History of the Germans Podcast

First up, why was reform suddenly needed?

It is hard to nail down the point in time when things went wrong for the Holy Roman Empire. It might have been as long ago as 1077 when emperor Heinrich IV had to kneel before the pope in Canossa, or was it in 1166 when the last great army of imperial vassals dies in mud and shit outside the walls of Rome. Or was it the sword that murdered Philipp of Swabia in 1208 that was the last of the thousand cuts.

But whatever event you choose, by 1495 the empire has been in dire straits for centuries. As friend of the podcast Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini said to the imperial princes “you acknowledge the emperor for your king and master, nevertheless he possesses but a precarious sovereignty; he has no powers; you only obey him when you choose and you are seldom inclined to obey. You are all desirous to be free: neither the princes nor estates render to him what is due; he has no revenues, no treasure. Hence you are involved in endless contests, and daily wars; hence you suffer rapine, murder and conflagrations, and a thousand evils which arise from divided authority.”

…because the endless feuding destroyed the country

When there are no powerful central institutions, law and order collapses. As one chronicler said, when the cat is away, the mice govern as they will. And what these mice liked even more than cheese was other people’s cheese.

Feuding was endemic. There weren’t just the major conflicts like the Mainzer Stiftsfehde or the Princes’ War, there were lots and lots of little fights, in particular in the south, where political power was particularly fragmented. It is the scale of it that is so shocking. Peter Wilson counted that between 1440 and 1570 there were 278 noble feuds – in Franconia alone. In the first half of the 15^th century, feuding destroyed 1,200 villages and the Hussite Revolt a further 1,500. And remember these villages are those that had survived the utter devastation in the wake of the Black Death.

Looting and pludering from the Housebook of Wolfegg

Now nobody can claim that in the 14^th and 15^th century the rest of europe was an island of peace where everybody was holding hands and singing Cumbaya. The Hundred years war, the War of the Roses, the battles between the Teutonic Knights and the Polish king, the Reconquista were epic struggles that ruined the countryside in very much the same way as it did in the empire. But all these conflicts were about the consolidation of central power, the king of France against his major vassals, which included the king of England, the king of England against the dukes, the Polish king against an independent state in his midst etc. You get my drift. These wars ended with a victory of the kings, who established strong institutions that did in the end made the roads safe and stopped peasants being assaulted by the local lords. The problem in the empire was that there was no light at the end of the tunnel. One day the Margrave of Brandenburg or the Count Palatine would win some territory, next time duke of Bavaria or the duke of Wurttemberg would take it away from them. There could never be a decisive victory that could bring all this mess to an end.

Feuding and the ensuing misery for the peasant population had been a scourge of the empire for centuries. So, what was it about the 15^th century that made the call for reform so deafening that it could no longer be ignored?

…because the empire is under threat from enemies for the first time

Arguably, there were two, or depending how you want to count, three things that changed during the 15^th century.

Firstly, up until the middle of the 15^th century, the empire had no natural predators. It may be a mess internally and the emperors were already very weak. But the gap to its neighbouring kingdoms, France, Poland, Denmark, Hungary wasn’t that huge. All these places, as discussed before, were going through a whole lot upheaval themselves. But as they consolidated, the fringes of the empire came under threat. Provence, Dauphine, Franche Comte, Prussia, Holland, the Venetian mainland, and even Austria were gradually swallowed up by these newly consolidated kingdoms.

And the empire is still shellshocked by the outcome of the Hussite wars where crusade after crusade is defeated in ever more humiliating fashion by the Bohemian peasant armies. If the flower of the German knighthood cannot even defeat these unwashed hillbilly’s, what if someone even better organised and even more powerful shows up on the border?

And there was exactly such a new kid on the block, a sort of bodybuilder kid, the Turkish Sultan who was rolling up the Balkans.

For the first time since the Magyar’s had been defeated on the Lechfeld in 955 was there a genuine threat to the very existence of the empire.

…because the cost of defence of the realm had exploded

These new threats emerged at a time when the cost of warfare exploded. Infantry tactics using pikes could now defeat cavalry and artillery had become a necessity. The best infantry troops were mercenaries, Bohemians, Swiss and German Landsknechte who expected to be paid handsomely. Founding canon was a highly specialised skill, and even a simple field gun cost a multiple of the typical knight’s equipment of warhorse, sword and working armour.

The defence of the empire could no longer be ensured by an occasional raising of the feudal levy. France and Hungary had created standing armies, and so had the Ottoman sultan. The Janissaries counted to about 8,000 to 10,000 men plus the permanent cavalry roughly the same size. And in case of war, the sultan could call on a multiples of that from the various regional governors, arguably as many as 200,000 men, though logistics meant they could not all be deployed at the same time in one place.

So the empire had to keep pace. In the 12^th and 13^th century the emperors would take 5 to 10,000 men south, Charles VIII took 30,000 men to Italy and as the Italian wars intensified, armies of 50,000 became the norm.

By the early 16^th century one year of campaigning against the Ottomans cost between 1.8m and 3.6m florins and another two decades later, the annual cost of the wars with France ran at 5.4m florins annually. The regular income from the imperial treasury was 25,000 florins though occasional one-off subsidies could be materially higher. An emperor, even if he was a major territorial prince in his own right simply could no longer protect the borders.

Though the full scale of the urgency was not clear to everybody in 1495, it was understood that the current political structure of the empire had run out of road.

..and the Council of Constance had shown a way out

But there were rays of sunshine here too. Feuding and threats to the territorial integrity of the empire had not been the biggest concerns of the people in the beginning of the 15^th century. The #1 issue was the great western schism, the fact that there were three popes who had all excommunicated each other and anyone who had followed their rivals, meaning everyone in europe had been excommunicated by at least 2 popes, giving them a 2 in 3 chance of hellfire.

Antonio Baldana: *De magno schismate* (On the Great Schism)

This massive problem had been resolved by the Council of Constance that sat between 1414 and 1418. This gave people not only hope that even the most intractable of problems could be resolved, it also gave them the tool to do it with. A church council, as we laid out way back in episodes 171 to 174 was the congregation of the faithful whose authority superseded even that of the pope. In other words ideas that had circulated since at least Marsilius of Padua, namely that authority is based on the consent of the ruled, had found manifest expression and prove more effective in resolving the schism than the hapless attempts of kings, cardinals and emperors that went on before.

The debate over Imperial Reform begins

It is no surprise that the serious debate over imperial reform kicked off for good during the later stages of the Council of Basel, i.e. in the 1430s.

This debate is I think extremely unusual, since it wasn’t conducted in the context of gatherings, like imperial assemblies or parliament, as it would have happened in the more centralised kingdoms of France or England. Because Germany was already fragmented into dozens of important centres, some princely residences, some free imperial cities, the debate was conducted in writing. Initially by copying manuscripts by hand, but soon after Gutenberg had invented the printing press, many of these documents were printed and distributed widely.

Most of these documents begin with an analysis of the dire state of the empire. Here is one commissioned by the archbishop of Trier in 1452 (quote): “… we perceive that there is neither peace nor justice nor prosecution of the law anywhere in the Empire’s affairs. There are many wanton conflicts, disobediences of subjects towards their lords, robberies, arsons, murders, thefts on the roads, feuds and enmities, without any justice or integrity. Neither freedom nor peace is anywhere to be found. Any given prince must defend himself with his own might. When he pursues peace or war in one place, new disputes instantly begin elsewhere. It is constantly necessary for princes, counts, lords, nobles and other good people to prepare for battle, or to pay money to avoid being attacked. It follows from this that the principalities are decayed and ruined through pledging, destruction, base and sinful usury and other day-to-day futile, pernicious, great and severe costs. In the same way, counties, lordships, monasteries and collegiate churches are also reduced to extreme poverty and ruin, and the more prestige and temporal goods they have, the greater the damage they suffer.

From this it also follows that the Roman Empire, the emperor, the princes and all the German nation is now considered the least by all other nations… It therefore seems to me to be necessary to consider a means to raise up the Empire and to put in order the matters of the Empire.”

The analysis was the part that everyone agreed on, it was the solution that was contentious. There are a dozen or so “major” documents that are considered part of this debate and that have influenced the Imperial reform process, though I would assume there were loads more that did not cut as deep.

In a very broad way, they fall into three camps.

Solution 1 – MEGA – Make the Emperor Great Again

In 1437 a paper appears that proclaims to be the “Reforms of Emperor Sigismund”, though it it is very unlikely he actually wrote it. For that the language is a little bit too fruity. The author does not hold back when he lays into the corruption and selfishness of the imperial princes. He is also interestingly very much against the imperial free cities, who he blames for not paying enough taxes. He says that when the heads of the church and the empire are confronted with their injustices, they quote: “turn their arses to us”. Not quite the tone of the imperial chancery.

His solution was to go back to the great and powerful emperors of the early Middle Ages. The princes, both the temporal and the spiritual ones should return all the lands, tolls, mints, mining rights that had once belonged to the empire. Then the emperor would again have the resources to deliver peace and justice and protect the realm.

This was of course never going to happen. But the “Reforms of Emperor Sigismund” remained in print throughout the 15th and 16^th century and enjoyed a lot of support amongst the lower classes, largely because it declared the following – quote:

“It is an unheard-of outrage – a great, ongoing injustice which ought to be publicized to all of Christendom – that some are so spiritually impoverished before God that they speak thus to their fellow human, whom God has powerfully redeemed and freed: ‘You are my property!’ This is a heathen way of behaving. God has redeemed us from all bonds, and henceforth nobody should haughtily exalt themselves into any position of ownership over another.” End quote

This idea of a renewed imperial power that could right all the wrongs done to the serfs and peasants was an important factor in the various uprisings and finally the Peasant War.

When these proposals were going a bit too fa, there were other, more moderate suggestions to create an effective imperial executive that enjoyed support.

Solution 2 – Let a Dozen Oligarchs Bloom

This position was first articulated in the policy paper, issued by the archbishop of Trier in 1452 that I have already quoted from before.

He proposed that every year the emperor and the electors come together in a city in the centre of the Reich and establish a court. Here all decisions about war, peace and justice were to be taken. As for the inner workings of this court he says quote: “each and every thing required for this establishment of justice and organization of the emperor’s court should be properly ordained by us, the electors, and the councillors whom we appoint for this purpose”.

The idea here is to set up a sort of oligarchy that runs the empire, keeps the peace, establish a system of courts to resolve disputes, bans feuding and raises armies for the defence of the realm as and when needed. The name for this structure was the Reichsregiment, best translated as the Imperial Government.

In this scenario the emperor was just a senior member of the Imperial Government with some ceremonial duties and maybe the nominal command of the army in case of war.

There are variations to this theme differing around the question of who is going to be a member of the Imperial Government. There were after all a number of very powerful imperial princes who were not electors like the dukes of Bavaria, Wurttemberg, Brunswick, Holstein and the Landgraves of Hesse to name just a few. And these princes were as disinclined to be ruled by the seven electors as they resented imperial interference in their affairs.

Solution 3 – Be More Pope

This proposal originated with Nicolas von Cues, one of the most influential theologians and thinkers of the age. Cues took inspiration from the church councils of Constance and Basel, the events that had given people hope that the difficulties of the empire could be resolved in the first place.

For him, the Reichstag, much like a church council, should represent the constituent parts of the empire, decide the laws and has the ultimate say in how the empire is to be run. The Reichstag should convene annually and a committee formed by the Reichstag should exercise its rights during the time the Reichstag wasn’t sitting.

But Cusanus did not want to replace the emperor with an imperial government, in the same way the church council did not replace the pope. He believed the empire needed a strong executive power to deliver peace and justice. The emperor should command a standing imperial army funded by an imperial tax. He would also direct four imperial vicars based in Brabant, Austria, Milan and Savoy who would administrate four regions or circles of the empire. Next, an eternal peace that banned feuding would be passed by the Reichstag and a system of courts established. Decision of the courts would be enforced by the imperial vicars or the emperor himself.

These are the three options, return to the good old days of Otto the Great, create an Imperial government made up of electors and maybe princes and third, a sort of middle way where we end up with the Reichstag and the emperor working together, one focusing on passing the rules and the other on enforcing the decisions, in particular the ban on feuding and the defence of the empire.

Attempts so far by Trier & Martin Mayr

Fascinating as this debate amongst clerics and intellectuals may be, this does not solve the problem unless somebody does something.

As you may remember from the previous seasons, efforts have been made to bring about imperial reform.

The electors deposed Wenceslaus the Lazy for incompetence and replaced him with Ruprecht of the Palatinate in the hope he would resolve the issue. When neither he nor Sigismund moved things on, they planned to depose Sigismund as well, but failed to agree on a candidate for his succession. Still first attempts at establishing a general imperial tax were made, but petered out rapidly (episode 179).

There was a lot of enthusiasm when Friedrich III come in and established the Kammergericht as an imperial court staffed with professional judges but that had evaporated rapidly. In the 1450s and 1460s several princes, guided by Martin Mayr, attempted to reform the empire by replacing Friedrich III with a more suitable, or malleable candidate. Various names were floated, including Friedrich the Victorious of the Palatinate and Georg von Podiebrad, the king of Bohemia.

But neither of these schemes came to fruition. In the 30 years before the diet of Worms of 1495, the debate had gradually turned into a standoff. The princes demanded action, and in 1467 Friedrich III passed a time limited Landfrieden, or general peace and re- established the Kammergericht. However this did not materially reduced feuding, mainly because the Kammergericht judges often went without pay and Friedrich III lacked the resources to enforce their judgements.

After that things then ground to a complete halt. Every time the estates demanded more significant change, Friedrich III refused to even debate it, at which point the princes refused any help in the various wars and conflicts, except for the most obvious cases at Neuss and when Maximilian was imprisoned in Bruges.

The 19^th century came down hard on Friedrich III, blamed the continued delay in German statehood on his intransigence. However, since the princely proposals were usually along the lines of the archbishop of Trier, aka asking for a complete emasculation of the emperor and the establishment of a princely Imperial Government, I can understand why he kept going Njet, or in Austria “na”

Maximilian on the other hand was more inclined to discuss imperial reform. He could see that his father’s strategy had run out of road. He had fought the French on the Western border for a decade and his dream was to go up against the Turks. There was no way he could do that without the support of the imperial estates. And the only way to ensure consistent support from the estates was by establishing new institutions and taxation model.

Therefore, when he was elected in 1486 he gave some subtle or not so subtle hints that he was ready to negotiate. But he could never really act on this since his father stepped in every time Maximilian was about to make concessions.

That is why nothing happened until 1495. But in 1495 Friedrich III, minus one half leg, was safely three feet under and the real discussion could begin.

Convocation of the Diet of Worms

Maximilian called on the imperial estates to assemble in Worms on February 2, 1495. When he did that, he had not intended to make this a debate about imperial reform. All he wanted was a two week get together, at the end of which the estates would grant him two things, an immediate subsidy to raise an army to go after king Charles VIII of France who had invaded the empire in Italy, and ideally a longer term say 10 to 12 year commitment to fund a standing army for the defense against the Turks.

Worms – Haus zur Munze where the Diet met

As usual, Maximilian was late. When he got to Worms on March 18^th, there was hardly anyone there. It took another 10 days before enough princes were assembled to form a quorum. Maximilian made a speech, said, give me the money now, it is urgent, the French are already in Naples.

This went down like a lead balloon. The still rather small audience was taken aback by the speech. Maximilian had not mentioned the imperial reform at all. Not a single word, not even a gentle nod in the general direction. Why, this was the first gathering after Friedrich III’s death. Of course we should discuss the Imperial reform now. They stalled and said we should wait until more princes are here.

April 1495 – The debate begins for real.

It took until April 7^th for the 147 participants to make their way to Worms. There were 5 of the 7 electors, 29 temporal princes and 10 spiritual lords had come in person and a further 12 had sent their representatives. Then there were 67 counts and imperial knights and 24 imperial cities present.

By now Maximilian was getting seriously twitchy. He was not prepared for some longish constitutional debate. Literally a week ago his envoys had signed up for the Holy League and his new Italian and Spanish allies expected him to come down to Italy with an army and help trap the king of France in Naples. He also had another couple of irons in the fire. Perkin Warbeck, the Yorkist pretender was recruiting an army for his landing in England. This army was paid for by Maximilian and his mother in law, Margaret of York and was sailing in July of that same year. And there was still a rest of the Burgundian war going on in Gelders, where the French supported a claimant to the duchy.

Maximilian really needed to get this done and quick.

But that was not easy. The princes, bishops, counts, knights and cities who had gathered in Worms believed that it was now or never. Maximilian’s father was dead and the new king should now engage on the long overdue reforms, and moreover, they had him by the short and curly’s. Plus, if they would give him the money now and he defeated the French, went to Rome, got crowned emperor and returned as the victorious hero, it would take decades before they could nail him down again.

So they stalled. They took the imperial funding proposals and pretended they were debating them. But in reality, they discussed what imperial reforms they would demand of Maximilian. After a few weeks of no progress, Maximilian realised that his schedule was no longer achievable. He called the estates, asked them what they wanted and they presented him with a document outlining a range of reforms they wanted to discuss. These looked aspirational, but not excessive and Maximilian reluctantly agreed that the Reichstag would now debate imperial reform.

The decision making process

To understand what happened next, we have to take a quick look at the way the Reichstag makes its decisions.

The Reichstag is not a parliament where everybody is in one room and debates the issues of the day. The Reichstag is actually three separate colleges, one for the Electors, one for the imperial princes and the counts and a third one for the cities.

The process starts with an imperial proposal that sets the agenda. The proposal goes into each of the colleges, where the members discuss it behind closed doors and vote on their response.

Then the three colleges compare their respective opinions and debate and revise them, until they arrive at a unanimous opinion of all three colleges which is then presented to the emperor. The emperor can then either agree or reject it. If he rejected it, it went back to the colleges and the whole process starts again.

This process took ages!

The process was heavily tilted in favour of the electors and major territorial princes. These two colleges would coordinate their opinions before they would show them to the college of the cities who could then only get smaller adjustments through. Secondly, the smaller entities, the counts, abbots, abbesses and imperial knights had to pool their votes, weighing no more than the vote of one of the princes, and peasants were of course not represented at all.

And the emperor was not allowed to be present at any of these. He was literally hopping mad outside the closed doors as the king of France slipped through his fingers.

And because it was complex and involved a lot of chats in corridors and meetups in side rooms, it required someone to manage the process. Enter stage left, Berthold von Henneberg, archbishop of Mainz.

Berthold has been painted as Maximilian’s great adversary who fought for the rights of the estates against a recalcitrant ruler, unwilling to pass any reforms. But that is probably inaccurate. Berthold was, like many other bishops and abbots, very keen on a permanent peace and an effective ban on feuding. As we have seen in the example of Mainz, the largely defenceless church territories were under constant attack from rapacious princes. And he also believed that an Imperial Government would be much better able to achieve law and order than the emperor. But he wasn’t a revolutionary flying the flag of the liberty in the face of tyranny. He was more the guy who brokered the compromise the estates could bring to the emperor.

With all the preliminaries out of the way, we can look at the actual debates. I think the whole process breaks down into three separate phases.

Phase 1 lasted from March 18^th to April 27^th 1495. In that phase Maximilian pushed for his initial proposal to just give him the money and maybe discuss imperial reform later. That proposal was stalled by the estates. Instead they presented him with a counterproposal, to first discuss a permanent peace, the establishment or revival of the courts, the Kammergericht and the Reichsregiment, the Imperial government. Once that has been agreed they would be happy to discuss the funding of the army and taxation. Maximilian resented the idea of an Imperial government where the electors had a huge amount of power, but given his position, he agreed to proceed on this basis.

Phase 2 lasted from April 27^th to June 22^nd. As described above, the Reichstag set-up and process is heavily skewed to the electors and Imperial princes. And the electors and imperial princes know that Maximilian is under massive pressure. So they ransack the sweetshop. What the Reichstag presents on May 18^th 1495 was a princely fever dream.

They propose an Imperial Government made up of 17 representatives that would be given full control of the state. They would handle Finance, domestic and foreign policy, defence, law and order, justice and even legislation. In this Imperial government the emperor would have only 3 of the 17 votes. In a particularly misjudged slight, the Habsburg duchies did not have a permanent seat in this government. What enraged Maximilian even more, if that is at all possible, was that the conduct of external wars was taken away from him completely. The Imperial government was to appoint an Imperial Captain who would raise troops, appoint officers, manage logistics and lead in battle.

That would have turned the emperor into a completely powerless figurehead, wheeled out on special occasions looking fancy in his crown and gown.

It also did not help that the proposal came with a whole host of accusations that Maximilian and his predecessors had presided over a century of decay and loss of territory. And since the emperors had let so many lands go, the burden on these who had remained was now exorbitant. So before he asked for more money, he should go and collect the outstanding dues in Provence, the Rhone Valley and the Low Countries.

Obviously there is no way in the world or outside it that Maximilian would sign on to this. They tried to sweeten the deal by granting him 100,000 florins to raise an army but that was less than the 150,000 he had asked for, and as we will see is only paid when it was too late.

When he receive the proposals on May 25^th, he called it for what it was, blackmail. He was so angry, he did not respond for almost a month. Instead he acted as if there was no Reichstag going on. He invested Ludovico il Moro as duke of Milan without asking the electors, he negotiated with the Swiss about hiring mercenaries for a war against the French and the Turks.

Having spent weeks jumping up and down outside the council chambers of the Reichstag, now he let the princes walk by his chamber wondering what the king would do next.

It must have been a true feat of self-discipline to not go and beg for money. With every day that passed the chances to meet his international commitments and to catch the king of France were dwindling away. But there was no way he could hand over the crown of the empire to the princes. There is more of his old man in Maximilian that it appears at first sight.

But Maximilian wasn’t idle. He seeded discontent amongst the estates. Not everyone was keen on an all-powerful Imperial government dominated by the Prince-electors. All the smaller entities, the counts, the abbots, the cities, the imperial knights feared quite rightly that they would be swallowed up by the larger territorial princes. But even some of the most powerful dukes, of Bavaria and Saxony were unhappy with the limitations to what was right now almost complete autonomy. Slowly but surely the consensus over a princely oligarchy was falling apart.

The first indication that the princes were about to cave came when they revised their proposals for the permanent peace and the process for the professional court, the Kammergericht. These were all topics where the two sides had a lot of common ground. These proposals then became the basis on which productive negotiations continued for the rest of the Reichstag.

But on the Imperial government, not a peep until, almost a month later, on June 22 he sent a revised version of the Reichstag proposals back to the colleges. He had taken their text and just simply flipped words, so that for instance the Imperial Government was to be staffed not by the princes, but by people the emperor chose. It would be based, not in Frankfurt, but at the imperial court. Whole sections he did not approve off, like the section on the Imperial Captain, he simply dropped.

All that went back to Reichstag for further debate, which kicks off Phase 3.

We are now at the end of June. The battle of Fornuovo took place on July 8^th. Charles VIII was home and dry. Perkin Warbeck’s landing in England had ended in a total disaster. The guy did not even get ashore before his small army was decimated. Gelders could wait another year.

Basically, the power of blackmail the estates had over Maximilian was gone. The ball is now in the King’s court. Now he can use time to force concessions.

On June 28^th, the electors and princes give up their idea of an Imperial Government that replaces the emperor. Instead they agree to something called the “Handhabung” that laid down some rules about a governing council and the Reichstag procedure that would soon be revised.

And whilst all this back and forth over power in the empire went on, a few unsung heroes managed to forge an agreement between all the parties involved that would actually stand the test of time. The “Ewige Landfrieden”, the eternal peace which at least formally ended feuding in the empire, the Kammergerichtsordnung, the procedural for the professional imperial court and the Common Penny, the tax that was meant to fund these institutions.

Some of these were real breakthroughs that stayed on the statute book until 1806, others were less successful, but 1495 marked a huge step towards the curious constitutional structure of the Holy Roman Empire that we will discuss in more detail next week. I hope you will join us again.

And as always, if you feel this show serves a purpose that you feel is worth supporting, go to historyofthegermans.com/support where you find all sorts of exciting ways to keep me in my seat chatting about long forgotten empires.

And a big thankyou to Duncan Hardy whose translations of key documents I used extensively in this episode. You can find a link to his excellent book in the travel, maps and books section of my website

Episode 220 – The Burgundian Experience(s)

by History of the Germans Podcast on 8th January 20265th February 2026

Maximilian elected King of Romans and emprisoned

Transcript

In this episode the 15-year long war over the Burgundian succession will come to its end. You may have thought it was done last time, but no. The revolutionary spirit of the Flemish cities is not yet broken and their most audacious move is still to come. And this time they are not going up against an archduke and regent, but against a newly elected king of the Romans.

Maximilian of Habsburg’s experience in Burgundy swung between moments of utter delight and happiness and depths of death, destruction and despair. It shaped this young duke who arrived aged 18 full of dreams of chivalry and left, aged 31 an battle hardened general with a clear view of where he wanted to take the empire. Get ready for the ultimate roller coaster.

But before we start just a quick update on the History of the Germans tour. I must say I was completely overwhelmed by the response. Effectively we were overbooked within 24 hours. That left me on the one hand elated that so many of you want to come along, but also with the unpleasant task of having to choose. As I mentioned before, we were giving patrons priority, and as it happened there were so many patrons signing on, that we could not even accommodate all of you. As they say in Jaws, “I think we need a bigger boat”. Since we have no bigger boat, I have decided to do another tour next year, summer 2027, likely on a similar route. I will let you know about it sometime in July. To all of you who we could not take along, let me say that I am really sorry, but hopefully it works out next time.

And with that, back to the show…

Recap

Our last episode is now 3 weeks old, a couple of things have happened that may have diverted your attention, so I should probably give you a quick reminder of where we are. Maximilian of Austria, the son of the emperor Friedrich III had married Marie of Burgundy, the heiress of the richest state in Europe. These lands that at their largest extent comprised modern day Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg, Picardie, Burgundy, Franche Comte and very briefly Lorraine were a massive thorn in the side of the French monarchy. During the Hundred Years War an alliance between Burgundy and England had almost forced the Valois kings of France into submission. When Maximilian took over the management of Burgundy, the French king Louis XI moved heaven and earth to crush him and break up Burgundy.

By the year 1485, it looked as if Maximilian had largely won this war. His last struggle had been with the two greatest cities of his realm, Bruges and Ghent, where popular uprisings fueled by French money had attempted to separate them from the Burgundian state. Through a combination of smart military tactics, brute force and fostering internal conflict, Maximilian had occupied first Bruges and then Ghent. The French troops sent to support the Ghent rebellion had to leave by the back door.

Meanwhile the smart king Louis XI of France had died and his son, Charles VIII was a minor, which slowed down French aggression. With Burgundy pacified and France contained, Maximilian could, for the first time in a decade turn his attention to the empire and to his ancestral homelands in Austria.

The Fall of Vienna

Things in Austria had gone from bad to worse. Maximilian’s father, the emperor Friedrich III had spent the last years trying to fend off a simultaneous attacks by the Ottoman empire and the king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus. Matthias and Friedrich had a very ambivalent relationship. On the one hand they both claimed the title of a king of Hungary and had clashed before. But that conflict had ended in a compromise that had left Friedrich with a small part of Hungary and the rights to carry the title, whilst Matthias received the Hungarian crown back and the two men recognized each other as heirs of their respective lands, should either die without male offspring.

But these agreements were not sufficient to contain Matthias’ ambitions. He commanded one of the largest, best equipped and best trained armies in Europe and he was keen to put it to good use. He fought a long war with Bohemia that brought him Silesia and Moravia. When that concluded in a peace agreement in 1478, he turned his eyes on Austria. In 1482 Matthias sent towards Vienna. The always skint Friedrich III fought back but realistically never stood a chance on his own. He begged and pleaded with the princes to fend off this foreign invasion into the empire. He called diet after diet, but no help was forthcoming.

Much like with Maximilian’s Burgundian efforts, the princes did regarded the Habsburg quarrels with their neighbors as a private matter, not one that affected the empire in its composition. They clearly did not see it in the same vein as the siege of Neuss where plucky Rheinlaenders were holding out against Charles of Burgundy who they regarded as a French prince. And since I am mentioning Neuss, let me pass on a recommendation from my old schoolfriend and avid listener of the show, Ulf. It is the History of the siege of Neuss by the city’s scribe, Christianus Wierstraet, one of the earliest print products and much more lively in its descriptions than earlier chroniclers. There is for instance a story about how the defenders of the city threw diluted pig manure on the attackers with devastating effect and lots more. Just check out his comment on the episode 214 webpage.

And another matter was driving the princes and electors, the issue of imperial reform. This topic had been on the table since at least 1410 and we are entering the hot phase of constitutional reform. For now I will only mention this in passing, but do not worry, we will get deep into it when we reach the diet of Worms in 1495.

We are still 10 years away from that, in 1485, and Matthias Hunyadi has just taken Vienna almost to the day when Maximilan marched into Ghent. This shifted the political situation in the empire at least a little bit. The princes were initially only mildly uncomfortable about a Hungarian taking over Austria, but they were actually concerned when Matthias assumed the title of duke of Austria without even asking for any kind of confirmation from the empire. That could be interpreted as a removal of Austria from the commonwealth. Losing Austria would be embarrassing and the world was still sufficiently medieval for embarrassment to be an important factor in politics.

What was even more embarrassing for all concerned was the 70-year old emperor Friedrich III who had suddenly become homeless. Over the next few years he would move from one city or monastery to the next, demanding being housed and fed and left once the imperial credit at the local tailors, butchers and bakers had been exhausted. Friedrich put his worldly possessions into his cousin Sigismund’s garage and left him his beloved daughter Kunigunde to look after. As we have heard in episode 197, the care and attention of the old roue did not extend to preventing her running away with one of Friedrich’s many enemies, duke Albrecht of Bavaria-Munich.

The Election of Maximilian I

To break out of this rather awkward situation, Friedrich III and Maximilian made a move that was at the same time long overdue and audacious.

All throughout the time Friedrich III wore the imperial crown, there had been discussions about electing a King of the Romans. Initially the princely reform faction had proposed Friedrich the Victorious of the Palatinate and then Georg of Podiebrad, the king of Bohemia. And then Charles the Bold had put his golden hat in the ring during the meeting in Trier. In 1486 another slate of potential candidates were discussed, including Albrecht of Saxony, a close ally of the Habsburgs and even more bewildering, Matthias Hunyadi, the Hungarian king and invader of the empire.

This constant debate showed first and foremost that the empire remained dissatisfied with the lack of initiative of Friedrich III and his reluctance to tackle the issue of imperial reform beyond the Landfrieden, the general peace he renewed in regular intervals. The princes and the public opinion had had enough and demanded a more proactive figure at the helm of the empire.

At the same time, electing a king of the Romans whilst the emperor was still alive had happened only once since the days of the Hohenstaufen. In 1376 emperor Karl IV had burned through literally millions to get his feckless son Wenceslaus elected, and that was no good precedent at all.

Still, in 1486 six Prince electors gathered in Frankfurt to elect a new king of the Romans. There were only six of them present because we now have two kings of Bohemia, Wladislaw Jagiello who ruled Bohemia proper and the already mentioned Matthias Hunyadi who had received the title along with Silesia and Moravia in the peace agreement that ended his Bohemian campaign. And neither of these men were fans of Maximilian and Friedrich, so they were NFI.

Which tells you who was the key candidate for the crown here, and that was of course Maximilian, by now 27 years old, a battle hardened general who had been at war continuously for 9 years, who had defeated the mighty king of France and had subdued the haughty cities of Flanders. In massive contrast to his father, he was young, dynamic, full of ideas and hinted that he may be open to a reform of the empire.

Though it had all been set up and arranged by the Habsburgs, the outcome wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Some of the Electors, including the now very aged Albrecht Achilles of Brandenburg had their reservations about electing Maximilian, Hungarian and French agents were distributing bribes and spreading discontent, and there was the obvious question, whether the election should be made conditional upon at least a first step towards imperial reform.

Another issue that had often been cited in the past was however a non-issue. Maximilian and Friedrich III had not seen each other since the fresh-faced prince had set off for his Burgundian adventure. And whilst Maximilian’s star was rising rapidly, Friedrich’s already somewhat matt rays had dimmed even further. And Friedrich had made Maximilian swear not to interfere in matters of the empire until the day his father had indeed shuffled off his mortal coil.

Some writers took these circumstances and concluded that Friedrich III had been jealous of his son and opposed Maximilian’s election. It is true that Maximilian had asked for an election long before 1486 and his father had turned him down, but that may not have been down to animosity or jealousy, but more a function of the still unstable situation in Burgundy. Hermann Wiesflecker, whose three volume biography of Maximilian is the benchmark secondary source, argued convincingly and based on detailed analysis, that Friedrich III was very much the engine behind the election of his son as a way to free up resources for a reconquest of Austria.

So, on February 16^th, 1486 the Prince electors gathered in the church of St. Bartholomeu in Frankfurt, the church that is today called the Frankfurt Dom. Unusually the election was presided over by the reigning emperor, Friedrich III who kept things in check. Maximilian I was duly elected king of the Romans.

Coronation of Maximiian – from the Triumphal Arch of Maximilian

At the same time the Landfrieden, the general peace was extended by another 10 years and the Kammergericht, the professional imperial court, was revived to adjudicate disputes. And then there was the main reason the Habsburgs had come to Frankfurt and had spent significant amounts bribing the electors, and that was to get the imperial princes to help pushing the king of Hungary out of Austria. More on that issue in a moment.

Before we get to the business end, we have to talk about the coronation, which at that point still took place in Aachen, complete with seating on the throne of Charlemagne and weird rituals involving oats. But the best bit was the feast. Of course the great princes and bishops were served an innumerable number of dishes, Maximilian and Friedrich on gold plates, not silver, a Burgundian tradition. As for the people, they were provided with some fine dish that leaves even the legendary Turducken in its wake. The court chefs roasted an Ox, stuffed with a pig that was stuffed with a goose that was stuffed with a chicken, which was stiffed with a pheasant. That is what we call stuffing!

Return to the Low Countries

That ox wasn’t the only one who got stuffed right royally that day. The emperor Friedrich III was the other. No help for the eastern lands was forthcoming. Not even his son Maximilian wanted to go with him to Innsbruck to muster an army against Hunyadi. Instead, Maximilian returned to his new home in the Low Countries. For a few days Friedrich wandered aimlessly around the empire before he reluctantly accepted his son’s invitation to join him in the splendor of the Burgundian court.

The father-son dynamic over the next few months was unusually modern. In an aristocratic society built on inheritance, you rarely hear stories of sons or daughters proudly showing off their achievements to their parents. But that is exactly what happened now. Maximilian dragged his aging and homeless father from one astoundingly rich and beautiful city in his realm to the next. Everywhere he ordered the Full Monty of grand entrances, tournaments, dances, visits to the arsenals and cloth halls, introductions to the great artists alive and dead, peeks into the vaults of the Burgundian treasure houses etc., etc. As a proud homeowner I find this exceedingly relatable.

But Maximilian’s decision to leave the ancient positions of the House of Habsburg to the enemy was not just because he craved the recognition of his old man. It was also driven by a fundamental geopolitical view that Maximilian had developed over the previous decade.

As we have followed the house of Habsburg over the last almost 20 episodes, their focus had been the south and east, Bohemia, Hungary, Tirol, Switzerland, further Austria, Dalmatia which put them in conflict with whoever ruled Bohemia and Hungary, Venice, the Swiss and the Wittelsbachs.

Burgundian politics had one primary focus, and that was France. In the same way that Burgundy’s existence was an existential threat to France, a powerful French king was an anathema to the Burgundian rulers. The foreign policy of the grand dukes of the West aimed to isolate and surround France through alliances with England, Brittany, Savoy and the Spanish Kingdoms. If they had any involvement with the eastern end of the empire, it was driven by romantic notions of the crusades, not hard politics.

the Siege of Orleans during the Hundred Years War

Maximilian’s formative years had been spent in his war with the French and he had swallowed the Burgundian worldview hook, line and sinker. In his mind, the victory in the west was a precondition of success in the east – where have we heard that before…

The French coming back to Flanders

And looking at the situation in 1486/87 Maximilian was right. Given the reluctance of the imperial princes to help against Hunyadi, any chance for the Habsburgs to regain Austria depended on a firm hold over the Low Countries and their tax revenues. And in 1486 the Low countries were again unstable – the French were back on the warpath.

The French regent, Anne of Beaujeu, the only one of Louis XI’s children to have inherited his cunning, had taken advantage of a serious mistake Maximilian had made. In the previous year, specifically on August the 22^nd, an English king is said to have uttered the unforgettable words “ A horse, a kingdom for a horse” before being put eight feet under a car park.

King Richard III in the car park as discovered in 2012

The battle of Bosworth Field was a major setback for Maximilian. He had kept a close relationship first with Edward IV and then Richard III of England, in large part because Margaret of York, the sister of these kings, was his mother in law and a major pillar of his regime. When Richard III fell and Henry Tudor took over as Henry VII, Maximilian supported the Yorkist opposition, including the imposter Perkin Warbek. That did not endear him to the new rulers of England who pivoted the usual alliance structure and lined up with France against Burgundy. Maximilian firmed up his friendship with duke Francois of Brittany and the Spanish monarchs to fend off the renewed threat.

Whilst Maximilian was showing off Brussels and Bruges to his dad, the French attacked his southern border. Maximilian had to go to the Estates General once again and ask for money. Reluctantly he was given some cash and he recruited mercenaries, some Swiss but many from southern Germany where a new pool of military forces was getting established – a pool that would become known as the Landsknechte.

Swiss Reislaufer and German Landsknechte have one thing in common, they fight for money. And money as we know by now is what Maximilian keeps running out of all the time. The net result was that Maximilian fought a number of reasonably successful engagements, but could not follow through, because he constantly lacked the cash at the crucial moment. Another issue was that the Swiss were leaning more and more towards the French whose payment discipline was significantly better than the Habsburgs’. So, when Maximilian was trying to drive his forces into French territory, the Swiss refused and went home. This will become a fixed pattern in the forthcoming conflict between France and the Habsburgs.

*Landsknechte*, etching by Daniel Hopfer, c. 1530

And then, in the summer of 1487, things went properly off the rails. A detachment of 1,300 riders and 1,600 infantry, led by some of the most important Burgundian nobles fell into an elaborate trap. The entire division was either cut down or taken prisoner.

Maximilian a Prisoner in Bruges

The defeat set Flanders alight. The horns of rebellion sounded once more. The lower classes in Ghent and Bruges took over the government again. Jan van Coppenhole, the leader of the last rebellion returned to Ghent and established a revolutionary government, complete with a revolutionary guard called the White Squires that kept order through blood and iron. The French, who had harbored and supported Coppenhole for a decade, offered the city of Ghent the status of an independent city republic within the French Kingdom.

Maximilian was once more confronted with an uprising by his richest cities. And as before, means to defeat them had to come from the other parts of his lands, from Brabant, Hainault and Holland. But they too were now exhausted. The constant wars and the marauding mercenaries who made no difference between friends and foes left them destitute and disenchanted with Maximilian’s rule.

*The Judgment of Cambyses* (commissioned in 1488, completed in 1498), Bruges’s symbolic apology to Maximilian

That is when Maximilian came up with a madcap plan. He decided to go straight into the Maw of the Flemish Lion. He took 500 men and entered Bruges. He took up residence in the ducal palace and opened negotiations with the Estates general he had convened there. For about a month things looked as if there was a way to reach a compromise. Maximilian sent some of his men out to reinforce the army he intended to lead against Ghent. But when he tried to join them, things got out of hand.

The city closed its gates and they gathered on the market square, all 52 guilds with banners, weapons and guns. Maximilian, accompanied by his remaining 150 Landknechte appeared on the square and tried to reason with them. The citizens complained about the greedy bureaucrats, the oppressive taxation levels, the marauding mercenaries and the disruption of the trade with France. Maximilian listened and promised to resolve these issues – how, god knows, but that was the kind of thing one says in that situation.

The people went home , but by the next morning they had concluded that Maximilian was not going to do anything they wanted. Once again the grand bell, the Roland rang across Bruges, the shutters went down on the shops and the citizens donned their armor and gathered on the market square. They plundered the houses of Maximilian’s allies and demanded to see him. Once more he appeared on the square, this time he left the Landsknechte at home and brought just 20 local noblemen. The mob demanded he handed over his senior administrators so they could be tried and hanged, which he refused. Rumors spread that he had ordered a great army to come down from Antwerp and that if they let him out, he would order his soldiers to massacre them all. You can imagine the screaming accusations, Maximilian’s increasingly irritated defense and the city leaders trying to calm the situation. This time bloodshed could be avoided and Maximilian returned to his palace.

The next day began as a replay of the previous two. Maximilian once more tried to reason with the increasingly enraged citizenship. The Bruggelinge had by now received a message from the revolutionaries in Ghent telling them not to let the king escape. Maximilian promised not to leave Bruges, but that promise was not enough. The locals pressed forward, took Maximilian and brought him to the house of a spice trader called the Kranenbourg. That is where he would remain for 16 long weeks, a prisoner of the city of Bruges.

That was an event that made all of europe gasp. Maximilian had been crowned king of the Romans, a process that had elevated him to be god’s anointed, almost a different kind of being to mere mortals. The great unwashed laying hands on his royal person and locking him up in the house of a commoner was not just shocking, but close to sacrilege.

It is not clear who had given the order to grab the king, whether there had ever been a plan to imprison their city’s overlord. My guess is that the citizens of Bruges were as stunned by developments as Maximilian himself.

But now that they had committed their unspeakable crime, the only way was forward. They demanded that Maximilian gave up his guardianship of his son Philipp who he had safely sent back to Mechelen before the chaos had broken out, they demanded an account of what happened to the money, they wanted him to hand over the German administrators who they accused of theft and corruption, they wanted him to make peace with France and even give Ghent and Bruges the monopoly of the textile trade.

Maximilian refused. They raided his lodgings, looking for weapons and treasure. Maximilian refused. They took away his last remaining companions, saying that a few heads need to roll to appease the people. Maximilian refused. They put metal rods in front of his windows and set up gallows below them. Maximilian refused. They tortured and then hanged Maximilain’s advisors. Maximilian refused. They plundered the ducal palace and sought out the Landsknechte and killed them. Maximilian still refused.

Like so often in revolutions, the breakdown of one set of rules leads to the next set of institutions to fall, until there are no safeguards left. The executioners of Ghent and Bruges were working overtime. Maximilian was placed into another prison. He now truly feared for his life. He wrote to his father begging him to come, otherwise he will soon be dead by poison or by violence. He would later say that he often saw a man aiming his crossbow directly at him when he passed the window.

Kunz von der Rosen and the escape from Bruges

There is a story about one of Maximilian’s closest associates, a man by the name of Kunz von der Rosen. He was the son of a prosperous merchant from Kaufbeuren, a small free imperial city. He had ascended rapidly in the archducal and now royal service due to quote “the utmost diligence in his work, an open and courageous character, but more than that, the ability to find the cheerful side in all situations in life, and his ever-ready wit.” He would often describe himself as the emperor’s fool and is depicted as such in the Maximilian’s monumental triumphal march. But he was a joker with a poker. He fought in most of Maximilian’s battle and became a hugely influential advisor. There is a story that he gained access to Maximilian in his prison disguised as a Franciscan monk, complete with tonsure and shave, and offered to take Maximilian’s place, letting him leave in his costume. Maximilian refused, unwilling to sacrifice his friend who would undoubtedly be torn to pieces by the mob.

The situation turned into Maximilian’s favour when the empire finally rallied behind him. Though the princes still saw the low countries as a Habsburg private project, the incarceration and threatening of their king was an unbearable attack on their honor and status. By April 1488 a sizeable army gathered and marched towards Bruges.

That caused a re-evaluation of options amongst the citizens. Calmer heads prevailed and they allowed Maximilian more freedom and luxuries. And negotiations over a formal peace began. Maximilian confirmed the rights his wife Marie had granted the estates of the Low Countries in the great privilege of 1477. Effectively giving them almost complete autonomy. He promised to honor the peace of Arras from 1482 that gave France a third of the former Burgundian state, to remove all German and foreign advisors, to send his mercenaries home and renounce the guardianship of his son and the regency. And of course he agreed that what happened in Bruges, stayed in Bruges. There was a weird ceremony in the church of St. Jakob where Maximilian smiled and declared that now finally they would all have peace. There was a lot of singing and jubilation, and Maximilian finally left Bruges. At the gate, he promised once more that he would stick to all of his promises, but ominously added that of course, he could not guarantee that his father would.

Four More Years of war

Well, he wouldn’t, wouldn’t he. Friedrich III put Ghent under siege. The pope issued an interdict against Bruges. Maximilian got around his oaths and promises by simply saying that it was only binding on him, not on the emperor or the imperial princes. Still Maximilian thought it more appropriate to leave the leadership of the campaign against Bruges and Ghent to his father and the imperial princes. He focused on fighting the French and the pirates.

What followed was another four years of atrocious warfare. The imperial army may not have been as successful in open battle or at sieges as Maximilian had been, but they were experts in the art of devastation. The initial model of various electors, archbishops, counts and dukes came to avenge their king of the Romans was quickly replaced by a more modern approach.

Duke Albrecht der Beherzte, „the Couragous“ was a very wealthy imperial prince and founder of the line of dukes of Saxony that ruled in Dresden and rose to royal titles. And he was also a war entrepreneur. We will talk a lot more about the Landsknechte and how they operated in one of the upcoming episodes. For now it is enough to say that we are in a time period where it was more effective to hire an army of well trained and well equipped mercenaries then to bring a feudal levy of knights. Albrecht had the funds to raise and maintain such an army and was an excellent general hardened in dozens of campaigns. He had fought against the most famous war leaders of the time, Charles the Bold and Matthias Hunyadi and he had a very rare quality that Maximilian and Friedrich appreciated even more- he was willing to work on credit.

Though Maximilian’s rule of the Low Countries came again close to collapse, Albrecht’s persistence and ability to pay his soldiers won through in the end. The French king Charles VIII made peace in 1489 and the cities of Flanders finally signed on the dotted line in 1492. The 15 year long war of the Burgundian succession was finally over.

Ernest, Elector of Saxony (1464–1486), Frederick II, Elector of Saxony (1428–1464) and Albert III, Duke of Saxony (1486–1500); from left to right, Fürstenzug, Dresden, Germany

But at what cost. The land was utterly destroyed. The population had shrunk dramatically due to famine and a return of the Plague. When Maximilian’s son Philipp took the reign in 1494, he kept the Low Countries out of his father’s conflicts. This state that once sustained the exuberant splendour of Philipp the Good and the impressive war machine of Charles the Bold no longer had the resources to do any of these things. As for Ghent and Bruges, the major trading houses had enough of war, siege and death and left for Antwerp.

What came out of the Burgundian Experience

Did Burgundy make the Habsburgs rich? Ultimately, no. These were the wealthiest lands in Northern Europe, but even after they had recovered, the debts Maximilian had built up in the wars of succession took until the middle of the next century to be repaid, and raising taxes remained a precarious process as everyone remembered the riots and rebellions. On Maximilian’s P&L the Burgundian state ranked roughly on par with Tirol and Austria and in terms of balance sheet well below the silver mines of Schwaz.

But the legacy of these 15 years was only partially fiscal. Maximilian had lived and fought there between the ages of 18 and 31. This is the time when the frontal lobes fuses, it is the time we today may spend at university and in our first jobs, and I may just be speaking for myself, but that was the time when my view of the world of friendships and values were formed. And in my case, that was a normal experience. But for Maximilian, that was – even by the standards of the time – an exceptional experience.

He arrived coming from the modest, almost austere court of his father to the most luxurious, most sophisticated society in Northern Europe. Literally every piece of clothing, art, armour, every painting and every tapestry was made by one of the greatest artists of the time. The parties, the tournaments, the dances, the music, everything was so much more refined. Court etiquette allowed for openness and interaction between the sexes that was utterly alien to conservative Styria. And then the hunts. Sure there was some great hunting at his father’s castle in Wiener Neustadt, but these Burgundian palaces, they had menageries with lions, leopards, rare birds. The letters he writes home to his friend Prüschek are almost breathless in their descriptions. He goes through the classic trope of country bumpkin in the big city complete with falling in love with a much more sophisticated, beautiful lady. There is a whiff of Crocodile Dundee here.

All this luxury was however not an empty display of epic consumption. The Burgundian court was the final manifestation arguably the high point in chivalric culture. Each one of the grand dukes would dream of going on crusade, on fulfilling their true purpose of protecting Christendom. Their art is suffused with medieval ideas, not with the aesthetic of ancient Rome or Greece. This is in a way a backward looking world and in that respect not far from the world of the 95 lords of Austria Maximilian had grown up in.

But at the same time this was a very modern reality. The painting techniques of a Jan van Eyck or Rogier van der Weyden were in many aspects much more advanced than their Italian contemporaries whose subjects focused on a more secular, individualistic world.

The economy that underpinned the state of Burgundy was equally a modern one. It was trade and industry that had created Burges, Ghent, Ypres, Arras, Brussels, Tournai and these other dozens of cities larger and richer than Vienna. Equally modern and forward looking was the military with its advanced artillery and disciplined infantry.

It is this mixture of idealism and realism that Maximilian fully embraced and made his own. He would be remembered as the “Last Knight” who wanted to resurrect the medieval empire of Barbarossa and Otto the Great and go on crusade to Jerusalem, whilst he was at the same time the father of the Landsknechte who fought with them on foot, the man who helped Antwerp becoming the most significant trading centre North of the Alps and the first ruler to take full advantage of the printing press.

Maximilian’s modern biographer, Hermann Wiesflecker makes the argument that Maximilian picked up much of the sophisticated Burgundian state craft and implemented it in Austria and Tyrol. In particular the concept of a central fiscal infrastructure with annual budgets and tax income forecasts had been imported from the Burgundian state. That view has been challenged by recent historians who point out that in particular the Tyrol had a sophisticated fiscal infrastructure already. I haven’t got the time to dig through all of these arguments, but I am convinced that Maximilian came away from 15 years of war and endless discussions with the Estates General with a clear understanding that such matters, boring as they may look, are what decides the outcome of war.

Against all that brightness, Maximilian also experienced some terrible tragedy . Marie’s sudden death shook him deeply and he kept her memory alive until his death. The loss of his children must have been exceedingly painful, only one of whom he gets back young. His daughter had become a teenager by the time he meets her again.

Durer’s feast of teh rose garlands with Marie of Burgundy as the Madonna and Maximilian kneeling

Being imprisoned by the mob, watching his senior servants being tortured unable to protect them was a shock, that left him with a lifelong hatred for Ghent and any form of city autonomy.

And let’s not forget the endless litany of betrayals and disappointments, the imperial princes that refused to help, his cousin Sigismund stabbing him in the back, the constantly shifting allegiances of the great cities and treachery even of some of the members of his order of the Golden Vlies.

Given all that, Maximilian could have easily ended up like his father, a withdrawn, depressed ruler who trusted no one. Instead he remained a man with many lasting real friendships and his famous Leutseligkeit, his ability to speak to anyone from beggars to barons.

Whilst this did not happen, the Burgundian adventure left him with the conviction that war was always the only solution. The solution to his conflict with France, the solution to the occupation of Vienna, the solution to the French invasion of imperial Italy we will talk about soon.

For Maximilian war was not a means to achieve a near term tangible political objective, it was fought for the complete destruction and defeat of the enemy. This idea was probably the most enduring idea he took away from Burgundy. The struggle between France and Burgundy he inherited and that shaped his formative years, was a war for survival. Both sides were convinced that only the complete defeat and erasure of the other guaranteed their existence.

For Maximilian and many of his successors, the west was where the decision over world domination and survival was going to be made, not in the east. This will leave the Habsburgs with a strangely lopsided strategy that left the Balkans and Hungary to Turkish aggression for a long time, even let them besiege Vienna, whilst throwing so much of their resources into the struggle with the Kings of France.

As you can imagine, though the war of the Burgundian succession is now over, this is not going to be the last clash between Habsburg and Valois. But next week we are going back to the heart of the empire, we will see how Maximilian and Friedrich regain Austria, prevent the Tyrol from getting sold to the Wittelsbach and lay another of the many foundations that will bring them the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary. Soon we will get to the imperial reforms, the Swabian Bund and the last war with the Swiss. And that can only mean one thing, we will finally exit the 15^th century…..and you thought that would never happen.

Episode 101 – Gottschalk & Adalbert

by haradigital on 6th January 202619th February 2026

The emergence of the duchy of Mecklenburg

This week we will follow the history of two men who could not be more different. On one side is Gottschalk, leader of the pagan Abodrites, who first comes to prominence as a brutal raider killing Saxons all across Holstein in revenge for his father’s killing. The other is Adalbert, son of a count, brother of the count palatinate of Saxony, friend and confidant of Henry III, a man who refused the offer of becoming pope for his ambition to convert all of Scandinavia and the Baltic. These two men formed an alliance against the Saxon magnates in general and the Billungs, dukes of Saxony in particular.

It is a story of greed and violence, of Christian conversion and attempts to break out of strategic gridlock…

History of the Germans

A narrative history of the German people from the Middle Ages to Reunification in 1991. Episodes are 25-35 min long and drop on Thursday mornings.
“A great many things keep happening, some good, some bad”. Gregory of Tours (539-594)

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

The Interregnum and the early Habsburgs (#138 ff
– Rudolf von Habsburg (#139-141)
– Adolf von Nassau (#142)
– Albrecht von Habsburg (#143)
– Heinrich VII (#144-148)
– Ludwig the Bavarian (#149-153)
– Karl IV (#154-163)
The Reformation before the Reformation
– Wenceslaus the Lazy (#165)
– The Western Schism (#166/167)
– The Ottomans (#168)
– Sigismund (#169-#184
The Empire in the 15th Century
– Mainz & Hessen #186
– Printing #187-#188
– Universities #190
– Wittelsbachs #189, #196-#199
– Baden, Wuerrtemberg, Augsburg, Fugger (#191-195)
– Maps & Arms (#201-#202)
The Fall and Rise of the House of Habsburg
– Early habsburgs (#203-#207)
– Albrecht II (#208)
-Freidrich III (#209-

It is a story of greed and violence, of Christian conversion and attempts to break out of strategic gridlock…

The music for the show is Flute Sonata in E-flat major, H.545 by Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach (or some claim it as BWV 1031 Johann Sebastian Bach) performed and arranged by Michel Rondeau under Common Creative Licence 3.0.

As always:

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To make it easier for you to share the podcast, I have created separate playlists for some of the seasons that are set up as individual podcasts. they have the exact same episodes as in the History of the Germans, but they may be a helpful device for those who want to concentrate on only one season.

So far I have:

Ep. 101: Colonisation of the East(700-1200) – Mecklenburg – Gottschalk and Adalbert

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 101 – Gottschalk and Adalbert

It is a story of greed and violence, of Christian conversion and attempts to break out of strategic gridlock…

But before we start let me tell you that 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 J. Lawton, Tracy J and Roger who have already signed up. And special thanks to Paul Huehnermund whose generosity and regular support on Twitter is much appreciated.

Last week we did a recap of the Saxon war that pitted the emperor Henry IV against the Saxon magnates, led by Otto von Northeim. This story you may remember from Season 2 and we will get on to the follow-on of it. But before we do that, I want to talk about the second strain in our narrative, the fate of the Wends, the Slavic peoples who live between the Elbe and Oder river, specifically their federations, the Abodrites and the Lutizi.

We have met the Abodrites before. They are a federation of several Slavic tribes who live in the March of the Billungs, across modern day Holstein and Mecklenburg. They had played a leading role in the great Slav uprising when their leader Mistivoj brought his troops up to and then through the gates of Hamburg, burning the city and all its wooden churches. According to the chronicles of Helmond of Bosau the leadership of the Abodrites, including Mistivoj had accepted Christianity but were provoked into revolt by the oppressive tributes the Billungs extracted as well as their refusal to accept them as their equals and marry their daughters to them as they had done with the Poles.

After the uprising of 983 Mistivoj seems to have returned to at least nominal Christianity. We do know that his son and successor, Udo was officially Christian, though the chronicler Helmond of Bosau describes him as lax in his religious devotion. Honestly, I can’t blame him.

Udo’s son was Gottschalk, born sometime between the year 1000 and 1015. Young Gottschalk was brought up in a monastery in Luneburg. We do not know what role the academic reputation of this establishment played in Udo’s decision to hand over his oldest son to preceptors in the hometown of the occupying duke of Saxony.

In 1028 or 1031 Gottschalk’s father was stabbed in the back by a Saxon in his retinue. Gottschalk flees from his monastery, sheds Christianity and takes over his father’s job, and goes out for revenge. For years he devastates what is today Holstein so that in the end only the garrisons in Itzehoe and Boeckelnburg remain standing. In the end he is captured by the duke of Saxony. The duke releases him after the two men had found an agreement. What the content of that was is unclear, but most likely a combination of a payment and promise to go into exile. Gottschalk went to Denmark and joined king Knut in his endeavour to gain the crown of England. He stayed in Denmark for almost 15 years and got involved in the various wars of succession that followed the death of the great Knut. It is during this period that the Abodrites show up on the Danish border. What exactly they were doing there is unclear. Some argue they were on migration, others that they had taken part in the wars of succession in Denmark. In what appears to have been an exceptionally brutal battle, the Slavs are beaten and allegedly 15,000 Abodrites lay dead on the field. Their leader, Ratibor fell in battle and his seven sons were caught to perish in Danish captivity. King Magnus of Norway and Denmark son of Saint Olaf wielded his father’s battle axe, curiously named Hel after the Nordic goddess of death…

Nominally the Abodrites had been allied with Sweyn Estridsson, one of the various claimants for the Danish throne, which makes it likely that Gottschalk was involved in this affair. We hear later that he married a daughter of Sweyn Estridsson, by now king of Denmark.

By 1047 he is definitely back in the land of the Abodrites where, probably with the help of his father-in-law, he had regained his position as the leader of the federation.

By now Gottschalk had converted back to Christianity. Not just that, he had become a strong promoter of the Christian faith. He founded monasteries in all the major towns, allowed new bishoprics in Mecklenburg and Ratzeburg to be erected until the whole land was full of churches and the churches full of priests as the Adam von Bremen noticed enthusiastically.

Which begs the question why he had done so? Sure Canute and his court were Christians, and they would probably have demanded nominal adherence to the new religion, as did Magnus and Sweyn Estridsson. But in a world where the saintly king of Norway calls his battle-ax Hel, this could only have been a thin veneer of Christianity. Gottschalk’s activity once he is back in charge is different. He means it. He is going to great length to convert his people. Chroniclers report that he joined the missionaries and translated the sermon into their language.

If you leave aside the possibility of a Damascus moment experienced in a Saxon prison cell, there might be another explanation. Imagine you are a pagan Slavic rule,r and you look at your list of long term options. Well, it isn’t a very long list.

Option 1 is to keep doing what you are doing which means at regular intervals the local margrave will come round and demand an outrageous amount in tribute. When you refuse, the margrave will come back with an army, devastate your land, steal everything that isn’t nailed down and take your women and children away as slaves. Or you can accept the tribute which requires you to gathe everything that isn’t nailed down yourself and hand it over.

Option 2 is to accept conversion. But that means you now have to pay the bishops and archbishops on top of the margrave. And even then you may find that the local rulers find ways to provoke you into fighting anyway. You remember grandpa Mistivoj who was called a dog by margrave Dietrich?

And then you look at Poland and realise things aren’t fair. The Poles had been pagan seventy years ago. Now look at them. There are churches everywhere, they have their own archbishop, their king had forced the old emperor Henry II to sign a humiliating peace agreement. And even though right now Poland is a mess, still their nobility is linked by marriage into the highest levels of the Saxon aristocracy, even the imperial family.

If you can set aside your religious scruples, that is where you want to get to. But how?

Just paying lip-service to the new gods is something the powerful Danes and Norwegians can afford, but that is not cutting the mustard out here in the Wendish lands. The solution has to be a close alliance with the one force that provides a counterweight to the Saxon magnates, the church, and most specifically the almighty archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, Adalbert.

Adalbert you may remember was a close ally of Henry III who saw his role in being the patriarch of the north, bringing Christianity to Scandinavia and all the shores of the Baltic Sea. Gottschalk is likely to have met Adalbert before he returned to his homeland since Adalbert had been a regular visitor to the Danish court. The return of Gottschalk may have been supported, if not even conceived by Adalbert.

Adalbert and Gottschalk worked closely together. The new bishoprics in Ratzeburg and Mecklenburg became part of the archdiocese of Hamburg and Adalbert put competent men into those positions, including a man called John who had come from Scotland where he had been bishop of Glasgow and possibly of Orkney. I mention him because he will reappear again a little later.

Tagging on to Adalbert looked like a winning move already in 1047. Adalbert was already hugely powerful at court. He had accompanied the emperor on his journey to Rome which included the famous council of Sutri where the emperor deposed three popes and replaced them with German bishops. Adalbert was offered the job but refused claiming he was needed for missionary activity in the north. A good move since the man who took the job, Suitger, bishop of Bamberg, died within months from the unhealthy climate in Rome.

If not at court, Adalbert’s main area of operations was Scandinavia. Adam von Bremen describes regular interaction with the kings of Norway, of Sweden and of Denmark. This is a period of constant coming and going on the Scandinavian thrones, though more often than not the going party wasn’t moving under its own propulsion any more. Adalbert seems to have managed these political upheavals deftly and held on to his position as the leader of the Scandinavian church.

Now let us move on to the year 1056. Two things happen. One, the emperor Henry III dies and two, the Lutizi achieve a major success destroying the army of William, Margrave of the Northern March. The first is a major problem for Adalbert, since Henry III was his great sponsor and as always in a regime change, the old advisors are chucked out. The latter was a real issue for Gottschalk who was trying to prove that a former pagan Slavic tribe could become an integral part of the empire. Ah, and if you remember last episode it was also a problem for the boy-king Henry IV who was nearly killed over it.

Now the next thing we hear is that a year after their great success the Lutizi begin to fight amongst themselves. The Lutizi are not a tribe itself but a federation of several small tribes, namely the Rearii, Tollensi, Kessini and Circcipani. No, you do not need to remember those. The Kessini and Circipani fell out with the Redarii and Tollensi on the other. We do not know what exactly drove the disagreement. Some have argued that the Redarii had been a sort of elite amongst the Lutizi and this was basically a revolt from below. It could also have been a falling out over strategy now that they had beaten the empire and the throne was occupied by a child. Or it was some clever undercover work by Gottschalk and Adalbert.

All that is fact is that the two sides went at it hammer and tongs. Adam von Bremen tells us of three separate campaigns that always ended with a defeat for the Redarii. The Redarii in their distress went for help to the most motley of crews. They first ask Gottschalk, prince of the Abodrites, then they ask Sweyn Estridsson, king of the Danes and then duke Bernhard of Saxony. All three of them are happy to help. So happy they bring along a colossal force that easily overwhelms the Circipani. Thousands of them die and the slaughter only ends when the defeated Circipani pay a fine of 15,000 pounds of silver. Adam von Bremen summarises the events as follows: Our soldiers returned home triumphant; there was no mention of Christianity, all they cared for was plunder.”

Adam von Bremen goes back to this again and again. In his view it was only the greed of the Saxons that stopped progress of the missionaries.

For Gottschalk this was at least outwardly a success. Fighting alongside his father in Law, the king of Denmark and his lord, Bernhard Billung, the duke of Saxony against the pagans makes him out as a Christian prince and reliable ally. The initial worry that the rebellion would force his strategy to unravel was put to rest. Gottschalk ploughs on in his project to convert his people and become a proper prince.

Adalbert meanwhile had other matters to take care of. We are now in the year 1057 and the imperial government under the regent empress Agnes is starting to get into heavy weather. The first year Agnes could rely in the pope, Victor II who had been the last of her husband’s appointees. Victor had been a relative of Henry III and fiercely loyal to the imperial family. But Victor II passed in 1057 and the inexperienced French empress was stumbling from one political mistake to the next. In 1061 she backed the bishop of Parma as pope Honorius II. Honorius had been part of a backlash against the progress of church reform. He and other prelates found the lifestyle restrictions proposed by the reformers around Peter Damian utterly cumbersome. Supporting the right of bishops to have mistresses and enjoy their wealth went completely against the grain of popular opinion. When Agnes sided with the counterreformers, the empire lost the lead in church reform, which was one of the reasons her son Henry IV ended up in the snow before the walls of Canossa.

Concerned about the implications of that decision the archbishop of Cologne, Anno, intervened. He had the boy king Henry IV kidnapped by luring him on to a ship he had moored in the Rhine River. Henry IV tried to flee by jumping overboard and nearly drowned. Child secured, Anno took over the government and formed a regency council on which Adalbert of Hamburg Bremen was the other prominent member. Adalbert and Anno did not like each other one bit, but shared a love for money and power. The chroniclers, even those who were on Adalbert’s side, tell tales of corruption and greed. Adalbert and Anno plundered the royal treasury, passing wealthy abbeys between each other.

Adalbert’s power increased further as young Henry IV grew older. Henry IV had never forgiven Anno the kidnapping. That made it easy for Adalbert to gain the young king’s confidence. The chronicler Bruno claims that Adalbert had encouraged the young king to give in to all his most base instincts. Henry supposedly always had two or three mistresses at the same time, lusted after his courtiers wives and daughters and even tried to get one of his guys to seduce the empress he had planned to divorce. That latter guy was by the way caught and beaten half to death by the enraged Bertha. Adalbert, instead of challenging his behaviour is supposed to have reassured the the king that he could always confess later and be absolved and that he would be a fool not to give in to all his urges

Whether any of these stories are true is unclear though increasingly historians tend to the opinion that Henry IV was definitely more prone to sinful behaviour than his all so saintly forebears. What is very much true thou is that Adalbert gained an ever stronger hold over the young king to the point that any of the nobles saw him as a de-facto dictator. Even the Hamburg-based chroniclers like Adam von Bremen and Helmond von Bosau took a dim view of Adalbert’s entanglement in high politics and his sheer limitless ambition and greed.

What might have gone down really badly with the aristocracy was his personal behaviour. In particular in his later years he became too big for his shoes. Applicants, even the most powerful ones would have to wait as much as a week before they are admitted into his presence. And would later find out that Adalbert had made fun of them at dinner with his friends. As Adam von Bremen said, he shed all his virtues he once possessed and brought the hatred of the magnates upon him.

At the beginning of 1066 the opposition to Adalbert had firmed up to the point they were seeking an open confrontation. The king had spent the last three months in Goslar mainly because the princes, including the archbishops of Mainz and Cologne refused to entertain the royal court. That was not only a major logistical problem, as the large retinue had literally eaten every morsel of food within the vicinity of Goslar, but it was also an insult bordering on rebellion. And the princes went one step further when they called an assembly at Trebur, something so far had only ever happened upon the invitation of the king. The purpose of the meeting was to get rid of Adalbert, as “nearly all the princes and bishops of the kingdom were unanimous in their hatred and conspired that he should perish”.

When he hears about this, Henry IV, Adalbert and some of his followers raced to Trebur to confront the princes. Thietmar reports of an event en route to Trebur where the royal guards forced the inhabitants of a village to hand over food. The villagers resisted and the commander of the royal bodyguards was severely wounded. He was brought before the abbot of Hersfeld who refused to grant the man the last rites before he had passed over some property the abbot claimed was his. If a mere abbot can treat a man under royal protection like that, it does not bode well for an archbishop everybody hates.

Upon arrival in Trebur, the assembled magnates tell Henry IV that he has a simple choice. Sack Adalbert or resign the throne. Henry IV is still a teenager at this point, so he twisted and turned and hesitated to make a decision. Adalbert advised the king to pack up the insignia of kingship and flee back to Goslar in the night. Orders are given to load the treasury on to wagons but all that made such a noise that the others woke up and stopped the proceedings. Guards were posted so that nothing untoward could happen.

The next morning the magnates confronted Adalbert and it was only by intervention of the king that he wasn’t struck dead right there. That was the end of Adalbert’s time in the limelight. He did beat a hasty retreat to his diocese protected by the few soldiers the impecunious king could spare.

Adalbert’s ordeal wasn’t over though. As his power was broken, the eternal enemy of the archbishops, the dukes of Saxony came out for their pound of flesh. Magnus Billung at this point only son of the reigning duke took his soldiers and laid siege to the city of Bremen where Adalbert had sought refuge. The threat was such that Adalbert was forced to sign an agreement that handed over almost 2/3rds of the assets of the archbishopric to the Billungs. Adalbert was allowed to leave Bremen and fled to Goslar.

The fall of Adalbert brought his entire political construct to collapse. Led by a man called Kruto the Abodrites rose up against the Christian Gottschalk and had him murdered as was appropriate together with a priest on the altar of a church. This kicked off a general persecution of Christians, in particular the priests. In Ratzeburg two monks were stoned.

Gottschalk’s wife, the daughter of the king of Denmark was pulled out of her palace and dragged naked through the town of Mecklenburg.

But the worst ordeal was reserved for John, the Scotsman who had come down to be bishop of Oldenburg. He was hauled from town to town across the lands of the Abodrites and Lutizi until he arrived at the religious centre of the Wends, a place called Rethra. Thietmar von Merseburg describes the place as follows:

Their holy of holies was a triangular building with three doors, built deep inside a holy forest. The building can be entered by all through two of the three doors. The third door is reserved to a special caste of priests. It opens onto a path that leads to a lake, that according to Thietmar, was “utterly dreadful in appearance”. The outer walls of the building were adorned by marvellous sculpted images of the gods and goddesses. Inside, in the centre was a skilfully made shrine that was standing on a foundation composed of the horns of animals. There were full-sized free-standing sculptures of the gods, each inscribed with their name and clothed with helmets and armour. There was a senior god Thietmar calls Swarozyc, though other sources call him Radogast, the same as the name of the place.

The Lutizi had a priest class whose role was preside over the drawing of the lots to make major decisions. The process was divided in two parts. In part one the priests would throw the lots and divine from how they lay what they believed the correct decision was to be. Next, they would bring in the sacred enormous horse that would walk over the lots and thereby declare its reading of the omens. Only when the priests and the horse agreed would the decision be implemented. If they disagreed the proposal is rejected. And if the omen suggested that internal warfare was imminent, a giant boar would emerge from the lake. All that again is what we are told by a Christian chronicler not a Slavic one.

The temple at Rethra was not the only one, but the most sacred. There were other religious centres for the different tribes in the federation. These tribes would take their decisions, namely about war and peace jointly and unanimously. Unanimous the decision might be, but there was a rule that anyone who opposes the decision in the assembly was to be beaten with rods until he agrees and if he opposes after the assembly, he loses everything, either by burning or confiscation. Clearly it does not always pay to be contrarian.

Part of the decision over war and peace was to determine what offers have to be made to the gods in case of a successful completion of the campaign.

We do not know whether what happened next had been the result of such a pledge. Adam von Bremen tells us that when the Bishop John of Oldenburg refused to renounce his faith, he had first his hands and then his feet cut off. They then decapitated him and threw his body into a ditch by the road. The head was planted on a spike and then sacrificed to Radegast, allegedly the god of hospitality.

After these atrocities the Abodrites consolidated again, this time under the leadership of Kruto, the man who had led them in their rebellion. The duke of Saxony spent the next 12 years trying to suppress Kruto but this time the Slavs were better trained and better equipped. These campaigns failed again and again. Things got so bad that the duke of Saxony was becoming the butt of jokes about his inability to defeat the Slavs.

Seemingly there was a third option for Slavic leaders.

Gottschalk’s sons and his wife survived the carnage. The older one called Butivoj allied with the duke of Saxony and attempted to regain his father’s position. This attempt ended in the picturesque city of Ploen. Ploen is surrounded by lakes and was only accessible by a land bridge. Butivoj had come to the town with an army of auxiliaries provided by duke Magnus of Saxony. To his surprise he found the city empty of enemy soldiers. Though he was warned that this could be a trap, he stayed the night in Ploen. By morning he found the land bridge occupied by a vast army of Abodrites. A quick survey of the town revealed that the retreating enemy had stripped the stores of all foodstuff and, even worse, had taken away all boats. Butivoj’s position was hopeless. He negotiated terms with the Kruto who allowed him and his men to go, provided they leave their weapons and precious items behind. That they accepted. As they came out rumours swirled around the camp that Butivoj’s men had raped the women left behind in Ploen during their short stay. The Abodrites got so enraged they murdered the defenceless Butivoj and his men before Kruto could stop them.

Gottschalk’s wife and younger son, Henry, had fled to Denmark where they had family. Henry was more successful than his brother. With Danish assistance he forced Kruto to let him back in as leader of a part of the Abodrite federation in 1093. Kruto was at that point quite old, but still wasn’t willing to give up neither his throne nor other pleasures of life. He had recently married a young lady called Slavina. According to Helmond von Bosau this lady was young and of a fun-loving disposition. And clearly not interested in spending the rest of her life with a decrepit old man. Or she may have acted out of self-preservation since some of the pagan Slavic tribes practiced Sati, the burning of widows upon the death of their husbands. Either way, when Slavina heard that Kruto planned to kill Henry, she warned him. Henry decided to get on the front foot, invited Kruto to a feast, plied him with immense amounts of drink until the old man was barely able to stand. As the old lord stumbled to his bedchamber, one of Henry’s Danes split his head with an axe.

That elevated Henry to prince of the Abodrites and he married Slavina. The other Slavic tribes, presumably the Lutizi and some disaffected Abodrites raised an army to unseat Henry. However, Henry prevailed with the help of Magnus Billung at the battle of Schmillau in 1093.

With that Henry became a vassal of duke Magnus of Saxony. He chose Liubice as his main residence, a place we know better by its modern name, Lubeck. Under his rule the Abodrites flourished. The economy improved and it seems the tributes had become more acceptable.

Though Henry was a Christian, he did not force his people to convert as his father had done. Being a vassal of the duke of Saxony and not the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, the pressure to do so must have been less. He also remembered his father’s demise in a pagan revolt. So he gave his people religious freedom. They no longer journeyed to the temple at Rethra where bishop John Scotus had found his end because that had been destroyed sometime around these decades. Instead the centre of the pagan faith was now the sanctuary of Cap Arcona on the island of Rugen.

It is around the time of Henry, whose reign went on until 1127, that the policy towards the marches is changing. Instead of raiding the lands to the east for plunder and slaves, the Saxon leadership is encouraging economic growth and colonisation. This is a decision with far, far reaching consequences.

We will hear more about that, the Abodrites, Henry and his descendants as we go along. But not next week. Next week we catch up with the high politics of the empire, the role the Saxons play in the Investiture Controversy and how once again a Saxon rises to become emperor. I hope you will listen in again.

You may not believe it but if all goes to plan I will still be sailing somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. If you want to follow along, you can do so on a website and app called Marine Traffic. Search for sailing vessel Purple Rain under French flag. Being away has a number of implications, apart from working like a dervish to get enough episodes recorded to cover the time. It means that my marketing efforts trickle down to zero. That is where you my listeners come in. I was wondering whether you would be prepared to help promote the show. Why not send a link to the History of the Germans to a friend or family member who might be interested, write a comment on one of my older posts which tends to revive them or even write your own post on social media. That would be massively appreciated, as would obviously signing up on Patreon at patreon.com/historyofthegermans.

Episode 100 – The Saxon War (Take II)

by haradigital on 6th January 202619th February 2026

The Conflict between the Saxons and the Emperors breaks out in the open

As we go through the story of the Saxon Stem duchy in the 10^th and 11^th century, two or maybe three main strains of the story emerge, the gradually drifting away of Saxony from the empire, the relationship between Saxons and Wends and the antagonism between the archbishop of Hamburg and the magnates. As for the first part of the storyline, the conflict between Saxons and the empire we are now hitting the hot stage. I did cover that already a long time ago in Episode 31 “The (second) Saxon War”. I had at some point thought of simply dropping the old episode into the feed as it quite neatly summarises the events of the great Saxon rebellion that precedes the journey of emperor Henry IV to Canossa. But then I thought I should at least put these events more into the context of the history of the North. So, most of what you hear now is recycled material with just a few artfully designed segues –as Wilhelm Busch used to say “wovon sie besonders schwaermt, wenn es wieder aufgewaermt”.

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

As we go through the story of the Saxon Stem duchy in the 10th

and 11th century, two or maybe three main strains of the story

emerge, the gradually drifting away of Saxony from the empire, the relationship between Saxons and Wends and the antagonism between the archbishop of Hamburg and the magnates. As for the first part of the storyline, the conflict between Saxons and the empire we are now hitting the hot stage.

I did cover that already a long time ago in Episode 31 “The (second) Saxon War”. I had at some point thought of simply dropping the old episode into the feed as it quite neatly summarises the events of the great Saxon rebellion that precedes the journey of emperor Henry IV to Canossa. But then I thought I should at least put these events more into the context of the history of the North. So, most of what you hear now is recycled material with just a few artfully designed segues –as Wilhelm Busch used to say “wovon sie besonders schwaermt, wenn es wieder aufgewaermt”….

As always:

Homepage with maps, photos, transcripts and blog: www.historyofthegermans.com

If you wish to support the show go to: Support • History of the Germans Podcast

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So far I have:

Ep. 100: Colonisation of the East(700-1200)- The (second) Saxon War

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 100 – The Saxon War – Take 2

As for the first part of the storyline, the conflict between Saxons and the empire we are now hitting the hot stage. I did cover that already a long time ago in Episode 31 “The (second) Saxon War”. I had at some point thought of simply dropping the old episode into the feed as it quite neatly summarises the events of the great Saxon rebellion that precedes the journey of emperor Henry IV to Canossa. But then I thought I should at least put these events more into the context of the history of the North. So, most of what you hear now is recycled material with just a few artfully designed segues –as Wilhelm Busch used to say “wovon sie besonders schwaermt, wenn es wieder aufgewaermt”. Sorry – not translatable.

But before we start let me tell you that 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 Albert J., Roman B., David B. and Mitchell B. who have already signed up.

Last week we saw the Saxons’ anger rising and rising and rising as the emperors Konrad II and Henry III tightened the screws on the duchy. And worse, the church had become a serious impediment to the looting and slaving business. The church insisted that Christians could not be enslaved and thanks to their missionary efforts in the eastern marches the pool of available pagan slaves was shrinking fast.

Resistance to the tightening control was not confined to Saxony. Towards the end of his reign Hermann of Reichenau, our most reliable chronicler of that period writes: quote “At this time both the foremost men and the lesser men of the kingdom began more and more to murmur against the emperor. They complained he had long since departed from his original conduct of justice, peace, piety, fear of God and manifold virtues in which he ought to have made progress from day to day; that he was gradually turning towards acquisitiveness and a certain negligence and that he would become much worse than he was before”. (end quote)

When Henry III died in 1056, the empire fell to his six-year-old son, Henry IV and his mother, the empress Agnes as regent. Agnes was in over her head and made several far-reaching and arguably catastrophic mistakes that undermined the imperial position.

As for the border region, the death of the emperor Henry III coincided with one of the rare defeats of the Saxons in their wars with the Slavs. The Margrave of the Northern March, William had taken an army “of Saxons in infinite number” who have been defeated and killed.

Naturally, the Saxons blame the emperor, who else for this defeat. Had he only sent more troops, made a better plan or generally been better at his job..

Lambert of Hersfeld writes the “the princes of saxony” had reached an agreement that the way to get compensation for their losses would be by seizing the kingship from young king Henry IV. Not just that but they were committed to actually killing the child, which would have created an absolute outrage. They then lined up behind a most unlikely candidate for the throne, a count Otto who was a half-brother of the margrave of the Northern marches whose mother was apparently a Slavic servant. This Otto person had spent most of his life in Bohemia and had only come to Saxony when his brother died in the hope of receiving the Northern March. Once there, the Saxon princes sold him the idea he could aspire straight for kingship. I am struggling to believe how serious the whole affair was, but it came to an actual battle when the conspirators with said Otto in their midst were heading to a royal assembly at Merseburg. On their way they ran into two distant relatives of the child king who somehow realised that something was amiss, plus they hated Otto and his friends for some other reason. In any event the two sides got to work, tearing each other apart. Otto and one of the royal cousins managed to run each other through with their lances, both dying from their wounds. In the end the royal party prevailed, and this particular insurrection petered out.

But that does not mean the Saxons were done. Nor was anyone else. The years of Agnes regency and then the rule of archbishop Anno of Cologne were extremely chaotic. The members of the regency council were accused of the most base corruption, shoving royal assets to each other whilst demanding bribes for the confirmation of rights and privileges. At the same time the duchies of Swabia and Bavaria slipped out of imperial control to men who would become the most irreconcilable enemies of the emperor. Check out episode 30 for more detail.

This regency period ended when Henry IV had been declared an adult at the ripe old age of 15.

It is around now, 1066 that Henry IV. begins his major castle building projects around Goslar. His father had already begun the process of creating a coherent royal territory around the silver mines in the Harz mountains. These royal lands around Goslar were administrated by Ministeriales, unfree men trained in war and administration. Mighty castles are built on the tops of mountains, castles no longer designed to protect the local population in times of war, but to suppress them. Instead of enfeoffing these castles to loyal men of noble descent, he garrisoned them with the sons of peasants trained in war who owed everything to him. He put the administration of the royal territory not into the hands of a count as would have been the case 50 years earlier but appoints a governor (Prefectus) who could be hired and fired at will.

The largest and most important of these new castles was the Harzburg, not far from the imperial residence in Goslar. Harzburg was not only one of the largest castles built in the 11^th century, rivalling Fulk of Anjou’s mighty constructions, it was also designed as an imperial residence and administrative centre. Nothing indicates more clearly the change of times than the fact that the emperors are leaving their indefensible palaces on the plains and move behind 10-metre-high walls on mountaintops. The Harzburg contained an imperial palace as well as a monastery. Henry IV had his brother Konrad who had died very young as well as his first son buried in this richly decorated chapel. He also transferred the imperial regalia, i.e., the imperial crown, the Holy Lance etc. onto the Harzburg.

Whilst the walls of the Harzburg and other fortifications are going up, the empire is shaken by a sequence of scandals that further undermine the imperial reputation. The first one involved Henry IV’s attempt to gain a divorce from the empress Bertha, something that did not happen and something he will later be very grateful for.

The second one which involved the recently appointed duke of Bavaria, Otto of Northeim. Otto was from a Saxon noble family that had come to prominence under Henry II. Otto himself made a very advantageous marriage when he married Richeza, a granddaughter of Otto II who also brought a huge dowry. He was put in as duke of Bavaria by Agnes in 1061, which was an odd choice to start with.

There is no indication that Otto of Northeim was involved in the attempts on Henry III’s life in 1046 and the botched coup of 1057, but he was such an important figure in Saxony, it is unlikely he was kept completely in the dark. Northeim then appears again as a co-conspirator in the kidnapping of Henry IV at Kaiserswerth, something that cannot have endeared him to the young king.

Then a sequence of mysterious events take place. Whilst Henry was staying at Otto of Northeim’s estate, one of his Ministeriales is ambushed and killed. Things are being investigated, but nothing comes of it. Since life is cheap and Ministeriales are still serfs, nobody ascribes much significance to that event.

In 1070, a certain Enigo, a thug of ill repute, claims publicly that Otto of Northeim had tried to hire him to murder the king. Otto of Northeim strenuously denies the claim. In classic 11^th century fashion, when it is one man’s word against another’s, the resolution has to be through trial by combat. Otto of Northeim initially accepts the ruling but does then not appear on the set dates in Goslar to fight for his honour. Under these circumstances the Saxon magnates pass a judgement in default. Otto of Northeim was stripped of the duchy of Bavaria, all other fiefs and even of his allodial possessions. Northeim is declared an outlaw.

According to the chronicler Bruno, this was all a plot by Henry IV. to strip Northeim of his title. Bruno even alleges that Northeim would have been killed on the king’s orders even if he had won the trial by combat. I find that last point hard to believe. The trial would have taken place in full view of the Saxon nobles and if Henry would have wanted to pull a stunt like this, his reputation would have suffered immeasurable damage. That in combination with the string of assassination attempts by Saxon nobles and the mysterious death of his Ministeriales the year before makes it likely that there was something to this allegation.

Guilty or not, Otto finds support from other Saxon nobles, including from Magnus, son of the duke of Saxony in his fight with the king. But he failed to bring the whole of the duchy behind him and had to submit to the emperor after a year of fighting. Henry IV. imprisons him and Magnus. Otto of Northeim is released in 1072 and some of his inherited lands are returned to him, minus a chunk Henry wanted to keep. Magnus, who after his father’s death had become the duke of Saxony, is kept longer, presumably as insurance against another Saxon uprising.

As far as insurance goes, this one did not work.

In the summer of 1073, the Saxon had enough of Henry’s castles. What pushed them over the edge was that Henry, cash strapped as he was, did not pay the Ministeriales who manned the castles. As a consequence the Ministeriales forced the local peasants to bring food to them, and if they failed to do so, burned their villages and raped their wives and daughters. At least that is the story told by the usually extremely biased chroniclers Bruno and Lambert. It may also be that the villages belonging to the castles were obliged to bring the produce by law and custom, as was the case with the castles the mighty Saxon lords had built themselves. The only difference was that the soldiers manning Henry’s castles weren’t Saxons, but foreigners from elsewhere, possibly Swabia.

In June of 1073 the magnates of Saxony, including the bishops of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Hildesheim, as well as Hermann Billung, uncle of the incarcerated duke Magnus of Saxony and Otto of Northeim appear before the emperor in Goslar demanding an audience to discuss the castle building program.

Henry IV. does not grant an audience. In fact, he leaves the Saxon magnates stand outside the castle whilst he is playing dice with is mates inside – again as reported by our biased chroniclers. This is often seen as an unnecessary insult that justifies the upcoming rebellion and puts Henry IV. in the wrong. On the other hand, imperial dignity required that the king would not yield to such explicit demands. Henry IV. had had a poor previous experience when he yielded princely demands to come to an assembly in Trebur to defend his advisor, archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg-Bremen. That was an experience he was not too keen to repeat. Plus, Henry also had been assembling an army for a campaign against Poland, which would come in handy if he needed to suppress any Saxon uprising.

The Saxon magnates are now infuriated to the max. A month later they meet at Hoetensleben for an assembly. There Otto of Northeim gives his famous speech, which I will try to translate here. Thanks, by the way to deepl.com whose free translation service has become a lifesaver for this podcast. Here is Otto of Northeim:

“The calamities and disgraces that our king has brought upon each one of you for a long time are great and unbearable, but what he still intends to do, if the Almighty God permits him, is even greater and more severe. Strong castles he has erected, as you know, numerous in places already firm by nature, and has placed in them a great multitude of his vassals, and abundantly provided with weapons of all kinds. These castles are not erected against the heathen, who have completely devastated our land where it borders theirs, but in the midst of our country, where no one ever thought of making war against him; he has fortified them with such great effort, and what they mean for this land some of you have already experienced, and if God’s mercy and your bravery do not intervene, you will soon all experience it. They take your possessions by force and hide them in their castles; they abuse your wives and daughters for their pleasure when they please; they demand your servants and your cattle, and all that they like, for their service; yes, they even force you yourselves to bear every burden, however odious, on your free shoulders. But when I imagine in my thoughts what is still waiting for us, then everything that you are now enduring still seems to me to be bearable. For when he will have built his castles in our whole country at his discretion and will have equipped them with armed warriors and all other necessities, then he will no longer plunder your possessions one by one, but he will snatch from you all that you possess with one blow, will give your goods to strangers, and will make you yourselves, you freeborn men, oblige unknown men as servants. And all this, you brave men, will you let it happen to you? Is it not better to fall in brave fight than to live a miserable and ignominious life, being made a shameful mockery by these people.

Even Serfs who are bought for money do not endure the unreasonable commands of their masters, and you, who were born free, should patiently endure servitude? Perhaps you, as Christians, are afraid to violate the oath with which you have paid homage to the king. Indeed, to the king you have sworn. As long as he was a king to me and acted royally, I also kept the oath I swore to him freely and faithfully; but after he ceased to be a king, the one to whom I had to keep loyalty was no longer there. So not against the king, but against the unjust robber of my freedom; not against the fatherland, but for the fatherland, and for freedom, which no good man surrenders other than with his life at the same time, I take up arms, and I demand of you that you also take them up. Awake, therefore, and preserve for your children the inheritance which your fathers have left you; beware lest through your carelessness or slothfulness you yourselves and your children become serfs of strangers” (end quote)

Now before you go and think that here is the first outburst of genuine German nationalism, I have to stop you there. When Northeim talks of “patria” or “fatherland” he talks about Saxony, not Germany. And when he talks about freedom, he is not talking about human rights, but ancestral privileges, the Freedoms as they will be later called.

But rousing the speech is nevertheless and the Saxons raise an army and head towards the Harzburg, where Henry IV. had gone to hold out while his agents bring over the army initially meant for the Poland campaign to defeat these obnoxious Saxons once and for all. The Saxons set up camp on an opposite hill and sent their demands to the king. He was to dismantle all his castles in Saxony and dismiss his false councillors.

The Harzburg was almost impregnable, so the Saxons blockaded the castle’s food supplies whilst throwing large stones down on the fortifications from a new structure built on the opposite hill.

Henry’s hope of support from the army readied for the war in Poland was quickly dashed. The mighty princes who made up his forces shared many of the views Otto of Northeim had articulated in his speech. They could see that if Henry were to prevail in Saxony, he would proceed to build similar castles in Bavaria, Swabia and anywhere else in the country. So, the princes withdrew their troops. Some magnates led by the archbishop of Mainz go further allegedly offering Otto von Northeim the crown.

Henry IV. fled the Harzburg and set up camp in Worms. There he managed to gather some bishops for an attempt to make a military move on Saxony, but his support was far too weak.

On February 2^nd, 1074 he signed the peace of Gerstungen, which cannot be described as anything but a complete capitulation. In a near full assembly of the great bishops and princes of the realm, Henry IV. conceded the demolition of all his castles, dismissed his councillors and gave full amnesty to all the rebels.

Henry IV. withdrew the garrison of the Harzburg and immediately the Saxons stormed in. The Saxon troops it is important to note were not just aristocratic knights but comprised a lot of free or half free peasants. These guys were the first through the gate and began the demolition work. In the peace agreement it was specifically stated that the demolition of the Harzburg should be gentle, respecting the imperial chapel on the site. Well, that did not happen. The Saxon commanders could not stop their enraged mob from tearing down the chapel, stealing the relics and horror of horrors pulling the remains of the Salian princes buried there out of their coffins and throwing them in the ditch like vile garbage.

This profound insult to the honour not just of Henry IV. but the realm as a whole led to one of these sudden mood swings that punctuate so much of medieval history.

The Saxon nobles apologised immediately and promised a thorough investigation and harsh punishment for the perpetrators. But that was not enough. The mighty princes, who did not treat their peasants any different to the way Henry IV. had the neighbours of the Harzburg, realised that these Saxon armies contained an unsettlingly large contingent of free peasants. And in 1073/1074 there had already been uprisings in major cities, namely Worms and Cologne where the bishops had to run for their lives. Even the mighty archbishop Anno of Cologne had been attacked. He only got away with his life because one of his supporters had put a door into the city walls near his house. This “hole of Anno” can still be seen in Cologne.

Given the choice between supporting a potentially overbearing emperor or the rabble-rousing Saxons, many of the Southern dukes, namely Rudolf of Rheinfelden, the duke of Swabia took the side of Henry IV. Henry IV. could muster an army to bring the Saxons to heel. The two sides met at the Unstrut river on June 9, 1075.

What ensued was one of the bloodiest and painful battles of the 11^th century. Though in principle it was Saxons against the rest of the kingdom, in reality many families were split. Fathers were fighting sons; brothers were killing each other in the melee. The unity of the kingdom created when king Henry the Fowler had fought against the Hungarians literally around the corner from here was trampled into the dust on that early summer’s day.

Henry IV. prevailed in the brutal fighting. After the battle his troops were let loose across Saxony, murdering and pillaging wherever they went. On October 25^th, 1075, the Saxon barons conceded an unconditional surrender.

This is by no means the end of the story – the civil war will continue. But it is a crucial moment. Up to this point there has been war and bloodshed in the kingdom. This is the Middle Ages after all where the state had not yet acquired the monopoly of violence. But this is the first time, imperial power stands against an entire duchy, not just its duke or a set of noblemen. If I had to put a pin onto the timeline where the history of Southern and Northern Germany split apart, the battle on the Unstrut would be my first choice.

Next week we will look at something that happens around the same time and involves several of the protagonists of this tale. It is the story of Gottschalk, the prince of the Abodrites who is trying to take his people out of the bind they find themselves in. He does that in a close alliance with Adalbert, the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen and will meet his fate when that great prelate falls, but still paving the way to a reset of the relationship between Wends and Saxons. I hope you will come along.

As I said last week, when you hear this I will still be sailing somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. If you want to follow along, you can do so on a website and app called Marine Traffic. Search for sailing vessel Purple Rain under French flag. What this journey means, apart from working like a dervish to get enough episodes recorded to cover the time, it also means that my marketing efforts trickle down to zero. Hence, I would hugely appreciate if you were to help promote the show. Why not send a link to the History of the Germans to a friend or family member who might be interested, write a comment on one of my older posts which tends to revive them or even write your own post on social media. That would be massively appreciated, as would obviously signing up on Patreon at patreon.com/historyofthegermans.

Episode 99 – Follow the Money

by haradigital on 6th January 202619th February 2026

The reason the Saxon nobles raided the east but did not conquer

This week we stumble into the next imperial succession where the Saxons are again standing on the side lines. On paper the new guy, Konrad II was a man after their own heart, fearsome warrior untroubled by bookish learning, but he was also a sponsor of the church. His son, Henry III was even more so, and there are many reasons why the Saxon magnates did not like the ecclesiastical princes. And it is not just about them greedily gobbling up lands and privileges, but they are also hitting them where it hurts most – the economy, stupid…

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

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Ep. 99: Colonisation of the East(700-1200) – Follow the Money

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 99 – Follow the Money

But before we start let me tell you that 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 Alexander G., John P., James B. and Jeremy H. who have already signed up.

Last week we saw a rift opening up between the Saxon magnates and the emperor Henry II. Henry II had called an end to the longstanding policy of a close alliance between Poland and the Empire. The ruler of Poland, Boleslav the Brave had built an empire that at some point included the Marches of Lusatia and Meissen as well as Bohemia. Henry II opposed him and, in this struggle, allied himself with the Liutzi, a federation of pagan Wendish tribes. This deeply irritated the Saxon magnates who by now had forged close links to the Polish nobility and its ducal house. Henry’s campaigns ultimately failed and in 1018 he had to conclude the peace of Bautzen that confirmed Boleslav’s control of Lusatia, Moravia and Silesia though not the core of Bohemia and Meissen. Boleslav the brave then turned east and conquered Kiev on behalf of his son in law, Sviatopolk the Accursed. Though he did not stay long and mostly came for the plunder, it was still quite cool.

What was not quite as cool was that Boleslav the brave decided that he was now big enough to go up one rank on the feudal hierarchy and crowned himself king of Poland. That was simply unacceptable to the emperor, not the king bit, but the bit of doing it without imperial permission.

However emperor Henry II was unable to do anything about it, largely because he was now dead, which gets us to the next succession crisis.

Emperor Henry II, like his predecessor Otto III had no children, none at all. In fact the Ottonian family had manged to get so haughty, they had decided not to let any of their daughters get married to mere mortals but made them brides of Christ, living their lives as eminent abbesses. And as for sons, they were so thin on the ground that there was simply not a single descendant of Henry the Fowler in the male line anywhere.

And that makes for a free election, where in principle any magnate with a reputation for brutality in war and regular donations to the church could throw in his hat. And one of those would then be elected by the dukes, counts, bishops and abbots of the kingdom. This election took place in Kamba on September 4, 1024. Here is the interesting thing. The Saxons do not show up for the election.

Instead the Saxon magnates had held an assembly a few weeks earlier where they decided to stay neutral. None of the chroniclers explains why they did that and Wipo, the usually best informed of them does even say the Saxons had been at Kamba, though we know they definitely were not.

Why would they do that? This has to do with the way a royal election is designed. It is not an election as we know it where two or more candidates canvass for votes and one of them ends up getting more votes than the competition. No, the idea of a medieval royal election is to identify and then confirm the candidate who is already chosen by God. That means the magnate would discuss the merits of the various candidates in the run-up to the actual voting process, but the vote itself had to be unanimous. That created a huge bandwagon effect since the vote was public and was done in order of seniority. The first to vote was the archbishop of Mainz. Bearing in mind that the vote had to be unanimous it meant that once the archbishop had cast his vote everyone else falls in line behind him.

That must have created a game of three-dimensional chess for the participants. As the fortunes of the different candidates are in flux there is a point in time where throwing your weight behind the ultimately successful candidate is the best strategy to get favours from the future emperor. But if you leave it too late, the benefits of doing so diminish as the future winner is less and less dependent on your support.

That is the moment where the supporters of the defeated candidates leave the assembly. That did mean the winner is voted for unanimously, but he still needs to consolidate his reign. Those who had left will now negotiate terms of their submission to the new ruler, which is a way to get at least some of their rights and privileges confirmed, or if one is very powerful, even granted new ones.

And that was the calculation of the Saxons even before the election had begun. They might have wanted to put forward their own candidate, but they probably could not agree on one amongst themselves. Their duke, Bernhard Billung was the most powerful, but did not have the kind of tight control over the duchy that for instance Henry II had over Bavaria. And there were now other, powerful magnates, including the three margraves of Meissen, Lusatia and the Northern March and the counts of Stade and Ballenstedt. Without a united vote for one Saxon candidate the best option was to stick together as one powerful block that would then extract concessions from the new ruler.

And that they did. Saxony was confirmed in its special status as it had been when Henry II had to do the same thing 20-odd years earlier. What that special status was is not quite clear. But you can assume that given the imperial archives were patchy to say it politely, there is a good chance the Saxons were able to extract special freedoms beyond whatever they traditionally may have had.

In summary, the Saxons recognised the fact that they no longer determined who was king, but at least they got a good deal out of the election process – or so they thought. And what made the deal even more attractive was that the new emperor was in their eyes a major upgrade on Henry II. The new guy, Konrad II was the diametrically opposite of his predecessor. Where Henry II was of fragile health, Konrad was a bear of a man, Henry was a bookish man, originally destined for the church and an accomplished theologian, Konrad’s main communication tool was the sword. And he was lucky.

His first win came when Boleslav the Brave died shortly after Konrad II had ascended the throne. and was succeeded by his son Miesco II who had himself crowned in December 1025 in Gniezno. But Miesco II was no Boleslav the Brave.

In 1028 Miesco II resumes the attack and retreat strategy his father had excelled at. His aim was to compel Konrad II to grant him the margraviate of Meissen and/or hand over the bits of Lusatia he did not yet control. But he lacked his father’s panache. He never brings a full-sized army down that could defend any positions taken. Instead Miesco’s modest forces run back home as soon as Konrad II appears. Miesco II then lures the imperial troops into the endless swamps and forests of Poland where their horses are useless and armour cumbersome. That is sort of smart as a way to defend territory, but no way to expand it.

Success eluded him. Whilst his father managed to put the fear of God into all his neighbours, expanding Poland at the expense of the empire, Bohemia and the Kievan Rus, his son lacked the authority required. Furthermore, he was not the only son of Boleslav. His brother -and I will now properly embarrass myself- called Bezprym had contested his father’s will and fled to Kiev.

At that point the empire, the Bohemians and the Kievan Rus formed a powerful coalition to take back the lands Boleslav had conquered. The Grand Prince of the Kievan Rus attacked Poland from the North with the intention of putting Bezprym on the throne. The duke of Bohemia came from the south taking back Moravia and the emperor took back the county of Lusatia that Henry II had to grant to Boleslav.

In 1031 Miesco II was expelled from Poland and his half-brother Bezprym was put on the throne by the Grand prince of Kiev. Bezprym immediately reconciled with the emperor by sending him the royal insignia of Poland thereby renouncing the royal title. However, his reign did not last long. There are reports of riots caused partially by Bezprym’s persecution of Miesco’s followers and he was murdered after just a year. Miesco II came back to Poland in 1033 on the promise to end hostilities against the empire. He submitted to Konrad at a royal assembly in Merseburg where he gave up his pretensions of kingship and reverted to being a mere duke and gave up all claims on Lusatia and Meissen.

Konrad ordered Poland to be split up amongst the three surviving members of the Piast dynasty. That separation did not last long as Miesco II’s two contenders met a violent end. But after the upheaval of the last decade, order was almost impossible to restore. The peasants revolted and aristocrats expanded their positions. When Miesco II died, his wife and little son, Kazimir, fled to the court of Konrad II. Poland was no longer a major political factor in the East.

Management of the Polish border was given to the last descendant of Margrave Eckard of Meissen, also called Eckard. He is most famous for being married to Uta von Ballenstedt, whose sculpture on the cathedral of Naumburg is one of the most recognisable pieces of medieval art. In the 1930s she was appropriated both by the Nazis as the ideal Arian woman and by Walt Disney as the Evil Queen in Snow White. When Umberto Eco was asked which woman of European art, he would be most like to spend an evening with, he replied: In first place, ahead of all others, Uta of Naumburg”.

Despite its artistic importance, this is not the most significant thing about Eckard II of Meissen. He was one of the most important military commanders on the border and a close associate of Konrad II and later his son Henry III. He was a man of his time and as such willing to use violence, even against members of his own family. In 1032 his brother in law, Dietrich, count of Wettin had taken over the margraviate of Lusatia in recognition of his deeds in the war against Miesco II. That sealed his fate. Eckart II too had been keen on becoming margrave of Lusatia and so simply killed his brother-in-law. Konrad II recognised this transaction and Meissen and Lusatia were united under the murderous Eckart II. But the margraviate of Meissen will not remain in Eckard’s family, mainly because he and the alluring Uta did not produce any offspring. After some back and forward twists the margraviate will end up in the hands of Dietrich’s descendants, the house of Wettin who will elevate it to the level of a kingdom and hold on to it until 1918.

The story of the House of Wettin is likely to be the subject of a separate episode. Therefore we should for now go back to the early 11^th century.

The issue with the countries on the eastern side of the empire is that they are a system of communicating vessels. If one goes down, another goes up. So as Poland went down, Bohemia ascended. The duke of bohemia, Udalrich, had benefitted materially from Miesco’s weakness and recaptured Moravia, which had been lost to Boleslav the Brave 20 years earlier. He even managed to capture Miesco when he had to flee from his half-brother.

This rise in Bohemian power caused concern in the empire, so when by 1033 Miesco and Poland had become embroiled in their internal fighting, Konrad sent an army under the nominal command of his son Henry III to Bohemia. Udalrich had to submit to Konrad who deposed him. Bohemia was split up again and Udalrich was replaced by his brother, another Jaromir, whilst Moravia was given to Udalrich’s son, Bretislav. By 1034 Konrad changed his mind upon pressure of Bohemian magnates and gives Udalrich the duchy to rule jointly with Jaromir. No prizes for what happen next. Udalrich takes over the whole of the duchy and blinds his brother Jaromir. That is not quite what Konrad wanted, so he would have invaded Bohemia again had not the sudden death of Udalrich solved that problem. Udalrich’s son, Bretislav, was made duke of a now reunified Bohemia. He paid homage to Konrad, provided hostages and promised to help with an expedition against the Slavs.

Bretislav became one of Bohemia’s most powerful rulers. He would attack the divided a Poland and steal the relics of St. Adalbert from Gniesno. This led to a repeat of the process, I.e., the next emperor Henry III intervened . In 1047 Bretislav was forced to make peace with the Poles which put this conflict to bed.

To round off the early Salian activity in the north, we need to talk about Denmark.

Last week we heard how Swen Forkbeard and his son Canute created a Viking empire that span Denmark, England and Norway. Konrad was able to establish a positive relationship with king Canute when the two met at his, i.e., Konrad II’s coronation in Rome in 1027. Canute had gone to Rome on some pilgrimage and by sheer coincidence was there at the same time. The two rulers seemed to have hit it off, both being men of the sword. As part of that alliance Canute accepted that the Danish bishoprics returned back under effective control of the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen after 2 decades of English influence.

This bromance culminates 8 years later in the marriage of Konrad II’s son, Henry III to Canute’s daughter Gunhilda who was called Kunigunde in Germany. The marriage was important enough for Konrad that he offered a truly royal present to king Canute, the county of Schleswig.

That is a pretty good track record for Konrad II. His management of the Eastern frontier was so effective that his son, Henry III could focus on issues in Italy, Lothringia and Hungary without having to think too much about how to deal with Bohemians, Poles and Danes.

Which begs the question why the Saxons did not like Konrad II and his son Henry III, and I mean not even one tiny bit. And there were a few reasons for that level of upset.

The first had to do with Goslar. Goslar was originally a possession of the Ottonians but had come to the Salian emperors when the Ottonians died out. Goslar was incredibly important as it held the largest silver mine in Europe at the time. Henry II had already built an imperial palace there in 1005 and Henry III hugely expanded the structure. Goslar became the closest thing to an imperial capital the medieval rulers ever managed. The Pfalz itself was and still is an impressive edifice. And next to it stood the convent of St. Simon and St. Jude, which under Henry III was the permanent seat of the imperial chancery. Until then the chancery had been travelling with the emperor on its perennial move from one Pfalz to the next. By creating a permanent seat, the chancery was able to establish proper reliable archives. And once they had reliable archives the magnates could no longer show up with some forged document that claimed they owned this or that manor house, bridge toll or salt mine without running the risk that the chancery would dig up their corresponding copy that said none of the sort.

If that professionalization of imperial administration was irritating, two more things enraged the nobles. Firstly Konrad II and then Henry III spent a lot of time in Saxony which meant that the Saxons were constantly required to feed the emperor and his vast entourage. Saxony became the imperial kitchen which constantly produced meals for free. That sounds petty, but the imperial court could easily count 1,000 individuals which makes a say 2-week stay ruinous for the count or bishop who has to host them.

The other was that Goslar was a mere 20km from the traditional Saxon palace at Werla. Werla was a large palace covering nearly 20 hectares enclosed by a stone curtain wall with two or more gates, several towers, two palaces, one of which had an underfloor heating system etc., etc. pp. This was a place of Saxon pride and a demonstration of its ancient power. By building out Goslar, the Salians cut Werla out of the equation. The place emptied out and by the 15^th century had entirely disappeared.

The Ottonians had stayed there 14 times, but Henry III never came to Werla to pay his respects to the ancient laws of the Saxons. He always stayed in Goslar and almost as a deliberate snub, summoned the magnates of Saxony come to his splendid new palace.

A professional chancery, constant demand of food and the snubbing of their ancient traditions were issues that irritated the Saxons but would not yet have driven them to distraction. What got them truly riled up was that Konrad II and even more so Henry III were consolidating political control within and over the duchy.

This was done in two ways. The first was to consolidate power around Goslar with the intention to build the very first territorial power base in the empire. This process started under Henry III but accelerated under Henry IV, which we will discuss in more detail next week.

The other leg was the aggressive sponsorship of the church. It is under Konrad II and Henry III that the Ottonian-Salian imperial church system reached its zenith. The basic concept was that the church infrastructure was used as part of the imperial administration. Bishops would receive not just money and lands but would take over entire counties to administer on behalf of the emperor. In return for this generosity the church would be obliged to provide the emperor with material resources, in particular provide soldiers and their supplies beyond the traditional vassalage obligations. The emperor could exert significant power over the bishops as he de-facto decided who would be placed on the episcopal throne. In the case of Henry III, he even did this with the popes themselves.

The expansion of the church power concerned the Saxon nobles. Every time another county or large farm was moving across into church ownership, it was another county or farm that could no longer be bought, inherited or taken by force. And the bishops took a proactive part in the imperial policy to curb feuds. Henry III had declared a Peace of God in 1043 that severely limited the opportunities for magnates to rob their way to riches.

And there is something else the Saxon magnates took issue with, and that was the church’s attempt to convert the Slavs in the Marches. There is a section in Adam von Bremen where he explains the animosity between the duke of Saxony, Bernhard Billung and the archbishop of Hamburg Bremen.

(Quote) “From the time the duke was installed in his post, the discord between the two houses, that of the archbishop and that of the duke never stopped. The duke attacked the king and the church, whilst the archbishop fought for the well-being of the church the fealty to the king. This conflict, that had remained hidden for long grew and grew to infinity. Duke Bernhard having forgotten his grandfather’s humility and his father’s piety pressed the Abodrites so hard for money, that they in their despair returned to their pagan beliefs…(end quote). Adam von Bremen then accuses the duke of further crimes including high treason and the destruction of churches.

But what I found interesting was this point about pushing the local Slavic people back into paganism. At a later stage Adam will get more explicit and say that duke and archbishop had opposite perspectives as regards the policy towards the Slavs. The archbishop cared mostly about gathering souls for Christendom. The duke on the other hand cared only about the tribute according to Adam von Bremen it was “the avarice of the duke that prevented the conversion of the people.”

That does not seem to make much sense. Why would the duke, a pious Christian no doubt, want to prevent the spreading of the gospel? The answer is the economy – stupid.

As long as the Slavs remained pagan, the margraves could demand tribute. How much tribute was in the hands of the margraves since pagans had no legal standing in court. And pagans do not pay the tithe to the church, leaving more to give to the duke. And if the Wends were unwilling or unable to pay the tribute, the dukes and margraves were entirely in their right to raid and plunder their lands without breaching the peace of God.

And there is another reason why it may be opportune for the Saxon nobles to keep the Wends pagan. And that has to do with the slave trade. The church had banned the enslavement of Christians, even recently converted Christians. And slaves were the most profitable business on the border. If the bishop gets to convert all these Hevellers, Abodrites and Liutzi, there is no longer a reservoir of potential slaves. One would have to go to the land of the terrifying Pruzzi to find more of them, and that is a long way and dangerous. The Pruzzi had recently killed their second missionary saint, Bruno of Querfurth, presumably also because he was carrying the books they so despised.

If you look at it this way, quite a lot of things start to make sense that I could not quite get my head round the first time. It explains why the Saxon nobles actively undermined Henry II’s alliance with the Liutzi – the alliance had taken the Liutzi out of the pool of potential slaves and targets for pillage. It explains why they never established garrisons or rebuilt the bishoprics in the Northern marches or the March of the Billungs after 983. They should have been able to since their military expeditions were mostly successful.

And it explains another story that I never quite got my head around. It relates to a war with the Liutzi in 1033.

In the years before the conflict, the Liutzi had been paying their tribute as was ordered and had been living peacefully, minding their own business.

That changed when a Saxon Count named Liudger was killed by the Slavs together with 40 of his comrades. The Slavs claimed that it was the Saxons who had provoked the fight, and they had only acted in self-defence. As there were no Christian witnesses, the emperor, on advice from his princes, proposed to determine the veracity of the respective claims through a trial by combat.

The Saxons put up a fighter who was full of the Christian faith, but, as the chronicler Wipo said, did not take seriously that God is the truth and decides all and everything in his proper judgement. The heathens on the other hand put up a fighter whose one and only focus was the truth. The Slav fought hard and fair until the Christian defender was hit and fell. The judgement was clear for all to see, the Liutzi had not given any reason for the Saxons to attack them. So the Saxons had to abandon their expedition. To pacify the border, Konrad built a strong fortification at Werben on the Elbe River.

The following year war finally broke out. This time the Saxon say that the Liutzi had taken the castle of Werben by treachery and killed or captured the garrison left there by Konrad. That may have been true, or we have an early version of the Gleiwitz incident. Left with no option, Konrad mobilises his army and enters the territory East of the Elbe River. As his army marches around in the lands of the Liutzi, they burn and devastate the lands until only the strongest fortifications and towns remain in the hands of Liutzi. Everything else is carried away by the raiders.

No wonder the Wends feel little warmth to their oppressors and, if they have to die anyway, prefer to do it believing in the old gods. The churchmen have a lot of sympathy for their plight and work on preventing these raids. The dominant church figure in Saxony after 1043 is Adalbert, archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen who embodies this spirit perfectly.

Adalbert was from one of the major Saxon clans, the counts of Goseck. His brothers became the counts palatinate of Saxony, which means they were the counts administrating the royal territories within the duchy. Adalbert and his brothers were very much the eyes and ears of Henry III in the duchy.

Adalbert had a very close relationship with Henry III. Like the emperor he had great ambitions. Adalabert saw himself and his archbishopric as the patriarch of the north, tasked with bringing Christendom to all the shores of the Baltic. That included being the superior of all the bishoprics in Denmark, Norway, Sweden as well as any future bishoprics to be established there or in what is now Finland, Russia and the Baltic states. His ambition was to convert the souls and make himself their spiritual guide. Raiding and rounding up of women and children as slaves did not feature in his plans.

In 1047 the Saxons in general and their ducal house, the Billungs had enough of Goslar, of centralisation, of disregard for their ancient traditions, but foremost for the preferment for the church that was getting in the way of their livelihood.

Henry III had gone to a royal estate in Saxony called Lesum to meet with the archbishop Adalbert. Lesum was a bit of a red rag as well, since Konrad II had taken it off the Billungs under some legal pretext 10 years earlier. Whilst the Emperor and Archbishop met, the Billungs, duke Bernhard II and his brother Thietmar come around with a large retinue. During this probably rather uneasy stay one of Thietmar’s vassals, a certain Arnold confides in the archbishop that Thietmar plans to kill the emperor.

Arnold is made to accuse Thietmar openly which results in another trial by combat. There is no evidence on either side, so God is to decide. Thietmar is happy to go along, maybe less on grounds of actual innocence but more on his recognised prowess with the sword. Anyway, the Lord reveals that Thietmar was lying by means of Arnold’s sword sticking out of his back.

There is no record of how Bernhard II explains the situation to his overlord, but not much happen to him. Henry III may not yet have enough assets in place to take the duke of Saxony on directly.

There is an epilogue to the story. A few years later Thietmar’s son captures his father’s killer and has him strung up between two dogs. That gets Henry III involved again. The son is exiled for life and his lands are given to the bishop of Halberstadt, further undermining ducal power in Saxony.

By the time Henry III died in 1056, the rift between the Saxons and the imperial Salian house has deepened to the point of open enmity. Only the undeniable strength of Henry III, the arguably most powerful medieval emperor of all time holds things in check. But nobody lives forever, and when Henry III leaves behind a small boy as his heir and an inept regent to run the empire for the next decade, the Saxons are getting ready to strike. How that works out we will hear next week. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, if you want to hear more about the reign of Konrad II and Henry III listen again to episodes 22 to 29.

And another thing. As you hear this I will be sailing somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. If you want to follow along, you can do so on a website and app called Marine Traffic. Search for sailing vessel Purple Rain under French flag. What this journey means, apart from working like a dervish to get enough episodes recorded to cover the time, it also means that my marketing efforts trickle down to zero. Hence I would hugely appreciate if you were to help promote the show. Why not send a link to the History of the Germans to a friend or family member who might be interested, write a comment on one of my older posts which tends to revive them or even write your own post on social media. That would be massively appreciated, as would obviously signing up on Patreon at patreon.com/historyofthegermans.

Episode 98 – The Rift

by haradigital on 6th January 202619th February 2026

The Saxon Nobles and the Emperors fall out over what to do with the East

This week we are talking about the rift that is opening up between the Saxons and the Empire. For 80 years Saxony had been the centre of imperial power and the Ottonians had been supportive of the Saxon nobles’ policy vis-à-vis the Wends and Poland. All that Is about to change. The new emperor Henry II, though a direct descendant of Henry the Fowler, was no Saxon. For three generations his family had been dukes of Bavaria and all that exposure to the despised southerners had rubbed off. The Saxons were too divided to field their own candidate, but that does not mean they wanted Henry II. And for good reason. The new administration drives a 180 degree turn in imperial policy versus Poland and versus the Slavic tribes in the Marches….

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

And for good reason. The new administration drives a 180 degree turn in imperial policy versus Poland and versus the Slavic tribes in the Marches….

As always:

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So far I have:

Ep. 98: Colonisation of the East(700-1200) – The Rift between Emperor and Saxon Princes

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 98 – The Rift

Before we start, I would like you to know that 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 Freddie de L, Britt K, David von G. and Alexey K. who have already signed up.

Last week we left off with emperor Otto III travelling to Gniezno and crowning or not crowning Boleslav the Brave as king. What he definitely did was elevating Gniezno to an archbishopric which cut the feet off the archbishop of Magdeburg’s claim to be in charge of all missionary activity in the east. All this was part of a repositioning of the relationship between Poland and the Empire in the wake of the Slavic rebellion of 983 and the formation of the Liuitzi and Abodrites federations that partially united the Slavic tribes between Elbe and Oder. To keep them down the empire was reliant on the duke of Poland. And Poland’s new ruler, Boleslav the Brave used this situation as leverage to move from mere vassal and duke to a new status as a friend and ally of the emperor.

Before we get into the story of how this relationship develops further, there are two other topics we need to discuss. The first is the situation in Denmark and the other is the succession of Otto III.

Let’s start with Denmark. Last time we checked in on them, King Harald Bluetooth had used the chaos following the catastrophic defeat of Otto II at the battle of capo Colonna and the succession crisis following Otto II’s death to retake the Danevirke and throw off the yoke of imperial vassalage.

But Harald Bluetooth could not enjoy his success for long. He had a son who may even have been the godson of Otto I, called Sweyn Otto. That son had been exiled together with his mother when Harald Bluetooth decided he fancied some well-endowed Slavic princess. To no-one’s surprise that turned out to have been a mistake because Sweyn came back several times to claim what he believed to be his rightful inheritance. In 986 he was successful. He defeated his father who died of wounds sustained in the decisive battle.

Adam of Bremen reports that Sweyn, though baptised a Christian, gave up his faith and reverted back to the old gods. Not only that but he also initiated widespread persecution of Christians across Denmark. For that he was punished by the Swedes who – according to Adam von Bremen – conquered Denmark with an army, “in number like the sand on the seashore”. What followed was 14 years of exile that only ended when the Swedish king died and Sweyn returned to Christianity.

That story used to be the generally accepted version but is now debunked. Archaeologists have found several churches built on Sweyn’s command during the period he was allegedly living in exile. There is also no record in Swedish sagas of a conquest of Denmark, something they would surely not have left out. What is more likely is that the archbishop of Hamburg and his chronicler had been upset when Sweyn placed Danish-speaking clerics from England into Danish bishoprics. If that is what happened and indeed these clerics had been responsible for missionary success in Norway and Sweden, then the claim of the archbishop of Hamburg to be the primate of all Scandinavian churches was very much in doubt.

So the more likely scenario is that Sweyn, who is now no longer calling himself Sweyn Otto, but Sweyn Forkebeard ruled continuously from 986 to his death in 1014. If the name Sweyn Forkebeard sounds familiar, the answer is yes. This is the same Sweyn Forkebeard who first raided and then conquered England after king Aethelread the Unready had committed the St. Brice massacres. He is also the father of king Knut who ruled over a Denmark, Norway and England, a veritable Nordic empire.

I am not the one to tell this story, I leave that to the History of England, the British History podcast and obviously Mikael Shankman from the Scandinavian History Podcast. And here is the man himself:

[SHP jingle]

What interests us here is only what Sweyn does on the border in Schleswig. And the answer is – nothing. Adam von Bremen mentions some Viking raids, raids that were so threatening that Bremen received a brand new city wall and the most valuable relics were brought down south. But there is no attempt at pushing the border. Hedeby, the trading city near Schleswig was back in Danish hands and as we heard, the Danish king was no longer a vassal of the empire and the Danish bishoprics were outside the authority of Hamburg. In that scenario Sweyn Forkebeard could see not much point in opening up a new frontier that would only weaken his ability to conquer England.

And on the other side, why did the empire not try to bring the Danish king back to heel? Nobody says anything, but the simple answer is that the delta in military capability on land between the empire and its neighbours was no longer as wide as it had been 50 years earlier. If they cannot tame the Slavs in the Northern Marches, how would they be able to defeat the mighty Danes?

And there was another issue. The empire was disunited. The emperor Otto III had died very young, most likely from a combination of mild illness and excessive religious exertions. He had not been married and had no offspring. He was also his father’s only son whilst his sister and many of his female relatives had joined religious orders. That left only one relative in the male line, Henry, duke of Bavaria, son of Henry the Quarrelsome, abductor of little Otto III and grandson of another Henry, brother and bane of Otto I.

Henry was of the view that he should be elected king and future emperor on the strength of his name and his position as duke of Bavaria. But not everyone agreed. The kingdom of East Francia was still an elective monarchy. Sure, the ruling king could force through the election of his son, as happened the last three times, but a second cousin was a different matter. Multiple candidates threw their hats in the ring. These included the duke of Swabia, Otto of Worms and the son of Hermann Billung, Bernhard Billung who was now duke of Saxony.

Within Saxony there was however an even more ambitious man, count Ekkehard of Meissen. He was a celebrated warrior. His most famous feat was the storming of the Castel Sant Angelo in Rome in 998. We know him for keeping control of the Slavs east of Meissen, taming the duke of Bohemia and commanding the respect of Boleslav the Brave of Poland. His fame was such that he was recognised by many as duke of Thuringia, a title that had been out of use for 200 years. He may not have any royal blood, but he is definitely on the list.

Duke Henry of Bavaria was nothing if not an astute and ruthless politician. He managed to get hold of the imperial regalia, which were a precondition for a valid coronation. To do that he had the bishop of Augsburg taken hostage which given his family’s reputation for blinding bishops was enough to make this bishop’s brother handing over the all-important Holy Lance. That brother was also the archbishop of Cologne which gives him access to the coronation church in Aachen, another important building block in the road to kingship.

What he needed now was some sort of quorum for an election.

Meanwhile in Saxony the Major nobles of the duchy had come together to discuss the succession. There was no consensus amongst the Saxons on who they wanted as the new king. They were treated well under the Ottonians who still saw themselves as Saxons and they ideally wanted their privileged status to remain as is. But there was no natural candidate for that policy.

Henry was not seen as a Saxon despite his heritage. His family had been dukes of Bavaria for three generations. And worse, Henry II had run a tight ship in Bavaria which got the Saxons worried he might suppress their ancient rights and privileges. Some supported the duke of Swabia. And then there was Ekkehard of Meissen who was a Saxon, but he was not universally loved in the duchy. So, in the first instance the Saxon nobles agreed to recognise no one, and all attendees, apart from Ekkehard, swore not to support any candidate unless they had all agreed.

One Saxon noble, Liuthard, however had a firm view that Ekkehard should not become king under any circumstances. He had it in for Ekkehard because of some slight related to a marriage proposal. So, he travelled down to Bavaria to discuss next steps with Henry. These two came up with a plan. They would send two abbesses, Mathilda and Sophie, a sister and an aunt of Otto III to plead Henry’s case in front of the Saxon nobles. These Ottonian abbesses are not to be underestimated. The ladies ruled abbeys that were extraordinarily rich and could raise significant contingents of soldiers. But more importantly, they combined imperial and sacred status. Several of them had become saints after their death, others had been regents during the absence of Otto II and Otto III.

When the abbesses showed up at the gathering of the Saxon magnates, they were initially treated with all the honours becoming their status. But after they had made their mission clear, Ekkehard and his supporters stopped being nice. They sent the ladies up to their room without dinner and took their place at the feast. That was worse than impolite, it was a mistake. You cannot treat the imperial ladies like that. His fellow Saxon were so wound up by that snub, Ekkehard was made to leave the gathering with his prospects now much diminished. He headed for Aachen, where Otto IIIs body was to be buried and, where in all likelihood, a royal assembly would gather to elect a new king.

En route to Aachen Ekkehard stayed at the Pfalz in Poehlde. In the night four armed men attack his sleeping quarters. They enter the antechamber and kill two of his attendants. Ekkehard wakes up and tries to raise his guards by making a fire and opening the window. All that does is alert the attackers to his whereabouts. They break down the door, kill more of his knights and finally one throws a javelin that brings the mighty warrior down. When he lies on the ground the assailants pile in, cut off his head and gruesomely mutilate his body before retreating. That crime shocked his contemporaries and raised many questions.

The assailants claimed it was revenge for the mistreatment of the imperial ladies at dinner. There was also some blood feud going on between Ekkehard and one of his assailants. But some things point to Henry as well. The assailants were relatives of Henry’s wife Kunigunde, of which there are admittedly many. Now I do not want to point the finger at anyone here, but that smells a bit off.

Killing Ekkehard created not just a moral but also a military problem. Ekkehard and his reputation as an invincible warrior had been key to holding down the Slavic tribes around Meissen and keeping the dukes of Bohemia in line. Ekkehard also maintained great relations with Boleslav the Brave of Poland. With his death that whole power balance collapsed, adding another big headache to whoever would become king.

With Eckhard out of the way, Henry outfoxed the duke of Swabia, managed to rustle up enough magnates to call it a quorum for an election and got the archbishop of Mainz to crown him. All that had happened without any involvement of Saxons though.

Hence the magnates of Saxony met for the third time to discuss the succession, this time in Merseburg. Henry appeared in person, wearing the royal robes and crown, thereby indicating that he did not come for election but for allegiance. The Saxons yielded, but only after having secured their ancient rights and privileged access to the king. Henry received another, this time only a ceremonial coronation. Henry and his wife moved on from there to Paderborn, which is still in Saxony. Here his wife, Kunigunde was formally crowned, which is another faint attempt by the Saxons to retain the right to determine who is king and queen of the land.

But we are now off on the wrong foot. The close link between the imperial family and Saxony is broken. Which gets me to the third topic I wanted to cover in this episode.

The great Saxon nobles, their duke Bernhard and Ekkehard of Meissen had operated very much in line with the policy of Otto III, meaning he maintained close relations with the Christian duke of Poland, Boleslav the Brave whose lands were even further east.

Following the great Slavic uprising of 983 the military strategy was was to attack the Slavs from both sides, the Germans coming from the West and the Poles coming from the East. This close cooperation was underpinned further when Otto III did his famous pilgrimage to Gniezno in Poland where he may or may not have crowned Boleslav as king of the Poles. Ekkehard, as one of the leaders of the German armies in the east had developed close family ties with Boleslav, namely his brother Gunzelin was married to Boleslav’s sister.

When Ekkehard was killed and Henry II was hurtling towards his coronation, his march of Meissen became a power vacuum. Boleslav the Brave saw the opportunity and jumped in. Boleslav had been keen on Meissen and Lusatia for a long time. Within days Boleslav had taken hold of the Lausitz, and the town of Meissen, helped by his brother-in-law, Gunzelin. Sorry, I just love saying Gunzelin, what a brilliant name!

Boleslav defended his take-over by saying that he acted on Henry II’s behalf, securing the vacant county against his enemies (whatever these enemies were).

Boleslav came to meet king Henry II in Merseburg. Boleslav hoped to keep hold of all the lands he had occupied, and in particular wanted to be invested as margrave of Meissen. Henry II was not prepared to go all that far. He gave him presents and let him have part of the march of Lusatia. The compromise over the county and city of Meissen was that it went to Gunzelin, Boleslav’s brother-in-law and at that point his strong supporter. Not everything he wanted, but more than good enough.

What happens next is disputed. As Boleslav departed from Merseburg, he and his entourage are getting ambushed by an unidentified group of knights. Boleslav gets severely injured in the melee and just about gets away with his life. The reason he survived was an intervention by duke Bernhard of Saxony who was also a supporter of Otto III’s policy of friendship with Poland and also a relative of Boleslav.

Did Henry order the ambush? Boleslav definitely believed that to be true and on his way home sacked the town of Strehla to make his point. The German chronicler, Thietmar of Merseburg explicitly said that it happened without Henry’s knowledge. Thietmar suggests the attackers had to defend the honour of the king since Boleslav and his men had refused to leave their weapons at the door when they had come into his presence.

There might be no evidence of Henry II’s involvement, but whoever attacked Boleslav would not have dared doing that against the will of the king. And the king did not identify and punish the perpetrators. Not the act of a friend and ally.

That raises the question why Henry II reversed the policy of close friendship and coordination with Poland that all previous Ottonian emperors had supported.

The fact that Boleslav stood with Ekkehard of Meissen in his bid for kingship is unlikely to be a reason for a deep rift between the two rulers. Henry II was perfectly happy to work with Heribert of Cologne who had actively promoted the candidacy of the duke of Swabia.

Henry II bigger concern was the emergence of a hugely powerful new polity on his eastern frontier. Under Boleslav, Poland had become an increasingly coherent state, was expanding northwards and eastwards and the meeting of Gniezno had shown that the ruler of Poland had large resources at his disposal.

That concern of rising Polish power increased further due to instability in neighbouring Bohemia. In 999 another Boleslaus, Boleslaus III (937-1037) called the Red had become duke of Bohemia. He was a weak ruler who quickly got into conflict with his stepbrothers Jaromir and Ulrich. Boleslaus III had Jaromir castrated, and the two brothers fled into exile at the court of Henry II in Bavaria.

Before Henry II could intervene on their behalf, Boleslaus III was deposed by a certain Wlodowej, a relative of the ducal family. Boleslaus III fled to his relative, Boleslav the Brave of Poland.

The usurper Wlodowej died a few months later, allegedly because he could not go an hour without a drink. The two exiled brothers returned with Jaromir been made duke. That lasted a few months before Boleslaus III returned with support of Boleslav the Brave.

After the Polish Boleslav had returned home the Bohemian Boleslaus invited all the major nobles of the duchy to dinner and – since they had supported either Wlodowej or Jaromir or were otherwise irritating, had them all killed. That did not go down well with his people, and they called on Polish Boleslav for help. Polish Boleslav lured Bohemian Boleslaus into a trap and had him blinded and imprisoned. And then Boleslav the Brave made himself duke of Bohemia.

If that was not enough, Boleslav the Brave was strengthening his relationships with the Saxon magnates including by marrying his daughter to Hermann the son of Margrave Ekkehard. That gradually turned into a broader alliance of “Friends of Boleslav” that even included the duke of Saxony himself.

Bohemia, which was part of the empire, under the control of an already exceedingly powerful duke of Poland would have been unacceptable, even if the duke of Poland had been a faithful vassal. And a faithful vassal he clearly was not.

War had now become inevitable.

The area Henry II had to defend against a potential Polish attack stretched pretty much the full length of today’s Germany, from Hamburg in the far north to Passau in the far south. Moreover, the friends of Boleslav controlled most of the northern end of that border. They may not fight the king directly, but they would pass on information to Boleslav and hold back their troops. The only people Henry could trust in this conflict were the bishops and his Bavarians. In that situation Henry II did something very, very unexpected.

Henry II went into an alliance with the Liutzi, the federation of pagan Slavic tribes who lived in what is today Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. These peoples have been defending their way of life against Saxon incursions since at least the 920s.

Henry II is otherwise very much the Christian ruler who derives his authority from God directly. Him allying with pagans upsets a lot of people, not least the missionaries like Brun of Querfurt who wrote a very unusual letter of complaint to his theocratic ruler.

Despite being unable to rely on the battle-hardened Saxons and morally in the wrong, the initial campaign was successful. Henry expelled Boleslav from Prague by circumventing the Poles major forces and put Jaromir back on the ducal throne.

In a next step he confronted Boleslav at a place called Krossen, where Boleslav had to flee, leaving a lot of his train behind, but without much loss of actual soldiers. Henry II progressed further into Poland and besieged Poznan, one of major towns. But in the end, he could not take it and with his army weakened by hunger and disease, the two sides concluded a peace agreement in 1005.

This process would repeat itself several times over the next 13 years. Henry II would build up his forces, invade Poland, get stuck in the vast territory and finally agree a truce. That truce would last as long as it took Henry to gather new forces to make another run at it.

As time went by, Henry began to gradually replace unreliable counts and margraves along the border. Namely our friend Gunzelin, the brother-in-law of Boleslav was removed as the margrave of the crucial March of Meissen. His successor was Hermann, the oldest son of the murdered Eckart.

Henry also tried to strengthen the power of the bishops in Saxony by handing them more and more resources. He -amongst other things – recreated the bishopric of Merseburg resolving an issue that had been undermining royal authority for the last 25 years.

One problem was that Boleslav was extremely well informed of what went on in Germany thanks to his network of supporters in the highest ranks of society. Every one of Henry’s moves, Boleslav could counter, and when that failed, he just disappeared into the depth of Poland where Henrys army would falter.

In 1013 both sides became pre-occupied with different things and made an attempt at a more lasting peace. Boleslav promised to be a faithful vassal of king Henry in exchange for being allowed to keep hold of what he had acquired, i.e., Lusatia, Silesia and some other parts of Bohemia Jaromir had been unable to recapture.

But that did not work either. Boleslav failed to send troops for Henry’s campaign to Rome which made him an unfaithful vassal. Henry invited Boleslav to a royal assembly in Merseburg to witness the submission of other unruly vassals before the emperor. That involved kneeling barefoot in front of the emperor wearing a hare shirt. To Henry’s surprise the proud duke of Poland did not fancy that, and hostilities resumed.

After another three-year campaign that was fought brutally across Poland, eastern Germany and Bohemia, Henry realised that he could not beat Boleslav. The two parties concluded a peace agreement signed at the castle of Bautzen, a final humiliation for Henry since Bautzen was on Imperial territory. Henry did not even bother to attend the ceremony. Boleslav had won almost everything he set out to gain, except for Meissen itself and the core duchy of Bohemia. That, together with his success against the Kievan Rus almost double the size of his realm. In the mind of many historians, Boleslav, and his father Miesco I, were the founders of Poland, turning a loose federation of independent groups into a coherent powerful state that was now largely independent from the empire. As a last act, in the period of uncertainty after Henry IIs death, Boleslav had himself crowned king of Poland, a process that had begun 25 years earlier with the “act of Gniezno” when Otto III may or may not have put his imperial diadem on Boleslav’s head.

If we look at the reign of Henry II, something has fundamentally changed in the relationship between the Saxons and the empire. Until now Saxony was the heartland of the empire, it’s rulers had been their men and they had chosen who succeeds. That was no longer the case at the death of Henry II. Moreover, imperial policy and Saxon policy was no longer in synch. There is now a rift between the Saxon magnates and their interests and the imperial interests on the other side. This rift will only deepen under the next two rulers, Konrad II and Henry III, something we will look at next week. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, if you want to hear more about the tumultuous rise of Henry II to the throne check out or listen again to episode 17.

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.

Episode 97 – Rebellion

by haradigital on 6th January 202619th February 2026

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…

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

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…

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So far I have:

Ep. 97: Colonisation of the East(700-1200) – Rebellion!

Transcript

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

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.

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 9^th and early 10^th 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.

Episode 96 – Meet the Neighbours

by haradigital on 6th January 202619th February 2026

Poland, Bohemia and Denmark in the 1oth cwntury

This week we are still getting our bearings. Last week we saw the emergence of the Stem duchy of Saxony and the Eastern marches. This week we take a look at the bigger neighbours, the Bohemians, the Poles and the Danes. It is right around this time, the middle of the 10^th century that these political entities form. As always none of this happens smoothly, so expect all sorts of battles and betrayals, including a legion of thieves…

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

This week we are still getting our bearings. Last week we saw the emergence of the Stem duchy of Saxony and the Eastern marches. This week we take a look at the most important neighbours to the East and North, the Bohemians, the Poles and the Danes.

It is right around this time, the middle of the 10th century that these coalesce into political entities. As always none of this happens smoothly, so expect all sorts of battles and betrayals, including a legion of thieves…

As always:

Homepage with maps, photos, transcripts and blog: www.historyofthegermans.com

If you wish to support the show go to: Support • History of the Germans Podcast

Facebook: @HOTGPod

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So far I have:

Ep. 96: Colonisation of the East(700-1200) – The Neighbours – Poland, Bohemia and Denmark

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 96 – Meet the Neighbours

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 Harm W., Markus N. and Brian L. who have already signed up.

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Last week we explored the destiny of the Saxons since Charlemagne first invaded in 772. We ended with the death of Otto I in 973 when the duchy seemed well set up. The original territory between the Rhine and the Elbe River was now well settled. Cities had emerged around the seats of bishops or the castles of important noblemen. A new military system had been established that relied heavily on armoured men on horseback who were bound to their leader by an oath of fealty.

Beyond the Elbe River two men, Hermann Billung and Margrave Gero had conquered the land of the Slavic tribes all the way to the Oder and Neisse Rivers. These territories, roughly the current Laender of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Sachsen Anhalt and Sachsen, had been divided into ultimately four marcher counties each headed by their own margrave. The population of these lands was predominantly Slavic peoples many of whom had at least nominally embraced Christianity.

Otto had also founded a number of new bishoprics in Brandenburg, Havelberg, Merseburg, Zeitz and Meissen and the archbishopric of Magdeburg in charge of the latter three. The purpose of these bishoprics was to embed Christianity in the local population and strengthen imperial control over these territories. At the same time they sent out missionaries to convert pagans further east as part of the great imperial mission to spread the gospel around the world.

The duke of Saxony at the time of Otto’s death was still the emperor. But due to his regular absences Otto had put his old comrade Hermann Billung in charge of the duchy as his proxy. And that is where the first cracks appear in this otherwise neat story.

Medieval rule was an intensely personal thing. A vassal swears fealty to another man, not to an institution. That is why upon the ascension to the throne all vassals have to renew their oaths. That is actually a Freudian slip here when I say renew the oath. Because this wasn’t a renewal. It was a new oath, as Otto von Northeim will say a 100 years later, an oath that was freely made.

Personal rule means the ruler has to be present. How else can you live this relationship. Moreover, the oath of fealty went two ways. Not only does the vassal promise to serve the liege lord in war, the liege lord is also obliged to protect the vassal, give access to justice and listen to the vassal’s council. When Otto I disappears to Italy for his coronation as emperor in 962 it will be almost 10 years before he returns. In all that time his Saxon vassals had to make do with his stand-in, Hermann Billung. This vague situation did become untenable. At some point in the 970s Hermann Billung transitioned from acting on Otto’s behalf to pretending to be the real duke.

In 972 Hermann called an assembly in Magdeburg. With burning tapers and all the bells ringing , he was received by the archbishop and led by his hand to the church. He even took the emperor’s place at dinner and slept in the emperor’s bed in his palace. This was a clear act of defiance against imperial prestige. The Saxon nobles who seemingly went along with it sent a clear message to Otto the Great, if he continues to stay away from the duchy, they will follow another leader who is present and prepared to fulfil his obligations. Basically the Saxons were in rebellion.

This issue was resolved quite quickly by Hermann Billung dying soon afterwards and Otto I making his way up north poste haste. But this is not the last time the Saxons will declare their displeasure with absent or overbearing leaders.

Before we get into that thorny issue, we should probably first take a look at the state of play beyond the forward frontiers of the Kingdom of East Francia.

There are three maybe four polities that will play a major role in our story going forward, going from North to south, these are Denmark, Poland, Bohemia and Hungary.

I will not go into detail about Hungary here. If you want to know more, I give a rundown of Hungarian history up to and beyond the battle on the Lechfeld in episode 6. For today’s purposes it is enough to know that the Hungarians or Magyars as they call themselves are not Slavs but steppe nomads probably originally from Siberia. Their language is related to Finnish and Estonian. They appear in western records for the first time in 895 when they are moving into the Carpathian basin. Form there they raid deep into Germany, Italy and even as far as Burgundy. Otto I defeated them on the Lechfeld and had their three leaders executed. In the subsequent upheaval a grandson of Arpad, the original leader of the Magyars consolidates power with the help of Otto I and his brother, the duke of Bavaria. Missionaries are admitted and two generations later their king Waik is baptised and takes the name of Stephen, becoming Saint Stephen in the process. His relatives, in the loosest sense of the word will rule Hungary until 1301.

Going north from Hungary, the next important power is Bohemia. As you probably know Bohemia is roughly equivalent to modern day Czech Republic. It consists of two parts, The Northern part is Bohemia itself and its southern part is known as Moravia.

Moravia is the first to make a splash on the European stage. In 805 Charlemagne had defeated the Avars, another nomadic peoples originating from Mongolia who had formed an empire ranging from the Elbe river down through Czech republic, Hungary into the Balkans. Into the power vacuum that had been created by their demise stepped the Moravians, a Slavic peoples. They created another empire that lasted around 100 years from 820 to 906. This, the Great Moravian empire reached its peak under Ratislav (846-870) and Svatopluk (870-894) when their power stretched from Southern Poland to Western Hungary. The World Heritage Convention describes Great Moravia as follows: At the height of its development it was already a consolidated protofeudal state with its own ruling dynasty, a complex of castles, an independently organized Church and a developed economy. The Great Moravian Empire was an important state entity of the Christianization period in Central Europe, with cultural ties to the Byzantian Empire; moreover, its culture laid the foundations of Slavonic literature and material heritage of the West-Slavonic peoples.”

So a lot more sophisticated than say the Saxons were before Charlemagne had arrived. The Moravians were formally vassals of the Carolingian empire. And we find that on several occasions their rulers swore fealty to the emperor, though they probably crossed their fingers behind their backs when making their oaths. Their foreign policy was a constant attempt to wiggle out from under the Carolingian kibosh.

For a long time the Carolingian empire and later the kingdom of East Francia were strong enough to force the Moravians to admit Bavarian missionaries to enter their lands and convert the locals. But as the Carolingians weakened, the Moravians found room to manoeuvre. Prince Ratislav expelled the Bavarian missionaries and asked the pope to send him fresh, basically non-German ones. But the pope refused as he did not want to cross the Franks. So the Moravians turned to the emperor in faraway Constantinople asking him to send missionaries. That he did. Two brothers arrived in Moravia in 863, Konstantine and Method. They not only had profound theological learning but also experience as diplomats and, most importantly, spoke a Slavic language. Being aware that mumbling strange phrases in Latin wasn’t going to ease conversion, the two brothers translated the most significant parts of the bible and the church fathers into the Slavic language they had picked up back home in Thessaloniki. This language that would later be known as Church Slavonic is still used in orthodox rites across eastern Europe. To write it down, the brothers invented a Slavic script called Glagolica that remained in use until the Kyrillic alphabet replaced it in the 10^th or 11^th century. Moreover the brothers convinced the pope to allow this Slavic language to be used in the church liturgy alongside Hebrew, Greek and Latin. A huge achievement if you take into account that it took the reformation before western Europeans could finally hear the bible in a language most of them understood.

Shortly after this great diplomatic success Konstantine died in Rome. He was buried in one of my all-time favourite Roman churches, the Basilica de San Clemente. His original resting place is a rather unassuming corner of the underground church that is covered in dedications from all Slavic nations as well as others. Constantine is better known as St Cyrill and together the two brothers are known as the apostles to the Slavs.

Grab von Hl. Kyrill, Basilica San Clemente

The other feat that made Sts. Cyrill and Method famous was the recovery of the relics of San Clemente. Clemente had somehow irritated the emperor Trajan and was martyred by been thrown overboard in the Black Sea with an anchor attached to his feet. That happened around the year 100 AD. Miraculously his body including anchor was preserved for 700 years on a beach in Crimea where Cyrill found him. He then brough San Clemente, seemingly minus his anchor, to Rome where the aforementioned basilica was dedicated to be his final resting place. Despite his rather unpleasant maritime experience San Clemente is the patron saint of seafarers, so honouring him here may come in handy when I am in the Middle of the Atlantic.

Enough of this diversion. But St. Cyrill and St. Method weren’t a diversion. They matter because though they are from Constantinople and were linked to what would later be the Greek orthodox tradition, they did submit themselves and the Moravian church to the pope.

Being subject to the pope was however not enough for the East Francians. They wanted the Moravian church to report to the bishop of Regensburg, the closest diocese. So the Carolingians encouraged Svatopluk, the nephew of Ratislav to rebel, a rebellion that was successful. Once Svatopluk was firmly installed he handed St. Method over to the Bavarian church who imprisoned him in a monastery. That now irritated the pope who forced the Bavarians to release St. Method, whilst Svatopluk – again -wiggled out of the stranglehold of the divided East Francian kingdom. In defiance the pope made St. Method an archbishop.

But by 890 this period of Moravian Slavic church comes to an end. Method had died in 885 and the pope had replaced him not with one of his pupils but with a Swabian who became bishop of Nitra. This guy, called Wiching banned the use of the Slavic language in Moravian church services and expelled Method’s pupils. About 10 years later the Moravian empire disappeared in a fireball of civil war and Hungarian attacks.

Even before Great Moravia had fallen, the local warlords on the periphery of the realm began fighting it out. Ok, serious warning. Now comes the part I have been dreading. Pronunciation of Slavic names. I think I am ok with French and Italian and obviously with German and English. I might do Dutch and Danish though that is already tricky. But Czech, Polish and Russian is not my forte, let alone Hungarian and Estonian. So my profound apologies for what will come next.

Alright, Bohemian warlords. There were many, but one starts to stand out, a man called Bořivoj. He is the first of the House of Premyslid who will rule Bohemia until 1306. His base is in central Bohemia a very fertile place at the intersection of multiple long distance trade routes. He plays a smart policy of playing the Moravian prince, the king of East Francia and his neighbours out against each other. One advantage he took early on was to convert to Christianity, which made him the go-to guy for the major powers in the region. In exchange he allowed all three kinds of missionaries to enter his territory, the pupils of Cyrill and Method, the Bavarians and Frankish missionaries.

His sons – and forgive me if I do not even attempt to pronounce them – expanded further from his father’s position and founded the city of Prague in a near perfect position on a rock dominating the Moldau/Vitava River.

In the next generation, we are now in the year 921, we have again two brothers sharing the rule. By now the Premislids have wiped out the last of the competing warlords and gained control of most of Bohemia. These brothers are known to us as Wenceslaus and Boleslaus. Wenceslaus was the elder and as such more senior. The old game of playing back and forth with the king of East Francia, Bavaria and Moravia had come to an end. Moravia had gone and was replaced by the Hungarians. And the Kingdom of East Francia had reconsolidated under King Henry the Fowler. In particular Bavaria had come back into the fold, leaving only a choice between the Franks or the Hungarians. Equally the religious issue could no longer be kept in limbo. It was Latin or orthodox, or even pagan.

Wenceslaus tilted towards Henry the Fowler and the Latin rite, mainly because Henry had sent his brand-new armoured knights up to Prague. Their pointy spears cleared up any theological doubt he might have had and young Wenceslaus became a devout catholic, expelled the pupils of Cyrill and Method and pushed conversion amongst the pagans with the same arguments that convinced him.

This did not go down well with the general population and in 935 Wenceslaus younger brother Boleslaus decided that political direction had to change, which meant changing the government and that meant changing the vital status of his brother from living to dead.

That was maybe callous but it was good timing, because the feared king Henry the Fowler died the following year. As his son Otto ascended to the throne, he made a half-hearted attempt to bring Boleslaus to heel. He sent the famous legion of thieves from Merseburg into Bohemia. This was a division of the army made up entirely of convicts who were given the choice between losing their heads or other extremities right now or in the service of the empire. These guys were a long way from the well trained and disciplined cavalry of Henry the Fowler. They achieved an initial success in a skirmish with Boleslaus troops, but then their discipline crumbled and the Bohemians retaliated, resulting in the loss of limb that had always been inevitable.

Otto I did not have much bandwidth to go after these Bohemian semi pagans because he was caught up in near constant civil wars. It took him until 950 before he could make another attempt at bringing Boleslaus to heel. This time he came with all the might his father had created and he had built upon. Boleslaus took one look at the army that had assembled before his castle and like his brother, his religious scruples disappeared into thin air. Boleslaus accepted vassal status in the East Francian kingdom, and he would come to Otto’s aid in the battle on the Lechfeld in 955.

How exactly this vassal status was structured has been subject to near endless debate between German and Czech historians. On the one hand the Bohemian dukes and later kings could be called to provide military assistance and were involved in the election of the emperor. On the other hand, the Kings and emperors rarely travelled to Prague, and if they did it was usually to resolve one of the incessant civil wars. Justice, taxation, building of castles and cities were the sole responsibility of the Bohemian ruler. What they had to accept was that the bishop of Prague became a direct report to the archbishop of Mainz, at least for now.

Spiritually Boleslaus did a full 180 degree turn. He embraced Latin Christianity and sponsored the cult of his murdered brother, who we now know as Good King Wenceslaus. It is all a bit rich given it was Boleslaus himself who cause the martyrdom of the holy king of Bohemia.

But Bohemia flourished under Boleslaus. Its location made it the main entrepot in the trade between east and west, which at the time meant the trade in slaves. This was a material source of income, but apparently not enough to satisfy the local aristocrats. Hence, he augmented their income through regular raids into Silesia and Northern Moravia.

This economic model did come to an end under Boleslaus son, duke Boleslaus II, mainly because his neighbours, the Poles, the Kievan Rus and the Hungarians had also consolidated into entities at least equal in military might to his raiding parties.

One of those, and the most important for us right now was Poland. Poland developed quite a bit later than Bohemia. There are few, if any contemporary written sources about what went on in Poland before Widukind put pen to parchment in 970. Archaeologists have found traces of smaller fortifications that date back to the 8^th and 9^th century. These were systematically destroyed when new, much larger structures were erected sometime between 920 and 950. In particular Gniesno and Poznan became centres of power. From there the early Polish rulers expanded their territory in all directions. Their zone of influence ranged from the mouth of the Vistula River to the modern day Polish/Ukrainian border. The first Polish ruler we hear about is Mieszko who had pushed his borders westwards to the lower Oder River where he hit upon out old friend Margrave Gero in around 960.

After this brief encounter Miezco seems to have concluded that this was not an opponent he wanted to challenge at this point. He concluded a treaty of friendship with Otto the Great. He also married Dobrawa a daughter of duke Boleslaus I of Bohemia. According to Thietmar it was Dobrawa who converted Miesco to Christianity, though it is more likely that he saw this a politically opportune move.

The arrangement with Otto meant that Miesco did not have to fear an expansion of the Saxons beyond the Oder River. And both the Saxons and the Poles had a common set of enemies, the Slavic people living in the marches who were constantly refusing to pay tribute and raiding into either Poland or Saxony. Or that may just have been the pretext to justify the Saxon and Polish slaving raids. These Slavic pagan people are now encircled by Christian powers, the Saxons to their West, the Poles to their East and the Bohemians in the South. In the North was the Baltic Sea and beyond that, the Danes.

Early Danish history is the history of the Vikings and if you want to know more about it, there are three options. You can watch the TV series Vikings, which I enjoyed massively and can only recommend. The only problem with it is that not all, but most of it is based on notoriously unreliable sagas. Or you could dive deep into modern academic research on the Vikings, which given the aforementioned unreliability of the sources tends to be a touch on the dry side. The third option is to listen to the Scandinavian History Podcast by Mikael Shainkman who strikes a great balance between the believed and the believable.

As far as relations between the Danes and the East Francian go, the first more intense encounter was in the 830s. It starts with a man called Ansgar, saint Ansgar to you and me. He was a Frankish nobleman from near Amiens who joined the Benedictine Monastery in Corbie as a child. Corbie was not only a famed school and scriptorium, it was also closely associated with the Carolingian family. Hence the monks were roped into missionary work in the recently acquired land of the Saxons. Monks from Corbie founded the abbey of New Corbie or as it is now called, Corvey, home to our favourite chronicler, Widukind of Corvey. Hence Ansgar was sent out to Saxony in 822 to spread the gospel. Being an enterprising soul, he extended his activities beyond the borders of the conquered territory and began preaching on the Jutland peninsula. He had some initial success and converted one of the minor Danish rulers but that king lost power shortly afterwards and Ansgar returned. In 829 he led a missionary effort into Sweden where he was a able to establish more lasting roots.

As a reward for his effort, Ansgar was elevated to the newly created archbishopric of Hamburg, which incorporated the already established bishopric of Bremen. As archbishop he was given the task to convert all of Scandinavia and was given the right to create new bishoprics in the heathen lands. All this sounds exceedingly grand, but at this time, this was the outer frontier of the empire. The chronicler Adam of Bremen notes that the only stone church in the archdiocese was in Bremen, whilst all others were built from wood.

In around 839/840 something on that missionary effort did go wrong. We hear that the Danes come to Hamburg and burned down the whole new city, its wooden churches and its newly established library. St. Ansgar manages to escape with his life and the precious relics he had brought up only a few years earlier. At the same time Friesland, i.e., modern day Holland came under Danish control.

From their bases in the Rhine delta, they raided along the Rhine, attacking Cologne, Xanten, Mainz and ultimately Aachen, the capital of Charlemagne. The danes had an easy run, mainly because the empire was riven by conflict between the three sons of Louis the Pious. These raids came to an end when the inheritance issue was resolved in the fateful treaty of Verdun that split the empire into three parts, West Francia, Lotharingia and East Francia. This more stable situation helped Ansgar to resume his missionary activity in Denmark and Sweden. Another Danish King, Horik the elder allowed Ansgar to set up a missionary bishoprics in Schleswig. But his successor shifted gear and threw the missionaries out again. This pattern repeated several times over the ensuing decades.

Over time Christianity did however penetrate deeper into Scandinavia. This had only partially to do with the work of the missionaries. Political and economic factors played a more important role. Getting baptised was a way to become the legitimate ruler of lands in continental Europe. The most famous case is that of Rollo, a Viking leader who was given Normandy or parts of Normandy in exchange for baptism and an oath of fealty. Rollo’s descendant William the Conqueror would later become famous for something I quite cannot recall at the moment. Rollo’s case was not unusual. These kinds of deals took place across England, France and Holland. The other component was trade. Though we know the Vikings as brutal raiders, that is only partially correct. They were also traders. And to gain access to markets it had become increasingly necessary to be Christian. And finally the Vikings had taken Christian slaves who were still performing their religious rites. So when Ansgar and his missionaries arrived, they often found there were already existing Christian communities.

Given the rather material considerations that drove this conversion, religious conviction appeared to have been only skin-deep. As late as the 13^th century we find indications of the worship of the old gods even in a commercial and cultural centre like Bergen in Norway.

Despite this encroaching Christianity, the Danes maintained their Viking lifestyle. Mostly their efforts were directed at England, Ireland and Northern France. In 878 the Vikings experienced a serious setback when king Alfred of Wessex beat the great heathen army at the battle of Edington. As a consequence a part of these forces decided to seek new targets on the continent. That is why in 881-884 we hear of multiple raids down the Rhine River as far as Trier, taking away everything that wasn’t nailed down. There are also indications of Viking settlements on the lower Rhine, though they no longer exist today.

As for Denmark itself, it seems that before the 940s there was no central authority. We hear of various kings in Jutland, Seeland and Skaene who seem to have been as busy fighting each other as they were raiding overseas.

Where things become little more settled and reliable is when we get to the first real king of Denmark, Gorm the Old who is believed to have reigned from 936 to 958. Gorm may have set out as one of several regional kings in Denmark but managed over time to expand his territory. His son, Harald Bluetooth (958-986) is understood to have completed the conquest of all of Denmark.

What may have driven the need for consolidation of power in Denmark was the military recovery in their neighbours to the south, the kingdom of East Francia. One of the last wars Henry the Fowler fought was against the Danes in 935. There was more fighting along the southern border and in 942 Hermann Billung was captured by the Danes. However he reappeared in Saxony shortly after which suggests either a ransom payment or a successful campaign by Otto the Great.

At some point in the 960s Harald Bluetooth converts to Christianity. How this came about exactly is unclear. Here is Widukind von Corvey’s version:

(quote) “In times past the Danes were Christians, but nevertheless continued to worship idols in their traditional manner. There was a dispute before the king during a feast regarding the worshipping of their gods. The Danes affirmed that Christ was a God. But they claimed there were other, greater gods, who manifested themselves to people through even more powerful signs and prodigies. Against this a certain cleric called Poppo [..] proclaimed that there is only one true God, the father, the son and the Holy spirit. The images, he proclaimed were of demons, not of gods. King Harold who is said was quick to listen but slow to speak, asked if Poppo wished to demonstrate his faith through his own person. Poppo responded without hesitation that he wished to do so. The king ordered that the priest be placed under guard until the next day. When morning came the king ordered that a very heavy piece of iron be heated in the fire. He then ordered the cleric to carry this glowing iron for his catholic faith. The Confessor of Christ seized the iron without any fear at all, and carried it as far as the king had ordered. The priest then showed everyone his unharmed hand and gave proof to everyone there of his catholic faith. As a result the King became a Christian and decreed that God alone was to be worshipped.” (end quote)

There is an alternative version in Adam von Bremen who wrote 100 years later according to which Harald Bluetooth had suffered a terrible defeat from the hands of Otto the Great and was made to convert and become a vassal of the empire.

What supports the latter story is that Harald Bluetooth had spent vast amounts of money and effort in reenforcing the Danevirk, the line of defences that stretches across the Jutland peninsula. This Danevirk had been and will remain the main Danish defence against incursions from the south until Prussian troops will overrun it in one of Europe’s most pointless wars in 1864.

When Otto I died in 973 Harald attacked Saxony believing the kingdom to be descending into civil war. That however backfired badly. Though Otto II was – to say it politely – not the most successful of emperors, he got this one right. Harald was defeated at the Danevirk and sued for peace. All of what is today Schleswig-Holstein was added to the empire – but we will see how long this will last.

This is it. Now you should have the lay of the land. There is the Stem duchy of Saxony, integral part of the empire and home of its rulers. There are the marches that stretch out eastwards from the Elbe River inhabited by a number of different mainly pagan Slavic peoples. Some, like the March of Meissen and the march of Lusatia are filled with Saxon castles and their garrisons. Others, like the march of the Billungs is barely penetrated by military forces, its rulers pay tribute and that is it.

Beyond those, bordering the march of Meissen in the south is the duchy of Bohemia. Christian for a long time already and its ruler a reliable ally of the empire.

In the east the just recently created duchy of Poland. Its ruler, Miesco I had just accepted baptism and become a vassal of emperor Otto the Great.

And in the north is Denmark. Its ruler, Harald Bluetooth had just tried to throw off the yoke of imperial vassalage but was brought back in the fold by the new emperor Otto II.

For these Slavic peoples living between Elbe and Oder River the writing seems to be on the wall. Surrounded on all side by Christian powers much superior to their own strength the options seem to be surrender or be traded south as a slaves. Hatred is simmering and they are waiting, hoping and praying for a weaking of the empire to regain their freedom. We will see next week how that comes about….I hope you will join us again.

Episode 95 – Callous Kings and Murderous Margraves

by haradigital on 6th January 202619th February 2026

The first wave of expansion east in the 10th century

I promised you a History of the Germans but I am afraid there is no such thing. All I can give you is the histories of the German people. The last 94 episodes you have heard one of the histories of the Germans, the one about the mighty emperors and their political, military and spiritual struggle with the papacy. It is a great story, and it was fun to tell it.

But today we kick off another of the histories, the history of the North of Germany, the part that looked east, rather than south. It is a story of a frontier culture where an estimated 7% of the population of the western part of the empire pack up their belongings and move east, sometimes under the cover of expansionary princes or knightly orders, sometimes invited by local potentates looking to grow their economies. It is a story about the creation and expansion of trade networks, the foundation of cities, some that will remain modest in size, others that turn into important European capitals. It is the story of a periphery that will in time become the centre.

And because it is an almost independent history, we start at the beginning, in the year 772, the year when Charlemagne takes his troops into Saxony hell bent on turning these pagan tribesmen into good Christians and subjects of his emerging empire. If things work out as I hope, we should end this episode with the life of Hermann Billung and Margrave Gero, the first of a wave of chancers and warlords that seek their fortune in the east.

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

I have to start with an admission. I promised you a History of the Germans but I am afraid there is no such thing. All I can give you is the histories of the German people. The last 94 episodes you have heard one of the histories of the Germans, the one about the mighty emperors and their political, military and spiritual struggle with the papacy. It is a great story, and it was fun to tell it.

And to all of you who may be new to the History of the Germans Podcast, do not panic. You do not have to catch up on all the previous episodes; you can just start right here, and the narrative should make sense in itself – at least I hope it will. However, some say that the previous three seasons weren’t completely shoddy and may be worth listening to.

As always:

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So far I have:

Ep. 95: Colonisation of the East(700-1200) – Callous Kings and Murderous Margraves

Transcript

Hello and Welcome to t the new Season of the History of the Germans: Colonists, Knights and Cogs, the North in the Middle Ages.

OK, we are almost through the preliminaries. One last thing before we start. 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 Jakob W., Douglas H. and Stanley U who have already signed up.

So let’s finally get going with Episode 95 – Callous Kings and Murderous Margraves

The story begins with the Saxons and when you talk about Saxons, there is no one more Saxon than the chronicler Widukind of Corvey who lived in the 10^th century. He explains where the Saxons came from (quote):

“There is a great deal of disagreement about this matter. Some think the Saxons had their origins amongst the Danes and Northmen. Others believe, as I heard someone saying when I was a youth, the Saxons descended from the Greeks. They say the Saxons were the survivors of the Macedonian army that followed Alexander the Great and was dispersed all over following his premature death. There is no doubt this is an old and noble people. This is proven by the fact that they are mentioned in a speech by Agrippa to the Jews in Josephus and are commented on by the poet Lucan.” (unquote)

Well, it is either that or they were a Germanic tribe that lived more or less peacefully in the lands between Rhine and Elbe rivers and the North Sea and the Harz Mountains, a territory that comprises today’s states of Lower Saxony, Nordrhein Westphalia east of the Rhine, parts of Hesse and Thuringia.

Widukind is making the Saxons out to be very bloodthirsty. Their name – he claims – derives from their word for knife, Sahs, because they had killed such a multitude with these knives. In reality they seem to have been a little bit sluggish. When all their neighbours went out to rampage around the ancient Roman empire in the fifth century, the Saxons stayed home, apart from a small contingent that sailed off to a foggy island in the North sea. No idea what they hoped to find there.

The Saxons are another example that proves that the Germans of today cannot be the descendants of those ferocious warriors that burned Rome and destroyed western civilisation. It is simple. The raiding and pillaging kind had all left Germany for the West and the South and stayed there. So they are the ancestors of fashionable Milanese and food-obsessed Catalans, not of the sausage-eating Berliners.

As a consequence of their remote and peaceful lives, by the year 772 these Saxons still lived very much like the Germanic tribes of the time of Tacitus. There were no cities and even the villages were very spread out. The Saxons had no king or duke. They would only gather around a leader in war. That leader was chosen by the free men of the tribe or, if you follow Widukind, by lot. Once the war was over, the leader stepped down and returned to till his fields.

There was an aristocracy amongst them whose votes counted more than the average free man. And there were slaves, often prisoners of war – so no egalitarian paradise at all. The Saxons were pagans who believed in a derivative of the Nordic polytheistic religion headed up by Wotan or for the friends of Marvel, Odin and his son Thor, Hella, Loki and the like. They also worshipped natural features, like trees, springs and the like.

In the fifth and sixth century the neighbours of the Saxons lived in quite a similar fashion, but by the 8^th century that had changed. Christianity had expanded from the territory that had previously been part of the Roman empire into the East. St. Boniface, an Anglo-Saxon Benedictine monk had shaped the organisation of the Latin church in the Merovingian empire that by then included not just France but also Bavaria, Swabia and Franconia. Boniface founded bishoprics and monasteries across the German lands so that at least nominally all of the Saxon neighbours to the West and South had become Christians.

As the Carolingian empire expanded conflict with the Saxons became inevitable. After some failed attempts by his grandfather and father, it fell to Charlemagne to subdue and integrate them into his Christian realm. So, the mighty king if the Franks crossed the Rhine on some trumped up pretext in 772 and within just 12 months the Saxon war leaders capitulated. That was quick and painless, or at least it seemed to be.

For Charlemagne this campaign in Saxony was not only about acquiring new territory and defeating an unruly neighbour. He saw his role as a champion of Christendom who had a mission to convert the pagans. That meant his occupation was accompanied by a campaign of conversion. This he kicked off by destroying pagan temples and other places of worship. He felled the sacred Irminsul, a wooden pillar or tree that the Saxons believe held up the sky and was one of their most important religious sites.

Somehow this systematic destruction of symbols of pagan religion and the forced baptisms failed to endear the locals to their new Frankish overlords. Therefore the next logical step was to bring on more destruction of symbols of pagan religion and more enforced baptism and when that did not work, yes, you guessed it, more wonton destruction of symbols of pagan religion and more baptism at the point of a spear.

Though their leaders had caved and converted, the population rose up against this treatment. Every time Charlemagne’s troops had to leave to fight another of his incessant wars, the Saxons took up arms. These uprisings were led by one of the few Saxon nobles who had not bend the knee. His name was Widukind, literally the “child of the forest”. He had refused to give homage to Charlemagne after the campaign of 772 and organised resistance from across the border in Denmark. In the ensuing decade Widukind led almost annual rebellions against the Franks that always ended as soon as Charlemagne showed up with his army. Only once, in 782 did he win a pitched battle. However, this battle was far from decisive, and Charlemagne retaliated by holding what was later known as the Blood Court of Verden where he allegedly had 4,500 Saxon rebels executed.

And again, the stubborn Saxons still did not understand that their new god was omnibenevolent. What followed was another 2 years of now continuous warfare that only ended when Charlemagne managed to capture Widukind in 785. Widukind agreed to get baptised in exchange for his life and disappeared into a monastery. In the subsequent 20 years there were further Saxon uprisings until by 804 all Saxon tribes had been defeated and baptised.

To properly embed Christianity, an ecclesiastical infrastructure was created. New bishoprics in Paderborn, Bremen, Verden, Muenster, Osnabrück, Hildesheim and Halberstadt were founded. The great abbey of Corvey was established in 815 and in 831-3 Hamburg was made an archbishopric with responsibility for Northern Saxony as well as all for Scandinavia and all the Slavic lands on the Baltic Sea. Small cities began to emerge around these new ecclesiastical centres.

The second plank to the integration scheme was to co-opt the Saxon aristocratic elite into the Carolingian social and political system, i.e., they were made counts with responsibility for newly created districts.

Three families that rose to the role of count during this time played important roles going forward.

The Immedinger were the most august of Saxon houses because they could trace their lineage back to the converted rebel Widukind who seemed to have have parleyed his capitulation into major territorial gains. They were based mainly in Westphalia with possessions stretching east towards Salzgitter and Brunswick.

The other great family were the Billungs whose centre was in the North-East around what is now Luneburg.

And finally there is one family that will outshine the other two. The Liudolfingers, so called after their earliest known ancestors, count Liudolf. They had established their headquarters in the Harz Mountains. Through intelligent marriage politics and general competence, Liudolf and his descendants gradually rose to a dominant role across Saxony. By 900 their main possessions expanded beyond the Harz mountains and stretched down towards the border to the pagan lands at Quedlinburg and Merseburg.

Whilst the noble houses of Saxony rose in power and wealth, the Carolingian empire declined and fragmented. Thanks to the tradition of dividing the lands of a ruling monarch amongst his sons upon his death, in 848 the great empire had split into three subkingdoms, West Francia, Lothringia and East Francia. And even the kings of these new entities saw their power slip away into the hands of the local aristocrats.

The declining central authority left chaos behind. Internally the different aristocratic clans got caught up in brutal and never-ending feuds. Meanwhile foes are gathering on the borders. There are the Vikings who raid the coastline from Hamburg to Brittany and up the river Rhine. Then we have the Magyars who have settled in the Hungarian plain and raid into Bavaria and Italy. For the Saxons the biggest challenge were what they called the Wends. These are Slavic peoples who have moved into the territories to the east of the Elbe during the 6^th and 7^th century. They were part of a much larger Slavic migration into eastern Europe that created Slavic areas of settlement in Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, across the Balkans and most significantly in the Kiewan Rus.

Where the Slavs originally came from is still subject to archaeological research. They first appear in Byzantine sources in the mid 6^th century as they attack Roman cities in Macedonia and Thrace. In Western sources their first mention in in the chronic of Fredegar from 660 who talks about the Winedi, the blond ones, who were attacking Merovingian strongholds in Thuringia. They then disappear from the chronicles for another 200 years before reappearing amongst other things as a threat to the Saxon border in the late 9^th century.

These internal and external pressures force the local aristocracies into a new coordination mechanism, the duchies. These appear in the 10^th century as a mid-layer between the ineffectual kings and the warring local clans. Their job is quite similar to that of a king, provide peace and justice internally and defend the borders.

In Saxony it is the family of the Liudolfingers that rises to the occasion. Otto the Venerable (c. 830 to 912) is often counted as the first duke of the Saxons. He rose into the leadership role after his older brother Brun had died in a battle against Danish Vikings. His family was well connected not only in Saxony but also into the imperial court of Arnulf of Kärnten which may be a reason for their ascendancy.

Saxony and its ducal house were catapulted from a relative backwater into the centre of European politics when the Liudolfingers rose first to King of East Francia under Henry the Fowler and then to the imperial title under Otto the Great. Their story and deeds we have already covered in the episodes 1 to 8 of the podcast, so I will not go through all of this again, only the bits that matter to our narrative.

The period of Ottonian rule from 919 to 1025 is the golden age of medieval Saxony. The emperors, in particular Henry I and Otto I spend most of their time in the duchy, create new cities and dioceses, build up military capabilities and first secure and then redraw the borders.

Henry I “the Fowler” is the first and my favourite Ottonian ruler. He stabilises the collapsing kingdom of East Francia through an astute combination of military and diplomatic efforts. His focus then shifted to protecting the kingdom against foreign raiders. He promulgated a set of new laws commonly known as the Burgenordnung, that professionalised the Carolingian military.

The concept was to build motte and bailey castles along the borders and garrison them with trained soldiers. These are castles meant to protect the local population in times of war, not to suppress them. The rule was that one in every 9 peasants was to constantly train in war and live in the castle whilst being supported by the other 8. And 1/3^rd of every harvest was to be stored inside the castle so that when the raiders burn down the fields there would be enough seed for the next harvest.

Moreover, these castles were turned into major economic centres so as to ensure their maintenance and upkeep in peacetime. Markets and courts are to be held at the castles. Assemblies of the local nobility of feast days are also to be held at the castle, which would usually entail the construction of a church. Settlements would then grow up around the church and the castle.

The other innovation was to massively expand armoured cavalry. These are the forerunners of the knights of chivalric tales. Like Knights they needed to live a life of constant training and regular application of their skills, which meant they needed funding. For that they are granted land or other sources of income like markets or tolls initially only for life. This would later convert into the system of fiefs where the vassal offers military service in exchange for the use of certain assets. Before it had become such a contentious term, I would have called this system feudalism. And if you promise not to tell anyone, I will continue to do so.

Whether it was feudalism or not, what did happen during the reign of Henry the Fowler was a material upgrade in the military capabilities of the kingdom of East Francia. Defensive structures appeared that could be and had been defended successfully and the new cavalry becomes an effective tool against in particular the Magyars who had been practically invincible until then.

Henry the Fowler gets to see some of the fruits of his labours when he begins an aggressive strategy against the Wends in 928. He first defeats the Slavic tribe of the Hevellers in 928. He occupies their castle in Brandenburg after a long winter siege and forces them to pay tribute. The same happens to the Daleminzians, a group that lived around where we now find Leipzig and Dresden. As he is already on a roll he moves on to Prague where he forces the ruler of the Bohemians, the man we know as Good King Wenceslaus into submission. In 929 he has forced most of the Slavic tribes living between Elbe and Oder to pay tribute.

Seemingly that tribute was so harsh that one tribe, the Redarii immediately rebelled. They mustered a large army and attacked a Saxon castle at Walsleben which they took over. Henry charges one of his vassals to sort out the Redarii. This is the first battle where the new armoured cavalry gets to be crucial. The Slavic army consists mainly of infantry fighting in a close formation. The Saxons tried several times to break this formation but failed. Only once they send the cavalry to attack the flank of the Redarii does the enemy break and flee.

These wars are fought with the utmost brutality. Since the Slavs were pagans, the Saxons had no qualms killing them and taking away their women and children as slaves. Equally the Slavs took no prisoners on the few occasions they got the upper hand. No wonder the warriors on both sides were frightened. Widukind mentions that some of the soldiers had been riven with fear before the battle and he even calls them cowards. Though he reserves the worst bit of cowardice to the Slavic defenders of Walsleben who surrendered and asked for their lives. That they were granted, but their wives and children were taken away as slaves.

Now that his army had passed the tests, he confronted the Hungarians and defeated them in 933 at the battle of Riade, stalling Hungarian expansion for a time. He finally led an army against the Danes in 935 securing the northern border as well.

The crowning glory of these defensive wars against foreign invaders fell to Henry’s son, Otto I usually called the Great. Otto I defeated the Hungarians in the battle on the Lechfeld in 955. As a consequence of this battle the Hungarians ceased to attack their neighbours and 45 years later converted to Christianity under their great king Stephen I, also known as Saint Stephen of Hungary.

Again Otto I’s deeds are many and a fantastic tale. But what interest us here are his activities in Saxony, specifically how he organised the border with the Slavic tribes and his efforts to build out the ecclesiastic infrastructure.

Let’s start with the border management. Otto I ascended the throne in 936, and one of his first acts was to appoint military commanders along the frontier. The northern sections along the Elbe River from Hamburg to Dannenberg was granted to Hermann Billung, whilst the whole of the border south of there was granted to a man we only know as Margrave Gero, no surname.

Hermann Billung came from the Billung family who held a big chunk of North-Eastern Saxony, based in Luneburg. As such the Billungs were optimally placed to defend the eastern border with the Slavs as well as the northern border with the Danes.

Widukind describes Hermann Billung as a noble, diligent and quite prudent man. And on his first outing he proves to be an able commander who led from the front and inflicted a grave defeat on the enemies. But Hermann Billung had a major problem, which was that he was the younger of two brothers. His older brother, Wichmann was also a powerful and brave man, generous, skilled in war and, as Widukind said, possessed of such learning that he was said by his people to have superhuman knowledge. This choice of Hermann over his equally competent but more senior brother leads to all sorts of rumblings in Saxony, which became worse when Hermann scored his first set of successes. The rivalry with Wichmann and later on, Wichmann’s son, also called Wichmann preoccupied Hermann Billung. As the two sides of the family grew to hate each other more and more, the Wichmanns would at times go across the border and fight with the Slavs against Hermann’s forces. As a consequence Hermann Billung could not establish as tight a level of control over the Slavic tribes in his border zone, namely the Abodrites and Redarii. They did pay tribute alright but would occasionally rise up and had to be forced back into submission on regular intervals. As we will find, this relatively loose control will result in different developments here compered to further south.

Despite his relatively moderate level of success, Otto I rated Hermann Billung highly and would make him his proxy during periods he was absent from Saxony. Widukind often calls Hermann Billung dux, or duke, though most scholars agree that he wasn’t duke in the way the dukes of Bavaria, Swabia and Franconia were dukes. Only under Otto II will the Billungs rise to become actual dukes of Saxony.

Hermann Billung’s counterpart was Margrave Gero, a man from a much more modest background than Hermann Billung. His father seems to have been the leader of Henry the Fowler’s household cavalry and his brother was employed on special missions by Otto I suggesting they were closely linked to the royal court.

Gero was again a perfect warrior in Widukind’s telling. He was “skilled in war and offered good council in peacetime. He was quite eloquent and learned. He preferred to demonstrate his prudence through deeds rather than through words. [And] he showed great energy in gaining wealth and generosity in giving it away.”

Gero was made a margrave. In the Carolingian realm a Markgraf or in English a margrave was a count who administrated a county on the border. Such a county was called a Mark or march in English. Being a margrave instead of a mere count had a number of advantages. A margrave had military command over the forces at the border. Moreover, he could dispose over the resources the march at will, instead of having to send them on to the king. Most importantly he would report directly to the king or emperor instead of a duke. So Gero for example never reported to Hermann Billung.

But despite all his skills, his appointment too had been controversial. He was given Merseburg as his headquarters. Merseburg had come into the Ottonian family through Henry the Fowler’s first wife. That marriage was later annulled and Henry the Fowler’s son from this marriage, Thankmar had expected to at least get Merseburg, his mother’s inheritance. When Otto passed it to Gero, Thankmar lost it completely kicking off a series of civil wars that were Otto I’s preoccupation during the first decades of his reign. Again, listen to the episodes 2 to 6, it is a riveting tale.

Despite the fact that his boss was constantly fighting brothers and sons for the throne, Gero managed to push the boundaries of the kingdom east. His methods were far from subtle. At one point he invited 30 Slavic leaders to a lavish feast, only to have them all murdered at the end of it, Red Wedding style. On another occasion Gero and Otto had defeated an army of Obodrites and had beheaded their king. The next morning (quote) the head of the minor king was placed in a field. Around it, seven hundred prisoners were beheaded. The eyes of his advisor were torn out, as was his tongue. He was then left helpless in the midst of the corpses” (end quote).

We have no records from Slavic hands that could tell us what they felt about these constant incursions. So we have to rely on Widukind who describes the Slavic attitude as follows:

“They were a tough people and able to endure hardships. Accustomed to the poor way of life, the Slavs desire those things that seem a burden to us. There was a truly long struggle between the two sides, with one fighting for glory and a great and broad empire, and the other fighting for liberty or against the worst kind of slavery.” (end quote).

Just a quick word on the slave trade of the time. The trade in slaves was an enormously profitable business in the 9^th and 10^th century. Many were employed on the large aristocratic estates across Europe. The most valuable of those were castrated young men who served in the harems of Spain, North Africa and the Levant, as well as at the court of Constantinople. The surgeons skilled in the most valuable root and stem castration were based in Verdun and Leon. As the church banned the enslaving of Christians, the main source of slaves were either Viking and Russian merchants who sold East Slavic peoples to Arab and Jewish traders who took them via the Baltic and Denmark down to Verdun and Leon. The other were the raids of Hermann Billung and Gero, who became incredibly rich in the process.

Gero operated as Margrave for 28 years, a period during which he managed to not only regularly defeat the Slavic groups but also to establish permanent forward bases. In particular in Lusatia, the Lausitz in German, whose inhabitants he had (quote) compelled to accept the heaviest burden of servitude. His latter years were overshadowed by a falling out with Otto I who believed him to have tacitly supported one of the rebellions. He also lost both his sons leaving him without an heir. In his grief he took himself off on pilgrimage to Rome and upon his return founded the abbey of Gernrode. The abbey church where he is also buried is one of the few remaining and a very impressive examples of early Ottonian architecture.

Gero made his widowed daughter-in-law the abbess of Gernrode which must have come as a great relief to Otto I. Because the territory that Gero had conquered was truly vast, equivalent to the modern states of Brandenburg, Saxony and Sachsen Anhalt or roughly 2/3 of what would later become the GDR. That is almost the size of one of the stem duchies of the time. Not just that but also the fact that Gero had conquered it almost singlehandedly would have given any of his descendants a hard to deny claim to succession to the whole of it.

But luckily for Otto, Gero did not have any surviving children and so the enormous march of Gero was divided into five separate units.

The Northern March, which is roughly equivalent to modern day Brandenburg went to a Count Dietrich of Haldensleben, who may have been a son of the rebellious Wichman. He will appear again in one of the next episodes, and let’s say, not in a most flattering light.

Then south of the rather large Northern March follows the Mark Lausitz or March of Lusatia which is roughly equivalent to the lower Lusatia region along the Saale River around Cottbus, southern Brandenburg and northern Saxony. This land was given to a certain Hodo who did a reasonable job but wasn’t of any further significance.

South of there were three marches, Merseburg, Zeitz and Meissen. The former two, Zietz and Merseburg were relatively quickly subsumed into the margraviate of Meissen. Now this, the margraviate of Meissen is going to be important. It is roughly equivalent to the modern state of Saxony. The first two margraves are not particularly relevant, Thietmar and Rikdag, but the third, Eckard I will feature quite a bit in the next few episodes.

So, bottom line is that by around 982 we have four territories east of the Elbe River, the March of the Billungs, which is equivalent to Mecklenburg Vorpommern, The Northern March, roughly Brandenburg, the march of Lusatia which is southern Brandenburg and Northern Saxony and the March of Meissen, roughly Saxony.

All these lands are predominantly inhabited by Slavs, some have taken baptism, presumably to escape slavery and the snip, but many have not. In the March of the Billungs control is pretty loose, but in the other three we find fortifications garrisoned by Saxon soldiers who keep a beady eye on the locals.

Military fortresses and slaving raids are one thing, but after all Otto the Great is not just here for a quick buck and some land. He is the emperor, the shield of Christendom and his job is to bring the word of the lord to the pagans.

And that meant creating a bunch of bishoprics. The first set were established in the Northern March, specifically in Brandenburg and in Havelberg in 948. The next big move traces back to 955 when Otto achieves his greatest triumph at the battle on the Lechfeld. On the eve of the battle he is supposed to have sworn the following oath (quote) “if on that day , through the intercession of such a great advocate [Saint Lawrence in this case], Christ would deign to grant him victory and life, he would establish a bishopric in the city of Merseburg in honour of the victor over the fire and turn his newly built palace there into a church” (end quote).

Now that is quoted from the chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg who, well, was bishop of Merseburg. Which makes him a touch biased. What is more likely is that Otto had decided on a much larger scheme to build a new ecclesiastical infrastructure in the East and North. What he wanted was a new archbishopric with responsibility for the whole of the East.

Just in case you are about to dose off on the grounds that you think these ecclesiastical matters are overly specialists, trust me that would be a mistake. They matter a lot. The church and the way it is organised matters a lot because secular state infrastructure of any kind simply did not exist. There is no police station, no local court let alone social services on the ground. AThe only kind of administration (in inverted commas) that reached down into every town and larger village was the church. We are in the period before the investiture controversy so we are at a point where the kings and emperors had a huge influence in the appointment of bishops and archbishops. Otto the Great and his successors used the church as their feet on the ground. That meant ensuring effective church administration was a crucial part of early medieval statecraft. It also meant that if the king establishes a new bishopric in land so far untouched by Christianity his control over these territories deepens.

And there are some serious long-term effects. We are in a period where the political map is still in flux. The emergence of France, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Czechia are by no means a given. If things had gone differently in the 200 year window between 850 and 1050 Europe may have had a very different shape.

The reorganisation of the episcopal responsibilities in 968 has to be seen in this context. Before the creation of the archbishopric of Magdeburg the archbishop of Mainz had nominal responsibility for all the lands to the east, theoretically all the way to the Ural mountains. But Mainz was a long way from the Elbe River, and, more importantly Mainz was already a dominant player in the imperial church, responsible for managing the election and the royal coronation. Letting Mainz have responsibility for the newly acquired territories east of the Elbe would have made it even more powerful.

Hence Otto wanted an archbishop closer to the frontier for both practical and political reasons. It took him 13 years of hard horse trading first with the archbishop of Mainz and then with his colleague in Halberstadt, but in the end he was granted the right to erect a new archbishopric in Magdeburg and three smaller bishoprics in Merseburg, Meissen and Zeitz. In the grand plan Magdeburg would be responsible for missionary activity into Poland and beyond. Meanwhile the already existing Archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen was again confirmed in its responsibility for the whole of Scandinavia. The recently created three bishoprics in Denmark, Schleswig, Ripe and Aarhus were put under his control as was the bishopric of Oldenburg in the March of the Billungs.

Hence when Otto the great died in 973, his northern possessions look well ordered. The old duchy of Saxony is stable under the leadership of his old friend Hermann Billung and his descendants. The borderlands to the east are run by competent margraves, none of which is too powerful to challenge either king or duke. And the infrastructure is in place to spread Christianity and imperial power further east.

But as we know, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. The very first cracks had already appeared. The Saxon nobles began to take against their duke and emperor spending most of his time in Italy. And there are the neighbours to consider, the Bohemians the Poles and the Danes. And because these will play a major role going forward, we will take a more detailed look at who they are and where they come from. I hope you will come along for this story next week.