Against the dark background of European history, and with the broad
level of obscurity stretching over the ages at its feet, there rises
one shining pinnacle. Considered as man or sovereign, Charlemagne is
one of the most impressive figures in history. His seven feet of
stature clad in shining steel, his masterful grasp of the forces of his
time, his splendid intelligence, instinct even then with the modern
spirit, all combine to elevate him in solitary grandeur.
Charlemagne found France in disorder measureless, and apparently
insurmountable. Barbarian invasion without, and anarchy within; Saxon
paganism pressing in upon the north, and Asiatic Islamism upon the
south and west; a host of forces struggling for dominion in a nation
brutish, ignorant, and without cohesion.
It is the attribute of genius to discern opportunity where others see
nothing. Charlemagne saw rising out of this chaos a great resuscitated
Roman Empire, which should be at the same time a spiritual and
Christian empire as well. Saxons, Slavs, Huns, Lombards, Arabs, came
under his compelling grasp; these antagonistic races all held together
by the force of one terrible will, in unnatural combination with
France. No political liberties, no popular assemblies discussing
public measures; it is Charlemagne alone who fills the picture; it is
absolutism--marked by prudence, ability, and grandeur, but still,
absolutism.
The pope looked approvingly upon this son of the Church, by whose order
4,500 pagan heads could be cut off in one day, and a whole army
compelled to baptism in an afternoon. Here was a champion to be
propitiated. Charlemagne, on the other hand, saw in the Church the
most compliant and effective means to empire.
His fertile mind was conceiving a vast design by which he might reign
over a resuscitated Roman Empire. In the dual sovereignty of his
dream, the pope was to be the spiritual and he the temporal head.
Mutually dependent upon each other, the election of the pope would not
be valid without his consent. Nor would the emperor be emperor until
crowned by the pope. The Church might use him as a sword, but he would
wear the Church as a precious jewel in his crown.
It was a splendid dream, splendidly realized; the most imposing of
human successes, and the most impressive of human failures. It seems
designed as a lesson for the human race in the transitory nature of
power applied from without.
A pyramid of such colossal proportions could only be kept from falling
in pieces by another Colossus like himself. The vast fabric resting
upon one human will, passed with its creator; was gone like a shadow
when he was gone.
It will be remembered that the Roman Empire in its decay fell into two
parts, a Western and an Eastern empire. The dying embers of the
Western empire, which had been fanned into a feeble flame in the sixth
century by Justinian, Emperor of the East, were threatened with
complete extinguishment by the Lombards in the eighth; from which
calamity they were saved, as we have seen, by Pepin. So when the
Franks were again appealed to, Charlemagne saw his opportunity. With
plans fully matured he responded, and with the consent and acquiescence
of the pope he took formal possession of the whole of Italy, annexing
to his own dominions the crumbling wreck of a magnificent past. And
when Leo III. placed upon his head the crown, and pronounced
"Carolus-Magnus, by the grace of God Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire"
(A.D. 800), the authority of the pope was placed upon unassailable
heights, and France had become the centre of a world-wide dominion.
[Illustration: Coronation of Charlemagne. From the painting by Levy.]
Little did pope or emperor dream of what was to happen; that after a
brief and dazzling interlude the imperial crown would never be worn in
France; and that the popes would for centuries be insulted and treated
as contumacious vassals by German emperors. And France--France, the
centre of this dream of a magnificent unity--in less than fifty years,
with her native incohesiveness, and in the irony of fate, would have
broken into fifty-nine fragments, loosely held together by a feeble
Carlovingian king.
The plan of a dual sovereignty of pope and emperor might have been wise
had both been immortal! But it was the triple division of the empire
brought about by Charlemagne's three grandsons which overthrew the
entire scheme of its founder.
Upon the death of Charlemagne, in A.D. 814, the crown and the sceptre
of the empire passed to his son Louis (the later form of Clovis). This
feeble son of Charlemagne, known as Louis the Débonnaire, struggled
under the weight of the crumbling mass until his death in 840. Then
Charlemagne's three ambitious grandsons fought for the great
inheritance. Lothaire, who claimed the whole by right of
primogeniture, was defeated at the battle of Fontenay in Burgundy, and
by the treaty of Verdun in 843 the partition of the empire was
consummated; the title of emperor passing to Lothaire, the eldest,
along with Italy and a strip of territory extending to the North Sea,
all west of that being arbitrarily called France, and all east of it
Germany.
So the European drama was unfolding upon lines entirely unexpected.
Not only had the empire fallen apart into three grand divisions, but
France itself was disintegrating, was in fact a mass of rival states,
with counts, princes, marquises, and a score of other petty potentates
struggling for supremacy.
The rough outlines of something greater than France--the outlines of a
future Europe--were being drawn. It is easy to see now what was then
so incomprehensible: that from the chaos of barbarism left by the
Teuton flood, there were emerging in that ninth century a group of
states with definite outlines, and the larger organism of Europe was
coming into form. The treaty of Verdun (843) had roughly separated
_Italy_, _France_, and _Germany_. At the same time the Heptarchy in
Britain had been consolidated into _England_ under King Alfred; while
an obscure Scandinavian adventurer named Rurik, quite unobserved, was
bringing into political unity, and reigning at Kieff as Grand Duke over
what was to become _Russia_. _Spain_, quite apart from all this
movement, had entered upon those seven centuries of struggle with
Saracen and Moor, that struggle of unmatched devotion and tenacity of
purpose which is really the great epic of history.
Those ambitious and too powerful vassals were not the greatest evils
menacing the Carlovingian kings. It was the incessant invasions of a
race of barbarians coming out of the north, which was going to bury the
past under a ruin of a different sort. There seemed no defence from
these Northmen, as they were called, who swarmed like destroying
insects upon the coast, up the rivers, and over the lands; three times
sacked Paris, the scars to-day being visible in that impressive Roman
ruin, the _Palais des Thermes_, the home of the Caesars, and of the
Merovingian kings, which they partially burned.
Fortified castles with towers and moats and drawbridges sprang up all
over the kingdom for the protection of the rich. After seven invasions
all the old cities, Rouen, Nantes, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Orleans,
Beauvais, had been devastated, and France in coat of mail was hiding
behind stone walls.
In looking through the vista of centuries it is easy to read the
eternal purpose in the chain of cause and effect; and also to see that
events, no less than kings, have their pedigrees. The terrible child
of the Northman was the _Feudal System_; which was again the father of
those romantic and picturesque children, the _Crusades_; and these, the
creators of a European civilization, whose children we are!
Who can imagine the course of history with any one of these
removed--each an apparently inevitable step in the unfolding of a
mighty design, utterly incomprehensible at the time?