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 when 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.