CRISTO RAUL.ORG ' |
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READING HALLCAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY |
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THE
CHAPTER XVIII
THE CAROLINGIAN REVOLUTION AND FRANKISH INTERVENTION
IN ITALY
THE eighth century had hardly entered on its second
half when the last of the long-haired Merovingians was thrust from the throne
of the Franks, and Pepin the mayor of the palace hailed as king. The change seemed
slight, for the new dynasty had served a long apprenticeship. For more than a
century the descendants of Clovis had been mere puppets in a king’s seat, while
the descendants of St Arnulf, though called only Mayors of the Palace or Dukes
and Princes of the Franks, had managed, and with vigour and success, the affairs of the realm. Their neighbours,
the scoffing Greeks, marvelled at the strange ways of
the Franks, whose lord the king needed no quality save birth alone, and all the
year through had nothing to do or plan, but only to eat and drink and sleep and
stay shut up at home except on one spring day, when he must sit at gaze before
his people, while his head servant ruled the State to suit himself. But it was
one thing to rule the State and quite another to lay hand upon those sacred
titles and prerogatives which the reverence of centuries had reserved for the
race of the Salian sea-god; and the house of Arnulf was little likely to forget
their kinsman Grimoald who in the seventh century had
outraged that reverence by setting his own son upon the throne,
and had paid the forfeit with his life and with his child's. Charles
Martel (the Hammer), in the last years of his long rule, had found it possible,
indeed, to get on with no king at all, dating his documents from the death of
the latest do-nothing; but, if he hoped that thus the two sons between whom at
his own death he divided France like a private farm might enter peacefully upon
the fact of kingship without its name, a year of turbulence was enough to teach
the sons that to rule the Franks a kingly title must back the kingly power. The
shadowy Merovingian whom they dragged forth from obscurity to lend a royal
sanction to their acts was doubtless from the first a makeshift. Through their
surviving charters, especially those of Pepin, the younger and more statesmanly, who not only appended to his name the proud
phrase “to whom the Lord hath entrusted the care of government” but used always
the “we” and “our” employed hitherto by royalty alone, there glimmers already
another purpose. But not Pepin himself, even after his brother’s abdication
left him sole ruler, and when, all turbulence subdued, two years eventless in
the annals had confirmed his sway, ventured the final step of revolution
without a sanction from a higher power.
Pepin [751
To one reared, like Pepin, by the monks of St Denis
and to the prelates who were his advisers, it could hardly be doubtful where
such a sanction should be sought. Whatever veneration still attached to ancient
blood or custom, Jesus Christ was now the national god of the Franks. “Long
live Christ, who loves the Franks”, ran the prologue of their Salk Law; “may he
guard their realm and fill their princes with the light of his grace”. And, if
the public law of the Franks knew no procedure for a change of dynasty, the story
of another chosen people, grown more familiar than the sagas of German or Roman
or Trojan ancestors, told how, when a king once proved unworthy, the God of
heaven himself sent his prophet to anoint with oil the subject who should take
his throne. Nor could any Frank be at a loss whither to look for such a message
from the skies. From the days of Clovis the glory of the Franks had been their
Catholic orthodoxy; and to Catholic orthodoxy the mouthpiece of heaven, the
vicar of Christ on earth, was the successor of Peter, the bishop of Rome. Since
the time when Pope Gregory the Great had by his letters guided the religious
policy of Brunhild and her wards there had come, it is true, long interruption
to the intimacy of Frankish rulers with the Roman bishop; but, with the rise of
the mayors of the palace of the pious line of Arnulf, that intimacy had been
resumed. Already to Charles Martel the Pope could plead the gifts of his
ancestors and his own to Roman altars; and it was that rude warrior, however
unchurchly at times his use of church preferment and church property, who had
made possible a reform of the Frankish Church through which it was now, beyond
even the dreams of a Gregory the Great, becoming a province of Rome. What,
backed by his strong arm, the English zeal of the papal legate Boniface had
begun, the sons of Charles had made their personal task. From the first they
had turned for guidance to the Pope himself; and when, in 747, Carloman, the elder, laying down all earthly rule for the
loftier service of heaven, had with lavish gifts betaken him to the tomb of Peter and under its shadow had chosen for his monastic home
the cave which once had sheltered that saintly Pope to whom the despairing
Constantine, as men believed, had turned for healing and for baptism, the
Frankish pilgrims whose multitude disturbed his peace must have learned afresh
the proper oracle for princes in doubt.
It can never be quite certain, indeed, so close were
now the relations of the Franks with Rome, that the scruple of conscience which
in the autumn of 751 two envoys of Pepin laid before Pope Zacharias—the
question whether it were good or no that one man
should bear the name of king while another really ruled—was not of Roman
suggestion, or that the answer had not, in any case, been made sure in advance.
But there were reasons enough why, without prearrangement, the papal verdict
might be safely guessed. It was not Pepin the Frank alone who ruled while
another reigned. For a century that had been as true of the bishop of Rome; and
the Pope not less than the mayor of the palace needed an ally. Though the
nominal sovereign at Rome was still the Byzantine monarch who called himself
Emperor of the Romans, and though from Constantinople still came imperial
edicts and imperial messengers, the actual control, now that the Lombards had narrowed to a thread the road from the
Exarchate by the Adriatic to the Roman Duchy by the Mediterranean and now that
the Saracens were not only tasking all the Empire's resources in the East but making
hazardous the sea route to the West, had passed ever more and more into the
hands of the Roman bishop. Even under the law of the Empire his civil functions
were large—the nomination of local officers, the care of public works, the
oversight of administration and of justice, the protection of the poor and the
wea—and what survives of his official correspondence shews how vigorously
these functions were exercised. But the growing poverty of the public purse,
drained by the needs of the imperial court or the greed of the imperial agents,
and on the other hand the vast estates of the Roman Church, scattered
throughout Italy and beyond, whose revenues made the Roman bishop the richest
proprietor in all the West, had little by little turned his oversight into
control. From his own resources he at need had filled
the storehouses, repaired the aqueducts, rebuilt the walls, salaried the
magistrates, paid off the soldiery. At his own instance he had provisioned the
people, ransomed captives, levied troops, bought off invaders, negotiated with
the encroaching Lombards.
This beneficent activity the imperial government had
welcomed. Making the Pope its own banker, it had formally entrusted him with
the supply of the city, with the maintenance of the militia. To him, as to a
Roman magistrate, it addressed its instructions. Meanwhile the needless civil
magnates gradually vanished or became his creatures. The Roman senate quietly
ceased to exist or existed so obscurely that for a century and a half it ceases
to be heard of. The praefect of the city was the
bishop's nominee. Even the military hierarchy, which elsewhere in Italy was now
supplanting the civil, at Rome grew subordinate. The city and its district,
separating from the Exarchate, had indeed become a duchy, and a duke still led
its army; but before the middle of the eighth century the duke was taking his
cue, if not his orders, from the Pope. So long as there remained that slender
thread of road connecting Rome with Ravenna, the Exarch, as imperial governor
of Italy, asserted a shadowy authority over both duke and Pope; but year by
year the Exarch’s Adriatic lands narrowed before the Lombards,
and with them his resources and prestige. In 751, a few months earlier than
Pepin's embassy, the Lombards occupied Ravenna
itself, and the Exarch was no more. The Roman pontiff was now the unquestioned
head of what remained to the Empire in Italy.
Why should there be any question? Who could serve the
Empire better than this unsalaried functionary whose duties to heaven seemed an
abiding guarantee against the ambitions of earth? And what could the vicar of
Peter more desire than thus unhampered to administer his province on behalf of
that imperial Rome whose eternal dominion he so often had proclaimed? But
imperial Rome did not leave unhampered that spiritual headship for whose sake
he had proclaimed her eternal dominion. Neither the rising prestige of the
Roman see nor the waning of imperial resources had restrained the emperors from
asserting in the West that authority over religious belief and religious
practice which they exercised unquestioned in the East. Upon the Roman bishop
they had heaped honours and privileges, they had even recognised his primacy in the Church; yet at their
will they still convened councils and promulgated or proscribed dogmas, and,
when the bishop of Rome presumed to discredit what they declared orthodox, they
did not scruple, while their power was adequate, to arrest and depose him or to
drag him off to Constantinople for trial and punishment. Their purpose may have
been the political one of silencing religious dissension and so ending the
quarrels which hazarded the unity of the Empire; but to the successor of Peter
the peace and unity of the Empire had worth only for the maintenance and the
diffusion of that divinely revealed truth whose responsible custodian he knew
himself to be.
When, therefore, in the year 725, the Emperor Leo,
having beaten off the besieging Saracens and restored order in his realm,
addressed himself to religious reform, and, waiting for no consultation of the
Church, forbade the use in worship of pictures and images of the Christ, the
Virgin, and the saints—nay, began at once on their destruction—Pope Gregory the
Second not only refused obedience, but rallied Italy to his defence against what he proclaimed to Christendom the Emperor's impiety and heresy. And
now, after a quarter of a century, though Gregory the Second had been followed
in 731 by Gregory the Third, and ten years later he by Zacharias, while on Leo’s
throne since 740 sat Constantine the Fifth, his son, the schism was still
unhealed. The Emperor, after the shipwreck of a fleet sent for the humbling of
the rebels, had indeed contented himself with the transfer of Sicily and
southern Italy from the jurisdiction of the Pope to that of the Patriarch of
Constantinople; and, having thus begun that severance of the Greek south from
the Latin north which (helped soon by the unintended flooding of south Italy
with religious fugitives from the East) was to endure for centuries, he did not
disturb the authority of Rome in the rest of the peninsula. The Pope, on his
side, though he laid all Iconoclasts under the Church's ban, opposed the
treasonous design to put a rival emperor on the throne, and scrupulously
continued to date all his official acts by the sovereign’s regnal years. But
clearly this was no more than armed neutrality. No emperor could feel safe
while religious rebellion had such an example and such a nucleus
; and the Pope well knew that it was all over with his own safety and
that of Roman orthodoxy the moment they could be attacked without danger of the
loss of Italy.
Italian loyalty to Roman leadership there was no room
to doubt. The alienation of the Latins from their Byzantine master had grounds
older and deeper than their veneration for the pictures of the saints. Their
consciousness of different blood and speech had for ages been increased by
administrative separateness and by the favoured place
of Italy in the imperial system; and, when division of the Empire had brought
to her Hellenic neighbours equality of privilege and
of prestige, there still remained to Italy the headship
of the West. She had welcomed those who in the honoured name of Rome freed her from the Ostrogoth barbarians and heretics; but, when in
their hands she found herself sunk to a mere frontier province, the officials
of her absentee ruler had soon become unpopular. The growing extortion of the
tax-gatherer was sweetened by no pride in the splendours it nourished. The one public boast of Italy, her one surviving claim to
leadership, was now the religious pre-eminence of her Roman bishop. His
patriarchate over all the West made Rome and Italy still a capital of nations.
His primacy, if realised, meant for her a wider
queenship. To Italy he was a natural leader. Directly or through her other
bishops —nearly all confirmed and consecrated by him and bound to him by oaths
of orthodoxy and of loyalty—he was the patron of all municipal liberties, the
defender against all fiscal oppression. And when the imperial court, in its
militant Hellenism, used its political power to dictate religious innovation,
the Roman pontiff became yet more popular as the spokesman of Western
conservatism. More than once before the iconoclastic schism had the sympathies
of the Italians ranged themselves on the side of the Pope against the Emperor.
When that quarrel came it found Italy already in a ferment. Imperial officials
on every hand were driven out or put to death, and — what was more significant
— their places filled by popular election.
But if, thus sure of popular support, Pope Gregory the
Third, as there is reason to believe, already harboured the thought of breaking with the Byzantine authority, a nearer danger stared
him in the face. The Empire’s Italy was, in fact, but a precarious remnant.
There were the Lombards. Already masters of most of
the peninsula, they were clearly minded to be masters
of it all. The Lombards, of course, were Christians.
They had long ceased to be heretics. Against the Iconoclasts they had even lent
the Pope their aid. For the vicar of Peter they
professed the deepest respect, and their bishops were suffragans of his see.
There was no reason to suppose, should they even occupy Rome itself, that they
would hamper or abridge the ecclesiastical functions of the Pope. But the Pope
well knew what difference lay between a mere Lombard bishop, however venerated,
and the all but independent sovereign of the capital
of the Christian world. Already the temporal power had cast its spell. Should
the Lombard king win Rome, there was much reason to fear that he would make it
his own capital. Though orthodox now and deferential, he might not always be
deferential or orthodox; and how short the step was from a deferential
protector to a dictatorial master papal experience had amply shown. At
Constantinople such a master was quite near enough. The Pope had no mind to exchange
King Log for King Stork.
Against the Lombards,
therefore, Pope and Emperor made common cause. The Emperor, needing every
soldier against his Eastern foes, was only too glad to make the Pope his envoy.
The Pope, needing every plea against the eager Lombard, was only too glad to
urge the claims of the Empire. But, in spite of papal
pleading and imperial claims, the Lombards took town
after town. The desperate Pope intrigued with Lombard dukes against the Lombard
king. Liutprand turned his arms on Rome itself. Then
it was, in 739, that Gregory appealed to Charles the Frank.
It was by no means the first time the Frankish
champions of orthodoxy had been called to the aid of Italy against the
barbarian; not the first time a Pope was their petitioner. As sons of the
Church and allies of the Empire they had crossed the Alps in the sixth century
and in the seventh to fight Ostrogoth and Lombard. But the appeal of Gregory
was couched in novel terms. Not for the Empire nor for the faith did he now
implore protection, but for “the Church of St Peter” and “us his peculiar
people”; and as return the Frankish chroniclers record that puzzling offer of
allegiance.
The great Frankish “under-king”—so the Pope entitled
him—did not lead his host against the Lombard king, his kinsman and ally ; but he answered courteously by embassy and gift, he
treasured carefully the papal letters, the earliest in that precious file
preserved us by his grandson, and it is not impossible that he interceded with
the Lombards. In any case, they did not now press on
toward Rome; and the mild and tactful Zacharias, who soon succeeded to the
papal chair, not only won back by his prayers, for “the blessed Peter, prince
of the apostles”, the towns seized from the Roman duchy, but staved off the
advance of the Lombards upon Ravenna, and before
long, when the pious Ratchis succeeded to the throne,
he made with him a truce for twenty years. But the persistent Lombards would not so long be cheated of a manifest destiny. Ratchis in 749, retiring like Carloman into monastic life, gave place to the tempestuous Aistulf.
By 751, as we have seen, Ravenna was his and the Exarchate had ceased to be.
Then came Pepin's conundrum.
751-755] Pepin King
The precise terms of Zacharias’ reply are not preserved.
What is left is only the oral tradition as to its substance. No letter of his
can be found among the papal epistles to the Carolings.
Errands so momentous often went then by word of mouth; and Pepin’s were trusty
messengers. One, Bishop Burchard of Witrzburg, the
new Franconian see so richly endowed by Pepin and by Carloman,
was a loyal lieutenant of the legate Boniface, English like him by birth and as
his messenger already known at Rome. The other, the Austrasian Fulrad, abbot of St Denis and arch-chaplain of the
realm, owed to Pepin both those high preferments and was throughout his life
his master's intimate and the Pope’s. If their message must in part be guessed
at, its outcome is well known. The Merovingian and his son, rejected like Saul
and Jonathan, went shorn into the cloister. The aged Boniface, in St Peter's
name, anointed king the new David chosen by the Franks.
King Pepin was not ungrateful. That same November of
751 which saw his elevation to the throne saw the capstone put to the organizing
work of Boniface by the lifting of his see of Mainz to metropolitan authority
throughout all Germany, from the mountains to the coast. It saw, too, by papal
grant soon royally confirmed (if we may trust two much-disputed documents), his
beloved Fulda, his favourite home, the abbey of his
heart, raised to a dignity elsewhere unknown in France by exemption from all
ecclesiastical supervision save the Pope’s alone. As coadjutor in the heavy
duties of his primacy Pepin gave the old man Lul,
best loved of the disciples brought from his English home, and when, even thus
stayed, he presently sighed beneath his task, the king released him from his
functions to seek among the heathen Frisians the martyr’s crown for which he
yearned. And Abbot Fulrad, now as royal chaplain the
king’s minister of public worship, was not forgotten. The earliest of Pepin’s
surviving royal charters (1 March 752) awards St Denis at Fulrad’s prayer a domain long unlawfully withheld; and many another from that year and
those which follow bears witness to his constant zeal in the defence of churchly property and rights.
Even as king, indeed, Pepin never gave back into full
ownership all those church lands appropriated by his father to the maintenance
of a mounted soldiery; but the Church was assured her rents, and the right of
the State to make such grants of church lands, though maintained, was carefully
restricted. It was doubtless the growing importance of the mounted force, and
its dependence on the pasturage of summer, which prompted Pepin early in his
reign (755) to change, “for the advantage of the Franks”, the time-honoured assembly and muster of the host, the “Field
of March”, into a “Field of May”. The faith itself had still need of swift
champions. The Saracens yet had a foothold in Gaul. Septimania,
the rich though narrow coastland stretching from Rhone to Pyrenees between the
Mediterranean and the Cevennes—the Low Languedoc of later days—was not yet a
possession of the Franks. A remnant of the old realm of the Visigoths and still
peopled by their descendants, it had been overrun by the Arab conquerors of
Spain, who remained its masters and made it a base for their raids. But in 752
a rising of the Gothic townsmen expelled them from Nimes and Maguelonne, Agde and Beziers, and
offered their land to Pepin. Narbonne alone held out still against the Franks.
Gaul thus all but redeemed to Christendom, Pepin in 753 led his host against
the rebellious heathen of the north. Crossing the Rhine into the territory of
the Saxons and laying it waste to the Weser, he subjected them once more to
tribute and this time compelled them to open their doors to the missionaries of
Christianity.
But while Pepin had thus been proving in France his
worth to Church as well as State, there had not been wanting signs that the
Church's head might need from him a more personal service. Since early in 752
the soft-spoken Zacharias was no more, and in his place sat Stephen II, a Roman
born and of good Roman blood. An orphan, reared from boyhood in the Lateran
itself, he was no stranger to its aims and policies. There was need at Rome of
Roman pride and Roman self-assertion. Aistulf the
Lombard was no man to be wheedled, and his eye was now upon the Roman duchy.
From the Alps to the Vulturnus all was now Lombard
except this stretch along the western coast. Rome was clearly at his mercy.
Already in June the Pope had sent envoys—his brother Paul (later to succeed him
as Pope) and another cleric—who made with the Lombard king, as they supposed, a
forty years’ peace. But it was soon clear that Aistulf counted this no bar to the assertion of his sovereignty. Scarce four months
later, claiming jurisdiction over Rome and the towns about it, he demanded an
annual poll-tax from their inhabitants. What could it matter to the Roman
bishop who was his temporal lord? Stephen, protesting against the breach of faith, showed his ecclesiastical power by sending as intercessors
the abbots of the two most venerated of Lombard monasteries, Monte Cassino and
San Vincenzo. The king, in turn, vindicated the royal authority by
contumeliously sending them back to their convents. Again and again the Pope had begged for help from Constantinople, and now there
appeared, not the soldiery for which he had asked, but, Byzantine-fashion, an
imperial envoy—the silentiarius John—with letters of
instruction for both Pope and king. The Pope obediently sent on the envoy to
the king, escorted by a spokesman of his own—again his brother Paul. Aistulf listened to the imperial exhortations, but there
his barbarian patience had an end. Yielding nothing, he packed off home the
Byzantine functionary, and with him sent a Lombard with counter-propositions of his own; he then turned in rage on Rome, vowing to put every Roman to the
sword unless his orders were forthwith obeyed. The Pope went through the idle
form of sending by the returning Greek a fresh appeal to the Emperor to come
himself with an army and rescue Italy; he calmed the panic-stricken Romans by
public prayers and processions, himself marching barefoot in the ranks and
carrying on his shoulder the sacred portrait of the Christ painted by St Luke
and the angels; but he had not grown up in the household of the Gregories without learning of another source of help. By a
returning pilgrim he sent a message to the new king of the Franks.
That unceasing stream of pilgrims—prelate and prince
and humble sinner—which now from England and the farther isles as well as from
all parts of Francia thronged the roads to the threshold of the apostles (Carloman to escape their visits had fled from his refuge on
Mount Soracte to the remoter seclusion of Monte
Cassino) must have kept Pepin and his advisers well informed of what was
passing in Italy, and many messages lost to us had doubtless been exchanged by
Pope and king; but what Stephen had next to offer and to ask was to be trusted
to no go-between, not even to his diplomat brother. By the mouth of the unnamed
pilgrim who early in 753 appeared at the court of Pepin he begged that envoys
be sent to summon himself to the Frankish king. Two other pilgrims—one was this
time the abbot of Jumieges—bore back to the Pope an
urgent invitation, assuring him that the requested envoys should be sent. From
the tenor of the Pope's still extant letter of reply it would
appear that by word of mouth a more confidential message was returned
through the abbot and his colleague. The written one briefly contents itself
with pious wishes and with the assurance that “he who perseveres to the end
shall be saved” and shall “receive an hundred fold and possess eternal life”;
and a companion letter which the Pope, perhaps not unprompted, addressed to “all
the leaders of the Frankish nation” adjures them, without defining what they
are wished to do, to let nothing hinder them from aiding the king to further
the interests of their patron, St Peter, that thus their sins may be wiped out
and the key-bearer of heaven may admit them to eternal life. For the formal
invitation of the Pope and for the sending of the escort the concurrence of the
Frankish folk had been awaited, and it was autumn before the embassy reached
Rome. Meanwhile Aistulf had shewn his seriousness by
taking steps to cut off Rome from southern Italy, and the Emperor had sent, not
troops, but once more the silentiary John, this time insisting that the Pope
himself go with him to beseech the Lombard for the restoration of the
Exarchate. Happily, with the arrival of the safe-conduct sought from Aistulf, arrived also the Frankish envoys —Duke Autchar (the Ogier of later legend) and the royal
chancellor, Bishop Chrodegang of Metz, after Boniface
the foremost prelate of the realm.
It was mid-October of 753 when, thus escorted, and in
company with the imperial ambassador, Pope Stephen and a handful of his
official household set out ostensibly for the Lombard court. King Aistulf, though notified, did not come to meet them. As
they approached Pavia they met only his messengers,
who forbade the Pope to plead before their master the cause of the conquered
provinces. Defiant of this prohibition, he implored Aistulf to “give back the Lord’s sheep”, and the silentiary again laid before him an
imperial letter; but to all appeals the barbarian was deaf. Then it was that the
Frankish ambassadors asked his leave for the Pope to go on with them to France,
and the pontiff added his own prayer to theirs. In vain the Lombard, gnashing
his teeth, sought to dissuade him. A grudging permission was granted and
promptly used. The Pope and his escort, leaving a portion of their party to
return with the Greek to Rome, were before the end of November safe on Frankish
soil. As they issued from the Alps they were met by another duke and by Abbot Fulrad, who guided them across Burgundy to a royal villa
near the Marne. While yet many miles away there met them a retinue of nobles
headed by the son of Pepin, the young prince Charles, who thus, a lad of
eleven, first appears in history. Pepin himself, with all his court, came three
miles to receive them. Dismounting and prostrating himself before the Pope, he
for some distance humbly marched beside him, leading by the bridle the
pontiff's horse (6 Jan. 754).
Such, in brief, is what is told by our one informant,
the contemporary biographer of Pope Stephen, of that transalpine journey whose
outcome was the temporal sovereignty of the popes, the severance of Latin
Christendom from Greek, the Frankish conquest of Italy, the Holy Roman Empire.
With the Pope’s arrival the Frankish sources, too, take up the tale. Yet only
by clever patching can all these together be made to yield a connected story of
what was done during the long months of that papal visit—of the Pope’s appeal
for Frankish aid against the Lombard, of his sojourn through the winter as the
guest of Fulrad at St Denis, of the futile embassies
for the dissuasion of the Lombard king, of the appearance in Francia of the
monk Carloman, sent by his abbot to intercede for the
Lombard against the Pope, of a springtide assembly of the Franks and of
reluctant consent to a campaign against the Lombard, of an Easter conference of
king and Pope and Frankish leaders at the royal villa of Carisiacum (Kiersy, Quierzy), of a
great midsummer gathering at St Denis, where in the abbey church Pope Stephen
himself in the name of the holy Trinity anointed Pepin afresh, and with him his
two sons Charles and Carloman, forbidding under pain
of excommunication and interdict that henceforward forever any not sprung from
the loins of these thus consecrated by God through the vicar of his apostles be
chosen king of the Franks
Our most explicit account of this coronation, a
memorandum jotted down a dozen years later at St Denis by a monkish copyist,
adds a detail. Pepin and his sons were anointed not only kings of the Franks
but “Patricians of the Romans”. Certain it is that this title, though Pepin
himself seems never to have used it, is thenceforward invariably appended to
his name and those of his sons in the letters of the Popes. Now, “Patrician”
was a Byzantine title—a somewhat nondescript decoration, or title of courtesy,
applied by the imperial court to sundry dignitaries (as to the Exarch of Italy
and to the Duke of Rome) and not infrequently conferred upon barbarian princes—and
there have not been wanting modern scholars who divine from its use that the
Pope was in all this the envoy of the Emperor. No intimation of such a thing
appears elsewhere in the sources. It is not hard to believe that the Pope may
have persuaded the imperial government that his journey into France was an
expedition in its interest, or that he may even have sought its authority for
the gift of the patricial title; it is easy to see that
the papal biographer might suppress a fact which by the time he wrote had grown
uncomfortable; but, had the Pope in France posed as the representative of the
Emperor, it is incomprehensible that a function so flattering both to him and
to his Frankish hosts should escape all memory. And the title conferred on
Pepin was not the familiar one of "Patrician," but the else unknown
one Patrician of the Romans. Precisely what that may have meant has long been a
problem; but it could hardly have been aught pleasing to Constantine Copronymus, who had just alienated anew his Italian
subjects by an iconoclastic council, whose deference to the religious dictation
of the Emperor might excuse almost any treason on the part of Western orthodoxy
Nor are we at a loss to guess what may have obscured
for Pepin the Empire’s claim to Italy. For more than two centuries there had
been growing current in the West a legend which strangely distorted the history
of Church and Empire. Constantine, earliest and greatest of Christian emperors,
while yet a pagan and at Rome—so ran the tale in that life of Pope Sylvester
which gave it widest vogue—persecuted so cruelly the Christians that indignant
Heaven smote him with leprosy. Physicians were in vain. The pagan priests in
desperation prescribed a bath in the blood of new-born babes. The babes were brought;
but, moved to pity by the mothers' cries, the Emperor preferred to suffer,
whereat relenting Heaven, sending in a dream St Peter and St Paul, revealed to
him Sylvester as his healer. The Pope was brought from his hiding-place on
Mount Soracte, disclosed the identity of the gods
seen in his dream, and not only cured but converted and baptised him. Thereupon the grateful monarch, proclaiming throughout the Empire his new
faith, provided by edict for its safety and support, made all bishops subject
to the Pope, even as are all magistrates to the Emperor, and, setting forth to
found elsewhere a capital, first laid with his own hands the foundations of St
Peter’s and the Lateran.
It was doubtless faith in this wild tale which led the
rueful Carloman, fain to atone for his own deeds of
violence, to choose Sylvester’s cave for his retreat and dedicate his convent
to that saint. The legend must thereby have gained a wider currency among the
Franks; and none could know this better than the papal court. Was it for use
with them, and was it now, that there came into existence a document which made
the myth a cornerstone of papal power—the so-called Donation of Constantine?
No extant manuscript of that famous forgery is older
than the early ninth century, and what most scholars have believed a quotation
from it by Pope Hadrian in 778 can possibly be otherwise explained; but minute
study of the strange charter's diction seems now to have made sure its origin
in the papal chancellery during the third quarter of the eighth century, and
startling coincidences of phrase connect it in particular with the documents of
Stephen II and of Paul, while to an ever-growing proportion of the students of
this period the historical setting in which alone it can be made to fit is that
of Stephen’s visit to the Franks or of the years which closely follow it.
The document makes Constantine first narrate at length
the story of his healing, embodying in it an elaborate creed taught him by Pope
Sylvester. Then, declaring St Peter and his successors worthy, as Christ’s
vicars on earth, of power more than imperial, he chooses them as his patrons
before God, decrees their supremacy over all the Christian church, relates his
building of the Lateran and of St Peter’s and St Paul’s, and his endowing them “for
the enkindling of the lights” with vast estates in East and West, grants to the
Pope the rank and trappings of an Emperor and to the Roman clergy those of
senators, tells how, when Sylvester had refused the Emperor's own crown of gold,
Constantine placed upon his head the white tiara and in reverence for St Peter
led his horse by the bridle as his groom, and now transfers to him, that the
papal headship may forever keep its more than earthly glory, his Roman palace
and city and all the provinces and towns of Italy. If this document or the
traditions on which it rests were through Fulrad or Chrodegang or the Roman guests familiar to the Frankish
king, neither his policy nor his phrases need longer puzzle us.
Even in this life Pepin, like Constantine, needed St
Peter’s help. The dethroned Merovingians, indeed, had sunk without a ripple,
and even while the Pope was on his way to Gaul that turbulent half-brother, Grifo, who had made for Carloman and Pepin such incessant trouble, met death at loyal hands as he was escaping
through the Alps from his plotting-place in Aquitaine to a more disquieting
plotting-place among the Lombards. But there still
was Carloman himself—a gallant prince whose
renunciation and monastic vows need bind no longer than the Church should will. There were still his growing sons, committed by
him to Pepin’s care, but with no rights renounced. Was it in part, perhaps, to
vindicate, for himself or for his sons, these rights of the elder line that Carloman had now appeared in France as advocate of the
Lombard cause? Was his reward, perchance, to be the Lombard's backing of his
own princely claims? In any case, what troubled waters these for Lombard fishing!
Was the Pope himself only a timelier fisher, and may the reluctance of the
Frankish nobles have been due in some part to friends of Carloman and of the Lombard alliance? All this is mere conjecture. But certain it is
that Pepin made effective terms with Heaven's spokesman and that the outcome
was the papal unction for himself and for his house. Carloman,
sick, perhaps with disappointment or chagrin, was detained in a Burgundian
monastery, where soon he died. His sons were, like the Merovingians, shorn as
monks. Even the fellow-monks whom he had brought with him from Italy were held
for years in Frankish durance.
Donation of Pepin [774
And what did Pepin in return assure the Pope? Stephen’s
biographer speaks only of an oral promise to obey the Pope and to restore
according to his wish the rights and territories of the Roman State. But, when
twenty years later the son of Pepin, leaving his siege of the Lombard capital,
went down to Rome for Easter, there was laid before him for confirmation, if we
may trust the papal biographer of that later day, a written document, signed at Quierzy during Pope Stephen’s visit by Pepin, his
sons, and all the Frankish leaders, which pledged to St Peter and to the Pope
the whole peninsula of Italy from Parma and Mantua to the borders of Apulia,
defining in detail the northern frontier of the tract, and including by express
stipulation, not only all the Exarchate “as it was of old time” and the
provinces of Venice and Istria, but the island of Corsica and the Lombard
duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. May we trust this passage of the Vita Hadriani—not only for the fact of a written promise by
Pepin and of its confirmation by Charles, but for all the startling contents?
This is that “Roman question” about which seas of ink have flowed and still are
flowing. For long it was the wont of ultramontane writers to assume both the
reality of such a promise and confirmation and the accuracy of this account of
it, while with almost equal unanimity those unfriendly to the Papacy or to its
temporal power dismissed the one as myth, the other as forgery. But in these
later years, now that the temporal power is but a memory, scholars have drawn
together. It seems established that the passage, however corrupt, is no
interpolation, and that it was written at Rome in 774; and there is a growing
faith in its accuracy, even as to the details of Pepin's promise. But how to
explain so strange a pact is still a puzzle. Was it, as some have thought, not
the main compact between Pope and king, but a scheme of partition for use only
in case the Frank invasion should perhaps result in the fall of the Lombard
power? Schemes such as this may well have filled the Pope’s long Gaulish visit; but for aught but guesswork our sources are
too scanty and too crude. The clerics who meagrely penned the deeds of king and Pope were only official scribes, inspired and
inspected, who of the deeper planning of their lords perhaps knew little and
betray yet less. The papal letters, a more solid support, are mute, of course,
during Stephen's visit; and, when they reappear, imperfectly preserved and uncertainly dated, are often but the mask for a wilier diplomacy by oral
message. And in this day of the eclipse of culture, when the best trained clerk
of convent or of curia groped helplessly for words and for inflections, one can
never be quite sure whether what is written is what seemed best worth writing
or only what seemed possible to write. Nor may it be forgotten that from the
side of Greek or Lombard, great though their stake in the affairs of Italy, we
have in all this period not a word.
754-756] The Franks in Italy
The Frankish host at last, in the late summer of 754
(possibly the spring of 755), set forth for Italy, taking with it the Pope.
Before its start and yet again during the march a fresh attempt was made to
scare off or buy off the Lombard from his prey. But neither gold nor threats could move Aistulf from his purpose. Happily for the Franks, the Alpine passes and their Italian
approaches had long been in their hands, and now, ere their main army began to
climb the Mont Cenis, they learned with joy that Aistulf,
routed by their vanguard, whom he had rashly attacked in the mountain defiles,
had abandoned his entrenchments in the vale of Susa
and sought shelter within the walls of his capital. The Franks, rejoicing in
the manifest favour of Heaven, were soon before
Pavia; and Aistulf, disheartened, speedily consented
to a peace “between the Romans, the Franks, and the Lombards.”
He acknowledged Pepin as his overlord, and promised to
surrender to the Pope Ravenna with all his other conquests. The Pope was sent
on, under escort, to Rome; and Pepin, taking hostages, returned to France.
But Aistulf soon rued his
concessions. Only a single town did he actually give up, and by midwinter of 755-756 he was again ravaging before the gates of Rome.
The Pope in panic appealed frantically to his ally. Nay, so great was the
emergency that, when the Franks delayed, St Peter himself addressed to Pepin,
Charles, and Carloman, and to the clergy, the nobles,
and all the armies and people of France a startling letter. “I, Peter, apostle
of God, who have adopted you as my sons” so runs this strange epistle, duly
delivered by messengers from Rome, “do call and exhort you to the defence of this Roman city and the people committed to me
by God and the home where after the flesh I repose ... And with us our Lady,
the mother of God, Mary ever virgin, doth most solemnly adjure, admonish,
and command you ... Give help, then, with all your might, to your brothers, my Roman people, that, in turn, I, Peter, apostle
called of God, granting you my protection in this life and in the day of future
judgment, may prepare for you in the kingdom of God tabernacles most bright and
glorious and may reward you with the infinite joys of paradise ... Suffer not
this my Roman city and the people therein dwelling to be longer torn by the
Lombard race: so may your bodies and souls not be torn and tortured in
everlasting and unquenchable hell fire ... Lo, sons most dear, I have warned
you: if ye shall swiftly obey, great shall be your reward, and, aided by me, ye
shall in this life vanquish all your foes and to old age eat the good things of
earth, and shall beyond a doubt enjoy eternal life; but if, as we will not
believe, ye shall delay, know that we, by authority of the holy Trinity and in
virtue of the apostolate given me by Christ the Lord, do cut you off, for
transgression of our appeal, from the kingdom of God and life eternal”.
The Franks delayed no longer. In May they were again
upon the march. Aistulf hastened from Rome to meet
them; but again he failed to bar their path, and again
was shut up in Pavia. It was now, as Pepin drew near the town, that a Greek
envoy, who had tried to intercept him on his way, at last came up with him. In
honeyed words he claimed for the Empire Ravenna and its Exarchate. But Pepin
answered that for no treasure in the world would he rob St Peter of a gift once
offered, swearing that for no man’s favour had he
plunged thus once and again into war, but for love of St Peter and the pardon
of his sins. It is the papal biographer who reports his words.
The siege was short. Aistulf,
now a convicted rebel, was glad to escape with life and realm by payment of a
third of his royal hoard, with pledge of yearly tribute, and by immediate
surrender of his conquests. To Abbot Fulrad, as Pepin’s deputy, these forthwith were handed over, one
by one, from Ravenna, with Comacchio, down the coast
to Sinigaglia and over the mountains to Narni; and their keys the abbot bore to Rome, where with
the written deed of their donation by his king he laid them on St Peter's tomb.
757-768] Desiderius King of the Lombards
When the Franks went home, the Exarchate, as Aistulf had found it, was the Pope’s. Rome and its duchy,
though unnamed by Pepin, were as surely his. But not contentment. Though his
lands now stretched from Po to Liris and from sea to
sea, the redemption of Italy was but begun. Aistulf's robberies won back, why not Liutprand’s? Occasion
offered soon. Aistulf was killed by accident while
hunting, and his brother Ratchis, without asking
leave of the Pope, left the monastery to assume the crown. The outraged Stephen
stirred Benevento and Spoleto to revolt, and aided Desiderius, duke of Tuscany,
in a struggle for the throne. But this aid had its price: a sworn contract
bound Desiderius to the surrender of the rest of the towns seized by the Lombards. Abbot Fulrad, who
lingered still at Rome, was not only witness to the pact, but with his little
troop of Franks took a hand in the enthronement of Desiderius. Perhaps he
thought thereby to plight his royal master to enforce the contract; but, though
the Lombard, once on his throne, yielded only Faenza and Ferrara, and though
Pope Paul, who in that same year (757) succeeded his brother, could extort no
more, and filled the ten years of his pontificate with piteous appeals to the “patrician
of the Romans” for help against dangers, real or fancied, from Lombard and from
Greek, the Frank refrained from further meddling.
Nor was there need of it. Though Desiderius quelled
with firm hand the rebels in Spoleto and in Benevento and was not to be cajoled
into further “restitutions” to the Pope, and though the Emperor tried intrigue
both with Lombard and with Frank, neither assailed Pope Paul with arms. Not
even the fiercely contested papal election which in 767 followed his death
disturbed the integrity of the Papal State. Pope Stephen III, who in 768
emerged from the turmoil, however he might date his charters by the Emperor's
regnal years and report his elevation to the Frank patrician, "his
defender next to God," was to all intent as sovereign as they. That so
vigorous a ruler and so capable a soldier as Constantine V made no armed
attempt to save to his Empire the fair peninsula that gave it birth must
doubtless be explained not only by the nearer cares which kept him busy, but by
the potent shadow of the Frank; and to that shadow was clearly due the inaction
of the Lombard. But the Frank himself, beyond St Peter’s gratitude here and
hereafter, asked no other meed.
Yet France was not without reward. Through the door
which war had left ajar culture crept in. “I send you”, writes Pope Paul, “all
the books which could be found”—and he names the hymn-books and the school-books of his packet, “all written in the Greek tongue”, an
antiphonal and a responsal, treatises on grammar,
geometry, orthography, works of Aristotle and of Dionysius. “I send, too”, he
adds, “the night-clock”—doubtless an alarm-clock, such as waked the monks to
their matins. It is but a glimpse at a traffic which must mainly have found
humbler channels. The improving calligraphy of Frankish scribes shows already
Roman influence. Bishop Remedius of Rouen imported
from Rome a singing-master for his clergy; and, when the master was called back
to head the Roman training-school, sent his monks thither to complete their
musical education. Chrodegang of Metz, ever in close
touch with Rome, inaugurated the most notable church reform of his day by
organizing under a discipline akin to the monastic the clergy of his cathedral
city. Among the imperial gifts from Constantinople came an organ, the first
seen in the West. A more questionable blessing was the advent of Greek
theologians: Byzantine envoys debated with papal, before the king and his
synod, as to the Trinity and the use of images; and, though they lost the
verdict, they must have quickened thought. Nor was the new horizon bounded by
Christian lands. The lord of Barcelona and Gerona, Muslim governor of
north-eastern Spain, strengthened himself against his Moorish sovereign by
acknowledging the Frankish overlordship; and a more distant foe of the Umayyad
court of Cordova, the great Caliph Mansur, from his new capital of Bagdad,
exchanged with Pepin embassies and gifts. It was the beginning of that
connection between the leading power of the Christian West and the leading
power of the Muslim East which has proved so perennial, and to the powers of
Christian East and Muslim West so costly.
Pepin’s Wars [759-760
But all this interest in the world at large meant no
sacrifice of energy at home. It was precisely the years that fell between or
followed the Italian expeditions which saw Pepin most active as a legislator.
In four successive synods of his clergy he perfected
the work begun by Boniface, but made it clear that in the Frankish Church the
crown was still to be supreme. Every spring henceforward all the bishops should
gather to the king for synod, and every autumn at his seat in Soissons those
clad with metropolitan authority should meet again. Inspection and stern
churchly discipline should keep at home and at religious duties priest and monk
and nun. All Christians must observe the Sunday rest and worship, and all
marriage must be public. “Though at the moment our
power does not suffice for everything”, runs an introductory clause full of
significance for the king’s whole character, “yet in some points at least we
wish to better what, as we perceive, impedes the Church of God; if later God
shall grant us days of peace and leisure, we hope then to restore in all their
scope the standards of the saints”.
Days of peace proved rare. In 759, having freshly
scourged the Saxons to tribute and submission, he “made no campaign, that he
might reform domestic affairs within his realm”. But in 760 began the task
which busied his remaining years—the subjection of Aquitaine. The broad south-west of Gaul, cut off from Neustria by the
wide stream of the Loire, from Burgundy by the escarpment of the Cevennes, had
not since Roman days fully cast in its fortunes with the rest. When Clovis won
it from the Goths he had not sown it with his Franks; and the Goths,
withdrawing into Spain, had left its folk less touched than any other in the
west of Europe by Germanic blood and ways. To the chroniclers and even to the
laws of Pepin’s time they still are “Romans”. The race of native dukes which
under the later Merovingians had made them almost independent acknowledged
Pepin as a suzerain only; and their boldness in harbouring fugitives from his authority and in taxing the Aquitanian estates of Frankish
churches had already caused friction and protest when the Frank occupation of Septimania gave rise to war. That this district, so closely
knit to Aquitaine before and since, its doorway to the Mediterranean and the
highway of its commerce, should pass into the keeping of the Frank was indeed a
knell to all their hopes. Duke Waifar had as early as
752 begun to wrest the region from the failing grasp of the Moor, and it was
perhaps only to escape his clutches that the Goths of its eastern towns offered
themselves to Pepin. This could be borne; but when, in 759, the taking of
Narbonne carried to the Pyrenees the Frank frontier, the speedy sequel was the
war with Aquitaine.
Pepin did not underrate his foe. Year after year, from
760 to 768, he led against Waifar the whole Frankish
host; and, though a brief peace closed the first campaign, the struggle
thereafter was to the death. With thoroughness and system, wasting no time in
raids, from fortress to fortress, district to district, through Berri,
Auvergne, the Limousin, garrisoning and organising as he went, the king relentlessly pushed on.
Once desertion and famine forced him to a pause; but there followed a fruitful
year—for whose blessings the king, like some American governor or president of
modern days, ordained in the autumn a general thanksgiving—and the war went on.
By the early summer of 768 the land was wholly overrun, and the death of Waifar ended the brave but hopeless fight. Pepin, himself
worn out by the struggle, lived only long enough to enact the statute which
should govern the new-won province. By this he fused it with the rest of his
kingdom, but left to its people their ancestral laws, guarded them against the
extortion of the royal officials, and provided for a local assembly of their
magnates which in conference with the deputies of the Crown should have final
authority as to all matters, civil and ecclesiastical.
In the palace reared by his son at Ingelheim the
fresco devoted to the memory of Pepin pictured him “granting laws to the Aquitanians”. It was, indeed, his most lasting work. Though
the whole history of Aquitaine betrays her separateness of blood and speech,
though still “there is no Frenchman south of Loire”, she has never ceased to
form with Neustria a single realm. All else—the absorption of Brittany, the
conquest of the Saxons, the humbling of Bavaria, whose young duke’s desertion
had for a moment crippled the war on Aquitaine—Pepin left unfinished to his
sons. Between the two, after the bad old fashion of the Franks, he now parted
the kingdom. To Charles, the elder, grown a man of twenty-six, fell Austrasia,
most of Neustria, the western half of Aquitaine—all, that is, to north and
west; to the younger, Carloman, still in his teens,
though wedded, all to south and east. Bavaria was assigned to neither: it must
first be won.
At St Denis, home of his childhood and his chosen
place of sepulture, Pepin died, not yet half through his fifties. His life,
though short, was fruitful. Modern scholars are at one in thinking his fame
eclipsed unduly by that of his successor. Nearly everything the son accomplished, the father had begun. Vigorous, shrewd,
persistent, practical, his own general and his own prime minister, relentless
but not cruel, pious but never blindly so, able to plan but able too to wait, Pepin bequeathed to Charles more than a
kingdom and a policy. Even for his bodily strength and presence, his power of
passion and his length of life, Charlemagne perhaps owed something to the
stainless self-control as husband and as father which was Pepin's alone of all
his line. How the king looked we have no means of knowing. The legend which
caused him in later centuries to be called “the Short” is baseless fable.
CHAPTER XIX
CONQUESTS AND IMPERIAL CORONATION OF CHARLES THE GREAT
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