Historic Boys: Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times

by Elbridge S. Brooks

"What ho, there, warders of the gate!" came the summons of the herald; "open, open ye the gates of Constance to your master and lord, Otho the Emperor!"

The thronging spear-tips and the swaying crests of Otho's two hundred knights flashed in the sun, and the giant form of the big Brunswicker strode out before his following. The sight of his dreaded master almost awed the Bishop of Constance into submission, but the voice of young Frederick's stanch friend and comrade, Berard, Archbishop of Bari, rang out clear and quick.

"Tell thy master, Otho of Brunswick," he said, "that Constance gates open only at the bidding of their rightful lord, Frederick of Hohenstaufen, Emperor of the Romans and King of Sicily. And say thou, too, O herald, that I, Berard, Archbishop of Bari, and Legate of our lord the Pope, do at his command now cut off and excommunicate Otho of Brunswick from the fellowship of all true men and the protection of the Church!"

Otho, deeply enraged at this refusal and denunciation, spurred furiously forward, and his knights laid spears in rest to follow their leader; but the words of excommunication decided the wavering Bishop of Constance to side with the boy sovereign, and he commanded hastily: "Ho, warders; up drawbridge—quick!"

The great chains clanked and tightened, the heavy drawbridge rose in air, and Otho of Brunswick saw the portcullised gate of Constance drop heavily before his very eyes, and knew that his cause was lost.

By just so narrow a chance did young Frederick of Hohenstaufen win his empire.

And now it was won indeed. From every part of Germany came princes, nobles, and knights flocking to the imperial standard. Otho retired to his stronghold in Brunswick; and on the fifth of December, 1212, in the old Römer, or council-house, of Frankfort, five thousand knights with the electors of Germany welcomed the "Boy from Sicily." Four days after, in the great cathedral of Mayence, the pointed arches and rounded dome of which rose high above the storied Rhine, the sad little prince of but five years back was solemnly crowned in presence of a glittering throng, which with cheers of welcome hailed him as Emperor supreme.

And here we leave him. Only seventeen, Frederick of Hohenstaufen—the beggar prince, the friendless orphan of Palermo, after trials and dangers and triumphs stranger than those of any prince of fairy tales or "Arabian Nights"—entered upon a career of empire that has placed him in history as "one of the most remarkable figures of the Middle Ages."

Schooled by the hardships and troubles of his unhappy childhood, the poor little "Child of Apulia" developed into a courageous and energetic youth, and into a man of power and action and imperial renown. Years passed away, and, on the thirteenth of December, 1250, he died at his hunting-lodge of Firenzuola, in his loved Apulian kingdom. A gray old man stood beside the dying monarch's bed—Berard, Archbishop of Palermo and Bari, the only survivor of that dauntless band which, nearly forty years before, had crossed the trackless Alps determined to win Germany or die. The "Boy from Sicily," who had started upon the "quest for his heritage" unheralded and almost unknown, died the most powerful monarch of his day in all the Christian world, unsurpassed in outward splendor, the possessor of six royal crowns—Germany, Burgundy, Lombardy, Sicily, Jerusalem, and the Holy Roman Empire.

A man of magnificent gifts—a great scholar, a far-seeing statesman and law-maker, a valiant and victorious Crusader, a mighty Emperor, but with all the weaknesses and cruel ways that marked the monarchs of those hard old days—this story of his remarkable and romantic boyhood comes down to us as a lesson of triumph over obstacles, showing us, as do so many nobler lives than his, how out of distress and trouble and actual hardships, any boy of energy and spirit may rise to eminence and lofty achievement. The age is passed when kings and princes rise so far above their fellow-men. All may be kings and princes in their special callings if they but have persistent and unflinching determination, and the boy of to-day has it in his power to become, even as did young Frederick of Hohenstaufen, the Boy Emperor, something great in his day and generation—perhaps even be acknowledged, as was he, though from far higher motives, Stupor Mundi Fredericus—"Frederick the Wonder of the World!"