The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

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The Emperor and the Pope; the temporal and spiritual power. ↩

Lombardy and Romagna. ↩

The dissension and war between the Emperor Frederick the Second and Pope Gregory the Ninth. Milman, History of Latin Christianity, Book X Ch. 3, says:⁠—

“The Empire and the Papacy were now to meet in their last mortal and implacable strife; the two first acts of this tremendous drama, separated by an interval of many years, were to be developed during the pontificate of a prelate who ascended the throne of St. Peter at the age of eighty. Nor was this strife for any specific point in dispute, like the right of investiture, but avowedly for supremacy on one side, which hardly deigned to call itself independence; for independence, on the other, which remotely at least aspired after supremacy. Caesar would bear no superior, the successor of St. Peter no equal. The contest could not have begun under men more strongly contrasted, or more determinedly oppugnant in character, than Gregory the Ninth and Frederick the Second. Gregory retained the ambition, the vigor, almost the activity of youth, with the stubborn obstinacy, and something of the irritable petulance, of old age. He was still master of all his powerful faculties; his knowledge of affairs, of mankind, of the peculiar interests of almost all the nations in Christendom, acquired by long employment in the most important negotiations both by Innocent the Third and by Honorius the Third; eloquence which his own age compared to that of Tully; profound erudition in that learning which, in the medieval churchman, commanded the highest admiration. No one was his superior in the science of the canon law; the Decretals, to which he afterwards gave a more full and authoritative form, were at his command, and they were to him as much the law of God as the Gospels themselves, or the primary principles of morality. The jealous reverence and attachment of a great lawyer to his science strengthened the lofty pretensions of the churchman.

“Frederick the Second, with many of the noblest qualities which could captivate the admiration of his own age, in some respects might appear misplaced, and by many centuries prematurely born. Frederick having crowded into his youth adventures, perils, successes, almost unparalleled in history, was now only expanding into the prime of manhood. A parentless orphan, he had struggled upward into the actual reigning monarch of his hereditary Sicily; he was even then rising above the yoke of the turbulent magnates of his realm, and the depressing tutelage of the Papal See; he had crossed the Alps a boyish adventurer, and won so much through his own valor and daring that he might well ascribe to himself his conquest, the kingdom of Germany, the imperial crown; he was in undisputed possession of the Empire, with all its rights in Northern Italy; King of Apulia, Sicily, and Jerusalem. He was beginning to be at once the Magnificent Sovereign, the knight, the poet, the lawgiver, the patron of arts, letters, and science; the Magnificent Sovereign, now holding his court in one of the old barbaric and feudal cities of Germany among the proud and turbulent princes of the Empire, more often on the sunny shores of Naples or Palermo, in southern and almost Oriental luxury; the gallant Knight and troubadour Poet, not forbidding himself those amorous indulgences which were the reward of chivalrous valor and of the ‘gay science’; the Lawgiver, whose farseeing wisdom seemed to anticipate some of those views of equal justice, of the advantages of commerce, of the cultivation of the arts of peace, beyond all the toleration of adverse religions, which even in a more dutiful son of the Church would doubtless have seemed godless indifference. Frederick must appear before us in the course of our history in the full development of all these shades of character; but besides all this, Frederick’s views of the temporal sovereignty were as imperious and autocratic as those of the haughtiest churchman of the spiritual supremacy. The ban of the Empire ought to be at least equally awful with that of the Church; disloyalty to the Emperor was as heinous a sin as infidelity to the head of Christendom; the independence of the Lombard republics was as a great and punishable political heresy. Even in Rome itself, as head of the Roman Empire, Frederick aspired to a supremacy which was not less unlimited because vague and undefined, and irreconcilable with that of the Supreme Pontiff. If ever Emperor might be tempted by the vision of a vast hereditary monarchy to be perpetuated in his house, the princely house of Hohenstaufen, it was Frederick. He had heirs of his greatness; his eldest son was King of the Romans; from his loins might yet spring an inexhaustible race of princes; the failure of his imperial line was his last fear. The character of the man seemed formed to achieve and to maintain this vast design; he was at once terrible and popular, courteous, generous, placable to his foes; yet there was a depth of cruelty in the heart of Frederick towards revolted subjects, which made him look on the atrocities of his allies, Eccelin di Romano, and the Salinguerras, but as legitimate means to quell insolent and stubborn rebellion.⁠ ⁠…

“It is impossible to conceive a contrast more strong or more irreconcilable than the octogenarian Gregory, in his cloister palace, in his conclave of stern ascetics, with all but severe imprisonment within conventual walls, completely monastic in manners, habits, views, in corporate spirit, in celibacy, in rigid seclusion from the rest of mankind, in the conscientious determination to enslave, if possible, all Christendom to its inviolable unity of faith, and to the least possible latitude of discipline; and the gay and yet youthful Frederick, with his mingled assemblage of knights and ladies, of Christians, Jews, and Mohammedans, of poets and men of science, met, as it were, to enjoy and minister to enjoyment⁠—to