Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen —— what is your opinion, judgment or appraisal?
Polymath and polyglot, consummate statesman and politician, despot and lawgiver, inspired naturalist, mathematician, architect, poet and musician. All in all, he was one of the greatest and most powerful figures of the European Middle Ages, and probably the most brilliant singular person to ever wear a crown. He seemed to rival Da Vinci in his intellectual versatility and application. Called the ‘forerunner of the Antichrist’ by his enemies in the medieval Church, and Stupor Mundi et Immutator Mirabilis (the Wonder of the World and its Marvelous Transformer) by his admirers. Excommunicated several times, he remained the most preeminent European ruler of his day and died under the Church’s ban, still essentially undefeated, defiant and the most powerful man in Europe. Terrified or transfixed, contemptuous or laudatory, his contemporaries views him in existential, near-cosmic hues as the very embodiment of ‘Romanity’ and imperial universalism as the last true Caesar of the West.
By his twenties, Frederick II spoke at least six languages (Latin, Sicilian Italian, Middle High German, Old French Provençal, Arabic, and Greek; according to some counts his count might have increased to nine by his death). Throughout his life, he showed himself to be profoundly intellectually endowed: he was an incisive naturalist ahead of his time who authored a treatise on falconry which audaciously corrected Aristotle and bore hints of the rationalism of the Scientific Revolution; he was a mathematician and architect who befriended Fibonacci and exchanged equations with Islamic scholars; he was learned philosopher who discoursed on par with public intellectuals like his friends Michael Scotus and Theodore of Antioch; he was a poet and musician whom Dante himself credited as the father of the Italian language and who might have even written some of the first sonnets with Giacomo Da Lentini; he was something of a scientist who conducted his own rudimentary experiments (however brutal they may have been, and they’ve likely been highly overplayed by slander) and studied astronomy with Guido Bonatti; as a legalist and historian, he seems to have clearly been able to hold his own with some of the more notable legal scholars of his day like Roffredo da Bevenento, several which were beside the emperor as he refashioned the Sicilian kingdom as highly centralized (relative to the period) absolutist state that looked a good deal like what would come to continental Europe during the Early Modern period.
It is not difficult to see why he has continued to fascinate historians and writers ever since. Dante placed him in Hell in The Inferno among the unbelievers and epicures, yet still considered him the greatest emperor and the imperial quintessence. Boccaccio held him up as a high comparison in the Decameron by which he judged contemporaneous Italian princes. Writing in during the atmosphere of imperial reform in the 15th century, Nicholas of Cusa looked to the last Hohenstaufen emperor as the model imperial ruler and a progenitor of change. Jacob Burckhardt called him (with more than a hint of anachronism) “the first modern man on the throne” who presaged the Renaissance, the rationalism of the 17th century and the very conception of the modern state—all of which for good and ill. The notable Italian historian Michelangelo Schipa in the Cambridge Medieval History said Frederick II was the “greatest singular human force of the Middle Ages” who had no equal between the ages of Charlemagne and Napoleon. For Friedrich Nietzsche, the last great Hohenstaufen emperor was “the first European” and an archetypal übermensch. Frederick was the subject of the most famous medieval biography of the 20th century by Ernst Kantorowicz who, in longing and brilliant prose, extolled the emperor as a Wagnerian figure of incandescence and destiny who was a template for the model ‘law-given soul’ (and a lodestar for German nationalism). More recent historians like the late David Abulafia and Wolfgang Stürner, or others like Hubert Houben have tended to revise this hagiographic and dramatic judgment, stressing Frederick’s ‘medieval-ness’, conservatism and pragmatism, dispelling much of the mythology around the emperor. Recent Italian historiography, like that of Fulvio Delle Donne, has sought to bridge this divide, portraying the emperor as both a pragmatic conservative and product of his time but also a bold visionary in many ways and an extraordinary figure. Ever-controversial and complex, Frederick’s reputation and legacy as a remarkable ruler of immense consequence and many-sided ruler of perspicacity, talent and dynamism remains basically intact in popular memory, nowhere more so than in his much-beloved Apulia and southern Italy.