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Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Sicily, King of Jerusalem, has, since his death in 1250, enjoyed a reputation as one of the most remarkable monarchs in the history of Europe. His wide cultural tastes, his apparent tolerance of Jews and Muslims, his defiance of the papacy, and his supposed aim of creating a new, secular world order make him a figure especially attractive to contemporary historians. But as David Abulafia shows in this powerfully written biography, Frederick was much less tolerant and far-sighted in his cultural, religious, and political ambitions than is generally thought. Here, Frederick is revealed as the thorough traditionalist he really was: a man...
Frederick II was unusually modern in his sensibilities. Sicily was a cultural melting pot in the thirteenth century and Frederick ended up speaking several languages. He protected Jews and Muslims in his realms and prosecuted Christian heretics throughout his thirty-year reign. He was a polymath with interests ranging from sculpture, architecture, and poetry to mathematics and science in many forms, earning him admiration from his contemporaries who called him Stupor mundi, "Wonder of the World." His lifelong interest in hunting with birds of prey led to the writing of the classic work De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (The Art of Falconry), which is still in print. Based on the latest scholarship and written for the general reader, Frederick II: The Wonder of the World by Richard Bressler provides the complete story of this complex and fascinating man.
Frederick II (1194-1250) - King of Sicily, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Jerusalem, expert ornithologist, Wonder of the World, has long been considered the first Renaissance ruler. A visionary autocrat who embraced the religious divisions within his empire to challenge the armies and oppressive limitations of the medieval church, he has also been denounced as the Antichrist, a heretic and a heathen, who died condemned by the papacy to eternal damnation. "From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Holy Roman Empire has often been anachronistically assumed to have been defunct long before it was actually dissolved at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The authors of this volume reconsider the significance of the Empire in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Their research reveals the continual importance of the Empire as a stage (and audience) for symbolic performance and communication; as a well utilized problem-solving and conflict-resolving supra-governmental institution; and as an imagined political, religious, and cultural "world" for contemporaries. This volume by leading scholars offers a dramatic reappraisal of politics, religion, and culture and also represents a major revision of the history of the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period.
This book was first written in Latin in 1241 by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor (1196-1250). It was first published as a two volume work by his son Manfred. The original is in the Vatican. Next it was published in French in 1300 in six volumes by Jean II of Dampierre. The six volume work was translated into English and combined into one book in 1931 by Dr. Casey Albert Wood (1856-1942), a Canadian ophthalmologist specializing in the eyes of birds, and F. Marjorie Fyfe. The illustrations in this book were obtained in the Vatican Library during the years that Dr. Wood was studying there. Falcons have the best eyesight of any creature known to exist. It has long been recognized...
Many called her Snow White, but few knew her as the Fairytale Keeper. Snow White was a pet name her mother had given her, but her mother's dead now. Adelaide hates that name anyway. A rampant fever claimed Adelaide's mother just like a thousand others in Cologne where the people die without Last Rites and the dead are dumped in a large pit outside of the city walls. Adelaide's father is determined to obtain a funeral for his wife, but that requires bribing the parish priest, Father Soren. When Soren commits an unforgivable atrocity, he pushes Adelaide to her breaking point, but if she seeks justice against the cruel priest, she risks sacrificing everything: her father, her friends, her first love, and maybe even her life.
Explores German engagement with the Italian Renaissance in the decades from German unification to the Weimar republic.
A comprehensive biography of the Treatise of the Three Impostors, a controversial nonexistent medieval book. Like a lot of good stories, this one begins with a rumor: in 1239, Pope Gregory IX accused Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, of heresy. Without disclosing evidence of any kind, Gregory announced that Frederick had written a supremely blasphemous book—De tribus impostoribus, or the Treatise of the Three Impostors—in which Frederick denounced Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad as impostors. Of course, Frederick denied the charge, and over the following centuries the story played out across Europe, with libertines, freethinkers, and other “strong minds” seeking a copy of the scandalo...
FREDERICK THE SECOND is the story of the remarkable man whose power and sphere of influence straddled the worlds of Christendom and of Islam. The last of the Hohenstaufens, HolyRoman Emperor and King of Sicily and Jerusalem, Frederick II was an energetic and versatile ruler, a man of great ambition in whose lifetime the conflict between Emperor and Pope reached a newintensity. Excommunicated three times by the Church, he was an absolute monarch whose power, defended in almost continuous struggle, extended over much of Germany and Italy as well as the Holy Land. Frederick was a complex man of cultured tastes and licentious manners who had unusually wide intellectual interests. At his Sicilian court scholars of all religions were welcomed--Christian, Jewish, Mohammedan. He founded the University of Naples in 1224 and was a patron of the arts and sciences. The life of this dynamic man is fully explored in Ernst Kantorowicz's notable biography, filled with dramatic incident and absorbing detail, and written with style and scholarship.
This book was designed to explore as fully as possible the appropriateness of the phrase immutator mundi or transformer of the world, as applied by contemporaries to Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, to establish the relationship of his many-sided achievements to those of his Norman and Hohenstaufen antecedents; to describe the circle of associates who participated in his manifold activities; and, finally, to seek the origin and to trace the course of the unremitting hostility of contemporary popes to him and to his concept of empire. The author has critically examined and judiciously employed all available contemporary chronicles, letters, official documents, polemical writings, and all other pertinent materials that either directly or indirectly bear upon the subject. In addition, the book is in no wise concerned with the spiritual motivation of the priesthood.