This
statue of Frederick II (photo, left)
is the second in a row of eight along the façade of
the Royal Palace in Naples; they show the dynasties
that ruled The Kingdom of Sicily (later known as the Kingdom of Two Sicilies
or, simply, the Kingdom of Naples) from the Normans in the 11th century to
the unification of Italy eight-hundred years later.
They are all the same size, but if they were hewn to
scale in terms of historical importance, none would be
larger than Frederick. It would be very hard to fit
this last great medieval emperor, this scholar,
diplomat and warrior into that tiny niche.
Knighthood and chivalry;
popes and princes; kings, castles and Crusades; valor
and skulduggery —all these things tumble together in our
hazy modern perception of what the Middle Ages were all
about. The Middle Ages are, indeed, confusing, but
Frederick II provides an excellent focal point if we
wish to understand not only the Middle Ages, but the
essential point that some of the great issues which
caused conflict then —religion, power, monolithic states
versus cultural diversity— have not yet been resolved.
Centuries of
struggle between the Church and the State in Europe came
to a head in the 1200s. On the one hand, politically,
Europe had been reformed by Charlemagne a few centuries
after the fall of the Roman Empire with the view that
The Empire, a vast monolithic state, should continue. In
spite of Charlemagne's failure to forge a lasting
empire, that idea took hold. It was, in hindsight, a
rather futile endeavor in light of the emergence of
separate 'national' identities in Europe —the French,
the Germans, the Spanish and the Italians; yet, the idea
remained that they could be joined through the single
overarching person of the emperor. A strong contender
among European royal houses of that age to provide just
such a strong emperor was the German house of
Hohenstaufen, the house of Frederick II.
On the other hand
was the Church of Rome. It had come into its own, on the
worldly plane, in 756, when Charlemagne's father, Pepin
III, rendered unto Christ a lot of what had belonged to
Caesar: land. That gift was a large part of central
Italy and was the beginning of the Papal States, a
church-state ruled by the Pope King. Over the next few
centuries, a papal vision took form, a vision of Europe
as a single theocracy with earthly princes subject to
the princes of the Church, or, in the words of Pope
Gregory VII, pope from 1073 to 1085: "The Holy See
has absolute power over all spiritual things: why
should it not also rule temporal affairs? God reigns
in the heavens; His vicar should reign over all the
earth." Clearly these two points of view on how
Europe should be ruled were destined not to get along
very well. And, indeed, they did not.
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was born near Seconal in the Papal States in 1194. He was the grandchild of emperor Frederick I and beneficiary of the marriage of his own royal family into that of the Norman rulers of the Kingdom of Sicily (a kingdom, remember, that included the southern Italian mainland). Frederick was crowned King of Sicily as a young child, and he spent much of his childhood in the south. His mother appointed Pope Innocent III guardian of the child, a fact that may have fooled the Pope into thinking that here, some day, at last would be an emperor the Church might get along with.
Frederick was crowned Holy Roman emperor at age 26 and set about continuing the Church/State struggle that his grandfather had waged years earlier. His task was to unite the north of Europe, the lands of the German princes, with the south, the Kingdom of Sicily. Standing in the way was the Church, the Papal States, aided by some central and northern Italian city-states that had become independent of imperial authority and liked it that way. These, in essence, were the battle lines: the so-called "Ghibellines" (from the German place name "Waiblingen"), in favor of a strong emperor vs. the "Guelphs" (from "Welf," the name of a Saxon royal family, who supported Papal authority.
Frederick had his own son
installed as King of the lands of Germany, setting the
stage for eventual unification of north and south. He
then set about solidifying his own rule in the Kingdom
of Sicily. He built a chain of castles and border
fortifications, built a naval as well as a merchant
fleet, and created a civil service for which candidates
were trained at the very first European state
university, which he founded in
Naples in 1224.
Bound by oath to undertake a Crusade, Frederick finally did so, and, amazingly, through a series of complex negotiations, as opposed to the usual bloodshed, obtained Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth from the sultan al-Kamil of Egypt. Considering the bloody Crusades of the previous century and the enmity between Christianity and Islam of that period, the fact the Frederick II of Hohenstaufen wound up peacefully(!) being crowned king of Jerusalem in the Holy Sepulcher in 1229 must rank high in the annals of diplomacy. Remembering his background, perhaps it is not surprising. Frederick had been raised in Sicily within living memory of Norman rule, that last great period of tolerance in European history, a time that saw Greeks, Italians and Arabs all forge their respective cultures —including religions— into a single state that worked. Frederick, himself, was fluent in Greek, French, Latin, vernacular Latin (which became Italian) and Arabic. (In his spare time, Frederick also wrote a treatise on falconry, considered one of the first European examples of natural history, based, as it was, on Frederick's own observations of the creatures in the wild.)
The emperor's behavior in
Jerusalem gave the Pope something to ponder, for
Frederick had issued a proclamation comparing himself to
Christ, recalling his earlier remarks, supposedly in
jest, that Moses, Christ and Mohammed had been
impostors! (There is actually an extant document
entitled Three Great Impostors; there are, to be
sure, other possibilities as to the author of that
document, but Frederick is a plausible choice.) Papal
troops invaded "continental Sicily" (that is, the
southern part of the peninsula, not the island of
Sicily) shortly thereafter; after all, it surely could
not have been very comforting to a Pope to realize that
there was now a powerful emperor with a Messianic
complex on the loose. Frederick nevertheless managed to
return to Italy, defend his kingdom, and smooth things
over with the Papacy.
In 1231 Frederick came up with a new constitution for the Kingdom of Sicily. It was the first time since the rule of the Byzantine emperor Justinian in the 6th century that the administrative laws of a European state had been codified. The constitution was revolutionary, anticipating the central authority and enlightened absolutism of a later age.
Frederick's troubles in
the north were growing, however. He was unable to thwart
the resistance by northern Italian city-states and the
princes of Germany to imperial rule. Also, Pope Gregory
IX, fearful of eventual encirclement by an earthly
empire, excommunicated Frederick in 1239. Frederick
countered by invading the Papal States in 1240,
threatening to take Rome, itself. He did not carry out
his threat, however; he settled for taking 100 clerics
prisoner, thereby reinforcing his reputation not only as
an oppressor of the Church, but perhaps as the
Anti-Christ, himself.
In 1245 the Pope declared
the Emperor to be deposed. The effectiveness of such a
declaration clearly depends on (1) ability to enforce,
and (2) willingness to comply, neither of which elements
were in great abundance. At the time of his death in
1250 Frederick was still in a strong position, but
within 25 years, his heirs had fallen victim to the same
struggle with the Papacy that had taken up his own life.
The last Hohenstaufen pretender, Conradin, was executed
in Naples by the Angevin rulers who had replaced
Frederick.
Frederick was entombed in
the cathedral of Palermo, surrounded by symbols of Roman
Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Arab respect, eulogies to
an emperor as well as appropriate tributes to the
peculiarly southern fusion of cultures that had shaped
him. Almost immediately the belief took hold that he
would return some day to restore the Empire. Even
Frederick II was not that much larger than life, but the
Messianic overtones of such an idea help us understand
just what it meant to command true awe in the Middle
Ages.
So, who won the
battle? Not Frederick, clearly. But not the Church,
either. By encouraging anti-Imperial sentiment, the
Church unwittingly helped foster the new European
consciousness of "nationality". Within half a century
of Frederick's death, France was so strong that the
French king had the Pope taken hostage, and eventually
forced the removal of the Papacy from Rome to Avignon.
When the Papacy returned to Rome almost a century
later, Italy and the times would be fertile soil for
the new ideas of the Renaissance, an unprecedented
wave of creativity that the Church itself would
promote and one that had been foreshadowed by
Frederick's wide-ranging abilities.
to history portal to top of this pagerelated: Lucera, a Muslim Colony in Medieval Italy; Castel del Monte;
Capaccio—Castle & Conspiracy, The Constitution of Melfi and The Manfred Who Would Be King.