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Updated: June 18, 2025
The third crusade is the most generally interesting of all the series, because of the place which it has taken in literature; because of the greatness of its leaders and their exploits; of the knightly character of Saladin himself; of the pathetic fate of the old Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who lost his life and sacrificed most of his army in an attempt to force his way overland through Asia Minor; and of its real failure after so great an expenditure of life and effort and so many minor successes the most brilliant of all the crusades, the one great crusade of the age of chivalry: but it concerns the history of England even less than does the continental policy of her kings.
In the days of Charlemagne, Germany's eastern boundary was extended to the Elbe, and beyond it to Holstein, but it was not until four centuries later, that is, in the reign of Frederick Barbarossa, that the Baltic was reached, the southern borders of which sea, now constituting Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and Prussia, having theretofore been inhabited chiefly by Slavonic and Lithuanian peoples.
Thus balked of his prey, Barbarossa swung his fleet round to the southward and westward and sailed for Sardinia, where, from the Straits of Bonifacio to Cape Spartivento, he left no house standing that would burn, or man alive who was not swept in as a captive.
I do not know why my delight in those tragedies did not send me to the volume of his plays, which was all the time in the bookcase at home, but I seem not to have thought of it, and rapt as I was in them I am not sure that they gave me greater pleasure, or seemed at all finer, than "Rollo," "The Wife," "The Stranger," "Barbarossa," "The Miser of Marseilles," and the rest of the melodramas, comedies, and farces which I saw at that time.
By way of a picturesque touch to the proceedings, Barbarossa is said to have arranged for a suitable display of executioners' axes at the meeting. Nevertheless this pretty imperial conceit settled no affairs one way or another, and it was not until Přemysl Ottokar became undisputed ruler of Bohemia, and eventually of Moravia as well, that order of a sort was restored.
From the time of his release by Barbarossa until the day of his death at the siege of Malta in 1565, he followed the example shown him by that prince among pirates with so much assiduity as to render him only second to Kheyr-ed-Din in the detestation in which he was held.
Frederick Barbarossa was already dead in Asia Minor, and the German army was already broken up, when, on the 24th of June, 1190, Philip Augustus went and took the oriflamme at St. Denis, on his way to Vezelai, where he had appointed to meet Richard, and whence the two kings, in fact, set out, on the 4th of July, to embark with their troops, Philip at Genoa, and Richard at Marseilles.
Walking through one of the low-browed doors, we pass across a vestibule, where a stone is pointed out in the pavement as the spot on which the emperor Barbarossa laid his head beneath the foot of Pope Alexander III. Then proceeding into the interior, you find the dusky atmosphere dimly blazing with a peculiar glitter from the walls and ceilings, the whole being one mass of gold mosaic, on which scripture subjects are inserted in a darker colouring.
"To my mind there can be no doubt," Rashevitch went on, growing more and more enthusiastic, "that if a Richard Coeur-de-Lion, or Frederick Barbarossa, for instance, is brave and noble those qualities will pass by heredity to his son, together with the convolutions and bumps of the brain, and if that courage and nobility of soul are preserved in the son by means of education and exercise, and if he marries a princess who is also noble and brave, those qualities will be transmitted to his grandson, and so on, until they become a generic characteristic and pass organically into the flesh and blood.
Out they rushed in hot pursuit, not thinking or caring save their shrewd captain whether this were not a feint of Doria's to catch them in the open. "Get into line," said Barbarossa to his captains, "and do as you see me do." Dragut took the right wing, Sālih Reïs the left. Early on the 28th the Christian fleet was discovered at anchor, in a foul wind, off Santa Maura, thirty miles to the south.
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