Chapter One May Arthur, good king of Brittany, Whose knighthood teaches us To be courteous, to be true knights, Held court as a king should On that holy day always Known as the Pentecost. -- Yvain, The Knight of the Lion Chrétien de Troyes, c. 1177 The tower of Trifels Castle beckoned, dark red against the pale spring sky and the new green of the tree-covered mountainside below. Princes, dukes, barons, and bishops came tiding from all parts of Germany, summoned by their suzerain, the thrice-crowned Henry VI, King of Germany, King of Italy, and Holy Roman Emperor, to attend high court on the feast of Pentecost, which in 1194 fell on the ninth of May.     Each came with a party of knights riding behind him, and a mule train laden with arms and armor, for once the court session had ended, they would move south, following their liege lord, Henry, and his wife, the Empress Constance, crossing over the Alps and down into the Lombard plain like the waters of the spring thaw. An army bent on conquest, their goal was southern Italy and the fabulously wealthy Norman Kingdom of Sicily, claimed by Henry through ancient imperial right, and by Constance as the only legitimate heir of the Norman dynasty. Whose claim was stronger depended on one's point of view.     Trifels beckoned to me as well. Although I had never seen it, not even in a photograph, I knew that it stood among the wooded hills of the Pfälzerwald, the Palace Forest that forms the northern border of the Palatine Rhineland, the ancestral possessions of the Hohenstaufen family, into which Constance had married. It was from here that she began her last journey south, and I sensed that in every way--culturally and emotionally as well as geographically--it represented the farthest point of her travels, her greatest distance from home. I would not be able to arrive at any understanding of Constance if I had not seen Trifels. * * * My own arrival in Germany in 1996 was easier, quicker, and considerably less dazzling than Constance's had been: I brought no mules, carried no treasure, made no perilous mountain crossings. My major challenges were to succeed in driving the car on and off the overnight ferry from Palermo to Naples, and thence find my way north to an apartment in Rome, that of Marcella Serangeli, the friend who was to accompany me.     Marcella was packed and waiting: a cup of coffee, and we were off. She had been unable to travel for several years and was delighted to explore a recently reacquired freedom by accompanying me on this trip. Marcella is a retired social worker, almost the first person I had met when I came to Sicily in 1962 to work in a community development project. We were co-workers and neighbors for two years, and then she left Sicily to work in Spain and then in Central America. Never a true expatriate, she knows nonetheless about living in a foreign country. Our children are contemporaries, and many vacations spent together had long since proved that we make good traveling companions.     We had agreed by phone that while the itinerary of our return journey southward, determined by that of Constance, would follow the secondary roads, on the northward portion we would take the superhighways, driving as fast as we could in order to get where we were headed as soon as possible. Travel as motion, not as experience.     It was May, the days were long, and we left Rome at noon. Except for the usual traffic jam crossing the pass over the Apennines between Florence and Bologna, and heavy traffic around Milan, there were no problems, and we arrived at Como in time for dinner. By eleven the next morning, we had zipped under the Alps and were in Zurich. It felt as if we had robbed ourselves of time and space.     We crossed the German border near Schaffhausen and, going slowly now, drove west along the northern bank of the Rhine. The river itself is fairly wide in this part, but the fluvial plain is narrower: to the north a strip of rich fields tightly farmed with what appeared to be forage crops, and then a dark line of fir trees--the southernmost hem of the Black Forest. Across the river and to the south, the Swiss side of the plain rose rapidly into foothills, beyond which the snow-covered peaks of the Alps closed the horizon like a freshly painted picket fence.     The vision of the distant mountaintops glowing in the sunset was tamed by the well-fed placidity of the Rhine in the foreground, the prosperous fields, and the highway running straight. Had it been the twelfth century, however, we would have found ourselves surrounded by bogs and marshes, rotting bushes and fallen trees obstructing our progress, our path blocked each spring by the floodwaters of the great river obese with roaring masses of melted snows, the rafts at the fords drawn ashore for the season, the wooden bridges torn from their moorings.     We would have felt menaced by that ribbon of black trees to the north. The Black Forest hid bandits, beasts both real and mythical, and even wild men, long-haired and naked, who lived on roots and berries and ran amok. We would be thanking God that at least the mountains were behind us and that we had been brought this far in safety, and praying that we would arrive at some sure lodging before darkness fell.     After an hour or so, Marcella and I picked a turnoff at whim and headed up into the twilight of the Schwarzwald, where we sank gratefully into the first pine-paneled, feather-bedded Gasthaus we could find, happily forgetful of our first exercise in historical imagination. * * * My idea of the Black Forest had always been strictly out of Grimm--virgin, dark, and impenetrable, populated by Gauls who moved silently through the underbrush, as at ease as deer. Caesar claimed to have marched through it for months without seeing sunlight. So be it, but that wasn't the forest of today. It wasn't black, and it wasn't composed of Norway spruce. I hadn't realized that a forest of conifers cannot reproduce itself, since the saplings die for lack of the sunlight that their parent trees deny them. Without human maintenance, careful foresting, and clearance, the beech tree, the only tree that can reproduce itself in its own shade, will take over.     What we found as we drove northwest through gentle hills were stands of Norway spruce, dark indeed but with little or no underbrush, alternating with bright green meadows and threaded with carefully tended walking paths, quite crowded with young families, babies and backpacks bobbing on their shoulders, and older couples striding along with the help of stout wooden walking sticks.     The meadow grass grew paler as the mist crept over it, laying big banks of fog over the lower valleys. We had decided to take the Schwarzwald-Hochstrasse, the upper road that would carry us up through the highest and densest part, which supposedly offered the most spectacular views. Here, however, the forest became white, ceding its black to the rain clouds closing over us; the long needles of the spruces caught thick strands of mist as if they were combing wool. We followed the red taillights in front of us while great glowing eyes glared up out of the fog and slithered past us to the left.     It was a relief to come down out of the fog and to cross the valley of the Rhine. The late afternoon sky was overcast and prematurely dark when we arrived at Annweiler, the small village that lies in the valley below Trifels. The clouds hung low over the hills, releasing intermittent and desultory rain, but the village streets were full of people, and it required two hours of increasingly desperate research to find a room on the outskirts of town.     We were lucky to find a bed, for it was the Friday of the Pentecost weekend, something we had not taken into our calculations. Pentecost has lost status in Italy, but in Germany it is still a major holiday weekend, and for many contemporary Germans, it signifies the opening of the hiking season. The paths of the Pfälzerwald, which more or less begins at Annweiler, compete with those of the Black Forest across the river for vacationers from the southwestern German cities.     That night my sleep was agitated by dreams involving Constance and the castle that we would be seeing the next day. I woke early, and while Marcella slept on, I lay in bed musing about Constance in the irregular thought patterns that belong to dawn, and gazing at the walls around me. The owner of the bed-and-breakfast was a big, sunny bear of a man who spoke only Greek, and the decor of his establishment had immigrated to Germany with him: souvenir amphoras and wall hangings embroidered with pictures of the Parthenon, Mediterranean kitsch rather than German Gemütlichkeit . I felt at home here, as Constance would have: she had grown up in a polyglot society in which the Greek language and culture played a prominent role, and the sound of someone speaking Greek would surely have aroused her nostalgia. * * * The name Trifels derives most probably from Drei Pfälze --three castles. They stand on adjacent hills: Anebos, a mere stub of reddish-brown tower; Scharffenberg Castle farther off, of which only a much-restored tower is visible; and Trifels itself, the most important. They date from the eleventh or possibly the tenth century, but in the mid-twelfth century they were enlarged and strengthened by Constance's father-in-law, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, in order to enforce the northern borders of his family lands.     The road to Trifels took us up through a forest of beech and elms, magnificently tall trees with new leaves of soft green, interspersed with stands of darker pines. The effect in late May was of a soft, gentle woods, where the light filtering through the green made the undergrowth luminous even when, as that morning, there was little sunlight. Occasionally the sun broke through the clouds, warming the stone to the color of cream of tomato soup, but a chill wind was blowing fairly steadily, and the tourists milling around the entrance all had wind jackets and heavy sweaters, with few short sleeves in sight. The majority of the visitors, and there were many, were Germans, perhaps attracted less by the sham beauty of the reconstructed castle than by the many stories of its treasures and its prisons, a symbol of the majesty and might of medieval Germany.     Today Trifels looks like every nineteenth-century engraver's idea of a medieval German castle. Towers of dark rose sandstone cluster on a mountaintop, their foundations hidden behind the upper branches of elms and pine trees on three sides and exposed on the fourth, where striated layers of the same rose-red stone descend in a sharp overhang. The towers are irregular: the original eleventh-century keep is flanked by a great tower and a chapel tower, unusual in that the apse of the chapel, located on the upper story, bulges out from the exterior wall, its semicylindrical weight resting on the heads of three cheerful lions. The lions are garlanded by gaping cracks, which explains why we were not allowed to enter the chapel but could only peer in from the doorway.     A great hall was added in the first half of the thirteenth century, then used as a quarry in later years. Extensive restoration after World War II, more enthusiastic than authentic, has given us the present hall, an impressive two-storied room with heavy arches on all four sides supporting the columns of the loggia above. The final touch was provided in 1960 by the construction of a squat square tower with a peaked roof, set off from the others and destined to be the custodian's residence. All that remains of the treasure are copies of the imperial insignia: a cross, a crown, an orb, and a scepter, none of which have anything to do with Sicily.     Scattered about the courtyard were billboards reconstructing the various stages of Trifels's construction, and a coin-operated loudspeaker told us its history. I read and listened diligently: first mentioned in 1081 as an imperial castle built by the emperors of the earlier Salian dynasty, it was then renovated in the middle of the twelfth century by the Hohenstaufen Frederick Barbarossa. Its dungeons were the prison of Richard the Lionheart when he was captured and held for ransom by Henry VI, the son of Barbarossa; and it served as treasure house for the fabulous spoils brought to Germany after Henry's conquest of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily. The spiel was well thought out and well executed. Yet it made not one mention of Constance.     They seem to care little about her in Germany. We searched the billboards in vain for her name, but the fabled Sicilian treasure had become the treasure of the Hohenstaufen, its presence there due only to the exploits of Henry VI. Yet Regine, my friend, neighbor, and translator, tells me that when she was a child growing up only a few miles from Trifels, it was the Treasure of the Kaiserin Konstanz that dominated her games and fantasies.     Only when we had climbed up to the tower roof did Constance begin to come alive in my own fantasy. The view from the top of the square tower could not have changed much in eight hundred years. To the north and west, wooded hills stretched as far as we could see, an undulating horizon craggy with ruined towers. Constance would have seen them newly built and been able to put a name and an owner to each. But I doubt she looked that way often; she would have been far more attracted by the view to the east, over the foothills to the valley where the Rhine, flowing down from the Alps, passed the great Holy Roman imperial cities: Speyer, Mainz, Worms, Cologne.     Better still was the view to the south, through the hills to the distant plain of Alsace, toward the palace at Haguenau, toward Sicily. This was the route by which Constance had first come to Germany, crossing from Italy to France, then coming up through Burgundy and Alsace. It was from the south that she had first seen Trifels, a lonely castle lit by a wintry sky and floating in a sea of leafless trees. Henry considered it the best-defended, most secure prison for hostages of rank. For Constance, daughter of the urban South, it must have looked like solitary confinement.     Imagine her standing there at the parapet, on the eve of their departure, looking south along the route they were to follow, a first leave-taking from her life in Germany. An older woman in the eyes of her contemporaries, she had recently turned forty. It is said that she was tall, blond, and good-looking, a description not improbable given her northern blood, but even in those days this was such a fairy-tale stereotype for those of royal blood (since darkness was equated with impurity and sin) that it might be pure invention.     One German historian, Karl Hampe, describes Constance as "a proud woman of independent spirit and passionate temperament," but gives no sources. He is handing us, perhaps, a bowdlerized version of a nasty comment made by the Franciscan monk, Fra Salimbene, who claimed "she was a perverse woman who constantly caused trouble among her brothers' wives and the entire family." But the monk, who was writing almost a hundred years after her death, was a partisan of the papacy as opposed to the empire, and like all men of the medieval Church, he had a very low opinion of women in general. Here as elsewhere, Constance serves as a blank screen on which each can project the woman he or she prefers. Victim, for centuries to come, of gossip and legend and spite, she has often been the target for opinions and judgments directed more at other members of her family than at the Empress herself.     I myself have chosen to see a woman whose early pride and passion, if ever they existed, had been battered and quelled by eight years of exile in a marriage to a man whom only ambition could arouse. Except for her husband, she was alone in the world: no member of the family of her childhood had survived. Cursed by her years, perhaps, or by her genes, she was barren, unable to fulfill the only legitimate purpose that the medieval world allotted to a laywoman, that of producing an heir. The future of thrones and dynasties depended on the issue of her fruitless womb.     At forty, the obsessive, raging ache of sterility, the yearning emptiness in her loins and in her arms, had dulled to resignation, and pride was a mask worn to hide failure and shame. If on the eve of their departure Henry was fired by the will to sit upon the Sicilian throne, Constance may often have entertained the idea of seeking refuge in a Palermo convent.     Departures were nothing new to Constance. Since the imperial office was an elective one, the empire had no capital city, and its court traveled continuously. Lacking any permanent bureaucratic structure or even any press through which to make his authority felt at a distance, the emperor had to rely on the persuasive powers of his own presence, journeying together with his empress and his court from one castle or episcopal palace to the next. Although by feudal law he had the right to demand hospitality from anyone in the realm, most often he stayed where he could feed his retainers from the produce of the imperial lands. Some princes had been exonerated from the duty of receiving the king, no mean privilege: the king's following might be composed of three hundred people or of four thousand, and his arrival had by law to be announced six weeks beforehand. A twelfth-century estimate of the court's daily consumption (probably exaggerated but nonetheless alarming) included one thousand pigs and sheep, ten barrels of wine and ten of beer, one thousand bushels of wheat, eight oxen, "and other things besides."     Henry tended to confine his traveling to the southwestern part of Germany, within the lands that belonged outright to the Hohenstaufen family. The high courts of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost were usually held in the imperial cities ruled by an "ecclesiastical prince," a bishop or archbishop of high noble birth who had been elected in accordance with the emperor's will and who administered for him the territory that had been granted in fief to the bishopric. The first cathedral city that Constance had visited in Germany was Speyer, where Henry had held court in March of 1188. They had spent the first two years of their marriage in Italy and had then come north along the western route, through the lands that Henry had inherited from his mother, Beatrix of Burgundy. At the beginning of March they had arrived at Toul, near Nancy; some days later they entered what is now Germany and proceeded to Speyer.     Speyer lies on the west bank of the Rhine, not far from Annweiler. Marcella and I drove there in the rain, across a plain of vineyards. Now a very pretty but modest town with lovely baroque houses, it was once one of the most important cities of the empire. At the height of its splendor in the sixteenth century, Speyer had sixty town gates topped by towers, as well as thirty-eight churches and chapels, plus an enormous Romanesque cathedral that had four spires so tall, they might well have inspired the city's name.     At a certain point we could see Speyer across fields and woods that blocked out all the modern part of the town, leaving us only a view of towers and spires. The road was empty of traffic; no crossroads required signs; and were it not for the asphalt, we might have been traveling with Constance, at a time when one had to rely on landmarks, river fords, passing merchants and pilgrims, and even far-off church steeples in order to find one's way. How grateful medieval travelers must have felt when the spires they were looking for came into sight.     In the past the Speyer cathedral was flanked by ever-spreading episcopal and imperial palaces and chanceries, where the court lodged when called to the imperial diet (the last took place in 1570), but all of this has disappeared. During the centuries the church has been burned, looted, demolished, bombed, deconsecrated, and reconsecrated, and its most recent restoration dates to the 1950s and 1960s. Much of the original crypt remains, but the upper parts have been reconstructed, supposedly according to the eleventh-century plans: the atrium is built in layers of beige and red stone, so that the façade is striped, while the rest of the cathedral is solid red stone.     The largest Romanesque church in all Europe and the first to have a vaulted ceiling, the cathedral has an interior impressive in its vastness. On that first visit Constance would have descended with her husband into the crypt, to pray at the tombs of his ancestors. Beatrix of Burgundy lies buried here, together with the five emperors of an earlier dynasty, that of the Salians. The imperial tombs are of the utmost simplicity--heavy slabs of unadorned stone resting on the floor, surprisingly stark compared with the elegance of royal burial in Sicily. In 1188 there was an empty space awaiting Beatrix's husband, Frederick Barbarossa, the first of the Hohenstaufen emperors. It remained empty for a century, until Rudolf of Hapsburg was buried there, for Frederick was destined to die far from Germany, on his way to the Holy Land, and despite the best efforts of the embalmers, his body never made it home.     Constance had never known her mother-in-law, who died in the year of her betrothal. Beatrix of Burgundy was by all accounts a highly cultivated and forceful woman who had done much to polish the rough intercourse of the German court, and her presence must have haunted Constance, who was unable to make a comparable impression in her husband's homeland. Wishing for someone to guide her in the role of a German queen, and missing her own mother, Beatrix of Réthel, who died at much the same time as the Burgundian Beatrix but in Palermo, Constance must have felt continually reproached by her mother-in-law's memory.     Beatrix of Burgundy had been brought up in Mâcon, at the cosmopolitan court of her father, Count William, the most powerful nobleman in the Kingdoms of Burgundy and Provence and the leader of the opposition to effective German rule over what was nominally part of the empire. Weaned on the literature of Provence and the poetry of courtly love, she was said to be herself a singer and a poet of some merit. She was still in her teens when the Holy Roman Emperor Barbarossa, some twenty years older than she, decided to quell the opposition by marrying the heir. A contemporary writer, Acerbus Morena, describes her as being "of medium build with hair shining like gold and a very beautiful face, her teeth white and well formed. She had an upright bearing, a very small mouth, a modest gaze, bright eyes, and a chaste and gentle manner of speech." However stereotyped this description, too, may sound, this young slip of a girl had entranced and dominated the mighty Barbarossa, so enslaving him that he was considered a vir uxoratus , a man ruled by his wife. In what seems to have been a truly happy union, Beatrix had insisted on breaking with tradition and traveling by her husband's side in his perpetual movements, bearing him at least twelve children along the way. She was but forty when she died, much mourned by her husband.     If Beatrix was a ghostly presence, who were the living that populated Constance's years in Germany? I have no information. My German being just adequate to finding a bed-and-breakfast, I have been able to read only what has been translated for me, but I suspect that little is there to find: the titles of princes and clerics who served as witnesses for court documents, casualty lists from battlefields, with little attention paid to the women participating in court life. I do not even know if Constance followed her mother-in-law's example in traveling about with the emperor, but I will assume that she did. (Continues...) Excerpted from Travels with a Medieval Queen by Mary Taylor Simeti. Copyright © 2001 by Mary Taylor Simeti. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.