King of Germany (1138-1152) and one of the leaders of the Second Crusade (1147-1149).
Conrad was the son of Duke Frederick I of Swabia (d. 1105) and of Agnes, daughter of Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor. It is probable that he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land before the Second Crusade, in 1124/1125; certainly he is known to have made a vow to go to Jerusalem, and he was not present at the election of a new German king in 1125, when his elder brother Duke Frederick II of Swabia (d. 1147) was one of the candidates. Conrad himself made a bid for the crown from December 1127 onward: probably this was shortly after his return from the East. He was eventually elected king in March 1138 after the death of Emperor Lothar III.
Conrad took the cross at Speyer at Christmas 1146. His initial reluctance was overcome by the persuasion of Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, who had come to the Rhineland to put a stop to the anti-Jewish agitation stirred up by a Cistercian monk, Rudolf. Bernard’s biographer claimed that the abbot gave the king a banner to carry on the expedition. The preparations were made very speedily. A diet of the imperial princes was held at Frankfurt am Main in March 1147, from which Conrad wrote to Pope Eugenius III, apologizing for taking the cross without notifying him, and the German crusade set out from Regensburg in May 1147. Despite some mishaps on the way, including the flooding of the army’s camp shortly after it had entered Byzantine territory, Conrad arrived at Constantinople (mod. Istanbul, Turkey) early in September. He already enjoyed close diplomatic relations with the Byzantine emperor, Manuel I Komnenos, not least through their common hostility to King Roger I of Sicily, and in 1145 Manuel had married Conrad’s sister-in-law, Bertha of Sulzbach.
The German army crossed the Bosporus and set out from Nicaea (mod. Iznik, Turkey) into Turkish-held territory on 15 October 1147. By now Conrad had split his forces, sending most of the poorer pilgrims and noncombatants along the coast of Asia Minor under the command of his halfbrother Otto, bishop of Freising. The main army soon ran short of food, and it suffered severely from Turkish attacks, eventually linking up with the French army under King Louis VII at the beginning of November. However, on arrival at Ephesos Conrad was forced to halt by illness, and he subsequently returned with most of his surviving forces to Constantinople. Many of the German troops then returned home. Conrad himself was nursed back to health by Manuel Komnenos, and he expressed his gratitude for this treatment in a letter to his chief minister in Germany, Abbot Guibald of Stavelot. He eventually sailed directly to the Holy Land on Byzantine ships, accompanied by a number of his princes, and landed at Acre (mod. ‘Akko, Israel) in April 1148. He had been well supplied with money by Manuel, and he used these funds to recruit pilgrims to augment the forces that remained to him.
Conrad IV of Germany (1228-1254)
The French army, which had succeeded in crossing Asia Minor, marched south from Antioch (mod. Antakya, Turkey), and the reunited crusade, along with the forces of the kingdom of Jerusalem, attacked Damascus at the end of July 1148. The decision to pursue this attack, often criticized, had been settled in a conference among the three kings (Conrad, Louis VII, and Baldwin III of Jerusalem) near Acre a month earlier, although the account by Otto of Freising suggests that Conrad and Baldwin had already decided on this aim before Louis’s arrival. However, after five days of heavy fighting, and with Muslim reinforcements approaching, the siege was abandoned. A subsequent proposal to attack Ascalon (mod. Tel Ashqelon, Israel) came to nothing, with Conrad blaming the men of Jerusalem for their failure to turn up. He left Acre by sea on 8 September 1148 and returned to Germany via Thessalonica and Constantinople, where his friendly relations with Byzantium were strengthened by the marriage of his other half-brother, Henry Jasomirgott, duke of Bavaria, to Manuel’s niece, Theodora.
Conrad’s health had been undermined by his experiences on the crusade, and he subsequently died on 15 February
1152. His eldest son had predeceased him, and he was succeeded as king of Germany by his nephew Frederick I Bar-barossa, the son of Frederick II of Swabia. Conrad’s reign in Germany was seen, even at the time, as a failure. He never secured his imperial coronation at Rome, and his crusade was a major setback. Certainly he must bear some responsibility for the indiscipline that hampered his army, and the attempt to follow the route of the First Crusade (1096-1099) across Anatolia in mid-winter and not to wait for the French was misguided. Yet he preserved good relations with Byzantium, which the French did not, and the attack on Damascus was by no means as ill-conceived as some modern historians have claimed.
-G. A. Loud
Bibliography
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-, “Kingship and Crusade in Twelfth-Century
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World History
