CAROLINGIAN AND ITALIAN EMPERORS.
[Sidenote: Lewis the Pious.]
[Sidenote: Partition of Verdun, A.D. 843.]
Lewis the Pious[86], left by Charles's death sole heir, had been some
years before associated with his father in the Empire, and had been
crowned by his own hands in a way which, intentionally or not,
appeared to deny the need of Papal sanction. But it was soon seen that
the strength to grasp the sceptre had not passed with it. Too mild to
restrain his turbulent nobles, and thrown by over-conscientiousness
into the hands of the clergy, he had reigned few years when
dissensions broke out on all sides. Charles had wished the Empire to
continue one, under the supremacy of a single Emperor, but with its
several parts, Lombardy, Aquitaine, Austrasia, Bavaria, each a kingdom
held by a scion of the reigning house. A scheme dangerous in itself,
and rendered more so by the absence or neglect of regular rules of
succession, could with difficulty have been managed by a wise and firm
monarch. Lewis tried in vain to satisfy his sons (Lothar, Lewis, and
Charles) by dividing and redividing: they rebelled; he was deposed,
and forced by the bishops to do penance; again restored, but without
power, a tool in the hands of contending factions. On his death the
sons flew to arms, and the first of the dynastic quarrels of modern
Europe was fought out on the field of Fontenay. In the partition
treaty of Verdun which followed, the Teutonic principle of equal
division among heirs triumphed over the Roman one of the transmission
of an indivisible Empire: the practical sovereignty of all three
brothers was admitted in their respective territories, a barren
precedence only reserved to Lothar, with the imperial title which he,
as the eldest, already enjoyed. A more important result was the
separation of the Gaulish and German nationalities. Their difference
of feeling, shewn already in the support of Lewis the Pious by the
Germans against the Gallo-Franks and the Church[87], took now a
permanent shape: modern Germany proclaims the era of A.D. 843 the
beginning of her national existence, and celebrated its thousandth
anniversary twenty-seven years ago. To Charles the Bald was given
Francia Occidentalis, that is to say, Neustria and Aquitaine; to
Lothar, who as Emperor must possess the two capitals, Rome and Aachen,
a long and narrow kingdom stretching from the North Sea to the
Mediterranean, and including the northern half of Italy: Lewis
(surnamed, from his kingdom, the German) received all east of the
Rhine, Franks, Saxons, Bavarians, Austria, Carinthia, with possible
supremacies over Czechs and Moravians beyond. Throughout these regions
German was spoken; through Charles's kingdom a corrupt tongue, equally
removed from Latin and from modern French. Lothar's, being mixed and
having no national basis, was the weakest of the three, and soon
dissolved into the separate sovereignties of Italy, Burgundy, and
Lotharingia, or, as we call it, Lorraine.
[Sidenote: End of the Carolingian Empire of the West, A.D. 888.]
On the tangled history of the period that follows it is not possible
to do more than touch. After passing from one branch of the
Carolingian line to another[88], the imperial sceptre was at last
possessed and disgraced by Charles the Fat, who united all the
dominions of his great-grandfather. This unworthy heir could not avail
himself of recovered territory to strengthen or defend the expiring
monarchy. He was driven out of Italy in A.D. 887, and his death in 888
has been usually taken as the date of the extinction of the
Carolingian Empire of the West. The Germans, still attached to the
ancient line, chose Arnulf, an illegitimate Carolingian, for their
king: he entered Italy and was crowned Emperor by his partizan Pope
Formosus, in 894. But Germany, divided and helpless, was in no
condition to maintain her power over the southern lands: Arnulf
retreated in haste, leaving Rome and Italy to sixty years of stormy
independence.
That time was indeed the nadir of order and civilization. From all
sides the torrent of barbarism which Charles the Great had stemmed was
rushing down upon his empire. The Saracen wasted the Mediterranean
coasts, and sacked Rome herself. The Dane and Norseman swept the
Atlantic and the North Sea, pierced France and Germany by their
rivers, burning, slaying, carrying off into captivity: pouring through
the Straits of Gibraltar, they fell upon Provence and Italy. By land,
while Wends and Czechs and Obotrites threw off the German yoke and
threatened the borders, the wild Hungarian bands, pressing in from the
steppes of the Caspian, dashed over Germany like the flying spray of a
new wave of barbarism, and carried the terror of their battleaxes to
the Apennines and the ocean. Under such strokes the already loosened
fabric swiftly dissolved. No one thought of common defence or wide
organization: the strong built castles, the weak became their
bondsmen, or took shelter under the cowl: the governor--count, abbot,
or bishop--tightened his grasp, turned a delegated into an
independent, a personal into a territorial authority, and hardly owned
a distant and feeble suzerain. The grand vision of a universal
Christian empire was utterly lost in the isolation, the antagonism,
the increasing localization of all powers: it might seem to have been
but a passing gleam from an older and better world.
[Sidenote: The German Kingdom.]
[Sidenote: Henry the Fowler.]
In Germany, the greatness of the evil worked at last its cure. When
the male line of the eastern branch of the Carolingians had ended in
Lewis (surnamed the Child), son of Arnulf, the chieftains chose and
the people accepted Conrad the Franconian, and after him Henry the
Saxon duke, both representing the female line of Charles. Henry laid
the foundations of a firm monarchy, driving back the Magyars and
Wends, recovering Lotharingia, founding towns to be centres of orderly
life and strongholds against Hungarian irruptions. He had meant to
claim at Rome his kingdom's rights, rights which Conrad's weakness had
at least asserted by the demand of tribute; but death overtook him,
and the plan was left to be fulfilled by Otto his son.
[Sidenote: Otto the Great.]
The Holy Roman Empire, taking the name in the sense which it commonly
bore in later centuries, as denoting the sovereignty of Germany and
Italy vested in a Germanic prince, is the creation of Otto the Great.
Substantially, it is true, as well as technically, it was a
prolongation of the Empire of Charles; and it rested (as will be shewn
in the sequel) upon ideas essentially the same as those which brought
about the coronation of A.D. 800. But a revival is always more or less
a revolution: the one hundred and fifty years that had passed since
the death of Charles had brought with them changes which made Otto's
position in Germany and Europe less commanding and less autocratic
than his predecessor's. With narrower geographical limits, his Empire
had a less plausible claim to be the heir of Rome's universal
dominion; and there were also differences in its inner character and
structure sufficient to justify us in considering Otto (as he is
usually considered by his countrymen) not a mere successor after an
interregnum, but rather a second founder of the imperial throne in the
West.
Before Otto's descent into Italy is described, something must be said
of the condition of that country, where circumstances had again made
possible the plan of Theodoric, permitted it to become an independent
kingdom, and attached the imperial title to its sovereign.
[Sidenote: Italian Emperors.]
The bestowal of the purple on Charles the Great was not really that
'translation of the Empire from the Greeks to the Franks,' which it
was afterwards described as having been. It was not meant to settle
the office in one nation or one dynasty: there was but an extension of
that principle of the equality of all Romans which had made Trajan and
Maximin Emperors. The '_arcanum imperii_,' whereof Tacitus speaks,
'_posse principem alibi quam Romæ fieri_[89],' had long before become
_alium quam Romanum_; and now, the names of Roman and Christian having
grown co-extensive, a barbarian chieftain was, as a Roman citizen,
eligible to the office of Roman Emperor. Treating him as such, the
people and pontiff of the capital had in the vacancy of the Eastern
throne asserted their ancient rights of election, and while attempting
to reverse the act of Constantine, had re-established the division of
Valentinian. The dignity was therefore in strictness personal to
Charles; in point of fact, and by consent, hereditarily transmissible,
just as it had formerly become in the families of Constantine and
Theodosius. To the Frankish crown or nation it was by no means legally
attached, though they might think it so; it had passed to their king
only because he was the greatest European potentate, and might equally
well pass to some stronger race, if any such appeared. Hence, when the
line of Carolingian Emperors ended in Charles the Fat, the rights of
Rome and Italy might be taken to revive, and there was nothing to
prevent the citizens from choosing whom they would. At that memorable
era (A.D. 888) the four kingdoms which this prince had united fell
asunder; West France, where Odo or Eudes then began to reign, was
never again united to Germany; East France (Germany) chose Arnulf;
Burgundy[90] split up into two principalities, in one of which
(Transjurane) Rudolf proclaimed himself king, while the other
(Cisjurane with Provence) submitted to Boso[91]; while Italy was
divided between the parties of Berengar of Friuli and Guido of
Spoleto. The former was chosen king by the estates of Lombardy; the
latter, and on his speedy death his son Lambert, was crowned Emperor
by the Pope. Arnulf's descent chased them away and vindicated the
claims of the Franks, but on his flight Italy and the anti-German
faction at Rome became again free. Berengar was made king of Italy,
and afterwards Emperor. Lewis of Burgundy, son of Boso, renounced his
fealty to Arnulf, and procured the imperial dignity, whose vain title
he retained through years of misery and exile, till A.D. 928[92]. None
of these Emperors were strong enough to rule well even in Italy;
beyond it they were not so much as recognized. The crown had become a
bauble with which unscrupulous Popes dazzled the vanity of princes
whom they summoned to their aid, and soothed the credulity of their
more honest supporters. The demoralization and confusion of Italy, the
shameless profligacy of Rome and her pontiffs during this period, were
enough to prevent a true Italian kingdom from being built up on the
basis of Roman choice and national unity. Italian indeed it can
scarcely be called, for these Emperors were still in blood and manners
Teutonic, and akin rather to their Transalpine enemies than their
Romanic subjects. But Italian it might soon have become under a
vigorous rule which should have organized it within and knit it
together to resist attacks from without. And therefore the attempt to
establish such a kingdom is remarkable, for it might have had great
consequences; might, if it had prospered, have spared Italy much
suffering and Germany endless waste of strength and blood. He who from
the summit of Milan cathedral sees across the misty plain the gleaming
turrets of its icy wall sweep in a great arc from North to West, may
well wonder that a land which nature has so severed from its
neighbours should, since history begins, have been always the victim
of their intrusive tyranny.
[Sidenote: Adelheid Queen of Italy.]
[Sidenote: Otto's first expedition into Italy, A.D. 951.]
[Sidenote: Invitation sent by the Pope to Otto.]
[Sidenote: Motives for reviving the Empire.]
In A.D. 924 died Berengar, the last of these phantom Emperors. After
him Hugh of Burgundy, and Lothar his son, reigned as kings of Italy,
if puppets in the hands of a riotous aristocracy can be so called.
Rome was meanwhile ruled by the consul or senator Alberic[93], who had
renewed her never quite extinct republican institutions, and in the
degradation of the papacy was almost absolute in the city. Lothar
dying, his widow Adelheid[94] was sought in marriage by Adalbert son
of Berengar II, the new Italian monarch. A gleam of romance is shed on
the Empire's revival by her beauty and her adventures. Rejecting the
odious alliance, she was seized by Berengar, escaped with difficulty
from the loathsome prison where his barbarity had confined her, and
appealed to Otto the German king, the model of that knightly virtue
which was beginning to shew itself after the fierce brutality of the
last age. He listened, descended into Lombardy by the Adige valley,
espoused the injured queen, and forced Berengar to hold his kingdom as
a vassal of the East Frankish crown. That prince was turbulent and
faithless; new complaints reached ere long his liege lord, and envoys
from the Pope offered Otto the imperial title if he would re-visit and
pacify Italy. The proposal was well-timed. Men still thought, as they
had thought in the centuries before the Carolingians, that the Empire
was suspended, not extinct; and the desire to see its effective power
restored, the belief that without it the world could never be right,
might seem better grounded than it had been before the coronation of
Charles. Then the imperial name had recalled only the faint memories
of Roman majesty and order; now it was also associated with the golden
age of the first Frankish Emperor, when a single firm and just hand
had guided the state, reformed the church, repressed the excesses of
local power: when Christianity had advanced against heathendom,
civilizing as she went, fearing neither Hun nor Paynim. One annalist
tells us that Charles was elected 'lest the pagans should insult the
Christians, if the name of Emperor should have ceased among the
Christians[95].' The motive would be bitterly enforced by the
calamities of the last fifty years. In a time of disintegration,
confusion, strife, all the longings of every wiser and better soul for
unity, for peace and law, for some bond to bring Christian men and
Christian states together against the common enemy of the faith, were
but so many cries for the restoration of the Roman Empire[96]. These
were the feelings that on the field of Merseburg broke forth in the
shout of 'Henry the Emperor:' these the hopes of the Teutonic host
when after the great deliverance of the Lechfeld they greeted Otto,
conqueror of the Magyars, as 'Imperator Augustus, Pater Patriæ[97].'
[Sidenote: Condition of Italy.]
The anarchy which an Emperor was needed to heal was at its worst in
Italy, desolated by the feuds of a crowd of petty princes. A
succession of infamous Popes, raised by means yet more infamous, the
lovers and sons of Theodora and Marozia, had disgraced the chair of
the Apostle, and though Rome herself might be lost to decency, Western
Christendom was roused to anger and alarm. Men had not yet learned to
satisfy their consciences by separating the person from the office.
The rule of Alberic had been succeeded by the wildest confusion, and
demands were raised for the renewal of that imperial authority which
all admitted in theory[98], and which nothing but the resolute
opposition of Alberic himself had prevented Otto from claiming in 951.
From the Byzantine Empire, whither Italy was more than once tempted to
turn, nothing could be hoped; its dangers from foreign enemies were
aggravated by the plots of the court and the seditions of the capital;
it was becoming more and more alienated from the West by the Photian
schism and the question regarding the Procession of the Holy Ghost,
which that quarrel had started. Germany was extending and
consolidating herself, had escaped domestic perils, and might think of
reviving ancient claims. No one could be more willing to revive them
than Otto the Great. His ardent spirit, after waging a bold and
successful struggle against the turbulent magnates of his German
realm, had engaged him in wars with the surrounding nations, and was
now captivated by the vision of a wider sway and a loftier
world-embracing dignity. Nor was the prospect which the papal offer
opened up less welcome to his people. Aachen, their capital, was the
ancestral home of the house of Pipin: their sovereign, although
himself a Saxon by race, titled himself king of the Franks, in
opposition to the Frankish rulers of the Western branch, whose
Teutonic character was disappearing among the Romans of Gaul; they
held themselves in every way the true representatives of the
Carolingian power, and accounted the period since Arnulf's death
nothing but an interregnum which had suspended but not impaired their
rights over Rome. 'For so long,' says a writer of the time, 'as there
remain kings of the Franks, so long will the dignity of the Roman
Empire not wholly perish, seeing that it will abide in its
kings[99].' The recovery of Italy was therefore to German eyes a
righteous as well as a glorious design: approved by the Teutonic
Church which had lately been negotiating with Rome on the subject of
missions to the heathen; embraced by the people, who saw in it an
accession of strength to their young kingdom. Everything smiled on
Otto's enterprise, and the connection which was destined to bring so
much strife and woe to Germany and to Italy was welcomed by the wisest
of both countries as the beginning of a better era.
[Sidenote: Descent of Otto the Great into Italy.]
[Sidenote: His coronation at Rome, A.D. 962.]
Whatever were Otto's own feelings, whether or not he felt that he was
sacrificing, as modern writers have thought that he did sacrifice, the
greatness of his German kingdom to the lust of universal dominion, he
shewed no hesitation in his acts. Descending from the Alps with an
overpowering force, he was acknowledged as king of Italy at
Pavia[100]; and, having first taken an oath to protect the Holy See
and respect the liberties of the city, advanced to Rome. There, with
Adelheid his queen, he was crowned by John XII, on the day of the
Purification, the second of February, A.D. 962. The details of his
election and coronation are unfortunately still more scanty than in
the case of his great predecessor. Most of our authorities represent
the act as of the Pope's favour[101], yet it is plain that the consent
of the people was still thought an essential part of the ceremony, and
that Otto rested after all on his host of conquering Saxons. Be this
as it may, there was neither question raised nor opposition made in
Rome; the usual courtesies and promises were exchanged between Emperor
and Pope, the latter owning himself a subject, and the citizens swore
for the future to elect no pontiff without Otto's consent.
FOOTNOTES:
[86] Usage has established this translation of 'Hludowicus Pius,' but
'gentle' or 'kind-hearted' would better express the meaning of the
epithet.
[87] Von Ranke discovers in this early traces of the aversion of the
Germans to the pretensions of the spiritual power.--_History of
Germany during the Reformation_: Introduction.
[88] Singularly enough, when one thinks of modern claims, the dynasty
of France (Francia occidentalis) had the least share of it. Charles
the Bald was the only West Frankish Emperor, and reigned a very short
time.
[89] Tac. _Hist._ i. 4.
[90] For an account of the various applications of the name Burgundy,
see Appendix, Note A.
[91] The accession of Boso took place in A.D. 877, eleven years before
Charles the Fat's death. But the new kingdom could not be considered
legally settled until the latter date, and its establishment is at any
rate a part of that general break-up of the great Carolingian empire
whereof A.D. 888 marks the crisis. See Appendix A at the end.
It is a curious mark of the reverence paid to the Carolingian blood,
that Boso, a powerful and ambitious prince, seems to have chiefly
rested his claims on the fact that he was husband of Irmingard,
daughter of the Emperor Lewis II. Baron de Gingins la Sarraz quotes a
charter of his (drawn up when he seems to have doubted whether to call
himself king) which begins, 'Ego Boso Dei gratia id quod sum, et
coniux mea Irmingardis proles imperialis.'
[92] Lewis had been surprised by Berengar at Verona, blinded, and
forced to take refuge in his own kingdom of Provence.
[93] Alberic is called variously senator, consul, patrician, and
prince of the Romans.
[94] Adelheid was daughter of Rudolf, king of Trans-Jurane Burgundy.
She was at this time in her nineteenth year.
[95] _Chron. Moiss._, in Pertz; _M. G. H._ i. 305.
[96] See especially the poem of Florus the Deacon (printed in the
Benedictine collection and in Migne), a bitter lament over the
dissolution of the Carolingian Empire. It is too long for quotation. I
give four lines here:--
'Quid faciant populi quos ingens alluit Hister,
Quos Rhenus Rhodanusque rigant, Ligerisve, Padusve,
Quos omnes dudum tenuit concordia nexos,
Foedere nunc rupto divortia moesta fatigant.'
[97] Witukind, _Annales_, in Pertz. It may, however, be doubted
whether the annalist is not here giving a very free rendering of the
triumphant cries of the German army.
[98] Cf. esp. the '_Libellus de imperatoria potestate in urbe Roma_,'
in Pertz.
[99] 'Licet videamus Romanorum regnum in maxima parte jam destructum,
tamen quamdiu reges Francorum duraverint qui Romanum imperium tenere
debent, dignitas Romani imperii ex toto non peribit, quia stabit in
regibus suis.'--_Liber de Antichristo_, addressed by Adso, abbot of
Moutier-en-Der, to queen Gerberga (circa A.D. 950).
[100] From the money which Otto struck in Italy, it seems probable
that he did occasionally use the title of king of Italy or of the
Lombards. That he was crowned can hardly be considered quite certain.
[101] 'A papa imperator ordinatur,' says Hermannus Contractus.
'Dominum Ottonem, ad hoc usque vocatum regem, non solum Romano sed et
pœne totius Europæ populo acclamante imperatorem consecravit
Augustum.'--_Annal. Quedlinb._, ad ann. 962. 'Benedictionem a domno
apostolico Iohanne, cuius rogatione huc venit, cum sua coniuge promeruit
imperialem ac patronus Romanæ effectus est ecclesiæ.'--Thietmar.
'Acclamatione totius Romani populi ab apostolico Iohanne, filio
Alberici, imperator et Augustus vocatur et ordinatur.'--Continuator
Reginonis. And similarly the other annalists.