Frederick II did not return to Germany for fifteen years, but from
time to time he called his son Henry, whom he had left behind as king,
across the Alps to general courts held ‘to reform the state of the
empire’.^92 In February 1234 King Henry held a solemn court at Frank-
furt and issued for the Germans a ‘General constitution on giving
justice and keeping the peace’, which placed right judgment in the fore-
front. To set an example, Henry made a promise that he himself would
preside in public court at least four days a month. Another prince con-
victed of neglecting his judicial duties should pay a hundred pounds in
gold to the king; a count or other noble with jurisdiction who failed to
judge according to the custom of the province should pay a hundred
pounds of silver, and after three convictions the jurisdiction would be
forfeit. Sentences of outlawry must be promulgated in public places, and
lifted only when the outlaws gave surety that they would answer in
court: if judges failed in this they were liable to restore the whole of
what the victim of the crime had lost.^93
Frederick was displeased by his son’s alienation of the German
nobility and at last returned to strip Henry of his kingship. Resumption
of the emperor’s rule in Germany was marked by the issuing of the
greatest of the peace-statutes. At a court attended by ‘almost all the
princes of the German kingdom’ at Mainz in August 1235, a new peace
was sworn, old rights were established, new laws were promulgated,
and the decisions were published abroad in written documents couched
in the German language. This country-wide peace does indeed survive
as both a Latin Constitutio Pacisand a German fride und gesetze, daz
der keiser hat getan.^94 The preamble of the Latin version echoes the
resounding phrases of the extensive Constitutions of Melfi which
Frederick had ordained four years previously for his kingdom of Sicily.
‘The necessities of worldly affairs and the urgings of divine providence’,
the Liber Augustalis of 1231had declared, compelled the appointment
of secular rulers as executors of the divine will ‘to curb the lawlessness
of the wicked and establish judgments for the people in matters of life
and death; in this way everyone might be safeguarded in ‘his fortune,
lot, and state [fortunam, sortem statumque]’.^95 The Latin version of the
96 The Spread of the Organized Peace
MGH Legum Sectio 4, ii (Hanover 1896), 86–91, 285; D. Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval
Emperor(London, 1988), 124–5, 129–30.
(^92) For Henry’s government of Germany and stormy relations with Frederick as Emperor,
see Constitutiones 1198–1272, 210–13, 398–400, 418–20, 426–9, 431–3; Historia Diplo-
matica Friderici Secundi, 6 vols., ed. J. L. A. Huillard-Breholles, (Paris, 1852–61), 4, ii. 681–6;
Annales maximi Colonienses, 837, 840, 842; Abulafia, Frederick II, 231–4.
(^93) Constitutiones 1198–1272, 428–9; Historia Diplomatica Friderici Secundi, 4, ii. 635–7.
(^94) Constitutiones 1198–1272, 241–63; Historia Diplomatica, 4, i. 1–177, ii. 945–7;
Annales maximi Colonienses, 844; Abulafia, Frederick II, 240–1.
(^95) Historia Diplomatica,4, i. 1–177.