Background
Frederick II was born on December 26, 1194, in Iesi, Italy, as the son of Emperor Henry VI and Constance of Hauteville and was baptized in Assisi.
Portrait of Frederick II from the "Manfred manuscript" (Biblioteca Vaticana, Pal. lat 1071) of De arte venandi cum avibus.
A statue of Frederick II from the Black Tower of Regensburg, c. 1280-1290.
Frederick II (left) meets Al-Kamil (right). Nuova Cronica, c. 1348.
Frederick II being excommunicated by Pope Innocent IV.
Contemporary bust of Frederick II in Barletta.
Contemporary bust of Frederick II in Barletta.
Frederick II (left) meets Al-Kamil (right). Nuova Cronica, c. 1348.
A gold augustalis bearing Frederick's effigy.
Frederick II being excommunicated by Pope Innocent IV.
A statue of Frederick II from the Black Tower of Regensburg, c. 1280-1290.
Frederick II was born on December 26, 1194, in Iesi, Italy, as the son of Emperor Henry VI and Constance of Hauteville and was baptized in Assisi.
During his infancy in 1196, he was elected King of the Germans by the princes at Frankfurt but Henry VI was not successful in garnering the support of the princes to make his son’s succession hereditary.
His father died in September 1197 following which the otherwise strong Roman Empire went through turbulence.
On May 17, 1198, he was coroneted as King of Sicily at two years of age while Constance of Hauteville became the regent for her son. She disestablished the bond of Sicily with that of the empire and with Germany by sending back the German counselors and giving up Frederick's claim to the empire and the German throne. This was followed by the election of two rival kings - Otto of Brunswick and Philip of Swabia.
Constance appointed Pope Innocent III as guardian of Frederick II and also as regent of the Empire of Sicily which was under the suzerainty of the papacy. He came under the tutelage of Cencio, who later went on to become Pope Honorius III. The next few years Sicily witnessed anarchism with local barons, papal leaders, German captains, and cities of Pisa and Genoa fighting vigorously to acquire control over the land.
The turbulence continued till November 1206 when the imperial chancellor took over Palermo and ruled the country in Fredrick II's name.
Frederick began his reign as emperor in Germany by gaining the support of the magnates, both lay and ecclesiastical, by confirming in 1213 and 1220 their right to the privileges they had usurped in 1197 on the death of Emperor Henry VI. He then made his son, Henry, king of Germany, and his viceroy and returned to Italy, which from this time on occupied most of his attention, for Germany never interested him except as a source of support for his Italian projects. Immediately upon his return, he persuaded Pope Honorius III to crown him emperor and managed to put off giving up Sicily, as he had promised, on the grounds he needed to pacify it so that it could support his crusade.
The first task Frederick undertook was to establish firm control over the kingdom of Sicily, which had been in complete disorder since 1197. In 1220, in contrast with his actions in Germany, he revoked all privileges granted its towns and nobles since the death of King William II (1189), put down a Moslem revolt on the island of Sicily itself, and began to organize his realm into a tyrannical but well-administered kingdom. By 1225, prodded by Pope Honorius, he had married Yolande, heiress of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and had made plans to proceed with his crusade to the East. He was still delaying on fulfilling this project when Pope Honorius died in 1227.
Honorius was succeeded by the aged Pope Gregory IX (reigned 1227-1241), who, though over 80, was a vigorous, unrelenting foe of the young emperor. This aged pope almost at once excommunicated him for not going on crusade and, when Frederick then left for the East in 1228 without having the excommunication lifted, excommunicated him again and began planning a crusade against Frederick's Sicilian domains. Frederick proved very successful in the East, where he regained the city of Jerusalem from the Moslems by negotiation instead of war, crowned himself king of Jerusalem (a title which he retained until 1245), and built up his authority in the East. He returned in 1230 to find Pope Gregory IX attacking his kingdom of Sicily. After he had defeated the papal forces, he made Gregory lift his excommunication.
In 1231 Frederick promulgated the Constitutions of Melfi, an important code of laws that set up a nonfeudal state in Sicily. By this code the independence of towns and nobles was curbed, a centralized judicial and administrative system was established, mercenary armies were recruited, ecclesiastical privileges were limited, and commerce and industry were fostered by a uniform system of tolls and port dues and a common gold currency. At the same time, his own revenues were increased by the establishment of royal monopolies over such things as salt production and the trade in grain. Sicily became one of the most prosperous realms in Europe.
Frederick then proceeded to attempt to extend his centralized rule to northern Italy, where in 1231 he made plans to subjugate its cities by appointing podestas, or imperial governors, over them. This alarmed the Pope, who saw the papacy, as in Henry VI's time, threatened between an imperial hammer in the north and the well-organized anvil of Sicily in the south. Gregory's answer was to reopen hostilities against Frederick II by attempting with some success to revive the Lombard League used against Frederick's grandfather Frederick Barbarossa. When these cities rose against him in support of a German revolt of his son King Henry, Frederick suppressed the revolt and in 1237 won a great victory over the Milanese at Cortenuova. As a result of this victory, the Lombard League temporarily collapsed, and most of its cities submitted to him, as did the majority of the nobles of northern Italy.
While Frederick was establishing his authority firmly in Sicily and northern Italy, however, he was following quite a different policy in Germany. There in 1231, he issued the Constitution in Favor of the Princes, which had the result of making the magnates practically independent and even placed the towns under their rule. When his son Henry objected to this and revolted, Frederick suppressed his rising, threw him into prison, where he died, and replaced him as king in 1238 with his second son, Conrad. From this time on he made little attempt to exercise any real authority in Germany, whose princes, satisfied with their status, caused him no trouble. The only action of importance he took which affected Germany was his grant of a special charter to the Teutonic Knights, who, late in his reign, began their occupation of East Prussia, which they wrenched from the grasp of the kings of Poland.
In Italy, however, Pope Gregory IX still refused to accept Frederick's domination of northern Italy and excommunicated him. When his papal opponent died in 1241, Frederick reacted by using military force to keep a new pope from being elected for 2 years (1241-1243) and finally by procuring the election of a Ghibelline pope, Innocent IV (reigned 1243-1254). Innocent IV, however, soon broke with Frederick and fled from Italy to Lyons, where in 1245 he held a great Church council which condemned Frederick as the antichrist. The efforts of the Pope to enlist French and English support against this great Hohenstaufen ruler, however, proved abortive, and the war continued in Italy.
Frederick, relying on his able illegitimate sons and on lieutenants like Ezzalino, fought valiantly against the continuing resistance of the cities of Lombardy and the Papal States. Finally, his army was badly defeated near Parma in 1248. By 1250, just as he was beginning to reverse the tide, he died suddenly, and his hopes of dominating all of Italy died with him.
Frederick II was a mighty Holy Roman Emperor of the Medieval Era who was often referred to as "stupor mundi" or wonder of the world. He was coronated as King of Sicily at three years of age with his mother, Constance of Hauteville as the regent. The cultural and political aspirations of Frederick II were far-reaching. He became King of Italy, Germany, and Burgundy. He also became the King of Jerusalem through his marriage and association with the Sixth Crusade. His relentless efforts to set up a powerful centralized Italian state often resulted in conflicts with the Papacy and the urban centers of Italy resulting in a long and bitter war with the Popes and other enemies. He was often assailed and faced excommunication four times. He was tagged as Antichrist by Pope Gregory IX. Frederick II was a great patron of arts and science. He was a polyglot who could speak Sicilian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, French, and German.
Frederick's character has long fascinated the historians and biographers who have studied him. He was married three times. He was reputed, probably with some justification, to have kept a harem in Palermo. His general lifestyle seemed to his contemporaries more Islamic than Christian; for instance, he maintained a force of Moslem mercenaries and scandalized his age by traveling with a private zoo. Though he remained formally a Christian, his spirit seemed more tolerant and skeptical than his age was ready to accept. In the cosmopolitan atmosphere of his Sicilian court, Arabic and Byzantine culture was highly prized.
Frederick got Innocent's successor to crown him emperor without having to promise to give up Two Sicilies. He then gave away imperial power to the German nobles, ensuring that the German empire would be racked by internal dissension and would remain leaderless as long as he was emperor. He intended to base his power in Italy and his actions made that clear. He had been raised in the cosmopolitan city of Palermo and, at least according to legend had spent much of his time as a child on the docks of that city. One may suppose that he gained a vision of a Mediterranean empire from listening to the talk of sailors and merchants.
Frederick was much attracted to scientific ideas, perhaps because of his appreciation of Arabic culture. He is said to have conducted a series of experiments to determine how digestion took place, using the contents of the stomachs of executed criminals as his evidence. He also tried isolating children at birth to discover what language they would speak if untaught.
Frederick proved an important patron of the arts throughout his entire reign. A poet himself, he prized southern French poetry highly, and he welcomed troubadour poets from this region when after the Albigensian Crusade they fled to his court. Through the influence of these poets, a new poetry began to be composed in the Sicilian vernacular tongue. He was also much interested in art and architecture, and under his aegis a classical artistic revival took place, anticipating that of later Renaissance Italy.
Frederick spoke a number of languages, and in 1234 he founded the University of Naples, the first state university in western Europe. He was also an enthusiastic falconer and wrote a book on the subject entitled On the Art of Hunting with Birds, which proved to be the most detailed scientific examination of ornithology written until the 19th century.
In short, Frederick deserves the title of Stupor Mundi (Wonder of the World), which his contemporaries bestowed upon him. This extraordinary man with all his faults, then, was a ruler who had the misfortune to be born before his time. He paid the price for this by seeing all his brilliance and ability brought to naught by a hostile papacy and a reluctant citizenry of the northern Italian communes. With his death, Italy had to wait more than 600 years for the unity he had tried to bring about.
Frederick II married Constance of Aragon on August 15, 1209, in Messina, Sicily. Their son Henry VII was born in 1211.
On November 9, 1225, he married his second wife Yolande of Jerusalem in Brindisi, Apulia and the couple had two children, Margareta born on November 1226 and Conrad IV born on 25 April 1228.
On July 15, 1235, he married his third wife, Isabella of England in Worms, Germany. They had four children - Jordon born in 1236, Anges born in 1237, Henry Otto born on February 18, 1238, and Margaret born on December 1, 1241, of whom the first two children did not survive infancy.
He had a long relationship with Bianca Lancia who bore him three children, Constance (Anna), Manfred, and Violante.
He had several other mistresses with whom he had many illegitimate children.
(m. 1209)
Gregory IX was one of the most vigorous of the 13th-century popes (reigned 1227-1241), a canon lawyer, theologian, defender of papal prerogatives, and founder of the papal Inquisition. Gregory promulgated the Decretals in 1234, a code of canon law that remained the fundamental source of ecclesiastical law for the Catholic Church until after World War I.
