Otto II (973-983)

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The Slavic Wends push the Saxons back across the Elbe River

Now that we know the lay of the land it is time for action, and quite some action it will be. The Wends, the pagan Slavic peoples living east of the Elbe who found themselves ever more squeezed by their now Christian neighbours wake up one morning to find their oppressors fatally weakened. Events 2000 km south of Brandenburg create the once in a century opportunity to throw off the yoke of the Saxons. The newly built churches go up in flames and their tormentors flee back across the Elbe. Any plans for retaliation are thwarted by a succession crisis. This loss of control will have a major impact not on German history but will reset the relationship with Poland and Bohemia as well. In the year 1000, emperor Otto III will manifest this new relationship when he visits one of Poland’s most remarkable monarch, Boleslav the Brave in Gniesno. Let’s find out…

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 97 – Rebellion!

Now that we know the lay of the land it is time for action, and quite some action it will be. The Wends, the pagan Slavic peoples living east of the Elbe who found themselves ever more squeezed by their now Christian neighbours wake up one morning to find their oppressors fatally weakened. Events 2000 km south of Brandenburg create the once in a century opportunity to throw off the yoke of the Saxons. The newly built churches go up in flames and their tormentors flee back across the Elbe. Any plans for retaliation are thwarted by a succession crisis. This loss of control will have a major impact not on German history but will reset the relationship with Poland and Bohemia as well. In the year 1000, emperor Otto III will manifest this new relationship when he visits one of Poland’s most remarkable monarch, Boleslav the Brave in Gniesno. Let’s find out…

But before we start just a reminder. The History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and other privileges from the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to Mattias J, Bruno B., Jean O. and Naomi K. who have already signed up.

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Last week we got a rundown of the main neighbours of the North, the Bohemians, the Poles and the Danes. All of these are now Christian and all of them are at least formally vassals of the emperor Otto the Great.

Not all of them are happy about that though. The Danes took the opportunity to rebel when emperor Otto the Great died in 973. Their king, Harald Bluetooth felt safe behind the Danevirke. The Danevirke is a 30km long earthen wall that goes from the old Danish trading port of Haithabu, near modern day Schleswig to the marshlands of the Treene river, effectively blocking access to the Jutland peninsula. This structure had been built and rebuilt several times over and in slightly different locations since about the year 650. The point of it was to defend Denmark against any retaliatory attacks their raids along the coast would trigger, or even more importantly, against a Saxon invasion during times when many of the Danish fighters were out in England or France. And it worked well. Even Charlemagne did not press on beyond the Danevirke after his conquest of Saxony. Most of the 9th and early 10th century the Danes did not see much threat from their immediate south. That changed when Henry the Fowler upgraded the military of East Francia. He and Otto the Great had entered Denmark several times and encouraged/forced the adoption of Christianity.

The Danish king Harald Bluetooth famous not just for his lax attitude towards dental hygiene, wanted to break out of this stranglehold. So he spent much fine gold on reenforcing the defences in the years leading up to 973, waiting for his chance. When Otto the great died in 973, he believes the moment had come. Transition of power from one monarch to the next is always a fraught affair in the early Middle Ages. And Otto II ascent to the throne was no exception.

Otto’s cousin, Henry aptly named “the Quarrelsome”, duke of Bavaria laid claim to the throne. His branch of the family had for a long time believed they had been cheated out of the succession after Henry the Fowler. Civil war was in the air.

And the king of Denmark wasn’t the only one who thought this was the time to shake off the imperial yoke. There are the sons of a former duke of Lothringia who plotted to get back what was once theirs. And the dukes of Poland and Bohemia openly supported Henry’s claim to replace Otto II.

Harold Bluetooth did not officially take part in the rebellion or link up with Henry the Quarrelsome. Still he musters his army and moves south, burning and pillaging as he went. Along for the journey came Jarl Haakon, the ruler of Norway who had become Harald Bluetooth’s vassal.

Despite having his hands full with his cousin, the Bohemians, the Poles and the Lotharingians, Otto II was able to field an army that pushed the Danish and Norwegian attackers back behind the Danevirke. But attempts to break the mighty defences were rebuffed.

According to the Danish sources, it was the betrayal by the Jarl Haakon who left in the midst of the fighting that turned the fortune of war. The Danevirke was broken, and Otto II stood inside the now defenceless kingdom. That brought not only an end to Harald Bluetooth’s rebellion, it also brought Schleswig into the empire.

Just to round off the story, Otto II was able to put down his cousin’s rebellion and forced the dukes of Bohemia and Poland to submit to him again in 978. So all is back to where we were when Otto the Great had died.

Well, yes and no. Otto II was no Otto the Great. Despite his initial success he found himself humiliated in 980 when king Lothair of West Francia suddenly attacked Aachen where the imperial family had just sat down for dinner. Otto II and his glamorous wife, the empress Theophanu escaped by a hair’s breadth. These and other misadventures began to undermine the credibility of the regime.

The biggest blow came in 982 when Otto had taken the largest army ever put up by the Ottonians to conquer Southern Italy. At the battle of Capo Colonna or battle of Stilo as some called it, the imperial forces were practically wiped out. They counted 4,000 fallen men, amongst them the duke of Benevento, the bishop Henry of Augsburg, the Margrave Gunther of Merseburg, the abbot of Fulda and a further 19 counts.  That cut deep into the military capabilities of the still young empire.

This defeat and the loss of his army was the moment so many had waited for, and none more so than the Wends. The rebellion began on July 29, 983 with the murder of the garrison and the destruction of the Cathedral of Havelberg, in the Northern March.

According to the chronicler Helmond von Bosau the trigger for that rebellion was the unwarranted mistreatment of the Slavs, in particular the Abodrites. The Abodrites are a federation of several Slavic tribes who live in the March of the Billungs, across Holstein and Mecklenburg. They had become Christian after the battle at the Raxa River where the leader of the Obodrites had his head put on a spike and 700 of his soldiers had been executed. This convinced the brother of the now headless prince of the Abodrites to become Christian. How sincere that was I leave to you to judge.

His son Mistivoj thought he would give this Christianity thing a real go. He saw how the Poles and Bohemians had been integrated into the political system of Christian Europe and risen in stature and power after taking the plunge. Not only did he convert and regularly paid the oppressive tributes, but -according to the chronicler – he also participated in imperial campaigns in Italy. To further enhance his status he had asked the duke Bernhard Billung for the hand of his daughter in marriage. As the nuptials approached the duke became evasive. Finally Dietrich von Halvensleben, the margrave of the Northern Marches shouted out that “the daughter of a duke should not be given to a dog”.

Dietrich von Havelberg who must have been a pretty nasty piece of work if even Thietmar accuses him to have brutally oppressed the populace in the Northern March

Mistivoj was not only deeply offended but also realised that his reconciliatory approach had failed. He meets up with the leaders of other Slavic tribes and they decide to strike. First, they attack Havelberg and 3 days later the cathedral of Brandenburg goes up in flames. The graves of the previous bishops were opened, and their bones scattered, the church treasures stolen and they “brutally spilled the blood of many”. But the biggest point of consternation for Thietmar and the Saxons was that all the population, even those who had converted, supported the uprising.

Meanwhile Mistivoj had less garrisons to burn in his own lands and so crossed the Elbe and attacked the core of the Saxon duchy. His troops burn Hamburg to the ground, kill the priests and take many home as prisoners. They even progressed as far as Magdeburg though the margrave Dietrich, the same who had caused so much anger, was able to put them to flight.

What happens next is hard to piece together from the sources. It seems the leaders of the border counties and the bishops finally gather troops to stop the flood of raging pagans. Battle is joined near Stendal and the Slavs are allegedly beaten comprehensively. I say allegedly because after the battle the Saxon troops move back behind the Elbe River and effectively abandon the Slavic lands to their people who continued in their pagan beliefs. In my book that would mean the Slavs have won.

Once the immediate catastrophe was averted, the Saxons call for their mighty emperor to come up and help sorting things out. Otto II had survived the carnage at the battle of capo Colonna by swimming out to a Byzantine merchant ship – but that is another story you can find in episode 10.

In 983 he held an assembly in Verona where the Saxon leaders attended. How much help they found there is a bit unclear since the key decisions taken there had nothing to do with Saxony. One of these decisions was to elect the 3-year-old son of Otto II as king and successor to his father.

Otto III travelled north to Aachen for his coronation as king. This took place at Christmas 983. If you go to Aachen cathedral you can still see a railing that had been put up in front of Charlemagne’s  throne to stop the imperial toddler from falling to his death.

Otto III did escape death on that day, but his father wasn’t so lucky. He had died in Rome in Mid-December, likely from exhaustion, frustration and the generally unhealthy conditions. Messengers with the bad news nocked on the doors of the cathedral just as the last of the Te-Deums was sung.

Like the death of Otto the great, the death of Otto II triggered a wave of rebellions, only worse this time. The Slavs are already in full-on riot mode. The next to smell the coffee was king Harald Bluetooth up there in Denmark. He saddled up again, retook the Danevirke and burned the additional castle Otto II had built for its defence. Schleswig too was lost.

This time the new emperor will not come up to Jutland for a long time. The rebellious duke Henry the Quarrelsome of Bavaria who had languished in jail for the last years was released as soon as the news of Otto II’s death had arrived. He is in Utrecht just two days ride from Aachen. He gallops down and seizes the royal child. As the closest male relative, he claims guardianship and the regency.

For many of the nobles Henry, despite his somewhat uncouth way of assuming control might look like a sensible solution. As the borders are on fire, who would want to put their faith onto the hands of a child. The duke of Bavaria was an experienced war leader and may well be the right person to protect the realm.

But not everyone is on board with Henry. The child’s mother, the empress Theophanu and its grandmother, the empress Adelheid were working together with the future pope Sylvester II to build up opposition against Henry’s plans. Many of the great nobles and bishops are concerned about the life expectancy of little Otto, who was after all their anointed king. An accidental fall down the stairs or a sudden illness is all that separates the Quarrelsome from the throne.

To make sure he can suppress any opposition Henry gathers allies to his cause. One is the king of West Francia, Lothair, who like any French king before him and any French king after him, wants Lothringia back. So Henry promises him the whole duchy in exchange for support. And two others he gathered to his side, the duke of Bohemia, Boleslaus II and the duke of Poland, Miesco I. We do not know what he promised them, but it is likely a material easing of their duties as vassals to the royal house.

The key to his success lay in Saxony. Saxony is where the risk of invasion is highest, and hence the willingness to accept Henry should be strongest. It is also the largest duchy and home of the imperial family.

When Henry popped up in Saxony in February 984, support was initially quite strong. He had by now dropped the pretext of guardianship and regency but was openly seeking the throne either for himself or together with little Otto. But during the subsequent few months his followership began to crumble. In part that may be due to his personal behaviour. In a famous scene he refused to show mercy to two Saxon counts who had approached him barefoot and begged his pardon. That was not very kingly.

But what must really have gone down the wrong way was that Henry invited not just the dukes of Poland and Bohemia to his election assembly in Magdeburg, but also the Mitsivoj, the deeply offended leader of the Abodrites who had only months earlier burned and pillaged the archbishopric of Hamburg. To top it off, duke Bolelslaus of Bohemia had taken possession of the March of Meissen whilst he was en route down to this assembly.

Whether it was their presence, the behaviour of Henry or the oath they had sworn to little Otto III a number of Saxon magnates, namely the duke Bernhard of Saxony, son of Hermann Billung, the margraves Dietrich of the Northern March, Bio and Esiko of Merseburg and Count Eckehard, the future margrave of Meissen as well as Bernward, future bishop of Hildesheim left the assembly and swore to oppose Henry’s claim to kingship.

Henry tried to bring them to submit through the display of military might but failed to intimidate them. That was a major blow to his claim. He could not deploy his military power against these men because that would have kicked off a civil war that the foreign foes would have exploited, which in turn would have undermined the underlying logic of his candidature. Henry then wanders off to find support in Bavaria and Franconia but the momentum is lost. There were another complex sets of backs and forths, but in the end Henry gives in and Theophanu becomes regent. We went through that is some detail in episode 11 which is by the way super interesting.

What is important here is that the Saxons had made again clear that they are the heart of the Ottonian system of government and that they have the final say who becomes king. Or at least that is what they believed.

Resolving the succession crisis did not mean that the threats on the border were resolved. What follows is a bit repetitive and goes roughly as follows:

Every year the Saxons raid into the lands of the Wends, specifically into the March of the Billungs and into the Northern March. They burn and pillage and then they go home. The following year they do the same and the year after, again, the same thing. They often organised these campaigns in collaboration with the duke of Poland, Miesco who would come in from the east. As you may see on the map, both of these marches were trapped between Poland and Saxony. In 986, little Otto comes along for one of these campaigns and allegedly captured Brandenburg, but the year later it is back in the hands of the locals.

Either before or during this period several of the smaller Wendish tribes joined together into the Liutzi or Lutici federation. They inhabited the Northern March as well as the eastern part of the March of the Billungs. They often ally with Mistivoj’s Abodrites who live in Holstein and Mecklenburg and the Hevellers based around Havelberg.

The Abodrites, Liutzi and Hevellers had by now largely reverted to their pagan religion. Their most important religious centre though was called Rethra, Riedegost or -for fans of Tolkien – Radegast. We know that Rethra was located within the territory of the Redarii, one of the federated members of the Liutzi, but we still have not found its exact location or any remnants of it.

The above applies only to the March of the Billungs and the Northern March, modern day Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg. In the two marches further south, Lusatia and Meissen the situation was materially different. Yes, there were serious rebellions as well. But thanks to the focused approach of Margrave Gero and his successors these marches had been much deeper penetrated by Saxon forces. There were multiple strong fortifications from where the occupiers could keep the Slavic population under their control. Hence down south the margraves could hold firm, the bishoprics stayed, and the Slavic inhabitants were made to maintain the Christian religion.

Things were so stable that Margrave Hodo of Lusatia seems to have had enough spare capacity to attack the Liutzi from the south. In Meissen the new Margrave, Eckhart I had taken over in 985. Eckhart was one of the most ambitious and proactive military leaders during this period. He had to fight on two fronts. On one side he had to get the locals back into submission but om top of that he had thrown out the Bohemians who had captured Meissen during the uprising of Henry the Quarrelsome.

Part of this success was down to a falling out between duke Miesco of Poland and duke Boleslaus II of Bohemia. Until now the two dukes seemed to have worked hand in glove in their attempts to get out from under imperial control. But once Otto III and his regency was established and the crisis resolved, they went at each other’s throat. This was mainly down to Boleslaus’ business model that was based on regular raids into enemy territory, which included Silesia where Poland pursued a similar policy. The conflict got so heated, the Christian Boleslaus was happy to go as far as entering into an alliance with the rebellious pagan Liutzi, as long as that kept Miesco busy. For the Saxons this struggle had the advantage that the Bohemians did not have enough resources to hold on to the March of Meissen.

If you look at it from a height of 10,000 feet, the political framework has markedly shifted. The March of the Billungs and the Northern March are no longer under direct Saxon control. The local tribes have lined up in two more powerful federations, the Abodrites and the Liutzi. The two southern marches are still held, but are under risk of attacks from the Bohemians, possibly in alliance with the Liutzi. And on top of that the mainly Slavic population is not best disposed towards their Saxon overlords.

That forces the local magnates into ever-closer alliance with duke Miesco of Poland. The Poles can provide coordinated attacks into the lands of the Wends and at the same time hold the Bohemians in check. These alliances are getting underpinned by marriages. Duke Miesco I marries Oda von Haldensleben, the daughter of margrave Dietrich of the Northern March. In turn the polish duke’s daughter marries Gunzelin the brother of Margrave Eckart of Meissen. And there were many more these personal and political links that will only grow stronger from here onwards.

Whilst the links between Saxon magnates and the Poles tighten, the link between the empire and Poland becomes looser. In a clever move, Miesco gave the whole of Poland to the Pope in 991 or 992. By doing that Miesco weakens the religious oversight of the archbishopric of Magdeburg, which is an important step in the disassociation between Poland and the empire.

These developments culminate in the famous journey Otto III undertakes to Gniezno in the year 1000. The background to the journey is Saint Adalbert of Prague or Vojtech in Czech. Saint Adalbert was a member of an important Bohemian family and became bishop of Prague at a very young age.

Despite his noble birth and elevated position Adalbert rejected all forms of comfort and luxury. Instead he pursued an ascetic life of prayer. He had to leave his seat as bishop of Prague because the local magnates did not take kindly to his excessive piety, or more precisely his idea that the wealth of the church should serve the poor. It also did not help that Adalbert’s powerful family was opposing duke Boleslaus of Bohemia. Things had come to a head when Adalbert tried to stop the mob from lynching a woman accused of adultery by sheltering her in his church.

Adalbert fled to Rome and did what he really wanted to do, which is commit himself to prayer and extreme forms of ascetic exercises as a monk. But that was not to be. He was dragged in front of a church Synod because as a bishop he was not allowed to abandon his flock for the delights of regular prayer, fasting and self-flagellation. Under canon law the link between a bishop and his diocese was an eternal bond like marriage that could not be broken. And that went both ways, i.e., as long as Adalbert was alive no new bishop of Prague could be appointed. That is why Adalbert’s superior, the Archbishop Willigis of Mainz insisted on Adalbert going back to Prague. Willigis did not care much that Adalbert would almost certainly be killed upon arrival, since like all the other members of his family who had been massacred by the duke.  Quite frankly that was all for the better, as far as Willigis was concerned since he could then appoint a new, more reliable bishop.

Otto III met Adalbert at the synod and almost immediately formed a close bond with the holy bishop. Through his intervention Adalbert’s condemnation was commuted into a missionary assignment with the Pruzzi. These are a pagan tribe that lives north-East of Poland and has so far been untouched by Christianity. As it turns out Adalbert’s chances of survival had not improved significantly in this new challenge. The Pruzzi aren’t Slavic but Baltic people who spoke Old Prussian, vaguely linked to Lithuanian and Latvian. They also did not like foreigners very much. And what they liked even less apparently was books. So when Adalbert got to his first village in Prussia and started preaching and reading from the bible, the local chieftain hit him over the head with an oar since he thought he was calling down demons. Things did not improve from here and a few weeks later a local mob led by a pagan priest attacked Adalbert and his small group of followers whilst they were lying on the grass having a snack. His head was cut off and put on a pole – with a small p.

Meanwhile old Miesco of Poland had died and the duchy had gone to his son, Boleslav, known in Poland as Boleslav Chrobry or Boleslav the Brave. He would become one of the most celebrated Polish rulers. Boleslav had welcomed Adalbert and had provided him with a military escort to the border. But not any further. Boleslav the Brave of Poland is terribly embarrassed about the death of the emperor’s friend and mentor. He promptly ransoms the body of Adalbert as well as his surviving brother from the Pruzzi. He brings the body of Adalbert to Gniezno (Gnesen in German) where he is buried in the main church.

When Otto hears about the death of his spiritual guide, he is profoundly shaken and blames himself for having encouraged him to go to Poland in the first place. And so he develops the idea of wanting to go to Gniezno and pray at the shrine of now Saint Adalbert.

But this is not only a spiritual journey. At least on the side of Boleslav the Brave this is an eminently political event. And it should also be on the side of Otto III. The relationship between Poland and the empire needs to be put on a new footing. The previous model of the duke of Poland as a vassal in the same way as say the duke of Swabia was a vassal no longer worked. On the other hand, letting Poland wander off into the sunset as an independent state was also not conceivable.

What follows was likely a misunderstanding on both sides.

Otto III arrives in Poland in the spring of the year 1000 and is welcomed by Boleslav the Brave, duke of Poland. Boleslav pushes the boat out big time for his important visitor. He has his soldiers and nobles arranged in long columns in a field like an enormous choir. His subjects were told to put on all the bling they could find, cloth embroidered with precious metal, fur and shiny armour. This event is basically the Polish equivalent of the field of cloth of gold.

But it is much more than that. According to Polish chronicles Otto III found what he saw far exceeds the rumours he had heard of Boleslav’s wealth and power. And then, upon consultation with his great men, Otto III declared that such an eminent man should not be called merely a count or duke but should be elevated to the royal title. Then, taking the imperial diadem from his head, Otto placed it on Boleslav’s head in a bond of friendship. And then he gives Boleslav a replica of the Holy Lance with a small shard of the nail of the cross in it.

The German chronicles are not completely in line with this. They do record a splendid reception by Boleslav, a bond of friendship and an elevation of Boleslav to become a “friend and ally of the Roman people”. But crucially they do not record a coronation or any other form of elevation to kingship.

This question whether the ruler of Poland has a royal title and what exactly his relationship to the empire is, will dominate the next century of Imperial-Polish relationship.

But – weird as that may sound – the coronation or not coronation wasn’t the main event.

After the great gathering Otto and Boleslav proceed to Gniezno, the place where Saint Adalbert is buried.  When he sees the city from afar, Otto gets off his horse, takes off his shoes and his imperial clothes and humbly walks into the town barefoot. At the church he is received by the bishop of Poznan who guides him in, the emperor kneels down in front of the sarcophagus of his friend and mentor, weeps profusely and prays for god’s grace through the intercession of the martyr.

Upon rising Otto declared the elevation of the church of Gniezno to an archbishopric. You may remember that duke Miesco had given the whole of Poland to the Pope as a donation. That had already weakened the link between the archbishopric of Magdeburg which was technically still in charge of Polish bishops. By creating the archbishopric of Gniezno, Otto III removed Poland from the control of the archbishopric of Magdeburg for good. The only level of hierarchy above the archbishop of Gniesno was now the pope.

The brother of Adalbert who had been ransomed by Boleslav is made the first archbishop of Gniezno and thereby the first primate of the Polish church. It also means that Poland is now separate from the Empire in terms of ecclesiastical organisation, which makes it easier to become independent in its secular relationships. You see the difference when you look at Bohemia or Czechia, where the bishop of Prague remains subordinated to Magdeburg for longer allowing the empire to integrate the Czechs.

There we are in our story. The two Northern marches are lost. Poland is rowing away fast from imperial control. What we have not talked about are our friends the Danes – quite a lot going on there too. That we will talk about next week. The other thing we will talk about next week is what happened after Otto III died. His successor is none other than the son of Henry the Quarrelsome, and he, the emperor Henry II will take a very different approach to the eastern border, an approach that will drive a first wedge between the Saxons and their emperor. I hope you will join us again.

Before I go, let me thank all of you who are supporting the show, in particular the Patrons who have kindly signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans. It is thanks to you this show does not have to do advertising for products you do not want to hear about. If Patreon isn’t for you, another way to help the show is sharing the podcast directly or boosting its recognition on social media. If you share, comment or retweet a post from the History of the Germans it is more likely to be seen by others, hence bringing in more listeners. My most active places are Twitter @germanshistory and my Facebook page History of the Germans Podcast. As always, all the links are in the show notes.

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The perception history of the Ottonians

The first and probably most important point to make is that the time of the Ottonians is a blank canvas. There are very few written sources. For Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great the Regesta Imperii, which is the list of all royal charter contains about 1,000 documents, most of which are land donations to monasteries etc. If you compare that to the reign of king Sigismund (1410-1437) there are about 14,000 registered documents though his reign was a mere third of the first Ottonians. On top of that, the contemporary chroniclers like Liudprand, Widukind and Thietmar are more interested in saint’s miracles than political analysis.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans – Episode 20 A Blank Canvas

I know, I know, it has been two weeks since the last episode and you are wondering whether I have disappeared. No worries. I did indeed go on holiday to Portugal with the family for a week which was lovely. And then I spent the last few days getting the History of the Germans Podcast Website going. Check it out under www.historyofthegermans.com – there are maps, images and transcripts as well as blogposts that hopefully makes the podcast more enjoyable and easier to follow.

But now I am back and rearing to go. In this episode as announced we are going to take a look at how the Ottonians were perceived by their successors and in particular in the 19th and 20th century. Why does it matter you ask? Is that not something for the History seminar at university?

Well, German history is always, always contentious and even the Ottonians, reigning a thousand years ago were and are still extremely contentious. For instance, I had a comment on one of my social media posts accusing the podcast of being “nationalistic” and suggesting that nobody should listen to it. I think once you listened to this episode you will understand that this person was not your average Social Media troll but was coming from a perspective that I can understand though fundamentally disagree with.

Ok, so let’s get going.

The first and probably most important point to make is that the time of the Ottonians is a blank canvas. There are very few written sources. For Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great the Regesta Imperii, which is the list of all royal charter contains about 1,000 documents, most of which are land donations to monasteries etc. If you compare that to the reign of king Sigismund (1410-1437) there are about 14,000 registered documents though his reign was a mere third of the first Ottonians. On top of that, the contemporary chroniclers like Liudprand, Widukind and Thietmar are more interested in saint’s miracles than political analysis.

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Not a single word or thought Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great has said or thought has been written down. Only by the time of Otto III do we get statements that can be directly attributed and give us a glimpse of their personalities and political ambitions. And there are no portraits at all of these rulers. There are images, but these images were conveying a message of what a king should look like, not what he actually looked like.

Therefore, what you end up with is a map showing an empire much larger than any other subsequent historic polity in Western Europe on which you can project whatever narrative you want. And that is exactly what happens.

During the middle ages and early modern period the Ottonians were certainly remembered, and we find impressive works commissioned in their memory like the funeral monument to Henry II and Kunigunde in Bamberg Cathedral created by Tilman Riemenschneider, Germany’s foremost sculptor of the time.  However, their fame was eclipsed by the veneration reserved for Charlemagne who was canonised in the 12th century and an extraordinary reliquary was made to hold his bones. Even the imperial crown that was likely made for an Ottonian ruler, maybe even for Otto I is now being called the “Crown of Charlemagne”.

The enlightenment of the 18th century dismissed the whole of the middle ages as the dark ages where people were held down by superstition and armed thugs on horseback. That is the time where Ottonian churches were drowned in baroque decorations until they were hardly recognisable.

Interest in the Ottonians, in particular in Otto the Great, emerged again in the 19th century, during and after the Napoleonic Wars.

The French Revolution did not just give birth to “Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite”, it also gave birth to its ugly twin, Nationalism. Suddenly everyone in Europe wanted to be living in a nation state. That was largely unproblematic if you were French or English or Swedish, because the infrastructure of a nation state was already there. It was much more of an issue if you were Italian or in particular German. These countries did not have a coherent national infrastructure but consisted of a multitude of independent polities.

And each nation created its’ own historical narrative to prove that they had always shared the same identity and had been destined to rule a certain territory. England was able to draw a straight line from William the Conqueror, the Hundred Year’s war, and the Tudors to its Empire. France created its storyline out of Jeanne d’Arc, and then a pick’n’mix depending on political affiliation of Henri IV, Louis XIV, Lafayette, the French Revolution and above all Napoleon.

And so, the people who spoke the German language too were scrambling around for a past full of glory as a unified nation dominating their territory.     

That notion ran into a whole busload of problems.

First up, the most recent past had little on offer when it came to glory and unity. After the humiliating defeat in the battle of Austerlitz in 1805 the Holy Roman Empire had been dissolved, Emperor Francis II had put down the “Crown of Charlemagne” and the institutions of the state like the Reichskammergericht and the Immerwaehrende Reichstag were closed. Moreover, by order of Napoleon the hundreds of German states were reduced to 39, which became satellite states of France destined to provide soldiers to die in the Russian steppes.

Looking further back also yielded little joy.

The towering German figure of the 18th century was Frederick II of Prussia. But he was no good as a unifying figure since most of his wars were against Austria a fellow German state. Plus, he avoided speaking German whenever possible.

Going back one century further, the 17th century was no time for heroes either as the 30 Years War killed 2/3 of the population. The 16th century’s two key figures were Martin Luther and Charles V, neither of whom a unifying figure in a country split 50/50 between Catholics and Protestants. Then you have the 15th and 14th centuries which was a time of weak emperors and fragmentation, no time for national heroes. And that meant you had to go back all the way to the early and high middle ages to find a time of glory and that is where the Ottonian, the Salians and the Staufer emperors come in.

Wilhelm von Giesebrecht (1814-1889) and his “Geschichte der Deutschen Kaiserzeit” or “History of the time of the German Emperors” perfectly encapsulates this notion.

Let me quote from the preface of his monumental works:

“Though the importance of these times (919-1250) for the development of world history is broadly recognised, it does hold a special meaning for our people. Not only did the emperors emerge from Germany and Germany had become the seat of power during this period, but it was also the time where the German Stems for the first time unified in a common political entity that separated themselves from the surrounding peoples. We became our own peoples who could pursue our own unique and special developments in church, state, arts and science. Moreover, during the time of the German emperors the German people were strong through unity so that they reached the highest power, being free not only to decide its own affairs but also to command other nations, where the German man was the most respected and the name of Germany had the greatest resonance.”

Sounds good, a time of unity and strength, a time when Germany ruled most of Europe, all boxes ticked. Should be a great national narrative.

But here comes the second problem. Where is Germany? What is in and what is not in Germany. AT that time the key question was, are the Austrians in, and hence should the Austrian emperor be the head of a new nation state, or should the Austrians stay out, leaving Prussia in charge. The debate also has a religious dimension as a Prussian-dominated Germany would be majority Protestant, whilst an Austrian inclusion would tilt it towards Catholicism.

And so, almost as soon as Giesbrecht who took a somewhat neutral stance had published his works, the debate over the so-called “grossdeutsche” or “kleindeutsche” solution turned history seminars into boxing rings.

In the Prussian corner we have Heinrich von Sybel (1817-1895). An accomplished historian and, like Giesebrecht, trained by the godfather of the modern science of history, Leopold von Ranke. He argued that Henry the Fowler was the greatest Ottonian ruler since he focused on unifying the German stems, defending the realm against the Magyars, and expanding eastwards. On the other hand, he thought Otto the Great was misguided and did terrible harm to Germany by going after the imperial crown. The entanglement in Italy forced him and his successors to waste blood and treasure in fruitless fights with the Italian states and most of all, the papacy. Taking the eye off the ball in Germany allowed the local princes to expand their power which ultimately led to the collapse of central authority in Germany and all the misery ever since. His bottom line was that Germany should focus on inner unity and coherence and avoid entanglement with foreigners in general and Roman Catholics in particular.

In the Austrian corner we have Johann von Ficker (1826-1902), unfortunate name but also a gifted writer. He argued that the imperial project of Otto the Great and Otto III was neither a true empire nor a nation state but an ambitious and benevolent attempt to bring together the members of multiple nations under one roof. It was no coincidence that this model of the reign of Otto the Great looked a lot like the then Austrian empire which comprised many nations including Hungarians, Czech, Poles, Croats, Slovacs, Slovenians and many more who allegedly lived happily under Emperor Franz Joseph’s benevolent rule. Otto the Great and Otto III were his heroes.

Fun fact is that both Sybel and Ficker were disappointed by Bismarck’s creation of a German Reich in 1871, Ficker for obvious reasons, but Sybel as well, because he was at heart a liberal and had hoped for a less autocratic more open society.

From then on, historians began ordering the medieval emperors into categories of good or bad, depending on whether their policies appeared more like Henry the Fowler’s perceived focus on Germany and Eastern expansion or Otto the Great’s perceived Globalism.

Whether despite or because of the debate about who was better, Henry the Fowler or Otto the Great, the Ottonians became a reference point for the German national narrative. It was seen as a period of great national success that anyone could ultimately be proud of. It was a bit like the Hundred Years war are for both Britain and France, a time of great heroism, towering successes, and tragic failures.

But it was also a narrative of conquests in the east that did influence German thinking into the World Wars.  The greatest travesty happened during the Nazi regime. The Nazis began to style Henry the Fowler as the more “German” king who they believed was also more racially pure. The latter was an extremely hare-brained notion since it related to Otto’s paternal grandmother Hedwig being of Frankish/Italian descent. How that works when Hedwig is also Henry’s mother is lost in muddled Nazi logic. But that stupid racial argument was by no means the worst thing.

Heinrich Himmler and the SS took over the abbey church of Quedlinburg where Henry the Fowler had been buried. In 1938 they destroyed the altar and interior decoration and created the “Weihestaette der SS”, a sort of secular Nazi chapel to consecrate SS fighters into the force. Himmler was completely obsessed with Henry the Fowler and even believed he had communed with the dead king in this “chapel”. His entourage even called him “King Henry”.

No surprise that after the war, the name of king Henry the Fowler was mud. I went to school in the 1980s and I cannot remember him being mentioned at all. Which is really sad given that for all we know Henry the Fowler was the exact opposite of a Nazi, always looking for reconciliation, friendship agreements and ruling as a first amongst equals.

Otto the Great was also taken off the Christmas card list in both West and East Germany. There were no celebrations for the 1000 years since his coronation as emperor in 1962 or the 1000-year anniversary of his death in 1973.

When West Germany looked at the Middle Ages in the 1970s and 1980s it looked at the empire of Charlemagne. Charlemagne was comfortable because the Carolingian empire was seen as a pan-European polity, an early EU if you like. Sharing the memory of Charlemagne with France was one of the manifestations of the Deutsch-Franzoesische Freundschaft, the Franco-German friendship, a concept like the special relationship between US and UK. The Ottonians were gradually readmitted by claiming that a true German history only started in the mid to end 11th century and what happened before was just an extension of Carolingian times. Karl Bosl even includes them in something he calls “Frankish Late Antiquity”. Theophanu was hailed as a rare example of openness towards other cultures and the Theophanu foundation awards an annual prize for individuals and organisations that make an outstanding contribution to bridging Europe’s historic diversities.

East Germany in line with Marxist theory regarded the early Middle Ages as a transition period from slave owning antiquity to feudalism where individual rulers would have little agency in the first place. They also had for obvious reason little enthusiasm for the Ottonian policy of eastern expansion. They believed the Western interpretation of the Ottonians as proto-European was just a smokescreen hiding bourgeois nationalist desires for world domination.

o.k., thank you for listening to this point. You really have a lot of stamina, because all this stuff is clearly bollocks. The Ottonians were neither proto-Europeans nor forerunners of a German national state. All of these narratives are nothing but projections of a contemporary narrative on to the blank canvas of a time we have very few facts about.

Already from 1880s onwards more enlightened scholars insisted on trying to understand the early Middle Ages on their own terms. That trend really gained traction in the 90s and 2000s and today dominates the debate.

When you look at the time of the Ottonians on their own terms, as I have tried as well, all the debates of the 19th and early 20th century disappear.

Getting involved in Italian affairs was not anything new Otto the Great had come up with. The dukes of Swabia and Bavaria had constantly meddled in affairs south of the alps without thinking about any long-term consequences. King Arnulf of Carinthia had gone to Italy, besieged Rome and taken the imperial crown. Aiming for the imperial crown and its inherent mission wasn’t much of a choice for whoever happened to be the strongest ruler within the Carolingian empire. And Otto certainly did not think in categories of German national interest at all. According to Widukind he identified first and foremost as Saxon, which again maybe just a reflection of Widukind’s bias as a professional Saxon. Equally Otto III talks about being an uncouth Saxon wanting to be a sophisticated Greek. No mention of German anywhere.

The other big transition in the perception of the Ottonians relates to the internal organisation of the kingdom.

The prevailing view well into the 1980s was that the Ottonians and Salians ran the kingdom through the bishops and abbots. The Imperial Church system was seen as a tightknit structure with a cadre of bishops available to the emperor at his back and call. In exchange the emperors would gradually shift land, positions and money from the aristocracy into church hands.

That narrative suited the 19th century historians extremely well for two reasons. First, it supported the notion that to unify Germany you needed a strong central power with a control and command hierarchy.

And secondly it provided a superbly convenient narrative about how the mighty empire had fallen. The story goes a bit like that. The popes regained moral authority thanks to the Gregorian reforms in the middle of the 11th century and took control over the German bishops away from the emperors. Having lost their main source of power the emperors could no longer hold down the princes and so the state fragmented until it became a mere spectre by the time the Holy Roman empire was dissolved in 1806. That can be shortened down to “the evil popes caused Germany’s weakness” which is a really good story if you want protestant Prussia to lead the new Germany.

It took until 1982 when Timothy Reuter fundamentally challenged the notion of a coherent Imperial Church system. He highlighted the inability of for instance Otto the Great to first create and then staff the archbishopric of Magdeburg, he pointed out that most bishops came from the high aristocracy and that in many rebellions the bishops were leading the charge against the king.

Once you remove the idea of a coherent exercise of power through the church the question is, how did the Ottonians rule?

Current scholarship focuses much on the symbols and rituals of kingship which is believed to have been the means by which the kings and emperors co-ordinated activity and resolved conflict. You have heard many times about the process of submission to the king and the obligation of the king to raise the supplicant back up into the royal favour. You also heard about the dogs to be carried to Magdeburg as a means of ritual humiliation.

Equally you saw in the narrative that the emperors moved from a purely political notion of kingship under Henry the Fowler to a predominantly religiously supported idea of sacred kingship under Henry II. The notion that a ruler has been consecrated and thereby been appointed by god was an inherent source of power and protection. I think I said in episode 11 that Otto III is unlikely to have survived the first 6 months of his reign had he only been elected but not consecrated.

I did spare you most of the detailed explanations of the imperial images in illuminated manuscripts which historians use to understand the notion of kingship for instance of Henry II versus Otto the Great. And I completely shielded you from debates about the significance of the use of lead in imperial seals. The reason I left this out is that despite reading lots and lots of articles about these topics , I could not tie this into a set of coherent arguments I believed myself.

But what I do gather from these discussions is that today’s historians see the Ottonians and their empire as a system of co-ordination where the ruler exercises power in agreement with at least his magnates. The magnates are being kept in line through a shared belief in the sacrality of the kingship reenforced through rituals.

Now here is what I am wondering. Despite 200 years of intense scholarship, we still have only a small set of known facts at our disposal when assessing the 10th century. If it is still a blank canvas, to what extent do current biases drive the assessment of the Ottonians? Are we projecting the last 30 years of a globalising economy onto these long dead polities? Are we seeing co-ordination mechanisms like the EU and the UN that do not themselves have power in the itinerant imperial courts? Do we see a reflection of rituals like the G7 and the imposition and then removal of sanctions in the way 10th century emperors dealt with their adversaries? Do we see the belief in “global values” as a source of soft power foreshadowed by the concept of the sacral kingdom?

Maybe if people listen to this podcast in 15-years time they will regard it as ridiculously outdated. Maybe by then these kings and emperors will be seen as ruthless thugs who cynically exploited the beliefs of the people to satisfy their greed and lust for power. Let’s hope not, because that would make the place behind the projector quite uncomfortable.

So, before I go, let me just remind you that the next episode is a Q&A where you can ask any question you like relating to the podcast, the Ottonians and the history of the Germans in general. Some of you have already sent some really great questions and I hope I will be able to get through all of them in two weeks time. See you then.

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Two Women ruling a Medieval Empire

Last week little king Otto III was rescued from the clutches of the kind of cousin twice removed you don’t want to talk to, Henry the Quarrelsome. Members of the odd rescue squad, namely  his mother Theophanu, his Grandmother Adelheid and archbishop Willigis of Mainz now formed a regency council that would run the country for the next 11 years. Theophanu will be in charge from 984 to 991 when she dies at only 40 years of age. Adelheid will then take over for the remaining roughly 4 years when Otto III gradually comes into maturity and takes over control of the kingdom.

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Hello and Welcome to The History of the Germans – Episode 12 –The regency of Theophanu and Adelheid

Just a bit of housekeeping first. You may have noticed that this episode did not hit your inbox on the customary Thursday. That is basically because I have just left my job and had to do quite a bid of admin to bed everything down. It is quite remarkable how much time one can waste with these things or how much time putting this podcast together actually consumes. In any event, the next episode will come on a Thursday, albeit Thursday the 15th of April, as Easter and the easing of lockdown means we can spend some more time with friends and family. I am sorry to deprive you of podcast listening pleasure  over the holidays but let’s take your earphones out for a while and talk to our children, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins twice removed, friends, acquaintances, work colleagues, gym buddies and baristas – don’t we all miss it.

Back to the show. Last week little king Otto III was rescued from the clutches of the kind of cousin twice removed you don’t want to talk to, Henry the Quarrelsome. Members of the odd rescue squad, namely  his mother Theophanu, his Grandmother Adelheid and archbishop Willigis of Mainz now formed a regency council that would run the country for the next 11 years. Theophanu will be in charge from 984 to 991 when she dies at only 40 years of age. Adelheid will then take over for the remaining roughly 4 years when Otto III gradually comes into maturity and takes over control of the kingdom.

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Saving the 4-year-old king and gaining the regency over the kingdom was no mean feat, but it did not solve the fundamental problems of the kingdom. If you have listened to all 12 episodes so far, you are now quite familiar with the main objectives of any German ruler of the time, which are:

  1. Holding on to the Duchy of Lothringia,
  2. Secure the eastern border and expand where possible,
  3. Establish a sustainable rule in Northern Italy,
  4. Keep control over the Papacy, and
  5. Hold down the powerful dukes, counts, barons and their extended clans.

Having five often conflicting policy objectives at the same time condemned the Kaisers to a perennial game of whack a mole. If he spends too much time down in Italy trying to establish control there and organising the papacy, he risks his magnates going AWOL, the king of France nibbling away at Lothringia and Slavs throwing off their chains. If he pushes hard on the eastward expansion, the local magnates tend to pick up the spoils making them more powerful, whilst back down in Rome, the population cuts off the noses and ears of the Kaiser’s envoys.

That is why in the 30 years since Otto the Great’s marriage to Adelheid our two emperors have been frantically rushing back and forth across the alps without a moment of rest.

What makes the next 11 years of the regency of Theophanu and later Adelheid such an achievement is that pretty much nothing bad happened. That may be a painful state of affairs for historians and podcasters, but great news for peasants who do not have to endure constant raiding and pillaging.

The way the imperial regency achieves this relative calm has some element of luck in it, but it is also down to a coherent policy of the two imperial ladies. When I talk about policy, this is not a policy in the modern sense with white papers developed by think tanks, ministerial working groups and discussions in cabinet, let alone debate in parliament. A lot of it is created on the hoof and by trial and error. But the absence of policy documents and the vagueness of stated objectives does not mean that rulers in the middle ages acted purely on impulse or to achieve short-term goals. There are things that are known to work and which imperial policy reverts to again and again.

Each imperial administration differs in the way they deploy or deviate from these basic policy approaches. When I look at Theophanu and Adelheid, I find their choices smarter than most, which makes the positive outcome of the regency more than just a function of luck.

Let us look at their approach in more detail, starting with policy objective number 1:  Holding on to the Duchy of Lothringia

The question which bits of the old kingdom of Lothar belongs to France and which bits belong to Germany is a perennial source of conflict that is only really put to bed in 1945. During the regency of Theophanu and Adelheid the Lothringian question was a particularly hot topic for the following reasons:

  1. King Lothar of France had been brought up by his father and his mother with the explicit objective of getting Lothringia back. His mother was the wife of Gilbert, the former duke of Lothringia who had drowned at Andernach. And his father named him Lothar after the Lothar who created Lothringia.
  2. King Lothar’s archenemy was his brother Charles. Charles had accused Lothar’s wife Emma of adultery with the bishop of Laon. When she was acquitted by a synod of bishops, Charles had been sent into exile. Otto II then threw oil in the fire by making Charles the duke of lower Lothringia – at which point the red mist came down in front of Lothar’s eyes. He took his forces to Aachen, almost caught the imperial couple and occupied the capital of Charlemagne for a few days.
  3. And finally © Lothar had managed to occupy Verdun in 984 when everybody was busy chasing  Henry the Quarrelsome around the place. Verdun was and remained for another almost thousand years a key psychological border town between France and Germany. Those of you who have read ahead may remember that the longest battle of World War 1 was fought around Verdun and that it is the original place where a bearded guy shouted “They Shall not Pass” though that was said in French at the time and not by a guy whose future acts left him in good stead in French history. Verdun also became the place where one of the most famous images of Franco-German reconciliation was taken in 1984 – Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl spontaneous holding hands in front of the memorial to the fallen. I digress – massively. In 984 Verdun had not yet become a symbol but was simply an important border city and fortress with a slightly dodgy side hustle in producing eunuchs for the courts of Constantinople and Cordoba. But nevertheless, Theophanu and the regency council needed to get it back. In September 984 the regency mobilises the loyal magnates of Lothringia to make an attempt at reconquering the town, which they seem to have managed by October[1]. Lothar came back in January 985, this time with a large army, allegedly comprising 10,000 men[2]. They surprised the occupiers and managed to capture them. Amongst the captured were the leaders of the Ottonian party in Lothringia, namely the duke of upper Lothringia, the count and the bishop of Verdun as well as others. These guys are then distributed across different fortresses held by the supporters of king Lothar. We are not off to a good start here.

The established Ottonian policy towards France was to exploit the constant squabbles between the king and his magnates, in particular between the king and his largest vassal, Hugh Capet. These squabbles were practically eternal because their resources were roughly evenly matched and they each held almost impregnable fortresses. Hugh Capet had Paris, and specifically the Ile de la Cite, which was surrounded by the Seine river on all sides. The king held Laon, which sits atop a solitary hill with 100m sheer cliff faces. Next time you drive down the Autoroute des Anglais look to your right halfway between Calais and Reims you will see what the French call the Montagne Couronne, the crowned mountain.  

Theophanu policy follows in the same vein. After the capture of the defenders of Verdun she prods Hugh Capet to intervene. Hugh Capet disrupts a major gathering of Lothar’s supporter by force, which stalls further aggression from the French king.

Theophanu then benefits from the last Carolingian monarchs in France going into self-destruct mode. King Lothar died in 986 and his wife Emma becomes regent. Emma is swiftly pushed aside by her son Louis V who warms up the allegations of adultery. That conflict between mother and son paralyses the kings of France politically until Louis V succumbs to a hunting accident.

After Louis’ death the time is ripe for the last real change in the reigning dynasty of France. In 987 Hugh Capet is elected king of France. That now causes a problem for Theophanu. She urgently needs a challenger to the French king who re-establishes the previous internal divisions in the kingdom.

Fortunately, one is at hand, Charles of Lower Lothringia. As brother of the before-last king he considers himself the heir to the kingdom. Since Charles is her vassal, he can expect some support from her against Hugh Capet, making the two sides evenly matched. Charles is quite successful in this war and gets hold of Laon and even the most prestigious archdiocese in France, Reims. Hugh Capet makes multiple attempts to storm Laon but without success. Theophanu now has the French where she wants them to be. Hugh Capet and Charles of Lothringia are beating each other over the head for several years, a period during which Theophanu gets Verdun back and the prisoners are released.

The conflict only ends when the bishop of Laon feigns a reconciliation with Charles. How Charles could believe that the man he accused of adultery would ever come round to his side is another one of these 10th century things we struggle to understand. Anyway, the bishop clearly had not found a great affection for Charles and lets Hugh Capet’s troops into the otherwise impregnable fortress of Laon where Charles is captured. Charles dies a year later in prison.

As a consequence by 991 Hugh Capet controls both his own land and the Carolingian crown lands making him a more powerful French king than his predecessor. Since Theophanu had died in 991 this becomes Adelheid’s problem. The fact that the French king is now stronger than before is offset by the fact that the Capetins are less obsessed with Lothringia compared to the Carolingians. All Adelheid can do is keeping a level of unhelpful interference in a fierce dispute over who is the legitimate archbishop of Reims.

Hugh Capet dies in 995 and his son Robert II takes over. Under Robert II French policy changes focus towards increasing the domestic holdings of the Capet family at the expense of their powerful magnates, the dukes of Normandy, Aquitaine and Burgundy, the counts of Flanders and Provence and anyone else who was either weak or had a daughter with a sizeable dowry.

With this the Regency had achieved its main objectives, regaining Verdun and safeguarding the duchy of Lothringia.

Objective 2 is – Managing the eastern border

When Theophanu took over in 984 the eastern border barely held together. The Slavs living between the Elbe and the Oder rivers had flattened the Christian towns and churches in a major uprising in 983, massacred or thrown out whatever military forces occupied their land and could just about been stopped from crossing into core Saxon territory by an emergency force.

Ensuring the integrity of the Saxon lands was probably the #1 objective of the regency. To do that there were multiple policy options, which break down into two choices.

The first question is whether to actually conquer territory and Christianise the peoples in it, or to just forward defend the home territory. The second question is who to ally with.

Under Otto the Great the policy was very clearly aimed at conquering the land and converting the local populace. Otto the great founded towns and established bishoprics in the lands east of the Elbe river. His general, Margrave Gero converted the locals with fire and sword. Under Otto II this system collapsed virtually overnight when the Slavs sensed a weakening of the imperial power after the defeat of Capo Colonna. Under the regency of Theophanu and later Adelheid, the imperial policy seemed to have changed. Though they invaded in regular intervals and at one point re-occupied the town of Brandenburg, there was no attempt to establish a permanent presence east of the Elbe. That suggests the objective was to create a deterrent and go for loot and enforce tribute.

Once the choice is made to stall rather than to conquer the lands of the Slavs, there are multiple options to join forces with other powers in the region.

The Danes can be ruled out, in part because they have reverted back to paganism after Sweyn Forkbeard had his father Harald Bluetooth killed. Furthermore, Sweyn and his mor famous son Canute were keener on England than on the Slavic lands. In fact, the Danes made some incursions into the empire during the Regency.

The other power in the region were the Bohemians. They were vassals of the empire and as such should support the regency. However, duke Boleslav of Bohemia had sided forcefully with Henry the Quarrelsome and captured the Saxon county of Meissen in the process. That put him on a collision course with Theophanu and Adelheid.

That puts the Poles in pole position. Poland is geographically ideal for a policy of containment. They occupy the lands to the east of the pagan Slavs. Furthermore, Poland had become Christian in 966 through missionary conviction rather than blood and steel, which seems to have been more sustainable. The Polish dukes had been involved in the Holy Roman empire since then and their duke Miesco had attended several royal assemblies. He had sided with Henry the Quarrelsome in 984 but was not as committed as his neighbour to the south Boleslav of Bohemia, making that easier to overlook.

So, Poland was chosen to be the ally. When Otto III was six years old he was send to fight the Slavs in a joint operation with the dukes of Poland. How much fighting he did himself is doubtful, but the duke of Poland gave him a camel for his bravery. The fascinating thing about this story is that nobody asks by which route the camel had managed to get to Poland in the first place.

The politically more significant move came in 991 when the duke of Poland gives his lands to the pope. What that means is not so much that the duke of Poland now becomes a vassal of the pope and has to send him troops or taxes. The most significant effect is that from now on the archbishop of Magdeburg who may have believed Poland to be part of his diocese to lose his rights in the area.

The duke of Poland is unlikely to have done this without agreement with the empress and the archbishop of Magdeburg. Miesco had met with Theophanu just months earlier in Quedlinburg, suggesting that the move had been discussed[3]. We also see no mention of any adverse reaction from the German side. Au contraire, the joint operations against the Slavs continue.

This policy of supporting the duke of Poland as a “friend” of the empire rather than as a vassal like the duke of Bohemia will continue and even intensify under Otto III. It is a major fork in the road for Poland, and this document, the Dagome Iudex is the foundation document of Poland. In many ways the decision by Theophanu and Adelheid may be the most significant of their reign. In the future the policy towards the East in general and Poland in particular will become the key differentiator between different emperors. But whichever policy they pursued, Poland is never integrated into the Roman empire, whilst Bohemia is.

The next major policy objective is #3 – Managing Northern Italy.

You may remember that one of Otto II’s flagship policies was to integrate the kingdoms of Italy and Germany. Otto II himself became first king of the Germans by election of the German nobles and coronation in Aachen by German archbishops. At a later stage he was elected king of Italy by Italian nobles and then consecrated in Pavia by an Italian archbishop.  Otto III on the other hand was elected by both Italian and German nobles and was crowned by both German and Italian archbishops. The idea was to create one source of legitimacy for a unified kingdom. This legitimacy seemed to have held out because when Otto III finally gets to Pavia in 996, he is not crowned king of Italy, but the nobles just repeat the allegiance they have already sworn in 983.

To manage Italy Theophanu started by doing the smartest thing she could do. She asked her mother-in-law, Adelheid, who had been queen of Italy since she was 15, who knew everybody and who owned vast tracts of land in Italy to run the country for her grandson. There is not much documentary evidence of her rule of Italy, but if we look at the end result, Adelheid must have done a great job. When Otto II died, Italy was convulsed by uprisings of the anti-Ottonian party. Supporters of the Ottonians like Pope John XIV and Gerbert of Aurillac were in fear of their life or even lost it. Adelheid arrived in July 985[4] and can relatively quickly put Ottonian supporters back into their former positions[5]. One of the pillars of Ottonian rule was Hugh of Tuscany who ruled not just Tuscany but also the Southern duchy of Spoleto. Hugh was exactly what the Ottonian wanted, an Italian magnate who was integrated into the imperial policy. He was regularly seen at court in Germany, he was even there when Theophanu died. He built himself a palace near the imperial Pfalz in Ingelheim and in most aspects acted like a duke of Bavaria or Swabia.

Theophanu stayed out of Adelheid’s way at least until 988 when she makes one of her Greek advisors, Johannes Philagathos archbishop of Piacenza and chancellor of the kingdom of Italy. In 989 she decides to travel to Italy and further on to Rome. This is the one moment when the two empresses have a serious policy disagreement.

So far, they seem to have been able to stay out of each other’s way without major clashes. In Italy that may have been more problematic. Johannes Philagathos was not very popular and his judgements were considered harsh. Adelheid may have tried to mellow things down whilst she was in Pavia, but when Theophanu travelled through Pavia, Adelheid made sure she was out of town, leaving Philogathus free rein. Adelheid’s first act after she had taken from Theophanu was to sack Johannes Philogathos who barely managed to get back into Germany alive. 

After that interlude Italy held together fine, even after Adelheid returned north of the Alps to take over the regency.

Which gets us to part 4 – controlling the papacy.

Policy towards the papacy breaks down into two separate components.

On the one hand there is the control over the papal states, the city of Rome and the person of the pope, which is what preoccupied us so far. The pope however has another side to his power, which is the moral and spiritual leadership. The reason it did not matter was that there was no real moral superiority. The pope may be the Vicar of Christ by virtue of his office, but these last few popes had little if any personal qualities that made them suitable to lead Christendom in prayer. 

One of those was (anti) pope Boniface VII who had returned from Byzantium shorty after Otto IIs death and proceeded to kill his predecessor, Benedict VII, making him one of the few popes who killed not just one, but two popes. Boniface lasted for just 11 months but quickly became isolated and abandoned by his Crescenti supporters it has been assumed he was either assassinated or may even have committed suicide. So hated was he that after his death men cut and pierced his body with spears, then dragged it, stripped and naked, by the feet to the Campus Martius and threw the corpse on the ground before the feet of the Horse of Constantine, i.e., the statue of Markus Aurelius. The next morning some more compassionate monks found the body parts and buried them.

After that Rome remained out of control for a month as the Crescenti tried to get control of the situation. It seems they had to ultimately accept a new pope, John XV who was a Roman, but from a rival faction of the aristocracy. John XV held out for 11 years which is pretty much a record by pursuing a policy of balancing the local Crescenti and the imperial forces. John XV was hated due to his avarice and general meanness, but in moral and spiritual terms he was a material step up from his predecessors, which may explain his longevity.

Theophanu travelled to Rome in 989 to pray at her husband’s grave, a luxury she did not enjoy in the tumultuous days of December 983. Her presence re-established some control over the papacy, albeit not so tight to provoke a Crescenti rebellion.

Some Historians suggest that Theophanu’s trip to Rome was aimed at a resurrection of her late husband’s policy of bringing Southern Italy under Ottonian rule. That is based on just one document issued in Rome relating to a monastery in the South. Quite frankly that is fairly thin evidence. Last time I checked her husband took the largest army ever seen to pursue his dream. Theophanu travelled with just a personal bodyguard…

Adelheid did not interfere significantly in Roman affairs. When pope John XV finally gets into hot water with the Crescenti and asks the imperial leadership for help, it is Otto III himself who musters an army to do what emperors have now been doing for a while – go to Rome, get crowned, get out.

For now all that matters is control of Rome, the moral superiority still resides with the emperor.

And finally, policy number 5 – keeping control of the magnates in Germany.

There is nothing to report, no uprisings, no grumblings, no disobedience, nothing, which is probably the best rate card you can get. Henry the Quarrelsome seems to have been a regular presence at court supporting the new regime. When he died a few years later in 995 he is supposed to have told his son that he should never oppose his king and lord, something he had regretted ever doing. 

Interestingly, apart from Henry of Bavaria we hear very little about the other dukes. That might be down to the fact that monasteries are better at retaining documents and most chroniclers are churchmen. But it is still noticeable that when we hear of great assemblies, most of the named attendants are bishops, whilst under Otto the Great the emphasis was on the temporal rulers. This is also the time when we first hear that a whole county is given to a bishop, making him a prince bishop. The lack of documentation on the duchies is so severe that we are not exactly sure who was duke of Carinthia at certain points of time, and Carinthia is one of only 6 duchies at the time. The Imperial church system is clearly expanding at a rapid pace during the regency.

What further accelerates the trend is the growing importance of the reform monasteries. Reform monasteries came about because discipline in monasteries had become lax, as it did ever so often. The most important reform monastery in the period was Cluny. Cluny was founded in 910 in Burgundy. By the 990s it has become a spiritual superpower.  Thanks to their ascetic life, care for the poor, regular prayers and celibacy they monks of Cluny became the members of the church lay people both aristocrats and peasants looked up to. Cluny had the privilege to found daughter monasteries that reported back to Cluny. By the end of the 12th century there were nearly 1000 monasteries that reported back to the abbot of Cluny. These reform monasteries sit at the heart of the more and more intense piety that will dominate the high middle ages and drive the crusades as well as the recovery of papal authority. Adelheid specifically was a huge supporter of Cluny. She founded several daughter abbeys of Cluny, including the abbey of Seltz in Alsace.

Supporting the reform of the church is a double-edged sword for the imperial system. A chunk of the authority the Kaiser exerts stems from his moral authority as the anointed quasi-religious leader. That authority is heightened when it is held against a profoundly corrupt papacy and lazy monks. As the church implements reforms and grows its moral authority, the moral authority of the Kaiser diminishes. And that results in some sort of religious arms race where the temporal rulers try to outpace their abbots and bishops and eve the pope in displays of extreme devotion. You will get what I mean by that when we get to Otto III in the next episode.

The last, but by no means least significant act of the regency was an economic one. I already mentioned that the Ottonians benefitted from a combination of improving climate and loosening of the rules of servitude. That created a surplus of agricultural product, which in turn drove the creation of markets and trade. What turbocharged these trends was the increase in production of small silver pennies, the Adelheid and Otto Penny.  Adelheid increased the production of the silver in mines near Goslar. The increased availability of coins must have hugely facilitated the exchange of day-to-day goods. Her coins were minted for another 100 years and are the most commonly found coins of the 10th and early 11th century.

Before we go into Otto III in more detail in the next two to three episodes, I just wanted to close the chapters on Theophanu and Adelheid.

Theophanu died in Nijmegen in 991 when Otto III is just 11 years old. She is buried in St. Pantaleon in Cologne, one of the few churches form that period still standing. If you go to Cologne, don’t waste your time staring at the western facade of the Dom, which is a pastiche from the 19th century, go around three blocks and look at St. Pantaleon, whose facade is largely unchanged since 980 AD and take a look at Theophanu’s modest grave.

Her biography remains one of the most astounding of the 10th century –born and brought up at the sophisticated Byzantine imperial court, then sent to the Ottonian court with a 50/50 chance of being buried in a monastery or being married to the heir of the throne, finally ruling the empire together with her husband for 10 years and then taking sole control as guardian for her son for another successful 7 years. Theophanu has forever animated German imagination and views have shifted back and forth between genius politician and hapless puppet of the main courtiers. I personally do not think she was a genius, but that she had common sense. She chose to continue policies that had proven to work and changed those that had not. That is more than one can say about many of her successors up to the present day.

When Theophanu died the situation could have easily gone out of hand again. Luckily Otto’s grandmother Adelheid stepped up to the guardianship. Adelheid had kept a low profile these last few years but had remained close to the court and her grandson so that the transition went comparatively smoothly.

Adelheid’s effective rule lasted just 3 years as Otto III was considered of age around age 14. When Otto III was declared of age at the royal assembly in Solingen in 994, Adelheid gradually retired from high politics. The official end of her guardianship came with the coronation of Otto III in Rome in 996. She enters the monastery of Seltz in Alsace she had founded in 991.

She died on December 16th, 999 at the age of 68.

Adelheid was one of the most remarkable female figures in early medieval history, of which there are a lot more than one would think. She had been incarcerated and probably tortured by Berengar but managed to escape and rose to become empress. For nearly 40 years she played a decisive role in shaping one of the key axes of medieval German politics, the link between Italy and Germany. She brings the Italian crown into the Ottonian family and through her contacts and relationships makes it possible for this regime to endure. Whether the orientation towards Italy has been a good or a bad thing for the development of Germany is an endless debate, but that it was hugely important, nobody can deny.

Her significance to the abbey of Cluny and its reform program was such that abbot Odilo of Cluny, who we will meet again soon, wrote her autobiography shortly after her death. He paints her as a saintly figure who triumphs over adversity because of her faith and good deeds. In 1047 she was canonised by Pope Urban II and her grave in Seltz became a place of pilgrimage.

That makes it even more depressing to look at where she is supposedly buried. Her monastery at Seltz has disappeared in the Reformation and her remains were transferred to the parish church of Seltz. That church was heavily damaged in the Second World War and the rebuild in the 1950s may not be to everyone’s taste. Her grave is now lost and even the Office de Tourisme of Seltz hardly mentions her.

Next time we will dive into Otto III, the great “what if” of German medieval history. He will continue many of his mother’s policies but will make some audacious moves toward what might have been a very different medieval world, a world that never materialised.

I hope you are going to join us. And if you enjoyed this episode, let your friends know on social media or in that old fashioned way – talking, now that we are allowed to do that again.

[1] RI II, 3 n 956y2

[2] RI II,3 n. 962g

[3] RI II,3 n. 1028d

[4] RI II,3 n. 972a

[5] RI II,3 n. 972c

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The abduction of Otto III

Otto had been elected king a couple of months earlier in Verona, by both the German and the Italian nobles. When Otto reaches Aachen either on Christmas eve or Christmas day 983 he is crowned king  by both the archbishop of Mainz and the archbishop of Ravenna, the respective leading churchmen of Germany and Italy.it all looks as if we finally have a ruler over a joint German and Italian Reich.  But not so. All this happened 16 days after his father had died, though nobody knew that during the ceremony.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans – Episode 11 – Woe to the land that is governed by a child….

Last week we watched the unlucky Otto II stumble through his 10 years of imperial rule, suffering defeat and loss of the eastern parts of Saxony to the Slavs.  Otto II died on December 7th, 983 in Rome of Malaria. And whilst Otto II lay on his deathbed, his three-year old son Otto was travelling a thousand miles north to Aachen for his coronation as king.

Otto had been elected king a couple of months earlier in Verona, by both the German and the Italian nobles. When Otto reaches Aachen either on Christmas eve or Christmas day 983 he is crowned king  by both the archbishop of Mainz and the archbishop of Ravenna, the respective leading churchmen of Germany and Italy.it all looks as if we finally have a ruler over a joint German and Italian Reich.  But not so. All this happened 16 days after his father had died, though nobody knew that during the ceremony.

Literally on the same day the messengers arrive with news that Otto II had died in Rome. You can almost imagine the riders banging on the church doors whilst inside the crown is put on the toddler’s head. As we will see that was extremely lucky for young Otto, now king Otto III. Having been anointed and consecrated properly has moved him from the realm of mere mortals into a higher level of human being, a ruler that has been chosen by God. 

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How much that matters we will see. Otto II had been just 28 years old when he died. His death was certainly unexpected. But, when we look back at previous expeditions to Rome, the Kaisers were always concerned about the risk of unexpected death in battle or more likely from disease. I mentioned before that Rome was a malaria infested swamp where northern warriors tended to fade away like gelato in the summer heat. That concern about an unexpected death drove Otto II’s coronation at the age of six and probably was also a driver behind the decision to have little Otto III crowned when he was only a child.

The one good thing about the timing of Otto II’s death was that most of the magnates of Germany were in Aachen for the coronation when the news arrived. That meant they could make a decision on what to do next. Little Otto III could obviously not rule in his own capacity and needed a guardian or guardians until he comes of age.

Who should be this guardian or these guardians? According to Germanic law, the closest male relative would automatically be guardian. Let us just think who is Otto III’s closest male relative? His father, Otto II had only one half-brother, Liudolf, who had already died in episode 5. Liudolf himself had a son, called Otto, who was later made duke of Swabia and Bavaria. That Otto had died in the last Episode, without a male heir.

That means we need to go up one level, to the brothers of Otto the Great. Only one of them had a male descendent, and you guessed it, that closest male relative of Otto III is none other than Henry the Quarrelsome. And therefore, in line with law and customs the German barons decided the Quarrelsome should become the guardian of little Otto III and sent for him. That was on December 26th.

When the German nobles took this decision, Henry had spent most of the last 10 years incarcerated for treason against Kaiser Otto II. The length of his incarceration was extreme by the standards of the time. Henry’s punishment looks even harsher when you compare it to his co-conspirators who have got back into the royal favour and one of them was even given Henry’s old duchy of Bavaria. Moreover, his branch of the royal family still held the view that they were cheated out of kingship by Otto the Great, who was born the son of a duke, whilst their ancestor was born “in aula regis” i.e., as the son of a king.

Despite all that backstory the German nobles voted for Henry as guardian and therefore de facto ruler of the country. Nobody in their right mind could have expected Henry to have any warm feelings for his cousin twice removed. They did not even care that of all people in the world Henry the Quarrelsome was the last one Otto II would have wanted as guardian for his son. So, why did they do that? Two reasons spring to mind.

The first one was that the Slavs had rebelled and expelled the German occupiers from their lands, had flattened Brandenburg and Havelberg, reverted to paganism and only at the last minute been stopped from crossing the Elbe and threatening the core of Saxony. Decisive leadership was urgently required. Henry was a recognised leader and warrior who could be trusted to hold the eastern frontier.

The second reason was that the only theoretical alternative was the child’s mother, Theophanu. Theophanu was not only a long way away, in Rome, but also not very popular. Apart from a solid dose of xenophobia, the German barons accused her of being behind the suppression of the bishopric of Merseburg which -as we all know- caused the lord to forsake the kingdom and create the Slav uprising. Bottom line, Henry was the better solution.

At the time of Otto’s coronation on Christmas day, Henry was locked up in Utrecht, just 200km from Aachen and 250km from Cologne. Henry is freed two days later on December 27th or 28th and rides hell for leather to Cologne, where Otto III had gone to stay with the archbishop. Henry reaches Cologne in the last days of 983 and physically grabs hold of the child. Possession being 9/10th of the law, Henry is now the de facto leader of the Reich.

It is fair to assume that Henry had spent the last 10 years in jail pondering about ways he could take over the kingdom and bury Otto II and his family in a shallow grave. So, when he came free, he is likely to have had a fully developed master plan how to take over as king, not just as guardian. This masterplan needed to address three main items:

Item one, he needed a decisive victory over the Slavs to justify him setting aside the anointed king. That meant he needed to have soldiers and money enough to mount a massive campaign east of the Elbe river.

Secondly it is fair to assume that the coup would not go smoothly and that traditional allies of Otto the Great’s family such as the dukes of Swabia would resist militarily. That meant he also needed some soldiers and some money to fight them.

And thirdly, a civil war in Germany would bring king Lothar of France back into the fray. You remember from last episode that king Lothar of France hankered after the duchy of Lothringia since forever. His mother was the widow of the last indigenous duke of Lothringia and his father had named him Lothar as a reminder that it was his job to regain the duchy. There was no question that if Henry the Quarrelsome would be busy fighting two wars, Lothar would invade Lothringia and turn the eagle on the imperial palace of Aachen round again. To prevent that, Henry would have needed even more soldiers and money, and that was more soldiers and more money than he could ever hope to raise.

That means there was only one thing that could be done – Henry the Quarrelsome had to make peace with Lothar right now, before the King of France invades. The price for peace with Lothar is pretty straightforward: Henry has to hand over the duchy of Lothringia on a silver plate.

Given the subsequent timing of events Henry must have sketched out his offer to Lothar literally whilst sitting on his horse riding down to Cologne to pick up his little cousin. The details of the offer are unknown, but he did swear an oath to Lothar that he would come to a meeting in Breisach scheduled for February 1 where a formal treaty was to be negotiated and signed.

At this point the chances for little Otto III to become ruler, or to be frank, making it to adulthood at all look pretty bleak. If Henry can keep the western front calm and throw the majority of his forces against the Slavs, he would get the level of support needed to shut down the Ottonian party and push little Otto III aside.

Otto IIIs only hope now is his mother, the byzantine princess Theophanu. She was last seen at Otto IIs deathbed in Rome. After Otto’s death on December 7th the situation in Rome had become extremely volatile extremely quickly.

The once so obedient bishops and counts rapidly disappeared back to their homelands to hunker down and see what will happens next. The Roman population grew restless. One of Otto II’s last acts had been to appoint his archchancellor for Italy as pope John XIV. John XIV had not really been elected by anyone other than Otto II and hence had no friends or supporters in the holy city. He barricaded himself into the Lateran palace waiting for the end.

In other words, Rome was not safe for Theophanu, but where should she go, and who could she rely upon? Northern Italy was convulsed by raids on the members of the pro-Ottonian party and nobody knew what was going on in Germany.

There was one other member of the Ottonian family still in Rome, Mathilda, sister of Otto II and Abbess of Quedlinburg. Whilst Theophanu had little standing amongst the German barons, Mathilda was a as close to the top of the pyramid as you could get. She was the granddaughter of Saint Mathilda, her predecessor as abbess of Quedlinburg. The convent of Quedlinburg was not only one of the richest abbey’s in the empire and a major landowner, but also home to king Henry the Fowler’s grave making it the spiritual centre for the whole dynasty. Mathilda herself was highly regarded in her own right and had been a member of the regency council during her father’s and her brother’s wars in Italy.

Mathilda and Theophanu could not have heard about the release of the Quarrelsome yet, but it would not require a genius to figure out that little Otto III and with him the whole branch of the family was in serious danger.

The two ladies, with the few friends and followers they still had left, fled Rome together and raced  to Pavia where they arrived just before Christmas. In Pavia they joined forces with a third and the most powerful female member of the family, Adelheid, the widow of Otto the Great and Grandmother of Otto III.

Allegedly Theophanu and Adelheid have never seen eye to eye in the past and some historians suggest that Theophanu may have been instrumental in the estrangement between Adelheid and her son Otto II. But now, as the dynasty itself was under threat both sides let bygones be bygones. 

The last piece of the jigsaw came in the person of Gerbert of Aurillac. Gerbert was the towering intellectual and polymath of 10th century Europe. Gerbert was a French monk who had spent years in Northern Spain and at least a short period in Cordoba, the centre of Muslim culture and learning in Europe. There he developed an interest in mathematics and astronomy that led to the reintroduction of the Abacus and the Astrolabe into Europe. His most important contribution was the introduction of Arabic numerals replacing the clumsy Roman numerals for most calculations.

He had access to the writing of antiquity including Cicero, Virgil and Boethius, he was familiar with Aristotle and main elements of Greek philosophy. He wrote treatises on logic and reorganised the logical and dialectic studies. Moreover, he was an accomplished musician who constructed several organs.

His connection to the Ottonian family came when he was recommended as a tutor for Otto II in 970. He had stayed in contact with the emperor who made him abbot of the rich abbey of Bobbio, north of Rome. When Otto II died, Gerbert was in a bit of a pickle. His stint as abbot was not going too well. He had irritated his tenants and forced his monks to behave in a saintlier fashion. Gerbert quite rightly feared that if Otto III would be replaced by Henry the Quarrelsome, he would lose his abbey and probably some crucial bits of his anatomy. So, he joined the three ladies in Pavia to hatch a plan.

And that plan had to be audacious. The Quarrelsome had the law on his side as far as his guardianship was concerned. He also had possession of the child and the support of most of the magnates.

The three ladies and the monk realised that the key to breaking Henry’s hold lay in Lothringia. If they can put a wedge between Henry and Lothar of France, then Henry will be forced into a war on three fronts he would not be able to win.

They dispatch Gerbert of Aurillac to Reims, just across the border from Lothringia. Reims is also the seat of the preeminent archbishop of France who also happens to be a close friend of Gerbert. Gerbert gets busy organising resistance to Henry’s plans in Lothringia. He wrote letters to all and sundry pointing out that Henry was not just becoming little Otto III’s guardian but wanted to make himself king in his place.

Henry thought that with the royal child under his control he could take hold of Lothringia quite easily. That worked in so far as the two archbishops of Cologne and Trier were concerned but failed to convince a number of the important counts. It crucially misread the position of the duke of Lower Lothringia, Charles who was Lothar’s archenemy, going back to some slander he had directed at Lothar’s wife. And Gerbert’s letters made the locals suspicious.

Bottom line was, Henry did not have the political authority or the military might to control Lothringia. And then he makes his first big mistake. Instead of going to Breisach and discuss options with king Lothar, he went to Saxony to gather his followers, presumably planning to come back to Lothringia afterwards.

Whether Henry tried to let Lothar know that he was not coming, is not reported, but even if he did, Lothar did not get the message. Lothar travelled to Breisach. There he found not his new best mate Henry who he expected to hand him Lothringia on a silver plate, but duke Konrad of Swabia, recently appointed by Otto II and a fully paid-up member of the Konradiner family who offered him a piece of his mind on the sharp end of a sword. How Konrad knew about Lothar’s arrival is unclear, but it may well be that Gerbert, who saw Lothar coming through Reims had tipped him off.

The French army suffered a defeat by the Swabians and king Lothar rushed back to Laon. King Lothar is now really p.o. with his no longer best mate Henry the Quarrelsome.

Gerbert of Aurillac now goes to hyperspace. Within just a few weeks he brings together a coalition of the Lothringian magnates and the French king who was now so angry with Henry he joined his enemies just for a laugh, recognising Otto III as king and declaring Henry an usurper.

Whilst all this is going down in Lothringia, Henry is in Saxony trying to rally his supporters.

But even there he started off on the wrong foot. Whilst en route, two important counts begged forgiveness from him for a not further explained ancient misdemeanour. Henry refused. His refusal indicated to the other Saxon nobles that he now lacked a crucial royal quality, clemency. For the nobles, who had not seen Henry for a decade that was a massive red flag.

Combine that with Henry’s odds now much shorter than before, it is understandable that the Saxon nobles became a bit hesitant to declare him king or co-regent or whatever he was hoping for. In a meeting in March the Saxon nobles offered to make Henry king alongside Otto III only on condition that they get the permission of the now 4-year-old child.  Not the kind of unanimous support Henry was hoping for.

The rumblings got worse for him after the royal assembly in Quedlinburg in April. Though he is received into the city with all the honours of a king, a few days later a number of Saxon barons left and gathered a few miles down the road in Asselburg. They declare themselves unwilling to break their oath to the anointed and consecrated little boy Otto III.

There might have been some genuine fear of breaking an oath to the anointed king, but we may also witness a nascent national sentiment. Giving away Lothringia to the French may have struck many barons as too high a price to pay just to get a more pro-active monarch. Henry tries to break the rebellion but lacks the resources to attack his opponents at Asselburg. Even worse, the guys in Asselburg are striking back, capture his war chest and free Otto III’s little sister.

Henry needs more supporters and goes looking for them in his old duchy of Bavaria. That is also not going as swimmingly as hoped because there is already a duke of Bavaria who is not best pleased that Henry starts gathering support in his duchy. Henry manages to get some important nobles and bishops to join his banner, but by no means the whole duchy.

This is not going too well for Henry. In his masterplan he should by now be mustering a large army to fight the Slavs, the Western front should be calm and gradually the remaining neutrals in Bavaria, Franconia and the important archbishop of Mainz should come to his banner. Instead, he does not even have enough troops to bring down the renegades in Asselburg.

What further tilts the game is that Willigis, archbishop of Mainz declares for Otto III and the three ladies. The Archbishop of Mainz is not only the most important churchman in Germany he is also by law and tradition the one who anoints the true king. Willigis had anointed Otto III and when Henry declared his intention to cast Otto III aside, it challenged the archbishop’s spiritual powers. Plus, Willigis was a crafty operator and realised that Henry’s chips were down. Willigis makes himself the ladies’ champion and sends notice to Pavia that it is safe for them to come to Germany and claim the guardianship over Otto III.

Henry still thinks his control of the child and support in Saxony and Bavaria gives him the upper hand and calls the opposing barons led by Konrad of Swabia and Willigis of Mainz to negotiate in Burstadt in May. Negotiate they did and despite all his charm and rhetoric, Henry cannot convince the barons of his claim to kingship. In the end he realises the only way to avoid a war that he would invariably lose, was to promise to hand over the boy king to his mother when she comes to Germany in June. 

At a meeting in Rohr on the 29th of June 984 all the protagonists are finally in the same place. The three ladies, Empress Theophanu, Empress Adelheid and the Mathilda of Quedlinburg, Archbishop Willigis, Gerbert of Aurillac and duke Konrad of Swabia all for the Ottonian party and on the other side, just Henry the Quarrelsome with his ward Otto III.

Henry had used the intervening weeks in an attempt to rally the duke of Bohemia and his Saxon supporters but finally realised that this would not happen. All he achieved was letting Meissen fall into the hands of the Bohemians. On June 20th he sends his followers home and arrives at the royal assembly alone with his ward, now 4-year-old Otto III.

He may have given up hope to be made king alongside Otto III but his hope was still to at least keep the guardianship. Under Germanic law he might still have a right to the guardianship despite all that had gone on before.

That is where our friend Gerbert brings it home for good or ill. Gerbert argued that under Roman law guardianship goes to the mother as long as she has not been remarried. And, Gerbert argues, Roman law applies here because Theophanu is a Byzantine princess and therefore subject to byzantine aka Roman law, and so is her son. That argument wins the day, albeit at a cost. The cost being that Otto III is now officially classed as a non-German, a notion that ultimately sticks as he becomes more and more Romanoi…

For now, the ladies have won, Henry has lost, and he hands over little Otto to his mother and grandmother.

He tries for another year or so to gather supporters in Lothringia and Bavaria but ultimately has little success. He even tries to bring king Lothar of France back into his camp but in the end he had to plead for forgiveness and succumb again to the three ladies and the boy king in Frankfurt at the end of the same year. Then, and only then was he received back in the bosom of the family and had the duchy of Bavaria, minus Carinthia, returned to him.

At easter the coming year little Otto III held a coronation meal where the major dukes including Henry of Bavaria had to serve him at table. Like his father, Henry was from then on no longer Quarrelsome but a loyal supporter of the boy king until his own death in 995.

Control of the empire was put in the hands of a council of guardians comprising Otto IIIs mother, the empress Theophanu, his grandmother Adelheid, Bishop Willigis of Mainz and bishop Hildibald of Worms.

The issue of succession resolved does not mean however that all problems are resolved. King Lothar had taken advantage of the mess and captured Verdun, the key border defence on the Meuse river. The Lothringian nobles remained unreliable since they may not want to be French subjects but have also little interest in being dominated by a German empire. The Slavs are riding high on their success in 983 and threaten the border cities of Merseburg and Hamburg. The duke of Bohemia has a nice time in his newly acquired county of Meissen. And then there is Italy with hostile popes and Otto II’s policy in tatters. You may remember hapless pope John XIV last seen cowering in the Lateran palace when Theophanu fled to Pavia. Well, his end came quickly when bad pope Boniface VII returned with Byzantine and local Crescenti support[1]. Boniface VII put John XIV into the now well set up prison in the Castel Sant’ Angelo where he died 4 months later of starvation or poison. That makes Boniface VII a member of a very exclusive club, the club of popes who have killed more than one other pope. 

All these problems were laid on the feet of Theophanu, our Byzantine princess who chairs a regency council of the wiliest of prelates, her powerful mother-in-law and a crooked bishop of Worms.

If you want to know how she manages that, tune in again next week. I hope to see you then. And if you enjoyed this episode, please tell others about this podcast. Maybe they will enjoy it too.

[1] Norwich, p. 84, Eleanor Shipley Duckett, Death and Life in the 10th century, p.110

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Otto II’s fateful journey to Southern Italy

After last weeks more descriptive episode this week we have an action-packed 25 minutes for you to enjoy. To get you back in the picture, we are in the year 977 and Otto II, together with two more Ottos has just put down the rebellion of the three Henries. Though the rebellion was challenging, Otto II seemed to have remained in control of the situation throughout. Some disaffected nobles had joined Henry’s banner but the major dukes, counts and bishops have remained loyal. But that lack of jeopardy will also be a weakness in Otto IIs reign. Without the sign of divine favour that was so obviously bestowed upon Otto the Great in Birten and Andernach, Otto II’s PR was not much better after the rebellion than before. The harsh treatment of Henry and his co-conspirators was a long way off the medieval ideal of the merciful ruler. Resentment continued which narrowed his room to manoeuvre.

Hello and welcome to the History of the German People – Episode 10 – The Misfortunes one can endure…

After last weeks more descriptive episode this week we have an action-packed 25 minutes for you to enjoy. To get you back in the picture, we are in the year 977 and Otto II, together with two more Ottos has just put down the rebellion of the three Henries. Though the rebellion was challenging, Otto II seemed to have remained in control of the situation throughout. Some disaffected nobles had joined Henry’s banner but the major dukes, counts and bishops have remained loyal. But that lack of jeopardy will also be a weakness in Otto IIs reign. Without the sign of divine favour that was so obviously bestowed upon Otto the Great in Birten and Andernach, Otto II’s PR was not much better after the rebellion than before. The harsh treatment of Henry and his co-conspirators was a long way off the medieval ideal of the merciful ruler. Resentment continued which narrowed his room to manoeuvre.

As Otto IIs family is quite small, it is crucial that he keeps them in strong positions dotted around the realm and aligned with his political objectives. One of the most important family members is his mother, Adelheid. Adelheid was a significant political player in her own right. During the reign of her husband, she was regularly referred to as the co-ruler of the empire. She had a particularly important role in Italy, where she had been queen before her husband had intervened. The Italian magnates saw her as the main reference point within the Ottonian family and she generously sponsored certain families, including the counts of Canossa, who became one of the most powerful families in Italy. She was also the sister of the King of Burgundy and the mother-in-law of the King of France. Her daughter Emma from her first marriage had married king Lothar of France. And let us not dismiss the fact that she had been involved in top level European politics since she was 15 and now, in her 45th year was a treasure trove of experience and knowledge crucial to the success of Otto IIs reign. In his first years as emperor, Adelheid was constantly by his side, providing advice and support. And he knew that falling out with his mother was something he could not afford. But he managed.

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Events in Lothringia brought their relationship to the brink. Lothringia had forever been a difficult to run territory as the French kings remained of the view that it should be part of their kingdom. That gave the Lothringian nobles a permanent option to reject orders from the Ottonian rulers by threatening to shift allegiance to the French king. As long as Otto’s uncle Brun had been archbishop of Cologne and duke of Lothringia at the same time, the duchy was fairly stable. Brun passed away in 962 and subsequently the duchy was divided into two, Upper and Lower Lothringia, held by local senior aristocratic families. These families stayed loyal to Otto the Great, but when the old emperor died, the ancient quarrels re-emerged.

By 977 one of these, the duchy of Lower Lothringia had become vacant. That duchy was huge sway of land, comprising today’s Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg and the bits of Germany on the western shore of the Rhine including the important cities of Cologne and Aachen. As we highlighted before, the Ottonians no longer confiscated vacant duchies for themselves or their families but gave them to members of the powerful families as a way to avoid large scale rebellions.

In the case of Lower Lothringia, Otto IIs choice of new duke was unusual. He chose his cousin Charles to be the new duke. Charles was not just Otto’s cousin, but much more importantly, he was the brother of Lothar, king of France. That was a very odd choice for a number of reasons:

  • Firstly, Charles was blatantly not a powerful German noble with a large family Otto had to placate, his links were in France.
  • Secondly, Charles had fallen out with his brother Lothar over the honour of Queen Emma, Lothar’s wife. Charles had accused Emma of adultery with bishop Adalbero of Laon[1]. Lothar sided with his wife and threw Charles out.
  • Thirdly Charles only 2 years earlier had fought Otto II together with some Lothringian nobles who had forever been opposed to the Ottonians

If we net all this out, I find very little usefulness in appointing Charles as duke of such an important duchy. He brings no support from any German clan. He brings no French support either, au contraire, his appointment invites war with France.

But the most crucial thing is that Adelheid is Emma’s mother, and she did not take kindly to Charles besmirching the honour of her daughter. Sorry, besmirching of honour sounds is a bit too benign. What it really meant is that had Emma been found guilty of adultery, she would have been lucky to get away with permanent incarceration in a monastery.

Adelheid was now snubbed twice. First her protégé Henry the Quarrelsome had been mistreated. But now her daughter and her son-in-law’s arch enemy gets promoted for what seemed no reason, other than to demean her. And off she went to stay with her brother in Burgundy[2].

Otto II had now lost one of his most important councillors. As it happened, he did not have a lot of them. What alienated people even more was that his few councillors were mostly people of modest backgrounds who had made their careers in the church. As we said before, personal interaction with the emperor is crucially important to the nobles. It gives them access to justice and opportunities for advancement and reward. And let us not forget, these guys have vassals of their own so they need to appear to them as if they had access to the 31st floor. Otto’s strategy of relying on people with limited or no connections takes away their entry badge.

Apart from these advisors, the other person Otto listened to was his wife, Theophanu. Theophanu was now 17 and has probably learned the language and began finding her feet. But to understand the intricate network of personal, military and economic interconnections between the magnates in her husband’s kingdom is not easy. Her personal entourage is probably equally lost at sea. She cannot even rely on support from Constantinople any more where her clan, the Skleros are in open rebellion against the new emperor Basil II.

Compare that to Otto’s  grandfather Henry the Fowler who was friend with everyone, married to a Saxon noblewoman deeply connected to all the major clans in Saxony, readily accessible to his dukes and nobles and happy to take their advice.

Otto’s unpopularity was not lost on king Lothar of France. When the duke of Upper Lothringia also dies[3], he sees the chance and makes a surprise attack on Lothringia. He pushed all the way to Charlemagne’s ancient capital in Aachen[4]. As it happened, the imperial family had literally sat down to dinner when Lothar and his troops arrived. Otto and Theophanu had to run as fast as they could to escape and Lothar took over the palace, grabbed the insignia of imperial power and turned the eagle on the roof from west to east as a sign of the change of times[5].

This was a psychological shock to the system. The emperor running away is another one of those images that are extremely difficult to eradicate, a bit like the dog carrying in Magdeburg. Militarily the whole thing was a nonsense. The king of France had barely the resources to hold on to the little bits of his kingdom not controlled by his overbearing vassals, let alone enough to seriously threaten the emperor.

Otto II had to and did retaliate. He took an army to France burning and pillaging the countryside around Reims, Laon and Paris[6]. Otto’s army camped on the hill of Montmartre outside Paris and shouted Hallelujah at the top of their voices, which for some reason was not frightening enough for the Parisians to open the gates[7].  In the end, he did not manage to capture any of these towns. Moreover, none of the major French vassals joined Otto II as they had done under Otto I reign. Whether that was down to Otto II’s personality and reputation or down to the beginnings of a French national consciousness is subject to an endless debate. Safe to assume it was probably a bit of both. After a couple of months mistreating peasants, Otto II headed back home. Almost home, the French attacked his rear guard and captured the wagons full of plunder[8]. The French celebrated this as a major victory. Lothar kept trying to take advantage of the situation and besieged Cambrai, but a few months later has to sign a peace agreement with Otto II[9] and give up his claim on Lothringia. That peace agreement was signed in the border town of Margut-sur-Chiers, in other words, Lothar does not come to the emperor at his palace, as he did in 965. We are back to the early times of Henry the Fowler when the king of France saw himself as equal to the German ruler. That is a step down from Otto the Great’s reign and confidence in Otto’s rule diminishes further.

Back home in Magdeburg a true Game of Thrones type event takes place. During the royal assembly, a certain Waldo accuses count Gero of Morazenigau of betrayal[10]. The court of leading princes rules that the case should be resolved by single combat. In the fight Waldo receives two severe blows but soldiers on. Once up again, he manages to land a massive blow on Gero’s head. Gero goes down and has to concede. Waldo lays down his weapons and gets a drink of water. The water is not half- way down his throat when he keels over dead. Now we have a problem. Gero lost the fight and is hence proven guilty. However, Waldo died almost instantly after the fight from Gero’s blow  which must mean something. Otto II is in the unfortunate position of having to decide and states that since Gero had conceded whilst Waldo was still alive, Waldo’s claim stands and hence Gero is to be beheaded. Several nobles intervened, including duke Otto of Swabia, but to no avail. Gero was beheaded in the morning. This judgement was one of those which “pleased nobody” and made Otto’s life even harder.

After the humiliation in France Otto’s luck brightened up a little In the spring of 980 his wife Theophanu had delivered him a son, named Otto after three daughters[11].

Otto IIs next move was to go down to Italy. After his father’s death things in Italy in general and in Rome in particular had gone out of hand.

Pope John XIII who had been appointed by Otto the First and compliant in all end everything had passed in 972. The imperial party in Rome then pushed through the election of Benedict VI. Benedict VI lasted just 18 months. Once news came that Otto the Great had died and his son was tied up with his nobles, the Romans rose up. The Romans appointed a new pope, Boniface VII, whose first pious act was to relieve his predecessor from the pains of earthly existence.

Boniface VII’s rule was over even more quickly. After 1 month and 12 days he fled from imperial troops into the Castel Sant Angelo. There he grabbed the papal treasure and fled to Byzantine controlled areas of Southern Italy[12].

The Roman people upon gentle prodding of the imperial spears elected a new Pope, a comparatively virtuous man who took the name Benedict the VII. As this going to get complicated, here is the basic rule – Boniface is bad, Benedict is good.

Good Benedict ruled from 974 to 983, but in 980 he got under severe pressure from the Roman population[13] and it might have been that Boniface, the bad pope, returned[14] and managed to take control of Rome. In March 981, Otto II came down to Rome to bring back pope Benedict (the good one).  Bad Boniface briskly bolted to Byzantium.

Not only did Otto get the Pope he wanted, after long and complex negotiations Otto and his mother Adelheid reconciled[15]. Adelheid was crucial since she had all the connections in Italy. With her support he was able to bring the Italian nobles onto his side for his real grand project.

In 981 Otto II called a royal assembly in Rome where lords, bishops from all over the empire and even the king of Burgundy in person came to pay him respect[16]. He was even called upon to resolve some dispute between king Lothar and one of his major vassals, the last time an emperor would have a say over the affairs of France. It felt a bit like the good old days of Otto the Great. At the assembly plans were hatched for what to do in the autumn campaign season.

Having avoided the summer heat and malaria of Rome by staying in a specially built imperial Pfalz in the Abruzzo Mountains, Otto came back to Rome in the autumn of 981 and mustered his troops for what was his true objective in Italy, the conquest of the south[17].

Bringing both the south and the north of Italy under one rule would end the constant struggles over the papacy as the king/emperor had the Roman warring factions bottled up inside the holy city and thereby make imperial rule much more robust.

For most of the previous century Southern Italy was kept in balance between three main powers, The Lombard dukes who held the territory immediately south and east of Rome, the Byzantines, who held the rest of Southern Italy and the Muslim emirs of Sicily who controlled the island of Sicily.

Otto the Great had managed Southern Italy through a loyal and competent Lombard duke called Pandulf Ironhead. Pandulf had the audacity to die in 781 and, being a Germanic leader had split his inheritance amongst a number of more or less competent sons and nephews. In good old Germanic tradition, these guys wasted no time allying themselves with other local powers and going at each other’s throats.

Within all that fighting, the Byzantines held on by the skin of their teeth occasionally losing Bari and Taranto, their main strongholds to the Muslims. Looks like Southern Italy is quite fragmented and should be an easy pick, right?

Otto II thought so and declared that Southern Italy had come to him as dowry for his wife Theophanu. Most western scholars dismiss this claim, probably correctly. However, there might be a connection to Theophanu. As you may remember from episode 8, Theophanu was a member of the Skleros clan and a niece by marriage of emperor John Tzimiskis. When John Tzimiskis died in 976, her uncle, Bardas Skleros staged an attempt to become emperor alongside or instead the new emperor Basil II. That rebellion ended in a battle in 979, but Bradas Skleros and presumably her father Christopheros Skleros were still alive in exile in Baghdad, plotting their return. There is no evidence of any coordination between the German imperial government and the Skleros family, but it is not far fetched to believe that Otto expected that a domestic civil war in Byzantium would make his conquest of Southern Italy easier. In the end it did not matter much because the Skleros only returned to Byzantium five years later in 987. One thing that may indicate this to be a possibility is that from this moment on Otto calls himself Imperator Romanorum Augustus, that is Augustus, Emperor of the Romans. His father had simply called himself Caesar or Kaiser, without the reference to the Romans. Otto II’s is the same title as the title of a Byzantine emperor, which may be justified if his father or uncle in law had recognised him as co-emperor of the Byzantine empire.

Back to more tangible things. The game plan was to leave Pandolf’s offspring to their own fighting, take over the Byzantine lands and then secure that conquest against the Muslims.

Part one of the campaign went exactly to plan. Otto II assembled the largest army the Ottonian period had ever seen and marched south. He conquered the Byzantine duchy of Salerno and stayed in its capital Taranto until June[18].

As Otto expected, in the spring of 982 the Emir of Sicily brought his army across the straights of Messina to fight the German emperor. When the emir approached the Ottonian encampment near  the small town of Rossano Calabro in the deep south he realised that the emperor’s army was a lot larger than he had bargained for. He turned his troops around and marched as fast as he could towards the straights of Messina with the plan to take ships back home. But he never made it.

As the emir’s troops ran home along the coast, they were spotted by Byzantine merchant ships coming up the coast. They told Otto and Otto’s heavy cavalry began the pursuit[19].  

Somewhere near Capo Colonna, though that is disputed, the Emir realise that he would not make it back in time. He halted the flight and set up in full battle order. Otto’s heavily armoured knights crashed into the emir’s troops and pushed all the way to the centre. The emir’s bodyguard crumbled and the emir was killed. Job done.

No, not done at all. Whilst the German cavalry were busy slaughtering the emir, unbeknownst to them a reserve detachment of about 5’000 Muslim cavalrymen joined the fray. They encircled the fighting Germans and having restricted their room to manoeuvre began systematically massacring Otto’s army[20]. Many senior nobles died including the duke of Benevento, the bishop Henry of Augsburg, the Margrave of Merseburg, the abbot of Fulda and a further 19 counts.

Otto II fled by hailing a Byzantine ship – oh irony of ironies. He convinced the captain of the ship that he had enough and that he wanted to just pick up his wife and the imperial treasury before retiring to Constantinople. The greedy captain pushed his rowing slaves go double time only to find that when his ship arrived back at the town of Rossano, the emperor simply jumped into the sea and swam ashore.

In most reports the defeat is described as catastrophic. Reports of the fallen purple flower of the fatherland, the pride of blond Germans reached as far as the kingdom of Wessex. But when I examined the movements of Otto II after the battle, it did not look like a flight for his life at all. He stayed in Rossana[21], a few miles from the battlefield for a few weeks before moving leisurely back to Salerno and Capua[22], taking care of administrative burdens. He only gets to Rome by December or even March 983, 9 months after the “catastrophe” of Capo Colonna. That suggests the Muslims had returned to Sicily with the body of their fallen leader and the Byzantines had remained unable or unwilling to reconquer Salerno.

In the meantime, Otto II had sent his nephew Otto of Swabia and Bavaria back home to raise fresh troops. He only made it to Lucca where he and his companions died, probably of Malaria[23]. As we said before, Otto II does not have a lot of close relatives, making the loss of Otto of Swabia and Bavaria one of his most important vassals and closest confidants a severe blow.

In order to stabilise the situation Otto called a royal diet in Verona where the senior nobles of Italy and Germany elected his 3-year-old son Otto III as king[24]. This election was the only election of a future Roman emperor to have taken place on Italian soil. But what is even more striking is that the child king was elected by both German and Italian nobles. Not only that, but when he sets off to be crowned king in Aachen, he is accompanied by both the archbishop Willigis of Mainz as the highest-ranking churchman in Germany and the Archbishop of Ravenna as the primate of the Italian church.

Up until then the Kings of East Francia were elected exclusively by German magnates and crowned exclusively by German archbishops, whilst the Kings of Italy were elected by Italian nobles and crowned by Italian archbishops[25]. Otto III’s election and later coronation is an attempt to merge the German and the Italian part of the Ottonian realm into one Reich. It is another step in the direction of a rebirth of a pan-European political entity that is a key feature of the later Ottonians.

Apart from the election of little Otto III, the assembly of Verona was extremely productive. The inheritance of Otto of Swabia and Bavaria was redistributed, again back to old aristocratic clans, the Konradiner in Swabia and the Liutpoldinger in Bavaria. The latter is particularly noteworthy, as the lucky winner of the duchy of Bavaria is none other than Henry of Carinthia, one of the rebellious three Henries. I actually made a mistake in the last episode when I said this henry would be the one to die in the service of the emperor, whilst the one who actually died was Henry Bishop of Augsburg. You see, you are not the only one struggling with an excess of Henries in this narrative.

The other thing of note is that Otto invests Adalbert with the bishopric of Prague. Adalbert will appear again in our story a few episodes down the line, but for now let me just say that he would die as a missionary to the Pruzzi, the Prussians making their debut on the global stage in time honoured bloody fashion. He would also become one of the national saints of Poland.

And then there is the dispute with the Venetians who have been subjected to what I think is the first case of trade sanctions since the ancient Roman empire[26]. Since it was impossible to conquer Venice without a fleet and the empire had no fleet, they had begun to act independently from the imperial government in Pavia. A trade embargo was the only way to enforce control, however, even though some agreements were signed in Verona, these did not stick and Venice kept pushing for independence.

One last thing about Verona, they also debated another campaign against Muslim Sicily[27], which again suggests the war had not been lost.

But while Otto dreamt of retribution and little Otto III travelled north to Aachen for his coronation an actual catastrophe befell the dynasties homeland, Saxony.

Since I have been harping on about it so many times, you may remember that Otto the Great’s two famous generals, Hermann Billung and Margrave Gero had pushed the boundaries of the duchy decisively east by subjugating and converting the Slavs who lived east of the Elbe River. Most of that Christianisation involved more cold steel than the lord’s prayer.

In 983 the Slavs had enough of forced baptisms and wanton destruction of their pagan shrines and rebelled. The rebellion ran like wildfire. The Abodrites in the north had not forgotten the slaughter of the 700 in 955 and burned the city of Hamburg (again). The Liutzen and Heveller flattened the hated cathedrals and towns of Brandenburg and Havelberg.

The leaders of the border counties and the bishops finally gather troops to stop the flood of raging pagans. Battle is joined near Stendal and the Slavs are allegedly beaten comprehensively. I say allegedly because after the battle the Saxon troops return behind the Elbe River and effectively abandon the Slavic lands to their people who continued in their pagan beliefs. In my book that means the Slavs have won.

Instead of blaming the rebellion on the brutal suppression of Slavic religion and culture, the contemporaries laid the blame straight at Otto II’s feet. It was seen as a punishment for his sins.

And that sin was having suppressed the bishopric of Merseburg in eastern Saxony in 982. Merseburg was one of the bishoprics founded by his father Otto the Great. His bishop was Giselher, a member of the royal chapel and one of Otto’s closest advisers. Merseburg was one of the smaller and less prestigious bishoprics, which is why Giselher got very excited when the much larger and more prosperous archbishopric of Magdeburg became vacant during Otto IIs reign. He convinced Otto II to make him archbishop of Magdeburg. There was one small problem though. According to canon law in the 10th century, a bishop was forever attached to his bishopric and could not move up the food chain. Therefore the decision was taken to suppress the bishopric of Merseburg on a technicality which would make Giselher free to become archbishop of Magdeburg.  Suppressing a bishopric is not only a complicated thing to do under church law, in the eyes of the 10th century it is also close to sacrilege. Therefore, when the Saxons try to find a reason for the Slav rebellion they conclude that it could not possibly have been the indiscriminate slaughter of pagans and enslavement of wives and children, but quite obviously the suppression of the bishopric of Merseburg, which in turn was Otto’s fault.

Otto II hears about the Slav rebellion in Rome where he is waiting for new troops. These troops never came as all resources had now to be moved to the defence of the eastern border.

With his kingdom shrunk and under threat, his Italian policy stalled and his standing as a holy roman emperor trashed, Otto had come to the end of the road. On December 7th, 983 Otto II died of malaria in Rome. He is buried in St. Peter in Rome, the only medieval emperor to be buried in the holly city.

Otto II has been judged very harshly by his contemporaries and history, if they take any notice of him at all. In preparation of this episode, I could not find any biography of Otto II at all. There are biographies of Otto the Great, Theophanu and Otto III galore, but Otto II none. That is quite odd.

Otto II mustered one of the greatest armies the Ottonian dynasty ever put into the field in an attempt to conquer Southern Italy which, if successful, would have fundamentally changed the history of the empire.  An empire that included both Northern and Southern Italy would have been able to control the papacy much more effectively. A papacy under control of the emperor would have been forced to accept the imperial Church system in perpetuity making it easier for the future emperors to form a coherent state.

And it wasn’t some obvious military error that led to his defeat, just bad luck. If Otto II had only had a 10th of the luck his father had, he would have succeeded in this endeavour.

It is also not fair to blame the Slav rebellion on Otto II. The rebellion was very much the result of his father’s policy of Christian conversion by fire and sword. Again, it was bad luck the rebellion broke out during his reign and not before or afterwards.

We may talk about bad luck, but people in the 10th century did not believe in luck, they believed in all things being ordained by God. That included even the smallest things like a stubbed toe or a late flowering of vines. When all and everything is controlled by God, then losing a battle is a decision by the lord against the ruler. The string of misfortunes Otto II endured were not bad luck but a judgement by the lord against him. If the lord was not on his side, then he cannot be the ruler by the grace of God. And why did God remove his grace from the properly anointed king? In the eyes of the 10th century that was obvious, it was the unforgiveable sin of suppressing the bishopric of Merseburg,

Though later historians did not think along those lines, they seem to have absorbed the general notion that Otto II was somehow not quite right as a ruler. His failings really come down to his inability to relate to his subjects on a personal level. He always appeared to be separate from his magnates, be it on account of his better education, his glamorous wife or his choice of advisors. But that matters more than anything else in a political structure that is entirely built upon personal relationships. Therefore, Otto II would still have had a hard time had he beaten the Emir of Sicily and if the Slavs had not rebelled.

Next week Otto III will arrive in Aachen and be crowned, just a day before the news arrive that his father is dead. That drops the German kingdom into chaos as the boy king’s closest male relative Henry the Quarrelsome is instantly released and his mother fight over the guardianship and by extension the control over the kingdom.  The mathematically inclined amongst you may now expect the reign of Otto III will start with an epic fight between 9 Ottos and 9 Henries. Nope, history is neither linear nor exponential. This time is just one Henry against three ladies, a geek and a 3 year old – I am taking bets.

I hope you will join as again for an action-packed episode.

And if you enjoyed this episode, why don’t you follow the podcast on Apple or Spotify and from then on you will get every new episode fresh into your inbox, every week.

[1]RI II,2 n. 742a

[2] RI, II, 2n, 771b

[3] RI, II,2n 769c

[4] RI, II,2n 770a

[5] Thietmar III,8

[6] RI, II,2n 771d

[7] Schneidmueller, Weinfurter, Die deutschen Herrscher des Mittelalters, p.67

[8] RI, II, 2n, 771d

[9] RI, II, 2n. 811a

[10] Thietmar III, 9

[11] RI, II 2n, 815a

[12] John Julius Norwich, the Pope, p.83

[13] Catholic Encyclopaedia: Benedict VII

[14] Norwich, p.83

[15] RI II, 2n, 833a

[16] RI II 2n, 840a

[17] RI, II 2n, 856c{a}

[18] RI II 2n,871

[19] Barkowski, Robert F. (2015). Crotone 982 (in Polish). Warszawa: Bellona. ISBN 978-83-11-13732-5.

[20] Reuter, Timothy. Germany in the Early Middle Ages 800–1056. New York: Longman, 1991.

[21] RI II 2n, 876

[22] RI II 2n, 877-890

[23] RI II 2n, 884a

[24] RI II 2n, 898b

[25]

[26] RI II 2n, 899-901

[27] RI II 2n, 902a

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The new emperor Otto II has to face the usual rebellions

Otto II had been crowned German king as long ago as 961 and was made co-emperor in 967. The people spontaneously hailed him emperor again at the funeral of his father. And, crucially, there were no contesting claims from any full or half-brothers. Otto II only had a sister.

The frontiers in all directions were calm. In the South, the Byzantine empire had made peace with the two Ottos and sent an imperial bride. In the West, the king of France was Otto’s cousin, married to his stepsister and had sworn fealty to his father. In the North, the king of Denmark had been defeated 10 years ago and had accepted both Christianity and the Ottonians as his overlord, the rulers of Bohemia and Poland in the East have sworn allegiance to the emperor as recently as the previous year.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 9 – A Matter of Habit.

Last episode we buried emperor Otto the Great under a simple stone slab in the cathedral of Magdeburg. In his last waking moments, Otto the Great could look at his succession plan and feel confident that his son would not have to face as much uncertainty as he did in the first 10 years of his reign.

Otto II had been crowned German king as long ago as 961 and was made co-emperor in 967. The people spontaneously hailed him emperor again at the funeral of his father. And, crucially, there were no contesting claims from any full or half-brothers. Otto II only had a sister.

The frontiers in all directions were calm. In the South, the Byzantine empire had made peace with the two Ottos and sent an imperial bride. In the West, the king of France was Otto’s cousin, married to his stepsister and had sworn fealty to his father. In the North, the king of Denmark had been defeated 10 years ago and had accepted both Christianity and the Ottonians as his overlord, the rulers of Bohemia and Poland in the East have sworn allegiance to the emperor as recently as the previous year.

But as we will see, even the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry!

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Within the next 10 years Otto will manage to make and lose war on all frontiers – not I believe because of incompetence, but mainly because he was simply unlucky. If you are one of those people that believe the universe is in some sort of balance, that makes sense. Otto the Great has consumed all the luck ever allocated to his family, leaving none at all for his unfortunate son and grandson.

Before we wade through all the misfortune that befalls our new emperor it may be time to take stock of the state of this empire in 973.

Let’s start with a very obvious thing, a thing so obvious I have completely forgotten to mention it in the last 10 episodes. It would not have come to my mind or the mind of Otto II either, had he not married the lovely Theophanu, the not quite a niece of the Byzantine emperor. What is this obvious thing, it is tax. The Ottonian rulers were not able to raise any taxes, zero, nada, zilch.

Their monetary resources were limited to (i) what was left of the royal estate from Carolingian times, (II) the tributes and plunder from recent conquests and (iii) their personal assets.

The royal estate comprised not just land but also rights, like the right to mint coins, to hold markets, to build infrastructure like bridges and castles, and it included  a share in the judicial fines. But they could not go and simply tax income or assets of their subjects.

There was a state in Europe in the 10th century that could raise taxes, Byzantium. And that made for a very different organisational structure. Warren Treadgold estimates Byzantium’s tax revenues in the mid tenth century to be 4m gold coins[1], equivalent to c. 18t of 24 carat gold. With that the emperor could maintain an army of 150,000 soldiers and allocate the remaining 30% to the bureaucracy and the magnates. In a system where the emperor pays the soldiers, the generals can be moved in and out of position quite easily. A little less than 10% of funds went on “Imperial largesse”, which is bribing the senior aristocrats. Once a year the emperor would pay the state employees, these being actual bureaucrats with genuine administrative roles, but it also included the court officials. These court officials did not perform strictly speaking useful roles unless you consider looking after the emperor’s bath salts as a crucial role. The purpose of having these roles and paying them exceedingly well was to keep the magnates in the capital and make them financially dependent upon the emperor.

You can imagine Otto II and Theophanu after the initial thrill of their honeymoon swapping tales of their respective homeland. Otto II must have stood there with his mouth open.

We do not know the number of soldiers the East Francian kingdom could raise, but let us take the battle at the Lechfeld where Otto fielded at max 8,000 soldiers and compare it to the 150,000 soldiers the Basileus commanded.

But the bigger issue than the absolute numbers was how loyal these soldiers were to the Ottonian emperor. Otto II like his father had a troop of knights who were personally attached to him, i.e., had received a fief from the emperor directly and owed him service. Some of those were permanently present at his court and could be instantly deployed. For instance, the troops that Otto I lead to the battle of Birten were mostly comprised of this “household cavalry”. If he needed a larger army, he needed to call upon his dukes, counts and bishops to send soldiers they were paying.

There is a piece of paper, or more precisely parchment currently held in the State library in Bamberg that sets out in detail a demand for additional troops by emperor Otto II to his German subjects. It is the only such record in existence. According to this record, Otto II demanded 2,100 armed knights to supplement his army in Italy. The orders are directed at 19 bishops, 12 abbots and 20 temporal lords, each requested to send between 10 and 100 knights. About half the knights are sent by the bishops, another fifth by the abbots and only a third by the temporal lords. Since it is the only such document, we do not know whether this kind of distribution between church and temporal lords is typical for Otto IIs reign. But there are some good reasons to believe it might.

The first thing to note is that when the previous Otto began his reign, he was himself duke of Saxony and a mere 4 years later confiscated the duchy of Franconia. Between 940 and 955 he brought all other duchies under the direct control of his close family, with Swabia under his son Liudolf, Lothringia under his son-in law Konrad the red and Bavaria under his brother Henry.

Now when Otto II began his reign, he controlled not a single duchy by himself or through sons or siblings. What has happened? After Liudolf’s rebellion Otto’s policy regarding the duchies and senior temporal roles had changed. Liudolf had been supported by a large number of previously loyal aristocratic clans who saw their opportunities to achieve senior positions curtailed by Otto’s policy to keep the big jobs in the family. After Liudolf’s rebellion we find Otto handing all the plum jobs to the powerful clans. Hermann Billung becomes duke of Saxony, the duchy of Swabia is reverted to its previous ruling clan, the Konradiner in Franconia are allowed to rebuild a powerbase and Lothringia is broken up into two parts that went to local aristocratic magnates related to the previous duke Gilbert. The lands of Margrave Gero which were extensive enough to be seen as a duchy was again not put under direct royal control but handed to aristocratic clans. Only Bavaria is technically in the family, though the current duke, Henry the Quarrelsome is only a cousin of Otto II and, as we will see, not much support at all.

When Otto I changed tack on the duchies and counties in 955, he tilted his efforts towards the church. You may remember that his brother Brun became archbishop of Cologne and his son William became Archbishop of Mainz, the German equivalent to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He also founded a number of bishoprics, namely Merseburg, Brandenburg, Havelberg and most prominently, the archbishopric of Magdeburg.

The underlying logic was that whilst it is very hard to control mighty lords, bishops and abbots are a lot more malleable. Under canon law a bishop would be elected as shepherd of his flock by the congregation or their representatives, the cathedral or abbey chapter. However, for a bishop to receive the temporal rights of the bishopric, i.e., the lands, cities, castles, and other possessions, he had to be invested by the king. That gave the king a lot of leverage at the election of bishops and abbots.

Furthermore, donations made to churches and abbeys often came with the proviso that the lord who donated it retained most of the use and income from the donation, including the ability to grant fiefs to knights in their armies. Therefore, when things go really well for the king, these bishoprics and abbeys are like trust funds to the ruler rather than property of the church. He does not technically own them, but he has still full control over them.

That is why during the Ottonian and later Salian Emperors large sways of lands and even whole counties are donated to the church. That turned bishops and abbots gradually into not only large landowners but mighty princes with their own contingents of knights and soldiers. These Prince bishops are not very different to dukes and counts apart from the fact that they had no legitimate heirs and their investiture was in principle the king’s decision.

And a further support mechanism was invented by Otto’s brother Brun. Brun set up his personal ecclesiastical shock troop of members of the king’s chapel, the chaplains, or chancellors. These chancellors were young priests who receive a thorough education at the court and were put in charge of drafting and designing the royal charters essentially the administration of the kingdom. Once they have proven to be competent and loyal, they would be installed in vacant bishoprics or abbeys. These former chaplains know the king and his objectives well are loyal and therefore should project his power.

This system of government has been called the imperial church system by historians. Up until fairly recently it was considered a smooth and efficient model of kingly rule that was at the heart of the medieval Reich. 

However, these are the Middle Ages and things do not run smoothly full stop. The legal system, both canon law and state law are a complete mess of exceptions, counter exceptions, ancient privileges, and raw political power. Magdeburg is a great example for that. The creation of the archbishopric of Magdeburg was a huge deal for Otto and I should have slotted it into the narrative before. But there was never a good moment for that so I will do it now.

Otto the great’s plan was that an archbishopric in Magdeburg would be close enough to the eastern border to manage and drive the missionary efforts amongst the Slavs, Poles and even beyond. Not a lot of people would disagree with that. The problem was that ecclesiastical sovereignty over all these regions were in principle already part of another archbishopric, the archbishopric of Mainz. The archbishop of Mainz unsurprisingly was not too happy to consent to a split of his area of responsibility. When Otto tried to push it, the archbishop wrote an angry letter to the pope and declared himself willing to die for the cause of his archbishopric. Clearly Otto did not have that much control over his bishops. What makes this even more astonishing is that this reluctant archbishop was his own son, William who he otherwise trusted blindly. Otto only overcame the resistance of Mainz after William had died and a new archbishop was elevated. That archbishop’s investiture was made dependent on consent to the creation of Magdeburg, which he duly provided. But that still did not solve it. Another bishop, Bernward of Halberstadt now refuses to have part of his diocese be subsumed into Magdeburg. In the end Bernward had to be bribed with large amounts of land from the king’s own purse.

If you think Otto has now finally achieved what he wanted, wait for this. For years Otto had a prelate in mind to become archbishop of Magdeburg. However, just when he was about to announce the creation of the archbishopric and the elevation of his chosen priest, he received a letter. A letter that changed his mind. We do not know who sent the letter or what was in it. What we do know is that Otto elevated Adalbert to become the first archbishop of Magdeburg instead of his chosen man. Adalbert was a highly competent churchman, a former missionary in Russia and writer of very useful chronicle of the times. But he was also closely related to the great noble families of Saxony, namely the Billungs. And when push came to shove in 971 it was that same Adalbert who welcomed duke Hermann Billung into Magdeburg with royal honours, thereby threatening Otto’s whole reign.

Bottom line of this story is that the Ottonian emperors, and in particular our new guy, Otto II have some significant control over the church assets and soldiers, but they are not fully in control. If the bishop does not want to do something, he probably will not.

With ultimate control over the military resources in the hands of dukes, counts, bishops and abbots, how can Otto II get them to fight his battles?

There are three broad models:

The first one is the simplest one – just pay them. That may not be particularly chivalric, but it works. The Ottonian emperors did hit a bit of a sweet spot. Agricultural productivity improved dramatically during their reign. In the previous centuries unfree peasants had worked as gang-slaves on their master’s land. Now they were allowed to rent small plots of land to cultivate on their own alongside their service to the master. The only estimates for the impact of something like this comes from when the Soviet Union eased the rules for their Kolkhoz workers, letting them tend to a small field alongside their normal duties. That increased overall productivity conservatively estimated by factor 5x and stopped the famine.

Add to that the beginning of the medieval warming period that lasted from 900 to 1300 and you have a proper, sustained economic boom. Note that boom periods in the Middle Ages did not result in an increase of income per capita, it only increased the headcount as less people starved to death. Villages and towns expanded, castles, churches and abbeys get built, new markets, fairs and courts are set up. The dukes, counts, bishops, and abbots needed royal approval if they wanted to build castles, churches, and abbeys, they needed approval to open a market, lay a bridge and charge tolls. Hence the Ottonian emperors had a ready supply of goodies to pay their followers with.

The other source of funds were the silver mines in Goslar. They were at the time the largest silver mines in Europe giving the kings another major source of ready cash.

Money on its own is not enough though. People who fight for payment make astute risk vs. reward decisions. How likely is that military adventure to succeed? How probable is it that I will make it there and back again, and finally, how much risk do I take by leaving my homeland short of soldiers?

The second possible incentive for offering soldiers to the emperor was the promise of booty or new lands. That worked really well on the eastern border with the Slavs. These were lands generally considered to be free since their pagan owners were considered lawless. People like Margrave Gero and Hermann Billung became extraordinary rich in that game.  It was harder to do on the Western side of the kingdom and even in Italy where ownership rights were long established. Otto I initially awarded land and positions to his German followers in Italy, which presumably did not much endear him to the locals. When he awarded more or less half off Northern Italy to his brother Henry it did not go down well even with the German magnates. By his latter campaigns, these land grants had become rarer and under the later Ottonian they almost stopped. Where Italian lands were re-allocated, they were given to Italian followers of the emperor, usually upon advice of empress Adelheid. Service in Italy therefore had to be renumerated in land and rights in Germany as above.

The third and for us modern people hardest to understand incentive is the religious motivation. A king and even more so an emperor was a religious figure as well as an active ruler. The process of the coronation is modelled on the consecration of a bishop or pope. The King swears to protect the church and to defend Christendom and is blessed with the chrism like the pope.

If you were a bishop in the 10th century, which authority would you recognise, the emperor who is personally pious, leads a scandal free life and claims to be on a mission to convert the pagans, or would you take orders from a randy pope in Rome with a harem of mistresses and a propensity to blind and torture his local opponents. The religious underpinning of kingship was intensely practical in so far as bishops would reject orders from Rome and instead turn to their emperor as the decision maker on issues including theology and church appointments.

And the last bit that an emperor need is that famous elusive, unexplainable thing called charisma. Like a democratic leader today, all these tools of power are effectively useless if people do not like you.

For an emperor to be successful, he needs to be able to play all these three different angles expertly. Henry the Fowler was the absolute master of charisma. He had no real power at the start of his reign, but everyone succumbed to his charms, signed friendship agreements, and just generally did what he asked them to do. He was also generous, a successful military leader, and pious. Otto the Great put less emphasis on people liking him, he was generous and merciful but first and foremost he enjoyed God’s grace because he won the battles of Birten and Andernach against all the odds.

Let’s see which one of these skills his son, Otto II excels at, if any.

Let us look at Otto II from the perspective of his German nobles. Otto II was 18 years old, maybe a bit short in stature but a very athletic man. He was well-educated, probably the first medieval emperor who could read and write thanks to his mother, the glamourous Queen Adelheid of Italy. The last 5 years Otto II had lived in Italy and may have spoken German with a foreign accent.

He was married to the ultimate trophy wife of 10th century western Europe, Theophanu, who came with clothes, perfumes and jewels not seen in Germany before and who spoke Greek and Latin to her exotic attendants. For all her glamour, what she missed were the deep connections into German and Italian nobility that had made Mathilda of Ringelheim and Adelheid so useful to the previous kings. 

And that can become a problem. Otto’s vassals may be dab hands with the sword and axe, but they would not for the life of them know which way round to hold a book. What their wives should be chatting to Theophanu about, god only knows.

Otto’s direct family is actually quite small. He only has one sister left, Mathilda who has become abbess of Quedlinburg. He has two nephews, both called Otto, one is the son of Liudolf who had rebelled against their father and the other is the son of Konrad the Red, who had also rebelled against his father. And then there is one more niece, who is also an abbess, this time in Essen.

The next closest relative was Henry, duke of Bavaria, son of that other Henry duke of Bavaria, bane, and brother of Otto the Great. History calls this Henry “Heinrich den Zaenker” which translates as Henry the wrangler or Henry the Quarrelsome.

Given Otto’s marriage to the lovely Theophanu was a mere 1 year old and no child had yet arrived, right now his presumptive heir is none other than Henry the Quarrelsome.

When Otto II takes over, the relationship between the two cousins is all harmony. One of his first sets of documents include a number of donations to monasteries dear to Henry and his mother’s heart. One of these generous donations is the city of Bamberg, not bad for a cousin.

Months later things start turning sour. The seat of the bishop of Augsburg has become vacant. The previous incumbent, Saint Ulrich, defender against the Hungarians had died. A suitable candidate had been put forward by the old bishop on his deathbed. However, by some trickery Henry the Quarrelsome and his mother Judith get one of her relatives elected. That puts Otto on the spot. either he overturns the formal election of the bishop and exposes his cousin, or he caves, inviting more of such shenanigans. Otto II caves.

In November 973, a mere six months after Otto the Great’s death, things really heat up. The old duke of Swabia had died and Henry the Quarrelsome expects to be made duke of Swabia on top of already being duke of Bavaria. His sister is the widow of the old duke, which he thinks gives him somehow a claim. This time Otto II stands his ground and refuses. He raises his nephew also called Otto to become duke of Swabia[2].

Henry the Quarrelsome and his extended family regarded this as a massive snub. But from Otto’s perspective it made a lot of sense. Combining the duchies of Bavaria and Swabia would have created not only a huge powerbase in the south, it would have also cut Otto off from Italy.  A combined Swabia and Bavaria Would control all Alpine passes.

Henry is not prepared to accept this verdict and mobilises his own supporters in Bavaria. He goes even further and involves the duke of Poland, Miesco and duke Boleslav II of Bohemia, son of fratricidal Boleslav. To say it with John le Carre: treason is very much a matter of habit.

It took almost 6 months for Otto to discover the plot, but when he did, he called the conspirators to be tried at court. The conspirators, ex the Bohemian and Polish duke do appear in front of Otto II and he has them locked up right away. Henry is brought to the luxurious Pfalz in Ingelheim, whilst his mother has to enter a nunnery[3].

Bang! Let’s just think about what has just happened. Some rumours link Henry the Quarrelsome to a rebellion and without even a trial or chance for him to defend his position Otto II picks him up and puts him in jail. Compare that to his father Otto the Great who was offering leniency again and again. He even embraced his brother after he had tried to kill him in his sleep. Otto II clearly takes a different approach.

Did this heavy-handed approach work? The harsh treatment of Henry must have been a severe shock to the system of governance in the German kingdom. Henry was not just anyone, he led the second most powerful clan in the kingdom, he was, as of now, heir to that kingdom, brother to the dowager duchess of Swabia, brother-in-law to the king of Burgundy and closely related to Queen Adelheid, Otto II’s mother. Locking him up for forcing through what he believed was his right without even yet using military might was an extreme act. Indignation was strongest in Saxony.

The Saxons were particularly unimpressed with Otto II. Remember, the Ottonian dynasty were originally the dukes of Saxony and are descendants of the Saxon folk hero Widukind. But the Saxons had already gone off Otto the Great because of his long-term entanglement in Italy and now they had a king and emperor who seemed more Italian than German, let alone Saxon – that just would not do.  What makes this particularly galling is that some of Henry’s new supporters were the counts who had been awarded the inheritance of Margrave Gero in 965 specifically to appease them. It just is never enough. They preferred Henry who presented himself as German through and through with little interest in foreign adventures.

When Henry managed to escape in 976 several Saxon and Swabian nobles joined him in armed rebellion. In time honoured tradition, Henry and the other rebels gather in Regensburg. Otto II puts up an army and arrives at the gates of Regensburg in mid-July. By the 21st of July Otto has taken the city. It seems the citizens of Regensburg either have lost their appetite for resisting emperors after being sacked and burned by imperial troops on 955, or they may remember that the guy sacking and burning the town was Henry the Quarrelsome’s father.  Bottom line is that Henry fled to Bohemia before the siege had really begun.

Not losing a minute, Otto II deposes Henry as duke of Bavaria and then dismantles the duchy. In 976 the duchy of Bavaria was a lot further Southeast of the modern state of Bavaria and included all of Austria and the eastern part of Northern Italy, roughly from Verona to Trieste. Otto carved out a new Duchy of Carinthia, which encompassed what is now Austria and the Italian parts. This new duchy was given to another Henry, hoping this one would be more loyal than Cousin Henry. What was then left of Bavaria was given to the emperor’s nephew, Otto of Swabia.

Admin done Otto saddles his horse again and pursues his cousin to Bohemia. However, that trip ended in a bathing accident. When his troops went for a swim in the river near the city of Pilsen, they were surprised by the Bohemians and cut to pieces. I do not want to go off on a tangent about bathing in the Middle Ages, but this is another indication that personal hygiene was known about, but clearly considered dangerous.

Not being able to catch Henry in the summer of 976 meant the rebellion was not over. During the winter months Henry managed to gather new allies against Otto II. The first was another Henry, bishop of Augsburg, the one he had put into his post just 2 years earlier.  Two Henries are good but not good enough, so he acquired a third. That third Henry was the most unexpected one, it was Henry, duke of Carinthia, the guy Otto II had made duke just 12 months earlier. Even more bewildering this Henry was the son of a previous duke of Bavaria who had been pushed aside in favour of Henry the Quarrelsome dad. Why did he join? Maybe some convoluted hope that if the Quarrelsome was made king he would be made duke of a re-unified Bavaria or maybe he was just irritated about something Otto II has said or done. The latter seems to be happening a lot.

Anyway, we now have what is called the war of the three Henries. This one Otto II finally wins. First, he beats duke Boleslav of Bohemia who swears never-ending loyalty and promises to appear in front of the court next year. Meanwhile the Henries had taken the city of Passau. There fighting was a bit more intense, but after just about a month of siege the three Henrys had to yield. Passau may or may not have been burnt to the ground, though it is not quite clear what the poor citizens of Passau had done to deserve that.

Next spring Otto holds a great court assembly in Magdeburg. Duke Boleslav of Bohemia appears and after swearing unending love and fealty again is allowed to go home. The three Henrys lose all their positions and are put in jail. Henry the Quarrelsome will remain in jail until the day the message of Otto IIs death arrives. The other two Henrys are released a few years down the line and one of them, Henry of Carinthia will die fighting for Otto II. As for the duchy of Carinthia, that bit that comprises Austria and North-Eastern Italy, that goes to Otto of Worms, the son of Konrad the red and a nephew of emperor Otto II. And hence the war of the three Henrys ends with the three Otto’s possessions much increased.

Again, we see something happening that is becoming a uniquely German trait. The duchy of Carinthia that Otto created with a strike of a pen is not coming under direct royal control, as it would have been in France, it is re-distributed to senior nobles. Otto of Carinthia may be Otto’s nephew, but he is first and foremost the head of the Konradiner clan who are busy rebuilding their lost duchy of Franconia.

The other thing to note is that Otto II had a much easier time of bringing down the rebellion of the Henrys than his dad. However, he did not come out of it with the same elevation of prestige his father achieved. It was because Otto the Great had to rely on miracles to secure his reign, his ultimate success was proof that he was God’s anointed. Otto II’s quick success did not prove anything other than that a large number of soldiers is better than a small number.

Next week we will see how Otto’s reputation develops as he encounters new foes and even gets a chance to play with a really, really large number of soldiers.

I hope you will come along.

And if you enjoyed this episode, why don’t you subscribe to the podcast and from then on you will get every new episode into your inbox, every week.

[1] Warren T. Treadgold A History of the Byzantine State and Society, 1997, p.575

[2] RI II,2n643a November 973

[3] RI II,2n 667b June 974

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The empress Theophanu arrives from Byzantium

This week we finally say goodbye to emperor Otto the Great after seven episodes. I hope you agree he was worth it.

When we last saw him, he was celebrating the end of his successful campaign with a great assembly at Cologne. This great gathering in 965 was even more of a confirmation of his role as successor to the great Charlemagne than the coronation itself. The assembled rulers of western Europe did not just show up for the party, they recognised him as emperor, as a ruler above mere kings. And that included Lothar the young king of France.

Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans Episode 8 – The Imperial bride

This week we finally say goodbye to emperor Otto the Great after seven episodes. I hope you agree he was worth it.

When we last saw him, he was celebrating the end of his successful campaign with a great assembly at Cologne. This great gathering in 965 was even more of a confirmation of his role as successor to the great Charlemagne than the coronation itself. The assembled rulers of western Europe did not just show up for the party, they recognised him as emperor, as a ruler above mere kings. And that included Lothar the young king of France.

After three years in Italy, what he now needs to do is stick around with his German subjects and give them a bit of TLC. Early medieval monarchs were not supposed to be away for so long. Because there is no real bureaucracy of any kind, all decisions, deliberations, and orders are best done face to face. It was management by walking around. Since Carolingian times the court had followed a largely consistent itinerary going from one royal palace, called a Pfalz, to the next. For instance, Ottonian emperors would regularly celebrate Easter in Quedlinburg and Christmas in Frankfurt. They would call regularly at Fritzlar, Memleben, Magdeburg, Ingelheim, Worms and Aachen to name a few. That constant travel was in part necessary because no single location could feed the hundreds, if not thousands of people that made up the entourage of the king.

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But more importantly, the presence of the king or emperor projected power. Wherever the royal party stopped he would issue judgements, consult with his barons, plan military campaigns, award positions and solve administrative problems. If he does not show up for a long time, fewer decisions are being taken. Quarrels between the highest-ranking nobles and between the church and nobles remain unresolved, often ending up in feuds. Key positions may be left vacant until an answer can be obtained leaving borders unmanaged. Even worse it weakens the bonds that hold the kingdom together. Medieval vassalage is in the end a personal, not an institutional relationship. The noble has his rights and obligation first and foremost towards the king as an individual, not to the king as an institution. Therefore, the major nobles expect the king to call on their support in person, not always, but at least from time to time. Equally the major nobles are entitled to advise the king and the king was obliged to take their advice into account – and that could only happen when the king was around.  Failure to do so leads to frustration and ultimately revolt.

Therefore, it is paramount that Otto remains in Germany for the next few years and re-establishes his relationship with the magnates of his kingdom. As with most things paramount, Otto decides not to do this either.

Events in Rome demanded another journey across the alps.

Pope Leo VIII had died and the Romans, now a bit more circumspect than before, asked Otto’s permission before electing a new pope. They raised John XIII to the seat of St. Peter. John was a more worthy vicar of Christ by 10th century standards, having received a proper ecclesiastical education and been ordained as a bishop. Though that was not the reason he was elected.  He was first and foremost a senior member of the Crescenti family. The Crescenti were the other Roman clan that vied for prominence against the Theophylacts. You may remember the Theophylacts. They are the clan of Mariucca and randy Pope John the XII.

That could not go down well and by Christmas 965 the Romans under Theophylacts leadership rose up. Pope John XIII disappeared into a cell in the Castel Sant’ Angelo. 

In the meantime, Berengar’s son Adalbert had returned from Corsica as soon as he saw the last of Otto’s soldiers turn the corner of the Brenner pass. As you can see, Italy is no different to Germany. Once the ruler is physically absent, the power balance shifts and magnates begin to rise up. That explains why Adalbert managed to gain instant support amongst the Italian magnates. Otto’s political position in Italy was wiped out. Members of the pro-Ottonian party that empress Adelheid had built so carefully were either joining Adalbert or hid in their strongholds. Even the bishops Otto had appointed as his representatives in Italy switched sides.

Otto had no option than to go down to Italy. He called a diet in Worms to set the kingdom up for another extended stay down south.

First item on the agenda was the regency, which again went to his son, archbishop William of Mainz. King Otto II now 11 years old and was again left behind with his uncle.

The other big items on the agenda were two inheritances. The first one was Margrave Gero, the bloodthirsty conqueror of what is today’s states of Saxony and Brandenburg. Gero had died without a direct male heir, giving Otto the opportunity to allocate his enormous possessions fairly freely. Before Liudolf’s uprising, he might have taken the inheritance and given it to a member of his family or a close confidant. By 965 that had changed. Otto realised that he needed to reward the powerful families if he wanted to be safe from rebellions.

Consequently, he split Gero’s inheritance into six separate counties and marches that he handed to either senior members of Gero’s extended clan or scions of mighty Saxon families, some of whom may have even been loyal supporters. That had some long-term consequences. By handing these rare and unexpected windfalls back to the aristocratic clans, he allowed new and powerful entities to grow up. These entities over time challenged the emperors.  One of those entities, the March of Brandenburg was the county that would later turn into the kingdom of Prussia. Otto’s approach is very different to the French kings who consolidated any vacant duchy, county, baronetcy, village aldermanship into the direct ownership of the king whenever they could. That way the French kings managed to build a unified kingdom, whilst Germany… well you will see.

The other sad loss was Archbishop Brun of Cologne, Otto’s brother and most loyal counsellor. He was replaced as archbishop of Cologne by Folkmar but again, Folkmar did not receive the duchy of Lothringia. The two sub-duchies of upper and lower Lothringia that Brun had created for administrative purposes were elevated to full duchies and given to local powerful lords.

 In August 966 Otto crossed the alps via the Gotthard passes with a much smaller army than last time. This time most of the German dukes, counts and bishops stayed back home.

The Italian nobles immediately succumbed. Adalbert had already left the country – courtesy of an advance party led by duke Burkhard of Swabia a couple of months earlier. Otto moved into the capital, Pavia and took control of Northern Italy. He replaced his previous unreliable administrators with others, no less flighty ones.

After the, his third attempt at the Italian crown Adalbert gave up his ambitions. He retired to his wife’s possessions in Burgundy and gave his only son the name Otto as a sign of submission. That is not the end of Berengar’s family quest for the crown of Italy but we get a reprieve for 30 years.

Once it was cold enough Otto went down to Rome, took the city, freed the pope and instigated a Christmas bloodbath amongst the supporters of the Theophylacts. The leader of the rebellion was hanged from the neck of the statue of Marcus Aurelius the one that still stands on the Capitol today, the rest had their necks snapped in the more traditional manner or were whipped naked through the streets, walk of shame style. After that Otto I had no more trouble from the Romans for the rest of his reign.

That being done, Otto expanded his control south of Rome forcing the Lombard dukes of Capua, Spoleto and Benevento to acknowledge him as their overlord. In an effort to simplify things he had the three duchies put under control of one of them, Pandulf Ironhead, who became Otto’s man for the South.

Otto now had a border with the eastern Roman empire in Byzantium, which still held most of southern Italy.

Byzantium had been very much on the up over the last 50 years. Under a succession of warlike leaders, namely Romanos Lekapinos and Nikephoros Phokas, the empire had pushed the Muslim Kalifate back towards Baghdad and reconquered Crete, Antioch and other centres of the ancient Roman empire. For the first time in a long time, they were in a position where they could project power in Italy had Otto become too much of a nuisance. And him taking over the Lombard duchies made him a bit of a nuisance. The Byzantines begun mustering an army to send over to Italy.

Otto had absolutely no interest in a confrontation with the emperor in Constantinople, in fact the exact opposite was the case. Despite all his success and power, Otto had a serious inferiority complex. He knew the inhabitants of the eastern empire looked down on the uncivilised Germanic boors that had grabbed hold of the ancient western empire. Just think about the fact that Otto I had only just learned to read and write whilst the nobles of the eastern empire were majoring in intricate theological differences.

What Otto really, really wanted was to be acknowledged as an equal by the Byzantines. To that aim he proposed a marriage between his son, Otto II and Anna, daughter of emperor Romanos II and stepdaughter of the current emperor Nikephoros Phokas. Anna was the highest category of Byzantine princess, as she was born in the purple, i.e., she was born in a special room in the imperial palace that was covered in purple porphyry stone where only reigning empresses were giving birth. Otto was confident this would be a straightforward deal and called his son down from Germany to get ready for marriage and coronation.

When Byzantium heard of the proposal, the laughter of derision must have been heard up and down the Mediterranean Sea. Marrying a purple-born princess destined for the church to this barbarian usurper – you must be joking. 

Otto was hurt and when a 10th century monarch is feeling pain, a lot of poor peasants will feel a lot more pain. He readied his army and invaded the byzantine duchy of Puglia in the very south east of Italy. As per their military manual the Byzantine troops disappeared behind the walls of the big cities and Otto raided the countryside. To force a decision, he laid siege to the city of Bari. Bari was the major harbour liking Italy to Greece since Roman times. As a harbour it was quite easy to resupply since the Byzantines controlled the sea. Otto had overlooked that crucial piece of military intelligence and had to raise the siege. He returned to his new palace in Ravenna empty handed.

 As he was already there, Otto had his son crowned Emperor Otto II in Rome in December 967.

Negotiations started up again. This time our old friend Liudprand of Cremona was dispatched to Constantinople to deal with Nikephoros Phocas. Nikephoros offered the hand of Anna in exchange for Ravenna, Rome and all Otto held in Southern Italy. That was a bit too much for Otto. Otto took his army down to Bari again, to find out the city was still by the sea. Meanwhile on the shore of the Bosporus, Nikephoros had our hapless envoy put in jail, which earned him a scolding description as a short, ugly, boorish man in Liudprand’s memoires.

And it would have gone on forever like that had not Nikephoros been murdered during a palace coup. The new emperor was his nephew and murderer John Tzimiskes. John had to shore up his reign and had no time for skirmishes with some barbaric western pseudo emperor. John agreed to send a princess for Otto II. And with that, enter stage left, the most glamorous female figure of medieval German history, Theophanu Skleraina.

Theophanu was the daughter of Constantinos Skleros and Sophia Phokaina. Both the Skleros clan and the Phokas clan were prominent military families. However, Theophanu’s blood relationship with actual emperors was at best tangential. Through her mother she was a great niece of the emperor Nikephoros Phokas. She was also related to the usurper John Tzimiskes who had previously been married to her aunt.  Nikephoros Phokas and John Tzimiskes were career emperors who acquired the throne through military success, they were not hereditary emperors. The true blue blooded imperial family of the Macedonians ranked well above them and towered over Theophanu. Her rank in the line of succession to the imperial throne was roughly equivalent to Savannah Philips claim to the British throne stands today. You do not know who Savannah Philips is? Well, nor do I.

When John Tzimiskes chose this very minor royal to be married to the young emperor Otto II, he knew that this was a slap in the face. It is not that Otto’s court was ignorant of the affairs and intrigues in Constantinople. There were regular embassies between the two courts and Greek churchmen took up important roles in Rome and elsewhere. Otto and his advisors knew full well that what had arrived was not a purple-born Macedonian princess. They knew she was not even a blood relative of the current emperor. They also knew that in 927 an actual daughter of the emperor Christopher Lekapenos had been married to the Bulgarian ruler. And to add even more irony, in 988 the much desired, purple-born princess Anna was married to Vladimir, the Grand Duke of the Kiev Rus. I doubt there was any ambiguity about what has just happened. The Byzantines did not mind marrying their princesses to barbarians, they just minded marrying them to this barbarian.

The other person who knew full well that she had been sent on suicide mission was 12-year-old Theophanu Skleraina. She was given all the trappings of a byzantine princess, robes of gold and purple, diadems and earrings and a train of exotic looking attendants. But underneath all that bling she must have been scared shitless. The most positive outcome of this journey was that she would be sent back which meant she would be damaged goods for any future marriage in Constantinople and she would end up in a monastery, but at least she would be back home. The worse option was that she would be rejected and then held in a monastery somewhere in this barbaric north, places with terrifying names like Essen or Gandersheim. And Alternative 3, she may have to spend the rest of her life with an uncouth ginger bloke whose father was famously hirsute.

But When the two Ottos unpacked the parcel from the Vasilev, they realised they had been played. Yes, they could send her back or put her into a monastery, but what then? Start another attempt at conquering Bari? The city still had a harbour and the Germans still did not have a fleet. And if it really came to war, John Tzimiskes was a famous general, hero of the campaigns against the Saracens. If he arrived in Italy, the still fragile Italian situation would very quickly turn against them. Last, but by no means least, by 972 Otto had already been in Italy for 6 years, far too long to leave his vassals north of the alps unsupervised.

Best solution for Otto was to grin and bear it. Theophanu was presented to the German people in all her exotic, Byzantine finery and hailed as the finest of blue-blooded princesses. And it worked. When I learned about Theophanu in the 1980s, it was still in all the schoolbooks that she was a Byzantine princess, not just some distant relative.

On the 14th of April 972 she was married to the now 17-year-old emperor Otto II with all pomp and circumstance in St. Peters in Rome. Thephanu was also crowned empress for good measure and received her personal apanage in a sumptuously decorated title deed which you can see on The History of the Germans Facebook page.

Otto really had to go home now. He had been in Italy for 6 years and if you add the previous journey, he had been away for almost 10 years. Because Otto had failed to show for such a long time, grumblings had begun about a possible rebellion. Not from Bavaria or Lothringia, where rebellions had been endemic for decades, no, this time from Otto’s heartland, Saxony.

Otto had left his old friend Hermann Billung, in charge of Saxony. In the last 30 years Hermann, Margrave Gero and the Saxon armies had pushed the borders of the realm further and further east until they had reached Poland. Not content with that success, they waged war against the Polish duke Miesco. Miesco finally succumbed, accepted Christianity, married a Christian Saxon Noblewoman and accepted a sort of overlordship by the German kings.

For all that Hermann was elevated to be Duke, Gero’s associates had become counts of the border marches but still he and his fellow nobles did not feel they got the recognition they deserved from their absent king.

Rumours were going round that Otto had died in Italy. For instance his instructions to continue to fight the Redariers in the North were ignored and generally the whole place had become restless.

As a deliberate act of insubordination, on Palm Sunday Hermann entered Magdeburg, Ottos favourite palace and received reverence from the archbishop as if he was the king, he took Otto’s seat at the table and even slept in Otto’s own bed. That message was clear, come home or there will not be a home to come back to.

When Otto came home in 973 all was fine again. Hermann came to see him, bent the knee and gave huge presents, as did the archbishop of Magdeburg. The Saxon leaders regained their access to the king and whatever sedition there might have been, it stopped.

Otto celebrated his rule one last time in Quedlinburg, where the Kings of Poland and Denmark and the duke of Bohemia came in person to pay their respects whilst every European power including the Kalif in Cordoba and the Emperor in Constantinople sent envoys.

A few weeks later, on the 7th of May 973 at the age of 61 at his palace in Memleben, Otto grew feverish and tired. I let Widukind of Corvey take over from here:

His men understood what was happening and lay him on a bench. His head was dropping as if he were already dead, but they revived him. He was just able to receive the sacraments before he gave his last breath, without a groan and at peace.

The people said a great deal in praise of him and remembered that he had governed his subjects with paternal mercy and had freed them from their enemies. He had conquered with arms his arrogant enemies, namely the Magyars, Saracens and Danes. He had subjugated Italy. He had destroyed the shrines of the gods among the neighbouring peoples. He had established churches and orders of priests. They recalled many other good things as they participated in the royal funeral.

When the morning came, although he had already been anointed as king, and designated emperor by the pope, the people eagerly gave their hands to the son of the emperor, the unique hope of the entire church, as they had done before, promised their loyalty and support against all the adversaries, and confirmed this with military oaths. Thus he was elected anew by the entire people as their ruler. He transferred his father’s body to the city, which his father, himself, had built, called Magdeburg. So died the emperor of the Romans, the king of peoples, on the seventh of May. The Wednesday before Pentecost.”

Otto had been king of East Francia for 37 years and had been formally Roman Emperor for 11. He lies under a simple marble slab in the Dom in Magdeburg, next to his beloved first wife, Eadgyth.

See you next week.

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