a council at which the emperor was deposed. For his part Frederick continued to have limited military fortunes in the north, while the burdens of the war on Sicily, which was paying for it, led to discontent and sedition.
The death of Frederick in 1250 undid all his work almost at a stroke. Of his three surviving sons only the illegitimate Manfred was able to continue Staufen rule of Sicily and the anti-papal cause in the rest of Italy. He was killed at the battle of Benevento in 1266. With the capture and execution of Frederick's grandson, Conradin, after the battle of Tagliacozzo in 1268, Staufen power was at an end. So, largely, was imperial activity in Italy. Nearly half a century elapsed before another emperor, Henry VII, felt strong enough to launch an Italian campaign ( 1310-13), and although he did so with a massive army, and caused great commotion in Italy, he stood no chance of a lasting increase in authority there. His death on campaign brought it to an abrupt end. One further emperor, Lewis 'the Bavarian', came into bitter conflict with the papacy in the 1320s, but by then Italy was increasingly peripheral to the struggle, and the struggle itself increasingly peripheral to the direction of European politics.
In some respects Frederick's greatest mistake was the choice of northern Italy as theatre of conflict. Tight control over the resources of Sicily gave him the opportunity to be an almost continuous threat in northern Italy, something no emperor, with German resources only, had been able to keep up. Yet his decision to assert imperial rights in the area--while natural enough, indeed almost inevitable for one imbued with the imperial tradition--was anachronistic. It was no simple conflict between major powers; in the Lombard towns Frederick was up against fiercely volatile independent political communities, racked by internal factionalism, unable, even when willing, to offer any continuity of policy or allegiance. It is a measure of the unacceptability of what the emperor was trying to do that so many warring towns came together in alliance against him. What opportunities there were Frederick largely missed-by poor tactics and sense of timing, but especially by total insensitivity to the aspirations and the potential of the towns.
-225-