Louis I (; 23 December 1173 – 15 September 1231), called the Kelheimer or of Kelheim, since he was born and died at Kelheim, was the Duke of Bavaria from 1183 and Count Palatine of the Rhine from 1214. He was a son of Otto I and his wife Agnes of Loon. Louis was married to Ludmilla, a daughter of Duke Frederick of Bohemia.
Life
Early years
Soon after his father's death in 1183, Louis was appointed under the guardianship of his uncle Conrad of Wittelsbach and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. His mother, Agnes, an energetic and enterprising leader, had taken over the regency of Bavaria in the meantime, securing her son's inheritance. Upon his coming-of-age, in 1189, at sixteen years old, at the beginning of his reign, he had already fallen in the midst of a conflict which triggered the nearly simultaneous extinction of the Burgrave of Regensburg and the Count of Sulzbach in the years 1188 and 1189. This allowed Barbarossa to expand his royal domains within the Empire to include Regensburg and Sulzbach at Louis's expense. When the Emperor died on Crusade, and his son, Henry VI had ascended the throne on 15 April 1191 in Rome, he had immediately found a princely opposition in Ottokar I of Bohemia and his brother-in-law Count Albert III of Bogen who demanded a revision of the Staufen imperial land policy. Using that justification, Albert had designs to seize the Sulzbach domains from Emperor Henry's royal territory. Louis immediately attempted to mediate and called for a Hoftag in Laufen, which caught the attention of many great men within the Empire, to settle the dispute. Yet he could not stop the Count of Bogen and the Sulzbach land was taken. When Duke Louis turned against that, it came to war. Louis's forces were pushed back by the combined might of Count Albert and Duke Ottokar. Even the vicious counter-attack of Leopold V, Duke of Austria and Berthold, Duke of Merania were not able to change the situation. And Louis had vowed to never stop until Count Albert was without Sulzbach.
It was in the summer of 1192 at Worms where he received the German tradition of knighting, which was the handing of sword and belt, in the presence of Emperor Henry VI and many other Princes. By 1193, Emperor Henry became involved in-person over the affair and seized Sulzbach and Albert declared a standstill of arms; Albert was to be banished and Ottokar of Bohemia deprived of his duchy. In exchange for this service, Louis was to remain, for the next decade and a half, on the side of the Staufen. Louis would demonstrate his partisanship at the Hoftag at Würzburg, Mainz and his attendance of the Imperial retinue to Apulia and Sicily, where he would stand with the Emperor on securing Emperor Henry's inheritance of southern Italy.
Until the death of the emperor, Louis remained a loyal supporter of Henry VI and accompanied the Hohenstaufen in 1194 also to Italy on his second expedition for the conquest of the kingdom of Sicily, which was entitled Henry's wife Constance as sole heir. In the struggle for the throne after the death of Henry VI, he remained one of the main supporters of the Hohenstaufen Philip of Swabia. His continued support, however, had a price. When the Landgrave of Stefling died without an heir in 1196, instead of including the region over to his royal domain, Henry enfeoffed it to Louis instead. Suddenly, Eberhard, Archbishop of Salzburg and Conrad, Bishop of Regensburg, falling at variance, declared war on Duke Louis and spared no sacred nor profane structures. It was only through Louis's character that peace was restored.
The following year, in 1197, Louis went with the Emperor to Sicily to prepare for their departure for the German Crusade of 1197. But Henry had died of an illness; possibly malaria, suddenly. And the journey was canceled. Henry's death thus began a most difficult epoch in German history.