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The role of Bulgaria in the Christian East under Tsar John Asen II
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Page 4
Alliance of John Vatatzes and Frederick II Hohenstaufen. With the name of John Vatatzes is connected the interesting question of the friendly relations between the two widely separated rulers, the Emperor of Nicaea and the western Emperor, Frederick II Hohenstaufen.
Frederick II, the most remarkable of all the Germanic kings of the Middle Ages, united under his power Germany and the Kingdom of Sicily. The latter, in the person of the Emperor Henry VI, at the end of the twelfth century had menaced Byzantium with fatal danger. Frederick had spent the years of his childhood and youth under the southern sky of Sicily, at Palermo, where had lived the Greeks, later the Arabs, and then the Normans; he spoke Italian, Greek, and Arabic beautifully and, probably, at least in his youth, he spoke German badly. He regarded religious problems much more coolly than his contemporaries. Under the influence of the eastern scholars, Arabs and Jews, large numbers of whom were at Frederick's court in Sicily, he became an enthusiast about science and philosophy and he founded the University of Naples and patronized the medical school at Salerno, a school famous in the Middle Ages. In a word, in mind and education Frederick greatly surpassed his contemporaries, and they did not always understand him. The time of Frederick II may be designated as a prologue to the Renaissance. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a French historian wrote that Frederick II gave the impulse to the Renaissance, which prepared the fall of the Middle Ages and the coming of modern times. He was a man of creative and daring genius. A few years ago a German historian said; In his universality, he was a real Renaissance genius on the imperial throne and at the same time an Emperor of genius. A subject of perennial interest to the historian, Emperor Frederick II represents in many respects a riddle which has not yet been solved.
Having inherited the conception of the imperial power as unlimited and granted by God and comprehending supreme sovereignty over the world, Frederick was a sworn enemy of the papacy and of its doctrine of the superiority of the papal power to that of the kings. The struggle of the popes with Frederick II was stubborn; three times the Emperor was excommunicated and he died wearied and exhausted by the persistent struggle, in which the popes, putting aside any spiritual aim, were revenging themselves on their personal enemies, this viper brood of the Hohenstaufens, which they were determined to exterminate.
A History of the Byzantine Empire - Table of Contents
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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/vasilief/john-asen-ii.asp?pg=4
