Word: costanza
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Frederick's grandfather was the great conqueror Frederick Barbarossa; his father was Heinrich VI of Germany, the man who captured Richard the Lion-hearted and whom the Italians accurately called Heinrich the Cruel. His mother Costanza brought the Sicilian crown in her dowry, but Heinrich had to subdue Sicily before he could wear it. This done, he burned alive all of Costanza's relations to ensure that he could wear it in peace. It seems certain that Costanza struck back by conspiring with Celestine III (who, like all Popes of the period, worked to undermine a strong king...
...Costanza died soon after, and Frederick grew up in Palermo, an unseen and uncared-for ward of the Pope. The boy, living almost as a beggar child, learned Arabic from the seaport's Arab sailors. He was to learn more than half a dozen other languages, including Hebrew and English. At 14 he was crowned King of Sicily. He held no power and had neither arms nor money. But by his late teens, chiefly by force of an agile mind and a personality radiantly well suited to rabble-and noble-rousing, he had seized control of his inherited German...