GERMANY 888-918
Arnulf, king of Germany—His victory at Louvain over the Danes—His
expedition to Italy—His troubles with his son Zwentibold—Approach of
the Magyars—Reign of Lewis the Child—Internal anarchy, and disasters
from Magyar invasions—Reign of Conrad of Franconia—His troubles and
death.
Arnulf of Carinthia was base-born, the son of the Slavonic mistress of
king Carloman, but he possessed a considerable share of the strength and
vigour of his ancestors. For the twelve years of his reign the German
realm made head against its enemies to north and east, and held the
primacy among the states of Christendom. The Frankish empire had now
fallen apart into five states: but the kings who held the other shares
all came to seek out Arnulf and obtain his recognition of their rights.
Odo the ruler of the West Franks was the first to appear before the
German monarch and crave his friendship. [Sidenote: Supremacy of Arnulf
in the Empire.] It would almost appear that he recognised Arnulf as his
superior and liege lord, for on his return to Neustria he had himself
crowned for a second time at Rheims in the presence of German
ambassadors, and with a diadem which Arnulf had given to him. Rudolf the
ruler of Upper Burgundy was the next to visit the German court: he came
to Regensburg, obtained recognition from Arnulf, and returned in peace.
Berengar of Lombardy, already threatened with war by his competitor Wido
of Spoleto, met the king of Germany at Trent, on the border of his
realm, and promised to be his faithful supporter in all things. Lastly
Hermengarde, the widow of Boso of Lower Burgundy (Arles), placed her
young son Lewis under Arnulf’s protection, and besought him to undertake
the regency of the Provençal realm.
Though Arnulf had not obtained the imperial title he was for all
practical purposes far more of a general suzerain and ruler of the whole
Frankish realm than any of his relatives had been for the last fifty
years. The best sign of his strength was that he succeeded in checking
the inroads of the Vikings in a manner which made them for the future
the least dangerous of the many enemies of Germany. In 891 the Danes
came flooding into Austrasia in great force, and harried all the lands
on the Meuse and Moselle. The local levies of Lotharingia were beaten,
and Sunderold archbishop of Mainz, who had led them, fell on the field.
[Sidenote: The Battle of Louvain, 891.] But Arnulf, who had been far
away in Bavaria, came flying westward on the news of this disaster, and
chased the Danes as far as their great fortified camp at Louvain on the
Dyle. There they had entrenched themselves with the river at their back
and a marsh in their front, which rendered it impossible for the
Frankish horsemen to approach them. But Arnulf bade all his warriors
dismount, and taking axe in hand led them through the swamp and up to
the Danish palisades. The Germans hewed down the breastwork, broke into
the camp, and drove the Danes into the river, where most of them
perished. This was the last first-class engagement which the Danes ever
fought in the East Frankish realm. They continued to come on plundering
excursions to Frisia and the lower Rhine, but never attempted again
either to penetrate deep into the land or to set up any independent
principality upon its borders.
[Sidenote: Arnulf in Italy.] After defeating the Danes and putting down
some risings of his eastern Slavonic vassals, the Czechs and Moravians,
Arnulf undertook the unwise enterprise of conquering Italy, whence his
friend and vassal Berengar had of late been expelled by Wido of Spoleto.
Of the details of his two invasions of 894 and 895-6 we have spoken at
length in our Italian chapter.[66] Arnulf returned from Italy wearing
the imperial crown, whose splendour seemed to ratify the primacy that he
already possessed over his brother-kings; but he was broken in health by
the fever that he had caught in the Roman campaign, and he left Italy
behind him in a state of complete disorder, and mainly in the hands of
Lambert of Spoleto.
Footnote 66:
See pages 463-4.
After his Italian expedition Arnulf’s reign was much less fortunate. A
fatal succession-difficulty arose in his own house, and caused endless
trouble. For many years he had no lawful issue born to him: so he
persuaded the national council of the Germans to allow him to designate
his bastard son Zwentibold as his heir (889). Four years later he made
this prince sub-king in Lotharingia. [Sidenote: Dynastic Troubles,
893-99.] But the same year (893) his wedded wife Ota bore him a son,
known in history as Lewis the Child, who was therefore recognised as the
lawful heir to the empire, to the great grief and anger of the new king
of Lotharingia. From this time forward Zwentibold, an unruly and
turbulent young man, was a perpetual thorn in his father’s side. He
grudged his infant brother the heritage of the German kingdom, and
persistently stirred up strife. He fell into a long and bloody feud with
some of the chief nobles of Lotharingia, and notably with
Reginald-with-the-Long-Neck, count of Hainault and the Maasgau. In
revenge for his tyranny Reginald and many others of the Austrasians
called in to their aid Charles the Simple, the monarch of Neustria, and
did homage to him as king of Lotharingia, handing over to him the old
royal towns of Aachen and Nimuegen. The attempt to tear away Austrasia
from Germany failed, not because of Zwentibold’s arms, but because
Charles the Simple feared to face the whole force of the East Frankish
realm, when Arnulf took up his son’s cause (898). He agreed to retire
into his own states, and evacuated Austrasia.
[Sidenote: The Hungarians.] Of even greater import of evil to Germany
than Zwentibold’s unruliness was the arrival on the eastern frontier of
the kingdom of a new race of enemies. These were the Ugrian tribe of the
Magyars or Hungarians who appeared in 896 on the middle Danube and
Theiss, where the decaying remnant of the Avars were now dwelling mixed
among the Slavonic Moravians. The Magyars had been driven westward by
another wild horde, the Tartar Petchenegs, who thrust them out of South
Russia and forced them to find new homes. They were a race of light
horsemen, mighty with the bow, skilful in sudden onsets and feigned
retreats, but wanting the perseverance and steady strength in pitched
battle which would have rendered them invincible. Their raids were even
more rapid and destructive than those of the Northmen, but they were not
such formidable foes to meet as the Vikings, for they never could learn
to besiege a fortified place, or to defend themselves in entrenched
camps, or to fight in regular line of battle. All their attacks were
mere ambushes or sudden surprises, and they seldom allowed the heavy
horsemen of Germany to fight them on equal terms and in the open field.
Their custom was to ride through the open country burning defenceless
monasteries and villages, but avoiding walled towns and always escaping
in haste if the levies of the district came out against them in full
force.
Arnulf himself was responsible for the first visit of the Magyars to the
empire. During his Moravian war he hired some of their warriors to
follow him to the field as auxiliary light horse. Thus they learnt the
way into Moravia and Germany alike: during Arnulf’s own life they do not
seem to have seriously molested his kingdom, for they were mainly
occupied in evicting the Slavs from the plains by the Danube. But no
sooner was the emperor dead than they began to extend their ravages into
Bavaria and Thuringia. At an even earlier date they are found already
harassing north Italy, and vexing the soul of king Berengar by ravaging
his native duchy of Friuli (899).
[Sidenote: Death of Arnulf, 899.] In December 899 Arnulf died, old
before his time, and was buried in his favourite city of Regensburg.
Then the dukes, counts, and bishops of Germany met at Forchheim and
chose as king Lewis the Child, the six-year-old son of their deceased
monarch. The reign of a minor was always dangerous to the old Teutonic
kingdoms, and that of Lewis was no exception to the rule. The eleven
years during which he nominally ruled as king of Germany were almost the
most disastrous ever known in the history of the East Frankish realm.
Hitherto the land had been fortunate in its rulers; of all the
descendants of Charles the Great the German line had been by far the
most able and vigorous; save the unhappy Charles the Fat,—who only
reigned for five years—they had all proved strong and capable rulers.
[Sidenote: Weakness of Lewis the Child.] But now under the nominal sway
of Lewis the Child all the evils that had been kept down by his father’s
strong hand came to a sudden head. Germany was deprived of all central
authority, and exposed to two evils at once, invasion by the enemy from
without and civil war at home.
The first troubles came from Lotharingia, where king Zwentibold had made
himself so hated that many of the Austrasian nobles determined to
disavow their allegiance to him, and to acknowledge his boy-brother as
immediate ruler as well as suzerain. While waging war on his rebellious
subjects Zwentibold fell in battle; as he very happily left no male
issue, his kingdom was at once reunited with the main body of the
Germanic realm.
But worse was to come: in 902 there burst out the first of the great
family feuds which were to be such a curse to Germany. During the last
generation the succession to the posts of duke, count, and margrave
throughout the land had been tending more and more toward hereditary
right. It was growing quite usual to continue the son in the father’s
office, and to give to brothers countships in each other’s close
neighbourhood. Under a strong government this had not led to any danger.
Arnulf had been powerful enough to keep all his vassals in order. But
his son was a mere child without any grown relative at his side to act
as protector, and not even provided with a strong Mayor of the Palace to
vindicate the royal authority. So far as there was any central
government at all, it was worked by two great bishops, Adalbero of
Augsburg and Hatto of Mainz—the wicked prelate of German tales, of whom
posterity persisted in believing that he was devoured alive by rats in
divine punishment for his sins. But Hatto and Adalbero were not even
formally acknowledged as regents by the national diet, and had no
authority to use the royal name save to execute the behests of that
council.
[Sidenote: Civil wars in Franconia.] In the third year of Lewis two
powerful family-groups of counts in Franconia began to wage open war on
each other, not under any pretence of serving the crown but purely to
settle a personal feud. Adalbert of Bamberg and his two kinsmen, who
governed the land of the Saal and upper Main, fell upon Conrad and
Eberhard, two brothers who ruled in Hesse and on the Lahn, and for four
years central Germany was torn by their intermittent struggles. The
meeting of the national council, and the anathemas of the bishops proved
quite unable to bring the feud to an end. Presently the quarrel spread
into western Lotharingia, where two other counts, Gerhard and Matfrid,
espoused the cause of Adalbert and attacked his enemies in Hesse. It was
only after four counts had fallen in battle, and the whole Main valley
had been miserably ravaged, that a diet, summoned by bishop Hatto at
Tribur, finally put its ban on Adalbert of Bamberg, as the fomenter of
the war, and raised a great army against him. He was beleaguered by the
national levy in his castle of Theres, captured and executed, while his
friends Gerhard and Matfrid were exiled. But it had taken four years to
induce the nation to move, and meanwhile other great counts and dukes
had learnt the lesson that they might enjoy a long impunity, whatever
turbulent enterprise they might take in hand. A few years later we find
Burchard margrave of Rhaetia endeavouring to make himself duke of all
Suabia by coercing the small governors in his neighbourhood; when he was
put down and executed, by counsel of the bishops who surrounded the
young king, popular sympathy was decidedly in favour of the feudal
usurper and not of the central government. In Lotharingia too troubles
never ceased; they culminated in a second attempt of count
Reginald-with-the-Long-Neck to make over the Austrasian countries to the
king of Neustria, Charles the Simple.
[Sidenote: Invasions of the Hungarians.] But serious as were these civil
broils, their importance was as nothing compared with the greater
disasters caused by the Hungarians’ ravages on the eastern frontier.
From the first year of king Lewis onward their attacks knew no
intermission. They began by raids on Bavaria and Carinthia; a little
later, while the Franconian civil war was in progress, we find them
penetrating into Suabia and even into the distant Saxony. In 907 they
defeated the whole levy of Bavaria, and slew its duke Luitpold together
with the archbishop of Salzburg and the bishops of Freising and Seben.
The consequence of this disaster was the temporary loss to Germany of
its eastern frontier, the Bavarian ‘Ostmark,’ which we now know as
Austria; the Magyars overran the whole of it as far as the Enns. In the
very next year the victorious horde entered Thuringia and slew its duke
together with the bishop of Wurzburg. In 910 the young king himself, now
sixteen years old, took the field against them for the first time, and
for once Bavarians, Suabians, and Franconians were found united under
him for a common campaign against the invader. But the first fight of
king Lewis was a disaster: his army was caught in an ambush and routed
with great slaughter, only the Bavarian troops escaped the panic and
succeeded in checking the outset of the victorious enemy.
How Lewis might have fared in future warfare against the Magyars we
cannot say, for a year later, ere yet he had attained the threshold of
manhood, he was carried off by disease. With him was extinguished the
German line of the Carolingian house, for he left no male heir of any
kind, whether brother, uncle, or cousin, to take up the heavy heritage
of the Teutonic crown. (911.)
The only alternatives that now lay before the German nobles were either
to elect as king one of the French branch of the Carolingian line, or
else to follow the example of the Burgundians, Italians, and Provençals
and choose one of themselves as the new ruler. [Sidenote: Election of
Conrad I., 911.] After much hesitation the latter course commended
itself to the diet, and at Forchheim the Franconians, Saxons, Suabians,
and Bavarians joined in elevating to the throne Conrad, a count of lower
Franconia, the son of that Conrad who had fallen in the war with
Adalbert of Bamberg five years before. Only the Austrasians, faithful
now as ever to the house of Charles the Great, refused to acknowledge
the new king, and once more did homage to Charles the Simple, the weak
but ambitious monarch of Neustria. Conrad seems to have been remotely
descended in the female line from the house of St. Arnulf, but could not
pretend to represent the old traditions of Frankish royalty. He was
simply the most powerful, or almost the most powerful, man among the
German noble houses, and was chosen purely for his military abilities.
Conrad’s reign of seven years (911-918) was one continuous story of
rebellion and disaster. Under a ruler of a new line, whom they regarded
merely as one of themselves, the local governors became even more
insolent to the central power than before. They made war on each other
at their good pleasure, and each endeavoured to put down his weaker
neighbours and make their possessions his own. Each of the ancient
divisions of the German realm, the original tribal unities of Suabian
and Bavarian, Saxon and Frank, showed a tendency to draw apart from its
fellows. Each sought to reassert its individuality under some new ruler
of its own, to hail its strongest noble as duke and follow him even
against the king. It required a strong and persevering monarch to keep
this separatist tendency under, and to prevent it from splitting up the
realm.
Conrad I. was deficient neither in energy nor in perseverance. His whole
reign was filled with struggles against the usurpations of the greater
nobles, but he was still far from having won a victory when he died.
Except from his fellow-countrymen in Franconia, and from the higher
clergy, he got little assistance in the strife, and his own last words
were a warning to the Germans that they must choose a stronger king than
himself if their kingdom was to survive.
[Sidenote: Rebellions against Conrad I.] It would be wearisome to relate
the many campaigns of Conrad against his too-powerful subjects, to tell
how the Palatine count Erchanger tried to make himself duke in Suabia;
how Arnulf, the son of that Luitpold whom the Hungarians had slain,
claimed the ducal power in Bavaria; how the great Saxon Henry, son of
duke Otto—to be better known a few years later as king Henry the
First—defied his liege lord to drive him out of Saxony. Conrad was
generally unsuccessful in his strife against the rebels; it is true that
he defeated, captured, and executed the would-be duke of Suabia, and
that he drove Arnulf the Bavarian into exile for a time. But he utterly
failed in his attempt to win back Austrasia from Charles the Simple, and
his expedition into Saxony against duke Henry came to a disastrous end,
so that he was compelled to make peace and to recognise Henry’s ducal
power over the whole country. It is said that Hatto, the great
archbishop of Mainz, died of sheer anger and disgust on hearing of the
triumph of the Saxon, against whom he had a personal grudge. Hatto had
been the chief supporter of the central government in the reign of
Conrad, as in the reign of Lewis the Child, and could not bear to see
the forces of disunion finally victorious.
[Sidenote: Further Magyar inroads.] It need hardly be added that while
civil war raged all over the German kingdom, the foreign enemy was more
active than ever. Instead of afflicting only the eastern border of the
land, the Magyars came flooding in over its whole extent. They even
reached the Rhine: in 913 we find them before the walls of Coblenz: in
917 they surprised and burnt Basel, the south-westernmost of all the
cities of the realm. Meanwhile the Suabians and Bavarians were too much
occupied in resisting the king to be able either to unite or defend
themselves.
[Sidenote: Death of Conrad, 918.] In this melancholy position of affairs
Conrad I. died on the 23d of December 918. His last act was to assemble
his brothers and his chief councillors at his bedside, and to warn them
that if Germany was to be saved they must find a stronger man than
himself to crown as king. He advised them not to look within his own
family, but to elect his rival the powerful duke Henry of Saxony. Though
Henry was an obstinate enemy of his own, Conrad considered him the
strongest and most capable statesman in the realm, and putting aside all
personal enmity gave his vote in the Saxon’s favour. His advice was
taken and the happiest results ensued.
Here then we must leave Germany, still in evil plight, but on the eve of
better things. She had yet to solve the question whether the work of
Charles the Great—the blending of Frank, Saxon, Suabian, and Bavarian
into a single nationality—was to endure, or whether the disruptive
tendencies were still too strong. Fortunately for her there were two
great forces at work in favour of unity. The Church owed her rise and
growth in Germany to the protection of the great Frankish kings, and in
gratitude always fought upon the side of royalty and union. But even
more important was the pressure of hostile neighbours from without: it
had become evident since the death of king Arnulf to even the most
turbulent of the Suabian counts and the most unruly of the Saxon tribes,
that if Germany was to survive she must submit herself to a single
ruler. If the reigns of Lewis the Child and Conrad the Franconian had
been disastrous failures, it was because the one was too young and the
other too destitute both of heriditary claims and of personal followers.
When a strong man with one of the great duchies at his back took
Conrad’s place, the problem of saving Germany was found not to be
insoluble.
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