CHAPTER VIII.
GERMANY: HENRY I AND OTTO THE GREAT.
"The future of the realm," Conrad is said to have declared with his dying words, "lies with the Saxons," and he bade his brother Everard to bear the royal insignia to Henry, the Saxon Duke, as the one man capable of restoring the glory of the German name. The union of Frank and Saxon had given the throne to Conrad on the death of Louis the Child; the same alliance was responsible for the ascendancy of the Saxon dynasty in 919[1]. Everard carried out the last injunctions of the late king, waived his own claim, and caused Henry the Saxon to assume the royal dignity. The election was a purely secular function; for, either from a genuine feeling of his unworthiness or from his dislike of the higher clergy and their secular influence, a dislike which he undoubtedly possessed in the earlier years of his reign, he dispensed with the solemn ceremonials of anointing and coronation offered him by Archbishop Heriger of Mayence. It took place at Fritzlar on the borders of Franconia and Saxony in May 919.
The position of Henry the Fowler[2] was a difficult one. As king he was scarcely more powerful than he was as duke. Saxon and Franconian princes had been present at the election, but there is little reason to believe that the princes of the southern duchies were present or that they acquiesced in the result. Everard, Duke of Franconia, had been chiefly instrumental in raising Henry to the throne, but he had previously been an inveterate enemy to the Saxon house, and his loyalty was only purchased at the price of almost complete independence in his own dukedom. The new king did not at first aspire very high. He had no scheme of governing the whole realm, as the Carolings before him, from one centre through his own officials. He had no choice but to allow the tribes to manage their own affairs according to their own customs and their own traditions. Even his modest ambition to be regarded as the head of a confederate Germany was not yet accepted. Bavaria and
