All the Emperor’s letters at this time are full of similar statements: the ten or twelve towns of the Lombard League are the disturbers of the peace, and the task has been assigned to the Emperor by God to compel them to repose. “In the eastern world the kingdom of Jerusalem, the inheritance on his mother’s side of Conrad, our most well-beloved son, is, in obedience to the will of heaven, steadfast in its loyalty to our name; and the Kingdom of Sicily no less, the glorious inheritance of our mother’s race, and also the mighty overlordship of Germania. We therefore believe that the Providence of the Redeemer has guided our steps so mightily and wondrously to this one end alone, that we should bring back to its allegiance towards our illustrious throne that centre of Italy which is on all sides surrounded by our strength, and that we should thus restore the Empire’s unity.” The conquest of Lombardy, that centre of the Empire, has been set him as a task by Providence, and God has directed his steps towards the goal. “We believe therefore that we are rendering the most welcome service to the living God when we think the more joyfully on the peace of the whole Empire as we more clearly read the portents which indicate the heavenly will.”
It is rare to find Frederick thus expounding his political actions. This one instance is all the more illuminating. The punitive campaign against the Lombards is in the Judge’s eyes a service to God, and happily that which God has foreordained corresponds remarkably with the passionate personal impulse of the Emperor. He can fulfil the divine purpose and renew the peace of the peoples, and gratify at one and the same time his ancient, inborn hatred of Milan. He writes to the King of France: “No sooner had we, in the years of our ripening adolescence, in the glowing power of mind and body ascended the highest peaks of the Roman Empire against all expectations of men and by the aid of Divine Providence alone… than all the acuteness of our mind was continually directed to one end… to avenge the injury offered (by the Milanese) to our Father and to our Grandfather, and to trample under foot the offshoots of abhorred freedom, already carefully cultivated in other places also.” Such hate has in it something Providential, something God-intended. Everything therefore points to one goal: Providence, the world’s weal, and personal impulse: peace must be imposed on the Lombards.
The Lombard war against heretics and rebels becomes no less a Holy War than a Crusade to the Holy Land, and it is again inconceivable to the Emperor why Pope Gregory should arrest the arm of imperial justice. The completion of his purpose is the first pre-requisite for fighting in Syria: “For on our side we have frankly no other aim behind our procedure than to take up the cause of the Crucified One. This, however, cannot occur until the peoples round are by the might of Justice reduced to peace.” So he wrote to King Louis of France, and on other occasions he resolutely denied that he was waging war for his own advantage: “When once the discord in the bosom of this Italy is triumphantly brought to an end, to the glory of God and of the Empire, we hope to be able to lead forth a powerful army to the Holy Land.” Had the Emperor here other things in mind? Those prophecies perhaps which had often been interpreted as referring to him, the redeemer of the Holy Sepulchre? That after the pacification of the West the Messiah-Emperor should return to the East, and there in the Holy of Holies lay aside the Crown of all the World, and hang up lance and shield on the dry tree as a token of the last Judgment? Did Frederick hope literally to fulfil this prophecy also?
Frederick took extremely good care not expressly to say this, nor to bind himself too exactly. The nearness of the Last Day, however, and the Empire of Peace are implicit in all he said. It was a question of peace… not only the peace of the actual Roman Empire but in this fulness of time the peace of the whole Christian world. The Lombard war, therefore, concerned the world. The Emperor invited the ambassadors of all the kings of Europe to a Lombard Diet in Piacenza in order, in common with them, to reduce the few remaining disturbers of the world’s peace—behind whom, though not always openly, the Pope had taken his stand. Frederick had struck the right note. Europe’s Christian kings now rallied to his side, though they did not send their armed assistance till his success in the war was assured. The King of England wrote: he would have preferred to gird on his sword and come himself. At the same time he spontaneously sent letters, in which he expressed himself very forcibly about the Lombards’ arrogance, to the Pope and some friends of his who were Cardinals: they really ought to take up the Emperor’s cause against the confederate towns. Even more emphatic was the document which King Bela of Hungary directed to the Pope in the June of this year 1236: he had heard that the insolence of the Lombards was seeking to induce the Pope on the pretext of necessary service for the cause of the Holy Land to oppose the imperial measures for strengthening the Empire. He would beg the Pope not to give ear to the Lombards. Unquenchable dissension between Empire and Papacy would be the consequence. He added that such an encroachment by the Pope on the secular rights of the princes would be a warning to himself and to the other princes of Europe.
These manly words of the Hungarian King show how warmly the other western monarchs felt the Emperor’s cause to be their own, and show also how high Frederick’s reputation stood amongst them; he is felt to be by far the first amongst them, not in virtue only of his imperial crown but in virtue of his actual strength. It now became the ultimate political goal of the Empire to cement the unity of the Christian kings of the west. There was nothing insincere in his statement, just on the eve of the greatest display of his power: “More than ever the whole world lives by the breath of the Empire; grows feeble if the Empire is enfeebled, and rejoices when the Empire thrives.” Again: “The Roman Empire must strive the more earnestly for peace, must the more urgently devote itself to establishing justice among the peoples, because it stands before all the governments of the world, as before a mirror.”
Now that his goal is an Empire of Peace, now that the aurea aetas beckons, the Emperor feels himself more than ever as Justice incarnate, and uses the phrase “our Justice” as synonymous with “our illustrious majesty.” He is about to arm “his Justice,” and the Lombards shall see his face which he would fain have shown them in peace, and “they shall not be able to look on it unmoved, from fear before Justitia.” Hitherto Justitia has been the organising and regulating power leading men in the path of reason, now for the first time it becomes the punishing and avenging force that works for world peace and perfect world order. Another ten years will pass and avenging Justice, filled with hate, shall rage solely for its own ends through the length of Italy.
Hopes of a world peace and the conception of a universal Roman Empire find expression at this time in yet other contexts. Frederick writes some remarkable letters to the populace of Rome. These are all full of the belief that the fulness of time is at hand and the world is about to be renewed. Renewal would mean reconstruction of the world in exactly the state in which it stood at the moment of the Redemption in the days of Augustus. The Messiah-Emperor who is expected and who shall set up an Empire of Justice must show himself the revivifier of the ancient Roman Empire, the reincarnation of Augustus, Prince of Peace, restoring imperial Rome to her old position in the world.
As early as Barbarossa’s day the Arch Poet, like his predecessors, had sung of this “Renovatio” expected from Roman Law and from his Emperor:
Iterum describitur orbis ab Augusto,
Redditur res publica statui vetusto,
Pax terras ingreditur habitu venusto,
Et iam non opprimitur iustus ab iniusto.
All the preconceptions which lent a tangible reality to the expected Messianic King: the tone and manner of the ancient Caesars and of the Augusti were adopted by Frederick when writing his magniloquent letters to the Romans to shake into wakefulness these people “all too content with the shadow of a great name,” “to arouse this later posterity to scale once more the peaks of their ancient greatness.” The Emperor’s words fell resonantly on the Romans’ ears: between domestic cares and enervating self-indulgence they have forgotten the
ir mighty past, “Behold, the arrogance of Milan has set up a throne in Northern Italy, and not content to be Rome’s equal, she has challenged the Roman Empire. Behold these folk who were bound of old to pay you tribute—so men say—fling insults at you in the tribute’s stead. How sore unlike the deeds of your forefathers and the virtues of the ancients!… that one town alone should dare to bid defiance to the Empire of Rome. In olden days the Romans were not content to subdue their neighbours only, they conquered all provinces, they possessed far distant Spain, they laid fair Carthage in ruins!” The contrast between the old Rome and the new, he continued, amazed all who had heard the fame of Rome or had read the monuments of the past and looked now upon the present. And thinking of the Roman communes the Emperor writes: “Ye reply perhaps that Kings and Caesars accomplished these great deeds. Behold, ye also have a King and Caesar who has offered his person for the greater glory of the Roman Empire, who has opened his treasuries and has not spared his travail! Ye have a king who with his constant calling stirs you from your slumbers. …”
In these ways the Emperor sought to arouse all the mental powers of the time, that the world might see what was at stake when he drew the sword against the Lombards. They were opposing the clearly-manifested aims of God: a world peace and an Empire of Justitia. Frederick was, therefore, justified in proclaiming that the Lombard rebels were in revolt, not only against him, the Emperor, but directly against God, against the Catholic faith, against Nature. He himself spoke very cautiously and only of his imperial peace mission, adding but one phrase: “The glory of the Emperor’s sceptre shines out from Rome across the darkness not in temporal affairs alone.” His friends in Italy, however, lauded the coming “Deliverer.” Piero della Vigna addressed the people of Piacenza, announced the Emperor’s impending arrival and, not wholly by accident, nor yet wholly by design, he took as his text the prophecy of Isaiah which recurs in the Gospel for Christmas Day: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.”
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Such were the signs and tokens under which Frederick II metamorphosed himself from Law Giver into Leader of Armies and prepared men’s minds for his appearance in the new part, fulfilling the formula of the Caesars: arma et leges. He had called the approaching campaign an “Execution of Justice,” and this conception made serious strategy impossible, for the armies were only an instrument of the Judge to punish law-breakers and rebels. Frederick had no large continuous stretch of territory to conquer. Like all medieval rulers he lacked space, and he lacked foes against whom to carry out campaigns in the style of Alexander, Hannibal or Julius Caesar. The Middle Ages saw on occasion kings and princes at the head of their armies, but—except perhaps in Byzantium—knew no generals, no strategists on a large scale. Any brave man could head an army, a cardinal or justiciar as well as a king, and none could be a good general or a bad general, because there was no art of war. An art of war began slowly to be evolved when the days of the condottieri came and the professional armies. The endless fighting of the preceding ten years had developed Frederick’s army till it was showing indications of becoming a professional one: the troops serving as feudal levies became gradually subsidiary to the soldiers recruited and paid directly by the Emperor. Frederick showed the adaptability of all great men by developing into something of a condottiere himself. There was no opportunity, however, for great strategic combinations, whether on his side or his opponents’. In the Middle Ages every battle was a more or less accidental impromptu affair, needing an immediate decision. Frederick used to the full the advantages of speed, surprise, cunning and superior strength. He could, however, rarely induce the enemy to risk pitched battles in which they were always defeated. The siege technique of the day was so imperfect that when they ensconced themselves behind the stout walls of their fortresses they could only be starved out, or very occasionally the place could be carried by storm. These sieges dragged on for many months and were as far as possible avoided by Frederick, for the cost of maintaining the besieging forces was enormous. Compared with the vast conceptions of universal Empire and universal Papacy the armies of the time seem ludicrously small. It is the characteristic of the period descending from the universal and the spiritual to the material, that a very minute concrete object might be charged with a great idea, and a most trifling deed with overwhelming spiritual significance. It is probable that Frederick II never assembled more than twelve thousand, at the utmost fifteen thousand men, “under the victorious eagles of the Imperium Romanum.” Even this force will have consisted of a heterogeneous assembly of the most disparate components: German, Italian, Sicilian feudal knights fighting alongside Saracens, infantry levies from the loyal towns beside mercenary knights, and archers of the most miscellaneous origin. The Emperor was probably superior to the enemy in cavalry, but the confederate armies as a whole were probably equal to his, and possibly even larger. In open battle the cavalry invariably won the day, but in siege operations the heavily armoured knights were valueless.
The army which the Emperor took with him for the campaign of many months in Lombardy was unwontedly small, even for those times. He had had to detach a strong German army against the Duke of Austria. The “Quarrelsome” Babenberg had not put in an appearance at any of the appointed Diets; he had imprisoned imperial ambassadors; had indulged in provocative acts against all his neighbour princes, and, finally, had refused obedience to the Emperor. He had now been placed under the ban of the Empire, and the King of Bohemia with the Duke of Bavaria were detailed to enforce the decree. They were able to overcome him within a few months and drive him back into his last fortresses. The Emperor had told off several of his German divisions for this subsidiary campaign so that at least he need not weaken his Italian troops.
The whole campaign of 1236 which only lasted a few months was, therefore, only a preliminary canter to clear the air in Lombardy. Frederick was anxious to have certainty about the Pope’s attitude. He, therefore, begged that since the war was against heretics, and since there was peace between Empire and Papacy, the Pope should take a hand, by spiritual proceedings against the rebels. It was not too much to ask the Curia to support this punitive campaign. Gregory IX sent no reply. Taxed with his silence he later wrote that he must have failed to answer “out of a kind of dreamy forgetfulness, as it were.” Instead, he sent the Emperor a new list of complaints about the Sicilian government and scarcely alluded to Lombardy. Finally, when for a moment the Emperor’s military progress seemed to have come to a standstill, the Pope suddenly unmasked, abruptly shattering the dream of unity: “Thou seest”—he wrote—“the necks of kings and princes bent under the knee of the priest, and Christian Emperors must subject their actions not to the Roman Pontiff alone; they have not even the right to rank him above another priest.” This is the famous, the notorious phrase of priestly omnipotence, which Gregory was the first to formulate, and which he launched, somewhat prematurely, against Frederick II. He far exceeded the claims made by his predecessors, for he subordinated the Emperor to every petty cleric, and in matters other than spiritual. The verdict of the Apostolic See was supreme throughout the world, declared Pope Gregory, which was the equivalent of saying that Frederick must submit without protest to the Pope’s decree in the Lombardy affair, although this quarrel between the Emperor and the rebels had in the last resort nothing whatever to do with the Pope. Pope Gregory derived the right of the Papal See to decide all questions, especially Italian questions, from that famous forgery, the so-called “Donation of Constantine.” He elaborated: “Constantine, Sole and Only Ruler over all regions of the World, in agreement with the Senate and People of Rome, who possessed authority not only over the city but over the whole Roman Empire, had found it seemly that the Vicegerent of the Prince of the Apostles who held sway over the priesthood and over the souls of men, should also possess supreme power over the affairs and persons of the entire world.” And Constantine had believed t
hat he, to whom the conduct of heavenly things had been on earth entrusted by the Lord, must also lead all earthly affairs on the bridle of justice. The symbols and the sceptre of the Empire were, therefore, handed over by Constantine to the Pope for all time; the city of Rome with the entire duchy, and also the Empire, for ever placed under his jurisdiction. Constantine had placed Italy completely at the disposal of the Apostolic Chair, and sought himself a new residence in Greece. For it seemed to him unseemly to possess power as earthly Emperor where the Head of the Christian faith sat on the throne on which the heavenly Emperor had placed him. Without in the least impairing the quality of its judicial supremacy the Apostolic See had transferred the Empire to the Germans, to Charlemagne, and had granted him the power of the sword by his coronation and anointing.
We need not here further pursue the papal doctrine. For the moment it served Pope Gregory to claim that his award in all Italian disputes was final and binding even against the Emperor. Frederick found it superfluous to answer this letter. If he had had any doubts before, he now knew where he was. What need of words! No doctrine of the judicial supremacy of Pope or Emperor, no theories of papal overlordship in Italy or in the Empire could argue away the fact that the Lombards in conspiring with King Henry had been guilty of high treason. The negotiations which Hermann of Salza was conducting with the Pope might drag on to the accompaniment of military campaigns. In this affair only deeds could decide.
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In August 1236 Frederick had reached the neighbourhood of Verona. Gebhard of Arnstein had been sent on in advance with five hundred mercenary knights and one hundred mercenary archers to invest the town, and Frederick himself brought a further thousand knights and some infantry. Considerable additional forces were to join him in Italy, in particular the levies from the loyal towns. The important thing was to enlarge in every direction the exit of the pass. Eccelino was to work eastwards towards the Treviso March: against Padua, Vicenza and Treviso, which were already being supported by Venice. The Emperor himself turned westward into Lombardy proper. Mantua had declared for the League, so communication with Cremona, Frederick’s most valuable north Italian base, was cut. The town levies from Cremona, Parma, Reggio and Modena could not join Frederick because a hostile Confederate army was doing its utmost to prevent the junction of the two forces. By making a northern detour, and invading the hostile territory of Brescia, the troops from the imperial towns succeeded in effecting a junction with the Emperor, which was accounted a great success for his cause. The most important task was now to open the road from Verona to Cremona. The two minor fortresses of Mercaria and Mosio were held by Lombard garrisons. These were taken. An effort was then made to tempt the Mantuans into the open by a three-day siege, but when they refused to come out the march to Cremona was continued. One goal had now been reached, and the Verona base secured.
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