FEDERICO II, IMPERATORE. — Grandson of Frederick Barbarossa and son of Henry VI and Constance of Hauteville, F. of Hohenstaufen was born at Jesi on 26 December 1194, while Henry was hastening his moves toward the complete occupation of the Kingdom of Sicily. Having been orphaned of his father at only three years of age, in 1197, and of his mother the following year as well, the imperial scion found himself becoming the focus of intrigues of every kind, involving German feudal lords, Norman, Sicilian, or Apulian nobles, papal legates, and dignitaries of the Palermitan court itself. The sole, and precarious, guarantee for the continuity of the throne was Henry VI’s testament, which recognized the Kingdom of Sicily as a fief of the Church, reaffirmed by the final act of Constance of Hauteville, who, on her deathbed, placed her son under the guardianship of Innocent III, precisely at the moment when the great Pontiff was turning toward the restoration of papal authority in central and southern Italy. It was Innocent’s design to undo what had been Frederick I’s skillful maneuver: namely, the union of the Empire and the Kingdom, of the German lands and the lands formerly belonging to the Normans. It was against this program of his guardian, who, as high lord of the Kingdom of Sicily, thereby counterbalanced Germany’s and the Emperor’s privileged position with respect to the clergy—a program that would be adopted by Innocent’s successors—that F. II would wage a tenacious struggle throughout his life.
For years, until the premature proclamation of his majority in 1208, struggles and intrigues continued in Sicily and throughout the Kingdom; F. II was, in a sense, at times even physically, a prisoner of them and of the various contenders (Gualtieri di Pelear, grand chancellor and archbishop of Troja, Markwald von Anweiler, Diutpold von Hohenburg). He emerged from them in a sudden and decisive break which, at fourteen, led him to assume the supreme responsibilities of power. Just in time to oppose, with the support of the papacy, Otto of Bavaria, the Guelph who, after obtaining the Empire, had turned against his natural protector, the Church, seeking simultaneously to supplant the papacy and F. II in Sicily, following the murder of Philip of Swabia, king of Germany since the death of Henry VI. The Ottonian conquest was already well advanced when the papal decision to set him against Otto—leading Innocent to overcome his intention of separating the Empire from the Kingdom, albeit only after obtaining from Frederick the promise, at San Germano, to cede the Kingdom to his firstborn son—placed the young sovereign in a position to undertake the struggle for the Empire in Germany. Mainly through the action of his direct rival, Philip Augustus, Otto IV was defeated and his decline assured. The result was a considerable increase in the prestige of the papacy, which Innocent III solemnly proclaimed at the Lateran Council of 1215.
At twenty, F. II found himself king of Sicily and Apulia, king of Germany, and designated for the Empire; with the death of the great Pontiff, however, his oppressive guardian, he could feel freer in his relations with the Church. Matured by his early experience, which had taught him about men, possessed of robust virility, accustomed to scorning every danger and hardship, but also skilled in every stratagem, fond of a free life and splendor, eager to draw upon every source of culture, from Latin to Arabic, from Byzantine to ecclesiastical culture—so that, a new but more learned Charlemagne, he would form around himself a school of science and poetry, and would himself, together with his sons, become a poet in the vernacular—F. II could now adopt those attitudes and seek to realize that program which adverse circumstances had until then advised him to conceal. His was the resumption, with a more flexible spirit and a more universal and profound sense of the problems of historical life, of the great design of imperial restoration in the West that the German peoples had pursued, even directly on Italian soil, since the Ottonians. Where, despite his extraordinary abilities, he would fail to provide a secure foundation for his program, and where the threatening fissure would open in the fabric of the medieval Empire, was in his failure to take account of Germany’s sense of nationality, in his promotion of the princes’ privileges to the detriment of central power, in his ever-greater detachment from the original kingdom, and in his open favor toward the new one, where he spent most of his life, between Palermo and the castles of Apulia, Campania, and Lucania.
The Lateran Council had assigned the conduct of the Crusade as the new emperor’s first duty. From the mild Honorius III, F. II first obtained a postponement and then, in exchange for renewing all the commitments already undertaken toward the Church, permission to retain, though only in a personal capacity, the Kingdom of Sicily. Honorius III was compelled, despite the most vigorous protests, to tolerate the election, at the Diet of Frankfurt, of the young Henry, F. II’s son, as King of the Romans. That same year, 1220, on 22 November, he was solemnly crowned emperor in St Peter’s.
What drove F. II to delay fulfilling his crusading vow was the dire condition of the Kingdom of Sicily, impoverished by a decade of struggles, just as the crown’s treasury had been scattered, while royal authority had declined because of the continual arrogance and abuses of the German and Norman barons. In the mountains, bands of Saracens, rebellious for some time, were waging guerrilla warfare. It was necessary to undertake a work of restoration, which could not be considered complete without a general reorganization of the Kingdom.
Also skilled in choosing capable and loyal collaborators (such as the jurist Roffredo di Viterbo, Taddeo da Sessa, and the Capuan notary Pier delle Vigne), his work was directed above all toward demolishing whatever in the feudal superstructure stood in the way of the construction of a state governed by officials, that is, a bureaucratic and modern state, which he pursued. Against rebellious barons he was harsh, at times merciless. Once finally subdued, he transferred the Saracens to the fortified camp of Lucera, making them an elite corps of defenders of the Empire. He promoted culture and science, encouraged trade, especially maritime trade, and likewise agriculture and the nascent industry fostered through imperial manufactories. A great builder of castles and royal palaces, in 1224 he ordered the establishment in Naples of a Studium generale, conceived as an institution for the benefit of the nation.
While the Pontiff insisted on the fulfillment of the Crusade, F. II employed every means to serve the pressing necessity of consolidating his power first. For this purpose, he did not hesitate to pursue, with some skill, a matrimonial policy as well: after Constance of Aragon, whom he had married immediately after attaining his premature majority, died in 1223, he married Isabella, daughter of the king of Jerusalem, John of Brienne. This represented an approach to the imperial task of defending the faith and to the now urgent obligation of the Crusade, but only after laying concrete and practical foundations to ensure its success. The Crusade also became an excellent pretext for imposing imperial authority on the communes of northern Italy, as he attempted to do at the Diet of Cremona, since he could not, as he said, tolerate leaving enemies behind him. The plan was not realized: on the contrary, the communes renewed the «Lombard League», and Honorius III could do no more than intervene as a peacemaker.
The elevation to the papal throne of Gregory IX—the former Cardinal Ugolino Conti, of the family of Innocent III—meanwhile brought into the open the discord that was developing between the Papacy and the Empire. On pain of excommunication, Gregory IX ordered F. II to depart on Crusade. The Emperor set out from Brindisi in August 1227; but after a few days he returned, apparently because an epidemic had broken out aboard the ships. The proud Pontiff did not consider this reason valid and excommunicated F. II, rousing Christian princes and peoples to struggle against him. It was undoubtedly a pretext for striking at the growing power of F. II, which was dangerous to the Church. He reacted by denouncing the Church’s greed and compelling the clergy to disregard the interdict, while immediately resuming the interrupted Crusade. In June 1228 he again set sail for the Levant, set foot in the Holy Land and, more as a diplomat than a conqueror, obtained Jerusalem from the sultan al-Kamil; he crowned himself king there in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, returning immediately to Italy. What called him back, and hastened his undertaking in the only way possible, was the invasion of the kingdom of Sicily by forces of « clavisignati », carried out by the Pontiff. It was enough, moreover, for him merely to reappear for Gregory IX, once his dominions had been reconquered, to be forced to submit to the peace of San Germano. A truce rather than a peace. A truce lasting less than ten years, which F. used to give final form to the administrative reorganization of the kingdom of Sicily and to the creation of that new State which took its model from the imperial example of Rome, moving toward a form of absolutism founded on a hierarchy of officials that would remain fundamental for centuries to come. At Melfi, in 1231, he promulgated a body of Constitutiones, renewing the Kingdom’s administrative structure; at other diets and assizes (Foggia; Ariano) he promulgated reforming laws for the administration of justice and in fiscal matters.
It was the attempt to extend the Empire’s influence once again in northern Italy that simultaneously reopened the struggles with the Communes and those with the Pontiff. The immediate cause was the demand that the Lombard Communes swear an oath of vassalage: what had happened in 1226 happened again in 1231. Only this time, when F. II returned after suppressing in Germany the rebellion of his son Henry, who had given expression to the disappointments caused by the Emperor’s Italian policy, and when the papal attempt to settle the conflict in Lombardy had proved fruitless, the Pontiff and the Communes joined forces. At Cortenuova, in 1237, F. II achieved his greatest victory over the League; and on the following day, another sign of that universal conception of the Empire which by then intoxicated him, he sent to Rome, to be preserved on the Capitoline, the Carroccio captured from the Milanese. The struggle did not end, however: the resistance of Milan, Alessandria, and Brescia kept the situation dangerous, while F. II further intensified it by gravely striking at the interests of the papacy, having his natural son Enzo marry 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. In response to the papal accusation that he was a plunderer of the Church’s possessions, F. II again denounced the greed of the Roman Church as an imminent danger to all princes. As at other moments in the struggle between the papacy and the Empire, polemical writings entered the dispute in violent terms. But it was F. II’s military action alone that could at this point have resolved the situation. And precisely now it became uncertain and indecisive, so that minor successes in Tuscany were matched by failures in the Po Valley and in Romagna. In Rome itself, despite the blandishments employed toward the nobility, the people rose as defenders of the venerable Pontiff and prevented the Emperor from seizing his person. As soon as F. had returned to Sicily, Gregory summoned a Council at Rome, aimed at the public and solemn deposition of the Emperor. But the bishops arriving from every quarter on Genoese ships were for the most part taken prisoner by King Enzo, who scattered the Genoese fleet at Meloria.
After Gregory IX died in 1241, peace negotiations were renewed, though fruitlessly, with Innocent IV, who, as Cardinal Fieschi, had not been averse to direct dealings with the Emperor. While he negotiated with tenacious skill, the new Pontiff was everywhere stirring up hostility against F. He was tired and disheartened, and perhaps close to any conclusion whatever of the struggle with the Church, when Innocent’s sudden decision to flee Rome and summon another council at Lyon, at which he would excommunicate and depose the Emperor and call upon the Christian peoples to launch a crusade against him, brought the epic struggle between the papacy and the Empire to its final turning point. The downfall of the Swabian house was now near. And just as Taddeo di Sessa’s eloquent defense had resounded in vain at the Council of Lyon, so too, around F. II, people did not refrain from fomenting treason through the hands of his most faithful followers. This drove the Emperor to renewed and more furious energy. He cruelly punished his enemies and punished Parma, the faithless city, but saw it rise against him and, in a victorious sortie, force him to withdraw to Cremona. Even almost to the end, F. II continued to believe in the possibility of an agreement with the Pontiff; although the suspicion that such an agreement might be negotiated without him led him to rid himself of his trusted chancellor Pier delle Vigne. Then the valiant Enzo fell into the hands of the Bolognese at Fossalta; further defeats and disappointments worsened F. II’s situation. But destiny still seemed suspended around his epic figure, and in Germany his second son Conrad was restoring the fortunes of the Empire, just as his vicar Ezzelino da Romano was doing in northern Italy, when, on the Apulian plain he had so favored, near Foggia and Lucera, at Castel Fiorentino, on 13 December 1250, the life of the great Emperor suddenly reached its end.
One of the most complex, most compelling figures, and one of the richest in human and intellectual gifts, F. II brought the medieval world to its decisive crisis on the way toward rebirth. A man in whom three civilizations converged—the civilization that, following the example of Charlemagne, might be called Latin-Germanic, the Arab, and the Norman—he drew from each of the three its inspirations and aims, from the almost religious sense of the Empire to bureaucratic centralism, to splendor and the love of culture. Yet he united and fused everything in the powerful originality of an open, strong, unconventional spirit, rich in curiosity and ranging across the most diverse problems. Far from being close to heretical ideas, he was nevertheless also alien to the mysticism prevalent in the Middle Ages: he detached himself, and detached his State, from the enduring central problem of medieval life, namely the religious problem, even though, to a considerable extent, F. II’s life and policy were influenced by the legacy of the dissensions produced by the struggles over investitures.
Alongside the gifts of preparation and intuition that made him the creator of a State largely new, even if founded on the threefold tradition mentioned above, lay the fundamental defect of his work: its personalism, the personality of a construction that, as was shown, was incapable of resisting under other hands. Even greater was the error of judgment he displayed toward the Roman Church: a tragic error of perspective, whereby F. II, in his attempts at domination and in his unconvincing approaches, underestimated the papacy’s political power. And this error would lead him to underestimate an agreement—precisely the one with the Church—that would likewise have left him perplexed and weakened before the Lombard Communes.
BIBLI: Sources: Saba Malaspina, Rerum Sicularum liber VI, in RIS, VIII; Nicolaus Carbiensis, Vita Innocentii IV, ibid., III; Constitutions et artis publicis imperatorum et regum, ed. L. Weiland, in MGH. Leges, II; Epistolarum Innocentii III, ed. Baluze, Paris 1852; Petrus de Vines, Epistolarum liber VI, Basel 1740; Constitutions regum Siciliæ mandante Frederico II per Petrum de Vines concinnatus, Naples 1776; J. P. Böhmer, Regesta Imperii (1770–1777), Stuttgart 1840; Nicolaus de Jonasilia, De rebus gestis Friderici II, in Del Re, Cronisti sinerani napoletani, II, Naples 1868; J. Ficker, Fortrhagea zur Reichen-Rechtsgeschichte Italiens, IV (documents), Innsbruck 1874; E. Winkelmann, Acta Imperii inedita, there 1880; Regesta Imperii III, Rome 1888; Liber Censum de l'Eglise romaine, ed. P. Fabre–L. Duchesne, 2 vols., Paris 1889–1910; Les registres de Grégoire IX, there 1890; Les registres d'Innocent IV, there 1894.
Literature: the Historia diplomatica Frederici II by J. L. A. Hultland Bieholles (6 vols., Paris 1852–61), which is the source for the greater part of the biographical information drawn from the sources and inaugurates the century of critical research on F. II, brought, for the time being, to its conclusion by the general, though overly personal, biography of E. H. Kanterovecz (Italian translation, Milan 1940). Among the most important studies on the Emperor, mention should be made of: 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. Kampera, K. Fr. der Zweite, der Wegbereiter der Renaissance, Leipzig 1920; W. E. Heupel, Der zibil, Grauhof unter Kaiser Fr. II, there 1940, and by the same author, Kaiser Fr. II, Leben u. Werk in Italien, there 1941. Of lesser importance is the Italian 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 legislature e il Regno di Sicilia, Turin 1937; M. Schipa, Sicilia e Italia cotto F. II, Naples 1939; G. Pepe, Lo Stato phibollico di F. II, Bari 1938. The volume by R. Morghen, Il tramonto della potenza suona in Italia, Rome 1936, may already be mentioned in connection with F. II. On the culture at the court of F. II, mention should also be made of 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 Venuesii cum quibus, Cambridge, Mass., 1927.
Pier Fausto Palumbo