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Conrad, Cardinal-Archbishop of Mentz

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was son of Otho IV, count of Wittelsbach, and was made archbishop in 1160, at the wish of the emperor Frederick I. In 1162 he made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Jago of Compostella. In 1165 Frederick, having convoked the diet of Wiirzburg in order to acknowledge the antipope, Conrad retired to Tours with the rightful pontiff, Alexander III. Frederick then placed Christian of Buche in the archiepiscopal see of Mentz, and the pope named Conrad cardinal-priest and bishop of Sabina. But he did not resign the archbishopric of Mentz until 1177, after peace was made between the emperor and the pope; in indemnification he was named archbishop of Salzburg. Christian of Buche having died in 1183, Conrad, returned to Mentz.

The following year he wished to seize that which had belonged, in Thuringia and Hesse, to the lost house of Franconia; but he found an adversary in the landgrave, Louis III. The result was a war of pillage and devastation, lasting for several years. In 1189 Conrad aided Henry VI, prince of Germany, in vanquishing Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony. In January 1197, the emperor, being unable to go to the Holy Land, as he was urged by the pope, put in his place the warlike archbishop, at the head of a large army. Conrad, with the title of legate, made it one of his tasks on the route to bring back to the Romish Church Livon, king of Armenia, and to reconcile him with Bohemond III, prince of Antioch. We are ignorant of his exploits in Palestine. He returned to Europe and landed in Apulia, July 15, 1199, rendered an account of his mission to pope Innocent III, then went to Mentz, and thence to Thuringia. He desired the same year to hold a diet at Boppard, in order to establish peace between the two competitors for the empire; but Otho refused to grant it. He then went to Hungary, and reconciled the king, Emeric, with Andrew, his brother; and succeeded, in 1200, at the assembly of Andernach, in pacifying the quarrels of the princes of the Rhine. In the same year he died. It was perhaps he who wrote the Chronicon Rerumn Moguninarum, giving an account of German events from 1140 to 1152 (published in Helverich's Hist. German, Frankf. 1550.) See Hoefer, Nouv. Biog. Generale, s.v.