ABSTRACT
Otto of Freising points in his Gesta Friderici to the remarkable coincidence between Frederick Barbarossa's coronation and royal unction at Aachen and the consecration of the Bishop of Munster, whose name was also Frederick, in the same church and on the same day. The “re-sacralization” of the Reich was clearly one of the priorities of Barbarossa's initial years of rule. It was part of his programme of renovatio imperii, where Roman universalism, the revival of Roman jurisprudence, and a new type of non-Christocentric imperial sacrality were interrelated. Rainald of Dassel did not limit the sacralization of the renewed Roman Empire to the figure of Charlemagne. He added an interesting new royal cult which linked wisdom, sanctity, and kingship. As Alexander Murray has argued, there was a strong relationship between the medieval discourse of sapiential rulership and the emergence of the cult of the so-called “Three Kings”.
