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He loved Sicily and its capital Palermo. The most
gifted, vivid and extraordinary of the medieval Holy
Roman Emperors was ill for some months before his
death. Early in December 1250 a fierce attack of
dysentery confined him to his hunting lodge of Castel
Fiorentino in the south of Italy, which was part of his
kingdom of Sicily. He made his will on December 7th,
specifying that if he did not recover, he should be
buried in the cathedral at Palermo, and sinking fast,
died on the 13th, a few days short of his fifty-sixth
birthday. He was escorted to Sicily by his Saracen
bodyguard and buried in a sarcophagus of red
porphyry mounted on four carved lions. The body was
wrapped in cloth of red silk covered with inscrutable
arabesque designs and with a crusader’s cross on the
left shoulder. The tomb can still be seen in Palermo Cathedral today.
When the news reached Rome, Pope Innocent IV was delighted. ‘Let heaven exult
and the earth rejoice,’ he proclaimed in a message to the Sicilian bishops and
people. One of his chaplains, Nicholas of Carbio, went further. God, he wrote,
seeing the desperate danger in which the storm-tossed ‘bark of Peter’ stood,
snatched away ‘the tyrant and son of Satan,’ who ‘died horribly, deposed and
excommunicated, suffering excruciatingly from dysentery, gnashing his teeth,
frothing at the mouth and screaming…’.
However vilely expressed, the relief of the pope and his party at Frederick’s death
was understandable, for the emperor had seemed to be on the verge of triumph at
last in his long struggle with the papacy. Born in Italy in 1194, heir to the
Hohenstaufen territories in Germany and grandson of the Emperor Frederick
Barbarossa, he was also the heir to the Norman kingdom of Sicily. His father died
young when Frederick was two, he was crowned King of Sicily at the age of three
and his mother died before he was four. At fourteen he came of age and took
control of Sicily. He went on to defeat his rival for the German kingship and in
1220, aged twenty-five; he was crowned emperor in St Peter’s, Rome, by Pope
Honorius III. This made him, in theory at least, the temporal head of Christ’s
people on earth and the overlord of northern Italy. The fact that he was also the
ruler of southern Italy and Sicily, on Rome’s doorstep, put him on collision course
with the popes.
Frederick astonished his contemporaries because he was more like an oriental
despot than a European king. His brilliant court at Palermo blended Norman,
Arabic and Jewish elements in a culture full of the warm south. He was witty,
entertaining and cruel in several different languages. He kept a harem, guarded by
black eunuchs. He had dancing girls, an Arab chef and a menagerie of elephants,
lions and camels. He founded towns and industries and he efficiently codified laws.
A man of serious intellectual distinction, he hobnobbed amicably with Jewish and
Muslim sages. He encouraged scholarship, poetry and mathematics, and original
The Hohenstaufen Dynasty - Page 51 of 200