ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
CHAPTER XI.
THE PONTIFICATE OF STEPHEN III.
The new Pope, however skillful he may have
been as a diplomatist, was not a man of any strength of will or singleness of
purpose. In his short tenure of the Papacy—only three years and a half—he
performed some extraordinary political evolutions and was guilty of some acts
which at least resemble treachery and ingratitude. Altogether he is one of the
poorest figures in the Papal annals of the eighth century.
The first business of the new reign was to decide as - to the fate of
the invader of the Papacy' and his abettors. George, bishop of Praeneste, who had been, with his will or against his will,
the chief instrument in Constantine's elevation, had been stricken with
paralysis soon after that event, and was now either dead or so much enfeebled
by disease as not to seem worth punishing. Strangely enough, we hear nothing of
proceedings against the two bishops, of Albano and Porto, who also concurred in
the consecration. The direst fury of the successful champions of the purity of
Papal election was reserved for Theodore, the vice-dominus who had acted as
ecclesiastical prime minister during the thirteen months of chaos, and who with
his master sat trembling in the Lateran when the Lombards poured into the City.
Some of the more lawless men of Stephen's party, whose cruelty is unsparingly
condemned by the Papal biographer, laid hold of Theodore where he was kept in
ward, and plucked out his eyes and tongue. Passivus,
the brother of Constantine, also had his eyes plucked out, and then, as the
biographer says, ‘they showed themselves so unpitying towards the men whom they
had thus barbarously used, that they did not even allow them to be removed to
their own homes that they might be tended by their servants, but taking away
from them all their goods and their household retinue, they sent Passivus to the monastery of St. Silvester and Theodore to
the monastery of Clivus Scauri' (which occupied the
site of the palace of Gregory the Great on the Coelian Hill). Here suffering
agonies of hunger and thirst, and vainly crying out for water, the unhappy
vice-dominus soon after expired.
As for Constantine himself, he was brought forth from his prison; a
heavy weight was attached to his feet, he was seated on a horse upon which, no
doubt in derision, a lady’s saddle had been prepared for him, and was thus led
in ignominious triumph to the monastery of S. Saba on the Aventine.
A week had now passed since the entry of the Lombards into the City. The
new Pope was to be consecrated on Sunday, but on the previous Saturday, the 6th
of August, certain of the bishops and other clergy were assembled in the
Lateran basilica, and Constantine being brought before them was, after the
reading of the canons, formally deposed. Maurianus a
subdeacon tore the pallium from his neck and cast it at his feet, and then
proceeded to cut off his pontifical shoes. Further proceedings against him seem
to have been postponed to the meeting of a council. On the next August 7, day,
as had been arranged, took place the consecration of Stephen III, whereat a
general confession was made by the Roman people of their sin in submitting
without resistance to the impious invasion of the Apostolic See; and this
confession was read again in a loud voice by the scrivener Leontius from the
ambo of St. Peter’s.
One of the first acts of the new Pope was to send a messenger to his
powerful Frankish patrons with the tidings of his elevation and a request for
the summoning of a council of the Church. The messenger chosen for the purpose
was naturally the all-powerful Sergius, who was now again secundicerius,
and also nomenculator in the Papal court. But
when Sergius arrived in Frank-land he found that the old king was already dead.
The last time that Pippin's name was mentioned he was resting at Bourges
in the autumn of 767 from his eighth Aquitanian campaign, and was receiving the
tidings of the death of Pope Paul. His intervention in the affairs of the
distracted Papal See was, as we have seen, solicited by the intrusive Pope
Constantine, but apparently the application received no reply. In the spring of
768 he again set his face south-westwards, determined once for all to make an
end of the resistance of Waifar, duke of Aquitaine. A certain Remistan, Waifar’s uncle, who
after taking oaths of fealty to Pippin had treacherously gone over to his
nephew's side and surrendered to him the towns which Pippin had entrusted to
his guardianship, was captured, apparently not without guile, and hung on a
gallows at Bourges. The mother, sister, and nieces of Waifar were next brought
in as captives to the king's camp at Saintes. Still, however, the chief quarry
escaped. Though utterly beaten, Waifar wandered hither and thither through the
cave-lined valleys of Perigord, and though Pippin divided his followers into
four bands and sent them in quest of the fugitive, they failed to capture him.
At last however on the 2nd of June, 768, the hunt was ended, in unsportsmanlike
fashion, by the murder of the quarry: Waifar was assassinated by some of his
own followers, as one of the chroniclers tells us, not without suspicion of the
king's privity to the crime. The action of Pippin in striving so persistently
for the incorporation of Aquitaine with the Frankish monarchy was probably wise
and statesmanlike, but there is nothing knightly in his treatment of the
champion of her independence.
The conqueror took up his quarters at Saintes, and there held an
assembly at which he regulated the affairs of Aquitaine, now virtually a new,
or at least a recovered possession of the Frankish kings. The great
ecclesiastics on whose behalf the contest with Waifar had been originally
entered upon were restored to the full enjoyment of all their estates; new
beneficia were carved out for the behoof of Pippin's loyal followers; yet
according to the wise policy of the Austrasian kings, no attempt was made to force
the unique and time-hallowed civilization of Aquitaine into the rigid mould of
the half-barbarous jurisprudence of the Northern Franks. It was enacted “that
all men, Romans and Salians alike, should keep their own laws, and that if any
man should come from another province he should live according to the law of
his own fatherland.” We have seen a similar privilege accorded to the Visigoths
of Septimania, who on passing from under the Moorish
yoke were assured by Pippin that they should still retain their own laws; and
thus we find already in action that curious system of personal laws which was
so marked a feature of Carolingian administration, especially in Italy.
But even while Pippin was thus wisely settling the affairs of his new
conquest the hand of death was upon him. It was during his residence at Saintes
that he began to sicken with fever. He journeyed towards the Loire; he visited
the tomb of St. Martin, greatest of the saints of Gaul, and besought the
intercession of the canonized soldier. In vain; but one more journey was left
him to accomplish, the journey to his place of sepulture,
the venerable abbey of St. Dionysius at Paris. He was still living when he
reached it, but he died on the 24th of September (768). He had attained only
the 54th year of his age. The Arnulfing princes were
far tougher and healthier than the short-lived Merovingians, but even they did
not attain to great length of days. Probably in Pippin's case the fatigues and
anxieties of his nine Aquitanian campaigns hastened his end.
Pippin is one of those historical personages of whom we know just enough
to be tantalized with a desire to know more. Even as to his personal appearance
we have no trustworthy information. The belief so prevalent in the Middle Ages,
that he was a man of short stature, perhaps originated in a confusion between
him and his grandfather Pippin of Heristal, but the contrast between the little
father and the giant son was so tempting that the fallacy easily took root.
Already little more than a century after his death Saga was busy with his
exploits. The monk of St. Gall (884-887) tells us that having discovered that
the chiefs of his army were privately casting imputations on his courage,
Pippin ordered a wild bull to be let loose, and then a fierce lion after him.
The lion made one spring, fastened his claws in the bull's neck, and pulled him
to the ground. Thereupon the king shouted to the by-standers, ‘Either drag the
lion off the bull or slay him on the top of him'. With hearts frozen with fear
the courtiers faltered out, “Master! there is not a man under heaven who dare
attempt such a thing as that”. Thereupon the king leapt from his throne, drew
his sword, cut through first the neck of the lion, then the neck of the bull,
sheathed his sword, and calmly resumed his throne. “Do you feel now”, said he,
“that I can be your master? Have you not heard what little David did to the
mighty Goliath and the short-statured Alexander to his stalwart chiefs?”. As if
struck with thunder, the courtiers fell to the ground, saying, “Who but a
madman would contest your right to rule?”
The story, pure Saga as it evidently is, may be accepted as pointing to
an early tradition that Pippin was of short stature, and (which is of more
importance) to the difficulties which sometimes beset his path from the
insubordinate conduct of some of the leading men of his kingdom. Like our own
Henry VII, he had to walk warily in the presence of men who remembered the time
when he was only one of themselves. The chroniclers say but little expressly
concerning these tendencies towards insubordination; but in one very important
case, the debate on the Italian expedition, they admit that such tendencies
existed, and we can see that they exerted an important influence on the course
of affairs.
King Pippin left but three children—the little princess Gisila, of whose
birth and baptism we have already heard in the correspondence of Pope Paul—and
her two brothers, who had already reached man's estate, Charles and Carloman.
It is an illustration of the fragmentary and unscientific character of
the Frankish chroniclers of this period that they give us no clear information
of the uncertain date of so important an event as the birth of Charles the
Great. His friend and biographer Einhard gives virtually three different
dates—742, 743, and 744. Two annalists place it in 747, but it is hardly
possible to reconcile so late a date with the commission entrusted to the young
prince to meet Pope Stephen II in December, 753, nor with a document of 7603 in
which he is already spoken of as a man. On the whole, the most probable
conclusion is that Charles the Great was born in 742, and was therefore
twenty-six years old when he succeeded his father.
As to the date of Carloman’s birth we have scarcely more information.
One annalist places it in the year 751, and if he is correct, Pippin's younger
son was a little child of three years old when he, along with his father and
brother, received the often-mentioned anointing from the Papal hands in the
abbey of S. Denis. On that basis of calculation he would be seventeen years old
at the time of his father’s death.
The strange obscurity which hangs over the birth and infancy of the
greatest of Frankish sovereigns may possibly be due to the fact that he was not
born in wedlock. Even this cannot be positively asserted; but there is some
authority for dating the marriage of Pippin with Bertrada, daughter of
Charibert, count of Laon, in the year 749, which was certainly after the birth
of Charles, though before the birth of Carloman. The sovereigns of Arnulf’s
line, though not licentious, were notoriously irregular in their matrimonial
relations, and seem generally to have kept for some years as a mistress the
woman whom they afterwards married with the rites of the Church. According to
Frankish law, even on this theory, the subsequent marriage of his parents
rendered Charles legitimate, but in the relation which existed between the two
brothers, and especially in the somewhat contemptuous tone which Carloman
occasionally assumed towards Charles, we may perhaps see indications of the
fact that the younger brother prided himself upon the strict legitimacy of his
birth and looked upon the elder as little better than a bastard.
The division of his dominions between his two sons had been one of the
last occupations of the dying king. The details of that division cannot be
quite accurately his sons, stated, but we may say generally that the
dividing-line ran more nearly east and west and less from north to south than
in some previous partitions. Thus we are told that Austrasia fell to the share
of Charles; Burgundy, Provence, Septimania, Alsace
and Alamannia (Swabia) to that of Carloman. The
allocation of Neustria is not mentioned, but it seems probable that it was
allotted to Charles. As to Aquitaine, the authorities differ irreconcilably;
the historian whom we have just quoted declaring that it was divided between
the two brothers, while the author of the Annales Einhardi says that it was all included in the lot of Charles. Bavaria is not mentioned
in the scheme of partition, a striking illustration of the virtually
independent position obtained by its Duke, Tassilo.
We find with some little surprise both the two young kings fixing their
residences in the northern part of the realm. Samoussy near Laon and Attigny on the Aisne are the places from which Carloman dates his
charters in the spring of 769, while Charles celebrated the Christmas of 768 at
Aquae Grani (Aix-la-Chapelle or Aachen), the first and last love apparently of
the great Austrasian.
As has been already hinted, the relation between these two brother
sovereigns was very unlike that brotherly harmony which prevailed in the
previous generation between the elder Carloman and his brother Pippin. The
blame of Carloman's ill-temper is laid by one annalist on ‘evil counsellors
among his nobles', and it is hinted that at one time there was a danger of
actual civil war between the two brothers. As Carloman disappeared early from
the scene, we do not of course hear the story as it would have been told by his
partisans. Probably, besides the motives of personal pique and thwarted
ambition, there may have been working in the minds of the counsellors of the
two young kings some of those centrifugal tendencies, the rivalries between
Frank and Burgundian, between the men of pure Teutonic descent and their
Gallo-Roman competitors which led a century later to the disruption of the
Frankish monarchy.
The first event which disclosed to all the world the gaping chasm
between the two brothers was the war in Aquitaine. Almost immediately after the
death of Pippin a certain Hunold, probably related to the family of the
dethroned duke, raised once more the trampled standard of Aquitanian
independence. Charles marched southwards in the spring of 769 to suppress this
revolt, and called on his brother for aid; but though Carloman came to meet him
at a place called Duasdives, he brought no troops
with him, and entirely refused to assist in the reconquest of Aquitaine; an
unbrotherly act if the province had been assigned to Charles alone, an
incomprehensible one if it was held by the two brothers in partnership.
After all, the revolt of Hunold proved to be but a feeble affair. The
old king in his nine campaigns had crushed the spirit of the men of Aquitaine
too thoroughly to leave much work to be done there by his son. Charles marched
to Aquitaine, and Hunold was soon fleeing before him. He fled to Gascony, and
placed himself under the protection of Lupus, duke of that remote corner of
Gaul. At the threat of war, war which, as Charles declared, should be continued
till Gascony was reduced to the same condition of dependence as Aquitaine,
Lupus surrendered his guest, together with that guest's wife, and promised
implicit obedience to all the commands of the Frankish king. What became of
Hunold and his wife we are not told; but Charles was through life, except on
one or two occasions of special exasperation, a merciful conqueror. He built a
strong fort at Fronsac near the junction of the Dordogne and Garonne, and returned
in triumph to his Austrasian home.
While these events were occurring in Gaul, Pope Stephen III, having
obtained the consent of the two young kings, was holding a synod in the Lateran
basilica in order to obtain the solemn judgment of the Church on the recent
anarchical proceedings at Rome. The synod was not ecumenical; it did not even
represent all the countries of the Western Patriarchate; but the presence of
twelve Frankish bishops “very learned in the divine Scriptures and the
ceremonies of the holy canons,” along with forty ecclesiastics from the various
districts of Northern and Central Italy, was a wise precaution to give dignity
to the proceedings of the assembly and to prevent its seeming the mere
mouthpiece of a vindictive Roman faction.
The bishops being all assembled in the great basilica, and Pope Stephen
III having taken his place as president of the synod, Constantine, the late
Pope, now sightless, and having endured for eight months the hardships of a
dungeon, was brought in and placed in the midst of the assembly. It was sternly
enquired of him, ‘why he, a layman, had presumed to invade the Apostolic See
and to do a deed so new and wicked in the Church of God'; whereupon he declared
that he had been forced into that deed by the people of Rome, weary of the
exactions and injustices of the late Pope, Paul—an important hint as to some of
the causes that had been at work in the recent revolution—and, as he averred,
after the vote of the people had been taken by show of hands he had been laid
hold of and forcibly inducted into the Lateran palace. Then falling to the
ground and stretching forth his hands on the marble pavement, he confessed with
tears that he had been guilty of sins more in number than the sand of the sea,
for which he implored the merciful forgiveness of the synod. They caused him to
be raised from the ground and sent back to his dungeon, adjourning their
decision for a day.
On the morrow, when he was again questioned as to the ‘impious novelty'
of his deed, Constantine, who seems to have recovered a little of his lost
self-confidence, replied that for a layman to be consecrated bishop was no
novelty at all. He might have appealed to the well- known case of the election
of Ambrose of Milan, but he chose more recent instances. Only seventeen years
before, Sergius, a layman, whose wife was still living, had been consecrated
archbishop of Ravenna, and though it was true that he had been cited to Rome on
account of the alleged irregularity, and even imprisoned there, the
irregularity had been condoned by Paul I, and he had been allowed to return to
his see, an archbishop in full communion with Rome.
So too, only three years before the date of the Lateran synod, Stephen,
a layman and governor of Naples, who had earned the enthusiastic love of the
Neapolitans, had been at a time of terrible pestilence chosen bishop by the
people, and had gone to Rome, where he received episcopal consecration at the
hands of the same Pope Paul.
When Constantine urged these examples in mitigation of his offence the
whole assembly was filled with fury. Unmoved to pity by the vacant gaze of
those poor sightless eyes, they buffeted him on the face, they forced him to
bow his neck, and finally thrust him out of the church. As to his ultimate fate
the Papal biographer is silent. The members of the synod then brought the
registers of Constantine's Papal acts and the records of the council which had
been held under his presidency and burned them all in the midst of the
presbytery. This done, Pope, priests and people cast themselves to the ground,
chaunting Kyrie Eleison, with floods of tears—those copious ecclesiastical
tears!—confessed their grievous sin in having received the communion from
Constantine's hands, and all submitted themselves to the penance due for so
great an offence.
The Papal biographer relates at great length the deliberations of the
synod concerning the difficult question of ecclesiastical orders bestowed by
the hands of the intrusive pontiff. The practical result was this, that the
ecclesiastics who had been raised by Constantine to the rank of bishop were
deposed from the episcopal office, but, after submitting themselves to a second
election by the clergy and people, were reconsecrated by Stephen. Those men, on
the other hand, who had been but laymen before and had received consecration as
deacons or presbyters from the intruder, were thrust down from their clerical
office (to which Stephen vowed that he would never again raise them), but not
being allowed to return into the world and resume the duties and privileges of
laymen, were ordered to retire into monasteries and spend the rest of their
lives in religious meditation. Unhappy victims, these, of the revolution which
in the eighth century corresponded to a change of ministry in the nineteenth!
The usual decree that with great honour and affection the sacred images
should be venerated by all Christians, and the usual anathema on ‘the execrable
synod which has been lately held in the regions of Greece for the deposition of
those sacred images', received the probably unanimous assent of the council.
More important than these, however, as affecting the constitution of the Church
for the eleven centuries which have since passed over it, was the solemn
resolution framed under anathema by the council, ‘that no layman nor man of any
other order should presume to be promoted to the holy honour of the Pontificate,
unless ascending by distinct steps he had first been made [cardinal] deacon or
cardinal presbyter'. We here meet, for the first time apparently, with the term
cardinal applied to the parochial clergy of Rome, those hinges of the
ecclesiastical organization of the Metropolis. They shared it with the suburbicarian
bishops of the territory in the immediate vicinity of Rome; and from this time
forth it was established as a sacred principle of the Church that only from one
of these three orders, cardinal-deacons, cardinal-priests, cardinal-bishops,
could a bishop of Rome be chosen. Thus the cardinals were now the alone
eligible persons; but it was not till three centuries later that they became
the alone electors.
It was probably some months, it may have been a year, after this synod
of the Lateran, that Stephen III addressed to the two young Frankish kings a
letter in which he congratulated them that the dissensions between them,
rumours of which had evidently reached even to Rome, were now at an end, and
exhorted them to turn their re-established harmony to good account by
vigorously urging the assertion of all the just claims of St. Peter. “If any
one tells you that we have already received satisfaction of these claims, do
not believe him.”
Harmony was indeed for a short time in the course of the year 770
re-established between the two Frankish kings, but it was by means of which
Pope Stephen little dreamt, and which drove him nearly wild with anger and
alarm when he discovered their nature.
The chief agent in this reconciliation was the dowager-queen Bertrada,
who now after her husband's death emerges from the comparative obscurity of her
earlier career, and plays with statesmanlike prudence and sagacity that part of
all-controlling, all-counselling queen-mother with which we are so familiar in
later chapters of French history. The policy which she advised, and which
doubtless found many other advocates in the Frankish council-chambers, was not
precisely that of the earlier years of her late husband, though towards the
close of his reign he had seemed to be tending thitherward.
“Is it wise”, we can imagine the counsellors of Bertrada's party to have
questioned,—“is it wise to spend the energies of the loosely- ompacted Frankish kingdom in expeditions across the Alps,
in order to enforce these shadowy, ever-growing, never-satisfied claims of St.
Peter? We thereby make the Lombard our deadly enemy, him who so lately as in
the days of Liutprand and Charles Martel, was our cordial, our ancestral ally.
And not only the Lombard, but with him goes the young duke of Bavaria [for
Tassilo a few years before this time had married Liutperga,
daughter of Desiderius, and formed a strict alliance with his new father-
in-law]; and Tassilo’s relation to the monarchy is one of the darkest spots in
our horizon. The late king never ventured to punish him for his great harisliz in 763. What the old hero dared not
attempt, his young and inexperienced sons are not likely to succeed in. Were it
not better to renounce the thoughts of vengeance and to have at least a
friendly, an allied, if we cannot have a humbly obedient Bavaria? Aquitaine is
but just tranquillized; she is still heaving with the turmoil of the nine years’
war of her subjugation. Then on the north-eastern frontier of the realm hover
the fierce, still heathen Saxons. There in those trackless forests, in those
wide-spreading marshes between the Weser and the Elbe, lies the real danger,
and also the true vocation of the Frankish monarchy. Even the Church can be
better served by forcing those wild heathen tribes to bow their necks to the
yoke of Christ, than by wresting a few more Italian cities from the Lombards
and handing them over to the successor of St. Peter. But before all things
peace is the present need of the Frankish kingdom; peace instead of strife
between the two royal brothers, peace with the Lombard and peace with the
Bavarian. And if the Pope should storm and threaten us with the wrath of St.
Peter and the terrors of the Day of Judgment, let him storm and let him
threaten. He has been already paid handsomely enough for that holy anointing at
S. Denis of which we have heard so much. It is time now for the sons of Pippin
to think of themselves and their own country, which is Frank-land, and not the
province of Italy.”
Probably by some such reasonings as this was that great change in
Frankish policy brought about, which was signalised by the journey of queen
Bertrada to Italy in the year 770. The point which to us is left in the
greatest obscurity is how the reconciliation with the Lombards was connected
with that which was undoubtedly the object nearest to Bertrada's heart, the
reconciliation between Charles and Carloman. That there was some such
connection is clear from the words of the annalists, but it would be mere guess-work
to say in what way it was brought about.
Intent on carrying through this scheme of reconciliation, Bertrada
undertook the labours and not inconsiderable hardships of a journey from the
north of Gaul into Italy. Starting probably from her son Charles's court at
Liege, she met Carloman by appointment at a little place called Selz in Lower
Alsace. There, doubtless, mother and son conferred on the new course of policy,
and she obtained his consent to the projected alliances. Journeying thence to
Bavaria, she no doubt conferred with Tassilo as to the best means of securing
the future friendship of Franks, Bavarians, and Lombards. Having crossed the
Alps, she probably visited the court of Desiderius at Pavia and there opened
the purport of her journey. “Friendship between the Frankish and Lombard courts:
more than friendship, matrimonial alliances : your daughter Desiderata for my
eldest son: my little daughter Gisila, now twelve years old, to become
hereafter the wife of your son Adelchis”; this was the flattering, the
surprising offer made by the widow of the pious Pippin to the ‘most unspeakable’
Lombard king. Even in making it, however, Bertrada did not wholly forget the
claims of St. Peter. Certain additional cities were to be handed over to the
Pope; a condition to which Desiderius gladly consented. Though all is left
painfully vague as to this part of the negotiation, it appears that some
cities— how many we know not—were actually ceded by the Lombard at this time to
the Papal See. Bertrada, who as we are told, when she had finished her
business, went to worship at the threshold of the Apostles probably took to the
pontiff the soothing news of this surrender. We may say almost with certainty
that she said nothing at Rome of the projected double marriage. Having probably
called on her return journey at Pavia, she recrossed the Alps, taking with her
the intended bride. Desiderata arrived at Charles's court; the existing lady of
the palace, Himiltrud, was divorced if she was his wife, or simply dismissed if
she was his concubine, and the daughter of Desiderius was hailed as queen of
the Franks, while some of the chief men of the kingdom swore to the observance
of the treaty of peace and friendship which Bertrada had concluded between them
and the Lombards.
When the news of this astounding alliance, either actually accomplished
or about to be accomplished, reached Rome, the rage of the outwitted Pope knew
no bounds. He seized the pen and wrote to the two brothers one of the fiercest,
haughtiest, most scornful letters that ever proceeded even from the Papal
chancery, a letter which already seems instinct with the spirit of Hildebrand
rather than with the meek submissiveness of a bishop just emancipated from the
heavy yoke of Byzantium.
After dilating on the virtue of constancy in the faith as exhibited by
God's chosen servants, and alluding to the fall of man, which through the wiles
of the Ancient Enemy was brought about by the weak nature of woman, Pope
Stephen proceeds :—
“Now a thing has been brought to our hearing which we cannot even speak
of without great pain in our heart, namely, that Desiderius, king of the
Lombards, is seeking to persuade your Excellencies, that one of your
brotherhood should be joined in marriage to his daughter. Certainly if that be
true, it is a veritable suggestion of the devil, and not a marriage, but rather
a most wickedly imagined concubinage. How many men, as we learn from Holy
Scripture, through unsanctified union with a woman of another nation, have
departed from the commandments of God, and fallen into grievous sin! But what
indescribable folly is this, 0 most excellent sons and mighty kings, that your
illustrious Frankish race which shines supreme above all other nations, and
that most noble royal line of yours, should be polluted—perish the thought—by
union with the perfidious and foully stinking race of the Lombards, which is
never reckoned in the number of the nations, and from which it is certain that
the tribe of lepers hath sprung! No one in the possession of his senses would
ever suspect that such renowned kings would entangle themselves in such hateful
and abominable contagion. For what fellowship hath light with darkness, or what
part hath he that believeth with an infidel?.”
The Pope then alludes to the fact, of which he appears to speak without
any hesitation, that both the young kings have already, by the desire of their
father, married fair and nobly- born wives of their own Frankish nation. This
positive utterance of his seems to force us to the conclusion, opposed as it is
to the statements of most of the chroniclers, that Himiltrud, the mother of
Charles's eldest son (afterwards known as Pippin the Hunchback), was his
awfully-wedded wife and not a concubine. But who shall unravel the mysteries of
the marriages of these most Christian kings of the Franks?
The Pope proceeds with his passionate exhortation : “None of your
ancestors ever accepted a woman of another kingdom and a foreign nation as his
wife”, an assertion which he would have found it hard to justify from history.
“And who of your most noble house ever condescended to contaminate himself by
mixing with the horrid nation of the Lombards, that you should now be persuaded
to defile yourself with that horrible people?”.
Knowing doubtless the share which Bertrada had taken in these hateful
negotiations, he reminds her, through her son, that his predecessor Pope
Stephen II had dissuaded Pippin from divorcing her—we know not on what
pretext—and expresses his hope that the sons will imitate the obedience which
the father then manifested towards the Holy See. The same obedience had been
shown in rejecting, under Papal advice, the offer of a brilliant alliance for
the little Gisila with the son of the Byzantine Emperor.
The Pope then returns to his strongest argument. “You have promised firm
and lasting friendship with St. Peter's successors. Their enemies were to be
your enemies; their friends your friends. That league of mutual friendship was
the reward of my pious predecessor Stephen II's journey across the Alps, a
journey which he would have done well never to have undertaken if the Frank,
whose aid he invoked, is going to join the Lombard against us. He reminded you
of that promise in a letter which he wrote to you on his death-bed. Where is
that promise now?
“Wherefore the blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, who received the
keys of the kingdom of heaven from the Lord, adjures you through my unhappy
mouth; and with him all the bishops and presbyters, the nobles and judges, and
all the rest of the clergy and people of Rome adjure you, by the majesty of God
and by the tremendous day of future judgment, that by no manner of means shall
either of you two brothers presume to receive in marriage the daughter of the
aforesaid Desiderius, king of the Lombards : nor shall your sister, the noble
lady Gisila, dear to God, be given to Desiderius' son : nor shall you dare to
put away your wives.
“This warning of ours we have placed upon the tomb of the blessed Peter,
and have over it offered sacrifice to God, and we do now with tears direct it
to you from the same sacred sepulchre. And if (which God forbid) any one shall
presume to act in opposition to this our adjuration and exhortation, let him
know that by the authority of my lord the blessed Peter, Prince of the
Apostles, he is fast bound in the chain of our anathema, and is banished from
the kingdom of heaven, and with the devil and all his horrid crew and the rest
of the wicked ones is sent down to be burned in the everlasting fire. But he
who shall keep this word of our exhortation, being honoured with celestial benedictions
from the Lord, shall be counted worthy to receive the rewards of eternal joy
with all the holy ones, elect of God.
“May the
heavenly grace keep your Excellencies in safety”.
This extraordinary letter, as we have seen, failed to produce any
effect. The policy of Bertrada and her counsellors was for the time triumphant.
Desiderata, the Lombard princess, was enthroned in Charles's palace and
received on her head the precarious crown-matrimonial of the Austrasian Franks.
Seeing this, the Pope, though doubtless bitterly enraged, concealed his
resentment and bided his time. The next two letters from him that we find in
the Codex Carolinus are full of words of cloying
sweetness, towards Bertrada, towards Charles, and towards Carloman. He
announces to Charles and his mother that their envoy Itherius,
who was dispatched for the restoration to the Holy See of its patrimonies in
the duchy of Benevento, has accomplished his mission with admirable prudence
and fidelity, and prays that he may be rewarded according to his deserts. He
rejoices at receiving the greatly desired ‘syllables' from the God-protected
Carloman which announce the birth of a son, and craves to be allowed to act as
godfather to the infant Pippin, that there may be the spiritual relationship of
co-fatherhood established between them, to the great joy both of the Pope and
the people of Rome.
But all this time events were ripening for a new and astonishing change
in Italian politics. “Since my Frankish patrons have deserted me”, Stephen
seems ° to have said to himself, “since they have left me alone to face the
fury of the now omnipotent Lombard, what hinders me from following their
example, and making my peace, unknown to them, with the common foe?”. There
were indeed two great living hindrances to the adoption of this tempting
policy— Christopher and his son Sergius, Primicerius and Secundicerius of the Papal household, and all-powerful in the Lateran palace. These men by
accepting the aid of Desiderius against the intruder Constantine and then
seating their own candidate, not his, on the Papal throne, had sinned too
deeply against the Lombard king for any hope of forgiveness. Moreover, in all
the subsequent demands for the recognition of the justitiae of St. Peter their
voices had ever been the loudest and the most importunate. But probably the
weak and vacillating Sicilian Pope was weary of the domination of these men,
and his weariness made him listen gladly to the suggestions of another of his
servants, the chamberlain Paulus Afiarta, who had been gained over by
Desiderius and stood at the head of the Lombard faction in the City. The sacrifice
of Christopher and Sergius was therefore resolved on, and when in the season of
Lent (771) Desiderius came with an army, professedly to worship at the tombs of
the Apostles, and when Pope Stephen went forth to meet him and ostensibly to
confer with him concerning the restitution of St. Peter's rights, all Rome
probably suspected, and Christopher and Sergius knew, that what would be called
in modern phrase a change of ministry was impending. It happened that a certain
envoy of Carloman named Dodo was then in Rome, probably at the head of a body
of troops. Some of the peasants of Tuscia and
Campania, and even from far-off Perugia, had also been gathered together for
the defence of Rome, when it was known that Desiderius was on his way. The
gates of the City were closed, new ones were hung on their hinges where the old
were too rotten to resist attack, the citizens were called to arms, and (again
to use a modern phrase) the City was proclaimed to be in a state of siege.
The contemplated defence of the City of Rome against the Lombards had
this peculiarity, that the man who should have been the representative of all
that was most Roman and national among the besieged was supposed, not untruly,
to be in league with the besiegers. We know from many instances in modern
history how ill it fares with a king or a commander-in-chief in such
circumstances, and what a menacing shape the indignation of the mob can assume
against a half-hearted or traitorous general. In this case, Christopher and Sergius,
with their Frankish ally and Dodo and a troop of armed men at their heels,
rushed to the palace of the Lateran; ‘intent on murdering me', writes the
resentful Pope. That is most improbable, but that they meant to put pressure on
Stephen to compel him to renounce his alliance with Desiderius is not to be
doubted. “They entered with arms” (he continues)”the sacred patriarchium of the Lateran, they smashed the doors and tore the curtains of the palace with
their lances, and entered with their coats of mail and their spears into the
basilica of Pope Theodore, where we were sitting, and into which no one had
till then penetrated with so much as a knife in his hand”.
The Pope, we are told, sharply chided the insurgents for coming armed
into the holy patriarchium, but he
condescended to take an oath, ‘by all the sacred relics that were contained in
the Lateran basilica', that he would have no secret dealings with Desiderius,
and thus quieted them for the time. Next day, however, he contrived to elude
their vigilance by some ingenious device, and made his way, attended by certain
of his clergy, to the great basilica of St. Peter, which was practically the
head-quarters of Desiderius. In the conference which there took place the
Lombard king appears to have promised to satisfy all the claims of St. Peter,
if only those evil counsellors, Christopher and Sergius, might be delivered
into his hands. Meanwhile St. Peter's was closed to prevent the egress of the
clergy who had come with the Pope; closed too and rigorously guarded were all
the gates of the City; everything seemed to portend a bloody encounter.
The Lombard party was, however, undermining the position of Christopher
and Sergius by promises, threats and gold. The great authority of the Papal
name was freely used to discourage the citizens who were holding the City
against their own bishop. Two bishops, Andrew of Praeneste and Jordanes of Signia, presented themselves before
the Porta Sancti Petri, bringing to the two chief rebels the Pope's fatherly
advice that they should either enter some monastery for the salvation of their
souls, or at once come forth and meet him at St. Peter's. Though Christopher
and Sergius knew the Lombard's resentment against them too well to trust
themselves to his mercy, others less deeply involved began to waver. The Pope's
envoys again approached the gates and cried with a loud voice, “Hear ye what
Pope Stephen orders by the command of God. Do not wage war against your
brethren, but expel Christopher and Sergius from the City, and free the City,
yourselves and your children from peril”. With that, many began to swarm down the
walls that they might make their way to the besieging army. A certain duke Gratiosus, who was a kinsman of Sergius, feigned to depart
to his own house, but collected a band of citizens and went to the Porta Portuensis, hoping to be able to open it. Finding it
hopelessly barred, they wrenched it from its hinges, and so went forth by night
to the Papal presence. And now all the City was in an uproar; everywhere men
were trying to open the gates and pass out through them; the two ministers saw
that they were surrounded by traitors and the game was lost. When the hour of
Vigils sounded from the great bell of St. Peter's, Sergius climbed down the
wall and hastened to that basilica, but was arrested by the Lombard sentinels
and carried off to their own king. Christopher followed, was also captured, and
brought into the presence of the Pope, who promised that his life and that of
his son should be preserved if they would quit their public career and enter a
convent.
Next day the Pope celebrated mass in the presence of Desiderius, and
returned (apparently) to the Lateran palace after giving orders that
Christopher and Sergius, whom he left at St. Peter's, should be quietly brought
back into the City at nightfall. But as soon as the sun began to set, Paulus
Afiarta, with a band of reckless partisans and with at least the connivance of
Desiderius, forced his way into St. Peter's, carried off Christopher and
Sergius, and brought them to the gate of the City. Here, in accordance with
that barbarous practice which the New Rome had taught to the Old, his men
plucked out the eyes of both prisoners. The aged Christopher, who was carried
to the monastery of St. Agatha, died in three days of the torment which his
brutal captors had inflicted upon him. Sergius, imprisoned in Pope Gregory's
monastery on the Clivus Scauri and afterwards
transferred to the cellarium of the Lateran, lingered there in blindness and
misery till the death of the reigning Pope.
It is impossible not to feel, in conning these pages of the Liber Pontificalis, what a wave of barbarism has swept over the
leading citizens of Rome, both lay and ecclesiastical, since the days of
Gregory the Great. Partly no doubt this is due to the long descent into
ignorance and superstition during the course of the seventh and eighth
centuries, but it seems to have become more rapid and more fatal since the two Gregories and Zacharias vanished from the scene. Is it an
unwarranted conjecture which would connect this increasing ferocity of Roman
politics with the acquisition of temporal power by the Roman pontiff?
When the revolution was accomplished the question naturally arose, ‘What
will the kings of the Franks say when they hear of the deeds that have been
done?'. In order to propitiate their resentment Stephen wrote a long letter to
Bertrada and her son Charles, in which he described the whole affair from the
point of view of Paulus Afiarta and Desiderius. The Lombard king, once so
‘unspeakable' and ‘stinking’, is now ‘our most excellent and God-preserved son,
King Desiderius, without whose aid we and all our clergy and all the faithful
members of God's Church would have been in peril of our lives’. “The most
unspeakable Christopher and his most wicked son took counsel with Dodo, the
envoy of your brother Carloman, to slay us. Behold what villainies and devilish
machinations the aforesaid Dodo put in operation against us, but we are sure
that our most excellent son his master will at once disavow his proceedings. It
was the enemies of Christopher and Sergius who rushing upon them plucked out
their eyes, without our will or counsel, as we call God to witness”. (When
Stephen lay upon his death-bed he did not assert his innocence of this crime
quite so positively.)
Lastly, “let your Religiosity beloved by God”— this to Bertrada, “and
your most Christian Excellency”—this to Charles—“recognise how in the name of
the Lord the most excellent and God-preserved king Desiderius has met us with
all good will. And we have received from him full and entire satisfaction of
all the claims of the blessed Peter”. (On this point also, when Stephen lay at
the point of death, he told a different tale to his successor.)
From this time, the Lent of 771 to February 772, Paulus Afiarta, a bold,
unscrupulous man, probably reigned supreme in the Papal council, and Stephen
was fain to live in outward amity with Desiderius, veiling his fear and his
dislike of the unspeakable one as well as he could. Scarcely had this great
change in his policy been accomplished when he learned that with a little
patience it might have been avoided. Charles the Frank was not after all
irrevocably committed to friendship and alliance with Desiderius. It was
probably in the summer of 771 that he sent back Desiderata to her father's
court, a woman scorned and a repudiated wife. No reason seems to have been
given for this insulting breach of the marriage covenant, but its cause was
probably personal rather than political. The Monk of St. Gall (writing it is
true more than a century after the event) says that she was in delicate health
and unlikely to bear children, and therefore, in accordance with the judgment
of the holiest ecclesiastics, was deserted as if she were dead.
We may perhaps reasonably conjecture that this delicate Italian flower
bore but ill her transplantation to the keen air of Brabant and Westphalia, and
that Charles, who was a man of brisk and joyous temperament, spending most of
his life in the open air and expecting his wife and his children to follow him
to the chase and on the campaign, came to the speedy conclusion that the pale
Lombard princess was no wife for him, and cut the knot with as little ceremony
as our own Henry Tudor.
There were not wanting voices and remonstrance in his own palace against
this selfish desertion of a lawfully wedded wife who had done him no wrong.
Bertrada, who had arranged the marriage and had brought the young bride across
the Alps, was deeply mortified by the divorce, which caused the only serious
dissension that ever separated the mother and the son. His young cousin
Adalhard also, though still only a page in the palace, boldly condemned the
divorce, which, as he declared, would make the king an adulterer, and all his
nobles who had sworn fidelity to the new queen, perjurers. Having thus
delivered his soul, Adalhard retired from court life into a monastery.
Politically, of course, such an event could have but one result. As
close as the alliance between Desiderius and Charles might have been had they
remained kinsmen, so deep and impassable was now the chasm between the injured
father and the faithless husband of Desiderata. Only, between the dominions of
the two kings stretched the wide realm of Carloman, and it is by no means clear
what would have been his attitude towards either. The line of policy pursued by
his envoy Dodo at Rome looks like hostility to the Lombard, who, as we shall
see, expected him to take a bloody revenge for the murder of Christopher and
the blinding of Sergius. But on the other hand, Einhard expressly tells us—and
his words seem to point to this period of their history—that many of Carloman's
partisans strove to break the bond between the two brothers, so that some
purposed to engage them even in civil war. And it would seem certain that at
this crisis, after the repudiation of Desiderata, any one who was the enemy of
Charles must have been the friend of Desiderius.
But all such speculations were set at rest for ever by the death of
Carloman, which occurred on the 4th of December, 771. We know nothing of the
cause or the manner of this untimely ending of a life which had lasted but
twenty years. Nor is the character of the young king, or what might have been
the possible future of his career, at all made clear to us. A far less forcible
and far less pathetic figure than his uncle the elder Carloman, he seems to
us—but herein we may do him wrong—only a somewhat petulant and querulous young
man, the impracticable partner of his heroic brother. Like the dark star which,
as some astronomers tell us, circles round Sirius, so Carloman interests us
only by the question how long he will continue to obscure the transcendent glory
of Charlemagne.
Two months after Carloman, died Pope Stephen III, after a short and
troubled pontificate of three years and a half. What passed between him and his
successor Hadrian, when he was lying on his death-bed, will be related in a
future chapter.
