The emperor called the Wonder of the World was excommunicated four times
Frederick II spoke six languages, wrote poetry, studied nature, and ruled from Sicily to Germany. Contemporaries called him Stupor mundi, the Wonder of the World. Popes had other names: he was excommunicated four times, and Innocent IV branded him a forerunner of the Antichrist.
Frederick was born at Jesi, near Ancona, on 26 December 1194, son of Emperor Henry VI, himself a son of Frederick Barbarossa, and Queen Constance of Sicily. His mother's advanced age fuelled rumours that the pregnancy had been faked and the baby's real father was a butcher, a miller or a falconer. One later legend even claims she gave birth in Jesi's public square to silence doubters, and she reportedly swore on the gospels before a papal legate that he was Henry's son. She first named him Constantine; he became Frederick Roger at his baptism, aged two.
His titles piled up. Crowned King of Sicily at three alongside his mother, he became King of Germany in 1212, emperor in 1220, and King of Jerusalem from 1225 to 1228 through marriage and the Sixth Crusade. He saw himself as heir to the Roman emperors. That ambition put him at constant odds with the papacy, whose territory was squeezed between his northern Italian lands and his southern kingdom.
In Sicily and much of Italy he built on Norman foundations to create an early absolutist state run by an efficient secular bureaucracy. Besides Latin and his native Sicilian, he reportedly handled Greek, Arabic, Old French and the German of his day. From around 1220 his court at Palermo was a leading cultural centre, where the Sicilian School of poetry first used an Italo-Romance language for literature, influencing what became modern Italian. He was also the first monarch to formally ban trial by ordeal as superstition.
Some have called him the greatest German emperor, perhaps the greatest medieval ruler. Yet his dynasty did not last. He died on 13 December 1250, the Hohenstaufen line soon ended, and the Holy Roman Empire slid into the long decline of the Great Interregnum.
Source: Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor
