Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  These things all gave a pretext for the papal reproach that Frederick II had adopted Saracen customs. Legend, partly friendly, partly malicious, strengthened this belief. The Saracen dancing girls, whom the Sultan had sent for his entertainment became, in the Pope’s letters, Christian women whom Frederick had compelled to dance before the Infidel before being outraged. An English pilgrim even wrote home that the Emperor had married the Sultan’s daughter and fifty Saracen women. His marriage with Isabella of Jerusalem may have lent colour to this story, perhaps also the fact that he had a natural son, Frederick of Antioch, of whose mother nothing was known and whose name suggested an oriental origin. People later even explained the normal dress of the Muslim women, the black “chadar,” as mourning for Frederick which the women had worn ever since his departure.

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  It is obvious that Frederick’s stay in the Holy Land kindled the imagination of his contemporaries in the very highest degree, especially his relationship to the Assassins (Hashishin), with one branch of whom, the Ismailites of Lebanon, he did in fact exchange embassies. The Hashishin were, as Marco Polo recorded a generation later, a fanatical sect who were trained to the most unquestioning obedience by their leader, Hasan i Sabbah, the so-called “Old Man of the Mountain,” and committed every kind of murder for the service of Islam. Suitable boys were selected and for years subjected to a most spartan regime, the delights of Paradise recounted to them the while. When the right moment came they were given a draught of hashish with their usual frugal meal. When they awoke it was to find themselves in a veritable garden of Paradise, which the “Old Man of the Mountain” had contrived in a beautiful valley. Here all the realistic promises of the Qur’an were fulfilled, streams flowed with honey, milk and wine, there were leaping fountains, huris and boys. After a few days of glorious enjoyment the disciples were given a second draught, from which they woke to find themselves again at the Old Man’s table, filled with yearning for the Paradise they had tasted. They were promised a return to Paradise if they should find death in their master’s service. The one ambition of the Hashishin was, therefore, speedy death.

  The Emperor had had intercourse—though very transitory—with this terrible sect whose daggers had laid low innumerable distinguished crusaders, and people told tales of a visit he was alleged to have paid to the “Old Man of the Mountain.” To demonstrate the obedience of his people the Old Man had signalled to two who were standing at the top of a high tower; happy to attain Paradise so soon, they hurled themselves down at his bidding. A later version represents Frederick as rearing his own “obedient stabbers” on similar lines. He locked children in a cellar, it was said, showed himself very rarely, and had them taught that the Emperor was God Almighty. When the little prisoners learned this:

  They thought that this indeed was so,

  The Kaiser was Lord God below.

  No prince was murdered during Frederick’s lifetime whose death was not ascribed to Frederick’s assassins, and even the Popes did not scorn to spread such rumours.

  These tales, of course, lack all historic truth, but it is interesting to note how tales of horror and wonder tend to focus round one great name, partly in order to gain greater credence from its authority and partly out of a strange desire to see two incongruous elements brought together in one person’s story—the real and the fantastic; Muhammad and Christ; Kaiser and Khalif. The oriental atmosphere that surrounds the figure of Frederick II was a necessary factor in the evolution of the autocratic mind, which loved to exercise the unchallenged caprice of a master. The Puer Apuliae has developed and revealed himself: he is no longer the fate and destiny of individuals; but as the Emperor, imitating the Old Man of the Mountain and playing God to his little prisoners in the cellar, he becomes himself the fate or destiny of communities and peoples.

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  There is no doubt that the Emperor was deeply impressed by the unquestioning obedience that he saw and by the unlimited autocracy of the oriental despot and the aura of Fate that surrounded them. A few years later the Pope wrote bitterly to him: “In thy kingdom of Sicily no man dares move a hand or foot save at thy command.”

  In all the anecdotes and reported conversations that record Frederick’s words and deeds during his Syrian stay, one recurring note is the immense admiration and reverence that he displayed for men and things. No doubt this had a political value—but the same is true throughout his life. When Frederick, in later days, was showing distinguished visitors his priceless planetarium, in which sun, moon and stars moved in mysterious harmony, he loved to tell that this was a gift of his Arab friend the Sultan, who was dearer to him than any living man save only King Conrad, his son and the heir of his body. Such a phrase indicates how boundless was the admiration felt by this greater Emperor for the Muslim princes—himself almost sole arbiter of the West. Constantly the proud boast recurs: “The Hohenstaufen Emperor, friend of the Muslim King”; when, for instance, he begs on occasion the loan of a small force from the Sultan of Egypt to intimidate the Lombard rebels, or when he opines that certain events in the East would not have taken place if he had had his way, sighing: “Ah… if my friend al Kamil were alive…!” Or, at a Diet of the German princes in Friuli, when the Emperor received with ostentatious favour a deputation from his Arab friends and celebrated with them—in sight of bishops and princes—in a great banquet the Muhammadan feast of the Hijrah, and then departed for Apulia in company with his Muslim guests; or when for a long time he mourns and bitterly laments the death of his friend, al Kamil—whom he had scarcely ever met—the chronicler who reports this imperial grief suggests a remarkable cause: the Sultan had perished unbaptised. All indications point to the fact that for the only time in his life, now vis-à-vis the East, Kaiser Frederick felt himself to be the learner and the gainer. He is ever ready to acknowledge the debt and proclaim himself the disciple; or, to use his own strong expression, “We are all naught but slaves of the Sultan.” That sums up the situation. On every convenient occasion Frederick endeavours to imitate his Eastern models, to pose as one of themselves. He sends mathematical and philosophical questions to the Sultans, or begs the Khalif for his good offices to convey an imperial letter on such topics to one scholar or another. After his return to the West Frederick kept up his Eastern correspondence, and recounts to his Muslim friends his quarrels with the Pope and with the Lombards, quoting by the way the famous Arab poets and imitating Arab custom in the endless titles he gives himself: Frederick, son of Kaiser Henry, son of Kaiser Frederick, etc., etc. He does not omit the customary emulation in the giving of gifts: al Kamil had presented him with an elephant, Frederick sends him in return a polar bear, which to the amazement of the Arabs eats nothing but fish. It is easy to detect the Emperor’s pride in being thus able to return the Sultan’s costly gift. In his intercourse with Easterns Frederick displays the gratitude which the Pope used to demand from him in vain. Only from the East did Frederick in fact receive new ideas and intellectual stimulus.

  The Emperor was naturally not indifferent to the impression he created; he succeeded in exciting great admiration: no western prince has ever evoked so much affection and understanding as he. Not only did they admire the encyclopaedic learning of the Emperor, who maintained erudite correspondence with the learned men of Egypt and Syria, Iraq, Arabia, Yemen, as well as Morocco and Spain, but they followed all the more important events of his life with unflagging interest. They knew of his Lombard troubles, of the conspiracies engineered by the Pope, spoke familiarly of Tuscany and Lombardy, quoted admiringly the interminable titles of the Emperor in which all his kingdoms and provinces were rehearsed by name. “I wished to include this letter (with the titles),” writes an Arab historian, “to record what territories are united under the sceptre of this Emperor and King. In truth there has never been in Christendom since the days of Alexander a monarch like to this, not only because of his power but because he challenges the Pope to battle, their Khalif, and drives him from the field.” A hundred years lat
er people still quoted Frederick on the political constellations of Italy: whoever wished to rule in Italy—he had said—must be good friends with the Pope, must have Milan in his power, and must possess good astrologers.

  It was a highly intellectual “Marriage Festival of Susa” that Frederick celebrated when he surrendered to the East as all great men have done since Alexander of Macedon, each after his own kind. What intoxicated the Hohenstaufen was not the space nor the sensual magic, which had been familiar to him as a Sicilian from his boyhood, but the inspiring freedom of the spirit, unfettered by scholastic philosophy and church dogma. He was the first and only medieval Emperor who drank of the spirit of the East and came home to fuse it with the Holy Roman Empire, the Empire of the Salians and the Hohenstaufens.

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  It was the Eastern triumph, not merely Eastern travel that won for Frederick the halo of the Caesars. On the 17th of March, 1229, the Emperor Frederick II made his entry into the royal city of Jerusalem. In defiance of Patriarch Gerold’s commands, the bulk of the pilgrims followed him, impelled partly by the yearning to do reverence to the Holy Sepulchre, partly by the desire to witness how the age-old prophecy would be fulfilled, of the Messianic ruler of the West who should set free Jerusalem. More than ten years before a widespread Arab prophecy had named the Calabrian King as Saviour of the Tomb, and many thought that King of the East was drawing nigh who should attack Islam in the rear. It was true enough that the Muslims had a hard fight to fight in the further East, but no man knew in all its fulness what this meant. For the distant thunder was the trampling of Chingiz Khan’s mounted hordes, while the Christians were still thinking of the Nestorian Prester John, whom men compared to Alexander, and with whom the Emperor was supposed to have exchanged remarkable embassies. There was no doubt at all in the minds of “the Pious,” as Frederick now began for the first time to style his adherents, that the Hohenstaufen Frederick II whom the pilgrims followed was the true Emperor of the Fulfilment who as by a miracle had succeeded in freeing Jerusalem, “without battle, without instrument of war, without bloodshed,” as the promise ran. To the papalists the Emperor now appeared to assume the features of the impious Anti-Christ who should take his seat like a God in the temple of the Almighty for the confusion of the faithful.

  On the day of his entry Frederick immediately betook himself to the Church of the Sepulchre, “In order,” as he wrote, “as a Catholic Emperor, to worship reverently at the grave of our Lord.” The whole world assumed that since the Emperor had now not only fulfilled his vow to make a Crusade, but had also accomplished the liberation of Jerusalem, he would be forthwith released from the papal ban. … “For no ban can endure longer in the eyes of God than a man’s sin,” so “Freidank” declared, in almost heretic phrase, challenging thereby the papal claim “to bind and to loose.” Even more anti-papal was his next clause: “Obedience is good as long as the Master worketh righteousness. If the Master seek to compel the servant to do what is wrong before God, then the servant must quit his master and follow him who doeth right.” Many another pilgrim shared Freidank’s views, and in Germany the Pope was often styled a “heretic.” The Emperor, too, was hopeful that his excommunication would now be ended. He wanted to arrange for a Sunday Mass in the Church of the Sepulchre. The wise and prudent Hermann of Salza, however, dissuaded him from thus rashly forestalling the Pope and challenging his further displeasure, for all the attempts at reconciliation that Frederick had made before and after his arrival in the Holy Land had been ignored, or had only provoked a renewal of the ban. The Pope’s unforgiving spirit was turned to good account. Thanks to it, it came about that on the 18th of March, the fourth Sunday before Easter, there took place in Jerusalem in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the most memorable self-coronation of an Emperor that the world was to see till the days of Napoleon. In full imperial State the banned and excommunicated Emperor—outside the congregation of the faithful—accompanied by followers and friends, crossed the threshold of the sacred edifice. Here, where the first king of Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon, with humble emotion, refused to wear a golden circlet where his Lord had worn a crown of thorns; here, without intermediary of the Church, without bishop, without coronation mass, Kaiser Frederick II, proud and unabashed, stretched forth his hand to take the royal crown of the Holy City. Striding towards the altar of the Sepulchre he lifted from it the crown, and himself placed it on his own head—an act, whether so intended, of far-reaching symbolism. For thus, on the holiest spot of all the Christian universe, he asserted a king’s immediate vassalhood to God, and without the interposition of the Church approached his God direct as a triumphant conqueror.

  Frederick II made no effort to derive from doctrines and theories a belief in the immediate relationship of God to Emperor—a doctrine fiercely denied by the Popes since the evolution of the Hierarchy—he based it on the miracles of his own career, obvious to all and far-renowned, which proved as nothing else could do that God’s immediate choice rested on his imperial person, if not on his imperial office. This personal element could be reinforced by doctrine, such as the teaching of a certain supernatural character inherent in the imperial majesty. Before the great breach Pope Gregory had written that God had installed the Emperor as a Cherub; he had been elevated “not as a Seraph but as a second Cherub, as a token of resemblance to the only-begotten son,” so they wrote later. This angelic character, which Pope Innocent had claimed for himself—“less than God, but more than man”—was alluded to by Frederick in the words wherewith he announced the imperial triumph in Jerusalem to the world at large. Immediately after the coronation Frederick made a public speech to the assembled pilgrims, while Hermann of Salza repeated the Emperor’s words in Latin and in German. The same speech, greatly expanded and enriched, formed the basis of a manifesto which was to announce the glory of this day to all the world: magniloquent pathos in which the Emperor’s more than mortal voice should make itself heard throughout the entire orbis terrarum. “Let all that are of righteous heart rejoice and give thanks unto the Lord, who hath taken pleasure in his people as they praised the Emperor of Peace. Let us praise him, whom the angels praise. …” The very first phrases place Frederick in the due proximity to God amongst the angels, like them aloft above the people, and now through the Emperor’s mouth is heard the very voice of God himself making known to the peoples the deeds of the Emperor as his own: “God he is the Lord, and it is he alone who worketh great wonders, it is he who mindful of his own mercy renews in our day the marvels that he wrought of old, as it is written. For God when he would make known his might hath need neither of chariots nor of horses: he hath shewn his power by the small number of his instruments, that all peoples might see and know that he is terrible in his might and glorious in his majesty and marvellous in his planning beyond all the sons of men. For in these few last days, more by the power of his wonders than by men’s courage, he hath happily caused that work to be accomplished which for long times past many princes and many mighty of the earth with the multitude of their peoples have all essayed in vain.”

  Thus Frederick ascribes to God what he himself had done, and while the Emperor praises the triumph of the One God he skilfully (with God) praises himself. Then, after an appeal to the nation, he bursts out: “See ye, now is the day of that salvation…,” and the manifesto proceeds to recount the wonderful proofs of God’s counsel and help displayed from the beginning. The pitiable plight of the pilgrims in Jaffa is pictured when suddenly the storms have cut off all supplies and when thereupon fear and murmuring waxed strong amongst them. God commanded the winds and the sea and a great calm fell, and all men cried “How great is he that commandeth the winds and the waters and they obey him.” The Emperor then related other difficulties, all of which God and his Son had miraculously solved by the instrumentality of the Emperor. How the hostile Sultans had lain at the distance of but one day’s journey, and how Christ himself, having witnessed from on high the Emperor’s patience and long suffering, so directe
d the negotiations that the Holy City was yielded to the Emperor and the treaty was ready for confirmation on the very day of our Lord’s resurrection. Finally, the scene in Jerusalem was briefly painted when the excommunicated Emperor donned the crown, “For Almighty God from the throne of his majesty in the plentitude of his grace hath exalted us above all the princes of the earth, that all may know that the hand of the Lord hath done this. And all who revere the True Faith shall proclaim far and wide that ‘the blessed of God hath visited us and hath wrought salvation for his people and hath exalted a horn in the house of his servant David.’”

  Beneath the appearance of humble devotion all this ascription of each success to God served but to exalt the Emperor himself. This was, moreover, the first time that Frederick II had adopted the words of Holy Scripture about the Son of God and applied them to his own Majesty: through the God-Kingship of David approaching the Saviour. There was nothing sensationally new in this. All the Emperors since Charlemagne had held themselves to be the heirs and successors of King David, the Chosen of God, and this was an argument for the ancient claim of the imperial immediacy. The coronation formula has this in mind, “David thy son thou hast exalted to the summit of Kingship.” The claim, however, was one thing; its actual realisation was another. For Frederick II was not merely claiming intellectually the inheritance of David, but claimed miraculously to have entered into actual possession of his inheritance, and showed himself to all the world as King of Jerusalem. Men sang the praises of the Emperor, “David wast thou in Jerusalem,” and Frederick himself wrote “It fills us with joy that our Saviour Jesus of Nazareth also sprang from David’s royal stock.” Similar thoughts were in the mind of a German poet who celebrated the Emperor’s triumphs of these days in pompous hexameters comparing Frederick to Jerusalem’s other King: