Luscombe D., Riley-Smith J. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 4: c. 1024-c. 1198, Part 2

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The western empire, 1125–1197 401

argument being that they tended not to be preserved because their value, un-

like that of diplomas conﬁrming privileges, was transitory. Since the chancery

perambulated with the court, its paraphernalia had to be economical. There

is no trace of any ofﬁcial register of royal charters. However, when Conrad III

was at Aachen for Christmas in 1145,hewas able to inform the archbishop of

Vienne that the town of Vienne belonged to the crown, information ‘which is

preserved in the archives of our empire’.

So it is possible that there was a mu-

niment box or room in the palace at Aachen, and there are other references to

rulers consulting old documents and proofs. The chancery certainly consulted

formularies on style, form and content. Wibald of Stablo, abbot of Corvey, kept

his own book of records, examples and other materials now known as the Codex

epistolae Wibaldi which is one of the principal sources for the diplomatic his-

tory of the empire in the twelfth century. Another informally used letter-book

was the Codex Udalrici drawn up by 1125 for didactic purposes at Bamberg. The

promotion of this codex from schoolbook to formulary testiﬁes to connections

between the imperial notaries and certain episcopal writing ofﬁces.

Oneofthe most talented chaplains recruited by Conrad III was an Italian,

Godfrey of Viterbo, who had been sent as a child to the cathedral school

of Bamberg. Inﬂuential at court throughout Barbarossa’s reign, he may have

acted as tutor to Henry VI who was, unlike his father, literate. Godfrey was a

voluminous and imaginative writer on imperial affairs, and left a ﬁne account,

perhaps exaggerated, of his busy experiences as an imperial notary, chaplain

and envoy. He complained that it was hard to ﬁnd time and place for his own

compositions, which nevertheless ﬁll almost a whole volume in the Monumenta

series of Scriptores, because he had to compose

in the nooks of the imperial palace or on horseback on the road, under a tree or deep in

the forest, whenever time permitted, during the sieges of castles, in the dangers of many

a battle. I did not write this in the solitude of a monastery or in some other quiet place,

but in the constant restlessness and confusion of events, in war and warlike conditions,

in the noise of such a large court. As a chaplain I was occupied every day around the

clock in the mass and all the hours, at table, in negotiations, in the drafting of letters,

in the daily arrangement of new lodgings, in looking after the livelihood for myself and

my people, in carrying out very important missions: twice to Sicily, three times to the

Provence, once to Spain, several times to France, forty times from Germany to Rome

and back. More was demanded of me in every exertion and restlessness than from

anyone else my age at the court. The more extensive and difﬁcult all this is, the more

miraculous it is that in such hustle and bustle, amidst such great noise and disquiet, I

was able to create this work.

One can only agree with him.

Ibid., Conrad III, no. 145,p.265, has ‘quod in archivis imperii nostri continetur’.

Godfrey of Viterbo, ‘Memoria seculorum’, p. 105. The translation is in Bumke (1991), pp. 460–1.

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402 benjamin arnold

ﬁnances and the imperial ﬁsc

Although there are references in the twelfth century to an imperial treasury

or camera with its chamberlains, it is difﬁcult to discern whether there was

a permanent treasury at court or whether camera is a synonym for the ﬁsc,

the chamberlains acting as revenue ofﬁcials. Nothing identiﬁable as treasury

documentation has survived from the twelfth century in Germany. The im-

perial court must have travelled with strong boxes (examples of which survive

from the thirteenth century) for holding the imperial insignia, relics and other

valuables such as gold seals and cash. It is known that the small but well-sited

castle on the rock of Trifels not far from the Rhine was used as a depository

for royal treasure. Already described as the strongest of Henry V’s castles, the

crown jewels were more than once sent there for safekeeping. Henry VI em-

ployed Trifels as a gaol for Richard I of England and other prisoners. Several

sources remark upon the astonishment caused in Germany by the richness of

the Sicilian royal treasure seized during the occupation of the Regno in 1194

and taken to Trifels. Some of the articles, notably Roger II’s crimson and gold

mantle, are still to be seen in the Vienna Schatzkammer.But like the archive

of Aachen, the treasury of Trifels as a possible institutional embryo of imperial

governance leaves no more than a shadow in the sources.

Since its virtual expulsion from Saxony in the 1070s, the crown had come to

rely heavily upon its possessions in southern Germany, including the lands in

Alsace and on the middle Rhine where, according to Bishop Otto of Freising,

‘the principal strength of the realm is known to lie’.

The crown experienced

difﬁculty in restoring its position as a landowner on the substantial scale en-

joyed before the War of Investitures. Upon Henry V’s death in 1125 Duke

Frederick II of Swabia had occupied as much of the Salian ﬁsc as his agents

could hold, claiming it as his rightful inheritance as Henry V’s nephew. It

took Lothar III and his allies several years of campaigning before the duke

and his brother, the anti-king Conrad, would give these resources up to the

crown. By the time that Conrad III succeeded in 1138,itisthought that his

holdings as king were surpassed by the enormous inheritances collected by the

Welf family in Swabia and Saxony. Frederick Barbarossa began his reign with

similar disadvantages because he relinquished his Swabian ducal title and lands

which he had inherited from his father in 1147 to his cousin Duke Frederick

of Rothenburg in 1152 or 1153. Then the emperor’s marriage to Beatrice of Bur-

gundy brought her large inheritance to the Staufen dynasty in 1156.Upon the

Roman campaign of 1167 so many German princes died of malaria that the

emperor was able to initiate a major programme of inheritances and reversions

for himself and for his sons.

Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici i, 12.

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The western empire, 1125–1197 403

We know that portions of the ﬁsc were entrusted to ministeriales enfeoffed

with castles from which to protect it, but very little speciﬁc information about

the ﬁsc’s administration in the twelfth century has survived. The most signiﬁ-

cant source is a list of royal manors in Germany and Italy entitled Iste sunt curie

que pertinent ad mensam regis Romanorum,‘These are manors which pertain

to the sustenance of the king of the Romans’,

the disparate parts of which

must therefore date from the years 1125–33 or 1138–55 or 1169–91 when there

were kings of the Romans. Substantial renders in kind from certain manors in

Saxony, Lotharingia, Franconia and northern Bavaria and in cash from manors

in Lombardy are scheduled, but in spite of a large scholarly literature, it is not

known for which king the list was drawn up, or for what purpose the selection

of manors and incomes may have been made in the ﬁrst place.

the peripatetic royal court and its palaces

The German court had no ﬁxed residence, but the royal iter or perambulation

around the provinces and dioceses of the empire was in itself a method of

governance serving several purposes. It was the means for exposing royal justice

in the regions, as we saw in the cases of Frederick Barbarossa’s visits to Worms

in 1155 and to the lower Rhineland in 1158.Itexposed assemblies of princes to

the sternness of the royal eye and involved them through the duty of consilium

or offering counsel in the political and judicial issues of the moment. Between

1178 and 1181 the removal of Henry the Lion as duke of Saxony and Bavaria

was worked out during court meetings of this kind. In November 1178 at the

court in Speyer the emperor failed to reconcile the duke with his enemies,

Archbishop Philip of Cologne at their head. In January 1179 the court held in

Worms required the duke to answer charges of having broken the peace. In

June 1179 the court at Magdeburg proscribed him for refusing to answer the

charges, and proceedings against him as a contumacious vassal were opened by

the court at Kayna in August. In January 1180 the court at W

urzburg deprived

him of his ﬁefs, and at the courts held in April at Gelnhausen and in September

at Altenburg, the ﬁefs were reapportioned to his rivals. After campaigns against

him in 1180 and 1181, the duke made his submission to the emperor at the court

held in Erfurt in November 1181, and he was sent into exile.

The royal iter was also a progress between various castles and palaces be-

longing to the ﬁsc, although the theory of routes deliberately patterned to

enable the court to take up successively the renders from its own possessions

is no longer widely current. The iter was a resourceful method for exploiting

the court’s ancient rights to hospitality from the cathedral churches and from

uhl and K

olzer (1979), p. 53.

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404 benjamin arnold

some of the abbeys of the empire, hospitality making up one component of the

servitia or services owed by the imperial church in return for its temporalities.

These rights relied upon the legal argument that most of the temporalities of

the church pertained ultimately to the crown, and had been enfeoffed or oth-

erwise entrusted to prelates for the mutual beneﬁt of the parties, church and

empire. Lothar III, Conrad III and Frederick Barbarossa followed the practice

of their Salian predecessors by staying more often in episcopal towns and in

royal abbeys than in their own palaces and castles. Of the latter, Lothar III

understandably favoured Goslar in Saxony as well as the imperial palace in

Aachen. Conrad III preferred Nuremberg and Frankfurt, possibly because he

had been well liked in their regions when he was anti-king. Frederick Bar-

barossa favoured all four, as well as frequently visiting Altenburg in the Saxon

marches, Gelnhausen in Franconia, Kaiserslautern west of the Rhine, Hagenau

in Alsace and Ulm in Swabia.

Although Henry VI paid more visits to the episcopal towns of Worms and

urzburg than to any single palace of his own, during his reign the royal

residences for the ﬁrst time housed the court more often than the abbeys and

the cathedral towns. This reﬂects not only that the ambitious programme of

palace building initiated by Conrad III and Frederick Barbarossa was coming to

fruition, but also that the ﬁsc had expanded phenomenally since the late 1160s,

thus leaving Henry VI economically less reliant upon ecclesiastical hospitality.

No doubt this was a relief to the bishops, because the royal entourage was large.

Areliable source reveals that when a cathedral town was the site of a plenary

session of the royal court, the crown’s ofﬁcials commandeered the bishop’s

principal revenues for the two weeks in which the meeting fell.

The royal iter was also designed to accommodate the ideological function

of displaying the power and the glory of the ruler through the ceremony of

wearing a crown before the court, usually coinciding with the major festivals of

the church. As Frederick Barbarossa put it in 1158,‘we wear a crown and diadem

of glory, namely at Christmas, at Easter and at Pentecost’.

Such ceremonies

served the explicit purpose of presenting the ruler as a sacred personage under

the express protection of Christ, summus rex et sacerdos, ‘highest king and priest’,

as Otto of Freising described him in relation to Frederick Barbarossa’s ﬁrst

coronation and unction at Aachen in 1152. The bishop drove this point home

by explaining that another Frederick, the bishop of M

unster, was consecrated

by the same bishops who had sanctiﬁed the king, so that ‘in one church the

same day saw the consecration of the only two persons who are sacramentally

anointed according to the procedures of the New and Old Testaments and are

MGH Diplomata,Frederick I, no. 201,p.337.

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The western empire, 1125–1197 405

solemnly called the Lord’s anointed’.

The subsequent crown-wearing festivals

carried political as well as religious and psychological messages. Meeting with

strong resistance at some point during his Lombard campaigns, for example,

Barbarossa vowed not to wear his crown until the affront to his majesty had

been avenged. By contrast the Whitsun crown-wearing ceremony at Mainz in

1182 was explicitly related by the author of the Worms annals to the victorious

outcome of the long effort to topple Henry the Lion. In the summer of 1178

on their way back through Provence and Burgundy from Italy, the imperial

tourists took the opportunity to stage new coronations; Frederick Barbarossa

was crowned at Arles and Empress Beatrice at Vienne.

Modern scholarship has not come to agreement about the constitutional

classiﬁcation of such ceremonies of coronation subsequent to the initial rites at

Aachen for the German kingdom and at Rome for the empire, and precision

is perhaps inappropriate. The purpose of an unusual triple coronation carried

out at Milan in 1186 was to promote the honour of the empire by a ceremony

combining the court’s ambition of the moment with the religious and hierar-

chical values of that age. With considerable sang-froid the emperor had come

to Milan to celebrate the marriage of his son Henry VI to Constance of Sicily

in the city he had levelled to the ground in 1162. After the wedding ceremony in

San Ambrogio all three were crowned, Barbarossa by the archbishop of Vienne,

Henry VI by the patriarch of Aquileia and Constance by a German bishop;

‘And from that day,’ reports the principal source, ‘he [Henry VI] was called

Caesar.’

Since the papal curia had recently refused the emperor’s application

for his son’s imperial coronation, the ﬁrst time that such an arrangement had

been proposed since Otto II’s imperial coronation during his father’s lifetime in

967, the most plausible explanation is that the 1186 coronations were planned

and executed as a substitute.

Although the cathedral towns of the empire were so signiﬁcant for the royal

iter, the pattern of journeys was revised in the twelfth century in relation

to the castles, palaces and towns situated upon the royal ﬁsc. Upon some of

the ancient possessions of the crown mentioned in the twelfth-century list of

the king of the Romans’ curiae such as Nimwegen, Ingelheim, Frankfurt and

Kaiserslautern, Conrad III and Frederick Barbarossa undertook reconstruction

of the royal palaces. Rahewin preserves a valuable description of one of these

projects, which were designed in part to display the glory of the dynasty and

the honour of the empire:

In Kaiserslautern he [Frederick I] built a royal palace of red stone and adorned it quite

lavishly. On one side he surrounded it with a very strong wall, the other side is enclosed

Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici ii, 3.

Ralph of Diceto, ‘Ex ymaginibus historiarum’ for 1186.

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406 benjamin arnold

byalake-like ﬁshpond, which contains for the delectation of the eyes and the palate all

delicacies of ﬁsh and fowl. An adjoining park offers nourishment to a wealth of stages

and deer. The royal splendor of all these things and their abundance, which is greater

than one could describe, strikes all who see it with amazement.

Another residence belonging to the Staufen family and much visited by

Frederick Barbarossa and Henry VI was Hagenau in Alsace. Adjacent to it a

town was founded early in the twelfth century, and the emperor granted it

a detailed privilege in 1164.Godfrey of Viterbo wrote of the castle’s sump-

tuously painted and gilded apartments, and of the towers which adorned it.

Apparently it contained a well-stocked library. Something of the magniﬁcence

of the new building programme can be inferred from the royal chapels, halls,

arcades and sculptured remnants at Gelnhausen, Nuremberg, Eger, Frankfurt

and Wimpfen. From surviving letters and inscriptions we learn a little about the

purpose of palaces for promoting imperial prestige. Having repaired the palace

at Kaiserswerth upon its island in the Rhine, Frederick Barbarossa installed an

inscription over the gateway in 1184 referring to the restoration of justice and

peace which the court meetings held in such palaces were intended to sustain.

After he had left Germany upon the Third Crusade, the emperor wrote back to

Henry VI to remind him not to neglect completion of the projects at Nimwe-

gen and Kaiserswerth since they had been residences of their Carolingian and

Salian predecessors, and were therefore valuable in underlining the signiﬁcance

of their own house. The ambitious construction of palaces indicates a reason-

ably prosperous imperial dynasty in the last third of the twelfth century, and

this impression is borne out by the acquisition of so many new assets after 1167

to make up a ﬁsc consisting of ample forests, proﬁtable jurisdictions, hundreds

of manors, scores of towns and monasteries and, according to the chronicler

Arnold of L

ubeck, 350 castles.

the crown and warfare

The resources of the crown, the court’s relationship with the church and the

ceaseless process of the iter also sustained one of the ruler’s most demanding

tasks, that of making war. As Wibald of Stablo, abbot of Corvey, reminded the

bishop of Hildesheim in 1149, the servitia owed by the church consisted not

only in attending the royal court and in providing hospitality for it, but also in

assisting the king’s military expeditions. The royal expeditio or armed campaign

conducted within the borders of the western empire was itself an administrative

method of last resort. Quoting the Second Book of Kings, Rahewin thought it

obvious that there was a proper time for kings to go forth to war, and applied the

Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici iv, 86. The translation is in Bumke (1991), p. 125.

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The western empire, 1125–1197 407

commonplace to Barbarossa’s second Italian expedition planned for 1158.He

also took it for granted that the bishops would be consulted and one of them,

Otto of Freising, wrote to the emperor that it was right to chastise the Milanese

for the honour of the empire. In the twelfth century the term honor was much

used by the imperial chancery to indicate both the dignity of the empire and

speciﬁc rights belonging to the crown. It was also employed to justify wars ‘for

the glory and honour of the Roman empire’ as Frederick Barbarossa expressed

it to Wibald of Stablo, abbot of Corvey in relation to the expedition against

Poland in 1157.

In Germany itself war or guerra was sometimes justiﬁed

on the same grounds. In 1166 the emperor enjoined Counts Leopold and

Henry of Plain in Bavaria to attack the Alexandrine see of Salzburg ‘for the

honour of the empire’, adding that ‘our honour depends upon this war’.

The means for war were provided chieﬂy by the armed retinues of the crown,

the secular princes and the church, although mercenaries were employed for

the empire’s wars during the twelfth century and the larger towns of Germany

also contributed contingents. Military retinues were normally sustained by

ﬁefs granted to knights by their lords, which is why Lothar III forbade the

alienation of ﬁefs without consent in 1136 since the consequence was that ‘our

princes are hardly able to make their knights contribute to the success of the

expeditions undertaken in our name because of their being so short of ﬁefs’.

Frederick Barbarossa repeated this legislation in 1154 and 1158.

Although many royal monasteries and a handful of bishoprics such as Con-

stance, Bremen and Chur were exempted from military service, the imperial

court normally expected all ecclesiastical and secular princes to be prepared

to send their militias on campaign, to attend in person when requested to

do so and to take the oaths customarily demanded for the purpose. Mili-

tary obligation in Germany did not run to speciﬁed numbers of knights, but

ambitious princes close to the court were willing to provide them in some num-

ber. In 1161, for example, Archbishop Rainald of Cologne, Duke Frederick of

Rothenburg, Count Palatine Conrad of the Rhine and Landgrave Louis II of

Thuringia provided more than 1,100 knights to reinforce the army besieging

Milan. Many bishops suffered severe ﬁnancial strain in supporting the high

cost of the empire’s wars. In addition to the injunctions about preserving ﬁefs

for their proper purpose, several other sources have survived which indicate the

scale of organization behind the movement of large armies from Germany to

Italy: a statute of 1158 for the conduct of the army and the camp; an edict con-

fected at Reichenau Abbey about 1160 and ascribed to Charlemagne, explaining

military obligations, personnel and equipment in considerable detail; and rules

MGH Diplomata,Frederick I, no. 181,p.304, has ‘quantave gloria et honore Romanum imperium’.

Ibid., no. 508,p.442.

Ibid., Lothar III, no. 105,p.170.

408 benjamin arnold

from different parts of Germany about the military conduct of the retinues of

knightly ministeriales.Several of the campaigns in Lombardy and against the

kingdom of Sicily as well as the German military contributions to the Second

and Third Crusades were failures. Nevertheless, it is apparent that German

armies were formidable and widely feared instruments in the twelfth century,

more than one author testifying to their fury and impetus, although some of

the language is borrowed from classical usage recording Rome’s suspicion of

Germanic barbarians.

the

DE FACTO independence of saxony, and its

expansion to the east

The virtual independence of Saxony from the authority of the crown was one

result of the War of Investitures which was conﬁrmed by the defeat in 1115

of Henry V’s invasion of Saxony at the battle of Welfesholz. Although the

crown was not totally bereft of political support and material possessions in

Saxony and its marches, the autonomy for which the Saxon aristocracy had

striven ever since 1073 was a reality of twelfth-century German politics. In 1125

it was the highest representative of this group, the Saxon duke Lothar, who

was himself elected king. The ascendancy of Saxony which this betokened

proved transitory when Lothar III’s son-in-law, Henry the Proud, failed to

secure the succession in 1138.But by this time Saxony was in the grip of a social

phenomenon of the utmost signiﬁcance for its future. By means of force and

colonization, missionary zeal and diplomacy, the Saxon frontier of the western

empire was extended far to the east in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Here we need to consider the political implications and results for northern

Germany.

As Saxony’s preoccupation with the issues of the War of Investitures receded

during the second and third decades of the twelfth century, so it became possible

to use the resources of the duchy as well as those of the highly populated

Netherlands for a renewed attempt to dominate the adjacent lands of the Slavs

by conquest and settlement. Lothar III as duke of Saxony and emperor, and his

grandson Duke Henry the Lion, proved adept at choosing commanders and

churchmen with the military and organizational talents necessary for annexing

and settling the Slav regions. Lothar was responsible for installing the resolute

Saxon dynasties of Schauenburg in Holstein (1110), of Ballenstedt in the North

March later called Brandenburg (1134) and of Wettin in the marches of Meissen

(1123) and Lusatia (1136), with enormous consequences for the consolidation of

these vast territories as provinces of the German realm. From the earliest years of

the century a plentiful supply of colonists from the Netherlands and Westphalia

had been ready to emigrate to the east, but in practice the conversion of the

The western empire, 1125–1197 409

country across the River Elbe into a Germanized landscape was a relatively

slow-moving affair due in part to Slav resistance and in part to the rivalries of

the Saxon princes.

In 1143 or 1144 Count Adolf II of Schauenburg and Holstein founded the

river port of L

ubeck which was important because it gave Germany a practical

outlet to the Baltic for the ﬁrst time since the losses of territory to the Slavs

during the rising of 983.But the settlement was destroyed in 1147 in an attack

by Niklot, prince of the Obodrites, and had to be founded anew by Henry the

Lion in 1159.Inthe meantime the archbishop of Bremen had reestablished the

sees destroyed by the Slavs in the eleventh century, Oldenburg, Ratzeburg and

Mecklenburg, although his enemy Henry the Lion insisted, as Saxon duke,

upon the right of investiture and protection. This was conceded by the royal

court in 1154.Some time later the see of Oldenburg was transferred to L

ubeck

and that of Mecklenburg to Schwerin. Two circumstances ensured the future

of German authority in the east. The ﬁrst was the decision by Slav princes

themselves to submit to imperial suzerainty. The second was the inﬂux of

German settlers whose utility is attested in the charters of their ecclesiastical

lords, and in the chronicle of the settlement composed by Helmold, the parish

priest of Bosau in Holstein. The impartiality of Helmold’s work will always

be a matter for some doubt, but his picture of the conquest and colonization

(since it is not the only source from which the story can be constructed) carries

reasonable conviction:

As the land was without inhabitants, he [Count Adolf II of Holstein] sent messengers

into all parts, namely to Flanders and Holland, to Utrecht, Westphalia and Frisia,

proclaiming that whosoever were in straits for lack of ﬁelds should come with their

families and receive a very good land – a spacious land, rich in crops, abounding in

ﬁsh and ﬂesh and exceeding good pasturage . . . An innumerable multitude of different

peoples rose up at this call and they came with their families and their goods into

the land of Wagria to Count Adolf that they might possess the country which he had

promised them.

The initial settlement of Holstein, Stormarn and Wagria was followed by

Henry the Lion’s venture, the Wendish Crusade of 1147 designed to coincide

with the Second Crusade to Jerusalem. In military terms the Saxons did badly,

but in the following years the Slav leadership came to realize that Saxon power

was in the ascendant and that the Christian faith and German settlement would

have to be accommodated in the interests of their own people. For such reasons

Pribislav of Brandenburg, who died in 1150, appointed Margrave Albert the

Bear as his heir, and the restored sees of Havelberg and Brandenburg were

Helmold of Bosau, Chronica Slavorum cap. lvii. The translation is by Tschan (1935), p. 168.

410 benjamin arnold

rapidly occupied by colonists from the Netherlands. According to Helmold,

using somewhat exaggerated expression,

The bishopric of Brandenburg, and likewise that of Havelberg, was greatly strengthened

by the coming of the foreigners, [i.e. Netherlanders] because the churches multiplied

andthe incomefromthe tithes grew enormously ...the Slavs have been everywhere

crushed and driven out. A people strong and without number have come from the

bounds of the ocean, and taken possession of the territories of the Slavs. They have

built cities and churches and have grown in riches beyond all estimation.

In 1163 the Piast princes Boleslaw of Wroclaw (Breslau) and Mieszko of

Racib

orz were installed as dukes in Silesia, to be tributaries of the western

empire while remaining vassals of the duke of Poland. Silesia had long been

converted to Christianity and was not in danger of German invasion, but now

the land was opened to German immigration and to eventual incorporation

into the empire in the thirteenth century. After another long military cam-

paign initiated in 1158,Henry the Lion installed new counts in the lands of

Obodrites, Gunzelin of Hagen in Schwerin and Henry of Schooten in Meck-

lenburg. In spite of further Slav resistance to these measures, the duke restored

the Obodrite prince Pribislav to his principality in 1167 to rule alongside his

previous appointees.

The initial conversion of Pomerania had been undertaken as early as the

1120sbyBishop Otto I of Bamberg as the principal missionary. A bishopric set

up at Wolin in 1140 as an exempt see under direct papal authority was moved

to Kammin in 1174. Bogislav of Stettin, prince of Pomerania who submitted

to Henry the Lion in the 1160s, was in 1181 after Henry’s fall given the title of

duke with the status of vassal immediate to the empire. Pomerania was thus

opened to German immigration. In a summary about what had been achieved

by the end of the 1160s, Helmold claimed that

all the country of the Slavs, beginning at the Eider which is the boundary of the

kingdom of the Danes, and extending between the Baltic Sea and the Elbe River in a

most lengthy sweep to Schwerin, a region once feared for its ambuscades and almost

deserted, was now through the help of God all made, as it were, into one colony of

Saxons. And cities and villages grew up there and churches were built and the number

of the ministers of Christ multiplied.

The conquest, conversion and colonization of the vast lands east of the Elbe

by the Saxons were challenged by the rising might of Denmark, since the

Danish crown was Henry the Lion’s rival for dominion over the southern coast

of the Baltic and managed intermittently to occupy Holstein, Mecklenburg

and Pomerania. Not until the battle of Bornh

oved in 1227 could this phase of

Denmark’s interest in the western empire’s lands be brought to an end.

Helmold of Bosau, Chronica Slavorum cap. lxxxix. The translation is by Tschan (1935), pp. 235–6.

Helmold of Bosau, Chronica Slavorum cap. cx. The translation is by Tschan (1935), p. 281.