REVOLTS AND CONSPIRACIES.
In tracing the history of Charles’s long struggle with the Saxons we
have come down to a very late point in the story of his reign. We must
now retrace our steps and notice some of the more important events that
happened during that struggle of thirty years. And first it will be
well to deal with some of the unsuccessful attempts that were made in
various parts of his dominions, other than Saxon-land, to throw off the
yoke of this strong and masterful ruler.
Less than two years after the downfall of the Lombard monarchy, at the
end of 775, when Charles was fully committed to his life-and-death
contest with Saxon heathenism, he received tidings of an attempt on the
part of at least one Lombard duchy to recover its independence. Before
leaving Italy he had either appointed a Lombard noble named Hrodgaud,
Duke of Friuli, or had confirmed him in the possession of that duchy.
Forum Julii, which we now know by the name of Friuli, and whose chief
city is now called Cividale, included the fertile lands north of the
Venetian Gulf, and was of primary importance to the Frankish king as it
touched on the one side the provinces of Venetia and Istria (wavering
at this time between allegiance to him and their old allegiance to
Constantinople) and on the other side the lands of the Duke of Bavaria,
who, as we shall soon see, was one of the most untrustworthy of subject
princes.
Hrodgaud appears to have been engaged in some obscure negotiations
with the Lombard dukes of Chiusi and Benevento for cutting short the
new papal territories, perhaps also for bringing in the exiled son of
Desiderius and raising once more the standard of Lombard independence.
But the combination failed, owing perhaps in part to the death of
the Emperor Constantine V., which happened in the autumn of 775.
The young Lombard prince Adelchis failed to make his appearance in
Italy; the Dukes of Chiusi and Benevento hung back from the dangerous
enterprise and Hrodgaud of Friuli was left alone to meet the Frankish
avenger. His courage did not fail; he seems to have proclaimed himself
king, doubtless “King of the Lombards,” and persuaded many cities in
Northern Italy to join his standard. But Charles, warned of his revolt
before the end of 775, crossed the Alps in the early months of 776.
The passes cannot yet have been open, and it must have been with a
small but select body of troops that he made his rapid descent upon
Friuli. Hrodgaud seems to have fallen in battle. Cividale surrendered.
Treviso, where Hrodgaud’s father-in-law, Stabilinus, sought to prolong
the struggle, was also captured and was the scene of Charles’s Easter
festivities. All the other revolted cities were taken, and in June
Charles recrossed the Alps to march swiftly northward to recapture the
oft-taken Eresburg, and to baptize some thousands of Saxons in the
Lippe.
Considering the difficulties of locomotion at that time this short
Italian campaign against Hrodgaud seems to have been one of the most
rapid and brilliant of all the military operations of King Charles. The
suppression of the revolt was followed, not indeed by bloodshed, but
by severe confiscations of the property of the insurgents. We have a
piteous account by the great Lombard historian, Paulus Diaconus,[43] of
the seven years’ captivity of his brother, who is generally believed
to have been punished for his share in this insurrection. “My brother
languishes a captive in your land, broken-hearted, in nakedness and
want. His unhappy wife, with quivering lips, begs for bread from street
to street. Four children must she support in this humiliating manner,
whom she is scarce able to cover even with rags.”
The next threatening of internal disaffection came from a quarter in
which the sky had long looked lowering. Tassilo III., Duke of Bavaria,
was the most independent and high-spirited of all the subject nobles
in the Frankish kingdom. Sprung from the old Agilolfing line, which
for more than two centuries had ruled the Bavarian people, he had
some pretensions to a descent from Merovingian royalty, and was the
undoubted grandson of Charles Martel, and therefore first cousin of
King Charles, with whom he was strictly contemporary, having been born
in the year 742. The dependence of Bavaria upon the Frankish crown
had always been of the slightest kind, consisting of little more than
a verbal recognition of the supremacy of the Frankish king, and the
sending of a contingent to serve in the Frankish army, while, in all
the details of ordinary administration, the will of the Agilolfing
duke seems to have been practically supreme. Moreover, close ties
of affinity and common interests had long united the ducal house
of Bavaria and the regal house of Lombard Italy. Together they had
resisted the incursions of their turbulent neighbors on the east, the
Avars and the Sclaves; together they had sought, rather by diplomacy
than by war, to keep at a distance from them the domineering Frank.
In the later years of Pippin, as has been already stated, this tendency
of Bavaria to independence was openly displayed. It is true that in the
year 757, when Pippin was holding his _placitum_ at Compiègne, thither
came the young Tassilo with the chiefs of his nation, and, “after the
Frankish manner placing his hands in the hands of the king, commended
himself unto him in vassalage, and promised fidelity both to King
Pippin himself and to his sons Charles and Carloman by an oath on the
body of St. Dionysius, and not only there, but also over the bodies
of St. Martin and St. Germanus with a similar oath promised that he
would keep faith towards his aforesaid lords all the days of his life.
And similarly all the chiefs and seniors of the Bavarians who had come
with him into the presence of the king promised at the said holy places
that they would keep faith towards the king and his sons.” But the very
insistence on this ceremony probably showed that the loyalty of the
Bavarians was deemed precarious. It is certain that six years later
(763), in the very crisis of the war with Aquitaine, “Tassilo, Duke
of Bavaria, neglected his oaths and all his promises, forgot all the
benefits which he had received from his uncle, King Pippin, and, making
a fraudulent excuse of sickness, withdrew himself from the campaign.
Then, strengthening his resolution to revolt, he stoutly declared that
he would come no more into the king’s presence.” This was nothing less
than to commit the crime of _harisliz_ (military desertion), which,
according to Frankish law, was punishable by death. But as we saw, King
Pippin wisely determined to fight with one enemy at a time, and devoted
all his energies to the long war with Waifar of Aquitaine, a war which
practically occupied him till the end of his days. Thus the _harisliz_
of Tassilo III. went for the time unpunished.
Then came Charles’s accession to the throne, and his marriage with
the daughter of Desiderius. By this marriage a tie of affinity was
formed between the two cousins,--the lord and the contumacious
vassal,--for Tassilo also about the same time married another daughter
of Desiderius, named Liutberga. It seemed for a short time as if Frank,
Bavarian, and Lombard might dwell together in amity; but only for a
short time. Soon followed the repudiation of the Lombard princess, Pope
Hadrian’s cry for help, the invasion of Italy, the fall of the Lombard
kingdom. During all these stirring events Tassilo seems to have
remained quiescent, yet assuredly then, if ever, would have been his
chance to assert the independence after which he yearned.
So too during the rebellion of Hrodgaud of Friuli, when doubtless he
might have intercepted Charles’s passage, and made the suppression of
that rebellion a much more tedious affair than it actually was, Tassilo
made no sign. He seems to have thought his sulky attitude of isolation
and _de facto_ independence of his lord would maintain itself without
any trouble on his part, but he was greatly mistaken. His Frankish
over-lord was no _roi fainéant_ to let his rights thus quietly glide
into desuetude.
Charles tried first spiritual means, which were perhaps suggested by
the fact of his finding himself in the presence of the pope. Towards
the end of 780, in one of those short lulls in the storm which made
him deem the work of the subjugation of the Saxons complete, Charles
visited Italy, kept his Christmas in the old Lombard palace at Pavia,
held a _placitum_[44] at Mantua, and at Easter visited Rome. He was
accompanied by his wife and his sons, Carloman and Louis, children of
four and three years old. Carloman, who had not yet been baptized,
was raised from the baptismal font by Pope Hadrian, who gave him the
ancestral name of Pippin, and being anointed by the pope was declared
by his father to be King of Italy. At the same time his yet more
infantile brother, Louis, was anointed King of Aquitaine. Of course
in both cases all kingly power remained in the hands of the great
War-lord; but apparently the object of the ceremony was something like
that which caused our Edward I. to name the baby Edward of Caernarvon,
Prince of Wales. National pride was soothed, and national patriotism in
some degree reassured, by the presence of a court and the assurance of
a separate administration, even though the nominal head of the court
was a little child in the nursery.
While Charles was at Rome there was converse between him and the pope
concerning the Duke of Bavaria. Tassilo had been a liberal friend to
the Church, and had successfully prosecuted the enterprise of the
conversion of the Sclaves on his eastern frontier. Hadrian well knew
how strained were the relations between duke and king, and was, we
may believe, sincerely anxious to reconcile Tassilo to his mighty
cousin. A joint embassy was despatched to the Bavarian court: the pope
being represented by the bishops, Damasus and Formosus, the king by
the deacon Richulf and Eberhard the arch-cupbearer. “And when,” says
the chronicler, “these emissaries, obedient to their instruction,
had conversed with the aforesaid duke, and reminded him of his old
oaths to King Pippin, King Charles and the Franks, his heart was so
much softened that he declared his willingness to hasten at once to
the king’s presence, if such hostages were given him as to remove all
doubt of his personal safety. These having been given, he came without
delay to the king at Worms, swore the oath which was dictated to him,
and gave twelve chosen hostages for the fulfilment of his promise
that he would keep as towards King Charles and his loyal subjects all
the oaths which he had sworn aforetime to King Pippin. These hostages
were promptly brought to the king in his villa of Quierzy by Sindbert,
Bishop of Ratisbon. But the said duke returning home did not long
remain in the faith which he had promised.”
Notwithstanding the ominous words with which the chronicler concludes,
a great moral victory had certainly been gained by Charles, and the
attitude of sullen semi-independence which Tassilo had maintained for
nearly twenty years was now abandoned.
For six years (781–787) the name of Tassilo disappears from the
chronicles, and we may conclude that he was for so long a fairly loyal
subject of the Frankish kingdom, or rather perhaps that he committed
no such open act of rebellion as to compel Charles, engrossed as he was
during these years by the war with Widukind, to send any of his sorely
needed Frankish warriors for the chastisement of his Bavarian vassal.
Moreover, the open enmity of the Saxons was not the only danger that
at this time menaced the security of the Frankish throne. In the year
785, immediately after the baptism of Widukind, we have the following
mysterious entry in the chronicles: “There was made in that same year
on the other side of the Rhine a vast conspiracy of the eastern Franks
against the king, of which it was proved that Count Hardrad was the
author. But information thereof was speedily brought to the king, and
by his shrewdness so mighty a conspiracy shortly collapsed without
any great danger, the authors thereof being condemned, some to death,
some to privation of sight, and some to deportation and exile.” Even
the king’s life was aimed at by the conspirators, yet Einhard assures
us that none of the conspirators were actually killed save three who
drew their swords upon the officers who were sent to arrest them.
The cause of this sudden outbreak of Austrasian jealousy and rage
against the great Austrasian hero must remain a mystery. Some of the
authorities seem to speak of it as a specially Thuringian conspiracy,
and one attributes it to the refusal of a Thuringian chief to hand
over his daughter to a Frankish suitor to whom she was betrothed.
An attempt has been made to account for it as the last struggle of
Thuringian independence, dismayed at seeing the Saxons on the north
and the Bavarians on the south subjected to the all-mastering Frankish
king. It seems, however, more probable that it was a personal, palace
conspiracy. Possibly Einhard gives us the requisite clue when he
attributes both this and a subsequent conspiracy to the cruelty of
Charles’s queen Fastrada who “diverted her husband from the kindness
and accustomed gentleness of his nature.”
Towards the end of 786 Charles again marched into Italy, where the
not only independent but even hostile attitude of Arichis, Prince of
Benevento called for his attention. Having spent his Christmas at
Florence, and paid his devotions at the tombs of the Apostles in Rome,
he proceeded southward (787), and on the confines of the Beneventan
territory was met by Romwald, son of Arichis, with gifts and promises
and entreaties that he would not enter his father’s territory. But
Charles, says the chronicler, “thinking that he must deal very
differently with an enterprise once begun, kept Romwald with him and
marched with all his army to Capua, where he pitched his camp, and
would have carried on the war from thence, unless the aforesaid duke
had anticipated his intention by wholesome counsel. For leaving his
capital, Benevento, he betook himself with all his followers to the
seaport of Salerno, as being a more fortified city, and, sending an
embassy, he offered both his sons to the king, promising that he would
willingly obey all his commands. Listening to these prayers, and moved
also by the fear of God, the king abstained from war; and keeping the
younger son Grimwald as a hostage, sent the elder son back to his
father. He, moreover, received eleven hostages from the rest of the
nation, and sent ambassadors to strengthen the covenant of the prince
and all the people of Benevento by oaths.” Thus had the Frankish king,
without striking a blow, extended his dominion to the southernmost
corner of Italy. It was, however, a precarious conquest; and the
princes of Benevento were almost to the end of Charles’s reign either
doubtful vassals or open enemies of the Frankish ruler.
Easter of 787 was spent by King Charles in Rome, and this visit,
like that of five years before was followed by a further development
of the contest between him and Duke Tassilo. Doubtless the hollow
reconciliation of 782 had been followed by mutual suspicion and
estrangement: and the Bavarian duke must have felt that, with the
Saxon rebellion now apparently quelled, his turn for subjugation
would come next. While the king was still in Rome, there appeared in
that city two Bavarian envoys, Arno Bishop of Salzburg, and Huneric
Abbot of Mond See, who besought the pope to mediate between Charles
and their master. The pope, as before, expressed his hearty goodwill
towards Tassilo, and an interview between king and envoys followed in
his presence. But when Charles called upon the bishop and the abbot
to state what guarantee their master had empowered them to give for
the fulfilment, this time, of his often violated promises, they could
only answer that they had no instructions on this head, being not
plenipotentiaries on Tassilo’s behalf, only messengers whose duty it
was to carry back to their master the propositions of the king and
pontiff. Apparently, then, the duke had reverted to that old position
of all but equality with the Frankish king which he took up twenty-four
years before at the time of the great _harisliz_, and the solemnly
plighted oaths sworn at Worms were to go for nothing. Hadrian was
not less indignant than Charles at this exhibition of fickleness and
bad faith, and appears to have visited his displeasure on the two
churchmen-ambassadors themselves, telling them that they and their
master were all liars together, and that they should all be visited by
the papal anathema unless Tassilo kept the oaths which he had sworn to
Charles and to Pippin. We have here one of the earliest instances of
that use of ecclesiastical censures to enforce political claims which
was so characteristic a feature of the Middle Ages.
The ambassadors returned to Bavaria empty-handed: and the king,
recrossing the Alps, went to rejoin his wife, the hard and haughty
Fastrada, at Worms. Probably her influence was not used to soften his
temper towards the rebellious duke. A general assembly was called,
to which the king rehearsed all the events of his Italian journey,
concluding with the story of the abortive negotiations with Tassilo.
By the advice probably of his nobles, one more embassy was sent to
claim from the Bavarian the fulfilment of his promises and to summon
him to the royal presence. On his refusal, Frankish invaders from
three different points entered the devoted duchy. Italian Pippin
from the South marched from Trient up the valley of the Adige and
over the water-shed of the Inn; Charles himself crossed the Lech and
entered Bavaria from the west by way of Augsburg. A little further
to the north, near Ingoldstadt, came an army of Austrasian Franks,
including not only Thuringians but even Saxons, so great was Charles’s
confidence in that pacification of the country which, as after events
showed, was then but half completed. Seeing himself thus surrounded,
and also knowing that many of his own subjects would side with the
invaders--for apparently to the ordinary Bavarian landowner the
prospect of a distant lord paramount at Aachen or Quierzy was more
acceptable than the reality of a present and stringent master on the
banks of the Danube--Tassilo gave up the game, presented himself at
Charles’s headquarters, handed over to him a stick, carved into some
resemblance of a man, as a symbol of the land for which he did homage,
and gave as a hostage his son Theodo, who for the last ten years had
been associated with him as ruler of the duchy. Hostages, as usual,
twelve in number, were given for Tassilo’s adherence to his freshly
made promises, and at the same time the people of the land were in some
way, the details of which are not disclosed, made parties to his oath
of fidelity to Charles.
It is not easy to account for the harsh proceedings of the next year
(788) after this apparent reconciliation of the vassal to his lord.
Possibly something had come to light which justified Charles in the
belief that Tassilo would never honestly accept the position of vassal
from which he had so often endeavored to escape. An assembly was
convened at Ingelheim, probably in the month of June. Tassilo, now
helpless and unarmed, was summoned to appear before it, and was there
accused, on the evidence of some of his own subjects who were loyal to
Charles, of having opened negotiations with the barbarous Avars on the
east after his last submission to the Frankish king. Liutberga, his
Lombard queen, mindful of the old feud and of her father’s wrongs, was
said to have been the ceaseless preacher of revenge. Even against the
life of Charles, Tassilo was accused of having conspired, and when men
spoke to him of the danger in which he thus placed his hostage-son,
he is said to have answered: “Had I ten sons I would lose them all in
this cause, since it were better for me to die than to live a vassal
on such ignominious terms as I have sworn to.” Then the old accusation
of the _harisliz_ of 763 was brought up against him, and on this and
other charges he was found guilty by the assembled nobles, Franks, and
Bavarians, Lombards and Saxons, assembled from all parts of Charles’s
realm, and by their united voice was adjudged worthy of death. This
sentence, however, was commuted by “the most pious Charles, moved
by compassion and the love of God and because he was his kinsman:
and he obtained from his own servants and the servants of God [the
nobles secular and religious] this favor, that he should not die. Then
Tassilo, being asked by the most clement king what he wished, begged
that he might have leave to assume the tonsure and enter a monastery,
there to do penance for so many sins, that he might save his soul.
Similarly his son Theodo was sentenced, tonsured, and sent into a
monastery, and the few Bavarians who chose to remain in opposition to
King Charles were banished.”
According to one authority, Tassilo, while accepting tranquilly the
decree which consigned him for the rest of his days to the monotonous
seclusion of a convent, begged that his long hair, the symbol of his
Frankish or even Merovingian descent, might not be shorn off in public,
in the sight of his Frankish compeers, his Bavarian followers and
companions in arms, and this favor was granted him by the clemency
of the king. He was sent at once to the monastery of St. Goar on the
Rhine, and afterwards to the safer seclusion of Jumièges in Normandy.
His sons and his daughters were also persuaded or compelled to enter
various convents: his wife, scion of that unhappy race which seemed
doomed to disaster in all its members, was either banished or like
the rest of her family accepted the sentence of seclusion in the
cloister. Once more does Tassilo appear upon the stage of history,
when in the year 794 he was brought to the assembly at Frankfort (an
assembly convened ostensibly for a purely theological purpose) and
there “made his peace with the lord the king, renouncing all the power
which he had once held in Bavaria and handing it over to the king.”
It is suggested that the law had been somewhat strained by Tassilo’s
condemnation in the assembly at Ingelheim and that this formal and
professedly voluntary surrender of his rights was deemed necessary to
perfect Charles’s title as ruler of Bavaria. After this event Tassilo
vanishes from the scene, the year and place of his death being alike
unrecorded by authentic history.
For the later history of Europe and especially of Germany, the
deposition of Tassilo and the vindication of the imperilled Frankish
supremacy over Bavaria were perhaps even more important than the
perpetually recurring Saxon campaigns which fill so large a space in
Charles’s annals. Sooner or later Saxon-land was almost certain to
become Christian and civilized, and so to enter the Frankish orbit:
but at Charles’s accession there seemed to be a great probability that
Bavaria would turn her _de facto_ independence into separation _de
jure_ from the Frankish realm. This would have caused a separation of
the Germany of the future into two independent states, a kingdom of the
North and a kingdom of the South, which, as we know, never actually
took place in the Middle Ages.
With one more conspiracy, this time of a domestic character, the tale
of treason is ended. In the year 792 (the year in which Charles had
an Avar war and a Saxon rebellion on his hands at once, and made his
abortive attempt to join the Danube and the Rhine by a canal),[45]
there was added to all his other cares a rebellion headed by one of his
own flesh and blood. His eldest son Pippin was apparently not born in
wedlock, though his mother Himiltrud, after her son’s birth, probably
became Charles’s lawfully wedded wife. This defect of legitimacy would
not have been an insuperable bar to succession in a house which derived
its chief glories from the illegitimate Charles Martel; but there was
another and more fatal circumstance in the case of Charles’s firstborn.
Though beautiful in face he was deformed, probably dwarfish in figure,
an unsuitable person therefore to be presented to the assembled
Frankish warriors as heir to his father’s kingdom. Thus Pippin, though
to a certain extent maintaining his princely rank, and named next to
his father in the litanies of the Church, seems to have been silently
edged out from all hope of succeeding to any portion of that father’s
power. Charles, the eldest son of Hildegard, was apparently recognized
as principal heir. Carloman and Louis were taken to Rome in their
infancy and anointed Kings of Italy and Aquitaine, while Pippin was
left unnoticed. Perhaps even the imposition of the ancestral name of
Pippin on the child Carloman was meant as a hint to his elder namesake
that he would never be saluted as Pippin, King of the Franks.
This exclusion doubtless galled the firstborn; and to these wrongs of
his, real or imaginary, appear to have been added some inflicted on him
and on his friends and followers by the unloved Fastrada. Thus, while
most of the other chroniclers can see in the conspiracy of Pippin only
the unholy attempt of a bastard, like another Abimelech, to seize the
royal power at the cost of the lives of all his legitimate brethren,
the honest Einhard in the following passage of his annals puts a
different color on the enterprise.
“When the king was spending his summer at Ratisbon, a conspiracy
was made against him by his eldest son, named Pippin, and certain
Franks who declared that they could not bear the cruelty of the queen
Fastrada, and therefore conspired for the death of the king. And when
this was detected by means of Fardulf the Lombard, he, to reward him
for his loyalty, was presented with the monastery of St. Dionysius [St.
Denis], but the authors of the conspiracy, as being guilty of treason,
were partly slain by the sword and partly hung from gallows, and so
with their lives paid forfeit for the meditation of such a crime.”[46]
Pippin’s own life was spared, but his head was shorn, and he was
sent “to serve God in a monastery.” The place of his confinement was
Prum in the Moselle country, and there apparently he remained till
his death, which happened in 811. So ended the last and probably the
most dangerous of the conspiracies against King Charles’s life and
government.