page_title: Hohenstaufen
section_title: Frederick II
hierarchical_section_title: Hohenstaufen / Ruling in Italy / Frederick II
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Italien, Castel del Monte English: Italy, Castel del Monte
context_page_description: The Hohenstaufen, also called Staufer, was a noble dynasty of unclear origin that rose to rule the Duchy of Swabia from 1079 and to royal rule in the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages from 1138 until 1254. The most prominent kings Frederick I, Henry VI and Frederick II ascended the imperial throne and also ruled Italy and Burgundy. The non-contemporary name is derived from a family castle on the Hohenstaufen mountain at the northern fringes of the Swabian Jura near the town of Göppingen. Under Hohenstaufen reign the Holy Roman Empire reached its greatest territorial extent from 1155 to 1268.
context_section_description: Emperor Frederick II spent little time in Germany as his main concerns lay in Southern Italy. He founded the University of Naples in 1224 to train future state officials and reigned over Germany primarily through the allocation of royal prerogatives, leaving the sovereign authority and imperial estates to the ecclesiastical and secular princes. He made significant concessions to the German nobles, such as those put forth in an imperial statute of 1232, which made princes virtually independent rulers within their territories. These measures favoured the further fragmentation of the Empire.
  By the 1226 Golden Bull of Rimini, Frederick had assigned the military order of the Teutonic Knights to complete the conquest and conversion of the Prussian lands. A reconciliation with the Welfs took place in 1235, whereby Otto the Child, grandson of the late Saxon duke Henry the Lion, was named Duke of Brunswick and Lüneburg. The power struggle with the popes continued and resulted in Fredrick's excommunication in 1227. In 1239, Pope Gregory IX excommunicated Fredrick again, and in 1245 he was condemned as a heretic by a church council. Although Frederick was one of the most energetic, imaginative, and capable rulers of the time, he was not concerned with drawing the disparate forces in Germany together. His legacy was thus that local rulers had more authority after his reign than before it. The clergy also had become more powerful.
  By the time of Frederick's death in 1250, little centralized power remained in Germany. The Great Interregnum, a period in which there were several elected rival kings, none of whom was able to achieve any position of authority, followed the death of Frederick's son King Conrad IV of Germany in 1254. The German princes vied for individual advantage and managed to strip many powers away from the diminished monarchy. Rather than establish sovereign states however, many nobles tended to look after their families. Their many male heirs created more and smaller estates, and from a largely free class of officials previously formed, many of these assumed or acquired hereditary rights to administrative and legal offices. These trends compounded political fragmentation within Germany. The period was ended in 1273 with the election of Rudolph of Habsburg, a godson of Frederick.
caption: Frederick's Castel del Monte, in Andria, Apulia, Italy.
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