HENRY VII, German king, son of the emperor Frederick II. and his first wife Constance, daughter of Alphonso II., king of Aragon, was crowned king of Sicily in 1212 and made duke of Swabia in 1216. Pope Innocent III. had favoured his coronation as king of Sicily in the hope that the union of Sicily with the Empire would be dissolved, and had obtained a promise from Frederick to this effect. Nevertheless Henry was chosen king of the Romans, or German king, at Frankfort in April 1220, and crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle on May 8, 1222 by his guardian Engelbert, archbishop of Cologne. He appears to have spent most of his youth in Germany, and in 1225 was married to Margaret (d. 1267), daughter of Leopold VI., duke of Austria. The murder of Engelbert in 1225 was followed by an increase of disorder in Germany, and in 1227 Henry took part in a quarrel which had arisen on the death of Henry V., the childless count palatine of the Rhine. Relations between Frederick and his son began to be strained. The emperor had favoured the Austrian marriage because Margaret's brother, Duke Frederick II., was childless; but Henry took up a hostile attitude towards his brother-in-law and wished to put away his wife and marry Agnes, daughter of Wenceslaus I., king of Bohemia. In 1231 Henry refused to appear at the diet at Ravenna, and opposed the privileges granted by Frederick to the princes at Worms. In 1232 he submitted to his father, but in 1233 he issued a manifesto to the princes, and in 1234 raised the standard of revolt at Boppard. He succeeded in forming an alliance with the Lombards in December 1234, but his few supporters fell away when the emperor reached Germany in 1235, and, after a vain attack on Worms, Henry submitted and was kept for some time as a prisoner in Germany. His formal deposition as German king was not considered necessary, as he had broken the oath taken in 1232. He was removed to San Felice in Apulia, and afterwards to Martirano in Calabria, where he died, probably by his own hand, on Feb. 12, 1242. His two sons, Frederick and Henry, died in Italy about 1251.
See J. Rohden, Der Sturz Heinrichs VII. (Gottingen, 1883) ; F. W. Schirrmacher, Die letzten Hohenstaufen (Gottingen, 1871) ; E. Winkel mann, Kaiser Friedrich II. (Leipzig, 1889) ; P. Reinhold, Die Empor ung Konig Heinrichs gegen seinen Vater (191I) .