Henry the Lion

Henry the Lion (German: Heinrich der Löwe; 1129/1131 – 6 August 1195), also known as Henry III, Duke of Saxony (ruled 1142–1180) and Henry XII, Duke of Bavaria (ruled 1156–1180), was a member of the Welf dynasty.

Henry was one of the most powerful German princes of his time. As the Duke of Saxony, Henry had had a decisive part in 1152 in his cousin Frederick Barbarossa's campaign for the throne. Because of this, in the following years, he was intensely promoted by Barbarossa. So, in 1156, he received the Dukedom of Bavaria. In North Germany, Henry could now build a kingly presence. He achieved this in Brunswick by building a new collegiate church, St Blaise, and, in the neighbouring Dankwarderode Castle, he placed a statue of a lion, as a symbol of its place as the capital of his duchies. The aggressive building strategy of the Duke in Saxony and north of the Elbe supplanted the influence of the previous greats of Saxony. Next, Henry repaid Barbarossa's sponsorship by putting great effort into his service to the first Italian dynasty.^{[circular reference]}

The agreement between Henry and Barbarossa encountered difficulties when Henry refused to send military assistance in 1176 for Barbarossa's invasion of Italy. With his expedition ending in defeat at the Battle of Legnano against the Lombard League, Barbarossa resented Henry for having failed to support him. In 1176, the rival Hohenstaufen dynasty succeeded in isolating him and eventually deprived him of his duchies of Bavaria and Saxony during the reign of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and of Frederick's son and successor Henry VI. After the death of Barbarossa, and the failure of the overall Italian political scene and the peace agreement of 1177 (due to campaigning by Pope Alexander III), Henry the Lion overthrew more Dukes, but had to go into exile in southern England.^{[circular reference]}

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. Alongside Frederick Barbarossa, he was an important protagonist in the Staufen-Welf conflict, which had served as the main political force in the twelfth century.^{[circular reference]} Henry achieved this great power in part by his political and military acumen and in part through the legacies of his four grandparents. He is considered as one of the most important people of this early era.^{[circular reference]}

Henry the Lion came from the Welf Dynasty. Since the 1120s, there arose more documents in the history of this family, where there were different spellings. This meant the Welfs were the first noble family in the kingdom that we know the history of. The household records in the Genealogia Welforum, in which the Saxon Welf Origins and the Historia Welforum are found, show a link before the Carolingians, and have a possible etymology of the name Welf, which may come from the Latin word catulus (Welpe in German).^{[circular reference]}

The ancestors of the Welfs begin in the eighth century at the time of the Carolingians. The rise of the family came completely from advantageous marriages. The Welf Judith was the second wife of Emperor Louis the Pious, and brought the earliest influence of the Welfs to the history of the Frankish Kingdom. Her sister, Hemma, was married to Judith's stepson King Ludwig the German. This second marriage into the Carolingian royal family secured the rise of the Welfs in the Royal Circle. The fall of the Frankish Kingdom offered an opportunity for the family of the Kings of Burgundy in 1032. After the death of Welf III in 1055 without an heir, the dynasty was thrown into an existential crisis. His sister, Cuniza, married the Margrave Azzo II of Este, changing the future of the dynasty.

The grandfather of Henry the Lion, the Bavarian Duke Henry the Black, married Wulfhild, the eldest daughter of the Saxon Duke Magnus Billung and Sophia, the daughter of the Hungarian King. Large tracts of land around Luneberg the center of power and the burial place of the House of Billung, now went to the Welfs. In 1123 a relative of the family, Bishop Conrad of Constance, was put forward for canonisation, and raised the reputation of the family. The Welf Judith, daughter of Henry the Black, married the Hohenstaufen Duke Frederick II, the father of Frederick Barbarossa. The candidacy of Frederick II as the successor to the ore rich lands of the late, childless Henry V stayed unsponsored. Instead, the Saxon duke Lothar III was preferred. The usual sponsors of Henry the Black were split between him and Duke Lothar. Some of these sponsors were won over by Lothar marrying his only daughter Gertrude to Henry's son, Henry the Proud. Gertrude’s mother was Richenza, heiress of the Saxon territories of Northeim and the properties of the Brunones, counts of Brunswick. From this union came Henry the Lion. He was born in Ravensburg. From the Steterburger Chronik, he must have been born around 1129/1130. His baptism was around 1135/36, but this seems a long time to wait for a baptism. It is possible that the copyist made a transcription error, so Henry's birth could have been in 1133/35.

Soon after, Henry the Proud gained a conglomeration of duchies, close to the size of a kingdom. At the end of the reign of his father in law Lothar, he ruled over the duchies of Bavaria and Saxony, and over the March of Tuscany in the Mathilda Guter, specifically the extensive lands in Swabia, Bavaria, Saxony and Italy. Henry's father died in 1139, aged 32, when Henry was still a child. King Conrad III had dispossessed Henry the Proud of his duchies in 1138 and 1139, handing Saxony to Albert the Bear and Bavaria to Leopold of Austria. This was because Henry the Proud had been his rival for the Crown in 1138.