permit this extraordinary piece of audacity to remain long unpunished. With a large army he crossed the frontier in October, while the French king retreated before him to Etampes. Otto sacked the royal manor of Attigny, passed unchecked through Rheims and Soissons, plundered the palace of Compiègne and eventually appeared on the heights of Montmartre above Paris. But as a fresh army was mustering to resist him, he contented himself with ravaging the country round and then withdrew to Germany. The French army harassed the rear of the retreating army and even fought a slight engagement on the banks of the Aisne. In the next year Lothair involved himself in a local dispute in Flanders, but finally sought an interview with the Emperor at Margut on the Chiers (980), where he agreed to abandon all claim to Lorraine.
During the first seven years of his reign Otto had been fairly successful. He had settled the troubles with which he was confronted in Bavaria at the outset of his reign; he had maintained his position in Lorraine in the face of repeated rebellions and attempts of Lothair to recover it for the West Frankish crown; he had subdued the Danes, the Bohemians, and the Poles. Under his rule the work of conversion of the heathen races on the eastern frontier made rapid progress. Bishoprics were established for Bohemia at Prague, for Moravia at Olmütz and for Denmark at Odense on the island of Fyn. Even the Hungarians, in spite of intermittent warfare in which Liutpold succeeded in extending the East March as far as the Wienerwald, were inclined to be on better terms with Germany and permitted Bishop Pilgrim of Passau to pursue his missionary labours among the heathen Magyars.
The affairs of Germany were at last sufficiently settled to justify the Emperor's absence in Italy. In November 980 he crossed the Alps accompanied by his wife, his infant son (Otto III was born in July 980), and his nephew Otto of Swabia.
The disastrous end of Otto's Italian campaign of 980-983[1] led to revolts all along the German frontier, accompanied by a heathen reaction. Duke Bernard of Saxony on his way to the diet of Verona (983) was summoned back by the news that Svein who had deposed his father, Harold Bluetooth, had overrun the Danish March. The Lusatians broke into rebellion, destroyed the churches of Havelberg and Brandenburg and put many Christians to the sword. Hamburg was plundered and burnt by the Obotrites, Zeitz by an army of Bohemians. The faith of Christ and St Peter, says Thietmar, was forsaken for the worship of demons. A combined movement of the Saxon princes
- ↑ Vide supra, pp. 168-70.
East Franks, and King Lothair turned it to the S. E. indicating that the West Frankish king was lord over Germany. But Thietmar II. 8 says the opposite. "It was the custom of all who possessed this place to turn it (the eagle) towards their country"; that is, if it pointed east it indicated that the German king was lord of Aix-la-Chapelle.
