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READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
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ITALY AND HER INVADERS.BOOK VIII.
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The first of these Agilolfing rulers of whom
history makes mention is Garibald, husband of the Lombard princess Walderada, who was the divorced wife of the Frankish king
Chlotochar. His daughter Theudelinda was the celebrated and saintly queen of
the Lombards. The reader may remember the romantic stories of her wooing by the
disguised Authari and of the cup of wine which she handed to the favoured
Agilulf. From some cause which is unknown to us Garibald incurred the
displeasure of his Frankish lords and probably had to submit to a Frankish
invasion . There is no proof however that he lost his ducal crown, and about
the year 596 he seems to have been succeeded by a son named Tassilo I
(596-611). It is indeed nowhere distinctly stated that this was the relationship
between the two princes, but the fact that Tassilo's son and successor was
named Garibald II renders it probable.
Of the reigns of these early dukes of Bavaria we know very little, nor
can we with any certainty fix the date of the second Garibald's possession of
power. It seems clear, however, that through the greater part of the seventh
century the bond of allegiance to the Frankish monarchy was growing looser and
looser; faineant Merovingian kings and warring Mayors of the Palace having
little power to enforce its obligations. The duke seems to have surrounded
himself with seneschal and marischal and all the
other satellites of a sovereign prince, and his capital, Ratisbon on the
Danube, doubtless outshone Paris and Metz in the eyes of his Bavarian subjects.
With the accession to the ducal throne of Theodo I (660-722) we gain a
clearer vision of Bavarian affairs from the lives of the saints, Rupert,
Emmeran, and Corbinian, who came from Gaul and from Ireland to effect the
conversion of the people. It is indeed surprising to us who have witnessed the
earnest zeal of the Bavarian Theudelinda, not merely for Christianity but for
orthodoxy among her Italian subjects, to find that, two generations later, her
own Bavarian countrymen still needed conversion. But apparently the
Christianity of Garibald's court was not much more than a court fashion (the
result very possibly of his own Frankish origin), and had not deeply leavened
the mass of his subjects. Probably we are in the habit of underestimating the
stubbornness of the resistance of Teutonic heathenism to the new faith. When a
tribe like the Franks or the Burgundians settled in the midst of a people
already imbued with Christian ideas through their subjection to the Empire, it
was comparatively easy to persuade them to renounce idolatry or to change the
Arian form of Christianity for the Athanasian. But when the messengers of the
Church had to deal with nations all Teutonic and all heathen, like the
Frisians, the Saxons, or the Bavarians, the process of conversion (as we know
from the history of our own forefathers) was much slower and more laborious.
Thus it came to pass that in the middle of the seventh century the mass of the
Bavarian folk were apparently still heathen, worshipping the mysterious goddess
Nerthus, and venerating a statue of Irmin in the sacred wood, feasting on
horse-flesh in the half-ruined temple which had perhaps once been dedicated to
Jupiter or Isis, and offering, with drunken orgies, sacrifices of rams and
goats beside the bier of their dead comrades, to commemorate their entrance
into Walhalla.
Into this rude, more than half-Pagan world came towards the end of the
seventh century bishop Rupert or Hroudbert of Worms.
His ancestry and birthplace are doubtful. Some have described him as sprung
from Ireland, while others make him a Frank, of kin to the royal house of the
Merovingians. He came into Bavaria, we are told, at the invitation of the duke,
but probably also with the full consent if not at the actual suggestion of the
great Frankish Mayor, Pippin of Heristal, who at this time not only by warlike
expeditions but also by wise and politic counsels was tightening once more the
loosened bonds which bound the Bavarians as well as the other nations east of
the Rhine to the Frankish kingdom.
At the outset of his operations Rupert baptized duke Theodo and then
proceeded with the conversion of the heathen remnant of his people to
Christianity, reconsecrating old temples which still bore the names we are told
of Juno and Cybele, and dedicating them to the Virgin, and ever on the quest
for some one place where he might found a monastery which he might make the
centre of his missionary work. Not desirous apparently of too near
neighbourhood to the ducal court at Ratisbon, he decided at last upon the
little Waller See about seven miles from Salzburg, where he founded the
monastery of the Church-by-the-Lake (See-Kirche). But
not long had he dwelt here when the desolate ruins of the once stately Roman
city of Juvavia attracted his notice. Still desolate,
two centuries after that destruction which St. Severinus had foretold of them
and the other cities of Noricum, they attracted and fascinated him by their
mouldering greatness. He obtained from duke Theodo a grant of the old city and
of the fort above, with twenty farms and twenty salt-pans at Reichenhall,
eighty ‘Romans ' with their slaves, all the unoccupied lands in the district of
Salzburg, and other rights and royalties. High up on that noble hill which
still bears the name of the Monk's Mountain Rupert reared his church, which he
dedicated to St. Peter, and founded there his monastery, which he put under the
guidance of twelve young Franks, his disciples and fellow-countrymen. Such was
the beginning of the great and rich bishopric of Salzburg.
It was probably about the time of Rupert’s first missionary operations
in Bavaria that duke Theodo, now past the middle of life, divided his duchy
between himself and three of his sons. Of these sons the only one of whom we
hear anything important is Grimwald, whose capital was Freising, about twenty
miles north-east of Munich, and who probably ruled over that part of Bavaria
which lies between the Danube and the Alps.
Soon after this division of the duchy and about the time of the death of
Pippin of Heristal, we may conjecturally place the appearance of the second
great Frankish missionary in Bavaria, Emmeran of Poitiers: a meteoric
appearance which heralded storm and was strangely quenched in darkness. Emmeran
came, we are told, into Bavaria, intending only to traverse the country on his
way to the barbarous Avars, of whom he desired to make proselytes. He came to
the strongly fortified city of Ratisbon and stood before duke Theodo, but an
interpreter was needed to mediate between the speech of Aquitaine and the
speech of Bavaria. He explained to the duke the object of his mission, and
Theodo replied, “That land to which thou wouldest fain go, on the banks of the Ens, is lying all waste and desolate, through the
incursions of the Avars. Stay rather here, and I will make thee bishop in this
province, or give thee the oversight of some abbey”. And Emmeran, learning that
the conversion of the Bavarians was yet but half accomplished and that they
still blended their heathen sacrifices with the Supper of the Lord, was
persuaded to stay in that fruitful land, whose inhabitants pleased him well,
and he preached there during three years.
Now Emmeran was a man of noble stature and comely face, generous both of
speech and of money, and extraordinarily affable to women as well as to men :
evidently a courtly bishop rather than an austere recluse. Unfortunately at the
end of the three years the princess Ota, duke Theodo’s daughter who had fallen into sin, accused the Frankish missionary as her
seducer, and either through consciousness of guilt, or through unworldly
carelessness as to his good name, he took no steps to clear himself of the
charge. He left Bavaria indeed, but it was not to prosecute his journey to
Avar-land, but to cross the Alps to Rome. A son of duke Theodo named Lantpert
pursued after him, and having overtaken him ere he had reached the mountains,
inflicted upon him the punishment of an incontinent slave, mutilation of the
tongue, the hands and the feet. He died of his wounds, and the Church (which
was persuaded of his innocence of the charge against him) reverenced him as a
martyr.
In the year 716, soon probably after the death of Emmeran, Theodo with a
long train of dependants visited Rome to pray at the tomb of St. Peter. As has
been already suggested, the visit was probably connected in some way with the
terrible event which had preceded it, and it is possible that the
reconciliation of the ducal family to the Pope may have been accomplished at
the price of some concessions which made the Bavarian Church more dependent on
the see of Rome.
The third great Frankish missionary, Corbinian, was a man of hot and
choleric temper, and he, like Emmeran, had his quarrels with the ducal house of
Bavaria, though they did not for him end in such dire disaster. Born at a place
called Castrus near Melun about the year 68o, he was
the son of a mother already widowed who probably fostered her child's
domineering and impetuous disposition. He seems also to have been a man of
wealth and some social importance, and accordingly, when his genius took the
direction of miracle-working and monastic austerity, the fame of his young
saintliness easily penetrated the court and reached the ears of the aged Pippin
of Heristal, who probably encouraged him to turn his energies to the building
up of a Frankish-Christian Church in barbarous Bavaria. After fourteen years of
retirement in his cell, he journeyed to Rome, ‘in order to ask of the Pope
permission to spend his life in solitude',' says his admiring biographer Aribo. But the Pope, we are told, perceiving his fitness for
active work in the Church, and determined that he should not hide his light
under a bushel, utterly refused to grant him the required permission to lead an
anchorite's life, pushed him rapidly through all the lower grades of the
hierarchy and consecrated him bishop, without however assigning him any
definite see, so that he must have been looked upon as a bishop in partibus. After this consecration we are surprised to
hear of his spending the next seven years in the cell of St. Germanus in his
native place. This and some other suspicious circumstances of the story incline
some scholars to believe that the whole tale of this earlier episcopate is a
figment of the biographer.
After this interval of seven years Corbinian appears in Bavaria, intent,
we are told, on undertaking a second journey to Rome. He chose, says Aribo, ‘the more secret way through Alamannia,
Germany, and Noricum' [Bavaria], instead of taking ‘the public road' from the
regions of Gaul. Arrived in Bavaria he found there the devout Theodo, who had
lately accomplished the partition of his duchy with his sons. The eldest
survivor of these sons, Grimwald, eagerly welcomed the saint, and offered if he
would remain to make him co-heir with his own children, doubtless only of his
personal property. Corbinian however rejected this offer, and insisted on
continuing his journey to Rome. Finding it impossible to change his purpose,
Grimwald dismissed him with large presents and gave him an honourable escort,
but at the same time gave secret orders to the dwellers in the Vintschgau that on his return he should be arrested at the
moment of his crossing the Bavarian frontier. We see at once that there is
something more here than the biographer chooses to communicate. The Bavarian
prince looks on the expected return of the great ecclesiastic from beyond the
Alps with the same sort of feelings which induced Plantagenet princes to decree
the penalties of praemunire against any one who should import into England
bulls from Rome.
Corbinian accomplished his journey into Italy. He was ill-treated by Husingus, duke of Trent, who stole from him a beautiful
stallion which he refused to sell, but was kindly received by king Liutprand at
Pavia. He remained here seven days, chiefly occupied in preaching to the king,
who listened with gladness to his copious eloquence. When he was leaving the
capital he again had one of his horses stolen, by a Lombard courtier, whose
dishonesty he detected and whose punishment he foretold. At last after divers
adventures he reached Rome, and here, in spite of his entreaties and his tears,
the Pope (probably Gregory II) ordered him once more to abjure a life of
solitude and to undertake active ecclesiastical work. On his return he again
visited Pavia, and on his arrival at that place the first object that met his
gaze was the body of the Lombard nobleman who had stolen his horse laid upon a
bier and carried forth to burial. The horse was restored, and the widow of the
culprit, grovelling at the saint's feet, besought him to accept 200 solidi
(£120), which her husband on his death-bed had ordered her to pay as the
penalty of his crime.
With a long train of horses and servants Corbinian now took his journey
up the valley of the Adige in order to return into Bavaria by the pass of the
Brenner. Scarcely, however, had he entered the Bavarian territory when by
Grimwald's orders he was arrested at Castrum Magense.
And now we hear something more of the cause of Grimwald's fear of the
holy man. The Bavarian duke had married a young Frankish lady of noble birth
named Piltrudis, who was the widow of his brother Theudebald. Against this kind of union, as we know, Rome
uttered strong though not always irrevocable protests, and it was possibly from
fear of Corbinian's bringing across the Alps a bull of excommunication of the
guilty pair that Grimwald had given orders for his arrest on entering the
duchy. However, after a struggle, the details of which are very obscurely
given, Corbinian obtained a temporary victory. Grimwald obeyed the order of the
saint, backed as he probably was by the Frankish Major-Domus, and within the
specified time of forty days put away Piltrudis.
It is needless to say that the divorced wife, who is looked upon by the
ecclesiastical historians as another Herodias, was full of resentment against
the author of her disgrace and vowed to compass his downfall. If we read the
story rightly, the saint's own choleric temper—even his biographer confesses
that he was easily roused to anger by vice, though ready to forgive—aided her
designs.
One day when Corbinian was reclining at the table with the duke he made
the sign of the cross over the food set before him, at the same time giving
praise to God. But the prince took a piece of bread and thoughtlessly threw it
to a favourite hound. Thereat the man of God was so enraged that he kicked over
the three-legged table on which the meal was spread and scattered all the
silver dishes on the floor. Then starting up from his seat he said, “The man is
unworthy of so great a blessing who is not ashamed to cast it to dogs”. Then he
stalked out of the house, declaring that he would never again eat or drink with
the prince nor visit his court.
Some time after this there was another and more violent outbreak of the
saint's ill-temper. Riding forth one day from the royal palace he met a woman
who, as he was told, had effected the cure of one of the young princes by
art-magic. At this he trembled with fury, and leaping from his horse he
assaulted the woman with his fists, took from her the rich rewards for the cure
which she was carrying away from the palace, and ordered them to be distributed
among the poor. The beaten and plundered sorceress, who was perhaps only a skillful female physician, presented herself in Grimwald's
hall of audience with face still bleeding from the saintly fists, and clamoured
for redress. Piltrudis, who seems to have returned to
her old position, seconded her prayer, and Corbinian was banished from the
ducal presence. He had already received from his patron a grant of the place
upon which he had set his heart, Camina, about five miles north of Meran in the
Tyrol, with its arable land, its vineyards, its meadows, and a large tract of
the Rhaetian Alps behind it, and thither he retired to watch for the fulfillment of the prophecies which he had uttered against
the new Ahab and Jezebel.
The longed-for vindication came partly from foreign arms, partly from
domestic treachery. It is possible that Grimwald had to meet a combined
invasion both from the north and from the south, for, as Paulus Diaconus informs us, Liutprand, king of the Lombards, ‘in
the beginning of his reign took many places from the Bavarians'. This may be
the record of some warlike operations undertaken in the troublous years which followed the death of old duke Theodo (722), and may point to some
attempt on the part of the Lombard king, who had married the niece of Grimwald,
to vindicate the claims of her brother Hucpert, whom
Grimwald seems to have excluded from the inheritance of his father's share in
the duchy. This however is only conjecture, and as Liutprand came to the throne
in 712 it is not perhaps a very probable one. But it is certain that in 725 the
great Frankish Mayor, Charles Martel, entered the Bavarian duchy, possibly to
support the claims of Hucpert, but doubtless also in
order to rivet anew the chain of allegiance which bound Bavaria to the Frankish
monarchy. In 728 he again invaded the country, and this invasion was speedily
followed by the death of Grimwald (729). He was slain by conspirators says the
biographer of Corbinian, who adds, with pious satisfaction, that all his sons,
‘deprived of the royal dignity, with much tribulation gave up the breath of
life', but it is probable that all these events were connected with the blow to
Grimwald's semi-regal state which had been dealt by Charles the Hammer.
After one of his invasions of Bavaria, perhaps the first of the two,
Charles Martel carried back with him into Frankland two Bavarian princesses, Piltrudis, the ‘Herodias' of Corbinian's denunciations, and
her niece Swanahild, sister of Hucpert. The latter
lady became, after the fashion adopted by these lax moralists of the
Carolingian line, first the mistress and afterwards the wife of her captor, and
she with the son Grifo whom she bare to Charles caused in after years no small
trouble to the Frankish state.
The result of this overthrow of Grimwald was the establishment on the
Bavarian throne of his nephew Hucpert, son of
Theudebert, brother-in-law of Liutprand the Lombard and Charles the Frank, who
ruled for eight uneventful years, at peace apparently with his nominal overlord
the Merovingian king and his mighty deputy. On his death in 737 the vacant
dignity was given to his cousin Otilo who ruled for eleven years (737-748), and
to whom Charles Martel gave his daughter Hiltrudis in
marriage.
The reign of Otilo (737-748) was chiefly memorable for the
reorganisation of the Bavarian Church by the labours of an Anglo-Saxon
missionary, the great archbishop Boniface. The offshoot of Roman Christianity
planted in Britain by direction of Gregory the Great had now at last, after
much battling with the opposition both of heathenism and of Celtic
Christianity, taken deep root and was overspreading the land. It is not too
much to say that in the eighth century the most learned and the most exemplary
ecclesiastics in the whole of Western Christendom were to be found among those
Anglian and Saxon islanders whose not remote ancestors had been the fiercest of
Pagan idolaters. But precisely because they were such recent converts and
because the question between the Celtic Christianity of Iona and the Roman
Christianity of Canterbury had long hung doubtful in the scale, were these
learned, well-trained ecclesiastics among the most enthusiastic champions of
the supremacy of the Roman see. To us who know what changes the years have
brought, it seems a strange inversion of their parts to find the Celtic
populations of Ireland and the Hebrides long resisting, and at last only with
sullenness accepting, the Papal mandates, while a sturdy Englishman such as
Boniface almost anticipates Loyola in his devotion to the Pope, or Xavier in
his eagerness to convert new nations to the Papal obedience.
Born at Crediton in Devonshire about 775, and the son of noble parents,
the young Wynfrith (for that was his baptismal name),
after spending some years in a Hampshire monastery and receiving priest's
orders, determined to set forth as a missionary to the lands beyond the Rhine,
in order to complete the work which had been began by his fellowcountryman Willibrord. With his work in Frisia and Thuringia we have here no concern. We
hasten on to a visit, apparently a second visit, which he paid to Rome about the
year 722 when he had already reached middle life. It was on this occasion
probably that he assumed the name of Bonifatius; and at the same time he took
an oath of unqualified obedience to the see of Rome, the same which was taken
by the little suburbicarian bishops of the Campagna, save that they bound
themselves to loyal obedience to ‘the most pious Prince and the Republic' ,an
obligation which Boniface in his contemplated wanderings over central Europe,
free from all connection with Imperial Constantinople or with the civic
community of Rome, refused to take upon himself. His eager obedience was
rewarded by a circular letter from the Pope calling on all Christian men to aid
the missionary efforts of ‘our most reverend brother Boniface', now consecrated
bishop in partibus infidelium,
and setting forth to convert those nations in Germany and on the eastern bank
of the Rhine who were still worshipping idols and living in the shadow of
death. At the same time a letter of commendation addressed to the Pope's
‘glorious son duke Charles' obtained from Charles Martel a letter under his
hand and seal addressed to ‘all bishops, dukes, counts, vicars, lesser
officers, agents and friends' warning them that bishop Boniface was now under
the mundeburdium of the great Mayor, and that
if any had cause of complaint against him it must be argued before Charles in
person.
As has been already observed, the protection thus granted by the mighty
Austrasian to the Anglo-Saxon missionary powerfully aided his efforts for the
Christianization of Germany. The terror of the Frankish arms, as well as a
certain vague desire to watch the issue of the conflict between Christ and
Odin, may have kept the Hessian idolaters tranquil while the elderly Boniface
struck his strong and smashing blows at the holy oak of Geismar. At any rate,
truehearted and courageous preachers of the faith as were Boniface and the
multitude of his fellowcountrymen and
fellow-countrywomen who crossed the seas to aid his great campaign, it is clear
that the fortunes of that spiritual campaign did in some measure ebb and flow
with the varying fortunes of the Frankish arms east of the Rhine.
Some time after the death of Gregory II Boniface again visited Rome
(about 737) and received, apparently at this time, from Gregory III the dignity
of Archbishop and a commission to set in order the affairs of the Church in
Bavaria. In fulfilling this commission he must have had the entire support of
the then reigning duke Otilo; but it is not so certain that he was still acting
in entire harmony with the Frankish Mayor. We have seen that after his death
the memory of Charles Martel was subjected to a process the very opposite of
canonization, and there are some indications that at this time the obedient
Otilo of Bavaria was looked upon at Borne with more favour than the too
independent Mayor of the Palace who refused to help the Pope against his
brother-in-law the king of the Lombards. However this may be, it is clear that
Boniface accomplished in Bavaria something not far short of a spiritual
revolution. He had been instructed by the Pope to root out the erroneous
teaching of false and heretical priests and of intruding Britons. The latter
clause must be intended for the yet unreconciled missionaries of the Celtic
Church. Is it possible that the Frankish emissaries were also looked upon with
somewhat of suspicion, that the work of the Emmerans and Corbinians was only half approved at Rome, even
as the life of Boniface certainly shines out in favourable contrast with the
ill-regulated lives of those strange preachers of the Gospel?
“Therefore”, says the Pope to the Archbishop, “since you have informed
us that you have gone to the Bavarian nation and have found them living outside
the order of the Church, since they had no bishops in the Church save one named Vivilo [bishop of Passau], whom we ordained long ago,
and since with the assent of Otilo, duke of the same Bavaria, and of the nobles
of the province you have ordained three more bishops and have divided that
province into four parrochiae, of which each
bishop is to keep one, you have done well and wisely, my brother, since you
have fulfilled the apostolic precept in our stead. Therefore cease not, most
reverend brother, to teach them the holy Catholic and Apostolic tradition of
the Roman see, that those rough men may be enlightened and may hold the way of
salvation whereby they may arrive at eternal rewards”.
Here then at the end of the fourth decade of the eighth century we leave
the great Anglo- Saxon archbishop uprooting the last remnants of heathenism
which his predecessors had allowed to grow up alongside of the rites of
Christianity ; forbidding the eating of horseflesh, the sacrifices for the
dead, and the more ghastly sacrifices of the living for which even so-called
Christian men had dared to sell their slaves; everywhere working for
civilization and Christianity, but doubtless at the same time working to bring
all things into more absolute dependence on the see of Rome. In him we see the
founder, perhaps the unconscious founder, of that militant and lavishly endowed
Churchmanship which found its expression later on in the great
Elector-Bishoprics of the Rhine. We shall meet again in future chapters both
with Boniface and with the Dukes of Bavaria.
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