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Rh reached the ears of Otto who proceeded as usual to the feast but with a strong guard, and there seized and executed the whole gang of conspirators. Henry fled, was captured and imprisoned at Ingelheim, but before the end of the year received the king's pardon. The unscrupulous Archbishop of Mayence was also implicated but cleared himself of guilt by receiving the sacrament in public.

The civil wars involved extensive changes in the government of the duchies. During the years which followed the restoration of order, Otto inaugurated and gradually established the policy of attaching the dukedoms more closely to himself by granting them to members of his own family. The administration of Lorraine was in 931 entrusted to a certain Otto, son of Ricwin, and on his death in 944 the duchy was conferred upon Conrad the Red, a nephew King Conrad I, who in 947 was married to Otto's daughter Liutgard. Franconia, after the death of Everard at the fight of Andernach, the king retained in his own hands. When Duke Berthold died in 947 his duchy of Bavaria passed to the king's own brother Henry, who, after the failure of his last attempt to win the throne in 941, had become one of the loyalest of Otto's subjects and who was already akin to the Bavarian ducal house through his marriage in 938(?) with Judith, the daughter of the old duke Arnulf. Lastly, on the death of Duke Herman in 949, Swabia was given to Otto's son Liudolf, who married Ida, the daughter of the late duke. By these arrangements the ancient supremacy of the Franconian tribe was for ever crushed; but in the southern duchies the order of things remained unchanged, for while granting the dukedoms to his own kinsmen, he maintained the traditions and customs of the tribal duchies by giving the new dukes in marriage to the daughters of the old ducal houses.

In the meanwhile the eastern neighbours of Germany had taken full advantage of the intestine troubles which filled the opening years of the new reign. In the midst of the ducal rebellion of 939 Widukind deplores the numerous enemies that beset his native Saxony, "Slavs from the east, Franks from the south, Lorrainers from the west, and from the north Danes and more Slavs"; he might have added Hungarians from the south-east, for their barbaric hordes swept into Thuringia and Saxony in 937 and 938. They were beaten back and never again ventured into Saxon territory. On the Wendish border there had been ceaseless activity. Fortunately for Otto, the frontier