On December 18, 1940, Adolf Hitler issued “Directive 21,” authorizing what would become the largest military campaign in human history. The Führer’s attention to detail regarding the German invasion of the Soviet Union even extended to the plan’s code name, which he chose personally: Operation Barbarossa. It is with that decision that John Freed’s weighty new book Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth both begins and ends.1 It is not a story of Nazis, however, but of one medieval ruler, Frederick I Barbarossa, whose life and reign would cast a long shadow across centuries of German history.
Born in 1122, the young Frederick became Duke of Swabia (in southern Germany) in 1147 and shortly thereafter participated in the ill-fated Second Crusade. Upon the death of Conrad III, in what remain mysterious circumstances, Frederick was elected king by the German princes, and was anointed at Aachen in 1152. Three years later Pope Hadrian IV crowned Frederick Holy Roman Emperor, the most exalted secular position in Europe.
The imperial title itself was the invention of the papacy and the German kings, first bestowed on Charlemagne in 800 and resurrected by Otto Iin 962. Like those men, Frederick believed that his authority extended not just across Germany, but also over Italy and the Catholic Church. Wealthy Italian city-states like Milan, Genoa, and Verona were accustomed to give lip service to the faraway German emperors, but were in reality fiercely independent sovereign states. Frederick was determined to
