Frederick II., OF GERMANY, grandson of Frederick I. (Barbarossa), and son of the Emperor Henry VI., and of Constance, heiress of Sicily, was born at Jesi, in Ancona, 26th December 1194. In the fourth year of his age his father died, leaving him king of Sicily under the guardianship of his mother, who secured the favour of Pope Innocent III. for her son by acknowledging the pope as her feudal superior in Italy at the expense of important privileges. In his eighteenth year Frederick set out, under the auspices of Innocent, to wrest the imperial crown from Otto IV., whom he succeeded in driving out of the empire with little trouble. On his promising to undertake a crusade, the pope sanctioned his coronation at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1215. Like his grandfather, Frederick was actuated by an ardent desire for the consolidation of the imperial power in Italy at the expense of the pontificate, which he wished to reduce to the rank of a mere archiepiscopal dignity. Having secured the nomination of his son Henry to the rank of king of the Romans, and appointed Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne as his viceroy, he left Germany, and, after having been crowned emperor at Rome in 1220, devoted himself to the task of organising his Italian territories. He founded the university of Naples, gave encouragement to the medical school of Salerno, invited to his court and patronised men of learning, poets, and artists, and commissioned his chancellor, Petrus de Vinea, to draw up a code of laws to suit all classes of his German and Italian subjects. Frederick's schemes for the union of his vast and widely scattered dominions were, however, frustrated by the refractory conduct of the Lombard cities, and still more by the antagonism of the popes Honorius III. and Gregory IX. Frederick's departure to the East was originally fixed for the year 1223, but the necessity of subduing the turbulent Italian nobles and cities, and curbing his Saracen subjects in Sicily, caused a delay of two years, and then a further delay of yet two years more. The pope at length grew so impatient that Frederick was constrained to embark from Italy. Nevertheless he returned a few days later, under the plea of personal sickness; this brought down upon him a bull of excommunication from the vehement Gregory IX. In the following year, however, the emperor at length fulfilled his vow, and fulfilled it in brilliant fashion, by securing from the sultan of Egypt, without striking a single blow, the possession of Jerusalem and the holy places, together with a truce for ten years. Then, after crowning himself king of Jerusalem with his own hand, 18th March 1229, he returned to Italy, where the continental half of his kingdom of Sicily had been overrun, at the instigation of the still irreconcilable pope, by a body of mercenary soldiers. During the remainder of his reign Frederick was engaged in a long and harassing contest with the papal power, the hands of his enemy being gradually strengthened by the accession of the revolted Lombard cities and of several of the princes and towns of Germany, headed by his own son Henry, and by the treachery of his most trusted and intimate friend, the chancellor Vinea. In 1239 he was again excommunicated for having proclaimed his natural son Enzo king of Sardinia, in defiance of the protest of the pope. Nor did the fury of the struggle abate when, in June 1243, Frederick's friend, Sinibaldi Fiesco, succeeded to the pontificate as Innocent IV. And the clouds of disaster, defeat, and misfortune were gathering thicker and more ominously above Frederick's head, when he died somewhat suddenly at Fiorentino, 13th December 1250.
This emperor is one of the most outstanding figures of the middle ages; and, like nearly all such personalities, his character was a blending of contradictory qualities. Intellectually he was perhaps the most enlightened man of his age, in many respects outrunning it by some centuries, as in his tolerance of the Jews and the Mussulmans, in the admiration of the spirit of free trade shown in his commercial legislation and policy, in his recognition of popular representation by annual parliaments, and in his anticipation of the later humanistic movement; but at the same time he was a persecutor of the heretics of the church, a staunch upholder of absolute sovereignty, and a supporter of the power of the princes against the cities. The strength, energy, and elasticity of his character were sadly marred by very conspicuous strains of licentiousness, cruelty, and perfidy. But, though he lacked the moral greatness of his ancestor, Barbarossa, he deserves unstituted admiration for his encouragement of learning and culture, and his fostering care of the arts and sciences. He himself not only spoke the principal languages of his extensive empire—German, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew—but he also was one of the first to write Italian poems, took a great interest in the arts, and was himself a diligent student of natural science. It has been brought as a reproach against him that he unduly neglected his territorial possessions in his native country of Germany, and that in religious matters, notwithstanding his crusade, he was far from being a model son of the church, though he was not, in all probability, the atheist, at least according to modern notions, that his ecclesiastical enemies made him out to be. See works by Schirrmacher (4 vols. Gött. 1859–65), Huillard Bréholles (12 vols. Paris, 1852–61), and Winkelmann (1889); and The Popes and the Hohenstaufens, by Ugo Balzani (Lond. 1889).