Jerusalem: The Biography

WONDER OF THE WORLD, BEAST OF THE APOCALYPSE

On 9 November 1225, at the cathedral in Brindisi, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, married Yolande, fifteen-year-old Queen of Jerusalem. As soon as the wedding was over, Frederick assumed the title of king of Jerusalem ready to set off on his Crusade. His enemies claimed that he proceeded to seduce his new wife’s ladies-in-waiting while cavorting with his harem of Saracen odalisques. This appalled his father-in-law John of Brienne and upset the pope. But Frederick was already the most powerful monarch in Europe – he was later to be known as Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World – and he did everything in his own way.

Frederick of Hohenstaufen, green-eyed and ginger-haired, half-German and half-Norman, had been raised in Sicily and there was nowhere else in Europe quite like his court in Palermo, which combined Norman, Arab and Greek cultures in a unique blend of the Christian and the Islamic. It was this upbringing that made Frederick so unusual and he certainly flaunted his eccentricities. His entourage usually featured a sultanic harem, a zoo, fifty falconers (he wrote a book called The Art of Hunting with Birds), an Arab bodyguard, Jewish and Muslim scholars and often a Scottish magician and hierophant. He was certainly more Levantine in culture than any other king in Christendom but that did not stop him ruthlessly suppressing Arab rebels in Sicily – he used his own spur to rip open the belly of their captured leader. He deported the Arabs from Sicily but built them a new Arab town in Lucera with its own mosques and a palace which became his favourite residence. Similarly he enforced anti-Jewish laws while he patronised Jewish savants, welcomed Jewish settlers and insisted they be fairly treated.

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.