THE EMPERORS IN ITALY: FREDERICK BARBAROSSA.
[Sidenote: Frederick of Hohenstaufen, 1152-1189.]
The reign of Frederick the First, better known under his Italian
surname Barbarossa, is the most brilliant in the annals of the Empire.
Its territory had been wider under Charles, its strength perhaps
greater under Henry the Third, but it never appeared in such pervading
vivid activity, never shone with such lustre of chivalry, as under the
prince whom his countrymen have taken to be one of their national
heroes, and who is still, as the half-mythic type of Teutonic
character, honoured by picture and statue, in song and in legend,
through the breadth of the German lands. The reverential fondness of
his annalists and the whole tenour of his life go far to justify this
admiration, and dispose us to believe that nobler motives were joined
with personal ambition in urging him to assert so haughtily and carry
out so harshly those imperial rights in which he had such unbounded
confidence. Under his guidance the Transalpine power made its greatest
effort to subdue the two antagonists which then threatened and were
fated in the end to destroy it--Italian nationality and the Papacy.
[Sidenote: His relations to the Popedom.]
Even before Gregory VII's time it might have been predicted that two
such potentates as the Emperor and the Pope, closely bound together,
yet each with pretensions wide and undefined, must ere long come into
collision. The boldness of that great pontiff in enforcing, the
unflinching firmness of his successors in maintaining, the supremacy
of clerical authority, inspired their supporters with a zeal and
courage which more than compensated the advantages of the Emperor in
defending rights he had long enjoyed. On both sides the hatred was
soon very bitter. But even had men's passions permitted a
reconciliation, it would have been found difficult to bring into
harmony adverse principles, each irresistible, mutually destructive.
As the spiritual power, in itself purer, since exercised over the soul
and directed to the highest of all ends, eternal felicity, was
entitled to the obedience of all, laymen as well as clergy; so the
spiritual person, to whom, according to the view then universally
accepted, there had been imparted by ordination a mysterious sanctity,
could not without sin be subject to the lay magistrate, be installed
by him in office, be judged in his court, and render to him any
compulsory service. Yet it was no less true that civil government was
indispensable to the peace and advancement of society; and while it
continued to subsist, another jurisdiction could not be suffered to
interfere with its workings, nor one-half of the people be altogether
removed from its control. Thus the Emperor and the Pope were forced
into hostility as champions of opposite systems, however fully each
might admit the strength of his adversary's position, however bitterly
he might bewail the violence of his own partisans. There had also
arisen other causes of quarrel, less respectable but not less
dangerous. The pontiff demanded and the monarch refused the lands
which the Countess Matilda of Tuscany had bequeathed to the Holy See;
Frederick claiming them as feudal suzerain, the Pope eager by their
means to carry out those schemes of temporal dominion which
Constantine's donation sanctioned, and Lothar's seeming renunciation
of the sovereignty of Rome had done much to encourage. As feudal
superior of the Norman kings of Naples and Sicily, as protector of the
towns and barons of North Italy who feared the German yoke, the
successor of Peter wore already the air of an independent potentate.
[Sidenote: Contest with Hadrian IV.]
No man was less likely than Frederick to submit to these
encroachments. He was a sort of imperialist Hildebrand, strenuously
proclaiming the immediate dependence of his office on God's gift, and
holding it every whit as sacred as his rival's. On his first journey
to Rome, he refused to hold the Pope's stirrup[181], as Lothar had
done, till Pope Hadrian the Fourth's threat that he would withhold the
crown enforced compliance. Complaints arising not long after on some
other ground, the Pope exhorted Frederick by letter to shew himself
worthy of the kindness of his mother the Roman Church, who had given
him the imperial crown, and would confer on him, if dutiful, benefits
still greater. This word benefits--_beneficia_--understood in its
usual legal sense of 'fief,' and taken in connection with the picture
which had been set up at Rome to commemorate Lothar's homage, provoked
angry shouts from the nobles assembled in diet at Besançon; and when
the legate answered, 'From whom, then, if not from our Lord the Pope,
does your king hold the Empire?' his life was not safe from their
fury. On this occasion Frederick's vigour and the remonstrances of the
Transalpine prelates obliged Hadrian to explain away the obnoxious
word, and remove the picture. Soon after the quarrel was renewed by
other causes, and came to centre itself round the Pope's demand that
Rome should be left entirely to his government. Frederick, in reply,
appeals to the civil law, and closes with the words, 'Since by the
ordination of God I both am called and am Emperor of the Romans, in
nothing but name shall I appear to be ruler if the control of the
Roman city be wrested from my hands.' That such a claim should need
assertion marks the change since Henry III; how much more that it
could not be enforced. Hadrian's tone rises into defiance; he mingles
the threat of excommunication with references to the time when the
Germans had not yet the Empire. 'What were the Franks till Zacharias
welcomed Pipin? What is the Teutonic king now till consecrated at Rome
by holy hands? The chair of Peter has given, and can withdraw its
gifts.'
[Sidenote: With Pope Alexander III.]
The schism that followed Hadrian's death produced a second and more
momentous conflict. Frederick, as head of Christendom, proposed to
summon the bishops of Europe to a general council, over which he
should preside, like Justinian or Heraclius. Quoting the favourite
text of the two swords, 'On earth,' he continues, 'God has placed no
more than two powers: above there is but one God, so here one Pope and
one Emperor. The Divine Providence has specially appointed the Roman
Empire as a remedy against continued schism[182].' The plan failed;
and Frederick adopted the candidate whom his own faction had chosen,
while the rival claimant, Alexander III, appealed, with a confidence
which the issue justified, to the support of sound churchmen
throughout Europe. The keen and long doubtful strife of twenty years
that followed, while apparently a dispute between rival Popes, was in
substance an effort by the secular monarch to recover his command of
the priesthood; not less truly so than that contemporaneous conflict
of the English Henry II and St. Thomas of Canterbury, with which it
was constantly involved. Unsupported, not all Alexander's genius and
resolution could have saved him: by the aid of the Lombard cities,
whose league he had counselled and hallowed, and of the fevers of
Rome, by which the conquering German host was suddenly annihilated, he
won a triumph the more signal, that it was over a prince so wise and
so pious as Frederick. At Venice, who, inaccessible by her position,
maintained a sedulous neutrality, claiming to be independent of the
Empire, yet seldom led into war by sympathy with the Popes, the two
powers whose strife had roused all Europe were induced to meet by the
mediation of the doge Sebastian Ziani. Three slabs of red marble in
the porch of St. Mark's point out the spot where Frederick knelt in
sudden awe, and the Pope with tears of joy raised him, and gave the
kiss of peace. A later legend, to which poetry and painting have given
an undeserved currency[183], tells how the pontiff set his foot on the
neck of the prostrate king, with the words, 'The lion and the dragon
shalt thou trample under feet[184].' It needed not this exaggeration
to enhance the significance of that scene, even more full of meaning
for the future than it was solemn and affecting to the Venetian crowd
that thronged the church and the piazza. For it was the renunciation
by the mightiest prince of his time of the project to which his life
had been devoted: it was the abandonment by the secular power of a
contest in which it had twice been vanquished, and which it could not
renew under more favourable conditions.
[Sidenote: Revival of the study of the civil law.]
Authority maintained so long against the successor of Peter would be
far from indulgent to rebellious subjects. For it was in this light
that the Lombard cities appeared to a monarch bent on reviving all the
rights his predecessors had enjoyed: nay, all that the law of ancient
Rome gave her absolute ruler. It would be wrong to speak of a
re-discovery of the civil law. That system had never perished from
Gaul and Italy, had been the groundwork of some codes, and the whole
substance, modified only by the changes in society, of many others.
The Church excepted, no agent did so much to keep alive the memory of
Roman institutions. The twelfth century now beheld the study
cultivated with a surprising increase of knowledge and ardour,
expended chiefly upon the Pandects. First in Italy and the schools of
the South, then in Paris and Oxford, they were expounded, commented
on, extolled as the perfection of human wisdom, the sole, true, and
eternal law. Vast as has been the labour and thought expended from
that time to this in the elucidation of the civil law, the most
competent authorities declare that in acuteness, in subtlety, in all
those branches of learning which can subsist without help from
historical criticism, these so-called Glossatores have been seldom
equalled and never surpassed by their successors. The teachers of the
canon law, who had not as yet become the rivals of the civilian, and
were accustomed to recur to his books where their own were silent,
spread through Europe the fame and influence of the Roman
jurisprudence; while its own professors were led both by their feeling
and their interest to give to all its maxims the greatest weight and
the fullest application. Men just emerging from barbarism, with minds
unaccustomed to create and blindly submissive to authority, viewed
written texts with an awe to us incomprehensible. All that the most
servile jurists of Rome had ever ascribed to their despotic princes
was directly transferred to the Cæsarean majesty who inherited their
name. He was 'Lord of the world,' absolute master of the lives and
property of all his subjects, that is, of all men; the sole fountain
of legislation, the embodiment of right and justice. These doctrines,
which the great Bolognese jurists, Bulgarus, Martinus, Hugolinus, and
others who constantly surrounded Frederick, taught and applied, as
matter of course, to a Teutonic, a feudal king, were by the rest of
the world not denied, were accepted in fervent faith by his German and
Italian partisans. 'To the Emperor belongs the protection of the whole
world,' says bishop Otto of Freysing. 'The Emperor is a living law
upon earth[185].' To Frederick, at Roncaglia, the archbishop of Milan
speaks for the assembled magnates of Lombardy: 'Do and ordain
whatsoever thou wilt, thy will is law; as it is written, "Quicquid
principi placuit legis habet vigorem, cum populus ei et in eum omne
suum imperium et potestatem concesserit[186]." The Hohenstaufen
himself was not slow to accept these magnificent ascriptions of
dignity, and though modestly professing his wish to govern according
to law rather than override the law, was doubtless roused by them to a
more vehement assertion of a prerogative so hallowed by age and by
what seemed a divine ordinance.
[Sidenote: Frederick in Italy.]
[Sidenote: Rome under Arnold of Brescia.]
That assertion was most loudly called for in Italy. The Emperors might
appear to consider it a conquered country without privileges to be
respected, for they did not summon its princes to the German diets,
and overawed its own assemblies at Pavia or Roncaglia by the
Transalpine host that followed them. Its crown, too, was theirs
whenever they crossed the Alps to claim it, while the elections on the
banks of the Rhine might be adorned but could not be influenced by the
presence of barons from the southern kingdom[187]. In practice,
however, the imperial power stood lower in Italy than in Germany, for
it had been from the first intermittent, depending on the personal
vigour and present armed support of each invader. The theoretic
sovereignty of the Emperor-king was nowise disputed: in the cities
toll and tax were of right his: he could issue edicts at the Diet, and
require the tenants in chief to appear with their vassals. But the
revival of a control never exercised since Henry IV's time, was felt
as an intolerable hardship by the great Lombard cities, proud of
riches and population equal to that of the duchies of Germany or the
kingdoms of the North, and accustomed for more than a century to a
turbulent independence. For republicanism and popular freedom
Frederick had little sympathy. At Rome the fervent Arnold of Brescia
had repeated, but with far different thoughts and hopes, the part of
Crescentius[188]. The city had thrown off the yoke of its bishop, and
a commonwealth under consuls and senate professed to emulate the
spirit while it renewed the forms of the primitive republic. Its
leaders had written to Conrad III[189], asking him to help them to
restore the Empire to its position under Constantine and Justinian;
but the German, warned by St. Bernard, had preferred the friendship of
the Pope. Filled with a vain conceit of their own importance, they
repeated their offers to Frederick when he sought the crown from
Hadrian the Fourth. A deputation, after dwelling in highflown language
on the dignity of the Roman people, and their kindness in bestowing
the sceptre on him, a Swabian and a stranger, proceeded, in a manner
hardly consistent, to demand a largess ere he should enter the city.
Frederick's anger did not hear them to the end: 'Is this your Roman
wisdom? Who are ye that usurp the name of Roman dignities? Your
honours and your authority are yours no longer; with us are consuls,
senate, soldiers. It was not you who chose us, but Charles and Otto
that rescued you from the Greek and the Lombard, and conquered by
their own might the imperial crown. That Frankish might is still the
same: wrench, if you can, the club from Hercules. It is not for the
people to give laws to the prince, but to obey his mandate[190].' This
was Frederick's version of the 'Translation of the Empire[191].'
[Sidenote: The Lombard Cities.]
He who had been so stern to his own capital was not likely to deal
more gently with the rebels of Milan and Tortona. In the contest by
which Frederick is chiefly known to history, he is commonly painted as
the foreign tyrant, the forerunner of the Austrian oppressor[192],
crushing under the hoofs of his cavalry the home of freedom and
industry. Such a view is unjust to a great man and his cause. To the
despot liberty is always licence; yet Frederick was the advocate of
admitted claims; the aggressions of Milan threatened her neighbours;
the refusal, where no actual oppression was alleged, to admit his
officers and allow his regalian rights, seemed a wanton breach of
oaths and engagements, treason against God no less than himself[193].
Nevertheless our sympathy must go with the cities, in whose victory we
recognize the triumph of freedom and civilization. Their resistance
was at first probably a mere aversion to unused control, and to the
enforcement of imposts less offensive in former days than now, and by
long dereliction apparently obsolete[194]. Republican principles were
not avowed, nor Italian nationality appealed to. But the progress of
the conflict developed new motives and feelings, and gave them clearer
notions of what they fought for. As the Emperor's antagonist, the Pope
was their natural ally: he blessed their arms, and called on the
barons of Romagna and Tuscany for aid; he made 'The Church' ere long
their watchword, and helped them to conclude that league of mutual
support by means whereof the party of the Italian Guelfs was formed.
Another cry, too, began to be heard, hardly less inspiriting than the
last, the cry of freedom and municipal self-government--freedom little
understood and terribly abused, self-government which the cities who
claimed it for themselves refused to their subject allies, yet both of
them, through their divine power of stimulating effort and quickening
sympathy, as much nobler than the harsh and sterile system of a feudal
monarchy as the citizen of republican Athens rose above the slavish
Asiatic or the brutal Macedonian. Nor was the fact that Italians were
resisting a Transalpine invader without its effect; there was as yet
no distinct national feeling, for half Lombardy, towns as well as
rural nobles, fought under Frederick; but events made the cause of
liberty always more clearly the cause of patriotism, and increased
that fear and hate of the Tedescan for which Italy has had such bitter
justification.
[Sidenote: Temporary success of Frederick.]
The Emperor was for a time successful: Tortona was taken, Milan razed
to the ground, her name apparently lost: greater obstacles had been
overcome, and a fuller authority was now exercised than in the days of
the Ottos or the Henrys. The glories of the first Frankish conqueror
were triumphantly recalled, and Frederick was compared by his admirers
to the hero whose canonization he had procured, and whom he strove in
all things to imitate[195]. 'He was esteemed,' says one, 'second only
to Charles in piety and justice.' 'We ordain this,' says a decree: 'Ut
ad Caroli imitationem ius ecclesiarum statum reipublicæ et legum
integritatem per totum imperium nostrum servaremus[196].' But the hold
the name of Charles had on the minds of the people, and the way in
which he had become, so to speak, an eponym of Empire, has better
witnesses than grave documents. A rhyming poet sings[197]:--
'Quanta sit potentia vel laus Friderici
Cum sit patens omnibus, non est opus dici;
Qui rebelles lancea fodiens ultrici
Repræsentat Karolum dextera victrici.'
The diet at Roncaglia was a chorus of gratulations over the
re-establishment of order by the destruction of the dens of unruly
burghers.
[Sidenote: Victory of the Lombard league.]
This fair sky was soon clouded. From her quenchless ashes uprose
Milan; Cremona, scorning old jealousies, helped to rebuild what she
had destroyed, and the confederates, committed to an all but hopeless
strife, clung faithfully together till on the field of Legnano the
Empire's banner went down before the carroccio[198] of the free city.
Times were changed since Aistulf and Desiderius trembled at the
distant tramp of the Frankish hosts. A new nation had arisen, slowly
reared through suffering into strength, now at last by heroic deeds
conscious of itself. The power of Charles had overleaped boundaries of
nature and language that were too strong for his successor, and that
grew henceforth ever firmer, till they made the Empire itself a
delusive name. Frederick, though harsh in war, and now balked of his
most cherished hopes, could honestly accept a state of things it was
beyond his power to change: he signed cheerfully and kept dutifully
the peace of Constance, which left him little but a titular supremacy
over the Lombard towns.
[Sidenote: Frederick as German king.]
At home no Emperor since Henry III had been so much respected and so
generally prosperous. Uniting in his person the Saxon and Swabian
families, he healed the long feud of Welf and Waiblingen: his prelates
were faithful to him, even against Rome: no turbulent rebel disturbed
the public peace. Germany was proud of a hero who maintained her
dignity so well abroad, and he crowned a glorious life with a happy
death, leading the van of Christian chivalry against the Mussulman.
Frederick, the greatest of the Crusaders, is the noblest type of
mediæval character in many of its shadows, in all its lights.
[Sidenote: The German cities.]
Legal in form, in practice sometimes almost absolute, the government
of Germany was, like that of other feudal kingdoms, restrained chiefly
by the difficulty of coercing refractory vassals. All depended on the
monarch's character, and one so vigorous and popular as Frederick
could generally lead the majority with him and terrify the rest. A
false impression of the real strength of his prerogative might be
formed from the readiness with which he was obeyed. He repaired the
finances of the kingdom, controlled the dukes, introduced a more
splendid ceremonial, endeavoured to exalt the central power by
multiplying the nobles of the second rank, afterwards the 'college of
princes,' and by trying to substitute the civil law and Lombard feudal
code for the old Teutonic customs, different in every province. If not
successful in this project, he fared better with another. Since Henry
the Fowler's day towns had been growing up through Southern and
Western Germany, especially where rivers offered facilities for trade.
Cologne, Treves, Mentz, Worms, Speyer, Nürnberg, Ulm, Regensburg,
Augsburg, were already considerable cities, not afraid to beard their
lord or their bishop, and promising before long to counterbalance the
power of the territorial oligarchy. Policy or instinct led Frederick
to attach them to the throne, enfranchising many, granting, with
municipal institutions, an independent jurisdiction, conferring
various exemptions and privileges; while receiving in turn their
good-will and loyal aid, in money always, in men when need should
come. His immediate successors trode in his steps, and thus there
arose in the state a third order, the firmest bulwark, had it been
rightly used, of imperial authority; an order whose members, the Free
Cities, were through many ages the centres of German intellect and
freedom, the only haven from the storms of civil war, the surest hope
of future peace and union. In them national congresses to this day
sometimes meet: from them aspiring spirits strive to diffuse those
ideas of Germanic unity and self-government, which they alone have
kept alive. Out of so many flourishing commonwealths, four[199] have
been spared by foreign conquerors and faithless princes. To the
primitive order of German freemen, scarcely existing out of the towns,
except in Swabia and Switzerland, Frederick further commended himself
by allowing them to be admitted to knighthood, by restraining the
licence of the nobles, imposing a public peace, making justice in
every way more accessible and impartial. To the south-west of the
green plain that girdles in the rock of Salzburg, the gigantic mass of
the Untersberg frowns over the road which winds up a long defile to
the glen and lake of Berchtesgaden. There, far up among its limestone
crags, in a spot scarcely accessible to human foot, the peasants of
the valley point out to the traveller the black mouth of a cavern, and
tell him that within Barbarossa lies amid his knights in an enchanted
sleep[200], waiting the hour when the ravens shall cease to hover
round the peak, and the pear-tree blossom in the valley, to descend
with his Crusaders and bring back to Germany the golden age of peace
and strength and unity. Often in the evil days that followed the fall
of Frederick's house, often when tyranny seemed unendurable and
anarchy endless, men thought on that cavern, and sighed for the day
when the long sleep of the just Emperor should be broken, and his
shield be hung aloft again as of old in the camp's midst, a sign of
help to the poor and the oppressed.
FOOTNOTES:
[181] A great deal of importance seems to have been attached to this
symbolic act of courtesy. See Art. I of the Sachsenspiegel.
[182] Letter to the German bishops in Radewic; Mur., _S. R. I._, t.
vi. p. 833.
[183] A picture in the great hall of the ducal palace (the Sala del
Maggio Consiglio) represents the scene. See Rogers' Italy.
[184] Psalm xci.
[185] Document of 1230, quoted by Von Raumer, v. p. 81.
[186] Speech of archbishop of Milan, in Radewic; Mur. vi.
[187] Frederick's election (at Frankfort) was made 'non sine quibusdam
Italiæ baronibus.'--Otto Fris. i. But this was the exception.
[188] See also _post_, Chapter XVI.
[189] 'Senatus Populusque Romanus urbis et orbis totius domino
Conrado.'
[190] Otto of Freysing.
[191] Later in his reign, Frederick condescended to negotiate with
these Roman magistrates against a hostile Pope, and entered into a
sort of treaty by which they were declared exempt from all
jurisdiction but his own.
[192] See the first note to Shelley's _Hellas_. Sismondi is mainly
answerable for this conception of Barbarossa's position.
[193] They say rebelliously, says Frederick, 'Nolumus hunc regnare
super nos ... at nos maluimus honestam mortem quam ut,' &c.--Letter in
Pertz. _M. G. H._ legg. ii.
[194]
'De tributo Cæsaris nemo cogitabat;
Omnes erant Cæsares, nemo censum dabat;
Civitas Ambrosii, velut Troia, stabat,
Deos parum, homines minus formidabat.'
Poems relating to the Emperor Frederick of Hohenstaufen, published by
Grimm.
[195] Charles the Great was canonized by Frederick's anti-pope and
confirmed afterwards.
[196] _Acta Concil. Hartzhem._ iii., quoted by Von Raumer, ii. 6.
[197] Poems relating to Frederick I, _ut supra_.
[198] The carroccio was a waggon with a flagstaff planted on it, which
served the Lombards for a rallying-point in battle.
[199] Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, and Frankfort.
[Since this was first written Frankfort has been annexed by Prussia,
and her three surviving sisters have, by their entrance into the North
German confederation, lost something of their independence.]
[200] The legend is one which appears under various forms in many
countries.