B (3:33)

Thank you for having me, Claire.

A (3:35)

So I thought of a lot of different things to ask you because I normally start out with a question and so I like a question unrelated to that actual topic. And at first I was like, how do I escape to Scandinavia? Was my initial thought. And then I was like, okay, maybe this is a off podcast conversation. So I think the question I settled on, because I've recently been shifting away from historian questions and I would like to get back to some of those. Like last time I asked someone about their skincare and stuff. What is your favorite part of being a historian?

B (4:09)

Oh, what's my favorite? That's a great question. I think it's that I get to spend all this time that I think I would have been spending my time thinking about the Middle Ages anyway. And in fact, the times I've had when I've been out of academic work and I've had to do non academic jobs, I found that that is really what was happening. I was obsessed with the Middle Ages all the time, and that definitely hampered my effectiveness as a postman. And I think it's such a fantastic privilege to have the time to be able to think about this stuff and even better, to be able to talk about it with other people. It's really wonderful.

A (4:43)

Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes we get very bogged down. We, as in like our profession, get very bogged down in the many extant problems. Right. That there are within the profession. There are lots of them. But I said this on a recent other episode that people will have heard a few weeks before this one comes out. We're hardly like down the mines, you know, like our job is, for me, often sit in the chair that's behind me, read a book, and then talk to someone about the book I read. And people Pay me to do that. That is an immense, immense joy and privilege for me.

B (5:17)

You know, I fully agree, and I think, as historians, I mean, you're obviously a Second World War historian, though, of course, increasingly you have the same issue as me, I suppose, which is that. Which is that these people are gone. Right. The people that we're talking to by reading the sources, they aren't with us anymore. So it's an incredible thing to be able to talk to the dead in that way.

A (5:35)

Yeah. There is a sort of necromantic. Is that the necromancing Necromantic.

B (5:41)

That is the correct objective?

A (5:43)

There is a sort of necromantic experience here where you are, at least for me, it might work in part because the people that I work on not only are often dead, but often I compare them to the sort of black box because I work on Holocaust perpetrators in the US and they have a real vested interest in not telling their stories. So a lot of times what I'm trying to do is understand and recreate their lives without being able to glimpse or engage with their internal world. So there's a level of, like, detective work that happens that I find really interesting where I'm trying to piece together their experiences of the world while also not fully having access to those experiences. And I think that's actually like, a very interesting kind of enriching thing to do, is to ask myself, how did someone think in the past?

B (6:30)

Yes.

A (6:31)

Based on how all of these behaviors, all of these contexts, and for medieval historians, it's even, like, much harder than I have to.

B (6:40)

Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's in one of the epigraphs of Mark Bloch's Belloge on being a historian or something like that. But he. He quotes someone else, one of the kind of great Prussian historians, and it's just the simple words, no one is ever lost. As long as there are some historians around who can read the sources, then even death, it can't take this away. It's an amazing thought.

A (7:01)

Yeah, it is an amazing thought. There is something I feel like right now, because we're talking about all these things also, that history as a profession is kind of bogged down with. There's this thing now where we're constantly having to prove our value. Right. Like, STEM students should take history classes because it will make them better at mining crypto or whatever it is that they're doing. Right. Like, there's this thing where we have to, like, make an argument for our value or for the value of the humanities and other academic disciplines aren't doing what we're doing in terms of being able to speak to the dead. Right. And that sounds really silly, but there is something to that where like, this is a skill and it's the most exciting part of what we're doing to me at least. But there's a good use case there that maybe gets undersold a little bit.

B (7:51)

Yeah. And it's something that people can understand. It's something that, I mean, I live in a taxpayer funded university system. Obviously your American listeners. Well, some. There are state schools in America, of course, but there's a lot of private schools. A slightly different ecology, but it's something that actually, you know, a taxpayer who hasn't studied at the university at all can understand what it is a historian is doing from nine to five. Yeah. I don't know if they can always understand what, what the, you know, but some of the things where our politicians would say, well, that's obviously good and we should definitely have that. I don't know how much of that is readily intelligible to the people who are actually paying for it, you know.

A (8:24)

Yeah. This will now be my second reference to my best friend on the show, but. Or one of my best friends on the show, but one of my best friends is sommelier and I'm a historian. And when we go to bars or parties or something, there are 50 people that we talk to who are like, ah, I'm in venture capital. And then they explain what they're doing. Or they're like, I am at desk type thing, something about deliverables, their shareholder value. Right. And when they turn to us, she's like, well, I taste and sell wine and I'm like, I'm a historian. And people immediately understand what our jobs are. And so I think that alone is like, it is such a easily understood profession that requires so much effort to be able to do it in the first place. And that doesn't mean that I think sort of history qualifications or university qualifications are the only thing that allows you to do it. But it is interesting to work this hard to do something. And then you can be like, yeah, I do this and my partner's a therapist and says, I'm a therapist. And everyone says, okay, I got that one too, you know. So I think that's pretty great.

B (9:27)

Absolutely.

A (9:27)

We probably should talk about the thing that you research or one of the things slash, people that you research, since that is theoretically the point of the episode. Who did you want to talk about today?

B (9:38)

I would like to talk about Frederick II, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire from 1220 to 1250, not to be confused with the other Frederick II, Frederick II of Prussia, who's from the 1700s, who I think probably is maybe these days a little bit better known than my Frederick, to the extent that even Frederick the Great is better known. But I want to talk about Frederick II, emperor in the 1200s.

A (10:05)

So I said this before we started, which is something I'm always saying on the show. I'll, like, reference the fact that I have to give people, like, a talk in before we start the show. But before we started, I said to you that I did the normal amount of research that I always do, beyond the normal sort of obvious violent, despotic, medieval king stuff. Because this is so far outside of my wheelhouse of historical knowledge, I have truly no idea what your problem with him is gonna be. Normally I can kind of tell. Like, normally I can figure out, okay, it's gonna be somewhere in here. But with this, I am actually very excited to find out what, like. Cause I'm sure the violent, despotic, king, emperor stuff is enough. Right. But I'm curious about some of the. It feels to me like there's gonna be more here, so I'm ready for that. What is he most famous for, in your estimation?

B (11:00)

You mean as in today? What is it? If he's remembered at all today or

A (11:04)

when he was alive or right after he was alive?

B (11:07)

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, in the middle of the 1200s, virtually everybody in the Latin Christian world and a lot of people who weren't in the Latin Christian world, a lot of people in the Islamic world, and a lot of people in the Greek speaking world would have known who Frederick II was. And that is something that carried on actually for centuries after his death, for that sort of period from around 1220 to 1250, I mean, he wore multiple crowns at once, but through the various crowns that he held, if we were, yes, talking about, say, the 1230s through the early 1240s, for example, he ruled a collected realm. I mean, it was never actually sort of constitutionally collected, but everything put together, right, that would have stretched from the borders of Denmark, where I live and work in the north, all the way through to the northern coast of Tunisia in the south. So the full stretch of Europe, right. And from Provence in the west, all the way through to Jerusalem in the east. So a huge. A huge kind of territorial holding. And it was something that was remembered for centuries after his death. In fact, Europeans, lots of different types of European at various places and various times, simply couldn't accept that he had died. So kind of magnificent was he supposed to be. And for centuries after his death, I mean, all the way through to the 1400s. Right. So nearly 200 years after his death, you get people who think they've seen him. Right. And it's like Elvis, Huh. Although unlike Elvis, you do get armed uprisings who proclaim that, yeah, he's back. You know, that hasn't happened with Elvis yet. There's still time, I suppose.

A (12:41)

Well, we all know about the second coming of Frederick, Right. Like, that's an important.

B (12:44)

Yeah.

A (12:46)

World mythology. I'm also curious. He gets called things like Stupor Mundi, which is like the wonder of the world. There is a sort of mythological association even while he's alive with him. Right.

B (12:59)

Yeah. Before he's born, actually. It starts while he's still in the womb. People start coming out with mad prophecies about him. Yeah.

A (13:05)

Please tell me more about that.

B (13:07)

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to. One is loathe to. To introduce Dune, but I'm assuming more people have seen Dune than they have or read the book.

A (13:16)

Please do.

B (13:16)

But it almost. When you look at his life, it's. It's hard to fight the idea that people were planning that he should have this sort of mystical effect on people's minds. I've got no evidence for that per se, but they're just the way that people are behaving. I mean, if you look at his parents, you've got Henry on his father's side, who's from the Hohenstaufen dynasty. So these are the ruler. Have been the rulers of the empire for some time. And obviously the empire is a big old chunk of Europe. And it's got a lot of ideological. Ideological baggage as well. Everyone wants to. I have an empire. Right.

A (13:47)

Somewhere deep inside, famously.

B (13:49)

Yeah. Actually, maybe they don't.

A (13:52)

Look, I'm always saying that to people. Everybody wants to have an empire.

B (13:57)

I can barely run the center for Viking Medieval Studies. I'm not sure I want an empire. But regardless, so he's got that on his father's side, but then on his mother's side, he's from the Sicilian ruling house, and his mother really seems to be doing some stuff, cultivating some mystique around him as soon as he's out the womb and maybe even before then. So she's called Constance and her name obviously evokes Constantine, you know, the first Christian emperor. So there's some stuff going on there. Just with her. And actually, when Frederick is first born, he is named Constantine, the masculine form of it. So there's clearly kind of nods to this imperial ideology already there. And then he gets given the name Frederick that harks back to his grandfather, Frederick I Barbarossa, who, again, is this great kind of imperial figure. And so, yeah, he's in the womb, and because there's this Norman Sicilian milieu that he's kind of coming from on his mother's side, wherever you get Normans, you get bureaucracy and you get horse riding and all kinds of kind of strange things. But one of the things that comes whenever you get Normans is Merlinic prophecies. Normans are really into the old Merlin prophecies. It's kind of funny because the original Merlin prophecies are kind of. They're all about how we, the oppressed, kind of Celtic peoples. It's not quite an idea in their minds, but something like it are going to throw off these horrible invaders who've come into the British Isles. Right. And the Normans, who are sort of the third round of invaders coming into the British Isles, are like, oh, yeah, that's quite good. Think we'll be procreating that. Thank you very much. So they start kind of coming out with this stuff. And so there's kind of melinic prophecy about Frederick. And he's got these two names, Constantine and Frederick, two great kind of imperial names.

A (15:39)

Yeah.

B (15:39)

Bringing together the Sicilians and the Hohenstauf. And so there's really a feeling that kind of incredible things are going to happen with this kid.

A (15:47)

I know you're scared to invoke Dune, but this really is like a Kwisatz Haderach Lisan al Gaib situation, where also his mom in this scenario is a Bene Gesserit from Sicily. And I don't know, it is. That is an interesting. We're constantly making these random pop culture comparisons on the show, and I also never go in planning to do them. So, like, one of the last episodes I recorded, we called Dick Cheney the Forest Gump of evil. And like, this is this. He's like the kwisatz Haderach of 13th century Europe.

B (16:19)

Yeah.

A (16:19)

You know, and that's a really classic scenario that everyone is familiar with, I'm sure. But that is fascinating that from before he's even born, he sort of has this thing bestowed upon him. Is it that he has to spend his life living up to it or he just kind of does this stuff and people are like, well, you know, I guess we can assign this to him.

B (16:40)

Yeah. Does he live up to it? I think that's the big question. He certainly. I mean, you quoted there. Stupor Mundi. That's from Matthew Paris, who's an English. An English chronicler writing in the middle of the 1200s. Principum mundi maximus Fredericus Stupor coque mundi et immutater mirabilis. First among the princes of the world, Frederick, wonder and miraculous transformer of the world. And that's being written in a report about the death of Frederick in 1215. Right. This idea of, yes, he's the wonder of the world, the Stupor Mundi, but he's the immutator of the world. He's the transformer of the world. The world's never the same after him, is the idea. Right. I think something that's really interesting is he's still a toddler when another chronicler, Peter of Eboli, calls him Reformator orbis et imperia, the reformer of the world and the empire. You know, he's about 4 years old when that's being said about him. I mean, he's not reforming anything other than his body as. But even then there's this idea and I think, interesting that this is going all the way through his life. I'm getting ahead of us a little bit, perhaps, but the question is, how much does he really actually transform the world? Right. People are going around, yeah. Saying it, but is the world transformed after Frederick's death? I'm not. I'm not certain that it is.

A (17:56)

That is so fascinating. I mean, that's the thing that we're going to get into. Right. Like, not, I mean, in a few minutes. But it is interesting that there is a specific sort of legacy, and in the research I did on him, that's sort of how he's framed. But then while doing further research into things he does. I was kind of like, I don't know if this is borne out so much by sources, but he does also do things like he is a patron. You can also tell me in any of these moments if I'm right or wrong, because I feel like medieval sources or medieval people are actually the hardest for me to do research into because of how much their legacy has been shaped and reshaped over and over since then, and is often shaped by them while they're alive or immediately following their death. So sometimes the facts aren't really facts, like the facts that people know or put out into the world are not really real, but sort of. He's sort of, from what I could Tell sort of a patron of science and philosophy and learning and that seems to be a big part of his long term legacy that people think that he's this sort of like learned figure. Is that right?

B (18:59)

Yes. Man of letters sort of thing going on there. This is something that's been sort of debated. I think a lot of academics, you know, they like to are quite bookish types. Surprisingly. I'm shocked here for a reason, but I think they're attracted to the idea of an emperor who's a man of letters. And certainly when he's interacting with the Islamic world, you know, there's an expectation that Muslim rulers should be learned. And he's very careful to make sure that Muslim rulers know what a brain box he is and that he can communicate in Arabic and all this kind of stuff. So there's stuff going on in the kind of, the great sort of revisionist biography of him, David Abulafia, who passed away recently. He sort of says actually he probably wasn't much more learned than any other kind of Sicilian ruler. So we sort of pause a, a dram of scorn on that idea. But I think we can't lose sight of the fact that there's a lot of scholarship that goes on at his court and it's happening in multiple languages. And Frederick is making an effort to interact with the Arabic world, which is actually fairly unusual for a Christian prince in his time. And the learning is a huge part of that. That's sort of his way in. Right. Because he's not going to. I mean, while he was alive, his enemies often said, oh, he secretly converted to Islam, he's a secret Muslim, you know, got to depose him. So this is often said about him. It's clearly not true in any, any kind of way. So his, his way in, his way of interacting is he's never going to become a Muslim. That's obviously not on the table. But he's interacting with Muslim scholarship and learning. That's kind of his way in, in that part of the world.

A (20:34)

I will say on our Crusades episode on Peter the Hermit, I kind of jokingly asked whether life in the medieval, in the, in the Middle Ages, in the medieval period was better or worse. And Eleanor Yannicka said yes in response. And this is one of those scenarios where like man, at least people kind of wanted their leader to be smart. They were doing that maybe better than we're doing right now in terms of wanting them to have read books and be interested in things. That being said, they aren't. He's Not a leader, because people, like, choose him to be a heater, necessarily. So, you know.

B (21:10)

Yeah, well, not the peasant on the street in the field, or the houser in the street is choosing him. Although it is interesting that he really does seem to attract a lot of popular support and he seems to mythologize himself successfully, as far as we can tell, to ordinary people. Whatever. Exactly that word, whatever that should mean. But we're not totally making something up when we talk about ordinary people. And Frederick figures, even sources at the time use terms like the Middle High German rhyming chronicles about him often mention that he's backed up by Die Mengach, Right. You know, the masses are kind of going for him. It's quite often in stories about him that there's allusions to sort of what the little people are saying about him. So there is, I think, a sort of popularity there. He's, of course, he's got a special place with the Arabic stuff as well, right, because he's brought up in Sicily and he actually has a. There's all this great expectations around him, right? These prophecies as soon as he's kind of out of the womb and even before he's. While he's still in there, actually. But it all goes wrong fairly quickly. You know, his father, the emperor, dies when he's three. His mother dies when he's just about turned four. So, you know, he's an orphan at four years old and he loses the lot, basically. All of this great promise that he's supposed to, you know, unite the Italian south and the German north. If you're looking at in the very late 1100s and the early 1200s, it wouldn't seem obvious at all that it was going. Anything good was going to happen to this boy. I mean, you probably would have put money on that. A courtier is going to smother him in his sleep, basically, or he's going to have an accident. All his dominions get given to other people, you know, wives, to a child. And he's just there in Sicily, just kind of being kept around. And that's where the Arabic connection comes in. Because in, you know, Sicily, in this period is a trilingual space, actually probably more than three languages. But, you know, you've got the Arabic third, the Greek third and the Latin third. We're not really certain exactly how he gets so in there with the Arabic third. One of his great biographers, Ernst Kantorovic, who maybe we'll speak about in a bit, he tells these lovely stories that basically the boy is just left to wander in the souks. It's sort of quite orientalist, really. But that's where he picks up his Arabic. Right? And they're sort of in the souks of Sicily that is made up. We don't know. We don't know that's what happened. But he got it somehow. Someone taught him to speak Arabic because he communicated in it fluently. And we have apographs of letters written by him in Arabic, and he undertook translation personally from Arabic into Latin so he could speak it. And that's something that he could probably only have accessed because of his Sicilian background.

A (23:47)

This does also, I think, very importantly, underscore how false this sort of popular myth of this disconnected Europe or disconnected world in the Middle Ages is. I think there's for some reason this. In this popular imagination, all of these spaces are existing separate from one another, and they're not connected. And there's no diplomatic relationship and there's no intellectual relationship and whatever. And that has been the work of so many medievalists for especially, like, the last hundred years, but even much shorter than that now to really, like, tell people that the world was much better connected. There was much more cultural exchange happening than a lot of people are willing to. To accept and understand because it subverts a kind of narrative of this, like, pure, separate Europe. Right. So that's kind of a tangential to what we're talking about, But I think he's a good example of, like, clearly there are connections being made interculturally or cross culturally here in this moment. Can you, now that we're at, you know, a few a little while in, and people have a general idea of who he is as a person and what he maybe represents in a lot of people's memory. Can we start to talk a little bit about what you see as some problems here? And I'm curious about whether your problem is with his legacy, whether your problem is with things that he actually did during his life. Is it a little of both?

B (25:07)

Yeah.

A (25:12)

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