I like to think I know what I’m doing when I make these videos,
but sometimes it becomes very obvious that History is the one in charge here, and not me. See, I had
intended to make a video about King Frederick II as a companion piece to my video on Sicily,
where I’d use his status as both King of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor to explore the changing
cultural atmosphere of Sicily as it passed from the Norman kings to German ones. Oh wow cool,
what happens when a pan-Mediterranean society of Normans Lombards Greeks and Arabs pivots north
toward mainland Europe? What remains, what gets cut, what gets added? Analyzing cultural nuance
good golly gosh! But as it happens, very little of that matters to us today, because as I did
my research this video revealed to me that it is actually an episode of Pope Fights. So, to take
what will be a surprisingly far-reaching tour of high-medieval shenanigans, Let’s do some History.
At the end of the 1100s, Kingship of Sicily and southern Italy passed by marriage from the Norman
Hauteville family to the Holy Roman (German) Emperor Henry VI of the Hohenstaufen dynasty.
He considered Sicily little more than a shiny novelty, so he plundered it for all it was worth,
shipped anything sparkly back to Germany, and brutally punished anyone who resisted. Luckily
for the Sicilians, he died three short years later in 1197, and the crown passed to his
infant son Frederick II, who was slightly too young to govern, even by medieval standards, so
the responsibility of babysitting the Kingdom of Sicily went to their northern neighbor The Pope.
This didn’t go so hot, since Pope Innocent III was busy with pope stuff, so local German barons were
left in charge. They were fully uninterested in cleaning up the wreck Henry left behind, and the
kingdom was a mess of lawlessness and inter-ethnic violence. Yikes. Luckily for young Frederick,
the royal court retained that multicultural atmosphere, so he grew up in the worldly,
sophisticated mold of the Norman kings before him. He also loved philosophy, had a mind for science,
was insatiably curious about the world around him, and enjoyed falconry more than anything else on
god’s green earth, so much that he literally wrote the definitive treatise on bird science
and hunting with birds of prey. Every chance he got, the man was out falconing in Sicily.
The problem was, after Henry died, the part of his royal domains that he actually cared about,
Germany, was in some hot water on account of the multiple civil wars that sprung from
the succession crisis caused by Henry’s surprisingly early death. Now this was not
Frederick’s responsibility, however it would become his problem. The Holy Roman Empire had
spent the past few decades dancing with the Papacy around the question of who was actually in charge,
and the plot twist is that it would be neither of them, because local lords and princes had
gotten really crafty at playing the two off of each other in exchange for more privileges and
autonomy. Emperors and Popes played this game with each other too, as Frederick’s
rival Otto bribed his way onto the imperial throne with concessions to Papal authority,
but when Otto invaded Italy the Pope got spooked and backed Frederick as the new emperor.
Still kinda bad for the Pope, because Frederick sandwiched him from the north and now the south,
but he made young Freddie pinky-promise to go on a crusade, so not the worst deal in the world.
Given the last crusade had completely failed and the one before that ended up sacking the
Very Christian city of Constantinople, whoops, it would be hard to do worse!
Much to the frustration of Pope Honorius in particular and Germany in general,
Frederick was distinctly unenthused about his new responsibilities, to go on crusade and even To Be
The Emperor, so he instead spent all of his time back home in Sicily hanging out with the royal
court and repairing the kingdom that his father Henry had so delicately ruined. In a reversal
of trends north of the Alps, Frederick actually restored some sense of royal authority to put the
kingdom back in order. He carefully kneecapped the nobility and confiscated many of their castles,
ended the Genoese trading monopoly which had been slowly strangling the treasury,
and slightly reorganized his subjects so they’d be less likely to murder each other, which,
in the past three decades, they had very much been doing. Frederick granted protected status to Jews,
and scooted the increasingly-rebellious Arab population of western Sicily over to Apulia,
where many worked as blacksmiths and his personal bodyguard. So we can see the steady downward
trend, as the diversity that characterized the Norman period was still here, but far more in
pockets than it was before. And his relationship with Islam was about to get a little more awkward,
because as the Pope was keen to remind him, Frederick was still on the hook to go crusade.
After marrying Queen Isabella of Jerusalem in 1225, King Frederick of
technically Jerusalem now finally had a personal motivation to make the journey, and to get Pope
Honorius to quit bothering him about it all the time, Frederick vowed to complete his crusade
or face excommunication if he failed. Problem was, Frederick got sick right when he left for the Holy
Land, so he sent his army on ahead, but went home to Italy to rest up, and the Pope considered this
a breach of contract, and excommunicated him. Now, in addition to instant damnation, this
meant Frederick was now forbidden to actually go on the crusade he was punished for not going on.
Frederick still wanted to go, to meet up with his army and claim the city that he was technically
king of. However, the Pope offered Frederick a convenient and straightforward way to escape his
excommunication: surrender the Kingdom of Sicily to the Pope. Weird that Frederick’s only option
to save his immortal soul had nothing to do with piety. But Frederick didn’t care what the Pope
said before and he wasn’t about to start now, so he rested up in Italy and then went on his
merry way to the holy land to get himself that city — excommunication be damned, literally.
So off he goes to the holy land on the next boat out, (for which the Pope excommunicated
him again but who cares) and he clowns on the entire concept of Holy War by
negotiating Jerusalem back from the Sultan. The Ayyubid empire was dealing with enough
internal problems that a 10-year truce and the promise to help him against his
rebellious brothers was worth trading one city. The local Christians howled in disappointment,
as they had failed to take Jerusalem for four decades and got outplayed by the guy who barely
even wanted to be there. Contemporary Islamic sources were likewise very upset about it,
but they took Jerusalem back in like 15 years, so they got over it — which goes to show that
even when crusades are astonishingly successful, they still do not actually accomplish anything.
But nobody was angrier than Pope Gregory, who couldn’t believe that a filthy excommunicate
had conquered Jerusalem, so he cut out the middleman, and rather than theologically
extort Frederick for his kingdom, he just called a crusade and marched on down to take it by force.
However, the pope was a worse crusader than Frederick was, so his armies shattered on impact,
and Gregory begrudgingly agreed to leave the man be, for now. The pope took the breathing
room to go reform the Vatican or whatever who cares but Frederick had more problems,
because in 1231 his son King Henry of Germany was berated by the local nobles and princes
into essentially granting them complete legal autonomy from the emperor. In addition to being
a colossal blow to the Holy Roman Empire in the long-run, this was an immediate problem
for Frederick on account of losing all of his imperial authority. This act of open rebellion
against his father resulted in Henry getting extremely grounded in 1235, for life. After that,
the imperial territories in Germany settled down, but the ones in Northern Italy did not.
So, slight backstory, after grandpappy Frederick I Barbarossa claimed direct authority over the
Imperial domains in Italy, the cities formed a “Lombard League” to collectively ask that he
shove off. This was great for the popes, who also wanted the emperor to shove off — Germany was far
away and didn’t matter, but Italy was where they are, and if the emperor was also right there,
that’s a problem. And now that Frederick II was out on the prowl to reimpose his authority,
the Italian cities renewed the league to drive him out, and the Pope contributed by once again
Excommunicating Frederick, Which, like, sure, perma-damnation is a pretty steep penalty,
but if it didn’t work before, twice, why would it work now? More tactically-concerning was that
Gregory called another crusade against him, and said that any crusader who had vowed to
fight in the Holy Land could fulfil their crusading obligation by fighting Frederick.
At this point, Frederick was so thoroughly done with Gregory’s antics that he marched down into
the Papal States and camped his army right outside the walls of Rome, where he proceeded
to kidnap all the bishops headed into the city. Pope Gregory, surrounded not just on
his northern and southern borders but now within line of sight from his house, died in 1241, quite
possibly out of pure fear, OR to rob Frederick of the satisfaction of killing him. Granted, the man
was at least in his 70s, so he probably just died, like, normally, but these two idiots had been at
each other’s throats for over a decade so I will only accept the most dramatic ending possible.
Anyway, with the mission basically accomplished, Frederick hustled back to Sicily to deal with a
revolt (on account of him having been the target of a crusade), and he almost needed to head back
north to deal with the arrival of the Mongols. But luckily for him, for once, they left almost as
soon as they arrived, so the Europeans breathed a sigh of relief and dutifully got back to fighting
each other. Because, for all the trouble Gregory caused, the new pope Innocent IV was
an even greater headache. In 1245 he declared the still-excommunicated Frederick deposed as emperor
and branded him a heretic and a predecessor to the antichrist, while of course renewing the call for
crusade. So off Frederick went, again, until his army got completely routed while attacking
the city of Parma. After this stunning defeat as well as the loss of the Imperial Treasure which
for some reason he brought to the siege, the jig was up and Frederick went home to Sicily.
But given how much he preferred Being In Sicily to anything else, not a bad consolation prize!
In the span of half a decade, Jerusalem was gone, Northern Italy was gone, Germany was basically
gone, so in his last few years he enjoyed the pleasures of royal life in Sicily. Frederick
was a man of many interests, known in Europe as “Stupor Mundi”, the wonder of the world,
but we should especially thank him for filling out the biggest gap in Sicilian Culture:
Literature. The Normans and friends had an astounding talent for architecture,
science, and law, but they weren't storytellers. Under Frederick,
the Sicilian school of poetry invented the sonnet and pioneered literature
in the local Italian vernacular, a century ahead of Dante writing in his local Tuscan.
By the time of Frederick’s death in 1250, it’s easy to argue that he lost.
The Holy Roman Empire fell into a half-century interregnum and disintegrated in all but name,
The Kingdom of Sicily fell back into diet-anarchy and was conquered by the French house of Anjou
just 16 years later, and those pesky Popes had the last laugh after all. So, on paper, sure, Popes-1,
Heretical-Demon-Tyrant-0, okay, but the Papacy didn’t win so much as it just survived. Frederick
was their most existentially-terrifying foe in centuries, and as far as he cared,
they were just a hassle who dragged him away from Sicily and got in the way of his poetry
and falconing. There’s plenty of scholarly debate as to whether he was a Renaissance
prince ahead of his time, but to have been THE Emperor and an unparalleled crusader,
yet still want nothing more than to simply hang out in Italy, damn if that isn’t a mood.
Thank you so much for watching! I feel like this is one of those rare videos that is a
highly-specific whirlwind of a time yet also manages to be surprisingly representative of the
high medieval period as a whole, AND it’s a pope fight video. Wins all around. Thank you to our
Patreon community, who made this video possible, and I will see you all in the next video.