CORRADO III, EMPEROR. — Duke of Franconia, nephew of Henry V and brother of Frederick of Swabia, representative of the Salian tradition and party, to which the Diet of Mainz in 1125 preferred the candidate of the high clergy, Lothair of Saxony. The Staufen party, however, on 18 December 1127, proclaimed Conrad king of Germany; and he soon turned toward Italy, to establish a firm base of resistance there. At Milan, in the church of Sant’Ambrogio, and with the archbishop Anselm of Pusteria, on 29 June 1128, he was crowned king of Italy. But the hostility of Honorius II and later, after the schism arose, of Anacletus II, and the fierce rivalry stirred up by Milan, made Conrad’s position precarious and forced him in the autumn of 1130 to return to Germany. For several more years the Staufens, relying on Bavarian and Swabian support, were able to hold out against Lothair; then Frederick at the end of 1134 and Conrad in 1135 had to yield, contributing in the Diets of Bamberg, Merseburg, and Mühlhausen to the renewed power of Lothair and finally taking part in the latter’s second expedition to Italy in 1136–37.
After Lothair’s death on his return, on 3 December 1137, Conrad was elected king in Germany at the Diet of Coblenz (7 March 1138). The struggles against the duke of Bavaria soon split Germany into the two parties of the Guelfs (Bavarian) and the Ghibellines (Swabian), and despite slight external successes in Bohemia and Poland, they revealed the weakness of the central power. They also prevented Conrad, when Innocent II appealed to him against the democratic revolution in Rome, from descending into the peninsula for his coronation and the usual settlement of Italian affairs. Notable negotiations took place in those years between Manuel Comnenus, emperor of the East, and Conrad, which, without resolving the conflicts between the two “Roman emperors,” led, as under Lothair, to an anti-Norman understanding and to the preparation, inspired by St. Bernard, of a new crusade. Conrad took part in person after taking the cross at Christmas 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 attacks of the Seljuk Turks. The army, for the most part, dispersed; only a small contingent was able to return with Conrad to Constantinople and await there, for the resumption of the enterprise, the arrival of the French led by Louis VII. By sea he reached Jerusalem, but the scarcity of successes after so much sacrifice and loss discouraged Conrad, who in 1148 returned to Germany.
Amid the renewal of the struggles with the Guelfs, Conrad did not neglect preparations for the long-postponed descent into Italy, but on 25 February 1152 he died, leaving to his nephew and heir, Frederick Barbarossa, the path open to the strengthening of imperial authority.