‘Since he was a man born and brought up to rule, he always showed a royal spirit in adversity, as was fitting in one of such descent, whose ancestors had held such high office and enjoyed such renown, and he preferred to die rather than be conquered. He considered it a matter of irremediable shame to allow an injury to go unpunished.’ Thus Henry IV is portrayed in the chronicle of Lampert, monk of Hersfeld, the apologist of his Saxon enemies. According to this chronicler, Henry's ‘royal spirit’ deteriorated under the influence of lowborn counsellors into a lust for power which threatened the property and the very freedom of his subjects. Another apologist of the Saxon rebels, Bruno, clerk of Merseburg, wrote that it was uncertain ‘which was the greater infamy, that of his incestuous lust or that of his boundless cruelty’ Most narrative sources for the reign of Henry IV were written from an anti-Henrician point of view. Many were composed by supporters of Pope Gregory VII and the reform papacy with which Henry was in conflict for the last thirty years of his reign. These Gregorian chroniclers echoed the language of the Saxon apologists, portraying a king who ‘used to rage savagely against [his subjects] according to his whim’; whose ‘thoughts turned to tyranny and [who] planned to hold the kingdom not by justice but by violence’.