‘Frederick Barbarossa’
By G.A. Loud
Reaktion Books, 200 Pages

A Holy Roman emperor between 1155 and 1190, Frederick Barbarossa ruled a vast domain that included northern Italy and what has become modern-day Germany. Barbarossa (1122-90) ruled for so long and over so much territory that he seemed invincible. So mighty was the emperor’s reputation that Hitler called his invasion of Russia in 1941 Operation Barbarossa, reflecting an imperial expansionism embodied in the person of one man.

Author G.A. Loud concentrates on the facts on the ground, which show a wily, determined leader who was possessed of extraordinary energy but defeated in his expansionist efforts as much as rewarded by them. He was dominant in Italy and yet his hold on power was tenuous and collapsed after his death. He tried to install his own man as pope and failed. 

At first, I thought that Mr. Loud’s relentless focus on Barbarossa’s battles and constant travel across his empire resulted in a virtual obliteration of any sense of the emperor himself, but that is the point: The man was utterly consumed by a desire to unite diverse lands and peoples under a unitary executive.

The plethora of campaigns, personalities, places, and issues is such that this book would have been aided by the appendices typically featured in biographies. I’m puzzled as to why Mr. Loud did not include maps, a chronology of events, and a cast of personages that readers could use to keep track of where, what, and who stood in the way of Barbarossa’s progress.

Barbarossa’s imperial designs were often thwarted, though he was able to disguise his failures with shrewd peacemaking in those periods when he was gearing up for another war. Toward the end of his reign, Mr. Loud suggests, the emperor was already losing power and the fealty of the princes who ostensibly were his vassals.

In fact, though Mr. Loud does not put it this way, this was the Age of the Princes, not the emperor. They might sign pledges of loyalty to him, but those pledges came at high prices the emperor had to pay. In other words, what it meant to be emperor was negotiable. 

In an era with none of the modern modes of communication, Barbarossa was in the saddle (literally) most of the time. He had to show himself in order to maintain his hegemony. Princes tended to go their own way and had to be cajoled and coerced into joining Barbarossa’s wars.

Opposing Barbarossa, as well, were popes who had the support of the English and the French, and the emperor did not have the talent, or perhaps the interest, to create the bureaucracies that strengthened England and France. Depending on one man to rule and to prevail over other powers only went so far, which meant that Barbarossa was sometimes isolated by popes who maneuvered around him.

In spite of Barbarossa’s outsized reputation, Mr. Loud shows that he left little by way of a legacy. Much of his manic energy, in retrospect, looks like the efforts of a frustrated man — though Mr. Loud never stoops to psychologizing the emperor. 

The irony of Barbarossa’s example is that he could only survive and sometimes succeed by war, by expansion, both of which exhausted his resources and, as Mr. Loud points out, prompted princes to become increasingly reluctant to join the emperor’s campaigns.

I kept thinking of Hitler while reading this book, wondering why he had not paid more attention to Barbarossa’s fate. Other than managing to remain as emperor for so long, what did Barbarossa have to show for his immensely expensive, ambitious expeditions? He could no more conquer northern Italy than Hitler could occupy Russia. 

Unlike Hitler, Barbarossa knew when to withdraw, when to make deals with hostile powers, and even, in some cases, join forces with those who had been his enemies. Even so, Mr. Loud’s book demonstrates that the appeal of one-man rule is perennial. Barbarossa was the “I alone can fix it” emperor, and by the force of his will created the illusion of an empire that was neither holy nor Roman — as an old joke has it. 

But Mr. Loud is not one to traffic in historical analogies. He has left those to reviewers.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Biography: A User’s Guide.”