CONFESSOR, TRAITOR OR PROSECUTOR: ON THE RITUALIZED RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN KINGS AND BISHOPS THROUGH THE PRISM OF OTTONIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

This paper is devoted to the analysis of the episcopal behavior and the interpretive frameworks that writers of the Ottonian age used to describe their actions. The focus of the research are various narrative representations, which were attached to the relationships between bishops and kings in the medieval historiography. The saintly bishop, the spiritual instructor of a king, the prosecutor of a ruler, and the bishop-traitor were the most prominent literary models, or modes of description, used in texts from the tenth and eleventh centuries. These modes of episcopal representations, in their relation to royal power, are perceived as parts of the coherent narrative strategies utilized by the medieval historiographers to meet their own aims. These aims included increasing the prestige of a community represented by a bishop, criticizing royal policies, condemning political rivals or justifying their own position. It is argued that all these various literary roles, thrusted upon bishops by chroniclers, hagiographers or polemicists, were realizations of the milestone concepts of episcopal power and medieval political theology: admonition and familiarity. These literary roles thus allowed Ottonian writers to imagine a bishop as being an intimate friend, a loyal lord, a prophet and a pastor to the ruling king and his realm.

The image of a saintly bishop is one of the most remarkable literary representations that a bishop could acquire in the Ottonian kingdom. Ascribing the status of a saint to an individual bishop required that his depiction in literary and liturgical texts had a specific character, beyond the confines of the bishop's actual biography 1 . This stylization was not required exclusively by conventions of a hagiographic genre. A newly created image, imposed on a bishop, was a product of its political and cultural milieu and often addressed the interests of the impresario of a bishop's cult, a religious community or a royal 1 For Ottonian (episcopal) sanctity see: Patrick  However, approaching this variety of king-bishop relations, we face impediments caused by Ottonian historiography 6 . A number of factors turn influential political actors into mere literary figures. These include the personal motives of tenth-eleventh century authors and the expectations of their audiences, literary traditions and topoi 7 . Chroniclers of the Ottonian Age turned the political protagonists of the period into tools for personal or communal self-fashioning, for creating useful pasts, for criticizing or getting rid of enemies, for propagating political or ecclesiastical ideas, and for exercising rhetoric.
In this paper, I analyse several specific "roles", or literary representations, which were attached to bishops by Ottonian writers; in other words -episcopal behaviour and interpretive frameworks that contemporaries used to understand their actions. I also pay attention to literary means used to construct those images and to reasons for creating these representations. I believe that this approach makes it possible to explain, or at least rethink, some of the "famous episodes" emerging from the convoluted relations between kings and bishops as we know them from the chronicles, gesta or saintly lives. Moreover, I acknowledge that the relations between kings and bishops, as seen in different literary forms, had a strong political and social background. However, as far as we are dealing with literary forms, it is useful to consider literary traditions of imagining and describing mundane rulers and clerics in concert with the aims and social logic of the text itself.
In the present study, I am mostly concerned with those relations between bishops and kings which are based on notions of familiaritas and auctoritas 8 . Signs of friendship, benevolence, closeness, enmity and power were expressed and negotiated through rituals, often referred to as Spielregeln 9 . Friendship and authority, combined with the idea of episcopal admonition, value of proximity, the virtue of pastoral care, and their represen-6 By an umbrella-term of Ottonian historiography I understand a group of historical and hagiographic texts created in the tenth and eleventh centuries in the German kingdom under the rule of the members of the tations by medieval authors, will be core points of reference for the current study. These aspects provide the following literary models of behaviour for the bishop: 1. Firstly, a personal confessor to the king; 2. Secondly, a prosecutor of the king's unfavourable policies, who has the authority to beseech the ruler or even impose penance on the king; 3. Thirdly, a traitor, who fails to honour his pledge to the king and thus disregards his pastoral duties. In the following, I deal with each of these literary types at length before synthesizing them in my conclusion.

Bishop-confessor
On the first pages of the Life of Burchard of Worms, written soon after the death of Bishop Burchard in 1025, the following passage concerning the relations between Emperor Otto III and Bishop Franko, Burchard's brother and predecessor on the episcopal see, can be found 10 : "With a vigilant spirit, [Franko] was zealous in the service of the emperor for more than one year and was often a party to his secrets. Whenever something regarding more important matters was to be discussed, the emperor treated him with such great familiarity and authority (even though he was an adolescent) that anything was only rarely decided without his counsel" 11 . This short episode presents the closest and most intimate relations between Otto and Franko: the emperor entrusts Franko with his secrets and seeks his council when deciding on political affairs.
The following scene describes how Otto and Franko went to Italy in 999 and practiced repentance together, "having put on hair shirts and with completely bare feet" 12 . This episode is a culmination of the amicitia motif. It is a high privilege, indeed, to repent together with the emperor and to share one of the sacraments with him. This voluntary practice of repentance brings the odour of sanctity to both the bishop and the emperor through "visions and divine conversations" 13 .
Even though Bishop Franko is not the main protagonist of the Vita, setting up this image of familiaritas and amicitia between Franko and the Holy Roman Emperor is vital: not only are the two personalities connected, but the two offices as well 14 . The same type of relations is outlined between the office of the German king and the bishop of Worms with regards to Burchard, the main character of the Vita. Burchard supported Duke Henry of Bavaria, future Henry II, during the contest for the German throne in 1002 and helped to stifle the rebellion of the Carinthian dukes. Even more intimate ties connected Burchard to Conrad II, Henry's successor. While Conrad was young, "The man of God [Burchard of Worms] summoned the boy [Conrad] and taught him the fear as well as the love of God and raised him as if he was an adopted son. And because he perceived in him a stability of spirit, he loved him more than the rest. It was he that God later elevated through His clemency to the throne of the kingdom" 15 .
For the author, it was important to underline the continuity of a close relationship between the German kings and the bishops of Worms, between the individuals as well as the offices. Why was it possible to entrust a bishop with the role of a king's councillor, confessor, and spiritual teacher, even when he, as a cleric, was subordinate to the ruler?
The answer lies in the concept of admonitio: the episcopal duty to "care about salvation and admonish brethren and kings" 16 . The responsibility of advising a ruler was thrusted onto the bishop already in Gregory I's Regula Pastoralis, hence the bishop was entrusted with the ruler's personal salvation and thus the salvation of the whole realm 17 . It was a sacral moral duty of a bishop to offer a council to a king, a friend and his flock. Otherwise, a bishop falls into a sin of negligentia and fails to conduct his pastoral office 18 . This idea of "monition and advice", a widely utilized discourse among kings and prelates in the Carolingian kingdom, enabled Ottonian authors to present the relations between the emperor and the bishop as based on council and authority 19 . In recent studies, the idea of episcopal admonition is considered to be "central to the self-representation of prelates across the high medieval west, and that it was more deeply engrained and more widely practiced than modern scholars have often recognized" 20 .
The author of the Life of Burchard was not alone in his attempt to present his protagonist as having the most intimate relations with the king. Several means were used to 14 Briefly on the development of tight connections between a ruler and episcopate mostly through the royal chapel see: GILSDORF (as above), pp. present the bishop as being a friend or moral advisor of the ruler, for example, through the topos of being in constant conversation with the emperor 21 .
Likewise, one of Adalbert of Prague's hagiographers claimed that during the Italian campaign, "the most Christian Caesar [Otto III], who always showed the greatest care and deepest solicitude towards the servant of God, often spoke to St. Adalbert and had him by his side as one of his closest, listening with pleasure to whatever he had to say" 22 . Later, during an encounter in Mainz: "The man of God remained with him for quite some time, because he was one of the closest. And he stayed day and night in the imperial bedchamber as the most holy attendant" 23 . In the chamber, Adalbert and Otto were engaged in "sweet conversations", and the saintly bishop taught Otto humility and "stimulated his desire for the heavenly homeland". Researches have established a direct borrowing of the idea and language of "holy conversations" from the homilies of Gregory the Great, whose treaties have already been mentioned as being extremely influential for episcopal self-fashioning and for understanding the role of the bishops 24 .
In his biography of Otto III, Gerd Althoff has stressed the idea of a royal "favour" to the bishop, quite often appearing in the vitae or gestae. In his words: "There authors confirmed their protagonists' influence by describing them engaged in intensive and confidential conversation with the ruler. To provide only one example for comparison: the two known bishops' vitae from the time of Otto the Great -those of Ulrich of Augsburg and Bruno of Cologne -also describe and stress the bishops' influence with the ruler in the same way, by emphasizing that he discussed everything with them in intimate conversation" 25 .
This boasting of a fictitious connection with a ruler was created in texts by attributing the role of the king's friend, confessor or spiritual instructor to the bishop. The ideal of having direct access to the king and being treated as his friend appears to have been highly valued in the Ottonian realm. It influenced the common use of the topos of being in constant conversation with the king, which served to highlight the royal benevolence towards the protagonist. Hence, these reports should not be taken at a face-value: these roles as advisor or confessor were thrusted upon the image of the bishop in the literary works. The ideal of close connections between a king and a bishop was one of the "key components in the rhetoric of admonitio", and cited authors were operating in this framework 26 . 21

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The creation of this specific image of close connection between a ruler and a bishop was highly important to the community, which a bishop represented and to whom his life and deeds were usually written about. This type of community can be defined as textual, or literary: a heterogeneous group of readers, authors and writers, bounded by a social practice of reading this text and a shared way of interpreting it 27 . The favourable image of a main protagonist was used to establish the community's identity in cooperation with the imperial power, and, as in case of Worms, even to hint at an indebtedness of the royal office to the community. However, these intimate connections should seem persuasive to the audience of those texts. I assume that such credibility was based on the shared idealized role of the bishop, mostly rooted in the Patristic tradition. The notion of admonition and of episcopal preceptorship was propagated in the writings mostly of Gregory the Great and was emulated, at least in literary form or in the imagined past of a community.

Bishop-prosecutor
The episcopal duty of admonitio did not necessarily create a positive image of amicable relations between the bishop and the king 28 . A bishop could directly point at royal faults and request the monarch to repent for his sins, as happened when Louis the Pious was deposed and confronted with his crimes at Soissons in 833 29 . In the following scenarios, a bishop or a council of clerics played the role of a king's prosecutor, striving for the purity of the realm and its beholder. However, a bishop remained in the theological framework focused on admonition and on correcting people's sins, which was often presented by contemporary authors as an acceptable mode of exercising Kaiserkritik.
As Mayke de Jong has pointed out, a patristic concept of admonitio stands on the borderline with increpatio: within the latter framework, monition and council transition into "antagonistic recrimination" 30 . Increpatio is a concept from the Old Testament, and so is the prototype of a certain episcopal position towards a king: a prophet 31 . Bishops tend to adopt a role of the "watchman of the house of Israel", a paradigm explained in . This type of relationships between worldly and episcopal offices entered both practice and literary discourse in the ninth century Carolingian realm. The Ottonian Age is considered as a failure for episcopal recrimination and monition to be adopted and actively practiced 32 ; however, I still see a possibility for transmission and transitions, rather than an abrupt change. In this part of the paper, I will draw attention to some 27 On the notion of textual communities see: Brian  108 of the episodes from Ottonian authors, which presumably describe a similar paradigm of political practice, situated on the verge of admonitio and increpatio.
First, I will turn to a marginal narrative from the reign of Otto I, that is to be found only in the Deeds of the Bishops of Halberstadt 33 . A conflict between Otto I and Bishop Bernhard of Halberstadt escalated due to Otto's activities when establishing an archbishop in Magdeburg 34 . His wish to elevate Magdeburg to the status of archbishopric is linked to the triumphal victory over the Hungarians in the battle at Lechfeld in 955 35 . However, it took him more than ten tough years to eliminate opposition of clerics and other magnates who joint the resistance: only in 968 the foundation was approved on the Synod of Ravenna 36 . While Otto I eventually managed to silence the opposition, memories of this episcopal resistance against a royal wish lived on for much longer, mostly in local historiographic traditions.
According to the gesta episcoporum, in 966 Emperor Otto had to imprison Bishop Bernhard, who, in his turn, rebuked the emperor and excommunicated him. Similar to the scenario of the Carolingian "penitential state", Otto I had to make a public repentance to expiate his guilt: "After the emperor went a little from the city, he, truly moved by divine inspiration, suddenly returned barefoot as a penitent, prostrated on the ground before the aforementioned bishop [Bernhard], and obtained the favour of absolution, which he humbly asked for" 37 .
As a result of the royal repentance, "the entire dispute between the emperor and the bishop finished" 38 . After the received absolution, Otto I entered Halberstadt as a triumphant lord and the conflict was never mentioned again in the lifetime of Bishop Bernhard: their relationships returned to the amicitia and auctoritas paradigm. The author of 33 On the genre of gesta episcoporum and abuse of this source see: Thomas  the gesta episcoporum presented Bishop Bernhard as taking the role of the king's persecutor and the "watchman of the house", striving for the personal guiltlessness of the ruler and the purity of the kingdom. At the same time, the reproach and excommunication had also an overtone of a personal vindication. This episode, which is described only in the local historiographic tradition of Halberstadt, raised a lot of doubts concerning its credibility and time of creation. The corpus of the Deeds of the Bishops of Halberstadt was compiled at the beginning of the thirteenth century and relies largely on earlier sources from the Ottonian age, such as Widukind's the Deeds of the Saxons and Thietmar's Chronicle. Kurt-Ulrich Jäschke has established that the layer of the text which narrates the discord between Otto I and Bernhard can be traced back to the end of the tenth century, between 992 and 996 39 . In this case, the gesta transmitted the events as preserved in the memory and oral communication of the next generation, the communicative memory 40 . Whether the communicative memory can be considered as a "reliable" source for "traditional" historical craft, namely reconstructing the course of event, is a debated question. However, a memory per se is of a great worth when analysing representational strategies of a community and, in this case, the role of a bishop as contributing to the self-identification of a group.
The image of Bishop Bernhard in the gesta, whether historically credible or not, is extremely powerful: first, Bernhard had the courage to excommunicate the emperor; later, he moved Otto I to repentance. Why was a bishop entrusted with such an authority, not only to admonish a ruler, but also to prosecute his sins? I would argue that in this local commemoration of the conflict between a bishop and a king a discussed biblical motive of increpatio was utilized as a narrative model.
The idea of the prosecutor-bishop is rooted in the Old Testament. The second book of Samuel and the first book of Chronicles contain episodes which drastically influenced the medieval understanding of worldly power and the representation of Christian kings. David, the powerful ruler of the kingdom of Israel, was moved to repentance twice by prophets, representatives of God's will on earth. First, by the Prophet Nathan after the king seduced Bathsheba and sent her husband Uriah to death 41 . The second time, David provoked God's wrath by taking census of the Israeli people, not believing that victory depended on the will of the Lord rather than the multitude of David's warriors. Therefore, the seer Gad was sent by the Lord to David to persuade the king to repent 42 . It took quite a while to develop a doctrine of episcopal power, giving clerics the right to admonish kings and to be their judges and moral arbiters. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, was the first to recognize and utilize the bishop's authority over a ruler. Ambrose used the image of David as an example for Emperor Theodosius, who was forced to publicly atone for his sin, namely the massacre at Thessaloniki in 390 43 . 39  Since then, royal penance had become both an influential political ritual from the arsenal of royal ceremonies and an instrument of exercising episcopal power of admonitio and increpatio. Bishops also used their right of correction during the reign of Louis the Pious and twice forced the king to perform public penance, though with different outcomes 44 . This ritual of royal repentance points to a specific connection between the wellbeing of a kingdom and the moral behaviour of its ruler on the one hand, and between a king and the Church as his moral arbiter on the other 45 . Even though there is no clear evidence that Ottonian ecclesiastical discourse was knowledgeable of the royal admonition performed by their Carolingian forerunners, the authority of bishop Bernhard of Halberstadt indeed echoes the same principle of episcopal admonition. The bishop has a responsibility to redeem the sins of the ruler, influence his soul and behaviour, and bring the Empire back on the road to salvation.
A similar image of an ecclesiastical authority prosecuting the ruler for his sins can be illustrated by two rather famous examples, both staged during the Second Italian Campaign of Otto III 46 . The emperor, fiercely suppressing the revolt in Rome, mutilated Crescentius, the leader of the Roman aristocracy, and John Philagathos, the antipope 47 . The Lives of two contemporary Italian ascetics, Nilus the Younger and Romuald, recount that both saints pointed Emperor Otto's misdeeds out to him and moved him to repentance. Even though these two narratives belong to two different cultural and literary traditions (Italo-Greek monasticism and the Gregorian reform movement), they both utilize the patristic concept of admonition, as Sarah Hamilton has convincingly shown 48 . Along with this, both hagiographers aimed to evoke in their readers the notions of sacerdotal superiority and royal humility when invoking the David model, to which the Lives clearly allude 49 . The commemoration strategy resembles the Halberstadt case: a religious com-  [Power, Society, and Individual in Medieval Europe]. Moskva 2008, pp. 211-242. 44 The recent publication on penances of Louis the Pious is: JONG (as above Greek author of munity established its identity against the royal power and confirmed its independence as well as, to a certain extent, superiority over the mundane authorities. The famous letter of Bruno of Querfurt to King Henry II from c. 1008 serves as a perfect illustration of the episcopal duty to advice and admonish a ruler, and to correct his sins 50 . This letter has been heartily discussed in respect to King Henry's politics in the East of the realm, namely his temporary union with the pagan Liutizi against Bolesław I Chrobry 51 . However, I would leave these questions aside and briefly pay attention to the rhetoric of the letter which Bishop Bruno utilized to express his Kaiserkritik in a most subtle way.
At the beginning of the letter, after rather conventional praises for King Henry, Bruno of Querfurt imputes on him such sinful emotions as "fear, anger, and mockery", which Henry had expressed in relation to Bruno's missionary activities among the Slavic peoples 52 . Later, Bishop Bruno straightforwardly rebukes Henry: "But, if it is permitted to speak thus without losing the king's grace: Is it good to persecute a Christian people and hold a pagan people in friendship? … On what battle line do the sacred lance and the diabolic banners, which are nourished with human blood, go forth together?" 53 And then: "After the holy emperor Constantine the Great, after Charles, that best exemplar of religion, there is now someone who persecutes the Christian, but almost no one who converts the pagan". This indictment reveals a sin which King Henry committed, and therefore would have to repent if not wishing to leave the fate of the whole empire in danger. And Bishop Bruno imagined himself as the right person to admonish the sinned ruler: it was a part of his pastoral duties.
This model of relations between the bishop and the ruler also implied that secular power should be judged by the Church, whereby popes, bishops and saints can rightfully claim the highest moral authority. This motive was often invoked in local traditions in order to maintain the identities of the local communities and separate them from royal influence. This "bishop-persecutor" model goes beyond a literary convention: it rests on biblical and patristic traditions, followed by historical precedents which altogether shaped the politics and behaviour of the bishops, as revealed by the example of Bruno of Querfurt. With an exception of the Decretum of Burchard of Worms, Ottonian liter- ary and scholarly environment did not produce extensive treaties devoted to a theory of episcopal (or in general, clerical) power. However, the steady process of crystallization of these ideas did take place in the Ottonian intellectual circles, as one can trace through typified images of bishops.

Bishop-traitor and rebellious bishops
The final concept that is tackled in this paper is that of a bishop represented being in an open disagreement with a mundane ruler. In narratives of the period, this relationship between episcopal and royal powers was depicted from two different angles. On the one hand, by contradicting royal will, a bishop could have exercised his "right of rebellion", hence his actions were in conformity with the Spielregeln of the political climate. On the other hand, an episcopal disagreement could have been understood as an act of betrayal and negligence of his own episcopal duties.
A right of disagreement was a crucial concept of social and political environment of the Early Medieval political formations. Relations between territorial lords and a ruler were regulated by unwritten sets of rules, expressed by ritualized actions; as profoundly discussed by Karl Leyser and Gerd Althoff, an opportunity to disagree and to rebel were one of these ritualized political means to negotiate the power 54 . Equally important was to facilitate the establishment of the order after breakouts of disagreement: a social institute of "begging pardon and favour" evoked 55 . In the tenth-eleventh centuries, bishops functioned also as powerful territorial lords and political leaders (examples of Ulrich of Augsburg or Bruno of Cologne are more than excessive). Consequently, the twofold mechanism of disagreement and pardon should have also shaped the relations between rulers and bishops. Together with previously discussed concepts of admonition and pastoral care, these gave Ottonian authors a framework of either condemning or justifying ecclesiastical lords. First, I recount briefly several examples of bishops who were convicted of betraying a ruling king (hence, deprived of their opportunity to rebel); the second part is devoted to the cases, in which an episcopal right of rebellion was approved.
When it comes to descriptions of bishops, who conspired against or betrayed a ruler, there is a striking similarity in the way Ottonian authors described and devalued these acts. "Non pastor, sed lupus" is how the author of the Quedlinburg Annals damned John Philagathos, a clergyman of Greek origin, who became an antipope during the revolt in Rome in 997 as has already been mentioned before. Unlike the Lives of the Italian saints Nilus and Romuald, which depicted the mutilated rebels in a favourable light and put all the blame on Otto III, the Quedlinburg annalist condemned the conspirators and proclaimed the coup to be a rebellion against the emperor and the Church 56 .
In his Chronicle, Thietmar of Merseburg, a bishop himself, described his malignant enemy Gisilher (at that time, the bishop of Merseburg) as "non pastor, sed mercenarius" 57 . Thietmar accused Gisilher of obtaining the see of Magdeburg cunningly, through deceit and by taking advantage of Otto II's benevolence 58 . Initially, Gisilher was meant to intercede for the Magdeburg community in front of Otto II and promote their own candidate; however, he deceived both the see of Magdeburg and the king: Gisilher betrayed royal favour and asked the see for himself, which led to the distortion of the bishopric in Merseburg 59 . However, one has to acknowledge that personal enmity between Thietmar of Merseburg, the author of this text, and Gisilher of Magdeburg shaped a negative image of Gisilher and added dramatic overtones in this specific passage. As far as Thietmar perceived the prosperity of the kingdom being strongly connected to his diocese of Merseburg, the dissolution of the latter put a shade over the whole kingdom 60 . Gisilher, who, according to his pastoral duties, had to take care of the salvation of the empire, did quite the opposite, from Thietmar's standpoint; hence, he failed to be a true pastor to his flock.
Similarly expressed accusations of episcopal infidelity can also be found in the epistolary genre, namely in the letters of Gerbert d' Aurillac, the future Pope Sylvester II. "Quasi vero tu pastor, et non lupus rapax, et potius alter Judas", that is how Gerbert referred to his addressee, Bishop Deitrich of Metz, on behalf of Charles of Lower Lotharingia. Dietrich was accused of betraying the young king Otto III, despite of his close connections to the royal family, in favour of Henry of Bavaria; although Duke Charles would later excuse himself for the sharp accusations 61 .
In these three examples, the authors, among whom two are bishops themselves, accuse the bishops of betraying the ruler or the interests of the realm, and they refuse to call them worthy bishops, pastor verus. This close connection between exercising pastoral duties and being loyal to the ruler is expressed in the formula "non pastor sed lupus", though the second element of the negation can also refer to a hireling or Judas. The wording is an echo of the verses from Christ's preaching before the Jews, narrated in the Gospel of John (10:11-14), 62 and the mount sermon from the Gospel of Matthew (7:15): "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves" 63 .

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In these excerpts, a distinction is made between the natures of true and false spiritual leaders, where the main virtue is to take care of the flock. Even though one cannot find any remarks about the relations between ecclesiastical and worldly powers in these verses, these exact famous excerpts were chosen by Ottonian authors as rhetorical forms to describe not just unworthy bishops, but those, who betrayed the ruler. I would suggest that maintaining the role of the bishop was tightly bound with being loyal to a king within Ottonian indigenous political theology.
The other literary representation, that of a "rebellious bishop", was comprehensively discussed by Ernst-Dieter Hehl 64 . While the image of a betrayer was thrusted upon bishops such as Giselher, John Philagathos or Dietrich, similar disagreements between ruler and bishop were explained as an expression of the episcopal right to discord, briefly analysed above. Fashioning episcopal disagreement with mundane authorities as realization of this right, often conducted in a ritualized form, allowed a bishop to keep his honour and clerical status even when disagreeing with a king.
An example of such rebellious bishops can be found in a famous episode from the Chronicle of Thietmar of Merseburg: namely, the Frankfurt synod in 1007 65 . A decision by King Henry II to establish a diocese in Bamberg faced severe discontent from the bishops. During the synod, King Henry plead bishops to grant him a right to establish a diocese, and, according to Thietmar, the king continuously repented and kneeled in front of the bishops until they gave him their consent. This puzzling scene has undergone innumerable interpretations from different theoretical frameworks, such as ritual studies, memory creation, new constitutional history etc. 66 Most of the researchers concentrated on questions of credibility of this narrative and possible prototype for such a seemingly unusual gesture of a king, and Gerd Althoff was among the first ones who hinted to the possible ironic use of such narrations 67 . Ernst-Dieter Hehl, in his turn, analysed episcopal behaviour, especially in times of succession crisis, as a realization of their right to rebel and express their agency. The only way for the king to overcome "stubbornness" of the presiding bishops was a ritual humiliation in front of the synod. In the end, his repentance and royal plea were utilized as a symbolic argument in the dispute concerning Bamberg.
This narration, on the one hand, questions the leading role of a king in the Imperial Church, and, on the other hand, shows how fragile "discordant" bishops were in the hands of the authors who depicted them. Depending on the position of the chronicler and the inner logic of the text, episcopal discord with the ruler was tolerated in some cases, while it was condemned as treason in the others.

Conclusion
In the Ottonian historiography, bishops are presented as confessors for kings, as the kings' closest advisors, or, quite on the contrary, as royal prosecutors or traitors of the realm. However, all these images are realizations of the same political principles and theological notions which constitute the office of a bishop, on which, consequently, the relations between episcopal and royal power were built in the Ottonian realm: admonitio, correptio, familiaritas, being a true pastor and a loyal territorial lord at the same time.
Even though the principle of admonition was not exercised as often as in the Merovingian or Late Carolingian epochs, it was an extremely important component in constructing and understanding the relations between the ruler and the bishop. The notion of an episcopal duty to take care of the flock and the realm made it possible to imagine a bishop being an advisor and spiritual director of the king. Furthermore, it provided bishops with the authority to admonish the ruler and express their discord. The depiction of a bishop as a close friend of the ruler was bound to the value of "closeness", both during public ceremonies and in private encounters. Not only access to the king mattered, but also loyalty to the ruler: this idea of faithfulness was bound to an image of the bishop as a true pastor and a territorial prince of the kingdom.
Most of these notions were not invented in the Ottonian intellectual sphere and were based on reconsideration of biblical prototypes and patristic tradition, corrected according to the political and social environment of the age. However, these exact traditions, together with the interpretative tools and personal aims of Ottonian historiographers and their audiences, made it possible to thrust the discussed images of saints, traitors, advisors or prosecutors upon bishops and kings. Indeed, the Ottonian epoch was an age of charismatic bishops, whose intricate relations with the Ottonian ruler and ambivalent position in the church system define our contemporary perception of the medieval power structures 68 .