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The long-standing historiographical controversy about the nature of the comital office in East Francia and Ottonian Germany has turned on the same set of questions for more than a century: over whom did the count exercise jurisdiction, what was the basis of count's jurisdiction, and what was the source of the material assets that allowed counts to perform their duties? Left out of these discussions, however, has been the related problem of the control exercised by the king over the assets attached to the comital office, denoted variously as the res de comitatu, the count's ministerium, or simply the comitatus. The following study examines this question from the reign of Emperor Louis the Pious (814–840) through the death of Emperor Henry II (1002–1024), and concludes that the Carolingian and Ottonian rulers maintained tight control over the fiscal assets assigned to counts, and were able to recover them and reassign them as the royal government saw fit. This conclusion is at odds with much of the scholarship on the comital office in East Francia and Ottonian Germany that presents counts holding erstwhile fiscal assets in allodial tenure and the de facto transformation of the comital office into a hereditary possession.

For more than a generation Karl Leyser's influential thesis, which credited Henry I with undertaking a military revolution which made possible the Saxon dynasty's rule of Francia orientalis, has dominated the scholarly literature. According to Leyser, Henry radically reformed the Saxon military by building a large force of heavily armed mounted fighting men. These men provided the means necessary to assure Saxon domination. It is argued here, by contrast, that this Saxon military revolution is a myth and that the continental Saxons, as contrasted to those in England, saw the gradual development of a heavily armed mounted fighting force following their conquest by Charlemagne in 805. The real Saxon military revolution was Henry's creation of the agrarii milites and the building of frontier fortifications.

In 929, King Henry I of Germany (919–36) launched an exceptionally successful offensive against the Slav polities along the length of his eastern frontier. This campaign, which is recorded in contemporary written accounts, has long been known to historians, and its importance in the political history of the German kingdom is undisputed. However, to date, there is no book‐length or article‐length study devoted to Henry's military successes in 929. This article fills that striking lacuna by drawing on the vast body of information provided through excavations, which sheds considerable new light on the scale and sophistication of Henry I's undertaking.