Otto the Great's victory at Lechfeld ended decades of Magyar raids
In 955 the Saxon king Otto crushed the pagan Magyars at the Battle of Lechfeld, ending Hungarian invasions of western Europe and earning a reputation as Christendom's saviour. Seven years later, following Charlemagne's example, a pope crowned him emperor in Rome, founding what became the Holy Roman Empire's line of German emperors.
Otto was born on 23 November 912, eldest son of Henry the Fowler, Duke of Saxony, and Matilda of Ringelheim. His father had become king of East Francia in 919 after the dying Conrad I persuaded his brother to offer Henry the crown, the first time a Saxon rather than a Frank ruled the kingdom. Otto inherited both Saxony and the kingship in 936.
He pressed on with unifying the German tribes and shifted power from the nobility to the crown. Through marriages and appointments he placed relatives in the major duchies, turning dukes who had been near-equals into subjects, and he reshaped the church in Germany so that its clergy answered to him. After quelling a short civil war among rebellious duchies, he won at Lechfeld. By 961 he had conquered the Kingdom of Italy, and in 962 Pope John XII crowned him emperor.
His final years were spent wrangling with the papacy and trying to hold Italy. From Rome he sought better terms with Byzantium, which resented his imperial title and southern ambitions; the matter was eased when his son Otto II took the Byzantine princess Theophanu as his bride in April 972. Otto returned to Germany that August and died at Memleben in May 973, succeeded by his son.
Historians across eras have judged him a successful ruler and a fine strategist, though the realm he assembled was too large for the administration of the time and functioned more as a confederacy. Recent scholarship emphasises his skill at building consensus among other powerful figures. David Bachrach credits Henry I and Otto with forging an inherited Carolingian and Roman administrative legacy into a military machine that made Germany Europe's leading kingdom from the tenth to the mid-thirteenth century. Otto's patronage also fostered the so-called Ottonian Renaissance in art and architecture.
Source: Otto the Great
