IT was Matthew Paris, the English historian, who gave Frederick II the appellation of
Stupor Mundi
. It fitted him so well that ever since then he has been called by this name, as if it were one of his legal titles. It was how he saw himself: the man who stupefied the world by his conquests and by his far-reaching intelligence and imagination; the viceroy on earth of both Alexander the Great and Christ himself. There was no end to his ambitions. He defied emperors and popes and acted as though he alone knew the art of kingship. Matthew Paris called him
Stupor Mundi et immutator mirabilis
âStupor of the world and marvelous changer of things. Actually, he changed very little and the Hohenstaufen dynasty collapsed with his death.
Yet in a sense what Matthew Paris claimed for Frederick II was true. He was a new kind of man; he saw the world in a new way. He was a man of the Renaissance long before the Renaissance came into existence. His imagination was precise and jewel-like; and while there was no limit to his ambitions, there was also no limit to his belief in the perfectibility of man and in man's power to understand the world around him. He could say that he alone among the European kings and emperors conquered Jerusalem without the use of military force; he alone would claim that it was due to his own presence in the Holy Land.
Frederick II, Emperor of the Romans, King of Sicily and Apulia, and King of Jerusalem, was a short, nearsighted, beardless man, with red-gold curly hair, and without natural grace except when he was riding on horseback. He liked to say that he ruled firmly in order to bring order to the world, but in fact he ruled chaotically, relying on sudden impulses and sudden changes of mood rather than on his formidable intelligence. He was cold, cruel, selfish, and unrelenting in his pursuit of those he regarded as his enemies. Although he claimed to be the viceroy of Christ, charged to bring heaven to earth, he had very little religious feeling and no regard whatsoever for the pope.
Frederick II puzzled and amazed his contemporaries, largely because of the strange electric excitement which accompanied him wherever he went. He seemed to be in rebellion against the world, against all constituted authority. Though he acquired all his crowns legitimately, by direct descent from an emperor and a king, he acted throughout his life with the cunning of a pretender or the malice of a usurper. He was uncomfortable to be with. He liked to say that his whole life was devoted to the quest for inner and outer peace, but no one could have been more noisy, more raucous, more desirous of trumpet music.
On July 25, 1215, Frederick was crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle in the presence of most of the nobility of Germany. He was twenty-one years old, already a seasoned warrior. He sat on the throne of Charlemagne; his grandfather, Frederick Barbarossa, had been crowned on the same throne. He swore to defend the empire and the Church in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, to love justice and hate iniquity, to judge the rich and the poor equally; and when the long and exhausting ceremony came to an end, he announced from the throne that he intended to lead Christendom on a new Crusade to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the infidels. No one had expected him to say this. The knights acclaimed him with enthusiasm; he asked them all to join him, and if he had set out for the Holy Land at that moment they would have followed him. All through the following day, at the orders of the young emperor, the nobility listened endlessly to Crusade sermons.
Wearing a red cross sewn onto the shoulder of his imperial robes, Frederick resembled a Crusader-emperor to perfection. His call to arms was a political act of the first magnitude: it excited the Germans, intimidated the pope, who had also called for a Crusade, and it placed him in a position of extraordinary authority. At that moment he seemed to be the destined leader of Europe.
But there was something about Frederick that made the pope wary. He realized that if Frederick led a Crusade, he would inevitably attempt to carve out for himself an empire in the East; at the very least he would want to be King of Jerusalem.
Still, in November 1220, Frederick, following the tradition set by Charlemagne, was crowned again, by the pope at St. Peter's. He was anointed, received into the brotherhood of the Canons of St. Peter, and given a sword which he brandished three times, thus becoming a
miles beati Petri
, a soldier of the blessed Peter. By becoming a soldier of the pope, he was sworn to defend the pope and the Church. It remained that he should become a
miles Christi
, a soldier of Christ.
Once again he announced that he would lead a Crusade. He even gave a date when the Crusaders would set sail: August 1221. Whether he had any real intention of keeping his promise is unclear. He was a man who enjoyed making vast plans for the future, but he was also a man who lived
from day to day. There were problems in Sicily (in those days this meant most of southern Italy together with the island of Sicily), which was in a state of chaos because of a large Saracenic colony. The trouble was stamped out, and the Saracenic prisoners were transferred to fortified camps in Apulia, where they tilled the land and could sometimes be called upon to serve in Frederick's army. It was during this period that he began to learn Arabic and to study science and philosophy, astronomy, astrology, and the physical sciences. He was preparing himself for the day when he would speak with Saracenic princes on equal terms and in their own language. He was also behaving more and more like the king of a Saracen country, with his vast harem and his oriental panoply. He was treated like a divinity by his court.
In March 1223, an extraordinary conference was held at Ferentino to discuss once more the question of the Crusade. Present at this conference were the pope, Honorius III, who was angry with Frederick for delaying the Crusade, the masters of the temple and the Hospital, Hermann of Salza, who was the grand master of the Teutonic Knights, John of Brienne, King of Jerusalem, Ralph, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Pelagius, the papal legate who had commanded the Christian army in Egypt. It was as though the pope had decided to gather together the corporate leadership of the Christian army in the Holy Land in order to discuss the ultimate Crusade. But gradually, as they talked and argued, it became obvious to all that there was no possibility of raising enough money and enough troops for another two years. But out of these debates one new idea emerged: Frederick should marry Isabelle, the daughter of John of Brienne and heiress through her mother to the throne of Jerusalem. It was an idea that pleased Frederick, for it meant that he would become king of Jerusalem without any more effort than was needed to attend a marriage ceremony. The pope was pleased with the idea because it bound Frederick to the Holy Land, and John of Brienne was pleased because his daughter would become an empress while continuing to be queen of Jerusalem.
Isabelle was fourteen. Frederick was thirty. They were first married by proxy in the Church of the Holy Cross at Acre. A certain Bishop James of Patti represented Frederick. There followed in the cathedral at Tyre the solemn coronation of the young queen, and for fifteen days there was feasting and celebration. Then at last she was placed on an imperial galley bound for Brindisi, with a guard of honor consisting of many notables of the kingdom. At Brindisi the emperor married the newly crowned queen of Jerusalem. Within a few days of their wedding, he announced that the title of King of Jerusalem was rightfully his and that John of Brienne was henceforth merely his subject. He issued grants in the name of “Ysabella, my beloved wife, empress of the Romans, queen of Jerusalem and Sicily.” In this way he ruled the Kingdom of Jerusalem from afar.
From this marriage Isabelle gained very little personal happiness. On
their wedding night he seduced one of her ladies-in-waiting. Frederick kept Isabelle at a distance; she was merely the instrument by which he obtained his new kingdom. In 1228, when she was seventeen, she gave birth to a son, who was called Conrad. She died a few days later.
Although the pope refused to recognize Frederick as King of Jerusalem, and continued to address John of Brienne by that title, the barons of Jerusalem believed that there was need for a strong, high-minded king. They believed that Frederick would bring power and authority to the Holy Land. If they had known him well, they might have thought otherwise.
Frederick was a Christian only because in the West it was probably not possible for anyone in his time not to be caught up in the vast stream of Christianity; Frederick's greater sympathies lay with Islam. He surrounded himself with Saracenic attendants and eunuchs, his harem was full of Saracenic women, and even his habits of mind were authoritarian in a peculiarly Saracenic way. The caliphs of Islam were learned men with a passion for knowledge and scientific invention; they were extremely sophisticated, and at home in the physical world. Frederick resembled them in his flair for the decisive act, and in his self-glorification.
Because he was believed to be so powerful, it puzzled the barons that he had not entered the Holy Land earlier. They had been waiting for him for a very long time. Nor were the barons in any way dismayed by his claim to be the lawful king of Jerusalem. By law and by tradition, the crown of Jerusalem passed, in the absence of male heirs, through the female line. The husband of the queen became king. So it had happened for Guy of Lusignan, Conrad of Montferrat, and Henry of Champagne. But the law expressly stated that the king must appear in his kingdom within a year and a day of inheriting the title. The marriage in Brindisi took place on November 9, 1225. Frederick therefore had until November 10, 1226, to set foot on the Holy Land. It was totally characteristic of him that he should delay his arrival, thereby defying the orders of the pope and the laws of Jerusalem.
One of the principal reasons Frederick continually delayed his Crusade can be found in his secret correspondence with the sultan of Egypt. Embassies were exchanged; trade treaties were signed; the sultan and the emperor exchanged presents. All this came to the attention of the pope, who quite naturally wondered how the peace-loving emperor could make war on a friendly sultan.
Frederick continued to promise that he would lead the Crusade. At last, in the early summer of 1227, it became clear that he intended to carry out his promise. From England, Sicily, Apulia, Lombardy, and farther Germany, the crusading army could be seen converging on Brindisi. The German army was commanded by the Landgrave Louis of Thuringia and Duke Henry of Lemburg. Forty thousand English knights and soldiers arrived under the bishops of Exeter and Winchester. This formidable army
reached Brindisi and found that Frederick had made only a very slight effort to welcome it. Food supplies were low, lodgings for the knights were inadequate, there was scarcely any sanitary facility to be seen on the campsites for the soldiers, and there was only a handful of ships in the harbor. There had been cloudless skies all through the summer, the heat was terrible, and the land was parched. Then the plague came, killing thousands, and both the emperor and Louis of Thuringia caught the fever. Soon the plague was being carried through Italy by troops who, having deserted the Crusade, were desperately attempting to reach their own lands.
Frederick could say that he was not responsible for the summer heat or for the plague, but in the eyes of the pope the plague was God's punishment on him. Although weak with fever, Frederick superintended the embarkation of some of his troops, believing that it was better that they should leave the plague-ridden city than die of the fever, and he sailed for the Holy Land. When he was two days out from Brindisi, Louis of Thuringia died of the plague. Terrified, Frederick put into the port of Otranto, buried his friend, and rushed off to the baths of Pozzuoli on the advice of his physicians, who counseled a moderate diet and frequent bathing in the springs.
Pope Gregory IX was an old man, crusty, handsome, strong-minded, with a great liking for the panoply of the Church and an even greater liking for power. Learning that Frederick had abandoned the Crusade and was now wallowing in the baths at Pozzuoli, he was incensed. There had been too many postponements, too many delays, and now, it seemed, Frederick had played the devil's game. In a state of fury the pope charged him with crimes he had not committed: he had deliberately chosen Brindisi as the staging ground for the Crusade, knowing how ill-favored the place was; he had had secret communications with the Saracens; he had never intended to go to the Holy Land. These were offenses that warranted excommunication. And without further ado the pope excommunicated the emperor.
Frederick was described as the beast who had torn the side of Mother Church, the cursed enemy of Christ, the most damnable enemy of mankind. With the solemn rites of excommunication performed, in the eyes of the church Frederick was a dead man. Not only was he cut off from the sacraments of the church, but no Christian could have any dealings with him. If he died he could not be buried in consecrated ground.
Frederick protested that he still intended to take the Cross; he had been delayed by illness, nothing else. He offered to perform whatever penance the pope demanded of him. The pope continued to curse him, accused him of poisoning Louis of Thuringia, and refused under any conditions to lift the ban of excommunication.
Frederick had wanted to lead the Crusade in August because he believed on the evidence of his correspondence with the sultan of Egypt that it would be possible by then to negotiate a treaty by which Jerusalem, or a
large part of it, could be retained in Christian hands. He had his own
bailli
in the Holy Land, acting as viceroy. This was Thomas of Aquino, who was astute and forceful. He also had his own troops there, for the duke of Lemburg had sailed from Brindisi with eight hundred knights and ten thousand infantry. Frederick was already a presence, issuing orders, in command of armies, while the pope fulminated that he was a procrastinator who had never intended to set foot in Palestine.