History for Kossacks: Frederick II's Crusade

You know, there just might be something to that old adage about history repeating itself:

If it should be fully known how astonishing, nay rather, deplorable, the conduct of the emperor has been in the eastern lands from beginning to end...from the sole of his foot to the top of his head no common sense would be found in him. For he came, excommunicated, without money and followed by scarcely forty knights, and hoped to maintain himself by spoiling the inhabitants of Syria.

- Gerold, Christian Patriarch of Jerusalem, 1229 CE

Last weekend, MBNYC posted a great diary pointing out the similarities between George W. Bush and Kaiser Wilhelm II, and yesterday occam's hatchet began a definitive series on the historical overlaps between today's Republicans and 1930's National Socialists.  Tonight, I humbly beseech you to step into the Cave of the Moonbat, where we can look into the parallels between our President and yet another arrogant warmonger from an even earlier period of German history...

A Note from the Moonbat: This one's pretty long - my one-week hiatus seems to have cost me a measure of self-restraint.  As your historiorantologist, I'd advise you to get comfy, use your hotlist key, or (best yet) subscribe. ;-)

Gerold's "letter to all the faithful" was referring to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (r. 1220-1250 CE), but by replacing a couple of proper nouns and updating a couple of phrases, this 13th-century blogger could just have easily been describing the 21st-century Holy Land adventures of The Decider.

Frederick II presents a problem for those who would number their Christian holy wars.  He promised to go on the Fifth Crusade, but didn't show up until almost a decade later, which has led some historians to number his a separate, Sixth Crusade.  Others count Frederick's invasion (such as it was) as an appendage of the Fifth; still others see it as an entirely unique expedition deserving of nothing less than being named after the man who led it.  This is rather like calling Iraq "Mr. Bush's War," and it is the approach your resident historiorantologist has chosen to apply to this ever-lengthening Crusades series, for just like Iraq and the wider War on Terra, the debacle/crusade of 1228-29 was a mess that history can pin on one man.

Also, it's important to note that this is an almost-entirely different Frederick II from the one that history remembers as Frederick the Great.  That guy was the King of Prussia from 1740-1786, and though he - like the Holy Roman Emperor a half-millennium before him - presumably drank beer and ate schnitzel, and definitely held the highest throne among the German monarchies of his time, Frederick the Great is remembered for his aggressive use of his army and as a tactical genius (among other things) who earned even Napoleon's highest regard.  Frederick the Emperor, while admittedly possessing admirable qualities of his own, is not able to count military science or deftness in public relations among them - 90 years later, Dante Alighieri, in his Inferno, places Fredrick II in the 6th layer of Hell, the one where the heretics are burned in tombs.  Pope Gregory IX, a contemporary, speculated that he might be the Antichrist.

Bonus SAT Answer: The King of the Germans is to Sicily as Governor of Texas is to Connecticut

Although the Holy Roman Empire was overwhelmingly German in origin, culture, and lands, the patchwork of allegiances, the far-flung titles and holdings, and the marriages of political convenience that dominated the politics of Europe during the medieval period gave rise to something we might now recognize as carpetbagging among nobles.  Frederick, like our Nutmeg-State President, was not from the territory whose throne would legitimize his eventual coronation as Holy Roman Emperor.  He was born heir to the throne of Sicily, as he was a grandson of the same Roger II who had united Norman control of the island and other territories back in the early 1100s.  Frederick became King of Romans, a usual prerequisite for becoming Holy Roman Emperor, as a result of being the progeny of Constance of Sicily and Conrad VI, of the German Hohenstaufen family.  His bloodline also made him a descendent of both Frederick Barbarossa - who died on the Third Crusade - and William the Conqueror (whose story has not yet been Moonbatified).

In the same way that gerrymandering makes for odd maps and an increasingly-untenable electoral process, the crossing lines of succession and the tendency of the power players of the medieval period to break oaths make for a confusing historical/political scene.  Suffice to say that young Frederick, having been raised in Sicily under the protection of Pope Innocent III, was pretty much a Sicilian, and wound up spending much of his later career fighting papal forces to maintain his land claims in Italy. - Debatable-but-hopefully-not-too-tortured-analogy (DBHNTTA from now on):  Silver-spoon fed GWB, whose Fairbanks family roots go back to the colonial era, is a New England blueblood pretending to be a rough-hewn Texas pioneer in a manner similar to Frederick alternately playing upon his aristocratic Sicilian/Italian/Norman lineage and his more papal-authority-bucking Germanic heritage.

What their backgrounds lack in commonality

In terms of differences between the two men, there are admittedly many.  Frederick, for example, was an esteemed intellect during his era.  He was said to be fluent in 9 languages and literate in 7 - and this at a time when most of his contemporary Europeans were unable to read the edicts the Popes kept sending out, much less compose a response.  He was a legal reformer who banned the practice of Trial by Ordeal, on the rationally blasphemous basis that they weren't fair.  He likewise had a far better command of basic economic theory than our own Harvard MBA, abolishing state monopolies and internal tolls while subjecting himself to the veto of a council of princes (though this early move toward representative leadership also had the result of hindering centralized German authority for centuries to come).  Indeed, Sicily under Frederick became the first absolutist monarchy in Europe, and so became the first western government to emerge from feudalism.

Frederick was also a patron of philosophy and the arts, and an avid falconer who commissioned a definitive text on the subject, working on at least part of the final Arabic-to-Latin translation himself.

To his credit, I could find no reports of Frederick II ever launching a falcon into the face of one of his friends, but then again, here we're looking for similarities with the President himself, not his entire junta.

Their aristocratic backgrounds may be similar, but the circumstances of their births have little in common.  George Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut, presumably under (at the minimum) sanitary and private conditions.  Constance, who is herself not altogether unlike Barbara Bush, was a pragmatic enough Middle-Ager to know that questions would be raised about a 40-year-old woman giving birth, and so devised a means of verification that She of the Beautiful Mind would likely never have contemplated: Constance had a tent set up in the middle of a public marketplace in Jesi and delivered Frederick in front of the city's prominent matrons.  To make things even clearer, she came back to the square a few days later and very publicly nursed her baby.  

And while we're on the subject of dissimilarities, King George and Emperor Frederick don't appear to share many of the same physical characteristics.  Here's a description from Wikipedia:

A Damascene chronicler, Sibt ibn al-Jawzi, leaves a physical description of Frederick based on the testimony of those who had seen the emperor in person in Jerusalem. "The Emperor was covered with red hair, was bald and myopic. Had he been a slave, he would not have fetched 200 dirhams at market." His eyes were described variously as blue, or "green like those of a serpent"

Then again, those eyes...

Of would-be sockpuppets who bite the hand that feeds them

Frederick's mother took advantage of the untimely death of Henry VI to try to disengage her infant son and the Kingdom of Sicily from the power politics of the age.  She had him crowned king, then herself named regent.  She did so just in time: Constance died when Frederick was only 3, leaving he and his lands as wards of the Pope.  Innocent essentially sequestered Frederick in Palermo and forgot him, and the young king wound up spending most of his formative years running around on the streets of a busy, cosmopolitan port, hanging around with all manner of travelers, traders, beggars, mercenaries, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and developing a real chip on his shoulder with respect to the Holy Father in Rome.  In his defense, Innocent saw to it that Frederick hooked up with a 25-year widow named Constance of Aragon, who gave Frederick both claims to lands in Spain as well as a son and heir, the future Henry II.

Frederick was all of 17 when he was elected King of the Romans by the Diet of Nuremberg in 1211.  That this came about at all was the result of an ongoing power struggle between the pontiff and Otto II von Brunswick, whom Innocent III had crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1209 but was ready to excommunicate by 1212.  Suddenly remembering his little Sicilian asset, Innocent arranged for a group of Vatican-backing lords to promote Frederick in abstentia, then sent the boy off to the heart of Guelph (anti-papal) lands to read Otto the terms of his excommunication.  This he did - after a journey legendary for the boy's uncanny good fortune in the face of successive near-disasters - but Frederick's hold on the throne was tenuous until an Innocent-arranged coalition of various national forces destroyed Otto's army at the decisive Battle of Bovines in 1214 (an early prelude of what would eventually bestow upon western civilization hundreds of years' worth of battles over national preeminence culminating in the over-the-top realpolitick of the First World War).  After Bovines, Otto's power was a ghost of what it had been, and Frederick was crowned King of the Romans in a ceremony in Aachen in 1215.

In an oddly-related trans-cultural quirk, one of the better expressions describing the adolescent Frederick actually comes from a land of which he may never have heard.  The Koreans have a folklore-derived word for an obstinate individual that can carry with it a connotation of mean-spirited but semi-cute/semi-forgivable playfulness in the face of societal expectations.  This slang word, occasionally directed at yours truly by the various Koreans in my life, is chong gaegorri ("blue frog", which altavista babelfish translates - I believe incorrectly - as "파란 개구리").  Regardless of the issues in Hangul translation, however, in his teen years, Frederick certainly was one:

At his coronation he carried a brand-new, red coronation robe with a strange ornamentation at the edge. In reality it was an Arabic inscription, which indicated that this robe dated from the year 528, not by the Christian but by Muslim calendar! About this was an Arab benediction: "May the Emperor be received well, may he enjoy vast prosperity, great generosity and high splendor, fame and magnificent endowments, and the fulfillment of his wishes and hopes. May his days and nights go in pleasure without end or change". This coronation robe can be found today in the Schatzkammer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
This was typical of him: while he was being crowned by the Pope to be the highest defender of the Christian faith, his coat referred to the history of Islam. And not only that. He did not exterminate the Saracens of Sicily with fire and sword; on the contrary, he allowed them to settle on the mainland and even to build mosques. Not least, he enlisted them in his - Christian - army and even into his personal bodyguards. As these were Muslim soldiers, they were immune from papal excommunication.
Source: Wikipedia
UPDATE: [Lainie http://www.dailykos.com/user/uid:13189], who knows a lot more about this cloak than I do, was kind enough to post this in the comment thread. Historical accuracy means everything to your Moonbat, even it means wiping some egg off my face to get at it. Thanks again, Lainie! (P.S. Sorry I couldn't seem to get the links to turn orange in this update - follow them from the comment in the thread for easy-clicking)

Wikipedia is wrong (* gasp! * how could that happen!) about that- the cloak they are referring to was made for Roger II, Not for Frederick. I know this fer shure because I've done quite a bit of work on that cloak, including making formal investiture cloaks modelled on that design. Heck, I've even see the photos taken when they peeled apart the layers of linings and found the original, which was a silk brocade with elephants and palm trees worked into it! (way, way cool. Worth the price of the plane ticket!) There are some INCREDIBLE photos of the cloak here: [http://rubens.anu.edu.au/...] You can see the rest of the piece of the coronation outfit here: [http://rubens.anu.ehttp://rubens.anu...] Moonbat, I already went in and excised the text in Wiki. (We'll see how long until someone else puts it back :-p) You might want to edit accordingly.

Swept up in the fervor of the moment, the new King, who would be made full-on Emperor in 1220, took the Oath of the Crusading Pilgrim, then set the notion of fighting on behalf of the Pope aside in favor of dashing around his empire, imposing his will upon his new and rebellion-prone subjects.  It was a promise that would eventually haunt him, National Guard-AWOL-like.

Dodging the draft, medieval-style

At the time he took the oath, there was no Crusade in the offing, so Frederick was sort-of off the hook.  By 1220 or so, the situation had changed, and the new pope, Honorius III, was putting pressure on the Emperor.  Things were foundering in the Nile delta, and all of Europe was looking to the financial and military assistance of the most powerful man on the continent.  In response to the urgent needs of Christendom, he futzed and dallied, eventually sending too few ships and too few soldiers a little too late to be of any use in staving off defeat. - DBHNTTA:  think of George Bush, scion of an ancient and storied American family, piddling around Texas not finding oil while less-fortunate men his same age died on far-off battlefields in the name of a cause which he considered important enough to take an oath, but on behalf of which he was not prepared to actually fight.

Frederick had an uncanny knack for having important people come through for him at critical times (he was also known for consulting astrologers in his court - hey, I'm just sayin'...), and his flagging reputation was saved by just such an occurrence in 1225.  In that year, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights (a man with the somewhat-unlikely-sounding name of Hermann von Salza) floated a trial balloon regarding the unification of the Empire and the Kingdom of Jerusalem by the marriage of Yolande, the 14-year-old Queen of Jerusalem, with the 31-year old widower Emperor.  Yolande's father and regent, John of Brienne, agreed, and the deal was sealed at an altar in Brindisi in November.

Within days, Yolande was complaining to her father that Frederick was seducing her maidservants, but it turned out she wasn't long for the misery of a unilaterally-monogamous marriage.  Frederick sent her to Palermo, where she died at age 17, six days after having given birth to Conrad, Frederick's son and legitimate heir to both the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Frederick's claim to similar titles was now a little more dubious, and hinged on his ability to be named Conrad's regent.  This would require the support of John of Brienne as well as the other Christian barons of Palestine, which would in turn require inter-Latin diplomatic skills far beyond those possessed by the heretically self-indulgent wannabe Viceroy of God, who viewed his role as more like that of an independent-acting Byzantine emperor than as the sword arm of the Pope.

Meet Frederick II, the least-punctual German ever    

Something had to be done to assuage the humiliation of the defeat of the Fifth Crusade.  History was mocking the men - the Pope, Frederick, the Grand Masters of the Military Orders, and the King of Jerusalem - who assembled at the Council of Ferentino in 1223.  Godfrey and the boys, all those years ago, had taken Jerusalem in a wave of righteous fury and free-flowing infidel blood; now here they were, heirs to a legacy already almost entirely lost, and they couldn't even seem to get a foothold into an increasingly fractious Muslim world.  Frederick tried to rise to the occasion, re-taking the oath in front of the Pope and the entire assemblage.  He set his date of departure for June 24, 1225.

But time flies when you're hunting and fishing and dealing with occasional rebellions here and there, and soon enough the date for departure had arrived and the new Pope, Gregory IX, once again found himself without a promised Holy Roman horde with which to liberate Jerusalem.  Thinking quickly, Frederick drew up a big huge plan with which to impress Gregory with regards to his newly refound seriousness: Frederick now promised that 1000 knights, 100 cargo ships, and 50 fighting galleys would be ready for departure on August 15, 1227, come hell or high water.  Just in case the Pope didn't believe him (he didn't), Frederick left 100,000 ounces of gold in the Vatican's Holy Receptacle of the Sacred Collateral.

He knew he was on double-secret papal probation, so this time Frederick made an earnest effort to turn over a new leaf.  His army assembled in Apulia in the summer of 1227, but there Frederick's hitherto weirdly-good luck began to run out.  Malaria broke out in his camp, and though the Duke of Limburg was able to get out in late July with a few hundred knights, Frederick himself was unable to depart with the main body until September 8.  His flotilla had scarcely left port when Lady Luck again abandoned him; it was discovered that the disease had followed them onto the ships.  Knowing full well that the cramped conditions would quickly turn his armada into a bunch of ghost ships crewed by the dead, Frederick ordered them to put into the port of Otranto after only three days under sail.

He knew Gregory was going to be pissed, and he sent a messenger to explain what had happened as soon as the fleet made landfall.  It didn't matter: Gregory had had enough of Frederick's crap, didn't wanna hear no more excuses, and excommunicated the Holy Roman Emperor on the spot.  Things got worse over the winter of 1227-28, when Frederick learned of Yolande's death and its potential ramifications on his career.  Many of his men, whether genuinely troubled in spirit or simply seizing on an excuse du jour, cited Frederick's excommunication as a reason to leave his army - with many probably further rationalizing that they had done their part to uphold their vows, and could hardly be blamed for the politico/religious mess into which their leaders had allowed the effort to descend.  - DBHNTTA:  those Iraq veterans who are somehow able to outwit Stop-Loss and return to their homes and families secure in the knowledge that they, at least, did their part with honor

With a much-depleted force, Frederick finally left for the Holy Land on June 28, 1228.  Because he had failed to seek absolution from the Pope before departing, Gregory excommunicated him a second time.  Frederick, who by this point was in full-scale Church-cursing mode, flipped him the bird and sailed for Cyprus.

Voyage of a cursed army

His father, Henry VI, had created the Kingdom of Cyprus, so Frederick did have a claim to lordship over it, but actual suzerainty was a bit of an issue here, too.  There was a king of Cyprus, but he was three years old and reigning under the regency of his mother, Alice of Jerusalem.  With the backing of the barons, she was able to retain her regency, but was forced under threat of imminent violence to cede some control to Frederick before he left for Acre in September, 1228.  Score one for ham-handed diplomacy.

Frederick was received in Acre like George Bush at a convention of Democrats.  The reports of his second excommunication began circulating around the same time he did, and more of his increasingly-suspicious army drifted off, but the DLC-types among the barons of Palestine were fearful, recalcitrant, and hesitant to take a stand against him.  The Military Orders (here playing the role of the staunch core-party-values believers), with the exception of the Teutonic Knights, wanted nothing to do with him, and the common people saw little benefit in swearing their allegiance to him.  In the end, Frederick found himself, Bush-like, forced to entreat with his enemies in order to avoid having to make bargains with people on his own side.

The main difference between the diplomacy of Frederick II and George W. Bush is that the Emperor was good at it.  He'd been in contact with the Abbuyid Sultan al-Kamil of Egypt since Italy (this is the same guy who had turned back the invading Crusaders during the early years of his reign - and had been able to do so because the newly-crowned Frederick of the time had pretty much dropped the ball and left his Christian brothers to perish before the walls of Damietta), and by this point al-Kamil was hinting that he would turn over Jerusalem without a fight if the terms were favorable.  

The sultan, however, was also otherwise occupied, and little needed the distraction of a Christian army on his flank.  His brother, the ruler of Damascus, had died unexpectedly in late 1227, leaving a vulnerable child on the throne.  Al-Kamil was currently besieging Damascus, and tried to delay negotiations with the Crusaders until either they or the Syrian capital gave up.  With neither side bargaining from a position of strength, the discussions dragged on, and not an abandoned Crusader offensive push, nor a refortification of the Christian port of Jaffa, managed to break the deadlock.  The soldiers of both armies were shaving their whetstones, expecting things to be settled on the field of battle.

Peace With Honor                    

They never did.  An agreement was reached in February, 1229, that resulted in the handover of Jerusalem (along with Bethlehem, Nazareth, the castles of Montfort and Toron, and the road between Jaffa and Jerusalem) to Frederick in exchange for what appeared to many Muslim eyes some pretty minimalist concessions.  Muslims were to retain access to Jerusalem, and to the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque, and were to observe a ten-year truce against attacking the holy city.

From Baghdad to Cairo, al-Kamil was denounced as an idiot who sold out Jerusalem without giving battle, but the days were long past when his generals plotted against him in his own camps.  He knew that history would vindicate his treaty, in the same way that he knew that the treaty itself was completely contingent on his own good offices - he could take back the nearly-indefensible city at will, should the mood strike or the need arise.

Nobody back in Palestine was under any illusions about this, either.  It was clear that Christian Jerusalem existed at the whim and pleasure of the Sultan, but the deal did have the upside of not killing a bunch of knights and soldiers.  Opinions, however, grew more negative the further one traveled west.  

Here's a short litany of Moonbat-extrapolated anti-return-of-Jerusalem-treaty reactions from some men and women on the European streets (such as they were), annotated with a few DBHNTTAs:

"It was him that was responsible for the defeat of the Fifth Crusade.  This don't do nothin' to make up for that." - an embittered veteran of Damietta

*    Bush's failure to send an adequate number of troops in the initial stages of the war led to Iraq reaching debacle status in about the same amount of time as the Fifth Crusade, which admittedly was a bit more limited in scope but had a more singular objective.

"He broke his vows as a crusader.  Repeatedly.  And now the Pope says he sucks." - a Christian peasant wising up to the fact that her faith has been used in a cynical power ploy

*    The cagier mouthpieces among the foe are starting to try to distance themselves from what they know will be a long-term negative perception of the Bush legacy, and they have sought to bolster their recent epiphanies by claiming that it is the President who has abandoned traditional conservative values, not the other way around.
historiorant:  As has been noted by many on this blog, we must not allow them to get away with this. The radioactive albatross of the failed Bush presidency must be hung firmly around the neck of that most recent of candidates for the dust-bin of history, modern conservatism.

"Ya just ain't s'posed ta' backtalk the Pope." - a student in a Church-run university, upon seeing his worldview shattered for the first time

*    The right has some fine minds, some great thinkers who (even if usually misguided and occasionally flat-out wrong) are worthy of intellectual respect.  I won't go so far as to say that Gregory was deserving of such fawning, but his office certainly entitled him to more deference than was shown by Frederick.  Think of President Bush flipping off pointy-headed think-tank dwellers like William F. Buckley and George Will so as to follow his own path of self-deification.

"If they knuckled under at the sight of your army, then what else do you think you could have taken from them if you'd actually had the cajones to attack?" - a hawkish knight who never went on Crusade

*    This is more reminiscent of the questions asked of George XLI after the Gulf War, and it's the exact sort of thinking that turned Darth Rumsfeld into what he is today.

"You swore you were going to fight to defend our faith and way of life, and you did what...!?" - everyone in Europe

   
link

The terrorism panel, better known as the 9/11 Commission, said in April (2004) that it knew of six chartered flights with 142 people aboard, mostly Saudis, that left the United States between Sept. 14 and 24, 2001.
 TIA now verifies flight of Saudis

"The military situation doesn't seem to have been resolved in our favor." - the viceroys and knights Frederick left behind to guard his new holdings
*    Relax, these are trustworthy guys - I promise.  I've had dinner with them.  They won't come back after their city until long after I'm gone

A pretty pathetic King of Jerusalem
Besides a few cowed locals, the only troops that rode into Jerusalem with the man who would be her new king were his own Germans and Italians.  The Church, the Hospital, and the Temple were not represented, as they held the excommunicant in contempt.  He was obliged to crown himself on the morning of ceremony, because no priest would attend the coronation Mass, and later set up his court in the evacuated Hospital.  There he made a great show of issuing orders to get the city running again by cajoling those Brownies and Chertoffs who had scuttled up from their hiding places in the cisterns to hear the words of their new overlord.

If our "leaders" in Congress would act in accordance with the Constitution they have ostensibly sworn to uphold, they would take a cue from the Patriarch of Jerusalem.  From Acre, he dispatched the Archbishop of Caesarea to lay an interdict on the holiest city in Christianity.  The interdict was the nuke in the Church's arsenal, for it denied the Sacraments to all people who were born, wanted to marry, or desired their daily mouthful of transubstantiated bread within its defined area.  It was rarely used; as it was recognized to be a deliberate attack on the social fabric of a country, it was also recognized to have the potential to spiral in directions that neither side could anticipate.

Enraged at the interdict, Frederick gathered up what forces remained under his control and marched off to Acre to show those unruly lords and priests a thing or two.  It was him that got shown.  - DBHNTTA:  Think George Bush putting in a fundraising appearance at Yearly Kos.

Take your treaty and shove it

The Emperor made all sorts of threats and demands, and was met with ill-concealed contempt.  A Templar knight recorded the flavor of the council in which Frederick attempted to assert his authority over the genteel and well-spoken John of Brienne:

The Emperor grew very angry and swore and threatened him. Finally the Emperor said: "I heard and learned a long time ago across the sea that your words were handsome and polite and that You were very discreet and subtle with words, but I shall show You that your wit, your subtlety, and your words are worth nothing against my power."
The Lord of Beirut replied in such a way that those who were present were astounded and all of his friends were much afraid. His reply was: "Sire, you heard tell long ago of my polite words: I too, have heard often and for long of your deeds. When I planned to come here, my whole council, with one voice, warned me that you would do what you are now doing and worse, and that I was not to trust you in any way. I came under no illusions; I had good advice and I understood it. But I would much rather suffer death or imprisonment than to allow anyone to speak evil of us or to allow the help due to Our Lord, the help due to the conquest of the Holy Land, and your service to be hindered by me, my family, or my compatriots. . . ." He suddenly stopped and sat down.
The Emperor was very angry and changed color often. People stared at the Lord of Beirut and there were many words and threats. Religious men and other good people intervened to try to reach agreement, but no one could get the Lord of Beirut to alter what he had said he would do. The Emperor made many strange and sinister requests. At last they agreed to do what the Lord of Beirut had earlier proposed and he could now be forced to concede no more than this: that he would furnish the Emperor with twenty of the most noble vassals of Cyprus as hostages.
(emphasis mine)

Sometimes when the people lead, the leaders follow.  Other times, the leaders flee.  Frederick, perceiving discretion to be the better part of valor, chose the latter course of action.  The same Templar knight tells us:

The Emperor secretly prepared to depart. At daybreak on the first of May, he boarded a galley before the Butchers' Street, without notifying anyone. Thus it happened that the butchers and the old people who lived on the street and who were very unfriendly saw his party and pelted him most abusively with tripe and scraps of meat....
Thus the Emperor left Acre, cursed, bated, and despised.
(emphasis mine)

Historiorant/The Holy War Hangover
Well, that was that, as far as Frederick was concerned.  He'd fulfilled his vow (despite being double-excommunicated), won back Jerusalem (in a way), and extended the influence of Christendom into new lands (creating new indefensible frontiers in the process).  He returned to Europe and spent the next 20 years fighting various popes and Italian/German alliances in an effort to hold together his empire.  - DBHNTTA:  I'll not even elaborate; Frederick's go-it-alone swagger and cynical contempt for the deeply-held beliefs of his subjects are too Bush-like to require further enumeration.

Outremer was set up for disaster; as expected, the Muslims retook Jerusalem shortly after the expiration of the truce.  Deep divisions emerged between the barons of Palestine and the pretenders to their thrones over political allegiances, and the days of the Christian presence in the Holy Land were plainly numbered and getting shorter. - DBHNTTA:  future generations will deal with the fallout from Iraq, and will likely end up paying the country a return visit - q/v repeated interventions in Nicaragua, Haiti, and dozens of other beneficiaries of the march of democracy

The power of the papacy was irrevocably undercut, for Frederick's Crusade showed that Christian objectives could be achieved through secular diplomacy rather than theocratic militarism.  It also showed that secular rulers had grown both wealthy and powerful enough to fund and execute these ventures without the support of the Church, thus freeing private efforts from burdensome oversight. - DBHNTTA:  just a thought, but it may take a while to get the Constitution back in order if and when such a thing becomes possible.  Like Frederick's response to his excommunications, The Decider will likely issue a signing statement as a response to the eventual articles of impeachment, and what are we to do then?.

Finally, the fervor had left the building.  A cycle of attempted vengeance that had begun after Hattin in the Second Crusade had failed, repeatedly, over a course of forty long years, to win anything more than a flimsy scrap of paper and a new title for an ambitious, arrogant lord.  After a half-century of being on a evangelical war footing, the people of Europe were simply played out, sick of never-ending, never-quite successful cycle.   - DBHNTTA:  you tell me...