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Otto I or the Great is considered by many historians to be the founder of the Holy Roman Empire.  He was an effective military warrior who encouraged military expansion, colonization, and missionary activity eastward into the Slavic world.  His campaign was to restore kingship on the Carolingian model. Succeeding his father Henry I as the Duke of Saxony in 936, his military genius was tested early.  Otto I faced the continuous raids and sieges of the dukes, the Ducal Rebellions, which were led by his brother Henry of Bavaria.  The war was the result of him acquiring an increasing amount of power that others resented.  It ended with Otto's victory in 941 in which he replaced the rebellious dukes with his own relatives, thus compelling them to accept royal over lordship.  In 951, he commanded a successful invasion of Italy and declared himself King.  Magyars invaded the empire in 954, and this invasion forced the nobility to reunite with Otto in order to defend themselves.  He was able to defeat the Magyars in the battle of Lechfield in 955 and this temporarily restored peace throughout his empire.

Duke William, King of England from 25 December 1066. He was the illegitimate son of Duke Robert the Devil whom he succeeded as Duke of Normandy in 1035. Claiming that his 2nd cousin King Edward the Confessor had bequeathed him the English throne, William invaded England in September 1066, defeating Harold II Godwineson at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066. William's coronation took place in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. He completed the establishment of feudalism in England, compiling detailed records of land and property in the Domesday Book, and kept the barons firmly under control. He died in Rouen after a fall from his horse and is buried in Caen, France. He was succeeded by his son William II.Gregory VII (ca. 1020-1085) was pope from 1073 to 1085. One of the greatest medieval popes, later canonized, he was a man of intense conviction and will. He vigorously initiated reforms and asserted the papal claim to primacy of jurisdiction in the Church.

Although Gregory VII did not create the grandiose structure of the medieval papacy, he was certainly one of its chief architects. He became pope at a time when powerful forces were striving to rid the Latin Church of moral corruption and organizational confusion, when the papacy had already begun to assume the role of reforming leadership previously filled by emperors, kings, and lesser churchmen, and when imperial control over the Church in Italy had already weakened. Gregory continued the policies he had previously advocated as a prominent member of the papal court. He intensified papal involvement in the reforming movement and directed that movement along the road that was to lead to the first major clash between pope and Western emperor and ultimately to the papal theocratic claims of the High Middle Ages.