 CHAPTER XVII. From that day of 1245, when his messengers had brought to him at Turin the news of his deposition, a deep gloom had gradually settled upon Frederick's soul. He realized then that the struggle in which the greater part of his life had been wasted was to continue to the end. He looked around his dominions, which had he been spared the immitable hatred of the papacy, had he been able to employ his gifts with which nature had so richly endowed him, would have presented a smiling aspect of peace, prosperity, and intellectual advancement. Instead he saw Germany and Italy given over to violence and discord, and his kingdom deprived of his fostering care and burdened by a heavy load of taxation, faltering on that road of progress along which in his happier days he had led it with so sure a hand. We can see him as he toils through the last years of his life, a man with set joyless face, laboring under the most venomous curses of the church, a man by some greatly hated, by some greatly loved, and by all greatly feared. He is conscious of the heavy destiny he must fulfill. He has set his hand to the plow and will not turn back. He has resolved to end his days in an almost hopeless struggle rather than purchase an ignominious peace. He is subject sometimes when he has brooded over long upon his wrongs to passionate storms of wrath in which it fares ill with those of his enemies who have fallen into his hands. If they have offended grievously against him they may call upon God for a speedy death, for all his wisdom and enlightenment had not triumphed over the cruelty of his age, or purged his blood of that taint which is part of the heritage of the Hohenstaufen race. The beginning of the year 1250 found him plunged in a profound melancholy. The shame of that flight before Parma, when his soldiers had swept him with them in their panic, had rankled sorely in his mind. The death of Thaddeus of Suesa in the same disaster had been an irreparable loss. The treachery of Peter Divinia in whom for more than twenty years he had placed implicit trust and affection had overwhelmed him with bitterness. With that tragedy the iron had entered into his soul. It needed only the imprisonment of Enzo, the being who held the largest place in his heart to leave him broken and weary of the burden of life. He was smitten toward the end of 1249 with a slow but mortal disease. It seemed but a mockery of fate that at the twelfth hour his fortunes should begin to improve while he himself was slowly losing his hold on the world. In the November of 1250 his illness overcame him while on the road to Luchera. He was compelled to halt at Fiorantino and took to his bed. His son Manfred the fruit of his love for Bianca Lancia was by his side and berard the old Archbishop of Palermo who had accompanied the boy of Sicily northwards in 1212 and had adhered to him with unswerving loyalty despite all the anathemas of the Pope. On the tenth of December he made his will, with deep sighs and declaring he had rather never had been born or assumed the government of the empire in the recovery and support of whose rights he had been involved in so many and such bitter sorrows. The empire and the kingdom were left to Conrad in his heirs, failing such heirs he was to be succeeded first by Henry and then by Manfred. The latter was to be the regent of the kingdom during Conrad's absence in Germany and was to receive certain territories as his domain. A hundred thousand ounces of gold were to be devoted to the sucker of the Holy Land for the benefit of the emperor's soul. All prisoners were to be set free except traitors. All who had been faithful to their lord were to be rewarded. The Holy Roman Church was to be restored to all her rights saving only the honor of the empire in his heirs and provided that the church restored the rights of the empire in turn. The end came soon afterwards. On December the thirteenth, twelve-fifty, Frederick the greatest of earthly princes, the wonder of the world, and the regulator of its proceedings departed this life. By his own wish or in kindly response to the entreaties of his old friend he had received absolution from the Archbishop of Palermo before his death. His body arrayed in the imperial robes and covered with a pall of crimson silk, guarded by an escort of sericins and six troops of knights, was born through wailing villages and towns to the port of Taranto. From there it was brought to Messina and thence to Palermo, where it was laid near to the graves of his imperial father, his mother, and his first wife. The traveler at Palermo may still see the granite and porphyry tomb of him who was the wonder of the world. "'Harrad is dead,' cried the vicar of Christ, now let earth and heaven break forth into joy at this great deliverance. Down to hell he went,' wrote the papal chronicler, taking with him not but a burden of sin. The friar Salem Bene rushed to the fourteenth chapter of Isaiah. Here was the fall of Lucifer cast down from heaven. He who had sought to exalt his throne above the stars of God, he that had made the earth to tremble and the kingdoms to shake, was brought down to hell and hell from beneath was moved to meet him. Prepare slaughter for his children, for the iniquity of their fathers that they do not rise and possess the land nor fill the face of the world with cities. The hatred that had pursued Frederick during his life could not be assuaged by his death. It fastened upon his house and only relaxed its hold when the last of the accursed Hohenstaufen brood had perished on the scaffold. Manfred had to hasten back from the burial of his father to defend the kingdom over which he was regent during Conrad's absence. He had already been accused of having poisoned the emperor by his ecclesiastical enemies. In 1251 Conrad, who had narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of the papal party, abandoned his hold on Germany and assumed the government and defense of the kingdom. The young Henry was the first of Frederick's descendants to die. The pope must needs to charge Conrad with poisoning his brother. Conrad sickened and died in 1254. His death was laid at Manfred's door by the papal chroniclers. There remained of Frederick's male descendants only Manfred and Conradine, the infant son of Conrad. For twelve years Manfred resisted all the efforts of the popes to overthrow him. Poet, scholar, soldier, and consummate diplomatist, he was the worthy son of a great sire. He survived Innocent who died, men said, in an agony of terror and remorse. Manfred extended his power as far as Tuscany under Innocent's successor Alexander IV. Pope Urban IV, unable to subdue him, sought for a powerful ally. The crown of the kingdom had already been sold by Innocent to Edmund, the son of Henry III of England. That prince showed no desire to embark upon a perilous struggle for its acquisition, and accordingly it was sold again to Charles of Anjou, the brother of King Louis of France. Manfred resisted Charles for some time but was defeated and slain at Benevento in 1266. His widow and children were thrown into prison by the conqueror and died in captivity. The Sicilians ground into dust by their new master called upon Conradine, a boy of fifteen years to deliver them. He invaded the kingdom with four thousand Germans, was joined by the oppressed populace, and gained several victories over the French usurper, but in 1268 he was defeated and captured and beheaded in the public square of Naples. So ended the race of the Hohenstalfens. Yet so largely had the greatest of that race loomed in the imagination of mankind that several decades passed away before the subjects of Frederick would be convinced that he himself had disappeared forever from the earth. In 1259 an impostor arose in Sicily who proclaimed himself to be Frederick. He declared that he had been allowed to return to the world after having expiated his sin for nine years. He gathered many nobles of Sicily and Apulia around him, but was overpowered and slain by Manfred. Twenty-six years later another false Frederick appeared in Germany and attracted so much attention that many of the Lombard nobles and states sent their envoys to inquire into the truth of his identity. He was seized by Rudolph of Habsburg, who, after an interregnum of twenty years, had secured the kingship of Germany, and was burned at the stake. Even in 1290 when Frederick would have been a man of ninety-six years of age there were barons in Germany ready to wager that their old Hohenstalfen Kaiser was still alive, that he would return some day at the head of a mighty force and restore the departed glories of the Holy Roman Empire. CHAPTER XVIII The monk of St. Albans and bestowing upon Frederick the title of the Wonder of the World deems it unnecessary to enlarge upon that title by comment or explanation. We may take it that he is but recording the universal opinion of his age. The magnificent and unparalleled figure of the Roman Emperor had excited in his generation a sentiment of wonder, and whether men marveled at him with admiration or deprecation, to friend an enemy alike, he was a being whose career and personality evoked surpassing interest and profound surprise. We may conceive easily enough how this sentiment had arisen. The sudden change in his fortunes which in his youth had elevated him from the position of a powerless king to that of the first monarch of Christendom had no doubt attracted considerable attention. And from henceforth by virtue of his high office he could no longer remain in obscurity, but it was the circumstances of his crusade that first made him the sinister of all eyes, his abortive embarkation for the Holy Land, and the excommunication which had been immediately launched upon him formed a dramatic prelude. His subsequent departure and defiance of the ban of the church and the attack which the enraged pope had made upon his dominions offered to Europe the strange spectacle of an emperor leading a crusade who was himself the object of a crusade. The extraordinary success which he had obtained by peaceful means in spite of the persistent antagonism of the papal party had earned him the admiring gratitude of Christendom, while at the same time his friendly intercourse with the sultan and his broad-minded attitude toward the infidels had mingled with that admiration and a motion of shocked amazement. He had returned to his European dominions with his dignity enhanced by the acquisition of the crown of Jerusalem and had rested from the pope the revocation of the sentence of excommunication. Men had then gradually become informed of his astonishing mental attainments, had learned of how he could discourse with Jews, Arabians, Frenchmen, Italians, and Germans in their own tongues, and how he had mastered the learning of Greece and Rome, of how he could meet on terms of equality if not of superiority with the greatest scholars of his age and every branch of knowledge. The elegance and magnificence of his court, its oriental splendor, and its cosmopolitan hospitality had been noised abroad. His maintenance of a harem, though it would have passed unnoticed had he been merely the king of Sicily, became a glaring defiance of propriety in one who was the chief monarch of Christendom. Men whispered in horrified undertones that he was even suspected of indulging in carnal pleasures with infidel women. He had ignored the prejudices of his day by planting a colony of sericens in the very heart of his kingdom and by employing them as his soldiers. He had flouted religious bigotry by allowing Greeks, Jews, and infidels to worship as they pleased. He was even said to have derided the immaculate conception, to have placed Christ on a level with Moses and Mohammed, to have become almost a seris in himself and belief and in manner of life. His system of government had aroused much of the same interest and surprise as would be excited in our own day by the spectacle of a monarch trampling down the established forces of democracy and erecting a despotism upon their ruins. In every other country the royal power was subservient to aristocratic and ecclesiastical privilege. In England the barons had rested the great charter from John, were soon to rise successfully against Henry III. In France the dynasty of Capet had hardly yet begun to assert its supremacy over the forces of feudalism. In the kingdom of Sicily, however, the nobles and ecclesiastics were stripped of every privilege which conflicted with the royal authority, and a perfectly centralized organization had been erected in which all power emanated from the king. Frederick had then entered upon the final stage of that long and bitter struggle with the papacy which was to endure until his death. This combat between the temporal and the spiritual power, the most vital feature of the history of the Middle Ages, enlisted the passionate interest of the inhabitants of every Christian country, and Frederick, as the object of a peculiarly venomous hatred, as the most redoubtable champion of the temporal cause, had loomed gigantically in the vision of men. His high-handed assertion of the imperial supremacy and the capture of Gregory's council had been but an astonishing incident of the struggle. A more lasting marvel lay in his steadfast maintaining of his independence. Where Henry IV had knelt in penitence at Canosa, where Barbarossa had flung himself before the feet of the pope at Venice, Frederick had never humiliated himself before the vicar of Christ. John of England had submitted himself in his realm to Innocent III. His successor was too feeble to resist the extortions of the papal tax-gatherers. The proud Philip Augustus of France had been compelled by the pope to put away the wife he loved and reinstate a divorced and discarded queen. There was scarcely a king or prince in Christendom who had not bowed before the threats of Rome. Frederick alone had resisted to the end, had survived the most furious assaults of Gregory and Innocent, had defied the sentence of deposition and had worn his crowns with scarcely diminished power until the day of his death. Thus around his name there had gathered a glamour of strangeness and splendor, of genius soaring to perilous questionings of eternal truths, of unbreakable resolution and of unconquerable pride. To his ardent supporters he had become the new Messiah. To his frenzied enemies the Antichrist. To those who stood outside the immediate fury of the strife, he was a being beyond the common range of human experience and comprehension. He was the dominating spirit of his age, the supreme center of interest and wonder, Stupor Mundi et Imutator Mirabilis. The historian Freeman has called him, the most gifted of the sons of men, by nature the more than peer of Alexander, of Constantine and of Charles, in mere genius, in mere accomplishments, the greatest prince who ever wore a crown. So rare in eulogy needs something more than a distinguished source to render it acceptable, but it will bear the scrutiny of skepticism passively well. Certain it is that in his tremendous intellect, in his cultured and inquiring mind, in his broad spirit of toleration, he towered far above his contemporaries, that his system of jurisprudence, his educational and economic regulations, portrayed a singularly enlightened conception of the arts of government. If the more cautious among us may hesitate to endorse the eulogy of Freeman with enthusiasm and conviction, we can at any rate follow him so far as this. We can say, nay, we must admit, that ingenious Frederick has had no superior among the princes of the world, and that in the potentialities of greatness as a ruler he excelled many who have earned the title of great. That title would assuredly have been his, had not the enmity of the papacy prevented him from exercising those potentialities. Frederick belongs to no age, continues the same writer. Intellectually he is above his own age, above every age. Morally it can hardly be denied that he was below his age, but in nothing was he of his age. If we may accept Freeman's praise of Frederick with some diffidence, we can reject his condemnation with confidence. The vices of the Hohenstaufen Emperor stand out in dark relief against the general enlightenment of his character. His duplicity, cruelty and licentiousness were lamentable enough, but they do not place him morally below his age, for his faults were essentially the faults of his age and of his country. It was inevitable that Frederick, surrounded from his childhood by intrigue and hostile ambitions, should absorb within himself some of the craft and dissimulation with which he was thus familiarised. He was never the complete Machiavellian, but he was ready enough to employ guile and subterfuge when it seemed profitable. Pretend some business, he writes to one of his captains whom he has ordered to obtain possession of a strong castle, and where will he call the castle unto you? Seize on him if you can and keep him till he cause the castle to be surrendered to you. This is a fair example of his duplicity and does not argue in him a high conception of public honour, but it is far removed from dark and damnable treachery, and it can be said in partial extenuation of such methods that no ruler ever prospered in medieval Italy who disdained the wisdom of the serpent. We need only glance through the pages of any chronicler of Frederick's time to see that in his cruelty he certainly did not exceed the guilt of his contemporaries. We can read, for instance, in Salambene, of the fate of Albaric De Romano, who with his wife and family fell into the hands of his enemies in the year 1260. His six sons, some of them mere children, were hewn into pieces before his eyes and their bleeding limbs thrust into his face. His wife and daughters were stripped from the waist downwards, were paraded through the streets and finally burnt at the stake. After he had witnessed their dying agonies, his own flesh was torn with red-hot pincers and his tortured body dragged to death at the tail of a horse. Frederick never descended to such barbarity as this. Nor can he be condemned as below his age when that age had witnessed the atrocities of the Albigensi and Crusade perpetrated with the sanction of the papacy, hideously sanctified by the pretext of religious zeal. If in his last years goaded into frequent fits of sinister fury by his implacable enemies, rendered vindictive by treacherous attempts upon his life, Frederick became indiscriminate in his vengeance, his cruelty at any rate was never a lust. He was no echelino de Romano to gloat over the sufferings of his victims, was rather an excessive form of severity. We can understand that in an age when such crimes as forgery and theft were punished by execution, a painless death seemed an utterly inadequate penalty for traitors. His cruelty was certainly not greater either in quantity or quality than that of his enemies, and on occasions he showed a generous clemency to his defeated foes. In the matter of sexual morality the greatest minds have rarely consented to be bound by the code which is accepted by their fellow men. Frederick was no exception to this rule. Bound by no rigid system of religious belief he was a law unto himself, entirely contemptuous of the conventions of his inferiors, and all men in his sight were the inferior of Caesar. He made no effort to hide from the world the license which that self-made law permitted him to enjoy. Yet in this vice as in others he was not below the standard of his age. The church itself, which we might expect to represent the highest morality of the time, was besmirched with lewdness from the highest to the lowest of its grades. If the popes themselves either through virtue or old age had renounced the lusts of the flesh, the papal court was notorious throughout Europe and polluted every city in which it sojourned. We found three or four houses of ill-fame when we came hither, said the cardinal Hugh of St. Cher, when the court was leaving Lyon to return to Italy after Frederick's death, and now, at our departure, we leave the whole city one continuous brothel. Another cardinal, the warlike Gregory of Montalango, was reputed to have as many Lemons as the Emperor himself. The vow of chastity was openly violated by the parish priests and the abuse of the confessional was widely prevalent. It is significant enough that in the many conditions of peace which were at one time or another demanded from Frederick by the papacy, he was never commanded to put away his concubines. His supposed intercourse with infidel women formed one of the charges set forth against him at the Council of Lyon, but his sins with Christian women were ignored. The church knew too well that in this matter she could not cast the first stone. He was entirely oriental in his sexual conduct. He may have been profoundly attached to Bianca Lancia or to one of his legitimate wives, but their position was only that of the favorite sultana. They never enjoyed the monopoly of his embraces. He was not a hunter of women, surrounded by a bevy of complacent beauties who existed solely for his own pleasure. The wives of his subjects were safe from his regards. Yet this Orientalism, though less mischievous than the roving amorousness of A. Charles II, is less easy to condone. It is sensuality without sentiment, devoid of the glamour of romance, a mere satisfaction of erotic impulse or bodily appetite rather than ardent passion or impetuous desire. It is unforgivable in one of his enlightened mind. We may concede that his morality was not lower than that of his age, but we cannot deny that he transgressed the bounds of that license which, if we would be tolerant, we must regard as the peculiar privilege of princes. To the men of his own country these faults in Frederick's character were ordinary enough. They were the sins that might be laid to the charge of any ruler great or small in medieval Italy. But there was an offense which in the eyes of a superstitious age was far more grievous than these. It is not for lewdness or cruelty or treachery that Dante consigns Frederick to hell, but for unbelief. The poet, imperialist, though he was, cannot ignore the accusation which was made against the emperor by his enemies, which was confirmed by his own hasty and scornful words. Frederick is an illustrious hero, his character is of nobility and righteousness, but nevertheless, because he doubted the eternal truths, his portion is among the heresy arcs in hell. How far the popular impression of his skepticism was corrected is of course impossible to determine. It is unlikely that he was an atheist, for when he realized that the hand of death was upon him, he said, the will of God be done. We may believe, however, that a mind of such broad and Catholic culture could not but revolt against the narrow dogma of the church. That mingling in himself the civilization of both Christendom and Mohammedanism, he viewed the two religions with a certain detachment, and regarded with impatience the claim of either to exclusive infallibility. That to his scientific and inquiring mind any sharply defined doctrine would be unacceptable, especially when it contained so large an element of superstition as the religious belief of his day. Unprovoked by the papal enmity, he might avail his opinions in discreet silence, but harassed beyond measure by an unjust persecution, he was occasionally stung into deriding the religion of which his arge enemy was the earthly head. To have endorsed these hasty utterances before the world by a public confession of his unorthodoxy would have involved him and his house in immediate and irretrievable ruin. It was not to be expected that he would gratify the pope and surrender all for which he had struggled by thus encompassing his own destruction. Such a suicide would have been a black crime in his eyes, a betrayal of his high charge as the guardian of the imperial heritage as the champion of mankind against the tyranny of the popes. He did not hesitate, therefore, when publicly charged, with the awful sin of heresy, to refute that charge by a vigorous assertion of his implicit faith in the tenets of Christianity. We may even believe that he made this assertion in all good faith, that he considered it incumbent upon him in his public capacity to uphold and maintain a religion which was inextricably mingled with social order and human virtue. Only in the light of this belief can we understand his persecution of heretics, for we may dismiss far from our minds the suspicion of odious hypocrisy which that persecution would otherwise fasten upon his name. It is always more easy to define the vices of a man than his virtues. The vices of Frederick can be exemplified by material things, his licentiousness by the harem that he maintained for his pleasure, his cruelty by the letting-cope, said to be his own invention under the weight of which his victims slowly weary to death. For his greater qualities we must look with a wider view, must envisage his whole life. We must note that fine pride which enabled him to resist the allurements of a life of peacefulness and cultured ease and to end his days in ceaseless warfare and toil. We must regard the all-powerful intellect, the mind freed from the trammels of religious bigotry, the enlightened measures for the prosperity and mental elevation of his people. How far in him the good exceeded the evil, the light triumphed over the darkness, may be gathered from the men who were his friends. The saintly Louis of France found in him more righteousness than in the vicar of Christ. Hermann van Salza, a man of blameless life and lofty reputation, was his loyal friend and trusty servant as long as he lived. Berard, the Archbishop of Palermo, against whose name there was no breath of columny, clung to his side through excommunication and deposition, never denied to him the sacred offices forbidden by the Pope, absolved him on his deathbed, and buried him with the full rites of the Church. Even that Pope, who summoned in Charles Avange to extirpate his house, could call him the noble Frederick and extol his government of the kingdom. But perhaps the most eloquent witness of the admiration he excited in his day lies in the words of one who should have been peculiarly bitter in his condemnation. Salim Bene was a minorite friar, a member of an order which was relentless in its antagonism to the emperor, in which therefore met with the severest repression at his hands. This chronicler speaks first as a friar should speak of one who was under the ban of the Church. Of faith in God he had none, he was crafty, wily, avaricious, lustful, malicious and wrathful. But having thus enumerated Frederick's vices he straightway relents and continues, and yet a gallant man at times when he would show his kindness or courtesy, full of solace, jock and delightful, fertile in devices. He knew to read, write and sing, and to make songs and music. He was a comely man and well-made, though of middle stature. I have seen him, and once I loved him. Moreover he knew to speak many and varied tongues, and to be brief, if he had been rightly Catholic and had loved God and his Church, he would have had few emperors his equals in the world. Yet this emperor has left little visible impression upon the history of the world. So little indeed, that in England at least, the memory of him has almost vanished from the popular mind, and when the name of Frederick II is spoken it is of his prescient namesake of a later age that men think, a monarch of far lesser genius and smaller soul. The work that Frederick had been able to accomplish in his kingdom was utterly destroyed by the invaders who came in answer to the papal call. The land fell back into darkness and confusion. Almost every trace of him was swept away. As for the empire, there had been little enough work in that wider sphere that he had been allowed to do. The papacy had seen to that. She knew better than to give him leisure to consolidate the imperial sway. Frederick maintained the glory of the empire during his reign by his personal renown, he even extended its territories. But it was diseased at the heart. It rested for its security upon the power of the German throne, and that had been fatally weakened by the long anarchy that had preceded Frederick's accession. He had been unable to remedy that weakness because all his energies had been absorbed in his struggle against the papacy, and the popes meanwhile had encouraged the turbulent princes of Germany in sedition and had finally, by raising a rival emperor to Frederick, rent Germany in twain. With Frederick's death and the extinction of his house, the whole fabric of the empire collapsed and the policy of the papacy came to its triumph. Frederick was thus the last of the great medieval emperors. The great interregnum which ensued in Germany after his death lasted for over twenty years. Finally, Rudolph of Hopsburg, built from the ruins of the imperial power, a precarious lordship of Germany which he dignified by the name of empire. But meanwhile Sicily had passed to the house of Anjou. The city-states of northern Italy had secured a complete independence, and Burgundy had turned to France. The empire of the Hopsburgs was but a shadow of the empire of the Hohenstalfens. Frederick has been denied the title of great, but he has merited the gratitude of mankind. Most of all should Englishmen who hold themselves to be lovers of those who fight in the cause of liberty remember his name with reverence and admiration. For Frederick, though an autocrat, was yet a champion of freedom. He strove manfully and with unwavering courage against that priestly tyranny which menaced all Europe in his age. Wherever that tyranny has triumphed there have followed evil, oppression and intolerance, the decay of nations and the abuse of power. England was saved from this, or at least from the danger of this, by Frederick II. She suffered grievously enough at the hands of the popes under her feeble kings John and Henry III, but if Frederick had not combatted the papal ambitions with all his power, drawn upon himself the full force of the papal fury and resisted the might of his enemy to the end, then the lot of England would have been immeasurably worse. If once the great dragon had been crushed, then assuredly the little basilisks would have been trodden underfoot. But when Frederick had been overcome by death, when his race had been extinguished and by the time another pope had arisen of the stamp of Gregory IX and Innocent IV, and Edward I had appeared on the throne of England and a Philip IV on the throne of France, the nations were strong and the opportunity of the popes had passed. In his strife with the papacy then lie at once the tragedy and the crown of Frederick's life, the tragedy since being by nature so wonderfully endowed to govern a realm in peace and glory he was yet denied the expression of his genius, the crown in that he did with his might the thing that his right hand found to do. And if a temple should ever be raised to the memory of those who have struggled for the freedom of man, then Frederick should find a high place in the sanctuary, and upon his image should be engraved in the words that he himself uttered. Let those who shrink from my support have the shame as well as the galling burden of slavery. Before this generation, and before the generations to come, I will have the glory of resisting this tyranny. Bormundi, the Life and Times of Frederick II, Emperor of the Romans, King of Sicily and Jerusalem, 1194 to 1250 by Lionel Alshorn.