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crated and ordered his political scholars to venerate, his Messianic char- acterization of himself as the Anointed of the Lord, as well as other Biblical masks behind which he hid these things revealed more than they concealed. His game became entirely obvious when he sought to supplant the mythological attitude toward the devotional practice of Christendom with a popular religion of the goddess For- tuna. The super-prince "who as a ruler is bound by no law," put himself in the place of Christ, whom he considered as being, in com- pany with Moses and Mohammed, one of the greatest defrauders of mankind! He denied having said this, but his deeds were everything else but a denial* A new wind blew out of Bagdad and Cordova, and filled the German son of a Semitic and Islamic culture, so sensitive to the perfumes it bore, with ideals by reason of which he would be proclaimed the ideal German by later Nordic generations.
In order not to lose the good will of Christendom, the Emperor signed the Treaty of San Germano (122,5) * n which he promised that if he did not go on a Crusade he would submit to the imposition of the ban. Two years later he went to sea, but was forced by a fever to return to port. Gregory IX (1227-1241) was a blunt* irascible old man. He mistrusted the Emperor and imposed the ban on him. When Frederic replied to the "anti-Christ Pope" with insults, he im- posed it a second time and placed the interdict upon whatever place harboured him. The Emperor instigated a Roman rebellion, which forced the Pope to flee. The Hohenstaufen armies occupied the Papal States. The banned Emperor then took up the Cross, and won a victory over his Islamic foe. When he returned, he defeated Gregory's troops which had invaded Apulia with Lombard allies, and drove them from the land. In 1230 the Pope concluded peace with him and freed him from the ban.
After some years of comparative calm, the storm broke out anew. Frederic's battles and victories in Lombardy; his constitutional and administrative reforms, which sought to make Qesaristic seignories out of the autonomous communes, and the threat which such successes constituted to the Papal States: all these compelled the Pope to form an alliance with Lombardy in 1239. If Italy was to be unified under one or the other master the one who lost would be forced to occupy the position of servitor. Frederic saw no way out excepting to do-
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