His name was Red


Knut Görich
Eine Biographie
782pp. Munich: C. H. Beck. ¤29.95.
978 3 406 59823 4

Published: 30 April 2012

M edieval people had the annoying habit of naming their children after themselves. While this might have been useful for marking family lineages in the absence of surnames, how did they ever get the right Frederick, Henry, William or Mary to come in for their dinner or tidy their toys? And how are we to tell them apart? Fortunately, there are always nicknames. Frederick I is distinguished conveniently among the many German rulers of this name by his epithet: Barbarossa or Red-Beard, Duke of Swabia, German King, Roman Emperor. Barbarossa acquired his handy middle name posthumously, from thirteenth-century opponents of his military activities in Italy; most likely because red hair was believed to indicate a choleric and aggressive temperament as much as because of his looks. The surviving contemporary descriptions and depictions claim that Barbarossa was good-looking, of medium height, with a cheerful face, beautiful nose and white teeth – and actually a blond head of hair. How much of this is standardized flattery and how much reflects his actual physiognomy is anyone’s guess.

About Barbarossa’s life, we know as little for certain as about his looks. Although he was one of the most powerful men of his time, ruling his empire between 1152 and 1190, the surviving descriptions are naturally biased because they were written either by his supporters or opponents. Knut Görich does a masterful job of synthesizing all there is to know about Barbarossa, carefully evaluating the credibility of each source, drawing reasonable and probable conclusions without too much speculation.

Power gained and maintained – this is the sum of Görich’s account of Barbarossa’s life. Görich, whose previous work was concerned with Barbarossa’s conception of honour and reputation, sees everything from the perspective of how his subject acquired and defended his status. The young Duke of Swabia became close to his predecessor, his uncle Conrad III of Staufen, who may have suggested him for his succession before succumbing to malaria. However, German kings at the time were elected by the great men of the kingdom, rather than appointed by a predecessor or inheriting their position, and Barbarossa persuaded the princes to elect him through clever negotiations and deals, while never showing too much ambition, a quality considered inexcusable in rulers.

Barbarossa continued to buy himself power – giving gold, titles and lands to lower aristocrats, who would be grateful to him and owe him loyalty in return. But his coffers were not as deep as those of other rulers, and although his vassals were obliged to give him military service, in reality, they were able to refuse if they did not want to join his projects. That Barbarossa managed to persuade so many people to accompany him on military campaigns to Italy and the Holy Land, and that he held on to power for almost four decades until he drowned on crusade, is testament to his generous sharing of the spoils of war, his clever forging of allegiances through marriage and fiefs, and his rhetorical and diplomatic skills. In a world where power was a performance, Frederick was a master of getting the right person to kneel before him, while coming out to the city gates to greet another. Such acts were not mere formalities: they publicly established rather than just reflected hierarchies and alliances. In the power struggle characteristic of the European Middle Ages between kings and the regional princes (who often wielded more de facto power simply through their proximity to their territories), Barbarossa largely kept his princes in check and out of feuds with each other. He also maintained his power in relation to the mighty Byzantine Empire and the ambitious papacy.

To those who are not political or military historians, what is gleaned of everyday life and of the culture of the court may be more interesting than the ever-changing enmities, allegiances, victories and defeats. Frederick spent most of his life in tents, for instance; the travelling court did not often use the palatine palaces he built as representations of his power. The young son of a duke with no expectations of reaching the throne, he was never educated in Latin, and had to travel with interpreters. One of his major conflicts with the papacy was due to a one-sided translation of a letter by Pope Hadrian IV. Barbarossa’s scholarly adviser rendered “beneficium” (benefits or fiefs) as “fiefs”, making it sound like the Pope believed he conveyed power to the Emperor, so that the Pope was forced to issue a clarifying statement.

Many political historians will rightly applaud this biography for its beautiful, tight style, erudition and state-of-the-art knowledge; and it will be hard to better this as a standard work on Barbarossa for a long time. And yet, it is not too far-fetched to see Görich’s book as symptomatic of German historiography desperately looking for an appropriate form of expression. Most German medievalists currently do not publish books, just articles. They might have had enough of writing long works after composing what are essentially two obligatory PhD dissertations; or may not find the right, less defensive tone after that. Or they might not get sufficient encouragement from their universities. Those who write books tend to do so for students or for non-specialist audiences. Publishers likewise seem to prefer either dissertations (which they usually print at a cost to the author), or books aimed at a popular market.

Görich’s biography falls between the two stools. It seems to be aimed at a wide audience, to judge by the lack of footnotes (only abbreviated references are given, which one then has to look up laboriously in the bibliography), by the background information given about certain aspects of the Middle Ages (“during Barbarossa’s time, royal rulers were essentially travelling rulers”), as well as by the handsome, expensive and careful production with images and maps. In other places, however, Görich assumes a fair bit of specialist knowledge or a very good memory (the range of meanings of “beneficium”, for example, is only implied; his main family tree of rulers presupposes that we know or can work out from the biography to which dynasty each belongs), and his bibliography is that of an up-to-date scholarly work.

Biography is the most conservative form of historiography, the safest and bestselling genre that publisher and author could have picked for this semi-popular book. It implies that history is best told as a story of human agents shaping the course of events. Görich’s account is particularly linear: it is told mostly chronologically, without a strong argument, simply describing how one action follows another. The story is propelled forwards by an elegant, fluent style relating a sequence of events, rather than ordered thematically. Interrupting the chronological progression are sections nodding to contemporary preoccupations of academic history: a short aside on Beatrice of Burgundy (Frederick’s wife of twenty-eight years who bore him eleven children); a chapter on emotions, group politics and performance as part of the court’s display of power; and sections on posthumous evaluations of Barbarossa’s life, especially as a hero of German nationalism (which Görich rebukes with gratifying curtness).

That there is no other way to read this book than from beginning to end cements the impression of a linear progression of deeds. There is not even an index (other than a name index; although this is again standard in German publishing, it drastically limits the usefulness of a printed book of nearly 800 pages). This seemingly objective genre, then, is ideologically loaded. Do humans really make history in the way suggested here? Görich is careful to separate fact from fiction, but the entirely sensible conjectures he draws – for example, that Barbarossa resisted the Pope not because he wanted to make some grand point about the separation of Church and State, but because he saw him as a competitor for power over Italy – make Barbarossa’s interest in gaining and maintaining power the reason for everything he did. Of course, Barbarossa would not have been able to reign for so long if this aim had not informed most of his actions, but is there no room at all for irrational or personal decisions? Might Frederick have picked Henry the Lion as a close adviser not just to solve the conflicts about the possession of Bavaria, but also because he knew he could work with him? Might he not have made some stupid or arbitrary choices, or might things not just have happened to him without his intent? In claiming to write a neutral account, Görich, like most historians, hides his bias towards logical causality and rational human agency. Knut Görich acknowledges that “the concept of great men who make history has lost much of its persuasive power”, and yet, he has written just that: an account of a great man who made history.

Bettina Bildhauer is a Senior Lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Medieval Blood, 2006, and Filming the Middle Ages, which was published last year.

Get Adobe Flash player




In the next TLS

  • FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTOBest case for Franco
  • SIMON GOLDHILLHow to tell an Amazon
  • KASIA BODDYDoris Lessing’s meatloaf
  • ALICIA RIXTurning Henry James