Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor

Henry was born on November 1, 1165, in Nijmegen, a town on the Waal river in the Low Countries that housed an imperial palace favored by his father ^[1]. That father was Frederick I Barbarossa, the most formidable German ruler of the twelfth century, and his mother was Beatrice of Burgundy, whose inheritance had brought the county of Burgundy into the Hohenstaufen orbit ^[2]. Henry was their second surviving son, yet the death and displacement of rivals within the family soon made him the designated heir.

His promotion came early. In 1169, when he was not yet four years old, the German princes elected him king of the Romans, and he was crowned at Aachen later that year ^[1]. The child king grew up amid the long struggle between his father and Pope Alexander III, and amid Barbarossa's repeated campaigns in Lombardy. Tutors gave him a Latin education unusual in its depth for a lay prince, and contemporaries later remarked on his learning and his taste for letters ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, should begin with this apprenticeship. Through the 1170s and 1180s he witnessed the machinery of imperial government at close range: diets, sieges, negotiated peaces, and the fall of the mighty Saxon duke Henry the Lion in 1180 ^[2]. By his teens he was issuing documents in his own name and standing in for his father north of the Alps whenever the emperor campaigned in Italy.

The decision that shaped Henry's entire reign was a marriage. On January 27, 1186, in the basilica of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan, he wed Constance of Sicily, aunt of the reigning Sicilian king William II and, at that moment, heiress presumptive to the Norman kingdom of Sicily and southern Italy ^[4]. The match, arranged by Barbarossa, alarmed the papacy, since a single dynasty holding both the empire and Sicily would encircle the Papal States. Around the time of the wedding Henry also took the title of Caesar, marking him publicly as co-ruler ^[1].

Events then moved faster than anyone expected. William II died childless in November 1189, and Constance's claim to Sicily became live. But the Sicilian barons, dreading German rule, crowned the illegitimate Norman prince Tancred of Lecce instead ^[4]. Meanwhile Barbarossa had departed on the Third Crusade, leaving Henry as regent in Germany. In June 1190 the old emperor drowned in the Saleph river in Anatolia, and the whole Hohenstaufen inheritance fell to a man of twenty four ^[2].

Henry moved to secure both crowns at once. He crossed the Alps in the winter of 1190 to 1191, and on April 15, 1191, Pope Celestine III crowned him and Constance emperor and empress in Rome ^[1]. The imperial coronation was the easy part. His first attempt on the Sicilian kingdom that summer collapsed outside Naples, where disease ravaged his army and forced a humiliating retreat; Constance herself was captured and held for a time by Tancred's supporters ^[4].

Fortune returned to Henry through an accident of the crusade. In December 1192 Duke Leopold V of Austria seized Richard I of England, the Lionheart, as he traveled home in disguise from the Holy Land, and early in 1193 Leopold handed his prize to the emperor ^[5]. Holding a crowned king and crusader prisoner scandalized much of Christendom, but Henry saw an instrument of policy and used it without embarrassment.

The terms were staggering. Richard's release was set at 150,000 marks of silver, a sum that England raised through punishing taxation, and the English king was also made to do homage to Henry before his release in February 1194 ^[5]. Among the notable Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor facts, this ransom ranks high: it amounted to a multiple of the English crown's ordinary annual revenue and gave the emperor the war chest he had lacked ^[2].

The money arrived at the perfect moment. Tancred of Lecce died in February 1194, leaving Sicily to a child, and Henry now had the silver to hire a fleet from Genoa and Pisa and pay an army for a second southern campaign ^[4]. The episode also strengthened his hand in Germany, where princes who had flirted with rebellion, including the Welf party allied to Richard, found their English paymaster neutralized ^[1].

The campaign of 1194 was swift. Naples, which had defied him three years earlier, opened its gates; Salerno, which had surrendered Constance to his enemies, was stormed and sacked as a warning ^[4]. By autumn the mainland was won, and Palermo submitted with little resistance. On Christmas Day 1194 Henry was crowned king of Sicily in Palermo cathedral, uniting the empire and the Norman kingdom in one person ^[1].

One day later, on December 26, 1194, Constance gave birth to their only child in the small town of Jesi in the March of Ancona. The empress was forty, and to silence doubters she is reported to have given birth publicly under a tent in the town square; the boy, the future emperor Frederick II, would become one of the most remarkable rulers of the Middle Ages ^[6]. Days after the coronation Henry announced the discovery of a conspiracy among the Sicilian nobility and had many arrested and deported to Germany, along with the Norman royal treasure ^[4].

At the peak of his power Henry pursued projects on a Mediterranean scale. He asserted overlordship in ways his predecessors had only imagined: the kings of Cyprus and of Cilician Armenia accepted crowns under his authority, and he planned a great crusade to the East funded by Sicilian wealth ^[2]. Among Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor achievements, contemporaries counted this reach toward the eastern Mediterranean as much as the Sicilian conquest itself. In Germany he floated the Erbreichsplan, a proposal to convert the elective German monarchy into a hereditary one. The princes and the papacy resisted, and in 1196 he settled for the election of the infant Frederick as king of the Romans instead ^[1].

Henry's marriage to Constance was a political construction that carried heavy personal costs. Eleven years his senior and raised in the sophisticated Norman court of Palermo, Constance watched her husband's men dismantle her family's kingdom, and later sources report tension between them, particularly over his severity toward Sicilians ^[4]. The couple had the one son, born when hope of children had nearly passed.

A less expected side of the emperor survives in verse. Three Middle High German love songs, or Minnelieder, are attributed to him in medieval song collections, most famously the illuminated Codex Manesse, where he appears as "Kaiser Heinrich" at the head of the anthology ^[3]. One lyric weighs the crown against the beloved and claims he would rather lose the crown; whether or not every attribution is secure, the tradition placed a reigning emperor among the founding voices of German courtly song, which is why his occupations are recorded as both monarch and writer ^[3].

In person he was, by report of chroniclers, slight of build, serious, fluent in Latin, and cold in judgment. Admirers praised his intelligence and energy; critics, especially in Sicily and England, remembered his harshness and his willingness to hold a crusader for ransom ^[2].

The final two years of the reign were consumed by the crusade project and by Sicilian resistance. Henry took the cross in 1195 and spent great effort recruiting German princes for an expedition to the Holy Land, the campaign now called the Crusade of 1197; contingents began sailing east from Messina in that year ^[2].

Sicily, however, would not stay quiet. In the spring of 1197 a serious conspiracy against German rule broke out, and some sources implicated the empress Constance herself, though her involvement remains uncertain ^[4]. Henry's reprisals were brutal even by the standards of the age: rebel leaders were executed with deliberate cruelty, and the pretender Jordan Lupin is said to have been killed with a burning crown fixed to his head, a story repeated by chroniclers hostile to the emperor ^[4].

While hunting near Messina in the late summer, Henry fell ill, probably with malaria, though chills contracted on the hunt and even rumors of poison circulated ^[1]. He died at Messina on September 28, 1197, aged thirty one, with his crusade barely launched and his son not yet three years old. He was buried in Palermo cathedral, where his porphyry tomb still stands beside those of Constance and Frederick II ^[6].

Any Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor biography has to reckon with how quickly his structure collapsed. Within months of his death Constance repudiated German rule in Sicily, the crusade dissolved, and Germany split into a civil war between Henry's brother Philip of Swabia and the Welf Otto of Brunswick that lasted a decade ^[1]. The union of empire and Sicily that he forged became the central problem of thirteenth century politics, feared by every pope and pursued by his son.

That son is the largest part of the legacy. Frederick II inherited both claims, and his long duel with the papacy grew directly from the encirclement Henry had created in 1194 ^[6]. Historians have long debated the counterfactual: had Henry lived to fifty, the hereditary empire he sketched in the Erbreichsplan might have changed the constitutional history of Germany, which instead remained an elective monarchy until its end ^[2].

Modern scholarship treats him as one of the most capable and most ruthless of medieval emperors, a ruler who accomplished more by thirty one than most monarchs manage in a lifetime, yet who governed through fear in his newest kingdom and left no settled order behind ^[2]. The poems under his name in the Codex Manesse add a softer footnote, keeping the conqueror of Sicily present in histories of German literature as well as of German power ^[3].