The Roman Curia had seen Frederick’s happy faculty for solving many difficult issues by one well-judged move. This, however, was in the diplomatic sphere and might have indicated merely a skill in casuistry. Frederick was now in the thick of real life. One single simple law, almost ludicrously simple, brought in a moment to a standstill all the hurly-burly of strife and disaffection in Sicily, precisely in the way most useful to Frederick personally. The last legitimate Norman king, William II, had died in 1189, and for the succeeding thirty years sheer confusion had prevailed. Royal prerogatives and rights, crown lands and fiefs had been recklessly squandered, abandoned, given away, some by Henry VI, with the full intention of ultimately recovering them, some by the many fleeting regents of Frederick’s youth, till the Crown was completely impoverished and had lost all power. The evil of these thirty years must be undone. The strong position which the Norman Kings had upheld was largely grounded on the extensive crown domains; the Demanium must be restored to the ruler. By a law which he had long before excogitated “de resignandis privilegiis” Frederick declared to be null and void all grants, gifts, donations, privileges, confirmation of titles and the like of the last thirty years. Every man must bring his documents, except those relating to purely private property, within the next few months and table them in the imperial chancery. Here they would be examined and, if it seemed desirable, renewed.
Every possessor therefore of crown lands, crown fiefs, royal grants, tolls, privileges and what not, was suddenly reduced to beggary, and at the Emperor’s option would retain or forfeit his possession. We cannot speak with certainty about the distribution of such property, as the vital Chancery records have been destroyed; but we know that nobles and monasteries and towns, and even numerous simple citizens (as farmers of petty taxes or holders of certain privileges perhaps), were hit by this enactment. The decisive consideration for the cancellation of privileges was, broadly, whether the Emperor needed the castle, the land, the tax or the special prerogative at the moment for the construction of his state, or whether he did not. If wanted by the Emperor, the property whose titles had been submitted to the inquisitorial eyes of the imperial court was simply confiscated, otherwise the holder received his diploma back again, new-issued and with an added formula by which the Emperor reserved the right to recall the new title at any time.
A further advantage had been secured by the imperial Chancery—an exact knowledge of all grants of every kind and their distribution, by which the Crown could at any moment lay hands on anything it wanted. Further, the Emperor could at his own good pleasure cancel at least the special separate privileges of any disaffected persons or powers. Further yet, the Crown—that is the King and State, for no separation of the two was dreamt of—regained possession of its extremely extensive property, and, finally, the Emperor was provided with a legal backing for the measures he directed against the various petty powers. This was a characteristic device of Frederick’s. He took the stage not as a conqueror, but as a fulfiller of the law. He was quick to point this out and warn all against putting their trust in illegal evasions; these would be valueless, for he had come to place justice on her throne once more and let her light shine again under his rule.
“Justice” for Frederick meant no rigid code, but the rights of a living state determined by the ever-changing necessities of the hour. In defiance of well-known medieval theories justice thus became a living thing, moving, progressive, capable of development and change—as we shall expound more fully later. From this chameleon justice sprang the Emperor’s legal “Machiavellianism” in the service of the state (not of the prince) which made its abrupt appearance in the first application of the Law of Privileges which in the manifold ramifications of its operations was the basis on which the whole new order in Sicily was founded.
A considerable number of the Sicilian barons had attended the coronation in Rome. The most powerful of them all, Thomas of Celano, Count of Molise, who alone could put some 1400 knights and esquires in the field, had sent his son to meet Frederick to do him homage and to enlist his favour. Like most of the other nobles the Count of Molise had played the traitor, and his father had been one of the chief supporters of Kaiser Otto. In spite of the weighty advocacy of the Pope and of Cardinal Thomas of Capua, Frederick refused to accept the proffered submission. There is no reason to suppose that Frederick cherished any special ill-will towards this particular count. He was determined to subdue the entire body of continental nobles, and he was exactly obeying that first and simplest rule—which Machiavelli later preached as a doctrine—by boldly declaring war against the most powerful and playing off the lesser barons against him. When the big man was disposed of by their help he would find it an easy matter to rid himself of the small ones in their turn. Frederick accepted the homage of the minor nobles in Rome; at least he immediately found a means of utilising Counts Roger of Aquila, Jacob of San Severino, Richard of Ajello, Richard of Celano and many another. On the ground of the Law of Privileges which he was just about to promulgate, and other orders which he issued immediately after the coronation, he commanded them to hand over certain castles which they possessed. For it was all-important to be in control of fortified positions in the kingdom.
It was a happy chance that the barons had been witnesses of the coronation ceremonies and the entente between Emperor and Pope; overcome by all they had seen, they obeyed him without protest. The Emperor cared nothing for individuals, only for the cause. The Abbot of Monte Cassino, who had also come to the coronation in Rome, had always been loyal and submissive; nevertheless he had to surrender, under the same law, not only certain revenues, but also, most surely against his will, two important border fortresses, Rocca d’Evandro and Atina. These with three more castles, Suessa, Teano and Mondragone (which Count Roger of Aquila was compelled to hand over), covered Frederick’s entrance into the kingdom and secured the road to Capua. Frederick crossed the border at Monte Cassino in December 1220.
These first castles were chosen for confiscation solely on account of their strategic importance. They were the same positions which the Romans had fortified of old against the Samnites. The same considerations applied to Sora and Cajazzo, which he next seized. These castles would strengthen his front towards the South-East. His first immediate goal was Capua.
Thus before he had entered his kingdom he had firm ground under his feet. There were a few entirely trustworthy families of the royal nobility on whose strength he could rely: the Cicali, the Eboli, above all the lords of Aquino. Immediately on entering Sicily Frederick created Landulf of Aquino Justiciar of the Terra Laboris, roughly the modern Campania; while another, the elder Thomas of Aquino, he named Chief Justice of the same district and of Apulia and created him Count of Acerra. He had, further, at his disposal the fighting forces of the erstwhile traitor barons mentioned above, who had now done homage. Relying solely on the barons, Frederick set out to fight the barons. He had brought very few troops with him from Germany to Italy and most of these were crusaders, so he entered Sicily almost without an army, but, on the other hand, accompanied by Roffredo of Benevento, sometime professor of law in Bologna. Frederick was anxious to conquer his country with the forces of the country itself.
In December 1220 he held a great Diet in Capua and promulgated a number of laws. The most important was the Law of Privileges; another, also directed against the barons, was closely allied: all castles and fortified places erected by vassals in the course of the last thirty years were to be surrendered to the crown or, alternatively, razed to the ground. The right of fortification was a royal prerogative, and from time immemorial vassals had therefore been forbidden to build castles even on their own land. So the new law was only the re-assertion of an ancient royal right. The Diet of Capua created the legal basis for Frederick’s future procedure, for which the struggle with the barons, the resumption of crown lands and castles, formed only the lever de rideau. The Emperor did not even conduct these operations in person. If the surrender was peaceful the
two ad hoc officials were sufficient; if resistance was offered the submissive barons were delegated to break it. Thomas of Aquino, for instance, was presently put in command of the campaign against the Count of Molise. Frederick thus kept his hands free for other work: for many things were happening simultaneously.
We must now follow in detail the two years’ campaign for the reduction of the continental barons. Within a few months the Emperor was in possession of quite a number of fortresses in the north of the kingdom. The Count of Ajello surrendered the castle from which he took his name. The Rocca d’Arce, a border fortress against the States of the Church, was quickly conquered by Roger of Aquila. Diepold of Schweinspeunt’s brother surrendered the castles of Cajazzo and Allifae, and Diepold himself, whom Frederick had for years held prisoner as hostage for these castles, was finally released and ostensibly received into the Teutonic Order. The county of Sora with its castle of Sorella was attached; it had been at one time pledged to Pope Innocent III and by him handed over to his brother Richard. During the next few years a whole series of further fortresses were conquered, destroyed or newly fortified, amongst them Naples, Gaëta, Aversa, Foggia. The Alsatians had coined a phrase about the Hohenstaufen, Duke Frederick, “He always has a castle tied to his horse’s tail,” and this would equally be applicable to his later namesake.
The spring of 1221 saw the beginning of the campaign against the Count of Molise. He had entrenched himself in two almost impregnable Abruzzi fortresses, Bojano and Roccamandolfi, and was beleaguered by the imperial generals. Bojano was taken by assault. Roccamandolfi was forced to surrender; the count himself escaped to a third stronghold, Ovindoli, whose resistance was not lightly overcome. After lasting the better part of two years the campaign was finally ended by a treaty under which Ovindoli was surrendered. The Count went into banishment; his personal possessions in Molise were for the present secured to him, or rather to his countess. Before long, however, a pretext was made that he had broken the treaty; he failed to obey the summons to appear before the imperial court, and Frederick confiscated the entire Molise property, as he had doubtless all along intended to do. Celano was the most important town in the Count’s domains; on account of a treacherous attack on a detachment of imperial troops it was razed to the ground and the inhabitants scattered. Later they were re-assembled and deported to Sicily, where Frederick had a scheme for utilising them. Years afterwards they were permitted to return home and rebuild Celano under the name of Caesarea. Thus the home town of Thomas of Celano, the Franciscan, suffered in some degree a dies irae in his lifetime.
That, however, was the end of the Molise campaign, and the most powerful of the continental barons had now been overcome, but the action against the body of feudal lords as a whole was not yet completed. Frederick had not the smallest intention of remaining so dependent on the smaller barons as he had been during these years. They also must be crushed. Frederick seized the first convenient opportunity after the Molise campaign. The Counts Roger of Aquila, Jacob of San Severino and some others had been summoned to war against the Saracens; some had not appeared at all, some had come with scanty forces. The Emperor ordered their arrest and the confiscation of their lands. On the Pope’s intervention he released the prisoners but sent them into exile. They followed the Count of Molise to Rome.
This blow was the last. The resistance of the feudal nobility was at an end, except for a few trifling episodes, for the duration of Frederick’s rule—the moral of which is that stern and ruthless measures are also the most humane if the person who employs them is sure of his aim. Plato saw no alternative line of conduct for a “Tyrant” who is of necessity compelled to “purge the State” by slaying and exiling. It is disconcerting to see with what prophetic insight Emperor Frederick obeyed the rules of Machiavelli, who demands under all circumstances that the earliest allies must be got rid of, otherwise they will later prove the most dangerous opponents, for they will allow themselves liberties towards their master and their demands on his gratitude will be insatiable. Machiavelli’s counsels would have struck a more sympathetic chord in Frederick than the actual advice of his contemporary, Thomas of Gaëta. This old Sicilian official, who had been entrusted with numerous missions to the papal court, shared in many things the point of view of Rome. He was horrified at the new state of affairs and advised the Emperor “rather to build churches and cloisters”—an occupation which offered Frederick no attractions—“than to fortify hills and crown the mountain heights with castles. Better to win men’s hearts than their bodies, for the love of his subject is the only impregnable bulwark of a king.” Frederick did not take this greatly to heart. He displayed a wonderful lust for building, but during his whole life built only one single insignificant little church—and that with extreme reluctance.
The power of the great nobles had thus been broken and, like other statesmen, Frederick found it convenient to enlist in his service the minor nobility—taking care for the most part not unduly to enrich them. All his actions in these matters are part and parcel of his strong dislike of the feudal system on principle, for it made the direct action of the overlord practically impossible. The most powerful fief-holders had now been forcibly eliminated, but the legislation of the Diet of Capua had prepared the way for a complete re-modelling of the whole feudal fabric. The fighting forces of the nobility were to be greatly increased and put immediately at the ruler’s disposition. Frederick was not driven to “inventing” new laws. He called to mind certain ancient Norman laws and gave them wider application and a definite direction. He first recalled as many feudal grants as possible and did not again renew them.
All vassals were forbidden to marry without the Emperor’s special permission; children of a fief-holder could only inherit their father’s fief with the Emperor’s consent. These two laws of marriage and inheritance were rigidly enforced. This hastened the reversion of fiefs to the Crown. All vassals were to re-assert any rights that had been filched from them during the years of chaos, just as the Emperor himself was doing, to avoid the sub-division of the fief. This measure was not conceived in the interests of the fief-holder himself, but in the interest of the Crown, in case of reversion. For the same reason all arbitrary creation of under-fiefs on tenure without express permission was most sternly forbidden, because a fief was greatly weakened by a train of under-vassals, and if the main fief fell again to the Crown a host of duties towards the under-vassals arose. Moreover, any independence of the subject, such as was implied by the sub-division of fiefs, was contrary to Kaiser Frederick’s principles of government.
The new feudal order in short laid down: that with reference to fiefs and their distribution no alteration was to be made in the status quo as existing at the death of the last Norman king—no marriage, no inheritance, no sub-letting without express permission from the Emperor. What had been an independent, living, moving, fluid form of life became in a moment petrified by one single edict into rigid permanence. Henceforth modifications could emanate from the Emperor alone, and he was put in a position from which he could review the whole detailed situation and exert his direct influence through the most distant ramifications of the system. Every independent, natural development was checked and—what entirely suited Frederick’s whole conception—every impulse, every activity must derive from him personally and have its source in his imperial will.
The loosely-knit framework of a feudal kingdom, held together by land-tenure alone, was to be succeeded by the firm architecture of a state: neither land nor fief would in future bind the noble to his lord—these now imposed duties on him, without entailing corresponding rights, nothing but personal service. Thus matters henceforth remained. The possession of a fief gave the nobleman no weight, only his personal service rendered directly to the King, either as warrior or, what Frederick valued more, as official. This paved the way to the foundation of a “Court Nobility,” such as developed later under absolutism.
Another measure ran parallel with this state-organisation of the
nobles and the knights. Frederick II was the first to place castles and fortresses under the immediate administration of the Crown and State, which was in effect to transform knightly castles into national strongholds. Over two hundred of these national towers, castles and fortresses date back to Frederick’s time. This entailed the creation of a new government department of “national defence,” which was made responsible for the administration, construction and upkeep of the fortresses, for the supervision of the necessary staff, the payment of the garrison and the like. The castles carried naturally no garrison in times of peace—a custom never known elsewhere—or at most a chatelain and a couple of men-at-arms. In time of war it was the duty of the neighbouring fief-holders and districts, who were also normally drawn on for construction and repair, to man the forts at command and to bear the costs of so doing. A type of national defence was thus organised, based on the old but considerably simplified feudal substructure. This was a unique creation for the period, especially because it was the unified product of systematic thought.
Attention should here be drawn to a very important implication of this transformation of knightly castles into state fortresses: an entirely new style of architecture was evolved for the new imperial castles that soon began to spring up. These were no residential castles, as were otherwise the norm, in which the knight lived with his wife and family; these were state strongholds which served as men’s quarters only. They could therefore be built, as were the Roman castra, according to one single uniform ground plan with slight variations—representing the last word in simplicity, economy and rectangularity: a stone square or rectangle with a tower at each of its four corners similar to the well-known specimen in Naples. Certain sportive variations, especially in the interior and in the ornamentation and artistic accessories, are of course distinguishable; many modifications also due to the site; but the same principle underlay them all and the pure form may be seen in plains and on the coast. People have justifiably seen in these Sicilian castles of Frederick II the prototype of the Prussian strongholds of the Teutonic Knights which show the same stark simplicity of plan. The conditions of the early Prussian state under the Order corresponded in many particulars to the Hohenstaufen state in Sicily. The Prussian castles housed no family life but served only as soldiers’ barracks and arsenals. Both entirely lacked any element of the “picturesque”; they are characterised by massiveness and stern straight lines, by their utilitarian plan and the mathematically simple form. In the interior there might be groined vaults or cloisters with pointed arches: Gothic windows and Gothic portals would also not be lacking; but the outside, with flat roofs and squat towers, showed nothing but right angles—gigantic stone blocks and cubes.
Frederick the Second Page 15