Henry the Lion - Biography, Family

Duke of Saxony (1142–80) and Bavaria (1156–80), the head of the Guelphs. His ambitious designs roused against him a league of princes in 1166, but he retained power through an alliance with Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. After breaking with Frederick in 1176, he was deprived of most of his lands, and exiled. Ultimately he was reconciled to Frederick's successor, Henry VI. He encouraged commerce, and founded the city of Munich.

He was one the most powerful of the German princes of his time, until the rival Hohenstaufen dynasty succeeded in isolating him and eventually deprived him of his duchies of Bavaria and Saxony during the reign of his cousin Frederick I and of Frederick's son and successor Henry VI.

At the height of his reign, Henry ruled over a vast territory stretching from the coast of the North and Baltic Seas to the Alps, and from Westphalia to Pomerania.

Biography

Born in Ravensburg, he was the son of Henry the Proud, Duke of Bavaria and Saxony, who was the son of Duke Henry the Black and an heiress of the Billungs, former dukes of Saxony. Henry's mother was Gertrud, only daughter of Emperor Lothair II and his wife Richenza of Northeim, heiress of the Saxon territories of Northeim and the properties of the Brunones, counts of Brunswick.

Henry's father died in 1139, aged 32, when Henry was still a child. King Conrad III had dispossessed Henry the Proud, who had been his rival for the crown in 1138, of his duchies in 1138 and 1139, handing Saxony to Albert the Bear and Bavaria to Leopold of Austria. In 1156 Henry also reacquired Bavaria by a decision of the new Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.

Henry is the founder of Munich (1157/58;

In 1147 Henry married Clementia of Zähringen, thereby gaining her hereditary territories in Swabia. He divorced her in 1162, apparently under pressure from Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who did not cherish Welfish possessions in his home area and offered Henry several fortresses in Saxony in exchange. In 1168 Henry married Matilda (1156 -1189), the daughter of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine and sister of Richard Lionheart.

Henry long and faithfully supported his older cousin, Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa), in his attempts to solidify his hold on the Imperial Crown and his repeated wars with the cities of Lombardy and the Popes, several times turning the tide of battle in Frederick's favor with his fierce Saxon knights. He did not consider these Italian adventures worth the effort, even after Frederick offered him the rich Imperial City of Goslar in southern Saxony as a reward, a prize Henry had long coveted. Taking advantage of the hostility of other German princes to Henry, who had successfully established a powerful and contiguous state comprising Saxony, Bavaria and substantial territories in the north and east of Germany, Frederick had Henry tried in absentia for insubordination by a court of bishops and princes in 1180.

When Frederick Barbarossa went on the Crusade of 1189, Henry returned to Saxony, mobilized an army of his faithful, and conquered and ravaged the rich city of Bardowick as punishment for her disloyalty. Barbarossa's son, Emperor Henry VI, again defeated the Duke, but in 1194, with his end approaching, he made his peace with the Emperor, and returned to his much diminished lands around Brunswick, where he finished his days as duke of Brunswick, peacefully sponsoring arts and architecture.

Family

Henry had the following known children:

by his first wife, Clementia (divorced 1162), daughter of Conrad, Duke of Zähringen and Clemence of Namur: Gertrude of Bavaria (1155-1197), married first Frederick IV, Duke of Swabia, and then King Canute VI of Denmark Richenza (died 1167) by his second wife, Matilda, daughter of King Henry II of England (married 1168): Matilda (c. 1209), married Godfrey, Count of Perche, and Enguerrand III, Count of Coucy Richza (1172-1204), married King Valdemar II of Denmark Henry V, Count Palatine of the Rhine (c.