His work in the south completed, the Emperor returned northward. On the march the troops suffered severely from the heat; pestilence broke out in the camp, and many, among them Queen Gunnhild and Herman, Duke of Swabia, perished; Conrad himself was overcome with sickness. Under these circumstances it was impossible to renew the siege of Milan. Leaving, therefore, injunctions with the Italian princes to make an annual devastation of the Milanese territory, the Emperor made his way back to Germany.
Conrad never recovered his strength. At Nimeguen in February 1039 he was overcome by a more severe attack of the gout; in May he was well enough to be removed to Utrecht, where he celebrated the Whitsun festival. But he grew rapidly worse, and died the following day (4 June). His embalmed body was borne through Mayence and Worms to Spires, the favourite city of the Salian emperors, and was buried in the crypt of its cathedral church.
Conrad, once he had gained the mastery in his kingdom, was determined to secure the inheritance to his son; he was not only the first, but by a definite policy the founder, of the Salian dynasty. So at Augsburg in 1026 he designated his youthful son Henry, a boy of nine years old, as his successor; his choice was approved by the princes, and the child was duly crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1028. The theory of hereditary succession seems to have been a guiding principle in the policy of Conrad II. He had suffered himself from the absence of it; for his uncle, the younger brother of his father, had acquired the Carinthian dukedom of his grandfather, and on his death it had passed out of the family altogether to the total disregard not only of his own claims, but also of those of his cousin, the younger Conrad, the son of the late duke. Adalbero of Eppenstein must in his eyes have been looked upon as an interloper. Personal wrongs doubtless biassed his judgment when the Duke of Carinthia was charged with treasonable designs at the Diet of Bamberg in 1035. Adalbero was deposed and sentenced to the loss of his fiefs. The court witnessed a strange scene before the verdict was obtained; the assent of the young King Henry, as Duke of Bavaria, was deemed necessary, and this the latter steadfastly refused to give; he was bound, he afterwards explained, by an oath to Adalbero taken at the instance of his tutor, Bishop Egilbert of Freising. Entreaties and threats availed nothing; the son was obdurate, and the Emperor was so incensed with passion that he fell senseless to the floor. When he recovered consciousness he again approached his son, humbled himself at his feet, and finally, by this somewhat undignified act, gained his end[1]. But the successor to the fallen duke was well chosen; it was the
- ↑ See the letter addressed to Bishop Azecho of Worms in Giesebrecht, II. 712. Cf. also Neues Archiv, III. 321.
