king of France, with whom he cemented his alliance. A second outbreak in the same quarter, a few years later, led to such bitter and offensive complaints on the part of the French king against the emperor, that the latter challenged his abusive ally to single combat. The challenge was declined, and the French king took his departure in the night time. Henry died in 1056.—R. H.
HENRY IV., surnamed the Great, notable for a singular blending of greatness and feebleness, and no less notable for the vicissitudes of his career, was born in 1050. He was the son of Henry III., and succeeded him in 1056, when only six years old. Henry's education was neglected; it fell into the hands of worldly and ambitious prelates. We cannot marvel then that, spite of his noble endowments, his youth was wild and licentious, and that after an early marriage he only plunged the deeper into debauchery. He was, however, at last roused to action, and found himself face to face with the indomitable Saxons, with the most daring and despotic of popes, Gregory VII., with selfish and rebellious feudatories, and with the rival emperor whom these feudatories had elected. To all his foes he opposed a resolute front; toward the pope alone was he guilty of a momentary weakness. If the popes raised up or favoured rival emperors, the emperors raised up or favoured rival popes. In this game, however, the popes were generally much more unscrupulous than the emperors. Urban II. and his successor Pascal II. pursued the same arrogant and inflexible policy as Gregory. More than once had Henry crushed his foes both in Italy and in Germany. At last papal influence and the counsel and assistance of the celebrated Countess Matilda, induced the emperor's eldest son Conrad to revolt against him. Conrad, who was exceedingly popular in the northern Italian towns, was crowned king of Italy. Henry treated him as a rebel and a traitor, and disinherited him. But this, and the nomination of two antipopes, were ineffectual weapons. A more terrible disaster was about to befall the unfortunate Henry. Another of his sons, Henry, was incited to assemble a council, and depose his father. The emperor tried the chance of his arms against his cruel and ungrateful son, and was defeated. Poor and forlorn, he wandered from city to city, scarcely finding bread enough to satisfy his hunger. In the extremity of distress, persecuted and forsaken, he died at Liége on the 7th August, 1106. He had magnanimity enough to pardon his son Henry's execrable deeds; he sent him his ring and sword as tokens of forgiveness. By a just retribution, that son, as Henry V., was to suffer more from the popes, and to make them suffer more, than his father. The enthusiasm excited by the crusades made men overlook both Henry IV.'s virtues and his wrongs. He was a great warrior, a great legislator, a friend of the poor and of liberty, a reformer; and let these atone for his mistakes as a politician and his errors as a man.—W. M—l.
HENRY V., the last and the worst of the Franconian line of emperors, was born in 1081. He became early in life a tool in the hands of the pope, and was used for the destruction of his father, Henry IV., whose eldest son Conrad had died after committing himself to a similar unnatural rebellion. Henry was in 1103 crowned king of the Romans, swearing upon the cross and the sacred lance of Constantine that he would never meddle with affairs of state during his father's life. But discontent and ambition were artfully fomented in the mind of the young king by emissaries from the Vatican. Pope Pascal absolved him from his oath, and insinuated that rebellion against an excommunicated sovereign was no crime. The son obeyed the insidious promptings, and in 1104 led an army of Saxons against his father, who was at Ratisbon. Having seized the treasures at Spire he engaged in no conflict, but early in the following year repaired unattended to Coblentz, and throwing himself at his father's feet implored pardon for his undutifulness. The emperor, deceived by this feigned repentance, consented to accompany his son to a diet assembled at Mentz, where they might make their reconciliation public. At this diet the imperial crown passed from the head of the father to that of the perfidious son.—(See Henry IV.) Henry V. once upon the throne was little disposed to yield to the papacy in the great controversy of investitures. After engaging in a war with Poland i n which he was unsuccessful, 1109, Henry turned to Italy, and at the head of thirty thousand men forced a humiliating treaty on Pope Pascal II. After this he was crowned by Pascal; and the two nominal chiefs of Christendom bound themselves to lasting friendship by a most solemn adjuration. The cardinals on the very first opportunity indignantly disavowed the treaty; but Pascal adhered to his promise. Henry, in order to strengthen himself by an alliance with England, had demanded in marriage Matilda, daughter of Henry I., when she was in her fifth year. She was betrothed to him in her eighth and married in her twelfth year; the emperor receiving a handsome dowry of £45,000. In 1116 the emperor was disturbed by the turbulence of his early abettors in treason, the Saxons, ever ready to oppose the Franconian dynasty. The rapid ascendancy of the house of Guelph proceeded in spite of Henry's efforts. He was again engaged in a quarrel with the pope; the object of dispute being the inheritance of the great Countess Matilda. Finding in Gelasius II. an uncompromising opponent, the emperor set up another pope with the title of Gregory VIII., who three years later was treated most unceremoniously by a vigorous rival, Pope Calixtus II. With Calixtus Henry negotiated; and at a diet of Worms in 1122 the long struggle concerning investitures was terminated by a concordat which gave the real power to Rome. An inglorious expedition against Louis le Gros of France is the sole remaining transaction worthy of record in this emperor's reign. Henry died at Utrecht of a painful and prolonged disorder on the 22nd of May, 1125. By Matilda, subsequently so celebrated as the mother of the first Plantagenet in England, he had one daughter, Christina, who married a king of Poland and made herself odious by her pride and passions.—R. H.
HENRY VI., surnamed the Cruel or the Severe, was the third emperor of the line of Hohenstaufen, and the son of Frederick Red Beard (Barbarossa). He was born in the year 1165, was elected king of the Romans in 1169, and succeeded his father in 1190. Henry's character does not seem to have been such as to entitle him either to love or respect. He was a bad husband, and a harsh, tyrannical ruler. In right of his wife, Constance of Suabia, toward whom and her family he is accused of having behaved with great barbarity, the emperor claimed the Two Sicilies; and shortly after his accession he led an army into the peninsula to assert his right against Tancred, an illegitimate brother of his consort. He did not meet, however, with much success; he laid siege to Naples, but failed to take it; and he was eventually obliged to relinquish for the time his Italian project and to return to Germany. There he experienced some slight consolation for his disappointment, and there an unexpected circumstance exposed the meanness of his nature. During his absence Richard Lion-Heart, or Coeur-de-Lion, having been shipwrecked in his homeward course on the Dalmatian coast, had been made prisoner by Leopold, duke of Austria, who handed him over for a pecuniary consideration to Henry. It is well known how the latter detained the king of England in a close and vexatious confinement, and how Richard owed his liberty to the remittance from his subjects of a large ransom. The money thus ignobly acquired enabled the emperor to prosecute afresh his schemes against the Sicilies; and on this occasion he encountered trifling opposition. Tancred was no more; Naples yielded to his arms; Sicily was awed into submission; and in October, 1194, the conqueror was crowned at Palermo. The reduction of Sicily itself, however, proved only partial; and the emperor, in order to bring that possession more completely under his sway, collected an army under the pretence of a desire to join the holy war, and invaded the island (1195-96). The tyrant, by his overbearing temper and inhuman conduct, soon estranged from him even his own supporters, and the more loyally-disposed Sicilians; and after a brief enjoyment of power, he died of poison administered, as some suspected, by his own wife, at Messina on the 28th December, 1597. He left a son Frederick, who ultimately (1220) became his successor.—W. C. H.
HENRY VII., or Henry of Luxemburg, son of Henry, count of Luxemburg, succeeded Albert as king of the Romans in 1308, being elected by the princes in preference to Charles, brother of Philip le Bel, whom the king of France wished them to accept. Henry, having exerted his best efforts to pacify the civil dissensions of Germany, set out for the peninsula in 1310 to place upon his head the iron crown and the imperial diadem, and to take advantage of the disgust excited among the Italians by the French domination. The emperor, who met with an enthusiastic reception from the Ghibeline faction, was crowned king of Italy at Milan and emperor of Germany at Rome. After this twofold ceremony he proceeded to enter into preparations on a vast scale for the conquest of the Two Sicilies and Genoa, if not of Venice herself, and for the
