As the vesper bells were ringing one Saturday evening at the end of July the Pavians set out at dusk and rode all night with their guest till they reached the Lambro. Faithful to their promise the Cremonese, under the Margrave of Este, had started at the same time, and they also reached the river in the grey dawn of the Sunday morning. While both parties were enjoying a brief rest the Milanese suddenly appeared to seize the King. At their approach he flung himself on a barebacked horse—so the story goes—and swam the river, as little moved by the taunts the Milanese hurled after him as by the bloody massacre they made amongst his returning Pavians. Frederick himself was saved. A few moments had been decisive. People were amazed. They opined that “Christ sought to show forth his wonders,” and when Frederick finally arrived in the ever-faithful Staufen town of Cremona they received the lucky youth with loud rejoicing and welcomed him as if they saw in him “the angel of the Lord.” There was now no holding him: from Cremona (which was not slow to secure considerable earthly benefits from the unearthly visitant, and see them duly put on record too), he hastened to Mantua; from Mantua to Verona; from Verona up the valley of the Adige to Trent. Further than this he could not use the Brenner road because the Dukes of Meran and Bavaria were supporters of Otto. Hence he had to leave the great Alp thoroughfare, and turning westwards seek himself a passage through the bleakest mountain tracts across into the Engadine. And thus in the beginning of September he reached Chur with a handful of followers.
The papal commands that the Hohenstaufen should everywhere be supported and received with honour began now to take effect in German territory. The Bishop of Chur received the traveller most hospitably and himself escorted him to St. Gall, where the Abbot of St. Gall and the Advocate of Pfäffers brought the strength of the King’s forces up to some 300 horsemen. With this force Frederick hastened on to Constance. Once again his luck held; a few hours decided his fate and the Empire’s.
While he was riding full speed for Constance his enemy Kaiser Otto was already encamped at Überlingen on the northern shore of the lake. During the last few months Otto had to a very large extent re-established his power in Germany, and when he heard of Frederick’s coming he hastened south to meet the Staufen on his first arrival. He was just about to cross over to Constance; his servants had arrived there, his cooks were already busily preparing his imperial dinner, the town was arranging a reception for him. Suddenly, instead of the expected Otto, Frederick stood before their gates and demanded admission. The Bishop, who was prepared to welcome Otto, at first refused to receive Frederick. Everything was at stake. The papal legate, Archbishop Berard of Bari, who accompanied the King, rehearsed the Pope’s excommunication of Kaiser Otto; the Bishop gave way, not without misgiving, and accorded to the Hohenstaufen entrance into the town, already lavishly decorated in honour of his rival. Hastily they fortified the bridge over the Rhine on the Überlingen road. Three hours later the Emperor Otto stood without the closed gates of Constance. He had arrived with weak forces and scanty retinue and could not risk a battle. “Had Frederick reached Constance three hours later,” so they say, “he would never have been successful in Germany.”
The news of the miraculous appearance of the Hohenstaufen spread like wildfire. Frederick’s success was manifestly a sign, an act of God: his following grew hourly. Within a few days all the nobles and princes of the Upper Rhine jubilantly embraced his cause, castles and strongholds and towns were illuminated. When he rode into Basel a week later it was with a royal retinue. The Bishops of Chur and Constance, the Abbots of Reichenau and St. Gall, the Counts Ulrich of Kiburg and Rudolf of Hapsburg with many others joined the cortege that had at the beginning been so modest, and in Basel the Bishop of Strasburg brought him 500 troopers. The King of Bohemia’s ambassador petitioned the seventeen-year-old monarch for the confirmation of his master’s crown. Fortunate and victorious, Frederick could now afford to forget the helplessness of his childhood and the Welf-persecutions of his boyhood. He was in any case precociously mature, and now in a night, not in a dream, like the heroes of romance, but in an almost dream-like reality, he had won the security of a young conqueror, though people still styled him “the child,” “the Child from Apulia.”
The possession of Basel and Constance gave him a firm footing. Kaiser Otto tried to bar the Rhine valley against him by investing Breisach, but Frederick did not need to take up arms against him in person. The Saxons had made themselves unpopular in the south by many a deed of tyranny, and the embittered Breisachers, hearing of Frederick’s approach to their relief, vigorously took up their own defence and frightened off the Emperor and his troops. Otto was deserted by numbers of his followers and fled to Hagenau, whence he was ejected by Frederick’s cousin, the Duke of Lorraine. The Welf was unable to rally himself and his forces till he reached Cologne on the lower Rhine, which had formerly acclaimed him. The whole upper valley of the Rhine was thus in Staufen hands. This valley had been the scene not long before of the Children’s Crusade, when hordes of boys and girls, seized with a blind enthusiasm and passionate fanaticism had poured into Italy from the countries by the Rhine. People had gazed in deep depression at this hapless procession of ill-starred youngsters, moving to inevitable destruction… the more gladly did they now greet the festive progress of the Hohenstaufen boy.
He was hailed with matchless enthusiasm as German King as he slowly moved downstream through the decorated Rhenish towns. He traversed Alsace, “most well-beloved of our hereditary lands” he called it, and was met everywhere by cries of joy as the populace escorted him and his ever-swelling multitudes in unbroken triumph through the valleys of the Rhine. An Italian had said: “it is a joy merely to gaze on the handsome Hohenstaufen boy,” and the people of the upper Rhine felt this still more strongly. In the driest and most meagre chronicles you can read between the lines the sympathy and joy of the writer in the young King’s success, whose first easy victory stood out like a miracle.
Even the outward circumstances of his surprising rise to power seemed like the fulfilment of well-known legends and fairy-tales: the Beggar Prince knocking at the gate of Constance, finding the dinner laid for another, and winning the Empire in a couple of hours—these were episodes familiar in story, which yet in everyday life seemed strangely remote and far away. And thus a touch of glamour lingered round the boy, and the Germans seemed to feel a breath of Sicilian air and the dream atmosphere of childhood enveloping him. His appearance too—so homely in spite of its foreignness—marked him as one of their own people. Just so must Duke Ernest of Swabia have looked long ago, the songs of whose wonder journeys were now beginning to be heard, set to the tune intended for Frederick. People rarely called him by his name or title; to all he was “the Apulian Lad,” “the Child of Pulle,” or just “Our Boy,” and decades afterwards the chroniclers still added to the mighty Emperor’s name, as if it were a cognomen, the title Puer Apuliae.
As the chosen of the Pope a further peculiar glory surrounded him, and the simple people who were accustomed to view temporal events in the light of spiritual imagery, celebrated in their Staufen hero the victory of the eternal CHILD, who with invisible weapons overthrows the mighty. The Pope himself, finding the Goliath story apt to existing circumstance, had sent the boy forth as his “David” against the giant Welf. And the people interpreted the victory in similar vein: one writer represents the Welf as a species of monster creeping off to its distant lair before the face of the Apulian child. Another said: “The child has conquered the Welf with heavenly rather than with earthly might,” and yet another speaks of the “wise child of Apulia.” “Behold the power of the child” sang one of the troubadours, and a rhymed chronicle in kindred mood summarises:
Now comes the Pulian Child along—
The Kaiser’s sword is twice as strong,
Whom yet the Child did overthrow
Without a single swordsman’s blow:
The people’s love towards him did flow…
About this time, or it may have bee
n a few years later, the troubadour, Aimeric of Peguilain, at the court of the Margrave of Montferrat, maintained that till he had witnessed the deeds of Frederick he had never been able to believe in the exploits of Alexander: for the Staufen, the “Physician of Salerno,” had raised Generosity from her sick bed. The troubadours praised other qualities of Frederick’s also—the freshness of his youth—his joie de vivre—his beauty—for he fulfilled the Minnesängers’ ideal of a king—his medium height (for “moderation” was valued above all)—his golden hair; but nothing was lauded so highly as his “graciousness,” of which the Macedonian king had also been a pattern. Openhandedness as a royal virtue was a relic of the heathen streak that coloured the ethics of the troubadours. For the true medieval Christian—in the absence of a Bible parallel—knew nothing of liberalitas, whether as an expression of overflowing joy in life or of humane intent, but reverenced only caritas indulged for the soul’s salvation. Since Hohenstaufen days Generosity belonged once more to the make-up of the perfect king, and when Frederick in the very first document written on German soil thus expressed himself: “Kingly dignity is enhanced by openhandedness, and prestige loses nothing by the giving of gifts,” this saying of his tallied word for word with many a verse of Minnesang.
Frederick II acted only, as he frequently asserted, “according to common royal custom on the one hand, and on the other according to a certain magnanimity peculiarly his own.” Thus the poets praised especially his innata liberalitas, even when in later days for grave reasons of state he was least able to display it towards the troubadours. Just now, however, he had scarcely set foot in Germany than his “graciousness” bordered on prodigality. In the first intoxication of success the young prince gave with both hands ancestral estates and imperial property to all who crowded round him, and when resources failed him for the nonce he promised gifts for the day “when with God’s help he would have wealth again.” When money came his way he handed it over forthwith to his hangers-on. The ambassadors of the French King who in the first weeks brought him a very considerable sum of money must have been more than a little surprised when the Chancellor asked where the money was to be kept and received for answer: “Neither this nor any other money is to be kept at all; it is to be distributed amongst the princes.”
“When people heard of this high-hearted generosity of the King a universal shout of jubilation was raised in his favour”—“all were bound to him and he became dear to all by his liberality”—such is the unanimous verdict of the chroniclers. The Puer Apuliae knew exactly what he was doing, and the means by which he could secure the adherence of the ever-hungry counts and princes. The gesture of openhandedness perhaps came natural to him, but he was by no means unaware of the contrast it would point between him and the notoriously parsimonious Welf. He declared himself: “Wisdom counselled it, and it gives us advantage in men’s minds over our foe who acts in other manner and thus brings down on his own head the hatred of men and the displeasure of heaven.”
In a few weeks Frederick was master of the whole of the south of Germany from Burgundy to Bohemia without exertion and without a blow. His debt to Pope Innocent was immeasurable, and it has justly been pointed out that his progress had hitherto lain through lands predominantly belonging to the Church. Chur, Constance, Basel and Strasburg were all bishop’s seats, as indeed was almost the whole plain of the upper Rhine. Next to the Pope’s the French King’s help had been of most value, and he was to get further assistance from the same quarter.
In November 1212 Frederick met the French heir to the throne in Vaucouleurs near Toul and was reported to have had a narrow escape from the daggers of Otto’s assassins. He concluded an alliance with the French against England, binding himself not to make peace with the foe without the consent of France. In these early years Frederick was wholly dependent on the powers that had helped to raise him, and was particularly bound to Philip Augustus who espoused his cause, a trifle too warmly perhaps. A certain arrogance was noticeable on the French side, as for instance when a French vassal swore to his king to support him and the Hohenstaufen Frederick, and, in the case of the latter’s death, the feudal oath ran on, “whomsoever the electors might, with the approval of the King of France, choose for Roman Emperor.” As France supported the Hohenstaufen, England backed the Welf, and so the day was coming when—sign of the appalling disintegration of Germany—the imperial throne would be the stake in a war between England and France. French envoys were present when Frederick II on the 5th of December, 1212, was once more formally elected King at a great assembly of princes in Frankfurt, and four days later at his coronation in Mainz. He was crowned it is true with imitation regalia, for the Welf had possession of the real ones, and not in Aix la Chapelle which was for the moment held by Kaiser Otto and his minions.
There was yet no open fighting between the two opponents. Otto was busy with haphazard little feuds in his native Saxony and Thuringia along the lower Rhine, and Frederick had not yet mustered an army. To gather forces, and at the same time to show himself to his vassals in the various provinces and receive their homage, Frederick held a series of royal courts: one in Ratisbon for Bavaria and Bohemia, one in Constance for Swabia. Much as Frederick owed to the Pope and to the King of France it was clear that in the south of Germany, and above all in Swabia, other and mighty influences were at work helping him to victory. The populace hailed him as their hereditary Lord, their Hohenstaufen. His enemy had set ugly tales in circulation: he was no son of Henry’s but the bastard of some papal official, just such a tale as had been circulated at the time of his birth and was to crop up again not infrequently. How the mere sight of him sufficed to quench all such gossip is best told in the words of the chronicler: “While now these fateful chatterings began to fly from lip to lip, lo, on a sudden, there appears amidst his Swabians, Bavarians and Bohemians, the young King as conqueror over his foes, and proves the nobility of his race by the courtesy and dignity of his behaviour.” Here he was hailed therefore as the legitimate heir, entering the kingdom of his fathers, by birth the lord of Swabia, whose due succession as Duke had been recognised by the Swabian monasteries immediately on the murder of Philip. People recalled once more that long ago in the lifetime of Henry VI Frederick had been elected King, and that only his youth, his absence, and the wiles of others had kept him from his throne, and they maintained that the imperial crown was the prerogative of a Hohenstaufen. For, they told each other, there was only one imperial race, one regia stirps that begot Emperors, the race of the Waiblings which reckoned doubly royal blood, the Carolingian and the Salian, and through the latter traced its descent from Troy. The Staufen ancestor had, at God’s express command, wedded a Waibling maid, and Barbarossa had been justified in his boast that he sprang from the regia stirps Waiblingensium. All this contributed not a little to the glorification of the last of the Hohenstaufens whom people had fetched home from Sicily.
Had not the Heruli of old—as with amazement the Byzantines related—sent out messengers to Ultima Thule to spy out the land and see whether a scion of their ancient royal house might there be found? And had not the Heruli also—weary of waiting for their messengers’ return—chosen themselves a new king whom, however, they stealthily forsook by night when the news came that their envoys were on the way bringing their hereditary prince. Not otherwise had it been in Swabia. Kaiser Otto had returned in haste from Italy and by his friends’ advice had hastily married the Staufen heiress Beatrice, to whom he was long since betrothed, and had hoped thereby to secure the loyalty of Bavarian and Swabian warriors. But his young bride died shortly after, and almost simultaneously the news came that the last of the Hohenstaufens was coming home. By night his men of war crept off and returned to their homesteads, leaving bag and baggage in Otto’s hands. For in these regions none loved “the Saxon” as they always called the Welf.
*
Frederick’s life was to be rich in wars against almost all the powers. It is significant that his career begins with the renew
al of a prehistoric racial feud. The boy had scarcely yet had time to make enemies of his own, but Otto the Welf, who from birth, as son of an Englishwoman, seemed destined for the most northern throne in Europe as King of the Scots, as the Staufen was born to a southern crown, seemed expressly created by fate to be the antithesis in every detail of his Waibling rival: even in his exterior. The Welf, heroic to foolhardiness, was a fearless dashing knight, unwontedly tall, with powerful frame and well-proportioned limbs. His strength lay in his mighty fist, trusting to which he bore himself with aggressive arrogance, “like a lion whose very voice inspires terror in all around.” Not many years before Frederick’s tour of his Swabian dukedom Kaiser Otto had visited the country in his royal progress. Swabia in those days centred round the Lake of Constance in the west and stretched far beyond the Rhine, embracing the whole of Alsace and reaching southward across the Alps almost to Lake Como. It was the oldest Roman settlement in Germany and as such tended to turn its gaze southward as of course. Throughout this Swabia then, Otto of Brunswick remained “the Stranger,” “the Saxon.” True, the Welfs were Swabian too by origin, and not until after the fall of Henry the Lion, Otto’s great state-founding father, had they been restricted to Brunswick. Kaiser Otto in filial piety had made a pilgrimage to those spots of Swabia that were dear to his house: Augsburg for instance and the monastery of Weingarten, but he had spent his boyhood at the English court of his uncle, Richard Cœur de Lion, and had become estranged from the land of his forebears. He displays many an English trait: a frugality bordering on parsimony, which Walther held up to scorn—“If he had been as generous as he was long, he would have had many virtues”—an amazing lack of education, a poverty of intellect. How could such a boor hold his own in the delicate play of intrigue of the Roman Curia or prove a match for the great Pope Innocent. He moves us almost to pity as we see him powerless in the grip of forces which he did not even understand, ignorant and unsuspecting in the toils of fate: not even rightly aware what goal he sought or ought to seek. Not until the storm had broken was he aware of its approach, and then he was bewildered by it—perplexus, as the chronicler has it. The impact broke him, instead of lending him fresh impetus.
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