FEDERICO I Barbarossa, EMPEROR. — Nephew of Corrado III, founder of the power of the duchy of Bavaria, son of Federico of Swabia and of the Bavarian Giuditta, sister of Enrico il Superbo, he ascended the throne on 4 March 1752. Through his will and fortune, he had the merit, by bringing the long crisis of imperial power to an end, of reuniting in himself both branches of German imperialism, joining the house of Franconia and the Guelph house by kinship, and subsequently in political action, and restoring unity to the principle and strength of the Empire.
His very accession to the throne signified the renewed alignment of the German feudal state against the Roman theocracies and the definitive separation of the Empire from the traditional relations that Carlomagno and Ottone I had consecrated with the Church of Rome and that, at the end of the first phase of the Investiture Controversy, the Concordat of Worms had reaffirmed. From his first acts of government—the granting of Bavaria to his uncle Enrico il Leone and the reassertion of royal influence in episcopal elections—F. gave clear signs of the path he would follow without ever deviating from II. In his mind he emphasized the position of Italy within the Empire, seeing in the field of communal discord the best guarantee of a reassertion of imperial power in the peninsula. The profound and extensive crisis of pontifical power, which under Eugenio III had reached a moment of uncertainty and dissatisfaction with the policies hitherto pursued, opened for him the possibility of taking less account than his predecessors had done of the power of the Church of Rome. The road to the South, through a revival of the policy of the Ottonians, was opened to him anew by the hoped-for impossibility of an agreement, against the Empire, between the papacy and the Communes. In Rome itself, the rising voice of Arnaldo da Brescia, together with the resurgence and renewed vitality of the ancient imperial traditions, gave him hope that he might also count on the support of the Roman people against the Pontiff. On the other hand, the Pontiff himself, at the moment of his fiercest struggle with the Roman Commune, promoted an alliance with F. (the Pact of Constance, 1153), offering him the imperial crown in return for the subjugation of Rome and the overthrow of Norman power.
Likewise, the Communes of Upper Italy, driven by the harshness of their struggles, themselves began to request imperial intervention against one another: thus Lodi and Como appealed against Milan, which was surrounded by powerful enemies. And the fatal conflict took shape: between the universalism of the Empire and the particularism of civic autonomies, while the two universal powers—Empire and Church—were unable to reach a sincere agreement, owing to the revival of a rivalry already centuries old, which would lead to the second phase of the grand confrontation.
October 1154: F. descended into Italy, assumed the royal crown at Pavia, and accepted the submission of the founders of Monferrato and of the Communes of the Milanese alliance. But the dominant Commune was Milan, and precisely because its rivals turned to the German king, it turned against him. During that first hour in Italy, F., although he had demonstrated his strength through the destruction of Tortona, Asti, and Chieri, had no time to settle his accounts with Milan. The journey to Rome was more urgent. In the city, where Adriano IV had succeeded Eugenio III, the Pontiff’s situation had greatly improved: the interdict with which the Romans had been struck had led them to abandon Arnaldo da Brescia to his fate. This resulted in relations that were anything but cordial between the German king and the Pontiff. Interest mitigated distrust: F. sacrificed Arnaldo and received the imperial crown in St Peter’s on 10 June 1155. But the Romans’ bold resistance, united against the Emperor in one of the most memorable episodes of resistance and struggle in the history of the city, exhausted the strength of the German army and forced F. to return swiftly to Germany.
If the first descent into Italy had produced only a formal result, with the contested coronation in St Peter’s, while leaving the disappointed Pontiff inclined to seek the necessary balance, security, and peace rather in an agreement with the Normans, in Germany F., with skill and good fortune, was able—though conceding much to the great vassals—to establish the foundations of a solid personal power. Burgundy was joined to the imperial domains through F.’s marriage to Beatrice. But the calm that was settling over the German Kingdom was matched by the agitated state of Italy, now regarded as the Empire’s foremost land, and especially of Lombardy. When F. descended into Italy again in 1158, he was already in violent conflict not only with the civic autonomies but also with the Roman Church, animated by the spirit of initiative of Cardinal Rolando Bandinelli, who would later, as pontiff (Alessandro III), become the Emperor’s fiercest antagonist.
In Lombardy, Milan emerged defeated from the direct confrontation with F. in September 1158. In November, F. was able to convene, on the plains of Roncaglia, the most famous of his diets and, in the Constitutio de regalibus, claim for the Empire all sovereign rights usurped by vassals and Communes. But these imperial claims, even if accepted in principle by the various parties involved, could not fail to become sources of ferocious dissension once they had to be applied in reality. At their foundation, moreover, lay not an abolition but a recognition of the communal constitutions, albeit with clear submission to the Empire regarding the appointment of magistrates. But as soon as the work of the imperial podestàs, appointed as a result of the decisions of Roncaglia, revealed itself to be arbitrary overreach, revolt first broke out in Milan and Genoa.
Already Adriano IV, and then the newly elected Alessandro III, openly abandoned the Emperor, joining forces with the rebellious cities. To restore the balance of his position, F. found no alternative but to introduce schism into the very bosom of the Church, securing the election, against Alessandro, of Vittore IV (Ottaviano di Monticelli). This led him to immerse himself ever more deeply in religious matters, with the convocation of a Council at Pavia, which Alessandro III did not attend. And after the Council, having destroyed Crema, the bulwark of Milan, F. once again turned against the latter and took it by starvation, after a three-year siege, in the spring of 1163. This time the walls and towers were demolished, the city quarters were sacked, and the citizens dispersed. Behind the Teutonic fury, the hatred of the rival cities—Lodi, Pavia, Como, Cremona, and Novara—could finally triumph.
With the destruction of Milan and the severe crisis afflicting papal power, while the schism of Vittore continued under Pasquale III, F. reached the height of his power. He still entertained grand designs: he envisaged the restoration of imperial power in the definitive predominance of Rome and the subjection of the Pontiff, in further territorial expansion in northern and central Europe, and in the revival of the eastern policy of the Ottonians. He had already laid claim to the possessions of the disputed Matildine inheritance, in an act of force that the Church would not forget. From the antipope Pasquale, he had demanded the canonization of Carlomagno, to the glory of imperial authority. Against Alessandro III, returned from exile in France, he directed his military effort; he succeeded in establishing himself in Rome and, in the very Vatican Basilica, where the legitimate Pope had fled to the Normans, installed the antipope, once again receiving the imperial crown from him. But once again resistance remained unbroken, and an epidemic that broke out among his troops forced him to resume the journey beyond the Alps, while he saw around him the collapse of the design for restoring the power of the Empire that he had tenaciously pursued.
Upon the revolt spreading among the cities of the Po plain, Byzantium extended its influence through Venice: Verona placed itself at the head of the league, to which the Lombard Communes adhered. At Pontida, on 7 April 1167, the reconstruction of Milan and the Communes’ unrelenting struggle for their freedom were decided upon, while Alexander III was acclaimed head of the league itself; in his honour, the name Alessandria was given to a new city, built at the confluence of the Trebbia and the Tanaro. The ecclesiastical party also raised its head again in Germany; the great feudal lords were no longer in solidarity with the Emperor, divided from him by Italian policy.
In 1174 F. descended into the peninsula for the third time, laid siege to Alessandria in vain and, after a series of clashes and attempts at peace, was defeated at Legnano on 29 May 1176 by the forces of the free Communes. Only with great difficulty could F. take refuge in Pavia.
The year after Legnano, on 21 July 1177, in Venice, the Emperor and the Pontiff reached an agreement, and a ten-year truce was established with the Communes. Forced to return immediately to Germany by the transformation of Henry the Lion’s attitude into open revolt, he succeeded in defeating him, bringing about the collapse of the power of the Guelph house. And, once again, the great idea of the universal Empire absorbed him, as he attempted with Lucius III what he had not succeeded in doing with Alexander, who had meanwhile died. In 1183, at Constance, the terms of the Venetian agreement were confirmed, and peace was established between the Communes and the Empire. The great fighter seemed by then, as the evening of his life approached, to have been led to abandon his Italian policy when, through a gesture of highly skilful matrimonial diplomacy, he succeeded in grafting the Italian authority of the Empire onto the far more real power of the Normans, marrying his son Henry to the heiress of the Kingdom of Sicily, Constance of Hauteville.
In 1187 Jerusalem fell once more into the hands of the infidels: in the Christian world, minds and forces were being mobilized for a new Crusade. This alone prevented the further recrudescence of a struggle that would have been no less violent in character than in the past. But the Emperor’s life was now drawing to its end: on 10 June 1190 he died on the road to the Holy Land, in Cilicia, drowned in the river Saleph. The conclusion of F.’s activity as a crusader cast a light of religious piety—moreover, one that had never been absent—upon his figure.
Pier Fausto Palumbo