EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES.
The coronation of Charles is not only the central event of the Middle
Ages, it is also one of those very few events of which, taking them
singly, it may be said that if they had not happened, the history of
the world would have been different. In one sense indeed it has
scarcely a parallel. The assassins of Julius Cæsar thought that they
had saved Rome from monarchy, but monarchy came inevitable in the next
generation. The conversion of Constantine changed the face of the
world, but Christianity was spreading fast, and its ultimate triumph
was only a question of time. Had Columbus never spread his sails, the
secret of the western sea would yet have been pierced by some later
voyager: had Charles V broken his safe-conduct to Luther, the voice
silenced at Wittenberg would have been taken up by echoes elsewhere.
But if the Roman Empire had not been restored in the West in the
person of Charles, it would never have been restored at all, and the
inexhaustible train of consequences for good and for evil that
followed could not have been. Why this was so may be seen by examining
the history of the next two centuries. In that day, as through all the
Dark and Middle Ages, two forces were striving for the mastery. The
one was the instinct of separation, disorder, anarchy, caused by the
ungoverned impulses and barbarous ignorance of the great bulk of
mankind; the other was that passionate longing of the better minds for
a formal unity of government, which had its historical basis in the
memories of the old Roman Empire, and its most constant expression in
the devotion to a visible and catholic Church. The former tendency, as
everything shews, was, in politics at least, the stronger, but the
latter, used and stimulated by an extraordinary genius like Charles,
achieved in the year 800 a victory whose results were never to be
lost. When the hero was gone, the returning wave of anarchy and
barbarism swept up violent as ever, yet it could not wholly obliterate
the past: the Empire, maimed and shattered though it was, had struck
its roots too deep to be overthrown by force, and when it perished at
last, perished from inner decay. It was just because men felt that no
one less than Charles could have won such a triumph over the evils of
the time, by framing and establishing a gigantic scheme of government,
that the excitement and hope and joy which the coronation evoked were
so intense. Their best evidence is perhaps to be found not in the
records of that time itself, but in the cries of lamentation that
broke forth when the Empire began to dissolve towards the close of the
ninth century, in the marvellous legends which attached themselves to
the name of Charles the Emperor, a hero of whom any exploit was
credible[60], in the devout admiration wherewith his German successors
looked back to, and strove in all things to imitate, their all but
superhuman prototype.
[Sidenote: Import of the coronation.]
As the event of A.D. 800 made an unparalleled impression on those who
lived at the time, so has it engaged the attention of men in
succeeding ages, has been viewed in the most opposite lights, and
become the theme of interminable controversies. It is better to look
at it simply as it appeared to the men who witnessed it. Here, as in
so many other cases, may be seen the errors into which jurists have
been led by the want of historical feeling. In rude and unsettled
states of society men respect forms and obey facts, while careless of
rules and principles. In England, for example, in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, it signified very little whether an aspirant to the
throne was next lawful heir, but it signified a great deal whether he
had been duly crowned and was supported by a strong party. Regarding
the matter thus, it is not hard to see why those who judged the actors
of A.D. 800 as they would have judged their contemporaries should have
misunderstood the nature of that which then came to pass. Baronius and
Bellarmine, Spanheim and Conring, are advocates bound to prove a
thesis, and therefore believing it; nor does either party find any
lack of plausible arguments[61]. But civilian and canonist alike
proceed upon strict legal principles, and no such principles can be
found in the case, or applied to it. Neither the instances cited by
the Cardinal from the Old Testament of the power of priests to set up
and pull down princes, nor those which shew the earlier Emperors
controlling the bishops of Rome, really meet the question. Leo acted
not as having alone the right to transfer the crown; the practice of
hereditary succession and the theory of popular election would have
equally excluded such a claim; he was the spokesman of the popular
will, which, identifying itself with the sacerdotal power, hated the
Greeks and was grateful to the Franks. Yet he was also something more.
The act, as it specially affected his interests, was mainly his work,
and without him would never have been brought about at all. It was
natural that a confusion of his secular functions as leader, and his
spiritual as consecrating priest, should lay the foundation of the
right claimed afterwards of raising and deposing monarchs at the will
of Christ's vicar. The Emperor was passive throughout; he did not, as
in Lombardy, appear as a conqueror, but was received by the Pope and
the people as a friend and ally. Rome no doubt became his capital, but
it had already obeyed him as Patrician, and the greatest fact that
stood out to posterity from the whole transaction was that the crown
was bestowed, was at least imposed, by the hands of the pontiff. He
seemed the trustee and depositary of the imperial authority[62].
[Sidenote: Contemporary accounts.]
The best way of shewing the thoughts and motives of those concerned in
the transaction is to transcribe the narratives of three contemporary,
or almost contemporary annalists, two of them German and one Italian.
The Annals of Lauresheim say:--
'And because the name of Emperor had now ceased among the Greeks, and
their Empire was possessed by a woman, it then seemed both to Leo the
Pope himself, and to all the holy fathers who were present in the
selfsame council, as well as to the rest of the Christian people, that
they ought to take to be Emperor Charles king of the Franks, who held
Rome herself, where the Cæsars had always been wont to sit, and all
the other regions which he ruled through Italy and Gaul and Germany;
and inasmuch as God had given all these lands into his hand, it seemed
right that with the help of God and at the prayer of the whole
Christian people he should have the name of Emperor also. Whose
petition king Charles willed not to refuse, but submitting himself
with all humility to God, and at the prayer of the priests and of the
whole Christian people, on the day of the nativity of our Lord Jesus
Christ he took on himself the name of Emperor, being consecrated by
the lord Pope Leo[63].'
Very similar in substance is the account of the Chronicle of Moissac
(ad ann. 801):--
'Now when the king upon the most holy day of the Lord's birth was
rising to the mass after praying before the confession of the blessed
Peter the Apostle, Leo the Pope, with the consent of all the bishops
and priests and of the senate of the Franks and likewise of the
Romans, set a golden crown upon his head, the Roman people also
shouting aloud. And when the people had made an end of chanting the
Laudes, he was adored by the Pope after the manner of the emperors of
old. For this also was done by the will of God. For while the said
Emperor abode at Rome certain men were brought unto him, who said that
the name of Emperor had ceased among the Greeks, and that among them
the Empire was held by a woman called Irene, who had by guile laid
hold on her son the Emperor, and put out his eyes, and taken the
Empire to herself, as it is written of Athaliah in the Book of the
Kings; which when Leo the Pope and all the assembly of the bishops and
priests and abbots heard, and the senate of the Franks and all the
elders of the Romans, they took counsel with the rest of the Christian
people, that they should name Charles king of the Franks to be
Emperor, seeing that he held Rome the mother of empire where the
Cæsars and Emperors were always used to sit; and that the heathen
might not mock the Christians if the name of Emperor should have
ceased among the Christians[64].'
These two accounts are both from a German source: that which follows
is Roman, written probably within some fifty or sixty years of the
event. It is taken from the Life of Leo III in the _Vitæ Pontificum
Romanorum_, compiled by Anastasius the papal librarian.
'After these things came the day of the birth of our Lord Jesus
Christ, and all men were again gathered together in the aforesaid
basilica of the blessed Peter the Apostle: and then the gracious and
venerable pontiff did with his own hands crown Charles with a very
precious crown. Then all the faithful people of Rome, seeing the
defence that he gave and the love that he bare to the holy Roman
Church and her Vicar, did by the will of God and of the blessed Peter,
the keeper of the keys of the kingdom of heaven, cry with one accord
with a loud voice, 'To Charles, the most pious Augustus, crowned of
God, the great and peacegiving Emperor, be life and victory.' While
he, before the holy confession of the blessed Peter the Apostle, was
invoking divers saints, it was proclaimed thrice, and he was chosen by
all to be Emperor of the Romans. Thereon the most holy pontiff
anointed Charles with holy oil, and likewise his most excellent son to
be king, upon the very day of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ; and
when the mass was finished, then after the mass the most serene lord
Emperor offered gifts[65].'
[Sidenote: Impression which they convey.]
[Sidenote: Later theories respecting the coronation.]
In these three accounts there is no serious discrepancy as to the
facts, although the Italian priest, as is natural, heightens the
importance of the part played by the Pope, while the Germans are too
anxious to rationalize the event, talking of a synod of the clergy, a
consultation of the people, and a formal request to Charles, which the
silence of Eginhard, as well as the other circumstances of the case,
forbid us to accept as literally true. Similarly Anastasius passes
over the adoration rendered by the Pope to the Emperor, upon which
most of the Frankish records insist in a way which puts it beyond
doubt. But the impression which the three narratives leave is
essentially the same. They all shew how little the transaction can be
made to wear a strictly legal character. The Frankish king does not of
his own might seize the crown, but rather receives it as coming
naturally to him, as the legitimate consequence of the authority he
already enjoyed. The Pope bestows the crown, not in virtue of any
right of his own as head of the Church: he is merely the instrument of
God's providence, which has unmistakeably pointed out Charles as the
proper person to defend and lead the Christian commonwealth. The Roman
people do not formally elect and appoint, but by their applause accept
the chief who is presented to them. The act is conceived of as
directly ordered by the Divine Providence which has brought about a
state of things that admits of but one issue, an issue which king,
priest, and people have only to recognise and obey; their personal
ambitions, passions, intrigues, sinking and vanishing in reverential
awe at what seems the immediate interposition of Heaven. And as the
result is desired by all parties alike, they do not think of inquiring
into one another's rights, but take their momentary harmony to be
natural and necessary, never dreaming of the difficulties and
conflicts which were to arise out of what seemed then so simple. And
it was just because everything was thus left undetermined, resting not
on express stipulation but rather on a sort of mutual understanding, a
sympathy of beliefs and wishes which augured no evil, that the event
admitted of being afterwards represented in so many different lights.
Four centuries later, when Papacy and Empire had been forced into the
mortal struggle by which the fate of both was decided, three distinct
theories regarding the coronation of Charles will be found advocated
by three different parties, all of them plausible, all of them to some
extent misleading. The Swabian Emperors held the crown to have been
won by their great predecessor as the prize of conquest, and drew the
conclusion that the citizens and bishop of Rome had no rights as
against themselves. The patriotic party among the Romans, appealing to
the early history of the Empire, declared that by nothing but the
voice of their senate and people could an Emperor be lawfully created,
he being only their chief magistrate, the temporary depositary of
their authority. The Popes pointed to the indisputable fact that Leo
imposed the crown, and argued that as God's earthly vicar it was then
his, and must always continue to be their right to give to whomsoever
they would an office which was created to be the handmaid of their
own. Of these three it was the last view that eventually prevailed,
yet to an impartial eye it cannot claim, any more than do the two
others, to contain the whole truth. Charles did not conquer, nor the
Pope give, nor the people elect. As the act was unprecedented so was
it illegal; it was a revolt of the ancient Western capital against a
daughter who had become a mistress; an exercise of the sacred right of
insurrection, justified by the weakness and wickedness of the
Byzantine princes, hallowed to the eyes of the world by the sanction
of Christ's representative, but founded upon no law, nor competent to
create any for the future.
[Sidenote: Was the coronation a surprise?]
It is an interesting and somewhat perplexing question, how far the
coronation scene, an act as imposing in its circumstances as it was
momentous in its results, was prearranged among the parties. Eginhard
tells us that Charles was accustomed to declare that he would not,
even on so high a festival, have entered the church had he known of
the Pope's intention. Even if the monarch had uttered, the secretary
would hardly have recorded a falsehood long after the motive that
might have prompted it had disappeared. Of the existence of that
motive which has been most commonly assumed, a fear of the discontent
of the Franks who might think their liberties endangered, little or no
proof can be brought from the records of the time, wherein the nation
is represented as exulting in the new dignity of their chief as an
accession of grandeur to themselves. Nor can we suppose that Charles's
disavowal was meant to soothe the offended pride of the Byzantine
princes, from whom he had nothing to fear, and who were none the more
likely to recognise his dignity, if they should believe it to be not
of his own seeking. Yet it is hard to suppose the whole affair a
surprise; for it was the goal towards which the policy of the Frankish
kings had for many years pointed, and Charles himself, in sending
before him to Rome many of the spiritual and temporal magnates of his
realm, in summoning thither his son Pipin from the war against the
Lombards of Benevento, had shewn that he expected some more than
ordinary result from this journey to the imperial city. Alcuin
moreover, Alcuin of York, the prime minister of Charles in matters
religious and literary, appears from one of his extant letters to have
sent as a Christmas gift to his royal pupil a carefully corrected and
superbly adorned copy of the Scriptures, with the words 'ad splendorem
imperialis potentiæ.' This has commonly been taken for conclusive
evidence that the plan had been settled beforehand, and such it would
be were there not some reasons for giving the letter an earlier date,
and looking upon the word 'imperialis' as a mere magniloquent
flourish[66]. More weight is therefore to be laid upon the arguments
supplied by the nature of the case itself. The Pope, whatever his
confidence in the sympathy of the people, would never have ventured on
so momentous a step until previous conferences had assured him of the
feelings of the king, nor could an act for which the assembly were
evidently prepared have been kept a secret. Nevertheless, the
declaration of Charles himself can neither be evaded nor set down to
mere dissimulation. It is more just to him, and on the whole more
reasonable, to suppose that Leo, having satisfied himself of the
wishes of the Roman clergy and people as well as of the Frankish
magnates, resolved to seize an occasion and place so eminently
favourable to his long-cherished plan, while Charles, carried away by
the enthusiasm of the moment and seeing in the pontiff the prophet and
instrument of the divine will, accepted a dignity which he might have
wished to receive at some later time or in some other way. If,
therefore, any positive conclusion be adopted, it would seem to be
that Charles, although he had probably given a more or less vague
consent to the project, was surprised and disconcerted by a sudden
fulfilment which interrupted his own carefully studied designs. And
although a deed which changed the history of the world was in any case
no accident, it may well have worn to the Frankish and Roman
spectators the air of a surprise. For there were no preparations
apparent in the church; the king was not, like his Teutonic successors
in aftertime, led in procession to the pontifical throne: suddenly, at
the very moment when he rose from the sacred hollow where he had knelt
among the ever-burning lamps before the holiest of Christian
relics--the body of the prince of the Apostles--the hands of that
Apostle's representative placed upon his head the crown of glory and
poured upon him the oil of sanctification. There was something in this
to thrill the beholders with the awe of a divine presence, and make
them hail him whom that presence seemed almost visibly to consecrate,
the 'pious and peace-giving Emperor, crowned of God.'
[Sidenote: Theories of the motives of Charles.]
The reluctance of Charles to assume the imperial title is ascribed by
Eginhard to a fear of the jealous hostility of the Greeks, who could
not only deny his claim to it, but might disturb by their intrigues
his dominions in Italy. Accepting this statement, the problem remains,
how is this reluctance to be reconciled with those acts of his which
clearly shew him aiming at the Roman crown? An ingenious and probable,
if not certain solution, is suggested by a recent historian[67], who
argues from a minute examination of the previous policy of Charles,
that while it was the great object of his reign to obtain the crown of
the world, he foresaw at the same time the opposition of the Eastern
Court, and the want of legality from which his title would in
consequence suffer. He was therefore bent on getting from the
Byzantines, if possible, a transference of their crown; if not, at
least a recognition of his own: and he appears to have hoped to win
this by the negotiations which had been for some time kept on foot
with the Empress Irene. Just at this moment came the coronation by
Pope Leo, interrupting these deep-laid schemes, irritating the Eastern
Court, and forcing Charles into the position of a rival who could not
with dignity adopt a soothing or submissive tone. Nevertheless, he
seems not even then to have abandoned the hope of obtaining a peaceful
recognition. Irene's crimes did not prevent him, if we may credit
Theophanes[68], from seeking her hand in marriage. And when the
project of thus uniting the East and West in a single Empire, baffled
for a time by the opposition of her minister Ætius, was rendered
impossible by her subsequent dethronement and exile, he did not
abandon the policy of conciliation until a surly acquiescence in
rather than admission of his dignity had been won from the Byzantine
sovereigns Michael and Nicephorus[69].
[Sidenote: Defect in the title of the Teutonic Emperors.]
Whether, supposing Leo to have been less precipitate, a cession of the
crown, or an acknowledgment of the right of the Romans to confer it,
could ever have been obtained by Charles is perhaps more than
doubtful. But it is clear that he judged rightly in rating its
importance high, for the want of it was the great blemish in his own
and his successors' dignity. To shew how this was so, reference must
be made to the events of A.D. 476. Both the extinction of the Western
Empire in that year and its revival in A.D. 800 have been very
generally misunderstood in modern times, and although the mistake is
not, in a certain sense, of practical importance, yet it tends to
confuse history and to blind us to the ideas of the people who acted
on both occasions. When Odoacer compelled the abdication of Romulus
Augustulus, he did not abolish the Western Empire as a separate power,
but caused it to be reunited with or sink into the Eastern, so that
from that time there was, as there had been before Diocletian, a
single undivided Roman Empire. In A.D. 800 the very memory of the
separate Western Empire, as it had stood from the death of Theodosius
till Odoacer, had, so far as appears, been long since lost, and
neither Leo nor Charles nor any one among their advisers dreamt of
reviving it. They too, like their predecessors, held the Roman Empire
to be one and indivisible, and proposed by the coronation of the
Frankish king not to proclaim a severance of the East and West, but to
reverse the act of Constantine, and make Old Rome again the civil as
well as the ecclesiastical capital of the Empire that bore her name.
Their deed was in its essence illegal, but they sought to give it
every semblance of legality: they professed and partly believed that
they were not revolting against a reigning sovereign, but legitimately
filling up the place of the deposed Constantine the Sixth; the people
of the imperial city exercising their ancient right of choice, their
bishop his right of consecration.
Their purpose was but half accomplished. They could create but they
could not destroy: they set up an Emperor of their own, whose
representatives thenceforward ruled the West, but Constantinople
retained her sovereigns as of yore; and Christendom saw henceforth two
imperial lines, not as in the time before A.D. 476, the conjoint heads
of a single realm, but rivals and enemies, each denouncing the other
as an impostor, each professing to be the only true and lawful head of
the Christian Church and people. Although therefore we must in
practice speak during the next seven centuries (down till A.D. 1453,
when Constantinople fell before the Mohammedan) of an Eastern and a
Western Empire, the phrase is in strictness incorrect, and was one
which either court ought to have repudiated. The Byzantines always did
repudiate it; the Latins usually; although, yielding to facts, they
sometimes condescended to employ it themselves. But their theory was
always the same. Charles was held to be the legitimate successor, not
of Romulus Augustulus, but of Basil, Heraclius, Justinian, Arcadius,
and all the Eastern line; and hence it is that in all the annals of
the time and of many succeeding centuries, the name of Constantine VI,
the sixty-seventh in order from Augustus, is followed without a break
by that of Charles, the sixty-eighth.
[Sidenote: Government of Charles as Emperor.]
[Sidenote: His authority in matters ecclesiastical.]
The maintenance of an imperial line among the Greeks was a continuing
protest against the validity of Charles's title. But from their enmity
he had little to fear, and in the eyes of the world he seemed to step
into their place, adding the traditional dignity which had been theirs
to the power that he already enjoyed. North Italy and Rome ceased for
ever to own the supremacy of Byzantium; and while the Eastern princes
paid a shameful tribute to the Mussulman, the Frankish Emperor--as the
recognised head of Christendom--received from the patriarch of
Jerusalem the keys of the Holy Sepulchre and the banner of Calvary;
the gift of the Sepulchre itself, says Eginhard, from Aaron king of
the Persians[70]. Out of this peaceful intercourse with the great
Khalif the romancers created a crusade. Within his own dominions his
sway assumed a more sacred character. Already had his unwearied and
comprehensive activity made him throughout his reign an ecclesiastical
no less than a civil ruler, summoning and sitting in councils,
examining and appointing bishops, settling by capitularies the
smallest points of church discipline and polity. A synod held at
Frankfort in A.D. 794 condemned the decrees of the second council of
Nicæa, which had been approved by Pope Hadrian, censured in violent
terms the conduct of the Byzantine rulers in suggesting them, and
without excluding images from churches, altogether forbade them to be
worshipped or even venerated. Not only did Charles preside in and
direct the deliberations of this synod, although legates from the Pope
were present--he also caused a treatise to be drawn up stating and
urging its conclusions; he pressed Hadrian to declare Constantine VI a
heretic for enouncing doctrines to which Hadrian had himself
consented. There are letters of his extant in which he lectures Pope
Leo in a tone of easy superiority, admonishes him to obey the holy
canons, and bids him pray earnestly for the success of the efforts
which it is the monarch's duty to make for the subjugation of pagans
and the establishment of sound doctrine throughout the Church. Nay,
subsequent Popes themselves[71] admitted and applauded the despotic
superintendence of matters spiritual which he was wont to exercise,
and which led some one to give him playfully a title that had once
been applied to the Pope himself, 'Episcopus episcoporum.'
[Sidenote: The imperial office in its ecclesiastical relations.]
[Sidenote: Capitulary of A.D. 802.]
Acting and speaking thus when merely king, it may be thought that
Charles needed no further title to justify his power. The inference is
in truth rather the converse of this. Upon what he had done already
the imperial title must necessarily follow: the attitude of protection
and control which he held towards the Church and the Holy See
belonged, according to the ideas of the time, especially and only to
an Emperor. Therefore his coronation was the fitting completion and
legitimation of his authority, sanctifying rather than increasing it.
We have, however, one remarkable witness to the importance that was
attached to the imperial name, and the enhancement which he conceived
his office to have received from it. In a great assembly held at
Aachen, A.D. 802, the lately-crowned Emperor revised the laws of all
the races that obeyed him, endeavouring to harmonize and correct them,
and issued a capitulary singular in subject and tone[72]. All persons
within his dominions, as well ecclesiastical as civil, who have
already sworn allegiance to him as king, are thereby commanded to
swear to him afresh as Cæsar; and all who have never yet sworn, down
to the age of twelve, shall now take the same oath. 'At the same time
it shall be publicly explained to all what is the force and meaning of
this oath, and how much more it includes than a mere promise of
fidelity to the monarch's person. Firstly, it binds those who swear it
to live, each and every one of them, according to his strength and
knowledge, in the holy service of God; since the lord Emperor cannot
extend over all his care and discipline. Secondly, it binds them
neither by force nor fraud to seize or molest any of the goods or
servants of his crown. Thirdly, to do no violence nor treason towards
the holy Church, or to widows, or orphans, or strangers, seeing that
the lord Emperor has been appointed, after the Lord and his saints,
the protector and defender of all such.' Then in similar fashion
purity of life is prescribed to the monks; homicide, the neglect of
hospitality, and other offences are denounced, the notions of sin and
crime being intermingled and almost identified in a way to which no
parallel can be found, unless it be in the Mosaic code. There God, the
invisible object of worship, is also, though almost incidentally, the
judge and political ruler of Israel; here the whole cycle of social
and moral duty is deduced from the obligation of obedience to the
visible autocratic head of the Christian state.
In most of Charles's words and deeds, nor less distinctly in the
writings of his adviser Alcuin, may be discerned the working of the
same theocratic ideas. Among his intimate friends he chose to be
called by the name of David, exercising in reality all the powers of
the Jewish king; presiding over this kingdom of God upon earth rather
as a second Constantine or Theodosius than in the spirit and
traditions of the Julii or the Flavii. Among his measures there are
two which in particular recall the first Christian Emperor. As
Constantine founds so Charles erects on a firmer basis the connection
of Church and State. Bishops and abbots are as essential a part of
rising feudalism as counts and dukes. Their benefices are held under
the same conditions of fealty and the service in war of their vassal
tenants, not of the spiritual person himself: they have similar rights
of jurisdiction, and are subject alike to the imperial _missi_. The
monarch tries often to restrict the clergy, as persons, to spiritual
duties; quells the insubordination of the monasteries; endeavours to
bring the seculars into a monastic life by instituting and regulating
chapters. But after granting wealth and power, the attempt was vain;
his strong hand withdrawn, they laughed at control. Again, it was by
him first that the payment of tithes, for which the priesthood had
long been pleading, was made compulsory in Western Europe, and the
support of the ministers of religion entrusted to the laws of the
state.
[Sidenote: Influence of the imperial title in Germany and Gaul.]
[Sidenote: Action of Charles on Europe.]
In civil affairs also Charles acquired, with the imperial title, a new
position. Later jurists labour to distinguish his power as Roman
Emperor from that which he held already as king of the Franks and
their subject allies: they insist that his coronation gave him the
capital only, that it is absurd to talk of a Roman Empire in regions
whither the eagles had never flown[73]. In such expressions there
seems to lurk either confusion or misconception. It was not the actual
government of the city that Charles obtained in A.D. 800: that his
father had already held as Patrician and he had constantly exercised
in the same capacity: it was far more than the titular sovereignty of
Rome which had hitherto been supposed to be vested in the Byzantine
princes: it was nothing less than the headship of the world, believed
to appertain of right to the lawful Roman Emperor, whether he reigned
on the Bosphorus, the Tiber, or the Rhine. As that headship, although
never denied, had been in abeyance in the West for several centuries,
its bestowal on the king of so vast a realm was a change of the first
moment, for it made the coronation not merely a transference of the
seat of Empire, but a renewal of the Empire itself, a bringing back of
it from faith to sight, from the world of belief and theory to the
world of fact and reality. And since the powers it gave were
autocratic and unlimited, it must swallow up all minor claims and
dignities: the rights of Charles the Frankish king were merged in
those of Charles the successor of Augustus, the lord of the world.
That his imperial authority was theoretically irrespective of place is
clear from his own words and acts, and from all the monuments of that
time. He would not, indeed, have dreamed of treating the free Franks
as Justinian had treated his half-Oriental subjects, nor would the
warriors who followed his standard have brooked such an attempt. Yet
even to German eyes his position must have been altered by the halo of
vague splendour which now surrounded him; for all, even the Saxon and
the Slave, had heard of Rome's glories, and revered the name of Cæsar.
And in his effort to weld discordant elements into one body, to
introduce regular gradations of authority, to control the Teutonic
tendency to localization by his _missi_--officials commissioned to
traverse each some part of his dominions, reporting on and redressing
the evils they found--and by his own oft-repeated personal progresses,
Charles was guided by the traditions of the old Empire. His sway is
the revival of order and culture, fusing the West into a compact
whole, whose parts are never thenceforward to lose the marks of their
connection and their half-Roman character, gathering up all that is
left in Europe of spirit and wealth and knowledge, and hurling it with
the new force of Christianity on the infidel of the South and the
masses of untamed barbarism to the North and East. Ruling the world by
the gift of God, and the transmitted rights of the Romans and their
Cæsar whom God had chosen to conquer it, he renews the original
aggressive movement of the Empire: the civilized world has subdued her
invader[74], and now arms him against savagery and heathendom. Hence
the wars, not more of the sword than of the cross, against Saxons,
Avars, Slaves, Danes, Spanish Arabs, where monasteries are fortresses
and baptism the badge of submission. The overthrow of the
Irminsûl[75], in the first Saxon campaign[76], sums up the changes of
seven centuries. The Romanized Teuton destroys the monument of his
country's freedom, for it is also the emblem of paganism and
barbarism. The work of Arminius is undone by his successor.
[Sidenote: His position as Frankish king.]
This, however, is not the only side from which Charles's policy and
character may be regarded. If the unity of the Church and the shadow
of imperial prerogative was one pillar of his power, the other was the
Frankish nation. The Empire was still military, though in a sense
strangely different from that of Julius or Severus. The warlike Franks
had permeated Western Europe; their primacy was admitted by the
kindred tribes of Lombards, Bavarians, Thuringians, Alemannians, and
Burgundians; the Slavic peoples on the borders trembled and paid
tribute; Alfonso of Asturias found in the Emperor a protector against
the infidel foe. His influence, if not his exerted power, crossed the
ocean: the kings of the Scots sent gifts and called him lord[77]: the
restoration of Eardulf to Northumbria, still more of Egbert to Wessex,
might furnish a better ground for the claim of suzerainty than many to
which his successors had afterwards recourse. As it was by Frankish
arms that this predominance in Europe which the imperial title adorned
and legalized had been won, so was the government of Charles Roman in
semblance rather than in fact. It was not by restoring the effete
mechanism of the old Empire, but by his own vigorous personal action
and that of his great officers, that he strove to administer and
reform. With every effort for a strong central government, there is no
despotism; each nation retains its laws, its hereditary chiefs, its
free popular assemblies. The conditions granted to the Saxons after
such cruel warfare, conditions so favourable that in the next century
their dukes hold the foremost place in Germany, shew how little he
desired to make the Franks a dominant caste.
[Sidenote: General results of his Empire.]
He repeats the attempt of Theodoric to breathe a Teutonic spirit into
Roman forms. The conception was magnificent; great results followed
its partial execution. Two causes forbade success. The one was the
ecclesiastical, especially the Papal power, apparently subject to the
temporal, but with a strong and undefined prerogative which only
waited the occasion to trample on what it had helped to raise. The
Pope might take away the crown he had bestowed, and turn against the
Emperor the Church which now obeyed him. The other was to be found in
the discordance of the component parts of the Empire. The nations were
not ripe for settled life or extensive schemes of polity; the
differences of race, language, manners, over vast and thinly-peopled
lands baffled every attempt to maintain their connection: and when
once the spell of the great mind was withdrawn, the mutually repellent
forces began to work, and the mass dissolved into that chaos out of
which it had been formed. Nevertheless, the parts separated not as
they met, but having all of them undergone influences which continued
to act when political connection had ceased. For the work of
Charles--a genius pre-eminently creative--was not lost in the anarchy
that followed: rather are we to regard his reign as the beginning of a
new era, or as laying the foundations whereon men continued for many
generations to build.
[Sidenote: Personal habits and sympathies.]
No claim can be more groundless than that which the modern French, the
sons of the Latinized Kelt, set up to the Teutonic Charles. At Rome he
might assume the chlamys and the sandals, but at the head of his
Frankish host he strictly adhered to the customs of his country, and
was beloved by his people as the very ideal of their own character and
habits[78]. Of strength and stature almost superhuman, in swimming and
hunting unsurpassed, steadfast and terrible in fight, to his friends
gentle and condescending, he was a Roman, much less a Gaul, in nothing
but his culture and his width of view, otherwise a Teuton. The centre
of his realm was the Rhine; his capitals Aachen[79] and
Engilenheim[80]; his army Frankish; his sympathies as they are shewn
in the gathering of the old hero-lays[81], the composition of a German
grammar, the ordinance against confining prayer to the three
languages,--Hebrew, Greek, and Latin,--were all for the race from
which he sprang, and whose advance, represented by the victory of
Austrasia, the true Frankish fatherland, over Neustria and Aquitaine,
spread a second Germanic wave over the conquered countries.
[Sidenote: His Empire and character generally.]
There were in his Empire, as in his own mind, two elements; those two
from the union and mutual action and reaction of which modern
civilization has arisen. These vast domains, reaching from the Ebro to
the Carpathian mountains, from the Eyder to the Liris, were all the
conquests of the Frankish sword, and were still governed almost
exclusively by viceroys and officers of Frankish blood. But the
conception of the Empire, that which made it a State and not a mere
mass of subject tribes like those great Eastern dominions which rise
and perish in a lifetime, the realms of Sesostris, or Attila, or
Timur, was inherited from an older and a grander system, was not
Teutonic but Roman--Roman in its ordered rule, in its uniformity and
precision, in its endeavour to subject the individual to the
system--Roman in its effort to realize a certain limited and human
perfection, whose very completeness shall exclude the hope of further
progress. And the bond, too, by which the Empire was held together was
Roman in its origin, although Roman in a sense which would have
surprised Trajan or Severus, could it have been foretold them. The
ecclesiastical body was already organized and centralized, and it was
in his rule over the ecclesiastical body that the secret of Charles's
power lay. Every Christian--Frank, Gaul, or Italian--owed loyalty to
the head and defender of his religion: the unity of the Empire was a
reflection of the unity of the Church.
Into a general view of the government and policy of Charles it is not
possible here to enter. Yet his legislation, his assemblies, his
administrative system, his magnificent works, recalling the projects
of Alexander and Cæsar[82], the zeal for education and literature
which he shewed in the collection of manuscripts, the founding of
schools, the gathering of eminent men from all quarters around him,
cannot be appreciated apart from his position as restorer of the Roman
Empire. Like all the foremost men of our race, Charles was all great
things in one, and was so great just because the workings of his
genius were so harmonious. He was not a mere barbarian warrior any
more than he was an astute diplomatist; there is none of all his
qualities which would not be forced out of its place were we to
characterize him chiefly by it. Comparisons between famous men of
different ages are generally as worthless as they are easy: the
circumstances among which Charles lived do not permit us to institute
a minute parallel between his greatness and that of those two to whom
it is the modern fashion to compare him, nor to say whether he was or
could have become as profound a politician as Cæsar, as skilful a
commander as Napoleon[83]. But neither to the Roman nor to the
Corsican was he inferior in that one quality by which both he and they
chiefly impress our imaginations--that intense, vivid, unresting
energy which swept him over Europe in campaign after campaign, which
sought a field for its workings in theology, science, literature, no
less than in politics and war. As it was this wondrous activity that
made him the conqueror of Europe, so was it by the variety of his
culture that he became her civilizer. From him, in whose wide deep
mind the whole mediæval theory of the world and human life mirrored
itself, did mediæval society take the form and impress which it
retained for centuries, and the traces whereof are among us and upon
us to this day.
The great Emperor was buried at Aachen, in that basilica which it had
been the delight of his later years to erect and adorn with the
treasures of ancient art. His tomb under the dome--where now we see an
enormous slab, with the words 'Carolo Magno'--was inscribed, '_Magnus
atque Orthodoxus Imperator_[84].' Poets, fostered by his own zeal,
sang of him who had given to the Franks the sway of Romulus[85]. The
gorgeous drapery of romance gradually wreathed itself round his name,
till by canonization as a saint he received the highest glory the
world or the Church could confer. For the Roman Church claimed then,
as she claims still, the privilege which humanity in one form or
another seems scarce able to deny itself, of raising to honours almost
divine its great departed; and as in pagan times temples had risen to
a deified Emperor, so churches were dedicated to St. Charlemagne.
Between Sanctus Carolus and Divus Julius how strange an analogy and
how strange a contrast!
FOOTNOTES:
[60] Before the end of the tenth century we find the monk Benedict of
Soracte ascribing to Charles an expedition to Palestine, and other
marvellous exploits. The romance which passes under the name of
Archbishop Turpin is well known. All the best stories about
Charles--and some of them are very good--may be found in the book of
the Monk of St. Gall. Many refer to his dealings with the bishops,
towards whom he is described as acting like a good-humoured
schoolmaster.
[61] Baronius, _Ann._, ad ann. 800; Bellarminus, _De translatione
imperii Romani adversus Illyricum_; Spanhemius, _De ficta translatione
imperii_; Conringius, _De imperio Romano Germanico_.
[62] See especially Greenwood, _Cathedra Petri_, vol. iii. p. 109.
[63] _Ann. Lauresb. ap._ Pertz, _M. G. H._ i.
[64] _Apud_ Pertz, _M. G. H._ i.
[65] _Vitæ Pontif._ in Mur. _S. R. I._ Anastasius in reporting the
shout of the people omits the word 'Romanorum,' which the other
annalists insert after 'imperatori.' The balance of probability is
certainly in his favour.
[66] Lorentz, _Leben Alcuins_. And cf. Döllinger, _Das Kaiserthum
Karls des Grossen und seiner Nachfolger_.
[67] See a very learned and interesting tract entitled _Das Kaiserthum
Karls des Grossen und seiner Nachfolger_, recently published by Dr. v.
Döllinger of Munich.
[68] Ἀποκρισιάριοι παρὰ Καρούλλου καὶ Λέοντος αἰτούμενοι ζευχθῆναι
αὐτὴν τῷ Καρούλλῳ πρὸς γάμον καὶ ἑνῶσαι τὰ Ἑωὰ καὶ τὰ
Ἑσπερία.--Theoph. _Chron._ in _Corp. Scriptt. Hist. Byz._
[69] Their ambassadors at last saluted him by the desired title
'Laudes ei dixerunt imperatorem eum et basileum appellantes.' Eginh.
_Ann._, ad ann. 812.
[70] Harun er Rashid; Eginh. _Vita Karoli_, c. 16.
[71] So Pope John VIII in a document quoted by Waitz, _Deutsche
Verfassungs-geschichte_, iii.
[72] Pertz, _M. G. H._ iii. (legg. I.)
[73] Pütter, _Historical Development of the German Constitution_; so
too Conring, and esp. David Blondel, _Adv. Chiffletium_.
[74] 'Græcia capta ferum victorem cepit,' is repeated in this conquest
of the Teuton by the Roman.
[75] The notion that once prevailed that the Irminsûl was the 'pillar
of Hermann,' set up on the spot of the defeat of Varus, is now
generally discredited. Some German antiquaries take the pillar to be a
rude figure of the native god Irmin; but nothing seems to be known of
this alleged deity: and it is more probable that the name Irmin is
after all merely an altered form of the Keltic word which appears in
Welsh as Hir Vaen, the long stone (_Maen_, a stone). Thus the pillar,
so far from being the monument of the great Teutonic victory, would
commemorate a pre-Teutonic race, whose name for it the invading tribes
adopted. The Rev. Dr. Scott, of Westminster, to whose kindness I am
indebted for this explanation, informs me that a rude ditty recording
the destruction of the pillar by Charles was current on the spot a few
years ago. It ran thus:--
'Irmin slad Irmin
Sla Pfeifen sla Trommen
Der Kaiser wird kommen
Mit Hammer und Stangen
Wird Irmin uphangen.'
[76] Eginhard, _Ann_.
[77] Most probably the Scots of Ireland--Eginhard, _Vita Karoli_, cap.
16.
[78] Eginhard, _Vita Karoli_, cap. 23.
[79] Aix-la-Chapelle. See the lines in Pertz (_M. G. H._ ii.),
beginning,--
'Urbs Aquensis, urbs regalis,
Sedes regni principalis,
Prima regum curia.'
This city is commonly called Aken in English books of the seventeenth
century, and probably that ought to be taken as its proper English
name. That name has, however, fallen so entirely into disuse that I do
not venture to use it; and as the employment of the French name
Aix-la-Chapelle seems inevitably to produce the belief that the place
is and was, even in Charles's time, a French town, there is nothing
for it but to fall back upon the comparatively unfamiliar German name.
[80] Engilenheim, or Ingelheim, lies near the left shore of the Rhine
between Mentz and Bingen.
[81] Eginhard, _Vita Karoli_, cap. 29.
[82] Eginhard, _Vita Karoli_, cap. 17.
[83] It is not a little curious that of the three whom the modern
French have taken to be their national heroes all should have been
foreigners, and two foreign conquerors.
[84] This basilica was built upon the model of the church of the Holy
Sepulchre at Jerusalem, and as it was the first church of any size
that had been erected in those regions for centuries past, it excited
extraordinary interest among the Franks and Gauls. In many of its
features it greatly resembles the beautiful church of San Vitale, at
Ravenna (also modelled upon that of the Holy Sepulchre) which was
begun by Theodoric, and completed under Justinian. Probably San Vitale
was used as a pattern by Charles's architects: we know that he caused
marble columns to be brought from Ravenna to deck the church at
Aachen. Over the tomb of Charles, below the central dome (to which the
Gothic choir we now see was added some centuries later), there hangs a
huge chandelier, the gift of Frederick Barbarossa.
[85] 'Romuleum Francis præstitit imperium.'--Elegy of Ermoldus
Nigellus, in Pertz; _M. G. H._, t. i. So too Florus the Deacon,--
'Huic etenim cessit etiam gens Romula genti,
Regnorumque simul mater Roma inclyta cessit:
Huius ibi princeps regni diademata sumpsit
Munere apostolico, Christi munimine fretus.'