Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  The fleet now came once more to the fore again. Peter of Gaëta, the new Sicilian admiral, succeeded in conquering seventeen Genoese ships with their crews, by an attack in the neighbourhood of Savona.

  *

  The Pope’s prospects began to look bleak in Italy. Nor were things brighter for him in Germany, for in the summer of 1250 King Conrad had undertaken a great Rhenish campaign against William of Holland, which had happily led to a truce with the archbishops on the Rhine. In Avignon and Arles the inhabitants had renewed their oaths of fealty to the imperial envoys in spite of the Pope’s utmost efforts to alienate them from the Hohenstaufen cause. Pope Innocent IV had little stomach left for further fighting. His money and his troops were almost exhausted; less than ever could he count on the French king even for the most trivial service. King Louis had had some initial successes in his Egyptian Crusade, but had been taken prisoner at Mansurah with almost his entire army. In common with countless others he laid the blame for this disaster at the Pope’s door. For in spite of Louis’ instant entreaties the Pope had refused peace with the Emperor, and hence prevented Frederick from lending “an assistance more potent than letters” in these overseas adventures. The Pope, moreover, still diverted, as far as he was able, those who had taken the cross to war against Frederick and thus robbed the Crusade of full support.

  Frederick skilfully exploited the spreading discontent. From the beginning he had furthered Saint Louis’ undertaking to the utmost of his power, and when the news of the French King’s capture reached him in Apulia he wrote immediately to the Egyptian Sultan, the son of al Kamil, and begged the king’s release. The commander-in-chief of the Saracen army was Frederick’s old friend Fakhru’d Din, and the French were not a little surprised to see the Roman eagle flashing in the shield of the infidel, an early gift of Frederick to his friend.

  A change of dynasty in Egypt, however, had enabled Louis to purchase his freedom for a large ransom without awaiting Frederick’s intervention. He then proceeded to Acre. The hopes of the French king and of the Crusaders were centred in help from Frederick, the chosen Leader of Crusades. Even one of the Templars (whose order Frederick had bitterly persecuted for years) wrote from the Holy Land that Christian and Saracen alike believed that the Emperor could have averted the fiasco of this Crusade if the Pope’s conceit had not prevented his participation. “Truly all our hope lies in Frederick’s bosom,” wrote the Templar. The whole world agreed. King Louis charged his brothers, whom he sent back from Acre, most insistently to demand that the Pope make peace with the Emperor, otherwise the French would drive him out of Lyons. Innocent, in perturbation, addressed himself thereupon to the English king, begging him to offer the Curia asylum in Bordeaux. The English king hesitated to permit this change of domicile, for Innocent IV had filled England with unfathomable hate.

  Frederick II seemed near the goal of his desire, an alliance of all the secular princes against the Pope. At the beginning of 1250 the Greek Emperor Vatatzes had sent considerable auxiliaries, and only the stirring events in Egypt, so Frederick wrote to the Castilian king, had detained Frederick so long in Apulia, that he might be near at hand. The journey to Germany and a call at Lyons were plans ever present to Frederick’s mind. His power had not for many years been so assured as now. Victory waited on his banners everywhere, and he was able to send one jubilant message after another to Vatatzes, “To let one letter follow on another, bringing good news of victories, rejoices not only those who are related by ties of blood and of unfeigned affection but rejoices every friend,” he wrote, concluding with full assurances of success: “and thus our divine glory re-inforced by the providence of heaven, leads and directs the Empire in order and in peace.”

  *

  In this moment of brilliant, almost unhoped-for, fulfilment, when the power of the Empire seemed unimpaired and the Imperator himself rejoicing in action and ready for the fray; when east and west alike were turning their gaze with eager expectation on the monarch of the world, at this moment of suddenly intensified glory the Emperor was reft from the arena. Frederick II died on the 13th of December, 1250, the feast of St. Lucy, shortly before the completion of his fifty-sixth year, an age that seems to belong to a certain group of heroes and rulers.

  In the early days of December he had been staying at Foggia. He seemed perfectly fit in spite of several slight indispositions during the year. Then he had left the palace, presumably on a hunting expedition, and later legends tell that while hunting he had turned on his finger the magic ring of Prester John and suddenly disappeared from sight. The fact was, however, that a severe attack of fever drove him to take refuge in Castel Fiorentino which he had never visited before. The dysentery which he had foolishly been neglecting turned to gastric inflammation, and he seems to have realised from the first that this illness was to be his last. He must himself have summoned at once his chief state officials, for within a day or two he had with him Archbishop Berard of Palermo, Lord Chief Justice Richard of Montenero, several High Court Judges, notaries, etc. The other faithful adherents who were with him in these last days were probably part of his permanent household. They included the eighteen-year-old Manfred, who was then the nearest and dearest of all his sons; Count Berthold of Hohenburg, to whose friendship the Emperor commended the boy; Pietro Ruffo, Master of the Royal Stables, with his nephew Folco Ruffo, one of the young poets of the Sicilian school to whom Frederick had recently been showing marks of great favour; his son-in-law Count Richard of Caserta; and, lastly, the physician John of Procida whose name is linked with the Sicilian Vespers that spelt the fate of the Anjous.

  Frederick II never left Castel Fiorentino, and the oracle that had foretold that he was destined to die sub flore was here fulfilled. The man who had, they said, hoped “to defy Nature” and live for ever, had in vain avoided Florence all his life. The illness lasted a few days only. Shortly before his death Frederick II, in the presence of his faithful friends, drew up his last testament: Conrad was to be heir of the Empire as a whole; Manfred, Prince of Taranto and Vicar of the Italian-Sicilian state. Arrangements for legacies, pious foundations and the like were made. All prisoners were to be released, except traitors. The Church was to recover her possessions on condition of rendering to Caesar the things that were Caesar’s. Frederick anticipated that his sons would carry on the fight. The witnesses signed the will: first among them the octogenarian Archbishop Berard of Palermo, who had accompanied the Puer Apuliae on his first dash to Germany, and was now about to render him the last rites. Then Frederick, showing himself therein a greater man than the giants Eccelino and Pallavicini, asked for absolution, donned the grey habit of a Cistercian and received the last sacrament from the hand of Archbishop Berard, in death as in life preserving the restraint and dignity that beseem a Christian-Roman Emperor.

  Frederick had given instructions that his obsequies should be carried out without ostentation. He probably also gave orders that the news of his death should be kept from the public as long as possible to avoid premature disturbance throughout the Empire. Manfred, however, did not allow the ceremonies to lack pomp or reverence as the body was conveyed first to Messina and then to Palermo. In the cathedral of Palermo, beside the tombs of King Roger II and the imperial parents Henry VI and his great consort Constance, Frederick was laid to rest in the majestic sarcophagus of dark-red porphyry which more than twenty years ago he had himself transferred from Cefalu to Palermo to await his mortal remains. The sarcophagus is borne on four porphyry lions carved with mysterious south-Italian pagan symbols dating from prehistoric times; one of them with his claws is guarding a Hercules. The lid is ornamented with the symbols of the four evangelists and the figure of the Emperor himself. The ruler was no longer shrouded in the Cistercian habit, but wrapped in a garment of Arabian silk into which were woven the symbols of world lordship and writings in exotic script.

  Frederick had passed away in the full glory of imperial power. The faithful hailed him as the vas electum Dei… “overcome by the
might of God alone whom the might of the children of men had not availed to overcome”… “the unconquered”… “the mightiest of heroes”… “the greatest of the princes of the earth, the admiration of the world and her most marvellous transformer.” Frederick suffered no martyrdom, nor bore the wounds St. Francis bore. The last Emperor of the Romans disappeared from amidst his followers in the radiant glory of the Imperator Invictus, and was spared the knowledge of the tragic fate that overhung his house. His life closed with the “transfiguration” into the Emperor of the End. His imperial career had described no curve, had known neither climax nor decline. From birth his line of life ran arrow-straight to its zenith, then quitted earth and vanished like a comet in the ether: perchance to reappear once more in fiery brilliance at the end of time. Ere long the sibyls spake: HE LIVES AND HE LIVES NOT.

  *

  Frederick was the last emperor to be deified or to find a place among the stars of heaven. In life they had hailed him as a “Sun King.” A notary and master of Frederick of Antioch writes “a new Sun is born: peace and fame, and haven and way.” At the time of the great conspiracy another had written, “they sought to rob the world of her Sun,” and again “Satan would fain have erected his rival throne beside the Sun God (deitas solis).” These are not the traditional commonplace metaphors applied to any powerful Emperor, they are comparisons belonging to a certain cycle of thought. The poet has in mind the great Vergilian prophecy of a Saviour and when he celebrates the Emperor’s “sacred posterity,” “like a radiant sun begotten by the sun,” or praises Conrad the imperial heir as the “unifying king at whose feet lieth the universe and to whom God smileth”; these and countless other turns of phrase belong to the messianic idea.

  Manfred writes to King Conrad of their father’s death: “the sun of the world has set, the sun which lightened the peoples; the sun of Justice has set, the treasure of Peace.” Within a month the Emperor’s followers are writing in the style of the Tiburtine Sibyl, “like the sun when he sinks from the heaven into the Western Sea, Frederick has left a son-sun in the west and already the crimson of the dawn begins to glow.” Here is the age-old cult of Sol Invictus, revivified by prophecy, which a thousand years before had fused with the cult of a Saviour and had now lent itself to an Emperor, Frederick II, who himself was born within a day of the birth of Christ and of the Sun, who had died in December and would return in his own time at the end of time to establish the kingdom of heaven.

  Prophecies and sibylline sayings multiplied themselves without end. Men knew that the Roman Empire closed with Frederick; it was said and said again. The people did not believe that Frederick was dead. The Pope had too often announced the Emperor’s death and the fall of the Empire. After great promises people were still awaiting greater deeds; they were readier to believe in a ruse of the resourceful Emperor than in his death. Many years after his death wagers were still laid in Florence as to whether Frederick was alive or not, since the prophets had promised him a life of two hundred and sixty-seven years. For decades to come impostors gave themselves out for the returning Emperor, who was believed to be in concealment in Etna or where not. Mons Gebellus was clearly the appropriate dwelling-place of the Ghibelline Emperor and philosopher whom men feared like Satan. One of these sham Fredericks established himself there and was styled Emperor, and was honoured and worshipped as the Lord. A Sicilian Franciscan told how he had been sunk in prayer beside the sea and had suddenly seen a mighty train of five thousand armed horsemen riding towards the shore and plunging into the sea. Then the sea hissed as if all the riders had been armed in glowing metal, and one of the horsemen said to the astonished monk “that was Kaiser Frederick, riding into Etna with his men.” This vision, which recalls the death of the great King of the Goths Dietrich of Bern, was said to have visited the brother at the very moment that Frederick died.

  The rumour of a mysterious disappearance of Frederick was not slow in reaching Germany. The Sibyl had foretold: “The Empire shall end with him; his successors, if any he shall have, shall be bereft of the Roman throne and the imperial name.” The chaos of the Interregnum saw the literal fulfilment of the prophecy. Germany had kings enough and to spare: William of Holland, Alfonso of Castile, Richard of Cornwall; but no ruler. The world had never seen before on such a scale the spectacle that followed the death of the Emperor: the complete disintegration in a night of the proud structure of government, the incoherence of all German happenings. The dismay which gripped the Germans is even more evident in art than in history: the glorious pride and freedom of Hohenstaufen days lay in the dust.

  South of the Alps Frederick’s legacy was the image of the “terrible” blent with the “majestic” which stemmed the inflowing tide of the God of Souls. Nothing of this touched the Germans in the North. Goethe’s saying already held of them: “they are more apt to perceive the Good than the Beautiful.” To them Frederick was no Apollo, no Sol Invictus, neither the God of the Sibyls nor the Bringer of the kingdom of the Sun God. The terrifying vision of Antichrist sweeping in storm above the clouds carried more conviction, for here only the degenerate Church stood at the judgment bar. Germany also refused to believe in the death of this great Emperor, and decades later impostors would still appear as the risen Kaiser. The pre-Christian God with whom men here identified Frederick was not Apollo but Woden. He appeared as “The Wanderer” to the peasants to announce:

  Once again shall he come home

  The mighty emperor of Rome.

  The reformation of the Church appeared the most important mission of the “Awaited One,” to flog and scourge the priests till they should hide their tonsures with cow-dung. So persistent was the conception of the redeeming saviour as a figure of awe and horror that after the Great Plague people hailed the dread leader of the Flagellants as Kaiser Frederick.

  Even in Germany other attributes, however, clung round Frederick’s name, wisdom and majesty and glory, though the beauty and the radiance had not impressed themselves on the northern people as on the Italians. Frederick would come again, though he had been cut into pieces or burnt to ashes, he would come to raise the Empire of the Germans to glory and to brilliance. He would bring justice and peace, he would hang the shield on the dry tree and lay down the sceptre of the world. Until the hour should strike when he would sit in judgment on a corrupt Church and gloriously renew the Empire’s might the northern peoples dreamt of him as withdrawn into some fastness of the mountains. The sagas pitched on Kyffhäuser in Thuringia as his hiding-place; perhaps because a grandson of Frederick II’s, Frederick the Peaceful, lived on till the opening of the fourteenth century, the son of the illustrious Henry of Meissen, and people longed to find in him the wished for Frederick III. Whatever associations of glory and brilliance the “Emperor” retained in the people’s dreams even into the later barren years, were derived from the deposed and excommunicated prince, the enemy of the Church, the Antichrist, the fallen angel.

  Old prophecies had given Frederick 267 years to live, and 267 years after his death the Reformation dawned in Germany. Two years later, in the chapbook of 1519, Frederick II was for the first time confused with his grandfather Barbarossa. It gradually became superfluous to picture the long-hoped for Saviour-Emperor as persecutor of the Church. And almost no one in Germany had had an Italian eye for Frederick II Antichrist as Herakles Musagetes. Frederick II is gradually metamorphosed into the bearded Barbarossa, the immortal boy into the aged man. Germany’s dream was changed, and change of myth reflects the changing life and longings of a people. The snow-white sleeper whose beard has grown through the table on which his elbow rests has no message for the German of to-day: he has had his fulfilment, in the greatest vassal of the Empire, the aged Bismarck. The weary Lord of the Last Day has naught to say to the fiery Lord of the Beginning, the seducer, the deceiver, the radiant, the merry, the ever-young, the stern and mighty judge, the scholar, the sage who leads his armed warriors to the Muses’ dance and song, he who slumbers not nor sleeps but ponders how he
can renew the “Empire.” The mountain would to-day stand empty were it not for the son of Barbarossa’s son. The greatest Frederick is not yet redeemed, him his people knew not and sufficed not. “Lives and lives not,” the Sibyl’s word is not for the Emperor, but for the German People.

  FINIS

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