dedicated cathedrals and other major churches in Saxony, on Matilda's two saints closely associated with England, Gregory the Great and Thomas Becket, thus stressing her English parentage. Behind the couple could be seen a number of their ancestors, carefully selected to emphasize the illustriousness of the pair. Henry's included a grandfather who had been crowned emperor as Lothar III, and his own father, Henry the Proud, for whom Lothar had, vainly, sought the succession. Behind Matilda were her father, King Henry II of England, and his mother, Matilda, who had once been empress. In this context the spiritual crowns could readily be taken in a more earthly sense, and they were probably intended to be, for the duke was almost certainly in pursuit of a crown.

Within five years his dream lay in ruins; in 1180, Barbarossa declared both his duchies confiscate and the duke was driven into exile. The portrait thus stands as a poignant memorial. But it is far more than that, for it illustrates matters central to the course of history at this time. All the relatives and ancestors who stood at either side of the couple came from families which had been obscure in Carolingian times, and all had risen through marriage; Lothar to the heiress of Saxony, Henry the Proud to Lothar's daughter, Matilda to the Emperor Henry V, Henry II by Matilda's subsequent marriage to his father, the count of Anjou, and by the death without male heir of King Henry I of England. Henry the Proud and Henry the Lion came from the most eminent of all these families, the Welfs, who had provided wives for Louis the Pious and Louis the German and had occupied the throne of Burgundy; but they came from a junior branch of it, and Henry the Proud's grandfather had been an Italian nobleman who had married into the family. Each of these figures was heir to their Carolingian forebears only in the most tenuous sense.

Good marriages were an essential element in their elevation, but those marriages had themselves mostly taken place with the approval of kings, whether to win allies, reward service, or provide for the succession. The relations between a king and his magnates could not be stable for they rested upon the accidents of birth and death, anticipations fulfilled or frustrated, the

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