Italy in 1154. "He came there on the invitation of the Pope,
of the Prince of Capua, and of the towns which had been
subjected to the ambition of Milan. He marched at the head of
his German feudatories, a splendid and imposing array. His
first object was to crush the power of Milan, and to exalt
that of Pavia, the head of a rival league. Nothing could stand
against him. At Viterbo he was compelled to hold the stirrup
of the Pope, and in return for this submission he received the
crown from the Pontiff's hands in the Basilica of St. Peter.
He returned northwards by the valley of the Tiber, dismissed
his army at Ancona, and with difficulty escaped safely into
Bavaria. His passage left little that was solid and durable
behind it. He had effected nothing against the King of Naples.
His friendship with the Pope was illusory and short-lived. The
dissensions of the North, which had been hushed for a moment
by his presence, broke out again as soon as his back was
turned. He had, however, received the crown of Charles the
Great from the hands of the successor of St. Peter. But
Frederick was not a man to brook easily the miscarriage of his
designs. In 1158 he collected another army at Ulm. Brescia was
quickly subdued; Lodi, which had been destroyed by the
Milanese, was rebuilt, and Milan itself was reduced to terms.
{1446}
This peace lasted but for a short time; Milan revolted, and
was placed under the ban of the Empire. The fate of Cremona
taught the Milanese what they had to expect from the clemency
of the Emperor. After a desultory warfare, regular siege was
laid to the town. On March 1, 1162, Milan, reduced by famine,
surrendered at discretion, and a fortnight later all the
inhabitants were ordered to leave the town. The circuit of the
walls was partitioned out among the most pitiless enemies of
its former greatness, and the inhabitants of Lodi, of Cremona,
of Pavia, of Novara, and of Como were encouraged to wreak
their vengeance on their defeated rival. For six days the
imperial army laboured to overturn the walls and public
buildings, and when the Emperor left for Pavia, on Palm Sunday
1162, not a fiftieth part of the city was standing. This terrible
vengeance produced a violent reaction. The homeless fugitives
were received by their ancient enemies, and local jealousies
were merged in common hatred of the common foe. Frederick had
already been excommunicated by Pope Alexander III. as the
supporter of his rival Victor. Verona undertook to be the
public vindicator of discontent. Five years after the
destruction of Milan the Lombard league numbered fifteen towns
amongst its members. Venice, Verona, Vicenza, Treviso,
Ferrara, Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona, Milan, Lodi, Piacenza,
Parma, Modena, and Bologna. The confederation solemnly engaged
to expel the Emperor from Italy. The towns on the frontier of
Piedmont asked and obtained admission to the league, and to
mark the dawn of freedom a new town was founded on the low
marshy ground which is drained by the Bormida and the Tanaro,
and which afterwards witnessed the victory of Marengo. It was
named by its founders Alessandria, in honour of the Pope, who
had vindicated their independence of the Empire. ... The
Lombard league had unfortunately a very imperfect
constitution. It had no common treasure, no uniform rules for
the apportionment of contributions; it existed solely for the
purposes of defence against the external foe. The time was not
yet come when self-sacrifice and self-abnegation could lay the
foundations of a united Italy. Frederick spent six years in
preparing vengeance. In 1174 he laid siege to the new
Alexandria, but did not succeed in taking it. A severe
struggle took place two years later. In 1176 a new army
arrived from Germany, and on May 29 Frederick Barbarossa was
entirely defeated at Legnano. In 1876 the seventh hundred
anniversary of the battle was celebrated on the spot where it
was gained, and it is still regarded as the birthday of
Italian freedom."
_O. Browning,
Guelphs and Ghibellines,
chapter 1._
See, also, ITALY: A. D. 1154-1162 to 1174-1183.
"The end was that the Emperor had to make peace with both the
Pope and the cities, and in 1183 the rights of the cities were
acknowledged in a treaty or law of the Empire, passed at
Constanz or Constance in Swabia. In the last years of his
reign, Frederick went on the third Crusade, and died on the
way.
See CRUSADES: A. D. 1188-1192.
Frederick was succeeded by his son Henry the Sixth, who had
already been chosen King, and who in the next year, 1191, was
crowned Emperor. The chief event of his reign was the conquest
of the Kingdom of Sicily, which he claimed in right of his
wife Constance, the daughter of the first King William. He
died in 1197, leaving his son Frederick a young child, who had
already been chosen King in Germany, and who succeeded as
hereditary King in Sicily. The Norman Kingdom of Sicily thus
came to an end, except so far as it was continued through
Frederick, who was descended from the Norman Kings through his
mother. On the death of the Emperor Henry, the election of
young Frederick seems to have been quite forgotten, and the
crown was disputed between his uncle Philip of Swabia and Otto
of Saxony. He was son of Henry the Lion, who had been Duke of
Saxony and Bavaria, but who had lost the more part of his
dominions in the time of Frederick Barbarossa. Otto's mother
was Matilda, daughter of Henry the Second of England. ... Both
Kings were crowned, and, after the death of Philip, Otto was
crowned Emperor in 1209. But presently young Frederick was
again chosen, and in 1220 he was crowned Emperor, and reigned
thirty years till his death in 1250. This Frederick the
Second, who joined together so many crowns, was called the
Wonder of the World. And he well deserved the name, for
perhaps no King that ever reigned had greater natural gifts,
and in thought and learning he was far above the age in which
he lived. In his own kingdom of Sicily he could do pretty much
as he pleased, and it flourished wonderfully in his time. But in
Germany and Italy he had constantly to struggle against
enemies of all kinds. In Germany he had to win the support of
the Princes by granting them privileges which did much to
undermine the royal power, and on the other hand he showed no
favour to the rising power of the cities. In Italy he had
endless strivings with one Pope after another, with Innocent
the Third; Honorius the Third, Gregory the Ninth, and Innocent
the Fourth; as well as with the Guelfic cities, which
withstood him much as they had withstood his grandfather. He
was more than once excommunicated by the Popes, and in 1245
Pope Innocent the Fourth held a Council at Lyons, in which he
professed to depose the Emperor. More than one King was chosen
in opposition to him in Germany, just as had been done in the
time of Henry the Fourth, and there were civil wars all his
time, both in Germany and in Italy, while a great part of the
Kingdom of Burgundy was beginning to slip away from the Empire
altogether."
_E. A. Freeman,
General Sketch of European History,
chapter 11._
"It is probable that there never lived a human being endowed
with greater natural gifts, or whose natural gifts were,
according to the means afforded him by his age, more
sedulously cultivated, than the last Emperor of the House of
Swabia. There seems to be no aspect of human nature which was
not developed to the highest degree in his person. In
versatility of gifts, in what we may call manysidedness of
character, he appears as a sort of mediæval Alkibiadês, while
he was undoubtedly far removed from Alkibiadês' utter lack of
principle or steadiness of any kind. Warrior, statesman,
lawgiver, scholar, there was nothing in the compass of the
political or intellectual world of his age which he failed to
grasp. In an age of change, when, in every corner of Europe
and civilized Asia, old kingdoms, nations, systems, were
falling and new ones rising, Frederick was emphatically the
man of change, the author of things new and unheard of--he was
stupor mundi et immutator mirabilis.
{1447}
A suspected heretic, a suspected Mahometan, he was the subject
of all kinds of absurd and self-contradictory charges; but the
charges mark real features in the character of the man. He was
something unlike any other Emperor or any other man. ... Of
all men, Frederick the Second might have been expected to be
the founder of something, the beginner of some new era,
political or intellectual. He was a man to whom some great
institution might well have looked back as its creator, to
whom some large body of men, some sect or party or nation,
might well have looked back as their prophet or founder or
deliverer. But the most gifted of the sons of men has left
behind him no such memory, while men whose gifts cannot bear a
comparison with his are reverenced as founders by grateful
nations, churches, political and philosophical parties.
Frederick in fact founded nothing, and he sowed the seeds of
the destruction of many things. His great charters to the
spiritual and temporal princes of Germany dealt the death-blow
to the Imperial power, while he, to say the least, looked
coldly on the rising power of the cities and on those
commercial Leagues which were in his time the best element of
German political life. In fact, in whatever aspect we look at
Frederick the Second, we find him, not the first, but the
last, of every series to which he belongs. An English writer
[Capgrave], two hundred years after his time, had the
penetration to see that he was really the last Emperor. He was
the last Prince in whose style the Imperial titles do not seem
a mockery; he was the last under whose rule the three Imperial
kingdoms retained any practical connexion with one another and
with the ancient capital of all. ... He was not only the last
Emperor of the whole Empire; he might almost be called the
last King of its several Kingdoms. After his time Burgundy
vanishes as a kingdom. ... Italy too, after Frederick,
vanishes as a kingdom; any later exercise of the royal
authority in Italy was something which came and went wholly by
fits and starts. ... 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 it is none
the less clear that from Frederick's time the Sicilian Kingdom
was doomed. ... Still more conspicuously than all was
Frederick the last Christian King of Jerusalem, the last
baptized man who really ruled the Holy Land or wore a crown in
the Holy City. ... In the world of elegant letters Frederick
has some claim to be looked on as the founder of that modern
Italian language and literature which first assumed a
distinctive shape at his Sicilian court. But in the wider
field of political history Frederick appears nowhere as a
creator, but rather everywhere as an involuntary destroyer.
... Under Frederick the Empire and everything connected with
it seems to crumble and decay while preserving its external
splendour. As soon as its brilliant possessor is gone, it at
once falls asunder. It is a significant fact that one who in
mere genius, in mere accomplishments, was surely the greatest
prince who ever wore a crown, a prince who held the greatest
place on earth, and who was concerned during a long reign in
some of the greatest transactions of one of the greatest ages,
seems never, even from his own flatterers, to have received
that title of Great which has been so lavishly bestowed on far
smaller men. ... Many causes combined to produce this singular
result, that a man of the extraordinary genius of Frederick,
and possessed of every advantage of birth, office, and
opportunity, should have had so little direct effect upon the
world. It is not enough to attribute his failure to the many
and great faults of his moral character. Doubtless they were
one cause among others. But a man who influences future ages
is not necessarily a good man. ... The weak side in the
brilliant career of Frederick is one which seems to have been
partly inherent in his character, and partly the result of the
circumstances in which he found himself. Capable of every
part, and in fact playing every part by turns, he had no
single definite object, pursued 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 Papacy, yet he did so simply because he
found that no Pope would ever let him alone. ... The most
really successful feature in Frederick's career, his
acquisition of Jerusalem [see CRUSADES: A. D. 1216-1229], is
not only a mere episode in his life, but it is something that
was absolutely forced upon him against his will. ... 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 all
that came of his success was that it was made the ground of
fresh accusations against him. ... 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. ...
But Frederick 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."
_E. A. Freeman,
The Emperor Frederick the Second
(Historical Essays, volume 1, Essay 10)._
For an account of Frederick's brilliant Sicilian court, and of
some of the distinguishing features of his reign in Southern
Italy, as well as of the end of his family, in the tragical
deaths of his son Manfred and his grandson Conradin (1268).
See ITALY: A. D. 1183-1250.
ALSO IN:
_T. L. Kington,
History of Frederick the Second._
_J. Bryce,
The Holy Roman Empire,
chapters 10-13._
_H. H. Milman,
History of Latin Christianity,
book 8, chapter 7, and book 9._
{1448}
GERMANY: A. D. 1142-1152.
Creation of the Electorate of Brandenburg.
See BRANDENBURG: A. D. 1142-1152.
GERMANY: A. D. 1156.
The Margravate of Austria created a Duchy.
See AUSTRIA: A. D. 805-1246.
GERMANY: A. D. 1180-1214.
Bavaria and the Palatinate of the Rhine acquired by the house
of Wittelsbach.
See BAVARIA: A. D. 1180-1356.
GERMANY: A. D. 1196-1197.
The Fourth Crusade.
See CRUSADES: A. D. 1196-1197.
GERMANY: 13th Century.
The rise of the Hanseatic League.
See HANSA TOWNS.
GERMANY: 13th Century.
Cause of the multiplication of petty principalities and
states.
"While the duchies and counties of Germany retained their
original character of offices or governments, they were of
course, even though considered as hereditary, not subject to
partition among children. When they acquired the nature of
fiefs, it was still consonant to the principles of a feudal
tenure that the eldest son should inherit according to the law
of primogeniture; an inferior provision or appanage, at most,
being reserved for the younger children. The law of England
favoured the eldest exclusively; that of France gave him great
advantages. But in Germany a different rule began to prevail
about the thirteenth century. An equal partition of the
inheritance, without the least regard to priority of birth,
was the general law of its principalities. Sometimes this was
effected by undivided possession, or tenancy in common; the
brothers residing together, and reigning jointly. This tended
to preserve the integrity of dominion; but as it was
frequently incommodious, a more usual practice was to divide
the territory. From such partitions are derived those numerous
independent principalities of the same house, many of which still
subsist in Germany. In 1589 there were eight reigning princes
of the Palatine family; and fourteen, in 1675, of that of
Saxony. Originally these partitions were in general absolute
and without reversion; but, as their effect in weakening
families became evident, a practice was introduced of making
compacts of reciprocal succession, by which a fief was
prevented from escheating to the empire, until all the male
posterity of the first feudatory should be extinct. Thus,
while the German empire survived, all the princes of Hesse or
of Saxony had reciprocal contingencies of succession, or what
our lawyers call cross-remainders, to each other's dominions.
A different system was gradually adopted. By the Golden Bull
of Charles IV. the electoral territory, that is, the
particular district to which the electoral suffrage was
inseparably attached, became incapable of partition, and was
to descend to the eldest son. In the 15th century the present
house of Brandenburg set the first example of establishing
primogeniture by law; the principalities of Anspach and
Bayreuth were dismembered from it for the benefit of younger
branches; but it was declared that all the other dominions of
the family should for the future belong exclusively to the
reigning elector. This politic measure was adopted in several
other families; but, even in the 16th century, the prejudice
was not removed, and some German princes denounced curses on
their posterity, if they should introduce the impious custom
of primogeniture. ... Weakened by these subdivisions, the
principalities of Germany in the 14th and 15th centuries
shrink to a more and more diminutive size in the scale of
nations."
_H. Hallam,
The Middle Ages,
chapter 5 (volume 2)._
See, also,
CITIES, IMPERIAL AND FREE, OF GERMANY.
GERMANY: A. D. 1212.
The Children's Crusade.
See CRUSADES: A. D. 1212.
GERMANY: A. D. 1231-1315.
Relations of the Swiss Forest Cantons to the Empire and to the
House of Austria.
See SWITZERLAND: THE THREE FOREST CANTONS.
GERMANY: A. D. 1250-1272.
Degradation of the Holy Roman Empire.
The Great Interregnum.
Anarchy and disorder universal.
Election of Rudolf of Hapsburg.
"With Frederick [the Second] fell the Empire. From the ruin
that overwhelmed the greatest of its houses it emerged, living
indeed, and destined to a long life, but so shattered,
crippled, and degraded, that it could never more be to Europe
and to Germany what it once had been. ... The German kingdom
broke down beneath the weight of the Roman Empire. To be
universal sovereign Germany had sacrificed her own political
existence. The necessity which their projects in Italy and
disputes with the Pope laid the Emperors under of purchasing
by concessions the support of their own princes, the ease with
which in their absence the magnates could usurp, the
difficulty which the monarch returning found in resuming the
privileges of his crown, the temptation to revolt and set up
pretenders to the throne which the Holy See held out, these
were the causes whose steady action laid the foundation of
that territorial independence which rose into a stable fabric
at the era of the Great Interregnum. Frederick II. had, by two
Pragmatic Sanctions, A. D. 1220 and 1232, granted, or rather
confirmed, rights already customary, such as to give the
bishops and nobles legal sovereignty in their own towns and
territories, except when the Emperor should be present; and
thus his direct jurisdiction became restricted to his narrowed
domain, and to the cities immediately dependent on the crown.
With so much less to do, an Emperor became altogether a less
necessary personage; and hence the seven magnates of the
realm, now by law or custom sole electors, were in no haste to
fill up the place of Conrad IV., whom the supporters of his
father Frederick had acknowledged. William of Holland [A. D.
1254] was in the field, but rejected by the Swabian party: on
his death a new election was called for, and at last set on
foot. The archbishop of Cologne advised his brethren to choose
some one rich enough to support the dignity, not strong enough
to be feared by the electors: both requisites met in the
Plantagenet Richard, earl of Cornwall, brother of the English
Henry III. He received three, eventually four votes, came to
Germany, and was crowned at Aachen [A. D. 1256]. But three of
the electors, finding that his bribe to them was lower than to
the others, seceded in disgust, and chose Alfonso X. of
Castile, who, shrewder than his competitor, continued to watch
the stars at Toledo, enjoying the splendours of his title
while troubling himself about it no further than to issue now
and then a proclamation. Meantime the condition of Germany was
frightful. The new Didius Julianus, the chosen of princes
baser than the prætorians whom they copied, had neither the
character nor the outward power and resources to make himself
respected. Every floodgate of anarchy was opened: prelates and
barons extended their domains by war: robber-knights infested
the highways and the rivers: the misery of the weak, the
tyranny and violence of the strong, were such as had not been
seen for centuries.
{1449}
Things were even worse than under the Saxon and Franconian
Emperors; for the petty nobles who had then been in some
measure controlled by their dukes were now, after the
extinction of the great houses, left without any feudal
superior. Only in the cities was shelter or peace to be found.
Those of the Rhine had already leagued themselves for mutual
defence, and maintained a struggle in the interests of
commerce and order against universal brigandage. At last, when
Richard had been some time dead, it was felt that such things
could not go on for ever: with no public law, and no courts of
justice, an Emperor, the embodiment of legal government, was
the only resource. The Pope himself, having now sufficiently
improved the weakness of his enemy, found the disorganization
of Germany beginning to tell upon his revenues, and threatened
that if the electors did not appoint an Emperor, he would.
Thus urged, they chose, in 1272 [1273?], Rudolf, count of
Hapsburg, founder of the house of Austria. From this point
there begins a new era. We have seen the Roman Empire revived
in A. D. 800, by a prince whose vast dominions gave ground to
his claim of universal monarchy; again erected, in A. D. 962,
on the narrower but firmer basis of the German kingdom. We
have seen Otto the Great and his successors during the three
following centuries, a line of monarchs of unrivalled vigour
and abilities, strain every nerve to make good the pretensions
of their office against the rebels in Italy and the
ecclesiastical power. Those efforts had now failed signally
and hopelessly. Each successive Emperor had entered the strife
with resources scantier than his predecessors, each had been
more decisively vanquished by the Pope, the cities, and the
princes. The Roman Empire might, and, so far as its practical
utility was concerned, ought now to have been suffered to
expire; nor could it have ended more gloriously than with the
last of the Hohenstaufen. That it did not so expire, but lived
on 600 years more, till it became a piece of antiquarianism
hardly more venerable than ridiculous--till, as Voltaire said,
all that could be said about it was that it was neither holy,
nor Roman, nor an empire--was owing partly indeed to the
belief, still unshaken, that it was a necessary part of the
world's order, yet chiefly to its connection, which was by
this time indissoluble, with the German kingdom. The Germans
had confounded the two characters of their sovereign so long,
and had grown so fond of the style and pretensions of a
dignity whose possession appeared to exalt them above the
other peoples of Europe, that it was now too late for them to
separate the local from the universal monarch. If a German
king was to be maintained at all, he must be Roman Emperor;
and a German king there must still be. ... That head, however,
was no longer what he had been. The relative position of
Germany and France was now exactly the reverse of that which
they had occupied two centuries earlier. Rudolf was as
conspicuously a weaker sovereign than Philip III. of France,
as the Franconian Emperor Henry III. had been stronger than
the Capetian Philip I. In every other state of Europe the
tendency of events had been to centralize the administration
and increase the power of the monarch, even in England not to
diminish it: in Germany alone had political union become
weaker, and the independence of the princes more confirmed."
_J. Bryce,
The Holy Roman Empire,
chapter 13._
See, also, ITALY: A. D. 1250-1520.
GERMANY: A. D. 1273-1308.
The first Hapsburg kings of the Romans, Rodolph and Albert.