Читать книгу The Empire and the Papacy, 918-1273. Investiture Contest, Crusades & The Famous Conflicts онлайн

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The effect of these wise measures was soon felt. Henry had laid the foundation of the great ring of marks, whose organisation was completed by his son. He had also inspired his subjects with a new courage to resist the barbarian, and a new faith in their king. When the nine years’ truce with the Hungarians was over, the Saxons resolved to fight rather than continue to pay them a humiliating tribute. ¹³ A long series of victories crowned the end of Henry’s martial career. He was no longer forced to strictly limit himself to the defence of his own duchy of Saxony, and the southern nations of Germany could honour and obey the defender of the German race from the heathen foe, though they paid but scanty reverence to the duke of the Saxons. Lotharingia reverted to her allegiance after the sceptre of the western kingdom had passed, on the death of Charles the Simple, from her beloved Carolings. Yet Henry never sought to depart from his earlier policy, and still gave the fullest autonomy to Saxon, Bavarian, and Lotharingian. He still lived simply after the old Saxon way, wandering from palace to palace among his domain-lands on the slopes of the Harz, and seldom troubling the rest of the country with his presence. Yet visions of a coming glory flitted before the mind of the old sovereign. He dreamed of a journey to Rome to wrest the imperial crown from the nerveless hands of the pretenders, whose faction fights were reducing Italy to anarchy. But his end was approaching, and the more immediate task of providing for the succession occupied his thoughts. His eldest son, Thankmar, was the offspring of a marriage unsanctioned by the Church, and was, therefore, passed over as illegitimate. By his pious wife Matilda, the pattern of German housewives, he had several children. Of these Otto was the eldest, but the next son, Henry, as the first born after his father had become a king, was looked upon by many as possessing an equally strong title to election. The king, however, urged on his nobles to choose Otto as his successor. He died soon after, on 2nd July 936, and was buried in his own town of Quedlinburg, where the pious care of his widow and son erected over his remains a great church and abbey for nuns, which became one of the most famous monastic foundations of northern Germany. ‘He was,’ says the historian of his house, ‘the greatest of the kings of Europe, and inferior to none of them in power of mind and body.’ But Henry’s best claim to fame is that he laid the solid foundations on which his son built the strongest of early mediæval states. Coronation of Otto I., 936.