Henry the Fifth of Germany, like so many other monarchs of the middle
ages, had wrested the imperial crown from the head of his unfortunate
father, Henry the Fourth. This latter emperor, having been dethroned
by his unnatural son, took refuge with the Bishop of Liege, in whose
city he died of grief.
The fifth Henry was fully recompensed for his undutiful conduct by the
continual rebellion of his subjects in different portions of the
imperial dominions, by the bitter hostility of his former friend,
Archbishop Albert, of Mainz, and by the unceasing persecution of the
Papacy. Henry the Fifth died childless in 1125, worn out with strife,
and the sceptre passed into the hands of Lothaire the Second. Five
years after the Emperor's death, a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of
Cluny, in Burgundy, startled his brother recluses by the assertion that
he was the supposed deceased monarch, Henry the Fifth of Germany. He
declared that being desirous of abdicating the crown which he had
forced his unhappy parent to resign to him, he had spread the false
intelligence of his own decease, and then had set out, in pilgrim garb,
for the Holy Land. He narrated a pitiful tale of the indignities
heaped upon his imperial head during the years of his pilgrimage; how
he had narrowly escaped drowning through a man having brutally pushed
him into the sea when he was on the point of embarkation; how he had
been compelled by the Knights Templars, at Acre, to assist as a
labourer at the construction of fortifications there; and many other
equally edifying stories of his adventures. The monks appear to have
believed in his identity, and some authors assert that by the express
commands of Pope Innocent the Second, a firm friend of the Emperor
Lothaire the Second, he was never permitted to pass beyond the
precincts of the abbey.
The historian Mezerai remarks that Henry was believed to have
eventually retired to Angers, and to have ended his days as a servitor
to the hospital there; having, however, previous to his death,
acknowledged his rank to his confessor, and been seen and recognized by
his wife Maud, daughter of Henry the Second of England, who had taken
another consort in the person of Geoffrey Plantagenet of Anjou.