The conclusion draws upon the findings of all the chapters to argue that Barbarossa scholars had often studied more a construct of post-Kulturkampf Germany than the medieval emperor himself. Rather than a sacraliser of the state who teamed up with Reichskanzler Rainald of Dassel (a stand-in for Otto von Bismarck) in order to hammer the Papacy into submission, Frederick I was a ruler determined to restore the greatness of the Empire by many different means, including papal and Arab alliances. This has been overlooked because of the dearth of sources for the later part of his reign, and because of the profound misunderstanding of Frederick’s Aquensian projects. By dismantling the historiography in an archaeological way, Sulovsky restores the connections apparent in the sources, and makes it clear that the increasing Romanisation of the Empire had radical consequences for authority and its expressions, both for the pope and the emperor. Therefore, much of what was described as a deliberate sacralisation of the Empire in opposition to the Papac, was in fact its gradual Romanisation. This was not a project spearheaded by German court, but by the self-conscious Italians, who wanted a Roman emperor to represent them, and not a German king.

The introduction explains the state of the scholarship regarding the sanctity of the state, starting with what is commonly believed. Sulovsky then traces the argument back to its intellectual roots, in the process showing that it is based on false premises that had more to do with the clash of Catholic and Protestant worldviews than with any medieval reality per se. The introduction of the phrase sacrum imperium, the translation of the Three Kings and the canonisation of Saint Charlemagne constituting a triad of sacralising acts is traced to Heinrich Appelt, the senior diplomatist who edited Frederick I’s diplomata. However, as Sulovsky shows, Appelt drew heavily upon Friedrich Heer, whose magnum opus Die Tragödie des Heiligen Reiches deeply influenced many scholars, though he is only reluctantly cited by them. Heer’s work is then shown to be a Catholic response to the Kulturkampf-dominated Prussian school, which formulated the original idea of the sacralisation of the state in 1910, but based on eighteenth-century German Protestant interpretations of imperial history. Thus, the introduction demonstrates that much of our knowledge rests on the presuppositions and axioms of a bygone ideological struggle.

This concluding chapter describes the inevitability of ambiguity among everyone affected by the Reformation. It reviews historiographical trends of research since the 1970s in intellectual and social history. Comparing these trends to the benefits and shortcomings of the “confessionalization thesis,” it argues for reconsideration of the idea of third forces, adapting a concept suggested by the Austrian medievalist and public intellectual Friedrich Heer and the French Renaissance historian Thierry Wanegffelen. It finally explains how the power of third forces describes the specific hybridity of the Reformation.