In another sphere of activity, this same year of mingled success and disaster brought Henry, before its close, a peculiar triumph. This was the establishment, on 1 November 1007, of the new see of Bamberg. The completion of this cherished scheme was at once the fruit of Henry's religious zeal and the witness to his supremacy over the German Church. Nevertheless, it was just his claim to such supremacy in a particular case that involved him soon after in a bitter domestic quarrel, which ran its unhappy course for several years, and, combined with other troubles at home, effectually hindered further action abroad. At this point, then, it is necessary to explain Henry's ecclesiastical policy, upon which his whole system of government was based.
In right of the Crown, Henry had small material means at command to enforce his authority. The obedience due to him as their chosen and anointed king might be readily acknowledged by all his subjects, but was just as readily withheld when it conflicted with private interest. Especially was this the case with the higher nobility. The counts, though still in theory royal officials and responsible to the sovereign for the maintenance of public order in their several districts, had become in fact hereditary territorial magnates, whose offices, like their fiefs and their family estates, usually passed from father to son in regular succession. The privilege of "immunity" which many enjoyed, and the feudal relation now generally subsisting between them and their tenants, still further strengthened their position. These petty potentates however, who should have been the upholders of law, were too often its worst transgressors. Their greed for landed wealth urged them into perpetual feuds with one another or with their ecclesiastical neighbours, while the abuse of their seignorial rights made them the oppressors of the classes below them. In these evil tendencies they had been encouraged by the lax administration of the last two reigns. Yet even more were the greater lay magnates, the dukes and margraves, disposed to regard themselves as hereditary princes. The dukes, in spite of past efforts to reduce their pretensions, were the recognised chiefs of the separate races which made up the German nation, and, like Herman of Swabia, were generally too strong, even in defeat, to be displaced without risk. The margraves, holding an office less venerable, had also won, by effective service on the frontiers, a firm position in the State. Though dukes and margraves alike required investiture by the king, it was rarely that a son was not preferred to his father's place. The control of men so firmly established in power and dignity could be no easy task; yet it now depended upon the vindication of the royal authority whether the nation should preserve its political cohesion, or be split up, like the adjacent kingdoms on the West, into a loose aggregation of almost independent principalities under a nominal sovereign.
It was the second Henry who by his energy postponed for two generations the process of disintegration which set in under Henry IV. To restore the rule of law was his prime object. In the decay, however,
