1. Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz was a German historian of medieval political and intellectual history and art, known for his 1927 book Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite on Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and The King's Two Bodies on medieval and early modern ideologies of monarchy and the state.
Ernst Kantorowicz was an elected member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ernst Kantorowicz was the cousin of author and Muslim homosexual activist Hugo Marcus.
Kantorowicz served as an officer in the German Army for four years in World War I According to his biographer Robert E Lerner, Kantorowicz served in a field artillery regiment and fought at Battle of Verdun, where he was wounded.
Ernst Kantorowicz was awarded the Iron Cross, second class in 1915.
Ernst Kantorowicz was later sent to the Ottoman front as a translator and liaison for Otto Liman von Sanders, commander of the Ottoman Fifth Army.
In 1921, Ernst Kantorowicz was awarded a doctorate supervised by Eberhard Gothein based on a slim dissertation on "artisan associations" in the Muslim world.
Ernst Kantorowicz remained in Germany until departing for the United States in 1938, when after the Kristallnacht riots it became clear that the situation for even assimilated Jews such as himself was no longer tenable.
Ernst Kantorowicz accepted a lectureship at the University of California, Berkeley in 1939.
Ernst Kantorowicz insisted he was no leftist and pointed to his role in an anti-communist militia as a young university student, but nonetheless objected on principle to an instrument which he viewed as a blatant infringement on academic freedom and freedom of conscience more generally.
Ernst Kantorowicz accepted the offer in January 1951 and moved to Princeton, where he remained for the rest of his career.
In 1957, Ernst Kantorowicz published his masterpiece, The King's Two Bodies, which explored, in the words of the volume's subtitle, "medieval political theology".
Ernst Kantorowicz believed that any political theory is based not on truth but non-rational psychological power.
Ernst Kantorowicz was concerned with the problem of ideas from the theological or religious world being transferred to the secular, a process that he believed characterized modernity.
Ernst Kantorowicz was the subject of a controversial biographical sketch in the book Inventing the Middle Ages by the medievalist Norman Cantor.
Cantor suggested that, but for his Jewish heritage, the young Ernst Kantorowicz could be considered a Nazi in terms of his intellectual temperament and cultural values.
Kantorowicz's defenders, including his student Robert L Benson, responded that although as a younger man Kantorowicz embraced the Romantic ultranationalism of the George-Kreis, he had only contempt for Nazism and was a vocal critic of Hitler's regime, both before and after the war.