BOOK IV

FALL OF THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE. NEW BARBARIAN INVASIONS (814-887).

CHAPTER x.

LOUIS THE PIOUS AND THE TREATY OF VERDUN

(814-843)

 

Instability of Charlemagne's Work.—Louis the Pious (814-840): His Weakness ; Division of the Empire.—Revolt of the Sons of Louis the Pious.—Battle of Fontenay (841); Treaty of Verdun (843).

 

THE German race, unlike the Arabian, had passed from a disintegrated to a united condition. But it was only a transient union which put all Western Europe under the sway of one man, and it perished with him who called it into existence. In the space of one century the Carolingian empire suffered a complete dismemberment, and the empire of Islam experienced a like fate. It was as if, instead of the great boulders which covered the soil of Europe, Asia, and Africa, at the end of the eighth century, nothing could be found but grains of sand after the lapse of a hundred or a hundred and fifty years.

Of these two empires it was the Arabian which still retained the greater unity, allowing for the vast extent of its territory. It preserved, for a time at least, unity of government, of religion, of law and of language, a unity which was prescribed in the Koran. Charlemagne’s empire had unity of religion and government only and no unity of language and laws. The Gallo-Romans and the Italians spoke the Roman language with various modifications; the Germans, the Teutonic languages. Charlemagne allowed the Lombards and the Saxons to keep their own laws; the Salian Franks, the Ripuarians, the Alemanni, and the Bavarians had also kept theirs.

Charlemagne had allowed them to retain, besides their own laws, their nationalities, or, if that is too strong an expression for the time, he had at least not destroyed the national characteristics and the love of independence possessed by each of the tribes gathered together in his empire. Thebe tribes had not mixed or merged in each other; they were simply held together by Charlemagne's force of will and strong administration, and this bond was their only union. When the bond was broken by Charlemagne’s death, and his feeble successor found himself incapable of renewing it, the union was dissolved and the nations all separated. But the revolution did not take place without a struggle, for unity had its partisans; and, moreover, those who demolished Charlemagne’s great structure did not know what to do with its materials or upon what plan to build up the Europe of the future. Hence the confusion, hesitations  and divisions of the time.

The private ambitions of the princes of the imperial family assisted in the general dismemberment, while the ambition of the great proprietors and imperial governors encouraged the tendency toward a minute division.

In this conflict, the Church usually upheld the cause of unity; nevertheless, as the ecclesiastical aristocracy had in general the same interests as the lay aristocracy, we see the bishops also in the party favoring division.

Of the tribes, only one demanded unity—the Austrasians, who had triumphed with the Carolingians, and who in the hands of Charlemagne had borne the imperial sceptre, the symbol of his power. The others, the Gallo-Romans of the West and the Teutons of the East, demanded independence and the abolition of the imperial unity which commemorated their defeat. “The greatness of Charles’s glory”, said the monk of St. Gall, “had led the Gauls, the Aquitanians, the Burgundians, the Alemanni, and the Bavarians to boast of being called the subjects of the Franks, as if it were a great distinction”. When Charlemagne and his glory departed, all that lent their servitude a semblance of honor departed with him.

Charlemagne0s successor, Louis the Pious, did not contribute anything to restore the vanishing glory. His goodness, his virtues, the purity of his life, the efforts he made from the beginning of his reign to banish from the court the loose morality which Charlemagne had allowed to prevail there, and to restore discipline among the monks and the secular clergy, were indeed worthy of praise, but he lacked the firmness necessary to sustain his authority. From the beginning he showed a deference toward the Pope which Charlemagne would have considered excessive. He allowed Stephen IV (816) to have himself elected and take possession of the pontificate, without awaiting his consent, and was satisfied with tardy excuses from the Pope; when Stephen came to France he allowed him to consecrate him, and to pronounce the following words, which showed the tendency of the Holy See to lay claim to the imperial crown in order to gain uncontrolled disposal of it : “Peter is proud to bestow this gift upon you, because you sustain him in the enjoyment of his just rights”. The papacy was already preparing to free itself a second time; the authority of the Western Empire was to be thrown off as that of the Eastern Empire had been.

If Charlemagne had considered it necessary to share his power with his sons, because of the extent of the empire, there was certainly a much greater necessity for Louis the Pious to do the same. But the manner in which he divided his states differed in no respect from the division of Charlemagne himself, and did not seem to call in question or to endanger the imperial unity. Two subordinate kingdoms, Aquitania and Bavaria, were erected for the second and third sons of the Emperor, Pippin and Louis; Lothaire, the oldest, was admitted to a share of the empire; Pippin and Louis could neither make war, nor conclude a treaty, nor give up a town, without his permission. Bernhard, King of Italy and nephew of the Emperor, rebelled against this division; but he was compelled to deliver himself into their hands; his eyes were put out, and he died from the effects of this punishment. His kingdom was given to Lothaire.

The tendency toward dismemberment, though to a certain extent yielded to, was checked by this division. Louis at the same time fought against the impending internal divisions by trying to bring the common freemen into direct relation with the Emperor and to call them back into political life, ground down, as they were, more and more under the power of the great proprietors and the provincial governors. It was to this end that he exacted the oath direct of all of them and that he ordained that all should be consulted with regard to the new provisions added to the law.

But these efforts were at first poorly supported, and the disturbances on the frontiers of the empire made it evident that the restraint of Charlemagne's strong hand had been removed. The Norsemen renewed their ravages, the Slavs crossed the Elbe, the Avars rose in rebellion; the Croats made themselves independent; the Duke of Beneventum refused to pay tribute; the Saracens of Africa pillaged Corsica and Sardinia, those of Spain invaded Septimania and assisted in a revolt of the Gascons, and the Bretons made Morvan their king and invaded Neustria. It is true that the Franks regained the advantage they had lost at most points; especially in the case of the Bretons, Morvan was killed, and Louis gave them another duke.

But soon the miserable weakness of the Emperor became a well-known fact. “In 822, he convoked a general assembly at Attigny, and there, before the bishops, abbots, and noblemen of his kingdom, made public confession of his faults, and, of his own accord, underwent punishment for all that he had done toward his nephew Bernhard, as well as toward others”. When Theodosius humiliated himself before St. Ambrose at Milan, he presented a noble spectacle to the world, and rose again stronger than he had been before, after the public avowal of his fault. Louis left Attigny with his power diminished and debased, because it was a political body—a rival authority to his own—that had given him absolution. After that every one knew how far it was safe to go with such a man.

His second wife, whom he married in 819, was Judith, the beautiful and learned daughter of a Bavarian chief; by her he had a son, who he named Charles (823). Judith exerted over the Emperor and the Empire an influence which she shared with her favorite, Bernard, Count of Barcelona, who was of a clever and intriguing turn of mind. In 829 she insisted upon her husband's giving a part of his dominion to the son she had borne him; and, accordingly, at the assembly of Worms (829), Louis converted Alemannia, Rhaetia, Alsace, and a part of Burgundy, into a subordinate government for his son Charles.

This division caused ill-feeling among Louis's elder sons, who considered themselves wronged by it, and among the partisans of unity, who saw the basis of 817 disturbed; the nobles joined with all the dissatisfied elements in the hope of overthrowing the influence of Judith and of Bernard, who was trying to lessen their consideration in the State. The revolt broke out during an expedition against the Bretons, who had regained their independence. Lothaire, Pippin of Aquitania, and Louis of Bavaria took up arms against their father, made him prisoner, and confined him in a monastery at Compiegne, in the hope that the monks would induce him to embrace the monastic life of his own accord. At the same time they sent the Empress and her son Charles to a convent (830). The constitution of 817 was again confirmed. Louis the Pious, however, managed to have the general assembly of the nation, which was to legislate upon the new state of affairs, convened at Nimwegen, in the midst of the Germans, in whom he had confi­dence. His confidence was justified, for the Germans, coming to the assembly in greater numbers than the Roman Franks (830), sustained his cause. A wily monk sowed discord among the three brothers, and Louis the Pious, again master, confirmed the gift that he had made to his youngest son. In 832 he did even more than that; tired of the never-increasing intrigues of Pippin, he took Aquitaine away from him to bestow it upon Charles.

This was the signal for a new revolt. The sons of the Emperor marched against him, taking with them Pope Gregory IV, who had come to France to defend the division of 817. Gregory was indeed an advocate of unity, but of that unity offered by the act of 817; that is to say, he upheld the cause of an emperor whose weakness would give more strength to religious unity. The army of Louis and that of his sons met in the plain of Rothfeld, near Colmar, in Alsace (833); his soldiers deserted' without striking a blow, and this act of treachery gave the place its name of Lugenfeld, the Field of Lies.

The conquerors insulted the age and dignity of their father by subjecting him to public disgrace. He was obliged to read in public, in the Church of St. Medard of Soissons, a long recital of his faults, in which he accused himself of having exposed the people to perjury and the State to murder and pillage, by making new divisions in the empire and by provoking civil war; after which the bishops, with great solemnity, removed his military belt and gave him the dress of a penitent.

This humiliation of the empire, in the Emperor's person, gave Louis a party to uphold his cause. His pious resignation and the revolting harshness of his sons excited the compassion of the people. His sons, moreover, agreed no better than before. Louis and Pippin were not willing to be despoiled for the sake of Charles, neither were they willing to obey Lothaire, who aimed to maintain the unity of imperial command; and they found a sure support in the reluctance of their people to remain in the empire. They, therefore, released Louis from the monastery where he was held by Lothaire, and gave him back his power (835); but he would not resume the insignia of office, after his public penance, until he had received the permission of the bishops.

When the Emperor emerged from the cloister, for which he was well fitted, he relapsed into his old faults. His blind preference for his youngest-born made him forget that the cause of all his misfortunes had been the division that he had made during his lifetime between his sons. In 837 he formed a new kingdom in the north of France for Charles. When Pippin, King of Aquitania, died, in the following year, the children he left were robbed and their kingdom, too, was given to Charles. Then Louis the German, and Lothaire, whose kingdoms were reduced, the one to Bavaria, the other to Italy, took up arms. In order to avoid fighting with them both at once, the Emperor entered into negotiations with Lothaire (839). He gave to Lothaire all the provinces to the east of the Meuse, the Jura mountains, and the Rhone, together with the title of Emperor; the western provinces he allotted to Judith's son; Bavaria to Louis the German. The latter, with all Germany to uphold him, rebelled against the injustice of the division; and the old Emperor spent his last days in this unrighteous warfare. He died near Mainz, on the Rhine. “I pardon him”, he said to the bishops who were interceding for the rebel, “but let him know that he has killed me”.

The Middle Ages were more affected by his virtues as a man than by his faults as a prince, and they have been full of indulgence toward the memory of the pious and good-natured Louis.

Lothaire succeeded Louis the Pious as Emperor. On his accession he claimed the rights of imperial authority and wished to exact the oath direct from all free men, even in the states of his two brothers. Charles II (the Bald), joined Louis the German in resisting these claims, and even in fighting against them, while Lothaire found an ally in Pippin II, whose ambition it was to recover Aquitania from Charles the Bald. After several vain attempts to come to an agreement, a great battle was fought at Fontenay, near Auxerre, (841). All the nations of the empire took part in this general affray except the Gascons, the Goths of Septimania, and the Bretons. Lothaire came leading the Italians, the Aquitanians, and the Austrasians; Louis led the Germans, and Charles, the Neustrians and the Burgundians. Forty thousand of the army of Lothaire, who was defeated, are said to have perished, and this great loss of life among the freemen was felt throughout the Frankish countries, which were thus deprived of their defenders at the very moment when they were threatened by the Norse invasion. Several days after the council of Tauricum, which was held near the field of battle, decided that the judgment of God had been pronounced on the plains of Fontenay. But Lothaire still refused to accept this judgment, and the two brothers united to force it upon him. They met between Basel and Strassburg, and in the presence of their armies took an oath of alliance, which Louis the "German pronounced in the Roman language of the West Franks before the soldiers of Charles the Bald, and Charles pronounced in the German language before those of Louis (842). Louis's oath is the earliest monument we possess of the French language.

Finally Lothaire yielded and contented himself with a third of the empire, with something over and above, due to his name of Emperor. The treaty of Verdun (843) sanctioned this arrangement by ordering a division of the Carolingian empire into three parts.

Lothaire received, with the title of Emperor, the whole of Italy as far as the duchy of Beneventum, and the country lying between the Alps and the North Sea along the Rhine, a long strip of territory separating the states of his two brothers. The boundary lines of this kingdom were complicated : the western boundary was a line following the Rhone from its mouth as far as Ardeche, then following the Cevennes as far as the heights of Macon, then the Saone, then the mountains of Argonne, passing to the right of the Ardennes, and finally the Scheldt, as far as its mouth; the eastern boundary started at Istria, skirted the eastern Alps, and followed the Rhine, leaving on the right hand the towns and territories of Worms, Spyer, and Mainz, in order to give some vineyard land to the King of Germany, and crossing the river a little lower down, joined the Weser near its mouth.

All the territory to the west of this was given to Charles the Bald. France thus lost for the first time her natural limits, the Rhine and the Alps, which she has not yet entirely recovered.

All the east was given to Louis the German.

In this division, so different from the Merovingian divisions, we see the first marking off of the two modern nationalities, France and Germany. Lothaire's part was the only one that had a temporary existence: the other two states soon fell to disputing over its fragments. Yet we can readily conceive that many intelligent men of that time groaned over the fate of the great empire of Charlemagne now fallen to earth and broken on the field of Fontenay. “A beautiful empire”, said the deacon Florus, a Latin poet of the day, “a beautiful empire flourished under a brilliant diadem; there was but one prince and one people ... The Frankish nation shone with a brilliant light before the eyes of the whole world. Foreign kingdoms, the Greeks, the Barbarians, and the Senate of Latium, all sent their embassies thither. The race of Romulus, Rome herself, the mother of kingdoms, had bowed down to this nation; it was there, in Rome, that its chief, sustained by .the aid of Christ, had received the diadem by apostolic gift. Happy, if it had only known its happiness, was the empire which had Rome for its citadel and the bearer of the keys of heaven for its founder. Fallen now, this great power has lost at once its glory and the name of empire; the kingdom, once firmly united, is divided into three portions ; there is no longer any one who can be called emperor; instead of a king, we have only a kinglet, and instead of a kingdom, a mere fragment of a kingdom”.

 

CHAPTER XI.

FINAL DESTRUCTION OF THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE (845-887).

 

Internal Discords ; Vain effort of the Sons of Louis the Pious to reconstitute the Empire. — Division of the royal Authority; Heredity of Benefices and of Offices. — Louis the Stammerer (877). Louis III, and Karlmann (879); Charles the Fat (884).

 

IN the year 843, we have only reached the end of the first act of the drama of the dismemberment of the Carolingian empire. The terms of the treaty of Verdun were indeed sanctioned by posterity, but only after having been contested during the forty-four years (843-887) that the Carolingian family remained supreme on the throne; until then, in spite of weakness, the Carolingians aspired to keep the whole of western Europe united in a single empire, and could not make up their minds to sacrifice the cherished hopes of Charlemagne. The final dismemberment did not take place till the downfall of their house.

The internal struggles redoubled, in the midst of the general breaking up that was going on; but these struggles were rather between the sovereign and the great nobles of each country, than between the groups of peoples. The aristocracy and the dignitaries of the Church acted in concert, and renewed their encroachments upon the central power which had been checked by the iron hand of the first three Carolingians. The nobles encroached in two directions. As holders of royal lands, they again began to dispute with the king the heredity of their benefices, and as officers of the sovereign power they raised new pretensions, those of making the offices which had been entrusted to them in the provinces hereditary, and of appropriating to themselves whatever of the royal authority had been delegated to them. The bishops, on their side, profited by the submissive and humble piety of the family of Louis the Pious to constitute themselves judges of the conduct of the kings, and to keep them in a subjection which, if they had really succeeded in establishing it, would have given rise in France to an almost theocratic rule.

In the midst of the struggle, born of the events and the legislation of the times, the kingdoms called into being by the empire became more and more incapable of defending themselves against attacks from without. The Norsemen at the north and the west, the Saracens at the south in Italy, Provence, and the Alps, and later the Hungarians at the east, ravaged with impunity the country from which Charlemagne had so often emerged to strike terrible blows at the barbarians, and from which Louis the Pious had still succeeded in repulsing them, but where henceforth feeble kings allowed them to encroach.

It would have seemed that the division of Verdun, by limiting the authority of each sovereign to a smaller extent of territory, would at least have made this authority stronger and more secure in all the parts of the country where it did exist, but this was not the case.

In France, Charles the Bald did not really reign over Brittany, Aquitaine, or Septimania. The Bretons set up a virtually independent kingdom. William, son of Bernard, defeated the army which was sent against Septimania, and fickle Aquitaine, over which he wished to make his son king, first recognized Pippin II, then summoned a son of Louis the German to the throne, then accepted the son of Charles, and finally returned to Pippin. The latter, in order to have more strength for resistance, allied himself with the Norse­men and adopted their religion, and united with them in all their devastations up to 864, when he was made prisoner and tried by the council of Pitres. Charles then succeeded in enforcing his authority and in securing the recognition of his son, but only by placing him under the guardianship of the great nobles, the real masters of the country.

In Germany, Louis the German suffered the same fate which he had inflicted on his father: he passed his life in putting down the rebellions raised by his sons. Nevertheless he also gained several victories over the barbarians who were crowding up against his frontiers, and began the military organization of Germany.

In Italy Lothaire struggled in vain against the dukes of Naples and of Beneventum, who called the Moors of Africa and of Spain to their aid, and even at the heart of the Peninsula he came into conflict with the pretensions of the Holy See and of the Roman aristocracy. Disgusted with the world, he retired to the abbey of Prum, in the midst of the Ardennes, where he died. It bodes ill for the power of the crown, when the king shuts himself up in a cloister. Lothaire had divided his states between his three sons: Louis II, who had Italy and the title of Emperor; Charles, who had the country of Provence, between the Alps and the Rhone; and Lothaire II, who had Lotharingia (Lorraine), the country between the Meuse and the Rhine. The King of Provence died in 863, and his brothers divided his states. A few years later, on the death of Lothaire II, after the scandalous affair of his double marriage, where the Pope interfered with such arrogance, but with such success, Charles hastened again to Metz to seize Lotharingia. But Louis the German arrived with a superior force, and compelled him to consent to a new division (870).

These princes, like the last Merovingians, were short-lived. The Emperor Louis II died in 875. He had driven the Saracens from Bari, but was taken prisoner by the Beneventins. His death left two thrones vacant; that of the empire and that of the kingdom of Italy. Two old men, who were each on the verge of the grave, disputed the succession. Charles the Bald was quicker than Louis the German, and was successful in gaining the title of Emperor.

Louis the German died the following year. Charles the Bald attempted to despoil his nephews, Karlmann, Louis, and Charles the Fat, of their three kingdoms of Bavaria, Saxony, and Swabia, and so to reconstruct the empire of Charlemagne, though he was not even able to defend Rouen against the Norsemen. He was defeated by Louis of Saxony, and Karlmann invaded Italy. When preparing to repel them, he encountered opposition from the great nobles of his own kingdom. He was therefore obliged to fly before Karlmann, and died on his retreat (877). Karlmann of Bavaria was crowned King of Italy.

Thus the career of the King of France was ended; there is a melancholy contrast between the grand memories and dreams of this heir of Charlemagne, on the one hand, and on the other his complete impotence in enforcing obedience from his nobles who, in perfect safety, refused him even military service, the first and most essential obligation of all vassals toward their sovereign.

This was really the result of the revolution which was going on, and in which the noble, who had in fact become independent of the king, stood between him and the simple freemen, and intercepted their allegiance. During this whole period the earlier custom of "commending" themselves to a powerful chief had been in use among the small proprietors, who were too weak to defend themselves from violence. This custom became general and the earlier Carolingian kings contributed to make it so, by recognizing the right of every freeman to choose himself a lord, but on the condition of remaining faithful also to themselves. They may have expected in this way to give greater security to the state, and to prevent a return of the condition of violence and anarchy which had prevailed under the Merovingian kings, throughout the whole of Gaul. But in working to establish order, they were really working against their own authority, or rather against the authority of their own successors; for the power of the first Carolingians was unassailable. In order to overcome the disadvantages of this method of commendation, and to reap only good results from it, a direct oath had been exacted from all freemen who became vassals of any lord. This practice was continued by the later kings, but it became merely a reminder of a vanished power. The edict of Mersen in 847 regulated these affairs: “Every free man, it said, shall be able to choose a lord for himself, either the king or one of his vassals, and in ordinary wars vassals may appear in the field under the command of their lords”.

These freemen had now nothing to do with anyone but their own lord, and no longer knew more than the name of the royal authority, with which they never came into contact. As those freemen who put themselves under the protection of others were generally land-owners, soon the land, which is permanent, came to be more considered than the men themselves, who pass away. Thus not only did the weak man look for protection to the great noble, but also the small field to the great domain; certain formalities symbolized this new relation, as when the small proprietor gave into the hand of the great a clod of earth or a branch of a tree to indicate the change of ownership. These were the earlier stages of the growth of the feudal system.

Charlemagne once wrote to his son Louis, King of Aquitaine, to reproach him for not having taken more pains to attach his subjects to him by presents and grants of land, and alluding to his son0s piety with delicate irony said: “You give nothing but your benediction, and that only when it is asked for; this is not enough”. The King of Aquitaine responded to him that he had nothing more to give, as his vassals refused to give back the benefices they had once received, and insisted on transmitting them to their heirs. Charlemagne replied that he must not allow this usurpation of the royal domains, but must get them back from the usurpers; however, as a prudent sovereign and kind father, he did not wish to compromise his son0s popularity, and undertook himself a task which would have been dangerous enough for any one else. Agents sent in his name forced the holders to give up the domains which they had illegally retained. This story illustrates very well the revolution which was taking place in these times. The obstacles which Charlemagne was able to overcome were insurmountable for his weak successors. Under them the heredity of benefices gained the authority of an established custom.

It was the same in the case of the heredity of the offices and titles of duke, count, etc., to which were attached an authority delegated by the crown, and which was all the more extended because the kings, and Charlemagne first of all, hoped to strengthen their own power by giving larger powers to their agents. But Charlemagne kept as careful a watch over the encroachments on the offices as on the benefices, and checked the growing independence of the counts; we see him in his Capitularies continually restraining their crafty attempts to retain their appointments, rebuking their negligence, and never allowing them to forget that he was their master. To keep them in better control he avoided making them too powerful, and never gave more than one county to any one person. His successors abandoned this wise and vigilant method. In the ordinary course of events what had been abuses passed first into customs, then came to have the force of laws, and in the famous Capitulary of Kiersy-sur-Oise, promulgated by Charles the Bald in 877, to persuade his nobles to follow him across the mountains, he implicitly recognized, at least as an established custom, the right of the son of a beneficiary to receive the benefice, and of the son of a count to receive the county, at his father's death.

The great nobles had powerful allies in the bishops, who, starting with the right of interference either to correct or punish the actions of all men, who are prone to error, came logically to claim the right of deposing kings and disposing of their crowns.

In 858, the nobles and bishops with Wenilo, Archbishop of Sens, prominent among them, after having summoned Charles to respect the Capitularies signed in their favor, resolved to depose him, and called Louis the German to his throne. Charles fled and demanded the protection of the Pope. Sometime later, a movement in his favor allowed him to return to his states, and he complained to the pub lie assembly of the boldness of Wenilo and the bishops, in the following terms : “Wenilo, according to his own choice and that of the other bishops and the nobles of the kingdom, consecrated me as king, following the traditions of the Church. After that I could not be removed from the throne by any one, at least without having been heard by the bishops who consecrated me as king, and who are the thrones of the Divine Spirit. I have always been prompt to submit to their paternal corrections, and am so still”. Hincmar, the great bishop of Rheims, a defender of the royal authority and one who was concerned in all the principal affairs of the times, wrote that “kings are subject to no one, if they govern according to the will of God; but if they are adulterers, homicides, or ravishers, they should be judged by the bishopsIt was certainly right that the kings should feel under some restraint, and should have to give an account of their actions to some moral power here on earth. But this accountability of the royal authority developed into servitude, and the institution of monarchy was shattered to its foundations.

It was in this deplorable state that Charles the Bald left the kingdom of France to his son Louis II, called the Stammerer (877). His reign and those of his two successors, his sons Louis III and Karlmann (879), were uneventful. The two latter, to be sure, showed some activity against the Norsemen, whom they defeated several times, especially at Saucourt in Vimeu. But these victims knew no other means of holding Hastings in check than by granting him the county of Chartres, and they were unable to prevent Boso, who had assumed the title of King of Arles and of Provence, from being crowned in an assembly of bishops; moreover, their reign was short; Louis died in 882, Karlmann in 884.

They left no children, and the crown was offered to Charles the Fat, the only surviving son of Louis the German, who by the death of his brothers (882) had united all Germany with Italy, with the title of Emperor. When France was joined to these the empire of Charlemagne, with the exception of the kingdom of Provence, was again united, but only temporarily and for the last time. The master of this vast empire was not even able to drive back the Norsemen who were besieging Paris; this city was defended by Eudes, [Odo] Count of Paris, the son of Robert the Strong, and by the bishop Gozlin. As for Charles the Fat he only paid the Norsemen a sum of money on condition that they should ravage a different part of his states, the valley of the Yonne, instead of the banks of the Seine.

His nobles, exasperated by his weakness, deposed him at the diet of Tribur (887).

Seven kingdoms were formed from the final and henceforth unchallenged dismemberment of the empire : Italy, Germany, Lorraine, France, Navarre, cisjurian Burgundy or Provence, and transjurane Burgundy; if we count Brittany and Aquitaine, which existed in fact if not in law, we have nine kingdoms. The power of the imperial crown declined in Italy, where petty princes disputed its possession ; elsewhere, no one could tell anything about it, for no real power was attached to it. National kings were chosen everywhere : Arnulf in Germany, Eudes Duke of France, in France. The separate existence of both these nations dates from this time. There was a general tendency toward isolation, and a new era in European history was about to begin.

 

CHAPTER XII.

THE THIRD INVASION, IN THE NINTH AND TENTH CENTURIES.

 

The Norsemen in France and England —In the Polar regions and in Russia .—The Saracens. —The Hungarians. —Difference between the Ninth century Invasion and those preceding.

 

THE names of Norsemen and Saracens have occurred frequently in the foregoing pages; it will be necessary to retrace our steps for a moment in order to gain a correct idea of the new invaders, who assailed the Carolingian Empire of the West and were so instrumental in its destruction, just as, four centuries earlier, the Germans, the first invasion, had assailed and ruined the Roman empire of the West ; and as the second invasion, the Arabian, had in the seventh century robbed the Empire of the East of half of its provinces.

This movement had three separate starting-points: in the north, in the south, and in the east, gradually spreading to the west and enveloping the whole empire. The Norsemen were the first to appear.

After Charlemagne had restored peace and order in Germany, the movement of invasion, which had tended toward the Rhine for many centuries, was forced to change its direction. Instead of keeping to the land, it took to the sea and assumed a piratical character. The men of the North, Norsemen, left their crowded Cimbric peninsula, and in their barks set out in little fleets upon the “pathway of the swans”, as the old national poems express it. Sometimes they coasted along the shores and lay in wait for their enemies in the straits, the bays and the little harbors, a habit which gave them the name of Vikings, or Children of the bays; sometimes they flew in pursuit across the ocean. Their frail boats were scattered and wrecked by the fierce storms of the northern seas, and they did not all rally again around the vessel of their chief at the signal agreed upon; but those of them who survived their ship­wrecked companions had neither lost confidence nor grown anxious; they laughed at the winds and the floods, which had not been able to harm them; “The force of the tempest”, they sang, “assists the arms of our oarsmen, the hurricane is at our command, it casts us whithersoever we wish to go”.—(Augustin Thierry.)

It was such men as these who had conquered a part of Ireland in the seventh century, and, under the names of Danes and Norwegians, had at different times ruled or swayed England. Charlemagne had seen them approaching the coasts of his empire. After his death they grew bolder and their light craft hovered about the shores of France. They entered the mouths of the rivers, and went far up their streams, establishing themselves there in bands of five or six hundred, and from these naval stations they overran the neighborhood, pillaging town and country and carrying their booty off to sea. In this way they seized the islands of Walcheren, at the mouth of the Scheldt; of Betau, between the Rhine, the Wahal, and the Leek; of Ossel, near Rouen; of Her or Noirmoutier, opposite the mouths of the Loire. In 840 they burned Rouen; in 843 they pillaged Nantes, Saintes, and Bordeaux, and then after rounding Spain, whose coasts they ravaged, and whose rivers they ascended, laying waste their banks, they advanced, led by their formidable chief, Hastings, to at­tack Italy and to pillage Luna, which they mistook for Rome. In 845 they pillaged the Abbey of St. Germain des Prés, at the very gates of the Paris of that day. In the next few years they repeatedly sacked Saintes and Bordeaux; in 851 they ascended the Rhine and the Meuse and devastated their banks; in 853, they captured Tours and burned the abbey of St. Martin; three years afterwards they were seen at Orleans. In 857 they burned the churches of Paris and led away to captivity the abbot of St. Denis. Soon Meaux and La Brie were laid waste. In 864 they were seen at Toulouse. They usually made the churches and abbeys the objects of their attacks, because it was there that all took refuge, and there that everything of value was carried for safety. In the midst of the general inertia, one man alone fought bravely against the invaders, namely, Robert the Strong, to whom Charles the Bald had given the country lying between the Seine and the Loire; which came to be called the Duchy of France. Robert, who was the ancestor of the Capetians, defeated the invaders repeatedly, and perished in an encounter with them at Brissarthe, near Mans (866). Charles then had no other resource but to buy the retreat of the Norsemen. They willingly accepted his gold and went off to ravage some neighboring province, while another band came to take their place in the province they had left.

These devastations continued until the year 911, in the reign of Charles the Simple. They stopped then, and for the same reason that the earlier devastations of the Burgundians, the Franks and the Goths had ceased, because the invaders had conquered and were settling in the new country. The Norsemen grew tired of their life of pillage; moreover, having destroyed so much, there was nothing left for them to seize, and at last they settled down in the places which had become familiar to them in their raids. Finally their presence as enemies became so disastrous that his nobles advised Charles to give up to them a part of his territory, which they would be interested in cultivating when they no longer regarded it as foreign land, but their own domain. Charles accordingly caused propositions of this nature to be laid before Rolf, or Rollo, one of the most terrible of their chiefs. They offered him the land lying between the Andelle and the ocean, with the hand of the king's daughter in marriage, on the condition of his establishing himself there with the title of Duke, of rendering homage to Charles, and of embracing Christianity. Rolf accepted this offer, and the treaty of St. Clair-sur-Epte confirmed the establishment of the Norsemen in the country which has taken their name (911). In the following year Rolf was baptized, and Neustria, repeopled not only by the Norsemen, who were few in number, no doubt, but also by a crowd of adventurers who came to have a share in the new settlement, was placed by its dukes upon the high-road to prosperity and power. It is difficult to believe that the Norsemen could have treated those they had conquered with much kindness; but it is certain that serfdom soon disappeared from the soil of Normandy; that the life of the husbandman was happy; that agriculture prospered; that the feudal system was more highly organized there than elsewhere; and that, in general, under these Norman dukes, the province enjoyed a high degree of prosperity and of civilization.

The Norsemen robbed France and the Netherlands of their security and of a part of their wealth, but from England they took her independence as well. Thus far we have spoken of this country only in connection with the sufferings she went through during the first invasion in the fifth century, because England, though soon to interfere often in the affairs of the continent, was as yet leading the isolated existence forced upon her by her insular position. From the time when the Roman power had been broken until the moment when William the Conqueror brought the British Isles again under continental dominion, England’s relations with the rest of Europe were slight. Her internal history is also void of interest. We need only mention the conversion of Ethelberht, King of Kent, to Christianity (596-616), whose example was gradually followed by the other states of the Saxon heptarchy.

In 829, after a troubled existence, these states were united under the power of one sovereign, the King of Wessex, Ecgberht the Great, who had spent several years at the court of Charlemagne, and had learned in the school of that great master how to reign. But England, like France and a part of Germany, was already beset by this last band of invaders emerging from the two Cimbric peninsulas, the Norse or Danish and the Scandinavian pirates. It needed only three days for those bold lords of the ocean to cross the North Sea in their ships with two sails, and to reach the coasts of the great island which lay opposite to their own country.

Ecgberht succeeded in repulsing them whenever they appeared during his reign. But, under" his successors (836-871), the Danes renewed their inroads and sanguinary raids, and succeeded in establishing themselves in the north of the heptarchy, where they occupied successively Northumberland, East Anglia, and Mercia.

In 871, they encountered an unexpected obstacle—Alfred the Great ascended the throne in that year. For seven years, he succeeded in warding off the approach of Guthrum, the terrible chief of the Danes, from his states, which included only the southern and western part of the island. But at the end of that time he could no longer call forth from his subjects the necessary zeal and devotion to continue the hard struggle.

His extensive knowledge, acquired by study and travel, inspired him with a disdain for his untutored people which he could not hide; the tendency he showed toward despotism, which he as well as the continent had derived from Roman traditions, wounded the independent spirit of the Saxon race. It is also necessary to add that this people seemed to have become enervated, as was the case with almost all the peoples who made the first invasion into the Roman Empire. Even the clergy abandoned Alfred, lest they should share his unpopularity. After a vain appeal to arms, he fled to the depths of Somersetshire and asked for shelter, according to tradition, without making himself known, in the house of a poor wood-cutter, where occurred the well-known incident of the burnt cakes.

For some months he remained concealed in the forest. In the meantime he carefully followed the state of affairs in the country, and noticing that the depredations of the foreigners roused the hatred of the Saxons more and more, he watched for a favorable opportunity to act. He had revealed his hiding-place to some of his former companions. He agreed to meet them at the stone of Ecgberht, in the seventh week after Easter. Guthrum and his Danes were encamped near that place, at Ethandune. Alfred made his way as the legend relates into the enemy's camp, disguised as a harper, and studied their position; then he attacked and completely routed them. Guthrum consented to be baptized and to withdraw to the north; a line was drawn between the Danish and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, which followed Watling Street, the great highway built by the Britons and rebuilt by the Romans, reaching from Dover to Chester.

Alfred ruled with great wisdom. The division of England into counties and hundreds, for administrative purposes, a division found on the continent also, no doubt existed before his time, and was derived from German customs, but its more precise organization is usually, and probably correctly, attributed to him. The county or shire was divided into hundreds, and they, in time, were divided into townships, or sometimes tithings, that is, communities of ten families; the ten heads of families were conjointly responsible for the misdemeanors committed within their district. Every man had to be enrolled in a tithing. The community itself decided on the cases brought before them. Any cases coming up for trial between members of one township were decided by the community itself; actions between different townships were judged in the hundred's court by a body of twelve chosen freeholders. Superior to the assembly of the hundred was the county assembly, which met twice in each year, and was presided over by the sheriff, with whom sat also the ealdorman and the bishop. The sheriff was appointed by the king, and represented his interests before this body and collected the fines. The general assembly, witenagemot (assembly of the wise men), was the highest grade in this hierarchical organization. It was open at first to all freemen, but later, as the size of the state increased, and the privilege grew more difficult to exercise, it became naturally reserved for the most powerful thanes or nobles alone. Finally, at the head of all stood the king, whose office was partly hereditary and partly elective, as among the Franks, and whose power was modified by the witenagemot.

When Alfred had restored order through these vigorous institutions he showed himself a stern lover of justice. He united in a single code all the ordinances of the kings Ethelberht, Ine, and Offa, and laid very heavy penalties on magistrates who had violated their trust. “It was possible then”, said the chroniclers, “to hang a golden bracelet over the highway and no one would dare touch it”. The defense of the country, also, occupied his attention; he built a number of fortresses, and constructed vessels on a different plan from the Danish ships—longer and with higher decks—and he succeeded in driving away the formidable Hastings under a promise never to return. Finally, he endeavored to diffuse knowledge among his people and founded schools, Oxford among others. He himself translated into Saxon the Ecclesiastical History of the Venerable Bede, the Epitome of Universal History of Paulus Orosius, and the Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius, and he corrected a translation of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great. He died in 901; his name is almost as famous among the English as Charlemagne’s among the Franks.

The Anglo-Saxon monarchy, thus restored, continued under Alfred's successors. His son, Eadward the Elder (901-925), conquered Mercia and East Anglia, covered the country with fortifications, showed favor to the commoners of the towns, and founded the school at Cambridge.

Ethelstan (925-940) overcame at Brunanburh, on the day of the great battle, a formidable coalition of Danes, Gaels, Scots, and nations of the Orkney Islands, armed with their terrible claymores (937). This victory brought all of the old heptarchy under one sceptre. Ethelstan’s renown spread afar; his sisters, Edwina (Eadgyfa) and Edith, married the kings of France and of Germany, and his nephew, Louis d'Outremer, found a refuge at his court. He may be said to have been the first king of the whole of England.

But this prosperity declined after his death, hastened by discords and crime in the royal family. The influence of the bishops is conspicuous in this period, and especially that of their chief, St. Dunstan, also the attempts on the part of the provincial governors to free themselves from royal authority. Then the Danes came back to renew the attack on England in its feeble condition. Ethelred II believed that he had sent them away when, on the advice of the bishops, he gave them 10,000 pounds of silver; it was, however, the surest way to bring them back that could be devised. Olaf, king of Norway, and Swein or Swegen, king of Denmark, continued their attacks until the end of the century. A second and third ransom had no effect in driving them off; Ethelred then formed a vast conspiracy against them; all the invaders who had established themselves in England were massacred on the day of St. Brice (1002). The Saxon men and women took a terrible revenge on their conquerors for the oppression they had suffered. It was but a transient deliverance ; for Swein made invasion upon invasion, and finally in 1013 assumed the title pf King of England. Ethelred fled to the court of the Duke of Normandy, whose daughter, Emma, he had married. His son, Eadmund II, Ironsides, fought with wonderful heroism, but without permanent success, against Cnut, son and successor of Swein, with whom he was forced to divide England, as Alfred had done before him. Eadmund died in 1016, and Cnut the Great established the Danish power throughout the country.

His reign began in cruelty. He set to work with bar­barian ferocity to rid himself of any obstacles in his path. But when his power was well secured he ruled more leniently and showed himself a great king. He became the representative and chief of the Scandinavian invasion, as Charlemagne had been that of the German invasion. By marrying Emma, the widow of Ethelred, he paved the way to a union of the conquerors and the conquered. He even had leisure to extend his power over Sweden and Norway and his supremacy over Scotland. He made wise laws and modified some of the severities of those of Alfred the Great, and took care that the Danes should not oppress the English; he sent Saxon missionaries to Scandinavia charged with the task of hastening the fall of paganism and with tempering the savage customs of its population. Finally, he strove to reform his own character, as many stories inform us. Having killed a soldier, in an access of fury, he gathered the men of his army together, acknowledged his crime, and demanded punishment. All were silent. He then promised that whoever would express his opinion should do so with impunity. His guards referred the decision to his own wisdom. He condemned himself to pay nine times the amount of the usual penalty. On another occasion his courtiers were extolling him as the greatest of monarchs, he whose will was law for six powerful nations, the English, Scotch, Gaelic, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian; he was then at Southampton, sitting by the shore of the sea. The tide was coming in; he commanded it to stop and to respect the sovereign of six kingdoms; the tide still rose and forced him to withdraw. “You see”, he said to his flatterers,—“you see the weakness of earthly kings; no one is strong but the Supreme Being who rules the elements”. And on his return to Winchester, he took his crown from off his head, placed it upon the great crucifix in the cathedral, and never wore it again except on the occasion of public ceremonies.

In 1027, he made a pilgrimage to Rome and visited the most famous churches on his road. He was so prodigal of gifts that, according to a German chronicler, all those who lived upon the paths he traveled cried with reason: “May the blessing of the Lord be upon Cnut, King of the English”. England’s well-merited reputation for wealth dates far back, for the Knytlinga Saga, speaking of the countries whence Cnut derived his riches, mentions the British isle as the richest of all the northern countries. After spending some time in the Holy City, where he happened to be at the same time with the Emperor Conrad II, the Scandinavian monarch went directly to Denmark. He wrote from that country a letter to his English subjects, in which he gave them an account of his travels, and closed by recommending them to pay promptly each year their tithes and Peter’s pence. This was a tax of one farthing on each hearth which he had imposed in behalf of the Holy See. Cnut ended his glorious reign at Shaftesbury on the 12th of November, 1035.

We have just seen how the Norsemen gained a footing in Norsemen in France and England; we must now follow them on their less famous but more remarkable expeditions, and see them, on the one hand, discovering America, and on the other founding what afterwards became the empire of Russia,

The Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred the Great, preserved and handed down to us an account of the routes taken by two Norse adventurers; of Wulfstan, who sailed to the furthermost parts of the Baltic Sea, a long journey in those days, and of Othere, who rounded the North Cape and reached Biarmia, that is to say, the regions lying on the White Sea and near the mouth of the Dwina. These hardy mariners were not daunted by the long voyage to the polar seas, nor even by the dangers there encountered. Accordingly it is not surprising to find that they reached the Faroe Islands in 861, and in 870 came upon Iceland, which owes to them its three or four centuries of prosperity; or that, carried by the currents, tempests, or the spirit of adventure, they should have found Greenland, in 981, 200 miles to the west. It was while they were skirting along these shores that they discovered Labrador, covered in those days with vines, and they called it Vinland; they were then in America. About the same time they discovered the Shetland Islands, which were unknown to the Romans; occupied the Orkneys, which Agricola had only seen from afar, and founded at the northern extremity of Scotland the kingdom of Caithness, which they held till the end of the twelfth century. They founded another kingdom in the Hebrides and on the peninsula of Cantire, which "remained in their possession until 1266.

They spread to the east as well as to the west, though not in such large numbers, because that region, which Roman civilization had not reached, had less to offer. In the middle of the eighth century a few adventurous Norse­men, who are called by Russian writers Varangians, a name of doubtful origin, had made their way into the midst of the Slav settlements around Lake Ilmen, where they occupied the town of Novgorod. Though they were driven away at first, they were soon called back. In 862 three brothers, named Rurik, Sineus and Truwor, who had gone there with a number of warlike companions, were recognized by these powerful cities as their leaders in war. Rurik, who inherited the power of his two brothers, is regarded as the founder of the Russian empire, whose capital was first Novgorod and later Kief.

Thus the Scandinavians, like the Arabs, had come forth from their sterile peninsula and had gone to the east and the west, and, like them, had spread along an immense belt of land from America to the Volga, narrow, except in Russia, and always keeping to the northern regions, as the Arabs had always kept to the south. Some Norse chiefs, it is true, came down into the South. We have seen how they pillaged Spain, and ventured into the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar. But that place was already occupied by other ravagers, namely, the Saracens.

The Saracens were to Italy what the Norsemen were to France. Like them, they long pillaged the coasts, and, like them, they settled down in certain places. They came from Africa, from Kairowan, which the Arabs had merged in the province of Tunis, and which had been made the capital of a flourishing kingdom by the Aglabites. On this Punic land they had found relics of naval grandeur, and had turned the maritime habits of the nations they found there to their own profit. They equipped some ships, and for the third time—in succession to Carthage and Gaiseric—this point of Africa sent out tyrants to rule over the Mediterranean. As pirates at first, they devastated Malta, Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia, and gave way only for an instant to the fleets of Charlemagne; when he died their incursions began again, and the corsairs became invincible. In 831 they subdued Sicily, and then passed over to the Great Land, as they called Italy. The rivalry existing between the Greek and Lombard chiefs enabled them to take Brindisi, Bari, and Tarentum, and to build a fortress at the mouths of the Garigliano. They burned Ostia, Civita-Vecchia, the suburbs of Rome, and the rich abbey of Monte-Cassino, and pursuing their disastrous course as far as Venice, they repeatedly threatened Naples, Salerno, Gaeta, and Amalfi, the last of which finally consented to negotiate with them. Malta, Sardinia, Corsica and the Balearic Islands were in their possession. Their domain extended over all the western Mediterranean, and their power, re-established by Khair-ed-deen Barbarossa in the sixteenth century, has continued down to the present day.

They were not afraid even to risk themselves in the very midst of the Christian nations. They landed on the coast of Provence; pillaged Arles and Marseilles, and in 889, they founded a military colony at Fraxinet, near St. Tropez in Provence. By means of outposts they commanded from this camp the passes of the Alps, and thus were safe during the whole of the tenth century to pillage Italy and France it their will. The terror inspired by these infidels reached such a point that one of them alone, says Luitprand, could put a thousand and two of them could put ten thousand to flight. From Provence they proceeded to the Dauphiné, Valais, and Switzerland, and there they met the other invaders coming from the east, the Hungarians.

The movement of invasion from the point from which the Hungarians came had never once ceased since Attila's time. Masses of men had pushed their way in like the waves of a storm-tossed ocean, rising and receding, continually asserting themselves and then giving way to others.

After Attila’s Huns, many of whom remained by the banks of the Danube in the neighborhood of their chief's favorite places of abode, came the Slavs, “those who can speak”, who had recovered their independence after the fall of the Gothic kingdom and after the destruction of Attila's monarchy; following them came the Bulgarians, “the cursed of God”; the Avars, another horde of Huns, who were the terror of Constantinople for two centuries, and who fell beneath the sword of Charlemagne; and finally the Khazars, a cross between Huns and Turks, whose chagan dwelt in the Crimea. Among the subjects of the Khazars, in the ninth century, was found a tribe who were also of the Hunnic race, and whom the Latins and Greeks called Hungarians. After living many years between the Ural and the Volga, they had advanced at the beginning of the ninth century as far as the country between the Don and the Dnieper. In 888 a new stream of invaders overwhelmed both masters and subjects. The Hungarians were forced back to the Danube and Transylvania, and were about to perish there with their leader Arpad, when a fragment of the Khazar nation, the tribe of Magyars, joined fortunes with them, revived their strength and courage, and were rewarded for the services they rendered, by the honor of giving their name to the whole nation. Those whom we still call Hungarians call themselves Magyars.

Arnulf, the king of Germany, induced them by means of gold to attack his enemies, the Moravian Slavs, who held dominion from the mountains of Bohemia to those of Transylvania. The Hungarians overpowered them, but seized upon the greater part of their country. There they found a population whose basis was of Hunnic and Avar stock, to whom they quickly assimilated themselves. As the wind of the desert piles up the sand into mountains in a moment’s time, so victory among unsettled peoples brings a host of tribes to the conqueror's standard and gives him irresistible strength. Though they had just come down from the Carpathian mountains, the Hungarians, borne away by their enthusiasm, carried war into the plains of the Theiss and into Pannonia and gained complete mastery over them in the space of a few years' time. In 899 they were already at the gates of Italy and ravaging Carinthia and Friuli; in the year 900 they made their way into Bava­ria, and the new king of Germany paid them tribute. The ease with which they acquired booty encouraged them to extend their raids. Their bold horsemen rushed down both sides of the Alps into the great plains of Lombardy and into the valley of the Danube. They even crossed the Rhine, and provinces like Alsace, Lorraine, and Burgundy, which up to that time had only looked with terror to the north and west, whence the Norsemen came, found out now by cruel experience that the east, too, could pour barbarians down upon them. The Hungarians spread such terror through these nations that in France their name was long remembered and used to express the utmost ferocity.

The destructive inroads of the Magyars had the same results as those of the Norsemen. As in France the country districts bristled with chateaus, so in Italy walls were built about the towns as a protection against them, and the city soldiery was reorganized, thus enabling them later to regain their municipal independence. In Germany fortresses were built, which were occupied by men who first used them to defend the country and then appropriated them to their own use. The two greatest powers, Austria and Prussia, were originally two marches (marks) organized on a military basis to cover Germany against the attacks of the invaders from the east.

If we now compare the invasion of the ninth century with those that preceded it, we shall find this difference, that but for the double attack of the northern and the southern barbarians, the Roman Empire might have had a prolonged though not a happy existence, as there was nothing to necessitate its fall nor even to make it desirable; while, on the other hand, the new Carolingian Empire carried within itself the causes of dissolution, which, though assisted by the invasion, were in themselves sufficient to destroy its existence as a united empire.

Another point of difference was the manner in which the Norsemen and Saracens carried on the invasion by little bands; the invasion did not mean with them the removal of whole nations in a body, as was the case with the barba­rians of the earlier invasion, nor, as with the Arabs in the seventh century, did it mean a religious conquest. They were in search of booty rather than lands, and their raids resulted in a great deal of pillage, local destruction, and sufferings among the people, but they did not cause a general upheaval nor the substitution of a new social state for the old. The Hungarians alone, in the valleys of the Theiss and of the Danube, formed a permanent settlement, like those of the Franks, the Burgundians, and the Goths, but they did not attempt to extend their occupation to any great distance. What especially distinguished the ninth century invasions from others was the fact that it promoted but did not create the general confusion; that it hastened the fall of the Carolingian Empire, that is, the breaking up of political unity—though it was not the sole cause of this: in a word, the invasion was one of the forces which impelled society of that day to assume the form it did : namely, feudal anarchy, taking the last of the words in its etymological meaning, that is, the absence of a supreme power; feudalism, as we shall see, was, in fact, the preponderance of local powers over the central authority.