Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans, Episode 53, Sacrum Imperium.

This week we'll see how Barbarossa addresses the big issue he had in his first Italian

campaign, the size of the army, and how he creates the Holy Roman Empire in the process.

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Last week, our imperial hero, Frederick Barbarossa, returned back to Germany after a year and a half of brutal fighting in Italy.

They got him the imperial crown, but not much else.

One of the limiting factors was the size of the army he had brought along, just 1,800

knights, which translates into an overall force of maybe 5,000 to 7,000 soldiers.

The modest strength of this German contingent meant he had to rely on Italian allies,

to provide the muscle, and most significantly the siege engines needed to break the heavily fortified cities of Italy.

As he discovered, Italy was a place where each of the cities was constantly at war with its

neighbors. And as they fought their immediate neighbors, they formed alliances with their

enemies' enemies, so that the whole of Italy resembled a chessboard where all the white cities

were fighting all the black cities all the time.

Barbarossa had sort of stumbled into this hornet's nest by more or less accidentally taking

the sight of Little Lodi in its conflict with Milan.

They meant that all the allies of Lodi, Como, Novara, Cremona, and most powerful amongst them

...