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instinctively felt that Frederick, the natural peer of Alexander, of Constantine, and of Charles, had left behind him no such creation as they left, and had not influenced the world as they had influenced it. He was stupor mundi et immutator mirabilis,' but the name of 'Fredericus Magnus' was reserved for a prince of quite another age and house, who, whatever else we say of him, at least showed that he had learned the art of Themistocles, and knew how to change a small state into a great one.

fits and starts. Later Emperors were crowned at Milan, but none after Frederick was King of Italy in the same real and effective sense that he was. Germany did not utterly vanish, or utterly split in pieces, like the sister kingdoms; but after Frederick came the Great Interregnum, and, after the Great Interregnum, the royal power in Germany never was what it had been before. In his hereditary kingdom of Sicily he was not absolutely the last of his dynasty, for his son Manfred ruled prosperously and gloriously for some years after his death. But Many causes combined to produce this it is none the less clear that from Freder- singular result, that a man of the extraick's time the Sicilian kingdom was doomed; ordinary genius of Frederick, and possessed it was marked out to be, what it has been of every advantage of birth, office and op ever since, divided, reunited, divided again, portunity, should have had so little direct tossed to and fro between one foreign sover- effect upon the world. It is not enough to eign and another. Still more conspicuously attribute his failure to the many and great than all was Frederick the last Christian faults of his moral character. Doubtless King of Jerusalem, the last baptized man who they formed one cause among others. But really ruled the Holy Land or wore a crown a man who influences future ages is not in the Holy City. And yet, strangely necessarily a good man. Few men have enough, it was at Jerusalem, if anywhere, ever had a more direct influence on the futhat Frederick might claim in some measure ture history of the world than Lucius Corthe honours of a founder. If he was the nelius Sulla. The man who crushed Rome's last more than nominal King of Jerusalem, last rival, who saved Rome in her last hour he was also after a considerable interval, the of peril, who made her indisputably and first; he recovered the kingdom by his own permanently the head of Italy, did a work address, and, if he lost it, its loss was, of all almost greater than the work of Cæsar. the misfortunes of his reign, that which could Yet the name of Sulla is one at which we be with the least justice attributed to him almost instinctively shudder. So the faults as a fault. In the world of elegant letters and crimes of Frederick, his irreligion, his Frederick has indeed some claim to be looked private licentiousness, his barbarous cruelty, on as the founder of that modern Italian lan- would not of themselves be enough to hinguage and literature which first assumed a der him from leaving his stamp upon his distinctive shape at his Sicilian court. But age in the way that other ages have been in the wider field of political history, Freder- marked by the influence of men certainly ick appears nowhere as a creator, but rather not worse than he. Still, it seems that, to everywhere as an involuntary destroyer. He exercise any great and lasting influence on is in everything the last of his own class, and the world, a man must be, if not virtuous, he is not the last in the same sense as princes at least capable of objects and efforts which who perish along with their realms in domes- have something in common with virtue. tic revolutions or on the field of battle. If Sulla stuck at no crime which would serve we call him the last Emperor of the West, his country or his party, but it was for his it is in quite another sense from that in country and his party, not for purely which Constantine Palaiologos was the last selfish ends, that he laboured and that he Emperor of the East. Under Frederick, sinned. Thorough devotion to any cause the Empire and everything connected with has in it something of self-sacrifice, someit seems to crumble and decay while pre- thing which, if not purely virtuous, is not serving its external splendour. As soon as without an element akin to virtue. Very its brilliant possessor is gone, it at once col- bad men have achieved very great works, lapses. It is a significant fact that a prince, but they have commonly achieved them by perhaps in mere genius, in mere accomplish- virtue of those features in their character ments, the greatest who ever wore a crown, which made the nearest approach to goodwho held the greatest place on earth, and ness. The weak side in the brilliant career was concerned during a long reign in some of Frederick is one which seems to have of the greatest transactions of one of the been partly inherent in his character, and greatest ages, seems never, even from his partly the result of the circumstances in own flatterers, to have received that appella- which he found himself. Capable of every tion of Great which has been so lavishly part, and, in fact, playing every part by bestowed on far smaller men. The world turns, he had no single definite object, pur

sued honestly and steadfastly, throughout his whole life. With all his powers, with all his brilliancy, his course throughout life seems to have been in a manner determined for him by others. He was ever drifting into wars, into schemes of policy, which seem to be hardly ever of his own choosing. He was the mightiest and most dangerous adversary that the Papacy ever had. But he does not seem to have withstood the Papacy from any personal choice, or as the voluntary champion of any opposing principle. He became the enemy of the Papacy, he planned schemes which involved the utter overthrow of the Papacy, yet he did so simply because he found that no Pope would ever let him alone. It was perhaps an unerring instinct which hindered any Pope from ever letting him alone. Frederick, left alone to act according to his own schemes and inclinations, might very likely have done the Papacy more real mischief than Frederick provoked to open enmity. Still, as a matter of fact, his quarrels with the Popes were not of his own seeking; a sort of inevitable destiny led him into them, whether he wished for them or not. Again, the most really successful feature in Frederick's career, his acquisition of Jerusalem, is not only a mere episode in his life, but it was something that was absolutely forced upon him against his will. The most successful of Crusaders since Godfrey is the most utterly unlike any other Crusader. With other Crusaders the Holy War was, in some cases, the main business of their lives; in all cases it was something seriously undertaken as a matter either of policy or of religious duty. But the Crusade of the man who actually did recover the Holy City is simply a grotesque episode in his life. Excommunicated for not going, excommunicated again for going, excommunicated again for coming back, threatened on every side, he still went, and he succeeded. What others had failed to win by arms he contrived to win by address, and his success simply became the ground of fresh accusations against him. For years the cry for the recovery of Jerusalem had been resounding through Christendom; at last Je rusalem was recovered, and its recoverer was at once cursed for accomplishing the most fervent wishes of so many thousands of the faithful. The excommunicated King, whom no churchman would crown, whose name was hardly allowed to be uttered in his own army, kept his dominions in spite of all opposition. He was hindered from the further consolidation and extension of his eastern kingdom only by a storm stirred up in his hereditary states by those who were

most bound to show towards him something more than common international honesty. Whatever were the feelings and circumstances under which he had acted, Frederick was in fact the triumphant champion of Christendom, and his reward was fresh denunciations on the part of the spiritual chief of Christendom. The elder Frederick, Philip of France, Richard of England, Saint Lewis, Edward the First, were Crusaders from piety, from policy, or from fashion; Frederick the Second was a Crusader simply because he could not help being one, and yet he did what they all failed to do. So again in his dealings with both the German and the Italian States, it is impossible to set him down either as a consistent friend or a consistent enemy of the great political movements of the age. He issues charters of privileges to this or that commonwealth, he issues charters restraining the freedom of commonwealths in general, simply as suits the policy of the time. In his dealings with the Popes, perhaps in his dealings with the cities also, Frederick was certainly more sinned against than sinning. But a man whose genius and brilliancy and vigour shine out in every single action of his life, but in the general course of his actions no one ruling principle can be discerned, who is as it were tossed to and fro by circumstances and by the actions of others, is either very unfortunate in the po sition in which he finds himself, or else, with all his genius, he must lack some of the qualities without which genius is comparatively useless.

In the case of Frederick probably both causes were true. For a man to influence his age, he must in some sort belong to his age. He should be above it, before it, but he should not be foreign to it. He may condemn, he may try to change, the opinions and feelings of the men around him; but he must at least understand and sympathize with those opinions and feelings. But Fred. erick belongs to no age; intellectually he is above his own age, above every age; morally it can hardly be denied that he was below his age; but in nothing was he of his age. In many incidental details his career is a repetition of that of his grandfather. Like him he struggles against Popes, he struggles against a league of cities, he wears the Cross in warfare against the Infidel. But in character, in aim, in object, grandfather and grandson are the exact opposite to each other. Frederick Barbarossa was simply the model of the man, the German, the Emperor, of the twelfth century. All the faults and all the virtues of his age, his country, and his position received in him their fullest

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development. He was the ordinary man. of his time, following the objects which an ordinary man of his time and in his position could not fail to follow. He exhibited the ordinary character of his time in its very noblest shape; but it was still only the ordinary character of his time. His whole career was simply typical of his age, and in no way personal to himself; every action and every event of his life was perfectly intelligible to every contemporary human being, friend or enemy. But his grandson, emphatically stupor mundi,' commanded the wonder, perhaps the admiration, of an age which could not understand him. He gathered indeed around him a small band of devoted adherents; but to the mass of his contemporaries he seemed like a being of another nature. He shared none of the feelings or prejudices of the time; alike in his intellectual greatness and in his moral abasement he had nothing in common with the ordinary man of the thirteenth century. The world probably contained no man, unless it were some solitary thinker here and there, whose mind was so completely set free, alike for good and for evil, from the ordinary trammels of the time. He appeared in the eyes of his own age as the enemy of all that it was taught to hold sacred, the friend of all that it was taught to shrink from and wage war against. What Frederick's religious views really were is a problem hard indeed to solve; but to his own time he appeared as something far more than a merely political, or even than a doc trinal, opponent of the Papacy. Men were taught to believe that he was the enemy of the head of Christendom simply because he was the enemy of Christianity altogether. Again, the crimes and vices of Frederick were no greater than those of countless other princes; but there was no prince who trampled in the like sort upon all the moral notions of his own time. He contrived, by the circumstances of his vices, to outrage contemporary sentiment in a way in which his vices alone would not have outraged it. A man who thus showed no condescension to the feelings of his age, whether good or evil, could not directly influence that age. Some of his ideas and schemes may have been silently passed on to men of later times, in whose hands they were better able to bear fruit. He may have shaken old prejudices and old beliefs in a few minds thus; he may perhaps have been the fountain of a tradition which was powerfully to affect distant ages. In many things his ideas, his actions, forestalled events which were yet far remote. The events which he forestalled he may in this indirect and silent way have influenced. But direct influence

on the world of his own age he had none. He may have undermined a stately edifice which was still to survive for ages; but he simply undermined. He left no traces of himself in the character of a founder; he left as few in the character of an open and avowed destroyer.

There was also another cause which, besides Frederick's personal character, may have tended to isolate him from his age and to hinder him from having that influence over it which we may say that his genius ought to have had. This was his utter want of nationality. The conscious idea of nationality had not indeed the same effect upon men's minds which it has in our own times. The political ideas and systems of the age ran counter to the principle of nationality in two ways. Nothing could be more opposed to any doctrine of nationality than those ideas which were the essence of the whole political creed of the time, the ideas of the Universal Empire and the Universal Church. On the other hand, the conception of the joint lordship of the world, vested in the successor of Peter and the successor of Augustus, was hardly more opposed to the doctrine of nationality than was the form which was almost everywhere taken by the rising spirit of freedom. A movement towards national freedom was something exceptional; in most places it was the independence of a district, of a city, at most of a small union of districts or cities, for which men strove. A German or Italian commonwealth struggled for its own local independence; so far as was consistent with the practical enjoyment of that independence, it was ready to acknowledge the supremacy of the Emperor, Lord of the World. But of a strictly national patriotism for Germany or Italy men had very little idea indeed. These two apparently opposite tendencies, the tendency to merge nations in one universal dominion, and the tendency to divide nations into small principalities and commonwealths, were in truth closely connected. The tendency to division comes out most strongly in the kingdoms which were united to the Empire. Other countries showed a power of strictly national action, of acquir ing liberties common to the whole nation, of legislating in the interest of the whole nation, almost in exact proportion to the degree in which they were placed beyond the reach of Imperial influences. Spain, Scandinavia, Britain, were the countries on which the Empire had least influence. Spain, Scandinavia, Britain, were therefore the countries in which we see the nearest approaches to true national life and consciousness. Still there is no doubt that, even within the Empire, national feelings did ex

Frederick

ercise a strong, though in a great measure | local life of some nation or city. an unconscious, influence. Local feelings Barbarossa was the hero of Germany, but exercised an influence still stronger. But his grandson, the hero of the Empire, was there was no national or local feeling which the hero of none of its component parts. could gather round Frederick the Second. The memory of his grandfather still lives There was no national or local cause of which in the hearts of a people, some of whom he could be looked on as the champion. perhaps even now look for his personal reThere was no nation, no province, no city, turn. The memory of the grandson has which could claim him as its own peculiar everywhere passed away from popular recolhero. Ruling over men of various races lection; the Wonder of the World remains to and languages, he could adapt himself to be the wonder of scholars and historians alone. each of them in turn in a way in which few In this last respect the memory of Fredmen before or after him could do. But erick the Second has certainly nothing to there was none of the various races of his complain of. Few princes have ever had dominions, German, Burgundian, Italian, such a monument raised to them as has been Norman, Greek, or Saracen, which could raised to the memory of the last Swabian really claim him as bone of its bone, and Emperor by the munificence of the Duke of flesh of its flesh. His parentage was half Luynes and the learning and industry of M. German, half Norman, his birthplace was Huillard-Bréholles. Here, in a series of Italian, the home of his choice was Sicilian, noble quartos, are all the documents of a his tastes and habits were strongly suspected reign most fertile in documents, ushered in of being Saracenic. The representative of by a volume which, except in not assuming a kingly German house, he was himself, be- a strictly narrative form, is essentially a yond all doubt, less German than anything complete history of Frederick's reign. M. else. He was Norman, Italian, almost any- Huillard-Bréholles scems literally to have thing rather than German; but he was far let nothing escape him. He discusses at from being pure Norman or pure Italian. length everything which in any way conIn this position, placed as it were above all cerns his hero, from the examination of ordinary local and national ties, he was, be- schemes which sound very like the instituyond every other prince who ever wore the tion of a new religion, down to the minutest Imperial diadem, the embodiment of the particulars of form in the wording, dating conception of an Emperor, Lord of the and spelling of the Emperor's official acts. World. But an Emperor, Lord of the We never saw a book which is more thorWorld, is placed too high to win the affec-oughly exhaustive of the subject with which tions which attach them to rulers and lead-it deals. It is not a history, merely because ers of lower degree. A King may command the love of his own Kingdom; a popular leader may command the love of his own city. But Cæsar, whose dominion is from the one sea to the other, and from the flood unto the world's end, must, in this respect, as in others, pay the penalty of his great ness. Frederick was, in idea, beyond all men, the hero and champion of the Empire. But practically the championship of the Empire was found less truly effective in his hands than in the hands of men who were further from realizing the theoretical ideal. The Imperial power was more really vigorous in the hands of princes in whom the ideal championship of the Empire was united with the practical leadership of one of its component nations. Frederick Barbarossa, the true German King, the man in whom the German instinct at once realises the noblest development of the German character, really did more for the greatness of the Empire than his descendant, whose ideal position was so far more truly Imperial. The men who influence their age, the men who leave a lasting memory behind them, are the men who are thoroughly identified with the actual or

the form of an Introduction or Preface seems to have prescribed to M. Bréholles the necessity of giving us, instead of a single regular narrative, a series of distinct narrative discussions of each of the almost countless aspects in which the reign of Frederick can be looked at. M. Bréholles has also followed up his great work by a monograph of the life and aims of one whose history is inseparably bound together with that of Frederick, his great and unfortunate minister, Peter de Vinea. In this he examines at full length a subject to which we shall again return, and which is perhaps the most interesting of all which the history of Frederick presents-namely, the relation of the freethinking and reforming Emperor to the received religion of this age. On this point we cannot unreservedly pledge ourselves to all the details of M. Bréholles' conclusions; but they are at least highly ingenious, and the contemporary evidence on which he grounds them is most singular and interesting, and deserves most attentive study. Altogether, we can have no hesitation in placing M. Bréholles' investigation of the reign of Frederick the Second among the most im

portant contributions which our age has | Sicilian kingdom, and his mother's death in made to historical learning.

Nor has the character and history of Frederick failed to attract notice among scholars in our own country. His career supplies materials for one of the most brilliant parts of Dean Milman's History of Latin Christianity; there is no part of his great work which is more palpably a labour of love. Mere recently has appeared the History of Frederick by Mr. Kington-Oliphant, the production of a young writer, and which shows want of due preparation in some of the introductory portions, but which also shows real research and real vigour as the author approaches his main subject, the life of Frederick himself. Mr. Oliphant is confessedly a disciple of M. Bréholles, and his volumes, as supplying that direct and continuous narrative which M. Bréholles' plan did not allow of, may be taken as a companion-piece to the great work of his master.

The reign of Frederick, like that of his predecessor, Henry the Fourth, was nearly co-extensive with his life. His history began while he was in his cradle. Like Henry the Fourth, after filling the first place in men's minds for a long series of years, he died at no very advanced period of life. Frederick, born in 1194, died in 1250, at the age of fifty-six. Henry at the time of his death was a year younger. Yet it marks a difference between the two men that historians seem involuntarily, in defiance of chronology, to think and speak of Henry in his later years as quite an aged man. No one ever speaks in this way of Frederick. The Wonder of the World seems endowed with a sort of undying youth, and, after all the great events and revolutions of his reign, we are at last surprised to find that we have passed over so many years as we really have. Frederick was a King almost from his birth. The son of the Emperor Henry the Sixth, and of Constance the heiress of Sicily, he was born while his father was in his full career of success and cruelty. His very birth gave occasion to mythical tales. The comparatively advanced age of his mother, which, however, has been greatly exaggerated, gave occasion to rumours of opposite kinds. His enemies gave out that he was not really of Imperial birth, and that the childless Empress had palmed off a supposititious child on her husband. His admirers hailed in him a birth wonderful, if not miraculous, and placed the conception of Constance alongside of the conceptions of the mothers of Isaac, of Samuel, and of John the Baptist. Elected King of the Romans in his infancy, his father's death left him in his third year his successor in the

the next year left an orphan boy as the heir alike of the Hohenstaufen Emperors and of the Norman Kings. His election as King of the Romans seems to have been utterly forgotten; after the death of his father, the Crown was disputed by the double election of Otto of Saxony and of Frederick's own uncle Philip. The child in Sicily was not thought of till the assassination of Philip, just when fortune seemed to have finally decided for him; till Otto, reaping the advantage of a crime of which he was guiltless, had been enabled to secure both the Kingdom and the Empire, and till he had fallen into disgrace with the Pontiff by whose favour he had at first been supported. Meanwhile the Sicilian kingdom had been torn by rebellions and devastated by mercenary captains. The land had at last been restored to some measure of peace, and the young King to some measure of authority, by the intervention of the over-lord Pope Innocent. A husband at fifteen, a father at eighteen, Frederick was, almost simultaneously with the birth of his first son, Henry, the future King and rebel, called to the German Crown by the party which was discontented with Otto, now under the ban of the Church. Frederick, destined to be the bitterest enemy of the Roman See, made his first appearance on German soil as its special nursling, called to royalty and Empire under the auspices of the greatest of the Roman Pontiffs. He came also, there seems little reason to doubt, under patronage of a less honourable kind. The long disputes between England and France had already begun, and by a strange anticipation of far later times, they had already begun to be carried on within the boundaries of the Empire. Otto, the son of an English mother, was supported by the money and the arms of his uncle John of England, while the heir of the Hohenstaufen partly owed his advancement to the influence and the gold of Philip of France. In 1210 Frederick was elected King; two years later, Otto, in Mr. Oliphant's words, 'rushed on his doom.' At Bouvines, a name hardly to be written without an unpleasant feeling by any man of Teutonic blood and speech, the King of the French overthrew the Saxon Emperor and his English and Flemish allies. The power of Otto, already crumbling away, was now utterly broken. In 1215, while John was quailing before his triumphant Barons, Frederick, the rival of his nephew, received the Royal Crown and assumed the cross. Three years later the death of Otto removed all traces of opposition to his claims, an event which, by a singular coin

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