Frederick II, Emperor

FREDERICK II, Emperor. - Grandson of Frederick Barbarossa and son of Henry VI and Constance of Hauteville, F. of Hohenstaufen, b. at Jesi on 26 Dec. 1194, while Henry was hastening his moves for the complete occupation of the Kingdom of Sicily. Left an orphan of his father at only three years of age, in 1197, and the following year of his mother as well, the imperial scion found himself becoming the center of intrigues of every kind, on the part of German feudatories, of Norman, Sicilian or Apulian nobles, of pontifical legates and of dignitaries of the Palermo court itself. The sole, and uncertain, guarantee for the continuity of the throne was the testament of Henry VI, which recognized the Kingdom of Sicily as a fief of the Church, reconfirmed by the final act of Constance of Hauteville, who, in dying, placed her son under the tutelage of Innocent III, at the very hour in which the great Pontiff was turning to the reestablishment of pontifical authority in central and southern Italy. It was part of Innocent's design to break what had been the able move of Frederick I, namely the union of the Empire and the Kingdom, of the lands of Germany and the formerly Norman lands. It was against this program of his tutor, who, as high lord of the Kingdom of Sicily, came to counterbalance the privileged position, with respect to the clergy, of Germany and of the Emperor - a program that would be made his own by Innocent's successors - that F. II would struggle tenaciously all his life.

For years and years, until the early proclamation of his majority, in 1208, in Sicily and throughout the Kingdom there followed one another the struggles and intrigues, of which, and of the various contenders (Walter of Palear, grand chancellor and archbishop of Troia, Markward of Anweiler, Diutpold of Hohenburg), F. II was a prisoner, in a sense at times even physically. He emerged from them with a sudden and decisive break, which at fourteen years of age led him to assume the supreme responsibilities of power. Just in time to oppose, with the support of the papacy, after the killing of Philip of Swabia, king of Germany since the death of Henry VI, the Guelph Otto of Bavaria who, having obtained the Empire, had then set himself against his natural protectress, the Church, seeking to replace, at once, the papacy and F. II in Sicily. The Ottonian conquest was already well advanced, when the papal decision to set him against Otto, causing Innocent to overcome his intention of the separation of the Empire from the Kingdom, albeit after obtaining from Frederick the promise of S. Germano, of ceding the Kingdom to his firstborn son, placed the young sovereign in a position to face the struggle for the Empire in Germany. More through the work of his direct rival, Philip Augustus, Otto IV was defeated and his decline sealed. What resulted from this was the considerable increase in the prestige of the papacy, which Innocent III solemnly proclaimed at the Lateran Council of 1215.

At 20 years of age, F. II found himself being king of Sicily and Apulia, king of Germany and designated for the Empire, while, with the death of the great Pontiff, but oppressive tutor, he could feel freer in his relations with the Church. Made mature by the early experience he had gained of men, of a robust virility, accustomed to the contempt of every danger and every toil, but also broken in to every cunning, a lover of the free life and of pomp, eager to draw from all the sources of culture, from the Latin to the Arabic, from the Byzantine to the ecclesiastical, so that he would form, a new, but more cultured, Charlemagne, around himself a school of science and poetry, and would make himself, with his sons, a poet in the vernacular, F. II could by now assume those attitudes and seek to realize that program which adverse circumstances had, until that moment, advised him to dissemble. His is the resumption, with a more supple spirit and with a more universal and profound sense of the problems of historical life, of the great design of imperial restoration in the West, which the Germanic peoples had pursued, even directly on Italian soil, since the Ottos. Where he, despite his extraordinary gifts, would not succeed in giving a secure basis to his program, and the rift would open menacingly in the fabric of the medieval Empire, would be in not taking account of the sense of nationality of Germany, in favoring the privileges of the princes to the detriment of the central power, in the ever greater detachment from the original kingdom and in the open favor of the new one, where he spends the greater part of his life, between Palermo and the castles of Apulia, Campania and Lucania.

The Lateran Council had entrusted as the first duty of the new emperor the conduct of the Crusade. From the mild Honorius III F. II obtains a first postponement and then, against the renewal of all the commitments already undertaken toward the Church, the concession of keeping, albeit on a personal basis, the kingdom of Sicily. Honorius III is forced, even after the most lively protests, to tolerate the election, at the Diet of Frankfurt, of the little Henry, son of F. II, as king of the Romans. That same year, 1220, on 22 Nov., he was solemnly crowned emperor in St. Peter's.

What drove F. II to delay the discharge of the crusading vow were the sad conditions of the Kingdom of Sicily, impoverished by a decade of struggles, as the treasure of the crown had been dispersed there, and the royal authority debased by the continuous abuses and extortions of the German and Norman barons. On the mountains, bands of Saracens, long rebellious, waged guerrilla warfare. It was necessary to set about a work of restoration, which could not be said to be complete except with a general reorganization of the Kingdom.

Skilled also in choosing capable and faithful collaborators (such as the jurist Roffredo of Viterbo, Taddeo of Sessa, or the Capuan notary Pier delle Vigne), his was a work directed above all at demolishing whatever of the feudal superstructures opposed the construction, which was pursued by him, of a State governed by officials, that is, bureaucratic and modern. Against the rebellious barons he was harsh, at times merciless. The Saracens, at last subdued, he transferred to the entrenched camp of Lucera, making them become a chosen corps of defenders of the Empire. He wanted, with culture and science, commerce to be developed and encouraged, especially maritime commerce, and likewise agriculture and nascent industry through imperial manufactories. A great builder of castles and royal palaces, in 1224 he wanted the rise, at Naples, of a Studium generale, conceived as an institution and advantage of the nation.

If the Pontiff insisted on the fulfillment of the Crusade, F. II employed every art in support of the peremptory necessity of first consolidating his power. Nor does he fail, for this, to use also, with some skill, a matrimonial policy: with the death, in 1223, of Constance of Aragon, married soon after his early majority, he united in marriage with Isabella, daughter of the king of Jerusalem, John of Brienne: it was a drawing near to the imperial task of defender of the faith and to the now pressing obligation of the Crusade: but, by first laying concrete, and also practical, bases for assuring himself of success. The Crusade became, moreover, an excellent pretext for imposing imperial authority on the Communes of northern Italy, as he attempted to do at the Diet of Cremona, being unable (as he said) to tolerate leaving enemies behind his back. The intent was not realized: the Communes renewed, on the contrary, the "Lombard League" and Honorius III could do nothing but interpose as peacemaker.

The accession to the papal throne of Gregory IX — the aged Cardinal Ugolino Conti, of the family of Innocent III — meanwhile brought into open conflict the dispute that was taking shape between the Papacy and the Empire. Under pain of excommunication, Gregory IX ordered F. II to set out for the Crusade. The Emperor departed from Brindisi in August 1227, but after a few days returned, it seems, because of an epidemic that broke out on the ships. The reason was not deemed valid by the stern Pontiff, who struck F. II with excommunication, urging Christian princes and peoples to fight against him. It was, undoubtedly, a pretext for striking at the growing power of F. II, which was dangerous to the Church. The latter reacted by denouncing the greed of the Church and forcing the clergy to disregard the interdict, and immediately resuming the interrupted Crusade. In June 1228 he set sail again for the Levant, set foot in the Holy Land and, as a diplomat rather than a conqueror, obtained Jerusalem from the Sultan al-Kamil, had himself crowned king there in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and returned immediately to Italy. What recalled him, and hastened his work in the only possible way, was the invasion of the kingdom of Sicily by the Pontiff, through bands of "clavisignati." It sufficed, moreover, that he should barely reappear for Gregory IX, once his domains had been reconquered, to be forced to submit to the Peace of San Germano. A truce, rather than a peace. A truce of less than ten years, of which F. took advantage to set the seal on the administrative reorganization of the kingdom of Sicily, on the creation of that new State which harked back to the imperial example of Rome in order to arrive at a form of absolutism founded on a hierarchy of officials, which would remain fundamental for centuries to come. At Melfi, in 1231, he promulgated a body of Constitutiones, which renewed the administrative organism of the Kingdom; in other diets and assizes (Foggia; Ariano) he promulgated reforming laws for the administration of justice and in matters of taxation.

It was the attempt to renew the extension of the Empire's influence in northern Italy that reopened, at the same time, the struggles with the Communes and those with the Pontiff. The occasional cause was the demand for an oath of vassalage from the Lombard Communes: what had happened in 1226 happened again in 1231. Only that, this time, when F. II returned from having crushed in Germany the rebellion of his son Henry, who had made himself the interpreter of the disappointments provoked by the Emperor's Italian policy, and the papal attempt at composing the conflict in Lombardy had proved vain, Pontiff and Communes made common cause. At Cortenuova, in 1237, F. II achieved his greatest victory against the League; and on the following day, another sign of that universal sense of the Empire that now intoxicated him, he sent to Rome, to be kept on the Capitoline, the Carroccio taken from the Milanese. The struggle, however, did not end: the resistance of Milan, of Alessandria, of Brescia kept a situation dangerous that F. II, on the other hand, contributed to exacerbate deeply by striking at the interests of the papacy, by marrying his natural son Enzo to Adelasia of Torres and Gallura and granting Enzo the title of king of Sardinia. Gregory IX did not hesitate to excommunicate the Emperor once again. To the papal accusation of being a plunderer of Church property F. II returned, by contrast, to denounce the greed of the Roman Church, a danger looming over all princes. Into the dispute, with violent colors, as already at other moments of the struggle between papacy and Empire, entered polemical pamphleteering. But it was the military action of F. II that alone could have resolved the situation at this moment. And precisely now it became uncertain and indecisive, so that scant successes in Tuscany were matched by failures in the Po Valley and in Romagna. In Rome itself, despite the blandishments used toward the nobility, the people rose in defense of the venerable Pontiff and prevented the Emperor from seizing his person. Barely had F. returned to Sicily when Gregory convoked a Council in Rome, aimed at a public and solemn deposition of the Emperor. But the bishops who arrived from every quarter, on Genoese ships, fell in large part prisoners of King Enzo, who at Meloria scattered the fleet of Genoa.

When Gregory IX died in 1241, with Innocent IV, who as Cardinal Fieschi had not been averse to direct relations with the Emperor, peace negotiations were renewed, but in vain. While negotiating, with tenacious skill, the new Pontiff stirred up hostility against F. everywhere. The latter was tired and discouraged and perhaps close to any sort of conclusion of the struggle with the Church, when Innocent's sudden gesture — of fleeing from Rome and convoking another council at Lyon, in which to excommunicate the Emperor, depose him and proclaim a crusade of Christian peoples against him — brought the epic struggle between the papacy and the Empire toward its final turning point. The ruin of the House of Swabia was by now near. And just as the eloquent defense of Taddeo of Sessa had resounded in vain at the Council of Lyon, so too, around F. II, no one refrained from stirring up betrayal, at the hands of his most faithful men. This induced the Emperor to a renewed and more furious energy. He punished his enemies atrociously, punished Parma, the faithless city, but saw it rise up against him and, in a victorious sortie, so that he was forced to withdraw to Cremona. And yet, almost to the very end, F. II believed in the possibility of an agreement with the Pontiff; even if the doubt that such an agreement might be maneuvered without him led him to rid himself of his trusted chancellor Pier delle Vigne. Then the valiant Enzo, at Fossalta, fell into the hands of the Bolognese, and other defeats and other disappointments aggravated the situation of F. II. But destiny still seemed suspended around his epic figure, and in Germany his second-born Conrad raised up again the fortunes of the Empire, just as in northern Italy his vicar, Ezzelino da Romano, did, when, on the Apulian plain, which he had loved above all, near Foggia and Lucera, at Castel Fiorentino, on 13 December 1250, the life of the great Emperor suddenly reached its end.

A figure among the most complex, most captivating, most richly endowed with gifts of humanity and genius, with F. II the medieval world reached its decisive crisis on the way toward rebirth. A man in whom three civilizations converged — that which, from the example of Charlemagne, could be called Latin-Germanic, the Arab, and the Norman — he derived from each of the three inspirations both aims and intentions, from the almost religious sense of the Empire to bureaucratic centralism, to splendor and the love of culture. But he united and fused everything in the powerful originality of an open, strong, unprejudiced spirit, rich in curiosity and ranging over the most diverse problems. Anything but close to heretical ideas, he was nonetheless also averse to the mysticism prevalent in the Middle Ages: he detached himself, and detached his State, from the permanent central problem in the life of the Middle Ages, which is the religious problem, even though, to a great extent, the life and politics of F. II were bound to feel the legacy of dissensions, the fruit of the struggles over investitures.

Alongside the gifts of preparation and intuition, which made him the creator of a State largely new, even if founded on the threefold tradition mentioned above, there is the fundamental defect of his work, which lies in his personalism, in the personality of a construction incapable, as it proved, of resisting under other hands. Even greater was the defect of valuation shown toward the Roman Church: a tragic error of perspective, whereby F. II, in his attempts at domination and in his unconvincing approaches, underestimated the political power of the papacy. And this error would have led him to underestimate an agreement — precisely that with the Church — which would also have made him hesitant and weak before the Lombard Communes.

Literature: Most of the biographical information drawn from the sources goes back to the Historia diplomatica Friderici II by J. L. A. Huillard-Bréholles (6 vols., Paris 1852-61), which opened the century of critical research on Frederick II, brought for now to a close by the brilliant, though overly personal, biography of E. H. Kantorowicz (Italian trans., Milan 1940). Worth remembering among the most important studies on the Emperor: E. W. Schirrmacher, Kaiser Fr. II, Göttingen 1889-95; E. Winkelmann, Kaiser Fr. II, 2 vols., Leipzig 1888-98; A. Folz, Kaiser Fr. II u. Papst Innocenz IV, Strasbourg 1903; F. Kampers, K. Fr. der Zweite, der Wegbereiter der Renaissance, Leipzig 1920; W. E. Heupel, Der sizilische Grosshof unter Kaiser Fr. II, ibid. 1940, and by the same author, Kaiser Fr. II, Leben u. Werk in Italien, ibid. 1941. Of lesser importance is our own historical literature on the subject: A. Del Vecchio, Intorno alla legislazione di F. II, Florence 1872; A. De Stefano, Fed. II e le correnti spirituali del suo tempo, Rome 1921, and by the same author, L'idea imperiale di F. II, Florence 1927, as well as La cultura alla corte di F. II, Palermo 1938; G. Cocchiara, Fed. II legislatore e il Regno di Sicilia, Turin 1937; M. Schipa, Sicilia e Italia sotto F. II, Naples 1939; G. Pepe, Lo Stato ghibellino di F. II, Bari 1938. One may also recall, already with regard to F. II, the volume by R. Morghen, Il tramonto della potenza sveva in Italia, Rome 1936. On culture at the court of F. II, H. Niese, Zur Gesch. des geist. Lebens am Hofe Friedr. II, in Hist. Zeitschr., 108 (1912), pp. 473-540, and C. H. Haskins, Science at the Court of Fr. II; The Ars Venandi cum avibus, Cambridge, Mass., 1927, are also to be cited.
Pier Fausto Palumbo