This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1902. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... IFIRST laid the scene of this dramatic sketch in Altruria, or Zenda, or some other undiscovered country, that had no existence save in my mind's eye; and the characters were purely imaginary also. Then, as I thought it over, I concluded to put the book back in the days of Barbarossa. For one thing, nobody knows much about the days of Barbarossa, therefore liberties can be taken with impunity; and for another thing, what little I did know of Barbarossa had awakened my admiration for him. I liked him, and, liking him, I wanted to put him in a book When I began to look him up further, in order that the liberties I took might not be too great, I found -- and it is a singular literary coincidence indeed--that the prototypes of the four principal characters in the story, the emperor, the duke, the count, and the countess, really did exist, and that they bore some such relationship to one another as might readily have developed the situations I had imagined. It had been years since I had read anything about Barbarossa or his time. I had no recollection whatever of his political rivalry and subsequent friendship with Henry the Lion, or the fact that Conrad von Hohenzollern, the founder of his house, married the Countess von Vohburg, who was an orphan and a great heiress in her own right. It was a case of imagination and reality fitting together. To add to my interest, I found that these people of the past had a connection with the present, in that their descendants rule the two greatest empires of the world to-day, the British and the German -- the United States, being a republic, does not enter into the comparison. Charmed by this coincidence which fixed the locale of the story, I have tried to work it out on old Germanic lines; to ca...