ship. It was he who bore the burden of keeping peace, and shortly before Henry's death we find him, the Saxon duke and the Danish king in allied expedition against the Lyutitzi. To the Church, which stood for civilisation, he was also a friend. He established monasteries and canons regular in Lübeck, Oldenburg and elsewhere. Throughout the land he built churches and to their service he summoned missionary priests who "freely did the work of God"; like Oswald in Northumbria he travelled with them and often acted as interpreter. "Had he lived," says the chronicler, "he would have brought all the pagans to the Christian faith." He survived Henry some ten years, being murdered in 1066.
The peace imposed by Conrad upon the Lyutitzi was twice broken under Henry. In 1045 he had to lead an expedition against them, but they promptly submitted and returned to tribute. When ten years later they again broke bounds, Henry sent against them William of the Nordmark and Count Dietrich. At Prizlava, where a ruined castle still overlooks the confluence of Havel and Elbe, the Margrave was ambushed, and both he and Dietrich fell. These tidings reached Henry before his death, and with it the frontier troubles grew more intense.
To this great King and Emperor there has sometimes been ascribed a conscious attempt at a restoration of the Empire of Charlemagne, limited geographically but of world-wide importance through its control of the Western Church from its centre, Rome. But there is little real trace of such a conception on Henry's part, save in the one feature of that ordered rule which was inseparably bound up with Charlemagne's Empire. Too much has been sometimes made of Henry's attitude towards Cluny, and of his marriage with Agnes of Poitou and Aquitaine, as paving the way for the acquisition of France. But this is a mere conjecture based upon a wish to reconcile later German ideals with the work of one of their greatest kings. He did use the sympathy of the Church, and especially of Cluny, in Burgundy, as a help towards the stability of ordered imperial rule, and that was all. It was no new and subtle scheme but an old-established procedure; a piece of honest policy, not a cynical design to trap France by means of piety. Henry's mind was, it is true, pre-occupied with the Middle Kingdom, but there is no trace of any endeavour to pave the way for an eventual re-union under the sceptre of his heirs of the whole Carolingian Empire. There is, however, far stronger basis for the belief that he meant an imperial control over the Papacy than that he aimed at an eventual supremacy over France.
For it is plain that Henry not only un-made and made Popes, but that he accepted the offer of the Patriciate in the belief that it meant control over papal elections, and that he secured from the Romans a sworn promise to give to himself and to his heir the chief voice in all future elections. Whatever the exact force of the Emperor's control, the promise meant that no one could be Pope except with his approval. It
