ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
CHAPTER VI.
THE ANOINTING OF PIPPIN.
On the abdication of Carloman the stream of events in the Frankish state
flowed on for a few years with little change. If there was any thought of
Carloman's sons succeeding to their father's inheritance, such thought was soon
abandoned. Pippin is seen both in Austrasia and Neustria ruling with
unquestioned power, nor do we hear any hint of his being a regent on behalf of
his nephews. The first act of his sole mayoralty was to release his
half-brother Grifo from the captivity in which Carloman had kept him for six
years. It proved to be an ill-judged act of mercy, for Grifo, embittered no
doubt by his long imprisonment, still refused to acquiesce in his exclusion
from sovereign power. It was true that Pippin gave him an honourable seat in
his palace, with countships and large revenues. These failed however to soothe
his angry spirit. He gathered many of the nobles to his banner, but, unable
apparently to conquer any strongholds within the Frankish realm, he fled from
the land, and accompanied by a band of young noblemen bent on adventure, he
sought the country of the Saxons and the tribe of the Nordo-Squavi.
These men were possibly descendants of those Swabians whose settlement in the
country of the Saxons and wars with their predecessors returning from the
conquest of Italy have been described in a previous volume. Pippin with his
army pursued his brother into the Saxon territory. The two hosts encamped not
far from the river Ocher in the duchy of Brunswick,
but parted without a battle, the Saxons having apparently feared to trust the
fortune of war against an adversary of superior strength. Grifo fled to
Bavaria, the country of his mother Swanahild, where the opportune death of his
cousin and brother-in-law, duke Otilo, seemed to open a convenient field for his
ambitious designs. He was at first successful. His sister Hiltrudis and her child, the little duke Tassilo, fell into his hands. For a short time
Grifo, who received help both from Bavaria and from Alamannic rebels against the Frankish supremacy, succeeded in establishing himself at
Ratisbon, but soon had to meet the irresistible Frankish army. The Bavarian
rebels retreated to the further bank of the Inn; Pippin prepared to cross it
with his ships, and the Bavarians, affrighted, renounced the combat. Grifo was
taken prisoner and was carried back into Frank-land. His long-suffering brother
gave him the lordship of twelve Neustrian counties, with Le Mans for his
capital; but all was in vain to win back that rebellious soul. In Aquitaine, in
Italy, wherever there was an enemy of Pippin, there was Grifo's friend. We will
anticipate the course of events by five years in order to end the story of this
often-pardoned Pretender. In 753, when a storm was already brewing between
Pippin and the Lombard king, Grifo essayed to pass over Mont Cenis into Italy
to join his brother's foes. He was stopped at S. Jean de Maurienne by two noblemen loyal to Pippin, Theudo, count of Vienne, and Frederic, count
of Transjurane Burgundy. The skirmish which followed
seems to have been a desperate one; for all three leaders, both Grifo and the
Burgundian counts, were slain. ‘Whose death, though he was a traitor to his
country, was a cause of grief to Pippin'.
In these central years of the eighth century, where the annals give us
such scanty historical details, our fullest source of information as to the
thoughts which were passing through the minds of the leaders of the people is
furnished by the copious correspondence of the Saxon apostle Boniface. His
letters to Pope Zacharias and that Pope's answers are especially interesting,
and give us on the whole a favourable impression of the character of both men.
They are no doubt, as we have already seen in the case of Aldebert and Clemens
, too anxious to use the power of the state for the suppression of what they
deem to be heresy, and they may have been too confident in the correctness of
their own faculty of distinguishing between divinely inspired truth and
dangerous error. For instance, the theory advanced by Virgil, bishop of
Salzburg, that there is another world beneath our feet, with inhabitants of its
own and lighted by its own sun and moon, does not appear to us such a wicked,
atheistic and soul-destroying doctrine as it appeared to Zacharias and
Boniface. But in the main, the energies of Pope and Archbishop were directed in
the right channel. They laboured together for the eradication of the
superstitious, sometimes impure or cruel practices of Teutonic heathendom, for
the maintenance of the sanctity of the Christian family, for the restoration of
discipline and the elevation of the standard of morals among the nominally
Christian Franks of Western Gaul. Throughout this period we are impressed by
the moral superiority of both the Saxons and the Germans to the Gallo-Roman
inhabitants of Neustria and Burgundy. The ‘transmarine Saxons' (as our
countrymen are called) and the dwellers by the Rhine and in Thuringia remained
much longer stiff and stubborn in their idolatry than the Burgundians or the
Salian Franks, but when they did embrace Christianity they submitted to its
moral restraints more loyally and aspired after holiness of life more ardently
than the inhabitants of those western regions into whose life there had entered
not only the softness but something also of the corruptness of the old Roman
civilization. It is true that this very same quality of whole-heartedness, as
has been already pointed out, made the newly-converted nations much more
enthusiastic champions than their Neustrian neighbours of the spiritual
autocracy of Rome. The Anglo-Saxon missionary and his German disciples are the Ultramontanes of the eighth century, while even in the
indiscipline of the Neustrian ecclesiastics we seem to perceive the germ of the
famous Gallican liberties of a later age.
One of the perplexities which pressed most heavily on the conscience of
Boniface, and on which he sought the advice both of the Pope and of his brother
bishops in England, was the doubt how far he could without sacrifice of his
principles exchange the ordinary courtesies of social life with the demoralized
and (as he deemed them) heretical prelates of the Frankish court. “I swore,” he
says, “on the body of St. Peter to the venerable Pope Gregory II, when he sent
me forth to preach the word of faith to the German nations, that I would help
all true and regularly ordained bishops and presbyters in word and deed, and
would abstain from the communion of false priests, hypocrites, and seducers of
the people if I could not bring them back into the way of salvation. Now such
men as these last do I find, when on account of the Church’s necessities I
visit the court of the prince of the Franks. I cannot avoid such visits, for
without the patronage of that prince I can neither govern the Church itself,
nor defend the presbyters and clergy, the monks and the handmaidens of God; nor
can I without his mandate and the terror of his name prohibit the rites of the
pagans and the sacrilegious worship of idols which prevail in Germany. This
being so, though I do not join with these men in the Holy Communion, and though
I feel that I have in spirit fulfilled my vow, since my soul has not entered
into their counsel, yet I have not been able to abstain from bodily contact
with them. Thus on the one side I am pressed by the obligations of my oath, and
on the other by the thought of the loss which will be sustained by my people if
I should not visit the prince of the Franks.”
In answer to this case of conscience the bishop of Winchester reminded
Boniface of the words of St. Paul, ‘for then must we needs go out of the
world'; and Zacharias assured him that for his conversations with these men, if
he was not a sharer in their iniquity, he incurred no blame in the sight of
God. If they hearkened to his voice and obeyed his preaching they would be
saved, but if they continued in their sin they would perish, while he himself,
according to the words of the prophet Ezekiel, would have delivered his own
soul.
We obtain a glimpse of the kind of men, ecclesiastical courtiers of
Pippin, with whom the zealous Boniface shrank from holding communion, when we
read the story of Milo, archbishop of Rheims and of Trier. Son and nephew of
bishops, but of bishops who had held also the dignities of duke and of count,
and himself brother of a count, this man was an eminent example of that
tendency to make the high places of the Church hereditary and to bestow them on
members of the nobility, which was also noticeable in the Gaul of Sidonius and
of Gregory of Tours. As a soldier he had shared the campaigns of Charles
Martel, who, in jovial mood probably, tossed to his battle-comrade the mitre of
Rheims. ‘An ecclesiastic only in the tonsure' as the scandalized chronicler
described him, he soon laid violent hands on the adjacent diocese of Trier.
Both provinces seem to have groaned under his yoke, but we are specially told
of the diocese of Rheims that he left many of the suffragan bishoprics vacant,
handed over the episcopal residences to laymen, and turned the regions under
his sway into a sort of ecclesiastical No-man's-land into which flocked all the
‘criminous clerks' who fled from the jurisdiction of their own bishops, and
there with disorderly monks and nuns lived a life of licence and utter defiance
of the Church's discipline. In order to remedy these disorders, Boniface
procured the consecration of his countryman Abel as Archbishop of Rheims, and, as
we have already seen, obtained for him from the Pope the grant of the coveted
pallium. But Pope and apostle alike seem to have been powerless against the
stout soldier and court favourite Milo. The meek stranger Abel soon vanishes
from the scene. Milo retains possession not only of one but of both
metropolitan sees, and at last, ‘after forty years' tyrannical invasion of the
Church' (says the chronicler), he meets his death in the forest, not like his
great namesake Milo of Crotona in a vain display of his mighty strength, but
from the tusks of a wild boar which he has been chasing. The contrast of the
lives of the two men, Milo and Boniface, brings forcibly before us the nature of
the work which had to be done in demoralized Neustria, and which was at length
accomplished by the united exertions of Austrasia and of Rome.
In one of Boniface's letters to the Pope he alludes to ‘certain secrets
of my own which Lul the bearer of this letter' (the friend and eventually the
successor of Boniface) ‘will communicate viva voce to your Piety.' In this
mysterious sentence some commentators have seen an allusion to the approaching
revolution in the Frankish kingdom. The conjecture is plausible; the time fits,
for the letter must have been written in the autumn of 751, but it is after all
nothing but a conjecture. It is, however, probable enough that during the years
749 to 751, of which little is heard in the chronicles, Pippin was preparing
the minds of his subjects, and especially of the great churchmen of his court,
for the momentous change which was approaching.
That change will be best told in the simple words of the monkish
chronicler who wrote the Annales Laurissenses Minores.
‘In the year 750 of the Lord's incarnation Pippin sent ambassadors to
Rome to Pope Zacharias, to ask concerning the kings of the Franks who were of
the royal line and were called kings, but had no power in the kingdom, save
only that charters and privileges were drawn up in their names, but they had
absolutely no kingly power, but did whatever the Major Domus of the Franks
desired. But on the [first] day of March in the Campus [Martius], according to
ancient custom gifts were offered to these kings by the people, and the king
himself sat in the royal seat with the army standing round him and the Major
Domus in his presence, and he commanded on that day whatever was decreed by the
Franks, but on all other days thenceforward he sat [quietly] at home. Pope Zacharias
therefore in the exercise of his apostolical authority replied to their
question that it seemed to him better and more expedient that the man who held
power in the kingdom should be called king and be king, rather than he who
falsely bore that name. Therefore the aforesaid Pope commanded the king and
people of the Franks that Pippin who was using royal power should be called
king, and should be settled in the royal seat. Which was therefore done by the
anointing of the holy archbishop Boniface in the city of Soissons : Pippin is
proclaimed king, and Childeric, who was falsely called king, is tonsured and
sent into a monastery'.
The kindred chronicle, which is called simply Annales Laurissenses, with fewer words gives us some more
particulars :—
“Burchard, bishop of Wurzburg, and Folrad the
chaplain were sent to Pope Zacharias to ask concerning the kings in Frank-land
who at that time had no royal power, whether this were good or no. And Pope
Zacharias commanded Pippin that it would be better that he should be called
king who had the power, rather than he who was remaining without any royal
power. That order might not be disturbed, by his apostolic authority he ordered
that Pippin should be made king”
“Pippin, according to the manner of the Franks, was elected king, and
anointed by the hand of archbishop Boniface of holy memory, and he was raised
to the kingdom by the Franks in the city of Soissons. But Hilderic, who was
falsely called king, was tonsured and sent into a monastery.”
One more entry, this time from the Continuer of Fredegarius, completes
the contemporary or nearly contemporary accounts of the great transaction :—
“At which time, by the advice and with the consent of all the Franks, a
report was sent to the Apostolic See, and on the receipt of authority [from
thence] the lofty Pippin, by the election of the whole Frankish nation into the
seat of royalty, with consecration of the bishops and submission of the nobles,
together with his queen Bertrada (as the order from of old requires), is raised
on high in the kingdom.”
Thus then was the revolution, towards which the whole course of Frankish
history had been tending for more than a century, at last consummated. The
phantasm disappeared and the reality was hailed by its true name. The
unfortunate Childeric, upon whom came the punishment for all the wasted lives
of so many licentious Merovingian ancestors, had to end his days in the dreary
solitude of his cell. But yesterday the deeds and charters which counted the
years from his accession styled him gloriosus dominus noster Hildericus;
now he is simply known by some monastic name, brother Martin it may be or
brother Felix, in the monastery of St. Medard at Soissons. His wife, according
to some accounts, and in the following year his son, were each compelled into
the same monastic seclusion. The race of Clovis and Meroveus,
the descendants of the sea-monster, disappear from history. Yet who knows? The
Merovingian blood may have filtered down into the lowest strata of society.
Among the fishwives who dragged Louis XVI in triumph back to Paris from
Versailles, among the unwashed rabble who haunted the galleries of the
Convention and shouted for the death of that innocent victim, there may have
been some men and women who, if they had known the names of their progenitors,
might have claimed descent from Dagobert and Chlotochar.
Turning away then from the grave of the Merovingian monarchy, let us
contemplate the new monarchy which is installed in the person of the descendant
of the sainted Arnulf. We observe that Pippin is ‘exalted into the kingdom,
according to the ancient manner of the Franks'. We also observe that there is a
distinct statement that he was ‘elected' to his new dignity. We may therefore
assert that on this occasion, in the utter failure and decay of the hereditary
principle, there was a reversion to the old Teutonic principle of elective
royalty, and we may probably infer that, as the outward and visible sign of
that election, Pippin was raised on a buckler amid the acclamations of the
assembled warriors of his people, even as Alaric and Clovis had been raised in
earlier centuries. It is to be noticed also that the ceremony took place at
Soissons, a place which was not a royal residence, and which had not been
frequently heard of in the later Merovingian time, but which, on account of its
memories of Clovis and Syagrius, was evidently looked
upon as one of the holy places of the Frankish monarchy.
Far more important, however, for practical purposes than these
sentimental reversions to the old Teutonic usages and associations was the
emphatic sanction given by the Roman Church to the new order of things. It may
be that the thought of a mission to Rome to enquire of Pope Zacharias was in
the first place only an expedient for the quieting of troubled consciences,
whether of Pippin himself or of some of his subjects, as to this step, which
looked like a breach of trust on the part of the legitimate king's Prime
Minister. Thus looked at, the embassy of one Austrasian and one Neustrian
ecclesiastic to Rome—Burchardt, bishop of Wurzburg, and Folrad,
abbot of S. Denis and private chaplain to the king—may have been somewhat like
those embassies which used to be sent to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi when
one of the Grecian states was about to enter upon a course of action which
strained the obligations of political morality. But with whatever notions
undertaken, there can be no doubt that the appeal to Rome on such a subject and
at such a crisis of the nation's history enormously increased the authority of
St. Peter's representative with the Frankish nation. We have only to look at
the language of the chroniclers to see for how much the papal sanction counted in
the establishment of the new dynasty. ‘The Pope commanded the king and people
of the Franks that Pippin should be called king'; ‘Pope Zacharias, . . that
order should not be disturbed by his apostolic authority, commanded that Pippin
should become king '; ‘According to the sanction of the Roman pontiff, Pippin
was called king of the Franks'; and so on. The tone of the chroniclers seems to
be that of men who are describing an event as to the moral colour of which they
are not themselves fully satisfied, but they quiet their consciences with the
reflection that it must after all have been right because it was sanctioned by
the authority of the head of Western Christendom.
To emphasise this fact of the papal consent to the great revolution the
chief actor in the religious part of the ceremony was Boniface, of whose
untiring devotion to the Roman see so many examples have been given in the
preceding pages. True, the other bishops were present, possibly some of them,
especially some of the Neustrian bishops, scowling at this officious Saxon who
dared to oust the successor of Remigius from his rights and to take the
foremost place in their own historical sanctuary of Soissons. But of any such growlings of discontent we have no historic evidence. The
fact emphasized by chroniclers and most needlessly questioned by some modern
historical sceptics was that Boniface, archbishop and soon to be martyr,
performed the solemn ceremony of anointing, probably also the ceremony of
crowning, for the new king of the F ranks.
By long habit we are so accustomed to the sound of the words ‘an
anointed king' that we hardly realize its full significance in the case before
us. Speaking broadly, it may be said that to pour oil upon the head of the
ruler and to anoint therewith his hands and his feet is not a Teutonic, nor
even an Aryan, but essentially a Semitic rite. No German thiudans,
no Greek or Roman basileus or rex, as far as we know, was ever anointed. The
rite comes from the burning East, from that Hebrew people who named ‘corn and
wine and oil' as the three great voices with which the earth praised Jehovah.
‘I have found David My servant, with My holy oil have I anointed him,' was the
verse of the Psalms which was doubtless present to the mind of Boniface when he
poured the consecrated oil upon the bowed head of the Frankish king. The
Eastern emperors, though Christian, had not taken over this ceremony from
Judaism. Late in the day, probably about the middle of the seventh century, it
had been adopted by the Visigothic kings of Spain. In our own country it seems
probable that the petty kings of Wales were anointed, before their Saxon rivals
submitted to the rite. However this may be, it is clear that in imitation of
Samuel and Zadok the Christian ecclesiastics of the eighth century were now
magnifying their office by pouring the oil of consecration on the head that was
about to receive a kingly crown. Possibly, as a German scholar suggests, the
religious sanction which the Christian Church thus gave to the new dynasty was
meant to compensate for the lost glamour of a descent from the gods of Walhalla
to which the posterity of St. Arnulf could with no consistency lay claim.
Thus then the elevation of Pippin to the Frankish throne, dictated as it
was by the inexorable logic of fact, and heartily acquiesced in by the nation,
received the solemn sanction of the great Patriarch of Western Christendom.
Such favours are not usually given by ecclesiastics gratuitously. The immediate
result of the ceremony at Soissons was undoubtedly the consolidation of the
power of Boniface as representing the Pope in Neustria and Burgundy. We may be
sure that ‘the Gallican liberties' (which in this century meant the Gallican
anarchy) suffered a new constraint from the day when Pippin felt the anointing
hand of the Apostle of Germany. But the king himself also, by invoking the aid
of the bishop of Rome, had incurred an obligation which brought him, and that
right speedily, into the troubled zone of Italian politics.
