Needed on the Hungarian frontier, Henry took a risky but generous step: he restored to Godfrey of Lorraine a former fief of his in the diocese of Cologne and set him to guard the peace against Baldwin. From this summer of 1051 until his marriage with Beatrice of Tuscany in 1054 Godfrey was outwardly an obedient vassal.
The earlier part of 1052 was marked mainly by ecclesiastical cares and appointments, and then by another Hungarian expedition. The siege of Pressburg was begun, when Andrew induced Leo IX to act the mediator, for which purpose the Pope came to Ratisbon. Andrew had promised the Pope to give all satisfaction and tribute, but when Henry had raised the siege he withdrew the promise. Leo, in just anger, excommunicated him, but Henry could not renew the campaign, which was his last against Hungary. He had other matters, and notably the Norman danger in Italy, to talk over with the Pope. From January 1052 to February 1053 Leo was in Germany: Henry sent off an army to help him in his Italian wars and then quickly recalled it. Leo had to set out with a motley band of his own raising, some sent by their lords, some criminals, some adventurers, and most of them Swabians like himself.
Events were moving towards the deposition of Kuno of Bavaria: since Christmas 1052 he and Gebhard, Bishop of Ratisbon, had been at daggers drawn. The enemies, thus breaking the peace, were summoned to Merseburg at Easter 1053; there Kuno for his violence against Gebhard and "dealing unjust judgements among the people" was deposed by the sentence of "some of the princes." He took his punishment badly, and on returning to the South he, like Godfrey, began to "stir up cruel strife," sparing neither imperialists nor his own late duchy. Bavaria was visited, too, by a famine so sore that peasants fled the country and whole villages were left deserted, and "in those days both great men and lesser men of the realm, murmuring more and more against the Emperor, were saying each to the other that, from the path of justice, peace, divine fear and virtue of all kind, on which in the beginning he had set out and in which from day to day he should have progressed, he had gradually turned aside to avarice and a certain carelessness; and had grown to be less than himself."
But if the diet at Merseburg saw Kuno turned to an enemy it also saw Svein of Denmark made a friend. In the North, Adalbert's parvula Bremen had become almost instar Romae. Adalbert's chance lay in the haphazard fashion of the conversion of the Scandinavian nations to Christianity. Before the days of Knut, Bremen had been the missionary centre for the North, although it had not wrought its work as carefully as did the English missionaries under Knut. As Denmark grew more coherently Christian, Bremen began to lose control, and its loss of ecclesiastical prestige meant a loss of political influence to Germany: whether the Danish bishops were consecrated at Rome or even at Bremen they were autonomous. The older alliance between Conrad II and Knut had brought
