divided into two parts, or rather ... the government over the
kingdom was divided, for some large parts of the territory
seem to have been in the hands of the two brothers together.
The fact is, that we know next to nothing about this division,
and hardly more about the joint reign of the brothers. The
only thing really clear is, that they did not get along very
well together, that Karl was distinctly the more active and
capable of the two, and that after four years the younger
brother, Karlmann, died, leaving two sons. Here was a chance
for the old miseries of division to begin again; but
fortunately the Franks seem by this time to have had enough of
that, and to have seen that their greatest hope for the future
lay in a united government. The widow and children of Karlmann
went to the court of the Lombard king Desiderius and were
cared for by him. The whole Frankish people acknowledged
Charlemagne as their king. Of course he was not yet called
Charlemagne, but simply Karl, and he was yet to show himself
worthy of the addition 'Magnus.' ... The settlement of Saxony
went on, with occasional military episodes, by the slower, but
more certain, processes of education and religious conversion.
It appears to us to be anything but wise to force a religion
upon a people at the point of the sword; but the singular fact
is, that in two generations there was no more truly devout
Christian people, according to the standards of the time, than
just these same Saxons. A little more than a hundred years
from the time when Charlemagne had thrashed the nation into
unwilling acceptance of Frankish control, the crown of the
Empire he founded was set upon the head of a Saxon prince. The
progress in friendly relations between the two peoples is seen in
the second of the great ordinances by which Saxon affairs were
regulated. This edict, called the 'Capitulum Saxonicum,' was
published after a great diet at Aachen, in 797, at which, we
are told, there came together not only Franks, but also Saxon
leaders from all parts of their country, who gave their
approval to the new legislation. The general drift of these
new laws is in the direction of moderation. ... The object of
this legislation was, now that the armed resistance seemed to
be broken, to give the Saxons a government which should be as
nearly as possible like that of the Franks. The absolute
respect and subjection to the Christian Church is here, as it
was formerly, kept always in sight. The churches and
monasteries are still to be the centres from which every
effort at civilization is to go out. There can be no doubt
that the real agency in this whole process was the organized
Church. The fruit of the great alliance between Frankish
kingdom and Roman papacy was beginning to be seen. The papacy
was ready to sanction any act of her ally for the fair promise
of winning the great territory of North Germany to its
spiritual allegiance. The most solid result of the campaigns
of Charlemagne was the founding of the great bishoprics of
Minden, Paderborn, Verden, Bremen, Osnabrück, and Halberstadt.
... About these bishoprics, as, on the whole, the safest
places, men came to settle. Roads were built to connect them;
markets sprang up in their neighborhood; and thus gradually,
during a development of centuries, great cities grew up, which
came to be the homes of powerful and wealthy traders, and gave
shape to the whole politics of the North. Saxony was become a
part of the Frankish Empire, and all the more thoroughly so,
because there was no royal or ducal line there which had to be
kept in place."
_E. Emerton,
Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages,
chapter 13._
Between 768 and 800 Charlemagne extinguished the Lombard
kingdom and made himself master of Italy, as the ally and
patron of the Pope, bearing the old Roman title of Patrician;
he crossed the Pyrenees, drove the Saracens southward to the
Ebro, and added a "Spanish March" to his empire (see SPAIN: A.
D. 778); he broke the obstinate turbulence of the Saxons, in a
series of bloody campaigns which (see SAXONS: A. D. 772-804)
consumed a generation; he extirpated the troublesome Avars,
still entrenched along the Danube, and he held with an always
firm hand the whole dominion that came to him by inheritance
from his father. "He had won his victories with Frankish arms,
and he had taken possession of the conquered countries in the
name of the Frankish people. Every step which he had taken had
been with the advice and consent of the nation assembled in
the great meetings of the springtime, and his public documents
carefully express the share of the nation in his great
achievements. Saxony, Bavaria, Lombardy, Aquitaine, the
Spanish Mark, all these great countries, lying outside the
territory of Frankland proper, had been made a part of its
possession by the might of his arm and the wisdom of his
counsel. But when this had all been done, the question arose,
by what right he should hold all this power, and secure it so
that it should not fall apart as soon as he should be gone.
{1402}
As king of the Franks it was impossible that he should not
seem to the conquered peoples, however mild and beneficent his
rule might be, a foreign prince; and though he might be able
to force them to follow his banner in war, and submit to his
judgment in peace, there was still wanting the one common
interest which should bind all these peoples, strangers to the
Franks and to each other, into one united nation. About the
year 800 this problem seems to have been very much before the
mind of Charlemagne. If we look at the boundaries of his
kingdom, reaching from the Eider in the north to the Ebro and
the Garigliano in the south, and from the ocean in the west to
the Elbe and the Enns in the east, we shall say as the people
of his own time did, 'this power is Imperial.' That word may
mean little to us, but in fact it has often in history been
used to describe just the kind of power which Charlemagne in
the year 800 really had. ... The idea of empire includes under
this one term, kingdoms, duchies, or whatever powers might be
in existence; all, however, subject to some one higher force,
which they feel to be necessary for their support. ... But
where was the model upon which Charlemagne might build his new
empire? Surely nowhere but in that great Roman Empire whose
western representative had been finally allowed to disappear
by Odoacer the Herulian in the year 476. ... After Odoacer the
Eastern Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, still
lived on, and claimed for itself all the rights which had
belonged to both parts. That Eastern Empire was still alive at
the time of Charlemagne. We have met with it once or twice in
our study of the Franks. Even Clovis had been tickled with the
present of the title of Consul, sent him by the Eastern
Emperor; and from time to time, as the Franks had meddled with
the affairs of Italy, they had been reminded that Italy was in
name still a part of the Imperial lands. ... But now, when
Charlemagne himself was thinking of taking the title of
Emperor, he found himself forced to meet squarely the
question, whether there could be two independent Christian
Emperors at the same time. ... On Christmas Day, in the year
800, Charlemagne was at Rome. He had gone thither at the
request of the Pope Leo, who had been accused of dreadful
crimes by his enemies in the city, and had been for a time
deprived of his office. Charlemagne had acted as judge in the
case, and had decided in favor of Leo. According to good
Teutonic custom, the pope had purified himself of his charges
by a tremendous oath on the Holy Trinity, and had again
assumed the duties of the papacy. The Christmas service was
held in great state at St. Peter's. While Charlemagne was
kneeling in prayer at the grave of the Apostle, the pope
suddenly approached him, and, in the presence of all the
people, placed upon his head a golden crown. As he did so, the
people cried out with one voice, 'Long life and victory to
Charles Augustus, the mighty Emperor, the Peace-bringer,
crowned by God!' Einhard, who ought to have known, assures us
that Charles was totally surprised by the coronation, and
often said afterward that if he had known of the plan he would
not have gone into the church, even upon so high a festival.
It is altogether probable that the king had not meant to be
crowned at just that moment and in just that way; but that he
had never thought of such a possibility seems utterly
incredible. By this act Charlemagne was presented to the world
as the successor of the ancient Roman Emperors of the West,
and so far as power was concerned, he was that. But he was
more. His power rested, not upon any inherited ideas, but upon
two great facts: first, he was the head of the Germanic Race;
and second, he was the temporal head of the Christian Church.
The new empire which he founded rested on these two
foundations."
_E. Emerton,
Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages,
chapter 14._
The great empire which Charles labored, during all the
remainder of his life, to organize in this Roman imperial
character, was vast in its extent. "As an organized mass of
provinces, regularly governed by imperial officers, it seems
to have been nearly bounded, in Germany, by the Elbe, the
Saale, the Bohemian mountains, and a line drawn from thence
crossing the Danube above Vienna, and prolonged to the Gulf of
Istria. Part of Dalmatia was comprised in the duchy of Friuli.
In Italy the empire extended not much beyond the modern
frontier of Naples, if we exclude, as was the fact, the duchy
of Benevento from anything more than a titular subjection. The
Spanish boundary ... was the Ebro."
_H. Hallam,
The Middle Ages,
chapter 1, part 1._
"The centre of his realm was the Rhine; his capitals Aachen
[or Aix-la-Chapelle] and Engilenheim [or Ingelheim]; his army
Frankish; his sympathies as they are shewn in the gathering of
the old hero-lays, the composition of a German grammar, ...
were all for the race from which he sprang. ... There were in
his Empire, as in his own mind, two elements; those two from
the union and mutual action and reaction of which modern
civilization has arisen. These vast domains, reaching from the
Ebro to the Carpathian mountains, from the Eyder to the Liris,
were all the conquests of the Frankish sword, and were still
governed almost exclusively by viceroys and officers of
Frankish blood. But the conception of the Empire, that which
made it a State and not a mere mass of subject tribes, ... was
inherited from an older and a grander system, was not Teutonic
but Roman--Roman in its ordered rule, in its uniformity and
precision, in its endeavour to subject the individual to the
system--Roman in its effort to realize a certain limited and
human perfection, whose very completeness shall exclude the
hope of further progress." With the death of Charles in 814
the territorial disruption of his great empire began. "The
returning wave of anarchy and barbarism swept up violent as
ever, yet it could not wholly obliterate the past: the Empire,
maimed and shattered though it was, had struck its roots too
deep to be overthrown by force." The Teutonic part and the
Romanized or Latinized part of the empire were broken in two,
never to unite again; but, in another century, it was on the
German and not the Gallo-Latin side of the line of its
disruption that the imperial ideas and the imperial titles of
Charlemagne came to life again, and his Teutonic Roman
Empire--the "Holy Roman Empire," as it came to be called--was
resurrected by Otto the Great, and established for eight
centuries and a half of enduring influence in the politics of
the world.
_J. Bryce,
The Holy Roman Empire,
chapter 5._
{1403}
"Gibbon has remarked, that of all the heroes to whom the title
of 'The Great' has been given, Charlemagne alone has retained
it as a permanent addition to his name. The reason may perhaps
be, that in no other man were ever united, in so large a
measure, and in such perfect harmony, the qualities which, in
their combination, constitute the heroic character, such as
energy, or the love of action; ambition, or the love of power;
curiosity, or the love of knowledge; and sensibility, or the
love of pleasure--not, indeed, the love of forbidden, of
unhallowed, or of enervating pleasure, but the keen relish for
those blameless delights by which the burdened mind and jaded
spirits recruit and renovate their powers. ... For the charms
of social intercourse, the play of a buoyant fancy, the
exhilaration of honest mirth, and even the refreshment of
athletic exercises, require for their perfect enjoyment that
robust and absolute health of body and of mind which none but
the noblest natures possess, and in the possession of which
Charlemagne exceeded all other men. His lofty stature, his
open countenance, his large and brilliant eyes, and the
dome-like structure of his head, imparted, as we learn from
Eginhard, to all his attitudes the dignity which becomes a
king, relieved by the graceful activity of a practiced
warrior. ... Whether he was engaged in a frolic or a chase--
composed verses or listened to homilies--fought or
negotiated--cast down thrones or built them up--studied,
conversed, or legislated, it seemed as if he, and he alone,
were the one wakeful and really living agent in the midst of
an inert, visionary, and somnolent generation. The rank held
by Charlemagne among great commanders was achieved far more by
this strange and almost superhuman activity than by any
pre-eminent proficiency in the art or science of war. He was
seldom engaged in any general action, and never undertook any
considerable siege, excepting that of Pavia, which, in fact,
was little more than a protracted blockade. But, during
forty-six years of almost unintermitted warfare, he swept over
the whole surface of Europe, from the Ebro to the Oder, from
Bretagne to Hungary, from Denmark to Capua, with such a
velocity of movement, and such a decision of purpose, that no
power, civilized or barbarous, ever provoked his resentment
without rapidly sinking beneath his prompt and irresistible
blows. And though it be true, as Gibbon has observed, that he
seldom, if ever, encountered in the field a really formidable
antagonist, it is not less true that, but for his military
skill, animated by his sleepless energy, the countless
assailants by whom he was encompassed must rapidly have become
too formidable for resistance. For to Charlemagne is due the
introduction into modern warfare of the art by which a general
compensates for the numerical inferiority of his own forces to
that of his antagonists--the art of moving detached bodies of
men along remote but converging lines with such mutual concert
as to throw their united forces at the same moment on any
meditated point of attack. Neither the Alpine marches of
Hannibal nor those of Napoleon were combined with greater
foresight, or executed with greater precision, than the
simultaneous passages of Charlemagne and Count Bernard across
the same mountain ranges, and their ultimate union in the
vicinity of their Lombard enemies."
_Sir J. Stephen,
Lectures on the History of France,
lecture 3._
ALSO IN:
_E. Gibbon,
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
chapter 49._
See, also,
GERMANY: A. D. 800.
FRANKS: A. D. 814-962.
Dissolution of the Carolingian Empire.
Charlemagne, at his death, was succeeded by his son Ludwig, or
Louis the Pious--the single survivor of three sons among whom
he had intended that his great empire should be shared. Mild
in temper, conscientious in character, Louis reigned with
success for sixteen years, and then lost all power of control,
through the turbulence of his family and the disorders of his
times. He "tried in vain to satisfy his sons (Lothar, Lewis,
and Charles) by dividing and redividing: they rebelled; he was
deposed, and forced by the bishops to do penance, again
restored, but without power, a tool in the hands of contending
factions. On his death the sons flew to arms, and the first of
the dynastic quarrels of modern Europe was fought out on the
field of Fontenay. In the partition treaty of Verdun [A. D.
843] which followed, the Teutonic principle of equal division
among heirs triumphed over the Roman one of the transmission
of an indivisible Empire: the practical sovereignty of all
three brothers was admitted in their respective territories, a
barren precedence only reserved to Lothar, with the imperial
title which he, as the eldest, already enjoyed. A more
important result was the separation of the Gaulish and German
nationalities. ... Modern Germany proclaims the era of A. D.
843 the beginning of her national existence and celebrated its
thousandth anniversary [in 1843]. To Charles the Bald was
given Francia Occidentalis; that is to say, Neustria and
Aquitaine; to Lothar, who as Emperor must possess the two
capitals, Rome and Aachen, a long and narrow kingdom
stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and
including the northern half of Italy; Lewis (surnamed, from
his kingdom, the German) received all east of the Rhine,
Franks, Saxons, Bavarians, Austria, Carinthia, with possible
supremacies over Czechs and Moravians beyond. Throughout these
regions German was spoken; through Charles's kingdom a corrupt
tongue, equally removed from Latin and from modern French.
Lothar's, being mixed and having no national basis, was the
weakest of the three, and soon dissolved into the separate
sovereignties of Italy, Burgundy and Lotharingia, or, as we
call it, Lorraine. On the tangled history of the period that
follows it is not possible to do more than touch. After
passing from one branch of the Carolingian line to another,
the imperial sceptre was at last possessed and disgraced by
Charles the Fat, who united all the dominions of his
great-grandfather. This unworthy heir could not avail himself
of recovered territory to strengthen or defend the expiring
monarchy. He was driven out of Italy in A. D. 887 and his
death in 888 has been usually taken as the date of the
extinction of the Carolingian Empire of the West. ... From all
sides the torrent of barbarism which Charles the Great had
stemmed was rushing down upon his empire. ... Under such
strokes the already loosened fabric swiftly dissolved. No one
thought of common defence or wide organization: the strong
built castles, the weak became their bondsmen, or took shelter
under the cowl: the governor--count, abbot, or
bishop--tightened his grasp, turned a delegated into an
independent, a personal into a territorial authority, and
hardly owned a distant and feeble suzerain. ... In Germany,
the greatness of the evil worked at last its cure.
[1404 moved to end of FRANKS.]
{1405}
When the male line of the eastern branch of the Carolingians
had ended in Lewis (surnamed the Child), son of Arnulf [A. D.
911], the chieftains chose and the people accepted Conrad the
Franconian, and after him Henry the Saxon duke, both
representing the female line of Charles. Henry laid the
foundations of a firm monarchy, driving back the Magyars and
Wends, recovering Lotharingia, founding towns to be centres of
orderly life and strongholds against Hungarian irruptions. He
had meant to claim at Rome his kingdom's rights, rights which
Conrad's weakness had at least asserted by the demand of
tribute; but death overtook him, and the plan was left to be
fulfilled by Otto his son."
_J. Bryce,
The Holy Roman Empire,
chapter 6._
"The division of 888 was really the beginning of the modern
states and the modern divisions of Europe. The Carolingian
Empire was broken up into four separate kingdoms: the Western
Kingdom, answering roughly to France, the Eastern Kingdom or
Germany, Italy, and Burgundy. Of these, the three first remain
as the greatest nations of the Continent: Burgundy, by that
name, has vanished; but its place as a European power is
occupied, far more worthily than by any King or Cæsar, by the
noble confederation of Switzerland."
_E. A. Freeman,
The Franks and the Gauls.
(Historical Essays, 1st series, number 7.)_
ALSO IN:
_E. F. Henderson,
Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages,
book 2, numbers 3._
_P. Godwin,
History of France: Ancient Gaul,
chapter 18._
_R. W. Church,
The Beginning of the Middle Ages,
chapter 8._
_F. Guizot,
History of Civilization,
lecture 24._
_Sir F. Palgrave,
History of Normandy and France,
volumes 1-2._
See, also,
GERMANY: A. D. 843-962;
and FRANCE: A. D. 843, and after.
FRANKS: A. D. 843-962.
Kingdom of the East Franks.
See GERMANY: A. D. 843-962.
----------End: FRANKS ----------
[Image: Central Europe (page 1404)]
CENTRAL EUROPE AT THE PEACE OF VERDUN 843 A. D.
CENTRAL EUROPE 888 A. D.
----------------------------------
FRATRES MINORES.
See MENDICANT ORDERS.
FRATRICELLI, The.
See BEGUINES, ETC.
FRAZIER'S FARM, OR GLENDALE, Battle of.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D. 1862 (JUNE-JULY: VIRGINIA).
FREDERICIA, Battle of (1849).
See SCANDINAVIAN STATES (DENMARK): A. D. 1848-1862.
FREDERICIA, Siege of (1864).
See GERMANY: A. D. 1861-1866.
FREDERICK I.
(called Barbarossa), Emperor, A. D. 1155-1190;
King of Germany, 1152-1190;
King of Italy, 1155-1190.
Frederick I., King of Denmark and Norway, 1523-1533.
Frederick I., King of Prussia, 1701-1713;
Frederick III., Elector of Brandenburg, 1688-1713.
Frederick I., Elector of Brandenburg, 1417-1440.
Frederick II.,
Emperor, 1220-1250;
King of Germany, 1212-1250.
See ITALY: A. D. 1183-1250;
and GERMANY: A. D. 1138-1268.
Frederick II., King of Denmark and Norway, 1558-1588.
Frederick II., King of Naples, 1496-1503.
Frederick II. (called The Great),
King of Prussia, 1740-1786.
Frederick II., King of Sicily, 1295-1337.
Frederick II., Elector of Brandenburg, 1440-1470.
Frederick III., Emperor, and King of Germany, 1440-1493.
Frederick III., German Emperor and King of Prussia,
1888, March-June.
Frederick III., King of Denmark and Norway, 1648-1670.
Frederick III., King of Sicily, 1355-1377.
Frederick IV., King of Denmark and Norway, 1609-1730.
Frederick V., King of Denmark and Norway, 1746-1766.
Frederick V., Elector of the Palatinate
(and King-elect of Bohemia),
and the Thirty Years' War.
See GERMANY: A. D. 1618-1620, 1620, 1621-1623,
1631-1632, and 1648.
Frederick VI.,
King of Denmark and Norway, 1808-1814;
King of Denmark, 1814-1839.
Frederick VII., King of Denmark, 1848-1863.
Frederick Augustus I.,
Elector of Saxony, 1694-1733;
King of Poland,1697-1704 (deposed), and 1709-1733.
Frederick Augustus II.,
Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, 1733-1763.
Frederick Henry, Stadtholder of the United Provinces,
1625-1647.
Frederick William (called The Great Elector),
Elector of Brandenburg, 1640-1688.
Frederick William I., King of Prussia, 1713-1740.
Frederick William II., King of Prussia, 1786-1797.
Frederick William III., King of Prussia, 1797-1840.
Frederick William IV., King of Prussia, 1840-1861.
----------FREDERICK: End----------
FREDERICKSBURG, Battle of.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D.1862 (OCTOBER-DECEMBER: VIRGINIA).
FREDERICKSBURG:
Sedgwick's demonstration against.
See
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D. 1863 (APRIL-MAY: VIRGINIA).
----------FREDERICKSBURG: End----------
FREDERICKSHALL.
Siege by the Swedes.
Death of Charles XII. (1718).
See SCANDINAVIAN STATES (SWEDEN): A. D. 1707-1718.
FREDERICKSHAMM, Peace of (1809).
See SCANDINAVIAN STATES: A. D. 1807-1810.
FREDLINGEN, Battle of (1703).
See NETHERLANDS: A. D. 1702-1704.
FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND.
See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1843.
FREE CITIES.
See CITIES, IMPERIAL AND FREE, OF GERMANY;
also, ITALY: A. D. 1056-1152, and after.
FREE COMPANIES, The.
See ITALY: A. D. 1343-1393;
and FRANCE: A. D. 1360-1380.
FREE LANCES.
See LANCES, FREE.
FREE MASONS.