BOOK III.

THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE, OR THE ATTEMPT TO ORGANIZE GERMAN AND CHRISTIAN EUROPE (687-814).

 

CHAPTER VIII.

THE MAYORS OF AUSTRASIA AND THE PAPACY, OR THE EFFORTS TO INFUSE UNITY INTO THE STATE AND THE CHURCH (687-768).

 

Pippin of Heristal (687-714).—Charles Martel (714-741); The Carolingian Family Reorganizes the State and its Authority.—Formation of Ecclesiastical Society ; Elections ; Hierarchy ; The Power of the Bishops.—Monks ; Monasteries ; the Rule of St. Benedict.—The Pope ; St. Leo ; Gregory the Great.—The Papacy breaks away from the Supremacy of Constantinople (726), Invokes the aid of Charles Martel.—Pippin the Short (741-768).

 

 

We left the history of the Franks at the year 681, when Ebroin's attempt to put the ruling power into the hands of royalty and of Neustria had been frustrated by his death. The mayors who succeeded him in the western kingdom were not strong enough to maintain the great struggle begun by him. They continued by their persecutions to enlarge the ranks of the Austrasian army, and that army finally reached the point when it was able to conquer, for its position on the banks of the Rhine and in the neighborhood of the barbarians had made it necessary that they should retain the courageous vigor which Neustria had lost, and which would have given the Austrasians victory much sooner had it not been for the genius of Ebroin. Pippin of Heristal by the decisive battle of Testry (687) became master over the three kingdoms, though he allowed Theodoric III. to remain on the throne. Just as Ebroin had taken up arms against the nobles and Austrasia, for the sake of royal authority and ''Roman France," as Neustria was called, so Pippin of Heristal resisted this attempt, and menaced, in a way, the conquest of Clovis in behalf of the ancient Ripuarians, and at first, as will readily be believed, equally in behalf of the old German customs. That this event was considered a serious revolution, even at the time of its occurrence, is shown by the fact that all the surrounding nations over which the Frankish power extended, the Britons, Aquitanians, Gascons, Frisians, and Alemanni, believed that power to be shattered and that the time had come to free themselves. But Pippin let them see that, far from having lost, it had gained in strength. "He waged many wars," said the chronicles, "against Radbod, duke of the Frisians, and other princes, against the Flemings and many other nations. In these wars he was always victorious."

Pippin did not set up the throne again in Austrasia, but kept it in Neustria, which he wished to treat with consideration, and three kings successively reigned there who were mere puppets in his hands. At his death (714), the hereditary right of his family to the mayoralty of the palace was evidently already regarded as a matter of course, for he left the title to his grandson, a child of six years of age, under the guardianship of his widow, Plectrude.

The Neustrians sought to profit by this minority to free themselves from Austrasian power. They defeated the Austrasians, and made Chilperic I their king and Raganfred their mayor. The Austrasian, who were not content to submit to a child and to a woman, recognized another son of Pippin as their chief, Karl or Charles, who was called a bastard by those who strictly regarded the law. The Neustrians had allied themselves with the Frisians, in order to place Austrasia between two hostile countries, and Charles was defeated at first in 716. But a year later he surprised the conquerors and defeated them at Vincy near Courtray (717). Instead of stopping to celebrate his victory according to the barbarian custom, he pursued the Neustrians to the very walls of Paris; their army was almost annihilated. As their alliance with the Frisians had not succeeded, the Neustrians turned to the Aquitainians, who were ruled by Duke Eudes, and who, through hatred of barbarian authority, joyfully seized the opportunity of repulsing the new set of Frankish invaders. But the second league failed like the first. Charles defeated them near Soissons (718), and pursued them as far as Orleans. Later he induced Eudes to deliver to him Chilperic II whom he recognized as king (720).

This victory completed the work begun at Testry, and marked the final victory of Austrasia and the beginning of a new era in the history of the Franks. Until then, all the old institutions had been falling to pieces, and nothing new had taken definite shape. The territory had been loosely held together and badly organized ; its outlying provinces were wavering between submission and independence. Saxons, Thuringians, Bavarians, Alemanni, and Aquitanians were placed in an uncertain position, and no one could give the exact limits of the Frankish Empire. Within, Neustria and Austrasia were divided by what was really the antagonism between Roman and barbarian ideas; the free men were more and more degraded, on the one hand, and on the other the aristocracy of the leudes became more and more powerful. Royalty existed, but without power; the Mayors of the Palace had the power but not the rights of kings. All the elements of the state were in confusion.

The Carolingian family, with its illustrious origin and victories, with its power and riches, was the only one in a position high enough, and with talents great enough, to infuse order into the barbarian world. The three great men belonging to it, Charles Martel, Pippin the Short, and Charlemagne, were workers in the same cause and followed the same policy, both in war and in peace; what was begun by the first of them was continued by the second, and accomplished by the third.

The quick blows, felt at the extreme limits of the kingdom, the expeditions alternating between the north and south, which, later, were the characteristic features of Charlemagne's wars, were already seen in those of Charles Martel. First there was a series of campaigns against the Bavarians; then another against the Frisians; then still another against the Saxons. All these nations, except the last, were subdued for a time, at least, if not forever (720­729). The wars were renewed in the south; all along the Rhone the Burgundian lords who had gained their independence returned to their allegiance, as well as Provence and Marseilles, whose governor Maurontus was banished (739). Eudes, the duke of Aquitania, was likewise forced to submit, and when he died Charles gave the duchy to his son Hunold only on the condition of his rendering homage to himself and his sons Pippin and Karlmann.

But the most famous military achievement of Charles, and that which gave him in after times his popular name of "Martel," was his great victory over the Saracens in 732. Hardly a century had passed since Mohammedanism came into being in the deserts of Arabia, and its votaries had already reached the farthest limits of the West; by the year 711 they had invaded Spain, by 720 they had crossed the Pyrenees, and conquered Narbonne. In 732, the Emin Abderrahman invaded Aquitania, captured Bordeaux, and marched upon Tours, tempted by the wealth of the abbey in that town. Charles, summoned by Eudes, went to meet the infidels and gained a great victory between Tours and Poi­tiers, which stopped the movement of Mussulman invasion.

Thus he consolidated his territory on every side, preventing a division and protecting the frontiers from new invasions. The same sword that accomplished this great work had, at the same time, the glory of saving Christianity.

The Middle Ages acknowledged two masters, the Pope and the Emperor, and these two powers came, the one from Rome, and the other from Austrasian France. We have seen how the mayors of Austrasia, Pippin of Heristal, and Charles Martel, rebuilt the Frankish monarchy and prepared the way for the empire of Charlemagne; we now pass to the Roman pontiffs and see how they gathered around them all the churches of the West, and placed themselves at the head of the great Catholic society, over which one day Gregory VII and Innocent III should claim to have sole dominion.

The Roman Empire had perished, and the barbarians had built upon its ruins many slight structures that were soon overthrown. Not even had the Franks, who were destined to be perpetuated as a nation, as yet succeeded in founding a social state of any strength; their lack of experience led them from one attempt to another, all equally vain; even the attempt of Charlemagne met with no more permanent success. In the midst of these successive failures one institution alone, developing slowly, and steadily through the centuries following out the spirit of its principles, continued to grow and gain in power, in extent, and in unity.

The preaching of the apostles and their disciples had spread the Gospel throughout the Roman world, and as early as the third century the Christians formed a kind of vast society by themselves in the heart of the Empire. From Britain to the banks of the Euphrates, a Christian, traveling with a letter from his bishop, found aid and protection all along his route. Everywhere that he went he met with brothers, who assisted him if poor, and cared for him if sick; a sign served in the place of words, and the Christians all understood each other no matter of what language or country they might be—for they were all of one family. This society had organized itself under the stress of persecution; it had a rigid discipline and a strictly regulated hierarchy. The cities of the Roman provinces had grown into dioceses governed by supervisors or bishops (episcopi); below them in authority were the elders or priests (presbyteri). The bishop, who had first been appointed by the apostles and consecrated by the laying on of hands, afterwards when the number of conversions necessitated the formation of a church in every city, was chosen by the faithful, installed by the other bishops of the province, and con­firmed in his powers by the metropolitan (Canon XIV of the Nicene Council). The letters  of Sidonius Apollinaris show that at Châlons and Bruges in the fifth century, the elections of bishops were by popular vote. Later the clergy took a larger part in ecclesiastical elections and inclined to the exclusion of the laity; but what the laymen lost in this respect they gained by the encroachment of the royal power upon the church, which power often gave the bishoprics to nobles. The clergy struggled against this usurpation and succeeded in establishing the principle of election by the clergy and the people, with the submission of the election to the king for his consent; this was the arrangement made by the canons of the councils of Orleans, in 549, and by the perpetual constitution of 615.

The election system was only used for one degree of the ecclesiastical dignitaries, for the bishopric. The lower dignitaries were chosen by the bishop. They were divided into two categories of orders—the higher and the lower orders. There were three higher orders, namely, the priests, the deacons, and the sub-deacons, and four lower orders, the acolytes, the doorkeepers, the exorcists, and the readers. The latter orders were not regarded as an integral part of the clergy, as their members were the servants of the others.

As regards the territorial divisions, the bishop governed the diocese, which at a much later date was divided into parishes, whose spiritual welfare was in the hands of the parish priest or curate (curio). The parishes, taken together, constituted the diocese; the united dioceses, or suffragan bishoprics, constituted the ecclesiastical province, at whose head stood the metropolitan or archbishop. When a provincial council was held, it met in the metropolis and was presided over by the metropolitan. Above the metropoli­tans were the Patriarchs, in the East, and the Primates, in the West, bishops who held the great capitals or the apostolic sees, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Rome, Jerusalem, Caesarea in Cappadocia, Carthage in Africa, and Heraclius in Thrace; among them Rome ranked higher by one degree, and from this supreme position exercised a supreme authority acknowledged by all the Church.

The organization of the hierarchy did not reach this point at once, but after a long process which separated and determined the originally confused elements and fixed by more exact lines and greater distances the different degrees of power. The authority which was at first shared by the mass of the faithful, the foundation of every religious structure, rose step by step as it was withdrawn from the lower orders, and was finally vested almost entirely in the supreme point, the Pope. This gradual ascent of authority from point to point sums up the whole of Church history till the time of Boniface VIII. ; about half the course had been run at the time to which we have now come.

In the fifth and sixth centuries, under the barbarian kings, the bishops kept and extended the influence which they had possessed under the Roman Empire in the cities which they often preserved from ruin during invasion, by their intercessions with the German chiefs. Chilperic complained of it; "The bishops alone," he said, "reign in the cities". They ruled as sovereigns, each one his diocese, and all together they managed the affairs of the province by means of the councils. The king, indeed, called the council together, but he did so at the suggestion of the bishops. The kings were not even admitted to it; priests and abbots were allowed to be present, but only a small number of them. There were twenty-five of these assemblies held in Gaul in the fifth century, and fifty-four in the sixth. It was then that the bishops had most influence, as the lay authority was still very weak on account of the prevailing confusion, and as the education of the bishops gave them great weight with the barbarian sovereigns. It declined, however, in the seventh century, and we hear of only twenty councils, while in the eighth century there were no more than seven in a period of fifty years. In fact, the introduction of nobles, rough barbarians, into the bishoprics had spread among the clergy ignorance and vices, worldly tastes and temporal ambitions, which ill accorded with the cares of ecclesiastical government.

The aim of the monastic system had originally been a purer and more ascetic life than that led not only by the faithful in general, but even by ecclesiastics. The monks, at first, were not members of the clergy, nor did they wish to be ; they were common laymen, who aspired to carry virtue to its extreme limits; they were the stoics of Christianity, but they carried their stoicism to excess. In the deserts of Syria and Egypt they gave themselves over to so severe a life of fasting and penitence that finally, as St. Jerome bears witness, "it unsettled their minds, so that they no longer knew what they were doing or what they were saying." Simeon of Antioch passed his life standing upon a column, whence his surname Stylites. In this state of absolute isolation they were called hermits (inhabitants of the desert), and anchorites (those who live in retreat); those who held any intercourse with each other, without, indeed, ceasing to live alone, were call monks (men of solitude), and this name is the one most commonly used. The name of cenobites (those who live in common) marked a third class, those who approved of union and a common life. This form of monasticism prevailed in the West.

It is true that instances of this anchorite fanaticism were occasionally seen in Europe, a result of the impetuosity of the barbarian character. Even in the Vosges there was a stylite who had taken his stand on a column, from which he had thrown down a statue of Diana, and who stayed there until the nails froze off from, his hands and feet; but in general the monks of the West did something better than abandoning themselves to useless maceration. In the midst of the confusion caused by invasion, they opened asylums where they would gather together and find the repose that was banished from every other place. Such were, in the fifth century, the monasteries of Saint Victor at Marseilles, and of Lerins on one of the islands near Hyeres, not to mention those of Milan, Verona, Aquileia, and Marmoutiers, near Tours, all of earlier date, where, instead of the ecstatic idleness of the anchorites, great intellectual activity was found, and where most of the controversies on the famous subjects of free will, predestination, grace, and original sin were started. The strictness of ascetic rule was moderated there to the nature and requirements of the climate, according to the wise saying of Sulpicius Severus, that " it is gluttony for the Greeks to eat heartily, but a necessity for the Gauls."

At the beginning of the sixth century St. Benedict of Nursia, whom ardent piety had early drawn into retirement, and who had seen flocking around him a herd of monks attracted by his virtues, published for the monastery of Monte Cassino, which he had founded, his famous Rule of the monastic life, thereby giving definite-shape to the institution in the West. These wise rules portioned off the monks' time, hour by hour, between manual and intellectual labor : agriculture, reading, and the copying of manuscripts were to occupy their time. The last mentioned occupation, so useful to civilization, was regarded as a work of great piety. Cassiodorus, who retired toward the year 540 to a monastery and there passed the rest of his life, was in the habit of copying manuscripts; he often repeated the saying, "that you stab the devil with as many blows as you trace letters on your paper."

St. Benedict of Aniane, in Aquitania, in the time of Charlemagne, marks a new era of reformation in monastic life. A question that had early aroused a great deal of discussion was, what place should be assigned to monks in the religious society. They had wished to be answerable only to their abbots, but the tendency toward organization, which showed itself everywhere, obliged them to submit to the bishops. This was necessary for the maintenance of good order and for the repression of the bad or false monks who overran the country. As early as 451, the ecumenical council of Chalcedon prescribed the subordination of the monks to the bishops, and the councils of Agde (506), and of Orleans (511 and 553) confirmed this law. In 787, a canon of the second Nicene Council granted to the abbots the right of conferring the lesser orders on the monks of their houses, and soon there was no monk 'who was not also a priest.

Above the aristocracy of the bishops rose the pontifical monarchy' by slow degrees. From the first, the word of the successor of St. Peter and of the bishop of the Eternal City had enjoyed a superior authority; he was often consulted on doubtful questions, and he was early regarded as the representative of Catholic unity. The second general council, convoked by Theodosius at Constantinople in 381, solemnly recognized this supremacy by giving to the bishop of Constantinople only a secondary rank. The name of pope, which originally belonged to all the bishops, was finally reserved for him alone; a change which was already perceptible in the time of Leo the Great, though it was not completed until a much later time.

The bishop of Rome had possessed a great deal of property as early as the time of the Empire, in the capital and in the rest of Italy. He even acquired some beyond the Alps, for instance in the province of Arles, upon whose bishop he laid the duty of administering his affairs. He occupied, moreover, in Rome itself, in the most famous city of the world, the influential position which had been granted to bishops during the municipal regime at the end of the Empire.

The part that St. Leo (440-461) took in public affairs, and the success of his intercession with Attila, did much to enhance the dignity of his office. He obtained an edict from Valentinian III, in which the Emperor pledged "the whole Church to recognize her spiritual director, in order to preserve peace everywhere," and at the same time he is seen reinstating in his see a bishop of Gaul, who had been banished from it, and transferring the metropolitan dignity from Arles to Vienne.

Though kindly treated, the Church of Rome did not make any progress under the Ostrogoths. But when their power had been broken (553), and Rome had been placed again under the authority of the Emperor of Constantinople, the very remoteness of her new master insured to the Church a more prosperous future. The invasion of the Lombards drove a great many refugees into her territory, and the Roman population showed a slight return of its old energy in its double hatred toward them, as barbarians and as Arians. As to the exarch, whom the Emperor of the East had entrusted with the government of his Italian provinces and invested with direct power over the military dukes and counts of Naples, Rome, Genoa, etc., he could no longer enforce his authority on the western shore of Italy, confined as he was to Ravenna and separated from Rome by the Lombard power which had seized Spoleto.

It was at this favorable point in the state of affairs, though critical in some respects, that Gregory the Great made his appearance (590-604). He was a descendant of the noble Anicia family, and added to his advantages of birth and position the advantages of a well-endowed body and mind. He was prefect of Rome when less than thirty years old, but after holding this office a few months he abandoned the honors and cares of worldly things for the retirement of the cloister. His reputation did not allow him to remain in the obscurity of that life. Toward 579 he was sent to Constantinople by Pope Pelagius II as secretary or papal nuncio, and he rendered distinguished services to the Holy See in its relations with the Empire and in its struggles against the Lombards. In 590 the clergy, the senate, and the people raised him with one accord to the sovereign pontificate, to succeed Pelagius. As it was still necessary for every election to be confirmed by the Emperor at Constantinople, Gregory wrote to him to beg him not to sanction this one ; but the letter was intercepted and soon orders arrived from Maurice ratifying the elec­tion. Gregory hid himself, but he was discovered and led back to Rome.

When once Pope, though against his will, he used his power to strengthen the papacy, to propagate Christianity, and to improve the discipline and organization of the Church. Although he complained that the episcopates, and especially his own, were less "the office of a shepherd of souls than of a temporal prince," yet he did not neglect the temporal powers of the Holy See. And it is well that he did assume these powers, for the Emperor did so little for the protection of Italy, that the soldiers entrusted with the defense of Rome against the Lombards were without pay. Gregory gave them their pay, took part himself in the work of defense, and armed the clergy. When Agilulf, whose advance had called for these preparations, had drawn back, Gregory entered into negotiations with him in the name of Rome, in spite of the protests of the exarch.

Strengthened thus by his own efforts, he undertook the propagation of Christianity and orthodoxy both within and without the limits of the old Roman Empire. Within those limits there were some who still clung to paganism, in Sicily, Sardinia, and even at the very gates of Rome, at Terracina, and doubtless also in Gaul, as there is a constitution of Childebert still extant dated 554, and entitled : "For the abolition of the remains of idolatry." There were Arians very near to Rome—namely, the Lombards; but through the intervention of Theudalinda, their queen, Gregory succeeded in having Adelwald, the heir to the throne, brought up in the Catholic faith; as early as 587 the Visigoths in Spain, under Reccared, were converted.

England was still pagan throughout; and thither Gregory sent the monk Augustine with forty Roman missionaries (596). They landed on the island of Thanet, went from there to the king of Kent, Ethelberht, who allowed them to preach their doctrines at Canterbury. Christianity spread rapidly from that center to the north and west, and, in 627, it was solemnly recognized in Northumberland. St. Augustine, archbishop of Canterbury, had been appointed primate of Great Britain by Gregory the Great, with whom he carried on an active correspondence which has come down to us.

Ireland, "the isle of Saints," was already converted, and monks were going out from her to join in the conquest of the barbarians. It was at this time that St. Columban, the monk who so boldly reproved Brunhilda for her crimes, went to preach the gospel among the mountains of Helvetia, and to establish abbeys there surrounded by cultivated lands. St. Rupert afterwards made his way into Bavaria and founded there the bishopric of Salzburg.

Christianity thus renewed its ardor for proselytism, and Gregory contributed to its success most wisely by enjoining precepts of moderation upon his missionaries, and by the skillful manner in which he made the transition to Catholicism easy to the pagans ; he wrote to Augustine : "Be careful not to destroy the pagan temples; it is only necessary to destroy the idols, then to sprinkle the edifice with holy water, and to build altars and place relics there. If the temples are well built, it is a wise and useful thing for them to pass from the worship of demons to the worship of the true God; for while the nation sees its old places of worship still standing, it will be the more ready to go there, by force of habit, to worship the true God."

In the interior Gregory succeeded in arranging the different degrees of power in the Church, and in forcing the recognition of the supreme power of the Holy See. We find him granting the title of Vicar of Gaul to the bishop of Aries, and corresponding with Augustine, archbishop of Canterbury, in regard to Great Britain, with the archbishop of Seville in regard to Spain, with the archbishop of Thessalonica in regard to Greece, and, finally, sending legates a latere to Constantinople. In his Pastoral, which he wrote on the occasion of his election, and which became an established precedent in the West, he prescribed to the bishops their several duties, following the decisions of many councils. He strengthened the hierarchy by preventing the encroachments of the bishops upon one another: "I have given to you the spiritual direction of Britain," he wrote to the ambitious Augustine, "and not that of the Gauls." He rearranged the monasteries, made discipline the object of his vigilant care, reformed church music, and substituted the chant that bears his name for the Ambrosian chant, "which resembled," according to a contemporary, " the far-off noise of a chariot rumbling over pebbles."

Rome, victorious again with the help of Gregory the Great, continued to push her conquests to distant countries after his death. Two Anglo-Saxon monks, St. Wilfrid, bishop of York, and St. Willibrord undertook the conversion of the savage fishermen of Friesland and Holland at the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth century; they were followed by another Englishman, the most renowned of all these missionaries, Winfrith, whose name was changed to Boniface, perhaps by the Pope, in recognition of his active and beneficent apostleship. When Gregory II appointed him bishop of Germany (723), he went through Bavaria and established there the dioceses of Frisingen, Passau, and Ratisbon. When Pope Zacharias bestowed the rank of metropolitan upon the Church of Mainz in 748, he entrusted its direction to St. Boniface, who from that time was primate, as it were, of all Germany, under the authority of the Holy See. St. Boniface was assassinated by the Pagans of Friesland in 755.

The Pope had now become, in truth, the ruler of Christendom. He was, however, still a subject of the Emperor; but a rupture was inevitable, as his authority, on the one hand, was growing day by day and the emperor's, on the contrary, was declining. As  early as the end of the seventh century, when Pope Sergius II refused to recognize the canons of the council in Trullo, the Emperor Justinian II wished to have him forc­ibly removed from Rome; but the soldiers refused to obey, Rome rose in rebellion, there was insurrection throughout the exarchate, and the Venetians formed themselves into an independent duchy. This was an entering wedge. In 726 the Isaurian Emperor Leo sided with the Iconoclasts (image breakers), who looked upon the worship of images as idolatry. He published an edict in their favor which he wished to enforce in his Italian provinces. But the images of the saints were already very dear to the Italians; and Rome again rebelled. Gregory II (713-731), upheld as he was by public opinion, and enjoying great popularity by reason of his wealth and good deeds, wrote a letter to the Isaurian Leo, which has a certain flavor of Gregory VII about it : "The civil powers and the ecclesiastical powers are things distinct; the body is subject to the former, the soul to the latter; the sword of justice is in the hands of the magistrate; but a more formidable sword—that of excommunication—belongs to the clergy. O tyrant, you come in arms to attack us; we, all unprotected as we are, can but call upon Jesus Christ, the prince of the heavenly army, and beg him to send out a devil against you who shall destroy your body and the salvation of your soul. The barbarians have bowed beneath the Gospel's yoke, and you, alone, are deaf to the voice of the shepherd. These godly barbarians are filled with rage; they burn to avenge the persecution suffered by the Church in the East. Give up your audacious and disastrous enterprise, reflect, tremble, and repent."

Gregory II followed up these letters with an appeal to the Venetians, to the Italians of the exarchate, and even to the Lombards. The Romans banished their imperial prefect. At the same time Luitprand, king of the Lombards, invaded the exarchate and put an end for the moment to the dominion of the eastern Empire in the northern part of Italy.

But the Pope did not intend this revolution to result for the Roman Church in a simple exchange of masters. Gregory II stopped Luitprand by conciliating the court of Byzantium, and succeeded in driving him away when he came to besiege Rome. The same danger reappeared under his successor Gregory III (731-741), who appealed to those godly barbarians with whom Gregory II had threatened the Greek Empire —namely, the Franks.

The Carolingians and the Popes had met in an enemy's country, in a field of battle, where the one party were seeking conquest with the sword, the other with the cross. The missionaries who went out under Roman auspices to convert the pagans of Germany sought the protection of Charles Martel's army, and they in turn helped him to victory. It was then that the alliance between the two supreme powers of the West was first formed. Pope Gregory III conveyed to Charles the keys of the tomb of St. Peter with other presents, and the titles of Consul and Patrician. Gregory conjured him to come and deliver him from Luitprand, the king of the Lombards, who was fiercely threatening Rome. Charles did not have time to accomplish this distant expedition himself, but it was done by his successor.

Charles Martel was succeeded (741) by his sons Karlmann and Pippin. His youngest son, Gripho, he first excluded from any share in the inheritance, but afterwards, on his death-bed, allotted him a certain portion. Gripho was despoiled of his share by his brothers, who pursued him whithersoever he went in search of an armed force to sustain his claims, among the Bavarians, the Saxons, and the Aquitanians, until at the end of ten years he died on his way to seek help among the Lombards. Karlmann had Austrasia, Pippin Neustria.

They made many expeditions to the north, the east, and the south, as their father had done before them; expeditions against the Bavarians, the Alemanni, and the Saxons, many of whom they forced to submit to the rite of baptism. They also marched against the Aquitanians, who were led by Waifar, as Hunold, his father, had retired to a monastery whence we shall shortly see him emerging.

Both Karlmann and Pippin tried to reform certain abuses that had crept into the Church. Two councils, convoked by Karlmann, the one in Germany (742), the other in the following year at Lestines (near Charleroi, in Belgium), drew up decrees which abolished superstitious rites and certain Pagan ceremonies, still remaining in force; they also authorized grants of Church lands by the "Prince" for military purposes on condition of the payment of an annual rent to the Church; they reformed the ecclesiastical life, forbade the priests to hunt or to ride through the woods with dogs, falcons, or sparrow-hawks; and, finally, made all priests subordinate to their diocesan bishops, to whom they were obliged to give account each year of their faith and their ministry—all of which were necessary provisions for the organization of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and for the regulation of church government. Similar measures were taken by the Council of Soissons, convoked by Pippin in 744. In 747, Karlmann renounced the world and retired to the celebrated Italian monastery of Monte Cassino. As he left he intrusted his children to the care of their uncle, Pippin, who robbed them of their inheritance and ruled alone over the whole Frankish Empire.

It was then that Pippin contemplated assuming the crown. Charles Martel had left the throne vacant on the death of Theodoric IV (737), possibly in order to accustom the Franks to do without their Merovingian kings. In 742 Pippin had crowned Childeric III, no doubt because he did not feel himself so strong as his father had been. Everybody must have been impressed by the contrast between the imbecility of the throne and the genius of the Carolingians, and it naturally gave rise to the question laid before Pope Zacharias by Pippin himself, namely: " Who should be called king, he who has the name or he who has the power?" When, at the solicitation of his envoys, the title of king was offered him by the chiefs of the nation, he seemed inclined to refuse it, and pretended that he wished to leave the question entirely in the hands of the sovereign pontiff. Accord­ingly Burchard, bishop of Wirzburg, and Fulrad, abbot of Saint Denis, were sent to Rome to consult the oracle, whose reply was such as Pippin desired. In November of the year 751, an assembly gathered at Soissons proclaimed him king. Childeric was deposed at the same time, and his head was shaved and he was shut up in the monastery of Sithieu, where he died in the year 755. He left one son named Theodoric, who was sent to the monastery of Fontenelle and brought up in obscurity. This ending of the first Frank dynasty did not excite even a protest or a murmur of regret.

Pippin was at first consecrated by Boniface, archbishop of Mainz, and again, two years later, by Pope Stephen II. in person, who anointed him and his two sons with holy oil, at the same time pronouncing the sentence of excommunication against any who should thereafter choose a king from any other family of the Franks.

Pippin reaped the fruits of the Carolingian alliance with the popes, in this sanction given to his temporal authority by the spiritual authority. He soon repaid the Pope, who was hard pressed by Aistulf, king of the Lombards. To induce him to cross the Alps, Stephen II bestowed upon him the title of Patrician of Rome—the highest possible title of the Empire, but one which brought no power with it. He made two expeditions against the Lombards, occupied the Pentapolis together with the exarchate of Ravenna, and presented it, in spite of protestations from the Emperor of the East, to St. Peter, thus putting temporal power into the hands of the Roman pontiffs (754-6).

Pippin was the first sovereign ruler of the West. Constantine V (Copronymus) the emperor at Constantinople, sent ambassadors to him, who brought him the first organ with several stops that had been seen in France, and asked of him the hand of his daughter Gisela for the emperor's son : they suggested the exarchate of Ravenna as her dowry, hoping by this means to recover it from the Pope ; and that was doubtless the real cause of their embassage. Pippin refused.

In the meantime he proceeded with his military measures; he conquered the Saxons again, whose complete subjection required a half century's continued struggle. The blows he struck at Aquitania were so fierce as to be decisive for that country. He first recovered Septimania from the Arabs, and then kept up a series of disastrous invasions into the country south of the Loire for eight consecutive years. Waifar, its brave chief, defended himself with indomitable courage, but he was at last assassinated (768), and the subjugation of Aquitania followed.

Pippin died of dropsy in the same year, leaving to his two sons, Charles and Karlmann, the reorganized kingdom of the Franks, with its royal power revived and established, and having the twofold supports of material strength and spiritual authority.

The life of the growing empire was threatened by the division of power between the two sons. But the death of Karlmann, at the end of three years, restored unity and enabled his brother Charles to become Charles the Great (Charlemagne).

 

CHAPTER IX.

CHARLEMAGNE ; UNITY OF THE GERMANIC WORLD— THE CHURCH IN THE STATE (768-814).

 

The Union, and the attempted Organization of the whole Germanic World under Charlemagne.—Wars with the Lombards (771-776).— Wars with the Saxons (771-804).—Wars with the Bavarians (788), the Avars (788-796), and the Arabs of Spain (778-812) ; the extent of the Empire.—Charlemagne becomes Emperor (800).—Results of his Wars.—His Government.—Literary Revival ; Alcuin.

 

Charlemagne enlarged and completed the work which had only been begun by Charles Martel and Pippin. It was not alone that he had greater genius than his father and his grandfather, but circumstances were also much more favorable to him. Born to the throne, while they had stood at first only on its steps, and heir to an authority which had been accepted by the nation for sixteen years, he was free both from the cares which precede and the dangers which follow an act of usurpation, and reigning for almost half a century, he had time to carry his plans to their completion. These plans consisted, in the first place, in the uniting, either by absorption or by the annihilation of the nationalities which still retained their independence, the whole Germanic world into a simple empire; and in the second place in the internal, organization of this Empire, in attempts to give to it a life of order and general intelligence and civilization, an effort in which Charlemagne far surpassed all the barbarian sovereigns who had preceded him, not even excepting Theodoric.

Charlemagne made war successfully upon all the peoples with whom his predecessors had fought. He proportioned the obstinacy of his attacks to the obstinacy of the resistance he encountered. His eastern frontier was in great danger from the Saxons, the Danes, the Slavs, the Bavarians and the Avars ; he led eighteen expeditions against the Saxons, three against the Danes, one against the Bavarians, four against the Slavs, and four against the Avars. He made seven against the Saracens of Spain, five against the Saracens of the Mediterranean islands, five against the Lombards, and two against the Greeks. If we add to these those which he directed against peoples who were already in the Frankish empire, but not entirely subjugated, that is, one against the Thuringians, one against the Aquitanians, and two against the Bretons, we shall have a total of fifty-three expeditions, which were led for the most part by Charlemagne himself, and which give an idea of his remarkable activity. He doubled the extent of the territory possessed by Pippin. None the less Charlemagne is generally represented as a royal sage, a pacific prince who only waged war in self-defense; but let us restore to him his real personality, rugged though it be. He had no invasion to fear. The Arabs were divided, the Avars weakened, and the Saxons powerless to carry on a serious war outside of their forests and their morasses. And if he led the Franks across their frontiers it was because he was ambitious, like many others, to reign over more people, and to leave a name behind him which should dwell in the memories of men.

The kingdom of the Lombards was always the refuge of the disinherited Frankish princes, and of whoever resisted the Carolingians. But if the Franks had a formidable enemy in Italy, they had also a very valuable ally there: the Pope; united with them by common interest, learned, either personally or through his many subordinates in the churches of Italy, the slightest movements made in the peninsula, and warned the Frankish king as soon as any open or hidden peril threatened their common cause. Having become sole master by the death of his brother Karlmann, in 771, Charlemagne had taken possession of the vacant throne of Austrasia, thus dispossessing his two nephews, who had taken refuge at the court of Desiderius, King of the Lombards. The aged Hunold, formerly duke of Aquitaine, who had left his convent in order to avenge the assassination of Waifar, had also gone thither. While Charles was defeating the Saxons for the first time, letters from Hadrian I and from the Archbishop of Ravenna came to him on the banks of the Weser, saying that Desiderius, on the refusal of the Pope to crown the sons of Karlmann King of Austrasia, had just invaded the Exarchate. Charlemagne, after vainly sum­moning the Lombard king to give back the domains of St. Peter to the Holy See, crossed the Alps (773), defeated the enemy, and occupied the whole of Lombardy. Hunold was killed, and Desiderius became a monk; the sons of Karlmann were confined in a monastery, and the conqueror triumphantly entered Rome, where he confirmed the grant made by Pippin to the Pope. He himself took the title of King of the Lombards, which gave him the whole of Upper Italy, at the same time that the title of Patrician assured to him the sovereignty over Rome, and over all the domains added to the Holy See (774). Two years later, when Adelgis, a son of Desiderius, encouraged by the court of Constantinople, and in league with the Dukes of Beneventum, of Friuli, and of Spoleto, tried to incite Italy to revolt, Charlemagne, victorious again, took the opportunity to substitute Frankish officers for the Lombard dukes in many places, though not in the case of Beneventum, whose duke continued independent, on the condition of paying a tribute, which he, however, never paid except when an army came to collect it. Nevertheless, Charlemagne allowed the Lombards to live under their own laws, as he generally did in the case of the people whom he conquered (776).

During this time, Charles was also at war with the Saxons. This war, which began in 771, did not end till 804; that is, it lasted thirty-three years. The Lombards were already a broken people; the Saxons were a young and vigorous people. The rude barbarian strength which the Austrasians had retained on the banks of the Rhine, and which distinguished them from the Neustrians, existed in still greater vigor among the Saxons on the banks of the Weser and the Elbe. They held by tribes the lands near the mouths of these two rivers, the Westphalians at the west, the Eastphalians at the east, the Engern (Angrians) at the south, and the north Elbe people (the Nordalbingien) on the right bank of the river Elbe. In the middle of the eighth century they were still precisely like the Germans of Hermann, and indeed Hermann himself, the hero of Teutonic independence, was the object of their adoration, in the form of the idol they called Irmensaüle (Hermann Saüle).

This religion of independence made them hard to convert. Saint Lebuin, who was preaching the gospel to them, not having sufficient patience to win them over gradually, thought he could give more weight to his words by threatening them with the sword of Charlemagne. This exasperated them, and they destroyed the church of Deventer, and slew the converts there. Charlemagne at once entered, their country to avenge this deed, and took the Eresburg and destroyed the Irmensaule. From its ruins arose Widukind, the Hermann of a new age, and whenever Charlemagne left the country of the Saxons, a new revolt broke out, signalized by the destruction of the churches.

A series of expeditions against the Saxons succeeded the campaigns of 774 and of 776 in Italy; in the first, he defeated them on the Weser, in the second near the source of the Lippe, and this second time he neglected no means of enforcing obedience to his rule. The establishment of fortresses and garrisons in the conquered country, enforced baptism, and the exaction of an oath from all the assembly at Paderborn (777) to recognize Charlemagne as their king, to pay him tribute, and to impose no obstacle to the propagation of Christianity, were so many moral and material guarantees of obedience, but they proved powerless. Widu­kind had not taken the oath; instead of going to Paderborn, he had taken refuge among the Danes, and at his first reappearance raised anew the call to war (778). He had advanced as far as Coblentz and the banks of the Rhine, when he was stopped by the Alemanni and the Austrasians, while Charlemagne hastened toward him. Charlemagne was victorious at Buckholz (779), received the submission of the tribes settled to the west of the Elbe (780), and redoubled the severity of his measures. Ten thousand Saxon families were transported to Belgium and Helvetia.

The Saxons were deprived of their assemblies and their judges, and were made subjects to Frankish counts. Their territory "was divided between bishops, abbots, and priests, on condition of their preaching and baptizing among them."

Charlemagne hoped, by establishing what might be called religious garrisons among this people, to strengthen his power much more than by the presence of the military garrisons. The bishoprics of Minden, Halberstadt, Verden, Bremen, Munster, Osnabruck, and Paderborn were established during the reign of Charlemagne, and others, like Hildesheim, under his immediate successors.

However, the war was not yet at an end. Widukind, who had taken refuge with the Danes, rekindled the fires of patriotism and vengeance, and again defeated the Frankish generals. This time Charlemagne resolved to terrify the Saxons into submission. He had 4500 of the warriors who had taken part in the battle delivered up to him, and outdoing all his former severities, had them slain at Verden. But this terrible massacre only excited another desperate insurrection, and it was not until Charlemagne had gained two victories, at Detmold and at Osnabruck, and his son Charles had gained one, and until the army had passed a winter under arms in the snows of Saxony, that he triumphed over the obstinacy of Widukind, who, sorely pressed and without hope, finally consented to submit and be baptized (785). From this time he disappeared from the stage of history.

His countrymen, however, showed more perseverance. In 792 the Saxons revolted again, and lying in ambush took a body of Frankish soldiers by surprise. Charlemagne who had allied himself with the Abodriti, a Slavic tribe, who were settled beyond them on the farther side of the Elbe, attacked them from both directions at once, ravaged their country, and passed the winter among them on the Weser. In 798, when his commissioners sent to levy the tribute were killed, he returned to their territory and deluged it with blood. Their submission did not seem assured until 804.

Even then, in spite of their comparative weakness, Charlemagne did not dare impose a heavy tribute upon them; he only kept up the tithe, and allowed them to retain their national institutions, though giving them Frankish judges. But he maintained the laws which he had given them in 780, and which punished with death all infractions of religious duties, even the neglect of a fast. Therefore the most stubborn of the people preferred to take refuge with the Slavs and the Danes rather than to make up their minds to such hypocrisy; and the incursions of the Bohemians and Slavs from 806-812 and of the Danes under their King Godfried (808-811) on the territory of the Empire may be considered as a continuation of the Saxon war. The lieutenants of Charlemagne repelled these incursions, but were obliged to march as far as the Oder before they could check the Slavs, and to the Eider in order to close the entrance of Germany to the Danes, which, however, did not prevent the men of the North, the Norsemen, from waging a more terrible war with his successor.

The Bavarians had been subjugated before the Saxons. They were the most powerful and most restless of all the wars with tributary peoples, and in consequence of their position formed a connecting link in coalitions between the peoples of the North and of the South. Their Duke Tassilo belonged (to the Agilolfings, one of those old and illustrious reigning families which are found among most of the German peoples, and which looked with disfavor on the recent elevation of the Carolingians. In 787, when Charlemagne was forced to fight not only with each people separately, but with a league which embraced almost the whole of Europe, the Lombard Duke of Bene­ventum and the court of Byzantium drew Tassilo into the contest. He brought with him the Avars and stirred up the Saxons, while at the same time the Arabs had taken up arms against Charlemagne in the South. After forcing the Lombards back to their allegiance, Charlemagne marched upon the Bavarians, who dared not resist him, advanced as far as the Lech, and sent the descendant of the Agilolfings to the monastery of Jumièges. Tassilo had before this time been guilty of "herisliz," that is, of abandoning the army of the Franks in an expedition against the Aquitanians (788). Bavaria was now divided by Charlemagne into counties.

The Avars as allies of Tassillo were now to undergo the same punishment that he had suffered. This nation, intimately related to the Huns, had appeared in Europe on the banks of the Don toward the middle of the sixth century, and soon after on the banks of the Danube. They took possession of Dacia and of Pannonia, and under their Chief Baian had menaced Constantinople, which was, however, saved by Heraclius (626). Their capital, the Ring fortress, which was simply an immense intrenched camp, filled with the spoils of the world, was situated in the marshes between the Danube and the Theiss, not far from the place where Attila's royal town had stood. Charlemagne wished to remove from the frontiers of his empire this perpetual menace of Hunnish invasion. He attacked the Avars with three armies, but without permanent success (791). It was not till 796 that combats which devastated Pannonia, and internal discords among the Avars, gave the victory to the Franks, and that Pippin, the son of Charlemagne, took possession of the Ring. The remnants of this people continued to live in the same place under native princes, who promised to pay tribute and to be baptized. Eginhard says "the Franks brought back from there such great wealth that though until then they might have been considered poor, from this time they could call themselves rich."

Charlemagne did the same work at the south as at the east; he advanced even farther than was prudent. Charles Martel had been content to repel the invasion of the Arabs. Charlemagne returned invasion with invasion. In 778 he went to the assistance of the wali of Barcelona, who refused to recognize Abderrahman and the Caliphate of Cordova. He entered Spain, through St. Jean-Pied-de-Port, while another army entered further to the east. Pampeluna and Saragossa were taken and the two armies were joined together, when the hostile spirit of the Gascons in the Pyrenees recalled the conqueror. In recrossing these mountains his rear guard was surprised in the valley of Roncesvalles by the Gascons, and was massacred with its leader Roland, Count of the frontier of Brittany, a hero who is better known to poetry than to history. In 793 the Arabs in their turn carried invasion into Septimania [as far as Narbonne, and Louis, a son of Charlemagne, whom he had made king of Aquitania, was obliged to carry on a war for nearly twenty years before he succeeded in establishing the Franks on the farther side of the Pyrenees. Finally, after the capture of Barcelona and of Tortosa, a part of the valley of the Ebro was subjugated by them by the year 812. At the same time the Frankish vessels were defending the Balearic Islands, which had invoked the protection of Charlemagne against the Saracens, and took temporary possession of Sardinia and Corsica, which were a prey to attacks of pirates of the same nation.

By these wars the dominion of the Franks was extended in all directions. Since the subjection of the Saxons and the Lombards, the whole Germanic race, except the Anglo-Saxons and the Norsemen of the Danish peninsula, had been united into a single group. All the foreign and hostile races, whether Slavs, Arabs, or Avars, were either subdued or driven back. The confusion of the barbarian world was reduced to order, the multiplicity of authorities was done away with, and the stage of history now presents a scene more easy of comprehension. Only four great empires remained in existence, those of Charlemagne, of Constanti­nople, of Bagdad, and of Cordova. These four divided among them three quarters of the world as it was then known. The empire of Charlemagne was bounded on the north and west, from the mouth of the Elbe to the Spanish shore of the Bay of Biscay, by the ocean; on the south by the Pyrenees, and in Spain, by a part of the river Ebro; in Italy it extended to the Garigliano and Pescara, without, however, including Gaeta, which belonged to the Greeks, and Venice, which recognized the merely nominal sovereignty of Constantinople; finally, in Illyricum, it extended to the Narenta, or the Cettina, without including the cities of Trau, Zara, and Spalato, which, after a maritime war of several years, remained in the possession of the Eastern Empire. The frontier at the east followed,—in Illyricum, the course of the Bosna and that of the Save until it joined the Danube; in Germany, the course of the Theiss from its confluence with the Danube to the point where it receives the river Hermath. From that point, the line of the frontier turned toward the west, keeping across Moravia a nearly equal distance from the Danube, and from the Carpathian mountains to the mountains of Bohemia, which it left on the east, and passing to the north joined first the Saale, then the Elbe, which was guarded by eight fortresses, and finally the Eider.

All the peoples within these limits recognized the direct supremacy of Charlemagne. The Thuringians, who had revolted against it once, and the Aquitanians, who were in revolt at the time of Charlemagne's accession, had been entirely subdued. Outside of these boundaries other peoples, who were merely tributary to it, formed around the Carolingian empire a girdle of defense. Such peoples were those of Navarre, Beneventum, the North Elbe Saxons, the Abodriti, the Wiltzi, and other Slavic tribes, all of whom were under the careful surveillance of the Counts of the Frontiers [Markgrafen]. Brittany and Bohemia had been ravaged, but not conquered.

The master of this vast empire had not felt content with the barbarian title of King, and in the year 800 had become Emperor. In this year he was at Rome during the Christmas season, and on that day, results of his while he was praying in the church where Pope Leo III was saying mass, in the presence of a great crowd, he suddenly felt a crown placed on his head; it was the imperial crown, and was given him by the Pope. Undoubtedly it had all been arranged beforehand, and these two great personages in their long conferences must have discussed the advisability of restoring the Empire of the West, a question which seriously concerned the future of Europe. Nevertheless, Charles feigned surprise in order to deceive his Austrasian subjects, who would hardly receive with favor such a complete return to the Roman traditions. This was the final consummation of the alliance which had so long united the Carolingians and the Pontiffs of Rome. Charlemagne well deserved this reward ; he who had founded not only a great Germanic empire but a great orthodox empire, who had conquered the enemies of Rome, the Lombards, and the pagan Avars, the Mussulman Arabs, and the idolatrous Saxons, and who had always identified the triumph of Catholicism with the triumph of his own cause ; and who, finally, had now come to Rome only to protect, by his authority as Patrician, the Pope who had recently been the victim of a conspiracy in his own city. His role of benefactor and his great power prevented the Pope from deriving any right of supremacy from the fact that he had bestowed the crown upon him. Charlemagne succeeded to all the prerogatives of the Emperors, and from this time governed Italy and the Church by virtue of this title.

Rome again had an imperial prefect and imperial judges. Charles made laws, dispensed justice, confirmed the election of the Pope, as the Emperor at Constantinople had formerly done, and the Church of Rome did not differ from the other churches of the Catholic creed in any temporal power, except that the Holy See had the revenues and the administration of greater domains. Thus the Church had resumed the same place in the state that it had held under the earlier Emperors.

Nevertheless this gift by the Pope of the imperial crown carried with it a danger for the future. For when political unity ceased and religious unity alone remained, the popes not only considered themselves above the authority of the State, but claimed the right of controlling, and of always disposing of, what they had once given. It was then that the great quarrel between the Popes and the Emperors arose, which fills the history of the Middle Ages.

By the conquest of Charlemagne, Italy lost her nationality; for the German Caesars, inheriting his title, always considered the peninsula as one of their provinces.

Some of the conquests of Charlemagne were permanent, some ephemeral; some were of value, others were not. Everything that he attempted beyond the Pyrenees failed. The country of Barcelona, joined by him to France, did not remain subject, and of the marches of Gascony, nothing is retained by France except what belonged to her from its natural position on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees. He would have gained more if he had conquered the Bretons, and had succeeded in assimilating them sooner to the French life and nationality instead of contenting himself with their wavering allegiance. The conquest of the kingdom of the Lombards was of no value either to France or to Italy, but it raised the political position of the Pope and assured his temporal power for the future. The country which gained the most by these long wars was the one which had suffered the most from them, namely, Germany. Before Charlemagne Germany was still a chaos of tribes, which, whether pagan or Christian, whether Franks, Saxons, Thuringians or Bavarians, were all bar­barians, enemies of each other, and without any bond of union. After his time, there was a German people, and a German kingdom soon came into being. It is a great glory to have created a nation, but one which can be claimed by few conquerors, for they destroy much more than they build up.

The world was filled with the renown of Charlemagne. The title he had taken at Rome was no empty one : he was in very fact the Emperor of the West. Eginhard describes him in his palace of Aix-la-Chapelle as continually surrounded by kings and ambassadors from the most distant countries. Ecgberht, King of the Anglo-Saxons of Sussex, and Eardwulf, King of Northumberland, were among those who came to his court. The King of Asturia, and the King of the Scots, in writing to him, always spoke of themselves as his men, and the former rendered him account of all his wars and offered him a share of the booty; following, says Eginhard, the Greek proverb still in use, "It is better to have the Frank for your friend than for your neighbor," the Eastern emperors made treaties with him, but did not acknowledge his title of Basileus, or recognize him as an emperor equal in rank to the Byzantine sovereigns. He sustained friendly relations with the Caliph of Bagdad; the great Haroun-al-Rashid was well able to appreciate him, and it was for his interest to ally himself with the enemy of the Caliphs of Cordova. Haroun sent him the keys of the Holy Sepulchre, whither pilgrims had already begun to go. A clock with wheels of marvelous workmanship, silken tents, perfumes from Arabia, land monkeys from Bengal, astonished the barbarians of the West. The Mussulman ambassadors said to Charlemagne : "The Persians, the Medes, the Indians, the Elamites, indeed all the nations of the East fear you more than our master Haroun."

The greatness of the Carolingian Empire owed as much to the wisdom of its government as to its victories. Charlemagne early recognized that the vast extent of his domains, and the individuality of the various populations, demanded a division of authority. And though he himself remained supreme over the German race and particularly over the victorious nation of the Austrasians, whose language and costume he continued to use, and in whose country, which was also the most central of his empire, he resided (Aix-la-Chapelle was his favorite residence), in 781 he had his sons Pippin and Louis crowned kings respectively of Italy and of Aquitaine. In 806, in the diet of Thionville, he arranged, under the form of a last will and testament, for a division of his empire between his three sons, Charles, Pippin, and Louis; and as the two former died in his lifetime, he made a new division in 813, by which Bernhard, son of Pippin, became King of Italy, while Louis had everything else with the title of Emperor. But even after they were kings, his sons were merely his lieutenants.

The national assemblies became nothing more than the council of the sovereign, and as they formerly had been gatherings of violent and ignorant warriors, it was a gain to withdraw from them the functions of government while leaving them those of counsel; bishops, nobles, freemen, and imperial agents came to these assemblies from the outermost parts of the empire, to inform the Emperor of all that happened in their provinces. It was customary to summon two such assemblies a year, though we only find thirty-five expressly mentioned by the chroniclers. There was no fixed place of meeting, but they were held wherever the Emperor happened to be at the time. While he was mixing with the multitude who collected there, and receiving presents from them, the assembly, composed of the dukes, the bishops, the abbots, and the counts, with twelve of the most important men of their counties, in a word of the grandees of the State, examined in his absence the projects for laws, prepared by him since their last meeting. After receiving their advice, which he was at liberty either to follow or to reject, he promulgated those Capitularies which have come down to us. These treat of all the concerns of both the civil and the ecclesiastical government, and not only of the administration of the provinces, but of that of the Emperor's domain and even of the added benefices. Who is not familiar, if only through Montesquieu, with the Capitulary De Villis, in which he regulates the sale of vegetables and eggs in his domains? He commands that care shall be taken that none of his slaves shall die of hunger, "as far as that is possible with God's help." All proprietors did not feel the same solicitude in this matter.

He treated ecclesiastical affairs in the same high-handed way that he did everything else. Concerning the question of the worship of images, he wrote the following to his clergy: " I have taken the office of arbiter between the bishops; we have seen, and, by the grace of God, have decided what it is necessary to believe." The Pope accepted his decision without protest, although it contradicted his own position.

Another agency of the central government, which the Emperor employed in making his power felt throughout the empire, was the institution of missi dominici, imperial envoys who were continually traversing the provinces and returning to make their report to the throne. Two of them were always sent together; a count and a bishop, in order to act as a restraint upon one another, to provide both for the secular and religious needs of the community, and also to combine wisdom with strength. In all the departments of his government Charlemagne gave great weight to the bishops and the clerks, because they alone had any learning, but he never allowed himself to be ruled by them as did his , weak successor. The missi dominici were supposed to traverse their circuits, which contained several counties, generally twelve, four times a year, and there to preside over the local assemblies, to publish the Capitularies, and personally I to supervise everyone and everything.

Charlemagne retained in almost its original form the method of administration established by the Merovingians over the provinces: the duke, the count, and the centenarius, with their duties of raising troops, administering justice, and collecting all the dues of the public treasury. The departments under these last mentioned officers were called respectively, comitatus (county) and centena (hundred) a district composed perhaps originally of 100 households.

Military service continued to be rendered gratuitously. Every land-owner owed it to the state; and possibly all free citizens even if owning no land, but several of the poorer freemen were allowed to unite in furnishing a man to represent them in this service. The bishops and the abbots, by the capitulary of 803, were exempted from per­sonal military service, on the condition of sending their men to the army.

Justice was administered by the local assemblies, but they no longer comprised all the freemen, as these had given up regular attendance. A certain number of scabini, seven at the least, formed a kind of jury which was presided over by the count or the centenarius. An appeal could be made from their decisions to the missi dominici when they came to hold their assizes in the county.

There had been no  regular public imposts since the beginning of the seventh century; all that the king received were the rents due to him as proprietor, by his numerous coloni, the fruits and revenues of his domain, the personal services and returns of the counts and of the holders of royal lands, the gratuitous gifts of the rich, and the tribute paid by conquered countries. The proprietors were obliged to furnish means of transportation to either himself or his agents when they passed through the country; besides this, they were charged with the care of the roads, bridges, and so forth. The army equipped and supported itself; the land which the soldiers had received took the place of pay.

Still another glory attaches to the name of Charlemagne : that of having raised learning from the low position to which it had sunk, and of having striven to dispel the ignorance which the barbarians had diffused over his empire. He himself could only write with difficulty, but he was none the less one of the most cultivated even of his times. Not all the nations subject to his power possessed at that time written laws; in some cases their customs were recorded during his reign, and in others existing codes were revised. He had the same thing done for the barbarian poems which celebrated the exploits of their ancient chiefs. He had a grammar of his national language begun, and had the four gospels revised by Greeks and Syrians. We read in one of his capitularies: "Desiring that the state of our churches shall more and more improve, and wishing by constant care to revive the cultivation of learning, which has almost perished through the indolence of our forefathers, we by our own example encourage all whom we can attract to the study of the liberal arts. We have also with the constant aid of God already corrected with accuracy the books of the Old and of the New Testaments, which have been corrupted by the ignorance of the copyists." He had founded a sort of small academy, called the School of the Palace, of which he as well as his three sons, his sister, his daughter, and all the important persons of his court were members. In this circle he was called David, Alcuin took the name of Flaccus, and Angilbert that of Homer.

Alcuin, the most remarkable man in the literature of that era, was his principal helper in his attempt to revive learning. He was an Anglo-Saxon monk whom Charlemagne had attracted to his court. In 796, Alcuin received from him the rich abbey of St. Martin of Tours, whose domains contained more than 20,000 coloni or serfs, and to which he retired in the year 800. Two folio volumes of his writings have come down to us. These contain works on theology, of which one refutes the opinion of Felix of Urgel on the difference between the two natures of Jesus Christ, a philosophical treatise on the nature of the soul, and books of poetry and history. The whole shows little originality, and is mostly borrowed from the writings of Boethius and the Fathers, but his style is superior by its precision to that of the writers of the age. Alcuin was truly a scholar; he was familiar with Pythagoras; often cites Aristotle, Plato, Homer, Virgil, and Pliny, and is one of the most notable instances of the union of those elements so difficult to harmonize, the spirit of ancient literature with the spirit of Christianity. The most interesting monument that he has left us is his letters, some 300 of which we possess, many of them addressed by this feeble Aristotle to one who equaled Alexander. They touch on all sorts of subjects, on theology, grammar, etymology, astronomy, chronology, and on the schools which they were both trying to restore and which prospered in certain places, especially in Tours, Fulda, Ferrieres, and Fontenelle, under the direction of pupils of Alcuin. Among these pupils was Rabanus Maurus, the archbishop of Mainz.

We must also mention Leidradus, archbishop of Lyons, Theodulf, bishop of Orleans, Smaragdus, abbot of Saint Mihiel, Angilbert, abbot of Saint Riquier, Saint Benedict of Aniane, the latter the second reformer of the monastical order in Aquitaine, and finally Eginhard, the secretary of Charlemagne, who wrote the Emperor's life and also annals of the epoch. His life of Charlemagne is characterized by f a literary style, and a manner of looking at things which are truly remarkable for the times. Thus a real progress had, been made over the two preceding centuries, which had only produced dry chronicles and coarse legends. This was the first revival of letters.

But this brilliant empire, this vast and wise organization, and this returning civilization were all to disappear with the man to whose existence they were bound. It was in vain that Charlemagne rekindled the lamp of learning ; its passing beams were soon again to disappear in the profound darkness that covered everything. In vain did he strive to create commerce and trace with his hand the plan of a canal that was to connect the Danube and the Rhine; the age of commerce and industry was still, far distant. In vain did he in his capitularies struggle against the tendency of the holders of royal lands to change their benefices into allodial land and extend their powers in all directions : these usurpations were to go on and to produce feudalism. In vain did he unite the whole German world into a simple empire; he felt this empire breaking to pieces in his very hands. In vain did he fight to the end against the outside barbarians : they had retreats whose depths his arm could not reach, and whence they reappeared before his death to sadden his old age with mournful forebodings. He saw the Norsemen prowling around his coasts, and was obliged to take defensive measures against the enemies who were to do much to overthrow his empire.