Otto of Freising

Otto of Freising was a twelfth-century German bishop and chronicler from the Babenberg family that ruled the Margraviate of Austria. He was a son of Margrave Leopold III of Austria and Agnes of Waiblingen, daughter of Emperor Henry IV. Through his mother he was a half-brother of King Conrad III of Germany and an uncle of Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. Born in Austria in the early twelfth century, he belonged to the highest ranks of the imperial aristocracy and was directed toward an ecclesiastical career.

He received an advanced education in France, studying at Paris when that city was becoming the leading center of scholastic theology. There he encountered the teaching associated with Hugh of Saint-Victor and the new interest in dialectic and in Aristotelian learning then entering the Latin West. After his studies he entered the Cistercian abbey of Morimond in Burgundy, taking the monastic habit in the early 1130s. In 1138 he was chosen abbot of Morimond and, in the same year, elected bishop of Freising in Bavaria, an appointment aided by the recent accession of his half-brother Conrad III to the German throne. As bishop he retained his Cistercian identity and remained closely tied to the order.

Otto took part in the political and military affairs of the empire. He accompanied Conrad III on the Second Crusade in 1147–1149 and shared in the severe losses suffered by the German army in Asia Minor. After his return he continued to serve as a counselor in Hohenstaufen circles and as a diocesan bishop who promoted reform and learning at Freising. In the mid-1140s he composed his Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus, an eight-book world chronicle conceived in Augustinian terms as a history of the earthly and heavenly cities. The work, which runs from Creation to his own time, is marked by a somber view of contemporary disorder and by an unusually reflective philosophy of history.

In his later years Otto began a second major work, the Gesta Friderici imperatoris, a history of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa that also treated the reigns of Henry IV, Henry V, Lothar III, and Conrad III. Compared with the Chronica, this narrative is more hopeful about the prospects of imperial restoration. Otto left the Gesta unfinished at his death; it was completed by his notary Rahewin. In 1158, while in France, Otto died at Morimond Abbey on 22 September and was buried there. His two histories remain among the most important narrative sources for twelfth-century Germany and for the intellectual culture of the high Middle Ages.