LEWIS THE PIOUS
814-840
Character of Lewis the Pious—He reforms the Frankish court—His
ecclesiastical legislation—After a narrow escape from death he
divides his kingdom among his sons—The partition of Aachen—Rebellion
and death of Bernard of Italy—The second marriage of Lewis and its
consequences—Second partition of the empire followed by rebellion of
Lewis’ elder sons—Their repeated risings—The ‘Lügenfeld’—Lewis twice
deposed and restored—Continued troubles of his later years—He dies
while leading an army against his son Lewis—Disastrous consequences
of his reign.
Charles the Great left his throne and his empire to his only surviving
son born in lawful wedlock, Lewis the Pious, as his own age named him,
though later chroniclers style him Lewis the Débonnair. The heir of the
great emperor was a devout prince, who proved—like our own Edward the
Confessor—‘a sair saint for the crown.’ He was a weak, good-natured man,
no longer in the first flower of his youth, whose meek virtues were far
more suited to adorn a monastery than a palace. Utterly wanting in
self-respect and determination, the slave of his wife, his chaplains,
and bishops, a doting father and husband, and an over-liberal giver, he
had one of those natures which are entirely unfit to bear
responsibility, and are only happy when placed under the rule of a
stronger will than their own. Lewis had before him the problems that had
taxed his father’s iron nerve,—the task of ruling each of the nations
that dwelt beneath the Frankish sceptre in the way that it needed, with
the additional trial of being sorely vexed by the incursions of the
Danes, whose first ravages Charles the Great had hardly lived to see.
Enough was there to occupy his every moment, even had he been a man of
ability. But he chose to add to his troubles the needless trial of a
disputed succession and a spasmodic civil war. The main feature of his
reign of twenty-six years is the weary tale of his unwise dealing with
his undutiful sons, and of the evils that ensued therefrom.
The great realm which now fell to Lewis had been built up in despite of
three main difficulties—the enormous extent of the conquered lands, and
the slowness of communication between them, the national differences
between the various peoples which inhabited them, and the old Teutonic
custom which favoured the partition of a kingdom among all the sons of
its ruler, just as if it were a private heritage. The first two dangers
had not proved fatal. The personal energy and never-ending travels of
Charles the Great had vanquished space and time. Racial divergences were
less formidable than might have been expected, for true national feeling
was not yet fully developed in Western Europe. It was neither the
enormous extent of the Frankish empire nor the heterogeneous character
of its inhabitants that proved the direct cause of its ruin, but the
baleful practice of the partition of heritages among all the heirs of
the reigning sovereign. Hitherto the empire had been fortunate in
escaping the consequences of this evil. Charles the Hammer had broken up
his realm, but the voluntary abdication of the elder Carloman had ere
long reunited the Neustrian and Austrasian lands. Pippin, again, had
divided his kingdom, but the co-heir, whose survival would have thwarted
the life-work of Charles the Great, died young. And in the next
generation, too, death had stripped the king of all his lawful issue
save one, and Lewis the Pious received an undivided heritage.
But Lewis, unhappily for himself and for the empire, had already three
half-grown sons when he succeeded to the empire, and was destined to see
a fourth reach manhood ere he died. The custom of partition was now
destined to have a fair trial and develop to its utmost extent.
Lewis was at Doué, in his kingdom of Aquitaine, when he received the
news of the death of his aged father. Making such speed as he could, he
arrived at Aachen after a journey of thirty days, and took possession of
the reins of power. Without sending for the Pope to assist at his
coronation, he celebrated his accession by taking the imperial crown off
the altar in the cathedral of his capital city, and placing it on his
own head, while the assembled counts and bishops shouted _Vivat
Imperator Ludovicus!_ The magnates also saluted him by the title of ‘the
Pious,’ an appellation which he placed upon his coins, on whose other
side appeared the legend, ‘_Renovatio Regni Francorum_.’ The ‘renewing’
of the kingdom found its first expression in the expulsion from office
of the ministers who had administered affairs during the declining years
of Charles the Great. Lewis came to Aachen with his own trusted servants
at his back, and was determined not to put himself in the hands of his
father’s favourites. There had been much in his father’s life and court
which his own scrupulous conscience could not approve. As a man who led
a singularly virtuous life himself, he could not abide the bishops and
abbots who had connived at his father’s immoralities. [Sidenote:
Accession of Lewis the Pious.] The Frankish court, though teeming with
ecclesiastics, had not been a model of soberness or chastity, and the
old emperor himself had not set the best of examples. Lewis was
determined that this should cease.
The moment that he was firmly seated on the throne the new monarch
dismissed from his court his sisters, whose life had been nothing less
than scandalous during his father’s later years. Their paramours were
banished or imprisoned—one was even deprived of his eyes. His next step
was to send away the three chief ministers of Charles the Great. The
Chancellor Helisachar, Abbot of St. Maximin, was relegated to his
monastery. The two brothers, count Wala and abbot Adalhard,[53] had
harder measure dealt out to them. The emperor sent Adalhard to dwell in
the lonely monastery of Hermoutier, on an island by the Loire-mouth.
Count Wala was stripped of sword and armour, shorn, and immured as a
monk in the cloister of Corbey.
Footnote 53:
They were Carlovingians of illegitimate descent, sons of Bernard, a
bastard of Charles Martel.
These councillors were replaced by men whom Lewis had learnt to know
while he was yet but king of Aquitaine. The chief were Ebbo, his own
foster-brother, abbot Hildwin, and count Bernard of Septimania. Ebbo,
though but the son of a serf, was dear to the emperor from early
association; he had taken orders, and was made archbishop of Rheims by
his patron at the earliest opportunity, amid the murmurs of many
high-born Frankish ecclesiastics, who exclaimed that such preferment was
not the meed of a man of servile extraction. Hildwin, the new
chancellor, was a shameless pluralist, three abbots rolled into one, and
ever seeking more preferment. Bernard, however, a clever, restless,
intriguing Gascon, provoked even greater jealousy and bitterness among
the old courtiers of Charles the Great, and seems to have been the
best-hated man in the realm. But perhaps the most influential of all the
advisers of Lewis was his wife, Hermengarde, the daughter of the count
of the Hesbain, an ambitious and unscrupulous woman, who exercised such
an influence over her uxorious spouse that she was even able to drive
him once and again to deeds of ill-faith and cruelty very foreign to his
mild and righteous disposition.
Charles the Great had left the frontiers of his great realm so well
secured that in the earliest years of Lewis the Pious there was no
foreign war to call the emperor into the field. It was a characteristic
sign of the new _régime_ that things ecclesiastical took precedence of
all others at the first meetings of the magnates of the empire. We hear
of legislation against carnally-minded bishops and abbots, who shocked
the pious by riding with cloak and sword and golden spurs like secular
nobles. A _modus vivendi_ was established between clerics of servile
birth and their former lords, providing that on due compensation being
paid the villein might go free. The emperor took the keenest interest in
this question. Not only his favourite Ebbo, but several others of his
counsellors had been serfs, and he was most anxious to defend them alike
against claims of their ancient masters, and insults at the hands of the
free-born clergy. [Sidenote: Ecclesiastical legislation.] Another decree
of Lewis’ dealt with the tenure of the lands of monasteries. After
stipulating that fourteen great houses owed both military service and
aids in money to the empire, and sixteen more the financial duty alone,
he declared that all the other monastic establishments in his wide
dominion should hold their property on the simple undertaking that they
should ‘pray for the welfare of the emperor and his children and the
empire.’ This threw a vast quantity of estates into tenure by what later
ages called ‘frank almoin,’ and relieved of its natural responsibility
to the State more land than could prudently be suffered to go scot-free.
[Sidenote: Lewis recrowned, 816.] Another sign of Lewis’ extreme regard
for the Church was given at the very commencement of his reign. When
pope Leo III., the aged pontiff, who had crowned Charles the Great, died
in 816 the Romans elected, in great haste, Stephen IV. as his successor.
The new Pope was consecrated without the imperial sanction being sought,
but Lewis made no objection, and showed no wrath at this disregard of
his prerogative. So far was he from resentment that he allowed Stephen
to represent to him that his coronation at Aachen had lacked the
Church’s blessing, inasmuch as he had taken the crown from the altar
with his own hands. To render Lewis’ position more like that of his
great father, the Pope proposed to cross the Alps and recrown his
master. Lewis took no offence at the slur thrown on the form of his
election to the empire, but received Stephen in great state at Rheims,
and was there crowned for the second time (816). Thus he loosened his
own grasp on the Papacy in one year, and allowed the Pope to tighten his
grasp on the empire in the next.
In 817 happened an accident which was to have the gravest consequences
on the emperor’s character and fate. He was passing with all his train
over a wooden gallery which connected the cathedral and the palace at
Aachen, when the whole structure came crashing to the ground. Many of
the courtiers were killed, and the emperor himself received injuries
which confined him to his bed for many weeks. The shock and the narrow
escape from death set Lewis meditating on the instability of life and
the necessity for being always prepared for the grave. He had never been
anything but sober and self-contained, but he now fell into a morbid and
lugubrious frame of mind, which never left him till his dying day. If he
had only hitherto been a daring sinner he might have salved his
conscience by turning to a new manner of life: but being already a man
of blameless and virtuous habits, his conversion only led him into an
exaggerated asceticism. He abandoned the study of profane literature,
which had hitherto soothed his leisure hours, and would for the rest of
his life read nothing but theology. We are even told that he destroyed
the collection of Old Frankish heroic poems which his father had made,
because of the many traces of heathenism which he found in them. It was
with difficulty that his councillors prevented him two years later from
laying down his crown and retiring to a monastery.
One of the first effects of Lewis’ morbid brooding over his latter end
was that he determined to make a settlement of the inheritance of his
wide dominions in view of his own possible death. He was now only
forty-three, and his eldest son was but seventeen, but he resolved to
take the untried boy into partnership and associate him with himself, so
that his succession might be assured at his own death. At the same time
he determined to give his younger sons appanages in the realm which
would be their brother’s. The old German instinct for dividing the
paternal heritage was still too strong to be resisted.
By this _Partition of Aachen_, the first of many partitions that we
shall have to bear in mind, Lothair, the eldest of Lewis’ three sons,
became co-emperor, and was allotted as his special province, during his
father’s life, the kingdom of Italy. Pippin, the second son, was to
inherit Aquitaine, his father’s original portion. Lewis, the third son,
was assigned Bavaria, and the wild marches to its east along the Danube.
Thus it was provided that at the emperor’s death his successor should
hold the great bulk of the realm, containing both its capitals—Aachen
and Rome—and including all the oldest Frankish lands, Neustria and
Austrasia alike. [Sidenote: The Partition of Aachen.] The kings of
Aquitaine and Bavaria would be far too weak, even if united, to trouble
him by rebellions, but Lewis ended his deed of gift by a solemn
exhortation to the younger sons to obey their brother, visit his court
once a year, and be his helpers in peace and war. In spite of the
experience of elder generations of his house he hoped that his children
might dwell together in amity.
There was one clause in the Partition of Aachen which was certain to
cause instant trouble. It named Italy as the special portion of the
young Lothair. Now, Italy was, and had been for seven years, under the
government of the emperor’s nephew Bernard, son of that Pippin of Italy
who died in 810. Charles the Great had placed him there, and while
obeying Lewis as a loyal subject he looked upon the Cisalpine kingdom as
his own appanage, and expected to retain it through all changes in the
imperial succession. Bernard was determined not to be ousted from his
realm; the moment that the news of the Partition of Aachen reached him
he flew into rebellion. His rule had been popular, and the Lombards
gladly took arms in his behalf and seized all the passes of the Alps. He
even tried to stir up trouble in Gaul by the aid of his friend Theodulph
bishop of Orleans.
Having gone so far, Bernard would have done wisely to abide altogether
by the arbitrament of the sword. Instead of doing this he held back and
negotiated. Relying on the emperor’s well-known character for justice
and moderation Bernard left his army and went to a conference at
Chalons-sur-Saône. He soon found that he had made a fatal mistake. He
was treated as a criminal on trial, not as a prince who came to
negotiate terms of peace. The conference adjoined to Aachen, and there
Bernard and his chief adherents were judged and condemned. The council
doomed the accused to death, but Lewis, half-mindful of the safe-conduct
that his ambassadors had promised, commuted the sentence to blinding.
[Sidenote: Death of Bernard of Italy, 818.] The cruel order was
executed, but so clumsily was it carried out, that Bernard died of the
shock. Rumour added that it was the empress Hermengarde who had bribed
the executioners to do their work so badly. The remorse that seized the
emperor for his broken safe-conduct and the death of his nephew never
ceased to vex his soul for all his remaining years. It was the only
grave moral offence that he had ever committed, and his tender
conscience would give him no rest.
Within a few months after Bernard’s death Lewis was visited by a
calamity which he considered the first instalment of the divine
vengeance for the deed. On his return from an expedition to Brittany he
was met by the news of the death of his wife Hermengarde. It was
whispered that she had been largely guilty in the matter of her nephew’s
death, and that she was now paying the penalty. Lewis at any rate seems
to have had this idea. He had been deeply attached to his imperious
wife, and leant much on her guidance. Deprived of her he fell into a
state of morbid melancholy, far worse than any he had yet experienced.
He shut himself up with his grief, neglected state affairs, and talked
of retiring into a cloister. After some months his ministers found the
situation growing so impossible that they took every means to rouse him.
It was, we are told, his bishops who took the strange step of urging on
him that he must marry again as a public duty; his seclusion injured the
realm, and he must remember that man was not meant to live alone. When
the emperor would neither go to seek a wife nor take a princess whom he
had not seen on another’s recommendation, his ministers brought to his
court all the fairest of the daughters of the counts and nobles of his
realm. The same scene was rehearsed that was a few years later to be
seen at Constantinople when the widowed Theophilus took his second wife.
Among the crowd of ladies presented before him, the eye of Lewis fixed
upon Judith, a noble damsel from the Suabian Alps, daughter of Welf,
count of Altdorf. Pressed hard by his courtiers he consented to take her
to wife, and rued it all his remaining years. Judith was fair, wise,
witty, and learned above all the women of her day, and soon acquired an
empire over her melancholy spouse, not less than that which her
predecessor had exercised. [Sidenote: Birth of Charles the Bald.] Two
years later she presented him with a son, whose birth was to cause
unending evils to the empire. The boy was named Charles, after his great
grandsire. (A.D. 822.)
For a space things seemed to be going well with Lewis, but three years
after his second marriage the black shadow closed in again over the
unfortunate emperor. Some cause, to us unknown, suddenly plunged him
once more into a fit of misery and contrition. He remembered first that
he had not pardoned all his enemies as a good Christian should.
Forthwith all whom he had ever injured were recalled from exile. The
brothers Wala and Adalhard were drawn out of their monasteries. The
partisans of Bernard of Italy who had suffered blinding and imprisonment
were sent back to their homes. So anxious was the emperor to atone for
his harshness that he most unwisely proceeded to place the most
important of the exiles in high posts of trust. He made Adalhard master
of his household, and sent Wala to his son Lothair to be his first
councillor. He had forgotten that others might not forgive as he could
himself; these appointments placed in power men who at the bottom of
their hearts could never pardon their years, of weariness and cloistered
seclusion.
After doing what he could to recompense his victims for the indignities
they had suffered, Lewis took another and a more startling step.
[Sidenote: Penance of Attigny.] He summoned a great council at Attigny,
hard by the royal city of Soissons, and proceeded to do penance for his
sins before the face of his magnates. Coming forth crownless and robed
in sackcloth he recapitulated all the faults and misdeeds that had ever
been committed, from the execution of Bernard of Italy down to many
trifling transgressions, which most men counted as harmless failings,
and all had long forgotten. He even rehearsed, with a somewhat
unnecessary scrupulousness, all the crimes and short-comings of his
great father the emperor Charles. Then he besought his bishops to lay on
him such a meed of penance as might fit these many and grievous sins.
Not unwilling to take advantage of their sovereign’s humiliation, the
prelates prescribed to him a course of stripes and fasting and vigils,
of prayer, almsgiving, and building of churches, all of which he
conscientiously carried out. The astonished counts and courtiers saw
their monarch baring his back to the lash, and discharging with
exactitude all the humiliating burdens that the clergy laid upon him. It
was the act of a saint, but not of an emperor.
Nothing could have done Lewis more harm than this outburst of laboured
penitence. While his subjects marvelled at his Christian humility, they
drew from his conduct the conclusion that as a sovereign he was no
longer to be feared or obeyed. The Frankish nobles who remembered the
high-handed Charles the Great, and had loved him in spite of all his
harshness, felt more scorn than admiration for an emperor who wept and
grovelled in public over deeds which few in that age considered sins at
all. They muttered that Lewis was no better than a brain-sick,
self-torturing monk. For the future there was an under-current of
contempt for the emperor passing through the minds of most of his lay
vassals. It needed but some small encouragement to turn this feeling
into active disloyalty.
The year of the council of Attigny was the last year of good fortune for
Lewis. It was followed by premonitory symptoms of evil all over his
realm. The Moors of Spain, quiescent for more than twenty years, sent a
sudden invasion into Septimania. The Danes drove out their king Harald,
a _protégé_ of Lewis and a favourer of Christianity, and began to ravage
the Frisian coast. But there were worse foes than Saracen or Dane
awaiting Lewis in his own household. His eldest son Lothair, under the
tutelage of the unforgiving Wala, had begun to display an alarming
amount of self-will and disregard for his father’s wishes and the common
weal of the empire. He bore himself like an independent king at his
court in Pavia.
In 829 the fatal civil wars of the ninth century began. Charles, the
young son of Lewis and Judith, had now attained his seventh year, and
his future had become the greatest concern of his father and mother. The
emperor, always brooding over his own latter end, was convinced that he
had not long to live: he was filled with fears as to the fate of the
Joseph of his old age when he should fall into the hands of his
brethren. Urged on by his wife he determined to make some provision for
the boy in the event of his own early death. He set aside the duchy of
Alamannia and the Swiss and Burgundian Alpine lands to the south of it,
as a kingdom for his youngest son.
Lewis declared his purpose of erecting the kingdom of Alamannia at a
great council held at Worms, to which no one of his three elder sons
vouchsafed his presence. The moment that the edict was published
murmuring and conspiracy began. The new kingdom was carved out of
territory which would have ultimately fallen to Lothair, but his two
brothers showed themselves quite as resentful at the partition as was
the heir of the empire. Their wrath found vent in slanderous rumours:
they did not shrink from asserting that Charles was no brother of
theirs. Bernard of Septimania, they said, had betrayed their father and
seduced the old man’s wife. The accusation was absolutely without
foundation, but it met with wide belief. The chiefs of the higher clergy
joined themselves to the royal princes; Wala found an opportunity of
revenging himself by aiding the conspiracy; the ministers Ebbo and
Hildwin, who had found themselves superseded in favour by count Bernard,
had the ingratitude to join in the plot against the man who had raised
them from the dust. [Sidenote: First Civil War, 829.] The two chief
prelates of Gaul, Agobard of Lyons and Jesse of Amiens, were also of the
conspirators. A general revolt was planned before the unsuspecting Lewis
had any notion that aught was amiss.
It burst out in the next spring. A new rising of the Bretons had called
the emperor off into a remote corner of his realm. He summoned a small
force to follow him, and was soon lost to sight on the distant western
moors. But the very moment that the emperor was gone his enemies set to
work to stir up rebellion. The implacable Wala harangued the west
Frankish nobles, and sent letters to the chief ecclesiastics of Gaul in
which he accused the emperor of ruining the unity of the Church and the
empire, the one by his interference with things sacred, the other by his
neglect of things secular. Lewis had become a mere tool in the hands of
an adulterous wife and an unfaithful servant, and it was the duty of
good Christians and patriotic Franks to rescue the empire from its
shame. Pippin of Aquitaine soon gave point to the harangues of Wala by
leading a Gascon army to Paris, where all the counts of Neustria joined
him in arms, Lothair sent word from Italy that he was approaching at the
head of a great host of Lombards. Presently Lewis came back from
Brittany to find the land in arms behind him: he penetrated as far as
Compiègne before he was surrounded by the forces of Pippin. Beset by an
overwhelming host of enemies, the army of the emperor dispersed, and he
himself fell into the hands of the rebels. His sons put him in
confinement, pending the meeting of a grand council. The empress Judith
they dragged from sanctuary and forced under the terror of death to take
the veil at Poictiers. But when the great council of the empire
assembled at Nimuegen in the next spring a reaction had followed the
first success of the rebellion. The meeting was in the heart of the old
Frankish land, where the rebels had few sympathisers, and the counts of
the Rhineland and northern Germany came up to it with such a following
of armed men and such a truculent aspect that the Neustrians and
Lombards who accompanied Pippin and Lothair were quite overawed. Without
a sword being drawn or a blow struck the tables were completely turned,
and the old emperor found his rebel sons at his feet. He showed himself
merciful—all too merciful—in the moment of his triumph. Lothair was
despoiled of his imperial title, but permitted to keep his kingdom of
Italy, and sent back unharmed to Pavia. Pippin returned to Aquitaine
pardoned also. The rancorous Wala, the soul of the conspiracy, was sent
back to his cloister at Corbey and bidden to live according to his rule,
till his disloyal murmurings provoked the emperor into banishing him
into a less comfortable seclusion on the shores of the Lake of Geneva.
[Sidenote: Lewis dethroned and restored.] The discomfiture of the rebels
released the empress Judith from her nunnery; but Lewis thought it
necessary to make her clear herself by compurgation from the cruel
charges that had been brought against her, before she was released from
her monastic vows.
Lewis was once more emperor, but the mercy with which he had treated his
conquered enemies was destined to breed him unending troubles. His
undutiful sons had been left as powerful as before, and instead of
feeling grateful for their pardon, were only vexed at the mismanagement
which had ruined their well-planned conspiracy. When they had returned
to their kingdoms they merely took breath for a space, and then
recommenced their intrigues. This time Lothair and Pippin took pains to
enlist their younger brother, Lewis of Bavaria, in the plot. By his
means they hoped to divide Germany, for the young king was very popular
in his own realm, and counted many adherents beyond its bounds. His
brothers promised him the Suabian lands of the boy Charles if he would
join them in a fresh rebellion.
The new troubles broke out in the spring of 832. The first signal was
given by Pippin of Aquitaine, who fled from his father’s court, refused
to attend the Easter great council, and began to arm his Gascon
subjects. The emperor determined to take warning by the events of 830
and not to be caught again unprepared. [Sidenote: Second Civil War.] He
summoned the whole force of the empire to meet for an invasion of
Aquitaine. But next came the news that Lewis of Bavaria had raised an
army, called in the Slavs of the Danube to his aid, and conquered
Suabia. For once provoked to righteous wrath by his sons’ misdoings, the
emperor proclaimed that Pippin and Lewis of Bavaria had forfeited their
kingdoms. He announced that his favourite Charles should be crowned king
of Aquitaine, and that Lothair—who had not yet made any hostile move,
though he was really in secret agreement with Pippin and Lewis—should be
the heir of the whole of the rest of the empire.
This new project of partition only did harm. It did not win the aid of
Lothair; it provoked the Bavarians and Gascons, both of whom were much
attached to their young kings; worst of all, it caused the whole empire
to exclaim that it was the emperor’s unreasonable fondness for his
youngest son that was at the bottom of all the trouble. Why should the
whole empire be upset merely in order that Charles might add Aquitaine
to Suabia?
Matters soon went from bad to worse. Lewis the Pious lay at Worms
gathering the levies of Austrasia and Saxony, when it was announced not
only that Pippin and Lewis of Bavaria were approaching, but that Lothair
had taken the field with the forces of Italy, and had crossed the Alps,
bringing in his train pope Gregory IV., a pontiff whose election he had
confirmed without his father’s leave some years before.
Lewis marched southward to meet his rebellious sons. The hosts faced
each other in the plains of the Rothfeld, and a battle appeared
imminent. But the pious emperor was still loth that blood should be shed
in the quarrel: he held back from the fight and offered to treat with
his sons. The princes knew their father’s weakness, and learnt that his
army was much discouraged and demoralised. They determined to try fraud
rather than force, and assented to the proposal to negotiate. Pope
Gregory lent himself to their plans, and presented himself before the
emperor in the character of an impartial mediator. But he had not been
long in the old man’s camp before the imperial army began to melt away.
To all appearance the Pope had sold himself to his patron king Lothair,
and used his opportunities to persuade the counts and bishops who still
remained loyal that they were adhering to a doomed cause. There soon
were agents of all kinds passing between the two camps, and their
influence was fatal. One after another the chief leaders of the
emperor’s host fled away by night to their homes, or with still greater
baseness took their soldiery over to the hostile encampment. At last a
mere handful mustered under the imperial banner. [Sidenote: The
Lügenfeld, 833.] Looking round on their scanty ranks the emperor
exclaimed, half in sarcasm, half in Christian resignation, ‘Go ye also
to my sons: it would be a pity if any man lost life or limb on my
account.’ The counts wept, but they departed, and Lewis was left
standing alone in the door of his tent, with his wife at his side and
his son Charles clinging to his hand. From that day the plain of the
Rothfeld was called by the Franks the Field of Lies—the Lügenfeld, the
‘_Campus Mendacii ubi plurimorum fidelitas extincta est_.’ (June 833.)
At once the sons of the emperor swooped down on their helpless prey.
They promptly rode over to the empty camp of Lewis, and after saluting
their father with feigned respect set a guard over his tent. Judith was
reinvested with the veil, and sent over the Alps to Lothair’s fortress
of Tortona. The boy Charles was consigned to the monastery of Prüm: his
extreme youth saved him both from blinding and ordination. The old
emperor was forwarded to the abbey of St. Médard at Soissons, and placed
in confinement in its tower. The most strenuous efforts were made to
induce him to abdicate and take the monastic vows. But though he would
have been willing enough to do so if unconstrained, Lewis refused to lay
down his crown when force and threats were employed. Failing to induce
him to resign, Lothair and archbishop Ebbo assembled an ecclesiastical
council of the bishops of Gaul and formally declared the emperor deposed
for incapacity and evil government. The unthinking Lothair was indeed
preparing a rod for the back of all future emperors when he allowed the
clergy to usurp such power!
Though Lewis would not acknowledge that he was legally dethroned, to do
penance he was now, as always, only too ready, and Lothair at last
resolved to be contented with this. His father’s humiliation could not
have been greater if he had formally resigned the crown. The old emperor
came before the altar of St. Médard with his sword and wearing the
jewelled imperial dalmatic. Then laying the weapon and robe upon the
altar he cast round himself a cloak of sackcloth and read a declaration
in eight articles, whereby he accused himself of being, by his sins, the
sole cause of the disorders of the empire. He began with deploring the
death of Bernard of Italy, the sole crime of which he can fairly be held
guilty. [Sidenote: The Penance of St. Médard.] Then he went on to accuse
himself of many futile offences—such as that of summoning an army to
meet during the holy season of Lent. He was even mean enough to own that
he had done evil in permitting his wife to throw off the monastic veil,
and clear herself by compurgation from the charges brought against her:
in so doing, he confessed, he might have abetted perjury.
Having read this humiliating document, the old man laid the parchment on
the altar, and retired again to his prison-tower. But the degrading
scene had not the effect that Lothair had hoped. Men felt more
indignation against the son who could force his father to such
humiliation, than contempt for the father who could submit to it. The
crowd outside the church tried to mob Lothair. The counts of Austrasia
and Saxony began to gather armed bands against him. Scared at their
approach the younger king fled away into Burgundy. [Sidenote: Lewis
again restored, 834.] The German counts at once drew Lewis out of his
confinement, girt him once more with the sword of empire, and proclaimed
him sole ruler of the Frankish realm. A considerable army set out to
pursue Lothair, and though he checked its pursuit at a skirmish near
Chalons-sur-Saône, he none the less withdrew from Gaul, and took refuge
in his own kingdom of Lombardy. This was the first blood actually shed
in battle in the civil war.
The vengeance of Heaven seemed to pursue the undutiful son and his
adherents. Soon after he had reached Italy a pestilence smote his army,
and slew his chief councillors, the aged Wala and Jesse of Amiens
together with Matfrid, count of Orleans, the chief of his men of war.
Lothair himself was stricken down, and lay for many weeks at the gate of
death, but he struggled through to give many more troublous years to the
empire. The two great ecclesiastics who had shared with Wala the guilt
of the illegal deposition of the old emperor, Ebbo of Rheims and Agobard
of Lyons, fell into the hands of the partisans of Lewis. Both were
deposed from their archbishoprics, and Ebbo the ungrateful
foster-brother of the emperor was put into solitary confinement in the
abbey of Fulda in the heart of Germany.
Still untaught by his misfortunes, Lewis now took the one step most
certain to alienate his newly recovered popularity. He summoned a diet
at Crémieux, near Lyons, and proposed in it a new division of his realm.
Lothair was to be punished by being deprived of all his dominions save
Italy. The greater part of the confiscated land—Burgundy, Provence, and
the old Austrasian realm about Metz and Trier—was to go to the
dearly-loved Charles, now a boy of fourteen years of age.
This project pleased nobody. It rendered Lothair desperate, did not
please Lewis and Pippin, and disgusted the whole of the Franks, who
exclaimed that the sole cause of the wars was to be found in the
emperor’s doting affection for his youngest son. It is probable that
another war would have broken out, if a new disaster had not fallen upon
the realm. The first great Viking invasion was just about to descend
upon the empire. The men of the North had seen its forces turned aside
into fratricidal civil war, and took the opportunity to make havoc of
the undefended coastland. In 835 when Lothair was being driven back
towards Italy, they landed in great force in Frisia and sacked Utrecht,
its metropolitan city, and Dorstad, the great harbour and mart of the
province—the predecessor in commercial history of Rotterdam. In 836
while Lewis had been planning the redivision of his empire to the
prejudice of Lothair at the diet of Crémieux, the Danes harried Flanders
and burnt the new city of Antwerp. Now in 837 they fell upon the island
of Walcheren, wasted it, and worked up the Rhine-mouth with fire and
sword as far as Nimuegen. [Sidenote: The Danes on the Rhine, 836.]
Relinquishing his plans against Italy, Lewis the Pious turned against
the heathen of the North, and marched rapidly towards the scene of their
ravages. But the Danes did not yet dare to face the full imperial army
of Frankland, and fled away to their ships leaving nothing in front of
the emperor but ravaged fields and burning villages.
Lewis returned at once to his unwise schemes for endowing his
well-beloved Charles. At a great council at Aachen in 837 he girt the
boy, now aged fifteen, with the royal sword, crowned him with his own
hands, and bestowed on him not only the Suabian and Burgundian lands
that he had been promised at the diet of Crémieux, but a great tract of
German land up to the borders of Saxony, which had been previously
allotted to Lewis of Bavaria. The counts and prelates of the new realm
were bidden to do homage to their young ruler, and become his men.
Lewis of Bavaria, however, was determined not to give up his promised
inheritance in Germany, and found support among all the Teutonic peoples
east of the Rhine, who had no wish to be handed over to the boy Charles.
He mustered an army, sent to beg the help of his brother Lothair, and
stood on the defensive. The old emperor replied by summoning a great
council at Cérisy-sur-Oise, at which he declared Lewis deprived of all
his lands save Bavaria, and conferred them on the young Charles.
Immediately afterwards Pippin of Aquitaine died, and the emperor put the
finishing touches to his unwisdom by handing over the whole of Pippin’s
realms to his darling. If this plan had been carried out, Lewis would
have left all the Frankish empire north of the Alps, save the single
duchy of Bavaria, to his youngest child. The worst point in the project
was that Pippin left sons, and the eldest of them—his father’s
namesake—was a growing boy of about the same age as Charles. The
majority of the people of Aquitaine would have nothing to say to the
transfer of their allegiance, and proclaimed Pippin the younger king in
his father’s room. The emperor, with transparent injustice, declared the
boy too young to reign, and bade the Aquitanians send him to Aachen to
be trained up at his court and learn the art of government—an art which
Lewis was so competent to teach! When the young Pippin did not appear,
Lewis threatened his southern subjects with invasion.
At once the civil war burst out in East and West and South. Lewis of
Bavaria broke into Suabia; the Gascon followers of Pippin the Young
marched on the Loire. At the same time the Danes who had been narrowly
watching their opportunity returned to the Frisian coast, destroyed
Dorstad for the second time and harried all the lands about the Rhine
mouth. (Spring of 839.) At his wit’s end to know which foe he should
first attack, the emperor resolved to seek aid in the only place where
it might still be found. Consigning to oblivion all memories of the
Lügenfeld, and the humiliations before the altar of St. Médard, he
besought the help of his eldest son. Lothair on his side was anxious to
recover his birthright, and to be recognised once more as heir to the
empire. He hurried from Pavia to Worms, to place himself at his father’s
disposition. Kneeling before the old man in full meeting of the great
council, he confessed his ingratitude and repeated treasons, and asked
for pardon. But while ostensibly craving for forgiveness only, he had
secretly stipulated for reward. Accordingly Lewis the Pious now
proclaimed the last of the many partitions of the empire which had been
the bane of his life. The _Placitum_ of Worms stated that Lewis of
Bavaria should retain his original Bavarian duchy alone, that the
younger Pippin should be wholly disinherited, and that Lothair and
Charles should divide the empire. The eldest son and heir took Italy,
Saxony, Suabia, all the Frankish lands on the Meuse and Rhine, and the
Burgundian and Provençal realms along the Rhone. The dearly-loved
Charles was given Neustria and Aquitaine, the two kingdoms whose union
roughly represents the modern land of France.[54]
Footnote 54:
France, that is, minus the lands between Rhone and Alps, and plus
Flanders and Catalonia.
[Sidenote: Third Civil War, 839.] The year 840 saw the commencement of
the civil war, with a new arrangement of combatants. Lewis the elder,
Lothair, and Charles, against Lewis the young, and Pippin. Fortune
favoured the old man for once. He first marched into Aquitaine, drove
the rebels before him, and forced the bishops and counts of the land
beyond the Loire to do homage to Charles at Clermont in Auvergne.
Contrary to his usual custom the emperor did not pardon all his enemies,
but beheaded several of the chief partisans of the young Pippin.
Aquitaine was no sooner overrun, than Lewis, with a vigour which he had
never shown before—it was the dying flash of his life’s energy—wheeled
his army northward and marched against his son the king of Bavaria. So
rapid was the attack that the younger Lewis was driven out of Suabia,
chased along the Bavarian bank of the Danube, and forced to take refuge
in the far Ost-Mark on the Slavonic border. The emperor had now
vindicated by the force of arms the partition of Worms: Pippin was
disinherited, and Lewis driven back into a narrow corner of Germany. A
great council was summoned to meet in July, and the emperor came back by
slow stages towards the Rhine to preside over it. But the double
campaign of the spring had been too much for him. For some years his
lungs had been affected, and the chills of a March and April spent in
arms in the open field brought on a rapid consumption. At
Frankfort-on-Main he dismissed his army and took to his couch. His
strength dwindled as the weeks passed away, and at last he bade his
attendants place him in a boat and row him down to the Rhine, to a spot
which he loved well, the island in mid-stream hard by his palace at
Ingelheim, where the tower of the Pfalz now rises from the rapid rushing
waters. Then it contained only a rough hunting lodge thatched with
reeds, and in that poor shelter the dying emperor lingered out the
midsummer weeks, lying for hours motionless on his couch with a little
cross clasped to his breast. His wife and his son Charles were far away
at Poictiers, in Aquitaine, and did not arrive in time to receive his
dying blessing. But a crowd of bishops and monks mustered around the
emperor’s deathbed, to watch over his edifying end. [Sidenote: Death of
Lewis, 840.] On June 25th the old man’s last agony seized him; he
started up in bed, cried in a loud voice ‘Out! Out!’ and fell back dead,
leaving the clerical throng around to debate whether his last words bade
some evil spirit depart from his presence, or referred to his own
setting out for a better world. So ended king Lewis,
Rex Hludovicus, pietatis tantus amicus,
Qui Pius a populo, dicitur et titulo.
He left the empire which he had done so much to dismember to be fought
for by his three sons and his grandson. He left the imperial dignity
fatally injured by his grovelling penances at Attigny and Soissons. He
had allowed the Danes to spy out the nakedness of the land in the North;
while the Saracens had already landed in Italy to the South. He had
suffered the clerical power again and again to usurp authority over
secular things, as none of his predecessors of the Frankish race,
Meroving or Karling, had ever done. Yet in spite of all, his piety and
conscientious desire to do right—often as it was misled—gave him a
greater claim to the respect of his subjects than did the personal
character of any of his successors. Ere long men came to look back to
the time of Lewis the Pious as to an age of comparative quiet and
prosperity.
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