Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  In vain did Piero della Vigna, in the proclamation intended for the Pope and for the Christian monarchs, seek to lift the victory into the realm of the miraculous: the triumph on the Capitol—which Christians believed to be the seat of heathen demons—the celebration of the victory itself, which lacked all Christian consecration, subserved no longer the eternal glory of God but the everlasting fame of a mortal, who, it is true, bore himself almost as a demi-god. But the glory of man grows pale; henceforth the thirst for fame grew stronger in Frederick and ever stronger. “That the might of Augustus may not lack occasion for fresh triumph!” he writes once during these fighting years. For his subjects the fighting was to bring the end of their burdens, “for ourselves the highest victory…”; for his subjects victory was to bring desired repose, “for ourselves the wreath of the battle.” For the “fame and praise” of his name Frederick at this time contemplated restoring the tunnel of the Emperor Claudius by which he had drained the Fucine Lake. “For eternal and everlasting memory” he had a statue of himself carved in stone, a figure in the round standing free, to ornament the gate of the bridge at Capua; reliefs all round celebrated the Emperor’s victories and gave the whole the character of a Porta Triumphalis. To attach so much importance to the perishable body, so shamelessly to do it homage, was unheard of in the Middle Ages.

  This Caesar-like gesture was no doubt the Emperor’s personal caprice and carried its own meaning, but a statesman’s most private act is not without its political purpose. Barbarossa, the first German Emperor after an interval of many years to intervene effectively in Italian affairs, found himself obliged sonorously to reassert his dignity as Caesar with the Roman law behind him, for the German feudal kingship with its armies which had sufficed the Ottos and the Salians no longer bore his weight in Italy. What had been true of Italy was truer still of Rome. A Cardinal writing in late Hohenstaufen times maintained that he who seeks to rule the Romans must show them: et gestus magnificos et verba tonantia et facta terribilia. The Romans had felt this craving for a century or more, since they re-awakened to self-consciousness: this lust for great-hearted gestures and words of thunder and awe-inspiring deeds was heightened by Frederick. The Romans were for him the people of his imperial capital at whose feet he hoped to lay once more the empire of the world. Besides: he needed the Romans in his duel with the Pope.

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  The year 1236 brought the whole Italian-Roman question to a head. And in that year begins Frederick’s wooing of the Romans with rhythmical high-sounding phrase. He had long since secured a strong party for himself in Rome, so that he was certain of finding some response. Probably during his first quarrel with the Pope about the Crusade, when Roffredo of Benevento had to read his explanatory manifesto from the Capitol, his first political alliances with the Romans had been established. Frederick had gathered about him the most powerful patrician families of Rome, headed by the Frangipani, and had made them his vassals by buying up their immovables in Roman territory and granting them back again as fiefs: landed estates, farms, vineyards, but, above all, towers and solid buildings in the town, most of which dated from old Roman times. The Mausoleum of Augustus belonged to the Colonna, the Colosseum to the Frangipani; the Arches of Titus and of Constantine, the Septizonium of Septimius Severus were all structures which had been fortified at an early date and served the town aristocracy as castles. The Emperor had acquired possession of all this, and the Romans were well pleased with the transaction: they remained in enjoyment of their property and received no small sum in ready money, and their freehold became a fief. For a long time to come Roman nobles were selling their possessions to the Emperor and becoming his vassals.

  In addition to this Frederick had granted fiefs in his Sicilian kingdom to many of the Roman patricians, a Frangipane received one in the Principata, John of Polo was granted the County of Fondi, and later Alba. It is probable that Frederick also took a wife for his son from the family of these adherents of his. The consort of Frederick of Antioch was said to have belonged to the Polo family. Yet other Romans drew regular annuities from the Emperor and enjoyed—rare privilege—untaxed commerce with Sicily.

  The Emperor’s party in the town of Rome, therefore, was by no means inconsiderable. It had been disconcerting for him to have to take the field on the Pope’s behalf against the Romans: a double game by which at the moment he purchased quiet in Germany. The citizens’ hate for their spiritual head, however, drove them back into Frederick’s arms, and within a year of his campaign against the Romans the imperial party was uppermost in Rome once more. Whether spontaneously in order to please Frederick, or whether at Frederick’s direct instigation, the nobles now stirred up the populace against the Pope just at the moment when the Lombard question was acute between them. In 1236 it again happened that a pro-Kaiser senator was elected, and Frederick now addressed his letters to this imperially-minded Rome. Pope Gregory’s complaints, therefore, that the Emperor was recklessly expending money in order to foment strife were not without plausibility. Frederick’s reply was that, on the contrary, peace had reigned in Rome since, and not before, the appointment of an imperial senator.

  It is a striking fact that Frederick II supported and turned to his own advantage in Rome the very same revolutionary anti-government impulses which in Lombardy he fought with fire and sword. But in Rome the movement was hostile to the Pope. The Lombards’ ambitions, moreover, were wholly individual and selfish, whereas the Romans were aspiring to their ancient and traditional world-dominion. Earlier Emperors had resented the suggestion that they exercised imperial rights in virtue of the Senatus Populusque Romanus, and had felt an enmity towards the Roman people. Conrad III had simply left unanswered the Romans’ invitation to make Rome, the caput mundi, his capital, and to restore the Roman Empire to the position it had held in the days of Constantine and Justinian, who had ruled the world from Rome. When Barbarossa was coming for his coronation the Romans made him a similar proposal and asked for certain assurances. With the magnificent arrogance of a Caesar, not lacking a touch of naïveté, Barbarossa thundered at the ambassadors of Rome: the Senate and the Ordo Equester were naught to him: “Do you crave to see the glory of your Rome? the dignity of your Senators? the valour and discipline of your Knights? Behold our empire! We have your Consuls, we have your Senate, we have your armies. I am the legitimate successor! Let who will snatch the key from the hand of Hercules! The prince issues orders to the people, not the people to the prince!” Nothing could more clearly illustrate the resemblance and the difference between Frederick and his grandfather. They had in common boundless pride and arrogance, but their attitude to Rome was radically different: one was the imperial warrior-knight, the other the imperial statesman-diplomat. Frederick II did not for a moment question that the imperial dignity was divinely his, having been bestowed on him by the Senate and Roman people. He loved, on the contrary, to recall that it was the Romans themselves who had chosen him, who had collauded the boy of seventeen, who “in all the anxieties of ambiguous fate was setting out to Germany to scale the heights of imperial fame.” He did not weary of repeating that the Romans of their own motion had entrusted to him all the offices and dignities of the Princeps according to the lex regia. The deduction which he drew was that the Romans who had spontaneously invested him with the imperial dignity were henceforth in duty bound adequately to support their King and Caesar, their Knight and Imperator, the pater imperii, the Princeps whom they themselves had chosen. He by no means deduced a right of the Romans to act against him. The reward that he held out to them was a share in their Emperor’s fame and triumph, a sample of which they had received in the spoils of victory sent by their Triumphator. “The same Felix Roma who had bestowed all office and ownership on the Roman Princeps must stand by him, sharing burdens and toil, nor fail to share the honours she herself had helped to heap on him.”

  Frederick II thus made the Romans sharers in his responsibility for the greatness and permanence of his Empire, and he had yet ano
ther thought in mind. He promised fulfilment of their ancient dreams: their wishes for the revival of the ancient Roman power. His Caesar titles meant a great deal to him, so did the revival of ancient forms and ceremonies, yet “gladly though we follow the rites of old we seek yet more eagerly to revive the ancient nobility of the City.” These words cannot be interpreted too literally or too exactly.

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  The old idea of Renovatio connoted for Frederick less the revival of titles and ceremonies than the regeneration of the Romans themselves, the Roman citizen and the Roman patrician who should again be worthy to rule an Empire. Romans had to be made anew. Frederick II could not, single-handed, effect a re-birth of Rome and of the Empire; could not alone call to life a Roman State in the ancient sense. He required the co-operation of a Roman aristocracy who had at least as great an affinity with the Fabii, Cornelii and the Tullii as he himself with Augustus and with Caesar. In this also he gave the Romans a lead: “We recall the ancient Caesars to men’s minds by the example of our own Person!” This was but the first preliminary of what he sought: “That in our auspicious days the honour of the blood of Romulus may revive, the imperial Roman speech be again heard in its glory, the ancient Roman dignity renewed and an inseparable bond by our grace be tied between the Roman Empire and the Roman people themselves.” To quicken the old instincts of rule and statesmanship by a share in the responsibility for the fate of the Empire, the Emperor now gave orders that Roman nobles and distinguished Roman citizens should be sent to him in order that offices of various kinds might be allotted to them. Some were to receive state offices at Court in his own immediate entourage. He would make others responsible for the conduct and administration of districts, and provinces, yet others would find a place in varied offices suited to the rank and qualifications of the individual. He summons to his service by name Proconsuls from the aristocratic families that were loyal to him, the Orsini, the Poli, the Frangipani and the Malabranca.

  It was now clear what Frederick had had in mind when he invaded Lombardy. The new pan-Italian State which he was planning was going to be ruled by Romans of the blood of Romulus, the Provinces were to be governed by Roman pro-consuls, as of yore the mighty Imperium Romanum had been held in leash by a small number of Roman officials. “We shall no longer delay the execution of the plan we have evolved: that to the honour and glory of Rome distinguished Romans shall preside over the business of the State and shall be resplendent in dignity.” The Roman Empire, Italy, “the seat of Empire,” should be for the Romans, for the blood of Romulus! That was Frederick’s idea of Renovatio. Once Milan had been eliminated, “the head of all dissensions in Italy,” the central point and the fountain of strength in the Italian Roman state should be Rome herself. The contemporary Dominican, Bartholomew, interprets Frederick’s intentions thus: Frederick wished quietly to leave in Rome the symbols of his mercy and his might, that the strength, the “virtue” might flow from the head of the world into the limbs. This implied a complete displacement of the centre of gravity of the Empire which under the olden German-Roman Emperors had been in Germany. It was more vital for Frederick to call the ancient Roman Caesar-Empire to new life from its very origins. True Roman blood should course again through the veins of the Roman Empire.

  Frederick had chosen the Romans for great tasks: but they must not slumber lest they miss the flow of the tide: “Awake! awake! Sleep not!” was the burden of those exhortations full of zeal and power, the aim of all this recalling of the famous deeds of ancient days. Fame, hard to earn, easy to keep, was almost lost to these Romans, so far estranged from their noble origin. The Emperor approaches them with a human touch otherwise reserved for his Apulians: now he calls them Fellow-Romans, Conromani, and recalls their origin from the ashes and ruins of Troy, now he harks back to the great names of old time and calls up the hosts of the Quirites, the tribes of Romulus, the Patres Conscripti, and the tens of thousands of the Populus Romanus: now he exhorts them to have in remembrance the triumph and the glory of their ancestors, the laurels of the conquerors, the ancient fasti of the Empire, the rods of the lictors.

  Rome is more to him than the origin of his imperial title; the Rome of the Caesars, like the Church herself, is his spiritual mother; he himself the son of Rome. A son was born to Frederick in these weeks following the victory of Cortenuova. All the world was informed of this auspicious event; the young king was celebrated “already conceived under a lucky star, whose birth has been heralded by such triumphs, which are pledges of the strength of the longed-for peace and justice that shall prevail in the Empire renewed under the ancient fasces, symbols of law and order.”

  The age-old revival dream of the German Emperors thus flamed up once more in Frederick, and as he sought to requicken not merely Roman forms (like his predecessors) but Roman life, the ancient state-life of the Romans, his renovatio ended by heralding the Renaissance. From the revival of the ancient State, Italy was led to the re-birth of the ancient man. Rome was to be the capital of a united Italy, and Italy herself the centre of the Roman Empire. Frederick, it is true, realised his dream only in part, but the vision never faded—Dante took it up and gave it a soul.

  The poet also conceived Italia Una as the centre of the Roman Empire, as the province of provinces, not only as the realm of the Caesars but as a national Italy. Frederick had sought to re-awaken the dead Roman, but Dante to call into life the Italian people, whom Frederick for a decade had been forcibly welding into one in his imperial State. This was the cause of Frederick’s great breach with the Curia, who also desired the rule over a united Italy and continued on into the period of the Borgia and Medici Popes to cherish the dream.

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  Frederick II was not content with securing for himself the Rome of the Caesars: he sought to win also papal Rome, and he thus kept Pope Gregory in perpetual unrest. Since the victory of Cortenuova the Pope’s position seemed in any case well-nigh hopeless. He had but recently returned to Rome, and Frederick’s undisguised intention of capturing Rome, his episcopal seat, followed by the intrigues amongst the Roman nobility, had hit him hard. Moreover, the concluding words of the triumphal proclamation which Frederick had addressed to the Romans contained a threat to the Curia that could not be misunderstood. The Romans should beware, he wrote, of those who saw with envy the imperial victory and pondered the destruction of the spoils; they should carefully guard the Emperor’s gift, and if necessary put their lex plebiscita in force which prescribed in such cases the penalty of death! Finally, in an emotional manifesto—a copy of which was sent to the Pope—Frederick interpreted his victory over Gregory’s protégés the Lombards as a triumph of the Lord over Satan! Nor was this all. Frederick II was a dangerous enemy, skilful to seek out the weak points in the armour of his foe. He formed a rallying-point for all enemies of the Papacy, and was able to find support amongst those most closely associated with Gregory: in the very college of Roman cardinals.

  The relation existing between the cardinals and the Pope has very justly been compared to that borne by the German princes to the Emperor: as the Emperor was elected by the princes so the Pope was elected by the cardinals, and the Bishop of Rome was, in certain matters, as much tied by the consilium and consensus of the cardinals as the Emperor in certain circumstances by the advice and concurrence of the princes. Similarly, in the Roman Curia it depended wholly on the personality of the Pope for the time being, whether he would rule more autocratically or more constitutionally, and the cardinals opposed excessive claims of the Caesar-Popes as strenuously as the princes those of the Emperor.

  Pope Gregory IX, kinsman and disciple of the great Innocent, was an autocrat in every fibre. To assure himself of a complaisant College of Cardinals he had nominated six new cardinals immediately after his elevation, men whom he knew to be wholly devoted to himself and prepared to support his policy as a whole. Individual cardinals, however, concerned for the welfare of the world and recognising a peaceful cooperation of the two powers as necessary, early began to
deprecate Gregory’s excessive hostility to Frederick. The Emperor was always kept well-informed about the course of affairs at the papal court. A favourite device of the Pope’s was to encourage the German princes against the Emperor; imitating this, Frederick skilfully drove a wedge into the almost invisible rift. He expressed on occasion a doubt whether the Pope had acted with the concurrence of the cardinals, and sought to play them off against their master with gradually-increasing success. As his relations with Pope Gregory grew worse over the Lombard war Frederick began more and more to make use of the cardinals, even to negotiate with them directly, over the Pope’s head. In a quarrel about the allegiance of a certain Italian town he accused the Pope of having refused to restore this place to the Empire, against the advice of almost all the cardinals. He complained direct to the cardinals against the activity of the papal legate in Lombardy, and the King of England wrote to individual cardinals urging the imperial claims. The Emperor’s success in arms was the ultimate cause of the final breach. Circumstances gave the verdict too plainly against Pope Gregory, and the majority of the cardinals saw with anxiety and concern the danger into which their master’s intransigence threatened to plunge the Church. The peace party, who sought an accommodation with Frederick if at all possible, gained in numbers quite apart from Frederick’s wooing. John Colonna, for instance, complained to a cardinal who was residing in England that the Church had committed herself “all too violently, all too unreflectingly,” to the waves… that no heed was paid to the dissatisfaction of the cardinals and others… that the advocates of peace were rebuffed, the College of Cardinals divided, and that he, the writer, had been shamelessly betrayed and left unsupported whenever he had tried to restore order. …