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insisted upon imposing their rule upon the free cities of North Italy. This particular series of intermittent campaigns bcgan early in thc 12th century, when the nobles of Germany overthrew the principle of hereditary monarchy and elected one of their number, Conrad Duke of Schwabia, to be Emperor in 1138. This didn't suit everybody, and the powerful Duke Henry of Bavaria, supported by his uncle, the chief of the powerful Welf family, refused to accept the electors¹ choice, and war flared up.

Conrad's family had taken the name of Hohenstaufen from one of their castles in Schwabia (it means "High Staufen"), and though inefifectual himself, he founded the most powerful and significant ruling Dynasty in German history. When this civil war began, the rival names of "Guelf" and "Ghibbeline" were heard for the first time. "GuelP was an Italiante rendering of the Welf family name, while "Ghibbeline" was based on the village of Waiblingen, one of the Hohenstaufen estates.

Early in this war Conrad's army besieged the town of Weinsberg, in which the rebel forces of Duke Henry had shut themselves up, and here for the first time, according to legend, was heard the rival war cries of "Hi-Welfi" and "Hi-Weibling!" which established for four cen-turies the names of the warring factions. The town fell to the Hohenstaufens in the end, who accepted its surrender on condition that only the women should be spared and should be allowed to leave with nothing but what they could carry on their backs. Whereupon the sturdy housewives ofWeinsburg were seen marching out of the town with their menfolk across their shoulders. True? Who can say, now? But it's a pretty legend, a verv typical action according to the Zeitgeist of the time and place, though the story is probably apocryphal like most of the yarns about massacres, atrocities, and miraclcs with which the age abounded.

Conrad went off on Crusade in 1142, but lost his army through total incompetence and came home in disgrace, which looked bad for the house of Hohenstaufen; but he died in 1152, and the family's first outstanding personage, Conrad's son Friedrich, was elected to the throne to succeed his father. Friedrich was thirty years old, a little ginger-haired man with a red beard which led the Italians to cali him Barbarossa. He was by no means insignificant, however, and in a splendid reign of 38 years, he brought Germany to the leadership of the Christian world.

Figurę 75. Infantry soldiers from a Spanish MS, c. 1150.

Having in his veins the blood of the Welfs as well as of the Hohenstaufen Weiblings, he was able to bring the warring factions in Germany to a condition sonie-what resembling peace, and he firmly suppressed feuds, disorder, and crime.

However, to be supreme monarch of Germany wasn't enough: his position would be greatly strengthened if he were to be actually crowned Emperor by the Pope. So he promised aid to the papacy against the trouble-soine Normans; then he went into Italy, and at Nepi, near Ronie, he met the reigning Pope, Adrian IV. Here, by an act of proud pighead-edness, he upset all the carefully