In the year 1216 Innocent III died—the most powerful of all Popes, a striking personality whose life by kindly fate did not outlast his glory. In estimating Innocent’s ability as a statesman there stands one blot against his record in the clear light shed by after-events, namely, the short-sighted policy that once again united the Kingdom of Naples to the Empire, and laid the Papacy between the upper millstone of Lombardy and the nether millstone of southern Italy. Excuse may be found in Innocent’s desperate need of a champion with Otto IV threatening his papal heritage, added to his belief in the promises of the young Hohenstaufen to remain his faithful vassal. He also tried to safeguard the future by making Frederick publicly declare that he would bequeath Naples to a son who would not stand for election to the Empire; but in trusting the word of the young Emperor he had sown a wind from which his successors were to reap a whirlwind.
The new Emperor was just twenty years old when Innocent died. Either to please his guardian, or moved by a momentary religious impulse, he had taken the Cross immediately after his entry into Aachen; but the years passed and he showed himself in no haste to fulfil the vow. Much of his time was spent in his loved southern kingdom, where he completed Innocent’s work of reducing to submission the Saracen population that had remained in Sicily since the Mahometan conquest.[20] As infidels the Papacy had regarded these Arabs with special hatred; but Frederick, once assured that they were so weak that they would be in future dependent on his favour, began protecting instead of persecuting them. He also encouraged their silk industry by building them a town, Lucera, on the Neapolitan coast, where they could pursue it undisturbed; while he enrolled large numbers of Arab warriors in his army, and used them to enforce his will on the feudal aristocracy, descendants of the Norman adventurers of the eleventh century.
So successful was he in playing off one section of his subjects against another, opposing or aiding the different classes as policy dictated, that he soon reigned as an autocrat in Naples. Many of the nobles’ strongholds were levelled with the dust: their claim to wage private war was forbidden on pain of death: cases were taken away from their law-courts and those of the feudal bishops to be decided by royal justices: towns were deprived of their freedom to elect their own magistrates, while crown officials sent from Palermo administered the laws, and imposed and collected taxes.
On the whole these changes were beneficial, for private privileges had been greatly abused in Naples, and Frederick, like Philip Augustus or the Angevin Henry II, had the instinct and ability to govern well when he chose. Nevertheless the subjugation of ‘the Kingdom’, as Naples was usually called in Italy, was of course received with loud outcries of anger by Neapolitan barons and churchmen, who hastened to inform the Holy See that their ruler loved infidels better than Christians and kept an eastern harem at Palermo.
Honorius III, the new Pope, accepted such reports and scandals with dismay. He had himself noted uneasily Frederick’s absorption in Italian affairs and frequently reminded him of his crusading vow. Being gentle and slow to commit himself to any decided step however, it was not till the Hohenstaufen deliberately broke his promise to Innocent III, and had his eldest son Henry crowned King of the Romans as well as King of Naples, thus acknowledging him as his heir in both Germany and Italy, that Honorius’s wrath flamed into a threat of excommunication. For a time it spread no farther, since Frederick was lavish in explanations and in promises of friendship that he had no intention of fulfilling, while the old Pope chose to believe him rather than risk an actual conflagration. At last, however, the patient Honorius died.
Gregory IX, the new Pope, was of the family of Innocent, and shared to the full his views of the world-wide supremacy of the Church. An old man of austere life and feverish energy, he regarded Frederick as a monster of ingratitude and became almost hysterical and quite unreasonable in his efforts to humble him. Goaded by his constant reproaches and threats, the Emperor began to make leisurely preparations at Brindisi for his crusade; but when he at last started, an epidemic of fever, to which he himself fell a victim, forced him to put back to port. Gregory, refusing to believe in this illness as anything more than an excuse for delay, at once excommunicated him; and then, though Frederick set sail as soon as he was well enough, repeated the ban, giving as his reason that the Emperor had not waited to receive his pardon for the first offence like an obedient son of the Church.
A crusader excommunicated by the Head of Christendom first for not fulfilling his vow and then for fulfilling it! This was a degrading and ridiculous sight; and Frederick, now definitely hostile to Rome, continued on his way, determined with obstinate pride that, if not for the Catholic Faith, then for his own glory, he would carry out his purpose. The Templars refused him support: the Christians still left in the neighbourhood of Acre helped him half-heartedly or stood aloof, frightened by the warnings of their priests; but Frederick achieved more without the Pope’s aid than other crusaders had done of late years with his blessing. By force of arms, and still more by skilful negotiations, he obtained from the Sultan possession of Jerusalem, and entering in triumph placed on his head the crown of the Latin kings.
His vow fulfilled, he sailed for Sicily, and the Pope, whose troops in Frederick’s absence had been harrying ‘the Kingdom’, hastily patched up a peace at San Germano. ‘I will remember the past no more,’ cried Frederick, but anger burned within him at papal hostility. ‘The Emperor has come to me with the zeal of a devoted son,’ said Gregory, but there was no trust in his heart that corresponded to his words.
A Hohenstaufen, who had taken Jerusalem unaided, supreme in Naples, supreme also in Germany, stretching out his imperial sceptre over Lombardy! What Pope, who believed that the future of the Church rested on the temporal independence of Rome, could sleep tranquilly in his bed with such a vision?
It is not possible to describe here in any detail the renewed war between Empire and Papacy that followed the inevitable breakdown of the treaty of San Germano. Very bitter was the spirit in which it was waged on both sides. Frederick, whatever his intentions, could not forget that it was the Father of Christendom who had tried to ruin his crusade. The remembrance did not so much shake his faith as wake in him an exasperated sense of injustice that rendered him deaf to those who counselled compromise. Unable to rid himself wholly of the fear of papal censure, he yet saw clearly enough that the sin for which Popes relentlessly pursued him was not his cruelty, nor profligacy, nor even his toleration of Saracens, but the fact that he was King of Naples as well as Holy Roman Emperor.