While this antagonism was developing, the most stupendous event in all history was taking place in Europe. The Christian conscience—more sensitive than it is to-day—had been roused to a frenzy of indignation by Mahomedan outrages in the Holy Land. That first "European Concert" had been formed to drive the Mahomedan out of the land, where a concert of Europe is striving to keep him undisturbed to-day!
This time of a great religious war was not favorable for an anti-papal policy in Germany. Conrad allowed himself to be swept into the current. He headed a great Crusade in the year 1147.
Not one tithe of his vast host ever reached the Holy Land. They melted like the dew before disease, starvation, and the sword of the Moslems in Asia Minor.
When the despondent Conrad returned to Germany he brought back one lasting memorial of his ill-fated Crusade. He had seen at Constantinople, on the Imperial standard of the Byzantine Emperor, a double-headed eagle. This representation of a double empire he determined to adopt for the emblem of his own, and hence it is that it exists to-day on the Austrian standard, and upon the coins of Germany and Austria.
It was well for Germany that, while she was thus torn and distracted by contending political factions, and while her life blood was being drained into Italy, Frederick I., or Barbarossa (1152), came to hold the reins of government as they had not been held since Charlemagne.
This great Hohenstaufen threw his lion-like weight into the controversy concerning Papal and Imperial supremacy. He spurned the pretensions of the Pope and his encroachments upon secular authority.
He claimed that his office was from God—not from the Pope; and that it was not a whit less sacred than his rival's. To which the Pope replied: "Who was the Frank before Pope Zacharias befriended Pepin? and what is the Teutonic King now, till consecrated by papal hands? What he gives, can he not withdraw?"
But the Imperial power never reached such height as under this imperious, commanding Teuton; who exists now as a half-mythic hero, honored in picture, statue, song, and legend throughout Germany. His reign was a splendid fight against the two antagonists which were finally to be fatal to the Empire—Italian nationality and the Papacy.
The knighthood established by his Saxon predecessor, in 930, had during the Crusades expanded into great orders of chivalry throughout Europe. Frederick Barbarossa fostered and brought the chivalry of Germany to great splendor.
He also brought to an end the long and destructive feud between the Welfs and the Waiblingers, pacifying the former by bestowing upon them the territory of Brunswick; to which fact England owes her present Queen, who is a daughter of the house of Brunswick.