Barbarossa Elected King: Holy Roman Empire Rises

German princes elected Frederick Barbarossa as their king at Frankfurt on March 4, 1152, choosing a red-bearded Swabian duke who would spend the next 38 years trying to impose imperial authority on popes, Italian city-states, and his own fractious nobility. He was the compromise candidate between two rival dynasties, and he turned that tenuous position into the most ambitious assertion of imperial power since Charlemagne. Frederick was the son of a Hohenstaufen father and a Welf mother, making him the only candidate acceptable to both houses in a feud that had paralyzed German politics for decades. His uncle, King Conrad III, had died in February 1152 and reportedly designated Frederick as his successor on his deathbed — bypassing Conrad's own young son. The princes confirmed the choice within weeks, an unusual speed that reflected their desperation for stability. Barbarossa's reign was defined by six military campaigns into Italy, where the wealthy Lombard cities resisted imperial taxation and governance. He destroyed Milan in 1162 after a brutal siege, scattering its population and salting its fields — an act that united the other cities against him. The Lombard League defeated his forces at the Battle of Legnano in 1176, forcing Barbarossa to recognize the cities' autonomous rights in the Peace of Constance in 1183. His conflicts with the papacy were equally dramatic. He supported a series of antipopes against Alexander III, leading to his excommunication in 1160. The confrontation at Venice in 1177, where Barbarossa reportedly knelt before Alexander to receive absolution, became one of the medieval period's most iconic images of secular power humbled before spiritual authority, though contemporaries debated whether the gesture was genuine submission or political theater. Barbarossa drowned crossing the Saleph River in Anatolia on June 10, 1190, during the Third Crusade. He was 67 years old. German legend held that Barbarossa slept beneath the Kyffhauser mountain, waiting to restore the empire to its glory — a myth that Bismarck's nationalists would exploit seven centuries later.