Philip of Swabia (1177-1208) was the last son of the German King Frederick Hohenstaufen «Barbarossa» and his darling spouse Beatrice, Countess of Burgundy. Philip had four elder brothers and was never destined to hold the German imperial regalia as he came last in the line of succession. Thus in his early years, he devoted himself to a religious career and avoided warfare.
After the sudden passing of his father Frederick in the distant East, during the time of the Third Crusade, his brother Henry assumed the imperial crown of the Germans as Henry VI and became one of the most powerful monarchs of his age. Henry was able to subdue not only Northern Italy but also the unbending South Italy. He could even occupy the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, ruled by the house of Hauteville, a great thorn for the German interests in the Italian peninsula. Among the hostages Henry found in Palermo was the young wife of Roger III of Sicily, the last Norman King. She was called Irene Angelina and was the eldest daughter of the Roman Emperor Isaac II Angelos. Irene was born in Constantinople around 1180 of the marriage of Isaac with a Palaiologina aristocrat. In 1193, she was sent as a bride to Sicily so for her father Isaac and the Norman King of the time Tancred of Lecce to seal an alliance against the Germans, who at this time threatened the interests of both. Nevertheless, this marriage was not to last for more than some months and Roger suffered a premature death around Christmas time of 1193. Irene was a young widow when the Germans entered in the Norman capital.
Henry wanted to continue the expansionist policies of his father concerning the East and to gain hereditary rights over the throne of the Caesars in Constantinople, so he married his brother Philip to Irene, thus making the dynasties of East (the Angeloi) and West (the Hohenstaufens) allied. At the same time, in 1195, the Emperor and father of Irene fell victim to a coup, led by his favored brother Alexios and was treacherously blinded. The German Kaiser used Irene as the greatest pretext of war and made clear that he would like to invade the eastern Roman Empire so to avenge her father’s blinding by Alexios III Angelos, the uncle of his sister in law. Henry wanted to put pressure on Alexios III to obtain funds from the treasures of Byzantium, but the «Greek money» he hoped for never arrived in the West due to his sudden passing. Philip of Swabia was the second German sovereign in history to marry a Greek woman, the first one was Otto II of the Saxon dynasty, husband of the famous Theophanu Skleraina Phocaina.
DEFENDER OF THE HOHENSTAUFENS
After suppressing a Norman rebellion, Henry arrived in Messina ready to set sail for the East for a new campaign, but the summer heat and malaria had other plans for the German troops and Henry finally perished in the autumn of 1197 at the young age of 32. Philip was by now the only male adult Staufen able to preserve the preeminence of his family and to continue the dynasty against its many rivals. Frederick, the only son of Henry, was still a boy and thus unable to lead a strong government. Philip left his nephew at the care of his empress-mother Constance of Hauteville in Palermo and moved with the imperial troops to the heart of the German lands, North of the Alps, to restore order and impose himself as guardian of Henry’s son and King of the Germans.
The reaction of the Welf party –the permanent opponents of the Hohenstaufens- was rapid. They had their own candidate for the German throne: a man known as Otto of Brunswick, the son of the Duke of Bavaria Henry the Lion, that once Frederick Barbarossa had humiliated, deprived of his lands and exiled to the Kingdom of England. A civil war erupted in the German realm, a confrontation that soon passed the short German borders: the English King Richard the Lionheart declared his support for his nephew Otto, while the French crown under Philip Augustus concluded an alliance with the Hohenstaufen party.
Romantic painting of emperor Otto IV, the only kaiser that the Welfs ever gave to the German monarchy, by Johann Christian Ludwig Tunica (1839).
In Rome, Pope Innocent III initally pretented to be neutral. Nevertheless, he soon announced to the two candidates the terms of the Holy See so to offer his support:
a. The new emperor would have to renounce all his rights inside the halls of the Church (as they were defined in the Concordat of Worms) and to stop influencing the election of bishops (the investiture).
b. The emperor would have to abandon all his claims in the lands of Central and South Italy where the Papal States stood.
c. And mainly to promise not to merge the Kingdom of Sicily and the German crown into one state.
As a proud Hohenstaufen, Philip rejected all the papal demands that he perceived as pejorative for the imperial institution. On the other hand Otto, weary of allies after the death of his uncle Richard in England, found it wise to submit to all the Papal terms as a loyal child of the Church.
Innocent directed an excommunication against Philip and authorized the election of Otto as a legitimate monarch. Yet, the holiest support of Innocent for Otto had little results: Philip kept winning against Otto in all their battles while the German lords and Church men, unsatisfied with the prospect of a full subjugation of their native German Church to the Holy See, supported their anathematized Philip with greater zeal than before. Seeing the victories of the Hohenstaufen party, Innocent restarted negotiations with Philip and abandoned Otto.
Philip agreed to make some concessions to the Papacy and Innocent called him to come to Rome so to finally crown him as emperor of the Romans. Philip was about to crush once and for all the Welf party when in the summer of 1208 in Bamberg, the Count Otto of Wittelsbach assassinated him to the surprise of all Germany. The real motivation behind this murder remains to this day a mystery. Philip was the first German sovereign in history to be murdered. The alone and pregnant Irene was able to flee and retire to the Hohenstaufen Castle under the protection of the Staufen party. In August, 1208, she gave birth to a last daughter but the complications of childbirth were bigger than the mother and child could bear and both soon passed away.
THE MOST MAGNIFICENT COUPLE OF THE WEST
From 1194 (the year of Irene’s arrest by the Germans) to 1197 the couple must have lived together in Italy and more precisely in Tuscany, where Philip was appointed as Margrave by his brother. After 1196, Philip became Duke of Swabia and the couple moved to Germany. In 1197, in Augsburg, shortly before his brother’s death, Philip and Irene were officially married. The wedding of the Hohenstaufen prince with the “foreign” princess from the East was an important event for Swabia and the Swabian nobility came to honor the pair. After the wedding, in July of the same year, we see Philip and Irene issuing together their first document-donation to the monastery of Weissenau, where Irene is presented as «our most noble consort duchess Irene» (una cum nobilissima consors nostra Erina ducisso) and Philip calls her as «my delicious and sweetest consort», a line that shows that from the start of their common life the couple led a happy life that they would retain until the end. The Swabian Duke and Duchess remained at the Schweinhausen Castle near Biberach until September and the sudden demise of his elder brother Henry. Philip took under his protection his nephew Frederick and accompanied him to his royal coronation as the new child-emperor.
On September the 8th, 1198, exactly after one year, we see Irene again by Philip on the occasion of his royal coronation in Mainz. Philip was officially crowned as King of the Germans and the Romans. According to one contemporary source Irene was seen walking beside him wearing a royal diadem. However, in 1199 we find her accompanying Philip with a crown on her head, so Irene must have been crowned along with Philip in Mainz.
This occasion was the court Christmas celebrations in Magdeburg at 1199. Gardolf of Hertbeke, the bishop of Halberstadt, described the procession led by the royal couple as incredibly splendid and palatial. The excited citizens of Magdeburg gathered together to pay their respect to the King and Queen, they greeted them with great joy, words of praise, and loved clapping their hands as they passed beside them. The greatest German poet of the time, Walther von der Vogelweide was also present in this festive celebration, in his song he addressed Irene as a «highborn queen» (die höhgeborne Küniginne) and compared her to the Virgin Mary, calling the Queen as «a dove without a thorn, a dove without a gall» (als röse one dorn, ein tübe sunder gallen). «This magnificence was nowhere else to find» Walther concludes.
During the 12th century, the Marian cult was blossoming in the West under the influence of the Cistercians monks. This is perhaps one of the reasons for which, in 1198, Irene was renamed Maria in the symbolic day of Nativity of Mary and also named her second daughter as such. In 1200, Pope Innocent III canonized the last Ottonian empress Kunigunde of Luxembourg as a saint, the religious answer of Philip was to transfer the bones of Saint Kuningunde in a great celebration at which Irene-Maria also participated. Furthermore, the royal couple would name their third daughter Kunigunde.
In January of 1205, in the royal city of Aachen, Philip and Irene were jointly re-crowned and anointed as king and queen by Adolf of Altena, the Archbishop of Cologne, in a ceremony that aimed at putting a formal end to the imperial aspirations of Philip’s opponent Otto. This time, Philip was crowned as King with the genuine imperial regalia of Charlemagne. The Greek contemporary chronicler Niketas Choniates remarks that divine providence had risen Irene from a prisoner of war to a free person, from a sad widow of her Norman husband to an adored bride and from a slave to the highest lady, thus describing her marriage with Philip as a happy one, as indeed it must have been.
But as we have already noted, this happiness was not to last, since at 1208 her husband Philip was murdered in the most shocking manner by Otto of Wittelsbach. We do not know if Irene was present at the spot of his assassination or if she heard the news from afar. What is certain is that in the June of 1208, she took her daughters and retired to the safety of the Hohenstaufen Castle. As the Marbach Annals put it: «the queen felt she was losing the only comfort – of her life-«.
THAT SUMMER OF 1208
Behind the walls of the Hohenstaufen Castle, Irene was soon to give birth to one more child. However, this late pregnancy didn’t stop her from assuming an active role in the succesion of the German Crown. According to the Cologne Chronicle, Irene concluded an alliance with the King Philip II of France. Together, they tried to convince Henry I, the Duke of Brabant, to run for the German Kingship and prevent Otto from assuming the royal dignity. Duke Henry was also a father-in-law of her daughter Maria, so a relative of the Hohenstaufen family. Irene must have thought that one day the kingship could pass to her son-in-law and her daughter.
At the same time Pope Innocent III sent a letter to the widow-Queen, asking her to allow her eldest daughter Beatrice to marry Otto in order for him to receive popular recognition of his title as king and peace to prevail in Germany. We do not know if this letter reached Irene while she was still alive, what is evident is that the Irene held the guardianship of the Hohenstaufen princesses and had a strong word for their future so that even the Papacy had to ask her support so for this betrothal to be arranged.
On August 20 of 1208, just one week before her death, Irene demonstrated her love for her cruelly murdered husband and issued a document to Adeleberg monastery for the salvation of the soul of Philip, and also offered to the abbey a farm in Oberesslingen. Had Irene lived after 1208, she would have had under her custody the ancestral Hohenstaufen household, since Philip had appointed her heiress to the old Hohenstaufen estate, thus making sure that Irene would have big outcomes even after his passing.
But Irene wouldn’t live so to use her influence on politics. Based on her late actions during these two months (June-August 1208) she doesn’t strike like a woman that wished to die. Irene’s body had given life to four daughters and also she must have suffered the miscarriage of two sons. She every time managed to recover from the shock of a dangerous medieval pregnancy. She failed to confront the complications of such hardship only two months after her husband’s sudden demise. It is possible that Irene was deep mentally and physically affected by her husband’s death and thus was unable to endure the childbirth complications.
Irene, «the Augusta of the Romans, by the Grace of God», was buried in the Lorch abbey along with her deceased infant. Lorch was the mausoleum of the great Hohenstaufen clan and she was the last member of the family to be buried there. A grand procession brought Irene from the Hohenstaufen Castle to the Lorch abbey, the citizens and commoners of the district gathered to pay their respect to the deceased queen that seems to have been popular among the simple people.
The funeral procession of Queen Irene-Maria Angelina, bringing her body from the Hohenstaufen household to Lorch Abbey. This event was the inspiration of the poet «Hear, hear, hear, the bells of Lorch are ringing».
«Horch, Horch, Horch! Klosterglocken zu Lorch» by the German religious poet Karl Gerok.
Engraving by: Carl von Häberlin
PUPPET MASTERS OF THE FOURTH CRUSADE
We cannot speak of Philip and Irene without discussing the historic event that is known as the Fourth Crusade and the Fall of Constantinople in 1204, perhaps the greatest political episode of the age. On the eve of the 13th century, Isaac Angelos still remained a hostage of his brother Alexios, but around 1200 he was able to find a way to deliver a message to his daughter Irene urging her to avenge him. The reply Isaac anticipated was a fast one and Irene sent him advice on what to do and expect.
Irene had one younger brother, also called Alexios Angelos. While she was the Queen of the Germans, he too was a prisoner of his uncle Alexios III, but in 1201 he was able to flee from Constantinople with the help of two Pisan merchants that had been entrusted with the mission to get Alexios from Constantinople to the German realm. The man behind this escape scheme was the no other than Philip of Swabia and we suppose the main reason he took this strange and daring initiative was due to Irene. Indeed, in 1202, Alexios arrived in Germany and stayed at the Swabian court, the home of his sister Irene. Philip gladly accepted his exiled brother-in-law in his household and Alexios spent a considerable time with the German King. Philip also introduced Alexios to Boniface, the Marquess of Monteferrat, one of the greatest lords of Northern Italy.
Meanwhile, the preparations for a new Crusade against Egypt had already begun in Italy and Boniface had been recognized as its leader. In the German court of 1202 as some historians support, the great decision would have been taken for the Crusade to divert to Constantinople and everyone had something to earn from this anomaly. Philip would establish a loyal relative on the throne of Constantine that would owe him his crown and would be willing to support the German interests in the eastern Mediterranean, Irene would see her direct family rise again into prominence and Alexios would become Emperor of the Romans. Boniface and his men on their part would earn treasures, funds, fiefs to rule and titles under the kingship of the Latinophile Alexios. Boniface was also a distant relative of Irene and Alexios, since once his brother Conrad had married one of their aunts.
Alexios appeared in the Crusade camp in 1202, wishing to convince the Crusade army to support his cause. To this end, he held in his pocket royal letters from Philip to the Crusader leaders, with an apparent content that would be unnecessary to mention here. It is hard to speculate that Philip and Irene could predict the disastrous outcome of the Fourth Crusade and the death of Irene’s relatives during the savage events of 1203/1204.
Actually, Philip must have been not at all rejoiced with a Fleming on the throne of Constantinople, after Count Baldwin of Flanders -and his family- assumed the imperial dignity with the support of the Venetian Republic. As a result, when the ambassadors of the Latin Emperor Henry of Flanders visited Philip’s court to ask the hand of one of his daughters for their master, Philip refused such matrimonial union and demanded Henry to acknowledge him as Roman emperor if he wished to have a German (half-Byzantine) princess as a wife. Henry apparently denied such concession and the negotiations ultimately failed.
Even after the death of her father and brother in Constantinople, there was still one relative of Irene alive in the far East, her sister Anna Angelina, the consort of Roman the Great, the Rus grand prince of Kiev and a member of the Rurik dynasty. It was this relation between Irene and Anna that made Philip and Roman allies against the Papacy and Otto. Roman had even sent Rus silver for the founding of a German monastery under the patronage of Philip. In this spirit, in 1205 Roman marched to the aid of Philip against Otto only to be killed by the Poles on his way. Later, this Anna Angelina, the sister-in-law of Philip, became regent of Galicia and Volhynia in the name of her son and led a very turbulent life.
We can see that Philip not only supported the family members of Irene but also tried to utilize those connections so to make international allies, such as the Rurik prince Roman.
Overall, the influence of Irene on Philip was something that even Pope Innocent III recognized, so in the beginning of 1208, he sent a letter to Irene, urging her to prevent her husband Philip from offering his royal support to the Danish bishop Valdemar of Schleswig that had been banished by the Papacy. Irene refused and Valdermar enjoyed full royal support.
THE BLOODLlNE OF IRENE
It is mainly through Philip’s Queen Irene Angelina (or Maria as she was renamed at the German court) that European royals today can boast about their “Byzantine” ancestry, since all of her daughters married to important aristocratic families of the time.
- Beatrice, the eldest daughter of the couple was the most unfortunate and just in 1212, four years after her parent’s death, she died as a newlywed empress of Otto IV, rival of her father.
- Maria of Swabia, their second daughter, married Henry II Duke of Brabant of the House of the Reginarids and had issue.
- The third daughter of Irene was Kunigunde of Hohenstaufen, who married King Wenceslaus of Bohemia. Kunigunde brought the German culture and traditions to the court of Prague and through her the Bohemian crown can trace their Greek roots. Kunigunde was also close to Sophia Angelina the Duchess of Austria, that was a first cousin of her.
- Last but not least, her youngest daughter Elizabeth of Swabia was married into the House of Castile and King Ferdinand III. The couple bore many children together.
All of Irenes daughters, except Beatrice, were taken care by their elder cousin Frederick II Hohenstaufen that made sure to confirm and arrange their marriages.
Last, Irene’s mother, the first spouse of Isaac Angelos, was a Palaiologina, a member of the early Palaiologos family. Through Irene, european royals can trace their ancestral roots back to some of the most important imperial Roman families such as the Doukai, Komnenoi, Angeloi, and Palaiologoi.
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EVGENIOS NTALIANIS - THE CHRONICLES OF BYZANTIUM 
Παράθεμα: THE GREEK HOHENSTAUFEN QUEEN: PHILIP OF SWABIA AND IRENE OF BYZANTIUM – History and Language