The Age of Chivalry (2 page)

The Saxons had been tenaciously pagan before Charlemagne conquered them in a series of fierce late-eighth-century military campaigns. Now a thoroughly Christianized territory, the duchy of Saxony was key to Germany's evolution into a power that embraced ancient Roman notions of empire and was the dominant partner in its alliance with the papacy. At the beginning of the tenth century Europe was still threatened from the north by the Vikings, and the danger of invasion from the east by the Magyars, a pagan and nomadic warrior race, posed major challenges until the 950s. However, the armies of the German
reich
, later to be termed the Holy Roman Empire, held the line against these threats and set the scene for the evolution of medieval European civilization.

In 919 Henry I, duke of Saxony and founder of the Ottonian dynasty, was elected “king of the Germans” by an assembly of aristocrats meeting at Fritzlar. The Eastern Frankish duchies of Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria and Lotharingia soon acknowledged his kingship. Henry's heirs would rule as his lineal successors, and the practice of election to the throne, although retained, became a formality. The new king, dubbed “the Fowler” because of his fondness for hunting wild birds, subdued the Danish Vikings, and in 924 he agreed a ten-year truce with the Magyars whom he then defeated at the Battle of Riade in 933. Henry's refusal to be made king was a major break with the traditions of “sacral kingship.” But he was determined to exercise power on his own terms and to avoid any suggestion of indebtedness to the Church. However, Henry's son, Otto I (“the Great”), chose to be anointed and consecrated a king when he was crowned at Aachen's Palatine Chapel in 936. The bishops and abbots of the German kingdom became his vassals, and these royal appointees identified strongly with Otto's system of government and supported the consolidation of his command over an often fractious nobility. This German
reichskirche
or imperial church was also instrumental in the eastward expansion of the Ottonian dynasty. The sees established in Poland, Bohemia, Moravia and Hungary operated as outposts of the ecclesiastical centers at Mainz and Magdeburg, Salzburg and Passau, and the new bishoprics were pivotal in trying to impose German culture and enforce political assimilation on the conquered Slavic peoples. The scale of new building projects, together with the demands for military hardware, made this an expensive policy, but the discovery of silver in Saxony's Harz region during the early tenth century had enriched the Ottonian kings and helped to subsidize their imperial ventures.

R
IGHT
A 1903 German mosaic of Otto I (“the Great”), who was crowned an emperor by the pope in 962
.

Otto's ambitions extended south as well as east. In 950 he launched a major campaign across the Alps in support of Queen Adelheid of Italy who was being threatened by the rebellion of Berengar, margrave of Ivrea in the peninsula's northwest. Success in battle led to Otto's recognition as “king of the Lombards” by the Italian nobility. The decisive defeat he inflicted on the Magyars at the Battle of the Lechfeld on August 10, 955 entrenched his authority over the German aristocracy. The king's war machine gained another crushing victory on October 16, 955 when it defeated the Obodrites, a Slavic tribe established in the region of Mecklenburg on the Baltic coast. This gave the kingdom a 30-year period of peace on its eastern frontier, during which time a tight system of lordship was imposed on the Slavs by their German rulers.

B
ELOW
A pen and watercolor manuscript illustration
(c.
1450) from the workshop of Diebold Lauber shows Emperor Otto I meeting Pope John XII
.

Berengar remained ambitious and in
c
.960 he occupied the papal states of central Italy. Otto responded by marching his army into Rome to safeguard the position of the young pope, John XII, who, on February 2, 962, crowned the German king an emperor. The
Diplomata Ottonianum
, an imperial-papal agreement issued later that same month, gave Otto the right to confirm elections to the papacy. Pope John swiftly repented of this
one-sided pact, and after making peace overtures to Berengar he was deposed in 963 by the Church council summoned by the emperor. For the remainder of his reign Otto was preoccupied with the Italian south, where a number of local princes retained their Lombard identity as descendants of the Germanic tribe that had invaded the region in the seventh century. Pandulf Ironhead, prince of Benevento and Capua, was one such ruler, and Otto enlisted him as his ally in the campaign to expel the Byzantines from the peninsula's south. Otto also engineered Pandulf's succession as prince of Salerno and granted him the duchy of Spoleto, a fiefdom (the territorial domain of a feudal lord) whose territories extended to the east of the papal states. A major anti-Byzantine power block was thereby created as the new German
reich
confronted the Greek empire.

THE OTTONIAN DYNASTY

800
Charlemagne, king of the Franks and of the Lombards, is crowned emperor by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day.

919
Henry I (“the Fowler”), duke of Saxony, is elected king of the Germans.

933
King Henry I defeats the Magyars at the Battle of Riade.

936
Otto I (“the Great”), founds Quedlinburg Abbey.

962
Otto I is crowned emperor by Pope John XII.

982
The army of Arab Sicily defeats Otto II's forces at the Battle of Stilo, Calabria. A rebellion of Slavic tribes settled between the Oder and Elbe endangers the German kingdom's eastern frontier.

996
Otto III, German king and emperor, begins to rule in his own right.

c
.1000
Coronation of Stephen I, Hungary's first king, as a Christian monarch.

1002
Duke Henry of Bavaria is elected king of the Germans and reigns as Henry II.

1004
Henry II defeats Arduin, Margrave of Ivrea, who has proclaimed himself “king of Italy.”

1024
Henry II, the last Saxon emperor, dies.

Otto's dynastic ambitions were endorsed when an assembly, meeting in Worms in 961, elected his son king of the Germans. The future Otto II was crowned joint-emperor with his father by the pope six years later and was thoroughly trained in the business of imperial war and government. His first major challenge came in 978 when Lothair, king of West Francia, launched an invasion and occupied Aachen. Otto retaliated in the autumn by leading his army over the frontier and inflicting heavy losses on the enemy. A peace agreement was arrived at in 980, and with his western boundaries secured Otto could plan an Italian campaign. He crossed the Alps with his army, and on Easter Day 981, accompanied by a retinue of courtiers and senior churchmen, Otto entered Rome. Here he held a magnificent court attended by nobles drawn from across the imperial territories. Otto's ambitions, however, lay further south.

The Arab pirates known as Saracens operated from bases on the north African coast, and they had been disrupting the Mediterranean sea lanes for over a century. An alliance with Arab-ruled Sicily was now enabling the Saracens to attack the southern Italian regions of Puglia and Calabria, and the German army advanced from Rome bent on confrontation. Pandulf Ironhead's heirs had fallen out with each other, but Otto managed to secure their recognition of his imperial authority and proceeded to annex Puglia—a region still controlled by the Byzantines. Military catastrophe followed. In July 982, at Stilo in Calabria, Otto's army was destroyed by the Arab army of Sicily whose emir, Abu al-Kasim, had declared a
jihad
or holy war against the Germans. The emperor managed to escape incognito on a Greek ship and return to Rome. At an imperial assembly held in Verona he secured recognition of his infant son as king of the Germans, and then started to plan a resumption of the southern campaign.

Emboldened by the news of imperial defeat, the Slavic tribes settled between the Elbe and the Oder on Germany's eastern frontier now seized the chance to rebel. This massive and prolonged insurrection was a major setback for the empire, and its active eastward expansion would not be resumed until the 12th century. Otto learned of the rebellion just before his death in Rome in December 983—and the event was to have long-term ramifications for his three-year-old heir, Otto III.

As soon as Otto III started to reign in 996 he demonstrated a deep conviction that Europe formed a unity and that the strength of his
reich
should therefore lie in its acknowledgment of diversity rather than in the imposition of a rigid uniformity. His keen sense of a common European culture was reflected in his veneration for Charlemagne's memory, and it also owed much to his Greek mother, Theophanu. The emperor made Rome his capital, and Pope Sylvester II, his former tutor the French intellectual Gerbert of Aurillac, became a reliable ally in the process of reforming the notoriously nepotistic late-tenth-century Church.

Otto grasped that his forebears' eastern ambitions were beyond the resources of his empire's German core. He also thought it strategically foolish, since the subjugated but hostile peoples might well turn to Byzantium for support. He therefore developed a federal policy for the eastern territories. The rulers of these lands were still expected to honor the imperial title, but they now enjoyed an internal autonomy within a looser structure than Otto I's tight model of subjugation. In Poland, therefore, Otto created an autonomous archbishopric at Gniezno as well as its three suffragan sees at Kolberg, Cracow and Breslau, and he also remitted the tribute payments previously made by Polish rulers to the emperors. These changes demonstrated to the Poles that they could remain part of the religious community of the Latin West without also having to become culturally German. Hungary's ruler, Stephen, was deeply influenced by this example and, encouraged by Otto, he opted for loyalty to the see of Rome when it came to the Christianization of his recently pagan country. Accordingly, he was crowned in about December 1000 as Stephen I, the first king of Hungary, with a crown sent him by the pope.

OTTONIAN RULERS 919–1024

HENRY I

[“the Fowler”]

(876–936)

r. 919–36

OTTO I

[“the Great”]

(912–73)

r. 936–73

OTTO II

(955–83)

r. 973–83

OTTO III

(980–1002)

r. 983–1002

HENRY II

(973–1024)

r. 1002–24

Otto III died in 1002 after contracting malaria in the marshes near Ravenna. Following his death various factions supported rival candidates for the succession. The year 1002 was marked by violent disputes among the imperial nobility, but the dynastic principle won the day as the best guarantor of order. Thus it was that Henry, duke of Bavaria, a direct descendant of Henry the Fowler, was elected to rule. Henry II had a thoroughly Ottonian view of the Church's role: he wished it to be powerful, and he
expected it to use that might in support of the empire. Like his predecessors, Henry ruled through the bishops, which is why he opposed the monastic clergy's attempts to establish their own jurisdiction independent of the episcopate. Henry was a genuine Church reformer, but his initiatives also suited his own goals as a strong territorial ruler. The imposition of clerical celibacy, for example, meant that the powerful clergy had no chance to create their own family dynasties.