Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor

Personality and religion

Frederick's contemporaries called him Stupor Mundi, the "Astonishment" or the "Wonder of the World", and Immutator Mirabilis or the "Marvelous Transformer [of the World]" for his charismatic personality and political ambitions. This carried with it a tinge of messianism from some of Frederick's supporters and a sense of the demonic from his opponents. Many of his contemporaries were astonished, even transfixed by his audacity, stubbornness, and extraordinary ambitions. However, they were also sometimes terrified by the pronounced unorthodoxy of the Hohenstaufen emperor, and pointed to his cruelty and despotism. Even so, the famous English chronicler Matthew of Paris still acclaimed Frederick as the "greatest of the princes of the earth."

Frederick II's multifaceted personality remains securely attached to his legacy. Even from a young age, he showed precocity and knowledge beyond his years, deeply conscious of his imperial lineage and defiant of any constraint on his free will. He seemed to be insatiably curious about everything – science, naturalism, mathematics, architecture, and poetry – and welcomed many of the most learned figures of his time to his court. He was a conversationalist with an "inexhaustible streak", equal to Voltaire or Oscar Wilde, and a keen polymath, comparable to Leonardo da Vinci, who "wanted to know everything". He enjoyed lively intellectual debates, and though he could be amiable, even enchanting, he was often passionate and intense. The emperor is considered to have been a highly energetic and proactive ruler, ceaselessly traveling around Italy and the Regno, with a zeal for governing perhaps unmatched in the whole of the Middle Ages. His "speciality" was being a despot and a "dirigiste technocrat" who aimed to command every aspect of his Italian realms. Frederick's statecraft, though inventive or perhaps even ingenious, indicates an intolerantly absolutist disposition. If the emperor allowed himself personal heterodoxy, he nevertheless enforced strict orthodoxy everywhere else he could. As the preeminent Christian monarch and Roman emperor, Frederick saw himself as the supreme temporal source of peace, order, and justice, for whom the interests of the state superseded everything.

For all his undeniable charisma and genius, Frederick was at heart a mercurial intellectual who lacked the "common touch" of his grandfather, Frederick Barbarossa, and seemed inclined to more "Oriental attractions." From a childhood of constant emotional insecurity and inhibited relationships, what emerged was a personality that was singularly impressive to contemporaries. Frederick II preferred a select company of intimates with whom he could share his seemingly endless intellectual interests and upon whom he could impress his dominating and protean personality. Frederick seemed to revel in his uncomfortable taste for shocking the conventional. Fundamentally, he possessed a character of inward discord whose stark paradoxes were more pronounced, perhaps, because of his preeminent status and the scope of his personality. He was industrious, farsighted and shrewd, but he could also be megalomaniacal, turbulent, impulsive and utterly ruthless; in Frederick, roguish playfulness and gaiety was paired with cruelty, harshness with magnanimity, rigid idealism and megalomania with an acute sense of political reality, tolerance with intolerance, and sardonic religious indifference with episodes of outward piety. Frederick was cerebral and tended towards a life of isolation and, despite his reputed great charm and acerbic humor—he could not resist a jibing joke or a sly witticism, he seemed unable to break through the barrier separating him from others. Because of the "isolated splendour" of his position as emperor and the innate suspicion implanted in him by his early years, instead of the more "normal pursuits" of men of his age, Frederick found respite from the cares of state in the study of science and mathematics, in philosophy and dialectic, in the violent exercise of the chase, and in an "unrestrained abandonment" to sensual pleasures.

Frederick was apparently gracious to each of his wives but he seems to have only had passionate romantic affection for Bianca Lancia. The emperor's wives likely lived in secluded environments per the semi-oriental customs of Sicilian royalty. He clearly had an amorous side and a voracious sexual appetite, siring a dozen or more illegitimate children alongside nearly ten legitimate children. Unlike some other contemporary monarchs though, Frederick always openly acknowledged his many illegitimate offspring and he seems to have been fond of most of his children, particularly Enzo and Manfred.

Whether because of his audacity, towering status or intellectual brilliance and the breadth of his personality, Frederick's contemporaries—supporters and enemies alike—seem to have found him an incredible enigma. Salimbene di Adam, generally a critic of the emperor, wrote that Frederick was alternatively witty, consoling, and delightful, but also cunning, greedy, and malicious, lacking any religious faith.

William Harvey Maehl argues that Frederick inherited German, Norman, and Sicilian blood, but by training, lifestyle, and temperament, he was "most of all Sicilian" on his cultural tastes and persuasions. Maehl, continues that for his whole life the emperor remained above all a Sicilian grand signore, and, in many ways, his whole imperial policy aimed at expanding the Sicilian kingdom and its administrative mechanisms into Italy rather than projecting southward from Germany proper. According to Norman Cantor, "Frederick had no intention of giving up Naples and Sicily, which were the real strongholds of its power. He was, in fact, uninterested in Germany." Cantor's view notwithstanding, historians generally agree that Frederick was a gifted and subtle politician who instinctively understood the need to balance his overarching Imperial status with the realities of his power-base in the Regno. If, as Maehl contends, the emperor prioritized expanding his Sicilian kingdom northward, even in the face of the opposition of Frederick's enemies, that strategy did, in some ways, prove more viable for securing wider Hohenstaufen hegemony than the earlier and later attempts by German emperors to extended imperial power south across the Alps.

Frederick was a religious sceptic to an extent unusual for his era. His papal enemies used this against him at every turn and accused him of claiming that Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were the three greatest deceivers who ever lived in a long-rumoured book called the Treatise of the Three Impostors. The actual existence of this book is doubtful (and Frederick himself denied all knowledge of it), but its supposed sentiment seemed to align with Frederick's perceived religious skepticism and indifference to personal faith. Innocent IV declared him preambulus Antichristi (predecessor of the Antichrist) on 17 July 1245. As Frederick allegedly did not respect the privilegium potestatis of the Church, he was excommunicated. His rationalistic mind took pleasure in the strictly logical character of Christian dogma. For all that his naturalist and intellectual pursuits may have pointed towards empiricism, the emperor was not a champion of rationalism, nor had he any sympathy with the mystico-heretical movements of the time; in fact, he viewed them as dissidents against the state and he joined in suppressing them. It was not the Roman Church of the Middle Ages that he antagonized, but its representatives. This notwithstanding, Frederick seemed to be personally ambivalent to religion. Once, when riding through a field of grain, Frederick is reported to have mocked the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation, remarking to his companions, "How many Gods will be made from this corn in my lifetime? How long will this deception last?" The question of Frederick's personal attitude to religion, whether he was a conventional Christian or privately more deistic, perhaps even atheistic, remains a persistent topic of debate.

Constitutions of Melfi and Court Patronage

The papal invasion exposed some of the vulnerabilities of his southern kingdom, and Frederick was determined to enact a broad restructuring of the entire apparatus of government. The reconstitution of the Kingdom of Sicily that followed would prove a milestone in the history of European statehood. In 1231, the emperor issued the Constitutions of Melfi as a comprehensive legal code which sought to centralize royal authority across the Kingdom of Sicily, replacing clerical officialdom with lay jurists trained in Roman law and establishing a tightly hierarchical administrative system reaching from the Emperor down to the most subordinate provincial functionary. The underlying philosophy was explicit: Frederick conceived of the Emperor as the living law upon earth, deriving authority directly from God, with the imperial office serving as the sole source of temporal justice. The code drew on Norman precedent and the emperor's earlier assizes but refashioned in a thoroughly 'Romanized' way, producing something qualitatively new in its breadth and scope. The code was not only a collection of precedents but also a relatively intricate body of royal law which was subject to change only by the sovereign's will and the broad outlines of an entire structure of statehood. As such, the emperor considered the code to be the model framework for his larger territorial empire. Frederick's idea of monarchy also manifested in the famous augustalis, a gold coinage first issued in 1231, which captured something of this synthesis of antiquity and contemporary tradition. A coin of fine quality, it bore the emperor's own image in the manner of the ancient Caesars rather than a Christian symbol and announced in tangible form his conception of a secular imperial authority grounded in classical antiquity and Roman universalism.

In addition to his state-building efforts, the emperor gained prestige through the reputation of his cosmopolitan court. Based primarily in Palermo and Foggia, and accompanying Frederick on his travels, the court became one of the leading intellectual centres of 13th-century Europe. The emperor surrounded himself with scholars, jurists, poets, mathematicians, and natural philosophers drawn from across Europe and the Islamic world, regardless of religion or origin. He took an active interest in intellectual and scholarly pursuits and was known for engaging directly with members of his court. Among the more notable attendants was the Scottish polymath Michael Scotus, astrologer Guido Bonatti, mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci, philosopher Theodore of Antioch, poet Giacomo da Lentini and the jurist Piero della Vigna, who became the emperor's chief minister. Dante Alighieri later identified Frederick II's court as the birthplace of Italian vernacular poetry. Contemporary accounts also described an intellectual environment that combined Roman legal traditions, Arabic philosophy, Byzantine administrative influences, and the emerging literary culture of the Italian peninsula. In this way, the court of Frederick was perhaps the last great blossoming of the remarkable Norman-Sicilian cultural synthesis.