Henry VI (1190–1197), Barbarossa's son, ransomed Richard the Lionheart, conquered Norman Sicily on his wife's claim, and died at thirty-one planning crusade and hereditary empire alike.
Henry VI took up his drowned father's empire in 1190 and in seven years came closer than any medieval emperor to universal monarchy: Richard the Lionheart, delivered to him by Austrian luck, was milked of 150,000 marks and vassalage; the ransom financed the conquest of Sicily — his wife Constance's inheritance — completed with calculated cruelty at Palermo in 1194.
Master of Germany, Italy, and the Mediterranean's richest kingdom, holding Cyprus and Armenia as client crowns, he was assembling a crusade and pressing the princes to make the empire hereditary when malaria killed him at Messina at thirty-one — leaving a three-year-old, a widow, and a civil war.
Born at Nijmegen in 1165, elected king of the Romans at four, Henry was trained in his father's shadow through the Lombard settlements and the great Mainz court of 1184. His marriage in 1186 to Constance of Sicily — aunt and, after the young king William II died childless in 1189, heiress of the Norman kingdom — was Barbarossa's masterstroke and the papacy's nightmare: the empire closing around Rome from north and south.
When Barbarossa drowned in Anatolia in 1190, Henry inherited the German kingship amid a Welf rising and the Sicilian succession already stolen — the Norman barons had crowned the bastard Tancred of Lecce. His first Italian expedition (1191) won him the imperial crown from a reluctant pope and lost an army to epidemic before Naples.
Contemporaries describe a slight, bookish figure — the Codex Manesse would later open its song-collection with the emperor's own courtly verses — housing perhaps the coldest political intelligence of his age. Chroniclers who admired the order he kept still recorded the method: the captured Sicilian leadership of 1194 blinded, burned, or drowned on suspicion of conspiracy, Richard of Acerra hung upside down until a jester mercifully finished him, the pretender's son blinded and castrated.
The same mind ran the subtlest negotiation of the century: Richard's captivity managed against pope, France, and the prisoner's formidable mother simultaneously, priced to the last mark, and converted — by making Richard a vassal king — into constitutional theatre. His plan for a hereditary empire, offered to the princes with Sicilian gold and nearly carried, was statecraft a century ahead of its institutions; everything he built assumed a length of life he did not get.
The Richard windfall (1192–1194) reset everything: the English king, shipwrecked and seized by Leopold of Austria, was bought by Henry, held at Trifels, and released for 150,000 marks of silver and homage — money that paid for the second Sicilian expedition. Genoese and Pisan fleets in his service, Henry swept the kingdom in 1194; Palermo fell in November, Tancred being conveniently dead, and Henry was crowned king of Sicily on Christmas Day — the day before Constance, forty and delivering her first child in a market-square tent at Jesi to forestall all doubt, bore Frederick.
The Sicilian conspiracy of 1197 was crushed with the ferocity noted above; the hereditary-empire plan traded away at the princes' resistance for the election of the infant Frederick as king of the Romans; and the crusade — the "German crusade" whose advance forces took Beirut — was boarding when the emperor died of fever at Messina on 28 September 1197. Within months Germany split between Philip of Swabia and Otto IV; Constance, dying in 1198, delivered Sicily and her son to the guardianship of Pope Innocent III.
Henry's union of Sicily and Empire defined the thirteenth century's central war: the popes' obsession with breaking the encirclement ran through Innocent III's wardship of Frederick, the deposition struggles of Frederick's maturity, and the extermination of the Hohenstaufen line at Charles of Anjou's hands in the 1260s. One early death, and sixty years of European politics reorganised around its consequences.
His son — Frederick II, "stupor mundi" — inherited the design and the enemies together. The Sicilian treasure Henry took north, the client kingdoms of Cyprus and Armenia he created, and the administrative fusion of Norman and imperial practice all outlived him; the breadth of the conception is why historians still argue over whether 1197 killed a passing hegemony or a different European future.