Emperor Henry II

Henry II, later venerated as Saint Henry and often called Henry the Pious, was born on 6 May 973, the son of Duke Henry II of Bavaria—known as Henry the Wrangler because of his repeated revolts against the imperial court—and of Gisela of Burgundy. He belonged to a Bavarian cadet branch of the Ottonian dynasty that had held the East Frankish and imperial crowns since the tenth century. His father’s depositions and imprisonments shaped his childhood and brought periods of exile upon the ducal household. Henry was educated at the cathedral school of Hildesheim, a leading center of Ottonian learning, where he received formation in Scripture, liturgy, and the duties of Christian rulership; some contemporaries thought he might be destined for an ecclesiastical career. In 995, on his father’s death, he succeeded as Duke of Bavaria.

When his cousin Emperor Otto III died unexpectedly in Italy in 1002 without an heir, Henry claimed the German throne as the nearest legitimate Ottonian kinsman. The succession was contested by Duke Herman II of Swabia and other magnates, and Henry had to campaign and negotiate before he was elected and crowned King of the Germans at Mainz in June 1002. He then made the customary royal progress through the duchies to secure recognition. In 1004 he crossed the Alps, was acknowledged as King of Italy, and was crowned at Pavia. On 14 February 1014 Pope Benedict VIII crowned him Holy Roman Emperor in Rome. Henry was the last emperor of the Ottonian line.

His government was marked by an unusually close partnership with the Church. In 1007 he obtained papal approval for the foundation of the Diocese of Bamberg, which he richly endowed from his own domains; the new see was meant both as a missionary base toward the Slavic lands and as a lasting memorial of his reign. He favored Cluniac and related monastic reforms, restored and founded abbeys, and treated the episcopate as a pillar of royal administration. Around the turn of the eleventh century he married Cunigunde of Luxembourg. The marriage produced no children. Later medieval hagiography portrayed it as a vowed celibate union; modern historians treat that claim with caution while agreeing that the couple remained childless. The extinction of the direct Ottonian line was the political result, and the crown passed after his death to Conrad II of the Salian house.

Henry’s reign was not peaceful. He fought a long series of wars against Bolesław I of Poland, whose expansion into Lusatia and Bohemia challenged imperial authority; campaigns across the first two decades of the eleventh century ended with the Peace of Bautzen, which left Bolesław in possession of Lusatia as an imperial fief. Henry also intervened in Burgundy and repeatedly in Italy, and he faced revolts among German princes. In his later years he continued the itinerant kingship of the period, holding assemblies and attending to his foundations. He died on 13 July 1024 at the imperial palatinate of Grona, near Göttingen, and was buried in Bamberg Cathedral. A cult of sanctity grew at Bamberg; in 1146 Pope Eugene III formally canonized him, the only medieval king of Germany to receive that honor. His feast is kept on 13 July. He is invoked as patron of Bamberg and its diocese, of Basel, of Benedictine oblates, of childless persons, of the disabled, of kings and dukes, and against sterility.