A.D.
CHILDEBERT III.--(_cont._)
711. DAGOBERT III.}
716. CHILDERIC. } CHARLES MARTEL Mayor.
720. THIERRY. }
742. CHILDERIC III.
_Carlovingian Line._
751. PEPIN THE SHORT.
768. CHARLEMAGNE.
Emperors of the East.
A.D.
TIBERIUS.--(_cont._)
711. PHILIPPICUS BARDANES.
713. ANASTASIUS II.
714. THEODOSIUS III.
716. LEO THE ISAURIAN.
741. CONSTANTINE COPRONYMUS.
775. LEO IV.
781. CONSTANTINE PORPHYROGENITUS.
802. NICEPHORUS.
Authors.
ALCUIN, (735-804,) BEDE, (674-735,) EGBERT, CLEMENS, DUNGAL, ACCA, JOHN
DAMASCANUS.
THE EIGHTH CENTURY.
TEMPORAL POWER OF THE POPES--THE EMPIRE OF CHARLEMAGNE.
This is indeed a great century, which has Pepin of Heristhal at its
commencement and Charlemagne at its end. In this period we shall see
the course of the dissolution of manners and government arrested
throughout the greater part of Europe, and a new form given to its
ruling powers. We must remember that up to this time the progress of
what we now call civilization was very slow; or we may perhaps almost
say that the extent of civilized territory was smaller than it had been
at the final breaking up of the Roman Empire four hundred years before.
England had lost the elevating influences which the residence of Roman
generals and the presence of disciplined forces had spread from the
seats of their government. Every occupied position had been a centre
of life and learning; and we see still, from the discoveries which
the antiquaries of the present day are continually making, that the
dwellings of the Prætors and military commanders were constructed in a
style of luxury and refinement which argues a high state of culture and
art. All round the circumference of the Romanized portion of Britain
these head-quarters of order and improvement were fixed; outside of it
lay the obscure and tumultuous populations of Wales and Scotland; and
if we trace the situations of the towns with terminations derived from
_castra_, (a camp,) we shall see, by stretching a line from Winchester
in the south to Ilchester, thence up to Gloucester, Worcester,
Wroxeter, and Chester, how carefully the Western Gael were prevented
from ravaging the peaceful and orderly inhabitants; and, as the same
precautions were taken to the North against the Picts and Scots, we
shall easily be able to estimate the effect of those numerous schools
of life and manners on the country-districts in which they were placed.
All these establishments had been removed. Barbarism had reasserted her
ancient reign; and at the century we have now reached, the institution
which alone could compete in its elevating effect with the old imperial
subordination, the Christian Church, had not yet established its
authority except for the benefit of ambitious bishops; and the same
anarchy reigned in the ecclesiastical body as in the civil orders. The
eight or nine kingdoms spread over the land were sufficiently powerful
in their separate nationalities to prevent any unity of feeling among
the subjects of the different crowns. A prelate of the court of
Deiria had no point of union with a prelate protected by the kings of
Wessex. And it was this very incapacity of combination at home, from
the multiplicity of kings, which led to the astonishing spectacle in
this century of the efforts of the Anglo-Saxon clergy in behalf of the
Bishop of Rome in distant countries. In this great struggle to extend
the power of the Popes, the regular orders particularly distinguished
themselves. The fact of submitting to convent-rules, of giving up the
stormy pleasures of independence for the safe placidity of unreasoning
obedience, is a proof of the desire in many human minds of having
something to which they can look up, something to obey, in obeying
which their self-respect may be preserved, even in the act of offering
up their self-will--a desire which, in civil actions and the atmosphere
of a court, leads to slavery and every vice, but in a monastery
conducts to the noblest sacrifices, and fills the pages of history
with saints and martyrs. The Anglo-Saxon, looking out of his convent,
saw nothing round him which could give him hope or comfort. Laws were
unsettled, the various little principalities were either hostile or
unconnected, there was no great combining authority from which orders
could be issued with the certainty of being obeyed; and even the
clergy, thinly scattered, and dependent on the capricious favour or
exposed to the ignorant animosity of their respective sovereigns, were
torn into factions, and practically without a chief. But theoretically
there was the noblest chiefship that ever was dreamed of by ambition.
The lowly heritage of Peter had expanded into the universal government
of the Church. In France this claim had not yet been urged; in the
East it had been contemptuously rejected; in Italy the Lombard kings
were hostile; in Spain the Visigoths were heretic, and at war among
themselves; in Germany the gospel had not yet been heard; in Ireland
the Church was a rival bitterly defensive of its independence; but
in England, among the earnest, thoughtful Anglo-Saxons, the majestic
idea of a great family of all the Christian Churches, wherever placed,
presided over by the Vicar of Christ and receiving laws from his
hallowed lips, had impressed itself beyond the possibility of being
effaced. Rome was to them the residence of God's vicegerent upon earth;
obedience to him was worship, and resistance to his slightest wish
presumption and impiety. So at the beginning of this century holy men
left their monasteries in Essex, and Warwickshire, and Devon, and knelt
at the footstool of the Pope, and swore fealty and submission to the
Holy See.
It has often been observed that the Papacy differs from other powers in
the continued vitality of its members long after the life has left it
at the heart. Rome was weak at the centre, but strong at the extremity
of its domain. The Emperor of Constantinople looked on the Pope as his
representative in Church-affairs, ratified his election, and exacted
tribute on his appointment. The Exarch of Ravenna, representing as he
did the civil majesty of the successor of the Cæsars, looked down on
him as his subordinate. There was also a duke in Rome whose office it
was to superintend the proceedings of the bishop, and another officer
resident in the Grecian court to whom the bishop was responsible
for the management of his delegated powers. But outside of all this
depression and subordination, among tribes of half-barbaric blood,
among dreamy enthusiasts contemplating what seemed to them the simple
and natural scheme of an earthly judge infallible in wisdom and
divinely inspired; among bewildered and trampled ecclesiastics, looking
forth into the night, and seeing, far above all the storms and darkness
that surrounded them in their own distracted land, a star by which they
might steer their course, undimmed and unalterable--the Pope of Rome
was the highest and holiest of created men. No thought is worth any
thing that continues in barren speculation. Honour, then, to the brave
monks of England who went forth the missionaries of the Papal kings!
Better the struggles and dangers of a plunge among the untamed savages
of Friesland, and the blood-stained forests of the farthest Germany, in
fulfilment of the office to which they felt themselves called, than the
lazy, slumbering way of life which had already begun to be considered
the fulfilment of conventual vows. Soldiers of the Cross were they,
though fighting for the advancement of an ambitious commander more than
the success of the larger cause; and we may well exult in the virtues
which their undoubting faith in the supremacy of the pontiff called
forth, since it contrasts so nobly with the apathy and indifference to
all high and self-denying co-operation which characterized the rest of
the world. We shall see the monk Winifried penetrate, as the Pope's
minister, into the darkness beyond the Rhine, and emerge, with crozier
and mitre, as Boniface the Archbishop of Mayence, and converter to the
Christian faith of great and populous nations which were long the most
earnest supporters of the rights and pre-eminence of Rome. This is one
strong characteristic of this century, the increased vigour of the
Papacy by the efforts of the Anglo-Saxons on its behalf; and now we are
going to another still stronger characteristic, the further increase of
its influence by the part it played in the change of dynasty in France.
A strange fortune, which in the old Greek mythologies would have been
looked on as a fate, overshadowing the blood-stained house of Clovis,
had befallen his descendants through all their generations for more
than a hundred years. Feeble in mind, and even degenerated in body,
the kings of that royal line had been a sight of grief and humiliation
to their nominal subjects. Married at fifteen, they had all sunk into
premature old age, or died before they were thirty. Too listless for
work, and too ignorant for council, they had accepted the restricted
sphere within which their duties were confined, and showed themselves,
on solemn occasions, at the festivals of the Church, and other great
anniversaries, bearing, like their ancestors, the long flowing locks
which were the natural sign of their crowned supremacy, seated in a
wagon drawn by oxen, and driven by a wagoner with a goad--a primitive
relic of vanished times, and as much out of place in Paris in the
eighth century as the state carriage of the Queen or the Lord-Mayor's
coach of the present day among ourselves Strange thoughts must have
passed through the minds of the spectators as they saw the successors
of the rough leader of the Franks degraded to this condition; but the
change had been gradual; the public sentiment had become reconciled
to the apparent uselessness of the highest offices of the State; for
under another title, and with much inferior rank, there was a man who
held the reins of government with a hand of iron, and whose power was
perhaps strengthened by the fiction which called him the servant and
minister of the _fainéant_ or do-nothing king. A succession of men
arose in the family of the mayors of the palace, as remarkable for
policy and talent as the representatives of the royal line were for the
want of these qualities. The origin of their office was conveniently
forgotten, or converted by the flattery of their dependants into an
equality with the monarchs. Chosen, they said, by the same elective
body which nominated the king, they were as much entitled to the
command of the army and the administration of the law as their nominal
masters to the possession of the palace and royal name. And when
for a long period this claim was allowed, who was there to stand up
in opposition, either legal or forcible, to a man who appointed all
the judges and commanded all the troops? The office at last became
hereditary. The successive mayors left their dignity to their sons by
will; and time might have been slow in bringing power and title into
harmony with each by giving the name of king to the man who already
exercised all the kingly power and fulfilled all the kingly duties, if
Charles Martel, the mayor, had not, in 732, established such claims to
the gratitude of Europe by his defeat of the Saracens, who were about
to overrun the whole of Christendom, that it was impossible to refuse
either to himself or his successor the highest dignity which Europe had
to bestow. When other rulers and princes were willing to acknowledge
his superiority, not only in power, but in rank and dignity, it was
necessary that their submission should be offered, not to a mere
Major-domo, or chief domestic of a court, but to a free sovereign and
anointed king. The two most amazing fictions, therefore, which ever
flourished on the contemptuous forbearance of mankind, were both about
to expire beneath the breath of reality at this time--the kingship
of the descendants of Clovis, and the pretensions of the successors
of Constantine. The Saracens appeared upon the scene, and those
gibbering and unsubstantial ghosts, as if they scented the morning air,
immediately disappeared. The Emperors of the East, by a self-deluding
process, which preserved their dignity and flattered their pride,
professed still to consider themselves the lords of the Roman Empire,
and took particular pains to acknowledge the kings and potentates,
who established themselves in the various portions of it, as their
representatives and lieutenants. They lost no time in sending the title
of Patrician and the ensigns of royal rank to the successful founders
of a new dynasty, and had gained their object if they received the new
ruler's thanks in return. At Rome, as we have said, they protected the
bishop, and gave him the investiture of his office. They retained also
the territories called the Exarchate of Ravenna, but with no power of
vindicating their authority if it was disputed, or of exacting revenue,
except what the gratitude of the bishop or the Exarch might induce
them to present to their patron on their nomination or instalment. A
long-haired, sad-countenanced, decrepit young man in a wagon drawn by
oxen, and a vain voluptuary, wrapped in Oriental splendour, without
influence or wealth, were the representatives at this time of the
irresistible power of the Frankish warriors, and the glories of Julius
and Augustus. But the present had its representatives as well as the
past. Charles Martel had still the Frankish sword at his command; the
Roman Pontiff had thousands ready to believe and support his claims to
be the spiritual ruler of the world. Something was required to unite
them in one vast effort at unity and independence, and this opportunity
was afforded them by the common danger to which the Saracenic invasion
exposed equally the civil and ecclesiastical power. Africa, we have
seen, was fringed along the whole of the Mediterranean border with the
followers of the Prophet. In one generation the blood of the Arabian
and Mauritanian deserts became so blended, that no distinction whatever
existed between the men of Mecca and Medina and the native tribes.
Where Carthaginian and Roman civilization had never penetrated, the
faith of Mohammed was accepted as an indigenous growth. Fanaticism
and ambition sailed across the Channel; and early in this century
the hot breath of Mohammedanism had dried up the promise of Spain;
countless warriors crossed to Gibraltar; their losses were supplied
by the inexhaustible populations from the interior, (the ancestors
of the Abd-el Kaders and Ben Muzas of modern times,) and, elate with
hopes of universal conquest, the crowded tents of the Moslem army were
seen on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees, and presently all the
plains of Languedoc, and the central fields of France as far up as the
Loire, were inundated by horse and man. Incredible accounts are given
of the number and activity of the desert steeds bestrode by these
turbaned apostles. A march of a hundred miles--a village set on fire,
and all the males extirpated--strange-looking visages, and wild arrays
of galloping battalions seen by terrified watchers from the walls of
Paris itself; then, in the twinkling of an eye, nothing visible but
the distant dust raised up in their almost unperceived retreat,--these
were the peculiarities of this new and unheard-of warfare. And while
these dashes were made from the centre of the invasion, alarming the
inhabitants at the extremities of the kingdom, the host steadily moved
on, secured the ground behind it before any fresh advance, and united
in this way the steadiness of European settlement with the wild fury
of the original mode of attack. Already the provinces abutting on the
Pyrenees had owned their power. Gascony up to the Garonne, and the
Narbonnais nearly to the Rhine, had submitted to the conquerors; but
when the dispossessed proprietors of Novempopulania and Septimania, as
those districts were then called, and the powerful Duke of Aquitaine,
also fled before the advancing armies; when all the churches were
filled with prayer, and all the towns were in momentary expectation of
seeing the irresistible horsemen before their walls, patriotism and
religion combined to call upon all the Franks and all the Christians to
expel the infidel invader. So Charles, the son of Pepin, whose exploits
against the Frisons and other barbaric peoples in the North had already
acquired for him the complimentary name of Martel, or the Hammer, put
himself at the head of the military forces of the land, and encountered
the Saracenic myriads on the great plain round Tours. The East and
West were brought front to front--Christianity and Mohammedanism stood
face to face for the first time; and it is startling to consider for
a moment what the result of an Asiatic victory might have been. If
ever there was a case in which the intervention of Divine Providence
may be claimed without presumption on the conquering side, it must
be here, where the truths of revelation and the progress of society
were dependent on the issue. The two faiths, according to all human
calculation, had rested their supremacy on their respective champions.
If Charles and his Franks and Germans were defeated, there was nothing
to resist the march of the perpetually-increasing numbers of the
Saracens till they had planted their standards on the pinnacles of
Rome. The first glow of Christian belief had been exchanged, we have
seen, for ambitious disputes, or died off in many of the practices of
superstition. The very man in whom the Christian hope was placed was
suspected of leaning to the Wodenism of his Northern ancestors, and
was scarcely bought over to the defence of the Church's faith by a
permission to pillage the Church's wealth. Mohammedanism, on the other
hand, was fresh and young. Its promises were clear and tempting--its
course triumphant, and its doctrines satisfactory equally to the
pride and the indolence of the human heart. But in the former, though
unperceived by the warriors at Tours and the prelates at Rome, lay the
germ of countless blessings--elevating the mind by the discovery of
its strength at the same moment in which it is abased by the feeling
of its weakness, and gifted above all with the power of expansion and
universality; themselves proofs of its divine original, to which no
false religion can lay the slightest claim. Cultivate the Christian
mind to the highest--fill it with all knowledge--place round it the
miracles of science and art--station it in the snows of Iceland or the
heats of India--Christianity, like the all-girding horizon of the sky,
widens its circle so as to include the loftiest, and contain within
its embrace the utmost diversities of human life and speculation. But
with the Mohammedan, as with other impostures, the range is limited.
When intellect expands, it bursts the cerement in which it has been
involved; and with Buddhism, and Mithrism, and Hindooism, it will be
as it was with Druidism, and the more elegant heathendom of Greece
and Rome: there will be no safety for them but in the ignorance and
barbarism of their disciples. On the result of that great day at Tours
in the year 732, therefore, depended the intellectual improvement and
civil freedom of the human race. Few particulars are preserved of
this momentous battle; but the result showed that the light cavalry,
in which the Saracens excelled, were no match for the firm line of
the Franks. When confusion once began among the swarthy cavaliers of
Abderachman, there was no restoration possible. In wild confusion the
_mêlée_ was continued; and all that can be said is, that the slaughter
of upwards of three hundred thousand of these impulsive pilgrims of
the desert so weakened the Saracenic power in Europe, that in no long
time their hosts were withdrawn from the soil of Gaul, and guarded
with difficulty the conquest they had made behind the barrier of the
Pyrenees. Could the gratitude of Church or State be too generous
to the man who preserved both from the sword of the destroyer? If
Charles pillaged a monastery or seized the revenues of a bishopric,
nobody found any fault. It was almost just that he should have the
wealth of the cathedral from which he had driven away the mufti and
muezzin. But monasteries and bishops were still powerful, and did not
look on the proceedings of Charles the Hammer with the equanimity of
the unconcerned spectators. They perhaps thought the battle of Tours
had only given them a choice of spoilers, instead of protection from
spoliation. In a short time, however, the policy of the sagacious
leader led him to see the necessity of gaining over the only united
body in the State. He became a benefactor of the Church, and a staunch
ally of the Roman bishop. Both had an object to obtain. What the
phantom king was to Charles, the phantom emperor was to the Pope. If
there was unison between the two dependants, it would be easy to get
rid of the two superiors. Presents and compliments were interchanged,
and moral support trafficked for material aid. Wherever the one sent
missionaries with the Cross, the other sent warriors to their support.
The Pontiff bestowed on the Mayor the keys of the sepulchre of St.
Peter, and the title of Consul and Patrician, and begged him to come to
his assistance against Luitprand, the Lombard king. But this was far
too great an exploit to be expected by a simple Bishop, and performed
by a simple Mayor of the Palace. So the next great thing we meet with
in this century is the investiture of the Mayor with the title of
king, and of the Bishop with the sovereignty of Rome and Ravenna. This
happened in 752. Pepin the Short, as he was unflatteringly called by
his subjects, succeeded Charles in the government of the Franks. The
king was Childeric the Third, who lived in complete seclusion and
cherished his long hair as the only evidence of monarchy left to the
sons of Clovis. Wars in various regions established the reputation
of Pepin as the worthy successor of Charles; and by a refinement of
policy, the crown, the consummation of all his hopes, was reached in
a manner which deprived it of the appearance of injustice, for it was
given to him by the hands of saints and popes, and ratified by the
council of the nation. He had already asked Pope Zachariah, "who had
the best right to the name of king?--he who had merely the title, or he
who had the power?" And in answer to this, which was rather a puzzling
question, our countryman Winifried, in his new character of Boniface
and archbishop, placed upon his head the golden round, and Might and
Right were restored to their original combination. But St. Boniface was
not enough. In two years the Pope himself clambered over the Alps and
anointed the new monarch with holy oil; and by the same act stripped
the long hair from the head of the Merovingian puppet, and condemned
him and his descendants to the privacy of a cloister.