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Frederick II
King of Sicily, King of Cyprus and Jerusalem, King of the Romans, King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor
Reign	December 9,1212 – December 13,1250
Coronation	September 3, 1198
Burial	Cathedral of Palermo
Consort	various
Issue	Conrad IV of Germany
House	Hohenstaufen
Father	Henry VI
Mother	Constance of Sicily

Frederick II (December 26, 1194 – December 13, 1250), Holy Roman Emperor of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, was pretender to the title of King of the Romans from 1212, unopposed holder of that monarchy from 1215, and Holy Roman Emperor from 1220 until his death in 1250. He was also King of Sicily, from 1198 to 1250, where he was raised and lived most of his life (his mother, Constance of Sicily, was the daughter of Roger II of Sicily). He is also referred to as Frederick I of Sicily. His empire was frequently at war with the Papal States, so it is not surprising that he was excommunicated twice. Pope Gregory IX went so far as to call him the anti-Christ. After his death the idea of his second coming where he would rule a 1000-year reich took hold, possibly in part because of this.

Said to speak nine languages and be literate in seven (at a time when many monarchs and nobles were not literate at all), Frederick was a very modern ruler for his times, being a patron of science and learning (astronomy and astrology, also: one of his advisors was the famous astrologer Guido Bonatti from Forlì) and having fairly advanced views on economics. He abolished state monopolies, internal tolls, and import regulations within his empire.

He was patron of the Sicilian School of poetry, where in his royal court in Palermo, from around 1220 to his death, we witness the first use of a literary form of an Italo-Romance language, Sicilian. The poetry that emanated from the school predates the use of the Tuscan idiom as the preferred lingua franca of the Italian peninsula by at least a century. The school and its poetry were well known to Dante and his peers and had a significant influence on the literary form of what was eventually to become the modern Italian.

He was known in his own time as the Stupor mundi ("wonder of the world"). Frederick wrote, or rewrote, a manual on the art of falconry, De arte venandi cum avibus ("On the art of hunting with birds"), of which many illustrated copies survive from the 13th and 14th centuries.

Life

Early years

Born in Jesi, near Ancona, Frederick was the son of the emperor Henry VI. Some old chronicles say he was born in a public square of the city of Jesi, in northern Italy, while his father was entering triumphantly into Palermo. Frederick was baptised in Assisi.

In 1196 at Frankfurt am Main the child Frederick had already been elected to become King of the Germans. At the death of his father in 1197, the two-year-old Frederick was in Italy in voyage towards Germany, and when the bad news reached his guardian, Conrad of Spoleto, he was hastily brought back to Palermo to Constance. It was a good move, as Henry's empire dissolved, and its monarchy was disputed by Henry's brother Philip of Swabia and Otto IV.

His mother, Constance of Sicily, had been in her own right queen of Sicily; she had Frederick crowned King of Sicily and established herself as regent. In Frederick's name she dissolved Sicily's ties to the Empire, sending home his German counsellors (notably Markward of Anweiler and Gualtiero da Pagliara), and renouncing his claims to the German kingship and empire.

Upon Constance's death in 1198, Pope Innocent III succeeded as Frederick's guardian until he was of age: he was crowned King of Sicily on May 17, 1198, being only three years of age, and received some of his early formal education in Rome. He was to remember forever, however, the time spent in his early years in the court of Palermo, where Arab, German, Latin, Byzantine, Norman, Provencal and even Jewish influences combined.

See also Personality

Emperor

Otto of Brunswick had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Innocent III in 1209. In September 1211 at the Diet of Nuremberg Frederick was elected in absentia as German King by a rebellious faction backed by Innocent, who had fallen out with Otto and excommunicated him; he was again elected in 1212 and crowned December 9, 1212 in Mainz; yet another coronation ceremony took place in 1215. Being King of the Germans had been the traditional precursor step for emperorship. However, until the debacle at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, Frederick's authority was quite tenuous and he was recognized only in southern Germany: in northern Germany, the center of Guelph power, Otto continued to hold the reins of royal and imperial power despite excommunication. Otto's decisive military loss at Bouvines lost him the practical means to hold onto kingship and emperorship, and he withdrew to the Guelph hereditary lands to die, virtually without supporters, in 1218. (See also Guelphs and Ghibellines). The German princes, supported by Innocent III, again elected Frederick king of Germany in 1215, and the pope crowned him king in Aachen on July 23, 1215. It was not until another five years had passed, and only after further negotiations between Frederick, Innocent III, and Honorius III—who succeeded to the papacy after Innocent's death in 1216—that Frederick was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome by Honorius III on November 22, 1220. At the same time his oldest son Henry took the title of King of the Romans.

See also Personality

Unlike most Holy Roman emperors, Frederick spent little of his life in Germany. After his coronation in 1220, he remained either in the Kingdom of Sicily or on Crusade until 1236, when he made his last journey to Germany. (At this time, the Kingdom of Sicily, with its capital at Palermo, extended onto the Italian mainland to include most of southern Italy.) He returned to Italy in 1237 and stayed there for the remaining 13 years of his life, represented in Germany by his son Conrad.

In the Kingdom of Sicily, he built on the reform of the laws begun at the Assizes of Ariano in 1146 by his grandfather Roger II. His initiative in this direction was visible as early as the Assizes of Capua (1220) but came to fruition in his promulgation of the Constitutions of Melfi (1231, also known as Liber Augustalis), a collection of laws for his realm that was remarkable for its time and was a source of inspiration for a long time after. It made the Kingdom of Sicily an absolutist monarchy, the first centralized state in Europe to emerge from feudalism; it also set a precedent for the primacy of written law. With relatively small modifications, the Liber Augustalis remained the basis of Sicilian law until 1819.

During this period, he also built the Castel del Monte and in 1224 created the University of Naples: now called Università Federico II, it remained the sole atheneum of Southern Italy for centuries.

After the death of the last Duke of Zähringen, Frederick explicitly or implicitly granted the status of Imperial Free City to Berne. The corresponding Golden Charter of Bern of 1218, though, has now come to be regarded as a forgery.

In 1226, by means of the Golden Bull of Rimini he confirmed the legitimacy of rule by the Teutonic Knights under their headmaster Hermann von Salza over the Prussian lands east of the Vistula including Prussian Culmerland (Chelmno Land).

The Crusade

At the time he was crowned Emperor, Frederick had promised to go on crusade. In preparation for his crusade, Frederick had, in 1225, married Yolande of Jerusalem, heiress to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and immediately taken steps to take control of the Kingdom from his new father-in-law, John of Brienne. However, he continued to take his time in setting off, and in 1227, Frederick was excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX for failing to honor his crusading pledge - perhaps unfairly, at this point, as his plans had been delayed by an epidemic. He eventually embarked on the crusade the following year (1228), which was seen on by the pope as a rude provocation, since the church could not take any part in the honor for the crusade, resulting in a second excommunication. Frederick did not attempt to take Jerusalem by force of arms. Instead, he negotiated restitution of Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem to the Kingdom with sultan Al-Kamil, the Ayyubid ruler of the region, who was nervous about possible war with his relatives who ruled Syria and Mesopotamia and wished to avoid further trouble from the Christians. The crusade ended in a truce and in Frederick's coronation as King of Jerusalem on March 18, 1229 — although this was technically improper, as Frederick's wife Yolande, the heiress, had died in the meantime, leaving their infant son Conrad as rightful heir to the kingdom. Frederick's further attempts to rule over the Kingdom of Jerusalem were met by resistance on the part of the barons, led by John of Ibelin, Lord of Beirut. By the mid-1230s, Frederick's viceroy had been forced to leave Acre, the capital, and by 1244, Jerusalem itself had been lost again to a new Muslim offensive.

However, Frederick's seeming bloodless victory in recovering Jerusalem for the cross brought him great prestige in Europe, and in 1231 the pope rescinded Frederick's excommunication; this event is known as the Peace of San Germano.

The war against the Pope and the Italian Guelphs

While he may have temporarily made his peace with the pope, the lesser German princes were another matter. In 1231, Frederick's son Henry (who was born 1211 in Sicily, son of Frederick's first wife Constance of Aragon) claimed the crown for himself and allied with the Lombard League. The rebellion failed, though not utterly; Henry was imprisoned in 1235, and replaced in his royal title by his brother Conrad, already the King of Jerusalem; Frederick won a decisive battle in Cortenuova over the Lombard League in 1237.

Frederick celebrated it with a triumph in Cremona, in the manner of an ancient Roman emperor, with the captured carroccio (later sent to the commune of Rome) and an elephant. He rejected any suit for peace, even from Milan which had sent a great sum of money. This demand of total surrender spurred further resistance from Milan, Brescia, Bologna and Piacenza, and in October 1238 he was forced to raise the siege of Brescia, in the course of which his enemies had tried unsuccessfully to capture him.

Frederick received the news of his excommunication by Gregory IX in the first months of 1239, while his court was in Padova. The emperor replied expelling the Minorites and the preachers from Lombardy, and electing his son Enzio as Imperial vicar for Northern Italy. Enzio soon annexed the Romagna, Marche and the Duchy of Spoleto, nominally part of the Papal States. The father announced he was to destroy the Republic of Venice, which had sent some ships against Sicily. In December of that year Frederick marched over Toscana, entered triumphantly into Foligno and then in Viterbo, whence he aimed to finally conquer Rome, in order to restore the ancient splendours of the Empire. The siege, however, was vain, and Frederick returned to Southern Italy, sacking Benevento (a papal possession). Peace negotiations came to nothing.

In the meantime the Ghibelline city of Ferrara had fallen, and Frederick swept his way northwards capturing Ravenna and, after another long siege, Faenza. The people of Forlì (which kept its Ghibelline stance even after the collapse of Hohenstaufen power) offered their loyal support during the capture of the rival city: as a sign of gratitude, they were granted an augmentation of the communal coat-of-arms with the Hohenstaufen eagle, together with other privileges. This episode shows how the independent cities used the rivalry between Empire and Pope as a mean to obtain the maximum advantage for themselves.

The Pope had called a council, but Ghibelline Pisa thwarted it, capturing cardinals and prelates on a ship sailing from Genoa to Rome. Frederick thought that this time the way into Rome was opened, and again directed his forces against the Pope, trailing behind him a ruined and burning Umbria. Frederick destroyed Grottaferrata preparing to invade Rome. But on August 22, 1240, Gregory died. Frederick, showing that his war was not directed against the Church of Rome but against the Pope, drew back his troops and freed two cardinals from the jail of Capua. Nothing changed, however, in the relationship between Papacy and Empire, as Roman troops assaulted the Imperial garrison in Tivoli and the Emperor soon reached Rome. This back-and-forth situation repeated again in 1242 and 1243. Though unfruitful, these expeditions around Rome permitted Frederick to capture treasures from the church of the cities he passed through, and gave him the opportunity to enjoy the pleasant nature of hills, lakes and woods of the Latium.

His last and fiercest opponent, Innocent IV

A new pope, Innocent, was elected on June 25, 1243. He was a member of a noble Imperial family and had some relatives in Frederick's camp, so the Emperor was initially happy with his election. Innocent instead was to become his fiercest enemy. Negotiations began in the summer of 1243, but the situation changed as Viterbo rebelled, instigated by the intriguing Cardinal Ranieri of Viterbo. Frederick could not lose his main stronghold near Rome, and besieged the city. Many authorities state that the Emperor's star began its descent with this move. Innocent convinced him to withdraw his troops, but Ranieri nonetheless had the Imperial garrison slaughtered on November 13. Frederick was full of powerless rage. The new Pope was a master diplomat, and Frederick signed a peace treaty, which was soon broken. Innocent showed his true Guelph face, and, together with most of the Cardinals, fled via Genoese galleys to the Ligurian republic, arriving on July 7. His aim was to reach Lyon, where a new coucil was held beginning June 24, 1245. One month later, Innocent IV declared Frederick to be deposed as emperor: he was characterized as a "friend of Babylon's sultan", "of Saracen customs", "provided with a harem guarded by eunuchs" like the schismatic emperor of Byzantium and, in sum, a "heretic". The Pope backed Heinrich Raspe, landgrave of Thuringia as his rival for the imperial crown, and set in motion a plot to kill Frederick and Enzio, with the support of his (the pope's) brother-in-law Orlando de Rossi, who was a friend of Frederick's as well.

The conjurers, however, were unmasked by the count of Caserta. The vengeance was terrible: the city of Altavilla, where they had found shelter, was razed, and the guilty were blinded, mutilated and burnt alive or hung. An attempt to invade the Kingdom of Sicily, under the command of Ranieri, was halted at Spello by Marino of Eboli, Imperial vicar of Spoleto.

Innocent also sent a flow of money to Germany to cut off Frederick's power at its source. The archbishops of Köln and Mainz also declared Frederick deposed, and in May 1246 a new king was chosen in the person of Heinrich Raspe. On August 5 Heinrich, thanks to the Pope's money, managed to defeat an army of Conrad son of Frederick near Frankfurt. But Frederick strengthened his position in Southern Germany acquiring the Duchy of Austria, whose titular had died without heirs, and one year later Heinrich died as well. The new anti-king was William II, Count of Holland.

Between February and March 1247 Frederick settled the situation in Italy by means of the diet of Terni, naming his relatives or friends as vicars of the various lands. Marrying his son Manfred to the daughter of Amedeo di Savoia and securing the submission of the marquis of Monferrato, Frederick also gained control of the passages of the Eastern Alps, clearing the route to Lyon, where he hoped finally to settle the long-standing dispute with the Pope. On his part, Innocent asked protection from the King of France, Louis IX; but the king was a friend of the Emperor and believed in his desire for peace. A papal army under the command of Ottaviano degli Ubaldini never reached Lombardy, and the Emperor, accompanied by a massive army, held the next diet in Turin.

The Battle of Parma and the end

An unexpected event was to change the situation dramatically. In June 1247 the important Lombard city of Parma expelled the Imperial functionaries and sided with the Guelphs. Enzio was not in the city and could do nothing more than ask for help from his father, who came back to lay siege to the rebels, together with his friend Ezzelino III da Romano, tyrant of Verona. The besieged languished, as the Emperor waited the besieged surrendered of starvation. He had a true wooden city built around the walls, pompously called Vittoria ("Victory"). Here Frederick kept the treasure with the harem and the menagerie, and from its pavilions he could attend his favourite hunting expeditions. On February 18, 1248, during one of these absences the camp was suddenly assaulted and conquered, and in the ensuing Battle of Parma the Imperial side was routed. Frederick lost the Imperial treasure and, with it, any hope to keep up his struggle against the rebellious communes, as well as the triumphant Pope, who began plans for a crusade against Sicily. Though he soon recovered and rebuilt an army, this defeat spurred the rebellious feeling of many cities that could no longer bear his fiscal and monarchic regime: Romagna, Marche and Spoleto were lost.

On February 1249 Frederick, who had just lost his other faithful minister Taddeo of Suessa, fired his advisor and prime minister, the famous jurist and poet Pier delle Vigne. The charge was speculation and embezzlement. Some historians, however, maintain instead that Pier was planning to betray the Emperor: according to Matthew of Paris, he cried when he discovered the betrayal. Pier, blinded and in chains, died in Pisa, presumably by suicide (a presumption that placed him in the Seventh Circle of Dante's Hell in Canto XII of Inferno). Even more shocking for Frederick was the capture of his son Enzio by the Bolognese at the Battle of Fossalta, in the May of the same year. Only 23 at the time, he was thrown into a jail cell in which he was to spend the rest of his life, dying in 1272. The place of the king of Sardinia was taken over by the marquis Oberto Pallavicino, a skilled but cruel man, not different from his ill-famed contemporary Ezzelino. In this period Frederick lost another son, Richard of Chieti. But the struggle continued: the Empire lost Como and Modena, but regained Ravenna and another army sent to invade the Kingdom of Sicily, under the command of Cardinal Pietro Capocci, was crushed in the Marche, at the Battle of Cingoli in 1250. In the first month of that year the indomitable Ranieri of Viterbo died and the Imperial condottieri again reconquered Romagna, Marche and Spoleto, and Conrad, King of the Romans scored several victories in Germany against William of Holland.

Frederick did not take part of any of these campaigns. He had been ill and probably felt himself tired. Despite the betrayals and the ill happenings he had faced in his last years, Frederick died peacefully on December 13, 1250 in Castel Fiorentino near Lucera, in Puglia, after an attack of dysentery: in his last moment he wore the habit of a Cistercian monk. At the time of his death, his preeminent position in Europe was challenged but not lost: his testament left his legitimate son Conrad IV the Imperial and Sicilian crowns. Manfred received the principate of Taranto and the government of the Kingdom, Henry the Kingdom of Arles or that of Jerusalem, while the son of Henry VII was entrusted the Duchy of Austria and the Marquisate of Styria. His will was that all the lands he had taken from the Church were to be returned to it, all the prisoners freed, and the taxes reduced, provided this not damaged the Empire's pride.

However, upon Conrad's death a mere four years later, the Hohenstaufen dynasty fell from power and an interregnum began, lasting until 1273, one year after the last Hohenstaufen, Enzio, had died in his prison. During this time, a legend developed that Frederick was not truly dead, but merely slept in the Kyffhaeuser Mountains and would one day awaken to reestablish his empire. Over time, this legend largely transferred itself to his grandfather, Frederick I, also known as Barbarossa ("Redbeard").

His sarcophagus (made of red porphyry) lies in the cathedral of Palermo, beside those of his parents (Henry VI and Constance) as well as his grandfather, the Norman king Roger II of Sicily. A bust of Frederick sits in the Walhalla temple built by Ludwig I of Bavaria.

Heirs

All the heirs of Frederick met unlucky fates.

• Frederick's son Henry, sometimes styled Henry VII, especially during his period of rebellion in alliance with the Lombard League — not to be confused with Henry VII of the House of Luxembourg, Holy Roman Emperor 1275-1313 — was born 1211 in Sicily, son of Frederick's first wife Constance of Aragon, whom he had married in the August of 1209. King of the Germans (or, equivalently, "King of the Romans"), King of Sicily, claimant to the imperial title. After quarrelling with his father and forming an alliance with the Lombard League, he was captured by Frederick's forces and imprisoned from 1236; he died in Martirano in 1242, probably of the consequences of an attempted suicide.

• Frederick's son Conrad IV, son of his second wife Yolande de Brienne, Queen of Jerusalem, was born April 25, 1228 in Andria, Apulia. He became King of Jerusalem at birth (his mother having died in childbirth), and was elected German king and future emperor 1237 in Vienna, although no coronation took place. In 1250, he succeeded his father as King of Sicily, as well. Conrad died May 21, 1254 of malaria in an army camp in Lavello.

• Frederick's illegitimate son Manfred, King of Sicily, was born in 1231 of Bianca, the daughter of Count Bonifacio Lancia. According to some accounts, Frederick married Bianca on his deathbed, in order to make Manfred's birth legitimate, but there is no consensus on this. Manfred, initially as regent for Conrad's young son Conradin, and, after 1258 as King of Sicily, continued—after initial attempts at reconciliation—Frederick's conflict with the Pope and was also placed under papal interdict. Manfred died February 26, 1266 in battle near Benevento against Charles of Anjou, brother to the French King, who had been entrusted with the Kingdom of Sicily by the Pope. Still under excommunication, he was buried in unhallowed ground in the rocky valley of Verde. His wife Helena, and also their sons Frederick, Henry, and Enzio died in prison, the sons having been held in lifelong solitary confinement, like animals, never even learning human speech.

• Enzio (or Enzo) in particular seemed to be the father's favourite, as he received the titles of King of Sardinia and that of Imperial vicar in Northern Italy. These nominations have been seen as a Frederick's attempt to create a centralized state also in Northern and Central Italy: but this failed after the Battle of Parma and the subsequent imprisonment of Enzio in Bologna in 1249. Enzio became a popular character for his pitiful fate, as he spent all the rest of his life in prison, dying in 1272.

• The last legitimate male heir of the Hohenstaufen dynasty was Frederick's grandson Conradin, son of Conrad IV. The grandson, born March 25, 1252 at Burg Wolfstein near Landshut, held the titles of Duke of Swabia, King of Jerusalem and Sicily. He invaded Italy in 1268 to reclaim his Kingdom from Charles of Anjou, but was defeated and captured by Charles at the Battle of Tagliacozzo and publicly executed at age 16 on October 29, 1268 in Naples.

In 1284 Frederick's ghost resurfaced in the form of a very convincing false Frederick, the impostor Tile Kolup, who impersonated the emperor with such expert knowledge and an amazing similarity that many of those who had known the true Frederick fell for him. Kolup was captured and executed, but rumors persist to this day that Kolup had been another illegitimate son of Frederick II.

Personality

His contemporaries called Frederick stupor mundi, the "wonder" — or, more precisely, the "astonishment" — "of the world"; the majority of his contemporaries, subscribing to medieval religious orthodoxy, under which the doctrines promulgated by the Church were supposed to be uniform and universal, were, indeed astonished — not seldom repelled — by the highly developed individual consciousness of the Hohenstaufen emperor, his temperamental stubbornness and his unorthodox, nearly unstoppable thirst for knowledge.

Frederick II was a religious sceptic. He is said to have denounced Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad as all being frauds and deceivers of mankind. He delighted in uttering blasphemies and making mocking remarks directed toward Christian sacraments and beliefs. Frederick's religious scepticism was most unusual for the era in which he lived, and to his contemporaries, highly shocking and scandalous. In his period in Jerusalem, this behaviour was much to the dislike of the Muslims too, who grew mistrustful of a Christian which was not a Christian.

Even his birth was remarkable. According to chronicles from the era, in order to stanch any doubt about his origin, the already 40-year old Constance gave birth to the child publicly in a marketplace. After Henry VI, his father, died at 31, Frederick came under the guardianship of the pope, which the latter, however, neglected him on the basis of power-politics. In Palermo, where the three-year-old boy was brought after his mother's death, he grew up like a street youth. On his own, he roamed a city which swarmed with adventurers and pirates, beggars and jugglers, Arab and Jewish merchants. The only benefit from Innocent III was that at 14 years of age he married a 25-year-old widow named Constance, the daughter of the king of Aragon in what is now Spain. As it happened, both seemed reasonably happy with the arrangement, and Constance soon bore a son, Henry.

Later, it appeared opportune to Innocent III to support Frederick as a legitimate king, in order to counter the Emperor Otto — whom up to that time the pope had supported. In 1212 he brought him to Rome, gave him a round of instruction in things political, and sent him, provided with a bull of excommunication against the Guelph Otto, in the direction of Germany. The voyage seemed difficult, as the sea was roamed by the ships of Pisa, as usual faithful to the official emperor, and the road north to Rome were commanded by imperial garrisons. But in that period of his life a kind of mystic and prophetical luck seemed to illuminate every step made by the young king.

Frederick managed to reach Liguria with ships sent by the fiercest rival of Pisa, Genova, where he stayed for three months. He crossed the Alps using the most difficult passes, as the Brenner Pass was occupied by the enemy troops of the duchies of Merano and Bavaria, and then he came to Konstanz in territory of the archbishop of Chur. The city was in fact preparing to receive the emperor, and would not allow the new aspirant to the imperial title to remain in the city. However, after a solemn reading of the pope's Bull of Excommunication, the gates of the city were opened for him. Otto, who meanwhile had waited in Überlingen for the ferry, came three weeks later before the city gates and was turned away. Frederick conquered the realm by means of generous promises and donations, without spilling a drop of blood. Otto, crushed in the Battle of Bouvines by the French, died some years later, a lonely man in the Harzburg, while Frederick would be crowned Emperor in Rome by the pope. In his coronation, too, he showed how unusual he was. At his coronation he carried a brand-new, red coronation robe with a strange ornamentation at the edge. In reality it was an Arabic inscription, which indicated that this robe dated from the year 528, not by the Christian but by Muslim calendar! About this was an Arab benediction: "May the Emperor be received well, may he enjoy vast prosperity, great generosity and high splendor, fame and magnificent endowments, and the fulfillment of his wishes and hopes. May his days and nights go in pleasure without end or change". This coronation robe can be found today in the Schatzkammer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

This was typical of him: while he was being crowned by the Pope to be the highest defender of the Christian faith, his coat referred to the history of Islam. And not only that. He did not exterminate the Saracens of Sicily with fire and sword; on the contrary, he allowed them to settle on the mainland and even to build mosques. Not least, he enlisted them in his - Christian - army and even into his personal bodyguards. As these were Muslim soldiers, they were immune from papal excommunication. These among others are reasons that Frederick II is listed as a representative member of the sixth region of Dante's Inferno, The Heretics who are burned in tombs.

A further example of how much he differed from his contemporaries was his Crusade in the Holy Land. Outside Jerusalem, with the power to take it, he parlayed five months with the Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt al-Kamil about the surrender of the city. The Sultan summoned him into Jerusalem and entertained him in the most lavish fashion. When the muezzin, out of consideration for Frederick, failed to make the morning call to prayer, the emperor declared: "I stayed overnight in Jerusalem, in order to overhear the prayer call of the Muslims and their worthy God". The Saracens had a good opinion of him, so it was no surprise that after five months Jerusalem was handed over to him, taking advantage of the war difficulties of al-Kamil. The fact that this was regarded in the Arab as in the Christian world as high treason did not matter to him one whit. As the Patriarch of Jerusalem refused to crown him king, he set the crown on his own head.

Besides his great tolerance (which, however, did not apply to Christian heretics), he had an unlimited thirst for knowledge and learning. To the horror of his contemporaries, he simply did not believe things that could not be explained by reason. So he forbade trials by ordeal on the firm conviction that in a duel the stronger would always win, whether he was guilty or not. Also, it can be forgotten amidst the general enthusiasm over his book on falconry releases frequently that he also wrote a scientific book about birds or that many of his laws continue to affect life down to the present day, such as the prohibition on physicians acting as their own pharmacists. This was a blow at the charlatanism under which physicians diagnosed dubious maladies and also at the same time in order to sell a useless, even dangerous "cure".

Frederick's greatest passion were animals, and falcons in particular. He inherited his love for falconry from his Norman ancestors. According to a source, Frederick replied to a letter in which the Mongol khan invited him to submit that he was keen to do it, provided he was permitted to become the khan's hawker. He mantained up to 50 hawkers a time for his court, and in his letters he requested the acquiring of Arctic gerfalcons from Lübeck and even from Greenland. He commissioned the translation of the treaty De arte venandi cum avibus, by the Arab Moamyn, to his Syrian astrologer Theodor, but he corrected or rewrote it during the endless siege of Faenza. This implies that the Emperor knew the Arab language very well. Frederick picked up information from many of the philosphers then known, and mainly from the De Animalibus by Aristotle, creating a really noteworthy scientific work for the time it was written. One of the two existing versions was modified by his son Manfred, also a keen adherent of falconry. Frederick loved exotic animals in general: his mobile zoo, with which he used to impress the cold cities of Northern Italy and Europe, included hounds, elephants, giraffes, cheetahs, lynxs, leopards and exotic birds. In 1232 he sent the Egyptian sultan a rare white bear, in exchange for a planetary worth 20,000 marks: Frederick was in fact attracted by stars, and his court was full of astrologers and astronomers. He often issued letters to the main scholars of the time (not only in Europe) asking for solutions to questions of science, mathematics and physics.

A Damascene chronicler, Sibt ibn al-Jawzi, leaves a physical description of Frederick based on the testimony of those who had seen the emperor in person in Jerusalem. "The Emperor was covered with red hair, was bald and myopic. Had he been a slave, he would not have fetched 200 dirhams at market." His eyes were described variously as blue, or "green like those of a serpent".

Law reforms

His 1241 Edict of Salerno (sometimes called "Constitution of Salerno") made the first legally fixed separation of the occupations of physician and apothecary. Physicians were forbidden to double as pharmacists and the prices of various medicinal remedies were fixed. This became a model for regulation of the practice of pharmacy throughout Europe.

He was not able to extend his legal reforms beyond Sicily to the Empire. In 1232, he was forced by the German princes to promulgate the Statutum in favorem principum ("statute in favor of princes"). It was a charter of aristocratic liberties for German princes at the expense of the lesser nobility and commoners. The princes gained whole power of jurisdiction, and the power to strike their own coins. The emperor lost his right to establish new cities, castles and mints over their territories. The Statutum extremely weakened central authority in Germany for ages. From 1232 the vassals of the emperor had a veto over imperial legislative decisions. Every new law established by the emperor had to be approved by the princes.

Summary

Frederick II was considered singular among the European Christian monarchs of the Middle Ages. This was observed even in his own time, although many of his contemporaries, because of his lifelong interest in Islam saw in him "the Hammer of Christianity", or at the very least a dissenter from Christendom. Many modern medievalists view this as false, and hold that Frederick understood himself as a Christian monarch in the sense of a Byzantine emperor, thus as God's Viceroy on earth. Other scholars view him as holding all religion in contempt, citing his rationalism and penchant for blasphemy. Whatever his personal feelings toward religion were, certainly submission to the pope did not enter into the matter. This was in line with the Hohenstaufen Kaiseridee: the ideology, claiming the Holy Roman Emperor to be the legitimate successor to the Roman emperors.

Modern treatments of Frederick vary from sober evaluation (Stürner) to hero worship (Ernst Kantorowicz). However, all in all, agreement prevails over the special significance of Frederick II as Holy Roman Emperor, even if some of his actions (such as his politics with respect to Germany) remain quite dubious.

Parentage and children

• Parents
  • Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor (son of Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor and Beatrix of Burgundy)
  • Constance of Sicily (daughter of Roger II of Sicily and Beatrice of Rethel)
• Children
  • With Constance of Aragon:
    • Henry (VII) of Germany
  • With Yolande of Jerusalem:
    • unnamed daughter, died young
    • Conrad IV of Germany:
  • With Isabella of England
    • Margaret of Sicily, margravine of Meissen
    • Henry Charlote of Sicily
    • Frederick of Sicily
    • Carl Otto of Sicily
  • With Bianca Lancia:
    • Manfred of Sicily
    • Constance (Anna) of Sicily, married John III Ducas Vatatzes
    • Violante of Sicily, married Riccardo di Caserta
  • With Adelheid Enzio:
    • Enzio of Sardinia
  • With Richina of Wolfs'oden:
    • Margaret of Swabia
  • With Matilda of Antioch:
    • Frederich of Antioch
  • With unknown:
    • Selvaggia
    • Conrad of Antioch
    • Richard of Theate
    • Catarina of Marano
    • Blanchefleur
    • Gerhard
    • Frederick of Pettorana

References

• Claudio Rendina, Federico II di Svevia - Lo specchio del mondo, Newton Compton, Rome, 1995, ISBN 8879839578.
• David Abulafia, Frederick II. A Medieval Emperor, Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1988, ISBN 8806131974 (Italian edition)
• Georgina Masson, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Martin Secker & Warburg, 1957, ISBN 8845291073 (Italian edition)
• Karen Armstrong, Holy War - The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World, Anchor Books, second edition, December 2001, ISBN 0385721404.
• R.H.C. Davis, A History of Medieval Europe, Longman Group UK Limited, Second edition, 1988, ISBN 0582014042
• Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, Shocken, 1989, ISBN 0805208984

In addition, this article uses material from the corresponding article in the German-language Misplaced Pages, which, in turn, gives the following references; the notes are theirs.

• Klaus van Eickels: Friedrich II., in: Bernd Schneidmüller/Stefan Weinfurter (editors): Die deutschen Herrscher des Mittelalters, Historische Porträts von Heinrich I. bis Maximilian I., Munich 2003, p. 293-314 and p. 585 (Bibliography). An outstanding short biography. Van Eickels also edited a volume of source materials on Frederick II.
• Ernst Kantorowicz: Kaiser Friedrich II., 2. volumes, Stuttgart 1985-86 (Nachdruck der Ausgabe aus den 20er Jahren), Beautifully written, but very romanticized, so to be read with caution. The author, a late-emigrated Jew, was close to the circle of Stefan George.
• Wolfgang Stürner: Friedrich II. (Gestalten des Mittelalters und der Renaissance), 2 volumes, Darmstadt 1992-2000. The best and most recent biography of Frederick II. Sober and objective, with an extensive guide to other literature on its subject.
• Gunther Wolf (editor).: Stupor mundi. Zur Geschichte Friedrichs II. von Hohenstaufen (Wege der Forschung 101), 2. veränderte Aufl., Darmstadt 1982. An important collection of essays on Frederick II.

See also

• Monarchs of Naples and Sicily
• Dukes of Swabia family tree
• Sicilian School

External links

• Catholic Encyclopedia: Frederick II
• Frederick II, Holy Roman emperor and German king. The Columbia Encyclopedia
• Frederick II — Encyclopædia Britannica

• 1194 births
• 1250 deaths
• Natives of the Marche
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• German Kings
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