The latter soon afterwards declared Frederick to be of age, at fourteen years, and in the same year married him to Constance, the sister of Peter the Second of Aragon and the young widow of a king of Hungary. She was older than he, of course, and she came of a race that lacked neither courage nor astuteness. Frederick, educated in the safe seclusion of a palace, while others disputed his kingdom, now issued from its gates to survey the wreck of the Norman dominions. The mainland was lost, apparently beyond recovery, partly to the Pope and partly to the lawless barons of the south; in Sicily, the royal lands had been either seized by the nobles or given away as bribes by the regents, who had also granted the province of Syracuse to a Genoese colony of traders; and of all King Roger’s conquests, Frederick could only count with certainty upon the allegiance of half a dozen Sicilian cities. As for the Empire, it was in dispute between his uncle and his cousin, and the boy, who was to be German emperor, king of Sicily and Apulia, and king of Cyprus and Jerusalem, had difficulty in raising enough money to support five hundred horsemen whom his wife borrowed from her cousin of Provence to defend him. To make matters worse, his cousin of Hohenstaufen, the Emperor Otto the Fourth, occupied Naples and Aversa, by the help of the Pisans, and secretly negotiated with the discontented Moslems of Sicily for the destruction of Frederick, in 1210. The youth seemed lost, but his career was already at its upward turning-point, and from that time he rose rapidly to the height of earthly glory.
Innocent the Third, to whom we may as well give credit for supporting his ward, prepared the way for the latter’s elevation to the throne of the Empire. With incredible energy and matchless knowledge of his times, he excommunicated the rival Otto, and formally proclaimed his deposition in Nüremberg, absolved the whole Empire from its oath of allegiance, recalled to the world the election of Henry’s infant son, and immediately forced Germany into a civil war, from which the only issue was clearly the coronation of the young Frederick, then eighteen years old. Frederick, as Amari well puts it, was already weary of reigning where he could not rule, and threw himself heart and soul into this German revolution. He left his queen and an infant son in Sicily in 1212, sailed to Gaeta, visited the Pope in Rome, and promised everything that was asked of him, sailed on again to Genoa, and rode by Pavia, Cremona, and Trent to Basle, barely escaping his enemies as he passed. In vain Otto pursued him, in vain allied himself with England; Philip Augustus of France joined Frederick and the Pope, and Otto was beaten in the decisive battle of Bouvines.
Frederick remained eight years in Germany, during which he repressed all opposition and made himself the undisputed master of the situation. His father had come down from the north to claim the southern kingdom as his wife’s dowry, and to hold it as his own possession; the son went northwards almost alone to claim an Empire which was his own by rightful inheritance. Henry, with Europe at his back, wreaked his vengeance upon a small and helpless kingdom; his son took that kingdom with him to the heart of the Empire he had claimed and recovered from the hands of usurpers. Henry’s body was borne to its stolen resting-place in Palermo, pursued by the curses and imprecations of mankind; Frederick the Second spent much of his life, indeed, in a contest with the popes, was thrice or four times excommunicated, and lies, perhaps unshriven, beside his father in the cathedral; but historians have called him the Philosopher King, and though he attained no saintly honours, his fame is at least unsullied by such dastardly cruelty as his father practised, and by the vile treachery that soon set Charles of Anjou on the throne of Sicily and Naples.
Having been crowned in Rome in the year 1220, he returned to Sicily to find himself face to face with what may be called the Moslem question. The nobles were more or less divided among themselves, and Frederick now had power to control them, but the Moslems, though united, were in a most unhappy position. Those who during more than twenty years had lived like free barons in the castles of the West were, legally speaking, the vassals of churches and monasteries that clamoured to the emperor for satisfaction against them; but Frederick, who found himself at odds with the Church and with his barons, needed these very barons as allies. The emperor did not hesitate to satisfy the most pressing demands of the churchmen by nominally bestowing upon them lands and castles held by the Saracens; but when the former attempted to take possession, they more than once found themselves the prisoners of those they sought to dispossess, and the Mohammedans began to move about the island in strong bands, committing depredations of every description, forming a permanent revolutionary army that fluctuated in strength, but may sometimes have numbered thirty thousand fighting men. Frederick held a sort of parliament at Messina soon after his arrival, and visited many of the principal cities; but he accomplished little until his next visit, when he was obliged to take the field against the great freebooter, Mirabbet, whose predatory enterprises had assumed dangerous proportions, and who had associated himself with two of the most infamous ruffians who ever adorned a gibbet, Hugo Fer of Marseilles and William the Swine of Genoa. These two, though some historians lay the blame entirely upon the first, had collected together, by promises and persuasion, a vast number of young children who were to be transported to the Holy Land under the name of the Children’s Crusade, to be cared for and educated by the kings of Jerusalem, and brought up to be defenders of the holy places. The organizers of the enterprise were well provided with money to carry it out, and offered the church’s parents such surety of their good faith that thousands of fathers, in those times of general poverty and numerous families, consented, each believing that his child was taken from him only to enter upon an honourable career of arms, and with the Pope’s especial benediction. In this way it is said that Hugo Fer and William the Swine gathered a company of fifty thousand boys with whom they embarked on many vessels for the East. The rest is soon told. The traitors sailed eastwards indeed, but not to Palestine, for they were in league with the Saracens, and they sold fifty thousand Christian children into slavery in Africa. Therefore when Frederick took those men alive with Mirabbet in the castle of Giato, he hanged them; and perhaps his father would have found for them worse tortures than boiling in lard or tearing to pieces with red-hot pincers.
Though Frederick now had the upper hand, a desultory war continued for some time, and in the meanwhile the Pope, Honorius the Third, did his best to force the emperor to lead another crusade, not without some crafty intention of seizing Apulia in his absence, and Frederick constantly made use of his troubles in Sicily, real and imaginary, as an excuse for putting off his departure to the Holy Land. He had now given up all idea of employing the Saracens against the nobles, and had accomplished the more difficult task of organizing the nobles against the Saracens. In the year 1225 he so completely defeated the latter in the Sicilian mountains, that during eighteen years afterwards there is no mention of a Moslem rebellion. It was on this occasion that he transplanted six thousand Saracens to the mainland. These colonists perished altogether under Charles of Anjou.
Frederick was driven at last, by the menaces and entreaties of Gregory the Ninth, to sail from Brindisi with an army of crusaders already decimated by the plague. Falling ill himself, he was obliged to put back, and was excommunicated by the ruthless pontiff before he had recovered. Nevertheless, in the following year he set forth again, founding his claim to the throne of Jerusalem upon his marriage with a princess of Antioch, and he actually succeeded in obtaining possession of the holy city by a treaty with the sultan of Egypt; whereupon the Pope declared the agreement to be sacrilegious, sent an army under Frederick’s brother-in‑law to take Jerusalem from him, and perhaps from force of habit, excommunicated the emperor again. But the latter returned to Italy with his new title of King of Jerusalem, drove the papal troops from his dominions, and forced the pontiff to a peace. His Mohammedan colonists fought bravely under him in this war, but as many of them afterwards attempted to return secretly to Sicily, he collected them together and established them in Apulia, in the town called from them Lucera de’ Saraceni, and t
hey long continued to play an important part in the wars of the continent. The ingenious pontiff, finding it impossible to get rid of his troublesome master in any other way, now exhorted him to lead another crusade to the Holy Land, but Frederick was little inclined to renew his previous experience, and he must have smiled when he received the usual excommunication in return for his refusal. But Pope Gregory had gone too far, and Frederick retorted by occupying the states of the Church, and even by threatening Rome itself. In desperate straits the pontiff called a council, but death overtook him suddenly, and after the two years’ reign of his successor, the next Pope, refusing to make peace, fled to France, convened a council in Lyons, and declared the Emperor Frederick deposed.
The remainder of the latter’s life was consumed in wars in the north of Italy, resulting principally from the attempt made to set up Henry Raspe, Landgrave of Thuringia, as anti-emperor, in which Frederick found himself opposed to his natural son Heinz, or Enzo, king of Sardinia, while his second son, Conrad, afterwards emperor, fought for the imperial cause in Germany. Frederick’s eldest son, Henry, had long ago rebelled against him, and died his father’s prisoner in a castle of Apulia. Manfred, his natural son, was with him in his latter days, and upon him has fallen the suspicion of having poisoned his father. Conrad defeated Henry Raspe, who died of grief, but the Pope, not relinquishing the bitter quarrel, caused William of Holland to be elected anti-emperor, he drove Conrad back into Italy. The great defeat of Parma made Frederick’s cause almost desperate in the north, and he retired to Apulia, never to return again, and leaving the affairs of the Empire in the most inextricable confusion. His end was mysterious. Some say that he died of an illness, repentant and absolved by the Archbishop of Salerno; others that he went out of the world as he had so long lived in it, the excommunicated enemy of the Church; and there are many who write that Manfred poisoned him, and that when his strong nature bade fair to survive the draught, Manfred smothered him in the night with a feather pillow, in Castel Fiorentino of Apulia, whereby was accomplished a prediction in which he had believed, that he should die ‘in the Fiorentino’; but he had thought that the word meant the territory of Florence, had never entered that city. He died •six miles from his Saracen city of Lucera, where his great castle still stands, and where Manfred took refuge from the Pope only four years later. The turbulent emperor was a great builder of castles, from the vast and melancholy stronghold that crowns Castrogiovanni to the fortified city of Aquila in the Abruzzi, founded by him, and populated, it is said, by the inhabitants of ninety-nine townships, in memory of which the great fountain has ninety-nine spouts, and it is said that there were once as many churches within the walls. A great builder, a great fighter, a passionate, headstrong man, held accursed by the ecclesiastical writers of his times, he is gravely censured by Muratori for his ambition, his unbridled passions, and his avarice, which was, indeed, but need of money in a desperate conflict; but he is to be praised also for his great heart and large intelligence, his love of justice, his taste for letters, and his learning in many languages. In him the power of the empire founded by Charlemagne culminated and began to wane, and under him the splendour that rose upon Sicily with King Roger spent its noonday radiance, and declined towards its fall. The south had lived its greatest day, and was soon to sink forever to the level of a province owned by kings who claimed a little Norman blood. It was no longer Greek, it was no longer Saracen, under Frederick the Second it had not even been any longer Norman; he had been born in the public square of Palermo, he had spent his early years in the shadow of Sicilian fortresses, he had used the island as a fulcrum upon which to wield the lever of empire; but Sicily had been to him but an imperial appanage, he had never in any sense been a Sicilian, and he squandered the strength that might have moved the world onwards, in a series of useless quarrels with the Papacy, when he might have better employed his genius, his gifts, and his knowledge of men in civilizing and consolidating the south. The confusion that followed upon his death, the disputes that arose between his sons, and especially between Conrad and Manfred, the quick decay of institutions which should have lasted for centuries, the chaos, in a word, which was the natural result of his reign, could only end as it did, in the disappearance of his heirs, the extinction of his house, and the rise of a new southern monarchy.
There is, perhaps, no greater contrast in history than that between Saint Lewis the Ninth, king of France, the leader of the sixth and seventh Crusades, and his brother Charles, Count of Anjou, the destined destroyer of the house of Hohenstaufen. That extraordinary man, in his struggle with Frederick’s heirs, quartered the country as a well-trained dog quarters a field. It was not until Frederick had been dead three years that Charles was definitely called in by Pope Innocent the Fourth, and, to the iniquitous exclusion of all other claims, was named king of Sicily, Duke of Apulia, and Prince of Capua. His principal opponents were Conrad and his half-brother Manfred, then a youth of one and twenty years, and gifted with much of the wisdom of his father, as well as the astuteness of his Norman ancestors. The premature death of another brother, a younger Henry, born of the Emperor Frederick’s marriage with Isabel of England, served the next Pope with an excuse for accusing Conrad of murder. He was cited to appear in Rome, but wisely caused himself to be represented by proxies. It is needless to say that he was found guilty and promptly excommunicated. Forty days later, he also died; and it was commonly believed, says Muratori, that he was poisoned by Manfred, with the help of John the Moor, the captain of the Saracens, Conrad’s favourite. He left an infant son two years old, who was destined to be known as the last of the Hohenstaufen. Why Manfred did not destroy this child, if he really had poisoned the father, it does not appear. He may have thought that his illegitimacy was an insuperable barrier between him and the Empire, and that the most he could hope for was that he might be the master of a future emperor. Conrad’s treasures were, meanwhile, seized by the regent he had designated, and for some short time this regent and Manfred actually exerted themselves to bring about an understanding with the Pope. Failing to do so, the German regent resigned his office, but not his ward’s treasure, to Manfred, who, as sole guardian, met the Pope and kissed his foot at Ceprano, on the confines of the papal states; after which the Pope made a sort of triumphal progress to Monte Casino, accompanied by Manfred. The latter, however, had refused to take the oath of fealty to the Church, and the negotiations which doubtless proceeded during the journey were rudely interrupted. Manfred quarrelled with one of the Pope’s favourite barons, who was accidentally or intentionally killed by one of Manfred’s men; and Manfred himself was soon obliged of take refuge in Lucera. He reached the gates on a dark night early in November, at a moment when John the Moor, who was governor, was absent on a journey. The Saracen sentinels upon the walls, on being told that Manfred was below, were filled with joy, and, fearing that the vice-governor might refuse to give them the keys, which were kept in his house, came down and broke the gates from within to receive Frederick’s son. In a moment the news spread through the Saracen town, the whole population came out into the streets, and, though it was night, insisted upon leading Manfred to the palace, where a great treasure, accumulated by Frederick and Conrad and John the Moor, was unconditionally handed over to him.
The death of Innocent the Fourth and the possession of so much wealth materially improved Manfred’s position, and for some time he overran the south, losing no time in regaining what he could for his ward Conradin, and followed everywhere by his faithful Saracens. Before long he inflicted a crushing defeat upon the papal army on the shores of the Adriatic, after which the Pope’s cardinal legate and general obtained terms with which the Pope should have been satisfied, but the Pope refused to acknowledge the treaty, and proclaimed Manfred an excommunicated member of the Church, to be treated like a Turk or an infidel; yet, strange to say, the Pope admitted the infant Conradin’s claim to the nugatory kingdom of Jerusalem. From this time Manfred’s position continued to improve. He was a
mild and generous prince to those who submitted to him, and from Aversa to Sicily the people volunteered to fight under his standard. We hear nothing of any attempt on the part of Charles of Anjou to take possession of the kingdom presented to him by Innocent the Fourth, and Muratori speaks of Manfred as the master of the kingdom on both sides of the straits in the year 1257. With the treachery that lay under his brilliant gifts he now attempted to crown himself king, spreading the report that his nephew Conradin had died in Germany, and some chroniclers say that he sent emissaries to murder the child. His youth, his courteous manner, and his clemency recommended him alike to the people and the nobles, and when Conradin’s mother sent ambassadors to him in 1258, protesting that Conradin was alive and was the rightful king, Manfred answered with a show of reason that the kingdom had been lost, and that, as all men knew, he had reconquered it by force of arms and at great pains, and that it was neither his duty nor for the advantage of the kingdom to give it up to a child who could not hold it against the popes, but that he would defend the kingdom against those implacable enemies of his house during his natural life, after which it should revert to his nephew. By way of impressing the ambassadors with his power, he marched in state from Apulia against the city of Aquila, which had been built by his father but had taken the Pope’s side, and having driven out the inhabitants without bloodshed, he burned the town. His power was too great to be humbled by the Church alone, and though Alexander the Fourth did not fail to excommunicate him, the same Pope offered to concede him the formal investiture of the kingdom in 1260, on condition that he would exile all Mohammedans from his dominions. The Pope probably knew that this was impossible, since the strength of Manfred’s army now lay chiefly in the Saracen contingent, in whom he could place far more reliance than in his barons of the south. Manfred rejected the proposition, and raised more Saracen troops in Sicily, but made the mistake of accepting the leadership of the Ghibellines in the north, and he sent help to the party, in return for good sums of gold, so that Florence was wrested from the Guelphs, and the famous Guido Novello became Manfred’s ‘vicar’ or viceregent in Tuscany. The Guelphs now made an unsuccessful attempt to bring Conradin down from Germany, in order to oppose him to his uncle; but Conradin’s mother refused to consent, and Urban the Fourth threatened to excommunicate all who proposed to make Conradin emperor. The popes hated not Manfred only, but all his race, and Urban bethought him of Charles of Anjou as the only man likely to be a match for the house of Hohenstaufen. It was with difficulty that Urban persuaded the generally docile Saint Lewis to countenance his brother Charles in the enterprise, but his arguments prevailed at last, and he cited Manfred to appear in Rome and answer for his sins against the Church. Manfred appeared by proxy, not trusting his life to Urban’s mercy. His case was argued from one side only, with a view to deposing him without delay and with little hearing, and Charles of Anjou was fully authorized to begin the conquest of the south. This was in the year 1263. By way of impressing their intentions upon Apulia and Sicily, the popes had placed the populations of the south under an interdict in a body, and one of the gravest crimes imputed to Frederick the Second and to Manfred was that they had prevented the interdict from being put into execution; yet so many persons were now excommunicated throughout Italy that the terrible spiritual punishment had lost much of its force, and even the relentless Urban began to moderate his fulminatory zeal. At this time it occurred to the always discontented Roman people to choose themselves a chief, called a senator, who should be also a powerful prince, and the choice of some fell upon Manfred, but others were for Charles of Anjou, and others still for James of Aragon. Though opposed to the idea, the Pope was forced to yield, and chose the Count of Anjou in order to exclude the other two. Charles at once sent a representative to Rome to take possession of the senatorial dignity. Destiny was slowly but surely preparing the downfall of Hohenstaufen. On the news of Charles’s election as senator, Manfred at once assumed the offensive, and the armies of the Pope that were sent against him bore the outward badge and received the spiritual indulgences of real crusaders. There was some desultory fighting, but Charles did not yet appear in Italy, being engaged in raising an army fit for such an expedition; and the death of Urban the Fourth, closely followed by that of Clement the Fourth, produced a sort of lull in the hostilities. In spite of Manfred’s attempt to intercept him, Charles arrived at the mouth of the Tiber in a storm, during which he barely escaped drowning. Soon afterwards he made his solemn entry into Rome and took possession of his new office; but though Manfred advanced far into Roman territory, Charles would not go out to meet him until he found himself at the head of a sufficient army. When all was ready Charles and his wife were crowned king and queen of Sicily and Apulia by five cardinals, in the Church of Saint Peter’s, and Charles did homage to the Pope for the kingdom of Sicily on both sides of the straits. Lack of money now obliged new king to take the field before his forces were rested from their long journey; but they took San Germano by storm, and fatigue was forgotten in the sacking of the rich town. One place after another fell into Charles’s hands, and Manfred retired upon Benevento, whence he sent ambassadors to treat with the Angevin. Charles’s answer has been preserved: ‘Tell the Sultan of Lucera,’ he said, ‘that I will have neither peace nor amnesty with him, but that before long either I will send him to hell, or he shall send me to heaven.’ Thereupon Charles marched against Manfred, hoping to terminate the war at a single stroke, and he reached the battlefield before Manfred had determined upon a plan. The position of the famous city has already been described in these pages; the remains of the bridge about which the battle was fought may be seen in the dark recesses of a mill built beneath the modern construction by which the river is crossed. The land by which Charles made his approach narrows to a point between the converging streams, so that as he came forward his ranks gained solidity by the conformation of the ground. Manfred must have recognized at a glance that his fortunes and those of all his house were to be decided on that day; but from the first he was unable to get any advantage over the French. Not trusting his Apulian barons, he sent forward his Saracens and Germans; but they were not the Normans with whom his great grandfather had won kingdom and glory. They fought well, but the French fought better. Seeing that the ranks wavered, Manfred called upon the barons to follow him in one desperate charge. They saw he was lost, they laughed, and they leisurely rode away. Then King Manfred, seeing that he must die, died like a king, and like one of Tancred’s house, for he rode alone at the French host where swords were thickest, and he was pierced with many wounds, and was lost among the slain.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1448