Thus ended Frederick II’s first great fight with the Curia, and for nearly ten years to come the strife was latent only. The newly established accord between Emperor and Pope was ostentatiously manifested to the world. Frederick paid a visit to Pope Gregory in his paternal home in Anagni, where they sealed their pact “with holy kisses” as Frederick reported. The Pope and the Emperor dined tête-à-tête in the presence of one man only, whose mission in life it was to strive for the honour of Church and Empire, and to whose efforts the conclusion of peace was in no small measure due: Hermann of Salza, the German Grand Master.
Now the Emperor set to work to build up his power: first in Sicily, later in Germany.
* Feirefis, Old French: vaire fiz, “the particoloured son,” Wolfram von Eschenbach, i. 1705.—Tr.
V. Tyrant of Sicily
Influence of Eastern success—Affection for Sicily—
Three emperor models—Constitutions of Melfi, 1231
—Expectation of Golden Age and End of World—
Augustales minted—Frederick’s birthday a public
holiday.
I
Liber Augustalis—Cult of Justitia—Invocation of
imperial name—“Crown Prosecution”—Theory of
the “Fall”—Necessitas—Dante’s de Monorchia—
The Divine Comedy.
II
Pope Gregory and the Liber Augustalis—Relation of
Church and State—Zeal against heretics—Muslims
and Jews—State organisation: justiciars, notaries—
Conditions of service—Treatment of suspects—
Rebellious towns—Augusta—Uniformity and simplification
of government—Town creation; frontier protection—
Monopolies—Customs and revenue—
Weights and measures—Fairs and markets—The
Emperor as trader—Taxation—Commercial agreements—
Overseas consuls and embassies—A Sicilian
nation—Marriage ordinances.
III
Triumph of lay culture—Petrus de Vinea (Piero della
Vigna)—Frederick’s public speaking—Frederick
amongst intimates—Youthfulness of Sicilian court—
Frederick’s retainers; menagerie—Famous families in
his service—Thomas Aquinas—Valetti imperatoris
—Frederick’s sons—Chivalry at court—Foggia:
banquets, revelry—Michael Scot—Sicilian poetry;
use of vernacular—Intellectual thought at court—
Learning at court—Astronomy and Astrology—
Hebrew scholars—Spirit of Enquiry; Ibn Sabin of
Ceuta—Research and experiment—De arte venandi
cum avibus—The art of seeing “things that are, as they
are”—Frederick’s personal appearance.
V. Tyrant of Sicily
It was no accident that Frederick II’s founding of the first absolute monarchy of the West followed his triumph in the East. This event had brought about a metamorphosis, as when a mythic hero becomes suddenly aware of his divine origin and the god in him springs visibly to life. Proclaiming himself the son of Jupiter Ammon, grandson of Venus Genetrix, or some other emanation of a Godhead, he gradually achieves his own apotheosis. From the moment that the divine sonship is proclaimed the career of the monarch takes a new direction: from the phase of mere personal activity and self-assertion he grows in stature, obeying the eternal law of his being by creative activity in empire and in state.
The Jerusalem coronation obviously marked such a turning point in Frederick’s career. The Puer Apuliae had circled round Palermo, Aix and Rome, and now as German-Roman Emperor, embraced the Orient. The whole was in his grasp. This last and outermost circle bordered on the dreamlike and the infinite and set bounds to all further personal ambition. No higher office lay ahead, no new crown was waiting, nothing could now exalt him further. For the first time the Hohenstaufen Emperor had focussed the eyes of the whole world—the Christian West and the Muslim East—on the Imperator of Christendom. For the first time he had proved his mettle in a world enterprise, as leader of a crusading army. For the first time God himself—in the great Jerusalem manifesto—had spoken to the peoples of the earth, and through the Emperor’s mouth proclaimed the Emperor his instrument. In the East Frederick had caught a glimpse of wider horizons; he returned to the narrower spaces of the West, and transplanting thither the conception of oriental autocracy he proceeded to grow anew—with his states.
Piling the eastern David-kingship on the Germanic feudal overlordship, and both on the authority of the Roman Princeps, the Hohenstaufens had succeeded in raising the medieval Christian Empire of the Caesars to a unique pinnacle. It was Frederick’s unexampled good fortune to find at this point a willing and receptive people in whom he could confide—despite his greatness—and who were able to comprehend him, the dangers of his majesty notwithstanding. It was his luck to have a people of his own with whom he could feel at one. The medieval Emperor had hitherto held a remarkably detached position; though he held the torch for all the Western peoples as lord of the Holy Roman Empire, he had possessed no land or people of his own, in whom his being and personality could be merged, as theirs in him, who would devote themselves to him with all their strength of mind and body and lend him the poise and weight that the “provincial kings” possessed as lords of the soil. The Emperor was of course the leader of Christendom, alongside the Pope, but only in certain circumstances, during a Crusade for instance, did Christianity as a whole centre in him. There was no one “Christian people,” and if folk used the phrase it was a mere expression of faith.
The Imperator was Roman Emperor and Roman King, but the ancient Populus Romanus, that once had ruled the world, was dead, and only its empty shell still supplied the mould for imperial feasts and formulas. And what of the Imperator as ruler of the Germans? A unity of German people was never more than a momentary flash: no conception existed of a German nation, no common German activity was possible save in the service of Empire or of Church. The Saxon, Frank and Swabian Emperors had found their support, not in a German nation, but each in his individual race. The Emperor knew no one land, no one nation in which he could rule untrammelled as a God. Many an Emperor had craved for it and sought it, always in Italy, especially that imperial boy who was the first before Frederick to catch a glimpse of the uttermost heights of priestly-imperial power: Otto III. But he found no popular support in the degenerate citizens of Rome, and the inspired vision faded while the lad himself, only a “Wonder of the World,” died an early death—a kindred figure to the poet-boy Conradin, who sought a kingdom and found a scaffold: the last-born of the house of Hohenstaufen.
Frederick II alone, the last Germanic prince to found a state on Italian soil, was granted the fulfilment of German dreams. His success was based not on his Sicilian people alone, but also on the Empire, and on Divine Providence—as he habitually stated—and finally, and chiefly, on himself. He also might have faded out as a mere visionary, a sublime imperial ghost, had he not had his roots in reality and his feet firmly planted on mother earth, had he not wisely understood the art of drawing more and more on her reserves of strength, while he reached up to steal the fire from Heaven. Frederick II found a land of people that believed in him and understood him, though his majesty might frown threateningly down on them from distant regions, a people prepared to follow him blindly—whether from love or fear.
Every great ruler needs such a basis, a land in which his life is rooted, a land which, be it never so limited and small, yet begets men of his own stamp whom he can make lords of the world. Thus the Macedonian nobles held sway in Asia, the Spanish Grandees throughout the wide Hapsburg lands of Charles, and under Napoleon the Marshals of France rode Europe on a curb. Earlier Emperors lacked a nation, but they had their race, later Emperors had their households. The strength of the Germanic races—Saxons, Franks and Swabians—was flickering out; they h
ad let it stream from them into the outer world, into the Empire; they had no impulse or desire, perhaps no power, for further wanderings to follow the Emperor as a whole clan wherever he might journey. As mercenaries they hired themselves to the Emperors in growing numbers, but mercenaries are not a people, and their obedience is radically different from the devotion of deeply-rooted racial loyalty.
Obedience, unquestioning devotion, and the mass-strength of a people was a prime necessity for Frederick if he was to get new blood into the Empire. A people and a state were peculiarly necessary to him personally. An Englishman has recently said of him that this Hohenstaufen was a man of such a personality that “a whole community of men, a sect, a party, or a nation, could look back to him as their prophet, founder or liberator.” Frederick II, indeed, seemed by nature specially destined to be the founder of his own state. Only such a creation of his own could impose that restraint and moderation that was needed by a man who had grown up an orphan in a strange land, without the discipline of home or family or clan. This freedom from repression, this personal liberty—such as no predecessor had ever known—was precisely what gave Frederick such an immense advantage over the intellectually-fettered age in which he lived. To it he owed his clearness and breadth of vision, his mental alertness and flexibility, his knowledge of tongues and absence of prejudice, and that immediate personal relation to God which enabled him to outgrow the bonds of the Church and left him free to stride along the shortest path, heedless of everything save state necessity. The unique endowments of this Emperor, if they were not to be frittered away in dangerous versatilities, needed some firm framework within which to ply their creative tasks, needed a firmly organised state of his own devising, whose laws were his laws, and whose laws, for the sake of this state he had begotten, he himself must willingly obey. A ruler of this type could submit to no fetters but those of his own forging. His beloved Sicilian inheritance, the ancient kingdom of his Norman ancestors, offered him the opportunity to make what laws he would.
“Sicily is the Mother of Tyrants.” Almost cynically—for in Christian eyes the “tyrant” was the embodiment of Satan—Frederick II wrote this phrase of Orosius at the head of one of his later edicts. With sound instinct for the practical, rather than from conscious wisdom, first the followers of Guiscard and now the Hohenstaufens harked back in many points to the statecraft of the old Greek tyrants of Sicily. Now was the moment when a wise despot was more sorely needed than ever before in history.
*
The geographical unity of the Sicilian peninsula, bounded on three sides by the sea and bolted and barred on the North by Frederick’s chain of fortresses, was the only unity he found to hand. Corresponding to this we may reckon the unity of will and power in her ruler, the Emperor himself. The most important link between the Ruler and the Land was missing still—the unity of the nation: which demanded as a condition precedent a unity of blood and speech, of faith and feast, of history and of law. The most wonderful task that can be set to a creator here awaited the Hohenstaufen Emperor: the Creation of a People—that is the creation of people—a task impossible to any but a tyrant, and a tyrant who believes himself divine, and who, more important still, can make other men believe him to be God. For every command and every utterance of the godlike majesty must be sacred and the populace must sink into the dust before his “oracles,” a word Frederick II himself employed at times.
Such a state of affairs was only possible in Sicily, for Sicily was accustomed to it, and this rich, fertile soil peaked and pined without her tyrants. The Sicilians—half oriental in origin—worshipped their ruler as a God, and rightly so, for in a land, as indolent by nature as luxuriant, the tyrant was in fact the Saviour too.
When the Emperor Henry VI entered Palermo in solemn state with his victorious army the people flung themselves down with their faces to the ground, shunning the sight of their Lord’s majesty. Under the reges fortunati, the Norman kings, prostration had been the custom, and it may have persisted, strengthened under Arab rule, since Narses, the Conqueror of the Goths, had brought the country under Byzantium. Sicily then was well accustomed to fall on her knees to any wielder of power; it is easy to imagine how this ruler-worship would gain in intensity when, instead of a Norman Count or ordinary prince, these glorious days brought her the Roman Emperor for her King. According to Roman Law the Emperor was Divus, in whose person the whole Empire, from of old, worshipped the symbol of the Godhead, and before whom even the Christian knights, the Templars and their brothers of St. John were wont to bow the knee. In Sicily, therefore, Frederick II could count on finding the willing self-surrender that he needed.
Sicily had been the dream-paradise of the Germanic tribes, Goethe still terms it “the key to everything.” Sicily, therefore, with Apulia, was the Land of Promise to an Emperor who sought to realise his dreams. When Frederick II crossed the sea on his crusade and saw Palestine and Syria, the “promised land” of Holy Scripture, he remarked—with his characteristically blasphemous wit—that Jehovah could not have seen his own hereditary Sicily, Apulia, and the Terra Laboris. If he had he could not so greatly have overrated this land that he was giving to the Jews. The south Italian kingdom where Frederick had spent his childhood, which he had known from infancy, remained through life his one true love. He would converse with “his Apulia” as with a living person, a beloved woman, and only in the lap of his hereditary land could he feel himself at home. When Napoleon said “I have only one passion and one love: France. I sleep with her, never has she forsaken me, she pours forth blood and treasure on my behalf…” he was expressing kindred feelings. Frederick II addressed to the land he loved, who gave herself to him, words of affection and of imagery from the Bible, and the poetry of his time and from the lyrics of the Orient. His southern kingdom is the “apple of his eye”; “the loveliness of his land exceeds all earthly sweetness”; “it is a haven amidst the floods and a pleasure-garden amidst a waste of thorns”; to it he turns “full of yearning, when he sails to and fro upon the Empire’s seas.” “Yet a little while to assure the highest victory to our titles and an end to your burdens and we promise our assured return; then rejoicing in our mutual love we shall gratify you with our constant presence whom now we can only caress intermittently with letters.” Thus he once wrote from Upper Italy. And again: “Though the multitude of peoples who happily breathe an atmosphere of peace under our rule, preoccupy our thoughts without intermission, yet impelled by a certain privilege of love we shall vigilantly devote constant thought to our own beloved people of Sicily, whose inheritance is more glorious in our eyes than all our other possessions, that she may be graced with peace and may flourish in the days of Caesar Augustus.”
Such was Frederick’s attitude to Sicily. “Sicily,” in his mouth, always embraces the “two Sicilies”; not island Sicily alone, but also Apulia and the southern half of the Italian peninsula. With the Sicilians he feels himself completely at one. As the Jewish God out of the multitude of peoples on the earth chose himself one—it is not possible to exaggerate the exactness with which Frederick pressed home the analogy—so the Emperor, King of Kings, Lord of the Imperium, chose him the Apulian-Sicilian people. Sicily is his promised land, her people are his chosen people, on whom he leans “as the head on a cushion for repose”; “the radiance of their faithfulness surrounds us like a star whose light grows brighter still as time flows by.” He professes that sympathy with the Sicilians “which springs from the graciousness of tender love which a father bears his sons”—the word is worth noting; the hackneyed phrase “Father of his people” dates from Frederick. A later writing expresses more completely the living unity of ruler and ruled: “We have chosen our domain of Sicily for our own amongst all other lands, and taken the whole kingdom as the place of our abiding, for we—radiant with the glory of the title of the Caesars—yet feel it no ignoble thing to be called ‘a man of Apulia.’ Borne hither and thither as we are on imperial floods far from the havens and harbours of Sicily, we feel ou
rselves a pilgrim and a wanderer from home. … Ever have we found your wishes one with ours; your willing and not-willing ever like unto our own.” These were no light words. The assurances of love for Sicily, however, of identity with her people would have remained words had Frederick not cemented them with deeds.
His early years as king had betrayed little of all this, and no such expressions then fell from him. As befitted his youth he had then faced the task of purging his kingdom of the vampires and parasites who were draining it of blood and marrow. By force and guile he had combated many, if scattered, forces and brought a preliminary order out of chaos. He had provided a scaffolding and framework for the state, prescribed the lines of future development, outlined the external unity of the state and laid the foundation of much else. But all this was, as it were, the preparation of the soil in which ten years later he was to sow the seed. The second state was the work of the mature philosopher and lawgiver, who “wove of the whole the warp and weft,” who impregnated the living state with his spirit and his law and called his creature into life—“as the soul creates a body for itself,” to quote from a Mirror of Princes. Having created a space in which to work, Frederick’s scheme was to fill it with himself as the law-giving Caesar, who followed the deed of force by the deed of love… the “prime love,” as Dante extols it in the Law-Giver Justinian.
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