had become the dominant power. They had moved tardily to the
conquest, but when they moved it was with rapid strides. While
they dwelt along the Lower Rhine, they were in two divisions:
the Salian Franks, who occupied, first, the country near the
mouth of the river, and then spread southwards, to the Somme,
or beyond; and the Ripuarians, who lived farther up the Rhine,
in the neighborhood of Cologne, advancing thence to the
Moselle. In the later part of the fifth century a Roman
Patrician, Syagrius, still exercised some kind of authority in
northern Gaul; but in 486 he was defeated and overthrown by
Chlodvig, or Clovis, the chief of the Salian Franks. Ten years
later, Clovis, leading both the Salian and the Ripuarian
Franks in an attack upon the German Alemanni, beyond the Upper
Rhine, subdued that people completely, and took their country.
Their name survived, and adhered to the whole people of
Germany, whom the Franks and their successors the French have
called Allemands to this day. After his conquest of the
Alemanni, Clovis, who had married a Christian wife, accepted
her faith and was baptized, with three thousand of his chief
men. The professed conversion was as fortunate politically for
him as it had been for Constantine. He adopted the
Christianity which was that of the Roman Church--the Catholic
Christianity of the Athanasian creed--and he stood forth at
once as the champion of orthodoxy against the heretic Goths
and Burgundians, whose religion had been poisoned by the
condemned doctrines of Arius. The blessings, and the more
substantial endeavors, of the Roman Church were, therefore, on
his side, when he attacked the Burgundians and made them
tributary, and when, a few years later, he expelled the Goths
from Aquitaine and drove them into Spain (A.D. 500-508).
Beginning, apparently, as one of several chiefs among the
Salian Franks, he ended his career (510) as sole king of the
whole Frank nation, and master of all Gaul except a Gothic
corner of Provence, with a considerable dominion beyond the
Rhine.
The Merovingian Kings.
But Clovis left his realm to four sons, who divided it into as
many kingdoms, with capitals at Metz, Orleans, Paris, and
Soissons. There was strife and war between them, until one of
the brothers, Lothaire, united again the whole kingdom, which,
meantime, had been enlarged by the conquest of Thuringia and
Provence, and by the extinction of the tributary Burgundian
kings. When he died, his sons rent the kingdom again, and
warred with one another, and once more it was brought
together. Says Hallam: "It is a weary and unprofitable task to
follow these changes in detail, through scenes of tumult and
bloodshed, in which the eye meets with no sunshine, nor can
rest upon any interesting spot. It would be difficult, as
Gibbon has justly observed, to find anywhere more vice or less
virtue." But, as Dean Church has remarked, the Franks were
maintained in their ascendancy by the favor of the clergy and
the circumstances of their position, despite their divisions
and the worthless and detestable character of their kings,
after Clovis. "They occupied a land of great natural wealth,
and great geographical advantages, which had been prepared for
them by Latin culture; they inherited great cities which they
had not built, and fields and vineyards which they had not
planted; and they had the wisdom, not to destroy, but to use
their conquest. They were able with singular ease and
confidence to employ and trust the services, civil and
military, of the Latin population. ... The bond between the
Franks and the native races was the clergy. ... The forces of
the whole nation were at the disposal of the ruling race; and
under Frank chiefs, the Latins and Gauls learned once more to
be warriors." This no doubt suggests a quite true explanation
of the success of the Franks; but too much may easily be
inferred from it. It will not be safe to conclude that the
Franks were protectors of civilization in Gaul, and did not
lay destroying hands upon it. We shall presently see that it
sank to a very darkened state under their rule, though the
eclipse may have been less complete than in some other of the
barbarized provinces of Rome.
Rise of the Carolingians.
The division in the Frankish dominion which finally marked
itself deeply and became permanent was that which separated
the East Kingdom, or Austrasia, from the West Kingdom, or
Neustria. In Austrasia, the Germanic element prevailed; in
Neustria, the Roman and Gallic survivals entered most largely
into the new society. Austrasia widened into the Germany of
later history; Neustria into France. In both these kingdoms,
the Frankish kings sank lower and lower in character, until
their name (of Merwings or Merovingians, from an ancestor of
Clovis) became a byword for sloth and worthlessness. In each
kingdom there arose, beside the nominal monarch, a strong
minister, called the Major Domus, or Mayor of the Palace, who
exercised the real power and governed in the king's name.
During the last half of the seventh century, the Austrasian
Mayor, Pippin of Heristal, and the Neustrian Mayor, Ebroin,
converted the old antagonism of the two kingdoms into a
personal rivalry and struggle for supremacy. Ebroin was
murdered, and Pippin was the final victor, in a decisive
battle at Testry (687), which made him virtual master of the
whole Frank realm, although the idle Merwings still sat on
their thrones. Pippin's son, Charles Martel, strengthened and
extended the domination which his father had acquired. He
drove back the Saxons and subdued the Frisians in the North,
and, in the great and famous battle of Tours (732) he
repelled, once for all, the attempt of the Arab and Moorish
followers of Mahomet, already lodged in Spain, to push their
conquests beyond the Pyrenees.
{1016}
The next of the family, Pippin the Short, son of Charles
Martel, put an end to the pretence of governing in the name of
a puppet-king. The last of the Merovingians was quietly
deposed--lacking even importance enough to be put to death--
and Pippin received the crown at the hands of Pope Zachary (A.
D. 751). He died in 768, and the reign of his son, who
succeeded him--the Great Charles--the Charlemagne of mediæval
history--is the introduction to so new an era, and so changed
an order of circumstances in the European world, that it will
be best to finish with all that lies behind it in our hasty
survey before we take it up.
The Conquests of Islam.
Outside of Europe, a new and strange power had now risen, and
had spread its forces with extraordinary rapidity around the
southern and eastern circuit of the Mediterranean, until it
troubled both extremities of the northern shore. This was the
power of Islam--the proselyting, war-waging religion of
Mahomet, the Arabian prophet. At the death of Mahomet, in 632,
he was lord of Arabia, and his armies had just crossed the
border, to attack the Syrian possessions of the Eastern Roman
Empire. In seven years from that time, the whole of Palestine
and Syria had been overrun, Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, and
all the strong cities taken, and Roman authority expelled. In
two years more, they had dealt the last blow to the Sassanian
monarchy in Persia and shattered it forever. At the same time
they were besieging Alexandria and adding Egypt to their
conquests. In 668, only thirty-six years after the death of
the Prophet, they were at the gates of Constantinople, making
the first of their many attempts to gain possession of the New
Rome. In 698 they had taken Carthage, had occupied all North
Africa to the Atlantic coast, had converted the Mauretanians,
or Moors, and absorbed them into their body politic as well as
into their communion. In 711 the commingled Arabs and Moors
crossed the Straits and entered Spain, and the overthrow of
the Christian kingdom of the Visigoths was practically
accomplished in a single battle that same year. Within two
years more, the Moors (as they came to be most commonly
called) were in possession of the whole southern, central, and
eastern parts of the Spanish peninsula, treating the
inhabitants who had not fled with a more generous toleration
than differing Christians were wont to offer to one another.
The Spaniards (a mixed population of Roman, Suevic, Gothic,
and aboriginal descent) who did, not submit, took refuge in
the mountainous region of the Asturias and Galicia, where they
maintained their independence, and, in due time, became
aggressive, until, after eight centuries, they recovered their
whole land.
The Eastern Empire.
At the East, as we have seen, the struggle of the Empire with
the Arabs began at the first moment of their career of foreign
conquest. They came upon it when it was weak from many wounds,
and exhausted by conflict with many foes. Before the death of
Justinian (565), the transient glories of his reign had been
waning fast. His immediate successor saw the work of
Belisarius and Narses undone, for the most part, and the
Italian peninsula overrun by a new horde of barbarians, more
rapacious and more savage than the Goths. At the same time,
the Persian war broke out again, and drained the imperial
resources to pay for victories that had no fruit. Two better
and stronger emperors--Tiberius and Maurice--who came after
him, only made an honorable struggle, without leaving the
Empire in a better state. Then a brutal creature--Phocas--held
the throne for eight years (602-610) and sunk it very low by his
crimes. The hero, Heraclius, who was now raised to power, came
too late. Assailed suddenly, at the very beginning of his
reign, by a fierce Persian onset, he was powerless to resist.
Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor were successively ravaged and
conquered by the Persian arms. They came even to the
Bosphorus, and for ten years they held its eastern shore and
maintained a camp within sight of Constantinople itself; while
the wild Tartar nation of the Avars raged, at the same time,
through the northern and western provinces of the Empire, and
threatened the capital on its landward sides. The Roman Empire
was reduced, for a time, to "the walls of Constantinople, with
the remnant of Greece, Italy, and Africa, and some maritime
cities, from Tyre to Trebizond, of the Asiatic coast." But in
622 Heraclius turned the tide of disaster and rolled it back
upon his enemies. Despite an alliance of the Persians with the
Avars, and their combined assault upon Constantinople in 626,
he repelled the latter, and wrested from the former, in a
series of remarkable campaigns, all the territory they had
seized. He had but just accomplished this great deliverance of
his dominions, when the Arabs came upon him, as stated above.
There was no strength left in the Empire to resist the
terrible prowess of these warriors of the desert. They
extinguished its authority in Syria and Egypt, as we have
seen, in the first years of their career; but then turned
their arms to the East and the West, and were slow in
disputing Asia Minor with its Christian lords. "From the time
of Heraclius the Byzantine theatre is contracted and darkened:
the line of empire which had been defined by the laws of
Justinian and the arms of Belisarius recedes on all sides from
our view" (Gibbon). There was neither vigor nor virtue in the
descendants of Heraclius; and when the last of them was
destroyed by a popular rising against his vicious tyranny
(711), revolution followed revolution so quickly that three
reigns were begun and ended in six years.
The so-called Byzantine Empire.
Then came to the throne a man of strong character, who
redeemed it at least from contempt; who introduced a dynasty
which endured for a century, and whose reign is the beginning
of a new era in the history of the Eastern Empire, so marked
that the Empire has taken from that time, in the common usage,
a changed name, and is known thenceforth as the Byzantine,
rather than the Eastern or the Greek. This was Leo the
Isaurian, who saved Constantinople from a second desperate
Moslem siege; who checked for a considerable period the
Mahometan advance in the East; who reorganized the imperial
administration on lasting lines; and whose suppression of
image-worship in the Christian churches of his empire led to a
rupture with the Roman Church in the West,--to the breaking of
all relations of dependence in Rome and Italy upon the Empire
in the East, and to the creating of a new imperial sovereignty
in Western Europe which claimed succession to that of Rome.
{1017}
Lombard Conquest of Italy.
On the conquest of Italy by Belisarius and Narses, for
Justinian, the eunuch Narses, as related before, was made
governor, residing at Ravenna, and bearing the title of
Exarch. In a few years he was displaced, through the influence
of a palace intrigue at Constantinople. To be revenged, it is
said that he persuaded the Lombards, a German tribe lately
become threatening on the Upper Danube, to enter Italy. They
came, under their leader Alboin, and almost the whole northern
and middle parts of the peninsula submitted to them with no
resistance. Pavia stood a siege for three years before it
surrendered to become the Lombard capital; Venice received an
added population of fugitives, and was safe in her
lagoons--like Ravenna, where the new Exarch watched the march
of Lombard conquest, and scarcely opposed it. Rome was
preserved, with part of southern Italy and with Sicily; but no
more than a shadow of the sovereignty of the Empire now
stretched westward beyond the Adriatic.
Temporal Power of the Popes.
The city of Rome, and the territory surrounding it, still
owned a nominal allegiance to the Emperor at Constantinople;
but their immediate and real ruler was the Bishop of Rome, who
had already acquired, in a special way, the fatherly name of
"Papa" or Pope. Many circumstances had combined to place both
spiritual and temporal power in the hands of these Christian
pontiffs of Rome. They may have been originally, in the
constitution of the Church, on an equal footing of
ecclesiastical authority with the four other chiefs of the
hierarchy--the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria,
Antioch and Jerusalem; but the great name of Rome gave them
prestige and weight of superior influence to begin with. Then,
they stood, geographically and sympathetically, in nearest
relations with that massive Latin side of Christendom, in
western Europe, which was never much disturbed by the raging
dogmatic controversies that tore and divided the Church on its
Eastern, Greek side. It was inevitable that the Western Church
should yield homage to one head--to one bishopric above all
other bishoprics; and it was more inevitable that the See of
Rome should be that one. So the spiritual supremacy to which
the Popes arrived is easily enough explained. The temporal
authority which they acquired is accounted for as obviously.
Even before the interruption of the line of emperors in the
West, the removal of the imperial residence for long periods
from Rome, to Constantinople, to Milan, to Ravenna, left the
Pope the most impressive and influential personage in the
ancient capital. Political functions were forced on him,
whether he desired to exercise them or not. It was Pope Leo
who headed the embassy to Attila, and saved the city from the
Huns. It was the same Pope who pleaded for it with the Vandal
king, Genseric. And still more and more, after the imperial
voice which uttered occasional commands to his Roman subjects
was heard from a distant palace in Constantinople, and in
accents that had become wholly Greek, the chair of St. Peter
grew throne-like,--the respect paid to the Pope in civil
matters took on the spirit of obedience, and his aspect before
the people became that of a temporal prince.
This process of the political elevation of the Papacy was
completed by the Lombard conquest of Italy. The Lombard kings
were bent upon the acquisition of Rome; the Popes were
resolute and successful in holding it against them. At last
the Papacy made its memorable and momentous alliance with the
Carolingian chiefs of the Franks. It assumed the tremendous
super-imperial right and power to dispose of crowns, by taking
that of the kingdom of the Franks from Childeric and giving it
to Pippin (751); and this was the first assumption of that
right by the chief priest of Western Christendom. In return,
Pippin led an army twice to Italy (754-755), humbled the
Lombards, took from them the exarchate of Ravenna and the
Pentapolis (a district east of the Appenines, between Ancona
and Ferrara), and transferred this whole territory as a
conqueror's "donation" to the Apostolic See. The temporal
sovereignty of the Popes now rested on a base as political and
as substantial as that of the most worldly and vulgar
potentates around them.
Charlemagne's restored Roman Empire.
Pippin's greater son, Charlemagne, renewed the alliance of his
house with the Papacy, and strengthened it by completing the
conquest of the Lombards, extinguishing their kingdom (774),
and confirming his father's donation of the States of the
Church. Charlemagne was now supreme in Italy, and the Pope
became the representative of his sovereignty at Rome,--a
position which lastingly enhanced the political importance of
the Roman See in the peninsula. But while Pope and King stood
related, in one view, as agent and principal, or subject and
sovereign, another very different relationship slowly shaped
itself in the thoughts of one, if not of both. The Western
Church had broken entirely with the Eastern, on the question
of image-worship; the titular sovereignty of the Eastern
Emperor in the ancient Roman capital was a worn-out fiction;
the reign of a female usurper, Irene, at Constantinople
afforded a good occasion for renouncing and discarding it. But
a Roman Emperor there must be, somewhere, for lesser princes
and sovereigns to do homage to; the political habit and
feeling of the European world, shaped and fixed by the long
domination of Rome, still called for it. "Nor could the
spiritual head of Christendom dispense with the temporal;
without the Roman Empire there could not be," according to the
feeling of the ninth century, "a Roman, nor by necessary
consequence a Catholic and Apostolic Church." For "men could
not separate in fact what was indissoluble in thought:
Christianity must stand or fall along with the great Christian
state: they were but two names for one and the same thing"
(Bryce). Therefore the head of the Church, boldly enlarging
the assumption of his predecessor who bestowed the crown of
the Merovingians upon Pippin, now took it upon himself to set
the diadem of the Cæsars on the head of Charlemagne. On the
Christmas Day, in the year 800, in the basilica of St. Peter,
at Rome, the solemn act of coronation was performed by Pope
Leo III.; the Roman Empire lived again, in the estimation of
that age, and Charles the Great reopened the interrupted line
of successors to Augustus.
{1018}
Before this imperial coronation of Charlemagne occurred, he
had already made his dominion imperial in extent, by the
magnitude of his conquests. North, south, east, and west, his
armies had been everywhere victorious. In eighteen campaigns
against the fierce and troublesome Saxons, he subdued those
stubborn pagans and forced them to submit to a Christian
baptism--with how much of immediate religious effect may be
easily surmised. But by opening a way for the more Christ-like
missionaries of the cross, who followed him, this missionary
of the battle-ax did, no doubt, a very real apostolic work. He
checked the ravages of the piratical Danes. He crushed the
Avars and took their country, which comprised parts of the
Austria and Hungary of the present day. He occupied Bavaria,
on the one hand, and Brittany on the other. He crossed the
Pyrenees to measure swords with the Saracens, and drove them
from the north of Spain, as far as the Ebro. His lordship in
Italy has been noticed already. He was unquestionably one of
the greatest monarchs of any age, and deserves the title
Magnus, affixed to his name, if that title ever has been
deserved by the kings who were flattered with it. There was
much more in his character than the mere aggressive energy
which subjugated so wide a realm. He was a man of
enlightenment far beyond his time; a man who strove after
order, in that disorderly age, and who felt oppressed by the
ignorance into which the world had sunk. He was a seeker after
learning, and the friend and patron of all in his day who
groped in the darkness and felt their way towards the light.
He organized his Empire with a sense of political system which
was new among the Teutonic masters of Western Europe (except
as shown by Theodoric in Italy); but there were not years
enough in his own life for the organism to mature, and his
sons brought back chaos again.
Appearance of the Northmen.
Before Charlemagne died (814) he saw the western coasts and
river valleys of his Empire harried by a fresh outpouring of
sea-rovers from the far North, and it is said that he had sad
forebodings of the affliction they would become to his people
thereafter. These new pirates of the North Sea, who took up,
after several centuries, the abandoned trade of their kinsmen,
the Saxons (now retired from their wild courses and
respectably settled on one side of the water, while subdued
and kept in order on the other), were of the bold and rugged
Scandinavian race, which inhabited the countries since known
as Denmark, Sweden and Norway. They are more or less confused
under the general name of Northmen, or Norsemen--men of the
North; but that term appears to have been applied more
especially to the freebooters from the Norwegian coast, as
distinguished from the "Danes" of the lesser peninsula. It is
convenient, in so general a sketch as this, to ignore the
distinction, and to speak of the Northmen as inclusive, for
that age, of the whole Scandinavian race.
Their visitations began to terrify the coasts of England,
France and Germany, and the lower valleys of the rivers which
they found it possible to ascend, some time in the later half
of the eighth century. It is probable that their appearance on
the sea at this time, and not before, was due to a revolution
which united Norway under a single king and a stronger
government, and which, by suppressing independence and
disorder among the petty chiefs, drove many of them to their
ships and sent them abroad, to lead a life of lawlessness more
agreeable to their tastes. It is also probable that the
northern countries had become populated beyond their
resources, as seemed to have happened before, when the Goths
swarmed out, and that the outlet by sea was necessarily and
deliberately opened. Whatever the cause, these Norse
adventurers, in fleets of long boats, issued with some
suddenness from their "vics," or fiords (whence the name
"viking"), and began an extraordinary career. For more than
half a century their raids had no object but plunder, and what
they took they carried home to enjoy. First to the Frisian
coast, then to the Rhine--the Seine--the Loire,--they came
again and again to pillage and destroy; crossing at the same
time to the shores of their nearest kinsmen--but heeding no
kinship in their savage and relentless forays along the
English coasts--and around to Ireland and the Scottish
islands, where their earliest lodgments were made.
The Danes in England.