gives the full text of one of these summonses: “Know, that we have
fixed this year our meeting place in the country of the Saxons, in
the Eastern part on the River Bota, at a place called Storosfurt. For
this reason we direct you to be at the said place on the 15th of June
accompanied by all your men, well armed and well equipped, so that
you may go under arms, wherever it seems good to us to direct you to
march. We expressly recommend you, in order that you may see that the
rest follow our directions, to proceed to the designated place, without
disturbance, by the shortest road, without taking anything from the
inhabitants but the grass, wood, and water you require. Let the men
of your company march constantly with the chariots and the horsemen,
and let them never leave them until they reach the meeting place, in
order that in the absence of their master they may not be tempted to
do evil.” Late comers were punished by being deprived of rations for
the time they were absent, if the period was short. They who failed to
appear altogether were exposed to pay a heavy fine proportionate to
their fortune. While on the march the troops, as we see by the terms of
Fulrad’s letter, were to receive from the inhabitants of the country
through which they passed fire, water, wood, and lodging, but nothing
else. They brought with them enough provisions to last three months,
and arms and clothing for six months. Each warrior was expected to have
a buckler, a lance or a sword, a bow with ten cords, and twelve arrows.
Those who were better off brought with them a better type of shield,
while the counts and those who served as substitutes for bishops and
abbots, wore a breastplate and a helmet. Some of the soldiers carried
slings, and, apparently, there were mounted divisions in the army. For
certain necessary parts of war-material the counts were personally
responsible, such as three kinds of battle-axe, skins, battering rams,
also for the transportation of these, and for all things required to
keep the various weapons in good condition, and for engineering tools.
It is interesting to note how these warlike preparations were arranged
for. Ownership in land was the basis selected for apportioning the
expense. But as the man who had only a small estate could not bear such
an outlay, inequality of fortune had to be considered, and also the
distance to be traversed to the place of meeting. These points were
all kept in view by the legislation of the Emperor, but there was no
systematic attempt made to meet these difficulties. There were special
provisions intended to govern special cases. In the first place, the
call to arms was rarely made general. This was only done on exceptional
occasions, as in 773, for the Lombard war; in 775, in the war against
the Saxons, and in 792, in that against the Avars. In 807 account
was taken of the distance. The Saxons, for example, only sent one
man out of six against the Spaniards and the Avars; one out of three
was demanded against the Slavs; but in case of conflict with their
neighbors, the Suabi, all Saxon warriors had to take up arms. There was
also an apportionment according to race: the Franks were called upon
to confront the Saxons, the Lombards and Bavarians marched against the
Avars; while, in case of war with the Spanish Arabs, the Aquitanians,
the Southern Goths, the Provençals, and the Burgundians had to make up
the imperial army. In the war against the Slavs, the Emperor called
upon the Eastern Franks, the Saxons, the Alemanni, and the Thuringians.
In 807 the Emperor made the following arrangement as to military
service: Every man who owned three manses had to appear under arms; of
two landowners, each one of whom had two manses, one was to provide the
equipment for the other, and he who could go earliest had to appear
for military duty. Of three landowners, who had but one manse apiece,
one must go, while the other two were to provide the equipment, and so
on, the same arrangement being applied to owners of smaller parcels of
ground. Another year, the duty of serving in the army began with the
owners of four manses. The working of this graduated system of service
was left in the hands of the “missus,” who made his arrangements in
view of the prospective campaign.
It was evidently the Emperor’s purpose to make the burden as light as
possible for the small landholder, and at the same time the obligation
to serve was extended to those who had no landed property. So we find
it declared in 806 that “if there are six landless men who own each as
much as the value of six silver pennies, i.e., a pound and a half of
the metal, one has to serve and be equipped by the other five.” But the
freemen alone were not sufficient to fill up the ranks; for, under the
strict application of this system, no one was obliged to serve who held
land in dependence, or as a “beneficium” from a wealthy landowner, nor
did the obligation rest on those who had surrendered their lands to
the Church, or to a powerful layman, in order to receive it back again
under the conditions of a “beneficium.” This class were not wholly
free, nor were they actually landowners.
The problem of keeping up the war strength without oppressing the small
landowner was solved in the following way: Charles called together,
under the following conditions, those who were his own tenants. “Let
every freeman,” he directed, “who owns absolutely four manses, or who
holds them from another in the relation of a ‘beneficium,’ undertake
to furnish his own equipment and join the army, either with his lord,
if his lord is going there, or with the count.” These distributions
enabled the Emperor to get recruits who otherwise would have escaped
service; the other more remote result was that the “beneficium” system
received legal recognition, and in this way the Emperor himself
coöperated in the disintegrating tendencies by which the feudalized
state finally destroyed the imperial system.
The lot of the small landowner was made hard and unendurable under the
terms of the imperial military regulations, despite the compromises
intended by Charles to protect him. There was every inducement to
the owner of a small holding to give it up. We find, for example, an
imperial order forbidding freemen without permission from the Emperor
to enter the clerical profession, “for we have heard,” he says, “that
certain of them are not so much actuated by devotion as by a desire to
escape service in the army, and other public duties to the sovereign.”
The fact, too, that rules regulating this subject were extremely
complicated, led to all kinds of abuses on the part of those who were
intrusted with their execution. In a report made to the Emperor, we
read that “the poor people claim that, if one of them is not willing
to abandon his property to the bishop or abbot, or count, or ‘master
of a hundred,’ these officials find occasion to have him condemned and
compel him to go to the place where the army is mobilized, so that
being reduced to misery he is forced, whether he wants to or not, to
give up his property or sell it.” It was added that those who had made
this sacrifice were not disturbed.
The recriminations of the poor were directed against clerical and
lay officers without distinction; and we hear of their grievances
against bishops, abbots, and their legal representatives, as well as
against the counts and other laymen. The Emperor’s efforts proved
futile, and he not only could not resist the movement of his age, but
he found himself promoting the evolution he criticised. He actually
gave exemptions under his own seal to a certain number of religious
houses. The counts, on their side, made a practice of giving exemptions
and dispensations from military service. The landlord was allowed a
kind of authority over the tenant in questions in which the holding of
land was not involved. The rule that each landowner must be conducted
to the place of mobilization by the count was broken, and the landed
proprietors were allowed to appear ready for service, at the head of
their tenants and dependents, a distinct anticipation of the later
feudal custom.
The mass of the people did not fail to let their sentiments be known
when the Emperor proceeded to extend the privilege of quartering his
functionaries on private individuals. The imperial officers were
assaulted and their baggage stolen. There was much complaint, too, of
the incessant calls to military service. Many sacrificed, therefore,
their free status, which simply meant to them the constant obligation
to be under arms, and they entered the ecclesiastical profession
or became dependents of those who were more powerful. Carolingian
legislation permitted the freeman to “commend” himself to whomsoever he
would “after the death of his lord,” and so that process began by which
the central authority was robbed of its own subjects, the small, free
landowners. Thus it was that the medieval régime took definite shape
as a governmental hierarchy based on the possession of landed estates,
great and small, worked either by serfs or by tenants, related to their
overlord by various kinds of dependent tenures.
X THE CHURCH
In his relations with the Church, Charles gave a liberal interpretation
to his acknowledged powers of guidance and direction; the kind of
rôle he was willing to undertake shows that he drew no hard and fast
line between the secular and spiritual prerogatives of a monarch.
For example, in the Adoptionist Controversy, he took the initiative
himself in settling a troublesome problem of theological speculation.
According to the Adoptionists, in Christ there are a divine personality
and a human personality, which latter becomes by adoption the Son of
God. This tenet was eagerly embraced in Spain, its two best-known
adherents being Elipandus, Archbishop of Toledo, and Felix, Bishop of
Urgel, the latter a city in the North of Spain under the authority of
the Frankish King, who, therefore, immediately took steps to bring the
subject in dispute before a council, assembled at Regensburg, “under
the orders of the most glorious and orthodox King Charles.” Felix was
convicted of false teaching and sent to Rome to appear before Pope
Hadrian. Though Felix was deprived of his bishopric he continued to be
supported by the Spanish episcopate, who collectively wrote to Charles
for his restoration. At Frankfort, in 794, a council of prelates from
various Frankish sees met and listened to the King, who read the letter
from the Spanish bishops. The council then heard a long technical
speech from their ruler on the questions at issue. The Bishop of Urgel
was again condemned, but the matter was not decided until a few years
later, in 799, when a long discussion, lasting over six days, took
place at Aix between Felix and Alcuin, the conclusion of which was
that Felix allowed that he was overcome in argument, and published a
retraction.
Charles was equally interested in two other religious controversies of
his time, and he made his personal point of view predominant in spite
of the weight of church authority on the other side. At the Council of
Frankfort the bishops had received from Pope Hadrian the acts passed at
the Second General Council of Nicæa dealing with the subject of image
worship, a matter that had been debated with much violence in the East
and in Italy for several generations. At Frankfort it was supposed,
owing to an inability to understand the precise meaning of certain
Greek words, that the Nicene Council had formally ordered the adoration
of images, and its decrees were therefore rejected. The Emperor
undertook the defense of the Western point of view, and in doing so did
not hesitate to differ with Rome itself. He also took up an independent
position on a more vital point. It seems that during Leo III’s
pontificate certain French monks residing in the East were charged
with heresy because they inserted in the so-called Nicene Creed, in
the article dealing with the procession of the Holy Spirit, i.e.,
where it is stated that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, the
crucial word “filioque” (and from the Son). The matter was taken up by
Charles, and after this recondite theological point had been studied,
the action of the monks was officially sanctioned by the Council of
Aix-la-Chapelle, in 809, although the Pope refused to approve of any
addition to the historic formula of Christian belief.
In considering the Frankish ruler’s attitude towards the Papacy, it is
well to remember that the later administrative system of the Curia,
which made so clear-cut the antagonism between the secular prince and
the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the medieval times after the age of
Hildebrand, had not yet been developed. Charles reverenced the Papacy;
indeed, the Pope’s counsel and the Pope’s words often played a decisive
part in influencing his motives. He was a convinced believer in the
Pope’s right to teach the faithful, and he saw in him the guardian of
apostolic tradition. It was to this tradition that he appealed when he
condemned the Adoptionists at the Council of Frankfort. The specific
rights of the Papacy, from this point of view, lay in its teaching
function and in its liturgical usages, which were to be taken by the
Christians of Charles’ dominions as the correct norm of their practice.
There was also a full recognition of the prerogatives of the Papacy in
phases of administration and discipline, wherever ancient precedents
could be cited. So we find Charles appealing, in the renewed disputes
between the sees of Arles and Vienne, to the ancient directions of the
Roman bishops governing this question.
But this recognition of the rights of Rome did not prevent Charles from
regarding himself as the director of the Frankish Church. He speaks
openly of himself as “the pilot of the Church in his domains,” and
when writing Leo III he explains his conception of the relation of the
kingdom and the Papacy. “Our task it is, by the help of God, to protect
by our arms outwardly the Holy Church of Christ from assaults of the
heathen and from being wasted by the unbelievers and to establish it
within by recognizing the Catholic faith. Your duty it is to support
as Moses did, with uplifted arms our service in the battlefield, that
the Christian people, being led through your petitions and prepared
by God, may have constantly and everywhere victory over the enemies
of His name.” While Charles assigned to the Pope a religious activity
and nothing more, he regarded his own guardianship over the churches
as extending beyond questions of their material welfare. In 789 in
a message to the bishops he stated that he wished to coöperate with
them, using his power as a ruler, and working through his subordinates
to improve things where improvement was possible. These were the
principles he used in his Church policy. Just as in secular matters he
was not absolute, but followed the laws and customs of the people over
whom he ruled, so in regard to the Church he observed its canonical
system with a reverence for its minute details. But his capitularies,
as we have seen, are filled with ecclesiastical legislation, and in
Church matters the King acted as the supreme authority. Even synods
laid their decrees before him for correction, and to secure his
authoritative sanction. There was little place for a fully developed
Papacy in an ecclesiastical system worked along these lines, and there
are no examples during Charles’ reign of Papal interference in the
administration of the Church in his own domains. The Pope, where and
when he did act, did so in concert with Charles; even in cases of
excommunication there was an understanding with the King; and often the
extreme penalty was inflicted under his initiative. Even the exercise
of discipline in connection with the episcopate was left in Charles’
hands without any protest on the part of the Pope.
These religious activities of Charles seemed natural to his
contemporaries. Alcuin says of him that he was armed with two swords,
the one to smite false teaching in the bosom of the Church, the other
to protect it from the devastations of the heathen. He speaks of
Charles as a parent and teacher, under whose rule the Church is placed;
yet at the same time Alcuin had the highest reverence for the Papacy
and never thought of the possibility of conflict between the Pope and
the Emperor. In Rome itself there was no formal acceptance of this
Frankish conception of an ecclesiastical polity in which the Pope’s
place was that of a fifth wheel to the coach. Roman enthusiasm for the
Emperor, as expressed by the Roman clergy, was limited to encomiums on
him as protector of the Church. He was spoken of as the faithful ruler,
who, by his energy and his benefactions, was doing valiant work for
Rome and for the Papacy.
In matters of internal Church administration, the influence of the
King was often paramount in questions affecting diocesan order. There
was nothing revolutionary here, for the independence of the Church
from the State implied a situation that was never dreamed of at this
period, nor had it really existed since the time of Constantine.
Theoretically, the choice of a bishop belonged rightfully to the clergy
and to the laity of a diocese, but, as a matter of fact, the monarch
controlled episcopal elections. These could not take place until the
royal sanction had been secured, and the official in whose presence
the electoral machinery was set in motion was an appointee of the
King. The official papers recording the election had to be sent to the
palace, and the successful candidate could not be consecrated except
with the King’s approval. Often Charles himself selected the candidate;
besides, if a man were known to be favored by him, he would, on the
strength of this fact, be elected. Where bishops were to be appointed
for sees created in territory newly conquered from the heathen, they
were named by Charles without the form of an election. What is true of
bishops holds also with regard to abbots, who, on account of the great
expansion of monastic life, were of more importance than a diocesan
bishop. Church councils were summoned by Charles; he could preside over
them, and only through his consent were the decrees they passed valid.
Much attention was given to a systematic organization of the hierarchy.
There were twenty-two metropolitical sees in the Empire, and the bishop
was given real and effective charge of the clergy under him. Counties
and parishes, throughout the imperial domains especially, were growing
in number, and were placed in the newly acquired territories under an
assistant bishop.
XI THE EMPIRE WITHOUT AND WITHIN
The diplomacy, as well as the strategy, of the Emperor was worthy of
a far-seeing and cautious ruler. He kept the frontiers of the Empire
assured by fortifications, wherever there was prospect of direct attack
from the Danes or the Slavs, and by such means saw to it that the
tribes bordering on the lines of defense were kept in awe and reduced
to a state of dependence. In other places where the more distant
Avars and the Bulgars might ultimately give trouble, the Emperor
had taken care to come to a friendly arrangement with the Eastern
Empire for mutual protection. This understanding did not, it is true,
prevent friction between the two powers on the Adriatic Sea, where
on several occasions the armies had met to decide their differences
by arms. But on neither side was there any intention of developing
consistent schemes for conquering the territory of the rival emperor.
Disturbances were local and the border population was itself uncertain
in allegiance, and ready to accept the guidance of its interests in
determining the direction of its loyalty. This kind of hesitancy was
not found in Italy, which remained inviolably faithful to Charles’ rule.
The rulers of Constantinople had no time nor inclination to repeat
the experiment of Justinian and Constans during the reign of Charles;
they were weakened by serious difficulties of their own, due to
disputed succession and religious conflict, and to the need of constant
watchfulness against Moslem aggression. It was fortunate for both
empires that the Saracens were not united. This was the most decisive
factor, indeed, of the history of this period. The East was freed from
the type of attack which had kept Leo the Isaurian constantly on the
defensive, and which only his high military talents were able to cope
with, while in the West the inability of the Moslems to act together
made it possible for Charles to expand his territory and to give the
time needed for internal development in the consolidation of his rule.
It was one of the most permanent results of the activity of Charles
as a conqueror that in the Spanish peninsula he strengthened not only
the natural position of the petty and struggling Christian kingdoms,
but by his personality made the ideal of a Christian ruler respected
there, and so assured for the Christians in Spain a future which
could be realized only when they had lived down their particularism
and recognized the value of solidarity. But the wider field of armed
conflict for the peoples included in his realm would have meant little,
if it had not been accompanied by opportunities for real social
progress.
The empire of Charles, though it was the concrete creation of an
ideal government crudely understood and most inadequately worked out,
illustrated the liberty-loving principles of the Germanic peoples who
were gathered in its fold. In this respect, with all its imperfections,
the rule of the great Frankish monarch is more closely allied to the
political principles of modern times than were the more ambitious and
more logical creations of the conquerors who preceded and who followed
him. Unconsciously, it may be, his system of government gave scope for
local diversities and recognized rights of deep-planted traditions
with a generosity which is characteristic not of empires such as those
of Cæsar and Napoleon, but of federal republics of the type of the
United States, and the Federation of the Swiss Cantons. When he aimed
at uniformity he did not lose sight of the fact that he was the ruler
of heterogeneous nationalities, on whose good-will and coöperation the
permanence of the Empire was dependent. The pressure of centralization
was lightly exercised, simply because in the Emperor’s mind the ideas
of Roman rule had to pass through the medium of German tribal tradition.
There was no steam roller set to work to equalize, if not to pulverize,
the component parts of his realm. The divisions were not destroyed,
but were rather combined in a higher political unity. The kingdom
of the West Goths was at least preserved, though it had less of a
definite character than the Lombard kingdom, which the Emperor took
special pains to preserve in its integrity. Even the traditions of the
Ostrogoths were allowed a value in so far as they stood for a strenuous
opposition to the imperial policy of uniformity of administration
and to the economic sacrifice of the local centers to the purposes
of world politics. Lombard influence had overcome both Ostrogothic
and Roman rule; it was irreconcilable, and stood for the stubborn
and conservative standpoint that made the first Germanic invaders
difficult to assimilate in the provinces of the Roman Empire, where by
force of arms they became the ruling class. A similar obstinacy, with
its preservation of the original political type, marked the Lombard
kingdom and duchies which Charles had conquered. A picturesque example
of local initiative was not crowded out by the Frankish overlordship
in Venice; the seafaring community came into being in a favored spot,
on the confines of the two empires, too remote to be crushed from
Constantinople, and protected from the Western ruler by a few leagues
of shallow sea.
The same centrifugal tendencies are seen in Southern Italy; and what is
more important, in Northern and Central Italy, there was no attempt
to stifle the germs of municipal activity which produced, later on,
such marvelous fruitage in the Italian town life of the Middle Ages.
The contrast between the Germanic and Roman elements in the Empire
faded away gradually under the Emperor’s administration, but Roman
civilization could not be eclipsed, while the laws of Justinian
continued to be quoted as a model, and while the Church with its
general use of the Latin language was regarded as the chief adjunct and
support of continuity in imperial rule.