Franks went hand in hand. The country was placed under the supervision
of counts, the leading Saxon chiefs being appointed to the positions.
In one of the capitularies assigned to this time, the slightest
deviation from Christianity is treated as a most serious crime. The
murder of a deacon is punished by death, while an assault on a count
only entails confiscation of property. Similar severity is exercised
against those who are guilty of sacrilege, who break into churches, or
who violate the rule of fasting.
There seemed to be a fear at this time lest the popular Saxon leader,
Witikind, who had failed to appear at the assembly, might organize a
pagan revival, and so head a successful revolt against the Franks.
This fear was realized, for the drastic character of the new religious
legislation only provoked the opposition it was designed to meet.
Witikind soon returned to his people and quickly organized a revolt.
The character of the struggle showed itself in attacks on the Christian
missionaries, and in the destruction of the newly erected churches,
the places selected for bishoprics and abbeys suffering most. This
insurrection was for a time successful, and a Frankish army, through
the divided counsels of those who were leading it, was defeated and
forced to retreat. But the personal appearance of Charles on the field
was enough to turn the tide and was followed by the defeat of the
Saxons and by pacification according to the familiar terms.
The question was what to do with those who had taken up arms. It was
decided to put to death all who had united with the heathen against
the Christians. This merciless penalty was applied in its fullest
rigor. Those who were taken captive in the revolt numbered in all four
thousand; and of these, five hundred were beheaded at Verden, a savage
act of retaliation which disgraces the memory of Charles, and which
even the crudeness of the times cannot excuse. Besides, it did not
accomplish its purpose, for it only embittered those who were related
by kin or by friendship to the massacred Saxons. The revolt against
the Franks hitherto had never been universal, but now the whole people
rose en masse with sudden determination. Yet even with this temper
they were not hardy enough to take the offensive; so, while they were
preparing to resist, Charles, by a quick movement, surprised them, and
divided their army by his unexpected onslaught. But the first battle,
though unfavorable to the Saxons, was not decisive. The second ended
in a complete victory for the Franks, who took many prisoners and much
booty. The backbone of Saxon resistance was now broken, and Charles
with his army marched through the whole territory as far as the Elbe.
In all these Saxon campaigns, three victories stand out above the rest,
dividing the monotonous levels of revolt, conquest, and pacification.
The first, at Brunisberg, opened a way into Saxon territory for the
Frankish army; the second, at Bocholt, brought about the suppression
of a partial insurrectionary movement; the third, on the Hase, settled
the fate of paganism in Germany. But the state of the Saxon country
required constant watching, and we find Charles taking up his station
at Eresburg in 784-85, ready to repress any incipient movement of
revolt.
At Paderborn the Frankish assembly was attended by the Saxons, and
this meeting was signalized by further extreme measures to protect
the Church. The defenders of their independence met with all the more
harshness because they were sturdily loyal to a primitive ancestral
faith. Charles saw in them only worshipers of evil spirits,--men who
are charged in the capitularies with the practice of offering human
sacrifices and with eating human flesh. In his ruthless dealings with
the Saxons, Charles was the champion of a higher civilization fighting
against a lower, but one must at least question the legitimacy of his
policy, specifically because it claimed Christian aims and professed
Christian sanction. But we know it seemed righteous in Charles’ own
eyes, and his satisfaction was increased when he received, after
the long military campaigns were over, the Saxon Witikind, and his
companion in arms, Abbio, as voluntary converts to the Christian faith.
With his baptism (785) Witikind drops into obscurity, and we only hear
that his descendants became known for their loyalty to the new religion.
From 785 to 792 the Saxons did not stir; they sent regularly their
assigned contingents to the army of the Franks, and they took no part
in the Bavarian troubles. However, at the beginning of the expedition
against the Avars in 793, there was a fresh revolt, marked, as the
previous ones had been, by the destruction of churches, the massacre of
priests, and the return of the people to idolatry. From 794 to 799 the
Franks under Charles were busy each year in enforcing Frankish rule in
Saxon lands by a specially thorough military occupation of the country.
Further drastic measures of pacification were required, for whenever
Charles returned West to his own domains, he took with him a large
contingent of the conquered people, men, women, and children. Lands
were given them, and so the natural racial traits of Saxon unity were
destroyed and their fidelity to paganism broken. It is estimated that
a third of the population was removed, and the extent of this enforced
emigration may be judged from the fact that in 804 ten thousand men
were deported from two districts of Saxony and their land given
over to some of Charles’ Slavic allies who had rendered efficient
services to him during these wars against their hereditary enemies.
The Saxons gave up the fight only when their strength was broken, and
when the last adherents of paganism yielded to superior force. Only
then was the country from the Elbe to the Atlantic under the sway of
a single sovereign, and united by the profession of the same faith.
The conquered land was effectively occupied, and the loyalty of the
inhabitants to Charles’ empire was secured by the establishment of
three richly endowed bishoprics, Bremen, Münster, and Paderborn, under
whose supervision the work begun by the Frankish armies was completed.
IV OTHER MILITARY ACHIEVEMENTS
The struggle with the Saxons lasted thirty years in all, and its
completion brings us almost to the end of Charles’ reign. In order to
close our survey of the military operations by which the integrity of
the Carolingian Empire was preserved, or its frontiers enlarged, it is
necessary to take up the narrative of various warlike expeditions and
operations which demanded the ruler’s attention while the Saxons were
making their heroic struggle to cast off the Frankish yoke.
Hardly two years after the destruction of the Lombard monarchy, there
was such unrest in the small Duchy of Friuli, which was ruled over
by Hrodgaud, that a punitive expedition was needed to restore order.
Apparently Hrodgaud was intriguing with other Lombard leaders to
procure the restoration of the exiled son of Desiderius and so to
reëstablish Lombard independence. The project failed. Hrodgaud’s allies
among his own people withdrew support. Adalghis, the “pretender,” did
not leave Constantinople to head the revolt, consequently the Duke of
Friuli was obliged single-handed to meet the avenging Frankish army.
The revolted cities were soon captured; Hrodgaud himself appears to
have lost his life on the battlefield, and after this short campaign,
which took place in the early months of 776, Charles crossed the Alps
in June to take up again the conquest of the Saxon lands.
This Lombard revolt, although it was an incident, and involved only
a small territory, was followed by stringent measures of repression.
Paul the Deacon, the Lombard historian, tells of the treatment of his
brother, who, it seems, took part in this insurrection. “My brother
languishes a captive in your land, broken-hearted, in nakedness and
want. His unhappy wife, with grieving lips, begs for bread from street
to street. Four children must she support in this humiliating manner,
whom she is scarce able to cover even with rags.”
Much more serious than this outbreak among the Lombards was the
disaffection of Tassilo III, Duke of Bavaria, who resented Charles’ aim
to turn a nominal suzerainty into an effective control. United closely
to the Frankish ruler by a common descent from Charles Martel, Tassilo,
whose family, the Agilolfings, had governed Bavaria for two hundred
years, had no mind to sacrifice the autonomy of his people. Even under
Pippin he had showed that he placed a very loose interpretation on
the ties of vassalage which bound him to the Franks. After Charles’
accession he continued his policy of isolation, showing by his failure
to render assistance in the campaign against the Lombards that he
did not recognize any obligation to further the ambitious schemes of
his overlord. During the revolt of Friuli he observed an attitude of
neutrality, an act which, coming from a vassal, could signify only that
the Duke of the Bavarians claimed an independent position. Such a claim
Charles was in no mood to allow. In 780, during one of the intervals in
the progress of the Saxon conquest, Charles, accompanied by his wife
and his sons, Carloman and Louis, spent Christmas at Pavia, the Lombard
capital, and in Easter, 781, visited Rome, where the royal children
received baptism at Pope Hadrian’s hands, and were raised by the
ecclesiastical ceremony of anointment to the royal dignity, Carloman
taking the title of King of Italy, and his brother Louis, that of King
of Aquitaine. During this stay at Rome, the relations of Tassilo to the
King of the Franks were discussed by Charles and the Pope. The result
was that a joint deputation was sent from both Charles and Hadrian
to Bavaria to remind its ruler of his obligations as a vassal of the
Frankish kingdom. Tassilo soon after appeared personally at Worms to
renew the oath previously sworn to Pippin. Hostages were exchanged on
both sides, but the tension continued. We find Tassilo, a few years
later, in 787, sending representatives to Rome in order to secure the
Pope as an intermediary to establish an agreement with Charles and put
an end to the mutual irritation of both parties. The terms offered by
the Bavarians were not regarded as acceptable by the representatives of
Charles, and the Pope himself solemnly appealed to the Duke to fulfil
his promises as a dependent ally and so avoid the evils of war.
After his return from Italy Charles held his court at Worms and
summoned Tassilo before him as the first step in acknowledging the
overlordship of the Frankish monarch. In the eyes of Charles, swift
dealing with a disobedient vassal was all the more necessary, because
Tassilo, by his marriage with the daughter of Desiderius, might easily
make himself the center of a revival of pro-Lombard feeling in Italy.
Three Frankish armies from different quarters invaded Bavaria, and
Tassilo soon found himself forced by this display of superior strength
to give up his dreams of independent power. He formally resigned his
duchy and received it back again from Charles’ hands, at the same time
taking an oath as vassal and giving hostages, among whom was his own
son. But not long after this Tassilo, who complained openly that his
position of dependence was insupportable, was charged by members of his
people with intriguing with the Avars. He was accused of treachery, and
was condemned to death by legal process. But the sentence was reduced
by Charles’ intervention to imprisonment in a monastery. His wife and
children met a like fate, and from this time on Bavaria was treated
as Frankish territory. Like Saxony, it was divided into jurisdictions
under counts and placed under the supreme military control of one
superior official.
The overthrow of Bavaria as a separate power laid the foundation of
a consolidated Germany, North and South, and, as in Middle Germany,
there was the same system of counties and bishoprics. Unity was still
far from being thoroughly realized, but that the germ of national
consciousness was already present is proved by the readiness of the
Bavarians, after the loss of their ruling duke and their autonomy, to
coöperate with the Franks in resisting the attacks of the Avars.
Just at the time that the tension in Bavaria was reaching its acute
stage, the situation in the Lombard Duchy of Benevento, whose Duke
Arichis seemed to be taking his cue from Tassilo, demanded attention.
There were no actual hostilities, for the presence of Charles in the
duchy was enough to bring the turbulent Duke to reason. His position
of vassalage was marked by a payment of an annual tribute of 7000
solidi. The duchy was mildly treated by Charles because it was useful
as a buffer against the provinces of the Eastern Empire, with which his
relations were far from being always friendly. The result was that the
Beneventines played a double rôle, sometimes befriending the Greeks
and rejecting the Frank overlordship, and on other occasions engaging
in hostilities with their Southern neighbors, as allies of the Franks.
There were a number of Frankish expeditions necessary to keep the
Lombards of Benevento and their dukes in mind of their duty as a vassal
state, and once there was a noteworthy failure of Frankish arms in 792,
when the campaign they had begun in the territory of the duchy was
abandoned.
Apart from the campaigns in Saxony, in Italy, and in Bavaria, necessary
to the integrity of the Frankish empire, there were various frontier
wars undertaken, not for the purpose of incorporating fresh territory,
but rather to impress upon contiguous peoples the power and prestige
of Frankish arms. The occupation of Bavaria brought Charles in contact
with the Avars, and his control of Aquitaine gave him as near neighbors
the Moslems of Spain, those enemies with whom his grandfather, Charles
Martel, had tried conclusions on the historic field of Poictiers.
This defeat had been inflicted on the conquerors of Spain at a time
when the Ommayad Caliphate ruled over a united Moslem world. But the
great internal revolution had broken this unity in 750, eighteen years
before the accession of Charles. The last Ommayad Caliph, Merwan, after
the great battle of Mosul, had been obliged to flee from Damascus to
Egypt and had there met his death. Shortly afterward eighty members
of his house were massacred by treachery at a banquet. Only one of
the family escaped, Abderahman, the son of Merwan, who, after many
adventures, reached Morocco, and was there invited to assume the rule
of Moslem Spain, where the jealousies of the Emirs, the lieutenants
of the far-distant Caliph in the East, had produced an era of
misgovernment and faction.
So began in 755 the Caliphate of Cordova, and with it the most
brilliant period of Mohammedan rule in Spain. But Abderahman was
not accepted as supreme head of the Spanish Moslems without active
protest; the Eastern Caliphate of the Abbasides had many supporters
in the peninsula, and it was to Charles that they appealed for aid
in resisting the Ommayad house. Naturally, the internal disputes of
the Spanish Moslems constituted by themselves no ground for Frankish
intervention. But the appeal was reinforced by promises that various
Spanish cities would open their gates if Charles would undertake to
cross the Pyrenees with an adequate army. This offer was made to
Charles by Moslem envoys, who appeared before him at Paderborn, where
he was holding a formal assembly (placitum) of the Frankish host
during the early course of the Saxon war. The prospects of valuable
territorial acquisition prompted the ruler of the Franks to embark
on this hazardous expedition. There is no proof whatsoever it was
undertaken to aid, as a kind of crusade, the feeble kingdom of the
Asturias, where the heirs of the Visigoths were still maintaining the
Christian cause against the Moslems.
In the spring of 778 the Christian army in force, containing
contingents of Lombards and Bavarians, as well as Franks, crossed the
Pyrenees, part of it passing into what afterwards became the Kingdom
of Navarre, while the second division moved along the Mediterranean
coast. Both were to meet at Saragossa, but before the junction was
made Charles laid siege to Pampeluna, which had previously belonged
to the small Christian kingdom of the Asturias. The city was taken,
and at Saragossa hostages were received to guarantee to the Franks the
possession of certain towns between the Ebro and the Pyrenees. With
this inconclusive result the aggressive part of the campaign ended.
Probably Charles hesitated to penetrate further into the country after
hearing that Abderahman had lately defeated an army of Berbers who had
come over to Spain to help the cause of the Abbaside Caliph. It was
now evident that the prospects of the opponents of the Ommayad house
were anything but brilliant, and it must have seemed advisable for the
Frankish army to withdraw from Spanish territory. Summer had already
begun before Charles turned his face homeward, after leveling the walls
of the city of Pampeluna to the ground to prevent its inhabitants from
revolting against him.
It was during this retreat that the famous disaster befell the arms of
Charles, to which literary history has given an importance beyond its
real deserts. On the 15th of August, at Roncesvalles, while the main
army was slowly winding its way among the defiles of the mountains,
the Basques applied to the Franks the guerrilla tactics they had
successfully used against all the invaders of Spain, Roman, Gothic, and
Moslem in turn. They made a sudden attack on the rear guard, and this
division of the Frankish army was utterly cut to pieces. Many of the
closest followers of Charles here met their death, among them Roland,
prefect of the march of Brittany, of whom we know nothing apart from
this brief notice in the contemporary histories, but whose exploits
were celebrated in popular legend, where, under the glamour of poetical
description, he has come to occupy a place as a warrior and hero almost
the equal of Hector.
The defeat remained unavenged, for it was realized that the pursuit
of the Basques in their mountain fastnesses was impossible. This
expedition into Spain not only accomplished little in the way of
permanent conquest, but served to provoke the Moslems to successful
reprisals extending over a series of years in the Southern part of
Gaul. The country was harried by the invaders, and towns as important
as Carcassonne and Narbonne were attacked and the country about them
ravaged. Dissensions among the Moslems themselves brought a respite,
and, aided by insurgents against the authority of the Cordovan
Caliphate, the Frankish officers in Aquitaine later on extended the
sphere of Frankish influence far into the Iberian peninsula. Before the
end of Charles’ reign Navarre and Pampeluna were again occupied, and he
could number Barcelona among the cities of his empire.
After the conquest of Bavaria, the campaign against the Avars, a people
closely allied to the Huns, was brought about by their threatening
attitude on the Eastern frontier, where they showed such constant
hostility to the peoples of German stock that in his military handling
of the problem Charles had the ready coöperation of the Saxons
themselves. After a preliminary campaign in 791, in which the Franks
advanced as far as the confluence of the Danube and the Raab, the
decisive struggle took place in 795, when the Frankish army, under
Pippin, the son of Charles, taking advantage of dissensions among the
Avars, succeeded in forcing the famous armed camp of the Khan called
the Ring, and returned with an immense amount of booty stored there,
the fruits of many successful raids on Christian towns and monasteries.
In 809 the Avars, hard-pressed by the Slavs, were glad to place
themselves under the Emperor, but their number had been so reduced by
warfare that a contemporary historian speaks of their lands as being
deserted, their treasures confiscated, and their nobility wiped out.
Operations against the Slavic tribes were taken up in earnest after the
reduction of the Saxons, though we hear of one marauding expedition
against them as early as 789. In 805 and 806 Slavic territory was
overrun by Frankish armies under the command of the Emperor’s
lieutenants, and two strong outposts were established for purposes of
military observation of their movements. These posts, on the Saale
and on the Elbe, became the nucleus for the development of the German
cities of Halle and Magdeburg.
After describing the wars of Charles, Einhard, his contemporary,
gives a summary of the conqueror’s achievements that deserves to be
repeated: “Such are the wars,” he says, “which this most powerful
king waged during forty-seven years. For as many years as these he
reigned in the different parts of the earth with the greatest wisdom
and the greatest success. So the kingdom of the Franks, which he had
received from Pippin, his father, already vast and powerful, nobly
developed as it was by him, was increased nearly twofold in extent.
Before his day this kingdom included only that part of Gaul which lies
between the Loire and the Rhine, the ocean and the sea of the Balearic
Isles, and that portion of Germany occupied by the Franks (who are
called Eastern) whose country lies between Saxony and the Danube, the
Rhine and the Saale, the river which divides the Thuringians from the
Swabians. Besides this, the Alemanni and the Bavarians acknowledged the
overlordship of the Franks. To these possessions Charles added by his
conquests first Aquitaine and Gascony, all the chain of the Pyrenees,
and all the territories as far as the Elbe. Then all that part of Italy
which extends from the valley of Aosta to lower Calabria, where is the
frontier between the Beneventines and the Greeks, in length more than
a million paces; then Saxony, which is a considerable part of Germany,
as long and twice as broad, it seems, as the portion of this country
inhabited by the Franks; then the two Pannonias; Dacia, situated on the
other bank of the Danube; then Istria, Liburnia, and Dalmatia, with
the exception of the coast cities which it pleased him to leave to the
Emperor, because of the friendship and the alliance by which they were
united. Finally, all the barbarous and savage nations situated between
the Rhine and the Vistula, the ocean and the Danube, much alike in
language, different in manners, and in their method of existence, all
of whom he overcame and rendered tributary.”
V THE RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE
In order to present a general outline of the wars of Charles, we
have been compelled more than once to pass beyond the crucial and
culminating event of his career, his coronation as Emperor at Rome in
the year 800, thirty-two years after he had become King of the Franks.
All of his conquests are closely related with this elevation to a
dignity revered for its venerable traditions, and yet the conquests
alone were not in themselves sufficient to secure such an elevation.
The acquisition of the imperial title was the result of a revolution,
a change of policy, due as much to the intangible forces that move
society as to the concrete details of the career of the Conqueror.
Master of Italy as he was after the downfall of Lombard powers, this
territorial control simply gave Charles the position once held by
another great German prince, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. But Theodoric
was not an orthodox churchman as Charles was. It was, therefore, the
combination of the orthodox religion, which Charles inherited as the
successor of the first Frankish kings, and his sway over the Italian
peninsula which prepared the way for the great event of Christmas Day,
800, when he took his place in the line of rulers marked by the names
of Augustus, Constantine, and Justinian.