The next century affords ample evidence of the growing favor in which the judicial combat was held. About the year 930, Hugh, King of Provence and Italy, becoming jealous of his uterine brother, Lambert, Duke of Tuscany, asserted him to be a supposititious child, and ordered him in future to claim no relationship between them. Lambert, being “vir ... bellicosus et ad quodlibet facinus audax,” contemptuously denied the aspersion on his birth, and offered to clear all doubts on the subject by the wager of battle. Hugh accordingly selected a warrior named Teudinus as his champion; Lambert was victor in the ensuing combat, and was universally received as the undoubted son of his mother. His triumph, however, was illegally brought to a sudden close, for Hugh soon after succeeded in making him prisoner and deprived him of eyesight.[353] Still, the practice continued to be denounced by some enlightened ecclesiastics, represented by Atto, Bishop of Vercelli, who declared it to be totally inapplicable to churchmen and not to be approved for laymen on account of the uncertainty of its results;[354] but representations of this kind were useless. About the middle of the century, Otho the Great appears, throwing the enormous weight of his influence in its favor. As a magnanimous and warlike prince, the wager of battle appears to have possessed peculiar attraction for his chivalrous instincts, and he extended its application as far as lay in his power. Not only did he force his daughter Liutgarda, in defending herself from a villanous accusation, to forego the safer modes of purgation, and to submit herself to the perilous decision of a combat,[355] but he also caused the abstract question of representation in the succession of estates to be settled in the same manner; and to this day in Germany the division of a patrimony among children and grandchildren is regulated in accordance with the law enacted by the doughty arms of the champions who fought together nine hundred years ago at Steil.[356] There was no question, indeed, which according to Otho could not be satisfactorily settled in this manner. Thus when, in 963, he was indulging in the bitter recriminations with Pope John XII. which preceded the subjugation of the papacy under the Saxon emperors, he had occasion to send Bishop Liutprand to Rome to repel certain accusations brought against him, and he ordered the armed followers of his ambassador to sustain his assertions by the duel; a proposition promptly declined by the pontiff, skilled though he was in the use of weapons.[357] A duellist, in fact, seems to have been reckoned a necessary adjunct to diplomacy, for when, in 968, the same Liutprand was dispatched by Otho to Constantinople on a matrimonial mission, and during the negotiations for the hand of Theophania a discussion arose as to the circumstances which had led to Otho’s conquest of Italy, the warlike prelate offered to prove his veracity by the sword