THE GERMAN EMPIRE AT THE HEIGHT OF ITS POWER; THE LATER SAXON AND EARLY
SALIAN EMPERORS (973–1056)[2]
The reign of Otto II.—Break-up of Bavaria—Projects of
Crusade—War and Alliance with Greek Empire—The Reign of Otto
III.—Regency of Theophano and Bavarian Revolt—Otto and the
Bishops—Gerbert of Aurillac—Visionary Schemes of Otto—His
failure—Reign of Henry II.—The two Conrads—Reign of Conrad
II.—His Italian and Slavonic Policy—Union of Arelate and
Empire—Fiefs declared Hereditary—Aribert—Reign of Henry
III.—His Policy in the East, France, Germany, and Italy—Synod
of Sutri—Death of Henry III.
[Sidenote: Otto II., 973–983.]
Otto II. was eighteen years of age when the death of his father made him
sole ruler. His education and surroundings gave his policy a very
different direction from that of Otto I. The elder prince was purely
German, and even in winning the imperial crown sought to subserve a
Teutonic object. His son, born and reared in the purple, Burgundian or
Italian on his mother’s side, and married to a Byzantine Emperor’s
daughter, took wider views. To Otto II. Italy was as important as
Germany, and his ambition was to weld the two realms together in a solid
imperial unity, while constantly keeping his eyes even beyond these two
kingdoms. To him the Emperor’s lordship of the world was a reality, and
he strove with all the force of an ardent, impetuous, and impulsive
nature to give effect to his ideal. But while Otto II.’s short reign
witnessed the Empire assuming a more universal character, it also saw
the first signs of that essential incompatibility between the position
of German king and Roman Emperor which, in after ages, was to bear such
bitter fruit.
Despite the quietness of Otto I.’s last years, the difficulties against
which the old Emperor had struggled still remained. The separatist
spirit of the national dukedoms still lived on in Bavaria, and had only
been temporarily glossed over by the good understanding between Otto I.
and Duke Henry. Judith, the widow of Duke Henry, now ruled Bavaria in
the name of her son Henry II., surnamed the Quarrelsome, while she
controlled Swabia through her influence on her daughter Hedwig, and
Hedwig’s aged husband, the Swabian Duke Burkhard. Otto II. saw the
danger of a close union between the two southern duchies, and, on
Burkhard’s death, invested his nephew Otto, Duke Ludolf’s son, with
Swabia. Judith and her partisans were instantly aroused. A new civil war
was threatened, in which the Bavarians did not scruple to call in the
help of the Bohemians and Poles. But the young Emperor’s vigorous
measures proved fatal to the attempted rebellion, and Otto took the
opportunity of his triumph to lessen the influence of the Bavarian dukes
by intrusting, to separate margraves, the east mark, on the Danube (the
later Austria), and the north mark between the Danube and the Bohemian
Forest. [Sidenote: Break-up of the Bavarian Duchy, 976–8.] The great
highland marchland of Carinthia and Carniola, with which still went the
Italian March of Verona, or Friuli, was constituted a seventh duchy. The
rest of the Bavarian duchy was consigned to the care of the faithful
Otto of Swabia. Judith was shut up in a convent. Henry the Quarrelsome
fled to Bohemia, whence he made subsequent unsuccessful attempts to
recover his position. Thus the Emperor triumphed, but he had simply to
do over again the work of his father. It was a thankless business, and
showed how insecure were the very foundations of the German kingdom. But
for the rest of his short reign Germany gave Otto but little trouble.
The extension of Christianity among Wends, Poles, and Bohemians gave
Magdeburg and Mainz new suffragans in the Bishops of Gnesen and Prague,
though renewed attacks on the marches soon taught Otto that the
Christianised Slavs were scarcely less formidable enemies than their
heathen fathers had been.
[Sidenote: War with France, 978.]
In 978 Otto marched with a great army almost to the walls of Paris to
avenge on the Carolingian king, Lothair, his attempt to withdraw
Lorraine from the imperial obedience [see page 70]. Few of his acts
bring out more clearly his imperial position than this long progress
through hostile territory. But Italy was the scene of Otto II.’s most
famous actions, and best illustrates his high conception of the imperial
dignity. Rome was, as usual, a constant source of trouble. A series of
insignificant Pontiffs succeeded John XIII.; but above them towered the
noble Roman, Crescentius, Duke of the Romans, perhaps the son of the
younger Theodora, Marozia’s sister, who aspired to renew the great part
played by Alberic II. [Sidenote: Crescentius at Rome, 980.] In 980 Otto
crossed the Alps for Italy, and on his approach the opposition was
shattered. In 981 he restored the Pope to Rome, whence he had fled from
fear of Crescentius, and forced Crescentius himself to withdraw into the
seclusion of a monastery, where a few years later he died. The need of
protection still kept the Papacy faithful to the imperial alliance.
Otto now assumed new responsibilities directly flowing from his position
as Emperor. The Mohammedan lords of Sicily had re-established themselves
in southern Italy, and threatened the march of Benevento. Otto marched
to the help of the Lombard Duke of Benevento. [Sidenote: Campaigns
against Greeks and Saracens, 981–982.] At the same time he sought to
make a reality of the cession of Greek Italy, the promised portion of
Theophano, but which, owing to the unwillingness of the Byzantines, had
never actually come into his hands. In 981 and 982 Otto carried on
successful war in southern Italy. A whole series of Greek towns—Salerno,
Bari, Taranto—fell into his hands. In the summer of 982 Otto traversed
the old road of Pyrrhus, along the Gulf of Taranto, and defeated the
Arabs at Cotrone (the ancient Croton), slaying Abul Cassim, the Ameer of
Sicily, in the fight. A few days later Otto fell into a Saracen ambush
as he pursued his route along the narrow road between the Calabrian
mountains and the sea. His army was almost destroyed, though he himself,
after a series of remarkable adventures, succeeded in eluding his
enemies.
[Sidenote: Diet of Verona and projected Crusade, 983.]
Germans and Italians vied with each other in their efforts to restore
the Emperor’s preponderance. In 983 a remarkable Diet assembled at
Verona, in which the magnates of Germany and Italy sat side by side, to
show that the two realms constituted but one Empire. The spirit that a
century later inspired the Crusades first appeared in this remarkable
assembly. It was resolved to follow the Emperor on a holy war against
the Mussulmans. That the succession might be peacefully secured during
his absence the magnates chose as their future ruler the little Otto,
his three-years-old son by Theophano. Preparations were then made for
the war against Islam. But the rising commercial city of Venice, jealous
of the imperial policy, and already enriching itself by trade with the
enemies of the Christian faith, refused to supply the necessary ships
for an expedition against Sicily, the centre of the infidel power. Otto
sought to block up the land approaches to the recalcitrant town, but,
secure in her impregnable lagoons, Venice was able to defy the Emperor.
The news of a Wendish invasion now came from Germany; and the disturbed
condition of Rome again demanded Otto’s personal presence. There he
laboured with feverish earnestness to prepare for his mighty task; but
there he was smitten with a sudden and deadly disease, that carried him
off on 7th December 983. He was only twenty-eight years old. His body
was buried, as became a Roman Emperor, in the Church of St. Peter’s. The
difficulties which had proved almost too much for the strong and capable
grown man, were now to be faced, as best they might be, by his young
widow Theophano, the regent of the new lord of the world, a child
scarcely four years of age.
The German Empire rested almost entirely on the warlike character of its
head, and any failure of the central military power involved the gravest
evils. A wave of heathen reaction burst from the Wendish and Danish
lands into the very heart of the Saxon Empire. In the south, Islam,
excited by the threatened Crusade, menaced the centre of the Christian
world. It seemed as if the Empire of the Ottos was on the verge of
dissolution, when Henry the Quarrelsome, the deposed Duke of Bavaria,
came back, and, by claiming the regency from Theophano, added the
terrors of internal discord to those of barbarian invasion. [Sidenote:
Revolt of Henry of Bavaria, 984.] At first Henry made good progress,
and, advancing in his claims, began to covet the crown itself. The Dukes
of Poland and Bohemia paid him homage, and Lothair of France eagerly
supported him. It was more important that Henry had won over many of the
bishops, who, as the natural result of Otto I.’s policy, had the balance
of power in their hands. He also secured the person of the young Otto
III. But, as the Archbishop of Magdeburg favoured Henry, the lay nobles
of the Wendish mark, who hated their clerical supplanters, and
Archbishop Willegis of Mainz, who still looked with detestation on the
mushroom primacy on the Elbe, declared for Theophano. The adhesion of
the mass of the Saxon nation at last secured the victory of the Greek.
Henry was forced to submit, and was pacified by being restored to his
duchy of Bavaria.
[Sidenote: Regency of Theophano, 983–991.]
Otto III. owed his throne to the clergy. The influence of the bishops
kept Germany quiet during the regency of Theophano. The fall of the last
of the West Frankish Carolingians, and the accession of Hugh Capet in
987, prevented any further danger from the French side, while on the
east, the Margrave Eckhard of Meissen hurled back the Slavonic invaders,
and cleverly set the Bohemians and the Poles by the ears. Adelaide,
Otto’s grandmother, ruled Italy from the old Lombard capital of Pavia.
She was less fortunate than her daughter-in-law, with whom, moreover,
her relations were not cordial. Rome fell away almost altogether, so
that a French synod at Reims (995) was able, with good reason, to
denounce the scandals that degraded the Papacy, and to threaten that
France, like the east, might be provoked into breaking off all
connections with the See of Peter. John Crescentius, son of the man
driven by Otto II. into a cloister, renewed the policy of his father,
and, taking the name of Patrician, ruled over Rome with little
opposition.
[Sidenote: Rule of the bishops and education of Otto, 991–996.]
Theophano died in 991. No new regent was appointed, but a council of
regency set up, prominent among its members being the Empress Adelaide,
Willegis of Mainz, Eckhard of Meissen, and Henry, Duke of Bavaria, son
and successor of Henry the Quarrelsome. The composition of this body was
a further proof of the extension of ecclesiastical influence. But an
even more significant indication of this was the fact that the young
king was brought up almost entirely under the direction of highly-placed
churchmen. Willegis of Mainz, and Bernward, Bishop of Hildesheim, the
future saint, were the two prelates most directly responsible for his
education. The result was that, though the young king spent his early
years amidst his fierce and half-barbarous Saxon subjects, he became
still less of a German than Otto II., and was possessed by ideals that
stand in the strongest contrast with those of his predecessors. Bernward
caused him to be schooled in the best culture of his time, and gave him
an abiding love of letters and learned men. He also strongly inspired
the quick-witted and sympathetic youth with the ascetic views and the
sacerdotal sympathies of the Cluniacs. Thus Otto became enthusiastically
religious, and ever remained a devout pilgrim to holy places and seeker
out of inspired anchorites and saints. Moreover, Otto inherited from
Theophano all the high Byzantine notions of the sacredness of the
Empire, and, seeking to combine the two aspects of his education, his
mind was soon filled with glowing visions of a kingdom of God on earth,
in which Pope and Emperor ruled in harmony over a world that enjoyed
perfect peace and idyllic happiness. Otto’s ideals were generous, noble,
and unselfish; but in the iron age in which he lived they were
hopelessly unpractical. The young king lived to become the ‘wonder of
the world’ and the ‘renewer of the Empire.’ But his early death came
none too soon to hide the vanity of his ambitions. At best, he was the
first of that long line of brilliant and attractive failures which it
was the special mission of the mediæval Empire to produce.
[Sidenote: Otto’s coronation at Rome, 996.]
In 996 Otto attained his legal majority, and crossed the Alps to seek
his coronation at Rome as Emperor. The king and his army marched as
though bound on a pilgrimage, or like the crusading hosts of a century
later. As they entered the Lombard plain, the news came that the Papacy
was vacant, and a deputation of Romans, tired of the tyranny of
Crescentius, begged Otto to nominate a new Pope. The young king at once
appointed his cousin, Bruno, grandson of Conrad the Red and Liutgarde,
daughter of Otto I., a youth of four-and-twenty, and a zealous champion
of the Cluniacs, who took the name of Gregory V. [Sidenote: Gregory V.,
996–999.] On 25th May 996, Otto was crowned by Gregory at Rome.
Pope and Emperor strove at once to embody their theories in acts. The
proceedings of the anti-papal synod of Reims were annulled; its nominee
to the see of Reims, Gerbert of Aurillac, was forced to yield up his
post to the worldly Arnulf that the synod strove in vain to depose. The
whole French episcopate bowed in submission before the new Pope, and
Gerbert soon repudiated his earlier teachings. The French king, Robert,
was visited with the severest censures of the Church for contracting a
marriage within the prohibited degrees. The holy Adalbert, the apostle
of Bohemia, but driven from his see of Prague by a pagan reaction, was
sternly ordered to return to his bishopric, or, if that were impossible,
to engage in a new mission to the heathen. Adalbert chose the latter
alternative, and his early death at the hands of the heathen Prussians
made him the protomartyr of the new order that Otto and Gregory were
striving to introduce. But while the two enthusiasts were busy in the
regeneration of the universe, they were unable to maintain themselves in
the very centre of their power. A new Roman rebellion brought back
Crescentius. [Sidenote: Fall of Crescentius, 998.] Only through the help
of the iron soldiery of the Saxon borders, headed by the valiant Eckhard
of Meissen, could Otto win back the Eternal City to his obedience. In
998 Rome surrendered, and Crescentius atoned for his rebellion on the
scaffold.
[Sidenote: Gerbert of Aurillac.]
An early death now cut off Gregory V., and Otto raised Gerbert of
Aurillac[3] to the papal throne. Gerbert was quite the most remarkable
man of his age. A poor Frenchman of obscure birth from the uplands of
the centre, he received his first schooling in a cloister at his native
Aurillac, where he took the monastic vows. Borrel, a pious Count of
Barcelona, made his acquaintance while visiting Aurillac on a
pilgrimage, and took him back with him to the Spanish march. There
Gerbert abode some years, and there he acquired that profound knowledge
of mathematics which had perhaps filtered into the march from the
Mussulman schools of Cordova, and which gave him in the unlearned north
a reputation for extraordinary learning, if not for magical skill. Ever
eager for knowledge, he accompanied his patron to Italy, and attracted
the notice of Otto I. Finally he settled down at Reims, attracted by the
fame of a certain archdeacon who taught in the cathedral school. The
good Archbishop Adalbero made Gerbert ‘scholasticus’ of the school at
Reims. Accompanying the archbishop to Italy, Gerbert received from Otto
II. the headship of Columban’s old abbey of Bobbio, and speedily
reformed its lax discipline. On Otto II.’s death, the angry monks drove
him away, and he went back to Reims and resumed his teaching as
‘scholasticus.’ He dominated the policy of the archbishop in the
critical years that saw the accession of Hugh Capet to the French throne
[see pages 70–71], but on Adalbero’s death was ungratefully passed over
by Hugh, whose interests procured the election of Arnulf, an unlearned
but high-born Carolingian, to the great see. A few years later, Arnulf
was deposed by the synod of 995, and Gerbert put in his place. But
Arnulf still claimed to be archbishop, and Gerbert went to Italy to
plead his cause with Gregory V. Finding his chances hopeless, he closely
attached himself to Otto III., with whom he had strong affinities in
character. Gerbert loved pomp and splendour, was attracted by Otto’s
high ideals, and was of a pliant, complaisant, and courtier-like
disposition. He was made Archbishop of Ravenna to compensate him for the
loss of Reims. When elevated to the Papacy, he chose to call himself
Sylvester II. As Sylvester I. had stood to the first Christian Emperor,
so would Sylvester II. stand to the new Constantine. Under him the close
alliance of Pope and Emperor was continued as fervently as during the
lifetime of Gregory V.
[Sidenote: Visionary schemes of Otto and Sylvester II., 999–1003.]
Otto’s plans grew more mystical and visionary. Rome, and Rome alone,
could be the seat of the renewed Empire, and Otto began the building of
an imperial palace on the Aventine on the site of the abode of the early
Cæsars. He abandoned the simple life of a Saxon etheling, which had been
good enough for his father and grandfather, and secluded his sacred
person from a prying world by all the devices of Byzantine
court-etiquette and Oriental exclusiveness. His court officials dropped
their old-fashioned Teutonic titles, and were renamed after the manner
of Constantinople. The chamberlain became the _Protovestiarius_, the
counsellor the _logothetes_, the generals were _comites imperialis
militiæ_, and their subordinates _protospatharii_. The close union of
the Pope and Emperor in a theocratic polity was still better illustrated
by the institution of the _judices palatii ordinarii_. They were of the
mystic number of seven, ecclesiastics by profession, and were to act as
supreme judges in ordinary times, but were also to ordain the Emperor (a
new ceremony to be substituted for coronation) and to elect the Pope.
But apart from its fantastic character, the whole policy of Otto
depended upon a personal harmony between Pope and Emperor. Even under
Otto himself this result could only be secured by the Emperor’s utter
subordination of his real interests to the pursuit of his brilliant but
illusive fancies.
[Sidenote: Opposition to Otto III. in Germany.]
Otto’s cosmopolitan imperialism soon brought him in collision with
Germany, and especially with the German Church. He set up a new
archbishopric at Gnesen in Poland, where reposed the relics of the
martyred Adalbert, and surrounded it with the mystical number of seven
suffragans. In the same way, Sylvester, in recognising Stephen, the
first Christian Duke of Hungary, as a king, established a Hungarian
archbishopric at Gran. These acts involved a recognition of the national
independence of Poland and Hungary. Wise as they were, they were
resented in Germany as being directly counter to the traditional Saxon
policy of extending German influence eastwards, by making the bishops
subject to the German metropolitans at Magdeburg and Salzburg. The
practical German bishops saw with disgust the Emperor giving up the very
corner-stone of the policy of Henry and Otto I. The deep differences of
sentiment came to a head in a petty dispute as to whether a new church
for the nuns of Gandersheim should be consecrated by Bernward of
Hildesheim, the diocesan, who favoured Otto’s fancies, or by the
metropolitan Willegis of Mainz, who bitterly lamented the outlandish
ideas of his old pupil. Sylvester upheld Bernward, but the German
bishops declared for Willegis, and paid no heed to the papal censures
that followed quickly on their contumacy. They refused even to be
present at the Councils in which Sylvester professed to condemn the
Archbishop of Mainz. The German clergy were thus in open revolt from
Rome, and they were, as we have seen, the leaders of the German nation.
[Sidenote: Breakdown of Otto’s system in Italy.]
While the outlook was thus gloomy in Germany, the march of events in
Italy gave but little encouragement to Pope and Emperor, and demanded
the personal presence of Otto, who had been forced to return to Germany
in the vain hope of appeasing the general opposition to his policy.
Before he crossed the Alps for the last time, Otto went to Aachen, and,
if we can believe one of his followers’ statement, visited the vaults
beneath the venerable palace-chapel to gaze upon the corpse of Charles
the Great, sitting as in life upon a throne, with crown on head and
sceptre in hand. When he reached the south, he found to his dismay that
lower Italy had fallen altogether from his obedience, and that even
Tivoli, in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome, had rebelled against
him. Otto made feverish efforts to restore his authority. He clamoured
for Byzantine help, and begged for a Byzantine wife. He paid a flying
visit to the Venetian lagoons, seeking for a fleet from the great Doge
Peter Orseolo. But worse news now reached him. Rome itself now rose in
revolt, and Otto, postponing in despair his warlike operations, could
only find consolation in visits to the holy Romuald in his inaccessible
island hermitage amidst the swamps of Ravenna, and in the practice of
penances, mortifications, and scourgings. Recovering his energy, he now
sought to obtain an army from Germany to procure, as in the old days,
the subjection of Italy; but it was the very moment of the crisis of the
Gandersheim struggle, and no German help was forthcoming. A sharp fever
now attacked Otto at the very moment of the collapse of all his plans.
He died on 23rd January 1002, at Paterno, near Rome, when only
twenty-two years old. [Sidenote: Death of Otto III., 1002.] With him
perished his lofty ambitions. He had made himself the wonder of the
world; but all that he had accomplished was to play the game of the high
ecclesiastical party. The tendency of his policy, like the latter
Carolings, was to subordinate the visionary Empire to the practical
Papacy, thus exactly reversing the ideas of the great Saxons, and
bringing out in its most glaring contrast the incompatibility of the
union of the German kingship with the imperial claims to universal
domination. Within a year Sylvester II. followed him to the tomb.
[Sidenote: Henry II., 1002–1024.]
For eighty years the Saxon kings and emperors had succeeded from father
to son, and even a minority had not broken down the tendency towards
heredity which seemed rapidly divesting the German kingdom of the
elective character which it had shared with the Empire itself. Otto
III.’s death without direct heirs now reminded the German magnates that
they still could choose their king, and, in the absence of any strong
claimant, there was a whole swarm of aspirants after the vacant dignity.
The friends of the Saxon traditions, which Otto III. had so violently
set at naught, hoped for the election of the brave and experienced
Eckhard of Meissen; but as Eckhard was travelling to the south to pursue
his candidature, he was murdered to satisfy a private revenge. His
removal secured the appointment of Henry, Duke of Bavaria, the son of
Henry the Quarrelsome, and the nearest kinsman of competent age and
position to the dead ruler. Thus the throne was retained in the hands of
the Saxon house, though it now was held by a branch that had long
attached itself to the traditions of its southern duchy. Bavarians,
Lorrainers, and Franks accepted Henry at once; the Saxons and Swabians
only after a short hesitation.
It was a great thing that the succession had been peaceably settled. Yet
the new king had neither the power nor the energy of the Ottos. Raised
to the throne by the great magnates, Henry II. never aspired to carry on
the despotic traditions of the earlier Saxon kings, but thought to rule
with the help of frequent Diets and Councils. He had more authority over
the Church, and his personal piety and zeal for good works, in which he
was well supported by his wife Cunigunde, procured for him in after
times the name and reputation of a saint, and in his own day kept him on
good terms with the clergy, though he was never their slave. He used his
bishops and abbots as instruments of his temporal rule, and
systematically developed Otto III.’s system of making the bishops and
abbots the local representatives of the imperial power by granting them
the position of Count over the neighbouring Gau. On one great matter he
gave much offence to the German bishops. [Sidenote: Henry II. and the
Church.] He set up a new bishopric at Bamberg in Franconia, laying in
1004 the foundations of its new cathedral, and conferring on it such
extensive privileges that every bishop in Germany was annoyed at the new
prelate holding a position next after the archbishops, while the
Archbishop of Mainz resented the merely nominal ties of obedience that
bound the Bishop of Bamberg to him as his metropolitan. Henry was a
friend of the Cluniac monks, and it was through his efforts that these
zealous Church reformers first got a strong position in Germany.
[Sidenote: Henry II. and the Slavs.]
Henry had no trouble with the Hungarians, whose great king, St. Stephen,
the founder of the settled Magyar state, was his brother-in-law and
friend. But it was among his chief cares to uphold the old Saxon
supremacy over the Slavs, which Otto III. had generously or
fantastically neglected. Poland was now a formidable state, and its Duke
Boleslav, who had become a terror to the marks before the death of Otto,
aspired to build up a strong Slavonic power, and drive back the Germans
over the Elbe. It was no longer the frontier warfare of the days after
Otto the Great’s victories. It was rather a stern fight between two
vigorous nations, in which Henry only won the upper hand after long and
costly efforts. Even at the last he was forced to hand over the mark of
Lausitz to the Poles, to be held as a fief of the German kingdom.
Henry’s laborious policy, his shrinking from great efforts, and his
fixed resolve to concentrate himself on little objects within his reach,
stand in the strongest contrast to the vast ambitions of his
predecessor. Yet, in his slow and determined way, Henry brought back the
German kingdom to a more national policy, and did much to restore the
havoc wrought by Otto’s vain pursuits of impossible ideals. As a German
king, he was in no wise a failure, though he raised the monarchy to no
new heights of power.
Henry’s success in Germany was closely connected with his failure in
Italy. Under his cautious rule the plans of Otto III. were quickly lost
sight of. On the death of Sylvester II., the Papacy fell back into its
old dependence on the local nobles. At first a third Crescentius, son of
Otto III.’s victim, assumed his father’s title of Patrician, ruled Rome
at his pleasure, and nominated two puppet Popes in succession. But a
stronger power arose, that of the Counts of Tusculum. Before long a
series of Tusculan Popes, set up by the goodwill of these powerful
lords, again degraded the Papacy, and threatened to deprive it of the
obedience and respect of Europe. [Sidenote: Henry II. and Italy.] It was
the same in the secular as in the spiritual sphere. Before the German
succession had been settled, Ardoin, Marquis of Ivrea, had got himself
elected King of Italy, and held his own for many years against the
partisans of Henry reinforced by German armies. In 1004 Henry went over
the Alps, and submitted to be elected and crowned king at Pavia, though
the Ottos had borne the Italian crown without condescending to go
through such formalities. Despite this Ardoin long maintained himself.
At last, in 1013, Henry went down to Italy again, and on 14th February
1014 received the imperial diadem from Pope Benedict VIII. But no
striking result followed this renewal of the Empire. Benedict, who was a
zealous partisan of the Count of Tusculum, now sought, by advocacy of
the Cluniac ideas, to maintain himself against an Antipope of the
faction of Crescentius. In 1020 Benedict visited Germany to consecrate
the cathedral of Bamberg, and signalised his visit by taking Henry’s
foundation under his immediate care. It seemed as if the old alliance of
Papacy and Empire were renewed. Next year Henry crossed the Brenner at
the head of a strong German army, which traversed all Italy, in three
divisions, commanded respectively by Henry himself, the Patriarch of
Aquileia, and the Archbishop of Cologne. But by the time the Lombard
dukes of Capua and Salerno had made their submission, and Henry was
marching through Apulia, a deadly sickness raged in his host and
compelled its immediate retreat. Next year Henry was back in Germany. It
is significant that the office of Count Palatine of Italy ceased to
exist during his reign. The Emperor was no longer an effective ruler of
the peninsula.
In the latter years of his life Henry attached himself still more
strongly to the Cluniac party, and, as with Otto III., his friendship
for foreign priests brought him into renewed conflict with the German
bishops. Aribo, Archbishop of Mainz, led the opposition to Henry and
Benedict. But just as the conflict was coming to a head, Benedict VIII.
died (1024). He was quickly followed to the grave by Henry himself. With
him perished the last king of the male stock of the Ludolfing dukes of
Saxony. His dull and featureless reign was but a tame conclusion to the
brilliant period of the Ottos.
[Sidenote: The two Conrads, 1024.]
The ecclesiastical differences that had troubled Germany during Henry
II.’s lifetime lay at the root of the party struggles that now raged
round the appointment of his successor. As in Henry’s case, there was no
specific candidate marked out by birth and special fitness for the
choice of the German nation. The bishops, led by Aribo of Mainz and
Burkhard of Worms, resolved to take full advantage of this freedom of
election to prevent the accession of any prince inclined, like the late
Emperor, to favour the spread of Cluniac ideas. They therefore urged the
claims of Conrad of Swabia. Conrad was the great-grandson of Conrad the
Red and his wife Liutgarde, Otto the Great’s daughter, and consequently
nephew of Pope Gregory V., and descended from the Ludolfings on the
female side. Though only the possessor of part of his rich family
estates in the Rhineland, Conrad had made a lucky marriage with the
widowed Gisela, Duchess of Swabia, the granddaughter of Conrad, king of
Arles, and a descendant of the Carolingians. This gave him the
guardianship of the young Duke Ernest of Swabia, Gisela’s son by her
former husband, and secured for him a leading position among the German
magnates. Conrad was a valiant and experienced warrior, and an
intelligent statesman, possessing a clear head and a strong will,
resolutely bent on securing practical objects immediately within reach.
He had persistently held aloof from the ecclesiastical policy of his
predecessor, with whom he had been more than once in open feud. He was
still more hostile to his cousin, Conrad, Duke of Carinthia, the son of
another Conrad, a younger brother of his father Henry, who, through the
caprice of their grandfather, had inherited the mass of the Rhenish
estates of Conrad the Red, usurping the position of the elder line. This
second Conrad was now the candidate of the Cluniac party against Conrad
of Swabia. But the great prelates were still all-powerful; despite the
opposition of the Lorrainers, among whom Cluniac ideas had gained a firm
hold, Conrad of Swabia was elected king. His path to the throne was made
smooth by the generosity of his rival, who, at the last moment,
abandoned his candidature, and voted for his cousin. [Sidenote: Conrad
II., 1024–1039.] Aribo of Mainz crowned Conrad in his own cathedral,
regardless of the claims of the rival Archbishop of Cologne, the
diocesan of Aachen, the proper place for the coronation. But Aribo
refused to confer the crown on Gisela, since the Church regarded her
marriage with Conrad as irregular by reason of their affinity. Pilgrim
of Cologne now saw his opportunity for making terms with the victor. He
gave Gisela the crown which Aribo had denied her. Thus Conrad entered
upon his reign with the support of all the leaders of the German nation.
The younger Conrad remained faithful to his old rival; while his younger
brother Bruno, who became Bishop of Toul, soon became one of the
greatest supports of the new dynasty.
[Sidenote: Italian policy.]
When Conrad II. became king, he found everything in confusion: but
within two years of his accession he had infused a new spirit and energy
into every part of his dominions. His first difficulty was with
Lorraine, whose two dukes had opposed his election, and now refused to
acknowledge its validity. They sought the help of King Robert of France,
whose weak support availed them but little. Conrad soon put down their
rebellion, and with almost equal ease quelled the revolt of his
ambitious and unruly step-son, Ernest of Swabia. Germany was thus
appeased, but Italy, where the imperial power had become very feeble in
the later part of the reign of Henry II., was still practically outside
Conrad’s influence. His authority was only saved from complete ruin by
the policy of the Lombard bishops, who saw in the Emperor their best
protection against the proud and powerful lay aristocracy, and
especially against the warlike margraves, who now aspired to renew the
part played by Ardoin of Ivrea. But conscious that they did not possess
sufficient strength to continue successfully a policy in which even
Ardoin had failed, the leaders of the north Italian nobility looked
elsewhere abroad for help to counterbalance the German soldiery of the
Emperor. When King Robert of France rejected their advances, they found
what they sought in William V., the Duke of Aquitaine and Count of
Poitou, an aged and experienced warrior, and a strong friend of the
Cluniacs, who hoped to find in Italy a suitable endowment for his young
son William. This was the first occasion in which the policy of calling
in the French to drive out the Germans was adopted by the Italians. But
the times were not yet ripe for the intervention of a French prince in
Italy. William crossed the Alps, but found that he could make but little
progress against the vigorous opposition of the Lombard bishops, headed
by Aribert of Milan, and tried to make up for his weakness in Italy by
uniting himself with the Lorraine rebels, and by stirring up an
anti-German party in the kingdom of Arles. But nothing came of his
elaborate schemes, and in 1025 he went home in disgust.
[Sidenote: Conrad’s imperial coronation, 1027.]
Early in 1026 Conrad crossed the Brenner, and in March received the
Lombard crown from Aribert in the cathedral of Milan. Pavia, the old
Lombard capital, shut its gates on the Emperor, who was thus unable to
be hallowed in the usual place. For a whole year Conrad remained in
northern Italy, and gradually forced his enemies to make their
submission. In the spring of 1027 the way to Rome at last lay open, and
on Easter Sunday Conrad was crowned Emperor by Pope John XIX. The
function was one of the most striking and memorable ceremonies in the
whole history of the mediæval Empire. It was witnessed by two
kings—Rudolf III., the last of the kings of Arles, and Canute of
Denmark, the conqueror of England and Norway, then at Rome on a
pilgrimage. But the clear head of Conrad was not in the least turned by
the mystic rite. Content that his twofold coronation gave him a firm
hold over Italy, he quickly recrossed the Alps and resumed his proper
work as a German king, taking good care that there should be no clashing
between his German and Italian interests. Before his return he visited
southern Italy, and ensured the obedience of the Lombard dukes, who
still guarded the frontier against the Greeks of Calabria.
On his return to Germany, Conrad felt that his power was sufficiently
secure to take steps towards retaining the Empire in his own family. In
1028, he persuaded the magnates to elect, and Pilgrim of Cologne to
crown, as his successor his eldest son, Henry, who was but ten years of
age. [Sidenote: Fall of Ernest of Swabia, 1030.] This act roused the
jealousy of the greater nobles, who found in Conrad’s son-in-law, Ernest
of Swabia, an eager champion of their views. Ernest again plunged into
revolt; and when pardoned, at the instance of his mother the Empress,
still kept up his close friendship with the open rebel, Werner of
Kyburg, Count of the Thurgau, a district including the north-eastern
parts of the modern Switzerland. In 1030 Conrad ordered Ernest to break
off from all dealings with his friend, and, as a sign of his repentance,
to carry out in person the sentence of outlawry and deprivation
pronounced against him. Ernest refused to give up Werner, whereupon
Conrad deprived him of his duchy. Bitterly incensed with his
father-in-law, the young duke left the palace, and wandered from court
to court, seeking help to excite a new rebellion. But Conrad was so
strong that neither foreign prince nor discontented German noble would
make common cause with Ernest. In despair he took to a wild robber life
of adventure, lurking with a few faithful vassals amidst the ravines and
woods of the Black Forest. Before the summer was out Ernest was
overpowered and slain. His commonplace treason and brigandage were in
after ages glorified in popular tales, that make his friend Werner a
model of romantic fidelity, and he himself a gallant and chivalrous
warrior. After his fall, Conrad reigned in peace over Germany.
[Sidenote: Hungary and Poland, 1030–1032.]
The inroads of the Hungarians and Poles now forced fresh wars on Conrad.
In 1030 he waged a doubtful contest against Stephen of Hungary. In the
succeeding years he obtained great successes against the Poles, winning
back in 1031 Lausitz and the other mark districts that Henry II. had
been forced to surrender to their king Boleslav, and compelling his
successor Miecislav, in 1032, to do homage to him for the whole of his
kingdom. But great as were Conrad’s successes in the east, they were
surpassed by his brilliant acquisition of a new kingdom in the west,
where in 1032 he obtained the possession of the kingdom of Arles.
[Sidenote: Union of the Arelate with the Empire, 1032.]
The kingdom of Arles or Burgundy had fallen into evil days. During the
long reigns of Conrad the Pacific (937–993) and Rudolf III. (993–1032)
all power had fallen into the hands of the territorial magnates, and now
the threatened extinction of the royal house seemed likely to plunge the
Arelate into worse confusion. Rudolf III. was old and childless, and had
long sought to make arrangements to prevent the dissolution of his
kingdom with his death. In 1007 he had concluded with Henry II., his
nephew, an agreement by which Burgundy was to fall on his death to the
German monarch, but the Burgundian nobles had more than once forced him
to renounce his treaty. An increasing sense of his powerlessness drew
Rudolf, who was Gisela’s uncle, more closely to Conrad II. He hurried to
Rome to be present at his coronation, and he trusted entirely to him for
protection against his turbulent nobility. The contract of succession
was renewed, and on Rudolf’s death, in 1032, Conrad entered into
possession of the Arelate. Count Odo of Champagne set himself up as a
rival and national king, but the German portions of the Arelate favoured
Conrad from the beginning. In 1033 he was chosen king, and crowned at
Ueberlingen, near Constance; and in 1034 Odo was forced into submission,
while Conrad triumphantly wore his crown at Geneva and received the
homage of the lords of Burgundy. Henceforward the kingdom of Arles was
indissolubly united with the Empire. Despite the small amount of power
which even the strongest Emperors could exercise in the Arelate, the
acquisition was one of no small importance. The Arelate was for the most
part a Romance land, and its union with the Empire made the Empire less
German, and, for some generations at least, prevented the natural
tendency to union between France and the Burgundian lands from being
carried out. Moreover, the acquisition of the Arelate, by virtue of a
contract of succession, increased the already strong tendency towards
hereditary monarchy in Germany and Italy. Again, Burgundy was the chief
home of the Cluniacs, and one very important consequence of its
absorption by Conrad was a gradual increase of Cluniac influence all
over the Empire. And most of all, the new-won kingdom was useful to the
Emperors as acting as a sort of buffer-state to protect Italy from
French interference. The attempt of William of Poitou had taught Conrad
the necessity of thus guarding the Italian frontier. For the next few
generations the acquisition of the Arelate made such projects more
difficult. Supplementing the final adhesion of Lotharingia to the
Eastern Kingdom, the lapse of the Arelate completed the absorption of
the ‘Middle Kingdom’ in the German Empire. Of the threefold partition of
Europe by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, only the ancient dominions of
Charles the Bald—France, in the narrower sense—were outside the powers
of the Emperor. Henceforth Conrad ruled not only all the lands that had
gone in 843 to Louis the German, but also over the districts that had
then fallen to the share of the Emperor Lothair. Two-thirds of the
Carolingian Empire were thus concentrated under Conrad.
[Sidenote: Feudal benifices declared hereditary.]
Ten years of Conrad’s rule had now brought the Holy Empire to a point of
solid prosperity that was seldom surpassed. But Conrad saw that there
were still great dangers inherent in his position, and foremost among
these was the smallness of the number of the feudal dignitaries with
whom he had direct legal dealings. There were no longer indeed the five
national dukedoms in their old united strength and dignity. There were
no longer dukes of Franconia; Lorraine was already divided into two
distinct duchies, of Upper and Lower Lorraine. Swabia was showing signs
of a similar tendency to bifurcation; Bavaria, after the rearrangement
of 976, was in a much less imposing position than under the Saxon
Emperors, and even in Saxony the margraves were a strong counterpoise to
the more imposing but not more powerful dukes. In the last generations
the more vigorous of the counts and margraves had shaken off their
dependence on the dukes, and aspired to stand in immediate relations
with the Emperor. Yet the whole drift of the time was towards feudalism,
and towards making a limited number of tenants-in-chief, whether dukes,
margraves or counts, the sole persons with whom the Emperor had any
direct relations. Secure in their own hereditary tenure of their fiefs
and allodial properties, the great lords of Germany claimed an absolute
control over all their vassals. The old tie of national allegiance that
bound every subject to his sovereign had fallen into neglect as compared
with the new link of feudal dependence of vassal on lord. The leading
tenants-in-chief considered that their powers over their vassals were so
absolute that it was the bounden duty of a tenant to follow his lord to
the field, even against his overlord. With the same object of
strengthening their own position, the great lords strove to prevent the
fiefs of their vassals from assuming that hereditary character which
they had already acquired in practice, if not in theory, for their own
vast estates.
Conrad showed a shrewd sense of self-interest in posing as the friend of
the lesser tenants against the great vassals of the crown. Whether he
also secured the best interests of Germany is not quite so clear. The
great vassals were strong enough to maintain order; the lesser
feudalists had neither their resources nor their traditions of
statecraft. It was too late to revive with any real effect the national
tie of allegiance, and the scanty means of an early mediæval king had
always made somewhat illusory great schemes of national unity. Conrad
did his best for the protection of the under-tenants by establishing for
them also that hereditary possession of their benefices which gave them
some sort of permanent position over against their overlords. This was
secured in Germany by a mere recognition of the growing custom of
heredity, though in Italy a formal law was necessary to attain the same
end. Another advantage won by Conrad by this action was that in securing
the recognition of the principle of heredity in every fief, he made a
long step towards securing the heredity of the crown. For Conrad, much
more distinctly than his Saxon predecessors, sought definitely to make
both the royal and imperial crown hereditary in his house. As a further
step towards breaking down the greater nobility, he strove to get rid of
the national duchies altogether. He persuaded the Bavarians to elect the
young King Henry as their duke, and, on the death of his last step-son,
gave Swabia also to his destined successor. On the death of his old
rival, Conrad of Carinthia, the great Carinthian mark was also handed
over to Henry. At the end of Conrad’s reign, Saxony and Lorraine were
the only duchies still held by independent princes. Like his
predecessors, Conrad used the bishops as the means of carrying on the
government and checking the growth of the lay aristocracy. Following the
example of the chief ecclesiastics, he encouraged the development of a
new class of hereditary _ministeriales_, who devoted their lives to the
service of the crown, and soon built up a new official body that enabled
his successors to largely dispense with the interested help of the
episcopate in carrying on the daily task of the administration of the
kingdom.
Conrad was so successful with this policy in Germany and Burgundy that
he desired to extend it to Italy. But the spirit of independence was
already deeply rooted south of the Alps, and the very prelates who had
called Conrad to help them against their lay rivals, now looked with
suspicion on a policy that deprived churchman and lay noble alike of
their cherished immunities. [Sidenote: Conrad’s strife with Aribert,
1036–1039.] Aribert of Milan had long aspired to a position of almost
complete independence. His dream was to make the see of St. Ambrose a
sort of North Italian patriarchate, and at the same time he wished to
combine with ecclesiastical ascendency an organised temporal power. His
twofold ambition was exactly that of the Papacy at a later period, and
for the moment Milan seemed stronger than Rome. The citizens of Milan,
more obedient to their bishops than the turbulent Romans, were zealous
partisans of Aribert; but the smaller nobles, who saw in the fulfilment
of his plans the destruction of their own independence, rose as one man
against him. Civil war broke out in Lombardy between the friends and
foes of Aribert. So dangerous was the outlook that in 1036 Conrad again
crossed the Alps in the hope of restoring peace in North Italy.
Aribert was summoned to a Diet at Pavia; but he loftily declared that he
would surrender no single right of the church of St. Ambrose, and was
soon in open war against the Emperor. Conrad saw his only chance of
overcoming the archbishop in winning over the smaller nobility to his
side. In 1037 he issued the famous edict which made fiefs hereditary in
Italy, thus doing for the south by a single stroke what gradual custom
and policy had slowly procured for the north. He also promised to exact
from his vassals no greater burdens than those already usually paid to
him. But these measures, though increasing the party of Conrad in Italy,
were not enough at once to overcome Aribert, who, secure in the hearty
support of the Milanese citizens, defied not only the threats of Conrad
but also the condemnation of Rome, which the Count of Tusculum, who then
occupied the papal throne, willingly put at the service of the Emperor.
In 1038 Conrad was forced by urgent business to recross the Alps,
leaving Aribert unsubdued. Next year he died suddenly at Utrecht. ‘No
man,’ says a Saxon annalist, ‘regretted his death.’ Yet if Conrad was
unpopular, he was singularly successful. Though he had failed to get the
better of Aribert, he had obtained his object in everything else that he
undertook. He left the royal authority established on such a solid basis
that his son, King Henry, already crowned King of Germany and Burgundy,
and already Duke of Bavaria and Swabia, now stepped into the complete
possession of his father’s power, as if he were already the heir of an
hereditary state. Henry III. was the first German king to succeed
without opposition or rebellion.
[Sidenote: Henry III., 1039–1056.]
Henry III. was now two-and-twenty years of age, and had been carefully
educated for his great position. Gisela had procured for him the best of
literary teachers, while Conrad himself had taken care that he should
excel in all knightly exercises, and go through a sound drilling in war,
law, and statecraft. He had already won martial glory against the Poles
and Hungarians, while he had acquired political experience as virtual,
if not formal, co-regent with his father. He was now able to take up his
father’s work, and while carrying it on essentially in the old lines, to
infuse it with a new spirit. For the gifted young king, though
inheriting to the full the practical wisdom of his father, soared far
above the cold self-seeking and hard selfishness of the least attractive
of the great German Emperors. Under his strong and genial rule, the Holy
Empire again became a great ideal, though it was now an ideal that had
little that was visionary or fantastic about it. The seventeen years of
his reign witnessed the culminating point of the power of the mediæval
Empire. Under him Germany effectively ruled the destinies of the world.
The early troubles that had attended the building up of the kingdom were
over. The later troubles that sprang from the struggle of the
ecclesiastical and temporal power had not yet begun.
A series of signal triumphs in the east first proclaimed to the world
the greatness of the new king. Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary were all
alike matters of concern to Henry. [Sidenote: Poland, Bohemia, and
Hungary made fiefs of the Empire.] But Poland, so mighty a few years
before, was distracted by civil strife, and attacked by the rising power
of Bohemia, now the strongest Slavonic state. It was a light matter for
Henry to retain Poland as a feudatory of the Empire. But it involved a
long struggle before Bohemia, under its warlike Duke Bretislav, could be
forced to accept the same position. It was Bretislav’s ambition to make
himself a king, and to secure for the Bohemian bishopric at Prague the
position of an archbishopric, so that a great Slavonic kingdom,
independent both in Church and State, might centre round the Bohemian
table-land. But Henry forced his way through the mountains of the border
and threatened Prague itself. In despair Bretislav did homage to him for
Bohemia and Moravia, and even for the outlying district of Silesia,
which he had conquered from the weak Polish monarchy and made an
integral part of the Bohemian kingdom. Even greater difficulties beset
Henry in Hungary, where a heathen reaction had set Aba, a member of the
hero race of Arpad, on the throne. In 1042 Henry invaded Hungary and
dethroned Aba, but the Hungarian king was soon restored, and it was not
until a third expedition in 1044 that Henry finally succeeded in
destroying his power. Aba’s defeat secured the complete triumph of the
German king. Peter, the new king of Hungary, performed homage to Henry,
thus making Hungary, like Poland and Bohemia, a fief of the Empire. In
1045 Henry visited Hungary, and received the submission of the Magyar
magnates. In pious gratitude for his victory Henry sent the gilded
lance, which Peter had given to him as an emblem of his dependence, as a
votive offering to the Papacy. A few years later another Arpad, Andrew,
dethroned the weak Peter, and gave a more national direction to the
fierce Magyar nation, though he was too conscious of Henry’s power to
break openly with him. With a row of vassal kingdoms extending to the
extremest eastward limits of Roman civilisation, the Holy Empire was
fast becoming in a very real sense the mistress of the world.
[Sidenote: Henry III. and France.]
With all his power, Henry could not hope to obtain from the princes of
the west the same formal acknowledgment of his supremacy that he had
wrested from the lords of the east. The France of Henry I. was indeed
feeble and helpless, but the early Capetian monarchy was still the
centre of a great system, and its feudatories, though constantly at war
with their king and with each other, would be likely to make common
cause against a German pretender to universal rule. Henry III. was
content to keep on friendly terms with his neighbours beyond the Rhine,
and, as a good means of securing French friendship, he chose a wife from
among the greater vassals of the Capetian throne. In 1043 he married
Agnes of Poitou, the youngest daughter of that Count William of Poitou
who, in his youth, had competed with Conrad the Salic for the crown of
Italy. Agnes exercised henceforth strong influence over her husband, and
in particular upon his ecclesiastical policy.
With the eastern kings paying him tribute and the monarch of the west
seeking his friendship, Henry had now leisure to improve the internal
condition of his dominions. Despite all that his predecessors had done,
Germany and Italy were still in the utmost disorder. [Sidenote: Henry
III. and Germany.] Conrad II.’s policy of encouraging the smaller
nobility had tended to increase the private wars and local feuds that
made existence so difficult and dreary for the simple freeman, and so
dangerous even to the great lord. Henry now made strenuous efforts to
restore peace to Germany. At a diet at Constance Henry solemnly forgave
all his enemies, and craved their forgiveness in turn, calling upon the
magnates to follow his example and lay aside their feuds with each
other. Some degree of success followed this appeal, especially as Henry
had partly abandoned his father’s policy of concentrating the national
duchies in his own hands. Germany was so vast that it could hardly be
effectively ruled from a single centre, and Henry hoped that henceforth
the dukes whom he set up would be faithful ministers, and not champions
of local independence.
Italy demanded Henry’s utmost care, and the critical position of the
Papacy closely connected his policy with his attitude towards the
Church. Since his marriage with Agnes, Henry had become more attentive
to the teachings of Cluny, and was keenly alive to the scandals which
still disgraced the Roman Church. No ecclesiastical reformation could be
complete which did not begin with the head of the Church, and it was
only by a great manifestation of his power that Henry could purify the
Papacy. [Sidenote: Henry III. and Italy.] The Counts of Tusculum still
kept their tight hold over the Roman Church, which had almost become
their hereditary possession. After two brothers—the reforming Benedict
VIII. (1012–1024) and the reactionary John XIX. (1024–1033)—had held in
turn St. Peter’s chair, a third member of the Tusculan house, their
nephew, Benedict IX., succeeded, despite his extreme youth, to the papal
throne (1033). His excesses soon gave occasion to universal scandal, and
in 1044 the Romans set up an Antipope in Sylvester III. Family influence
still upheld Benedict, but next year new troubles arising, he sold the
Papacy in a panic to a new pretender, who called himself Gregory VI.,
and who, despite his simoniacal election, soon attracted the reformers
around him by his zeal in putting an end to abuses. But Benedict soon
repented of his bargain, and sought to regain his position as Pope. The
result was that three rival claimants to the Papacy distracted Rome with
their brawls, and none of them had sufficient power to get rid of the
others.
A synod assembled at Rome, and called on Henry III. to put an end to the
crisis. In 1046 he crossed the Alps, and held a Church Council at Pavia,
in which he issued an edict condemning simony. [Sidenote: Synod of
Sutri, 1046.] In December 1046 he held another synod at Sutri, near
Rome, where two of the three claimants to the Papacy were deposed. The
third claimant was deposed in a third synod held in Rome itself.
Suidgar, Bishop of Bamberg, was chosen Pope through Henry’s influence,
and enthroned on Christmas Day as Clement II., conferring on the same
day the imperial crown on Henry and Agnes. Accompanied by Clement, the
Emperor made a progress through southern Italy, which he reduced to
submission. Grave troubles on the Lower Rhine now brought Henry back to
Germany; yet even in his absence his influence remained supreme in
Italy. Clement II. died in 1048; but a whole succession of German Popes,
the nominees of the Emperor, were now accepted by the Romans with hardly
a murmur. The first of these—Damasus II., formerly Poppo, Bishop of
Brixen, died after a few weeks’ reign. His successor, the Emperor’s
kinsman, Bruno of Toul, took the name of Leo IX. (1048–1054). Short as
was his pontificate, the result of his work was epoch-making in several
directions. During the reign of his successor, Victor II. (1054–1057),
Henry III. paid his second and last visit to Italy, the results of which
we will speak of later. No sooner was he over the Alps than a rebellion
broke out in Bavaria that necessitated his immediate return. The
presence of the Emperor soon extinguished the revolt, but the rising
taught Henry the insecurity of his position, and he now sought to
conciliate his foes.
[Sidenote: Death of Henry III., 1056.]
In the summer of 1056 Henry held his court at Goslar, where he was
visited by Victor II.; but in September he fell sick, and had only time
to take further measures to secure his son’s succession, when death
overtook him, on 5th October, in the thirty-ninth year of his age. Under
him the mediæval Empire attained its apogee. Germany was now almost a
nation; Italy a submissive dependency; the Papacy had been reformed, and
the Church purified. A child of six years old was now called to the
throne, whose burden had been almost too heavy for his father. With the
accession of Henry IV. the decline of the Empire begins.
GENEALOGY OF THE SAXON AND SALIAN EMPERORS
HENRY I., the Fowler, Duke of the Saxons,
German King (919–936)
_m._ Matilda
|
+-------------+--------------+------+------+---------------+---------------+
| | | | | |
Thankmar OTTO I. Henry, Bruno, Gerberga, Hedwig,
(illegitimate) (936–973) Duke of Archbishop of _m._ 1. Giselbert, _m._ Hugh
_d._ 938 _m._ 1. Edith Bavaria, Cologne Duke of Lorraine the Great
of England _m._ Judith, 2. Louis IV.,
2. Adelaide, daughter of King of West
widow of Arnulf, Franks
Lothair, Duke of
King of Bavaria
Italy |
| +---------------------------+--------------+
(1) (2) | | |
+-----------+----+-----------+----------------+ | |
| | | | Henry II., Hedwig,
Ludolf, OTTO II. Liutgarde, William Duke of _m._ Burkhard,
Duke of (973–983) _m._ Conrad the (illegitimate), Bavaria, the Duke of
Swabia _m._ Theophano, Red, Duke of Archbishop of Quarrelsome Swabia
| daughter of Lorraine Mainz |
OTTO, Romanus II., | +------+------+
Duke of Eastern | | |
Swabia Emperor | HENRY II., Gisela,
| | the Saint _m._ St.
| | (1002–1024) Stephen
| | _m._ Cunigunde of Hungary
OTTO III. Otto
(983–1002) |
|
+------------+------------+
| | |
Henry Bruno Conrad
| Pope Gregory V. |
| (996–999) |
| |
| +------+-------+
| | |
Gisela, _m._ CONRAD II., Conrad of Bruno,
Duchess of | the Salic Carinthia, Bishop of Toul,
Swabia | (1024–1039) rival to Pope Leo IX.
| | Conrad II. (1048–1054)
Ernest, |
Duke of |
Swabia |
|
HENRY III.
(1039–1056)
_m._ Agnes, daughter of William,
Count of Poitou
|
HENRY IV.
(1056–1106)
_m._ 1. Bertha
2. Praxedis of Russia
|
+-----------+-------+---------------------+
| | |
Conrad, HENRY V. Agnes,
Anti-Cæsar, (1106–1125) _m._ Frederick,
_d._ 1101 _m._ Mathilda of England Duke of Swabia,
ancestor of the
Hohenstaufen