Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  We have no clue to the inactivity of the papal-Guelf army. The rumour inevitably spread through the besieged town that the papal general, young and charming Cardinal Ottaviano degli Ubaldini, was secretly in league with the Emperor. This was certainly untrue, for this particular scion of the powerful Tuscan family which played so important a rôle in Florentine history, never was in league with anyone. He made this a matter of principle. This highly-gifted, “most unpriestly priest,” had been made acting-bishop of Bologna at twenty-six, was fully consecrated when he reached the prescribed age of thirty, and at once created a Cardinal Deacon by Pope Innocent. He was neither Guelf nor Ghibelline but just himself: THE CARDINAL! Every child in Tuscany knew him under this title, and Dante introduces him into the Divine Comedy under this name. The poet saw him side by side with Frederick II in the fiery tombs of the Epicureans “who with the body make the spirit die.” Dante made them neighbours no doubt also because the Cardinal, like Eccelino and many another, was under the intellectual spell of the great Hohenstaufen whom he took as his model in many ways.

  Once when he lost a sum of money through the Ghibellines the blasphemous Ottaviano remarked with a sigh, “If there happens to be a soul I have lost mine to the Ghibellines.” Ubaldini did not make ruthless power an end in itself—he was a complete failure as a general—but he pushed to its ultimate limit another method of the Emperor’s: the game of political diplomacy. He did not pursue imperial politics, nor church politics, nor Ubaldini family politics, nor cardinals’ politics, but just “politics”; sometimes pro- and sometimes anti-Guelf; sometimes with, sometimes against, Florence; there was no Ghibelline party, no political group with which he did not maintain continuous relations, no intrigue in which his ringed hand did not play its part always holding the last card in reserve. Far above Empire or Papacy he rated his own attractive, capricious personality which everyone in Italy cordially distrusted. This lighthearted artist, epicure and prince of the Church sought every stimulus that the times offered. He was one of the first Tuscan vernacular poets, closely related to Hohenstaufen circles, not only in matters of belief. When the handsome Cardinal Ottaviano apostrophised “my master, Cupid,” in a very perfect sonnet he sang of what he knew. His mistresses and his posterity were well known. The luxury indulged in by the amorous poet, who was also an enthusiastic huntsman, in his magnificent country seat in the Mugello, rivalled the Emperor’s. He had had his silver table-service wrought in Paris; he sent for ornaments and costly stuffs from Spain and Tripoli and Greece; his buckles and brooches were set with cameos and pearls and precious stones; his apartments were lighted by candles in candelabra of mountain crystal; as ,well as the rarest and most select works of art, such as the first goblet worked in niello, his treasure included a magnificent crown set with sapphires, rubies and carbuncles. The pomp of Ubaldini exercised nearly as great a fascination over the young aristocrats as the Emperor’s court had been wont to do, and the Cardinal was well skilled in finding high positions for his young chaplains. These protégés of his were infected as a matter of course with his amazing religious indifference, still remarkable amongst the spiritual princes of the day, and with the Epicurean doctrines of Averroes which Ottaviano expiated in his tomb of flame. He raised his chamberlain, Otto Visconti, to the see of St. Ambrose, making him archbishop of Milan when this town turned Ghibelline. Otto Visconti, to whom the Galeazzo and Bernabo owed their power, was such a perfect heretic that his chiselled tomb of red marble turned black of itself, and when his nephew Matthew Visconti had it painted red again turned black once more, so the story ran. Cardinal Ottaviano was, in short, the first of a type of cardinal which perished with Ippolito Medici.

  While the Cardinal remained quietly in his camp at Guastalla his reluctance to attack produced ere long unpleasant consequences in Parma. The blockade which Enzio and Eccelino had succeeded in establishing began to make itself gradually felt. Parma was cut off from all external assistance, and nothing was to be got from the immediate neighbourhood, for cavalry and raiding parties of the Emperor’s scoured the country without ceasing, and devastated and laid waste everything which they did not themselves require. Famine became so acute that they were baking bread of linseed, and were suffering severely from lack of salt. The townsfolk began to lose heart when the Cardinal’s promised reliefs on which they had been counting were still delayed. The courageous and resourceful defender of Parma, the papal legate Gregory of Montelongo, who knew the Lombards better than most men, was driven to every conceivable stratagem to persuade the inhabitants to hold out. The most distinguished knights of Parma were assembled when a mendicant monk suddenly appeared in their midst, travel-stained and in the last stages of exhaustion, and took from his knapsack a letter with the joyful news that help was at hand. The letter had been written overnight by Montelongo. In spite of all promises the general opinion was that Cardinal Ottaviano was betraying the papal cause, and Fra Salimbene, who at this point escaped from Parma, even carried the rumour to Lyons, where the upshot of the siege was awaited with intense anxiety: “for as in a duel the whole fate of Rome and of the clergy hung thereon.” The story ran that the red-legged cardinals who swarmed in Lyons had pressed round Fra Salimbene in such numbers that one climbed the shoulders of another in their eagerness to hear the latest news of Parma.

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  In spite of the greatest exertions on both sides a speedy decision was not forthcoming. During the winter of 1247–48 the Emperor was fighting everywhere in Italy. December brought especially heavy battles in the provinces. Margrave Boniface of Montferrat, who had recently submitted to the Emperor, had turned his coat once more, and with the support of Vercelli and Milan had seized Turin, where only the garrison of the Emperor’s palace still held out. The Emperor despatched thither his grandson Frederick, a youth of twenty or so, who succeeded in driving the Margrave out and rescuing Turin for the Emperor. At about the same time Count Richard of Theate defeated a papal army under Hugo Novellus at Interamna, and Robert of Castiglione, imperial Vicar of the March, inflicted an overwhelming defeat on the papal legate, bishop Marcellina at Osimo, south of Ancona, chiefly by the assistance of German mercenary knights. The bishop was taken prisoner, four thousand papalists were reported slain, numerous standards and banners were captured, amongst them one which Manuel Comnenus had presented to the people of Ancona when they betrayed Barbarossa. Hubert Pallavicini with Jacob of Caretto, the Emperor’s son-in-law, was preparing an attack on Genoa in which the fleet took part.

  Conditions in Florence, and indeed in Tuscany in general, were nevertheless very critical for the Emperor. Even without going himself to Florence Cardinal Ottaviano had an easy task to urge the Guelfs, especially the nobility, into open rebellion. They had been everywhere excluded from office and jealously watched. The common people, artisans and merchants, were by no means exclusively anti-Kaiser. Thanks to skilful Ghibelline policy the famous imperialist party, well known as the primo popolo, had been formed, which included both the pro-Kaiser nobility and the people’s party. Their case was not unique. The popular movement in Siena had years before been given an imperialist bias and a Ghibelline had put himself at the head of the people. In Florence both parties now proceeded to woo the crowd, and although Orlando di Rossi may have worked against the Emperor while still keeping the mask of loyalty during his term of office as podesta, there were probably not many of the popular party on the occasion of this rising fighting under the lily-banner of the Guelfs against the Hohenstaufen eagles.

  Frederick of Antioch had hitherto treated the Florentine Guelfs with tolerance and had permitted their remaining in the town. This lightened their task of capturing the reins of government in the town with the help of the Bolognese and causing Florence to desert the Emperor. The most terrible street fighting took place, in which the rage of the Guelfs was chiefly directed against the imperialist family of the Uberti. They, however, were able in their powerful towers to defy all attack and even to take the offensive. The head of the Uberti was
the great leader Farinata, who, in Dante’s hell, is a neighbour of Frederick II and of the Cardinal. After the victory of Montaperti his Ghibelline friends wanted to wipe Florence off the face of the earth, but Farinata intervened and won thereby the eternal fame of having saved Florence. His gigantic shade recognising a fellow Florentine in Dante’s speech revealed the future to the poet:

  His breast and forehead there

  Erecting, seemed as in high scorn he held

  E’en Hell.

  Farinata had been preparing the ground for an attack on the Guelfs when Frederick of Antioch, having assembled his forces in Prato, arrived and penetrated into Florence. He soon had the town in his power, and while the Guelfs fled to various minor rallying points in Tuscany the crash might be heard of the Guelf towers which Frederick of Antioch was pulling down. The lofty tower of the Adimari, some 230 feet high, crashed down on the Piazza, missing the Baptistery by the thickness of a hair.

  The tale of Florence was repeated everywhere, and even when the imperial officials contrived to drive the rebels from the towns, the “fugitives,” as they were called now, formed a definite class in the population (one to which Dante was later to belong) which was nearly as dangerous without the walls as within. For they leagued themselves with the fugitives from other towns and constituted a standing menace to every imperialist city, as, conversely, fugitive Ghibellines from the Guelf towns fought in the Emperor’s army and threatened their native places. The defection of Parma was the signal in Italy for a fight of all against all, which was to rage for decades with undiminished fury. The chronicler complains that none could plough nor sow nor reap nor gather in the vintage, nor live in the country villas, for all was too unsafe. Only quite close to a town under the protection of armed men a little agriculture could be carried on. On the high road one traveller shrank from another as from the devil incarnate, for each suspected the other of wanting to hold him to ransom. Merchants could only move about in large caravans, and even then the Florentines who were reckoned to be imperialists were by no means safe from, for instance, the papalist folk of Piacenza, who on occasion looted an entire Tuscan caravan. The Middle Ages looked on this general unrest only as a sign that the reign of Antichrist, of the rex tyrannus, had come, and that, as the chronicler adds, “all hath fulfilled itself in its time from the moment that Parma fell away from the side of the Emperor to the side of the Church.”

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  Day by day Frederick was indeed growing more and more of a rex tyrannus. While he was encamped before Parma he saw his whole Italian state aflame in raging revolt and the Church lashing men on to treachery. How could he master these intangible spirits! Thanks to the valour of his sons and his vicars he was at first victorious in the provinces, but it became more and more difficult to get to grips with the foe. Men of Florence, Parma, Ferrara, Mantua, and other places were fighting: some in the imperial army and some for the Guelfs; and Frederick was now pitted not against the hostile feeling of whole communes, but against individual and isolated persons, whose adherence to this party or that was dictated by the petty accidents and advantages of the moment. The impulses that actuated them were confused, incalculable, making a mockery of any comprehensive policy. Thousands of single foes and single traitors constituted no commensurable enemy for an Emperor. All the while, as the great conspiracy had proved, Frederick’s life was not safe. Surrounded by his bodyguard of Saracens he came more and more, though against his will, to resemble the “Tyrant” who, with treachery spreading round him like a plague, the defection of yesterday’s friends for ever imminent, grew hourly more suspicious, more severe, even malicious, in his punishments, and often by fear terrified men into disloyalty and rebellion.

  Frederick now began to have recourse to all the cruel refinements of oppression which are forced on a government threatened by betrayal. The principle of taking hostages had long been in force, but the system was now carefully extended. It was not possible to transport all hostages at once to Apulia, so those of one town were handed over for safe custody to another.

  The hostages of Como, for instance, were lodged with Siena, those of Spoleto with Poggibonsi and San Gimignano, so that each town went bail for the other and the towns were linked together by a network of hostages. Further, so far as Guelfs did not of their own accord fly from the Ghibelline towns, suspects were banished in masses and every imperialist town was forbidden to accord them refuge. The evils of denunciation followed, for anyone could thus get rid of a rival or opponent. The imperial officials, breathing the air of treachery, dare not neglect any accusation. They had to take up any suspicious case brought to their notice, and in order, if necessary, to extort confession, torture came into play. The Sicilian Book of Laws forbade the use of torture save in a few restricted cases, but all safeguards were now thrown to the winds in Italy, and nothing short of a miracle (the repeated breaking of a rope for instance) could set a victim again at liberty. The application of torture had a further consequence. It was natural to employ “the cyclops of Avernus, the slaves of Vulcan,” that is to say, the Emperor’s Saracens, as executioners, and the vicar’s courts were usually provided with a Saracen hangman, whom saint or priest could not intimidate.

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  The case of bishop Marcellina of Arezzo, who was taken prisoner in the battle of Osimo, will show how these “myrmidons of Satan” discharged their office. The Emperor had issued general orders that no more prisoners should be spared and held to ransom, they should be without exception hanged. The fact that Marcellina of Arezzo was a priest and a legate of the Pope’s was certainly not an extenuating circumstance in the Emperor’s eyes. On the contrary, he had often inveighed against weapon-bearing priests, and Marcellina was, moreover, a vassal who had broken his oath of fealty. Yet his case was looked into and he was imprisoned for several months before being handed over to the hangman. His execution aroused great indignation. Cardinal Rainer of Viterbo gave vent to his hate shortly before his own death in a horror-inspiring pamphlet recording in letters of fire the martyrdom of Marcellina and the abominations of Frederick II. The Saracen devils had first bound the saint’s hands and feet and tied the bishop to a horse’s tail to drag him through the mire to the place of execution. But the bishop sang the Te Deum and the pious horse stood still, and even blows would not induce him to move till the Saracens had silenced further singing. After various torments the bishop was hanged. Three days later some mendicant monks buried him. The Saracens exhumed the corpse, defiled it, and hung it on the gallows again. This continued till the Emperor put an end to it.

  The episode gave a handle to hostile agitation. In Würzburg a crusading sermon against Frederick was preached. In England the opinion was that this deed of shame would have been more scandalous if the papalists had not sullied their cause with deeds more heinous. The Emperor will not have been greatly stirred by the news that Marcellina’s bones performed miracles. Saints who were still alive were always, with good reason, highly suspect: Peter “the Martyr,” who later became the patron saint of the Spanish Inquisition, stirred up a revolt in Florence, and St. Rosa carried on her activities in Viterbo till the Emperor banished her and her following. Frederick now issued instructions against the monks and priests of Italy similar to those he had formerly levelled at the clergy of Sicily. No cleric was to presume to change his dwelling without the written permission of the podesta. Every bishop who obeyed the Pope’s command and ceased to hold divine service and administer the sacraments was banished and his goods confiscated. A ten-days’ respite was granted them in which to resume the services. This put the priests into an awkward position. The Pope’s advice: patiently to endure martyrdom was probably not always taken. The mendicant monks, whom Innocent sternly segregated from all other orders, developed a Jesuitical theory that it was lawful for them to hold services and avail themselves of imperial passports in order to get about their business. Frederick, therefore, tightened up the regulations against the mendicant orders: any receiver or conveyer of a papal letter
, anyone even knowing of such a letter, was forthwith condemned to a fiery death. One suspect procurator of the Sicilian Minorites was arrested, and eighteen separate tortures were appointed for him. The chroniclers were never tired of recording the cruelties and outrages committed by this “Pharaoh drunk with the blood of the saints” who had persecuted the clergy above all others. Frederick showed in reality little of a bloodthirsty tyrant, though he would execute a number of Parma prisoners every morning in front of the city to intimidate the besieged. His reign of terror was inspired not by madness but by direst need.

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  Meanwhile matters were progressing favourably round Parma. As winter drew on, Frederick II repeated his Faënza procedure on a much larger scale and built a fortified camp-town, bringing wood and tiles from all the neighbourhood round. The Emperor was determined that when Parma fell it should be wiped out and in its stead this new town should remain. He laid it out according to a well-thought-out plan, and in anticipation called it “Victoria,” a name not unworthy to rank with his other foundations: Caesarea, Augusta, Aquila. He copied the methods of classical town-planners: the new town was to arise under the sign of Mars: astrologers and augurs had to calculate an auspicious moment while the site of the new town was marked out with the plough. It was to have eight gates, with walls, moats and drawbridges; nothing was lacking: a canal brought water to it, and mills were built on the new river. And in Victoria one of the very few places of worship was erected of which Frederick was the founder. This temple was dedicated to St. Victor. The coins of the new town bore on the one side the Emperor’s head, and on the other the town with the legend “Victoria”; they were known as Victorines. This new foundation was to resemble a town of long standing, with streets and houses, market-place and palace, shops, and everything which a town could require, while outside it the Emperor laid out villas with gardens and vineyards and orchards for his Saracen maidens and their host of eunuchs. Frederick had installed himself with his entire court, his chancery and treasury, his courts of law and household, his menagerie and his huntsmen, so as to await in peace and comfort the starvation of Parma. The world looked on in amazement. Not a chronicler but records at least the building of Victoria. One who was learned in astrological lore remarks that the Emperor had failed to note in founding his town that Cancer was very close to Mars; the town was doomed.