THE DISRUPTION OF CHARLEMAGNE'S EMPIRE
[Sidenote: Louis the Pious succeeds Charlemagne.]
35. It was a matter of great importance to the world whether
Charlemagne's extensive empire was, after his death, to remain one or to
fall apart. He himself appears to have had no expectation that it would
hold together, for in 806 he divided it up in a very arbitrary manner
among his three sons. We do not know whether he was led thus to undo his
life's work simply because the older tradition of a division among the
king's sons was as yet too strong to permit him to hand down all his
possessions to his eldest son, or because he believed it would be
impossible to keep together so vast and heterogeneous a realm. However
this may have been, the death of his two eldest sons left only Louis,
who succeeded his father both as king and emperor.
[Sidenote: Partition of Charlemagne's empire among the sons of Louis the
Pious.]
Louis the Pious had been on the throne but a few years before he took up
the all-important problem of determining what share each of his sons
should have in the empire after his death. As they were far too
ambitious to submit to the will of their father, we find no less than
six different partitions between the years 817 and 840. We cannot stop
to trace these complicated and transient arrangements, or the rebellions
of the undutiful sons, who set the worst possible example to the
ambitious and disorderly nobles. On the death of Louis the Pious, in
840, his second son, Louis the German, was in possession of Bavaria and
had at various times been recognized as ruler of most of those parts of
the empire now included in Germany. The youngest son, Charles the Bald,
had all the western portion of the Frankish possessions, while
Lothaire, the eldest, had been designated as emperor and ruled over
Italy and the district lying between the possessions of the younger
brothers. Charles and Louis promptly combined to resist the attempts of
Lothaire to assert his superiority as emperor, and defeated him at
Fontenay (841). The treaty of Verdun, which followed, is one of the most
memorable in the history of western Europe.[52]
[Illustration: Map of Treaty of Verdun]
[Sidenote: Treaty of Verdun, 843.]
In the negotiations which led up to the treaty of Verdun there appears
to have been entire agreement among the three parties that Italy should
go to Lothaire, Aquitaine to Charles the Bald, and Bavaria to Louis the
German. The real difficulty lay in the disposal of the rest of the
empire. It seemed appropriate that the older brother, as emperor, should
have, in addition to Italy, the center of the Frankish dominions,
including the capital, Aix-la-Chapelle. A state of the most artificial
kind, extending from Rome to northern Holland, was thus created, which
had no natural unity of language or custom. Louis the German was
assigned, in addition to Bavaria, the country north of Lombardy and
westward to the Rhine. As for Charles the Bald, his realm included a
great part of what is France to-day, as well as the Spanish March and
Flanders.
36. The great interest of the treaty of Verdun lies in the tolerably
definite appearance of a western and an eastern Frankish kingdom, one of
which was to become France and the other Germany. In the kingdom of
Charles the Bald the dialects spoken by the majority of the people were
derived directly from the spoken Latin, and in time developed into
Provençal and French. In the kingdom of Louis the German, on the other
hand, both people and language were German. The narrow strip of country
between these regions, which fell to Lothaire, came to be called
_Lotharii regnum_, or kingdom of Lothaire.[53] This name was perverted
in time into Lotharingia and, later, into Lorraine. It is interesting to
note that this territory has formed a part of the debatable middle
ground over which the French and Germans have struggled so obstinately
down to our own day.
[Sidenote: The Strasburg oaths.]
We have a curious and important evidence of the difference of language
just referred to, in the so-called Strasburg oaths (842). Just before
the settlement at Verdun, the younger brothers had found it advisable to
pledge themselves, in an especially solemn and public manner, to support
one another against the pretensions of Lothaire. First, each of the two
brothers addressed his soldiers in their own language, absolving them
from their allegiance to him should he desert his brother. Louis then
took the oath in what the chronicle calls the _lingua romana_, so that
his brother's soldiers might understand him, and Charles repeated his
oath in the _lingua teudisca_ for the benefit of Louis' soldiers.[54]
Fortunately the texts of both of these oaths have been preserved. They
are exceedingly interesting and important as furnishing our earliest
examples, except some lists of words, of the language spoken by the
common people, which was only just beginning to be written. Probably
German was very rarely written before this time, as all who could write
at all wrote in Latin. The same is true of the old Romance tongue (from
which modern French developed), which had already drifted far from the
Latin.
[Illustration: Map of Treaty of Mersen]
[Sidenote: New divisions of the empire corresponding to France, Germany,
and Italy.]
37. When Lothaire died (855) he left Italy and the middle kingdom to his
three sons. By 870 two of these had died, and their uncles, Charles the
Bald and Louis the German, did not hesitate to appropriate the middle
kingdom and divide it between them by the treaty of Mersen. Italy was
left to Lothaire's only surviving son, together with the imperial crown,
which was to mean nothing, however, for a hundred years to come. The
result was that, as early as 870, western Europe was divided into three
great districts which corresponded with startling exactness to three
important states of modern Europe, i.e., France, Germany, and Italy.
[Sidenote: The empire temporarily reunited under Charles the Fat.]
Louis the German was succeeded in the East-Frankish kingdom by his son,
Charles the Fat. In 884, owing to the death of the sons and the
grandsons of Charles the Bald, there was no one to represent his line
except a child of five years. So the aristocracy of the West-Frankish
kingdom invited Charles the Fat to become their king. In this way it
came about that the whole empire of Charlemagne was reunited for two or
three years under a single ruler.[55]
[Sidenote: Charles the Fat and the Northmen.]
Charles the Fat was ill and proved an incompetent emperor, entirely
unequal to the serious task of governing and protecting his vast
territories. His weakness was especially shown in his pusillanimous
treaties with the Northmen. When Paris was making an heroic defense
against them under its count, Odo, Charles, instead of marching at the
head of an army to relieve it, agreed to pay the invaders seven hundred
pounds of silver if they would raise the siege. They were then permitted
to take up their winter quarters far inland, in Burgundy, where they
proceeded to burn and pillage at will.
[Sidenote: Charles the Fat deposed and succeeded by Arnulf.]
This degrading agreement so disgusted the West-Frankish nobility that
they were glad to join a conspiracy set on foot by Charles' nephew, the
brave Arnulf of Carinthia, who had resolved to supplant his inefficient
uncle. Charles was deposed and deserted by all his former supporters in
887. No one, except Napoleon, has ever again succeeded in bringing the
eastern, western, and southern parts of Charlemagne's empire under his
control, even for a brief period. Arnulf, although enjoying the title of
emperor, could scarcely hope to be recognized as king in all parts of
the Frankish empire. Even nominal unity was no longer possible. As one
of the chronicles of the time puts it, "While Arnulf was frittering away
his time, many little kingdoms grew up."
[Sidenote: Origin of the kingdom of Burgundy, or Arles.]
In the West-Frankish territory the nobility of the northern part chose
Odo, the hero of the siege of Paris, as their king; but in the south
another enterprising nobleman, Count Boso of Vienne, succeeded in
inducing the pope to crown him king of a certain district on the Rhone
which included Provence. Immediately after Boso's death a large
territory about the Lake of Geneva, which he had hoped to win for
himself, became a separate kingdom under its own ruler. This region and
that which Boso ruled to the south were later united into the kingdom of
Burgundy, or, as it is often called, Arles.
Even before the deposition of Charles the Fat, many of the counts and
other important landowners began to take advantage of the weakness of
their king to establish themselves as the rulers of the districts about
them, although they did not assume the title of king. In the
East-Frankish kingdom the various German peoples whom Charlemagne had
managed to control, especially the Bavarians and Saxons, began to revive
their old national independence. In Italy the disruption was even more
marked than in the north.[57]
[Sidenote: Causes of disruption.]
[Sidenote: Poor roads.]
38. It is clear, from what has been said, that none of the rulers into
whose hands the fragments of Charlemagne's empire fell, showed himself
powerful and skillful enough to govern properly a great territory like
that embraced in France or Germany to-day. The difficulties in the way
of establishing a well-regulated state, in the modern sense of the word,
were almost insurmountable. In the first place, it was well-nigh
impossible to keep in touch with all parts of a wide realm. The
wonderful roads which the Romans had built had generally fallen into
decay, for there was no longer a corps of engineers maintained by the
government to keep them up and repair the bridges. In those parts of
Charlemagne's possessions that lay beyond the confines of the old Roman
Empire, the impediments to travel must have been still worse than in
Gaul and on the Rhine; there not even the vestiges of Roman roads
existed.
[Sidenote: Scarcity of money for paying government officers and
maintaining armies.]
In addition to the difficulty of getting about, the king had to contend
with the scarcity of money in the Middle Ages. This prevented him from
securing the services of a great corps of paid officials, such as every
government finds necessary to-day. Moreover, it made it impossible for
him to support the standing army which would have been necessary to
suppress the constant insubordination of his officials and of the
powerful and restless nobility, whose chief interest in life was
fighting.
[Sidenote: New invasions,--the Northmen, Slavs, Hungarians, and
Saracens.]
The disintegration of the Frankish empire was hastened by the continued
invasions from all sides. From the north--Denmark, Norway, and
Sweden--came the Scandinavian pirates, the Northmen.[58] They were
skillful and daring seamen, who not only harassed the coast of the North
Sea, but made their way up the rivers, plundering and burning towns
inland as far as Paris. On the eastern boundary of the empire the
Germans were forced to engage in constant warfare with the Slavs. Before
long the Hungarians, a savage race, began their terrible incursions into
central Germany and northern Italy. From the south came the Saracens,
who had got possession of Sicily (in 827), and terrorized southern Italy
and France, even attacking Rome itself.
[Sidenote: Growing power and independence of the great landed
proprietor.]
39. In the absence of a powerful king with a well-organized army at his
back, each district was left to look out for itself. Doubtless many
counts, margraves, bishops, and other great landed proprietors who were
gradually becoming independent princes, earned the loyalty of the people
about them by taking the lead in defending the country against its
invaders and by establishing fortresses as places of refuge when the
community was hard pressed. These conditions serve to explain why such
government as continued to exist during the centuries following the
deposition of Charles the Fat was necessarily carried on mainly, not by
the king and his officers, but by the great landholders. The grim
fortresses of the mediæval lords, which appeared upon almost every point
of vantage throughout western Europe during the Middle Ages, would not
have been tolerated by the king, had he been powerful enough to destroy
them. They plainly indicate that their owners were practically
independent rulers.
When the traveler in France or Germany comes upon the picturesque ruins
of a mediæval castle, perched upon some rocky cliff, accessible from one
side only, and commanding the surrounding country, he cannot but see
that those massive walls, with their towers and battlements, their moat
and drawbridge, were never intended as a dwelling place for the peaceful
household of a private citizen, but rather as the fortified palace of a
ruler. We can picture the great hall crowded with armed retainers, who
were ready to fight for the proprietor when he was disposed to attack a
neighboring lord, and who knew that below were the dungeons to which the
lord might send them if they ventured to rebel against his authority.
[Illustration: Mediæval Fortress, showing Moat and Drawbridges]
[Sidenote: The landed proprietor and the manor.]
In order to understand the position of the mediæval noble and the origin
of feudalism we must consider the situation of the great landowners. A
large part of western Europe in the time of Charlemagne appears to have
been divided up into great estates, resembling the Roman villas. Just
how these originated we do not know. These estates, or _manors_, as they
were called, were cultivated mainly by serfs, who were bound to the land
and were under the control of its proprietor. They tilled such part of
the estate as the owner reserved for his own particular use, and
provided for his needs and their own without the necessity of buying
much from the outside. When we speak of a mediæval landowner we mean one
who held one or more of these manors, which served to support him and
left him free to busy himself fighting with other proprietors in the
same position as himself.[59]
[Sidenote: Immunities.]
It had been common even before Charlemagne's time to grant to
monasteries and churches, and even to individuals, an extraordinary
privilege which exempted their lands from the presence or visits of
government officials. No public officer with the power to hear cases,
exact fines, obtain lodging or entertainment for the king and his
followers when traveling about, or make requisitions of any kind, was to
enter the lands or villages belonging to the monastery or person
enjoying the _immunity_. These exemptions were evidently sought with a
view to getting rid of the exactions of the king's officials and
appropriating the various fines and fees, rather than with the purpose
of usurping governmental prerogatives. But the result was that the
monasteries or individuals who were thus freed from the requisitions of
the government were left to perform its functions,--not, however, as yet
in their own right, but as representatives of the king.[60] It is not
hard to see how those who enjoyed this privilege might, as the central
power weakened, become altogether independent. It is certain that a
great many landowners who had been granted no exemption from the
jurisdiction of the king's officers, and a great many of the officers
themselves, especially the counts and margraves, gradually broke away
altogether from the control of those above them and became the rulers of
the regions in which they lived.
[Sidenote: Tendency to hereditary offices.]
The counts were in a particularly favorable position to usurp for their
own benefit the powers which they were supposed to exercise for the
king. Charlemagne had chosen his counts and margraves in most cases from
the wealthy and distinguished families of his realms. As he had little
money, he generally rewarded their services by grants of estates, which
only served to increase their independence. They gradually came to look
upon their office and their land as private property, and they were
naturally disposed to hand it on to their sons after them. Charlemagne
had been able to keep control of his agents by means of the _missi_.
After his death his system fell into disuse and it became increasingly
difficult to get rid of inefficient or rebellious officers.
[Sidenote: Forces opposed to disruption, viz., partial survival of royal
authority and feudalism.]
Yet we must not infer that the state ceased to exist altogether during
the centuries of confusion that followed the break-up of Charlemagne's
empire, or that it fell entirely apart into little local governments
independent of each other. In the first place, a king always retained
some of his ancient majesty. He might be weak and without the means to
enforce his rights and to compel his more powerful subjects to meet
their obligations toward him. Yet he was, after all, the _king_,
solemnly anointed by the Church as God's representative on earth. He was
always something more than a feudal lord. The kings were destined to get
the upper hand before many centuries in England, France, and Spain, and
finally in Italy and Germany, and to destroy the castles behind whose
walls their haughty nobles had long defied the royal power.
[Sidenote: Feudalism.]
In the second place, the innumerable independent landowners were held
together by _feudalism_. One who had land to spare granted a portion of
it to another person on condition that the one receiving the land should
swear to be true to him and perform certain services,--such as fighting
for him, giving him counsel, and lending aid when he was in particular
difficulties. In this way the relation of lord and vassal originated.
All lords were vassals either of the king or of other lords, and
consequently all were bound together by solemn engagements to be loyal
to one another and care for one another's interests. Feudalism served
thus as a sort of substitute for the state. Private arrangements between
one landowner and another took the place of the weakened bond between
the subject and his king.
The feudal form of government and the feudal system of holding land are
so different from anything with which we are now familiar that it is
difficult for us to understand them. Yet unless we do understand them, a
great part of the history of Europe during the past thousand years will
be well-nigh meaningless.[61]