On Sunday, in his imperial robes and attended by a magnificent retinue, Frederick went to his coronation, as king of Jerusalem, in the Church of the Sepulchre.  Not a single ecclesiastic was there to take part in the ceremony.  The archbishops of Capua and Palermo stood aloof, while Frederick, taking the crown from the high altar, placed it on his own head.  By his orders his friend Herman de Salza read an address, in which the Emperor acquitted the Pope for his hard judgment of him and for his excommunication, and added that a real knowledge of the facts would have led him to speak not against him, but in his favor.  He confessed his desire to put to shame the false friends of Christ, his accusers and slanderers, by the restoration of peace and unity, and to humble himself before God and before his vicar upon earth.

From the Saracens he won golden opinions.  The cadi silenced a muezzin who had to proclaim the hour of prayer from a minaret near the house in which the Emperor lodged, because he added to his call the question, “How is it possible that God had for his son Jesus the son of Mary?” Frederick marked the silence of the crier when the hour of prayer came round.  On learning the cause he rebuked the cadi for neglecting, on his account, his duty and his religion, and warned him that if he should visit him in his kingdom he would find no such ill-judged deference.  He showed no dissatisfaction, it is said, with the inscription which declared that Saladin had purified the city from those who worshipped many gods, or any displeasure when the Mahometans in his train fell on their knees at the times for prayer.  His thoughts about the Christians were shown, it was supposed, when, seeing the windows of the Holy Chapel barred to keep out the birds which might defile it, he asked:  “You may keep out the birds; but how will you keep out the swine?”

In glowing terms Frederick wrote to the sovereigns of Europe, announcing the splendid success which he had achieved rather by the pen than by the sword.  He scarcely knew what a rock of offence he had raised up among Christians and Moslems alike.  By a few words on a sheet of parchment the Christian Emperor had deprived his people of the hope of getting their sins forgiven by murdering unbelievers; by the same words the Moslem Sultan had prevented his subjects from insuring an entrance to the delights of paradise by the slaughter of the Nazarenes.

From Gerold, Patriarch of Jerusalem, a letter went to the Pope, full of virulent abuse of the Emperor as a traitor, an apostate, and a robber; but even before he received this letter Gregory had condemned what he chose to consider as a monstrous attempt to reconcile Christ and Belial, and to set up Mahomet as an object of worship in the temple of God.  “The antagonist of the Cross,” he wrote, “the enemy of the faith and of all chastity, the wretch doomed to hell, is lifted up for adoration, by a perverse judgment, and by an intolerable insult to the Saviour, to the lasting disgrace of the Christian name and the contempt of all the martyrs who have laid down their lives to purify the Holy Land from the defilements of the Saracens.”