Frederick’s great predecessor as verus imperator, Pope Innocent III, who was to the marrow an imperial statesman, equated heresy and treason when he said it was a graver thing to offend against heavenly than earthly majesty. There is an echo of the Pope’s words in Frederick’s Coronation edicts of 1220, but this is the first occasion of his translating the doctrine into state action. In the Sicilian edict it runs: “We condemn most severely the increase of heretics in Sicily and we command for the present: that the crime of heresy, the heresy of any and every accursed sect—under whatever name the sectaries are known—shall be accounted a crime against the State, as it is in the ancient Roman laws. It must be condemned as a yet more heinous offence than a crime against our own Majesty, because it is a manifest attack on the matter of the Divine Majesty, though when the sentence is pronounced the one punishment does not exceed the other.” In the whole edict there is no question of the identity of the two powers. Heresy is a direct crime against the State, against God, against the injured Majesty of the Emperor. The boundary lines between God and Emperor are indeed even more fluid than usual; even the slight rise from the imperial to the divine majesty is neutralised by the anti-climax that in each case the penalty is the same, and, finally, the imperial majesty is not even directly balanced against the Majesty of God. For the phrase is the “matter of the Divine Majesty”! Was God to be understood by this?—or the Emperor himself? The suggestion that the Emperor was meant must have been possible, for Pope Innocent IV when he revived the imperial heresy-edict in 1254 changed the word “materiam” into “injuriam,” whereby the whole point was lost. The clause now read “an attack to the injury of the Divine Majesty” instead of “against the matter of the Divine Majesty.” It is very clear that the one-sided relation of the State to God was now counterbalanced by the Deity’s being imported into the State: the heretic injures God and thereby the Emperor, the rebel in injuring the Emperor commits, at the same time, a crime directly against God.
This position is not nearly so clear when set forth in the imperial laws against heretics; the corresponding passage simply runs: “When our Illustriousness is incensed against contemners of our name, when we condemn in their own person and by the disinheritance of their children those accused of treason, it is both just and seemly that we should be the more incensed against those who blaspheme the Divine Name and those who lower the Catholic Faith. …” And even when the Emperor poses as the God of Vengeance who punishes the guilt of the heretic unto the second generation, “… so that the children, in memory of their father’s crime may pine in misery and know in truth that God is a Jealous God, powerful to visit the sins of the father upon the children…,” he is here an image only of the Deus zelotes, not “the matter of the Divine Majesty.” The method of heretic hunting demonstrates more clearly than words that it was only in Sicily that heresy was directly treated and pursued as a crime against the State; for the Sicilian Inquisitors were not agents of the Church but imperial officials, who interpreting Frederick’s wishes did not split hairs over the distinction between heretics, who through God injured the Emperor, and rebels who through the Emperor blasphemed God, but consigned both alike to the flames till Pope Gregory himself was horrified, and intervened to mitigate Frederick’s zeal. There is no basis for the supposition that the “liberal-minded and freethinking” Hohenstaufen persecuted the luckless heretics only at the instigation of the Church: the “accursed sectaries whatever they like to call themselves” had nothing to hope for but a fiery death. It happened that this was one of the few laws of Frederick’s that really pleased the Church, and Frederick II had no hesitation in gratifying the Church in the matter on all occasions. In 1238 the severer Sicilian edict was extended to the whole Empire, and in 1254 incorporated at the Pope’s command in the Statute Books and Town Laws.
As the Emperor himself pointed out, his whole heresy legislation was closely modelled on Roman law. Heresy was treason, for God and Emperor were one. In imperial Rome there was no crimen laesae Romanae religionis (Tertullian first evolved this conception); under the Emperors religious crime is treason. In accordance with this idea Frederick II described heresy as “perduellio,” high treason against the State—in Sicily only. The word is used here only, and the imperial Chancery was well skilled, as has always been acknowledged, in its choice of words.
The heretics were guilty of high treason, plague-carriers, enemies of the State, as their interpretation of Scripture proved: for they held that God was to be obeyed, rather than man; a doctrine ill adapted to Frederick’s state, whose dogma ran “over men a MAN is set.”
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People have detected in this an inner contradiction, “the Freethinker legislates against heresy.” Even if there is something in common between the free mind of the Emperor and the mind of the heretic, in that both release certain vital forces, the Emperor was lord over these forces, and in his hands under well-defined conditions subject to well-defined laws they could prove potent and beneficent. The same forces released by unauthorised persons were dangerous and destructive. For the Emperor personally the dictum might be valid: the Emperor must obey God and not man, but no lesser individual had the right to arrogate to himself this, or any other, imperial privilege. His whole life long, therefore, even in his last and bitterest struggle with the Church, Frederick strenuously repudiated any and every sympathy with heretics. When he was besieged on one occasion they approached and offered help, but were spurned on the instant. They were destroyers in his eyes of that world unity which he represented, though in order to preserve it he often had recourse to anti-dogmatic allies. Dante assigns to Frederick therefore a place, not among the sectaries, but among the Epicureans, those who despise a future life.
Another contradiction of Frederick’s has been detected in his persecuting heresy at the same time that he ‘tolerated’ Muhammadans, Jews, and orthodox Greeks. Frederick’s relation to the non-Christian elements in his State is one of the most instructive items in his statesmanship, more especially when we study the limits of his complaisance. Compared with the mixture of races and religions and the peaceful co-existence in Norman times of Christians, Saracens, and Jews, living side by side in harmony, the freedom of the non-Christians had been very considerably curtailed under Frederick—not for the sake of religion, or of the Pope or of the Church, but for the sake of the State. Frederick’s sympathy for professors of another faith, in which he displayed a broadmindedness shared by very few of his contemporaries, extended only so far as they were serviceable to the State and laid no hand upon its sanctities. To avoid any penetration by non-Christians he had, as we have seen, segregated them completely from the very first. He removed the Saracens from the island of Sicily and planted them in Lucera. After he had thus neutralised the Muslim poisons that threatened hostility and confusion to the State, he could afford to be tolerant of their religious observances, as he always showed himself tolerant of any good customs of conquered rebels.
The same principle governed his conduct towards the Jews. In one of his first ordinances, issued after his return from Germany, Frederick laid down that Jews must be distinguished from Christians by their dress and must grow their beards “so that the rites of the Christian faith may not be confused.” Any offender was punished by the confiscation of his goods, or, if he was poor, by branding on the forehead—not from religious intolerance but to preserve order in the State. For the rest the Jews were permitted, nay obliged, to live according to their own religious laws unless these were harmful to the State. Many of their religious practices were even advantageous and some were therefore specified in the Liber Augustalis: “We exempt the Jews from obedience to our usury laws. They are not to be accused of usury forbidden by God, since—as is well known—they are not subject to the laws of the blessed Fathers of the Church.” The moment injury accrued to the State the Emperor’s toleration was at an end. An alleged ritual murder by Jews was brought up before the Emperor. Thanks to his astounding knowledge of foreign rites he im
mediately saw the baselessness of the accusation, but he declared that if it had proved that the Hebrew ritual demanded such human sacrifice he would be prepared immediately to massacre every Jew in the Empire. On the other hand, he constantly intervened against the Church on behalf of the Jews, but there was a special reason for that. In the age-old dispute whether the Jews as foreigners came under the jurisdiction of the State, or as infidels under the jurisdiction of the Church, Frederick II naturally decided for the former—to the intense annoyance of Pope Gregory. On the same principle he brought the Jews into the scheme of the State. In Norman days they had been mainly attached as serfs to churches and monasteries. Frederick II emancipated them almost entirely from this relationship, and rarely or never again farmed out his rights over the Jews any more than his other crown rights; he insisted all the more strongly on their direct private bond to his own person. Even in the Empire the elected bishop of the Jews was replaced by an appointed Jewish master, who was practically a state official. In order that the State might gain the maximum advantage from its Jewish subjects, Frederick II, with unerring instinct contrived to link the Jew-monopoly with the renewed trade-monopolies, particularly the dye and silk works. To his private Jewish serfs the Emperor entrusted the state dyeworks, the manufacture of silk and the commerce in silk—matters in which the Jews had traditional skill and experience—with advantage to both parties, Emperor and Jew. This had nothing whatever to do with tolerance; it was simply part of Frederick’s usual policy to turn even the smallest force to the advantage of the State and to let nothing be wasted.
This solution meant, in fine, that the servitude of the Jews should be so organised and utilised, that their own industrial life might directly benefit the State. The non-Christians, on the other hand, being thus incorporated in the State, enjoyed in Sicily and in the other imperial territories, a State protection, such as rarely fell to their lot elsewhere. It was clearly stated “the master shall be honoured in his servants,” and again “no innocent man shall be oppressed because he is a Jew or a Saracen.” There was no suggestion of equal citizenship. An assassination cost the guilty community 100 Augustales if the victim was a Christian and 50 if he were a Saracen or a Jew. Conversion from Catholicism to Islam or to Judaism was severely punished according to existing laws. It was of course permissible for Jews or Muslims to seek baptism. We may be permitted to doubt whether Frederick II encouraged the step, for he lost his serf tax and his poll tax and the birth and marriage tax and many another imposition. Whatever the underlying reasons, the fact is incontestable: the Emperor was, on the whole, averse to changes of faith. Frederick’s whole policy in the Jew and Saracen questions may be summed up by saying that the true statesman finds no material without its uses.
Frederick II persecuted no man for his belief. He had his hands full persecuting rebels and heretics for their unbelief. It is illogical to argue that toleration of other genera should involve a toleration of degenerates—for heretics were degenerates in Frederick’s eyes—who rent the “coat without seam” and tore asunder the unity of the State. The contradiction lies not with the Emperor, but in the failure to recognise that heretics were for Frederick enemies of the State, much more than enemies of religion. The misunderstanding is based secondly on a false and arbitrary application of post-Reformation ideas of toleration originating in the days when Protestantism was an independent religion and included sectaries. The misapplication of these ideas to Frederick in his relations with sectaries and non-Christians, is all the more dangerous as it tempts to false generalisations about Frederick’s character, representing him as an enlightened and tolerant potentate—an artificial picture that does not fit the facts.
In regard to his personal inclinations—especially wherever the sanctities of the State were at stake—Frederick II was in fact probably the most intolerant Emperor that ever the West begot. No Emperor was ever, both in claim and in act, so uncompromisingly the JUDGE as Frederick II. As judge he lived for centuries in the memories of men, as judge they awaited his second coming as the avenger of human degeneracy. A tolerant judge is like luke-warm fire.
The Emperor, who felt no hate to the non-Christian, showed himself in very deed a “Jealous God” towards rebels and heretics, offenders against the Deity Justitia and the sanctified order of the State; a very fanatic, obsessed by a primeval hate that pursued its victim remorselessly to the second and third generation. The most appalling punishments seemed too mild for such offenders. The edict against those heretics who—to quote the Emperor—called themselves “Sufferers” Patarenes, after the “passion” of the heroic martyrs, closes with a bloodcurdling taunt: “We therefore command by this our law that these accursed ‘Sufferers’ shall in fact suffer the passion of that death they lust for: that they be condemned to the flames and burnt alive in the sight of all men; nor shall we regret that we thus fulfil their own desire.”
The Emperor’s mission as Protector of the Church gave him his only opportunity to draw the universal Roman Church into his State, even to subordinate her to the State as in need of protection. On the other hand, the Church was indispensable to him, for his whole State with its laws was founded on the Catholic faith. This relationship of mutual dependence was quite in harmony with Frederick II’s conception of all human and divine relationships, and however greatly he might magnify his protective office till he even filled the rôle of the Avenging God, he never hesitated freely to admit that the Pope stood to the Emperor as the father to a child, or as the Sun to the Moon. Even in the heat of battle Frederick always conceded the position, though reiterating that the moon was none the less an independent heavenly body. This was no sign of weakness. It testifies to a higher degree of inner freedom, security and highmindedness, calmly to acknowledge a superior than to deny him. Dante devotes a special book to depicting a World-monarch whose independence of the Pope and immediate relationship to God the poet seeks to prove. It might be a portrait of Frederick. He concludes with words that might easily be Frederick’s own: “Let Caesar evince that respect for Peter which the first born son must display towards his father, that he, in the light of the paternal favour, may more radiantly illumine the earth, over which he is set by Him alone who is the Director of all that is spiritual and of all that is worldly.”
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The “once and for all” factor in Frederick’s imperial metaphysics has already been pointed out. They were centred in the person of just this one Emperor and were valid only in just this one moment of time. What the world, however, seized upon, and what each of the European states sooner or later, directly or indirectly, adopted was the technique of statecraft which Frederick had deduced from his metaphysics: the administrative body of jurists; the bureaucracy of paid officials; the financial and economic policy.
This is not the place to pursue the development of all this nor its gradual modification. The maxims of State in time asserted themselves everywhere; first, of course, in the neighbouring Romance kingdoms, in France and Aragon as well as in divided Italy, perhaps in Castile too, even before the end of the century. The new system of administration with its officials in the king’s pay was inevitable in time to come. Such a scheme, immeasurably more amenable to the ruler than the feudal degrees, gave a security hitherto undreamt of and the possibility of developing a comprehensive well-planned organisation deriving from one central authority. The feeling was never wholly absent that the Jurist State had had its origin in reaction against the Church while utilising Church methods throughout. What unholy danger threatened the Church in this spiritually independent bureaucracy was acutely expressed by Napoleon during his own struggle against Pope and Church: “II faut faire agir les tribunaux, opposer robe à robe, esprit de corps à esprit de corps. Les juges sont, dans leur genre, une espèce de théologiens comme les prêtres; ils ont aussi leurs maximes, leurs règles, leur droit canon. On a toujours vu l’administration échouer dans ses luttes contre les prêtres; la monarchie n’a pu résister au clergé qu’en lui opposant les parlem
ents.” This mighty soldier with his eye for the essential, got to the root of things when he called on the judges for help against the clergy, as the only group of state officials in his day bound together by a common spirit.
This gives us a measure of Frederick’s genius. He was the first to create this intellectual order within the state and to make it an effective weapon in his fight with the Church—bound together from its birth by sacred ties in the priestly-Christian spirit of the age, and uplifted to the triumphant cult of the Deity Justitia.
The organisation of this first western bureaucracy, this priesthood of Justitia, is necessarily hieratic. Frederick himself styles the body of officials the “Order of Justitia” or the “Order of Officials.” Rigid precedence is clearly marked in the most important department, that of the Justiciaries, as is indicated by the Latin nomenclature of the highest grades which are traditionally called the Magister Justitiarius and the Magnae Curiae Magister Justitiarius. According to the new orders of 1239, three grades are recognised; the Justiciars, governors of the ten provinces; Master-Justiciars, governors of the two halves of the kingdom—peninsula and island—and the Grand Master Justiciar, the head of the whole judicial administration who acted in place of the divine Emperor as Grand Master of the Order, much as the German Grand Master of the Teutonic Order in place of Christ. There is no question of Sicily’s having “copied” the Order-organisation. In those days it was inevitable that any intellectual body of men of the vita activa must approximate their organisation to that of the knightly orders. It was in fact the case that the Prussian State under the Teutonic Order was more akin than any other to imperial Sicily, because Sicily and Prussia were the only two States whose constitution was based on a rational system. It is not irrelevant to compare the far-off State of the Teutonic Order; if the Sicilian bureaucracy was modelled on similar lines to the Order, the office-holders amongst the Teutonic Knights were speedily officialised under the influence of the Sicilian model, with which the German Grand Master, Hermann of Salza, was of course intimately conversant. In complete contrast to the Templars and the Knights of St. John, the bearers of high office amongst the Teutonic Knights—Marshals and Commanders for instance—soon became “officials” whose functions were quite obviously in certain things under Sicilian influence. The Sicilian bureaucracy, itself the earliest intellectual state corporation of the Middle Ages, is at least as closely related to the knightly orders as to the modern state services to which people have retrospectively compared it.
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