Luscombe D., Riley-Smith J. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 4: c. 1024-c. 1198, Part 2

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The western empire, 1125–1197 391

limits; we do not accept whatever is not compatible with them.’

According

to Rahewin, Otto of Freising’s secretary and the continuator of the bishop’s

biography of Frederick Barbarossa, the cultivation of imperium as protective

judicial authority was the emperor’s constant concern. As the ruler travelled

through the lower Rhineland in 1158,he

let no days pass in idleness, thinking those lost on which he had not made some

enactment to the advantage of the empire, for the preservation of law and justice

among all peoples. That was the reason why he had so consistently striven for so strong

an empire on this side of the Alps, had calmed the spirits of such strong peoples by great

discretion, without warfare, and . . . was now regarded not as the ruler of the realm, but

as father and governor of one home, one state.

Imperium was an ofﬁce taken to have been endowed with the power of one

of the two swords mentioned to Christ at the Last Supper, this power also being

interpreted in medieval times as needful for the defence of the church. As a letter

of Frederick Barbarossa’s expressed the idea in 1170,ironically at a time when

the papacy under Alexander III regarded him as a persecutor, ‘It is the duty of

imperial majesty to provide for peace and justice in the empire’s affairs according

to the established laws and canonical decrees, and above all for the church of

God, by whose intercessions and prayers we hope to be advanced and to reign

more conﬁdently in the Lord.’

In spite of perceiving Emperors Henry IV and

Vasenemies of the church, imperial protection of religion was still accepted as

normal by the twelfth-century papacy, including the speciﬁc guardianship or

advocacy of the papal see at Rome, however differently the papal and imperial

courts preferred to interpret the scope and limits of this advocacy. Once Henry

V and Pope Calixtus II had offered peace to one another in 1122 over the

questions of episcopal election and investiture and of ecclesiastical property

in Germany and Italy, the defensive duty of the imperial sword could be

resumed with propriety. From enemies such as Roger II of Sicily and the

Roman commune of 1143 to 1155, the papacy was eager to be rescued by the

military assistance of Lothar III, Conrad III and Frederick Barbarossa in turn.

In 1149 Conrad III assured Pope Eugenius III that he was vexed by whatever

threatened the pope’s person and the Roman church, ‘of which we are appointed

the defender by God’.

In the convention drawn up at Constance in 1153 between this pope’s legates

and Frederick Barbarossa, the latter committed himself to preserve and to

defend ‘the honour of the papacy and the secular properties of St Peter as the

MGH Constitutiones i,no.167,p.233.

Otto of Freising and Rehewin, Gesta Friderici iii, 17. The translation is by Mierow and Emery (1953),

p. 189.

MGH Diplomata,Frederick I, no. 568,p.39.

Ibid., Conrad III, no. 216,p.386.

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392 benjamin arnold

devoted and particular advocate of the holy Roman church’.

But when the

aims of the papal and imperial courts were no longer aligned, these imperial

powers of protection and advocacy began to look like a threat. In 1159 for

example, Frederick Barbarossa made it clear that the schism which had just

occurred in the papacy was to be settled by a council to be convened under

his own auspices at Pavia early in 1160.Pope Alexander III was informed that

‘since we are obliged to protect all churches established in our empire, we

ought so much the more readily to provide for the most sacred Roman church,

because the care and defence of it are believed to have been more particularly

committed to us by divine providence’.

But the bishops assembled at Pavia

declared against Alexander III, and his rival Victor IV, who was more solidly in

favour of the emperor’s anti-Sicilian diplomacy, was proclaimed pope instead.

It is not therefore surprising that many churchmen shared reservations about

the supposed beneﬁts of imperial defence of the church. But not until the

papacy could make plenitudo potestatis,‘plenitude of power’, truly effective in

the secular sense, that is, in the thirteenth century, would it prove possible to

circumvent the real presence of the German emperor and his representatives

as protectors of the Holy See and of the patrimony of St Peter.

Imperium also signiﬁed a geographical space called the Roman empire, occa-

sionally rendered inaccurately as ‘the German empire’ by the imperial chancery

simply because that reﬂected the realities of rule. A letter from Conrad III men-

tioned France, Spain, England and Denmark as adjacent to the empire in this

geographical sense, and Otto of Freising listed France, England and Hungary

in the same mode. In an interesting letter of 1155 to the Pisans, Frederick Bar-

barossa praised them for terrifying the peoples of Asia and Africa by land and

sea, thereby defending ‘the borders of Europe within which we occupy the

seat and domicile of empire’.

More often the texts conceive of imperium as

a species of terrestrial authority permitted by God for the discipline of the

nations, a power transmitted in history from the ancient empires of the east

to the Romans. Twelfth-century historiography took great interest in this phe-

nomenon and in its biblical proof-texts, mainly from the Book of Daniel.

Learned opinion argued that the Roman imperium represented the fourth and

last of such empires before the end of political history. According to Abbot

Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129), imperium would thereafter belong to Christ alone.

Bishop Otto of Freising was satisﬁed that the German kings would be custo-

dians of Rome’s imperium until the last days, Otto the Great’s reception of the

title imperator et augustus at Rome in 962 having been the ﬁnal conﬁrmatory

act, ‘and thus the Roman imperium was devolved upon the Germans’.

This

Ibid., Frederick I, no. 51,p.86.

Ibid., no. 285,p.97.

Ibid., no. 119,p.201.

Otto of Freising, Chronica sive Historia vi, 22.

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The western empire, 1125–1197 393

Roman imperium as the last universal empire was held to constitute some form

of dominion over the other Christian kingdoms, if not the entire world. In 1137

Wibald of Stablo expressed the idea to Lothar III when he wrote: ‘For just as

amongst all the stars it is certain that the sun rules in ﬁrst place in the heavens,

so the Roman imperium indisputably surpasses all the powers in the world.’

Possession of the city of Rome was held to symbolize this universal dominion,

so the German princes received letters in 1157 from the emperor explaining that

‘by divine and provident clemency we hold the governance of the city and the

world’.

In the following year papal legates soothingly addressed the emperor

as ‘lord and emperor of the city and the world’.

‘Lord of the World’ was not a

title adopted by the imperial chancery but it did enjoy some literary currency.

Vincent of Prague referred to Frederick Barbarossa as ‘the lord emperor, lord

of the world’s lands’,

and the author known as Archipoeta, who belonged to

the entourage of the imperial chancellor and archbishop of Cologne, Rainald

of Dassel, addressed the emperor as follows:

Salve mundi domine cesar noster, ave.

Cuius bonis omnibus iugum est suave.

Princeps terre principum cesar Frederice ...

Greetings to the lord of the world, Hail, our Caesar.

For the good of all, his yoke is light.

Prince of the princes of the land, Caesar Frederick...

Henry VI’s eulogist Peter of Eboli in his Liber ad honorem Augusti referred to

that emperor as prince of the world and lord of the world, and an aspect of this

rhetorical style was taken up by the chancery to proclaim the pre-eminence of

the empire over all the powers, peoples and kingdoms of the Christian world.

A diploma of 1174, for example, elevates Frederick Barbarossa’s clemency and

imperial majesty above the nations and the kingdoms. Another consequence

was the designation of other kings as reguli or kinglets, although this demeaning

description was never used ofﬁcially. However, John of Salisbury reported that

Louis VII of France was enraged with the archbishop of Cologne for referring

to him as a regulus, and the pro-Staufen author of the Chronica regia Coloniensis

was scornful of provincial kinglets and peoples who were supporting Alexander

III during the papal schism.

A letter from Henry II of England, who was on good terms with the im-

perial court, does contain what looks like an explicit admission of Frederick

Barbarossa’s supposed world authority; ‘We lay before you our kingdom and

Codex epistolae Wibaldi,no.12,p.92.

MGH Diplomata,Frederick I, no. 163,p.280.

Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici iii, 25.

Vincent of Prague, ‘Annales’, 1163 (actually 1162).

Archipoeta, Carmina vii.

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394 benjamin arnold

whatever is anywhere subject to our sway and entrust it to your power, that all

things may be administered in accordance with your nod, and that in all respects

your imperial will may be done.’

Such expressions belonged to a formal lan-

guage of diplomatic courtesy although one of Henry II’s subjects, Stephen of

Rouen, did consider the emperor to be Charlemagne’s proper heir and that in

consequence the Capetians had usurped his right to the sovereignty of France.

John of Salisbury was disgusted by German pretensions to world dominion. At

the time of the council of Pavia he wrote with indignation to Ralph of Sarre:

Who has appointed the Germans to be judges of the nations? Who has given authority

to brutal and headstrong men that they should set up a prince of their own choosing

over the heads of the sons of men? In truth their madness has often attempted to do

this; but by God’s will, it has on each occasion been overthrown and put to confusion,

and they have blushed for their own iniquity.

To support the last assertion, John of Salisbury offers no proof whatever.

Apart from taking homage from kings of Denmark and England, from dukes

of Poland, Pomerania and Silesia and from counts of Flanders, did the rulers

of twelfth-century Germany entertain concrete plans to transform imperium

into an institutional reality beyond the conﬁnes of the German, Burgundian

and Italian kingdoms? In alliance with the papacy, Lothar III, Conrad III and

Frederick Barbarossa did in turn propose to conquer the upstart kingdom of

Sicily proclaimed in 1130, but it is not clear what the status of the Regno would

then have been. When they invaded the south in 1137, Lothar III and Pope

Innocent II avoided a confrontation about this issue. Together they invested

Count Rainulf of Alife with the duchy of Apulia, implying joint imperial and

papal lordship over the Sicilian lands, for which homage had intermittently

been offered to the papacy ever since 1059. The problem revived when William

II of Sicily died in 1189.Henry VI regarded himself as the heir in right of his wife,

Constance of Sicily, the last legitimate member of the Sicilian royal house. But

the barons of the Regno elected the illegitimate royal scion, Count Tancred of

Lecce, instead and he was recognized as king by the pope in 1192.In1191 Henry

VI inconsistently claimed that Sicily should devolve to the empire both by an-

cient imperial right and as the inheritance of his consort. After he had seized the

kingdom in 1194,heavoided offering the customary homage for it to the pope.

Butinapparently rejecting Sicily’s status as a papal ﬁef, it is not clear that he re-

ally regarded Sicily as a fourth kingdom of the western empire either, although

he did designate its capital, Palermo, to be an imperial as well as a royal town.

Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici iii, 8. The translation is by Mierow and Emery (1953),

p. 179.

Letter 124 (1160) ed. and trans. in The Letters of John of Salisbury, i: The Early Letters (1153–1161), ed.

Millor, Butler and Brooke, pp. 206–8.

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The western empire, 1125–1197 395

In its attitude towards the eastern Roman empire, its rival in claims to world

dominion, the western imperial court oscillated between formal alliances and

covert hostility. Although the western court accepted that the Comnenians

were true emperors, the chancery was careful to deny the name of Roman to

the eastern empire and invented circumlocutions for its rulers such as king

of the Greeks or Constantinopolitan emperor. If theories of world dominion

had not assisted Frederick Barbarossa in his efforts to solve the papal schism

of 1159 to 1178, then it does appear to have conﬁrmed his desire to take overall

military command of the Third Crusade. Henry VI’s ambitions to make the

claim to universal dominion more realistic were certainly suspected by foreign

observers such as Roger of Howden and Niketas Choniates. But no one knows

whether the crusade which the emperor was preparing in 1196 and 1197 was

partly intended for the conquest of Constantinople or not. This was certainly

a strategic option considering what the Fourth Crusade achieved in 1204.A

German chronicler, the well-informed monk Otto of St Blasien, thought that

Henry VI did intend to take advantage of the prostration of Byzantium and

to subject it to his own western imperium.Henry VI’s acceptance of homage

from the new kingdoms of Cyprus and Cilician Armenia can be interpreted

as pointing in this direction, because these provinces had until very recently

been possessions of the eastern Roman empire. Whatever Henry VI’s plans

may have been, they died with him in 1197.

Since the 1030s the western empire had consisted geographically of three

kingdoms: Germany, sometimes called ‘the Roman kingdom’ to establish con-

sistency with the title king of the Romans; Italy, sometimes called ‘the king-

dom of Lombardy’, its designation when conquered by Otto the Great; and

Burgundy, whose southern portion bordering the Mediterranean was occa-

sionally distinguished as ‘the kingdom of Provence’.

Election to the German

kingdom validated title to the other two thrones, and it is recorded that certain

barons from Italy came to Frankfurt to observe Frederick Barbarossa’s election

in 1152.In1085 the title of king had been granted on a personal basis to the

duke of Bohemia, and in 1158 the emperor repeated the honour for Wladislav

II. But Bohemia was not permanently accounted a kingdom in its own right

until 1212.Itisoften held that neither the western empire nor its constituent

kingdoms had capitals, and following modern administrative language this

is an accurate judgement. To the twelfth-century mind, however, the empire

certainly possessed capitals, places associated with the sacred regnal authority

conferred by unction and coronation. The gold seals of Conrad III, Frederick

E.g. MGH Diplomata, Conrad III, no. 4,p.7, 1138, and no. 50,p.84, 1140, have ‘Romanum regnum’

for Germany; ibid., Lothar III, no. 103,p.167, 1136, has ‘cum in regno Longobardiae fuerimus’;

ibid., Conrad III, no. 132,p.240, 1145, has ‘in toto regno nostro Provincie’.

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396 benjamin arnold

Barbarossa and Henry VI were inscribed roma capvt mvndi regit orbis

frena rotvndi,‘Rome, head of the Earth, governs the reins of the round

world,’

and in 1159 Frederick Barbarossa described Rome as the city ‘which is

the head of our empire’.

He claimed that the papal schism of 1159 threatened

to wrest the capital from his jurisdiction; ‘For since, by divine ordinance, I am

emperor of Rome and am so styled, I have merely the appearance of ruling

and bear an utterly empty name lacking in meaning if authority over the city

of Rome should be torn from my grasp.’

The same emperor set about revising and extending the ofﬁcial association of

certain capital towns with imperial power. During the festivities of December

1165 and January 1166 for the canonization of Charlemagne, Barbarossa declared

Aachen to be a holy city and the chief of cities, ‘the head and seat of the

German kingdom’, a place of kings which, as ‘the royal seat in which the

Roman emperors are ﬁrst crowned’, outshone all other places in dignity and

honour.

In the theoretical language of imperial ideology, Aachen was thus

seen as the capital of Germany, and in the other kingdoms certain towns were

distinguished in the same manner. For Italy the emperor had already marked

out Monza in 1159 to the detriment of Milan and Pavia as ‘head of Lombardy

and seat of that kingdom’, and built a palace there in 1163.Heclaimed that

‘our predecessors were accustomed to be crowned there [Monza] by the law

of the kingdom’,

but this was deliberate misinformation. The motive may

have been to legitimate the only coronation which had actually taken place

there, that of his uncle as anti-king Conrad III in 1128.Insimilar style Arles

was declared head of Provence and a principal seat of the empire in 1164, and

Vienne was declared the seat of the Burgundian kingdom in 1166.

the application of law and justice

When diplomas of Lothar III record ‘the authority of the Roman empire’ and

of Conrad III ‘the authority of our power’,

what methods and resources were

available to German rulers to make this authority manifest? The foremost

Haussherr (1977), nos. 29, 31, 34,pp.21–5, and MGH Diplomata, Conrad III, p. 241,n.1 (1145). The

inscription goes back to Conrad II’s seal; ibid., Conrad II, p. xxvi.

Ibid., Frederick I, no. 285,p.97, has ‘status urbis, quae caput imperii nostri est’.

Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici iv, 35. The translation is by Mierow and Emery (1953),

p. 271.

MGH Diplomata,Frederick I, no. 502,p.433, has ‘que caput et sedes regni Theutonici est’, and no.

503,p.434, has ‘pro sede regali, in qua primo imperatores Romanorum coronantur’.

Ibid., no. 253,p.53, 1159, has ‘que caput Lombardiae et sedes regni illius esse dignoscitur, in qua

etiam nostri antecessores de iure regni coronari consueverant’. See Peyer (1951), p. 457.

E.g. MGH Diplomata, Lothar III, no. 57,p.90, 1134, has ‘auctoritate Romani imperii’; ibid., Conrad

III, no. 79,p.141, 1142, has ‘auctoritatis nostre potestate’.

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The western empire, 1125–1197 397

royal duty was to provide justice. In 1129 Lothar III spoke of having been

raised by the grace of God to the royal ofﬁce in order to provide justice for the

church and for all men, an idea expressed with the same dignity by Conrad

III in 1141.Asthe Lord’s anointed, he owed judgement and justice against all

wrong-doing, and protection for everyone’s rights. The rulers of the twelfth-

century empire took these ancient formulas and their programme as a serious

religious obligation. Quoting Psalm 98, one of Conrad III’s diplomas opens

with ‘The king’s honour is to cultivate judgement as King David attests.’

Added together, the realms of the western empire were too large for the royal

court to be capable of supervising travelling assizes or permanent tribunals

in the various regions. The itinerant royal household was itself the highest

court of law, its procedures being simple and speedy. For 1151, for example, we

possess the record for the archbishop-elect of Cologne, Arnold II, bringing a

case before the king to ask for the restoration of episcopal possessions alienated

under his predecessor. As usual the king required the princes present to assist

him to consider the case, to deliberate the issues and to deliver the judgement.

Ideally the law upheld by the royal court was the will of heaven found out

during the hearings and recorded in the ﬁndings or sententiae.However, the

latter did not constitute a code of law which could be consulted. For the placita

or law courts of dukes, counts and ecclesiastical advocates, the records some-

times refer to the custom of the Bavarians or the Franconians or the Saxons.

But after the preservation of ancient regional codes in Carolingian times, no

such custom was written down in any detail until Eike von Repgow’s Sach-

senspiegel in the thirteenth century. Writing about German legal practices of

the twelfth century, Provost Burchard of Ursberg complained that the lack

of written law was a great inconvenience. But one reason why written codes

were not widely perceived to be necessary was that many German magnates

drew up and operated rules of their own for their households, manors, villages,

towns and retinues. Notable twelfth-century examples include Bishop Otto II

of Bamberg’s regulations for his Bavarian manors; Archbishop Rainald of

Cologne’s rules for his extensive retinue of ministeriales; the duke of Z

ahringen’s

regulations for the town of Freiburg im Breisgau founded in 1120 and the bishop

of Strasbourg’s for his cathedral town, promulgated in 1130 or 1131; and the rules

of the bishops of Hildesheim for the rural immigrants to their diocese.

In the twelfth century, concepts of law in Germany were being transformed

by three different types of legal endeavour: the study of Roman Law, the

establishment of the pax or peace-keeping association known as the Landfriede

and the uses made of feudal law or feodalis ius.Since the eleventh century

imperial diplomas had quoted from Justinian’s legislation, a practice reinforced

Ibid., no. 56,pp.94–5, 1141.

398 benjamin arnold

in Conrad III’s chancery by Wibald of Stablo, abbot of Corvey. The presence of

Bolognese lawyers at Frederick Barbarossa’s court in Italy lent an authoritarian

tone to the ordinances issued at Roncaglia in 1158.Two of this emperor’s acts,

Sacramenta puberum on oaths and Habita on the privilege of students, were

boldly inserted as authentica into the Codex of Roman Law. Bishop Otto of

Freising explicitly referred to the principle of kings standing above the law

when he sent a copy of his History of the Two Cities to the emperor in 1157, and

a paragraph from Justinian’s legislation stood behind the following passage in a

charter for the town of Speyer issued in 1182: that just as it was up to the emperor

‘tocreate laws, so it is for us to elucidate benevolently things which are unclear’.

A signiﬁcant example of emperors making law in this sense of leges condere

concerns Frederick Barbarossa’s edict issued at Osimo in 1177 which forbade

the plunder of wrecks and shipwrecked persons. This was confected by Italian

lawyers, but Henry VI’s edict of 1196 on the same subject appears to have been

composed by his chancery. Barbarossa’s edict against incendiarism issued at

Nuremberg in 1186 or 1188 also had the character of law made by imperial

authority, but legal scholars today are not agreed as to whether the sworn

associations for enforcing the peace known as Landfrieden count as consented

custom or newly made law. For the earliest imperial Landfriede,HenryIV’s

issued at Mainz in 1103, only a report of the oath sworn has survived. For

Henry V’s Landfrieden (1119, 1122, 1125), Lothar III’s (1125, 1135) and Conrad

III’s (1147), the texts have perished. Frederick Barbarossa’s Landfriede of 1152

survives in the form of twenty rules circulated to the princes of Germany,

conveying the impression of a code in the making. Its justiﬁcation was set out

in the preface; peace was proclaimed by royal authority in order to maintain

divine and human laws, to defend the church, to guarantee everyone’s rights

and to repair the unsettled state of the empire. His Landfriede of 1179 was,

on the other hand, a regional association conﬁned to Rhenish Franconia. The

ohlde annals report that when the emperor visited Wallhausen in 1169 he

had renewed the pax, but it is not known whether this too was a local Saxon

Landfriede or an ordinance for the whole empire.

Although the peace-keeping associations did not work well as a curb upon

feuds, they had great inﬂuence upon judicial practice in twelfth-century

Germany in that the princes and their own law courts were involved by the

crown in the tasks of preserving law and order. In the legislation against arson

(1186 or 1188), for example, it was explicitly stated that the dukes, margraves,

counts palatine, landgraves and counts must do justice over incendiaries on

their own authority. But Burchard of Ursberg asserted with reference to this

ordinance that the emperor ‘assembled a meeting of princes at Nuremberg

Ibid., Frederick I, no. 827,p.34.

The western empire, 1125–1197 399

where he made arrangements for peace over the land and ordered it to be set

out in writings which the Germans until today call fridebrief, that is, letters of

peace, nor do they employ any other laws; but they do not obey them properly,

being such a wild and unruly people’.

The royal court did not intend to replace older custom in the provinces where

it could be effective against crime, and a picturesque example of provincial cus-

tom preceding the Landfrieden was preserved by Otto of Freising in his report

of Frederick Barbarossa’s visit to Worms for Christmas in 1155.Archbishop

Arnold of Mainz and Count Palatine Hermann of Stahleck were brought to

trial for devastating the land during their feuds:

Nowanold custom has gained the status of a law among the Franks and the Swabians,

that whenever a noble, a ministerialis or a peasant (colonus)has been found guilty by his

judge of such offences, before he is punished by sentence of death the noble is obliged

to carry a dog [and] the ministerialis asaddle . . . from one county into the next in token

of his shame. The emperor, observing this custom, compelled that count palatine, a

great prince of the realm, together with ten counts, his accomplices, to carry dogs the

distance of a German mile.

The study of law and legal practice in the twelfth-century empire as they af-

fected politics is a complex subject. Nevertheless, renewed interest in Roman

Law, the need perceived for Landfrieden and the German king’s position as over-

lord of vassal princes who included all the bishops made a deep impression with-

out essentially changing the ruler’s traditional role as protector of old custom to

that of creator of new law. As a diploma issued by Lothar III judiciously recorded

in 1132,‘custom is by long usage transformed into the character of law’.

the royal chancery

With the itinerant royal court travelled the clerical personnel who staffed both

the royal chapel and the chancery. The production of numerous privileges, let-

ters and other written instruments while on the move was one of the remarkable

achievements of royal governance in the medieval empire, as the volumes of

diplomas edited in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica series show. In nor-

mal times the chancery was directed by a cancellarius or chancellor under the

formal obedience of the archbishop of Mainz, and the royal chapel doubling

as a chancery was, as part of the royal court doubling as a law court, the prin-

cipal organ of government in the twelfth-century empire. In 1125 Lothar III

Burchard of Ursberg, Chronicon for 1186.

Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici ii, 48. The translation is by Mierow and Emery (1953),

p. 163.

MGH Diplomata, Lothar III, no. 41,p.68.

400 benjamin arnold

disbanded the staff of Henry V’s chapel and chancery and appointed new men,

Saxons for the most part, as the chaplains and notaries. He agreed with Arch-

bishop Adalbert I of Mainz not to appoint a chancellor at all, probably so that

the archbishop might enjoy the emoluments normally attached to the chancel-

lor’s ofﬁce as part of his reward for permitting Lothar’s election. This unusual

arrangement made little difference in practice to the work of the chancery in

producing diplomas and other materials. As soon as Conrad III was elected in

1138,hereverted to Salian tradition and appointed Arnold of Wied, cathedral

provost of Cologne, as his chancellor. After the latter’s promotion to the arch-

bishopric of Cologne in 1151, the king appointed his longest serving chaplain,

Arnold of Selehofen, as chancellor. He continued to direct the writing ofﬁce

for Frederick Barbarossa until his elevation to the see of Mainz in 1153.

It can be perceived that the chancellors, chaplains and notaries were bound to

wield great inﬂuence at the heart of imperial affairs. Wibald of Stablo was taken

up by Conrad III as his most creative notary. His advice was heeded at court, and

he was further distinguished by receiving the abbacy of Corvey in 1146.Hewas

also employed as an envoy in France and Italy; he continued to work in Fred-

erick Barbarossa’s chancery; and in the 1150shewas twice sent as ambassador to

the Byzantine emperor. Through his reworking of older charters and through

new diplomatic expression, Wibald of Stablo paved the way for the style of

Frederick Barbarossa’s ﬂamboyant chancellor Rainald of Dassel, appointed in

1156. The third of Barbarossa’s nine chancellors, he was rewarded with the

see of Cologne in 1159.Inthe chancery he employed Henry of W

urzburg as

protonotary, thus conﬁrming a new title invented by Wibald in 1150 and pos-

sibly indicating an elaboration of business. Henry was also employed as an

envoy, to France, Italy and Byzantium. Rahewin considered him a person ﬁt

to judge the literary worth of his work as the continuator of Otto of Freising’s

biography of Barbarossa. Other notable chancellors were Christian of Buch,

a man ﬂuent in several languages, who was promoted to the archbishopric of

Mainz in 1165; and Philip of Heinsberg who received the see of Cologne in 1167.

Henry VI’s capable chancellor Conrad of Querfurt was, like Rainald of Dassel,

aSaxon. In 1194 he became bishop of Hildesheim and was later appointed to

the see of W

urzburg as well. He was assassinated in W

urzburg in 1202.

The majority of the extant products of the chancery are grants or conﬁrma-

tion of rights, possessions and imperial protection to the churches and towns of

Germany and Italy, diplomas or their copies which have survived the centuries

in reasonably well-protected ecclesiastical and urban archives. A number of

letters have also survived which are mandates to secular princes, churchmen or

ministeriales to carry out a particular function in the near future, or to desist

forthwith from some species of misdemeanour. It is thought that the chancery

may have sent out far more mandates than the residue would indicate, the