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Frederick II and the Moslem Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Francesco Gabrieli
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The starting point of any inquiry into the relationship between Frederick and the Arabic-Islamic culture goes back to the Arabic-Norman Sicily to which he was bound by the great Constance, by his infancy, by his early adolescence, and by his crown. Despite the fact that he was born by chance in the Marche region and had preferred to spend his adult years in the flat land of Puglia, where he died, it was in Sicily that he first formed the elements of his intellectual personality and culture. The first question to be answered, therefore, is: How much of the Arabian culture of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries was still alive in Sicily after the survival of both the Moslem domination and the political, religious, ethnical, and social crises by which the last Mohammedan influence upon Sicily had been completely eliminated under the last Norman kings?

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 6 , Issue 24 , December 1958 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © 1958 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

A work on Frederick II of fundamental importance is E. Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (Berlin: Bondi, 1931); more recent is G. Masson's Frederick II of HohenstaufenGoogle Scholar
London: Secker & Warburg, 1957). On culture in general of Frederick and his court see Haskins, C. H., “Science at the Court of Frederick II,” in Studies in the History of Medieval Science (Cambridge, 1927), and Stefano, A. De, La Cultura alla corte di Federico II Imperatore (2d ed.; Bologna, 1950).Google Scholar
For the relationships particularly with the Moslem world, in addition to the classical work by M. Amari on the Mohammedans of Sicily, see Gottshalk, H.L., “Al-anbaratùr Imperator,” Der Islam, XXXIII (1957), 30–36, and “Der Untergang der Hohenstaufen,” WZKM, LIII (1957), 267–82.Google Scholar
The letters in Arabic to the emir Fakhr ad-din have been translated by F. Gabrieli in Storici Arabi delle Crociate (Turin, 1957), pp. 264–67.Google Scholar