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In true Aryan fashion, Frederick saw himself as the 'Sun Emperor', and was variously known as the 'terror of the earth', and 'the anti-christ' by his contemporaries. The chronicler Matthew Paris called Frederick "The World's Wonderman", while the poet Dante later described him as;"ultimo imperadore de li Romani",i.e., 'the Last Emperor of the Romans'.
His supporters saw Frederick as the god-Emperor of a New Age, and he no doubt prefigured the Renaissance, that era of European history which Nietzsche regards as its highest peak;"Frederick called himself the 'Lord of the World'. Norman and German in ancestry but essentially a Sicilian, Frederick always felt a stranger in Germany".[Columbia Encyclopedia]Here we see an immediate parity with Nietzsche - Germanic in blood, but drawn to the European Mediterranean.
"Frederick was also a gifted artist and scientist. A poet himself, he was surrounded by Provencal troubadours and German minnesingers".[ib.]
This is the atmosphere of Nietzsche's book 'The Joyous Wisdom', with its poetry and nods to Provencal 'gaya scienza'. This is compounded by the following;
"Frederick patronised science and philosophy, and interested himself in medicine, mathematics, astrology, and astronomy. His 'De Arte Venadi Avibus', on hawking as well as the anatomy and life of birds, was the first modern ornithology".[ib.]
Like Nietzsche, Frederick was a man of languages;
"Frederick spoke six languages fluently, among them Greek and Arabic; he had read the Koran and got on well with Muslim rulers, whom he considered his only cultural equals".[Hildinger]
This is uncanny - Nietzsche too admires Islam at the expense of Christianity.
Frederick's fascination with linguistics was said to have lead to experiments worthy of the Third Reich;
"Fond of 'scientific' experimentation, Frederick commanded that a number of children be raised from birth in total silence and isolation, in order to find out what language they would ultimately speak ... all the children died young".[R.Roland]
In that macabre result is much to be learned about the nature of language!
Like Nietzsche, Frederick was a man surrounded by rumour. It was said that Frederick had written a now lost book called 'De Tribus Impostoribus'.
The 'Three Imposters' of the title were none other than Moses, Jesus and Mohammed; this can be seen as nothing other than a comprehensive assault on the three Semitic religions.In his free spititedness, Frederick pioneered the establishment of a secular government [including the endowment of the University of Naples, the first clearly secular university in the West];
"In Frederick II the Pope was fighting an anti-ecclesiastical theory of world-organisation, aggressive and fully armed. The Emperor was making it his life's aim to restore the ancient subordination of religion to the state. The Pope was determined to destroy him".[N.Cohn]
This is very much the prototype for Nietzsche's Mastery of the Earth;
"Frederick became the battle-cry of the West; bloodier and more savage than before, the strife raged through the Christian world around his person alone. Never before had one single individual acieved such personal importance - Frederick the man, not Frederick the Emperor. The person of the Emperor was now the World-Idea".[Kantorowicz]
One can see how the Nietzschean tone of Kantorowicz's book quoted from above has inspired Hitler's Struggle. The forces that Frederick struggled against, "the Church, magnified Frederick the Hohenstaufen into a giant. The Papacy with all the forces of all the countries of Europe, was now fighting not the Emperor, nor the Empire, but one demon in whom all the evil of the world was incarnate, one Hohenstaufen".[ib.]
This standing alone as the personification of Evil against the 'moral world order' is a Hitlerian/Nietzschean stance which heralds the Overman (and can be symbolised by the Swatika). Kantowicz tells us that the poets of Frederick's time compared the Emperor to "Zeus, the Thunder God and Lightning Wielder of Greek mythology".[ib.]
We know from the work of Jung that those mythological archetypes find parallels in the Teutonic Wotan, and also therefore, in Nietzsche's Blond Beast.
"The Fates warn, stars teach, and likewise the flight of birds, that I will soon be the Hammer of the world. Papal Rome, a long time wavering, having committed a multitude of errors, will collapse and cease to be the Leader of the World".
[Frederick II]
Ah! - the Nietzschean echoes in that statement of the Emperor! The brooding atmosphere of Twilight, and the symbol of the Hammer;
"Frederick was at home in the mysterious Twilight of the prophets and the stargazers and could not value their sphere too highly as, in a certain sense, a training ground".[Kantorowicz]
This is very much the world of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, a necessary rite of passage for the philosophers of the future.
Many legends have accrued around the Emperor;"In spite of Frederick's manifest dislike for Germany, it is he, and not his father Barbarossa ('Redbeard'), to whom that German legend originally attached - that legend which represents a great monarch slumbering in a deep cavern, his beard grown 'round a stone table, against a day of awakening when the world will be restored by him from an extremity of disorder to peace".[Wells]
Frederick, known in his day for his 'intelligence, licentiousness and cruelty' was greatly honoured in his death, his Lion-throned sarcophagus of blood-red porphry in its Classical grandeur calling to mind Napoleon's tomb in Paris."The final resting-place of Frederick II, according to Dante, is in a fiery coffin, in Circle Six with the Heretics, in Book Ten of The Inferno. - Yet Dante had the most profound respect and admiration for the Hohenstaufen. All his life Frederick II was the model Ruler, and Judge, the Scholar and Poet, the perfect Prince, the 'Illustrious Hero' ".[Kantorowicz]
And in all of this, Nietzsche saw himself and his philosophical Destiny.
All Hail The Hohenstaufen!
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