Frederick Barbarossa

Frederick was born in 1122, most likely at Haguenau in Alsace, into the highest ranks of the German aristocracy. His father was Frederick II, Duke of Swabia, head of the Hohenstaufen family, and his mother was Judith of Bavaria, a member of the rival Welf dynasty ^[1]. That parentage mattered enormously. The Hohenstaufen and the Welfs were the two great competing houses of twelfth century Germany, and the young Frederick carried the blood of both, a fact contemporaries later cited when explaining his election as king ^[2].

Little is recorded of his childhood, which was typical for a nobleman of the era. He was trained for war and lordship rather than letters, learning to ride, hunt, and fight, and he probably never learned to read Latin fluently, relying instead on clerks and advisers throughout his reign ^[1]. In 1147 his father died and Frederick succeeded him as Duke of Swabia, taking control of extensive family lands in southwestern Germany.

That same year he joined his uncle, King Conrad III, on the Second Crusade. The expedition to the Holy Land ended in failure, with the German army badly mauled crossing Anatolia, but the campaign gave the young duke firsthand experience of long-distance command and of the dangers of the overland route to the East, a route he would attempt again more than forty years later ^[3].

Conrad III died in February 1152 without leaving an adult heir in a strong position, and within weeks the German princes assembled at Frankfurt chose Frederick as king. He was crowned at Aachen on March 9, 1152 ^[2]. The electors seem to have hoped that a man related to both the Hohenstaufen and the Welfs could calm the feuding that had destabilized Germany for a generation, and to a remarkable degree Frederick delivered. Early in his reign he conciliated his powerful Welf cousin Henry the Lion, confirming him as Duke of Saxony and later restoring Bavaria to him as well ^[1].

For anyone asking who was Frederick Barbarossa in the eyes of his own age, the answer begins with his conception of the empire itself. He promoted the idea of a sacrum imperium, a holy empire whose authority came from God and from Roman law rather than from papal favor, and his chancery worked hard to project that dignity ^[4]. His uncle and biographer, Bishop Otto of Freising, wrote an admiring account, the Gesta Friderici, which remains a central source for the reign ^[3].

In 1155 Frederick crossed the Alps and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome by Pope Adrian IV on June 18. The coronation itself was marred by violence, as Roman citizens attacked the imperial party and were driven off with heavy losses ^[2]. The uneasy partnership between emperor and pope, already strained at a famous meeting at Besançon in 1157 over whether the empire was a papal beneficium, would define much of the next three decades ^[4].

Northern Italy became the great preoccupation of Frederick's reign. The cities of Lombardy, led by Milan, had grown rich on trade and had quietly absorbed rights of justice, taxation, and coinage that legally belonged to the crown. At the Diet of Roncaglia in 1158, Frederick, advised by jurists from the law school of Bologna, formally reclaimed these royal rights, known as the regalia, a decision worth an enormous sum in annual revenue and one the cities were never likely to accept peacefully ^[4].

War followed. Frederick led repeated expeditions across the Alps, six in all during his reign. Milan, the heart of resistance, surrendered after a long siege and in 1162 was demolished on his orders, its population dispersed to surrounding settlements ^[1]. The severity backfired. When a disputed papal election in 1159 produced both Pope Alexander III and an imperial antipope, Frederick backed the antipope, and Alexander became the natural ally of every Italian city that feared the emperor ^[5].

In 1167 sixteen cities banded together as the Lombard League, rebuilt Milan, and founded a new fortress city that they named Alessandria in the pope's honor. Disaster struck the imperial army that same year when an epidemic, probably malaria, destroyed much of Frederick's force outside Rome and killed several of his leading advisers, including his chancellor Rainald of Dassel ^[2]. The decisive test came on May 29, 1176, at Legnano, where the infantry and cavalry of the League defeated the imperial army and nearly killed the emperor himself ^[5]. Frederick, a realist as well as a warrior, drew the conclusion. He made peace with Alexander III at Venice in 1177, kneeling before the pope he had opposed for eighteen years, and in 1183 the Peace of Constance granted the Lombard cities self-government under loose imperial overlordship ^[4].

Frederick's achievements in Germany were quieter than his Italian wars but arguably more durable. He expanded the network of imperial ministeriales, unfree knights who administered crown lands and castles, and he consolidated a compact block of Hohenstaufen territory in Swabia and Franconia ^[1]. He also raised the prestige of the monarchy through spectacle. The court festival held at Mainz in 1184, where his sons were knighted before tens of thousands of guests, was remembered for generations as the greatest gathering of chivalric Germany ^[3].

His most consequential domestic act was the destruction of Henry the Lion. The Welf duke had grown into the most powerful prince in Germany, ruling both Saxony and Bavaria, but in 1176 he refused to bring troops to the emperor's aid in Italy. When complaints from Henry's many enemies piled up, Frederick had him tried before the princes, and between 1179 and 1181 Henry was stripped of both duchies and exiled to the court of his father-in-law, King Henry II of England ^[2].

The judgment reshaped the German map. Saxony was divided, Bavaria passed to the Wittelsbach family, who would hold it until 1918, and the precedent was set that even the mightiest duke answered to the law of the princes and the crown ^[1]. Historians still debate whether the settlement strengthened the monarchy or simply strengthened the princes, but it removed Frederick's only serious rival within Germany ^[4].

Frederick married twice. His first marriage, to Adelheid of Vohburg, was childless and was annulled in 1153 on grounds of consanguinity ^[2]. In June 1156 he married Beatrice of Burgundy, heiress to the County of Burgundy, a match that brought him a wealthy territory between France and the empire along with a partner who accompanied him on campaign and was crowned alongside him. Beatrice bore numerous children before her death in 1184; at least eight sons and several daughters are recorded ^[1].

Among the children, Henry was crowned German king in 1169 while still a small boy, securing the succession, and later married Constance of Sicily, a union that would eventually bring the Norman kingdom of Sicily into Hohenstaufen hands under their son, the future Frederick II ^[5]. Another son, Frederick of Swabia, would die on crusade shortly after his father, while Philip of Swabia was elected German king in 1198 during the succession crisis that followed the dynasty's sudden losses.

Contemporaries describe the emperor as of middling height, well built, with reddish-blond hair and the famous red beard that gave him the Italian nickname Barbarossa ^[3]. Otto of Freising and other writers praise his even temper, his memory for names, and his attention to justice, though such portraits came from men writing for his court and must be read with that in mind ^[3].

News of Saladin's capture of Jerusalem in October 1187 shook Latin Europe, and Frederick, now in his mid sixties, took the cross at Mainz in March 1188. Among the essential Frederick Barbarossa facts is the scale of what followed: he assembled one of the largest crusading armies of the Middle Ages and led it overland through Hungary and the Byzantine Empire beginning in May 1189 ^[6].

Relations with the Byzantine emperor Isaac II Angelos turned hostile, and Frederick wintered at Adrianople before forcing a crossing into Anatolia in the spring of 1190. His army fought its way through Seljuk territory and stormed the outskirts of the sultanate's capital at Iconium, modern Konya, in May 1190, a hard-won victory that reopened the road toward Cilicia and Syria ^[6].

The end came suddenly. On June 10, 1190, while the army moved through Cilician Armenia, Frederick drowned in the River Göksu, known to the crusaders as the Saleph. The exact circumstances were never firmly established; accounts differ on whether he was swept away attempting to cross or collapsed while bathing in the cold water ^[5]. Deprived of its leader, the great army fell apart. Some contingents turned home, others died of disease at Antioch, and only a remnant under his son Frederick of Swabia reached the siege of Acre. Attempts to preserve the emperor's body for burial in Jerusalem failed; his flesh was interred at Antioch, his bones apparently at Tyre, and his heart and inner organs at Tarsus ^[6].

Judged by results, the reign was a mixture of defeat and durable construction. Frederick failed to break the Lombard cities, and the Peace of Constance conceded most of what Roncaglia had claimed. Yet he restored the standing of the German monarchy after decades of civil strife, secured the succession, tied Burgundy and eventually Sicily to his house, and left the empire more prestigious than he found it ^[4]. Legal historians also point to his patronage of Roman law and the Bologna jurists as an important moment in the revival of learned jurisprudence in Europe ^[4].

The legend outgrew the man. By the later Middle Ages a story attached itself to Frederick (borrowed in part from tales about his grandson Frederick II) that the emperor was not dead but asleep inside the Kyffhäuser mountain in Thuringia, seated at a stone table with his red beard growing through it, waiting to return in Germany's hour of need ^[7]. Nineteenth century German nationalists embraced the tale; a colossal Kyffhäuser monument linking Barbarossa with Kaiser Wilhelm I was completed in 1896 ^[7].

The darkest appropriation came in 1941, when Nazi Germany code-named its invasion of the Soviet Union Operation Barbarossa, harnessing the medieval emperor's name to a war of annihilation he could never have imagined ^[5]. Modern scholarship, notably John Freed's 2016 biography, has worked to separate the twelfth century ruler from the layers of national myth, presenting a capable, sometimes ruthless, often pragmatic monarch whose achievements were real but whose posthumous career as a symbol tells us more about later Germans than about him ^[1].