I've been working on this for a few days and reckoned I should put it up for critique before it becomes too long. Basically, it's a WI about the
Investiture Crisis.
1076. Rudolf von Rheinfeld makes overtures to the Archbishop of Mainz Siegfried I over crowning him Antiking as part of the Great Saxon Rebellion, part of the greater Investiture Controversy that pitted the Holy Roman Emperor against the Papacy of Pope Gregory VII. Rudolf hoped that with the Archbishop’s considerable influence within the Empire he could turn his political capital with Pope Gregory VII into a real advantage. He is, however, rebuffed by the Archbishop, who openly declares his allegiance to and support for, Emperor Henry IV.
Henry is hard pressed by both Papal and Saxon forces. Rudolf, a respected and illustrious warrior, has the support of the Saxon, Thuringian and Swabian elites. Henry has maintained his control of Bavaria, Lotharia and Bohemia yet the rebels have cut a swathe through the empire, separating the Emperor from the urbanised Rhineland. Henry is also facing Papal interdict, and there is only one clergyman who he can depend on, and he is hardly alien to realpolitik. Siegfried, however, sees the Pope’s reforms as a move that will cause his family, the Reginbodonen house, which had traditionally controlled both the clerical and civil arms of Mainz governance, to lose their considerable political influence, and rather make the office of Bishop one handed out at Rome, rather than elected locally. He therefore backed the Emperor, who sought to limit Papal influence within the Empire.
Henry, however, continues to be outmatched by the rebels. Many lesser lords gather around Rudolf, who leads many against the anointed Emperor. Henry, however, engages the services of 500 Norman mercenaries who arrive from Normandy in 1079 and who compliment his depleted ranks of knights. He hires them with a generous contribution from Siegfried’s considerable personal treasury. He also engaged the surfaces of many crossbowmen, especially North Italian and Bavarians, who fought using large crossbows drawn with windlasses and cranks, and who used a large pavise shield to shelter behind while they reloaded. He instructed these men to paint their shields with is personal banner, and he used them to send swarms of iron bolts into the ranks of the enemy. He was derided and loathed for his use of common crossbowmen against knights.
Henry, however, won with these new reinforcements. At the Battle of Tannhausen in Baden in 1080 he defeated the rebel force led by Rudolf. Many leaders were captured and Rudolf himself was struck with a crossbow bolt, and died thirteen agonising hours later in his own camp. Henry treated his prisoners well, yet would not give them their freedom. Instead he held them hostage, forcing their families and clients to surrender before finally releasing them. He did not, however, return to them their lands, but sent them to various monasteries to be lay brothers or to be tonsured. He dispensed their land as he saw fit, and so created a string of Duchies and Margraves that were loyal to him.
The conflict with Pope Gregory, however, was not over. Robbed of his avatar in Germany proper, Gregory invited Roger of Sicily to claim the title King of Italy, giving him a Papal banner and encouraging him to march on Ravenna and Milan.
Using this as evidence that Gregory was an enemy to Christendom, Henry made his Confessor anti-Pope, and crowned him Pope Calixtus in 1081. The new Pope was installed in Ravenna with a guard of 200 knights. Henry meanwhile campaigned in Lombardy, taking the Iron Crown and smashing a Milanese army outside Brescia. He then turned on the Sicilians.
Henry had supplemented his army with Italian forces who were skilled in the use of pike and crossbow. These were the antithesis to the Norman knights, who rode down all before them. At the Battle of Bolognia, hundreds of valiant knights fell beneath iron bolts. Roger himself was not present-he was in Durazzo spearheading an assault upon the Eastern Roman Empire. However, when he heard of the disaster he rushed back to Italy to raise new forces. He would be unable to do so, however, as the ransom demanded for the 600 captured knights was 40,000 gold pieces. Roger reluctantly paid, as his own son in law was one of the captured, yet he funded it by sacking Rome in 1082. The terrified Pope Gregory fled and died several months later, a broken man.
In 1082 Henry made peace with Roger of Sicily. They both recognised each others gains, and Henry recognised Roger as king of Sicily. In return, both parties recognised that Rome was a terra nullus, where neither side would enter in with hostile intentions. In a separate set of negotiations, Henry acknowledged the College of Cardinals as the elective body to choose the Pope. The College in 1084 had 100 members of which 30 were from within the Empire. One was Siegfried, Archbishop of Mainz. During the negotiations, it was agreed that the Emperor would have the prerogative to choose a further 20 of the Cardinals, a right given to no other Christian monarch. It was also agreed that 20 of the Cardinals would be from the Papal States, whose borders were fixed as Latium and Umbria. Emilia Romagna, however, was made an Imperial Duchy and given to the House of Hohenstaufen.
Following the Italian campaign, Henry reorganised northern Italy. He created the Duchies of Lombardy, Tuscany, Venetia and Romagna. These were given to prominent supporters, most notably Frederick of Hohenstaufen, who was the new Duke of Swabia, who was made Duke of Romagna, as well as being given the title Constable of the Realm. Henry also co-opted the Venetian and Genovese Republics. Venice, which had been neutral, was left to its own devices, however the Doge did accept he was the nominal client of Henry. Genoa was more closely controlled, its Duke being made to swear fealty to every new Emperor in person. Apart from that, the maritime republics were left alone.
In 1084 Henry declared Milan, Bolognia, Florence, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Augsburg and Cologne Imperial Free Cities. These were put under the direct control of the Emperor, however in reality they were given over to the local urban elite. This was part of the plan to remove the clergy from secular power, and so the prominent cities were made Imperial cities rather than their previous rule by various Bishops. Mainz, however, retained its status as being controlled by the Archbishop. In 1084 Siegfried was crowned Prince Bishop at the behest of Henry, who supported his ally. The Bishop died later that year, yet his successor Wurhard was loyal to the Emperor and continued his predecessor’s policies.
Mainz was a thriving city in the late 11th century. It profited enormously from the Imperial control of the Rhine, which effectively created an enormous free trade zone from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea. Each town and city had its own trade taxes and barriers levied by its town council or Bishop or guild, but trade flourished following the Confirmation Conflict of the 1080s. Meanwhile, Benedictine monasteries multiplied in ever increasing numbers. They were in the vanguard of both theology yet also of economics. They introduced innovations such as ox-drawn ploughs and crop rotation to the Rhine. This allowed local peasant communes to produce food surpluses to sell to towns which then sped up urbanisation in the region. When Saint Lucius of Hochheim made his journey from Geneva to Utrecht to Lubeck in 1100-1102 he saw a patchwork of fertile and productive fields, bustling towns and ever more glorious places of worship. The various Burgratten of the Rhineland towns donated lavishly to new religious establishments. Monasteries, libraries, schools, churches and chapter houses were all built and lavishly decorated.
In Mainz, the new Prince Bishop Wurhard founded the monastery of Hochheim in 1085 as an establishment for the glorification of God, the preservation and passage onwards of wisdom and learning, and of divine service. The monastery was closely tied to the Bishop’s court, and many of his advisors and subordinates had been educated there. More than a few had been tonsured and Wurhard’s chief advisor, Lucius, was canonised for his role in the establishment of some 300 monasteries across the Elba.
Emperor Henry IV was anointed for a second time by the newly elected Pope Innocent III on Easter Sunday in 1086 in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. His relationship with the new, far more tame, Papacy, was far better than with the previous Bishop of Rome. For the next twenty years, he would lead the Roman Empire into the new world as a strong temporal ruler with the backing of God and his representitive on Earth.
The land across the Elba, the Margrave of Pomerania, Brandenburg and the wilds of Jutland were outside the Imperial, or indeed Christian, fold. They had stuck to their ancient pagan beliefs and rejected Imperial overlordship. In 1090 Henry led a force of 15,000 men including 1,000 knights across the Elba, stopping off at Hamburg where Henry ordered the demolition of the four old castles and the construction of a larger Imperial castle on the outskirts of the town overlooking the river. This was given to Guy of Luxembourg, who was made Marcher Lord of Hamburg and Upper Saxony. He was given the right to levy his own taxes as he saw fit, raise soldiers and fight campaigns across the Elba. Guy would use these powers to expand his own personal powerbase into the north.
Henry crossed the Elba in early Summer of 1090. He then rampaged through Pomerania, where the Obotrite Confederation, a confederation of Christian tribes that had long been allied to the Carolingians, declared themselves for Henry and one of their leaders, also called Henry, was made Grand Duke of Mecklenburg and the city of Lubeck founded as an Imperial Free City. Henry then continued east, reaching the Oder where he planted a large iron cross, prayed, and then headed back west. He did, however, make a detour into Bohemia where he built a bridge across the Vlatva at Prague, which would remain in use until the 14th century.
Having thus consolidated his eastern march, Henry encouraged the expansion of monastic communities within the Empire. St Lucius travelled to Mecklenburg where he founded numerous monasteries. The various Saxon tribes of the area often slaughtered the monks of such establishments and looted them mercilessly. However, they were persecuted mercilessly by Duke Henry, who captured many and gave them the choice of slavery or conversion. The Grand Duke also offered land to peasants from Frisia and the Rhineland to come and settle. Many thousands took up the offer, and the new settler colonies stretched in an enormous swathe from Lubeck to the Bohemian plateau. The great bogs were drained and causeways built over uneven ground. Farmers using the new crop rotation techniques devised in the monasteries of the Rhineland, cleared the forests and over the next century the population would explode. The influx of monks furthermore swiftened the transformation of the area, as the last traces of paganism were erased from the popular imagination and Christendom expanded not only on the map but also in the peoples’ minds.
Leading this new surge in Christian missionary activity was Archbishop Wurhard, who dispatched many monks to the Baltic, and even commissioned one of them, Matthew of Neuesdorf to cross the seething northern sea and spread the word to the peoples of the east and Lithuania. He returned from his three year odyssey in 1095 to Mainz with tales of strange gods and mysticism across a stormy ocean. A world inhabited by dragons, heroes, wrathful gods and snakes who stretched the circumference of the earth. Such tales excited the popular imagination of the people, and everyone from Prince Bishop to lay brother was filled both with fear and wonder at such tales. Wurhard gave the missionary a retinue of fifty other monks, a substantial treasury and an armed guard of twenty knights errand to found a new monastery.
The small band reached Lubeck several months later and, accompanied by a small contingent of craftsmen and more monks the party, numbering a little over one hundred, embarked for the east. The first monastery in so-called they called Neustrand- the new beach, in the plain, vivid speech of the Benedictine order. It was a rough stockade with a ditch and a small gate led to by an earth causeway set in a clearing in a forest about half a mile from the coast. Within the stockade was a small wooden church with no steeple, sleeping quarters for the monks and lay brothers as well as the knights, and finally a small stable for the knights’ horses. The monastery passed largely unnoticed for nearly a year until a band of natives approached it. Matthew, who spoke their language, managed to open a dialogue. When the natives heard what the monks had to offer, they retreated wordlessly from the area and were never seen again.
The monastery, however, began exerting a gradual influence upon the local people. Gradually, trade began, and with that Christianity soon followed. Soon the local communities practised Christianity, and would gather at the monastery every Sunday to hear Mass. Some of the chieftains tried to learn latin, yet largely failed. Their children, however, took up the new language and avidly learned the lessons taught not just by the monks but also by the knights, who instructed them in chivalry and the role of a Christian soldier. In 1101 one of the chieftains, the foremost among the rest, founded the Kingdom of Ostmark. He spoke no latin yet was a pious Christian. He gave large tracts of land to the monks who sent messages back to Mainz which prompted Wurhard to send a further 100 monks to the new Christian beacon so far away from the Holy Land.
The Kingdom of Ostmark would later become the Kingdom of Ostland and it would expand rapidly along the coast. From its power base in the eastern Baltic it would conquer large parts of Poland and Lithuania before its apex in the 12th century. Its main lifeline to the rest of Christendom, however, would be the string of Benedictine Monasteries that flourished in the new Christian kingdom. They began as rude structures of mud, timber and earth yet they grew into sturdy stone buildings and then into monastic places worthy of Western Europe.
Within the Empire, Henry was faced by the ambitions of his own brood, especially his sons Conrad and Henry, who had been suspected of sympathising with the Saxon Rebels during the Investiture Crisis, and the Emperor never quite trusted them since. Nevertheless, he abdicated the throne of Italy in 1092 and crowned Conrad as King with a Papal prelate overseeing the ceremony. Little did Henry know that his own son intended to supplant him. For in 1095 Henry, with the backing of Pope Innocent III, raised his own standard in the Imperial Free City of Milan and crowned himself king of the Lombards and of the Alemmani. He then garrisoned the Alpine fortresses and prepared an expeditionary force to lead north. He intended to seize Geneva and then storm down the Rhine to Mainz and then to Trier, where he would then switch east and take Frankfurt.
Conrad courted the various Italian powers, and received troops and support from Sicily, Venice and Genoa, as well as the Duke of Burgundy. The Duke of Romagna, however, Frederick of Swabia, refused to betray his Emperor, and so his territory, which lay in Conrad’s path, was blocked. With this voice of dissent south of the Alps, Conrad’s plans were put on hold as it became evident that he would have to fight a long and protracted feudal war within Italy before he could cross the Alps. The Emperor, meanwhile, amassed his forces along with his erstwhile supporter the Duke of Swabia, whose second son was married to Henry’s infant daughter Adelaide, who was only nine years old. Henry trusted Frederick more than his own issue, and the Duke amassed yet more titles during the Italian war.
Henry led an army of 20,000 men south to meet Conrad. Conrad’s forces were focused in Romagna, laying siege to Bolognia which had resisted for two months. When it finally surrendered it was looted mercilessly and even the great cathedral there was despoiled. This did not dent Pope Innocent’s support for the usurper, who then gathered his army and marched north with 16,000 men. He was met outside Ravenna by a force of 1,000 Venetians, who also ferried in Greek mercenaries as well as Eastern Roman forces who had been sent as a goodwill gesture by the Comnenid Emperor. These brought his strength up to 20,000 men and he marched to meet his father.
The Emperor for his part had the superior force. His knights were more numerous and more seasoned; the war was often described by scholars as a war fought between fathers and sons, as the older knights sided with the experienced and battle hardened Emperor, their sons with his charismatic and effervescent son. The Emperor looked set to score a victory as the two forces moved closer, yet disaster struck him when the two forces were leering at each other across the River Po.
His second son, another Henry, had raised his own standard of revolt in Bohemia. He had attracted many to his cause and had the support of many other nobles from the eastern marches. At this news, the Emperor was take by a dreadful fever that wracked him for a week. During this time he delegated command to Frederick of Swabia, who withdrew the army to Ferrara. Here the Emperor convalesced while his two sons ran amok in his border possessions. He finally recovered in the last week of August in 1095 yet he was a broken man. Bereft of loved ones, he seemed possessed only by a desire for peace and rest. There was one, however, who was more vital and that was his old comrade Frederick of Swabia, who organised the Imperial response. He led a force of 8,000 men north, hoping to reach central Germany in time to remind the feudal lords of their obligations. The Emperor himself remained in Italy, lackadaisically co-ordinating the defence of Lombardy.
Conrad, assured of his own success, moved into Tuscany and received the subjugation of the Duke of Tuscany and the support of the various town councils. He then toured Liguria at a leisurely pace, receiving reinforcements from Genoa, who funded the hiring of a contingent of Saracen archers. He then moved north across the plain of Lombardy towards Turin and Milan.
The Prince Bishop of Turin, however, was an ardent Imperialist and he shut Conrad out of the city. Conrad prepared for a siege and the people of Turin, having seen the ravaging of Bolognia, resisted furiously. Winter was approaching, and the citizens knew that without shelter the rebel army would freeze to death. Meanwhile, the Emperor was in Milan drilling his infantry and resting his knights for a new campaign. Morale was therefore high, yet by November it had begun to flag. With no word from Milan it was feared that the Emperor had abandoned them. In truth, Henry was once again ill. Overtaken by fever once more his life was in peril. At one point he asked for reconciliation with the Holy Father, yet was refused by Innocent. This seems to have made things worse, and it took him two months to recover.
By January, Turin was starving. The rebels were being resupplied by Genovese convoys, and their camps were well provisioned, rather better so than the beleaguered city. Finally in late February the Prince Bishop capitulated. The city was spared a sack, yet some 2,000 children were sold into slavery by the capricious Genovese. Some found their way to the markets of Timbuktu and Ghana, yet many more died shortly afterwards on plague infested galleons.
This event seemed a crushing defeat for the Imperialist forces. However, Conrad’s forces were depleted and demoralised. When the Emperor finally faced them in early March of 1096 his force was far superior. The Battle lasted the better part of three days, and many thousands of men were slaughtered. During the battle it is said that the Emperor met his son, Conrad in full bloodlust, and that the rebellious son made for his father, swinging his war mace crying for his blood. The story goes that the Emperor removed his helmet and did nothing to prevent his son, and only the timely intervention of a Flemish knight saved the Emperor. Conrad’s forces were finally defeated and he himself escaped south to Genoa from where he fled to Rome and then to Naples.
The Emperor, it seems, was shaken from his ashen cold, for he flung his army south at Genoa and besieged the city for three months before forcing an assault. The fighting was fierce yet finally the city was taken; the elite fled the city by ship yet many thousands of civilians were killed. The city was left a burnt out husk, none of its former splendour remaining.
Genoa’s political cousin, Venice, soon took the hint and capitulated to Henry. The Emperor was lenient, demanding only the city accept an Imperial garrison and pay a tithe to the Imperial treasury. The Serene Republic was swift to capitalise on the collapse of its greatest competitor, and her maritime trade boomed as in the anarchy she seized Dalmatia and thus the great forests so vital for her ship building needs.
To the north, Frederick of Swabia was showing none of his fifty six years. He rallied the German aristocracy and the burghers and the town militia and presented a solid front against the rebellious Henry. Frederick led his forces into Bohemia, crossing the Vlatva and taking Prague. Henry fled north and with a force of 4,000 men seized Lubeck. He was, however, trapped, and Frederick besieged him in there. Lubeck, a young town with a strong sense of identity, rebelled against the upstart and combined with an Imperial assault they rose up and ousted the rebels. Henry was captured and his force destroyed utterly. Many of his supporters were executed, the nobles beheaded the commoners hanged. Frederick handed the rebellious son over to the Emperor, who met him at Frankfurt.
The Emperor was and old man, and a broken one at that. He needed a secure successor to give his Empire to. He looked to the people he trusted; there was of course Frederick of Swabia, his erstwhile ally. Frederick, however, was old as well, and so could not be relied on; his sons were also very young, and Henry knew the anarchy a disputed succession could bring. He trusted few others; Henry of Luxembourg was promising, yet he had no male offspring. He therefore had little choice but to reconcile with his son. He forgave is son and in 1106 he crowned him King of the Germans at Aachen. From then on Henry was little but loyal to his father, his place in the Imperial hierarchy secured. His health failing him, Emperor Henry made his son co-Emperor later the same year, and abdicated in early 1107. He retired to the monastery of Hochheim where he spent time discussing theology with the Abbot and occasionally with the Archbishop of Mainz.
Henry V was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1107. The Electors saw things the way the old Emperor did, yet a few still voted for Frederick of Swabia. There would be no controversy, however, as he died in May 1107/ All acknowledged Henry as Emperor of the West, even Pope Innocent III, who anointed him Emperor in Milan later that year on Christmas Day. It seemed that the rift between Curia and Empire had been healed, or at least glossed over. He seemed little concerned by the death of his father in July of that year, and the old Emperor was buried in Mainz Cathedral, near his ally Siegfried. His tomb would be destroyed in 1302 during renovations being carried out on the old building, and his bones were then moved to the Imperial Tomb at Frankfurt where they were interred with his wife and father, the Emperor Henry III.
This new Emperor, however, was faced immediately by an urgent request from the East. In the late 11th century Emperor Alexius Comnenus of the Eastern Empire had beseeched western Christendom for aid against the Turks, yet during the War of Fathers and Sons (as it became known) he was ignored. Now the Turks were pressing ever further west, with the Roman armies on the run ever since the disaster at Manzikert, and Alexius needed reinforcements. He first sent his appeals to Rome, yet Innocent’s position depended on the Normans in Sicily, whose anti-Byzantine policies prevented him from announcing his support for the Eastern army of Christendom. Alexius therefore sent word to his fellow Emperor Henry, asking him to come to his assistance and relieve the pressure upon the Roman Empire.
Henry was at first hesitant, yet it was the Archbishop of Trier who persuaded him to undertake the relief effort. He therefore raised 2,000 knights and a further force of 12,000 commoners, largely pilgrims and levies, and set off with them east in early 1109.
While he was away, he left control of the realm to his trusted companion, Frederick II of Swabia, whose Hohenstaufen family had long supported his Salic Dynasty. His supporters were many, and they were often seen together in Frankfurt, and included much of the younger nobility, including the new Prince Bishop of Mainz, Augustus, who witnessed his marriage to Adeleza of Louvain. Great enmity divided the Imperial court, yet with Emperor and senior nobility absent, the Empire was locked in political impasse.