THE ORIGINS OF THE SICILIAN KINGDOMechoes of the Norman past as a result of the emperor's
fascination with ornithology, expressed in his famous tract
on The Art of Hunting with Birds, which reveals an impress-
ive knowledge of Aristotle and of Islamic authors. Frederick
was no 'baptised sultan'. The development of courtly love
lyrics, based closely on those of the Occitan troubadours but
written in a formalised Italian vernacular, was one of the most
lasting legacies of Frederick's cultural patronage. Spending
on the fine arts had a strongly propagandist aspect, as can
be seen in the surviving neo-classical sculptures of the Capua
gateway, which proclaimed to those travelling into the Regno
the pervasiveness of royal justice. But it was on the restora-
tion of Norman castles such as Lagopesole or the building
of palaces and hunting boxes in Lucera, Castel del Monte
and elsewhere that funds were most often disbursed; little
was built at royal expense for the Church, a point which
perhaps unfairly reinforced the image of the emperor as its
opponent.
FREDERICK'S INHERITANCE IN ITALY
Frederick Il's sons struggled to maintain their inheritance.
Conrad IV, king of Germany and Sicily (1250-54) found it
all but impossible to juggle his Sicilian and German duties,
in the midst of rebellions on all sides; and it was only through
the willing cooperation of his bastard brother, Manfred
Prince of Taranto, that uprisings among the barons and
townsmen of southern Italy were defeated. Conrad himself
arrived in the south in 1252 and once again had to tackle
resistance in Naples and the north-west of the kingdom. His
success in bringing his opponents to their knees encouraged
Conrad to appeal to his father's great foe Pope Innocent IV,
and to attempt to have his royal title recognised by the tech-
nical overlord of the king of Sicily. But the pope was all the
more afraid to see another German king sit upon the throne
of Sicily; the long-felt need to separate the interests of the
Hohenstaufen north of the Alps from their interests south
of Rome naturally dominated papal thinking. Any other
course of action risked a return to Frederick II' s excessive
accretion of power. Moreover, Conrad began to take an inter-
est in northern Italy where, after all, his father's enemies