THE CENTURIES OF SUBMERGENCE AND OF NATIONALIZATION
Charlemagne, the man typical of Teutonic force and power, a consummator
of ancient forces and an initiator of a new progress, stands between the
German and the Roman worlds as a gigantic form on the boundary line of
two nations and two civilizations. Charlemagne was the first to realize
the political unity of western Christendom as spiritually personified in
the Papacy. This is the significance of that mighty event, pregnant with
tremendous possibilities for good and for evil, when on the Christmas
day of A. D. 800, the Pope bestowed upon Charlemagne the political crown
of the Christian world with the obligation to support the church in its
spiritual and secular supremacy. Only by the imperial crown, as a
continuation of the majesty of the Roman Caesars, could Germany maintain
even its ascendancy among the other nations of Europe.
When the German races were organized as a nation and imbued with the
Christian faith by Charlemagne, this new political formation became the
bearer of a new civilization amalgamated from its various constituents
and as complex as was the state itself. Though preeminently papal and
clerical, yet it was, also, eminently intellectual and classical. The
treasures of a new thought, of culture, of Greco-Roman refinement, and
even of material wealth, were opened to the people of Germany. Fruitful
as these Roman germs were, they were only a ferment for German strength
and characteristics; for the Germans alone made Christianity a living
issue. It was impossible for the putrid soil of the decaying Roman
Empire to become a fruitful abode for Christianity.
Men and women fled to the desert to worship God in solitary
contemplation and far from the temptation of the world. The monks in
spite of the faults and the degeneration which will ever cling to things
human are, after all, the purveyors of intellectual and moral culture.
The cloisters, too, were at first fortresses of civilization, labor,
agriculture, artisanship, and, though with monachal limitations, they
were yet transmitters of literary and classical antiquity.
We need only recall the life of the disciples of Saint Benedict in the
cloister of Saint Gall, so dramatically described by Scheffel in his
_Ekkehard_, their activity in letters and missionary work and gardening,
in the copying of the classics and in teaching, as _Ekkehard_ taught the
Duchess Hadwig the intellectual charms of the great pagan poet Virgil,
to realize the debt owed by civilization to these monks. Though they and
their classics, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, etc., sunk into the
foundations of our civilization, yet, in their fanatic zeal, they
destroyed many priceless old German treasures, relics of antiquity,
which are, unfortunately, irretrievably lost. Charlemagne, with his deep
intuition, recognized the value of these relics, and, assisted by the
staff of free-hearted and free-minded scholars with whom he had
surrounded himself, tried to save what could yet be saved.
With the advent of the monk came the nun. The great Boniface, the
apostle of the Germans, with inflexible will and diplomatic shrewdness,
availed himself of the especial gifts of woman to aid in subjecting
Germany to the Holy See. Not finding sufficient aid in Germany, he
fetched women from England. The Anglo-Saxon abbesses, Lioba of
Bischofsheim, Thekla of Kitzingen, and Walpurgis of Heidenheim, were of
immense utility in his missionary work, and left a saintly memory in
Germany. They raised the female priesthood of the nuns to a lofty
height, their cloisters were nurseries of culture. Princesses and royal
daughters sought the veil as an honor or as a refuge from the trials of
their high station. It is true, however, that the monasteries of the
nuns did not always maintain their original purity. Not seldom a nun
broke her vow and preferred excommunication to a loveless existence.
Sometimes the nuns tried to console themselves in the cloister itself
for the dreariness of their existence. The Capitularies of Charlemagne
inform us of the manner in which vagrant nuns, amorous dwellers in
cloisters, offended against religious laws. Sometimes, indeed, the nuns
even carried on amours for money, and the natural consequences of the
breach of the vows of chastity were removed by crime, while, on the
other hand, the chastisements meted out for such crimes were truly
barbarous. There are Capitularies that prescribe that nuns' cloisters be
not too conveniently near to the monasteries of monks, and others that
accurately define the intercourse between clerics and laymen, that set
forth the rule that "no abbess should presume to go outside of the
monastery without episcopal permission nor permit her subordinate nuns
to do so, that they shall not dare to write or send love-songs
(_winileodes_);" but it is not less true that _winileodes_ continued to
be realistically played in the nunneries and played in earnest. That
luxury and high living must have developed in cloisters appears from a
capitulary which forbids abbesses to have packs of hounds, and falcons,
and hawks, and jugglers; that they shall live "regularly," and that
their cloisters should be "rationally" established.
We prefer, however, to write of the many holy women, the nuns,
especially the Anglo-Saxon nuns, who obtained martyrdom by cooperating
with Winfrid, the apostle of the Germans and other holy missionaries of
the time. The monk Rudolf of Fulda wrote a biography of Saint Lioba
after the report of her female disciples. Lioba was educated in an
English nunnery which had been founded at Winbrunne (to-day Wimborne
Minster, Dorsetshire), together with a monastery. Very naively Rudolf
asserts that in spite of the proximity of the institutions no undue
intercourse between their inhabitants ever occurred; nay, the abbess was
so strict that she forbade entrance to the assemblies of the nuns, not
only to clerics and laymen, but also to the bishops. At this holy place
did the virgin grow up, soon becoming the star of piety and wisdom in
the cloister, and the favorite of the abbess. Thence she was sent by the
will of Boniface to Germany and placed at the head of the cloister of
Bischofsheim. From all parts of Germany young women went to her cloister
to learn virtue and wisdom from the holy woman. When Boniface prepared
himself for his last missionary expedition to the pagan Frisians, he
commended his pious sister to his successor, exhorted her not to weary
in her holy work, and directed that her body after death should be
placed with his own in one grave, that they should both await the day of
resurrection after they had served Christ in the same endeavor and
aspiration during their lives. When Boniface had found the martyr's
death in Frisia, Lioba worked on for many years with beneficent activity
in the Christianization of Germany. Venerated by all she was an especial
favorite of Charlemagne and his consort Hildegard, yet she preferred at
all times the atmosphere of her cloister to the luxurious life at the
court. She died A. D. 780, sanctified by the Church, and many miracles
are related by Rudolf as having happened at her grave.
There are scores of similar legends in the Latin literature of the time,
for, from the eighth century on, Germany is filled with holy women and
maidens, promoters of the Church, founders of cloisters. The nun's
garment is revered everywhere; the veiled, consecrated maids of God owe
their high appreciation to their virgin state for which as already
especially mentioned the Germans felt a deeply ingrained veneration. The
"Maria-cult" had constantly grown in importance since the fifth century.
Goethe's "eternal feminine" celebrated its apotheosis in the new faith
as it had in the old belief in Freya and the Valkyries. Mary's
motherhood was sacred, but sacred only because it was motherhood with
virginity, eternal virginity. Yet the ideal of womanly beauty and
fascination is not at all lacking. Scherr translates a description given
by the Church Father Epiphanius as early as the fourth century of the
Holy Virgin as the ideal of pure womanhood. And, though the memory of
Olympus is apparent everywhere in the description, Epiphanius from
Palestine pictures Mary, the Mother of Christ, as a truly German ideal
of beauty: a golden-haired, blue-eyed Madonna. "The most beautiful of
women, gloriously formed, neither too short nor too long. Her form was
white, finely colored and immaculate; her hair was long, soft,
gold-colored. Under a well-shaped forehead and bright brown eyebrows
shone her moderately large eyes with the lustre of a sapphire. The white
in her eye was milk-colored and brilliant as crystal. The straight and
normal nose as well as the mouth were comparable to snow in whiteness.
Each of her cheeks was like a lily upon which lies a rose-leaf. Her
well-rounded chin bore a dimple, her throat was white and ivory, her
neck slender and well-proportioned. Fine was her gait, graceful the play
of her features, chaste her entire attitude. Briefly, excepting the Son
of God, none ever possessed such a beautiful and pure body as the Holy
Virgin Mary." Indeed, the humanizing of the Mother of God was as
complete as that of foam-born Aphrodite in Homer. Mary is the leader,
the choregetes of saintly womanhood; solemnly enthroned in the heavens,
she moves everything, including Christ, her Son. She is the alpha and
omega of Christian poetry and art.
No wonder that women of all states of society found high incentives
toward dedicating their lives to the service of Christ and the Holy
Virgin. The disappointments and trials of womanhood, too, prompted many
to seek seclusion from the world. Scheffel, in his _Ekhehard_, describes
such a type of holy recluse under the title of _Wiborada Reclusa_. She
had once been a proud, unapproachable maiden, he says, well versed in
many arts; she had learned from her priestly brother Hitto to repeat all
the Psalms in Latin, and had not once been inclined to sweeten the life
of a husband; the bloom of her land (_Suabia_) had found no grace before
her eyes, and she had made a pilgrimage to Rome. There her soul must
have been shaken to its foundation; for three days she was lost sight
of, for three days her brother Hitto was running up and down the Forum,
and through the halls of the Coliseum and under Constantine's triumphal
arch, down to the four-headed Janus on the Tiber, seeking his sister and
finding her not. On the morning of the fourth day, she came in through
the Salarian gate and carried her head aloft, and her eyes were shining,
and she spoke, saying that everything was vain in the world as long as
the honor due to Saint Martin was not rendered to him.
When she returned home, she bequeathed her property to the Episcopal
church at Constance, on condition that the priests on the eleventh day
of every October should celebrate in honor of Saint Martin. She herself
entered into a narrow hut, where the recluse Citia had established
herself, and led a cloister life. And when this place no longer suited
her, she removed to a cell in the valley of Saint Gall. The bishop
himself conducted her thither and put the black veil around her, and led
her by the hand to the Irish hill (Saint Gall had been an Irish
missionary in Germany) and spoke the blessing over her; with the trowel
he made the first stroke on the stones with which the entrance was
walled up, and pressed four times his seal upon the lead wherewith they
closed the cracks, and thus separated her from the world, and the monks
sang at that, mournfully and with muffled tones, as if someone were
buried. But the people of the neighborhood held the recluse in high
honor; they said that she was a "hard-forged mistress of holyness," and
on Sunday they stood head to head on the meadow plain, and Wiborada
stood at her little window and preached to them, and other women settled
in the neighborhood and sought instruction from her in virtue.
The influence of the Church was especially beneficial to the position of
woman in married life. The Church insisted upon, and frequently
enforced, monogamy and the sanctity of marital vows, and sanctified
marriage by making it a sacrament. Dissolution of marriage, according to
the law of the Church, was permitted only in case of adultery, of danger
to the life of the one or the other party from hate or crime, the exile
of one of the couple, impotence on the part of the man, or sterility on
the part of the woman, and by common agreement between husband and wife
for sacred purposes, e. g., entrance into a monastery or cloister. Yet
while the influence of the Church, in theory, was, on the whole,
extremely helpful in fashioning the standard of morals, there prevailed,
nevertheless, even during the Carlovingian epoch, a terrible
demoralization and sexual laxity a legacy from the preceding Merovingian
period.
It is historically doubtful whether at Charlemagne's birth his mother
was married to his father, Pepin. It was no uncommon practice for the
actual consummation of marriage to follow close upon the betrothal, and
for the actual marriage, with the consecration of the Church, to follow
much later, if at all. The private life of the greatest German emperor,
who was canonized by the Church and who thus is a saint, at least in his
imperial city, Aachen, or Aix-la-Chapelle, is by no means edifying.
Gustav Freytag characterizes Charlemagne from the moral point of view
with the greatest psychological truth. He describes him as greatly in
need of woman's love. Indeed, even here his tenderness was that of a
lion, and was felt by wife and daughters with secret awe, though
answered by flattering caresses. When not on warlike expeditions he
lived always with his family. He ate with them, and took them with him
on all his journeys. This was tedious enough for his successive wives
and daughters, since he was almost always on journeys, especially during
the first half of his long reign. While his children were small, he had
hardly a permanent home. His family life appeared reprehensible, even to
his contemporaries, who were accustomed to great digressions from moral
law.
The chroniclers of the time, mostly court historians and court poets of
the great emperor, naturally express themselves rather cautiously
concerning his private life; and yet we can deduce strange facts from
their reports, especially from the _Life of Charlemagne_, written by
Eginhard, the friend and counsellor of the emperor. The latter's mother,
Berthvada, induced him to marry Desiderata, daughter of King Desiderius
of the Langobards; but he divorced her at the end of one year, whether
for political reasons not to be entangled in the complications between
the Langobard dynasty and the Papacy or for private considerations is
not known. His next wife was Hildegard, an Alemannian duchess, who bore
him three sons, Charles, Pepin, and Louis, and three daughters,
Hruodrud, Bertha, and Gisela. By his third wife, Fastrada, a German
princess of Eastern-Prankish birth, he had two daughters, Theodorada and
Hiltrud, and by a concubine, Ruodhaid. His next wife, Liutgard, bore him
no children. After her death he had three concubines, Gerswinda, a Saxon
lady, the mother of Adaltrud; Regina, the mother of Drogo and Hugh; and
Ethelind (_Adalinde_). It is characteristic, however, that this
authentic account does not designate the mothers of all his children.
Charlemagne desired that all the children of his mistresses as well as
of his legitimate wives should live together at his court and be of
equal royal rank. Without distinction of sex, he gave to all of them a
liberal education in the sciences; and as soon as their age permitted,
his sons were trained in arms, and his daughters instructed in the use
of the loom and the spindle. He had so great an affection for his
children that he prevented his daughters from marriage, in order not to
lose their company. They are reputed to have been very beautiful, and,
in spite of their occupation with the spinning-wheel, they found time
for love adventures; so that, as Eginhard tells us, "though otherwise
happy, the Emperor experienced the malignity of fortune so far as they
were concerned; yet he concealed his knowledge of the rumors current in
regard to them, and of the suspicions entertained with regard to their
honor."
Eginhard himself did not escape suspicion, though his amour with fair
Emma, and the romantic story of their nightly meetings and Emma's
carrying her learned lover through the freshly fallen snow to conceal
his footprint must be assigned to the domain of unauthenticated legend.
But it is a historical fact that several of Charlemagne's daughters had
illegitimate children. Being debarred from marriage they sought unlawful
love adventures. The oldest, Hruodrud, who had been several years
betrothed to the Greek emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitos, until her
father dissolved the betrothal, left a son by Count Rorich. Bertha's two
sons, Hartnid and Nidhard, the latter a brave warrior and a famous
chronicler, owed their existence to Angilbert, the court poet and
historian who was afterward Abbot of Centulum. Especially after the
death of Charlemagne were the lives of his daughters so shameful that
King Ludwig, the German, saw himself forced to remove some of the most
scandalously behaving lords from the suite of the princely sinners.
In spite of those moral shortcomings, Princess Bertha was especially
brilliant as a scholar. She was called Delia, sister of Apollo, in
Charlemagne's "Academy." She sang her teacher Alcuin's poems, which she
accompanied by string music. Besides the emperor's wife and his
daughters, there were two nuns in the academic circle: the elder,
Gisela, Charlemagne's sister, surnamed Lucia, Alcuin's best friend, and
her intimate, Riktrudis, with the academic name of Columba; also
Gundrada, of illustrious nobility and charm, the sole secular lady at
the court against whom no word of gossip was ever uttered by courtiers
or clerics.
So flagrant are, however, the sins of love at that brilliant court which
did so much for classical, Germanic, and sacred learning in Germany,
that even the saga, in dim recollection of past events, seized upon
Charlemagne's towering figure in respect to his moral side. He is
represented by a later legend as having been misled into grievous sins
by a mysterious, magic precious stone in a ring which he had presented
to his queen. As long as she wore the ring, he could not live away from
her. At last the queen fell ill and came to die. But grudging the stone
to any other woman and desiring that the king might not love another as
he loved her, she concealed the ring under her tongue and died.
Charlemagne unable to live without her did not allow her to be buried,
but carried her with him day and night on the journey through his vast
realm. An inexpressible sin, due to the magic ring in her mouth, ensued.
At last, when Charlemagne was absent, the corpse of the dead woman was
examined and the ring was found in her mouth. A knight took the ring
away and kept it. Charlemagne had the queen buried at once. But all the
love which he bore to his dead wife, he now transferred to the knight as
long as the latter possessed the stone. The knight, annoyed by this love
and the shame thereof, threw away the stone into a morass. Charlemagne
conceived such an affection for the place where the ring lay that he
built there the Cathedral of Our Lady at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle). And,
as a higher irresistible power had brought about the moral sins as well
as other sins bearing the character of incest, Saint AEgidius and Saint
Theodolin secured for him atonement, expiation, and absolution.
The court life at the time of Charlemagne, loose as it was, had its
great redeeming features; it sank, however, under his weak successors
into the utmost decay and degradation. The dynasty perished with Ludwig
the Child (A. D. 911). Charles the Fat, the unworthy descendant of his
great sire Charlemagne, had given the world, during his calamitous
reign, the melancholy spectacle of a king publicly accusing his wife,
Richardis, of adultery with his own chancellor, Liutward, Bishop of
Vercelli. But Richardis asserted that she was a virgin though she had
been living with her husband for twelve years. The emperor forced an
ordeal (A. D. 887) to free her from the terrible accusation: and an
ordeal remained, during the entire Middle Ages, the only means for an
accused woman to purify herself and redeem her honor. This special
ordeal is minutely described in the so-called _Kaiserchronik_ (Chronicle
of Emperors), how Richardis slipped into a garment made for that
purpose, which was set on fire at all four ends, at her feet and arms,
simultaneously. In a short hour the garment burned from her body; the
wax dripped down to the pavement, but the royal lady remained unhurt,
and the spectators of the cruel ordeal cried _Deo gratias!_ Richardis,
however, retired after this disgrace to a cloister which she had
founded.
The same accusation was raised later against Kunigunde, wife of the last
Saxon emperor, Henry II. the Pious, but she, too, was exonerated by the
ordeal of "the hot iron" upon which she trod with impunity. Kunigunde
has been canonized by the Church for having preserved her virginity also
in married life, and for having forced the devil to church building.
The moral life of the higher classes was duly reflected in the lower
walks of life. The female serfs, who, as we learn from imperial decrees
of the time, when they did not work in the fields, carried on their
domestic labors in a separate house, called _screona_ (shrine), were
practically helpless in the hands of their masters. Those out-houses
were frequently used as places for gratifying lust by forcing their
inmates to sin, though nominal fines still prevailed for rape or
violence: he who "covered" (_belag_) a maid "without her thanks," _i.
e._, against her will, paid a fine of three shillings; if she was a
head-maid, or a stewardess or skilled laborer, six shillings. Thus it
happened that as early as the time of Charlemagne the women's house came
to have the flavor of infamy _Frauenhduser_ was the name of houses of
prostitution during the Middle Ages. Unfree women could marry only with
the permission of their masters; the bridegroom had, in recognition of
this fact, to pay a tax (_maritagium_) called by different obscene names
in different localities, as a redemption, as it were, of the bride's
virginity. Naturally, the female serf was helpless against the lord, who
did what he pleased: a shameful abuse, which, in the course of time,
crystallized into a right; the infamous _jusprinuz noctis, i. e._, the
right of the lord to the body of his unfree female serf during the first
night of her married life. The several attempts to relegate this usage
to the realm of legends have signally failed. Both Scherr and Freytag
expatiate on this gloomy subject, on which a whole legal and cultural
literature has sprung up. Passing quickly over this saddest of all the
chapters of human subjection to shame, many a beautiful feature of the
growth of womanhood among the lower classes may be noted.
With the general improvements of agriculture under Charlemagne, there
was a corresponding improvement in the art of building. Instead of the
old German block-house, plastered with clay, the crevices filled with
reed, and without windows or staircases, in which people and cattle were
stalled together, dwellings fit for human beings were gradually evolved.
The dwellings of unfree people (_Hdrige_) consisted of house, barn, and
stable for cattle, while the estates and houses of landed proprietors
comprised mansion (_Herrenhaus_), cellar house (_cellaria_), bath house,
grange (_picarium_), stables, and a separate house for women (_genitium_
or _screona_) in which the women handled distaff and spindle, spinning
linen and wool, making ornaments, embroidery, figures in cloth, and
other feminine work. There they sat, the distaff between their knees,
the spindle in their hands, beautiful pictures of noble German
womanhood. There they made the linen garments for themselves and their
families, including their husbands. Royal ladies worked not less than
peasant women or unfree maids. Later on, Luitgardis, daughter of Emperor
Otto the Great, was so famed for being an industrious spinner that a
golden spindle was hung over her grave. The tailoring needle and
scissors were handled with skill, as is certified in many a mediaeval
song. The Carlovingian period, therefore, furnishes us with much over
which to lament, but also with much over which to rejoice. Virtue and
vice are there in abundant measure.
The Christian-German civilization founded by Charlemagne was almost
destroyed under his successors. Under Charlemagne we could treat his
vast realm, at least so far as it covered France and the North, as
genuinely Teutonic land; two generations later, under his grandsons,
Charles the Bald and Ludwig the German, we must begin the separation of
France and Germany, by the Treaty of Verdun, A. D. 843, while the middle
land, namely, Burgundy, Alsace, and Lorraine, which fell to Lothaire
with the already shadowy imperial crown, becomes the Eris-apple between
the two. Germany and France, originally one, are separated by a
territorial dispute for more than one thousand years.
Side by side with the heroic figures of Henry I. (919-936), who
refounded the shattered empire, and his still greater son, Otto I., who
rebuilt it, we find spirited princesses, some of them, like Adelheid of
Burgundy, foreigners, with great zeal for culture, who brought an
appreciation of refinement and art to the German court. Otto the Great's
son and grandson added the Byzantine culture to the Roman-Carlovingian
substratum. The women of the tenth century played a remarkably active
part in politics and literature. Mathilda and Editha, the pious wives of
the first two Saxon emperors, powerfully affected the civilization of
their time. The reigns of Otto II. and Otto III. bear most decided
traces of the influence of two royal women, Adelheid and Theophano, who
exercised a strong influence upon the political and intellectual life of
the century.
The period of the Ottos marks the climax of an early renaissance as
distinguished from the great classical movement so called five centuries
later. In art, this renaissance is expressed by churches and palaces
built after late Roman and Byzantine models, partly even with the
materials of those times; in literature, the renaissance blossoms in
classical studies, Latin historiography and poetry. Indeed, Tietmar of
Merseburg, the famous chronicler of the Saxon emperors, could well say:
"Proud like Lebanon's cedars the Empire towered, a terror to all nations
far and wide;" and again: "Highly blessed was the world when Otto
wielded the sceptre."
As regards the moral life of the times, Tietmar's _Chronicon_ presents
Henry, the founder of the dynasty, as not faultless. The legend also
weaves around Henry the wreath of romance when it reports that Princess
Use of the Herz Mountains kissed the cares from his royal brow in her
wondrous castle, a favor which, according to the charming Use song, she
bestows some nine hundred years later on Heine, the darling of the
Muses. When still very young, Henry concluded a marriage with
Hatheburch, a distinguished widow at Merseburg, but rejected her after
she had borne him a son, Thammo (_Thankmar_). He had fallen in love with
Mathilda, a rich and beautiful maiden of the race of Duke Widukind, who
had immortalized the Saxon name in the thirty years' struggle with
Charlemagne. She became Henry's wife and bore him three sons, Otto,
Henry, and Bruno. She seems to have steadied her great husband, though
their married life did not remain always cloudless. An episode related
by Tietmar, "to deter and warn the pious," may be repeated here because
of the flavor of its time: Henry had once on the day before Good Friday
of Easter week intoxicated himself, and, driven by the devil, abused his
pious wife in the following night. Satan, rejoicing over the deed, could
not refrain from telling the story to a respectable matron of Merseburg,
adding that the fruit of that unholy embrace would undoubtedly belong to
him. The matron betook herself to the queen and exhorted her "to keep
constantly priests and bishops ready to wash by holy baptism off the
newborn child all that may be pleasing on him to the devil." When the
devil learnt of this betrayal of his confidence, he chided the matron
violently, but added that, after all, something of the godless deed
would ever cling to the race of the king. And the chronicler explains
the violent feuds of the sons of King Henry and their fratricidal,
internecine strifes by the flagitious transgression of God's
commandment: "thou shalt keep the Sabbath holy." Tietmar, continuing,
says: "That there is nothing which is not permitted in legal marriage,
is proved by the Holy Scriptures. But such lawful married life obtains
through the observation of holidays and honorable dignity, and is not
disturbed by the storm of threatening danger." Another example of the
same sin is quoted: Uffo, a Magdeburg burgher, while violently
intoxicated, forced his wife, Gelsusa, to yield to his will. When the
woman, having conceived in that night, in due time bore a child, it had
bent and crooked toes. Terrified at that sign, she had her husband
called and complained to him that this mark of divine displeasure was
due to their common sin: "Behold, the wrath of God reveals itself to us
and exhorts us that we should not act thus further! Thou hast committed
a grievous sin in that thou commanded me what was not right; and I have
sinned equally in that I obeyed thee." The fruit of sin, however, the
babe, was taken from the exile of this life to the hosts of innocent
children in heaven.
Queen Mathilda outlived her consort; and though she favored the
succession of her younger son, Henry, she saw her eldest son, Otto
(936-973), elevated to the throne of his father. Otto married an English
princess, Editha, the pious daughter of King Ethmund. She was to the
great emperor a pure and faithful consort. She was endowed with
numberless virtues, a fact which became manifest after her death by
miracles and heavenly signs. After nineteen years of married life
"pleasing to God and men," says the chronicler, "she died, the noblest
foreign princess who ever adorned the German Imperial throne." She left
but one son, Luidoulf by name, whom Otto married to the only daughter of
Hermann, Duke of Suabia, whom he succeeded. Otto married again, his
bride being Adelheid, widow of the Italian king Lothaire, who, hard
pressed by Berengar, ruler of Ivrea, had called the Emperor to Italy as
her protector and liberator. "Otto," says Tietmar, naively, "who had
heard of her far-famed beauty, under the pretext of travelling to Rome,
marched to Lombardy, wooed the princess, who had escaped from Berengar's
cruel prison, and induced her, after he had won her favor by rich
presents, to yield to his wishes." We have a life of Empress Adelheid by
the abbot Odilo of Cluny, who was an intimate friend and closely
connected with her during the last years of her reign. He deprecates his
ability to write the life of the empress, to do which either Cicero
would have to be recalled from Orcus or the presbyter Hieronymos from
heaven. "For she deserves to be revered as the most imperial of all
empresses. Not one before or after her was her equal, she so elevated
and increased the Empire. She subjected defiant Germania, fruitful Italy
and their princes to the sword and sceptre of Rome. Then noble king Otto
won through her the imperial crown. Also the son whom she bore him, was
the pride and ornament of the Empire."
After the death of Otto I., Adelheid, with her son, Otto II. (973-983),
happily conducted the affairs of the empire and firmly established its
supremacy. But evil people alienated the heart of her son; she retired
to Burgundy, her home. Meanwhile, Germany mourned the absence of the
benefactress, but all Burgundy exulted over her return. Seized by
repentance, Otto humbly besought his mother to meet him at Pavia.
Weeping, he threw himself down before his mother, and from that time the
insoluble bond of love remained until Otto's premature death. Otto III.
(983-1002) and his Greek mother, Theophano, his guardian, succeeded Otto
II. Theophano, incited by the Greek, Philagathus, Archbishop of
Piacenza, became hostile to the empress, and, overcome by anger, she
uttered these menacing words: "If I shall still reign one year, Adelheid
shall not rule over more ground than one can encompass with one hand."
Before one month was over, Theophano was overtaken by Nemesis and died
(June 15, 991), while Adelheid outlived her in the enjoyment of
happiness. "So many realms as she possessed, through the grace of God,
first as the consort of the great Otto, then as the guardian of her son
and grandson, so many cloisters did she found at her own expense, in
honor of the King of kings." Before the year 1000 of Our Lord had ended,
longing to be united with the Lord of Hosts, on the 16th of December,
she died "and her soul rose to the pure light of the purest ether," says
the chronicler, "and to describe all the miracles at her grave, another
book would be necessary. But not to cover them entirely with silence at
her grave the blind recover their lost sight, the paralyzed the use of
their limbs, those sick with fever are cured there. Many ailing with
manifold diseases are healed by the grace and the compassion of Our Lord
Jesus Christ." Forsooth, A. D. 1000 is yet the blessed time when "faith
transported mountains."
The most memorable women of the Ottoman epoch is perhaps the nun
Roswitha, or Hrotsuit, of the cloister of Gandersheim, who is regarded
as the first German poetess, although her works are exclusively in
Latin. Born of a noble Saxon family she came early to Gandersheim, where
she was educated by the Carmelite sister Richardis and the highly
cultured Abbess Gerberga, Otto's niece. She became steeped in the
classics, and was soon able to imitate them to such an extent that her
fame as the bright ringing voice of Gandersheim soon spread over the
Christian world. She composed in Latin hexameters a eulogy on Saint
Mary, legends of saints, and an epic of Otto's great deeds (_Carmen de
gestis Oddonis I. Imperatoris_). The last work is rich in valuable
information, but a part of it has, unfortunately, been lost. She also
wrote the history of her cloister from its foundation until 919. But her
fame is founded especially on her Latin comedies, or rather dramatic
sketches, six in number, imitating the style of Terentius, but borrowing
the material from sacred legends, and chiefly glorifying chastity and
virginity. She takes as her themes womanly martyrdom, and the strength
of which even the frail woman is capable, if animated by faith and
virtue. She writes with a moral ascetic view and preeminently for her
sisters in the cloisters. Yet, because of the taste of her time she
introduces the reader to situations which are rather delicate. Hence
ensues a strange blending of classic sensualism and Christian
spiritualism. The fire of sensuality blazes throughout, though the
conclusion is always edifying through martyrdom; there is a struggle
between vice and virtue, but in the end, the triumph of Christian
sacrifices carries the day over the temptations and the sins of this
world. Kuno Francke (_Social Forces in German Literature_) thinks that
Roswitha, though surrounded by the atmosphere of the nunnery, was
carried away by the naturalistic tendencies of her time. Scherr asserts:
"Methinks that we may not offend her state as a nun when we suppose that
she must have had, before she wrote her comedies, some experience in
love, not merely in Terentius." Preferably, she chooses quite equivocal
situations. It is true that in her preface she deprecates any such
purpose with great ardor: "There are many good Christians who, for the
sake of a more refined language, prefer the idle glitter of pagan books
to the usefulness of the Holy Scriptures, a fault of which we also
cannot acquit ourselves entirely. Then there are industrious Bible
readers, who, though they despise the writings of the other pagans, yet
read the poems of Terentius too frequently, and, allured by the grace of
diction, stain their minds through acquaintance with unchaste objects.
In view of this I, the clearly ringing voice of Gandersheim, have not
disdained to imitate the much read author in diction, in order to
glorify the praiseworthy chastity of pious women according to the
measure of my feeble ability in the same way as the vile vices of
lascivious women are there represented." It is interesting to see how
she executes her plan. Take for example, her play entitled Abraham. In
this an old hermit hears that his stepdaughter, who had run away with a
seducer, is living in abject misery. He seeks to rescue her from a house
of ill repute where she has sought shelter. She does not recognize him
in his disguise, but he comes to see all the wretchedness of her life of
shame, and melts her heart in a wonderfully poetic conversation which
reminds one of Erasmus's colloquy between the youth and the fallen
woman. "O my daughter, part of my soul, Maria, do you recognize the old
man who with fatherly love brought you up and betrothed you to the Son
of the Heavenly Lord?" "Whither has flown that sweet angelic voice which
formerly was yours?" "Your maiden purity, your virgin modesty, where are
they?" "What reward, unless you repent, is before you? You that plunged
wilfully from heavenly heights into the depth of hell!" "Why did you
flee from me? Why did you conceal your misery from me from me who would
have prayed and done penance for you?" The miserable woman in her agony
replies only by exclamations of pain, and confesses: "After I had fallen
a victim to sin, I did not dare approach you." Abraham replies to that:
"To sin is human, to persist in sin is hellish. He who stumbles is not
to be blamed, only he who neglects to rise as quickly as possible."
In the play Dukitius, the Roman general so named, to commit an act of
criminal wantonness, enters at night time the prison of three Christian
maidens who had been thrown into confinement by order of Diocletian, the
persecutor of Christians. But the would-be ravisher is confounded by the
Holy Virgin, the protectress of innocence, and takes the pots and
kettles and pans for the maidens. The virgins look through the chinks of
the wall, and see the fool out of his mind holding the pots caressingly
on his lap, and kissing tenderly the pans and kettles. Irene remarks:
"His face and his hands and his clothes are soiled and blackened all
over by his imaginary sweethearts." "Just as it should be," replies
Chiona, "it is the color of Satan who possesses him."
Such was the work of the virtuous Christian singer in a strange foreign
garment, the only one possible for her to write in, for a popular
written German language did not yet exist. But her work was not lost, or
as she said herself in her preface: "If anybody shall find pleasure in
this my devotion (_devotio_), I shall be glad; but if it should please
no one, on account of my humble station or the rusticity of a faulty
diction, I myself at least rejoice over what I have done." Later on,
copies of her works were spread beyond her cloister. One copy was dug up
some five hundred years later from the dust of the cloister library of
Saint Emmeran at Regensburg by Conrad Celtes of Humanist fame, and
edited by him in 1,501. Roswitha was greeted by the world of the
Renaissance as the "German Muse." Celtes's edition is adorned by the
immortal Albrecht Durer with a woodcut representing Roswitha in a
kneeling posture, presenting her works to Emperor Otto the Great in the
presence of Archbishop Wilhelm of Mainz.
While dealing with the womanhood of the Ottoman era, it is incumbent
upon us to mention the history of a true German type of a royal woman,
who has been immortalized by Scheffel in the romance _Ekkehard_, already
mentioned: Hadwig, Duchess of Suabia, niece of Otto I., sister of
Gerberga, the abbess of Germersheim, the famous connoisseur of the
classical authors, and the teacher of Roswitha. Early widowed by
Burkhard of Suabia, the young, strong-minded princess of Saxon imperial
blood with a firm hand continued the administration of the duchy. "The
young widow," as Scheffel paints her, "was of royal disposition and
uncommon beauty. But she had a short nose, and the sweet mouth was
somewhat disdainfully puckered up, and her chin projected boldly so that
the dimple which becomes woman so sweetly, was not to be found with her.
And whose countenance is thus shaped, he bears with a sharp spirit a
hard heart in his bosom and his nature inclines to severity. Therefore
the duchess, in spite of the bright roses of her cheeks, inspired many a
one in her land with a strange terror." Scheffel describes her
steel-gray garment which flowed in light waves over the embroidered
sandals; this garment clung close to her body; over it was a black tunic
reaching down to the knee; in her girdle that encased her hips, shone a
precious beryl; a gold-thread embroidered net held her chestnut-brown
hair, yet carefully curled locks played around her bright forehead. The
boudoir, too, of the illustrious lady of the tenth century is minutely
described. On the marble table near the window stood a fantastically
formed, dark green vase of polished metal, in which burned a foreign
incense and whirled its fragrant white fumes up to the ceiling of the
room. The walls were hung with many colored, embroidered rugs.
On the whole, there is in the wide domain of literature scarcely
anywhere such a detailed and absolutely accurate picture of the state of
the culture and civilization of the tenth century as in this novel. The
description of the characters, Hadwig's chamberlain Spazzo, the abbots
and monks and warriors, the home industries, the vintage, the life of
all the classes of people, the cloisters, the festivals, the Hunnish
terror, the virtues and faults of the time, clerical purity and piety
and the little and great shortcomings of celibacy, the German Christmas
and Easter and Whitsuntide, the German soul (_Gemuf_), the patriarchal
relations between the imperial mistress of Otto's blood and her lowliest
maidservants pass before our eyes in a charming, ever-changing
kaleidoscopic procession. The young widow, in her lofty castle of the
Hohentwiel, whiling away her idle hours in the study of Virgil, with the
pure-hearted and scholarly monk Ekkehard, whom she invited from the
famed cloister of Saint Gall; Praxedis, the lovely chamber-woman of the
duchess, of Greek race, a living souvenir of the time when the son of
the Byzantine Emperor Basilius had wooed Hadwig; Hadumoth, the lovely
forest flower and the foundling of the lowest stratum of society with
her heart of love and truth and beauty, the personification of all that
is great and good in the soul of German womanhood of the lower classes;
the wood witch, who continues the old beloved custom of worship and
loyalty to the old gods, in bitter hate of the new faith that has robbed
her of husband, happiness, and child; the servant maid Friderun, tall as
a building of several stories, surmounted by a pointed roof, her
pear-shaped head, whose heart is now desolate, since her sweetheart was
slain in the Hunnish battle, and who turns her attention to the solitary
Hunnish prisoner, Cappan, whom she domesticates, Christianizes and
marries; all these types of German womanhood are so perfect, so
fragrant, so real that the historian of civilization loses heart in
attempting to describe other or better types. The love of Hadwig and of
Ekkehard, the latter's brief forgetfulness of his and her mission,
Ekkehard's trial, his escape and recovery on the snowy Santis mountain
in the Alps, the composition of the Walthari saga in the bracing
mountain air, close to the blue heavens, inspired by the Alpine
shepherd's godly child, Benedicta, are all episodes worthy of King
Solomon's Song of Songs.
After the Ottoman dynasty follow the Franconian emperors, descendants,
both through the female line and through marriage, from the
Carlovingians and the Ottomans, since Konrad II. (1024-1039), the first
Franconian, was descended from Otto's daughter and married Gisela of
Burgundy, a descendant of Charlemagne. Theirs is a period of transition,
of struggle between the Papacy and the empire, the preparation for the
crusades, fantastic, impolitic expeditions to the Orient for the
recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, fostering the spirit of aimless
adventure, but, at the same time, widening marvellously the narrow
horizon of the European world.
In contrast with the Latin poetry of court and cloister, the humble
people cultivated in their own way the German popular love song and the
tales that stir the popular soul. From those old folk songs we derive a
great deal of our knowledge of the life and love of the women of the
time. It is undoubtedly this awakening of the people which stimulated
the clerics also to the necessity for preaching in German. An
interesting spiritual poetess arises, known as the Frau Am, the recluse
and sacred singer, who died in Austria in 1127, and who was the first
woman known to us who in poetic German language worked out Biblical and
evangelical stories. The naive tone of her poetry is exemplified in her
description of the scene where the enemies of Christ lead the adulteress
to Him. Before retiring from the wicked world she had been married, and
had had two sons who seem to have been theologians. They furnished her
with material for three spiritual poems in which she described, with the
inartistic hand of a plain woman, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost as
they are communicated to man and create his virtues; further, she deals
with the Antichrist and the Last Judgment.
We must not leave the Prankish-Salian dynasty without mentioning briefly
a few superior royal women. Konrad II. found in his consort, Gisela, a
beneficent helpmate and also a coadjutor in the affairs of state. To
Konrad attaches the particularly characteristic and touching story of
the _Women of Weinsberg_, which has again and again been made the
subject of poems exalting the virtues of the faith and love of German
womanhood. When the emperor besieged the city of Weinsberg in Suabia he
met with such a stout resistance that he swore in his wrath to slay all
those who were able to carry arms. At last when hunger forced surrender,
the women appeared in Konrad's camp pleading for mercy, but the emperor
permitted them only to take as much of their precious possessions from
the doomed city as they could carry on their backs. And behold! next
morning when the gates opened, every woman tottered along under the
burden of her husband on her shoulders. Konrad's magnates maintained
that this was not the meaning of the grace offered to the women, but the
emperor, touched by so much loyalty and love, exclaimed: "An Imperial
word shall not be distorted by interpretation. The pledge as understood
by the Women of Weinsberg shall hold good!"
Konrad and Gisela's great son, Henry III. (1039-1056), who was strong
enough to bend and break the power of the Papacy during his brief reign,
married Agnes, a princess with a manly soul. She would have saved her
minor son, Henry IV. (1056-1106), perhaps the most unfortunate prince
who ever wore the thorny crown of the empire, if the perfidious, selfish
magnates of the empire had not snatched him by force too early from her
motherly and royal care. With the loss of his mother Henry lost the
direction and control and he seldom regained it during his long and
calamitous reign. At the age of sixteen he was married to Bertha of
Savoy (A. D. 1066), to whom he conceived a strange and unmerited
aversion, which she overcame in the course of time by her faithfulness
and loyalty in times of misfortune. She shared all the sorrows and
humiliations inflicted upon him by the haughty magnates of the realm and
especially by the German Pope Hildebrand, Gregory VII., the overtowering
personality of his time. But divine providence tried to compensate her
for her life of trial and bitterness: she became the mother of Agnes,
wife of Frederic of Hohenstaufen, ancestress of that glorious dynasty
under which blossomed up the First Classical Period of Bloom of German
Literature and Civilisation.
Of tremendous influence in all states and conditions of women and men is
the enforced celibacy of the clergy, an institution due, with all its
consequences of good and of evil, to the energy and iron will of Pope
Gregory VII. It is true that among the ancient Hebrews the marriage of
the high priest, and even of the priests in general, to a divorced woman
or to a widow, or, in fact, to any woman not a virgin, had been
forbidden. The New Testament, however, knows no such ordinance. Several
apostles, especially Saint Peter, were married. The Latin Church,
however, since the eighth century, insisted more and more upon the
celibacy of the clergy; but, nevertheless, it remained the rule for the
clergy in Germany, France, and Upper Italy to be married. During the
tenth century the moral decay among the clergy and the fear of its
increase, if the ordinances of celibacy were enforced, left priestly
marriage undisturbed. But the theory of the greater sanctity of the
priestly state, and the mediaeval spirit of the mortification of the
flesh, as well as the growing conviction that only the sacraments
administered by spiritually pure priests without carnal knowledge of
woman had a saving grace and force, and prepared the way for the final
stroke of entirely abolishing priestly marriage. As the power of the
Papacy increased, and as the necessity for an army of instruments
severed from the binding ties of family life and consequent dependence
upon the secular powers became ever more pressing, the great Gregory
VII. ventured the decisive and final decree of 1074, according to which
every married priest who administered the sacrament at the altar, and
every layman who accepted it from his hand, should be excommunicated,
Amid a fearful storm of protest, the order for priestly celibacy was
carried out in Germany. But the overwhelming power of Gregory VII. and
the weakness of the emperor, which drove the princes and bishops into
the arms of the Pope, lessened the resistance, though for centuries the
storm did not subside, and in the north of Germany it continued far into
the fourteenth century. Celibacy became a strong weapon in the hands of
the Papacy; it subjected the priesthood absolutely to the Church, and
withdrew its members from subjection to the secular power; but celibacy
did not at least during the first centuries redound to a higher morality
of the clergy. The complaints of their immorality increased with the
firm establishment of celibacy, and after the fourteenth century
actually fill the literature of Germany. These complaints are indeed one
of the primary forces and agencies in bringing about the great
revolution against the Church, known in history as the Reformation. It
is no less true, however, that, with the counter reformation within the
Ancient Church, a purifying influence was exerted upon the clergy, that
the Reformation was to the Church a blessing in disguise, and that no
doubt celibacy had its redeeming features, inasmuch as it made the
genuine, earnest, and honest part of the priesthood pure and independent
and fearless in their uplifting mission to the people of the Catholic
faith: a true ecclesia militans. But celibacy, like any other great
institution, is a two-edged sword! One needs only to trace the literary
and historical sources of those centuries to become convinced that, on
the whole, celibacy was a failure so far as the greater part of the
clergy was concerned, and a still greater failure in so far as it
affected the sphere of womanhood. The priestly farces
(_Pfaffenschwanke_), the popular wisdom as expressed in hundreds of
proverbs and sententious references, as well as the history of the time
in question, prove the truth of this assertion and testify to the low
moral status of both the clergy and the laity.