the
length of appointing their own cardinals and pope, having declared the
Church in a state of apostasy. Their regime of life was of the severest
nature; they begged from door to door their daily food, and went clothed
in rags.

FRAUNHOFER, JOSEPH VON, German optician, born in Straubing, Bavaria;
after serving an apprenticeship as a glass-cutter in Muenich, he rose to
be manager of an optical institute there, and eventually attained to the
position of professor in the Academy of Sciences; his name is associated
with many discoveries in optical science as well as inventions and
improvements in the optician's art; but he is chiefly remembered for his
discovery of the dark lines in the solar spectrum, since called after him
the Fraunhofer lines (1787-1826).

FREDEGONDA, wife of Chilperic I. of Neustria; a woman of low birth,
but of great beauty and insatiable ambition, who scrupled at no crime to
attain her end; made away with Galswintha, Chilperic's second wife, and
superseded her on the throne; slew Siegbert, who had been sent to avenge
Galswintha's death, and imprisoned Brunhilda, her sister, of Austrasia,
and finally assassinated her husband and governed Neustria in the name of
her son, Clotaire II. (543-597).

FREDERICK I., surnamed Barbarossa (Red-beard), of the house of
Swabia, emperor of the HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE (q. v.) from 1152 till
1190; "a magnificent, magnanimous man, the greatest of all the Kaisers";
his reign is the most brilliant in the annals of the empire, and he
himself among the most honoured of German heroes; his vast empire he
ruled with iron rigour, quelling its rival factions and extending his
sovereign rights to Poland, Hungary, Denmark, and Burgundy; the great
struggle of his reign, however, was with Pope Alexander III. and the
Lombard cities, whose right to independence he acknowledged by the treaty
of Constanz (1183); he "died some unknown sudden death" at 70 in the
crusade against Saladin and the Moslem power; his lifelong ambition was
to secure the independence of the empire, and to subdue the States of
Italy to the imperial sway (1123-1190).

FREDERICK II., called the Wonder of the World, grandson of the
preceding; he was crowned emperor in 1215, at Aix-la-Chapelle, having
driven Otto IV. from the throne; he gave much attention to the
consolidating of his Italian possessions, encouraged learning and art,
founded the university of Naples, and had the laws carefully codified; in
the