Diet of Mainz pageant

1184

Barbarossa staged a huge chivalric feast at Mainz to knight his sons and display imperial magnificence. Chroniclers described forty thousand knights and tents stretching for miles along the Rhine. A freak windstorm that killed several participants was read as an omen that the imperial peak had passed. The pageant was the most lavish secular celebration of the twelfth century, a deliberate demonstration that the empire could still command the loyalty of Latin Christendom.