The Historians' History of the World 07

A revival of the Carlovingian conception of sovereignty can at once be discerned in the mind of the young king. The coronation itself offered an opportunity for this to appear. The duke of Bavaria had not come to do him homage; Otto deposed him and set up, beside the duchy of Bavaria, a count palatine to watch that the interests of the king should never suffer from the independence of the great vassal. It was the beginning of a policy radically different from that of Henry, who had left almost complete autonomy to the different nations and their dukes. From now on till the time of Bismarck the main story of German history is the struggle of the kings for a centralised government, and the frustration of their efforts by the local magnates who represented the tribes and nations of the earliest days.

The story of Otto’s wars against these great dukes is too long and too intricate to tell in detail here. Suffice it to say that every duke in the kingdom was in rebellion at one time and another. Even the Saxons turned against them, and aided the rebellion of his elder but bastard brother Thankmar and his younger brother Henry, who was the eldest born of the children of Henry I after he was king. At first Otto was beaten, but in a victory at Andernach (Birten) the dukes of Franconia and Lorraine were slain, and the young Henry was forced to submit (939).

Then the great plan of Otto was realised. The power of the king was to be secured by setting up members of his own family in place of the stem dukes, whom the people had hitherto looked up to as sprung from the old race of heroes, and the only hereditary lords of the Germans. Franconia he kept for himself; Bavaria was given to the penitent brother Henry; Swabia was held by his eldest son, Ludolf; his son-in-law Conrad was put over Lorraine. But they were no longer the old independent sovereigns. The scattered estates of the king that spread throughout the different duchies offered the chance for a system of counts palatine who, like the missi dominici of Charlemagne, were to be the agents of royalty and centralisation, and to watch with jealous eye the actions of their neighbours, even if they were of the royal line. It was evident that another Charles was at the helm, but a second civil war had to be fought before the royal prerogatives were assured. Nothing shows more clearly the real tendencies of German history towards local liberty rather than imperial unity than the fact that the new dukes, the king’s own kin, were soon leading the forces of their respective nations against Otto. But the rebels quarrelled among themselves, and an invasion of the Hungarians forced them to join in a common national defence. Otto, however, had learned that he could never rely upon the dukes, whoever they were. Traditions of local independence and tribal, or as they viewed it “national” interests, overcame all ties of blood or duty. Counts palatine were not strong enough to act as a sufficient check. They must be backed up by some other force, or the unity of the monarchy was doomed. The only available ally was the church, and with the same deep political purpose at heart Otto posed as the protector of the church and its reformer. His protection meant the exaltation of ecclesiastical lords to a plane equal to or above that of the lay lords; his reformation meant the placing of his brother, the learned Bruno, over the archiepiscopate of Cologne (953), and his son William in the place of the perfidious Frederick, the archbishop of Mainz, who had connived at a plan for Otto’s assassination.

THE TENTH CENTURY RENAISSANCE

These appointments were eminently just, no more attractive or saintly character appears in German history than that of Bruno, who as chancellor and as prelate carried out reforms that brought intellectual awakening with religious revival. Fostered by him, rare literature again began to be produced; the night of the dark age was passing, and Bruno, carrying his library with him in his travels, and studying Greek with the Scotchman Israel, is like an Erasmus of the tenth century. His work was that of a reformer and teacher.a