It is not completely clear why Frederick II was suddenly prepared for such a capitulation; at one point he even contemplated abdicating in King Conrad’s favour and going to the East for good. His position was certainly growing more and more difficult; he was now fifty years of age and the craving for peace must have become overmastering. The phase of life is clearly visible in his constant toying with the thought of going to the East for a long period: or for ever. Besides, for his heirs’ sake he wanted peace lest the quarrel should become immortal for his successors. He himself could defy the world; he could hardly ask his successors to do the same. The fall of the Empire seemed to lie ahead unless an end could be put, at whatever sacrifice, to this quarrel.
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Frederick was spared this humiliation. Once again the warlike manes of Gregory IX awoke. Cardinal Rainer of Viterbo, on whom had fallen the mantle of Gregory’s hate, succeeded in dashing to the ground the last possibility of peace. Pope Innocent intended to hold his Council in Lyons in June. It happened that Frederick had invited the German princes for the same date to a diet in Verona. In April 1245, while the Patriarch of Antioch was still wrestling for peace, the Emperor set out from Apulia with his whole court and a large army and marched north. His route lay through the Papal State, close by Viterbo. He could not refrain from laying waste at least the country round Viterbo and even indulging in a short siege. On the representations of the Patriarch that hostilities would imperil the negotiations that were in train he at last consented to move on. He did so on that very 6th of May which Innocent had appointed for his absolution.
Now Cardinal Rainer had been left behind as the Pope’s vicegerent in Italy. He had followed with deep vexation the course of the Patriarch’s overtures, which appeared likely to bear fruit. As Frederick II devastated the Viterbo domains it happened that the imperial troops here and there crossed into papal territory. This gave Rainer of Viterbo a pretext for again wrecking the threatening peace; he made a report to the Pope, and under his pen these trifling trespasses became a serious breach of the treaty. At the same time he despatched numerous pamphlets to the prelates assembling in Lyons, all of which bore the hall-mark of the school of Gregory IX.
These pamphlets of Rainer of Viterbo were destined to fix for all time the hostile portrait of Frederick II as the della Vigna letters fix the contrasting portrait for his friends. In his decree of deposition Pope Innocent only reproduces in moderated terms and with more coherence the contents of Cardinal Rainer’s unbridled and hate-ridden pamphlets. Pope Gregory’s awe-inspiring manifesto of excommunication was, in comparison, a mild and harmless document. The Pope had been the first to treat Frederick II as an apocalyptic figure. Rainer utilised all the terrifying imagery of the Revelation and the Prophets to prove that Frederick was, in fact, the forerunner of Antichrist. All previous accusations are raised to a monstrous and inhuman power, each one is corroborated by the phrases of the prophets employed with savage fury. No single feature of Antichrist must be missing; all must be found in Frederick’s life. Rainer rehearses all Frederick’s activities, and finds in all symbols of the Antichrist: his friendship with the Muhammadan princes, from whom he accepts gifts in spite of their slaughter of the Christians; the heretical sayings of his courtiers, repeated as his own; the existence of the Saracen colony; the outrages committed by these warriors, who are alleged to violate Christian women and girls before the altar of their God; the murder of Pope Gregory and of his own imprisoned son, all these crimes are laid at Frederick’s door. Further, it is recounted how he had kept his three consorts (the third of whom had recently died) imprisoned in “the labyrinth of his Gomorrah,” and, finally, had poisoned them; how he and his warriors spread death and destruction throughout the world, how he savagely pursued even the prelates with his ships. “But because his accursed raging and his fearsome stiff-necked wrath are like unto the foaming sea that cannot rest but stirs up with its waves the mud and slime in the eyes of all that see, he charged against the Lord with the uplifted neck of his pride and with the broad shoulders of his riches and his power he destroyed the cities, ravaged the habitations and recked so little of men that he slew them like lambs. But the foe and the pursuer set his hand to yet worse evil. He carried the war further against the saints and constrained them. Lifting himself up against Heaven he flung down from the firmament and from the stars the holy ones of the Most High and tore them in pieces. He hath three rows of teeth in his jaws, for the monks and the clerks and the innocent laity, and mighty claws of iron hath he, and some he hath devoured, consigning them to death, and others he hath slain with other torments, and the remnant he hath trampled in his dungeons under foot. Hell-hound shall he be called like Herod, yet Herod thought only to slay the Christ, while this man blasphemes the body of the Lord and strives to overturn the law of God and hath slaughtered exalted members of the clergy. Crueller than Nero shall he be known, for Nero slew the Christians because they sought to abolish the worship of his idols, but this man is crueller and baser than Julian the Apostate who seeketh to destroy the faith he doth himself profess.”
Every deed that Frederick had wrought marks him as Antichrist: the closure of Sicily and the passport regulations are tokens of Satan, and now this glorification of his own person. “And thus this new Nimrod, a raging hunter before the Lord, steeped in vice, who loveth the lying word, hath as his servants abandoned men who delight the king with their wickedness, and with lies rejoice their prince. … He despises the ban and gulps down his punishments like water from a brimming goblet and misprises the power of the Keys, this Prince of Tyranny, this overthrower of the Church’s faith and worship, this destroyer of precept, this master of cruelty, the transformer of the times, this confounder of the earth, this scourge of the universe. He is like unto the fallen angels who would fain be the equals of God and seat themselves on the mountains of the Most High. Like Lucifer he essayed to scale the heavens to establish his throne above the stars and the candlesticks of the Bride, and his seat over against midnight, that he may be equal to, yea higher than, the vicegerent of the Most High. And while he sits like Very God in the temple of the Lord he alloweth priests and bishops to kiss his very feet, and while he commandeth that they shall call him holy, he hath all them beheaded as enemies of the State and as blasphemers who dare to utter truth about his manifest untruths. When the apostolic chair long time stood empty, the heart of this evil prince became uplifted to the destruction of the Church, and like the Prince of Tyre he would fain have sat upon the seat of God as if he were God indeed, and he sought himself to choose the High Priest and to fasten his yoke upon the apostolic chair, and had in mind to break the right divine and to alter the eternal precept of the Gospel. Since he hath in his forehead the horn of power and a mouth that bringeth forth monstrous things, he thinketh himself enabled to transform the times and the laws and to lay truth in the dust, and hence he blasphemed against the Highest and uttered contumelies against Moses and against God.”
The aim of these half-insane, abusive trumpetings was to cause the priests assembled in Lyons to forget the very possibility of peace and induce them to agree to Frederick’s deposition. “Sacred vessels and holy places dedicated to God hath he put to shameful uses, as of old Belshazzar the Babylonian defiled the vessels of the temple of Jehovah what time the prophetic finger wrote on the wall mene tekel upharsin, who in that same night lost his Empire and his life. This criminal deserves no less to lose his kingdom of the Church.” Cardinal Rainer quotes dozens of biblical parallels, “The men of Bethshemesh were destroyed because they looked upon the ark of the covenant; Uzzah was slain because with unclean hand he sought to support the ark of the Lord; Uzziah the king, who sought symbolically to burn incense on the altar of incense, was marked with leprosy on his forehead, and the word of the priest drave him from his throne; Korah, the shameless, with his kindred was devoured by fire because he sought to snatch the privilege of the priesthood. Of a truth whoever could be proven to have transgressed the law of Moses was
without mercy condemned to death.” How much more does Frederick deserve such a fate: “Have therefore no pity for the ruthless one! Cast him to the ground before the face of the kings that they may see and fear to follow in his footsteps! Cast him forth out of the holy place of God that he may rule no longer over Christian people! Destroy the name and fame, the seed and sapling of this Babylonian! Let mercy forget him!” Cardinal Rainer knew how to get his effects. The pamphlets contain nothing doctrinal, nothing about the supremacy of the Pope over the Emperor, no learned hair-splittings. In the main their contents consisted in rehearsing the Emperor’s well-known behaviour with interpretations which turned everything Caesarean into anti-Christian. How ripe the moment was for such bogeys needs no elaboration. The appearance of Antichrist had been independently and confidently predicted for the year 1260, and we recall how the dawn of this year of terror brought the outbreak of the Flagellants throughout Europe. Rainer of Viterbo played for his own ends on the unreasoning terror which this event inspired. The Emperor’s downfall was the goal of his existence. When the Council met in Lyons at the end of June men lent a willing ear to these extravagant outbursts.
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Frederick II was also summoned to appear in Lyons, though it is true that the Pope had only indirectly invited him in the course of a sermon. The position was an impossible one: the Roman Emperor could not appear as the accused before a council consisting almost wholly of hostile bishops. If he had appeared escorted by an army the situation would have become even more acute. Frederick, moreover, knew nothing of the altered atmosphere produced by Rainer’s reports and writings, and still imagined that his position was favourable. At the end of May 1245 he reached Parma on his march to Verona, and from thence he despatched his representative and advocate to Lyons, the tried and trusty Thaddeus of Suessa. We know frankly nothing about this renowned jurist and orator. He may have been a replica on a smaller scale of Piero della Vigna; his name indicates that he was a native of the Campagna. He was always one of Frederick’s most faithful adherents and was killed fighting his battles. This man was now entrusted with the most responsible and difficult task that can be conceived—the hopeless defence of his master before a court of hostile priests.
While Thaddeus journeyed to Lyons Frederick proceeded to Verona. Here, after many years, he again met Eccelino, and here King Conrad with the nobles of Germany awaited his father. The most important business before the Verona Diet was the Austrian situation. Frederick was contemplating a marriage with the heiress of the last of the Babenbergs and was prepared to create Austria a kingdom in return for his bride. The papal Curia had other plans for the Duke’s daughter, and apparently succeeded in terrifying Gertrude of Austria at the thought of marrying the excommunicated Antichrist. One of Rainer’s pamphlets represented Frederick as a Bluebeard who had already murdered three wives, and some legate would appear to have put this in her hands. However this may be, the seventeen-year-old girl refused at the last moment to follow her father to Verona. So this Austrian scheme fell through. When the Duke died in the next year 1246 Austria was annexed as a vacant imperial fief and administered by a Vicar General.
This was the last Diet of Frederick’s at which the German princes put in an appearance, and there were already serious gaps in the ranks. King Conrad, Frederick’s son and heir, remained some weeks with the Emperor; it was the last time his father saw him. The boy was only seventeen, but he had matured early according to the Hohenstaufen habit; joyless years of inglorious fighting lay before him in which in spite of his ability he could only hold his own. All that was brilliant in Frederick seems to have been handed on to his bastard sons, and beside Enzio, Manfred, Frederick of Antioch, the fate of the legitimate heirs seems drab indeed. Burdens too heavy to be borne had been laid on their young shoulders.
From Verona the Emperor sent an embassy to Lyons to bring the new peace proposals. An arrangement had been made with Thaddeus of Suessa that the Emperor would halt in Turin in July so as to be the nearer to Lyons in case of a reconciliation with the Pope for which he still hoped. When he left Verona in haste on the 8th of July, later than had been agreed upon, the first two meetings of the Council were over.
The Council was not well attended. Innocent Ill’s Lateran Council had rallied 405; scarcely 150 prelates attended at Lyons. The German and Hungarian bishops were absent almost to a man, so were the Sicilians, for Berard of Palermo attended only in his capacity of Emperor’s representative; very few Italians appeared. There remained only the clergy of England and of France to be the Emperor’s judges, and the bishops of Spain, who since the sea-encounter of 1241 nourished an indescribable fury against Frederick, though they were the only victims who escaped. After their arrival in Genoa the Spaniards had at once written to the Pope, Gregory IX, to take every possible step against Frederick II, for he was setting a bad example to other kings. Nevertheless, the Council styled itself a “General Council,” though Frederick sturdily disputed its claim to the title. According to the testimony of friend and foe, Thaddeus of Suessa’s defence of his master during the sittings of the first two days was brilliant. Cardinal Rainer had summarised the various accusations under the incongruous title of “lese majesty.” His reasoning appears to have been somewhat on these lines: the clergy are members of the Church, hence members of the Body of Christ; the majesty of Christ is above the majesty of man; whoever, therefore, injures a priest is guilty of lese majesty. We need not pursue in detail the defence of the High Court Judge. By the end of the second day the most important thing that he had accomplished was the adjournment for twelve days of the final session. He was awaiting plenary powers, or even the Emperor’s personal attendance, for Frederick had already reached Turin. Not to appear intransigent Pope Innocent agreed to the delay. He did not, however, wait for the arrival of the envoys. All that was necessary had been arranged in secret session with the prelates, and the blow was timed to fall on the 17th of July.
The concluding session of the Council was introduced like the earlier ones by a solemn ceremonial. The Pope sat on a raised throne in the choir of the Cathedral church of Lyons, the nave of which was filled with archbishops and abbots. A few serious complaints of the English prelates against the money-hunters of the Curia, a topic unwelcome to the Pope, were speedily disposed of. The refusal of Thaddeus of Suessa to recognise the assembly as a General Council was “humbly and benevolently” waved aside by the Pope. Protests on Frederick’s behalf by envoys of the French and English kings received no hearing, and the Patriarch of Aquileia, venturing to take up the Emperor’s defence, was threatened with the loss of his ring if he broke silence.
Thereupon the Pope read the decree of deposition. Frederick had been proved guilty of perjury, breach of the peace, sacrilege and heresy. He was perjured because he had not fulfilled the treaty sworn in Rome; he had repeatedly broken the peace with the Church; he had committed sacrilege in taking prisoner the prelates; and, finally, he was a heretic who was even yet bound in the bonds of friendship to the Saracen kings; he had put his consorts in the charge of eunuchs; he had permitted Muhammad to be proclaimed in the Temple of the Lord at Jerusalem; he had utilised Saracens as warriors against Christians; he had entered into marriage relations with the schismatic Emperor, John Vatatzes; he had cleared princes from his path by assassins; he had caused the sacred mysteries to be celebrated in his presence when he was excommunicate. Apart from the irregularities of his harem he despised the morals and manners of a Catholic prince, and took no pains to secure his good repute or the salvation of his soul by pious deeds; he gave no alms; he was ready enough to destroy churches and oppress the clergy, but he had built neither church nor cloister, neither hospital nor any other pious building. In virtue, therefore, of his papal power to bind and to loose, the Pope declared this Emperor, so sunk in sin, deposed—and his territories released from their allegiance. A new Emperor must be chosen. Whereupon Pope and Prelates extinguished the torches which they bore, and while Thaddeus of Suessa, weeping and beatin
g his breast, left the cathedral with the other supporters of the Emperor, Pope and Prelates intoned the Te Deum.
With pain and wrath and scorn Frederick received the news. How could the Roman Emperor, the Lord of all majesty, be accused of lese-majesty and deposed! Sternly he bade them bring his royal treasure. Choosing amongst his many crowns he selected one and himself placed it on his head and grimly remarked: he had not yet lost his crowns and would not let papal baseness nor council’s decree rob him of them without most bloody battle. His position now, he said, was better than before. Previously he had to obey the Pope, now he was free; without obligations.
Pope Innocent himself had saved Frederick from a second Canossa, from a humiliating peace and a decline from the heights of Empire. The pamphlets had unwittingly pointed the way which the last Emperor of the Roman Empire no longer hesitated to tread. In Lyons they had called him “Proteus,” who was not to be caught because he constantly changed his form. He was now ready for the final metamorphosis thrust on him. Something of that northern defiance and northern horror which formed part of his make-up now found vent, when Frederick II, whom men had called Antichrist and Scourge of the World, turned to his followers with a new saying: “I have been anvil long enough… now I shall play the hammer!”
IX. Antichrist
Dual interpretation of Frederick’s life—Frederick’s posterity—
Satellite giants: Eccelino, Guido of Sessa,
Hubert Pallavicini—“Labour of Love”: to purge the
Church—Reform manifestos—Pope’s counter-activities—
Increasing savagery of Frederick—Lure of the
East—Conspiracy of intimates, 1246—Distrust of
Frederick the Second Page 69