The Age of Chivalry

by Hywel Williams

  Barbarossa’s decision to return Bavaria to Welf control was part of his initial policy of compromise with regard to the fractious German princes. Henry II Jasomirgott, the ousted duke of Bavaria who was also margrave of Austria, was compensated with the title of duke of Austria. Initially, Barbarossa’s papal policy was similarly realistic, since he wanted an ally in the struggle to restore German imperial influence in north Italy. In 1160, however, he was excommunicated by Pope Alexander III, who had decided that such ambitions undermined the papacy’s own position as an Italian territorial power. In retaliation, Barbarossa backed the claims of dissident clergy who rejected the legitimacy of the official papal leadership, and it was therefore the antipope Paschal III who canonized Charlemagne at the emperor’s request.

  ABOVE Henry (“the Lion”) submits to Frederick I (“Barbarossa”) in 1181, in this 1882 painting by Peter Janssen (1844–1908).

  DEATH IN THE HOLY LAND

  Henry the Lion did not share Barbarossa’s conviction that true German glory required an Italian dimension. Moreover, he had his own, anti-Slavic, campaigns to fight on the northeast frontier. His decision not to join the emperor’s military expedition against the city of Rome in 1166 contributed to its defeat, and the pattern was repeated in Barbarossa’s fifth Italian expedition, launched in 1174. Barbarossa was again denied Henry’s support, and he was decisively defeated by the combined forces of Lombard north Italy at the Battle of Legnano on May 29, 1176. As a result the emperor had to moderate his Italian ambitions, and the subsequent peace deal arrived at in Venice required his recognition of the Papal States’ sovereign independence. Barbarossa’s title as king of Italy remained merely nominal, therefore, but in Germany he was able to punish Henry the Lion for disloyalty to the imperial cause. Roman law was one of the great rediscoveries of 12th-century Europe, and Barbarossa relied on its distinctive methodology—interpreted by a new cadre of professional lawyers—to override traditional German law and give new substance to the imperial authority. In 1180 the case against Henry was brought before an imperial court of law, and use of the Roman system ensured that the duke was deprived of his lands and declared an outlaw. A subsequent military invasion of Saxony by Barbarossa’s army led to Henry’s exile in England, although he was allowed to return in 1184. The emperor’s death during the Third Crusade contributed to the evolution of the Barbarossa legend. Having reconciled himself to the papacy, Barbarossa took the Cross at Mainz in 1188 but was drowned in the Saleph River, in Armenia, on June 10, 1190 as his army approached Antioch. Attempts at preserving the body in vinegar failed: Barbarossa’s flesh was buried in Antioch, his bones ended up in Tyre cathedral, while his heart and vital organs were interred in Tarsus.

  ITALIAN MANEUVERS

  The Norman kingdom of Sicily had been a papal ally in the anti-Staufen Italian opposition. William II (1155–89) was keen to make peace, however, since he wished to concentrate his forces on a campaign against the Greek empire. The Treaty of Venice (1177) therefore stipulated that William’s aunt Constance, daughter of Roger II, would marry Barbarossa’s son, the future emperor Henry VI. That same year William married Joan, the daughter of England’s Henry II, and he can hardly have imagined that the eventual marriage of his aunt at the age of 32, in 1186, would lead to the end of Norman rule in Sicily. Constance was an elderly bride by the standards of the age, but she was nevertheless William’s legitimate heir and his death without issue in 1189 had momentous consequences. Henry VI and Constance were crowned emperor and empress in 1191 by Pope Celestine III, and by then both were intent on pursuing their Sicilian claim.

  Southern Italy’s Norman nobles, appalled at the prospect of German rule, had chosen Tancred, a grandson of Roger II, to be their king, and the final rebellion of Henry the Lion meant that Henry VI needed to remain in Germany at the start of his reign. By 1194, however, the German situation was under control, and a deal with the north Italian cities allowed Henry’s army to cross their territories on the way to the southern kingdom. He was also by now suddenly and enormously rich, thanks to the payment of a ransom in order to secure the release from captivity of his prisoner, Richard I of England (“the Lionheart”). Plantagenet support for Tancred and for Henry the Lion played their part in the emperor’s hostility, and Richard had quarreled with Leopold, duke of Austria, during the Third Crusade. Richard’s seizure by Leopold while traveling back to England gave the emperor a chance to renew his coffers by demanding, and getting, a ransom of 150,000 marks.

  THE WORLD’S ASTONISHMENT

  Tancred died in February 1194, and the divided Norman nobility was no match for the imperial army that took Palermo on November 20. On Christmas Day Henry VI was crowned king of Sicily, which he would rule as joint monarch with Constance. The papacy’s worst fear had been realized: a German imperial hegemony on both its northern and southern frontiers. It had been a year of wonders, including the birth on Boxing Day of an heir to Constance and Henry. When her labor began the queen was traveling through central Italy to join her husband in Palermo, and she stopped at the town of Jesi, in the march of Ancona, in order to give birth. She was now 40 years of age and, in order to allay any doubts about the authenticity of the event, she gave birth in public, surrounded by courtiers and local witnesses within the tented pavilion raised for the occasion in Jesi’s central square. The child was then taken to Assisi, where he was baptized and christened Frederick.

  * * *

  THE STAUFER DYNASTY 1079–1268

  FREDERICK VON STAUFEN

  (1050–1105),

  duke of Swabia

  (1079–1105)

  FREDERICK II OF SWABIA

  (1090–1147)

  duke of Swabia

  (1105–1147)

  CONRAD III

  (1093–1152)

  r. 1137–52

  FREDERICK I

  [“Barbarossa”]

  (1122–90)

  r. 1152–90

  HENRY VI

  (1165–97)

  r. 1190–97

  FREDERICK II

  (1194–1250)

  r. 1198–1250

  CONRAD IV

  (1228–1254)

  r. 1237–54

  CONRADIN

  (1252–68)

  r. 1254–58

  MANFRED

  (1232–66)

  r. 1258–66

  * * *

  The sense of wonder that surrounded Frederick at birth clung to him as he grew to manhood, and stayed with him throughout his life. Contemporaries would dub him stupor mundi, “the world’s astonishment”; because of his questing intellect, restless personality and unconventional ways. In the eyes of the papacy, which excommunicated him repeatedly, he was an anti-Christ figure, a religious skeptic who refused to go on crusade. But so far as the Staufen were concerned, Frederick II (1194–1250) was the best thing since Barbarossa.

  Henry VI wanted his title to be hereditary, and he therefore secured Frederick’s election as king of the Germans when the infant was just two years old. But the emperor’s death a year later led his brother, Philip of Swabia, and Henry the Lion’s son, Otto of Brunswick, to make their own claims to the German throne. Constance meanwhile kept her son in Sicily where he was crowned king in 1198, the year of her death. She renounced on his behalf any claim to the German throne and sent Henry VI’s retinue back to Germany. Frederick spent most of his life in Sicily’s cosmopolitan ambience, but the claims of his Staufen lineage were not so easily denied, and rebels against Otto of Brunswick, who had become the German king and emperor, elected him to be the rival king of the Germans on three occasions. An election was one thing, but making it effective was another. Even after the third election in 1215, it was another five years before Pope Honorius III crowned Frederick emperor in Rome. His numerous concessions to the German princes left them firmly in the saddle, and in 1232 Frederick allowed them the right of veto over imperial legislative initiatives. The ideal of a German national monarchy waned accordingly, but Frederick’s devolution o
f his rights to the German princes included an accommodation with the Welf dynasty, and by the mid-1230s Germany’s Welf-Ghibelline conflict was over. From 1220 to 1236 Frederick was either in Sicily or on crusade, and after a final visit to Germany in 1236–37, he never went there again.

  ABOVE A statue of Frederick II in Pfullendorf, Germany, which he made a free imperial city in 1220. The statue, sculpted by Peter Klink, was erected in 2006.

  It was his Sicilian kingdom that inspired Frederick as ruler, and the Constitutions of Melfi (1231) remain a landmark in the constitutional development of written, as opposed to customary, law. That Italian dimension, along with Frederick’s crusading exploits, brought him into prolonged and embittered confrontation with the papacy. Frederick’s failure to join the Fifth Crusade contributed to its defeat in 1221, and he was excommunicated in 1227 after illness delayed his participation in the Sixth Crusade. By now Frederick was, at least nominally, king of Jerusalem following his marriage to Yolande, the heiress to the Latin kingdom and whose father John of Brienne transferred the title to his son-in-law. Frederick joined the crusade in 1228 at a time that inconvenienced the papacy, and a second excommunication followed. He operated independently while on crusade and, taking advantage of a Syrian-Egyptian divide within the region’s Ayyubid rulers, the emperor negotiated the return of the city of Jerusalem, lost to the kingdom since 1187. On March 18, 1229 Frederick, still an excommunicate, crowned himself king in Jerusalem. However, the tensions between his own agents and the kingdom’s nobility erupted in open warfare, and Ayyubid authority over the city was re-established in 1244.

  Frederick’s German concessions meant that he could concentrate on north Italian campaigning, and in 1237 he won a decisive victory over the Lombard League at the Battle of Cortenuova. However, his demand that Milan be surrendered unconditionally only strengthened the resistance of the north Italian communes. A frightened papacy renewed Frederick’s excommunication in 1239, and he responded by annexing large areas of the Papal States. The election of Sinibaldo Fieschi to the papacy as Innocent IV (1243–54) brought to the fore an incendiary personality who loathed the Staufen adventurism. In the summer of 1245 the pope declared Frederick deposed as emperor. He also plotted, unsuccessfully, against him in Germany by backing Heinrich, landgrave of Thuringia, as an alternative king.

  THE END OF THE STAUFER DYNASTY

  Fredrick met his nemesis at Parma following the city’s rebellion in the summer of 1247 against the imperial government that had been imposed on it. Frederick’s army settled into a lengthy siege, but after its defeat at the Battle of Parma (February 18, 1248), rebellion spread to the rest of north Italy. The emperor lost control of the areas of the Papal States he had annexed, only to regain them by the beginning of 1250. But the capture and imprisonment of his son Enzio, imperial vicar general for north Italy, by the victorious Bolognese following the Battle of Fosalta (May 26, 1249) was a debilitating blow.

  Frederick was by now ailing, and following his death on December 13, 1250 at the castle of Fiorentino in Puglia his son Conrad succeeded him as king and ruler of both Sicily and Germany. He was unable, however, to assert military control in Sicily. After Conrad died of malaria in 1254 it was his half-brother, Manfred, the true inheritor of their father’s physical and intellectual energy, who exercised power there as regent on behalf of the dead king’s infant son Conradin. In 1258 Manfred took advantage of a false rumor that Conradin had died, and quickly crowned himself. He then refused to give up the crown, and embarked on a series of highly successful anti-papal campaigns in northern and central Italy. The papacy turned to Charles, count of Anjou, as its protector against this latest Staufen enemy, whom it inevitably excommunicated. Invested with the kingdom of Sicily by the papacy in 1263, Charles defeated and killed Manfred at the Battle of Benevento on February 26, 1266. The Staufen had lost their kingdom in the sun, and the dynastic line was extinguished when Conradin was beheaded as a traitor following his capture by French forces near Naples.

  PARZIVAL

  The Bavarian knight and poet Wolfram von Eschenbach (c.1170–c.1220), author of Parzival, was not the first great artist to be attracted by the story. Chrétien de Troyes, author of the unfinished Perceval, le Conte du Graal (Perceval, the Story of the Grail), was also inspired by the tale. He dedicated the romance to his patron Philip, count of Flanders, and his account of the Arthurian hero has a stylistic and thematic connection with Peredur, one of the medieval Welsh prose tales collectively known as the Mabinogi.

  The true origin of Parzival’s story is unknown, but the variety of its treatments shows how literary material reflected local circumstances within a cosmopolitan ambience. Von Eschenbach’s poem, arguably the greatest of the German medieval epics, is infused by the knightly ethic with its portrayal of the need for compassionate love when searching for a healing wisdom. Parzival’s grief-stricken mother, Herzeloyde, has consciously brought him up to be ignorant of chivalric knighthood following the death in battle of the boy’s father Gahmuret. Itinerant knights, however, inform the youth of the glories of Arthur’s court at Camelot, and Parzival departs for the island of Britain. His despairing mother, however, dresses him in a fool’s clothes in the hope that his appearance will exclude him from courtly life and the dangerous attractions of knighthood.

  Parzival’s strange appearance makes him an object of curiosity at Camelot, and he is instructed in the need for knightly self-control. An even higher calling is reserved for him, however, and he arrives at the castle of the Grail where he meets the mysterious Anfortas, the wounded “Fisher King.”

  Anfortas is the keeper of the Grail, but his wound means that he can do little other than fish, and his suffering mirrors that of his kingdom, which seems doomed to sterility. Many knights have tried to heal him, but only an individual with exceptional spiritual self-understanding can relieve Anfortas’s suffering. That penitent knight turns out to be Parzival, who therefore holds the key to the regeneration of the kingdom itself. Liberated from earlier ignorance and self-centredness, Parzival learns that Anfortas is, in fact, his mother’s brother, and he himself becomes in time the Grail king. Von Eschenbach’s highly charged account of knighthood’s challenges and tribulations gives a mythological dimension to the German empire of the Staufen. His primary emphasis is on the need for a spiritual self-understanding, but the theme of a regenerated kingdom that has recovered from its wounds and divisions has obvious affinities with the German empire’s political and military struggles in the age of the Staufen princes.

  Parzival (right) is shown in this manuscript (1443–46) of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s poem.

  THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE

  1154–1216

  Stephen of Blois (c.1096–1154), raised to the throne by nobles hostile to the succession of Henry I’s daughter Matilda, was the last member of the Anglo-Norman dynasty to wear the English Crown. His regnal claim, following Henry I’s death in 1135, was reasonably justified: his mother, Adela, was William the Conqueror’s daughter, and Stephen had been partly raised at the English court. But for the reasons why England’s Norman aristocracy objected to Matilda, Henry’s sole direct heir and his chosen successor, we must look beyond her sex. She was also married to Geoffrey of Anjou whose lands, including Touraine and Maine, bordered Normandy—and the count was the latest in a line of Angevin rulers who had territorial designs on the duchy, which was a possession of the English Crown.

  Matilda’s first marriage—to Henry V, the Holy Roman emperor—had given her the courtesy title of empress. Although not crowned as such by the pope, she was keen on the title and continued to use it after Henry’s death in 1125. Matilda was not someone whose rights could be trifled with, all the more so since her second husband, Geoffrey—handsome, vigorous and militarily talented—was extremely eager to conjoin her claims with his own ambition. As soon as Henry I died Matilda crossed the border into Normandy to claim her inheritance, but although she had some local supporters the duchy’s wary nobility declared for Stephen. Ma
tilda and Geoffrey remained undaunted, and the empress’s invasion of England in 1139 marked a new stage in the succession crisis. Stephen was briefly deposed in April 1141, but although Matilda ruled in London for a few months her refusal to cut taxes made her unpopular locally, and by the end of the year the king had regained his throne.