subordinates—Punishment of conspirators—Complicity
of Pope—Henry Raspe—Italy partitioned
amongst the Hohenstaufen—March on Germany;
threat to Lyons—Defection of Parma—“The
Cardinal”—Siege of Parma—Saracens as executioners—
Victoria—Defeat before Parma—Money
shortage—German knights in Italy—German influence
on Renaissance art—Renewed threat to Lyons
—Fall of Piero della Vigna—Attempt to poison
Frederick—Piero della Vigna’s suicide—Enzio taken
prisoner—Manfred’s rise and fall—Conradin’s coronation—
Tagliacozzo; Conradin’s execution—Death of Enzio—
Curse on the Hohenstaufen—Parma avenged—
Death of Frederick, December 13, 1250—
Burial at Palermo—The Frederick myth
IX. Antichrist
“Nemo contra Deum nisi Deus ipse.”
“Now I shall be the hammer!” This was the characteristic cry which led Nietzsche to hail Frederick of Hohenstaufen as “one of my nearest kin.” Nietzsche, the first German to breathe the same air as Frederick, took up the cry and echoed it. Frederick had struck a new note, and passed into a supernatural world in which no law was valid save his own need. He had long realised that he would be compelled to loose terrible and savage forces; he shrank from it and had sought to avert it by the humblest offers of peace, even by complete submission to the Pope; nay, by actual abdication. He did not seek the rôle of the Scourge of God, compelled to lay the recalcitrant “between hammer and anvil and to smite their obstinacy with blows so thick that they shall bow their necks to the yoke of commandment, and whatever their thoughts may be, shall recognise their true master.”
Innocent IV had not recognised that a man like Frederick II could be bound only by fetters of his own forging and would take on him the yoke only of his own choosing. Innocent trusted to his papal power of binding and loosing, to excommunication and deposition, and had thus released from bondage the Antichrist, whom the Lord himself had held in fetters for a thousand years. The chains had worn thin; they had grown rusty; the Pope had subjected them to a strain too great. The “Lord of the World” might polish them till they shone like gold, and voluntarily adorn himself therewith, but they could not bind him against his will. He laughed them to scorn.
Since Antichrist it had to be, Frederick accepted his fate. All that had gone before now wore an air of preparation and seemed to indicate a readiness to welcome the inevitable with open eye. Though he had been (Frederick wrote) unalterably convinced that this Pope, like all others, would be opposed to him, yet he had worked to compass the elevation of Innocent. Why? “Solely in order that our hand might hold him whom we should overcome or—if the fates had been kinder—him whom we should love?”
That is to say with open eyes to co-operate with mysterious fate, to create his own foe since fate so willed. This is the clearsighted fatalism of the man of action: a survival of the heroic age. A thousand years of Christianity lend it a Christian colouring: almost to the point of self-immolation Frederick had hoped that he might love his enemy. But the Norns which ruled the career of this Hohenstaufen recognised no such solution. Love was barred; he must fulfil himself through hate. If he might not as a Saviour-Emperor join hands with an Angel-Pope to draw the peoples under the gentle yoke of an Emperor of the End, he was ready with scourge and sword, with axe and halter, to compel the recreants to bow under the yoke. “Because they above all others have cut us to the HEART, therefore shall we pursue after them with greater zeal and fury, we shall the more mightily deploy our powers to compass their destruction, we shall wield the sword of vengeance the more cruelly against them… and the HATE that consumes us will be slaked only by their utter annihilation.”
At every stage of his career it was clear that Frederick was full of primeval hate for any disturber of his sacred order. Hatred and revenge—virtues both in Frederick’s eyes—are characteristics of the priest, who asks quite other reparation from the desecrator of his Holy of Holies than that which the warrior exacts from his enemy. Hatred and revenge are qualities of the Justitia and of the judge of whom it is said “the righteous is as a glowing coal.” Frederick II was the sacred judge in a degree undreamt of by Emperors before or after him, hence gratitude, tolerance, kindness, magnanimity, had no more right than their opposites to a place amongst his qualities. Gentleness and mercy he recognised as forces at the disposal of Justitia, in the same way as revenge and hate, but henceforward he displays almost exclusively the avenging power of the state-founding Justitia. Hatred becomes to him the breath of life. In proportion as the foe no longer seeks to overthrow the Emperor’s order, but aims solely at his person, this hate becomes a personal imperative. As the Scourge of God he recognises no law, divine or human, save his own advantage and his own caprice. None knew, none guessed what he was fighting for, what he still hoped to gain—perhaps he knew himself—except the assertion of his own personality. He became the battle-cry of the West; bloodier and more savage than before the strife raged through the Christian world round his person alone. Never before in Christian times had one single individual achieved such personal importance—Frederick the man, not Frederick the Emperor. Times had changed. Those lofty ideals for which Frederick had fought of old: the rebirth of the Roman Empire, the reign of Justitia, the mission of World Peace—at most their distant echoes faintly sounded, as “revolution” and “enlightenment” echoed faintly round Napoleon in his last years. They no longer supplied the driving force. The person of the Emperor was now the World-Idea. If Frederick had been unable thus to exalt himself the Curia would still have given the struggle its œcumenical importance. With magnificent single-minded concentration the Church laid aside all other tasks and devoted her entire world-organisation to the destruction of one man. The Church magnified the Hohenstaufen into a giant. The Papacy, with all the forces of all the countries of Europe, was now fighting not the Emperor nor the Empire, but one demon in whom all the evil of the world was incarnate, one Hohenstaufen, by name Frederick. Only once again has the world seen such a fight against a single man in which, perhaps, greater numbers were involved, but scarcely greater forces, the final death-grapple with Napoleon. This was the atmosphere in which Frederick let his new note be heard. The air of Attila was round him which he alone could breathe. Attila’s mission was his, which none but he could comprehend. Instinctively his contemporaries bestowed on him the cognomens that Attila had borne, “Scourge of the Peoples,” “Hammer of the World.” With hushed voices his own followers styled him no longer merely “him who ruleth over earth and sea” or “him who maketh the winds of heaven to rejoice,” but “him whose might tramples the mountains and bends them.” All Europe suffered terribly under him, friend and foe alike, Italy and Germany more particularly. Except for those who worshipped and followed him, Frederick now became in very deed the incarnation of evil. He possessed, indeed, a capacity for evil rare in a ruler of his greatness. Nor has any man ever felt a greater joy in ill-doing than Frederick in the rôle the hostile Church had thrust upon him. Where the State was at stake Frederick had always been capable of every meanness and cunning, of every violence and severity, of every deceit and ruse, of every malice and of every scorn. “I never reared a pig but I was prepared to eat his bacon” is one of his sayings. Hitherto whatever evil he had done had been done for the sake of the State. The world was now at war over the body of the Hohenstaufen. State necessity had of old constituted right: now his personal exigencies. Law was bent to his will not to serve the state or the world at large but at the apparent bidding of imperial caprice. Theoretically he had often proclaimed that the welfare of the Empire, of the other peoples, of the kings, of those who believed, hung upon his private weal or woe. Every act of his now appeared more tyrannical, more monstrous, and was, in fact, more ruthless since it seemed to serve the preservation of one single individual. J
ust because Frederick II had so nearly been the Saviour (and indeed in the eyes of the faithful still was) he had the opportunity to be the very Antichrist. Since as a priest he knew all mysteries no mystery was safe from his fearless mocking attack. No spirit among all the thousand demons of the world was a stranger to his cosmopolitan mind. All the supernatural magic of the East was at his command and the elusive jinns, and all the satanic poisons of Italy and the immeasurable daring of the German Mephistopheles, who crosses the Alps “and believes that all is his.” The great saying of Luther might well have been applied to him: “An Italianised German is the devil incarnate!”
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It is hardly necessary to mention that ecclesiastical principles, excommunication and dethronement decreed by a Council, broke powerlessly against this genius and ruler of the Opposition-world: “The stones hurled by the papal catapults were changed to straw.” The blasphemies with which he was credited are without number; whether authentic or not, they were believed. The Church in her own defence circulated the wildest exaggerations and the most fatuous lies, and spread them more widely than Frederick in speech with his friends could possibly have done. Not only the speech about the three deceivers, but mockeries about the sacraments were ascribed to Frederick as to every heretic. At the sight of a cornfield he is said to have remarked with jesting reference to the Eucharist: “What a lot of gods are ripening here!” And another time, “even if God had been bigger than the biggest mountain the priests would surely have devoured him before now.” And when he saw a priest bearing in haste the viaticum to a dying man: “how long will this humbug continue?” It is known that he made merry over the virgin birth as contrary to nature, and that he denied the immortality of the soul. Cardinal Rainer was, therefore, not without some justification when in his pamphlets he asked: What was to restrain the Emperor from the most devilish infamy since he had no craving for eternal bliss, which he was prepared to sacrifice to slake his thirst for vengeance in the blood of the people of Viterbo, and since he had no fear of hell. For he had taught his courtiers to believe that “the soul passes away like a breath and is consumed like an apple plucked from off the tree, man and apple composed alike of the four juices.”
What recked he of the Church’s means of grace—confession, penance, absolution—since he and his astrologers believed in fate determined by the stars, and such a belief in fate precluded remorse! How was a man to be bridled who counted human blood as naught, who could, with impunity, hang or behead, drown or imprison bishop, monk or priest, whom men reproached for pulling down churches to build privies in their place and using the stones for fortresses for his beloved Saracens!
Councils and popes could certainly now erect no barriers that Frederick would have hesitated to break down. The only limits he could recognise were those he set himself. He had taken on himself a new mission, the office of Hammer of the World and Scourge of God: not without the demonic joy of creative genius in being free to destroy: not without the pain and sorrow of preserving genius in being forced to destroy. Pope Gregory had once said that Frederick loved to hear himself called Antichrist; but Frederick had endured to the last limit of endurance before becoming Antichrist indeed. He was capable of any sacrilege, of any blasphemy, of any depravity, but whatever rage or revenge he might indulge was never wanton, it was always necessary for his self-preservation, and with it all he preserved always unimpaired the proud gesture of a Caesar, the noble bearing, the exalted dignity which stooped to nothing mean, the self-control, the poise that became a Christian Caesar. Woe to the heretic who dared to draw near him as a “fellow heretic!” He remained to the last the Christian Emperor in style and bearing, without prejudice to his personal system of dogma. “Even dogmatic orthodoxy is false if the correct bearing is lacking,” he once wrote. The phenomenon was remarkable: however violently his terrible and primitive force broke forth it was always controlled by the restraint of a Roman Augustus, who might tolerate vice but not indiscipline. He once described his own ambition: “to repress even the most righteous impulses of the spirit, and in virtuous self-discipline to preserve a Caesar’s calm.” Thus we too must picture him. A Scourge of God not in the aberrations of Ivan the Terrible, not sunk in sinister and brooding gloom, but in a more eerie windless calm, the detached aloofness of a timeless God. Thus under the figure of Caesar Augustus, Kaiser Frederick is reflected two-fold in a double mirror as Antichrist and as the Messianic Judge.
Caesar, Messiah, Antichrist: these are the three fundamentally identical manifestations of Frederick II since Cortenuova, since the beginning of his World Rule. He remained unchanged; only the fluctuations of circumstance show us his form lit with a different glow. The more he genuinely approximated to a Roman Augustus from whom salvation was to come the more he resembled the very antithesis. A genuine Roman Emperor reincarnate who erected statues to himself, inevitably appeared as Nero or as Antichrist beside the Galilean.
The whole life of Frederick II could be interpreted either in the Messianic or the Anti-Christian spirit. The Antichrist begotten in sin shall be surrounded by astrologers and augurs, wizards and magicians, shall re-introduce demon worship, shall seek personal fame and call himself God Almighty. He shall come to Jerusalem and set up his throne in the Temple. He shall restore the temple of Solomon, and shall lie, and call himself the son of the Almighty. He shall convert the kings and princes and through them the peoples. He shall send his messengers and preachers over the whole earth, and his message shall reach from sea to sea, from East to West and from South to North. With him the Empire of Rome shall end. He shall accomplish signs and wonders and unheard-of deeds, but confusion shall reign upon earth the like of which was not before. When men shall see his deeds then even the perfect and the chosen of God shall be in doubt, whether he be Christ who shall come again at the End of the World according to the scriptures or whether he be Antichrist. For both must be like and equal.
Frederick’s manners and methods were always open to two interpretations. His menagerie and exotic pomp made some to think of a world-king who ruled over all beasts and kindreds and tongues, of the Messiah under whose sceptre all the animals of earth should lie together in peace; while some saw in this train of owls and pards and dark-skinned corybantes, sweeping through the towns of Italy, the hosts of the Apocalypse. Frederick could not mount a horse but some symbolic meaning was forthwith attached thereto: if he rode a white horse he was aping the Saviour and was accused of blasphemy; if a chestnut, he became “the rider on a red horse” who bringeth strife; if he chose a dun, he was death: and if he was mounted on a black horse men trembled before the judge with his balance. Frederick probably aggravated things himself by calling his favourite horse “Dragon.” When Cardinal Rainer spoke of the “horn of power in his forehead,” and when the Cistercians, after his deposition, dated their writings according to the years of the reign of “Fridericus Cornutus,” the horn is thought of as the sign of Satan. But two horns are the token of the Messiah, symbols not of evil but of power as Moses shows and Alexander. Frederick was reputed invulnerable; in later days this was accepted as conclusive proof of a pact with the Devil; but others believed that only God could summon back his own. Some called Frederick the fallen angel whose countenance had once been likest God’s; others thought of the God-likeness of the Messiah, and Piero della Vigna celebrates his master as “like unto God.” Riches marked the Antichrist, but again Christ was lord over all the treasures of the earth. Frederick’s knowledge of tongues, so that “he was wont to speak in many languages of many kinds,” was also satanic: or divine. Points in which Frederick quite unquestionably appeared as the Christian ruler caused most discussion of all: for deceit and disguise were the chief characteristics of Antichrist. Frederick was then more dangerous than ever. There is irony in the fact that this temperate man, who preserved his health by a regime of one meal a day (so that he was even accused of stultifying the penance of fasting), should have volunteered to win absolution by fasting.
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br /> Frederick’s life was a consistent unity, though capable of a dual interpretation; yet some have sought to find a “conflict” in it and to trace this throughout his life: the freethinker persecutes heretics; the friend of Saracens goes a-crusading; the man whose very atmosphere generated freedom must nip freedom in the bud as he fights the freedom-loving towns; the man born to rule the world must confine himself to Italy; the man who poured scorn on the priesthood must call himself a priest; the Christian Emperor must needs by penetrating query undermine the Christian faith; and, finally, he who would fain be like the Messiah was yet prepared to play the Scourge of God and Hammer of the World. It is depreciating genius to expect it to be transparently simple to construe.
The conception of a Roman-Christian Caesar implied the fusion of two worlds; the tension of two extreme forces. Each perpetually denied the other, each owed the other the fullness of its vitality. A smaller man than Frederick II would have succumbed under the strain, but at such altitudes the same miracle is ever renewed and ever challenges man’s admiration: “the glaciers shone on by the fiercest sun become not warm, neither do they melt, the sunlight lends them brilliance only.” Frederick summed up the situation in his fundamental dogma of the secular State: true freedom exists only under the yoke of the Imperium.
For once these antitheses could co-exist in one form and shape without thus losing firmness of texture or of outline: Emperor and Galilean; Pagan and Christian; Saviour and Antichrist. For the Christ whom Frederick the Hohenstaufen represented, who was for the last time incarnate in this German Emperor, was the almost pagan Christ of the Old Saxon Heliand, the Iesus Rex of the royal house of David, who wore the diadem of the Roman Emperors and ruled the Germanic year with fame and glory; who founded the new Christian Imperium which ended with him. This Saviour, blent of Germanic, Greek, and Christian elements, wearing a crown of light, holding in his hand the orb, the lance, the book, enthroned in the aloofness of the mandorla that knows not time nor space: this was the Saviour whom Frederick in actual fact released, fulfilled and lived, lending him bodily existence in his own flesh. Christ once more had become man: God was again to die. St. Francis had vouchsafed a new glimpse of the same God: a picture of a gentle not a jealous God, a sufferer with wounds and crown of thorns, beside whom the stern judge and unapproachable, the fame-crowned king, inevitably appeared as Antichrist. For yesterday’s God is ever the Satan of to-day.
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