OTTO I, Emperor and King of Germany. - The Saxon dynasty had established itself so effectively in Germany through the work of Henry I that his son O. had been able to succeed him at the age of 24 without encountering opposition. Tall, robust, poorly educated (he did not know Latin and did not learn to read until he was 35), he was above all a warrior; and surrounded by scribes, among whom the idealized memory of Charlemagne remained alive, he strove to revive the tradition of the great Emperor. Enthroned at Aachen on 7 August 936 before the bishops and dukes, eager to serve him, he would soon know how, once consecrated, to unite in his person all those other traits that contemporaries considered essential in an emperor: victorious leader, sovereign of many peoples, protector of the Pope.
Like Charlemagne, O. appeared before his subjects as the defender of the Christian people. Saxony, once a hotbed of barbarism and paganism, had become the champion of Christian order. Against the Slavs O. revived the tradition of warlike and missionary expansion, occupied Brandenburg and Lusatia, encouraged the apostolate of Boso of Merseburg, founded the bishopric of Oldenburg and the archbishoprics of Magdeburg and Hamburg, metropolitan sees of new Christianities (955-68). He dealt his hardest blows against the Hungarians, who after 937 had spread terror from one side as far as Capua and on the other as far as Reims and Aquitaine. Supported, in fact, by all the forces of Germany, he confronted them in Bavaria on the banks of the Lech (10 August 955) and exterminated them. Broken in this way, their vital strength, the Hungarians settled down and founded a State that thirty years later, with St. Stephen, would enter into the fold of Christendom.
Meanwhile O. applied himself, first of all, to rebuilding the cohesion of Germany, fragmented into so many national duchies. Triumphant over two great seditions (938-39 and 953), he recovered the usurped lands of the royal domain, forced the princes to fidelity, replaced them, when necessary, by his own authority with members of his family: thus he established his son Liudolf in Swabia, his brother Henry in Bavaria, his son-in-law Conrad in Lorraine, keeping Franconia for himself. And to remove from each the temptation to rebel, he had his vassals supervised by the counts palatine. With regard to the German Church, O.'s policy consisted in making himself master of the bishoprics and in enriching the prelates in order to secure their support. He intervened constantly in elections, himself carried out investitures, regarded bishops as lords, developed their feudal prerogatives and sometimes abandoned to them the comital powers; thus at Magdeburg, Cologne, Speyer. Although his choice often fell on loyal persons and on relatives, the bishops appointed by him generally gave good proof of true religious zeal: for example, his brother Bruno, archbishop of Cologne, and Ulrich of Augsburg.
O. also sought to gather under his scepter the other Carolingian countries. In France he exploited the dissensions between Louis IV d'Outremer and Hugh the Great, son of King Robert, both his brothers-in-law, and acted now as mediator, now as protector of the hard-pressed Carolingian; while the Council of Ingelheim (948) provided him with the occasion to concern himself with the ecclesiastical affairs of the Kingdom of France. But his action in the West was limited to this. In the Rhône regions O. intervened to keep the Kingdom of Burgundy in the hands of the young king Conrad, threatened by the claims of Hugh of Arles, already possessor of the crown of Italy. The anarchic situation of the peninsula favored the ambitions of the German King in a quite particular way. In the north the ancient Lombard Kingdom was the prey of several rival dynasties: the dynasties of Arles and of Burgundy, both supplanted by Berengar, margrave of Ivrea, to whom
O., in the course of a first intervention (951), had had to recognize the Lombard crown. In the south, the Byzantine possessions were infested by the Saracens. In the center, the Papal State was in the grip of the agitations provoked by the double succession of the "principal senator of the Romans" Alberic (954) and of Pope Agapetus (955), both devolved to Alberic's son, Octavian, barely sixteen years old and pontiff under the name of John XII, inexperienced and of no good repute. Summoned to aid by the Pope, O. descended into Italy (961), assumed the Iron Crown at Pavia and came to encamp at Monte Mario (31 January 962); two days later he received the imperial crown in St. Peter's.
The elevation of O. I to emperor sharpened his desire to re-establish the tradition of Charlemagne. With the title, like him, of "imperator augustus," he intended to legislate for the entire Frankish people and to restore the imperial rights over the Eternal City, despite all the efforts of John XII to maintain the principle of the pre-eminence of pontifical power. While the conciliar decrees of 963, ratifying O.'s ecclesiastical policy in Germany, recalled the Pope's right to regulate, in the final analysis, religious organization, the Privilegium Othonis (13 February 962) confirmed the territorial donations of Pepin and Charlemagne and renewed the Constitution of 824: control of the administration of the Papal States by means of the missi dominici, oath of fidelity of the Pope to the Emperor. The misunderstanding between Pope and Emperor worsened when John XII sought the support of Berengar of Ivrea and of his son Adalbert. O., the stronger, returned to Rome, presided at St. Peter's over a Council that deposed John (November 963) and set against him the antipope Leo VIII (4 December 963). A revolt of the Romans restored John XII to his see; but he died shortly afterward (May 964) and O. was fortunate enough to capture and deport the ephemeral successor Benedict V (June 964) and finally to impose on the Romans, after the death of Leo VIII (965), a Pope of his own choosing, John XIII. To better consolidate his power over Italy and the Papacy, O. stayed six consecutive years in the peninsula, presided in Rome itself, in 967, over a great assembly, and demanded from the Pope the imperial coronation of his son Otto II at Christmas of the same year. At the same time O. I asserted his claims to dominate southern Italy; he forced the dukes of Benevento and of Capua to pay him homage and the basilico John Tzimiskes to recognize his imperial title and to give as wife to Otto II a "porphyrogenita" princess, Theophano.
The prestige of O. I, in its extent, recalled that of Charlemagne. At the "judgments," which he too held in Italy, in Saxony, in Franconia or in Lorraine, there appeared the envoys of the kings of France and of Burgundy, those of Denmark, of Hungary and of Bulgaria and of the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt himself. The future of the new dynasty seemed gloriously assured; O. and his descendants seemed marked by God to take up and continue the work of Charlemagne. The idea of the Empire was consolidated by the association of an heir already crowned, while the father was still living. But the inequality of powers between the Emperor and the Pope was so great in favor of the former that it gave reason to foresee the renewal and aggravation of the conflicts in which O. had struggled. The importance he accorded to Italian problems already announced the orientation that his successors would imprint on their imperial policy.
Bibliography15 works
Guglielmo Mollat