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[Illustration: CHARLEMAGNE
Painting by Albrecht Dürer.]
THE LIFE OF
CHARLEMAGNE
(CHARLES THE GREAT)
By THOMAS HODGKIN, D.C.L.
WITH NOTES
BY HENRY KETCHAM
[Illustration]
A. L. BURT COMPANY,
PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
Copyright, 1902,
BY E. A. BRAINERD.
PREFACE.
In attempting to compress the history of the great Emperor Charles
within the narrow limits of the present volume, I have undertaken a
difficult task, and I trust that my fellow-historians will consider,
not how much has been omitted, but how much, or rather how little, it
was possible to insert.
It may be thought that I might have gained space by proceeding at once
to the beginning of Charles’s own reign instead of devoting more than
eighty pages to his predecessors, but this did not seem to me possible.
The great Emperor was the last term of an ascending series--nobles,
mayors of the palace, kings; and in order to understand the law of
the series it is absolutely necessary to study some of its earlier
members....
A few words as to our authorities. For the period before the accession
of Pippin our chief authority is the chronicle which is known by the
name of _Fredegarius_, very meagre, and written in barbarous Latin, but
honest; then a still more miserable continuation of this work by an
unknown scribe; and lastly, a much better performance, from a literary
point of view, _The Lives of the Bishops of Metz_, by Paulus Diaconus.
For the reigns of Pippin and of Charles the Great we have fairly
satisfactory materials in the shape of the Annals, which now began
to be kept at various monasteries; chief among them the _Annales
Laurissenses majores_, so-called from their connection, real or
supposed, with the great monastery of Lorsch (in Hesse-Darmstadt, about
ten miles east of Worms). So extensive, however, is the knowledge
of State affairs possessed by this writer that it is the opinion of
Professor Ranke, and of most modern inquirers, that he cannot have been
a mere monk writing his chronicle in a convent, but that we have here
in fact the chronicles of the Frankish kingdom. This view is to some
extent confirmed by the fact that there is a fuller recension of them
in a more literary form, which bears the name of _Annales Finhardi_,
and thus professes to be the work of Charles’s friend and secretary.
The precious _Vita Caroli_, from the pen of the same writer, is
described in the following pages.
The writers who in modern times have treated of the life of Charles
the Great number some hundreds, and I make no pretension to even a
superficial acquaintance with the bibliography of so vast a subject,
but I may mention that the books which I have found most helpful
in the composition of the following pages are Waitz’s _Deutsche
Verfassungsgeschichte_, Guizot’s _Lectures on the History of
Civilization_, Dahn’s _Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen
Völker_, and pre-eminently the series of _Jahrbücher der deutschen
Geschichte_, in which Bonnell has treated of _The Beginnings of the
Carolingian House_; Oelsner, of _The Life of Pippin, King of the
Franks_; and Abel and Simson, of _The Life of Charles the Great_. To
the last work (in two volumes) I have been under great and continual
obligation.
THOS. HODGKIN.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
TO THE BIRTH OF CHARLEMAGNE.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER II.
EARLY MAYORS OF THE PALACE 15
CHAPTER III.
PIPPIN OF HERISTAL AND CHARLES MARTEL 45
CHAPTER IV.
PIPPIN, KING OF THE FRANKS 63
PART II.
FROM THE BIRTH OF CHARLEMAGNE.
CHAPTER V.
FALL OF THE LOMBARD MONARCHY 109
CHAPTER VI.
THE CONVERSION OF THE SAXONS 137
CHAPTER VII.
REVOLTS AND CONSPIRACIES 166
CHAPTER VIII.
RONCESVALLES 188
CHAPTER IX.
WARS WITH AVARS AND SCLAVES 204
CHAPTER X.
RELATIONS WITH THE EAST 219
CHAPTER XI.
CAROLUS AUGUSTUS 240
CHAPTER XII.
OLD AGE 274
CHAPTER XIII.
RESULTS 308
APPENDICES--
A. Genealogy of the Ancestors of Charles the Great 332
B. Family of St. Charles the Great 333
CHARLEMAGNE.
PART I.
TO THE BIRTH OF CHARLEMAGNE.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
In the gradual transformation of the old world of classical antiquity
into the world with which the statesmen of to-day must deal, no man
played a greater part than Charles the Great,[1] King of the Franks
and Emperor of Rome. The sharp lines of demarcation which we often draw
between period and period, and which are useful as helps to memory,
have not for the most part had any real existence in history, for in
the world of men, as in the development of the material universe, it
is true that uniformity rather than cataclysm is the rule: _Natura
non vadit per saltum_. Still there are some great landmarks,[2] such
as the foundation of Constantinople, Alaric’s capture of Rome, the
Hegira of Mohammed, the discovery of America, the Reformation, and
the French Revolution, which have no merely artificial existence. We
can see that the thoughts of the great majority of civilized men were
suddenly forced into a different channel by such events, that after
they had occurred, men hoped for other benefits and feared other
dangers than they had looked for before these events took place. And
such a changeful moment in the history of the world was undoubtedly the
life of the great ruler who is generally spoken of as Charlemagne, and
pre-eminently the year 800, when he was crowned as Emperor at Rome.
When Charles appeared upon the scene, the Roman Empire--at least as far
as Western Europe was concerned--had been for more than three centuries
slowly dying. An event, to which allusion has just been made--the
capture of Rome by Alaric in 410--had dealt the great world-empire a
mortal blow, and yet so tough was its constitution, so deeply was the
thought engraven even on the hearts of its most barbarous enemies,
“Rome is the rightful mistress of the world,” that it seemed as if that
world-empire could not die. The Visigoth, the Ostrogoth, the Vandal,
the Burgundian, the Lombard, coming forth from the immemorial solitude
of their forests, streamed over the cities and the vineyards of the
Mediterranean lands, and erected therein their rude state-systems,
their barbaric sovereignties; but even in framing their uncouth
national codes they were forced to use the language of Rome; in
government they could not dispense with the official machinery of the
Empire; in religious affairs, above all, they found themselves always
face to face with men to whom the city by the Tiber was still _Roma
caput mundi_. Hence in all these new barbarian kingdoms that arose on
the ruins of the Empire there was a certain feeling of precariousness
and unrest, a secret fear that the power which had come into being so
strangely and so unexpectedly would in a moment vanish away, and that
the Roman Augustus would assert himself once more as supreme over the
nations; to borrow a phrase from the controversies of a much later
date, the Visigothic and Burgundian and Lombard kings were obviously
kings _de facto_; but there was a latent consciousness in the minds of
their subjects, perhaps in their own also, that they were not kings _de
jure_.
Had the Italian peninsula been less easily accessible by way of the
Julian Alps, or had Rome been situated in as strong a position as
Constantinople, it is possible that this secret belief in her rightful
predominance might have won back for a Roman emperor that dominion
over Europe which was in fact wielded for a time by the Roman popes.
But the virtual transference of the seat of empire from the Tiber
to the Bosphorus, which was the result of the foundation of the new
Rome,[3] and the frequent successful sieges of the old Rome, prevented
the Roman emperor from thus reasserting himself. There were jealousies
between Rome and Constantinople already before the end of the fourth
century, and when under Justinian the Empire made its wonderful efforts
to recover the ground which it had lost in Africa, in Italy, and in
Spain,[4] though these reconquests were effected in the name of a Roman
Augustus, it was felt, and often loudly asserted, that the armies which
fought under the imperial standards were Greek rather than Roman. Thus,
through all the kingdoms of the west, even while the emperor enthroned
at Constantinople was looked upon as in some sense the legitimate
monarch of the world, the old deep-rooted hostility between East
and West also made itself felt, and it was becoming every day more
improbable that the western lands should ever be brought under the rule
of a “Byzantine” Cæsar.
Ere the long, slow agony which I have called the death of Rome was
completed, the world was startled by that outbreak of fierce Semitic
monotheism which is associated with the name of Mohammed. In 622,
rather more than two centuries after Alaric’s capture of Rome, Mohammed
escaped from Mecca to Medina, and in this retreat of his the followers
of his faith in succeeding ages have rightly seen the beginning of his
career of spiritual conquest, wherefore they date all their events from
the midnight journey of a fugitive, even as the other great Oriental
faith has taken for its landmark the birth of a little child in a
stable. Before Mohammed’s death in 632 the career of Saracen conquest
had begun. Ere the close of the seventh century Syria, Persia, Egypt,
North Africa, were torn from the Empire of the Cæsars and obeyed the
rule of the Caliph. In 711 Europe saw the first breach made in its
defences when the great Iberian peninsula (all save a few mountain
glens in the remote north) was conquered by the Moors, and Mecca took
the place of Jerusalem or Rome as the spiritual centre of gravity
for Spain. The turbaned invaders crossed the Pyrenees, in 725 they
penetrated as far as Autun, only 150 miles from Paris. Though defeated
by Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, in the great battle
of Poitiers,[5] the Moors remained encamped on the soil of that which
we now call France. Narbonne was in their possession at the time of the
birth of Charlemagne, and remained so during the years of his boyhood,
till won back for Christendom by his father in 759.
In the east of Europe the Avars[6] still hung menacingly over the
Italian and Illyrian lands. A people allied to the Huns, they occupied
the mid-Danubian region which had been the seat of the barbarian
empire of Attila, and though their power had declined somewhat from
that which they wielded in the seventh century, it was still a serious
danger to civilization. As we shall see, however, the barbarous and
heathen Saxons in the lands between the Lower Rhine and the Elbe,
representing the Teutonic spirit in its fiercest and most stubborn
moods, represented an even more formidable obstacle to that remodelling
of Europe in the likeness of the old Roman Empire which was the aim of
the great statesman with whose life we have to deal.
Such, very briefly, was the aspect of affairs when Charles the Great,
the descendant of many Mayors of the Palace and of one King, found
himself, with the power of the Frankish nation collected in his sole
right hand, controller of the destinies of Western Europe. Without
going too far into the times preceding his accession, something in
order to explain his position must be said, both as to the Frankish
nation and the Arnulfing family.
In the north-east of Gaul dwelt, in the latter part of the fifth
century after Christ, a confederacy of German tribes called the Salian
Franks, occupying the districts known in later days as Flanders,
Artois, and Picardy. Farther south was the strong and warlike tribe of
the Ripuarian Franks, whose territory stretched along the banks of the
Rhine from Mainz to Köln, and along the Moselle from Coblenz to Metz.
Salians and Ripuarians recognized a loose tie of kinship between them,
but there was no strong feeling of unity even in the subdivision of
the two nations. Both Salians and Ripuarians had many petty kings, and
there were frequent civil wars between them.
In this state of things one of these petty kings, Clovis,[7] the Salian
Frank,[8] began to reign at Tournai in 481, being then fifteen years
of age. When he died, in the years 511, after forty-five years of life
and thirty of sovereignty, he had made himself sole master of all
Frankish men, and had subdued to his dominion three-fourths of France
and a great block of territory in south-western Germany. Let us briefly
recapitulate these conquests, omitting the wars in which the other
Frankish princes, whether Salian or Ripuarian, went down before him.
In 486 he overthrew the Roman governor Syagrius, who had set up some
sort of independent kingship at Soissons. This conquest gave Clovis
the provinces afterwards known as Champagne and Lorraine. In 496 he
defeated the Alamanni in a great battle, the ultimate result of which
was the annexation of the wide district on the right bank of the Rhine
known in the Middle Ages as Swabia, comprising in terms of modern
geography Alsace, Baden, Würtemberg, the western part of Bavaria,
and the northern part of Switzerland. The well-timed conversion to
Christianity, and to the Catholic form of Christianity which followed
this victory, facilitated the next great conquest of Clovis. In the
year 507 he went forth to war against Alaric, King of the Visigoths,
defeated and slew him, and thus added Aquitaine, that large and fertile
region which lies between the Loire and the Pyrenees, to his dominions.
Four years after this he died, but in the next generation, between 524
and 534, his sons conquered Burgundy, and thus added to their father’s
kingdom the whole valley of the Rhone from its source to its mouth,
except the narrow but rich land of Provence, which was retained by the
Ostrogothic kings of Italy for a few years longer, but in 536 this
also became Frankish. Contemporaneously with the conquest of Burgundy
proceeded the conquest of Thuringia, the fair region in the heart of
Germany which still bears that name, and the establishment of the
over-lordship of the Franks over the nation of the Bavarians, whose
country stretched from the Danube across the Alps, into the valley of
the Adige and up to the very gates of Italy. The date of this last
addition to the Frankish dominions cannot be precisely ascertained, but
may be stated approximately at the year 535.
It will be seen from this brief summary how rapidly the tide of
Frankish conquest rose almost to the same high-water mark which it
maintained at the time of the birth of Charlemagne. In fifty years from
the first appearance of Clovis as a warrior, the Franks have subdued
the whole of modern France (except a little strip of Languedoc), the
Low Countries, Switzerland, and all Germany as far as the Elbe and the
mountains of Bohemia, except Hanover and a part of Westphalia which is
occupied by the untamed and still heathen Saxons. Such a monarchy even
now would be the greatest power in Europe. In the sixth century, with
Spain weakened by the estrangement between Arians and Catholics, with
Italy torn by strife between the Empire and its barbarian occupants,
with Britain still in utter chaos, nibbled at but not devoured by
her Anglo-Saxon invaders, the kingdom of the Franks when united and
at peace within itself, was the strongest power in Europe, with the
two doubtful exceptions of the kingdom of the savage Avars and the
tottering fabric of the Roman Empire.
But the years in which the Frankish kingdom was thus united and at
peace with itself were few. It had been built up by the ferocious
energy of one man and his sons; it was hardly in any true sense of
the word national, and he and his descendants treated it as an estate
rather than as a country, partitioned and repartitioned it in a way
which wasted its strength and ruined its chances of attaining to
political unity. The comparison may seem a strange one, but in the
personal, non-national character of his policy the first Frankish king
reminds one of the latest French conqueror; the career of Clovis may
be illustrated by that of Napoleon. Both men emphatically “fought for
their own bands”; both were more intent on massing great countries
under their sway than on really assimilating the possessions which they
had already acquired; both in different ways made, or tried to make,
the Catholic Church an instrument of their ambition; and both seem to
have looked upon Europe, or so much of it as they could acquire, as a
big estate to be divided among their children or relations.
There is no need here to dwell upon the perplexing details of the
division of the kingdom of Clovis among his sons and grandsons. We
perceive a tendency to regard the north-eastern portion of the realm,
especially that conquered from Syagrius,[9] as the true kernel of the
kingdom; and therefore, widely as the dominions of the brothers stretch
asunder, their capitals, Metz, Orleans, Soissons, Paris, all lie
comparatively near to one another, all probably within the ring-fence
of the Syagrian kingdom. But there is also a tendency to fall asunder
into four great divisions. Burgundy and Aquitaine, though they do not
formally resume their independence, are often seen as separate kingdoms
under a Frankish king. But the more important division, the more
fateful rivalry separates the two northern kingdoms, which eventually
receive the names of Neustria[10] and Austrasia. In Neustria,
which contained the regions of Flanders, Normandy, Champagne, and
Central France as far as the Loire, there was doubtless a very large
Gallo-Roman population, though its numbers may not have so enormously
preponderated over those of the Teutonic immigrants as in Aquitaine and
Burgundy. The Roman language and some remains of Roman culture survived
here in Neustria, and were preparing the ground for the formation
of the mediæval kingdom of France. Austrasia, on the other hand,
the territory of the Rhine and the Moselle, seems to have remained
essentially German. The Latin speech in this country must have been
confined to ecclesiastics and a few of the more cultivated courtiers;
it can never have been the speech of the people. And though here we
must speak rather by conjecture than by proof, it is probable that the
old Germanic institutions of the hundred and the _gau_[11] survived
here in greater vigor than on the alien soil of the Romanized Gaul. It
was also through the rulers of Austrasia that the connection, frail
and precarious as it often might be, was kept up between the Frankish
monarchy and the great, semi-independent duchies of the Thuringians,
the Alamanni, and the Bavarians.
Thus already in the fissure between the western and eastern portions of
the Merovingian kingdom[12] we see the rift, premonitory of that mighty
chasm which now separates the great states of France and Germany.
CHAPTER II.
EARLY MAYORS OF THE PALACE.
The historical student who visits in thought the nursery of modern
European states--the period from 500 to 800 of the Christian
era--finds with amused surprise how many of the features familiar
to him in their weather-beaten old age he can trace in the faces of
those baby kingdoms. Gothic Spain, with its manifold councils, its
ecclesiastical intolerance, and its bitter persecutions of the Jews,
is the anticipation of the Spain of the Ferdinands and the Philips.
Italy, cleft in sunder by the patrimony of St. Peter and with the
undying hostility between the pope and the Lombard king, presages
the very conflict which is now being waged between the Vatican and
the Quirinal. England, notwithstanding all her early elements of
confusion and mismanagement, clings desperately to her one great saving
institution of the Witan,[13] and thus travails in birth with the
future parliament.
And even so, France under the Merovingian kings is the land of
centralized government, which though strong and imposing in theory,
repeatedly shows itself weak and insufficient in practice from the
incapacity of the governing brain to perform the manifold functions
assigned to it by destiny. As far as we can see, Clovis and his
immediate successors wielded a power which was practically unlimited.
The checks which the German nations from the time of Tacitus downwards
had imposed on the authority of their kings had almost entirely
disappeared before the overmastering power of the great Salian
chief who had united the whole of Gaul under his sway, and who was
continually reminded by his friends, the Christian bishops, how high
had been the throne and how heavy the sceptre of the Roman Augustus
in that very region. The well-known story of the vase of Soissons
illustrates at once the German memories of freedom and the Merovingian
mode of establishing a despotism. As a battle comrade the Frankish
warrior protests against Clovis receiving an ounce beyond his due share
of the spoils. As a battle leader Clovis rebukes his henchman for the
dirtiness of his accoutrements, and cleaves his skull to punish him for
his independence.
There can be little doubt that it was the influence of Roman and
ecclesiastical ideas which tended to exalt the rude chiefs of the
Salian tribe into their later position of practically despotic
monarchs, surrounded by a crowd of fawning flatterers and servile
courtiers. The effect of this exaltation on the royal house itself was
disastrous. Merovingian royalty flowered too soon and faded early.
Clovis himself was short-lived, dying, as we have seen, at the age of
five-and-forty. But two or three generations later the career of the
kings, his descendants, was of far more portentous brevity. Nothing
is more common than to find a Merovingian king who is a father at
fifteen, or even earlier, and who dies (not always by a violent death)
under thirty. Let us take a few of the lives of the later kings as
an illustration. Dagobert I., who is a sort of patriarch among them,
dies at thirty-eight; his son, Clovis II., at twenty-four; of the sons
of this latter king, Chlothair III. dies at eighteen, Childeric II.
at twenty. Theodoric III. actually lives to the age of thirty-eight,
but of his sons one dies at thirteen and another at eighteen. And so
on with many other names that might be quoted. It was evidently by
their vices that these hapless “do-nothing” kings were hurried to
such early graves. Every student of the pages of Gregory of Tours[14]
knows the dreary picture of morals and of social life which is there
presented: the coarseness of the barbarian without his rough fidelity,
the voluptuousness of the Gallo-Roman noble without his culture. Even
as we see at the present day in the contact of two civilizations or of
two faiths, notably in the contact of Christianity and Mohammedanism,
that the men whose position places them on the borders of the two are
apt to display the vices of both and the virtues of neither, so was it
with the Frankish nobles and bishops of Gaul in the sixth and seventh
centuries, and so emphatically was it with their head, the Frankish
king who reigned at Metz or Orleans or Paris. Immersed in his swinish
pleasures, with his constitution ruined by his early excesses, what
could the sickly youth, the Childebert or Chlothair of the day, do to
overtake the mass of business which the administration of the realm,
with its highly centralized mechanism, imposed upon him? He could not
do it all, and in practice he did nothing, and sank easily, perhaps
happily, into the condition of a _roi fainéant_. Dagobert I., who died
in 638, is the last Merovingian king who displays some royal energy
and strength of purpose. After him for more than a century a series of
pageant kings pass before us, Clovises and Theodorics and Chilperics,
whose names history refuses to remember, but whose pitiable condition
is represented to us by a few vivid touches from the hand of Einhard,
the biographer of Charlemagne. He describes to us how the Merovingian
king, seated in his chair of state, received the ambassadors of foreign
powers, and repeated, parrot-like, the answers which he had been
taught to give; how he travelled through the land in a wagon drawn by
a yoke of oxen, with a clownish herdsman for his charioteer, and thus
made his appearance when his presence was required at the palace or
at the yearly assemblies of the people; but how for the greater part
of the year he abode at one small villa in the country, living on its
produce, eked out by a scanty grant from his prime minister, and having
in truth nothing that he could call his own save his royal title, his
long flowing hair, and his pendulous beard, which were the marks of his
kingly state.
Doubtless it is not only the constitutional sovereign who is obliged
to content himself with only a small share of actual power. The despot
also, if he wishes to have any enjoyment of life, must leave much to be
done by his ministers, who, whatever show of deference they may yield
to his judgment, will practically decide for themselves the great mass
of administrative questions that come before them. Thus Louis XIII. had
his Richelieu; thus the Sultan of Turkey has his Grand Vizier; thus,
till our own day, the Mikado of Japan had his Shogun, whom European
travellers wrote about by his Chinese title of Tycoon. The relation of
these last regents to the royal dynasty in whose name they ruled for
many centuries, while depriving them of every shred of actual power,
seems to furnish the closest parallel in all history to the relation of
the Frankish _major domus_ to the Merovingian king.
The origin and early stages of the growth of the power of the “mayor
of the palace” (our usual English translation of the title _major
domus_) form one of the most difficult subjects in Frankish history.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty is to understand why it is that no
Teutonic name of an office which was certainly not Roman but Teutonic
should have survived in history. An opinion which has found some
powerful supporters is that the office was the same which was called
by the Germans _seneschal_, “the oldest servant” in the palace, and
that as the last part of this word denoted a servile condition, the
more respectful Latin term _major domus_ was adopted instead of it.
This opinion is, however, as powerfully opposed, and certainly the
fact that both _major domus_ and _seniscalcus_ are found in the same
documents as titles of apparently different offices seems to throw a
doubt upon its correctness.
But whatever the origin of the name, it is pretty clear that the mayor
of the palace was originally but the chief domestic of the king, he
to whom it appertained to order the ceremonies of the court, to rule
the royal pages, probably to superintend the repairs of the royal
dwelling. Hence not only reigning kings but queens dowager, and even
princesses, had their _majores domus_, and it even seems probable
that one king might have several mayors, each superintending one of
his various palaces. This, however, is only true of the early days of
the mayoralty. As chief man of business to an imperfectly educated,
care-encumbered, pleasure-loving king, the mayor of the palace took
one burden after another off the royal shoulders, and at the same time
drew one source of power after another into his own hands. Especially,
at a pretty early period of his career, he seems to have acquired the
supreme control of the royal treasury, superintending the collection
of the taxes, administering the royal domains, eventually acquiring
the power of granting those _beneficia_ or (as they would be called in
the language of a later day) those fiefs, by which on the one hand the
royal property was so seriously diminished, but on the other hand the
friendship of an important nobleman might, at a crisis of the mayor’s
fortunes, be so easily secured.
From the first appearance of the _major domus_ in Frankish history
till the year when the last _major domus_ was crowned King of the
Franks, thereby absorbing the lower office in the higher, a period of
about 170 years intervened, and during that long space of time these
anomalous functionaries assume very different shapes and exercise their
powers in very different ways. Sometimes, especially in the earlier
years of this period, they are the vigorous upholders of the rights
of the crown against a turbulent aristocracy, and then the mayor of
the palace seems to anticipate Richelieu. Sometimes they appear at the
head of the aristocracy and force their way, almost in spite of the
king, into the palace from which they take their title, and then they
remind us of the Guises and the Condés of a later day. In Neustria and
Burgundy no mayor of the palace who arises there succeeds in making his
office hereditary. In Austrasia there is a very early tendency towards
hereditary succession in the office, and five generations of able men
wielding its growing powers become at last in name, as well as in fact,
supreme.
It is out of the question to give here any detailed description of the
development of the mayoralty of the palace during that space of nearly
two centuries, but one or two illustrations drawn from the history of
the times may show what manner of men the mayors were, and how they
wielded their power.
“In the tenth year of the reign of Theodoric II., King of Burgundy,”
says the unlettered chronicler who goes by the name of Fredegarius,[15]
“at the instigation of Brunechildis, and by order of Theodoric,
Protadius is appointed mayor of the palace, a man of great cleverness
and energy in all that he undertook, but fierce was his injustice
against private persons. Straining too far the rights of the treasury,
he strove to fill it and to enrich himself by ingenious attacks on
private property. Wherever he found a man of noble descent, all such
he strove to humble, that more might be found who could assume the
dignity which he had seized. By these and other exactions, the work of
a man too clever for his office, he succeeded in making enemies of all
the chief men in Burgundy.” The chronicler then goes on to describe
how Protadius stirred up strife between Theodoric and his brother
Theudebert, King of Austrasia, whom he declared to be no true king’s
son, but son of a gardener by an adulterous intercourse with the
queen. The Burgundian army marched forth and encamped at a place called
Caratiacum, but there the king was advised by his _leudes_ [retainers]
to make peace with Theudebert. Protadius, however, exhorted them one
by one to join battle. Theudebert was encamped not far off with his
army. Then all the army of Theodoric, finding a suitable opportunity,
rushed upon Protadius, saying that it was better that one man should
die than that the whole army should be sent into danger. Now Protadius
was sitting in the tent of King Theodoric playing at draughts with
the arch-physician Peter. And when the army had surrounded him on
every side, and Theodoric was held back by his _leudes_ to prevent his
going thither, he sent Uncilenus to announce to the army his word of
command that they should desist from their plots against Protadius.
Uncilenus straightway bore to the army this message: ‘Thus orders our
lord Theodoric, that Protadius be slain.’ Rushing in, therefore, and
entering the king’s tent from all sides with drawn swords, they slay
Protadius. Covered with confusion, Theodoric made an involuntary peace
with his brother Theudebert, and both armies returned to their own
homes.
“After the decease of Protadius in the eleventh year of Theodoric,
Claudius is appointed to the office of _major domus_. He was a Roman
by descent, a prudent man, a pleasant story-teller, energetic in all
things, given to patience, abounding in counsel, learned in letters,
full of faith, desiring friendship with all men. Taking warning by the
example of those who had gone before him, he bore himself gently and
patiently in his high office, but this only hindrance had he, that he
was burdened with too great fatness of body.
“In the twelfth year of Theodoric, at the instigation of Brunechildis,
Uncilenus, who had by his treacherous words brought about the death
of Protadius, had one of his feet cut off, was despoiled of his
possessions and reduced to poverty. At the instigation of the same
queen Vulfos, the patrician who had been consenting to the death of
Protadius was killed at the villa of Fauriniacum by order of Theodoric,
and Ricomeris, a man of Roman descent succeeded him in the patriciate.”
These events may be taken as a sample of the working of the institution
of the _major domus_ in Neustria and Burgundy for the greater part of a
century. We see a king becoming more and more helpless in the presence
of the nobles and clergy whom he and his predecessors have enriched.
Theodoric II. is not personally a _fainéant_ king, but he cannot
prevent murder being committed in his name. We see a _major domus_
intent on refilling the royal treasury, and probably not scrupulous
as to the means which he employs for that purpose, nor afraid of
enriching himself at the same time as his master. We see a grasping
and turbulent aristocracy, made up of courtiers and ecclesiastics,
who are determined to keep what they have got from the crown, and to
whom both the lawful and the lawless acts of the prime minister on
behalf of his impoverished master render that minister equally odious.
The aristocracy bide their time. When the army is assembled in the
field they appeal to the old Teutonic spirit of almost democratic
independence, and slay their enemy in defiance of the king’s authority.
A sleek and supple Gallo-Roman takes the place of the murdered mayor,
and in his placid corpulence gives up the struggle, letting things
drift as they will. But the vengeance of the palace slumbers not, and
in time the aristocratic murderers of the prime minister are themselves
cut off by hands as lawless as their own. Such is Merovingian France in
the seventh century after Christ.
I have tried to indicate the general character of the _major-domat_ in
the two western kingdoms of Gaul. In Austrasia, though probably the
chief functions of the office are the same, its holder seems to look in
a different direction, and certainly arrives at a different end. The
Neustrian and Burgundian mayors of the palace are generally striving
for the rights of the crown against the aristocracy. In Austrasia they
are more often found at the head of the aristocracy and opposed to
the crown. In the western kingdoms we see indications that the _major
domus_ was often a man of humble origin, and that this was part of the
grievance of the aristocracy against him. In Austrasia he is generally
a man who, by his birth and possessions, takes a foremost place in the
realm independently of his official rank. Hence, and, from the fact
that the office was held in Austrasia by a long succession of able men
in the same family, arises the distinction already alluded to, that
in Austrasia the _major-domat_ becomes hereditary, and that it never
acquired that character in Neustria.
Lastly--and this difference is perhaps related to most of the others
which I have named, as cause is related to effect--the western kingdoms
seem at this time to have been always looked on as containing the heart
and centre of the Frankish dominion. Thus when a Frankish king had been
ruling in Austrasia with Metz for his capital, if by the death of a
father or brother he succeeded to the throne of Neustria, he generally
migrated westwards to Paris or Soissons, sometimes sending a son or a
younger brother to rule in Austrasia, sometimes seeking to rule it
from Paris. Now it is clear that there was a strong and growing feeling
in Austrasia (which was already beginning to be stirred by some of the
same sentiments as the Germany of to-day) that it would not be ruled
from Neustria (the ancestress of France). A Merovingian king, the
descendant of the Salian Clovis, it would endure, but he must rule,
not through Neustrian but through Austrasian instruments. This feeling
of national German independence was represented and championed by the
mayors of the palace of the line of Arnulf and Pippin, and to their
history we now turn.
The ancestors of Charlemagne first emerge into the light of history
at the time of the downfall of Queen Brunechildis. No student of
Frankish history can ever forget the tragic figure of that queen or
her life-long duel with her ignoble and treacherous sister-in-law
Fredegundis. While Brunechildis was still in early womanhood (576)
came reverses, the murder of her husband, imprisonment, a second
marriage, separation from the young husband whom she had so strangely
chosen, followed by his death at the bidding of Fredegundis. Meanwhile
she returned to Austrasia and ruled there for a time, first in the
name of a son, then of a grandson. Driven from thence (600) by the
turbulent aristocracy whose power she had striven to quell, she
escaped to Burgundy, and governed it for thirteen years in the name
of her grandson Theodoric. We have just seen her “instigating” the
appointment of Protadius as mayor of the palace and the punishment
of his murderers. All through these later years of her life the once
fascinating and beautiful woman seems like a lioness at bay. If Mary,
Queen of Scots, had escaped from Fotheringay, even so could we imagine
her, grown gray and hard and cruel, confronting John Knox and the
Scottish lords. Her grandsons perished early. Theodoric renewed the
war with Theudebert, defeated and slew him, but died himself at the
Austrasian capital in the year 613. And now were left of the race of
Clovis only the four infant sons of Theodoric II. and their distant
relation, Chlothair of Neustria, son of the hated Fredegundis. War was
inevitable. Which would prevail, the old lioness fighting for her cubs
or the whelp of Neustria? At this crisis the adhesion of two Austrasian
nobles to the party of Chlothair decided the day in his favor. These
two Austrasian nobles were Pippin “of Landen” and Arnulf, afterwards
Bishop of Metz.
Pippin of Landen (so called)[16] had large possessions in the country
between the Meuse and the Moselle, stretching in an easterly direction
toward the Rhine, including the forest of the Ardennes, and apparently
including also the city of Aquisgranum, which was one day to be the
home of Charlemagne. Pippin was born about 585, and was therefore
somewhere about thirty years of age when war broke out between
Brunechildis and Chlothair. His friend and contemporary, Arnulf,
born of a noble and wealthy Frankish family, had received a better
education, apparently, than fell to the lot of most of his class, and,
on the recommendation of the “sub-king” Gundulf (possibly mayor of
the palace), had been taken into the service of Theudebert, who had
assigned to him the government of six provinces. He had married a girl
of noble family, by whom he had two sons, Chlodulf and Ansigisel. The
latter was the ancestor of Charlemagne.
It was, as we are told, by the secret advice of these two men and
other nobles of Austrasia that Chlothair invaded the kingdom. However
strong might be their disinclination to the rule of a Neustrian King,
their determination not to submit again to “the hateful regimen of a
woman,” and that woman their old foe Brunechildis, was even stronger.
The folly of the old queen, who was at the same time secretly plotting
against the life of her Burgundian mayor of the palace, Warnachar,
aided their designs. When it came to the decision of battle, the
soldiers who should have defended the cause of the young king and his
great-grandmother turned their backs without striking a blow. Chlothair
had only to pursue and to capture the little princes and their
ancestress. One of the princes escaped, and was never heard of more;
another was spared as being the godson of Chlothair; two were put to
death. The aged Brunechildis was, we are told, tortured for three days
by the son of her old rival Fredegundis, led through the camp seated
on a camel, then tied by her hair, by one foot and one arm, to a most
vicious horse, and dashed to pieces by his furious career. Such were
the tender mercies of a Merovingian king.
This first appearance of Pippin and Arnulf on the stage of history is
not a noble one, yet of actual disloyalty or ingratitude they were
probably not guilty, since to Theudebert, the victim of the resentment
of Brunechildis, rather than to the family of Theodoric, his vanquisher
and murderer, they owed allegiance and gratitude. The subsequent career
of the two nobles, however, is more to their credit. In the year after
the overthrow of Brunechildis, the see of Metz having fallen vacant,
there was a general outcry among the people that none was so fitted to
fill it as Arnulf, the _domesticus_ and _consiliarius_ of the king.
There was on his part the usual tearful protestation of unfitness and
unwillingness, but the curtain fell on his acceptance of the episcopal
dignity. His biographer tells the story of his three-days’ fastings,
his hair shirt, his boundless hospitality to poor vagrants, to monks,
and to other travellers. We perceive, however, that he had not wholly
lost his interest in state affairs, for in the year 624 he, with his
friend Pippin, the _major domus_, procured the disgrace of a certain
nobleman named Chrodoald, who was charged with having abused the king’s
favor to his own enrichment and the spoliation of the estates of other
Austrasians. In the next year, too, when Dagobert I., son of Chlothair,
who had been sent to rule over a shorn and diminished Austrasia, met
his father near Paris, and had a sharp contention with him over the
narrow limits of his kingdom, it was Bishop Arnulf who, at the head of
the other bishops and nobles, succeeded in reconciling father and son.
It seems that Arnulf had for years cherished a desire to withdraw
from the world, but when he mentioned this project to Dagobert, the
young king, who greatly valued his counsels, was so incensed that he
swore that he would cut off the heads of his two sons if he dared to
leave the court. “My sons’ lives,” said the intrepid prelate, “are in
the hands of God. Your own life will not last long if you slay the
innocent.” On this the passionate young Merovingian drew his sword, and
was about to attack Arnulf, who, not heeding the wrath of the king,
said, “What are you doing, most miserable of men? Would you repay evil
for good? Here am I ready for death in obedience to His commands who
gave me life, and who died for me.” The nobles besought the king not
to give the bishop the crown of martyrdom. The queen appeared upon
the scene, and in a few moments she and Dagobert were grovelling at
Arnulf’s feet, beseeching forgiveness for the king’s offence, and
declaring that he should go when and whither he would.
So after an episcopate of fifteen years, in 629 Arnulf retired into the
recesses of the Vosges mountains, accompanied by one friend, Romaric,
once a courtier like himself, who had gone before him into the hermit
life, and who, like him, attained to the honors of saintship. The death
of Arnulf is generally placed in 640, but we have, in truth, no exact
information as to the date. We only know that Romaric survived him,
and that the body of the now canonized prelate was brought with great
pomp to the city of Metz by order of his successor in the see, and was
there interred in the church of the Holy Apostles, which has ever since
borne his name.
The _Vita Arnulfi_, from which these facts have been taken, appears
to have been the work of a contemporary (doubtless a much-admiring
contemporary), and we need not therefore here suspect that tendency
to flatter Charlemagne by magnifying the greatness of his ancestors
which has undoubtedly colored the histories of some of the members of
his family. It is certainly an interesting fact that a saint should
have been the paternal ancestor, even in the fifth degree, of so great
a statesman as Charlemagne. The standard of mediæval saintship in the
centuries with which we are dealing was not a high one, but Arnulf’s
character seems to have been pure and lofty; his retirement from the
world was due to a real longing after holiness, and on the whole we may
recognize in him a man not unworthy to be the sainted progenitor of the
Emperors of the West, even as Archbishop Philaret stands at the head of
the proud pedigree of the Russian Romanoffs.
Compared with the life of St. Arnulf, that of his friend and kinsman
Pippin is worldly and commonplace. In 622, when Chlothair II. sent his
son Dagobert to reign over Austrasia, Pippin received the dignity of
mayor of the palace under the young king. By his counsels and those
of Arnulf the Eastern realm was governed for seven years, and we are
told that this was a sort of golden age for Austrasia, in which justice
was impartially administered and prosperity prevailed. Possibly these
results were not obtained without some sacrifice of Pippin’s popularity
with his brother nobles. When Dagobert, on his father’s death (in 629),
removed to Paris, his character we are told, underwent a change. He
fell into vice and dissipation, and lost the respect of his retainers.
Pippin apparently tried to mediate between him and them, and shared the
usual fate of mediators, earning the hatred of both parties. “The zeal
of the Austrasians surged up so vehemently against him that they tried
to make him odious in Dagobert’s eyes, that he might even be slain,
but the love of justice and the fear of God, which he had diligently
embraced, freed him from all evils.” However, it seems that he,
together with other Austrasian nobles, was kept in a sort of honorable
captivity in Neustria during the rest of the days of Dagobert (from 630
to 638), and that not till the latter date did he return to Austrasia.
Evidently there was already an uneasy feeling on the part of the
Frankish ruler dwelling at Paris that these great Austrasian potentates
would one day give him or his descendants a sharp struggle for the
crown.
For one year after his return Pippin swayed the affairs of the
Austrasian palace, acting always in concert with Cunibert, Bishop of
Cologne, who had succeeded to the same position of spiritual prime
minister which had formerly been held by St. Arnulf. Together they
presided over the division of the treasures of the late king, assigning
one-third to his widow, Nantildis; one-third to his son, Clovis II.,
who succeeded him in Neustria, and one-third (which with jealous care
was at once conveyed to Metz) to his other son, Sigibert III., who
ruled in Austrasia. In 640 Pippin died, greatly regretted, we are told,
by all the men of Austrasia, whose hearts he had won by his goodness
and love of justice. Possibly during his enforced absence from the
realm the Austrasian nobles had learned that the strong hand under
which they had chafed was, after all, needed for the welfare of the
State.
Some years apparently before the death of Pippin the alliance between
the two great Austrasian chiefs had been cemented by a marriage between
Adelgisel, son of St. Arnulf, and a daughter of Pippin, who was
probably named Becga. From this marriage sprang the second Pippin, the
great-grandfather of Charlemagne.
Adelgisel himself was mayor of the palace for a few years before the
return of his father-in-law, but he seems to have been a somewhat
insignificant person, and is overshadowed in history by the sanctity
of his father and the success of his son.
A much more important figure is his brother-in-law, Grimwald, son of
Pippin of Landen, who three years after his father’s death succeeded
by a deed of blood perpetrated by one of his adherents, in obtaining
the coveted mayoralty. For thirteen years, or thereabouts, he acted
as _major domus_ to the weak but devout Sigibert III., the first
of the absolutely _fainéant_ kings. Then, in 656, on the death of
Sigibert, Grimwald deemed that the time had come for ending the farce
of Merovingian royalty, shaved off the long locks of Dagobert, his dead
master’s son, sent him, under the escort of the Bishop of Poitiers,
to a monastery in Ireland, and proclaimed his own son, to whom he had
given the Merovingian name of Childebert, King of the Eastern Franks.
He was, however, a century too soon. The glamour which hung round
the descendants of the great Clovis had as yet not utterly vanished,
neither had the Pippins and the Arnulfs yet done such great deeds as
to give them any title to claim the Frankish throne. “The Franks,”
says the chronicler, “being very indignant hereat, prepared snares for
Grimwald, and, taking him prisoner, carried him for condemnation to
Clovis II., King of the Franks. In the city of Paris he was confined in
a dungeon and bound with torturing chains; and at length, as he was
worthy of death for what he had done to his lord, death finished him
with mighty torments.”
This premature clutch at royalty seems to have damaged for a long time
the fortunes of the Austrasian house. In fact, we hear no more of the
descendants of Pippin in the male line; it is through the Arnulfings,
the posterity of Grimwald’s sister, that the fortunes of the family
will one day revive.
The thirty-two years that follow (656–688) are perhaps the dreariest in
all Frankish history. The kings, as has been said, were little better
than idiots; Austrasia was probably a prey to anarchy and dissension;
the strong and warlike races on the eastern frontier which had been
harnessed to the car of the Frankish monarchy were rapidly breaking
their bonds. The Wends, beyond the Elbe, under a Frankish commercial
traveller named Samo (who had made himself their king, and who had
twelve wives and thirty-seven children), had inflicted a crushing
defeat on Dagobert. Dagobert’s son, Sigibert, had been defeated by
Radulfus, Duke of the Thuringians, with such a fearful slaughter of the
Franks as moved the youthful king to tears. The Alamanni were growing
restless, the Dukes of the Bavarians were making themselves practically
independent. The situation of the Frankish realm in these later years
of the seventh century was becoming like the situation of the Mogul
Empire when Clive landed in India--an old monarchy founded on force,
and long held together by fear, but now fast falling into decomposition
and ruin through the utter loss of power in its heart.
It will be hardly necessary to waste another word on the nominal
occupants of the Frankish throne. Here, from the pages of the slightly
later years _Liber Historiæ Francorum_, is a picture of the reign of
Clovis II., son of Dagobert, who reigned over Neustria and Burgundy
from 638 to 656.
“At that time Chlodoveus (Clovis), at the instigation of the devil,
broke off an arm of the blessed martyr Dionysius. At that time the
kingdom of the Franks fell under many pestilential disasters. But
Clovis himself was given up to every kind of filthy conversation, a
fornicator and a deceiver of womankind, happy in his gluttony and
drunkenness. As to his death history records nothing worth repeating,
for many writers speak in condemnatory language concerning his end, but
not knowing exactly how his wickedness was terminated, they talk in an
uncertain way, one saying one thing and another another.”
For the next quarter of a century after the death of Clovis II. the
canvas is fully filled by the great figure of Ebroin, who was during
many years mayor of the palace for Neustria and Burgundy, and during
a short time for Austrasia also. Thus the same results, which in the
next generation were secured by the ancestor of Charlemagne, seemed
for a time to have been obtained by the Neustrian Ebroin. Originally
raised to the dignity of mayor of the palace by something like a vote
of the Frankish nobles, he used his power, when he felt himself settled
in his seat, in a spirit of strenuous hostility to the aristocracy,
both spiritual and temporal. That it was absolutely necessary in
the interest of the kingdom that some stand should be made against
the increasing pretensions of the counts and bishops there can be
little doubt, but how far Ebroin acted in the interests of king and
kingdom, and how far in those of his own avarice and ambition, it is
now hopeless to determine. He was evidently a hard and unscrupulous
man, but we have always to remember in reading the vituperative
adjectives which are attached to his name that his story is written
by ecclesiastics, and that he showed himself their constant opponent.
Especially was he brought into collision with the astute and able
Leodegarius, Bishop of Autun, who in the year 670, successfully using
the name of the puppet king of Austrasia, overthrew Ebroin and his
puppet, and sent the fallen _major domus_ with tonsured head into
retirement at Luxeuil. For three years Bishop Leodegarius ruled as
practically, if not nominally, _major domus_ of Burgundy; then he
too fell into disgrace, became involved in an ignoble squabble with
another canonized bishop, Patricius of Clermont, fled from the court,
was taken captive and sent to rejoin his former rival in the monastery
of Luxeuil. The assassination of Childeric, the Austrasian king (a
crime which Leodegarius was afterwards accused of having prompted),
led to a turn in the wheel of fortune. Leodegarius and Ebroin escaped
from the monastery and succeeded in getting hold of the person of the
last surviving son of Clovis II. In his name Ebroin again ruled as
_major domus_ in Neustria and Burgundy (674) but the alliance between
him and his late fellow-prisoner was of short duration. Leodegarius
was seized and blinded, and four years afterwards put to death. This
Bishop of Autun was evidently a mere politician, like his far more
famous successor, Talleyrand. He had less than Talleyrand’s luck,
and it may perhaps be admitted that, if he were not really privy to
the assassination of Childeric, his punishment was somewhat harder
than that usually meted out even in those days to politicians who had
failed. But it is not without a slight feeling of surprise that we find
this turbulent bishop transformed into a saint and martyr, and discover
that Leodegarius, Bishop of Autun, is none other than the St. Leger
whose name, among all those of mediæval saints, is perhaps the most
often heard from the lips of Englishmen.[17]
Restored to power, Ebroin kept his _major-domat_ in Neustria and
Burgundy for seven years (674–681). The same monastic biographer who
pours upon his memory the names “devil,” “viper,” “cruel lion,” and
“son of damnation,” confesses at the close of his career that “he had
acquired such sublime glory as fell to the lot of no other Frank.”
About the year 679 there was civil war between the eastern and western
kingdoms, and the leaders of the Austrasian army were Pippin and
Martin. The former was the nobleman who is commonly called Pippin of
Heristal, the grandson of St. Arnulf and Pippin of Landen; the latter
was perhaps a kinsman of the Arnulfing line. Thus after more than
twenty years of obscuration the great Austrasian house was once again
coming to the front. Not yet, however, did victory shine upon their
banners. Ebroin and his puppet king met them in battle near Laon: “An
infinite crowd of people there rushed together to the fight; but the
Austrasians, being conquered, turned their backs and fled. Ebroin
pursued them with most cruel slaughter and laid waste the greater part
of that region.” Pippin escaped to Austrasia; Martin sought a refuge
in Laon, but was tempted forth by Ebroin, who swore, apparently on the
relics of the saints, that his life should be safe if he surrendered.
Unfortunately for the suppliant the coffers, which were thought
to contain the sacred dust, were really empty, and Ebroin put his
outwitted victim to death with all his associates.
At last about the year 681 private vengeance ended the career of the
great Neustrian Mayor. A certain nobleman named Ermenfrid, whose
property Ebroin had confiscated, waited for him at his house door
one Sunday morning as he was just setting out for mass, drew his
sword, struck him a mortal blow on the head, and escaped to Pippin
in Austrasia. The death of Ebroin meant apparently the ascendency of
the eastern family. After some revolutions which it is not necessary
to describe, a certain Berchar, “a man of little stature, of base
education, useless in counsel,” was chosen by the misguided nobles
of Neustria as mayor of the palace. Against this Berchar and his
king, Theodoric III., Pippin of Heristal marched with a mighty host
of Austrasians. Battle was joined at a place called Textricium, now
Testri, not far from St. Quentin. Berchar and his king fled from the
field. The former was slain (“by his flatterers,” says the chronicler),
and Pippin became practically lord of the whole Frankish dominion. This
event, as to the details of which we know next to nothing, but which
was of immense importance for the future destinies of Europe, happened
in 687. About seventy years after their first appearance in history
the Arnulfings have won for themselves that high place which they will
now hold in defiance of all foes till they have won a yet higher, the
highest in Christendom.
CHAPTER III.
PIPPIN OF HERISTAL AND CHARLES MARTEL.
Thus at last was supreme power in the Frankish kingdom concentrated
in the hands of that family of statesmen who were to hold it for two
centuries. I have been somewhat minute in tracing the history of the
Neustrian Mayoralty, but in the Austrasian kingdom it seems to have
been rather as great nobles than as Mayors of the Palace that the
Arnulfings rose to eminence. When Pippin won the battle of Testri he
had no Austrasian king in whose name he could fight, and he seems to
have been known simply as _Dux_ or _Princeps Francorum_, not as _Major
Domus_ of Austrasia. From the scanty and imperfect indications of the
chroniclers and the biographers of saints, it would seem that before
688 all the Eastern portion of the Frankish kingdom was (as I have
already said) in a state of disintegration, and that Pippin, if he had
been so minded, might have followed the example of the chiefs of the
Frisians, Thuringians, and Bavarians, by setting up for himself as a
virtually independent Duke of Austrasia. What constitutes the peculiar
world historical importance of this Arnulfing is that he was not
satisfied with this easy solution of the problem before him, but using
his great position in Austrasia as a lever made himself supreme also in
Neustria and Burgundy, and then as _major domus_ of a legitimate though
utterly effete Merovingian king, compelled the unruly chiefs on the
Eastern frontier to return to their old allegiance, and thus became in
fact the second founder of the Frankish monarchy. That monarchy seems
indeed to us who labor through its barbarous annals about as miserable
a political machine as the Aryan notions have ever invented; but,
however bad it may have been, it was probably the best that could then
be contrived for the united government of the countries between the Bay
of Biscay and the mountains of Bohemia; and for the time it was all
important for Europe that these countries should still form part of one
state.
For some years Pippin ruled the Western realm by means of a royal
adherent, Nordbert, to whom however he did not concede the fateful
title of mayor. About fourteen years after the battle of Testri we find
his son Grimwald recognized as _major domus_ for Neustria and probably
his eldest son Drogo held the same office in Burgundy. Meanwhile
Pippin, returning to his own Austrasian lands, was warring down the
German pretenders to independence. The Frisian Ratbod was defeated in
a great battle, compelled to cede West Friesland to the Franks, and to
acknowledge in fact as well as in name the supremacy of the Merovingian
_fainéant_. Though himself a heathen, Ratbod was fain to give his
daughter--who was no doubt converted to Christianity--in marriage
to Pippin’s son Grimwald; and the Anglo-Saxon preacher Willibrord
had a clear course given him for his missionary operations among the
Frisians. So too the Alamanni and the Bavarians appear to have been
brought back into subjection by Pippin, though we hear less of his
operations on the Danube than by the mouths of the Rhine.
For twenty-seven years this strong and statesmanlike man ruled with
absolute sway the kingdom of the Franks, and then in his old age, by
one act of supreme folly, went near to ruining the whole achievement
of a lifetime. As it was said of old, “Let no man be called happy,”
so may we add, “Let no man be called wise, till his death.” He had
married in early life a lady named Plectrudis, nobly born and with a
reputation for prudence and ability, by whom he had two sons, Drogo and
Grimwald. Drogo had died in 708, leaving two sons who were now grown
up to manhood. Grimwald, who had married, as before said, a Frisian
princess, had no son by her, but was the father of an illegitimate son,
a little child named Theudwald.
As for Pippin himself, like many other members of his house, though
descended from the sainted Arnulf, and generally on very good terms
with the Church, he seems to have been guilty of great laxity in
his matrimonial relations. Assuredly the Arnulfings did not plunge
into those excesses of profligacy which destroyed the vigor of the
Merovingian line, yet there was a tendency in many of them to take a
polygamous view of marriage, more suited to an Arabian Caliph than
to a Christian nobleman. Thus we find that Pippin had another wife
named Alphaida, who, though the relationship was an interlude in his
married life with Plectrudis, is yet treated by the chroniclers not
as a concubine, but as a lawfully wedded wife. To a son born of this
marriage Pippin had given the name of Charles. According to an old
Saga, when the child was born, the messenger came into the presence
of the great mayor of the palace and, dismayed at seeing him sitting
with Plectrudis by his side, shouted out “Long live the king. It is a
Carl,” the old German word for a man. “And a very good name, too,” said
Pippin. “Let him be called Carl.” This Charles, son of Alphaida, was in
the year 714 a strong and vigorous man of between twenty and thirty,
already married and father of an eight-year-old son.
Now, when the aged Pippin was lying on that which was to prove his
death-bed (at the villa of Jovius near Liège), his son Grimwald, a
man “pitiful, moderate, and just,” who was his universally recognized
heir, was on his way to visit him and receive his last commands, when
for some unknown reason he was assassinated in a church at Liège by a
heathen named Rangar. This was a cruel blow for the dying chieftain,
but as far as the future of his house was concerned not an irreparable
one. His obvious policy was to declare that Charles, the son of
Alphaida, was to be his heir in room of the murdered Grimwald. Instead
of this, influenced no doubt by his wife’s hatred of her step-son, he
committed the inconceivable folly of passing over Charles, and naming,
not even one of Drogo’s adolescent sons, but the childish Theudwald,
son of Grimwald, his heir, and designating him for the mayoralty
under the regency of Plectrudis. This was an absolutely preposterous
arrangement and one foredoomed to failure. The Merovingian king,
_fainéant_ of course, but a lad of fifteen years old, was to have a
little child of eight thrust upon him as adviser, factotum, supreme
prime minister, and the nominal advice of the baby was to be given
through the lips of his grandmother, a harsh and domineering old woman.
Such a scheme of administering the affairs of a great kingdom crumbled,
as it was sure to crumble, at the first contact with actual fact.
“Plectrudis,” we are told by the chronicler, “with her grandsons and
the king governed all things by her discreet rule.” One of the early
acts of this discreet rule was to shut up her step-son Charles in
prison. But deliverance for the Arnulfing house came from an unexpected
quarter. The nobles of Neustria, indignant, probably, at being calmly
transferred to the dominion of a beldame and a child, proclaimed one
of their own class, a certain Raginfrid, _major domus_ and supported
his pretensions with an army. Neustria and Austrasia met in battle at
the Cotian Forest, not far from Compiègne, and Nuestria won a decided
victory, the baby mayor, who had been brought into the field at the
head of the Austrasian _leudes_, being with difficulty carried off by
his partisans. Raginfrid pressed on and formed an alliance with old
Ratbod, the Frisian, and apparently with the Saxons also. Plectrudis,
shut up in Cologne, saw her power slipping from her and the Austrasian
state threatened with ruin. The disorganization which everywhere
prevailed had at least this advantage, that in the confusion Charles
escaped from his prison (715). He gathered round him some of his
father’s adherents: he fought Raginfrid, his puppet king, and the
Frisians: fought them at first unsuccessfully, for they pushed on to
Cologne where Plectrudis was fain to purchase peace for herself and her
grandsons by the surrender of a large part of the royal hoard. After
this she and Theudwald disappear from history. Charles, whose powers
of recovery the Neustrians appear to have under-rated, follows them
westwards in 716 and wins a great victory over them at Amblève and
another next year at Vincy. Raginfrid sees no prospect of defending
his puppet king (to whom Charles has set up a rival) except by seeking
the help of Eudo, the great Duke of Aquitaine, who as a practically
independent sovereign, is ruling all the region south of the Loire.
Eudo and Raginfrid join forces and advance as far as Soissons (719):
then for some unexplained cause Eudo turns back and leaves Raginfrid
to face the enemy alone. Charles wins a third great victory, and now
Raginfrid’s resistance is practically at an end. He submits on certain
conditions to Charles, who becomes (in 720) unquestioned _major domus_
of all three kingdoms, while Raginfrid subsides eventually into some
such position as Count of Angers, where he prolongs his resistance
till 724.
The Arnulfing hero who out of such a chaos of opposing forces succeeded
in evoking that order and stable government which the Frankish State
so greatly needed, received, apparently from his contemporaries, the
name of Martel or the Hammer. This epithet, which has been sometimes
connected with his great victory[18] over the Saracens, seems to be
more truly derived from his exploits in the earlier part of his career,
destroying as he did with his smashing blows, the petty tyrannies which
had grown up in the anarchy that followed the death of his father.
It is worthy of note that Charles, unlike his father, did not delegate
his mayoralty in Neustria and Burgundy to any one, even a son, and that
he styled himself _major domus_ for Austrasia as well as for the other
kingdoms, a title which for some reason seems not to have been claimed
by his father. It is also noteworthy that he finally got the needed
Merovingian _fainéant_ into his possession by a compromise with Eudo
of Aquitaine who had carried him off from the unfought battlefield of
Soissons. There are many indications that both Eudo and Charles felt
the necessity of sparing one another’s strength and not pushing any
dispute between them to extremities, in view of the far more tremendous
danger which threatened them and all Christendom from the turbaned
followers of the Prophet who were now beginning to swarm over the
passes of the Pyrenees.
It was in 711, three years before Pippin’s death, that the Visigothic
monarchy of Spain fell before the Moslem invader. In 716 the Moors
seem to have first entered Gaul in detached squadrons. In 720, the
year after the campaign of Soissons, they invaded Gaul in force, took
Narbonne and established themselves in the old Visigothic province of
Septimania, from which they were not finally dislodged for nearly forty
years. They besieged Toulouse with many great engines of war, and their
retreat from this place, compelled by the appearance of Duke Eudo with
an army, may be noted as the first sign of ebb in the tide of Moslem
conquest in Western Europe.
It was, however, twelve years before the Mussulman’s hope of adding
Gaul to the Empire of the Caliph received its death-stroke. In 725 they
penetrated as far as Autun, in the very heart of Burgundy, demolished
the city and carried off the treasures of the Church to Spain. The
vigilance of Eudo of Aquitaine seems to have relaxed, and he was now no
longer, as in 720, the great champion of Gaulish Christendom against
the invader. On the contrary he entered into friendly relations with at
least one Mussulman warrior, bestowing his daughter Lampegia on Munuza,
a Berber chieftain, who seems to have been striving to establish a
Moorish kingdom in Spain independent of the Caliphs. It was perhaps
owing to this new combination that Eudo broke through the treaty
which he had made with Charles in 720. There were thus two princes, a
Christian and a Moor, Eudo and Munuza, each rebelling against the state
to which they nominally owed allegiance. However, neither attempt at
independence was destined to succeed: Charles twice crossed the Loire
in the year 731, defeated Eudo in battle, apparently near the city of
Bourges, and returned home with great booty, having effectually checked
the separatist designs of the Aquitanian chief. About the same time
apparently, Abderrahman, the legitimate representative of the Caliph
of Damascus, overthrew the Berber chief Munuza and hunted him into the
Pyrenees, where he was overtaken while resting by a fountain. Munuza
fell pierced with many wounds, and his bride, Eudo’s daughter, was sent
to end her days in the Caliph’s harem.
Thus then were all the side issues disposed of, and the ground was
cleared for the great, the real issue between the Mohammedan power
reaching from Damascus to the Pyrenees, and the Christian power which
was embodied in the Frankish monarchy, but whose central point was
now to be found in the home of the great _major domus_ by the Rhine.
Abderrahman, a brave and capable warrior, the chief who alone had
gotten glory out of the great expedition of 720, when he led the beaten
host back from Toulouse, prepared a great armament for the conquest of
Gaul, and in the spring of 732 started from Pampelona on an expedition,
as full of meaning for the future history of the human race as was that
armament of Xerxes which found its doom at Salamis. The overflowing
flood of the Islamites soon spread beyond the limits of Gascony. In
Perigord Eudo met them, Eudo now cured of all desire to coalesce with
the Mussulman and probably longing to revenge Lampegia’s wrongs on
her captor, Abderrahman. He was, however, utterly defeated by the
banks of the river Vienne and lost the greater part of his army. The
Moorish host pushed on towards the Loire; and now, had the Frankish
monarchy been in the same condition as seventeen years before, with
Neustria and Austrasia divided against one another, and the Austrasian
_major-domat_ put in commission between an old woman and a child, the
Moorish invasion must to all appearance have carried everything before
it. But when Abderrahman had reached Poitiers, and burnt the Church
of St. Hilary, the tide of his success was stayed. Eudo, a fugitive
and despairing, had sought the help of his late adversary Charles, and
the great _major domus_ with a host of stout-hearted Austrasians was
posted between the rivers Clain and Vienne, blocking the old Roman road
from Poitiers to Tours. For seven days the armies stood watching one
another, while Abderrahman was probably trying to turn the Frankish
position. Then at last, on a certain Saturday in October, finding
that only the sword could open up the road, he sent the masses of his
turbaned followers against the Frankish position. In vain they dashed
against that moveless barrier. “The Northern nations,” says the Spanish
Chronicler Isidore,[19] “stood immovable as a wall, or as if frozen
to their places by the rigorous breath of winter, but hewing down the
Arabs with their swords. But when the Austrasian people by the might
of their massive limbs, and with iron hands striking straight from the
chest their strenuous blows, had laid multitudes of the enemy low, at
last they found the king [Abderrahman], and robbed him of life. Then
night disparted the combatants, the Franks brandishing their swords
on high in scorn of the enemy. Next day, rising at earliest dawn and
seeing the innumerable tents of the Arabs all ranged in order before
them, the Europeans prepared for fight, deeming that within those tents
were the phalanxes of the enemy; but sending forth their scouts they
found that the hosts of the Ishmaelites had fled away silently under
cover of the night, seeking their own country. Fearing, however, a
feigned flight, and a sudden return by hidden ways, they circled round
and round with amazed caution and thus the invaders escaped, but the
Europeans after dividing the spoils and the captives in orderly manner
among themselves returned with gladness to their homes.”
So, in uncouth and not always intelligible words, does the Spanish
ecclesiastic tell the story of that great day, which decided that
not the Koran but the Gospel was to be the guide of the conscience
of Europe. To Charles Martel and his stalwart Austrasians struggling
through that terrible Saturday in October,[20] is it due that the
muezzin is not at noon to-day calling the faithful to prayer from some
high minaret by the Seine. It was said that the Franks on this day slew
375,000 Saracens, losing only 1500 of their own men. The numbers are
evidently but a wild and baseless guess, but the strange thing is that
they could be thus reported by a sober and cautious historian, and one
not of the Frankish nation (Paulus Diaconus),[21] writing barely sixty
years after the date of the famous victory.
The Moslem invaders were weakened, but not absolutely crushed by
this great encounter. They still kept their hold on the sea-coast of
Languedoc, the region which having been for three centuries in the
possession of the Visigoths was still known as Gothia. In 737 they
crossed the Rhone, and forming a league with a certain Maurontus (who
was perhaps Duke of Provence), they obtained possession of the strongly
fortified city of Avignon. Charles, whose normal occupation was warfare
with the Frisians and Saxons, was recalled from the Rhine-lands in
order to do battle with the Islamite in the valley of the Rhone.
Avignon was recaptured and Charles marched on to Narbonne, the citadel
of the Saracen power in Gaul. But though he defeated the Mussulmans in
a great battle by the sea-coast, he failed to take Narbonne. Nismes and
several other towns in Languedoc were recovered from the misbelievers;
their walls were demolished, and the great amphitheatre of Nismes was
somehow dismantled so as to prevent its again affording cover to the
enemy, but Narbonne was still Islamite at the death of Charles.
In the same year in which this encounter took place, died Theodoric
IV., the _fainéant_ Merovingian who for seventeen years had been the
figure-head at the prow of the vessel of the State. Charles did not
covet the mere name of royalty, nor was he disposed to imitate the
disastrous example of his great-uncle Grimwald; but, as the needful
Childeric or Chilperic was not at the time forthcoming, he dispensed
with the luxury of a _roi fainéant_, and for the remaining four years
of his life reigned alone, mayor of a palace in which no king was to be
found.
The career of Charles Martel was now drawing to a close. He was again,
in 738, recalled from his operations against the Saxons, by tidings of
the invasion of Provence by the Saracens in league with the turbulent
Maurontus. For that year the danger was averted by the help of the
Lombard king Liutprand, the friend and brother-in-law of Charles. Next
year Charles himself invaded Provence with a large army, brought the
whole of that beautiful land into real instead of nominal subjection
to the Frankish State, and broke the power of Maurontus, who, a hunted
fugitive, escaped with difficulty over the craggy cliffs of the
Riviera, which are now linked together by the great highway of the
Cornice.
But, this exploit performed, Charles began to sicken. He was still
little more than fifty years of age, but his incessant wars his rapid
marches and counter-marches between the German Ocean and the Pyrenees
had worn out his strenuous frame. The hammer would strike no more blows
for the welding together of the Frankish State. The piteous appeals
of Pope Gregory III., who implored his assistance against the Lombard
assailants of Rome, fell on unwilling ears. Charles had something
else now to do than to cross the Alps and wage war on his friend and
kinsman Liutprand, who had been his helper against the Islamites,
and to whom he had sent his son Pippin to be adopted as his _filius
per arma_, a ceremony similar to the bestowal of knighthood in a
later day. In 740 the extraordinary fact is recorded, that no warlike
expedition was undertaken by the Franks. The great _major domus_ seems
to have been chiefly occupied in arranging for the partition of his
territories--they were now without hesitation called his--among his
three sons. On the 22d of October, 741, he died at his villa of Quierzy
on the Oise, and was buried in that great abbey of St. Denis, which
was to receive the corpses of so many sovereigns of his own and other
races.
Though the descendant of the sainted Arnulf though the champion of
Christendom against the Saracens, and the strong protector of the
“apostles” who, relying on the sharpness of the Frankish battle-axe,
went forth to convert the heathen Frisians and Saxons, Charles Martel
was looked upon with no favor by the ecclesiastics of his time. By
the grants of _fainéant_ kings and honorable women, the possessions
of the Church in Gaul had grown so enormously as to weaken the
resources of the kingdom, and Charles found himself, or believed
himself, compelled to lay his hand upon some of all this accumulated
wealth for the defence of Gaul and Christendom. He did it in the most
dangerous way for the Church, not by revoking grants or imposing taxes
on ecclesiastical property, but by conferring prelacies and abbacies
on trusty friends and followers of his own, men who were without any
pretensions to the spiritual character, but upon whom he might rely
to use the Church’s wealth on the right side. Thus, we find already
emerging the question which three or four centuries later in the days
of Hildebrand and the Franconian Emperors, took peace from the earth.
It is easy to see how such a manner of disposing of ecclesiastical
property would rouse the opposition of all that was highest as well
as of all that was lowest in the Gaulish Church, of genuine zeal for
holiness as well as of mere greed and worldly ambition. Thus it came
to pass, that while the rest of the Arnulfing line were venerated as
friends and patrons of the Church, Charles Martel fared more hardly at
her hands, and the superstition of the times--
“Doomed him to the Zealot’s ready hell,
Which” pleads the Church’s claims “so eloquently well.”
In the next century a libellous vision was forged by a famous
archbishop,[22] according to which a prelate saw Charles Martel
suffering the torments of hell, and, on asking the cause, was told that
it was his allotted penalty for seizing on the domains of the Church.
The dreaming prelate, on awaking, went, so it was said, to the abbey of
St. Denis and opened Charles’s tomb, but found no corpse therein, only
a blackened shell, out of which a winged dragon rushed and flew rapidly
away.
CHAPTER IV.
PIPPIN, KING OF THE FRANKS.
The unity of the Frankish State, so dearly purchased by the heroic
labors of Charles Martel, was as usual placed in jeopardy by the dying
ruler’s arrangements for the succession to that which was now openly
spoken of as his “principatus.”
He left two sons, Carloman and Pippin, by his first wife Hrotrudis, and
one, Grifo, by a Bavarian princess named Swanahild, whom he had married
after an invasion of her country, and whose sister was the wife of the
Lombard king Liutprand.
This was the manner in which Charles Martel divided his dominions
among his sons. To the eldest, Carloman, he gave the greater part of
Austrasia, Alamannia, and Thuringia; to Pippin, the younger, Neustria,
Burgundy and Provence. Apparently both Aquitaine in the south-west,
and Bavaria in the south-east were too nearly independent to be thus
disposed of by a ruler who, after all, was still, in theory only the
chief adviser of a Merovingian king, though that king’s royalty was
for the present in abeyance.
To Grifo, whose turbulent attempts at insurrection aided by his mother
Swanahild, had troubled the last years of Charles, who assigned a small
central state carved out of all the three realms, Austrasia, Neustria,
and Burgundy, at their point of meeting. “As to this third portion,”
says the chronicler, “which the dying prince had assigned to the young
man Grifo, the Franks were sorely displeased that by the advice of a
wicked woman they should be cut up and separated from the lawful heirs.
Taking counsel together and joining with them the princes Carloman and
Pippin, they collected an army for the capture of Grifo, who, hearing
of their intent, took to flight, together with his mother Swanahild
and all who were willing to follow him, and all shut themselves up in
Lugdunum Clavatum (Laon). But Grifo, seeing that he could not possibly
escape, surrendered himself to the keeping of his brothers. Carloman
receiving the captive sent him to be kept in safe custody at the New
Castle (Neuf Château in the Ardennes): and they placed Swanahild in the
monastery of Cala (Chelles near Paris.)”
We shall rapidly pass in review the events which led to the
concentration of the whole power of the State in the hands of Pippin
alone, but first we must notice that for some unexplained reason,
possibly in order to give them a better title to the obedience of
Aquitaine and Bavaria, the princely brothers decided to bring the
kingless period to an end. In 743 Childeric III. was placed on the
throne. He was probably about twenty years of age, but the date of
his birth, and even his place in the royal pedigree are doubtful. Of
his character, of course, we know nothing. He is but the shadow of a
shadow, this last Merovingian king.
Very different from shadows were the two Arnulfing brothers, as they
warred with Hunald, Duke of Aquitaine (son of their father’s old
troubler Eudo), with Odilo, Duke of Bavaria, with the heathen Saxons,
with the restless and disloyal Alamanni. Of the two brothers, Pippin
seems to have been somewhat the gentler. It was Carloman the strong and
stern warrior, who, infuriated by the faithlessness of the Alamanni,
entered their territory, called a muster of their warriors at Cannstadt
(near Stuttgart), and then surrounding them by his Franks, disarmed
them, and slew many of their leaders. The accounts of this assembly at
Cannstadt are dark and perplexing, but on comparing them it certainly
seems probable that there was great severity on the part of Carloman,
probably treachery and possibly widespread slaughter.
Was it remorse for this bloody deed which changed the character
and career of Carloman? It is not expressly so said by any of the
chroniclers, yet the statement seems a probable inference from their
meagre notices. For it was in the same year (746) in which the strange
transaction with the Alamanni had taken place at Cannstadt that
Carloman began to talk to his brother Pippin concerning his desire to
relinquish the world and devote himself to the service of Almighty God:
“Therefore both the brothers made their preparations, Carloman that he
might go to the threshold of the apostles Peter and Paul, and Pippin
that his brother might make the journey with all honor and splendid
gifts.”
Carloman’s decision to embrace the monastic life was not an unexampled
sacrifice for a ruler in that day. Sixty years before, Ceadwalla, King
of the West Saxons, and twenty years before, his royal kinsman Ine
had left their palaces and come to live and die as tonsured monks in
Rome. Two years before Carloman’s abdication, Hunald of Aquitaine, and
three years after it, Ratchis the Lombard took the same step. Still,
the splendid position which Carloman abandoned, and the lowliness of
his demeanor after his abdication, touched and awed the hearts of his
contemporaries.
In 747 Carloman formally renounced his share of power, and went with
along train of nobles and with costly presents in his hand to Rome, “to
the threshold of the apostle Peter.” There he submitted to the tonsure
and received the clerical habit from Pope Zacharias. After a time, by
the pope’s advice, he withdrew to the mountain solitude of Soracte,
twenty-eight miles from Rome, where he erected a monastery in honor
of St. Sylvester. This saint was the Bishop of Rome who, according
to an ecclesiastical fable which was just at this time obtaining
wide currency, received from the Emperor Constantine the celebrated
“Donation” of Rome and the larger part of Italy. The fable also related
that Sylvester had previously sought a refuge in Mount Soracte from
the persecution ordained by Constantine while still a Pagan, and had
afterwards cured that emperor of leprosy by directing him to a pool
on the mountain in which he was to perform a threefold immersion. It
need hardly be said that all this is utterly valueless as history, but
as it was in that uncritical age accepted as unquestioned truth, the
fact that the enthusiast Carloman sought the solitudes of Soracte for
the place of his retirement and there dedicated his monastery to St.
Sylvester is important as showing what was passing in the minds of men,
and especially of devout Frankish princes in that age. Later on, he
left his mountain home in Soracte and sought the far-famed monastery
of St. Benedict on Monte Cassino. Tradition said that he fled thither
by night, with one faithful squire, his companion from infancy, and
with no sign of his once high dignity. Knocking at the door of the
convent he desired speech with the abbot, and when that dignitary
appeared, threw himself on the ground before him, confessing that
he was a murderer and praying to be allowed to expiate his crime by
repentance in the monastery. The abbot, seeing that he was a foreigner
asked him of his race and country. “I am a Frank,” said Carloman, “and
for my crime I have left my native land of Francia. I heed not exile
if only I may not fail of the heavenly fatherland.” He was received
into the cell of the novices with his companion and was subjected to
severe discipline, as became a man of barbarous race and unknown name,
for the abbot was mindful of the apostolic precept, “Try the spirits
whether they are of God.” To all these hardships and humiliations
Carloman submitted with exemplary patience. It chanced at last that it
fell to his lot as a novice to take a week’s turn in the kitchen of the
convent. He did his work zealously but made many blunders, for which
the head cook, heated with wine, rewarded him with a slap on the face.
Meekly the princely scullion replied, “Is that how you ought to serve
the brethren? May God pardon you, my brother, and Carloman too.” The
last words were perhaps uttered under his breath, for he had not yet
revealed his name to any one. A second and a third time this incident
was repeated, and on the last occasion the cook’s blows were cruel
and brutal. His faithful squire could then bear the sight no longer.
He snatched up the pestle with which the bread was being pounded for
the brethren’s soup, and struck the head cook with all his might,
saying, “Neither may God spare thee, vile slave, nor may Carloman
forgive thee.” Then followed uproar, indignation at the foreigner’s
presumption, arrest, imprisonment. Next day the squire was set in the
midst of the assembled monks and asked why he had dared to stretch
forth his hand against a serving brother. “Because,” he answered, “I
was indignant at seeing a slave, the meanest of mankind, not only flout
and jeer, but actually strike a man, the best and noblest of all that
I have ever met with on the earth.” The angry monks demanded who was
this man whom he, a foreigner, dared to rank before all others, not
even excepting the abbot himself. Thus was the truth forced out of him,
since it was the will of God that it should no longer be concealed.
“That man is Carloman, formerly ruler of the Franks, who, for the love
of Christ hath left his kingdom and the glory of the world: who from
such high estate has so humbled himself as to be subject not only to
the insults but even to the blows of the vilest of men.” Then the monks
rose from their seats in terror and prostrated themselves at the feet
of Carloman, imploring his forgiveness for aught that they might have
done to him in ignorance of his rank. Vainly did he in turn grovel on
the earth before them and try to assure them that his comrade had lied
and that he was not Carloman. He was recognized by all, held in the
highest reverence, and as we shall afterwards see, was selected by the
abbot for an important mission.
On the abdication of Carloman, Grifo was liberated by Pippin from his
imprisonment which had lasted six years, received by him in his palace
with every mark of honor and affection, and invested with several
countships and large revenues. This was not enough, however, for Grifo,
who probably aspired to an equal share of his father’s late dominions.
He allied himself with the Saxons and shared their defeat in battle
(748); he sought refuge in Bavaria, and for a time made himself duke of
that country (749); expelled from thence by Pippin he betook himself
first to Aquitaine and then to the King of the Lombards, but was met at
Maurienne by Count Theodowin, who was guarding the passes of the Alps
in the Frankish interest. A skirmish followed, in which many Frankish
nobles fell, Grifo himself and Theodowin among them (753). There was no
further obstacle raised by any member of the Arnulfing family to the
sole domination of Pippin.
Fateful for all the after-history of Europe were the middle years of
the eighth century, upon which we have now entered. The time had at
last come when Pippin, virtual sovereign of Gaul and Western Germany,
could venture to take the step which had proved fatal to his kinsman
Grimwald, and to bring names and facts into accord by proclaiming
himself King of the Franks. But in taking this step it behoved him
to be sure of two things, the consent of the nation and the sanction
of the Church. By the advice and with the consent of all the Franks,
expressed no doubt by some assembly of the chief men of the nation,
two great ecclesiastics, Fulrad, Abbot of St. Denis representing
Neustria, and Burchard, Bishop of Würzburg representing Austrasia, were
sent to Rome to ask the opinion of the pope on the great problem. It
will be well to state their commission in the words of a contemporary
chronicler:
“In the year 750 [it should be 751] from the incarnation of our
Lord, Pippin sends ambassadors to Rome to Zacharias the Pope to ask
concerning the Kings of the Franks who were of the royal race and were
called kings, but had no power in the kingdom except only that grants
and charters were drawn up in their names, but they had absolutely no
royal power; but what the _major domus_ of the Franks willed, that
they did. But on the [first] day of March in the _Campus_ [_Martis_]
according to ancient custom gifts were offered to those kings by the
people, and the king himself sat on the royal throne with the army
standing round him and the _major domus_ close by, and on that day
he gave forth as his orders whatever had been decreed by the Franks,
but on every other day thenceforward he sat quietly at home. Pope
Zacharias thereupon answered their question according to his apostolic
authority, that it seemed better and more expedient to him that _he_
should be called and be king who had power in the kingdom rather than
he who was falsely called king. Therefore the aforesaid pope commanded
the king and people of the Franks that Pippin who exercised the royal
power should be called king and be placed on the royal seat; which was
accordingly done by the anointing of the holy archbishop Boniface in
the city of Soissons. Pippin is called king, and Childeric who falsely
bore that title receives the tonsure and is sent into a monastery.”
So at length was the great change accomplished towards which Frankish
history had been tending for more than a century. What happened
was undoubtedly a revolution, though of a peaceful kind. The papal
sanction, the archiepiscopal unction might impress the minds of the
multitude; this new Christian consecration might partly compensate
for the missing glamour of a descent from gods and heroes which had
surrounded the dynasty of the Merovings; but in strict right, of
course, the Bishop of Rome had no title to command the change, no power
to absolve the Salian and Ripuarian Franks from their plighted faith
to the descendants of Clovis. It was well thought of to put the scene
of the consecration of the new dynasty at Soissons, that place so
memorable in the history of the older race. It was also important, if
the pope himself could not be induced to cross the Alps to perform the
ceremony of anointing, to have it performed by Boniface the Apostle of
the Germans, and the most conspicuous ecclesiastical figure in Europe.
We may pause for a moment to notice the remarkable share taken by
this man and others of our fellow countrymen in bringing about the
conversion of large portions of the German nation to Christianity,
and indirectly in founding the Teutonic “Holy Roman Empire” of the
Middle Ages. Scarcely had the Anglo-Saxon peoples been won over to the
Christian Church, when they began with missionary zeal to preach the
faith among their still heathen kinsmen on the Continent. The mission
of St. Augustine[23] to Britain took place in the year 596. In 634 was
born the Northumbrian Wilfrid, and in 658 his countryman Willibrord,
both of whom labored with zeal and success for the conversion of the
heathens of Friesland. A generation later the young Devonian Winifried,
born at Crediton, appeared on the banks of the Lower Rhine, to profit
by the experience of the aged Willibrord and to catch his falling
mantle. Three times he visited Rome to confer with those great popes,
the second and the third Gregory, and to receive their orders for the
conversion of fresh tribes in Germany, or for the consolidation of
spiritual conquests already achieved. On one of these visits, probably,
he received that name of Boniface by which he is best known in history,
together with a sort of roving commission as archbishop, and authority
to act as legate in the churches of Germany. Armed with this power
he set up bishoprics in Bavaria, revived the dying Christianity of
Thuringia, and chastised heretics in Gaul. Wherever the armies of
Charles Martel marched, in Friesland, in Saxony, in Hesse, Archbishop
Boniface followed, smashing idols, felling sacred oaks, and baptizing
half-unwilling converts. Towards the end of his life his roving
commission was changed into the more stationary office of Archbishop
of Mainz, and he sometimes retired for repose to the great monastery
of Fulda, which he had founded in the Hessian land near the source of
the Weser. But the old warhorse was still stirred by the sound of the
trumpet. Three years after his consecration of Pippin, Boniface went
forth on a last expedition for the conversion of the Frisians. When he
reached Dockum (in the north of the present province of Friesland) he
found there, instead of the expected catechumens, a multitude of the
heathen, zealous for the honor of their idols which Boniface had so
often destroyed, and eager for the spoil of the ecclesiastical invader.
From their hands he received the crown of martyrdom for which he longed.
The career of Boniface is of especial importance because of his
absolute devotion to the see of Rome. It was observed that the recently
converted nations, as is so often the case with new converts, surpassed
their older brethren in the fervor of their faith. While the bishops
of Gaul were lukewarm, sometimes almost insubordinate, the Anglo-Saxon
bishops were the devoted adherents of the papacy. Boniface especially
professed the most unbounded reverence for the chair of St. Peter, and
took with alacrity an oath of implicit obedience, substantially the
same which was exacted from the “suburbicarian” bishops of the sees in
the immediate neighborhood of Rome. This was the spirit in which the
infant churches were trained, and this no doubt was the tenor of the
advice which the zealous Archbishop of Mainz gave to the new King of
the Franks on the day of his coronation.
A traveller through the pleasant valleys of Devonshire when he comes
to the little town, scarcely more than a village, of Crediton between
its two overhanging hills, may reflect with interest that he beholds
the birthplace of the man who, more than any other, brought about the
entrance of the German nation into the family of Christian Europe.[24]
The coronation of Pippin took place probably about November 751. In
four months from that time Pope Zacharias died, doubtless without any
presentiment of the abiding importance of the event in which by his
answer to the Frankish messengers he had borne a part, but which is not
even mentioned by his biographer in the _Liber Pontificalis_. After a
short interval, an ecclesiastic of Roman parentage, who figures in the
annals of the papacy as Stephen II., was raised to the papal see. His
pontificate was short; it lasted but five years, but they were years
full of import for the destinies of Europe.
In order to concentrate our attention on the transformation of the
Arnulfing mayors of the palace into Frankish kings, I have hitherto
said as little as possible about the affairs of Italy, but this silence
can be kept no longer, now that a Roman pope is about to cross the Alps
and ask for Frankish aid to enable him to smite down his foes.
The Lombards had invaded Italy in the year 568, and for nearly two
centuries from that time there had been waged a kind of triangular
contest which, to compare great things with small, was like the
litigation which might go on in an English parish between an absentee
landlord, a big Nonconformist farmer, and a cultured but acquisitive
parson.
The Emperor was the great absentee. Though still always spoken of as
Emperor of Rome, he had been in fact for some centuries an absolutely
Oriental Sovereign. Since the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in
476, no Roman Emperor had touched the soil of Italy save for one brief
and most unwelcome visit paid by Constance II. in 663. The Imperial
dominion in the peninsula was by this time limited to the Venetian
islands, two provinces on the Adriatic coast called the Exarchate
of Ravenna and the Pentapolis, the city of Hydruntum (Otranto), the
province of Bruttii at the very end of the peninsula, Paestum, Naples
and the duchy of Rome, which included the city of Rome, the present
province of Latium and a little bit of Etruria. This scattered and
fragmentary dominion, which as will be seen was almost entirely
confined to the sea-coast, and embraced only a part of that, was ruled
by an imperial lieutenant who bore the title of Exarch, and whose seat
of government was the strong, almost impregnable, city of Ravenna.
Far the largest part of Italy, including all the fertile valley of the
Po, all the central chain of the Apennines and the valleys leading
from them, the greater part of Tuscany and almost the whole of Apulia,
was in the possession of the rough and masterful Lombards, who had
been fierce savages when they entered Italy, but who had lost most of
their savagery and some of their warlike vigor by long residence in the
delightful land and by contact with the vestiges of Roman civilization.
Arians for the most part, and even with some heathens among them at
the time of their first invasion, they had now embraced the Catholic
faith, were generous benefactors of the Church, and desired to be
considered her dutiful sons. But still the remembrance of their old
heresies continued, and whenever the political interests of the King
of the Lombards clashed with those of the Pope of Rome--and they did
clash as often and as irreconcilably as do those of pope and king
at the present day--the old epithets “unspeakable,” “sacrilegious,”
“diabolical,” flowed from the pens of the scribes in the papal chancery
as freely as they had flowed when the Lombards were yet idolaters.
As for the pope, how to describe in few words his anomalous and
fast-changing position? Undoubted Patriarch of the Western Church, he
nevertheless had many a struggle with the Patriarch of Constantinople
as to his claim to rule the Church Universal. The missionaries whom
he had sent forth to convert the Teutonic tribes of England and
Germany were, as has been said, zealous asserters of his spiritual
pre-eminence, and, like the Jesuits of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, the great champions of the rights of Rome. Herein also they
were vigorously supported by the monks who had spread widely over all
Christian lands, and who at this time were almost without exception
followers of the rule of the Italian saint, Benedict. Some of the
bishops, however, especially some of the Gaulish bishops, were, as has
been said, by no means equally prompt in their obedience to the papal
see. The pope’s relation to the distant emperor at Constantinople
during these centuries of transition is one of the hardest things to
describe with accuracy. A subject, and yet in a certain sense a rival,
often severely snubbed by the emperor’s representative at Rome, almost
adored on one or two occasions when he set foot in Constantinople;
elected by the clergy and people of Old Rome, yet for many generations
not venturing to assume the title of pope till he received the imperial
confirmation from New Rome; a mere ecclesiastic without as yet any
pretension to temporal sovereignty, and yet under the stress of
circumstances ordering campaigns against the Lombards, installing dukes
and displacing tribunes--such in the time of Gregory the Great[25] and
for more than a century afterwards had been the anomalous relation of
the _beatissimus Papa_ or _sanctissimus Pontifex_, to his _serenissimus
Dominus, Christianissimus principum_, the man who at Constantinople
wore the diadem of Diocletian.[26] The relation was strained and
difficult, and one would have said that it could not long endure; and
yet (as anomalies, especially in the relations of Church and State, are
apt to do), it lasted long, for at least six generations of mankind.
During this time the popes had certainly often to complain of harsh
and overbearing treatment on the part of their imperial masters. One
pope was dragged from the altar to a dungeon; another was banished to
the Crimea, and died in that remote place of exile; the life of another
was conspired against by murderers in the pay of the emperor’s Italian
representative, and these were only the more striking passages in a
long history of estrangement and mutual suspicion. Through all, the
hold of the pope on the affections of the Roman people was steadily
increasing, since he was looked upon as the representative of Roman
nationality and Roman orthodoxy against the often schismatical Greek
and the always domineering Lombard.
Of late--that is to say, during the greater part of the mayoralty
of Charles Martel--the antagonism between pope and emperor had been
increased by the dispute about the worship of images. In 726 Leo
III. the great Isaurian emperor who had successfully repelled the
Saracens from the walls of Constantinople, put forth his edicts for the
destruction of the sacred images throughout the empire. These decrees,
which roused some of the Greeks to actual insurrection, were met by
sullen disobedience on the part of the Italians. The authority of the
Exarch of Ravenna was set at naught; the local government was vested
in dukes chosen by the enraged image-worshippers; it seemed as though
the empire would utterly lose even the vestiges of its dominion in
Italy. But at this crisis the pope (Gregory II.), though he had been
in strong opposition to the emperor, and had sharply denounced his
iconoclastic edicts, restrained the Italians from actual revolt and
from the election of a counter-emperor, “hoping for the conversion of
the sovereign.” It is difficult to say how the matter ended. Apparently
the decrees were not enforced in Italy, nor did the movement of
insurrection gather head. The exarch still ruled in Ravenna; the pope
still considered himself the subject of the eastern emperor; but there
was no cordiality between them, and more and more the popes looked
across the Alps to the new Austrasian potentate, rather than to the old
Augustus by the Bosphorus, for defence, patronage, and endowment.
The question of the pope’s position is somewhat complicated by the fact
that he was probably the largest landowner in Italy. The “Patrimony of
St. Peter,” as it was called, comprised great estates in the Campagna,
in Samnium, on the Adriatic coast, besides a considerable portion of
Sicily. Any estimate of their extent and value can be only guess-work,
but it is conjectured that in the time of Gregory the Great they
would, if all massed together, have formed a district as large as
Lancashire,[27] and that the yearly revenue derived from them amounted
to £420,000. It is to be observed that we are here dealing not with
sovereignty but with ownership, and that the wide domains thus actually
owned by the Bishop of Rome had probably been increased rather than
diminished in the century and a half that had elapsed since the death
of Gregory.
As to the purposes to which this vast wealth was applied, even a severe
critic of the mediæval papacy must admit that they were, in the main,
right and noble ones. We have no hint now of that nepotism which was
the disgrace of the Roman see in much later ages. None of these early
popes, as far as we know, ever “founded a family.” The maintenance of
the large and brilliant papal household was doubtless a first charge
on the revenues of the see. The costly and somewhat ostentatious gifts
of plate to St. Peter’s Church, which are punctually recorded in the
_Liber Pontificalis_, were perhaps a second charge upon them. But after
all, a large proportion of these revenues must have gone towards the
relief of poverty, sickness, and distress. The pope was now what the
emperor had once been, the great relieving officer of Rome; not only in
the Eternal City, but all over Italy, at any rate while such a pope as
the first Gregory sat in St. Peter’s chair, whenever a bishop brought a
case of distress under his notice there was a strong probability that
he would receive a grant in aid from the papal revenues.
It is needless to point out what enormous power the ownership of such
vast estates and the distribution of such princely revenues must have
placed in the hands of the elderly ecclesiastic who was acclaimed
as pope by the assembled multitude in the basilica of St. Peter. In
the year 751 he was not yet a sovereign, but he was that kind of
territorial magnate out of whom a sovereign might easily be made.
The curious and difficult relation which had subsisted for so long
between the three great powers in Italy was ended in 751, the year of
Pippin’s coronation, when Aistulf, King of the Lombards, captured the
city of Ravenna and terminated the exarch’s rule in Italy. Believing
evidently that the time had come for the long postponed consolidation
of Italy under the Lombard rule, he drew nigh to the city of Rome, and
in some way or other threatened its independence. What he actually did
it is difficult to discover from the verbose and passionate declamation
of the papal biographer, but it seems clear that his soldiers committed
some depredations on the “Patrimony of St. Peter,” and it is probable
that without laying formal siege to the city he threatened it with
war unless the citizens would consent to pay him a poll-tax in
acknowledgment of his sovereignty over them.
These depredations, or these schemes of conquest, were not needed
to arouse the fierce and passionate hostility of the pope to the
all-absorbing Lombard. So long as there had been three great powers in
Italy there had been an equilibrium of a certain kind between them.
In fact, the pope had more than once invoked the help of the Lombard,
“unspeakable” as he called him, against his “most Christian” sovereign
in Constantinople, when the latter pressed him too hard. But now the
pope and the Lombard king stood face to face with no other rival to
their greatness, and each of them probably felt, dimly but certainly,
that it would be a duel to the death between them.
It was probably in the year 752, some months after the conquest of
Ravenna, and when the hostile intentions of King Aistulf against Rome
had been sufficiently indicated, that Pope Stephen II. sent a secret
message by a pilgrim who had visited Rome, imploring the King of the
Franks to give him a formal invitation to his court. In the spring of
753 the envoys of Pippin brought the desired invitation, and a letter,
in which there was probably some promise of protection against the
Lombards. Just about the same time a messenger, the _silentiarius_[28]
John, arrived from the Emperor Constantine V., desiring the pope to
repair to the court of Pavia and solicit King Aistulf to grant the
restoration of Ravenna to the empire. The pope had sent more than one
urgent message to the emperor imploring his protection, and this futile
commission was the only reply. The form of the despatch showed that
the emperor still regarded the pope as his subject, but its substance
was certainly some justification to Stephen for that transfer of his
allegiance from Constantine to Pippin, which had now begun to present
itself to his mind as a possible way of escape from his difficulties.
In itself the Imperial Commission was not unwelcome, since it
necessitated a safe conduct from Aistulf for the journey to Pavia.
On the 13th of October, 753, Pope Stephen set forth from Rome. Many
of the Romans followed him out of the gates, weeping and wailing, and
striving in vain to prevent him from undertaking the journey. But,
though weak in body, he had a stout heart, and was not to be turned
from his purpose. When he reached Pavia he was met by the envoys of
Aistulf, who brought him the king’s command not to mention the word
restitution in connection with Ravenna or the exarchate. He answered
boldly that no intimidation should procure his silence on that subject.
When admitted to the royal presence he exhibited the gifts which he had
brought for the king, and, with many tears, implored him to restore the
captured cities to the empire. The request was utterly vain; probably
even the imperial _silentiarius_, who was standing by, hardly expected
that it would be anything else. But then came another request of much
more serious import. Bishop Chrodegang and Duke Autchar, the high-born
and powerful representatives of the King of the Franks, asked, in
no obsequious tones, that the pope should be allowed to visit their
master. The pope was summoned to the royal presence, and questioned
as to his desire to cross the Alps. Several of the officers of the
court had been sent to Stephen to warn him that he would incur the
severe displeasure of the king if he persisted in his project; but when
questioned by Aistulf himself, he boldly answered, “If it be your will
to relax my bonds, it is altogether my will to undertake the journey.”
King Aistulf, we are told, “gnashed his teeth like a lion.” He knew
too well what danger this journey foreboded to himself and the whole
Lombard state, but the request, so made and so supported, was one that
he dared not refuse, and he most reluctantly gave his consent. On the
15th of November the pope started from Pavia, and travelled rapidly
lest Aistulf should after all seek to detain him. When he reached Aosta
he was already in Frankish territory, though on the Italian side of
the Alps. The danger which after that point terrified the pope and his
long train of trembling ecclesiastics were only the dangers of nature’s
contriving, the steep cliffs and impending avalanches of the Great St.
Bernard; henceforth they were safe from the fear of man. Having arrived
at the great monastery of St. Maurice, in the valley of the Rhone, the
pope and his followers rested there certain days. That had been the
appointed place of meeting with the Frankish king, but apparently the
impetuous old pope had reached it before he was expected.
“But the king,” says the papal biographer, “hearing of the pope’s
arrival, went with great speed to meet him, together with his wife,
his sons, and his chief nobles. For which purpose also he directed his
son, named Carolus, to meet that quasi-angelic pope, together with some
of his nobles. Then he himself, starting from his palace at Ponticum
[Ponthieu], dismounted from his horse, and going three miles to meet
him, with great humility prostrated himself before him on the ground,
and so, together with his wife, sons, and nobles, received that most
holy pope, to whom also he served the office of a groom, running for
some distance by his stirrup. Then the aforesaid health-bringing man,
with all his train, in a loud voice giving glory and ceaseless praises
to Almighty God, marched to the palace, together with the king, with
hymns and spiritual songs. This befell on the 6th day of January (754),
on the most holy festival of the Epiphany.”
This journey of the pope across the Alps is not only the first of a
long and fateful series, but affords us our first glance at that young
lad who was then only “the king’s son Carolus,” but who was one day
to deal with popes on his own account, and was to be known, the world
over, as _Carolus Magnus_. The date, as well as the place of his birth,
is uncertain, but it is probable that he was born in 742, the year
after his father’s accession to the mayoralty, and was therefore under
twelve years of age when he was sent by his father to accompany Pope
Stephen II. on his journey of not less than 200 miles from St. Maurice
in Switzerland, to Ponthieu in Champagne.
At the entry of the pope, the Frankish king had humbled himself before
him. On the next day the parts were reversed. “The pope appeared,
together with his clerical companions, in the presence of Pippin.
Clothed in sackcloth, and with ashes on his head, he cast himself on
the ground, and besought the king, by the mercies of Almighty God, and
by the merits of the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, that he would
free himself and the Roman people from the hand of the Lombards, and
from slavery to the proud king Aistulf; nor would he arise until King
Pippin, together with his sons and the nobles of the Franks, stretched
forth their hands and lifted him from the ground as a sign of their
future support and a pledge of his liberation.”
There are some indications that the nobles and warriors of the
Frankish Court were averse to undertaking the risks and hardships of a
Transalpine campaign, and it was probably for the sake of winning their
concurrence that this scene was enacted. The king, though not perhaps
very eager in the cause, was sufficiently bound to the pope by the
memory of past favors, and the hope of favors to come, in the shape of
papal blessings on his newly-assumed royalty.
The winter months of 754 were passed in embassies between the
two kings. Pippin called upon Aistulf to cease from his impious
presumption, and to leave unmolested the city of St. Peter and St.
Paul. His ambassadors brought back naught but words of pride and
obstinacy from the Lombard. War was resolved on, but before it began,
Pippin, mindful of the chances of war, and determined to secure the
succession in his family, resolved to have another confirmation of his
doubtful title from the hands of his venerable guest. Pope Stephen, who
had passed the winter at the wealthy convent of St. Denis, “anointed
the most pious Prince Pippin King of the Franks and Patrician of the
Romans with the oil of holy anointing, according to the custom of the
ancients, and at the same time crowned his two sons, who stood next
him, in happy succession, namely, Charles and Carloman, with the same
honor.”
This passage is an important one, and we must pause upon it for a few
minutes.
First, as to the rite of anointing. The writers who have most carefully
inquired into the matter, are clear that this rite, though it had been
practised upon the later Visigothic kings of Spain, and upon some of
the British kings in Wales, was new to the Frankish monarchy, when
performed first by Boniface and then by Stephen on the head of Pippin.
It really rested upon Old Testament precedents, such as the anointings
of Saul and of David: and it was possibly intended, as already hinted,
to replace in some degree the religious sanction which in old heathen
days royal families, such as the Merovingians, had possessed in their
fabled descent from gods and demi-gods.
Secondly: as to the bestowal on Pippin of the title “Patrician of the
Romans.” Long ago, before the series of Western emperors came to an
end, the word patrician had ceased to denote an aristocratic class, and
had been used of a single powerful individual, otherwise called “the
Father of the Emperor,” who in fact bore to the sovereign a relation
not unlike that which the Frankish mayor of the palace bore to the
Merovingian king. Thus, in the fifth century, Aetius and Ricimer had
successively borne the dignity of patrician, and in the sixth, the
Ostrogothic king Theodoric, speaking by the mouth of his minister
Cassiodorus, had said, “The great distinction of the patriciate is
that it is a rank held for life, like that of the priesthood from
which it sprang. The patrician takes precedence of all other dignities
save one, the consulship, and that is one which we ourselves sometimes
assume.” Since then, the imperial lieutenant in Italy had apparently
always assumed the title of patrician at Rome, in addition to that of
exarch by which he was best known at Ravenna. Now that the exarchs
were gone, the sonorous and imposing title might perhaps be said to be
nobody’s property. If any one had a right to bestow it the emperor at
Constantinople was the man: but he was far off and unpopular. There
was an obvious temptation to the Bishop of Rome to pick the shining
bauble out of the dust and present it to his powerful friend on the
other side of the Alps. It is not likely that it included any definite
functions of government, but it probably carried with it, in a somewhat
ill-defined and shadowy form, the right and the duty of defending from
external attacks the people and city of Rome.
Thirdly: the pope included in his coronation-service the two boyish
sons of Pippin, Charles and Carloman, and at the same time (if we may
trust a curious memorandum, the _Clausula de Pippino_, which professes
to have been written in 767 and which is now generally considered
authentic) the pope “blessed the Queen Bertrada and the nobles of the
Frankish nation, and while confirming them in the grace of the Holy
Spirit, he bound them under penalty of interdict and excommunication
never to presume to elect a king who should come forth from the loins
of any other than these persons whom Divine Providence had raised to
the throne, and who through the intercession of the holy Apostles had
been consecrated and confirmed by the hands of their vicar, the pope.”
Even so: that which had been done in the case of the last Merovingian
was never to be repeated in the case of any Arnulfing however
inefficient. The ruler who four years ago was only king _de facto_ must
now claim to the uttermost all the rights of a king _de jure_ descended
from a long line of regal ancestors.
This solemn coronation of Pippin took place, we are told, on the 28th
of July, 754. We naturally ask what had so long delayed the intended
expedition into Italy. There had been a dangerous illness of the pope,
the result of the hardships of his journey and of the unaccustomed
rigors of a Gaulish winter. There had also been more embassies:
apparently Pippin would exhaust all the resources of negotiation
before he proceeded to war. And lastly there had appeared at the royal
villa of Carisiacum an unexpected advocate to plead for the Lombard
king. This was none other than Pippin’s brother Carloman, lately ruler
of Austrasia, and the senior partner in the semi-royal firm, now a
tonsured monk, humbly though earnestly advocating the cause of peace.
The papal biographer sees in him only a dupe tempted forth from his
monastery by the “devilish persuasions of the unspeakable tyrant,
Aistulf,” and “striving vehemently with all his might to subvert
the cause of God’s Holy Church.” Certainly this intervention of the
newly-made monk against the great Head and Patron of all monks, is
one of the strangest incidents in his strange career: but it may be
permitted us to conjecture that during his seven years’ residence in
Italy he had acquired somewhat of an Italian heart and had learnt to
dread the ravages of
“the arméd torrent poured
Down the steep Alps.”
Possibly too in the silence of his convent he had learned to estimate
at their true value the papal claims to wealth and wide dominion, and
with prophetic soul foresaw that the armed interference of the Franks
in the quarrels of pope and Lombard king would in the end bring good
neither to the Church nor to his father’s house.
But whatever Carloman’s motives might be, his interposition on behalf
of Aistulf was firmly, perhaps ungraciously, repelled. He was not
allowed to return to Italy, but was confined in a monastery in France,
“where after certain days,” says the biographer, “at the call of God he
migrated from the light of day.” He died on the 17th of August, 754.
There is no suggestion of foul play, and indeed Pippin’s character,
as far as we know it, is too noble to warrant any such suggestion. It
seems probable that Carloman died broken-hearted at the discovery that
he had renounced the honest worldliness of the palace for the baser and
more hypocritical worldliness of the cloister and the cathedral.
After this episode of the intervention of Carloman, his sons were shorn
and sent to a convent. Grifo also, as we have seen, perished a little
before this time. There now remained only Pippin and his sons visibly
before the world as representatives of the great Arnulfing House.
At last all negotiations were ended, and in the late summer Pippin
with his whole army marched against Aistulf. He had reached S. Jean
de Maurienne: the pass of Mont Cenis rose before him, by which he
must make his way into Italy. He was still, however, on Frankish
ground, for, as the result of the wars between Lombards and Franks two
centuries previously, both Mont Cenis and (as has been already said)
the Great St. Bernard with their adjacent towns of Susa and Aosta
formed part of the Frankish kingdom. The Lombard king had come as far
as Susa and had there accumulated great store of warlike machines, “for
the nefarious defence of his kingdom against the republic and the Roman
Apostolic see.” He had, however, neglected the obvious precaution of
sending soldiers forward to secure the heights and harass the Frankish
army in their passage over the mountain. Thus it came to pass that
a small but brave body of men, the advance-guard of Pippin’s army,
emerged unhindered into the valley of Susa. Thinking to win an easy
victory Aistulf launched the Lombard host upon them. But the Franks,
strong in their pious faith in God and St. Peter, and fighting also in
a narrow valley, where the superior numbers of the enemy gave them no
advantage, bravely repelled the Lombard onset. After Aistulf had seen
many of his dukes and counts fall around him he turned to flee, and
halted not till with few followers he had reached his capital of Pavia.
Now was the path clear before the Frankish king, who without difficulty
crossed the mountains, sacked the rich Lombard camp, laid waste the
valley of the Po with fire and sword, and appeared with all his host
under the walls of Pavia. After some days Aistulf sounded the trumpet
for parley, and sought terms of peace. This was granted to him on
condition of his paying 30,000 soldi (£18,000) to Pippin and promising
to restore to the papacy all the estates which he had torn from the
papal patrimony and to live henceforth at peace with the successor
of St. Peter, who had by this time returned to Rome. Possibly there
was also included in the terms of this peace the far more important
condition that he should surrender to the pope the Pentapolis and the
cities of Ceccano and Narni in the neighborhood of Rome, as well as pay
a yearly tribute of 5,000 soldi (£3000) to the Frankish king.
Though hostages had been given and solemn oaths sworn for the
performance of these conditions, the Lombard king did not keep, perhaps
had never intended to keep them. Narni indeed was handed over to the
pope, but apparently none of the other cities or lands which Aistulf
had promised to restore; and on New Year’s day, 756, he appeared with
a large army before the gates of Rome. The men of Tuscany blockaded
the gate of St. Peter’s; the Beneventans, the gates of St. Paul and
St. John Lateran; while Aistulf himself, like another Alaric, appeared
before the Salarian gate and called upon the citizens as they valued
their lives, to open the gate and hand over the pontiff to his tender
mercies. For nearly two months had the siege lasted when Stephen II.
contrived, through the agency of the abbot Warnehar, to make audible
to Pippin his piteous cries for help. In the last and most urgent of
these letters the pope associates St. Peter with himself, represents
the Apostle as praying Pippin to hasten his aid, “lest you should allow
this city of Rome to perish in which the Lord has appointed that my
body should rest, and which He has commended to my protection and made
the foundation of the faith.” This letter is certainly a very daring
rhetorical artifice, but it is probable that it was understood to be
that and nothing more, both by the sender and the receiver.
This time the Frankish king required but little persuasion. The
flagrant breach of the treaty made with himself, as well as with the
pope, was an insult which called for vengeance. In the spring of 756
he put his army in motion, and after a rapid march by way of Chalons
and Geneva he was once more under the snows of Mont Cenis. The Lombard
soldiers again failed to prevent his passage over the crest of the
pass, and when he had descended into the higher valleys where they
were stationed, the Franks, who had evidently among them many trained
mountaineers (no doubt from the regions now known as Dauphiné, Savoy,
and Switzerland) turned the position of the Lombards by mountain tracks
which they had left unguarded, and descending upon them with that
_furia Francese_ of which in a later day Italy was to have so many and
such fatal examples, slew a multitude of the enemy and put the rest
to flight. Again was all the upper valley of the Po devastated by the
Frankish troops, and again did Pippin pitch his tents on either side
of the Ticino under the walls of Pavia. At the sight thereof, Aistulf,
abandoning all hope of successful resistance, obtained the mediation of
the nobles and bishops in the invading army, and, imploring pardon for
his broken promises, submitted to the conditions, hard as they were,
imposed by the conqueror. These were, the surrender to Pippin of one
third of the royal hoard stored up through many generations at Pavia,
the bestowal of large presents on the nobles of the Frankish court, the
payment of long arrears of tribute, and, now at length in very deed,
the cession of the cities of the exarchate[29] and the Pentapolis.[30]
But to whom were these cities, wrested as they had been by the Lombards
from the representative of the Eastern Emperor, to be ceded? That was
a question which, though it had probably been discussed and decided
by the Pope and the King of the Franks, had not received a definite
answer in the face of Europe till this summer of 756. It happened that
at the very time when Pippin was opening his campaign, there arrived
in Rome, George and John, Chief Secretary and Captain of the Guard,
from the Emperor Constantine V. on a mission to the Frankish king.
Journeying by sea to Marseilles, and then crossing the Alps, the
Secretary found Pippin under the walls of Pavia, and entreated him with
much earnestness and with the promise of many gifts from the emperor,
to hand over the city of Ravenna and the other cities of the exarchate
to the imperial rule. “But not thus,” says the papal biographer, “did
he avail to bend the strong will of that most Christian and most benign
man, so loyal to God and such a lover of St. Peter, King Pippin, to
hand over those cities to the imperial dominion; for that devout and
most mild-mannered king declared that never should those cities be
alienated from the power of St. Peter, and the rights of the Roman
Church and the pontiff of the Apostolic see: affirming with an oath
that not to win the favor of any mortal man had he twice addressed
himself to the fight, but solely for love of St. Peter and for the
pardon of his sins: and vowing too that no amount of money should
induce him to take away what he had once given to St. Peter. With this
answer he gave the imperial messenger leave to return to his country by
another way, and he having failed in his commission returned to Rome.”
This is apparently the critical point from which we must date the
pope’s independence of the Eastern, or as we ought still to call
him, the Roman Emperor. Up to this time, whatever divergencies there
may have been in doctrine or in policy, the Bishop of Rome has always
been in theory the subject of the Emperor of Rome. Now he distinctly
asserts, by the mouth of his powerful friend from over the Alps, that
certain broad domains which have been conquered from the empire, shall
be handed over not to the emperor but to himself. He shakes himself
loose from his old subjection and becomes by the same act a sovereign
prince, not only--and this is an important point--in the newly-acquired
territory of the exarchate, but also in his old home of the _Ducatus
Romae_.
The cities now handed over to the see of Rome were twenty-two in
number, and stretched along the Adriatic coast from the mouths of the
Po to within a few miles of Ancona and inland as far as the Apennines.
The plenipotentiary of the Frankish king, Fulrad, Abbot of St. Denis,
travelled through the Pentapolis, and the exarchate, together with
Aistulf’s commissioner, entered each city, received its keys and was
introduced to the chief magistrates, who journeyed onward in his
train. All these arrived at Rome. The local magistrates were doubtless
presented to their new sovereign. The keys of Ravenna and all the other
cities were laid on St. Peter’s tomb along with the donation by which
King Pippin granted them for ever to St. Peter and the pope. This done
Abbot Fulrad returned to Paris having accomplished his world-historical
mission. Stephen II., 94th Bishop of Rome, was now in fact not only
pope but king, and a beginning was made of those “States of the Church”
which with one brief interval have down to our own day intersected the
map of Italy.
I have dwelt at considerable length on Pippin’s relations with the
papacy, because they are inseparably connected with the most important
event in the history of his son. His other achievements, though
remarkable, and though they were evidently much nearer to his heart
(for his intervention in Italian affairs was done grudgingly and almost
against his will), must be dismissed in a few words.
In the first place, in the year 759 a Frankish army besieged Narbonne.
A solemn oath was sworn to the Goths, that if they would surrender the
city to Pippin they should be allowed to keep their own separate laws,
and on this the Goths rose, slew the Saracens who held the city for the
Caliph of Cordova, and handed it over to the Frankish generals. With
this capture ended the Moslem domination in Southern Gaul, though it
was not the last time that the turbans of the Moors were to be seen
north of the Pyrenees.
The conditions upon which the Christian inhabitants of Narbonne
consented to help the Frankish host against the Saracens, show how
strong was still the spirit of separate Gothic nationality in that part
of Gaul. Something of the same spirit, blended with other elements,
tended to make all that great region south and west of the Loire,
which went by the name of Aquitaine, seek for independence from the
Franks whom she still looked upon as strangers and foreigners. We have
seen how this spirit of independence was working when Eudo was Duke
of Aquitaine and Charles Martel _major domus_ of Francia, and how it
was only the pressure of a terrible danger which caused Eudo to seek
the help of Charles before the battle of Poitiers. Eudo was succeeded
(735) by his son Hunold, who seven years after, on the death of Charles
Martel, strove to throw off the Frankish yoke, but soon found that what
the father had won his two sons were well able to maintain. In 744
Hunold, by false oaths, enticed into his power his brother Hatto, who
apparently aspired to share his dominion, put out his eyes and thrust
him into prison. Then, apparently in penitence for this crime, he, like
Carloman, retired into a monastery and was succeeded in his duchy by
his son Waifar.
This Waifar, Duke of Aquitaine, is a man of whom we would gladly know
more, but of whose deeds no song or saga has preserved the memory. Only
a few dry sentences in chronicles, written by the flatterers of his
foe, tell us that for nine years (760–768) King Pippin carried on with
him a war which, beginning with complaints about the withholding of
the revenues of some Frankish churches, was more and more embittered
as time went on, and in the end became nothing less than a struggle
for the absolute subjugation of Aquitaine and the destruction of the
dynasty of Eudo. In 768 the Frankish king took the mother, sister,
and nieces of Waifar prisoners in the town of Saintes. Still the
chief fugitive escaped him. In the forests of Perigord, among the
mountain-caves of the Dordogne where, ages before, neolithic man had
graven the likeness of the reindeer and the bear,[31] the grandson of
Eudo made his ever-changing hiding-places. At length the warriors of
Pippin dividing themselves into four bands ran him to earth somewhere
in Saintonge. He was at once put to death, and the dream of an
independent Aquitaine vanished.
While Pippin was laboring over the work, so necessary from his point of
view, of the subjugation of Aquitaine, Bavaria, which held a somewhat
similar position of semi-independence on the south-east of the kingdom,
was escaping from his grasp. The work of the reconquest of this great
duchy had to be left to his sons, and I must postpone to a future
chapter the story of the changing fortunes of Tassilo, Duke of Bavaria.
It was while tarrying at Saintes and celebrating his triumph over
Waifar that Pippin was attacked by his last and fatal sickness. In
vain did he visit the shrines of St. Martin at Tours and St. Denis
at Paris. The hand of death was upon him, and having convoked all
the nobles, dukes, and counts of the Franks, and all the bishops and
chief ecclesiastics of the kingdom to an assembly at Paris, he there
solemnly, “with the consent of his chiefs,” divided his dominions
between his two sons, Charles and Carloman. He then after a few days
died (24th September, 768) and was buried at St. Denis with great pomp.
He had governed the people of the Franks either as _major domus_ or as
king for twenty-six years, and he had probably reached about the 54th
year of his age. The princes of the Arnulfing line, though not like the
debauched and short-lived Merovings, seldom saw the end of their sixth
decade of life.
What Pippin did for the foundation of the monarchy which was to be
the basis of the new settlement of Europe, was in its way quite as
important and even more enduring than that which was done by his more
illustrious son, upon whose reign we now enter.
PART II.
FROM THE BIRTH OF CHARLEMAGNE.