Discourses of Time and the Ghost of the Roman Emperor

Abstract

The article deals with the appearance in 1284 of a man who declared himself as Emperor Frederick II of Staufen, who had actually died more than 30 years earlier. When this man was asked where he had been for so many years, he replied that he had covered his sins in the Holy Land as a pilgrim, and now the time had come again to him to rule his empire. This story revealed that medieval man apprehended contemporary events in “several times” at once: 1) as a period of the reign of one sovereign (which, as this episode shows, could be broken and then resumed); 2) the sacral time, a tangible proximity “the end times”; 3) still alive and actualizable images of the emperor in people’s memory. And these memories to some extent continued to define the actions of the urban community at the time when the impostor appeared.