Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  When Frederick with his magnificent escort rode from Wimpfen into the Swabian Palatinate on one of his noble Andalusian or Barbary steeds he found that King Henry had hastened thither before him, to cast himself at his father’s feet. His life was forfeit for insurrection. The Emperor did not permit his son to enter his presence. Henry was first compelled to accompany as prisoner his father’s triumphal progress down the Neckar valley to Worms. Frederick was solemnly welcomed by the people, and twelve bishops waited at the portals of the cathedral to greet him. The Emperor saw amongst them Landulf of Worms, one of the chief supporters of the rebellious king. He ordered him out of his presence and commanded them to strip his bishop’s robes from him. King Henry was flung into prison, and the troubadours tell that in the morning when his armour was taken from him he was still singing; but when at evening they brought him food he wept.

  Not till some days later did Frederick sit in judgment on his son. In the presence of many nobles, counts and princes, the Emperor sat enthroned in sacra majestas. King Henry entered the hall and flung himself at the feet of his judge, and as a traitor to his sovereign who sues for pardon bowed his forehead to the ground before the Emperor’s unchanging glance. Amidst an oppressive silence he was obliged to retain this position for a long time, and no one bade him rise. At last, on the prayer of several of the princes, the Emperor allowed the command to be given that he should stand up. Shocked and bewildered he stood and commended himself to the Emperor’s mercy, renouncing his kingly dignity and all that he possessed. His submission saved his life, but he had forfeited his freedom. He had made all hope of this impossible by at first refusing to surrender the castle of Trifels which his supporters were defending and in which the crown jewels were lodged; he had even attempted flight. He was first imprisoned in Heidelberg and then despatched to Apulia. Any rebels who had not yet surrendered were defeated. Frederick showed great leniency to all; he even took Bishop Landulf into favour again and released, after a short time, the Lombard envoys captured in Trifels. Only the son felt the full severity of father, emperor and judge. For weary years he remained a prisoner in Rocca San Felice near Melfi; then he was transferred to Nicastro. After a further six years of imprisonment he was to be again transferred. The story is that he was about to be released but had not yet been so informed. Weary of life and fearing yet severer treatment King Henry on the road from Nicastro to his new place of confinement rode his horse over a mountain precipice. He was thirty years of age. He was buried in the church of Cosenza in a marble sarcophagus, clad in a shroud of gold and silver tissue into which eagles’ feathers were woven. A Minorite preached the funeral sermon, according to Apulian custom, and chose as his text: “And Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son.” The sermon concluded with a peroration in praise of Justitia, the God of the State, to whom Frederick had had to sacrifice his first-born. We must not forget how severely Frederick himself suffered. In the mourning letter he wrote when giving orders for the obsequies there echoes still the sorrow of that judgment day in Worms, when the father had, to pass sentence on the son according to his own saying: human nature must of necessity bow to justice. “The pity of a tender father must yield to the judgment of the stern judge: we mourn the doom of our first-born. Nature bids flow the flood of tears, but. they are checked by the pain of injury and the inflexibility of justice.”

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  To describe the imperial stay in Germany is to describe a series of most brilliant festivities. For when the great attain the summit of their fame they love to hold stately review of all the forces and the spirits they command. The first celebrations honoured the occasion of the Emperor’s re-marriage. Conrad, King of Jerusalem, was now the sole remaining legitimate heir to the throne, and Frederick determined to take him a third wife. Pope Gregory, like his predecessors, chose the bride. She was Isabella, sister of King Henry III of England. Soon after the Emperor’s meeting with Pope Gregory in Rieti, Piero della Vigna had been despatched to London to negotiate the marriage treaty. It was a most important step in view of both home and foreign politics, for Frederick had hitherto on strictly German grounds always inclined to the side of France against England, lover of the Welfs. The marriage with the English Isabella was the first step in the solemn renunciation which was soon to follow, of the ancient Welf-Hohenstaufen feud.

  While King Henry was still a prisoner in Worms awaiting his sentence people were already making preparations. It was the beginning of July, and Isabella had been in Cologne since May awaiting the Emperor’s arrival in Germany. Matthew Paris, the English chronicler, with the Englishman’s love for the “intimate” details about the great, cannot relate with sufficient minuteness the whole story of the wedding of the beautiful young Empress of scarcely twenty-one, scion of the ancient house of Plantagenet. He begins even before the engagement. After the English King had given his consent to his sister’s wedding the imperial envoys had begged to be allowed to see the princess, and Isabella was escorted from her home in the Tower of London to the Palace of Westminster to show herself to them. They had gazed long upon her with delight, esteeming her in all ways worthy of the Emperor’s bed, had placed the engagement ring on her finger in Frederick’s name, and greeted her as Empress of the Roman Empire. All the details are now recorded of her jewellery and the individual items of her clothing and of her plenishing, down to the gay silken counterpanes and soft cushions of the bridal bed, and the cooking pots which were of unalloyed silver, “a thing that seemed to all superfluous.” Then the Empress’s journey and sea-voyage are described, and especially the festive and joyous reception which the people of Cologne prepared for her. Tens of thousands flocked out to welcome her with flowers and palm branches and music. Riders on Spanish horses had performed with their lances the nuptial breaking of staves, while in ships which appeared to sail upon dry land, but were drawn by horses concealed under silken coverings, the clerks of Cologne played new airs upon their instruments. The matrons seated on their balconies sang the praises of the Empress’s beauty, when Isabella at their request laid aside hat and veil and showed her face. Six weeks later, on the fifteenth of July, with all conceivable pomp and ceremony, the wedding was celebrated in Worms.

  People told each other with amazement that the Emperor did not consummate the marriage the first night, but waited till early the next morning till the hour which the astrologers had indicated as the most favourable for procreation. Then Frederick handed over his consort to the care of Saracen eunuchs (a state measure as important as, but no more significant than any other) telling her that she was pregnant of a son, a fact which he also set in writing in a letter to the English King. In contrast to his predecessors Frederick II looked on his consorts simply as mothers of his legitimate heirs and successors; they had no importance as Empresses. His imperial forefathers, especially in making pious foundations, habitually drew up their charters in the name of the royal pair: Henry and Kunigunde for instance, Frederick I and Beatrice, even Henry VI and Constance. With the sole exception of the few documents relating to marriage settlements the records of Frederick II, the last Emperor, contain no allusion to his consorts. Frederick II stands alone, a fact that was not without influence on his sons. Although he himself frequently referred to his parents, and celebrated his Divine Mother in phrases such as no German ruler had ever used before, his sons called themselves only Divi Augusti Imperatoris Filius. This cold-blooded attitude to his wives has often been made responsible for Frederick’s “lack of sentiment.” Be that as it may: any other relation was unthinkable. For Frederick was in an unprecedented way on the pinnacle of the world, which none could share with him. The picture of an imperial pair was possible for a German Emperor, but inconceivable for a Tyrant of Sicily or for a Roman Caesar. Even the appearance of sentiment and domesticity was out of the question for Frederick, who could more readily be seen in company with a Saracen beauty than with his royal consort. The English King complained that after years of wedlock the Empress had never wo
rn the crown in public. Enemies accused the Emperor of imprisoning his wives in the “labyrinth of his Gomorrah” (that is in his harem, as contrasted with Sodom), rendering them almost invisible and making them strangers to their children. This was all true enough. There was no room round Frederick in which a woman could strike root. All his wives died after a few years of marriage, and, as far as we know, his mistresses shared the same fate: none of them survived him. In the rarefied atmosphere of these brilliant heights no human being but himself could thrive: none even of his friends could hold out for long; no woman could have breathed there. Hence, the English Isabella, surrounded by her imperial household and dignities, watched by eunuchs, disappeared forthwith into the “harem.”

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  The happy Hohenstaufen days saw an unprecedented outburst of artistic creativeness in Germany in which all races in common found their own characteristic expression: human forms were created in a perfection never since attained: it is the only period in which German plastic art spontaneously and unconsciously approaches the antique. In August 1235, soon after the wedding festivities of Worms, Kaiser Frederick held a great Diet at Mainz. Never was the “better nature” of the Germans, the reconciliation of their great eternal contradictions, so strikingly realised as on this occasion. This great imperial celebration must have awakened many memories of that “incomparable festival” in which Barbarossa celebrated the sword-investiture of his sons with a noble and chivalrous ceremonial never before seen in Germany. Barbarossa, though well over sixty, had himself taken part in the tournament, and was hailed by the minstrels as a new Alexander, Caesar, King Arthur. The fresh glory of this beginning of courtly chivalry in Germany was happily symbolised by the exchange of greeting and handclasp between Henry of Veldeke, one of the earliest of German singers, and a French troubadour. The next fifty years, the period of Gottfried and Wolfram and Walther von der Vogelweide, brought blossoming and promise, and full in the midst of all this outburst of German genius the Puer Apuliae was wafted into Germany from the South, and was caught up and transfigured by its glory. Now Frederick II, himself in the forties, revisited Germany after twenty years and found the Springtime over and the moment ripe for him to garner the first fruits. Now seemed the time to give permanence to the beautiful Roman-German form that had been just evolved, to help it to a still finer perfection, to weld the whole into a conscious unity: princes and races into one people. To strengthen and harden into an enduring state, as sculptors then were fashioning enduring monuments of stone, this German growth that bore the impress of Rome, neither by cutting it adrift from Rome nor by abolishing the princely power, but by persistently inspiring princes and races with the thought and the spirit of state-building.

  Frederick II’s great curia solemnis of Mainz was the beginning: law, speech, blood and feudal faith (which here had more weight than in the south) were the links of the chain the Roman Caesar forged. He appeared in exotic magnificence before this dazzling assembly, at which almost without exception all the German princes were for once united, with all the solemn dignity pertaining to the God-appointed Provider, Protector, Preserver of peace and justice. He opened the Diet with a proclamation of Public Peace, from the opening words of which there echoes the pride of the Law-giver who for the first time erects Tables of the Law, “for men throughout all Germany in private quarrels and in legal suits at present live according to the age-old traditions and customs and according to unwritten Law.” The Proclamation of the Landpeace of Mainz contained both old and new laws, and far excelled in importance all previous pronouncements of the sort. It was to form the basis of all future imperial legislation, a foundation which all later lawgivers must build upon, and to which they must ever and again recur. Town confederations and princes and kings like Rudolf of Hapsburg, Adolf of Nassau, Albert of Austria have frequently renewed the Landpeace of Mainz in its entirety. The nine-and-twenty sections dealt with the jurisdiction of princes and bishops, rights of mintage and transport, the abolition of unjust dues, the prohibition of self-vindication, the limitation of ordeal by battle, and much else.

  The Emperor, as himself the Law Incarnate, always conceived his personal actions as constituting a precedent, he therefore created an imperial law out of his own sentence of perpetual imprisonment against his son, and the Landpeace begins with the decree: “Whatever son shall drive his father out of his castles or other property, or shall burn it or shall plunder it, or shall conspire with his father’s foes, or plot against his father’s honour or seek his father’s destruction… that son shall forfeit property and fief and personal possessions and all inheritance from father or mother, and neither judge nor father shall be able to reinstate him, for ever.” And it continues with a sinister note ringing through the Middle High German of the original words: whatsoever son lays hands upon his father’s body or criminally attacks him “he shall be without honour and without right for ever, so that he may never again come into his own.”

  An important innovation, copied from Sicily, was the installation of an Imperial Grand Justiciar, who was daily without fee to preside over the High Court and represent the Emperor. He was to hold office for at least a year, and he was given the services of a special notary, who must be a layman, “so that he may pay the penalty” if he does wrong. We can detect here and there echoes of Sicilian laws, but nothing that does violence to natural German Law, rather another offshoot from the same root, clothing itself in forms that have proved useful elsewhere.

  The Proclamation of Mainz was presumably only a preliminary regulation, as in Sicily the Capua Proclamation had been the forerunner of the great Constitutions of Melfi. Frederick may well have planned a similar work for Germany. We know that he had Sicilian High Court Judges in his train, and that the idea of a great imperial codification of law was in the air at the time. The English poet, Henry of Avranches, who was an ardent admirer of the Emperor, adjured him to win everlasting renown by publishing a Summa of the numerous scattered number of imperial laws which should be a companion to the Pope’s Collection of Decretals which Gregory IX had published a year before.

  It was a matter of the highest significance that this “Italian” Frederick published his proclamation in German, and recorded it in writing in German, and had it translated from the German into Latin. It was the first time that German had been utilised for a proclamation, and the importance of the fact that it was thus recognised as on an equality with Latin for an edict of the Roman Emperor needs no emphasis. It proves that this most Roman of Emperors was also the most German. It was the beginning of an individuality in the State as a whole (not only in the subsidiary states), the first record of German law in German, the first laying aside of the Latin scaffolding as no longer indispensable to speech.

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  It would be difficult to overrate this first tentative of Frederick’s to raise with the co-operation of the princes a German state structure comparable to the contemporary German achievements in art and literature. This historic Diet was rich in memorable and symbolic events, but the pan-German legislation might easily rank as the most important of them all, were its pride of place not disputed by the termination of the age-old racial feud of Welf and Waibling. Otto of Lüneburg, the Welf nephew of Kaiser Otto, was present. Frederick announced: “At this solemn Diet of Mainz, with the princes ranged round our illustrious throne, Otto of Lüneburg hath done us homage, and unmindful of all hate and harassment that existed between our forefathers hath placed himself under our protection and at our service.” Frederick confirmed Otto in all his Lüneburg possessions, which he first took over for the Emperor in order to grant them back as an imperial fief. Further, he augmented the Welf territory by the gift of Brunswick which he had acquired by purchase for himself, and created a new dukedom of Brunswick-Lüneburg. When Otto the Welf above the imperial crucifix placed his hands in Kaiser Frederick’s and swore the oath of allegiance, voluntarily committing himself and his possessions to the good faith of the Waibling, to whom he showed respect in every m
anner possible, Frederick in return entrusted him with the newly-created dukedom as a hereditary imperial fief, and solemnly bestowed on the Welf the banner that custom demanded. The racial feud of earlier days had become an anachronism in a Germany flooded as far as the Baltic and the North Sea by the glory of Imperial Rome. There was no longer Welf nor Waibling in the North. The age-old prophecy had been literally fulfilled which laid down the correct constitution for Germany: the Welfs should ever provide mighty Dukes, but only Waiblings should be Emperors, Frederick II was well justified in giving command: “This day shall be recorded in all the annals of the Empire because it has added another duke to the Empire… This also gave him a reason for proceeding next day to the cathedral, crowned with the imperial diadem, and after high mass giving a royal feast to all the German princes and the 12,000 knights of their escorts. This was the last great imperial feast of the old aristocratic regime of the Holy Roman Empire, before the onset of a duller bourgeois world which Frederick was trying to hold at bay by strengthening the princely power; a world which lacked the spaciousness of an Empire, but from its own narrow confines reached upwards, seeking to win the empire of the skies.

  Frederick had come to Germany as the Judge, showing himself for the first time in this capacity to all Europe, and presently an opportunity offered to figure as the highest judge of all the Christian world in a case which aroused much interest and excitement and which he himself contrived to magnify into an affair of the whole Occident. It must have been shortly after the great day of Mainz that the case was brought before him while he was halting in Hagenau in the imperial Palatinate. The Jews of Fulda were accused of having committed a ritual murder on a Christian boy at their Easter festival. The first result of this was a massacre of Jews in Fulda and several other German towns. Then the people had waited till the Emperor’s arrival to seek a decision in all the unrest, and both parties, Jews and Christians, now appealed to Frederick in Hagenau. As a witness against the Jews the Christians had kept the child’s corpse and dragged it along to Hagenau. Frederick heard the case and passed a sentence worthy of Solomon. First he pointed to the body, and said drily to the Christians: “When they are dead, bury them. It’s all they’re fit for.” He satisfied himself that the Jews were innocent, but imposed a large fine on them, because—innocent or guilty—that had been the cause of a disturbance. Thus peace was restored in Germany.