The Swabian dynasty that ruled the Holy Roman Empire at its medieval height and, through marriage, the Kingdom of Sicily.
The Staufen were dukes of Swabia who rose to the German throne when Conrad III was elected king in 1138, beginning a long rivalry with the Welf family — the Guelf-versus-Ghibelline struggle that would divide Italy for centuries. The dynasty took its name from the castle of Hohenstaufen.
Conrad’s reign was troubled, but his nephew Frederick, who succeeded in 1152, would make the house the dominant power in Europe.
Frederick I "Barbarossa" spent his long reign trying to turn the Holy Roman Empire into an effective monarchy, above all by mastering the wealthy cities of northern Italy. His defeat by the Lombard League at Legnano in 1176 forced a compromise, but he restored imperial prestige and arranged his son’s marriage to the heiress of Sicily.
Barbarossa died in 1190 crossing a river in Anatolia during the Third Crusade, and passed into German legend as the emperor sleeping under a mountain who would one day return.
Henry VI married Constance of Sicily, heiress of the Norman House of Hauteville, and by 1194 had conquered the Kingdom of Sicily, uniting it with the Empire and encircling the Papal States. Ruthless and ambitious, he was planning further conquests when he died suddenly in 1197, leaving a three-year-old heir.
The union of Empire and Sicily made the Hohenstaufen immensely powerful but set them on a collision course with a papacy determined never to be surrounded.
Frederick II, raised in multicultural Sicily, was the most remarkable ruler of his age — a lawgiver, patron of scholars, and author of a famous treatise on falconry, who governed a brilliant court at Palermo and negotiated the return of Jerusalem on the Sixth Crusade without a battle. Contemporaries called him stupor mundi, the "wonder of the world".
His endless war with the papacy, which excommunicated him repeatedly and branded him Antichrist, consumed his later reign and undermined the dynasty’s German base.
After Frederick II’s death in 1250 the papacy set out to destroy his line. His son Conrad IV died in 1254, his illegitimate son Manfred fell in battle against the papal champion Charles of Anjou at Benevento in 1266, and his sixteen-year-old grandson Conradin was captured and beheaded in Naples in 1268, extinguishing the house.
The fall of the Hohenstaufen left the Empire without a strong dynasty for decades — the "Great Interregnum" — and passed Sicily to the Angevins, reshaping the politics of Italy and Germany alike.