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Updated: June 22, 2025
A conspicuous Country ever since in the world, and which grows ever more so in our late times. Cousin to one Kaiser, the Lothar above named; then a chief stay of the Hohenstauffen, of the two Hohenstauffens who followed: a restless, much-managing, wide-warring man.
The imperial position of the Hapsburgs was far less splendid than that of the Hohenstauffen; it rapidly became more German and less European, until by and by people began to forget what the empire originally meant. The change which came over the papacy was even more remarkable.
"For love of him who suffered on this day I will grant thee thy life." He was afterwards exchanged for Beatrice, the daughter of the unhappy Helena, whose sons, the last princes of the Hohenstauffen race, died in the prison in which they had lived since infancy. The ideas of law and order in mediæval Germany were by no means what we now understand by those terms.
They prepared the way for Innocent III to plant his foot upon the necks of kings, and for Innocent IV to destroy the House of Hohenstauffen. That this would be the result of their stand for liberty, neither they nor the other parties to the struggle could foretell. But on both sides it was felt that the greatest issues were at stake.
Otto II, in whose idealism there was a trace of his father's concrete ambition, planned the conquest of South Italy and Sicily. The scheme was not impracticable as the Hohenstauffen were afterwards to prove. And in the year 980 it could be justified as advantageous to the whole of Christian Europe. A new Saracen peril was impending in the Western Mediterranean.
THE SUABIAN AGE. A splendid epoch of belles-lettres dates from the year 1138, when Conrad III., of the Hohenstauffen dynasty, ascended the throne of the German Empire. The Crusades, which followed, filled Germany with religious and martial excitement, and chivalry was soon in the height of its splendor.
The Swabian House, the Hohenstauffen, gained the ascendancy in the person of Frederick Barbarossa. The lineal representatives of the Saxon Guelfs are found to-day in the House of Brunswick. The rule of the Swabian House is most intimately connected with Italian history.
By the extinction of the House of Hohenstauffen and by the assumed right to grant the investiture of the kingdom of Naples to foreigners, the Popes not only struck a death-blow at imperial influence, but also prepared the way for their own exile to Avignon.
On the other hand they inspired the wider aims of the Ottos and the Hohenstauffen. It is therefore worth our while to understand what a Carolingian king was, and what a Carolingian Emperor hoped to be.
He says little of the great writers of his age; that, too, is a weakness of youth whose imagination lingers willingly in the past or future, but not in the present. The Hohenstauffen period does not attract him. He rides close to the magnificent Castel del Monte but fails to visit the site; he inspects the castle of Lucera and says never a word about Frederick II or his Saracens.
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