Identifier: modernhistoryeur00west (find matches)
Title: Modern history; Europe
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: West, Willis Mason, 1857- (from old catalog)
Subjects:
Publisher: Boston, Allyn and Bacon
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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ir own use, until they became amongthe richest orders in Europe. D. Frederick II. The most gifted of the sons of men, . . . a wonderful man in a won-derful age. — Freeman. 85. Character. —Frederick II has been called the last of thegreat medieval emperors and the first of the great modernkings. Unlike his grandfather, Barbarossa, he was an Italianby birth and nature. In person, he was slight, bald, near-sighted. A Mohammedan historian wrote that as a slave hewould not have brought a hundred drachmas. He was an en-thusiastic patron of literature, a founder of one of the earlyuniversities (§ 180 a), and himself a scholar and an author, ofno mean ability, in prose and in verse. He wrote charmingsongs, not in Latin, but in the new Italian tongue of every-daylife; and Dante (§ 188) afterward regarded him as the fatherof Italian poetry. He was deeply interested in the science of 1 As early as 1221 the Dominicans reached England, passing at once toLondon. Oxford, York, and other towns.
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§86) FREDERICK II. 93 the Arabs; lie ridiculed trial by.ordeal and other medievalsuperstitions; and his own codes of law were far in advance ofthe barbarous customs and ideas of the age. He was a modern,rather than a medieval man, in his habit of thought and feel-ing : a many-sided man, warrior, statesman, law-giver, scholar,poet. At the same time, in his private life he was immoral,and sometimes in his public policy cruel and unscrupulous,so that Dante puts him, alone of all the emperors, in hell; and,with all his wonderful genius, he gave his lifes energies tobuttressing a hopelessly outgrown and tottering system, so thathe left no positive result behind him and was only the mostdazzling of a long line of imperial failures. 86. Frederick and the Popes: the Fall of the Hohenstaufen. —The death of Innocent III, in 1216, left the field clear for themoment for the young Emperor, who was just coining to man-hood. Politically, there was an irreconcilable opposition ofinterest between F

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