Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick II was called the wonder of the world, was excommunicated four times, and ruled from Sicily rather than Germany. Born in 1194 in a tent in an Italian market square, so that the birth could be publicly witnessed, he was the son of the Emperor Henry VI and the Norman heiress of Sicily, and was orphaned at four and made a ward of Pope Innocent III. He grew up in Palermo, in the most cosmopolitan court in Europe — Greek, Arabic, Latin and Norman — and spoke six languages. Innocent backed him against Otto IV, who was excommunicated and destroyed at Bouvines in 1214, and Frederick was crowned emperor in 1220 having promised to go on crusade. He did not go for eight years, and Gregory IX excommunicated him for it. He then went while excommunicated, in 1228, and did what four armed crusades had failed to do: he negotiated with al-Kamil in Arabic, and obtained Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth by treaty for ten years. He was excommunicated again for succeeding. He governed Sicily as an administrative state, promulgating the Constitutions of Melfi in 1231 — a professional judiciary, a salaried bureaucracy, state monopolies, and the first secular law code since antiquity — and founded the University of Naples to staff it. He wrote a treatise on falconry that is a serious work of observational zoology. He spent his last two decades at war with the papacy and the Lombard cities, and died in 1250. His dynasty was extinguished within twenty years, and Germany went into an interregnum it never fully recovered from.
- Lived: 1194 CE – 1250 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader, scholar
