L'Empereur Frédéric II

by Ernst H. Kantorowicz

'This new edition returns a mercurial, bravura work to the bookshelves, from which it has been absent too long' Dan Jones, author of The Templars .Dubbed the 'stupor mundi' – the wonder of the world – Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, led a life of extraordinary drama and ambition. Born in 1194, Frederick was the son of Emperor Henry II and Constance, Queen of Sicily. He inherited the Sicilian throne when he was only four years old and, in adulthood, the charismatic Frederick fought for control over the lands he considered his birthright to become King of the Germans and Holy Roman Emperor. At the zenith of his power, he crowned himself King of Jerusalem in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, thereby securing an empire which embraced vast areas of Western Europe and the Holy Land.Frederick was a towering figure of his age, but he was a man full of contradictions. For some he was a Messiah, an enlightened monarch and bringer of justice and peace; for others, a tyrant and a devil, bent on absolute power. He led crusades but was excommunicated four times. He was a warrior but also an influential patron of the arts. He welcomed Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars to his court whilst persecuting Arabs and Jews in his Sicilian homeland.First published in 1927, Ernst Kantorowicz's stylish and absorbing biography of Frederick was one of the first examples of popular narrative history writing, and a classic of its time. This edition, with a new introduction by the bestselling author Dan Jones, rightly brings that life to a new audience.

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, Medieval, Medieval History, European History, Germany

664 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1927

About the author

Kantorowicz was born in Posen (Polish: Poznań, then in Prussia) to a wealthy, assimilated German-Jewish family and as a young man was groomed to take over the family business (primarily liquor distilleries). He served as an Officer in the German Army for four years in World War I, he decided not to return to the business world, but went instead to study philosophy at the University of Berlin, at one point also joining a right-wing militia that fought against Polish forces in the Greater Poland Uprising (1918-1919) and helped put down the Spartacist uprising in Berlin.[1] The following year, he moved to the prestigious University of Heidelberg to study history with Karl Hampe and Friedrich Baethgen, two noted medievalists. While in Heidelberg, Kantorowicz became involved with the so-called Georgekreis, a group of artists and intellectuals devoted to the German poet and aesthete Stefan George and who shared an interest in art, literature and Romantic mysticism.

His association with the elitist and culturally conservative Georgekreis inspired Kantorowicz's unorthodox, aesthetic-cultural biography of the great Holy Roman emperor Frederick II published in German in 1927 and English in 1931.[2] Instead of offering a more typical treatment of laws, institutions and important political achievements, the book took a decidedly poetic turn, portraying Frederick as an idealized spiritual, as much as political, leader of the German nation. The work elicited a combination of bewilderment and criticism from the mainstream historical academy. Reviewers complained that it was literary mythmaking and not a work of serious historical scholarship. As a result, Kantorowicz published a hefty companion volume (Ergänzungsband) in 1931 which contained detailed historical documentation for the biography.

Despite the furor over the Frederick book, Kantorowicz received an appointment to an academic chair at the University of Frankfurt. In 1933, Kantorowicz had to resign his university position due to Nazi racial policies. Upon leaving, he took up a teaching position for a short time at Oxford before moving to the University of California, Berkeley in 1939. After a controversy prompted by his reaction to McCarthyism (he refused to take a loyalty oath required of all UC employees), he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Not long after arriving in Princeton, he published his masterpiece, The King's Two Bodies (1957), which explored, in the words of the volume's subtitle, "medieval political theology." In particular, the book traced the ways theologians, historians and canonists in the Middle Ages and early modern period understood the office and person of the king, as well as the idea of the kingdom, in corporeal and organological terms. The figure of the European monarch was a unique product of religious and legal traditions that eventually produced the notion of a "king" as simultaneously a person and an embodiment of the community of the realm. The book remains a classic in the field.

Kantorowicz was the subject of a controversial biographical sketch in the book Inventing the Middle Ages (1991) by the late Canadian medievalist, Norman F. Cantor. Cantor, who knew Kantorowicz at Princeton, suggested that, but for his Jewish heritage, Kantorowicz (at least as a young scholar in the 1920s and 1930s) could be considered a Nazi in terms of his intellectual temperament and cultural values. Cantor compared Kantorowicz with another contemporary German medievalist, Percy Ernst Schramm, who worked on similar topics and was a member of the Nazi Party. Kantorowicz's defenders (particularly his student Robert L. Benson)[3] responded that although as a younger man Kantorowicz embraced the Romantic ultranationalism of the George-Kreis, he had only disdain for Nazism and was a vocal critic of Hitler's regime.

Reviews

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book defies easy characterization. It is, to be sure, a biography of the last of the great German medieval emperors, Frederick II Hohenstaufen. But it vibrates with a subdued roar under the surface. By turns it is fierce, melodramatic, evocative, pitying, and electric. Maybe, in 1927, with Germany at its nadir, Ernst Kantorowicz was trying to channel the modern age of steel and thunder, translating it through the works of a long-dead megalomaniac king into a hoped-for new era. Or maybe he aimed to wake the ancient ghost of Frederick, stirring him from his long sleep in the Kyffhäuser Mountains. Either way, Kantorowicz did see reborn the German energies he thought should be reborn. But as with most summoned spirits, the rebirth did not advantage the summoner.

Frederick II, born in 1194, was the son of Henry VI, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Constance, Queen of Sicily. Henry’s father had been Frederick I Barbarossa, perhaps the most famous of all German emperors. Constance’s father was Roger II, the centralizer of Norman Sicily. This illustrious pedigree meant that Frederick claimed both all of southern Italy and most of Germany—but not northern Italy, or the Papal States, the combined cause of the greatest challenges of his reign. The High Middle Ages were beginning, and many changes were afoot—not only in Europe, where Richard II Lionheart, John Lackland, and Saint Louis IX were Frederick’s contemporaries, but in the Middle East, where Islam had entered its long decline, accelerated during Frederick’s reign by the start of the Mongol invasions.

It was an interesting time, and a tremendously intricate time, and one that it is hard for us to fully grasp. Men and women were the same as us, yet viewed the world very differently in many ways. Frederick himself is often, far too often, presented to us as some kind of proto-modern, supposedly a man of unique tolerance and liberality. He was none of those things. He was a man convinced of his world-bestriding importance, fascinated by the new things in his world, and indifferent to much beyond his own sense of destiny. He never quite accomplished his goals, and his heirs died in pain, ignominy, or obscurity, quickly losing grasp of all Frederick had worked for. But he did not know that, and so, perhaps, he died largely satisfied. And he would no doubt have been pleased that for nearly a thousand years, many Germans have looked to his reign as the apogee of German heroic power, to evoke which Kantorowicz wrote this book.

The reason Frederick is incorrectly perceived as of a different kind of medieval king is because others have always benefited from casting him in a certain light. His brutal lifelong struggle with the temporal power of the Papacy has made him distasteful ever since to Roman Catholics, especially those of an ultramontanist bent. This grew the legend of him as anti-Catholic, which proved useful for purveyors of Protestant propaganda after the Reformation and anti-Christian propaganda after the Enlightenment. All these groups found that the fevered polemics hurled against Frederick to gain support for the Pope were later fertile sources of lurid, therefore useful, tales about Frederick’s perfidy and supposed hatred of religion. And, of course, Frederick had his own propagandists, which is why he is still known to some as the stupor mundi, the “wonder of the world,” though perhaps better translated as “marvel” or “astonishment.” After eight hundred years of this, it’s hard to recapture the man, but Kantorowicz does a good job—and then uses Frederick for his own purposes, casting him as an exemplar for twentieth-century Germans needing a hero in an age of German degradation.

Kantorowicz himself had a life that fits poorly into our paucified modern categories. Born in 1895, he fought in World War I, and then in the Freikorps against Communist killers. He became a disciple of the poet Stefan George, part of the Conservative Revolution. George was a mystical, anti-modernist type, focused on the rebirth of the German nation, bidding it emerge as an intellectual creation, breaking through the rough crust of current troubles to create a new Germany, led by a physical and spiritual aristocracy (who, as typical in these cultish groups of eggheads, would be led by the disciples of the Master, as they called George). Some of these ideas, which were in the air all over Germany, were taken up by the National Socialists, as usual modified for cruder, and therefore more effective, propaganda purposes. However, George’s circle is remembered today mostly because they inspired a variety of anti-Hitler plotters in later years, after George’s death in 1933, including most famously Claus von Stauffenberg. By that time, though, Kantorowicz, Jewish by birth, was long departed from Germany, moving to California after Kristallnacht. He lived there until 1963, publishing other books and trying to disown this book, but it is still the one for which he is most remembered.

Thus, Kantorowicz was of a specific German political type of the first decades of the twentieth century, often, and often unfairly, associated with the National Socialists. He was one of many who rejected liberalism and cried out for German greatness to be restored. Such ideas were adopted by the NSDAP, but that does not make them National Socialist ideas. If the besetting sin of left-wing intellectuals is direct participation in and furthering of evil (and it is), the besetting sin of right-wing intellectuals seems to be their irrepressible belief that their superior intelligence and insight will allow them to control, direct, and rule other men who implement their ideas in a bastardized form aided by violence. I don’t know if the National Socialists used this book to any great degree (it does not appear so), but its author, and Stefan George’s circle, seem to fit right into this right-wing paradigm, which always loses out to those less interested in thinking and more interested in doing. Then the intellectuals on the Right invariably wonder what happened—as was the case with Carl Schmitt. It’s a vaguely pathetic pattern, and likely one we’ll see in America in the coming years.

When Kantorowicz published Frederick the Second, as a young man with an incomplete doctorate in Muslim economic history, professional historians were aghast at the book’s departures from history-writing orthodoxy. Kantorowicz did not offer footnotes (although he later added an entire volume with sources and references to satisfy his critics), and more to the point, wrote history as epic, blurring the line between fact and legend, openly using Frederick’s life as a platform for the restoration of Germany on heroic lines. At this remove, I can’t tell if the historians attacking Kantorowicz were legitimate historians, or the type of “historian” that dominates our own times, whose main project is to view history, and rewrite it, through a Left lens. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose; Kantorowicz’s book stands now on its own.

In Kantorowicz’s telling, Frederick was generous and open-handed; self-assured to an extreme degree and with great personal magnetism; openly proclaiming of his intentions and views; eager to learn but fiercely protective of his prerogatives and his aims. He was highly educated, speaking several languages (including Arabic) and keenly interested in sports such as falconry. He hated heretics and he hated rebels; they were, after all, the same thing. Frederick saw himself as an instrument of Providence; he may have sometimes confused whether, exactly, God was truly superior to him, but he was not an atheist or even a religious freethinker. Not that he was a pious man; if anything, he was a proto-Machiavellian, very aware of the uses of religion for power, in his case usually to his disadvantage. Yet his goal was not Machiavellian; he sought the standard medieval formula of “peace and justice,” as in the time of the Emperor Augustus. Like most mighty men, he probably thought God owed him; he reminds one in this respect (and none other) of that moral pygmy Michael Bloomberg, who infamously said “[I]f there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.” No doubt he will find out, soon enough, and no doubt Frederick has as well.

It is all so very complicated. Guelf and Ghibelline; German princes and Sicilian lords; Lombard towns and Calabrian fortresses; Venice and Genoa; Jerusalem and the Eternal City; and much, much more. In brief, Frederick grew up in Sicily, under his mother’s rule of the territory, since his German inheritance (which was technically elective, after all) was in dispute between his uncle, Philip of Swabia, and the Welf contender, Otto of Brunswick, briefly Otto IV. When his mother died, before Frederick came of age, he became a ward of the Pope, Innocent III, a mighty medieval pope many of whose designs, from the Fourth Crusade to demanding ever-greater papal temporal supremacy, ultimately went wrong. Frederick, when he came of age, avoided open conflict with him, instead focusing on reuniting his Sicilian domains with his father’s German domains. Frederick failed to participate in the Fifth Crusade despite his promise, and was blamed for its failure; he did participate in the Sixth Crusade and negotiated the re-transfer of Jerusalem to the Christians with Al-Kamil, the Ayyubid sultan of Egypt, who had defeated the Fifth Crusade (and had met Saint Francis of Assisi then), but who had his own problems and didn’t want the hassle of another war with the Christians.

The episode of the “retaking” of Jerusalem is emblematic of the way everything Frederick did was viewed through two lenses. In the eyes of Frederick and his partisans, this was a heroic victory that buttressed Frederick’s claim to be the true inheritor of the mantle of the Emperors of Rome. In the eyes of his enemies, it was a craven cop-out by an excommunicate eager to score a cheap propaganda victory of limited durability and thereby aggrandize himself, though they did not explain how many earlier failures to free Jerusalem by force could this time have been bettered by fighting instead of negotiating.

In any case, successive popes, notably Gregory IX and Innocent IV, saw Frederick as a menace, since he threatened to fully surround the Papal States. They could not abide this, and therefore could not abide Frederick. Conflict under these premises was inevitable. So, Frederick struggled for decades to break the power of the Papacy and its on-again, off-again allies, the north Italian cities of the Lombard League, together with other intermittent allies. Along the way he had other projects: he masterminded the conquering of Prussia by the Teutonic Knights, under the Grand Mastership of Hermann of Salza, a close counselor of his (and go-between with the Pope), laying the groundwork for seven centuries of the importance of Prussia to Germany (although now, to be sure, most of those territories are no longer part of Germany). He made a few more half-hearted efforts towards the East, as well; Kantorowicz interprets this as the need for the King of the West to be the King of the East in order to be the World Ruler, which seems a very big leap. Those were side projects, though; Frederick spent his life primarily in endless back-and-forth fighting to achieve a unified realm with an Italian focus, ultimately falling short and dying of an intestinal complaint in 1250 at the age of fifty-six. His heirs all died, and his line ended with his grandson, Conradin, executed at age sixteen by Charles of Anjou in 1268 (a man who, strangely, has recently received attention from sections of the resurgent, fermenting American Right).

The long-term effects of the struggle between Frederick and the Papacy were very significant. Kantorowicz blames Innocent for trying to wholly eliminate the separation of the temporal and spiritual power, thereby causing increased conflict with the temporal power and, ultimately, the erosion of the Pope’s spiritual power. To the consequences of this Kantorowicz ascribes most of the events and later consequences of Frederick’s career, which might otherwise have resulted in a German Empire from the Baltics to Palermo, with the Papal States still extant but effectively without substantial temporal power. If Frederick had had a free hand, he would not have had to grant to the great lords of Germany near total independence from the Empire, in effect making them kinglets with only nominal obedience to the Emperor, which caused Frederick little immediate trouble but set the pattern for a fragmented Germany for hundreds of years. He might have forged a true empire—but he spent his power on the challenges he met, making the compromises he needed to make, and thus he could not weld together Germany into the empire that Kantorowicz so clearly thought was Germany’s destiny. In his Italian possessions, on the other hand, Frederick was a modernizing centralizer, eroding feudal institutions, continuing the rebirth of Roman law and the reformation of justice and administration, and, in general, trying to act like a real Emperor of Rome. This created the first modern state, though it, too, fragmented after Frederick’s death, leaving itself as an example for later monarchs.

I was interested to see that Kantorowicz credits Frederick with presiding over a great flourishing of art, especially of poetry, but also other arts. As I recently discussed in connection with Sohrab Ahmari’s The New Philistines, what matters for great art is having a great ruling class, and this is another piece of historical evidence for my thesis. Kantorowicz describes it as neither “frivolity nor royal fashion, but an incomparable vigor of the blood, which even in ruin demands glory and fame.” Vigor is it, I think; no vigor, no great art, and vice versa.

Frederick’s long struggle with the Papacy . . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Jeff]

Reading -- perhaps for the first time? Frederick II is the kind of book that, as you're reading it, you're aware that perhaps you've read it before, so well-known a type it is, but then you can't pin down your earlier reading of it. Not a biography; not a history (though the epigraph, in German, translates from the German, roughly: "His Emperor and heroes | The Secret Germany"); more a mythography, a hagiography, the subject of which is so persuasively exceptional (most readers today assume the subject is power); Kantorowicz' treatment so masterfully nuanced, you can't imagine that any biographical or historical treatment would be preferable. It was from Kantorowicz (and this book) that his student, Robert Duncan, first perceived St. Francis as a poet; it's Franciscan thanopoesis that runs as an order through Duncan's work, as well as the work of Simone Weil, Fanny Howe, and others. Then again, there's Kantorowicz' recent treatment by Agamben, Eric L. Santner, and Byung-Chul Han, to name only a few from a long list of writers interested in Kantorowicz as an early semiotician of the political theology of the state. I'll write more when I'm further in --

Let's say something further about the Kantorowicz perception of St. Francis as a poet of the Italian language. Kantorowicz depicts Frederick as a worldly autocrat, a man of some six languages (old German, Sicilian, Latin, Greek, Arabic and the Languedoc), singlehandedly posed to invent a constitutional monarchical empire able to countervail the papacy and bring down the European feudal system; while in his childhood he benefitted from the stewardship of Innocent III (whom he met only once), the Palermo of the Emperor's regency was a poly-cultural glut that bred in Frederick a skepticism abrogated only in the Cistercian orders that embraced him when in his late teens (1215) he was coronated in Aix la Chapelle and before the dying Innocent III took the cross. The Cistercian mysticism Frederick adopted had both a personal and spiritual aim, by which re-unification of the Empire, as well as the re-unification of God in Love can come by two routes: a rectification of the reason by the Word; out of which is born humility; and a rectification with the Will by the Holy Spirit -- two mystical cornerstones of Frederick's humanism that were put to the test during the Honorius prefecture when Frederick, delaying a long-promised Crusade into the Holy Land, endeavored to re-unite the Northern Italian cities under the crown, going so far as to travel to Cremona for Honorius' Imperial Diet, undertaken at a high point (1226) of Franciscan fervor. Francis, greatly suffering, would be dead in October of that year. Here is Kantorowicz, writing in Frederick's point of view:

"From the imperial standpoint [Frederick] justifiably regarded this alliance of the Pope with heretics and rebels, enemies alike of Church and Empire, as treason to the Church herself -- treason that is to the aristocratic medieval Church. Frederick could not feel otherwise, and in his wrath at this betrayal he could justify to himself and to the world his fight [just then evident in Frederick's stand with Cremona in their fight with Milan] against the papacy. Indeed his faith in his mission and in the justice of his cause was mainly based on the conviction that this 'incestuous' coalition of Church and heretic undermined the God-ordained constitution of the world. This was a purely aristocratic constitution founded on two swords -- the spiritual and the temporal -- and the unity of two monarchs: Emperor and Pope."

The heretics just then in league with the papacy were, of course, the followers of this little known order of the highest poverty (the Franciscans), the followers of this new mystical knowledge at loose:

"Political advantage certainly held the foreground; but behind the scenes, behind Lombards and papacy, a new world-power was at work, a power against whose warriors Frederick II consciously fought, against which itself he fought his life long all unknowing, and growing thereby in stature: Francis of Assisi and the new Christ image he had evoked." (159-160)

For Kantorowicz, then, this is the story of "power and counter-power" and the persona most created by it is Dante: "With Dante the man is born who consciously suffers in both conflicts". (162). Dante, obviously, is a Guelph (Frederick was a Ghibelline) whose family came of those orders of upper middle-class tradesmen whose only recourse against Frederickian Absolutism was to join Guilds, and begin to demand freedom of appointment and social mobility through those ranks. For Kantorowicz, Frederick is to become the Papacy (under Ugolino di Conti = Pope Gregory IX)'s "scourge," the figure most responsible for returning the Church to Christ and the Apostolic orders. This is Kantorowicz' scheme -- it's Nietzsche's Anti-Christ, Kantorowicz is explicit about that -- and of course, it's just this debt Kantorowicz owes that has led to his being consistently mis-read by those who don't like to miss an analogy to the Third Reich --

Here is the most recent effort to smear Kantorowicz: my link text

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Review of E. O. Lorimer's English translation.]

This poetical biography is nothing short of phenomenal. Equal parts Evolian pontifex and Machiavellian perfect prince the portrait of Frederick II drawn here gives the reader a glimpse into the true nature of power. The shifting perspective and the manifold nuance give this book a quality that is best described as enthralling. And the effect is sustained throughout...which is quite an achievement given that it is 689 pages long (It's only fitting that it exceeds 666 pages...) Recommended for Traditionalist that take Evola so seriously that they cannot see where he has misstepped in understanding power and for Christian Alt-Right type's who see the High Middle Ages as more "Christian" then they actually were — this book provides the needed corrective. If you've read about the conflict between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines before and would like to see this conflict examined in a more personal and concrete way then this immensely readable, novelesque book is where you should go. It is the height of biography. (If anyone knows of other biographical titles of this caliber please contact me. I'd sincerely appreciate the recommendation.)

[Raffaele Felici · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un’opera maestosa

Sono arrivato a questa imponente biografia di Federico II grazie ad una delle lezioni del professore Barbero sull’affascinante figura di Ernst Kantorowicz, storico vissuto tra il 1895 e il 1963.
Nonostante siano passati molti anni dalla sua pubblicazione lo stile è chiaro, misurato. Una difficoltà può essere certamente la lunghezza e la complessità delle vicende italiane durante la vita di Federico II ma consiglio ma lettura di questo saggio a tuttə colorə che intendono approfondire questo bellissimo e travagliato periodo storico dal punto di vista di uno dei suoi protagonisti indiscussi.

[Charlie]

Even having read just 1/10 of this classic biography for a seminar, I was struck by the force of its prose and the author's sheer energy. The portions I read offered a compelling portrait of the self-perception of Frederick II, stressing his uniqueness in combining Norman absolute monarchy with the pan-Mediterranean conceit of the Holy Roman Emperor. Unlike other HRE rulers, he had a territory of his own, Sicily, in which to focus his empire concretely. Highly enjoyable. I would gladly go back to this someday.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense but fascinating history of the Hohenstaufen Emperor. My interest is mostly for the interaction and conflict of pope and imperator, or the first ever clash of Church and State. Readers of BEFORE CHURCH AND STATE will find much to consider in this life of Frederick II, a contemporary of St. Louis IX.

[Schaden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tremendously hagiographic. A fun and well researched book, but often has rushed conclusions based on little fact.

[Dmitry Halavach · Rating 4 out of 5]

A (very) flawed masterpiece. Refreshing to see a break from the endless “critique” with which modern historiography is preoccupied. But very often I want to scream “how do you know this?” when I encounter yet another sweeping generalisation or an assertion about the Emperor’s state of mind. Not sure people would read this book today, were it not for the fact that it was popular in certain political circles in 20th century Germany. Kantorowicz distanced himself from this work later in life. Also, I fear that the retention rate of all this wealth of detail will be almost zero.

[Ellis Knox · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in English, not Italian!

This is actually not particularly good history, as David Abulafia has amply demonstrated, but it's a good read. Moreover, Kantorowicz' interpretation of Fritz and his life and his historical impact has colored most textbook presentations of the man.

[Luigi Salamanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ho già letto diversi libri sulla vita i Federico II di Svevia, ognuna col suo stile ed ancora una stò leggendo in questo momento. Mi sono avvicinato a questo libro con soggezione, sia x le dimensioni, sia perchè è noto x essere uno dei migliori sulla vita di Federico. Ho trovato un libro che sicuramente mantiene la sua fama di preciso, dettagliato e completo saggio storico, ma anche un libro molto piacevole da leggere, quasi fosse in formato romanzo. Davvero un bel testo, da raccomandare a chi, come me, è amante sia del Medioevo, ma anche di Federico II re ed Imperatore.

[Attila Gáspár · Rating 3 out of 5]

Truly grandiose book about Frederick II, the Wonder of the World, the last Roman Emperor and the first European. Unfortunately it is also amazingly over-written and some parts did not age particularly well. This book is certainly not for everyone, but those who are interested in history, political philosophy, or just love the High Middle Ages will enjoy it, especially if they can tolerate the bit-too-German style of prose.

[VeganMilf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uniquely forceful prose even for a time period gifted by so many great non-fiction writers. Kantorowicz's almost reckless mixture of mythology and erudite discussion medieval politics make for an intoxicating read. How can I fault something that so freely transitions from some of the best analysis of the political philosophy of the Holy Roman Empire to talking about Fredrick II receiving jewels taken from the crown of a Babylonian dragon? Perfect

[Fabio Mocci · Rating 3 out of 5]

Biografia esaustiva ma a tratti pesante, ripetitiva. Da leggere per completare le conoscenze di questo incredibile personaggio, ma per chi come me cercava un primo approccio risulta troppo approfondita

[Pierluigi · Rating 4 out of 5]

È un grande classico degli studi federiciani. Anche se molti punti e considerazioni dell'autore sono stati sorpassati dalla medievistica odierna, rimane una lettura obbligata per chi è del campo. Potrebbe interessare anche ai non specialisti, l'ho sempre considerata una lettura piacevole.

[Jasper · Rating 4 out of 5]

First stirrings of the Italian Renaissance
The unravelling of medieval political philosophy wrt church and state, especially as influence on Dante
The Guelph-Ghibelline wars
Frederick's relevance as 'Kaiser' to the Germany of the book's time

[Frejola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frederick II offers exceptional clarity on the complexities of the 13th century; Kantorowicz’s astonishing scholarship outshines the subtle biases of his era (the word race appears often and problematically).

[Edward]

"Kantorowicz, besides a number of other works, produced the monumental work Frederick II: The Hohenstaufen Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It was first published in German and then translated into English in 1957. It was first published in 1931, before Hitler. And it is a remarkable account of the rise of the modern state. Fredrick II was an openly humanistic emperor. The façade of Christianity was very thin. Many regarded him as a secret Moslem. He actually had a harem. His center was Sicily, although German constituted the center of his empire. He presented himself as a humanistic statist Christ. His ostensible birthplace was a small town named Bethlehem and his mother Mary. He created the inquisition, because there could be no dissent from the state.

The Church borrowed it, but most of the time the inquisition was a civil matter. The state likes total control over the individual. And everything we have in the modern state Kantorowicz shows Frederick II (1194-1250) had worked out so that the modern state has been a long time in the making. Its pattern very clearly laid out." ~Rushdoony

[Maurizio Randaccio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Molto completo anche se a tratti richiede un buon impegno per poterlo seguire.