Barbarossa Under the Kyffhäuser: The Sleeping Emperor and the Ravens That Still Circle
On the tenth of June, 1190, in the swift cold water of a river in Asia Minor, the Holy Roman Empire suffered the most inadmissible of deaths. The Emperor Frederick I — Barbarossa , Redbeard, nearly seventy years old and leading the Third Crusade at the head of the greatest army Germany had ever sent east—drowned in the Saleph while his host watched from the banks. The body failed even to reach Jerusalem in pickled dignity; it was boiled, divided, buried in three places, none of them home. An emperor of such magnitude, dying so abruptly, so absurdly , in a river a cavalry horse could ford—the German lands simply declined the fact. Within generations the refusal had organized itself into one of Europe's mightiest legends: the emperor is not dead. He sits inside the Kyffhäuser , a low wooded mountain on the edge of the Golden Meadow in Thuringia, asleep at a stone table, his head on his hand, his red beard grown through the table—twice around it, say the strict accounts—waiting. Eve...