Otto I

Otto I, called Otto the Great, was king of the East Franks, the realm that became Germany, from 936 and emperor from 962 until his death in 973. He crushed a series of rebellions by his own family and the great dukes, ended the Hungarian raids on western Europe at the battle of Lechfeld in 955, made himself king of Italy and was crowned emperor in Rome. His coronation revived the western empire of Charlemagne and is traditionally taken as the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire.

Otto was born on 23 November 912, probably at Wallhausen in Saxony, the eldest son of Henry, duke of Saxony, and his second wife, Matilda. In 919 his father was elected king of East Francia, the eastern part of the old Carolingian Empire, the first king of a Saxon rather than a Frankish line. In 929 or 930 Otto married Eadgyth, half-sister of King Æthelstan of England and a granddaughter of Alfred the Great, a match that brought prestige to the new dynasty.

Henry broke with Frankish custom by leaving the kingdom undivided to a single heir. When he died in July 936, Otto was crowned and anointed at Aachen, Charlemagne's old capital, on 7 August. He wore Frankish dress for the ceremony and was served at the coronation banquet by the dukes, a deliberate display of royal authority over them.

That authority was soon tested. Between 938 and 941 Otto faced revolts by his elder half-brother Thankmar, who was killed in 938, by Duke Eberhard of Franconia and Duke Gilbert of Lotharingia, and by his own younger brother Henry, who hoped to take the crown. The rebellion collapsed when Eberhard was killed and Gilbert drowned in the Rhine after the battle of Andernach in 939. Henry plotted again in 941 to have Otto murdered at Easter in Quedlinburg, was discovered, and was pardoned after doing penance. He was later reconciled and made duke of Bavaria.

Otto's answer to the problem of overmighty dukes was to give the duchies to members of his family. His son Liudolf received Swabia, his son-in-law Conrad the Red Lotharingia, and his brother Bruno, archbishop of Cologne, later Lotharingia as well. Family ties proved no guarantee. In 953 Liudolf and Conrad rebelled, partly out of fear that Otto's new marriage would cost Liudolf the succession, and for a year the kingdom was close to civil war.

Eadgyth died in 946. In 951 Otto crossed the Alps in answer to an appeal from Adelaide, the young widow of King Lothair of Italy, who had been imprisoned by the new Italian king, Berengar II. Otto took Pavia, assumed the title king of the Lombards, and married Adelaide there. Berengar was allowed to keep Italy as Otto's vassal, a settlement that satisfied nobody and helped to provoke Liudolf's revolt.

For decades mounted Hungarian raiders had plundered Germany, Italy and France. In 954 they attacked again, and their invasion helped end the rebellion, since the rebels could now be accused of working with the enemy. In August 955 the Hungarians besieged Augsburg. Otto came to its relief with an army drawn from most of the duchies and a Bohemian contingent, and on 10 August defeated them on the Lechfeld, the plain by the river Lech. Conrad the Red, now reconciled, was killed in the battle. Many of the Hungarian leaders were captured and executed. The raids on the west stopped, and over the following generations the Hungarians settled into a Christian kingdom under rulers such as Stephen I, forming medieval Hungary.

Later in 955 Otto also defeated the Slavic Obodrites on the river Recknitz near the Baltic. His commanders, notably the margraves Gero and Hermann Billung, pushed German lordship east of the Elbe, often with great brutality, and Otto planned a network of missionary bishoprics for the Slavic lands. The jewel of the plan was Magdeburg, his favourite residence, which became an archbishopric in 968 after years of resistance from neighbouring bishops.

In 961 Pope John XII asked for Otto's help against Berengar. Otto marched to Rome, and on 2 February 962 the pope crowned him emperor in St Peter's, with Adelaide as empress. A charter issued days later, the Diploma Ottonianum, confirmed the pope's lands in central Italy, the later Papal States, while asserting the emperor's right to approve papal elections. The alliance quickly broke down: John intrigued against him, and in 963 Otto had him deposed by a synod and replaced. For most of his last decade Otto stayed in Italy, defeating Berengar, who died a prisoner in Bamberg, and fighting in the south, where his claims clashed with those of the Byzantine Empire.

The quarrel with Constantinople ended with a marriage. In 967 Otto had his son Otto II crowned co-emperor, and in 972 the Byzantine princess Theophanu, a niece of Emperor John Tzimiskes, married the younger Otto in Rome. In 973 Otto returned to Saxony, held a great assembly at Quedlinburg attended by envoys from as far as Byzantium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Denmark, and died at Memleben on 7 May 973, in the same place as his father. He was buried beside Eadgyth in Magdeburg Cathedral.

Otto governed through the church more than any king before him. He appointed bishops and abbots, often from his own chapel, and gave them lands and the powers of counts, on the reasoning that churchmen could not found hereditary dynasties to rival the crown. This arrangement, often called the imperial church system, gave the king loyal administrators and troops, but it tied church office to royal service, a link the reform popes of the eleventh century, such as Gregory VII, would fiercely contest. Historians now stress that the system was less a deliberate plan than a gradual practice, and that Otto ruled as much through personal bonds, ritual, gift-giving and consensus with the great nobles as through any institutions.

Much of what is known about Otto comes from Widukind of Corvey's Deeds of the Saxons, which presents him as a heroic Saxon king, and from the chronicle of Thietmar of Merseburg, written a generation later. His reign established the Saxon or Ottonian dynasty, whose patronage produced a revival of art, learning and church building known as the Ottonian Renaissance. Whether 962 marks the founding of the Holy Roman Empire is partly a matter of definition, since the name came into use only later and the empire claimed continuity with Charlemagne's, but from Otto onwards the German kings who ruled Italy regarded the imperial crown as theirs by right. That union of Germany and Italy under one ruler would shape both countries' history for the next eight centuries.