A pilgrimage to the Holy Land undertaken by Henry the Lion (d. 1195), duke of Saxony and Bavaria from 1156, the leader of the Welf family, the most powerful princely dynasty in Germany after the Staufen imperial family.
Henry set off on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in January 1172. This was made possible by an end to a series of local conflicts in Saxony from 1166 onward, by the dowry that the duke received when he married Matilda, eldest daughter of Henry II of England, in 1168, and by the reopening of diplomatic negotiations with Byzantium by Frederick I Bar-barossa, Holy Roman Emperor, in 1170.
Henry and a large entourage traveled through Hungary, surviving shipwreck on the Danube and an attack by bandits in Byzantine territory before arriving at Constantinople (mod. Istanbul, Turkey) on Good Friday (14 April) 1172. He was treated with great respect by Emperor Manuel I Kom-nenos, and there was a public debate between the ecclesiastics in his train and some Greek clergy about the differences in religious interpretation between Greeks and Latins. He continued by sea to Palestine, was received in state by King Amalric at Jerusalem, and visited the Holy Sepulchre, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and the river Jordan before returning northward by land to Antioch (mod. Antakya, Turkey), where his companion Bishop Conrad of Lubeck fell ill. Conrad subsequently died at Tyre on 24 July 1172.
From Antioch, despite an offer of safe-conduct from the Armenian ruler of Cilicia, the duke preferred to travel by sea to Tarsos (mod. Tarsus, Turkey) on ships provided by Bohe-mund III, prince of Antioch. From there he was escorted by Turkish troops to meet Qilij Arslan II, sultan of Rum, near the latter’s capital of Ikonion (mod. Konya, Turkey), where again he was received with great respect and laden with presents. Henry subsequently returned via Constantinople and the route through the Balkans by which he had come, reaching Bavaria by December 1172.
There is a detailed account of this pilgrimage in the Chronicae Slavorum of Arnold of Lubeck, but whether Henry made quite such an impression as this author maintained is doubtful. Certainly his visit to the Holy Land was not mentioned by the chronicler William of Tyre, perhaps because it was an entirely peaceful pilgrimage, of no military significance whatsoever. However, according to Arnold, Duke Henry made generous donations to the Holy Sepulchre and to the military orders, including 1,000 marks of silver to the Templars to buy land to support troops. Perhaps the most significant consequence was the establishment of friendly relations with the Saljuq sultan of Rum, diplomatic contacts that set a precedent for Frederick Barbarossa’s negotiations with Qilij Arslan II in 1188-1189 as he attempted to secure an unopposed passage for his army across Asia Minor during the Third Crusade (1189-1192).
Some slightly later commentators interpreted the pilgrimage as the beginning of Henry’s breach with the emperor, which was to lead to the confiscation of his duchies in 1180, but this view seems to be colored by hindsight, and relations between the two remained friendly for some time after 1172. Arnold of Lubeck saw the motive as entirely religious, “to adore the Lord in the land where His feet had trod” [Arnoldi Chronica Slavorum, ed. Johann Martin Lappenberg, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Ger-manicarum 14 (Hannover: Hahn, 1868), p. 11].
-G. A. Loud
Bibliography
Jordan, Karl, Henry the Lion: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986).
World History
