here - Nobility Associations

himself. This reacquisition of Jerusalem was a temporary phenomenon and it fell
again about a dozen years later. The lines of communication were too long for
European interests to hold in the 13th century.
Frederick was intellectually curious and had scholars in his court. Among his
interests, he was a coin collector. He was culturally interested in Islamic thought
but was forceful in dealing with any kind of resistance from Islamic (or other)
subjects. At one point he forcibly relocated 15,000 rebellious Muslims to the
mainland as a way of asserting control in Sicily. He required Muslims and Jews and
prostitutes to wear distinctive clothing as a way of setting them apart in Sicily. This
was all happening as Europe was becoming even less tolerant of non-orthodox non-
Christian thinking. He directed this hostility towards his subjects, and was himself
the target of a 'crusade' for his unorthodox ideas and anti-papal actions. It was not
successful. This was just after the time the Church supported another intra-
European crusade, against the Albigensian heresy in southern France.
He was frequently at war with the Papacy, hemmed in between Frederick's lands in
northern Italy and his Kingdom of Sicily (the Regno) to the south, and thus he was
excommunicated four times and often vilified in pro-papal chronicles of the time
and since. Pope Gregory IX went so far as to call him the Antichrist.
Speaking six languages (Latin, Sicilian, German, French, Greek
and Arabic, Frederick was an avid patron of science and the
arts. He played a major role in promoting literature through
the Sicilian School of poetry. His Sicilian royal court in
Palermo, from around 1220 to his death, saw the first use of a
literary form of an Italo-Romance language, Sicilian. The
poetry that emanated from the school had a significant
influence on literature and on what was to become the modern
Italian language. The school and its poetry were saluted by
Dante and his peers and predate by at least a century the use of
the Tuscan idiom as the elite literary language of Italy.
Marriage of father Henry VI
In 1186 is celebrated in Milan (Altar of St. Ambrose) the marriage of Henry VI, who
was born in the 1165 to Nimwegen: cruel man more feared than loved, ruthless and
vindictive, called "Nordic storm of terror" by Pope Innocent III, the second
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, with Constance, born in the year 1154, daughter of
Roger II of Sicily and the fifth wife Beatrice, and aunt of William II the Good, who
had married Joan of England, sister of Ricardo Lionheart, was the heir of the
Norman Kingdom of Sicily. This marriage would in fact have meant, in near future,
the union of Kingdom of Sicily with the Empire, which should have ended
completely the Papal States to the work of one great universal power, to reduce The
Holy See to a role of absolute nothingness.
Constance, wife of Conrad VI, had been forced to renounce her vows for the
marriage to the son of the Emperor. Reign on the throne of Sicily was Constance’s
The Hohenstaufen Dynasty - Page 45 of 200