Where Abbot Joachim’s sayings were insufficient other joachite promises and interpretations were speedily invented. Genuine and false sibylline verses, magic sayings of Merlin, prophecies of Michael Scot, oriental oracles, Spanish forebodings, all contributed to confuse and excite minds which were already living in terror of the imminent coming of Anti-Christ, the End of the World and the Day of Judgment, and were yet buoyed up by lingering hopes of the approach of the Messiah, the peace of the world and the golden age of Apollo. For though Anti-Christ would woefully assail the Church he would yet be overcome by the effective intervention of an Order, living a life of Apostolic simplicity. Such was the promise. And not long after Abbot Joachim Francis of Assisi made his appearance: the fulfilment of the prophecy. With similar weapons Dominic took up the war against heretics. In Padua Anthony was worshipped as a Saint. The Italian people were thirsting for peace and weary of never-ending feuds. In this time of crisis and confusion, tortured with the throes of a new birth, all spiritual and other forces were tense and at fever heat, and men fell an eager prey to any miracle that promised easier and better things. In the midst of all this the preachers appeared everywhere simultaneously, calling to penance, and coupling their terrifying words with the message of peace they stung the people to raving and madness. The epidemic spread like wildfire. “All were drunk with heavenly love, for they had quaffed of the wine of the spirit of God after testing which all flesh begins to rave.” The peace and penance mania of the year 1233 is known as the “Great Halleluja!” because the penance-preachers overran the country with this cry in praise of the Three-in-One. Externally it was everywhere the same. In Parma a preacher appeared in fantastic garb who belonged to no Order: wearing a black beard and with a high Armenian cap on his head, shrouded in a sacklike garment and bearing a gigantic red cross on breast and back. The brother played on a little copper trumpet, from which he drew now sweet now terrifying sounds. He lured the people, especially children, after him like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. They followed with boughs and burning tapers through streets and market-places, joining loudly in the brother’s Halleluja. On his arrival all enmities were suddenly forgotten, all battles abandoned: “A time of happiness and joy began; knights and people, burghers and peasants struck up hymns and songs in praise of God; people fell on each other’s necks, there was no wrath, no strife, no confusion: only Love and Peace.”
Almost the whole of Italy fell under the spell of the Halleluja. Sicily was an exception: one such penance-monger was ejected across the border by imperial officials. Florence also greeted these proceedings with witticism and merriment, and met the miracle-working of the preachers with practical jokes. In Milan the multitude was led by the Dominican Peter of Verona, the same who was later murdered and honoured by the title of “Martyr”; in Piacenza by Leo the Franciscan; the Dominican, John of Vicenza, worked north from Bologna upwards, and in Parma Brother Gerard, a Minorite, took the apostolic office, performing many miracles. Another Minorite brother, Salimbene of Parma, relates vividly the manner of these miracles. Every here and there all the great preachers must have held conferences and agreed on the day, hour, place and theme of their sermons, and then gone their several ways and preached. “There stood Brother Gerard in the Piazza of Parma on a wooden stair which he had had made for his addresses as I saw with my very eyes, and while the people hearkened he ceased and drew his hood over his head, as if he sank himself in God. After a long time, to the admiration of the people, he removed the hood and continued his speaking, as who should say ‘I was in the spirit on the Lord’s day.’” And then he informed the amazed populace he had been hearing Brother John in Bologna speaking on such and such a text, and Brother Leo on such another. The people of Parma assured themselves by messengers of the truth of his visions and many entered the Order. What the preachers achieved, by whatever means, was, in fact, a complete and sudden cessation of all hostilities.
In some towns matters went so far that mendicant monks snatched the reins of authority, like the Dominican Savonarola 250 years later, and ruled according to mendicant principles. The Minorite Brother Gerard, who was an admirer and supporter of Frederick II, did so in Parma, for instance, and Brother John of Vicenza, the Emperor’s foe, who was worshipped as a saint in Bologna, cast the whole town under a spell, and thereupon continued his campaign of peace in the March of Treviso. Finally, at Verona he mounted the carroccio of the town and preached to the multitude who streamed in from Padua, Treviso, Ferrara and Mantua; thousands were assembled, who acclaimed him Duke and Rector of Verona. None dared oppose the will of the excited populace and their leader. The authorities were impotent. In a moment the rule of Eccelino in Verona was at an end: he, “Satan in person,” was compelled to swear obedience to the Brother, and did so with tears in his eyes—tears of emotion, opined the multitude.
The service of penance of 1233 was only a foretaste of the much wilder and more savage outburst of the Flagellants in 1260 after Frederick’s death, fanatic figures who are not far removed from the cycle of legend that centres round Frederick. For the still living Emperor the Great Halleluja had the most inconvenient political consequences. The only person who profited was Pope Gregory. With the loss of Verona Frederick had again lost his mountain pass; the Pope had seized this opportunity of making peace with the Romans. He was now triumphant in Rome without the Emperor’s help, and had now not the smallest intention of meeting Frederick half-way in the Lombard question, just at the moment when it was peculiarly acute. The Lombards did not stand by their concessions, and though the Pope did not accede to their more outrageous demands he evolved an expedient. He revived in essentials the treaty, none too favourable to Frederick, that had been concluded by his predecessor Honorius III, and instead of achieving a settlement everything was, as before, in the melting-pot. This procedure of the Pope’s stirred to bitterness and resentment not only Frederick but several of the Cardinals. The Cardinals made no secret of their feelings; they refused to follow Gregory to Rome, but remained in Anagni, and when the Pope returned to Anagni they immediately betook themselves to Rieti. To everyone’s amazement the Emperor, though not recognising the League, acquiesced in the Pope’s proposals, partly for expediency, partly because he had other schemes brewing. He had not yet received satisfaction for the interference with his Diet.
The Halleluja came to an abrupt conclusion. At the last and greatest feast of peace in Paquera 400,000 North Italians, it was computed, assembled round Brother John of Vicenza. Solemnly a pact of eternal peace was sworn. Four days later in Lombardy and the March of Treviso the war of the towns broke out again. All flew at each other’s throats, and Brother John, “Duke” of Verona, sat in the dungeon of one of his innumerable foes. The balance between Emperor and Pope was gradually restored when the Romans had sobered again after their orgy of peace. In 1234 Luca Savelli was elected Senator of Rome. He declared papal Tuscany and the Campagna to be the property of the Roman people, and he demanded homage from the towns of these areas. The Pope fled to Rieti, and excommunicated the Romans, who were looting the Lateran and the cardinals’ houses, and called the whole Christian world to his relief.
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Now was Frederick’s opportunity. In the sight of the whole world he could pose as Advocatus of Rome and Protector of the Pope. He could draw the temporal sword to defend the Church, exactly as world-ideals demanded, exactly as he had pictured in his recent letter to the Pope. He offered active assistance to the Pope and joined him in Rieti, taking his six-year-old son Conrad with him to hand over to the Pope as a hostage for the purity of his motives. Then he entered Viterbo with his troops to besiege the Roman fortress of Rispampani from this base. The gesture was here the thing. The Pope, of course, could not accept the hostage, and the Emperor, who had no desire for a fight with the Romans, preferred to loose his falcons in the Campagna and hunt in papal purlieus. As the siege grew protracted he returned to Sicily, while his troops, after a while, forced the Romans to make peace. The Emperor had accomplishe
d all he wanted. It was no trifle. The latest news from Germany indicated that the moment had arrived to assign to the Pope his rôle in the coming events.
The Sicilian Book of Laws depicted the Emperor as Fate itself. The Emperor’s own son was the first victim. Since the day when King Henry opposed his father’s wishes by absenting himself on the first occasion from Ravenna his fate had been sealed; slowly, steadily, inevitably he moved towards his doom. When decision was forced on him at Cividale he had no choice but to bow unconditionally before his father’s might, to swear obedience, and to treat the princes with respect. When once he had returned to Germany he felt the full pressure of the fetters he had donned. He sought, cautiously at first, to slip them from him. It was not long till circumstances compelled him to defy Princes, Pope and Emperor. There is no riddle here to read! In forfeiting his father’s confidence he had forfeited his own freedom of action. Spied upon by a host of hirelings, looked upon with suspicion and often thwarted by the Emperor, the very aimlessness of his movements often lent them a compromising air. Henry himself felt insecure, he gave orders, countermanded them; whatever he did, right or wrong, turned at once to his own destruction.
It is unnecessary here to pursue in detail the successive phases of his fall. One episode will show the luckless star under which the young king sailed. Roughly about the time that the Hallelujas of the penance preachers were echoing through the towns of Northern Italy, the German Inquisitor, Conrad of Marburg, a narrow gloomy fanatic, distinguished himself in the papal service as a heretic-hunter. The chief German heretics appear to have been the various sects of Luciferians who magnified Satan as the Creator. The Emperor, in the edicts we already know, had commanded the eradication of heresy, and King Henry and the German princes were at first whole-heartedly on the side of the Inquisition. Before long, however, Conrad of Marburg began to behave like an irresponsible maniac; he accepted every denunciation and accusation as a proof of guilt; he declared burghers heretics and flung them to the flames till the Rhine towns gazed in paralysed horror at his rage, not knowing how to avert it. Finally, Conrad without rhyme or reason accused several of the German nobles of heresy: the Counts of Arnsberg and Solms, and, especially, Henry of Sayn, thus trespassing on the jurisdiction of the bishops. At this point King Henry, with the concurrence of the princes, called a halt to the increasingly savage behaviour of the Inquisitor and sent a protest to the Pope in Rome. This document unfortunately reached Pope Gregory at the same moment as the news that Conrad of Marburg had meantime been murdered by embittered enemies. The Pope, in a fury, tore up King Henry’s letter. In the meantime Henry at a Diet in Frankfurt had declared himself opposed to all such courts as Conrad’s, and had complained that the Bishop of Hildesheim was preaching a heretic-crusade.
In all this the King’s procedure had been above reproach, but the fact that he should just at this moment draw down on himself the Pope’s wrath was in the highest degree inopportune for the Emperor. Just at this moment the consequences of the penance epidemic had given the Pope an advantage over the Emperor, and he had been able to return to Rome, while Frederick saw his whole position in North Italy undermined by the activity of the preachers, and he was particularly anxious to be on good terms with Gregory. He, therefore, strongly disapproved of his son’s course. At the same time King Henry had most unhappily mixed himself up in almost treasonable doings, had made friends with the Emperor’s enemies, and had contrived, most unjustly, to injure his father’s special friends, the brothers Godfrey and Conrad of Hohenlohe, and the Margrave of Baden. Finally, something very like anarchy was beginning to spread through Germany. The princes compelled Henry to proclaim a Public Peace: which altered nothing. Just as Frederick was taking the field against the Romans the son, after having been severely reproved by his father, raised the standard of insurrection. He was in Boppard with a handful of trusty friends, a heterogeneous group of all ranks, united only by the most various impulses of opposition. Some townsfolk and ministeriales and a few bishops, such as Augsburg, Würzburg and Worms, the Abbot of Fulda, and a few secular lords, were on his side. It is hard to see what success King Henry can have hoped for. The Emperor had all the real power behind him, the Princes and the Pope. Frederick designated his son’s behaviour as “boyish defiance,” and his son as “a madman who imagined he could hold the northern throne in our despite.” It was really an act of utter despair when Henry was tempted to a further and final folly. In the late autumn of 1234, in order to hinder or delay the Emperor’s return to Germany, he allied himself with the deadly enemies of his father and his forefathers and of the whole house of Hohenstaufen: with Milan and the confederate Lombard towns. After this no accommodation was possible.
King Henry could no longer stem the tide of events. Frederick II wrote once: “The power of the Empire takes no account of individuals. …” Foreseeing the future he had long since prepared the net for his son, he now drew it slowly in, mesh by mesh, without speed or haste. King Henry’s alliance with the Lombards was rendered valueless before it was concluded. When the first disturbing rumours from Germany reached Frederick, just as he was visiting the Pope in Rieti, and offering his youngest son as a hostage, he himself negotiated the excommunication of his eldest. Pope Gregory IX was pleased, only too eager, to accede to Frederick’s wish, and issued the papal ban. With that move Gregory lost the game. He sat firm in the Emperor’s snare just when he was preparing a trap for Frederick. For when the alliance of his Lombard friends, Milan and her train, with King Henry became known, the Pope was in an extremely delicate position. He could not join this Lombard-German conspiracy to overthrow the Emperor or gravely endanger him, for by his excommunication of King Henry he had declared himself his enemy. Far from being able to stand by the Lombards he ought by rights to have damned them also as the allies of the excommunicated king. He did not go quite so far as this; nor did the Emperor press the point. Frederick, however, was not slow to take advantage of the Pope’s embarrassment. It was impossible now for the Pope to uphold his Lombard friends, guilty of high treason. Frederick could find no delegate more apt to his purpose than the astonished Pope, so he entrusted to the faithful hands of the High Priest himself the task of exacting satisfaction and inflicting punishment for the new treachery of the League, which could not this time be explained away. The Pope was paying dearly for Frederick’s help against the Romans. And Frederick could set out for Germany with an easy mind. He had already written to the German nobles “there is no doubt of our fortunate arrival.”
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The news of the Emperor’s arrival in Ratisbon was enough. The quite considerable insurrection in Germany at once collapsed, and King Henry was quickly persuaded by Hermann of Salza to unconditional surrender. Fear of the Judge, though approaching alone from the south, exercised a paralysing effect. Without an army, without a train of Sicilian nobles (whom he dismissed at the frontier), Frederick had set out in the spring of 1235, using his galleys to convey him from Rimini to Aquileia, northwards through Friuli and Styria. He took the seven-year-old Conrad with him and his personal exchequer, whose coffers he had replenished by a new tax, well knowing what means would avail him best in Germany. Just as on that former occasion when the Puer Apuliae arrived almost alone in Constance to be soon surrounded by thousands, so now the Emperor’s following grew from day to day, and the number of adherents who streamed to him. As often before, in Germany, in Syria, in Sicily, Frederick II trusted once again to his personal presence, the glory and the magic of his name. He was master of the various arts that cast men under a spell, and according to circumstances used now one method, now another. In Syria he had captivated the Orientals by learned talk about mathematics and astronomy; in Sicily he conjured up the fear of the Divine Power, incarnate as Law upon the earth, charms which were too close and immediate to be potent in Germany, which unfailingly reacted to the magic of the far-away. The marvel of southern strangeness had helped the Puer Apuliae whom men called David to victory, and now the great Charlemagn
e of tale and story seemed bodily risen again, and came as one of the wise kings of the East, wealthy, magnificent, the Emperor of the End, with his train of exotic animals—and conquered once again.
The German chroniclers tell of Frederick’s magnificence with bated breath. “As befits the imperial majesty, he progressed with the utmost pomp, and many quadrigae, chariots, followed him laden with gold and with silver, with byssus and with purple, with gems and costly vessels. He had with him camels, mules, dromedaries, apes and leopards, with Saracens and dark-skinned Ethopians skilled in arts of many kinds, who served as guards for his money and his treasure.” All the fairy-tale magnificence of the south, the exotic treasures and the marvels of his treasury, “of which the west has scanty store,” the Emperor displayed in the towns of the Danube, the Neckar and the Rhine. And when by chance the uncanny monarch flung to his leopard-keeper a few commands in Arabic, the foreign words were not without effect on the people nor on his train of princes, knights and nobles. This picture of the Emperor stamped itself indelibly on the German mind: In the days of Rudolf of Hapsburg a “false Frederick” arose: he sought to prove his authenticity by possessing three Moorish attendants and some heavily-laden mules. And the pictures of the divine majesty in Berthold of Ratisbon’s sermons are unquestionably coloured by memories of that triumphant imperial progress.
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