THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT MAYORS OF THE PALACE
656-720
The Mayor Grimoald unsuccessfully endeavours to make his son king of
Austrasia—Decadence of the house of the Merovings—Ebroin and his
tyrannical rule in Neustria—Long civil wars—Rise of Pippin the
younger and his victory at Testry—The ascendency of Pippin: his
successes in consolidating the kingdom—Missionary enterprises in
Germany—Civil wars at the death of Pippin—Final triumph of his son
Charles Martel.
In 656 died King Sigibert III., the first Meroving king of Austrasia who
had been but a puppet in the hands of his Mayor of the Palace. At his
death was made, a full century too soon, the first attempt of that great
family which had of late held all real power to add the shadow to the
substance by assuming the royal name. King Sigibert had only reached the
age of twenty-seven when he died: his son and heir, named Dagobert after
his grandfather, was but eight. Taking advantage of the boy’s youth, the
Mayor Grimoald had him stolen away from his country by the hands of a
bishop, and lodged him in an Irish monastery, where his head was shorn,
and he was consecrated as a monk. [Sidenote: Usurpation of Grimoald,
656.] Having got rid of the rightful heir, Grimoald induced his
partisans to raise his own son Childebert on the shield, and salute him
as king of Austrasia. But the times were not yet ripe: Grimoald had many
bitter enemies, and the majority of the people were not yet accustomed
to the idea of dethroning the ancient house of the Merovings. Within a
few days after the usurpation, Grimoald was seized by a band of
Austrasian nobles, cast into fetters, and hurried off to Paris, where
his captors laid him before the feet of king Chlodovech II. of Neustria,
the brother of the deceased Sigibert.
Chlodovech, a cruel and debauched young man, slew Grimoald with horrid
tortures. It appeared as if the greatness of the house of Pippin and
Arnulf was destined to be extinguished with the life of its chief: but
the Fates willed otherwise. Within a few months of the execution of the
great Mayor, king Chlodovech died, leaving the diadem to his little son
Chlothar III. All the Frankish realms were once more under the nominal
rule of a child, and the last chance of the survival of the kingly power
was gone, in Neustria now as well as in the Eastern realm. The house of
the Austrasian mayors was within a few years to raise its head once
more.
Meanwhile the minority of Chlothar III. was destined to be a time of
storm and trouble. Before he had been four years on the throne his
Austrasian subjects determined that they would once more have a king of
their own, and not obey orders from Soissons or Paris. Accordingly they
took Childerich, the younger brother of Chlothar, and crowned him as
king of the Eastern realm. The joint reign of the boys Chlothar III. and
Childerich I. lasted for ten years: at first the kingdoms were kept in a
certain measure of peace by the queen-mother, Bathildis, an Anglo-Saxon
lady of great virtue and ability. But after four years, worn out by the
troublous task of reconciling the opposing factions of the nobility, she
retired into a nunnery, and when her gentle influence was removed,
trouble at once broke out.
[Sidenote: Mayor Ebroin. 660-81.] The man mainly responsible for the
evil time of civil strife that followed was Ebroin, Mayor of the Palace
in Neustria. He was a cruel, ambitious, vindictive noble, who aspired to
much the same position that Pippin the Old and Grimoald had once
occupied in Austrasia. Strong by the power of using the royal name, by
his numerous _comitatus_, and by his unscrupulous readiness to strike
down all who opposed him, he exercised for several years what the
contemporary chroniclers called a ‘tyranny.’ He was, we are told, so
greedy of money, that to him the man with the longer purse always seemed
to have the better cause. Nor was greed his worst fault; however small
the offence, any crime committed by a man that he suspected or envied
brought the invariable penalty of death. His mandates were as capricious
as they were harsh, for example he once issued an order that no Frank of
Burgundy should approach the king’s person without the mayor’s express
permission. This domination of Ebroin lasted until his young master,
Chlothar III., of whose personal influence or character we hear naught,
died on the verge of manhood in 670.
The autocratic Mayor of the Palace at once raised on the shield
Theuderich, Chlothar’s youngest brother. But the majority of the
Neustrians saw their chance of getting rid of their tyrant. Rising under
the leadership of Leodegar, bishop of Aûtun, they proclaimed Childerich
of Austrasia king of the West, as well as of the East Franks, and called
him in to their aid. The personal following of Ebroin was too weak to
resist the Neustrian and Austrasian nobles combined. He and his puppet
king were made captive, and both compelled to take monastic vows—Ebroin
at Luxeuil, Theuderich at St. Denis. It might have been better in the
end for the Franks if Leodegar had been less merciful to the vanquished
Mayor: he was yet to give much trouble.
For three years Childerich reigned over all the Franks: he reached
manhood in this time, but the power of the kingship did not pass into
his own hand. The Mayor Wulfoald ruled in Austrasia, while bishop
Leodegar administered Neustria with some success ‘till the old enemy of
mankind, whose wont it always is to foment discord, began to stir up
against him the envy of the great men whom he had taken as his fellows
at the helm, and to sow the tares of malice between him and the king.’
Leodegar was at last thrust by his envious colleagues into the monastery
of Luxeuil, where he found his old enemy Ebroin awaiting his company.
[Sidenote: Murder of Childerich I.] In the same year king Childerich was
murdered: he had seized a free Frank named Bodolin, and without trial or
judgment, bound him naked to a stake, and flogged him in the palace
court. No sooner was the furious Neustrian freed from his bonds than he
gathered a few friends, and slew the king in his bed.
There followed anarchy all over the Frankish realm, for Childerich had
left only an infant son. One party in Neustria took out of the monastery
of St. Denis prince Theuderich, who had been Ebroin’s candidate for the
Neustrian throne three years before, and proclaimed him king. Wulfoald,
the Mayor of the Palace of Austrasia, sent to Ireland to find Dagobert,
the long-lost prince whom Grimoald had kidnapped and sent over-sea in
656. Sought out by Wilfred, bishop of York, and perhaps guarded by
Northumbrian warriors, Dagobert was brought over to Germany, and raised
to the throne. But another party, mainly composed of Austrasians,
proclaimed a boy named Chlodovech, whom they said was a natural son of
king Chlothar III. Ebroin broke from his monastery-prison, let his hair
grow, and joined the adherents of Chlodovech. In this three-cornered
duel the kings counted for little or naught, the mayors and the nobles
for everything. [Sidenote: Tyranny of Ebroin.] By his superior daring
and persistency Ebroin worked himself once more to the front, and on
consenting to abandon the boy pretender, whose cause he had feigned to
espouse, was made Mayor of Neustria once more by king Theuderich (678).
His first care was to send for his old enemy Leodegar, against whom he
entertained an unforgotten grudge, in spite of their common captivity at
Luxeuil. The good bishop was brought before him, blinded, and afterwards
beheaded. Later generations, remembering his well-meaning government and
cruel end, saluted him as a saint (St. Leger).
For three years the wicked Ebroin went forth conquering and to conquer:
he used the name of king Theuderich to cover his misdeeds, and ordered
everything at his own pleasure. Entering Austrasia he crushed its army,
and Dagobert, the king from over-sea, was slain by traitors after his
defeat. Some of the East Franks, however, refused to lay down their
arms, and placed at their head the heir of the house of Arnulf and
Pippin, as the most popular chief that Austrasia could find. This was
Pippin the Young, nephew of Mayor Grimoald, son of Ansegisel and Begga,
and grandson both of St. Arnulf and Pippin the Old.
THE GREAT MAYORS OF THE PALACE.
St. Arnulf, Bp. of PIPPIN the Elder, Mayor
Metz, died 641. of Austrasia, died 639.
| |
| +----------------+---------------+
| | |
ANSEGISEL, Mayor ===== Begga. GRIMOALD, Mayor of
of Austrasia 632-38. | Austrasia, died 656.
| |
Plectrudis=====PIPPIN the Younger,::::::::Alphaida. Childebert,
Proclaimed
| Mayor of Austrasia, : King of Austrasia 656.
| Neustria, and :
| Burgundy, died 714. :
| :
+-------+-+ CHARLES MARTEL, Mayor
| | of Austrasia 717, of all the
GRIMOALD, Drogo, Kingdoms 719, died 741.
Mayor of died 708. |
Neustria, +--------------++-------------+----------+
died 714. | | | |
| CARLOMAN, PIPPIN the Short, Grifo. Bernhard.
Theudoald. Mayor of Mayor of Neustria |
Austrasia, 741, King of the |
died 754. Franks 752. |
| |
+---------+---+ +---------+-+
| | | |
CHARLES the CARLOMAN. Adalhard. Wala.
Great.
Ebroin, however, was strong enough to overbear the resistance of Pippin:
at Lafaux, near Laon, he defeated the last Austrasian army in the open
field, and compelled all the Franks, from Meuse to Rhine, to acknowledge
his _protégé_ Theuderich as king. He himself became mayor both of
Neustria, Burgundy, and Austrasia, and might well have aspired to assume
the royal title. But a private enemy, whose death he had been plotting,
secretly murdered him in 681, and with his death the ascendency of
Neustria came to an end. [Sidenote: Rise of Pippin II.] The Austrasians
once more took up arms under Pippin the Young, and after seven more
weary years of civil war, a decisive battle at Testry near St. Quentin
settled the fate of the Frankish realms (687). Pippin with the men of
the East was completely victorious, and Theuderich and the Neustrians
were compelled to take what terms he chose to give them. He claimed to
be what Ebroin had been, mayor both in East and West, but he chose to
dwell himself at Metz, the home of his grandfather, and from thence
administered Austrasia almost as an independent ruler; while regents
named by him guided the steps of king Theuderich in Neustria. By the
fight of Testry the question of precedence between Austrasia and
Neustria was finally settled in favour of the former. From this moment
onward, the East-Frankish house of the descendants of Arnulf and Pippin
is of far more importance in Frankish history than the effete royal
family. Warned by the fate of Grimoald, they did not again demand the
crown for a space of eighty years, and were content with a practical
domination without any regal name. Henceforth we shall find the Franks
more Teutonic and less Gallo-Roman than they had hitherto been: the
central point of the realm is for the future to be found about
Austrasian Metz, Aachen and Köln, not around Neustrian Soissons, Paris,
or Laon.
Pippin, the son of Ansegisel, was Mayor of the Palace for twenty-six
years (688-714), a period in which he did much to rescue the Frankish
realm from the dilapidation and evil governance which it had experienced
for the last fifty years. [Sidenote: Dilapidation of the realm.] His
first task was to endeavour to restore the ancient boundaries of the
kingdom; for during the reigns of the sons and grandsons of Dagobert I.,
the old limits of the realm had fallen back on every side. On the
eastern border the homage which the Bavarian dukes owed to the Merovings
had been completely forgotten; for all practical purposes they were now
independent. Farther north, the Thuringians were in much the same
condition; they had been saved from the Slavonic hordes of Samo by their
own chiefs, not by their Frankish suzerain, and since they had repulsed
the Slavs had gone on their own way, caring nought who ruled at Metz or
Köln. The Frisians of the Rhine-mouth, a race whom the Merovings had
never subdued, were pushing their raids into the valleys of the Scheldt
and Meuse. These were all comparatively outlying tribes, whose freedom
is easily explained by their distance from the centre of government. But
it is more surprising to find that even the Suabians or Alamanni, on the
very threshold of Austrasia, along the Rhine and Neckar and in the Black
Forest, had of late refused the homage which for two hundred years they
had been accustomed to render to the Merovings, and paid no obedience to
any one save their own local dukes. In the south also the Gallo-Romans
of Aquitaine had achieved practical independence under a duke named
Eudo, who was said to be descended from Charibert, king of Aquitaine,
the brother of Dagobert I.
For fifty years Pippin and his son Charles were to work at the
restoration of the ancient frontier of the Frankish realm, beating down
by constant hard fighting the various vassal tribes who had slipped away
from beneath the Frankish yoke. Pippin’s chief wars were with the
Frisians and the Suabians, against both of whom he obtained great
successes. [Sidenote: Frisia subdued.] After a long struggle he
compelled Radbod, the duke of the Frisians, to do homage to king
Theuderich, and cede to the Franks West-Frisia, the group of marshy
islands between the Scheldt-mouth and the Zuider Zee, which is now
called Zealand and South Holland. To protect this new conquest Pippin
set up or restored castles at Utrecht and Dorstadt, new towns destined
to become, the one the ecclesiastical, and the other the commercial,
centre of the lands by the Rhine-mouth. Duke Radbod was also compelled
to give his daughter in marriage to Pippin’s eldest son, Grimoald.
Another series of campaigns were directed against the Suabians. Pippin
followed them into the depths of their forests, and compelled their duke
Godfrid to acknowledge himself, as his fathers had done, the vassal of
the Franks.
It is very noticeable that under Pippin’s rule and by his aid the
conversion of Germany to Christianity was begun. The descendants of St.
Arnulf were, as befitted the issue of such a holy man, zealous friends
of the Church and patrons of missionary enterprise. The Merovingian
kings had been, almost without exception, a godless race, Christian in
name alone. They had taken no pains to favour the spread of Christianity
among their vassals: it was sufficient in their eyes if their own
people, the ruling race, conformed to the Catholic faith; for the souls
of Suabians, Frisians, or Bavarians, they had no care. Such missionaries
as had hitherto been seen in the German forests, along the shores of the
Bodensee, or the upper reaches of the Danube and Main, had been, almost
without exception, Irish monks, drawn from the Isle of Saints by their
own fervent zeal for the spread of the Gospel, not by any encouragement
from the Frankish kings. In the sixth and seventh centuries these holy
men overran the whole Continent, seeking for heathen to convert, or
planting their humble monasteries in the wildest recesses of the
mountains or the primeval forest. They wandered as far as Italy and
Switzerland, where two of the greatest of them fixed their homes, St.
Fridian at Lucca, St. Gall in the hills above the Bodensee.
[Sidenote: Conversion of Germany.] But till the time of Pippin no
systematic attempt had been made to convert those among the German races
who still lay in the darkness of Paganism. It was Pippin who first saw
that this duty was incumbent on the Frankish government. He sent to
England for St. Willibrord, the first apostle of the Frisians, who with
his twelve companions wandered over the newly-conquered West Friesland,
preaching to the wild heathen. It was by Pippin’s encouragement also
that the Englishman Suidbert laboured among the Hessians, till he and
his converts were driven away by the invasion of the pagan Saxons. At
the same time St. Rupert, bishop of Worms, completed the conversion of
Bavaria, and founded there the great bishopric of Salzburg (696). Much
about the same date the Irish monk Killian passed up the Main and along
the skirts of the Thüringerwald, to preach to the Thuringians, till he
met with a martyr’s death at Würzburg. Everywhere the ascendency of the
grandson of Arnulf was followed by the arrival of zealous missionary
workers, Franks, Irish or English, who strove to bear the standard of
the Cross into the German woodlands, where Woden and Thunor alone had
hitherto been adored. What Pippin began, his greater son, Charles the
Hammer, and his still mightier great-grandson, Charles the Emperor, were
destined to complete. By this work alone the house of the great
Austrasian mayors did more to justify their existence in three
generations than the wicked Merovings had done in eight.
The years during which Pippin governed the Franks were marked in their
regal annals by four obscure names. Theuderich, the weak king who had
been drawn from the cloister to sit on his brother’s throne,[41] died in
691: he was followed by his two infant sons, Chlodovech III. (691-5),
and Childebert III. (695-711), both of whom were recognised alike in
Neustria and Austrasia, but had no real authority. Chlodovech died while
yet a boy: Childebert survived to early manhood, begat a son, and then
hastened to the grave. Apparently the vices of their ancestors had
sapped the vital energy of the later Merovings; scarce one of them
survived to reach the age of thirty, and each long minority made the
kingly power more and more shadowy, and the authority of the great mayor
more and more real. Childebert III. was followed by one more young boy,
his son Dagobert III. (711-16), the last of the four puppet kings in
whose names the great Pippin swayed the Frankish sceptre.
Footnote 41:
See page 259.
Pippin lived to a great age, and had the misfortune to lose in his
declining years his two legitimate sons, Grimoald and Drogo, whom he had
destined to succeed him. The heirs then remaining to him were Theudoald,
a young boy, the son of Grimoald, and Carl [Charles Martel], an
illegitimate son whom he had by a concubine named Alphaida. The former
was only eight years of age, the latter twenty-five, but the old man
designated the boy Theudoald as his successor, hoping that he might be
spared to see him grow up to manhood. [Sidenote: Death of Pippin, 715.]
He died, however, within a few months, and a strange problem was put
before the Franks, whether they would tolerate a child-mayor ruling in
the name of a child-king. Pippin’s widow Plectrudis tried to seize the
reins of government in behalf of her little grandson, and some of the
Austrasians adhered to her cause. As a precautionary measure she cast
her husband’s natural son Charles into prison, knowing that many men
regarded him as the only possible heir to Pippin’s position, since the
idea of a child-mayor was preposterous.
Plectrudis’ endeavour to rule in the name of her grandson proved, as
might have been expected, a complete failure. The counts and dukes of
Neustria hastened to take the opportunity of shaking off the domination
of the Austrasians. They mustered in arms, chose a certain Raginfred,
one of themselves, as Neustrian Mayor of the Palace, and raised an army
to invade Austrasia in the name of the young Dagobert III. They did not
shrink from allying themselves with the enemies of the state, the
Frisians and Saxons, who attacked Austrasia from the rear, while they
themselves, advancing through the Ardennes, wasted all the lands between
Meuse and Rhine with fire and sword. Plectrudis and her grandson shut
themselves up within the walls of Köln.
[Sidenote: Rise of Charles Martel.] Before the end of the year, however,
two important events occurred to give a new turn to the war. Charles,
the son of Pippin, escaped from his stepmother’s prison, and was at once
saluted as chief by the majority of the Austrasians, who had been driven
to wild rage by the ravages of the Neustrian army, and yearned for a
leader capable of commanding in the field. Shortly after the young king,
whom East and West had both acknowledged, died, as did all his
ancestors, just when he had attained manhood, and immediately after the
birth of his first child. Like the Grand Lamas of Thibet, these wretched
Merovings expired, with hardly an exception, just as they grew old
enough to interfere in politics. As with the Lamas, so with the Franks,
we cannot help suspecting that there was more in these sudden deaths
than appears on the surface: it certainly was not to the interest of
those about the persons of the kings that they should ever live long
enough to assert their regal power.
On the death of Dagobert, the Neustrians drew out from the monastery,
where he had been placed in earliest infancy, the son of Childerich I.,
the king whom Bodolin had slain in 678. [Sidenote: Chilperich II., 716.]
The monk Daniel was saluted by the royal name of Chilperich, and raised
on the shield: he was the first Meroving for eighty years who had
reached manhood at the moment of his accession, being in his
thirty-eighth year. Chilperich, in spite of his monastic rearing—or
perhaps in virtue of it—turned out a far more vigorous personage than
any of his relatives, and cannot be called one of the ‘_rois
fainéants_.’ He continually took the field at the head of his
Neustrians, and did his best to become their national champion.
Unfortunately the times were against him.
In 716 the Neustrian king and mayor marched together into Austrasia to
make an end of the resistance alike of Plectrudis and of Charles. At the
same time Radbod, the Frisian duke, pushed up the Rhine towards Köln.
Charles offered battle to the invaders near that city, but was defeated,
and forced to take refuge in the mountains of the Eifel. Chilperich then
laid siege to Köln, and compelled Plectrudis and her party to
acknowledge him as king, give up the royal treasure-hoard of Austrasia,
and withdraw the boy Theudoald’s claim to the mayoralty. But while the
Neustrian army was returning in triumph to its own land, Charles, who
had assembled a new force, fell upon it near Malmédy, on the skirts of
the Ardennes. At the battle of Amblève all the work of Chilperich’s
vigorous campaign was undone, for his army was routed, and he and his
mayor, Raginfred, barely escaped with their lives (716).
[Sidenote: Battle of Vincy, 717.] This was the first blow of Charles the
Hammer [Martel], as after generations named him. From henceforth his
career was to be one of uninterrupted success against every foe who
dared withstand him. Early in the spring he followed up his first stroke
by invading Neustria, and defeating Chilperich for a second time at
Vincy, near Cambray. Pressing on after his victory he pursued the
Neustrians up to the gates of Paris, and when resistance ceased, turned
back in triumph to Austrasia. There he compelled his stepmother
Plectrudis to give up Köln to him, and dispersed her partisans. Being
now undisputed master of the Eastern kingdom, he proclaimed a certain
Chlothar king, and named himself Mayor of the Palace. Chlothar IV.,
whose descent is not certain, but who was perhaps grandson of the Irish
exile Dagobert II., was of course a mere puppet in his mayor’s hands.
After securing for himself a legitimate position in the state, Charles
started forth to humble all the enemies who had vexed Austrasia in its
time of trouble. He drove the Saxons over the Weser, compelled Radbod
the Frisian to surrender West Friesland for the second time, and then
turned against Neustria. It was in vain that king Chilperich, who fought
hard to maintain his independence, joined forces with Eudo, who in the
late troubles had made himself independent duke of Aquitaine. Charles
beat them both at a battle near Soissons, and chased king and duke
beyond the Loire. This battle of Soissons was the last effort alike of
the Merovingian house and the Neustrian realm. After it had been lost
they both bowed before the Austrasian sword, and humbly took their
orders from the great Mayor of the Palace (718).
At this conjuncture Charles’s puppet, king Chlothar IV. died. The victor
of Soissons might perchance have chosen to proclaim himself king of
Austrasia, but remembering the fate of his grandfather Grimoald,
preferred to offer terms to the exiled king Chilperich. On recognising
Charles as mayor of East and West alike, the vanquished Meroving was
allowed to return to Neustria, and proclaimed King of all the Franks
(719). He had deserved a better fate than to sink into a mere name and
shadow, and if he had been born eighty years earlier might perchance by
his courage and persistence have given a longer lease of power to the
Merovingian house. But the times were now too late for his energy to
avail.
Chilperich II. died only a year after his submission to Charles. There
remain only two more names to chronicle in the ancient royal house,
Theuderich IV. and Childerich II. These obscure persons—so obscure that
the chroniclers do not even give us the date of Theuderich’s death—were
too weak even to be used as tools by the enemies of the great mayor. A
well-known passage in Einhard describes their wretched position:—‘For
many years the house of the Merovings was destitute of vigour and had
nothing illustrious about it save the empty name of king. For the rulers
of their palace possessed both the wealth and the power of the kingdom,
bearing the name of mayor, and had charge of all high matters of state.
There was nothing for the king to do save to content himself with his
title, and sit with his long hair and long beard on the throne, like the
effigy of a ruler, to hear foreign ambassadors harangue him and answer
them in words put into his mouth as if speaking for himself. [Sidenote:
Effeteness of the last Merovings.] His royal name was profitless and his
allowance of revenue was at the discretion of the mayor, nor was there
anything he could really call his own save one royal manor of moderate
value (Montmacq). There he kept his family and his little establishment
of servants. When he had to travel he set out in a covered carriage
drawn by oxen, and driven by a rustic retainer. Thus he used to travel
up to his palace, or to the national gathering, which met once a year to
settle the affairs of the realm, and thus he would return. But the
administration of the kingdom, and everything that had to be done either
at home or abroad was cared for by the Mayor of the Palace.’
Theuderich’s name covers the years 720-737, Childerich’s the years
742-752. Between the one’s death and the other’s accession there was a
period of six years, in which the great mayor did not even trouble to
provide himself with a nominal king, but ruled on his own authority.
The twenty-two years of Charles Martel’s rule as mayor of Neustria and
Austrasia are the turning-point in the history of Western and Central
Europe (719-41). Continuing the policy of his father Pippin the Younger,
both at home and abroad, he devoted all his energies to restoring the
old boundaries of the Frankish realm, taming its heathen neighbours,
spreading Christianity among the more distant German tribes, and
restoring law and order among the unruly counts and dukes within the
empire. His strong hand was as valuable in ending anarchy at home as in
winning victory abroad.
[Sidenote: Rise of the mayoralty.] The six years of civil war which
followed the death of Pippin the Younger had undone most of the work of
that great man, and Charles had to commence once more the task which had
busied his father. He was, however, in a position of greater firmness
and strength than Pippin had enjoyed, and was able to make his will felt
all over the Frankish realms in a much more thorough fashion. It was his
task to make the arm of the central government feared all over the
kingdom, as much as it had been in the days of the earliest Merovingian
kings. The task was hard, because a century and a half of feeble
administration had taught the local counts and dukes all the arts of
insubordination, more especially the trick of utilising the annual
meetings of the great national council—what England would have called
the Witan—for the purpose of overawing their ruler. They appeared at the
‘March-field,’ followed by great hosts of armed followers, and bound
themselves together by family or party confederacies to withstand the
central government. In this they succeeded as long as the feeble
Merovings continued, and were able to elect the officers of state at
their pleasure or to distribute the local governorships among each
other. The great mayors put an end to this. The house of St. Arnulf had
gathered such a great following of faithful partisans in Austrasia that,
by their aid, it could face any combination of discontented counts. The
other great houses of Austrasia seem to have gradually disappeared, and
all the smaller nobility and freemen of the land between Meuse and Rhine
had become the enthusiastic followers of Pippin and Charles. In return
the great mayors planted Austrasians in office all over the kingdom, and
trusted mainly to their aid in all crises. Their system was a domination
of the Austrasians over the Neustrians, Burgundians, Aquitanians, and
East Germans: their empire reposed on the fact that their own countrymen
were loyal, united, and self-confident, while the other races were
jealous, divided, and humbled by recent defeat. Yet the struggle was no
easy one. It needed the repeated blows of Amblève, Vincy, and Soissons
to crush the Neustrian spirit of separatism. Aquitaine was only kept
down by campaign after campaign directed against its disloyal dukes.
Neither south Gaul nor south Germany (Suabia and Bavaria) were really
tamed till they had been deprived of their native dukes, and cut up into
countships or _gaus_, administered by Austrasian chiefs. But the house
of St. Arnulf continued to produce great men for generation after
generation, and the taming was finally accomplished.
The work of the great mayors without was no less arduous than within. To
subdue those indomitable tribes of northern Germany, from whose pathless
woodlands even the iron legions of Augustus had drawn back in despair,
was a great work for the tumultuary armies of Austrasia to accomplish.
But they carried out the struggle to the bitter end, till they had
conquered the very easternmost Teuton, and had looked upon the Baltic
and the unknown boundaries of the Slavs. Bavaria and Frisia took many a
hard blow ere they were incorporated with the Frankish realm; but at
last they relinquished, with a sigh, their heathen independence. Even
the Italian kingdom of the gallant Lombards, protected by the great
Roman fortresses of Pavia, Verona, and Ravenna could not withstand the
Austrasian sword.
[Sidenote: Approach of the Saracens.] But of all the military
achievements of the East Franks under the house of St. Arnulf, the
grandest, as well as the most enduring in effect, was to be won over a
foe unknown to their ancestors, a new enemy who threatened not merely to
ravage the borders of the realm like Frisian or Lombard, but to
dismember it by lopping away Aquitaine from Western Christendom. Great
as were their other feats, the most important of all was the turning
back of the wave of Mussulman fanaticism at the battle of Poictiers. For
that crowning mercy, if for nothing else, Europe owes an eternal debt of
gratitude to the great mayors of the eighth century and the indomitable
hosts of Austrasia.
Three years before the death of Pippin the Younger, king Roderic the
Visigoth had fallen at the battle of the Guadalete, and Spain had been
overrun by the infidel. In 720,—the first year of the complete
domination of Charles over the two Frankish kingdoms,—the Saracens had
pushed beyond the bounds of the Iberian peninsula, crossed the Pyrenees,
and entered Aquitaine, where they laid siege to Toulouse. Their first
blow fell on Eudo, duke of Aquitaine, who had just acknowledged himself
the vassal of the Frankish king, and given up his claim to reign as an
independent prince. The duke obtained aid from the Frankish governors on
his borders, attacked the Saracens in their camp at Toulouse, and put
them to rout with the loss of their leader El-Samah. But though beaten
in battle, the Moslems kept a foothold north of the Pyrenees, by holding
to the old Visigothic capital of Narbonne. The danger from them was but
postponed, not finally warded off. Ere long Charles himself was to be
obliged to take the field, to defend the southern borders of the
Frankish realm against expeditions far more formidable than that which
duke Eudo had turned back in 721.
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