Chapter five moves to the third main theme of the book, that of Aachen itself. Where earlier scholars took note of only a few sources, Sulovsky reconstructs Barbarossa’s crown chandelier, known as the Barbarossaleuchter, on the basis of findings ranging from annals, charters, liturgical books and theological literature to the visual and textual consonances of the chandelier with other parts of the Marienkirche in Aachen. This demonstrates deep traditionalism of Aachen, including the link between Aachen’s Carolingian dome mosaics, Alcuin’s commentary on the Apocalypse that was its textual counterpart and exposition, and the Barbarossaleuchter, which imitates both the dome and the commentary numerologically and visually. By using the annals of Aachen, a text barely noticed by historians, the dating of the chandelier’s inauguration is established. The chapter shows how Saladin’s emissaries were kept in attendance during Easter 1174, when the chandelier was being dedicated, so that Barbarossa could have Arabic representatives present. This was done in order to imitate Charlemagne’s cordial relationship with the Arab caliph Harun al-Rashid, who had given his Christian counterpart two golden candelabra, which Charlemagne then dedicated to the Virgin of Aachen. Thus, Frederick was not trying to sacralise the Empire, but to follow Charlemagne’s example.

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.