Post by Glance A'Lot on Jul 26, 2007 19:20:19 GMT
I invite you to list historic persons, who you - for whatever reason - find to be extraordinary in their historic role.
I'll start out with Frederick II von Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor (1194 - 1250), who even by his contemporaries was acknowledged as 'extra-ordinary' though controversial:
His contemporaries called Frederick stupor mundi, the "wonder" — or, more precisely, the "astonishment" — "of the world"; the majority of his contemporaries, subscribing to medieval religious orthodoxy, under which the doctrines promulgated by the Church were supposed to be uniform and universal, were, indeed astonished — and sometimes repelled — by the pronounced individuality of the Hohenstaufen emperor, his temperamental stubbornness, and his unorthodox, nearly unquenchable thirst for knowledge.
Frederick II was a religious sceptic. He is said to have denounced Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad as all being frauds and deceivers of mankind. He delighted in uttering blasphemies and making mocking remarks directed toward Christian sacraments and beliefs. Frederick's religious scepticism was unusual for the era in which he lived, and to his contemporaries, highly shocking and scandalous.
In Palermo, where the three-year-old boy was brought after his mother's death, he was said to have grown up like a street youth. The only benefit from Innocent III's guardianship was that at fourteen years of age he married a twenty-five-year-old widow named Constance, the daughter of the king of Aragon. Both seem to have been happy with the arrangement, and Constance soon bore a son, Henry.
At his coronation, he showed how unusual he was. He wore a brand-new, red coronation robe with a strange ornamentation at the edge. This was an Arabic inscription indicating that the robe dated from the year 528 in the Muslim calendar; it incorporated the Arab benediction: "May the Emperor be received well, may he enjoy vast prosperity, great generosity and high splendor, fame and magnificent endowments, and the fulfillment of his wishes and hopes. May his days and nights go in pleasure without end or change". This coronation robe can be found today in the Schatzkammer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Rather than exterminate the Saracens of Sicily, he allowed them to settle on the mainland and build mosques. Not least, he enlisted them in his — Christian — army and even into his personal bodyguards. As Muslim soldiers, they had the advantage of immunity from papal excommunication. For these reasons, among others, Frederick II is listed as a representative member of the sixth region of Dante's Inferno, The Heretics who are burned in tombs.
A further example of how much Frederick differed from his contemporaries was the conduct of his Crusade in the Holy Land. Outside Jerusalem, with the power to take it, he parlayed five months with the Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt al-Kamil about the surrender of the city. The Sultan summoned him into Jerusalem and entertained him in the most lavish fashion. When the muezzin, out of consideration for Frederick, failed to make the morning call to prayer, the emperor declared: "I stayed overnight in Jerusalem, in order to overhear the prayer call of the Muslims and their worthy God". The Saracens had a good opinion of him, so it was no surprise that after five months Jerusalem was handed over to him, taking advantage of the war difficulties of al-Kamil. The fact that this was regarded in the Arab as in the Christian world as high treason did not matter to him. When certain members of the Knights Templar wrote al-Kamil a letter and offered to destroy Frederick if he lent them aid, al-Kamil handed the letter over to Frederick. As the Patriarch of Jerusalem refused to crown him king, he set the crown on his own head.
Besides his great tolerance (which, however, did not apply to Christian heretics), Frederick had an unlimited thirst for knowledge and learning. To the horror of his contemporaries, he simply did not believe things that could not be explained by reason. He forbade trials by ordeal in the firm conviction that in a duel the stronger would always win, whether or not he was guilty. Many of his laws continue to influence modern attitudes, such as his prohibition on physicians acting as their own pharmacists. This was a blow to the charlatanism under which physicians diagnosed dubious maladies in order to sell useless, even dangerous "cures".
Frederick inherited a love of falconry from his Norman ancestors. According to a source, Frederick replied to a letter in which the Mongol Khan invited him to "surrender" that he would do so provided only that he be permitted to become the Khan's hawker. He maintained up to fifty hawkers at a time in his court, and in his letters he requested Arctic gyrfalcons from Lübeck and even from Greenland. He commissioned his Syrian astrologer Theodor to translate the treatise De arte venandi cum avibus(of the art to hunt with birds - still a basic work on falconry), by the Arab Moamyn, and he corrected or rewrote it himself during the interminable siege of Faenza. One of the two existing versions was modified by his son Manfred, also a keen falconer.
Frederick loved exotic animals in general: his mobile zoo, with which he impressed the cold cities of Northern Italy and Europe, included hounds, elephants, giraffes, cheetahs, lynxes, leopards and exotic birds.
Frederick was also interested in the stars, and his court was host to many astrologers and astronomers. He often sent letters to the leading scholars of the time (not only in Europe) asking for solutions to questions of science, mathematics and physics.
Frederick II was considered one of the foremost European Christian monarchs of the Middle Ages. This reputation was present even in Frederick's era, even though many of his contemporaries, because of his lifelong interest in Islam, saw in him "the Hammer of Christianity", or at the very least a dissenter from Christendom. Many modern medievalists view this notion of Frederick as an anti-Christian as false, holding that Frederick understood himself as a Christian monarch in the sense of a Byzantine emperor, thus as God's Viceroy on earth. Other scholars view him as holding all religion in contempt, citing his rationalism and penchant for blasphemy. Whatever his personal feelings toward religion, certainly submission to the pope did not enter into the matter. This was in line with the Hohenstaufen Kaiseridee, the ideology claiming the Holy Roman Emperor to be the legitimate successor to the Roman emperors.
A fascinating man and very independent mind, to say the least.
I'll start out with Frederick II von Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor (1194 - 1250), who even by his contemporaries was acknowledged as 'extra-ordinary' though controversial:
His contemporaries called Frederick stupor mundi, the "wonder" — or, more precisely, the "astonishment" — "of the world"; the majority of his contemporaries, subscribing to medieval religious orthodoxy, under which the doctrines promulgated by the Church were supposed to be uniform and universal, were, indeed astonished — and sometimes repelled — by the pronounced individuality of the Hohenstaufen emperor, his temperamental stubbornness, and his unorthodox, nearly unquenchable thirst for knowledge.
Frederick II was a religious sceptic. He is said to have denounced Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad as all being frauds and deceivers of mankind. He delighted in uttering blasphemies and making mocking remarks directed toward Christian sacraments and beliefs. Frederick's religious scepticism was unusual for the era in which he lived, and to his contemporaries, highly shocking and scandalous.
In Palermo, where the three-year-old boy was brought after his mother's death, he was said to have grown up like a street youth. The only benefit from Innocent III's guardianship was that at fourteen years of age he married a twenty-five-year-old widow named Constance, the daughter of the king of Aragon. Both seem to have been happy with the arrangement, and Constance soon bore a son, Henry.
At his coronation, he showed how unusual he was. He wore a brand-new, red coronation robe with a strange ornamentation at the edge. This was an Arabic inscription indicating that the robe dated from the year 528 in the Muslim calendar; it incorporated the Arab benediction: "May the Emperor be received well, may he enjoy vast prosperity, great generosity and high splendor, fame and magnificent endowments, and the fulfillment of his wishes and hopes. May his days and nights go in pleasure without end or change". This coronation robe can be found today in the Schatzkammer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Rather than exterminate the Saracens of Sicily, he allowed them to settle on the mainland and build mosques. Not least, he enlisted them in his — Christian — army and even into his personal bodyguards. As Muslim soldiers, they had the advantage of immunity from papal excommunication. For these reasons, among others, Frederick II is listed as a representative member of the sixth region of Dante's Inferno, The Heretics who are burned in tombs.
A further example of how much Frederick differed from his contemporaries was the conduct of his Crusade in the Holy Land. Outside Jerusalem, with the power to take it, he parlayed five months with the Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt al-Kamil about the surrender of the city. The Sultan summoned him into Jerusalem and entertained him in the most lavish fashion. When the muezzin, out of consideration for Frederick, failed to make the morning call to prayer, the emperor declared: "I stayed overnight in Jerusalem, in order to overhear the prayer call of the Muslims and their worthy God". The Saracens had a good opinion of him, so it was no surprise that after five months Jerusalem was handed over to him, taking advantage of the war difficulties of al-Kamil. The fact that this was regarded in the Arab as in the Christian world as high treason did not matter to him. When certain members of the Knights Templar wrote al-Kamil a letter and offered to destroy Frederick if he lent them aid, al-Kamil handed the letter over to Frederick. As the Patriarch of Jerusalem refused to crown him king, he set the crown on his own head.
Besides his great tolerance (which, however, did not apply to Christian heretics), Frederick had an unlimited thirst for knowledge and learning. To the horror of his contemporaries, he simply did not believe things that could not be explained by reason. He forbade trials by ordeal in the firm conviction that in a duel the stronger would always win, whether or not he was guilty. Many of his laws continue to influence modern attitudes, such as his prohibition on physicians acting as their own pharmacists. This was a blow to the charlatanism under which physicians diagnosed dubious maladies in order to sell useless, even dangerous "cures".
Frederick inherited a love of falconry from his Norman ancestors. According to a source, Frederick replied to a letter in which the Mongol Khan invited him to "surrender" that he would do so provided only that he be permitted to become the Khan's hawker. He maintained up to fifty hawkers at a time in his court, and in his letters he requested Arctic gyrfalcons from Lübeck and even from Greenland. He commissioned his Syrian astrologer Theodor to translate the treatise De arte venandi cum avibus(of the art to hunt with birds - still a basic work on falconry), by the Arab Moamyn, and he corrected or rewrote it himself during the interminable siege of Faenza. One of the two existing versions was modified by his son Manfred, also a keen falconer.
Frederick loved exotic animals in general: his mobile zoo, with which he impressed the cold cities of Northern Italy and Europe, included hounds, elephants, giraffes, cheetahs, lynxes, leopards and exotic birds.
Frederick was also interested in the stars, and his court was host to many astrologers and astronomers. He often sent letters to the leading scholars of the time (not only in Europe) asking for solutions to questions of science, mathematics and physics.
Frederick II was considered one of the foremost European Christian monarchs of the Middle Ages. This reputation was present even in Frederick's era, even though many of his contemporaries, because of his lifelong interest in Islam, saw in him "the Hammer of Christianity", or at the very least a dissenter from Christendom. Many modern medievalists view this notion of Frederick as an anti-Christian as false, holding that Frederick understood himself as a Christian monarch in the sense of a Byzantine emperor, thus as God's Viceroy on earth. Other scholars view him as holding all religion in contempt, citing his rationalism and penchant for blasphemy. Whatever his personal feelings toward religion, certainly submission to the pope did not enter into the matter. This was in line with the Hohenstaufen Kaiseridee, the ideology claiming the Holy Roman Emperor to be the legitimate successor to the Roman emperors.
A fascinating man and very independent mind, to say the least.
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