Chapter V: Charlemagne (3)

The imperial assembly consisted of all the lay and clerical lords, _i.e._, of the high court officials, the bishops, abbots, dukes, counts (_Grafen_), and the principal men of the royal retinue. It met every spring, usually in connection with the great review of the field of May, and its counsel was asked in all weighty affairs of state or important imperial laws. The council of state, however, was composed only of the high court officials, and the magnates of the empire whom the emperor deemed worthy of special confidence, and summoned to his presence either temporarily or permanently. In the autumn the council of state generally met for especially important sessions which served for the most part as preliminary consultations for the next imperial assembly, and for this purpose was increased by important servants of the emperor from all parts of the empire, and hence might be considered as a sort of imperial assembly in miniature.

The ancient works of art and science had made an impression upon Charles’ mind at an early date. He had wandered in Italy among the ruins of the great world gone by, and had decorated his palaces and the new churches in his native land with ancient works of art. It had thus been revealed to him that a peculiar breath of the divine spirit animated art and science, and also out of the German songs, despised by others, there was wafted to him a breath of fresh, vigorous, intellectual life. Charles raised his eyes far above the narrow bounds in which the western church confined art and science, where only the Roman erudition transformed by the clergy according to its own ideas had held its ground; he felt that Christianity carried with it the tendency towards a universal culture of mankind, but he also felt that it ought also to assimilate all the higher intellectual elements which were scattered in the individuality of different nations. Above all he realised, as no one before him, what treasures of mind were stored in his German mother-tongue, and could be elaborated from it. For this reason he gave especial attention to the German language and poetry; he himself worked on the first German grammar, and was the first who caused the German heroic poems to be written down. He held the clergy to preaching in German to the Germans, to instructing them in the German language. Only thus could the foundation for a German national civilisation be laid; since nothing less than the civilisation of the nation as a whole was the end he had in view.

The idea of a general national culture, which only recent times have called to life, and that in a very imperfect manner, was in fact already conceived in the mind of the great emperor. But national culture could proceed only from scholastic culture, although the latter, which had been preserved almost exclusively among the clergy, had long worn a predominantly theological character. For that reason alone Charles was obliged to nourish and cultivate this theologising scholarship, to which he also attributed the highest value, in all directions. He gathered the first scholars of the day at his court, bringing them not only from Italy but also from England, whither the new Latin science and literature had been transplanted from Rome together with Christianity, and where, invigorated by fresh nourishment, it had put forth new blooms. Charles himself was a most zealous pupil of these men whom he held up as a shining pattern for his clergy, and whose example did indeed have an unusual influence. Even if the emperor’s final ends were far from being attained, nevertheless schools began soon to flourish in the episcopal churches and in the cloisters; the Frankish clergy soon became distinguished for its learning, and even the laity was in some degree affected by the new intellectual life. Theological literature again produced works of lasting influence. Latin poetry was diligently cultivated, the German received rules and an artistic development; the art of reliable historical composition which was able to distinguish between fact and fable, and could grasp great events in their true position, grew up then for the first time among the Germans. In all of this almost solely the work of the clergy may be detected, which allowed itself to be directed by the mind of the emperor. He tried to remove the bishops and abbots from all earthly cares, and ordered them to install secular persons as judges and officials, who should execute justice and collect the revenues of the chapters, so that they themselves might follow their spiritual and intellectual calling with undivided force.

But mighty and influential as was the position to which the clerical and civil nobility had attained, the real power of the people still rested in the estate of freemen, which had ever remained the broad foundation of the Germanic political organisation. Only the stubborn force and the simplicity of severe morality that still persisted, especially in the German portions of the Frankish monarchy, had preserved the kingdom of the Merovingians from complete destruction and had made the establishment of royal power possible to the house of Pepin. No one knew better than Charles that the roots of his power lay here and that it would of necessity itself wither and disappear with them. With indefatigable zeal therefore he kept watch that the estate of freemen should neither be diminished nor shorn of its rights. When the magnates were evidently striving to displace the smaller landholders, seize their possessions and thus bring them into a dependent relation, Charles opposed them with the whole force of his authority and strictly forbade all oppression that could be employed to that end. Charles opposed such oppressive drudgery of the free people with unrelenting sternness and regulated by law the services that could be required of the freemen. The poorer men were partially freed from the duty of personal military service, several of them being permitted to combine to equip one of their number. On the outbreak of war, moreover, for the most part only those provinces that were near the scene of the conflict were obliged to furnish their full complement of men.

If, as has been asserted, Charles was the only sovereign of the entire Middle Ages who penetrated to any depth the secrets of political economy, he could not fail to see that the nourishment and support of the state lay in the assured permanence of the middle and lower class landowners. To be sure, at a time when the internal organisation of the state consisted almost exclusively in the administration of justice, Charles could not carry out any great general measures for the elevation of the national welfare; but he could furnish others an example of how to practise agriculture successfully. And he gave this example to the whole empire. He was the best husbandman in it, his estates were model establishments, he saw to everything personally, looked over all accounts himself; and he even required a report of every wolf killed on his property. In other directions also he showed ways and means of increasing the national wealth. He directed his attention to the industries which, at least in the German provinces, were still carried on only by bondmen; and taught on his estates how they could be engaged in with profit.

He safeguarded trade, which was carried on in the German provinces mostly by Italians and Jews, and opened new routes to it. A highway of commerce joining the Mediterranean and the North Sea extended along the Rhine. Another route led from the mouth of the Elbe to the middle Danube and branched there in one direction towards the Black Sea, in the other towards the Adriatic. The development of an extensive industrial activity out of these foundations of Charles was slow and late; for the moment they were no more successful than those legal enactments of the emperor which forbade the freeman all feud and even self-defence, and commanded him to lay down his arms in time of peace. Mighty though the emperor’s arm was, there still existed a remnant of the old personal liberty and impatience of restraint which even he was unable to overcome.

Thus the state of Charlemagne sought to unite in itself all the different elements of political life that had developed in the Christian-Germanic period. In combination they were to supplement and counterbalance, control, and gradually to permeate one another. The clergy and the civil nobility were intended both to support and to watch each other. The officials and the communes extended to one another a helping hand, but at the same time kept each other within bounds. The crown united the whole, but it was none the less actually, if not legally, restricted and bound by the separate elements of the state. A certain balance of powers was established, but its maintenance required great skill and no little expenditure of power. The mighty personality of Charles succeeded in this in good part, but his keen insight did not fail to perceive how strong were the individual interests of the separate estates, and how hard it was for them to adapt themselves to any legally regulated system.

Not everything turned out as he wished and planned. The political institutions of Charles were indeed far from really penetrating the whole extent of his dominions; the ideal that hovered before his spirit in fact came to actual realisation only in his immediate vicinity, at his court. According to the ecclesiastical and temporal character of the empire, the person of the emperor was surrounded by a numerous body of court clergy and a brilliant retinue of temporal nobles. At the head of the ecclesiastical household stood the apocrisiary or arch-chaplain; through his hands all ecclesiastical matters passed to the emperor, and he had also assumed the duties of referendary. Below him was the arch-chancellor, who later himself gained the position of arch-chaplain. The best trained men of affairs, the most worthy servants of the church, the first scholars of the time were among the court clergy, which was the training-school of the bishops of the empire and under whose direction also stood the court school, at that time the most famous educational institution in the entire West. As the court chapel--the entire body of court clergy--was the centre of all ecclesiastical and scientific activity, so too in the supreme court the administration of justice and the science of government reached their height. Here the emperor either presided in person or was represented by the count palatine, who formed the head of the civil nobility and through whose hands all legal matters went to the emperor.

For the direct service of the king’s person vassals were appointed who could be looked upon as models of knightly training. At the court of Charles the most distinguished and influential men from all parts of the empire met. No one came into the emperor’s presence who could not have found there a fellow-countryman and in him an advocate. Service in the imperial palace was under the strictest regulations; everything was exactly fitted together, in order to be of mutual advantage. The older men received assistance and support from the younger; the latter found precept and example in their elders. So the court was not only a training-school for the clergy, but in no less degree for the nobility. The noble propriety and courtly manners which were later a distinguishing characteristic of knighthood, seemed to have had their beginning at the court of Charles.

Like the stars about the sun the paladins were grouped about the great emperor, who overshadowed them all. Not indeed, through brilliancy and pomp of external appearance did he charm the eyes of those who approached him; but about his tall, dignified figure played a dazzling glory as of some higher light in which the clearness of his great spirit seemed to radiate. Those long, white locks which adorned his head in old age, the great piercing eyes, the calm, serene brow, the powerful figure, aged but still not lacking in grace--this whole picture not only imprinted itself deeply upon his contemporaries, but history and tradition have held fast to it in all times, and to-day there is not a youth who has not received that impression. Many ambitious sovereigns have appeared in the thousand years since his time, but none has striven towards a higher ideal than to be placed beside Charlemagne; with this the boldest conquerors, the wisest pacific princes have contented themselves. The French chivalry of later times glorified Charles as the first knight, German citizens venerated him as the paternal friend of the people, and the most just of judges. The Catholic church placed him among its saints; the poetry of all nations in the succeeding ages has repeatedly received strength and vigour from his mighty appearance. Never perhaps has a richer life proceeded from the activity of a mortal man.

_Last Years of Charles_

In the last years of his life Charles was less occupied with military enterprises than in the earlier period. He turned over military glory to his sons, Charles, Pepin, and Louis, with whom he associated capable generals as advisers. Pepin, in Italy, had to conduct many a campaign against the armies of the Grecian emperor, Nicephorus, who had dethroned Irene; it was not until 812 that the court of Byzantium recognised Charles as emperor and the boundaries of the Eastern and Western empires were settled. At about the same time, too, the principality of Benevento finally submitted; it remained under Lombard princes, but they had to pay tribute to Charles. In the Alps and the valley of the Danube affairs were more easily and quickly settled after Pepin had destroyed the kingdom of the Avars. The frontier next the Avars, the marks of Corinthia and Friane, gained a firm outline, and the Slavs living within and along these boundaries recognised the sovereignty of the Franks. In 806, Charles, the emperor’s oldest son, also made war upon the Bohemians and the Sorbs; they were humbled, and for supervision of them the Frankish mark on the upper Main and the Thuringian mark on the Saale, Gera and Unstrut, were established.

[Sidenote: [793-814 A.D.]]

More stubborn and dangerous were the wars against the Arabs in the southwest of the empire. The earlier conquests of Charles had been lost again, and in 793 the Arabs had even crossed the Pyrenees and attacked the Frankish dominions. But in 797 a Frankish army, under the command of Louis, again succeeded in penetrating far into Spain, and four years later Barcelona fell. The foundation was laid for the Spanish mark and its extent was gradually increased by a series of successful campaigns. At the same time the small Christian states that had been formed in the northern mountains of the land arose to manful defence against the infidels. The kingdom of Asturia now for the first time gained an assurance of permanency under the brave king Alfonso II. Oviedo was built as a royal city and Compostela arose over the grave of the holy apostle James whose bones had just been miraculously discovered there. The veneration of St. Iago di Compostela and the courage of the chivalrous Alfonso then inflamed the Spanish Christians to further successful undertakings. The deeds of Charles gave the first inspiration for their victories, and Alfonso, who called himself a servant of the emperor, laid his choicest booty at Charles’ feet. At the same time the Basques, Pamplona, and all Navarre cut loose from the alliance with the Arabs by making temporary submission to the Franks; and along the Balearic Isles, and on the coasts of Corsica and Sardinia, Frankish fleets were already fighting Arab pirates with some degree of success.

Unquestionably the Frankish arms had proved themselves far superior to the once feared prowess of the Arabs. But the empire was now attacked by new enemies who stormed upon the northern marks with fearful might and wild violence, seeming to gain an access of renewed strength in the heat of battle. These enemies were the Danes. In earlier times they had appeared as friendly and closely related brothers of the German peoples; but Christianity and the compact union of the Frankish kingdom formed a strong dividing wall between the German and the Scandinavian peoples and turned the blood and racial friendship into the bitterest enmity. Unquenchable love of freedom, daring, and heroic courage, inexhaustible natural vigour, wild lust of booty--all that had once made the Germans so fatal to the Roman Empire was turned now with these sons of the northland against the Roman-German sovereignty of Charles and threatened it with all the greater danger since the Danes were skilled in naval as well as land warfare; while the Franks, who had for a long period fought only on land, must first learn to do battle on the unstable element of the waves. With the help of the seafaring Frisians Charles fitted out his first fleets, and as Frankish seamen were already fighting in the Mediterranean to protect the shores of Italy and Gaul from the Arabs, so too Frankish ships were soon seeking to defend the coasts of the North Sea from the attacks of the Norse enemies; but the Franks never became thoroughly familiar with naval warfare.

The wide empire was now protected against the neighbouring lands and peoples by a complete circle of strongly fortified and well defended marks, similar to dykes for the protection of a carefully tilled plain against the rush of wild floods. The Frankish vassals settled everywhere here for the defence of the boundaries formed a standing military force, always on guard against the near enemy and therefore also relieved from all service in other parts of the empire. These vassals, called _Markmannen_, were thus a sort of military colony on conquered ground, and were under their own counts who were clothed with extensive plenary powers and were chosen by the emperor from the bravest warriors among his nobles. These counts were called _Markgrafen_ [hence our word marquis].

[Sidenote: [814 A.D.]]

When Charlemagne felt his end approaching he placed his youngest son Louis, his sole heir after the early death of Charles and Pepin, on the throne beside him and with his own hands set the imperial crown upon his head at Aachen [Aix-la-Chapelle]. Four months later the world mourned the death of the great emperor. On the 28th of January, 814, Charles died in his palace at Aachen, in the seventy-second year of his age and the forty-sixth of his reign.[c]

THE LEGENDARY CHARLEMAGNE

Scarcely had the great emperor passed away when the sober truth of his achievements took on the tones of the miraculous, and the historic Charles, too great to comprehend as he really was, became the centre for all that wealth of legend which grew into the epic poetry of France. In the year 883 a garrulous old monk in the monastery of St. Gaul on the upper Rhine recorded his version of the invasion of Lombardy, and through his words, which the theme renders eloquent, one can see for the first time the picture of the Charlemagne of the Middle Ages.[a]

_The Monk of St. Gall’s Story_

With Desiderius (in Pavia) was Otker, one of Karl’s great nobles, who had fled the wrath of the dread king some years before and had found refuge with Desiderius. Now on the approach of the terrible Karl, they climbed into a high tower from which they could see in all directions.

The advance guard appeared, stronger than all the armies of Darius or of Cæsar; and Desiderius asked Otker, “Think you Karl is with this great army?” But he replied, “Not yet.” Then he saw the van of the army drawn from all parts of the wide empire and he said to Otker, “Surely the conquering Karl is in that host.” But Otker said, “Not yet.” Then Desiderius, in growing alarm, cried out, “What can we do if still more come with him?” Otker replied, “You will soon behold the manner of his coming; but as for us, I know not what shall befall.” And lo, while they yet spoke there appeared, wave after wave, the multitude of his household servants. “That is Karl,” cried Desiderius in terror. But Otker said, “Not yet.” Then came the bishops and abbots and chaplains and their train, and the dazed and trembling king, stammering with fear, called to Otker, “Let us go down and hide in the earth from the wrath of this terrible foe.” But Otker, who in his better days had seen the power of Karl’s incomparable arms, answered in dread, “When a harvest of steel comes waving in the fields, and the Po and the Ticino dash waves black with steel against the city wall, then Karl is coming.” Scarce had he spoken when in the north and in the west they saw his coming, dark and cloudlike, attended by shadow that eclipsed the clear day. Then as the king drew nigh there came a flash from gleaming weapons that was more awful to the besieged than any night. Then they saw Karl, the man of steel, his arms, his iron breast, his broad shoulders protected by steel harness, his left hand holding aloft the iron lance, his right ready for the victorious sword. Steel filled the fields and roads, and shot back the rays of the sun; the people, paralyzed by fear, did homage to the bristling lances and bared swords.

And all this, which I, a toothless old man have told, stammering and with many words, Otker saw with one swift look, and said to Desiderius, “There is Karl, whom you so long desired to see.” And with these words he fell to the ground like one dead.[d]

_Sheppard’s Summary of the Legends_

[Sidenote: [800-814 A.D.]]

In any effort of the mind to represent unto itself the personal attributes of the great Carlovingian emperor, it becomes indescribably confused, owing to the double image presented to the vision by the historic and the legendary Charlemagne. To the mediæval imagination, excited by the romantic strains of minnesingers and trouvères, the last was undoubtedly predominant. His mother, whom Villon calls _Berthe aux grans pies_ (Bertha of the large feet, the original, perhaps, of the goose-footed queen still known in nursery tales), daughter of the king of Hungary, the betrothed of Pepin, for whom a false Bertha was substituted by the officer intrusted to bring home the royal bride, is as mythical a personage as Deïanira or Ariadne. Her wanderings in the forest; her residence with the good miller of Mans, for whom she spins so gracefully and so patiently; the coming of King Pepin when lost in the chase; his love at first sight for the gentle peasant maid; the gradual _dénouement_ of the truth; the punishment of the traitors; the marriage of the lovers, and the birth of Charles, form an introduction to the life of the hero of Carlovingian romance, which removes him at once into the region of the fabulous. And when at last he emerges into the twilight land which lies between the domains of legend and history, he becomes, after the immemorial habit of the myth, the nucleus round which are concreted innumerable traditions of warlike enterprise and religious animosity--the spontaneous products of a time when the instincts which underlie both are in a state of preternatural excitement.

Charlemagne, surrounded by his paladins and “douze pairs,” like the British Arthur amid his knights of the Round Table, formed a much more distinct and familiar image in the popular mind, than the great monarch who sat as a real lawgiver in the court of his palace at Aachen. And probably his relations with Harun-al-Rashid, and the actual incidents of the Saracenic wars, were altogether distorted and obscured by the legends of his campaigns in Spain and the Holy Land, to win from the children of Mahoun the sacred relics of Calvary, the crown of thorns, the holy lance, and the nails of the true cross. But it is through this delusive medium that the image of Charlemagne has generally been presented to our modern perceptions. Coloured by the prismatic light of legend, myth, and song, the form of the greatest man of early European times assumes to the gazer’s eye a brilliant, but strangely changeful aspect. We fill up, from mingled sources of history and romance, a great though indistinct outline: the vast but well-knit body, the towering stature, the “dome-shaped” skull, the broad, lofty forehead, with the “large quick eye” beneath, the snowy hair and beard which swept his waist, like the blossoming hawthorn or the flowering laurestinus, the giant strength which could cleave a knight in twain at a single blow, from helmet-peak to saddle-bow, his famous sword Joyeuse, with its religious legend engraven on the blade--_Decem præceptorum custos Carolus_; his death-dealing spear, supposed by some to be the very lance which pierced the Saviour’s side; his glittering mail of proof; the large robes of otter-skin in which he sat wrapped, while, during the long winter evening, he listened to the _barbara et antiquissima carmina_ of his favourite bards, most probably the earliest rhapsodies of the _Nibelungenlied_; his hearty jovial spirit, the outpouring of a great, strong, sensuous nature; his _bonhomie_, developed in practical jokes upon pedants and fools; his strong common sense, his courtesy, his patronage of learning, his feats of strength, his amours, his restless locomotion, his laborious efforts to write, his fatherly fondness for those beautiful but unworthy daughters whom he could not bear to leave behind, even in his warlike expeditions--all these form a complex portraiture most probably very unlike “the rough, tough, and shaggy old monarch,” as Sir F. Palgrave calls him, who had the courage, the energy, and the skill to govern that wild ninth-century world. Yet it may be doubted whether some modern writers have not wandered still further from the original, while they ignore the lapse of a thousand years, and depict a constitutional monarch of modern Europe. “Each generation, or school,” says Sir F. Palgrave, with some little exaggeration, “has endeavoured to exhibit him as a normal model of excellence. Courtly Mézeray invests the son of Pepin with the taste of Louis Quatorze; the polished Abbé Velly bestows upon the Frankish emperor the abstract perfection of a dramatic hero. Boulainvilliers, the champion of the noblesse, worships the founder of hereditary feudality; Mably discovers in the _Capitularies_ the maxims of popular liberty, Montesquieu the perfect philosophy of legislation.”[e]

FOOTNOTES

[132] [He is believed to have been born on the Main in modern Hesse-Darmstadt. As to his apology for his poor Latinity, it may be said that he was remarkably versed for his time in Latin.]

[133] [We are curiously in the dark as to the date of Charles’ birth. There are reasons for accepting each of the following dates,--742, 743, 744, and 747. The first is probably the correct date.]

[134] [On one of these forays in 772, Charles cut down the sacred idol Irminsul, symbolic of the column which in the Odinic cosmogony supported the world; his army was threatened with destruction by thirst, which the Saxons took as a proof of sacrilege; when a cloudburst however saved the army, many of the Saxons were converted to the more potent deity. Another account states that the army obtained water from the sudden starting of an intermittent spring. There is no doubt that the destruction of the Irminsul cast a great gloom over the Saxon army. Deputies were sent to Charles’ camp with promises that Christian priests would be received and with offers to send twelve hostages for their safety. Charles treated them with great moderation, hoping they would remain quiet under the great blow he had dealt until he could attend to other pressing matters.]

[135] [He was tried the same year, his royal locks shorn, and his person immured in a convent. With him end the Agilolfings.]

[136] [Also spelled Godefrid or Göttrick.]

[137] [Aix-la-Chapelle, the _Aquisgranum_ or _Civites Aquensis_ of the Romans.]

[138] [Hodgkin[c] calls him the son of Charles’ wife Himiltrud. But this conspiracy took place in 972. See the later remarks on the state of concubinage.]