Emperor Henry II

Henry II, known as Saint Henry and sometimes called Henry the Exuberant, was the last emperor of the Ottonian dynasty and the only German king to be formally canonized by the Catholic Church. He was born on 6 May 973, the son of Henry II, Duke of Bavaria, called the Quarrelsome, and Gisela of Burgundy. His childhood was marked by his father's repeated conflicts with the imperial court, including exile and imprisonment after rebellions against Otto II and Otto III. Henry received a careful clerical education at the cathedral school of Hildesheim and later under Bishop Wolfgang of Regensburg, which formed a lasting attachment to the Church and to monastic ideals. Upon his father's death in 995 he succeeded as Duke of Bavaria and began to build an independent princely power in the southeast of the German kingdom.

When Emperor Otto III died suddenly in Italy in 1002 without an heir, Henry, as the nearest male Ottonian kinsman, claimed the German crown. Several magnates contested the succession, notably Duke Hermann II of Swabia, but Henry secured election and was crowned King of the Germans at Mainz. He spent the following years consolidating royal authority in Germany, subduing rivals, and asserting his rights in Italy, where he was crowned King of Italy at Pavia in 1004. After further campaigns south of the Alps he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Benedict VIII in Rome on 14 February 1014. His reign was characterized by repeated wars on the eastern frontier against Duke Bolesław I of Poland, by efforts to keep the stem duchies subordinate to the crown, and by a close working alliance with the papacy and the German episcopate. He also intervened in Burgundy and maintained pressure on the Slavic lands beyond the Elbe and Oder.

Henry was an outstanding patron of ecclesiastical institutions. In 1007 he founded the Diocese of Bamberg, richly endowing it from royal and ducal lands and making the new see a center of imperial representation and religious life; Bamberg Cathedral became his principal foundation and later his burial church. He supported the Cluniac reform and the legal independence of monasteries, granted privileges to numerous abbeys, and was himself received as a Benedictine oblate. Contemporary writers and later hagiographers presented him as a ruler of unusual personal piety who had once contemplated entering the cloister and who governed as a servant of the Church. Around the year 1000 he married Cunigunde of Luxembourg. The couple remained childless. Later legend interpreted this as a virginal, Josephite marriage, but modern historians generally treat the lack of offspring as infertility rather than a deliberate vow. The absence of an heir meant that Henry's death brought the male Ottonian line to an end and opened the way for the election of Conrad II, the first Salian king.

Henry died on 13 July 1024 at the imperial palace of Grona, near Göttingen in Saxony, after a reign of more than two decades as king and ten years as emperor. He was buried in Bamberg Cathedral. His widow Cunigunde later entered the monastery she had founded at Kaufungen and was herself canonized in 1200. Popular veneration of Henry grew first at Bamberg and then more widely in the Empire. Pope Eugene III canonized him in 1146. His feast is kept on 13 July. He is invoked as patron of kings and emperors, of the cities of Bamberg and Basel, of childless couples, of people with disabilities, of those rejected by religious orders, and of Benedictine oblates, and he remains the outstanding sainted secular ruler of medieval Germany.