Ottonian Dynasty

The Ottonian dynasty, also called the Saxon dynasty or Liudolfings after its earliest known ancestor Count Liudolf of Saxony (d. 866), rose to power when Henry I (the Fowler) was elected King of East Francia in 919, making him the first non-Frankish monarch to rule that realm. Under his son Otto I the Great, the dynasty reached its zenith: Otto crushed the Magyar threat at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope John XII in 962, and revived the imperial title in the tradition of Charlemagne. The Ottonians cultivated a powerful ideology of sacral kingship, presenting the emperor as a divinely ordained ruler whose authority was intertwined with the Church; they patronised monastic reform movements, founded great cathedral chapters, and sponsored a flourishing of manuscript illumination and ecclesiastical architecture now known as Ottonian art. Heirs to the throne were often educated in cathedral schools or under the supervision of prominent churchmen, and royal women—queens and empress-mothers—frequently founded or led abbeys that served as centres of learning, prayer, and dynastic commemoration. The dynasty ended with the death of the canonised Emperor Henry II in 1024, as his marriage to Cunigunde of Luxembourg produced no children, and the imperial crown passed to the Salian Conrad II.