Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

Henry ‘the Lion’

Barbarossa returned to Germany to vent his rage on Henry the Lion, to whose refusal to accompany him to Italy he considered his defeat largely due. Strong in the support of the Church, to which he was now reconciled, he summoned his cousin to appear before an imperial Diet and make answer to the charge of having confiscated ecclesiastical lands and revenues for his own use. Henry merely replied to this mandate by setting fire to Church property in Saxony, and in his absence the ban of outlawry was passed against him by the Diet. Here again was the old ‘Waiblingen’ and ‘Welf’ feud bursting into flame, like a fire that has been but half-suppressed, and cousinship went to the wall. Henry the Welf was a son-in-law of Henry II of England and had made allies of Philip Augustus and the King of Denmark: his Duchy of Bavaria in the south and of Saxony in the north covered a third of German territory: he had been winning military laurels in a struggle against the Slavs, while Frederick had been losing Lombardy. Thus he pitted himself against the Emperor, unmindful that even in Germany the hands of the political clock were moving forward and feudalism slowly giving up its dominion.

To the dawning sense of German nationality Barbarossa was something more than first among his barons, he was a king supported by the Church, and Bavarians and Saxons came reluctantly to the rebel banner; while, as the campaign developed, the other princes saw their fellow vassal beaten and despoiled of his lands and driven into exile without raising a finger to help him.

Frederick allowed Henry the Lion to keep his Brunswick estates, but Saxony and Bavaria he divided up amongst minor vassals, in order to avoid the risk of another powerful rival. Master of Germany not merely in name but in power, he and his successors could have built up a strong monarchy, as Philip II and the House of Capet were to do in France, had not the siren voice of Italy called them to wreck on her shifting policies.

Hitherto we have spoken chiefly of North Italy; but Frederick I bound Germany to her southern neighbours by fresh ties when he married his eldest son Henry in 1187 to Constance, heiress of the Norman kingdom of Naples and Sicily. By this alliance he hoped to establish a permanent Hohenstaufen counterpoise in the south to the alliance of the Pope and the Guelf towns in the north. Triumphant over the wrathful but helpless Roman See, he felt himself an emperor indeed, and having crowned his son Henry as ‘Caesar’, in imitation of classic times, he rode away to the Third Crusade, still lusting after adventure and glory.

The news of his death in Asia Minor[18] swept Germany with sadness and pride. Like all his house, he had been cruel and hard; but vices like these seemed to weigh little to the mediaeval mind against the peace and prosperity enjoyed under his rule. Legends grew about his name, and the peasants whispered that he had not died but slept beneath the sandstone rocks, and would awake again when his people were in danger to be their leader and protector.

Henry VI, who succeeded Frederick in the Empire, succeeded also to his dreams and the pitfalls that they inspired. One of his earliest struggles had been the finally successful attempt to secure Sicily against the claims of Count Tancred, an illegitimate grandson of the last ruler. Great were the sufferings of the unhappy Sicilians who had adopted the Norman’s cause; for Henry, having bribed or coerced the Pope and North Italy into a temporary alliance, exacted a bitter vengeance. Tancred’s youthful son, blinded and mutilated, was sent with his mother to an Alpine prison to end his days, while in the dungeons of Palermo and Apulia torture and starvation brought to his followers death as a blessed relief from pain.

Queen Constance, who had been powerless to check these atrocities, turned against her husband in loathing: the Pope excommunicated their author; but Henry VI laughed contemptuously at both. It was his threefold ambition: first, to make the imperial crown not elective but hereditary in the House of Hohenstaufen; next, to tempt the German princes into accepting this proposition by the incorporation of Naples and Sicily as a province of the Empire; and thirdly, to rule all his dominions from his southern kingdom, with the Pope at Rome, as in the days of Otto the Great, the chief bishop in his empire.

Strong-willed, persistent, resourceful, with the imagination that sees visions, and the practical brain of a man of business who can realize them, Henry VI, had he lived longer, might have gained at least a temporary recognition of his schemes; but in 1197 he died at the age of thirty-two, leaving a son not yet three years old as the heir of Hohenstaufen ambitions. Twelve months later died also Queen Constance, having reversed as much as she could during her short widowhood of her hated husband’s German policy, and having bequeathed the little King of Naples to the guardianship of the greatest of mediaeval Popes and the champion of the Guelfs, Innocent III.

Pope Innocent III