Holy Roman Empire (X): Henry VI
22. Henry VI
Henry VI Heinrich VI (November 1165 – 28 September 1197), King of Romans (reigned 1167–1197) and Holy Emperor (reigned 1190–1197) of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. He was also King of Sicily from 1194 onwards.
His father was Frederick I of Barbarossa, and his mother was Beatrice of Burgundy. Heinrich VI was born in Nymwegen, The Netherlands. Heinrich VI, about the fifth child of the emperor and his wife, became crown prince due to the death of his elder brother, and on August 15, 1169, the 4-year-old Heinrich, at the will of his father, was crowned king of the Roman people at the Cathedral of Achen. In 1184, Frederick VI, Duke of Mainz and his brother Swaben, was knighted after a grand ceremony; but during the celebration earthquake and high winds destroyed the tent, a harbinger of the decline of the dynasty.
In 1191 Henry VI attacked the kingdom of Sicily on the grounds of his wife Constance's succession to the throne, besieging Naples, but failing due to an epidemic, and after the withdrawal of the army, Queen Constance was captured; in 1194 he formed a more powerful army and conquered Sicily with the ransom paid by king Richard I of England who had been kidnapped by him.
Henry VI's appearance was melancholy, pale, and serious. He was not tall, thin, and completely different from his father's tall and handsome. In his youth he was a great lover, and at the same time wrote poems for love, and was a representative of the heyday of court lyric poetry at that time. He left behind about three poems, among which "R test du nu hinnen", in the tone of a woman, tells the sorrow and sadness of the parting of her lover, which became a masterpiece of German literature. In his love poems, Henry VI is a deep and delicate knightly lover, but as a ruler, he shows a ruthless attitude in the face of the enemy. The future Pope Innocent III described him as "Henry VI roaring like a north wind, raging in the rose garden of Sicily".
(1) Conquest of the Kingdom of Sicily
At the will of his father, at the age of 21 he married Princess Constance of Sicily in Milan, northern Italy, on 27 January 1186. The newlyweds were crowned King of Italy by Archbishop Gottfried of Aquila, and Henry received the title of "Caesar".
Princess Constance is 32 years old, blonde and tall. She was the widow of King Rujero II of Sicily, and is said to have become a nun as a teenager because she was predicted that "marriage would destroy Sicily" and has been kept in the Church of Santissimo Salvatore, Palermo in Palermo to remain celibate, even though she is already the sole legal heir of Guglielmo II. Such a marriage was only to maintain German influence and domination over Italy, so that Frederick I would abandon his claim to southern Italy, and would not have foreseen that the marriage would make Henry VI the future King of Sicily, bring nearly a century of war and turmoil to Germany and Italy, and eventually lead to the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages.
From 1189 onwards, during his father Frederick I's expedition to Palestine, he became regent of the empire (the Latin word "regent" appeared after the 13th century). Due to the sudden death of King Guglielmo II of Sicily and leaving no heirs. Henry's wife Constance became the only legal heir as Wilhelm II's aunt. However, the National Party of Sicily had already installed Guglielmo's illegitimate cousin, Tantredi, Count of Lecce, as the new monarch, and the Archbishop of Palermo was crowned in 1190 with the consent of the Pope. After Frederick's death in June 1190, Henry succeeded to the throne. Henry could not pass up the great opportunity to get the sworn enemy country. He immediately negotiated peace with the Welf family headed by Henry the Lion, and the two sons of the Duke of Henry the Lion, Henry and Lothair, remained with the Emperor as hostages. After settling Germany, Henry VI led an army to Italy to seize the rich kingdom brought to him by his wife.
Henry first won the support of the northern Italian cities and marched to Rome in order to get the crown promised to him by Pope Clement III. As a condition of coronation, he handed over the small city loyal to the Emperor, Tusculum, to its enemy Rome for destruction, abandoning the city allied with the Empire, a move that undoubtedly demonstrated Henry VI's strong spirit of self-interest and unscrupulousness. On 15 April 1191 he and Constance were crowned Holy Roman Emperor and Empress by Pope Celestine III.
Henry VI continued to march south against the Pope's warnings, encircling Naples from the sea through a fleet of Pisa, but the famous city of southern Italy withstood Henry VI's attack, and The General of Tankred and his uncle Magaritone of Brindisi also came to participate in the defense, blocking Henry's Pisa fleet and nearly wiping out the Genoese detachment that came later. As the siege gradually entered the spring and summer, Henry VI's army began to have a large-scale epidemic of malaria due to water and soil problems, and the emperor himself fell ill, and the illness became more and more serious, at this time Henry the Lion's eldest son Henry the Younger Henry (Lothair had died) fled back to Germany from the emperor's side during the great chaos in the army, and spread false news to Germany that the emperor had died, making the world chaotic for a time.
By this time Henry VI began to recover, but he had realized that it was impossible to conquer southern Italy immediately, and in August he withdrew his army from Naples and returned to Lombardy. For the German army, this withdrawal was almost equivalent to fleeing, and the cities that had surrendered to the Holy Roman Empire returned to Sicily, and even Queen Constance, who had been left by Henry in salerno's palace as a signal that she would soon return, was betrayed by the Salerno and fell into the hands of Tankred. But in Milan, the Emperor met with King Philip II of France and re-established the Staufen-Cappé alliance. He then returned to Germany at the end of 1191 with disappointment.
Tancred took the opportunity to propose a ceasefire to Henry in order to release Constance, and Celestine suggested that Henry reconcile with Tancred, but Henry refused to reconcile despite his wife's still being held by Tancred. Tancred also had no intention of letting Henry redeem Constance unless Henry recognized him. Henry was unable to save his wife and complained to Celestine about her capture. Under the intervention of Celestine III, in the summer of 1192, Tancred sent troops to send Constance to Rome in order to gain Celestine's recognition, but on the way the German army ambushed Andreas constance and brought her back to Henry, causing Celestine to pressure Henry to submit to his plan to fail.
Henry roughly conquered Italy and carried out a retaliatory plunder of Salerno, who had betrayed and resolutely resisted at this time. In 1194, the son of Tancred was deposed, Guglielmo III, and on 25 December was crowned King of Sicily in Palermo (an Italian city). In 1196, because he hated the capture of his wife, he hanged Tancred's brother-in-law, Acera's Ricardo.
On 20 May 1197 and 18 July of the same year, Henry VI first donated a hospital in Beretta, Italy, and then a church and monastery in Sicily to the Teutonic Knights. This gave the "Knights Hospitaller of St. Mary of Germany" founded in 1190 a good start, and it was Henry's preparation for the Crusades against the Byzantine Empire. But his saxon in Sicily sparked rebellions in Catania and South Sicily. Angered by his neglect and sympathetic to his natives, Constance joined the rebels against her husband, besieging him in a Sicily castle and forcing him to sign peace agreements with terms he did not want to accept. He died of malaria in Messina on 28 September while preparing for a military operation, and was said to have been poisoned.
(2) Domination in Germany
Henry began ruling for his father on the expedition when he was less than 24 years old, and the task before him in the first few months was quite daunting. In October 1189 Henry the Lion broke his promise to return to Saxony, with the aim of restoring his old rule in northern Germany while his old rival Frederick I was absent from the country. As Count Adolf III of Holstein left his homeland to follow the Emperor in the Crusades, Henry the Lion was able to quickly take control of most of the strongholds in the region. Henry VI, king of Rome, immediately declared war on Henry the Lion, the enemy of the Empire, at the Congress of Merseburg. Winters in northern Germany were very cold, and the war raged on until the spring of 1190, when victory was achieved.
When the originally hopeful Battle of Italy was defeated, Henry VI returned to Germany and found that the situation in Germany was still quite unfavorable to him, and even continued to deteriorate. In 1192, Vichmann, archbishop of Magdeburg, who had long supported Henry, died, and because of his tyrannical attitude, the northern regions were no longer under his control.
Previously, in September 1191, there had been an electoral struggle between Albert of Brabant and Albert of Le Taylor in the Diocese of Liège, supported by their respective relatives Henry, Duke of Brabant, and Baldwin V, Count of Eno. Henry VI favored Albert of Le Taylor, who was the uncle of Empress Constance (who had been captured by Sicily at the time), and he had planned with Constance to make him the next Bishop of Liège. But Albert of Brabant received most support. In January 1192, the Emperor handed over the diocese to his new chancellor, Lothair of Hochstadt, on the grounds that the election was controversial, and in September guaranteed Lothair's appointment, forcing Liège to admit it, and both candidates also withdrew, but caused dissatisfaction among the many princes of the Lower Rhine. Albert of Brabant went to Rome to complain to Pope Celestine III, who, although the Pope confirmed him as bishop, could not return to his own diocese and had to seek refuge with archbishop Reims, while Henry VI supported Lothair and Baldwin V, Count of Eno, against Albert, who was brutally killed by German knights in Reims.
(3) Henry VI's diplomacy
Richard I, the "Lionheart" of England, took part in the Third Crusade and began a thrilling return in the autumn of 1192. He first disguised himself as a merchant and boarded a merchant ship, but the ship was shipwrecked in the Adriatic Sea near Venice. Because of Richard I's support for Tancred in Sicily, Henry VI was very dissatisfied with him. After preventing him from passing through French ports, Richard I decided to cross Germany with only a few of his men and managed to evade several pursuits against him. However, in Vienna in December he was arrested by The Austrian Duke Leopold V and sold to the emperor at a very high price. The Emperor imprisoned him in the hill castle of Trifiers. Voltaire later commented that it was "uncompromisingly barbaric and despicable".
Henry VI, by threatening to give it to Philip Augustus, forced Richard I to pay a ransom of 50,000 pounds and had to help the emperor in his struggle against Tancred. It was only that the British ransom was delayed, and the emperor increased the weight to add another 25,000 pounds, but the king himself could not be required to participate in the anti-Sicily war. Since Richard I's younger brother Prince John did not want his brother to return to China (he obviously moved the heart of usurping power), the emperor once again extorted the ransom, the legend is that Richard I had to pay a ransom of 100,000-150,000 pounds, the British launched a wave of scraping the land, the people are not happy, then there is the famous legend of Robin Hood. In the end, the amount of ransom was more scientifically calculated as 34,100 kilograms of silver, which was almost the income of the British treasury for ten years at that time. During his captivity, Richard I also received a letter from his mother Eleanor, who advised Richard to reduce England to imperial vassalage and submit allegiance to the Emperor. The "Lionheart King" later knelt at the feet of the emperor and performed the ritual of submission, calling Henry "king of kings and lord of all lords." Moreover, as an imperial fief, Richard I also had to pay Henry £5,000 a year in interest, until the full ransom was paid, and Richard was released on February 4, 1194, and returned to England.