ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION. THE MEROVINGIAN KINGS.
EARLY FRANKISH HISTORY.
We have reached a decisive point in the history of Italy and its
relations to the rest of Europe. The Visigoth dealt a mortal blow to the Roman
State: the Hun and the Vandal mocked its dying agonies; the Ostrogoth tried,
but tried in vain, to resuscitate its life, breathing his Teutonic energy into
its outworn frame; then the Lombard came, at first a ruthless barbarian,
pillaging and destroying, but gradually won over to Christianity and
civilization by the unquenchable influence of the beautiful land. For nearly
two centuries three powers were engaged in a struggle for supremacy in Italy:
the Lombard king, the Byzantine Emperor, and the Pope of Rome. Between the last
two, the relations were nominally relations of friendship and alliance, the
Pope being in theory the submissive subject of the Emperor; but there had none
the less been real opposition between them, sometimes breaking out into actual
strife, and since the publication of the Iconoclastic decrees (726), there had
been complete estrangement, though not as yet any formal renunciation of the
Imperial sovereignty on the part of the Pope.
We are now about to see the balance of power which had been thus far
maintained between these three opposing interests, roughly destroyed. Under the
impact of the Lombard kings the Empire will lose Ravenna and all but disappear
from the Peninsula. The Popes, thus left alone face to face with their
hereditary enemies, the Lombards, will in their despair look beyond the Alps
for help. The Frankish kings will answer to their call, and by blow upon blow,
will lay the Lombard monarchy in the dust. Italy will thus be drawn into close
political union with France and Germany, and those relations will be
established with the latter country, which will subsist in one shape or another
down to the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Finally, after the conquest of Italy by the Franks, the Roman Empire
will be revived in the person of the Frankish King, and Medieval Europe will
come into being.
The struggles which 1 have thus briefly described, and which will form
the subject of the present volume, must have contained many elements of the
highest human interest. The fall of Ravenna, the last fight of the Lombard
nation for dominion in Italy, might each have furnished material for a noble
epic poem: but unfortunately not only the ‘sacred poet', but even the humbler
historian is almost entirely wanting. We hear absolutely nothing from the
Byzantines as to the details of the capture of Ravenna. Owing to the silence of
Paulus Diaconus—a silence which was no doubt politic,
but which his readers must always regret —we hear nothing from Lombard sources
as to any of the events after the death of Liutprand. The gallant Lombard
nation ‘dies and makes no sign'. We have to discover the course of events as
best we can from the meagre notices of Frankish chroniclers, from the verbose
and never graphic letters sent forth from the Papal Chancery, from the lives of
the Popes included in the Liber Pontificalis. This last
source does give us some interesting facts, and it is that from which we shall
have mainly to draw; but it is very incomplete, leaving sometimes large spaces
of time wholly without record, and its passionate unfairness to all who came
into collision with the Papacy greatly lessens its historical value.
In accordance with the plan pursued in the previous volumes, a detailed
history of the new Invaders, the Franks, should here precede the story of their
conquest. So much, however, has already been said about them in several
preceding volumes, that a slight retrospective sketch of their deeds will here
be sufficient.
The fierce tribes of the lower Rhine and Meuse, Sicambri and Chatti, and probably some of their neighbours, Bructeri, Chamavi and Chasuarii, appear in the third century after Christ to have
coalesced into one great confederacy, which took to itself the proud name of
Franks or Free-men. This confederacy however became divided, how or why we know
not, into two smaller federations, the Salians and the Ripuarians. The Salian
Franks probably derived their name from the river Yssel,
the most northerly of the branches by which the Rhine flows westward into the
German Ocean. In the middle of the fifth century they held the districts which
now bear the names of Belgium, Artois, and part of Picardy. The Ripuarian
Franks settled on the left bank (ripa) of the Rhine,
and occupied the pleasant vine-clad hills on the west of it between Mayence and Cologne, as well as the valley of the Moselle,
from its confluence with the Rhine to its source in the mountains of the
Vosges. The chief seat of their power seems to have been the Roman city, which
under its modern name of Cologne still preserves the memory of Colonia
Agrippina. There appears to have been a certain feeling of a common
nationality, connecting, though loosely, these two great divisions of the
Frankish nation; and each tribe, the Salians and the Ripuarians, was split up
into many smaller fragments, obeying the sway of their own petty kings.
One of these petty kings, or rather chieftains, Hlodwig, Ludovicus,
Louis, or Clovis, in 481 began to bear rule over the Salian Franks at Tournai.
He was then fifteen years of age, and he succeeded his father Childeric, hero
of some strange Frankish sagas, who twenty-four years previously had succeeded
his father Merovech. Merovech,
from whom the line of Clovis took its well-known name of Merovings,
was himself fabled to be the son of a Frankish queen, begotten by a sea-monster
or demi-god. So near still to the age of mythology was the heathen nation of
the Franks when the young Clovis, himself heathen, began to lead forth its
armies to battle.
We may mark five stages in the career of this extraordinary man, who
beginning life as regulus of a fragment of the Salian Franks, ended it as
unquestioned lord of two-thirds of France and of no small part of Germany.
I. First came
his victory over Syagrius, the Roman king (so called)
of Soissons, the correspondent of Apollinaris Sidonius, the eager student of
the language of his German neighbours; Syagrius, whom
all his state-craft and all his linguistic accomplishments availed not to save
from the conquering battle-axe of the young Merovingian. This conquest took
place in 486 and gave to Clovis the remainder of Picardy, the greater part of
the Isle of France including Paris itself, Champagne and a considerable portion
of Lorraine. A glance at the map will show what a mighty stride towards
dominion over Gaul was thus made by the son of Childeric, who was still only
twenty years of age. After history proved that his people felt the immense
importance of this conquest. In the division of his realm among his sons and
grandsons the kingdom of Syagrius was evidently
always regarded as the head of the Frankish dominion.
II. Secondly,
came the great victories won by Clovis over the Thuringians and the Alamanni,
victories which apparently were won in the years 491 and. 496. The Thuringians,
here mentioned, are probably a detachment of the nation settled on the left
bank of the Rhine. The Alamanni occupied and gave their name to the region
which is otherwise known as Swabia (Alsace, Baden, and Wurtemberg).
This victory over the Alamanni, however important in itself (since it
opened up to Clovis the whole country of the Upper Rhine and carried him to the
sources of the Danube), was yet more important for its indirect results. The
Frankish king, who had long resisted the entreaties of his wife, the Burgundian
princess Clotilda, that he would embrace Christianity, when he saw himself in
danger of being overwhelmed by the dense masses of the Alamanni, lifted up to
heaven his tear-streaming eyes and said, “0 Jesus Christ, whom Clotilda affirms
to be Son of the living God, and who are said to give victory to them that
trust in You; if You will grant me the victory over these mine enemies, I will
believe and be baptized in Your name. For I have called on my own gods and had
no help from them, wherefore I believe that they have no power”.
It was probably at the Christmas of 496 that Clovis stood in the white
robes of a Catechumen in the Basilica of Rheims, and heard from bishop Remigius
the often-quoted words, “‘Meekly bow thy neck, O Sicambrian,
adore what thou hast heretofore burned, and burn what thou hast adored”.
III. The
baptism of Clovis by bishop Remigius proclaimed him a champion of the Catholic
faith against the Arian form of Christianity, which was at this time dominant
among the Teutonic invaders of the Roman Empire. The Vandal in Africa, the
Ostrogoth in Italy, the
Burgundian in the valley of the Rhine, the Visigoth in Spain and
Aquitaine were all upholders of that which the orthodox denounced as ‘the Arian
pravity'. Now that the fierce heathen, whose example was at once followed by
three thousand of his followers, had become not merely Christian but a
professed believer in the doctrine of the Homoousion, every Catholic priest, at
any rate in Gaul, felt that here was one who by throwing his sword into the
scale of orthodoxy might ensure its early triumph.
It seemed as though the Burgundian kingdom would be the first to fall
under the blows of the Frankish convert. In 500, Gundobad, the Burgundian king
who reigned at Lyons, fled before the army of Clovis which came to the
assistance of his traitorous brother Godegisel of Geneva. But by a sudden
change in the fortune of war, Godegisel was defeated and slain, and Gundobad
regained his throne. The end of Burgundian independence was not yet.
Seven years later, however, came the most important conquest effected by
Clovis in the name of Catholic orthodoxy. Having announced to his assembled
warriors that “he took it ill that those Arians should hold so large a part of
Gaul”, he crossed the Loire, met the Visigoths in battle near Poitiers,
defeated them and slew their king Alaric II, and after two years of warfare
succeeded in adding to his dominions the whole of the fair region of Aquitaine,
while Gallia Narbonensis and Provence remained under
the rule of Alaric's Ostrogothic kinsman, Theodoric of Italy.
IV. The chieftain
who had thus carried far and wide over Gaul the terror of the Frankish arms,
was not likely to remain a mere member of a partnership of kings in his own
nation. At some time or other in his career, probably towards the beginning of
his reign, he succeeded in sweeping off the board the other petty kings of the
Salian Franks. Ragnachar, who reigned at Cambrai, had helped Clovis in his war
against Syagrius, but when the time came for removing
him he was forced into war, conquered in fight and then killed for disgracing
his royal house by permitting himself to be beaten. Chararic, another Salian
king, was craftily captured, shorn of his long Merovingian locks and turned
into a priest. His son, who was at the same time shorn of his hair and ordained
deacon, was overheard comforting his weeping lather by the reflection that
leaves might yet sprout forth from their lopped branches, and thereupon both
father and son were put to death.
V. Lastly,
Sigibert, king of the Ripuarians, who had been the ally of Clovis in his war
against Alaric the Visigoth, had to be put out of the way. His son was incited
to murder him and then was himself assassinated by one of the henchmen of
Clovis. It is strange after reading the plain unsoftened story of the crimes by
which this ‘baptized Pagan' hewed his way to solitary dominion over all
Frankish men, to read the following sentence in the pages of Gregory, bishop of
Tours, “Thus did God daily humble his enemies under his hand and increase his
kingdom, because he walked before Him with righteous heart and did those things
which were pleasing in His sight”. Fascinated, apparently, by the very
wickedness of his hero, Gregory, after describing some more royal murders, goes
on to say, “Having slain these and many other kings and their noble relations,
of whom he was jealous, lest they should rob him of the kingdom, Clovis
extended his sway over the whole of Gaul. However, having on a certain occasion
collected his followers together, he spoke concerning his relations whom he had
himself destroyed, “Woe is me, that I remain as a stranger in a strange land
and have none of mine own kindred who could help me if adversity came upon me”,
But he said this not in real sorrow for their death, but in guile, and in order
that, if he could by chance find any such surviving him, he might kill him”.
Thus, then ere he had passed middle life, the petty chieftain of the
Salian Franks whose principality had been once almost bounded by the horizon of
Tournai, had become ruler of the
larger part of the lands between the Atlantic and the Rhine. In 508,
after Clovis had overthrown the Visigothic kingdom in Gaul, he received from
the Emperor Anastasius a letter conferring upon him the dignity of Consul; and
donning in the basilica of St. Martin the purple tunic and the chlamys of a
Roman senator, rode through the streets of Tours, scattering largesse among the
crowd. This letter from Anastasius was the first of a series of
courtesies—ending in something quite other than courtesies—which passed between
the Roman Emperors and the orthodox kings of the Franks.
Clovis died at Paris in 511, having only attained the age of forty-five
years. He was certainly a scoundrel, but he was a successful scoundrel and he
had some of the qualities of a statesman. Moreover, he was the first of the
long line of ‘the most Christian kings of Francia'.
The only conceivable palliation for any of the crimes which Clovis
committed would have been the advantage of securing the unity of the Frankish
state. Yet that unity was immediately impaired by the division of his dominions
between his four sons. By one means or another, partly by events which happened
in the course of nature and partly by fratricidal crimes, the monarchy thus
divided became one again under Chlotochar I, the last survivor of the sons of
Clovis; but it remained united for only three years, and was then again divided
among his four sons, not to be reunited till the year 613, under Chlotochar II,
great grandson of Clovis. Thus, throughout the whole of the sixth century we
may think of ‘Francia' as generally divided into four parts, which corresponded
in the main with the four great natural divisions of the realm, Austrasia,
Neustria, Aquitaine, and Burgundy.
Austrasia (otherwise called Auster, or Austria) seems to have included
all the lands which had belonged to the Ripuarian Franks, together with those
conquered from the Thuringians, and with those wherein the Bavarians and
Alamanni had been made subject to Frankish rule. But it must also have included
at least the Eastern half of the old ‘kingdom' of Syagrius,
since the countries which were afterwards called Champagne and Lorraine formed
part of the Austrasian kingdom.
As Austrasia was the land of the Ripuarians, so Neustria seems to have
been specially identified with the territory of the Salian Franks, and hence it
had what appears on the map as a curious prolongation north-eastward to the
river Scheldt, and in fact must have included at least half of the modern
kingdom of Belgium. All western France, north of the Loire, belonged
theoretically to the Neustrian kingdom, though the sovereignty which its rulers
were able to assert over the restless Bretons of Armorica was a perpetually
changing quantity.
Aquitaine was the former kingdom of the Visigoths in Gaul, and it had
its well-marked boundaries in the great river Loire and the mountains of the
Cevennes. The Roman influence, strong in Neustria, was yet stronger here, and
it may be doubted how far it was ever bound except by bonds of fear and
compulsion to the Frankish monarchy.
Burgundy, which included the valleys of the Rhine and the Saone, and
which reached up to the western slopes of the Alps, was, as we have seen, still
unconquered at the death of Clovis. Its annexation to the Frankish state was
the work of his sons, one of whom fell in battle in the second campaign. The
story of the conquest (523—534) has been told with some detail in a previous
volume, on account of its connection with the family history of Theodoric whose
daughter was married to Sigismund, king of Burgundy.
The connection of the Franks with the history of Italy, during the
period of this first partition of the Frankish kingdom, brought little glory to
the descendants of Clovis, but much disaster to the Italian peninsula. When
Belisarius began his brilliant enterprise for the recovery of Italy, the
Frankish kings seized the opportunity to threaten the Ostrogothic possessions
in Gaul. They were quieted for the time by the surrender of those possessions
(consisting of Provence and part of Dauphine), which were ceded to them by
Witigis in 536. But three years later, Theudebert, king of Austrasia, a
grandson of Clovis, crossed the Alps, and his savage warriors poured like a
torrent over Northern Italy. They made war alike upon the Goths and the
soldiers of the Empire: they sacked cities and ravaged vineyards, till at last
disease, the result of their own brutal excesses, and a threatening message
from the indignant Belisarius, caused them to return to their own land.
When Totila raised again the standard of Gothic independence, the
Franks, whose manifest policy it was to fish in troubled waters, again
intervened in Italy; and owing to the reluctance of both parties to engage with
another antagonist, succeeded in making the greater part of the three northern
provinces (Liguria, Alpes Cottiae, and Venetia),
subject to tribute. All Italy north of the Po, and both slopes of the Maritime
Alps, except some seaport towns which were held by the Empire, and a few
scattered fortresses still garrisoned by the Goths, were thus added to the
Frankish dominion.
This state of things probably lasted for about ten years. When the
powerful and aspiring Theudebert was succeeded by his son, the sickly Theudebald (A.D. 548), the reins of sovereignty were
relaxed, and hence it came to pass that the Alamannic brethren, Leuthar and Butilin, were allowed to make their objectless and
ill-managed raid into Italy. The utter failure of this expedition (554)
doubtless weakened the hold of the Franks on the valley of the Po, and three
years afterwards we learn that under the rule of Narses the Empire recovered
all that portion of Italy which Theudebert had once held.
It was, however, probably in consequence of this temporary possession of
Northern Italy, that the Franks held so much of the northern half of Raetia as
we find them to have possessed a few years later on, when they came into
collision with the Lombards.
In 558, a year after the Empire had reconquered the territory north of
the Po, Chlotochar I (as has been already said) became, by the death of his
last surviving brother, sole monarch of the Franks. Three years afterwards he
died, and his kingdom was divided between his four sons, whose number was
reduced to three in the year 567 by the death of Charibert, king of Paris. And
now we are upon the threshold of the Lombard invasion of Italy which, as the reader
may remember, occurred in the year 568. Thenceforward, for nearly two hundred
years, the Frankish kings had a Lombard state touching them as their
south-eastern frontier, and the intervening Alps did not prevent the two powers
from meeting, sometimes in friendship but more often with the clash of battle.
In the first eight years of their sojourn in Italy (568575), the Lombards made
five invasions of Frankish territory. These invasions, which harried the
districts of Dauphine and Provence, were conducted without military skill or generalship, and were without much difficulty repelled by
the soldiers of Guntram, the Frankish king of Burgundy. This senseless and
wanton warfare had one permanent effect, which proved eventually disastrous for
the Lombard state, since it left the valleys of Aosta and Susa, on the Italian side of the Alps, in the possession of the Franks.
The return visits of the Franks to Italy under Chramnichis,
about 576, and under Childebert between 584 and 590, were like those of the
Lombards, ravaging and plundering expeditions, effectual doubtless for the
devastation of the country, but powerless for its conquest. A noticeable fact
about the later invasions of Childebert is that they were undertaken at the
suggestion of the Byzantine Court and to some extent in cooperation with the
Byzantine armies, the lever which the Imperial Court used with the king of
Austrasia being the presence at Constantinople of the unfortunate child
Athanagild, the son of Childebert's sister, Ingunthis. This conjunction of
Imperial and Frankish power might, had it been often repeated, have proved
disastrous for the Lombard state : but, partly owing to ill-planned
combinations, it effected nothing of importance in 590 (when Maurice was
Emperor and Childebert Frankish king), nor was it repeated at any later time.
At the close of the sixth century, Agilulf, king of the Lombards, concluded ‘a
perpetual peace' with the Franks, both Italy and Germany being then menaced by
the invasions of the barbarous Avars; and this peace, probably owing to the
increasing impotence of the Merovingian kings, actually endured for a century
and a half. We must however except one trifling interruption soon after the
accession of Grimwald (662), when a Frankish army (perhaps espousing the cause
of the banished Perctarit) entered Italy from Provence, but was easily defeated
by the Lombard king near Asti in Piedmont.
The peace thus long maintained between the once hostile nations was not
only peace but sometimes alliance. Thus in the year 630, when Dagobert the
Frank, through the insolence of his ambassadors, had become involved in a war
with Samo, a Frankish merchant who had cunningly raised himself to the position
of king of the Wends or Slavs on Dagobert's eastern frontier, the Lombards sent
soldiers to the assistance of the Franks. These auxiliaries together with the
Alamanni, were victorious, and carried off a multitude of captives, while
Dagobert himself appears to have suffered a disastrous defeat.
And again, when Charles Martel (about 737) was somewhat hardly pressed
by a Saracen invasion of Provence, he called on his brother-in-law, Liutprand,
for help, and called not in vain. Liutprand led a great army across the
Maritime Alps, and at his approach the Saracens fled in terror.
During this century and a half of peace between the Franks and Italy,
Merovingian royalty had been sinking ever lower and lower into mere fatuity and
impotence, while the power of one great Austrasian house, which furnished a
succession of hereditary Prime Ministers to the State, had been almost as
steadily rising.
As to the Merovingians, the lifelong duel between the two queens,
Fredegundis and Brunichildis, the vices of Chilperic of Neustria, ‘the Nero and
Herod of his time' (the husband of Fredegundis), and the fierce energy of
Theodoric II, king of Burgundy (grandson of Brunichildis), shed a sort of lurid
light over the royalty of the descendants of Clovis at the close of the sixth
century. Chlotochar II, king of Neustria, son of Fredegundis, succeeded in
uniting all the Frankish kingdoms under his own sceptre (613), and annihilated
the rival Austrasian line. He and his son, Dagobert I, showed some energy and
power of rule, but after
Dagobert's death (638) the royal line became utterly effete, and for a
hundred years, kings rightly named Do-nothings (Faineants) nominally reigned
over Gaul and Germany. The short lives of these kings sufficiently indicate the
decay of their vital powers, caused by their vicious habits. The following are
the ages at which the kings died who reigned between Dagobert I and the last of
his line, Childeric III: twenty-six, twenty-four, twenty-seven, eighteen,
twenty, thirty-eight, seventeen, fifty (but this king only reigned five years,
and had the advantage of spending most of his life in exile), thirty-six,
twenty-four, and twenty-one.
The manner of life of these hapless inheritors of dignity divorced from
duty is described for us by Einhard, the biographer of Charlemagne, in a
passage which has been often quoted, and which, though modern criticism finds
in it somewhat to object to on the score of strict accuracy, may be quoted once
again.
“The Merovingian race, from which the Franks were wont to choose their
kings, is considered to have lasted down to king Childeric, who by order of
Stephen the Roman pontiff was deposed and tonsured and thrust into a monastery.
But though it may seem to have ended in him, it had for a long while possessed
no real vigour, nor had had anything to show for itself except the empty title
of king: for all the wealth and power of the kingdom were centred in the
Prefects of the Palace, who were called Majores Domus, and to whom supremacy in
the State belonged. For nothing else was left to the king except this, that
satisfied with the mere royal name, with his long locks and flowing beard, he
sat upon the throne and played at sovereignty, receiving the ambassadors who
came to him from all quarters, and repeating to them on their departure the
replies which he had been taught or ordered to deliver, as though they came
from his own decision. Thus, except the useless name of king and a precarious
allowance which the Prefect of the Palace afforded him as he thought fit, he
possessed nothing else of his own, save one estate (villa) with a very poor
revenue, on which he had his house, and out of which he kept the slender train
of servants who performed the necessary services for him and gave him a show of
obedience. When he must needs go on a journey, he went in a wagon, which was
drawn by yoked oxen with a rustic cowherd driving them. Thus he went to his
palace, thus to the public assembly of the people, which was held once a year
to deliberate on the affairs of the realm, and thus was he wont to return to
his home. As for the administration of the kingdom and all those things which
had to be done or arranged for at home or abroad, they were all provided for by
the Prefect of the Palace”.
This picture may be slightly over-coloured. It is possible that some of
the details, such as the oxen drawing the rude royal chariot, may really be due
only to the inherent conservatism of the Teutonic race, which preserved in the
king's household at Soissons or Paris archaic usages derived from bygone
centuries when the king dwelt in a rustic hut on a forest-clearing in the heart
of Germany. But the broad outline of the picture is undoubtedly correct. The
Merovingian kings in the fifth generation from Clovis had sunk into mere
ciphers. Intent on drinking their cup of muddy pleasure to the dregs, they left
all the hard work of life, and all the duties of royalty, in war, in judgment,
in finance, to the servants who clustered about the Court; and of these servants
one, foremost in rank and position, gathered up the reins of government as they
fell from the nerveless hands of the Merovingians, and became king in fact,
while they for a hundred years remained kings in name. This allpowerful servant was the Mayor of the Palace, and when his power was once firmly
established, it was too late for the descendants of Clovis, even had a man of
energy and virtue arisen among them, to recover the lost dominion.
The institution of Mayor of the Palace was not peculiar to the Frankish
nation. Traces of it may be found among the Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Lombards,
perhaps even among the Vandals but nowhere else had it the same great
development which it attained in the Frankish people. That some such official
should emerge out of chaos, that many of the powers of the State should
crystallize round him, was however inherent in the nature of things. Clovis and
his sons, men of ruthless will and barbarous energy, had formed a State whose
corner-stone was military conquest. Apparently the old liberties, the ancient
germs of self-government, which had existed among the Franks as in nearly all
the Teutonic peoples, had been crushed out under the centralizing sway of these
barbarian kings, flattered and caressed as they had been by the Catholic
ecclesiastics of Gaul. The old tribal nobility of the Salians and Ripuarians
had probably also disappeared, and had been replaced by a new order of nobility
who drew all their splendour from the royal majesty in whose rays they basked.
The Palace had become the State, and he who was great in the king's household
was great in the Frankish realm.
The inevitable limitation of autocracy comes from the love of ease.
After all, government means work, and though for a few generations men may be
found so lustful of power that they will ‘spurn delights and live laborious
days', in order to rule with power over a mighty empire, in the course of this
tremendous energy wears itself out. Some member of the royal family comes to
the throne who finds that ‘slumber is more sweet than toil', and that power is
not worth having at the price of an utter sacrifice of all the restful
pleasures of life. He hands over the reins of government to some obsequious
servant who is only too glad to take them from him and to govern in the king's
name. The Merovingian has found his Mayor of the Palace, the Bourbon king his
Richelieu or his Alberoni, the Mikado of Japan his Taicoon.
It is possible that at first the duties of the Mayor of the Palace were
strictly those of a master of the household. Merovingian royalty owned vast
domains, cultivated for the most part by slave labour. The king and his great
train of courtiers went in progress from one villa, or big estate, to another,
consuming the produce of each villa in succession, and then moving on to that
which was nearest. The mere superintendence of the receipts and expenditure of
one of these great domains was in itself a considerable business, and may at
first have been the chief concernment of the Mayor of the Palace, for in his
humbler days it is possible that there may have been one Major Domus to every
residence of a Frankish king. In the course of time, however—and by this I mean
within a century from the death of Clovis—the Mayor had become such an
important person that there was only one of his class in each of the four
kingdoms, into which the Frankish monarchy generally fell apart, one for
Austrasia, one for Neustria, one for Burgundy, one (perhaps) for Aquitaine.
And what were the duties of the Mayor of the Palace when he had thus
emerged from the condition of a head-servant into that of a great official of
the State? Perhaps we may say that still his chief functions were financial.
Like the Comes Rerum Privatarum of the later
empire, it was his business to administer the revenues, not now of one villa or
palace, but of all the royal domains within the limits of his master's kingdom.
A most important part of his functions in this capacity was that of confirming
alienations of the royal domain. Throughout the seventh century, as we have
reason to believe, the new landed aristocracy which was forming itself was
getting grants of beneficia either from the Church or the Crown; and a weak
Merovingian king was under great temptation to strengthen his party by lavish
grants of the Crown lands to importunate and blustering petitioners. Just at
this point, therefore, the control exercised by the Mayor of the Palace would
have an important effect on the fortunes of the aristocracy, since it was in
his power to forbid all grants of beneficia to his foes and to encourage
similar grants to his friends.
He had, moreover, such power over the collection of the taxes (however
rude and undeveloped the Merovingian system of taxation may have been) as gave
him great opportunities for enriching himself while professing to serve the
royal exchequer. Thus it was matter of bitter complaint against Protadius, Mayor of the Palace of Burgundy under Theodoric
(grandson of Brunichildis), that though a man of great ability and energy, he
committed grievous injustice against individuals, straining the rights of the
royal fisc, ingeniously striving to fill the royal treasury at the expense of
private persons and at the same time to enrich himself. The general attitude
which the Mayor of the Palace at first assumed, especially in Neustria, was
that of championship of the rights of the Crown against the aristocracy, though
in the end he became strong enough to set Crown and aristocracy alike at
defiance.
Lastly, in addition to the powers of administration and finance which
the Mayor of the Palace exercised, he must have eventually gathered into his
hands the supreme command of the nation-army of the Franks, though apparently
we have but little information of the steps by which a Grand Chamberlain was
thus transformed into a Commander-in-Chief.
After this brief sketch of the general character of the office of Major
Domus, let us trace the fortunes of that Austrasian family which more than all
others made it illustrious.
