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Thus the great vassals of Ivrea, Verona, Tuscany, and Spoleto raised themselves against Pavia. The monarchs, placed between the Papacy and their ambitious nobles, were unable to consolidate the realm; and when Berengar, the last independent sovereign strove to enforce the declining authority of Pavia, he was met with the resistance and the hatred of the nation.
Henry then sought the hand of Eleanor, a girl twelve years old, and the second of the four daughters of Raymond Berengar IV., Count of Provence, and his wife Beatrice, sister of Amadeus III., Count of Savoy. The marriage contract was signed in October. Before that time Eleanor had left Provence under the escort of her mother's brother, William, bishop-elect of Valence.
Within twenty years the crown had been given to five different aspirants. They were Germans, or were Italians only in name. Berengar was finally defeated and assassinated. John Scotus Erigena, or John Scot, Erinborn, who was at the head of his palace-school, was an acute philosopher, who, in his speculations in the vein of New Platonism, tended to pantheistic doctrine.
Berengar had given the cities permission to inclose themselves with walls in order to repel the invasions of the Huns. Otho respected their right of self-defense, and from the date of his coronation the history of the free burghs begins in Italy.
The attitude of the Church to that heritage was for long unfixed and uncertain. The logic, and still more the metaphysics, of Aristotle were not the most comfortable of neighbours to the new body of Christian revelation committed to the Church's keeping. In the hand of Berengar of Tours the methods of Greek logic proved a corrosive to the received doctrine of the Mass.
Louis IX refused the offer for a son, but it was accepted by his brother, Charles of Anjou, whose wife, the daughter and heiress of Raymond Berengar of Provence, desired to be the equal of her three elder sisters, the Queens, respectively, of France, England, and Germany.
The first thing to do, therefore, was to escape from this prison, and get to some place where, for a time at least, she could defend herself against Berengar, while waiting for Otto to take her under his protection.
The Church of the Middle Ages had asserted that the body of Christ was actually present in the consecrated wafer, and few there were who doubted it. Berengar had maintained in the eleventh century that the sacred elements should be regarded as mere symbols; but he was vehemently opposed, with all the terrors of spiritual power, and compelled to abjure the heresy.
When John XII. reversed his steps, allied himself with Berengar, and tried to stir up the Greeks, and even the Hungarians, against the emperor, Otto came down from Lombardy, and captured Rome.
Catalonia was again united with Provence by the marriage of Raimon Berengar III. with a Provençal heiress in 1112. As the counts of Barcelona and the kings of Aragon held possessions in Southern France, communications between the two countries were naturally frequent. We have already had occasion to refer to the visits of various troubadours to the courts of Spain.
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