The Falcon of Palermo

by Maria R. Bordihn

  Berard moistened his lips, “Despite all our efforts, and the protests of the representatives of the French and English kings, the council has found you guilty of heresy and sacrilege.”

  Silence spread through the room. “I see,” Frederick said at last. “And the penalty?”

  Berard raised an unsteady hand to the cross on his chest. “The pope has declared you deposed. He has called on the German princes to elect a new emperor.”

  Frederick steepled his fingers together. “I’ve been deposed, have I? And who does this pope think has given him the right to depose the sovereigns of this world? Are we kings by the grace of God? Or are we the pope’s puppets? My brothers of France and England had better take care, or they, too, will be caught in this fisherman’s net.”

  Berard stared at him. “You must do something, Frederick!” he said, his voice rising.

  “Do something? I have no wish to do anything. Short of sweeping the entire papacy into the sea, there’s nothing that would change the situation. I am weary. I have struggled with four popes in my lifetime. I have placated them and pandered to them and shown more forbearance than I ever thought myself capable of. To please them I’ve even issued laws against heretics and other harmless fools that today weigh heavily on my conscience.”

  “As for being deposed, let me tell you something.” He leaned forward, his eyes burning. “No one but God is going to depose me! Fetch the imperial crown,” he ordered his son, “and summon my household!”

  Calm again, Frederick turned back to Berard. “This upstart priest has no army with which to enforce his decree,” he said, “nor sufficient influence on the German princes. They, both lay and ecclesiastical, have stood by me for more than thirty years through my conflicts with the papacy. They’ll continue to stand by me. I represent stability as well as a guarantee of their privileges, which,” he glanced at Berard, “I have taken great care to extend over the years. The pope can rave and rant all he wants in his lair on the Rhône, it’ll avail him nothing. And what’s more, now I can drop even the pretense of coming to terms with him. I’m finally free of the papacy, free forever!”

  “Are you saying, Frederick,” Berard asked, his voice unsteady, “that you are content to live as an excommunicate, perhaps for the rest of your days?”

  “Anything is possible, dear friend. Popes change and so do their attitudes. I may still bring the Lombards to heel, in which case Innocent might be forced to change his mind, but it isn’t of paramount importance. I don’t fear the state of excommunication any longer. I have no doubt that if I died tomorrow, my soul would be received somewhere. The God of which Christ spoke sees beyond the fabrications of a church council. I’ve come to accept the pope’s ban as a hazard of my calling.”

  He flung one arm over the back of his chair. “But this, too, will change. Men are weary of the Church’s oppression and venality. Everywhere, there are orders and heretics preaching rebellion against this. So far, the Church has succeeded in integrating the former and exterminating the latter. Mostly they are foolish people without able leaders. But one day, a great man will rise against the Church and bring it to heel. It’s inevitable. Within its trailing robes of shimmering samite embroidered with pearls and gold, the papacy carries the seeds of its own destruction.”

  Berard closed his eyes. This was heresy.

  “But my lord,” Piero put in, “even if you are willing to accept it, your people will find it difficult to obey you.”

  Frederick smiled coldly, “Most of the German and Sicilian clergy will side with me, won’t they?” he turned to Berard.

  Berard sighed. “Yes, many will choose allegiance to you over obedience to the pope. The sacraments will still be administered, justice isn’t going to be impaired, but nevertheless, it’s a terrible thing …”

  FREDERICK OPENED THE silver coffer lined in faded crimson silk. He lifted the crown of Charlemagne up for all to see. An awed murmur ran through the room.

  “As long as this crown rests on my head, I am emperor. Let him who dares take it from me!” he said, placing the crown on his head. He smiled, “Now, let’s sup, lest it be said that the rantings of a deranged pope have affected my appetite.”

  Berard, who had excused himself on account of his fatigue, stood leaning on the arm of his page. He watched Frederick, the crown still on his head, lead the others down the corridor at a brisk pace. The torchlit passage resounded with laughter. Frederick’s lords, following his example, had chosen to cast the pope and his council into oblivion.

  Berard watched until the last cloak had vanished around a corner and the voices faded into the distance. Silence descended on the passage. As he turned to climb the stairs to his apartments, he glanced back over his shoulder. It seemed to him as if he could still see Frederick, the crown of his forefathers on his head, bestriding the Christian world.

  With sudden certainty, he knew that Frederick would prevail. A law onto himself, Frederick would continue to rule as emperor in total disregard of the conventions of men, obeying only the rules of a God of his own choosing.

  FOGGIA, OCTOBER 1250

  The white steed was restlessly pawing the dust in the piazza. Manfred, wearing his colors of green and gold, sat on his horse, waiting. As the fanfares sounded, all heads turned to see the emperor’s favorite son enter the lists.

  Frederick, presiding over the tournament, smiled as he watched his son charge, lance couched, thundering across the turf toward Rainald of Aquinas, who was flying toward him on a roan stallion from the opposite side of the tiltyard. A great roar went up. With effortless grace, without so much as leaning toward his adversary, Manfred unhorsed the count of Aquinas’s son, famed for his skill at tourneying.

  Berard saw the pride in Frederick’s eyes as Manfred helped his adversary up with a mail-gloved hand. Fate, which had robbed Frederick of the women he loved, had been kind to him in the children it left him. They adored their father, who in turn loved them with an oriental fondness. Like many older fathers, Frederick reveled vicariously in his son’s youthful successes.

  He has aged, Berard thought, glancing sideways at Frederick. His hair, still short and curly, was steely gray now, his face clean-shaven and bronzed from the sun of Apulia. Slight jowls and some extra weight added dignity to his figure. He looked more than ever like the Caesar he had become, both in spirit and in flesh, down to the draped togalike cloak of purple Estanfort fastened on his right shoulder with a Roman fibula.

  Five years had passed since Innocent IV pronounced his sentence on Frederick in the incense-clouded cathedral on the Rhône. Berard’s mind went back to the terrible defeat of Victoria. Frederick, made careless by his success against the Lombards soon after Lyon, had gone hunting with his lords, leaving the imperial camp that besieged the city only scantily defended. His forces had fallen to a surprise sortie from the besieged garrison. The treasury was captured. Frederick’s personal books, including his treatise on falconry, were thrown from mercenary to mercenary, to be sold as loot. The Saracen girls of his harem were dragged screaming through the streets, raped in the square, and then sold as slaves.

  Since, Frederick had narrowly escaped two assassination attempts. The first, a conspiracy by some of his vassals to poison him at a banquet, had been discovered by Richard of Caserta in the nick of time. The second, also by poison, implicated Piero, and possibly the pope. The fall from grace of the most powerful man in the realm, who for years had had Frederick’s complete trust, had been a terrible blow to him. Compromising letters from the pope’s secretary, known for his knowledge of alchemy and poisons, had been found under the chancellor’s floorboards.

  Berard lowered his eyes. He remembered Piero’s terrible screams. Frederick ordered the entire court to witness his punishment. His eyes were gouged out with red-hot irons. The blind man had then been cast into a dungeon. Shortly afterwards, Piero dashed out his own brains on a pillar. Had love, unrequited, turned to hate? Was it greed or sudden religious zeal? Had he really been guilty of an att
empt on Frederick’s life? While no one dared ask the question openly, many wondered about it.

  Yet Frederick still ruled, just as Berard had known he would. The pope continued to live in exile. Frederick had been excommunicated for ten years. The world and his subjects had become used to it. The German princes and the Sicilian Church had, almost to a man, stood by him. Bianca’s daughter Constance had married the emperor of Byzantium. Three months ago, his son Manfred, in a ceremony attended by the princes of Europe, had wedded Beatrice, the Count of Savoy’s daughter. King Conrad was proving if not a brilliant, at least a very adequate, ruler, counseled by his father.

  However, two shadows darkened the autumn of Frederick’s life: the Lombards and Enzio. He had been captured by the Bolognese. Despite Frederick’s offer to lay a ring of silver around the walls of Bologna, the Bolognese refused to ransom him. He was imprisoned in a tower of Bologna’s great fortress, where he composed melancholy poems and was visited by a beautiful Bolognese noblewoman who had fallen in love with him.

  Frederick was planning another Lombard campaign in the spring, to liberate Enzio. How much blood, gold, and effort had already been expended in these Lombard wars. It was as if fate, which had smiled so generously on Frederick all his life, determined to deny him this last achievement: the destruction of the Lombard League, which the German emperors had been unsuccessfully attempting for more than a century.

  Berard sighed. Age was beginning to weigh heavily on him. He closed his eyes again. His chin slipped down until his white beard touched his chest. The archbishop had fallen asleep. Around him the combatants clashed and the crowds cheered.

  THE TWO MEN walked side by side through a path between the fields. Every now and then they’d halt, gesturing as if to make a point. Behind them rose rocky mountains, bleak and purple against a gray sky.

  The lay brothers hoeing the fields paused at their approach. Removing their straw hats, they bowed to Frederick and the abbot before returning to their rhythmic preparation of the earth. They’d become accustomed to seeing him. Often, when his travels brought him to this mountainous part of Apulia, he would halt at the abbey for the night.

  They reached the gate in the stone wall that fenced the fields. “I’ll miss your chess, Matteo,” Frederick said, opening the wattle wicket. In the courtyard, he could see the horses saddled and ready. The slow-moving baggage train had already left. “Thank you for your hospitality; I always sleep well under your roof.”

  The abbot inclined his head. He was tall and bony, in a gray Cistercian habit, his hair bleached by time. “Your Grace, it is I who thank you for your interest in my experiments, and the graciousness with which you eat the coarse bread of our house.”

  The abbey, built in the Cistercian manner of perfectly dressed blocks of stone, stood on a lonely plateau; its well-tended fields and orchards had been reclaimed from nature over many years of labor. They were crossing the open space before the church when a gentle tinkling grew and made them turn around. An immense flock of sheep appeared over a swell in the road, led by drovers and sheep dogs.

  The abbot smiled. “The first flock of autumn.”

  Before Frederick and he could reach the courtyard, the sheep engulfed them, together with a tremendous ovine stench. They both stood still as the swirling current of dirt-encrusted sheep milled around them, bleating as they sensed fodder and rest.

  Frederick raised his arms. He wrinkled his nose. “What a reek!” Yet despite the smell, he felt a sense of oneness with the earth as he waited for the animals to be driven into the sheepfolds behind the abbey. The Cistercian abbey of Santa Eufemia del Monte straddled one of Sicily’s principal drover routes. He raised his voice above the bleating, barking chaos. “How many?”

  The abbot shouted back, “Two, maybe three thousand. One of the larger flocks. The smallest number about three hundred, the biggest can reach five thousand.”

  Sheep were one of the great sources of Sicilian wealth. Frederick had revived the Roman custom of transhumance, fallen into disuse because of brigandage and lack of organized shelters. He regulated the use of common pastures and instituted two large annual fairs. Some of the main traturri, or drover routes, which led from the plains of Apulia to the summer pastures in the mountains, were hundreds of miles long. At regular intervals there were now shelters for animals and men, where fodder was available at fixed prices and guards provided safety in return for a tax. The sheep migrated to the mountains in May, after the fair of Foggia, and returned in autumn, to be blessed by the clergy.

  The ovine turmoil finally subsided. Frederick swung himself into the saddle. “Farewell, Matteo. I’ll await the arrival of the brother stonemason you’ve spoken of.” He grinned. “And if your new lentils really are the size of chickpeas, send me some as proof!”

  The abbot smiled. “I shall, Your Grace, if they turn out as I hope.” He raised his hand. “Go with God, my lord.”

  The abbot’s eyes followed Frederick’s vermilion cloak until the cavalcade disappeared beyond a hill. The emperor’s friendship was one of the treasures of his old age. “May the Lord protect him,” he murmured, feeling suddenly apprehensive. The emperor’s enemies were many.

  The Cistercians had remained loyal to him through all his battles with Rome. For nearly thirty years, he had been their patron, granting them lands and encouraging their pioneering work to improve food production. He took a keen interest in their horse and sheep breeding and their experiments with new farming and building techniques. Cistercians had installed the plumbing in his castles, and the famous flushing privies, first used by them in their French mother abbey at Cîteaux.

  FREDERICK, RIDING DOWN from Santa Eufemia over the rocky terrain, glanced at the sun that had chased away the early clouds. It was well past its zenith. Their next halt was the building site of a new hunting lodge. They should be there just after vespers.

  The sun had begun to dip as they cantered along a river. As far as the eye could see, autumnal forests clothed the rolling hills. Flaming foliage mirrored itself in the river. On the opposite bank, the patched brick walls and Norman watchtower of a town came into view. A stone bridge with a keep in its middle spanned the river.

  Frederick pointed, “Villafranca, fief of Odo of Villefranche.”

  Thomas of Aquinas, chief justiciar of Sicily, nodded.

  “Odo’s a good man,” Frederick said, “and a sensible one. He continued to have masses said without having to be prodded by my senechals.”

  As they drew nearer, they noticed that the bridge was filled with people. The wind carried the loud clamor of voices across the water. Frederick, shielding his eyes against the setting sun, drew rein. The stone bridge reached only halfway across the river. From there, a wooden drawbridge joined it to the far side. The entire bridge was crammed with townspeople, shouting and shaking their fists.

  “What’s going on here?” Frederick asked.

  Thomas leaned forward in the saddle. “Perhaps they’re hanging a criminal.” There were several men-at-arms in helmets clustered around the centre of the bridge.

  “From the bridge?” Frederick frowned. Perhaps this one had already been executed and was now being suspended there as a deterrent to others.

  “Officer,” he called to the nearest Saracen, “find out what’s happening.”

  The man spurred his horse forward. By now the people on the bridge, who had been facing the other way, had noticed the riders. Someone recognized the imperial eagle on its field of gold.

  “The emperor! It’s the emperor!” As they all turned around, a gap appeared in the crowd. At its center Frederick saw a woman, her coppery hair flowing down her back. She was standing, trussed up like a goose for the spit, rope wound around her from shoulders to feet.

  Thomas spoke, his face eager. “An adulteress, no doubt. This one’s obviously not going to be burned, but fed to the fishes.”

  Frederick shot him a searching glance. The count’s tone had been gleeful, gloating almost. He had noticed Thomas’s
dislike of women before. Frederick asked himself, not for the first time, what his friend’s sexual proclivities were. Perhaps, like Berard, he didn’t have any. His disinterest in women had obviously been passed on to his heir, a brilliant scholar also named Thomas. The son, to his family’s outrage, had recently taken holy orders. If credence could be given to the tales about him, young Thomas Aquinas was destined for sainthood.

  “My lord,” the Saracen officer reported, “they’re trying a lady for murder. She’s to be thrown into the river, bound. If she survives, they say God will have proven her innocence.”

  Frederick’s eyes narrowed, “Trial by ordeal! I outlawed it years ago! Who’s this woman?”

  “The lord Odo’s widow. The town’s lord died recently. His wife gave birth to a deformed child a few days after his death, and is accused of having killed it.”

  “Superstitious fools!” Frederick gave spurs to his horse. He clattered across the bridge, scattering people and geese as he went. In the middle of the bridge he halted before a group of soldiers, a priest, acolytes, and a friar. The group was dominated by a tall, broad man with an imperious nose. Clearly a man of authority, this personage was dressed in a rich cloak of mustard yellow, a jeweled dagger at his side. The man bowed. “Count Tancred of Villafranca, at Your Grace’s service.” The smile reached only the lips; the hooded eyes were guarded.

  “Don’t you know that all trials by ordeal have been forbidden since the Constitutions of Melfi?” Frederick bellowed, jabbing a finger at the priest, who stood beside two acolytes carrying a silver crucifix on a long pole.

  The count jutted out his jaw. “My lord, this is a matter of family honor, not of common law. The woman was my brother’s wife. She has killed her own child, my brother’s son. If she’s truly innocent, as she claims to be, God won’t let her perish.”

  “I didn’t kill my child!” the bound woman cried out, “It died a natural death, poor deformed mite. My brother-by-marriage wants to do away with me for the sake of my husband’s—” A brutal slap across the mouth from one of the count’s guards silenced her.