Frederick Barbarossa

Biographies of the famous medieval emperor seem to be like buses. One waits a very long time for one to appear, and then two come in relatively quick succession. Knut Görich published the first full scholarly biography in German for many years in 2011, and now John Freed has produced an equally massive study in English. This will surely become the standard work on this important reign for anglophone readers, superseding the 1969 book of Peter Munz—a work that was never entirely satisfactory, given its eccentric and perverse central thesis (rev. ante, vol. lxxxvi [1971], 73–8). Freed’s biography has benefited not just from Görich’s book, although he has certainly taken the latter’s arguments fully into account, but especially from the publication of the MGH edition of the emperor’s charters, completed in 1990, of which he makes full and careful use. The picture of the emperor and his reign is revisionist. The patriotic cliché of this era as the high-point of imperial authority in the Middle Ages, before the crisis and civil war of 1198 initiated a swift and irrevocable decline, is firmly rejected. (There is a very interesting appendix which discusses Barbarossa’s later reputation from the Middle Ages to the present day, which not only medievalists may wish to read.) Freed, however, sees the emperor’s authority as much diminished over the course of his reign, the key moment of which was the epidemic which ravaged his army in Rome in the summer of 1167; after this, not only did his Italian policy unravel disastrously but so too, albeit more subtly, did his power within Germany. Although Barbarossa took advantage of the fatalities at Rome greatly to extend his (and later his sons’) property holding, especially in Swabia, the range of his authority contracted. After 1167, his itinerary was increasingly confined to south Germany, and he rarely went north of the River Main. Attendance at his court diminished significantly as well: fewer bishops, princes and counts, and more of his own ministeriales witnessed his charters. Even the Swabian bishops attended less frequently, because, Freed suggests, his growing territorial base in the duchy caused them to view him less as a benevolent overlord and more as a local competitor. In common with Görich, Freed sees the fall of Henry the Lion not as an assertion of the emperor’s power against a dangerous and over-mighty prince but rather as a sign that Barbarossa was manipulated by the north German princes who hated and feared Henry. While the good relations that had once prevailed between the emperor and his cousin had undoubtedly cooled (not least when Barbarossa secured their uncle Welf VI’s inheritance for his sons), he may not have wanted Henry’s downfall to be quite so complete as it was; in the event, he had little choice, and it was the princes who gained—not the emperor

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