottfried and Wolfram and Walther von der Vogelweide, brought blossoming and promise, and full in the midst of all this outburst of German genius the Puer Apuliae was wafted into Germany from the South, and was caught up and transfigured by its glory. Now Frederick II, himself in the forties, revisited Germany after twenty years and found the Springtime over and the moment ripe for him to garner the first fruits. Now seemed the time to give permanence to the beautiful Roman-German form that had been just evolved, to help it to a still finer perfection, to weld the whole into a conscious unity: princes and races into one people. To strengthen and harden into an enduring state, as sculptors then were fashioning enduring monuments of stone, this German growth that bore the impress of Rome, neither by cutting it adrift from Rome nor by abolishing the princely power, but by persistently inspiring princes and races with the thought and the spirit of state-building.

Frederick II’s great curia solemnis of Mainz was the beginning: law, speech, blood and feudal faith (which here had more weight than in the south) were the links of the chain the Roman Caesar forged. He appeared in exotic magnificence before this dazzling assembly, at which almost without exception all the German princes were for once united, with all the solemn dignity pertaining to the God-appointed Provider, Protector, Preserver of peace and justice. He opened the Diet with a proclamation of Public Peace, from the opening words of which there echoes the pride of the Law-giver who for the first time erects Tables of the Law, “for men throughout all Germany in private quarrels and in legal suits at present live according to the age-old traditions and customs and according to unwritten Law.” The Proclamation of the Landpeace of Mainz contained both old and new laws, and far excelled in importance all previous pronouncements of the sort. It was to form the basis of all future imperial legislation, a foundation which all later lawgivers must build upon, and to which they must ever and again recur. Town confederations and princes and kings like Rudolf of Hapsburg, Adolf of Nassau, Albert of Austria have frequently renewed the Landpeace of Mainz in its entirety. The nine-and-twenty sections dealt with the jurisdiction of princes and bishops, rights of mintage and transport, the abolition of unjust dues, the prohibition of self-vindication, the limitation of ordeal by battle, and much else.

The Emperor, as himself the Law Incarnate, always conceived his personal actions as constituting a precedent, he therefore created an imperial law out of his own sentence of perpetual imprisonment against his son, and the Landpeace begins with the decree: “Whatever son shall drive his father out of his castles or other property, or shall burn it or shall plunder it, or shall conspire with his father’s foes, or plot against his father’s honour or seek his father’s destruction… that son shall forfeit property and fief and personal possessions and all inheritance from father or mother, and neither judge nor father shall be able to reinstate him, for ever.” And it continues with a sinister note ringing through the Middle High German of the original words: whatsoever son lays hands upon his father’s body or criminally attacks him “he shall be without honour and without right for ever, so that he may never again come into his own.”

An important innovation, copied from Sicily, was the installation of an Imperial Grand Justiciar, who was daily without fee to preside over the High Court and represent the Emperor. He was to hold office for at least a year, and he was given the services of a special notary, who must be a layman, “so that he may pay the penalty” if he does wrong. We can detect here and there echoes of Sicilian laws, but nothing that does violence to natural German Law, rather another offshoot from the same root, clothing itself in forms that have proved useful elsewhere.

The Proclamation of Mainz was presumably only a preliminary regulation, as in Sicily the Capua Proclamation had been the forerunner of the great Constitutions of Melfi. Frederick may well have planned a similar work for Germany. We know that he had Sicilian High Court Judges in his train, and that the idea of a great imperial codification of law was in the air at the time. The English poet, Henry of Avranches, who was an ardent admirer of the Emperor, adjured him to win everlasting renown by publishing a Summa of the numerous scattered number of imperial laws which should be a companion to the Pope’s Collection of Decretals which Gregory IX had published a year before.

It was a matter of the highest significance that this “Italian” Frederick published his proclamation in German, and recorded it in writing in German, and had it translated from the German into Latin. It was the first time that German had been utilised for a proclamation, and the importance of the fact that it was thus recognised as on an equality with Latin for an edict of the Roman Emperor needs no emphasis. It proves that this most Roman of Emperors was also the most German. It was the beginning of an individuality in the State as a whole (not only in the subsidiary states), the first record of German law in German, the first laying aside of the Latin scaffolding as no longer indispensable to speech.

*

It would be difficult to overrate this first tentative of Frederick’s to raise with the co-operation of the princes a German state structure comparable to the contemporary German achievements in art and literature. This historic Diet was rich in memorable and symbolic events, but the pan-German legislation might easily rank as the most important of them all, were its pride of place not disputed by the termination of the age-old racial feud of Welf and Waibling. Otto of Lüneburg, the Welf nephew of Kaiser Otto, was present. Frederick announced: “At this solemn Diet of Mainz, with the princes ranged round our illustrious throne, Otto of Lüneburg hath done us homage, and unmindful of all hate and harassment that existed between our forefathers hath placed himself under our protection and at our service.” Frederick confirmed Otto in all his Lüneburg possessions, which he first took over for the Emperor in order to grant them back as an imperial fief. Further, he augmented the Welf territory by the gift of Brunswick which he had acquired by purchase for himself, and created a new dukedom of Brunswick-Lüneburg. When Otto the Welf above the imperial crucifix placed his hands in Kaiser Frederick’s and swore the oath of allegiance, voluntarily committing himself and his possessions to the good faith of the Waibling, to whom he showed respect in every manner possible, Frederick in return entrusted him with the newly-created dukedom as a hereditary imperial fief, and solemnly bestowed on the Welf the banner that custom demanded. The racial feud of earlier days had become an anachronism in a Germany flooded as far as the Baltic and the North Sea by the glory of Imperial Rome. There was no longer Welf nor Waibling in the North. The age-old prophecy had been literally fulfilled which laid down the correct constitution for Germany: the Welfs should ever provide mighty Dukes, but only Waiblings should be Emperors, Frederick II was well justified in giving command: “This day shall be recorded in all the annals of the Empire because it has added another duke to the Empire… This also gave him a reason for proceeding next day to the cathedral, crowned with the imperial diadem, and after high mass giving a royal feast to all the German princes and the 12,000 knights of their escorts. This was the last great imperial feast of the old aristocratic regime of the Holy Roman Empire, before the onset of a duller bourgeois world which Frederick was trying to hold at bay by strengthening the princely power; a world which lacked the spaciousness of an Empire, but from its own narrow confines reached upwards, seeking to win the empire of the skies.

Frederick had come to Germany as the Judge, showing himself for the first time in this capacity to all Europe, and presently an opportunity offered to figure as the highest judge of all the Christian world in a case which aroused much interest and excitement and which he himself contrived to magnify into an affair of the whole Occident. It must have been shortly after the great day of Mainz that the case was brought before him while he was halting in Hagenau in the imperial Palatinate. The Jews of Fulda were accused of having committed a ritual murder on a Christian boy at their Easter festival. The first result of this was a massacre of Jews in Fulda and several other German towns. Then the people had waited till the Emperor’s arrival to seek a decision in all the unrest, and both parties, Jews and Christians, now appealed to Frederick in Hagenau. As a witness against the Jews the Christians had kept the child’s corpse and dragged it along to Hagenau. Frederick heard the case and passed a sentence worthy of Solomon. First he pointed to the body, and said drily to the Christians: “When they are dead, bury them. It’s all they’re fit for.” He satisfied himself that the Jews were innocent, but imposed a large fine on them, because—innocent or guilty—that had been the cause of a disturbance. Thus peace was restored in Germany.

The case, however, did not end here. The Emperor vowed if ritual murders were possible he would slay every Jew in the Empire, and he instituted a full and complete enquiry to elucidate the truth. His first step was to apply to princes, nobles, great men, abbots, and various Church dignitaries in the Empire to ask their opinion. The complete contempt, however, which the autocrat and the scholar felt for the findings of such a body finds voice in his ultimate decision: “These men, being different all, expressed different opinions in the matter, but showed themselves incompetent to give an adequate judgment in the case. We, therefore, out of the secret depths of our own knowledge perceived that the simplest method of procedure against the Jews, who were alleged guilty of the aforementioned crime, would be through such men as had been Jews and had been converted to the Christian faith. They, being opponents, would not conceal what they might know against Jews or against the books of Moses or through the Old Testament. Now, though we ourselves in our wisdom, acquired from many books which our Majesty has learned to know, intelligently consider that the innocence of these Jews has been proved, yet we are anxious both to satisfy the law and to appease the unlettered populace. Hence we have decided with wholesome foresight and in concurrence with the princes, nobles, great men, abbots and Church dignitaries, to despatch special messengers to all the kings of the Western lands, and request them to send us from out their realms the greatest possible number of newly-baptised who are learned in Jewish law.”

This really took place. King Henry III wrote from Windsor that he had received the Emperor’s messenger, an imperial marshall, joyfully and with honour as was seemly. His illustrious and imperial Majesty had earned the king’s deepest thanks since His Majesty had been pleased to impart this hitherto unheard-of case which had recently occurred in his imperial territories. So far as in him lay the King of England would endeavour to meet the imperial desires, and he was therefore sending the two most eminent of the newly-baptised whom he had been able to find in England, who would be happy to obey all imperial commands. The other European monarchs must have replied in much the same strain. It was a case which concerned them all. This “royal commission,” assuredly the first that any Emperor ever summoned, expended no little time in consultations, of whose tenor the Emperor kept himself exactly informed. Finally, they announced as their certain conclusion that, as the Emperor had supposed, the Hebrew scriptures contained no such suggestion, that they rather forbade all blood sacrifices, and that the Talmud and the Bereshith laid heavy penalties on bloody animal sacrifices. On the basis of this finding the Emperor granted the Jews a pronouncement which severely forbade any similar accusation in future throughout the entire Empire.

Frederick’s main purpose in all this inquiry was to summon as Emperor a judicial court for the western world, and, secondly, to display before such a gathering his own immense learning, which he was never at pains to conceal, well knowing that the European kings would hear of it from their delegates. It made no small impression in Germany, though in some quarters they took it ill that the Emperor had given his decision against the Christians. With what curiosity and amazement these foreigners must have made the acquaintance of the Emperor who showed himself not only surrounded by exotic brilliance and luxury, but who held discussions about the Talmud, who seemed more completely master of Arabic than of German, and who gave visible proof of the truth of those reports that he made use “of these Saracen augurs and soothsayers whom people call mathematicians and astronomers.” Philosopher in those days meant much the same as wizard and magician, master of all secret arts, and even a man like Albertus Magnus was reputed to deal in magic. Later German legends relate that Kaiser Frederick visited Albertus in his magic garden at Cologne, as others tell that Averroes lived at his court. The Germans, indeed, always felt the Emperor to be somewhat uncanny; but their awe was blent on the whole with profound admiration rather than repugnance, and with a secret yearning to love him.

Frederick II spent the winter in Hagenau, a place he preferred to all the others. He always designated Alsace, in climate and in customs the most southern German province, as the favourite of his German hereditary lands. He stayed here for months with short interruptions, surrounded by numerous princes, settling quarrels, making agreements, receiving ambassadors. Some came from Spain, bringing valuable horses, and the Russian Duke (of Kiev?) had sent messengers with gifts. During this period in his own personal German domains where he was “Lord of the Land” he seems to have carried through some constitutional measures and at least established a centralised customs department, probably not very different from his Sicilian one. Otherwise he occupied himself with increasing his private and imperial possessions. With Sicilian money he redeemed certain claims on Swabia exercised by the King of Bohemia, and he acquired imperial rights in Uri which were so far important as they gave him the land at this end of the newly-opened St. Gothard Pass and thus secured him an alternative passage across the Alps. It was scarcely possible yet to use the pass for troops to attack Milan in the rear, for instance. Frederick will have had the ancient route over the Septimer or Julier passes in mind when he conceived the plan, at the beginning of the Lombard campaign, of invading Lombardy with two armies at once. The Rhenish and Low Country knights were to assemble in Basel, and those who were crossing by the Brenner Pass in Augsburg; perhaps the first great strategic conception of the Middle Ages.

*

The Lombard War could no longer be averted. At Mainz the German princes had unanimously voted for the campaign against the Lombards, whose alliance with King Henry was treachery to the Empire. According to German custom they pledged themselves by shout and lifted hand, instead of oath, to be ready for war in the spring. Frederick had not only right but might on his side. Pope Gregory suddenly found himself completely deserted. He had informed himself by a courier of German affairs. His position was desperate. An alliance with the Emperor against the Lombards meant the strangulation of the Papacy as a political power: the States of the Church would be wedged into an imperial Italy and would in all likelihood soon fall an easy prey to the Emperor. Neither could Gregory declare openly for the Lombards. They had undeniably offended in the highest degree against the majesty of the Empire, and when the Pope sought to treat with them the towns cared as little about his commands as about the Emperor’s. Gregory himself now began to complain of their “insolence.” To maintain neutrality was practically to declare for Frederick and to abandon the towns to the imperial vengeance.

Pope Gregory’s first effort was, therefore, directed to trying to postpone for a little the punishment threatening his Lombard friends. There was suddenly nothing so urgently vital for the Christian world as a new crusade and the regulation of affairs in general in the Holy Land, where the Christians, to the Emperor’s detriment rather than to that of the Curia, were mutually fighting each other. The Pope wrote to the princes still assembled in Mainz and begged them to abandon the Lombard War for the sake of the Holy Land. He begged in vain. Frederick would not, in any circumstances, have consented to breaking the ten years’ truce with his friend al Kamil, which was not to terminate till 1239. Nevertheless, he gave the Pope one more chance. If he, as arbitrator, could persuade the Lombards between the August and Christmas of 1235 to offer terms satisfying to the honour of Emperor and Empire no armed intervention need take place. Whereupon Pope Gregory made the utterly impossible demand that Frederick should pledge himself beforehand to accept unconditionally the Pope’s award in the matter, whatever it might be. The Emperor, in view of his previous experience, returned an emphatic refusal, but sent the German Grand Master as negotiator to the Pope, to rejoin Piero della Vigna who had been for a long time in charge of the imperial cause in Rome.

Hermann of Salza now began his great rôle of go-between. He enjoyed a high reputation with Pope Gregory, who always recognised his honourable disinterestedness, and he was almost Frederick’s friend. The Pope had untruthfully asserted the Lombards’ unconditional readiness to abide by his arbitration, but week after week the Grand Master awaited their messengers in vain. At length he returned to his master—not wholly empty-handed. Pope Gregory had been endeavouring to wean Verona from her imperial allegiance by suddenly installing there, without the shadow of right, a papal podesta. Hermann of Salza, accompanied by the imperial legate, Gebhard of Arnstein, had arrived in the nick of time, and rescued the most important town for the Emperor, of which Gebhard now took control. No sooner had Hermann quitted Italy than the ambassadors of the Lombard League appeared before the Pope, in no wise minded to submit. Gregory despatched an express messenger to urge the Grand Master’s return! Hermann of Salza’s reply was that his master’s orders were to proceed, and he went on his way to Germany. The period allotted by Frederick II had meantime run out, and all hope of peace was wrecked by the intransigence of the Lombards, who were fully aware how dire was the Pope’s need of them and took liberties with the Curia accordingly.

Pope Gregory now had recourse to another weapon which had served him at the time of Frederick’s first excommunication. Then the real cause of friction, the delay of the Crusade, was pushed into the background and Sicilian politics were made the rock of offence. Similarly now the Pope dropped the Lombard question. He unexpectedly made complaints about the conduct of Sicilian officials, about Sicilian taxes on churches and clerics, about the Saracen colony of Lucera, and other kindred topics: he joined battle on another field. The complaints now raised bore no relation to the burning Lombard question and, right or wrong, had not arisen since Frederick had quitted Sicily in complete harmony with the Pope a few months ago. As if nothing had been on the tapis for a long time past but the state of affairs in Sicily, Pope Gregory closed his letter with the ominous words: “We can no longer lock such matters in our breast without injury to the majesty of God, without detriment to our reputation and our conscience.”

Ere long a second letter followed. This time it was the Crusade which had to serve the Pope’s turn. Pope Gregory suddenly found it absolutely essential and wrote in conclusion: “The Church cannot, with equanimity, be a witness of any oppressive measures towards the Lombards, who have trusted themselves to her protection, for in this way the Crusade is being delayed. … In a case where the glory of the Redeemer is at stake the Pope cannot be a respecter of persons.” This was the flimsiest of pretexts. When the Crusade later was in progress, and it seemed that the result might strengthen the Emperor, Pope Gregory was the first to prevent its setting forth.

The German princes were solid behind Frederick, and this time the Pope had tried their patience once too often. In a letter of unspeakable bitterness Frederick goes through the Sicilian complaints point by point and seeks to refute them. But even if, in his absence, irregularities had taken place, it was not possible for him from Germany to keep the eyes of a lynx on his Sicilian kingdom and make himself heard there in the thunder! He would be coming soon enough to Italy, and would then be ready to discuss such matters. The imperial reply to the second letter stated briefly that foreign excursions were excluded until peace was restored within the Empire. This cast the die for an imperial campaign against the Lombards.

As Frederick’s relations with the Roman Curia grew tenser and more doubtful he seemed to wish visibly to demonstrate once more the essential unity of Church and Empire, Emperor and Pope. At his coronation in Aix as a mere boy he had set the seal of sanctity on his German-Roman kingdom by unexpectedly taking the Cross and by the solemn re-interment of the sainted Charlemagne. Now that he was about to leave Germany he closed the circle with a kindred ceremony. He went to Marburg to exhume and re-inter the childlike St. Elizabeth, Landgravine of Thuringia.

*

St. Elizabeth, the chaste and beautiful princess of the Wartburg, is still remembered. The greatest miracle she wrought was to combine a tender love for husband and children with a life devoted to the poor and the sick; to temper dignity and pride of race with gentleness and humility. The memory of the penitent of Marburg, clad in the robe of a Brother Minor, girt with a cord, flogging herself, is forgotten in the picture of the gracious lady. Elizabeth was a daughter of the King of Hungary, she had spent her childhood at the Thuringian court and was, at an early age, betrothed to the Landgrave Lewis. Later centuries related miracles of her childish days. The generous-hearted girl had filled a basket with food for the poor; some one reproved her severely for her generosity, and lo! beneath its covering cloth the basket was full of fragrant roses. When Elizabeth first met the disciples of Francis of Assisi in Eisenach she was fifteen years old. The teaching of the Tuscan-Umbrian saint fell on well-prepared soil. His demand for chastity and humility, and above all for poverty, pointed the path which the princess resolved to tread when presently she found herself a widow. Landgrave Lewis had always been benevolently tolerant to her enthusiasms, and when he fell a victim to the plague in Brindisi on his way to Frederick II’s Crusade, Elizabeth ardently desired to exchange her life as a princess for that of a beggar woman. Her confessor was Conrad of Marburg, the same who, after her death, developed into the nightmare-haunted fanatic of the Inquisition. He persuaded her to avoid excess. She quitted the Wartburg, renounced her children, and built herself a hut of wood and mud, as St. Francis had commanded his followers to do; but she retained her princely rank and used her widow’s riches to help and to feed the poor and suffering. She housed diseased and leprous children, washed their wounds and cared for them, and even kissed them, overcoming her revulsion with a smile. One Good Friday in an ecstacy she was granted heavenly visions. She did not abandon herself to visions, however, still less gave them publicity and she claimed no miracles in her short life of twenty-four years. When she was about to die, and lay on her pallet in an intensity of joy, people said that the sweetest sounds of angelic music were heard from her throat though her lips were tightly closed. The very day after her burial the saint began to work miracles, and people came from far to secure scraps of her garment, of her hair and nails as relics. Not long afterwards the Pope canonised her at the request of Landgrave Conrad of Thuringia, who himself entered the Teutonic Order. Kaiser Frederick came to Marburg in May 1236 to give his sainted kinswoman royal burial.

An uncounted multitude—people spoke of twelve hundred thousand!—had streamed into Marburg when Frederick II, in the presence of many bishops and princes and especially knights of the Teutonic Order, lifted the first stone from the grave of the young saint. Forthwith from the sacred body oil began to flow, which the Teutonic knights collected and distributed to churches and monasteries. The corpse was then enclosed in an oaken casket overlaid with skilfully wrought gold, and richly adorned with silver figures and antique gems. Frederick presented the saint with the golden beaker from which he was wont to drink, and crowned the head of the Landgravine with a golden crown, thus doing homage to the saint and princess, his kinswoman. The foundation stone of the Church of St. Elizabeth in Marburg was laid at this time; its stained-glass windows represent their patron saint as the daughter of the Queen of Heaven, receiving a crown from the Virgin Mother, while St. Francis at her side is being crowned by the Son of God himself. They give no picture of the barefoot servant of the poor, clad in white flowing garments, distributing alms.

Frederick’s interest in the exhumation of any chance mendicant saint would have been scarcely seemly. People seem to have hinted this, for Frederick defends himself against the innuendo that his homage was paid less to the saint than to the princely kinswoman. The two things—he wrote—are not easy to dissociate: “For it fills us with joy to know that our Saviour, Jesus of Nazareth, was a shoot of King David’s royal stem; and the tables of the Old Testament bear witness that the Ark of the Covenant might be touched only by the hand of the nobly-born.” Thus Frederick expressed himself in a letter about the Marburg ceremonies to the Minister-General of the Franciscan Order.

*

Marburg marked the close of this German period. They were days of solemn festival, happy days of brilliance and of peace, a peace which lay over the whole of Germany and over almost all the lands of the Roman Empire. An atmosphere of world peace prevailed; the chroniclers report an overwhelming wine harvest and a mild warm winter; all signs which seemed to prove that the Prince of Peace, the Emperor of Justitia, was reigning. It might well seem so, for Frederick had always succeeded in conquering without weapons; all the great successes that had raised him to these heights had been won by peaceful means, at most by a threatening gesture. If the Lechfeld this summer was echoing to the clash of arms as the warriors assembled round their Emperor this army was to bring the world the gift of peace. The Emperor called the coming campaign an “Execution of Justice,” and he failed to understand how Pope Gregory could damn with so ugly a word as “war” the “peace-restoring intentions” of the imperial Judge. The peace which God designed to fill the world under the Emperor of Justice was nigh at hand, disturbance flickered here and there only in the Lombard corner. It was now his duty to bring peace to this quarter also, this easily-excited, bloodthirsty region which had brought on itself the punishment of the Judge and the Avenger. He was bringing peace with the sword—but only because the Lombards would not have it otherwise.

All the Emperor’s letters at this time are full of similar statements: the ten or twelve towns of the Lombard League are the disturbers of the peace, and the task has been assigned to the Emperor by God to compel them to repose. “In the eastern world the kingdom of Jerusalem, the inheritance on his mother’s side of Conrad, our most well-beloved son, is, in obedience to the will of heaven, steadfast in its loyalty to our name; and the Kingdom of Sicily no less, the glorious inheritance of our mother’s race, and also the mighty overlordship of Germania. We therefore believe that the Providence of the Redeemer has guided our steps so mightily and wondrously to this one end alone, that we should bring back to its allegiance towards our illustrious throne that centre of Italy which is on all sides surrounded by our strength, and that we should thus restore the Empire’s unity.” The conquest of Lombardy, that centre of the Empire, has been set him as a task by Providence, and God has directed his steps towards the goal. “We believe therefore that we are rendering the most welcome service to the living God when we think the more joyfully on the peace of the whole Empire as we more clearly read the portents which indicate the heavenly will.”

It is rare to find Frederick thus expounding his political actions. This one instance is all the more illuminating. The punitive campaign against the Lombards is in the Judge’s eyes a service to God, and happily that which God has foreordained corresponds remarkably with the passionate personal impulse of the Emperor. He can fulfil the divine purpose and renew the peace of the peoples, and gratify at one and the same time his ancient, inborn hatred of Milan. He writes to the King of France: “No sooner had we, in the years of our ripening adolescence, in the glowing power of mind and body ascended the highest peaks of the Roman Empire against all expectations of men and by the aid of Divine Providence alone… than all the acuteness of our mind was continually directed to one end… to avenge the injury offered (by the Milanese) to our Father and to our Grandfather, and to trample under foot the offshoots of abhorred freedom, already carefully cultivated in other places also.” Such hate has in it something Providential, something God-intended. Everything therefore points to one goal: Providence, the world’s weal, and personal impulse: peace must be imposed on the Lombards.

The Lombard war against heretics and rebels becomes no less a Holy War than a Crusade to the Holy Land, and it is again inconceivable to the Emperor why Pope Gregory should arrest the arm of imperial justice. The completion of his purpose is the first pre-requisite for fighting in Syria: “For on our side we have frankly no other aim behind our procedure than to take up the cause of the Crucified One. This, however, cannot occur until the peoples round are by the might of Justice reduced to peace.” So he wrote to King Louis of France, and on other occasions he resolutely denied that he was waging war for his own advantage: “When once the discord in the bosom of this Italy is triumphantly brought to an end, to the glory of God and of the Empire, we hope to be able to lead forth a powerful army to the Holy Land.” Had the Emperor here other things in mind? Those prophecies perhaps which had often been interpreted as referring to him, the redeemer of the Holy Sepulchre? That after the pacification of the West the Messiah-Emperor should return to the East, and there in the Holy of Holies lay aside the Crown of all the World, and hang up lance and shield on the dry tree as a token of the last Judgment? Did Frederick hope literally to fulfil this prophecy also?

Frederick took extremely good care not expressly to say this, nor to bind himself too exactly. The nearness of the Last Day, however, and the Empire of Peace are implicit in all he said. It was a question of peace… not only the peace of the actual Roman Empire but in this fulness of time the peace of the whole Christian world. The Lombard war, therefore, concerned the world. The Emperor invited the ambassadors of all the kings of Europe to a Lombard Diet in Piacenza in order, in common with them, to reduce the few remaining disturbers of the world’s peace—behind whom, though not always openly, the Pope had taken his stand. Frederick had struck the right note. Europe’s Christian kings now rallied to his side, though they did not send their armed assistance till his success in the war was assured. The King of England wrote: he would have preferred to gird on his sword and come himself. At the same time he spontaneously sent letters, in which he expressed himself very forcibly about the Lombards’ arrogance, to the Pope and some friends of his who were Cardinals: they really ought to take up the Emperor’s cause against the confederate towns. Even more emphatic was the document which King Bela of Hungary directed to the Pope in the June of this year 1236: he had heard that the insolence of the Lombards was seeking to induce the Pope on the pretext of necessary service for the cause of the Holy Land to oppose the imperial measures for strengthening the Empire. He would beg the Pope not to give ear to the Lombards. Unquenchable dissension between Empire and Papacy would be the consequence. He added that such an encroachment by the Pope on the secular rights of the princes would be a warning to himself and to the other princes of Europe.

These manly words of the Hungarian King show how warmly the other western monarchs felt the Emperor’s cause to be their own, and show also how high Frederick’s reputation stood amongst them; he is felt to be by far the first amongst them, not in virtue only of his imperial crown but in virtue of his actual strength. It now became the ultimate political goal of the Empire to cement the unity of the Christian kings of the west. There was nothing insincere in his statement, just on the eve of the greatest display of his power: “More than ever the whole world lives by the breath of the Empire; grows feeble if the Empire is enfeebled, and rejoices when the Empire thrives.” Again: “The Roman Empire must strive the more earnestly for peace, must the more urgently devote itself to establishing justice among the peoples, because it stands before all the governments of the world, as before a mirror.”

Now that his goal is an Empire of Peace, now that the aurea aetas beckons, the Emperor feels himself more than ever as Justice incarnate, and uses the phrase “our Justice” as synonymous with “our illustrious majesty.” He is about to arm “his Justice,” and the Lombards shall see his face which he would fain have shown them in peace, and “they shall not be able to look on it unmoved, from fear before Justitia.” Hitherto Justitia has been the organising and regulating power leading men in the path of reason, now for the first time it becomes the punishing and avenging force that works for world peace and perfect world order. Another ten years will pass and avenging Justice, filled with hate, shall rage solely for its own ends through the length of Italy.

Hopes of a world peace and the conception of a universal Roman Empire find expression at this time in yet other contexts. Frederick writes some remarkable letters to the populace of Rome. These are all full of the belief that the fulness of time is at hand and the world is about to be renewed. Renewal would mean reconstruction of the world in exactly the state in which it stood at the moment of the Redemption in the days of Augustus. The Messiah-Emperor who is expected and who shall set up an Empire of Justice must show himself the revivifier of the ancient Roman Empire, the reincarnation of Augustus, Prince of Peace, restoring imperial Rome to her old position in the world.

As early as Barbarossa’s day the Arch Poet, like his predecessors, had sung of this “Renovatio” expected from Roman Law and from his Emperor:

Iterum describitur orbis ab Augusto,

Redditur res publica statui vetusto,

Pax terras ingreditur habitu venusto,

Et iam non opprimitur iustus ab iniusto.

All the preconceptions which lent a tangible reality to the expected Messianic King: the tone and manner of the ancient Caesars and of the Augusti were adopted by Frederick when writing his magniloquent letters to the Romans to shake into wakefulness these people “all too content with the shadow of a great name,” “to arouse this later posterity to scale once more the peaks of their ancient greatness.” The Emperor’s words fell resonantly on the Romans’ ears: between domestic cares and enervating self-indulgence they have forgotten their mighty past, “Behold, the arrogance of Milan has set up a throne in Northern Italy, and not content to be Rome’s equal, she has challenged the Roman Empire. Behold these folk who were bound of old to pay you tribute—so men say—fling insults at you in the tribute’s stead. How sore unlike the deeds of your forefathers and the virtues of the ancients!… that one town alone should dare to bid defiance to the Empire of Rome. In olden days the Romans were not content to subdue their neighbours only, they conquered all provinces, they possessed far distant Spain, they laid fair Carthage in ruins!” The contrast between the old Rome and the new, he continued, amazed all who had heard the fame of Rome or had read the monuments of the past and looked now upon the present. And thinking of the Roman communes the Emperor writes: “Ye reply perhaps that Kings and Caesars accomplished these great deeds. Behold, ye also have a King and Caesar who has offered his person for the greater glory of the Roman Empire, who has opened his treasuries and has not spared his travail! Ye have a king who with his constant calling stirs you from your slumbers. …”

In these ways the Emperor sought to arouse all the mental powers of the time, that the world might see what was at stake when he drew the sword against the Lombards. They were opposing the clearly-manifested aims of God: a world peace and an Empire of Justitia. Frederick was, therefore, justified in proclaiming that the Lombard rebels were in revolt, not only against him, the Emperor, but directly against God, against the Catholic faith, against Nature. He himself spoke very cautiously and only of his imperial peace mission, adding but one phrase: “The glory of the Emperor’s sceptre shines out from Rome across the darkness not in temporal affairs alone.” His friends in Italy, however, lauded the coming “Deliverer.” Piero della Vigna addressed the people of Piacenza, announced the Emperor’s impending arrival and, not wholly by accident, nor yet wholly by design, he took as his text the prophecy of Isaiah which recurs in the Gospel for Christmas Day: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.”

*

Such were the signs and tokens under which Frederick II metamorphosed himself from Law Giver into Leader of Armies and prepared men’s minds for his appearance in the new part, fulfilling the formula of the Caesars: arma et leges. He had called the approaching campaign an “Execution of Justice,” and this conception made serious strategy impossible, for the armies were only an instrument of the Judge to punish law-breakers and rebels. Frederick had no large continuous stretch of territory to conquer. Like all medieval rulers he lacked space, and he lacked foes against whom to carry out campaigns in the style of Alexander, Hannibal or Julius Caesar. The Middle Ages saw on occasion kings and princes at the head of their armies, but—except perhaps in Byzantium—knew no generals, no strategists on a large scale. Any brave man could head an army, a cardinal or justiciar as well as a king, and none could be a good general or a bad general, because there was no art of war. An art of war began slowly to be evolved when the days of the condottieri came and the professional armies. The endless fighting of the preceding ten years had developed Frederick’s army till it was showing indications of becoming a professional one: the troops serving as feudal levies became gradually subsidiary to the soldiers recruited and paid directly by the Emperor. Frederick showed the adaptability of all great men by developing into something of a condottiere himself. There was no opportunity, however, for great strategic combinations, whether on his side or his opponents’. In the Middle Ages every battle was a more or less accidental impromptu affair, needing an immediate decision. Frederick used to the full the advantages of speed, surprise, cunning and superior strength. He could, however, rarely induce the enemy to risk pitched battles in which they were always defeated. The siege technique of the day was so imperfect that when they ensconced themselves behind the stout walls of their fortresses they could only be starved out, or very occasionally the place could be carried by storm. These sieges dragged on for many months and were as far as possible avoided by Frederick, for the cost of maintaining the besieging forces was enormous. Compared with the vast conceptions of universal Empire and universal Papacy the armies of the time seem ludicrously small. It is the characteristic of the period descending from the universal and the spiritual to the material, that a very minute concrete object might be charged with a great idea, and a most trifling deed with overwhelming spiritual significance. It is probable that Frederick II never assembled more than twelve thousand, at the utmost fifteen thousand men, “under the victorious eagles of the Imperium Romanum.” Even this force will have consisted of a heterogeneous assembly of the most disparate components: German, Italian, Sicilian feudal knights fighting alongside Saracens, infantry levies from the loyal towns beside mercenary knights, and archers of the most miscellaneous origin. The Emperor was probably superior to the enemy in cavalry, but the confederate armies as a whole were probably equal to his, and possibly even larger. In open battle the cavalry invariably won the day, but in siege operations the heavily armoured knights were valueless.

The army which the Emperor took with him for the campaign of many months in Lombardy was unwontedly small, even for those times. He had had to detach a strong German army against the Duke of Austria. The “Quarrelsome” Babenberg had not put in an appearance at any of the appointed Diets; he had imprisoned imperial ambassadors; had indulged in provocative acts against all his neighbour princes, and, finally, had refused obedience to the Emperor. He had now been placed under the ban of the Empire, and the King of Bohemia with the Duke of Bavaria were detailed to enforce the decree. They were able to overcome him within a few months and drive him back into his last fortresses. The Emperor had told off several of his German divisions for this subsidiary campaign so that at least he need not weaken his Italian troops.

The whole campaign of 1236 which only lasted a few months was, therefore, only a preliminary canter to clear the air in Lombardy. Frederick was anxious to have certainty about the Pope’s attitude. He, therefore, begged that since the war was against heretics, and since there was peace between Empire and Papacy, the Pope should take a hand, by spiritual proceedings against the rebels. It was not too much to ask the Curia to support this punitive campaign. Gregory IX sent no reply. Taxed with his silence he later wrote that he must have failed to answer “out of a kind of dreamy forgetfulness, as it were.” Instead, he sent the Emperor a new list of complaints about the Sicilian government and scarcely alluded to Lombardy. Finally, when for a moment the Emperor’s military progress seemed to have come to a standstill, the Pope suddenly unmasked, abruptly shattering the dream of unity: “Thou seest”—he wrote—“the necks of kings and princes bent under the knee of the priest, and Christian Emperors must subject their actions not to the Roman Pontiff alone; they have not even the right to rank him above another priest.” This is the famous, the notorious phrase of priestly omnipotence, which Gregory was the first to formulate, and which he launched, somewhat prematurely, against Frederick II. He far exceeded the claims made by his predecessors, for he subordinated the Emperor to every petty cleric, and in matters other than spiritual. The verdict of the Apostolic See was supreme throughout the world, declared Pope Gregory, which was the equivalent of saying that Frederick must submit without protest to the Pope’s decree in the Lombardy affair, although this quarrel between the Emperor and the rebels had in the last resort nothing whatever to do with the Pope. Pope Gregory derived the right of the Papal See to decide all questions, especially Italian questions, from that famous forgery, the so-called “Donation of Constantine.” He elaborated: “Constantine, Sole and Only Ruler over all regions of the World, in agreement with the Senate and People of Rome, who possessed authority not only over the city but over the whole Roman Empire, had found it seemly that the Vicegerent of the Prince of the Apostles who held sway over the priesthood and over the souls of men, should also possess supreme power over the affairs and persons of the entire world.” And Constantine had believed that he, to whom the conduct of heavenly things had been on earth entrusted by the Lord, must also lead all earthly affairs on the bridle of justice. The symbols and the sceptre of the Empire were, therefore, handed over by Constantine to the Pope for all time; the city of Rome with the entire duchy, and also the Empire, for ever placed under his jurisdiction. Constantine had placed Italy completely at the disposal of the Apostolic Chair, and sought himself a new residence in Greece. For it seemed to him unseemly to possess power as earthly Emperor where the Head of the Christian faith sat on the throne on which the heavenly Emperor had placed him. Without in the least impairing the quality of its judicial supremacy the Apostolic See had transferred the Empire to the Germans, to Charlemagne, and had granted him the power of the sword by his coronation and anointing.

We need not here further pursue the papal doctrine. For the moment it served Pope Gregory to claim that his award in all Italian disputes was final and binding even against the Emperor. Frederick found it superfluous to answer this letter. If he had had any doubts before, he now knew where he was. What need of words! No doctrine of the judicial supremacy of Pope or Emperor, no theories of papal overlordship in Italy or in the Empire could argue away the fact that the Lombards in conspiring with King Henry had been guilty of high treason. The negotiations which Hermann of Salza was conducting with the Pope might drag on to the accompaniment of military campaigns. In this affair only deeds could decide.

*

In August 1236 Frederick had reached the neighbourhood of Verona. Gebhard of Arnstein had been sent on in advance with five hundred mercenary knights and one hundred mercenary archers to invest the town, and Frederick himself brought a further thousand knights and some infantry. Considerable additional forces were to join him in Italy, in particular the levies from the loyal towns. The important thing was to enlarge in every direction the exit of the pass. Eccelino was to work eastwards towards the Treviso March: against Padua, Vicenza and Treviso, which were already being supported by Venice. The Emperor himself turned westward into Lombardy proper. Mantua had declared for the League, so communication with Cremona, Frederick’s most valuable north Italian base, was cut. The town levies from Cremona, Parma, Reggio and Modena could not join Frederick because a hostile Confederate army was doing its utmost to prevent the junction of the two forces. By making a northern detour, and invading the hostile territory of Brescia, the troops from the imperial towns succeeded in effecting a junction with the Emperor, which was accounted a great success for his cause. The most important task was now to open the road from Verona to Cremona. The two minor fortresses of Mercaria and Mosio were held by Lombard garrisons. These were taken. An effort was then made to tempt the Mantuans into the open by a three-day siege, but when they refused to come out the march to Cremona was continued. One goal had now been reached, and the Verona base secured.

The Emperor spent nearly the whole of October in Cremona, waiting. Negotiations with Pope and Lombards were in progress, and the Diet was to be held in Cremona which had first been summoned for Piacenza. Piacenza was no longer eligible, for a papal “action of peace and mediation” had succeeded in detaching the town from Frederick and inducing it to join the League. The town was lost to the Empire for the next ten years. On the other hand, the town of Bergamo threw over the League and joined Frederick. Lombard politics were always kaleidoscopic.

The Diet was destined not to be held at all. At the end of October the Emperor suddenly quitted Cremona. Eccelino on the Adige in the Legnano region was holding a hostile army in check, composed of combined troops from Vicenza, Treviso, Padua and Mantua. He saw the Verona passes threatened again, and called Frederick to the eastern scene of war. The Emperor hastened to his assistance in a forced march that has become famous, probably intending to take the confederate troops in the rear by approaching from the north via San Bonifacio and Arcole. Accompanied only by his heavy cavalry Frederick quitted Cremona on the evening of the 30th October, and in a march of one day and two nights covered the whole distance from Cremona to San Bonifacio, east of Verona, close on seventy miles, at full speed, “like a swallow cutting the air.” On the morning of November 1st he reached San Bonifacio, halted “as long as it takes a man to eat a piece of bread in haste” and hastened on at once, not southwards to Eccelino but still east to attack Vicenza. The position had suddenly altered. When the confederate army heard of the Emperor’s unexpected approach it dissolved at once, for the towns themselves seemed threatened. The Vicenzans led the van, abandoning tents and baggage in hasty flight for home, since Vicenza lay more exposed to attack than any of the other towns. They came too late. A few hours took Frederick the additional eighteen and a half miles to Vicenza. He arrived on the afternoon of that same first of November, stormed the town which had refused to surrender, and gave it over to plunder. Eccelino meantime came up, the town was handed over to his care and put in immediate charge of an imperial captain.

The story runs that Frederick II gave his friend Eccelino a brief demonstration of how he would like the government of the town to be conducted. The two were walking up and down in the bishop’s garden in Vicenza when the Emperor drew his poniard and said: “I will show thee how thou mayest without fail maintain thy rule,” and thereupon he beheaded with his dagger all the longer blades of grass. Eccelino understood. “I shall not fail to note the Emperor’s instructions,” was his reply. Before long he began by a reign of terror to build up Italy’s first seigniory.

The immediate result of the taking of Vicenza was the surrender of Salinguerra, with his capital of Ferrara and the surrender of the district of Camino. The other towns of the East were so shaken that Eccelino and Gebhard of Arnstein were able, in the course of the winter, to capture Padua, after which Treviso under the Margrave of Este also surrendered. The whole of Northern Italy, east of a line running from Verona to Ferrara, had thus been won for the Emperor. Eccelino under the Emperor’s protection now organised the whole territory into one kingdom or “Tyranny”: which Venice felt to be a grave menace to her. The brief campaign of 1236 had not brought a final decision, but had at least achieved notable successes: above all the exit from the Alps and the approach to Cremona were secured.

We have already anticipated the chief events in Austria. The overthrow of the Babenberg had only been temporary, for Duke Frederick had been able to maintain himself at certain fortified places. Nevertheless, peace had been for the moment restored. The Emperor lingered for weeks in Vienna; declared the Babenberg deposed, and laid the foundation of those private Hohenstaufen possessions already mentioned. He granted a great privilege to Vienna which was henceforth to be a direct appanage of the Empire. He held a Diet there at which once more a large number of German princes were assembled. Nothing bears more eloquent testimony to Frederick’s increased prestige and power than the fact that without any special concessions the German princes at once consented to choose the nine-year old Conrad, King of Jerusalem, as Frederick’s successor; and, more, as “King of the Romans and future Emperor,” thus satisfying the ancient ambition of the House of Hohenstaufen. The electoral decision of the princes is couched in haughty language. They fell in with the Hohenstaufen tradition, and felt themselves in fact the successors and heirs of Roman Senators. “In the beginning of Rome’s history, after the memorable defeat of the Trojans and the destruction of their noble city, the highest power and the electoral franchise for the Empire rested with the senators of the new race of the new town. Yet with the gradual ever-increasing growth of the Empire and its evergrowing strength, the height of such great fortune could not remain for ever with one single city—though she were the royallest among them all. After the Empire’s power had pilgrimaged through the most distant regions in a certain circular wandering it came to rest at last for ever among Germania’s princes—in a manner not less beneficial than inevitable—that from amongst them, who secure the safety and prosperity of the Empire, the ruler of the Empire should be chosen.”

The royal succession was thus assured in Germany and in the Roman Empire. The Emperor, however, abstained from crowning King Conrad IV. His experience with King Henry, in whose stead Conrad was now chosen, “as David for Saul,” had demonstrated that too great independence on the part of the German King was dangerous. King Conrad, or the Regents appointed for him, were, therefore, to rule simply as delegates of the Emperor. The first regent was Archbishop Sigfrid of Mainz, and, later, Henry Raspe of Thuringia. In spring Frederick moved from Vienna to Speyer to assemble other princes there for Whitsuntide and permit them to confirm the King’s election. The Emperor’s time was mainly occupied in extensive preparations for continuing the Lombard war, and in August he was again encamped on the Lechfeld with fresh troops. A brief letter informed the Romans of his proceedings. No matter which concerned the Romans should be concealed from them (he wrote), since every undertaking of the Emperor’s was specially planned on their behalf. He was now striking his tents on the fields of Augsburg before again seeking Latium’s borders with the assembled fighting forces of Germany under the fame-crowned banner of the imperial eagles.

When marching at the head of his armies Frederick felt himself more than ever one of the Caesars. He had opened the Lombard campaign by seizing one of the Roman eagles in his hand. This year, even more than last, he hoped the genius of Rome would accompany him on his campaign.

At the request of the German Grand Master negotiations with the Pope were again opened this year. Hermann of Salza had a difficult task. At a big Chapter in Marburg, where over a hundred of the Teutonic knights were assembled, the brothers of the Order showed themselves quite as impatient as the German princes at the thought that their Master was treating, and for ever treating, instead of striking. The Emperor was not optimistic about these fresh efforts, though, in fact, Hermann of Salza accomplished on this occasion more than ever before. Frederick’s successes in the March of Treviso had intimidated both Lombards and Pope. Gregory even withdrew from Lombardy his legate, Cardinal Jacob of Palestrina, whom the Emperor cordially disliked, and replaced him by two more congenial cardinals. The Lombards also were becoming more amenable, and perhaps a treaty might have been arranged if the Venetians had not torpedoed the peace negotiations. A Lombardy united under the Emperor, an Eccelino at their back in the March of Treviso: they must have felt that this would be a perpetual menace. After Piacenza deserted the Emperor’s cause a Venetian had been put in as podesta. On instructions from the Doge he made the Piacenzans swear that they would never accept an imperial podesta. This was one of the Emperor’s most important conditions, and the negotiations fell through.

In the middle of September 1237 the Emperor arrived in Verona with two thousand German knights. Gebhard of Arnstein joined him soon after. He had hastened on ahead and called up the Tuscan levies in the greatest haste, and joined forces with the Sicilian army consisting of seven thousand Saracen archers and the Apulian knights. A few days later the levies from the loyal towns came in, led by Cremona, and the auxiliaries of Eccelino. The chivalry of individual towns like Bergamo and Tortona mustered also, and other volunteers poured in, so that the Emperor ultimately had at his disposal an army of some twelve to fifteen thousand men. Success speedily followed. The fortress of Redondesco, west of Mantua, was conquered in September, followed by two other castles in the Mantuan region, so that Mantua itself surrendered on the first of October. Preliminary negotiations with the podesta, Count Richard of San Bonifacio, had paved the way for the surrender of this important town.

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The Emperor now turned north into Brescian territory. Montechiaro, strongly fortified and strongly garrisoned, was taken by stratagem after a siege of fourteen days. The fortifications were destroyed and the fifteen hundred foot-soldiers and twenty knights of the Lombard League captured here were taken to Cremona. The road to Brescia was now open. But a Lombard army about ten thousand strong lay close before the walls, and the problem was to attack the enemy forces as far as possible in the open. The Lombards skilfully evaded a battle, which was a simple matter as long as they could use Brescia as their base. The Emperor tried to lure them off. He marched through the Brescia territory southwards, laying waste, captured four castles and compelled the Lombards to follow, for they feared an attack on one of the other defenceless towns if they lost touch with the imperial army. The story of Vicenza might well have been repeated. By the middle of November the two armies finally lay face to face near Pontevico, separated by a marshy little river which there flows into the Oglio. Operations came to a standstill. The Emperor could not allow his heavy cavalry to attack across the marshy land, the Lombards accepted no challenge. November was almost over. Negotiations had been unsuccessful—in spite of considerable concessions by the towns. There seemed no hope of dealing a decisive blow at the Lombards before the year was out.

The Battle of Cortenuova

Then Frederick II had recourse to stratagem. The Oglio, a small river that traverses Lombardy from north to south and flows into the left bank of the Po, lay behind his position, which probably filled the angle made by the marshy little tributary and the Oglio. On the further side of the Oglio lay Cremona, three or four hours’ march away. The Emperor made a feint of setting off to take up his winter quarters in the town, a move which the advanced season made entirely plausible. While the watching Lombards remained, covered by their marshes, the Emperor crossed the Oglio by several bridges, broke these behind him, as the enemy could observe, and sent in fact a large part of his army, including the town infantries and the baggage, southwards to Cremona, He himself, however, now separated from the Lombards by the Oglio, marched off northwards with his striking force: the entire cavalry and his light Saracen archers. He followed the Oglio upstream. The Lombards, certainly the Milanese, were bound to cross the river somewhere, and the Emperor intended to intercept them. For two days he lay in vain in ambush at Soncino; at last news came. The Lombards, feeling perfectly secure, had moved off further north, crossed the river and were encamped at Pontoglio. Frederick immediately struck camp, left Soncino on the morning of November 27th, and his vanguard of German knights fell on the amazed Lombards that same afternoon. The Lombards had only just time to rally round the carroccio, the standard-bearing chariot of Milan, which had been set up at Cortenuova. Meanwhile Frederick’s main force, marching up in several columns, one of which the Emperor himself commanded, soon compelled a decision. Darkness set in early owing to the season, and there was not time to take Cortenuova by daylight. The Lombards abandoned the place in the night and fled, leaving the Milanese carroccio behind. The pursuit began at dawn; the Lombards lost an immense number of prisoners: 3,000 foot soldiers and over 1,000 knights, amongst whom was the podesta of Milan, Pietro Tiepolo, son of the Doge of Venice. The standard itself, which the Milanese had sought to save, got lost in the flight and was found by the victors and made a great trophy in the conquered camp.

Cortenuova, one of the few great battles of the Middle Ages, was a complete victory for the imperial arms and a glorious climax to Frederick’s empire in Germany. It belongs entirely to his German period. For the last time an Emperor’s Italian campaign, voted and supported by the German princes took the form of an imperial war. Coming from the North, Frederick, like his forefathers, had once again crossed the Alps and conquered in the Lombard plain. The victory was won mainly by the German knights, but was immediately translated by Frederick into Roman phraseology to give the success its spiritual value: “Germanic victory” would have created a false impression, “German victory” would have as yet had no meaning. The victory was therefore turned to the glory of Roman arms, it was won in the name of imperial Rome and of her Caesars as Frederick truthfully wrote to the people of Rome. Even during the battle the manes of the Roman Imperators had accompanied the Hohenstaufen, yea, even victorious Roma herself, when he gave his warriors their new battle-cry, their new slogan of victory:

MILES ROMA! MILES IMPERATOR!

And in order to lose nothing of the glamour and glory of ancient deeds of arms the Emperor followed up the victory, which he had won with the battle-cry of Rome, by a triumph which deliberately and intentionally revived prehistoric and forgotten ceremonies. People said that he was planning to elevate Cremona to the position of a second Rome. When Frederick a few days later entered Cremona with his immense booty, his numerous prisoners and his victorious army, he did so after the fashion of the Roman Emperors celebrating their triumphs: the captured enemy commanders followed in fetters; Pietro Tiepolo, son of the Doge of Venice, sometime podesta of Milan, was bound upon his back to the lowered mast of the Milanese carroccio. This noblest of trophies was drawn by an elephant through the streets of Cremona to the joyous cheering of the people. The Emperor’s yellow banner with the Roman eagles floated aloft, while from a wooden tower on the elephant’s back trumpeters made known the triumph of the new Divus Caesar Augustus. The Emperor himself told the Romans that his triumph was a reversion to the original Roman form.

The intoxication of this exotic, pagan-Roman, assuredly most unchristian, celebration of victory, marked a turning point in Frederick’s life. All the magnificent Roman titles which he, like his predecessors bore, were justified. The empty formula, meaninglessly used, “Imperator Invictus,” suddenly meant once more what it had meant of old. Without the need of transcendental interpretation he was now in the naked literal sense:

FELIX VICTOR AC TRIUMPHATOR.

The shades of Rome, of the Romans and their Caesars, had tasted blood: they began to stir again and to be visible in the flesh once more; a genuine breath of antiquity revivified by life itself.