Colin Windeyer

Frederick II was one of the most extraordinary characters of the Middle Ages. He was Holy Roman Emperor, and as such nominally ruler of vast swathes of northern and central Europe to the east of Champagne, down to northern Italy, although that was constantly contested; King of Sicily, including all of southern Italy up to just below Rome; and one time King of Jerusalem. He was a free thinker and enemy of the Popes who was twice excommunicated. He was also one of the greatest intellectuals of his age.

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Frederick was born in 1194. His mother was Constance, Queen of Sicily, descendant of the Norman Kings of Sicily. His father was Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. Frederick in turn became King of Sicily and later, Holy Roman Emperor. Over his life Frederick spent little of his time and efforts in Germany and as a result over time his authority there diminished.

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Frederick was in constant conflict with the Popes, who feared encirclement; and with good reason. Frederick’s long term aim was to take control of the whole of Italy and to restore the splendour of the ancient Roman Empire. Frederick was also a free thinker who encouraged ideas which would have been regarded as heretical elsewhere. He was excommunicated by the Popes twice, once supposedly because he broke his promise to go on crusade to the Holy Land. Frederick instead went crusading the following year, while still excommunicated. To the chagrin of the papacy, without any fighting he managed to negotiate a treaty resulting in the restitution of Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem and was crowned King of Jerusalem; although when he left civil war broke out, so his rule was at best tenuous, and Jerusalem was subsequently lost again to the Saracens 15 years later.

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For the last 20 or so years of his life, Frederick was engaged in more or less constant war and intrigue aimed at winning control of the northern and central Italian city states. In this he had the support of many of the cities; although a lot of cities played off the Emperor against the Pope to obtain maximum advantage for themselves. The Emperor’s supporters were known as Ghibellines and those opposing him and supporting the Papacy were known as Guelphs. In the end Frederick died in 1250 after suffering a string of reverses, with his dream a long way from realisation.

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The Emperor Frederick II was a reformer with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and learning.

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He promulgated a comprehensive law code known as the Constitutions of Melfi for the Kingdom of Sicily, which formed the basis of Sicilian law for the next 6 centuries. He founded the University of Naples, in part as a political act to attack the Guelph city of Bologna with its famous university, but also to train the intelligentsia of his Kingdom whom he needed for its administration.

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Frederick made his court a magnet for the intellectuals of his day. He subsidised and patronised a group of translators and scientific writers. He himself wrote a learned book on falconing, which was based entirely on observation and experiment; quite at odds with how books were written in that age. He could reputedly speak 6 languages and was an avid patron of the arts as well as the sciences. He wrote poetry, but he particularly favoured science and mathematics.

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He was deeply interested in medicine and he heavily regulated it and pharmacology to improve their standard in the Kingdom of Sicily.

 

In an age of slavish devotion to the words of the ancient Greeks, especially Aristotle “the prince of philosophers”, Frederick questioned everything which couldn’t be explained by reason, including on occasions the great Aristotle himself. In this regard he was virtually one of a kind in his age.

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He freely questioned the teachings of the church, although mostly in private, exacerbating his problems with the Papacy. At one stage the Pope even declared he was the Antichrist!

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Either it was his scepticism and love of experimentation, disrespect for the Catholic Church, sense of fun, or lasciviousness or a bit of them all, but the story goes that one night he tempted St Francis of Assisi with a beautiful woman whom he let into the Saint’s bedchamber and then spied on to see if the Saint would stand true to his preaching. St Francis resisted the temptation, duly passing the test and rising enormously in sceptical Frederick’s estimation.

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A central figure at the Emperor’s court was Michael Scot, for many years the official philosopher and astrologer. Michael was earlier a member of the Toledo group of translators and there translated several important works which had an enormous impact on scientific thought in Western Christendom. The Toledo translators feature in Colin Windeyer’s novel Call the Intention Good and Michael Scot is a background character. 

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While Michael Scot was undoubtedly a serious scholar, he was still a man of his time, without the Emperor’s critical questioning of everything. He has also been described by at least one historian as “something of a charlatan”*. Somewhat surprisingly Michael Scot managed to convince the otherwise incessantly sceptical Emperor to rely on his astrological predictions; in part probably due to Michael Scot’s convincing personality coupled with his undoubted achievements as a scholar.

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Reportedly the Emperor Frederick II was quite callous to human wellbeing in his pursuit of knowledge, probably here better reflecting his age. Amongst the cruel experiments attributed to him, were the following.

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He had 2 prisoners fed the same meal, then had one rest and the other exercise. He then had them both cut open to study their digestion and the differences the exercise had made. In another case, in order to try and find out the mother tongue of humanity, he had some unfortunate children brought up from birth in absolute silence to see what language they’d speak. Needless to say they didn’t and all died. In studying fish and marine plants, he ordered his diver to dive ever deeper and deeper to find more new specimens, until the diver finally failed to resurface.

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Some of the contemporaries of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II called him “Stupor Mundi”, the Wonder or Astonishment of the World. In the words of the historian Georgina Masson* “Frederick’s character was an enigma and a source of wonder to his contemporaries, even more than it is to us today.”

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The Emperor Frederick II is a background character in Colin Windeyer’s novels Call the Intention Good and Call the Acts Chaos.

 

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*Georgina Masson: Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, A Life, Octagon Books, New York 1973