While the German race was working its way to fresh destinies with little guidance from its nominal king, Frederick himself was again becoming embroiled in the troubles of Italian and ecclesiastical politics. Even in the quiet times that followed the Treaty of San Germano, the Lombard cities had watched with alarm the despotic and anti-municipal policy of the Emperor. So early as 1232 delegates from Lombardy renewed their league, which was soon to be extended by the inclusion of the chief towns of Romagna and the March. Other leagues grew up in Tuscany and Umbria. Soon Frederick’s suspicions were excited, and his anger passed all bounds when the North-Italian cities formed a close alliance with the revolted King Henry, who found south of the Alps the civic support that he had sought in vain to procure in Germany. Frederick at once strove to set up some power antagonistic to the League. Faithful in North Italy to his German policy, he saw in the feudal aristocracy his best immediate support. Even under the shadows of the Alps the Italian barons had not the strength and commanding position of the Teutonic feudalists. But some of the more capable barons were able to extend their authority by exercising influence over the cities, and chief among these was the ancient house of Romano, German in its origin, and now represented by the two brothers Eccelin and Alberic, who had established themselves in Verona and Vicenza respectively. It was upon this bastard feudalism of Italy, that owed half its importance to its capacity for establishing civic tyranny, that Frederick henceforth chiefly relied. It was a policy even more fatal to him than his alliance with the princes in Germany. But for the moment it attained an equal success. After all, feudal ruffians like Eccelin were better fighters than the ill-trained militia of the Lombard cities.

In 1236 Frederick was back in Italy, and found a ready welcome from Eccelin da Romano, who now aspired to appropriate the whole region between the Alps and the Adige, and soon made himself lord of Padua and Treviso. Recalled over the mountains by the Austrian troubles, Frederick again appeared in Italy in 1237. But a small portion of his army came from Germany. He relied for the most part on the Ghibelline barons of Italy, on Eccelin and his following, and on his trusty Saracens from Lucera. The Lombard League sought in vain to withstand his progress. Frederick’s clever strategy soon out-generalled the civic host, and on 27th November 1237 the whole army of the League was signally defeated at Cortenuova, half-way between Brescia and Milan. |Battle of Cortenuova, 27th Nov. 1237.| Taken at a disadvantage, the valour of the citizens was powerless to withstand the skill and discipline of the imperial army. The Milanese abandoned their carroccio in their flight, and their Podestà, the Venetian Tiepolo, fell into the victor’s hands. Frederick celebrated his success by a sort of Roman triumph through the streets of Cremona, where his famous elephant, with its Saracen drivers on its back, dragged the captured carroccio of Milan through the town, with the Podestà Tiepolo tightly bound to its standard-pole. Soon after, Frederick married his daughter to Eccelin, and granted the dominion of Sardinia to his bastard son Enzio, who had wedded the heiress of the island. The majority of the cities desisted from the hopeless struggle and made peace with the victor. Only a few irreconcilable Guelfic strongholds, including Milan, Alessandria, Brescia, Piacenza, and Bologna, persisted in withstanding the Emperor. They could again hope for the support of the Pope, who now thought the time was ripe for breaking with the Emperor.

During the years of peace Gregory IX. had busied himself with the suppression of heresy, the organisation of the Inquisition, the encouragement of the new orders of Mendicant Friars [see chapter xviii.], the rekindling of the religious zeal of Europe, and his great work of ecclesiastical legislation. In his war against the heretics he had, as we have seen, the Emperor no less than the Mendicants as his allies. He firmly identified the Papacy with the new religious movement when he canonised Francis and Dominic and the Emperor’s kinswoman, St. Elizabeth of Thuringia, the devoted disciple of Conrad of Marburg. With the help of his penitentiary, Raymond of Pennaforte, he collected the constitutions and decretals of earlier Popes in an official code of five books, which was invested with exclusive authority in the courts and the law-schools. Henceforth the Decretals of Gregory IX. stood side by side with the Decretum of Gratian itself among the authoritative texts of the Canon Law. It was, in a measure, an answer to the antagonistic legislation of Frederick in Sicily. But all Gregory’s efforts could do little to stop the progress of the Emperor, and he was further hampered by the constant turbulence of the Romans, who more than once drove him from their city. After the triumph at Cremona, Frederick significantly sent the Milanese carroccio to the Roman enemies of the Pope. |Renewed breach between Gregory and Frederick, 1239.| Gregory’s turn would come when the last of the Lombard cities had been reduced. Frederick was already boasting of his intention to restore Middle Italy to its obedience to the Empire. Accordingly Gregory openly declared himself on the side of the Lombard League. Hermann of Salza made his last efforts on behalf of peace, but his death soon removed the one man whom both Pope and Emperor implicitly trusted. In March 1239 Gregory for a second time launched a bull of excommunication against Frederick, and absolved his subjects from their allegiance.

The new contest between Pope and Emperor was waged with extraordinary and almost unprecedented bitterness and violence. The Emperor reproached the Pope for standing in the way of the repression of heresy in Lombardy, and called upon all kings and princes to unite against the greedy and self-seeking priest who sought to make the humiliation of the Roman Cæsar the first step towards the abasement of all temporal authority. The Pope answered by accusing Frederick of the most outspoken blasphemy, of utter incredulity, and the most shameless profligacy. It was significant that both Frederick and Gregory strove hard to get public opinion on their side, and that neither failed to win over a body of ardent supporters.

Gregory did his best to stir up a revolt in Germany. His legate proposed the election of the King of Denmark, as King of the Romans in place of Conrad; but, despite the adherence of the Duke of Austria and of other discontented magnates, the scheme was shattered through the steady devotion of the German episcopate to the young king. It was equally in vain when Gregory offered the crown to Robert of Artois, St. Louis’ brother. The French nobles roundly told the Pope that even if the Emperor deserved deposition, his deprivation could only be effected by a General Council. Headed by the regent, Siegfried, Archbishop of Mainz, the German clergy rejected the alliance of the Papacy, so that Frederick was able to carry on his war against Gregory in Italy without the distraction of a German revolt. Even the Mendicant preachers of the papal sentence did little to turn German opinion away from the Emperor.

Frederick answered Gregory’s attacks by declaring the incorporation of the March of Ancona and the Duchy of Spoleto with the imperial dominions, and by absolving the inhabitants of those regions from their fealty to the Pope. He turned from his Lombard enemies to invade the papal territory, and made himself master of Ravenna and Faenza, and before long of towns so near Rome as Foligno and Viterbo. Nothing but a strange freak of fidelity on the part of the Romans to Gregory saved the holy city from the Emperor’s advance. Secure for the moment in his capital, Gregory strove to emphasise the solemnity of his ecclesiastical censures by summoning a Council to Rome, to join with him in the condemnation of the Emperor. But the Pope’s violence had alienated even clerical opinion, and a mere handful of prelates answered his summons. Frederick derided the packed Council, and refused safe-conducts to those wishful to take part in it. Nevertheless a certain number of North-Italian, French, and Spanish bishops and abbots collected together in the spring of 1241 at Genoa, and the Pope, by lavish payments, prevailed on the Genoese to provide a fleet to take them to Rome. However, the seafaring towns, with Pisa at their head, were all on the Emperor’s side, and an imperial fleet, superior in numbers and fighting capacity, bore down upon the densely packed Genoese galleys near the island of Giglio. After a show of resistance, the mass of the Genoese fleet was captured. Most of the Spanish prelates escaped, but a crowd of French and North-Italian ecclesiastics, including three archbishops and the abbots of Cluny, Cîteaux, and Clairvaux fell, with the delegates of the Lombard towns, into the hands of the imperialists. |The capture of a General Council, 1241.| The prisoners were taken by Enzio to Naples, ‘crowded together in oppression and bonds, and tormented by hunger and thirst,’ until the prison wherein they were cast, ‘heaped together like pigs,’ seemed a ‘welcome place of rest.’^[31] Flushed with this signal triumph, Frederick once more advanced upon Rome. This time Gregory could not resist his progress. The enemy were at the gates when, on 21st August, the aged Pontiff suddenly ended his long and stormy career.

When the rival heads of Christendom were thus fiercely contending for supremacy, Europe was, for the first time since the tenth century, menaced with the horrors of barbarian invasion. The great Tartar Empire, which had already conquered China and threatened the whole Eastern world, now found an easy victim in the divided principalities of Russia, and poured its hordes of fierce warriors over the plains of Poland and Hungary. Germany itself was now threatened by their advance, but Pope and Emperor, though they reproached each other with indifference to the danger, were unable to make even a truce to resist the common enemy. In 1240 the sack of Kiev by the Mongol chieftain Baty, grandson of Genghiz Khan, led directly to the invasion of the West. The young King Conrad armed Germany to meet the savage hosts of Baty. Luckily for Europe the death of the Khan of All the Tartars called Baty back to Asia, and the alarm of the Mongol fury passed away as quickly as it arose.

The triumph of Frederick was further assured by Gregory’s death. With affected moderation Frederick withdrew for the moment to Naples, but a mere handful of cardinals ventured to assemble in conclave. Their choice fell upon Celestine IV., who died in a few weeks, before there was time to consecrate him. For more than eighteen months the Holy See now remained vacant, but finally, in June 1243, the cardinals agreed to elect Sinobaldo Fiesco, a Genoese cardinal, who had been professor of law at Bologna, and was reputed to be Ghibelline in his sympathies. |Innocent IV. and the continuation of the struggle, 1243–1250.| But as Pope Innocent IV., the imperialist lawyer showed from the first a stern determination to continue the policy of Gregory IX. The saying attributed to Frederick, ‘I have lost a good friend, for no Pope can be a Ghibelline,’ though probably never uttered, expressed the facts of the case. Some hollow negotiations for a pacification were entered upon, but soon broke down. Within a year of Innocent’s election, Frederick’s Saracen hordes were again ravaging the Campagna. In June 1244 Innocent fled from Rome to Genoa, whence he crossed the Alps and took up his abode in the free imperial city of Lyons. It shows the weakness of Frederick in the Arelate that Innocent was able to live in a town nominally subject to the Emperor as long as he chose. So safe did the Pope feel himself that he summoned to Lyons the General Council which, as Gregory IX. had already designed, should strengthen the papal condemnation of the Emperor by the ratification of the prelates of Christendom.

In June 1245 the Council assembled at Lyons. It was reckoned the thirteenth General Council, according to the Roman computation, but even the French refused to acknowledge it as such, and very few German prelates ventured to attend its sessions. However, a fair attendance of prelates was ensured, though the presence of a bishop like Grosseteste, who, five years later, remonstrated before the Pope’s face against the exactions of his agents and his abuse of his patronage, showed that there was some spirit left among the fathers of the Council. Five troubles, declared Innocent, grieved his spirit, and the calling of the assembly was destined to relieve Christendom from them. Its business was the protection of Christianity from the Tartars, the ending of the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches, the extirpation of heresy, the revival of the Crusades, and the condemnation of the Emperor. In practice the last item absorbed all the energy of the Council, though the presence of the fugitive Latin Emperor, Baldwin II., did something to make the fathers realise the sorry plight of Eastern Catholicism and the need of uniting all sorts of Oriental Christians against the Tartars and Turks. Frederick condescended to send as his representative to the Council his chief justiciary, Thaddæus of Suessa, but his condemnation was a foregone conclusion, and Thaddæus had difficulty in obtaining a brief adjournment while he returned to Italy to acquaint his master with the state of affairs at Lyons. Without waiting for the arrival of Peter della Vigna, whom Frederick now despatched to represent him, Innocent on 17th July pronounced in the name of the Council the deposition of his enemy, both as regards the Empire and his two kingdoms. ‘We order,’ added he, ‘those who have the right of election within the Empire to proceed at once to a fresh election. As regards Sicily, we ourselves will do all that is fitting, after taking the advice of our brethren the cardinals.’

The last hope of Christendom lay in the mediation of Louis IX., who saw that the continued contest of Pope and Emperor was fatal to the prospects of a great Crusade. The French king met Innocent at Cluny, and Frederick offered to allow the archbishop of Palermo to thoroughly investigate his orthodoxy. But nothing came of these projects, and the blame of rejecting all compromise lay mainly at the door of the Pope. The spiritual benefits first awarded to those who had assumed the Cross to free the Holy Sepulchre were now offered to all who would take up arms to carry out the Lyons sentence against the Emperor. In 1246 the papal intrigues so far prevailed in Germany that four archbishops, a considerable number of bishops, and a few temporal princes met together and elected as King of the Romans Henry Raspe, Landgrave of Thuringia, the brother-in-law and persecutor of St. Elizabeth. The majority of the Germans remained true to Frederick, though enough Crusaders flocked to Henry’s standard to enable him to win a victory over his rival King Conrad, near Frankfurt. ‘He shows us his back and not his face,’ boasted Henry over his defeated enemy. ‘He fled as men are wont to fly who fight with the Holy Empire.’ But next year Conrad turned the tables on Henry, who fled home and died soon afterwards in the Wartburg. The imperial crown now went begging for a time. ‘I will willingly fight the enemies of the Church,’ declared King Haco of Norway, to whom it was offered, ‘but I will not fight against the foes of the Pope.’ At last the young William, Count of Holland, was persuaded to accept election by the papalists. But only one lay prince, the Duke of Brabant, William’s uncle, associated himself with the bishops who assembled for the choosing of the new monarch. For the rest of Frederick’s life a fierce fight was fought between William and Conrad. Neither of the two could succeed in crushing the other, and Germany gradually drifted into all the worst horrors of feudal anarchy.

Frederick remained in Italy, struggling with all his might against the papal partisans, and holding his own so far that Innocent found it wise to remain at Lyons. Now that all possibility of reconciliation with the Church was cut off, Frederick threw prudence to the winds. He no longer scrupled against soliciting the help of the heretical Cathari that still swarmed all over Lombardy. Visions of power such as he had never imagined in the days of his success now began to flit before his mind. The apocalyptic visions of the Neapolitan seer, the abbot Joachim, began to weigh upon his mystical temperament. Despite the canonisation of Francis of Assisi and the enrolment of his followers under the banners of the Papacy, there was still an undercurrent of revolutionary religious feeling in Italy of the sort that afterwards found expression in the risings of the Fraticelli. Of this opinion Frederick now began to make himself the mouthpiece, hoping thus to be revenged upon his enemies, and to win for himself that first position in the world to which he conceived he was divinely called. He had long used the Franciscan doctrine of Poverty as a weapon against the greedy political Popes. ‘It is upon poverty and simplicity,’ he wrote in 1227, ‘that the Primitive Church was built, in those days when she was the fruitful mother of saints. No one may presume to lay other foundations for her than those appointed by the Lord Jesus.’ He now worked out the same idea in a manifesto addressed to all Christian princes. ‘God is our witness,’ he declared, ‘that our intention has always been to force churchmen to follow in the footsteps of the Primitive Church, to live an apostolic life, and to be humble like Jesus Christ. In our days the Church has become worldly. We therefore propose to do a work of charity in taking away from such men the treasures with which they are filled for their eternal damnation.’ ‘Help us,’ he wrote later, ‘to put down these proud prelates, that we may give mother Church more worthy guides to direct her.’ But his only conception of ecclesiastical reform was the absorption of the Church in the State. Even in their affliction the Orthodox princes of the East seemed to him fortunate, since they had no Pope or independent patriarchs to contend against. He now strove to exclude all papal authority from Naples by condemning to the flames the introducers of papal bulls and all who, under pretext of religion, spoke or acted against his authority. He anticipated Henry VIII. in his effort to abolish the papal power, and, like the great Tudor, condemned as traitors or heretics all who denied his absolute supremacy over the Church. More than that, Frederick proclaimed himself as worthy of the adoration of his subjects, like the pagan Emperors of old. He claimed to be a vicar of Christ, a lay pope, a Christian caliph—nay, an emanation of the Divinity. Jesi, his birth-place, was the blessed Bethlehem where Cæsar first saw the light, and Peter della Vigna was the apostle of the imperial Messiah, the Peter who would never betray his master.

The contest was fought out fiercely with sword and fire. The Guelf and Ghibelline towns were pillaging, burning and destroying each other. Enzio, the son, and Eccelin, the son-in-law of Cæsar, strove to stamp out in blood all Guelfic resistance in Northern Italy. Frederick of Antioch, another bastard of Frederick’s, worked a similar reign of terror in Tuscany. So well did Frederick’s fortunes go, that he dreamt of crossing the Alps and marching to Lyons. In 1247 he was turned from his bold purpose by the unexpected revolt of Parma. He hurried back from Turin eager for revenge. Before long the dispersed partisans of Pope and Emperor flocked to Parma, eager to defend or attack the city. |The Revolt of Parma.| With all his energy, Frederick could only blockade it on one side, and neither dearth of provisions nor the hideous cruelty of the Emperor moved the Parmesans to think of surrender. At last in despair Frederick built over against Parma a new city called Vittoria, devastating the whole Parmesan territory to supply it with building materials and fortifications. But in 1248 the Parmesans made a great sally, won an unexpected victory, slaying the faithful Thaddæus of Suessa, destroying utterly Frederick’s new city, and leading home spoil the carroccio of imperialist Cremona and the whole harem of the Emperor, that had been unable to keep up with his rapid flight.

Everything now went against Frederick. Despite the reign of terror exercised in the South, plots and conspiracies multiplied, and the Apulian barons rose in revolt. The blind rage of the suspicious despot now fell on Peter della Vigna, his trusted confidant, who had long kept, as Dante says, the two keys of Frederick’s heart. He was arrested on charges of conspiring with the Pope to murder his master. His eyes were cruelly torn out, and he sought his own death to avoid further torture. In 1249 Frederick’s favourite son Enzio was defeated and taken prisoner by the Bolognese at Fossalta, and spent the rest of his life in hopeless captivity. But Frederick was not yet at the end of his resources. In 1250 fortune smiled once more on his cause. The Ghibellines of Lombardy at last won the upper hand. Good news came from beyond the Alps of Conrad’s triumphs over William of Holland. Frederick himself spent most of the year at Foggia, surrounded by his faithful Saracens, in whom he still placed his chief trust. |Death of Frederick, 1250.| Towards the end of the year he started once more for the north, but he was seized with a mortal illness before he had traversed many stages. He took to his bed at Fiorentino, a hunting lodge a few miles short of Lucera. An ancient prediction of his astrologers that he would die near iron gates at a town called Flora further troubled his spirit. ‘This is the spot,’ he said, ‘long ago foretold to me where I must die. The will of God be done.’ He calmly drew up a will, bequeathing to Conrad both the Empire and the kingdom, while his favourite bastard, Manfred, who carefully ministered to his last hours, was to act as his regent in his brother’s absence. On 19th December he died, either, as his friends believed, calmly and religiously, clad in the white robe of the Cistercians and reconciled to the Church by the Archbishop of Palermo, or a prey to hideous despair and misery, as the Friars his enemies loved to imagine. He was buried beside his Norman ancestors at Palermo, where his tomb may still be seen. With him expired the Roman Empire as a real claimant to any share of the rule of the world, though for another generation faction raged more fiercely than ever as to the disposal of its heritage. The Papacy had at last triumphed over the Empire. The sacerdotium had laid low the regnum, and all that remains of the history of the world-strife of Pope and Emperor is to write its epilogue. But the mystic followers of the abbot Joachim could not believe that their hero, the all-powerful Emperor, was removed from the world. ‘He shall resound,’ they cried, ‘among the people; he is alive, and yet is not alive.’ But though many impostors arose in his name, Frederick came not back to his disciples, nor did he leave behind him any successor. The last of the great Emperors and the first of great modern Kings, Frederick, with all his brilliant gifts, was but the most dazzling of the long line of imperial failures. Though he filled so large a part in the history of his own day, he left singularly little behind him. Yet as we survey the horrors through which the generations that succeeded him travelled slowly to the realisation of a brighter future, we shall not think Dante wrong when he puts the golden age of Italy in the time ere Frederick had been hounded to death by his remorseless enemies.