A Holy Roman Emporer who was the grandson of
Barbarossa. Frederick was supposed to have been a fairly ugly man--short, fat, bald, and nearsighted. He was also supposed to have been a rather intelligent and inquisitive fellow.
Frederick was not a good man. On his wedding night, he wooed his bride's sister. He drove his son to suicide. He was said to have been extremely sexually corrupt. When he was young, he swore he would someday go
Crusading in the
Holy Land, however he was somewhat of a
coward, and therefore put it off and off until the
Pope excommunicated him. Finally, in 1228, he got his men together and left for
Palestine. To the surprise of all, he brought a
Muslim interpreter who knew
Arabic, and he actually offered some modicum of respect to the
Islamic customs.
When he got to the
Holy Land, he quickly surveyed the place and decided that fighting another set of wars would be pointless. Instead, he engaged in a series of clever and cunning negotiations which resulted in the
Christians getting control of
Jerusalem,
Nazareth, and
Bethlehem. Furthermore, the two sides agreed to a
ceasefire for ten years.
This freaked all of the
Christian Knights out. They hated him for acquiring
Jerusalem without a fight, and they hated him because they didn't get to kill any
Muslims. His own people threw pig entrails, slop, and rotten fruit at him. He had gotten everything the
Christians had wanted, had succeeded where the other
Crusades had failed, and not a single man had died in the process. And they threw pig entrails at him.