The End of the Hohenstaufen

Two days after Pope Innocent’s death in Perugia, the cardinals met in that same city and elected the elderly and already frail Cardinal Cencio Savelli, who took the name of Honorius III. He came from an aristocratic Roman family and had already given many years’ service in the Curia; in 1197 he had even served briefly as tutor to Frederick of Sicily, though as Frederick was not yet three years old he is unlikely to have made much impression.

From the day of his installation, Honorius saw as his first duty the continuation of his predecessor’s plans for a Crusade. To achieve the political unity necessary for its success, he worked hard on the diplomatic front, arbitrating between the kings of France and Aragon, persuading Philip Augustus to abandon his invasion of England, helping John’s son Henry succeed to the throne after his father’s death in 1216. Alas, the Fifth Crusade proved as ill starred as the Second, Third, and Fourth. It had as its object the capture of the Egyptian city of Damietta, which it was hoped to exchange later for Jerusalem. A fleet had set out in 1218, initially under the leadership of John of Brienne, titular King of Jerusalem, but on the arrival, four months late, of the papal contingent under the Spanish Cardinal Pelagius of Santa Lucia, the cardinal had insisted on assuming the overall command.

By this time the Crusade was gathering its forces. A constant stream of young German knights was crossing the Alps and pouring down the pilgrim roads of Italy to join the emperor in Apulia, where the army was to take ship for the Holy Land. But then, in the savage heat of an Apulian August, an epidemic broke out. It may have been typhoid; it may have been cholera; but it swept relentlessly through the Crusader camps. Now Frederick himself succumbed; so too did the Landgrave of Thuringia, who had brought with him several hundred cavalry. The two sick men embarked nonetheless and sailed from Brindisi in September, but a day or two later the landgrave was dead and Frederick realized that he himself was too ill to continue. He sent the surviving Crusaders ahead with instructions to make what preparations they could; he himself would join them when sufficiently recovered, by May 1228 at the latest. Ambassadors were simultaneously dispatched to Rome, to explain the situation to the pope.

AT LAST, ON Wednesday, June 28, 1228, Frederick II sailed from Brindisi with a fleet of about sixty ships, bound for Palestine. He was now fully restored to health, but his relations with Pope Gregory had not sustained a similar improvement; indeed, on discovering that he really was preparing for departure, the pope had fired off another excommunication on March 23. (Yet another was to follow on August 30.) Frederick, meanwhile, had once again become a father. Two months earlier, the sixteen-year-old Yolande had given birth to a boy, Conrad—only to die of puerperal fever shortly afterward.

After spending some months in Cyprus, the emperor landed in Tyre toward the end of 1228. Impressive detachments of Templars and Hospitalers were there to greet him, still further swelling the ranks of what was already a considerable army; but Frederick had no intention of fighting if his purposes could be achieved by peaceful diplomacy, as he had reason to think they might be. Some months before, the Sultan al-Kamil in Cairo, at loggerheads with his brother al-Mu’azzam, governor of Damascus, had secretly appealed to him: if he would drive al-Mu’azzam from Damascus, then he—al-Kamil—would be in a position to restore to him the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

There were no threats—none, at least, outwardly expressed. But the imperial army was on the spot, and its strength was considerable. The sultan was in an impossible position. The emperor was there on his very doorstep, waiting to collect what had been promised and unlikely to leave until he had gotten it. Meanwhile, the situation in Syria, where his attempts to capture Damascus were having no effect, was once again causing him increasing alarm. Perhaps an alliance might be no bad thing after all. And so the sultan capitulated, agreeing to a ten-year treaty—on certain conditions. First, Jerusalem must remain undefended. The Temple Mount, with the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque opposite it, could be visited by Christians but must remain in Muslim hands, together with Hebron. The Christians could have their other principal shrines in Bethlehem and Nazareth, on the understanding that they would be linked to the Christian cities of the coast only by a narrow corridor running through what would continue to be Muslim territory.

The situation could hardly have been worse: yet from the moment of Frederick’s arrival the tide began to turn. Here was the emperor, once again among his own people, not dead but triumphant, having recovered without bloodshed the Holy Places for Christendom. His achievement might not have impressed the Christian communities of Outremer, but to the people of South Italy and Sicily it appeared in a very different light. Moreover, with his return to his kingdom, Frederick himself instantly became a changed man. Gone were the anger, the bluster, the insecurity, the lack of understanding; he was back now in the land he knew and loved; once again, he was in control. All that summer he spent tirelessly on campaign, and by the end of October the papal army was broken.

Gregory IX, however, was not; and the final reconciliation between the two was a long and painful process. In the following months the emperor made concession after concession, knowing as he did that the obstinate old pope still retained his most damaging weapon. Frederick was still excommunicate: a serious embarrassment, a permanent reproach, and a potentially dangerous diplomatic liability. As a Christian, too—insofar as he was one—Frederick would have had no wish to die under the ban of the Church. But still Gregory prevaricated; it was not until July 1230 that, very reluctantly, he agreed to a peace treaty—signed at Ceprano at the end of August—and lifted his sentence.

THE TRUCE PROVED, inevitably, uneasy; but it lasted for nine years, during which time each party rendered the other useful service. When, in 1234, the Romans staged one of their periodic revolts, demanding the abolition of clerical immunities as well as the right to raise taxes and strike coinage, Frederick instantly answered Gregory’s appeal for aid and forced their submission. In return the emperor sought papal assistance in his difficulties with the Lombard cities; Gregory did his best to mediate and obligingly excommunicated Frederick’s refractory son Henry, King of the Germans, who was plotting with the Lombards against his father. All too soon, however, the rifts began to appear. His attempts at mediation having failed, the pope was seriously concerned when Frederick summoned the help of German princes in subduing the Lombard cities by force; he clearly could not allow the emperor to ride roughshod over North Italy and impose on it the same degree of autocracy as prevailed in the South. Were he to do so, what was to prevent an imperial invasion of the Papal States and the consequent absorption of the whole of Italy into the empire?

Then, in November 1237, Frederick smashed the Lombards at Cortenuova. They fled by night, leaving behind the splendid Milanese carroccio, the ceremonial war chariot that carried the standards and served as a rallying point for the army. To heighten the impact of his victory, the emperor then entered Cremona, where he awarded himself a triumph on the ancient Roman pattern. Behind him and his victorious soldiers marched the captured Lombard commanders in fetters; the carroccio itself was drawn through the streets by an elephant from the menagerie which accompanied Frederick on all his travels, with Pietro Tiepolo, a son of the Doge of Venice and sometime podestà (governor) of Milan, bound to its central flagpole. For Gregory, this was additional proof that the Papacy was in mortal danger, and when in the following year Frederick sent his bastard son Enzio to Sardinia—a papal fief—arranging for him to marry a noble Sardinian girl and designating him king, his worst suspicions were confirmed.

But emperors could not be thrown out so easily. The Hohenstaufen name retained immense prestige in Germany, while in Frederick’s own kingdom his endless peregrinations had ensured him a consistently high profile, to the point where he seemed omnipresent—part of life itself. Loftily ignoring the papal pronouncement, he continued the struggle; Innocent fought back, supporting two successive antikings whom he had had elected by the German princes, using the mendicant orders to preach a Crusade against the emperor, and even at one point conniving in a plot to assassinate him. He spent considerable amounts of money on bribes and would have spent more if the papal treasury had not been virtually empty; on his accession he had been besieged by a mob of creditors demanding the repayment of debts incurred by Pope Gregory.

King Louis IX of France did his best to mediate, but the quarrel was too deep, and the two were still at daggers drawn when, in December 1250 during a hunting trip in Apulia, Frederick suffered a violent attack of dysentery. He died a few days later at Castel Fiorentino, just thirteen days short of his fifty-sixth birthday. His body was taken to Palermo Cathedral, where, at his request, it was consigned to the magnificent porphyry sarcophagus that had been prepared for his grandfather Roger II and can still be seen there today.

Ever since Frederick’s theoretical deposition, Innocent IV—and, after his death in 1254, his successor (and Gregory IX’s nephew), the gentle, easygoing, and ultimately ineffectual Alexander IV—had been seeking an “athlete of Christ” who would rid South Italy once and for all of the House of Hohenstaufen and lead the army of the Church to victory in the peninsula. Richard, Earl of Cornwall, a brother of the English King Henry III, had seemed at one moment a possibility, but had finally refused to take up the challenge; so too—after the pope had actually invested him with the southern kingdom—had King Henry’s son Edmund. In 1261, however, Alexander died at Viterbo, where, to avoid the factional strife in Rome, he had spent most of his pontificate, and after three months of inconclusive deliberations the cardinals elected a rank outsider, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who happened to be visiting the Curia at Viterbo in his official capacity. Jacques Pantaléon was a Frenchman, the son of a poor cobbler in Troyes. He took the name of Urban IV; and his eye soon fell on a compatriot, Charles of Anjou.

On January 6, 1266—Epiphany—a group of cardinals in Rome crowned Charles of Anjou with the crown of Sicily. (Neither Pope Urban nor his successor, Clement IV, ever went near the Holy City, preferring to remain at Anagni or Viterbo.) Less than a month later, on February 3, Charles’s troops crossed the frontier into the Regno and met Manfred’s outside Benevento on the twenty-sixth. It was all over quite quickly. Manfred, courageous as always, stood his ground and went down fighting, but his troops, hopelessly outnumbered, soon fled from the field. The battle had been decisive: the Crusade was over.

And so—or very nearly—was the House of Hohenstaufen. Two years later Manfred’s son Conrad IV, better known as Conradin, made a last desperate attempt to save the situation, leading an army of Germans, Italians, and Spaniards into the Regno. Charles hurried up and met them on August 23, 1268, at the border village of Tagliacozzo. This time the battle proved a good deal harder, resulting in hideous slaughter on both sides, but the Angevins again won the day. Conradin escaped but was captured soon afterward. There followed a show trial in Naples, after which, on October 29, the young prince—he was just sixteen—and several of his companions were taken down to the marketplace and publicly beheaded.

The Hohenstaufen were defeated; but it would be a mistake to see the Papacy as victorious. Urban and Clement were both Frenchmen; they had done everything they could to support their compatriot Charles of Anjou. Clement had not even protested at the cruel and vindictive execution of young Conradin. It had been the intention of both popes, however, that Charles’s authority should be confined to his new Sicilian kingdom; instead, his early victories had awakened far greater ambitions in him. These now encompassed the domination of all Italy, the reduction of the pope to the status of a submissive puppet, the reconquest yet again of Constantinople—now once more in Greek hands—its return to the Latin faith, and, ultimately, the establishment of a Christian empire that would extend the length and breadth of the Mediterranean. With every day that passed it was becoming clearer that his threat to the independence of the Holy See was potentially as great as Frederick’s had ever been.

The architect of this abdication was Cardinal Benedetto Caetani, who is said to have introduced a secret speaking tube into Celestine’s cell through which, in the small hours of the night, he would simulate the voice of God, warning him of the flames of Hell if he were to continue in office. It was certainly Caetani who drafted the deed of renunciation which, on December 13, the pope read out to the assembled cardinals before solemnly stripping off his papal robes and revealing himself once again in his hermit’s rags.

Poor Celestine: he is usually identified with the unnamed figure whom Dante meets in the Third Canto of the Inferno and whom he accuses of “having made through cowardice the great refusal”—il gran rifiuto. In fact, he was no coward; he simply asked to return to the hermitage that he should never have left.

Having been appointed cardinal by the Frenchman Martin IV, Boniface had always been a steadfast supporter of the Angevin cause in Naples and Sicily; at his first coronation ceremony in Naples, his white horse had been led by Charles II of Sicily and his son Charles, King of Hungary. No sooner was he crowned, however, than he made it known that he was returning at once to Rome—and that his predecessor, Celestine, would be coming with him. The old man was predictably horrified: the whole object of his abdication had been to enable him to return to his mountain hermitage. With his vast following of the faithful, however, he might easily have become all unwittingly the focus of opposition; and Boniface was taking no chances. On reaching Rome, the pope was furious to learn that Celestine had somehow slipped away and taken to the hills once again; he gave immediate orders for his pursuit and arrest, by force if necessary. It took some time—despite his age, Celestine was still remarkably quick on his feet—but at last he was found and brought before his formidable successor. It was then that he is said to have uttered his famous prophecy: “You have entered like a fox,” he declared to Boniface; “you will reign like a lion—and you will die like a dog.”

His words probably had little effect on his fate; he was, whether he liked it or not, too dangerous to be allowed his liberty. Boniface imprisoned him in a remote castle at Fumone—it was, in fact, just the sort of place where he felt at home—and there, ten months later, at the age of ninety, he died.

It was in a way typical of him that he should have declared 1300 a Holy Year, the first in Christian history. Attracted by the promise of “full and copious pardon” to all who visited St. Peter’s and the Lateran after making their confession, some 200,000 pilgrims are said to have converged on Rome from all over the continent, vastly enriching the city—in certain of the basilicas, the sacristans were said to have had to gather in the offerings with rakes—and adding immeasurably to the Papacy’s prestige. Among the pilgrims was the poet Dante, who set the Divine Comedy in the Holy Week of that year; in Canto XVIII of the Inferno he actually compares the regimentation of the crowds in Hell to the one-way system which he had seen controlling the traffic on the Ponte Sant’Angelo.

Simultaneously and quite unnecessarily, he also made enemies of the immensely powerful family of Colonna. Although the family was a traditional rival of the Caetani, the two Colonna cardinals had originally supported his election, but they had quickly become disenchanted with his arrogance and autocratic style. Matters came to a head when, in 1297, a party of their supporters hijacked a consignment of bullion on its way to the papal treasury, claiming that it had been extracted “from the tears of the poor.” Boniface as usual overreacted, threatening to send papal garrisons to their home city of Palestrina and other Colonna strongholds and expelling the two cardinals—who had of course not been implicated in the hijacking—from the Sacred College. Finally he excommunicated the family en masse, seizing and devastating its lands in the name of a Crusade. When the Colonnas all fled to France, his principal enemies in Italy became the Fraticelli, a spiritual branch of the Franciscans, who had rebelled against the increasing worldliness of their order to return to their founder’s principles of asceticism and poverty. Boniface they loathed, not only for his wealth and arrogance but because they held him responsible for Celestine’s abdication, imprisonment, and death.

Now the gloves were off. The pope was made the victim of a campaign of scurrilous abuse probably unequaled even in papal history. Its authors did not confine themselves to charges of nepotism, simony, or avarice, which could all too easily be justified; they accused him of idolatry—because he had erected so many statues of himself—of atheism, and even of sodomy. (Sex with boys, he was accused of saying, was no worse than rubbing one hand against the other.) All these accusations, and many others still more outlandish, were enthusiastically echoed in France—if indeed France was not their original source. Within three or four years of his accession, Boniface VIII was probably the most widely detested pope there had ever been.

Probably on the advice of his new minister Guillaume de Nogaret—whose Albigensian grandfather had been burnt at the stake and who consequently had no love for the Papacy—Philip now returned to his former tactic of all-out personal attack. All the old charges, together with several new ones such as illegitimacy and heresy, which included disbelief in the immortality of the soul, were repeated, and an insistent demand was made for a General Council at which the Supreme Pontiff would be arraigned. An army of 1,600 under Nogaret in person was dispatched to Italy with orders to seize the pope and to bring him, by force if necessary, to France. Boniface was, meanwhile, in his palace at Anagni, putting the finishing touches to a bull excommunicating Philip and releasing his subjects from their allegiance. He was due to publish it on September 8; but on the seventh Nogaret and his troops arrived, together with Sciarra Colonna and a band of Italian mercenaries. The pope donned his full papal regalia and faced them with courage, challenging them to kill him. They briefly took him prisoner, but he was rescued by the people of Anagni—he was, after all, one of their number—and spirited away. Nogaret, seeing that there was no way of laying hands on him short of a massacre, wisely decided to retire.

His mission, however, had not been in vain. The old pope’s pride had suffered a mortal blow. After a few days’ rest, his Orsini friends escorted him back to Rome, but he never recovered from the shock. He died less than a month later, on October 12, 1303. Dante, by anticipation—since Boniface died only three years after the poet’s visit to Hell—placed him in the eighth circle, upside down in a furnace. His judgment may be thought a little harsh—but one sees, perhaps, what he meant.