sinner. According to custom he wore only a long hair shirt. He was very cold. Up in the vaulted, heated chamber sat a man who had grown up under the lowly roof of an artisan, a dinner guest by the side of the powerful noblewoman to whom the castle belonged. He was fifty-six years old, ugly, brilliant, hungry for power, and for four years he had been Pope of the Christians.
Surely Gregory must have known at once that he must give in. A real nobleman would have ended the grotesque scene the very first hour. But Gregory savored the spiritual defeat of his enemy to the dregs, letting him wait three days outside. He could not forgive Henry his birth, his youth and his grace. On the third day he descended into the castle yard to bestow the kiss of Judas upon the repentant sinner.
From this amazing scene in January 1077, in which two rulers fought, not over territory, but at bottom for the world’s favor, the man who submitted drew victory. None of his contemporaries saw any humiliation in penitence for sins—they all had enough on their conscience as it was. When Henry returned he found the hostile princes plotting new intrigues; but the people were for him.
The Pope had drawn the short end of the bargain. Seven years after the day of Canossa Henry was crowned emperor in Rome. Gregory died in loneliness. Henry’s life was later frittered away in a gigantic struggle with his son. But he was in the mood of a victor when he suddenly died, long after Gregory, his enemy. Here were the two most powerful men of their time struggling less for the substance of power than for the supremacy of the spirit over the State. In typical German fashion these two Germans blended their motives of world dominion with those of their missions, for here spirit and State were not each limited to one of the parties—they existed on both sides.
For decades all these forces were squandered and scattered to no purpose, as though there were no peasants and burghers in the German Reich for whose benefit the Reich had been originally contrived.
4
EMPEROR FREDERIC I (1152–1190) has gone down into history by his Italian name, as Barbarossa, signifying his red beard. His deeds would never have earned him this fame; it must have been the red beard, in addition to his personal courage and his enmity against the burghers, that made this ruler a favorite of the Germans. His fame was enhanced by a lucky chance. The original emperor of the German legend was Charlemagne, asleep in the magic cave, his beard growing through the table, waiting to rise again. It was not until the nineteenth century that German nationalists substituted Barbarossa in the ancient legend.
Six times Barbarossa went to Italy with his armies. Altogether he spent fifteen years there. Like his forebears he squandered Germany’s resources there without achieving anything in the end. To him too world dominion meant the Roman crown, which must be secured by control of northern Italy.
Even at that time, the chronicles report, the Germans invented many new atrocities in keeping with the harshness of the times. At the siege of Crema in 1160 Barbarossa hung baskets full of captured citizens from siege towers rolled up to the city walls, even forcing them to carry torches at night. In matters of torture the Germans in the Middle Ages exceeded all other nations in inventiveness. The executions and banishments of the proud, independent citizens of Milan which Barbarossa ordered or at least tolerated aroused the horror of his contemporaries.
Of all his wars, and even of the Crusade in the course of which he drowned in a river in Asia Minor, nothing bore fruit for German history but his notion of marrying his own son to a Norman princess; for from this union there issued a grandson who was truly a great man—Frederic II (1212–1250).
He took over the reins as a youth. Of all German rulers he remains the noblest. He alone, between Charlemagne and Charles V, bore the traits of a great personality, the most modern of all. The secret lies in the fact that this German emperor was born and died in Sicily, that of his reign of thirty-eight years only ten were spent in Germany. In him a felicitous mixture of races uniquely blended the southern and northern characters. At moments when one is inclined to see in history but a spectacle, one is tempted, for the sake of this one bright star, to accept the German southward aspiration as an attempt of providence to resolve the German conflict.
When Frederic became Emperor, at the age of twenty-one, he began his career by breaking two vows he had given the Pope. He neither handed over Sicily, as he had promised, nor did he undertake a Crusade. When the Pope excommunicated him, Frederic did what no one before him had thought of. Instead of fighting or repenting, he mocked the Lord of Christendom. He sent copies of the Papal bull of excommunication to all the princes of Europe and simultaneously decided to save Jerusalem now that he was beyond the pale of Christendom. Frederic proceeded like an oriental chessplayer rather than like a German general. He arranged for a friendly meeting with the Sultan of Egypt. Frederic spoke six languages, including Arabic, and since he was himself half a Moor, the two rulers soon came to an agreement. Why all the fuss for two hundred years? they asked each other in amazement. The Sultan handed over the holy places to the Emperor, retaining only the temple, even there, however, granting Christians the right to pray. With brief interruptions this arrangement held down to the year 1918. The two rulers at the same time concluded a sensible trade treaty. To discredit the Pope even further, the Emperor sent the entire clergy away from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and had a so-called secular crown placed on the altar. Then he entered and placed the crown upon his own head. Returning with a few companions, he forced the Pope to lift the ban. It was the most successful and least bloody of all the Crusades, undertaken against the infidels by one who was less of a believer than any of them.
Germany appeared to Frederic II as a mere dependency. He went north when his son went in league with the other German princes against him, had him taken in chains and later had him buried as a king. He had many more children, for he had four wives and many mistresses. The manner in which he lived with them reminds only superficially of Charlemagne. Frederic was actually much moodier and more dependent on his nerves. He might suddenly turn against a son who did something against his liking. The women too he seems often to have treated with cynicism, perhaps because he had lost his mother in childhood and had been forced to contract an early marriage. Among his sons he evidently loved those best who were handsomest.
For it was beauty this German emperor—first and last in this endeavor—sought to gather round him. And it was wisdom that ennobled him. His court, at Palermo, two hundred and fifty years before the Renaissance in Florence and Venice and Rome, was unique in the Middle Ages, entirely irradiated by his person. A true Maecenas, he capably practised what he patronized, especially writing. His book on falconry is but one example, for there are many scattered fragments from his hand. No matter what their origin, useful innovations were introduced by him—Arabic numerals, but recently brought to Europe, the first poetry of young Italy; and when he had no gold, bank notes after the model of ancient Carthage. At the same time he himself was the champion falconer, for he loved nothing more than hunting, and for this very reason the German princes begrudged his absence, for they were wont to share the pleasures of the hunt with their kings.
He had been brought up in Sicily, the witches’ caldron of the nations, and had lived more closely to the sages of Islam than to the learned monks. He exhibited complete tolerance toward all religions, believing in none himself, often praising the serenity of the Mohammedans to fanatical Christians. Superstitious and fatalistic, he inclined somewhat to Islam. “Study well,” he wrote to his son and successor, “that you may learn to understand much; for kings are born like other men and die like them.” Yet he regarded himself as of divine descent, not because he came from the House of Hohenstaufen, but because he was a genius. This almost Voltairean spirit, who required much effort and time to govern, still found time for everything Occident and Orient had to offer by way of intellect and art, collecting the one in his head, the other in his palace.
The German share in his character emerged in a lifelong friendship with a Teutonic knight from Thuringia who seems to have combined all the traits the Germans
