Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/767

 EMPERORS.] FREDERICK 731 by Radevic, one of the canons of Otto ; the chronicle of Otto Morena of Lodi, continued from 1162 to 1167 by his son Acerbus ; and the life of Pope Alexander III. by the cardinal of Aragon. The chief modern writers are Muratori, Annali d Italia ; Sismondi, Histoirc des Kepubliqucs Italiennes ; H. v. Biinau, Leben und Thaten Fried- richs I., Leipsic, 1722; Cherrier, Histoirc dc la luttc dcs papcs ct dcs cmpercurs dc la, maison de Souabc, &c., 2d edition, Paris, 1856; F. vonRaumer, Geschichte der Holicnstaufen und ihrer Zeit, 4th ed., Leipsic, 1871 ; P. Scheffer-Boichorst, Fricdrichs letzter Streit mit der Curie, Berlin, 1866 ; K. Fischer, Der Kreuzzug Fricdrichs I., Leipsic, 1870; H. Prutz, Kaiser Frcidrich I., 3 vols., Dantzic, 1871-73 ; Fr. X. Wegele, Kaiser Friedrich I. Barlarossa, ein Vortrag, Nordlingen, 1871 ; Dettloff, Der erste Romerzug Kaiser FricdricJis I. Gbttingen, 1877 ; Bryce, Holy Raman Empire ; Milman, History of Latin Christianity ; C. Vignati, Storia diplo- matica della lega Lombarda, Milan, 1866; Testc, History of tltc Wars of Frederick I. ami tJie Communes of L&mbardy, English translation, 1877 ; and E. A. Freeman in his first series of Essays. (T. F. H.) FREDERICK II. (1194-1250), Holy Roman Emperor, surnamed the Hohenstaufen, the most remarkable historic figure of the Middle Ages, grandson of the preceding, aiicl son of Henry VI. and of Constance, heiress of the throne of Sicily, was born at Jesi, near Ancona, 26th December 1194. He was elected king of the Romans iu 1196; and, his father having died 28th September 1197, he was in May 1198, crowned king of Sicily, his mother obtaining for him the recognition and support of Pope Innocent III. by acknowledging the feudal supremacy of the papacy, by the sacrifice of certain ecclesiastical rights, and by the payment of a yearly tribute. Dying the same year, she bequeathed his guardianship to the pope ; but for some time after this, Sicily was the scene of hopeless political anarchy, and the custody of the young king at Palermo was the occasion of continual and complicated intrigues, and of a confused and protracted civil war which had very varying results. The pope could thus only fulfil his trust imperfectly, but the education of Ids ward, so far from suffering on this account, was exceptionally thorough and complete ; and the different nationalities with which he came into contact contributed each its quota to the instruction and development of his strong and many-sided character. Though crowned in infancy king of the Romans, he actu ally inherited from his father no other throne than that of Naples and Sicily. In 1208 he entered upon the per sonal government of his kingdom, and in the following year he was married to Constance of Aragon. About this time. Otto, second son of Henry the Lion, had, on account of the murder of Philip of Hohenstaufen by Otto of Wittelsbach, obtained undisputed possession of the throne of Germany; but immediately after his coronation at Rome in 1209 the inevitable jealousy between pope and emperor led to the usual results, and when Otto was meditating the subjuga tion of Naples and Sicily, he was met in 1211 by a bull of excommunication. At a diet held at Nuremberg in October of the same year it was resolved to offer the crown of Germany to the young king of Sicily. Innocent III. on certain conditions gave his sanction to the offer ; and to Frederick, even had he seen in it nothing to incite his imaginative ardour, it must have appeared almost in the form of an unexpected deliverance from impending ruin. Having therefore resolved to dispute his ancestral throne with his rival, he set out in the spring of 1212 on his romantic and hazardous quest. Landing at Genoa on the 1st of May accompanied by only a few adherents, he made his way over the Alps by unfrequented passes to Coire, and learning at St Gall that Otto was about to occupy Constance, he by great good fortune was able to anticipate him by three hours. The town at once declared in Frederick s favour, and Otto, without seriously attempt ing to resist his progress in southern Germany, retired to Saxony. In November of the same year Frederick made a treaty with Philip of France, and in December ho was elected king Tat Frankfort, and crowned at Mainz. By inherent force of character, aided by his unrivalled diplomatic skill and his bold and rapid movements, he had won success almost without striking a blow ; and his task was at least denuded of all difficulty through Otto s disastrous defeat by Philip at Bou vines, near Tournay, 27th July 1214. Any further organized resistance was thus rendered impossible against the progress of the Hohen staufen, who in July 1215 ascended the marble throne of Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle, and received the silver crown. At a solemn ceremony which followed he took the cross; but even after the death of Otto in May 1218 he was fully occupied in establishing his influence in Germany. In 1220 he succeeded in obtaining the election of his son Henry to the German throne, but the favour was dearly rewarded by the charter which by the independent privi leges it conferred upon the princes virtually dissolved the unity of the kingdom. The election was contrary to a promise made to Pope Innocent III. to appoint Henry king of Sicily, but Pope Honorius III., anxious for the success of the crusade, was pacified without much difficulty, and Frederick leaving Germany in the autumn of 1220 was crowned emperor at Rome on the 22d November, renew ing at the same time his oath to set out on the crusade with all possible speed. His absence in Germany had permitted the growth of disorder and confusion in his southern king dom ; and to restrain the licence of the Apulian nobles he now established at Capua a tribunal to revise their privileges, while, to deliver the Christians iu Sicily from. the attacks to which they were continually exposed from the Saracen mountain tribes, he transferred 2000 Saracens to Lucera, an expedient which also established in Italy a con venient instrument of resistance to the papal power. The departure of the crusade, at first fixed for 1223, was deferred till 1225, and even then it was found necessary to delay it for two years longer; but, his wife Constance having died in 1222, he gave a pledge that his ambition coincided with the papal wishes by marrying in 1225 Yo- lande, daughter of King John of Jerusalem ; and he also bound himself by heavy penalties to set out with a stipu lated force in August 1227. The hostilities between him and the Lombard league, begun in 1226, were suspended through the intercession of Pope Honorius in February 1227, and the Lombards agreed to furnish a certain number of knights for the expedition. In March Honorius died, and was succeeded by Gregory IX., who on the very day of his accession addressed a new and imperative warn ing to the emperor against delay in the fulfilment of his oath. Frederick actually set out at the time agreed upon, but returned three days afterwards, and, asserting as his reason a serious illness, permitted the armament to be dissolved, whereupon Gregory without further negotiation launched against him, September 30, the solemn bull of excommunication. The appeal to Christendom with which Frederick met the church s fulmination is remark able in that, so far from contenting himself with defending his own conduct, he, besides denouncing the temporal pretensions of the pope as menacing the whole of Christen dom with an &quot;unheard-of tyranny,&quot; asserted that instead of rolling in wealth and aspiring to worldly influence the church s representatives ought to cultivate the simplicity and self-denial of the early Christians. In resolving to set out on the crusade, notwithstanding his excommunication, Frederick was therefore actuated, not merely by the wish to take possession of a secular throne, or to demonstrate the sincerity of his purpose to keep his oath, but by the deter mination to assert his right still to act as the temporal head of the church. His preparations were not delayed by the death of his wife Yolande in April 1228, and he set