Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

Frederick I, the ‘Barbarossa’ of the Third Crusade, was a Hohenstaufen on his father’s side, a Welf on his mother’s; and it had been the hope of those who elected him Emperor that ‘like a corner-stone he would bind the two together ... that thus with God’s blessing he might end their ancient quarrel’. At first it appeared this hope might be realized, for the new Emperor made a friend of his cousin Henry the Lion who, as Duke of Bavaria and Saxony, was heir of the Welf ambitions. Frederick also, by his firm and business-like rule, established what the chroniclers called such ‘unwonted peace’ that ‘men seemed changed, the world a different one, the very Heaven milder and softer’.

Unfortunately Frederick, who has been aptly described as an ‘imperialist Hildebrand’, regarded the peace of Germany merely as a stepping-stone to wider ambitions. Justinian, who had ruled Europe from Constantinople, was his model, and with the help of lawyers from the University of Bologna, whom he handsomely rewarded for their services, he revived all the old imperial claims over North Italy that men had forgotten or allowed to slip into disuse. The ‘communes’ found that rights and privileges for which their ancestors had fought and died were trampled under foot by an imperial official, the podestà, sent as supreme governor to each of the more important towns: taxes were imposed and exacted to the uttermost coin by his iron hand: complaint or rebellion were punished by torture and death.

‘Death for freedom is the next best thing to freedom,’ cried the men of Crema, flaming into wild revolt, while Milan shut her gates against her podestà in an obstinate three years’ siege. Deliverance was not yet, and Frederick and his vast army of Germans desolated the plains: Crema was burned, her starving population turned adrift: the glory of Milan was reduced to a stone quarry: Pope Alexander III who, feeling his own independence threatened by imperial demands, had supported the movement for liberty, was driven from Rome and forced to seek refuge in France. Everywhere the Ghibellines triumphed, and it was in these black days in Italy that the Guelfs ceased for a time to be a faction and became patriots, while the Pope stood before the world the would-be saviour of his land from a foreign yoke.

Amid the smouldering ruins of Milan the Lombard League sprang into life: town after town, weary of German oppression and insolence, offered their allegiance: even Venice, usually selfish in the safe isolation of her lagoons, proffered ships and money. Milan was rebuilt, and a new city, called after the patriot Pope ‘Alessandria’, was founded on a strategic site. Alessandria degla paglia, ‘Alessandria of the straw’, Barbarossa nicknamed it contemptuously, threatening to burn it like a heap of weeds; but the new walls withstood his best engines, and plague and the damp cold of winter devastated his armies encamped around them.

The political horizon was not, indeed, so fair for the Emperor as in the early days of his reign. Germany seethed with plots in her master’s absence, and Frederick had good reason to suspect that Henry the Lion was their chief author, the more that he had sulkily refused to share in this last Italian campaign. Worst of all was the news that Alexander III, having negotiated alliances with the Kings of France and England, had returned to Italy and was busy stirring up any possible seeds of revolt against Frederick, whom he had excommunicated.

Battle of Legnano

In the year 1176, at Legnano, fifteen miles from Milan, the armies of the League and Empire met in decisive battle, Barbarossa nothing doubting of his success against mere armed citizens; but the spirit of the men of Crema survived in the ‘Company of Death’, a bodyguard of Milanese knights sworn to protect their carroccio, or sacred cart, or else to fall beside it. Upon the carroccio was raised a figure of Christ with arms outstretched, beneath his feet an altar, while from a lofty pole hung the banner of St. Ambrose, patron saint of Milan.

When the battle opened the first terrific onslaught of German cavalry broke the Milanese lines; but the Company of Death, reckless in their resolve, rallied the waverers and turned defence into attack. In the ensuing struggle the Emperor was unhorsed, and, as the rumour spread through the ranks that he had been killed, the Germans broke, and their retreat became a wild, unreasoning rout that bore their commander back on its tide, unable to stem the current, scarcely able to save himself.

Such was the battle of Legnano, worthy to be remembered not as an isolated twelfth-century victory of one set of forces against another, but as one of the first very definite advances in the great campaign for liberty that is still the battle of the world. At Venice in the following year the Hohenstaufen acknowledged his defeat and was reconciled to the Church; while by the ‘Perpetual Peace of Constance’ signed in 1183 he granted to the communes of North Italy ‘all the royal rights (regalia) which they had ever had or at the moment enjoyed’.

Such rights—coinage, the election of officials and judges, the power to raise and control armies, to impose and exact taxes—are the pillars on which democracy must support her house of freedom. Yet since ‘freedom’ to the mediaeval mind too often implied the right to oppress some one else or maintain a state of anarchy, too much stress must not be laid on the immediate gains. North Italy in the coming centuries was to fall again under foreign rule, her ‘communes’ to abuse and betray the rights for which the Company of Death had risked their lives: yet, in spite of this taint of ignorance and treachery, the victory of Legnano had won for Europe something infinitely precious, the knowledge that tyrants could be overthrown by the popular will and feudal armies discomfited by citizen levies.