Yet it was power not exotica that consumed Frederick, who devoted his life to defending his vast inheritance, stretching from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, against envious popes who excommunicated him twice, denounced him as the Anti-Christ and blackened him with the most outlandish calumnies. He was alleged to be a secret atheist or Muslim who said Moses, Jesus and Muhammad were frauds. He was portrayed as a medieval Dr Frankenstein who had sealed a dying man in a barrel to see if his soul could escape; who had dis-embowelled a man to study his digestion; and locked children in isolation-cells to see how they developed language.
Frederick took himself and his family’s rights very seriously: he was actually a conventional Christian who was convinced that as emperor he should be a universal holy monarch on the Byzantine model and that as the descendant of generations of Crusaders and the heir to Charlemagne, he must liberate Jerusalem. He had already taken the Cross twice but kept delaying his departure.
Now that he was king of Jerusalem, he planned his expedition in earnest – but of course after his own fashion. He deposited his pregnant queen of Jerusalem in his Palermo harem, promising the pope that he was departing on Crusade – but Yolande, aged sixteen, died after giving birth to a son. Since Frederick was king of Jerusalem by marriage, his son now assumed the title. But he was not going to let that detail interfere with his new approach to crusading.
The Emperor hoped to win Jerusalem by exploiting the rivalries of the House of Saladin. Indeed Sultan Kamil offered him Jerusalem in return for help against Muazzam who held the city. Frederick finally set off in 1227, only to fall ill and return – at which Pope Gregory IX excommunicated him, which was more than an inconvenience for a Crusader. He sent his Teutonic Knights and infantry on ahead and by the time he joined them in Acre in September 1228, Muazzam was dead and Kamil had occupied Palestine – and withdrawn his offer.
However, Kamil was now having to fight Muazzam’s sons as well as Frederick and his army. He could not handle both threats. Emperor and sultan were too weak to fight for Jerusalem so they opened secret negotiations.
Kamil was as unconventional as Frederick. As a boy, Safadin’s son had been knighted by the Lionheart himself. While emperor and sultan negotiated the sharing of Jerusalem, they debated Aristotelian philosophy and Arab geometry. ‘I’ve no real ambition to hold Jerusalem,’ Frederick told Kamil’s envoy, ‘I simply want to safeguard my reputation with the Christians.’ The Muslims wondered if Christianity was ‘a game to him’. The sultan sent the emperor ‘dancing girls’ while the latter entertained his Muslim guests with Christian dancers. Patriarch Gerold denounced Frederick’s singing girls and jugglers as ‘persons not only of ill-repute but unworthy to be mentioned by Christians’, which of course he then proceeded to do. Between negotiating sessions, Frederick hunted with his falcons and seduced new mistresses, playing the troubadour to write to one of them: ‘Alas I didn’t think that separation from my lady would be so hard remembering her sweet companionship. Happy song, go to the flower of Syria, to her who holds my heart in prison. Ask that most loving lady to remember her servant who shall suffer from love of her until he has done all she wills him to do.’
When the negotiations wavered, Frederick marched his troops down the coast to Jaffa in the footsteps of Richard, threatening Jerusalem. This did the trick and on 11 February 1229, he achieved the undreamable: in return for ten years’ peace, Kamil ceded Jerusalem and Bethlehem with a corridor to the sea. In Jerusalem, the Muslims kept the Temple Mount with freedom of entry and worship under their qadi. The deal ignored the Jews (who had mostly fled the city), but this treaty of shared sovereignty remains the most daring peace deal in Jerusalem’s history.
Yet both worlds were horrified. In Damascus, Muazzam’s son Nasir Daud ordered public mourning. The throng sobbed at the news. Kamil insisted, ‘we’ve only conceded some churches and ruined houses. The sacred precincts and venerated Rock remain ours.’ But the deal worked for him – he was able to reunite Saladin’s empire under his crown. As for Frederick, Patriarch Gerold banned the excommunicate from visiting Jerusalem, and the Templars denounced him for not gaining the Temple Mount.
On Saturday 17 March, Frederick, escorted by his Arab bodyguards and pages, his German and Italian troops, the Teutonic Knights, and two English bishops, was met at the Jaffa Gate by the sultan’s representative, Shams al-Din, the Qadi of Nablus, who handed him the keys of Jerusalem.
The streets were empty, many Muslims had left, the Orthodox Syrians were sullen at this Latin resurgence – and Frederick’s time was short: the Bishop of Caesarea was on his way to enforce the patriarch’s ban and place the city under interdict.20
THE CROWNING OF FREDERICK II: GERMAN JERUSALEM
After spending the night in the palace of the Master of the Hospitallers, Frederick held a special Mass in the Holy Sepulchre, empty of priests but filled with his German soldiery. He rested his imperial crown on the altar of Calvary then placed it on his own head, a crown-wearing ceremony designed to project himself as the universal and paramount monarch of Christendom. He explained to Henry III of England: ‘We being a Catholic Emperor wore the crown which Almighty God provided for us from the throne of His Majesty when of His especial grace He exalted us on high among the princes of the world in the house of His servant David.’ Frederick was not one to underestimate his own importance: his eerie, magnificent mise-en-scène was the crowning of a sacred king, a mystical Emperor of the Last Days, in the Church that he saw as King David’s temple.
Afterwards, the emperor toured the Temple Mount, admiring the Dome and al-Aqsa, praising its beautiful mihrab, climbing on to Nur al-Din’s minbar. When he spotted a priest holding a New Testament trying to enter al-Aqsa, he knocked him over, shouting ‘Swine! By God if one of you comes here again without permission, I shall have his eyes!’
The Muslim custodians did not know what to make of this ginger-haired maverick: ‘Had he been a slave, he wouldn’t have been worth 200 dirhams,’ mused one of them tactlessly. That night Frederick noticed the silence of the muezzins: ‘O Qadi,’ he said to the sultan’s representative, ‘why didn’t the muezzins give the call to prayer last night?’
‘I recommended the muezzins not to give the call out of respect for the king,’ said the qadi.
‘You did wrong,’ replied Frederick. ‘My chief aim in passing the night in Jerusalem was to hear the muezzins and their cries of praise to God during the night.’ If his enemies saw this as Islamophilia, Frederick was probably more interested in making sure his unique deal worked. When the muezzins called the midday prayer, ‘all his valets and pages as well as his tutor’ prostrated themselves to pray.
That morning, the Bishop of Caesarea arrived with his interdict. The emperor left his garrison in the Tower of David and headed back to Acre where he was faced with the ungrateful hostility of barons and Templars. Now under papal attack in Italy, the emperor planned a secret departure, but at dawn on 1 May the Acre mob, collecting the offal of Butchers Street, bombarded him with entrails and giblets. On his ship home to Brindisi, Frederick pined for his ‘flower of Syria’: ‘Ever since I went away, I’ve never endured such anguish as I did on board the ship. And now I believe I shall surely die if I don’t return to her soon.’21
He had not stayed long and he never returned, but Frederick remained officially the master of Jerusalem for ten years. Frederick gave the Tower of David and Royal Palace to the Teutonic Knights. He ordered their master, Hermann of Salza and Bishop Peter of Winchester, to repair the Tower (some of this work survives today) and fortify St Stephen’s (today’s Damascus) Gate. Franks reclaimed ‘their churches and had their old possessions restored to them’. The Jews were again banned. Without walls, Jerusalem was insecure: weeks later, the imams of Hebron and Nablus led 15,000 peasants into the city while the Christians cowered in the Tower. Acre sent an army to eject the Muslim invaders and Jerusalem remained Christian.*