Frederick II
Holy Roman emperor
born Dec. 26, 1194, Jesi, Ancona, Papal States
died Dec. 13, 1250, Castel Fiorentino, Apulia, Kingdom of Sicily
Main
king of Sicily (1197–1250), duke of Swabia (as Frederick VI, 1228–35),
German king (1212–50), and Holy Roman emperor (1220–50). A Hohenstaufen
and grandson of Frederick I Barbarossa, he pursued his dynasty’s
imperial policies against the papacy and the Italian city states; and he
also joined in the Sixth Crusade (1228–29), conquering several areas of
the Holy Land and crowning himself king of Jerusalem (reigning 1229–43).
Early years.
In 1196, Frederick, at the age of two, was elected king by the German
princes at Frankfort. His father, however, failed in his attempt to gain
the princes’ support to make Frederick’s succession hereditary. Just
before embarking on a crusade to the Holy Land, Emperor Henry died in
September 1197 after a brief illness, only 32 years old. Though the
medieval Roman Empire was at the height of its strength, the Emperor’s
death brought it close to dissolution.
After the death of her husband, Empress Constance had young Frederick
brought to Sicily, where in May 1198 he was crowned king of Sicily.
Before her death later that year, Constance loosened the bonds that
joined Sicily to the empire and to Germany by appointing Pope Innocent
III her son’s guardian as well as regent of the Kingdom of Sicily, which
was already under papal suzerainty. In Germany two rival kings were
elected, Frederick’s uncle Philip of Swabia and Otto of Brunswick, as
Otto IV.
Even the Pope, however, did not succeed in protecting Sicily from
many years of anarchy. German and papal captains, local barons, and
Sicilian Saracens, as well as the cities of Genoa and Pisa, fought for
mastery of the country. The situation was not stabilized until the
imperial chancellor conquered Palermo in November 1206 and governed in
Frederick’s name. In December 1208 Frederick, then 14, was declared of
age.
In 1209 he married the much older Constance of Aragon, who brought
him an urgently needed troop of knights with whose help he gained
control of Sicily, defeated a conspiracy of the barons, and was
partially successful in regaining the crown properties that had been
lost during his minority. At this time his relations with the Pope began
to show signs of strain.
Frederick’s Sicilian efforts were seriously endangered when at the
end of 1210 Otto IV invaded the realm on the mainland and in 1211 even
threatened Sicily itself. Otto withdrew, however, when in September 1211
a number of German princes deposed him and elected Frederick king.
Before leaving for Germany in March 1212, Frederick had his
one-year-old son Henry VII crowned king of Sicily and granted various
privileges to the Holy See. Having rapidly conquered south Germany,
where he met almost no opposition, Frederick was elected once again king
of Germany by a large majority of princes at Frankfurt in December 1212
and crowned a few days later. In the same year he concluded an alliance
with France against Otto, who was decisively defeated at the Battle of
Bouvines in July 1214.
Consolidation of the empire.
In April 1220 Frederick’s nine-year-old son Henry VII was elected king
by the German princes, thus negating Frederick’s promise to Pope
Innocent that he would relinquish control of Sicily in favour of Henry,
for it meant that Sicily and Germany would eventually be united under
one ruler. Although Frederick sought to exonerate himself with Pope
Honorius III by claiming that the election had been held without his
knowledge, he had to pay for it by surrendering extensive royal
prerogatives to the German ecclesiastical princes.
Crowned emperor by the Pope in St. Peter’s Church, in Rome, on Nov.
22, 1220, Frederick confirmed on the same day the legal separation of
the empire from the Kingdom of Sicily while continuing the existing
personal union. In addition, he granted important privileges to the
Italian ecclesiastics and issued laws against heretics, and it seemed
indeed that harmony had been reestablished between the Emperor and the
Pope for some years to come. Frederick spent the following years
consolidating his rule in Sicily. He broke the resistance of the barons
to revocation of certain of their privileges and defeated the rebellious
Saracens (1222–24), whom he later resettled in Apulia where they became
his most faithful subjects, providing him with a loyal bodyguard immune
against papal influence.
In addition to erecting a chain of castles and border fortifications,
he had enlarged the harbours of his kingdom and established a navy and a
fleet of merchant vessels. He instituted measures designed to bring
trade under state control and make the manufacture of certain products
the monopoly of the state. Finally, he created a civil service for which
candidates were trained at the first European state university, in
Naples, which he himself founded in 1224.
Years as a crusader.
In the meantime, the Pope was reminding the Emperor of the crusading
vows he had taken at his coronations in 1212 and 1220. Frederick,
however, was inclined to postpone such a venture until the Italian
problems had been resolved. He claimed the Kingdom of Jerusalem for
himself through his marriage to Isabella (Yolande) of Brienne, the
heiress of the titular king of Jerusalem, who had become his wife in
1225 after Constance had died in 1222. Before embarking for the Holy
Land, Frederick convened an imperial diet for Easter 1226 in Cremona, in
northern Italy, in order to reinforce certain imperial rights in Italy
and to prepare for the crusade. The cities of Lombardy, however,
reconstituted themselves, under the leadership of Milan, as the Lombard
League, and not only sabotaged the diet at Cremona but effectively
opposed Frederick’s reorganization of northern Italy.
In September 1227, when Frederick was at last ready to embark from
Brindisi for the Holy Land, an epidemic broke out among the crusaders.
The new pope, Gregory IX, a passionate man who belonged to the
intellectual world of Francis of Assisi—his personal friend whom he
canonized as early as 1228—brushed aside Frederick’s justification and
excommunicated him for his failure to carry out the crusade.
In June 1228, ignoring the excommunication, Frederick set sail from
Brindisi. In the Holy Land, following complex negotiations, he obtained
Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth from the Sultan al-Kāmil of Egypt. It
was certainly the impact of Frederick’s personality on the Arab world,
and not armed might, that made this treaty possible. On March 18, 1229,
the excommunicated emperor crowned himself king of Jerusalem in the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This was the high point as well as the
turning point of Frederick’s conception of sovereignty. Eschatological
prophecies concerning his rule were now made, and the Emperor considered
himself to be a messiah, a new David. His entry into Jerusalem was
compared with that of Christ on Palm Sunday, and, indeed, in a manifesto
the Emperor, too, compared himself to Christ.
In the meantime, however, papal troops had penetrated into the
Kingdom of Sicily. Frederick returned at once and reconquered the lost
areas but did not in turn attack the Papal States. His diplomacy was
rewarded: after the Treaty of San Germano (July 1230) he was absolved
from excommunication the following month at Ceprano.
In August 1231, at Melfi, the Emperor issued his new constitutions
for the Kingdom of Sicily. Not since the reign of the Byzantine emperor
Justinian in the 6th century had the administrative law of a European
state been codified. Frederick’s codes contained many ideas that
anticipated enlightened absolutism and the centralization of the state.
During the same time, however, Frederick could not prevent his son, the
German king Henry VII, from making a number of important concessions to
the German princes. These concessions, confirmed by Frederick in 1232 at
the diet of Cividale, strengthened the rule of the princes at the
expense of the central power of the empire. These and other steps set
back the development of communal self-government in Germany and
furthered the independence of the principalities. In the meantime,
relations between Frederick and Henry VII deteriorated steadily. Henry
had been ruling independently in Germany since 1228, when in December
1234 he entered into an alliance with the Lombard League. This action
amounted to high treason in the eyes of the Emperor. On Frederick’s
arrival in Germany, his son’s rebellion collapsed; he died in a prison
in Calabria in 1242.
His second wife having died in 1228, Frederick in July 1235 married
Isabella of England. Shortly thereafter, he issued an edict of imperial
peace, which also called for the appointment of a chief justice of the
imperial court in order to protect the sovereign rights of the emperor
from further erosion.
After some military successes in Lombardy against the Lombard League,
the Emperor returned to Germany in 1236 to remove the rebellious duke
Frederick of Austria and Styria from rule. In February 1237 he had his
nine-year-old son Conrad IV elected king of Germany in Vienna. After
several more months in Germany—it was to be his last visit—he descended
into northern Italy. He defeated the Lombard League at Cortenuova, but,
misjudging his strength, he rejected all Milanese peace overtures and
insisted on unconditional surrender. It was a moment of grave historic
importance when Frederick’s hatred coloured his judgment and blocked all
possibilities of a peaceful settlement.
Struggle with the papacy.
Milan and five other cities held out, and in October 1238 he had to
raise the siege of Brescia. In the same year the marriage of Frederick’s
natural son Enzio with the Sardinian princess Adelasia and the
designation of Enzio as king of Sardinia, in which the papacy claimed
suzerainty, led to the final break with the Pope. Gregory IX deeply
distrusted Frederick both in religious and political matters: Frederick
was supposed to have jested that Moses, Christ, and Muḥammad were three
impostors who had themselves been hoodwinked; and in the political arena
the Pope was fearful that the Papal States were about to be isolated and
encircled, particularly because a pro-imperial party had been formed in
Rome. Under the pretext that the Emperor intended to drive him from
Rome, Gregory excommunicated Frederick for the second time on Palm
Sunday, March 20, 1239. This was the beginning of the last phase of the
gigantic struggle between the papacy and the empire; it ended with the
death of the Emperor and the downfall of his house.
Frederick countered the excommunication with a number of important
manifestos, most of them composed by Pietro della Vigna, a member of the
imperial chancery, who had outstanding literary gifts. The manifesto
emphasized that the cardinals were meant to participate in the
leadership of the church, and Frederick even tried to evoke solidarity
among the secular princes. He also, however, intensified his military
activities in northern Italy. In order to finance his constantly growing
need for arms, he instituted a thorough administrative reorganization of
imperial Italy (among others, the formation of 10 vice regencies) and of
the Kingdom of Sicily. In addition, he decreed the rigorous surveillance
of the population. In central Italy he took the offensive, occupying the
March of Ancona and the Duchy of Spoleto, and in February 1240 his army
marched into the Papal States and threatened Rome. At the last moment,
however, the Pope won the support of the Romans.
Following the defeat of a Genoese fleet bringing delegates for a
papal council to Rome, more than 100 high-ranking
ecclesiastics—cardinals and bishops among them—were taken as Frederick’s
prisoners to Apulia. This military victory proved, however, to be a
political disadvantage: it provided material for propaganda depicting
Frederick as an oppressor of the church.
While still encamped before Rome, Frederick received the news of Pope
Gregory’s death and thereupon withdrew to Sicily. In the meantime, the
Mongols had invaded Europe. They were temporarily halted in the
extremely bloody Battle of Liegnitz in Silesia on April 9, 1241, but
probably only the sudden death of their leader, the great khan Ögödei,
prevented further Mongol advances at that time.
Celestine IV’s brief pontificate was followed by a long interregnum.
When in 1243 Innocent IV was elected, Frederick, at the urging of the
German princes and of King Louis IX of France, opened negotiations with
the new pope. Agreement between the Pope and the Emperor seemed close on
the evacuation of the Papal States, when in June 1244 Innocent fled the
city. In Lyon he convened a council for 1245 and in July of that year
deposed the Emperor, the obstacle to reconciliation apparently being the
status of the Lombard communes.
The battle between the Emperor and the papacy then raged in full
fury; on the papal side the Emperor was branded as the precursor of the
anti-Christ; on the imperial side he was hailed as a messiah. The
Emperor supported the contemporary demand that the church return to the
poverty and saintliness of the early Christian community and again
appealed to the princes of Europe to join in a defensive league against
the power-hungry prelates. Most of the princes, however, remained
neutral, and, although two successive German antikings received little
support, the Emperor steadily lost ground in Germany.
In May 1247 Frederick’s planned journey to Lyon in order to plead his
own case before the papal council was interrupted by the revolt of the
strategically placed city of Parma. In the wake of this debacle much of
central Italy and the Romagna was lost. The following year the Emperor
was to suffer further blows of fate; Pietro della Vigna, for many years
the Emperor’s confidant, was accused of treason and committed suicide in
prison. In May 1249 King Enzio of Sardinia, Frederick’s favourite son,
was captured by the Bolognese and was kept incarcerated until his death
in 1272.
The Emperor’s position, both in Italy and—through the efforts of his
son, Conrad IV—in Germany, was improving when he died unexpectedly in
1250. He was buried in the cathedral of Palermo near his first wife, his
parents, and his Norman grandfather.
When the news of his death was published, all Europe was deeply
shaken. Doubts arose that he was really dead; false Fredericks appeared
everywhere; in Sicily a legend grew that he had been conveyed to the
Aetna volcano; in Germany that he was encapsuled in a mountain and would
return as the latter-day emperor to punish the worldly church and
peacefully reestablish the Holy Roman Empire. Yet he was also thought to
live on in his heirs. In fact, however, within 22 years after his death,
all of them were dead: victims of the battle with the papacy that their
father had begun.
Assessment.
Frederick’s character was marked by sharp contradictions, undoubtedly
the result of his insecure and emotionally barren childhood. Enchanting
amiability and gaiety were paired with cruelty; harshness and rigidity
existed side by side with superior intelligence and a keen sense of
reality; tolerance and intolerance went hand in hand; impulsive
sensuality did not stand in the way of genuine piety; imbalance and
inner discord pervaded his personality and his achievements.
Frederick cannot be considered the first modern man on the throne,
nor a pioneer of the Renaissance, as some historians have maintained.
Though his gifted personality heralded some of the intellectual trends
of later times, he was, all in all, a man of the Middle Ages. He had
indeed had the good fortune to have grown up in Sicily in a mixed
culture that uniquely combined elements of antiquity, Arabic and Jewish
wisdom, the Occidental spirit of the Middle Ages, and Norman realism.
The intellectual life of his court reflected this heritage. A courtly
“republic of scholars,” it nurtured and fostered the natural sciences as
well as philosophy, poetry, and mathematics, and translations as well as
original writing, both in Latin and in the vernacular. The pursuit of
knowledge without special respect for traditional authorities was
characteristic of Frederick and his court.
Witness to the intellectual vigour and distinction of Frederick
himself and those around him are the content and style of his great
legal codices and manifestos, many of them serving as examples to later
generations; the edifices he erected, particularly the classic style of
the Castello del Monte—a fusion of poetry and mathematics in stone; and,
most outstanding, his own work De arte venandi cum avibus, a standard
work on falconry based entirely on his own experimental research.
Frederick’s concept of the emperor’s function was rooted in the
ideology of the late Greco-Roman period and the Judeo-Christian
philosophy of the Middle Ages, emphasizing the sacredness and universal
character of the office. In the light of it, Frederick claimed
preeminence for the emperor over all other secular rulers—undoubtedly an
ill-timed claim in an age when separate nation-states were developing.
Thus, Frederick’s policies, full of intellectual and political promise,
were in actuality dogged by tragedy.
Gunther Wolf
Encyclopaedia Britannica
