MR. KINGTON'S FREDERICK II., EMPEROR OF THE ROMANS.*
* History of Frederick the Seim!, Emperor of the Romans: from Chronicles and Documents published within the last ten years. By T. L. Kington, LA,, (cc. In TWO Vols. Cambridge and London : Macmillan and Co. 1862.
THE habitual readers of Dante in this country, and the serious students in general of modern history, can rarely fail to recognize the importance of the era of which Mr. Kington has treated in these volumes with a thoroughness that Ave can but slenderly- make evident within our present limits, and with the genuine and cordial earnest of a man anxious to trace the hand of Providence- in the course of worldly events. It is an era only second to that of the Reformation, as the latter will be appreciated by all who do not confound manufactures with civilization, sophistica- tions with culture and science, or else superstition, with a re- ligious philosophy of man's individual and social duties. It witnessed -the most desperate conflict between the true elements of human polity, and the pretensions of that sacerdotal au- thority, which had trucked away its pure moral influences to sus- tain a weak and violent system of interference with the positive- laws and rights of nations, a power which had long before built its throne on many waters, and corrupted itself in intrigues. with kings and petty princedoms. It was the fall of that strenuous and ill-fated ruler which gave life and distinct- ness to the principles of Italian Ghibellinistn, until they received a pure and high development in the treatise "Dc Monarchia " of the Florentine epic poet, and were inculcated by many brilliant passages, to say the least of it, in the last two books of his " Commedia." And the memory of that champion of the empire, that splendid patron of Italian nationality and civi- lization, was to many of this party an Eikon Basilike more- majestic than the blood of any loyal Englishman has flowed for ; because to them it was still connected with that medimval ideal (or chimera, if we could venture to call it so) of a united Christian Church and a paramount Christian empire, which was soon destined, through the clashing of the "two swords," to be over- thrown and shattered in the core of Europe for a time, and seem- ingly for ever.
Yet Dante himself, from his position as a Latin Catholic, had failed to scrutinize with sufficient rigour the begin- nings of that sacerdotal anarchy which then oppressed Europe, and which is now mainly confined between the Tiber and the Gulf of Gaeta. Dante has applauded the first grand infi- s "tality of his " Lupe " in casting off her ordained suzerains in Byzantium, and setting up a spurious "Empire of the West" in the midst of the unsubdued and not more barbarian powers of Britain and other countries. Or, supposing that there was here a necessary divorce, still the bonds between Rome and the East had been singed by the ambition of the Latin Patriarch, and mainly through their defence of that scandal of image-worship by which they had made their faith more vulnerable to the scorn of Saracens and of Berbers ; whence a schism arose which was but plausibly vindicated by hollow formulas and contemptible punctilios. We do not say these considerations should have modified Dante's practical allegiance to his Church or Empire ; but they may have been very differently regarded, and with some reason, by Frederick II. same fifty years earlier ; and the religious. vacillations to which that monarch was so vehemently goaded,. may have presented themselves in over dark colours to the poet who describes the penalties of epicureans and unbelievers in all divine things within a fiery tomb, and says,-,- " Qua entro e lo secondo Federico" (the line which Mr. Kington has selected for his motto). But it is very notable that Dante has scarcely uttered a word against the " Suabian storm" in his human relations ; lie has not breathed a hint of reprobation against the fierce and tortuous. policy of his troubled government, nor against any of the wild outbursts of passion and violence, with which he was so freely charged ; and if he has slightly noticed the cruelty of some of his judgments, this was a cruelty only too subservient to the persecuting principles of the Vatican. (Inf. 23, 66). He, on the contrary, takes every fair opportunity of showing the deepest regard and most tender reverence for his memory, as appears in the canto of the suicides, where he makes the discarded favourite, Peter de Vinea, speak of " mio Signor che fu d'onor si degno;" and in the treatise," De Vulgari Eloquio," where he so emphatically commends his patronage of the nascent language and the minstrelsy of Italy and Sicily. We seem thus to have a respectable authority for taking the most moderate possible view of Frederick's much abused character, and for not imputing even gross offences in him to the same radical depravity that they might have shown in any sovereign who had not reigned per- petually in such perils and perplexities.
But the character of this remarkable sovereign is earnestly scrutinized, rather than it is judged with confidence, by Mr. King, ton. In reviewing his public measures and their antecedents, the author is disposed to do large homage to the maxim, Salus republicx lex supremo. He bears in mind, too, that Frederick was an earthly sovereign, bound to do all justice to the Moslem enemies or subjects whom the voice of the Church was always urging him to fight down, and not to spare, and to reclaim by violence. It is with these convictions he seems to write the fol- lowing paragraph, among others :—
" He placed his chief trust, during the last year of his life, in Moham- medans, finding the votaries of his own creed untrustworthy. Thus, in April, it was discovered that the Inspector of Prisons at Bari was pro- . posing to allow the captives there to escape. The Emperor instantly sent down his fiscal advocate, Andrew of Capua, with a dozen cross- bowmen. Three days later justice was done at Bari, where Matthew Spinello' the Apulian chronicler, happened to be. The traitorous inspector, with ten of his servants, was quartered; a Lombard count, two Florentines, and William of Tocco, a high official, were all beheaded. The castle of Bari was thenceforward entrusted to a Saracen, from Lucera. . . . La September a Saracen was slain at Barletta, and the murderer was screened from justice by the citizens : two of them were laden with chains, and their town was fined a thousand Augustals."
This was a stern kind of justice ; but was suited to save a despot from the infamy that has been incurred by a Ferdinand and a Philip. By the side of his unrelenting severities against state criminals, and the permanent martial law which he en- forced in those tremendous conflicts, we find traces of a remark- able meekness in regard to the merely personal affronts or audacities by which he was sometimes wounded. Thus we read about the siege of Vicenza, in 1230 :—
" The Emperor had no wish to damage the town, knowing that Azzo was the only guilty rebel : he first tried a parley, promising the towns- men their lives and their goods. Nothing could be gained ; Eccelin therefore advised the Emperor to storm the place' which was done on the let of November The Germans and Veronese showed no mercy ; the whole city was soon the scene of murder, rape, and robbery. No age or sex was spared ; the bell-tower was fired, and one of its
guards was killed by a fall from its top Eccelin saw a German noble, bent on outraging some of the ladies of Vicenza ; finding the foreigner deaf to the word of command to quit the prey, the Italian emote off the brute's head. Frederick, who was standing by, thought the punishment rather out of bounds; but Eccelin answered, I should have done the same thing to you, Emperor, had you been guilty of so gross a scandal.'
This is the most creditable story we have seen of Eccelin da Romano ; but in the next we cite it is his master alone who figures. When Frederick was besieging Parma, and had reared a new city to take its place, as a monument of his anticipated triumph over the "Papal Federation" plans of those days, he at one time made so sure of his game, that he went hunting a day or two, and on his return found his "Victoria' burnt down to the ground.
"Bitter was the sorrow of the Cremonese, when Frederick rode into their city on the evening of that shameful day. They were smart- ing under the loss of their best men, and one of the angry burghers cried, You, too, Emperor, ought to have your head struck off, since you left Victoria for those accursed sports of yours.' Frederick bore the reproach in silence, knowing it to be just. His failure was east in his teeth by jesters, who knew that he would always bear a great deal from them. He patted the hump of one of these buffoons, and asked, When is this casket to be opened I' 'That will not be easy,' said the other, 'since I lost the key at Victoria.' Eccelin, as it was remarked, would at once have sent the impudent wag to the gibbet, or blinded him, but Frederick only groaned, and uttered a few words of self- reproach."
This well-told anecdote is from the many and valuable ones whichour author has taken from the lately resuscitated "Chronicle of Frit Salimbeue," a contemporary Guelf monk of egregious courage and sagacity. The precedents of Frederick's Sicilian legislation were extremely severe, like that of all the Norman kings ; but they were tempered with noble scruples, as may be seen in the laws relative to women. It is needless to say that the wars in which the Emperor's life terminated were waged with a ferocity only matched by those against helots or gladiators. Each side was striving for a despotism, either civil or spiritual, which to itself appeared liberty, and to the other, a naked and infernal tyranny. The yoke threatened the greatest as well as the least of the antagonists. Each cause was setting itself above law and truth; the party of the Cassar emulating the bottomless fraud and cruelty for which it found precedents in the conduct of the priests against itself, against the Paterines and the Albigenses. On both sides was the fanatical fury of those who covet heaven or earth for a sect or party, and despair or blaspheme over the inter- ests of the bulk of humanity. The mind of the sovereign was embit- tered by the seeming claims of gratitude for the early guardianship of the Vatican, which he counted a perfidy, and by the oaths drawn from him, which he counted as imposed upon his weak- ness and inexperience. To rest on the chief causes of contro- versy among so many, the Popes had affected to take away and give back a crown which should have been made hereditary, and so capable of orderly transmission ; they had played fast and loose with the chances of a cementation being effected between the two great nations of middle Europe, and they had used as a puppet for mad and pseudo-Christian crusading schemes, the one man in many centuries who could have centred in himself the love and devotion of those unequally yoked races —that man whose very birth had been compassed, in the teeth of public manners and private desires, to unite the imperial blood of Germany to that of those Norman kings, who had revived a noble and flourishing state in southern Italy. And hence the torrent of fatal strife, which bore with it all the energies of a sovereign of such genius, magnanimity, and wise munificence, that his presence had seemed a very elixir to all the best efforts of art, science, minstrelsy, and chivalry. But it had been destined that there should be no concord between the two countries, until they could in part cast off the burdens they had reciprocally imposed on one another, the feudal tyrannies which Germany had planted in Italy, and the monar- chical church which Italy had imposed on Germany.
The work of Mr. Kington shows throughout much historic power ; but, we should not set as high an estimate on the first four chapters as on those that follow. The former comprise a very spirited and well-condensed review of the antecedents of Frederick's reign, and many modern allusions whieh are always clever and frequently valuable ; but he has in this part followed the views of his historical predecessors with an implicit respect which disparages his originality, and sometimes, we think, his judgment. The scorn which the modern historian of Sicily, Amen, entertains for the Greek Church, finds in these pages an echo of startling liveliness. The work is admirably finished ; even the index and table of contents will form valuable chronological and biographical memoranda ; though for the first references of an eager reader the former might have been better arranged, and the dates in the latter transferred with considerable advantage to the margins of pages in the body of the book.
Previous page
