The Age of Chivalry (13 page)

L
EFT
Robert Guiscard frees Pope Gregory VII from the Castel San' Angelo in Rome, where he had been besieged by Henry IV and the antipope Clement III in March 1084
(Codex Jenensis Bose
1157)
.

Philip I of France was equally high-handed in relation to the Church, and his devotion to simony meant that the threat of excommunication hung over him in the mid-1070s. Here again, though, it was the gravity of the situation in Germany that saved Philip from papal condemnation. The Normans in Italy were perhaps the most perfidious of all Gregory's allies. Previous popes had made substantial concessions to them and had hoped thereby to limit the Normans' advance into central Italy as well as to gain some military protection. Robert Guiscard abandoned Gregory's cause at the moment of Henry IV's advance toward Rome, and when the city was captured the outraged local population dispatched Gregory, Robert's ally, to his exile in Salerno.

The investiture controversy's effects were both destructive and creative, with spiritual power and lay authority becoming more sharply defined than in the past. Gregory transformed papal government: the curia became the central administrative machine running an international organization, and the papal legist emerged to become a key figure in the history of the medieval papacy. Gregory's trans-European awareness meant that he was inevitably concerned about the fate of the Greek Church, and the deepening split between Latin West and Greek East troubled him greatly. His alarm about the fate of Greek Christians who were coming under Arab and Turkish attack in Palestine and Syria led him to conceive of a military expedition aimed at retaking the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. He is therefore one of the intellectual ancestors of the crusading ideal. Germany was broken by the contest and lapsed into a collection of small states. As the power of the monarchy dwindled so the rights of local lords grew, with the result that more peasants were turned into serfs. Local taxes and levies bore heavily on the population, while the Crown's revenues dwindled. Justice became localized as well, since local courts reflected the regional power patterns and could evade regal control. This German model was replicated in northern Italy since here, too, the imperial and royal power dwindled away and was replaced by local lordship. The scene was set for the Staufer dynasty, the family that attempted to resolve these difficulties by subsuming them within a truly imperial and dynastic dimension.

The Romanesque structure of the imperial palace at Goslar in Saxony was built in the 1040s for Henry III and is an enduring monument to Salian dynastic ambition
.

Goslar became a major center of government under Conrad II, and its wealth, derived from local mineral resources, was central to his family's political ambitions. The silver deposits of the Harz Mountains lay nearby, and Goslar itself is situated at the foot of the Rammelsberg Mountain, where mining operations yielded one of Europe's major supplies of copper ore during the Middle Ages. Local riches turned Goslar into a “Rome of the north” with 47 churches, private chapels and monasteries being established there from the 11th century onward. The representative diets of the Holy Roman Empire were frequently convened in the city, and although no less than 62 imperial palaces are recorded as having existed, it was the
kaiserpfalz
or imperial palace at Goslar that was Henry III's favored summer residence. He died there, and a sarcophagus within the building contains his heart.

The Salian dynasty first rose to greatness as dukes of Franconia, with the family's power base sited in the cities of the Rhineland in the duchy's west. Their dynastic name recalled the Salians, who were a dominant tribal grouping among the Franks. The family could also claim an impeccably imperial bloodline: Conrad II's father, Count Henry of Speyer, was the grandson of Liutgarde, a daughter of Otto the Great. Conrad was elected king of Germany in 1024 and then crowned emperor by Pope John XIX three years later. He was, however, the last to bear the title “duke of Franconia,” and after Conrad died the great cities of Rhenish Franconia—Mainz, Worms and Speyer—were ruled by their local prince-bishops as mini-states within the empire.

The 11th-century imperial palace at Goslar
.

Conrad and his successors looked north and to Goslar partly because of the prospect of bullion. Cash might liberate them from dependence on
the aristocracy and help them to assert German kingship's independent authority.

Conrad also recovered many expropriated lands, especially those given to monasteries and bishops, which he then returned to the royal demesne (lands personally owned by the Crown). These estates were then run on the Crown's behalf by the
ministeriales
, a class of knight-administrators who worked as the king's agents. Bullion supplies and demesne revenue gave the kings resources other than their own lands when it came to rewarding their adherents. And when looking to the east of Saxony, the Salians saw other political opportunities for independent assertion: new Crown territories might be established in the colonized lands.

Conrad's son Henry III was personally pious and much influenced by the Church reform movement advocated by the monastery at Cluny in Burgundy. He also thought he had the right to impose such a reform on the Church, and he used his powers of patronage to appoint serious-minded reformers. But it was exactly that degree of imperial power over the Church that the reform movement came to regard as an outrage in the generation that followed. Confronted by three rival claimants to the papacy, Henry convened the synod which met at Sutri near Rome in December 1046, and which followed his wishes by electing Suidberg, bishop of Bamberg, to the papal office as Clement II. Clement was enthroned on Christmas Day, and on the same day he crowned his patron emperor. Henry would use his influence to elect three more reforming German popes, but he was the last emperor able to dominate the Church, and his high-handedness alienated him from the German clergy. Godfrey II, duke of Upper Lorraine, led serial rebellions against the emperor, who also faced aristocratic dissent in Saxony and southern Germany. In 1054–55 the nobility in Bavaria and Carinthia tried to depose Henry, and his legacy included the power struggles of the German nobility that surrounded Henry IV in his boyhood.

The Staufer family derived its name from the castle in Swabia, Germany, which was the dynasty's original power base. Frederick von Staufen, appointed duke of Swabia by Henry IV in 1079, was a key imperial supporter. However, Henry V, the last of the Salian emperors, left no male heirs, and the struggle to succeed him—waged between Lothair, duke of Saxony, and Frederick II of Swabia—simply highlighted the lack of focus in the German national identity. By the end of his reign Henry V had in effect conceded victory to the papacy in the long-running investiture contest, and the campaign to provide national leadership had all but ended. That deficiency was also to be a Staufen opportunity
.

By 1125, when the reign of Henry V was over, Lothair was 50 years of age, childless and guileless. He was thus the ideal candidate for those who wanted merely a figurehead king of the Germans. His wife's family, the Welfs of Bavaria, supported Lothair's regnal ambitions, and in a contested election he defeated Frederick to become king in 1125. The German nobility's decision was nonetheless controversial, since it ignored the rights of dynastic succession. Frederick's mother, Agnes, was Henry IV's daughter, and Henry V had therefore been his uncle. Frederick and his brother Conrad, duke of Franconia, thus inherited as family members the territories personally owned by Henry V and his Salian ancestors. However, they also claimed the Crown lands gained by the Salians as emperors. This amounted to a declaration of war, and in the ensuing conflict most of the German imperial cities backed the brothers. Lothair's imperial coronation by Pope Innocent II in 1133, although a token of subservience to the papacy, nonetheless solidified his authority, and the Staufen conceded defeat in the following year.

Recognition of Staufen leadership came after Lothair's death in 1137, when Conrad was elected to succeed him. Factionalism nonetheless persisted and the Welf leader Henry the Proud, duke of Bavaria and of Saxony, contested Conrad's election. As Lothair's son-in-law, Henry had inherited the Saxon duchy. He was immensely rich, and therefore well placed to start a civil war. Conrad's decision to deprive Henry of his duchies proved unpopular in both Bavaria and Saxony, and that divisiveness led to the first prolonged period (1137–42) of Welf-Ghibelline armed conflict. In 1152 Conrad lay on his deathbed. His son was only six years old and his brother Frederick had died five years previously. Conrad was never crowned emperor, but he recognized in his brother's son, Swabia's new duke Frederick, those qualities of military prowess, personal charm and ambitious idealism that might drive the family on to imperial greatness. It was the north Italians he tried to conquer who would dub this particular Frederick “Barbarossa,” and Conrad's nomination of his nephew heralded a century of Staufen struggle for European predominance.

R
IGHT
Frederick I (“Barbarossa”) with his two sons, Henry VI, Holy Roman emperor, and Frederick V, duke of Swabia (from the
Welfenchronik
produced by the Benedictine monks of Weingarten Abbey, the Welf family monastery in southern Germany, during the 1180s)
.

THE STAUFER DYNASTY

1152
Frederick von Staufen, duke of Swabia, is crowned king of Germany as Frederick I (“Barbarossa”). He is crowned emperor (1155) by Pope Adrian IV, but then excommunicated (1160) by Pope Alexander III.

1190
Death of Barbarossa.

1191
Henry VI, king of Germany, and his wife Constance of Sicily are crowned emperor and empress by Pope Celestine III.

1194
Henry VI and Constance become joint rulers of Sicily. Birth of their son, Frederick.

1198
Frederick II is crowned king of Sicily.

1215
Frederick II's coronation at Aachen as king of Germany.

1220
Pope Honorius II crowns Frederick II emperor.

1250
Death of Frederick II, who is succeeded by his son Conrad.

1254
Conrad dies of malaria.

1258
Manfred, Frederick II's illegitimate son, seizes the Sicilian throne from Conradin, son of Conrad.

1263
The papacy invests Charles, count of Anjou, with the kingdom of Sicily.

1266
Battle of Benevento: Charles of Anjou defeats and kills Manfred.

Frederick I Barbarossa devoted himself to the cause of restoring the imperial power both in Germany and north Italy. The tenth-century dynasty of Ottonian emperors provided him with an inspiration in this regard, and so did Charlemagne's memory. He was crowned king of the Germans in Aachen in 1152 and returned there in 1165 to attend the great service marking Charlemagne's canonization—a recognition that Barbarossa, with his appreciation of symbolism, had promoted personally. His imposing physical presence, crowned by flaming red hair, contributed to his charisma, as did his keen practical intelligence and courtly grace. Symbols and gestures were also needed, because he had few other cards to play outside the Staufen power base in Swabia and Franconia. However, the inventiveness with which he impressed himself on the German public's imagination meant that his leadership acquired a mythic quality, even in his own lifetime. He was crowned king of Italy in Pavia in 1154, and an initially obliging papacy gave him an emperor's crown in 1155. Those were largely nominal roles, but his lineage gave Barbarossa a more tangible asset since his mother Judith belonged to the Bavarian ducal house. This great representative of the Ghibelline interest was therefore also a Welf, and that fact encouraged the hope of reconciliation between the two factions. This, though, was to underestimate the tenacity of Henry the Lion, the Welf leader who had inherited the duchy of Saxony from his father, Henry the Proud, following its restoration to the family by King Conrad in 1142. Henry the Lion was Barbarossa's equal in grasping the importance of symbolic gesture and, unlike his rival, he had the means to express his vision of German glory through artistic patronage. Henry was Barbarossa's supporter initially, and the duchy of Bavaria was therefore returned to his dynasty in 1156. His foundation of Munich, together with Henry's embellishment of Brunswick, his capital in Saxony, marked the duke's command of a Saxon-Bavarian power block stretching from the North Sea to the Alps. Marriage to Matilda, daughter of England's Henry II, was further confirmation of Henry the Lion's standing as one of Europe's greatest princes.