Frederick II

In December 1194, Constance of Hauteville, traveling through the March of Ancona to reach her husband Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, in Sicily, stopped in Jesi. On December 26, she gave birth to Frederick II. According to tradition, the birth took place under a tent in Piazza San Floriano, now Piazza Federico II, in the presence of the city’s civil and religious authorities.

King of Sicily from 1196, he was placed under the guardianship of Pope Innocent III in 1198. Elected King of Germany in 1212, he received the crown of the Holy Roman Empire in 1220 from Pope Honorius III. He came into conflict with the papacy after ignoring calls for a crusade and was excommunicated in 1226. In 1228, he led an expedition to the Holy Land, during which he successfully regained Jerusalem through diplomacy, negotiating peace with the sultan.

In Germany, he granted broad autonomy to the high nobility, weakening the lesser nobility, the cities, and ultimately the crown itself, whose authority was significantly reduced. He established the political and administrative center of his rule in Sicily, creating a centralized bureaucratic system and enacting, with the Constitutions of Melfi in 1231, a comprehensive body of laws.

His court in Palermo became a meeting point and center of diffusion for Arab, Greek, and Jewish culture. As leader of the Italian Ghibellines, he engaged in a twenty-year-old clash with the papacy, was again excommunicated in 1239, and fought the Guelph forces, particularly the northern Italian communes, which he defeated at the Battle of Cortenuova in 1237 but by which he was later defeated at the Battle of Parma in 1248. He died at Castel Fiorentino, near Lucera, in 1250.