Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth by John B. Freed (review)

Despite his reputation as the most powerful ruler in twelfth-century Europe, Frederick I, nicknamed Barbarossa (“Redbeard”), king of Germany from 1152 and emperor of the Romans from 1155 until his death in 1190, has not been the subject of nearly as much modern biography as one might expect. John B. Freed is one of the most knowledgeable commentators on the social and political history of the medieval Reich, so his study of Frederick—the first English-language biography in almost fifty years—is most welcome. This magisterial volume is especially valuable, as the history of the Staufer dynasty (1138–1254) has tended to be underrepresented in English scholarship in comparison to the Ottonian and Salian rulers of Germany.

Freed subjects the rich narrative and diplomatic sources for Frederick’s reign to serious scrutiny, providing comprehensive coverage of his long wars against the recalcitrant communes of northern Italy; his stubborn refusal to accept Pope Alexander III following the disputed papal election of 1159; his shaky relations with the rulers of England, France, Sicily, and Byzantium; and his attempts to juggle his Italian enterprises with the shifting interests and demands of nobles and princes north of the Alps (most famously, those of Frederick’s cousin, Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria). Freed rightly discards the historiographical baggage that long accompanied debates over the implications of Barbarossa’s decision to focus his attention on Italy (i.e., the question of whether the pursuit of empire was detrimental to Germany’s development as a nation). Instead, he successfully demonstrates that Frederick was, in most respects, a typical German prince of the age, whose chief concerns were the preservation of his personal honor and his dynasty. While this does not amount to a radical reinterpretation of the reign, Freed has nevertheless produced a judicious and authoritative account of the emperor and his times, for which he deserves our thanks.

Although this is an extremely learned and wide-ranging book, it must be said that it is not an easy read. Events are treated in exhaustive detail. Freed leaves no stone unturned: all available sources are recounted, contextualized, and compared; discrepancies and uncertainties are noted; competing interpretations are dissected; hypothetical alternatives are occasionally ventured. Certainly, there is scope for this kind of expansive synthesis, especially in the wake of the completion of the long-awaited scholarly edition of Frederick’s 1,259 charters in 1990. The overwhelming mass of data does, however, raise the question of what kind of readership the author was aiming for. The book seems to have been intended primarily for nonexperts, but amidst the sea of detail, the interested lay reader may struggle to grasp what was distinctive about Frederick’s world. Just one of seventeen chapters (chapter 5) provides the necessary background on the contours of the empire: the nature of medieval rulership, assemblies, and the German princes. Minimal attention is paid to Ottonian and Salian imperial precedent, while the “Investiture Contest” and the rise of the “reform papacy” in the late eleventh century are barely outlined. The serious conflicts behind this recent history loomed large in Barbarossa’s eighteen-year dispute with Pope Alexander III and provides an essential context for the growth of the Lombard communes, against which the emperor marched across the Alps five times. In a book of this length, these topics surely deserved at least a few pages for the uninitiated.

While Freed’s study self-consciously reacts to outdated, nationalistic conceptions of Frederick’s reign as a heroic high-water mark of the medieval German Reich, in other ways it is quite conventional. The author adopts a very traditional source-critical approach in order to establish the “facts” of the emperor’s life. But in seeking to demonstrate that Frederick was simply a prince of his times, and because “there is no way to read the emperor’s mind” (403), as the reader is often reminded, Freed’s...