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Updated: June 6, 2025
Even so the Italian language suddenly crystallizes itself into a brilliant and perpetual type, at the same epoch as the wondrous poem of Dante flashes forth from the brooding chaos, the fiat lux of a new intellectual world. The Emperor Frederic II., last of the imperial Hohenstaufens, died in 1250.
To sum up his position in contemporary history: As the German nation is the result of an evolution of individual and national character in obedience to resistless inner forces and to its environment, so out of the medley of imperial and royal Hohenstaufens, Hapsburgs, Wittelsbachs, Wettins, Guelphs, and the like, have arisen, as by a survival of the fittest, the Hohenzollerns.
After the death of Frederick II., the war of the popes against his successors lasted for seventeen years. After the defeat of Manfred , Conradin, the last of the Hohenstaufens, died on the scaffold at Naples. Charles of Anjou lost Sicily through the rebellion of the Sicilian Vespers ; and dominion in that island, separated from Naples, passed to the house of Aragon.
Next, he had managed to get into a quarrel with Pope Innocent III, the famous enemy of the Hohenstaufens. In the year 1213 John had been obliged to make an ignominious peace just as Henry IV had been obliged to do in the year 1077.
GERMAN, ENGLISH, AND SPANISH WRITERS. In Germany, in the age of the Hohenstaufens, the poets called Minnesingers abounded. They were conspicuous at the splendid tournaments and festivals. In the thirteenth century numerous lays of love, satirical fables, and metrical romances were composed or translated.
Before his departure upon the crusading expedition during which he lost his life, Frederick saw his son, Henry VI, crowned king of Italy. Moreover, in order to extend the power of the Hohenstaufens over southern Italy, he arranged a marriage between the young Henry and Constance, the heiress to the Norman kingdom of Naples and Sicily.
It is, to be sure, a Romantic Waiblingen, and not the real city, as Arnim himself was afterward forced to admit with some disappointment when he actually saw it. But as Arnim portrays it, it rises to typical value without losing any of its poetic individuality. It is the city of the Hohenstaufens, the last stand of medievalism against the encroachment of a new civilization.
Conradin went to Italy, but was defeated and captured in 1268, and was executed at Naples. Such was the tragic end of the last of the Hohenstaufens. The unbearable tyranny of the French led to a conspiracy called the Sicilian Vespers ; and, at Easter Monday, at vesper time, the rising took place. All the French in Sicily were massacred.
Let us be careful to keep what we have, lest we lose it because we do not know how to appreciate it. Germany once was a powerful empire under the Carolingians, the Saxons, and the Hohenstaufens, and when she lost her place, five, yes six hundred years passed before she regained the use of her legs if I may say so. Political and geological developments are equally slow.
But let us ignore for the moment all that belongs to a remote past, the study of which would call for more space than we have at our disposal. Let us not question the empire of the Ottos, the Hohenstaufens or the Hapsburgs, in which Germany, at least as a nation and a race, played but a secondary part and was still unconscious of her existence.
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