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not institutional routine. This made the building of political consensus, the basis to all effective authority, a full-time and precarious exercise for German rulers in the eleventh century. Since 962, the king of Germany could hope to be crowned by the pope as Roman emperor. Despite the Investiture Contest and continued tension thereafter, most kings succeeded in persuading popes to perform this highly symbolic and important ceremony. However, some did not. King Conrad III of Germany, commander of the Second Crusade (1145–9), was one of the few medieval German kings after Otto I not to be crowned emperor, although he nonetheless exercised many of the imperial prerogatives and gave himself some of the formal titles of an emperor. The lack of imperial title reduced a German king’s claims to jurisdiction in North Italy, one of the wealthiest regions of western Europe, which formed a significant and lasting element in imperial pretensions. However, Conrad’s power, like that of his predecessors, depended on his position in Germany.
    Politically, Germany in the eleventh and twelfth centuries comprised a number of disparate regions each dominated by its own duke andclosely integrated nobilities: Bavaria, Swabia, Franconia, Saxony, Lorraine. Eastward expansion, although temporarily halted in the north by a great Slav rebellion in 983 against German rule east of the Elbe, had created marcher lordships such as in Austria, Styria and Meissen, giving local entrepreneurial margraves considerable autonomy. The power of the king depended on his own personal dynastic lands – Otto I had been duke of Saxony – coupled with a range of imperial lands, cities and rights, and alliance with the church, the only truly imperial institution (hence the threat presented by the Investiture dispute). Although tending to descend within one family – the Saxons 911–1024; Salians 1024–1125; Hohenstaufen 1138–1254 – the German kingship was elective, a right the electors, composed of the leading dukes and ecclesiastical magnates such as the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz, stubbornly maintained. While the elective element in other kingdoms, such as England, France or the Christian states of northern Iberia, withered, repeated dynastic interruptions, through either lack of direct heirs (1002, 1024, 1125, 1138, 1152) or the succession of minors (1056, 1197), entrenched an active elective principle in Germany. Nonetheless, the German kings were – and were recognized by their neighbours as being – not just sentimentally the secular heads of western Christendom by virtue of the imperial title, but practically the leading secular rulers in western Christendom.
    Not the least symptom and cause of this predominance lay in the role of German rulers in the expansion of Christianity to the Slavic kingdoms of eastern Europe. It says much for the damage inflicted on German monarchic power that, whereas in the tenth and eleventh centuries the initiative in reeling the new kingdoms and principalities of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary into the orbit of western Christendom had come from the German kings, from the mid-twelfth century it was left to local east German dukes and lords, aided by the ideology of holy war and their recruiting of crusaders and immigrants, who pushed the frontiers of Latin Christendom into Prussia and the north-eastern Baltic. Although many of the earliest Christian missionaries to the western Slavs, especially in Bohemia and Moravia, and to the Magyars in Hungary in the decades around 900 were Greek Orthodox, the creation of the new western empire by Otto I, not least through his defeats of Magyar invaders, opened the region to western Latin evangelists as local rulers sought to associate themselves with the new Germanpower. The adoption of Christianity provided a cohesive force in the establishment of settled political identities and institutions, the church providing education, literacy, civil servants, a potentially pliant and