Absolute Monarchs (23 page)

His way north, however, was by no means clear. On July 28 he was given a warm welcome in Pavia, but the Lombard plain was constantly patrolled by bands of pro-Guelf Milanese, and it was one of these bands that surprised the imperial party as they were leaving the town the next morning. Frederick was lucky indeed to be able to leap onto one of the horses and, having forded the Lambro River bareback, to make his way to friendly Cremona. By the beginning of autumn he was safely in Germany, where, in December, he was crowned king. It was his first step toward the Empire of the West.

From Innocent’s point of view, Frederick had begun promisingly enough. In the summer of 1213 he guaranteed, in what was known as the Golden Bull of Eger, free elections of all bishops and abbots in his realms, and allowed, in cases of religious litigation, the right of appeal to the Holy See, which had been previously denied in Sicily. It was inevitable that imperial-papal relations should sooner or later turn sour—they always did—but for the remaining three years of Innocent’s life he had good reason to congratulate himself on the success of his policy toward the empire.

OTTO OF BRUNSWICK
had done enough to blacken himself in the pope’s eyes, and his image was not improved by the fact that he was the nephew of King John of England. Already in 1208, before Otto had fallen from grace and when John had refused to recognize the pope’s nominee (and old personal friend) Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, Innocent had laid the whole kingdom under an interdict. John had retaliated by seizing all clerical property and ordering the arrests of all the mistresses of priests and clerks—though he soon allowed them to buy back their freedom. Negotiations had begun between king and pope, but John continued as refractory as ever, and in 1209 Innocent excommunicated him—at which nearly all the English bishops and abbots went into voluntary exile. Now, the ban of the Church had in the past been known to bring kings and even emperors to their knees—we have only to think of Henry IV at Canossa; the difficulty was that when sees and abbacies became vacant, their revenue reverted to the Crown. By 1211 the king’s profits from seven of one and seventeen of the other were such that he seemed to be actually enjoying his excommunication and in no hurry to have it lifted.

A year later, however, by now some £100,000 the richer, John determined to win back extensive territories in France—Normandy, Anjou, Maine, and parts of Poitou—that he had lost to Philip Augustus early in his reign. This would clearly involve a massive continental campaign, and such a campaign, he knew, would be impossible while he was an excommunicate. And so, in November 1212, he agreed to accept Langton. He need not have bothered; the ensuing campaign was a disaster. His chief ally was his nephew, the Duke of Brunswick, whom he had long supported and largely financed; there were also units from the Low Countries commanded by the Count of Flanders, making a total of perhaps 15,000 men in all. Undaunted, the 10,000-strong army of Philip Augustus, supported only by Frederick of Sicily, rode out to meet the invaders on July 27, 1214, at Bouvines, between Lille and Tournai—and won a decisive victory. The Count of Flanders was taken prisoner, while Otto fled back to Brunswick. As for John himself, Bouvines marked the end of his coalition and of all his continental ambitions. At home, his position was now so weak that he was obliged to sign the Magna Carta the following year.

Such is the reputation of this most celebrated of all historic documents that it comes as something of a surprise to learn that the more intransigent barons almost immediately rendered it unworkable. Far from ensuring a healthier relationship between themselves and the monarchy, it led to a civil war which soon became an international one when Prince Louis of France (later Louis VIII) invaded England at the barons’ invitation. Pope Innocent, who saw it not as an assertion of the law against tyranny but as an attempt at feudal insurrection against royal authority, was predictably furious—and at John’s request declared it null and void on the grounds that it had been imposed upon the king against his will.

By this time, however, the pope was immersed in preparations for the climax of his pontificate, and indeed of all medieval papal legislation, the Fourth Lateran Council, which opened in November 1215. Present were more than four hundred bishops and archbishops, including the Latin patriarchs of Constantinople and Jerusalem and representatives of those in Alexandria and Antioch. Among the rest were more than eight hundred abbots and priors, together with the envoys of Frederick of Sicily (now King of the Germans), the Latin Emperor of Constantinople, and the kings of England, France, Aragon, Sicily, Hungary, Cyprus, and Jerusalem. Conspicuous by their absence were representatives of the Greek Church in the East; the horrors of the Fourth Crusade were still too fresh in their minds.

The Council concerned itself with two problems in particular: the occupation by the Infidel of the Holy Places and the recrudescence of heresy. The starting date of the proposed new Crusade was fixed for June 1, 1217, and a tax of one-fortieth of their income was imposed on all the clergy, with pope and cardinals paying one-tenth; but Innocent’s death on July 16, 1216, deprived the preparations of their momentum and the project was of necessity postponed. Where heresy was concerned, it is noteworthy that the first speaker after the pope himself was the Bishop of Agde, who discussed the Albigensian problem at considerable length. Later the Catharist doctrine was formally condemned, and Crusading privileges were extended to all those who took part in campaigns against it.

Sometime during the early sessions of the Council, St. Dominic arrived in Rome to request from Pope Innocent the official confirmation of his order; but there were various problems to be solved, and it was Innocent’s successor, Honorius III, who finally gave the Dominicans his blessing. They were to prove as successful as the Franciscans; by the time of Dominic’s death in 1221, six priories had been founded in Lombardy, four in Provence, four in France, three each in Tuscany and Rome, and two in Spain.

Altogether, the Council promulgated seventy-one canons, or decrees, covering a remarkably wide field. The very first defined the doctrine of transubstantiation; the thirteenth forbade the foundation of any new religious orders (St. Dominic got over that one by adopting the Rule of St. Augustine); the eighteenth abolished the use of hot water and red-hot iron in trials by ordeal; the twenty-first insisted on confession and Communion for all Catholics at least once a year at Easter; the thirty-first prohibited illegitimate sons of the clergy from inheriting their fathers’ churches. The closing canons were directed against the Jews: no Christian was to have commerce with Jewish usurers; both Jews and Muslims were to wear distinctive dress; no Jew might appear in public during Holy Week, nor might he exercise any public function involving power over Christians.

Those last provisions seem shocking to us today; they would not have done so in the early thirteenth century. Innocent and his colleagues were children of their time; they discriminated against the Jews, but it was their fellow Christians whom they persecuted. Before condemning them too harshly we should perhaps consider the position of the Jews in medieval England, remembering how before the end of the century, after innumerable arrests and executions, King Edward I was to banish the entire Jewish community from English soil.

Quite apart from the decrees of the Council, Innocent was responsible for a huge corpus of legislation; he left over six thousand letters, many of which were decretals of canon law, issuing his first collection of them as early as 1210 and entrusting it to the University of Bologna. His reign marks the apex of the temporal power of the medieval Papacy, but none could have foreseen the suddenness with which it came to an end. In July 1216 the pope left Rome for the North, hoping to settle the age-old quarrel between Genoa and Pisa so that the two great maritime republics could collaborate in the projected Crusade. Some years before, he had suffered a severe attack of malaria which had brought him to the edge of the grave; he had gotten no further than Perugia when the same disease struck again. A day or two later he was dead. He was fifty-five.

The following night, the house in which he had died was broken into and his body stolen. It was found the next day, stripped naked and rapidly decomposing in the summer heat, and was hastily buried in the Cathedral of San Lorenzo.
⁴
At some later date, we are told, the bones of one of the greatest—if not the greatest—of medieval popes were heedlessly thrown, together with those of Urban IV and Martin IV, into a box which was stored in a cupboard in the sacristy of the new cathedral. At the end of the nineteenth century Leo XIII ordered that they be brought back to the Lateran; and so they were finally returned to Rome, in the suitcase of a priest, by rail.

1.
Concerning the Contempt of the World, or the Wretchedness of Man’s Lot.

2.
The term “mendicant order” is in fact not strictly accurate where the Franciscans are concerned, St. Francis having recommended that they live as far as possible by manual labor, begging only as a last resort.

3.
In 1209, at the age of fourteen, Frederick had married Constance, daughter of Alfonso II of Aragon, a thirty-year-old widow.

4.
According at least to his biographer Helene Tillman, to whom I am indebted for this entire paragraph. She quotes L. Bonazzi,
Storia di Perugia dalle origini al 1860
, vol. 1 (1865). I have not traced this book, nor, more surprisingly, have I traced the cathedral, which appears in none of the guidebooks to the city.

CHAPTER XIV

The End of the Hohenstaufen

T
wo days after Pope Innocent’s death in Perugia, the cardinals met in that same city and elected the elderly and already frail Cardinal Cencio Savelli, who took the name of Honorius III. He came from an aristocratic Roman family and had already given many years’ service in the Curia; in 1197 he had even served briefly as tutor to Frederick of Sicily, though as Frederick was not yet three years old he is unlikely to have made much impression.

From the day of his installation, Honorius saw as his first duty the continuation of his predecessor’s plans for a Crusade. To achieve the political unity necessary for its success, he worked hard on the diplomatic front, arbitrating between the kings of France and Aragon, persuading Philip Augustus to abandon his invasion of England, helping John’s son Henry succeed to the throne after his father’s death in 1216. Alas, the Fifth Crusade proved as ill starred as the Second, Third, and Fourth. It had as its object the capture of the Egyptian city of Damietta, which it was hoped to exchange later for Jerusalem. A fleet had set out in 1218, initially under the leadership of John of Brienne, titular King of Jerusalem, but on the arrival, four months late, of the papal contingent under the Spanish Cardinal Pelagius of Santa Lucia, the cardinal had insisted on assuming the overall command.

After Damietta had endured a seventeen-month siege, the Egyptian Sultan Malik al-Kamil in desperation offered the whole Kingdom of Jerusalem west of the Jordan in return for the Crusaders’ departure; idiotically, however, the offer was refused by Pelagius, who was determined to shed as much blood as possible, conquering Cairo and indeed the whole of Egypt. Damietta duly fell on November 5, 1219, but the war dragged on for nearly two more years and would have continued even longer had not the Crusading army been trapped by the Nile floods, from which it extricated itself only by surrender. The Crusade, so nearly a success, had been yet another disaster, thanks entirely to the pigheadedness of its leader.
¹

Pope Honorius, on the other hand, was inclined to lay the blame elsewhere—on the massive shoulders of the man who was now the Emperor Frederick II. As early as 1214, Frederick had announced his intention of taking the Cross. Why he did so remains a mystery. He had never been particularly pious; moreover, he had been brought up by Muslim scientists and scholars, whose language he spoke perfectly and whose religion he deeply respected. Nor at this time was he under pressure from the pope or anyone else. Indeed, there is plenty of reason to believe that he later regretted his promise; he certainly showed no eagerness to fulfill it, remaining in Germany until 1220 and allowing the Fifth Crusade to depart without him. Had he accompanied it as its leader, the pope believed—probably rightly—that there would have been a very different outcome; and it was at least to some extent to hasten him on his way that Honorius had crowned him emperor when he passed through Rome on his journey back to Sicily.

For the failure of the Fifth Crusade had served only to increase the pope’s determination to launch a Sixth, to be led by the emperor himself. Frederick remained markedly unenthusiastic, but there was now a further complication to be considered. The Empress Constance had died in 1222, and it had recently been proposed that Frederick should marry the twelve-year-old Yolande de Brienne, the hereditary Queen of Jerusalem. Her title came from her mother, the granddaughter of King Amalric I; she, at the age of seventeen, had married the sexagenarian John of Brienne, who had promptly assumed the title of king. After his wife’s early death a year or two later his claim to it was clearly questionable, but he had continued to govern the country as regent for his little daughter Yolande—and, as we have seen, had initially led the recent Crusade.

Frederick had not at first been greatly attracted by the proposal. Yolande was penniless and little more than a child; he was more than twice her age. As for her title, few were emptier; Jerusalem had now been in Saracen hands for half a century. On the other hand, the kingship, purely titular as it might be, would greatly strengthen his claim to the city when he eventually left on his long-postponed Crusade. And so, after some deliberation, he agreed to the match. He agreed, too, in the course of further discussions with Honorius, that the Crusade—to which the marriage was indissolubly linked—would set out on Ascension Day, May 20, 1227. Any further delay, Honorius made clear, would result in his excommunication.

In August 1225 fourteen galleys of the imperial fleet arrived at Acre, the last surviving outpost of Crusader Outremer,
²
to conduct Yolande to Sicily. Even before her departure she had been wedded to the emperor by proxy; on her arrival at Tyre, being now deemed to have come of age, she received her coronation as Queen of Jerusalem. Only then did she embark on the journey which was to take her to a new life, accompanied by a suite which included a female cousin several years her senior. Frederick, together with her father, was awaiting her at Brindisi, where a second marriage took place in the cathedral on November 9. It was, alas, ill fated. On the following day the emperor left the city with his bride and without previously warning his father-in-law; by the time John caught up with them, he was informed by his tearful daughter that her husband had already seduced her cousin. When Frederick and Yolande reached Palermo, the poor girl was immediately packed off to the palace harem. Her father, meanwhile, had been coldly informed that he was no longer regent. Still less did he have any further right to the title of king.

Whether John’s fury was principally due to the emperor’s treatment of his daughter or to the loss of his titular kingdom is not clear; at any rate he went at once to Rome, where Honorius predictably took his side and refused to recognize Frederick’s assumption of the royal title. This could hardly have failed to exacerbate the strain in imperial-papal relations, already at an abysmal level owing to Frederick’s continued dilatoriness and his refusal to acknowledge the pope’s authority over North and Central Italy. The quarrel took a further downward plunge when Honorius died in 1227 and was succeeded by Cardinal Ugolino of Ostia, who took the name of Gregory IX. Already in his seventies, he started as he meant to go on. “Take heed,” he wrote to Frederick soon after his accession, “that you do not place your intellect, which you have in common with the angels, below your senses, which you have in common with brutes and plants.” To the emperor, whose debauches were rapidly becoming legendary, it was an effective shot across the bows.

By this time the Crusade was gathering its forces. A constant stream of young German knights was crossing the Alps and pouring down the pilgrim roads of Italy to join the emperor in Apulia, where the army was to take ship for the Holy Land. But then, in the savage heat of an Apulian August, an epidemic broke out. It may have been typhoid; it may have been cholera; but it swept relentlessly through the Crusader camps. Now Frederick himself succumbed; so too did the Landgrave of Thuringia, who had brought with him several hundred cavalry. The two sick men embarked nonetheless and sailed from Brindisi in September, but a day or two later the landgrave was dead and Frederick realized that he himself was too ill to continue. He sent the surviving Crusaders ahead with instructions to make what preparations they could; he himself would join them when sufficiently recovered, by May 1228 at the latest. Ambassadors were simultaneously dispatched to Rome, to explain the situation to the pope.

Gregory, however, refused to receive them. Instead, in a blistering encyclical, he accused the emperor of having blatantly disregarded his Crusading vows. Had he not, after repeated postponements, himself set a new date for his departure? Had he not agreed to his own excommunication if he did not fulfill his pledge? Had he not foreseen that, with thousands of soldiers and pilgrims crowded together in the summer heat, an epidemic was inevitable? Had he not therefore been responsible for that epidemic and for all the deaths that it had caused, including that of the landgrave? And who was to say that he had really contracted the disease anyway? Was this not just a further attempt to wriggle out of his obligations?
³
On September 29 he declared Frederick excommunicated.

In doing so, however, he created for himself a new problem. It was self-evident that excommunicates could not lead Crusades, and as the weeks passed it became increasingly clear that that was precisely what Frederick intended to do. Another awkward fact was also beginning to emerge: the pope had badly overplayed his hand. Frederick had replied with an open letter addressed to all those who had taken the Cross, explaining his position quietly and reasonably, appealing for understanding and conciliation—setting, in short, an example to the Holy Father of the tone which he would have been well advised to adopt himself. The letter had its effect. When, on Easter Sunday 1228, Pope Gregory launched into yet another furious sermon against the emperor, his Roman congregation rioted; hounded from the city, he was obliged to seek refuge in Viterbo. From there he continued his campaign, but whereas only a few months before he had been urgently calling upon Frederick to leave on the Crusade, he was now in the ludicrous position of preaching equally urgently against it, knowing as he did that were the emperor to return victorious, papal prestige would sustain a blow from which it would take long indeed to recover.

AT LAST, ON
Wednesday, June 28, 1228, Frederick II sailed from Brindisi with a fleet of about sixty ships, bound for Palestine. He was now fully restored to health, but his relations with Pope Gregory had not sustained a similar improvement; indeed, on discovering that he really was preparing for departure, the pope had fired off another excommunication on March 23. (Yet another was to follow on August 30.) Frederick, meanwhile, had once again become a father. Two months earlier, the sixteen-year-old Yolande had given birth to a boy, Conrad—only to die of puerperal fever shortly afterward.

After spending some months in Cyprus, the emperor landed in Tyre toward the end of 1228. Impressive detachments of Templars and Hospitalers were there to greet him, still further swelling the ranks of what was already a considerable army; but Frederick had no intention of fighting if his purposes could be achieved by peaceful diplomacy, as he had reason to think they might be. Some months before, the Sultan al-Kamil in Cairo, at loggerheads with his brother al-Mu’azzam, governor of Damascus, had secretly appealed to him: if he would drive al-Mu’azzam from Damascus, then he—al-Kamil—would be in a position to restore to him the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

In the interim, al-Mu’azzam had died—rather surprisingly, of natural causes—and it looked as though al-Kamil, who had come to claim what he conceived was his birthright, might now be rather less enthusiastic about the proposed alliance; but Frederick still had high hopes. An embassy was dispatched, pointing out that the emperor had come only on the sultan’s invitation, but that the world now knew that he was here; how, then, could he leave empty-handed? The resulting loss of prestige might well prove fatal, and al-Kamil would never be able to find himself another Christian ally. As for Jerusalem, it was nowadays a relatively insignificant city, defenseless and largely depopulated, even from the religious point of view far less important to Islam than it was to Christendom. Would its surrender not be a small price to pay for peaceful relations between Muslim and Christian—and, incidentally, for his own immediate departure?

There were no threats—none, at least, outwardly expressed. But the imperial army was on the spot, and its strength was considerable. The sultan was in an impossible position. The emperor was there on his very doorstep, waiting to collect what had been promised and unlikely to leave until he had gotten it. Meanwhile, the situation in Syria, where his attempts to capture Damascus were having no effect, was once again causing him increasing alarm. Perhaps an alliance might be no bad thing after all. And so the sultan capitulated, agreeing to a ten-year treaty—on certain conditions. First, Jerusalem must remain undefended. The Temple Mount, with the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque opposite it, could be visited by Christians but must remain in Muslim hands, together with Hebron. The Christians could have their other principal shrines in Bethlehem and Nazareth, on the understanding that they would be linked to the Christian cities of the coast only by a narrow corridor running through what would continue to be Muslim territory.

On Saturday, March 17, 1229, Frederick, still under sentence of excommunication, entered Jerusalem and formally took possession of the city. On the following day, in open defiance of the papal ban, he attended Mass in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, deliberately wearing his imperial crown. He had effectively achieved everything he had set out to achieve and had done so without the shedding of a drop of Christian or Muslim blood. In the Christian community a degree of rejoicing might have been expected; instead, the reaction was one of fury. Frederick, while still under the ban of the Church, had dared to set foot in the most sacred shrine of Christendom, which he had won with the collusion of the Sultan of Egypt. The Patriarch of Jerusalem,
⁴
who had studiously ignored the emperor ever since his arrival, now showed his displeasure—somewhat illogically, it must be said—by putting the entire city under an interdict. Church services were forbidden; pilgrims visiting the Holy Places could no longer count on the remission of their sins. The local barons, meanwhile, were outraged that they had not been consulted. How, they asked themselves, were they expected to retain all these territories that Frederick had so dubiously acquired once the imperial army returned to the West?