The Friar and the Cipher by Lawrence Goldstone Page A

truce with powerful Egypt, which included the return of Jerusalem to Christendom. Thus Frederick achieved without the loss of a single human life what hundreds of thousands across Europe had suffered and died for since the very first crusade had been called in 1095.
    Frederick rode into the Holy City on March 17, 1229, and had himself crowned the king of Jerusalem. It had been Thomas's father's cousin, another Tommaso d'Aquino, who had handled the delicate negotiations with al-Kamil.
    There was a tradition in Sicily at the time that the youngest son in a family was given to the Church, and so, at almost the same moment as the emperor was riding into Jerusalem, Thomas's parents sent him off for schooling to the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, just a few miles to the north. The Benedictines were aligned more with the pope than with the emperor, but that did not seem particularly inflammatory at the time. What's more, the Aquino family was sufficiently prestigious (and had donated enough to the abbey) to be fairly confident that Thomas would one day be made abbot.
    Monte Cassino was not much of a school, but it sufficed for primary education. Thomas learned a little reading, a little writing, and a little Latin, along with the psalms. He probably would have stayed on and become a Benedictine monk himself had the further intrigues of Frederick II not intervened.
    Frederick's ambitions were not limited to the Holy Land. He wanted Italy as well, particularly Rome itself. He and Pope Gregory IX—the current ruler in the city—loathed each other with single-minded fury. Gregory had long since excommunicated Frederick and had tried to seize Sicily while the emperor was in Jerusalem by starting a rumor that Frederick was dead. Frederick foiled the plan by turning up alive, and for the next decade the two fought for the future of Europe and the Church.
    They alternated between a war of words and one of deeds. Frederick called the pope “the abomination of Babylon,” while Gregory spread the word that the emperor was the Antichrist. At the end of the twelfth century, a Calabrian monk named Joachim of Flora had prophesied that a representative of Satan was to bring about the end of the world, the Day of Judgment, and a new era in or around the year 1260. Joachim's prophesies had spread throughout Europe, gaining adherents throughout the Church, particularly among the Franciscans and others prone to mysticism. Gregory simply attached Frederick to Joachim's prophesy. “With fangs and claws of iron it seeks to destroy everything and trample the world to fragments beneath its feet . . . behold the head and tail and body of the Beast, of this Frederick, this so-called emperor,” Gregory noted in a proclamation.
    By 1236, in one of the more active periods of this conflict, Frederick had decided to take Lombardy, and full-scale war ensued. There was a decisive battle at Cortenuova, which Frederick won by skill and daring. Within the week he had swept into the principal city of Cremona in full regalia, his prisoners trailing behind him, the nobles in chains. The foremost prisoner, a Milanese aristocrat, was tied to the mast of a captured Milanese vessel, which was pulled through the streets by Frederick's ever-present elephant. The man chosen to oversee the guarding of these prisoners was Thomas's father. His father's cousin, the other Tommaso d'Aquino, was Frederick's envoy in Rome.
    Eventually, in 1239, imperial troops took over the abbey of Monte Cassino, and it was suddenly inconvenient for a member of the Aquino family to be a novitiate at a facility even loosely aligned with the pope. Thomas left and came home.
    Thomas was at just the right age to go to university, so his parents sent him off almost at once to the new school Frederick had established at Naples. Not surprisingly, Frederick's university was like no other in Europe. Unlike the schools at Paris, Oxford, and Bologna, which had grown out of a tradition of scholarship,