Andorra 10 Diners Silver Coin 1996 Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II
Obverse: Crowned Coat of Arms of Andorra above ECU.
Reverse: Frederick II with a falcon, miniature from his treatise (Frederick II on the second page of the "Manfred manuscript"), “De arte venandi cum avibus” (On The Art of Hunting with Birds) in the Vatican Library.
Composition: Silver.
Fineness: 0.925.
Weight: 31.47 g.
ASW: 0.9359 oz.
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick II (26 December 1194 – 13 December 1250), was one of the most powerful Holy Roman Emperors of the Middle Ages and head of the House of Hohenstaufen. His political and cultural ambitions, based in Sicily and stretching through Italy to Germany, and even to Jerusalem, were enormous. However, his enemies, especially the popes, prevailed, and his dynasty collapsed soon after his death.
Viewing himself as a direct successor to the Roman Emperors of Antiquity, he was Emperor of the Romans from his papal coronation in 1220 until his death; he was also a claimant to the title of King of the Romans from 1212 and unopposed holder of that monarchy from 1215. As such, he was King of Germany, of Italy, and of Burgundy. At the age of three, he was crowned King of Sicily as a co-ruler with his mother, Constance of Hauteville, the daughter of Roger II of Sicily. His other royal title was King of Jerusalem by virtue of marriage and his connection with the Sixth Crusade.
He was frequently at war with the Papacy, hemmed in between Frederick's lands in northern Italy and his Kingdom of Sicily (the Regno) to the south, and thus he was excommunicated four times and often vilified in pro-papal chronicles of the time and since. Pope Gregory IX went so far as to call him an Antichrist.
Speaking six languages (Latin, Sicilian, German, French, Greek and Arabic), Frederick was an avid patron of science and the arts. He played a major role in promoting literature through the Sicilian School of poetry. His Sicilian royal court in Palermo, from around 1220 to his death, saw the first use of a literary form of an Italo-Romance language, Sicilian. The poetry that emanated from the school had a significant influence on literature and on what was to become the modern Italian language. The school and its poetry were saluted by Dante and his peers and predate by at least a century the use of the Tuscan idiom as the elite literary language of Italy.
He was also the first king who explicitly outlawed trials by ordeal as they were considered irrational.
After his death, his line quickly died out and the House of Hohenstaufen came to an end.
De arte venandi cum avibus
De Arte Venandi cum Avibus, literally On The Art of Hunting with Birds, is a Latin treatise on ornithology and Falconry written in the 1240s by Frederick II, and dedicated to his son Manfred (1232 – 26 February 1266) was the King of Sicily from 1258 to 1266.
Frederick II was familiar with Aristotle's treatises on animals in Latin translation: Liber Animalum, a translation by Michael Scot, from the Arabic translation Kitāb al-Hayawān. He was also familiar with De Scientia Venandi per Aves, a treatise by the Arab falconer Moamyn, it was translated into Latin at his court by Master Theodore of Antioch, and much copied.
It is notable that Frederick II mainly confides in his own observations and experiments: he experimented with eggs to see if they would hatch only by the warmth of the sun; he tried to find out if birds used their sense of smell while hunting by covering the eyes of vultures. The author keeps to his intention, formulated in the preface, to describe the things as they are (“que sunt, sicut sunt”). It is a scientific book, approaching the subject from Aristotle, whom he likes to contradict. At the same time it is a scholastic book, minute and almost mechanical in its divisions and subdivisions.
The original manuscript of Frederick II was lost in 1248 at the siege of Parma. Manuscripts of De arte venandi cum avibus exist in a two-book version (Manuscripts at Rome, Vienna, Paris (2x), Geneva and Stuttgart) and in a six-book version (Manuscripts at Bologna, Paris, Nantes, Valencia, Rennes, and Oxford).
The most famous copy of this treatise is an illuminated manuscript commissioned by his son Manfred, a two-column parchment codex of 111 folios now in the Vatican Library in the Bibliotheca Palatina The manuscript belongs to the two book version and is illustrated with brilliantly coloured, extraordinarily lifelike, accurate and minute images of birds, their attendants, and the instruments of the art. This manuscript contains additions made by Manfred, which are all clearly marked in the beginning by notations such as "Rex", "Rex Manfredus" or "addidit Rex".
The first translation of this work was in French and commissioned around 1300 by Jean II, lord of Dampierre., and the first translation into English (of the six-book version) was by Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyfe, as The Art of Falconry by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (Stanford University Press) 1943. The first printed edition of the Latin manuscript (the two-book version) was by Velser, Augsburg, 1596.