became so dominant and its monuments so impressive that they have come for many to symbolize the Middle Ages. Elsewhere these innovations were slow to take root; in Germany the prevalent trend followed Roman and Italian example, though greater size forced some technical change. In art, as in other respects, Germans looked back to an increasingly irrecoverable world.
For most of these three centuries the kingdom of Germany stood supreme in western Europe. It would have been hard to foresee this in 919 when Henry I came to the throne. Designated by Conrad I, his succession was initially recognized only within his own duchy, Saxony, and Conrad's, Franconia. Force having failed, he was obliged to gain recognition from the dukes of Swabia and Bavaria by allowing them to appoint bishops within their territories and by allowing them to take over the crown lands. With these grants he appeared to have conceded the essentials of kingship; estates upon which the ruler and his entourage might stay when travelling through the kingdom to hear pleas, offices which could be filled with trusted servants. By the time of Henry's death the losses had been recovered, but the example of Henry the Lion reminds us that dukes long after were seeking the same rights as their distant forebears. The course of German history is not one of smooth development within which the monarchy could establish its own authority and traditions; nor was it one of an inevitable degeneration into princely particularism. Rather it lay in the violent oscillation between the two.
Henry I's success lay upon two foundations. As a vigorous war-leader he was able to contain the threat from Denmark to the north of his duchy, and in 933 to inflict a major defeat upon the Magyars, who had menaced the whole of eastern Germany and many points further west since their destruction of the Moravian kingdom in 906. The scale of the threat made the dukes his far from unwilling partners, and it brought other rulers, Wenceslaus of Bohemia chief among them, under his
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