barbarian usage of dividing a kingdom, in the manner of a family estate,
equally between the sons of a dead sovereign. Logically pursued this
custom of inheritance would have led to utter disintegration, such as
Germany exhibited in the fourteenth century. Among the Franks a
partition was followed, as a matter of course, by fratricidal conflicts
and consequent reunion of the kingdom in the hands of the ultimate
survivor; but even so the energies of the nation were squandered upon
civil wars. The descendants of Clovis did little to augment the realm
that he bequeathed to them; this little was done in the fifty years
following his death. The Burgundians, Bavarians and Thuringians were
subdued; Provence was bought from the Ostrogoths at the price of armed
support against Justinian; the Saxons were compelled to promise tribute.
From 561 to 688 the power and the morale of the Franks steadily
declined. Dagobert I (628-638), the most renowned of the Merovingians
after Clovis, could only chastise rebels and strengthen the defences of
the eastern frontier. He released the Saxons from tribute; he was unable
to prevent an adventurer of his own race, the merchant Samo, from
organising the Slavs of Bohemia and the neighbouring lands in a powerful
and aggressive federation. Already in his time the East Franks
(Austrasians) refused to be governed from Neustria, and insisted that
the son of Dagobert should be their king. After Dagobert the three
kingdoms of Neustria, Austrasia and Burgundy asserted their right to
separate administrations, even when subject to one king.
In each of these divisions the effective ruler was the Mayor of the
Palace, a viceroy who kept his sovereign in perpetual tutelage. The
later Merovingians were feeble puppets, produced before their subjects
on occasions of state, but at other times relegated to honourable
seclusion on one of their estates. The history of the Franks from 638 to
719 is that of conflicts between the great families of Neustria and
Austrasia for the position of sole Mayor. At length unity was restored
by the triumph of the Austrasian Charles Martel. His father had gained
the same position, but it was left for the son to sweep away the last
remaining competitors.
Charles Martel is the true founder of the Carolingian house, although
his ancestors had long played a conspicuous part in Austrasian and
national politics. He was not the inventor of feudalism, but was the
first to see the possibility of basing royal power on the support of
vassals pledged to support their lord, in every quarrel, with life and
limb and earthly substance. To provide his vassals with fiefs he
stripped the churches of many rich estates. But he atoned for the
sacrilege upon the memorable field of Poitiers. In 711 the Arabs, having
wrested northern Africa from the Byzantine Empire, entered Spain and
overthrew Roderic, the last King of the Visigoths. With his death the
cause of his nation collapsed. Though the Visigoths had long since
accepted the orthodox creed and were in close alliance with the Spanish
bishops, they were detested by the provincials, whom they had reduced to
serfdom and brutally oppressed. Within ten years the soldiers of the
Caliph were masters of Spain and turned their attention to southern
Gaul.
The Frankish Duke of Aquitaine could neither protect his duchy nor
obtain a lasting treaty. In the last extremity he turned to the Mayor of
the Palace, whom he had hitherto regarded as an enemy. The appeal was
answered; and Charles with a great Frankish host confronted the Arabs
under the walls of Poitiers. For seven days neither side would make the
first move; on the eighth the infidels attacked. The Frankish host was
composed of infantry protected by mail-shirts and shields; against their
close-locked lines, which resembled iron walls, the Arabs dashed
themselves in vain. When the attack had been repelled in disorder, the
Franks advanced, bearing down resistance by sheer weight and strength.
The Emir Abderrahman fell on the field, and then night put an end to the
conflict. Both armies camped on the field; but next morning the Arabs
had vanished in full retreat for the Pyrenees (Oct. 732). The flood of
Islam had received the first check; though Spain was not to be recovered
by the Franks, they were held to have saved northern Europe. Modern
criticism has remarked that the internal dissensions of Moslem Spain did
better service than this victory to the cause of Christendom; that the
Arabs continued to hold Septimania and sent raids into Provence. But for
contemporaries there was no question that the Franks had established a
claim to the special gratitude of the Church, and Charles to his
anomalous position as an uncrowned King. The Mayor of the Palace was
fully alive to the value of ecclesiastical support. He lent his support
to the work of the English missionaries Willibrord and Boniface among
the unconverted German tribes (Frisians, Hessians, Thuringians) over
whom he claimed supremacy. He permitted Boniface to enrol himself as the
servant of the Holy See. It is true that he would not form a political
alliance with the Roman Church against the Lombards. Northern wars
absorbed him; wars with the Frisians, the Saxons, the rebellious
Bavarians, Alemannians, and Aquitanians. But from alliance with the
Church to alliance with Rome was a natural step for his successors.
Shortly before his death (741) he divided his power between his sons
Carlmann and Pepin, giving Austrasia to the one, Neustria to the other.
But Carlmann abdicated to become a monk (747) and Pepin his junior was
left to continue the work of their father single-handed. Both brothers
employed Boniface to reorganise and reform the clergy of their
dominions; Pepin allowed the saint to take from all the Frankish bishops
an oath of subjection to the Holy See; and accepted him as Archbishop of
Mainz and primate of the German church. Three years later the Mayor
obtained the permission of Pope Zacharias to depose the last of the
Merovingian puppet-kings and to assume the regal style; the Pope justly
recommending that he should have the title to whom the power belonged
(751). So ended the line of Clovis, and with it the barbarian period of
Frankish history. For the next sixty years the history of Europe is that
of Carolingian conquests and essays in political reconstruction.
And now the growing connection with the Papacy acquired a new character.
Since the beginning of the eighth century the Eastern Empire had
forfeited the last claim to Italian allegiance by embracing the
Iconoclastic heresy, a protest at once belated and premature against the
growing materialism and polytheism of Catholic Christianity. Pope and
Lombards made common cause to protect the images in imperial Italy.
Gregory III excommunicated the iconoclasts (731); the Lombard King
Aistulf seized Ravenna, the last important stronghold of the Byzantines
in the peninsula (751). Too late the Papacy realised that the orthodox
Lombard was a greater menace than the Greek heretic. Aistulf regarded
Rome, in common with the other territories of the Empire, as his
rightful spoil. For the first time the issue was raised between secular
statesmanship scheming for Italian unity and a Roman bishop claiming
sovereign power as the historical and indispensable adjunct of his
office. Pope Stephen II visited the Frankish court to urge, not in vain,
the claims of religion and of gratitude. By two raids across the Alps
Pepin forced the Lombard to withdraw the claim on Rome, and furthermore
to restore what had been conquered from the Empire. These territories,
lying in Romagna and the Marches, the Frankish King conferred on the
Pope, as the legitimate representative of imperial power (756). Pepin's
Donation, made in defiance of Byzantine protests, greatly extended the
temporal power which the predecessors of Stephen had long exercised in
Rome and the neighbourhood. A shrewd expedient for crippling the most
formidable rival of the Franks, it was to be the rock on which ideals
then undreamed of were to founder. For it was the temporal power which
provoked the last and mortal struggle of the Holy Roman Empire with the
Papacy, which presented the most stubborn obstacle to the leaders of the
_Risorgimento_.
Like his father, Pepin laboured hard to knit together the conquests of
the early Merovingians, but without the same success. He expelled the
Arabs from Narbonne; he recovered the duchy of Aquitaine and suppressed
the ducal dynasty after eight hard-fought campaigns. But neither from
the Saxons nor from the Bavarians could he win effective recognition of
his suzerainty. What he had achieved in Aquitaine was seriously
endangered when, on his deathbed, he followed the tradition of dividing
his realm between his sons Carloman and Charles (768). Fortunately
Charles, though harassed by the intrigues of his incompetent senior,
weathered the storm of a new Aquitanian rising; he saw Carloman sink
unlamented into an early grave (771) and easily obtained recognition as
sole king. Then indeed he stood in a position singularly favourable for
prosecuting a policy which should embrace and transcend the ambitions of
his ancestors. Heir to a power extending from the Atlantic to the
Bohemian border in the one direction, in the other from the North Sea
and the Channel to the Alps and Pyrenees; the hereditary patron of the
Roman Church; ruler of a hierarchy which had definitely accepted the
ideal of a Christian Republic and desired to see Christian unity
enforced by the sword of the secular power; lord of a military caste of
vassals filled with the pride and lust of conquest; he had at his
disposal the resources and supporters sufficient to make him, what
Theodoric had idly dreamed of becoming, the supreme lord of the Teutonic
peoples, the lieutenant of the Empire in all the western provinces. It
was no ordinary man to whom this opportunity fell. Imperfectly educated,
even for his age, but of ready wit and unbounded curiosity; a general
whose iron will and superhuman energy seldom failed in leading his
soldiers through difficulties and reverses to ultimate victory; a
dreamer whose imagination kindled whenever he came into contact with the
great ideas, Christian or pagan, of an older world; a practical
statesman whose innate love of order and respect for justice were
coupled with a gift for organisation and the power of extracting their
best work from his subordinates, it is not for any want of natural
qualifications that his claim to rank with the great world-heroes can be
challenged. The shortcomings of his work are merely those of the race
and the age to which he belonged. The highest statesmanship is only
possible when the statesman has at his disposal the accumulated
experience and the specialised capacity of a civilisation which is old
and at the same time vigorous.
The policy of Charles in his period of sole rule (771-814) is
Janus-headed; it looks forward and looks back. A true Austrasian, he is
faithful to the old Frankish ideal of military conquest; but he gives it
a new meaning, and besides fulfilling the projects of his predecessors
goes beyond the horizon of their most ambitious enterprises. In his
friendship for the Pope, in his care for ecclesiastical reform, he is
his father's son; but the relations of the son with the Church have a
new purpose and involve more than one breach with the past. His
administration is largely guided by the traditional standard of royal
duty; he is a notable steward of his demesnes; he is the reliever of the
poor, the refuge of the defenceless, the champion of justice. But he is
also a far-sighted reformer adapting old administrative methods to the
requirements of a new political fabric. In fact, to epitomise all these
antitheses in one, he is the heir of an old barbarian monarchy and also
the founder of a new Empire.
The story of his conquests reads like the epitome of a lost romance--so
varied are the incidents, so jejune the details afforded by contemporary
sources.
(1) In 773 he crossed the Alps, at the prayer of Pope Hadrian, because
the Lombard King Didier had seized some cities comprised in Pepin's
Donation and was even threatening Rome. Pavia was starved into
surrender, Didier relegated to a monastery; Charles annexed the whole of
Lombard territory except Spoleto (which submitted to the Pope) and
Benevento. He assumed the title of King of the Lombards; but beyond
garrisoning a few towns and appointing a few Frankish counts made no
attempt to displace Lombard officials or alter the Lombard modes of
government. He visited Hadrian at Rome, renewed the Donation of Pepin,
and concluded a pact of eternal friendship with the Papacy.
(2) Then followed the period of the Saxon wars, as much a crusade
against German heathenism as the vindication of old and dubious claims
to suzerainty. The first campaign against the Saxons had taken place in
772; their final submission was not made till 785. The Saxons were still
in that stage of political development which Tacitus describes in his
_Germania_, ruled by petty chiefs who set up a war-leader when
there was need for common action, otherwise united only by racial
sentiment and the cult of a tribal deity. But they were a warlike race,
and found in this crisis a leader of genius, the famous Widukind. At
last he set his followers the example of embracing Christianity. Charles
acted as sponsor at his baptism, and Widukind became a loyal subject of
his spiritual father. In a few years the whole of Saxony was dotted with
mission churches; in a few generations the Saxons were conspicuous for
their loyalty to the faith, and the Saxon bishops counted among the
wealthiest and most influential of ecclesiastical princes. It was
through Saxon rulers, descended from Widukind, that the imperial policy
of Charles was revived in the tenth century and the imperial diadem
appropriated by the German nation. Yet the Saxons sturdily adhered to
their national laws and language; their obstinate refusal to be ruled by
other races was a stumbling-block to the most masterful sovereigns that
medieval Germany produced.
(3) During the years 786-787 Charles was threatened with a conspiracy
against his power in Italy. Tassilo, the vassal Duke of Bavaria, aspired
to independence and was induced by his wife, a daughter of King Didier,
to make common cause with her nation; Areghis, the Lombard ruler of
Benevento, had emphasised his independence by assuming the style and
crown of a king. The two princes made common cause, but were detected
before their plans had matured, and successively terrified into
submission by the appearance of overwhelming armies on their borders.
The Lombard duchy was no permanent acquisition for the Franks, but that
of Bavaria was suppressed, in consequence of a second plot (788). The
addition of this large and wealthy province made the eastern half of the
Frankish kingdom practically coextensive with medieval Germany, and
almost equal in importance to the Romanised provinces of Gaul.
(4) As a natural precaution for the defence of Bavaria, Charles then
turned against the Avars, a race akin to the Huns, who had settled on
the middle Danube after the departure of the Lombards for Italy. The
Avars invaded Bavaria and Friuli as allies of Tassilo (788); they were
punished by three campaigns of extirpation (791-796), which broke their
power and spared only a miserable remnant of their people. Their land
was annexed but not settled; for Germany offered a more tempting field
to the Frankish pioneers. Indeed, some of the surviving Avars were
planted in the Ostmark (Austria), which Charles established as an
outpost of Bavaria, to keep watch upon the Slavs.
(5) To Spain the Emperor first turned his attention in 777, when he was
invited by the discontented emirs on the north of the Ebro to free them
from the Caliph of Cordova. The next year saw his abortive march through
the pass of Roncesvalles to the walls of Saragossa--an expedition
immortalised in the _Chanson de Roland_, the earliest and most famous
epic of the Charlemagne cycle, but fabulous from first to last, except
in recording the fact that there was a certain Roland (warden of the
Breton Mark) who fell in the course of the Frankish retreat. More
substantial work was done in Spain during the last years of the reign.
Navarre declared for the Franks and Christianity; the eldest son of
Charles captured Tortosa at the mouth of the Ebro (811), and founded the
Spanish Mark.
This lengthy catalogue only accounts for the more important of the wars
in which Charles and his lieutenants were engaged. We must imagine, to
complete the picture, a background of minor conflicts within and without
the Empire--against the Slavs, the Danes, the Greeks, the Bretons, the
Arabs, the Lombards of Benevento. These crowded years of war leave the
Frankish Empire established as the one great power west of the Elbe and
Adriatic. It did not include the Scandinavian lands or British Isles;
the Franks were never masters of the northern seas. It had failed to
expel the Arabs and Byzantines from the western Mediterranean; Spain,
Sicily, even parts of Italy remain unconquered. Of recovering North
Africa there could be no question. Still in magnitude the Frankish realm
was a worthy successor of the Western Empire. On Christmas Day, 800,
Charles was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III, in St.
Peter's basilica at Rome; and his subjects vainly imagined that, by this
dramatic ceremony, the clock of history had been put back four hundred
years. Though the Age of the Barbarians had been ended by the greatest
of them, the era which he inaugurated was an era not of revival but of
new development.
III
THE EMPIRE AND THE NEW MONARCHIES (800-1000 A.D.)
The imperial policy of Charles the Great constitutes a preface to the
history of the later Middle Ages. He holds the balance between nascent
forces which are to distract the future by their conflicts. He pays
impartial homage to ideas which statesmen less imperious or more
critical will afterwards regard as irreconcilable. He is at one and the
same time an autocrat, the head of a ruling aristocracy, and a popular
ruler who solicits the co-operation of primary assemblies. From the
highest to the lowest his subjects must acknowledge their unconditional
and immediate allegiance to his person; yet he tolerates the existence
of tribal duchies, he revives the Lombard kingdom, and creates that of
Aquitaine, as appanages for his younger sons. He fosters the growth of
territorial feudalism, and lends the sanction of royal authority to the
claims of the lord upon his vassal; but simultaneously he contrives
expedients for controlling feudalism and stifling its natural
development. He exalts the Church, and he enslaves her. He is there to
do the will of God as expounded by the clergy; but he disposes of sees
and abbacies like vacant fiefs, he dictates to the Pope, he interferes
with the liturgy, he claims a voice in the definition of dogma and the
wording of the creed. Finally, and most striking, there is the
antithesis between the two aspects of his power, the monarchical and the
imperial.
The Franks left to Europe the legacy of two political conceptions. They
perfected the system of barbarian royalty; they outlined the ideal of a
power which should transcend royalty and embrace in one commonwealth all
the Catholic kingdoms of the West. On the one hand they supplied a model
to be imitated by an Egbert, a Henry the Fowler, a Hugh Capet. On the
other hand they inspired the wider aims of the Ottos and the
Hohenstauffen. It is therefore worth our while to understand what a
Carolingian king was, and what a Carolingian Emperor hoped to be.
The king's power was based upon three supports: the general allegiance
of his subjects, the more personal obligations of the vassals who were
in his _mund_, the services and customs of the tenants on the royal
demesne. It is from these last that he derives his most substantial
revenue. He is the greatest landowner of his realm, until in the ninth
century he dissipates his patrimony by grants of hereditary
_beneficia_. The farming of the demesnes is an important branch of
the public service; they are managed by bailiffs, who work under rules
minutely elaborated by the king in the form of edicts, and who render
their accounts to a minister of state, the Seneschal or steward of the
household. The king is further the fountain of justice, the guardian of
public order, the protector of peaceful industry and commerce.
Accordingly he derives large profits from the fines of the law-courts,
the forfeitures of criminals, the tolls of highways and markets, the
customs levied at seaports and at frontier towns. In the exercise and
exploitation of his prerogatives he is assisted by functionaries of whom
most are household officers: the Chamberlain who keeps the royal hoard;
the Constable (_comes stabuli_) who marshals the host; the Seneschal, or
High Steward, who controls the demesnes; the Protonotary, by whose staff
the royal letters and all documents of state are written out; the
Arch-chaplain, to whom ecclesiastical suitors bring their petitions and
complaints. Finally there are the Counts of the Palace, appointed from
the chief races of the realm, who exercise the king's appellate
jurisdiction in secular cases. But the king is bound by custom to govern
with the counsel and consent of his great men--a Germanic tradition
which no after growth of respect for Roman absolutism can destroy. A
select body of influential nobles deliberates with the king on all
questions of national importance. Their decisions are submitted
for approval to a more general assembly (Mayfield), held annually in the
spring or summer. By this assembly the military expedition of the year
is discussed and sanctioned; here also are promulgated royal edicts
(_capitula_).
The ordinary freeman, upon whom falls the ultimate burden of military
service, has no voice in the debates of the Mayfield; but ordinances
affecting the old customary laws of the several races which make up the
kingdom (Salians, Ripuarians, Saxons, etc.) do not take effect till they
have been accepted by popular assemblies in the provinces which they
concern. And such revisions are infrequent. The royal prerogative in
legislation is limited by a popular prejudice, which regards the
customary law as sacred and immutable. The Capitularies are chiefly
administrative ordinances; the "law of the land," which is the same
everywhere and for all persons, is an ideal to be realised in England
alone of medieval states. Elsewhere the king's law is a supplement, a
postscript; the privilege of the free man is to live under the law of
his province, his lord's fief or his free city.
In local administration the king relies, outside the tribal duchies, on
counts whose districts are subdivisions of the old national provinces.
The count, often a hereditary official, is a royal deputy for all
purposes, military and civil. He collects the royal dues, leads the free
men to the host, maintains the peace and administers justice. His
tribunal is the old Germanic hundred-court, in which the free suitors
ought to be the judges; but the suitors for this purpose are represented
by a few doomsmen (_scabini_) chosen for their respectability and
knowledge of the law. They are an ineffectual check upon the count, and
it is a standing difficulty to find ways and means of compelling these
local viceroys to act with common honesty. For this purpose the king
annually appoints itinerant inspectors (_missi dominici_); in twos
and threes they are dispatched on circuit to acquaint the count with
royal instructions, to promulgate new legislation, and above all to
receive and adjudicate upon the complaints of all who are oppressed. A
comparatively late expedient, and the first part of the Carolingian
system to disappear, these tours of inspection were the one safeguard
against local misgovernment and the feudalising of official power. When
they ceased, the Carolingian county too often became a hereditary fief
exploited for the lord's sole benefit.