ppoli61

@ppoli611674629039 · 12 Nov 2020

Follow Following

Frederick Barbarossa and the Kyffhauser saga

#history #peopletoknow

As the communes gradually grew, popes and emperors argued among themselves about who was more important. The emperors felt they were heirs of the Roman Empire that had dominated the world and they thought that the Church too owed them obedience. The popes believed that taking care of souls was more important than taking care of bodies. Furthermore, the Holy Roman Empire had been granted to Charlemagne by a pope. The church therefore maintained that the Pope was the real master of the Empire and had the right to entrust it only to those gentlemen who enjoyed their trust. And here comes the question of law. In those days it was normal to think that someone had the right to rule over other people, just for being the son of already powerful and famous people.

The struggle between the papacy and the empire became more bitter about twelve hundred years after the birth of Christ. The Emperor realized he was losing ground and sought a land on which to strengthen his power. The choice fell on Italy. Here the fiefdoms were small and loyal to the emperor, there were many communes but the emperor underestimated the strength of artisans and traders, in a word of the bourgeoisie. As for the Pope, he did not have an army.

Emperor Frederick, known as Barbarossa, (1122-1190) gathered an army of loyal noble feudal lords and crossed the Alps, in search of our sunny and rich land. He was thinking of an easy conquest. How could the merchant communes rebel against the best knights in Europe? Communes were only interested in remaining free and trading, but the Emperor really wanted to become the master of everything and everyone. Gathered in his camp the representatives of the communes, he gave his orders: each commune would no longer have to mint coins, nor legislate, nor administer justice. He should have welcomed a feudal lord loyal to the Emperor as head, he would have had to pay all the old taxes such as tolls and bridges, in short, everything had to go back as before and the citizens had to resign themselves to not being free men anymore.

Then it was the Pope's turn. Barbarossa asked that Rome become the capital of his Empire and that the Pope recognize his inferiority to the Emperor.

The Communes did not obey and the Pope neither.

Many legends circulated about Barbarossa, also due to his sudden death while fording a river. One is that of the sleeping hero, linked to the older British-Celtic ones of Arthur and the Mabinogion. Legend has it that he is not dead but asleep with his riders in a cave in the Kyffhäuser mountains in Thuringia and that when the ravens stop flying around the top, he will wake up and bring Germany to its former greatness. Dominating the monument erected in his memory is a 57 meters high tower surmounted by a huge imperial crown. A staircase of 247 steps leads to the top of the tower.

The Kyffhäuser saga was born for his nephew Frederick II, but during the nineteenth century, some writers including the Grimm brothers, in the Germanic Sagas, took up the saga of Mount Kyffhäuser, attributing it to Barbarossa, where he is asleep, sitting at a table and his red beard grows enormously so that it has already made two turns around the table. When the third round is completed, Federico will wake up and fight an extraordinary battle: the day of judgment will arise.

In reality Barbarossa, as was the custom then, after death was placed in boiling water to detach the flesh from the bones, bones that were later to be brought to the Holy Land. They never got there.