Frederick Barbarossa

Frederick Barbarossa was born in mid-December 1122 in Hagenau in Swabia. He combined the bloodlines of the two great rival German houses — Hohenstaufen on his father's side and Welf on his mother's — which made him an acceptable compromise candidate for the prince-electors when his uncle, King Conrad III, died without naming an effective heir. He had already fought on the Second Crusade in 1147, surviving a flash flood that wiped out much of the main German camp near Adrianople and witnessing the failed siege of Damascus the following year.

Elected German king at Frankfurt on 4 March 1152, he inherited a kingdom in which royal authority had been hollowed out for twenty-five years by the Investiture Controversy. The imperial title, in the words of Norman Cantor, was little more than a propaganda slogan. Frederick devoted his reign to restoring it. He concluded the Treaty of Constance with Pope Eugene III in 1153, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Adrian IV in Rome on 18 June 1155, and on the same day suppressed a riot in which more than a thousand Romans died.

Italy defined his reign. Between 1154 and 1186 he led six campaigns south of the Alps. At the Diet of Roncaglia in 1158, drawing on lawyers trained in the newly revived Corpus Juris Civilis, he claimed the regalia — coinage, tolls, fortifications — for the crown, a moment historians regard as foundational for the medieval recovery of Roman law. But his political imagination was matched by ruthless practice: in March 1162, after Milan rose against him a second time, he razed much of the city and dispersed its population into four villages, an act that stained his reputation for centuries. His support of three antipopes against Alexander III, who excommunicated him in 1160, deepened the rupture with the Church.

The turning point came at Legnano on 29 May 1176, where the citizen infantry of the Lombard League, supported by Henry the Lion's refusal to send Saxon reinforcements, defeated the imperial army. Wounded and briefly believed dead, Frederick had no option but to negotiate. At the Peace of Venice (1177) he knelt before Alexander III; at the Peace of Constance (1183) he conceded the right of Lombard cities to elect their own magistrates while extracting oaths of loyalty in return. The settlement is now read by historians such as Knut Görich as the act of a pragmatist who could absorb defeat and rebuild his honor imperii on different terms.

In Germany he punished Henry the Lion for the refusal of 1176, having him tried in absentia in 1180, stripping him of Saxony and Bavaria and redistributing the duchies among rival princes — an outcome that arguably accelerated the long-term fragmentation of the empire into territorial principalities. He also founded mints, granted toll exemptions to Rhineland merchants, and presided over a ninefold increase in German coinage workshops between 1152 and 1197.

News of Saladin's victory at Hattin (1187) and the fall of Jerusalem moved him to take the cross in March 1188 at Mainz. His Third Crusade was, by contemporary judgment, "the most meticulously planned and organized" expedition of its era. Some 12,000-15,000 men, including 3,000-4,000 knights, left Regensburg in May 1189 by the overland route. After defeating the Seljuks at Iconium, Frederick drowned on 10 June 1190 while crossing the Saleph River in Cilicia. The exact cause — heart attack, exhaustion, fall from his horse weighed down by armour — is contested in the medieval sources. Without him most of the German army melted away; only a third reached Acre.

His legacy is genuinely double-sided. On the credit side: the revival of Roman law as a tool of state, the Landfriede peace ordinances that curbed feudal private warfare, the expansion of imperial chancery practice with a new professional class of jurists trained at Bologna, and a network of mints — twelve royal foundries he established personally — that monetised the German economy and underwrote the trans-Alpine trade. He granted toll exemptions to merchants from Aachen, Gelnhausen, Hagenau, Monza, Rome, Pisa and Venice, knitting together a single imperial commercial space. On the debit side: the brutality at Milan in 1162, with the population dispersed into four villages, an act that lived on in Lombard memory for centuries; the 18-year schism with Alexander III that drained both papal and imperial authority; the unresolved succession arrangements that doomed his crusade once he died at the Saleph; and the redistribution of the Welf duchies after 1180, which empowered exactly the territorial princes whose later autonomy hollowed out the empire he tried to rebuild. The most uncomfortable part of his afterlife was political. The Kyffhäuser legend, in which he sleeps under a mountain awaiting Germany's hour of need, was politicised in the 19th-century Risorgimento, in the Wilhelmine empire that built the Kyffhäuser Monument on 18 June 1896 — the anniversary of his coronation — to declare Wilhelm I his reincarnation, and most darkly in 1941 when Hitler attached his name to the invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa). Few medieval rulers carry such complex modern baggage, and historians since the 1970s have spent considerable effort dismantling the romantic-nationalist Frederick to recover the pragmatic, often beleaguered ruler of the contemporary sources.