Frederich II

"I was particularly captivated by the personality of that gifted Emperor Frederich II., … it delighted me to find in the German mind the capacity of appreciating beyond the narrow bounds of nationality all purely human qualities, in however strange a garb they might be presented. For in this I recognised how nearly akin it is to the mind of Greece. In Frederick II I saw this quality in full flower. A fair haired German of ancient Swabian stock, heir to the Norman realm of Sicily and Naples, who gave the Italian language its first development and laid a basis for the evolution of knowledge and art where hitherto ecclesiastical fanaticism and feudal brutality had alone contended for power, a monarch who gathered at his court the poets and sages of eastern lands and surrounded himself with the living products of Arabian and Persian grace and spirit – this man I beheld betrayed by the Roman clergy to the infidel foe, yet ending his crusade, to their bitter disappointment, by a pact of peace with the Sultan from whom he obtained a grant of privileges to Christians in Palestine which as the bloodiest victory could scarcely have secured."

This was what Wagner wrote about the personality of Frederick II whom he discovered in reading Raumer's History of the Hohenstaufen.  

Reading passages like this in Wagner's autobiography My Life makes me wonder if Wagner,  like Nietzsche, has been a victim of media campaigns against him, passed down the generations, because of his anti-cleric attitudes. I think it is highly likely, as even assuming Wagner presented himself in the best light in his autobiography (although actually he is very self critical), he would hardly write something like this if he didn't mean it.