HOHENSTAUFEN, a German princely family which de rived its name from a village and ruined castle near Lorsch in Swabia, now in Wurttemberg. Its members were emperors or German kings from 1138 to 1208, and again from 1214 to The earliest known ancestor was Frederick, count of Buren (d. 1094), whose son Frederick built a castle at Staufen, or Hohen staufen, and called himself by this name. He supported the emperor Henry IV., who granted him the dukedom of Swabia in 1079, and gave him his daughter Agnes in marriage. In I o81 he remained in Germany as Henry's representative, but only secured possession of Swabia after a struggle lasting twenty years. In 1105 Frederick was succeeded by his son Frederick II., called the One-eyed, who, together with his brother Conrad, afterwards the German king Conrad III., held south-west Germany for their uncle the emperor Henry V. Frederick inherited the estates of Henry V. in 1125, but failed to secure the throne. He opposed the new emperor, Lothair the Saxon, who claimed some of the estates of the late emperor as crown property. A war broke out and ended in the complete submission of Frederick at Bamberg. In 1138 Conrad of Hohenstaufen was elected German king, and was succeeded in 1152, not by his son but by his nephew Frederick Barbarossa, son of his brother Frederick (d. 1147). Conrad's son Frederick inherited the duchy of Franconia which his father had received in 1115, and this was retained by the Hohenstaufen until the death of Duke Conrad II. in 1196. In 1152 Frederick received the duchy of Swabia from his cousin the German king Frederick I., and on his death in 1167 it passed successively to Frederick's three sons Frederick, Conrad and Philip. The second Hohen staufen emperor was Frederick Barbarossa's son, Henry VI., after whose death a struggle for the throne took place between Henry's brother Philip, duke of Swabia, and Otto of Brunswick, afterwards the emperor Otto IV. Regained for the Hohenstaufen by Hen ry's son, Frederick II., in 1214, the German kingdom passed to his son, Conrad IV., and when Conrad's son Conradin was beheaded in Italy in 1268, the male line of the Hohenstaufen became extinct. Daughters of Philip of Swabia married Ferdinand III., king of Castile and Leon, and Henry II., duke of Brabant, and a daughter of Conrad, brother of the emperor Frederick I., married into the family of Guelph.
See F. von Raulner, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen and ihrer Zeit (Leipzig, 1878) ; B. F. W. Zimmermann, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen (Stuttgart, 1st ed., 5838; 2nd ed., 1865) ; F. W. Schirrmacher, Die letzten Hohenstaufen (Gottingen, 1871) .