government; kings no less than emperors were regarded as holding a
definite rank and office in the Christian commonwealth. No traditions of
imperial bureaucracy, except in a debased and orientalised form, were
accessible to Charles the Great. In Gaul and Italy he had subjects who
lived under a corrupt and mutilated Roman Law; but he was unacquainted
with the scientific principles of the great jurists whose writings were
the highest achievements of the Roman genius. To the best minds of the
eighth century the Roman Empire appeared, not as to an Athaulf or a
Theodoric, a masterpiece of human statesmanship, but rather a divine
institution, providentially created before the birth of Christ to school
the nations for the universal domination of His Church. The model of the
Carolingian Emperors was not Augustus but Constantine the Great, the
Most Christian ruler who made it his first business to protect the
Church against heretic and heathen, to endow her with riches, to enforce
her legislation. However his relation to the Pope might be conceived,
the Emperor held his office as the first servant of the Church. What
then were his practical duties? According to some he was pledged to
restore the material unity of Christendom and to subdue all heathen
peoples. This childlike ideal of his office no emperor could put into
practice. Charles the Great waged no important wars after his
coronation; he did not scruple to make peace with the Eastern Empire or
even to exchange courtesies with Haroun al Rashid, the Caliph of Bagdad.
He held, and the sanest of his counsellors agreed, that his first duty
was to protect, unite and reform the societies over which the Church
already exercised a nominal dominion. To conquer other Christian rulers
was no more to be expected of him than that he should surrender his own
royal prerogative; though it was desirable that they should do homage to
him as the earthly representative of spiritual unity.
Within his own realms the imperial office was to make a difference in
the spirit rather than the forms of government. The Empire raised to a
higher power the dignity and the responsibilities which belonged to him
as a king. He conceived himself bound to provide more carefully than
ever for the maintenance of ecclesiastical and the betterment of secular
law. His subjects were to realise that through their allegiance to him
they were God's subjects, bound to observe the law of God as a part of
the law of the Empire; he on his side was to be, to the best of his
power, a moral censor, an educator, a religious missionary, a protector
of the clergy, a defender of the faith.
When we turn from this noble dream to follow the history of the
Carolingian Empire, the contrast between the real and the ideal is
almost grotesque. Within a generation the Frankish realm is partitioned
after the Merovingian fashion; all that remains as a guarantee of unity
is the imperial title attached to one of several kingdoms, and the
theory that the kings are linked in fraternal concord for the defence of
Church and State against all enemies. Contemporaries laid the blame on
the weakness of Lewis the Pious and the ambition of his sons. These
causes undoubtedly accelerated the process of disruption; but others
more impersonal and more gradual in their operation were at work below
the surface of events.
(1) The first was the dawning of nationality. North of the Alps the
subjects of the Empire fell into a Germanic group, lying chiefly east of
the Rhine, and a Romance group nearly co-extensive with the modern
France; Italy was sharply severed from both by geography, by differences
of race and language, and by political tradition. In the Treaty of
Verdun (843), which begins the process of political disintegration,
these natural divisions are only half respected. The kingdom of the East
Franks is wholly Germanic; that of the West Franks contains the
Gallo-Roman provinces subdued by Clovis; but between them lies the
anomalous Middle Kingdom, the portion of the titular Emperor, in which
are united Italy, Provence, Burgundy, the valley of the Moselle and a
large part of the Netherlands. In each re-distribution of territories
among Carolingian princes the lines of partition approximate more
closely to the boundaries of modern nations. Burgundy and Provence alone
remain, after the year 888, as memorials of the Middle Kingdom. Italy
becomes an independent state; the northern provinces (Lotharingia) are
disputed between the East Franks and the West Franks. And already the
rulers of the new states are identifying themselves with national
sentiments and aspirations; it is not without reason that a later age
has given to Lewis, the first King of the East Franks, the title of "the
German."
(2) But, in the minds of ordinary men, national sentiment was little
more than a contempt for those of alien race and speech. The
nationalities were ready enough to separate one from the other; having
done so, they split asunder into tribal or feudal groups. Thus in
Germany the Saxons, Suabians, Bavarians, Thuringians, Franconians group
themselves round provincial chieftains. West of the Rhine, where Roman
rule had long since weakened tribal feeling, we can see a broad
distinction between the North and South of Gaul, but in each half of the
country the feudal principle is the dominating force; from the middle of
the ninth century we remark the formation of those arbitrarily divided
fiefs which play so large a part in French history. But of the feudal
movement we shall speak elsewhere.
(3) Last but not least we must allow for the disappearance of that moral
enthusiasm which Charles the Great had evoked in his subjects. His
conception of the Empire was too large for narrow minds. They could see
no reason in it. They were acutely alive to the sacrifices which it
demanded in the present, and sceptical as to the advantages which it
promised in the future. The idea of working for posterity does not
naturally occur to half-civilised peoples; they live from hand to mouth,
and are continually absorbed in the difficulties of the moment; they
believe in the supremacy of chance or fate or providence, and speak of
human forethought as presumptuous or merely futile. The imperial
programme was cherished and publicly defended by a little clique of
clerical statesmen; but they did not succeed in making many converts.
When the last of the Carolingian Emperors was deposed (887), there were
cries of lamentation from ecclesiastics. But among lay statesmen not a
hand was raised to stay the process of disintegration. This Emperor,
Charles the Fat, had succeeded by mere longevity in uniting all the
dominions of his family under his immediate rule; but in three short
years he dissipated whatever lingering respect attached to the idea for
which he stood. In the words of the annalist "a crop of many kinglets
sprang up over Europe." All the new pretenders came from the class of
the great feudatories. Among the West Franks it was Eude the Count of
Paris who seized the royal diadem; the East Franks elected Arnulf, Duke
of Carinthia; Italy became an apple of discord between the margraves of
Spoleto and Friuli; Burgundy was partitioned by two native families.
Yet within a hundred years there arose a reaction in favour of the
imperial idea--a reaction of which Germany was the apostle, which Italy
accepted, which made many converts in West Francia. There were new and
sufficient reasons for returning to the discarded system. The national
hierarchies, who had undermined the Frankish Empire to broaden the
foundations of ecclesiastical privilege and influence, were discovering
that they had set up King Stork in place of King Log; the exactions of
an Augustus were as nothing compared with the lawless pillaging of the
new feudalism; and elective sovereigns, ruling by the grace of their
chief subjects, were powerless for good as well as harm. The lower ranks
of laymen had no better cause to be content with the new order under
which the small freeholder was oppressed, the peasant enslaved, the
merchant robbed and held to ransom. The freedom of the aristocracy
spelled misery for every other class. These self-constituted tyrants
passed their lives in devastating faction fights. Worst of all, their
divisions and their absorption in petty schemes of personal
aggrandisement left Europe at the mercy of uncivilised invaders. In the
ninth and tenth centuries, medieval society experienced the same ordeal
to which the Roman Empire had been subjected in the fifth. From the
North and from the East a new generation of barbarians, perceiving the
patent signs of weakness, began to break through the frontiers in search
of plunder and of settlements.
First came the Northmen from Norway and Denmark. Like the Saxons of the
fourth century they were unrivalled seamen. Their fleets transported
them from point to point faster than land forces could follow in pursuit;
the great rivers served them as natural highways; and if beaten in a
descent upon the land, they had always their ships as a safe refuge. To
make treaties and to offer blackmail was a worse than useless policy;
the Vikings came in bands which operated separately, or united in this
year to scatter and form new combinations in the next. One leader could
not bind another; to buy off one fleet was merely to invite the coming
of a second. These pirates had begun to molest the British Isles and
Frisia before the death of Charles the Great; but after the first
partition of his Empire they fell on the whole coastline from the Elbe
to the Pyrenees. Originally attracted by the hope of plunder they soon
aimed at conquest; when, at the close of the ninth century, there was a
sudden pause in the flood of armed emigration from the North, the
Danelaw in England and Normandy on the opposite side of the Channel
remained as alien colonies which the native rulers were obliged to
recognise.
It was in Gaul that the ravages of the Normans were most severely felt,
though for a few years they were the scourge of Frisia and the adjacent
provinces. Germany and Italy had other enemies to fear. In the year 862
a new danger, in the shape of the Hungarians, appeared on the borders of
Bavaria. They were an Asiatic people, from the northern slopes of the
Ural Mountains, who had been moving westward since the commencement of
the century. Contemporaries identified them with the Huns of Attila, and
the resemblance was more than superficial. The Hungarians were of the
Tartar race--nomads who lived by hunting and war, skilled in
horsemanship and archery, utterly barbarous and a byeword for cruelty.
The rapidity of their movements, and the distances to which their raids
extended, are almost incredible. In 899 they swept through the Ostmark
and reached the Lombard plain; in 915 they sacked Bremen; in 919 they
harried the whole of Saxony and penetrated the old Middle Kingdom; in
926 they went into Tuscany and appeared in the neighbourhood of Rome; in
937 they even reached the walls of Capua. In fact, until the great
victory of Otto I upon the Lech (955), they were the terror of
two-thirds of Christian Europe. Italy, the most disunited of the new
kingdoms, was further vexed by the Saracen pirates who roamed the
Western Mediterranean. The only sea-power capable of dealing with them
was that of the Byzantine Empire. The Greek fleet protected the
southeast of Italy, but was powerless to save Sicily, which was
conquered piecemeal for the Crescent (827-965). Farther north the
seaports of Amalfi, Gaeta, Naples and Salerno paid tribute or admitted
Saracen garrisons; in 846 Ostia and the Leonine quarter of Rome
(including the basilica of St. Peter) were pillaged. Robber colonies
established themselves on the river Garigliano, and at Garde-Frainet,
the meeting-point of Italy and Provence.
The effect which these disasters produced on the minds of the sufferers
is nowhere more clearly visible than in England. Here the House of
Alfred was able, within a century of the partition made at Wedmore
between the West Saxon kingdom and the Danes (878), to establish a
kingdom of imperial pretensions, loosely knit together but more durable
and more highly organised than any power which had arisen in Britain
since the Roman period. In Germany the Saxon line, beginning with Henry
the Fowler (919-936), was permitted to make the royal title hereditary,
and to assert an effective suzerainty over the other tribal dukes. In
France the House of Paris, after ruling for many years in the name of a
degenerate Carolingian line, was invited in the person of Hugh Capet to
assume the royal dignity (987). We have here a European movement in
favour of monarchy; and on the heels of it follows another for the
restoration of the Empire. The new royal dynasties did good work; even
the weakest among them, that of France, served as a symbol of unity, as
a rallying point for the clergy and all other friends of peace; but both
on practical grounds and on grounds of sentiment they left much to be
desired. National monarchy meant national wars and the right of national
churches to misgovern themselves according to their several
inclinations. Every year the rent in the seamless robe of Christendom
grew wider; political unity was disappearing, and religious unity would
soon go the same way. The kingly title made but a slight appeal to the
imagination or the conscience; with whatever ceremonies a King was
crowned, the real source of his power was the position which he held,
independently of his office, as a chief of a tribal or a feudal group;
of men who, as St. Odo bitterly remarked, being oppressed took to
themselves a lord that with his help they might become oppressors.
Sovereign power had lost all poetry and dignity; it was being perverted
to serve petty ends. An Emperor was needed to restore a higher sense of
justice, to exalt the spiritual above the material side of life.
So the idealists reasoned, and in Germany their arguments found willing
converts. This may appear strange, since Germany had taken the lead in
repudiating the Carolingian Empire, and Henry the Fowler, who
established the new German monarchy, was the reverse of an idealist. But
the truth was that the peculiar constitution of the German kingdom and
the peculiar problems raised by German expansion towards the East were
such as to make the ideal policy the safest. Though Henry the Fowler had
sedulously limited his attention to German problems, his son, working on
the same lines, found himself led by the natural sequence of events to
cross the Alps, seize Italy and take the imperial crown from the Pope's
hands.
Henry the Fowler, elected after nineteen years of nominal kingship and
unbridled anarchy, defined his position by a series of compacts with the
great Dukes. Suabia, Bavaria and Lotharingia became dependent
principalities, whose rulers attended national Diets, occasionally
appeared at court, and still more occasionally rendered military
service. Under their sway the new feudalism, which they encouraged as
the means of creating armies both for defence and for pursuing an
independent foreign policy, took root and throve as a legal institution.
Within the borders of the duchies Henry had little power except as the
patron of the church. He claimed the right of nominating bishops--though
in Bavaria this claim was not made good till the next reign--and
religious foundations held their privileges by his grace. The
ecclesiastical councils which legislated with his sanction were more
important than the Diets composed indifferently of laymen and prelates.
His general policy gave greater cause for satisfaction to the clergy
than to the remainder of his subjects. The assertion of supremacy over
Lotharingia (925), and Bohemia (929), and the defeat of the Hungarians
at the Unstrut (933), were national achievements; but for nine years
before the battle of the Unstrut the King had allowed the Hungarians to
work their will in Bavaria and Suabia, having secured the immunity of
his own duchy by a separate truce. He had chiefly employed those years
in building strong towns for the defence of Saxony, and in extending
Saxon power by the conquest of Brandenburg, Lusatia, Strelitz and
Schleswig. These could only be called national services on the
assumption that the crown was to remain the hereditary possession of his
house; but the German kingship was elective. To the Church, however,
nothing was more welcome than conquests gained at the expense of heathen
Slavs and Danes. In her eyes this Saxon statesman was the forerunner of
the Christian faith in the dark places of Europe. For all these reasons,
then, the power of Henry and his successors remained a power resting
upon ecclesiastical support. To strengthen the alliance of church and
state must be the first object of a Saxon ruler.
For some years after his accession (936) Otto I was harassed by
pretenders of his own family who allied themselves with one or more of
the great Dukes. The Bavarians threatened to secede and form an
independent nation; the Franconians rebelled when their right of waging
private wars was called in question; the Lotharingians intrigued to make
themselves an independent Middle Kingdom. All such malcontents found it
easy to secure a brother or a son of the King as their nominal leader.
Even when Otto had placed all the duchies in the hands of his own
kinsmen or connections, his power was still precarious. For he claimed
new rights which, though necessary to the maintenance of kingly power,
did violence to feudal and provincial sentiment; while the Dukes whom he
nominated usually took up the pretensions of their predecessors, and
identified themselves with the interests of their subjects. It was more
important than ever that the King should have the help of the clergy in
educating public opinion. But in the most critical period (939-955) of
the reign the German primate, Archbishop Frederic of Mainz, lent the
weight of his influence and high personal reputation to the rebel cause.
In another direction also Otto found the clergy the chief opponents of a
cherished scheme. Organised missions were among the means on which he
relied for civilising and extending his father's conquests in Slavonic
territory. For this purpose he planned, with the approval of Rome, to
make Magdeburg an archbishopric and the head of a Slavonic province. To
this proposal the sees of Mainz and Halberstadt offered strenuous
resistance, on the ground that it would curtail their jurisdictions
(955). Twice, therefore, Otto had been sharply reminded that his
authority over the German Church was insufficient for his purpose.
Meanwhile the train of events had drawn him into Italian politics. The
Kingdom of Italy had been seized, in 926, by Hugh of Provence, an
adventurer of Carolingian descent. In 937, on the death of Rudolph II of
Burgundy, Hugh designed to seize this derelict inheritance. He was
forestalled by Otto, who assumed the guardianship of the lawful heir of
Burgundy, the young Conrad; a united kingdom of Italy and Burgundy would
have been too dangerous a neighbour for the German Kingdom. Hugh,
however, secured for his son, Lothair, the hand of Conrad's sister
Adelaide, thus keeping alive the claims of his family for a future day.
Somewhat later Otto retaliated by giving protection to an Italian foe of
Hugh, the Margrave Berengar of Friuli, who came to the Saxon court and
became the liegeman of the German King. In 950 this relation suddenly
acquired political importance, through the unexpected deaths of Hugh and
Lothair, and the succession of Berengar in Italy. Reminded of his oath
to Otto, the new King repudiated his obligations as a vassal, and gave
further provocation by ill-treating the widowed Adelaide. Otto was thus
equipped with a double excuse for making war. And war was forced upon
him by the ambitions of his brother Henry, Duke of Bavaria, and of his
son Liutolf, Duke of Suabia. Both cast covetous glances on Italy, which
was hopelessly divided and an easy prey for the first-comer. In 949 the
Duke of Bavaria had seized Aquileia; in 951 the Duke of Suabia crossed
the Alps ostensibly to champion Adelaide. Otto could not remain idle
while two of his subjects and kinsmen contended over the spoils of
Italy. He collected an army and followed hard on the footsteps of
Liutolf. Berengar fled, the Dukes made peace with their suzerain, and
Otto was free to dispose of the Italian kingdom (951).
It is possible that, if the opportunity had been forthcoming, he would
at once have proceeded to Rome for an imperial coronation. But the Pope,
who alone could make an Emperor, was the nominee of a Roman faction,
headed by the ambitious Alberic the Senator who aspired to build up a
secular lordship on the basis of the Papal patrimony. Otto was not
invited to visit Rome. After some hesitation he decided, instead of
himself assuming the unprofitable duties of an Italian King, to restore
Berengar on condition of a renewal of homage. Perhaps the arrangement
was intended to be temporary. Otto was still menaced by conspiracies in
Germany; and Berengar might serve to guard Italy against ambitious
Dukes, until the hands of his overlord were free for Italian adventures.
Later events justify some such hypothesis. Within a few years the chief
difficulties of Otto were removed. A great ducal rising collapsed; the
Hungarians were so decisively beaten at the Lechfeld (955) that they
ceased to trouble Germany; death relieved Otto of his most dangerous
rivals, Archbishop Frederic of Mainz and his own son, Duke Liutolf.
Then, in 960, arrived the long-delayed call from Rome. John XII, a
dissipated youth of twenty-two, the son of Alberic (died 954) but devoid
of his father's ability, invoked the aid of Germany to protect the
temporal possessions against Berengar. Otto required no second summons.
Descending upon Italy, he expelled his vassal, assumed the Italian crown
at Pavia (961) and then repaired to Rome. Here in 962 he was crowned by
the Pope as lord of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. For good
or for evil the prerogative of Charles the Great was inseparably united
to the German monarchy.
From this complicated series of events some interesting conclusions may
be deduced. The Empire, which has so often been abused as a source of
countless woes to Germany, was revived in the interests of a purely
German policy. Unlike his son and his grandson, Otto I never submitted
to the spell of Italy. Since the time of Charles the Great it had been
taken for granted that the Empire could only be conferred by the Pope
and only held by a King of Italy. Otto did not greatly value his Italian
dominions, though circumstances forced him to reside in Italy for a
large part of his later years. For a time he had thoughts of recovering
Apulia and Calabria from the Greeks, Sicily from the Arabs. But he
abandoned his claims against the Eastern Empire as the price of a
marriage-alliance, and he left Sicily untouched. The Crown of Italy was
valuable to him chiefly as a qualification for his imperial office. To
the ecclesiastical duties of that office he was not indifferent. His
bishops, though largely employed as secular administrators, were
chosenwith some regard to their spiritual duties; he was a friend to the
Cluniac movement for monastic reform. But clearly he did not visit Rome
in pursuit of any plans for cleansing that Augean stable the Papacy. The
vices of John XII were notorious; but, as a Pope who could legally
confer the Empire, he was good enough for Otto's purpose. Only when John
repented of his bargain and turned traitor was he evicted in favour of a
more reputable successor (963). And John's successor was a layman until
the time of his election. Otto's chief concern was to secure a
trustworthy partisan; this remained the Saxon policy till the days of
his grandson.
Otto was not indifferent to the splendour or the more ambitious claims
of his office. He paraded before the world the benevolent protectorate
which he exercised over the young rulers of Burgundy and France; he
insisted upon the homage of the Polish and Bohemian dukes. He held
magnificent Diets to celebrate his new position, and made great efforts
to win recognition from the Byzantine court. But in substance his
ambitions were those of a German national king. He had a keen sense of
realities, a keen appreciation of concrete results; from first to last
his thoughts centred round the problems of his native land. The
extension of the eastern frontier, the alliance with the Church, the
management of the duchies--these were his main achievements as they had
been his main ambitions. But he had built better than he knew; and the
Empire acquired before his death a nobler significance than he perhaps
had ever contemplated.