The German kings had reestablished control over the mixed Slav-inhabited lands on the eastern borders of the Holy Roman Empire in the beginning of the twelfth century.

Albert the Bear, son of Otto the Rich, count of Ballenstedt, and Eilika, daughter of Magnus Billung, Duke of Saxony, had on his father’s death in 1123 inherited his valuable estates in northern Saxony between the Harz Mountains and the middle reaches of the Elbe River.

The dynasty founded by Otto is known as the Ascanian House, named after the city of Aschersleben.

Albert has remained a loyal vassal of his relation, Lothair I, duke of Saxony, from whom, in about 1123, he had received the margravate of Lusatia, to the east; after Lothair became king of the Germans, Albert had in 1126 accompanied him on a disastrous expedition to Bohemia, where he had suffered a short imprisonment.

Albert's entanglements in Saxony stem from his desire to expand his inherited estates there.

His brother-in-law, Henry II, who had been margrave of a small area east of the junction of the Elbe and Havel rivers called the Saxon Northern March, or Nordmark, had died in 1128, and Albert, disappointed at not receiving this fief himself, had attacked Udo, the heir, and had consequently been deprived of Lusatia by Lothair.

In spite of this, he had gone to Italy in 1132 in the train of the king, and his services are rewarded in 1134 by the investiture of the Nordmark, the Holy Roman Empire's territorial organization on the conquered areas of the Wends, which was again without a ruler.

Lothair, while while battling the Hohenstaufens for control of the empire, encourages a policy of eastward expansion into Slavic lands and the conversion of the Slavs, by peaceful means or otherwise, to Christianity.

(Later historians will term this the Drang nach Osten, ”literally, “Drive to the East”).