According to Frederick’s descriptions of this meeting in his letters, the pope received him kindly, explaining the reasons for his past judgment of the emperor and expressing his benevolence toward him, thereby wiping away any enmity Frederick might have harbored toward Gregory. “We hold him in all reverence,” the emperor declared, “our only and universal father, showing ourselves to him as a devout son of the church in the bond of love that joins the priesthood and empire to one another.” Two days later, with the pope’s blessing, Frederick returned to Apulia, while Gregory and his entourage returned to Rome.98 Even if the pope and emperor harbored personal resentments toward each other, this scene of public harmony struck the right chord after years of sensational conflict. What exact shape that reformed peace would take, however, still remained to be seen.
Chapter 2
Reforming the Peace
A year after Gregory IX and Frederick II agreed to settle their violent differences at San Germano, the emperor issued a sweeping new legislative code for the kingdom of Sicily, the Constitutions of Melfi. These laws presented the “crown” as the sole source of justice and peace, centralizing royal government over the centrifugal forces of the local nobility, clergy, and urban communities. The code also reinforced and clarified Frederick’s rights over ecclesiastical offices and properties in the Regno. According to some modern commentators, the Constitutions of Melfi represented, among others things, a challenge to the universal jurisdiction of the Roman pope over the church at the expense of the king, a tacit rebuke to the “papal monarchy,” a “gauntlet thrown down in the great struggle between the empire and papacy.”1 Certainly, when news reached Gregory about the planned legislation, he delivered a blunt rebuke to the emperor and to Jacob, archbishop of Capua, who had been tasked with helping to draft the law code. The pope warned Frederick that if he went through with his decision to issue the “new constitutions,” acting by his own will or following the advice of “perverse men,” he would rightly be called a “persecutor of the church and destroyer of public liberty.”2
Other scholars, however, have cautioned against interpreting this episode as indicative of a deeply rooted conflict between the two powers, pointing out that Gregory made no objections to the final version of the Constitutions of Melfi, apparently a sign that his protest worked, and that Frederick modified the new laws accordingly.3 Even as the pope called for the emperor to reconsider his forthcoming constitutions, he tried to avoid further escalation, stressing to the emperor in a subsequent communication that he had made his earlier complaints “in private not public, in secret letters, not cried aloud.”4 In yet another letter to Frederick that same month, which addressed persistent disruptions to the peace in the Regno, Gregory warned him about wicked men operating in the shadows who wished to destroy the state of concord between the two powers, the “two great lights” of the priesthood and empire.5 As will become evident below, this was hardly the last time that the pope would show an explicit sensitivity to the vulnerable nature of his relationship with the emperor during the fragile period following their reconciliation.
After his meeting with Frederick in September 1230 and more or less for the first time since the beginning of his papacy, Gregory did not stand at odds with the imperial ruler of the Christian world. Once again, Frederick had become a beloved son who had chosen the way of peace, resuming his proper duties to serve and defend the Roman church. Over the following years Gregory would repeatedly emphasize the theme of harmonious unity between the two powers or the two swords, the spiritual and the material, making common cause for the defense of the faith, the protection of the papal patrimony, and the proper ordering of the church. As the Vicar of Christ, who was responsible for preserving and fostering the peace, he identified a number of challenges and projects that called for the emperor’s assistance one way or another: settling the persistent strife on the Italian peninsula, above all in Lombardy; dealing with the imperiled conditions of the Holy Land; and combating the threat of heresy within the body of the faithful. When the Romans tried to cast off papal lordship and attacked neighboring communities that belonged to the Papal States, the pope even called for imperial assistance against the rebellious citizens of his own city.6
Rather than an elaborate ruse that masked the inevitable return of antagonism between Gregory and Frederick, these years of relative peace and cooperation in their relationship revealed the potentialities of public cooperation between the two powers in ways rarely seen before.7 Frederick openly embraced his role as a “spiritual son” of the Roman church, its defender against infidels, heretics, and other enemies. Such obligations did not imply political subordination to the Vicar of Christ; they represented the fulfillment of his exalted position. In its preamble, the Constitutions of Melfi make this claim clear. As part of the “stewardship” granted to them by the Lord, rulers should not allow the “Holy Church, the mother of the Christian religion” to be “defiled by the secret perfidies of slanders of the faith.” Rather, “they should protect her from attacks of public enemies” by the power of the “material sword” and “preserve peace,” the sister of justice. The law code reaffirmed the prince’s commitment to fight against heretics and his drawing the “sword of righteous vengeance against them,” preventing their hostile attacks against the Roman church, “the head of all other churches, to the more evident injury of the Christian faith.” Judged guilty of “public crimes,” heretics would face the loss of their property and capital punishment, while their accomplices would suffer dispossession and exile.8
To be clear, peace did not always or necessarily mean the absence of contention and violence. Peace meant coercion and war deployed in the right directions, for the right purposes, by the right authorities for the common good. In Lombardy, the Holy Land, and even the city of Rome, the pope and emperor confronted signs of the devil’s work, disturbers of the peace, warmongers, and sowers of scandal. As the head of the Roman church, Gregory possessed a compelling mandate for proclaiming peace, but he did not enjoy a monopoly over its creation. Papal and imperial networks of peacemaking ran on overlapping but sometimes divergent tracks. In different localities, the two Christian authorities confronted individuals and communities who refused their visions of peace or sought peace on different terms. Facing fluid political landscapes, Gregory and Frederick competed as much as cooperated, pursuing complementary but not identical ends, more often than not publicly rebuking each other for failing to live up to their divinely ordained duties. Rather than relieving the tensions embedded in the relationship between the two powers, reforming the peace transposed them into a different register.
Scars of War
Although the Treaty of San Germano had formally ended the fighting between the church and the prince, the process of turning that agreement into a meaningful political settlement on the Italian peninsula had just begun. By reconciling with Frederick, the pope shared public responsibility for the ruler’s subsequent actions. As early as October, Gregory warned him about certain men around Foggia conspiring to destroy the new peace, “murmuring” and “clamoring” that the convergence of two great lights—that of the pope and emperor—was casting them into the shadows. Such accusations caused him “grief in private, shame out in the open.” To prevent further blasphemy about “both our names,” Gregory called upon the emperor to act with mercy and forbearance, rather than giving such critics further reason to reproach the pope for the faith that he placed in Frederick. Judging by a letter sent to Frederick on 3 December, Gregory remained watchful for any signs of noncompliance on the emperor’s part. An envoy from the imperial court, a judge from Pavia identified only as G., had recently come to the papal curia with imperial “letters of security,” the promises sworn by various magnates and prelates to ensure that Frederick observed the terms established at San Germano. When the pope inspected the letters, however, he discovered several things omitted, either out of negligence or oversight. As a consequence, he decided not to “publicize” them, since this might give their detractors cause to “murmur” against them both. Gregory
