Stupor Mundi

THE GREAT INFIDEL (431 pp.)--Joseph Jay Deiss--Random House ($5.95).

Frederick the Second--Holy Roman Emperor, King of the Germans, King of Sicily, scholar, scientist, quarreler with Popes, prodigious lecher, successful Crusader, political innovator--is a blazing figure in a period in history (the first half of the 13th century) that the casual student too often slides by. The attention is caught briefly, perhaps, by Frederick's nickname, Stupor Mundi (wonder of the world), and by accounts that his scientific curiosity led him to experiment with live servants. But ahead, amplified by history's hindsound, are the first horn calls of the Renaissance. The temptation is to leave Frederick for the grandeur born two centuries later.

Frederick belonged to the Renaissance, and he lived the life of a Renaissance prince. If he had been born in that period, he might have dominated it, but in the 13th century individual ambition was kept in check by a strong church. Novelist Deiss, a rehabilitated public-relations man turned scholar, offers in this impressive biographical novel a solid, scrupulous recreation of Frederick's lifelong struggle to surmount his times.

Far Terrain. Deiss chooses to tell his story from his subject's point of view, in a first-person chronicle supposedly set down by Frederick at the end of his life, the device used so well by Marguerite Yourcenar in Hadrian's Memoirs. To some extent the method sacrifices dramatic force--violence recollected in relative tranquillity is only the shadow of violence. But although Frederick, as warrior and sensualist, was at the center of many dramas, his life was lived in the far and lonely terrain of his own mind.

Frederick's grandfather was the great conqueror Frederick Barbarossa; his father was Heinrich VI of Germany, the man who captured Richard the Lion-hearted and whom the Italians accurately called Heinrich the Cruel. His mother Costanza brought the Sicilian crown in her dowry, but Heinrich had to subdue Sicily before he could wear it. This done, he burned alive all of Costanza's relations to ensure that he could wear it in peace. It seems certain that Costanza struck back by conspiring with Celestine III (who, like all Popes of the period, worked to undermine a strong king) to poison her husband. Heinrich recovered long enough to put dozens of plotters to death, but died a few months later of stomach cramps. Such was Frederick's infancy.

Costanza died soon after, and Frederick grew up in Palermo, an unseen and uncared-for ward of the Pope. The boy, living almost as a beggar child, learned Arabic from the seaport's Arab sailors. He was to learn more than half a dozen other languages, including Hebrew and English. At 14 he was crowned King of Sicily. He held no power and had neither arms nor money. But by his late teens, chiefly by force of an agile mind and a personality radiantly well suited to rabble-and noble-rousing, he had seized control of his inherited German crown. When he moved to consolidate his rule in Sicily, he found that Rome, which feared the jaws of a nutcracker, had become an open enemy.

The Hammer. Crushing rebellions the papacy stirred up, Frederick earned another nickname--il Martello del Hondo (hammer of the world); but at last the machinery of his rule, having been sabotaged and repaired too many times, no longer functioned. When he died (in bed --a triumph for a ruler of those times), Italy and the Empire were in chaos. And, lacking another emperor of Frederick's energy, in chaos they remained.

Author Deiss has done a remarkable job of making 13th century church-state politics comprehensible, and in addition has performed the stupefying task of sorting out Frederick's romances (he fathered legitimate children by several queens and was responsible for numberless bastards; in addition, making no distinction between sexes, he carried on a lifelong affair with Pier della Vigna, the lowborn lawyer who may have invented the sonnet). The novel is not, like its subject, a stupor mundi, but it is a careful, craftsmanlike job, done with intelligence and conscience.

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