CONRAD III, Emperor. - Duke of Franconia, nephew of Henry V and brother of Frederick of Swabia, representative of the Salian tradition and party, to whom the Diet of Mainz in 1125 preferred the candidate of the high clergy, Lothair of Saxony. On 18 Dec. 1127, however, the party of the Hohenstaufen proclaimed C. king of Germany; and he turned at once toward Italy, to make there a solid base of resistance. Milan welcomed him and the archbishop Anselm della Pusterla, on 29 June 1128, crowned him king of Italy. But the hostility of Honorius II and then also, once the schism arose, of Anacletus II, and the fierce rivalry stirred up by Milan, made C.'s situation precarious, and forced him in the autumn of 1130 to return to Germany. For a few more years the Hohenstaufen, strong in Bavarian and Swabian support, were able to hold out against Lothair; then Frederick toward the end of 1134 and C. in 1135 had to yield, to contribute at the Diets of Bamberg, Merseburg, Mühlhausen to the renewed power of Lothair, and finally to take part in Lothair's second expedition to Italy in 1136-37.
When Lothair died on the return journey, on 3 Dec. 1137, C. was elected king in Germany at the Diet of Koblenz (7 March 1138). The struggles against the duke of Bavaria at once provoked the split of Germany into the two parties, Guelph (Bavarian) and Ghibelline (Swabian), and despite slight external successes in Bohemia and Poland, they showed the weakness of the central power, and furthermore prevented C., when Innocent II appealed to him against the democratic revolution of Rome, from descending into the peninsula for the coronation and the customary settlement of Italian affairs. Notable negotiations took place in those years between Manuel Comnenus, emperor of the East, and C. which, without resolving the conflicts between the two "Roman emperors", nevertheless led, as already under Lothair, to an anti-Norman understanding and to the preparation, animated by St. Bernard, of a new Crusade. C. took part in it in person after having taken the cross at Christmas of 1146. Following the land route, he crossed the Bosphorus with the intention of reaching the Holy Land through Asia Minor, exposing himself, besides the difficulties of the march, to the assaults of the Seljuk Turks. The army, for the most part, scattered: only a small nucleus was able to return with C. to Constantinople and await there, in order to resume the enterprise, the arrival of the French led by Louis VII. He reached Jerusalem by sea, but the scarcity of successes after so much sacrifice and so many losses discouraged C., who in 1148 returned to Germany.
Amid the renewal of the struggles with the Guelphs, C. did not neglect the preparations for the ever-postponed descent into Italy, but on 25 Feb. 1152 he died, leaving to his nephew and heir, Frederick Barbarossa, the path opened to the strengthening of imperial authority.
Bibliography4 works
Pier Fausto Palumbo