When the Emperor Henry IV crossed the ice-bound Alps on his journey of submission to Canossa he was accompanied by a faithful knight, Frederick of Buren, whom he later rewarded for his loyalty with the hand of his daughter and the title Duke of Suabia. Frederick’s son was elected Emperor as Conrad III,17 the first of the imperial line of Hohenstaufen that was destined to carry on through several generations the war between Empire and Papacy.

The Hohenstaufen received their name from a hill on which stood one of Frederick of Buren’s strongest castles, but they were also called ‘Waiblingen’ after a town in their possession; while the House of Bavaria, their chief rivals, was called ‘Welf’ after an early ancestor. The feud of the Waiblingen and the Welfs that convulsed Germany had no less devastating an effect upon Italy, always exposed to influence from beyond the Alps, and the names of the rivals, corrupted on Italian tongues into ‘Ghibellines’ and ‘Guelfs’, became party cries throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

In our last chapter we spoke of French ‘communes’, municipalities that rebelled against their overlords, setting up a government of their own: the same process of emancipation was at work in North Italy only that it was able to act with greater rapidity and success for a time on account of the national tendency towards separation and the vigour of town life.

‘In France’, says a thirteenth-century Italian, in surprise, ‘only the townspeople dwell in towns: the knights and noble ladies stay ... on their own demesnes.’ Certainly the contrast with his native Lombardy was strong. There each city lived like a fortified kingdom on its hill-top, or in the midst of wide plains, cut off from its neighbours by suspicion, by jealousy, by competition. In the narrow streets noble and knight jostled shoulders perforce with merchants, students, mountebanks, and beggars. The limits of space dictated that many things in life must be shared in common, whether religious processions or plagues, and if street fighting flourished in consequence so also did class intimacy and a sharpening of wits as well as of swords. Thus the towns of North Italy, like flowers in a hot-house, bore fruits of civilization in advance of the world outside, whether in commerce, painting, or the art of self-government; and visitors from beyond the Alps stared astonished at merchants’ luxurious palaces that made the castles of their own princes seem mere barbarian strongholds.

Yet this profitable independence was not won without struggles so fierce and continuous that they finally endangered the political freedom in whose interests they had originally been waged. At first the struggle was with barbarian invaders; and here, as in the case of Rome and the Popes, it was often the local bishops who, when emperors at Constantinople ceased to govern except in name, fostered the young life of the city states and educated their citizens in a rough knowledge of war and statecraft.

With the dawn of feudalism bishops degenerated into tyrants, and municipalities began to elect consuls and advisory councils and under their leadership to rebel against their former benefactors, and to establish governments independent of their control.

The next danger was from within: cities are swayed more easily than nations, and too often the ‘communes’ of Lombardy became the prey of private factions or of more powerful city neighbours. Class warred against class and city against city; and out of their struggles arose leagues and counter-leagues, bewildering to follow like the ever-changing colours of a kaleidoscope.

Into this atmosphere of turmoil the quarrel between Popes and Holy Roman Emperors, begun by Henry IV and Hildebrand and carried on by the Hohenstaufen and the inheritors of Hildebrand’s ideals, entered from the ‘communes’ point of view like a heaven-sent opportunity for establishing their independence. In the words of a tenth-century bishop: ‘The Italians always wish to have two masters that they may keep one in check by the other.’

The cities that followed the Hohenstaufen were labelled ‘Ghibelline’, those that upheld the Pope ‘Guelf’; and at first, and indeed throughout the contest where cruelty and treachery were concerned, there was little to choose between the rivals. Later, however, the fierce imperialism of Frederick I was to give to the warfare of his opponents, the Guelfs, a patriotic aspect.

Frederick I, the ‘Barbarossa’ of the Third Crusade, was a Hohenstaufen on his father’s side, a Welf on his mother’s; and it had been the hope of those who elected him Emperor that ‘like a corner-stone he would bind the two together ... that thus with God’s blessing he might end their ancient quarrel’. At first it appeared this hope might be realized, for the new Emperor made a friend of his cousin Henry the Lion who, as Duke of Bavaria and Saxony, was heir of the Welf ambitions. Frederick also, by his firm and business-like rule, established what the chroniclers called such ‘unwonted peace’ that ‘men seemed changed, the world a different one, the very Heaven milder and softer’.

Unfortunately Frederick, who has been aptly described as an ‘imperialist Hildebrand’, regarded the peace of Germany merely as a stepping-stone to wider ambitions. Justinian, who had ruled Europe from Constantinople, was his model, and with the help of lawyers from the University of Bologna, whom he handsomely rewarded for their services, he revived all the old imperial claims over North Italy that men had forgotten or allowed to slip into disuse. The ‘communes’ found that rights and privileges for which their ancestors had fought and died were trampled under foot by an imperial official, the podestÀ, sent as supreme governor to each of the more important towns: taxes were imposed and exacted to the uttermost coin by his iron hand: complaint or rebellion were punished by torture and death.

‘Death for freedom is the next best thing to freedom,’ cried the men of Crema, flaming into wild revolt, while Milan shut her gates against her podestÀ in an obstinate three years’ siege. Deliverance was not yet, and Frederick and his vast army of Germans desolated the plains: Crema was burned, her starving population turned adrift: the glory of Milan was reduced to a stone quarry: Pope Alexander III who, feeling his own independence threatened by imperial demands, had supported the movement for liberty, was driven from Rome and forced to seek refuge in France. Everywhere the Ghibellines triumphed, and it was in these black days in Italy that the Guelfs ceased for a time to be a faction and became patriots, while the Pope stood before the world the would-be saviour of his land from a foreign yoke.

Amid the smouldering ruins of Milan the Lombard League sprang into life: town after town, weary of German oppression and insolence, offered their allegiance: even Venice, usually selfish in the safe isolation of her lagoons, proffered ships and money. Milan was rebuilt, and a new city, called after the patriot Pope ‘Alessandria’, was founded on a strategic site. Alessandria degla paglia, ‘Alessandria of the straw’, Barbarossa nicknamed it contemptuously, threatening to burn it like a heap of weeds; but the new walls withstood his best engines, and plague and the damp cold of winter devastated his armies encamped around them.

The political horizon was not, indeed, so fair for the Emperor as in the early days of his reign. Germany seethed with plots in her master’s absence, and Frederick had good reason to suspect that Henry the Lion was their chief author, the more that he had sulkily refused to share in this last Italian campaign. Worst of all was the news that Alexander III, having negotiated alliances with the Kings of France and England, had returned to Italy and was busy stirring up any possible seeds of revolt against Frederick, whom he had excommunicated.

In the year 1176, at Legnano, fifteen miles from Milan, the armies of the League and Empire met in decisive battle, Barbarossa nothing doubting of his success against mere armed citizens; but the spirit of the men of Crema survived in the ‘Company of Death’, a bodyguard of Milanese knights sworn to protect their carroccio, or sacred cart, or else to fall beside it. Upon the carroccio was raised a figure of Christ with arms outstretched, beneath his feet an altar, while from a lofty pole hung the banner of St. Ambrose, patron saint of Milan.

When the battle opened the first terrific onslaught of German cavalry broke the Milanese lines; but the Company of Death, reckless in their resolve, rallied the waverers and turned defence into attack. In the ensuing struggle the Emperor was unhorsed, and, as the rumour spread through the ranks that he had been killed, the Germans broke, and their retreat became a wild, unreasoning rout that bore their commander back on its tide, unable to stem the current, scarcely able to save himself.

Such was the battle of Legnano, worthy to be remembered not as an isolated twelfth-century victory of one set of forces against another, but as one of the first very definite advances in the great campaign for liberty that is still the battle of the world. At Venice in the following year the Hohenstaufen acknowledged his defeat and was reconciled to the Church; while by the ‘Perpetual Peace of Constance’ signed in 1183 he granted to the communes of North Italy ‘all the royal rights (regalia) which they had ever had or at the moment enjoyed’.

Such rights—coinage, the election of officials and judges, the power to raise and control armies, to impose and exact taxes—are the pillars on which democracy must support her house of freedom. Yet since ‘freedom’ to the mediaeval mind too often implied the right to oppress some one else or maintain a state of anarchy, too much stress must not be laid on the immediate gains. North Italy in the coming centuries was to fall again under foreign rule, her ‘communes’ to abuse and betray the rights for which the Company of Death had risked their lives: yet, in spite of this taint of ignorance and treachery, the victory of Legnano had won for Europe something infinitely precious, the knowledge that tyrants could be overthrown by the popular will and feudal armies discomfited by citizen levies.

Barbarossa returned to Germany to vent his rage on Henry the Lion, to whose refusal to accompany him to Italy he considered his defeat largely due. Strong in the support of the Church, to which he was now reconciled, he summoned his cousin to appear before an imperial Diet and make answer to the charge of having confiscated ecclesiastical lands and revenues for his own use. Henry merely replied to this mandate by setting fire to Church property in Saxony, and in his absence the ban of outlawry was passed against him by the Diet. Here again was the old ‘Waiblingen’ and ‘Welf’ feud bursting into flame, like a fire that has been but half-suppressed, and cousinship went to the wall. Henry the Welf was a son-in-law of Henry II of England and had made allies of Philip Augustus and the King of Denmark: his Duchy of Bavaria in the south and of Saxony in the north covered a third of German territory: he had been winning military laurels in a struggle against the Slavs, while Frederick had been losing Lombardy. Thus he pitted himself against the Emperor, unmindful that even in Germany the hands of the political clock were moving forward and feudalism slowly giving up its dominion.

To the dawning sense of German nationality Barbarossa was something more than first among his barons, he was a king supported by the Church, and Bavarians and Saxons came reluctantly to the rebel banner; while, as the campaign developed, the other princes saw their fellow vassal beaten and despoiled of his lands and driven into exile without raising a finger to help him.

Frederick allowed Henry the Lion to keep his Brunswick estates, but Saxony and Bavaria he divided up amongst minor vassals, in order to avoid the risk of another powerful rival. Master of Germany not merely in name but in power, he and his successors could have built up a strong monarchy, as Philip II and the House of Capet were to do in France, had not the siren voice of Italy called them to wreck on her shifting policies.

Hitherto we have spoken chiefly of North Italy; but Frederick I bound Germany to her southern neighbours by fresh ties when he married his eldest son Henry in 1187 to Constance, heiress of the Norman kingdom of Naples and Sicily. By this alliance he hoped to establish a permanent Hohenstaufen counterpoise in the south to the alliance of the Pope and the Guelf towns in the north. Triumphant over the wrathful but helpless Roman See, he felt himself an emperor indeed, and having crowned his son Henry as ‘Caesar’, in imitation of classic times, he rode away to the Third Crusade, still lusting after adventure and glory.

The news of his death in Asia Minor18 swept Germany with sadness and pride. Like all his house, he had been cruel and hard; but vices like these seemed to weigh little to the mediaeval mind against the peace and prosperity enjoyed under his rule. Legends grew about his name, and the peasants whispered that he had not died but slept beneath the sandstone rocks, and would awake again when his people were in danger to be their leader and protector.

Henry VI, who succeeded Frederick in the Empire, succeeded also to his dreams and the pitfalls that they inspired. One of his earliest struggles had been the finally successful attempt to secure Sicily against the claims of Count Tancred, an illegitimate grandson of the last ruler. Great were the sufferings of the unhappy Sicilians who had adopted the Norman’s cause; for Henry, having bribed or coerced the Pope and North Italy into a temporary alliance, exacted a bitter vengeance. Tancred’s youthful son, blinded and mutilated, was sent with his mother to an Alpine prison to end his days, while in the dungeons of Palermo and Apulia torture and starvation brought to his followers death as a blessed relief from pain.

Queen Constance, who had been powerless to check these atrocities, turned against her husband in loathing: the Pope excommunicated their author; but Henry VI laughed contemptuously at both. It was his threefold ambition: first, to make the imperial crown not elective but hereditary in the House of Hohenstaufen; next, to tempt the German princes into accepting this proposition by the incorporation of Naples and Sicily as a province of the Empire; and thirdly, to rule all his dominions from his southern kingdom, with the Pope at Rome, as in the days of Otto the Great, the chief bishop in his empire.

Strong-willed, persistent, resourceful, with the imagination that sees visions, and the practical brain of a man of business who can realize them, Henry VI, had he lived longer, might have gained at least a temporary recognition of his schemes; but in 1197 he died at the age of thirty-two, leaving a son not yet three years old as the heir of Hohenstaufen ambitions. Twelve months later died also Queen Constance, having reversed as much as she could during her short widowhood of her hated husband’s German policy, and having bequeathed the little King of Naples to the guardianship of the greatest of mediaeval Popes and the champion of the Guelfs, Innocent III.

At the coronation of Innocent III the officiating priest had used these words: ‘Take the tiara and know that thou art the father of princes and kings, the ruler of the world, the Vicar on earth of our Saviour Jesus Christ.’ To Lothario di Conti this utterance was but the confirmation of his own beliefs, as unshakable as those of Hildebrand, as wide in their scope as the imperialism of Frederick Barbarossa or Henry VI. ‘The Lord Jesus Christ,’ he declared, ‘has set up one ruler over all things as His Universal Vicar, and as all things in Heaven, Earth, and Hell bow the knee to Christ, so should all obey Christ’s Vicar that there be one flock and one shepherd.’ Again: ‘Princes have power on earth, priests have also power in Heaven.’

In illustration of these views he likened the Papacy to the sun, the Empire to the lesser light of the moon, and recalled how Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane gave to St. Peter two swords. By these, he explained, were meant temporal and spiritual power, and emperors who claimed to exercise the former could only do so by the gracious consent of St. Peter’s successors, since ‘the Lord gave Peter the rule not only of the universal Church but also the rule of the whole world’.

Gregory VII had made men wonder in the triumph of Canossa whether such an ideal of the Papacy could ever be realized; but as if in proof he had been hunted from Rome and died in exile. It was left to Innocent III to exhibit the partial fulfilment, at any rate, of all that his predecessor had dreamed. In character no saintly Bernard of Clairvaux, but a clear-brained practical statesman, he set before himself the vision of a kingdom of God on earth after the pattern of earthly kingdoms; and to this end, that he sincerely believed carried with it the blessing of God for the perfecting of mankind, he used every weapon in his armoury.

Sometimes his ambitions failed, as when, in a real glow of enthusiasm, he preached the Fourth Crusade—an expedition that ended in Venice, who had promised the necessary ships, diverting the crusaders to storm her a coveted port on the Dalmatian coast, and afterwards to sack and burn Constantinople in the mingled interests of commerce and pillage. His anger at the news that the remonstrances of his legates had been ignored could hardly at first be extinguished. Not thus had been his plan of winning Eastern Christendom to the Catholic Faith and of destroying the infidel; for the Latin Empire of Constantinople, set up by the victorious crusaders, was obviously too weak to maintain for long its tyranny over hostile Greeks, or to serve as an effective barrier against the Turks. Statesmanship, however, prompted him to reap what immediate harvest he could from the blunders of his faithless sons; and he accepted the submission of the Church in Constantinople as a debt long owing to the Holy See.

The Fourth Crusade, in spite of the extension of Rome’s ecclesiastical influence, must be reckoned as one of Innocent’s failures. In the West, on the other hand, the atmosphere created by his personality and statecraft made the name of ‘The Lord Innocent’ one of weight and fear to his enemies, of rejoicing to his friends. When upholding Queen Ingeborg he had stood as a moral force, bending Philip Augustus to his will by his convinced determination; and this same tenacity of belief and purpose, added to the purity of his personal life and the charm of his manner, won him the affection of the Roman populace, usually so hostile to its Vicars.

Mediaeval popes were, as a rule, respected less in Italy than beyond the Alps, and least of all in their own capital, where too many spiritual gifts had been seen debased for material ends, and papal acts were often at variance with pious professions. During the pontificate of Innocent III, however, we find the ‘Prefect’, the imperial representative at Rome, accept investiture at his hands, the ‘Senator’, chief magistrate of the municipality, do him homage; and through this double influence his control became paramount over the city government.

In Naples and Sicily he was able to continue the policy of Constance, drive out rebellious German barons, struggle against the Saracens in Sicily, and develop the education of his ward, the young King of Naples, as the spiritual son who should one day do battle for his ideals. ‘God has not spared the rod,’ he wrote to Frederick II. ‘He has taken away your father and mother: yet he has given you a worthier father, His Vicar; and a better mother, the Church.’

In Lombardy, where the Guelfs naturally turned to him as their champion, the papal way was comparatively smooth, for the cruelty of Barbarossa and his son Henry VI had aroused hatred and suspicion on all sides. Thus Innocent found himself more nearly the master of Italy than any Pope before his time, and from Italy his patronage and alliances extended like a web all over Europe.

Philip Augustus of France, trying to ignore and defy him, found in the end the anger he aroused worth placating: John of England changed his petulant defiance into submission and an oath of homage: Portugal accepted him as her suzerain: rival kings of Hungary sought his arbitration: even distant Armenia sent ambassadors to ask his protection. His most impressive triumph, however, was secured in his dealings with the Empire.

Henry VI had wished, we have seen, to make the imperial crown hereditary; but no German prince would have been willing to accept the child he left as heir to his troubled fortunes. The choice of the electors therefore wavered between another Hohenstaufen, Philip of Suabia, brother of the late Emperor, and the Welf Otto, son of Henry the Lion. The votes were divided, and each claimant afterwards declared himself the legally elected emperor, one with the title Philip II, the other with that of Otto IV.

For ten long years Germany was devastated by their civil wars. Otto, as the Guelf representative, gained the support of Innocent the Great, to whom the claimants at one time appealed for arbitration; but Philip refused to submit to this judgement in favour of his rival, believing that he himself had behind him the majority of the German princes and of the official class.

‘Inasmuch,’ declared Innocent, ‘as our dearest son in Christ, Otto, is industrious, prudent, discreet, strong and constant, himself devoted to the Church ... we by the authority of St. Peter receive him as King and will in due course bestow on him the imperial crown.’

Here was papal triumph! Rome no longer patronized but patron, with Otto on his knees, gratefully promising submission and homage with every kind of ecclesiastical privilege, to complete the picture. Yet circumstances change traditions as well as people, and when the death of Philip of Suabia left him master of Germany, the Guelf Otto found his old ideals impracticable: he became a Ghibelline in policy, announced his imperial rights over Lombardy, even over some of the towns belonging to the Pope, while he loudly announced his intention of driving the young Hohenstaufen from Naples.

Innocent’s wrath at this volte-face was unbounded. Otto, no longer his ‘dearest son in Christ’, was now a perjurer and schismatic, whose excommunication and deposition were the immediate duty of Rome. Neither, however, was likely to be effective unless the Pope could provide Italy and Germany with a rival, whose dazzling claims, backed by papal support, would win him followers wherever he went. In this crisis Innocent found his champion in the Hohenstaufen prince denounced by Otto, a lad educated almost since infancy in the tenets and ambitions of the Catholic Church.

Frederick, King of Naples and Sicily, was an interesting development of hereditary tastes and the atmosphere in which he had been reared. To the southern blood that leaped in his veins he owed perhaps his hot passions, his sensuous appreciation of luxury and art, his almost Saracen contempt for women save as toys to amuse his leisure hours. From the Hohenstaufen he imbibed strength, ambition, and cruelty, from the Norman strain on his mother’s side his reckless daring and treachery. With the ordinary education of a prince of his day, Frederick’s qualities and vices might have merely produced a warrior king of rather exceptional ability; but thanks to the papal tutors provided by Innocent, the boy’s naturally quick brain and imagination were stirred by a course of studies far superior to what his lay contemporaries usually enjoyed, and he emerged in manhood with a real love of books and culture, and with an eager curiosity on such subjects as philosophy and natural history.

In the royal charter by which he founded the University of Naples Frederick expressed his intention that here ‘those within the Kingdom who had hunger for knowledge might find the food for which they were yearning’; and his court at Palermo, if from one aspect dissolute and luxurious, was also a centre for men of wit and knowledge against whose brains the King loved to test his own quips and theories.

When Frederick reached Rome, on Innocent’s hasty summons to unsheath the sword of the Hohenstaufen against Otto, much of his character was as yet a closed book even to himself. Impulsive and eager, like any ambitious youth of seventeen called to high adventure, and with a genuine respect for his guardian, he did not look far ahead; but kneeling at the Pope’s feet, pledged his homage and faith before he rode away northwards to win an empire. In Germany a considerable following awaited him, lifelong opponents of Otto on account of his Welf blood, and others who hated him for his churlish manners. Amongst them Frederick scattered lavishly some money he had borrowed from the Republic of Genoa, and this generosity, combined with his Hohenstaufen strength and daring, increased the happy reputation that papal legates had already established for him in many quarters.

In December 1212 he was crowned in Mainz. Civil war followed, embittered by papal and imperial leagues, but in 1214 Otto IV was decisively beaten at Bouvines in the struggle with Philip II of France that we have already described,19 and the tide which had been previously turning against him now swept away his few friends and last hopes. With the entry of his young rival into the Rhineland provinces the dual Empire ceased to exist, and Frederick was crowned in Aachen, the old capital of Charlemagne.

Innocent III had now reached the summit of his power, for his pupil and protÉgÉ sat on the throne of Rome’s imperial rival. In the same year he called a Council to the Lateran Palace, the fourth gathering of its kind, to consider the two objects dearest to his heart, ‘the deliverance of the Holy Land and the reform of the Church Universal’. Crusading zeal, however, he could not rouse again: to cleanse and spiritualize the life of the Church in the thirteenth century was to prove a task beyond men of finer fibre than Innocent: but, as an illustration of his immense influence over Europe, the Fourth Lateran Council with its dense submissive crowds, representative of every land and class, was a fitting end to his pontificate.

In the year 1216 Innocent III died—the most powerful of all Popes, a striking personality whose life by kindly fate did not outlast his glory. In estimating Innocent’s ability as a statesman there stands one blot against his record in the clear light shed by after-events, namely, the short-sighted policy that once again united the Kingdom of Naples to the Empire, and laid the Papacy between the upper millstone of Lombardy and the nether millstone of southern Italy. Excuse may be found in Innocent’s desperate need of a champion with Otto IV threatening his papal heritage, added to his belief in the promises of the young Hohenstaufen to remain his faithful vassal. He also tried to safeguard the future by making Frederick publicly declare that he would bequeath Naples to a son who would not stand for election to the Empire; but in trusting the word of the young Emperor he had sown a wind from which his successors were to reap a whirlwind.

The new Emperor was just twenty years old when Innocent died. Either to please his guardian, or moved by a momentary religious impulse, he had taken the Cross immediately after his entry into Aachen; but the years passed and he showed himself in no haste to fulfil the vow. Much of his time was spent in his loved southern kingdom, where he completed Innocent’s work of reducing to submission the Saracen population that had remained in Sicily since the Mahometan conquest.20 As infidels the Papacy had regarded these Arabs with special hatred; but Frederick, once assured that they were so weak that they would be in future dependent on his favour, began protecting instead of persecuting them. He also encouraged their silk industry by building them a town, Lucera, on the Neapolitan coast, where they could pursue it undisturbed; while he enrolled large numbers of Arab warriors in his army, and used them to enforce his will on the feudal aristocracy, descendants of the Norman adventurers of the eleventh century.

So successful was he in playing off one section of his subjects against another, opposing or aiding the different classes as policy dictated, that he soon reigned as an autocrat in Naples. Many of the nobles’ strongholds were levelled with the dust: their claim to wage private war was forbidden on pain of death: cases were taken away from their law-courts and those of the feudal bishops to be decided by royal justices: towns were deprived of their freedom to elect their own magistrates, while crown officials sent from Palermo administered the laws, and imposed and collected taxes.

On the whole these changes were beneficial, for private privileges had been greatly abused in Naples, and Frederick, like Philip Augustus or the Angevin Henry II, had the instinct and ability to govern well when he chose. Nevertheless the subjugation of ‘the Kingdom’, as Naples was usually called in Italy, was of course received with loud outcries of anger by Neapolitan barons and churchmen, who hastened to inform the Holy See that their ruler loved infidels better than Christians and kept an eastern harem at Palermo.

Honorius III, the new Pope, accepted such reports and scandals with dismay. He had himself noted uneasily Frederick’s absorption in Italian affairs and frequently reminded him of his crusading vow. Being gentle and slow to commit himself to any decided step however, it was not till the Hohenstaufen deliberately broke his promise to Innocent III, and had his eldest son Henry crowned King of the Romans as well as King of Naples, thus acknowledging him as his heir in both Germany and Italy, that Honorius’s wrath flamed into a threat of excommunication. For a time it spread no farther, since Frederick was lavish in explanations and in promises of friendship that he had no intention of fulfilling, while the old Pope chose to believe him rather than risk an actual conflagration. At last, however, the patient Honorius died.

Gregory IX, the new Pope, was of the family of Innocent, and shared to the full his views of the world-wide supremacy of the Church. An old man of austere life and feverish energy, he regarded Frederick as a monster of ingratitude and became almost hysterical and quite unreasonable in his efforts to humble him. Goaded by his constant reproaches and threats, the Emperor began to make leisurely preparations at Brindisi for his crusade; but when he at last started, an epidemic of fever, to which he himself fell a victim, forced him to put back to port. Gregory, refusing to believe in this illness as anything more than an excuse for delay, at once excommunicated him; and then, though Frederick set sail as soon as he was well enough, repeated the ban, giving as his reason that the Emperor had not waited to receive his pardon for the first offence like an obedient son of the Church.

A crusader excommunicated by the Head of Christendom first for not fulfilling his vow and then for fulfilling it! This was a degrading and ridiculous sight; and Frederick, now definitely hostile to Rome, continued on his way, determined with obstinate pride that, if not for the Catholic Faith, then for his own glory, he would carry out his purpose. The Templars refused him support: the Christians still left in the neighbourhood of Acre helped him half-heartedly or stood aloof, frightened by the warnings of their priests; but Frederick achieved more without the Pope’s aid than other crusaders had done of late years with his blessing. By force of arms, and still more by skilful negotiations, he obtained from the Sultan possession of Jerusalem, and entering in triumph placed on his head the crown of the Latin kings.

His vow fulfilled, he sailed for Sicily, and the Pope, whose troops in Frederick’s absence had been harrying ‘the Kingdom’, hastily patched up a peace at San Germano. ‘I will remember the past no more,’ cried Frederick, but anger burned within him at papal hostility. ‘The Emperor has come to me with the zeal of a devoted son,’ said Gregory, but there was no trust in his heart that corresponded to his words.

A Hohenstaufen, who had taken Jerusalem unaided, supreme in Naples, supreme also in Germany, stretching out his imperial sceptre over Lombardy! What Pope, who believed that the future of the Church rested on the temporal independence of Rome, could sleep tranquilly in his bed with such a vision?

It is not possible to describe here in any detail the renewed war between Empire and Papacy that followed the inevitable breakdown of the treaty of San Germano. Very bitter was the spirit in which it was waged on both sides. Frederick, whatever his intentions, could not forget that it was the Father of Christendom who had tried to ruin his crusade. The remembrance did not so much shake his faith as wake in him an exasperated sense of injustice that rendered him deaf to those who counselled compromise. Unable to rid himself wholly of the fear of papal censure, he yet saw clearly enough that the sin for which Popes relentlessly pursued him was not his cruelty, nor profligacy, nor even his toleration of Saracens, but the fact that he was King of Naples as well as Holy Roman Emperor.

To a man of Frederick’s haughty temperament there was but one absolution he could win for this crime, so to master Rome that he could squeeze her judgements to his fancy like a sponge between his strong fingers. ‘Italy is my heritage,’ he wrote to the Pope, ‘and all the world knows it.’

In his passionate determination to obtain this heritage statesmanship was thrown to the winds. He had planned a strong monarchy in Naples, but in Germany he undermined the foundations of royal authority that Barbarossa and Henry VI had begun to lay. ‘Let every Prince’, he declared, ‘enjoy in peace, according to the improved custom of his land, his immunities, jurisdictions, counties and hundreds, both those which belong to him in full right, and those which have been granted out to him in fief.’

The Italian Hohenstaufen only sought from his northern kingdom, whose good government he thus carelessly sacrificed to feudal anarchy, sufficient money to pay for his campaigns beyond the Alps and leisure to pursue them. In the words of a modern historian, ‘he bartered his German kingship for an immediate triumph over his hated foe.’

At first victory rewarded his energy and skill. His hereditary enemy, the ‘Lombard League’, had tampered with the loyalty of his eldest son, Henry, King of the Romans, whom he had left to rule in Germany: but Frederick discovered the plot in time and deposed and imprisoned the culprit. In despair at the prospect of lifelong imprisonment held out to him, the young Henry flung himself to his death down a steep mountain-side; and Conrad, his younger brother, a boy of eight, was crowned in his stead.

In North Italy Frederick pursued the policy not so much of trampling down resistance with his German levies, like his grandfather Barbarossa, as of employing Italian nobles of the Ghibelline party, whom he supported and financed that they might fight his battles and make his wrath terrible in the popular hearing. Such were Eccelin de Romano and his brother Alberigo, lords of Verona and Vicenza, whose tyranny and cruelties seemed abnormal even in their day.

‘The Devil’s own Servant’ Eccelin is called by a contemporary, who describes how he slaughtered in cold blood eleven thousand prisoners.

‘I believe, in truth, no such wicked man has been from the beginning of the world unto our own days: for all men trembled at him as a rush quivers in the water ... he who lived to-day was not sure of the morrow, the father would seek out and slay his son, and the son his father or any of his kinsfolk to please this man.’

Alberigo ‘hanged twenty-five of the greatest men of Treviso who had in no wise offended or harmed him’; and as the prisoners struggled in their death agonies he thrust among their feet their wives, daughters, and sisters, whom he afterwards turned adrift half-naked to seek protection where they might.

Revenge when this ‘Limb of Satan’ fell into the hands of his enemies was of a brutality to match; for Alberigo and his young sons were torn in pieces by an infuriated mob, his wife and daughters burned alive, ‘though they were noble maidens and the fairest in the world and guiltless.’

Passions ran too deep between Guelf and Ghibelline to distinguish innocency, or to spare youth or sex. Cruelty, the most despicable and infectious of vices, was the very atmosphere of the thirteenth century, desecrating what has been described from another aspect as ‘an age of high ideals and heroic lives’.

It is remarked with some surprise by contemporaries that Frederick II could pardon a joke at his own expense; but on the other hand we read of his cutting off the thumb of a notary who had misspelt his name, and callously ordering one of his servants, by way of amusement, to dive and dive again into the sea after a golden cup, until from sheer exhaustion he reappeared no more.

At Cortenuova the Lombard League was decisively beaten by the imperial forces, the carroccio of Milan seized and burned. Frederick, flushed with success, now declared that not only North but also Middle Italy was subject to his allegiance, and replied to a new excommunication by advancing into Romagna and besieging some of the papal towns. Gregory, worn out by grief and fury, died as his enemy approached the gates of Rome: and his immediate successor, unnerved by excitement, followed him to the grave before the cardinals who had elected him could proceed to his consecration.

Innocent IV, who now ascended the papal throne, had of old shown some sympathy to the imperial cause; but Frederick, when he heard of his election, is reported to have said, ‘I have lost a friend, for no Pope can be a Ghibelline.’ With the example of Otto IV in his mind he should have added that no Emperor could remain a Guelf.

Frederick had indeed gained an inveterate enemy, more dangerous than Gregory IX, because more politic and discreet. From Lyons, whither he had fled, Innocent IV maintained unflinchingly the claims he could no longer set forth in Rome, declaring the victorious Emperor excommunicate and deposed. ‘Has the Pope deposed me?’ asked Frederick scornfully, when the news came. ‘Bring me my crowns that I may see what he has taken away!’

One after another he placed on his head the seven crowns his attendants brought him, the royal crown of Germany and imperial diadem of Rome, the iron circlet of Lombardy, the crowns of Jerusalem, of Burgundy, of Sardinia, and of Sicily and Naples. ‘See!’ he said, ‘Are they not all mine still? and none shall take them from me without a struggle.’

So the hideous war between Welf and Waiblingen, between Guelf and Ghibelline continued, and Germany and Italy were deluged with blood and flames. ‘After the Emperor Frederick was put under the ban,’ says a German chronicler, ‘the robbers rejoiced over the spoils. Then were the ploughshares beaten into swords and reaping-hooks into lances. No one went anywhere without flint and steel to set on fire whatever he could kindle.’

The ebb from the high-water mark of the Emperor’s fortunes was marked by the revolt and successful resistance of the Guelf city of Parma to the imperial forces—a defeat Frederick might have wiped out in fresh victory had not his own health begun to fail. In 1250 he died, still excommunicate, snatched away to hell, according to his enemies, not dead, according to many who from love or hate believed his personality of more than human endurance.

Yet Frederick, whether for good or ill, had perished, and with him his imperial ambitions. Popes might tremble at other nightmares, but the supremacy of the Holy Roman Empire over Italy would no more haunt their dreams for many years. Naples also, to whose conquest and government he had devoted the best of his brain and judgement, was torn from his heirs and presented by his papal enemy to the French House of Anjou. Struggling against these usurpers the last of the royal line of Hohenstaufen, Conradin, son of Conrad, a lad of fifteen, gallant and reckless as his grandfather, was captured in battle and beheaded.

Frederick had destroyed in Germany and built on sand elsewhere; and of all his conquests and achievements only their memory was to dazzle after-generations. Stupor et Gloria Mundi he was called by those who knew him, and in spite of his ultimate failure and his vices he still remains a ‘wonder of the world’, set above enemies and friends by his personality, the glory of his courage, his audacity, and his strength of purpose.

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368–73.