Disaffection was rife among the nobles throughout the empire, for Henry, like his father, had endeavoured to secure the dukedoms for his own family, or to confer them on men of no consequence who should be dependent upon himself. The Saxons, whose ancient pride could ill brook the rule of a Franconian, bore him the bitterest ill-will of all, and, of the Saxons, the ducal house of Billing most keenly resented the wrongs which, like many other great Saxon families, it believed it had suffered at the hands of the emperor and his friends. The expenses of the court, which the emperor usually held at Goslar to keep the Saxons in check, also weighed heavily upon the province. The nobility were in a ferment throughout the empire; the emperor held them down with iron hand, but his position was in truth even such as one of his faithful councillors and friends saw in a dream: “The emperor stood before his throne, sword in hand, and cried with a terrible countenance that he would yet smite down all his enemies.” But he was snatched from the empire in the flower of his age, when its need of a strong ruler was sorest. The pope was on a visit to him, and his nobles were gathered about him in his palace at Bodfeld in the Harz, where he had gone for a few days to enjoy the pleasures of the chase. There he was met by the news of a defeat inflicted on Saxon levies by the Wend tribes at Prizlava, in the angle between the upper Havel and the Elbe. The evil tidings were soon followed by the death of the great monarch, and his empire was left to a child six years old, helpless in the face of the evil days to come.
HENRY IV (1056-1106 A.D.)
[1056-1066 A.D.]
The first two emperors of the house of Franconia had drawn in the reins of government so tightly that the German princes seemed to have fallen once more upon the times of Charles and Otto the Great. But the old intractability which prevented complete union was still active in the German races, and this instinct was now reinforced by the private interest of the great nobles who found the authority of the empire irksome when too vigorously wielded, and whose sovereign privileges had been greatly reduced under Conrad II and Henry III. The moment was therefore propitious to all who hated a strong and united empire, for a child king now succeeded the strongest and sternest ruler the empire had ever known. The empress Agnes was to undertake the regency for the youthful monarch, Henry IV, as Theophano had done for Otto III. She did so with Bishop Henry of Augsburg for her adviser. But envy, selfishness, and perfidy were already at work undermining the power of the crown. Under the first Franconian monarchs times and manners had been rude and hard, but now all restraint was flung aside and every consideration of right and fealty seemed to have departed from the empire.
Troubles presently began to ferment; here and there in Saxony a rumour ran of attempts on the young king’s life. Agnes was soon forced to make large concessions in order to gain friends, who proved untrustworthy after all. A Saxon noble, Otto, of the family of Nordheim, a race akin to the Billings, whose hereditary seat lay close to the modern town of Göttingen, received from the empress the duchy of Bavaria, which Henry III had acquired for his own house. Rudolf von Rheinfelden, a Burgundian noble, worked his way into the empress’ good graces, and received the duchy of Swabia together with the hand of the daughter of the empress. The duchy of Carinthia was given to Berthold, a Zähringian. If only the empress could have purchased fidelity by these concessions! But not one of these men was trustworthy; and the moving spirit of all the plots which aimed at wresting the sovereign power from the empress and bestowing it on the nobles of the empire, was Archbishop Hanno of Cologne, a man of low origin, but ambitious, harsh, crafty, and cunning, although outwardly wearing the semblance of the sanctity of the cloister. It was natural that the power of the empire should decline abroad—in Italy, in Hungary, and over the Wends; and the fact was laid to the charge of the empress, together with the accusation that she was bringing up her son too effeminately. In brief a criminal project was maturing in Hanno’s heart as in the hearts of the princes, his allies. The empress was then at Kaiserwerth on the Rhine with her twelve-year-old son, when Hanno appeared at her court, and after a festive banquet invited the young king to take an excursion on the Rhine in his beautiful boat. The boy embarked unsuspectingly with Hanno, together with some of the conspirators: the bishop’s serfs plied their oars and the boat was quickly under way. The lamentations of the young king’s mother pursued him from her balcony; the people followed on the banks, cursing the robbers; and the boy himself, alarmed and fearing the worst, jumped into the river, from which he was rescued with difficulty. But the plot had succeeded and Hanno, who now had the young king in his own hands, succeeded, by the help of the nobles, in assuming the reins of power at the head of the bishops.
Matters were not thereby mended in the empire. The empress soon retired from the world and ended her days in Italy, occupied in works of piety. Under Hanno’s administration any man who pleased laid hands on the royal demesnes; and a few years later the young king was an eye-witness of mortal combat in the cathedral at Goslar, where brawling ecclesiastics fought for temporal honours in the very sanctuary.
Such an education sowed the seeds of mistrust, bitterness, and hatred in the heart of the young ruler, and as soon as he was able he threw himself into the arms of a different guide, Archbishop Adalbert of Bremen. The latter, no less ambitious than Hanno, and even prouder, sought to exalt his famous metropolitan see, whence missions still went forth across the North Sea and the Baltic, to the position of the patriarchate of the north. Formerly the friend of Henry III, he now sought to win the friendship of the youthful Henry IV. When Henry attained the age of sixteen he declared him of age, according to German law, by girding him with the sword, but for some years he continued to direct his unripe youth. In his endeavours Adalbert frequently incurred the displeasure of the Saxon nobles. Their intentions, as a matter of fact, were evil, and it was against them that he fostered the young king’s suspicions. Meanwhile the latter began to grow up to independent manhood. Of the authority, property, and prerogatives of his predecessors, he found but little left; all his efforts were directed to their recovery, and in pursuit of this end he manifested the iron will of his forefathers. Their hot blood flowed also in his veins, inciting him to occasional arbitrary acts, and above all to excesses which were magnified by the slanderous tongues of his enemies. He first sought to subdue Saxony. The means he employed for the purpose were such as the Normans had adopted in lower Italy; he erected strongholds in commanding situations in the land. From these centres, however, many acts of violence were perpetrated in the surrounding country, and he thus aroused the wrath, not only of individual nobles, but of the whole Saxon race.
But Henry did more than this to compass the fall of the enemies who had ruled for so long. About this time a man arose to accuse Otto of Nordenheim, duke of Bavaria, of having conspired against the king’s life, and offered to prove the charge by ordeal. Henry deposed the duke, laid him under the ban of the empire, together with Magnus of Saxony, of the house of Billing, and presently threw the latter into the dungeon of the Harzburg. He seemed bent upon completely abolishing the duchy of Saxony; but Bavaria he gave to a member of the ancient Swabian dynasty, Welf by name. Meanwhile Adalbert had died, after having seen all his plans go to wreck; for the Wends east of the Elbe, among whom he had hoped to establish his suffragan bishoprics by the help of Godschalk, one of their own chiefs, had rebelled, and extirpated Christianity for the time and for long afterwards, within their borders.