The Life of Charlemagne (Charles the Great)

Thomas Hodgkin

The Life of Charlemagne (Charles the Great)

EAN 8596547252405

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [email protected]

Table of Contents

CHARLEMAGNE.

PART I. TO THE BIRTH OF CHARLEMAGNE.

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER II. EARLY MAYORS OF THE PALACE.

CHAPTER III. PIPPIN OF HERISTAL AND CHARLES MARTEL.

CHAPTER IV. PIPPIN, KING OF THE FRANKS.

PART II. FROM THE BIRTH OF CHARLEMAGNE.

CHAPTER V. FALL OF THE LOMBARD MONARCHY.

CHAPTER VI. THE CONVERSION OF THE SAXONS.

CHAPTER VII. REVOLTS AND CONSPIRACIES.

CHAPTER VIII. RONCESVALLES.

CHAPTER IX. WARS WITH AVARS AND SCLAVES.

CHAPTER X. RELATIONS WITH THE EAST.

CHAPTER XI. CAROLUS AUGUSTUS.

CHAPTER XII. OLD AGE.

CHAPTER XIII. RESULTS.

APPENDIX A Genealogy of the Ancestors of Charles the Great

APPENDIX B Family of St. Charles the Great

CHARLEMAGNE.

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PART I.

TO THE BIRTH OF CHARLEMAGNE.

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CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

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In

the gradual transformation of the old world of classical antiquity into the world with which the statesmen of to-day must deal, no man played a greater part than Charles the Great,¹ King of the Franks and Emperor of Rome. The sharp lines of demarcation which we often draw between period and period, and which are useful as helps to memory, have not for the most part had any real existence in history, for in the world of men, as in the development of the material universe, it is true that uniformity rather than cataclysm is the rule: Natura non vadit per saltum. Still there are some great landmarks,² such as the foundation of Constantinople, Alaric’s capture of Rome, the Hegira of Mohammed, the discovery of America, the Reformation, and the French Revolution, which have no merely artificial existence. We can see that the thoughts of the great majority of civilized men were suddenly forced into a different channel by such events, that after they had occurred, men hoped for other benefits and feared other dangers than they had looked for before these events took place. And such a changeful moment in the history of the world was undoubtedly the life of the great ruler who is generally spoken of as Charlemagne, and pre-eminently the year 800, when he was crowned as Emperor at Rome.

When Charles appeared upon the scene, the Roman Empire—at least as far as Western Europe was concerned—had been for more than three centuries slowly dying. An event, to which allusion has just been made—the capture of Rome by Alaric in 410—had dealt the great world-empire a mortal blow, and yet so tough was its constitution, so deeply was the thought engraven even on the hearts of its most barbarous enemies, Rome is the rightful mistress of the world, that it seemed as if that world-empire could not die. The Visigoth, the Ostrogoth, the Vandal, the Burgundian, the Lombard, coming forth from the immemorial solitude of their forests, streamed over the cities and the vineyards of the Mediterranean lands, and erected therein their rude state-systems, their barbaric sovereignties; but even in framing their uncouth national codes they were forced to use the language of Rome; in government they could not dispense with the official machinery of the Empire; in religious affairs, above all, they found themselves always face to face with men to whom the city by the Tiber was still Roma caput mundi. Hence in all these new barbarian kingdoms that arose on the ruins of the Empire there was a certain feeling of precariousness and unrest, a secret fear that the power which had come into being so strangely and so unexpectedly would in a moment vanish away, and that the Roman Augustus would assert himself once more as supreme over the nations; to borrow a phrase from the controversies of a much later date, the Visigothic and Burgundian and Lombard kings were obviously kings de facto; but there was a latent consciousness in the minds of their subjects, perhaps in their own also, that they were not kings de jure.

Had the Italian peninsula been less easily accessible by way of the Julian Alps, or had Rome been situated in as strong a position as Constantinople, it is possible that this secret belief in her rightful predominance might have won back for a Roman emperor that dominion over Europe which was in fact wielded for a time by the Roman popes. But the virtual transference of the seat of empire from the Tiber to the Bosphorus, which was the result of the foundation of the new Rome,³ and the frequent successful sieges of the old Rome, prevented the Roman emperor from thus reasserting himself. There were jealousies between Rome and Constantinople already before the end of the fourth century, and when under Justinian the Empire made its wonderful efforts to recover the ground which it had lost in Africa, in Italy, and in Spain,⁴ though these reconquests were effected in the name of a Roman Augustus, it was felt, and often loudly asserted, that the armies which fought under the imperial standards were Greek rather than Roman. Thus, through all the kingdoms of the west, even while the emperor enthroned at Constantinople was looked upon as in some sense the legitimate monarch of the world, the old deep-rooted hostility between East and West also made itself felt, and it was becoming every day more improbable that the western lands should ever be brought under the rule of a Byzantine Cæsar.

Ere the long, slow agony which I have called the death of Rome was completed, the world was startled by that outbreak of fierce Semitic monotheism which is associated with the name of Mohammed. In 622, rather more than two centuries after Alaric’s capture of Rome, Mohammed escaped from Mecca to Medina, and in this retreat of his the followers of his faith in succeeding ages have rightly seen the beginning of his career of spiritual conquest, wherefore they date all their events from the midnight journey of a fugitive, even as the other great Oriental faith has taken for its landmark the birth of a little child in a stable. Before Mohammed’s death in 632 the career of Saracen conquest had begun. Ere the close of the seventh century Syria, Persia, Egypt, North Africa, were torn from the Empire of the Cæsars and obeyed the rule of the Caliph. In 711 Europe saw the first breach made in its defences when the great Iberian peninsula (all save a few mountain glens in the remote north) was conquered by the Moors, and Mecca took the place of Jerusalem or Rome as the spiritual centre of gravity for Spain. The turbaned invaders crossed the Pyrenees, in 725 they penetrated as far as Autun, only 150 miles from Paris. Though defeated by Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, in the great battle of Poitiers,⁵ the Moors remained encamped on the soil of that which we now call France. Narbonne was in their possession at the time of the birth of Charlemagne, and remained so during the years of his boyhood, till won back for Christendom by his father in 759.

In the east of Europe the Avars⁶ still hung menacingly over the Italian and Illyrian lands. A people allied to the Huns, they occupied the mid-Danubian region which had been the seat of the barbarian empire of Attila, and though their power had declined somewhat from that which they wielded in the seventh century, it was still a serious danger to civilization. As we shall see, however, the barbarous and heathen Saxons in the lands between the Lower Rhine and the Elbe, representing the Teutonic spirit in its fiercest and most stubborn moods, represented an even more formidable obstacle to that remodelling of Europe in the likeness of the old Roman Empire which was the aim of the great statesman with whose life we have to deal.

Such, very briefly, was the aspect of affairs when Charles the Great, the descendant of many Mayors of the Palace and of one King, found himself, with the power of the Frankish nation collected in his sole right hand, controller of the destinies of Western Europe. Without going too far into the times preceding his accession, something in order to explain his position must be said, both as to the Frankish nation and the Arnulfing family.

In the north-east of Gaul dwelt, in the latter part of the fifth century after Christ, a confederacy of German tribes called the Salian Franks, occupying the districts known in later days as Flanders, Artois, and Picardy. Farther south was the strong and warlike tribe of the Ripuarian Franks, whose territory stretched along the banks of the Rhine from Mainz to Köln, and along the Moselle from Coblenz to Metz. Salians and Ripuarians recognized a loose tie of kinship between them, but there was no strong feeling of unity even in the subdivision of the two nations. Both Salians and Ripuarians had many petty kings, and there were frequent civil wars between them.

In this state of things one of these petty kings, Clovis,⁷ the Salian Frank,⁸ began to reign at Tournai in 481, being then fifteen years of age. When he died, in the years 511, after forty-five years of life and thirty of sovereignty, he had made himself sole master of all Frankish men, and had subdued to his dominion three-fourths of France and a great block of territory in south-western Germany. Let us briefly recapitulate these conquests, omitting the wars in which the other Frankish princes, whether Salian or Ripuarian, went down before him. In 486 he overthrew the Roman governor Syagrius, who had set up some sort of independent kingship at Soissons. This conquest gave Clovis the provinces afterwards known as Champagne and Lorraine. In 496 he defeated the Alamanni in a great battle, the ultimate result of which was the annexation of the wide district on the right bank of the Rhine known in the Middle Ages as Swabia, comprising in terms of modern geography Alsace, Baden, Würtemberg, the western part of Bavaria, and the northern part of Switzerland. The well-timed conversion to Christianity, and to the Catholic form of Christianity which followed this victory, facilitated the next great conquest of Clovis. In the year 507 he went forth to war against Alaric, King of the Visigoths, defeated and slew him, and thus added Aquitaine, that large and fertile region which lies between the Loire and the Pyrenees, to his dominions. Four years after this he died, but in the next generation, between 524 and 534, his sons conquered Burgundy, and thus added to their father’s kingdom the whole valley of the Rhone from its source to its mouth, except the narrow but rich land of Provence, which was retained by the Ostrogothic kings of Italy for a few years longer, but in 536 this also became Frankish. Contemporaneously with the conquest of Burgundy proceeded the conquest of Thuringia, the fair region in the heart of Germany which still bears that name, and the establishment of the over-lordship of the Franks over the nation of the Bavarians, whose country stretched from the Danube across the Alps, into the valley of the Adige and up to the very gates of Italy. The date of this last addition to the Frankish dominions cannot be precisely ascertained, but may be stated approximately at the year 535.

It will be seen from this brief summary how rapidly the tide of Frankish conquest rose almost to the same high-water mark which it maintained at the time of the birth of Charlemagne. In fifty years from the first appearance of Clovis as a warrior, the Franks have subdued the whole of modern France (except a little strip of Languedoc), the Low Countries, Switzerland, and all Germany as far as the Elbe and the mountains of Bohemia, except Hanover and a part of Westphalia which is occupied by the untamed and still heathen Saxons. Such a monarchy even now would be the greatest power in Europe. In the sixth century, with Spain weakened by the estrangement between Arians and Catholics, with Italy torn by strife between the Empire and its barbarian occupants, with Britain still in utter chaos, nibbled at but not devoured by her Anglo-Saxon invaders, the kingdom of the Franks when united and at peace within itself, was the strongest power in Europe, with the two doubtful exceptions of the kingdom of the savage Avars and the tottering fabric of the Roman Empire.

But the years in which the Frankish kingdom was thus united and at peace with itself were few. It had been built up by the ferocious energy of one man and his sons; it was hardly in any true sense of the word national, and he and his descendants treated it as an estate rather than as a country, partitioned and repartitioned it in a way which wasted its strength and ruined its chances of attaining to political unity. The comparison may seem a strange one, but in the personal, non-national character of his policy the first Frankish king reminds one of the latest French conqueror; the career of Clovis may be illustrated by that of Napoleon. Both men emphatically fought for their own bands; both were more intent on massing great countries under their sway than on really assimilating the possessions which they had already acquired; both in different ways made, or tried to make, the Catholic Church an instrument of their ambition; and both seem to have looked upon Europe, or so much of it as they could acquire, as a big estate to be divided among their children or relations.

There is no need here to dwell upon the perplexing details of the division of the kingdom of Clovis among his sons and grandsons. We perceive a tendency to regard the north-eastern portion of the realm, especially that conquered from Syagrius,⁹ as the true kernel of the kingdom; and therefore, widely as the dominions of the brothers stretch asunder, their capitals, Metz, Orleans, Soissons, Paris, all lie comparatively near to one another, all probably within the ring-fence of the Syagrian kingdom. But there is also a tendency to fall asunder into four great divisions. Burgundy and Aquitaine, though they do not formally resume their independence, are often seen as separate kingdoms under a Frankish king. But the more important division, the more fateful rivalry separates the two northern kingdoms, which eventually receive the names of Neustria¹⁰ and Austrasia. In Neustria, which contained the regions of Flanders, Normandy, Champagne, and Central France as far as the Loire, there was doubtless a very large Gallo-Roman population, though its numbers may not have so enormously preponderated over those of the Teutonic immigrants as in Aquitaine and Burgundy. The Roman language and some remains of Roman culture survived here in Neustria, and were preparing the ground for the formation of the mediæval kingdom of France. Austrasia, on the other hand, the territory of the Rhine and the Moselle, seems to have remained essentially German. The Latin speech in this country must have been confined to ecclesiastics and a few of the more cultivated courtiers; it can never have been the speech of the people. And though here we must speak rather by conjecture than by proof, it is probable that the old Germanic institutions of the hundred and the gau¹¹ survived here in greater vigor than on the alien soil of the Romanized Gaul. It was also through the rulers of Austrasia that the connection, frail and precarious as it often might be, was kept up between the Frankish monarchy and the great, semi-independent duchies of the Thuringians, the Alamanni, and the Bavarians.

Thus already in the fissure between the western and eastern portions of the Merovingian kingdom¹² we see the rift, premonitory of that mighty chasm which now separates the great states of France and Germany.

CHAPTER II.

EARLY MAYORS OF THE PALACE.

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The

historical student who visits in thought the nursery of modern European states—the period from 500 to 800 of the Christian era—finds with amused surprise how many of the features familiar to him in their weather-beaten old age he can trace in the faces of those baby kingdoms. Gothic Spain, with its manifold councils, its ecclesiastical intolerance, and its bitter persecutions of the Jews, is the anticipation of the Spain of the Ferdinands and the Philips. Italy, cleft in sunder by the patrimony of St. Peter and with the undying hostility between the pope and the Lombard king, presages the very conflict which is now being waged between the Vatican and the Quirinal. England, notwithstanding all her early elements of confusion and mismanagement, clings desperately to her one great saving institution of the Witan,¹³ and thus travails in birth with the future parliament.

And even so, France under the Merovingian kings is the land of centralized government, which though strong and imposing in theory, repeatedly shows itself weak and insufficient in practice from the incapacity of the governing brain to perform the manifold functions assigned to it by destiny. As far as we can see, Clovis and his immediate successors wielded a power which was practically unlimited. The checks which the German nations from the time of Tacitus downwards had imposed on the authority of their kings had almost entirely disappeared before the overmastering power of the great Salian chief who had united the whole of Gaul under his sway, and who was continually reminded by his friends, the Christian bishops, how high had been the throne and how heavy the sceptre of the Roman Augustus in that very region. The well-known story of the vase of Soissons illustrates at once the German memories of freedom and the Merovingian mode of establishing a despotism. As a battle comrade the Frankish warrior protests against Clovis receiving an ounce beyond his due share of the spoils. As a battle leader Clovis rebukes his henchman for the dirtiness of his accoutrements, and cleaves his skull to punish him for his independence.

There can be little doubt that it was the influence of Roman and ecclesiastical ideas which tended to exalt the rude chiefs of the Salian tribe into their later position of practically despotic monarchs, surrounded by a crowd of fawning flatterers and servile courtiers. The effect of this exaltation on the royal house itself was disastrous. Merovingian royalty flowered too soon and faded early. Clovis himself was short-lived, dying, as we have seen, at the age of five-and-forty. But two or three generations later the career of the kings, his descendants, was of far more portentous brevity. Nothing is more common than to find a Merovingian king who is a father at fifteen, or even earlier, and who dies (not always by a violent death) under thirty. Let us take a few of the lives of the later kings as an illustration. Dagobert I., who is a sort of patriarch among them, dies at thirty-eight; his son, Clovis II., at twenty-four; of the sons of this latter king, Chlothair III. dies at eighteen, Childeric II. at twenty. Theodoric III. actually lives to the age of thirty-eight, but of his sons one dies at thirteen and another at eighteen. And so on with many other names that might be quoted. It was evidently by their vices that these hapless do-nothing kings were hurried to such early graves. Every student of the pages of Gregory of Tours¹⁴ knows the dreary picture of morals and of social life which is there presented: the coarseness of the barbarian without his rough fidelity, the voluptuousness of the Gallo-Roman noble without his culture. Even as we see at the present day in the contact of two civilizations or of two faiths, notably in the contact of Christianity and Mohammedanism, that the men whose position places them on the borders of the two are apt to display the vices of both and the virtues of neither, so was it with the Frankish nobles and bishops of Gaul in the sixth and seventh centuries, and so emphatically was it with their head, the Frankish king who reigned at Metz or Orleans or Paris. Immersed in his swinish pleasures, with his constitution ruined by his early excesses, what could the sickly youth, the Childebert or Chlothair of the day, do to overtake the mass of business which the administration of the realm, with its highly centralized mechanism, imposed upon him? He could not do it all, and in practice he did nothing, and sank easily, perhaps happily, into the condition of a roi fainéant. Dagobert I., who died in 638, is the last Merovingian king who displays some royal energy and strength of purpose. After him for more than a century a series of pageant kings pass before us, Clovises and Theodorics and Chilperics, whose names history refuses to remember, but whose pitiable condition is represented to us by a few vivid touches from the hand of Einhard, the biographer of Charlemagne. He describes to us how the Merovingian king, seated in his chair of state, received the ambassadors of foreign powers, and repeated, parrot-like, the answers which he had been taught to give; how he travelled through the land in a wagon drawn by a yoke of oxen, with a clownish herdsman for his charioteer, and thus made his appearance when his presence was required at the palace or at the yearly assemblies of the people; but how for the greater part of the year he abode at one small villa in the country, living on its produce, eked out by a scanty grant from his prime minister, and having in truth nothing that he could call his own save his royal title, his long flowing hair, and his pendulous beard, which were the marks of his kingly state.

Doubtless it is not only the constitutional sovereign who is obliged to content himself with only a small share of actual power. The despot also, if he wishes to have any enjoyment of life, must leave much to be done by his ministers, who, whatever show of deference they may yield to his judgment, will practically decide for themselves the great mass of administrative questions that come before them. Thus Louis XIII. had his Richelieu; thus the Sultan of Turkey has his Grand Vizier; thus, till our own day, the Mikado of Japan