For eighty years the Saxon kings and emperors had succeeded from father to son, and even a minority had not broken down the tendency towards heredity which seemed rapidly divesting the German kingdom of the elective character which it had shared with the Empire itself. Otto III.’s death without direct heirs now reminded the German magnates that they still could choose their king, and, in the absence of any strong claimant, there was a whole swarm of aspirants after the vacant dignity. The friends of the Saxon traditions, which Otto III. had so violently set at naught, hoped for the election of the brave and experienced Eckhard of Meissen; but as Eckhard was travelling to the south to pursue his candidature, he was murdered to satisfy a private revenge. His removal secured the appointment of Henry, Duke of Bavaria, the son of Henry the Quarrelsome, and the nearest kinsman of competent age and position to the dead ruler. Thus the throne was retained in the hands of the Saxon house, though it now was held by a branch that had long attached itself to the traditions of its southern duchy. Bavarians, Lorrainers, and Franks accepted Henry at once; the Saxons and Swabians only after a short hesitation. It was a great thing that the succession had been peaceably settled. Yet the new king had neither the power nor the energy of the Ottos. Raised to the throne by the great magnates, Henry II. never aspired to carry on the despotic traditions of the earlier Saxon kings, but thought to rule with the help of frequent Diets and Councils. He had more authority over the Church, and his personal piety and zeal for good works, in which he was well supported by his wife Cunigunde, procured for him in after times the name and reputation of a saint, and in his own day kept him on good terms with the clergy, though he was never their slave. He used his bishops and abbots as instruments of his temporal rule, and systematically developed Otto III.’s system of making the bishops and abbots the local representatives of the imperial power by granting them the position of Count over the neighbouring Gau. On one great matter he gave much offence to the German bishops. [Sidenote: Henry II. and the Church.] He set up a new bishopric at Bamberg in Franconia, laying in 1004 the foundations of its new cathedral, and conferring on it such extensive privileges that every bishop in Germany was annoyed at the new prelate holding a position next after the archbishops, while the Archbishop of Mainz resented the merely nominal ties of obedience that bound the Bishop of Bamberg to him as his metropolitan. Henry was a friend of the Cluniac monks, and it was through his efforts that these zealous Church reformers first got a strong position in Germany. [Sidenote: Henry II. and the Slavs.]