Frederick of Sicily

Frederick of Sicily (1272–1337) is a historical figure who functions in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose as a potent political and apocalyptic symbol rather than as a character who appears within the abbey's walls. He is the king whom the heretical leader Fra Dolcino, according to the testimony of Ubertino of Casale and the cellarer Remigio of Varagine, identified as the chosen Emperor destined to exterminate the clergy and establish a new age of purity. At the same time, Frederick was a real sovereign who, in the years before the novel's 1327 setting, had welcomed Spiritual Franciscans expelled from Umbria, making him a concrete historical ally of the very movement whose radical fringes produced Dolcino. His name thus binds together the novel's intertwined themes of imperial politics, millenarian heresy, and the violent struggle over the meaning of apostolic poverty.

Historical Role and Political Context

Frederick of Sicily was a contemporary of Pope John XXII and Emperor Louis the Bavarian, and his reign intersected directly with the conflicts that form the backdrop of the novel. As Ubertino explains to Adso, Dolcino's prophecies named Frederick as the Emperor who would carry out the destruction of all prelates, clerics, and religious orders, a role that Dolcino's third letter explicitly assigned to him. This identification was not merely a random choice: Frederick had a well-known record of receiving and protecting Spiritual Franciscans who had been driven out of Umbria by papal persecution, making him a natural figurehead for those who saw the imperial throne as the only earthly power capable of opposing a corrupt papacy. The novel's abbot, Abo, alludes to this history when he warns William of Baskerville that the line between orthodox Franciscans and heretical bands like Dolcino's is dangerously thin, and that the Emperor's own supporters have sometimes failed to distinguish between them.

Apocalyptic Significance in Dolcino's Prophecy

In the elaborate eschatological system that Fra Dolcino constructed, Frederick of Sicily occupied a central place as the instrument of divine wrath. Ubertino recounts to Adso how Dolcino, in his letters, identified four successive popes: Celestine V as the first and good, Boniface VIII as the second and wicked, an unnamed third pope whom Dolcino recognized as the lion prophesied by Jeremiah—and that lion, Ubertino says with horror, was Frederick of Sicily. The fourth pope was to be the Angelic Pope, still unknown, who would usher in the final renewal of the church. This scheme placed Frederick not merely as a political ally but as a figure embedded in the apocalyptic narrative of the last days, a role that made him, in the eyes of the church, a blasphemous pretender to a divine mission. The cellarer Remigio, confessing his past as a Dolcinian, confirms that the sect believed they were the vanguard of the Emperor sent by heaven, and that Frederick was the one who would hasten the descent of the angel of Philadelphia.

Contrast with the Novel's Imperial Politics

Frederick of Sicily stands in implicit contrast to the Emperor who actually appears in the novel's political frame, Louis the Bavarian. While Louis is the living Emperor whose conflict with Pope John XXII drives the diplomatic mission that brings William and Adso to the abbey, Frederick belongs to a slightly earlier generation and to a more radical, apocalyptic register of imperial expectation. Louis's theologians, such as Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun, argued for imperial sovereignty on rational and legal grounds; Dolcino's prophecy, by contrast, cast Frederick as a messianic destroyer. This distinction underscores the novel's broader argument that the same ideas—poverty, imperial authority, the reform of the church—could be deployed in radically different ways by learned theologians, mystical visionaries, and violent revolutionaries, and that the line between them was often tragically thin.

Narrative Function and Thematic Weight

Frederick of Sicily appears only in the reported speech of other characters—Ubertino, Remigio, and the abbot—but his name carries considerable thematic weight. He is a figure who embodies the dangerous fusion of political power with apocalyptic certainty, a fusion that the novel repeatedly critiques. William of Baskerville, in his conversations with Ubertino and the abbot, consistently tries to disentangle the different strands of heresy and reform, warning against the tendency to conflate them. Frederick's name, as invoked by Dolcino, represents the extreme case where that conflation becomes literal: the Emperor is not merely a political ally but a prophesied agent of divine judgment. The novel's final conflagration, in which the library—the great repository of learning—burns to ashes, can be read as a grim fulfillment of the destructive logic that Frederick's name, in Dolcino's mouth, had promised to unleash on the world.