Frederick Barbarossa — "red beard" — was the most powerful of the three monarchs who set out on the Third Crusade, and the only one who never arrived. Holy Roman Emperor from 1155, he had spent thirty-five years imposing his will across Germany and Italy, and in 1189 he led the largest of the crusading armies overland toward the Holy Land. On 10 June 1190 he drowned in the River Saleph in southern Anatolia — thrown from his horse, or stricken while fording the cold water. Leaderless, and then gutted by disease, his great host melted away; only a remnant of Germans ever reached the siege at Acre.

King & Country models him after the equestrian statue at the imperial palace of Goslar: the emperor crowned and mailed on a white horse, in a golden surcoat bearing the black imperial eagle, the harness picked out in red and gold. He rode toward the same war as Richard the Lionheart and against the same adversary, Saladin — the three-cornered story of the Third Crusade — while the German knighthood he embodied would soon harden into orders like the one carried by the Teutonic flagbearer. In a diorama he heads a column of German crusaders winding through Anatolia toward a war he would not live to fight.

Model: MK219 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set