When in 911 Louis the Child, last of the East Frankish Carolingians, died without leaving a male heir, it seemed quite possible that his kingdom would break into pieces. In at least three of the duchies—Bavaria, Saxony, and Franconia—the ducal families were established in the leadership of their regions; in Swabia (Alemannia) two houses were still fighting for hegemony. Only the church, fearing for its endowments, had an obvious interest in the survival of the monarchy, its ancient protector. Against the growing authority of the dukes and the deep differences in dialect, customs, and social structure among the tribal duchies there stood only the Carolingian tradition of kingship; but, with Charles III (Charles the Simple) as ruler of the West Frankish kingdom, its future was uncertain and not very hopeful. Only the Lotharingians put their faith in the ancient line and did homage to Charles, its sole reigning representative. The other component parts of the East Frankish kingdom did not follow suit.
Germany in the 10th and 11th centuries.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
On November 10, 911, Saxon and Frankish leaders ended Carolingian rule in Germany when they met at Forchheim in Franconia to elect Conrad, duke of the Franks, as their king. The rejection of the Carolingian dynasty was motivated by the dynasty’s inability to protect the kingdom from invaders and related internal political matters. In the early 10th century, the Germanic peoples in the lands east of the Rhine and west of the Elbe and Saale rivers and the Bohemian Forest—as rudimentary and as thinly spread as their settlements were—had to face even more primitive and pagan races pressing in from farther east, especially the Magyars. The Saxons, headed by the Liudolfing duke Otto—who refused to be considered a candidate for the royal crown—were threatened by more enemies on their frontiers than any other tribe; Danes, Slavs, and Magyars simultaneously harassed their homeland. A king who commanded resources farther west, in Franconia, might therefore prove to be of help to Saxony. The Rhenish Franks, on the other hand, did not wish to abdicate from their position as the leading and kingmaking people, which gave them many material advantages.
Conrad of Franconia, elected by Franks and Saxons, was soon recognized also by Arnulf, duke of Bavaria, and by the Swabian clans. In descent, honours, and wealth, however, Conrad was no more than the equal of the dukes who had accepted him as king. To surmount them, to found a new royal house, and to acquire those wonder-working attributes that the Germans venerated in their rulers long after they had been converted to Christianity, he had yet to prove himself able, lucky, and successful.
In this period, political affairs became the monopoly of the German kings and a few score families of great magnates. The reason for this concentration of power was that, at the very foundation of the German kingdom, circumstances had long favoured those men whom birth, wealth, and military success had raised well above the ranks of the ordinary free members of their tribe. Their estates were cultivated in the main by half-free peasants—slaves who had risen or freemen who had sunk. The holdings of these dependents fell under the power of the lord to whom they owed service and obedience. Already they were tied to the lands on which they laboured and were dependent on their protectors for justice. For many reasons ordinary freemen tended generally to lose their independence and had to seek aid from their more fortunate and powerful neighbours; thus, they lost their standing in the assemblies of their tribe. Everywhere, except in Friesland and parts of Saxony, the nobles wedged themselves between king or duke and the rank and file. They alone could become prelates of the church, and they alone could compete for the possession and enjoyment of political power. At the level below the dukes, the bulk of administrative authority, jurisdiction, and command in war lay with the margraves and counts, whose hold on their charges developed gradually into a hereditary right. The commended men and the half-free disappeared from the important functions of public life. In the local assemblies they came only to pay dues and to receive orders, justice, and penalties. Their political role was passive. Those lords whose protection was most worth having also had the largest throng of dependents and thus became more formidable to their enemies and to the remaining freemen. Lordship and vassalage were hereditary, and thus the horizon of the dependent classes narrowed until eventually the lord and his officials held all secular authority and power over their lives. Military strength, the possession of arms and horses, and tactical training in their use were decisive. Most dependent men were disarmed, and this became part of their degradation. The accession of the Saxons
Conrad I was quite unequal to the situation in Germany. According to the beliefs of contemporaries, his failure meant that his house was luckless and lacked the prosperity-bringing virtues that belonged to true kingship. He also had no heir. On his deathbed in 918, he therefore proposed that the crown, which in 911 had remained with the Franks, should now pass to the leading man in Saxony, the Liudolfing Henry (later called the Fowler). Henry I was elected by the Saxons and Franks at Fritzlar, their ancient meeting place, in 919. With a monarch of their own ethnicity, the Saxons now took over the burden and the rewards of being the kingmaking people. The centre of gravity shifted to eastern Saxony, where the Liudolfing lands lay.
The transition of the crown from the Franks to the Saxons for a time enhanced the self-sufficiency of the southern German tribes. The Swabians had kept away from the Fritzlar election. The Bavarians believed that they had a better right to the Carolingian inheritance than the Saxons (who had been remote outsiders in the 9th century) and in 919 elected their own duke Arnulf as king. They, too, wanted to be the royal and kingmaking people. Henry I’s regime rested in the main on his own position and family demesne in Saxony and on certain ancient royal seats in Franconia. His kingship was purely military. He hoped to win authority by waging successful frontier wars and to gain recognition through concessions rather than to insist on the sacred and priestlike status of the royal office that the church had built up in the 9th century. At his election he refused to be anointed and consecrated by the archbishop of Mainz. In settling with the Bavarians, he abandoned the policy of supporting the internal opposition that the clergy offered to Duke Arnulf, a plank to which Conrad had clung. To end Arnulf’s rival kingship, Henry formally surrendered to him the most characteristic privilege and honour of the crown: the right to dispose of the region’s bishoprics and abbeys. Arnulf’s homage and friendship entailed no obligations to Henry, and the Bavarian duke pursued his own regional interests—peace with the Hungarians and expansion across the Alps—as long as he lived.
From these unpromising beginnings the Saxon dynasty not only found its way back to Carolingian traditions of government but soon got far better terms in its relations with the autonomous powers of the duchies, which had gained such a start on it. Nonetheless, the governing structures that it bequeathed to its Salian successors were self-contradictory; while seeking to overcome the princely aristocracies of the duchies by leaving them to themselves, the Saxon kings came to rely more and more, both for the inspiration and for the practice of government, on the prelates of the church, who were themselves recruited from the ranks of the same great families. They loaded bishoprics and abbeys with endowments and privileges and thus gradually turned the bishops and abbots into princes with interests not unlike those of their lay kinsmen. These weaknesses, however, lay concealed behind the personal ascendancy of an exceptionally tough and commanding set of rulers up to the middle of the 11th century. Thereafter the ambiguous system could not take the strain of the changes fermenting within German society and even less the attack on its values that came from without—from the reformed papacy.