Berengar, Otto went a second time to Italy, in 961; and on this occasion he received from the pope at Rome the imperial Otto crowned emperor. crown. In 966 he was again in Italy, where he remained six years, exercising to the full his imperial rights in regard to the papacy, but occupied mainly in an attempt to make himself master of the southern, as well as of the northern half of the peninsula.
By far the most important act of Otto’s eventful life was his assumption of the Lombard and the imperial crowns. His successors steadily followed his example, and the sovereign crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle claimed as his right coronation by the pope in Rome. Thus grew Connexion of Germany with the Empire. up the Holy Roman Empire, that strange state which, directly descending through the empire of Charlemagne from the empire of the Caesars, contained so many elements foreign to ancient life. We are here concerned with it only as it affected Germany. Germany itself never until our own day became an empire. It is true that at last the Holy Roman Empire was in reality confined to Germany; but in theory it was something quite different. Like France, Germany was a kingdom, but it differed from France in this, that its king was also king in Italy and Roman emperor. As the latter title made him nominally the secular lord of the world, it might have been expected to excite the pride of his German subjects; and doubtless, after a time, they did learn to think highly of themselves as the imperial race. But the evidence tends to show that at first at least they had no wish for this honour, and would have preferred their ruler to devote himself entirely to his own people.
There are signs that during Otto’s reign they began to have a distinct consciousness of national life, their use of the word “deutsch” to indicate the whole people being one of these symptoms. Their common sufferings, struggles and triumphs, however, account far more readily for this feeling than the supposition that they were elated by their king undertaking obligations which took him for years together away from his native land. So solemn were the associations of the imperial title that, after acquiring it, Otto probably looked for more intimate obedience from his subjects. They were willing enough to admit the abstract claims of the Empire; but in the world of feudalism there was a multitude of established customs and rights which rudely conflicted with these claims, and in action, remote and abstract considerations gave way before concrete and present realities. Instead of strengthening the allegiance of the Germans towards their sovereign, the imperial title was the means of steadily undermining it. To the connexion of their kingdom with the Empire they owe the fact that for centuries they were the most divided of European nations, and that they have only recently begun to create a genuinely united state. France was made up of a number of loosely connected lands, each with its own lord, when Germany, under Otto, was to a large extent moved by a single will, well organized and strong. But the attention of the French kings was concentrated on their immediate interests, and in course of time they brought their unruly vassals to order. The German kings, as emperors, had duties which often took them away for long periods from Germany. This alone would have shaken their authority, for, during their absence, the great vassals seized rights which were afterwards difficult to recover. But the emperors were not merely absent, they had to engage in struggles in which they exhausted the energies necessary to enforce obedience at home; and, in order to obtain help, they were sometimes glad to concede advantages to which, under other conditions, they would have tenaciously clung. Moreover, the greatest of all their struggles was with the papacy; so that a power outside their kingdom, but exercising immense influence within it, was in the end always prepared to weaken them by exciting dissension among their people. Thus the imperial crown was the most fatal gift that could have been offered to the German kings; apparently giving them all things, it deprived them of nearly everything. And in doing this it inflicted on many generations incalculable and needless suffering.
By the policy of his later years Otto did much to prepare the way for the process of disintegration which he rendered inevitable by restoring the Empire. With the kingdom divided into five great duchies, the sovereign could Otto and the duchies. always have maintained at least so much unity as Henry the Fowler secured; and, as the experience of Otto himself showed, there would have been chances of much greater centralization. Yet he threw away this advantage. Lorraine was divided into two duchies, Upper Lorraine and Lower Lorraine. In each duchy of the kingdom he appointed a count palatine, whose duty was to maintain the royal rights; and after Margrave Gero died in 965 his territory was divided into three marches, and placed under margraves, each with the same powers as Gero. Otto gave up the practice of retaining the duchies either in his own hands or in those of relatives. Even Saxony, his native duchy and the chief source of his strength, was given to Margrave Billung, whose family kept it for many years. To combat the power of the princes, Otto, especially after he became emperor and looked upon himself as the protector of the church, immensely increased the importance of the prelates. They received great gifts of land, were endowed with jurisdiction in criminal as well as civil cases, and obtained several other valuable sovereign rights. The emperor’s idea was that, as church lands and offices could not be hereditary, their holders would necessarily favour the crown. But he forgot that the church had a head outside Germany, and that the passion for the rights of an order may be not less intense than that for the rights of a family. While the Empire was at peace with the popes the prelates did strongly uphold it, and their influence was unquestionably, on the whole, higher than that of rude secular nobles. But with the Empire and the Papacy in conflict, they could not but abide, as a rule, by the authority which had the most sacred claims to their loyalty. From all these circumstances it curiously happened that the sovereign who did more than almost any other to raise the royal power, was also the sovereign who, more than any other, wrought its decay.
Otto II. had been crowned German king at Aix-la-Chapelle and emperor at Rome during his father’s lifetime. Becoming sole ruler in May 973, his troubles began in Lorraine, but were more serious in Bavaria, which was now a Otto II. very important duchy. Its duke, Henry, the brother of Otto I., had died in 955 and had been succeeded by a young son, Henry, whose turbulent career subsequently induced the Bavarian historian Aventinus to describe him as rixosus, or the Quarrelsome. In 973 Burchard II., duke of Swabia, died, and the new emperor refused to give this duchy to Henry, further irritating this duke by bestowing it upon his enemy, Otto, a grandson of the emperor Otto I. Having collected allies Henry rebelled, and in 976 the emperor himself marched against him and drove him into Bohemia. Bavaria was taken from him and given to Otto of Swabia, but it was deprived of some of its importance. The southern part, Carinthia, which had hitherto been a march district, was separated from it and made into a duchy, and the church in Bavaria was made dependent upon the king and not upon the duke. Having arrived at this settlement Otto marched against the Bohemians, but while he was away from Germany war was begun against him by Henry, the new duke of Carinthia, who, forgetting the benefits he had just received, rose to avenge the wrongs of his friend, the deposed duke Henry of Bavaria. The emperor made peace with the Bohemians and quickly put down the rising. Henry of Bavaria was handed over to the keeping of the bishop of Utrecht and Carinthia received another duke.
In his anxiety to obtain possession of southern Italy, Otto I. had secured as a wife for his son and successor Theophano, daughter of the East Roman emperor, Romanus II., the ruler of much of southern Italy. Otto II., Otto and France. having all his father’s ambition with much of his strength and haughtiness, longed to get away from Germany and to claim these remoter districts. But he was detained for some time owing to the sudden invasion of Lower Lorraine by Lothair, king of France, in 978. So stealthily did the invader
