Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  For nearly three hundred years—the era of the Renaissance—the strife of the one yet dual God was the spur of mankind. Dante was the first to fight it to the end and overcome. Dante who reconciled the Eagles and the Cross, the kingdoms of this world and the next, ended the opposition which had begun with Vergil, and growing ever stronger had lasted for a thousand years. The tension between the Empire of Caesar and the Empire of Christ was symbolised in the two contemporaries, Francis and Frederick, preceding the great singer with whom the Empire closed. Another great singer Vergil, whom Dante claimed as master, had heralded the era of tension and cleavage, the age of the dual Saviour, Christus-Augustus.

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  Frederick’s influence partook of this dual character. His legacy was most potent in Italy, and the reverberations of his career were felt there for three hundred years. New giants grew up around him. Through his son-in-law Eccelino of Romano, the Devil of Treviso, he became the ancestor of Sigismondo Malatesta and of Cesare Borgia. Eccelino, the admirer and the creature of the Hohenstaufen, was one of the many who seized on one trait only of the Emperor’s many-sided character and exaggerated it into a colossal caricature. The ruthless assertion of personality, the unbridled lust for power, became with Eccelino an end in themselves and therefore evil. After the death of the Emperor had removed all restraint, this tyrant developed his vices to their uttermost. The two men were of the same age, but Eccelino survived Frederick for nine years. Long before the end Romano was the most feared and most hated man in the East of Northern Italy, which, in the Emperor’s name, he had subjected to his power. Eccelino had ripened in the party quarrellings of the towns, had at an opportune moment rallied to the Hohenstaufen banner, and been given a free hand in those regions without any definite imperial office. Basing his operations on Padua, Verona and Vicenza, Eccelino had built up a self-contained despotism. He added town after town to his possessions, raised taxes on his own authority, promulgated new laws, appointed his own relations to office, at times against the Emperor’s wishes, and even enlarged his territories at the Emperor’s expense. His power was based wholly on terror. From pure self-seeking he remained faithful to Frederick, and, as he was a trustworthy guardian of the Brenner, Frederick left him unmolested. Eccelino, in spite of the Emperor’s backing, was the first of a new type of ruler, a type which Manfred later dignified by referring to the precedent of Caesar: the illegitimate prince who founds his throne on power and cunning, and maintains it with severity, cruelty and fear, relying on his personality alone.

  Dante represents the tyrant Eccelino expiating his sins in a stream of boiling blood: “that brow whereon the hair so jetty clustering hangs.” He is said to have been covered all over with black hair like an animal’s coat. His outward appearance was sinister, his bearing assured. He was only of middle height, but the sight of him inspired terror. He always appeared to be trembling with wrath and arrogance. Though for political reasons he had frequently been married, he held aloof from women. He despised them and rarely approached one. Yet he poniarded on the instant a German soldier whom he caught raping a woman at the storming of Vicenza. He liked to call himself a “scourge sent for the punishment of sinners,” seeking the sinners rather among the aristocracy than amongst the common people, whom he kept sternly under his heel. Eccelino believed that his fate was linked with the stars and relied on the learned Guido Bonatti and the long-bearded Saracen, Paul of Baghdad, to read his fortunes in the sky. He loved magnificence, but his Padua court displayed only the oppressive pomp of the tyrant, and his Saracen bodyguards served more for awe than for grandeur. “This state must be kept pure” was the motto of the despot, who grew more and more stony as the years went on. The faintest breath of suspicion spelt rack or stake, castration or the dungeon. He is said to have sacrificed 50,000 men by murder, torture or execution to maintain his power. He acted, no doubt, on the principle of his brother-in-law, Salinguerra: “The whole heavens are the Lord’s… but the earth hath he given to the children of men.” He died faithful to his principles. He was sixty-five when uncounted enemies suddenly surrounded him, and brave though he was and tried in battle, he was stunned by the blow of a club and taken prisoner. He refused food and doctors and died within a few days. He repudiated confession and the last sacrament, jesting that he had but one crime of which he repented, having let himself be overpowered and being unable to take vengeance. Whereupon he dismissed the priest. His voluntary death may well have saved him from an end as gruesome as his brother’s. Alberigo of Romano had at first been hostile to Eccelino, but later became his ally. He was quite as cruel, and lustful to boot. They made him creep on all fours to the place of execution with a bit in his mouth, serving as a mount for the mob. He was made to witness the tortures of his family, then the flesh was torn from his body with pincers, and while still living he was tied to a horse and dragged to death.

  Eccelino was by no means the only giant in Frederick’s circle. Another was Guido of Sessa, who cynically refused the last rites to some condemned papalists, assuring them that as friends of the Pope they were sure of immediate access to Paradise. Taking flight, one night, he and his horse plunged into the lepers’ cloaca and perished in the filth. Yet another was the one-eyed Margrave Hubert Pallavicini, who began as Eccelino’s friend but betrayed his rival and took him prisoner. He rivalled Eccelino in vice and practised the same unscrupulous violence to maintain his rule. He had less demonic fanaticism and remained always a sly calculator without a conscience. His whole appearance was uncanny. While he was still in the cradle a cock had picked out one eye, but the remaining one glittered “like a black coal” from a face framed with blackest hair and beard. He also was of middle height, but immensely powerful and tough. Like all the Emperor’s intimates he made merry over the Church and her dogmas. He looked on the Roman Church purely as a political power and the Pope as a ridiculously petty Italian landowner, scarcely on a par with a Pallavicini. This materialist point of view was usual amongst men of his type in Renaissance times. The Emperor had entrusted him with the Vicariate-General of Cremona and had made him a gift of numerous places in these, his native territories. After Frederick’s death the Margrave continued the war against the Papacy and the Guelf. Like Eccelino he fought nominally for the Empire, but with the parts of Lombardy which he conquered he swelled his growing Seignory and styled himself “Vicar General in Lombardy and permanent lord of Cremona, Pavia, Piacenza and Vercelli.” Crema and Milan, Alessandria, Tortona and Parma also obeyed the despot, whose immense domain ultimately fell to pieces as rapidly as it had been thrown together. When he died at seventy (also, so the legend runs, refusing the ministrations of the Church) the Margrave Hubert Pallavicini possessed nothing but the single castle Busseto near Parma from which he had been wont to sway the destinies of Lombardy.

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  These comrades of Frederick II were large-scale criminals, men who made mock alike of the bliss of heaven and the pains of hell. And each of them showed features of the Hohenstaufen Emperor distorted into caricature. Frederick was the only one of them who bore God in his breast as well as the Devil. His immense potentialities are seen in the way in which he developed as Hammer of the World and Scourge of the Peoples, and yet might worthily have stood beside Francis of Assisi and with him fought the common foe, the degenerate Church. Frederick took care at first not to attack the Church; he sought to confine his quarrels to the individual Pope. When this became impossible he changed weapons with lightning adaptability and began to emulate the wrath of Elijah, who “jealous for the Law slew the greedy priests of Baal in the storm of the spirit” and embarked on a campaign against the worldliness of the clergy. His great Reform Manifesto followed hard on the Council of Lyons: “It was ever our intention and our will to induce the priesthood of every rank, not least the highest, to endure ‘to the end’ as they were of old in the early church: leading an apostolic life and emulating their Master’s humility. For such are the men who see visions and work miracles, who heal the sick and wak
e the dead, who not by force of arms but by their holiness make kings and princes to serve them. Our priests on the other hand are slaves to the world, drunken with self-indulgence, who put God in the second place: the increasing stream of their wealth has stifled their piety. To take from them these treacherous treasures which are their burden and their curse: THIS IS A LABOUR OF LOVE.” Thus Frederick wrote to the kings of Europe and exhorted them to relieve the servants of God of all superfluity. In this Frederick was in accord with the mood of his time. This was the doctrine which well-nigh caused Francis of Assisi to be condemned as a heretic: the doctrine of return to the simplicity of apostolic times, the Church’s re-marriage to her long-forgotten spouse, poverty. The moment seemed opportune, for the end should be like the beginning, as Frederick expressly emphasised.

  The Emperor pressed his demand further: “Whence have our priests learned to bear arms against the Christians? To don their coats of mail instead of sacred garments, instead of a shepherd’s crook to wield a lance, to carry the bow and arrows of bitterness instead of their writing reed, to think lightly of the weapons of salvation? What assembly of God-fearing men has commanded this and sealed it with its seal? If anyone doubts us let him behold the holy cardinals and archpriests who brandish warlike weapons in the land where we bear sway! The one styles himself a duke, a margrave another, yet a third a count, according to the province where he rules. Did the first disciples of Christ so arrange it? O foolish multitude! Ye attribute holiness unto them, ye create saints unto yourselves as imaginary as the giants of myth!”

  Frederick in this document demanded nothing less than the abandonment by the Roman Church of all her worldly property and of all her worldly dignities: duchies, margravates and counties. The French Revolution first brought these demands to general fruition, though in Sicily Frederick had succeeded in establishing the desired state of affairs. For in his own kingdom most of the Church treasures had been confiscated and Frederick had long since ceased to bestow official rank on his Sicilian clergy. It is obvious that Frederick was not preaching the poverty of the Church from the motives of urgent faith and piety that inspired St. Francis. It has been the fashion to make it a reproach that Frederick wanted the Church to be poor, not because of his zeal for God but because he was a bad Catholic. The Emperor certainly did not espouse the cause of Church reform for its own sake, yet reform was part of his office, and in pursuing it Frederick was boldly ahead of his time. St. Francis and the reforming Emperor are suddenly near akin. Whoever sought to bring again the Augustan age had need of a church as it had been in the days of the early Empire. The Saint demanded the return of the primitive Church, and his Order yet more imperatively demanded it (for that they hoped “as a new breed of men” to oust from office the degenerate clergy), and in so doing they unwittingly conjured up the Augustan as well as the Apostolic age. St. Francis, intent only on the Church’s weal, had no thought for such logic. Frederick II, however, with wider vision, saw that his empire could absorb the greatest movement of the time, saw indeed that the Empire of Rome could co-exist only with a Franciscan type of pope. Frederick here anticipated the vision of Dante: a penniless Peter as pope, side by side with him, an emperor of boundless possessions, both immediately appointed of God. To such a pope, who by his holiness made kings and princes to serve him, Frederick was prepared to render—as Dante demanded—“that reverence which a firstborn son must show his father, that in the light of his father’s grace he may be more powerfully resplendent throughout the world. …”

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  We must draw attention to a remarkable turn of phrase in one of the reform manifestos. “Our conscience is pure and therefore God is with us,” Frederick announced to the European kings. This is a kind of spiritual communion with God different from that of St. Francis. A communion in virtue of conscience, which is based on the imperial doctrine that the Emperor is responsible for his action to God alone. This is the layman’s claim to immediacy of intercourse with God, which not without good reason was first formulated by the last Emperor of the Middle Ages. This doctrine preludes the later notes of the Reformation. Yet there could hardly be a greater contrast than lies between the two points of view. The appeal to purity of conscience which, when taken up by the many, served to obliterate all ranks and grades, was here a privilege of the all-responsible Emperor who claimed it for himself in full consciousness of his own uniqueness and accorded it otherwise to none. In judging others Frederick held their actions only of account. But the imperial attitude was challenging; how challenging we see from the gloss on this passage by an astonished monk: “Believe in deeds!”

  Frederick had described his campaign against the Church as a “labour of love,” and we need feel no surprise that the mendicant orders hailed his tribunal as just, and hoped that the final era of peace and repose was now about to dawn. The growing hostility between the regular clergy and the orders became Frederick’s ally, and many, both Franciscans and Dominicans, supported him against the clergy. In opposition to the prevailing belief that Antichrist would come from without to attack the Church, many saw the destroyer within the bosom of the Church herself.

  One of the mendicants, Brother Arnold, demonstrated in a document bearing the title “Innocent IV, Antichrist,” that the words “Innocentius Papa” yielded the number 666, and that, therefore, the Pope was Antichrist. In another highly emotional pamphlet the same writer espoused the Emperor’s cause. He asserted that God had revealed to him in a vision that it was the divine intention to renew Holy Church and to lead her back to her original purity. Thus instructed, Brother Arnold had, he reported, betaken himself to Kaiser Frederick, who had investigated the vision with the advice of wise and learned men, and being himself a Catholic free from all unfaith, the Emperor had approved the reformation of the Church as a most pious work. After forty days of mystic rapture Christ himself vouchsafed a vision to the monk, and revealed to him that the Pope and the papalists were the real enemies of God and the destroyers of the Gospel, and that the Lord had expelled them from the community of the faithful.

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  Many shared Brother Arnold’s belief, and the cry “Heretic Pope” was heard unceasingly till the Reformation. It was particularly loud in Germany. In Hall in Swabia and in other places wandering preachers announced to thronging listeners: “the Pope is a heretic; the prelates are simonists; the priests are unworthy to bind or to loose; papal indulgences are valueless and the Pope leads a perverted life and sets an example of evil.” “Pray therefore,” the preachers concluded, “for the Lord, Kaiser Frederick and for Conrad his son, for they are perfect and they are just.”

  The Emperor’s reform manifestos were particularly popular in Germany. Wild abusive pamphlets attacked the clergy, “spouses of luxury who shirk marriage”; one in its wrath struck the very note of imperial utterances: “O the blind unenlightened simplicity of you Christian people! Why be ye deceived by such trickery! Arise, arise, ye monarchs of the earth. Arise, ye princes! Arise, ye peoples, open your eyes and see! Endure no longer the disgrace of such enmity. Root out this diseased multitude from the earth who bring confusion and contamination! Reform Holy Church disfigured by such crimes! And when the evil leaven of crime and wickedness is swept away may a new yeast begin to work in purity and truth and faith!”

  Such voices could not alter the outcome of the strife and no rising of the masses was at that period to be hoped for. But it is idle to pretend, as some have done, that Frederick was “misunderstood” by his contemporaries. Frederick must have been perfectly aware that his reforming manifestos could not shatter the Papacy; he probably did not even wish that they should, for without a World Church the World Empire would cease. But he pushed the campaign to the uttermost, and the seed he sowed took root even in his own day. With his instinct for a living force Frederick seized on these ideas and flung them into the conflict between mind and might, to germinate for centuries. The hopes of earnest men in Germany who sought reform were for all time linked with the name of Fre
derick II Hohenstaufen. Men dreamt that he would some day return, in all his glory, to reform the corruption of the Church, and would pursue the Roman hierarchy so savagely that they would hide their tonsures with cow dung if they could find no other covering.

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  Perhaps it was especially to make impression on the Germans that Frederick let loose the terrors of the Angel of Death and of Antichrist. Germany is quicker to recognise the good than the beautiful; perhaps it would not otherwise have recognised the Emperor as Saviour. The Pope’s procedure gave new food for such reflections. Germany was drawn into the strife to a greater degree than before and suffered bitterly under the Curia’s persecutions.

  Up till the Council of Lyons Germany had felt relatively little of the great strife between Papacy and Empire. The church agitation had exercised little influence, although in 1239, just before the Emperor’s excommunication, the papal legate, Albert of Bohemia, had succeeded in organising an opposition amongst the princes: Bohemia, Bavaria and Austria had formed the Confederation of Passau against Frederick. But it broke up within a few months. Bohemia and Austria came to terms with the Emperor, and the Duke of Bavaria was left alone. Not even the Bavarian clergy had gone over to the Pope, doubtless because the bishops were hostile to the Duke and therefore remained imperialist. The bishop of Ratisbon openly defied the Pope’s legate; the bishop of Brixen barricaded the street against the papal messenger; the bishop of Freising denied the Pope any jurisdiction whatever in Germany, and the archbishop of Salzburg trampled a papal letter under foot. Princes and towns sent auxiliaries and money to the Emperor in Italy. Finally, even the Duke of Bavaria abandoned his hostility, for the Mongol peril which threatened his neighbours Bohemia, Hungary and Austria, diverted his attention. The propaganda of the Curia seemed to have been in vain.