Frederick at first opposed all his strength of soul against the sentence of excommunication pronounced by the council on him. Causing his jewels to be brought him, and placing the golden crown of the empire on his head, he declared before a numerous assembly that he would still wear it, and knew how to defend it; but, notwithstanding the enthusiasm of the Ghibelline party, the devotion of his friends, and the progress of philosophical opinions, which he had himself encouraged, the man whom the church had condemned was in constant danger of being abandoned or betrayed. The mendicant monks everywhere excited conspiracies against him. They took advantage of the terrors inspired by sickness and age, to make sinners return, as they said, to the ways of salvation, and desired them to make amends for their past transgressions by delivering the church of God from its most dangerous enemy. Insurrections frequently broke forth in one or other of the Two Sicilies; still oftener the emperor discovered amongst his courtiers plots to destroy him, either by the dagger or poison; even his private secretary, his intimate friend, Pietro delle Vigne, whom he had raised from abject poverty, to whom he had entrusted his most important affairs, gave ear to the counsel of the monks, and promised to poison his master.
[1245-1248 A.D.]
Frederick, on his part, became suspicious and cruel; his distrust fell on his most faithful friends; and the executions which he ordered sometimes preceded the proofs of guilt. He had confided Germany to his son Conrad, and the exclusive government of the Veronese marches to Ezzelino. The hatred which this ferocious man excited by his crimes fell on the emperor. Ezzelino imprisoned in the most loathsome dungeons those whom he considered his enemies, and frequently put them to death by torture, or suffered them to perish by hunger; he was well aware that the relatives of these victims must also be his enemies; they were, in their turn, arrested; and the more he sacrificed to his barbarity, the more he was called upon to strike. The citizens of Milan, Mantua, Bergamo, and Brescia every day heard of new and horrible crimes committed by the governor of the marches; they conceived the greater detestation of the Ghibelline party, and entertained the firmer determination to repel Frederick. He, on the contrary, had no thoughts of attacking them; he established himself during the Council of Lyons at Turin, and thence entered into a negotiation with St. Louis, to obtain by his mediation a reconciliation with the church to which he made, in token of his submission, the offer to accompany Louis to the Holy Land.
Street Costume of an Italian Nobleman, Thirteenth Century
The revolt of Parma, on the 16th of June, 1247, obliged Frederick to resume his arms at a moment when he was least disposed. The friends and relatives of Pope Innocent IV, the Guelf nobles of the houses of Corregio, Lupi, and Rossi, re-entering Parma, whence they had been exiled, triumphed over their adversaries, and in their turn expelled them from the city. Frederick was determined at any price to recover Parma. He sent for a numerous band of Saracens from Apulia, commanded by one of his natural sons, named Frederick, to whom he gave the title of king of Antioch. He assembled the Lombard Ghibellines, under the command of another of his illegitimate sons, named Hans or Hensius, called by him king of Sardinia, and whom he had made imperial vicar in Lombardy. Ezzelino arrived, too, at his camp from the Veronese march, with the militias of Padua, Vicenza, and Verona, and the soldiers whom he had raised in his hereditary fiefs.
On the other side, the Guelfs of Lombardy hastened to send succour to a city which had just sacrificed itself for them. The Milanese set the example; the militias of Mantua, Piacenza, and Ferrara followed it; and the Guelfs, who had been exiled from Reggio, Modena, and other Ghibelline cities, thinking they served their country in fighting for their faction, arrived in great numbers to shut themselves up in Parma. Frederick was prevented from hanging the hostages given previous to the revolt, before the walls of the city, by the militia of Pavia, who declared it was with the sword of Ghibelline soldiers only, and not with that of the executioner, that they would secure the throne of the emperor. The siege made little progress; the winter had begun, but Frederick persisted in his attempt. He proclaimed his determination to raze Parma to the ground, and to transfer those of the inhabitants who should be spared into his fortified camp, of which he would make a new town, called Vittoria. This camp, which he quitted on a hawking party, on the 8th of February, 1248, was in his absence surprised by a sortie of a Guelf army from Parma, taken, and pillaged; his soldiers were dispersed, and the emperor had the humiliation of being forced to raise the siege.
THE GUELFS EXPELLED FROM FLORENCE; THE BATTLE OF FOSSALTA
[1248-1249 A.D.]
Before this event, he had sent his son, the king of Antioch, into Tuscany with sixteen hundred German cavalry, to secure Florence to his party; where, since the death of Buondelmonte, the Guelfs and Ghibellines, always in opposition, had not ceased fighting. There was seldom an assembly, a festival, a public ceremony, without some offence given, either by one or other of the parties. Both flew to arms; chains were thrown across the streets; barricades were immediately formed, and in every quarter, round every noble family; the more contiguous, who had the most frequent causes of quarrel, fought at the same time in ten different places. Nevertheless the republic was supposed to lean towards the Guelf party; and the Florentine Ghibellines, in their relations with other people, had never sought to separate from their fellow-countrymen, or to place themselves in opposition to their magistrates. Frederick, fearing to lose Florence, wrote to the Uberti, the chiefs of the Ghibelline faction, to assemble secretly in their palace all their party, to attack afterwards in concert and at once all the posts of the Guelfs; whilst his son, the king of Antioch, should present himself at the gates, and thus expel their adversaries from the city. This plan was executed on the night of Candlemas, 1248; the barricades of the Guelfs were forced in every quarter, because they defended themselves in small bands against the whole of the opposite party. The Ghibellines, masters of the town, ordered all the Guelfs to quit it. They afterwards demolished thirty-six palaces belonging to the same number of the most illustrious families of that party; and intimidating the other cities of Tuscany, they constrained them to follow their example, and declare for the emperor.