Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Duke University Libraries https://archive.org/details/charlesgreat01 hodg jTorcifln ^tate^mcu CHARLES THE GREAT CHAELES THE GREAT, . owing to the death of Constantine V. (September 775), and how Hrodgaud of Friuli was left alone to bear and to sink under the vengeful might of the Frankish king. The Emperor Constantine V. was succeeded by his son Leo IV., surnamed the Khazar, his mother having been a princess of that barbarous Tartar tribe, who dwelt by the Sea of Azof and under the Caucasus. The strain of barbarian blood did not bring strength to the character of the young emperor. Leo IV., though an earnest image-breaker, was distinctly a weaker man than his father, and during his short reign the cause of Icono- clasm probably retrograded rather than advanced. The five years during which Leo the Khazar was on the throne (775-780) were years during which Charles gave little attention to the affairs of Italy, having much to occupy him elsewhere, for these were the years of Roncesvalles and of the fresh outbreak of the Saxon revolt. His friend and clamorous dependant, however. Pope Hadrian, sent him frequent cries for help. “ The Greeks hateful to God ” (that is the generals and minis¬ ters of Leo the Khazar) were conspiring with the “most unutterable ” Lombards of Benevento to seduce the towns in Campania from their allegiance to Charles and Hadrian. The island of Sicily, the one secure strong¬ hold of the Byzantine power during all these centuries, was the focus of this strife, but in order to prosecute it more successfully the patrician of Sicily took up his headquarters at Gaeta, and from thence, in concert with the Duke of Naples, was pressing hard upon those Campanian and Latian cities which kept their loyalty to the pope. Moreover, when Hadrian wrote one of his most urgent letters, in 779, it was daily expected that X RELATIONS WITH THE EAST 1(39 “ the son of the most umitterable and long ago absolutely unmentionable king Desiderius ” would land in Italy with soldiers lent him by his Imperial ally and head the anti- Papal, anti-Frankish coalition. Still, however, Adelchis lingered in Constantinople and once again a vacancy in the palace of the Caesars saved Italy from a war. On the 8th of September 780, Leo the Khazar died and was succeeded by his son Constantine VI., a boy of nine years old, ruling not under the regency of, but jointly with, his mother Irene. This woman was a daughter of Athens and a secret worshipper of images, though in her father-in-law’s lifetime she had solemnly sworn always to adhere to the party of the Iconoclasts. Like Queen Athaliah of old, she was passionately fond of power, both for its own sake and as helping her to maintain the cause of idolatry against the religious reformers, and she was ready, in defence of her darling schemes of ambition, to violate not only the oath which she had given to her father-in- law — that was a light and pardonable offence — but the deepest and holiest instincts of a woman’s heart, the love of a mother for her only son. For the first ten years of the joint reign (780-790) the lad, Constantine VL, quietly submitted to his mother’s ascendency, and only her will and her projects require the historian’s attention. The Iconoclastic spirit was strong among the soldiers of her late husband’s family, and she had to wait four 3 mars before she could openly take steps towards the restoration of the worship of images; but she seems at once to have ceased the attacks on Hadrian’s subject cities, and to have assumed a more friendly attitude towards Charles, who was not 170 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. himself at this time interested in the Iconoclastic con¬ troversy, but whose friendship was important if the Patriarchate of Constantinople was to be reconciled with that of Eome. Thus it came to pass that in 781, during Charles’s second visit to Rome, there appeared in that city two high nobles of the Byzantine Court, the saccl- larius Constans and the priinicerius Mamalus, who brought proposals for a marriage between the young emperor and Charles’s daughter Hrotrud, whom the Greeks called Eruthro. It was only an alliance at some future day that was talked of, for the prospective bridegroom was but ten years old, and the Frankish princess was prob¬ ably about eight. But the match was a splendid one, there having been no previous instance of a matrimonial alliance between the Roman Csesars and the Frankish kings, and Charles gladly accepted the offer. A tutor named Elissseus was sent to the Frankish court to instruct the future empress in the Greek tongue, and there was peace in Italy between the Franks and the generals of the empire. During these years of peace Irene was maturing her plans for the restoration of image-worship. In 784, Paul the Patriarch of Constantinople resigned his great office and became a monk, acknowledging to all the world that his conscience was troubled by the isolation of Constantinople from all the other Patriarchates on the ground of Iconoclasm. Nothing could have suited Irene’s plans better than this resignation. Her secretary Tarasius, though a layman, was made patriarch in the room of Paul, evidently on the understanding that images were to be restored. In August 785 an imperial letter from Constantine and Irene was addressed to X RELATIONS WITH THE EAST 171 Pope Hadrian begging him to fix a time for the convoca¬ tion of a general council at Constantinople to settle the question of Iconoclasm. The pope of course gladly con¬ sented, though he took advantage of the reopened intercourse with Constantinople to demand the restora¬ tion of the “patrimonies” (probably in Sicily) which had been taken away from St. Peter’s see by the first Iconoclastic emperor; and though he also held 112 :) to the Byzantine rulers the admirable example of Charles, “ King of the Franks and Lombards, and Patrician of Rome, who had in all things obeyed the admonitions of the 2^ope Ids spiritual father, had subdued to himself the barbarous nations of the west, and had given back to the church of St. Peter many estates, 2 U’ovinces, and towns, of which it had been despoiled b}'^ the faithless Lombards.” The general council was opened at Constantinople in August 786, but failed of its 25urpose. The Iconoclastic spirit was still too strong among the soldiers who were quartered in Constantinople, old comrades of Leo III. and his son. The church was invaded by them, and the image-worshipping bishops de23arted in fear. Next year, however, care having been taken to dispose of the Iconoclastic troo 2 )s elsewhere, a general council was held at Nicsea (24th September to 23rd October 787), and there the cultv,s of images was re-established in full glory, only with one of those distinctions dear to theologians which defined “ that it was right to salute and grovel in adoration before the holy images, but not to give them that peculiar worship which is due to God alone.” Thus, then, the great cause of ecclesiastical contention was removed, and we might expect that the joyful event 172 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAl’. would be celebrated by the marriage of the young affianced pair, Constantine and Hroti'ud, now aged six¬ teen and fourteen respectively. On the contrary, this was the very year in which, after mysterious embassies backivards and forwards between the two Courts, the marriage treaty was broken off and the relations became more openly hostile than ever; but curiously enough (as is not unfrequently the case in such affairs) there is a conflict of testimony as to which side had the credit or discredit of breaking off the match. The Frankish annalists say or hint that Charles refused his daughter to the young Emperor, who was much angered by the refusal. A Byzantine historian says that “Irene broke off the treaty with the Franks and sent the Captain of the Guard to fetch a damsel from Armenia named Mary whom she married to her son the Emperor Constantine, he being much grieved thereat, and not liking his bride because his inclination was towards the daughter of Charles, King of the Franks, to whom he had been pre¬ contracted.” It is hopeless with our scanty materials to discover the reason of this mysterious rupture between the Courts. One of the most careful of the German writers who have treated of this period attributes it entirely to Charles’s invasion of Benevento and reduction of its prince Arichis to vassalage, which, as has been already related, occurred in the year 786. This, he considers, was a breach of the tacit agreement to maintain the Italian status quo ante entered into in 781, and was resented accordingly. Others have seen in it a stroke of policy on the part of Irene, Avho was already becoming jealous of her son’s share in the Imperial authority, and feared to see him X RELATIONS WITH THE EAST 173 provided with a too powerful father-iiidaw. If it be permitted to hazard yet another conjecture, where all is conjectural, I would point out that in the interval between 781 and 787, Hildegard, the mother of Hrotrud, had died, and Charles had married another wife, the haughty and unpopular Fastrada. Possibly that proud and jealous woman resented the idea of seeing her little step-daughter raised higher than herself by her exalta¬ tion to the throne of the Caesars, and may have used her influence with her husband to entangle still further the already ravelled hank of the negotiations with Constanti¬ nople, and at last in disgust to break off the match altogether % The whole story is a I'emarkable illustration of the fact, so clearly shown in the negotiations for the Spanish marriage of Charles 1. when Prince of Wales, that a marriage treaty, if not very carefully conducted, is quite as likely to embroil two sovereigns as to unite them. One curious, though not immediate, result of the rapidly increasing estrangement between Franks and Greeks was that in the great synod which Charles held at Frankfurt in 794 for the condemnation of the “ Adoptian heresy,” Charles induced his bishops to pass a severe condemnation of “ the synod held a few years before under Irene and her son which called itself the Seventh Ecumenical Council, but which was neither the seventh nor ecumenical, but was rejected by all present at Frankfurt as absolutely superfluous.” At the same time it was declared by the assembled bishops that neither worship nor adoration was to bo paid to the images of the saints. Thus was Charles, the great patron and defender of the papacy, actually brought into contro- 174 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. versy with the pope on an important point of Christian practice. The immediate effect of the rupture of the marriage treaty was seen in an invasion of Italy by the Greeks, in which at last the long lingering Adelchis took part. The intention was to make an attack on Charles’s dominions in combination with the Prince of Benevento (on whom the dignity of patrician was conferred) per¬ haps also with Tassilo the Bavarian; but before the Imperial troops landed in Italy, Arichis of Benevento was no more. He died on the 26th of August 787, a man still in the flower of his age. It is striking to observe how much Charles’s upward course to empire was facilitated by the opportune deaths of his competitors. Carloman, Constantine V., Leo IV., and now Arichis of Benevento, all died at the most seasonable time for the success of Charles’s projects. At the time of the death of Arichis, his son and heir Grimwald III. was in Charles’s keeping as a hostage. Pope Hadrian earnestly besought the king never to permit one of the God-hated dynasty to ascend the Beneventan throne, but Charles, after some delay, allowed Grimwald to return and take his place in the palace of Benevento. He was, however, compelled to promise to pay a yearly tribute of 7000 solidi, to coin money with Charles’s effigy, to date his charters by the years of the Frankish king, and in all things to acknowledge him as his over-lord. For the present these conditions were kept, and at the crisis of the Byzantine invasion Grimwald HI. comported him¬ self as a loyal vassal of Charles. So it came to pass that when at last the Byzantine troops landed in Calabria they were met by the united forces of the Frankish X RELATIONS WITH THE EAST 175 king under his general Winighis, and the Lombard dukes of Spoleto and Benevento. The defeat of the Greeks was crushing (788). Four thousand of their warriors were slain, among them the sacellarius John, commander of the expedition; and one thousand wei’e taken prisoners. Adelchis appears to have made his escape. He reappeared no more on the soil of Italy, hut died many years aftei', an elderly, probably a wealthy, patrician at Constantinople. This last scion of the Lombard kings is not an interesting figure in history. Charles’s reply to this direct attack on his dominions in the south of Italy was to lay hands on the Imperial province of Istria in the north, a conquest desiral)le in itself, for the cities of Istria were numerous and wealthy, and also one that facilitated the operations which he was planning against the Avars. The Court of Constan¬ tinople, probably dispirited by the defeat of the great armament under the sacellarius John seems to have accepted the rebuff. For several years after this we hear nothing more of Greek expeditions to Italy, though there may have been intrigues with the young Prince of Benevento, who married a Greek wife named Wantia, a relative of the Emperor, and in various ways showed that he fretted under his galling vassalage to the Frankish king. But in Constantinople itself during these years of truce with the West, strange and terrible events were happening. The young Emperor Constantine VI. found as he grew up to manhood that he was an absolute cipher in his empire and in his palace. All power was kept by Irene in her own hands, all orders went through her confidential minister the eunuch Stauracius. To 176 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. these two all suppliants addressed their petitions. Con¬ stantine himself was treated as of no account to any man. Brooding over the daily slights which he had to endure, and resenting also, it is said, the manoeuvi-e which had de 2 )rived him of his fair young Frankish bride, and tied him to the unloved and childless Armenian, he began in 790 to look around for partisans who would enable him to effect a revolution and become a real instead of a pujapet emperor. The jdan of the conspira¬ tors (among whom were two patricians and the great minister called magister officiorum), was to arrest the empress, send her off to banishment in Sicily, and pro¬ claim Constantine sole emjseror. The ever watchful Stauracius, however, obtained intelligence of the plot, arrested the conspirators, ordered some of them to be flogged, tonsured, and sent into the Sicilian exile which they had planned for Irene; the magister officiorum re¬ ceived some degrading punishment and was imprisoned in his own house; and lastly this same punishment of seclusion was inflicted on Constantine, after his mother had herself struck him and attacked him with an angry woman’s invective. Then a new and strange oath was administered to all the soldiers in the capital and its neighbourhood. “ So long as thou livest, 0 Emj^ress ! we will not suffer thy son to reign.” These events took l^lace in the spring or summer of 791. In September of that year there came a change. The soldiers who were stationed in Armenia, when they were required to take the new oath, refused. “We will not put the name of Irene before that of Constantine,” said they, “but will swear obedience as of old to Constantine and Irene.” The disaffection spread ; the regiments which X RELATIONS WITH THE EAST 177 liad sworn the new oath to Irene forgot their vows and joined the soldiers from Armenia. By the end of October the revolution was complete. Irene was com¬ pelled by the clamour of the soldiers to liberate her son from confinement; she was deprived of all power, and Constantine was hailed as sole emperor. Stauracius was beaten, tonsured and sent into exile in Armenia. Aetius, another eunuch and confidant of Irene, was also banished, and a clean sweep was made of all the menial eunuch train, through whom apparently for ten years the empire had been governed. But, unfortunately, the character of the young emperor, weakened by the subjection in which his mother had kept him, was utterly inadequate to the duties of his new position. With extraordinary folly, after a few months he drew Irene forth from the seclu¬ sion of her palace, and allowed the people to shout once more, “Long life to Constantine and Irene.” He went forth to war with the Bulgarians and was badly beaten. This humiliation of the imperial arms caused the soldiers in the city to plot for the elevation of Nicephorus, a half-brother of Leo IV. and uncle of Constantine VI. The young emperor arrested Nicephorus and ordered him to be blinded; and at the same time the tongues of four other of his uncles were cut out (792). These barbarous punishments, blinding and mutilation, were characteristic of the Constantinople of that day, but the resort to them on so large a scale proved the alarm as well as the cruelty of the young emperor, and must have helped to lose him the hearts of his subjects. His mother and Stauracius (who was now back again in the palace) were thought to have counselled these cruel N 178 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAr. deeds; and they certainly succeeded in embroiling him with his old supporters, the Armenian soldiers, whose revolts plunged the empire in civil war. The climax of the emperor’s unpopularity seems to have been reached when (in January 795) he put away his Armenian wife, compelling her to enter a convent, and in September of the same year publicly celebrated his union ivith a lady of her bedchamber named Theodote. He had now lost the favour of the multi¬ tude, while his mother was ever at work forming a party among the officers by promises and bribes, suggesting that they should depose her son and proclaim her sole empress. On the 14th of June 797 Constantine went, after witnessing an equestrian performance in the circus, to worship in the church of St. Mamas in the environs of Constantinoiile. The conspirators, whose movements were directed by Stauracius, endeavoured to seize him there, but he seems to have been warned, and escaped in the imperial boat to the Bithynian shore. Unhappily his mother’s friends and his own bitterest foes accompanied his flight. There was hesitation and delay, and there seemed a possibility that the soldiers would rally round him and his cause might yet triumph. The ruthless Irene sent a secret message to his adherents, “Unless in some way or other you effect his capture I will inform the emperor of all the plot which you and I have formed against him.” Fear made the conspirators bold; they seized the emperor while at his prayers, forced him to re-embark, and hurried him back across the Sea of Marmora to Constantinople. There, after the lapse of some weeks, in the Purple Chamber of the palace. X RELATIONS WITH THE EAST 179 they put out his eyes, purposely performing the cruel operation with such brutality as to endanger his life. It was, in fact, supposed by many that he was dead, but he appears to have lingered on through many revolu¬ tions, an obscure and forgotten sufferer, for more than twenty years after his mutilation. The deed was done on Saturday the 15th of August 797, at the ninth hour of the day. On the same day of the week and at the same hour, five years before, had his uncle suffered the same punishment. Men observed the coincidence and traced a divine retribution therein. But with greater horror did they learn that the emperor had suffered this brutal punishment in the Purple Chamber which was always reserved for the birth of an emperor’s children. Here, in the very same room of the palace where he first saw the light, did he with the connivance, if not by the express command, of his mother lose the light of day and all that makes life worth living. “ For seventeen days,” says the historian, himself an image-worshipper and adherent of Irene, “the sun was darkened and did not give forth his rays, so that vessels lost their course and drifted helplessly, and all men said and confessed that because of the blinding of the emperor the sun did not show his beams. Thus did Irene his mother obtain supreme power.” The character of the Empress Irene receives un¬ bounded praise from the writers of the image-worshipjnng party. She is for them “the most pious Irene,” “that strong-minded and God-guided woman, if, indeed, it he right to call her a woman, who was armed against all foes and all calamities with truly masculine temper.” 180 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAr. “Irene, that strong-miiuled and God-beloved woman, if we ought to call ‘woman’ one who surpassed even man in her pious disposition, one through whom God mercifully expelled the crooked heresy which had crept snakelike into the Church and brought back orthodoxy.” But neither these flatteries of the monkish image- worshippers, nor her outward show of magnificence when, on Easter Monday (799), the proud Athenian rode forth from the Church of the Apostles in a golden car drawn by four white horses, which were driven by four patricians, and showered money among the multitude after the fashion of the ancient Consuls of Rome, repre¬ sented the real place of the empress in the hearts of her subjects. The rule of Irene meant, as every one knew, the rule and the bickerings of the eunuchs who advised her. Moreover, there ivas really no precedent for a woman sitting alone in the seat of empire. When Pulcheria, sister of Theodosius II., was hailed as Augusta, it was on condition of her giving her hand to the soldier Marcian. Theodora and Sophia were Augustie, but ruled only during the lifetime of their husbands. When Martina, widow of Heraclius, tried to pose as joint-ruler with her son and stepson (641), the multitude shouted an indignant denial of her claims. “ How can you sit upon the throne and answer foreign envoys when they come to the royal city. God forbid that the polity of the Romans should come into such a plight as that.” It was a hundred and fifty- six years since the Byzantine populace had hurled these words at Martina and compelled her to descend from the throne, but we may be sure that the spirit which prompted them still dwelt in the hearts of the X RELATIONS WITH THE EAST 181 mass of the people who yet called themselves Eomans, To be ruled by a woman, and such a woman, the despoiler and all but murderer of her own son, was felt to be an unendurable humiliation. The insecurity of Irene’s position was shown by the shortness of her reign, but that short reign of five years (797-802) was long enough to include, in a certain sense to necessitate, the great event which will be the subject of the following chapter. CHAPTER XI CAROLUS AUGUSTUS The events described at the end of the last chapter happened in August 797. In the autumn of the follow¬ ing year, when Charles was resting at Aachen from the fatigues of a Saxon campaign on the banks of the Elbe, there appeared before him two Byzantine ambassadors, Michael, aforetime Patrician of Phrygia, and Theophilus, a priest of Blachernse, who, on behalf of the Empress Irene, sought for and obtained the restoration of friendly relations between the empire and the kingdom. The covenant of peace was ratified by the return of an illustrious Greek captive, Sisinnius, brother of the Patriarch Tarasius, who had been taken prisoner prob¬ ably in the Apulian war of 788. But a far more distinguished visitor than either Michael or Theophilus was to visit Charles’s court in the following year, and to plead in lowlier fashion for his help. To understand the nature of this visit we must go back for a few years and glance at the events which had been happening not in the New, but in the Old Rome. On the day after Christmas Hay, 795, died Pope <'iiAr. XI CAROLUS AUGUSTUS 183 Hadrian I. after a long and eventful pontificate. The relations between him and Charles had not been always friendly, for Hadrian had found that no more than the Lombard king would the Frank grant the exorbi¬ tant demands for towns and lordships which Avere un¬ ceasingly urged in the name of St. Peter. Still there had been a certain similarity of spirit and temper which had drawn these two strong men together, and, as we have already seen, Charles mourned for the death of Hadrian as if he had been the dearest of his sons. On the death of Hadrian, Leo HI. was immediately elected to the jiapal throne. He was a Roman by birth, an inmate from his childhood of the Lateran palace, and had gone through the regular gradation of ecclesiastical offices till he had reached the high position of papal vesiamrius. It would seem probable that he was the candidate most acceptable to the clerics of the Roman Church, though the result showed that there was a large Jjarty among the great lay-officers of the papal court to whom his elevation was by no means welcome. He was, at a crisis of his fortunes, accused by bitter enemies of adultery and forgery, but no proof Avas offered of these charges, and there seems no reason to believe that his moral character Avas not stainless. There are some indications, hoAvever, that he Avas not loved by the people of Romo. Possibly his temper may have been hansh : possibly too they Avere beginning to chafe under the yoke of the dignitary who but lately Avas their spiritual pastor, sometimes their champion, but Avho noAV asserted himself as their sovereign. Immediately on his elevation, Pope Leo sent 184 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAV. messengers to Charles announcing his election and carry¬ ing to him the keys of St. Peter’s tomb and the banner of the city of Rome. This act of submission to the great Patrician of Rome, to whom the pope looked for confirmation of his rights and protection from his enemies, was represented in the celebrated mosaic in the Triclinium of the Lateran palace, of which a toler¬ ably accurate seventeenth-century copy still exists on the outside wall of the oratory called the Sancta Sanctorum, immediately in front of the Lateran. In it the Apostle Peter, of colossal size, is represented sitting with the keys on his lap. Before him, on his right, kneels Pope Leo, to whom he is giving the pallium; on his left “our lord Carulus,” to whom he gives a banner; and underneath is an inscription in barbarous Latin stating that the blessed Peter gives life to Pope Leo and victory to King Charles. Charles is repre¬ sented as wearing a moustache, but no beard. He has a broad pleasant face and is crowned with a conical diadem. The Frankish king replied to the new pope by sending to him his friend and chaplain Angilbert, bearing a letter in which he dilated on the various duties which Providence had assigned to its sender and its receiver. “ It is ours with the help of the divine piety externally to defend the Holy Church of Christ by our arms from all pagan inroads and infidel devastation, and internally to fortify it by the recognition of the Catholic faith. It is yours, most holy father, with hands raised to God like Moses, to help our warfare; that by your intercession the Christian people may every¬ where have the victory over its enemies, and the name XI CAROLUS AUGUSTUS 185 of our Lord Jesus Christ may be magnified throughout the whole world.” At the same time Angilbert brought the share of the Avar booty which Charles had set aside for Hadrian, but which came too late to gladden the heart of the aged pontiff. This exchange of embassies took place in 796. Tw'o years later the Christian world was horrified by the news of a brutal outrage enacted in the streets of Rome. On the 25th of April 798, the pope was mounted and preparing to ride forth from Rome along the Flaminian Way, in order to celebrate what was called the Greater Litany, a religious function which had taken the place of the heathen Robigalia and in which the Divine pro¬ tection was implored for the springing corn against the perils of blasting and mildew. Suddenly, ere he had emerged from the city, he was set upon by a band of ruffians who had been lying in wait at the church of St. Silvestro in Capite, on the right hand of the Corso. They tore him from his horse, they belaboured him with cudgels ; according to one account they tried to practise upon him the Byzantine atrocities of pulling out the eyes and cutting out the tongue; at any rate they left him speechless and helpless in the solitary street, for all his long train of attendants, as well as the crowd which had gathered after him to go forth in bright procession along the Flaminian Way, forsook him and fled. There is some reason to suppose that this attack was an outburst of civic fury, exasperated by some acts of the unpopular pontiff; but there is no doubt that the movement was directed by two men, Paschalis and Campulus, who were high in office in the papal house- 186 CHAELES THE GREAT CHAr. hold, and one or both of whom were nephews of the pope’s predecessor Hadrian. A lurid light is shed by this fact on the heart-burnings and angry disappoint¬ ments which Were often caused among the clients of a deceased pope by the election of his successor. After suffering many indignities the unhappy Leo was dragged at night to the monastery of St. Erasmus on the Coelian hill. Here he was closely confined for some days, but he recovered somewhat from his bruises, and sight returned—miraculously the next generation said —to his injured eyes. By the help of a faithful servant, his chamberlain Albinus, he succeeded in escaping— probably by a rope—down the wall of the convent, and was taken by his friends to St. Peter’s. Here he was soon in perfect safety, for the Frankish duke of Spoleto, Winighis, who had heard of the murderous assault, came with an army to his rescue and escorted him to his own city, a safe stronghold among the mountains of Umbria. The foiled conspirators, who had heard with terror of their victim’s flight, vented their rage on the house of Albinus, which they gave to the flames. Probably for many subsequent months anarchy ruled in Rome. In the disturbed state of Italy, and with Rome given over to his unscrupulous foes, the only resource left for the pope was in the protection of Charles; and to his court, or rather to his camp, for he was immersed in the Saxon war, Leo HI. repaired in the summer of 799. It was now more than forty-five years since a pope (Stephen H.) had crossed the Alps on a similar errand. Much had happened in the interval. The monarchy of the “most unspeakable” Lombards had been overthrown; the successor of St. Peter had become one of the great XI CAROLUS AUGUSTUS 187 princes of the earth; and yet, as Leo must with sadness have reflected, not even sovereignty had brought safety. “ Wounded in the house of his friends,” the Bishop of Eome had received from the hands of his own courtiers and subjects treatment infinitely more cruel and contu¬ melious than any that the much vituperated Lombard had ever inflicted on his predecessors. Musing on these things Pope Leo doubtless saw that the day-dream of a papal sovereignty extending over all Italy could not be realised. Bather must he make his Frankish friend and protector stronger in Italy. The Patrician of Eome must take some higher and more imposing title, and must be induced to give more assiduous attention to the aflairs of the Italian peninsula. As in that earlier papal visit Charles, then a lad of twelve, had been sent to meet Stephen IL, so now did Charles send his son Pippin (a young man of twenty-two, and the crowned king of Italy) to meet Pope Leo. Pippin escorted the venerable guest into his father’s presence. Pope and king embraced and kissed with tears. The clergy in the papal train intoned the Gloria in Excelsis, and the nobles and courtiers round added their joyful acclamations. This meeting took place at Paderborn, where Charles had built a new and splendid church in the place of the edifice often destroyed by the Saxons. In this church Pope Leo hallowed an altar, which he enriched with relics of the protomartyr Stephen brought by him from Eome, and assured the king that by the powerful intercession of that saint the church would be j)reserved from future devastation. Leo remained probably for about two months, from Jul}' to September, at Paderborn, in constant inter- 188 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. course with Charles. Much ivould doubtless be said in the conferences between the two potentates concerning the condition of the Church, the heresy of the Adoptians, the Iconoclastic controversy, and above all concerning the charges brought against the pope’s character by his relentless enemies in Eome. Was there also something said about that great event towards which, as we know, the course of history was tending, the bestowal of the imperial title on Charles'! Here we have only conjec¬ tures to guide us, but in these conjectures we must take account of one most powerful influence upon which I have hitherto been silent, the influence of the absent, but continually consulted Northumbrian, Alcuin. Alenin, born of a noble Anglian family about the year 735, and therefore some seven years older than Charles, was brought up from childhood in the monastic seminary of York, and there drank in with eager lips the learning, deepest and best of its day in all Europe, which that celebrated school imparted to its pupils. Bede, it is true, had died about the time of Alcuin’s birth, but from Bede’s pupil Ecgbert, Archbishop of York (732-766), and from his successor Albert (767-778), he acquired a knowledge, not only of theology, but also of many secular arts and sciences. To astronomy he was led by the intricate calculations and endless discussions concerning the true date of Easter. But in the archiepiscopal library, as Alcuin himself tells us, there was also a re¬ spectable collection of the Latin classics, Pliny, Cicero, Virgil, Lucan, Statius are all enumerated by him, as well as Aristotle, who was probably represented only by a Latin translation. To the study of these authors the young Northumbrian gave many industrious years ; XI CAROLUS AUGUSTUS 189 Virgil e&pccially was long the master of his soul, and the legends of a later generation told how the visit of an evil spirit to his cell was necessary to frighten him away from the nocturnal study of the Mantuan bard into the repetition of the Psalms appointed for the midnight service. Certain it is, however, that he did not forsake the study of the profane authors, until they had thoroughly permeated his style. Although an ecclesiastic he wrote Latin, both prose and verse, of which no Eoman in the first century need have been ashamed. To pass from the continual barbarisms, obscurities, puerilities of Gregory of Tours, of Fredegarius, or even of the authors of the lAher Poniificalis, to the easily flowing prose, or hexameter verse of Alcuin is like going from the ill-spelt productions of a half-educated ploughman to the letters of Cowper or the poetry of Goldsmith. Alcuin has been called the Erasmus of the eighth cen¬ tury, and though in one respect the comparison is too flattering, since the Northumbrian did b ut little for critical science, it gives on the whole not an incorrect impression of the literary position of this man, the “child and champion” of the Carolingian Eenascence. It is evident that he and the men with whom he asso¬ ciated, Angles, Saxons, or Franks, were tired of the barbarism which had pervaded Europe for three centuries, and looked back with longing, perhaps sometimes with unwise longing, to the great days of Eoman supremacy and peace. Even their Teutonic names were to them somewhat of a humiliation. In the literary circle or academy which formed itself in Charles’s court, chiefly under Alcuin’s influence, the members assumed classical names (like the Melancthon and CEcolampadius of a later 190 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. Renascence), and corresponded with one another under these disguises. Thus Alcuin himself was Flaccus Albinus, Eiculf (afterwards Archbishop of Mainz) was Damoetas; Angilbert, Charles’s chaplain, was Homer; Arno, Archbishop of Salzburg, was Aquila. The name of the great king himself was David, a name admirably chosen to express his piety, his success in war, and his love of women. The event which brought “ Albinus ” and his “ dearest David ” together was a journey which Alcuin undertook to Rome in 781, in order to obtain the pallium for his friend and superior, Eanbald II., Archbishop of York. Alcuin himself was at this time, and in fact throughout middle life and old age, only a deacon, though from his learning and piety he wielded more influence than many bishops. Returning from Rome, he met Charles at Parma, and w'as entreated by him to return to Prank- land on the accomplishment of his mission. He protested that he could only do this with the consent of his king and his archbishop, and these consents having been obtained he returned to Charles’s court and resided there, a sort of literary prime minister, from 782 to 796, with the exception of a visit to his own country between 790 and 792. Though apparently he never entered the monastic state, he received from Charles, as a piece of preferment, the headship of two abbeys, that of Bethlehem at Fenl^res and that of St. Lupus at Troyes. In 796, feeling the need of repose, he obtained his master’s reluctant permission to retire to the great monasteiy of St. _Ma,rtin_g,t_TQurs, which was placed under his rule, and where he spent the remainder of his days. This absence from the court is a fortunate thing XI CAROLUS AUGUSTUS 191 for us, for to it we owe the letters between Charles and Alcuin, of which a considerable number are still preserved, and which show both king and deacon in no unpleasing light. Sometimes Alcuin advises the king to treat the con¬ quered Saxons and Avars tenderly, and not to gall them with the yoke of tithes. Sometimes he explains to his royal friend the meaning of the terms Septuagesima and Sexagesima. Then he enters into long discussions about the calendar, the date of Easter, the intercalations necessary to bring the solar and the lunar years into harmony. The king half mischievously refers these cal¬ culations to the well-taught pages of his palace, who dis¬ cover in them some errors, which, after much mutual banter, the elder scholar is comjielled to acknowledge. Always, however, the intercourse is friendly, sincere, elevating. The king does not patronise, and the deacon does not cringe. One cannot but feel in reading these letters that both men were made to be loved. Such was the man who, as there is every reason to believe, had whispered to many of his friends the fateful word “ Imperator ” before Pope Leo III. arrived, a hunted and half-blinded fugitive, at Charles’s court. In the month of May (799) Alcuin had written to his royal master a remarkable letter, commenting on the tidings which Charles had sent him of the assault on Pope Leo. From this letter it will be well to extract some sentences. “To his peace-making lord King David, Albinus wishes health. I thank your Goodness, sweetest David, for remembering my littleness and making me ac¬ quainted with the facts which your faithful servant has brought to my ears. Were I present with 192 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. you I should have many counsels to offer to your Dignity, if jmu had opportunity to listen or I eloquence to speak. For I love to write concerning your pro¬ sperity, the stability of the kingdom given you by God and the advancement of the Holy Church of Christ. All which are much troubled and stained by the daring deeds of wicked men which have been perpetrated, not on obscure and ignoble persons, but on the greatest and the highest. “For there have been hitherto three persons higher than all others in this world. One is the Apostolic Sublimity who rules by vicarious power from the seat of St. Peter, prince of the apostles. And what has been done to him, who was the ruler of the aforesaid see, you have in your goodness informed me. “ The second is the Imperial dignity and power of the second Rome. How impiously the governor of that empire [Constantine VI.] has been deposed, not by aliens but by his own people and fellow citizens, universal rumour tells us. “ The third is the royal dignity in which the decree of our Lord Jesus Christ has placed you as ruler of the Christian people, more excellent in power than the other aforesaid dignities, more illustrious in wisdom, more sublime in the dignity of your kingdom. Lo ! now on you alone the salvation of the churches of Christ falls and rests. You are the avenger of crimes, the guide of the wanderers, the comforter of the mourners, the exalter of the good. “ Have not the most frightful examples of wickedness now made themselves manifest in the Roman see where of old there was the brightest religion and piety ? These XI CAROLUS AUGUSTUS 193 men, blinded in their own hearts, have blinded him who was their true head. There is in that place no fear of God, no wisdom, no charity. What good thing can you look for where these are absent! These are the perilous times long since foretold by Him who was Himself the Truth, and therefore the love of many waxes cold.” Alcuin then advises his royal friend to make peace if possible with the “unutterable” people (the Saxons), to forbear threats in dealing with them and to intermit, at any rate for a time, the exaction of tithes. Evidently this prudent counsellor felt that the affairs of Italy had now the most pressing claim on his master’s attention, and that it would be wise to concentrate all his forces for the solution of the problem which there awaited him. It was then to a monarch thus prepossessed in his favour by the representations of one of his nearest friends that Leo HI. appealed in the interview at Paderborn. The pope’s accusers sent their representa¬ tives to the Saxon towns, repeating the charges of adultery and perjury, and claiming that the pope should be called upon to deny the truth of these charges on oath. Privily they gave him the advice of professed well-wishers that he should give up the contest, lay down his papal dignity and retire in peace to some convent. But the king, while reserving the investigation into these charges for some future assembly to be held in Lome, showed by his conduct that he attached to them but little importance. After several weeks’ sojourn at Paderborn, Leo was dismissed with all honour from the camp and was escorted by royal missi reverently back to Rome, where he received an enthusi- 194 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. astic welcome from bis penitent subjects (30tb Novem¬ ber 799). Tbe close of this year was saddened by tbe tidings of tbe death of those two brave champions of Frankish civilisation, Gerold and Eric. In the spring of 800, Charles set forth on an expedition into Neustria, a part of his dominions which he had apparently not visited for two-and-twenty years. Piratical raids of the Northmen seem to have been the determining cause of this expedition, the object of which was to put the coast of the Channel in a proper state of defence. He also, however, received the submission of some Breton chiefs who had long been in a chronie condition of revolt; he made the round of his villas and country palaces in Neustria; and above all he visited the tomb of St. Martin at Tours, and had a long spell of close and confidential intercourse with his friend Alcuin. Here at Tours his fifth and last wife Liutgard died (4th June 800), and her illness probably lengthened his stay in that city. At length, after revisiting Rhine-land and holding a placitum at Mainz (August 800) he began his last and most celebrated journey into Italy. Having rested for seven days at Ravenna, where he probably inhabited the palace built by Theodoric wherein the Byzantine exarch had dwelt, he marched down the coast of the Adriatic to Ancona. From thence he despatched his son Pippin to lay waste the territories of that unruly vassal, Grimwald of Benevento. Charles himself proceeded through the Picene and Sabine districts by the old Via Solaria, and arrived at Nomen- tum, fourteen miles from Rome. Here he was met by the pope, who accosted him with every show of humility XI CAROLUS AUGUSTUS 195 and deference. Pope and king supped together at Nomentum, and then Leo returned to arrange for the triumphal entry into Eome. Next day (24th November 800) this great pageant was enacted. The banners of the city of Eome borne by citizens, the gilt crosses borne by ecclesiastics, came in long procession to meet the great Patrician. G-roups of citizens and of the foreigners resident in Eome, Franks, Frisians, Saxons (among the latter doubtless many of our own countrymen), stationed at intervals along the Salarian Way, thundered forth their laudes as the king rode by. St. Petei’’s Church, now as before, was the goal of his pilgrimage, and on the broad marble stairs stood the pope, with all his train of bishops and clergy, to welcome him. He sprang from his horse, mounted the steps (not now apparentl}’ on his knees), and after receiving the papal blessing went in and paid his devotions at the tomb of St. Peter. The chief business which had brought King Charles to Eome was, of course, the enquiry into the brutal assault on the pope and the clearing of his character from the charges brought against him. Ah’eady the Frankish missi who accompanied Leo to Eome had held a preliminary enquiry, the result of which was that Paschalis and Campulus had been sent across the Alps to Charles for judgment. Now apparently they returned in his train, not so much to defend themselves on the score of the outrage (for their guilt was too clear) as to prove, if they could, their often-repeated accusations;. A great synod was assembled at St. Peter’s on the 1st of December, and was opened liy a speech from the king. According to the papal biographer, the ecclesi¬ astics composing the synod all with one accord declared : 196 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. “We do not dare to judge the Apostolic see, which is the head of all the Church of God; for by it and by the Apostle’s vicar we all are judged, but the see itself is judged of no man, and this has been the custom from old time.” Whether this high papal doctrine was pro¬ claimed and accepted or not, it certainly seems as if Paschalis and Campulus entirely failed to make good their charges ; but the pope offei’ed, if his conduct were not drawn into a precedent against his successors, to accept the challenge to clear himself by oath from the charges brought against him. It is possible that the pope was only slowly brought to make this concession, for it was not till more than three weeks after the assembling of the synod that the next step was taken. On the 23rd of December, in the presence of the Roman clergy, as well as of the Frankish followers of the king. Pope Leo appeared in the miho of St. Peter’s, bearing a copy of the four gospels, which he clasped to his breast, and then he swore with a loud and clear voice : “ Of all those charges which the Romans, my unjust persecutors, have brought against me, I declare in the presence of God and St. Peter, in whose church I stand, that I am innocent, since I have neither done those things whereof I am accused nor procured the doing of them.” The result of the whole investigation was that Paschalis and Campulus and their accomplices were found guilty of high treason and condemned to death, a sentence which, on the intercession of the pope, was commuted to perpetual banishment into Frank-land. During the weeks that the papal trial was proceeding Charles, of course, abode in Rome, whether in one of the old imperial dwellings on the Palatine, or as an honoured XI CAROLUS AUGUSTUS 197 guest of the pope at the Lateran we are not informed. It was observed that now, as on the occasion of a previous visit to Eome, out of courtesy to the pope he laid aside his Frankish dress—a tunic with silver border, a vest of otterskins and sable, and a blue cloak — and wore instead, after the Roman fashion, a long tunic and a chlamys over it, shoes also made like those of the Romans, instead of his Frankish boots with stockings and garters. It was precisely during this month of December that by a fortunate coincidence, the priest Zacharias, whom more than a year before Charles had sent on a mission to the holy places, returned from the East. Two monks came with him, from Olivet and St. Saba, sent by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and bringing by way of blessing from that ecclesiastic the keys of the Holy Sepulchre and of Calvary, of Jerusalem and Mount Zion, together with a consecrated banner. A more striking testimony to the world-wide fame of the Frankish conqueror could hardly have been rendered than this, Avhich must have been meant to invest Charles with a kind of protectorate over the most sacred sites in Christendom. The pope’s solemn oath of self-exculpation was sworn on the 23rd of December. Two days later was trans¬ acted that yet more solemn ceremony by which the Patriarch of the Western Church, thus purged from the stains which his assailants had sought to cast upon his character, bestowed upon his royal champion that title which set him highest among the rulers of the Christian world. The scene was again laid in the great basilica of St. Peter, a building, of course, utterly unlike to the vast Renaissance temple of Bramante and Michael 198 CHAllLES THE GEEAT CHAP. Angelo. Thoi’C, on Christmas morning, Charles the Frank was worshipping before the Confessio or tomb of St. Peter. The stately Eoman chlamys hung around his shoulders; the crowd that filled the basilica could see with satisfaction the dainty Roman buskins of the kneeling monarch. When he rose from prayer Pope Leo approached him, placed upon his head a costly golden crown, and clothed him in the purple mantle of empire. “Then,” says the papal biographer, “all the faithful Romans, beholding so great a champion given them, and knowing the love which he bare to the Holy Roman Church and its vicar, in obedience to the will of God and of St. Peter, the key-bearer of the kingdom of heaven, cried out with deep accordant voices : ‘ To Charles, most pious and august, crowned by God, the great and peace-bringing emperor, be life and victory!’” Thereupon the people sang their jubilant laudes, and the pope performed that lowly adoration wherewith his predecessors had been wont to greet a Valentinian or a Theodosius. The deed was done, and the Holy Eoman Empire, which lasted a thousand years, and only in the days of our fathers was shattered by the fist of Napoleon, was established, or (as Alcuin and Leo would have said) was re-established in Europe. It was a revolution, no doubt, that was enacted on that morning of the 25th of December 800. It could not have been justified out of the Digest or the Code. According to all the maxims of legitimacy which had prevailed for many preceding centuries, Charles was an usurper and Leo an inter¬ meddling traitor. And yet, if one could go back still earlier to the first days of the empire, the bestowal XI CAKOLUS AUGUSTUS 199 of the imperial title on Charles was not so utterly lawless a proceeding. The Roman Imperator in those early centuries was not by any elaborate process elected, but was always acclaimed. Acclaimed by the army, it is true, but also by the people, and there were doubtless many soldiers of the militia cohorfalis of Rome present among the crowd who shouted for life and victory to the peace-bringing emperor. When acclaimed by army and people the Csesar was, or ought to be, accepted by the Senate; and there are some indications that after centuries of suspended animation a body calling itself the Senate was at this time existing in Rome and con¬ senting to the elevation of Charles. And these bodies. Senate, people, army, however insignificant in them¬ selves, were at any rate Roman : they belonged to the true old Rome; they trod the forum of the republic, and looked up to the Palatine of the emperors; they weie not like the bastard Romans of the Bosphorus, who chattered in Greek and rvore the robes of Asia, but who had usurped for so many centuries the profitable trade¬ mark of the Senate and People of Rome. So, though there was but one precedent — and that the bad one of Maximin the Thracian — for conferring the dignity of emperor on a man of purely Teutonic descent, and though it is quite impossible to find a place for the chief actor, the Bishop of Rome, in the drama as played by all the earlier Caesars, we may on the whole conclude that Charles became Roman Emperor by as good a title as any who had worn the purple since the days of Theodosius. What were the chief causes which led to this great change in the political constitution of Eurojie? They •200 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. have been already hinted at, and we shall probably not be wrong in enumerating them as follows. First .—The great revival of classical learning, due chiefly to the labours of Anglo-Saxon scholars; a movement of which men like Bede and Alcuin were the standard-bearers. The minds which were influenced by this revival perceived plainly that the interests of civilisa¬ tion, and to a certain extent of Christianity, had been in past centuries identical with those of the great Eoman Empire; and from a genuine revival of that Empire (not from a mere ephemeral reconquest of certain cities or provinces by a spatliarius or cubicularius setting sail from Constantinople), they anticipated, not altogether erroneously, great gains for the civilisation and the Christianity of the future. Second.-—The anomalous position of that which called itself the empire, which for the first time in its history found itself under what John Knox called “the monstrous regiment of a woman,” and that woman the murderess of her child. Third .—The brutal attack on Pope Leo made by the disappointed kinsmen of his predecessor. This event may well have produced an important change in the attitude of the pope towards the question of reviving the empire in the west. Before that day of April when he was assaulted by his own courtiers and left half dead in the streets of Borne, he may (as has been already hinted) have looked forward to a time when he should reign over the best part of Italy, subject to no king or governor; and when whispers reached him of the use of the words “Emperor” and “Imperial” by the learned ecclesiastics of Charles’s court he may in that XI CAROLUS AUGUSTUS 201 mood of mind h;ive shown that their projjosals were little to his taste. After that fatal day, his reluctance, if he had any, to see one man in the Italian peninsula holding an indisputably higher position than his own, was changed into eager acquiescence in the scheme. He was willing, nay anxious, to see the purple robe encircling the stalwart limbs of the Frankish conqueror, if only he himself might take shelter under that robe from the dagger of the assassin. In all this it may be truly said that we have failed to consider one important factor in the problem, the desires and ambitions of Charles himself. Unfortunately a mystery which we cannot penetrate hangs over that very subject. One of his most intimate friends, his secretary Einhard, expressly says that Charles “ at first so greatly disliked the title of Emperor and Augustus that he declared that if he could have known beforehand the intention of the pope he would never have entered the church on that day, though it was one of the holiest festivals of the year.” It used to be assumed that this reluctance on the part of Charles to receive the new dignity was only a bit of well-played comedy between him and Leo, that the Frankish king had been long aspiring to the imperial dignity, and had even put constraint upon the pope to force him to take part in the coronation. More recent discussion has shaken our confidence in this easy solution of the problem: and probably the greater number of writers on the history of this period now hold that Charles was speaking the truth when he expressed his dissatisfaction with the poj^e’s proceedings. The cause of that dissatisfaction can only be conjectured. Einhard 202 CHAELES THE GEEAT CHAP. seems to hint that it was fear of the resentment of the Byzantine Ctesars, but this hardly seems a sufficient cause to one who remembers the low estate of the eastern monarchy under Irene. With much more probability Professor Dahn argues that what Charles disliked was not the bestowal of the title in itself but its bestowal by the pope. He thinks that Charles and his counsellors had already, in 799, virtually resolved on the revival of the empire, that the pope penetrated their design, and determined that if that step were taken he at least would be chief actor in the drama; that by his adroit tactics he, so to speak, forced Charles’s hand, and that the latter, foreseeing the evil consequences which would result from the precedent thus established, of a pope-crowned emperor, expressed his genuine feelings of vexation to his friend Einhard when he said, “Would that I had never entered St. Peter’s on Christmas Day.” Certainly the remembrance of all the miserable complications caused during the Middle Ages by the pope’s claim to set the crown on the head of the emperor would do much to justify the unwillingness of a statesman such as the Frankish king to bind this chain round the limbs of his successors. But even beyond this it seems possible that Charles’s own mind was not fully made up as to the expediency of accepting the imperial diadem, by whomsoever bestowed. That the plan had been discussed (perhaps often discussed, through many years), by his more highly educated courtiers, cannot be denied. He may have been dazzled by the brilliancy of the position which was thus offered him; and yet the calmer judgment of that foreseeing mind of his may not have been satisfied XI CAROLUS AUGUSTUS 203 that it was altogether wise for him to accept it. The Frankish kingdom, as it had been built up by the valour and patience of Charles and his forefathers, was a splendid and solid reality. This restored empire of Rome that they talked of, would bo even more splendid, but would it be equally substantial 1 After all, the Avliole Roman Orhis Terranm was not subject to his sway. Was it wise to assume a title which seemed to assert a shadowy claim to vast unsubdued territories 1 Was it wise to claim for a Teuton king that all-embracing authority wherewith the legists had invested the Roman Imperator? The controversies of Guelphs and Ghibel- lines, which distracted Italy for centuries, show that these questions, if they presented themselves to the mind of Charles, were questions which gi-eatly needed an answer. And there was also a difficulty, which has perhaps not been sufficiently dwelt uj^on, arising from Charles’s prospective division of his dominions among his sons. Charles, the eldest, was to succeed him in that Austrasian region which was the heart and strong¬ hold of his kingdom. If any son were to inherit the Imperial dignity, sitting on a higher throne than his brethren and holding a certain pre-eminence over them, that son must be Charles. Yet Pippin, the second son, was the actual king and destined heir of Italy, and would rule over Rome, the city from which the Roman Emperor was to take his title. Here was the germ of jirobable future embroilments between his sons, such as the prudent Charles may well have feared to foster. Upon the Avhole, therefore, it appears a probable conclusion that Charles, though ho accepted the imperial crown, accepted it with genuine reluctance, and that he 204 CHAELES THE GREAT CHAP. was the passive approver rather than the active and ambitious contriver of the great revolution of 800. In the summer of 801 Charles recrossed the Alps to his home in Rhine-land. In the thirteen years of life which remained to him he never again entered Italy, but he was, during the greater part of that time, well repre¬ sented there by his son, the able and courageous Pippin. A question which doubtless excited much interest in all the Frankish world was, how Charles’s assumption of the imperial title would be viewed at Constantinople. There must have been many among the Byzantine statesmen who bitterly resented it, but Irene’s position was too insecure to permit of her giving utterance to their indignation. It is indeed stated by a Greek chronicler that Charles sent an embassy to Constantinople proposing to unite the two empires by his own marriage with Irene, and that the project was only foiled by the opposition of the eunuch Aetius who was scheming to secure the succession for his brother. Whether this be true or not (and the entire silence of the Frankish authorities on the subject is somewhat suspicious), there is no doubt that a friendly embassy from Irene appeared at Charles’s court in 802, and was replied to by a return embassy, consisting of Bishop Jesse and Count Helmgaud, who were despatched from Aachen in the same year, and that this embassy may have carried a declaration of love from the elderly Frank to the middle-aged Athenian. But not in such romantic fashion was the reconciliation of the two empires to be effected. \^Tiile the bishop and the count were tarrying at Constantinople they were the unwilling spectators of a palace-revolution, which possibly may have been hastened by their presence XI CAROLUS AUGUSTUS 205 and by the fear of a treaty, wounding to the national jn’ide. On the 31st October 802, Irene was deposed and the Grand Treasurer of the empire, Nicephorus, was raised to the throne. Irene’s life was spared, but she was banished to an island in the Sea of Marmora, and afterwards to the isle of Lesbos, where according to one account she was so meanly supplied with the necessaries of life by her penurious successor, that this proud and brilliant lady had to support herself by spinning. She died on the 9th August 803. Again the precariousness of the new ruler’s position compelled him to assume a courteous tone towards the Frankish sovereign. Charles’s ambassadors were accompanied on their return journey by three en¬ voys from Nicephorus, a bishop, an abbot, and a life- guardsman, who were charged with many professions of amity and good-will to the Frankish king. In all this, however, there was no sign of recognition of Charles as Emperor, and for any such recognition Charles apparently waited for eight years in vain. In 806 there was actual war between the two states, the bone of contention being the little island-state of Venice, which was now rising into commercial importance and in whose obscure and entangled history two parties, a Frankish and a Byzantine, are dimly discernible. After a long time a fleet from Constantinople appeared for a second time in Venetian waters, but was not able to prevent the victory of Pippin, who made a grand attack by land and sea, and subdued apparently the cities of the lagunes, whose capital was at this time shifted to the Rialto. This occurred in 810, but in the same year there appeared at Aachen an and^assador 206 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. XI from Nicepliorus wlio probably, amid the usual unmean¬ ing professions of friendship, conveyed a hint that his master might bo willing, for a suitable compensation, to recognise Charles as Roman Emjieror. On this hint, for which he had waited with statesmanlike patience, the Frankish monarch acted. He expressed his willing¬ ness to surrender the Adriatic territories, Venetia, Istria, Liburnia, and Dalmatia to “ his brother Nice- phorus” and sent Heito, Bishop of Basel, with two colleagues to settle the terms of the new treaty. Unhappily, when Heito and his colleagues arrived in Constantinople they found a change in the occupant of the palace. Nicephorus had fallen in battle, a most disastrous battle, with Krum, the King of the Bulgarians (25th July 811); but his brother-in-law and successor, Michael Rhangab4, was abundantly willing to confirm tbe proposed accommodation with the most powerful sovereign of the west. In truth the suggestion must have come at a most welcome season, for Constantinople was just then as hard pressed by the Bulgarian as she had ever been by the Avar or the Saracen. So it came to pass that yet another embassy from the Byzantine court appeared at Aachen in January 812. A formal document containing the terms of the treaty of peace was handed to them by Charles in the church of the / Virgin, and possibly the counterpart was received from the ambassadors. But the essential point was, that they sang a litany in the Greek tongue in which they hailed the Frankish sovereign as Imperator and Basileus. That was a formal recognition of Charles’s equality, and thenceforth no one could doubt that there was an Emperor by the Rhine as well as by the Bosphorus. CHAPTEK XII OLD AGE The somewhat tedious tale of the wars of the August and Pacific Emperor is happily almost at an end. We hear of repeated ravages by Scandinavian pii’ates along the shores of the German and Atlantic oceans: by Moorish pirates along the shore of the Mediter¬ ranean : and with neither class of freebooters does Charles appear to have grappled very successfully, for the good reason that he never devoted a sufficient portion of his energies to the establishment of a navy. The well-known story that Charles saw from the windows of his palace at Narbonne the Danish sea-rovers scudding over the waters of the Gulf of Lyons, and foretold Avith tears the miseries which these freebooters should bring upon his posterity and their realm, comes to us on the late and doubtful authority of the Monk of St. Gall and need not be accepted as authentic history : but that was one of the thunderclouds looming np on the horizon of the ninth century whether Charles was Avare of it or no. While the pirate barks of the Scandinavians Avere spreading terror over the islands of the Avest, the land forces of the King of Denmark Avere threatening the 208 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. north-eastern bonndary of Charles’s kingdom. Here the Saxons, at last subdued into lo 3 'alty, were, as we have seen, bounded on the east by the Sclavonic nations, the Abodrites, and the Wiltzi, and on the north, in Sleswik, by the Danes. The usual arrangement of parties in the perpetually recurring frontier wars was this: the Saxons (that is the Frankish kingdom) in alliance with the Abodrites on one side, and the Danes with the Wiltzi on the other. The king of the Abodrites was named Drasko; the king of the Danes was Godofrid, a proud, high-soaring king of pirates, who ventured to put himself oh an equality with the mighty Frankish Emperor, declaring that Friesland and Saxon- land were of right his territories, and that he would appear one day with all his warriors round him at Aachen and would try conclusions with Charles. It was in the years from 808 to 810 that this menace to the tranquillity of the Frankish kingdom showed itself in its most alarming shape. In the first of those years Godofrid invaded the territory of the Abodrites and ravaged their lands. Drasko fled before him, but another chieftain, Godelaib, was treacherously taken and hung. The Wiltzi joined forces with the Danes; and after much slaughter on both sides (for the flower of the Danish nobility fell in this campaign), the Abodrites were made subject to tribute to the Danish king. In retaliation for this onslaught on a friendly tribe, the younger Charles was sent across the Elbe with an army, but though he ravaged the lands of some Sclavonic allies of the Danes he seems to have returned home without achieving any decisive victory. Then both the two chief powers, knowing that a war of XII OLD AGE 209 reprisals was imminent, took to fortifying their frontier. Godofrid drew across Holstein that line of forts which has since become famous as the Dannewerk, and Charles erected fortresses on his side of the border, es^jecially restoring the stronghold of Hohbuoki which had been destroyed by the Wiltzi. Next year (809) Godofrid sought and obtained an interview with Charles at Badenfliot (in Holstein), de¬ siring to exculpate himself from the charge of having provoked the previous war. But the interview came to nothing. The Danish king did not sincerely desire peace, and probably showed too plainly the arrogance of his ignorant soul and his foolish pretensions to ecpiality with Charles. He succeeded, however, in patching up a temporary peace with the Abodrite chief Drasko who returned to his own land, but only to fall a victim some months later to the treacherous attack of a vassal of Godofrid’s, who was believed to have been incited to the deed by the Danish king. In 810 the contest seemed to be growing desperate, and the wild hopes of Godofrid to be approaching fulfilment. A fleet of two hundred Danish ships sailed to Friesland, laid waste all the multitudinous islands on the Frisian shore, and landed an army on the mainland, which defeated the Frisians in three pitched battles and laid upon them a tribute, of which 100 lbs. of silver had been already paid when tidings of the disaster reached the emperor in his palace at Aachen. He at once set about the too long delayed construction of a fleet: and at the mouths of all the rivers which poured into the German Ocean, the Channel, and the Atlantic, the sound of the shij)- builder’s hammer was heard. Then in the midst of his p 210 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. anxieties he received two welcome 2 )ieces of intelligence. The first was that the Danish fleet had returned home ; the second that Glodofrid was dead, murdered by one of his vassals, a fitting retribution for the assassination of Drasko, which he himself had instigated. After this there was peace for the rest of Charles’s life between him and the Danes. Hemming, the nephew and successor of Godofrid, was not strong enough to continue the aggressive policy of his uncle, and on Hemming’s death (812) there was a bloody civil war between his family and the rival dynasty of Harald. However, Charles wisely did not relax his naval prepara¬ tions, but in the year 811 repaired to Boulogne in order to review the fleet which he had commanded to be assembled there from the various estuaries of his kingdom. Was it partly in remembrance of this event, that nearly a thousand years later, Napoleon, that great imitator of Charlemagne, caused his flotilla to assemble at Boulogne for the long meditated, never accomplished, invasion of Britain ? The last years of the great em^jeror’s life were saddened by a succession of domestic afflictions; but before describing them it will be well to give a glance at his family life in his hajDpier middle age before these troubles fell upon him. As we have seen, Charles was five times married. Of his first wife Himiltrud, mother of the hunchback Pippin, we know nothing, save that, according to Pope Stephen’s account, she was “siwung from the very noble race of the Franks,” and that she must have either died or been divorced before-7 70, when he married the daughter of the Lombard king, who is by one writer called Desiderata, and by another XII OLD AGE 211 Eei'trada. She bore him no children, and on her divorce after something less than a year of matrimony, Charles married Hildegard, a noble Swabian lady,the best beloved of all his wives. Her life, though splendid, was not an easy one. She was only thirteen years old when she married the Frankish hero who was verging on thirty : she accompanied him on his campaigns and pilgrimages : she bore him nine children, and after twelve or thirteen years of wedlock she died on the 30th of April 783, and was buried at Metz in the chapel of St. Arnulf, her husband’s revered ancestor. From this marriage sprang all the three sons, Charles, Pippin, Louis, among whom Charlemagne hoped to divide his kingdom, also another son who died in infancy, and five daughters. The eldest of these daughters was that princess Hrotrud who learned Greek of Elissseus, and who so narrowly missed sharing the Byzantine throne. A few months after the death of Hildegard, Charles married (about October 783) Fastrada, daughter of the Austrasian count Radolf, with whom he shared eleven years of married life, and whose baneful influence on his character and conduct is described to us by Einhard. She bore him two daughters (both of whom eventually became abbesses) but no son, and died on the 10th of August 794, shortly after the great council of Frankfurt. Not many years after Fastrada’s death Charles married his fifth wife, the Alamannian Liutgard, who had previously lived with him as his concubine, and who died on the 4th of June 800, a few months too soon to wear the title of Empress. We are not told of any issue of this marriage, the last legal union which Charles contracted — the magnificent scheme of a marriage alii- 212 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. ance with Irene having never been realised. We hear, however, of four additional concubines and several illegitimate children, some of whom rose to high honours in the Church. The home which the great emperor favoured above all others was that city which his love alone made eminent, though he did not absolutely found it, the city Avhich the Romans called Aquisgranum, Avhich the Germans now call Aachen, and the French Aix-la- Chapelle. Here, on the southern slope of the Lousberg hills, in the pleasant land between Rhine and Meuse, Charles made the dwelling-place of his old age. With all his wide, far-reaching schemes he remained, it would seem, at heart a Ripuarian Frank—Ripuarian not Salian—and we may conjecture that Neustria was to him as little of a homeland as Aquitaine or even Italy. The river Rhine with its great bordering bishoprics, Mainz, Koln, Trier, and its grand Romanesque churches, bore for centuries the character which it had received from the greatest of its sons, the friend alike of Hadrian the Pope and of Alenin the scholar : and, if not on the actual banks of the Rhine, at least in the near neighbour¬ hood of Rhine-land it was fitting that Charles should die. Doubtless the nature-heated baths which had been known since the time of Severus Alexander, and which are said to have been named from Apollo Granus, were the chief determining causes which led Charles to visit the place, at which indeed his father Pippin had kept Christmas and Easter as long ago as 765. But having visited it, and probably derived benefit from the waters, he evidently became more and more attached to the place. We first hear of Charles keeping his Christ- xn OLD AGE 213 mas there in 788 : but after that the name is of frequent recurrence in the Annals till at last Worms and Frankfurt which had before been his favourite abiding-places are almost entirely superseded, and “Imperator celebravit natalem Domini Aquisgrani,” becomes the regular formula of the chronicles. Here, then, at Aachen, Charles built himself a lordly palace and a church, joined together by a colonnade. For both these structures he or his architect, Master Odo, borrowed the plan from Kavenna; the palace being built after the pattern of Theodoric’s palace, and the church, which was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, being a copy of that dedicated to San Vitale. Nor was the plan the only thing which was borrowed. Columns and marble tablets were brought from Rome as well as from Ravenna. The mosaics from Theodoric’s palace and the equestrian statue in gilded bronze of the great Ostrogoth—a work apparently of more artistic merit than most of the pro¬ ductions of the sixth century, were all carried off from the city on the Ronco to adorn the Belgic palace of the new emperor. Near the palace was a wide-stretching forest surrounded with walls, full of game, resounding with the song of birds and watered by the little stream of the Worm. Of all these memorials of the great emperor probably nothing now remains but the church. The deer-park has doubtless long since disappeared: of the palace all that can be said is that the Rathhaus is built upon its site: but the Capella in Palatio still stands, and is included in the much later building which is known as the Miinster. It is about 100 feet high and 50 feet in diameter, surmounted by an octagonal cupola and 214 CHAELES THE GEEAT CHAP. surrounded by a sixteen-sided cloister. The resem¬ blance to San Vitale at once strikes the visitor who is acquainted with the churches of Eavenna. It was certainly a triumphant era for the Frankish nation—still one, not yet fallen asunder into diverse and hostile nationalities—when the embassies of mighty kings from east and west trod the streets of the little city in Ehine-land which their ruler, sprung, not from a long line of kings but from a family of Austrasian nobles, had made the seat of his empire. Thither came swarthy Saracens from Bagdad, ambassadors from the court— Of Haroun, for whose name by blood defiled, Geniu.s hath wrought salvation. Common enmities (for they both were hostile to the Ommayad Caliphs and the eastern emperors), drew together these two men whose names for so long were dear to the story-tellers of east and west, Charlemagne and Haroun-al-Easchid. Haroun sent to Charles in 807 some sort of message or letter confirming the act of the / Patriarch of Jerusalem which by the surrender of the keys constituted him guardian of the Holy Places. Some years before he had sent, besides other rich and costly i^resents, one which especially impressed the minds of the Franks, an enormous elephant named Abu-1- Abbas. Under the guidance of its keeper, Isaac the Jew, the elephant safely reached Aachen, where it abode for eight years. In the year 810 it was taken across the Ehine, apparently that its great strength might be made use of in the expected campaign against Godofrid the Dane; and its sudden death at Lippeham in West- XII OLD AGE 215 phalia is solemnly recorded by the chroniclers among the memorable events of that melancholy year. It was in this same year, in the month of October, that the emperor saw with pride two embassies, from east and west, meet at his court. The long delayed overtures for reconciliation from the Emperor Nicephorus were brought by the one, and proposals for a treaty of peace with El Hakem the Cruel, Emir of Cordova, were brought by the other embassy and graciously accepted by Charles. Nor was our own island unrepresented among the embassies which visited the Frankish Court. With Offa of Mercia, most 230werful of English kings before the rise of Ecgbert, the relations were not altogether friendly. A treaty for the marriage of the younger Charles with the daughter of Ofia broke down (789), it is said, because of Offa’s counter-proposal on behalf of his son for the hand of Charles’s daughter Bertha. Some passages in this abortive “double marriage negociation” so annoyed the Frankish king that English merchants were forbidden to land on the shores of Gaul. However, though no marriage was brought to pass, friendly rela¬ tions between the two kings were restored, perhaps through the mediation of Offa’s subject, Alcuin; and in 796 when the great Bring of the Avars had been de¬ spoiled by Eric of Friuli, an Avar sword was graciously sent by Charles as a present to the King of Mercia. It was not at Aachen but at Nimeguen on the Bhiiie that another English king, driven from his realm by revolution, Eardulf of Northumberland, visited Charles’s court in 808 and besought his aid to restore him to his throne. Cliarles seems to have embraced his cause and 216 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. sent him on to Rome with a lettei' of recommendation to Pope Leo whose help was needed, as the Archbishop of York had taken an active part in Eardulf’s deposition. AVith the help of emperor and pope, Eardulf was re¬ stored (809) to a throne which he seems to have justly forfeited by various acts of tyranny; but the reign of the restored king was of short duration. It may be permitted to conjecture that the happiest period of the life of Charles consisted of the fifteen years which he spent mainly at Aachen between 795 and 810. The Saxon and Avar wars were drawing to a close, his labours for the reform of the Church and for the spread of learning were bearing manifest fruit; the haughty and difficult-tempered Fastrada was dead, and his children, whom he loved with fondness not often found in palaces, Avere growing up around him. The few words in which Einhard sketches his family life give one an impression of joyous magnificence not unlike that which the poets have feigned concerning the purely imaginary court of King Arthur :— “ He determined so to bring ujs his children that all, both sons and daughters, should be well grounded in liberal studies, to which he himself also gave earnest attention. Moreover, he caused his sons as soon as they were of the proper age to learn to ride after the manner of the Franks, to be trained to war and the chase : but his daughters he ordered to learn the spinning of wool, to give heed to the spindle and distaflF, that they might not grow slothful through ease, but be trained to all kinds of honest industry. . . . “ So great was the attention which he paid to the education of his sons and daughters that when he was XII OLD AGE 217 at home he would never sup without them; when he journeyed they must accompany him, the sons riding by his side and the daughters following a little behind, while a band of servants ajipointed for this purpose brought up the rear. As for these daughters, though they were of great beauty and were dearly loved by him, strange to say he never gave one of them in marriage either to a man of his own nation or to a foreigner, but he kept them all Avith him in his own house till his death, saying that he could not dispense Avith their company. On this account, prosperous as he Avas in other ways, he experienced the unkindness of adverse fortune, as to which, hoAvever, he so skilfully dissembled that no one would suppose that any suspicion of a stain on their fair fame had ever reached his ears.” This last sentence of Chai'les’s usually enthusiastic biographer hints at court scandals Avhich could not be always concealed, and the results of some of Avhich appear in the Carolingian pedigrees. But the previous statement concerning his unwillingness to have his merry family circle broken in upon by the unAvelcome claims of a son-in-law, may possibly help to explain Avhat has perplexed us in the rupture of the matrimonial treaty Avith Byzantium or even Avith the King of Mercia. Instead of seeking for deep state-reasons of policy for these failures, Ave ought, perhaps, simply to see in them the pardonable Aveakness of a father Avho, when the crisis came, gave more heed to the voice of family affection than to the maxims of state-craft. A notice of Charles’s home life Avould be incomplete Avithout some allusion to the circle of friends by Avhom he was surrounded, and Avhom he seems to have inspired 218 CHARLES THE GREAT cuAr. with a genuine love for himself as a man, apart from their loyalty to him as sovereign. The great ecclesiastics who, under the name of Arch¬ chaplains, held a place similar to that of a modern prime minister, Fulrad, Abbot of St. Denis, who had been chaplain to his father and who died in 784; his suc¬ cessor Angilram, Bishop of Metz, who died while ac¬ companying Charles on his Avar campaign in 791; Hildibald, Archbishop of Cologne, who stood by the emperor’s death-bed: all these men, though highly trusted and able servants, have not left many evidences by which we can judge of their individual characters. Much more interesting is Charles’s relation to the men of letters whom he delighted to gather around him. Chief among these were Alcuin, Peter of Pisa, Paul the Lombard, and Einhard. Of Alcuin, who might truly be called Charles’s literary prime minister, no more need be said, save that he died at Tours in 804, full of years and in unclouded friend¬ ship with the emperor. It was apparently about the year 780 that Peter of Pisa, a deacon who had once taught in the Lombard capital, Pavia, and had there held a celebrated disputa¬ tion with a Jew named Lullus, came to Charles’s court. He was then an old man. Grammar was his main / subject, and Charles regularly attended his lectures. The date of his death is uncertain, but it was before the year 799. Paul the Lombard, generally known as Paulus Diaconus, probably made Charles’s acquaintance during his second visit to Italy (780-781). At any rate, some¬ where about the year 782 he followed Charles across the xri OLD AGE 219 Alps, and was for some two or three years in pretty close attendance at the Frankish court. The main object of his journey was to obtain pardon and the restitution of confiscated property for his brother Arichis who, as has been already stated, seems to have been involved in the rebellion of Duke Hrodgaud, and was carried captive into Frankland, leavijig his wife and children destitute. There can be little doubt that the pardon of Arichis was granted to the intercession of his brother, for whom Charles seems to have conceived an especial affection. An amusing but fearfully perplexing series of poems exists, in which enigmas, compliments, and good-natured banter are exchanged between the king, Paulus Diaconus, and Petrus Pisanus. At dawn of day a trim young courtier with a hopeful little beard brings to Peter the grammarian a riddle which the king has thought of in the night and desires him to guess it. In despair Peter turns to Paul begging for his aid. In a hexameter poem of forty-seven lines (all the corre¬ spondence is in verse) Paul gives his version of the answer, which, if correct, certainly proves the riddle to have been a very foolish one. At another time the king poetically asks Paul which of three penalties he would prefer—to be crushed under an immense weight of iron, to be doomed to lie in a gloomy dungeon-cave, or to be sent to convert and baptize Sigfrid who “ wields the impious sceptre of pestilential Denmark.” Paul replies in a strain of enthusiastic devotion that he will do anything which the king desires him to do, but that as he knows no Danish he will seem like a brute beast when he stands in the presence of the barbarian king. Yet would he have no fear for his own safety if he under- 220 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. took the journey : for if Sigfrid knew that he was one of Charles’s subjects, so great is his dread of the Frankish king that he would not dare to touch him with his little finger. And so on through many hexa¬ meter and pentameter verses. A harsh critic might describe the whole correspondence as “graciousfooling,” but in view of the hard and toilsome life of the slayer and converter of so many Saxons, it is a consolation to find that he had leisure and spare brain-power even for occasional nonsense. Paulus Diaconus, after a few years’ sojourn at the Frankish court, returned to Italy to the shelter of his beloved convent of Monte Cassino, where he died, probably in one of the closing years of the eighth century. We are indebted to him, not only for his well-known Ilistoria Langobardorum —almost the only record of the history of Italy from 568 to 744—but also for a book on the Gesta Episcoporum Mettensium which gives us valuable information as to the lives of the early Arnulfings. The last of Chailes’s literary courtiers who can be noticed here is Einhard or (as his name is commonly but less correctly written) Eginhard. This man, who was born near the time of Charles’s accession to the kingdom, and who survived him about thirty years, was the son of Einhard and Engilfrita, persons of good birth and station who dwelt in Franconia near the Odenwald. He was educated in the monastery of Fulda, and came as a young man to the Frankish court, where his nimbleness of mind, his learning and his skill ill the administration of affairs so recommended him to Charles that for the remaining twenty years or more of XII OLD AGE 221 his reign the little Franconian — he was a man of con¬ spicuously short stature — was the great king’s inseparable comjianion. His skill in all manner of metal work earned for him in that name-giving circle of friends the name of Bezaleel, by which he is pleasantly alluded to in one of Alenin’s letters. He was employed to superintend some of Charles’s great architectural works : notably the palace and basilica at Aachen, the palace at Ingelheim and the great bridge over the Rhine at Mainz. A twelfth-century chronicler connected his name unpleasantly with that of one of the daughters of Charles: but for this scandal there does not seem to be the slightest foundation. None of Charles’s daughters was named Emma, the name attributed to the alleged mistress, afterwards wife, of Einhard. His real wife appears to have been Emma, sister of Bernhard, Bisho}) of Worms. About the year 826 he and his wife parted by mutual consent and “ ga^e themselves to religion.” He was ordained priest and retired to the monastery of Seligenstadt on the Main where he died about the year 840. Einhard had a share (how large is a subject of constant discussion), in the composition of the official Annals which are our most trustworthy authority for the history of his master’s reign. But we are far more indebted to him for his short tract De Vitil Caroli Magni from which several extracts have already been made. In this life there is an evident ambition on the part of the writer, who calls himself “a barbarian little skilled in Roman speech ” to follow the example of the great classi¬ cal authors. His imitation, especially, of the Life of Augustus by Suetonius, is almost servile, and provokes 222 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. much liiugliter on the part of modern scholars; but however he may be derided, the fact remains that almost all our real, vivifying knowledge of Charles the Great is derived from Einhard, and that the Vita Caroli is one of the most precious literaiy bequests of the early Middle Ages. Here are some features of the picture of his master by Einhard which have not been copied in the preceding pages:— “This king, whose prudence and magnanimity sur¬ passed that of all contemporary princes, never shunned on account of toil, nor declined on account of danger, any enterprise which had to be begun or carried through to its end; but having learned to bear every burden as it came, according to its true weight, he would neither yield under adversity, nor in prosperity trust the flatter¬ ing smiles of fortune.” “ He loved foreigners and took the greatest pains to entertain them, so that their number often seemed a real burden, not only to the palace but even to the realm. But he, on account of his greatness of soul, refused to worry himself over this burden, thinking that even great inconveniences were amply compensated by the praise of his liberality and the reward of his renown.” “ His gait was firm, all the habit of his body manly : his voice clear, but scarce corresponding to his stature : his health good, except that during the last four years of his life he was often attacked by fever, and. at the last he limped with one foot. Moreover he guided himself much more by his own fancy than by the counsel of his physicians, whom he almost hated because they tried to XII OLD AGE 223 persuade him to give up roast meats, to whicli he was accustomed, and to take to boiled. He kept up diligently his exercises of riding and hunting, wherein he followed the usage of his nation, for scarcely any other race equals the Franks herein. He delighted, too, in the steam of nature-heated baths, being a frequent and skilful swimmer, so that hardly any one excelled him in this exercise. This was his reason for building his palace at Aquisgranum where he spent the latter years of his life up to his death. And not only did he invite his sons to the bath, but also his friends and the nobles, sometimes even a crowd of henchmen and body¬ guards, so that at times as many as a hundred men or more would be bathing there together.” “ He Avas temperate in food and drink, especially the latter, since he held drunkenness in any man, but most of all in himself and his friends, in the highest abhorrence. He was not so well able to abstain from food, and used often to complain that the fasts [of the Church] Averc hurtful to his body. He very seldom gave banquets, and those only on the chief festivals, but then he invited a very large number of guests. His daily supper Avas served Avith four courses only, except the roast, which the huntsmen used to bring in on spits, and Avhich he partook of more willingly than of any other food. During supper he listened either to music or to the reading of some book, generally histories and accounts of the things done by the ancients. He delighted also in the Avritings of St. Augustine, especially that one Avhich is entitled l)e Civitate Dei. He Avas so chary of drinking Avine or liquor of any kind, that he seldom drank more than three times at supper. In summer, after his mid- 224 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP, day meal, he would take some fruit and would drink once, and then laying aside his raiment and his shoes, just as he was wont to do at night, he would rest for two or three hours. At night his sleep used to be interrupted, not only by awaking but by rising from his bed four or five times in one night. When he was having his shoes or his clothes put on he used not only to admit his friends, but even if the Count of the Palace informed him of some law-suit which could not be settled without his order, he would direct the litigants to be at once introduced into his presence, and would hear the cause and pronounce sentence exactly as if he were sitting on the judgment seat. And not only so, but he would also at the same time tell each official or servant of the palace what duty he had to perform that day.” “ He was full even to overflowing in his eloquence, and could express all his ideas vdth very great clearness. And not being satisfied with his native language alone, he also gave much attention to the learning of foreign tongues, among which was Latin, which he learned so perfectly that he was accustomed to pray indifferently in that language or in his own. Greek, however, he learned to understand better than to pronounce. He was in truth so eloquent that he seemed like a professional rhetorician. In learning grammar he attended the lectures of Peter of Pisa, an old man and a deacon: in other studies he had for his teacher another deacon, Al- binus, surnamed Alcuin, from Britain, a man of Saxon race and extremely learned in all subjects, with whom he gave a great deal of time and toil to the study of rhetoric and dialectic, and pre-eminently to that of XII OLD AGE 225 astronomy. He learned the art of computation, and with wise earnestness most carefully investigated the courses of the stars. Pie tried also to write, and for this purpose used to carry about with him tablets and manuscripts [to copy] which were placed under the pillows of his bed in order that he might at odd times accustom his fingers to the shaping of the letters: but the attempt was made too late in life and was not successful.” “He was a devout and zealous upholder of the Christian religion, with which he had been imbued from infancy. He regularly attended the church which he had built at Aquisgranum morning and evening, and also in the hours of the night and at the time of sacrifice, as far as his health permitted; and he took great pains that all the rites celebrated therein should be performed with the greatest decorum, constantly admonishing the ministers of the church that they should not allow anything dirty or unbecoming to be brought thither or to remain within it. He provided so large a supply of holy vessels of gold and silver and of priestly vestments, that in celebrating the sacrifices there was no necessity even for the doorkeepers, who were of the lowest grade of ecclesiastics, to minister in their private dress. He took great pains to reform the style of reading and singing, in both of which he was highly accomplished, though he did not himself read in public nor sing, save in a low voice and with the rest of the congregation.” “ He was very earnest in the maintenance of the poor and in almsgiving, so that not only in his own country and kingdom did he thus labour, but also beyond Q 226 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. sea. To Syria, to Egypt, to Africa, to Jerusalem, to Carthage, wherever he heard that there were Christians living in poverty, he was wont to send money as a proof of his sympathy, and for this reason especially did he seek the friendship of transmarine kings, in order that some refreshment and relief might come to the Christians under their rule. But before all other sacred and venerable places he reverenced the church of St. Peter at Rome, and in its treasure chamber great store of wealth, in gold, silver, and precious stones was piled up by him. Many gifts, past counting, were sent by him to the popes, and through the whole of his reign no object was dearer to his heart than that the city of Rome by his care and toil should enjoy its old pre-emin¬ ence, and that the church of St. Peter should not only by his aid be safely guarded, but also by his resources should be adorned and enriched beyond all other churches. Yet though he esteemed that city so highly, in all the forty-seven years of his reign he went but four times thither to pay his vows and offer up his supplications.” Amid such interests and such friendships the later years of Charles’s life glided away, comparatively little disturbed by the clash of arms, since his two elder sons Charles and Pippin, brave and capable men both of them, now relieved him of most of the drudgery of war. It is hinted that there were some occasions of variance between the two brothers, but it is not certain that Pippin the Hunchback is not the person here alluded to as at enmity with the younger Charles; and the difference, whatever it may have been, is said to have been removed by the mediation of St. Goar, whose cell on the banks of the Rhine was visited by the two princes. XU OLD AGE 227 In 806, at the Villa Theodonis, Charles, in the presence of a great assembly of his nobles, made a formal division of his dominions between his three sons. Pippin was to have Italy, or as it was called, Langobardia, with Bavaria, and Germany south of the Danube, also the subject realms of the Avars and southern Sclaves. Louis was to have Aquitaine, Provence, and the greater part of Burgundy. All the rest, that is Neustria, Austrasia, the remainder of Burgundy, and Germany north of the Danube was to go to Charles, who was probably to have some sort of pre-eminence over his brothers, though nothing was expressly said as to the imperial title. The division was so ordered that each brother had access to the dominions of the other two, and both Charles and Louis were earnestly enjoined to go to the help of Pippin — then apparently the most exposed to hostile attack — if he should require their help in Italy. Elaborate arrangements were also made as to the succession, in case of the death of any of the brothers. Unhappily all these dispositions jwoved futile. The year 810, in which Godofrid of Denmark died, and also Haroun’s elephant Abu-l-Abbas, was in otlier ways a sore year for Charles. On 6th June his eldest daughter Hrotrud, once the affianced bride of the Eastern Coesar, died, unmarried but leaving an illegitimate son, Louis, who afterwards became Abbot of St. Denis. Ere Charles had time to recover from this blow came the tidings that Pippin, the young King of Italy, had died on 8th July, possibly (but this is only a conjecture) of some malady contracted during his campaign of many months among the lagunes of Venice. 228 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. So, though Pippin left a son, the lad Bernhard, who, if things went well with him, might hope to inherit his father’s kingdom, already a breach was made in Charles’s arrangements for the succession to his dominions. But a yet heavier blow fell upon him next year (4th December 811), when his eldest son Charles, that one of all his children who most resembled him in aptitude for war and government, in strength of body and manly beauty, was torn from him by death. Now, of all his sons, there was only left that pathetically devout and incapable figure who is known to posterity as Louis the Pious or Louis the Debonnair, but whose piety and whose good nature were alike to prove disastrous when he should be called upon to guide with his nerveless hands the fiery steeds which had drawn his father’s car of empire. However, there was no other heir available. In September 813 a generalis conventus was held at Aachen, at which, after taking the advice of his nobles, Charles placed the imperial crown on the head of Louis, and ordered him to be called Imperator and Augustus, thereby designating him as his successor, but not, as it should seem, admitting him to a present participation in his power. With that keen insight into character which Charles undoubtedly possessed, he must have perceived the weakness of his son’s disposition, and fears for the future of the empire which he had built up with so much toil and difficulty probably saddened his last days. The great emperor had now entered on the eighth decade of his life. His health was apparently failing, and there were also signs and portents betokening the XII OLD AGE 229 approaching end, which, with proper regard to classical precedent, are duly recorded by Einhard. For the last three years of his life there was an unusually large number of eclipses of the sun and moon. A big spot on the sun was observed for seven days. The colonnade between the church and palace at Aachen, constructed with great labour, fell in sudden ruin on Ascension-day. The great bridge over the Rhine at Mainz, which had been ten years in building, and for which Einhard himself had acted as clerk of the works, was burnt to the water’s edge in three hours. Then, in his last expedition against Danish Godofrid (but that was as far back as 810), a fiery torch had been seen to fall from heaven, in a clear sky, on the sinister side, and Charles’s horse at the same moment falling heavily had thrown his master to the ground with such violence that the clasp of his cloak was broken, his sword-belt burst, and the spear which he held in his hand was hurled forwards twenty feet or more. Moreover there were crackings of the palace-ceilings; the golden apple which was on the roof of the church was struck by lightning and thrown on to the roof of the archbishop’s palace hard by. In the inscription which ran round the interior of the dome, and which contained the words KAROLVS PRINCEPS, the letters of the second word, only a few months before Charles’s death, faded and became invisible. All these signs convinced thoughtful persons that an old man of more than seventy, who had led a hard and strenuous life, and who was bowed by many recent sorrows, had not long to live. In the year 811, the emperor, feeling that the end was not far off, had given elaborate orders as to the 230 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. disposal of his personal property, consisting of gold, silver, and precious stones. The details, though curious, need not he quoted here. It is sufficient to say that only one-twelfth of the whole was to be divided among his children and grand-children. About two-thirds were to be divided among the ecclesiastics of twenty-one chief cities in his dominions. The remainder was for his servants and the poor. It is interesting to observe that the division of the property was to be completed “ after his death or voluntary renunciation of the things of this world.” There was therefore a possibility that the first Emperor Charles might have anticipated the fifth in retiring from a palace into a convent. Also we note with interest a square silver table containing a plan of the city of Constantinople, which was to be sent as a gift to St. Peter’s at Eome; a round one containing a similar plan of Rome, which was to be sent to the Archbishop of Ravenna; and a third, “far surpassing the others in weight of metal and beauty of workman¬ ship, which consisted of three spheres linked together, and which embraced a plan of the whole world with delicate and minute delineation,” and which was to be sold for the benefit of the residuary legatees and the poor. At last the time came for all these dispositions to take effect. After the great assembly in which the imperial diadem was placed on the head of Louis of Aquitaine (Sept. 813), Charles, though in feeble health, went on one of his usual hunting expeditions in the neighbourhood of Aachen. The autumn was thus passed, and at the begin¬ ning of November he returned to the palace to winter there. In January (814) he was attacked by a severe fever XII OLD AGE 231 and took to his bed. According to his usual custom he thought to subdue the fever by fasting, but pleurisy was added to the fever, and in his reduced state he had no power to grapple with the disease. After partaking of the Communion he departed this life at nine in the morning of the 28th of January 814. He was then in the seventy-second year of his age, and the forty-seventh of his reign. On the day of his death he was buried in his own church of St. Mary, amidst the lamentations of his people. On a gilded arch above his tomb was in¬ scribed this epitaph. “ Under this tomb-stone is laid the body of Charles, the great and orthodox Emperor, who gloriously enlarged the kingdom of the Franks and reigned prosperously for 47 years {sic). He died, a septua¬ genarian, in the year of our Lord 814, in the 7th Indic¬ tion on the 5th day before the Kalends of February.” Before many years had passed, the adjective Magnus was universally affixed by popular usage to the name Carolus: and 351 years after his death he received the honour of canonisation from the Eoman Church. CHAPTER XIII RESULTS /No ruler for many centui'ies so powerfully impressed I the imagination of western Europe as the first Frankish / Emperor of Rome. The vast cycle of romantic epic j poetry Avhich gathered round the name of Charlemagne, I the stories of his wars with the Infidels, his expeditions I to Constantinople and Jerusalem, his Twelve Peers of France, the friendship of Roland and Oliver and the treachery of Ganelon—aU this is of matchless interest in the history of the development of mediaeval literature, but of course adds nothing to our knowledge of the real Charle^of history, since these romances were con¬ fessedly the work of wandering minstrels and took no definite shape till at least three centuries after the death of Charlemagne. In this concluding chapter I propose very briefly to enumerate some of the chief traces of the great emperor’s forming hand on the western church, on Literature, on Laws, and on the State-system of Europe. I. Theologically, Charles’s chief performances were the condemnation of the Adoptianist heresy of Felix of Urgel by the Council of Frankfurt (794): the condem- CHAP. XIII RESULTS 233 nation of the adoration of images liy the same Council; and the addition to the Nicene Creed of the celebrated words “Filioque,” which asserted that the Holy Spirit “proceedeth from the Father and the Son.” In these two last performances Charles acted more or less in opposition to the advice and judgment of the pope, and the addition to the Creed was one of the causes which led to the schism between the eastern and western churches, and which have hitherto frustrated all schemes for their reunion. In the government of the church Charles all through his reign took the keenest interest, and a large—as most modern readers would think a disproportionate— part of his Capitularies is dedicated to this subj ect . Speaking generally, it may be said tha t he strove, as his father before him had striven, to s ubdue the anarchy t hat had disgraced the churches of Gaul under the Merovingian kings. He insisted op the monks and the canonical priests living according to the rules which they professed: he discouraged the manufacture of neAV saints, the erection of new oratories, the worship of new archangels other than the well-known throe, Gabriel, Michael, and Eaphael. He earnestly exhorted t he b ishops to work in harmony with the counts for the maintenance of the public peace. While not slow to condemn the faults of the episcopacy he supported their authority against mutinous priests: and pre¬ eminently, by the example which he set to Gaul in the powerful and well-compacted hierarchy which he estab- li^ied in Ge rmany, he str engthened the aristocratic constitution of the church under the rule of its bishops. At the same time there can be no doubt that by his 234 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. close relations with the Eoman Pontiff and by the temporal sovereignty which he bestowed upon him, he contributed, consciously or unconsciously, to the ultimate transformation of the western church into an absolute monarchy under the headship of the pope. That Charles, with all his zeal for the welfare of the church, was not blind to the faults of the churchmen of his day is shown by the remarkable series of questions—possibly drawn up from his dictation by Einhard—which are contained in a Capitulary of 811 written three years before his death: “We wish to ask the ecclesiastics themselves, and those who have not only to learn but to teach out of the Holy Scriptures, who are they to whom the Apostle says, ‘ Be ye imitators of me ’: or who that is about whom the same Apostle says, ‘No man that warreth entangleth himself with the business of this world ’; in other words, how the Apostle is to be imitated, or how he (the ecclesiastic) wars for God 1 ” “Further, we must beg of them that they will truly show us what is this ‘renouncing of the world’ which is spoken of by them; or how we can distinguish those who renounce the world from those who still follow it, whether it consists in anything more than this, that they do not bear arms and are not publicly married 1 ” “We must also enquire if that man has relinquished the world who is daily labouring to increase his posses¬ sions in every manner and by every artifice, by sweet persuasions about the blessedness of heaven and by terrible threats about the punishments of hell; who uses the name of God or of some saint to despoil simpler and less learned folk, whether rich or poor, of their XIII RESULTS 235 2 )roperty, to dejirive the lawful heirs of their inheritance and thus to drive many through sheer destitution to a life of robbery and crime which they would otherwise never have embraced ? ” Several more questions of an equally searching character are contained in this remarkable Capitulary. II. If doubts may arise in some minds how far Charles’s ecclesiastical policy was of permanent benefit to the human race, no such doubts can be felt as to his patronage of literature and science. Herein he takes a foremost place among the benefactors of humanity, as a man who, himself imperfectly educated, knew how to value education in others; as one who, amid the mani¬ fold harassing cares of government and of war, could find leisure for that friendly intercourse with learned men which far more than his generous material gifts cheered them on in their arduous and difficult work; and as the ruler to whom more perhaps than to any other single individual we owe the fact that the precious literary inheritance of Greece and Eome has not been altogether lost to the human rac e. Every student of the history of the texts of the classical authors knows how many of our best MSS. date from the ninth century, the result unciuestionably of the impulse given by Charles and his learned courtiers to classical studies. It is noticeable also that this reign constitutes an important era in Paleography, the clear and beautiful “ minuscule ” of the Irish scribes being generally substituted for the sprawling and uncouth characters which had gone by the name of Langobardic. In one of his Caiiitularies Charles calls the attention of his clergy to the necessity 236 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. for careful editing of the Prayer-books; otherwise those who desire to pray rightly will pray amiss. He enjoins them not to suffer boys to corrupt the sacred text either in writing or reading. If they require a new gospel, missal, or psalter, let it be copied with the utmost care by men of full age. In another Capitulary, he expresses his displeasure that some priests, who were poor when they were ordained, have grown rich out of the church’s treasures, acquiring for themselves lands and slaves, but not purchasing books or sacred vessels for the church’s use. Something has already been said as to the Academy in Charles’s palace, which Avas apparently founded on the basis of a court-school established in his father’s life¬ time, but became a much more important institution in his own. Probably it Avas then transformed from a school for children into an Academy for learned men, in the sense in which the word has been used at Athens, Florence, and Paris. Alcuin, after his departure from court, founded a school at Tours, which acquired great fame; and Ave hear of schools also at Utrecht, Fulda, Wurzburg, and elsewhere. Doubtless, most of these schools were primarily theological seminaries, but, as we have seen in the case of Alcuin, a good deal of classical literature and mathematical science was, at any rate in some schools, taught alongside of the correct rendering of the church service. The Monk of St. Gall (who wrote, as we have seen, two generations after Charlemagne, and whose stories Ave therefore accept with some reserve) gives us an interesting and amusing picture of one of the schools under Charles’s patronage. After giving a legendary and inaccurate account of the arrival of two Irish XIII RESULTS 237 scholars in Gaul, named Alenin and Clement, he goes on to say that Charles persuaded Clement to settle in Gaul, and sent him a number of boys, sons of nobles, of middle-class men and of peasants, to be taught by him, while they were lodged and boarded at the king’s charges. After a long time he returned to Gaul, and ordered these lads to be brought into his presence, and to bring before him letters and poems of their own composition. The boys sprung from the middle and lower classes offered compositions which were “ beyond all expectation sweetened with the seasoning of wisdom,” but the productions of the young nobility were “ tepid, and absolutely idiotic.” Hereupon the king, as it were, anticipating the Last Judgment, set the industrious lads> on his right hand and the idlers on his left. He addressed the former with words of encouragement, “ I thank you, my sons, for the zeal with which you have attended to my commands. Only go on as you have begun, and I will give you splendid bishoprics and abbacies, and you shall be ever honourable in my eyes.” But to those on his left hand he turned with angry eyes and frowning brow, and addressed them in a voice of thunder, “You young nobles, you dainty and beautiful youths, who have presumed upon your birth and your possessions to despise mine orders, and have taken no care for my renown; you have neglected the study of literature, while you have given yourselves over to luxury and idleness, or to games and foolish athletics.” Then, raising his august head and unconquered right hand towards heaven, he swore a solemn oath, “ By the King of Heaven, I care nothing for your noble birth and your handsome faces, let others prize them as they 238 CIIAKLES THE GREAT CHAP. may. Know this for certain, that unless ye give earnest heed to }^our studies, and recover the ground lost by your negligence, ye shall never receive any favour at the hand of King Charles.” There was one branch of learning in which Charles was evidently not enough helped by his friends of the classical revival, and in which one cannot help wishing that his judgment had prevailed over theirs. Einhard tells us that he reduced to writing and committed to memory “ those most ancient songs of the barbarians in which the actions of the kings of old and their wars were chanted.” Would that these precious relics of the dim Teutonic fore-world had been thought worthy of preservation by' Alcuin and his disciples ! He also began to compose a grammar of his native speech; he gave names to the winds blowing from twelve different quarters, whereas previously men had named but four; and he gave Teutonic instead of Latin names to the twelve months of the year. They were— for January, TVintarmanoth ; February, Hornung ; March, Lentzinmanoth ; April, Ostarmanoth; May, Winnemanoth ; June, Brachmanoth ; July, Hewimanoih; August, Aranr manotli; September, Witumanoth ; October, Windumema- noth; November, Herbistmanoth; December, Heilagmanoth. III. It is of course impossible to deal with more than one or two of the most important products of Charles’s legislative and administrative activity. 1. In the first place, we have to remark that Charles was not in any sense like Justinian or Napoleon, a codifier of laws. On the contrary, the title chosen by him after his capture of Pavia, “ Rex Langohardorum,” xni RESULTS 239 indicates the general character of his policy, which wa s to leave the Lombards un der Lombard law, the Roman s un der Rom an law j even the Saxons, if they would only a ccept Chris tianity, to some extent under Saxon institu¬ tion To turn all the various nationalities over which he ruled into Ripuarian Franks was by no means the object of the conqueror; on the contrary, so long as thej ^ally obeyed the great central government they mi ght keep the ir own laws, customs, and language unaltered . As this princij^le applied not only to tribes and races of men, but also to individuals, we find our¬ selves in presence of that most peculiar phenomenon of the early Middle Ages which is known as the system of “ personal law .” In our modern society, if the citizen of one country goes to reside in the territory of another civilised and well-ordered country, he is bound to con¬ form to the laws of that country. Where this rule does not prevail (as in the case of the rights secured by the “capitulations” to Europeans dwelling in Turkey or Morocco) it is a distinct sign that we are in the presence of a barbarous law to which the more civilised nations will not submit. But quite different from this was the conception of law in the ninth century under Charles the Great and his successors. Then, every man, accord¬ ing to his nationality, or even his profession,—according as he was Frank or Lombard, Alaman or Bavarian, Goth or Roman, layman or ecclesiastic,—carried, so to speak, his own legal atmosphere about with him, and might always claim to be judged secundum legem patriae suae. Thus, according to an often-quoted passage, “so great was the diversity of laws that you would often meet with it, not only in countries or cities, but even in 240 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. single houses. For it would often happen that five men would he sitting or walking together, not one of whom would have the same law with any other.” But though Charles made no attempt, and apparently had no desire, to reduce all the laws of his subjects to oim common denominator, h^had schemes for improving, an d eve n to some_ extent harmonising, the several national codes which he found in existence. But these schemes were only imperfectly realised. As Einhard says, “ After his assumption of the imperial title, as he perceived that many things were lacking in the laws of his people (for the Franks have two systems of law, in many places very diverse from one another), he thought to add those things which were wanting, to reconcile discrepancies, and to correct what was bad and ill expressed. But of all this naught was accomplished by him, save that he added a few chapters, and those imperfect ones, to the laws [of the Salians, Eipuarians, and Bavarians]. All the legal customs, however, that were not already written, of the various nations under his dominion, he caused to be taken down and com¬ mitted to writing.” While Charles’s new legislation was in general of an enlightened and civilised character, a modern reader is surprised and pained by the prominence which he gives, or allows, to those barbarous and superstitious modes of determining doubtful causes—wager of battle, ordeal by the cross, and ordeal by the hot ploughshares. As to the first of these especially, the language of the Capitu¬ laries seems to show a retrogression from the wise dis¬ trust of that manner of arriving at truth expressed half a century earlier by the Lombard king, Liutprand. XIII RESULTS 241 2. A question which we cannot help asking, though it hardly admits of an answer, is, “ What was Charles’s relation to that feudal system which, so soon after his death, prevailed throughout his empire, and which so quickly destroyed its unity 1 ” The growth of that system was so gradual, and it was due to such various causes, that no one man can be regarded as its author, hardly even to any great extent as its modifier. It was not known to early Merovingian times; its origin appears to be nearly contemporaneous with that of the power of the Arnulfing mayors of the palace; it must certainly have been spreading more widely and striking deeper roots all through the reign of Charlemagne, and yet we can hardly attribute either to him or to his ancestors any distinct share in its establishment. It was, so to speak, “in the air,” even as democracy, trades’ unions, socialism, and similar ideas are in the air of the nineteenth century. Feudalism apparently had to be, and it “ sprang and grew up, one knoweth not how.” One of the clearest allusions to the growing feudalism of society is contained in a Capitulary of Charles issued the year before his death, in which it is ordained that no man shall be allowed to renounce his dependence on a feudal superior after he has received any benefit from him, except in one of four cases—if the lord have sought to slay his vassal, or have struck him with a stick, or have endeavoured to dishonour his wife or daughter, or to take away his inheritiince. In an exjmnded version of the same decree a fifth cause of renunciation is admitted—if the lord have failed to give to the vassal that protection which he promised when the vassal put R 242 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. liis hands in the lord’s, and “ commended ” himself to his guardianship. Other allusions to the same system are to be found in the numerous Capitularies in which Charles urges the repeated complaint that the vassals of the Crown are either endeavouring to turn their leneficia into allodia, or, if possessing property of both kinds,—a leneficium under the Crown and an allodium by purchase or inheritance from their fathers,—are starving and despoiling the royal heneficium for the benefit of their own allodium. 3. An institution Avhich was intended to check these and similar irregularities, and generally to uphold the imperial authority and the rights of the humbler classes against the encroachments of the territorial aristocracy, was the peculiarly Carolingian institution of missi dominici, or (as we may translate the words) “imperial commissioners.” These men may be likened to the emperor’s staff-ofiicers, bearing his orders to distant regions, and everywhere, as his representatives, carry¬ ing on his ceaseless campaign against oppression and anarchy. The pivot of pr ovincial government was s till, as it had been in Merovingian times, the Frankish comes or_count, who had his headquarters generally in on e of the old Eom an cities, and governed from thence a district w hich was of varying extent, but which may be fairly taken as equivalent to an English county. Under him were the centenarii, who, originally rulers of that little tract of country known as the Hundred, now had a somewhat wider scope, and acted probably as vicarii or representatives of the count throughout the district subject to his jurisdiction. These governors, especially the count, were doubtless generally men of XIII RESULTS 243 wealth and great local influence. They had not yet succeeded in making their ofiices hereditary and trans¬ mitting the countship, as a title of nobility is now transmitted, from father to son. The strong hand of the central government prevented this change from taking place in Charles’s day, but it, too, like so much else that had a feudal tendency, was “ in the air ”; and it may have been partly in order to guard against this tendency and to keep his counts merely life-governors that Charles devised his institution of missi. But a nobler and more beneficial object aimed at was to ensure that justice should be “truly and in¬ differently administered ” to both rich and poor, to the strong and to the defenceless. It is interesting in this connection to observe what was the so-called “ eight-fold ban ” proclaimed by the Frankish legislator. Any one who (1) dishonoured Holy Church ; (2) or acted unjustly against widows; (3) or against orphans; (4) or against poor men who were unable to defend themselves; (5) or carried off a free-born woman against the will of her parents; (6) or set on fire another man’s house or stable; (7) or who committed harizhut —that is to say, who broke open by violence another man’s house, door, or enclosure; (8) or who when summoned did not go forth against the enemy, came under the king’s ban, and was liable to pay for each offence sixty solidi (£36). Here we see that three of the specified offences were precisely those which a powerful local count or cenfenarius would be tempted to commit against the humbler suitors in his court, and which it would be the business of a missus dominicus to discover and report to his lord. The missi had, however, a wide range of duties beyond 244 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. tlie mere c ontrol and correction of unjust jud ges. It was theirs to e nforce the rights of the royal treasury, to administer the oath ^ allegiance to the inhabitants o f a district, to enquir e into any cases of wrongful ajj propriation of church property, to hunt down robbers, to report upon the morals of bishops, to see that monks li ved according to the rule of the ir order. Sometimes they had to command armies (the brave Gerold of Bavaria was such a missus) and to hold placita in the name of the king. Of course the choice of a person to act as missus would largely depend on the nature of the duties that he had to perform : a soldier for the command of armies or an ecclesiastic for the inspection of monasteries. As Charles, in his embassies to foreign courts, was fond of combining the two vocations, and sending a stout layman and a subtle ecclesiastic together to represent him at Cordova or Constantinople, so he may often have duplicated these internal embassies, these roving commissions, to enquire into the abuses of authority in his own dominions. We have, in one of Charles’s later Capitularies, an admirable exhortation which, though put forth in the name of the missi, surely came from the emperor’s own robust intellect:—“Take care,” the missi say to the count whose district they are about to visit, “ that neither you nor any of your officers are so evil disposed as to say ‘ Hush ! hush ! say nothing about that matter till those missi have passed by, and afterwards we will settle it quietly among ourselves.’ Do not so deny or even postpone the administration of justice; but rather give diligence that justice may be done in the case before we arrive.” XIII RESULTS 245 The institution of missi dominici served its purpose for a time, but proved to be only a temporary expedient. There was an increasing difficulty in finding suitable men for this delicate charge, which required in those who had to execute it both strength and sympathy, an independent position, and willingness to listen to the cry of the humble. Even already in the lifetime of Charles there was a visible danger that the missus might become another oppressor as burdensome to the common people as any of the counts whom he was appointed to superintend. And after all, the missus could only transmit to the distant regions of the empire as much power as he received from its centre. Under the feeble Louis the Pious, his wrangling sons and his inept grandsons, the institution grew ever weaker and weaker. Admirable instructions for the guidance of the missi were drawn up at headquarters, but there was no powei' to enforce them. With the collapse of the Carolingian dynasty towards the close of the ninth century the missi dojninici disappear from view. 4. Another institution was perhaps due to Charles’s own personal initiative; at any rate it was intro¬ duced at the outset of his reign, and soon spread widely through his dominions. It was that of the scabini, whose functions recall to us sometimes those of our justices of the peace, sometimes those of our grand-jurors, and sometimes those of our ordinary jurors. Chosen for life, out of the free, but not prob¬ ably out of the powerful classes, men of respectable character and unstained by crime, they had, besides other functions, pre-eminently that of acting as as sessors to the coines or to the centenarius in his court of 246 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. justice. Seven was the regular number that should be present at a trial, though sometimes fewer were allowed to decide. As in all the earlier stages of the development of the jury system, they were at least as much witnesses as judges—their own knowledge or common report forming the chief ground of their decision. It is not clear whether their verdict was necessarily unanimous, but it seems certain that the decision was considered to be theirs, and not that of the presiding functionary, whether comes, vicarius, or centenarius. It was, moreover, final; for, as one of the Capitularies distinctly says, “After the scaUni have condemned a man as a robber, it is not lawful for either the comes or the vicarius to grant him life.” The scabini were expected to be present at the meetings of the county—probably also, to some extent, at those of the nation, and they joined in the assent which was there given to any new Capitularies that were promulgated by the emperor. It is easy to see how, both in their judicial and in their legislative capacity, the scabini may have acted as a useful check on the lawless encroachments of the counts. There was probably in this institution a germ which, had the emperors remained mighty, would have limited the power of the aristocracy, and have formed in time a democratic basis upon which a strong and stable monarchy might have been erected. IV. Lastly, a few words must be said as to the permanent results of Charles’s life and work on the state-system of Europe. In endeavouring to appraise them let us keep our minds open to the consideration XIII RESULTS 247 not only of that which actually was, but also of that which might have been, had the descendants of Charles been as able men as himself and his progenitors. The t hree great political events of Charles’s reign w ere his conquest of Ita l y, his co nsolidation of thq_ Frankish kin gdom, and- his assumption of the imp erial . title. 1. His conduct towards the vanquished Lombards was, on the whole, generous and statesmanlike. By assuming the title of King of the Lombards he showed that it was not his object to destroy the nationality of the countrymen of Alboin, nor to fuse them into one people with the Franks. Had his son Pippin lived and transmitted his sceptre to his descendants, there might possibly have been founded a kingdom of Italy, strong, patriotic, and enduring. In that event some of the glorious fruits of art and literature which were ripened in the independent Italian republics of the Middle Ages might never have been brought forth, but the Italians, though a less artistic people, would have been spared much bloodshed and many despairs. But wo can only say that this was a possible con¬ tingency. By the policy (inherited from his father) which he pursued towards the papal see, Charles called into existence a power which would probably always have been fatal to the unity and freedom of Italy. That wedge of Church-Dominions thrust in between the north and south would always tend to keep Lombardy and Tuscany apart from Spoleto and Bene- vento; and the endless wrangle between Pope and King would perhaps have been renewed even as in the days of the Lombards. Tlie descendants of the pacific and 248 CHARLES THE GREAT CHAP. God-crowned king would then have become the “ un¬ utterable ” and the “ not-to-be-mentioned ” Franks, and peace and unity would have been as far from the fated land as they have been in very deed for a thousand years. 2. Charles’s greatest work, as has been once or twice hinted in the course of the preceding narrative, was his extension and consolidation of the Frankish kingdom. One cannot see that he did much for what we now call France, but his work east of the Rhine was sjdendidly successful. Converting; the Saxo ns,—a triumph of civilisation, however barbarous were the methods em¬ ployed,—subduing the rebellious Bavarians, keeping the Danes and the Sclavonic tribes on his eastern border in check, and utterly crushing the Avars, he gave the Teutonic race that position of supremacy in Central Europe which, whatever may have been the ebb and flow of Teutonism in later centuries, it has never been forced to surrender, and which, with all its faults, has been a blessing to Europe. 3. As to the assumption of the imperial title, it is much more difficult to speak with confidence. We have seen reason to think that Charles himself was only half persuaded of its expediency. It was a noble idea, this revival of the old world-wide empire and its conversion into a Civitas Dei, the realised dream of St. Augustine. But none knew better than the monarch himself how far his empire came short of these grand prophetic visions; and profounder scholars than Alcuin could have told him how little it had really in common with the state which was ruled by Augustus or by Trajan. That empire had sprung out of a democratic republic, and retained for centuries something of that resistless xrii RESULTS 249 energy which the consciousness of self-government gives to a brave and patient people. Charles’s empire was cradled, not in the city but in the forest; its essential principle was the loyalty of henchmen to their chief; it was alre ady permeated by the spirit of feudalism, and beUveen feudalism an d any true reproduction of th e Imperium Eom ajium there could be no abiding union. I need not here allude to the divergence in language, customs, and modes of thought between the various nationalities which composed the emperor’s dominions. The mutual antagonism of nations and languages was not so strong in the Middle Ages as it has been in our own day, and possibly a succession of able rulers might have kept the two peoples, who in their utterly different languages swore in 842 the great oath of Strasburg, still one. But the spirit of feudalism was more fatal to the unity of the empire than these differences of race and language. The mediaeval emperor was perpetual ly fi nding himself overtopped by one or other of his nominal v assals, an d history h as few more pitiable spectacles th an some that were presented by the rule rs of the H oly Roman Em pire—men bearing the great names of Ciesar and Augustus — tossed helplessly to and fro on the waves of European politics, the laughing-stock of their own barons and marquises, and often unable to provide for the ordinary expenses of their households. But all this belongs to the story of the IMiddle Ages, not to the life of the founder of the empire. It would be absurd to say that he could have foreseen all the weak points of the great, and on the whole beneficent, institution which he bestowed on Western Europe. And whatever estimate we may form of the good or 250 CHAKLES THE GREAT CHAP. the evil which resulted from the great event of the eight hundredth Christmas day, none will deny that the whole history of Europe for at least seven hundred years was profoundly modified by the life and mighty deeds of Charles the Great. NOTE ON THE ENTOMBMENT OP CHARLEMAGNE A CURIOUS and somewhat difiBcult question arises as to the disposal of the remains of the great emperor. The account given in the text ^ rests on the authority of Einhard, and is fully confirmed by Thegan the biographer of Louis the Pious. But in the year 1000 the Emperor Otho III. opened the tomb in the presence of two bishops, and a knight named Otho of Lomello, and according to the statement of that knight communicated to the author of the chronicle of Novalese, they found the emperor sitting on a throne with a golden crown on his head, and holding a golden sceptre in his hands. The hands were covered with gloves, through which the nails protruding had worked their way. A little chapel (tuguriolum) of marble and lime was erected over him, through the roof of which the excavators made their way. None of the emperor’s limbs had rotted away, hut a little piece had fallen from the end of the nose, which Otho caused to be replaced in gold. The four discoverers fell on their knees before the majestic figure. Then they clothed him with white robes, cut the finger nails, took away one tooth as a relic, closed the roof of the chapel and departed. The account is a very circumstantial one, and is given by a contemporary chronicler on the authority of one of the actors of the scene who is a fairly well-known historical per¬ sonage. Yet most modern enquirers accept the conclusion advocated by Theodor Lindner (Die Fahel von der Bestattung Karls des Grossen), that the story must be ‘ Page 231. XIII NOTE 251 rejected as untrue, in other words, that Otho of Lomello in relating it was playing on the credulity of his hearers. The chief reasons for this conclusion are, that the story is hope¬ lessly at variance with the statements of Einhard and Thegan. If the body was buried on the very day of death, there would be no time for the elaborate process of embalming which this story requires. The words of the epitaph “ humatum,” “ sub hoc conditorio situm est,” would not be applicable to such a mode of interment. Moreover, such a very unusual mode of dealing with the great emperor’s body would surely have attracted some notice from the ninth-century authors who in prose and verse celebrate the deeds of Charles, not one of whom makes the slightest allusion to it. Lastly, though an industrious search has been often made, no one has ever been able to fiud a trace of the tuguriolum (necessarily a room of a certain size) in which the corpse was said to have been seated. In 1165, at the time of the canonisation of Charles, his body was taken up by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, removed from the marble sarcophagus, in which it had lain for nearly 352 years, and placed in a wooden coffer in the middle of the church. For this wooden coffer was substituted fifty years later, at the order of Frederick II., a costly shrine adorned with gold and jewels in which at the present day, every six years, the relics of “St. Charles the Great,” are exhibited to the people. The head is separated from the body and enclosed in a silver portrait-bust of fourteenth - century workmanship. « O f£l W H P P P K W Q o O ^ V* 00 '* o .2 ^ p-( pH 'S ^ "3 ^ .2" Ph 4 ^ s Ph O rP o p PQ O Charles the Great, b. 742 {?), king 768 Carlomak, 6. 751 , Emperor 800, t814. king 768, t771. N'ote .—Many of the above dates are conjectural. APPENDIX B Fa:mily of St. Charles the Great (Wives) to ^ S'- a S oo c3 a QJ g go H XI x <1 fT-( 'P 00 I'-, nS 12 fciD^ X' 2g K‘: 2 ® > -a M aj t-> ^ “P tH a> Cm 53 . A 'S S o ^'§,9 wg 2 S :3 CO c S o Q w: 'T3 .—T feCTi 1^ w -I o a> -*^ o :3 tH o p £ rn cq' O t3 O CO 21’ “§S 2 S°? T3 s S o ca ^ o <1 ' a 2 0'S 3 .a y- -a a ;-( g S E § *^(9 Cd ^ -rt“? ■•Jl O'! 5^^ Two daughters Hugo, Abbot of St. Drogo, Archbishop Theodoric, 6. 810. and three sons. Quentin, and of Metz ; Arch- Made an ecclesias- The youngest Chancellor of chaplain, t855. tic 818. Theodoric, t807. Louis I., 1844. Printedhy R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh. 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