Duke of Saxony (1142-1180) and Bavaria (1154-1180), participant in the Wendish Crusade (1147), and leader of an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1172.
Through his parentage on both sides, Henry had royal connections. His mother, Gertrude, was the daughter of Lothar III, Holy Roman Emperor. The Welf dynasty of his father, Henry the Proud, duke of Bavaria and Saxony (d. 1139), had Carolingian marriage links. His father competed for the German crown with Conrad III in 1138, and a sense of royal status remained a powerful factor throughout Henry’s career.
Henry’s youth was dominated by the struggle to recover Saxony and Bavaria, forfeited as a result of his father’s opposition to the election of Conrad III. By 1142 he was confirmed as duke in Saxony, but Bavaria had been secured by Henry Jasomirgott, margrave of Austria. Thwarted in this claim, Henry the Lion and the Saxon magnates refused in 1147 to join Conrad’s army for the Second Crusade (1147-1149). Yet Bernard of Clairvaux acceded to their proposal that a war against the unchristianized Slavs on the northeastern marches of the empire should carry crusading status and privileges. Though the campaign was no more successful than that in the Holy Land, it helped establish Henry in the role of conqueror and converter in the lands beyond the Elbe.
Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa granted Henry powers to refound and invest bishoprics in these territories and in 1156 restored him as duke of Bavaria. For the next twenty years, duke and emperor cooperated to their mutual advantage: in return for Henry’s military support in Italy and his recognition of Pope Victor IV, Barbarossa left him a free hand in transforming Saxony into a territorial principality. While in Bavaria he had no allodial lands, in Saxony he had extensive landholdings, the advocacy of around fifty churches, and some 400 ministerial knights, and it was there that he sought to create a compact territorial state as his main power base.
Central to Henry’s ambitions was the colonial expansion of Saxony beyond the Elbe. Campaigns, climaxing in the 1160s with the conquest of the Abodrites, allowed the chronicler Helmold of Bosau to hail him in 1171 as a reborn Otto the Great for his extension of empire and Christendom. Henry controlled swathes of new land between the rivers Elbe and Oder, exercised quasi-royal investiture rights in the bishoprics of Ratzeburg, Oldenburg in Holstein, and Meck-lenburg-Schwerin, refounded Lubeck as a trading town, and remodeled Braunschweig as a ducal residence. In 1168 he married Mathilda, daughter of Henry II of England, and in 1172 he led more than 1,000 followers on an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. At the same time, his ruthless pursuit of power provoked the mediatized Saxon nobles to rebel against him in 1166-1167.
In 1176 Henry refused military support for Frederick I in Italy, and the emperor blamed Henry’s defection for his defeat in the battle of Legnano. The Peace of Venice with Pope Alexander III left the emperor free to move against the overmighty duke. Found guilty in 1179 of breaching the peace of the kingdom, and outlawed, then arraigned, under feudal procedure in 1180, Henry was stripped of his fiefs, his two duchies were alienated and divided, and in 1182 he was banished to England. Allowed to return in 1185, he was banished again as a precaution when Barbarossa left on the Third Crusade in 1189. Returning illegally the same year, he campaigned to recover Saxony until 1193, when the Emperor Henry VI finally subdued the Lion.
Henry’s campaigns east of the Elbe in the 1150s and 1160s were an important step toward the later Baltic Crusades; the church never revoked its sanction of the Slav wars as crusades. However, Henry’s ruthless pursuit of his interests, and the ambition and arrogance that his contemporaries accused him of, were at odds with the ideal of the soldier of Christ. The fullest account of Henry’s wars, the Chronca Slavorum by Helmold of Bosau, captures the ambivalence of his motives and actions. Seeing Henry in the long historical perspective of holy war against pagan Saxons and Slavs, led by Charlemagne and Otto the Great, Helmold often finds him wanting, even as a military tactician. He especially contends that in Henry’s campaigns in 1149 “there was no mention of Christianity, but only of money”; once they pay the duke his tribute, “the Slavs still sacrifice to their demons and not to God” [Helmold of Bosau, Slawenchronik, ed. Heinz Stoob (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchge-sellschaft, 1973), 240]. From around 1160, however, Hel-mold depicts Henry as combining conquest and conversion in cooperation with the missionary church, an exemplar more of the Carolingian and Ottonian imperial mission than of the twelfth-century crusader.
A second Chronica Slavorum, by Arnold of Lubeck, enhances the picture of Henry as crusader. Its opening episode narrates Henry’s triumphal pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1172. In this account, 1,200 armed men and a large contingent of clergy follow the traditional route of Emperor Charlemagne’s road to Byzantium, where Henry is received like a king. In Jerusalem, he hopes for military venture until dissuaded by the Templars, to whom he donates money and weapons.
Henry’s sense of royal status, his imitation of Carolingian and Ottonian holy war in the lands beyond the Elbe, and his desire to play the crusader generated striking representations of his power and prestige. From the time of his royal marriage in 1168, he developed Dankwarderode into a palatial ducal residence in Braunschweig, taking royal palaces, especially Goslar, as his model. Before the palace stands a monumental bronze lion, symbol of the Welf dynasty and Henry’s personal heraldic image. He rebuilt the church of St. Blasius as a dynastic shrine, and its canons served as his chaplains and chancery staff. The effigies of Henry and Mathilda lie before the high altar, surrounded by the liturgical artifacts with which the ducal couple endowed their church. The marble altar houses relics brought back from Byzantium, and a great seven-branched candelabra associates the church with Solomon’s Temple. The Helmarshausen Evangeliary (MSS Wolfenbuttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, 105 Noviss., and Munchen, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm.30055), commissioned for the altar, links Henry in its dedicatory poem with Charlemagne. One of its sumptuous miniatures shows him and Mathilda flanked by royal forebears, holding crosses, being crowned by the hands of God.
The symbiosis of imperial mission and crusading piety finds most explicit expression in the translation commissioned by Henry around 1172, at Mathilda’s prompting, of the Old French Chanson de Roland. Its author, the priest Conrad, turns Charlemagne’s campaign in Spain into a formal crusade, with sermons and indulgence, albeit one summoned and led by the emperor without papal sanction. The chivalric heroes shed all secular concerns and are motivated by a crusading fervor voiced in language strongly reminiscent of St. Bernard’s De laude novae militiae. Conrad’s epilogue extols Henry as crusader, as converter of the heathen, and as the Charlemagne of his age.
-Jeffrey Ashcroft
Bibliography
Ashcroft, Jeffrey, “Konrad’s Rolandslied, Henry the Lion, and the Northern Crusade,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 22 (1986), 184-208.
Ehlers, Joachim, Heinrich derLowe: Europdisches Furstentum im Hochmittelalter (Gottingen: Muster-Schmidt, 1997).
Heinrich der Lowe und seine Zeit: Herrschaft und Reprdsentation der Welfen 1125-1235, ed. Jochen Luckhardt and Franz Niehoff, 3 vols. (Munchen: Hirmer, 1995).
Jordan, Karl, Henry the Lion: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986).
Die Welfen und ihr Braunschweiger Hof im hohen Mittelalter, ed. Bernd Schneidmuller (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1995).
World History
