Frederick Barbarossa

Frederick I, known as Barbarossa, "red beard", was king of Germany from 1152 and emperor of the Holy Roman Empire from 1155 until his death in 1190. A member of the Staufen family, he spent much of his reign trying to restore imperial authority in northern Italy, which led to a long conflict with the cities of Lombardy and with Pope Alexander III. He drowned in Anatolia while leading an army on the Third Crusade, and later legend turned him into a sleeping emperor who would one day return to save Germany.

Frederick was born in December 1122, the son of Frederick II, duke of Swabia, of the Staufen or Hohenstaufen family, and Judith, a daughter of the Welf duke of Bavaria. The Staufen and the Welfs were the two most powerful rival families in Germany, and his mixed descent made him a natural candidate to reconcile them. He became duke of Swabia in 1147 and that year went on the Second Crusade with his uncle, King Conrad III. When Conrad died in February 1152, the princes passed over the king's young son and on 4 March elected Frederick at Frankfurt. He was crowned at Aachen five days later.

The nickname Barbarossa comes from Italy. Contemporaries described his beard as reddish, but the name was not used in medieval Germany, where he was simply Emperor Frederick.

Frederick's guiding idea was the honour of the empire, the restoration of the rights and dignity that he believed earlier emperors, from Charlemagne and Otto I onwards, had held. In Germany he settled the quarrel with the Welfs by giving his cousin Henry the Lion, already duke of Saxony, the duchy of Bavaria as well, and compensated the previous holder by raising Austria to a duchy in 1156. In the same year he married Beatrice, heiress of the county of Burgundy, adding a large territory on the empire's western edge.

His first expedition to Italy ended with his coronation as emperor by Pope Adrian IV in Rome on 18 June 1155. Relations with the papacy were tense from the start. At an assembly at Besançon in 1157, a papal letter seemed to describe the empire as a beneficium, which could mean either a favour or a fief granted by the pope, and Frederick's chancellor, Rainald of Dassel, made the most of the insult. Around this time the phrase "holy empire" begins to appear in imperial documents, asserting that the emperor's authority came directly from God.

The cities of northern Italy had grown rich and largely self-governing, and they had taken over many rights that had once belonged to the crown. At the Diet of Roncaglia in 1158, lawyers trained in Roman law at Bologna helped Frederick define those royal rights, including tolls, mints and the appointment of officials, and he set about reclaiming them. Milan, the leading city, resisted. Frederick besieged and destroyed the neighbouring town of Crema in 1160, and after a long siege Milan surrendered in March 1162; its population was expelled and much of the city was demolished. In 1164 Rainald took relics believed to be those of the Three Magi from Milan to Cologne, where they are still kept in the cathedral.

The disputed papal election of 1159 deepened the conflict. Most of Europe recognised Alexander III, but Frederick backed a series of rival popes, and Alexander excommunicated him. In 1167 Frederick captured Rome, only for an epidemic, probably malaria or dysentery, to devastate his army and kill Rainald and many leading nobles. The same year the cities formed the Lombard League, which rebuilt Milan and founded a new fortress town named Alessandria after the pope. On 29 May 1176, at Legnano near Milan, the League's infantry and cavalry defeated Frederick's army; he was unhorsed and for a time thought dead.

Frederick changed course. At Venice in 1177 he recognised Alexander III as pope and was formally reconciled with him, and a truce with the Lombard cities led to the Peace of Constance in 1183, which left the cities self-governing in return for recognising imperial overlordship. The failure in Italy was partly blamed on Henry the Lion, who had refused to send troops in 1176. Princes who resented Henry's power brought charges against him, and in 1180 he was stripped of his duchies and later went into exile in England. Saxony and Bavaria were broken up, a decision that strengthened the territorial princes at the expense of any single great duke.

Frederick's later years were a high point of Staufen prestige. In 1184 he held a famous court festival at Mainz to knight his sons, and in 1186 his son Henry married Constance, heiress to the Norman kingdom of Sicily, a match that would later bring southern Italy under Staufen rule.

After Saladin took Jerusalem in 1187, Frederick took the cross. In May 1189 he left Regensburg with one of the largest armies of the Crusades, marched overland through Hungary and the Balkans, forced his way through tense relations with the Byzantine Empire, and crossed into Anatolia. In May 1190 his army defeated the Seljuk Turks and took their capital, Konya. On 10 June 1190, aged 67, he drowned in the river Saleph, today the Göksu, in southern Anatolia; the sources disagree over whether he was bathing or crossing and whether he fell from his horse or suffered a heart attack in the cold water. Without him most of the army broke up and went home, leaving Richard I of England and Philip II of France to carry on the crusade. His remains were buried in several places, including Antioch, and their final resting place is unknown.

In the sixteenth century, a legend that had first gathered around his grandson Frederick II became attached to Barbarossa: that the emperor was not dead but asleep inside the Kyffhäuser mountain in Thuringia, his beard growing through a stone table, waiting to return when Germany needed him. In the nineteenth century, when Germans longed for a united state, he became a symbol of national greatness, and a vast monument to him and Emperor Wilhelm I was built on the Kyffhäuser in the 1890s. In 1941 Nazi Germany gave his name to Operation Barbarossa, its invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World War.

Historians now see him less as a national hero than as a capable, energetic ruler who governed through alliances with the princes, and whose Italian ambitions repeatedly ran up against the wealth of the cities and the authority of the papacy. His reign left the cities of northern Italy more independent and the princes of Germany more powerful than before.