THE ·wESTERN MEDITERRA.NEAN KINGDOMS 1200-1500sent, arguably with papal approval, to murder him. Yet he
also showed a surprising willingness to come to terms with
the pope; suggestions were in the air to the effect that he
would retire to a life of crusading, for the sake of peace. But
Frederick suddenly died of a fever at the end of 1250, when
his prospects for holding the papacy at bay still seemed good.
It was left to his sons to defend his reputation, which had
been the constant target of bitter, often apocalyptic, papal
propaganda casting him at worst as the Antichrist, come to
persecute the Church in its last days before redemption.:l'i
Nor were those who sought to destroy his power in Sicily
simply adherents of papal policy. The emergence of inter-
nal opposition in the Regno, in which even his close adviser
Piero della Vigna was supposedly implicated, served as a
warning: heavy taxation and the repression of local liberties
by a ruthless government at war with the papacy could, in
fact, fail to achieve their objectives; instead of maintaining
internal peace and strengthening royal finances, Frederick's
policies in the late 1240s created new enemies and revived
old memories of pre-Norman liberties. The papacy dangled
in front of the townsmen of the Bay of Naples promises of
urban liberties similar to those practised by the autonomous
city-states of northern Italy. Such tensions were also part of
Frederick's legacy to later conquerors of Sicily and the south.
Frederick II has acquired a powerful reputation as a cul-
tural leader, which has been accepted very uncritically. He
certainly had contact with Jewish and Muslim scholars, such
as Judah ha-Cohen in Castile and ibn Sab'in in Ceuta. He
was the patron of the great astrologer and physician Michael
Scot, who had earlier been in papal service. On the other
hand, Frederick's own entourage consisted predominantly of
Christian scholars, and his contact with Islamic scholarship,
unusual though it was, was achieved through the exchange of
letters or during the visits of ambassadors. By the thirteenth
century, the Spanish courts had become the major centres
of contact between Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars;
but that of Frederick, itinerant through Italy, retained some
- Yet some of this documentation must be treated with caution, as
Peter Herde points out in 'Literary activities of the imperial and papal
chanceries during the struggle between Frederick II and the papacy',
in lntellertual lzfe at the rourt of Frederick If, pp. 227-39.