FRANCE The Eastern Frontier, 1598-1789.]

Absorption of land and power by the aristocracy of Gaul.

The aristocracy, on the contrary, went on increasing in power, and

eventually became masters of the situation. It was through them that the

emperor, theoretically absolute, practically carried on his

administration; but he was no longer either strong or a divinity, and

possessed nothing but the semblance of omnipotence. His official

despotism was opposed by the passive but invincible competition of an

aristocracy, more powerful than himself because it derived its support

from the revived relation of patron and dependants. But though the

aristocracy administered, yet they did not govern. They suffered, as did

the Empire, from a general state of lassitude. Like their private life,

their public life, no longer stimulated by struggles and difficulties,

had become sluggish; their power of initiative was enfeebled. Feeling

their incapacity they no longer embarked on great political schemes; and

the army, the instrument by which such schemes were carried on, was only

held together by the force of habit. In this society, where there was no

traffic in anything but wealth and ideas, the soldier was nothing more

than an agitator or a parasite. The egoism of the upper classes held

military duty in contempt, while their avarice depopulated the

countryside, whence the legions had drawn their recruits. And now come

the barbarians! A prey to perpetual alarm, the people entrenched

themselves behind those high walls of the _oppida_ which Roman security

had razed to the ground, but imperial impotence had restored, and where

life in the middle ages was destined to vegetate in unrestful isolation.

Intellectual decadence of Gaul.

Amidst this general apathy, intellectual activity alone persisted. In

the 4th century there was a veritable renaissance in Gaul, the last

outburst of a dying flame, which yet bore witness also to the general

decadence. The agreeable versification of an amateur like Ausonius, the

refined panegyrics of a Eumenius, disguising nullity of thought beneath

elegance of form, already foretold the perilous sterility of

scholasticism. Art, so widespread in the wealthy villas of Gaul,

contented itself with imitation, produced nothing original and remained

mediocre. Human curiosity, no longer concerned with philosophy and

science, seemed as though stifled, religious polemics alone continuing

to hold public attention. Disinclination for the self-sacrifice of

active life and weariness of the things of the earth lead naturally to

absorption in the things of heaven. After bringing about the success of

the Asiatic cults of Mithra and Cybele, these same factors now assured

the triumph over exhausted paganism of yet another oriental

religion--Christianity--after a duel which had lasted two centuries.

Christianity in Gaul.

This new faith had appeared to Constantine likely to infuse young and

healthy blood into the Empire. In reality Christianity, which had

contributed not a little to stimulate the political unity of continental

Gaul, now tended to dissolve it by destroying that religious unity which

had heretofore been its complement. Before this there had been complete

harmony between Church and State; but afterwards came indifference and

then disagreement between political and religious institutions, between

the City of God and that of Caesar. Christianity, introduced into Gaul

during the 1st century of the Christian era by those foreign merchants

who traded along the coasts of the Mediterranean, had by the middle of

the 2nd century founded communities at Vienne, at Autun and at Lyons.

Their propagandizing zeal soon exposed them to the wrath of an ignorant

populace and the contempt of the educated; and thus it was that in A.D.

177, under Marcus Aurelius, the Church of Lyons, founded by St Pothinus,

suffered those persecutions which were the effective cause of her

ultimate victory. These Christian communities, disguised under the

legally authorized name of burial societies, gradually formed a vast

secret cosmopolitan association, superimposed upon Roman society but

incompatible with the Empire. Christianity had to be either destroyed or

absorbed. The persecutions under Aurelian and Diocletian almost

succeeded in accomplishing the former; the Christian churches were saved

by the instability of the existing authorities, by military anarchy and

by the incursions of the barbarians. Despite tortures and martyrdoms,

and thanks to the seven apostles sent from Rome in 250, during the 3rd

century their branches extended all over Gaul.

Triumph of Christianity in Gaul.

The emperors had now to make terms with these churches, which served to

group together all sorts of malcontents, and this was the object of the

edict of Milan (313), by which the Church, at the outset simply a Jewish

institution, was naturalized as Roman; while in 325 the Council of

Nicaea endowed her with unity. But for the security and the power thus

attained she had to pay with her independence. On the other hand, pagan

and Christian elements in society existed side by side without

intermingling, and even openly antagonistic to each other--one

aristocratic and the other democratic. In order to induce the masses of

the people once more to become loyal to the imperial form of government

the emperor Julian tried by founding a new religion to give its

functionaries a religious prestige which should impress the popular

mind. His plan failed; and the emperor Theodosius, aided by Ambrose,

bishop of Milan, preferred to make the Christian clergy into a body of

imperial and conservative officials; while in return for their adhesion

he abolished the Arian heresy and paganism itself, which could not

survive without his support. Thenceforward it was in the name of Christ

that persecutions took place in an Empire now entirely won over to

Christianity.

Organisation of the Church.

In Gaul the most famous leader of this first merciless, if still

perilous crusade, was a soldier-monk, Saint Martin of Tours. Thanks to

him and his disciples in the middle of the 4th century and the beginning

of the 5th many of the towns possessed well-established churches; but

the militant ardour of monks and centuries of labour were needed to

conquer the country districts, and in the meantime both dogma and

internal organization were subjected to important modifications. As

regards the former the Church adopted a course midway between

metaphysical explanations and historical traditions, and reconciled the

more extreme theories; while with the admission of pagans a great deal

of paganism itself was introduced. On the other hand, the need for

political and social order involved the necessity for a disciplined and

homogeneous religious body; the exercise of power, moreover, soon

transformed the democratic Christianity of the earlier churches into a

federation of little conservative monarchies. The increasing number of

her adherents, and her inexperience of government on such a vast and

complicated scale, obliged her to comply with political necessity and to

adopt the system of the state and its social customs. The Church was no

longer a fraternity, on a footing of equality, with freedom of belief

and tentative as to dogma, but an authoritative aristocratic hierarchy.

The episcopate was now recruited from the great families in the same way

as the imperial and the municipal public services. The Church called on

the emperor to convoke and preside over her councils and to combat

heresy; and in order more effectually to crush the latter she replaced

primitive independence and local diversity by uniformity of doctrine and

worship, and by the hierarchy of dioceses and ecclesiastical provinces.

The heads of the Church, her bishops, her metropolitans, took the titles

of their pagan predecessors as well as their places, and their

jurisdiction was enforced by the laws of the state. Rich and powerful

chiefs, they were administrators as much as priests: Germanus (Germain),

bishop of Auxerre (d. 448), St Eucherius of Lyons (d. 450), Apollinaris

Sidonius of Clermont (d. c. 490) assumed the leadership of society, fed

the poor, levied tithes, administered justice, and in the towns where

they resided, surrounded by priests and deacons, ruled both in temporal

and spiritual matters.

The Church's independence of the Empire.

But the humiliation of Theodosius before St Ambrose proved that the

emperor could never claim to be a pontiff, and that the dogma of the

Church remained independent of the sovereign as well as of the people;

if she sacrificed her liberty it was but to claim it again and maintain

it more effectively amid the general languor. The Church thus escaped

the unpopularity of this decadent empire, and during the 5th century she

provided a refuge for all those who, wishing to preserve the Roman

unity, were terrified by the blackness of the horizon. In fact, whilst

in the Eastern Church the metaphysical ardour of the Greeks was spending

itself in terrible combats in the oecumenical councils over the

interpretation of the Nicene Creed, the clergy of Gaul, more simple and

strict in their faith, abjured these theological logomachies; from the

first they had preferred action to criticism and had taken no part in

the great controversy on free-will raised by Pelagius. Another kind of

warfare was about to absorb their whole attention; the barbarians were

attacking the frontiers of the Empire on every side, and their advent

once again modified Gallo-Roman civilization.

The barbarian invasion.

For centuries they had been silently massing themselves around ancient

Europe, whether Iberian, Celtic or Roman. Many times already during that

evening of a decadent civilization, their threatening presence had

seemed like a dark cloud veiling the radiant sky of the peoples

established on the Mediterranean seaboard. The cruel lightning of the

sword of Brennus had illumined the night, setting Rome or Delphi on

fire. Sometimes the storm had burst over Gaul, and there had been need

of a Marius to stem the torrent of Cimbri and Teutons, or of a Caesar to

drive back the Helvetians into their mountains. On the morrow the

western horizon would clear again, until some such disaster as that

which befell Varus would come to mortify cruelly the pride of an

Augustus. The Romans had soon abandoned hope of conquering Germany, with

its fluctuating frontiers and nomadic inhabitants. For more than two

centuries they had remained prudently entrenched behind the earthworks

that extended from Cologne to Ratisbon (Regensburg); but the intestine

feuds which prevailed among the barbarians and were fostered by Rome,

the organization under bold and turbulent chiefs of the bands greedy for

booty, the pressing forward on populations already settled of tribes in

their rear; all this caused the Germanic invasion to filter by degrees

across the frontier. It was the work of several generations and took

various forms, by turns and simultaneously colonization and aggression;

but from this time forward the _pax romana_ was at an end. The emperors

Probus, Constantine, Julian and Valentinian, themselves foreigners, were

worn out with repulsing these repeated assaults, and the general

enervation of society did the rest. The barbarians gradually became part

of the Roman population; they permeated the army, until after Theodosius

they recruited it exclusively; they permeated civilian society as

colonists and agriculturists, till the command of the army and of

important public duties was given over to a Stilicho or a Crocus. Thus

Rome allowed the wolves to mingle with the dogs in watching over the

flock, just at a time when the civil wars of the 4th century had denuded

the Rhenish frontier of troops, whose numbers had already been

diminished by Constantine. Then at the beginning of the 5th century,

during a furious irruption of Germans fleeing before Huns, the _limes_

was carried away (406-407); and for more than a hundred years the

torrent of fugitives swept through the Empire, which retreated behind

the Alps, there to breathe its last.

The Germans in Gaul.

The Franks before Clovis.

Whilst for ten years Alaric's Goths and Stilicho's Vandals were

drenching Italy with blood, the Vandals and the Alani from the steppes

of the Black Sea, dragging in their wake the reluctant German tribes who

had been allies of Rome and who had already settled down to the

cultivation of their lands, invaded the now abandoned Gaul, and having

come as far as the Pyrenees, crossed over them. After the passing of

this torrent the Visigoths, under their kings Ataulphus, Wallia and

Theodoric, still dazzled by the splendours of this immense empire,

established themselves like submissive vassals in Aquitaine, with

Toulouse as their capital. About the same time the Burgundians settled

even more peaceably in Rhenish Gaul, and, after 456, to the west of the

Jura in the valleys of the Saône and the Rhône. The original Franks of

Germany, already established in the Empire, and pressed upon by the same

Huns who had already forced the Goths across the Danube, passed beyond

the Rhine and occupied north-eastern Gaul; Ripuarians of the Rhine

establishing themselves on the Sambre and the Meuse, and Salians in

Belgium, as far as the great fortified highroad from Bavai to Cologne.

Accepted as allies, and supported by Roman prestige and by the active

authority of the general Aetius, all these barbarians rallied round him

and the Romans of Gaul, and in 451 defeated the hordes of Attila, who

had advanced as far as Orleans, at the great battle of the Catalaunian

plains.

The clergy and the barbarians.

Thus at the end of the 5th century the Roman empire was nothing but a

heap of ruins, and fidelity to the empire was now only maintained by the

Catholic Church; she alone survived, as rich, as much honoured as ever,

and more powerful, owing to the disappearance of the imperial officials

for whom she had found substitutes, and the decadence of the municipal

bodies into whose inheritance she had entered. Owing to her the City of

God gradually replaced the Roman imperial polity and preserved its

civilization; while the Church allied herself more closely with the new

kingdoms than she had ever done with the Empire. In the Gothic or

Burgundian states of the period the bishops, after having for a time

opposed the barbarian invaders, sought and obtained from their chief the

support formerly received from the emperor. Apollinaris Sidonius paid

court to Euric, since 476 the independent king of the Visigoths, against

whom he had defended Auvergne; and Avitus, bishop of Vienne, was

graciously received by Gundibald, king of the Burgundians. But these

princes were Arians, i.e. foreigners among the Catholic population; the

alliance sought for by the Church could not reach her from that source,

and it was from the rude and pagan Franks that she gained the material

support which she still lacked. The conversion of Clovis was a

master-stroke; it was fortunate both for himself and for the Franks.

Unity in faith brought about unity in law.

Clovis, the Frankish chief.

Clovis as a Roman officer.

Clovis was king of the Sicambrians, one of the tribes of the Salian

Franks. Having established themselves in the plains of Northern Gaul,

but driven by the necessity of finding new land to cultivate, in the

days of their king Childeric they had descended into the fertile valleys

of the Somme and the Oise. Clovis's victory at Soissons over the last

troops left in the service of Rome (486) extended their settlements as

far as the Loire. By his conversion, which was due to his wife Clotilda

and to Remigius, bishop of Reims, more than to the victory of Tolbiac

over the Alamanni, Clovis made definitely sure of the Roman inhabitants

and gave the Church an army (496). Thenceforward he devoted himself to

the foundation of the Frankish monarchy by driving the exhausted and

demoralized heretics out of Gaul, and by putting himself in the place of

the now enfeebled emperor. In 500 he conquered Gundibald, king of the

Burgundians, reduced him to a kind of vassalage, and forced him into

reiterated promises of conversion to orthodoxy. In 507 he conquered and

killed Alaric II., king of the Arian Visigoths, and drove the latter

into Spain. Legend adorned his campaign in Aquitaine with miracles; the

bishops were the declared allies of both him and his son Theuderich

(Thierry) after his conquest of Auvergne. At Tours he received from the

distant emperor at Constantinople the diploma and insignia of

_patricius_ and Roman consul, which legalized his military conquests by

putting him in possession of civil powers. From this time forward a

great historic transformation was effected in the eyes of the bishops

and of the Gallo-Romans; the Frankish chief took the place of the

ancient emperors. Instead of blaming him for the murder of the lesser

kings of the Franks, his relatives, by which he had accomplished the

union of the Frankish tribes, they saw in this the hand of God rewarding

a faithful soldier and a converted pagan. He became their king, their

new David, as the Christian emperors had formerly been; he built

churches, endowed monasteries, protected St Vaast (Vedastus, d. 540),

first bishop of Arras and Cambrai, who restored Christianity in northern

Gaul. Like the emperors before him Clovis, too, reigned over the Church.

Of his own authority he called together a council at Orleans in 511, the

year of his death. He was already the grand distributor of

ecclesiastical benefices, pending the time when his successors were to

confirm the episcopal elections, and his power began to take on a more

and more absolute character. But though he felt the ascendant influence

of Christian teaching, he was not really penetrated by its spirit; a

professing Christian, and a friend to the episcopate, Clovis remained a

barbarian, crafty and ruthless. The bloody tragedies which disfigured

the end of his reign bear sad witness to this; they were a fit prelude

to that period during the course of which, as Gregory of Tours said,

"barbarism was let loose."

The sons of Clovis.

The conquest of Gaul, begun by Clovis, was finished by his sons:

Theuderich, Chlodomer, Childebert and Clotaire. In three successive

campaigns, from 523 to 532, they annihilated the Burgundian kingdom,

which had maintained its independence, and had endured for nearly a

century. Favoured by the war between Justinian, the East Roman emperor,

and Theodoric's Ostrogoths, the Frankish kings divided Provence among

them as they had done in the case of Burgundy. Thus the whole of Gaul

was subjected to the sons of Clovis, except Septimania in the

south-east, where the Visigoths still maintained their power. The

Frankish armies then overflowed into the neighbouring countries and

began to pillage them. Their disorderly cohorts made an attack upon

Italy, which was repulsed by the Lombards, and another on Spain with the

same want of success; but beyond the Rhine they embarked upon the

conquest of Germany, where Clovis had already reduced to submission the

country on the banks of the Maine, later known as Franconia. In 531 the

Thuringians in the centre of Germany were brought into subjection by his

eldest son, King Theuderich, and about the same time the Bavarians were

united to the Franks, though preserving a certain autonomy. The

Merovingian monarchy thus attained the utmost limits of its territorial

expansion, bounded as it was by the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Rhine; it

exercised influence over the whole of Germany, which it threw open to

the Christian missionaries, and its conquests formed the first

beginnings of German history.

Civil wars.

But to these wars of aggrandizement and pillage succeeded those

fratricidal struggles which disgraced the whole of the sixth century and

arrested the expansion of the Merovingian power. When Clotaire, the last

surviving son of Clovis, died in 561, the kingdom was divided between

his four sons like some piece of private property, as in 511, and

according to the German method. The capitals of these four

kings--Charibert, who died in 567, Guntram, Sigebert and Chilperic--were

Paris, Orleans, Reims and Soissons--all near one another and north of

the Loire, where the Germanic inhabitants predominated; but their

respective boundaries were so confused that disputes were inevitable.

There was no trace of a political idea in these disputes; the mutual

hatred of two women aggravated jealousy to the point of causing terrible

civil wars from 561 to 613, and these finally created a national

conflict which resulted in the dismemberment of the Frankish empire.

Recognized, in fact, already as separate provinces were Austrasia, or

the eastern kingdom, Neustria, or north-west Gaul and Burgundy;

Aquitaine alone was as yet undifferentiated.

Fredegond and Brunhilda.

Sigebert had married Brunhilda, the daughter of a Visigoth king; she was

beautiful and well educated, having been brought up in Spain, where

Roman civilization still flourished. Chilperic had married Galswintha,

one of Brunhilda's sisters, for the sake of her wealth; but despite this

marriage he had continued his amours with a waiting-woman named

Fredegond, who pushed ambition to the point of crime, and she induced

him to get rid of Galswintha. In order to avenge her sister, Brunhilda

incited Sigebert to begin a war which terminated in 575 with the

assassination of Sigebert by Fredegond at the very moment when, thanks

to the help of the Germans, he had gained the victory, and with the

imprisonment of Brunhilda at Rouen. Fredegond subsequently caused the

death of Merovech (Mérovée), the son of Chilperic, who had been secretly

married to Brunhilda, and that of Bishop Praetextatus, who had

solemnized their union. After this, Fredegond endeavoured to restore

imperial finance to a state of solvency, and to set up a more regular

form of government in her Neustria, which was less romanized and less

wealthy than Burgundy, where Guntram was reigning, and less turbulent

than the eastern kingdom, where most of the great warlike chiefs with

their large landed estates were somewhat impatient of royal authority.

But the accidental death of two of her children, the assassination of

her husband in 584, and the advice of the Church, induced her to make

overtures to her brother-in-law Guntram. A lover of peace through sheer

cowardice and as depraved in his morals as Chilperic, Guntram had played

a vacillating and purely self-interested part in the family tragedy. He

declared himself the protector of Fredegond, but his death in 593

delivered up Burgundy and Neustria to Brunhilda's son Childebert, king

of Austrasia, in consequence of the treaty of Andelot, made in 587. An

ephemeral triumph, however; for Childebert died in 596, followed a year

later by Fredegond.

The fall of Brunhilda.

The whole of Gaul was now handed over to three children: Childebert's

two sons, Theudebert and Theuderich (Thierry), and the son of Fredegond,

Clotaire II. The latter, having vanquished the two former at Latofao in

596, was in turn beaten by them at Dormelles in 600, and a year later a

fresh fratricidal struggle broke out between the two grandsons of the

aged Brunhilda. Theuderich joined with Clotaire against Theodobert, and

invaded his brother's kingdom, conquering first an army of Austrasians

and then one composed of Saxons and Thuringians. Strife began again in

613 in consequence of Theuderich's desire to join Austrasia to Neustria,

but his death delivered the kingdoms into the hands of Clotaire II. This

weak king leant for support upon the nobles of Burgundy and Austrasia,

impatient as they were of obedience to a woman and the representative of

Rome. The ecclesiastical party also abandoned Brunhilda because of her

persecution of their saints, after which Clotaire, having now got the

upper hand, thanks to the defection of the Austrasian nobles, of Arnulf,

bishop of Metz, with his brother Pippin, and of Warnachaire, mayor of

the palace, made a terrible end of Brunhilda in 613. Her long reign had

not lacked intelligence and even greatness; she alone, amid all these

princes, warped by self-indulgence or weakened by discord, had behaved

like a statesman, and she alone understood the obligations of the

government she had inherited. She wished to abolish the fatal tradition

of dividing up the kingdom, which so constantly prevented any possible

unity; in opposition to the nobles she used her royal authority to

maintain the Roman principles of order and regular administration.

Towards the Church she held a courteous but firm policy, renewing

relations between the Frankish kingdom and the pope; and she so far

maintained the greatness of the Empire that tradition associated her

name with the Roman roads in the north of France, entitling them "les

chaussées de Brunehaut."

Clotaire II.

Like his grandfather, Clotaire II. reigned over a once more united Gaul

of Franks and Gallo-Romans, and like Clovis he was not too well obeyed

by the nobles; moreover, his had been a victory more for the aristocracy

than for the crown, since it limited the power of the latter. Not that

the permanent constitution of the 18th of October 614 was of the nature

of an anti-monarchic revolution, for the royal power still remained very

great, decking itself with the pompous titles of the Empire, and

continuing to be the dominant institution; but the reservations which

Clotaire II. had to make in conceding the demands of the bishops and

great laymen show the extent and importance of the concessions these

latter were already aiming at. The bishops, the real inheritors of the

imperial idea of government, had become great landowners through

enormous donations made to the Church, and allied as they were to the

aristocracy, whence their ranks were continually recruited, they had

gradually identified themselves with the interests of their class and

had adopted its customs; while thanks to long minorities and civil wars

the aristocracy of the high officials had taken an equally important

social position. The treaty of Andelot in 587 had already decided that

the benefices or lands granted to them by the kings should be held for

life. In the 7th century the Merovingian kings adopted the custom of

summoning them all, and not merely the officials of their _Palatium_, to

discuss political affairs; they began, moreover, to choose their counts

or administrators from among the great landholders. This necessity for

approval and support points to yet another alteration in the nature of

the royal power, absolute as it was in theory.

The mayors of the palace.

The Mayoralty of the Palace aimed a third and more serious blow at the

royal authority. By degrees, the high officials of the _Palatium_,

whether secular or ecclesiastical, and also the provincial counts, had

rallied round the mayors of the palace as their real leaders. As under

the Empire, the Palatium was both royal court and centre of government,

with the same bureaucratic hierarchy and the same forms of

administration; and the mayor of the palace was premier official of this

itinerant court and ambulatory government. Moreover, since the palace

controlled the whole of each kingdom, the mayors gradually extended

their official authority so as to include functionaries and agents of

every kind, instead of merely those attached immediately to the king's

person. They suggested candidates for office for the royal selection,

often appointed office-holders, and, by royal warrant, supported or

condemned them. Mere subordinates while the royal power was strong, they

had become, owing to the frequent minorities, and to civil wars which

broke the tradition of obedience, the all-powerful ministers of kings

nominally absolute but without any real authority. Before long they

ceased to claim an even greater degree of independence than that of

Warnachaire, who forced Clotaire II. to swear that he should never be

deprived of his mayoralty of Burgundy; they wished to take the first

place in the kingdoms they governed, and to be able to attack

neighbouring kingdoms on their own account. A struggle, motived by

self-interest, no doubt; but a struggle, too, of opposing principles.

Since the Frankish monarchy was now in their power some of them tried to

re-establish the unity of that monarchy in all its integrity, together

with the superiority of the State over the Church; others, faithless to

the idea of unity, saw in the disintegration of the state and the

supremacy of the nobles a warrant for their own independence. These two

tendencies were destined to strive against one another during an entire

century (613-714), and to occasion two periods of violent conflict,

which, divided by a kind of renascence of royalty, were to end at last

in the triumphant substitution of the Austrasian mayors for royalty and

aristocracy alike.

First struggle between monarchy and mayoralty.

The first struggle began on the accession of Clotaire II., when

Austrasia, having had a king of her own ever since 561, demanded one

now. In 623 Clotaire was obliged to send her his son Dagobert and even

to extend his territory. But in Dagobert's name two men ruled,

representing the union of the official aristocracy and the Church. One,

Pippin of Landen, derived his power from his position as mayor of the

palace, from great estates in Aquitaine and between the Meuse and the

Rhine, and from the immense number of his supporters; the other, Arnulf,

bishop of Metz, sprang from a great family, probably of Roman descent,

and was besides immensely wealthy in worldly possessions. By the union

of their forces Pippin and Arnulf were destined to shape the future.

They had already, in 613, treated with Clotaire and betrayed the hopes

of Brunhilda, being consequently rewarded with the guardianship of young

Dagobert. Burgundy followed the example of Austrasia, demanded the

abolition of the mayoralty, and in 627 succeeded in obtaining her

independence of Neustria and Austrasia and direct relations with the

king.

Renascence of monarchy under Dagobert, 629-639.

The death of Clotaire (629) was the signal for a revival of the royal

power. Dagobert deprived Pippin of Landen of his authority and forced

him to fly to Aquitaine; but still he had to give the Austrasians his

son Sigebert III. for their king (634). He made administrative

progresses through Neustria and Burgundy to recall the nobles to their

allegiance, but again he was forced to designate his second son Clovis

as king of Neustria. He did subdue Aquitaine completely, thanks to his

brother Charibert, with whom he had avoided dividing the kingdom, and he

tried to restore his own demesne, which had been despoiled by the

granting of benefices or by the pious frauds of the Church. In short,

this reign was one of great conquests, impossible except under a strong

government. Dagobert's victories over Samo, king of the Slavs along the

Elbe, and his subjugation of the Bretons and the Basques, maintained the

prestige of the Frankish empire; while the luxury of his court, his

taste for the fine arts (ministered to by his treasurer Eloi[28]), his

numerous achievements in architecture--especially the abbey of St Denis,

burial-place of the kings of France--the brilliance and the power of the

churchmen who surrounded him and his revision of the Salic law, ensured

for his reign, in spite of the failure of his plans for unity, a fame

celebrated in folksong and ballad.

The "Rois fainéants" (do-nothing kings).

But for barbarous nations old-age comes early, and after Dagobert's

death (639), the monarchy went swiftly to its doom. The mayors of the

palace again became supreme, and the kings not only ceased to appoint

them, but might not even remove them from office. Such mayors were Aega

and Erchinoald, in Neustria, Pippin and Otto in Austrasia, and Flaochat

in Burgundy. One of them, Grimoald, son of Pippin, actually dared to

take the title of king in Austrasia (640). This was a premature attempt

and barren of result, yet it was significant; and not less so is the

fact that the palace in which these mayors bore rule was a huge

association of great personages, laymen and ecclesiastics who seem to

have had much more independence than in the 6th century. We find the

dukes actually raising troops without the royal sanction, and even

against the king. In 641 the mayor Flaochat was forced to swear that

they should hold their offices for life; and though these offices were

not yet hereditary, official dynasties, as it were, began to be

established permanently within the palace. The crown lands, the

governorships, the different offices, were looked upon as common

property to be shared between themselves. Organized into a compact body

they surrounded the king and were far more powerful than he. In the

general assembly of its members this body of officials decided the

selection of the mayor; it presented Flaochat to the choice of Queen

Nanthilda, Dagobert's widow; after long discussion it appointed Ebroïn

as mayor; it submitted requests that were in reality commands to the

Assembly of Bonneuil in 616 and later to Childeric in 670. Moreover, the

countries formerly subdued by the Franks availed themselves of this

opportunity to loosen the yoke; Thuringia was lost by Sigebert in 641,

and the revolt of Alamannia in 643 set back the frontier of the kingdom

from the Elbe to Austrasia. Aquitaine, hitherto the common prey of all

the Frankish kings, having in vain tried to profit by the struggles

between Fredegond and Brunhilda, and set up an independent king,

Gondibald, now finally burst her bonds in 670. Then came a time when the

kings were mere children, honoured with but the semblance of respect,

under the tutelage of a single mayor, Erbroïn of Neustria.

Struggle between Ebroïn and Léger.

Battle of Tertry.

This representative of royalty, chief minister for four-and-twenty years

(656-681), attempted the impossible, endeavouring to re-establish unity

in the midst of general dissolution and to maintain intact a royal

authority usurped everywhere, by the hereditary power of the great

palatine families. He soon stirred up against himself all the

dissatisfied nobles, led by Léger (Leodegarius), bishop of Autun and his

brother Gerinus. Clotaire III.'s death gave the signal for war. Ebroïn's

enemies set up Childeric II. in opposition to Theuderich, the king whom

he had chosen without summoning the great provincial officials. Despite

a temporary triumph, when Childeric was forced to recognize the

principle of hereditary succession in public offices, and when the

mayoralties of Neustria and Burgundy were alternated to the profit of

both, Léger soon fell into disgrace and was exiled to that very

monastery of Luxeuil to which Ebroïn had been relegated. Childeric

having regained the mastery restored the mayor's office, which was

immediately disputed by the two rivals; Ebroïn was successful and

established himself as mayor of the palace in the room of Leudesius, a

partisan of Léger (675), following this up by a distribution of offices

and dignities right and left among his adherents. Léger was put to death

in 678, and the Austrasians, commanded by the Carolingian Pippin II.,

with whom many of the chief Neustrians had taken refuge, were dispersed

near Laon (680). But Ebroïn was assassinated next year in the midst of

his triumph, having like Fredegond been unable to do more than postpone

for a quarter of a century the victory of the nobles and of Austrasia;

for his successor, Berthar, was unfitted to carry on his work, having

neither his gifts and energy nor the powerful personality of Pippin.

Berthar met his death at the battle of Tertry (687), which gave the king

into the hands of Pippin, as also the royal treasure and the mayoralty,

and by thus enabling him to reward his followers made him supreme over

the Merovingian dynasty. Thenceforward the degenerate descendants of

Clovis offered no further resistance to his claims, though it was not

until 752 that their line became extinct.

In that year the Merovingian dynasty gave place to the rule of Pippin

II. of Heristal, who founded a Carolingian empire fated to be as

ephemeral as that of the Merovingians. This political victory of the

aristocracy was merely the consummation of a slow subterranean

revolution which by innumerable reiterated blows had sapped the

structure of the body politic, and was about to transfer the people of

Gaul from the Roman monarchical and administrative government to the

sway of the feudal system.

Causes of the fall of the Merovingians.

The Merovingian kings, mere war-chiefs before the advent of Clovis, had

after the conquest of Gaul become absolute hereditary monarchs, thanks

to the disappearance of the popular assemblies and to the perpetual

state of warfare. They concentrated in their own hands all the powers of

the empire, judicial, fiscal and military; and even the so-called "rois

fainéants" enjoyed this unlimited power, in spite of the general

disorder and the civil wars. To make their authority felt in the

provinces they had an army of officials at their disposal--a legacy,

this, from imperial Rome--who represented them in the eyes of their

various peoples. They had therefore only to keep up this established

government, but they could not manage even this much; they allowed the

idea of the common interests of kings and their subjects gradually to

die out, and forgetting that national taxes are a necessary impost, a

charge for service rendered by the state, they had treated these as

though they were illicit and unjustifiable spoils. The taxpayers, with

the clergy at their head, adopted the same idea, and every day contrived

fresh methods of evasion. Merovingian justice was on the same footing as

Merovingian finance: it was arbitrary, violent and self-seeking. The

Church, too, never failed to oppose it--at first not so much on account

of her own ambitions as in a more Christian spirit--and proceeded to

weaken the royal jurisdiction by repeated interventions on behalf of

those under sentence, afterwards depriving it of authority over the

clergy, and then setting up ecclesiastical tribunals in opposition to

those held by the dukes and counts. At last, just as the kingdom had

become the personal property of the king, so the officials--dukes,

counts, royal vicars, tribunes, _centenarii_--who had for the most part

bought their unpaid offices by means of presents to the monarch, came to

look upon the public service rather as a mine of official wealth than as

an administrative organization for furthering the interests, material or

moral, of the whole nation. They became petty local tyrants, all the

more despotic because they had nothing to fear save the distant

authority of the king's _missi_, and the more rapacious because they had

no salary save the fines they inflicted and the fees that they contrived

to multiply. Gregory of Tours tells us that they were robbers, not

protectors of the people, and that justice and the whole administrative

apparatus were merely engines of insatiable greed. It was the abuses

thus committed by the kings and their agents, who did not understand the

art of gloving the iron hand, aided by the absolutely unfettered licence

of conduct and the absence of any popular liberty, that occasioned the

gradual increase of charters of immunity.

Immunity.

Immunity was the direct and personal privilege which forbade any royal

official or his agents to decide cases, to levy taxes, or to exercise

any administrative control on the domains of a bishop, an abbot, or one

of the great secular nobles. On thousands of estates the royal

government gradually allowed the law of the land to be superseded by

local law, and public taxation to change into special contributions; so

that the duties of the lower classes towards the state were transferred

to the great landlords, who thus became loyal adherents of the king but

absolute masters on their own territory. The Merovingians had no idea

that they were abdicating the least part of their authority,

nevertheless the deprivations acquiesced in by the feebler kings led of

necessity to the diminution of their authority and their judicial

powers, and to the abandonment of public taxation. They thought that by

granting immunity they would strengthen their direct control; in reality

they established the local independence of the great landowners, by

allowing royal rights to pass into their hands. Then came confusion

between the rights of the sovereign and the rights of property. The

administrative machinery of the state still existed, but it worked in

empty air: its taxpayers disappeared, those who were amenable to its

legal jurisdiction slipped from its grasp, and the number of those whose

affairs it should have directed dwindled away. Thus the Merovingians had

shown themselves incapable of rising above the barbarous notion that

royalty is a personal asset to the idea that royalty is of the state, a

power belonging to the nation and instituted for the benefit of all.

They represented in society nothing more than a force which grew feebler

and feebler as other forces grew strong; they never stood for a national

magistracy.

Disruption of the social framework.

Society no less than the state was falling asunder by a gradual process

of decay. Under the Merovingians it was a hierarchy wherein grades were

marked by the varied scale of the _wergild_, a man being worth anything

from thirty to six hundred gold pieces. The different degrees were those

of slave, freedman, tenant-farmer and great landowner. As in every

social scheme where the government is without real power, the weakest

sought protection of the strongest; and the system of patron, client and

journeyman, which had existed among the Romans, the Gauls and the

Germans, spread rapidly in the 6th and 7th centuries, owing to public

disorder and the inadequate protection afforded by the government. The

Church's patronage provided some with a refuge from violence; others

ingratiated themselves with the rich for the sake of shelter and

security; others again sought place and honour from men of power; while

women, churchmen and warriors alike claimed the king's direct and

personal protection.

The beneficium.

This hierarchy of persons, these private relations of man to man, were

recognized by custom in default of the law, and were soon strengthened

by another and territorial hierarchy. The large estate, especially if it

belonged to the Church, very soon absorbed the few fields of the

freeman. In order to farm these, the Church and the rich landowners

granted back the holdings on the temporary and conditional terms of

tenancy-at-will or of the _beneficium_, thus multiplying endlessly the

land subject to their overlordship and the men who were dependent upon

them as tenants. The kings, like private individuals and ecclesiastical

establishments, made use of the _beneficium_ to reward their servants;

till finally their demesne was so reduced by these perpetual grants that

they took to distributing among their champions land owning the

overlordship of the Church, or granted their own lands for single lives

only. These various "benefactions" were, as a rule, merely the indirect

methods which the great landowners employed in order to absorb the small

proprietor. And so well did they succeed, that in the 6th and 7th

centuries the provincial hierarchy consisted of the cultivator, the

holder of the _beneficium_ and the owner; while this dependence of one

man upon another affected the personal liberty of a large section of the

community, as well as the condition of the land. The great landowner

tended to become not only lord over his tenants, but also himself a

vassal of the king.

Pippin of Heristal.

Thus by means of immunities, of the _beneficium_ and of patronage,

society gradually organized itself independently of the state, since it

required further security. Such extra security was first provided by the

conqueror of Tertry; for Pippin II. represented the two great families

of Pippin and of Arnulf, and consequently the two interests then

paramount, i.e. land and religion, while he had at his back a great

company of followers and vast landed estates. For forty years (615-655)

the office of mayor of Austrasia had gone down in his family almost

continuously in direct descent from father to son. The death of Grimoald

had caused the loss of this post, yet Ansegisus (Ansegisel), Arnulf's

son and Pippin's son-in-law, had continued to hold high office in the

Austrasian palace; and about 680 his son, Pippin II., became master of

Austrasia, although he had held no previous office in the palace. His

dynasty was destined to supplant that of the Merovingian house.

Pippin of Heristal was a pioneer; he it was who began all that his

descendants were afterwards to carry through. Thus he gathered the

nobles about him not by virtue of his position, but because of his own

personal prowess, and because he could assure them of justice and

protection; instead of being merely the head of the royal palace he was

the absolute lord of his own followers. Moreover, he no longer bore the

title of mayor, but that of duke or prince of the Franks; and the

mayoralty, like the royal power now reduced to a shadow, became an

hereditary possession which Pippin could bestow upon his sons. The

reigns of Theuderich III., Clovis III. or Childebert III. are of no

significance except as serving to date charters and diplomas. Pippin it

was who administered justice in Austrasia, appointed officials and

distributed dukedoms; and it was Pippin, the military leader, who

defended the frontiers threatened by Frisians, Alamanni and Bavarians.

Descended as he was from Arnulf, bishop of Metz, he was before all

things a churchman, and behind his armies marched the missionaries to

whom the Carolingian dynasty, of which he was the founder, were to

subject all Christendom. Pippin it was, in short, who governed, who set

in order the social confusions of Neustria, who, after long wars, put a

stop to the malpractices of the dukes and counts, and summoned councils

of bishops to make good regulations. But at his death in 714 the

child-king Dagobert III. found himself subordinated to Pippin's two

grandsons, who, being minors, were under the wardship of their

grandmother Plectrude.

Charles Martel (715-741).

Pippin's work was almost undone--a party among the Neustrians under

Raginfrid, mayor of the palace, revolted against Pippin II.'s adherents,

and Radbod, duke of the Frisians, joined them. But the Austrasians

appealed to an illegitimate son of Pippin, Charles Martel, who had

escaped from the prison to which Plectrude, alarmed at his prowess, had

consigned him, and took him for their leader. With Charles Martel begins

the great period of Austrasian history. Faithful to the traditions of

the Austrasian mayors, he chose kings for himself--Clotaire IV., then

Chilperic II. and lastly Theuderich IV. After Theuderich's death (737)

he left the throne vacant until 742, but he himself was king in all but

name; he presided over the royal tribunals, appointed the royal

officers, issued edicts, disposed of the funds of the treasury and the

churches, conferred immunities upon adherents, who were no longer the

king's nobles but his own, and even appointed the bishops, though there

was nothing of the ecclesiastic about himself. He decided questions of

war and peace, and re-established unity in Gaul by defeating the

Neustrians and the Aquitanian followers of Duke Odo (Eudes) at Vincy in

717. When Odo, brought to bay, appealed for help to the Arab troops of

Abd-ar-Rahman, who after conquering Spain had crossed the Pyrenees,

Charles, like a second Clovis, saved Catholic Christendom in its peril

by crushing the Arabs at Tours (732). The retreat of the Arabs, who were

further weakened by religious disputes, enabled him to restore Frankish

rule in Aquitaine in spite of Hunald, son of Odo. But Charles's longest

expeditions were made into Germany, and in these he sought the support

of the Church, then the greatest of all powers since it was the

depositary of the Roman imperial tradition.

Charles Martel and the Church.

No less unconscious of his mission than Clovis had been, Charles Martel

also was a soldier of Christ. He protected the missionaries who paved

the way for his militant invasions. Without him the apostle of Germany,

the English monk Boniface, would never have succeeded in preserving the

purity of the faith and keeping the bishops submissive to the Holy See.

The help given by Charles had two very far-reaching results. Boniface

was the instrument of the union of Rome and Germany, of which union the

Holy Roman Empire in Germany was in the 10th century to become the most

perfect expression, continuing up to the time of Luther. And Boniface

also helped on the alliance between the papacy and the Carolingian

dynasty, which, more momentous even than that between Clovis and the

bishops of Gaul, was to sanctify might by right.

Charles Martel and Gregory III.

This union was imperative for the bishops of Rome if they wished to

establish their supremacy, and their care for orthodoxy by no means

excluded all desire of domination. Mere religious authority did not

secure to them the obedience of either the faithful or the clergy;

moreover, they had to consider the great secular powers, and in this

respect their temporal position in Italy was growing unbearable. Their

relations with the East Roman emperor (sole lord of the world after the

Roman Senate had sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople in 476)

were confined to receiving insults from him or suspecting him of heresy.

Even in northern Italy there was no longer any opposition to the

progress of the Lombards, the last great nation to be established

towards the end of the 6th century within the ancient Roman

empire--their king Liudprand clearly intended to seize Italy and even

Rome itself. Meanwhile from the south attacks were being made by the

rebel dukes of Spoleto and Beneventum. Pope Gregory III. cherished

dreams of an alliance with the powerful duke of the Franks, as St

Remigius before him had thought of uniting with Clovis against the

Goths. Charles Martel had protected Boniface on his German missions: he

would perhaps lend Gregory the support of his armies. But the warrior,

like Clovis aforetime, hesitated to put himself at the disposal of the

priest. When it was a question of winning followers or keeping them, he

had not scrupled to lay hands on ecclesiastical property, nor to fill

the Church with his friends and kinsfolk, and this alliance might

embarrass him. So if he loaded the Roman ambassadors with gifts in 739,

he none the less remembered that the Lombards had just helped him to

drive the Saracens from Provence. However, he died soon after this, on

the 22nd of October 741, and Gregory III. followed him almost

immediately.

The Carolingian dynasty.

Pippin the Short, 752-768.

Feeling his end near, Charles, before an assembly of nobles, had divided

his power between his two sons, Carloman and Pippin III. The royal line

seemed to have been forgotten for six years, but in 742 Pippin brought a

son of Chilperic II. out of a monastery and made him king. This

Childeric III. was but a shadow--and knew it. He made a phantom

appearance once every spring at the opening of the great annual national

convention known as the Campus Martius (Champ de Mars): a dumb idol, his

chariot drawn in leisurely fashion by oxen, he disappeared again into

his palace or monastery. An unexpected event re-established unity in the

Carolingian family. Pippin's brother, the pious Carloman, became a monk

in 747, and Pippin, now sole ruler of the kingdom, ordered Childeric

also to cut off his royal locks; after which, being king in all but

name, he adopted that title in 752. Thus ended the revolution which had

been going on for two centuries. The disappearance of Grippo, Pippin's

illegitimate brother, who, with the help of all the enemies of the

Franks--Alamanni, Aquitanians and Bavarians--had disputed his power, now

completed the work of centralization, and Pippin had only to maintain

it. For this the support of the Church was indispensable, and Pippin

understood the advantages of such an alliance better than Charles

Martel. A son of the Church, a protector of bishops, a president of

councils, a collector of relics, devoted to Boniface (whom he invited,

as papal legate, to reform the clergy of Austrasia), he astutely

accepted the new claims of the vicar of St Peter to the headship of the

Church, perceiving the value of an alliance with this rising power.

Sacred character of the new monarchy.

Prudent enough to fear resistance if he usurped the Merovingian crown,

Pippin the Short made careful preparations for his accession, and

discussed the question of the dynasty with Pope Zacharias. Receiving a

favourable opinion, he had himself anointed and crowned by Boniface in

the name of the bishops, and was then proclaimed king in an assembly of

nobles, counts and bishops at Soissons in November 751. Still, certain

disturbances made him see that aristocratic approval of his kingship

might be strengthened if it could claim a divine sanction which no

Merovingian had ever received. Two years later, therefore, he demanded a

consecration of his usurpation from the pope, and in St Denis on the

28th of July 754 Stephen II. crowned and anointed not only Pippin, but

his wife and his two sons as well.

Pippin and the Papacy.

The political results of this custom of coronation were all-important

for the Carolingians, and later for the first of the Capets. Pippin was

hereby invested with new dignity, and when Boniface's anointing had been

confirmed by that of the pope, he became the head of the Frankish

Church, the equal of the pope. Moreover, he astutely contrived to extend

his priestly prestige to his whole family; his royalty was no longer

merely a military command or a civil office, but became a Christian

priesthood. This sacred character was not, however, conferred

gratuitously. On the very day of his coronation Pippin allowed himself

to be proclaimed patrician of the Romans by the pope, just as Clovis had

been made consul. This title of the imperial court was purely honorary,

but it attached him still more closely to Rome, though without lessening

his independence. He had besides given a written promise to defend the

Church of Rome, and that not against the Lombards only. Qualified by

letters of the papal chancery as "liberator and defender of the Church,"

his armies twice (754-756) crossed the Alps, despite the opposition of

the Frankish aristocracy, and forced Aistulf, king of the Lombards, to

cede to him the exarchate of Ravenna and the Pentapolis. Pippin gave

them back to Pope Stephen II., and by this famous donation founded that

temporal power of the popes which was to endure until 1870. He also

dragged the Western clergy into the pope's quarrel with the emperor at

Constantinople, by summoning the council of Gentilly, at which the

iconoclastic heresy was condemned (767). Matters being thus settled with

Rome, Pippin again took up his wars against the Saxons, against the

Arabs (whom he drove from Narbonne in 758), and above all against

Waïfer, duke of Aquitaine, and his ally, duke Tassilo of Bavaria. This

last war was carried on systematically from 760 to 768, and ended in the

death of Waïfer and the definite establishment of the Frankish hold on

Aquitaine. When Pippin died, aged fifty-four, on the 24th of September

768, the whole of Gaul had submitted to his authority.

Charlemagne.

Pippin left two sons, and before he died he had, with the consent of the

dignitaries of the realm, divided his kingdom between them, making the

elder, Charles (Charlemagne), king of Austrasia, and giving the younger,

Carloman, Burgundy, Provence, Septimania, Alsace and Alamannia, and half

of Aquitaine to each. On the 9th of October 768 Charles was enthroned at

Noyon in solemn assembly, and Carloman at Soissons. The Carolingian

sovereignty was thus neither hereditary nor elective, but was handed

down by the will of the reigning king, and by a solemn acceptance of the

future king on the part of the nobles. In 771 Carloman, with whom

Charles had had disputes, died, leaving sons; but bishops, abbots and

counts all declared for Charles, save a few who took refuge in Italy

with Desiderius, king of the Lombards. Desiderius, whose daughter Bertha

or Desiderata Charles, despite the pope, had married at the instance of

his mother Bertrade, supported the rights of Carloman's sons, and

threatened Pope Adrian in Rome itself after he had despoiled him of

Pippin's territorial gift. At the pope's appeal Charles crossed the

Alps, took Verona and Pavia after a long siege, assumed the iron crown

of the Lombard kings (June 774), and made a triumphal entry into Rome,

which had not formed part of the pope's desires. Pippin's donation was

restored, but the protectorate was no longer so distant, respectful and

intermittent as the pope liked. After the departure of the imperious

conqueror, a fresh revolt of the Lombards of Beneventum under Arichis,

Desiderius's son-in-law, supported by a Greek fleet, obliged Pope Adrian

to write fresh entreaties to Charlemagne; and in two campaigns (776-777)

the latter conquered the whole Lombard kingdom. But another of

Desiderius's daughters, married to the powerful duke Tassilo of Bavaria,

urged her husband to avenge her father, now imprisoned in the monastery

of Corbie. After endless intrigues, however, the duke, hemmed in by

three different armies, had in his turn to submit (788), and all Italy

was now subject to Charlemagne. These wars in Italy, even the fall of

the Lombard kingdom and the recapture of the duchy of Bavaria, were

merely episodes: Charlemagne's great war was against the Saxons and

lasted thirty years (772-804).

Organization of the conquests.

The work of organizing the three great Carolingian conquests--Aquitaine,

Italy and Saxony--had yet to be done. Charlemagne approached it with a

moderation equal to the vigour which he had shown in the war. But by

multiplying its advance-posts, the Frankish kingdom came into contact

with new peoples, and each new neighbour meant a new enemy. Aquitaine,

bordered upon Mussulman Spain; the Avars of Hungary threatened Bavaria

with their tireless horsemen; beyond the Elbe and the Saal the Slavs

were perpetually at war with the Saxons, and to the north of the Eider

were the Danes. All were pagans; all enemies of Charlemagne, defender of

Christ's Church, and hence the appointed conqueror of the world.

Wars with the Arabs, Slavs and Danes.

Various causes--the weakening of the Arabs by the struggle between the

Omayyads and the Abbasids just after the battle of Tours; the alliance

of the petty Christian kings of the Spanish peninsula; an appeal from

the northern amirs who had revolted against the new caliphate of Cordova

(755)--made Charlemagne resolve to cross the Pyrenees. He penetrated as

far as the Ebro, but was defeated before Saragossa; and in their retreat

the Franks were attacked by Vascons, losing many men as they came

through the passes. This defeat of the rear-guard, famous for the death

of the great Roland and the treachery of Ganelo, induced the Arabs to

take the offensive once more and to conquer Septimania. Charlemagne had

created the kingdom of Aquitaine especially to defend Septimania, and

William, duke of Toulouse, from 790 to 806, succeeded in restoring

Frankish authority down to the Ebro, thus founding the Spanish March

with Barcelona as its capital. For two centuries and a half the Avars, a

remnant of the Huns entrenched in the Hungarian Mesopotamia, had made

descents alternately upon the Germans and upon the Greeks of the Eastern

empire. They had overrun Bavaria in the very year of its subjugation by

Charlemagne (788), and it took an eight-years' struggle to destroy the

robber stronghold. The empire thus pushed its frontier-line on from the

Elbe to the Oder, ever as it grew menaced by increasing dangers. The sea

came to the help of the depopulated land, and Danish pirates, Widukind's

old allies, came in their leathern boats to harry the coasts of the

North Sea and the Channel. Permanent armies and walls across isthmuses

were alike useless; Charlemagne had to build fleets to repulse his

elusive foes (808-810), and even after forty years of war the danger was

only postponed.

Charlemagne's empire.

Meanwhile Pippin's Frankish kingdom, vast and powerful as it had been,

was doubled. All nations from the Oder to the Elbe and from the Danube

to the Atlantic were subject or tributary, and Charlemagne's power even

crossed these frontiers. At his summons Christian princes and Mussulman

amirs flocked to his palaces. The kings of Northumbria and Sussex, the

kings of the Basques and of Galicia, Arab amirs of Spain and Fez, and

even the caliph of Bagdad came to visit him in person or sent gifts by

the hands of ambassadors. A great warrior and an upright ruler, his

conquests recalled those of the great Christian emperors, and the

Church completed the parallel by training him in her lore. This still

barely civilized German literally went to school to the English Alcuin

and to Peter of Pisa, who, between two campaigns, taught him history,

writing, grammar and astronomy, satisfying also his interest in sacred

music, literature (religious literature especially), and the traditions

of Rome and Constantinople. Why should he not be the heir of their

Caesars? And so, little by little, this man of insatiable energy was

possessed by the ambition of restoring the Empire of the West in his own

favour.

Charlemagne emperor (800).

There were, however, two serious obstacles in the way: first, the

supremacy of the emperor of the East, which though nominal rather than

real was upheld by peoples, princes, and even by popes; secondly, the

rivalry of the bishops of Rome, who since the early years of Adrian's

pontificate had claimed the famous "Donation of Constantine" (q.v.).

According to that apocryphal document, the emperor after his baptism had

ceded to the sovereign pontiff his imperial power and honours, the

purple chlamys, the golden crown, "the town of Rome, the districts and

cities of Italy and of all the West." But in 797 the empress of

Constantinople had just deposed her son Constantine VI. after putting

out his eyes, and the throne might be considered vacant; while on the

other hand, Pope Leo III., who had been driven from Rome by a revolt in

799, and had only been restored by a Frankish army, counted for little

beside the Frankish monarch, and could not but submit to the wishes of

the Carolingian court. So when next year the king of the Franks went to

Rome in person, on Christmas Eve of the year 800 and in the basilica of

St Peter the pope placed on his head the imperial crown and did him

reverence "after the established custom of the time of the ancient

emperors." The Roman ideal, handed down in tradition through the

centuries, was here first revived.

This event, of capital importance for the middle ages, was fertile in

results both beneficial and the reverse. It brought about the rupture

between the West and Constantinople. Then Charlemagne raised the papacy

on the ruins of Lombardy to the position of first political power in

Italy; and the universal Church, headed by the pope, made common cause

with the Empire, which all the thinkers of that day regarded as the

ideal state. Confusion between these powers was inevitable, but at this

time neither Charles, the pope, nor the people had a suspicion of the

troubles latent in the ceremony that seemed so simple. Thirdly,

Charlemagne's title of emperor strengthened his other title of king of

the Franks, as is proved by the fact that at the great assembly of

Aix-la-Chapelle in 802 he demanded from all, whether lay or spiritual, a

new oath of allegiance to himself as Caesar. His increased power came

rather from moral value, from the prestige attaching to one who had

given proof of it, than from actual authority over men or

centralization; this is shown by the division between the Empire and

feudalism. Universal sovereignty claimed as a heritage from Rome had a

profound influence upon popular imagination, but in no way modified that

tendency to separation of the various nations which was already

manifest. Charles himself in his government preferred to restore the

ancient Empire by vigorous personal action, rather than to follow old

imperial traditions; he introduced cohesion into his "palace," and

perfect centralization into his official administration, inspiring his

followers and servants, clerical and lay, with a common and determined

zeal. The system was kept in full vigour by the _missi dominici_, who

regularly reported or reformed any abuses of administration, and by the

courts, military, judicial or political, which brought to Charlemagne

the strength of the wealth of his subjects, carrying his commands and

his ideas to the farthest limits of the Empire. Under him there was in

fact a kind of early renaissance after centuries of barbarism and

ignorance.

The Carolingian Renaissance.

This emperor, who assumed so high a tone with his subjects, his bishops

and his counts, who undertook to uphold public order in civil life, held

himself no less responsible for the eternal salvation of men's souls in

the other world. Thanks to Charlemagne, and through the restoration of

order and of the schools, a common civilization was prepared for the

varied elements of the Empire. By his means the Church was able to

concentrate in the palatine academy all the intellectual culture of the

middle ages, having preserved some of the ancient traditions of

organization and administration and guarded the imperial ideal.

Charlemagne apparently wished, like Theodoric, to use German blood and

Christian unity to bring back life to the great body of the Empire. Not

the equal of Caesar or Augustus in genius or in the lastingness of his

work, he yet recalls them in his capitularies, his periodic courts, his

official hierarchy, his royal emissaries, his ministers, his sole right

of coinage, his great public works, his campaigns against barbarism and

heathenry, his zeal for learning and literature, and his divinity as

emperor. Once more there existed a great public entity such as had not

been seen for many years; but its duration was not to be a long one.

Dissolution of the Frankish Empire.

Charlemagne had for the moment succeeded in uniting western Europe under

his sway, but he had not been able to arrest its evolution towards

feudal dismemberment. He had, doubtless conscientiously, laboured for

the reconstitution of the Empire; but it often happens that individual

wills produce results other than those at which they aimed, sometimes

results even contrary to their wishes, and this was what happened in

Charlemagne's case. He had restored the superstructure of the imperial

monarchy, but he had likewise strengthened and legalized methods and

institutions till then private and insecure, and these, passing from

custom into law, undermined the foundations of the structure he had

thought himself to be repairing. A quarter of a century after his death

his Empire was in ruins.

The practice of giving land as a _beneficium_ to a grantee who swore

personal allegiance to the grantor had persisted, and by his

capitularies Charlemagne had made these personal engagements, these

contracts of immunity--hitherto not transferable, nor even for life, but

quite conditional--regular, legal, even obligatory and almost

indissoluble. The _beneficium_ was to be as practically irrevocable as

the oath of fidelity. He submitted to the yoke of the social system and

feudal institutions at the very moment when he was attempting to revive

royal authority; he was ruler of the state, but ruler of vassals also.

The monarchical principle no longer sufficed to ensure social

discipline; the fear of forfeiting the grant became the only powerful

guarantee of obedience, and as this only applied to his personal

vassals, Charlemagne gave up his claim to direct obedience from the rest

of the people, accepting the mediation of the counts, lords and bishops,

who levied taxes, adjudicated and administered in virtue of the

privileges of patronage, not of the right of the state. The very

multiplication of offices, so noticeable at this time, furthered this

triumph of feudalism by multiplying the links of personal dependence,

and neutralizing more and more the direct action of the central

authority. The frequent convocations of military assemblies, far from

testifying to political liberty, was simply a means of communicating the

emperor's commands to the various feudal groups.

Thus Charlemagne, far from opposing, systematized feudalism, in order

that obedience and discipline might pass from one man to another down to

the lowest grades of society, and he succeeded for his own lifetime. No

authority was more weighty or more respected than that of this feudal

lord of Gaul, Italy and Germany; none was more transient, because it was

so purely personal.

Causes for the dissolution of the Empire.

When the great emperor was buried at Aix-la-Chapelle in 814, his work

was entombed with him. The fact was that his successors were incapable

of maintaining it. Twenty-nine years after his death the Carolingian

Empire had been divided into three kingdoms; forty years later one alone

of these kingdoms had split into seven; while when a century had passed

France was a litter of tiny states each practically independent. This

disintegration was caused neither by racial hate nor by linguistic

patriotism. It was the weakness of princes, the discouragement of

freemen and landholders confronted by an inexorable system of financial

and military tyranny, and the incompatibility of a vast empire with a

too primitive governmental system, that wrecked the work of Charlemagne.

Louis the Pious (814-840).

The Empire fell to Louis the Pious, sole survivor of his three sons. At

the Aix assembly in 813 his father had crowned him with his own hand,

thus avoiding the papal sanction that had been almost forced upon

himself in 800. Louis was a gentle and well-trained prince, but weak and

prone to excessive devotion to the Church. He had only reigned a few

years when dissensions broke out on all sides, as under the

Merovingians. Charlemagne had assigned their portions to his three sons

in 781 and again in 806; like Charles Martel and Pippin the Short before

him, however, what he had divided was not the imperial authority, nor

yet countries, but the whole system of fiefs, offices and adherents

which had been his own patrimony. The division that Louis the Pious made

at Aix in 817 among his three sons, Lothair, Pippin and Louis, was of

like character, since he reserved the supreme authority for himself,

only associating Lothair, the eldest, with him in the government of the

empire. Following the advice of his ministers Walla and Agobard,

supporters of the policy of unity, Louis the Pious put Bernard of Italy,

Charlemagne's grandson, to death for refusing to acknowledge Lothair as

co-emperor; crushed a revolt in Brittany; and carried on among the Danes

the work of evangelization begun among the Slavs. A fourth son, Charles,

was born to him by his second wife, Judith of Bavaria. Jealousy arose

between the children of the two marriages. Louis tried in vain to

satisfy his sons and their followers by repeated divisions--at Worms

(829) and at Aix (831)--in which there was no longer question of either

unity or subordination. Yet his elder sons revolted against him in 831

and 832, and were supported by Walla and Agobard and by their followers,

weary of all the contradictory oaths demanded of them. Louis was deposed

at the assembly of Compiègne (833), the bishops forcing him to assume

the garb of a penitent; but he was re-established on his throne in St

Etienne at Metz, the 28th of February 835, from which time until his

death in 840 he fell more and more under the influence of his ambitious

wife, and thought only of securing an inheritance for Charles, his

favourite son.

The sons of Louis the Pious.

The Strassburg oath.

Hardly was Louis buried in the basilica of Metz before his sons flew to

arms. The first dynastic war broke out between Lothair, who by the

settlement of 817 claimed the whole monarchy with the imperial title,

and his brothers Louis and Charles. Lothair wanted, with the Empire, the

sole right of patronage over the adherents of his house, but each of

these latter chose his own lord according to individual interests,

obeying his fears or his preferences. The three brothers finished their

discussion by fighting for a whole day (June 25th, 841) on the plain of

Fontanet by Auxerre; but the battle decided nothing, so Charles and

Louis, in order to get the better of Lothair, allied themselves and

their vassals by an oath taken in the plain of Strassburg (Feb. 14th,

842). This, the first document in the vulgar tongue in the history of

France and Germany, was merely a mutual contract of protection for the

two armies, which nevertheless did not risk another battle. An amicable

division of the imperial succession was arranged, and after an

assessment of the empire which took almost a year, an agreement was

signed at Verdun in August 843.

Partition of the Empire at Verdun (843).

This was one of the important events in history. Each brother received

an equal share of the dismembered empire. Louis had the territory on the

right bank of the Rhine, with Spires, Worms and Mainz "because of the

abundance of wine." Lothair took Italy, the valleys of the Rhône, the

Saône and the Meuse, with the two capitals of the empire,

Aix-la-Chapelle and Rome, and the title of emperor. Charles had all the

country watered by the Scheldt, the Seine, the Loire and the Garonne, as

far as the Atlantic and the Ebro. The partition of Verdun separated once

more, and definitively, the lands of the eastern and western Franks. The

former became modern Germany, the latter France, and each from this

time forward had its own national existence. However, as the boundary

between the possessions of Charles the Bald and those of Louis was not

strictly defined, and as Lothair's kingdom, having no national basis,

soon disintegrated into the kingdoms of Italy, Burgundy and Arles, in

Lotharingia, this great undefined territory was to serve as a

tilting-ground for France and Germany on the very morrow of the treaty

of Verdun and for ten centuries after.

Charles the Bald (843-877).

Charles the Bald was the first king of western France. Anxious as he was

to preserve Charlemagne's traditions of government, he was not always

strong enough to do so, and warfare within his own dominions was often

forced on him. The Norse pirates who had troubled Charlemagne showed a

preference for western France, justified by the easy access afforded by

river estuaries with rich monasteries on their shores. They began in 841

with the sack of Rouen; and from then until 912, when they made a

settlement in one part of the country, though few in numbers they never

ceased attacking Charles's kingdom, coming in their ships up the Loire

as far as Auvergne, up the Garonne to Toulouse, and up the Seine and the

Scheldt to Paris, where they made four descents in forty years, burning

towns, pillaging treasure, destroying harvests and slaughtering the

peasants or carrying them off into slavery. Charles the Bald thus spent

his life sword in hand, fighting unsuccessfully against the Bretons,

whose two kings, Nomenoé and Erispoé, he had to recognize in turn; and

against the people of Aquitaine, who, in full revolt, appealed for help

to his brother, Louis the German. He was beaten everywhere and always:

by the Bretons at Ballon (845) and Juvardeil (851); by the people of

Aquitaine near Angoulême (845); and by the Northmen, who several times

extorted heavy ransoms from him. Before long, too, Louis the German

actually allied himself with the people of Brittany and Aquitaine, and

invaded France at the summons of Charles the Bald's own vassals. Though

the treaty of Coblenz (860) seemed to reconcile the two kings for the

moment, no peace was ever possible in Charles the Bald's kingdom. His

own son Charles, king of Aquitaine, revolted, and Salomon proclaimed

himself king of Brittany in succession to Erispoé, who had been

assassinated. To check the Bretons and the Normans, who were attacking

from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, Charles the Bald found himself

obliged to entrust the defence of the country to Robert the Strong,

ancestor of the house of Capet and duke of the lands between Loire and

Seine. Robert the Strong, however, though many times victorious over the

incorrigible pirates, was killed by them in a fight at Brissarthe (866).

Division of the kingdom into large fiefs.

Despite all this, Charles spoke authoritatively in his capitularies, and

though incapable of defending western France, coveted other crowns and

looked obstinately eastwards. He managed to become king of Lorraine on

the death of his nephew Lothair II., and emperor and king of Germany on

that of his other nephew Louis II. (875); though only by breaking the

compact of the year 800. In 876, the year before his death, he took a

third crown, that of Italy, though not without a fresh defeat at

Andernach by Louis the German's troops. His titles increased, indeed,

but not his power; for while his kingdom was thus growing in area it was

falling to pieces. The duchy with which he rewarded Robert the Strong

was only a military command, but became a powerful fief. Baldwin I. (d.

879), count of Flanders, turned the country between the Scheldt, the

Somme and the sea into another feudal principality. Aquitaine and

Brittany were almost independent, Burgundy was in full revolt, and

within thirty years Rollo, a Norman leader, was to be master of the

whole of the lower Seine from the Cotentin to the Somme. The fact was

that between the king's inability to defend the kingdom, and the

powerlessness of nobles and peasants to protect themselves from pillage,

every man made it his business to seek new protectors, and the country,

in spite of Charles the Bald's efforts, began to be covered with

strongholds, the peasant learning to live beneath the shelter of the

donjon keeps. Such vassals gave themselves utterly to the lord who

guarded them, working for him sword or pickaxe in hand. The king was

far away, the lord close at hand. Hence the sixty years of terror and

confusion which came between Charlemagne and the death of Charles the

Bald suppressed the direct authority of the king in favour of the

nobles, and prepared the way for a second destruction of the monarchy at

the hands of a stronger power (see FEUDALISM).

Establishment of feudalism.

Before long Charles the Bald's followers were dictating to him; and in

the disaffection caused by his feebleness and cowardice prelates and

nobles allied themselves against him. If they acknowledged the king's

authority at the assemblies of Yütz (near Thionville) in 844, they

forced from him a promise that they should keep their fiefs and their

dignities; and while establishing a right of control over all his

actions they deprived him of his right of jurisdiction over them.

Despite Charles's resistance his royal power dwindled steadily: an

appeal to Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, entailed concessions to the

Church. In 856 some of his vassals deserted him and went over to Louis

the German. To win them back Charles had to sign a new charter, by the

terms of which loyalty was no longer a one-sided engagement but a

reciprocal contract between king and vassal. He gave up his personal

right of distributing the fiefs and honours which were the price of

adherence, and thus lost for the Carolingians the free disposal of the

immense territories they had gradually usurped; they retained the

over-lordship, it is true, but this over-lordship, without usufruct and

without choice of tenant, was but a barren possession.

Decay of the Carolinglan power.

Like their territories public authority little by little slipped from

the grasp of the Carolingians, largely because of their abuse of their

too great power. They had concentrated the entire administration in

their own hands. Like Charlemagne, Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald

were omnipotent. There were no provincial assemblies, no municipal

bodies, no merchant-gilds, no autonomous churches; the people had no

means of making themselves heard; they had no place in an administration

which was completely in the hands of a central hierarchy of officials of

all ranks, from dukes to _scabini_, with counts, viscounts and

_centenarii_ in between. However, these dukes and counts were not merely

officials: they too had become lords of _fideles_, of their own

_advocati_, _centenarii_ and _scabini_, whom they nominated, and of all

the free men of the county, who since Charlemagne's time had been first

allowed and then commanded to "commend" themselves to a lord, receiving

feudal benefices in return. Any deprivation or supersession of the count

might impoverish, dispossess or ruin the vassals of the entire county;

so that all, vassals or officials, small and great, feeling their

danger, united their efforts, and lent each other mutual assistance

against the permanent menace of an overweening monarchy. Hence, at the

end of the 9th century, the heredity of offices as well as of fiefs. In

the disordered state of society official stability was a valuable

warrant of peace, and the administrative hierarchy, lay or spiritual,

thus formed a mould for the hierarchy of feudalism. There was no

struggle with the king, simply a cessation of obedience; for without

strength or support in the kingdom he was powerless to resist. In vain

Charles the Bald affirmed his royal authority in the capitularies of

Quierzy-sur-Oise (857), Reims (860), Pistes (864), Gondreville (872) and

Quierzy-sur-Oise (877); each time in exchange for assent to the royal

will and renewal of oaths he had to acquiesce in new safeguards against

himself and by so much to diminish that power of protection against

violence and injustice for which the weak had always looked to the

throne. Far from forbidding the relation of lord and vassal, Charles the

Bald imposed it upon every man in his kingdom, himself proclaiming the

real incapacity and failure of that theoretic royal power to which he

laid claim. Henceforward royalty had no servants, since it performed no

service. There was no longer the least hesitation over the choice

between liberty with danger and subjection with safety; men sought and

found in vassalage the right to live, and willingly bartered away their

liberty for it.

Louis the Stammerer (877-879).

Louis III. and Carloman (879-884).