The Historia de expeditione Friderici imperatoris, a contemporary narrative of Frederick Barbarossa’s crusade from 1189–1190, represents the most comprehensive and detailed description of the emperor’s military campaign and has the character of an eyewitness account. Nevertheless, it remained overshadowed by narratives of the French and English participation in the Third Crusade, and its content was not properly analyzed for a long time. This was largely due to the question of the text’s exact authorship, which frustrated previous research attempts and prevented a deeper examination of the text’s content and context.
Rather than limiting itself to answering the question of the author’s identity, this monograph considers the source’s possible ‘causa scribendi’, its intended audience, narrative functions, and the context that may have influenced its form and message. The analysis reveals that the primary concern of the anonymous author (and perhaps, to some extent, of the compiler as well), to whom the historiographical tradition ascribes the name “Ansbert”, was to glorify the crusade and its leader Barbarossa, and when the crusade disintegrated after Frederick’s death in the Saleph River, to offer an apologia of the expedition and, above all, the crusading emperor. To achieve this aim and to portray Barbarossa and his crusade as legitimate and indeed successful, at least in terms of salvation, the narrative employed a broad range of crusading ideology that had gradually developed during the 12th century. By analyzing the elements that usually constituted crusade ideology at the end of the century and the imprint that it left on the ‘Historia de expeditione’, this book also contributes to our understanding of the crusade movement and ideology in the High Middle Ages.