A weekly #podcast covering the History of the Germans from the coronation of Henry the Fowler in 919 to the German Reunification in 1990. Also on 🟦as @HotGPod.
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Charles of Anjou, count of Provence and king of Sicily was one of the most ambitious and most successful noblemen of the 13th century. Born the 11th son of king Louis VIII of France, he climbed the ladder to first count and then, with papal support, to king of Sicily. (2/ 
Rudolf was born in 1218 the son of Albert, called the Wise of Habsburg. The Habsburgs were nobles based in the Aargau, today a region in North Switzerland. They were named after their ancestral castle, the Habichtsburg, near Brugg. (2/ 
The first upgrade was in 848 when Ansgar, the archbishop of Hamburg had to flee his wooden cathedral before a Viking attack. He got himself elected bishop of Bremen on top of Hamburg, creating the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen. (2/ 
The 12 donors of Naumburg had roles in German history that went well beyond just giving money o build the cathedral and pay one of the greatest medieval artists, the unknown "Master of Naumburg" to have their portrait sculptured. (2/
Just compare the Hanseatic cities of Lubeck, Hamburg, Danzig/Gdansk, Riga, Reval/Tallinn with the great Italian maritime republics of Venice, Genoa and Pisa. 
In 1193 Richard the Lionheart, king of England and lord over most of France is captured by the duke of Austria who hands him over to emperor Henry VI. Henry VI. not only negotiates an astronomic sum as ransom but also forces Richard to kneel before him and become his vassal. (2/ 
Podebusk had entered the service of king Waldemar IV Atterdag of Denmark in 1350. During most of the Middle Ages Denmark oscillated between world domination and total chaos. When Waldemar was crowned the kingdom was mortgaged to German noblemen led by Gerhart von Holstein. (2/ 
It wasn't that the plague left the Hanse cities untouched. Bremen counted 6,966 named dead from the 1350 outbreak, at least half of its overall population. more than a third of the council members of Lübeck, Wismar, Reval and Lüneburg perished. (2/ 
Almost all of these Hanseatic cities, Lübeck included, had Slavic predecessor towns. The strategic benefits along the rivers had been well known to the locals long before the first German merchant arrived. They often had established trading links into Scandinavia. (2/
Herring have a number of great advantages. The first one is that they often move in large schools as solitary herring are getting quickly confused and lost. The name Herring might go back to the Old High German word “heri” meaning “lots” or “many”. (2/
What made the Hanse special starts with violence between German merchants and traders from Gotland. Talk is of "many evils, namely the hatred, enmities, and murders that arose from the discord of the two peoples" that Henry the Lion, duke and lord of Lübeck needs to resolve. (2/ 
When Barbarossa first came to Italy in 1155, the Lombard cities were split almost 50/50 between Milan and its supporters on one side and Cremona and its supporters on the other. The emperor sided with Cremona when he decided in favour of the citizens of Lodi by pure chance. (2/
The background is that emperor and pope are caught in a deadly struggle for supremacy. One element of it is the question of who appoints (=invests) bishops. That matters in an empire where bishops have received vast tracts of land to administer on behalf of the king. (2/
Frederick Barbarossa is the master of Europe. The mighty German princes served in his army. He had destroyed Milan. The Lombards paid him taxes and dues that made him more resourceful than any of his predecessors since Otto I. (2/ 
Each had put their candidate on the papal throne, the Frangipani Innocent II and the Pierleoni Anaclet II. Anaclet II held Rome and was allied with Roger II of Sicily, who he had made king. (2/ 
He was born in 1075, probably just after his father, a count in the Harz mountains had died fighting the emperor Henry IV. His mother (was) remarried almost immediately. Lothar may have grown up in her new home in Lothringia or with his grandmother, the duchess of Saxony. (2/
And because this is an almost independent history, we have to start at the beginning. Who are the Saxons? As the chronicler Widukind observed in the 10th century " “There is a great deal of disagreement about this matter." (2/ 
The Normans first arrived in Southern Italy in around the year 1000, allegedly as pilgrims to the shrine of the archangel Michael at Monte Gargano. Their local hosts assessed their military prowess and quickly hired them as mercenaries in their endless conflicts. (2/ 
Let's start with where one would expect to see copies of antiquity long before the Renaissance. Here is an Augustalis of emperor Frederick II (1194-1250). 
Nobody believed the emperor had died in 1250, if not for the undeniable evidence that Joachim of Fiore had predicted his death for 1260. He must be in hiding or on pilgrimage to wash off his sins.