“An Emperor is subject to no one but God and Justice.”
— Frederick Barbarossa
This quote is attributed to Barbarossa in Julius Wilhelm Zincgref's Apophthegmata. It captures his lifelong insistence on imperial sovereignty independent of papal authority, the central political struggle of his reign.
I became king of Germany at thirty and emperor at thirty-three. Half the princes wanted to break the empire apart. The Pope wanted to break me. Italy revolted every time I left. I fought six campaigns south of the Alps and lost at Legnano badly enough to change my entire strategy. But I kept coming back because an empire either grows stronger or it dies. I drowned in a river in Anatolia at sixty-seven on my way to take Jerusalem. I never arrived. But the empire held.