h its
vineyards and continuous orchards. The Hohenstaufens belonged to the
poetic, highly gifted race of the Suabians from which have sprung some
of the greatest German poets and thinkers. Suabia is the cradle of many
of the choicest spirits from antiquity down to Schiller and Uhland.

German history during the golden reign of the Hohenstaufen emperors is
filled with the deeds of royal women no less than with those of their
anointed husbands. Imperial women held the insignia at the death of the
emperors. Kunigunde, consort of Henry II., at his death turned over to
Konrad II., the first Salian Frank, the insignia of the empire, the
crown, the sceptre, and the holy relics which belonged to the regalia;
which the last Frank, Henry V. (1106-1125), on his deathbed, intrusted
to his consort, requesting her to hand them to his successor, that she
might win gratitude and influence; for great weight was attributed to
their possession, as they were deemed to contain mysterious forces and
to give to their possessor the favor of the saints. Archbishop Adalbert
of Mainz, a cunning politician, induced the widowed empress to deliver
the crown jewels to Frederic of Hohenstaufen, and then intrigued for the
election of Lothaire the Saxon, who won the crown. At the next vacancy
Konrad of Hohenstaufen (1138-1152) was elected, and founded the great
Suabian dynasty. During its governance (1138-1254) the Germanic body
politic displayed the highest degree of energy, and with that dynasty
began and ended the most glorious period of mediaeval German social life
and literature. By the magnificence of their rule, the Suabian emperors,
in spite of many and great political errors, through which they
exhausted much of their strength in Italian wars, carried the
romanticism of the Middle Ages to its zenith. In the same proportion in
which the nation was raised by a knowledge of its own power, the
national productions of art and letters were stamped with a bold and
original character. Great men of extraordinary genius arose to exalt
their own names with the glories of the empire.

The Roman expeditions of Frederick Barbarossa, who sought to restore the
grandeur of Charlemagne, and of Otto the Great brought to Germany a new,
original culture that took a place beside the old Latin, monkish,
scholarly culture, with its gloomy clericalism. Chivalry, courtliness,
the "gay science" of the Romance peoples, were grafted upon a knotty,
rugged, but intensely he