Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  In his great Crusade manifesto from Jerusalem Frederick had praised God, “who commanded the winds and the waves and they obey him.” Now the same phrase is used of him as if he were himself the incarnate God: “Who bindeth the corners of the earth and ruleth the elements.” Even the foe recognised his supernatural quality—for evil. His adherents worshipped him as a God: “Thy power, O Caesar, hath no bounds; it excelleth the power of man, like unto a God,” writes one of his courtiers. A second says: “Wear the crown that beseems thy supernatural position.” A third praises him as the co-operator Dei, the coadjutor of God. Such phrases were, of course, the current coin of this Hohenstaufen court, but they characterise the monarch. Behind the adulations of the courtiers, often grossly overdone, we can see the truth: the impression the Emperor wished to make, especially on his own followers. The language of a court coterie is always two-edged, by turns veiling and revealing. If the phrase of the worshipper is taken too seriously it immediately becomes a jest, but if it is treated merely as a courtly game it suddenly is fully and literally intended.

  This homage shows at least that Frederick enjoyed a degree of supernatural reverence that was unique. Nothing proves this more clearly than the deep anxiety which the Emperor-cult evoked on the papal side. They reproached him with allowing himself to be worshipped like a God, with letting men call him holy and kiss his feet, with aiming at founding a priestly Empire. None of these accusations is strictly true, but none is entirely false.

  Earlier Emperors had been praised as deus de prole deorum, vicar of God, second David, holy, divine, the anointed of the Lord, Christus Domini, Salvator Mundi. There was nothing far-fetched in this because the Christian Middle Ages—unlike pagan antiquity—had only one type of God in human form: the Saviour. What seemed to the Church so satanic, so acutely dangerous, was that in addition to the stereotyped and relatively harmless formulas previously in use men spoke of Frederick as “versed in the divine plans,” “ceaselessly illuminated by the eye of God,” as a real, active, divine force. Apparent humility took a step back and conceived him as an emanation of the true God, a son of God, and continually placed him on the same plane as the Redeemer Christ himself. Perpetual reiteration gave these claims a peculiar ring, and their effect was enhanced by the fact that the world was at the moment wrought up to an hourly, vivid expectation of an imperial Messiah. Frederick II was the only Emperor of whom posterity cherished the dream that he would return as Saviour at the End of the World.

  The Emperor himself, and Piero della Vigna earlier, had given the courtiers the note: the letter to Jesi, the Emperor’s Bethlehem, is the best example of the style. An echo was only to be expected. A few years later an imperial governor with his troops was surrounded, and in need he wrote: “Our forefathers looked no more eagerly for the coming of Christ than we do for thine. … Come to free and to rejoice us. … Show thy countenance and we shall find salvation!… This it is for which we groan, this for which we sigh: to rest under the shadow of thy wings.” An imperial notary goes even further in numerous appeals from prison to the Emperor: “O harbour of salvation to them that believe… lead the children of Israel out of Egypt… we endure torment for thee such as the martyrs endured for Christ. …” One of the faithful Sicilian bishops, when summoned to court, writes: “Walking on the waters I shall come to my Lord.”

  After the second excommunication it became the fashion for the courtiers to keep up this “style” even in conversation amongst themselves. It is noteworthy, indicating the plane on which the Emperor moved, that all their allusions are either to Caesar or to Christ, never to Charlemagne or any of the great medieval Emperors. Piero della Vigna had had the largest share in creating this figure of his master. The vital thing was that Frederick II found spirits to praise him and recognise him: that he not only felt himself to be the emissary of God but was believed to be so by his followers.

  It is Piero della Vigna and his circle of jurists, stylists and literati who supply the enduring expression of this conception. The time believed that the first and second ages of Adam and of Christ were overpast and that the third was drawing on. Piero della Vigna boldly pointed to his imperial master as the hero of the third and coming age, the ruler “whom the Great Artificer’s hand created man,” “into whose breast all virtues are poured, on whom the clouds rain justice and the heavens send their dew.” And della Vigna praises in this last Emperor of the ancient Empire the “ideal of good,” “who is free from crooked sight, who bindeth the corners of the earth and ruleth the elements, that frost is mated with fire, and wet with dry, and rough with smooth, and the pathless is wedded to him whose ways are straight.”

  The marriage of opposites had been from of old the token of an aurea aetas, a Golden Age in which strife and war shall cease: an age of peace which the Saviour-Emperor shall bring. The Logothetes, therefore, praises his master: “In his day shall the bonds of evil be loosened and with might shall security be sown: men shall beat their swords to ploughshares for the bond of peace causeth all fear to cease.” Piero della Vigna was not alone in his belief that the reign of peace had come again under Frederick II. A North Italian sings: “cuius ad imperium redit aetas aurea mundo.” Another Italian poet in his enthusiasm over Frederick’s great victory at sea hopes that this severe defeat will teach the Pope the kind of peace which awaits him at the end of the strife:

  Et Puer Apuliae terras in pace habebit.

  The youthful name of Frederick II is revived again to link the Vergilian prophecies of the divine peace-bringing boy with the Messiah whom men now were seeking or had found in Caesar Augustus. Thus myth and poem and prophecy were interwoven in the life of that Emperor who had redeemed the Holy Sepulchre and was now waging war on a corrupted clergy.

  The fusion of the Messiah-Emperor and the Sicilian God of Justice in the person of Frederick II gave a peculiarly practical and human character to the new Emperor-cult. In turning over the letters that passed to and fro between the courtiers we find such unanimity of tone and phrase as almost amounts to a “secret dogma,” which grows more concentrated and forceful in proportion as the Pope is seen as the false and Frederick as the true Vicar of Christ. It was natural to turn to Piero della Vigna as the Peter and Prince of the Apostles of this new imperial Saviour. Della Vigna became “like unto the new Law-bearer, Moses, descending from Sinai, bringing the tables of the law from Heaven to men,” or, again, “a second Joseph to whom as a true interpreter the mighty Caesar whose power the Sun and Moon admire has handed over the direction of the kingdoms of the earth. He was the Peter who bears the keys of Empire and locks what no man may open, and opens what no man again may lock.” “Peter, the humble fisher, the Prince of the Apostles, who left his nets and followed God… but this law-bearing Peter quits not his Master’s side. The Galilean thrice denied his Lord… far be it from the Capuan to deny his Master once.” The trend of courtly thought is even more clearly revealed in the half serious letter which was written to Piero della Vigna. “And the Lord said: ‘Peter, lovest thou me? Feed my sheep,’ and thus the Lord who loveth Justice wished to build justice on this rock and give the reins of law into the hands of Peter, making you the custodian of justice. To show this the more clearly the Lord hath placed you over against the face of him who is the President but also the Perverter of the Church, that the true vicegerent Peter may rule through Justice while the false Vicar of Christ perverts his vicegerency to the injury of many in body, goods and name. … If such a charge oppresses you, since you are unaccustomed to it and never sought it… you can only answer ‘Lord thou knowest that I love thee. If I can serve thy people I refuse not the service: Thy will be done.’”

  This was not, as has sometimes been assumed, a serious suggestion that Piero della Vigna should be, in fact, elevated as a real Anti-Pope, but it contained the idea that the Head of the “imperial Church,” the jurist hierarchy, should be in a special sense an “Anti-Pope.” Below the half-serious, half-jesting flattery with which the courtier recalls the
master to his lofty duties, urging: “the Pope is useless, do thou, as the true Peter, discharge his duties,” we detect the lofty sense of dignity and responsibility which inspired the Court, and the clear consciousness that the imperial hierarchy of jurist and official formed an independent spiritual order like the Pope’s Church, and quite as good. Napoleon’s thought: “Gown against gown, esprit de corps against esprit de corps, judge against priest,” was anticipated, in other words, at Frederick’s court. To express ideas such as these was in those days only possible by using the symbols of the only spiritual kingdom then known: the Church with Christ her King.

  To establish the worship of a spiritual ruler without the Church men were fain to employ the Church’s methods: while to celebrate the warlike triumphs of the Emperor their thoughts leaped forthwith to the pagan Caesars. Thus it is that the State is called the imperialis ecclesia, the provinces are conceived as bishops’ dioceses and the purchase of office as simony. At moments men went further and stated that the Emperor’s Church, founded on Peter, was manifest whenever “the spirit of the Illustrious Emperor draws strength from a supper with his disciples.” We recall in this connection the High Mass of Justitia, the mystery and the sacratissimum ministerium, the solemn exotic ritual of the High Court when the Law Incarnate was revealed in the Emperor’s person, when the Emperor whispered his sentence to his Logothetes, who announced it to the kneeling multitude, while the tinkling of the bell betokened the mystic communion that was consummated. The essential result of the identification of Frederick with the Son of God is the reintroduction of the human element. The State was cemented by the direct belief of his disciples in a living man and his divine mission. Such a faith as saints evoke by miracles, but never an Emperor inspired save Frederick only. He wrought no miracles, but he was called “Transformer,” “Wonder of the World.” He was inevitably glorified into a saint, and men gave him the title of the Byzantine Emperor: “Long live the name of St. Frederick amongst the people!”

  There would be no need to pay so much attention to the inflated homage of the courtiers’ writings if this worship of Frederick had been confined to the rhetoric of the Vigna circle. This, however, was by no means the case. This extra-ecclesiastical “sacred cult” of a living man had other and very different consequences: it led to the representation and immortalisation of this divine person in art. The remarkable outburst of south Italian plastic art, an early breath as it were of the Renaissance, that suddenly blossomed as if by magic in the carefully-tended Paradise that was Frederick’s Sicilian kingdom, gave more open and more unmistakable expression to the feelings which the elaborate metaphors of the courtiers’ letters half obscured.

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  This new art formed no exception to the law that representational art is dependent on a living worship—certainly in primitive times. The great works of Hohenstaufen sculpture in Sicily date almost without exception from the last ten years of Frederick’s life, from the period after Cortenuova when the Emperor-worship began to take more definite shape and play a more ceremonial rôle. Amongst court circles it began to strike a more human and personal note and gradually to develop into a Frederick-worship. The sculpture was inspired by the worship of the Hohenstaufen God: at no moment was this “ruler, wrought and made man by the Great Artificer’s hand” more vividly present to men’s minds than in that solemn ceremony in which he, clothed in the awe of his divine majesty as highest judge and lawgiver, consummated in the eyes of all his communion with God when God, incarnate as Law, became man in the stainless Son!

  The literary records tell of that High Mass of the Emperor’s, the “supper with the disciples,” the founding of the imperialis ecclesia on Peter, his nearest intimate, and the works of art themselves, representing man in his “ideal,” i.e. his divine moment, can mean no less. In those days when the solemn ritual was evolved and della Vigna, under the exotic title of Logothetes, officiated, as intermediary and speaker for the Emperor, there was created in Naples a representation, probably a relief, picturing the scene. It has not been preserved, but has been described with considerable exactness: In the background the Emperor was seen high and lifted up, seated on his throne, beside him at a more modest elevation Piero della Vigna, and in the foreground, at the Emperor’s feet, the kneeling people. The multitude was demanding Justice from the Emperor, the chronicler declares, and the inscription tells the same tale:

  CAESAR—AMOR LEGUM. FREDERICE PIISSIME REGUM

  CAUSARUM TELAS NOSTRARUM SOLVE QUERELAS.

  The person so addressed who is to loose the web of strife, and who in his Book of Laws describes himself as weaving the woof of Justice, points to Piero della Vigna, the transmitter of the divine commands, as who should say: “Turn to this man in your strife. He will give judgment or beg me to do so. Vigna is his surname… he is called Peter, the Judge.”

  Even without the explanatory verses of the inscription the arrangement of the scene would have indicated what was here represented: this was the Emperor “in cultu Justitiae.” Justice, poured forth in due gradation. As Justice reigns as mediatrix between God and the Emperor, so Petrus Judex is represented as mediator between the Emperor of Justice and the people. Men were accustomed thus to see their ruler holding his High Court. The vitally important point is that we have here a representation of no abstract thought, but of real, actual life as it was known and seen. We have no knowledge how far this relief in the palace of Naples approached the antique, but under Frederick II all plastic art turned towards antiquity, driven by an inner necessity, quite independent of the Emperor’s personal predilections. For the sculpture that came to birth in Sicily was a “profane” art. Here, in the Pope’s fief, in scorn of the Church, came to birth the first great non-religious art of the West such as served to celebrate the State and the State Gods in the days of the old Roman Divi, if by “profane” we understand a contrast to ecclesiastical and religious representation. The secular art of the Hohenstaufen State was in its own way no less “sacred.”

  In the Middle Ages all creative art had been exclusively ecclesiastical; the outburst of new creativeness, and the new style associated with the secular state, inevitably meant reversion to the antique, and the dependence was surprisingly intimate. For a whole millennium all pictorial representation had served the glorification of the Saviour or his followers, the Saints. Pictures of rulers formed no exception: they were confined to chapels and cathedrals and were designed to magnify the Redeemer. Now for the first time plastic art was given a meaning, a life, a consecration, a raison d’être by the secular State. Only the worship of the Emperor Frederick makes this possible. Here, in the secular world, outside the Church, another son of God was glorified.

  From another point of view this ultimate dependence on antiquity and its method of seeing and portraying was entirely logical. The hieratical-ecclesiastical art had devoted its first attention to the relation which the presentation bore to the God of the other world, and its second thought only to the object represented. Here a bodily presentation of the World Ruler himself was possible: a portrait of the man who was, as he was. Truth and reality in art, which a heavenly subject rendered superfluous and which could be replaced by signs and symbols and frozen symmetries, now became the important aim. The beautiful golden coins indicate that even a “likeness” was by no means to be despised: “In order that the form of the money may bring our name to your memory and our illustrious image to your eyes… that the frequent sight thereof may strengthen you in your loyalty and fire your devotion.” Above the image on the seal is written: “The human impulse to fulfil commands received, faith in the message sent, these things are only justified by the image stamped in wax or metal of him who issues the commands.” On the seals the image is still mainly a mere “sign,” but this image speaks like a command, and the more it resembles the commanding person the greater will be the force it carries. This was the point to which the Emperor attached importance: the imperial image would be potent by recalling the PERSON, and power would
radiate from it as grace from a sacred picture through religious faith.

  Emancipated from the rigidity and symbolism of religious convention and once more in touch with life, everything in Hohenstaufen plastic art turned towards antiquity, whose achievements in a “profane” self-sufficing State had no need of Christian or mystic interpretation to be sacred. The recognition that every thing existed in its own right, was in itself divine and god-devised, was reinforced by the new conception of art for which Frederick stood. He had an eye for the bodies of man and beast such as no man before him had possessed, and his strong feeling of affinity with the Caesars had given him a keen appreciation of the art of their times. He filled his Apulian castles with ancient sculptures. From Grottaferrata, near Rome, he had a bronze cow and a bronze male statue transported to Apulia. From Naples slaves had had to carry on their shoulders ancient works of art to adorn the castle of Lucera. Almost all his castles boasted similar treasures. High on a wall of the inner court of Castel del Monte a relief may even now be seen, on which horses and riders can still be distinguished. Perhaps it was a Meleager hunting-scene such as was a favourite subject for sarcophagi… such as adorns the tomb in which Frederick buried the remains of his first consort, Constance of Aragon, in the cathedral of Palermo.

  The Emperor by no means contented himself with such works of art as were already to hand. His sculptors were commissioned to make more. Many heads and fragments of sculpture in Castel del Monte are probably copies of antique originals. Imitation, however, was not good enough. The Apulian stone masons received remarkable commissions and were set to work from real life, though in antique style. At times one might imagine that these were genuine relics of Roman days did not some detail betray the thirteenth century. The Emperor’s “unquenched desire” to renew the greatness of the Caesars, to take his stand beside the Augusti and measure himself against them, called forth these wonderful creations: figures in the round more like the antique than any preceding medieval work. Since the days of the Roman Emperors no state divinities had called for representation. What Christian ruler would have thought it necessary to build a great triumphal arch to glorify himself and his State, and decorate it with the figures of his trusty followers. Who would have dared to crave it! Who would have dared to execute it!