Unlike most other rumors, this one was true. Piero remembered the occasion well. It had been the first time he had realized just how far Frederick’s conceit went. Frederick’s friend, the aged bishop of Winchester, brought up this new doctrine. It stated that at the moment of elevation, the host and wine actually became the body and blood of Christ, rather than being the mere symbols they had hitherto been. Peter of Winchester only wished to discuss its finer theological points. Frederick, however, laughed harshly, “Ha,” he said, “what a clever ploy to increase the clergy’s power. Formerly priests were just intermediaries between God and man. Now they’ve been endowed with divine attributes themselves, conjuring up miracles before the eyes of the faithful!” Stunned silence had greeted this outburst.
Piero leaned against the back of his chair and rubbed his forehead. He was forty-five, Frederick’s senior by a year. The burden of running the imperial administration was beginning to show in deep horizontal lines on his high curved forehead and thinning hair. He eschewed no expense in dress, horses, or servants. He owned two great estates in Apulia and a town with a lucrative manufactory producing pottery. Risen from small beginnings—his father was steward to a bishop—he owed everything to Frederick, who treated him with the same magnanimity he accorded all those he valued.
There had been a time, after Palermo, when he tried to overcome his growing resentment of Frederick, of his manner of never doubting his right to override every sacred tenet. With the years Frederick’s vicious streak, long hidden under a veneer of cultivated affability, emerged further. At the recent hanging, in revenge for Venice’s betrayal, of the doge’s son who had been captured at Cortenuova, Frederick had thrown back his head and laughed, a demonic laughter. At that moment, Piero had felt something black, like a bat’s wing, brush his heart.
It was Piero’s greatest secret, a secret so deeply concealed that at times even he forgot about it. Yet for years, since first meeting the emperor as a poor young notary, he had been under his spell. At a banquet given by the university of Bologna, Piero had been selected to read some of his poetry. Frederick, at the end of the reading, beckoned him onto the dais. He offered him praise, wine in a silver cup, and a little later, a post at the university he had just founded in Naples.
During the years of compiling the Constitutions of Melfi, they had often worked together in Frederick’s apartments till late. One sweltering night in Palermo, after the others left, Frederick had unlaced his shirt. He flung it over the back of his chair. Piero could see himself staring at the bronzed muscular torso glistening with sweat. He remembered the dryness of his mouth and the surge in his loins. The auburn head had been bent over the draft of a law, the quill scraping the parchment.
Frederick raised his head. He hesitated for a moment, as if taken aback, then smiled. Frederick’s hand, with the seal of Sicily, reached out to him across the table. Time and Piero’s heart stood still. He imagined the taste of skin, the feel of thick, curly hair, of hard muscles. An owl hooted outside. The spell was broken. The hand touched his arm, lightly.
After all those years he could still hear Frederick’s voice: “You don’t look well, Piero. Go and sleep.” There had been a strange look in Frederick’s eyes, somewhere between contempt and compassion.
Yet Frederick had never changed his attitude to him. He, who possessed such insight into men, continued to single him out as one of his closest friends.
Piero slipped his hands into his sleeves. Frederick would need all the friends he could muster. Two weeks ago, four bishops, two Italian and two German, arrived in Padua from Rome. Ostensibly sent to discuss a list of papal grievances, including that hardy perennial, Frederick’s treatment of the Sicilian Church, their real aim had been to question him about his faith. Frederick, aware that a breach with the pope at this stage would cripple his efforts in northern Italy, resisted the impulse to cast the bishops into a dungeon for their temerity. Instead he submitted with amazing good grace to what amounted to an interrogation.
The bishops had departed, reassured of his orthodoxy. But to Piero it had been obvious that this was not the end, but rather the beginning of a storm soon to break.
UNBEKNOWN TO HIM, the storm Piero had foreseen was unleashed several weeks later a few hundred miles south of Padua, in Rome.
The mosaics in the apse of the Lateran basilica glimmered in the candlelight. The cardinals stood around the high altar, lighted tapers in their hands. They looked on with solemn faces as the ancient pontiff was helped up the altar steps by Matteo Orsini, senator of Rome and Gregory’s staunchest supporter.
Gregory raised his bony arms, invoking the Holy Ghost. “My brothers in Christ,” he intoned in a voice shrill with age and fury, “we are gathered here today to call down the wrath of God on Frederick of Hohenstaufen. He is the enemy of the Church, and an incarnation of the Antichrist. Not only has he consorted with infidels and stirred up disaffection in our city of Rome, he has terrorized the Sicilian clergy, refused belief in the doctrines of the Church and denied Christ himself!”
Gregory pronounced the sentence of excommunication on Frederick. Sicily was to be laid under the ban as well. The sentence was to be read afresh, amid tolling of bells, at every celebration of high mass throughout the Christian world. Frederick’s subjects were absolved from their allegiance and encouraged to rise up against his heretic tyranny.
Gregory, too, was handed a lighted taper. Silver trumpets blew three times. The pope and the cardinals dashed their tapers to the ground and stamped them out. Frederick’s soul had been cast into darkness.
AS SOON AS it was possible to do so without arousing comment, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna slipped out of the basilica. Gathering up his robes of scarlet silk, the cardinal, tall, gaunt and hook-nosed, climbed into his waiting litter and told his bearers to make for his palace with all haste.
Once there, he called for parchment and ink. Within minutes, he handed a sealed letter for the archbishop of Palermo to a messenger, with the order to ride to Padua at all speed, but without wearing the distinctive livery of the princely house of Colonna.
THE MESSENGER, SPARING neither himself nor the mounts he changed at staging posts, arrived in Padua in a record time of five days.
Berard’s hand holding the cardinal’s letter shook. He felt a terrible tightness in his chest, a lack of breath. He put the parchment down and breathed deeply in and out a number of times. Then he lowered himself to his knees.
He prayed with a fervor he hadn’t felt for many years. “Oh Lord in heaven, protect Frederick from the forces of destruction this madman has unleashed against him. Protect him from his own rashness. Give him wisdom and strength that he may emerge victorious, oh Lord, and accord him your divine compassion and support, I beseech you.”
He rose to his feet. The blossom-clad apple trees in the spring sunshine outside were like a mockery of the leaden weight he felt within him. Frederick was presiding at a joust in the piazza. Berard had watched him earlier mount in the courtyard, followed him with his eyes as he and his friends rode through the gates. He could still hear their laughter, see the bright banners streaming behind them in the sun.
He squared his shoulders, then called for his escort. Once again, it fell to him to be the bearer of calamitous news.
FREDERICK SPENT THE next two years warring against the Lombards and their new allies, Venice and Genoa. Fearful of the encroaching imperial power, and lured by Gregory with promises of future trading bases in Sicily, these old rivals had found common cause and joined the Lombards. The navies of Genoa and Venice now threatened the island of Sicily.
The Sicilian Church was forced to finance the war. Frederick ordered the Sicilian clergy to provide religious services despite the papal ban. Those who refused had their lands confiscated. Several who incited the population against him were hanged for treason.
Although Frederick was turning bitter, he could still amaze the world. When, after a long and bloody siege, the Lombard city of Faenza capitulated, expecting
to be put to the sword, Frederick pardoned the stunned citizens. From Faenza, Frederick marched south, to lay siege to Rome. The Romans, with whose leaders he had been negotiating, were on the verge of opening the gates to him, when, at the last moment, the pope was saved by his own courage. Knowing that the populace favored Frederick, Gregory issued from the Lateran at the head of a procession bearing the heads of the apostles Peter and Paul. When the people began jeering, the old pope removed his tiara and set it upon the sacred relic.
“If you, the people of Rome, will not defend her against the Antichrist at her gates,” he thundered, “the holy apostles of Christ shall do so!” In an instant, the mood of the townspeople changed. With tears of contrition, they pressed around the pope, crying their willingness to defend the Church and Rome. Frederick, unwilling to drench the holy city in blood, raised the siege.
Gregory called a general council of the Church, for Easter the following year, to arbitrate between himself and the emperor. Frederick, who would not have been averse to a council composed of the College of Cardinals, many of whom had imperial sympathies, knew that Gregory had invited mostly those foreign prelates who would do his bidding. Since Frederick controlled all the land routes to Rome, he warned his fellow sovereigns that he would grant no safe-conducts for their churchmen to cross his territories.
The churchmen, unable to ignore a papal summons, gathered apprehensively in Genoa, to be ferried by sea to Rome. Frederick ordered his fleet to intercept the Genoese galleys off the Tuscan coast. A large number of prisoners, including nearly a hundred prelates and two cardinals, were taken to Apulia, where they were imprisoned as pawns in the deadly game of chess being played between himself and the pope.
In August 1240, at the age of almost a hundred, Gregory finally died. The danger from Venice and Genoa disappeared with the death of the formidable old man who, by his will alone, had held together the rival factions. Frederick closeted himself with Berard and Piero to plan the election of a pope of his choosing. Satisfied that he had done all he could, Frederick went to spend the winter in Sicily, the first time he had set foot in the realm in five years.
CAPUA, JUNE 1241
The trestle tables were cleared away to make room for the entertainers. Frederick watched Richard of Cornwall’s well-formed lips curl in a smile as his eyes followed the dancers in their diaphanous pastel silks. It wasn’t the first time they had performed for the earl, but today they were outdoing themselves. Golden anklets and bracelets clinked as the girls swayed to the soothing Saracen music.
The chamber, a small mosaic-floored hall whose groin-vaulted roof was upheld by fluted columns of pink breccia marble, lay within the private apartments of Capua’s nearly completed palace. Cushioned marble seats ran along two sides of the room. Piero, Berard, Manfred, the counts of Aquinas and Caserta, Enzio, and several English barons of Richard’s suite were seated on either side of Frederick. Servants refilled their cups with smooth, ruby-red wine from Samos. Through the arches of the loggia the June night sparkled with stars.
Did Richard, who had recently spent time in Palestine, find it odd to be watching Saracen dancing girls here? Frederick, glancing at his brother-by-marriage, thought not. Like most men, Richard, too, had fallen under their spell. They were a handsome race, these Plantagenets. Handsome, and fertile.
Isabella was with child again, the fruit of an almost accidental joining. As often before, Isabella had been slightly in her cups one afternoon when he had paid her one of his infrequent visits. To his surprise, the regal Isabella embraced him with all the abandon of an alley cat. His mind had been elsewhere, and his body sated from a night spent in other company, yet he had felt honor-bound to give her what she so clearly asked for. It was odd that that delightful wantonness of hers didn’t draw him to her bed more often.
Was it Bianca who came between them? Several times in the last two years he had been on the verge of casting aside his pride just to hear her voice, to touch her hand. Here in Capua, which was close to Caserta, the temptation to do so was even more frequent. Manfred, who saw her often, reported that she was well. She regularly wrote to their children, tender letters that he read avidly in the hope of gleaning some insight into her heart. Yet not once had there been a word for him, not even after his excommunication and war with Gregory.
Isabella remained mostly in the palace in Foggia, spending the summer in the shady gardens of cooler Melfi, playing her sackbut or trying on new garments or cosmetics from the East. Even in Melfi, she felt the heat in summer. She played with little Margaret, who was three, and Henry, who was two, but in a distracted fashion. Piero had told him that her long letters to her brothers, while never disloyal, were filled with yearning for England. Although she didn’t complain and always received him with a smile, it was clear to him that Isabella wasn’t happy. Whenever he appeared unannounced in her apartments there’d be a goblet of wine by her side and when he left, she’d cling to him. She had seemed far more content in Germany. His infatuation with her had worn off; Isabella’s conversation bored him. Even her limpid blue eyes, so praised by others, appeared vacuous to him. Was it, he wondered, because he compared them to those other eyes, dark pools full of mystery?
After the dancers had left, Isabella’s brother turned to him. “My lord, your dancing girls truly dance like angels. This news,” he added, smoothing back his thick chestnut hair, “will greatly reassure Henry.”
Richard wasn’t being facetious. Frederick smiled, “I trust you’ll tell my brother of England that the rumors that I am a monster are unfounded. He needn’t worry about Isabella!”
Richard grinned back at him. “I shall do so with pleasure.” He had been ill on his arrival from Palestine, but was now fully recovered. To Isabella’s regret, he would soon return to England. The conversation, interrupted by the dancers, resumed. It concerned a subject more serious even than the deadlock of the papal election in Rome: the Mongols.
Frederick listened in brooding silence as his guests discussed the latest news from the Empire’s eastern borders. They all agreed that the only answer was a crusade. Shortly before Gregory’s death, an embassy of German princes had begged him to abandon his feud with him and instead call a crusade to fight the Mongols. Gregory, however, had been more interested in destroying Frederick than in saving Europe. The embassy had returned empty-handed. And now there was no pope to call a crusade. The chair of Saint Peter had been vacant for nearly a year.
The great Tatar empire of Genghis Khan had been further enlarged under his son Ogotay. After the Khan’s death, Ogotay conquered Russia.
From there, his hordes turned to Hungary, overrunning it in the spring. Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, and above all, Austria were in deadly peril. Two months ago, the Mongols had been at the gates of Vienna.
At a Diet in May he had called the German princes to war, issuing a decree that every man with an income of three marks or more must take up arms to defend the Empire. At this moment the fate of Austria might already have been decided, while his army loitered in Italy, engaged in sporadic fighting with the Lombards and awaiting the outcome of the papal election.
Frederick tightened his hand around the cup. And he was here, a prisoner of Southern Italy just like those hapless cardinals in their conclave in Rome …
Manfred turned to him, as if he had read his thoughts. “How much longer can this situation in Rome last?”
Frederick looked at Manfred. Damn those eyes! “Soon, Manfred, sooner than we think,” he replied with a calm he didn’t feel.
“Have you had word from Rome?” Richard asked eagerly, leaning forward.
Frederick shook his head. “No, not yet. But I have a feeling that we’ll soon have a pontiff. Whether he will be to my liking remains to be seen.”
Berard cast him a long look. He, too, had read the letter, hidden in a cake of wax, that had arrived that morning from Rome. It hadn’t boded well for the election of a Ghibelline pope.
STARING OUT INTO the inky night before retiring that e
vening, Frederick thought how savage an irony it was that while the Empire was being threatened, he was forced to remain here. He couldn’t leave, risking the election of a Guelf pope and the invasion of Sicily while he fought the Mongols in Austria.
The Frangipani and the Colonna, two powerful clans who headed the imperial faction in Rome, had assured him that despite Matteo Orsini, the powerful senator of Rome and Frederick’s foe, they would be able to bring about the election of a Ghibelline pope. This morning, however, a hastily scribbled letter from Cardinal Colonna’s brother had reached him. Orsini had imprisoned the entire College of Cardinals, including Giovanni Colonna, Frederick’s candidate, in the Septizonium, a crumbling Roman ruin on the Palatine.
There, the ten elderly cardinals were shut in a single room with only bread and water, while their guards urinated on them through the leaking floor above. Orsini’s strategy was simple: as soon as they elected his Guelf candidate, he told them, they’d be free. How long could ten frail old men last in the heat of a Roman summer in conditions such as these? It was obvious that the cardinals would soon give in to Orsini.
He could march again on Rome, regardless of the bloodshed, and set Cardinal Colonna on the papal throne. It would be easy. The whole Campagna except Rome was in his hands. It would give him the city, and a pope of his own choosing. The Christian world would condemn him, of course, but for how long? The spiritual authority of a pope thus elected might be challenged by an anti-pope, as had happened before.
Frederick sighed. The East, too, gave him cause for concern. Matters in the Holy Land were in turmoil again. The local barons were fighting one another or fighting the imperial bailiffs. The Saracens took advantage of this. The truce he signed with Al-Kamil had expired. Everything he had gained would be lost if a Western army didn’t soon come to the rescue of the Christians.
The Falcon of Palermo Page 44