Henry the Lion

Henry was born in 1129, most likely at Ravensburg in Swabia, into the Welf dynasty, one of the great princely houses of medieval Germany ^[1]. His father was Henry the Proud, Duke of Bavaria and Saxony, and his mother was Gertrude, the only child of Emperor Lothair III. Through both parents the boy inherited claims to two of the richest duchies in the empire, along with the vast private estates of the Welfs in Swabia and the lands of the Billung and Supplinburg families in Saxony ^[2].

His childhood coincided with a violent contest for the German throne. When Lothair III died in 1137, the princes passed over Henry the Proud and elected Conrad III of the rival Hohenstaufen house. Conrad stripped Henry the Proud of both duchies, and the deposed duke died suddenly in 1139, leaving a ten year old heir surrounded by enemies ^[1]. The boy's grandmother Richenza and his mother Gertrude fought to preserve his Saxon inheritance, and in 1142 a settlement recognized the young Henry as Duke of Saxony, while Bavaria remained for the moment in other hands ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Henry the Lion should begin with this turbulent start. He grew up amid siege and negotiation rather than courtly leisure, and the experience left him with a lifelong determination to recover everything his father had lost and to yield nothing once he held it ^[2].

Henry came of age in the 1140s and quickly showed the ambition that marked his whole career. In 1147 he took part in the Wendish Crusade, a campaign authorized by Pope Eugenius III against the pagan Slavic peoples east of the Elbe, and he used the expedition to press Saxon claims along the Baltic frontier ^[3]. That same year he formally demanded the return of Bavaria, opening a dispute that would occupy imperial politics for a decade.

The decisive turn came in 1152, when his cousin Frederick Barbarossa of the Hohenstaufen family was elected king of Germany. Frederick needed peace between the two great dynasties, and Henry became one of his most valuable allies. The new king restored Bavaria to Henry in 1156, compensating the previous holder, Henry Jasomirgott, by raising Austria into a separate duchy through the charter known as the Privilegium Minus ^[1]. Henry the Lion now ruled two duchies stretching from the North Sea to the Alps, a concentration of territory no other German prince could match ^[2].

He repaid Frederick with military service. Henry accompanied the emperor on his Italian expeditions, including the campaign of 1158 against Milan, and his Saxon and Bavarian knights formed a substantial part of the imperial army ^[3]. For roughly two decades the cooperation between emperor and duke held firm, and each man used the alliance to pursue his own expansion, Frederick in Italy and Henry in the German north and east.

Henry the Lion achievements were concentrated in town foundation, colonization, and the extension of Christian rule along the Baltic. In 1158 or 1159 he refounded Lübeck after a fire, granting privileges that helped the city grow into the leading German port on the Baltic and later the head of the Hanseatic League ^[4]. In Bavaria he forced trade across the Isar through a new bridge and market settlement, and the town that grew there, Munich, dates its foundation to his charter arrangements of 1158, confirmed by Frederick Barbarossa at the Imperial Diet of Augsburg ^[5].

East of the Elbe he pursued a sustained program of conquest and settlement among the Slavic Wends. He campaigned repeatedly against the Obotrite prince Niklot, who was killed in 1160, and installed German lords, bishops, and peasant colonists across Mecklenburg and Holstein ^[3]. He sponsored or restored the bishoprics of Lübeck, Ratzeburg, and Schwerin, tying the new frontier churches to his own patronage rather than to distant royal control ^[1]. Historians treat this eastward movement as one of the formative processes of medieval German history, and Henry was its most forceful single agent in the twelfth century ^[2].

He also transformed Brunswick (Braunschweig) into a residence city worthy of a near royal prince. Around 1166 he erected the bronze lion monument on the Burgplatz, the first large freestanding sculpture cast north of the Alps since antiquity, and he rebuilt the collegiate church of St. Blaise as his dynastic burial place ^[4]. The commissioning of the richly illuminated Gospels of Henry the Lion, produced at the Benedictine abbey of Helmarshausen, showed the same appetite for display: when the manuscript was sold at auction in 1983 it fetched a record price for any book sold to that date ^[6].

Henry married twice, and both unions served his politics. His first wife was Clementia of Zähringen, whom he married around 1147; the match brought him castles and influence in Swabia, but he had the marriage dissolved in 1162, citing consanguinity, at a moment when the Zähringen alliance had lost its value ^[1].

In 1168 he married Matilda, the twelve year old daughter of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, in a ceremony at Minden Cathedral ^[4]. The English marriage linked the Welfs to the Angevin empire and gave Henry powerful relatives beyond the reach of the German emperor. Matilda bore him several children, among them Otto, who was raised partly at the English court and later became Emperor Otto IV, the only member of the Welf house ever to wear the imperial crown ^[2].

Contemporaries described the duke as proud, tenacious, and fond of magnificence. In 1172 he undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, traveling through Byzantium, where Emperor Manuel I Komnenos received him with honor ^[3]. The journey burnished his reputation as a Christian prince, though it did nothing to soften the resentment his power provoked among the Saxon nobility and the churchmen whose lands bordered his own.

The alliance with Barbarossa broke in the 1170s. In 1176, as the emperor prepared to face the Lombard League in Italy, Henry refused to send the military help Frederick requested, reportedly demanding the imperial city of Goslar as his price ^[1]. Frederick suffered a serious defeat at Legnano soon afterward, and though later chroniclers embellished the confrontation between the two men, the refusal marked the end of their partnership ^[2].

Henry's many enemies among the German princes then brought formal complaints against him. Summoned repeatedly before the imperial court and failing to appear, he was placed under the imperial ban, and at the Diet of Gelnhausen in 1180 he was stripped of both duchies ^[3]. Saxony was divided, with Westphalia going to the Archbishop of Cologne, while Bavaria passed to Otto of Wittelsbach, founding a dynasty that ruled there until 1918 ^[5]. After a brief war Henry submitted at Erfurt in 1181, retaining only his allodial lands around Brunswick and Lüneburg.

Exile followed. He spent the years 1182 to 1185 at the court of his father in law Henry II in England and Normandy, and a further period abroad from 1189 ^[4]. When Barbarossa departed on the Third Crusade, Henry returned to Saxony ahead of the agreed terms and fought to recover his position, sacking Bardowick in 1189. He reached a final peace with Emperor Henry VI in 1194. The old duke died at Brunswick on August 6, 1195, and was buried beside Matilda in the cathedral of St. Blaise, the church he had built ^[1].

Any Henry the Lion biography must weigh a paradox: the duke lost his great political gamble, yet much of what he built endured. Munich and Lübeck, the two most consequential of his urban foundations, became major European cities, and the settlement of the lands east of the Elbe that he drove forward permanently altered the demography of Central Europe ^[5]. The Brunswick lion still stands on the Burgplatz (the original is now displayed indoors, with a copy outside), and Brunswick Cathedral preserves the tombs of Henry and Matilda ^[4].

His fall in 1180 changed the constitutional structure of the empire. The breakup of the old tribal duchies of Saxony and Bavaria accelerated the fragmentation of Germany into smaller territorial principalities, a pattern that persisted into the nineteenth century ^[2]. The Welf line he preserved at Brunswick and Lüneburg later produced the Electors of Hanover, and through them the Hanoverian kings of Great Britain, giving his dynasty an afterlife he could hardly have imagined ^[1].

Among the basic Henry the Lion facts, his epithet deserves a final word. The lion was his heraldic and personal emblem, proclaimed in bronze at Brunswick and repeated in the chronicles of his own day. Medieval writers used it to convey both his courage and his appetite for dominion, and modern historians, whether they judge him a state builder or an overreaching magnate, have found no better shorthand for the man ^[3].