Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Perhaps unique among contemporary European rulers, the second of the 'baptized sultans' sought to ground his worldview in reason, a hallmark of the coming scientific method. This approach was at the heart of the emperor's decision to abolish trial by ordeal . . . He exhibited a new spirit of inquiry and cultural receptivity that broke with centuries of self-imposed intellectual isolationism." [House of Wisdom, p. 171-2] " . . . he was excommunicated four times and often vilified in pro-papal chronicles of the time and after. Pope Gregory IX went so far as to call him an Antichrist. . . . Speaking six languages (Latin, Sicilian, Middle High German, Langues d'oïl, Greek and Arabic), Frederick was an avid patron of science and the arts. . . . called by a contemporary chronicler stupor mundi (the wonder of the world) . . ." [Wikipedia] "Michael Scot was one of the Emperor's favorites, and with good reason. Physician, astrologer, necromancer, and expert translator of Arabic and Hebrew texts, he was the epitome of the intellectual that Frederick II—emperor of Sicily, Holy Roman Emperor, and king of Jerusalem—wanted around him . . . " [Menocal: Ornament of the World, p. 190]