King's Designation

The king on his deathbed, using the last moment of his life to point out his best successor is a scene fitting a film, or a painting, where viewers would be better able to comprehend the role of the moment. While reading the description of Conrad I's death found in Antapodosis, it is easy to imagine such a scene; it fits perfectly the description of the typical last moments of a king. There are tears at court, a tense wait for the king's last word that will save the kingdom, the trembling and weakening breath, and courtiers listening to the final speech of the dying monarch. This is how Liudprand describes the moment in which he introduces Henry of Saxony. This scene sets the pattern for the narration following and elevates Henry above all other duces in the kingdom.

When discussing Henry's election most modern scholarship has seen the competing descriptions as mostly being identical with only minor differences. Liudprand set the scene as follows: When Conrad felt that he was going to die, he summoned Burchard of Swabia, Eberhard of Franconia, and Giselbert of Lotharingia. Widukind, on the other hand, depicts Conrad as having been fatally wounded in a battle against Arnulf of Bavaria, with only Eberhard present. Adalbert's account refers to several nondescript ‘brothers and kinsmen, that is the great men of the Franks’. Scholars have mostly brushed aside this difference. Some, like Johannes Fried, have mistakenly included Arnulf of Bavaria among the important witnesses of the designation. In Mathilda's Vitae there is a description of Henry's rise with its own twist, where the question is over whether the events took place in war or peace. There is no appointment of a new king.

Looking closely at this difference in enumeration of those who may have been present during King's death, it has to be acknowledged that it alters the story's outlook and explains many problems with later parts of the narrative. For Fried this line up of witnesses based on a recollection of later coronations, specifically the coronation of Otto II, and tells us more about later times than it does about 919. I suggest otherwise, that this difference between the various lists of attendants at the designation was neither a mistake, nor a recreation of a later historical situation.