FREDERICK I BARBAROSSA, Emperor. - Nephew of Conrad III, founder of the power of the Swabian duchy, son of Frederick of Swabia and of the Bavarian Judith, sister of Henry the Proud, he ascended the throne on 4 March 1152. Through his will and his fortune he earned the merit, by closing the long crisis of imperial power, of uniting in himself both branches of German imperialism, joining in kinship, as later in political action, the House of Franconia and the Guelph house, restoring to unity the principle and the strength of the Empire.
His very ascent to the throne signified the renewed assertion of the German feudal State against the Roman theocracies and the definitive detachment of the Empire from the traditional relations that Charlemagne and Otto I had consecrated with the Church of Rome and that, at the end of the first phase of the investiture struggle, the Concordat of Worms had reconfirmed. From his first acts of government (the grant of Bavaria to his uncle Henry the Lion, the resumption of royal influence in episcopal elections) F. gives clear signs of the path he would follow without ever swerving. In his mind he accentuates the position, within the Empire, of Italy, where he sees the field of communal discords as the best guarantee of a reassertion of imperial power in the peninsula. The vast and profound crisis of the pontifical power, which had reached, in the time of Eugenius III, a moment of uncertainty and of discontent with the paths hitherto pursued, opened to him the possibility of not holding the power of the Church of Rome in the same account as his predecessors had. It is the path of the South, with the resumption of the policy of the Ottos, that reopened before him, in the hoped-for impossibility of an agreement, against the Empire, between papacy and Communes. In Rome itself, the rise of Arnold of Brescia, with the ebbing and the new flourishing of the never-extinguished imperial traditions, gave him the hope of being able to count also on the support of the Roman people against the Pontiff. And, on the other hand, it was precisely the Pontiff, at the moment of the bitterest struggle with the Roman Commune, who became the sponsor of an alliance with F. (Pact of Constance, of 1153), offering him the imperial crown in exchange for the subjection of Rome and the overthrow of the Norman power.
No differently, the Communes of upper Italy, drawn on by the bitterness of their struggles, themselves came to request, one against the other, imperial intervention: thus Lodi and Como against Milan, encircled by powerful enmities. And the fatal dissension took shape: between the universalism of the Empire and the particularism of the city autonomies, without however the two universalisms (Empire and Church) being able to reach a sincere agreement, because of the revival of a rivalry by now centuries old and which would lead to the second phase of the grandiose clash.
October 1154: F. descends into Italy, assumes the royal crown in Pavia, accepts the subjection of the founders of Montferrat and of the Communes of the anti-Milanese league. But the dominant Commune is Milan, and precisely because its rivals turn to the German king, it turns against him. In that first Italian hour of his, F., even after having shown his strength with the destruction of Tortona, of Asti, of Chieri, does not have the time to settle his accounts with Milan. The journey toward Rome is more urgent. In the city, Adrian IV having succeeded Eugenius III, the situation of the Pontiff had greatly improved: the interdict by which the Romans had been struck had led them to abandon Arnold of Brescia to his fate. This brings about relations anything but cordial between the German king and the Pontiff. Interest attenuates distrust: F. sacrifices Arnold and receives, in St. Peter's, on 10 June 1155, the imperial crown. But around him the daring fighting of the Romans, united against the Emperor in one of the most memorable episodes of resistance and struggle in the history of the city, exhausting the forces of the German army, forces F. to a rapid return to Germany.
If the first descent into Italy had produced only a formal effect, with the contested coronation in St. Peter's, while it left the disappointed mind of the Pontiff inclined to seek rather the necessary equilibrium, security and peace in an agreement with the Normans, in Germany, with skill and with fortune, F. can, albeit conceding much to the great vassals, establish the bases of a solid personal power. Burgundy is joined to the imperial domains through F.'s marriage to Beatrice. But to the calm that supervened in the German Kingdom there corresponded the state of agitation of Italy, by now regarded as the first land of the Empire, and particularly of Lombardy. F., when he descends again into Italy in 1158, was already in violent conflict not only against the city autonomies, but against the Roman Church, animated by the enterprising spirit of Card. Rolando Bandinelli, who would later be, as pontiff (Alexander III), the fiercest antagonist of the Emperor.
In Lombardy, Milan emerges defeated, in Sept. 1158, from the direct clash, this time, with F. And in Nov. he can gather, on the plains of Roncaglia, the most famous of his diets: and, in the Constitutio de regalibus, reclaim for the Empire all the sovereign rights usurped by vassals and by Communes. But such imperial claims, even if accepted in principle by the various parties concerned, could not fail to translate into fierce points of dissension, when they had to be applied in reality. There was, at the base, on the other hand, not an abolition, but a recognition of the communal constitutions, albeit with a clear subjection to the Empire as regards the appointment of the magistracies. But as soon as the work of the imperial podestàs, appointed as a result of the decisions of Roncaglia, revealed itself as arbitrary arrogance, the revolt broke out, first, in Milan and in Genoa.
Already Adrian IV, and then the newly elected Alexander III, openly abandon the Emperor, making common cause with the rebellious cities. To rebalance his position, F. finds nothing better than to bring schism into the very bosom of the Church, thanks to the election, against Alexander, of Victor IV (Ottaviano di Monticelli), which leads him to immerse himself ever more deeply in religious matters, with the convocation of a Council at Pavia, where Alexander III did not go. And after the Council, F., having destroyed Crema, the bulwark of Milan, turns once again against the latter and takes it by starvation, after a three-year siege, in the spring of 1163. This time the walls and towers are demolished, the city's districts plundered, the citizens scattered. Behind the Teutonic rage, the hatred of the rival cities (Lodi, Pavia, Como, Cremona, Novara) could finally triumph.
With the destruction of Milan and the harsh crisis that afflicts the papal power, while the schism of Victor continues with Paschal III, F. reached the moment of his greatest power. Great designs he still revolved in his soul; the restoration of imperial power he saw in the definitive predominance in Rome and in the subjection of the Pontiff, in the further territorial expansion in the north and in the center of Europe, in the resumption of the Eastern policy of the Ottos. He had already laid his hands on the goods of the disputed Matildine inheritance, with an act of force that the Church would not forget. He had, from the antipope Paschal, sought the canonization, to the glory of imperial authority, of Charlemagne. Against Alexander III, returned from exile in France, he directs his effort of war: and he succeeds in installing himself in Rome, and in the Vatican Basilica itself, in which, the legitimate Pope having fled to the Normans, he installs the antipope, again receiving from him the imperial crown. But once again the resistance is not tamed and an epidemic that broke out among his troops draws him to resume the journey beyond the Alps, while he sees, around him, collapsing that design of restoration of the power of the Empire that he had tenaciously pursued.
Over the serpentine revolt of the cities of the Po plain, Byzantium extends its influence, through the intermediary of Venice: Verona places itself at the head of the league, to which the Lombard Communes adhere. At Pontida, on 7 April 1167, the reconstruction of Milan and the Communes' struggle to the bitter end for their freedom are decided, while Alexander III is acclaimed as head of the league itself and, in his honor, the name Alessandria is given to a new city, raised at the confluence of the Trebbia and the Tanaro. The ecclesiastical party raises its head again in Germany as well; the great feudal lords are no longer in solidarity with the Emperor, divided from him by his Italian policy.
In 1174 F. descended for the third time into the peninsula, laid siege in vain to Alessandria 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, at Venice, the Emperor and the Pontiff came to 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 had not succeeded with Alexander, who had meanwhile died. In 1183, at Constance, the terms of the agreement of Venice were confirmed, establishing peace between the Communes and the Empire. The great fighter seemed by now, near the sunset, drawn to abandon his Italian policy, when, with a gesture of most skillful matrimonial policy, he succeeded in grafting the Italian authority of the Empire onto the far more real power of the Normans, joining in marriage his son Henry with the heiress of the Kingdom of Sicily, Constance of Hauteville.
In 1187 Jerusalem fell back into the hands of the infidels: in the Christian world spirits and forces were set in motion for a new Crusade. Only this prevented the further recrudescence of a struggle that would have had a character of violence no less than in the past. But the Emperor's life was now drawing to its end: on 10 June 1190 he died on the way to the Holy Land, in Cilicia, drowned in the river Saleph. The closing of F.'s activity as a crusader cast a light of religious piety (which, moreover, had never failed him) over his figure.
Bibliography21 works
Pier Fausto Palumbo