The peace, however, soon bred in the city a restless vigour which could find no other vent than war. Under Ariberto d’Intimiano, who was elected archbishop in 1018, Milan, now restored to undisputed pre-eminence over her rival Pavia and the rest of the Lombard cities, started upon a career of conquest. In Ariberto the archiepiscopal pallium cloaked a potent statesman and warrior, who well knew how to defend that temporal power which the ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages looked upon as the best guarantee of their spiritual authority. When the Emperor Henry II., who followed the Othos, died in 1024, and the uncertainty as to his successor on the Lombard throne threatened new trouble to Italy, Ariberto hastened to Germany, and on his sole authority, according to one chronicler, though others say that he was supported by a party of Italian magnates, offered the kingdom to Conrad the Salic. Two years later (1026) he reasserted the right of the Primate of Milan to crown the King of Italy, by laying the circlet on the new monarch’s brow within the city itself. At Conrad’s subsequent coronation in Rome as Emperor, the Archbishop of Milan was the most important of the imposing company of ecclesiastical princes who attended on the occasion. His dignified withdrawal from a contest with the Archbishop of Ravenna for the place of highest honour was followed by a formal recognition of his primacy in a Papal Bull, while with less self-restraint his vast train of followers reduced the company of the Ravennese prelate to proper submission by apostolic blows and knocks in the streets of Rome, amid a tremendous uproar. Milan’s ecclesiastical superiority to Ravenna and all other Italian Sees was thus triumphantly settled. Ariberto’s ambition for the glory and predominance of Milan was well supported by the people. They followed the militant prelate with enthusiasm to the subjugation of Pavia, which had refused to acknowledge Conrad as king (1027), and a little later they made a furious assault under his command upon the little neighbouring city of Lodi, and forced its freedom-loving inhabitants to submit to Ariberto’s yoke and accept a bishop of his choosing. Thus Milan, impelled by the pride and ambition and necessity of expansion bred of strength and riches, was the first to provoke that spirit of hatred and revenge among the sister cities of Lombardy, which could only be expiated by centuries of bloodshed and sorrow.