Justice, Loyalty and the Absence of Honour: Frederick II and Henry (VII) as Seen by Their Contemporaries

Abstract

This chapter addresses some overlapping questions: what does the way contemporaries report on King Henry’s revolt tell us about the ideals and norms applied in judging the actions of rulers? Where do these norms overlap with, and where do they differ from those the king and his father had sought to project? What does this, in turn, tell us about the structural underpinnings of imperial politics in the thirteenth century? We will seek to answer these questions by grouping our sources into three categories. The first will deal with those texts typical of the fragmentary, often laconic and heavily regionalised perspective adopted by German chronicles, and will give us a flavour of how the majority of narratives described the events of 1234–5. The second will focus on three more detailed sources, which provide perspectives and allow us to ask questions to which the overwhelming mass of chronicle entries would yield no answers. We will finally turn to vernacular texts, both poetry and historical narratives, in which we will find dissonances in an otherwise shared, almost uniform, outlook on events.