Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans.

Episode one.

A new beginning in more than one way.

This is the very first real episode of my podcast and I so hope you enjoy it.

I am massively excited and if I sound a bit nervous, it is because I am.

So please bear with me.

It will get better.

So, on with the show.

We are starting in the year 919 AD.

Things are not going well.

The mighty empire of Charlemagne has fallen apart.

What we have instead are a multitude of puny kingdoms.

Their feeble rulers are being pushed around by their formidable barons.

The frontiers are breached.

In the north, the Vikings and the Danes are ransacking towns and villages along the coast, and even deep in land.

In the east, the Slavs are burning Hamburg.

And in the south, the most terrifying of them all, the Magyars.

A steppe tribe like the Huns and the Mongols, are marauding all the way from Bavaria to northern Spain.

One of those crumbling kingdoms was East Francia, which covers what is today West Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Its ruler, Conrad, was the last king who traced his claim back to Charlemagne himself, even though that was really only by adoption.

After seven years of incessant and fruitless civil and foreign wars, Conrad, exhausted and disillusioned, gave up and died.

For six months, the throne remained vacant.

So by rights, the crown should have gone to the West Francine King Charles, Charles the Simple.

As the most senior member of the Carolingian family.

However, the four German dukes of Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria and Saxony agreed on one thing and one thing only, and that was that Charles should not be king.

Ruling Charles out left only three credible contenders.

Eberhard of Franconia, the brother of the deceased King Conrad, Duke Arnulf of Bavaria and Duke Henry of Saxony.

There's another Duke, Burckhardt of Swabia, but he was otherwise occupied in his own little civil war.

Eberhard held the greatest of the four duchies and was the closest blood relative of the last ruler.

So by all accounts, he ought to succeed him.

But that is not what happened.

According to the chronicles, when Conrad lay on his deathbed, he beseeched his brother Eberhard not to take the reign, but to offer it to Henry, the Duke of Saxony.

And it says that Eberhard saddled his horse and dutifully traveled to Henry's castle at Quedlinburg to present him with the crown.

And when he stood there, crown in hand, he found Henry more interested in his favorite pastime, playing with songbirds, hence his nickname, the Fowler.

Rather than in pursuing power and Might.

That story is in equal measure cute as it is made up.

Note, there were six months between Conrad's death and Eberhard's visit.

So even though the roads in 10th century Germany were pretty awful, he could have made that journey in a lot less time than that.

It's more likely that Eberhard used his time to think through the implications of taking up his brother's mantle.

Objectively, the kingdom of East Francia was a complete hospital pass.

The king was expected to use up all his resources, including his private property, to defend the realm.

At the same time, his rapacious nobles were constantly grabbing more and more of the royal domain, making it ever harder to keep the ship of state afloat.

And his brother, despite being the richest of the dukes, had failed in the attempt to unify the kingdom and became a lot poorer in the process.

There was no indication that Eberhard would fare any better.

So my guess is that Eberhard decided it was better to pass the buck on to another duke, kick back and see what advantages he could gain under the new regime anyway.

Whether it was respect for the last wishes of a dying king or a cold hearted weighing of options.

In May 919 at the Royal palace of Fritzlar, the nobles of Saxony and Franconia elected Henry, Duke of Saxony, to be king of East Francia.

Note that it was only the Saxons and the Franconians who elected Henry.

The other half of the country, namely the Bavarians and Swabians, stayed away from the election.

Instead, the Bavarians actually elected their own duke, Arnulf to be king.

Henry's coronation also differed vastly from Conrad's.

Conrad had insisted on the full pageantry of a Carolingian royal investiture.

That includes being anointed and consecrated, which in turn raised him from a humble human being to a representative of Christ on earth.

Henry, on the other hand, decided to forego any major ceremony and certainly did not want to be anointed and consecrated as king.

Hardly ever in German history has a king acceded to the throne with so little going for him.

He was no close blood relative of any previous king.

He was elected only by half of his kingdom's barons, and he wasn't even consecrated as king by the Church.

But I think behind the low key coronation and that story with the songbirds, there have been a very clever calculation.

You see, Conrad, despite his adoption and all that frankincense in myrrh, could not bend the dukes and the bishops to his will.

Henry may have some more resources, having pooled with Eberhard but success was by no means guaranteed.

So by foregoing the claims to absolute dominion awarded by the Church and pretending not to be really interested in the crown in the first place, he opens up the possibility of bringing the other dukes into a new political system where the king is only a first amongst equals, rather than an almighty ruler and man.

Did this new model and this new king do?

Well, Henry will achieve in seven simple steps what all his predecessors since Charlemagne have failed so dismally at creating a unified, lasting kingdom that was at least comparatively safe from external threats.

Let's start with step one, the bringing of the Swabians and the Bavarians into the fold.

The first duke to succumb to the charms and arms of Henry was Burckhardt of Swabia.

Burckhardt may have stayed away from Henry's coronation, but also he didn't support Arnold's claim to kingship.

He was otherwise occupied.

Having literally just months earlier captured the reins of the duchy, he was now under pressure from King Rudolf of Burgundy.

This Rudolf had made claims for parts of what is now Alsace in Germanic Switzerland.

His army had captured Zurich and had started to threaten Burckhardt's main power base around Lake Constance.

Now Burckhardt was able to fight Rudolf of Burgundy back at a battle near Winterthur.

However, as soon as Rudolf's army had disappeared over the hill, Henry suddenly appeared with his forces.

But no battle ensued.

Instead of trying to defeat Burckhardt and then extract land and concessions from him, Henry offered him a friendship agreement.

Under this agreement, Henry appointed Burckhardt to be Duke of Swabia as his representative.

And that meant Burckhardt could now legitimately control the royal domain within his lands.

He could appoint bishops and abbots and essentially rule at will in his duchy.

In exchange, he had to accept Henry as king and support him in war.

Basically, he received pretty much the same freedoms we think Eberhard of Franconia had negotiated with Henry at the coronation.

Now, Bavaria was a harder nut to crack.

You see, the Bavarians always saw themselves as something better.

They were more civilized, thanks of having been inside the Roman Empire and having converted to Christianity earlier compared to the pagan, long haired and unwashed Saxons.

So really not much has changed there.

Plus they had a lot bigger guns than the Swabians.

Henry had to run two campaigns, one of which brought him to the gates of Regensburg, the capital of Bavarian Duke Arnulf.

Again, rather than trying to achieve a full military success and humiliate Arnulf, Henry preferred to agree terms and another Friendship Treaty was signed in 921, and Arnulf gained the same rights in Bavaria over royal domains, abbots and bishops that Burckhardt had gained in Swabia and Eberhard had already enjoyed in Franconia.

Arnulf then recognized Henry as king and accepted the duchy from him.

So within just three years, Henry had achieved what Conrad had so abysmally failed at.

He had unified the kingdom, though at the expense of a huge degree of independence for the dukes.

Now we get to step two, the acquisition of Lotharingia.

Having secured the southern duchies into the kingdom, Henry's focus now shifted towards Lothringia.

Just as a recap, Lothringia had been created as a separate kingdom for Emperor Lothar under the Treaty of Verdar in 843, and it comprised a strip of land that goes from the North Sea to the Mediterranean.

So it included what is today the Netherlands, Belgium, parts of West Germany, which includes the imperial capital in Aachen, eastern France.

So that's namely Burgundy, Alsace Lorraine, but also Provence and French speaking Switzerland, and then northern Italy.

In fact, these are the battlefields of every Franco German clash over the next 1102 years.

After the direct descendants of Lothar had died out, the southern end, including Burgundy, Provence and Northern Italy, had become separate kingdoms.

And we will talk about those a lot in the upcoming episodes.

The northern parts had become a duchy, and that duchy had moved back and forth between the kings of East Francia and the kings of West Francia.

Under King Conrad, Lothringia had just been lost to the West Francian King, Charles the Simple.

It was therefore a question of honor for Henry to get it back.

It also included the palace of Charlemagne in Aachen, making it even more desirable.

The good news for Henry was that Charles the Simple had become very unpopular in France.

In 922, the nobles of France rebelled and elected Robert of Neustria as the new king.

In the inevitably ensuing civil war, Henry remained neutral, even though he had just signed a friendship agreement with Charles a year before.

So instead of helping, he started nibbling away at Lothringian territory.

And then Charles was captured in a battle, in the same battle where his rival Robert had also died, leaving France without a king.

That's where Henry saw his chance and invaded.

However, the French quickly lined up behind Robert's successor, King Rudolf, and retaliated.

Henry had to run back across the border.

In the subsequent peace treaty.

For reasons that I don't quite understand, Henry was somehow able to keep all his gains so far.

The next chance came in 925, when the Lothringian leaders, including their Duke Gilbert, broke with King Rudolf of France and called on Henry for help.

Another invasion resulted in a demonstration of strength, but again no decisive battle.

Henry used his upper hand not to inflict humiliating defeats, but to sign friendship agreements again now with Duke Gilbert, with the French king, and with many of the Lothringian nobles.

And now something quite fundamental happens.

You know, under Charles, the simple Lothringia had remained a separate entity with its own laws, courts and king, who just happened to be either the king of West Francia or the king of East Francia.

Now, Henry's treatise changed that and it turned Lothringia into a duchy that was an integral part of the East Francian kingdom, so similar to Bavaria or Franconia.

He reconfirmed Gilbert as Duke of Lothringia and awarded him the same level of autonomy that the other dukes enjoyed, and also gave him his daughter as a wife.

Having acquired Lothringia not only strengthened the kingdom, but also gave Henry enormous prestige.

He now held the capital of Charlemagne in Aachen, making him not just practically, but also visibly the most senior leader in the ancient Carolingian empire.

Over the ensuing decades, the duchies as such, remained separate entities with their own internal structure and a lot of independence.

The dukes may seem irritatingly powerful to the king, but they themselves were not absolute rulers in their duchies either.

Like the king, the dukes needed to balance the powerful families within the duchies, ensure they feel respected and that their advice was heard.

The title of dukes was not yet an inherited one, so the king could, and ultimately did, replace the ruling ducal families with trusted allies or more often, immediate family members.

That being said, he could not change the duchy's internal structure.

So these new dukes, even when they are sons or brothers of the king, will represent the duchy in their dealings with the king, rather than being at the king's beck and call.

Now comes step three, the building of a new military.

Having created a new political structure for the kingdom, ensured some internal peace and led to a rapid expansion of the economy.

At the same time, Henry reformed and founded new monasteries that played a major role not only in learning and spiritual well being, but also in the internal colonization of the country that was still almost entirely covered in forests.

The biggest change, however, was to the military.

The Carolingian armies consisted predominantly of free men who were obliged to serve a certain number of days as soldiers at their own expense.

There were some armored knights embedded in the army, but they were still exceedingly rare and did not form their own divisions.

So, given the transitory nature of military service, soldiers tended to be poorly trained and pretty poorly equipped.

That did not matter much as long as the wars were mainly either civil wars or wars against similarly structured armies in France or in Italy.

In the early 10th century, the kingdom had come under pressure from new and better equipped enemies.

The Vikings in the north and the Magyars in the south.

The Vikings were the greatest sailors of the age, allowing them to quickly deploy their forces wherever they wanted along the coasts and the rivers.

And once on land, their advantage lay mainly in the element of surprise and a well deserved reputation for merciless cruelty.

By 925, the Vikings had been raiding northern Europe for nearly a hundred years, and their attack forces had become veritable armies.

Just a few decades earlier, the famous Rollo and his troops had besieged Paris and were paid off with the Duchy of Normandy.

The Vikings were really terrifying, but they did not challenge the system as such.

Given that they had so far not shown any tendency to stay as they had in England and in France, the Magyars were a vastly different threat.

The origin of the Magyars is heavily disputed, but they may have originated near the Ural Mountains in Russia.

So over 500 years, they had migrated from northern Russia to an area that is today's Hungary.

That is why we call them Hungarians, though they themselves prefer the term Magya.

And that is until today.

Their military style was similar to the classic steppe fighters, like the Huns and the Mongols.

Their army consisted almost entirely of light cavalry armed with composite bows.

The composite bow was the most powerful and the least recognized weapon of the Middle Ages.

A composite bow consists of several types of wood and horn laminated together.

That allows for small but immensely powerful bows that can be shot from a horse.

The famous English archers used a single wood bow, which needed to be much bigger to achieve similar power, and hence could only be used by infantry.

The reason English archers do not use composite bows is as so many things are, down to the weather.

Composite bows do not work in the rain.

The humidity weakens the lamination between the different kinds of wood, which weakens the bow.

And that is probably the only reason why the Mongols never invaded Western Europe.

Composite bows gave the Hungarians huge mobility and the ability to fight their foes at a distance.

The peasant infantry of the Carolingian period stood no chance against these awesome fighters.

Every time the Carolingian army charged them on foot, with their knives in their pitchforks, the Hungarians just rode away, turned round and shot them with arrows from a safe distance.

In the year 907, the Hungarians inflicted a massive defeat on the Bavarian Duke Lewittpolt, which opened the border into Germany.

They had previously already made inroads into Italy and from 907 onwards the Hungarians undertook annual raids deep into Carolingian territory, raiding and plundering as far west as Burgundy, Provence and even northern Spain.

In Henry's reign, the Hungarians came through in 919, in 924 and in 926.

And he couldn't do anything about it.

All he did was hide behind the walls of his castles.

The only available military response was to catch the Hungarians on their way back when they were slowed down by the wagons full of plunder.

By a stroke of luck in 926, in one of these retreat actions, Henry's troops managed to capture not just the loot, but also a highly ranking Hungarian Prince Henry used this hostage to do what he does, negotiate.

He agreed a nine year truce with the Hungarians in exchange for the prince and an annual tribute.

The truce might have been humiliating, but Henry did not lose time.

A fundamental reform of the military was needed to confront the Hungarians.

He called the Royal Diet in worms in 926 to agree two major reform packages.

The first one was the Burgenordner.

The idea behind it was to professionalize the peasant infantry.

Instead of all peasants having to come to the aid of the King in war, out of each group of nine, one was selected to do military service for them.

This ninth peasant was to become a full time soldier, had to move to a castle.

In the castle he must build and maintain accommodation for the other eight and their families and animals should they need to retreat.

The other eight would have to do the field work on the land of the permanent soldier and store 1/3 of the harvest in the castle.

So when the enemy comes, the population flees into the castle.

There they hide out until the raiding Hungarians have gone back home.

Given they have stored one third of last year's harvest in the castle, the peasants have enough seed to sow the crops for next year.

You have to remember that agriculture in the early Middle Ages was extremely inefficient.

You needed about one third of the harvester's seed for next year.

That meant when an enemy had raided the countryside and stolen or destroyed the entire harvest, the peasant not only lost this year's crop, but potentially several years of harvest.

By storing a third of the grain in the castle, the maximum damage was limited to just one harvest.

Henry also ordered that Markets and courts should be held in these castles, making castle building even more attractive.

There's a rather tedious debate among scholars whether Henry had the legal and political right to enforce the Borgenordnung outside his own Duchy of Saxony.

The answer, probably not.

However, the Hungarian invasion was a major threat to all duchies, and the Borgenordnow was a pretty good idea.

That, combined with Henry's negotiation skills, meant that most, if not all, dukes, counts, bishops and abbots fell in line.

And castles sprung up all over Germany.

Part two of the military reform was to create a heavily armored cavalry.

Whilst the stirrup had already been introduced more than 100 years earlier, and subsequently, armored knights were a thing, there weren't a lot of them around.

Armored knights are expensive.

To maintain a horse and armor requires a lot more than the work of just eight peasants.

Hence, Henry had to grant the knights some of his lands to fund the cost.

The structure of the award tended to be a lease for life that in principle would revert the land back to the awarding king at the death of the incumbent.

But as we all know, this is not how this story ended.

The knights became the feudal lords who passed the lands down to their heirs.

And again the question was it just Henry's land they received?

And again, the answer is no.

Knights sprung up all over the country, suggesting the dukes, the bishops and the abbots came in on the planet.

The military reform was not confined to the ability to fight wars, but had fundamental consequences for the social structure.

By professionalizing the army, the free peasant lost his right and ability to bear arms.

Suddenly, he turned from being a member of a conquering royal army to being a defenceless subject who needed protection from armed warriors.

This shift had certainly not come about just through the Bogenordnung, but the Burgenorden is a watershed moment where what we now call feudalism became the norm.

And we are moving into the Middle Ages proper now, going on to step four, the expansion into the East.

Before Henry could use his shiny new army to oppose the Hungarians, he needed to try them out.

The best place to do that was at the eastern border of his own Duchy of Saxony.

It allowed him to catch two birds with one stone.

On the one hand, he expands his own domain, and on the other hand, he acquires land he can then lease to his new armed cavalrymen.

In a campaign in 928 and 929, he pushes the border towards the Elbe, including the previously unconquered areas in what is today's state of Saxony, around Dresden And Leipzig.

The following year, he teams up with the Duke of Bavaria and subjects the Bohemians and enters their capital in Prague again.

We will hear a bit more about that story in one of the upcoming episodes.

Now, on to step five.

The Holy Lance.

Having an army on earth seemed to have not been enough for Henry to dare to confront the Hungarians.

What he needed now was his support from above.

In 932, he held a synod of all the major bishops and abbots of his realm, calling for God's blessing in his upcoming endeavor.

As part of the bargain with the Lord, the synod implemented a number of church reforms, including new feast days, stricter fasting rules, and severe punishment for priests who fail in their moral rectitude.

So it sounds as if Charlemagne's general admonishment needed another refresher.

But the most important celestial help came from King Rudolf of Upper Burgundy.

You see, amongst the treasures of Upper Burgundy was the Holy Lance.

The Holy Lance was described by Luitprand of Cremona as at the raised part, which we call the waist, there are crosses made from the nails that once pierced the hand and feet of our Lord and Redeemer, Jesus Christ.

This is the lance that contains the nails from the cross.

When Henry heard that Rudolf possessed this inestimable heavenly treasure, he sent envoys to see if he could acquire it and as gained for himself an invincible weapon against all enemies, visible and invisible, and make perpetual triumph certain.

Rudolf initially refused, but after being threatened with fire and sword, he finally relented and handed the Lance over for presents of gold and silver and a large district of the Duchy of Swabia, that is the city and canton of Baseline.

So far, Henry's been really good at negotiating this one.

Not so sure.

On the one hand, the city of Basel is at least today one of the richest spots on earth.

The Holy Lance, on the other hand, unfortunately looks suspiciously like an 8th century standard Frankish lance.

There's also the side issue that there are Holy Lances in Paris, Rome, Armenia and Constantinople.

One has to wonder what was going on in the 8th century when they not only produced a fake Constantine Donation, but a veritable avalanche of relics.

There were two notorious dealers in relics called Deus, Dona and Felix, who sold the same saints over and over again.

As far as I found out, there seemed to be at least five heads of John the Baptist for years.

I believe there was a church in Sicily where they venerated a head of John the Baptist.

At the age of six, when preparing the podcast, I was looking for the source of the story, and it is for Umberto echoes the name of the rose, so probably not true.

But if any one of you finds evidence for it, please post it on Twitter or Facebook.

Anyway, Henry swapped the city for a stick.

A stick he believed will make him invincible.

We'll see whether that will come true.

Over the centuries, the myth of the lance's magical powers grew and grew.

And in the 12th century, folklore tied it to the Lance of Longinus, who pierced the side of the Lord at the crucifixion.

It became the most revered of the imperial regalia, and we will meet it again and again in our narrative.

If you want to see it, it's in the Kunsthistorche Museum in Vienna.

And now to step six, the big one, the fight against the Hungarians.

In the year 933, Henry felt ready to take the plunge.

The army was ready, the heavenly forces were appeased, and he had the Holy Lance.

He summoned the people and said, once your empire was disrupted on every side by countless dangers, but now it is free.

You yourself know this well, having labored under the grinding weight of civil conflicts and foreign wars, and now, with the grace of the highest divinity, by our labor and by our strength, there is peace and unity.

The Slavs have been defeated and subjected in service to us.

There is just one thing remaining for us to do.

We must join together against our common enemy, the Magyars.

I have plundered you, your sons and your daughters to fill their treasuries.

And now I am forced to plunder the churches and the servants of those churches, leaving us naked and with no money.

Consider amongst yourselves what should be done about this and choose.

Should I take the treasuries that were consecrated to the divine office and hand them over to purchase our redemption from the enemies of God?

At this, the people raised their voices to heaven, saying that they wished above all to be redeemed by the living and true God, because He was faithful and just in all of his path and holy in all of his works.

Promising to the King their full effort against this most vicious of peoples, they raised their right hands into the air and affirmed this pact.

So Henry refused to pay his annual tribute and waited for the Hungarians to show up.

The Hungarians realized quite quickly that something was up.

The Slavic tribes on the Elbe, instead of coming along on the raid as they have done in the past, sent them a very fat dog as a present.

The Hungarians did not have time to avenge that insult, as they were far too much in a hurry to get into the fight with the Germans.

As the Hungarians entered Germany proper, they found the defenses stronger than expected, and they lost two smaller skirmishes in Thuringia.

Then, on 15 March 933, an army consisting of soldiers from all across the kingdom faced the Hungarians at Reed on the Unstrut River.

The armored cavalry proved its worth, as did the much improved infantry, and the Hungarians fled back into their homeland.

This was not the final or even a devastating defeat, but it was the first time a Frankish army had beaten the Hungarians in an open battle.

The expansion into Schleswig Henry led one last campaign against the Danes in 934, conquering Schleswig and thereby bringing the threat from the Vikings to an end.

You see, Germany had always been a secondary target for the Scandinavians, mainly because England and France offered rich pickings without much risk of retaliation.

Germany was a bit poorer and had a land border with Denmark, meaning the Germans could bring fire and brimstone to Danish homes whilst their Vikings were away on raids.

Henry's attack reminded them that the latter was a real option.

So from then on, the Danes kept to foreign shores and even went through some charade of submission to the German kings.

And that was it.

Henry died of a stroke in 936, having reigned just 17 years.

He achieved in these 17 years more than any Germanic ruler since Charlemagne.

He unified the kingdom of the Germans.

He defined its borders that remained largely unchanged, at least in the west, north and south, until 1648.

He created not just a new military structure, but also the new social structure that would prevail for another 500 years.

He founded castles, cities and monasteries in untold numbers.

And he fought of the Vikings and the Hungarians.

His authority extended well beyond the borders of the kingdom.

He was recognized as the senior ruler in the ancient Carolingian realm.

And so he was called upon to resolve internal conflicts within West Francia, Italy and Burgundy.

But the last and final major reform came at the end.

Henry broke the damaging tradition of Merovingian and Carolingian kings to divide their empire between their sons.

He made the nobles swear to elevate his oldest son, Otto, to the kingship, and only him.

From this point forward, kings and ruling dynasties will change.

The central power will rise in vain, but the kingdom as such will no longer be formally divided until 1806.

And that is the magic word, kingdom.

What Henry did not achieve was to be crowned emperor and turning his kingdom into an empire.

That will be the job of his son, Otto I, known as the Great.

Next week, we will meet Otto and follow his tumultuous first years in office when he nearly destroyed all his father had achieved.

I really hope to see you then, and if you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast from, and any future episode will miraculously appear in your feed every week, I promise.

And you can go even further and leave a positive review, which would be really, really appreciated.

Sa.