ineffectual efforts of his motley army, but by the same means as it was lost, the treachery of Kiso. His faithless conduct brought on an attack of the Lusatians; they fell upon and scattered an army sent to Kiso's support under the Margrave Eckhard of Meissen. However, when the king took the field himself they were quickly dispersed. A brief notice of the Quedlinburg annalist informs us of a general rising of the Wends: "All the Slavs except the Sorbs revolted from the Saxons" (994). After a short campaign in the following year Otto seems to have patched up some kind of a truce, and restored order sufficient to permit him to leave Germany, and fulfil his cherished wish of visiting Italy.
Unfortunately the disturbances were not confined to the eastern frontier. In 991 the Northmen, taking advantage of the internal weakness of Germany, renewed their piratical descents on the Frisian coast. In 994 they actually sailed up the river Elbe and carried their devastations into Saxony. In an engagement fought at Stade a small band of Saxons was defeated and their leaders were captured. While the Saxon chiefs lay bound hand and foot on the ships, the Northmen ravaged the country at will. Of the captives, some were ransomed, the Margrave Siegfried effected his escape by making his capturers intoxicated, the remainder, after shameful mutilation, were cast, more dead than alive, upon the shore. The pirates renewed their inroads in the next year, but the defensive measures taken by Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim successfully checked their aggressions.
Our brief summary of the events of the frontier campaigns illustrates the difficulties of the situation in Germany; it shews how fatal and how lasting had been the effects of Otto II's Italian policy, how unwise the high imperial aims of Otto III. Fortunately for the regents the southern duchies had given no trouble since the baffled attempt of Henry the Wrangler to obtain the crown for himself. Changes however had taken place in their administration. On the death of Henry the Younger in 989 Carinthia and the March of Verona had been re-attached to the duchy of Bavaria. But when Henry the Wrangler died in 995, they did not pass with Bavaria to his son Henry, afterwards the Emperor Henry II, but were restored to Otto, the son of Conrad the Red[1].
Otto's first object was to visit Italy. He had taken the government into his own hands in 994 when he was fourteen years of age, but owing to the unsettled state of Germany it was not until 996 that he was able to achieve his purpose. It was after his return from his first expedition across the Alps that he began to develop that ambitious and somewhat fantastic policy, for which perhaps he has been too severely censured. It must be remembered that from his earliest boyhood he had come under the influence of foreigners. The blame must rest equally on all those who had charge of his education. His mother, the Empress Theophano, and his tutor John, Abbot of the monastery of Nonantula, a Calabrian by
- ↑ According to some authorities Otto was not restored to his duchy till 1002.
