FREDERICK I BARBAROSSA, Emperor. — Grandson of Conrad III, founder of the power of the Swabian duchy, son of Frederick of Swabia and Judith of Bavaria, sister of Henry the Proud, ascended the throne on 4 March 1152. By his own will and by fortune’s favor, he earned the merit of ending the long crisis of imperial power by uniting in himself both branches of German imperialism, reconciling in kinship—as later in political action—the Franconian and Guelph houses, and restoring unity to the principle and strength of the Empire.
His very accession to the throne signified the renewed stance of the German feudal state against Roman theocracy and the definitive severing of the Empire from the traditional relations which Charlemagne and Otto I had consecrated with the Church of Rome and which, at the close of the first phase of the Investiture Controversy, the Concordat of Worms had reconfirmed. From his earliest acts of government (the granting of Bavaria to his uncle Henry the Lion, the resumption of royal influence in episcopal elections), F. gave clear signs of the path he would follow without deviation. In his mind, he accentuated the position of Italy within the Empire, seeing in the peninsula the field of communal discord as the best guarantee for a reassertion of imperial power. The vast and profound crisis of papal power, which at the time of Eugenius III had reached a moment of uncertainty and dissatisfaction with the paths pursued thus far, opened to him the possibility of not holding the power of the Church of Rome in the same regard as his predecessors. In the Mezzogiorno, with the resumption of the policy of the Ottonians, there re-emerged, in the hoped-for impossibility of agreement, the opposition of papacy and communes against the Empire. Even in Rome itself, the fiery words of Arnold of Brescia, with the revival of imperial traditions long dormant, gave him hope of counting on the support of the Roman people against the Pope. And, on the other hand, it was precisely the Pope, at the moment of his bitterest struggle with the Roman commune, who became the advocate of an alliance with F. (the Pact of Constance, of 1153), offering him the imperial crown in exchange for the subjugation of Rome and the overthrow of papal power.
Not differently, the communes of Upper Italy, driven by the bitterness of their struggles, themselves invited imperial intervention against one another: thus Lodi and Como against Milan, encircled by powerful enemies. And the fateful rift was laid bare: between the universalism of the Empire and the particularism of civic autonomies, without, however, the two universalisms (Empire and Church) being able to reach sincere agreement, for the resumption of a rivalry now centuries old and destined to lead to the second phase of the grand clash.
October 1154: F. descends into Italy, assumes the royal crown in Pavia, and accepts the submission of the feudatories of Montferrat and the communes of the anti-Milanese league. But the dominant commune is Milan, and precisely because its rivals turn to the German king, it turns against him. In that first hour in Italy, F., though having shown his strength by the destruction of Tortona, Asti, and Chieri, does not have the time to settle accounts with Milan. More urgent is the journey to Rome. In the city, succeeding Eugenius III, Adrian IV, the Pope’s situation had greatly improved: the interdict with which the Romans had been struck had driven them to abandon Arnold of Brescia to his fate. This brought relations between the German king and the Pope to a state far from cordial. Interest tempered distrust: F. sacrificed Arnold and received, in St. Peter’s, on 18 June 1155, the imperial crown. But around him the combative spirit of the Romans, united against the Emperor in one of the most memorable episodes of resistance and struggle in the city’s history, wielded the forces of the German army, forcing F. to make a swift return to Germany.
If the first descent into Italy had yielded only a formal effect, with the contested coronation in St. Peter’s, while leaving the disappointed spirit of the Pope to seek rather the necessary balance, security, and peace in agreement with the Romans, in Germany, with skill and good fortune, F. was able, though conceding much to the great vassals, to lay the foundations of a firm personal power. Burgundy was joined to imperial domains through F.’s marriage to Beatrice. In the calm that settled over the German kingdom, there corresponded the state of agitation in Italy, now considered the first land of the Empire, and particularly of Lombardy. When F. descended again into Italy in 1158, he was already in violent conflict not only with the civic autonomies but with the Roman Church, animated by the initiative of Cardinal Roland Bandinelli, who would later, as Pope Alexander III, become the Emperor’s most bitter antagonist.
In Lombardy, Milan emerged weakened from the direct clash of September 1158, and within nine days F. was able to convene on the plains of Roncaglia the most famous of his diets: and in the *Constitutio de regalibus*, he reclaimed for the Empire all sovereign rights usurped by vassals and communes. But such imperial claims, even if accepted in principle by the various parties involved, could not but translate into fierce points of contention when applied in reality. In the end, there would be not an abolition but a recognition of communal constitutions, albeit with clear subordination to the Empire in the appointment of magistrates. Yet as soon as the work of the imperial podestà, appointed as a result of the decisions of Roncaglia, revealed arbitrary preponderance, revolt broke out, first in Milan and then in Genoa.
Already Adrian IV, and then the newly elected Alexander III, had openly abandoned the Emperor, making common cause with the rebellious cities. To rebalance his position, F. found no recourse but to introduce schism within the Church itself, through the election, against Alexander, of Victor IV (Octavian of Monticelli), which drew him ever deeper into religious matters with the convocation of a council at Pavia, where Alexander III did not appear. It was after the council that F., having destroyed Crema, a dependency of Milan, turned once more against the latter and took it by famine after a three-year siege in the spring of 1162. This time the walls and towers were demolished, the quarters of the city were sacked, and the citizens were dispersed. Behind the Teutonic rage lay the hatred of rival cities (Lodi, Pavia, Como, Cremona, Novara), which could at last triumph.
With the destruction of Milan and the bitter crisis afflicting papal power, while the schism of Victor continued with Paschal III, F. reached the zenith of his power. Great designs still stirred in his soul; the restoration of imperial power he envisaged in the definitive dominion over Rome and the subjugation of the Pope, in the further territorial expansion in northern and central Europe, and in the resumption of the eastern policy of the Ottonians. He had already laid hands on the goods of the contested Matilda inheritance by an act of force that the Church would not forget. He had, from the antipope Paschal, procured the canonization, to the glory of imperial authority, of Charlemagne. Against Alexander III, returning from exile in France, he directed his war effort: and he succeeded in installing himself in Rome, and even in the Vatican Basilica itself, where, with the legitimate Pope fled to the Normans, he installed the antipope and again received the imperial crown. But once more resistance was not quelled, and an epidemic breaking out among his troops forced him to retrace his steps across the Alps, while he saw crumbling about him that design of imperial power restoration which he had so tenaciously pursued.
The influence of Byzantium, through the intermediary of Venice, extends over the spreading revolt of the cities in the Po Valley: Verona is placed at the head of the league, which is joined by the Lombard communes. At Pontida, on 7 April 1167, it is decided to rebuild Milan and to wage relentless war for the freedom of the communes, while ALEXANDER III is acclaimed as head of the league, and in his honour a new city, named Alessandria, is founded at the confluence of the Trebbia and Tanaro rivers. The ecclesiastical party also raises its head in Germany; the great feudal lords are no longer united with the Emperor, divided from him by his Italian policy.
In 1174 FREDERICK descends for the third time into Italy, vainly besieges Alessandria, and after a series of clashes and peace attempts is defeated at Legnano on 29 May 1176 by the forces of the free communes. With great difficulty FREDERICK manages to take refuge in Pavia.
The year after Legnano, on 21 July 1177, at Venice, the Emperor and the Pope come to an agreement and a ten-year truce is established with the communes. Forced to return immediately to Germany by the open revolt of HENRY THE LION, he succeeds in defeating him, thereby bringing about the collapse of the power of the Guelf house. And once again the great idea of the universal Empire absorbs him, as he attempts with LUCIUS III what had not succeeded with ALEXANDER, who had meanwhile died. In 1183, at Cosenza, the terms of the Venetian agreement are confirmed, and peace is established between the communes and the Empire. The great contender now seemed, as the sun was setting, to abandon his Italian policy, when, with a gesture of consummate political skill, he succeeded in grafting the imperial authority in Italy onto the far more substantial power of the Normans, by arranging the marriage of his son HENRY with the heiress of the Kingdom of Sicily, CONSTANZA D'ALTAVILLA.
In 1187 Jerusalem falls back into the hands of the infidels: in the Christian world spirits are stirred, perhaps for a new Crusade. Only this prevented the further escalation of a struggle that would have taken on a character of violence no less intense than in the past. But the life of the Empire was now drawing to its close: on 10 June 1190 he died on the road to the Holy Land, in Cilicia, drowned in the Salef river. The end of FREDERICK’s activity as a crusader cast a light of religious piety (which, moreover, had never deserted him) over his figure.
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At the age of twenty, FREDERICK II found himself king of Sicily and Apulia, king of Germany, and designated for the Empire, while, with the death of the great Pope—yet an oppressive guardian—he felt himself freer in his relations with the Church. Matured by early experience, which had schooled him in robust manliness, hardened to scorn of every danger and toil, yet also schooled in every kind of cunning, loving a life of freedom and splendour, eager to draw from every source of culture—Latin, Arabic, Byzantine, and ecclesiastical—so that he would form, anew but more learned than CHARLEMAGNE, a school of science and poetry around himself, and would himself, with his sons, compose in the vernacular, FREDERICK II could now assume those attitudes and seek to realise that programme which adverse circumstances had hitherto counselled him to conceal. His was the revival, with a more flexible spirit and a deeper and more universal sense of the problems of historical life, of the great design of imperial restoration in the West, which the German peoples had pursued, even directly on Italian soil, since the Ottonians. Where he, despite his extraordinary gifts, would fail to give a secure foundation to his programme, and the crack would open menacingly in the structure of the medieval Empire, was in his disregard for the sense of nationality in Germany, in his fostering of the princes’ privileges to the detriment of central power, in his ever-greater detachment from his original kingdom, and in his open favour towards the new, where he spent the greater part of his life, between Palermo and the castles of Apulia, Campania, and Lucania.
The Lateran Council had entrusted to the new Emperor as his first duty the conduct of the Crusade. From HONORIUS III FREDERICK obtains a first postponement, and then, against the renewal of all the obligations already undertaken towards the Church, the concession to retain, albeit in a personal capacity, the Kingdom of Sicily. HONORIUS III is compelled, despite his most vigorous protests, to tolerate the election, at the Diet of Frankfurt, of the young HENRY, son of FREDERICK II, as king of the Romans. In that same year, 1220, on 22 November, he was solemnly crowned Emperor in St Peter’s.
What drove FREDERICK II to delay the fulfilment of his crusading vow were the sorry conditions of the Kingdom of Sicily, impoverished by a decade of strife, as the royal treasury had been squandered, and royal authority weakened by the continual arrogance and oppression of German and Norman barons. In the mountains, bands of Saracens, long rebellious, waged guerrilla warfare. It was necessary to undertake a work of restoration, which could not be considered complete unless accompanied by a general reorganisation of the Kingdom.
Skilled also in selecting capable and loyal collaborators (such as the jurist ROFFREDO OF VITERBO, TADDEO DA SESSA, or the notary of Capua PIER DELLE VIGNE), his work was directed above all to dismantling whatever of the feudal superstructure stood in the way of the construction he pursued of a state governed by officials—that is, a bureaucratic and modern state. Against recalcitrant barons he was harsh, at times ruthless. The Saracens, finally subdued, were transferred to the fortified camp at Lucera, where they became an elite corps of defenders of the Empire. With culture and learning he fostered and encouraged commerce, especially maritime trade, and likewise agriculture and nascent industry. Manifestly imperial in character were the great constructions of castles and royal palaces. In 1224 he desired the foundation, in Naples, of a general Studium, conceived as an institution for the benefit of the nation.
If the Pope insisted on the fulfillment of the Crusade, Frederick II employed every means to consolidate his power as a matter of urgent necessity. To this end, he did not hesitate to employ, with some skill, a matrimonial policy: after the death in 1223 of Constance of Aragon, whom he had married upon reaching his majority, he took as his wife Isabella, daughter of John of Brienne, King of Jerusalem. This was a step toward fulfilling his imperial duty as defender of the faith and the pressing obligation of the Crusade, but it was also a means of securing practical foundations for success. The Crusade also provided an excellent pretext for extending imperial authority over the communes of northern Italy, as he attempted to do at the Diet of Cremona, declaring—so he said—that he could not tolerate leaving enemies behind him. The attempt failed: the communes, on the contrary, renewed the Lombard League, and Honorius III could only intervene as a mediator.
Meanwhile, the election of Pope Gregory IX—Ugolino Conti, the aged cardinal of the family of Innocent III—brought the growing conflict between Papacy and Empire into the open. Gregory, intending to impose the Crusade, ordered Frederick II to depart for II. The emperor set sail from Brindisi in August 1227, but returned after a few days, apparently because of an epidemic that had broken out on the ships. The Pope did not accept this reason as valid and excommunicated Frederick II, urging Christian princes and peoples to take up arms against him. It was doubtless a pretext to strike at the emperor’s growing power, which threatened the Church. Frederick reacted by denouncing the greed of the Church and forcing the clergy to disregard the interdict, immediately resuming the interrupted Crusade. In June 1228, he sailed again for the Levant, landed in the Holy Land, and, acting more as a diplomat than a conqueror, obtained Jerusalem from the sultan al-Kamil. He was crowned king in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and returned at once to Italy. What recalled him—and in the only way possible to hasten his work—was the invasion of the Kingdom of Sicily by bands of “crusaders” at the instigation of the Pope. As soon as he reappeared, however, he recovered his domains, and Gregory IX was forced to make peace at San Germano. It was more a truce than a peace, lasting less than a decade, which Frederick used to imprint his administrative reorganization on the Kingdom of Sicily and to lay the foundations of a new state modeled on the imperial example of Rome, achieving an absolutism based on a hierarchy of officials that would endure for centuries. At Melfi in 1231, he promulgated a body of constitutions that reformed the administrative structure of the kingdom; at other diets and assemblies (Foggia, Ariano), he issued laws that modernized the administration of justice and fiscal matters.
His renewed attempt to extend imperial influence into northern Italy reopened both the struggle with the communes and the conflict with the Pope. The occasion was the demand for an oath of fealty from the Lombard communes—what had happened in 1226 now recurred in 1231. This time, however, when Frederick II returned from suppressing the rebellion of his son Henry in Germany, where the young prince had become the spokesman for the discontent aroused by the emperor’s Italian policies, the papal effort to mediate the Lombard conflict failed, and Pope and communes stood together. At Cortenuova in 1237, Frederick II won his greatest victory over the League, and on the following day, in another sign of that universal sense of empire that now intoxicated him, he sent the Carroccio taken from the Milanese to be preserved in the Capitol at Rome. The struggle did not end, however: the resistance of Milan, Alessandria, and Brescia kept the situation dangerous, and Frederick, for his part, exacerbated it by striking at the Pope’s interests—marrying his natural son Enzo to Adelasia of Torres and Gallura and granting him the title of King of Sardinia. Gregory IX did not hesitate to excommunicate the emperor again. To the papal charge that he was a plunderer of Church property, Frederick retorted by denouncing the rapacity of the Roman Church as a danger to all princes. As in other moments of the struggle between Papacy and Empire, the controversy took on the violent tones of pamphleteering. But it was military action alone that could have resolved the situation at this point, and Frederick’s action now became hesitant and indecisive, so that his successes in Tuscany were matched by failures in the Po Valley and Romagna. Even in Rome itself, despite the blandishments he offered the nobility, the people rose to defend the venerable Pope and prevented the emperor from seizing his person.
As soon as Frederick returned to Sicily, Gregory summoned a council in Rome with the aim of solemnly deposing the emperor. But many of the bishops who came by Genoese ships were captured by King Enzo, who dispersed the Genoese fleet at Meloria.
After Gregory IX’s death in 1241, Innocent IV—who, as Cardinal Fieschi, had not been averse to direct dealings with the emperor—renewed peace negotiations, but in vain. While negotiating with tenacious skill, the new pope stirred up hostility against Frederick everywhere. The emperor was weary and discouraged, perhaps close to any conclusion of the struggle with the Church, when Innocent’s sudden flight from Rome and convocation of another council at Lyons—where the emperor was to be excommunicated, deposed, and subjected to a crusade of Christian peoples—brought the epic struggle between Papacy and Empire to its final crisis. The downfall of the Swabian house was now imminent. And just as Taddeo da Sessa’s eloquent defense at the Council of Lyons proved vain, so too was treachery raised against Frederick by those closest to him. This drove the emperor to renewed, more furious energy. He punished his enemies mercilessly, devastating Parma, the rebellious city, but found himself faced by a rising tide of resistance; in a sortie, he was victorious, yet forced to retreat to Cremona. Even to the end, Frederick II believed in the possibility of an agreement with the Pope, though the suspicion that such an agreement might be negotiated without him led him to dispose of his faithful chancellor, Pier della Vigna. Then his valiant son Enzo was captured by the Bolognese at Fossalta, and further defeats and disappointments deepened Frederick’s plight. Yet fate seemed still suspended over his epic figure, and in Germany his second son Conrad rallied the fortunes of the Empire, just as in northern Italy his vicar Ezzelino da Romano did likewise. Then, in the plain of Apulia, which he had loved, near Foggia and Lucera, at Castel Fiorentino, on 13 December 1250, the life of the great emperor came suddenly to its end.
One of the most complex, most compelling, and most richly endowed figures in human genius and talent, Frederick II brought the medieval world to its decisive crisis before its rebirth. A man in whom three civilizations converged—the Latin-Germanic civilization that could be said to derive from the example of Charlemagne, the Arab, and the Norman—he drew from each of the three inspirations and aims, from the almost religious sense of Empire to bureaucratic centralism, from the splendor of culture to a love of learning. Yet he united and fused all in the powerful originality of an open, strong, and uncompromising spirit, rich in curiosity and ranging across the most diverse problems. Far from harboring heretical ideas, he was nevertheless also a stranger to the mysticism that prevailed in the Middle Ages: he detached himself, and detached his state, from the central problem of medieval life, which was the religious problem, even though, to a large extent, the life and politics of Frederick II continued to bear the legacy of the disputes arising from the Investiture Controversy.
Alongside the qualities of preparation and insight that made him the creator of a state largely new—though founded on the triple tradition mentioned above—there was the fundamental defect of his work, namely, his personalism, the very personality of a structure incapable, as was demonstrated, of enduring under other hands. Even more serious was the defect in his assessment of the Roman Church: a tragic error of perspective, one by which Frederick II, in his attempts at domination and in his unpersuasive approaches, underestimated the political power of the papacy. This error would lead him to underestimate an agreement—precisely that with the Church—which would have rendered him perplexed and weak also in the face of the Lombard communes.
FEDERICO III IMPERATORE — FEDERICO II DI PRUSSIA