He enters history beneath iron banners and in the glow of ceremonial fires: a tall, broad man with a beard that catches torchlight like copper. To his allies he is Fredericus, a restorer of order. To his enemies he is the storm north of the Alps. To posterity he becomes Frederick I “Barbarossa”—the red-bearded emperor who spent nearly four decades trying to make the sprawling patchwork of the Holy Roman Empire act like a single state.
His reign (1152–1190) is a long, determined argument that law and ritual, managed with steel, can hold together a world that prefers to fly apart.
This is his story: how a Swabian duke became emperor; how he fought communes in Italy and magnates in Germany; how he sparred with popes and bargained with princes; and how his last campaign—the Third Crusade—ended suddenly in a river, leaving behind not only a legend, but a template for medieval statecraft.
A Prince between two houses
Frederick was born around 1122 into a divided world and a divided aristocracy. His father, Frederick II, Duke of Swabia, was a Hohenstaufen—a pillar of imperial authority in southern Germany. His mother, Judith of Bavaria, belonged to the rival Welf family, whose power stretched across Bavaria and Saxony.
That parentage was a political miracle: it gave the young duke kinship ties to both camps in a bitter German rivalry. When his uncle Conrad III (a Hohenstaufen) took the German throne in 1138, the teenager learned the rhythms of itinerant kingship—circuiting among courts, holding diets, brokering feuds—while watching how quickly authority could drain from a ruler who lacked money, allies, or luck.
Frederick’s early fame came not from decrees but from campaigning in the Second Crusade (1147–1149), where Conrad’s army marched into Anatolia and suffered. The crusade failed; the lesson endured. Great projects require supplies, communications, and clear lines of command—an insight Frederick would never forget.
In 1152 Conrad died, and with unusual speed German princes elected Duke Frederick of Swabia as King of the Romans (the German king who was heir to the empire). He was crowned at Aachen, Charlemagne’s old seat, then moved immediately to the task that would define him: rebuilding imperial authority across the German lands and in the wealthier, more combustible cities of northern Italy.
Program of a new king: arbitration at home, ambition in Italy
The empire Frederick inherited was less a unitary state than a negotiated space. German dukes held vast regional power. Bishops and abbots controlled lands, courts, and tolls. Imperial prestige was real—but often abstract. Frederick’s first move was practical: be seen, make settlements, reward loyalty, and reshape the map with careful grants.
He mended quarrels among princes, confirmed rights where it cost little, and tightened them where it mattered. The strategy worked in part because he could offer something no duke could: recognition, titles, and legitimacy that flowed from a crown.
But the revenue and leverage he needed lay where Roman emperors had always looked—Italy—with its minting cities, busy roads, and long memory of Roman law. That would be the furnace for his ambitions—and the place that often burned him.
Rome, Milan, and the law of empire
In 1154 Frederick led his first expedition into Italy. He made peace with Pope Adrian IV and was crowned Emperor in Rome in 1155, but not before Roman communal politics boiled over and forced him into street fighting around St. Peter’s. The message was plain: in Italy, legitimacy wore a miter—but muscle decided who walked the streets.
The deeper struggle, however, ran through Lombardy, where rising communes such as Milan, Cremona, Pavia, and Piacenza financed trade, minted coins, and grew confident enough to negotiate (or defy) emperors. To Frederick, these cities were imperial vassals owing regalian rights—tolls, roads, markets, coinage, justice. To the cities, those rights had become local property.
He chose to answer not only with armies but with law. On his second Italian campaign, at the Diet of Roncaglia (1158), he summoned jurists from the University of Bologna, the leading school of revived Roman law, and asked them to define the emperor’s ancient regalia.
Their learned opinions, couched in Justinianic language, handed him a legal toolkit: the emperor possessed final authority over tolls, roads, markets, mints, feudal appeals, and high justice. With scholarly glosses in hand, he appointed imperial podestà (governors) in Lombard cities and moved to collect what law now said was his.
The cities resisted. Milan, proud and rich, became the emblem of that resistance.
The destruction of Milan—and the price of victory
The war against Milan spanned years and several campaigns. Frederick’s forces made and unmade sieges, cut roads, and recruited rivals of Milan to choke the city’s trade. In 1162, after a grinding struggle, Milan capitulated.
The penalty was spectacular and chilling: the city was demolished—walls leveled, buildings pulled down, population dispersed to nearby villages. It looked like a triumph; it behaved like a warning. But it also sowed a seed of common cause among the Lombard communes. Destroying a city did not destroy the habits that built it: collective wealth, mutual defense, and a fierce sense of corporate honor.
Even in victory, Frederick had to manage another front: his relationship with the papacy. With Adrian IV he had managed an awkward peace; with Alexander III, elected in 1159 amid a contested papal election, peace would be harder to find.
The schism: emperor vs. pope
A split among cardinals produced two rival popes in 1159: Alexander III, supported by much of Western Christendom, and Victor IV, backed by Frederick. The emperor believed he was defending proper electoral order and papal responsibility to the broader Church and empire; Alexander saw imperial interference in spiritual affairs.
The schism widened into a struggle for Europe’s conscience. Kings and bishops chose sides. Councils and embassies multiplied.
Frederick’s most forceful spokesman was Rainald of Dassel, Archbishop of Cologne and imperial chancellor—a brilliant, hard-edged statesman who argued that the emperor, crowned in Rome, had not only temporal superiority but a say in the papacy’s political conduct.
Alexander III refused to bend. Meanwhile, Italian cities, alarmed by imperial commissioners and by Milan’s fate, organized.
In 1167 they formed the Lombard League, a defensive alliance that newly founded Alessandria—named pointedly for Alexander III—soon joined. Frederick besieged it and other League towns; disease ripped through his camp; opportunity slipped. Then came Legnano.
Legnano (1176): a check in the plain
On 29 May 1176, Lombard League forces met the imperial army near Legnano. Accounts are colored by civic pride and later myth, but the essentials are clear: the League fought around its carroccio (a sacred war-wagon bearing city banners), held firm against imperial cavalry charges, and repulsed Frederick’s assault. The emperor himself was unhorsed; rumors said he had fallen. He had not—but the aura of invincibility had.
Defeat forced diplomacy. Frederick sought peace with Alexander III and with the cities. The Peace of Venice (1177)ended the schism from his side: he recognized Alexander III as pope, restored the Roman commune’s autonomy under papal overlordship, and set a truce with the League. It was not surrender so much as an admission that Italy could not be ruled by force alone.
A few years later, the Peace of Constance (1183) made the settlement durable: the Lombard cities retained communal liberties—their own consuls, courts, and local jurisdiction—while acknowledging the emperor’s formal overlordship and paying certain regalian dues. The legal framework Frederick had claimed at Roncaglia survived in part; the practice of urban autonomy survived in whole.
The result was classic medieval compromise: layered authority, ceremonial deference, and a great deal of practical self-government.
Burgundy, Beatrice, and the western horizon
Frederick was not only an Italian strategist. In 1156 he married Beatrice of Burgundy, heiress to the County of Burgundy (Franche-Comté). The match brought him influence west of the Rhine, access to Alpine passes, and a coronation as King of Burgundy later in his reign.
It also linked him more closely to the Capetian orbit without entangling him in French vassalage. The Hohenstaufen horizon, thanks to Beatrice, now stretched cleanly from Swabia to the Jura, giving the emperor leverage over transalpine trade and diplomacy.
Germany: taming the great duke
While Italy consumed headlines, the empire’s German heartland remained Frederick’s power base—and his problem. No magnate embodied that problem like Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and (after 1156) Duke of Bavaria as well. A Welf prince of enormous resources and ambition, Henry built cities (Munich owes much to his policy), cleared lands, and ruled the north with a king’s confidence.
For years, Frederick and Henry balanced one another: the emperor needed Henry’s military strength; Henry needed imperial favor to cement his ducal projects. The balance cracked after the Italian reverses.
Frederick asked his great vassal to bring Saxon troops south; Henry refused, calculating that a decisive imperial defeat would weaken the Hohenstaufen more than a Saxon absence would weaken himself.
Frederick could not let that calculus stand. At imperial courts culminating in the Diet of Gelnhausen (1180), princes judged Henry the Lion guilty of contumacy. Frederick banished him, stripped him of his great fiefs, and partitioned Saxony: the mighty duchy was broken into smaller principalities; Bavaria went to Otto of Wittelsbach, founding the Wittelsbach dynasty that would rule there for centuries.
Henry submitted, went briefly into exile in England (he had married Matilda, daughter of Henry II of England), and later returned as a lesser, still wealthy lord.
The deposition was ruthless—and effective. It curbed over-mighty subjects, rewarded allies, and signaled that imperial justice, amplified by a consensus of princes, could still bite. It also re-wrote Germany’s political map into a mosaic more manageable from the throne.
Rituals of rule: law, ceremony, and the itinerant court
Frederick’s empire ran on movement. He did not sit in a capital; he carried the capital with him—an itinerant courtmoving from diet to diet (assemblies) at Worms, Mainz, Nuremberg, Regensburg, and dozens more.
There he heard suits between bishops and dukes, confirmed city privileges, arbitrated border disputes, arranged marriages, and took hostages in the old way that made peace tangible.
He cared about form—about the choreography that turned authority into habit. At Besançon (1157), a papal chancellor’s phrase—beneficium—nearly sparked war when imperial lords read it as “fief” (implying the emperor held his crown from the pope).
The uproar told Frederick how much his princes cared about the dignity of the crown—and how quickly language could erode it. He used charters, seals, and public oaths to underline the emperor’s special place among rulers: first among equals in Germany, the anointed protector of the Church in Italy, the sworn keeper of roads, coinage, and peace.
His chancery, staffed by sharp minds like Rainald of Dassel and Christian of Mainz, issued documents that read like administrative poetry: lists of regalia, formulas for appeals, careful confirmations of old rights that simultaneously claimed new ones.
He was not a bureaucrat in the modern sense; he was a medieval ruler who understood that power travels best in legal clothes.
A continental diplomacy
Frederick’s reach was European. He negotiated with the Byzantine Empire (Manuel I Komnenos and later emperors), alternately cooperating and competing for influence in the Balkans and over Adriatic cities.
He bargained with the Norman kings of Sicily, whose grip on southern Italy made them the hinge of any Roman policy. He worked civilly with England and France when it suited him, mindful that the Capetians were consolidating in the Île-de-France while Henry II and his sons built an Angevin sprawl from Scotland to the Pyrenees.
His marriage diplomacy had long afterlives. The most consequential was arranged for his son: in 1186, Henry VImarried Constance of Sicily, heiress to the Sicilian kingdom.
The match looked like a triumph of imperial design: one generation later, the Hohenstaufen would inherit southern Italy and Sicily, turning the emperor’s old southern problem into a family possession. The plan, brilliant on paper, would also entangle his heirs in endless Mediterranean storms—but that belonged to the next reign.
The Third Crusade: a final march
In 1187, the unthinkable happened: Jerusalem fell to Saladin after the battle of Hattin. Christendom reeled. Frederick took the cross at the Diet of Mainz (1188), a great public vow witnessed by princes and prelates.
He was an old man by the standards of the age—well into his sixties—but his energy remained fierce. The Third Crusade would be his last project and, if successful, his greatest.
He chose the hard road: overland through Hungary, along the Danube, across Byzantine lands, and into Anatolia. Relations with Emperor Isaac II Angelos in Constantinople were strained; the Byzantines feared a massive German army camped on their soil as much as they hoped it would strike Saladin. After tense negotiations and some skirmishing, Frederick crossed the straits into Asia Minor in 1190.
There the old campaigner showed his quality. He defeated the Seljuk Turks in open fighting and took Iconium (Konya), a rare and difficult achievement deep in enemy country. Morale soared. The march turned south, toward Cilicia, where he hoped to link up with fleets and supplies. Then came the river.
Contemporary and later sources agree that Saladin took Frederick Barbarossa’s overland advance very seriously, especially after the Germans smashed the Seljuqs and seized Iconium (Konya) in May 1190. Muslim and Latin narratives note real anxiety in the Ayyubid camp and redeployments to contain a possible German push down through Cilicia into northern Syria.
What Saladin knew (and why he was worried)
- A huge, disciplined army was coming overland. News filtered to Saladin through a well-oiled information network (merchants, scouts, embassies, chancery letters). After the German victories at Philomelion and Iconium, Ayyubid leaders feared the Germans could break into Syria—sources even say Saladin was “seriously alarmed” by the emperor’s approach.
- He adjusted deployments. Accounts of the Siege of Acre (1189–91) indicate that reports of Frederick’s approach led Saladin to bring in substantial forces and to manage a “double siege” (surrounding Acre and also the Crusader camp) while guarding against a German descent from the north—evidence that the German threat shaped his troop movements.
- He tracked events in Anatolia. Arabic chronicling (via later compilations) preserves that the Seljuq sultan Kilij Arslan explained to Saladin why he failed to stop the Germans crossing Asia Minor—which only makes sense if Saladin expected updates and cared about those fronts.
What Frederick knew (and signaled)
- He knew exactly who Saladin was—and drew a line. Frederick had earlier been on civil terms with Saladin, but in 1188 he sent an ultimatum demanding the restoration of conquests (including the True Cross) and warning of war if refused—clear proof that both men were thinking about each other before swords crossed. Modern editors note some letters in the dossier are probably forgeries, but the ultimatum itself and the diplomatic posture are widely reported.
- Operationally, he planned to hit fast overland. As a veteran of the Second Crusade, Frederick chose the Danube–Anatolia route, negotiated passages, and then showed combat power in the field—facts Saladin’s side learned in real time and reacted to.
By early summer 1190, Saladin had good reason to be concerned: a formidable imperial army had broken the main barrier in Anatolia and was approaching the Levant. The sudden drowning of Frederick in the Saleph (Göksu) on 10 June 1190 transformed that threat overnight—Muslim writers later framed it as providential deliverance—which is itself a measure of how seriously his advance had been taken.
On 10 June 1190, while crossing the Saleph (Göksu) River, Frederick fell into the water and drowned. Accounts vary—was it a sudden cold shock, a heavy armor moment, a misstep in swift current?—but the result was the same.
The emperor was gone. The army he had personally disciplined and inspired wavered, leaderless; many turned back. His son Frederick of Swabia carried a remnant on toward the Holy Land, but the great German effort had lost its heart.
Medieval sources debate what happened to his body. The heat made transport nearly impossible; parts were interred along the route—Tarsus, Antioch, and finally Tyre appear in the traditions—an unsettling end for a ruler who had tried to organize everything he touched.
What he built—and what he could not
Frederick Barbarossa did not “unify Germany” in the modern sense. He did something more realistic for his century: he re-centered the crown. At home, the downfall of Henry the Lion and the distribution of great fiefs to new ducal houses(like the Wittelsbachs) curbed the tendency of any single magnate to rival the king.
He refined the grammar of rule—diets, charters, and judicial rituals—that made imperial authority legible to thousands of local lords.
In Italy, he learned—after hard lessons—that no emperor could simply abolish communal self-government without breaking the economy that made the region worth ruling. The Peace of Constance left the cities powerful but plugged into an imperial framework.
In church politics, he fought a pope to a draw he later transformed into cooperation, acknowledging Alexander III and normalizing relations after Venice.
As a symbol, he was unmatched. The combination of martial prowess, legal theater, and public piety made him the archetype of the high medieval emperor. Long after his death, German folklore worked him into the Kyffhäuser legend: the sleeping emperor in a mountain, beard growing through a stone table, destined to wake when the nation needed him.
Myth chooses wisely. It is no accident that the legend preferred Barbarossa to quieter emperors; he embodied the will to order that a fractured political culture felt but could not always achieve.
Failures, limits, and the human core
A fair account must tally the limits. He did not force Italy into obedience; the attempt helped forge the Lombard Leagueagainst him. He backed antipopes, prolonging a schism that exhausted churchmen and laymen alike.
His destruction of Milan was a savage act whose political return proved short. His deposition of Henry the Lion, while necessary in imperial arithmetic, also hardened Welf-Hohenstaufen enmity that would echo into the next century.
And in the East, the Third Crusade without him lost its German mass; the greatest army of the expedition became a memory with a single misstep in a river.
Yet behind these limits stands a human figure that medieval chroniclers liked to describe in detail. He could be jovial in camp and terrible in anger; he loved the hunt and the formality of feasts; he prized loyal service and punished treachery; he trusted ritual not as empty pomp but as architecture for a fragile world.
Modern readers may smile at the splendor of diets and coronations; to Frederick, they were work tools. If everyone agreed on where to stand and when to bow, perhaps they might also agree on who held the bridge toll and what coin should be taken at the gate.
The long shadow
Barbarossa’s most enduring effects outlasted his banners. The Wittelsbachs in Bavaria and the Ascanian and Brandenburg settlements in the former Saxon sphere re-shaped the German political landscape for centuries.
His willingness to think in Roman law—to ask jurists what the crown could claim—helped seed the tradition of imperial jurisprudence that later emperors and city councils alike would exploit.
His son Henry VI carried the Hohenstaufen project forward, fusing the imperial title with claims on Sicily; his grandson Frederick II would make southern Italy a laboratory for centralized royal governance.
None of that would have been possible without the prestige and habits established by the red-bearded grandfather who proved that an emperor could still command respect from the Alps to the Baltic.
Even the Peace of Constance—so often read as a concession—quietly confirmed the idea that the emperor had legal rights in Italy, even if administered lightly.
And the Peace of Venice that ended the schism preserved a world in which popes and emperors could quarrel without destroying each other—no small achievement in a century that had seen both sides regularly push to existential brinkmanship.
Portrait in closing
Imagine him once more, on the march in Lombardy or along the Danube: a king who believed that forms could tame forces, that a properly staged assembly could puncture a feud’s logic, that learned words from Bologna could turn tolls and roads into imperial arteries again. Sometimes he was wrong; sometimes the world bent to him.
He died, not in a palace, but in motion—crossing. It suits him. Frederick Barbarossa lived as a bridge between tribal and legal Europe, between feudal might and written rule.
His story is the high medieval wager that power, wrapped in law and performed in public, can hold a wide realm together long enough for prosperity to grow.
For almost forty years, he made that wager every season. The coins he struck, the charters he sealed, the princes he humbled, the cities he bargained with, the pope he fought and then greeted as the head of Christendom—all belonged to a single argument: that there was still such a thing as empire in the West, and that it could be made to work.
It is hard to say he proved it; it is just as hard to say he failed. He left behind a continent that still spoke the language of empire—and a legend that refused to die. That, for a medieval emperor, is not a bad epitaph.
