FALL OF THE LOMBARD MONARCHY.
The situation of affairs after the death of Pippin seems at first
sight almost the exact counterpart of that which existed at the death
of Charles Martel. We have again two brothers ruling, one of them
a Carloman, and the Frankish dominions are divided between them.
There are however some important differences. In the first place the
two young princes are now not mere _majores domus_ but acknowledged
kings. Moreover, the division of the Frankish territories between the
brothers proceeds on a different principle from that adopted in 741.
The dividing line then ran north and south: now it is more nearly east
and west. Thus Charles, the elder son, again has Austrasia and the
North German lands dependent upon it, but probably also the larger
part of Neustria; while Burgundy, Provence, and Alamannia (Swabia) fall
to the lot of Carloman. Aquitaine, which Pippin looked upon as his own
conquest, was probably included in Charles’s portion. But the general
tendency of this division, even more perhaps than of the division of
741, must have been to give the lands where the memories of Roman
civilization were strong and where the Latin tongue was used, to the
younger brother, and all the specially Teutonic, Frankish lands, the
cradle of the Arnulfing race, to the elder.
Another, and what might have been a more important difference between
the two partitions, lay in the relation between the brothers. So long
as the partnership lasted between the elder Carloman and Pippin they
appear to have lived in mutual loyalty and love; but the relation
between Charles and the younger Carloman was one of scarcely veiled
enmity. Their mother, the good and clever queen Bertrada, did her best
to keep the peace between them, but some of Carloman’s friends fanned
the flame of discord. Dislike might have broken out into actual civil
war but for the opportune death of Carloman, which occurred on the
4th of December 771, after a little more than three years of joint
sovereignty. This Carloman is a much less strongly marked figure than
his uncle and namesake, and in fact, the quarrel with his far more
famous brother, and his marriage to a noble Frankish maiden named
Gerberga, are almost the only events in his life that history records.
On hearing the tidings of his brother’s death, Charles at once
proceeded to the villa of Corbonacus near Soissons which had probably
been Carloman’s chief residence, and there, with the consent of
Archbishop Wiltchar, of Fulrad, Abbot of St. Denis and royal chaplain,
and of some of the nobles of Carloman’s court, he was solemnly
proclaimed King of all the Franks. The claims of the two infant sons of
Carloman were thus set aside, it would seem, rather by the influence
of the great ecclesiastics of the realm than with the hearty consent
of the nobles, some of whom shared the exile of the widowed Gerberga,
who with her children crossed the Alps and sought shelter at the Court
of the King of the Lombards. We may probably discern in this action of
Wiltchar and Fulrad somewhat of the same statesmanlike spirit which
caused the great Anglo-Saxon churchmen to work for the consolidation
of the Heptarchy into one kingdom. None knew better than they the
evils which a long minority and protracted dissensions between north
and south would bring upon the kingdom, and for the safety of the
state they were perhaps justified in encouraging Charles to seize the
auspicious moment for reuniting the divided realm.
When Charles thus became sole ruler of the Frankish state he was
probably a little under thirty years of age. He was a man of commanding
presence, more than six feet high, with large and lustrous eyes, a
rather long nose, a bright and cheerful countenance and a fine head of
hair, which we may suppose to have been now yellow like that of his
Teutonic forefathers, though when his biographer Einhard knew him best
it had the beautiful whiteness of age.
Already in the three years of the joint kingship he had had some
experience of war. Though his father seemed to have thoroughly subdued
Aquitaine, the embers of disaffection were still smouldering there,
and on the appearance of a certain Hunold, probably of the family of
the well-remembered Eudo, they broke out into a flame (769). Charles,
having vainly called on his brother Carloman for aid, marched to
Angoulême, where he concentrated his forces. On his appearance the
insurrection collapsed and Hunold had a narrow escape of capture. By
his superior knowledge of the country he succeeded in baffling his
pursuers and made his way into Gascony. Lupus, duke of that region, was
minded to give him shelter, but on receiving a message from Charles
that if the fugitive were not surrendered he would march his army into
Gascony and not depart thence till he had thoroughly subdued it to his
obedience, the Gascon duke lost heart and surrendered Hunold and his
wife to their conqueror. We hear nothing more of their fate. Gascony,
unlike Aquitaine, kept its duke, and though it must have vaguely
recognized the over-lordship of Charles, it was probably the least
thoroughly subdued and assimilated of all the regions of that which we
now call France.
But meanwhile the whole current of events--marriages, deaths, worldly
ambition and ghostly counsel--was sweeping Charles onward to the great
exploit of his reign, the conquest of Italy. When we last glanced at
Italian affairs we saw Abbot Fulrad, together with the commissioner of
the Lombard king Aistulf, gathering up the keys of the cities of the
exarchate and bringing them to lay at the feet of Pope Stephen II.[32]
That important event, the beginning of the temporal dominion of the
pope, occurred in 756, twelve years before the accession of Charles.
In the interval many changes had occurred, and several new actors had
appeared upon the scene.
In the first place, only a month or two after he had performed the
long-delayed surrender of the exarchate, Aistulf died. His death was
due to an accident in the hunting-field, but as he had been so often
at war with the Church, of course the papal biographer sees in it “a
blow from the Divine hand.” Desiderius, Duke of Tuscany, now aimed at
the Lombard crown; but Ratchis, the long since dethroned king emerged
from his convent and succeeded in reigning once more for three months
as King of the Lombards. Desiderius, however, sought the intervention
of the pope--probably the return of the monk Ratchis to secular life
was disapproved of on religious grounds--and by the promise of adding
yet more cities to the new papal dominions succeeded in procuring
his powerful interference on his behalf. Abbot Fulrad, too, that
able _chargé d’affaires_ of the Frankish king, exerted himself on
the same side, probably threatening his master’s intervention. The
result of the negotiations was that the matter was settled, apparently
without bloodshed. Ratchis stepped back into his convent, Desiderius
surrendered the cities for which the pope had bargained, and became
King--as it proved the last native king--of the Lombards (March, 757).
In the following month Pope Stephen II. died, and was succeeded by his
brother Paul I. The ten years of this prelate’s pontificate seem to
have been a time of comparative peace between pope and Lombard king.
Then came a stormy interregnum, the invasion of the papal see by an
intrusive Tuscan nobleman, his expulsion after thirteen months, and
the elevation to the papal chair of the Sicilian, Stephen III. We need
not here enter into the history of these obscure revolutions in which
two parties, a Lombard and a Frankish, are dimly seen struggling for
the mastery. We note only that Stephen III.’s elevation (7th August,
768) happened but a few months before the death of Pippin. About two
years after, we find him addressing an extraordinary letter full of
passionate animosity against the Lombards, to the two young Frankish
kings. He has heard that Desiderius King of the Lombards is seeking to
persuade one or other of the royal brothers to dismiss his lawfully
wedded wife and marry a Lombard princess, his daughter. Perish the
thought! To say nothing of the impiety of putting away a wedded wife
to marry another woman, what folly, what madness it would be in the
kings of so noble and illustrious a nation as the Franks to pollute
themselves by marrying a woman of the stinking Lombard race, which is
not counted in the number of the nations, and from which it is certain
that the brood of lepers has sprung! “Remember and consider that ye
have been anointed with holy oil with celestial benediction by the
hands of the vicar of St. Peter, and take care that you do not become
entangled in such crimes. Remember, too, that you have promised the
blessed Peter, his vicar [Pope Stephen II.] and his successors that you
would be friends to his friends and enemies to his enemies, as we have
promised to you the like and do firmly continue therein. How, then,
can you escape the guilt of perjury if you ally yourselves with that
perjured nation of the Lombards, who, forever attacking the Church of
God and invading this our province of the Romans, are proved to be our
deadliest foes?”
This passionate, almost insolent letter of dissuasion was of no avail.
Carloman indeed kept his wedded wife Gerberga, but Charles, some time
in the year 770, put away his wife, a noble Frankish lady, named
Himiltruda, and married the daughter of Desiderius, whom his mother
Bertrada, a friend of the Lombard alliance, had brought back with her
from Italy after a pilgrimage to the tombs of the Apostles.
The tie of kinship between Frank and Lombard, thus formed, was soon and
rudely broken. After a year of wedlock the daughter of Desiderius was
back again in her father’s court a divorced and rejected wife (771).
What were the motives of her husband for such insulting treatment of
his young queen none of his contemporaries have told us. The monk of
St. Gall,[33] writing a century after the event, tells us that the
lady was a delicate invalid, unlikely ever to become a mother, and
that for this reason Charles, acting by the advice of his most saintly
bishops, put her away as if she were dead. It is a plausible conjecture
that the king, remembering the passionate endeavor of the pope to
dissuade him from this marriage, may have recognized a Divine judgment
in its threatened sterility, and may for that reason have decided on
ending it.
This harsh termination of an alliance on which Queen Bertrada had set
her heart, and which she had been the chief agent in bringing to pass,
caused, for the time, an estrangement between mother and son, the only
one, we are told, that ever took place between them.
The repudiation of the Lombard princess of course did not improve the
relations between Desiderius and Charles. Still more strained did those
relations become when, on the death of Carloman, a few months later,
his widow, with her infant children and some trusty adherents crossed
the Alps and placed herself under the protection of the Lombard king.
Charles, we are told, considered this proceeding on the part of his
sister-in-law to be “superfluous,” but nevertheless bore it patiently.
The year 772 was fully occupied with the first of those great campaigns
against the Saxons which will form the subject of a later chapter; and
Charles had no time or energy to spare for the complicated affairs of
Italy.
But during that year (772) these Italian complications were rapidly
increasing. At the end of January came the death of Pope Stephen III.,
the Sicilian, a weak and ineffectual man, who during all his short
pontificate had been pulled this way and that by the two factions,
the Lombard and the Frankish, which divided the nobility of Rome.
When his insolent letter to Charles failed to divert him from the
Lombard alliance, he had thrown himself into the arms of Desiderius,
and allowed the Lombard faction, headed by a certain Paulus Afiarta,
to work their lawless will in Rome, banishing, blinding, imprisoning,
putting to death the chiefs of the opposite party.
Now, however, on the death of the Sicilian, a very different man was
raised to the vacant papal chair. This was Hadrian I., a man of Roman
birth, of spotless if somewhat ambitious character, capable of forming
and executing large and statesmanlike plans, a man not altogether
unworthy in point of intellect to be compared to the great Emperor
whose name he bore. His pontificate, one of the longest in the papal
annals, lasted very nearly twenty-four years (772–795), so that he
narrowly missed “seeing the years of St. Peter,” and during this long
space of time, common hopes, common dangers, common enterprises drew
him and Charles sometimes very close together, and though there were
also some sharp disputes between them, the king, we are told, “regarded
the pope as his chief friend, and when he received the tidings of his
death wept for him as for a much loved son or brother.”
As soon as Hadrian assumed the pontifical robe it was manifest to all
men that the unnatural friendship between pope and Lombard king had
come to an end. The prison doors were opened for the anti-Lombard
partizans, the civil and military officers who had been driven into
exile were recalled. Paulus Afiarta himself was tried and put to death
by the Archbishop of Ravenna. Hadrian indeed seems to have exerted
himself that the sentence might be commuted to banishment, but there is
no doubt that he thoroughly approved of criminal proceedings of some
kind being taken against the great unscrupulous Lombard partizan.
The action of Desiderius at this eventful crisis of his nation’s
history is not easy to understand: it is only possible here to describe
its general course without entering into details. He seems to have
recognized that he had an enemy in the new pope and one of a more
determined kind than either Paul I. or Stephen III., whose demands
for a further cession of territory he had been for the last fifteen
years successfully evading. Apparently, however, he cherished the
hope that by a judicious mixture of threats and entreaties he might
draw the pope over to his side and induce him to anoint the infant
sons of Carloman as Kings of the Franks. For to this desperate act
of defiance to Charles was he now impelled both by the memory of his
daughter’s wrongs and by the conviction that, sooner or later, war
must again break out between the Frank and the Lombard. In this frame
of mind he despatched alternately embassies to sue for the pope’s
friendship and armies to invade his territory. The rapid changes of his
attitude probably irritated the pontiff then as much as they perplex
the historian to-day. First Faenza, Ferrara, and Comacchio, the latest
acquisitions of the papacy, were occupied; then Ravenna was closely
pressed; Urbino and the greater part of the Pentapolis were invaded;
Blera and Otriculum, not a day’s journey from Rome, were entered by the
Lombard troops, who in the former city are said to have perpetrated a
cruel massacre of the unresisting inhabitants. But all these violent
measures failed to shake the resolution of Hadrian or induce him to
consent to an interview with Desiderius. His uniform answer to the
Lombard ambassadors was, “First let your master restore the possessions
of which he has unjustly despoiled St. Peter; and then, but not till
then, will I grant him an interview.”
At last, when the Lombard king was evidently preparing to tighten his
grip on Rome itself, Pope Hadrian sent a messenger named Peter to beg
for the help of the great King of the Franks. At the same time he did
what he could to put the city in a state of defence, gathering in
soldiers from Tuscany, Campania, and the Pentapolis, removing the most
precious adornments of the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul to safer
custody within the walls of the city, and barring up all the doors
of St. Peter’s so that the Lombard king, without some violent act of
sacrilege, should not be able to enter.
At last, in February or March 773, Peter the papal messenger (having
travelled by sea to Marseilles, as all the land routes were beset by
Lombard soldiers) arrived at Theodo’s villa where Charles was holding
his court. This is the place which the Neustrian citizens of the
French Republic still call Thionville, while the Austrasian subjects
of Kaiser Wilhelm, who have wrested it from the Neustrians, speak of
it as Diedenhofen. It is now a strong border fortress on the Moselle,
sixteen miles north of Metz. Hither, then, came the papal messenger
to utter his master’s piteous cry for help. Probably the ambassadors
of Desiderius appeared there also to deny the charges brought against
him, or to declare that whatever he had forcibly taken from the papal
see he had already surrendered. Charles resolved on war if war was
needful, but, even as his father Pippin had done, he tried diplomacy
first. Three messengers, a bishop, an abbot, and a courtier, were sent
to Italy to inquire into the rights of the quarrel, and on their return
and report that the cities violently taken from St. Peter were not
restored, Charles, still treading in his father’s footsteps, sent one
more embassy to Desiderius, offering the Lombard 14,000 golden solidi
(£8000) if he would restore the conquered cities, and fully satisfy all
the Papal demands. The offer was refused, and Charles having summoned
the Frankish host to his standard, set forward for Italy.
According to a plan which he frequently adopted, and one reason
for which was probably the desire to lessen the difficulties of
commissariat, Charles, after mustering his troops at Geneva, divided
his host into two parts--one of which under his uncle Bernard was to
cross by the Great St. Bernard and to descend upon Aosta, while the
other which he himself commanded, crossing the Mont Cenis, was to take
the road to Susa. Both divisions, as in his father’s time, traversed
the highest points of their respective passes without hindrance, but
when Charles descended into the long and narrow valley of the Dora
Susa, he found his further progress barred by the fortifications and
the army of Desiderius. He renewed his offers of a money payment in
return for the papal cities, he even expressed his willingness to be
satisfied with a mere promise to surrender those cities, if three
Lombard nobles were handed over to him as hostages; but all was in
vain. Strong in the impregnability of his fortifications Desiderius
refused every offer of accommodation, until a sudden panic seized his
host, the fortresses were abandoned, and again, as in Pippin’s time,
all the Lombard army retreated down the valley and shut itself up
behind the walls of Pavia.
So sudden and scarce hoped for a termination to what looked like an
evenly balanced game was naturally attributed by the papal biographer
to a divinely inspired terror; but a Frankish chronicler tells us of
a picked squadron of troops which Charles had sent over an unguarded
pass, and later local tradition spoke of a certain Lombard minstrel who
for a brilliant reward guided the Frankish troops by untrodden ways to
the rear of his countrymen’s position. We know from other evidence that
there were Lombards who were disaffected to Desiderius, and had opened
negotiations with the Frankish king; but the story of treachery in this
case is not well vouched for. It is possible that Bernard’s successful
transit over the pass which preserves the memory of his namesake
saint, may have turned the rear of the Lombard position, and compelled
Desiderius to seek safety in flight.
The siege of Pavia, which was now formed by Charles, began probably
about the end of September, 773, and lasted for ten months. The other
great focus of Lombard resistance was the city of Verona, where
Adelchis, son of Desiderius, commanded the garrison, and where those
important guests Gerberga, widow of Carloman, her children and her
trusty counsellor Autchar had taken refuge. Thither, Charles proceeded
at an early period of the siege of Pavia. The resistance seems to have
been slight, perhaps the garrison was half-hearted. Very soon after
Charles’s arrival, Gerberga and her train came forth from the city
and surrendered themselves to his will. The city itself was probably
surrendered at the same time; and the young prince Adelchis made his
escape to Constantinople. After this point the widow and children of
Carloman vanish from the scene. We should certainly have been informed
if any of them had been put to death, and we may therefore safely
assume that Charles was merciful. There are faint and doubtful traces
of one of the sons as holding the bishopric of Nice.
Charles appears to have spent his Christmas under canvas before the
walls of Pavia, or else in one of the numerous expeditions by which
he brought the cities on the left bank of the Po into his obedience.
But as the siege still dragged on, though there could be little doubt
of its final event, when Easter approached, Charles, with a brilliant
train of dukes and counts, of bishops and abbots, journeyed through
Tuscany to Rome. Never had his father, King Pippin, though he had twice
crossed the Alps, visited the Eternal City, and this was Charles’s
first visit to that Rome with which his name was to be inseparably
linked in after ages. He went by forced marches, hastening to be in
Rome on the eve of Easter Sunday. At thirty miles from the city, Pope
Hadrian ordered that he should be met by the nobles of the _Ducatus
Romae_, displaying the banner of St. Peter. At one mile from the city
the various squadrons of the Roman militia with their officers and
the boys out of the schools met him, all bearing palm-branches and
olive-branches and crosses, and singing loud his praises, for Hadrian
had ordered that in all things the reception of the King of the
Franks should do him as great honor as ever had been done of old to
the patrician and exarch arriving from Ravenna. When Charles saw the
crosses and the banners he dismounted from his horse and went on foot
with all his nobles to the church of St. Peter. There on the top of the
steps stood Pope Hadrian, with all the clergy and people of Rome who
had arisen at dawn to be ready to welcome the victorious king. As he
ascended each step, Charles knelt down and kissed the venerable stones;
and so he reached the summit where, in the long _atrium_ outside the
doors of the church the pope stood waiting to receive him. King and
pontiff were clasped in mutual embrace (we hear nothing of the abject
prostrations performed by later emperors before later popes), and then
holding Hadrian’s right hand Charles entered the great basilica, while
all the clergy and all the monks shouted with loud voices, “Blessed
is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.” Then the king and all the
Frankish nobles and churchmen in his train knelt at the tomb of St.
Peter, thanking God for the great victories already wrought through the
intervention of the Prince of the Apostles. On the three following
days, at Sta. Maria Maggiore, at St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s, the king,
after humbly imploring the papal permission, offered up his prayers to
God, and on Easter Sunday there was a great banquet at the Lateran.
Thus we come to the Wednesday on which an important piece of business
was transacted between the two potentates. So much here turns on a few
words that it will be well to give a literal translation of the passage
in the _Liber Pontificalis_ (our only authority), which describes this
memorable interview.
“On the fourth day of the week, the pope, with his staff of officers,
both civil and ecclesiastical, went forth to the church of St. Peter,
and there meeting the king in conference, earnestly prayed him, and
with paternal affection exhorted him, to fulfil in its entirety that
promise which his father, the late King Pippin of blessed memory, had
made, and which he himself with his brother Carloman and all the nobles
of France had confirmed to St. Peter and his vicar Pope Stephen II.,
when he visited Frankland, that they would grant divers cities and
territories in that province of Italy to St. Peter and his vicars for
a perpetual possession. And when he (Charles) had caused that promise
which was made in Frankland in a place called Carisiacum to be read
over to him, all its contents were approved by himself and his nobles.
And of his own accord, with good and willing mind, that most excellent
and most Christian King Charles caused another promise of gift like the
first to be drawn up by Etherius his chaplain and notary, and in this
he granted the same cities and territories to St. Peter and promised
that they should be conveyed to the pope with their boundaries set
forth as is contained in the aforesaid donation, to wit: From Luna with
the island of Corsica, thence to Surianum thence to Mons Bardonis (that
is Vercetum), thence to Parma, thence to Rhegium, and from thence to
Mantua and Mons Silicis, and moreover the whole exarchate of Ravenna
such as it was of old time, and the provinces of Venetia and Istria:
moreover the whole duchies of Spoletium and Beneventum.”
The papal biographer then goes on to describe the signing of this
donation by Charles himself with all his bishops, abbots, dukes, and
counts, its being laid upon the altar of St. Peter, and afterwards
placed within his tomb, and the “terrible oath” which was sworn by all
the signers, promising to St. Peter and Pope Hadrian that they would
keep all the promises contained in the document.
Let us look at the extent of the territories which according to the
papal biographer were thus conveyed to the Roman Pontiff. The island
of Corsica: that is clear though introduced in a curious connection.
Then the line starts from the coast of Italy, just at the point where
the Genoese and Tuscan territory join: it crosses the Apennines and
strikes the Po a little north of Parma. From Mantua it works round to
the head of the Adriatic and includes the peninsula of Istria. The
exarchate of Ravenna, “as it was of old time,” reached inland to the
Apennines and probably is here to be taken as including the Pentapolis.
The extent of the two great Lombard duchies of Spoleto and Benevento is
perfectly well known; they included the whole of Italy south of Ancona
except the duchy of Rome, a little territory round Naples and the
district which is now called Calabria in the extreme south, the toe of
Italy.
Instead, therefore, of asking what this donation included, it is more
to the purpose to inquire what it excluded. As the duchy of Rome is
apparently treated as already an undoubted part of the papal dominions,
we may say, using modern geographical terms, that if this donation had
ever been carried into effect the popes would have become sovereigns of
the whole of Italy except the Riviera, Piedmont, part of Lombardy north
of the Po, the city of Naples and Calabria.
It is almost impossible to believe that Charles, even in the fervor
caused by his first visit to Rome, his meeting with St. Peter’s vicar,
and his prayers in the great Roman basilicas, can have meant to convey
such vast territories as these to an ecclesiastic, however eminent,
whose pretensions to rank as a civil ruler of any territory, however
small, were only twenty years old. It is absolutely impossible to
believe that his father can (as is here implied) have promised to
endow the pope with territories such as those of Venetia and Istria,
which were in no sense Lombard, and were still in close connection
with the Eastern Empire. The whole subsequent course of history shows
that Charles, with all his lavish generosity to the Holy See, never
seriously contemplated making its occupant the virtual lord of Italy.
What solution of the enigma is possible? The idea of an absolute
fabrication of the document naturally occurs to the mind, especially to
the mind of a student who is constantly confronted with charters forged
in the interests of some church or monastery. This is the view taken by
many modern inquirers, amongst others by Malfatti (the careful author
of “Imperatori e Papi”), who inclines to assign the fabrication of the
document to the ninth century, “famous for so many other fictions of
that kind.”
On the other hand, Abbé Duchesne, the learned and impartial editor of
the _Liber Pontificalis_, declares that he looks upon this passage
as the work of an absolutely contemporary author, and that he cannot
accept the theory of a later fabrication. At the same time he fully
admits that this vast cession of territory to the pope never took
practical effect, and he suggests that somewhere about 781 the pope,
finding that there was no chance of realizing the splendid dream of
sovereignty over the whole of Italy in which he had indulged at the
interview of 774, liberated Charles from the promises then made, in
consideration of some important addition to the duchy of Rome over
which his rule was undisputed. In point of fact we find at that time
the pope unable to maintain himself even in the territory of the
exarchate, which was wrested from him by the ambitious Archbishop of
Ravenna. Prudence may therefore have suggested to him the expediency
of concentrating his attention on the duchy of Rome, and at least
strengthening the frontiers of that possession.
Another theory for which some good arguments may be adduced, is that in
this promised gift we are still dealing not with a grant of sovereignty
but with a restitution of property; that for instance when Spoleto and
Benevento are mentioned, all that Charles undertook, or at least meant
to undertake, was that any “patrimonies” in either of those duchies of
which the see of St. Peter had been unjustly despoiled by the Lombards
should be restored to it.
It is not for the present author to pretend to decide a question on
which so many able scholars are at issue, and to which so many special
treatises have been devoted; but the impression produced on his mind
is that at least the hand of the interpolator, if not that of the
wholesale fabricator, must have been at work in the passage which he
has quoted from the _Liber Pontificalis_.
Having finished his conferences with the Pope, in which he discussed
with him many matters ecclesiastical as well as civil, Charles returned
to his camp under the walls of Pavia. It was now the tenth month of the
siege: disease and probably famine were pressing the defenders hard:
and Desiderius, who had never been a popular sovereign, heard on every
side of the defection of his countrymen. At length on a certain Tuesday
in June (774) the city opened her gates to her conqueror. The great
hoard was handed over, the nobles and chief men from all the cities of
northern Italy came to Charles seated in the royal palace of Pavia, and
acknowledged him as their lord: the dominion of the Lombards in Italy
was at an end.[34]
To Desiderius and his family Charles showed himself merciful in his
triumph. The fallen king was carried across the Alps, accompanied
by his wife and one daughter (whether this was the divorced wife of
Charles we know not), and was invited to enter the seclusion of a
monastery, in Austrasia, where, if any faith is to be placed in the
stories that were current a century or two after his death, he devoted
himself with assiduity to the duties of the cloister, and even declared
that he would not desire to resume his crown, having entered the
service of the King of Kings.
Very soon after the capture of Pavia, Charles was back again on
the Rhine, as the affairs of North Germany required his immediate
attention. It was perhaps in part from the scantiness of his leisure,
but it was surely in part also from his statesmanlike insight into the
conditions of the problem before him, that he made so little change
in the internal constitution of his new kingdom. There was no attempt
to amalgamate the regions north and south of the Alps: Italy did not
become a part of “Francia,” but Charles took his place as successor
of the long line of kings from Alboin to Desiderius who had reigned
over Lombard Italy. “Rex Francorum et Langobardorum atque Patricius
Romanorum”: that was now his full title. As King of the Franks he ruled
the wide regions north of the Alps: as King of the Lombards he ruled
all of Italy that the Lombards had once held: as Patrician of the
Romans he seems to have been recognized as supreme ruler of all the
rest of Italy except the little fragments on the coast which still held
by their allegiance to the eastern emperor.
What, then, during the years of transition between 774 and 800, were
his relations to that eastern emperor? Some answer to this question
will be given in a subsequent chapter. And what were his relations to
the pope, in those territories in which his or his father’s donation
had taken effect? A question almost impossible to answer. Never was
there a more striking case of that phenomenon of the Middle Ages to
which M. Guizot has drawn attention, the co-existence of two opposing
theories of law without any apparent perception of their discord
in the minds of the men who had to carry them into practice. But
though both Charles and the pope are spoken of as sovereigns in these
territories it appears probable--we cannot say more--that Hadrian, had
he been closely questioned on the subject, would have recognized that
even in the duchy of Rome he was, in a manner difficult to define,
subject to the over-lordship of the Frankish king.
As has been said, the conduct of Charles in reference to the kingdom
of Italy, if that of an ambitious man, was on the whole wise and
statesmanlike. This praise can hardly be given to his relations to the
papacy, in which there was a want of that clear and frank statement
of what was granted and what was withheld, which is the only means of
avoiding future misunderstandings between the giver and the receiver
of a benefit. And the consequences of this omission weighed heavily on
Europe for centuries, and often involved two really upright and honest
men, a Pope and an Emperor, in hopeless quarrels.
If we may recur to the simile of a country parish which was used in a
foregoing chapter, the old absentee squire and the big Nonconformist
farmer have both vanished from the scene. In their stead we have a new
squire, young, enthusiastic, and devoted to the Church, who, as all
the rustics see, is “hand and glove with the parson.” But he has other
large estates in a distant county which claim the greater portion of
his time; and, partly in his haste to return to them, partly in the
effusion of his ecclesiastical zeal, he makes or is understood to make
to his clerical friend such promises of subscriptions, endowments,
rebuildings, and upholdings as he finds in after days of calmer
calculation would practically exhaust his whole rent-roll.