From the time of Sir Walter Scott onwards, discussion of the Third Crusade of 1189-92 has tended to focus on Richard the Lionheart and the Anglo-Norman Crusade. Much more recently, the publication of English translations of primary sources in this same series by Peter Edbury and Helen Nicholson has allowed students also to study the siege of Acre in depth from its beginnings in the autumn of 1189. In comparison, the German expedition led by the Emperor Frederick I, which in contrast to those of the kings of France and England took the ‘traditional’ overland route through the Balkans and Asia Minor, has been neglected, despite its great intrinsic interest. The death of the emperor, drowned while crossing, or bathing in, a river in Armenia, tends to be seen as rendering the expedition a fiasco, although it is argued here that this was very far from being the case. My own interest in this subject has stemmed directly from my teaching in the University of Leeds of both Crusader history and more recently that of medieval Germany. It has been the latter, in particular, which has encouraged me to investigate the sources and the background to Frederick’s expedition, and my thanks must go to the students who over the last three years have taken what was a pretty experimental module. A number of others have made substantial contributions to this project. My publisher John Smedley encouraged me to turn the brief extracts that I had translated for my students into a book, and one of the series editors, Bernard Hamilton, has read and commented on the entire manuscript, some of it more than once. Professor John Davies of the University of Liverpool helped me with the translation of some of the more problematic passages in the Historia de Expeditione, during what was otherwise an entirely social occasion. I have also benefited from extensive help from two of my colleagues at Leeds, Alan Murray and Ian Moxon, both of whom have shown that (contrary to popular stereotypes) Scots can be the most generous of friends. Alan has shared his knowledge of Crusader and German history, and of German geography, and has furnished me with copies of his articles and copious bibliographical advice. Both he and Ian have also read drafts of the introduction. Ian meanwhile has done his best to remedy the defects of my classical education. Time and again he has abandoned whatever he was then doing to assist me with Latin passages where I was hopelessly confused or in error. I hope that he will forgive some of my more free or colloquial renditions, painful as they must be to his austere respect for the Latin language. I have striven to render these translations as accurate as possible, but any translator must tread a fine line between accuracy and intelligibility. Similarly, I have tried to be consistent with regard to place and personal names, but when in doubt have tended to use the forms most familiar to Anglophone readers. Needless to say, none of those named above bear any responsibility for any flaws in the finished product; although without their assistance there would have been far more than there now are.
Finally there are the two dedicatees of this book. My wife Kate has helped with the maps and genealogical charts, and coped with the fallout from the expiry of my laptop halfway through the writing of this book, as well as patiently suffering my obsession with the distant past interfering with matters domestic. The other dedicatee, my former collaborator and close friend Thomas Wiedemann, is sadly no longer here to read this. A brilliant classicist who died far too young, he would have particularly encouraged my new concern with the history of the country where he was born, not least because his father had as a student gone to the lectures of the great Heidelberg medievalist Karl Hampe, the historian of the Salian and Staufen emperors. Thomas’s last gift to me, his father’s copy of one of the most famous works of medieval German history, Kantorowicz’s Friedrich der Zweite, sits on my bookshelf as I write these words.
Leeds and Lyme Regis, September 2009.