In the 13th century, when Europe was still bleeding from the wounds of crusading fanaticism and the Holy Inquisition was just beginning to sharpen its iron rhetoric, a Holy Roman Emperor named Frederick II of Hohenstaufen decided to take scientific curiosity beyond the limits of ethics. The following story isn’t in school textbooks. Not because it’s false, but because it reveals an uncomfortable truth about power, science, and the human soul.
Frederick II, a cultured, polyglot monarch, protégé of philosophers, and translator of Arabic into Latin, launched one of the first documented linguistic experiments in Western history. His question was as old as civilization itself: what is the original language of humankind? Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Latin? Or is there an innate, pure language, uncontaminated by culture or upbringing?
To find the answer, Frederick designed an unprecedented—and soulless—experiment. He took a group of newborns, either orphaned or given to the state, and locked them away in total verbal isolation. The nurses and caregivers were forbidden to speak to them, sing to them, or interact beyond minimal physical contact for feeding and cleaning. The emperor’s hypothesis was that, growing up without external influence, the children would spontaneously begin to speak in the divine language. Perhaps Hebrew, if the Bible was correct. Perhaps Greek, if Homer preceded Moses.
What happened was darker than any philological possibility. None of the children spoke. None uttered a word. They all died.
“The children could not live without clapping, joyful gestures, or words of tenderness,” wrote Fra Salimbene of Parma, a Franciscan monk who documented the experiment decades later. They died, quite simply, of silence.
An Iron Crown and a Scientific Mind
Frederick II was not just another medieval ignoramus. He was an emperor, but also a scholar. He loved animals, Arabic philosophy, and promoted rational thought. He corresponded with Muslim scholars, protected Jewish doctors, and distrusted religious dogma. He is the same man who wrote De Arte Venandi cum Avibus, a treatise on falconry that included ethological observations ahead of its time.
However, the paradox is brutal: this promoter of knowledge resorted to a primitive form of torture in his pursuit of knowledge. What we would call today a crime against humanity was, in his logic, an “empirical experiment.”
And therein lies the crux of the problem: when power disguises itself as science but forgets ethics, it becomes barbarism.
Science without conscience: a sinister precedent
The case of Frederick II is not unique, but it is pioneering. Centuries later, behavioral psychologists like Watson and Skinner also tried to mold the human mind as if it were clay. In the 20th century, history would repeat its cruel experiment with the babies of Nazism, Soviet orphanages, and Romanian newborn nurseries. In all of them, the result was identical: without affection, there is no language. Without love, there is no life.
Frederick wanted to discover the original language. What he discovered was a universal law: human beings need not only food, but contact. The voice is not only a vehicle of meaning, but a caress.
What if babies had spoken?
There are those who still fantasize that, had they survived, the children imprisoned by Frederick might have spoken in dead languages, or even in a divine proto-language. These stories border on mystical delirium. But what we are left with is not a linguistic utopia, but a warning: all knowledge that disregards life ends up devouring itself.
In times when Artificial Intelligence learns to speak with us faster than a baby, it is worth remembering the essentials. Language isn’t born of isolation. It’s born of relationship. From arms that cradle. From words repeated with love. From glances that speak louder than a thousand languages.
Frederick II, the philosopher-emperor, died in 1250. His experiment, however, still resonates like an open wound. Not for what he achieved, but for what it revealed: that the desire to know, without heart, can become the cruelest language of all.
When silence kills: the linguistic experiment of the emperor who wanted to listen to God
In the annals of Western history, there are madnesses that became empires, heresies that founded religions, and scientific delusions that—in the name of reason—crucified life. Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was no ordinary tyrant: he was a crowned intellectual, a polyglot obsessed with knowledge, a heretic with his own library… and a visionary so ruthless that he sought to discover the language of God using the lives of newborns as a laboratory.
This is not a myth. It is a fact documented by 13th-century Franciscan chroniclers, including Salimbene of Parma, who recorded one of the darkest episodes in medieval thought: the “original language” experiment. The experiment that killed by silence.
Frederick II (1194–1250) was no ordinary medieval king. Born in Sicily, raised among Muslim courts, educated by Jewish and Arab scholars, he spoke at least six languages and surrounded himself with scientists, astronomers, and poets. The Vatican hated him more for his cult than for his infidelity. He was excommunicated twice. He was nicknamed Stupor Mundi (the wonder of the world), not because of courtly adulation, but because of what his mind provoked: brilliant, skeptical, feared.
But behind this advanced humanism was also a perverse impulse: the obsession with deciphering the origin of human language. What language would a human being speak who had never heard another human being speak? What is the natural language of the soul? Hebrew, as the scholastics believed? Greek, as the Byzantine philosophers thought? Or perhaps an extinct language from before time?
The laboratory was a voiceless orphanage
The hypothesis was simple and brutal: if a group of babies were raised without verbal contact, their first word would be the language of God.
So Frederick—in one of the most sadistic outbursts in scientific history—ordered several infants to be isolated. The wet nurses were only to feed and clean them. They were forbidden to speak to them, rock them, sing to them, or even look at them affectionately. All stimulation was to be eliminated. Total silence. Not even a smile.
The goal was not to teach them anything. The goal was precisely to teach them nothing. Medieval science was cruel, but logical: if language is innate, it will emerge on its own.
Nothing emerged.
The babies died. One by one. From emotional starvation, from emotional abandonment, from biological desolation. They died not from hunger, but from not hearing a human voice. Not Hebrew, not Greek, not Aramaic: what they spoke was the language of interrupted crying. What they learned was that without love, life is impossible.
Science without soul, religion without mercy
There are few experiments as abominable in the history of linguistics. Not even the Nazi laboratories managed to formalize anything like this. The irony is that this horror was not carried out by a barbarian, but by an intellectual. A king who loved Arab philosophy, who quoted Aristotle, who believed in reason… but who forgot the most basic detail: human beings are not guinea pigs with vocal cords.
Frederick II’s experiment anticipated—by centuries—debate that remains relevant today: is language learned or biological? Which is stronger: nature or culture? And to what extent does the pursuit of knowledge justify cruelty?
Frederick wanted to answer a metaphysical question, but instead left a clinical lesson: without human contact, language is not born. Speech is not just a code. It is a vital necessity. The locked-up babies did not discover the original language. They reminded us: without affection, there is no possible language.
Echoes of Horror in Modern Science
Perhaps this 13th-century emperor was the first modern “scientist”: one who uses logic as a scalpel to dissect ethics. Today, his heirs don’t wear robes, but lab coats or Silicon Valley suits. The experiments are not on babies, but on algorithms that simulate language, empathy, love.
But the principle is the same: to seek the purity of a language without contaminating it with humanity. And that desire leads us—time and again—to the same abyss: when science kills compassion, all that is born is silence.
Frederick II died in 1250, persecuted by the Church, admired by scholars, and—according to some rumors—poisoned by his own circle. He never found the language of God. But he made it clear to us what it is not: language without love.
And if a divine language ever existed, it probably wasn’t spoken. It was sung into the ear of a newborn. By a mother who knew nothing of science, but she did know tenderness.
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