Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (15 page)

Frederick II is probably the most controversial of all emperors (crowned in 1220). The English chronicler Matthew Paris called him
Stupor Mundi
, or the ‘amazement of the world’. He was certainly astonishing. Intelligent, charming, ruthless and unpredictable, he often appeared to act on a whim. His supporters saw him as fulfilling a messianic mission, especially after his recovery of Jerusalem in 1229 (see
pp. 146–7
). His papal opponents called him the Beast of the Apocalypse and compared him to Nero in destroying the Empire. Later generations have shared this mix of awe and revulsion: hated by Luther, Frederick was celebrated by Nietzsche as a ‘free spirit’. The emperor had 19 children by 12 different women and deposed his son and designated heir. Frederick regarded himself as a true Christian, yet spoke some Arabic, tolerated Muslims, and had his own Saracen bodyguard. However, he was not a modern multiculturalist, nor as innovative as some biographers have claimed.
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Frederick reneged on his agreement with Pope Innocent as soon as he felt sufficiently secure in Germany. By 1220 it was obvious he had resumed his father’s programme of uniting Sicily and the Empire. The papacy reluctantly played along, hoping the emperor would lead a new crusade. Relations broke down, leading to Frederick’s excommunication in 1227, which had to be lifted after he recovered Jerusalem through bloodless negotiation. Problems resumed after 1236, leading to his renewed excommunication for alleged heresy three years later – this time permanently. The issues remained the same as those under the previous three emperors, but now the pope employed the new weapon of crusader indulgences to rally military assistance in addition to backing a series of German anti-kings from 1246. The situation returned to that under Barbarossa where neither side could gain a decisive preponderance, yet this time no one was in the mood to negotiate. Imperial defeats in Italy between 1246 and 1248 were reversed in later counter-attacks, and the situation remained open at Frederick II’s death in 1250. The Staufer failure was contingent, not structural (see
pp. 377–8
).

Frederick’s son Conrad IV and other relations rapidly lost control of Germany after 1250, in turn hastening their demise in Italy in the face of local revolts in Naples and papal support for Charles of Anjou, the
French king’s younger brother, whose conquest of Sicily was sanctioned as a crusade.
¹²⁷
The death of the last Staufer claimant in 1268 secured the papacy’s primary goal of preserving its suzerainty over Sicily and Naples whilst keeping these separate from the Empire. However, the failure of either pope or emperor to gain the upper hand in the prolonged war since 1236 increasingly encouraged contemporaries to regard both as merely ordinary monarchs.
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PAPACY AND EMPIRE FROM 1250

Empire and Papacy in the Age of the ‘Little Kings’

The period from Frederick II’s death in 1250 to Henry VII’s imperial coronation in 1312 was the longest without a crowned emperor in the Empire’s history. Without coronation journeys, there was also no royal presence in Italy. However, the imperial ideal remained potent, attracting the first ‘foreign’ candidates in what proved a second ‘double election’ in 1257 when both Alfonso X of Castile and Richard, earl of Cornwall, were elected German king. Between 1273 and 1313 the German kingdom was ruled by a succession of men who had only been counts prior to their election. All saw the imperial title as a means of asserting themselves over the more powerful dukes (see
pp. 377–96
). Imperial traditions remained strong. Rudolf I, Adolf of Nassau and Albert I were all buried in the imperial crypt in Speyer Cathedral next to the illustrious Salian emperors. Henry even had Adolf and Albert expressly moved there to convey a sense of legitimate continuity after a brief renewed civil war in 1298.

The papacy also remained interested in the Empire. Like their previous choices of protectors, the popes found that the Angevins (the Anjou family) quickly escaped their control as they added Sicily and Naples to their existing possessions in Provence. The revolt known as the Sicilian Vespers led to the loss of the island to the king of Aragon in 1282. This severed the link between Sicily and mainland Naples that had existed since the Norman conquest around 1070, and so released the papacy from the threat of encirclement.
¹²⁹
However, the Angevins remained powerful, even exercising a protectorate over the papacy for about twenty years after 1313. Additionally, the popes had to deal with
increasingly assertive western monarchs like the kings of France. Embarking on a prolonged series of wars with England, the French kings redirected annual fees paid by their clergy from the papacy to their own war chest. Faced with these problems, a strong but largely absent emperor again appeared an attractive option to the papacy.

Pope Gregory X urged the German electors not to repeat their double election of 1257 when Richard of Cornwall died in 1272. Three years later the pope also persuaded Alfonso of Castile to renounce the German royal title he had never actually exercised. The new king, Rudolf I, thrice planned to go to Rome for a prearranged coronation, only for other events to intervene.
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Meanwhile, French pressure on the papacy mounted, encouraging Clement V to welcome the arrival of Henry VII, who had been elected German king in November 1308.
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Henry’s arrival late in 1310 encouraged unrealistic expectations amongst those, like Dante, who identified themselves as Ghibellines and hoped Henry would restore order and end the violent factionalism raging in many Italian cities. All initially went well as Henry was crowned king of Italy in Milan in January 1311. However, the Italian cities were no longer accustomed to accommodating imperial expeditions, while the Angevins marched north from Naples to block any attempt to reassert imperial jurisdiction over southern Italy. Some cities paid Henry to go away, but others resisted, providing excuses for his largely mercenary army to repeat the ‘German fury’ of old. Henry’s brother Walrum was killed, while his wife died (of natural causes) and most of his troops went home. Delays meant that Henry missed the planned date of 2 February 1312 for his imperial coronation, which had been scheduled to coincide with the 350th anniversary of Otto I’s coronation. Roman resistance had to be overcome by a violent assault in which Archbishop Baldwin of Trier, the only senior German lord accompanying Henry, split the skull of a defender with his own sword (see
Plate 6
).

Clement had meanwhile decamped to Avignon, where the papacy was obliged by French pressure to remain until 1377. With St Peter’s still held by his opponents, Henry was forced to stage his imperial coronation (the first since 1220) in the Lateran palace on 29 June 1312. Only three cardinals officiated on Clement’s behalf, while Guelph crossbowmen fired at the imperial party in the banqueting hall afterwards.
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It was hardly an auspicious beginning. The end came soon.
Having failed to capture Florence, Henry caught malaria and died at Buonconvento, near Siena, on 24 August 1313.

Another double election to the German throne in 1314 saw Louis IV ‘the Bavarian’ pitted against Frederick ‘the Fair’ until the latter renounced his claim in 1325. Learning from Innocent III’s failure in 1198, Pope John XXII refrained from posing as arbiter and instead declared the throne vacant, establishing the new idea of
vacante imperio
to strengthen papal claims to exercise imperial prerogatives in the absence of an emperor.
¹³³
Louis’ determination to dispute this opened what proved to be the final round of old-style papal-imperial conflict. Louis appointed Count Berthold of Neuffen as his own imperial vicar in 1323 to exercise prerogatives in Italy, thereby directly challenging papal claims. Pope John responded with the full range of measures developed since 1073, but now underpinned by a much more substantial administration. Proceedings were opened at the papal court in Avignon, which predictably condemned Louis as a usurper, hence John’s reference to him as merely ‘the Bavarian’ to deny him legitimacy in Germany. Louis’ excommunication (1324) and a crusade (1327) followed as the dispute escalated.
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Unlike his predecessors, Louis enjoyed support from leading intellectuals who were alienated both by the papacy’s move to Avignon and by its condemnation of popular movements such as the Franciscan Spirituals, who took the vow of poverty literally. Those arguing for imperial supremacy as a way to a new order included Dante, William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua and Johannes of Jandun, but their writings were not widely disseminated for another century.
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In practice, Louis relied on traditional methods, forcing his way into Italy in 1327–8 aided by local supporters. His imperial coronation by two Italian bishops on 17 January 1328 was the first since 817 without either a pope or at least a papal legate officiating. Advised by his supporters, Louis cited Otto I’s example in order to depose John XXII on the grounds he had abandoned Rome and to install his own pope, creating the first schism since 1180. This had little effect given that John was safe under French protection in Avignon.

French involvement continued the trend present since at least the 1170s that papal-imperial disputes were open to external influence. France repeatedly hindered negotiations, because the dispute allowed it to prolong what Petrarch called the papacy’s ‘Babylonian Captivity’ in
Avignon. John’s imposition of the interdict suspending church services in Germany was widely resented and ignored, and cost him the moral high ground by appearing to punish ordinary Germans. Already in 1300, the leading German lords had rejected papal attempts to fan their dispute with King Albert I. Now in 1338 they backed Louis’ decree
Licet iuris
explicitly endorsing the Staufer’s earlier idea that the German king was already emperor-designate entitled automatically to exercise imperial prerogatives immediately after his election. For once, an intellectual directly influenced events, as Lupold of Bebenburg supplied the legal and historical arguments for Louis’ decree. This programme was continued by Charles IV, who emerged as Louis’ challenger and, soon, successor, culminating in the Golden Bull of 1356, which excluded the pope entirely from German royal elections (see
pp. 301
and
307
).

The Luxembourgs and the Papacy

Like Pope Innocent’s
Venerabilem
, the imperial statements implicitly acknowledged limits. It was difficult to nationalize the imperial title without accepting it no longer represented superiority over other kings. In short, Louis and Charles still sought the idealized cooperation with the papacy that their predecessors had failed to secure. Charles used a brief coincidence of Guelph and Ghibelline sentiment in Italy to travel with only 300 troops for his imperial coronation, which was conducted by a papal legate in Rome in April 1355. This was the first coronation since 1046 not to be marred by serious violence.
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The papacy still insisted on the prerogatives claimed in
Venerabilem
, while the German lords continued the line resumed in 1338. Pope Gregory XI was ignored in 1376 when Charles’s son Wenzel was chosen as king of the Romans, the title henceforth used for the successor designate in the Empire.

Gregory’s death in March 1378 changed the direction of papal-imperial relations. Gregory had only moved the papacy back to Rome from Avignon 22 months earlier. The Romans had grown accustomed to self-government, while the cardinals regarded themselves like the electors in the Empire and were not prepared to be treated as papal functionaries. France’s reluctance to lose its influence added a third factor. The result was the Great Schism lasting until 1417 and coinciding with a period of dramatic intellectual and religious development. The founding of universities during the twelfth century ended the church’s
monopoly over education. The Great Schism accelerated this, since central Europeans were no longer as keen to attend Paris or the Italian universities due to the disruption in public life. Charles IV had already provided an alternative by founding Prague University in 1348. This had been followed by Vienna (1365) and fifteen more universities by 1500, while student numbers in the Empire more than doubled across the fifteenth century to reach over 4,200.
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New, critical approaches associated with Renaissance Humanism increasingly challenged established claims, including the
Donation of Constantine
, which was proved by Lorenzo Valla to be a forgery in 1440.
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Such criticism appeared most suspicious amidst the surge in popular religious practices, which threatened to escape official supervision. These included new shrines attracting thousands of pilgrims, such as Wilsnack in Brandenburg between 1383 and 1552, as well as Marian cults, fresh waves of monasticism and relic collecting.
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Debates surrounding faith and practice gave urgency to those about church governance, since one could not be resolved without the other. They also merged with reform discussions in the Empire, where the idea of the electors and lords exercising collective responsibility meshed with the new concept known as conciliarism emanating from the University of Paris, which argued that papal monarchy should be balanced by a general council of bishops and cardinals. Practical politics added further impetus. Both Wenzel and Richard II of England were deposed by aristocratic conspiracies within a year of each other, while France descended into civil war from 1407, which widened with England’s involvement eight years later. The instability prevented imperial coronations for either Wenzel or his rival after 1400, Ruprecht (Rupert) of the Palatinate. Wenzel’s refusal to stand down, even after the election of his younger brother Sigismund in 1410, extended the political uncertainty in the Empire until his death in 1419. By that point, the Empire faced its own heretical movement, the Hussites in Bohemia, as well as the menacing advance of the Ottomans through Sigismund’s own kingdom of Hungary to the east.