Henry II became king of Germany in 1002 and Holy Roman emperor in 1014. His father, Henry II the Quarrelsome, duke of Bavaria, having been in rebellion against two preceding German kings, was forced to spend long years in exile from Bavaria. The younger Henry found refuge with Bishop Abraham of Freising and was later educated at the Cathedral School of Hildesheim. As he was exposed thus to strong church influence in his youth, religion influenced him strongly. Contemporaries observed an ironic trait in his character and were also impressed by his ability to intersperse his speeches with biblical quotations. Though devoted to church ritual and personal prayer, he was a tenacious and realistic politician, not adverse to alliances with heathen powers. Usually in poor health, he yet performed for 22 years the office of the itinerant king, riding on horseback through his dominions to judge and compose feuds, pursue rebels, and extend the power of the crown.

After the death of King Otto III in January 1002, Henry, aware of strong opposition to his succession, captured the royal insignia that were in the keeping of the dead king's companions. At Otto's funeral the majority of the princes declared against Henry, and only in June, with the assistance of Archbishop Willigis of Mainz, did Henry secure both election and coronation. It took another year before his recognition was final.

Henry first turned his attention to the east and made war against the Polish king Bolesław I the Brave. After a successful campaign, he marched into northern Italy to subdue Arduin of Ivrea, who had styled himself king of Italy. His sudden interference led to bitter fighting and atrocities, and although Henry was crowned king in Pavia on May 15, 1004, he returned home, without defeating Arduin, to pursue his campaigns against Bolesław. In 1003 Henry had made a pact with the Liutitian tribe against the Christian Bolesław, and he allowed the Liutitians to resist German missionaries east of the Elbe River. Henry was more interested in consolidating his own political power than in spreading Christianity. Supported by his tribal allies, he waged several campaigns against Poland, until in 1018, at Bautzen, he made a lasting compromise peace with the Poles.

Sensitive to tradition and anxious to be crowned emperor, Henry decided in late 1013 on another expedition to Italy. He marched straight to Rome, where he was crowned Holy Roman emperor by Pope Benedict VIII, on Feb. 14, 1014. By May he was back in Germany, seeking to fulfill his duties to Italy by charging German officials with the administration of the country. Henry even convened an Italian imperial court at Strassburg (now Strasbourg) in 1019. In 1020 Pope Benedict visited him in Germany and begged him to put in another appearance in Italy to fight the Greeks in the south and protect the papacy against the Lombard princes. Henry reluctantly responded the following year, fighting both Greeks and Lombards successfully; but he withdrew at the first opportunity.

Henry's main interest and success were concentrated on the consolidation of a peaceful royal regime in Germany. He spent much time and energy in elaborating the so-called Ottonian system of government. Inaugurated by Otto I, this system was based upon the principle that the lands and the authority of the bishops ought to be at the disposal of the king. Henry made generous grants to the bishops and, by adding to their territorial holdings, helped to establish them as secular rulers as well as ecclesiastical princes. He freely availed himself of the royal right to appoint faithful followers to these bishoprics. He insisted on episcopal celibacy—to make sure that on the death of a bishop the see would not fall into the hands of the bishop's children. In this way, he managed to create a stable body of supporters who made him more and more independent of rebellious nobles and ambitious members of his own family.

His greatest achievement was the foundation of the new bishopric of Bamberg. The upper region of the Main River was poorly populated, and Henry set aside large tracts of personal property to establish the new bishopric, much against the wishes of the bishop of Würzburg in the middle Main region. He obtained the consent of other bishops at a synod in Frankfurt in late 1007. The new bishop was consecrated on Henry's birthday in 1012. In 1020 Bamberg was visited by the pope, and it quickly developed into a splendid cathedral town where contemporary scholastic culture and art, as well as piety, found the support of Henry and his queen, Cunegunda.

During the last years of his reign Henry planned, in concert with Pope Benedict VIII, an ecclesiastical reform council at Pavia to seal the system of ecclesiastico-political order he had perfected in Germany. But he died suddenly in July 1024, before this could be done.

Always a loyal supporter of the Habsburg emperors, Henry tried to restore Roman Catholicism in his realm but was defeated by John Frederick I the Magnanimous of Saxony and Philip the Magnanimous, landgrave of Hesse, and finally driven from his duchy. Reestablished after the emperor Charles V's victory over the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in 1547, Henry continued his earlier efforts but with little success. He defeated the Protestant Albert II Alcibiades of Kulmbach-Bayreuth at the Battle of Sievershausen (1553) but lost his two oldest Roman Catholic sons. The later years of Henry's reign were marred by the conflict with his Lutheran heir Julius, duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, to whom he eventually became reconciled, showing a certain degree of tolerance to the new religion.

king of Castile from 1369, founder of the house of Trastámara, which lasted until 1504.

The illegitimate son of Alfonso XI of Castile, Henry rebelled against his younger half brother, Peter I (Peter the Cruel), invaded Castile with French aid in 1366, and was crowned king at Burgos. Peter sought English aid, and Henry was routed by Edward the Black Prince at Najera (April 3, 1367). He obtained more French aid and captured Peter, whom he murdered on March 23, 1369.

The legitimist claim was upheld in Galicia, in Portugal, which he invaded; and he also had to defend himself against England's John of Gaunt, who had married Peter's daughter. He crushed opposition and rewarded his adherents. He introduced from France the hereditary titles of duke and marquess, with entailed estates, creating the class of grandees from his relatives and supporters; he thereby gained the title of El de las Mercedes.

After receiving a good literary education, part of it in England, Henry became duke of Normandy in 1150 and count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine on the death of his father, Geoffrey Plantagenet, in 1151. Although the claim of his mother, Matilda, daughter of Henry I, to the English crown had been set aside by her cousin, King Stephen, in 1152, Henry advanced his fortunes by marrying the beautiful and talented Eleanor, recently divorced from King Louis VII of France, who brought with her hand the lordship of Aquitaine. Henry invaded England in 1153, and King Stephen agreed to accept him as coadjutor and heir. When Stephen died the following year Henry succeeded without opposition, thus becoming lord of territories stretching from Scotland to the Pyrenees.

The young king lacked visible majesty. Of stocky build, with freckled face, close-cut tawny hair, and gray eyes, he dressed carelessly and grew to be bulky; but his personality commanded attention and drew men to his service. He could be a good companion, with ready repartee in a jostling crowd, but he displayed at times an ungovernable temper and could be heartless and ruthless when necessary. Restless, impetuous, always on the move, regardless of the convenience of others, he was at ease with scholars, and his administrative decrees were the work of a cool realist. In his long reign of 34 years he spent an aggregate of only 14 in England.

His career may be considered in three aspects: the defense and enlargement of his dominions, the involvement in two lengthy and disastrous personal quarrels, and his lasting administrative and judicial reforms.

His territories are often called the Angevin empire. This is a misnomer, for Henry's sovereignty rested upon various titles, and there was no institutional or legal bond between different regions. Some, indeed, were under the feudal overlordship of the king of France. By conquest, through diplomacy, and through the marriages of two of his sons, he gained acknowledged possession of what is now the west of France from the northernmost part of Normandy to the Pyrenees, near Carcassonne. During his reign, the dynastic marriages of three daughters gave him political influence in Germany, Castile, and Sicily. His continental dominions brought him into contact with Louis VII of France, the German emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa), and, for much of the reign, Pope Alexander III. With Louis the relationship was ambiguous. Henry had taken Louis's former wife and her rich heritage. He subsequently acquired the Vexin in Normandy by the premature marriage of his son Henry to Louis's daughter, and during much of his reign he attempted to outfight or outwit the French king, who, for his part, gave shelter and comfort to Henry's enemy, Thomas Becket (Becket, Saint Thomas), the archbishop of Canterbury. The feud with Louis implied friendly relations with Germany, where Henry was helped by his mother's first marriage to the emperor Henry V but hindered by Frederick's maintenance of an antipope, the outcome of a disputed papal (papacy) election in 1159. Louis supported Alexander III, whose case was strong, and Henry became arbiter of European opinion. Though acknowledging Alexander, he continued throughout the Becket controversy to threaten transference of allegiance to Frederick's antipope, thus impeding Alexander's freedom of action.

Early in his reign Henry obtained from Malcolm III (Malcolm III Canmore) of Scotland homage and the restoration of Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmorland, and later in the reign (1174) homage was exacted from William the Lion (William I), Malcolm's brother and successor. In 1157 Henry invaded Wales and received homage, though without conquest. In Ireland, reputedly bestowed upon him by Pope Adrian IV, Henry allowed an expedition of barons from South Wales to establish Anglo-Norman supremacy in Leinster (1169), which the King himself extended in 1171.

His remarkable achievements were impaired, however, by the stresses caused by a dispute with Becket and by discords in his own family.

The quarrel with Becket, Henry's trusted and successful chancellor (1154–62), broke out soon after Becket's election to the archbishopric of Canterbury (May 1162; see Becket, Saint Thomas). It led to a complete severance of relations and to the Archbishop's voluntary exile. Besides disrupting the public life of the church, this situation embroiled Henry with Louis VII and Alexander III; and, though it seemingly did little to hamper Henry's activities, the time and service spent in negotiations and embassies was considerable, and the tragic denouement in Becket's murder earned for Henry a good deal of damaging opprobrium.

More dangerous were the domestic quarrels, which thwarted Henry's plans and even endangered his life and which finally brought him down in sorrow and shame.

Throughout his adult life Henry's sexual morality was lax; but his relations with Eleanor, 11 years his senior, were for long tolerably harmonious, and, between 1153 and 1167, she bore him eight children. Of these, the four sons who survived infancy—Henry, Geoffrey, Richard, and John—repaid his genuine affection with resentment toward their father and discord among themselves. None was blameless, but the cause of the quarrels was principally Henry's policy of dividing his dominions among his sons while reserving real authority for himself. In 1170 he crowned his eldest son, Henry (Henry The Young King), as co-regent with himself; but in fact the young king had no powers and resented his nonentity, and in 1173 he opposed his father's proposal to find territories for the favoured John (Lackland) at the expense of Geoffrey. Richard joined the protest of the others and was supported by Eleanor. There was a general revolt of the baronage in England and Normandy, supported by Louis VII in France and William the Lion in Scotland. Henry's prestige was at a low ebb after the murder of Becket and recent taxation, but he reacted energetically, settled matters in Normandy and Brittany, and crossed to England, where fighting had continued for a year. On July 12, 1174, he did public penance at Canterbury. The next day the King of Scots was taken at Alnwick, and three weeks later Henry had suppressed the rebellion in England. His sons were pardoned, but Eleanor was kept in custody until her husband died.

A second rebellion flared up in 1181 with a quarrel between his sons Henry and Richard over the government of Aquitaine, but young Henry died in 1183. In 1184 Richard quarrelled with John, who had been ordered to take Aquitaine off his hands. Matters were eased by the death of Geoffrey (1186), but the King's attempt to find an inheritance for John led to a coalition against him of Richard and the young Philip II Augustus, who had succeeded his father, Louis VII, as king of France. Henry was defeated and forced to give way, and news that John also had joined his enemies hastened the King's death near Tours in 1189.

In striking contrast to the checkered pattern of Henry's wars and schemes, his governance of England displays a careful and successful adaptation of means to a single end—the control of a realm served by the best administration in Europe. This success was obscured for contemporaries and later historians by the varied and often dramatic interest of political and personal events, and not until the 19th century—when the study of the public records began and when legal history was illuminated by the British jurist Frederic William Maitland (Maitland, Frederic William) and his followers—did the administrative genius of Henry and his servants appear in its true light.

At the beginning of his reign Henry found England in disorder, with royal authority ruined by civil war and the violence of feudal magnates. His first task was to crush the unruly elements and restore firm government, using the existing institutions of government, with which the Anglo-Norman monarchy was well provided. Among these was the King's council of barons, with its inner group of ministers who were both judges and accountants and who sat at the Exchequer, into which the taxes and dues of the shires were paid by the King's local representative, the sheriff (shire-reeve). The council contained an unusually able group of men—some of them were great barons, such as Richard de Lucy and Robert de Beaumont, earl of Leicester; others included civil servants, such as Nigel, bishop of Ely, Richard Fitzneale, and his son, Richard of Ilchester. Henry took a personal interest in the technique of the Exchequer, which was described at length for posterity in the celebrated Dialogus de scaccario, whose composition seemed to Maitland “one of the most wonderful things of Henry's wonderful reign.” How far these royal servants were responsible for the innovations of the reign cannot be known, though the development in practice continued steadily, even during the King's long absences abroad.

In the early months of the reign the King, using his energetic and versatile chancellor Becket, beat down the recalcitrant barons and their castles and began to restore order to the country and to the various forms of justice. It was thus, a few years later, that he came into conflict with the bishops, then led by Becket, over the alleged right of clerics to be tried for crime by an ecclesiastical court. A result of this was the celebrated collection of decrees—the Constitutions of Clarendon (Clarendon, Constitutions of) (1164)—which professed to reassert the ancestral rights of the King over the church in such matters as clerical immunity, appointment of bishops, custody of vacant sees, excommunication, and appeals to Rome. The Archbishop, after an initial compliance, refused to accept these, and they were throughout the controversy a block to an agreement. The quarrel touched what was to be the King's chief concern—the country's judicial system.

Anglo-Saxon England had two courts of justice—that of the hundred, a division of the shire, for petty offenses, and that of the shire, presided over by the sheriff. The feudal (feudalism) regime introduced by the Normans added courts of the manor and of the honour (a complex of estates). Above all stood the King's right to set up courts for important pleas and to hear, either in person or through his ministers, any appeal. Arrest was a local responsibility, usually hard upon a flagrant crime. A doubt of guilt was settled by ordeal by battle; the accused in the shire underwent tests held to reveal God's judgment. Two developments had come in since William the Conqueror's day: the occasional mission of royal justices into the shires and the occasional use of a jury of local notables as fact finders in cases of land tenure.

Henry's first comprehensive program was the Assize of Clarendon (Clarendon, Assize of) (1166), in which the procedure (procedural law) of criminal justice was established; 12 “lawful” men of every hundred, and four of every village, acting as a “ jury of presentment,” were bound to declare on oath whether any local man was a robber or murderer. Trial of those accused was reserved to the King's justices, and prisons for those awaiting trial were to be erected at the King's expense. This provided a system of criminal investigation for the whole country, with a reasonable verdict probable because the firm accusation of the jury entailed exile even if the ordeal acquitted the accused. In feudal courts the trial by battle could be avoided by the establishment of a concord, or fine. This system presupposed regular visits by the King's justices on circuit (or, in the technical phrase, “on eyre”), and these tours became part of the administration of the country. The justices formed three groups: one on tour, one “on the bench” at Westminster, and one with the King when the court was out of London. Those at Westminster dealt with private pleas and cases sent up from the justices on eyre.

Equally effective were the “possessory assizes (property law).” In the feudal world, especially in times of turmoil, violent ejections and usurpations were common, with consequent vendettas and violence. Pleas brought to feudal courts could be delayed or altogether frustrated. As a remedy Henry established the possessory writ, an order from the Exchequer, directing the sheriff to convene a sworn local jury at petty assize to establish the fact of dispossession, whereupon the sheriff had to reinstate the defendant pending a subsequent trial at the grand assize to establish the rights of the case. This was the writ of Novel Disseisin (i.e., recent dispossession). This writ was returnable; if the sheriff failed to achieve reinstatement, he had to summon the defendant to appear before the King's justices and himself be present with the writ. A similar writ of Mort d'Ancestor decided whether the ancestor of a plaintiff had in fact possessed the estate, whereas that of Darrein Presentment (i.e., last presentation) decided who in fact had last presented a parson to a particular benefice. All these writs gave rapid and clear verdicts subject to later revision. The fees enriched the treasury, and recourse to the courts both extended the King's control and discouraged irregular self-help. Two other practices developed by Henry became permanent. One was scutage, the commutation of military service for a money payment; the other was the obligation, put on all free men with a property qualification by the Assize of Arms (1181), to possess arms suitable to their station.

The ministers who engaged upon these reforms took a fully professional interest in the business they handled, as may be seen in Fitzneale's writing on the Exchequer and that of the chief justiciar, Ranulf de Glanville, on the laws of England; and many of the expedients adopted by the King may have been suggested by them. In any case, the long-term results were very great. By the multiplication of a class of experts in finance and law Henry did much to establish two great professions, and the location of a permanent court at Westminster and the character of its business settled for England (and for much of the English-speaking world) that common law, not Roman law, would rule the courts and that London, and not an academy, would be its principal nursery. Moreover, Henry's decrees ensured that the judge-and-jury combination would become normal and that the jury would gradually supplant ordeal and battle as being responsible for the verdict. Finally, the increasing use of scutage, and the availability of the royal courts for private suits, were effective agents in molding the feudal monarchy into a monarchical bureaucracy before the appearance of Parliament.

Henry II lived in an age of biographers and letter writers of genius. John of Salisbury, Thomas Becket, Giraldus Cambrensis, Walter Map, Peter of Blois, and others knew him well and left their impressions. All agreed on his outstanding ability and striking personality and also recorded his errors and aspects of his character that appear contradictory, whereas modern historians agree upon the difficulty of reconciling its main features. Without deep religious or moral conviction, Henry nevertheless was respected by three contemporary saints, Aelred of Rievaulx, Gilbert of Sempringham, and Hugh of Lincoln. Normally an approachable and faithful friend and master, he could also behave with unreasonable inhumanity. His conduct and aims were always self-centred, but he was neither a tyrant nor an odious egoist. Both as man and ruler he lacked the stamp of greatness that marked Alfred the Great and William the Conqueror. He seemed also to lack wisdom and serenity; and he had no comprehensive view of the country's interest, no ideals of kingship, no sympathetic care for his people. But if his reign is to be judged by its consequences for England, it undoubtedly stands high in importance, and Henry, as its mainspring, appears among the most notable of English kings.

The second son of Francis I and Claude of France, Henry was sent with his brother Francis, the dauphin, as a hostage to Spain in 1526 and did not return to France until 1530, after the conclusion of the Peace of Cambrai. When the dauphin died in 1536, Henry became heir to the throne. Strong differences between Henry and his father were accentuated by the rivalry between Henry's mistress, Diane de Poitiers, and the king's, Anne, Duchess d'Étampes, as well as by Henry's continuing support of the constable Anne de Montmorency (Montmorency, Anne, Duke de), who had lost favour with the crown. Henry's reputation has suffered by contrast with his father's brilliance, and his melancholy made his character unsympathetic. Although he continued many of his father's policies, he dismissed many of his father's ministers and raised Montmorency and the house of Guise to favour.

Upon his accession, Henry undertook administrative reforms. The functions of the different sections of the king's council became more specialized; the commissaries sent into the provinces “to exercise the king's orders” were the forerunners of the intendants; (intendant) and intermediary tribunals were established between the local justices and the parlements (high courts). In foreign affairs Henry continued his father's warfare against the Holy Roman emperor Charles V. He signed the Treaty of Chambord in 1552 with the German Protestant princes, promising them troops and subsidies; in return, they agreed to France's taking the bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun. Though Henry made a truce with Charles in 1556, war was soon resumed when a French expedition was sent into Italy under François, Duke de Guise (1557). The Spanish in the Netherlands, however, besieged the town of Saint-Quentin in Picardy, and Montmorency was defeated in an attempt to relieve it. After Guise had somewhat improved the situation by taking Calais, Guînes, and Thionville, the financial difficulties of both France and Spain and Henry's desire to fight Protestantism in France led to the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (Cateau-Cambrésis, Peace of) (1559).

A bigoted Roman Catholic, Henry was rigorous in the repression of Protestantism, which was approaching the zenith of its power in France. In 1547 he created the Chambre Ardente in the Parlement of Paris for trying heretics. His Edict of Écouen (1559) laid the ground for systematic persecution of the Protestants.

The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis was to be cemented by the marriages of Henry's daughter Elizabeth and his sister Margaret to Philip II of Spain and to Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy, respectively. In a tournament during the festivities, Henry was hit in the head by a lance of Gabriel, Count de Montgomery, captain of the Scottish guard, and died 10 days later. He left four sons by his marriage to Catherine de Médicis: the future kings Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III and François, Duke d'Alençon and later Duke d'Anjou. In addition to Elizabeth, he had other daughters by Catherine—Margaret, who married Henry of Navarre (the future Henry IV), and Claude, who married Charles III the Great, Duke of Lorraine. One of his natural children was Diane de France, who was legitimatized.

king of Navarre from 1516 who for the rest of his life attempted by force and negotiation to regain territories of his kingdom that had been lost by his parents, Catherine de Foix and Jean d'Albret, in 1514.

In February 1516, when his mother died, Henry fell heir to the House of Albret claim; and in 1521, supported by French forces, he invaded Navarre but suffered crushing defeat. Henry fought with Francis I of France (1525) in Italy, was captured with him, but escaped. Two years later he married Francis' sister Margaret of Angoulême; their daughter Jeanne became the mother of the future Henry IV of France. Emperor Charles V (who was also Charles I of Spain) in 1530 voluntarily ceded Henry the small section of Navarre north of the Pyrenees, but negotiations for the remainder failed. Henry was, however, accorded rulership of the southwestern French region of Guyenne by Francis.