Sachsen

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These last few episodes you may have wondered how all this hangs together. This week we will try to resolve this question. What we will talk about is how the great stem duchy of Saxony fell apart. And there are two stories about that. One is the story of Henry the Lion and his fall in 1180. That story has been repeated over and over again and put into a context of rivalry between the Welf and the Hohenstaufen, between Guelfs and Ghibellines. It makes for a great story of betrayal and revenge. But it is also partly wrong and more importantly, not the whole story. The whole story is one about princely opposition against centralising tendencies, about an antagonism between the south and the north and about a broad trend of fragmentation of power that engulfed not just the empire but also Italy, Poland, Denmark and others.

It is the resulting environment of warring mid-sized principalities that allowed alternative structures like the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Knights to emerge. So let’s get straight into it.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 108 – From Saxony to Saxonies

These last few episodes you may have wondered how all this hangs together. This week we will try to resolve this question. What we will talk about is how the great stem duchy of Saxony fell apart. And there are two stories about that. One is the story of Henry the Lion and his fall in 1180. That story has been repeated over and over again and put into a context of rivalry between the Welf and the Hohenstaufen, between Guelfs and Ghibellines. It makes for a great story of betrayal and revenge. But it is also partly wrong and more importantly, not the whole story. The whole story is one about princely opposition against centralising tendencies, about an antagonism between the south and the north and about a broad trend of fragmentation of power that engulfed not just the empire but also Italy, Poland, Denmark and others.

It is the resulting environment of warring mid-sized principalities that allowed alternative structures like the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Knights to emerge. So let’s get straight into it.

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 Tej. Egefjord, Alex P., Bernhard B. and Jerry C.Z. who have already signed up.

For today’s narrative we have to – for one last time – go back to the reign of Lothar of Supplinburg. It is with him that the process of territorialisation of the principalities begins. He may not have invented the concept – that honour must go to emperor Henry IV – but he was the one who decided who amongst the magnates of the North would become the great territorial princes. He gave some minor Westphalian noblemen the county of Holstein, he gave Albrecht the Bear the Mark that became the Mark Brandenburg, and he installed the house of Wettin in Meissen and Lusatia.

But the biggest territorial decision was the great election bribe to Henry the Black, duke of Bavaria. If you remember way back in episode 43 there were two men contesting the election as king of the Romans. One was Frederick of Hohenstaufen, duke of Swabia, nephew and heir of the last Salian emperor Henry V. The other had been Lothar of Supplinburg. The electors were split right down the middle, and all depended on the Bavarians. Their duke, Henry the Black was married to Frederick’s sister and the Hohenstaufen party was confident the vote would go in their favour. But ii did not. Henry the Black switched over to Lothar, making him king and later emperor Lothar III.

The price he had to pay for that was that Lothar gave his only child, Gertrud, in marriage to Henry’s son, Henry the Proud. Since Lothar died without heirs, all of the enormous wealth he had acquired during his long and successful life came to the House of Welf. Henry the Proud became duke of Saxony on top of his title as duke of Bavaria.

What Henry the Proud did not become was king and emperor. The German princes could no longer tolerate an emperor with such an enormous personal powerbase. Hence the elected Frederick’s brother, Konrad III. Konrad turned out to be exactly as advertised, a weak king caught in a constant struggle with his largest vassal.

What saved Konrad III’s reign was the sudden death of Henry the Proud, who left behind a small boy, also imaginatively called Henry, Henry the Lion.

Henry’s grandmother, the dowager empress Richeza managed to preserve the enormous property of the House of Welf for young Henry. The only bit he had lost was the duchy of Bavaria that Konrad had given to his half-brother, the Babenberger count of Austria.

In 1152 Frederick Barbarossa becomes king and in 1155 emperor. His proposition to the princes, including to Henry the Lion who is by now 23 years old, is that he will rule as a first amongst equals. He promises to involve them in his decision making and share whatever gains they would make from rebuilding imperial power in Italy.

The capstone of his policy is the reconciliation between the Hohenstaufen and the Welf. Part of that reconciliation is the return of the title of duke of Bavaria, title the family lost under Konrad III. That is achieved by splitting the duchy into two parts, one going to Henry the Lion, the other going to the Babenbergers who are elevated to dukes of Austria. But Bavaria was only a status symbol. Henry the Lion never really cares about Bavaria and barely visits. The main plank of the deal is that Barbarossa supports any policy Henry the Lion wants to implement in Saxony.

And that policy is to turn the duchy of Saxony into a territorial principality. Henry the Lion tries to to do the same thing Konrad of Wettin did in the margraviate of Meissen and what Albrecht the Baer did in Brandenburg.

That means he builds castles across his lands in Saxony and staffs them with his Ministeriales who are to keep the peace and dispense justice. And he extends his allodial, i.e., private lands. He is already the heir to some of the richest and most powerful families in the duchy, the Brunones of Brunswick, the Northeims and the Billungs. But that is not enough.

His first target is the county of Stade. You may remember from the episode about Albrecht the Baer that the counts of Stade were an ancient dynasty that controlled the lands between Hamburg and Bremen and were margraves of the Northern March. You may also remember that the last margrave of the Northern March was killed by Dithmarscher peasants and his sole heir was disposed of by Albrecht the Baer.

That left two. One was Hartwich who had joined the church and was a member of the cathedral chapter of the archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen. Hartwich was the heir to the family lands since the only other surviving family member was his sister. Hartwich did a deal with the archbishop of Bremen. He would make the archbishopric the heir to most his vast fortune, if the collegiate would make him archbishop once the current incumbent is dead. The archbishop was delighted by this plan.

As we know from the episode about Gottschalk and Adalbert, the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen had been squeezed by both the Billung dukes of Saxony and the Danish kings. Though they still harboured the ambition to become the religious centre for all of Scandinavia, their lack of resources and the creation of an archbishopric in the then Danish city of Lund meant this had been a pipe dream. Having Stade would finally provide the resources to become the head of the Christian faith on the Baltic.no wonder he was excited.

Who was not excited about the idea was Henry the Lion. He immediately declares a claim on the lands of the counts of Stade. He claims ownership of the county primarily because he is the duke and Hartwig – being a churchman – cannot perform the duties of a count, namely fighting in battle and performing executions. He also claims that his family are the closest relatives of the counts of Stade, based on some 10th century ancestor. Both arguments are extraordinary flimsy. Henry will show a similarly flexible approach to legality throughout his career.

In 1145 the Saxon nobles get together to adjudicate the dispute between Henry the Lion and the Archbishop. As henry sees that things are not going his way, he unsheathes his sword, has his men holding back the judges and apprehends the archbishop and Hartwich of Stade. Legally, schmeagely.

The next inheritance is that of Hermann II of Winzenburg. He is another of the Saxon noblemen who amassed a fortune after the duchy had moved outside of imperial control. He created an almost completely coherent territory from Hannover to Northern Hesse.

He was a brutal man, even by the standards of the time. He had angered and enraged many, but the ones who really hated him were the bishops of Hildesheim and his Ministeriales. Two of them decided to put an end to all of this and broke into the count’s bedchamber, murdered him and his wife. This wife was – yes you may remember – Liutgard, the sister of Hartwich.

And again, who would claim the inheritance? Henry the Lion of course. His great-grandmother was the sister of Herman’s great grandfather. So a much closer relation that count Herman’s two daughters. Or Albrecht the Baer, who also lodged a claim. But by now the decider is Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick and Henry have a deal. The possessions of the count of Winzenburg are added to the already massive fortune of Henry the Lion.

So far so normal. This is the bit where Henry the Lion emulates Konrad of Wettin and his descendants, adding territory bit by bit and deepening his hold on them.

Where he is the equivalent of Albrecht the Bear is in the March of the Billungs, the land of the Abodrites. You may remember that we talked about Henry the Lion’s campaigns in the episode about the Foundation of Lübeck. He first tries in 1147 during the Wendish crusade and then again in 1160, in the latter case with a lot more success. During the 1160 campaign he establishes his own centrally controlled march centred around Schwerin. He invites settlers to come and wrestles Lübeck out of the hands of Adolph II of Schauenburg.

The final cornerstone of his power structure and where he goes well beyond the other two is in his handling of the church. Henry the Lion intended to bring the major bishops in his duchy under his direct control. As for the archbishoprics, this had to be done by force. Hartwig of Stade, the man Henry had expropriated had become archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen and was unsurprisingly an implacable enemy. Henry used military force to keep the archbishop down and even used his mate Frederick Barbarossa who expropriated further bits of the Bremen church in 1155. As for Magdeburg, the other archbishopric in Saxony, that was held by bishop Wichmann. Wichmann was a close confidant of Barbarossa and his former chancellor. That gave him a stronger position and duke and archbishop were constantly facing off against each other at the castle of Haldensleben.

Whilst the archbishops were under pressure, the bishops were properly subjected. The bishop of Halberstadt, Ulrich was stripped of his fiefs by Barbarossa in 1155 for failure to take part in the Italian campaign and then expelled in 1159 when he sided with pope Alexander III during the schism. Henry the Lion then placed a docile man of his choosing on the episcopal throne who handed over fiefs of the Halberstadt church to the duke. In Hildesheim the bishop fund himself entirely surrounded by Henry the Lion’s lands. The bishop’s Ministeriales and vassals shifted allegiance to the duke putting an end to ambitions to grow episcopal territory. The same happened in Verden and Minden.

Where Henry the Lion had even more influence was on the bishoprics in his march. In 1154 Barbarossa granted Henry the Lion the royal rights of investiture over Ratzeburg, Oldenburg and Mecklenburg. That is an unprecedented grant that elevates Henry the Lion’s position to a vice-regal if not quasi-regal position.

These regal ambitions of Henry the Lion manifested themselves in his enormous palace of Dankwarderode, today part of Brunswick. This construction easily rivalled any of the imperial palaces like Hagenau and Gelnhausen.

Another elevation of his status came when he married Matilda, the daughter of Henry II of England and sister of Richard the Lionheart. This marriage was again the result of the close relationship between Henry the Lion and Barbarossa. Barbarossa had intended to forge a closer link with Henry II as both rulers were in conflict with pope Alexander III. The agreement was to be sealed by a marriage alliance. One of the English princesses was to marry the eldest son of Barbarossa and the other should marry Henry the Lion. The marriage to Barbarossa’s son did not take place in the end, but in 1168 the wedding took place in the cathedral of Minden.

By that time Henry the Lion was at the zenith of his power. He had expanded the already vast territory he had inherited and his plans to turn all this into a territorial principality were proceeding at pace.

But what about the Saxon nobles? All these freedom-loving, hard-edged warriors, who had raised their arms at the slightest indication of imperial overreach. Where are they?

Well, many of their families, like the Northeims, the Stades and the Winzenburgs have simply died out and their land has gone to, well to Henry the Lion himself. The counts of Holstein who had risen to prominence owed their elevation to Lothar III and were hence loyal vassals of Henry the Lion.

But there are powerful men who saw the rise of Henry the Lion as a major threat to their position. One was Albrecht the Baer who had tried to take over the duchy of Saxony in the days of Konrad III and had ever since hankered at replacing Henry the Lion. Then there are the counts palatinate of Saxony who had been tricked out of various inheritances by Henry the Lion. And then there are the churchmen, Wichmann of Magdeburg and Hartwig of Bremen I already mentioned but other bishops, like the deposed Ulrich of Halberstadt and the encircled bishops of Hildesheim and Verden were equally opposed to Henry the Lion. In 1163 these men got in touch with other imperial princes, including the landgraves of Thuringia, the duke of Austria and the king of Bohemia to go after Henry the Lion.

It is again Barbarossa who comes to the Lion’s rescue and convinces the major princes to abandon their plan. In 1164 Albrecht the Aber and the count palatinate of Saxony try again but get defeated. It seems that as long as Barbarossa was on the Lion’s side, he was untouchable.

But in 1166 Barbarossa sets off on his fourth and largest Italian campaign. The oppressive imperial rule in Italy had exhausted the patience of even Barbarossa’s closest allies like Cremona, Pavia and Lodi. He went down to Italy with one of the largest forces ever mustered by a medieval emperor.

With the emperor out of the country, the conspirators decided to strike. Their ranks had been swelled by the sons of Konrad of Wettin who had intermarried with Albrecht the Baer’s family. They attacked the castle of Haldensleben, one of Henry the Lion’s key fortresses. Their side got an enormous boost when the archbishop of Cologne joined their side.

By 1167 Henry the Lion is so distressed he reconciles with Pribislav, the prince of the Abodrites who he had fought for five years in an attempt to gain control of the March of the Billungs. In this agreement Henry concedes him Mecklenburg and opens up the way for a Slavic ruler to become duke of Mecklenburg and an imperial prince.

Throughout 1167 and 1168 the situation became more and more difficult for Henry the Lion. His enemies were ravaging his lands and he was losing supporters. But in 1168 the greatest of Henry’s supporters was back. The emperor Frederick Barbarossa stepped in. He demanded an end to the war that he blamed on the defeat in his Italian campaign. Had only the soldiers engaged in this civil war come to the aid of the emperor, the war against the Lombard League and the pope could have been won. Whether Barbarossa believed that is doubtful given his huge army was defeated, not by a human enemy, but by infection.

Still, Henry the Lion prevailed, and he could even leave his duchies in 1172 to go on a crusade to the Holy Land. If you want to hear more about that journey, there is a bonus episode in the Patreon feed about it.

I guess you have now clocked the pattern. Whenever Henry’s expansionist ambitions run into obstacles, the emperor Barbarossa appears like a genie in a bottle and sorts everything out. Which begs the question, why would he do that?

On obvious reason is that Henry supported Barbarossa with men and weapons during his Italian campaigns. He played an important role in the first and second siege of Milan where he brought in as many as a 1000 armoured knights with equipment etc.

The other reason was that Barbarossa had seen his uncle Konrad III fight an endless war against the Welf that rendered his predecessor unable to pursue any kind of long-term strategy. His main value proposition to the empire had been that he would be the capstone that reconciled the two families.

We, having followed Saxon history since 800 in this series, we know this is not just a family conflict. Saxony had moved into a semi-autonomous relationship with the empire ever since the latter years of Henry IV’s reign. All an emperor could hope for was to have some nominal overlordship over Saxony mediated by whoever the Saxons chose to be their interlocutor. The concept was that Saxony remained part of the empire but would organise its internal affairs without imperial interference. The emperor would interact with the Saxons via an intermediary. These intermediaries were initially Hartwig of Magdeburg and Henry the Fat for emperor Henry IV. Henry V hoped Lothar of Supplinburg would be that link but found that relationship hard to manage. When Lothar ascended the throne Saxony was temporarily folded back into the imperial power structure. That may have been the reason that Konrad III thought he could operate more forcefully in the North, an attempt that ultimately failed.

Barbarossa’s policy versus Henry the Lion was hence a return to the approach taken by Henry IV and Henry V. Henry the Lion’s job was to keep Saxony on an even keel, appear at court and act as a faithful vassal, even though both sides knew he was largely independent and, if possible, support the imperial policy with military resources.

A third reason why Barbarossa was less concerned about the expansionary policies of his most powerful vassal was that he himself had not tried to build his own power-base, his Hausmacht before 1167. Barbarossa’s policy North of the Alps had been to stay above the squabbles for land and local power his magnates engaged in so forcefully. His strategy was to re-establish the imperial regalia in Northern Italy which would give him the resources to pursue his policies on the European stage. Given how much richer Northern Italy was compared to Germany, this would have made him infinitely more powerful than even Henry the Lion.

All these reasons fell away in the decade after 1167.

After the catastrophic loss of his army before Rome in 1167, Barbarossa’s Italian strategy was broken. The dream to build a pan-European empire funded with the riches of Northern Italy had become unrealistic. Barbarossa needed another source of funds. Hence he did what his magnates were doing. He picked up the inheritances of the men who had died in his service during the 1167 campaign, built castles manned with Ministeriales to expand control vertically and even engaged in some light colonisation in the Pleissenland and the Egerland.

That not only brought him into conflict with many of his magnates, including his Saxon magnates, it also eroded his political standing as an emperor who floats above the grubby spats over land.

As for Henry the Lion’s ability to keep Saxony on an even keel, the war of 1167/68 had shown quite clearly that Henry did not command the respect of his Saxon peers. In fact he was the source of the unrest.

And finally there is the famous meeting in Chiavenna. In 1177 Barbarossa had made one last attempt at bringing Northern Italy under his control. That failed already before Alessandria, the city of Straw we talked about in episode 59. But he kept ploughing on and demanded for more troops to be brought down from Germany. Some magnates, including the archbishop of Cologne, complied. Chroniclers who wrote about events decades later report that Barbarossa had asked Henry the Lion to meet in Chiavenna, on the Italian side of the Splugen and Septimer passes. There Barbarossa first demanded and then begged Henry to supply him with additional troops. Barbarossa may or may not have knelt before Henry the Lion as a last resort to sway his mind. Kneeling or even prostrating themselves is something emperors and other powerful men used in the Middle Ages as a last resort sway someone’s opinion. Henry II did it and even Konrad II, the mightiest of German warrior rulers had done it. Henry the Lion still refused, making it an unforgivable affront.

That was compounded by the fact that Barbarossa suffered his final defeat at Legnano where his relatively small contingent of soldiers was defeated by a Milanese army. This defeat brought an end to Barbarossa’s campaigns in Italy and forced him to reconcile with pope Alexander III and the Lombard League.

German historians have been debating whether the footfall of Chiavenna had really happened or not for centuries. Many, in particular in the 19th century built an entire narrative around this snub and its devastating consequences. This was the reason, so they argue, that the alliance between Barbarossa and Henry the Lion broke letting the fight between Welf and Hohenstaufen, between Guelfs and Ghibellines re-emerge.

Modern historians are less certain it happened, though the most recent biography of Henry the Lion by Joachim Ehlers argues quite forcefully for a prostration.

In the end we do not need the whole drama of an imperial footfall to explain why Barbarossa dropped the support for Henry the Lion.

The Lion had stopped being useful. He no longer kept peace in Saxony, he did not act as the emperor’s intermediary, and he could no longer provide military support given his precarious situation. And he wasn’t even a threat anymore. During the previous conflict between Welf and Hohenstaufen, the Welf could count on the support of many of their fellow Saxon nobles. By 1178, that was no longer the case. They almost all hated Henry the Lion.

That is why the conflict between Henry the Lion and the Saxon nobles resumed in 1178. There were various campaigns that I will not bore you with. The main protagonists were the archbishops Philipp of Cologne and Wichmann of Magdeburg as well as the children of Albrecht the Baer and Konrad of Meissen. Henry’s position deteriorated rapidly, many of his castles capitulated without a fight and when Barbarossa joined the campaign in person in 1180 it was over quite quickly.

Henry was stripped of both his ducal titles, the one of Saxony and the one of Bavaria. He lost vast tracts of his lands as his enemies took advantage of his defeat. The archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen even got Stade after all. Henry the Lion had to go into exile to his father-in-law, king Henry II of England.

The great stem duchy of Saxony was split up. The western part became the duchy of Westpahalia and was given the archbishop of Cologne. The eastern part went to Bernhard of Anhalt, the youngest son of Albrecht the Bear. But mostly what happened is that the ducal institutions disappeared. Westphalia became a territorial principality owned by Cologne and the now shrunk duchy of Saxony became an empty title. The counts of Holstein, the Margraves of Brandenburg, the margraves of Meissen, the dukes of Mecklenburg and the Landgraves of Thuringia became medium sized powers. Not large enough to challenge the emperor but string enough to resist any attempts by the central authority to take them over as we have seen last episode.

Henry the Lion returned in 1185 and rebuild some of his personal possessions. It was still a major agglomeration of power and his son, Otto IV, will rise to become king and even be crowned emperor. If you want to hear this story, go to episode 73 to 75. But that involved a civil war against Barbarossa’s son Philip of Swabia, a war that cemented the power of the territorial princes. When Frederick II becomes king and emperor, there is not much he can do to re-establish central power. The empire has become a mixed monarchy where the emperor just coordinates the other princes rather than rules them.

And that is even more true in the North than elsewhere. Imperial power had already been weak since the 11th century but is now virtually non-existent. Nor is there a ducal co-ordination mechanism for the vast territory north of the Main and east of the Rhine. Power is fragmented.

And that situation is mirrored in the two other centres of power in the Baltic, Denmark and Poland. Denmark’s constant wars over the succession are endemic. Though there is a period between 1154 and 1241 under Waldemar I and II when Denmark is united and expansionist, it fell into civil war and what the Danes call “the Decay” right afterwards.

Poland as well had suffered many a civil war as different pretenders for the crown fought each other. Boleslaw III, called wrymouth, managed to unite the country again in 1106 but upon his death in 1138 Poland was divided into 5 separate duchies, Silesia, Masovia, Greater Poland, Sandomierz plus the duchy of Pomerania. Theoretically one of the dukes was the princeps or head of the clan, but de facto, each pursued their own policies.  

Which gets us to the last question, which is why we end up with so many Saxonies in Germany. There is Niedersachsen, Sachsen and Sachsen Anhalt today, but there were lots and lots of duchies of Sachsen-suchandsuch in German history.

Let’s start with Niedersachsen or Lower Saxony in English. This Bundesland came into existence in 1945. That being said, the name goes back to the 14th century and the empire had put together several principalities, mainly that of the Welf duchy of Brunswick and Lueneburg as the Kreis of Lower Saxony. Though Niedersachsen comprised a large part of the old stem duchy of Saxony the territorial princes that formed its Kreis did not have any ducal Saxon title.

The title of duke of Saxony went a you may remember to Bernhard of Anhalt. He then passed it on to his descendants until in 1252 the possessions of Bernhard were divided into three lines. One retained the title of duke of Saxony, the other called themselves princes of Anhalt. Each of them then divided into even more lines, each multiplying the title by adding another placename to it, like Sachsen-Lauenburg and Sachsen-Wittenberg. The one that mattered most here was Sachsen-Wittenberg because with it came the rank of elector. So when the dukes of Sachsen-Wittenberg died out in 1422 the title was reassigned and came to Frederick, margrave of Meissen. His family from then onwards used the title duke or elector of Saxony. The Wettiner then split into two lines in 1485, one who held on to the margraviate of Meissen and the other to the landgraviate of Thuringia. The ones in Thuringia. Both sides used the title duke of Saxony plus location, except of the one who held the electoral position. That moved initially to Thuringia and then to Meissen.

And that explains it all, right? Maybe not. Maybe the simplest way to explain it is that there was no real power or territory associated with the title duke of Saxony, so emperors and other princes tolerated it that the title was granted to all surviving sons of a family, leading to this proliferation of dukes of Saxony. Hence Saxony could gradually wonder off towards the east. And even more bewildering, when Sachsen-Anhalt was created in 1945, the constituent states were the Prussian province of Saxony and the lands of the princes of Anhalt, but no dukedom with Saxony in it. On the other hand, the Bundesland of Thuringen contained no less than four duchies of Saxony, Sachsen-Weimar, Sachsen-Meiningen, Sachsen-Altenburg and Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha. The lands of the Wettiner electors then became simple Saxony. It is a mess. Maybe it is easier to forget about all these tiny Saxonies. All that matters is that the old stem duchy of Saxony was once a hugely powerful political entity in the empire and was now fragmented into a thousand pieces, some more powerful than others, but none truly powerful.

It is this world of fragmented power that allows for the rise of the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Knights in Prussia. We will get into their story in two weeks’ time as I need to prepare a bit more for this next season. I hope you will join us again.

There are two items of housekeeping that I want to address.

The first is from listener and most generous patron Sherrylyn. She asked for a bibliography at the end of each episode so that she can read up in more detail. I will add book titles at the bottom of the transcripts that you find on my website “historyofthegermans.com. For this episode I relied heavily on Joachim Ehler’s biography of Henry the Lion, on John B. Freed’s biography of Barbarossa and Adam Zamoyski’s Poland.

And further as our story is moving east and north, we are likely to run into geographically contested territory. The way I want to handle this and hopefully get it broadly right is as follows:

When I am talking about the political entities at the time, say the margraviate of Brandenburg or the free city of Gdansk, I will use the English name. where such a name does not exist and the place lies outside modern day Germany I will use either the currently used name or both German and the currently used name. So for instance, I would use the Duke of Silesia, The mayor of Visby and the city of Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad.

When I am talking about geographic locations rather than political entities, I want to use current borders. So, when I speak about Russia in the context of Hanseatic trade routes, I mean the current country of Russia. When I want to talk about the political entities it may be the principality of Nowgrord or of Moskva.

I know that I will make mistakes in that respect, so please correct me if you feel I am getting this wrong.

And now, before I finally 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.    

Bibliography

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If you ever come to Dresden, and if you like art, architecture and history, you very much should, you may want to turn into Augustusstrasse right by the Residenzschloss. What you fnd there is the largest porcelain artwork in the world, 102 metres long and made from 23,000 Meissen porcelain tiles. This is the “Fürstenzug”, the procession of princes. It was made to celebrate 800 years of the House of Wettin who ruled over what we now know as the land of Saxony. It portrays 35 margraves, electors, dukes and kings from 1127 to 1904. Being essentially a 19th century artwork, it depicts all these Saxon rulers as powerful military leaders surrounded by their fighting men and important nobles, all in contemporary costume. There are 94 depictions and only one female figure in the whole procession. So, was the lasting rule of the House of Wettin built upon their martial prowess? Well they did fight a lot, but the true source of their power is depicted in one of the very last figures of the procession coming after the princes, the army, the intellectuals and the artists and largely obscured by the images of the carpenter and the builder involved in the project. What that figure represents and what lay at the heart of the Wettiner success, we will find out…

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 107: The House of Wettin

If you ever come to Dresden, and if you like art, architecture and history, you very much should, you may want to turn into Augustusstrasse right by the Residenzschloss. What you fnd there is the largest porcelain artwork in the world, 102 metres long and made from 23,000 Meissen porcelain tiles. This is the “Fürstenzug”, the procession of princes. It was made to celebrate 800 years of the House of Wettin who ruled over what we now know as the land of Saxony. It portrays 35 margraves, electors, dukes and kings from 1127 to 1904. Being essentially a 19th century artwork, it depicts all these Saxon rulers as powerful military leaders surrounded by their fighting men and important nobles, all in contemporary costume. There are 94 depictions and only one female figure in the whole procession. So, was the lasting rule of the House of Wettin built upon their martial prowess? Well they did fight a lot, but the true source of their power is depicted in one of the very last figures of the procession coming after the princes, the army, the intellectuals and the artists and largely obscured by the images of the carpenter and the builder involved in the project. What that figure represents and what lay at the heart of the Wettiner success, we will find out…

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Last week we talked about Albrecht the Baer and the creation of the Mark of Brandenburg. You may remember that he got his first break in 1123 when the future emperor Lothar III enfeoffed him with the Mark of Lusatia.

At that same time and in the same context Lothar also enfeoffed Konrad, count of Wettin with the Mark of Meissen. Konrad leads the Fürstenzug I mentioned and is generally seen as the founder of the dynasty. If you have listened attentively and have been able to navigate the sea of names, you may remember that Konrad was not the first margrave of Meissen from the Wettiner family. That was Henry of Eilenburg, Konrad’s cousin. In fact the Wettiner had been dukes and margraves for generations before. So, other than Albrecht the Bear, the elevation of Konrad was more in the spirit of continuity and inheritance.

And it shows. Apart from a brief conflict with Wiprecht of Groitzsch in the first two years after his appointment, Konrad did not have to do much fighting. Nor did he have to sign shady deals with local potentates to expand his territory. In fact he benefitted from the shady actions of his neighbour Albrecht the Bear. You may remember from last episode that Albrecht lost the margraviate of Lusatia after his men had murdered Udo of Frecksleben. The margraviate of Lusatia went to Konrad without him having to do anything special. And that sets a pattern. Konrad acquired more and more lands and positions in his margraviates either by purchase or grant. He bought the county of Bautzen east of Dresden, he was granted the county of Rochlitz as well as most of the lands once owned by Wiprecht of Groitzsch. At the end of his 35 years he had amassed a large and coherent territory in what we now know as the Land Sachsen.

Konrad is called “the Great” in the Fürstenzug, which is a moniker not normally given to guys with modest military exploits and a habit of getting gifts from Kings and bishops.

What makes Konrad and his immediate successors stand out is their use of both the colonisation trend and the bundle of rights that come with the title of margrave to create one of the earliest territorial principalities in the empire.

Let’s start with colonisation. That had begun a lot earlier in the margraviate of Meissen than in many other parts. Wiprecht of Groitzsch had invited settlers from Frankonia as early as 1104 to live on previously uninhabited lands south of Leipzig. Konrad dramatically accelerated this process. One of the ways he did that was by not doing everything himself. Instead he would grant vast tracts of sparsely inhabited land to his Ministeriales and even more often to monasteries. These would then organise the colonisation themselves, bringing in people from a wide range of places.

Furthermore the big difference between Meissen and Lausitz compared to Brandenburg was that these territories had been under much more intense Saxon control. The Slavic uprising did not result in Slavic principalities. Though the population was almost entirely Wendish before 1100, the elite was either Saxon or assimilated into the Saxon nobility. Wiprecht of Groitzsch who came from Slavic stock and rose to become the most prominent political figure in the region is a great example. So a lot of the land, including the large forests and marshland were already in the possession of local nobles, bishops and monasteries. Plus there were important centres of power like Meissen itself. The town of Meissen was transformed from a Slavic settlement into a German Town by King Henry the Fowler and had remained the seat of a Bishop since. Meissen has played a role in our podcast before, as had Bautzen, even further east.

Given the majority of the peasants who had come to the lands of Konrad had been free labourers or had been released by their landlords back home, the new settlers were in their vast majority free men and women. There were very few serfs, most of them likely descendants of the original Slavic population.

Which leaves the question, how will Konrad and his descendants benefit from all this development activity when the colonisation is largely managed by other people?

That comes down to the way Konrad managed to exploit the rights that came with being a margrave. As you may remember, a margrave was originally a count in charge of frontier county. His role was not just to administer justice and maintain the king’s peace, he was also responsible for the defence of the border.

In light of this additional burden, the margraves were given full access to the royal regalia in their territory. In other words, all the special rights the kings have in the rest of the kingdom were given to the margrave to fund the defence of the border.

Amongst these rights was the right to build castle, to establish markets, to demand tolls, to mint coins and to exploit mineral resources. Konrad and his descendants had the great advantage that their margraviate no longer bordered any hostile enemies. To their south was the duchy and soon kingdom of Bohemia, an integral part of the Holy Roman Empire. When the Bohemian rulers came into Meissen it was for some reason of internal imperial politics, not as a foreign foe. 

As for the eastern border with Poland, the threat had much diminished. Ever since Boleslav the Brave, the kingdom of Poland was riven by internal conflict. Boleslav III Wrymouth had managed to unify the kingdom in 1107. But in 1138 he was forced by internal politics to split his kingdom amongst his five sons. This division lasted until 1320, leaving the individual states unable to mount any expansionist policies westwards. We will look at this in more detail in a future episode. For now what matters is that Poland was no longer a threat to the exterior border.

The absence of any need to fortify the borders did however not mean that the margraves of Meissen and Lusatia were prepared to hand back all the great regalia they had received. Instead they used them to leverage themselves into territorial rulers. They erected castles across their ands and put men in charge of them who reported directly to the margrave. The castles were there to guarantee the peace and often the seats of justice. For these services they collected tolls from passing merchants, court fees and general levies on the peasants.

When they gave land from the royal demesne to a monastery, they made themselves the Vogt or worldly administrator of this land, collecting a share of the income.

The most valuable part of these rights was also the most unexpected. In 1162 Konrad’s eldest son Otto gave a large tract of land in a forest that Thietmar of Merseburg had called Mircwidu between What is today Dresden and Chemnitz to the monastery of Altzelle. This was to become the house monastery for the house of Wettin and the Cistercians there were to pray for the passage into the afterlife of the family members. So far so normal. The Cistercian began developing the land, cutting down the trees, invitingcolonists and establishing new villages.

In one of these new villages called Christiansdorf, after a locator called Christian, a settler finds a curiously looking rock. It turns out this rock contains not just lead but also silver. And this one rock was no fluke. More and more appear and it is clear that there is a huge deposit of silver under this hill. An enormous deposit.

Margrave Otto does two things. First, he takes the land back from the monks of Altzelle – leaving dad in purgatory for a bit longer. And then he invites over the only people in the empire who have expertise in mining silver, the miners of Goslar. You may remember that the silver mines of Goslar were a crucial part in the economics that kept the emperors in funds. In particular the Ottonians relied heavily on the silver mines to fund their wars in Italy. During the Salian reign Goslar was a massively important location and Henry III built his great palace there.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, silver is so important because it is much less valuable than gold. Gold coins are pretty much useless as day-to-day money. One single gram of gold costs currently £50 and a typical coin would be 4.5 grams i.e., worth £225 in today’s money. There is very little that costs £225 in a medieval shop. Silver is much better for this. One gram of silver costs £0.60 today. That makes silver coins a much better means of exchange than gold. In fact very few gold coins were minted in the Middle Ages. Frederick II minted his Augustales more as a demonstration of his power than as a way to pay anyone. It will take until the High Middle Ages before Gold coins become common.

All this means is that silver is in very high demand. And Otto, margrave of Meissen just got himself one. No wonder he is called Otto the Rich.

The settlers flood into the little village of Christiansdorf. This is a proper gold rush. By 1170 there are already two large churches,  a third is begun in 1180. The common view is that the place is given city status in 1168, a mere six years after the first tree was cut down and presumably only 2 or 3 years after the first rock was found. The name is changed to Freiberg and it quickly overtakes Leipzig as the mercantile centre of the region.

Now one silver mine is great, but what about several? Here again the Wettiner approach of letting other people do the work kicks in. Otto declares the right to mine a “free right”. That means that anyone is free to dig wherever they want – and have the permission of the landowner. Whatever they find, they have to give one tenth to the margrave. This precipitates a mining boom, first around Freiberg, but in the 13th century at Dippoldiswalde and Scharfenberg, in the 14th Neustaedel and Neustadt. In the 15th and 16th century this goes into overdrive with Altenberg, Annaberg, Baerenstein, Buchholz, Ehrenfriedersdorf, Marienberg, Scheibenberg, Schneeberg and Zinnwald feeding the coffers of the margraves and later electors. Riches funded the stay of Martin Luther on the Wartburg as guest of the Elector Frederick the Wise where he translated the bible.

The mountain range that held all this wealth stretched along the border between Saxony and Bohemia. It contained so much metal ore, mainly silver and tin, that they are now known as the Erzgebirge, the Ore Mountains.  On the Bohemian side one place became famous for the silver coins minted there, the town of Joachimstal or Jachymov in Czech. Tal is valley in German. This coin was called the Joachimsthaler and was so common, people abbreviated the name to s’thaler and finally just Thaler. Thaler became the word for many large silver coins, like the Reichsthaler or the Maria Theresia Thaler. From there the word moved to Spain where it was another term for the famous “Pieces of Eight” or Peso’s for short. The Spaniards pronounced it dollar.

During the American war of independence the British restrained the colonies’ access to hard currency. So the Spanish silver coins, the dolars began circulating in the United States. On April 2, 1792 Alexander Hamilton, a famous musical entertainer and in his spare time treasury secretary, declared the money of account for the new country should be expressed in dollars or fragments thereof. There you go, from medieval margrave to modern monetary instruments in under fur minutes.

The wealth of the House of Wettin came from mining, which makes it simply rude that the Furstenzug gives room only to one miner tucked away in the back.

And how important the mines were is getting apparent when you remember what happened to the descendants of Albrecht the Baer. Both he and Konrad of Meissen end up splitting their possessions between their many sons. The Ascanier divisions are permanent and every time one of the lines dies out, none of the others have the clout or the money to bring the inheritance back together.

Not so the House of Wettin. Otto the Rich had been the eldest of the five sons of Konrad. When Konrad retired to a monastery in Halle, his possessions were divided amongst them. But the difference is that the Wettiner possession almost always come back together again. That to me comes down to the mines and the wealth they produce. If at least one side of the family controls the mines, they can push through their claims, even against the harshest opposition, as we will see.

It begins with Otto the Rich’s two sons, Albrecht called the Proud and Dietrich called the Pressured. Albrecht was the elder but Dietrich was his mother’s favourite. Hedwig somehow convinced her husband to promise the succession in the margraviate and hence possession of the mines to the younger son Dietrich. In 1188 Albrecht the Proud did the one thing one could do at this point, he gathered support amongst his uncles and apprehended his father and threw him in jail. That was a severe disturbance of the peace, so the emperor Frederick Barbarossa intervened. Albrecht had to release his father. After an uneasy 2 years Otto the Rich died and Albrecht the Proud immediately took over as margrave. That was unfortunate timing, because – as we know – 1190 is also the year Barbarossa dies and Henry VI takes over. Henry VI invites Albrecht to come along to fight for his crown of Sicily, an offer he could not refuse.

Once Albrecht is out of town, the younger brother Dietrich stages a coup, together with his father-in-law, the landgrave Hermann of Thuringia. The coup did fail partially because Albrecht returns and the two sides fight for 4 years, at the end of which Dietrich gained just Weissenfels.

All that becomes irrelevant when Albrecht dies in 1195 without male heir. At which point Dietrich should now finally become margrave -but no. There is a reason he is known to history as dietrich der Bedraengte, Dietrich the Pressured.

The emperor Henry VI cancels the enfeoffment and takes the mark of Meissen for himself. Why he did that may have to do with the deal he was trying to strike with the imperial princes right around this time. The suggested deal was that the princes would gain the right to dispose of their fiefs, their duchies, margraviates and palatinates as they wished, even pass it down the female line. In exchange they would have to accept that the imperial title would also become inheritable, rather than an elective title. In other words the emperor could no longer recall a fief upon the death of the incumbent if the princes place the Hohenstaufens on the throne forever. Recalling the Mark of Meissen may just have been a way to putting a bit more power behind his proposal. Or it was just a part of his father’s policy of expanding the imperial territory.

Dietrich seemed to have caved to imperial pressure and signed up for Henry VI’s crusade, presumably as a way to regain the imperial grace or -failing that – benefitting from the proposed deal.

Dietrich is one of the few participants in this crusade who make it to the Holy Land where he hears that Henry VI had died. He swiftly returns home and – again with his father-in-law’s help regains physical possession of his margraviate. In 1198 he sides with Philip of Swabia in the civil war between the Welfs and the Hohenstaufen and is confirmed in his fief. That was a close shave that could have ended the family right there.

Instead Dietrich the Pressured becomes one of the most successful early Wettiner. He takes advantage of the constant back-and-forth in the war between Philip and Otto IV and towards the end, when Philip seems to be winning, boldly shifts to Otto IV, a move that pays out handsomely when Philip is murdered in 1208 leaving Otto IV in charge. Another 180 degree turn was needed when emperor Frederick II comes up to Germany in 1213 to challenge Otto IV. and again he can keep his territory.

And he does a great job with it. The first wave of colonisation is coming to an end and his next effort is to build out the existing cities like Leipzig and Chemnitz and create new ones, the most important of which was Dresden.  During his 24 year reign the administration of the margraviate tightened further ensuring peace and justice to a much higher degree than other parts of the empire. And just like today, if the state provides a reliable framework in which to operate, enterprising minds find it easier to build and grow businesses.

The flipside of tight control is the loss of freedom. And that is particularly the case with the citizens of Leipzig. The city had grown fast and its citizens were looking to places like Lübeck and Cologne and demanded to become a free imperial city. But that was not something Dietrich with all his love for growth and merchants could tolerate. He used his vast wealth to oppose their demands. The citizens had some initial military successes, but in 1217 Dietrich prevailed. So Leipzig, one of the largest German cities and one driven by trade and its famous fair never became a free city.

And it may have been the reason for Dietrich’s early death. It is likely that he was poisoned by his doctor who in turn may have been bribed to do so by the citizens of Leipzig.

Dietrich’s son, Henry nicknamed the Venerable ruled at least nominally for 67 years. He was just 6 years old when his father died in 1221. Despite his minority and the ambitions of his neighbours the margraviate held together. Not only that Henry continued the policy to build out the territorial power of the margrave in his lands. We are now in the period when power shifts from the medieval system of interlocking rights and privileges to territorial principalities. The concept was first tried by Henry IV in Saxony during the 1070s. The idea is that instead of holding a long list of individual rights as a personal possession the magnate would be a prince who exercises all power over a specific territory. So in the 10th century a senior nobleman would look at his possessions and say, I own this castle, this set of fields, the toll on that bridge and a market over in the next town. Everything he does not explicitly own is either someone else’s, or the king’s. A territorial prince looks at things and says that in this specific territory everything is his, except for the things others have a legitimate claim to.

The transition from one state to the other is naturally gradual and vestiges of the older system still prevailed into the 19th century. But it can be argued that the Wettiner in Meissen were ahead of their peers in forming a territorial principality largely on the back of the fact that the land was comparatively new, that they had the king-like position of the Margraves and the wealth to buy out competitors.

And the last great benefit for them was the privilege in favour of the princes that emperor Frederick II signed in 1231/32. With that he grants pretty much all the regalia to the imperial princes, i.e., those who have received at least one fief from the emperor directly. In his charters Henry is referred to as princeps terre, territorial prince.

The last great benefit the Hohenstaufen grant Henry is also the largest. Henry’s mother was a daughter of the Landgrave of Thuringia. The Landgraves rivalled the Wettiner for wealth and for the efficiency of their administration. They were the most astute players in the game of back and forth between Philip of Swabia, Otto IV and Frederick II, becoming immensely rich and powerful in the process. Their castle of Wartburg became the centre of Minnesang culture and the splendour of their court was legendary. In their short existence they also counted a most venerable saint in their midst, Saint Elisabeth of Thuringia. The luck of the landgraves ran out with Heinrich Raspe. Raspe had thought he could play the game in the big league when he became the head of the papal party that opposed Frederick II. They made him anti-king and he began a war against Frederick II’s supporters, one of which was Henry the venerable. Heinrich Raspe was wounded in one of these battles in 1247 and died. With that the male line of the landgraves had died out. There were a number of sisters married to various princes with eminent offspring. But Frederick II gave the whole of the landgraviate to his faithful servant, Henry the Venerable, Margrave of Meissen.

That did not go down well with other claimants and a war of succession broke out. One conflict ended in 1249 with the treaty of Weissenfels whereby the landgraviate was split, the part west of the Werra river came to the counts of Hesse and the remainder came to the house of Wettin. The other leg ended in 1264. To celebrate the achievement Henry the Venerable organised an eight-day long tournament. The first price was a tree made from solid silver with solid gold fruit hanging off it. The court of Dresden was quickly taking over from the Wartburg as the centre of high medieval culture in the German lands.

By 1268, as the empire fell into the interregnum, Henry the Venerable was the most powerful secular lord north of the alps. Or he should have been, had he not undermined his own position by splitting his lands with his sons. These two, again called Albrecht and Dietrich each got a piece whilst Henry held on to the margraviate of Meissen. The two brothers instantly began fighting each other and in 1268 it became open war. In 1270, Albrecht, the elder, who became known as “der Entartete” or the Degenerate turned on his venerable father.

This was not the only thing that horrified his peers. Albrecht had been married to Margaret, the legitimate daughter of emperor Frederick II and his wife Isabella of England. But the relationship broke down. Albrecht fell for lady Kunigunde von Eisenberg. His wife Margaret felt deeply insulted that this margrave would so humiliate the daughter of an emperor and granddaughter of a king. She did leave Albrecht and went to Frankfurt where she died shortly afterwards. What a scandal!

Albrecht the Degenerate had three sons with Margaret, one where it said laconically that he “disappeared in Silesia”. The two younger ones were Frederick and Diezmann. There is the story that Margaret when saying goodbye to her sons bit Frederick in the cheek so that he should forever remember what his father had done. Hence Frederick is known as Friedrich der Gebissene or Frederick the Bitten.

To compound the scandal, the two younger sons also run off, joining their uncle Dietrich, who is still at war with their father. At that point a sort of total war starts between Albrecht and all other members of his family.

In the midst of all this sits Henry the Venerable who sees his life’s work crumble into dust. In 1288 he is released from his mortal toil, no doubt cursing his sons.

The death of the patriarch did however calm things somewhat. The different legs of the family divide up the inheritance of Henry the Venerable and sign an agreement promising each other to respect the newly drawn borders to eternity.

Family feuds run on their own timelines. Eternity turns out to be just 12 months. By 1290 they are back at it hammer and tongs.

At which point a new party enters the fray, king Rudolf of Habsburg. Rudolf had an amazing career which we will no doubt investigate in detail in a later episode. But let’s just summarise it as follows. A modest count from what is essentially Switzerland is elected king in 1273 because he is obscure nobility, limited power and horribly poor. But clearly, he had some other qualities because by 1275 he had taken Austria from king Ottokar of Bohemia and made himself a duke. Following this success recalled all imperial territories that had been lost since the death of Frederick II. What was and was not imperial became a bit fluid as time went by. First, he demanded the Pleissenland, a territory between Meissen and Thuringia that had been acquired for the crown Frederick Barbarossa but had come to the House of Wettin via the ill-fated marriage of Albrecht and Margaret.

That was reverted to the crown after a payment of 10,000 mark of silver to Albrecht who found himself in an ever-tighter spot financially. All that fighting had disrupted the silver production in Freiberg.

In 1290 Rudolf von Habsburg dies and his successor, another impecunious count with grand ambitions, Adolf of Nassau has a go at the possessions of the ever-quarrelling Wettiner. When first Albrecht’s brother and then his son died, his lands get split between Frederick the Bitten and Diezmann. This split is then objected to by king Adolf of Nassau who awards this to the Ascanier in nearby Brandenburg, bringing another party to the table.

Friedrich the Bitten and his brother manage to push the Brandenburger back. Flush with this success they turn against their father who flees to the court of king Adolf of Nassau. Albrecht is now completely broke and sells the Margraviate of Meissen, the Landgraviate of Thuringia and the Pleissenland for a mere 12,000 mark of Silver to king Adolf of Nassau. The richest territory with the seemingly inexhaustible silver mines of Freiberg is going for a song.

Fredrich and Diezman refuse to hand over any of these lands. In 1294 royal troops enter the margraviate and burn what is left of the once flourishing land to the ground. They returned home before reaching Leipzig, but returned in 1295 now pushing on to Freiberg and Meissen. The two brothers flee. Frederick the Bitten resumes the fight in 1297 and by April 1298 he is again lord, but lord of a shell of a land.

But the pain is not over. King Adolf’s reign ends ignomiously at the battle of Goellheim when the anti-king, Albrecht of Habsburg beats his troops and takes over. Naturally Frederick and Diezman are fans of the new king Albrecht of Habsburg. But hey, we are before the good old times of “felix Austria nube”.

King Albrecht does like the policies of his father and one of those was to get hold of Meissen and the great silver mines of Freiberg. He reinstalls Albrecht the Degenerate in Meissen with the proviso that upon his death all his lands go to him. Same deal as Adolf, just this time no payout.

He then calls Frederick and Diezmann to come to a royal assembly to finalise the feudal arrangements for Thuringia and all the other possessions, presumably so that they can go to their father and then to king Albrecht. The two brothers one twice the other one trice bitten once shy, give this opportunity a miss.

Everything is now in total chaos. The cities think this their opportunity to become free imperial cities and fight whoever is currently claiming overlordship. For Eisenach that was at the time Albrecht the Degenerate. They besiege him in the Wartburg, where none other that his son Frederick relieves him.

The family, or what is left of it are now holding hands and promise eternal mutual support. They muster an army to fight King Albrecht who had now dropped all pretence. On May 31st 1307 the two sides join battle at Lucka near Aldenburg. The royal army was commanded by Count Frederick of Nürnberg from the House of Hohenzollern and consisted mainly of southern Germans and some city contingents whilst the army of Frederick and Diezmann comprised armed peasants, contingents of some other cities and knights from Brunswick.

The result was a comprehensive defeat of the royalists. Count Frederick of Nürnberg was captured. King Albrecht of Habsburg was murdered by his nephew over some other outlandish demand for land and privileges.

For the sake of family unity Diezmann did the best possible thing and died without offspring. Albrecht the degenerate now had enough and retired to Erfurt where he died in relative obscurity. The new king and emperor, Henry VII recognised Frederick as the sole ruler and heir to the lands of the house of Wettin.

That left Frederick the Bitten in control of the extensive territories of the House of Wettin. Everything is broken and devastated. The recovery takes decades, but in the end the descendants of Konrad of Wettin become one of the richest, if not economically the richest territorial princes in the German lands. Rich enough to buy the crown of Poland, to turn Dresden into a jewel of Art and architecture but not rich enough to ever gain the imperial crown and despite all the pictures of soldiers on the Fürstenzug, not rich enough to hold against the rising power of neighbouring Prussia.

We are gradually coming to the end of these summary histories of the territories that had once been the stem duchy of Saxony. One big one is still missing though, and that is the story of the house of Welf and its greatest proponent, Henry the Lion. That will be the subject of next weeks episode. And then, I promise we will get into the world of the Hanseatic League. I hope you will come along.

Ah, and there was the quiz. Do you remember them all?

Her they go:

Konrad the Great

Otto the Rich

Albrecht the Proud

Dietrich the Pressured

Henry the Venerable

Albrecht the Degenerate

And

Friedrich the Bitten.

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

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In today’s episode we finally get closer to the history of the Hanseatic League. We will take a closer look at some of the fundamental changes in the Saxon policy towards the east that were ushered in during the reign of Lothar of Supplinburg and shaped events for a long period thereafter. It is in these decades that the Saxon magnates will realise that raiding and plundering of the lands east of the Elbe is no longer the financially most attractive option. A great organised migration from the overpopulated Rhineland, Holland and Flanders into Northern Germany begins.

What we will look at specifically is the county of Holstein and its brand-new counts, the lords of Schauenburg. These ambitious and proactive family will develop these lands and found or re-found two of the most significant cities of the Hanseatic league, Lubeck and Hamburg.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 104 – The Making of Holstein

In today’s episode we finally get closer to the history of the Hanseatic League. We will take a closer look at some of the fundamental changes in the Saxon policy towards the east that were ushered in during the reign of Lothar of Supplinburg and shaped events for a long period thereafter. It is in these decades that the Saxon magnates will realise that raiding and plundering of the lands east of the Elbe is no longer the financially most attractive option. A great organised migration from the overpopulated Rhineland, Holland and Flanders into Northern Germany begins.

What we will look at specifically is the county of Holstein and its brand-new counts, the lords of Schauenburg. These ambitious and proactive family will develop these lands and found or re-found two of the most significant cities of the Hanseatic league, Lubeck and Hamburg.

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 Anders B., Sherrylyn B., Felipe A. and Andreas A. who have already signed up.

Last week we talked about Lothar of Supplinburg and how he transformed the political structure of the duchy of Saxony, turning it from a loose federation under a nominal duke into a much more centralised entity. Part of his success was down to his HR policy. He installed loyal men into key positions, often by disregarding the wishes of his emperor Henry V who he had comprehensively defeated at the battle of Westenholz.

These men, and at this stage they are all men, will found dynasties that will determine the fate of Northern Europe for centuries to come. And these are Konrad of Wettin, whose family will become the electors of Saxony and ultimately kings of Poland, Albrecht the Baer, who will create the margraviate of Brandenburg and whose family, the Ascanier or dukes of Anhalt will rule lands in Sachsen Anhalt until 1918, Henry the Proud, head of the house of Welf whose family will be best known to the Anglo Saxon listeners as the kings of Hannover and then the kings of England. The fourth of these men was Adolph of Schauenburg who was given the county of Holstein, and Holstein is what we will talk about today.

Geographically Holstein is the lower part of the Jutland Peninsula, that piece of land that separates the North Sea from the Baltic. Its southern border is the river Elbe and its northern border is the river Eider, or in terms of cities, it stretches from Hamburg to Kiel and from Lubeck to the North Sea coast.

Holstein first appears in the historic records when Charlemagne shows up in the 770s. The people who lived North of the Elbe were the most obstinate of the Saxon tribes. To break their resistance Charlemagne had large numbers of them deported into the south. If you see names like Sachsenheim or Sachsenhausen in Franconia, these may be places where these unfortunates have been brought. Then Charlemagne invited the Slavic Obodrites, specifically the tribe of the Wagrarians to settle in Holstein. In 811 Charlemagne had confirmed Denmark in its control of Schleswig, the territory north of the Eider River. The Wagrarians were supposed to form some sort of buffer state against an invasion by the Danish Vikings.

However, by 814 some of the Saxons had returned and Holstein was split between the Wagrarians and other Obodrites in the eastern parts and the Saxon population in the west. Between them lay what Adam of Bremen called the Limes Saxoniae. That was a bit of an exaggeration suggesting a sort of Hadrian’s wall similar to the Roman Limes that separated the Roman empire from the Germans. In reality it was just a no man’s land between the two populations made up of bogs and thick forest with barely any walls or fortifications.

The Wagrarians were part of the Abodrites Federation, the same federation you may remember that was led by our friend Gottschalk. These Federations are relatively loose arrangements and as we will see the Wagrarians were not always aligned with the other Obodrites.

As for the Saxons in the western parts of Holstein, they comprised three distinct groups. There were the Holsten who gave their name to the county, then the Stormarns who lived around Hamburg and the Dithmarscher who settled along the North Sea coast.

These groups had retained their ancient Germanic traditions well into the 12th century. That means that instead of succumbing to the feudal order under some count or baron, the free peasants of Holstein bowed to no one. They organised their society through the ting where all decisions were taken, and temporary military leaders were chosen should the need arise. This system of a free peasant’s republic persisted in Dithmarschen until the late 16th century. Dithmarschen is today a part of Holstein, but had remained under the rather theoretical overlordship of the counts of Stade and later the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen until the 16th century, not the Schauenburg counts of Holstein.

Interspersed within the western part of the county were some castles initially built and maintained by the dukes of Saxony and now enfeoffed to the Shauenburgs.

In terms of towns or larger villages, there was Hamburg. But at the time, Hamburg, despite being formally the seat of an archbishop was not much to write home about. The first archbishop, Ansgar had built a wooden cathedral, but in the subsequent centuries the settlement had been regularly attacked and burned down by Vikings and Slavs, so that the population had shrunk to maybe a few hundred huddled around the sole church that stood on what is today the Domplatz.

The major trading centres in the region were Stade, on the western shore of the Elbe and hence not in Holstein and Haithabu, the Danish trading port just outside modern-day Schleswig, i.e., also not in Holstein.

The major settlement of the Wagrarier was Oldenburg and it seems that Ploen had also become at least a large village. And finally as we have heard in the episode about Gottschalk and Adalbert, the son of Gottschalk and his successor as leader of the Abodrites, Henry had based himself in Liubice, or old Luebeck, a Slavic settlement at the mouth of the Trave River just outside the modern city of Luebeck.

As for the relationship between all these groups, we can read in Helmond von Bosau that the Saxon communities in Holsten and Stormarn would regularly come to the aid of Henry, the prince of the Abodrites in his conflicts with other Slavic tribes, be that the Wagrarians or the Rani. The Rani, inhabitants of the island of Ruegen had replaced the Lutizi as guardians of the most important shrine of the pagan deities and general shield bearer of the old gods.

In 1111 this patchwork of peoples and castles was granted to Adolph of Schauenburg as the County of Holstein. He was a nobleman from further south. Their castle, the Schaumburg lay between Minden and Hannover.

The County of Holstein was, to use modern management speak, an opportunity. Not only did the new count have to deal with the Slavic neighbours, the hostile Wagrarians who had just killed his predecessor as well as Henry, the powerful prince of the Abodrites. On top of these two he also had to contend with the local Saxon population that had as much desire to subject themselves to some southern aristocrat as their Slavic neighbours. In terms of resources, he had a handful of castles and that was pretty much it. And before I forget, his other neighbours, the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen and the King of Denmark both did not much like ducal authority in their backyard either and that animosity extended to the duke’s vassal, the count of Holstein.

At this point the question for our brand-new count is, what shall he do. Until now the standard strategy for a count put in charge of a territory bordering the Slavic lands was simple. Raise an army or failing that a band of thugs and go burning and plundering in the east.

This has been going on for nearly 200 years now and the strategy has run its course. There is only so many times you can steal the same man’s purse. Economic activity and population in the Slavic territories has likely shrunk under the permanent onslaught. In particular after the defeat of the Lutizi in the 1060s the Saxons had taken the last large remaining stores of gold held at the temple in Radegast. The only large temple and treasure left was now the one on Cap Arcona on the island of Ruegen. Helmond of Bosau tells us that Henry, the prince of the Abodrites had already picked up some of that treasure when he forced the Rani of Ruegen to part with 4,400 mark of silver to avoid their destruction. Plus Ruegen was a long way from the border and any attack required the consent of Henry, who was after all a Christian and technically an ally.

Not only were there no more valuables to be found, the slavery business was also struggling. The end-markets, the Muslim kingdoms in Spain and the court of Constantinople had had begun their 300-year long fight for survival. The former from the Reconquista as small Christian kingdoms led crusades south, and the latter from the dual pressure of Turkish tribes and Frankish crusaders. There was simply not much money available for such fripperies as a root and stem eunuch.

And then we have the gradual Christianisation of the Slavs which made it harder to justify the constant raiding. There is a new generation of missionaries heading east. The first waves led by Adalbert of Prague and Bruno of Querfurt had often been very brief and ineffective affairs. Its protagonists seemed keener on a spectacular martyr’s death than on actual conversion of the heathens.

This next group is better organised and more focused on getting the job done. Two men stand out here, and they could not be more different. On the one hand there is the bishop Otto of Bamberg, scion of the dukes of Meranien. He took it upon himself to convert the Pomeranians, or so we are told. There are some doubts a grand prelate like Otto would actually have spent years going from hovel to hovel convincing the victims of chivalric brutality that Christianity is the religion of forgiveness and love. This work was probably done by members of his church whose names are lost to history. Still he staged two missionary journeys into Pomerania accompanied by 20 priests and a large retinue that so impressed the locals, 22,000 of them took baptism in one great session in 1128.

His counterpart was Vizelin, a man, as Helmond of Bosau writes, who was born to parents who were distinguished more by the probity and goodness than by nobility of birth. Translate – poor people. Vizelin had studied in Minden and Paderborn, had led the cathedral school in Bremen and went to France to further his studies. Vizelin’s first posting as a missionary was in Wippendorf, a nominally Christian village near the no-man’s land that Helmond of Bosau described as an empty wasteland full of misguided half heathens. Vizelin founded a monastery there that he called new minster or Neumünster the name the city has to this day. Vizelin and his comrades did proper missionary work. Preaching relentlessly and where possible protect their flock from attacks.

Vizelin had initially put his hopes in Henry the prince of the Abodrites who was a Christian and hence sympathetic to missionaries. But Henry died before Vizelin really got going and the two sons of Henry began a civil war that killed both of them. After the last member of the family, a small boy, was murdered Knut Lavard, one of the claimants to the ever-disputed Danish throne brought the Abodrites under his control. That did not last long either since Knut too was murdered in the endless Danish succession wars. At that point the Abodrites split up, one part, the Wagrarians were led by Pribislav and the other, based around Mecklenburg by Niklot. Neither of them were Christians and so missionary work slowed down.

In his last act in Holstein, Vicelin convinced the emperor Lothar to build a castle in Segeberg. This castle, one of only three mountaintop castles in Schleswig Holstein became the key military position from where the counts of Holstein controlled their territory. After that Vicelin departed to proselytise amongst the Hevellers in the Northern Marches.

So, thanks to the efforts of Otto of Bamberg, Vicelin and presumably hundreds of unnamed others, the Slavic peoples of the north gradually became Christians making it increasingly difficult to justify attacks on them.

With the plundering model becoming less and less attractive, the question arises, what to do in its stead. For the counts of Holstein and many other territorial lords in the east, the answer came from events elsewhere and well outside their control.

By the 12th century the great economic boom that started around 950 through a combination of climate change and improvements in agriculture is slowly petering out. Not that things got worse, just they did not get better at the same rate they did before. Or more precisely, economic growth did not keep pace with population growth. That means cities and villages are still growing in wealth and power, merchants got rich and tax income for the bishops and princes was still expanding, but the average income per head of population did not.

The region where this was most impactful were Flanders, Holland and the Rhineland. These regions had already been fairly well developed at the beginning of the millennium and by the early the 12th century they reached the end of the line. Most of the forests had been cut down and turned into fields. Wherever it was possible land had been reclaimed from the sea, the swamps had all been drained and the riverbeds straightened. Farmers were using modern ploughs and horses and field management had been refined.

At the same time the traditional landowners who had seen their holdings fragment be it by inheritance, donations to the church or simple mismanagement were replaced by more entrepreneurial ones who reconsolidated holdings and expelled smallholders wherever they could generate more income than the rents they collected. By the 1100s we find a huge population of landless paupers in the western parts of the empire who are living day by day, eating only when they find work.

Bad harvests and freak weather events such as the flooding of the recently reclaimed Dutch lowlands could quickly turn a precarious situation into catastrophic famine. People are leaving their homes to seek new lands where they could farm and feed their children. Hearing of the vast and by now almost depopulated rich farmland in the east many are prepared to leave to seek their fortunes.

The first wave of migrants we hear about dates back to 1106. The Archbishop of Hamburg, Frederick I signed an agreement with a group of settlers allowing them to take land between the Weser and Elbe Rivers. This was uninhabited swampland that was regularly flooded when the tidal Elbe and Weser rivers breached its banks. The Dutch and Flemish immigrants had experience with building dams and ditches and the idea was that they could drain these lands and make them fertile.

The deal sets out that each settler would get a very long and thin strip of land, 140m wide and 3,400m long. This he would hold as a tenant with the right to pass the tenancy to his descendants. The initial rent was extremely generous at just one penny a year and they were released from paying the tithe at least for a time. Where exactly this group went is not explicitly stated but may have been either in what is today called the Alte Land near Hamburg or the mouth of the Weser downriver from Bremen, a region that is still today called Hollerland and where later settler’s contracts have been agreed.

The settlers were allowed to live by their own rules, had their own lower jurisdictions, their own priests and probably maintained their language. Many terms they used in particular as it relates to agriculture and the construction of dykes and ditches remain in the lower German dialects to this day, as do the shape of the fields.

These early waves may have been initiated by the desperate people in Holland or Flanders, but the territorial rulers in the east quickly realised how profitable these new settlements could be and set up a veritable immigration pipeline.

The lord would identify a suitable piece of territory, initially lands that had lain fallow for a long time, either because nobody had ever lived there, or the previous Slavic inhabitants had been wiped out in one of the incessant raids of the last centuries. They would then send agents, so called locators to the large cities in the west and recruit settlers for this territory, offering terms not dissimilar to what had been offered by archbishop Frederick. The locator would organise transport and – once they had arrived – the allocation of the strips of land, the supply of materials and seeds, the design of the villages etc. These guys would then either appoint or become a Schulze, a sort of lower magistrate/mayor of the settlement who would dispense lower justice and collect the rents and tithes for their territorial lord.

If you find villages not just in Holstein that have a first name and -dorf at the end, such as Petersdorf, Sipsdorf, Lubbersdorf, these are typically named after the locator who had brought the settlers there.

The settlement process in Holstein started on the Elbe River as Dutch and Flemish immigrants drained the swamps on the Northern shore. They built dykes for instance in Vierlande south of Hamburg that turned this empty stretch into a breadbasket famous for its fruit and vegetables. Other centres of colonisation were in the no-man’s land between the Holsten and the Slavs, around Segeberg, Neumuenster and Oldesloe. After the Slavic Wagrier had been comprehensively defeated in the 1140s, the colonisation moved further east. The first settlements there were around Eutin and Lutjenburg. Oldenburg in Holstein had been an old Slavic settlement and you may remember that Gottschalk established a bishopric there that had to be abandoned after his fall. The bishop now returned, and a new church is constructed.

After 1160 recruitment spread wider and locators were sent into Westphalia and Eastphalia as well as the low countries. TheWestphalians settled further south around Ratzeburg.

A church tax inventory gives an idea of the scale of the change. In 1194 the bishopric of Ratzeburg counted 35 villages as payers of tithes in its area. By 1230, 35 years later, this had risen to 125. In the next 70 years it would grow by another third.

All this gets us to the question to what extent these settlements were created at the expense of the Slavic population who had lived there before, a question that is obviously highly contentious.

As far as we can see the population density in Holstein was very low at the start of the 12th century. This was frontier country and as we said, there was a large strip of no-man’s land between the Saxon and the Slavic peoples. And there were large areas that were continuously flooded and hence had not ever been used for agriculture. These latter territories are genuinely new lands not taken from anyone. As for the no-man’s land there are two ways to look at it. One way is to argue that these places were empty before the colonists arrived. The other is to say that the constant raids and attacks were the reason population density was low and that these lands were empty.

And finally, we can find German villages with names that indicate they had initially been founded by Slavic peoples. Charles Higounet counted as many as 50 out of the 125 villages that were mentioned in the Ratzeburg register of 1230. We also hear that the count Adolph II of Schauenburg had granted the Wagrarians the island of Fehmarn and territories near Oldenburg as a sort of reservation, suggesting they had been expelled from their homes. And finally we find villages with names that start with wendisch-such and such, which indicates that these were Slavic villages within areas now mainly inhabited by German speakers. And finally we find evidence that in some villages Slavs and Germans lived side by side.

I have seen commentators comparing the colonisation of the lands north and east of the Elbe to the colonisation of the American west. And there are some similarities, namely the organisation of the treks, the allocation of equal strips of land to the settlers, the perception that the land was empty and the creation of reservations for the indigenous population. But there are also material differences. One fundamental one is that both Slavs and Germans were a settled people making a living from agriculture. Hence what we do not have is an equivalent of the destruction of the herds of American Bison as a means to starve out the locals.

That does not mean that there weren’t periods the process of eastern colonisation in the 12th century descended into outright genocide. One of those was the so-called Wendish crusade of 1147, initiated by the famous Saint Bernhard of Clairvaux, very much my candidate for Worst Saint ever. The background to the Wendish crusade had been political. Lothar III’s successor, the new king, Konrad III had taken the cross in 1146. His reign was dominated by his conflict with the House of Welf, led by Henry the Lion, the new duke of Saxony.

Konrad III could not dare to leave for the Holy Land whilst his adversary remained in the German lands. On the other hand, Henry the Lion had no desire to serve under a king he despised and had deprived him of his ancestral duchy of Bavaria. To break the gridlock, Bernhard devised a separate crusade for Henry the Lion and the Saxons to go and convert the heathen Slavs. That crusade, called the Wendish Crusade would keep both sides apart and busy.

What distinguishes this effort from the previous raids into Saxon territory was the instruction Bernhard of Clairvaux, via his pope Eugene III issued to the crusaders. The crusaders were to receive the same absolution for all their sins on condition that they would not make peace until (quote) “either the heathen cult or its nation has been utterly destroyed”. That is different to what we had before. Before the raids were done for plunder and as Adam of Bremen stated, there was no mention of Christianity or conversion at all. Saint Bernhard’s instruction is an order to force conversion by the sword and where there is resistance to kill those who refuse. Forced conversion is by the way uncanonical. Hence catholic sources had tried to re-interpret these instructions as solely an obligation to break the nations, i.e., the political infrastructure of the Wends. I doubt that is what Bernhard meant, but then I am biased against pretty much everything he stands for.

If you want to contemplate whether this makes a difference, here the definition of genocide as set out by the UN: (quote)

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group, as such:

  1. Killing members of the group
  2. Causing serious bodily harm to members of the Group
  3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
  4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
  5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

(unquote).

The crusade started slowly. Many of the participants, including our friends, Albrecht the Baer, Konrad von Meissen and Adolph of Schauenburg were hesitant. Part of that hesitation was because the whole policy framework had already shifted, and they all had arrangements with their Slavic neighbours. Mostly they were paying tribute and had promised not to attack the new settlements. Adolph of Schauenburg had gone furthest and had signed a treaty of friendship with Niklot, the prince of the Abodrites. Now he tried to find a way through his commitment to the crusade and his obligations to Niklot. In the end he could not avoid the war. Niklot struck first and destroyed some settlements of Westphalian and Dutch settler in Holstein. It seems that Niklot himself had held back, but the Christian Holstens and Stormarn peasants were taking the opportunity to get rid of the new arrivals.

When the crusade finally sets off, they split into two groups. One, led by Konrad von Meissen and Albrecht the Bear headed for Pomerania. They besieged Dobbin with not much vigour and then headed for Stettin. However, bishop Adalbert of Pomerania, one of the missionaries who had come there with Otto von Bamberg convinced the crusaders to abandon the siege so as not to jeopardise the hard work of the saintly bishop. So the they lifted the siege and went back home. In total this part of the crusade had lasted just a few weeks.

The other contingent led by Henry the Lion went down to besiege Dobin, a castle Niklot had built as a stronghold for his people. Then something very, very unusual happened. According to Helmond of Bosau the vassals of Henry the Lion went to their duke and said: “Isn’t this our own land that we are burning down and our own peoples who we are fighting? Why are we acting as if we were our own enemies, destroying our own incomes?” And that was it. This is one of the vanishing few instances in history where rational economic thought beat religious fanatism. I have been wrecking my brain for another case where an army sent out to fight for whatever ideology is held back by the simple realisation that their quest creates more harm than good.

So, the Saxons signed an agreement with Niklot. Niklot found some volunteers who were willing to endure some water being spilled over their head and some prayers mumbled and hey presto, the crusaders declared victory and went home.

From that point onwards, the process of colonisation goes into overdrive. It is not just the Saxon magnates who give lands to immigrants from the west, Slavic princes as well as the dukes of Poland understand the huge benefits these energetic and skilled peoples can bring to their lands. At risk of receiving another 1-star review bemoaning me referencing modern politics, here is just another example for the fact that immigration is one of the most efficient engines of economic growth.

Again, let’s talk about the scale of the move. Historians estimate the total number of migrants moving east between 1106 and 1250 at around 200,000. That is followed by a second wave of a further 200,000 who go further afield, from as far south as Transylvania to Lithuania in the North.

This feels like a small number compared to the roughly 5m Germans who emigrated to the US between 1820 and 1900, but those made up less than 10% of the total German population. The medieval migration east is estimated to have involved about 7% of the empire’s population north of the Alps. This makes it one of the greatest migrations in Europe between the Dark Ages and the 19th century.

I am so sorry. This episode has gone on for quite some time now and I will now not get to the re-founding of Luebeck and Hamburg. So we will do this next week, which isn’t so bad because it gives us a chance to talk about King Waldemar of Denmark and his best mate Absalom inadvertently giving Luebeck its first break as well as the origins of the duchy of Mecklenburg.

I hope you find this interesting and are going to join us again. If you have comments on these episodes, for instance want me to go faster or slower, leave a comment on my website or in the Q&A option on Spotify.

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

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This week we talk about what happens after the fight for independence is won. As had happened countless times before in history, precious freedoms gained in bloody struggles can be lost easily in the subsequent peace, not to the old adversary, but to new, homegrown usurpers. That is at least one way of telling the story, the other being, that every major political upheaval is followed by a period of consolidation that embeds the gains made and truncates the excesses that appeared during the revolutionary period.

Something like that happened following the Saxon wars when Lothar of Supplinburg, a hitherto minor count from Westphalia is raised to ducal authority in 1106. Before he took the reins of the duchy, Saxony had turned into a free for all. Whenever a rich count or margrave fell victim to the various dangers a civil war generated, his cousins and peers would race to first seize his wife or daughter and then use their claim to grasp as much of his property as possible. A process not much more dignified than the opening of the doors on a Black Friday pre-pandemic.

Lothar established a central authority for the duchy that calms things down considerably. It is during this time that four of the five great princely dynasties in the North get established, the Welf, the Wettins, the Ascanier and the counts of Holstein. The rise of these four was however not a given. There were others, like the counts of Stade and Wiprecht of Groitzsch whose burning ambitions came to nought as they stumbled in the race between reproduction and their near inevitable violent death.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 103 – All the Duke’s Men

It is so nice to be back. Crossing the Atlantic was a great adventure, but I still missed the Podcast and you, lovely listeners, a lot. I had a lot of time thinking about whether I want to change anything about the podcast, and I have concluded to not change a thing. All will plough on as before. Upon my return I went straight to the British Library and hurrah, no more tinned episodes, but all freshly baked and sweet smelling.

This week we talk about what happens after the fight for independence is won. As had happened countless times before in history, precious freedoms gained in bloody struggles can be lost easily in the subsequent peace, not to the old adversary, but to new, homegrown usurpers. That is at least one way of telling the story, the other being, that every major political upheaval is followed by a period of consolidation that embeds the gains made and truncates the excesses that appeared during the revolutionary period.

Something like that happened following the Saxon wars when Lothar of Supplinburg, a hitherto minor count from Westphalia is raised to ducal authority in 1106. Before he took the reins of the duchy, Saxony had turned into a free for all. Whenever a rich count or margrave fell victim to the various dangers a civil war generated, his cousins and peers would race to first seize his wife or daughter and then use their claim to grasp as much of his property as possible. A process not much more dignified than the opening of the doors on a Black Friday pre-pandemic.

Lothar established a central authority for the duchy that calms things down considerably. It is during this time that four of the five great princely dynasties in the North get established, the Welf, the Wettins, the Ascanier and the counts of Holstein. The rise of these four was however not a given. There were others, like the counts of Stade and Wiprecht of Groitzsch whose burning ambitions came to nought as they stumbled in the race between reproduction and their near inevitable violent death.

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 Jeff M., Michael M, Robin R., and Claude L. who have already signed up.

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Last time we ended with the death of Ekbert II, margrave of Meissen, an event that brought the Saxon wars against emperor Henry IV to an end. 15 times the emperor had taken an army into Saxony and 14 times he was unsuccessful.  Though Henry IV could claim victory in this his last attempt after the leaders of the rebellion had sworn allegiance to him, in reality, it was the Saxons who had achieved their political objectives.

The conflict that began as far back as 1075 had always been more about limiting royal power in the duchy, than about removing Henry IV from the throne. Yes, the Saxons had supported the deposing of Henry IV at Forchheim, had sworn allegiance to the anti-king Rudolf von Rheinfelden and aligned themselves with pope Gregory VII and the reformers. But at the heart of the conflict had been the resistance against royal encroachment into the richest parts of the duchy as symbolised by the Harzburg. On that count, the Saxons were entirely successful. Henry IV never again set foot in the duchy and his position in the Harz mountains eroded quickly. Only Goslar itself remained imperial.

The solution was a face-saving compromise. Henry IV was technically the overlord of Saxony but had no material influence in the affairs of the duchy. To make this solution work on a day to day basis, a political buffer was created between the emperor and the Saxon magnates.

This political buffer had a name, or in fact two names. Hartwig of Magdeburg and Henry the Fat, Count of Frisia. These two men’s job was to keep the emperor and the magnates apart. They would formally swear allegiance to Henry IV and do all the required kneeling and nodding. At the same time they reassured the Saxons that none of the Imperial orders had any actual effect on the ground.

Hartwig and Henry were ideally suited for this job. Hartwig had been one of the leaders of the Saxon rebellion and a firm supporter of the Gregorian reforms. Henry was the eldest son of Otto von Northeim, the hero of the initial decade of the war as well as being the largest magnate in Saxony. At the same time these two managed to gain the confidence of Henry IV, reassuring him that the Saxons would remain outwardly loyal.

Having a feudal layer between the king and the counts is nothing new. When the Carolingian empire shuffled off into the eternal sunset of history exactly such a structure had emerged, the stem duchies. Duchies were a middle layer between the king and the counts and knights below. A duke would exercise some of the royal prerogatives, such as guaranteeing peace, dispensing justice, leading the ducal contingents in war and holding regular ducal assemblies.

Saxony was such a stem duchy and still had a duke. Which gets us to the now obvious question, where is the duke of Saxony in all of this? Shouldn’t this be his job?

Well, there is a duke of Saxony, Magnus Billung. But as you may remember, the Billungs had never risen to being proper stem dukes. The dynasties’ founder, Hermann Billung had ruled the duchy only on behalf of Otto the Great and it seems his successors struggled to shake off this inferior status. The Billungs were rarely called upon to dole out justice, assemblies were called with and sometimes without the duke and military leadership these last decades rested with Otto von Northeim and other magnates, not with the duke Magnus,

On top of that you had the system of margraviates along the eastern border. Margraves had a special status, being direct vassals of the king or emperor, not of the duke. With five margraviates in the duchy and those held typically by the most powerful families, ducal power was constitutionally curtailed.

And then you had a solid dose of bad luck. Magnus Billung had joined and to a degree led the Saxon rebellion. But he somehow managed to get captured again and again. Sure, the Saxons were duly enraged by the imprisonment of their duke and felt honour bound to free him. But whilst he was in prison, they still needed a leader, which is how the military and political role of the duke transferred to Otto von Northeim. Magnus became more and more marginalised and focused on his perennial feud with the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen. The final blow to his reputation came when he defected to Henry IV early on in the final struggle.

Duke Magnus died in 1106 without male offspring and his only brother had died long before, bringing an end to the Billung dynasty. Despite the ineffectual role Magnus had played as duke, the institution was not completely obsolete. So a new duke needed to be found.

Magnus had left behind two daughters. One, Wulfhild, had married Henry from the House of Welf, nicknamed the Black, the second son of the duke of Bavaria. Though we associate the house of Welf very much with Hannover, Braunschweig and Lueneburg and ultimately the crown of England, in 1106, the Welf had no material possessions north of the Main River. Their power base was in Swabia, in the duchy of Bavaria and in Northern Italy. As a second son Henry the Black only held some family possessions whilst the title of duke of Bavaria and all the rest was held by his brother Welf V. His only claim to get into the upper echelons of aristocratic society was via his wife’s connections. Which is why Henry the Black threw his hat in the ring to become duke of Saxony.

The other daughter of duke Magnus was Eilika, a rather formidable woman who, judging by the scarce sources available, asserted her rights forcefully. In the context of the times that suggests she took up arms against whichever neighbour had stood in her way. Her martial prowess may have got something to do with the fact that she was the great-granddaughter of the axe-wielding saint-king Olaf II of Norway. Sorry, I am getting carried away with my excitement to get closer to the Scandinavian part of the story. But before we get there, we have to plough through a bit more German genealogy.

So, the formidable Eilika married Otto von Ballenstedt. This count was part of the highest ranks of Saxon nobility, related to all and sundry, though up to that point his family, soon to be known as the Askanier, had not held positions as margrave or duke. The most famous of the Ballenstedts was Uta, the medieval pin-up on Naumburg cathedral. Being perennially on the cusp of becoming an imperial prince with a direct vassalage to the emperor fuelled the Ballenstedts’ ambitions and the death of good old Magnus gave Otto hope he might finally rise in his station.

So, the two sons in law of Magnus Billung would very much like become duke, sport an excessively noble line and are recognised as competent military leaders. But they are not the most powerful men in the duchy. These were still the great margraves, in particular Henry of Eilenburg, from the family of Wettin who had taken over the Margraviate of Meissen after the death of Ekbert II, the counts of Stade who held the Northern March, Wiprecht of Groitzsch we will hear about in a moment, the recently created landgraves of Thuringia and probably some others I have missed out.

I could not find any detailed accounts of the election/selection process for the new duke of Saxony, but my assumption is that given the complexity of the situation, the lack of one obvious claimant and the relative insignificance of the role meant, the Saxons had to go to the ultimate arbiter of decisions in the empire, the emperor himself. What facilitated that decision was that the hated Henry IV had just been deposed by his son, Henry V. Henry V had been the champion of the princes against his father and had been supported by many of the magnates of Saxony. Check out Episode 39 if you want to hear more about that.

This unusual combination of circumstances is the only way to explain why the Saxons -after 30 years of war against the central power- would let the emperor decide who will become their duke. What was even more surprising than the fact they let the emperor have a say in such an important decision was Henry V’s choice for the role, Lothar of Supplinburg.

Lothar was the son of a rather obscure count in the Harz mountains. In the older literature his father is described as a minor nobleman, which is not quite correct. He was a member of the high aristocracy of Saxony, related to the counts of Walbek and the counts of Querfurt. His mother, Lothar’s grandmother had married the duke Ornulf of Saxony after his grandfather’s death. Lothar’s father augmented his possessions by abducting and then marrying Gertrud, the daughter of the Bavarian counts of Formbach. The Supplinburg that Lothar is named after came in the dowry of his mother. So, a family of ancient origin and on the rise, but not exactly in the top five.

Lothar was born in 1075, the same year his father died in the battle of Langensalza on the side of the Saxons. In that same year 1075 his mother married again, this time the duke of Lothringia, who had fought against her now dead husband on the side of emperor Henry IV at the same battle. As ever, it is unclear whether she – and her inheritance – were parts of the spoils of war, or whether she had a passionate longing for the duke. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, he was known as “Theorderic the Valiant” after all.

We also do not know what happened to little Lothar in the aftermath of his father’s death and his mother’s shotgun wedding. He might have gone to Lothringia with his mother, which meant he would have been raised at the ducal court in Namur. Or alternatively he would have been raised by his grandmother at the court of Magnus of Saxony, or finally he may have been raised by servants at the castle of Supplinburg which he was named after, or a combination of all three.

We hear that in 1088, aged 13 he takes over his father’s role as a count in the Harz mountains. Then it gets dark again. In 1101 he is mentioned as an attendant in a grand assembly of Saxon nobles and in 1104 he is found in the entourage of Henry V. He is now 29 years old, presumably rising in the imperial hierarchy and growing his lands and possessions. When Henry V rebels against his father, Lothar becomes one of his key supporters who might have been the one who convinced the Saxon magnates to support the young price.

At this point Lothar had hugely increased his wealth and position as he had married the richest heiress the country had on offer at the time, Richenza. Richenza is the daughter of Henry the Fat who had inherited the lion’s share of his father, Otto of Northeim’s lands. She is also the daughter of Gertrud, the heiress to the fortune of Ekbert II, margrave of Meissen and count of Brunswick.

Whatever the exact mechanics, but in 1106, Henry V selects Lothar von Supplinburg to become duke of Saxony. With his elevation to duke of Saxony Lothar also acquires the old Billung possessions around Luneburg and the march of the Billungs. Over the next decades Lothar of Supplinburg, modest count from the Harz mountains, became, not only duke but also the by far largest landowner is Saxony. In 1117 his mother-in-law died and the county of Brunswick comes to Richenza. Around the same time Richenza’s brother and sole male descendant of Henry the Fat died resulting in most of the Northeim inheritance coming to Lothar. Basically by 1120 most of the territory that would later make up the kingdom of Hannover had come together in Lothar’s hands.

Backed up by his enormous wealth and burning ambition, Lothar began to restore the ducal institutions. Because the Saxons had removed any direct imperial influence inside the duchy and the Billung’s power such as it was had faded, there had been a vacuum in the duchy where the ruler should be.

There was no justice, there were no regular assemblies, no truce of god. This absence of a final decision authority, may it be an emperor, a duke or an assembly meant that disputes could not be resolved and often lingered on for decades, if not centuries. These disputes were sometimes about some perceived slight to a man’s honour, but mostly they were about land and wealth.

The Saxon aristocracy had intermarried to an astonishing extent as we have heard in the section about Lothar’s family connections. Add to that a near constant civil war that claimed the lives of many wealthy knights and counts well before their time. As they died young, they often left no male heirs behind, or the heirs were small children. In that case their inheritance is in play. As you may remember when we talked about the Hohenstaufen and earlier about Konrad II, the notion of inheritance and clan affiliation were still cognatic, i.e., weren’t strictly a function of being the eldest son of the eldest son. Inheritance and family association could be transferred in the female line, as had been the case of the impressively fecund Agnes of Waiblingen.

Therefore any greedy neighbour or cousin will pounce on the wife and daughters of a recently deceased rich count as a means to strengthen their claim. We hear of women being married off, like Lothar’s mother, as soon as the last verse of her husband’s funerary mass had been sung. Three or more marriages were not uncommon. And where the bride was unwilling or the negotiations went on for too long, ardent suitors are known to have kidnapped their future wife and run away to the medieval equivalent of Gretna Green.

And even if the lord managed to live to the ripe old age of fifty and had been blessed with a brace of strapping sons, that wasn’t much better. According to tradition, the lands were split between the brothers who turned against each other as soon as the old man had settled down to watch the radishes grow from below. Great territorial fortunes are gathered and lost at an astonishing speed and with ruthless brutality.

This fluid situation allowed even men from outside the close-knit Saxon aristocracy to rise to astounding heights.

One of them was Wiprecht of Groitzsch. He came from an ancient Slawic family, that -like Gottschalk, the prince of the Abodrites – had converted to Christianity. He swapped his father’s possessions for the castle of Groitzsch, south of Leipzig. This swap turned out to be a bad deal since he faced severe local opposition, forcing him into exile in Bohemia. There he became a close friend and adviser of duke Vratislav of Bohemia, the closest ally of Henry IV during the Saxon wars. He gained a reputation as a fearsome warrior and accompanied the emperor on his subsequent campaigns in Italy. The annals of the Pegau Monastery report that he attacked the papal forces with just his shield and was the second over the walls of Rome in 1084. He is also supposed to have knocked out a male lion with his bare fists. All these manly feats gained him the hand of the beautiful Judith, daughter of the duke of Bohemia. She brought him the counties of Nisani and Budisin, modern day Dresden and Bautzen, not far from Groitzsch which he regained and fortified. He further added lands in a series of local feuds that included the destruction of the city of Zeitz and the burning of its cathedral. After Judith had died, Wiprecht married Kunigunde of Weimar, and with her a claim to Weimar inheritance. Kunigunde had already been widowed twice, another example of the process I described above. Wiprecht tried to tie down the inheritance even further by marrying his son to Kunigunde’s daughter.

That way Wiprecht managed to expand his territory to the point it covered a large chunk of the modern-day state of Saxony. As was typical for a man of his time, he was ravaged by guilt for his attacks on the church. To atone for his sins he went on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain from where he returned with a priceless relic and the intention to found a monastery. In 1091 he established a Benedictine abbey in Pegau close to Groitzsch, one of the oldest monasteries east of the Elbe. Wiprecht was a pioneer not only in that respect but was also amongst the first to invite colonists from the western parts of the empire to settle in the Marches. By the time Lothar became duke, Wiprecht had risen from minor Slavic ruler to being one of the great Christian magnates of Saxony.

Another, even more unusual story is that of Frederick, Count of Stade. Frederick was born not as a member of the ancient family of the Udones, the counts of Stade since time immemorial, but as the son of an English noblewoman who had fled after the battle of Hastings and was shipwrecked on the North Sea coast. That calamity turned her into the property of the count of Stade who married her to one of his Ministeriales. Ministeriales are, as you probably know by now, unfree men trained in knightly warfare that territorial lords used extensively as soldiers and administrators. Frederick was hence born a serf. He received the same training as a knight, preparing him for his role as a Ministeriale. He quickly rose through the ranks and the reigning count Udo entrusted him with the management of the county of Stade whilst he was busy with his margraviate, the Northern March.

Stade is today a delightful city of 50,000 inhabitants, downriver from Hamburg, Germany’s largest port. The port of Hamburg was only founded in 1189 which meant that until then, Stade was the largest harbour in Germany. That made the county of Stade strategically important and very rich. It stretched along the Elbe River and west towards Bremen.

Count Udo of Stade died in 1106, leaving behind a four-year old son, Henry. Henry’s uncle Rudolf acted as the guardian for the little count, whilst Frederick remained as manager of the county. Rudolf and Frederick did not get on to say it politely. When Frederick tried to buy his freedom for 40 marks of silver, Rudolf thwarted this attempt. As a consequence Frederick and Rudolf began an open feud. Each gathered allies. The emperor Henry V sided with Frederick, in part because he hoped to gain more leverage into Saxony. Imperial leverage in Saxony wasn’t something Lothar could tolerate since part of his job was to continue as the buffer between imperial power and the Saxon magnates. In 1112 Lothar apprehends Frederick whilst he was on his way to the imperial court where he had filed a complaint against Lothar. That was a blatant display of disrespect for Henry V who had guaranteed safe passage to Frederick. In retaliation, Henry V deposed Lothar as duke of Saxony and replaced him with Otto von Ballenstedt, one of the ambitious sons-in-law of old duke Magnus.

A brief military campaign followed that Lothar lost. Lothar had to submit to Henry V on his knees and -since this was the first disobedience – was reinstalled as duke. Frederick was freed and returned as vice-count in charge of the county of Stade, albeit still an unfree Ministeriale acting on behalf of little Henry.

In 1115 Frederick swapped sides and struck up a friendship with Lothar. Lothar now supported him against young Henry. When Lothar becomes emperor in 1125 Frederick was released from serfdom and in 1135, once Henry had died, was formally enfeoffed with the county he had controlled for 25 years. But upon his death his little empire unravelled. The county was returned to the Udones, the family that had ruled it for centuries.

This is the kind of environment Lothar of Supplinburg inherits. It isn’t exactly a free for all. There are some rules, such as, you need some sort of justification for your claim, even if it is down to kidnapping a twice widowed second cousin, but largely it is “might is right”.

How he resolves the situation is difficult to nail down. I have just spent a bit more than a day reading Ruth Hildebrand’s book about Lothar as duke of Saxony and I can confirm that we really do not have much to go on in the sources. What is indisputable though is that by the time Lothar is elected emperor in 1125, he is by far the most powerful duke of Saxony since Ottonian times. And this is not just down to the force of his personality since the ducal position remains dominant under his two successors.

In my assessment there were two things that helped him establish his position, the first was taking the lead in the Saxon opposition against the emperor Henry V, and the other was his ability to place competent and loyal people into key positions.

As for the military leadership, we have just heard that Lothar clashed with Henry V over the county of Stade and lost. But that was a temporary setback, so temporary, it barely lasted a month.

By 1115 the honeymoon period of emperor Henry V’s reign was over – even though he does not yet know it. Henry V had returned from Rome in 1112, freshly crowned and after having forced the unlucky pope Paschalis II to make all sorts of concessions. Riding high, he resumed the policy of his father, trying to create a coherent royal territory, administered by his ministeriales. This time his focus wasn’t Saxony, but along the Rhine River, bringing him in conflict with his former friend, the archbishop Adalbert of Mainz. He also clashed with the archbishop of Cologne and the city itself. Finally, Henry’s support for Frederick in Stade was seen as part of a larger plan to expand imperial power into Saxony itself.

The Rhineland and Saxony erupt in rebellion literally days after Lothar had kneeled before the emperor. On February 11th, 1115 an imperial army, led by the general Hoyer von Mansfeld takes the field against the rebel forces, outnumbering them 5 to 3. The battle was in equal measure brutal as it was decisive. The general Hoyer von Mansfeld fell whilst attempting to break the centre of the rebel forces. Thereafter the imperial troops lost cohesion and turned to flight. Whether Lothar did indeed lead the rebel forces, or he just ended up being the last of the magnates left alive after the fighting, Lothar was credited with this success, which raised his profile enormously. Helmold of Bosau reports that following the battle Lothar convinced all the princes of Saxony to swear oaths to support each other against any potential retaliation by the emperor Henry V. That seems to have involved princes who had been neutral or even supportive to the imperial cause such as Frederick of Stade who now switched to the ducal side. After Westenholz Lothar had become the military leader of the duchy.

The other reason for his success was a great HR policy. His first major appointment was count Adolf of Schauenburg as count of Holstein. The Schauenburgs were an aristocratic clan based in Westphalia. Not top drawer, but like Lothar’s own family, they have been around for a long time. The county of Holstein on the other hand was a relatively new invention. These lands, roughly between Kiel, Hamburg and Bremen were in part inhabited by Slavic people who were part of the Abodrites federation and the Holstens, a Saxon subgroup who lived in peasant republics unwilling to recognise any count or duke above them. Interspersed were castles established by the Billungs. Lothar had initially placed a man called Godfrey in charge of these defences and given him the title of count of Holstein. How fragile his position was is explained in a story that Helmond of Bosau tells. In 1111 a band of Slavic raiders had come to plunder Hamburg, at the time not much more than a small agglomeration of wooden shacks surrounding a church. The count arrived on scene and surveyed the damage. Egged on by the locals who call him a coward he pursues the raiders who lure him into a trap. The raiders fall upon him as he is crossing a large, wooded area. All the local peasants found afterwards were the remains of his 20 companions and the headless body of the count. If a count can taken down by common rabble one has to wonder about the strength of this new institution.

That will change quite significantly under the Schauenburgs. Like Wiprecht of Groitzsch, they are pioneers in the colonisation of the former Slavic lands and founders of important cities that will take a lead role in our story, namely Kiel, Lubeck and Hamburg. When they are done, no Slavic raider would dare to attack Hamburg again.

The next major appointment was Konrad of Wettin as Margrave of Meissen. You may remember that after the death of the rebellious Ekbert the margraviate of Meissen had gone to Henry of Eilenburg who was already margrave of Lusatia. Henry died in 1103 fighting Polabian Slavs and his son and heir died in 1123 without having produced any offspring. That renders two margraviates available, margraviates that are strategically important.

A margrave is an imperial prince and hence has at least formally to be enfeoffed directly by the emperor. And that is exactly what emperor Henry V does. He gives both margraviates to Wiprecht of Groitzsch, you remember, the Slavic lord who had felled a lion with his bare hands. Apart from being of herculean strength, Wiprecht had also been loyal to the imperial family for decades, had large possessions in the marches and has proven to be a competent manager. By all accounts a sensible choice.

But Lothar was not happy with the appointment of a Salian loyalist in this crucial post. He allied with Conrad of Wettin, the closest relative of Henry of Eilenburg and elevated him to be Margrave of Meissen. This was an unprecedented act. Lothar had no right to make any such appointment. As duke he wasn’t even the feudal overlord of the margrave. But hey, Lothar had by now the full support of the duchy and though Wiprecht put on a good fight, Conrad and Lothar defeated him. Wiprecht died in 1124 from wounds he received when he tried to extinguish a fire with his bare feet. From then on Conrad was de facto Margrave of Meissen. Wiprecht had left behind a son and successor, Henry who died 7 years later without being able to enforce his claim to the margraviates. The great territory of the counts of Groitzsch was then snatched up by his enemies, the same Conrad of Wettin.

As for Eilenburg’s other margraviate, that of Lusatia, Lothar gave that to Albrecht, the son of Otto of Ballenstedt and Eilika Billung. Albrecht was not necessary a loyal follower, but he needed to be appeased. As we have heard, Otto of Ballenstedt had taken on the mantle of duke of Saxony for a brief period and that claim had now gone to Albrecht. Granting Albrecht the title of Margrave was a way to partially compensate him. That did work. Albrecht was content to be elevated to imperial prince and became a close follower of Lothar.

We have introduced Albrecht and his father Otto as counts of Ballenstedt because that was the name by which they were known at the time. However the clan would change its name to the latinised form of another of its possessions, Aschensleben and will be known from then on as the Ascanier. The Ascanier would rule a range of principalities, including the state of Anhalt until 1918.

The combination of massive personal possessions, military leadership and putting loyal followers into key positions allowed Lothar to also take over the control of the church. He is again usuroing royal privileges when he influences the selection of bishops in Saxony. In defiance of the just recently agreed concordat of Worms, Lothar effectively chooses the bishop of Halberstadt against the wishes of the cathedral chapter. As we will see church power in Saxony is a lot weaker than in the rest of the empire. The two archbishoprics, Hamburg-Bremen and Magdeburg are way poorer than the mighty and ancient seats of Cologne, Mainz, Trier and Salzburg. Moreover, they are subject to constant harassment and as we will see soon, find their property alienated to the rising territorial powers.

By 1125 Lothar has become the undisputed ruler of Saxony, the by far largest of the German duchies. And he was not just nominal lord of this territory but had real control, more control than any of his predecessors since Otto the Great ever had. In 1125 Lothar is elected King of the Romans and is crowned emperor in 1133. We have covered the story of his interesting reign, his struggle with the Hohenstaufen and his ambiguous relationship with the popes and Bernhard of Clairvaux in episodes 43 to 46. Have a listen just in case you want to hear more about what was ging on in the wider European context.

Once Lothar is elected King and later crowned emperor Saxony finds itself in a situation that at least on the face of it never wanted. There is now significant imperial influence in the duchy and the emperor is directly controlling a large, coherent territory right in their midst. This fact got lost in the exuberance of Lothar’s election and the idea that once more the emperor is one of them and the Saxon magnates have great influence at court. The imperial army is now stacked with margraves and counts from Saxony, families that haven’t sent contingents down to Italy for almost a century.

Will this last? It depends on who follows Lothar as duke of Saxony and as emperor. You remember the tumultuous election of Lothar III in Mainz? Where at the last minute the duke of Bavaria, Henry the Black switches side and instead of supporting the imperial nephew and his own son-in-law Friedrich of Hohenstaufen he tilts the election in Lothar’s favour. In exchange for this move, Henry gains the hand of Gertrud, the only child of the aging emperor, for his son, Henry the Proud. Gertrud’s inheritance is truly enormous. All the lands the Billungs, the Brunones and the Northeims had gathered over the centuries will now go to the House of Welf. And the Welf themselves aren’t exactly poor. Henry the Black is already duke of Bavaria and count of Este in Italy. His son will add to that the lands of Matilda of Tuscany making him the by far most powerful magnate in the empire. And he will also claim the title of duke of Saxony.

I know, this was a blizzard of confusing names and you will be wondering whether you should write them down somewhere just in case we need them later. No, not to worry. You will not have to write them down because some, like Wiprecht of Groitzsch and Frederick of Stade disappear down the orcus of history. But others, namely Adolf von Schauenburg, Conrad von Meissen, Albrecht the Baer, Henry the Proud and the dynasties they created will stick around. They will get their own episodes shortly, because these dynasties and the territories they created will last for the next almost 800 years and will shape not just Saxon, but German and European history going forward.

Next week we will start with the counts of Holstein and the start of the eastern colonisation that will get almost 7% of the empire’s population to pack their bags and go east. And we will hear about the foundation of two of the major Hanseatic cities, Lubeck and Hamburg. I hope you will join us again.

Finally, I just want to thank you guys for the support to the podcast whilst was away. So many nice posts and comments on Twitter and Facebook. Thank you, thank you! It makes all the difference. As you may know the platform algorithms are driven more by subscriber growth than by downloads which means that to keep the History of the Germans visible on something like Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Podcast Addict requires a constant flow of new listeners. And the place to find new listeners is either through word of mouth from existing listeners or social media. So thanks so much for your support and I promise not to disappear for six weeks ever again.

And last but by no means least thanks to all of you who have become Patreons during this time. I always appreciate and even more so when it was clear that not much in terms of bonus episodes would be produced whilst I was away. So thanks again.

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