The reflections that follow have grown out of my preoccupation with two sets of problems. First, I have been working for far too long on a new edition of the letter-collection of Wibald of Stablo, which as you will all know contains the major part of all surviving Staufer mandates as well a considerable number of papal mandates, and it therefore seems an obvious challenge to compare these two governmental systems and their methods. Second, not long ago, I tried to sketch for anglophone historians the basic features of the style of rulership in the twelfth-century regnum Teutonicum: now is the time to fill out that sketch a little further. What I am offering here is certainly not polished or complete. It is, rather, work in progress, which means that it is preliminary and has many gaps (I especially regret the omission of France and its high court) – but that can't be helped when I am trying to tackle mandate, privilege and court judgement in only an hour.

In my title, I have deliberately used the word ‘age’ rather than ‘reign’. As long ago as the 1920s and 1930s, leading German medievalists dealt with the period of Barbarossa in the framework of processes of modernisation that became evident in the twelfth century. To some extent, this was a new version of the old battle between historians of ‘Big Germany’ and those of ‘Small Germany’.