Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

For ten long years Germany was devastated by their civil wars. Otto, as the Guelf representative, gained the support of Innocent the Great, to whom the claimants at one time appealed for arbitration; but Philip refused to submit to this judgement in favour of his rival, believing that he himself had behind him the majority of the German princes and of the official class.

‘Inasmuch,’ declared Innocent, ‘as our dearest son in Christ, Otto, is industrious, prudent, discreet, strong and constant, himself devoted to the Church ... we by the authority of St. Peter receive him as King and will in due course bestow on him the imperial crown.’

Here was papal triumph! Rome no longer patronized but patron, with Otto on his knees, gratefully promising submission and homage with every kind of ecclesiastical privilege, to complete the picture. Yet circumstances change traditions as well as people, and when the death of Philip of Suabia left him master of Germany, the Guelf Otto found his old ideals impracticable: he became a Ghibelline in policy, announced his imperial rights over Lombardy, even over some of the towns belonging to the Pope, while he loudly announced his intention of driving the young Hohenstaufen from Naples.

Innocent’s wrath at this volte-face was unbounded. Otto, no longer his ‘dearest son in Christ’, was now a perjurer and schismatic, whose excommunication and deposition were the immediate duty of Rome. Neither, however, was likely to be effective unless the Pope could provide Italy and Germany with a rival, whose dazzling claims, backed by papal support, would win him followers wherever he went. In this crisis Innocent found his champion in the Hohenstaufen prince denounced by Otto, a lad educated almost since infancy in the tenets and ambitions of the Catholic Church.

Frederick II

Frederick, King of Naples and Sicily, was an interesting development of hereditary tastes and the atmosphere in which he had been reared. To the southern blood that leaped in his veins he owed perhaps his hot passions, his sensuous appreciation of luxury and art, his almost Saracen contempt for women save as toys to amuse his leisure hours. From the Hohenstaufen he imbibed strength, ambition, and cruelty, from the Norman strain on his mother’s side his reckless daring and treachery. With the ordinary education of a prince of his day, Frederick’s qualities and vices might have merely produced a warrior king of rather exceptional ability; but thanks to the papal tutors provided by Innocent, the boy’s naturally quick brain and imagination were stirred by a course of studies far superior to what his lay contemporaries usually enjoyed, and he emerged in manhood with a real love of books and culture, and with an eager curiosity on such subjects as philosophy and natural history.

In the royal charter by which he founded the University of Naples Frederick expressed his intention that here ‘those within the Kingdom who had hunger for knowledge might find the food for which they were yearning’; and his court at Palermo, if from one aspect dissolute and luxurious, was also a centre for men of wit and knowledge against whose brains the King loved to test his own quips and theories.

When Frederick reached Rome, on Innocent’s hasty summons to unsheath the sword of the Hohenstaufen against Otto, much of his character was as yet a closed book even to himself. Impulsive and eager, like any ambitious youth of seventeen called to high adventure, and with a genuine respect for his guardian, he did not look far ahead; but kneeling at the Pope’s feet, pledged his homage and faith before he rode away northwards to win an empire. In Germany a considerable following awaited him, lifelong opponents of Otto on account of his Welf blood, and others who hated him for his churlish manners. Amongst them Frederick scattered lavishly some money he had borrowed from the Republic of Genoa, and this generosity, combined with his Hohenstaufen strength and daring, increased the happy reputation that papal legates had already established for him in many quarters.

In December 1212 he was crowned in Mainz. Civil war followed, embittered by papal and imperial leagues, but in 1214 Otto IV was decisively beaten at Bouvines in the struggle with Philip II of France that we have already described,[19] and the tide which had been previously turning against him now swept away his few friends and last hopes. With the entry of his young rival into the Rhineland provinces the dual Empire ceased to exist, and Frederick was crowned in Aachen, the old capital of Charlemagne.

Innocent III had now reached the summit of his power, for his pupil and protégé sat on the throne of Rome’s imperial rival. In the same year he called a Council to the Lateran Palace, the fourth gathering of its kind, to consider the two objects dearest to his heart, ‘the deliverance of the Holy Land and the reform of the Church Universal’. Crusading zeal, however, he could not rouse again: to cleanse and spiritualize the life of the Church in the thirteenth century was to prove a task beyond men of finer fibre than Innocent: but, as an illustration of his immense influence over Europe, the Fourth Lateran Council with its dense submissive crowds, representative of every land and class, was a fitting end to his pontificate.