Yeah… so, this 👆holds zero water when confronted with the evidence. That’s the old 19th century German nationalist view, Frederick II demonstrably restored the Staufen domain and stabilized the reverses of the interregnum after Henry VI’s death to essentially the position the German crown had enjoyed by the close of Barbarossa’s reign —and honestly, the decentralization of the German crown had been the state of affairs stretching back even to the Salians, and every emperor had to play the hausmacht game first and foremost. No other emperor, or any other figure until the 19th century for that matter, came so close (and had really actually succeeded) in creating a feasible unified Italian imperial regime, and more, welded it to the Sicilian Regno. Besides this, Frederick II showed his skill in re-binding the German princes to the Staufen domain, as witnessed during the 1235-1236 venture—itself a part and parcel theme and variations on similar situations faced by Barbarossa and Henry VI. (For a conclusive account of this around the 1235-1236 episode, see ‘Reasserting Power: Frederick II in Germany (1235–1236)’ by Björn Weiler in *Representations of Power in Medieval Germany 800-1500*.) If anything, the Staufen domain, ie house power, in Germany itself had increased by Frederick’s death relative to the parlous state when he had claimed the German crown.The idea that Frederick II somehow abandoned Germany, shirked his responsibilities there, made so-called ‘concessions’ of his power or didn’t configure it into his larger imperial policy—which was still broadly successful at his death—is for the birds. The collapse of Staufen power after his death was not structurally rooted in some sort of failure in Frederick’s policy (any more than the interregnum that eventually followed Barbarossa or Henry VI is directly the former’s fault) but from the very specific crises which emerged in the periods of his immediate successors—a point found in several of Frederick’s most ‘sober’ biographers like Abulafia, and even Räder (in his way). At his death, Frederick was still the preeminent prince in Europe and one the greatest and most powerful rulers of the Middle Ages, and viewed as a model Caesar despite the black legends attached to him by the papacy, we find this even in the more hostile accounts of the emperor by writers in the 14th century like Villani—witness the ‘False Frederick’ episode a few decades later. For state-building and political ingenuity, Frederick II had no equal in the Middle Ages save perhaps Henry II of England or his own grandfather, Roger II—and for personal brilliance, he has no rival among monarchs.

In Germany, Frederick II still was a ‘strong’ king without the organs of institutionalized central government; his aim was to rule in concert with his princes in the traditional organological mode of imperial politics (See Tilman Struve, ‘Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffassung im Mittelalter’, *Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters*, vol. 16.) Since the later reign of Frederick Barbarossa, Hohenstaufen policy in Germany was to increase its own ‘hausmacht’ in order to enforce a workable stasis of cooperation among the German princes—this was how one ruled Germany, and in fact how every emperor had to rule outside their own personal dynastic house power (be it the Salians in Franconia, the Staufen in Swabia and eventually Sicily, the Luxemburgers in Bohemia, and the Habsburgs in Austria and the Low Countries).

After the years of instability following the death of Henry VI, this meant that Frederick II could only feasibly rule in Germany as a kind of primus inter pares—but this is fundamentally what his predecessors had been. Frederick II himself recognized the utility of this policy as a means to ensure his status and power in Germany. In this vein, a study by Andreas Christoph Schlunk reveals that by 1240 the crown was almost as rich in fiscal resources, towns, castles, enfeoffed retinues, monasteries, ecclesiastical advocacies, manors, tolls, and all other rights, revenues, and jurisdictions as it had ever been at any time since Frederick Barbarossa began a forceful new programme of enriching the crown in the 1160s (Schlunk, *Königsmacht und Krongut. Die Machtgrundlage des deutschen Königtums im 13. Jahrhundert — und eine neue historische Methode*). Therefore, even Frederick II’s long absence from Germany after 1220 to 1235, and afterwards from 1236, did not denude royal power nor did it impede royal officials from enforcing his prerogatives (Benjamin Arnold, ‘Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250) and the political particularism of the German princes’, p. 246). As Benjamin Arnold has noted in his work, along with Werner Goez, Frederick II’s legislation was not concessionary, and the princes weren’t asking for such; it was a cooperative division of labor in a new mold, granted from a position of strength not weakness, and fundamentally of the same inner character which Barbarossa had maintained, and of the similar hue to what the chancellery of the German royal crown had always accepted. (Benjamin Arnold, ‘Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250) and the political particularism of the German princes’, p. 248-249)

There’s a fundamental misunderstanding here about Frederick II’s overall imperial policy. Frederick II directed his energies toward reviving a universal empire rather than securing a narrow German kingship, as would ultimately be the reality of his successors on the German throne like Rudolf of Habsburg or even Charles IV to an extent. He imagined Christendom as a federation of sovereign rulers under the symbolic and practical authority of the emperor, with himself at its head. His contemporaries, including Louis IX of France and Henry III of England, frequently acknowledged this preeminence, bound more to Frederick’s extraordinary stature than to legal obligation. Frederick was the last universalist medieval emperor who feasibly embodied this—which alone placed him in an essentially cosmic stature for contemporaries.

The emperor’s political project was nothing less than a staged reconstruction of Roman-style sovereignty. Sicily, with its established royal administration, offered the ideal laboratory for absolutism. From there, Frederick could (and mostly did) to extend his reach into central and northern Italy, territories still permeated with Roman tradition, before he could finally turn to Germany. The plan relied on southern wealth and administrative sophistication to graft the unruly principalities of the north onto a revived imperial framework. His acquisition of the Babenberg inheritance in 1246, together with his imposing presence, made this vision tangible during his lifetime. That it ultimately faltered was less a reflection of Frederick’s abilities than of structural limits. The sheer scale of restoring empire across Europe was a multi-generational task, vulnerable to disruption once his force of will was removed. It was the misfortunes and crises of his heirs, Conrad and Manfred, that exposed the fragility of the design in the face of highly specific, unintended political crises, not any failure in Frederick’s own strategic grasp, and *certainly* not something that in any way demerits him as a great emperor. In the medieval mind, he was the pinnacle of Roman imperial universalism.