fury of the pope did not hinder the emperor from achieving in the Holy Land deeds worthy of his fame. He concluded with the Sultan Kernel a truce of ten years, and obtained that Jerusalem and a part of the environs should be surrendered to the Christians, the only condition being that the Mahometans should have free access to Jerusalem, which, no less for them than for the Christians, is a sacred city. On the 17th March, 1259, Frederick crowned himself at Jerusalem as king thereof—he being at the time in such spiritual disrepute that no one would say mass in his presence. A plot to assassinate him was defeated by the magnanimity of the Mahometans. Meanwhile the pope had done his utmost and his bitterest to excite all Italy against the emperor, and with abundant success. But fresh from the glories of the East, Frederick had only to appear in Italy to strike all opposition down. There was a semblance of reconciliation between the emperor and the pope, and in 1230 Frederick ceased to be under the papal ban, which was less formidable than it would have been a generation or two before. In 1231 the emperor convoked a diet at Ravenna, chiefly intended to put an end to the wars between the towns of the imperial and those of the Guelph faction. This diet had little other result than to gain for the emperor the firm and faithful friendship of the Romano family, the members of which were more than once conspicuous in mighty mediæval scenes. The reconciliation between the pope and the emperor could not be of long duration. While the pope was bigoted beyond all the bigots of his age, and surrounded himself with the most ferocious instruments of the recently established inquisition; beyond all the enlightenment and tolerance of his age Frederick was tolerant and enlightened, and in his palaces at Naples, Messina, and Palermo—moving in a congenial crowd of astrologists and of favourites, of legists and of Saracens, of artists and of poets—mocked antiquated forms and obsolete formulas, and decreed the overthrow of the Roman theocracy, which he hated as his own enemy, and viewed as the deceiver and oppressor of the human race. Evermore fresh food for hatred was furnished to him. The papal party stirred up to revolt against him, in 1234, his son Henry, who had before been crowned king of the Romans. It cost him small trouble to suppress this rebellion; and when Henry was mad enough to rise anew in arms against his father, he was condemned, with his wife and child, to imprisonment for life in a castle of Apulia. The emperor appointed as successor Conrad—a child of nine years, whose mother was Jolanda, the emperor's second wife. About the same time he married a third wife—Isabella, the sister of Henry III. of England. Envenomed by the rancours of the pope, and by their own turbulent tendencies, the Lombard cities persisted in thwarting and annoying the emperor. Frederick resolved to teach them better behaviour. He marched against them an army, in which were many thousand Saracens. On the 26th November, 1237, a decisive battle was fought at Cortenuova, and the Lombards were signally defeated—ten thousand of them being either killed or made prisoners. The Milanese caroccio was taken, and, to insult the pope, Frederick sent it with a pompous letter to the senate and the people of Rome. For this the pope's revenge was excommunication. The emperor's reply was the appointment of his son Enzio as king of Sardinia. Such defiance of what he deemed his rights exasperated the pope, but did not subdue his obstinacy. He denounced Frederick as a monster. Frederick retaliated by proclaiming the pope Antichrist. There had been more than once antipopes—sometimes there had been an Anticæsar. To catch an Anticæsar was the pope's last move on the broad, bold chessboard of Italian diplomacy. He caught, or tried to catch, Robert D'Artois, the brother of the king of France. But Saint Louis, though a devotee, had shrewd sound sense. He disapproved of the pope's malignity toward the emperor, and therefore he flatly refused to let his brother be an Anticæsar—probably an unsuccessful one. Despairing of doing anything on the chessboard, the pope, gnashing his teeth, threw the chessboard itself at the head of his adversary. He convoked for the end of 1241 a general council at Rome. The Genoese fleets were placed at the disposal of the prelates who intended to be present at the council. Near Meloria the emperor attacked the Genoese and completely defeated them. Bishops, abbots, deputies of Lombard cities without number, fell into the hands of the emperor. Having conducted the prelates to Pisa, he chained them with chains of silver. Those who were subjects of the king of France were, out of respect to Saint Louis, immediately set at liberty. The news of the unexpected disaster so keenly wounded the pope that he died of apoplexy, aged a hundred years. His successor was Celestine IV., who died immediately after his election. There was now a papal interregnum of eighteen months. At last a pope was chosen, who took the title of Innocent IV. This pontiff had, up to the time of his election, been the intimate friend of the emperor. But he became, as Frederick himself had predicted, the emperor's implacable foe. After the election of Innocent IV. in 1243, the reign of Frederick was scarcely anything more than a long duel between the pope and the emperor. Here we have no word of blame for the emperor, but boundless and burning blame for the vindictive and ungrateful pope. The duel it would be tedious and sickening to narrate. Innocent IV., whose name must for ever be execrated, was not contented with fighting as enemy should ever fight with enemy. He calumniated the emperor in the most unscrupulous fashion. The emperor, nevertheless, would have been victorious, but he died suddenly at Fiorenzuola on the 13th Septembter, 1250. Of truly primordial men there are few whom we can love and admire so much as Frederick II. With the brow of Jupiter he had the form of Apollo. His fair told his Teutonic origin; his nose and mouth, both formed to enrapture the sculptor, were eloquent of the antique spirit which he yearned to introduce into mediæval things; the eagle's eye was for ever melting into the dove's; he could speak Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German, Arabic; but the language which he best understood and excelled in most was that of affection. A beautiful and knightly soul that ought to have lived in some less troubled age. But even what he did in a most anarchic age is as yet little known, especially in England.—W. M—l.
Frederick III., Emperor of Germany, surnamed der Schöne (the Handsome), son of the Emperor Albert I. and Elizabeth of Carinthia, was born in 1286; and after the assassination of his father in 1308, undertook the government of the duchy of Austria in his own right and that of a younger brother. In early youth Frederick had concluded an intimate friendship with Prince Ludwig of Bavaria—the two making a solemn vow never to cease loving each other through life. Ambition, however, soon showed itself stronger than friendship; for the nobility of Lower Bavaria choosing Frederick as regent of the province, Ludwig in his disappointment made war on his friend, and their armies meeting, the Bavarian was beaten in the battle of Gamelsdorf in 1313. Soon after, an election occurred for the throne of Germany, and both Frederick and Ludwig became candidates for the imperial purple. As fate would have it, the electors disagreed in the conclave, splitting into two parties; the one choosing the Bavarian, and the other the Austrian prince. Ludwig was the first in the field, and hurrying to Frankfort-on-the-Maine, he got himself publicly acknowledged and solemnly crowned as emperor. When Frederick arrived a few weeks after, he found the gates of the imperial town shut against him, and was threatened with the ban. In violent anger he collected his knights around him, and moving along the left bank of the Rhine, allowed himself to be crowned in a field near Bonn, the ceremony being performed by the archbishop of Cologne; after which intestine war with all its horrors broke forth throughout the German empire. In the commencement Frederick was rather more successful than his antagonist; but the fortune of war turning after a while, Ludwig got the upper hand, and ended by beating his former friend in the sanguinary battle of Mühldorf, September 28, 1322, in which Frederick himself was made a prisoner. Frederick was carried into the fortress of Trausnitz, near Nabburg, where he had to remain three years in solitary confinement. At the end of this period, in consequence of the efforts made by his noble wife, Elizabeth of Arragonia—who, as the old chroniclers relate, "cried herself blind for her husband"—Ludwig consented to set his antagonist at liberty, under the condition that not only he himself would acknowledge Ludwig's rule, but would bring the whole Austrian party to submission. Frederick set out for his native country, resolved to keep his word, but met with determined opposition in the person of his brother Leopold, the reigning duke of Austria, who absolutely refused to submit to Ludwig. Seeing his efforts fruitless, Frederick again constituted himself a prisoner in the emperor's hands. Ludwig was touched to tears by this most unexpected act of loyalty; forgetting all animosity, he sank into the arms of his old friend, protesting his love, and imploring him to share his throne. Frederick did so, and Germany had to witness the
