THE ROMAN THEORY AND THE REX IN THE REGNUM SICILIAE

The ‘great blaze of Seneca's popularity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’ in western Europe acquired a remarkable intensity in the protracted ideological confrontation between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II over the latter's government of the Kingdom of Sicily in the first half of the Duecento. In 1231, some three years after the Regnum had been transformed into a battlefield by a papal army launched against the Sicilian monarch, one of the earliest instances of recourse to Senecan political theory stands out amid the series of military and juridical conflicts which helped define the development of the various monarchical centres of power on the Italian peninsula during the thirteenth century. As Kantorowicz and Marongiù noted, the prologue of the massive body of royal legislation, promulgated by Frederick in the aftermath of the invasion and entitled the Liber Augustalis, cites the preamble of De clementia, placing the words of the Senecan princeps in the mouth of Frederick, ‘ever Caesar Augustus of the Romans, Felicitous Victor and Conqueror of Italy, Sicily, Jerusalem, Arles’. Part of the Senecan theory thus became inscribed upon the constitutional document which provided the fundamental framework of public law within the Kingdom of Sicily from 1231 down to the Napoleonic era: