The History of the Renaissance World (54 page)

F
REDERICK HAD MANAGED
to align himself, however briefly, with Rome; but he continued to spar with his own son.

Near the end of December 1234, Henry declared open war against his father and his father’s forces. He headquartered himself on the banks of the Rhine river, just south of the German city of Koblenz. It was a short rebellion. Frederick, avoiding the hostile northern Italian lands altogether, landed on the northern shore of the Adriatic and then marched up through the loyal eastern German duchy of Carinthia. Joined by the Duke of Carinthia and by the equally loyal Duke of Lorraine, he progressed to Worms. His presence in his country, after so many years away, was greeted as a Second Coming by his people; and by the time he reached Worms, Henry’s supporters had faded away. “The Emperor . . . seized his said son, King Henry, and two sons of his, little lads,” wrote the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani, no fan of Frederick, “and sent them into Apulia into prison . . . and there he put him to death by starvation in great torment.” In fact, Henry did not die from starvation, but after nearly eight years in confinement he could bear no more; in the early days of 1242, while riding under guard to a new prison cell near Martirano, he spurred his horse over a steep cliff face and was killed.
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But Henry was still alive when Frederick assembled a new imperial diet at Mainz, in 1235, and had his second son, seven-year-old Conrad, elected as the new king of Germany (and crowned two years later). He then began to plan a war against the rebellious Lombards; determined, now that his own family was in line, to restore “the unity of the Empire.”
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While the Inquisition began to spread its new-fledged wings, Frederick—ignoring Gregory IX’s repeated pleas for peace in Italy—campaigned in Lombardy. Verona welcomed him; Vicenza resisted, and was sacked; Ferrara surrendered; Mantua fell. The Milanese fought stubbornly, for months on end. Frederick, backing away, managed to draw them away from their home ground towards Cortenuova, farther to the east, and then surrounded them. On November 27, 1237, the emperor’s army killed or took prisoner over half of the Milanese soldiers and seized almost all of their horses, wagons, and supplies.

The remainder fled; and Frederick, bolstered by his victory, demanded the unconditional surrender of the city. Milan refused. “We fear your cruelty,” they wrote back, in response, “which we know by experience; we had rather die under our shields by sword, spear, or dart, than by treachery, starvation, and fire.” Instead, they dug themselves in for the winter; and their resistance encouraged the other Lombard cities to rejoin the battle.
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It had become increasingly clear to Gregory IX that Frederick’s designs on Italy would, eventually, reach down to Rome itself. The temporary truce between the two men was fragile; cooperation against heretics would last only so long, as a common bond. Gregory IX’s attempts to negotiate peace between emperor and Lombards were rejected. When, early in 1239, Frederick landed troops on the shores of the island of Sardinia, which the pope claimed as his own territory, Gregory IX rose up in wrath and condemned the emperor’s ambitions: “The hatred which sprung up between the pope and the emperor, like an old wound, produced foul matter,” records the English chronicler Matthew Paris. In the Lenten season, Gregory IX pronounced Frederick II not only excommunicated but deposed.
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46.1 Frederick’s War in Italy

The foul matter was now out in the open. Pope and emperor exchanged a series of increasingly testy letters, with Frederick copying his complaints to the crowned monarchs of Europe. (“The nations are now endeavouring to despise the ruler of Italy and the imperial sceptre!” he complained, neatly conflating his differences with Gregory and his desire to put down the Lombard revolt.) Finally Frederick II, leaving troops to go on with the war in Lombardy, began to march south towards Rome itself. In August of 1241, he was approaching the city’s walls when Gregory IX—well into his eighties, suffering from the heat of a Roman summer—died.
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Immediately, Frederick retreated and pointed out piously that his quarrel was not with the Church but with the ambitions of the man himself. Gregory’s successor served for only seventeen days before dying of illness and throwing Rome into chaos. Not until 1243 was a new pope finally elected: the Genoese cardinal Sinibaldo Fieschi, a canon lawyer who now became Pope Innocent IV.

Frederick had been friendly with Cardinal Fieschi, but he had his reservations. “This election,” he told his familiars, “will be of much hurt to us; for he was our friend when cardinal, and now he will be our enemy as Pope.” His prediction very shortly came true.
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Innocent IV had a lawyer’s mindset, and before long was combining Roman law with canon principles to come up with a clear articulation of his own power. Church law, he wrote, was above secular law; and since, in Roman jurisprudence, the prince stands above the law, so the pope also stands above church law, unbound by it, able to change it, depart from it, or even nullify it as needed.
Absolute papal monarchy
: it was a theory that Innocent IV spent much of his papacy elaborating and defending, and it was almost custom-designed to infuriate the emperor.
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Innocent IV began his papacy by ordering Frederick to give up all of the territory he had conquered since his excommunication by Gregory IX, five years earlier. When Frederick refused, Innocent IV traveled to the French city of Lyons—outside of Italy, and outside of the emperor’s grasp. There he renewed both the excommunication and the call for Frederick’s deposition as emperor.
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This began yet another war of letters, with both pope and emperor pleading their case to the rest of the world. “I hold my crown from God alone; neither the Pope, the Council, nor the devil shall rend it from me!” Frederick raged. “What might not all kings fear from the presumption of a such a pope?” “When a sick man who cannot be helped by mild remedies undergoes a surgical incision or cautery,” wrote Innocent IV, primly, in response, “he rages in bitterness of spirit against his doctor. . . . If then Frederick, formerly emperor, strives to accuse . . . the sacred judge of the universal church . . . he is behaving in the same fashion.”
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Inevitably, the war of words devolved into simple war. Innocent IV declared one of Frederick’s German subjects, Henry Raspe, to be the new king of Germany in place of young Conrad (now seventeen); Henry marched on Conrad’s own forces but died on campaign, so Innocent threw his weight behind another candidate, William of Holland. While Conrad fought in Germany, Frederick II started to lose his foothold in Italy. Bishops and cardinals loyal to the pope were preaching revolt to the emperor’s subjects in Sicily and Lombardy. In early February of 1248, Frederick’s army was unexpectedly defeated while laying siege to the city of Parma; the emperor was forced to flee to Cremona, and most of the gold and treasure he had been using to finance the war fell into Lombard hands. The Milanese, heading the Lombard League, led the recapture of Modena; Como fell; and in 1250, still battling, Frederick II grew ill with dysentery, the scourge of a soldier’s existence.
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“That Frederick who was once emperor died . . . in Apulia,” writes the Franciscan Salimbene. “And because of the very great stench of corruption which came from his body, he could not be carried to Palermo, where the sepulchers of the kings of Sicily are.” Salimbene was a northerner, and other northern Italians believed his horror story. In fact, Frederick’s body was embalmed, taken by ship to Sicily, paraded through the streets with an honor guard, and buried in Palermo, at the church of Monreale. The emperor’s death left Innocent IV still marooned in Lyons, Frederick’s son Conrad fighting off the anti-king of Germany, William, and the Inquisition blooming like a black weed across Europe.
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Chapter Forty-Seven

The Shadow of God

Between 1236 and 1266,
the crown of Delhi passes from
the family of Iltumish to a Turkish slave
who becomes absolute monarch

T
HE
S
ULTAN OF
D
ELHI
, Iltumish, was dead. His sons were “engrossed in the pleasures of youth,” none of them worthy of the throne; and so Iltumish left his crown to his daughter Raziyya. “[She] was a great sovereign, and sagacious,” the
Tabakat-i-Nasiri
tells us, “just, beneficent . . . and of warlike talent, and was endowed with all the admirable attributes and qualifications necessary for kings; but, as she did not attain the destiny, in her creation, of being computed among men, of what advantage were all these excellent qualifications to her?”
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Her father’s officers divided. The vizier of Delhi and his supporters, hoping to put one of the sultan’s useless sons on the throne instead, mounted an attack on the palace, while several governors from the outlying provinces marched with their forces to Delhi to fight for Raziyya. The queen’s supporters won, driving the malcontents out of the city.

The opposition never fully faded, though. Raziyya appointed as Master of the Stables (a military position, directing the deployment of both horses and elephants) an African soldier named Malik Hakut, born in the highlands of the southern Nile. Immediately her Turkish detractors began to whisper that Malik Hakut must be her lover; why else would she have appointed a non-Turk to such a favored position? To quell the gossip, Raziyya abandoned traditional female appearances; whenever she rode out, she used a war elephant rather than a horse, and wore a man’s armor and headdress.
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But this did not end her troubles. She was forced to put down a serious rebellion in Lahore, and had just returned to Delhi when she heard that her trusted official Malik Altuniah, governor of the southward city of Bathinda, had also revolted. Unknown to Raziyya, this second rebellion had been carried out with the cooperation of Turkish officials in her own court. She left Delhi again and marched to Bathinda, but as she arrived, her own retinue joined with Malik Altuniah, killed the queen’s Master of the Stables, and took her prisoner.

With Raziyya held captive in the Bathinda fortress known as Qila Mubarak, her shiftless brother Bahram declared himself king in Delhi, with the support of forty Turkish officers and aristocrats. But Malik Altuniah had intended to seize the throne of Delhi himself. He drew up a contract of marriage with Raziyya (apparently without consulting her), converting himself from rebel to her champion, and then brought her by force back to Delhi, where he mounted an attack on Bahram.

According to the
Tabakat-i-Nasiri
, Bahram’s forty supporters and their retinues routed the attackers in short order. On October 13, 1240, Raziyya and her new husband were taken captive; both of them were executed the next morning. She had served as the first Muslim queen of India for three years, six months, and six days.
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Bahram only lasted two years before his own soldiers assassinated him. For some years, his supporters—the Forty, the most powerful mamluk warriors and courtiers in Delhi—struggled with one another for power while paying lip service to a puppet sultan: first Raziyya’s alcoholic nephew and then her youngest brother, Nasiruddin.
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