Jesi: Museo Federico II

Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1194-1250) can be counted among the greatest monarchs spawned by the European Middle Ages. He was King of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor, but also a crusader and a patron of arts and sciences, to name but a few of his other activities. His birthplace Jesi in the Marche has a museum that is entirely dedicated to Frederick. The Museo Federico II is a multimedia museum, with an audio tour, movies, information panels, reconstructions and scale models, but very few original objects. At the entrance of the museum visitors are welcomed by a statue of the emperor, with a leopard at his feet. The statue is a modern one from 1994. It was erected exactly 800 years after Frederick’s birth.

Early years

In the year 1194, on Christmas day, Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, was crowned King of Sicily in the cathedral of Palermo. Henry owed his crown to his wife Constance, a posthumous daughter of King Roger II of Sicily. Constance herself was not present at the coronation ceremony. She was pregnant and had therefore decided to follow her husband at a slow pace. When she had arrived in the territory of the town of Jesi, she felt she was going into labour. Jesi seemed like an excellent place to give birth to her child. The town was part of the territories of Markward von Annweiler (died 1202), margrave of Ancona and one of Henry’s vassals. What was special about Constance’s pregnancy was that she was already forty years old. She had been born in 1154, and in 1186 she had married a much younger Henry. So far the marriage had failed to produce any offspring, and Constance feared that if she did not take precautions, evil tongues might claim that the child she was about to bring into the world was not hers. She therefore decided to put up a tent in the central square of Jesi, right in front of the cathedral. The matrons of the town were allowed to enter the tent so that they could witness the birth of her child.

Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was born on 26 December 1194. His full name was Frederick Roger, after both of his grandfathers, Frederick Barbarossa and Roger II. We do not know when and where exactly he was baptised. It may have been in the cathedral of Jesi, but another possibility is that the baptism took place in Assisi, or even in the cathedral of Palermo, the place where Frederick’s father had been crowned. What is certain is that the boy was taken to Foligno shortly after birth and was entrusted to the care of the wife of Conrad of Urslingen, Duke of Spoleto and Count of Assisi. Like Markward von Annweiler, Conrad (died 1202) was a loyal vassal of Frederick’s father. In those first years he was also Frederick’s tutor. It was not until 1197 that Frederick, not yet three years old, travelled to Sicily. His father Henry had meanwhile died there, just 31 years old and deeply hated by the Sicilians because of his despotic behaviour. His mother Constance followed her husband to the grave the next year. A month short of his fourth birthday, Frederick now became the new king of the vibrant and multicultural kingdom. In those days Sicily did not just comprise the island, but also almost all of Southern Italy.

King and emperor

After the death of his parents the new Pope Innocentius III (1198-1216) took care of the young orphan and became his guardian. Cencio Savelli – the future Pope Honorius III (1216-1227) – was appointed as the boy’s tutor. Young Frederick was already King of Sicily, but for the moment the position of Holy Roman Emperor eluded him. Henry VI was first succeeded by his brother Philip of Swabia and then by Otto of Brunswick. Frederick later successfully took up arms against the latter. When Otto – known to posterity as Otto IV – had been soundly defeated by the French at Bouvines, Frederick became the new King of the Romans in 1215. In 1220 he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by his former tutor Pope Honorius III.

Frederick was undoubtedly one of the greatest monarchs of the thirteenth century, as is evidenced by his nickname stupor mundi, which is Latin for “astonishment of the world”. The emperor was a great intellectual, who was very interested in science and was fluent in multiple languages, including Arabic. His proficiency in that language was hardly surprising. At the time Sicily was still home to a substantial minority of Arabic-speaking Muslims, the result of the Aghlabid conquest of 831. The Norman conquest between 1061 and 1091 did not immediately end the influence of Islam on Sicily. Even in Frederick’s days, more than a century later, large groups of Muslims still inhabited the island. Frederick himself was of course a Catholic monarch, but his interest in Islam was genuine and he greatly admired the works of Islamic scholars. Moreover, he showed great respect for the work of Jewish scholars. In an era of religious fanaticism, bigotry and crusades, this gave him a bad reputation, especially with Pope Honorius’ successors. Frederick constantly found himself at odds with these gentlemen, Popes Gregorius IX (1227-1241) and Innocentius IV (1243-1254).

Frederick’s respect for Islam does not mean that his relations with his Muslim subjects were always peaceful. On the contrary, while the emperor was visiting his German territories in 1222, a great revolt broke out among the Sicilian Muslims inhabiting the west of the island. Frederick had no choice but to use military force against the rebels. His actions were quick, determined and if necessary utterly ruthless. By 1225-1226 the worst fighting was over, although the embers of rebellion were not stamped out until 1246. The emperor had found a rather special solution for the survivors of the war and those who had surrendered to him. He had several thousands of them deported to Lucera in Apulia. “Deportation” sounds rather grim, and it no doubt was. On the other hand, the Muslims who had been forcibly removed from Sicily enjoyed great freedom in Lucera. If they paid the jizya – the tax for non-Muslims, but now imposed on Muslims themselves – they could freely practice their religion, and their community of about 20,000 people flourished for several decades. Lucera was obviously a good place to live, as is evidenced by the fact that Frederick himself had a castle built there, which became a favourite residence of his.

The aforementioned Pope Gregorius IX was not an admirer of the Lucera experiment. The Museo Federico II relates how he sent Dominicans to Lucera to convert the Muslims to Christianity. The Dominicans were not very successful. On the contrary, the bishop of Lucera was forced to learn Arabic in order to be able to communicate with the Muslim community of his town. The Lucera experiment ultimately came to an end in 1300 when Charles II of Anjou, King of Naples, destroyed the town and killed, enslaved or forcibly converted the inhabitants. Meanwhile Islam and Arabic had almost entirely disappeared on Sicily as well. Only in Palermo was the language still spoken in small communities, not just of Muslims, but also of Jews, who communicated in Judeo-Arabic (see Palermo: La Zisa). The territories previously inhabited by Muslims were now administered by Teutonic Knights, members of a German chivalric order which had gained ground on Sicily since the days of Henry VI and would remain on the island until 1492 (see Palermo: Santissima Trinità del Cancelliere (La Magione)). The irony of the whole story is that Frederick, in spite of his great admiration for Islam and Arabic, ultimately contributed to the downfall of both.

The end

As early as 1217 Frederick had promised Honorius to go on a crusade. The holy city of Jerusalem had been captured by the armies of the First Crusade in 1099, but in 1187 it had been retaken by the Muslims. Frederick made preparations for a campaign to recapture the city, but kept procrastinating his departure for Palestine (although he could of course legitimately blame the delay on the rebellion on Sicily). When he finally started his crusade in 1227, Honorius had already died. Moreover, Frederick himself was struck by a serious illness. Honorius’ successor Gregorius IX unsurprisingly showed little sympathy and excommunicated the emperor for breaking his promise, an act he repeated the next year when a recovered Frederick sailed to Jerusalem. In spite of these setbacks, Frederick continued his crusade and – still excommunicated – concluded a ten-year peace treaty with Sultan Al-Kamil of Cairo. The treaty stipulated that Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem were to be returned to the Christians. Not a single drop of blood had been shed. Frederick was crowned King of Jerusalem and the city would remain in Christian hands until 1244.

Although he had set foot in the holiest city of Christianity as an excommunicated man, Pope Gregorius undid Frederick’s excommunication, only to excommunicate him again in 1239. Gregorius passed away in 1241 and his successor Celestinus IV died after just 17 days on the throne of Saint Peter. Sinibaldo dei Fieschi – who was elected in 1243 and took the name of Innocentius IV – was then Frederick’s nemesis for the seven remaining years of the latter’s life. Frederick was almost immediately excommunicated again, and on 13 December 1250, about two weeks before his 56th birthday, the emperor died of dysentery. He was laid to rest in a porphyry sarcophagus that was originally not intended for him, but for his grandfather Roger II. It had always been Roger’s fervent wish to find his final resting place in the cathedral of Cefalù, which he had built himself. It was there that two porphyry sarcophagi were placed, one as a tomb for the king, the other as an empty memorial for the Hauteville family. After his death in 1154, Roger’s wish was sadly ignored, and he was buried in the cathedral of his capital Palermo. The two sarcophagi remained in Cefalù for decades, but in 1215 Frederick had them taken to Palermo to be used for himself and his late father.

Legacy

Frederick III had been married three times. His first wife was Constance of Aragon. Constance had been born between 1179 and 1183, so she was much older than her husband (and previously married to the Hungarian King Imre). She died in 1222 in Catania and had borne Frederick a son, Henry (1211-1242), who was elected King of the Romans, but ultimately rebelled against his father and spent his last years in captivity. Frederick’s successor was therefore his son Conrad, born from his second marriage with Yolande of Brienne (1212-1228). In 1235 Frederick married for the third time, this time to Isabella of England (ca. 1214-1241), a sister of the English King Henry III. After Conrad’s death in 1254, Sicily was taken over by Manfred, Frederick’s favourite illegitimate son. As of 1258 Manfred began officially calling himself King of Sicily, but in 1266 he was defeated by the Frenchman Charles of Anjou, a defeat that marked the start of the Angevin era in the history of Sicily (see Palermo: Santo Spirito and the Sicilian Vespers).

There can be no doubt that the legacy of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen is enormous. He for instance founded the university of Naples in 1224, a university that is named ‘Federico II’ after him and last year celebrated its 800th birthday (see Naples: San Domenico Maggiore). Moreover, in the 1240s the emperor wrote a book about falconry called De arte venandi cum avibus (‘about the art of hunting with birds’). His birthplace Jesi had ample justification for dedicating an interesting museum to this versatile man. Frederick II lovingly called Jesi his “Bethlehem”, which makes it somewhat sad that he never saw it again.