Word: frederick
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Terrain. Deiss chooses to tell his story from his subject's point of view, in a first-person chronicle supposedly set down by Frederick at the end of his life, the device used so well by Marguerite Yourcenar in Hadrian's Memoirs. To some extent the method sacrifices dramatic force-violence recollected in relative tranquillity is only the shadow of violence. But although Frederick, as warrior and sensualist, was at the center of many dramas, his life was lived in the far and lonely terrain of his own mind...
...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...
...Hammer. Crushing rebellions the papacy stirred up, Frederick earned another nickname-il Martello del Hondo (hammer of the world); but at last the machinery of his rule, having been sabotaged and repaired too many times, no longer functioned. When he died (in bed -a triumph for a ruler of those times), Italy and the Empire were in chaos. And, lacking another emperor of Frederick's energy, in chaos they remained...
Author Deiss has done a remarkable job of making 13th century church-state politics comprehensible, and in addition has performed the stupefying task of sorting out Frederick's romances (he fathered legitimate children by several queens and was responsible for numberless bastards; in addition, making no distinction between sexes, he carried on a lifelong affair with Pier della Vigna, the lowborn lawyer who may have invented the sonnet). The novel is not, like its subject, a stupor mundi, but it is a careful, craftsmanlike job, done with intelligence and conscience...