to the earliest Henry of his race. In moral dignity, it may be safely said, he excelled any monarch of the Saxon house.
The Empire presented a complication of difficulties such as only patience and prudence could overcome. Nearly every province was seething in unrest. Not only were the lay magnates, as ever, at feud with their ecclesiastical neighbours, but each order was rent by quarrels among its own members. Among the clergy of every degree, worldliness and neglect of duty, avarice and loose living, were widely prevalent. It was a heavy task, therefore, that Henry undertook, and he had now to restore by his own efforts the sovereign power in face of men who had hitherto been his equals.
In these adverse circumstances the new reign began, and by them its course was set. The history of the reign is confused; but through it all may be traced the king's unwavering purpose of bringing about a more settled state of things. The large measure of success that he achieved therein entitles Henry to a high place among the sovereigns of Germany; but his zeal for the suppression of ecclesiastical abuses was felt over a wider sphere, and has set him among the reformers of the Western Church. And it is in the ecclesiastical policy that he pursued, combining as it did the political system of Otto the Great with the reforming energy of Henry the Third, and thus linking him with both those monarchs, that the chief interest of his career is to be found.
The beginning of Henry's reign was marked by two grave losses to the Empire; in the South, of the Lombard kingdom; in the East, of the tributary duchy of Bohemia. The former event, indeed, had taken place even before Henry had become a candidate for the throne. For within a month of the death of Otto III Lombardy broke into open revolt; and on 15 February 1002 Ardoin, Marquess of Ivrea, was elected King of the Lombards and crowned in the basilica of St Michael at Pavia.
This new king was nearly related to, if he did not actually spring from, the marquesses of Turin, and was connected also with the late royal house of Ivrea, with whose hereditary March he had been invested about twelve years since. His career as marquess had been a stormy one. During a quarrel with Peter, Bishop of Vercelli, Ardoin had taken that city by assault, and in the tumult the bishop was slain. Soon after, his violence towards Warmund, the Bishop of his own city of Ivrea, had brought down upon him a severe rebuke from Pope Gregory V. Through the influence of Leo, Bishop of Vercelli, Ardoin was summoned to Rome in 999 to answer for his alleged misdeeds. Yet, in spite of papal censure and imperial forfeiture, he had kept fast hold both of his March and of his possessions until the turn of fortune raised him to the Lombard throne[1].
Ardoin may have been in truth little more than a rough soldier. Yet he proved himself a skilful leader in war; and if his reign was unfortunate
- ↑ See supra, Chap. VII, pp. 175-6.
