The emperor on the other hand wished to restore the "imperium mundi"; Rome was again to be the capital of the world and Frederick was to become the real emperor of the Romans. He published an energetic manifesto protesting against the world-empire of the pope. The emperor's successes, especially his victory over the Lombards at the battle of Cortenuova , only embittered the opposition between Church and State.
The pope , who had allied himself with Venice , again excommunicated the "self-confessed heretic", the "blasphemous beast of the Apocalypse" 20 March, Frederick now attempted to conquer the rest of Italy , i. His son Enrico captured in a sea-fight all the prelates who by the command of Gregory were coming from Genoa to Rome to assist at a general council.
Gregory's position was now desperate, and, after his death 22 Aug. During this interval the bitterness existing between the rival parties seemed to moderate somewhat, and about this time the emperor was threatened by a new and dangerous movement in Germany. The German episcopate could ill bear the prospect of being henceforth at the mercy of the reckless tyrant of Italy.
Frederick sought to weaken the hostile bishops by favouring the secular princes and granting privileges to the cities. The energetic Innocent IV ascended the papal throne on 25 June, To secure peace with the newly elected pontiff, the emperor was inclined to make concessions.
The main issue at stake however was not settled, i. In order to nullify Frederick's military superiority in the future phases of the struggle, Innocent left Rome secretly and went by way of Genoa to Lyons.
Here he summoned a general council 21 June, by which Frederick was again excommunicated. Immediately there appeared several pretenders in Germany , i. It was only with the greatest difficulty that Frederick's son Conrad could hold his own in Germany , since the greater part of the clergy supported the pope.
Most of the lay lords, however, remained faithful to the emperor and exhibited an attitude of hostility to the clergy. A contemporary writer describes as follows the situation in "Injustice reigned supreme. The people were without leaders and Rome was troubled. Clerical dignity was lost sight of and the laity were split into various factions. Some were loyal to the Church and took the cross, others adhered to Frederick and became the enemies of God's religion.
In German legend he continued to live as the emperor fated to return and reform both Church and State. In more recent times, however, he has had to yield his place in popular legend to Frederick Barbarossa , a figure more in harmony with German sentiment. Freiburg, APA citation. Kampers, F. Frederick II. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. Innocent showed his true Guelph face, and, together with most of the Cardinals, fled via Genoese galleys to Liguria, arriving on 7 July.
His aim was to reach Lyon, where a new council was being held since 24 June Despite initially appearing that the council could end with a compromise, the intervention of Ranieri, who had a series of insulting pamphlets published against Frederick in which, among other things, he defined the emperor as a heretic and an Antichrist , led the prelates towards a less accommodating solution.
One month later, Innocent IV declared Frederick to be deposed as emperor, characterising him 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 rival for the imperial crown and set in motion a plot to kill Frederick and Enzo, with the support of the pope's brother-in-law Orlando de Rossi, another friend of Frederick.
The plotters were unmasked by the count of Caserta, however, and the city of Altavilla, where they had found shelter, was razed. The guilty were blinded, mutilated, and burnt alive or hanged. Innocent also sent a flow of money to Germany to cut off Frederick's power at its source. The archbishops of Cologne and Mainz also declared Frederick deposed, and in May Heinrich Raspe was chosen as the new king.
On 5 August Heinrich, thanks to the Pope's money, managed to defeat an army of Conrad, son of Frederick, near Frankfurt. Frederick strengthened his position in Southern Germany, however, acquiring the Duchy of Austria, whose duke had died without heirs.
Between February and March Frederick settled the situation in Italy by means of the diet of Terni, naming his relatives or friends as vicars of the various lands.
He married his son Manfred to the daughter of Amedeo di Savoia and secured the submission of the marquis of Monferrato. 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.
Battle of Parma An unexpected event was to change the situation dramatically. In June the important Lombard city of Parma expelled the Imperial functionaries and sided with the Guelphs.
Enzo 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 for them to surrender from starvation. He had a wooden city, which he called "Vittoria", built around the walls.
On 18 February , during one of these absences, the camp was suddenly assaulted and taken, and in the ensuing Battle of Parma the Imperial side was routed. Frederick lost the Imperial treasure and with it any hope of maintaining the impetus of his struggle against the rebellious communes and against the pope, who began plans for a crusade against Sicily.
Frederick soon recovered and rebuilt an army, but this defeat encouraged resistance in many cities that could no longer bear the fiscal burden of his regime: Romagna, Marche and Spoleto were lost. In February Frederick fired his advisor and prime minister, the famous jurist and poet Pier delle Vigne, on charges of peculation and embezzlement. Some historians suggest that Pier was planning to betray the Emperor, who, according to Matthew of Paris, cried when he discovered the plot.
Pier, blinded and in chains, died in Pisa, possibly by his own hand. Even more shocking for Frederick was the capture of his natural son Enzo of Sardinia by the Bolognese at the Battle of Fossalta, in May, Enzo was held in a palace in Bologna, where he remained captive until his death in Frederick lost another son, Richard of Chieti.
The struggle continued: the Empire lost Como and Modena, but regained Ravenna. In the first month of that year the indomitable Ranieri of Viterbo died and the Imperial condottieri again reconquered Romagna, the Marche and Spoleto; and Conrad, King of the Romans, scored several victories in Germany against William of Holland. Frederick did not take part in of any of these campaigns.
He had been ill and likely felt tired. Despite the betrayals and the setbacks he had faced in his last years, Frederick died peacefully, wearing the habit of a Cistercian monk, on 13 December in Castel Fiorentino territory of Torremaggiore , in Apulia, after an attack of dysentery.
At the time of his death, his preeminent position in Europe was challenged but not lost: his testament left his legitimate son Conrad the Imperial and Sicilian crowns. Frederick's will stipulated 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 did not damage the Empire's prestige.
However, upon Conrad's death a mere four years later, the Hohenstaufen dynasty fell from power and the Great Interregnum began, lasting until , one year after the last Hohenstaufen, Enzo, had died in his prison. Over time, this legend largely transferred itself to his grandfather, Frederick I, also known as Barbarossa "Redbeard".
Personality Frederick's contemporaries called him stupor mundi, the "astonishment of the world"; the majority of his contemporaries were indeed astonished — and sometimes repelled — by the pronounced unorthodoxy of the Hohenstaufen emperor and his temperamental stubbornness. Frederick inherited German, Norman, and Sicilian blood, but by training, lifestyle, and temperament he was "most of all Sicilian.
He was, in fact, uninterested in Germany. Frederick was a religious sceptic. Despite accusations of blasphemy and paganism, and the presence of pagan and oriental elements in his imperial conceptions, Frederick remained substantially linked to traditional Christianity, as shown by his early contacts with both the Franciscans and the Cistercians in he was admitted to that order's praying community , as well as with St Elizabeth.
In spite of this, Frederick's religious scepticism was unusual for the era in which he lived, and to his contemporaries was highly shocking and scandalous. His papal enemies used it against him at every turn; he was subsequently referred to as preambulus Antichristi predecessor of the Antichrist by Pope Gregory IX, and, as Frederick allegedly did not respect the privilegium potestatis of the Church, he was excommunicated. In Palermo, where the three-year-old boy was brought after his mother's death, he was said to have grown up like a street youth.
He was highly precocious. The only benefit from Innocent III's guardianship was that at fourteen years of age he married a twenty-five-year-old widow named Constance, the daughter of the king of Aragon. Both seem to have been happy with the arrangement, and Constance soon bore a son, Henry. At his coronation, he may have worn the red silk mantle that had been crafted during the reign of Roger II. It bore an Arabic inscription indicating that the robe dated from the year in the Muslim calendar, and incorporated a generic benediction, wishing its wearer "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. Rather than exterminate the Muslim population of Western Sicily, he deported them at Lucera. Not least, he enlisted them in his Christian army and even into his personal bodyguards. As Muslim soldiers, they had the advantage of immunity from papal excommunication.
For these reasons, as well as his supposed Epicureanism, Frederick II is listed as a representative member of the sixth region of Dante's Inferno, that of the heretics, who are burned in tombs. A further example of how much Frederick differed from his contemporaries was the conduct of his Crusade in the Holy Land. Outside Jerusalem, with the power to take it, he parleyed 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 the city of 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. When certain members of the Knights Templar wrote al-Kamil a letter and offered to destroy Frederick if he lent them aid, al-Kamil handed the letter over to Frederick. As the Patriarch of Jerusalem refused to crown him king, he set the crown on his own head. Literature and Science Besides his great tolerance which, however, did not apply to Christian heretics , Frederick had an unlimited thirst for knowledge and learning.
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 founded the University of Naples in Some chronicles say that his mother, the forty-year-old Constance, gave birth to him in a public square in order to forestall any doubt about his origin. Frederick was baptised in Assisi. However, these attempts did not come to fruition because Gregory IX died in In , he formed a council called the Council of Lyons, where he excommunicated the emperor and called for his deposition and a new crusade against him.
These civil wars had disastrous repercussions for the kingdom of Germany. They continued even after his death in with the papacy forbidding the German nobility from electing another Hohenstaufen as the next emperor. They could elect anyone but a member of House Hohenstaufen, which showed the deep hostility of papacy toward the Hohenstaufens. However, there were still some individuals loyal to the Hohenstaufens. After he was elected, the pope declared that since he had no right to rule in Germany, he would declare a crusade against him.
They openly said that the papacy wanted to eliminate the Hohenstaufen family. The empire was so disastrously fragmented that the nobility could not find a good emperor.
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