It was in 1220 that Frederick returned from Germany to Italy, leaving
his northern kingdom in the hands of the Archbishop of Cologne, as
regent. At Rome he received the imperial crown from the hands of the
pope, and, his first wife dying, married Yolinda de Lusignan, daughter
of John, ex-king of Jerusalem, in right of whom he claimed the kingdom
of the East.
Shortly afterwards a new pope came to the papal chair, the gloomy
Gregory IX., whose first act was to order a crusade, which he desired
the emperor to lead. Despite the fact that he had married the heiress of
Jerusalem, Frederick was very reluctant to seek an enforcement of his
claim upon the holy city. He had pledged himself when crowned at
Aix-la-Chapelle, and afterwards on his coronation at Rome, to undertake
a crusade, but Honorius III., the pope at that time, readily granted him
delay. Such was not the case with Gregory, who sternly insisted on an
immediate compliance with his pledge, and whose rigid sense of decorum
was scandalized by the frivolities of the emperor, no less than was his
religious austerity by Frederick's open intercourse with the Sicilian
Saracens.
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