ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
CHAPTER III
PIPPIN OF HERISTAL AND CHARLES MARTEL
In the year 656, the same year which saw the death of Sigibert of
Austrasia and the premature attempt of Grimwald to fill the vacant throne,
Clovis II of Neustria died also. His sons, (Chlotochar III, 656-670; Childeric
II, 660-673; Theodoric HI, 673-691 ; their cousin Dagobert II, son of Sigibert
II, king of Austrasia, 674-678), Merovingians of the usual imbecile type, were
for the next thirty years the nominal rulers of the three Frankish kingdoms, at
first under the regency of their mother, the sainted Balthildis, an
Anglo-Saxon, originally the slave of a Mayor of the Palace, afterwards wife of
Clovis II. But the one figure which dominates the obscure and bloody history of
the quarter of a century following the fall of Grimwald, is that of Ebroin, who
was during the greater part of that time Mayor of the Palace in Neustria and
Burgundy. He had more than one sharp struggle for power, especially with the
turbulent Leodegarius, bishop of Autun, who figures
in the ecclesiastical calendar as St. Leger; but from all these struggles, from
the prison and the convent-cell, he emerged triumphant. A hard, cruel, and
unscrupulous man he was, yet perhaps as good a ruler as the putrescent western
Frankish kingdoms of that day deserved, and he did something to arrest the
rapid process of disintegration which had set in.
Meanwhile in Austrasia a position somewhat similar to that of Ebroin had
been held by a certain Mayor of the Palace named Wulfwald,
who for eighteen years seems to have striven to uphold the royal power and the
authority of the central government against the usurpations of the nobles. In
674, in order to avoid union with Neustria, the half-forgotten son of Sigibert
was fetched from the Irish monastery to which, seventeen years before, Grimwald
had banished him, and was raised to the Austrasian throne under the title of
Dagobert II. In five years, however, his troubled reign was at an end, and then
it seemed inevitable that the Neustrian king, whose rule, as all men knew,
meant simply the rule of the terrible Ebroin, must reign in Austrasia. To avert
this danger, the nobles put an army in the field (678), and the leaders of that
army were Pippin of Heristal and a confederate, possibly a kinsman named
Martin. Battle was joined, probably in the neighbourhood of Laon, and the
Austrasians were routed with terrible slaughter. Pippin escaped: Martin shut
himself up in Laon, and was besieged there by Ebroin. He was summoned to
surrender, and the messengers of Ebroin swore to him on certain boxes, which
were believed to contain very holy relics of saints, that his life should be
spared. Unfortunately for Martin the boxes when opened were found to be empty,
and the tremendous oath could therefore be violated with impunity. He and his
comrades were put to death, and Austrasia, like her sister kingdoms, came under
the harsh rule of Ebroin.
Three years after this defeat of the Austrasians, Ebroin perished, a
victim to private revenge. He was assassinated by a certain Frankish nobleman
named Hermenfrid, whose property he had confiscated,
and who, waiting by the door of his house in the grey of the morning, slew him
as he was setting out for mass. The thought that he had thus been sent out of
life ‘unhousel'd, unannealed,’ gave a keener edge to
the joy of the avenger.
The murderer of Ebroin fled to Pippin for refuge, and the successor of
Ebroin in the Mayoralty of the Palace, who was named Waratto, made a treaty of
peace, exchanging hostages with the same Austrasian chief, whose fortunes were
evidently now beginning to recover from the effects of the great disaster of
Laon. Moreover, there were dissensions in the family of Waratto. These
Neustrian mayors lacked that instinct of family cohesion which was
so strong in the early generations of the Arnulfings. Waratto’s son Ghislemar,
apparently an able but shifty person, intrigued against his father and thrust
him out of the Majordomat (683). He carried on the
perpetual feud of Neustria against Austrasia, fighting a hard battle against
Pippin at Namur, and probably defeating him, for we are told that ‘after
swearing a false oath, he slew very many of the noble followers of Pippin'. Returning
to his home, however, ‘he was struck by the hand of God, and, as he deserved,
yielded up his most wicked spirit' (684). Waratto hereupon recovered his
dignity of Mayor of the Palace, which he held for two years, years of peace
between him and the Austrasian chief.
On the death of Waratto in 686, he was succeeded in the office of Major
Domus by his son-in-law Berchar, a man whose small
stature and pitiable self-earned for him the contempt of the Neustrian nobles.
In the war which almost as a matter of course was waged between Neustria and
Austrasia, the disaffection of the Neustrian nobility led to a momentous result.
The armies met at Textri in Picardy (687). The puppet
king Theodoric III was there as well as his insignificant Major Domus, but the
best men in Neustria seem to have been in the opposite camp, and Pippin won a
decisive victory. Berchar escaped from the field of
battle, but only to die at home by the weapon of an assassin, instigated, it
was said, by his mother-in-law Ausfled. Pippin
obtained possession of the person of the Merovingian king and of the royal
hoard, arranged all things in the palace according to his good will and
pleasure, and returned into Austrasia, now practically the unquestioned lord of
all the three kingdoms.
The year 687, the date of the battle of Textri,
is one of three, which are the most noteworthy steps in the ascent of the Arnulfing house to the headship of Western Europe. The
dreary and chaotic period of miscellaneous mayoralties is over. From
henceforward, with one very slight break, the supremacy of the great Austrasian
family is unquestioned and incontestable.
Of the twenty-seven years (687-714) during which Pippin of Heristal was
the virtual sovereign of France, we have very meagre accounts in the
chronicles. Faineant Merovingian kings, Theodoric III and his sons, come and
go, but history refuses to take account of them save to notice that though they
still receive the flattering titles ‘renowned' and ‘glorious', they are
actually spoken of as subject to their nominal servant the Mayor of the Palace.
The principal figure of this period, after Pippin's, seems to be that of
Ratbod, chief or king of the Frisians, who remained obdurate in his Paganism,
and with whom Pippin had more than one sharp encounter, and whom he at last
decisively defeated at Durestede near Utrecht. We are somewhat surprised to
find a daughter of this ‘Gentile' chief given in marriage to Pippin's son
Grimwald, but we may conjecture that she was received into the Christian Church
before the espousals, and that the marriage was a pledge of the alliance and
consequent peace which seems to have prevailed between Pippin and the Frisians
for the last twenty years of his Majordomat.
We hear of Pippin also as invading the country of the Alamanni, that is
to say, the region afterwards known as Swabia. From this and other slight
indications, we may infer that while ruling Neustria and Burgundy by the means
either of a faithful adherent or of a son holding the office of Major Domus in
those kingdoms, his own work was chiefly Austrasian, and consisted in
re-establishing the Frankish power in those lands east of the Rhine which,
under the rule of the effete Merovingians, had been gradually dropping off from
the monarchy.
The last years of Pippin of Heristal were clouded by family bereavement.
By his wife Plectrude, who is spoken of as a ‘noble and very prudent woman',
but who seems to have been ambitious and perhaps somewhat intriguing, he had
two sons, Drogo and Grimwald. In the year 708, Drogo died of fever and was laid
in the basilica of his sainted ancestor Arnulf at Metz. In 714 the second son
Grimwald, whom we have just met with as son-in-law of the Frisian chief, and
who was already Major Domus of Neustria, was on his way to visit his father who
was lying sick at Jupille on the Meuse in the
neighbourhood of Liege. Turning to pray at the basilica of St. Lambert in
Liege, he was waylaid and slain by ‘a certain most cruel man, a son of Belial,
the heathen Rantgar.’ The mention of the heathenism
of Rantgar suggests the conjecture that he was a
Frisian, and that the cause of quarrel may have been connected with Grimwald's
marriage with the daughter of Ratbod.
Grimwald left one son, Theudwald, the
offspring not of his marriage with the Frisian princess, but of a connection
unblessed by the Church. This boy appears to have been at once promoted to his
father’s Neustrian mayoralty, and on the death of his grand-father Pippin,
which happened soon after (hastened very probably by the tragedy of Grimwald's
murder), he was recognized as the heir to all his greatness. Of course the
nominal rule of such a child implied a regency, and that regency was also of
course wielded by the ambitious widow of Pippin. As the chronicler, who is
somewhat of an admirer of the new regent, tells us, “Plectrude with her
grandsons and the king governed all things with discreet rule”. The use of the
word ‘grandsons' in the plural probably points to the association in the
government of a son of the deceased Drogo, named Hugo, who was at this time
about eighteen years of age, but who had already entered the Church, and
afterwards rose to be abbot of St. Wandril and archbishop of Rouen.
The position of affairs, as indicated by the chronicler, was certainly a
sufficiently absurd one. Here was this nominal king Dagobert III, now fifteen
years of age. His Mayor of the Palace, that is, his confidential adviser and
practical man of affairs, was a little child of perhaps six years old: but that
child again was advised, and of course absolutely governed, by his grandmother,
a ‘very prudent’ but not very popular person, and a young clerical cousin who
was mounting the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment.
What made the situation more preposterous was that there was already in
the Arnulfing house a man of full age, a son of the
just deceased statesman, one in every way admirably qualified to hold the reins
of power, and kept in the background only by a beldame's jealousy. This was Charles, ever after to be known as Charles Martel, son of
Pippin of Heristal and Alpaida. Whether Alpaida were wife or concubine cannot be safely said, but
as she was living at the same time as Plectrude, and as her son was younger
than the sons of her rival, the legitimacy of Charles can only be maintained by
resorting to an elaborate theory of divorces and remarriages for which there
does not seem to be any warrant in the authorities. The Arnulfings,
though not as outrageously profligate as the Merovingians, were notoriously lax
in their marriage relations, which with them tended to assume the character of
polygamy, and legitimacy or illegitimacy was not a matter of supreme
importance.
The origin of the name Charles, which has since figured so prominently
in the royal houses, not of France and Germany alone, but also of Spain,
England, Sweden, and Naples, is thus told by an old Saga. At the time of his
birth a messenger was sent to inform the child's father. Bursting into the
presence of the great Austrasian, he found him sitting with Plectrude by his
side; and, perhaps overawed by the presence of the rival princess, the
messenger stammered out, “Long live the king! It is a Karl”, using a colloquial
term for a boy. “And a good name too”, laughed the delighted if somewhat
embarrassed father. “Let him be called Karl”.
Fearing the obvious danger to her rule which existed in the person of
this hated step-son, Plectrude immediately on her husband's death shut up
Charles in prison. Then burst forth a storm which very nearly shattered the
Frankish monarchy. The Neustrians, who had no mind to
accept the rule of a baby Mayor of the Palace from the hated Austrasians,
proclaimed one of their own countrymen, Raginfrid,
Mayor, and declared war upon Plectrude and her grandson. In a battle which was
fought in the Cotian forest (near Compiegne), the
Austrasians were utterly defeated, the boy-mayor. Theudwald fled from the field, and apparently the Merovingian king Dagobert III fell into
the hands of Raginfrid (715). On Dagobert's death
shortly after, a certain priest of Merovingian extraction named Daniel was
fetched out of the church and proclaimed king under the title of Chilperic II.
Here at last was a Merovingian king of full age, for this Daniel was a man of
between forty and fifty; and when the long locks began to grow where the
clerical tonsure had been, he was probably able to play the part with more
dignity than the boy-kings his predecessors. He even seems to have entered with
some energy into the struggle with the Austrasian house, but in that struggle,
however necessary it may have seemed for the preservation of Merovingian
kingship, the far more important interests of the great Frankish monarchy which
Pippin of Heristal had so assiduously promoted were like to have been utterly
ruined. The Neustrian king and his Mayor joined hands with the old heathen
Ratbod king of the Frisians, pressed on to the Meuse, besieged Plectrude in
Cologne, and at last having received from the dismayed dowager a large part of
the treasure accumulated by her husband, marched back into their own land
(716).
The one favourable symptom in this perilous conjuncture of affairs was,
that in the confusion caused by the civil war, Charles Martel had escaped from
his step-mother's keeping. Gradually the loyal followers, the leudes of his father, gathered round him. Defeated at first
with great loss by Frisian Ratbod, and unsuccessful in his war against the Neustrians, he still held on his way, and now, falling on
the triumphant invaders at a place called Amblaya, he
inflicted upon them a severe defeat and carried back the paternal treasure to
Cologne. A still more crushing defeat which Chilperic and Raginfrid sustained next year (717) at Vincy near Cambrai was the crisis of Charles's
fortunes. He visited Paris as a conqueror, and when he returned to Cologne
Plectrude handed over to him the remaining treasures of his father and retired
into obscurity. His nephew Theudwald appears to have
taken orders as an ecclesiastic and to have died not many years after. Charles
was now the admitted head of the Arnulfing house, the
acknowledged Mayor of the Palace for Austrasia : and though the civil war with
Neustria still lingered, chiefly owing to the powerful aid which Raginfrid received from Eudo, the virtually independent
duke of Aquitaine, it was ended in 720 by a convenient compromise. Along with
the Neustrian treasure Chilperic II was handed over to Charles, whose own
puppet- king had just died, and who could therefore easily admit him to the
vacant dignity. Raginfrid, whose opposition was
obstinate and protracted, does not seem to have been finally subdued till 725,
when he was allowed to retain the position of Count of Angers.
Thus after our review of two centuries of Frankish history we have come
down to the accession to power of the hero whose period of rule, as before
stated, almost exactly coincided with that of the last great Lombard king,
Liutprand.
The one event of world-historical importance in Charles Martel's
leadership of the Franks was his victory over the Mussulman invaders of Gaul in
the year 732. In 711 the Moors (as the Saracen conquerors were called owing to
their having entered Europe from Mauretania) had crossed the Straits of
Gibraltar and had in one battle overthrown the effete, priest-ridden monarchy
of the Visigoths. Five years afterwards they entered Gaul : four years after
that (720) they took Narbonne and made the old Gothic province of Septimania their own. Eudo of Aquitaine, who had just made
his peace with Charles Martel, compelled them in that year to retreat from the
unconquered city of Toulouse, and that ineffectual siege may be considered as
the first sign of the reflux of the wave of Saracen invasion. But five years
later (725) the Moors had actually penetrated as far as Autun in Burgundy. How little most students of modern history grasp the fact that the
standard of the Crescent once floated within a hundred miles of the Lake of
Geneva! During these years the opposition of Eudo to the Moorish advance was
intermitted, and from the champion of Christianity he seemed in danger of
becoming its betrayer. They were on his part years of revolt against Frankish
supremacy, and of alliance, even matrimonial alliance, with the Mussulman, for
Eudo's daughter Lampegia was given in marriage to a
Berber chief named Munuza. In 731 there was war in
earnest between Charles Martel and Eudo of Aquitaine. The Austrasian twice
crossed the Loire, defeated Eudo, and returned home each time with great booty.
But in 732 these relations were suddenly changed. Eudo's son-in-law the
Berber chief had been put to death by the lawful Moorish governor of Spain, and
now that governor, Abderrahman, crossed the Pyrenees with a mighty army, intent
on punishing Eudo, but doubtless also intent on adding Gaul as well as Spain to
the countries which professed the faith of Mohammed. Laying waste the land and
burning the churches, the Saracens reached the Garonne and laid siege to
Bordeaux. Eudo, striving to deliver the city, was defeated with terrible loss
and fled to his late enemy Charles, imploring his succour. The invaders pressed
on by the great Roman road which led northward from the Garonne to the Loire.
They reached Poitiers, where they burned the church of St. Hilary: they were
threatening the yet more venerated sanctuary of St. Martin at Tours. But Count
Eudo had not reckoned in vain on the statesmanlike generosity of Charles
Martel, who, forgetful of all the recent causes of quarrel between Austrasia
and Aquitaine, determined at any cost to repel the onslaught of the Islamites. Having collected a large army, in which probably
Frisians, Saxons and Alamanni served as well as Franks, he moved rapidly across
the Loire and took up a strong position near the town of Old Poitiers between
the rivers Elain and Vienne, barring the road to Tours.
A terrible battle followed. The fervour of the sons of desert, who
perchance like the first warriors of Islam deemed that they already saw the
flashing eyes of the houris waiting to receive them into Paradise, was met, was
chilled, was broken by the stolid courage of the soldiers from Rhineland, who
stood, says the historian, rigid and immovable as a wall of ice. Yet from that
icy wall flashed forth countless swords wielded by strong arms and held as in
the grasp of iron hands; and under their strokes Abderrahman himself and
thousands of his bravest warriors fell prostrate. Grievous however were also
the losses of the Frankish army, but with stout hearts they nerved themselves
for the expected contest of the morrow. But when the morrow dawned the long
rows of the tents of the Saracens were seen to be strangely solitary and
unpeopled. The Franks feared a snare and an ambuscade, but gradually their
scouts venturing into the hostile lines brought back word that the camp was
indeed deserted, that there was an abundance of spoil in the tents, that the
enemy, disheartened by the terrible slaughter of the previous day, had fled
under cover of the night. The scene which followed must have been like that
described by the Jewish historian after the flight of the Syrian host. The
Austrasian soldiers peaceably divided among themselves the immense spoil of the
Saracens, and returned with joy to their own land, where doubtless many
barbarian fingers handled and barbarian eyes appraised with wonder the tissues
woven in the looms of Damascus and the cunning work of the goldsmiths of
Seville.
Thus was the great blow struck, and Europe, at least Europe north of the
Pyrenees, was freed from the nightmare of Mussulman invasion. Charles Martel
was hailed as the great deliverer of Christendom, and popular report, which
‘lied like a bulletin', so magnified his victory that barely half a century
after the event an honest and sober historian like Paulus Diaconus could write, and could expect his readers to believe, that the Franks slew
375,000 Saracens, with a loss of only 1,500 of their own countrymen.
Three years after this great victory Count Eudo Later died (735), and a
Frankish invasion of Aquitaine seems to have been necessary in order to reduce
his son Hunold to the same degree of dependence on the central monarchy in
which Eudo had acquiesced since the day of his great deliverance. Two years
later (737) there was again war between the Saracens and Charles, but not
apparently on the vast scale of the earlier campaign. The invaders were aided
by disunion or treachery among the Christians. A certain duke Maurontus, in league with other rebel nobles of Provence
who probably resented the pretensions of the Austrasian Mayor to rule their
southern land, conspired with the Saracens of Septimania and enabled them to possess themselves of the strong city of Avignon as well as
of the more exposed city of Arles. Charles, who was now growing old, and who
was besides always more or less engaged in hostile operations against the
Frisians and Saxons on his northern border, sent his brother, or half-brother,
‘an industrious man, Childebrand', with a large army and many dukes and counts
under him to recover the lost territory. Our interest in this industrious
kinsman or offshoot of the great Austrasian house is increased when we find
that it is to him and his son Nibelung that we owe the order for the
composition of those chronicles (the Continuation of Fredegarius) from which
almost all our slender knowledge of the history of this period is derived.
Avignon was blockaded : Charles himself appeared upon the scene : there were
the sounding of trumpets and the shouting of warriors ‘as at Jericho', but
there were also engines of war and ropes and cords before which ere long the
defence fell powerless. The Franks streamed in at the breach, slaying and
burning, and Avignon was recovered from the infidels.
From Avignon Charles pressed on across the Rhone, defeated the Saracens
in a great battle near the sea-coast south of Narbonne, and slew their leader
Omar, but failed to take Narbonne itself, though he took Nimes and Agde and demolished their walls. Through the meagre
sentences of the chronicler we seem dimly to discern that, as already hinted,
there was something more in this campaign than the opposition between Christian
and Moslem, that the Romanised and meridional children of Provence resented the
domination of the rough Teutonic warriors from Rhineland, and were even willing
to join hands with the Saracens in order to break the Austrasian yoke from off
their necks.
It was apparently at the time of this Saracen invasion that Charles
Martel asked for and obtained that help from his brother-in-law Liutprand king
of the Lombards which has been described in a previous volume.
Next year Charles again sent Childebrand to Provence to complete the
work of subjugation, and again followed in his kinsman's footsteps. Though
Narbonne was not taken and Septimania remained
Saracen, all Provence was apparently won back and firmly united to the Frankish
monarchy. The traitor Maurontus escaped ‘by safest
ways over inaccessible rocks', doubtless, that is to say, by the narrow gorges
and snow- blocked passes of the Maritime Alps.
Charles Martel was now sole ruler of the great Frankish monarchy, for on
the death of the faineant king Theodoric IV in 737 he had not thought it
necessary to put another puppet in his place. On his return from this last
expedition to Provence (in 738) to his villa at Verimbria near Compiegne he began to sicken, and for the remaining three years of his
life he was in feeble health. While he was in this condition came those two
embassies which have been already described, from Pope Gregory III beseeching
his assistance against the Lombard kings Liutprand and Hildeprand. They
returned ineffectual, though they brought to the great Mayor, besides many
other precious gifts, the chains of St. Peter, the keys of his sepulchre, and
the honour (which it was not for the Pope to bestow) of a Roman consulship. But
Charles, besides the natural dissuasions of enfeebled health and approaching
old age, had no inclination to engage for the Pope's sake in a war with a
kinsman, an ally, and the knightly godfather of his son Pippin. Any warlike
deeds that had to be done in the few remaining years of his supremacy were done
by his sons. He tarried peaceably at home, gave great gifts to the church of
St. Denis at Paris in which his bones were to be laid, and then departing to
his favourite villa of Cariciacum (now
Quierzy-sur-Oise) he was there seized with a fever of which he died on the 22nd
of October, 741.
In his reign (for such we may truly call his mayoralty) of nearly
twenty-five years, Charles had accomplished great things. With many a warlike
blow, corresponding to his surname the Hammer, he had welded the
once-discordant kingdoms, Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy, into unity. He had
done something towards the more difficult work of forcing Aquitaine to renounce
its semi-independence and become a loyal member of the Frankish monarchy. In
the north and in the south he had shown himself a valorous champion of the
Christian Church militant, since not only had he repelled the Mussulman
invasions of Gaul, but by his perpetual and in the main successful wars with
the Frisians he had made possible those missionary expeditions by which our
countryman Wynfrith, better known as Boniface,
chastised the heathen, destroyed their idols, and with energy of arm as well as
of tongue made Christianity triumphant along the whole course of the Rhine.
But all these valiant deeds on behalf of the Church availed not to save
the memory of Charles Martel from the ecclesiastical ban to which he alone of
all the early descendants of St. Arnulf is obnoxious. The ancestors of Charles
in their upward struggle towards the supreme power had uniformly leant upon the
arm of the Church : but that Church in the disorganization of the later
Merovingian monarchy had grown so rich and so headstrong that probably any wise
and statesmanlike ruler was bound to come into collision with its hierarchs.
That Charles's acts in derogation of its power were all wise and statesmanlike
it would be rash to assert. He was a great military chieftain, with a number of
hungry followers to provide for. Not only the consolidation of his own power in
Neustria and Austrasia, but his border wars with Frisians and Saxons, his
tremendous struggle with the Saracens, all had to be carried on by the help of
generals and officers versed in the arts of war, who assuredly were not
backward in urging their claims to tangible rewards. But the great Crown lands,
out of which in earlier days a Merovingian king might have appeased his hungry
followers, were, there is reason to think, in large measure by this time
alienated to ecclesiastical purposes. It is probable that a large part of the
land of Gaul was now held of the Church under the name of beneficia by tenants
who were bound to make a certain yearly payment to their ecclesiastical lords.
What Charles Martel appears to have done in the difficult circumstances in
which he found himself, was not indeed to order a general confiscation of
Church property—of that he seems to be unjustly accused— but in many cases to
use the right of resumption of grants which at least theoretically resided in
the Crown, in order to take away lands from a bishopric here or a monastery
there, and bestow them on some stout warrior whom he was sending as Count to
rule a distant province or to fight the Frisian or the Saracen. In many such
cases the actual occupation of the soil would not be changed, but the holder of
the beneficium would be ordered to pay his rent (as we should call it) not to
the Churchman but to the Count.
Of course these acts of spoliation, however necessary they may have been
for the salvation of the state, were resented by the ecclesiastics at whose
expense they were performed. A proceeding which looked less violent but which
was really far more perilous to the best life of the Church, was the bestowal
on Charles's own henchmen—mere warriors without any pretence to the religious
character—of the prelacies and abbacies which were endowed for a very different
purpose. Nor did he confine himself to bestowing one only at a time upon his
favourites. The pluralist abuse now also crept into the Church. His follower
Milo (who was a clergyman only by his tonsure) received the headship of the
convents of Trier and Rheims; and his nephew Hugo was actually crowned with the
three mitres of Paris, Rouen, and Bayeux, and was at the same time abbot of
Fontenelle and Jumieges.
Such a high-handed policy towards the Church was certain to excite the
anger of the ecclesiastics who had it in their power to bless or to curse, in
this world at any rate, if not in the next. Possibly also Charles's refusal to
aid the Pope against the Lombards may have added an article to the indictment
against him. In the next century, Archbishop Hincmar, writing the life of St.
Eucherius, bishop of Orleans, related that the saint, being one day engaged in
prayer, was allowed to have a beatific vision of the other world, in the course
of which by the gift of the Lord he was permitted to see Charles tormented in
the lowest hell. Enquiring the cause of this punishment, Eucherius was told by
an angel that in Charles's case the judgment of the last day was anticipated,
and that he had to suffer the punishment not only of his own sins but of the
sins of all those who had devised lands and houses for the support of the
servants of Christ and for lighting candles in the churches, but whose pious
intentions had been frustrated by his confiscations. On recovering
consciousness the saint called to him St. Boniface and Fulrad abbot of St. Denis and bade them go to the church and open Charles's tomb. If
they found that empty they would surely then believe that he had seen a true
vision. They went; they opened the vault; a dragon issued forth, and all the
interior of the vault was black and charred with fire. “This is written”, says
the chronicler, “that all who read it may take note of the righteous damnation
of him by whom the property of the Church has been unjustly taken away”.
So wrote Hincmar about the middle of the ninth century. The story is
hard to believe, since the bishop Eucherius died three years before Charles
Martel.
