Otto I the Great
Otto I stopped the Magyars, took the Italian crown, and was crowned emperor in Rome in 962, founding what became the Holy Roman Empire. He succeeded his father Henry the Fowler as king of the East Franks in 936 and had himself crowned at Aachen in Charlemagne's chapel, deliberately, with the German dukes serving him at table as household officers. They rebelled within three years, and again repeatedly — his brother Henry twice, his son Liudolf in 953 — and he beat them each time and generally pardoned them. His answer to the structural problem was to build the church into the government. Bishops and abbots were appointed by the king, endowed with land and rights of justice, and could not found dynasties because they had no legitimate heirs, so their offices returned to the crown. That system, later called the imperial church, gave him an administration the dukes could not inherit. The Magyars had raided into Germany for sixty years. Otto destroyed them at the Lechfeld outside Augsburg in August 955 with a force drawn from every duchy including the rebels of the year before, and the raids stopped permanently; within a generation Hungary was a Christian kingdom. He intervened in Italy in 951 and again in 961 at a pope's request, was crowned emperor in February 962, and imposed an agreement requiring papal elections to be confirmed by him. He deposed that pope the following year. He died in 973, and the empire he made lasted until 1806. The coronation of 962 also created the quarrel that ran for the next three centuries. An emperor who made popes and a papacy that claimed to make emperors could not both be right, and the investiture contest, Canossa and the wars with the Hohenstaufen all follow from the arrangement Otto thought he had settled.
- Lived: 912 CE – 973 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader
