THE ORIGINS OF THE SICILIAN KINGDOMto the Lombards as it had against Frederick II's German
grandfather Frederick Barbarossa in the 1160s.^29
The involvement of a south Italian king in Lombard pol-
itics was a post-Norman phenomenon, resulting from the fact
that the king of Sicily was also Holy Roman Emperor. The
Norman kings of Sicily had used bribes and commercial
treaties to influence north Italian politics, and they had done
this because they saw the Lombard towns as a buffer against
the empire, when the empire threatened to assert ancient
rights over southern Italy. But the Hohenstaufen kings of
Sicily needed, of course, no buffer against themselves: the
Lombard towns and the papal state were sandwiched between
the German Kingdom in the north and the Kingdom of
Aries or Burgundy in the west, with the Kingdom of Sicily
to the south. It is not surprising that the Lombards attempted
to separate north from south by attracting to their cause
Frederick II' s son Henry (VII), King of Germany and deputy
for his father north of the Alps. But Henry's rebellion against
his father only increased Frederick's bitterness.^30
The papacy too was worried. In the 1220s there were bitter
accusations against the newly powerful Frederick: he was said
to have abandoned the cause of the crusade. (Later writers
also pointed to the fact that he had a Muslim bodyguard,
which was odd for a Christian emperor.) Gentle admoni-
tion under Honorius III (1216-27) gave way to stern reproof
under Gregory IX (1227-41). The quarrel reached its peak
when Frederick married the heiress to the Latin Kingdom of
Jerusalem, ignoring her (supposedly for his harim girls) and,
worse still, ignoring her influential father John of Brienne,
who believed that he too had some claim to be regarded
as king of Jersualem in right of his own late wife, Isabella's
mother. The papacy was unsympathetic to the claim that
Frederick was prevented from going on crusade by rebellions
among the Muslims of Sicily, among the Lombards, and
elsewhere. Mter one false start, he was excommunicated and
in 1229 sailed east without papal blessing; he recovered the
Holy City by negotiation; his presence in the Latin Kingdom
of Jerusalem and in the Kingdom of Cyprus, an imperial
fief, caused political chaos as rival factions grouped for and
- Abulafia, Frederick II, pp. 229-41.
- Ibid., pp. 292-3.