King of Sicily (1208-1250), king of Germany (1211-1220), and Holy Roman Emperor (1220-1250); leader of a crusade to the Holy Land that brought the city of Jerusalem back under Christian control.
The son of Emperor Henry VI (d. 1197) and Constance, heiress to the kingdom of Sicily, Frederick was born at Jesi (near Ancona in central Italy) on 26 December 1194. He was initially named Frederick Roger after his two grandfathers, a name that embodied the twin poles of his political life: the Holy Roman Empire and the Norman kingdom of Sicily. Frederick’s early years were dominated by rivalries between the German officials of his father and his Sicilian officials, with control of the regency at the heart of these struggles.
Frederick came of age as king of Sicily in 1208, but continued to face a restive baronage and powerful enemies at home and abroad. In Germany, the early death of Frederick’s father had led to the election of two rival kings: Otto IV of Brunswick, count of Poitou, and Frederick’s uncle Philip, duke of Swabia. All sides initially ignored the claims of the infant Frederick. However, when Otto (crowned emperor in 1209) invaded the kingdom of Sicily (1210), Pope Innocent III began to promote Frederick’s candidacy for the German throne. to support from the papacy and within Germany, Frederick was elected king in 1211 at Nuremberg, and crowned at Mainz on 9 December 1212. This act was repeated on 25 July 1215, at Aachen, the traditional place for the coronation of the king of Germany, and there Frederick promised to lead a crusade to the Holy Land. Pope Innocent III insisted that when Frederick was crowned emperor, he should bestow Sicily on his infant son Henry (VII); the papacy was anxious to maintain the separation between Sicily and the empire, which together surrounded the Papal States around Rome. Frederick’s actions soon demonstrated that he did not mean to keep to the undertaking he had made to the pope: he had Henry brought to Germany, and made him duke of Swabia, the traditional heartland of the Staufen dynasty, and rector of the kingdom of Burgundy. Finally, he had Henry elected king of Germany by the German princes in April 1220.
Nevertheless, Frederick received and depended upon ecclesiastical support. Pope Honorius III, who was keen to see him go on crusade, crowned him Holy Roman Emperor at Rome on 22 November 1220. Frederick had already (1213) confirmed Otto IV’s grants to the papacy in the Golden Bull of Eger, and in 1220 he issued a confirmation of privileges to the prelates of the empire, the Confoedera-tio cum principibus ecclesiasticis. Many of these privileges referred to matters of economic organization (including restrictions on the expansion of towns, coinage, and mining), but they also helped to strengthen the political role of the ecclesiastical princes. Similarly, Frederick’s coronation as emperor went hand in hand with draconian legislation against heresy and a public display of mutual support between Frederick and Honorius III, including a renewal of the emperor’s promise to lead a campaign to the Holy Land. The years immediately following Frederick’s imperial coronation were, however, taken up with the affairs of Sicily and imperial Italy. In 1220, at a diet in Capua, he ordered a thorough investigation of royal grants since 1189 and began to attack several of the powerful baronial families that had established themselves on the mainland. Simultaneously, Frederick began to expand his lands and territories in Northern Italy, where he soon clashed with the Lombard League of northern cities led by Milan.
In 1222-1224 the emperor undertook several campaigns against the Muslims living in the mountainous regions of Sicily, and he resettled them at Lucera in Apulia. This campaign, fought with brutal ferocity on Frederick’s part, should serve as a warning against a common misperception that Frederick was more liberal or tolerant in his attitude toward Muslims than his contemporaries. The surviving Muslims were used to provide the emperor’s bodyguard, servants, and entertainment, but also found themselves exposed to systematic efforts to convert them to Christianity. To some extent this effort formed part of a more wide-ranging campaign against heretics and non-Christians within imperial domains. Frederick had set the tone by taking the cross in 1215 and issuing legislation against heretics in 1220, and sharpening it in his corpus of legal customs for the kingdom of Sicily (the Uber Augustalis, 1230). More importantly, by issuing the Golden Bull of Rimini (1226), the emperor laid the foundations for what was to become the territory of the Teutonic Order in Prussia, and encouraged it to take up the fight against the pagans in the Baltic region. Although Frederick maintained friendly relations with al-Kamil, sultan of Egypt, the emphasis in his dealings with Muslim rulers remained on conversion and on the expansion of Christendom.
To some extent, the emperor’s activities in these years formed part of the process of preparing for his imminent crusade. In 1226 he had the towns of Lombardy excommunicated because they were preventing him from setting sail for the Holy Land; a truce concluded in 1227 stipulated that they should provide him with a contingent of400 knights for his campaign. After all, the pacification of a crusader’s own lands was an essential precondition if he was to spend years away from his domains while on crusade. In the end, it was the collision between the needs of the Holy Land and Frederick’s continuing inability to leave for the East that led to his excommunication by Pope Gregory IX (September 1227). Frederick, however, set sail regardless, and in 1229 he arranged a truce that returned the city of Jerusalem to Christian control for a period of ten years.
Frederick pursued his policies with renewed vigor on returning from his crusade in 1229, attempting to extend and manifest imperial authority across the whole range of his territories. In Burgundy he sought to settle relations between the counts of Provence and Toulouse following the upheaval of the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229). In Germany he not only deposed his eldest son, Henry (VII), but he also issued the Mainzer Reichslandfrieden, which remained one of the basic legal texts defining the political structure of the Holy Roman Empire until its dissolution in 1806. In Italy he won a decisive victory over the Milanese at Cortenuova in November 1237. Frederick saw the Holy Land as part of this constellation, although his position there was a difficult one. His rights derived from his marriage in 1225 to Isabella II, queen of Jerusalem. However, Isabella died in 1227 after giving birth to a son, Conrad (IV). Thus Frederick exercised rights in the kingdom of Jerusalem at first only by right of his wife, and then on behalf of Conrad. Nonetheless, Frederick refused to acknowledge his lack of a clear legal right to the rulership, and crowned himself king of Jerusalem in 1239.
Frederick pursued a policy in the Holy Land not dissimilar to his policies in Italy, Burgundy, and Germany; that is, he sought to strengthen and expand what he believed to be royal or imperial rights and prerogatives. This policy soon led to clashes with the Frankish nobility of Outremer and Cyprus, in particular the Ibelin family. These tensions were aggravated by Frederick’s appointment of his own officials to run the kingdom of Jerusalem: Richard Filangieri and Thomas of Acerra as imperial governors and Walter of Ocra as chancellor of Jerusalem. Furthermore, after Frederick secured the return of Jerusalem and additional territory to Christian control, many of the lands regained were awarded not to their former lords, but to those close to the emperor. In short, Frederick was prepared to ignore established customs and procedures in order to expand his own authority. Yet many of these initiatives were essential for securing the recovery of Jerusalem, and to prepare for the time after the expiry of the truce of 1229 with the Ayyubids.
The emperor’s handling of affairs in Italy and Sicily soon brought him into conflict with the papacy, leading to his second excommunication, by Gregory IX on 20 March 1239.
The bull of excommunication stressed Frederick’s frequent infringements of ecclesiastical liberties, but also laid the foundations for his modern image as an “enlightened autocrat” by accusing him of illicit dealings with Muslims and of failing to defend the Christian faith against its enemies. These accusations were taken up by Pope Innocent IV, who, at the First Council of Lyons (1245), deposed Frederick as emperor, king of Sicily, and king-regent of Jerusalem. The pope’s fight against the emperor now became embedded in a wider campaign against the enemies of Christendom. Innocent IV argued that Frederick consorted with the enemies of the faith, that he aided and abetted them by sowing discord among Christians, and that he therefore posed an even greater danger than Muslims, Mongols, Byzantines, and pagans combined. Frederick’s deposition led to the election of Landgrave Henry Raspe of Thuringia (12461247) and then of Count William of Holland (1247-1256) as antikings in Germany with papal support. Frederick and his son Conrad IV (king of Germany since 1237) maintained control of most of Germany and Italy, but lost control in Burgundy and the kingdom of Jerusalem. By 1249-1250 it seemed as if Frederick might be able to decide the conflict in his favor by military means, but his death on 13 December 1250 near Lucera put an end to these hopes.
The needs of Outremer and the expansion and defence of Christendom played a major part in Frederick’s actions from the moment he was crowned king of Germany in 1215. They provided a means to legitimize his political undertakings during the 1220s and 1230s, and they constituted an integral function of his understanding of the royal and imperial office. That understanding, however, went beyond merely fighting in the Holy Land or elsewhere; Frederick saw his mission as preparing Christendom internally for its external expansion. In order to be able to defeat its manifold enemies, Christendom had to be both politically and religiously reformed. Moreover, even after his second excommunication, and after the collapse of Staufen rule in Outremer in 1242, Frederick continued to be involved in the crusades. He supported the first crusade of King Louis IX of France (1248-1254), and was, in fact, recognized as regent of Jerusalem by Louis. He arranged several truces between the Latin Emperor at Constantinople and his Greek adversaries, and he sought to organize a campaign against the Mongols. More importantly even, like his papal opponents, he frequently sought to tie their conflict to the affairs of the Latin East, and his diplomatic initiatives thus played a major part in the crusading preparations of Louis IX and Henry III of England, as well as in those of the rulers of Hungary, Castile, and Aragon.
-Bjorn K. U. Weiler
See also: Crusade of Emperor Frederick II (1227-1229); Germany; Sicily
Bibliography
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Jacoby, David, “The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Collapse of Hohenstaufen Power in the Levant,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 40 (1986), 83-101.
Lomax, John Philip, “Frederick II, His Saracens and the Papacy,” Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam, ed. John Victor Tolan (London: Routledge, 2000), 175-198.
Powell, James M., “Frederick II and the Muslims: The Making of an Historiographical Tradition,” in Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle Ages: Studies in Honour of Robert I. Burns, S. J., ed. Larry J. Simon (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 261-269.
Ross, Linda, “Frederick II: Tyrant or Benefactor of the Latin East?” Al-Masdq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 15 (2003), 149-159.
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Weiler, Bjorn, “Frederick II, Gregory IX and the Liberation of the Holy Land, 1230-9,” Studies in Church History 36 (2000), 192-206.
World History
