FREDERICK THE SECOND, EMPEROR OF THE ROMANS.*
THE phrase which Mr. .Allshorn has taken for the title of his book is that with which Matthew Paris chronicles the event of Frederick's death in the full heat of his great struggle with the Papacy, "Stupor Mundi, et immutator mirabilis." Freeman writes of him as " the most gifted of the sons of men ; by nature the more than peer of Alexander, of Con- stantine, and of Charles; in mere genius, in mere accom. plishments, the greatest prince who ever wore a crown." He was the only emperor whom Dante consigned to hell. Even to the more pedestrian though juster mind of Mr. Bryce be remains "one of the most remarkable personages in history." And truly Frederick looms, out of the dreary age of splendour, struggles, lust, and cruelty through which he lived, a tre- mendous and scarcely credible figure. A king at three, married at fourteen to a king's widow, summoned at seven- teen by the Pope to -wrest the Imperial throne from the recalcitrant Otho, he proved more than equal to the tre- mendous part which Fate had called on him to play upon the stage of Europe. His first campaign against Otho in the Alps found him possessed of a daring and rapidity of execution rare in tried commanders. His swift conciliation of France and the princes of the Empire showed powers of diplomacy no less remarkable ; and the decision and breadth of view with which, his position as Emperor thus secured, he set about the subjugation and organ- ization of his hereditary kingdom of Sicily and Naples promised the highest qualities of statesmanship. Indeed, there seemed no limit to what the world might expect of him. But disease was already at the root of his power. The conflict between the Papacy and the Empire had been open and violent since the reign of Henry IV., though the romantic submission of Frederick's grandfather Barbarossa had for a short time checked it. Barbarossa himself had been in continual difficulty with the Lombard cities, which he was never able properly to subdue, and his son and successor, Henry VI., by the acquisition, on his marriage, of the kingdom of Naples and Sicily, had in reality weakened the Imperial position. For the Emperor was now tied to the extreme south of his dominions by the necessity of organizing this turbulent little kingdom, which was his by inheritance without the intervention of any Papal title, and between him and Germany be had first of all the Papal dominions and then a chain of refractory and powerful cities. It was this division which proved fatal to Frederick. At the very beginning of his reign he gave the Pope a Toi; aTa, by promising to lead a crusade against the infidel, but the necessity of organizing his southern kingdom kept him year after year. The disastrous campaign which resulted in the surrender of Damietta emphasized the Emperor's defection, but still he delayed, and the accession of Innocent III. found him on the point of embarking on his first expedition. This, as is well known, ended in a miserable fiasco, for which the Emperor's mismanagement of detail must to some extent be held respon- sible. The result was the first excommunication, and with it began the struggle which was finally to destroy the Hohen- staufens, and with them the Empire. Even the brilliant success of the second expedition, in which the Emperor (still tinder excommunication) recovered the Holy City without striking a blow, and crowned himself King of Jerusalem with his own hand, did not mitigate the Papal anger, nor could all the splendour of the years which succeeded his • Stupor l[uncli, By Lionel Allshorn. London : Martin Seeker. [16e. net.]
return in reality consolidate his power. It was during these years that he did most to earn the title that Matthew Paris gives him. His Court at Palermo (where now he lies buried in a tomb of porphyry) combined a foretaste of the intel- lectual glories of the Renaissance with a luxury and freedom from moral restraint which outraged even the medieval sense of propriety. His Prime Minister, Pier della Vigna, wrote the first Italian sonnet, and the Emperor himself, who could speak six languages, and was besides proficient in philosophy and mathematics, set the fashion by composing poetry in the vernacular. Michael Scott and others of the foremost spirits of the age visited him. He corresponded freely with the Arab and Jewish philosophers, who were the leading thinkers of the time, founded the University of Naples, and promul- gated a code of laws for his Italian kingdom which was the most complete that had been devised since the days of Charle- magne. But his time of peace was short-lived. A rebellion of the Lombard cities called him north in 1231, and the next four years were embittered by the defection of his eldest son. From this time until his death in December 1250 he knew no rest, and had to submit to see the great edifice of his power crumble gradually away from him. The course of these calamities it is impossible to trace here. It is described at length in Mr. Allshorn's volume, the narrative of which is both clear and accurate. In other respects the book is less successful. His story is too much entangled with the details of Court scandal, political intrigue, and military strategy to allow of any very clear and comprehensive statement of the causes and results of the struggle through which Frederick lived. The Emperor's relations with his German territories, and the blow which his two pragmatic sanctions, by their concessions to the feudal nobility, dealt the Imperial power are but very slightly sketched. Nor is his treatment sufficiently imaginative to add much to our conception of Frederick's character. He hardly mentions the theory of Huillard Breholle (supported by Mr. Bryce) that the Emperor aimed at uniting in his own person the spiritual and temporal supremacy of the world. Yet there is evidence that he had some such aim, and that he saw in himself a new emanation of the divinity, in the circumstances of whose life the incidents of that of Jesus Christ were to some extent repeated. Mr. Allehorn talks freely enough of his hero's greatness, but he does not make one feel it, nor help one to realize why it was that Frederick took so strong a hold upon the imagination of his age.
Indeed, the character of Frederick is extraordinarily difficult to realize. In spite of the great mass of contemporary (or almost contemporary) material dealing with him, in spite of the extraordinary impression he made upon his own time, his image soon faded from the world. In England he is known to most readers only in the short though spirited pages of Bryce and Freeman. Even in Germany, where there is a great quantity of modern literature concerning him, the medieval legend which told of his enchantment in the under- ground castle of the Kyfflinser, and pictured him still living and waiting to come to the help of Germany in her hour of need, has been long since transferred in the popular imagina- tion to his grandfather, Barbarossa. His personality has faded as completely as the Empire dispersed at his own death, and it is as difficult for the modern mind to reconstruct the one as the other. The fact is that Frederick was never really at home in the age and society in which he lived. He had none of the Teutonic characteristics which have so endeared his grandfather to the popular imagination of his country, while among the Latin portions of his empire he was always suspect. The enmity of the Papal party, his own undisguised interest in Mohammedan thought, customs, and religion, the doubts always cast upon his orthodoxy, made him a stranger in Italy. He failed to realize with quite sufficient intensity the real problem of his age, just as he failed at two or three crucial moments of his own career to realize the importance of practical issues. The faulty preparation of his first expedition to Palestine, the carelessness which in 1248 cost him a humili- ating defeat before the city of Parma, and finally ruined his cause in North Italy, were only indications of a missing faculty. For all his broad views and brilliant powers, for all his indomitable will and splendid courage, Frederick lacked that concentration and devotion to a purpose which have earned for lesser minds the title of " Great."
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