Is Trump Fredrich II? Stupor Mundi
Friedrich II, the Wonder of the World, Stupor Mundi, as his contemporaries named him, governed for fifty years and demonstrated daily what the Hauteville principle produced when the Nicene pressure was held at bay long enough for a man to govern as Roger II had governed.
He spoke six languages. He corresponded with Arab mathematicians and Muslim philosophers. He kept a menagerie of lions, leopards, cheetahs, giraffes, and an elephant that he brought to the cold cities of northern Europe to demonstrate that the world was larger than their bishops had told them. He wrote the definitive medieval treatise on falconry, De Arte Venandi cum Avibus, based on years of personal observation and Arabic sources, and it remained the authoritative work on the subject for three centuries. He founded the University of Naples in 1224. He issued the Constitutions of Melfi in 1231, the most sophisticated legal code in medieval Europe, codifying Roman law, protecting the rights of his Muslim and Jewish subjects, establishing standardised weights and measures across the kingdom. He outlawed trial by ordeal. He was excommunicated four times. He was called the Antichrist by Pope Gregory IX. He governed anyway.
In 1228 he sailed to the Holy Land on crusade. He had been excommunicated before he left. He did not fight a single battle. He negotiated with Sultan al-Kamil of Egypt, a man with whom he had been corresponding for years on matters of philosophy, mathematics, and the nature of God, and in February 1229 signed a treaty returning Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth to Christian administration. The Muslim population remained undisturbed. Access to the Temple Mount was guaranteed to both faiths. Jerusalem was recovered. No blood was shed.
Pope Gregory IX excommunicated him again for succeeding.
The papal legate in Jerusalem declared the Church of the Holy Sepulchre polluted by Friedrich's presence and suspended all religious services. Friedrich crowned himself King of Jerusalem in the empty church, in silence, because no priest would perform the ceremony. He placed the crown on his own head. Then he left.
He was Roger II's grandson in every way that counted. The court he built in Palermo, Arab scholars, Greek philosophers, Sicilian poets, Jewish physicians, falconers and mathematicians and legal theorists, was Roger II's court continued into the thirteenth century. It was the living proof that the Arian-adjacent model worked. That plurality governed better than uniformity. That a king who speaks to his subjects in their own languages builds a more durable state than one who imposes a single doctrinal identity from above. It was the proof the Nicene institutional order could not tolerate.
Friedrich died on 13 December 1250 at Castel Fiorentino in Apulia, of dysentery, aged fifty-five. He died wearing a Cistercian monk's habit. He was buried in a red porphyry sarcophagus in the Cathedral of Palermo, beside his parents Henry VI and Constanza, and his grandfather Roger II. Four generations in four sarcophagi in one cathedral. The founder and his descendants, together in the city they had built.