The Pope, however, set about filling the vacant sees after a further warning to Frederick not to interfere with Church affairs—a dangerous thing for laymen. Witness the Bible example of Uzzah who put forth his hand to the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord when the oxen shook it and God smote him there for his error and there he died by the Ark of God. The Pope would henceforth appoint his own shepherds for his flocks. Even when the persons chosen were not in themselves unwelcome to Frederick—Marinus Filangieri, for instance, was a brother of the Emperor’s marshal Richard Filangieri—he nevertheless forbade their admission. The correspondence between Pope and Emperor grew steadily more hostile, till at last the hoarded wrath burst forth simultaneously on both sides, just at the moment least convenient to the Emperor when he was busy restoring order in Lombardy.
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Frederick’s early days were not to pass without his learning the bitterness of his other enemies, the Lombard towns, for whom he was as yet no match—largely because the Roman Curia of the time was behind the Lombards.
The Treaty of San Germano had granted Frederick two years’ respite before the Crusade. He intended to utilise this interval to round off all Western affairs before tackling the problems of the Orient. The reorganisation of Sicily was already more or less complete, and German problems were to be regulated at a Diet which Frederick decided to hold in Lombardy, so as to give full weight to his imperial authority in those regions. He therefore invited the German princes and King Henry to Cremona for Easter 1226, “and if you come for no good reason but to see ourself, ourself will be well pleased by sight of you,” so he concluded his letter of invitation. The Court agenda mentioned only very general topics: Restoration in Italy of Imperial Rights: Eradication of Heresy: Prosecution of the Crusade. Frederick particularly stressed the last two items, which concerned Church affairs. Backed by the united armed forces of Germany and Sicily he had good hope of finding the Lombards docile and complacent.
The Lombards, however, had unfortunately noted the recent re-assertion of royal rights in Sicily, and Frederick’s “Restoration of Imperial Rights” rang ominously in their ears. The normal status quo for Lombardy was laid down in Barbarossa’s Peace of Constance dating from 1183. For several decades no Emperor’s eye had been upon the Lombard towns, and there was no question that they had quietly encroached on imperial properties and on imperial rights, quite as seriously as the minor powers had in Sicily usurped royal rights and property. The Lombards might well dread another Law of Privileges with more far-reaching effects than the Sicilian one. They had no wish to take risks. Exaggerated reports reached them of the mighty army that Frederick was gathering for his Lombard Diet. This was decisive. With quick distrust the Lombards, under the leadership of Milan, formed themselves into a League which was joined by the majority of north Italian communes.
It is most unlikely that Frederick had had any such Law of Privileges in mind, for he was well aware that the Lombard problem was very different from the Sicilian. He was here opposed, not by a multitude of disconnected, mutually warring, minor powers, but by a large number of homogeneous foes, territorial powers who, not unlike the German princes, would immediately rally to a common banner to repulse a common enemy, all their mutual jealousies and squabbles notwithstanding. The Peace of Constance did not forbid a union of the towns, but this revival of the ancient Lombard League was a manifest act of hostility, provoked it is true by Frederick’s attitude, which in Lombard politics had gradually become more and more obviously that of a partisan. Lombardy was in fact split into two camps, and a non-party Emperor was scarcely possible. Traditional as well as personal bias determined his choice of party.
Cremona and Milan strove for the hegemony of Lombardy, just as Genoa and Pisa disputed the supremacy of the Mediterranean. Milan was of old the most powerful of the Lombard towns. The arrogance of the bishops who sat in the seat of St. Ambrose rose in the eleventh century to actual rivalry with Rome, as Frederick reminded the Romans, to spur them on to humble the pride of Milan. Milan, moreover, was an ancient coronation town. In quite recent times Henry VI had worn there the crown of the Italian King. The people of Milan, with justifiable pride, had been the first among the communes to fight for freedom. Here for the first time the burghers and the humbler aristocracy made common cause against the Great, and had in the motta* achieved municipal unity. Milan was the first town which quite early dared to defy imperial authority. Having once talked of freedom, Milan under its consuls strove for political independence and submitted only with extreme distaste to any law, spiritual or temporal, emanating from a higher power. This attitude on the part of its powerful citizens of dual rebellion—against Church and Empire—made Milan the focus of heresy and insurrection. Its territories were the size of a dukedom, and no other Lombard town could compete with it in wealth or power. The other towns also early developed a taste for freedom, for independence and for territorial aggrandisement. In spite of endless wars amongst themselves they all willingly acknowledged the primacy of “the central town” if outside aggression threatened their liberties and challenged them to common resistance. This did not preclude them from occasionally banding themselves together against the oppressive superiority of Milan, or even lending Barbarossa a helping hand when he destroyed the town in 1162. Such alliances between the towns did not denote any dream of a larger unity. The polis was all in all to the Lombards as to the Greeks, and this narrow-minded pre-occupation with solely municipal affairs militated against all serious political thought, and against any wish to subordinate their town to the overlordship of the Roman Empire.
Not all the towns, however, followed Milan; a proportion held to Cremona. Tacitus’s judgment seemed for many a long day to hang like a curse over this town: bellis externis intacta, civilibus infelix. But from the ninth century on Cremona became powerful and rich and her ships sailed down the Po to trade with Venice and even directly with Byzantium. The first Italian town to be granted a town charter, as far as is known, was Cremona, and since then the burghers whom Otto III protected had in the main stood by the Empire. A hundred years later, in 1098, the final seal was put for all time on Cremona’s loyalty. The Margravine Matilda, who had in her lifetime witnessed the great Canossa struggle, threw down an apple of discord between Cremona and Milan when she amplified a gift to the Cremonese by including the land between the Adda and the Serio, the so-called “insula Fulcherii,” and the town of Crema. “In this year the fight for Crema began,” declares the chronicler, and from this time onwards Cremona was always on the side of the Emperors, for only they could secure to the Cremonese the possession of the bequest by protecting them against Milan who also laid claim to Crema. It was important therefore for the Emperors to strengthen the loyal communes, and those towns which from time to time for one reason or another were enemies of Milan or of Milan’s satellites. The political groupings in Lombardy altered often, and altered suddenly. But however greatly the following of the two rival towns might change, one thing remained unchanged in Lombardy: the hate between Cremona and Milan.
Frederick II had to take up his position. Two ways were theoretically open: he could hold himself aloof and above the quarrels of the towns, if he could have found a formula to satisfy all rivals, and thus have won the Lombard towns for himself. This might in fact have been possible if Frederick instead of ever and again seeking reconciliation with the aristocratic Church had made common cause with the Lombards against the common enemy—the papacy. But an alliance of the Empire with the tiers état against the clergy—in other spheres the greatest of Frederick’s great achievements—had for many reasons not yet risen above the Hohenstaufen’s horizon in the sphere of world politics. So only the second path lay open: to take sides; to espouse the cause of Cremona, and with her help and her allies, in addition to the resources of Sicily—which earlier emperors had not had at their disposal—and with German backing, to intimidate the opposite party, if possible without fighting, and so to restore imperial rights. The personal facto
r was not wanting. Frederick on his first journey to Germany at seventeen had been hunted by Milan, whereas Cremona had helped him in his need. He had pledged his faith to her, confirming her title to Crema and the Isola Fulcheria. Frederick apparently considered this old attachment to Cremona still of value; at any rate he professed to feel himself still bound by his early promise—by no means always his case—and accepted now her friendly demonstration with a graciousness he rarely showed at any time to any town. “This faithful town, hereditarily loyal to the Empire,” as he called it, was later even permitted to play the godmother to Frederick’s son, Conrad.
Yet another factor carried weight. The Emperor nourished an instinctive constitutional hate against rebels in general, and an inherited hate against Milan in particular. “No sooner had we ascended against all the expectation of men, by the aid of Divine Providence alone, the highest peaks of the Roman Empire, in the years of our ripening adolescence, in the glowing power of mind and body… than all the acuteness of our mind was continually directed to one end… to avenge the injury offered (by the Milanese) to our Father and our Grandfather and to trample under foot the offshoots of abhorred freedom already carefully cultivated in other places also.” Thus the Emperor, ten years later. Such abysmal hate, such lust for vengeance, admits no argument. It is simply a fact to be reckoned with. As early as 1219 in Germany Frederick had vowed to the Cremonese never to receive Milan into favour without their concurrence. He soon delegated to Cremona control over the affairs of Lombardy.
This was the major schism in northern Italy, and the Emperor’s attitude to it was already laid down. The mere fact that he summoned his Diet to meet in Cremona showed the enemy his hand. But in the tangle of divisions and feuds the rivalry of the two groups of towns only represented one of many cleavages. From somewhere about the turn of the century the inhabitants of the towns had been divided by internal faction. In the eleventh century burgher and inferior noble had made common cause against margrave and count, and had wrung from the great landowners the territories of the town. And now the plebeians had risen against the inferior noble and the town knight. In most towns two factions had developed, the knightly party and the popular party, and in some cases the similar parties of different towns had formed alliances.
This quarrel divided Lombardy horizontally into two factions, between whom the Emperor must needs make his choice. His attitude could not be merely to support the knights, though in general of course they were pro-Emperor, while the plebeians as the revolutionary section seemed naturally the Emperor’s foes. Matters were not however so straightforward and simple as that. The knights were frequently anti-Emperor and the plebeians the opposite. It even happened now and then—as later once in Siena—that one of the Emperor’s men cleverly contrived to place himself at the head of the popular movement and that the victorious popular party was thus the Emperor’s. In spite of the confusion, however, we can trace certain well-defined principles that guided Frederick’s conduct: in the traditionally loyal towns like Cremona, Parma, Pavia he tried to smooth out differences and establish peace, so as to secure the support of these imperial cities as a whole. In the towns which he felt to be wavering, and whose population as a whole he could not hope to win, he sided with the knights. In Piacenza, for instance, he broke up the plebeian party, declared them rebels and outlawed them, while he recognised and protected the potentially loyal knightly party and issued orders to the neighbouring towns to support the knights of Piacenza. A short-lived alliance even came to birth between the knights of Piacenza and the imperial commune of Cremona. In the actively hostile towns the Emperor set himself to fan the discord as far as possible. It was a complicated policy, since Frederick had to treat each town individually and could never bring his direct, wholesale straightforward methods into play, unless he were prepared to fight.
A sample correspondence will illustrate the radically different points of view of the pro- and anti-Kaiser towns. If it is a fabrication it is all the more illustrative. Florence wrote during these years to the imperial town of Siena: “It is true that the Emperor’s Majesty being bound by no law enjoys the fulness of power. Yet it is dependent on the law for life and must not hanker after what is alien, lest it break the law and be itself accused of injustice at the very time that it enforces obedience upon others.” Whereupon Siena writes: “Whereas it is the property of the Roman Princeps to tower above others in peace or war as victor, it is not to be tolerated that his subjects should crave equally to be his equals. For if the condition of all men were equal the name of Princeps would be an empty sham; there can be no superior without inferiors. And the law of nations would have accomplished nothing, whereas it has established inequality and arranged ranks and grades.”
It would not be easy to formulate more sharply the contrasts in which the question of the Church’s attitude to the parties is bound up. For the aristocratic Church of the Middle Ages must of necessity be as hostile as the Emperor to the popular movement, which was asserting the freedom of the individual alike against temporal and against spiritual authority. And so in fact it was. Just before this, when the populace of Milan rose against the bishop, the papal legate in Lombardy, Cardinal Hugo of Ostia, assisted the knightly party against the people. Frederick II, like his predecessors, always strove to preserve, as far as he could, the feeble remnants of episcopal power in the Lombard towns. In these matters he was, to all appearance, hand in glove with the Pope, who went so far as to excommunicate Milan and stigmatised it as “saturated with the poison of heresy.” Frederick had demonstrated his unanimity with the Church on such matters by stiffening up, in March 1224, the edict against heretics which he had already issued on the occasion of his coronation. Those condemned as heretics by the bishop were summoned before a secular tribunal, and the punishment for heresy was death by burning or the amputation of the tongue, that further blasphemy might be forestalled. These edicts were no mere “courtesies” from Emperor to Pope; they represented, as will be seen later, the innermost conviction of Frederick, for whom the heretic was synonymous with the rebel, who blasphemed the divine majesty of the Emperor. Being at one with the Church on questions of rebels and heretics Frederick had counted on considerable support from the Church for his Lombard Diet, the more so as his agenda especially stressed the two items of heresy and Crusade.
The Curia had to stand by him over the Crusade, but that by no means implied taking an anti-Lombard line; quite the reverse; politically the Church was driven into the Lombards’ arms. For if the Emperor were to succeed in establishing in north Italy a power similar to that he had organised in Sicily, the states of the Church would be hemmed in, north and south, by imperial territories, and the Curia could foresee his next move. The papal “Recuperations,” the central Italian provinces of the Church, were menaced; at a very minimum the Adriatic strip, the March and Spoleto, but probably other sections of the Church’s land as well, would be commandeered to give Frederick a corridor from south to north. Frederick had let it be seen how sorely he craved these lands.
As long as the Lombards, however, resisted the Emperor, and stood out against any reproduction in northern Italy of the Sicilian monarchy, the Church was safe. The Curia therefore could not possibly take the risk of helping the Emperor to break down the opposition of the Lombard towns. Politically the Church found the Lombard Confederation a valuable ally, and in Rome the fact was welcomed that the League was organising itself into a semi-state. The Confederation was renewed for twenty-five years. All the confederate towns had annually to renew the oath; none were to conclude independent peace; and resignation from the league was to be considered as “rebellion” and dealt with accordingly. The Emperor saw in the Confederation a rebel state within a state; the Church hailed it as a bulwark against imperial encirclement.
In questions relating to heresy and popular movements the views of Emperor and Curia were by no means identical. As regards the recalcitrant Roman plebeians they saw eye to eye on many points, but the Curia was in
touch with the Roman populace in a way in which the Emperor was not. The Curia too was willing enough to use the Emperor’s sword for the eradication of heresy, but felt by no means so exclusively dependent on his good offices in the matter as Frederick liked to think. Here quite a new factor enters in. The two new mendicant orders aimed at reaching these two classes, plebeian and heretic, and either luring them back into the Church or rendering them innocuous. The democratic Franciscans and the heresy-hunting Dominicans had recently sprung from the womb of the Church in her old age. These two Orders lent a significance, beyond the merely political, to the alliance between Lombards and Curia. Without here pursuing the very varied activities of the Orders in detail we may quote an episode which legend records, that illustrates the sympathy existing between a man like St. Francis and various strata of the populace. One day when the saint was preaching in Perugia before a large crowd the knights of the town invaded the piazza and began to joust and to manoeuvre their horses, doing their best to disturb the saint’s discourse, whereupon the populace set upon them. For the message of St. Francis was directed to the humbler townsfolk who enthusiastically clung to the apostle of poverty.
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Such was in rough outline the tangled state of affairs in northern Italy when Frederick set out to hold his diet in Lombardy. To add to existing difficulties Frederick’s quarrel with the Curia over the episcopal elections in Sicily was just then at its height. And, finally, his march to the north provoked a quarrel with the Curia that nearly amounted to a final breach. Without asking permission Frederick marched his troops right through central Italy and, acting as if the Church only held these territories from the Empire in fee, he enlisted auxiliaries for his Lombard Diet. This procedure was no doubt a little brusque. Frederick II, however, had not acted without reflection. If the Pope had denied him permission the breach would have been even more inevitable, and he would have created a dangerous precedent for himself by appearing to acknowledge that the Emperor had no right to march his troops from Sicily into north Italy without papal sanction. Pope Honorius now taxed Frederick with this march, reproached him for ingratitude to the Church, and at last the long-repressed resentment on both sides burst forth. Quousque tandem patientia mea abutetur pontifex! Such was the gist of Frederick’s answer, if we may anticipate an expression attributed to him later in a reply in which he likened the Pope to Catiline.
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