Lothair III
Lothair III was Holy Roman Emperor from 1133 and reached the throne as a rebel against two previous emperors. Born around 1075 into the Saxon Supplinburg family, he inherited little and built his position by marriage to Richenza of Northeim, which brought him the Brunswick and Northeim inheritances and made him the greatest landholder in Saxony. Henry V made him Duke of Saxony in 1106, and he revolted against him repeatedly, defeating an imperial army at Welfesholz in 1115. When Henry V died childless in 1125 the Salian line ended, and the princes elected Lothair over the hereditary claimant Frederick of Hohenstaufen. The election mattered more than the man: it asserted that the crown was elective rather than inherited, and it began the Welf-Hohenstaufen feud that shaped German and Italian politics for the next century and a half. He secured the Welf alliance by marrying his only daughter to Henry the Proud of Bavaria, and spent years fighting the Hohenstaufen brothers, who submitted in 1135. He intervened twice in Italy on behalf of Pope Innocent II against the antipope Anacletus, and was crowned emperor in Rome in 1133 — receiving from Innocent the Mathildine lands as a papal fief, which the Church later cited as evidence that the empire itself was held from the pope. His second Italian expedition in 1136–37 pushed Roger II of Sicily out of the mainland south, and the gains evaporated on his departure. He died crossing the Alps in December 1137. The Hohenstaufen took the crown the following year and held it for over a century.
- Lived: 1075 CE – 1137 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader
