The learned Peter of Eboli was not the only poet and soothsayer who offered his prophetic wares to the new-born child on the day following the Christmas of 1194. Godfrey of Viterbo, the tutor of Henry VI, hailed the boy as the future Saviour foretold of prophets, the time-fulfilling Caesar. Even before the birth Godfrey had in sibylline speech informed his master that the coming son was destined to prove the long-awaited King of all the World, who should unite East and West as the Tiburtine sibyl had foretold. And later the story ran that East and West had cried aloud with joy at the birth of the imperial heir. Meanwhile other and less flattering predictions gained currency which had likewise accompanied the birth of the youngest Hohenstaufen. The Breton wizard Merlin was said to have spoken of the child’s “wondrous and unhoped for birth” and in dark mysterious words to have hinted at disaster. The child would be a lamb, to be torn in pieces, but not to be devoured; he was to be a raging lion too amongst his own. The Calabrian Cistercian, the Abbot Joachim of Flora, the “Fore-runner” of St. Francis, was swift to recognise in the new-born child the future Scourge of the World, the Anti-Christ who was to bring confusion in his train. The Abbot, indeed, full of prophetic fire, was said to have informed the Emperor betimes that the Empress—overlain by a demon—was pregnant, without yet knowing of her pregnancy. The Empress too had had a dream and it had been revealed to her that she was to bear the fiery brand, the torch of Italy.
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Constance obsessed the imagination of her contemporaries as few empresses have done. The strangely-secluded girlhood of the heiress of Sicily, posthumous daughter of the gifted Norman king and state-maker, Roger II, the great blond-bearded Viking: her belated marriage, when she was already over thirty, with Barbarossa’s younger son, her junior by ten years: her nine years of childlessness: the unexpected conception by the ageing woman: all this was—or seemed—mysterious enough to the people of her time to furnish ample material for legend. According to current rumour Constance’s mother, Beatrice, daughter of Count Gunther of Rethel, had been a prey to evil dreams when, after the death of King Roger, she was brought to bed of the future Empress. And the augurs of the half-oriental Norman court declared that Constance would bring dire ruin on her fatherland. To avert this evil fate, no doubt, Constance was at once doomed to be a nun. The fact that the princess actually spent long periods in various nunneries in Palermo may well have strengthened such a report. The story further ran that Constance had been most unwilling to marry at all, and this coloured Dante’s conception of her: because she left her “pleasant cloister’s pale” under pressure and against her will, he gave the Empress a place in Paradise. The tale that Constance had taken the veil was widely believed, and later deliberately circulated by the Guelfs out of malice towards her son. The similar superstition of a later day foretold that a nun should be the mother of Anti-Christ. Meantime this first and only pregnancy of the forty-year old empress gave rise to another cycle of legend. It became the fashion to represent Constance as being considerably older than she was, in order to approximate the miracle of this belated conception to Bible precedent, and she is traditionally depicted as a wrinkled old woman. The rumour that the child was supposititious was bound to follow, and it was given out that he was in reality the son of a butcher. Shrewd woman that she was, Constance had taken measures to forestall such gossip: she had had a tent erected in the open marketplace, and there in the sight of all she had borne her son and proudly displayed her well-filled breasts—so the counter-rumour ran.
Not in Palermo, but in Jesi, a small town dating from Roman times, in the March near Ancona, Constance brought her son to birth. After he was Emperor, Frederick sang the praises of his birthplace in a remarkable document. He called Jesi his Bethlehem, and the Divine Mother who bore him he placed on the same plane as the Mother of our Lord. Now the Ancona neighbourhood with its landscapes belongs to the most sacred regions of Renaissance Italy. As soon as the Italian people awoke to self-consciousness it recognised this as a sancta regio and consecrated it as such. From 1294—a hundred years after the birth of the Staufen boy—the Virgin’s house from Nazareth stood in the Ancona Marches, and Loreto, where it eventually came to rest, became one of the most famous places of pilgrimage in Italy. So it need cause no surprise that the March—the home moreover of Raphael—supplies the actual landscape basis (so far as a mythical landscape has a real prototype) for innumerable pictures of the Madonna playing with the Holy Child.
These sunlit scenes played no part in the actual childhood of the boy. A few months after his birth Constance had the “blessed son”—to whom for the moment she gave the name of Constantine—removed to Foligno near Assisi and placed in the care of the Duchess of Spoleto, while the Empress herself hastened back to her Sicilian kingdom. She had only stayed in Jesi for her confinement, while the Emperor Henry travelled south to repress a Sicilian insurrection. This he accomplished with severity and bloodshed, and at last, after years of toil and fighting, he took possession of the hereditary country of his consort. All that Barbarossa had once dreamed, and had hoped to achieve through the Sicilian marriage of his son: to checkmate the exasperating Normans who always sided with the enemies of the Empire; to secure in the extreme south a firm fulcrum for the Empire of the Hohenstaufen, corresponding to their stronghold north of the Alps, and from these two bases—independent of the favour or disfavour of the German princes—to supervise and hold in check the Patrimonium between, and the ever-restive Italy: all this had reached fulfilment one day before the heir to this imperial power was born. Escorted by Saracen trumpeters, Henry with unexampled pomp entered as victor into the conquered city of Palermo, the terrified populace falling on their knees as he rode by, and on Christmas Day 1194 he was crowned King of Sicily in the cathedral of the capital. He was soon able to announce in one and the same letter both the victorious outcome of his campaigns and the birth of his son and heir. The assurance of the succession gave full value to the conquest of the southern kingdom, a hereditary not an elective monarchy, and to the other great achievements of the indefatigable Emperor.
Henry’s rule over the Roman Empire lasted but six years. But this short space sufficed him to crush the world into the dust before his throne. If, like his son, he had possessed the skill to read the stars, and had learned from them how short a span was accorded for the fulfilment of his gigantic task, he could scarcely have economised his time more drastically than he did without this foreknowledge. He recognised no values but the concrete and the practical; he allowed no scruple to stem his progress; when state policy was at stake all conventions were but will-o’-the-wisps. The sober statesmanlike genius that reveals itself in this he shared with the other Hohenstaufens, but he lacked many another quality of that favoured house: he had nothing of the genial bonhomie of his family, nothing of their gracious exterior. His body was gaunt and frail, his sombre countenance, dominated by the mighty brow, was unvaryingly stern. His face was pale, his beard was scant. No man saw him laugh. His personality completely lacked the amiability and compelling charm of Barbarossa. He had a gloomy autocratic way with him; in later days he might almost have been of stone. His policy was ambitious and all-embracing, but hard and uninspired. Hardness was indeed the keynote of his being, a hardness as of granite, and with it a reserve rare in a German. Add to this a mighty will, a passion immensely strong but cold as ice, an amazing shrewdness and political acumen. There was a remarkable absence of youthfulness in all these qualities, and indeed it is easy to forget that with his thirty-second year Henry’s career had run its course.
In addition to the Empire itself, Barbarossa had bequeathed to his son the sum total of imperial claims and demands which were his by Roman Law: the theory that the whole circuit of the world was by right under the tutelage of the Roman Imperator. And the task now fell to Henry to make good these claims. He had none of Barbarossa’s devouring fire or infectious enthusiasm and none of his ingenuous naïveté—Barbarossa for instance had once commanded the Sultans to place their lands u
nder his rule as heir of the Augusti, because these eastern territories had of old been conquered by the generals of his Caesar ancestors. Henry possessed, however, one quality most essentially Roman: a boundless, sober common sense. He was skilful in turning to account for his own success as a world-conqueror the enthusiasm kindled by his father. “As the sun outshines in greatness and in glory all the massed stars of Heaven, so the Roman Empire is lofty above the other kingdoms of the world. Sole overlordship belonged of yore to the Roman Empire, and as the stars receive their light from the sun, so do the kings receive from the Emperor the right to rule.” Thus wrote not long afterwards the Rhenish Cistercian, Caesarius of Heisterbach, and many non-Germans would have agreed with him. The English John of Salisbury, writing in an almost humanistic atmosphere, dubbed them “petty kings,” and again Huguccio of Pisa, with his mental background of Roman law, taught: “there be many provinces in the Roman Empire, with many kings, but only one Emperor, their suzerain.”
Such is the familiar conception of the imperial power held by the house of Hohenstaufen. As Walther von der Vogelweide phrased it later, “the minor kings surround thee.” The imperial claim could not always be made good in the form of an immediate, absolute autocracy, but with the aid of feudal law it could be realised mediately. Within a few years the West, and not the West alone, had in fact learned to recognise in Henry VI the highest feudal lord. Even before the death of Barbarossa Henry had laid claim to Denmark and the Polish East; England had become a tributary vassal state—the capture of Richard Coeur de Lion was a master stroke of Henry’s calculating statesmanship. He claimed further, through Cœur de Lion, to be acknowledged as overlord by Philip Augustus of France: for the great English possessions, from Normandy to the borders of Navarre, were French fiefs. France was to be compelled to take the oath of fealty, and Richard of England was commissioned, as any subordinate general might have been, to make war on France in the Emperor’s name, and to conclude peace only with the Emperor’s permission. The Emperor’s pretensions extended to the kingdom of Burgundy, which, since Barbarossa’s marriage to Beatrice, had once more reverted to the Empire. He even claimed Castile and asserted rights in Aragon which he looked to the Genoese to uphold for him. Italy as a whole was in his hand. The Italian islands belonged to the Empire, the Lombard states scarcely ventured to resist, and the Pope—in no wise a match for the imperial power—was restricted to a patch of the Campagna: “where none the less men feared the Emperor rather than the Priest.” The entire Patrimonium, Spoleto, the March, Tuscany, were in his possession. Rome accepted her Prefect from the Emperor’s hand, and the whole side of the city lying on the right bank of the Tiber was incorporated in Tuscany. Once Sicily had been conquered, therefore—an undertaking that for many years taxed all the Emperor’s strength—the whole of Italy was united under a single all-powerful monarch.
With the possession of Sicily a new world opened to Henry: from the pillars of Hercules to the Hellespont the whole basin of the Mediterranean lay within the radius of his power. He conceived himself the heir of the Normans, not alone of the royal citadel, of Palermo and of the royal dignities, but also of their rights and claims. Since the days of Roger II the Normans had styled themselves “Kings of Africa,” and the Muslim princes, from Morocco to Tripoli, were now compelled to render to the German Emperor—the new Lord of Sicily—the tribute heretofore paid to their Norman masters. The Sultan of the Almohades did not hesitate long about paying tribute, for he saw his Balearic islands threatened after the fall of Sicily. Henry VI further considered himself the heir of the campaigns of Robert Guiscard and his followers against the Eastern Empire. The vivid German picture of one universal Roman World would have been far from realisation if Henry had tolerated the existence of the Greek Emperor by his side: the ring round the Mediterranean would not have been complete without Byzantium. Henry VI was able to back his claims by various legal titles, and where these failed the fear of his power was by itself enough to make the powerless Greeks speedily complacent. As heir of the Normans he demanded all the territory from Epidaurus to Thessalonica, and through his ambassador he inexorably exacted tribute, followers, and ships from the anaemic usurper, Alexius III. “As if he were Lord of Lords and King of Kings” he conducted his business with Byzantium. To raise the tribute-money Alexius was driven to institute a “German Tax,” and he did not shrink even from opening up the imperial tombs—including that of the great Constantine—and plundering the dead of their ornaments. But all these things were only the preliminaries to the conquest of the East, to which the ambitious schemes of Henry’s last years were almost exclusively directed. Some individual Christian princes in the East had voluntarily placed themselves under the protection of the only man who at that time could afford them any: the thirty-year-old Emperor. The king of one of the Crusader states, Bohemund of Antioch, had besought the Emperor to be his feudal lord; ambassadors from the King of Cilicia had done homage to Henry and begged him to grant their master as his vassal the crown and title of “King of the Armenians,” exchanging thus their old feudal allegiance to the Eastern Emperor for allegiance to the new world-ruler of the West. The messengers of King Amaury of Cyprus penetrated as far north as Worms to ask that their master should be feudally invested with his kingdom and his crown at Henry’s hands. Meantime Henry was now planning a Crusade which was finally to unlock the East and make it subject to him. All preparations were made with the greatest care. The Pope, the octogenarian Celestine III, suspected no doubt the real intention of this Holy War, but as spiritual overlord of Western Christendom he could not, in those days at any rate, take up any but a benevolent and helpful attitude towards such an undertaking. Against his will he was harnessed to the imperial plans and was able successfully to oppose the Hohenstaufen will in one particular only.
Henry VI was well aware that his giant empire lacked organic unity, for each of the component countries stood in a different relation to the Emperor: Germany was an elective monarchy; Sicily a hereditary one; and the other countries were feudal dependencies, many of them mediate. He did his utmost to pull the whole together and give it a certain stamp of uniformity. When his son was born he thought the time had come. He sought to win over the German princes to his schemes by offering to the temporal princes the promise of a hereditary succession, and to the spiritual ones free testamentary powers. He hoped thus to transmute the German Elective Kingdom into a Hereditary Roman Empire. To achieve this end he was prepared to incorporate in the Empire his own personal hereditary kingdom of Sicily. The German princes declared themselves in favour of these proposals: all except the Archbishop of Cologne and a small following. In order to overcome the last remnants of opposition the Emperor betook himself to Rome. His idea probably was to induce the Pope, in defiance of any protest by the princes, to crown his infant son as Roman Emperor and Co-Caesar. The Pope declined, and Henry had no alternative but to do, as others before him had done: to get his son chosen by the German princes as their future king and thus to safeguard the Empire for the house of Hohenstaufen.
Henry had only twice, quite briefly, seen the heir of his immense empire: once in Foligno shortly after his birth, and once when he (probably) attended his son’s belated baptism. The boy had been originally called Constantine by his mother (no doubt in allusion to her own name, Constance, for she liked to think of him as his mother’s son and heir) and the German princes had chosen him in Frankfurt for their king under this foreign-sounding cognomen. When it came to the baptism, however, which ultimately took place in the presence of many cardinals and bishops—though not, as Henry had desired, of the Pope—the child was given the names of Frederick Roger after his two grandfathers: whom in truth he was to resemble rather than his parents. These names had been first suggested in a poem by Peter of Eboli, and it was not unnatural to prophesy a future of immense and almost god-like power for the grandson of these two mighty princes and the son of Henry VI. All the poets and wise men who had stood by the cradle of the boy had shown th
emselves at one in this anticipation: whether they were rejoicing, as friends of the Empire; or, as partisans of the Pope, were trembling for the fate of the Roman Church. Before long, however, it looked as if all the prophets were at fault.
King Henry was spending the summer of 1197 in Sicily. That spring he had discovered a conspiracy of the Sicilian nobility directed against his life and he had escaped only by the skin of his teeth. People said that both Pope Celestine and the Empress Constance had had a hand in the plot, and there is nothing to render this improbable. The Emperor had the captured ringleaders done to death with the most cruel tortures, and he compelled his wife to be present at the ghastly execution of her guilty countrymen, while the court jesters played their grisly pranks with the still quivering bodies. Soon after this the Crusade was underway. The great majority of the Crusaders had sailed across to the Holy Land from Sicily during the course of the summer, and it seemed not impossible that the Emperor himself would bear a part in the crusade, but he thought it wise to await developments, and with a few companions he remained behind in Sicily. He did not even see the Promised Land from afar as Barbarossa had done. During a hunting expedition he fell ill of dysentery—as northerners are apt to do in the dangerous summer climate of Sicily. Within a few weeks, after an initial improvement, he quite unexpectedly succumbed in Messina in September 1197. A chronicler announces with pride: “Henry showed the world the superiority of the Germans, and they inspired terror in all adjacent peoples by their valour.” With Henry’s death all this was at once a thing of the past. German world-rule and world-greatness, resting on the qualities of a single man and not upon the people, was fated to crumble in a moment.
Frederick the Second Page 3