Absolute Monarchs (24 page)

The last straw, to priests and laymen alike, was the emperor’s obvious interest in, and admiration for, both the Muslim faith and Islamic civilization as a whole. He insisted, for example, on visiting the Dome of the Rock, of whose architecture he made a detailed study,
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and the al-Aqsa Mosque, where he is said to have expressed his disappointment at not having heard the call to prayer. (The sultan had ordered the muezzins to be silent as a gesture of respect.) As always, he questioned every Muslim he met—about his faith, his calling, his way of life, and anything else that occurred to him. To the Christians of Outremer, such an attitude was profoundly shocking; even the emperor’s fluent Arabic was held against him. With every day he remained in Jerusalem his unpopularity grew, and when he moved on to Acre, narrowly escaping an ambush by the Templars on the way, he found the city on the verge of open rebellion.

By this time he, too, was in a dangerous mood, shocked by the apparent ingratitude of his fellow Christians and ready to give as good as he got. He ordered his troops to surround Acre, allowing no one to enter or leave. Churchmen who preached sermons against him were bastinadoed. Meanwhile, he had the fleet made ready to sail on May 1. Soon after dawn on that day, as he passed through the butchers’ quarter to the waiting ships, he was pelted with offal. It was his last experience of the Holy Land.

Stopping only very briefly in Cyprus, the emperor reached Brindisi on June 10. He found his kingdom in a state of helpless confusion. Pope Gregory had taken advantage of his absence to launch what almost amounted to a Crusade against him, calling on the princes and churches of Western Europe for men and money for an all-out attack on his position both in Germany and in Italy. In Germany the pope’s attempts to establish a rival emperor in the person of Otto of Brunswick had had little effect; in Italy, on the other hand, he had organized an armed invasion with the object of driving Frederick out of the South once and for all, so that the whole territory could be ruled directly from Rome. Furious fighting was at that moment in progress in the Abruzzi and around Capua, while several cities in Apulia, believing the rumors—assiduously circulated by papal agents—of Frederick’s death, were in open revolt. To encourage others to follow their example, Gregory had recently published an edict releasing all the emperor’s subjects from their oaths of allegiance.

The situation could hardly have been worse: yet from the moment of Frederick’s arrival the tide began to turn. Here was the emperor, once again among his own people, not dead but triumphant, having recovered without bloodshed the Holy Places for Christendom. His achievement might not have impressed the Christian communities of Outremer, but to the people of South Italy and Sicily it appeared in a very different light. Moreover, with his return to his kingdom, Frederick himself instantly became a changed man. Gone were the anger, the bluster, the insecurity, the lack of understanding; he was back now in the land he knew and loved; once again, he was in control. All that summer he spent tirelessly on campaign, and by the end of October the papal army was broken.

Gregory IX, however, was not; and the final reconciliation between the two was a long and painful process. In the following months the emperor made concession after concession, knowing as he did that the obstinate old pope still retained his most damaging weapon. Frederick was still excommunicate: a serious embarrassment, a permanent reproach, and a potentially dangerous diplomatic liability. As a Christian, too—insofar as he was one—Frederick would have had no wish to die under the ban of the Church. But still Gregory prevaricated; it was not until July 1230 that, very reluctantly, he agreed to a peace treaty—signed at Ceprano at the end of August—and lifted his sentence.

Some weeks later, the two men dined together in the papal palace at Anagni. The dinner, one feels, must have been far from convivial, at least in its early stages, but Frederick was capable of enormous charm when he wanted to use it, and the pope seems to have been genuinely gratified that the Holy Roman Emperor should have taken the trouble to pay him an informal visit. So ended, for the time being, yet another of those Herculean struggles between pope and emperor on which the history of medieval Europe seems so frequently to have turned.

THE TRUCE PROVED
, inevitably, uneasy; but it lasted for nine years, during which time each party rendered the other useful service. When, in 1234, the Romans staged one of their periodic revolts, demanding the abolition of clerical immunities as well as the right to raise taxes and strike coinage, Frederick instantly answered Gregory’s appeal for aid and forced their submission. In return the emperor sought papal assistance in his difficulties with the Lombard cities; Gregory did his best to mediate and obligingly excommunicated Frederick’s refractory son Henry, King of the Germans, who was plotting with the Lombards against his father. All too soon, however, the rifts began to appear. His attempts at mediation having failed, the pope was seriously concerned when Frederick summoned the help of German princes in subduing the Lombard cities by force; he clearly could not allow the emperor to ride roughshod over North Italy and impose on it the same degree of autocracy as prevailed in the South. Were he to do so, what was to prevent an imperial invasion of the Papal States and the consequent absorption of the whole of Italy into the empire?

Then, in November 1237, Frederick smashed the Lombards at Cortenuova. They fled by night, leaving behind the splendid Milanese
carroccio
, the ceremonial war chariot that carried the standards and served as a rallying point for the army. To heighten the impact of his victory, the emperor then entered Cremona, where he awarded himself a triumph on the ancient Roman pattern. Behind him and his victorious soldiers marched the captured Lombard commanders in fetters; the
carroccio
itself was drawn through the streets by an elephant from the menagerie which accompanied Frederick on all his travels, with Pietro Tiepolo, a son of the Doge of Venice and sometime
podestà
(governor) of Milan, bound to its central flagpole. For Gregory, this was additional proof that the Papacy was in mortal danger, and when in the following year Frederick sent his bastard son Enzio to Sardinia—a papal fief—arranging for him to marry a noble Sardinian girl and designating him king, his worst suspicions were confirmed.

By 1239 relations between the two were once again as bad as they had ever been. Papal agents were sowing dissension in Germany; others were working on the Lombards, stiffening their resolve after Cortenuova. Meanwhile, the emperor was secretly intriguing with the cardinals to get rid of Gregory once and for all. The inevitable result was yet another sentence of excommunication. Frederick was quite accustomed to this by now, but it served as a useful excuse for war. Insults flew back and forth: the pope was “a Pharisee seated on the chair of pestilence, anointed with the oil of wickedness,” who should be deposed forthwith; the emperor was the forerunner of Antichrist, the monster of the Apocalypse, “the furious beast from the sea.”
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Then Frederick marched. In 1240 his troops surrounded Rome, though they did not enter the city. The pope retaliated by summoning a General Council of the Church, to convene at Easter 1241. It was, in a sense, a challenge: would or would not those attending be allowed unrestricted passage? But the emperor called his bluff. The German churchmen were forbidden to attend. With all land routes closed, the French cardinals and bishops were obliged to travel by sea; their ships were intercepted by the imperial fleet, and over a hundred distinguished churchmen were taken prisoner.

For Pope Gregory, now in his late eighties, this last blow was too much. His spirit was unbroken, but his old body was ravaged by kidney disease. He struggled on as best he could, but the Roman summer proved too much for him and on August 22 he died. Frederick, who was probably well aware that his old enemy’s end was near, had remained outside Rome. He had always maintained that he had no quarrel with the Church, only with the pope personally; on Gregory’s death, therefore, he quietly returned to Sicily.

The pontificate of Gregory IX was completely overshadowed by his battle with the emperor. He did, however, make one significant contribution to canon law, publishing in 1234 what was known as the
Liber Extra
, the first complete collection of papal decretals, which was to remain the fundamental authority until the early twentieth century. Like his predecessor, he looked benevolently on the mendicant orders, canonizing Francis in 1228 and Dominic six years later. It was unfortunate that he should have entrusted to those orders—and particularly the Dominicans—the administration of the papal Inquisition, which, among the Albigenses in the Languedoc, was becoming increasingly brutal.

If Gregory’s successor, the hopeless old Celestine IV, had lived, Frederick’s worries might have been almost at an end, but after just seventeen days Celestine followed Gregory to the grave. For the next year and a half the emperor, while simultaneously preparing a huge fleet to sail against Genoa and Venice, did everything he could to influence the next election, but in vain; the Genoese Cardinal Sinibaldo Fieschi, who in June 1243 became Pope Innocent IV, though he lacked his predecessor’s vehement intemperance, was to prove, if anything, an even more determined adversary than Gregory had been. Only two years after his accession, at a General Council in Lyons, he declared the already excommunicated Frederick deposed, stripping him of all his dignities and titles.

But emperors could not be thrown out so easily. The Hohenstaufen name retained immense prestige in Germany, while in Frederick’s own kingdom his endless peregrinations had ensured him a consistently high profile, to the point where he seemed omnipresent—part of life itself. Loftily ignoring the papal pronouncement, he continued the struggle; Innocent fought back, supporting two successive antikings whom he had had elected by the German princes, using the mendicant orders to preach a Crusade against the emperor, and even at one point conniving in a plot to assassinate him. He spent considerable amounts of money on bribes and would have spent more if the papal treasury had not been virtually empty; on his accession he had been besieged by a mob of creditors demanding the repayment of debts incurred by Pope Gregory.

King Louis IX of France did his best to mediate, but the quarrel was too deep, and the two were still at daggers drawn when, in December 1250 during a hunting trip in Apulia, Frederick suffered a violent attack of dysentery. He died a few days later at Castel Fiorentino, just thirteen days short of his fifty-sixth birthday. His body was taken to Palermo Cathedral, where, at his request, it was consigned to the magnificent porphyry sarcophagus that had been prepared for his grandfather Roger II and can still be seen there today.

AS HIS HEIR
in Germany and the Regno—as his South Italian and Sicilian kingdom was now called—Frederick had named Conrad, son of Yolande of Jerusalem, and during Conrad’s absence in Germany he had entrusted the government of Italy and Sicily to Manfred, the favorite of his eleven illegitimate children. Manfred proved a worthy scion of his father. He re-created Frederick’s brilliant court, founded the Apulian port of Manfredonia, and—by marrying his daughter to the Despot of Epirus—acquired for the empire the island of Corfu and a considerable stretch of the Albanian coast. Before long he had absorbed much of the Papal States, the March of Ancona, Spoleto, and the Romagna. He did not, to the pope’s inexpressible relief, claim authority over North Italy; nevertheless, his increasing power in the South could not but reawaken anxieties in Rome, and these became greater still when, in August 1258, the Sicilian baronage proclaimed him king.

Ever since Frederick’s theoretical deposition, Innocent IV—and, after his death in 1254, his successor (and Gregory IX’s nephew), the gentle, easygoing, and ultimately ineffectual Alexander IV—had been seeking an “athlete of Christ” who would rid South Italy once and for all of the House of Hohenstaufen and lead the army of the Church to victory in the peninsula. Richard, Earl of Cornwall, a brother of the English King Henry III, had seemed at one moment a possibility, but had finally refused to take up the challenge; so too—after the pope had actually invested him with the southern kingdom—had King Henry’s son Edmund. In 1261, however, Alexander died at Viterbo, where, to avoid the factional strife in Rome, he had spent most of his pontificate, and after three months of inconclusive deliberations the cardinals elected a rank outsider, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who happened to be visiting the Curia at Viterbo in his official capacity. Jacques Pantaléon was a Frenchman, the son of a poor cobbler in Troyes. He took the name of Urban IV; and his eye soon fell on a compatriot, Charles of Anjou.

The brother of King Louis IX, Charles was now thirty-five. In 1246 he had acquired through his wife the county of Provence, which had brought him untold wealth; he was also lord, inter alia, of the thriving port of Marseille. To this cold, cruel, and vastly ambitious opportunist the pope was now offering a chance not to be missed. In return for a lump sum of 50,000 marks and the promise of an annual tribute of 10,000 ounces of gold, together with military aid as required, Charles would be enfeoffed with the Kingdom of South Italy and Sicily. The army which he was to lead against Manfred, and which began to assemble in North Italy in the autumn of 1265, would be officially designated a Crusade—which meant that it would be, as always, something of a rag-bag, with the usual admixture of adventurers hoping to secure fiefs in South Italy, pilgrims seeking the remission of their sins, and ruffians simply out for what they could get. With them, however, was an impressive number of knights from all over western Europe—French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Provençal, with even a few Englishmen thrown in for good measure—who, Charles firmly believed, would be more than a match for anything that Manfred could fling against them.