ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
CHAPTER XIV.
END OF THE LOMBARD MONARCHY.
At last the reign of the shifty and perfidious Desiderius was to come to
an end. He had climbed to the throne by the help of a Pope whom he had deluded
with vain promises. He had maintained himself thereon for sixteen years by a
policy cunningly compounded of force and fraud. Now the day of reckoning was
come.
Though we have really no Lombard history of this period—alas for the
silent voice of the national historian Paulus—we have sufficient indications
that the reign of Desiderius was unpopular with many of his subjects, and we
may conjecture that the whole state was honeycombed by domestic treason. In
November, 772, the young King Adelchis, enthroned in Brescia, signed a document
by which he conveyed to the monastery of St. Saviour “all the property and
serfs of Augino, who has revolted and fled to
Frank-land', together with all the farms, territories and serfs of eight other
proprietors whose names are mentioned, and of other their accomplices, ‘which
they have lost for their disloyalty and which have thus become the property of
our palace.”
We hear also of the avowed disaffection of Anselm, formerly duke of
Friuli, who in 749 had laid down his ducal dignity, had assumed the monk’s
cowl, and had founded the monastery of Nonantula, a
few miles north-east of Modena. Banished and proscribed by Desiderius, he was
now living in retirement at Monte Cassino, but was using all the power which he
had acquired by his deserved reputation for holiness to shake the throne of his
royal antagonist. As he was a brother of Giseltruda,
Aistulf's queen, we have in Anselm’s disgrace probably another indication of
the ill-will which existed between the families of the two last kings of the
Lombards.
All these elements of weakness in the Lombard state were doubtless known
to Charles, when, after deliberation with his Franks, probably at the Field of
May, he determined to follow his father's example and invade Italy in the
service of St. Peter. A levy of the nation in arms wag ordered and while it was
proceeding Charles, still treading in his father's footsteps, sought by
diplomacy to render the war needless. We are told that he offered Desiderius
14,000 solidi of gold, besides an [unnamed] quantity of gold and silver
[vessels], if he would comply with the demands of Hadrian. The transaction
looks suspiciously like a duplication of the similar offer of Pippin, but if
the offer was ever made, it was this time also ineffectual. ‘Neither by prayers
nor by gifts did Charles avail to bend the most ferocious heart of Desiderius.
The Frankish host was mustered at Geneva, and Charles then proceeded,
according to a favourite strategic plan of his, to divide his army into two
portions, one of which, under the command of his uncle Bernhard, was to march
by the pass of the mountain of Jupiter, now called the Greater St. Bernard,
while Charles himself was to lead the other over the Mont Cenis.
What next followed is told us in meagre and confused fashion by the
annalists on one side and the Papal biographer on the other; and it is only by
the help of one or two conjectures that we can combine the details into any
harmonious picture. With that aid the story may be thus narrated. As before,
there no fighting on the actual summits of the passes, but Desiderius prepared
to meet the invaders in the narrow gorges on the Italian side before they had
got clear of the mountains. He himself advanced from Susa to meet King Charles,
while his son Adelchis, marching from Ivrea, awaited the approach of Bernhard.
When Charles descended toward the valley of the Dora he found his further
progress barred not only by the Lombard army, but by walls which they had built
and by warlike engines commanding the pass. To force his way through seemed so
difficult an enterprise that he again tried the path of diplomacy. He renewed
his offer of the 14,000 solidi if Desiderius would restore the conquered
cities. When this offer was refused he reduced his demand. Without the actual
restoration of the cities he would be satisfied with the surrender of three
hostages, sons of Lombard nobles, as a pledge for their future restitution.
This too was met with a surly negative by Desiderius, and thereupon the young
Frankish king was actually about to turn back and reascend the mountain. A
dangerous enterprise surely with an embittered foe behind him! The question was
then probably trembling in the balance whether the name of Charles the Great
should ever be heard of in European history. But just at this crisis, on the
very eve of the intended retreat, a panic seized the host of Desiderius. They
left their tents, with all the stores that they contained, and fled in terror
down the valley, at first pursued by no man, but soon followed by the Frankish
soldiers, who slew numbers of them, though Desiderius and his nobles succeeded
in making their escape to Pavia.
What was the cause of this sudden terror? Almost probably certainly the
advance of Bernhard, who had succeeded in eluding or defeating Adelchis, and
now, advancing on the flank of the army of Desiderius, threatened to cut them
off from Pavia. The strategic operation planned by Charles, involving an attack
by two converging hosts on an enemy in the centre of the circle, is admitted to
be a very dangerous one for the assailant, but when it succeeds, the effect is
crushing. It was the consciousness that they were thus utterly outmanoeuvred
which drove Desiderius and his men in headlong rout down the valley .
Charles now meeting no obstacle in his onward march, in the beginning of
October commenced the siege of Pavia. Seeing, however, that it was likely to be
a long and tedious affair he returned to Frank-land, and fetched from thence
his girl-wife Hildegard, an Alamannian lady of noble
birth, only thirteen years of age, whom he had married immediately after his
repudiation of Desiderata. She came with her infant son Charles and with his
half-brother Pippin, the son of the first of all Charles's wives, Himiltrud. A
boy of some seven or eight years old, probably, was this Pippin, born
apparently to high destinies, but unhappily deformed in his person. The family
affection, conspicuous in the Teutonic conquerors of Rome, shows itself in this
young Austrasian warrior Charles, who must have his wife and children beside
him if he is to endure the weariness of the long blockade of Pavia.
That blockade occupied eventually more than eight months, but not all of
that time was spent by Charles himself before the walls of the city on the
Ticino. When he learned that Adelchis, son of Desiderius and partner of his
throne, had fled with Gerberga and her sons to Verona, Charles marched thither
with a chosen band of Frankish warriors, and, notwithstanding the strong
position of Verona, appears to have taken it without much difficulty. Gerberga
and her sons, with their chief adviser Autchar,
surrendered themselves at once to Charles. All of them at this point vanish
from history : a fact which may be interpreted differently according to our
estimate of the character of the conqueror. To me, considering the clemency
with which Charles usually treated his vanquished foes, it seems probable that
all their lives were spared, though it is not unlikely that Gerberga and Autchar were recommended to embrace the monastic life, and
that the sons were educated for the service of the Church. As for Adelchis, he
escaped from Verona and began that life of wandering and exile which was his
portion for the remainder of his days. Charles returned to the upper valley of
the Po, and took many cities of the Lombards without relinquishing his grasp on
Pavia.
Meanwhile, or perhaps even before some of the events just related,
important political changes had been taking place in Central Italy. When it was
seen that the throne of Desiderius was tottering, the Lombards of Spoleto, who
had probably never heartily accepted the sovereignty of the Tuscan upstart,
proceeded to make terms for themselves with him who seemed now likely to become
the most powerful of Italian princes, the Bishop of Rome. “The leading men of
Spoleto and Rieti”, says the biographer, “ere yet Desiderius and his Lombards
had arrived at the Alpine passes, fleeing for refuge to St. Peter, handed
themselves over to Pope Hadrian, swore fealty to the Prince of the Apostles and
the most holy Pope, and were tonsured after the manner of the Romans”. Their
example, we are told, would have been followed by all the inhabitants of the Spoletan duchy, but they were restrained by fear of
Desiderius. After his defeat and flight to Pavia, and when his Spoletan soldiers had returned home, “immediately the whole
body of inhabitants of the various cities of the duchy of Spoleto streamed
together into the presence of the lovely pontiff, and rolling themselves at his
feet earnestly besought his holy Thrice-Blessedness that he would receive them
into the service of St. Peter and the Holy Roman Church, and would cause them
to be tonsured after the manner of the Romans”. Pope Hadrian marched with his
new subjects to St. Peter’s, administered the sacrament, received their oath of
fidelity for themselves and their remotest descendants, gave them the desired
Roman tonsure, and “appointed them a duke whom they themselves had chosen of
their own free will, to wit the most noble Hildeprand, who had previously taken
refuge with the rest [of his followers] at the Apostolic See.”
At the same time, the citizens of Fermo, Osimo and Ancona, at the
southern end of the Pentapolis, and the Tuscan town of Castellum Felicitatis, west of the Apennines, submitted themselves in
similar manner to the Pope and his successors. Well may the biographer describe
with exultation the extension of the Papal territory which Hadrian had thus
obtained by his own unaided efforts. The commendation—for such the above
transaction seems to have been—of the great duchy of Spoleto and the annexation
of the other cities just mentioned, gave to the dominions of St. Peter the
shape and extent which they retained down to our own day. The Adriatic
provinces were now joined to the Ducatus Romae, not by the slender and precarious thread of Perugia
and the Via Flaminia alone : a solid block of territory covering both sides of
the Apennines and including the old Roman province of Picenum now gave roundness and symmetry to dominions which reached, nominally at any
rate, from Ferrara in the north to Terracina in the south, a distance in a
straight line of some two hundred and twenty miles.
The winter passed away, Eastertide was approaching, and Charles, who had
probably a wider mental horizon than Pippin, determined to visit that great
metropolis of Christendom which his father had never seen. Leaving of course
all the working part of his army encamped round beleaguered Pavia, he started
with a brilliant train of dukes, counts, bishops and abbots, and a sufficient
body-guard of soldiers, on the road through Tuscany to Rome. He marched in
haste, and was within a day's journey of the City, ere Hadrian heard of his
arrival. ‘Falling into an ecstasy of great astonishment,' the Pope directed all
the magistrates of the City to go thirty miles along the north-western road to
meet the great Patrician. They met him at the place called Ad Novas, the third
station on the Via Clodia, near the shores of Lake Bracciano,
and here they presented him with a standard, probably such an one as St. Peter
is represented as granting Carulo Regi in the mosaic outside the Lateran.
At one mile from the City the Pope had ordered that the illustrious
visitor should be met by all the regiments of the little army of the Ducatus Romae, together with
their officers and the boys who had come to Rome, probably from all the
countries of the Christian West, to learn the language of the Church. The great
crosses, which were, so to speak, the standards of the Church, were brought
forth, as was the custom when an Exarch or Patrician entered Rome. All the
Romans, men and boys alike, sang hymns of praise, in which Charles's Frankish
soldiers joined with their deep Teutonic voices. As soon as Charles saw the
crosses being borne towards him, he alighted from his horse, and in lowly
pedestrian fashion, with the nobles who followed his example, accomplished the
scene at rest of the journey. And now the venerable basilica of St. Peter—a
building utterly unlike the domed Renaissance temple of Bramante and Michael
Angelo—rose before them on the Vatican hill, and there in the long atrium
outside the doors of the church stood Pope Hadrian and all his clergy, who had
risen at early dawn to welcome their great deliverer. At the foot of the hill
King Charles knelt down, assuredly in no feigned reverence, but overcome with
emotion at the sight of the long dreamed of sanctuary, and kissed each step
that led up to the crowded atrium. When he reached the summit, King and Pope
clasped one another in a loving embrace—no Byzantine prostration of the
ecclesiastic before his sovereign, no Hildebrandine abasement of the sovereign before the ecclesiastic—and so, while Charles
cordially grasped the right hand of Hadrian, they together entered “the
venerable hall of St. Peter, Prince of Apostles, all the clergy and brethren of
the monastic orders chanting the while with loud voices, Blessed is he that
cometh in the name of the Lord.”
Let us pause for a moment to gaze at the figures of the two men, the
highest types in their day of the old Roman and the new Teutonic civilization,
who accomplish this fateful meeting on the steps of St. Peter’s basilica.
Hadrian, a Roman of the Romans, sprung of a noble stock, born almost under the
shadow of the mausoleum of Augustus, bearing the name of the most artistic of
Roman Emperors, “elegant and very graceful in person”, but a man of indomitable
will and of courage that had never quailed before the threats of the brutal
Desiderius—this man, as worthily as Leo or as Gregory, represents the old
heroic spirit of the men of Romulus, transformed yet hardly softened by the teachings
of the Man of Nazareth.
And Carl, not the majestic yet somewhat out-worn Emperor of medieval
romance, but a young and lusty warrior who has not reached the half-way house
of life. The very name of this grandson of Charles Martel has a Teutonic ring
in it, and reminds us of the day when the unmannerly messenger burst into the
second Pippin's presence as he was sitting by the solemn Plectrude and shouted
out ‘It is a Carl'. But though he is Teuton and Austrasian to the core, a
descendant of untold generations of Rhine-land warrior-chiefs, and though the
Frankish lawless love of women stains many pages of his history, he never
forgets that he is also the descendant of the sainted Arnulf of Metz, and that
his father was crowned by the not less saintly Boniface. The welfare of the Church
is dear to his heart. If he be not a pattern of morality himself, he will not
tolerate immorality in that Church's ministers. He has perhaps already begun to
read the book which will be the delight of his middle life and old age,
Augustine's great treatise ‘On the City of God'; and with the help of this
great Roman, the Vicar of Peter, he has visions of one day bringing that city
down to dwell on the earth, such wide spaces of which are subject to his rule.
A word as to the personal appearance of the great Austrasian. He was of
commanding stature, probably not less than six feet five in height. His nose
was long, his eyes large and sparkling, his face bright and cheerful. His hair,
which when Einhard drew his picture was ‘beautiful in whiteness,' we may
imagine to have been at this time golden in hue, descending in long curls to
his shoulders. His gait, even when he was an old man, was firm and martial: how
much more when he now for the first time trod the soil of Italy at the head of
his Frankish warriors.
Such were the two men who on Holy Saturday, the 2nd of April, 774, met
in the atrium of St. Peter’s. They marched together up the long nave, followed
by all the bishops, abbots and nobles of the Franks, drew nigh to the confessio of the Apostle, and there, prostrate
before the relics of the saint, offered up their loud thanksgivings to Almighty
God for the victory which had been wrought by his intercession. Prayer being
ended, Charles humbly besought the pontiff for leave to worship at the various
churches in Rome. It was not the Patrician, come to set in order the affairs of
the City, but the pilgrim from across the Alps come for the healing of his
soul, who preferred this lowly request. Then they all went down the steps into the
crypt and stood by the actual (or alleged) body of the Apostle, while Pope,
King, and nobles gave and received solemn oaths of mutual fidelity.
We need not follow the enthusiastic biographer through his
minutely-detailed description of the ceremonies which followed this ‘joyous
entry' of Charles into the City of Rome. On Saturday, the numerous baptisms
usual on this day of the Calendar were administered by the Pope at the Lateran
basilica. On Easter Sunday, a great presentation of Roman magistrates and
officers to Charles was followed by a mass at S. Maria Maggiore, and then by a
banquet at the Lateran palace. On Monday there was mass at St. Peter's, and on
Tuesday at St. Paul's. But on Wednesday there was enacted, if the Papal scribe
speaks truth, that great event the Donation of Charles to Hadrian, an event of
such transcendent importance that the biographer must be allowed to tell it in
his own words :—
“Now on the fourth day of the week, April 6, 774, the aforesaid Pope,
with his officers both of Church and State, had an interview with the King in
the church of St. Peter, when he earnestly besought and with fatherly affection
exhorted him to fulfill in every particular the
promise which his father, the late King Pippin of holy memory, and Charles
himself with his brother Carloman and all the Frankish nobles, had made to St.
Peter and his vicar Pope Stephen II on the occasion of his journey into Frank-land:
this promise being that divers cities and territories of that province of Italy
should be handed over to St. Peter and his vicars for a perpetual possession.
And when Charles had caused this promise which was made at Carisiacum in Frank-land to be read over to him, he and his nobles expressed their entire
approval of all things therein contained. Then, of his own accord, with good
and willing mind, that most excellent and truly Christian Charles, king of the
Franks, ordered another promise of gift like the former one to be drawn up by
his chaplain and notary, Etherius. Hereby he granted
the same cities and territories to St. Peter, and promised that they should be
handed over to the pontiff, according to their defined boundaries, as is shown
by the contents of the same donation, to wit, from Lima with the isle of Corsica,
thence to Surianum, thence to Mount Bardo, that is to Vercetum, thence to Parma, thence to Rhegium, and
from thence to Mantua and Mons Silicis, together with
the whole exarchate of Ravenna, as it was of old, and the provinces of the Venetiae and Istria; together with the whole duchy of Spoletium and that of Beneventum. And having made this
donation and confirmed it with his own hand, the most Christian king of the
Franks caused all the bishops, abbots, dukes and counts to sign it also. Then
placing it first on the altar of St. Peter, and afterwards within, in his holy confessio, the king and all his nobles promised St.
Peter and his vicar Pope Hadrian, under the sanction of a terrible oath, that
they would maintain his right to all the territories included in that donation.
Another copy thereof, by order of the most Christian king, was made by Etherius, and to keep alive the eternal memory of his own
name and the Frankish kingdom, was placed by Charles's own hands upon the body
of St. Peter under the gospels which it is the custom to kiss in that place.
Certain other copies of the same donation made by the bureau of our Holy Roman
Church were carried away by his Excellency.”
By this transaction on the 6th of April, 774, if the Papal biographei1
is to be believed, the bishop of Rome became the actual or expectant sovereign
of two-thirds of Italy. Actual or expectant, I say, because some part of the
territory thus assigned was still in the hands of the Lombards, and yet more
because the provinces of Venetia and Istria still, probably, owed allegiance to
the Emperor Constantine. But in fact all enquirers who have carefully
considered the question admit the impossibility of reconciling this alleged
donation with the facts of history. The Pope of Rome never, we may confidently
assert, was (as this donation would have made him) lord of all Italy with the
exception of Piedmont, Lombardy, the immediate neighbourhood of Naples, and Calabria.
The explanations of the difficulty are numerous. Forgery by the biographer,
interpolation by a later hand, forgery by accepting a papal scribe, misunderstanding
by the unlettered Frank, confusion between ownership of estates and lordship of
territories, an early surrender by the Pope of rights which he found himself
unable to maintain—all these solutions of the enigma have been suggested. For a
slight and far from exhaustive discussion of the subject I must refer to a note
at the end of this chapter. Only this much may be said at the present point,
that the more completely the reader can banish from his mind the thought that
in 774 Charles the Frank deliberately and of set purpose made Pope Hadrian
sovereign of two-thirds of Italy and of the island of Corsica, the easier will
he find it to follow the events of the next quarter of a century.
From Rome the Frankish king soon returned to. Pavia, where the long
siege was drawing to a close. Disease was rife within the city, and more men
fell under its ravages than by the sword of the enemy. At last on a Tuesday in
the month of June 1 the city surrendered, and Desiderius with his wife Ansa and
a daughter whose name we know not became prisoners of the Frankish king. Recent
events might well have embittered Charles against his Lombard father-in-law,
but he displayed his usual clemency, and sparing his life sent him, apparently
accompanied by the two royal ladies, to the monastery of Corbie in Picardy, the
same holy house to which young Adalhard had retired when he refused to connive
at repudiation of the Lombard princess Desiderata, and of which he was one day
to be the venerated abbot. Here, we are told, the exiled king remained till the
day of his death, passing his time in prayers and watchings and fastings, and many other good works. His wife,
who had always been a zealous builder of churches and monasteries, doubtless
shared this pious ending to that which had been in her husband's case a
troubled and somewhat ignoble career.
The reader has now before him the historic facts as far as they are
known, concerning the siege and fall of Pavia. He may be amused by seeing the
transformation which, in the course of a century, these facts had undergone in
the hands of monastic rhapsodists.
“There was in the court of Desiderius,” wrote the Monk of St. Gall (in
the book on the deeds of Charles which he dedicated to his great-grandson), “a
chief minister of King Charles named Otker, who having incurred his master’s
displeasure sought a refuge among the Lombards. When the war had broken out and
the approach of Charles was expected, Desiderius and Otker together ascended a
tower which commanded a very wide view. When the baggage wagons drew near which
would have not misbeseemed the expeditions of Darius
or Julius, Desiderius said to Otker, “Is Charles in this mighty army?”. “Not
yet,” said Otker. The rank and file of soldiers collected from so many lands
appeared : then the corps of guards, for ever intent on their duty: then the
bishops, abbots and chaplains with their trains. At the sight of each
successive company Desiderius asked, “Is not Charles with these?” and [for some
unexplained reason] the appearance of the ecclesiastics filled him with more
overmastering fear than all the rest, so that he longed to leave his tower and
hide himself underground from the face of so terrible an enemy. But Otker said
to him, “When you see an iron harvest bristling in the plain, and these rivers
Po and Ticino which surround your walls black with the reflection of iron-clad
warriors, then know that Charles is at hand.” Even while he spoke a dark cloud
from north and west seemed to overshadow the light of day. But then as the
monarch drew nearer, the reflection from his soldiers' arms made a new daylight
more terrible than night. Then appeared that man of iron, Charles himself, with
iron helmet, gauntlets and breastplate, with an iron spear held erect by his
left hand, for his right was ever stretched forth to his unconquered sword: the
outer surfaces of his thighs, which for ease in mounting on horseback are with
other men left bare, with him were encircled in rings of iron. Why speak of his
greaves, for they, like those of all the rest of his army, were iron? Of iron
too was his shield; and his iron-grey horse had the strength as well as the
colour of that metal. Him, the great leader, all who went before, all who
flowed round him on each side, all who followed him, imitated to the utmost of
their power. The iron river filled all the plain, reflected the rays of the sun,
struck terror into the pale watchers on the walls. “O the iron! alas for the
iron!” so rose the confused murmur of the citizens. All these things I, a
toothless and stammering old man, have told you at far greater length than I
should have done, but then he, the truthful sentinel Otker, took them all in at
a glance, and turning to Desiderius said to him, “Lo, now you have him whom you
so earnestly desired to behold”; whereupon Desiderius fell fainting to the
ground.”
The Monk then goes on to describe how, as there were still some among
the citizens of Pavia who refused to open the gates to the Franks, Charles in
order that the day might not pass over without some worthy deed, ordered his
men to build a basilica in which they might render service to Almighty God
outside the walls, if they could not do so within them. So said, so done. The
men dispersed in all directions, some seeking stones, some lime for mortar,
some timber, some paints and painters, and thus setting to work at the fourth
hour of the day, before the twelfth hour thereof “they had erected such a
basilica, with walls and roofs, with ceilings and pictures all complete, that
no one who looked upon it would have supposed that it could have been built in
less than a twelvemonth.”
After this, that party among the citizens which was in favour of
surrender prevailed, and on the fifth day of the siege, without shedding a drop
of blood, Charles was master of the city.
Thus with the lapse of three generations had the story of the siege of
Pavia been transformed, and the long and weary blockade of eight months'
duration had become changed into a sudden capture, caused by the magic of his
presence, a capture almost as marvellous and quite as unhistorical as the
building in eight hours of the suburban basilica.
Passing from the realm of Saga, we are forced to ask ourselves the
question why it was that the Lombard power went down so easily before the
impact of the Franks. We ask, but our materials are so scanty that we must be
contented with a most imperfect answer. We have seen that there were treachery
and disunion in the Lombard camp, and that, from some disadvantage of birth or
defects of character, Desiderius failed to win for himself the loyalty of the
whole Lombard people. Moreover, throughout the two centuries of their history
the ‘centrifugal' tendency, which was the bane of so many of the new Teutonic
states, was fatally manifest in the Lombard nation. Benevento and Spoleto were
always bound by a very loose tie to Pavia, and at the least provocation Trent
and Friuli were ready to fly off from the central power. Then there was
probably the same want of cohesion between the Teutonic and the Latin elements
of the population which led to the early downfall of the Burgundian and
Visigothic kingdoms. The condition of the Roman aldius may have been, probably was, far better under Desiderius than under Alboin or
Authari, but still he felt himself to be a subject where his fathers had been
lords, and he saw no reason why he should fight for the maintenance of Lombard
supremacy. To this must be added the inextinguishable and to us inexplicable
animosity of the Church, to which, however orthodox their profession of faith,
however lavish their gifts to convent and cathedral, the Lombards were still
the same ‘most unspeakable, most foul and stinking' race that they had been at
their first entrance into Italy. Assuredly in this case the antipathy was one
of race rather than of religion. The ecclesiastic who was perhaps the son of a
Roman aldius hated the man ‘who dressed his
hair after the manner of the Lombards', not now as a heretic, but as the
descendant of the invaders who had reduced his fathers to slavery.
And lastly, but perhaps not of least importance, we may suggest that the
influence of climate was not unimportant in weakening the fibre of Lombard
manhood. The soldiers of Alboin came, fresh and hardy, from the forests of the
Danube and the glens of Noricum (very different countries assuredly from the
pleasant lands which now represent them); they came into the softer climate of
a land whose thousand years of civilization not all the ravages of the
barbarians had availed wholly to obliterate. They came, they enjoyed, and
probably they lost some of their ancient manhood.
Whatever the cause, it must be admitted that there is something which
disappoints us in the meagrely-told tale of the downfall of the kingdom of the
Lombards. Herein they differ from the Anglo-Saxons, their old neighbours, with
whose history their own for so many years ran parallel. In both nations there
was for long the same want of cohesion (till the Church, the enemy of Lombard
unity, accomplished the unity of England); in both there was the same
slackness, the same tendency to procrastination, the same absence of wide and
far-seeing statesmanship. But the old Anglo-Saxon battle-songs found a fitting
close on the well-fought field of Senlac, while the course of Lombard history
trickled out to an unworthy end amid the famine and fever of Pavia.
NOTE
The Alleged Donation of Territory in Italy by Charles the Great to Pope
Hadrian.
I. In the first
place, let us have before us the actual words in Vita which the Papal
biographer records this memorable transaction:
“At vero quarta feria, egressus praenominatus pontifex cum suis judicibus tam cleri quamque militiae in
ecclesia beati Petri apostoli, pariterque cum eodem rege se loquendum conjungens, constanter eum deprecatus est atque ammonuit et paterno affectu adhortare studuit ut promissionem illam, quam ejus sanctae memoriae genitor Pippinus quondam rex et ipse praecellentissimus Carulus cum suo germano Carulomanno atque omnibus judicibus Francorum, fecerant beato Petro et ejus vieario sanctae memoriae domno Stephano juniori papae, quando Franciam perrexit, pro concedendis diversis civitatibus ac territoriis istius Italiae provinciae et contradendis beato Petro ejusque omnibus vicariis in
perpetuum possidendis, adimpleret in omnibus. Cumque ipsam promissionem, quae Francia in
loco qui vocatur Carisiaco facta est, sibi relegi fecisset, complacuerunt illi et ejus judicibus omnia quae ibidem erant adnexa. Et
propria voluntate, bono ac libenti animo, aliam donationis promissionem ad instar anterioris ipse antedictus praecellentissimus et revera Christianissimus Carulus Francorum rex adscribi jussit per Etherium, religiosum ac prudentissimum capellanum et notarium suum : ubi concessit easdem civitates
et territoria beato Petro easque praefato pontifici contradi spopondit per designatum confinium, sicut in eadem (sic) donationem continere monstratur, id est: A Lunis eum insula Corsica, deinde in
Suriano, deinde in monte Bardone,
id est in Verceto, deinde in Parma, deinde in Regio
: et exinde in Mantua atque Monte Silicis, simulque et universum exarchatum Ravennantium sicut antiquitus erat, atque provincias Venetiarum et Istria: necnon et cunctum ducatum Spolitinum seu Beneventanum. Factaque eadem donatione et propria sua manu earn ipse Christianissimus Francorum rex earn conroborans, universos episcopos, abbates, duces etiam et grafiones in ea adscribi fecit: quam prius super altare beati Petri et postmodum intus in sancta ejus confessione ponentes, tam ipse Francorum rex quamque ejus judices, beato Petro et ejus vicario sanctissimo Adriano papae sub terribile sacramento sese omnia conservaturos quae in eadem donatione continentur promittentes tradiderunt. Apparem vero ipsius donationis eundem Etherium adscribi faciens ipse Christianissimus Francorum rex, intus super corpus beati Petri, subtus evangelia quae ibidem osculantur, pro firmissima cautela et aetema nominis sui ac regni Francorum memoria propriis suis manibus posuit. Aliaque ejusdem donationis exempla per scrinium hujus sanctae nostrae Romanae ecclesiae adscriptum ejus excellentia secum deportavit”.
II. As to the
geographical import of the donation. The mention of Corsica is simple enough.
That island at this time was possibly Lombard. At any rate it soon became part
of the Frankish dominion. On the mainland of Italy the boundary traced begins
from the gulf of Spezzia, and then runs nearly due
north past Sarzana (Surianum),
following upward the course of the river Magra till
it strides across the Apennines at La Cisa (Mons Bardonis).
Thence in a more north-easterly direction past Berceto (Vercetum) to Parma : along the Via Emilia for a
short distance to Reggio, and thence at right angles to its former course till
it reaches Mantua. From Mantua it goes nearly east till it reaches Monselice (Mons Silicis), about
fifteen miles south of Padua. From thence we must draw some conjectural line to
include the two provinces of Venetia and Istria, though the mention of Monselice makes it hard to draw the line so as not to
exclude the westernmost part of Venetia. When we have traced this northern
frontier our work is done; for the Exarchate of Ravenna as it was anciently
held (of course including the Pentapolis) and the two great duchies of Spoleto
and Benevento practically include all Italy south of this line, unless we ought
to make a reservation for the fragments of southern Italy which still belonged
to the Empire, and which probably at this time consisted only of the territory
immediately surrounding Gaeta, Naples, and Amalfi, the district which now bears
the name of Calabria, and so much of the south-east of Apulia as went with the
possession of Otranto—a district perhaps equivalent to the modern province of
Lecce. Instead, therefore, of enumerating the portions of Italy which were
included in the alleged donation, it will be simpler to consider what portions
were excluded from it. They were (in modern geographical terms) Piedmont, the
Riviera di Ponente and the Riviera di Levante as far as Spezzia,
the late duchy of Piacenza, Lombardy north of the Po, Verona and (probably)
Vicenza; Naples, Calabria, and Otranto. About two-thirds of Italy, as I have
mentioned in the preceding chapter, were thus assigned to the vicars of St.
Peter, and only one third was left for the Frankish King and the Empire to
share between them.
III. Of this alleged donation, notwithstanding the
statement by the biographer as to the copies deposited at Rome among the
Frankish archives and elsewhere, no copy exists today, nor do we, I believe,
ever find in any historian the slightest allusion to the production of such a
copy. It is never once alluded to in the copious correspondence between Charles
and Hadrian which is contained in the Codex Carolinus.
And to fit it in with the course of dealing between the two powers, Frankish
and Papal, during the forty years that intervened between the conquest of Italy
and the death of Charles, is a task so difficult as to be all but impossible.
IV. In this
dilemma various theories have been suggested, the discussion of which has
filled many volumes. Here of course the discussion can be but very briefly
summarized. We may divide the theories into two classes, those which uphold and
those which deny the authenticity of the document contained in chapters the
Vita Hadriani.
A.
Upholders of the authenticity.
(1) Chief among
these, and entitled to speak with preeminent authority, must be named the Abbe
L. Duchesne, the distinguished editor of the Liber Pontificalis.
He firmly maintains the authenticity and the contemporaneous character of the
Vita Hadriani. The donation, wide as are its terms,
is, he believes, a donation of territory, not a mere restoration of scattered
‘patrimonies' violently abstracted by the Lombards. At the same time he admits,
of course, that the Popes never really bore sway over the vast territories here
conceded to them. He argues therefore that, after the conquest of Pavia,
Charles changed his point of view. As he had now made himself king of the
Lombards and was friendly to the Pope, there was no longer the same necessity
for the Pope to be put in possession of such large domains in order that he
might be protected against the malice of his enemies. Also Charles may have
seen that now that the
Lombard power was destroyed there was no longer, on the part of the
Roman population, the old willingness to come under the Papal rule. These
changes in his mental attitude were taking place between 774 and 781, the date
of his third visit to Rome. The Pope had also been discovering that he had not
the power to rule such wide domains, and that even in the Exarchate and
Pentapolis he could barely hold his own against the ambitious archbishop of
Ravenna. In 781 therefore (presumably) an arrangement was come to, whereby, in
consideration of some material additions to the Ducatus Romae in Tuscia and
Campania, the Pope abandoned his vast and shadowy claims under the Donation of
774, which thenceforward passed out of notice.
The theory is ingenious and explains some of the facts. It is well
argued for by Duchesne, but I find it difficult to believe that such an
enormous abandonment of well-ascertained Papal rights would ever have been
made, or being made would have left no trace in the Papal- Frankish
correspondence.
(2) Another
theory, which is advocated by Prof. Theodor Lindner with more elaboration but
less lucidity than by Duchesne, is, virtually, that the document was not a
donation of territory, but a restoration of ‘patrimonies' within the limits
described. Lindner's view is that both Pippin and Charles from the beginning
had set before themselves no other object than the satisfaction of the just
claims (‘justitiae') of the successors of St. Peter. True it was that by a sort
of legal fiction, according to which St. Peter represented the respublica Romana, the territories of the
Exarchate and the Pentapolis, lately torn from the Empire by Aistulf, were
looked upon as a sort of jacens hereditas to which St. Peter was entitled, and so far
Pippin's action had the result of conferring territorial sovereignty on the
Pope. True also that the Ducatus Romae had by the force of circumstances, by the absenteeism of the Emperors, and the
ever-present activity of the Popes, become in fact purely Papal territory. But
as to all the rest of the lands and cities comprised within the boundary which
started a Lunis, all that, according to Lindner’s view, Charles promised
to Hadrian was that those patrimonies which had once belonged to St. Peter and
had been wrested from him by the Lombards should, on production of the
necessary evidences of title, be restored to the Holy See.
The theory is a plausible one. One may even go further and say that in
all likelihood it represents with sufficient exactness what actually Look place
in St. Peter's on the 6th of April, 774. What Charles probably intended to do
was to confirm in the fullest manner possible the Pope's sway (as ruler) over
the Exarchate, the Pentapolis, and the Ducatus Romae, and to recover for him the possession (as landlord)
of the estates in the rest of Italy of which he had been robbed by the ravaging
Lombards. But the question now before us is not what Charles promised, but what
the Papal biographer represents him as having promised. And here it seems to me
that Lindner's contention fails. How can his statement of the character of the
donation be got out of the words in the Vita Hadriani?
Not a mention there of patrimonia, a large and
unrestricted grant of civitates et territoria,
no distinction drawn between the Exarchate or Pentapolis and other parts of
Italy, for instance Tuscia, which had been Lombard
for centuries: full words of grant of “provincias Venetiarum et Istriae et cunctum ducatum Spolitinum, seu [ = et] Beneventanum.” Lindner battles bravely with this obvious
difficulty, but if words are to have any meaning at all, these words cannot be
taken in the limited sense which he would impose upon them.
It may be noted in passing that Abbe Duchesne, though fighting on the
same side as Lindner in defence of the genuineness of the passage in question,
entirely rejects the patrimonial theory. He says “Et ici je dois ecarter l'idée que les regions limitées par la frontier a Lunis—Monte Silicis soient indiquées, non comme concedées dans leur entier et avec les droits de souveraineté, mais comme contenant des patrimoines revendiqués par l'Eglise Romaine.” But this often happens in this strange
discussion. The champions on the same side destroy one another's arguments. As Faulconbridge says in King John “Austria and France
shoot in each other’s mouth.”
It may also be observed that Charles's promise, on Lindner's theory,
would fall short of that which Hadrian had a right to expect. There was at
least one large and important patrimony, that of the ‘Alpes Cottiae,'
situated north-west of the line traced by the donation. If it were merely a
question of the restitution of plundered estates, why should that not have been
restored along with the others?
Let us pass to some of the arguments advanced by
B. The opposers of the genuineness of the donation.
(1) In the first place, we ought to notice the possibility that the
donation, though literally genuine, was in fact a forgery, having been obtained
from Charles by some trick such as a skilful notary might practise on an
unlettered sovereign. This is certainly not impossible. The Roman Court would
contain at that time some of the most practised scribes in Europe, whereas
Charles, as we are told by Einhard, though he tried hard to learn the art of
writing, never succeeded in doing so, having begun too late in life. And though
we know that he was not altogether illiterate, but greatly delighted in such a
book as St. Augustine's ‘De Civitate Dei', yet even
this seems, from Einhard's account, to have been read to him at his meals,
rather than by him in his library. But then Charles was not alone on this
occasion, but was accompanied by all the great ecclesiastics as well as nobles
of his realm, and it seems reasonable to suppose that among all of these there
would be at any rate someone able and willing to detect any gross literary
fraud practised upon his master.
Considerable stress has been laid on the mention of the name of Etherius, ‘religiosus ac prudentissimus capellanus et notarius Caroli'. This is no doubt the same person as Itherius, abbot of St. Martin at Tours, who was sent in 770
to claim from Desiderius the return of the Papal patrimonies in Benevento on
which he had laid hands, but all the theories founded on the personality of
this man (some of them not very favourable to his loyalty to Charles) are mere
baseless conjectures.
(2) It is suggested that the three chapters in the Vita Hadriani which record the donation are an interpolation of
a later date into an authentic and contemporary document.
We may take Dr. Martens as the advocate of
this theory, which he has maintained with much earnestness and diligence in his
monographs ‘Die Romische Frage’ (1881).
Dr. Martens assigns
the forgery of all three documents, the Donation of Constantine, the Fragmentum Fantuzzianum, and the
three chapters in the Vita Hadriani, to about the
same time, somewhere in the pontificate of Hadrian. All the rest of the Vita he
looks upon as genuine and trustworthy, nor does he attribute to the Pope any
complicity with this fabrication, but he thinks that it was probably imagined
by some Roman ecclesiastic during Hadrian's lifetime— perhaps about 780 or
781—and then after his death was tacked on by him to the genuine Life (of which
I suppose Martens considers the later chapters to have been at the same time
suppressed). He thinks that this forger used for his purpose the slightly
earlier Fragmentum Fantuzzianum,
and built his romance upon it. His secret intention was to express his
disappointment that Charles had so meagrely fulfilled the hopes of a great
extension of the Papal dominion which had been founded on his anticipated
victory over the Lombards. For this purpose, with malicious subtlety the author
sketches the Frankish king in that attitude which the Roman clergy would have
liked him to assume in 774, knowing all the while that in actual fact things
turned out very differently. Charles really played his part as ‘Defensor Ecclesiae'
very coldly, only granting that which was of most urgent need and which it was
scarce possible to withhold. The Vita, on the other hand, offers us the lying
statement that Charles propria voluntate, bono ac libenti animo bound himself by an utterly exorbitant
promise, and swore a
fearful oath for its fulfilment. As neither the Life of Hadrian I nor
that of Leo III contains any account of the redemption of this promise, the
king of the Franks stands before us in the pages of the Liber Pontificalis as a confessed oath-breaker. Thus to
compromise the character of the great prince was the main object of the forger,
but he may also have nourished a secret hope that some successor of Charles
would deem himself bound to fulfil in its integrity the promise which here
stood charged to the account of his ancestor.
(3) Such is the
theory of Dr. Martens. Accepting, as I do, many of
his arguments, I venture to go a little further and to suggest that the whole
Life, as we have it, is the product of a slightly later age, and was composed
in the hope, perhaps not a very confident hope, that the weak monarch who bore,
not for nought, the title Louis the Pious, might be induced to acquiesce in its
extravagant pretensions.
In this connection it seems to me an important fact that three times in
the Vita Hadriani (though not in the now disputed
chapters), Charles’s name is mentioned with the addition Magnus, which he did
not usually bear in his lifetime, but which was generally used soon after his
death.
On the other side, in favour of the contemporaneous character of the
Vita Hadriani, may be quoted undoubtedly the great
authority of Abbe Duchesne, who thinks that the first forty- four chapters
(that is the whole historical part of the Life) were composed in this very year
774. ‘It is enough,' he says, ‘to read these pages with some knowledge of their
historic environment, to feel oneself in the presence of an absolutely
contemporary narrative. It was not in 795, twenty years after the disappearance
of the Lombard dynasty, that a writer would have dwelt so minutely on the
details of the negotiations with Desiderius, on the punishment of Afiarta and
his partisans, on the political correspondence with Constantinople, on the
negotiations of the Spoletans with the Pope, even on
the journey of Charlemagne to Rome in 774. At the death of Hadrian, men were
already far from this earlier period : important events had succeeded, amongst
others, two journeys of Charlemagne to Rome in 781 and 787, which have left
their marks on the Papal correspondence, on the monuments, on the constitution
of the Roman state : certain courses had been taken, new ways of looking at
things had become necessary: of all which we find no trace in the narrative
before us. It represents well enough what might be written, what ought to be
written in 774, not what would be written after the death of Hadrian V
I can accept nearly all these statements of the eminent editor of the
Liber Pontificalis, without accepting his conclusion
that the Vita Hadriani, as we have it, is a
contemporary document. Let me remind the reader of the extraordinary phenomenon
which that work presents to us. Here we have a so-called life of the Pope which
narrates with great minuteness the events of the first two years of his reign,
which just leads up to the alleged donation by Charles, tells in a few lines
the conquest of Pavia, and then is absolutely silent as to the last twenty
years, most important years, of the same reign, giving us instead of history a
most wearisome and diffuse catalogue of all the ecclesiastical rebuildings, and of all the articles of upholstery
wherewith Hadrian enriched the Roman churches during his long pontificate.
Surely there is something suspicious in this extreme loquacity as to two years
and this utter silence as to the succeeding twenty. Whether there ever was or
was not a life of Hadrian worthy of the name, must be I think a matter of
conjecture. As to this production which is now before us, it appears to me to
be what the Germans call a Tendenzschrift, having for
its object the assertion of certain preposterous claims for papal sovereignty
over two-thirds of Italy. I suggest that it was composed during the reign of
Louis the Pious, that the compiler copied certain genuine and contemporary
documents with reference to the collapse of the party of Paulus Afiarta and the
negotiations with Desiderius, tacked on to them his absolutely fictitious
account of the donation of Charles (perhaps to some extent copied from the Fragmentum Fantuzzianum), and they
left the remaining twenty years of Hadrian's pontificate undescribed, knowing
that at every step of the real history he would have been confronted with facts
which proved the absurdity of his romance. To obtain the necessary length for
his biography he has (like many other authors of the Papal lives but at greater
length than they) ended that biography with the aforesaid catalogue of
furniture, for which, very likely, trustworthy materials existed in the Papal
bureaux.
We have thus three fictitious documents of great historical importance
emanating from the Papal chancery or written in the Papal interest, during the
hundred years between 750 and 850; possibly within a much shorter compass of
time. They are the Donation of Constantine, the Donation of Pippin (Fragmentum Fantuzzianum), and the
Donation of Charles.
One document of a slightly later date, the Privilegium of Louis the Pious addressed to Pope Paschal II in 817—a document which is now
generally quoted as the Ludovicianum — after
remaining long under a cloud of suspicion, has been of later years, chiefly by
the exertions of two German scholars, Ficker and Sickel, rehabilitated as a
genuine and trustworthy document. But this vindication of the Privilege of
Louis does not help, but rather damages the alleged Donation by his father. For
the Ludovicianum, though sufficiently generous
towards the Popes, gives no more territory to them than is perfectly consistent
with the course of historical events disclosed to us by the Codex Carolinus, and when it travels far afield beyond the limits
of the three provinces (Exarchate, Pentapolis, and Ducatus Romae), it carefully introduces the word patrimonia. There is also a very distinct
reservation of the Imperial supremacy over the duchies of Tuscany and Spoleto,
accompanying the grant of certain revenues out of those provinces. Considering
the characters of the men, it is almost inconceivable that the Popes would have
accepted from the weak and pious son the limited grant of territories contained
in the Ludovicianum if they had in their archives a
document conferring far larger territories, bearing the signature of the strong
and statesmanlike father. The Ludovicianum is
therefore distinctly a witness against the Vita Hadriani.
There is no doubt, however, that in the course of the ninth century the
fabrication had obtained extensive currency, being no doubt by that time fairly
installed in the Liber Pontificalis. It is quoted in
the False Decretals of Isidore, and it reappears in the Ottonianum,
or Privilegium granted to the Pope by the
Emperor Otto I in 962.
After being in modern times generally discredited, the Caroline Donation
has recently found some staunch and able defenders; but the qualifications and
reservations, which even these authors have to make, show the extreme
difficulty of the task which they have undertaken, and, at any rate in the
judgment of the present writer, it is not probable that the cause which they
have championed will finally prevail.
The whole discussion and the ever-expanding character of the Papal
claims for territory at this period seem to be the best explanation of the
forethought exhibited by the great Frankish ruler when he pinned down his Papal
correspondents to certain positions by collecting their letters in the Codex Carolinus.
