A story largely woven on an Italian plot, this one that goes, generically, under the name of pope and emperor, of State and Church in the century. XIII. But there was also a powerful effort of unified organization of the whole peninsula, made by Frederick II as king and emperor.
According to THEMEPARKTOUR.COM, Frederick’s relations with Germany were scarce, and secular princes and high prelates from across the Alps benefited from it, who increased the sum of their prerogatives and began to organize the country as a set of independent small and middle states. So Frederick, feeling that the Swabian house was losing ground in Germany, turned more and more towards the countries on this side of the Alps. his struggle against the papacy. But it essentially relied on its Pugliesi and Sicilians, on Pisa and Siena and Modena and Pavia and Como Ghibellines, on its feudal and vicarage of Tuscany, Lombardy, and the Veronese March. A dense network of various relationships was woven, either by his own intention or by force of circumstances, between his kingdom of Sicily and the rest of Italy: bureaucratic organization, first of all, through imperial vicars chosen from among the people of Puglia, subjects of the kingdom; Apulian podestàs sent to rule Lombard and Piedmontese cities; Manfredi, son of Federico, Uberto Pelavicino, great lord Obertengo, and the family from Romano, placed and strengthened with favors and offices in Piedmont, Lombardy and Lunigiana, in the Veneto region up to Trento and beyond, also because they held for the emperor routes to Germany. Frederick then encouraged the immigration of foreigners into the kingdom, exempting them from taxes for a certain number of years: the reason why Pisani, Genoese, Florentines and Venetians became more frequent, first in ports then in the interior of the country. He welcomed in Sicily a beautiful group of Lombards led by Ottone di Camerana and formed the colony of Corleone, in 1237, soon became one of the most populous and prosperous lands of the kingdom. He cultivated numerous personal relationships in the other districts of Italy and had partisans and supporters in every corner of the peninsula. These moved, more than anything else, by local impulses and their own interests, but they inserted their political action in Federico’s, like this one in theirs. Some of them had a face that recalls that of the king: Uberto Pelavicino and Ezzelino da Romano. There were mayor citizens who underwent the moral action, as well as, in some cases, the precise directives of the prince. In the Podestà’s manuals of the time, the theoretical elements recall those that the king proclaimed in his heated protests against the curia. And vice versa, Federico did not remain insensitive to what was happening in the cities, to their legislation, to their schools of law and rhetoric. His conception of the prince also drew from the Bolognese tradition, as well as from that of Byzantium, which were then, a little, the same thing. And he used the work of the glossators to make his rights over his subjects and the territory more and more complete. Carrying out his own personal and absolutist policy of wide and varied intentions, while he was moving away from his court feudatars and prelates, he surrounded himself with jurists who had all studied in Bologna: Roffredo di Benevento, Taddeo da Sessa, Andrea di Bari, the two di Tocco, Pier delle Vigne da Capua, the elders of that class of men of the law who are the core of the bourgeoisie in the kingdom, as well as, albeit to a lesser extent, in the Italy of the cities. Frederick had entrusted them with the drafting of the constitutions of Melfi; And, at the suggestion of Roffredo, the University of Naples was established in 1224, which must have been almost an offshoot of Bologna in the south, according to the intentions of the founder. It is to these men that Frederick’s legislation was influenced both by Roman and canon law, equally elaborated by the Bolognese school, and by the Italian statutory element. It is thanks to them that the literary action of the north and the literary and artistic culture of classical antiquity also made themselves felt in the south. These men are almost all of the continental and northern provinces of the kingdom, Puglia, Campania, Molise and Abruzzo, provinces that are more linked to Rome and the rest of Italy. Symptomatic fact, to be related to the tendency of the kingdom to move its center towards the continent and the north: a tendency that is a bit in things and is in the will of the king, whose eyes turn so much towards the rich, cultured, refined Italy of the cities. The Norman and Arab Palermo decays, although they continue to be the official capital; Messina, on the other hand, is growing, a city that was formerly Greek and Latin and now Latin more and more, stimulated by ambitions of Sicilian primacy; Naples grows, by now the largest city in the South on the mainland, despite the opposing resistance to the German conquest and the impairments suffered by its municipal autonomy.
