VI.

The Hohenstaufens and the Peak of the Empire (1137-1254)

During the 12th and 13th centuries, the empire expanded to its greatest extent but was also divided by political feuding between two old princely rivals. The Hohenstaufen or Waiblingen family of Swabia, known in Italy as the Ghibellines, held the German and imperial crowns for over a century. The Welfs of Bavaria and Saxony, known as Guelphs in Italy, were allies of the papacy and persistently plotted against Hohenstaufen rulers.

After Henry V, the last Salian emperor, died without an heir, the Welfs and the Hohenstaufens competed for succession to the imperial crown. The other German princes took advantage of this rivalry to increase their own power at the expense of the empire, playing the factions off against one another. They bypassed the more powerful members of the feuding families who would have exerted greater imperial control and instead elected a series of weak emperors who were unable to challenge their authority. This resulted in a long civil war between the two factions, a war that eventually spilled over into Italy as the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict. The civil war in the empire was finally settled in 1152 by the election of Frederick I, the son of a Hohenstaufen father and a Welf mother.

However, the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict continued for another two centuries. It became a specifically Italian conflict between forces opposed to the papacy and those supporting it. See Guelphs and Ghibellines.

A.

Frederick I, Barbarossa

Handsome, intelligent, warlike, judicious, and charming, Frederick I, called Barbarossa, ruled from 1152 to 1190. Partly to assert his status as a religious equal of the pope, he added Holy to his title of Roman Emperor. He spent most of his reign shuttling between Germany and Italy, trying to restore imperial glory to both regions and coming closer than any other medieval ruler.

In the north, he married the daughter of the Duke of Burgundy and joined that duchy to his hereditary lands. In the south, Frederick made six expeditions to Italy to assert full imperial authority over both the pope and the cities of the Lombards, which had become increasingly independent of the empire. He was initially successful in defeating a variety of alliances between these two challengers to imperial authority in Italy. During his fifth Italian expedition, however, he was defeated by the Lombard League at the Battle of Legnano in 1176 and was forced to recognize the cities’ political autonomy. Frederick later died leading the Third Crusade.

B.

The Last Hohenstaufen Kings

More ambitious even than his father Frederick, Henry VI seized Sicily, an island off southern Italy, and forced the northern Italian cities to submit to him. Intending to create an empire in the Mediterranean, he exacted tribute from North Africa and the weak Byzantine emperor. However, when Henry died suddenly in 1197 while planning a new crusade, the empire immediately fell apart. The German princes refused to accept his infant son Frederick as king and thus initiated a new civil war between backers of the Hohenstaufen, Philip of Swabia, and those of the Welf, Otto of Brunswick. When Otto invaded Italy, Pope Innocent III secured the election of Frederick as German king on the promise that the young king would give up Sicily so as not to surround papal territory.

Outstandingly accomplished in many fields, Frederick II, who reigned from 1212 to 1250, was called Stupor Mundi (Latin for “wonder of the world”). Determined to keep Sicily as his base of operations, he revised his coronation promise to the pope, giving Germany rather than Sicily to his young son Henry. In exchange for the German princes’ support of his Italian campaigns, Frederick allowed them to usurp many of his own powers, making them virtually kings in their own territories. In an edict issued in 1220, Frederick surrendered to the German princes the right to erect castles, grant town charters, and levy taxes. Bishops and other ecclesiastical rulers received similar concessions for their support. Such decentralization soon backfired on Frederick and Henry, as the princes’ greater autonomy further weakened the power of the emperor.

Frederick spent the remainder of his long reign preoccupied with the struggle over northern Italy. He led a successful crusade to Jerusalem in 1228 but was soon forced to return to reclaim Sicily from the invading Pope Gregory IX. In 1237 the pope sided with the Lombard League against the emperor, and this time, Frederick responded by seizing the Papal States. Gregory’s successor, Innocent IV, fled to Lyon, France, and declared the emperor deposed. Before he could secure his position against the League, Frederick died. Under his successor Conrad IV, the Hohenstaufens were finally ousted from Sicily.

The empire then suffered the turmoil of the Great Interregnum (1254-1273), during which two non-Germans, Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso X of Castile, claimed the imperial crown, though neither was ever crowned emperor. The German princes, meanwhile, exploited the absence of an emperor, to further solidify their own political independence. At the very time that French and English kings were centralizing their power, German lands were becoming further politically fragmented into numerous units, thus fracturing central authority. The Great Interregnum marked a decisive turning point in the history of Germany and the empire, beginning the long decline of real imperial power.