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____ Frederick (Friedrich) II
Birth: 26 Dec 1194 Iesi, Italy
Death: 13 Dec 1250 Montreale, Palermo, Sicily
Burial: Palermo, Sicily
Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_II,_Holy_Roman_Emperor
Frederick II (26 December 1194 13 December 1250) was a Holy Roman Emperor and
King of Sicily in the Middle Ages, a member of the House of Hohenstaufen. His
political and cultural ambitions, based in Sicily and stretching through Italy to
Germany, and even to Jerusalem, were enormous. However, his enemies, especially
the popes, prevailed, and his dynasty collapsed soon after his death.
Viewing himself as a direct successor to the Roman emperors of antiquity,[2] he was
Emperor of the Romans from his papal coronation in 1220 until his death; he was also
a claimant to the title of King of the Romans from 1212 and unopposed holder of that
monarchy from 1215. As such, he was King of Germany, of Italy, and of Burgundy. At
the age of three, he was crowned King of Sicily as a co-ruler with his mother,
Constance of Hauteville, the daughter of Roger II of Sicily. His other royal title was
King of Jerusalem by virtue of marriage and his connection with the Sixth Crusade.
He was frequently at war with the papacy, hemmed in between Frederick's lands in
northern Italy and his Kingdom of Sicily (the Regno) to the south, and thus he was
excommunicated four times and often vilified in pro-papal chronicles of the time and
since. Pope Gregory IX went so far as to call him an Antichrist.
Speaking six languages (Latin, Sicilian, German, French, Greek and Arabic[3]),
Frederick was an avid patron of science and the arts. He played a major role in
promoting literature through the Sicilian School of poetry. His Sicilian royal court in
Palermo, from around 1220 to his death, saw the first use of a literary form of an
Italo-Romance language, Sicilian. The poetry that emanated from the school had a
significant influence on literature and on what was to become the modern Italian
language.[4]
He was also the first king who explicitly outlawed trials by ordeal as they were
considered irrational.[5]
After his death, his line quickly died out and the House of Hohenstaufen came to an
end.
Early years[edit]
Born in Iesi, near Ancona, Italy, Frederick was the son of the emperor Henry VI. He
was known as the puer Apuliae (son of Apulia).[6] 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.[7][8]
In 1196 at Frankfurt am Main the infant Frederick was elected King of the Germans.
His rights in Germany were disputed by Henry's brother Philip of Swabia and Otto of
Brunswick. At the death of his father in 1197, Frederick was in Italy travelling towards
Germany when the bad news reached his guardian, Conrad of Spoleto. Frederick was
hastily brought back to his mother Constance in Palermo, Sicily, where he was
crowned as King on 17 May 1198, now Frederick I of Sicily, at only two years of age.
[8]
Constance of Sicily was in her own right queen of Sicily, and she established herself
as regent. In Frederick's name she dissolved Sicily's ties to Germany and the Empire
that had been created by her marriage, sending home his German counsellors and
renouncing his claims to the German throne and empire.
Upon Constance's death in 1198, Pope Innocent III succeeded as Frederick's
guardian. Frederick's tutor during this period was Cencio, who would become Pope
Honorius III.[9] However, Markward of Annweiler, with the support of Henry's brother,
Philip of Swabia, reclaimed the regency for himself and soon after invaded the
Kingdom of Naples. In 1200, with the help of Genoese ships, he landed in Sicily and
one year later seized the young Frederick.[8] He thus ruled Sicily until 1202, when he
was succeeded by another German captain, William of Capparone, who kept Frederick
under his control in the royal palace of Palermo until 1206. Frederick was
subsequently under tutor Walter of Palearia, until, in 1208, he was declared of age.
His first task was to reassert his power over Sicily and southern Italy, where local
barons and adventurers had usurped most of the authority.[8]
Emperor[edit]
Holy Roman Emperor
Otto of Brunswick had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Innocent III in
1209. In southern Italy, Otto became the champion of those noblemen and barons who
feared Frederick's increasingly strong moves against them, exemplified by the firing of
the pro-noble Walter of Palearia. The new emperor invaded Italy, where he reached
Calabria without meeting much resistance. In response, Innocent sided against Otto,
and in September 1211 at the Diet of Nuremberg Frederick was elected in absentia as
German King by a rebellious faction backed by the pope. Innocent also
excommunicated Otto, who was forced to return to Germany.[8] Frederick sailed to
Gaeta with a small following. He agreed with the pope on a future separation between
the Sicilian and Imperial titles, and named his wife Constance as regent. Passing
through Lombardy and Engadin, he reached Konstanz in September 1212, preceding
Otto by a few hours.[8]
Frederick was crowned as king on 9 December 1212 in Mainz. Frederick's authority in
Germany remained tenuous, however, and he was recognized only in southern
Germany; in the region of northern Germany, the center of Guelph power, Otto
continued to hold the reins of royal and imperial power despite his excommunication.
But Otto's decisive military defeat at the Bouvines forced him to withdraw to the
Guelph hereditary lands where, virtually without supporters, he died in 1218. The
German princes, supported by Innocent III, again elected Frederick king of Germany in
1215, and he was crowned king in Aachen on 23 July 1215 by one of the three
German archbishops. 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 22 November 1220.[10] At the same
time, Frederick's oldest son Henry took the title of King of the Romans.[10]
Unlike most Holy Roman emperors, Frederick spent few years in Germany. In 1218, he
helped Philip II of France and Eudes III, Duke of Burgundy to bring an end to the War
of Succession in Champagne (France) by invading Lorraine, capturing and burning
Nancy, capturing Theobald I, Duke of Lorraine and forcing him to withdraw his support
from Erard of Brienne. After his coronation in 1220, Frederick remained either in the
Kingdom of Sicily or on Crusade until 1236, when he made his last journey to Germany.
He returned to Italy in 1237 and stayed there for the remaining thirteen 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 1140 by his grandfather Roger II. His initiative in this direction was visible as
early as the Assizes of Capua (1220, issued soon after his coronation in Rome) 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; 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.
Personality[edit]
Detail of the Castel del Monte
Frederick's contemporaries called him stupor mundi, the "astonishment of the world";
[8] the majority of his contemporaries were indeed astonished and sometimes repelled
by the pronounced unorthodoxy of the Hohenstaufen emperor and his temperamental
stubbornness.[22]
Frederick inherited German, Norman, and Sicilian blood, but by training, lifestyle, and
temperament he was "most of all Sicilian."[23] Maehl concludes that "To the end of
his life he remained above all a Sicilian grand signore, and his whole imperial policy
aimed at expanding the Sicilian kingdom into Italy rather than the German kingdom
southward."[23] Cantor concludes that "Frederick had no intention of giving up
Naples and Sicily, which were the real strongholds of its power. He was, in fact,
uninterested in Germany."[24]
Frederick was a religious sceptic.[8] 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 1215 he was admitted to
that order's praying community), as well as with St Elizabeth.[8] 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 528 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,[25]
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[edit]
The Cremona elephant as depicted in the Chronica maiora, Part II, Parker Library, MS
16, fol. 151v - On parade during the visit of Frederick's brother-in-law Richard of
Cornwall to Cremona in 1241
Besides his great tolerance (which, however, did not apply to Christian heretics),
Frederick had a great thirst for knowledge and learning. Frederick employed Jews from
Sicily, who had immigrated there from the holy land, at his court to translate Greek and
Arabic works.[26]
He played a major role in promoting literature through the Sicilian School of poetry. His
Sicilian royal court in Palermo, saw the first use of a literary form of an Italo-Romance
language, Sicilian. The poetry that emanated from the school had a significant
influence on literature and on what was to become the modern Italian language.
[citation needed] The school and its poetry were saluted by Dante and his peers and
predate by at least a century the use of the Tuscan idiom as the elite literary language
of Italy.[27]
Frederick II is the author of the first treatise on the subject of falconry, De Arte
Venandi cum Avibus ("The Art of Hunting with Birds"). In the words of the historian
Charles Homer Haskins:
It is a scientific book, approaching the subject from Aristotle but based closely on
observation and experiment throughout, Divisivus et Inquisitivus, in the words of the
preface; it is at the same time a scholastic book, minute and almost mechanical in its
divisions and subdivisions. It is also a rigidly practical book, written by a falconer for
falconers and condensing a long experience into systematic form for the use of
others.[28]
Frederick's pride in his mastery of the art is illustrated by the story that, when he was
ordered to become a subject of the Great Khan (Batu) and receive an office at the
Khan's court, he remarked that he would make a good falconer, for he understood
birds very well.[29] He maintained up to fifty falconers at a time in his court, and in his
letters he requested Arctic gyrfalcons from Lόbeck and even from Greenland. One of
the two existing versions was modified by his son Manfred, also a keen falconer.
Frederick loved exotic animals in general: his menagerie, with which he impressed the
cold cities of Northern Italy and Europe, included hounds, giraffes, cheetahs, lynxes,
leopards, exotic birds and an elephant.[22]
He was also alleged to have carried out a number of experiments on people. These
experiments were recorded by the monk Salimbene di Adam in his Chronicles.[30]
Amongst the experiments included shutting a prisoner up in a cask to see if the soul
could be observed escaping though a hole in the cask when the prisoner died;
feeding two prisoners, sending one out to hunt and the other to bed and then having
them disemboweled to see which had digested their meal better; imprisoning children
without any contact to see if they would develop a natural language.
In the language deprivation experiment young infants were raised without human
interaction in an attempt to determine if there was a natural language that they might
demonstrate once their voices matured. It is claimed he was seeking to discover what
language would have been imparted unto Adam and Eve by God. In his Chronicles
Salimbene wrote that Frederick bade "foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe
and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for he would have
learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or
Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had
been born. But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of
the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments."
Frederick was also interested in the stars, and his court was host to many astrologers
and astronomers, including Michael Scot and Guido Bonatti.[31][32] He often sent
letters to the leading scholars of the time (not only in Europe) asking for solutions to
questions of science, mathematics and physics.[33]
In 1224 he founded the University of Naples, the world's oldest state university: now
called Universitΰ Federico II, it remained the sole atheneum of Southern Italy for
centuries.
Appearance[edit]
A Damascene chronicler, Sibt ibn al-Jawzi, left 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." Frederick's eyes were described
variously as blue, or "green like those of a serpent".[34]
Family[edit]
Frederick left several children, legitimate and illegitimate:
Legitimate issue[edit]
First wife: Constance of Aragon (b. 1179 d. 23 June 1222).[37] Marriage: 15 August
1209, at Messina, Sicily. Henry (VII) (1211 12 February 1242).[37]
Second wife: Yolande of Jerusalem (1212 25 April 1228).[37] Marriage: 9 November
1225, at Brindisi, Apulia. Margareta (November 1226 August 1227).
Conrad IV (25 April 1228 21 May 1254).[37]
Third wife: Isabella of England (1214 1 December 1241).[37] Marriage: 15 July 1235,
at Worms, Germany. Jordan (born during the Spring of 1236, failed to survive the
year);[38] this child was given the baptismal name Jordanus as he was baptized with
water brought for that purpose from the Jordan river;
Agnes (b and d. 1237).
Henry Otto (18 February 1238 May 1253), named after Henry III of England, his
uncle; appointed Governor of Sicily and promised to become King of Jerusalem after
his father died, but he, too, died within three years and was never crowned. Betrothed
to many of Pope Innocent IV's nieces, but never married to any.
Margaret (1 December 1241 8 August 1270), married Albert, Landgrave of Thuringia,
later Margrave of Meissen.
Frederick had a relationship with Bianca Lancia (ca. 1200/10-1230/46),[37] possibly
starting around 1225. One source states that it lasted 20 years. She bore him three
children: Constance (Anna) (1230 April 1307), married John III Ducas Vatatzes.[37]
Manfred (1232 killed in battle, Benevento, 26 February 1266),[37] first Regent, later
King of Sicily.
Violante (12331264), married Riccardo Sanseverino, Conte di Caserta.
Matthew of Paris relates the story of a marriage in articulo mortis (on her deathbed)
between them when Bianca was dying,[39] but this marriage was never recognized by
the Church. Nevertheless, Bianca's children were apparently regarded by Frederick as
legitimate, evidenced by his daughter Constance's marriage to the Nicaen Emperor,
and his own will, in which he appointed Manfred as Prince of Taranto and Regent of
Sicily.[40]
Mistresses and illegitimate issue[edit]
Unknown name, Sicilian Countess. According to Medlands, she was the first known
mistress of Frederick II, then only King of Sicily. Her exact parentage is unknown, but
the Thomas Tusci Gesta Imperatorum et Pontificum stated she was a nobili comitissa
quo in regno Sicilie erat heres. Frederick of Pettorano (1212/13 aft. 1240), who fled
to Spain with his wife and children in 1240
Adelheid (Adelaide) of Urslingen (c. 1184 c. 1222).[41] Her relationship with
Frederick II took place during the time he stayed in Germany (between 1215 and
1220). According to some sources,[42] she was related to the Hohenburg family under
the name Alayta of Vohburg (it: Alayta di Marano); but the most accepted theory
stated she was the daughter of Conrad of Urslingen, Count of Assisi and Duke of
Spoleto. Enzo of Sardinia (1215 1272).[37]
Caterina da Marano (1216/18 aft. 1272), who married firstly with NN and secondly
with Giacomo del Carretto, marquis of Noli and Finale.
Matilda or Maria, from Antioch. Frederick of Antioch (1221 1256).[37]
An unknown member of the Lancia family:[41] Selvaggia (1221/23 1244), married
Ezzelino III da Romano
Manna, niece of Berardo di Castagna, Archbishop of Palermo:[41] Richard of Chieti
(1224/25 26 May 1249).
Anais of Brienne (c. 1205 1236), cousin of Isabella II of Jerusalem:[41] Blanchefleur
(1226 20 June 1279), Dominican nun in Montargis, France.
Richina of Wolfsφden (c. 1205 1236):[41] Margaret of Swabia (12301298), married
Thomas of Aquino, count of Acerra.
Unknown mistress: Gerhard (died after 1255).
Parents
____ Henry (Heinrich) VI (Nov 1165 - 28 Sep 1197)
OF SICILY Constanza (2 Nov 1154 - 27 Nov 1199)
Siblings
____ Frederick (Friedrich) II (26 Dec 1194 - 13 Dec 1250)
Marriage To LANCIA Bianca (ABT 1200 - ABT 1245)
m.
Notes
Children by LANCIA Bianca ABT 1200 - ABT 1245
____ Manfred (1232 - 26 Feb 1266)
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