The Dark Ages, Period 1, 476-918

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Title: The Dark Ages, Period 1, 476-918
Author: Oman, Charles
Language: English
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PERIODS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY

PERIOD I., 476-918

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Periods of European History

General Editor, ARTHUR HASSALL, M.A.,

STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD.

Crown 8vo. With Maps and Plans.

The object of this series is to present in separate Volumes a
comprehensive and trustworthy account of the general development of
European History, and to deal fully and carefully with the more
prominent events in each century.

It is believed that no such attempt to place the History of Europe
before the English Public has yet been made, and it is hoped that the
Series will form a valuable continuous History of Mediæval and Modern
Europe.

Period I.—The Dark Ages. A.D. 476-918. By C. W. C. OMAN, M.A., Fellow of
All Souls College, Oxford. 7s. 6d. [Already published.

Period II.—The Empire and the Papacy. A.D. 918-1273. By T. F. TOUT,
M.A., Professor of History at the Owens College, Victoria
University, Manchester. 7s. 6d. [Already published.

Period III.—The Close of the Middle Ages. A.D. 1272-1494. By R. LODGE,
M.A., Professor of History at the University of Glasgow. [In
preparation.

Period IV.—Europe in the 16th Century. A.D. 1494-1598. By A. H. JOHNSON,
M.A., Historical Lecturer to Merton, Trinity, and University
Colleges, Oxford. 7s. 6d. [Already published.

Period V.—The Ascendancy of France. A.D. 1598-1715. By H. O. WAKEMAN,
M.A., Fellow of All Souls College, and Tutor of Keble College,
Oxford. 6s. [Already published.

Period VI.—The Balance of Power. A.D. 1715-1789. By A. HASSALL, M.A.,
Student of Christ Church, Oxford. 6s. [Already published.

Period VII.—Revolutionary Europe. A.D. 1789-1815. By H. MORSE STEPHENS,
M.A., Professor of History at Cornell University, Ithaca, U.S.A.
6s. [Already published.

Period VIII.—Modern Europe. A.D. 1815-1878. By G. W. PROTHERO, Litt.D.,
Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh. [In
preparation.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE DARK AGES

476-918

CHARLES OMAN, M.A., F.S.A.

FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE
AND LECTURER AT NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD

AUTHOR OF ‘A HISTORY OF GREECE,’
‘THE ART OF WAR IN THE MIDDLE AGES,’ ETC.

PERIOD I

RIVINGTONS
KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN
LONDON
1898

Third Edition

------------------------------------------------------------------------

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

In spite of the very modest scale on which this book has been written, I
trust that it may be of some use to students of European History. Though
there are several excellent monographs in existence dealing with various
sections of the period 476-918, there is no continuous general sketch in
English which covers the whole of it. Gibbon’s immortal work is
popularly supposed to do so, but those who have read it most carefully
are best aware that it does not. I am not acquainted with any modern
English book where the inquirer can find an account of the Lombard
kings, or of the Mohammedan invasions of Italy and Sicily in the ninth
century, or of several other not unimportant chapters in the early
history of Europe. I am in hopes, therefore, that my attempt to cover
the whole field between 476 and 918 may not be entirely useless to the
reading public.

I must acknowledge my indebtedness to two living authors, whose works
have been of the greatest possible help to me in dealing with two great
sections of this period, Doctor Gustav Richter, whose admirable
collection of original authorities in his _Annalen des Fränkischen
Reichs_ makes such an excellent introduction to the study of Merovingian
and Carolingian times, and Professor Bury of Dublin, whose _History of
the Later Roman Empire_ has done so much for the knowledge of East-Roman
affairs between 476 and 800. Nor must I omit to express my indebtedness
to the kindly and diligent hands which spent so many summer hours in the
laborious task of compiling my index.

A word ought, perhaps, to be added on the vexed question of the spelling
of proper names. I have always chosen the most modern form in speaking
of places, but in speaking of individuals I have employed that used by
contemporary authorities, save in the case of a few very well known
names, such as Charles, Henry, Gregory, Lewis, where archaism would
savour of pedantry.

OXFORD, _November 1893._

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

The author has to acknowledge much kind help in the revision of this
second edition given him by the Rev. Dr. Bright, Regius Professor of
Ecclesiastical History; by Mr. C. H. Turner, Fellow of Magdalen College;
by the Rev. F. E. Brightman, of University College; and by the unwearied
compiler of the index. They have materially improved the accuracy of the
book by their suggestions.

_October 30, 1894._

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. ODOACER AND THEODORIC, 476-493, 1

II. THEODORIC KING OF ITALY, 493-526, 19

III. THE EMPERORS AT CONSTANTINOPLE, 476-527, 33

IV. CHLODOVECH AND THE FRANKS IN GAUL, 55
481-511,

V. JUSTINIAN AND HIS WARS, 528-540, 65

VI. JUSTINIAN—(_continued_), 540-565, 89

VII. THE EARLIER FRANKISH KINGS AND THEIR 111
ORGANISATION OF GAUL, 511-561,

VIII. THE VISIGOTHS IN SPAIN, 531-603, 128

IX. THE SUCCESSORS OF JUSTINIAN, 565-610, 145

X. DECLINE AND DECAY OF THE MEROVINGIANS, 158
561-656,

XI. THE LOMBARDS IN ITALY AND THE RISE OF 181
THE PAPACY, 568-653,

XII. HERACLIUS AND MOHAMMED, 610-641, 204

XIII. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE VISIGOTHS, 221
A.D. 603-711,

XIV. THE CONTEST OF THE EASTERN EMPIRE AND 235
THE CALIPHATE, 641-717,

XV. THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT MAYORS OF THE 256
PALACE, 656-720,

XVI. THE LOMBARDS AND THE PAPACY, 653-743, 272

XVII. CHARLES MARTEL AND HIS WARS, 720-41, 289

XVIII. THE ICONOCLAST EMPERORS—STATE OF THE 300
EASTERN EMPIRE IN THE EIGHTH CENTURY,
717-802,

XIX. PIPPIN THE SHORT—WARS OF THE FRANKS AND 322
LOMBARDS, 741-768,

XX. CHARLES THE GREAT—EARLY YEARS 335
768-785—CONQUEST OF LOMBARDY AND
SAXONY,

XXI. THE LATER WARS AND CONQUESTS OF CHARLES 357
THE GREAT, 785-814,

XXII. CHARLES THE GREAT AND THE EMPIRE, 369

XXIII. LEWIS THE PIOUS, 814-840, 383

XXIV. DISRUPTION OF THE FRANKISH EMPIRE—THE 405
COMING OF THE VIKINGS, 840-855,

XXV. THE DARKEST HOUR, 855-887. FROM THE 424
DEATH OF LOTHAIR I. TO THE DEPOSITION
OF CHARLES THE FAT,

XXVI. ITALY AND SICILY IN THE NINTH CENTURY, 446
827-924,

XXVII. GERMANY, 888-918, 468

XXVIII. THE EASTERN EMPIRE IN THE NINTH CENTURY, 478
802-912,

XXIX. THE END OF THE NINTH CENTURY IN WESTERN 496
EUROPE. CONCLUSION,

INDEX 519

--------------

MAPS

NO. PAGE

1. The Perso-Roman Frontier under 91
Justinian,

2. The Frankish Kingdoms in 511, 112

3. The Frankish Kingdoms in 575, 160

4. Italy in 590, 189

5. The Asiatic Themes, 243

6. Saxony in the Ninth Century, 350

7. The Partition-Treaty of Verdun, 853, 410

8. Western Europe in 890, 444

--------------

GENEALOGICAL TABLES

1. The Vandal Kings, 12

2. The Eastern Emperors, 457-518, 39

3. The House of the Merovings, 166

4. The Lombard Kings, 183

5. The House of Heraclius, 236

6. The Mayors of the Palace of the House of 260
St. Arnulf,

7. The Descendants of Charles the Great, 413

--------------

APPENDIX.

Names and Dates of the Emperors at 515-517
Constantinople, the Ostrogothic and
Visigothic Kings, the Popes, and the
Caliphs,

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER I

ODOACER AND THEODORIC

476-493

Importance of the year 476—The Emperor Zeno recognises Odoacer as
Patrician in Italy—Odoacer’s position—Divisions of Europe in 476—The
Vandals in Africa and King Gaiseric—Rule of Odoacer in Italy—His war
with Theodoric, and fall.

In the summer of 477 A.D. a band of ambassadors, who claimed to speak
the will of the decayed body which still called itself the Roman senate,
appeared before the judgment-seat of the emperor Zeno, the ruler of
Constantinople and the Eastern Empire. They came to announce to him that
the army of the West had slain the patrician Orestes, and deposed from
his throne the son of Orestes, the boy-emperor Romulus. But they did not
then proceed to inform Zeno that another Caesar had been duly elected to
replace their late sovereign. Embassies with such news had been common
of late years, but this particular deputation, unlike any other which
had yet visited the Bosphorus, came to announce to the Eastern emperor
that his own mighty name sufficed for the protection of both East and
West. They laid at his feet the diadem and purple robe of Romulus, and
professed to transfer their homage and loyalty to his august person.
Then, as if by way of supplement and addendum, they informed Zeno that
they had chosen Flavius Odoacer for their governor, and trusted that
their august master would deign to ratify the choice, and confer on
Odoacer the title of Patrician.

It has often been repeated of late years that this date, 476 A.D., does
not form a very notable landmark in the history of the world, that its
sole event was the transfer of the nominal supremacy of the Western
World from a powerless Caesar who lived at Ravenna to a powerless Caesar
who lived at Constantinople. We are reminded that the patrician Odoacer
and the deputies of the Roman Senate assured the Eastern Emperor not
that they had cast off allegiance to the imperial name, but that Italy
no longer needed a separate Augustus, and that a single ruler might once
more rule East and West, as in the days of Constantine and Theodosius.
[Sidenote: Odoacer Patrician in Italy.] And if the representatives of
the western realm then proceeded to recommend Zeno to appoint as his
vice-regent among them ‘Odoacer, a mighty man of war, and a person well
skilled in political matters, whom they had selected to defend their
interests,’ they were, in truth, making no new or startling proposition;
for similar embassies had often arrived at Constantinople to announce,
not the choice of a mere patrician, but the election of an independent
emperor.

In a purely formal way all this is true enough, and we must concede that
the permanent establishment of a Teutonic ruler in Italy was only
another instance of what had already occurred in Spain and Africa. As
yet nobody in either of the three countries had asserted that the Roman
Empire had died out and been replaced for all purposes by a Teutonic
kingship. Documents were still dated and coins still struck with the
name of a Roman Emperor upon them alike in Spain, Africa, and Italy.
After 476 the subjects of the Visigoth Euric, no less than those of the
Scyrrian Odoacer, proceeded to grave a rude portrait of Zeno on their
moneys, just as they had done a few years earlier with a rude portrait
of Valentinian III. What mattered it to them that the one dwelt east of
the Adriatic and the other west?

But if the historians of the last century were too neglectful of the
constitutional and theoretical aspect of affairs, when they bluntly
asserted that the Roman Empire ceased in the West in 476, there is a
danger that our own generation may become too much imbued with the
formal aspect of things, and too little conscious of the real change
which took place in that obscure year. The disappearance of the Roman
Empire of the West was, in truth, a long process, which began as early
as 411 when Britain—first of all the Occidental ‘dioceses’—was abandoned
to the barbarian, and did not, perhaps, end till Francis II. of Austria
laid down the title of Emperor in the year 1806. Yet if we must choose a
point at which, rather than at any other, we are to put the breach
between the old and the new, if we must select any year as the
dividing-line between ancient history and the Middle Ages, it is
impossible to choose a better date than 476.

Down to the day on which Flavius Odoacer deposed Augustulus there was
always at Rome or Ravenna a prince who represented in clear heritage the
imperial succession that descended from Octavian and Trajan and
Constantine. His crown might be fragile, his life in constant danger;
his word might be less powerful in Italy than that of some barbarian
Ricimer or Gundobad who stood behind the throne. Nevertheless, he was
brought into real contact with his subjects, and was a visible, tangible
personage whose will and character still made some difference in the
governance of the state. The weakest Glycerius or Olybrius never sank
into being a mere puppet, like an eighth century king of the Franks, or
a seventeenth century Mikado. Moreover, there was till the last a
possibility—even, perchance, a probability—that there would arise some
strong emperor who would free himself from the power of his German prime
minister. Majorian nearly succeeded in doing so; and the stories of the
falls of the Goths, Gainas and Aspar, in the East show that such an
attempt was not a hopeless undertaking.

But when Odoacer seized the throne from the boy Augustulus, and became
with the consent, if not the goodwill, of the Constantinopolitan Caesar,
the sole representative in the West of the imperial system, a very grave
change took place in the status of the empire. [Sidenote: Practical
meaning of Odoacer’s position.] Flavius Odoacer was something far more
than a patrician ruling as the representative of an absentee emperor. He
was not only the successor of Ricimer, but the predecessor of Theodoric
and Alboin. For, beside being a Roman official, he was a German king,
raised on the shield and hailed as ‘Thiudans’ by the whole Teutonic
horde who now represented the old legions of the West. If he never took
the title of ‘king of Italy,’ it was because territorial appellations of
the kind were not yet known. Euric and Gaiseric, his contemporaries,
called themselves Kings of the Visigoths and Vandals, not of Spain and
Africa. And so Odoacer being king of a land and an army, but not of a
nation, may have been somewhat at a loss how to set forth his royal
appellation. He would not have deigned to call himself ‘king of the
Italians;’ to call himself king of the Scyrri or Turcilingi, or any
other of the tribes who furnished part of his host, would have been to
assume an inadequate name. Puzzled contemporary chroniclers sometimes
called him king of the Goths, though he himself never used such a title.

Still he was a king, and a king with a settled territory and an
organised host; not a migratory invader of Italy, as Alaric had been,
but a permanent ruler of the land. In this way he was undoubtedly the
forerunner of the Ostrogoths and Lombards who took his place, and,
though the title would have sounded strange in his own ears, we may
fairly style him king of Italy, as we so style Theodoric, or Berengar,
or Victor Emmanuel. For it was the will of Odoacer that was obeyed in
the land, and not the will of his titular superior at Constantinople. It
was Odoacer who appointed taxes and chose officials, and interfered in
the election of bishops of Rome, and declared war on the Rugians or the
Vandals. In the few documents of his time that have survived, the name
of Zeno is seldom mentioned, and in signing grants he styles himself
Odovacar Rex, and not Odovacar Patricius, as strict Roman usage should
have prescribed. Similarly, an Italian official acknowledges his _regia
largitas_, not his _patricia magnitudo_. It is, then, in every way
correct, as well as convenient, to style him the first German king of
Italy, and to treat his reign as the commencement of a new era. If we
hesitate to do this, we are logically bound to refuse to recognise the
Visigothic or Frankish kings in Spain and Gaul as independent sovereigns
till the middle of the sixth century, and to protract the Roman Empire
of the West till Leovigild and Theudebert formally disclaimed the
imperial supremacy (540-70).

In the year 476 the greater parts of the lands which had formerly
composed the Roman Empire of the West had taken new forms in the shape
of six large Teutonic kingdoms. Italy and Noricum formed the kingdom of
Odoacer; North Africa the dominions of the Vandal Gaiseric. The
Visigothic realm of Euric extended from the Loire to the Straits of
Gibraltar. King Gundobad the Burgundian occupied the valleys of the
Rhone and Saône, as far as their extreme headwaters. The Princes of the
Franks reigned on the Meuse, Moselle, and lower Rhine. Last and smallest
of the six Teutonic States was the kingdom of the Suevi in what would
now be called north Portugal and Galicia. Interspersed among these
German kingdoms were three or four remnants of the old Roman Empire,
which had not yet been submerged by the rising flood of Teutonism,
though they were destined ere long to disappear beneath its surface.
[Sidenote: State of Western Europe in 476.] The province of Britain had
become a group of small and unhappy Celtic kingdoms, on whose borders
the Angle and Saxon had not yet made any appreciable encroachment.
Armorica, the modern Brittany, was also a rough confederacy of Celtic
states. The Seine valley and the middle Loire formed a Romano-Gallic
kingdom under Syagrius, the last governor who had acknowledged the
supremacy of the empire beyond the Alps. The Cantabrians and Basques in
their hills above the Bay of Biscay had preserved their independence
against the Visigoths, just as their ancestors, five centuries before,
had held out against the Roman conquerors of Spain. Lastly, there was
still a fragment of territory on the Adriatic which claimed to represent
the legitimate Empire of the West. The emperor Julius Nepos, when driven
from Rome and Ravenna, had fled to Dalmatia, where he contrived to keep
together a small kingdom around his capital of Salona. Of these five
scattered remnants of territory which had not yet fallen into the hands
of the Germans, there were two, the kingdoms of Syagrius and Nepos,
which were doomed to a speedy fall; for the other three a longer and
more chequered career was reserved.

Around the solid block of land, which had once formed the Western
Empire, were lying a ring of German tribes, who had worked forward from
the North and East into the deserted dwellings of the races who had
already passed on within the Roman border. The Frisians lay about the
mouths of the Waal and Lech, north of the land lately won by the Franks.
The Alamanni, a confederacy of Suevian tribes, had possession of the
valleys of the Main and Neckar, the Black Forest, and the banks of the
upper Danube. East of them again lay the Thuringians and Rugians, in the
lands which we should now call northern Bavaria and Bohemia. Beyond them
came the Lombards in Moravia and northern Hungary, and the Herules and
Gepidae on the middle Danube and the Theiss. All these tribes, like
their brethren who had gone before them, were showing a general tendency
to press West and South, and take their share in the plunder of the
dismembered Empire.

The history of the Teutonic kingdoms of the later fifth and earlier
sixth century falls into two distinct halves. The tale of the doings of
Frank, Visigoth, Burgundian, and Suevian in the West forms one. Very
slightly connected with it do we find the other, the story of the doings
of Odoacer in Italy, and of the Vandal kings in Africa, whose
connections and interests are far more with the Eastern Empire than with
the Transalpine kingdoms. It is with these two states that we shall
first have to deal, leaving the discussion of the affairs of the Teutons
of Gaul and Spain for another chapter.

Gaiseric, or Genseric as the Romans sometimes called him, first of the
Vandal kings of Africa, was still reigning at Carthage in the year when
Odoacer became ruler of Italy. For forty-eight years did this first of
the Teutonic sea-kings bear sway in the land which he had won, and hold
the naval supremacy in the central Mediterranean. The creation of the
Vandal kingdom had been one of the most extraordinary feats of the time
of the great migrations, and must be attributed entirely to the personal
energy of their long-lived king. His tribe was one of the least numerous
of the many wandering hordes which had trespassed within the bounds of
the empire, no more than 80,000 souls, men, women, and children all
counted, when they first invaded Africa. [Sidenote: The Vandals in
Africa, 439-77.] That such a small army should have overrun a province a
thousand miles long, and should have become the terror of the whole
seaboard of the Western Empire was the triumph of Gaiseric’s ability. He
was not one of the stalwart, hard-fighting, brainless chiefs who were
generally to be found at the head of a German horde, but a man of very
moderate stature, limping all his life through from a kick that he got
from a horse in early youth. His mental powers alone made him
formidable, for he was not only a general of note, but a wily
politician, faithless not with the light and heady fickleness of a
savage, but with the deliberate and malicious treachery of a
professional intriguer. He was one of those not uncommon instances of a
Teuton, who, when brought into contact with the empire, picked up all
the vices of its decaying civilisation without losing those of his
original barbarism. It is not without some reason that the doings of
Gaiseric have left their mark on the history of language in the shape of
the modern word ‘Vandalism.’ The sufferings of Italy and Africa at his
hands were felt more deeply than the woes they had endured at the hands
of other invaders, because of the treachery and malice which inspired
them. Compared with Gaiseric, Alaric the Goth seemed a model of knightly
courtesy, and Attila the Hun a straightforward, if a brutal, enemy. The
Vandal king’s special foibles were the conclusion of treaties and
armistices which he did not intend to keep, and a large piratical
disregard for the need of any pretext or justification for his raids,
save indeed the single plea that the city or district that he attacked
was at that particular moment not in a good position to defend itself.

From his contact with the empire, Gaiseric had picked up the
characteristics of the two most odious types of the day—the
tax-collector and the persecuting ecclesiastical bigot. There was more
systematic financial oppression in Africa than in any of the other new
Germanic kingdoms, and far more spiteful persecution of religious
enemies.

The system on which the Vandal organised his realm was not the
comparatively merciful ‘thirding of the land’ that Odoacer and Theodoric
introduced into Italy. He confiscated all the large estates of the great
African landowners, and turned them into royal domains, worked by his
bailiffs. Of the smaller estates, tilled by the provincials who owned
them, he made two parts; those in the province of Africa proper and the
best of those beyond it, were appropriated and made into military fiefs
for his Teutonic followers. [Sidenote: Vandal Oppression.] These _sortes
Vandalorum_, as they were called, were hereditary and free from all
manner of taxation. The royal revenue was raised entirely from those of
the poorer and more remote provincial proprietors, who had not been
expropriated, and from them Gaiseric, by pitiless taxation, drew a very
large revenue.

But it was for his persecution, far more than his fiscal oppression,
that Gaiseric was hated. The Vandals, like most of the other Teutons,
had embraced Arianism when they were converted, and Gaiseric—evil-liver
as he was—had set his mind on forcing his subjects to conform to the
religion of their masters. He confiscated all the Catholic churches in
Africa, and either handed them over to the Arians or destroyed them. He
forbade the consecration of new Catholic bishops, and banished or
imprisoned all whom he found already existing in his dominions.
Occasionally he put to death, and frequently he imprisoned or sold as
slaves, prominent supporters of the orthodox faith. If martyrdoms were
few, ‘_Dragonnades_’ were many, and, by their systematic cruelty, the
Vandal king and people have gained for themselves an ill name for ever
in the pages of history.

Their hateful oppression of the provincials made the Vandals’ power in
Africa very precarious. They were far too few for the mighty land they
had conquered, even when Gaiseric had attracted adventurers of all sorts
to his banner, and had even enlisted the savage Moors of Atlas to serve
on his fleet. The fanatical Africans, the race who had produced the
turbulent Donatist sectaries and the wild Circumcelliones, were not
likely to submit with meekness to their new masters. They only waited
for a deliverer in order to rise against the Vandals, and twice, during
the reign of Gaiseric, it seemed as if the deliverer were at hand. On
each occasion, the Vandal snatched a success by his cunning and
promptitude, when all the probabilities of success were against him.
[Sidenote: Gaiseric in danger.] In 460, the Emperor Majorian had
collected a fleet of overwhelming strength at Carthagena, and was
already gathering the army that was to be conveyed in it. But warned and
helped by traitors, Gaiseric came down on the ships before they were
manned or equipped, and carried off or burnt them all. In 468, a still
greater danger had threatened the Vandal; the Emperors of East and West,
Leo and Anthemius, had joined their forces to crush the nest of pirates
at Carthage. They actually sent to Africa an army that is said to have
amounted to nearly 100,000 men, and overran the whole country from
Tripoli to the gates of Carthage. In the hour of danger Gaiseric’s
courage and treachery were both conspicuous. After deluding the imbecile
Roman general Basiliscus, by asking and gaining a five days’ truce for
settling terms of submission, he sent fire-ships by night against the
hostile fleet, and, while the Roman troops were endeavouring to save
their vessels, attacked their unguarded camp. After suffering a defeat,
the coward Basiliscus drew off his armament, and the Vandal, saved as by
a miracle, could breathe again.

The last ten years of Gaiseric’s reign were filled with countless pirate
raids on Italy and Sicily, unopposed by the five puppet-emperors who
ruled at Rome and Ravenna in those evil days. Gaiseric survived the fall
of Romulus Augustulus just long enough to enable him to make a treaty
with Odoacer. By this agreement the Vandal, always more greedy for money
than for land, gave up his not inconsiderable conquests in Sicily in
return for an annual payment from the newly-enthroned king of Italy.

Gaiseric died in 477, and with him the greatness of the Vandals, though
their kingdom was to endure fifty years more. He left behind him a fine
fleet and a full treasury, and a palace resplendent with the spoils
taken at the great sack of Rome in 455. But the dominion of his handful
of Vandal followers in Africa was still as precarious as ever; their one
security had been the cunning and courage of their aged king, and when
he was gone there was no defence left to prevent the Vandal dominion
from falling, the moment that it should be attacked. Dreading rebellion
among the provincials, Gaiseric had dismantled the walls and gates of
every African town save Carthage. One battle lost would place the whole
country-side in the hands of an assailant, and at no very distant day
the assailant was to come, to avenge the sufferings of three unhappy
generations of the oppressed subjects of the Vandals.

[Sidenote: Hunneric, 477-84.] Gaiseric was succeeded by his son,
Hunneric, a man already advanced in years, who was, like his father, an
Arian and a bitter persecutor. He was married to Eudocia, the daughter
of the emperor Valentinian III., a prisoner of the sack of Rome in 455.
But his wife did not much influence him; he drew from her no tincture of
Roman civilisation, nor did her persistent orthodoxy wean him from his
Arianism. After living with him for sixteen unhappy years and bearing
him two sons, she at last contrived to escape secretly from Carthage,
fled to Jerusalem, and died there enjoying once more the Catholic
communion of which she had been so long deprived.

Hunneric was a tyrant of the worst type. His dealings with his family
are a sufficient proof of his character. Gaiseric, to avoid the danger
of a minority—a contingency which would have been fatal to his
precarious monarchy—had prescribed that each Vandal king should be
succeeded, not by his next-of-kin, but by his eldest relative. Such
successions were very usual among the Teutonic tribes, though they had
never before been formally made into a rule. Now Hunneric had a grown-up
son, Hildecat, whom he destined for his successor; but the prince was,
of course, younger than the king’s own brothers. Instead of cancelling
his father’s law, Hunneric set to work to exterminate his brothers, and
slew them with all their children, save two youths, the sons of his next
brother, Genzo, who saved themselves by timely flight.

During the seven years of his reign (477-484) Hunneric waged no wars;
his fleet could no longer prey on the dying carcase of the Western
Empire. The two formidable kingdoms of the Visigoth Euric and the
Scyrrian Odoacer could not be ravaged like the realm of a Maximus or a
Glycerius. They were left alone, while the energies of Hunneric were
devoted to persecution of the Catholics in his own realm. The orthodox
declared that he from first to last caused the death of 40,000 persons,
a hyperbolical exaggeration which half causes us to doubt the reality of
what was in truth a very cruel and severe persecution. Hunneric
delighted more in mutilation of hands and eyes and tongues than in death
given by the sword and the rope, but there is no doubt that, in a
considerable number of cases, he punished Catholics with the extreme
penalty.

While Hunneric was thus employed it is not strange to hear that he was
vexed by rebellions. The Moors of Mount Atlas rose against him, and, by
no means to the grief of the Latin-speaking provincials, encroached on
the Southern border of the Vandal kingdom, and pushed their incursions
as far as the Mons Aurasius in Numidia. While preparing to attack them
the king died, smitten, if the Catholic chroniclers are to be believed,
by the same horrid disease which made an end of Herod Agrippa. His
eldest and only grown-up son, Hildecat, had died before him, and the
Vandals at once placed on the throne Gunthamund, the eldest of his two
surviving nephews, a prince who showed great forbearance, when the
circumstances are considered, in imprisoning instead of murdering
Hunneric’s two younger children.

THE VANDAL KINGS, 427-530.

[The names of kings in Capital letters.]

GAISERIC,
King, 427; reigned at
Carthage, 439-477.
|
+---------+-----------------+
| | |
Eudocia, = HUNNERIC, Genzo. Theodoric.
daughter | 477-484. |
of Valentinian| |
III. | |
| +------------+----------+
| | | |
HILDERIC, GUNTHAMUND, THRASAMUND, Gelaris.
523-530. 484-496. 496-523. |
|
+---------+--------+
| | |
GEILAMIR, Ammatas. Tzazo.
530-534.

While we turn from the Vandal kingdom in Africa to the dominions of
Odoacer in Italy, we are struck at once by the contrast between the
methods of government employed in the two countries. [Sidenote: Internal
Government of Odoacer in Italy.] While Gaiseric and Hunneric ruled as
mere barbarians, and cast away all the ancient Roman machinery of
administration, king Odoacer kept up the whole system as he found it. He
appointed prætorian præfects, and _magistri militum_, and counts of the
sacred largesses, just as the Emperors before him had done. The senate
still sat at Rome and passed otiose decrees, the consuls still gave
their names to the year. But his great scheme of expropriation, by which
one-third of the land of each of the richer proprietors of Italy was
confiscated for the benefit of his mercenary troops, must have caused
much trouble and heart-burning. It is curious that we find so little
complaint made about it in the historians of the time. Probably
Odoacer’s wisdom in letting the smaller proprietors alone has preserved
his name from the abuse which still clings to the reputations of many of
the Teutonic conquerors of the empire.

On the whole the provincials of Italy must have felt comparatively
little change, when they began to be governed by a barbarian king,
instead of by a barbarian patrician, such as Ricimer or Gundobad had
been. Odoacer appears to have been one of those wise men who can let
well alone. Though an Arian himself, he refrained from all religious
persecution; and, if he firmly asserted his right to confirm the
election of bishops of Rome, we do not find that he ever forced his own
nominees on the clergy and people. Indeed, he was noted as a repressor
of the alienation of church lands and of simony.

Odoacer’s foreign policy seems to have been limited in its scope to the
design of keeping together the old ‘Diocese of Italy,’ that is, the
peninsula with its mainland appendages of Noricum and north Illyria. He
ceded to the Visigoth Euric the coastland of Provence, which he had
found still in Roman hands, and made no attempt to establish relations
with the Romano-Gallic governor Syagrius, who held Mid-Gaul, pressed in
between Visigoth and Frank. On the other hand, he pursued a firm policy
on his north-east frontier. When Julius Nepos was murdered by rebels in
480, Odoacer at once invaded and subdued the Dalmatian kingdom, which
the ex-emperor had till the last contrived to retain. Further north, in
Noricum, the Rugians had for many years been molesting the Roman
provincials and pushing across the Danube. Odoacer sent against them his
brother Hunwulf, who drove them back over the river, and took prisoner
Feva their king. But, when freed for a moment from their Rugian
oppressors, the Roman provincials took the opportunity, not of repairing
their ruined cities, but of migrating _en masse_ to Italy. [Sidenote:
Evacuation of Noricum 487.] Protected by the army of Hunwulf, the whole
population of Noricum, bearing all their goods and chattels, their
treasures, and even the exhumed bodies of their saints, poured southward
over the Alps, and obtained from Odoacer a settlement on the waste lands
of Italy, which the Vandals had ruined. Only in the Rhaetian valleys did
some remnants of the Latin-speaking population linger behind. Hence it
comes that south Bavaria and archducal Austria are not at this day
speaking Roumansh, like the Engadine, but the German tongue of the
Rugians and Herules who passed into the deserted province of Noricum,
when it was abandoned a few years later by the armies of Odoacer.

For thirteen years, 476-489, the Scyrrian king bore rule over Italy,
Noricum, and Dalmatia with very considerable success. As the years
rolled on without any disaster, with the army in good temper, and the
Italians fairly content at being at last freed from Vandal and Gothic
raids, Odoacer must have begun to believe that he had established a
kingdom as well founded as those of his Burgundian or Visigothic
neighbours. But there was one fatal weakness in his position: he
depended not on the loyalty of a single compact tribe, but on the
fidelity of a purely mercenary army, made up of the remnants of a dozen
broken Teutonic clans, which looked upon him as a general and a
paymaster, and not as a legitimate hereditary prince, descended from the
gods and heroes. The regiments of _Foederati_, who had proclaimed him
king, were in no sense a nation; it would have taken many generations to
weld them into one, and the fabric of the new kingdom was to be tried by
the roughest of shocks before it was even half a generation old.

In 489 there came against Odoacer from the Danube and the Illyrian Alps,
Theodoric, son of Theodemir, the king of the Ostrogoths, with all the
people of his race behind him—a vast host with their wives and children,
their slaves and their cattle, blocking all the mountain-passes of the
north-east with the twenty thousand ox-waggons that bore their worldly
goods.

Theodoric, the king of that half of the Gothic race which had lingered
behind in the Balkan peninsula, when Alaric led the other half westward,
was just at the end of a long series of rebellions and ravages by which
he had reduced Thrace and Moesia to a condition even more miserable than
that in which they had been left by the hordes of Attila.[1] Having
failed, like all his forerunners, to take Constantinople, and having
concluded his fourth peace with the emperor Zeno, he found himself left
with a half-starved army in a land which had been harried quite bare. He
had tried his best to reduce the Eastern empire to the condition to
which Ricimer had brought the Western, but the impregnable walls of
Byzantium had foiled him. Young, capable, and ambitious, he was yearning
for new and more profitable fields to conquer; while, at the same time,
the emperor of the East was casting about for all possible means to get
the Goths as far away from his gates as could be managed. Both Zeno and
Theodoric had their reasons for wishing ill to Odoacer: the emperor
believed him to have fostered or favoured a late rebellion in Asia which
had shaken his throne;[2] the Ostrogothic king was being stirred up by
Rugian exiles who had fled before the conquering arm of the king of
Italy.

Footnote 1:

See pp. 40-43.

Footnote 2:

See p. 44.

Neither party then needed much persuasion when a scheme was broached for
an invasion of Odoacer’s realm by the Ostrogoths. Zeno, taking the
formal ground that, by the admission of Odoacer and the Italians, he was
emperor as well of West as of East, proceeded to decree the deposition
of the patrician who now ruled at Rome, and his supersession by a new
patrician, the king of the Ostrogoths. Theodoric, in return for his
investiture with his new title, and the grant of the dominion of Italy,
made a loosely-worded promise to hold his future conquests as the
emperor’s representative. How far such homage would extend neither party
much cared; the emperor only wanted to get rid of the king of the Goths;
the king of the Goths knew that once master of Italy he could pay the
emperor just as much or as little deference as he might choose.

In the autumn of 488 Theodoric called together the whole Ostrogothic
people to a camp on the middle Danube, and bade them prepare for instant
migration. The inclement season of the year that he chose for this march
seems to have been dictated by fear of famine, for the war had so
ravaged Moesia that the Goths had not provisions enough to last till
next spring. So, in the October of 488, the Ostrogoths, a great
multitude of 200,000 or 300,000 souls, followed the Roman road along the
Danube, crossed at Singidunum and set out to march across Pannonia. But
they soon met with opposition; Traustila, king of the Gepidae, who now
occupied both banks of the mid-Danube, came out against them with his
host to prevent them from passing through his land. Theodoric defeated
him, but found such difficulty in pressing on through the hostile
country that he had to winter on the Save, supporting all his host on
the plunder of the farms of the Gepidae. [Sidenote: Theodoric invades
Italy, 489.] In the spring of 489 he moved on, and pressing through the
passes of the Julian Alps, without meeting any opposition from the
troops of the king of Italy, came out at last to the spot where the
gorge of Schönpass leads down into the plain of Venetia. Here, on the
banks of the Isonzo, Odoacer was waiting for him with all his host of
_Foederati_, and there was a mighty battle. The result was not doubtful;
the Ostrogoths, a single people, fighting for their wives and families,
who lay behind them in the crowded pass, led by their hereditary king,
the heaven-born Amal, and knowing that defeat meant destruction, were
too desperately fierce to be stopped by the mixed multitude of
mercenaries that followed Odoacer. The king of Italy was routed, his
camp stormed, his army scattered. It was only beneath the walls of
Verona that he could rally it for a second stand. Just a month after the
battle of the Isonzo, Theodoric appeared again in front of his enemy,
and again won a prompt victory. Here perished most of the old regiments
of _Foederati_ that had been wont to defend Italy, for Odoacer had
fought with the rapid Adige behind him, and the greater part of his army
was rolled back into the fierce stream.

Abandoning north Italy Odoacer now fell back on the marsh-girt fortress
of Ravenna, which had baffled so many invaders of the peninsula.
Theodoric meanwhile pressed forward and occupied Milan and all the
valley of the Po; his triumph was apparently made complete by the
surrender of Tufa, the _magister militum_ of Odoacer’s host, who
submitted to the Ostrogoth with the wreck of the Italian army. (Autumn,
489.)

But the war was destined to endure for three years more: Ravenna was
impregnable and Theodoric was thrice diverted from its siege by
disturbances from outside. First Tufa, with the remnant of the
_Foederati_, broke faith and rejoined his old master Odoacer. Then, in
the next year, Gundobad, king of the Burgundians, came over the Alps and
had to be turned back. Last Frederic, king of the Rugians, the first of
the many Frederics of German history, took arms in favour of Odoacer,
though Theodoric had sheltered him three years before, when he had fled
from the armies of the king of Italy. [Sidenote: Siege of Ravenna.
491-93.] It was not till July 491 that Odoacer was for the last time
driven back within the shelter of the marshes of Ravenna. For twenty
months more he maintained himself within its impregnable walls, till
sheer famine drove him to ask for peace in February 493.

Theodoric proffered his vanquished enemy far better terms than he could
have expected—that he should retain his kingly title and a share in the
rule of Italy. But, when Odoacer had laid down his arms and came to his
conqueror’s camp, he was treacherously slain at a banquet, only ten days
after Ravenna fell. This was almost the only base and mean crime in
Theodoric’s long and otherwise glorious career: his whole conduct at the
time of the surrender seems to prove that he deliberately lured his
rival to visit him, with the fixed intention of putting him to death.
(March, 493.)

So died Odoacer in the sixtieth year of his age; seventeen years after
he had slain Orestes, he met the same fate that he had inflicted on his
predecessor.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER II

THEODORIC KING OF ITALY

493-526

The Ostrogothic race—Character of Theodoric—His Administration of
Italy—Theodoric in Rome—Foreign Policy of Theodoric—His wars with
the Franks and Burgundians—His supremacy in Western
Europe—Misfortunes of his later years—Death of Boethius—Failure of
Theodoric’s great schemes.

From the formal and constitutional point of view the substitution of
king Theodoric for king Odoacer, as ruler in Italy, made no change in
the position of affairs. From the practical point of view the change was
important, for the new Teutonic kingdom was very much stronger than the
old. Its ruler was a younger and a far abler man, the wisest and most
far-sighted of all the Germans of the fifth and sixth centuries.
Moreover, the military power of the Ostrogoths was far greater than that
of the mixed multitude of _Foederati_ who had followed Odoacer. They
were a numerous tribe, confident of their own valour after a century of
successful war, and devotedly attached to the king, who, for the last
twenty years, had never failed to lead them to victory. While they
preserved their ancient courage, they had acquired, by a stay of three
generations within the bounds of the empire, a higher level of
civilisation than any other of the Teutonic tribes. Their dress, their
armour, their manner of life, showed traces of their intercourse with
Rome; they had been Christians for a century, and had forgotten many of
the old heathen and barbarous customs of their ancestors. They
possessed, too, first of all Teutonic peoples, the germ of a written
literature in the famous Gothic Bible of Ulfilas. There are documents
surviving, written in the character which Ulfilas had devised for his
people, which show that there were Gothic clergy and even laymen who
could commit their contracts to paper in their own tongue. Theodoric
himself never learnt to write, but there must have been many among his
subjects who could do so. Though the king actually discouraged the Goths
from giving themselves up to book-learning, yet in the generation which
followed him there were Goths skilled both in Roman and Greek
literature,—some even who called themselves philosophers and claimed to
follow Plato.

Of all the German nations it seemed that the Ostrogoths were the most
suited to form the nucleus for a new kingdom, which should grow up a
young and strong yet civilised state on the ruins of the Roman empire.
And if any one man could have brought such a consummation to pass,
Theodoric was certainly the most fitted for the task. [Sidenote:
Character of Theodoric.] Ten years spent as a hostage at Constantinople
had shown him the strong and the weak points in the Roman system of
administration; twenty years spent in the field at the head of his
tribesmen had won him an experience in war, both with Roman and
barbarian, that made him unequalled as a general. Italian statesmen
found him a master-mind who could comprehend all difficulties of the
administration of an empire. Gothic warriors looked up to him not only
as the most skilful marshaller of a host, but also as the stoutest lance
in his own army. Alike when he smote the Gepidae by the Danube, and when
he drove the _Foederati_ of Odoacer into the Adige, the king had himself
headed the final and decisive charge that broke the shield-wall of the
enemy. But Theodoric was even more than a great statesman and warrior:
he was a man of wide mind and deep thought. His practical wisdom took
shape in numerous proverbs which his subjects long treasured. And, in
spite of one or two deep stains on his character, we may say that his
brain was inspired by a sound and righteous heart. The essential justice
and fairness of his mind shines out in his official correspondence, even
when enveloped in the obscure and grandiloquent verbiage of his
secretary Cassiodorus. Among all the Teutonic kings he was the
_justissimus unus et servantissimus aequi_, who set himself to curb the
violence of the Goth, no less than the chicanery of the Roman, and
taught both that he was no respecter of persons, but a judge set upon
the throne to deal out even-handed justice. Alone among all rulers,
Roman or German, in his day, he was a believer without tending in the
least to become a persecutor. No monarch for a thousand years to come
could have been found to echo Theodoric’s magnificent declaration that
‘religion is a thing which the king cannot command, because no man can
be compelled to believe against his will.’ [Sidenote: Theodoric’s
religious views.] Though an Arian himself he employed Catholics, Gothic
and Roman, as freely as those of his own sect. Even the Jews got strict
justice from him, when every other state in the world dealt hardly with
them. The abuse which he won from fanatical Christians for resenting the
mobbing of a Rabbi, or the profanation of a synagogue, is one of the
highest testimonies in his praise. ‘The benefits of justice,’ he said,
‘must not be denied even to those who err from the faith.’ Yet he was
not, as were some others who tolerated Jews, a semi-pagan or an
agnostic; the very rescripts which grant temporal justice to the
oppressed Hebrews end with an appeal to them to leave their
hard-heartedness and flee from the wrath to come.

In managing the settlement of his victorious tribesmen on the soil of
Italy, Theodoric showed much ability. The third of the land, which
Odoacer had confiscated seventeen years before, seems to have sufficed
for their establishment. The greater part of the _Foederati_ who had
been holding this third, had fallen in battle, and those who escaped the
Gothic sword seem mostly to have perished in a simultaneous outbreak of
riot and murder, by which the Italians celebrated the downfall of
Odoacer, when they heard that he had finally been shut up in Ravenna.
[Sidenote: Settlement of the Ostrogoths.] Hence Theodoric was able to
provide for his countrymen without further spoliation of the native
proprietors. He threatened indeed for a moment to deprive of their lands
and rights those Italians who adhered too long to Odoacer, but better
counsel prevailed, and even those men were spared. So the Goths settled
down with little friction among their new subjects: they lay thickly
along the valley of the Po, and in Picenum, more sparsely scattered in
Tuscany and central Italy; into the south few seem to have penetrated.
Nearly all settled down to farm the country-side; only in the royal
towns of Ravenna, Pavia, and Verona did the Goths become an appreciable
element in the urban population.

Theodoric’s plan for dealing with the government of conquered Italy
deserves careful study. He did not abolish the remains of the Roman
administrative system which he found still existing, nor did he, on the
other hand, endeavour to subject the Goths to Roman law. He was content
that, for a time, two systems of administration should go on side by
side. The Goths were to be ruled and judged by his ‘counts,’ the Gothic
governors whom he set over each Italian province, his ealdormen, as an
Anglo-Saxon would have called them, according to the traditional
folk-right of their tribe. The Romans looked for justice to magistrates
of their own race. If a Goth and a Roman went to law, the case was heard
before the count and the Italian judge, sitting together on the same
bench.

In the central administration the same mixture of systems was seen.
Theodoric’s court was like that of another German king in many ways; he
had about him his personal retinue of military retainers, the king’s
men, whom the Goths called by the name of Saiones, but whom, in writing
our own English history we should call thegns or gesiths. The Saiones
went on the king’s errands, served him in bower and hall, and acted as
his body-guard on the battle-field. [Sidenote: Central Government.]
Above their rank and file rose two or three more prominent followers who
seem to represent the great officers of the household of the later
Middle Ages; such were the chamberlain, _regiae praepositus domus_, and
the great captains who in Roman usage were styled _magistri militum_,
and the king’s high-butler and steward.

But beside his Teutonic court—‘the hounds of the royal hall,’ as
Boethius called them—Theodoric kept up a full establishment of Roman
officials, bearing the old titles that had been used under the
empire—praetorian praefects, masters of the offices, quaestors, and
notaries. He showed great skill and discretion in choosing the most
honest among his Italian subjects for these posts, so that his courtiers
never became an oppressive official clique, as had habitually been the
case under the later emperors. He even chose as his praetorian praefect
Liberius, who had adhered to Odoacer to the last, and told him that he
esteemed him all the more for his fidelity to his first master. The best
men in Italy were undoubtedly set to administer the central government;
but it was Theodoric’s misfortune that the better the man the more
likely he was to indulge in vain dreams of old Roman glory, and to
resent in his heart the wise rule of the Ostrogoth. Boethius, the last
of the Romans as he may be called, served Theodoric all his life without
learning true loyalty to him.

We have not space to notice half of Theodoric’s reforms in the
administration of Italy. Most wise among them was the careful
restoration of the old roads, aqueducts, and drainage canals, which had
been the glory of the early empire. He was himself a great builder, and
erected royal palaces at Verona and Ravenna, of which, alas! only the
smallest fragments survive. But he spent even greater care in keeping up
ancient edifices. In Rome he set apart every year two hundred pounds
weight of gold pieces for the repair of palaces and public buildings. He
took under his protection even statues and monuments, and added
representations of himself to the crowd of effigies which adorned Rome.
So thoroughly did he put himself in the place of the Caesars that he
even took care to celebrate games in the circus, and harangued the
assembled people in the Forum. [Sidenote: Theodoric in Rome.] He
attended and took part in the debates of the Senate, and endeavoured to
strengthen it by the appointment of a few Gothic senators. If he showed
some unwisdom in arranging for the resumption of the bread-dole, which
had been such a curse to Rome, he atoned for it by a liberal scheme for
the rearrangement of taxes, which at once relieved the people and filled
the treasury. At his death the royal hoard at Ravenna amounted to no
less than 40,000 pounds weight of gold, £1,600,000 in hard cash.

Theodoric’s wise administration at home was accompanied by an equally
firm and able foreign policy. His first care was to establish friendly
relations with the Eastern Empire. Even before Odoacer had met his
death, he despatched an embassy to report to Zeno that he had carried
out his commission of conquering Italy, and claimed an imperial
confirmation of his title. But the embassy found Zeno just dead, and his
successor, Anastasius, engrossed in the suppression of riots and
rebellions. It was not till 497 that the emperor recognised the king of
the Goths as ruler in Italy. Then, however, Anastasius made up for his
tardy recognition by sending to Theodoric the regalia which Odoacer had
forwarded to Zeno twenty years before, the robes and palace ornaments,
which had last been used by the boy Romulus Augustulus.

During the thirty-three years of the Amal’s reign in Italy he had only
one dispute with the emperor: this was a frontier quarrel in 505, caused
by troubles in Illyricum. Theodoric had taken in hand the restoration of
the bounds of the Western Empire towards the East, and his generals,
having subdued Pannonia as far as Sirmium and Singidunum, trespassed on
to Moesian soil, and came into contact with the East-Roman armies. There
was some trouble for three years, but no great war, though in 508 two of
Anastasius’ generals made a destructive raid on Apulia. But peace was
ultimately made on the terms that the boundary should be drawn, as in
the days of the Western Empire, at the Save and Danube.

Much more important were Theodoric’s dealings with his neighbours to
west and north. He took over the task of Odoacer in guarding the old
Roman districts beyond the Alps, which had once composed the provinces
of Rhaetia and Noricum. Both were now becoming Teutonic rather than
Latin-speaking lands. Into Rhaetia had fled many of the Alamanni, or
Suabians, when Chlodovech the Frank in 496 drove them out of their lands
on the Main and Neckar. This people gladly acknowledged Theodoric as
over-lord, in return for his protection against the pursuing Franks,
whom the Ostrogoth bade halt at the line of the upper Rhine, between
Basel and Constanz. Farther east, in Noricum, the place of the emigrant
Roman provincials had now been taken by a mixed Teutonic population, the
remnant of the broken clans of the Rugians, Scyrri, and Turcilingi, who
were just beginning to call themselves by the common name of Bavarians,
under which we know them so well a few years later. They, too, like the
Alamanni, were glad to acknowledge Theodoric as suzerain, and pay him
tribute.

To the west, Theodoric at his accession found his kingdom bounded by the
Alps, for Odoacer had given up to the Visigoths Marseilles, and the
other towns which had obeyed the emperor down to the year 476. Beyond
the Alps, Alaric the Visigoth now held the mouths of the Rhone and the
Provençal Coast, while Gundobad the Burgundian ruled on the middle and
upper Rhone, from Avignon as far as Besançon and Langres. North of both
Burgundian and Visigoth, and far from the Alpine borders of Theodoric,
lay the new Frankish kingdom of Chlodovech, now reaching as far as the
Loire and the upper Seine.

With all these three monarchs the king of the Ostrogoths had many
dealings. At the very beginning of his reign he asked for the hand of
Augofleda, the sister of Chlodovech, and hoped that by this alliance he
had bound the clever and unscrupulous Frank to himself. By Augofleda he
became the father of Amalaswintha, the only child born to him in lawful
wedlock, though he had two elder daughters by a concubine ere he came to
Italy. [Sidenote: Marriages of Theodoric’s family.] Soon after his own
marriage with the Frankish princess, Theodoric wedded one of these
natural children to Sigismund, the son and heir of the Burgundian
Gundobad, and the other to Alaric the Visigoth. Thus all his neighbours
became his relatives.

But this did not secure peace between the new kinsmen of Theodoric. In
499 Chlodovech fell on Gundobad, to strip him of his realm, routed him,
and shut him up in Avignon, the southernmost of his strongholds; but
after many successes the Frank lost all that he had gained, and turned
instead to attack the king of the Visigoths. Theodoric strove
unsuccessfully to prevent both wars, and was not a little displeased
when, in 507, his brother-in-law Chlodovech overran southern Gaul, and
slew his son-in-law Alaric in battle. Burgundian and Frank then united
to destroy the Visigoths, and might have done so had not Theodoric
intervened. The heir of the Visigothic throne was now Amalric, the son
of Alaric and of the king of Italy’s daughter. To defend his grandson’s
realm Theodoric declared war both on Chlodovech and on Gundobad, and
sent his armies over the Alps to save the remnants of the Visigothic
possessions in Gaul. One host crossed the Cottian Alps, and fell on
Burgundy; another entered Provence, and smote the Frank and Burgundian
besiegers of Arles. With his usual good fortune, Theodoric recovered all
Gaul south of the Durance and the Cevennes (509), so that the conquests
of Chlodovech were confined to Aquitaine. The way was now clear for the
Ostrogothic armies to march into Spain, to support the claims of the
child Amalric against Gesalic, a bastard son of Alaric II., who had been
proclaimed king of the Visigoths at Barcelona. After two years of
guerilla fighting, the pretender was hunted down and slain, though he
had sought and obtained some help from the Vandal king Thrasamund (511).

For the next fourteen years, till Amalric reached manhood, Theodoric
ruled Spain in his grandson’s behalf. [Sidenote: Theodoric king of the
Visigoths.] He was recognised as king of the Visigoths, in common with
Amalric, and ruled both halves of the Gothic race—reunited after an
interval of two hundred years—with equal authority, and his royal
mandates ran in Spain as well as in Italy. His delegate was Count
Theudis, an Ostrogothic noble, who was made regent, and ruled at
Narbonne over all the Visigothic realm west of the Rhone; while the
Roman Liberius, named praetorian praefect of Gaul, administered
Visigothic Provence from the ancient city of Arles.

Theodoric’s power was now supreme from Sirmium to Cadiz, and from the
upper Danube to Sicily. He ruled the larger half of the old Roman Empire
of the West, and exercised much influence in Gaul and Africa, the two
parts of it that were not absolutely in his hands. After the war of
507-10 Clodovech the Frank had died, and his four sons, who parted his
realm, made peace with the Ostrogoth; while Gundobad, the Burgundian
king, had been fain to follow their example even earlier.

Twelve years of peace followed (511-523) before Theodoric, now in
extreme old age, had occasion to interfere in Gaul. Sigismund, the
husband of Theodoric’s elder natural daughter, was now king of the
Burgundians. He was a gloomy and suspicious tyrant, and drew down the
wrath of Theodoric by murdering his own heir, Sigeric, who was the
Gothic king’s eldest grandson. To punish this crime Theodoric leagued
himself with the Franks, and attacked Burgundy. He conquered, and took
as his share of the spoil the lands between Durance and Drôme, with the
cities of Avignon, Orange, and Viviers, the farthest extension to the
north-west of the Ostrogothic empire.

The circle of family alliances which Theodoric had made with his
European neighbours was extended even beyond the Mediterranean. He
married his sister, Amalafrida, a widowed princess, no longer in her
first youth, to Thrasamund, the old king of the Vandals. In virtue of
this connection he seems to have treated Thrasamund as a younger
brother, if not as a vassal. When the Vandal dared to help the usurper
Gesalic in Spain, Theodoric imposed a tribute on him, and bade him for
the future do nothing without the counsel of his wife Amalafrida.
Thrasamund did not resent this treatment, and for the future did all he
could to propitiate his brother-in-law.

The Vandal state, indeed, was not in a condition to risk a quarrel with
Theodoric. Ever since the death of Hunneric it had been steadily on the
decline. In the reigns of Gunthamund (484-496) and Thrasamund himself
(496-523) it was continually losing ground to the insurgent Moors of
Atlas. Gunthamund, who was not a persecutor like his predecessor
Hunneric, had endeavoured to win the favour of the Catholics by allowing
them to recall their exiled bishops and open their churches. But these
boons did not check the falling away of his subjects, and during his
reign the Moors conquered from him the whole sea-coast from Tangiers to
the gates of Caesarea. [Sidenote: Vandal Persecutions in Africa.] His
brother Thrasamund tried the opposite policy, resumed the persecutions,
deported two hundred Catholic bishops to Sardinia, and renewed the
horrors of the days of Hunneric. Naturally, he was no more fortunate in
dealing with the native rebels than his brother had been. A quarrel with
Theodoric would have meant ruin, so he kept himself from all foreign
war. He died in 523 at a great age, killed, it is said, by the news of a
great defeat which his armies had suffered at the hands of the Moors.
His successor was his cousin Hilderic, the son of Hunneric and the Roman
princess Eudocia, the last scion of the house of Theodosius the Great.
Educated by a Catholic mother, Hilderic was himself the first orthodox
Vandal king, and ended the long African persecutions. But his reign was
not happier than those of his two cousins. His enthusiastic championship
of the Catholic cause brought him into collision with the bulk of his
Vandal subjects, and he was attacked by a rebellious party, headed by
Theodoric’s sister, the queen-dowager Amalafrida, who wished to proclaim
as king of Africa one of her late husband’s nephews. Hilderic had the
better of the fighting, defeated the rebels, and captured Amalafrida,
whom he consigned to a dungeon, to the great wrath of her brother, the
king of the Goths (523). As long as Theodoric lived he merely kept her
in close confinement, but the moment he heard of the old man’s death, in
526, he had the cruelty to slay the aged queen, a deed which alienated
for ever the Vandals and the Ostrogoths.

The captivity of his sister was not the only sorrow which clouded the
last few years of Theodoric’s long life. He was left in some trouble as
to the succession to his crown. He had married his only legitimate
child, Amalaswintha, to a Visigothic prince named Eutharic, of whose
prudence and valour much was expected. Theodoric intended him to reign
with his daughter as colleague and king-consort, but in 522 Eutharic
died, leaving as his heir a boy of only five years of age. Theodoric
could not but see that on his death the accession of a woman and a child
to the throne would be fraught with the gravest danger, more especially
as his nephew Theodahat, the nearest male heir of the Amal house, was
known to be an unscrupulous intriguer.

It was perhaps owing to a temper embittered by these family troubles
that Theodoric was led, during the last few years of his life, into an
unhappy quarrel with some of the best of his Italian subjects. Rightly
or wrongly, he had imbibed a notion that the Italians would take
advantage of his death to stir up the emperor at Constantinople against
his infant heir. The idea was very justifiable; for, in spite of all
Theodoric’s wisdom and goodness, most of his Roman subjects never learnt
to look kindly upon a ruler who was at once an Arian and a Goth, and it
seems that some, at least, of the Senate were secretly corresponding
with the emperor Justin. That monarch, the first Eastern Emperor for
fifty years who was undisputedly orthodox, had fired the enthusiasm of
Catholics all over the world by his attempts to suppress Arianism, and
the faithful in Italy were undoubtedly contrasting his action with the
strict impartiality of Theodoric, to the latter’s disadvantage.
[Sidenote: The Misfortunes of Boethius.] In 524 the patrician Albinus
was accused by Cyprian, the _magister officiorum_, of sending disloyal
letters to Constantinople. At his trial he was defended by the Consular
Boethius, at once a great official and the best-known author of the day,
noted as philosopher, theologian, astronomer, and mechanist—in short,
the chief representative of the intellect of Italy. Boethius resented
the impeachment of Albinus in the most fiery terms. ‘If this man is
guilty,’ he cried, ‘then both I and all the Senate are guilty too.’ The
accuser, Cyprian, proceeded to take him at his word, and brought forward
further evidence to prove that Boethius himself had been one of the
senators in correspondence with Justin, or had, at least, done his best
to suppress evidence against those who actually were so engaged.[3] Such
an accusation, even if not fully proved, seems to have fired the anger
of the old king. He could not tolerate disloyalty in a man whom he had
always distinguished by his favour, and preferred to the highest
offices. By his orders Boethius was put on his trial before the Senate,
and there condemned. For a year Theodoric kept him in prison—a year
invaluable to future ages, for in it the captive composed his
_Consolation of Philosophy_, a work which was to be the comfort of many
a noble but unhappy soul in the Middle Ages, and to find countless
readers from King Alfred down to Sir Thomas More. At the end of a year’s
confinement Boethius was tortured and put to death. Possibly he was
altogether innocent of the charge laid to his account, that of secret
correspondence with Constantinople; but more probably he had actually
written harmless letters into which a treasonable purpose was read by
the malice of his accusers and the fears of the king.

Footnote 3:

This would seem to have been the charge which Boethius himself
expressed by saying that he was accused of ‘having endeavoured to
preserve the senators.’

The death of Boethius was followed by another execution, that of his
aged father-in-law, Symmachus, the chief of the senate, whom Theodoric
put to death on the mere suspicion that he resented his son-in-law’s
cruel end. There seems to have been no further charge laid against him,
and no formal trial, so that this action ranks with the murder of
Odoacer as the second unpardonable sin of Theodoric’s life (525).

Others also suffered during the last two years of the old king’s reign.
In anger at Justin’s persecution of the Arians, he threatened reprisals
against the Catholics of Italy, and charged John the bishop of Rome to
sail at once to Constantinople, and inform the emperor that further
persecution would mean war with the Goths, and involve an attack on the
orthodox throughout the Ostrogothic dominions. Moved by these threats,
Justin suspended his harrying of the Arians, and treated the Pope with
such respect and distinction that he roused the suspicions of the king
of Italy. Theodoric thought that John had been too friendly with the
emperor, and suspected that the honours and reverence shown him at
Constantinople were part of a plan for seducing away the allegiance of
his Roman subjects. When the Pope returned he was thrown into prison,
where, being already in ill-health, he soon died. He was at once hailed
as a martyr by all the Western Church (526).

The Italians thought that the execution of Symmachus and the
imprisonment of Pope John foreboded a general persecution throughout
Italy. It was rumoured that the Arians had won from the king his consent
to an edict closing the Catholic Churches, and that the Goths were to
take arms against their fellow-subjects. Considering the tenor of the
whole of Theodoric’s previous life, it is most improbable that he had
any such wild scheme of intolerance in hand. [Sidenote: Death of
Theodoric, 526.] But he had certainly grown gloomy, suspicious, and hard
in his declining days, and it was well for his own fame, as well as for
his subjects, that he was carried off by dysentery not long after the
death of Pope John. It would have been still better, both for king and
people, had the end come three years earlier, before his first harsh
dealings with Boethius. His unpopularity at the moment of his death is
shown by the survival of several curious legends, which tell how holy
hermits saw his soul dragged down to hell by the injured ghosts of John
and Symmachus, or carried off by the fiend himself.

So, after reigning thirty-three years over Italy, and twelve years over
Spain, Theodoric died, aged seventy-two, and was buried by the Goths in
the round mausoleum outside the gate of Ravenna, which he had built for
himself many years before. His body has long disappeared, but his empty
tomb still survives, well-nigh the only perfect and unbroken monument
that recalls the sixty years of Gothic dominion in Italy.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER III

THE EMPERORS AT CONSTANTINOPLE

476-527

Contrast between the fates of the Eastern and Western Empires—The East
recovers its strength—Leo I. and the Isaurians—The Emperor Zeno
and the rebellion against him—Wars of Zeno with the two
Theodorics, 478-483—The ‘Henoticon’—Character of the Emperor
Anastasius—Rebellion of the Isaurians—War with Persia, 503-5—The
‘Blue and Green’ Factions—Rebellion of Vitalian—Accession of
Justin I.

At Rome the emperors of the third quarter of the fifth century—all the
ephemeral Caesars whose blood-stained annals fill the space between the
death of Valentinian III. and the usurpation of Odoacer—had been the
mere creatures of the barbarian, or semi-barbarian, ‘patricians’ and
‘masters of the soldiers,’ to whom they owed alike their elevations and
their untimely ends. The history of those troubled years would be more
logically arranged under the names of the Caesar-makers, Ricimer,
Gundobad, Orestes, than under those of the unhappy puppets whom they
manipulated.

But, when we turn our eyes eastward to Constantinople, we are surprised
to find how entirely different was the aspect of affairs. The Western
Empire was rapidly falling to pieces, province after province dropping
out of the power of the emperor, and becoming part of the realm of some
Gothic, Burgundian, or Vandal prince, who paid the most shadowy homage,
or no homage at all, to the ephemeral Caesar at Rome. [Sidenote:
Contrast between Eastern and Western Empires.] The Eastern Empire, on
the other hand, maintained its boundaries intact, and was slowly
building up its strength for renewed activity in the next century. While
nine emperors’ reigns filled no more than twenty-one years at Rome
(455-476), two emperors were reigning for thirty-four years (457-491) on
the Bosphorus. And the character of the rulers of East and West was as
different as their fates: the short-lived Roman Caesars were either
impotent nobodies raised to the throne by the caprice of the barbarian,
or ambitious young soldiers who vainly dreamed that they might yet
redeem the evil day, and save the State. Their contemporaries in the
East, Leo, Zeno, and Anastasius, were three elderly officials, men of
experience, if not of great ability, who followed each other in
peaceable succession, and devoted their declining years to a cautious
defensive policy, with the result that they left a full treasury, a
strong and loyal army, and an intact realm behind them.

At the beginning of the fifth century the eastern half of the Empire had
seemed no less likely than the western to fall under the dominion of the
barbarian, and crumble to pieces. The Goths were cantoned all over
Thrace, Moesia, and Asia Minor, and the Gothic general Gainas had taken
possession of the person and authority of the Emperor Arcadius. Had he
been a man of greater ability he might have made and unmade emperors, as
Ricimer afterwards did in the West. But the schemes of Gainas were
wrecked, and the Empire saved by the great riot at Constantinople in
401, when the Gothic _foederati_ were massacred, and their leader chased
away by the infuriated populace, who thus saved not only their own
homes, but the whole East, from the danger of Gothic domination.

Though the European provinces of the Eastern Empire suffered grievously
from Teutonic ravages during the first eighty years of the century,
there was never again any danger that the barbarians would get hold of
the machinery of government, and subvert the Empire from within. In the
long reign of Theodosius II. (406-450), if no progress was made in
strengthening the realm, at least no ground was lost.

Two external causes were, during this time, operating in favour of the
Eastern Empire. The first was the absolute impregnability of
Constantinople against any invader who could only assault it from the
land side: the town could not be starved out,—as Rome was starved by
Alaric,—and its walls could laugh to scorn all such siege appliances as
that age knew. Though Goth and Hun pushed their ravages far and wide in
the Balkan peninsula, they never seriously attempted to molest the great
central place of arms on which the East-Roman power based itself.
[Sidenote: Importance of Constantinople.] The Western Empire had no such
stronghold—capital, arsenal, harbour, and centre of commerce all in one.
Ravenna, where the Western Caesars took refuge in times of storm and
stress, was in every way inferior to Constantinople as a base of armed
resistance to the invader. Though its marshes made it strong, it did not
cover or protect any considerable tract of country, and it was just far
enough from its harbour to allow of an enemy cutting off its supplies.

The second great factor in the vitality of the Eastern Empire was the
prolonged freedom from foreign war enjoyed by its Asiatic provinces.
After the revolt of Gainas in 401, the Goths disappeared from Asia
Minor, and no other invaders made any serious breach into that
peninsula, into Syria, or into Egypt, for a hundred and forty years. Two
short Persian wars, in 420-421 and 502-505, led to nothing worse than
partial ravages on the Mesopotamian frontier. It is true that the
Asiatic provinces of the empire were not altogether spared by the sword
in the fifth century, but such troubles as they suffered were due to
native revolts, chiefly of the Isaurians among the mountains of southern
Asia Minor. These risings were local, and led to no very widespread
damage, nor was the fighting caused by the revolts of the rebel-emperors
Basiliscus and Leontius, in the reign of Zeno, much more destructive.
[Sidenote: Prosperity of the East.] On the whole, the four oriental
‘dioceses’ of the Eastern Empire must have enjoyed in the fifth century
a far greater measure of peace and prosperity than they had known, or
were to know, in the previous and the succeeding ages. It was their
wealth, duly garnered into the imperial treasury, that made the emperors
strong to defend their European possessions. We shall soon see that
their military resources also were to count in a most effective way in
the reorganisation of the East-Roman army.

But the strength of Constantinople and the wealth of Asia might have
proved of no avail had they fallen into the hands of a series of
emperors like Honorius or Valentinian III. We must in common fairness
grant that the personal characters of the Emperors Leo I., Zeno, and
Anastasius I. had also the most important influence on the empire. These
three cautious, persistent, and careful princes, who neither endangered
the empire by over-great enterprise and ambition, nor let it fall to
pieces by want of energy, were exactly the men most fitted to tide over
a time of transition.

Leo, the first of these three emperors, was already dead when Romulus
Augustulus was deposed in the West. He had left his mark on
Constantinopolitan history by his summary execution of Aspar, the last
of the great barbarian ‘masters of the soldiers,’ who rose to a
dangerous height of power in the East; and still more by his very
important scheme for reorganising the army, by enrolling a large
proportion of native-born subjects of the empire in its ranks.
Recognising the peril of trusting entirely to Teutonic mercenaries,—the
fatal error that had ruined the Western Empire,—Leo had enlisted, in as
great numbers as he could obtain, the hardy mountaineers of Asia Minor,
more especially the Isaurians. [Sidenote: Leo and the Isaurians.] His
predecessors had distrusted their unruly and predatory habits, but Leo
saw that they supplied good and trustworthy fighting material, and dealt
with them as the elder Pitt dealt with the Highlanders after the
rebellion of 1745, teaching them to use in the service of the government
the wild courage that had so often been turned against it. Leo had
indeed done all that he could for the Isaurians, and had at last married
his elder daughter Ariadne to Zeno, an Isaurian by birth, and one of the
chief officers of his court.

It was this Zeno who was seated on the throne of the Eastern realm at
the moment that Odoacer made himself ruler of Italy, and to him was
addressed the celebrated petition of the Roman Senate which besought him
to allow East and West alike to repose under the shadow of his name, but
to confide the practical governance of Italy to the patrician Odoacer.
Zeno was neither so able nor so respectable a sovereign as his
father-in-law: two faults, a caution which verged on actual cowardice
and a taste for low debauchery, have blasted his reputation. [Sidenote:
The Emperor Zeno, 475-491.] His enemies were never tired of taunting him
with his Isaurian birth, and recalling to memory that his real name was
Tarakodissa, the son of Rusumbladeotus, for he had only taken the Greek
appellation of Zeno when he came to court. But though he was by birth an
obscure provincial, and by nature something of a coward and a free
liver, Zeno had his merits. He was a mild and not an extortionate
administrator, had a liberal hand, a good eye for picking out able
servants, was sanguine and persevering in all that he undertook, and
pursued in Church matters a policy of moderation and conciliation, which
may bring him credit now, though in his own time it provoked many
strictures from the orthodox. The worst charges that can be laid to his
account were acts that were prompted by his timidity rather than by any
other motive,—two or three arbitrary executions of officers whom he
rightly or wrongly suspected of plotting against his life. After three
rebellions which came within an ace of success, it is not unnatural that
he grew somewhat nervous about his own safety.

Zeno’s reign was more troubled in this way than those of his predecessor
and successor. His well-known lack of daring tempted men to conspire
against him, but they reckoned without his cunning and his perseverance,
and in every case came to an evil end. Zeno could count on the active
support of his countrymen the Isaurians, who now formed the most
trustworthy part of the army, and on the passive obedience, or at worst
the neutrality, of the mercantile classes and the bureaucracy, who
disliked all change and disorder. Hence it came to pass that court
conspiracies, or local revolts of divisions of the army, were not enough
to shake his throne.

The first half of Zeno’s reign may be divided into three parts by these
three conspiracies. The emperor had hardly ascended the throne when the
first of them broke out: it was a palace intrigue hatched by the
Empress-Dowager Verina, who detested her son-in-law. The conspirators
took Zeno quite by surprise, they failed to catch him, for he fled from
Constantinople at the first alarm, but they got possession of the
capital, and proclaimed Basiliscus, the brother of Verina, as Augustus.
[Sidenote: Revolt of Basiliscus, 475-477.] The mob of the city, with
whom Zeno was very unpopular, joined the rising, and massacred the
Isaurian troops who were within the walls; their leader’s absence seems
to have paralysed the resistance of the soldiery. Zeno meanwhile escaped
to his native country, and raised an Isaurian army: Syria and the
greater part of Asia Minor remained faithful to him, and he prepared to
make a fight for his throne. Luckily for him, Basiliscus was a
despicable creature,—it was he who had wrecked the great expedition
against the Vandals which Leo I. had sent out seven years before. He
soon became far more hated by the Constantinopolitans than Zeno had ever
been; it is doubtful whether his arrogance, his financial extortions, or
his addiction to the Monophysite heresy made him most detested. The army
which he sent out against Zeno was intrusted—very unwisely—to a general
of Isaurian birth, the _magister militum_ Illus, who allowed himself to
be moved by the prayers and bribes of the legitimate emperor, and
finally went over to him. Having recovered all Asia Minor, Zeno then
stirred up in Europe Theodoric the Amal against his rival, and induced
the Goth to beset Constantinople from the West, while he himself
blockaded it on the Eastern side. The town threw open its gates, and
Basiliscus, after a reign of twenty months, was dragged from sanctuary
and brought before his nephew’s tribunal. Zeno promised him that his
blood should not be shed, but sent him and his sons to a desolate castle
in Cappadocia among the mountain-snows, where they were given such
scanty food and raiment in their solitary confinement, that ere long
they died of privation (477).

It was just after his triumph over Basiliscus that Zeno received the
ambassadors of Odoacer, and was saluted as Emperor of West and East
alike, in spite of his advice to the Romans to take back as their Caesar
their old ruler, Julius Nepos, who was still in possession of part of
Dalmatia, though he had lost Italy three years before. Perhaps Zeno
might have been tempted to interfere with something more than advice in
the affairs of the West, if his second batch of troubles had not fallen
upon him, in the form of his long Gothic war with the two Theodorics—the
sons of Theodemir and Triarius—which began in the year following his
restoration.

THE EASTERN EMPERORS, 457-518,
WITH THEIR FAMILIES.
[Names of Emperors in Capitals.]

The Ostrogoths had never gone westward, like their kinsmen the
Visigoths. They had lingered on the Danube, first as members of the vast
empire of Attila the Hun, then as occupying Pannonia in their own right.
But, in the reign of Leo I., they had moved across the Save into the
territory of the Eastern Emperors, and had permanently established
themselves in Moesia. There they had settled down and made terms with
the Constantinopolitan Government. But they were most unruly vassals,
and, even in full time of peace, could never be trusted to refrain from
raids into Thrace and Macedonia. [Sidenote: Early life of Theodoric.]
The main body of their tribe now acknowledged as its chief Theodoric the
son of Theodemir, the representative of the heaven-born race of the
Amals, the kings of the Goths from time immemorial. Theodoric was now a
young man of twenty-three, stirring and ambitious, who had already won a
great military reputation by victories over the Bulgarians, the
Sarmatians, and other tribes who dwelt across the Danube. He had spent
ten years of his boyhood as a hostage at Constantinople, where he had
learnt only too well the weak as well as the strong points of the
East-Roman Empire. His after-life showed that he had there imbibed a
deep respect for Roman law, order, and administrative unity; but he had
also come to entertain a contempt for the timid Zeno, and a conviction
that his bold tribesmen were more than a match for the motley mercenary
army of the emperor, of which so large a proportion was still composed
of Goths and other Teutons, who could not be trusted to fight with a
good heart against their Ostrogothic kinsmen.

But Theodoric the Amal was not the only chief of his race in the Balkan
peninsula. He had a namesake, Theodoric the son of Triarius, better
known as Theodoric the One-eyed, who had long served as a mercenary
captain in the imperial army, and had headed the Teutonic auxiliaries in
the camp of the usurper Basiliscus. When Basiliscus fell, Theodoric the
One-eyed collected the wrecks of the rebel forces, strengthened them
with broken bands of various races, many of whom were Ostrogoths, and
kept the field against Zeno. He retired into the Balkans, and
occasionally descended to ravage the Thracian plains; but meanwhile he
sent an embassy to Zeno, offering to submit if he were given the title
of _magister militum_, which he had held under Basiliscus, and taken
with all his army into the imperial pay.

Zeno indignantly refused to entertain such terms, and resolved to take
in hand the destruction of the rebel. [Sidenote: The two Theodorics.] He
sent an Asiatic army into Thrace to beset the son of Triarius from the
south, and bade his warlike vassal the son of Theodemir to attack his
namesake from the north, on the Moesian side. The younger Theodoric
eagerly consented, for he grudged to see any other Gothic chief than
himself powerful in the peninsula, and looked down on the son of
Triarius as a low-born upstart, because he did not come like himself
from the royal blood of the Amals.[4]

Footnote 4:

By his name (Triarius) the father of Theodoric the One-eyed must have
been a Roman or a Romanised Goth, but the One-eyed had himself married
a wife who was close akin to Theodoric the Amal, for his son Recitach
is called the Amal’s cousin.

The campaign against Theodoric the One-eyed turned out disastrously for
the imperial forces. The Roman army in the south missed the track of the
rebel, whether by accident or design, while Theodoric the Amal with his
forces got entangled in the defiles of the Balkans, and surrounded by
the army of his rival. He had been promised the co-operation of the army
of Thrace, but no Romans appeared, and his projects began to look dark.
His one-eyed rival, riding to within earshot of his camp, taunted him
with his folly in listening to the orders and promises of the emperor.
‘Madman,’ he cried, ‘betrayer of your own race, do you not see that the
Roman plan is always to destroy Goths by Goths? Whichever of us falls,
they, not we, will be the stronger. They never will give you real help,
but send you out against me to perish here in the desert.’ Then all the
warriors of the Amal shouted that the One-eyed was right, and that they
would not fight against their brethren in the other camp. The son of
Theodemir bowed to their will and joined himself to the son of Triarius.
Uniting their armies, they moved down into the valley of the Hebrus, and
advanced toward Constantinople. They sent Zeno an ultimatum, in which
the Amal demanded more territory for his tribe, and a supply of corn and
money, while the One-eyed stipulated for the post of _magister militum_,
and an annual payment of 2000 pounds of gold. Zeno, who was very anxious
to keep the younger Theodoric on his side, proffered him a great sum of
money, and the hand of the daughter of the patrician Olybrius, if he
would abandon his namesake the rebel. But the Amal refused to break the
oath that he had sworn to his ally, and marched westward to ravage
Macedonia up to the very gates of Thessalonica. Zeno sent his troops
into winter-quarters, as the season was late, and made one final attempt
to stave off the impending danger by offering terms to Theodoric the
One-eyed. Less true to his word than the Amal, the elder Theodoric
listened to the emperor’s offer, and, on being promised the title of
_magister militum_ and all the revenues that he had enjoyed under
Basiliscus, led his troops over into the imperial camp (479).

For the next two years the son of Theodemir ranged over the whole Balkan
peninsula from Dyrrhachium to the gates of Constantinople, plundering
and burning those parts of Macedonia and Thrace which had hitherto
escaped the ravages of the Huns of Attila and the Ostrogoths of the
previous generation. [Sidenote: Wars of Zeno and Theodoric the Amal.]
The generals of Zeno met with little good fortune in their attempts to
check him, the only success they obtained being a victory won by a
certain Sabinianus in 480, who cut off the rear-guard of Theodoric as it
was crossing the Albanian mountains, and captured 2000 waggons and 5000
Gothic warriors. But Sabinianus made himself too much feared by Zeno,
who, on a suspicion of treachery, had him executed in the following
year. It was not till 483 that the Amal, having wasted Thrace and
Macedon so fiercely that even his own army could no longer find food, at
last came to terms with Zeno, on being made _magister militum_, and
granted additional lands in Moesia and Dacia for his tribesmen. The son
of Triarius had died a year earlier: he had again burst out into
insurrection against the emperor, and was mustering an army on the
Thracian coast when he was slain in a strange manner. A restive horse
threw him against a spear which was standing by the door of his tent,
and he was pierced to the heart. His son Recitach continued his
rebellion, but Theodoric the Amal, who wished to see no other Gothic
chief but himself in the Balkan peninsula, slew the young man, and
incorporated his warriors with the main body of the Ostrogoths.

The utter helplessness which Zeno showed in dealing with the two
Theodorics may be attributed in a large measure to his troubles at home.
In 479, the year when he had failed to support Theodoric the Amal in the
Balkans, his throne had nearly been overturned by a rising in
Constantinople. Marcianus and Procopius, the two sons of Anthemius, the
late emperor of the West, who were popular with the citizens of the
capital, formed a plot for overthrowing the emperor, in which they
enlisted many men of importance. They surprised the palace and massacred
the body-guard, but Zeno escaped, brought over his faithful Isaurians
from Asia, and crushed the rebellion after a vigorous street fight. In
482-3 he had a prolonged misunderstanding with his commander-in-chief
Illus, the Isaurian general who had put down the rebellion of Basiliscus
five years before. Zeno neither banished nor fully trusted him. He left
him in office, but was nervously on his guard, and always thwarting his
Minister. It is said that, with or without his consent, the Empress
Ariadne endeavoured to procure the assassination of Illus.

In 483, the year in which Theodoric the Amal made his peace with Zeno, a
certain Leontius raised a rebellion in Syria. Illus, who was sent to put
him down, had grown tired of serving his suspicious and ungrateful
master, and joined in the revolt. [Sidenote: Revolt of Leontius, 483.]
He and Leontius seized Antioch, where the latter was proclaimed emperor,
and got possession of Cappadocia, Cilicia, and north Syria. It is said
that they designed to re-establish paganism, a project which seems
absolutely incredible in the very end of the fifth century, when the
heathen were no more than a forlorn remnant scattered among a zealous
Christian population. The empress-dowager Verina, who was living in
exile in Cappadocia, joined herself to them, and adopted Leontius as her
son. But the rebels took more practical measures to support their cause
when they applied for aid to Odoacer the king in Italy, and to the
Persian monarch Balas. Both promised aid, but, before they could send
it, Zeno had put the rebellion down. He induced his late enemy Theodoric
to join his army, and the Goths and Isaurians combined easily got the
better of Leontius. Syria submitted, and the rebel emperor and Illus,
after a long and desperate defence in a castle in Cappadocia, were taken
and slain.[5]

Footnote 5:

This fort—it was called Castellum Papirii—is said to have held out for
the incredibly long period of four years after all the rest of the
rebellious districts had been subdued, and only to have fallen by
treachery.

Zeno enjoyed comparative peace after Leontius’ rebellion had been
crushed, and was still more fortunate when, in 488, he induced Theodoric
the Amal to move his Ostrogoths out of Moesia and go forth to conquer
Italy. How Theodoric fared in Italy we have already related. His
departure was of enormous benefit to the empire, and, for the first time
since his accession, Zeno was now able to exercise a real authority over
his European provinces. They were left to him in a most fearful state of
desolation: ten years of war, ranging over the whole tract south of the
Danube and north of Mount Olympus, had reduced the land to a wilderness.
Whole districts were stripped bare of their inhabitants, and great gaps
of waste territory were inviting new enemies to enter the Balkan
peninsula, and occupy the deserted country-side. North of the Balkans
the whole provincial population seems to have been well-nigh
exterminated. [Sidenote: State of the Balkan peninsula.] When the
Ostrogoths abandoned the country there was nothing left between the
mountains and the Danube but a few military posts and their garrisons,
nor was the country replenished with inhabitants till the Slavs spread
over the land in the succeeding age. Illyria and Macedonia had not fared
so badly, but the net result of the century of Gothic occupation in the
Balkan peninsula had been to thin down to a fearful extent the
Latin-speaking population of the Eastern Empire. All the inland of
Thrace, Moesia, and Illyricum had hitherto employed the Latin tongue:
with the thinning out of its inhabitants the empire became far more
Asiatic and Greek than it had before been.

When the Ostrogoths migrated to Italy, the empire acquired a new set of
neighbours on its northern frontier, the nomad Ugrian horde of the
Bulgarians on the lower Danube, and the Teutonic tribes of the Gepidae,
Heruli, and Lombards on the middle Danube and the Theiss and Save.
Contrary to what might have been expected, none of these races pushed
past the barrier of Roman forts along the river to occupy Moesia. They
vexed the empire with nothing worse than occasional raids, and did not
come to settle within its limits.

Zeno’s ecclesiastical policy demands a word of notice. He was himself
orthodox, but not fanatical: the Church being at the moment grievously
divided by the Monophysite schism, to which the Churches of Egypt and
Palestine had attached themselves, he thought it would be possible and
expedient to lure the heretics back within the fold by slightly
modifying the Catholic statement of doctrine. In 482, though he was in
the midst of his struggle with Theodoric the Amal, he found time to
draft his ‘Henoticon,’ or Edict of Comprehension. The Monophysites held
that there was but one nature in our Lord, as opposed to the orthodox
view, that both the human and the divine element were fully present in
His person. [Sidenote: Zeno’s Henoticon.] Zeno put into his ‘Henoticon’
a distinct statement that Christ was both God and man, but did not
insert the words ‘two natures,’ which formed the orthodox shibboleth.
But his well-meant scheme fell utterly flat. The heretics were not
satisfied, and refused to conform, while the Catholics held that it was
a weak concession to heterodoxy, and condemned Zeno for playing with
schism. The patriarch, Acacius, who had assisted him to draft the
‘Henoticon,’ was excommunicated by the Bishop of Rome, and the churches
of Italy and Constantinople were out of communion for more than thirty
years, owing to an edict that had been intended to unite and not to
divide.

The last years of Zeno’s reign were far more undisturbed by war and
rebellion than its earlier part. He survived till 491, when he died of
epilepsy, leaving no heir to inherit his throne. He had had two sons,
named Leo and Zeno: the first had died, while still a child, in 474; the
second killed himself by evil-living, when on the threshold of manhood,
long ere his father’s death.

The right of choosing Zeno’s successor fell nominally into the hands of
the Senate and people, really into those of the widowed Empress Ariadne
and the Imperial Guard. The daughter of Leo made a wise choice in
recommending to the suffrages of the army and people Anastasius of
Dyrrhachium, an officer of the _silentiarii_,[6] who was universally
esteemed for his piety and virtue.

Footnote 6:

A body-guard, whose duty it was to preserve silence around the
emperor’s private apartments.

Anastasius was a man of fifty-two or fifty-three, who had spent most of
his life in official work in the capital, and was specially well known
as an able and economical financier. He was sincerely religious, and
spent many of his leisure hours as a lay preacher in the church of St.
Sophia, till he was inhibited from giving instruction by the Patriarch
Euphemius, who detected Monophysitism in his sermons. He had once
proposed to take orders, and had been spoken of as a candidate for the
bishopric of Antioch. Yet, in spite of his religious fervour, he was
never accused of being unworldly or unpractical. [Sidenote: Character of
Anastasius.] Anastasius was a man of blameless life, learned and
laborious, slow to anger, a kind and liberal master, and absolutely just
in all his dealings. ‘Reign as you have lived,’ was the cry of the
people when he first presented himself to them clad in the imperial
purple. Only two objections were ever made to him—the first, that he
leaned towards the Monophysite heresy; the second, that his court was
too staid and puritanical for the taste of the multitude, who had loved
the pomp and orgies of the dissolute Zeno. He earned unpopularity by
suppressing gladiatorial combats with wild beasts, and licentious
dances.

Six weeks after his accession the new emperor married the
Empress-Dowager Ariadne, who had been the chief instrument in his
election. She was a princess of blameless life, and had done much in the
previous reign to redeem the ill-repute of her first husband. It was a
great misfortune for the empire that she bore her second spouse no heir
to inherit his throne.

The commencement of the reign of Anastasius was troubled by a rebellion
of the Isaurians. Zeno had not only formed an Imperial Guard of his
countrymen, but had filled the civil service with them, and encouraged
them to settle as merchants and traders in Constantinople. They had been
much vexed when the sceptre passed to the Illyrian Anastasius, and
entered into a conspiracy to seize his person, and proclaim Zeno’s
brother, Longinus, as emperor. A few months after his accession they
rose in the capital and obtained possession of part of the city near the
palace, but the majority of the people and army were against them, and
they were put down after a sharp street fight, in which the great
Hippodrome was burnt. Longinus was captured, and compelled to take
orders. He died long after as a priest in Egypt. Anastasius, after this
riot, dismissed all the Isaurian officers from the public service. They
returned to their homes in Asia Minor, and organised a rebellion in
their native hills. A second Longinus, who had been _magister militum_
in Thrace, put himself at the head of the insurrection, which lingered
on for five years (491-496), but was never a serious danger to the
empire. [Sidenote: Rebellions in Isauria, 492-496.] The rebels were
beaten whenever they ventured into the plains, and only maintained
themselves so long by the aid of the mountain-castles with which their
rugged land was studded. In 496 their last fastnesses were stormed, and
their chief, the _ex-magister_, taken and executed. Anastasius punished
the communities which had been most obstinate in the rebellion by
transferring them to Thrace, and settling them on the wasted lands under
the Balkans, where he trusted that these fearless mountaineers would
prove an efficient guard to keep the passes against the barbarians from
beyond the Danube.

The Asiatic provinces of the empire had no further troubles till 502,
when a war broke out between Anastasius and Kobad king of Persia. The
Mesopotamian frontier had been singularly quiet for the last century;
there had been no serious war with the great Oriental monarchy to the
East since Julian’s unfortunate expedition in 362. The same age which
had seen the Teutonic migrations in Europe had been marked in inner Asia
by a great stirring of the Huns and other Turanian tribes beyond the
Caspian, and while the Roman emperors had been busy on the Danube, the
Sassanian kings had been hard at work defending the frontier of the
Oxus. In a respite from his Eastern troubles Kobad made some demands for
money on Anastasius, which the emperor refused, and war soon followed.
It began with several disasters for the Romans, and Amida, the chief
fortress of Mesopotamia, was stormed in 503. [Sidenote: War with Persia,
503-505.] Nisibis fell later in the same year, and when Anastasius sent
reinforcements to the East he appointed so many generals with
independent authority that the whole Roman army could never be united,
and the commanders allowed themselves to be taken in detail and defeated
in succession. In 504, however, the fortune of war turned, when the
supreme authority in the field was bestowed on Celer, the _magister
officiorum_; he recovered Amida after a long siege, and began to press
forward beyond the Persian frontier. Kobad was at the same time assailed
by the Huns from beyond the Oxus, and gladly made peace, on terms which
restored the frontier of both parties to the line it had occupied in
502. Anastasius provided against future wars by building two new
fortresses of the first class on the Persian frontier, Daras in
Mesopotamia, and Theodosiopolis farther north on the borders of Armenia.
These places served to break the force of the Persian attack thirty
years later, when the successors of Kobad and Anastasius again fell to
blows. The Persian war, like the Isaurian, had only afflicted a very
limited district,—the province beyond the Euphrates,—and no raids had
penetrated so far as Syria. Indeed, during the whole reign of
Anastasius, the only serious trouble to which the Asiatic half of the
empire was exposed was a Hunnish raid from beyond the Caucasus, which in
515 caused grave damage in Pontus, Cappadocia, and Lycaonia. This
invasion, however, was an isolated misfortune, followed by no further
incursions of the nomads of the Northern Steppes.

The European provinces—now as in the time of Zeno—had a far harder lot.
The Slavs and Bulgarians repeatedly crossed the Danube and pressed over
the desolated plains of Moesia to assail Thrace. More than once the
Bulgarians defeated a Roman army in the field, and their ravages were at
last pushed so far southward that Anastasius built in 512 the celebrated
wall which bears his name, running from the Black Sea to Propontis,
thirty-five miles west of Constantinople. These lines, extending for
more than fifty miles across the eastern projection of Thrace, served to
defend at least the immediate neighbourhood of the capital against the
restless horsemen from beyond the Danube. Macedonia and Illyricum seem
to have suffered much less than Thrace during this period; the Slavs who
bordered on them were as yet not nearly such a dangerous enemy as the
Bulgarians, while the Ostrogoths of Italy, on reconquering Pannonia,
proved more restful neighbours to the north-western provinces of the
empire than they had been in the previous century.

It was in the reign of Anastasius that one of the most characteristic
features in the social life of Constantinople is brought forward into
prominence for the first time. This was the growing turbulence of the
‘Blues and Greens,’ the factions of the Circus. From the very beginning
of the Roman Empire these clubs had existed, but it was only at
Constantinople that they became institutions of high political
importance. There the rivalry of the Blues and Greens was not confined
to the races of the Circus, but was carried into every sphere of life.
Nor was it any longer only the young men of sporting and fashionable
proclivities that joined the ‘factions.’ They served as clubs or
political associations for all classes, from the ministers of state down
to the poorest mechanics, and formed bonds of union between bodies of
churchmen or supporters of dynastic claims. [Sidenote: The Blues and
Greens.] It is hard for an Englishman to realise this extraordinary
development of what had once been a mere rivalry of the Hippodrome. To
make a parallel to it we should have to suppose that all who mount the
light or the dark blue on the day of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race
were bitterly jealous of each other—let us say, for example, that all
Dark Blues were Conservatives and Anglicans, and all Light Blues were
Radicals and Dissenters. If this were so, we can imagine that in times
of political stress every boat race might be followed by a gigantic
free-fight. This, however, was exactly what occurred at Constantinople;
the ‘Blue’ faction had become identified with Orthodoxy, and with a
dislike for the family of Anastasius. The ‘Green’ faction included all
the Monophysites and other heterodox sects, and was devoted to the
person and dynasty of Anastasius. In any time of trouble the celebration
of games in the Hippodrome ended with a fierce riot of the two factions.
No wonder that the just and peaceable emperor strove to suppress shows
of all sorts, and in especial showed a dislike for the disloyal ‘Blue’
faction.

The worst of Anastasius’ domestic troubles were due to the suspicion of
heterodoxy that clung to him. In 511 when he added to the hymn called
the Trisagion the line ὁ σταυρωθεὶς δι’ ἡμᾶς in a context which seemed
to refer to the whole Trinity, the orthodox populace of Constantinople
headed by the Blue faction burst out into sedition. It was only quelled
by the old Emperor presenting himself before the people in the
Hippodrome, without crown or robe, and announcing his intention of
abdicating. So great was the confidence which his justice and moderation
had inspired in all ranks and classes, that the proposal filled the
whole multitude with dismay, and they rose unanimously to bid him resume
his diadem.

But the grievance against the Monophysite tendencies of Anastasius was
not destined to be forgotten. [Sidenote: Rebellion of Vitalian, 514.] In
514 an ambitious general named Vitalian, who held a command in Moesia,
rose in arms, alleging as the cause of his rebellion, not only certain
misdeeds committed in that province by the emperor’s nephew Hypatius,
but also the dangerous heterodoxy of Anastasius’ religious opinions.
When Hypatius was removed from his office the greater part of Vitalian’s
army returned to its allegiance, and the rebel then showed how much
importance was to be attached to his religious scruples, by calling in
the heathen Bulgarians and Huns to his aid. At the head of an army
composed of these barbarians he maintained himself in Moesia for some
time. The emperor, somewhat unwisely, replaced his nephew Hypatius in
command, and sent him with a large army to put down the rebel; but,
while the Romans lay encamped on the sea-shore near Varna, they were
surprised by a night attack of the enemy and completely scattered. Many
thousand men were driven over the cliffs into the sea and crushed or
drowned, while Hypatius himself was taken prisoner (514). The old
emperor was driven, by concern for his nephew’s life, to make peace. He
ransomed Hypatius for 15,000 lbs. of gold, and granted Vitalian the post
of _magister militum_ in Thrace. The pardoned rebel for the remainder of
Anastasius’ reign occupied himself in strengthening his position on the
Danube, being determined to make a bold stroke for the imperial throne
when old age should remove the octogenarian ruler of Constantinople.

In spite of all his troubles with the two Longini, king Kobad and
Vitalian, Anastasius may be called a successful and prosperous ruler.
All these rebellions had been of mere local import, and for the whole
twenty-seven years of his reign the greater part of the empire had
enjoyed peace and plenty. The best testimony to his good administration
is the fact that at his accession he found the treasury emptied by the
wasteful Zeno, and that at his death he left it filled with 320,000 lbs.
weight of gold, or £15,000,000 in hard cash. This was in spite of the
fact that he was a merciful and lenient administrator, and had actually
abolished several imposts including the odious Chrysargyron or
income-tax. Nor was the money collected at the cost of neglecting proper
expenditure. Anastasius had erected many military works,—in especial his
great wall in Thrace, and the strong fortress of Daras—and restored many
ruined cities. ‘He never sent away petitioners empty, whether they
represented a city, a fortress, or a seaport.’ He left an army of
150,000 men in a good state of discipline and composed for its larger
half of native troops, with a frontier intact alike on east and west and
north.

The good old man died in 518; his wife Ariadne had preceded him to the
grave three years before. He had refrained from appointing as his
colleague his nephew Hypatius, whom many had expected him to adopt, and
the empire was left absolutely masterless. The great State officials,
the Imperial Guard, and the Senate had the election of a new Caesar
thrown upon their hands. The most obvious candidates for the throne were
Hypatius, whom the Green faction should have supported, and the
_magister militum_ Vitalian, who at once took arms to march on the
capital. But neither of them was destined to succeed. The sinews of war
lay in the hands of the treasurer Amantius; he himself could not hope to
reign, for he was a eunuch, but he had a friend whom he wished to crown.
[Sidenote: Accession of Justin I., 518.] Accordingly he sent for
Justinus, the commander of the Imperial Guard, and made over to him a
great sum to buy the aid of the soldiery. Justinus, an elderly and
respectable personage whom no one suspected of ambition, quietly took
the gold, distributed it in his own name, and was saluted as Augustus by
his delighted guardsmen. The Senate acquiesced in the nomination, and he
mounted the throne without a blow being struck.

Justinus was an Illyrian by birth, and had spent fifty years in the
imperial army; he had won his promotion by good service in the Isaurian
and Persian wars. He was very illiterate—we are told that he could
barely sign his own name—and knew nothing outside his tactics and his
drill-book. He had the reputation of being quiet, well-behaved, and
upright; no one had anything to say against him, and he was rigidly
orthodox in matters of faith. He was sixty-eight years of age, fifteen
years older than even the elderly Anastasius had been at the moment of
his accession.

Justinus seated himself firmly on the throne; he executed the treasurer
Amantius, but made terms with the two men who might have been his
rivals. Hypatius remained a simple senator; Vitalian was confirmed in
his command in Moesia and given a consulship. While holding this office
and dwelling in the capital he was assassinated; rumour ascribed the
crime to the emperor’s nephew Justinian, who thought the turbulent
_magister_ too near the throne.

There is very little to record of the nine years of Justinus’ reign,
save that he healed the forty-years’ schism which had separated the
churches of Rome and Constantinople since the publication of Zeno’s
‘Henoticon.’ Being undisputedly orthodox, he withdrew that document, and
the schism disappeared with its cause. The only real importance of
Justinus is that he prepared the way for his famous nephew and
successor, Justinian, whom he adopted as colleague, and intrusted with
those matters of civil administration with which he was himself
incompetent to deal. He died and left the throne to Justinian in A.D.
528.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER IV

CHLODOVECH AND THE FRANKS IN GAUL

481-511

The Franks in Northern Gaul—Their early conquests—State of Gaul in
481—Chlodovech conquers Northern Gaul, 486—He subdues the Alamanni,
495-6—Conversion of Chlodovech, 496—He conquers Aquitaine from the
Visigoths, 507—He unites all the Frankish Kingdoms, 511.

While Odoacer was still reigning in Italy, and Theodoric the Amal had
not yet left the Balkans, or the banks of the Danube, the foundations of
a great kingdom were being laid upon the Scheldt and the Meuse. Early in
the fifth century the confederacy of marsh-tribes on the Yssel and Lech
who had taken the common name of Franks, had moved southward into the
territory of the Empire, and found themselves new homes in the provinces
which the Romans called Belgica and Germania Inferior. For many years
the hold of the legions on this land had been growing weaker; and, long
ere it became a Frankish kingdom, it had been largely sprinkled with
Frankish colonists, whom the emperors had admitted as military settlers
on the waste lands within their border. In the lowlands of Toxandria,
which after-ages called Brabant and Guelders, there were no large cities
to be protected, no great fortresses to be maintained, and, while the
Romans still exerted themselves to hold Treveri and Colonia Agrippina
and Moguntiacum,[7] they allowed the plains more to the north and west
to slip out of their hands. [Sidenote: The Franks in Lower Germany.] By
the second quarter of the fifth century the Franks were firmly
established on the Scheldt and Meuse and lower Rhine, where the Roman
garrisons never reappeared after the usurper Constantine had carried off
the northern frontier legions to aid him in his attack on Italy (406).
By this time, too, Colonia Agrippina, first of the great Roman cities of
the Rhineland, seems to have already fallen into the hands of the
Franks. Between 430 and 450 they continued to push forward as far as the
Somme and the Moselle, and when, at the time of Attila’s great invasion
of Gaul, the last imperial garrisons in the Rhineland were exterminated,
and the last governors driven forth by the Huns from Treveri and
Moguntiacum and Mettis, it was the Franks who profited. After the Huns
had rolled back again to the East, Frankish kings, not Roman officials,
took possession of the ravaged land along the Moselle and Rhine, and the
surviving provincials had for the future to obey a Teutonic master near
home, not a governor despatched from distant Ravenna.

Footnote 7:

Trier, Köln, and Mainz.

The Franks were now divided into two main hordes; the Salians—who took
their name from Sala, the old name of the river Yssel—dwelt from the
Scheldt-mouth to the Somme, and from the Straits of Dover to the Meuse.
The Ripuarians, whose name is drawn from the fact that they inhabited
the bank (_ripa_) of the Rhine, lay along both sides of the great river
from its junction with the Lippe to its junction with the Lahn, and
extended as far east as the Meuse. Each of these two tribes was ruled by
many kings, all of whom claimed to descend from the house of the
Merovings, a line lost in obscurity, whose original head may, perhaps,
have been the chief who in the third century first taught union to the
various tribes who formed the Frankish confederacy.

The Franks were one of the more backward of the Teutonic races, in spite
of their long contact with Roman civilisation along the Rhine. Kings and
people were still heathens. They had not learnt like the Goths to wear
armour or fight on horseback, but went to war half-naked, armed only
with a barbed javelin, a sword, and a casting-axe or tomahawk, called
the Francisca after the name of its users. Unlike Goth and Vandal they
had not learnt the advantages of political union, but obeyed many petty
princes instead of one great lord. All Roman writers reproach them for a
perfidy which exceeded that of the other barbarians. The Saxons, we are
told, were cruel, the Alamanni drunken, the Alans rapacious, the Huns
unchaste, but the special sin of the Frank was treachery and perjury.

At the time of the deposition of Romulus Augustulus by Odoacer, the
Salian Franks held the old Roman towns of Cambrai, Arras, Tournay, and
Tongern, while the Ripuarians occupied Köln, Trier, Mainz, and Metz.
[Sidenote: Divisions of Gaul in 481.] South of the Ripuarians lay the
new Burgundian kingdom which Gundobad had founded in the valleys of the
Rhone and Saône. South of the Salians was a district of Roman Gaul which
had to the last acknowledged the supremacy of the ephemeral emperors of
the West, and kept itself free from barbarian invaders under the
patrician Ægidius. After his death in 463 his son Syagrius succeeded to
his power, and ruled at Suessiones (Soissons) over the whole Seine
valley, and the plain of central Gaul as far as Troyes and Orleans.
After the disappearance of the last Western Emperor, Syagrius had no
over-lord, but was so much his own master that the Franks called him
‘king of the Romans,’ though he himself took no title but that of
patrician. South of the realm of Syagrius lay the Visigothic kingdom of
Euric, a vast state extending from the Loire to Gibraltar, and from the
Bay of Biscay to the Maritime Alps. Its king dwelt at Toulouse, and the
Gaulish rather than the Spanish half of his dominion was considered the
more important. Indeed his rule in Spain was still incomplete, as the
Suevi held its north-western corner, the land which we now call Galicia
and north Portugal, and the Basques maintained their independence in the
western Pyrenees.

In the third quarter of the fifth century the most important of the
Frankish chiefs of the Merovingian line was a prince of the Salians,
named Childerich, who dwelt at Tournay, and ruled in the valley of the
upper Scheldt. He died in 481, leaving his throne to his
sixteen-year-old son and heir, a prince named Chlodovech or Chlodwig,
who was destined to found the great Frankish kingdom, by extinguishing
the other Frankish principalities, and conquering southern and central
Gaul.

Such an event seemed most unlikely at the time of Chlodovech’s
accession, when the dominant power in the land was that of the fierce
and able king Euric the Visigoth. It was Euric who had brought the
Visigothic kingdom up to its largest extent, by driving the Sueves into
a corner of Spain, conquering the last Roman provinces in central Gaul,
and receiving Provence from the hands of Odoacer, king of Italy. He was
the first Visigothic king to publish a code of laws, and would have left
a good name in history but for his assassination of his brother
Theodoric, and his persecutions of the Catholics. Though not such an
oppressor as the Vandals Gaiseric and Hunneric, he had made himself
hated by refusing to allow the election of Catholic bishops, and by
closing or handing over to his favourites, the Arians, many of the
churches of the orthodox. Euric died in 485, just as Chlodovech was
about to commence his conquering career in northern Gaul, a career which
the Visigoth would probably have checked if a longer life had been
granted him. He was succeeded by his son Alaric, a boy of only sixteen
or seventeen years.

It was in the very year of Euric’s death that Chlodovech, now aged
twenty-one, set out on the first of his warlike expeditions. In company
with his kinsman Ragnachar, king of Cambrai, he invaded the realm of the
Roman patrician Syagrius. The Gaulish troops were unable to resist the
onset of the Franks, and their leader, after a short struggle, abandoned
his home, and fled for safety to the court of Alaric the Visigoth. The
councillors of Alaric, either wishing to gratify their Teutonic
neighbours, or fearing the event of a war while their king was yet so
young, threw the patrician into bonds, and sent him back to Chlodovech,
who promptly put him to death. [Sidenote: Chlodovech conquers Syagrius,
486.] The Seine valley and the great towns of Soissons, Paris, Rouen,
and Rheims now fell into the hands of the Frankish king, and, in the
course of the next three years, he extended his power up to the Loire
and boundary of Armorica, where the Romano-Celts of the extreme west
still succeeded in holding out. Chlodovech took all the spoils for
himself, none fell to his neighbours, the other kings of the Salian
Franks. It was these princes who were next to feel the force of his arm.
He picked quarrels with his kinsmen the kings of Cambrai and Térouanne,
the one for not helping him against Syagrius, the other for claiming
part of the spoil of the Roman, and slew them both, the one by
treachery, the other in open battle. The remaining Merovingian princes
of the Belgic plains soon shared their fate; then Chlodovech pressed
eastward against the Ripuarian Franks, and conquered the Thoringi, their
chief tribe, in the year 491. In a short time he had won all the
Frankish kingdoms save that of his ally Sigebert the Lame, king of Köln.
He remorselessly slew every prince of Meroving blood who fell into his
hands, and did his best to exterminate all the rival lines. When he
could find no more to kill, he is said to have made open lamentation
that he was left alone in the world, and that the royal house of the
Franks was threatened with extinction; he then bade any kinsman who
might yet survive come to him without fear. But it was cruelty, not
remorse, that moved him, for his only object was to catch and slay any
Meroving who might yet survive.

His conquests in Ripuaria brought Chlodovech into touch with new
neighbours, the Burgundians to the south, and the confederacy of the
Alamanni to the east, along the Main and Neckar. With the first named he
entered into friendly relations, and married Chrotechildis (Clotilde),
niece of King Gundobad, in 492. The princess, unlike her uncle and most
of her tribe, was a devout Catholic, and much was destined to follow
from her alliance with the pagan Frank. [Sidenote: Chlodovech’s wars
with the Alamanni.] With the Alamanni the relations of Chlodovech were
from the first hostile; in fact, when he brought his frontier up to the
middle Rhine, he was constrained to take up an already existing feud
between the Ripuarians and their eastern neighbours. For several years
he was engaged in a struggle with this confederacy, who held the east
bank of the Rhine from Coblenz upwards, the valleys of the Main and
Neckar, and all the Black Forest. At last, in 496, he got the better of
them in a decisive battle—apparently near Strasburg—and forced the main
body of the confederacy to do him homage and acknowledge him as
over-lord. An obstinate remnant retired over the Rhine, and took refuge
in Rhaetia under the protection of the great Theodoric, but all the rest
became Frankish vassals. As a result of this war the Alamanni were
driven southward out of the Main valley, which was seized and settled by
Ripuarian settlers, and became a Frankish country under the name of East
Francia, or Franconia.

A suggestive legend and an important fact are connected with these
campaigns of Chlodovech against the Alamanni. The ecclesiastic writers
of the next century state that, in his decisive battle with the
confederates, Chlodovech was driven back and almost routed. Then,
recalling the words of his wife Chrotechildis, ‘who never ceased to
persuade him that he should serve the true God,’ that the Lord was the
Lord of Hosts and the arbiter of battles, he cried aloud, ‘O Christ
Jesu, I crave as a suppliant Thy glorious aid; and if Thou grantest me
victory over these enemies I will believe in Thee, and be baptized in
Thy name.’ At once the Alamanni began to give back, and the king
obtained a complete triumph.

Whether this was the manner of his conversion or not, it is at any rate
certain that Chlodovech, on returning from his Alamannic campaign, had
himself baptized at Rheims on Christmas Day, 496. His sister and 3000 of
his warriors followed him to the font. Every reader of history knows the
famous tale how Archbishop Remigius hailed the king with the words, ‘Bow
thy neck Sigambrian, adore that which thou hast burnt, and burn that
which thou hast adored.’ First among the converted Teutonic kings
Chlodovech was received into the Catholic Church, and did not become an
Arian like his neighbours. In this we may, no doubt, trace the influence
of his orthodox queen Chrotechildis. [Sidenote: Conversion of
Chlodovech, 496.] The consequences of his conversion to the orthodox
faith were most important; he was the only Teutonic king who adopted the
faith of his Roman subjects, and was therefore served by them, and more
especially by their clergy, with a loyalty which no Goth, Vandal, or
Burgundian prince could ever win. Not least among the causes of
Chlodovech’s easy triumphs and of the permanence of his kingdom may be
reckoned his adherence to Catholicism.

It cannot be said that the king’s conversion made any favourable change
in his character or his conduct. He still remained the cruel,
unscrupulous, treacherous tyrant that he had always been. It will be
seen that his last recorded action was an elaborate incitement to
parricide followed by a horrid murder. Yet he was granted a measure of
success that was refused to kings of far better disposition and far
stronger intellect, such as Theodoric the Ostrogoth, or Ataulf the
Visigoth.

After their king’s conversion the Franks, both Salian and Ripuarian,
hastened to follow him to the fold of the Church, and in a single
generation the old Frankish paganism disappeared. But, as with king so
with people, the change was almost entirely superficial; it is long
before we trace the influence of any Christian graces on the ungodly and
perfidious race of the Franks.

After subduing the Alamanni, Chlodovech’s next war was with the people
of his wife’s uncle, Gundobad, the king of Burgundy. He made a secret
agreement with Godegisl, Gundobad’s younger brother, to invade and
divide the Burgundian realm. While the treacherous brother raised war in
Helvetia, where he possessed an appanage, the king of the Franks
attacked Gundobad from the front, and invaded the valley of the Saône.
It appeared as if here, as well as in the lands farther north,
Chlodovech would sweep all before him. The Burgundian king was beaten
and driven out of Dijon, Lyons, and Valence into Avignon, the
southernmost fortress of his realm, while his brother was made king by
the Frank, and became his vassal. But, in the next year, Gundobad
recovered all he had lost, slew Godegisl at Vienne, and drove the Franks
out of Burgundy with such success that Chlodovech ere long made peace
with him (501).

But the next campaign of the Frankish king was one of far greater
importance and success. He was set on trying his fortune against the
young king of the Visigoths, whose personal weakness and unpopularity
with his Roman subjects tempted him to an invasion of Aquitaine. It
would seem that Chlodovech carefully chose as a _casus belli_ the Arian
persecutions of Alaric, who, like his father Euric, was a bad master to
his Catholic subjects. [Sidenote: Chlodovech conquers Aquitaine, 507.] A
first quarrel in 504 was composed by the great Theodoric, who, as
father-in-law of the Visigoth and brother-in-law of the Frank, could
appeal with authority to each of the rivals. But in 507 Chlodovech
declared war on the Visigoths. ‘I cannot bear,’ he said, ‘that those
Arians should hold any part of Gaul. With God’s aid we will go against
them, and subdue their land beneath our sway.’ Knowing the strength of
the Visigothic realm, Chlodovech allied to himself for the struggle his
old enemy Gundobad the Burgundian, and Sigebert of Köln, the last
surviving Ripuarian king.

Advancing from Paris Chlodovech crossed the Loire, and met the Visigoths
and their king on the Campus Vocladensis, the plain of Vouglé, near
Poictiers. Whether from cowardice, or from distrust of his own
generalship, Alaric held back from fighting, but his army forced him to
give battle. He attacked the Franks, was utterly defeated, and fell with
the greater part of his men. So crushed were the Visigoths by the
disaster that Chlodovech was able to overrun all the provinces between
the Loire and the Garonne without striking another blow. He entered
Bordeaux in triumph, and there spent the winter. Next spring he marched
against Toulouse, the Gothic capital, and took it, and with it the great
hoard of the Visigothic kings, including many of the Roman trophies that
Alaric and Ataulf had carried off from Italy a hundred years before.
Meanwhile, Chlodovech’s Burgundian allies overran Provence, and captured
all its cities save Arles. To add to the troubles of the Visigoths they
were distracted by civil strife; one party recognised as king Amalric,
the infant son of Alaric, by Theodoric’s daughter, his lawful queen; the
other elected Gesalic, a bastard son of Alaric, who had fortified
himself in Narbonne and Barcelona. But the Franks and Burgundians drove
Gesalic over the Pyrenees, and it appeared as if there was about to be
an end of all Visigothic power north of those mountains.

Meanwhile, Chlodovech returned from Toulouse to Tours, where he found
awaiting him ambassadors from the Emperor Anastasius, who saluted him by
their master’s command with the titles of proconsul and patrician, and
presented him with a diadem and purple robe. Anastasius sought by these
honours to win an ally against Theodoric the Ostrogoth, with whom he had
lately quarrelled. Chlodovech accepted them with alacrity, because of
the prestige they gave him in the eyes of his Roman subjects, who saw
his power over them formally legalised by the grant of the Emperor.

This was the culminating scene of Chlodovech’s life; for, in the next
year, fortune turned somewhat against him. The great Theodoric
interfered in the Gothic War as the guardian and protector of his
grandson, Amalric. His armies routed the united Franks and Burgundians
near Arles, where they are said to have slain 30,000 men. They then
reconquered Narbonne and all the Mediterranean coast as far as Spain.
Chlodovech’s conquests were thus restricted to the land west of the
Cevennes, but still comprised the greater bulk of Visigothic Gaul, with
the three great cities of Poictiers, Bordeaux, and Toulouse (510). Only
the Narbonensis and Provence were saved from him by Theodoric, who now
chased away the usurper Gesalic, and ruled all Spain and south Gaul till
his grandson Amalric came of age.

Checked on the south by the great Ostrogoth, Chlodovech turned north to
round off his dominions by the acquisition of the last independent
Frankish state. Sigebert of Köln was now very old, and his ambitious son
Chloderich was persuaded by Chlodovech not only to dethrone, but to slay
his father. When he had seized the kingdom Chlodovech affected great
wrath and indignation against him, procured his death at the hands of
assassins, and then annexed his kingdom. [Sidenote: Chlodovech king of
all the Franks, 510.] All the Frankish states were now united under one
hand, but Chlodovech did not long survive this last success, though,
according to the strange words of his admirer, Bishop Gregory of Tours,
‘The Lord cast his enemies under his power day after day, and increased
his kingdom, because he walked with a right heart before Him, and did
that which was pleasing in His sight!’

In 511 this sanguinary ruffian, murderer, and traitor died, just after
he had presided at Orleans over a synod of thirty-two Gaulish bishops
who were anxious to repress Arianism, and gladly called in the secular
arm of their orthodox lord to their aid. Chlodovech was morally far the
worst of all the Teutonic founders of kingdoms: even Gaiseric the Vandal
compares favourably with him. Yet his work alone was destined to stand,
not so much from his own abilities, though these were considerable
enough, as from the happy chance which put his successors in religious
sympathy with their subjects, and preserved the young kingdom, during
the following generation, from any conflict with such powerful foes as
those who were destined to overthrow the monarchies of the Ostrogoths,
the Visigoths, and the Vandals.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER V

JUSTINIAN AND HIS WARS

A.D. 528-540

Character of Justinian—His marriage with Theodora—His first War with
Persia, 528-31—Rise of Belisarius—Justinian suppresses the ‘Nika’
sedition, 532—His foreign policy—Belisarius conquers the Vandals,
533-4—Decay of the Ostrogoths in Italy—Justinian attacks
Theodahat—Belisarius conquers Sicily, Naples, and Rome—Siege of Rome
by the Ostrogoths (537-8)—Belisarius defeats the Ostrogoths and
captures Ravenna (540).

For three quarters of a century, during the reigns of the four cautious
and elderly Caesars, whose annals fill the space between 457 and 527,
the East-Roman Empire had been recovering its strength, and storing up
new energy for a sudden outburst of vigour under the able, restless, and
ambitious sovereign who followed the aged Justinus I. Justinian—the son
of Sabatius the brother of Justinus—was nearly forty years old when he
became, by his uncle’s death, sole ruler of the empire. He was no mere
uncultured soldier like his predecessor; when he obtained promotion in
the army, Justinus sent for his nephew from the Dardanian village where
his family dwelt, and had him reared in the capital in all the
accomplishments which befitted the heir of a great fortune. [Sidenote:
Character of Justinian.] By the acknowledgment of his bitterest enemies
Justinian had an extraordinary power of assimilating knowledge of all
kinds: he took a keen interest alike in statecraft and architecture, in
theology and law, in finance and music. When his uncle came to the
throne, the student soon developed into the practical administrator, for
Justinus trusted him with all those details of civil government which he
himself was unable to understand or to manage. It soon became known that
the heir of Justinus was a man of extraordinary ability and untiring
thirst for work. At an age when most young men would have been tempted
by their sudden elevation to plunge into the enjoyments that lay open to
an imperial prince, Justinian applied himself to mastering all the
tiresome details of the administration of the empire. Men noted with
surprise that he never seemed happy save when he was in his cabinet,
surrounded by his secretaries, his registers, his files of reports, and
despatches. He was like the Aristotelian character who was ‘too
indifferent to things pleasurable,’ for nothing save work appeared to
have any attraction for him. He rose early, spent his day in
administrative duties, and his night in reading and writing. As he grew
older he seemed to dispense with sleep altogether, as if he had become
free from the common necessities of man’s nature. There was something
strange and horrible in his cold-blooded, untiring energy; superstitious
men whispered that he was inspired by a restless demon who gave him no
peace, or that he was actually a demon himself. Had not a belated
courtier met him after midnight pacing the dark corridors of the palace
with a fearful and changed countenance that was no longer human, or
even—as the story grew—with no face at all, a shapeless monstrous
shadow?

But that Justinian was a man, with all a man’s waywardness and
recklessness, was proved ere long. To the surprise of the whole
population of the empire, and the utter horror and confusion of all
respectable persons, it was suddenly noised abroad that the heir of the
empire had announced his intention of marrying Theodora the dancer, the
chief star of the Byzantine comic stage. The staid passionless
bureaucrat was contemplating a step from which Nero or Heliogabalus
would have shrunk with dismay.

We have elaborate but untrustworthy details of the scandalous early life
of Theodora in a book—the ‘Secret History’—which bears the name of the
historian Procopius, but was in all probability no work of his.[8] She
was the daughter of Acacius the Cypriot, an employé of the ‘Green
Faction’ at the Hippodrome, and had for some years appeared on the stage
as an actress and dancer. So much we may take for truth; knowing the
general character of Roman actresses we may assume that there was some
foundation for the stories over which the ‘Secret History’ gloats.
[Sidenote: Theodora.] As to the particular facts alleged, we may
conclude that they are untrustworthy—among those which the ‘Secret
History’ gives as most certain are the statements that she was a
vampire, and often held intercourse with evil spirits; the rest is
written in the same spirit of silly and superstitious malignity. But we
may fairly conclude that the marriage of Justinian was a scandal and a
wonder. His mother and his aunt the Empress Euphemia, as we know, set
their faces against it; but he went on in his usual steady persistence,
gradually warred down the will of his old uncle Justinus, and formally
took Theodora to wife. The emperor was even induced to bestow upon her
the high title of Patrician.

Footnote 8:

For a discussion of this print see Mr. Bury’s _Later Roman Empire_,
vol. i. p. 359, where he concludes—with Ranke—that the work is the
forged compilation of a personal enemy.

In brains and power of will Theodora was a fit enough occupant for the
imperial throne, whatever her past history may have been. She was as
ambitious, restless, and capable as her husband, and acted as much as
his colleague as his consort. We shall see how on one occasion of crisis
she stood boldly forward and interposed between him and destruction. Her
worst enemies do not suggest that she was an unfaithful or profitless
spouse to him; the ‘Secret History’ itself calls her after her marriage
luxurious, cruel, capricious, arrogant, but does not accuse her of
evil-living or folly. Against this we may set the well-ascertained facts
that she was devoted to the exercises of religion, and founded many
charitable institutions. Remembering the dangers of her own youth, she
built a great institution for the reclaiming of fallen women—the first
of the kind known in Christendom. She was zealous in buying and freeing
slaves, and in caring for the bringing up of orphans and the marriage of
dowerless girls.

Theodora was by all accounts the most beautiful woman of her age. Even
the ‘Secret History’ allows this, adding only that she was rather below
the middle stature, that her complexion was somewhat pale, and that she
devoted untold hours to the mysteries of the toilet. Two portraits of
her have survived, one at the monastery on Mount Sinai, the other in the
Church of San Vitale at Ravenna—two spots so far apart as to call up
vividly to our memory the wide extent of her influence. Unfortunately
the hieratic style of art into which Roman portraiture had long sunk,
and the intractable nature of mosaic as a material do not allow us to
judge from these representations what was her actual appearance.

Justinian has left behind him an almost unparalleled reputation as a
conqueror, a builder, and a lawgiver, besides a less happy record of
theological activity. It is mainly, however, with his foreign policy
that we shall have to concern ourselves: the other spheres of his labour
are better fitted for another work. But his dealings with Africa, Italy,
and Spain form a great landmark and turning-point in the history of
southern Europe, and their results were not entirely exhausted till the
eleventh century. His long struggles with Persia are less interesting
and less important, but they filled a great space in the view of
contemporary observers, and were not without their moment.

Justinian’s reign opened with a fierce war with the old Persian king
Kobad. The struggle which this monarch had waged with Anastasius,
twenty-five years before, had been so indecisive that the Sassanian
longed for a new trial of arms. Almost immediately on Justinian’s
accession he issued his declaration of war, using as a pretext the
erection of some fortifications near Nisibis, which were being
constructed by Belisarius, governor of Daras, a young officer whose name
was destined to be intimately associated with the whole history of
Justinian’s reign. [Sidenote: First war with Persia, 528-31.] The war
opened with a defeat in the open field, suffered by the Roman army of
Mesopotamia; but when reinforcements came up the Persians retreated
beyond their frontier. After the winter of 528-29 was over neither side
advanced in force, and all that occurred was a flying Roman raid into
Assyria, and an equally hasty Persian incursion into Syria, both of
which did some harm, but had no practical result on the fate of the war.
Things went far otherwise in the next year, 530: the Persians crossed
the frontier in full force, and marched on Daras, where they were met by
Belisarius, who had lately been appointed commander-in-chief in the
East. Under the walls of Daras the decisive battle of the war was
fought, in which Belisarius, with 25,000 men, defeated 40,000 Persians
by means of his tactical skill. The plan which he worked was to draw
back his centre, containing all the Roman infantry, and when the
Persians followed it, to launch against their exposed flanks all his
cavalry, a miscellaneous gathering of Hunnish light horse, Teutonic
Heruli from the Danube, and Roman _Cataphracti_ or cuirassiers. This
plan, much resembling Hannibal’s manœuvre at Cannae, and perhaps
consciously copied from it, resulted in the complete rout of the
Sassanian host.

After this defeat Kobad commenced abortive negotiations for peace, but
the war was protracted into the next year, and Belisarius did not fare
so well in 531. In stopping a Persian raiding force on the middle
Euphrates, which aimed at Syria, and had turned the southern flank of
the Mesopotamian fortresses, he suffered serious loss at the affair of
Callinicum. Though he was defeated, his resistance had yet turned and
frustrated the Persian expedition. Four months later king Kobad died,
and his successor Chosroes I. made peace on the base of the _status quo
ante_, fearing to continue the Roman war while his throne was insecure.
(September, 531.)

The end of the Persian war left Justinian free to cast his eyes on the
affairs of his neighbours to the West. Though so indecisive, it had not
been without its uses, for it had permitted him to test the solidity of
his army, and to discover several officers of merit, and one general of
commanding ability—the young victor of Daras. [Sidenote: Belisarius.]
Belisarius was now twenty-six years of age: he was, like his master, a
native of the borderland between Thrace and Illyricum, bred at an
unknown village named Germania, but not, as the name of his birthplace
might seem to suggest, of Teutonic but of Thracian blood.[9] He had
entered the army at a very early age, and had fought his way up to the
post of governor of the great fortress of Daras before he was
twenty-four. His favour with Justinian had been confirmed by his
marriage with Antonina, the friend and confidante of the empress
Theodora. She was a clever, unscrupulous, domineering woman, several
years older than her husband, and exercised over him a domestic tyranny
which any man less easy tempered than the young general would have found
unbearable. The position of Belisarius and Antonina at the Court of
Justinian has been not unaptly compared to that of Marlborough and his
imperious wife at the court of Queen Anne; but it is only fair to the
East-Roman to say that he was in every way a better man than the
Englishman, while his wife had all the faults of Duchess Sarah, without
her one redeeming virtue of fidelity to her spouse.

Footnote 9:

There seems no reason to make him a Slav, as some have done on account
of his rather Slavonic-looking name.

Before he was able to turn his attention to the West, and just after the
crisis of the Persian war had passed, Justinian was exposed to a sharp
and sudden danger, the most perilous experience of his whole career. We
have already spoken at some length of the rivalries of the Blue and
Green factions,[10] and explained how, in the early sixth century, the
Greens were reckoned heterodox and supporters of the house of
Anastasius, while the Blues were orthodox and favoured Justinus and his
nephew. Accident conspired with the innate turbulence of the factions to
stir them up into fierce disorder in the year 532, and brought about the
celebrated ‘Nika’ sedition. To provide for the expenses of the Persian
war, Justinian had not only drawn upon the hoarded wealth of Anastasius,
but had imposed heavy additional taxation. This act made his instruments
the Quaestor Tribonian and the Praetorian Prefect John of Cappadocia
very unpopular. Both of them were suspected—and not incorrectly—of
having used the opportunity to fill their pockets at the expense of the
public, and John the Cappadocian had made himself particularly odious by
his cruel treatment of defaulting debtors. In January 532 there were
riotous scenes in the circus, caused by the protests of the Greens
against the oppression they were suffering. There soon followed tumults
in the streets, and the factions settled their grievances with bludgeon
and knife. [Sidenote: The ‘Nika’ Sedition, 532.] Justinian often allowed
the Blues a free hand in dealing with their adversaries, but, on this
occasion, his supporters had gone too far. The police seized many
ring-leaders of both factions, and seven of the chiefs were condemned to
the axe or the cord. While an angry crowd stood round, five of the
rioters were put to death, but when the last two, a Blue and a Green,
were being hung, the cord slipped twice, owing to the nervousness of the
executioner, and the criminals fell to the ground. The populace then
burst through the police and hurried off the men to sanctuary in a
neighbouring monastery. This incident proved the beginning of a fearful
uproar. Instead of dispersing, the mobs paraded the place shouting for
the dismissal of the unpopular ministers John and Tribonian. Blues and
Greens united in the cry, the whole city poured out into the streets,
and the police were trampled down and driven away.

Footnote 10:

See page 50.

Frightened by the storm Justinian had the weakness to yield; instead of
sending out the imperial guard to clear the streets, he announced that
he had determined to remove the obnoxious Quaestor and Prefect. This
only made matters worse; after burning the official residence of the
prefect of the city, the mob mustered in a most threatening attitude
outside the palace. This constrained the emperor to use force, but he
happened to be very short of soldiery at the moment. All the garrison of
Constantinople save 3500 of the _scholarii_, or imperial guard, had been
sent off to the Persian war. Only two regiments had as yet returned, a
corps of 500 cuirassiers under Belisarius, and a body of Heruli of about
the same number. Five thousand men were hardly enough to cope with an
angry populace of half-a-million souls in the narrow streets of the
capital.

When attacked by the troops the rioters set fire to the city, and an
awful conflagration ensued. The great church of St. Sophia perished
among the flames, together with all the houses and public buildings to
the north and east of it. Blood having once flowed, the mob were set
upon something more than a riot—a revolution was in the air, and the
Greens, who took the lead in the struggle, sought about for their
favourite the patrician Hypatius, the nephew of their old patron
Anastasius I. [Sidenote: Hypatius proclaimed Emperor.] But Hypatius was
a prudent and cautious person, with no ambition to risk his head; he had
entered the palace and put himself in Justinian’s hands to keep out of
harm’s way. It was not till the emperor, who feared traitors about him,
ordered all senators to retire to their homes that Hypatius fell into
the hands of his own partisans. The unhappy rebel in spite of himself
was at once hurried off to the Hippodrome, placed on the imperial seat,
and crowned with a diadem extemporised from his wife’s gold necklace.

It was in vain that Justinian issued from the palace next day, and
proclaimed an amnesty; he was chased back with insulting cries.
[Sidenote: The Counsel of Theodora.] Losing heart he summoned the chief
of his courtiers and guards, and proposed to them to abandon
Constantinople and take refuge in Asia, as Zeno had done in a similar
time of trouble. John of Cappadocia and many of the ministers advised
him to fly; but the intrepid Theodora stepped forward to save her
husband from destruction. ‘It has been said,’ she cried, ‘that the voice
of a woman should not be heard among the councils of men. But those
whose interests are most concerned have the best right to speak. To
death the inevitable we must all submit, but to survive dignity and
honour, to descend from empire to exile, to such shame there is no
compulsion. Never shall the day come when I put off this purple robe and
am no more hailed as sovereign lady. If you wish to protract your life,
O Emperor, flight is easy; there are your ships and there is the sea.
But consider whether, if you escape to exile, you will not wish every
day that you were dead. As for me, I hold with the ancient saying that
the imperial purple is a glorious shroud.’

Spurred on by the fiery words of his wife Justinian tried the fortune of
war once more. A few reinforcements had arrived; with these, and the
harassed troops who had already faced five days’ street-fighting,
Belisarius once more sallied forth from the palace. The rebels were off
their guard, for a false rumour had got about that Justinian was already
fled. At this moment the mob was crowding the Hippodrome and saluting
their creature with shouts of _Hypatie Auguste tu vincas_. [Sidenote:
Suppression of the Sedition.] After a vain attempt to break in by the
imperial staircase, Belisarius assaulted the main side gate of the
circus, and burst in at a point where the conflagration had three days
before made a breach in the wall. Penned into the great amphitheatre,
and taken by surprise, the rebels made a weak resistance. Soon they
turned to fly, but all the issues were choked, and the victims of the
sword of Belisarius were numbered by the ten thousand. Hypatius and his
brother were caught alive and brought to Justinian, who ordered them to
be beheaded. The next day he heard of all the facts concerning the
unwillingness of Hypatius, and gave his body honourable burial. It was
many years before the Blues and Greens ever vexed him by another riot.
The awful carnage in the circus kept the city quiet for a whole
generation.

Justinian was now free from trouble at home and abroad, and turned to
those ambitious schemes of foreign policy which were to occupy the rest
of his reign. The dream of his heart was to reunite the Roman Empire, by
bringing once more under his sceptre all those western provinces which
were occupied by Teutonic kings, and paid only the shadow of homage to
the imperial name. A few years before, the dream would have seemed
fantastically overweening, but of late matters had been growing more and
more promising. Justinian was, compared with his four predecessors,
young and vigorous; he had an immense store of treasure, all the hoard
of Anastasius, a large and efficient army, and at least one general of
first-rate ability. His throne was firmly rooted; his eastern frontier
secure; nothing now prevented him from undertaking wars of aggression.

Meanwhile, everything in the West favoured his projects. In Italy the
great Theodoric was dead, and, since his death, the Ostrogothic kingdom
had been faring ill. The old hero had left his realm to his grandson
Athalaric, a boy of eight years old, under the guardianship of his
mother Amalaswintha, the widow of Eutharic. The daughter of Theodoric
was a clever and masterful woman, but she had a difficult task in
teaching the turbulent Ostrogoths to obey a female regent. [Sidenote:
Minority of Athalaric, 526-34.] They murmured at all her doings, and
most especially at her taste for Roman and Greek letters, and her
frequent promotions of Roman officials. She strove to bring up her son,
it was said, more as an Italian than a Goth, placing him under Roman
tutors and keeping him tight to the desk, in spite of the saying of
Theodoric that ‘he who has trembled before the pedagogue’s rod will not
face the spear willingly.’ It was as much as Amalaswintha could do to
keep the Goths in their obedience while her son was young, but when he
had attained the age of twelve or thirteen, and began to show some will
of his own, the murmurs of the people grew louder. At last, when he had
one day been chastised by his mother, he burst into the guard-room, and
bade his subjects take note how a king of the Goths was treated worse
than a slave. This scene produced a tumult, and the chiefs of the Goths
took the education of the boy out of his mother’s hands, though they
left her the regency. Handed over to unsuitable companions Athalaric
grew idle, drunken, and reckless; he was of a weakly habit of body, and,
before he reached manhood, had developed the symptoms of consumption.
Meanwhile, Amalaswintha was contending for power with the chiefs of the
Goths, and had earned much unpopularity by putting to death, without
form of trial, the three heads of the party which opposed her. So
uncertain was her position that she sent secretly to Justinian in 533 to
beg him to give her refuge at Dyrrhachium if she should be forced to
fly. The emperor soon grasped the position—a divided people, an
unpopular regent, a boy-king sinking into his grave invited him to
active interference in Italy.

In Africa the condition of affairs was equally tempting. [Sidenote:
Hilderic’s Reign, 523-30.] We have already mentioned how, on the death
of king Thrasamund, the Vandal throne had fallen to his kinsman
Hilderic, the son of king Hunneric and the Roman princess, Eudocia.
Hilderic was elderly, unversed in affairs of state, and a conscientious
Catholic, inheriting from his Roman mother that orthodoxy which his
Arian subjects detested. He had but a short reign of seven years, but in
it he succeeded in alienating the affections of the Vandals in every
way. He incurred great odium for putting to death his predecessor’s
widow Amalafrida, the sister of the great Theodoric, because he found
her conspiring against him. His wars were uniformly unsuccessful, the
Moors of Atlas cut to pieces a whole army, and pushed their incursions
close to the gates of Carthage. Probably his open confession of
Catholicism, and promotion of Catholics to high office, were even
greater sources of wrath. In 530 his cousin Geilamir organised a
conspiracy against him, overthrew him with ease, and plunged him into a
dungeon. Justinian professed great indignation at this dethroning of an
orthodox and friendly sovereign, and resolved to make use of it as a
grievance against the new king of the Vandals. Just before the ‘Nika’
sedition broke out he had sent an embassy to Carthage to bid Geilamir
replace his cousin on the throne, and be contented with the place of
regent. The usurper answered rudely enough: ‘King Geilamir wishes to
point out to king Justinian that it is a good thing for rulers to mind
their own business.’[11] He trusted to the remoteness of his situation
and the domestic troubles of Justinian, and little thought that he was
drawing down the storm on his head.

Footnote 11:

There was deliberate insult in the use of the word βασιλεύς for both
monarchs, as if they were equal and bore the same title.

For Justinian had fully made up his mind to begin his attack on the West
by subduing the Vandals. All things were in his favour, notably the
facts that an Arian king was once more making life miserable to the
African Catholics, and that Vandal and Ostrogoth had been completely
estranged by the murder of Amalafrida nine years before. Amalaswintha
favoured rather than discouraged the emperor’s attack on her nearest
Teutonic neighbours. There was yet one more piece of good fortune: king
Geilamir had just sent off the flower of the Vandal troops to an
expedition against Sardinia.

Encouraged by these considerations, Justinian prepared an army for the
invasion of Africa in the summer of 533, though some of his ministers,
and above all the financier, John of Cappadocia, warned him against
‘attacking the ends of the earth, from which a message would hardly
reach Byzantium in a year,’ a ridiculous plea to any one who remembered
the ancient organisation of the empire. The army was not very large: it
consisted of 10,000 foot and 5000 horse, half regular troops from the
Asiatic provinces, half Hunnish and Herulian auxiliaries. [Sidenote:
Belisarius invades Africa, 533.] But its commander, Belisarius, was a
host in himself, and confidence in him buoyed up many who would
otherwise have despaired. The voyage was protracted by contrary winds to
the unprecedented length of eighty days, but at last the armament cast
anchor at Caput Vada, on the cape which faces Sicily, in the beginning
of September. The Vandals were caught wholly unprepared: their king was
absent in Numidia, their best troops were in Sardinia, their fleet had
not been even launched. A blind confidence in their remoteness from
Constantinople had led them to despise all Justinian’s threats, and no
preparation whatever had been made against an invasion. Geilamir hurried
down to the coast, put his prisoner Hilderic to death, and summoned in
his warriors from every side; but it was eleven days before he mustered
in sufficient force to attack the Romans, and meanwhile Belisarius had
advanced unopposed to within ten miles of the gates of Carthage. The
provincials received him everywhere with joy; for he proclaimed that he
came to deliver them from Arian oppression, and kept his soldiery in
such good order that not a field or a cottage was plundered.

Belisarius had reached the posting-station of Ad Decimum, and was
advancing cautiously with strong corps of observation securing his flank
and front, when suddenly he was assailed by the whole force of the
Vandals, who outnumbered him in at least the proportion of two to one.
He was beset on three sides at once; one corps of Vandals under the
king’s brother Ammatas issued from Carthage to attack him in front;
another body beset his left flank; the main army under Geilamir himself
assailed the rear of his long column of march. But the Vandals
mismanaged their tactics, and failed to combine the three attacks. First
the troops from Carthage came out, and were beaten off with the loss of
their leader; then the turning corps was driven back by the Hunnish
cavalry, whom Belisarius had kept lying out on his flank. When the main
Vandal army came up there was more serious fighting with the centre and
rear of the Roman column. Geilamir furiously burst through the line of
march, and cleft the Roman army in twain, but he did not know how to use
his advantage. Instead of improving his first success, he halted his
troops, and allowed Belisarius to rally and re-form his men. It is said
that he was so transported with grief at finding the corpse of his
brother, who had fallen in the earlier engagement, that he gave no more
orders, and cast himself weeping on the ground. Presently, the Romans
were in good array again; their victorious vanguard had returned to aid
the centre, and they fell once more, as the evening closed in, on the
stationary masses of the Vandals. The conquerors of Africa must have
forgotten their ancient valour, for, after a very paltry resistance,
they turned and fled westward under cover of the night.

Carthage at once threw open its gates, and Belisarius dined next day in
the royal palace on the meal that had been prepared for the Vandal king.
[Sidenote: Carthage taken.] Geilamir reaped now the reward for the
hundred years of persecution to which his forefathers had subjected the
Africans. Every town that was not garrisoned opened its gates to the
Romans, and the provincials hastened to place everything they possessed
at the disposal of Belisarius. His entry into Carthage was like the
triumph of a home-coming king, and the order and discipline of his
troops was so great that none even of the Vandal and Arian citizens
suffered loss.

Geilamir meanwhile retired into the Numidian hills, with an army that
had suffered more loss of _morale_ than loss of numbers. He was soon
joined by the troops whom he had sent to Sardinia; having subdued that
island they returned, and raised his forces to nearly 50,000 men.
Finding that Belisarius was repairing the walls of Carthage before
marching out to finish the campaign, Geilamir resolved to take the
offensive himself. Descending from the hills he marched on Carthage, and
met the Roman army at Tricameron, twenty miles westward of the city.

Here Belisarius won a pitched battle after a struggle far more severe
than that he had gone through at Ad Decimum. Thrice the Romans were
beaten back, but their gallant leader rallied them, and at last his
cuirassiers burst through the Vandal ranks and slew Tzazo, the king’s
brother. Geilamir turned to fly, though his men fought on until their
retreat was cut off. Almost the whole Vandal race perished in this fight
and the bloody pursuit which followed. Geilamir himself took refuge in
the heights of Mount Atlas among the Moors, and dwelt among them
miserably enough for a few months.

[Sidenote: End of the Vandal kingdom.] Discovering that he could not
raise a third army, and that life was unendurable among the filthy
barbarians, he determined to surrender, and yielded himself and his
family to Belisarius, on the assurance that he should receive honourable
treatment, in spite of the fact that he had murdered the emperor’s
friend Hilderic.

In the spring of 534 Belisarius was able to return in triumph to
Constantinople, bringing with him the king and most of the surviving
Vandals as captives. His ships were loaded with all the plunder of the
palace of Carthage, the trophies of a century of successful pirate
raids, including the plate and ornaments which Gaiseric had carried off
from Rome in 455. It is said that the emperor recognised among this
store the seven-branched candlestick and golden vessels of the temple of
Jerusalem, which Titus Caesar had taken to Rome when he conquered Judea
four hundred years back. He sent them to be placed in the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre, in the Holy City where they had been first consecrated.
Belisarius was allowed the honours of an ancient Roman triumph, a
privilege denied to a subject for four centuries; he entered the
Hippodrome in state, and laid his prisoners and his booty at Justinian’s
feet, while senate and people saluted him as the new Scipio Africanus, a
title which he had fairly earned. Next year he was promoted to the
consulship, and given every honour that the emperor could devise. His
captive, king Geilamir, was kindly treated, and presented with a great
estate in Phrygia, where he and his family long dwelt in ease.

The year of the triumph of Belisarius saw new opportunities arising for
him and for his master. In the autumn of 534 died the sickly and
debauched youth who held the title of king of the Ostrogoths; he had not
yet attained his eighteenth birthday. His mother, Amalaswintha, was now
left face to face with the wild Goths, stripped of the protection of the
royal name, and exposed to the enmity of the families of the chiefs whom
she had executed. In despair of inducing the Goths to endure the rule of
a queen-regnant, she determined to choose a colleague, and confer on him
the title of king. Theodoric’s next male heir after Athalaric was a
certain Theodahat, the son of his sister Amalaberga. [Sidenote:
Amalaswintha and Theodahat.] This prince had been excluded by his uncle
from all affairs of state for his notorious cowardice, covetousness, and
duplicity. He was a Romanised Teuton of the worst type, and, as was
truly said, _Vilis Gothus imitatur Romanum_; he had pronounced literary
tastes, called himself a Platonic philosopher, and showed some care for
the arts, but was wholly mean and corrupt. Amalaswintha thought to
presume on the cowardice of her cousin, and to force him to become her
tool; she forgot that even a coward may be ambitious. At the queen’s
behest the assembly of the warriors of Italy hailed Theodahat and
Amalaswintha joint rulers of the Ostrogoths. But in less than six months
the intriguing king had suborned his partisans to seize and imprison his
unfortunate cousin. She was cast into a castle on the lake of Bolsena,
and shortly afterwards murdered, with Theodahat’s connivance, by some of
the kinsfolk of the nobles whom she executed five years before. (May,
535.)

Justinian had now an even better _casus belli_ in Italy than he had
possessed in Africa. His ally had been dethroned and murdered, and her
crown was possessed by a creature far inferior to Geilamir, who was at
least a warrior if an unfortunate one. The miserable Theodahat grovelled
with fear when he received the angry ultimatum of Justinian. He even
made secret proposals to the emperor’s ambassadors to the effect that he
would abandon his crown and betray his people, if only he were granted
his life and a suitable maintenance. When even this did not avail, he
took to consulting soothsayers and magicians. We are told that a Jewish
seer bade him pen up thirty pigs—to represent unclean Gentiles, we must
suppose—in three sties, calling ten ‘Goths,’ ten ‘Italians,’ and ten
‘Imperialists.’ He was to leave them ten days without food or water, and
then take augury from their condition. When Theodahat looked in at the
appointed hour, he found all the ‘Goth’ pigs dead save two, and half of
the ‘Italians,’ but the ‘Imperialists,’ though gaunt and wasted, were
all, or almost all, alive. This the Jew told the downcast king would
portend a war in which the Gothic race was to be well-nigh exterminated,
and the Italians to be terribly cut down, while the Imperial armies
would conquer after much toil and privation!

While Theodahat was vainly busy with his soothsayers, the Roman armies
had already attacked the Gothic province in Dalmatia. The wretched
usurper had to face war, whether he willed it or no. Justinian had
determined, as was but natural, to intrust the Ostrogothic war to the
conqueror of Africa, and, in the autumn of the year of his consulship,
Belisarius sailed for the West with a small army of 7500 men, of whom
3000 were Isaurians, and the rest equally divided between Roman regulars
and Hunnish and Herule auxiliaries. It was a small force with which to
attack a king who commanded the swords of a hundred thousand gallant
Germans, but reinforcements were to follow, and Theodahat’s cowardice
and incapacity were well known.

In September 535 Belisarius fell on Sicily; here as in Africa the
provincials hastened to throw open the gates of their cities to the
invader. There were few Goths in Sicily; they garrisoned Palermo, but
Belisarius took the place by a sudden assault, after lying only a few
days before its walls. [Sidenote: Belisarius conquers Sicily, 535.] By
the approach of winter the whole island was in his hands. He would have
hastened on to attack Italy, but for a mutiny which broke out in Africa
and compelled him to cross the sea and spend some time in the
neighbourhood of Carthage.

Meanwhile the poor craven Theodahat did nothing but besiege the ears of
Justinian with more fruitless proposals for peace. He was as unprepared
as ever for resistance when Belisarius crossed over the straits of
Messina, in April 536, and overran Bruttium and Lucania. So greatly were
the Goths of the south discouraged by his helplessness, that Ebermund,
the Count of Lucania, surrendered to Belisarius, and entered the
imperial service with all his followers. It was not till he had pushed
on to Naples that Belisarius met with any opposition; all through
southern Italy the city gates swung open the moment that he touched them
with his spear. The old Greek city of Naples, however, held by a strong
Gothic garrison, made a very obstinate defence, and held out for many
weeks, awaiting the arrival of a relieving army. King Theodahat had
gathered a great army at Rome, but the coward dared not close, and kept
50,000 men idle, while 7000 Romans were beleaguering Naples. At last the
city fell, a party of Isaurian soldiers having found their way up a
disused aqueduct, and stormed one of the gates from within. The news of
the fall of Naples raised the wrath of the Goths against their wretched
king to boiling point. At a great folk-moot at Regeta in the Pomptine
Marshes the army solemnly deposed Theodahat, and, as no male Amal was
left, raised on the shield Witiges, an elderly warrior of respectable
character, who had won credit in the old wars of Theodoric. The
dethroned king fled away to seek refuge at Ravenna, but a private enemy
pursued him and cut his throat ‘like a sheep’ long ere he had reached
the City of the Marshes.

The choice of Witiges was a fearful error on the part of the Goths; they
had mistaken respectability for talent, and paid the penalty in seeing
the stupid veteran wreck all their hopes. The first blunder on the part
of the new king was to draw his army northward on the news that the
Franks were crossing the Alps to ravage the valley of Po. He left only
4000 men in Rome, and marched on Ravenna with all the rest. The moment
that he was departed Belisarius moved northward to attack the imperial
city. It fell into his hands without a blow; the Gothic garrison felt
that they were left deserted among a populace ready to betray them to
the enemy; indeed Pope Silverius and the Senate had already written to
pray Belisarius to deliver them. [Sidenote: Belisarius takes Rome, 536.]
When the Imperialists appeared before the southern gate, the Goths fled
out of the northern, in a panic that was inexcusable, for they were
well-nigh as numerous as the 5000 men that Belisarius brought with him.
(December 9, 536.)

Belisarius was now master of Rome, but he knew that his hold on it was
precarious. Witiges had settled matters with the Franks by paying them
130,000 gold solidi and ceding his Transalpine dominions in Provence.
After marrying Mataswintha, the sister of the late king Athalaric, and
the last scion of the house of the Amals, he resolved to return and
deliver Rome. All north Italy had sent him its Gothic warriors, and
100,000 men marched under his banner to besiege Rome in the spring of
537.

The defence of Rome is the greatest of all the titles to glory that
Belisarius won. The walls of Aurelian were strong, but there were only
5000 men to defend their vast circuit, and within was an unruly mass of
cowardly citizens, liable to all sorts of panic fears—mouths to be fed
without hands to strike, for hardly a Roman took arms to aid the
imperial troops. In the middle of March the Goths appeared before the
walls, and pitched seven camps opposite the northern and eastern gates
of the city. They then cut all the aqueducts which supplied Rome with
water, and commenced the construction of siege-engines for a great
assault. With the want of thoroughness that he always displayed, king
Witiges made no adequate preparation for blockading the southern side of
the city, or for stopping its communications with Ostia and Naples. All
through the siege convoys of provisions and reinforcements were
frequently able to creep into Rome by night, eluding the outposts which
were all that Witiges placed on the side of the Tiber and the Campagna.

A fortnight after arriving in front of the walls Witiges had his engines
ready, and delivered his great assault on the northern and north-eastern
fronts of the city. Everywhere the attack failed; the towers and rams
which the Goths had drawn forward never reached the walls; the oxen
which drew them were shot down before they neared the ditch. But
thousands of wild warriors with scaling-ladders delivered assaults
against innumerable portions of the enceinte. In most cases they failed
entirely; the walls of Aurelian were too strong; but at two points, at
opposite ends of the city, they nearly won success. At the Praenestine
gate a battering-ram broke in the outer bulwarks, and a swarm of Goths
was only held back by an inner entrenchment till the reinforcements of
Belisarius arrived. But greater danger still was encountered at the
Mausoleum of Hadrian (castle of St. Angelo), just beyond the Ælian
Bridge. [Sidenote: Belisarius defends Rome, 536-37.] There the Goths
filled the ditch, overwhelmed the defenders with arrows, and were
fitting their ladders to the embrasures, when they were at last checked
by a strange expedient. The walls of the mausoleum were lined with
dozens of splendid statues, some of them figures of emperors, others the
ancient spoils of Greece. At the supreme moment the desperate garrison
flung these colossal figures on the besiegers below, and drove them off
by the hail of marble fragments.

At the end of the day Belisarius was everywhere successful; 20,000 Goths
had fallen, and the self-confidence of Witiges was so broken that he
never again tried a general assault. He relied instead on a blockade,
but, though he inflicted great misery on the garrison, and still more on
the populace, he never closed the roads or the river sufficiently to
exclude occasional convoys of provisions. He did not prevent Belisarius
from transferring to Campania the greater part of the women, aged men,
and slaves in the city. Meanwhile the summer drew on, and the Gothic
hosts began to suffer from malaria, and from the filthy state of the
crowded camps. On the other hand, Belisarius at last began to receive
reinforcements from Constantinople, and was able to make sallies, in
which his horsemen handled the Gothic outposts very roughly.

When both assault and blockade had been proved ineffectual, and when an
attempt to creep into the city through the empty aqueducts had been
foiled, Witiges would probably have done well to raise the siege, and
throw on Belisarius, whose army was still very small, the burden of
taking the offensive. Instead of doing this he lay obstinately in his
camp for a year and nine days, watching his army melt away under the
scourge of pestilence, and allowing the numbers and boldness of the
Imperialists to increase. At last Belisarius had been so strongly
reinforced that he was able, while still holding Rome, to put a second
force in the field. This he sent, under an officer named John the
Bloody, through the Sabine hills to make a dash into Picenum and menace
Ravenna. [Sidenote: Siege of Rome raised, 538.] John, a very able
officer, seized the important town of Rimini, only thirty-three miles
from Ravenna, in February 538. The news that his capital was being
threatened, and that the enemy was in his rear, at last forced the
sluggish king of the Goths to move. He set his seven camps on fire, and
retired up the Flaminian Way into Picenum. Thus the prudence and valour
of Belisarius were at last vindicated, and the Romans, after a siege of
374 days, could once more breathe freely.

Middle Italy was now lost to the Goths, and the scene of operations
shifted into Picenum, north Etruria, and the valley of the Po, where the
war was to endure for two years more (538-40). It resolved itself into a
struggle for the coast towns between Ravenna and Ancona, and for the
command of the passes of the Apennines. One half of the Roman army was
concentrated at Rimini and Ancona, while Belisarius himself with the
other was occupied in clearing the Gothic garrisons out of northern
Etruria. Two Gothic armies at Ravenna and Auximum penned the northern
Roman force into the narrow sea-coast plain, and at last laid siege to
both Rimini and Ancona. Here Witiges seemed for once likely to succeed,
but, when the garrisons had been brought to the last extremity, they
were relieved by new forces from Constantinople commanded by the eunuch
Narses the _praepositus sacri cubiculi_.

Thrown on the defensive Witiges drew back to Ravenna, and allowed the
Romans to overrun the province of Æmilia, and even to cross the Po, and
raise an insurrection in the great city of Milan. There now followed a
long pause: Belisarius found that Narses was set on asserting an
independent authority over the newly-arrived army, and had to send to
the emperor to beg him to recall the eunuch. Meanwhile he laid siege to
the last two Gothic fortresses south of Ravenna, the towns of Fiesole in
Etruria and Auximum (Osimo) in Picenum. Both cities made a gallant
resistance, and while Belisarius was at a standstill Uraias, the warlike
nephew of Witiges, stormed and sacked Milan, and restored the Gothic
dominion north of the Po (539). Meanwhile the king took the only wise
step which occurred to him during the whole war: he sent ambassadors to
the East to inform Chosroes, king of Persia, that well-nigh the whole
Roman army was occupied in Italy, and that he might overrun Syria and
Mesopotamia with ease. Taken two years earlier, this step might have
saved the Goths, but now it was too late: Chosroes moved, but moved only
in time to hear that Witiges was dethroned and a captive.

After holding out seven months, Auximum surrendered to Belisarius at
mid-winter, 539-40. Witiges had done nothing to save the gallant
garrison, alleging that a Frankish raid into the valley of the Po
prevented him from moving. The excuse was true but insufficient, for
when the Franks of Theudebert, thinned by disease, turned home again,
the Gothic king did not stir any the more.

At last, in the spring of 540, Narses had been recalled, and Belisarius
had full possession of all Picenum and Etruria, and could safely advance
on Ravenna. After posting a covering force to ward off any attempt to
relieve the town by the Goths of northern Italy, he drew his main army
round the great fortress in the marshland, the chosen home of Theodoric,
the storehouse of the hoarded wealth of the Amals. The defence was weak,
far weaker than that of the smaller stronghold of Auximum. Witiges
seemed to have the power of communicating his sloth and hesitation to
all who came near him. He listened first to offers from Theudebert the
Frank, then to proposals for surrender sent in by Belisarius. At last he
determined to close with the terms offered by Justinian, that he should
resign all Italy south of the Po, give up half the royal hoard, and
reign in the Transpadane as the emperor’s vassal. The terms were not
hard, for Justinian had just been attacked by Persia, and wished to end
his Italian war at once. It would have been well for all parties if they
had been carried out; but two wills intervened: the Gothic nobles were
wildly indignant at their master’s cowardice: Belisarius, looking at his
military advantages, thought the terms too liberal. [Sidenote: Witiges
surrenders Ravenna, 540.] From this discontent came an extraordinary
result: the Teutonic chiefs boldly proposed to the imperial general that
he should reign over them,—whether as king of the Goths or Roman Caesar
they cared not,—but their swords should be his, and the craven Witiges
should be cast away, if he would take them as his vassals and administer
Italy. Belisarius temporised, and the simple Goths, believing that no
man could resist such an offer, threw open the gates. But the great
general was loyal to the core: instead of proclaiming himself emperor,
he took over the town in Justinian’s name, bade the Gothic warriors
disperse each to his own home, and shipped all the golden stores of
Ravenna off to Constantinople.

It seemed as if the monarchy of the Goths was ended: nothing remained to
them save Pavia, Verona, and a few more north Italian cities. Justinian
resolved to recall Belisarius before these places should fall; meaner
generals would suffice to take them. Two motives stirred the emperor:
his great captain was wanted on the eastern frontier to keep back the
advancing Persian; but suspicion also played its part: Justinian was not
too well pleased that Belisarius had overruled his project of making
peace with Witiges, and he had been somewhat frightened by the Gothic
proposal to make Belisarius emperor. It had been declined, it is true,
but might not the seeds of disloyalty have sunk into the heart of the
general? It would be safer to bring him away from the temptation.

So, by the imperial mandate, Belisarius sailed for the Bosphorus, taking
with him the captive Witiges, and all the gold and gems of the great
hoard of the Amals. He was denied a formal triumph such as he had won by
his Vandal victory, but none the less his reception was magnificent. His
personal body-guard of 7000 chosen men had followed him to the capital,
and, as they passed through the streets, the populace exclaimed ‘the
household of one man has destroyed the kingdom of the Goths.’ Happy
would it have been for the great general if he had died at the moment of
this his grandest success. He was reserved for lesser wars and years of
chequered fortune (540).

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CHAPTER VI

JUSTINIAN—(_continued_)

540-565 A.D.

Justinian as builder—His ruinous financial policy—His second Persian
war—Chosroes takes Antioch, 540—Campaigns of Belisarius and
Chosroes—The Great Plague of 542—Peace with Persia—Baduila restores
the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy—His campaign against Belisarius—Two
sieges of Rome—Success and greatness of Baduila—Narses invades
Italy—Baduila slain at Taginae, 552—End of the Ostrogothic
kingdom—Narses defeats the Franks—Justinian attacks Southern
Spain—Third Persian War, 549-55—Justinian as Theologian—Belisarius
defeats the Huns—Later years of Justinian—His legal reforms.

The year 540 was the last of Justinian’s years of unbroken good fortune.
For the rest of his long life he was to experience many vicissitudes,
and see some of his dearest schemes frustrated, though, on the whole,
the dogged perseverance which was his most notable characteristic
brought him safely through to the end.

The first difficulty which was destined to trouble him, in the latter
half of his reign, was a financial one. He had now come to the end of
the hoarded wealth of Anastasius; the military budget of his increased
empire required more money, for Africa and Italy did not pay their way,
and now a new Persian war was upon his hands. [Sidenote: Justinian as
builder.] In addition, his magnificent court and his insatiable thirst
for building called for huge sums year after year. It is impossible to
exaggerate Justinian’s expenditure on bricks and mortar: not only did he
rebuild in his capital, on a more magnificent scale, all the public
edifices that had been burnt in the ‘Nika’ riot, but he filled every
corner of his empire, from newly-conquered Ravenna to the Armenian
frontier, with splendid forts, churches, monasteries, hospitals, and
aqueducts. Whenever a Byzantine ruin is found in the wilds of Syria or
Asia Minor it turns out, in one case out of every two, to be of
Justinian’s date. In the Balkan peninsula alone we learn to our surprise
that he erected more than 300 forts and castles to defend the line of
the Danube and the Haemus, the side of the empire which had been found
most open to attacks of the barbarian during the last century. The
building of his enormous cathedral of St. Sophia alone cost several
millions, an expenditure whose magnificent result quite justifies
itself, but one which must have seemed heartrending to the financiers
who had to find the money at a moment when the emperor was involved in
two desperate wars.

Justinian poured forth his treasures with unstinting hand in the arts
both of war and of peace. But to replenish his treasury—that jar of the
Danaides—he had to impose a crushing taxation on the empire. His finance
minister, John of Cappadocia, was the most unscrupulous of men, one who
never shrank from plying extortion of every kind upon the wretched
tax-payers: as long as he kept the exchequer full Justinian winked at
his iniquitous and often illegal proceedings. It was only when he
chanced to quarrel with the empress Theodora that John was finally
disgraced. [Sidenote: Ruinous finance of Justinian.] His successors were
less capable, but no less extortionate: ere ten years had passed the
Africans and Italians, groaning under the yoke of the Greek
_Logothetes_, were cursing their stars that ever they had aided
Belisarius to drive out the Arian Goth and Vandal. As Justinian’s reign
went on the state of matters grew worse and worse; for a crushing
taxation tends to drain the resources of the land, and at last renders
it unable to bear even a burden that would have once been light.
Historians recapitulate twenty new taxes that Justinian laid upon the
empire, yet at the end of his reign they were bringing in far less than
the old and simpler imposts of Anastasius and Justin had produced.

This ruinous draining of the vital power of the empire only began to be
seriously felt after 540, when, for the first time, Justinian was
compelled to wage war at once in East and West, and yet refused to
slacken from his building. The Gothic war—contrary to all probability
and expectation—was still destined to run on for thirteen years more;
the Persian lasted for sixteen, and, when they were over, the emperor
and the empire alike were but the shadow of their former selves: they
were unconquered, but drained of all their strength and marrow.

[Illustration:

THE PERSO-ROMAN FRONTIER UNDER JUSTINIAN.
]

We have already mentioned that the young king Chosroes of Persia,
stirred up by the embassy of Witiges, and dreading lest the power which
had subdued Carthage and Rome should ere long stretch out its hand to
Ctesiphon, had found a _casus belli_, and crossed the Mesopotamian
frontier. Some blood-feuds between Arab hordes respectively subject to
Persia and Constantinople, and a dispute about the suzerainty of some
tribes in the Armenian highlands formed a good enough excuse for
renewing the war at a moment when Justinian’s best general and 50,000 of
the flower of his troops were absent in Italy and Africa.

[Sidenote: Second Persian war, 540-545.] In the spring of 540, at the
very moment when Belisarius was reducing Ravenna, Chosroes marched up
the Euphrates, leaving the frontier fortresses of Daras and Edessa on
his flank, and launched a sudden attack on north Syria. He had been
expected not there but in Mesopotamia, and all preparations for defence
were out of gear. Before any resistance was organised Chosroes had
crossed the Euphrates, sacked Beroea, and ransomed Hierapolis for 2000.
lbs. of gold. But it was at Antioch, the third city of the Roman Empire,
and the seat of the Praetorian Prefect of the East that the Persian
monarch was aiming. It was more than two centuries and a half since the
city of the Orontes had seen a foreign foe, and its walls were old and
dilapidated. A garrison of 6000 men was thrown in, and the Blues and
Greens of the city armed themselves to guard the ramparts. [Sidenote:
Sack of Antioch, 540.] But there was no Roman army in the field to
protect the city from the approach of the Persian: Buzes, the general of
the East, refused to risk his small army in a general engagement, and
had retired no one knew whither. The siege of Antioch was short, for the
defence was ill-managed: the garrison cut its way out when the walls
were forced, but the town, with all its wealth, and a great number of
its inhabitants who had not found time to fly, became the prize of
Chosroes. The Persian plundered the churches, burnt the private houses,
and drove away a herd of captives, whom he took to his home, and
established in a new city near Ctesiphon, which he called
Chosroantiocheia.

The great king then ransomed the neighbouring cities of Chalcis and
Apamea, and recrossed the Euphrates into Mesopotamia. Here, where strong
and well-armed fortresses blocked his way, Chosroes found that he could
effect nothing; after looking at Edessa he found it too strong, and made
his way to Daras. To this town he laid siege, but was beaten off without
much difficulty, and then returned home for the winter (540).

The Persians were never destined to win again such successes as had
fallen to them in this the first year of the war. By the next spring
Justinian had reinforced the eastern frontier with all his disposable
troops, and the mighty Belisarius himself had arrived to take command of
the army of Mesopotamia. But it was not fated that the great king and
the great captain should ever measure themselves against each other.
Hearing that the frontier to the south was now well guarded, the Persian
had resolved to make a dash at a new point of the Roman line of defence.
While expected on the Euphrates he quietly marched north through the
Median and Iberian mountains, crossed many obscure passes, and appeared
on the Black Sea coast by the river Phasis. The Romans here held the
shore by their great castle of Petra, while the Lazi, the tribes of
inland Colchis, were Roman vassals. Chosroes overran the land,
constrained the Lazi to do him homage, and, after a short siege, took
Petra.

Meanwhile Belisarius, on finding the Persian invasion of Mesopotamia
delayed, had crossed the frontier in the far south, beaten a small
Persian force in the field, and ravaged Assyria from end to end, though
he could not take the great fortress of Nisibis. On hearing of this raid
Chosroes returned from Colchis with his main army, whereupon Belisarius
retired behind the ramparts of Daras. The campaign had not been
eventful, but the balance of gain lay on the side of the Persians, whose
frontier now touched the Black Sea.

Nor was the next year (542) destined to see any decisive fighting.
Belisarius had concentrated his army at Europus on the Euphrates and
waited to be attacked, but save one raid no attack came, though Chosroes
had brought the full force of his empire up to Nisibis. The Roman
chronicles ascribe his sluggishness to a fear of the reputation of
Belisarius, but another cause seems to have been more operative. The
great plague of 542 had just broken out in Persia, and its ravages were
probably the real cause of the retreat and disbanding of the army of
Chosroes, much as in 1348 the ‘black death’ caused English and French to
drop for a time their mutual hostilities.

This awful scourge merits a word of notice. It broke out in Egypt early
in the year, and spread like wildfire over Syria, the lands of the
Euphrates valley, and Asia Minor, thence making its way to
Constantinople and the West. It is impossible to make out its exact
nature, but we know that it was accompanied by ulcers, and by a horrible
swelling of the groin. [Sidenote: The Great Plague of 542.] Few whom it
struck down ever recovered, but of these few was Justinian himself, who
rose from his bed when the rumour of his death was already abroad and a
fight for the succession imminent. At Constantinople the plague raged
with such violence that 5000, and even 10,000 persons are said to have
died in a single day. The historian Procopius marvelled at its universal
spread. ‘A man might climb to the top of a hill, and it was there, or
retire to the depths of a cavern, but it was there also. It took no note
of north or south, Greek or Persian, washed or unwashed, winter or
summer: in all alike it was deadly.’ This awful scourge, which is
thought to have carried off a third of the population of the empire, was
not the least of the causes of that general decay which is found in the
later years of Justinian’s reign. It swept away tax-payers, brought
commerce to a standstill, and seems to have left the emperor himself an
old man before his time.

The plague then sufficiently accounts for the stagnation of the war in
542. Perhaps we may also allow something for the personal troubles of
Belisarius, who, in the previous winter, had fallen on evil times. He
had detected his intriguing wife Antonina in unfaithfulness, and, for
throwing her into a dungeon, and kidnapping her paramour, had incurred
the wrath of Theodora, which seriously handicapped him in the rest of
his career, so great was her influence with her imperial spouse. He was
no longer supported from Constantinople as he had once been, and was at
last compelled to disarm Theodora’s displeasure by liberating his wife.
The imperial ill-humour may, perhaps, have stinted his resources during
the summer that followed his domestic misfortune.

In 543, the plague having somewhat abated, Chosroes once more assumed
the offensive, and moved towards Roman Armenia, following the valley of
the upper Euphrates; but a fresh outbreak of pestilence forced him to
turn back, and the Romans were consequently enabled to invade
Persarmenia. Belisarius was not with them, and they suffered a serious
defeat from an inferior force, and returned with discredit to their old
cantonments. The great general had been recalled with ignominy to
Constantinople. Justinian had heard that, when the news of his supposed
death had reached the army of the Euphrates, Belisarius had shown some
signs of arranging for a military _pronunciamento_. He did not make this
his pretext for recall, but dwelt on some unsettled charges of money
lost from the Vandal and Gothic treasures, for which there was some
foundation, for Belisarius, like Marlborough, had an unhappy taste for
hoarding. For some months the general was in disgrace: his body-guard
was dispersed—7000 men was too large a _comitatus_ for even the most
loyal of men—and much of his wealth confiscated, but, on his consenting
to be reconciled to his wife, and to depart for Italy, the empress
Theodora consented to forget her displeasure and allow Justinian to give
Belisarius the charge of a new war (543).

But, before relating the doings of the humbled and heartbroken
Belisarius in the West, we must finish the Persian war. In 544 Chosroes,
freed alike from the plague and from the fear of Belisarius, invaded
Mesopotamia and laid siege to its capital Edessa. After a siege of many
months, in which the gallant garrison beat off every effort both of open
force and of military engineerings,—mounds, mines, rams, and towers
availed nothing against them,—Chosroes withdrew humbled to Nisibis, and
began to negotiate for a truce; it was successfully made on the terms
that the Persians should retain the homage of their conquests in
Colchis, and receive 2000 lbs. of gold on evacuating their other
conquests—which were of small value. On the all-important Mesopotamian
frontier the great fortresses had held good, and there was nothing of
importance for the king to restore. This truce was concluded for five
years, at the end of which the war was renewed (545-550).

Meanwhile all Italy was once more aflame with war. After Ravenna
surrendered, and Witiges was led captive to Byzantium, all the Gothic
fortresses surrendered save two, Verona and Pavia, the only towns of
northern Italy in which the Teutonic element seems to have outnumbered
the Roman. [Sidenote: Hildibad, king of the Goths, 540-41.] The remnant
of the Ostrogoths in Pavia, though they did not number 2000 men, took
the bold step of proclaiming a new king, a warrior named Hildibad, who
was the nephew of Theudis, king of Spain, and who promised his uncle’s
help to his followers. Hildibad’s resistance might have been crushed if
he had been promptly attacked, but the Roman commanders were occupied in
taking over the towns that made no resistance, and in quelling some
disorders among their own men. After Belisarius left, there were five
generals in the peninsula of whom none was trusted with supreme
authority over the rest. Each left to another the task of treading out
the last sparks of Gothic resistance, and gradually Hildibad grew
stronger as the scattered remnants of the army of Witiges made their way
to his camp. When he recovered most of Venetia, the Romans thought him
worthy of notice, but he won a battle near Treviso over the army that
came against him. The Italians were now far from showing the devotion to
the imperial cause that they had once displayed. The Logothetes from
Constantinople were harassing them with new imposts, and most especially
with the preposterous attempt to gather the arrears of taxation for the
years during which the war had raged, a time at which the emperor had,
as a matter of fact, no firm hold on the country.

In 541 Hildibad was murdered by a private enemy ere yet he had succeeded
in freeing all the land north of the Po. But this hero of the darkest
hour, who had saved the Goths from extinction when salvation seemed
impossible, found a still worthier successor. After a few months, during
which a certain Rugian, named Eraric, ruled at Pavia, Hildibad’s nephew,
Baduila, was raised on the shield and saluted as king. Baduila[12] was,
after Theodoric, the greatest of all the Goths of East or West: he
showed a moral elevation, a single-hearted purity of purpose, a
chivalrous courtesy, a justice and piety worthy of the best of the
knights of the Middle Ages. As a warrior his feats were astonishing: he
out-generalled even the great Belisarius himself. The only stain on his
character, during eleven years of rule, are one or two unjustifiable
executions of prisoners of war who had roused his wrath, and caused the
old Gothic fury to blaze forth.

Footnote 12:

This, as his coins show, was his real name, but the Constantinopolitan
historians call him Totila.

From the first moment of his accession Baduila went forth conquering and
to conquer. [Sidenote: Baduila, king of the Goths, 541-53.] The Roman
generals frightened by his first successes were at last induced to
combine: he foiled them at Verona, followed them across the Po, and
inflicted on them at Faenza in Æmilia a decisive defeat in the open
field, though they had 12,000 men to his 5000. Then crossing the
Apennines he won all Tuscany by a second battle on the Mugello near
Florence. By these two victories all Italy north of Rome, save the great
fortresses, fell into his hands: Rome and Ravenna, with Piacenza in the
valley of the Po, and Ancona and Perugia in the centre, were left as
isolated garrisons, rising above the returning tide of Gothic conquest.
All the surviving Goths had rallied under Baduila’s banner, and many of
the imperial mercenaries of Teutonic blood took service with him when
the cities which they garrisoned were subdued. After conquering Tuscany
and Picenum, Baduila left Rome to itself for a space—the memories of its
last siege were too discouraging—and spent the year 542 in overrunning
Campania and Apulia. The Italians kept apathetically quiet, while the
imperial garrisons were few and scattered. In six months south Italy was
once more Gothic up to the gates of Otranto, Reggio, and Naples. The
siege of the last-named town was Baduila’s first exercise in
poliorcetics: the place was very gallantly defended, and only
surrendered when famine had done its work, and after an armament sent
from Constantinople to its relief had been shattered by a storm almost
in sight of the walls, along the rocks of Capri and Sorrento. In spite
of this desperate resistance, it was noted with surprise that Baduila
treated both garrison and people with kindness, sending the one away
unharmed, and preserving the other from plunder. It was at the time of
the fall of Naples that an event occurred which was long remembered as a
token of the justice of Baduila. A Gothic warrior had violated the
daughter of a Calabrian: the king cast the man into bonds and ordered
his death. But many of the Goths besought him not to slay a brave
warrior for such an offence. Baduila heard them out, and replied that
they must choose that day whether they preferred to save one man’s life,
or to save the whole Gothic nation. At the beginning of the war they
would remember how they had great hosts, famous generals, vast treasure,
splendid arms, and all the castles of Italy. But under king Theodahat, a
man who loved gold better than justice, they had so moved God’s anger by
their unrighteous lives that everything had been taken from them. But
the divine grace had given the Goths one more chance of working out
their salvation: God had opened a new account with them, and so must
they do with him, by following justice and righteousness. The ravisher
must die, and as to being a brave warrior, they should remember that the
cruel and unjust were never finally successful in war, for as was a
man’s life, such was his fortune in battle. The officers caught their
sovereign’s meaning and withdrew, and the criminal was duly executed.

In 542, the year of the plague, Justinian had been able to do little for
Italy, but in that which followed, when he heard that Naples had fallen,
he determined to send the newly-pardoned Belisarius back to the scene of
his former glories. Denied the services of his own body-guard the great
general recruited 4000 raw troops in Thrace, and made ready to return.
Baduila meanwhile was besieging Otranto, and clearing Apulia of the
Imperialists.

In the next year the Gothic king and the Roman general came for the
first time into contact; contrary to expectation it was not Belisarius
who had the better of the struggle: broken in spirit, badly served by
his raw recruits, and by the demoralised army of Italy, and unaided by
Justinian, who was straining every nerve to keep up the Persian War, he
accomplished little or nothing. [Sidenote: Campaign of Belisarius and
Baduila.] Based on the impregnable fortress of Ravenna he was able to
seize Pesaro, and to relieve the garrisons of Osimo and of Otranto, but
that was all. Baduila ravaged Italy unmolested, and began to make
preparations for the siege of Rome: if he was to be checked—as
Belisarius wrote to his master—more men and money to pay them were
urgently needed.

Justinian could not, or would not, send either men or money in adequate
quantity, and Baduila was able to invest Rome. Unlike Witiges, he
succeeded in barring all the roads, and in blocking the Tiber by a boom
of spars. Famine was soon within the walls, but the Goths made no
attempt at a storm, leaving hunger to do its work. Bessas, the governor
of Rome, sought for aid from all sides, and corn ships were sent him
from Sicily, but Baduila seized them all as they were tacking up the
Tiber channel. Then Belisarius came round to Portus, at the mouth of the
river, with all the men he could muster, a very few thousands, and
endeavoured to force his way to Rome by breaking Baduila’s boom, and
bringing his lighter war-vessels up the Tiber. He left his wife, his
stores, and his reserves at Portus, sailed up the river, and succeeded,
after a hot engagement, in burning the towers which guarded the boom.
But, in the moment of success, news came to him that the Goths were
attacking Portus in his rear, and that his wife and camp were in danger.
He turned back, found that the fighting at Portus was only an
insignificant skirmish brought on by the rashness of the officer in
command there, and so missed his chance of forcing the boom.
Disappointment, or the malarial fever of the marshy Tiber-mouth, laid
him on a bed of sickness next day, and, before he was recovered, Rome
had fallen. Some of the famished garrison threw open the Asinarian Gate
at midnight, and admitted the Goths, after the siege had lasted thirteen
months (545-546). The blame of the fall of the city rested mainly on the
governor Bessas, who doled out his stores with a sparing hand to
soldiery and people alike, while he was secretly selling the corn at
exorbitant prices to the richer citizens. The troops were starving, yet
vast quantities of provisions were found concealed in the general’s
praetorium.

Baduila gave up the plunder of the city to his long-tried troops, but
sternly prohibited murder, rape, or violence. [Sidenote: Baduila takes
Rome, 546.] By the confession of his enemies themselves only twenty-six
Romans lost their lives, though 20,000 war-worn troops had poured into
the city at midnight, wild for plunder and revenge. The king made the
churches into sanctuaries, and the multitudes that gathered in them
suffered no harm.

Baduila looked upon Rome as the chief lair of his enemies, the home of a
faithless people, and the snare of the Goths. He resolved neither to
make it his capital nor to garrison it, but to make a desert of it. The
people were driven out, the gates burnt, and great breaches were made
all round the walls of Aurelian. Then he harangued his army, bidding
them remember how, in the days of Witiges, 7000 Imperialists had robbed
of power and wealth and liberty 100,000 rich and well-armed Goths. But
now that the Goths were become poor, and few, and war-worn, they had
discomfited more than 20,000 Greeks. The reason was that in the old days
they had angered God by their pride and evil-living; now they were
humbled and chastened in spirit, and therefore they were victorious. For
the future they must remember that if just they would have God with
them; but, if they fell back into their former ways, the hand of Heaven
would work their downfall.

This done, he drew off with his army, leaving Rome desolate, and without
a living soul within its walls. For forty days the imperial city was
given up to the wolf and the owl, but at last Belisarius, who still lay
at Portus with his small army, marched within the walls, hurriedly
barricaded the breaches and the gateless portals, and prepared to hold
Rome for a third siege. The Goths had been too slack in casting down the
walls, and the hasty repairs of Belisarius made the city once more
tenable against any _coup-de-main_. [Sidenote: Belisarius recovers
Rome.] In great disgust Baduila rushed back from Campania, and tried to
force the barricades. After three assaults he recognised that they were
too strong, and retired to central Italy, leaving, however, a strong
corps of observation at Tivoli, to keep Belisarius from issuing out of
the city for further operations.

For two years more Belisarius and Baduila fought up and down the
peninsula, but the Goth kept the superiority; though sometimes foiled,
he had, on the whole, the advantage. Belisarius, like Hannibal during
the later years of his sojourn in Italy, flitted from point to point
with his small army, looking for opportunities to strike a blow, but
seldom finding them. Justinian, though now freed from the Persian War,
sent no adequate supplies or reinforcements, and seemed content that his
general should hold no more than Rome and Ravenna. In 548 Belisarius was
recalled on his own or his wife’s request. He felt that he could do no
more with his inadequate resources, he had outlived the desire of glory,
and his old age was at hand. Justinian received him with kindness, made
him _magister militum_ and chief of the Imperial Guard, and bade him
live in peace in Constantinople.

The sole check on Baduila was now removed, and, in the four years that
followed, the gallant Goth cleared the whole country, save Ravenna, of
the presence of the imperialist soldiery. He retook Rome in 549, and
captured or slew the whole garrison. This time, instead of dismantling
the city, he determined to make it his capital. [Sidenote: Successes of
Baduila.] He reorganised the Senate, bade the palace be repaired, and
celebrated games in the circus as his great predecessor, Theodoric, had
done. It would seem that he now felt himself so strong that he feared no
return of the imperialist armies, and lost his old dread of walled
towns. He sent embassies to Justinian, bidding the emperor recognise
accomplished facts, and return to the old relations that had subsisted
between the Goths and the emperor in the happy days of Anastasius and
Theodoric. But the stern ruler of the East was immovable. He quietly
persisted in the war, and merely began to collect once more an army for
the invasion of Italy. The first expedition he placed under count
Germanus, his own nephew, who was looked upon as the destined heir to
the empire. But a sudden invasion of Macedonia by the Slavs drew aside
Germanus to Thessalonica. He achieved a success over the invaders, but
died soon after, and his army never crossed the Adriatic. Baduila
meanwhile was in full possession of Italy. When he found that the
armament of Germanus had dispersed, he built a fleet, conquered
Sardinia, and then crossed into Sicily, and ravaged that island, against
whose people the Goths bore an especial grudge for their rebellion and
eager reception of Belisarius fifteen years before.

It was not till 552 that Baduila was forced to fight on the defensive
once more, and protect Italy from the last of the armies of Justinian.
[Sidenote: Narses invades Italy, 552.] This time the emperor had chosen
a strange commander-in-chief, the eunuch Narses, his chamberlain, or
_praepositus sacri cubiculi_, who had once before been seen in Italy, in
538, when he had intrigued against Belisarius. Narses was known as
clever, pushing, and persistent, but his choice as a general-in-chief
was one of those strange appointments of Justinian’s which looked like
freaks of folly, but turned out to have been guided by the deepest
knowledge of character. Being better trusted than Belisarius, he was
better equipped for war. Besides a large detachment of the regular
troops of the East, he was allowed to hire no less than 10,000 German
auxiliaries from the Danube—Herules, Lombards, and Gepidae. His whole
force must have been more than 20,000 strong, thrice the size of the
army that had followed Belisarius. Narses had resolved to turn the head
of the Adriatic and advance through Venetia, but, while he was executing
this long march, he sent a fleet to threaten the east coast of Italy.
Off Ancona his armada met and defeated the Gothic ships, which Baduila
had brought round to watch the Adriatic. This engagement seems to have
induced the Goths to expect a Roman landing in Picenum, and only a small
portion of Baduila’s army was sent into Venetia, under count Teia, to
watch the passes of the Carnic Alps. Narses succeeded in eluding this
force by hugging the sea-coast, and using his ships to ferry him over
the Po-mouth. He reached Ravenna without striking a blow, and there was
joined by such Roman troops as were already in Italy.

Then, neglecting all the Gothic fortresses, he marched straight on Rome:
not by the Flaminian Way, the great road between north and south—for
that was held by the Goths—but by following a minor pass up the valley
of the river Sena. He had just crossed the Apennines when Baduila met
him at Taginae, in Umbria, under the very shadow of the mountains. The
Gothic king had called up all his forces from central Italy, and was
joined by Teia and the northern army on the eve of the fight, but he was
still inferior in numbers to the Imperialists. Narses showed himself an
able general. Knowing that the Goths mainly trusted to the wild rush of
their heavy cavalry, he dismounted all his barbarian auxiliaries, and
formed them in a serried mass in his centre; 8000 Roman archers flanked
them, and 1500 chosen Roman cavalry were held in reserve on his left
wing. Baduila bade his men use the lance alone, and himself led the
horsemen of his _comitatus_ in a gallant charge on the enemy’s centre.
[Sidenote: Battle of Taginae.] From noon till dusk the Gothic knights
dashed again and again at the phalanx in the middle of the Roman line:
they could not break it, and meanwhile they were shot down in hundreds
by the archers on the wings. The battle, in fact, was much like the
English fight at Cressy; at both the archery and dismounted horsemen
beat back the unsupported cavalry of the assailant. At last, towards
dusk, the wrecks of the Gothic cavalry reeled back in disorder upon
their infantry, and Narses bade the 1500 cuirassiers of his reserve to
strike at the hostile flank.

All was over with the Goths. Their line broke and fled, their gallant
king was mortally wounded in the pursuit, and darkness alone saved the
army from annihilation. So perished Baduila, last Ostrogothic king of
Italy, and ‘first of the Knights of the Middle Ages,’ as he has been not
inaptly styled. There was still, however, fighting to be done. The
warriors who had escaped from Taginae proclaimed count Teia king, and
though most of the Italian towns accepted the death of Baduila as ending
the war, a few still held out. Rome, manned by an inadequate garrison,
was stormed with ease, and its keys sent, now for the third time, to
Justinian. King Teia, after ranging up and down the land in a vain
attempt to keep up the war, was brought to bay in Campania. His little
army, penned up in the hills above Sorrento, made a sudden dash to catch
the eunuch-general unprepared. [Sidenote: The Goths leave Italy, 553.]
But Narses was ready for them, and on the banks of the Sarno the last of
the Goths were overwhelmed with numbers, and saw their king slain in the
forefront of the battle. Then the poor remnants of the rulers of Italy
sent to offer submission. They would leave the peninsula, with bag and
baggage, wife and child, and betake themselves beyond the Alps, if only
a free passage were granted to them. So, in the autumn of 553, the few
remaining Gothic garrisons laid down their arms, gathered together, and
disappeared over the passes of the Alps into the northern darkness. We
have no tidings of the fate of these last survivors of the great
Ostrogothic race. Whether they became the vassals of the Frank, or
mingled with the Bavarians, or sought their kinsmen, the Visigoths of
Spain, no man can tell.

So perished the Gothic kingdom, which had been erected by the genius of
Theodoric, by the same fate which had smitten the pirate-realm of the
Vandals seventeen years before. Both fell because the ruling race was
too small to hold down the vast territory that it had overrun, unless it
could combine frankly and freely with the conquered Roman population.
[Sidenote: Causes of Gothic disasters.] But the fatal bar of Arianism
lay in each case between masters and servants, and when the orthodox
armies of Constantinople appeared, nothing could restrain the Africans
and Italians from opening their gates to the invader. The Ostrogoths had
been wise and tolerant, the Vandals cruel and persecuting, but the end
was the same in each kingdom. It was only in the measure of the
resistance that the difference between Goth and Vandal appeared. Sunk in
coarse luxury, and enervated by the African sun, the Vandals fell in one
year before a single army. The Ostrogoths, the noblest of the Teutons,
made a splendid fight for seventeen years, beat off the great Belisarius
himself, and only succumbed because the incessant fighting had drained
off the whole manhood of the tribe. If Baduila could have mustered at
Taginae the 100,000 men that Witiges had once led against Rome, he would
never have been beaten. It is one of the saddest scenes in history when
we see the well-ordered realm of Theodoric vanish away, and Italy is
left an unpeopled desert, to be disputed between the savage Lombard, the
faithless Frank, and the exarchs of distant Byzantium.

The conquest of Italy by Narses was destined to have one further episode
ere it was yet complete. When Teia’s fate was known, the ministers of
the young Frankish king Theudebald of Metz launched a great army into
the peninsula, under two Suabian dukes Chlothar and Buccelin. Their
hosts pressed down the peninsula, following the one the western coast,
the other the eastern. But Chlothar’s army was destroyed by famine and
pestilence, and Buccelin’s was annihilated at Casilinum, in Campania, by
Narses. Against the mass of Frankish foot-soldiers, with spear and
battle-axe, Narses employed the same tactics as against the Gothic
horse. A solid centre of dismounted Teutons, Lombards, and Heruli, kept
the Frankish column in check, while wings of Roman archers and
cuirassiers swung round the flanks of the invader, enveloped him, and
destroyed him. Of 40,000 of Buccelin’s men it is said that not a hundred
escaped, so far worse did they fare than the Goths had fared at Taginae
in the previous year. [Sidenote: Desolation in Italy.] The Frankish
ravages put the last finishing touch to the misery of Italy. Alike in
the northern plain, in Picenum and Æmilia, and in the neighbourhood of
Rome, the whole population had disappeared. Justinian and Narses had
restored peace, but it was the best example ever seen of the adage,
_solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant_.

To these same years belongs the story of Justinian’s invasion of
southern Spain, an episode which will be found narrated at full length
in the chapter dealing with the Visigoths.

We must now turn back to Justinian’s fortunes in the East. It will be
remembered that his Second Persian War had been ended by a five years’
truce in 545, after the great plague and gallant defence of Edessa. The
five years of peace that followed were not very notable in the history
of the empire save for one important event. Theodora, the colleague and
other self of Justinian, died of cancer in 548, and with her death much
of her husband’s vigour, if not of his persistence, seems to have
vanished. Deprived of his councillor and helpmate the emperor became
gloomy and morbid. His midnight studies took the direction of theology
alone, and he launched out into a futile ecclesiastical controversy on
‘The Three Chapters.’ This was a wholly unnecessary dispute as to
whether three documents of three patristic writers, Theodore, Ibas, and
Theodoret—all long dead—contained heretical matter or not. But it
succeeded in convulsing the whole Eastern Church, and led Justinian into
a quarrel with the Roman see, which refused to condemn the ‘Three
Chapters.’ He seized Pope Vigilius, and brought him to Constantinople,
to compel him to fall in with his own views. [Sidenote: Justinian and
Pope Vigilius.] After detaining the unfortunate pontiff in the East for
six years, and even dragging him from sanctuary and imprisoning him in
an island, the emperor succeeded in inducing him to declare that
Theodore and the two other theologians had indeed fallen into grievous
heresy (A.D. 553). Justinian was triumphant, but Vigilius found that he
had thereby introduced schism into Italy and Africa, where many bishops
stood by the ‘Three Chapters.’ An African council went so far as to
excommunicate Vigilius, and for a century some of the north Italian
churches were out of communion with the Roman see.

But long ere Vigilius had yielded Justinian was once more at war with
Persia. When the five years’ truce ran out at the end of 549, the
imperial troops advanced to recover the suzerainty of Colchis, the one
point that had been yielded to Chosroes in the treaty of 545. But
strangely enough, while the war was renewed on the Black Sea, it did not
recommence on the Mesopotamian frontier. [Sidenote: Third Persian War,
549-55.] Both parties concurred to renew the truce for everything except
Colchis, and on that limited arena alone the hostilities proceeded. The
struggle recalls, in this curious feature, the way in which the French
and English fought in India in the eighteenth century, while in Europe
they were at peace. The conditions of the war were favourable to
Justinian, whose armies had free access by sea to the Colchian coast,
while the Persians had to reach it by the wild passes over the Armenian
and Iberian mountains. The dreary but very bloody Colchic or Lazic war
went on for six years, draining alike the Persian and the imperial
treasuries; but at last the Romans had the better in the struggle,
secured the homage of the Lazic king, and drove the Persians far back
into the interior (555). Finally, after interminable negotiations
Chosroes made peace, surrendering his claim on Colchis in consideration
of an indemnity of 30,000 solidi (£18,000) per annum.

This was the last of Justinian’s great wars; but the end of his reign
was far from being peaceful or prosperous. It was especially noteworthy
for the repeated inroads of the Huns and Slavs into the Balkan
peninsula. The greatest raid was in 558, when the Cotrigur Huns under
their khan Zabergan eluded the garrisons on the Danube, crossed the
Balkans, and rode at large over the whole of Thrace. [Sidenote:
Belisarius defeats the Huns.] One body of 4000 horse pushed their
incursions up to the very gates of Constantinople, and so alarmed
Justinian that he bade the aged Belisarius to buckle on his arms once
more, and save the capital. The military resources of the empire were so
scattered that Belisarius could only count on 300 of his own veterans,
on the ‘Scholarian Guards’[13] and a levy of half-armed Thracian
rustics. By skilfully posting this small force, and inducing the Huns to
attack his line exactly where it was strongest, he routed the
barbarians, and returned in triumph from this his last campaign.

Footnote 13:

A body of local troops raised in the city, who formed part of the
imperial guard.

After this final feat of the old general it is sad to learn that his
master had not even yet learned to trust him. Four years later there was
a futile conspiracy against Justinian, and Belisarius was accused of
having known of it. He was disgraced, and put under ward for eight
months, before the emperor convinced himself that the charge was false.
Restored at last to favour, he lived two years more in possession of his
riches and honours,[14] and died in March 565. His thankless master
followed him to the grave before the end of the same year. On the 11th
of December 565, Justinian, after living more than seventy years, and
reigning for thirty-eight, descended to the tomb.

Footnote 14:

It is now fully recognised, as Finlay and Bury have proved, that there
is no truth in the legend that Belisarius was blinded, and became a
beggar crying to the people, _Date obolum Belisario_.

We have spoken of Justinian’s wars, of his buildings, of his financial
policy, of his ecclesiastical controversies. But for none of these is he
so well remembered as for his activity in yet another sphere. [Sidenote:
Legal reforms of Justinian.] It is by his great work of codifying the
Roman law, and leaving it in a complete and orderly form as a heritage
to the jurists of the modern world that he earned his greatest title to
immortality. This was an achievement of the first half of his reign,
carried out with the aid of the best lawyers of Constantinople, headed
by Tribonian, the able but greedy quaestor against whom the rioters in
the ‘Nika’ sedition had raged so furiously.

Roman law had hitherto consisted of two elements—the constitutions and
edicts of the emperors, and the decisions of the great lawyers of the
past. Both these elements were somewhat chaotic. Five centuries of
imperial edicts overruled and contradicted each other in the most
hopeless confusion; Pagan and Christian ideas were intermixed in them,
many had gone completely out of date, and new conditions of society had
made others impossible to work. Nor were the _responsa prudentum_ or
decisions of the ancient jurisconsults any less chaotic; in modern
England the difficulties of ‘case made law,’ as it has been happily
called, are perplexing enough to enable us to understand the troubles of
a Constantinopolitan judge, confronted with a dozen precedents of
contradictory import.

Justinian removed all this confusion by producing three great works. His
_Code_ collected the imperial constitutions into a manageable shape,
striking out all the obsolete edicts, and bringing the rest up to the
requirements of a Christian state of the sixth century. His _Digest_ or
_Pandects_ did the same for the decisions of the ancient lawyers, laying
down the balance of authority, and specifying the precedents which were
to be accepted. Lastly, the _Institutes_ gave a general sketch of Roman
law in the form of a commentary on its principles for the use of
students. These volumes were destined to be the foundation of all
systematic jurisprudence in modern Europe; their compilation was the
last, and not the least, of the works of the ancient Roman spirit of law
and order, incarnate in the last great emperor of Roman speech, for none
of Justinian’s successors could say, as could he himself, that Latin was
his native tongue. After-ages remembered him, above all things, as the
compiler of the _Code_, and it was as its framer that he is set by Dante
in one of the starry thrones of the Christian paradise.

In spite of all his great achievements it cannot be disputed that
Justinian left the empire weaker than he found it. Its territorial
expansion in Italy, Africa, and Spain did not compensate for the
exhaustion of the Eastern provinces. By his ruthless taxation Justinian
had drained off their vital energies, and left them poorer and weaker
than they had ever been before. Even his armies felt the reaction; at
the end of his reign we read that they were sinking both in numbers and
efficiency; the new and extended frontiers were more than they could
guard, and the old race of generals who had followed Belisarius was
dead. Justinian himself is said to have neglected their pay and
maintenance, while he set his aged brains to wrestle with the problem of
the ‘Three Chapters’ or the heresy of Aphthartodocetism. Like Louis XIV.
of France, whom he resembles in many other respects, Justinian closed a
reign of unparalleled magnificence as a gloomy pietist, whose despotism
drained and crushed a people who had grown to abhor his very name.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VII

THE EARLIER FRANKISH KINGS AND THEIR ORGANISATION OF GAUL

511-561.

The Sons of Chlodovech—Theuderich conquers Thuringia, 531—Childebert
and Chlothar conquer Burgundy, 532—Their war with the
Visigoths—Theudebert invades Italy—Chlothar reunites the Frankish
kingdoms, 558—Organisation of the Frankish realm—The great
officials—Mayors of the Palace—Counts and Dukes—Local government,
the Mallus—Legal and financial arrangement.

Chlodovech left four sons: one, Theuderich, borne to him by a Frankish
wife in early youth; three, Chlodomer, Childebert, and Chlothar, the
offspring of his Burgundian spouse, Chrotechildis. In accordance with
the old Teutonic custom of heritage-partition, the four young men
divided among themselves their father’s newly-won realms, though the
division threatened to wreck the Frankish power in its earliest youth.
Theuderich, the eldest son, took the most compact and most Teutonic of
the parts of Chlodovech’s realm, the old kingdom of the Ripuarian Franks
along the Rhine bank from Köln as far south as Basle, with the new
Frankish settlements east of the Rhine in the valley of the Main.
[Sidenote: The sons of Chlodovech.] He fixed his residence, however, not
at Köln, the old Ripuarian capital, but in the more southerly town of
Metz on the Moselle, an ancient Roman city, though one less hitherto
famous than its greater neighbour Trier. In addition to Ripuaria
Theuderich took a half share of the newly-conquered Aquitaine, its
eastern half from Clermont and Limoges to Albi.

[Illustration:

THE FRANKISH KINGDOMS. 511.
]

While Ripuaria was given to Theuderich, his brother Chlothar obtained
the other old Frankish realm, the ancient territory of the Salian Franks
from the Scheldt-mouth to the Somme, together with his father’s first
conquests from the Gallo-Romans in the valley of the Aisne. His capital
was Soissons, the old stronghold of Syagrius, in the extreme southern
angle of his realm. The remaining two brothers, Chlodomer and
Childebert, reigned respectively at Orleans and Paris, and ruled the
lands on the Seine, Loire, and Garonne which Chlodovech had won from
Syagrius and Alaric. Their kingdoms must have been far less strong,
because far less thickly settled by the Franks, than those of Theuderich
and Chlothar. Chlodomer’s dominion comprised the whole valley of the
middle and lower Loire, and Western Aquitaine, including Bordeaux and
Toulouse. Childebert had a smaller share—the Seine valley and the coasts
of the Channel from the mouth of the Somme westward.

The four brother kings were all worthy sons of their wicked
father—daring unscrupulous men of war, destitute of natural affection,
cruel, lustful, and treacherous. But they were eminently suited to
extend, by the same means that Chlodovech had used, the realms that he
had left them. The times, too, were propitious, for during their lives
was removed the single bar that hindered the progress of the Franks, the
power of the strong Gothic realm that obeyed Theodoric the Great.

Although the sons of Chlodovech not unfrequently plotted each other’s
deposition or murder, yet they generally turned their arms against
external enemies, and even on occasion joined to aid each other. The
object which each set before himself was the subjection of the nearest
independent state. Theuderich therefore looked towards inner Germany and
the kingdom of the Thuringians, on the Saal and upper Weser; Childebert
and Chlodomer turned their attention towards their southern neighbours
the Burgundians.

Both these states were destined to fall before the sons of Chlodovech,
but neither of them without a hardly fought struggle. Theuderich was
distracted from his first attempts against Thuringia by a great
piratical invasion of the Lower Rhineland by predatory bands from
Scandinavia, led by the Danish king Hygelac (Chrocholaicus), who is
mainly remembered as the brother of that Beowulf whom the earliest
Anglo-Saxon epic celebrates (515). [Sidenote: Theuderich conquers
Thuringia.] The son of the king of the Ripuarians slew the pirate, and
next year the Thuringian war began. It did not terminate till 531, when
Theuderich, calling in the aid of his brother Chlothar, utterly
destroyed the Thuringian realm, and made it tributary to himself. The
Frank celebrated his victory first by an unsuccessful attempt to murder
his brother and helper Chlothar, who was fain to fly home in haste, and
next by the treacherous murder of Hermanfrid, the vanquished Thuringian
king, who had surrendered on promise of life. Theuderich led him in
conversation around the walls of the city of Zülpich, and suddenly bade
his servants push him over the rampart, so that his neck was broken.
Southern Thuringia, the region on the Werra and Unstrut, was for the
future a tributary province of the Franks. Northern Thuringia, between
Elbe and Werra, was overrun by the Saxons, and never came under
Theuderich’s power.

While the king of Ripuaria was warring in Germany, his younger brothers
had assaulted Burgundy. In 523 Childebert and Chlodomer attacked the
unpopular king Sigismund, the slayer of his own son, as we have
elsewhere related.[15] They beat him in battle, took him prisoner, and
threw him with his wife and son down a well. [Sidenote: Frankish
invasion of Burgundy.] But Gondomar, brother of Sigismund, restored the
forture of war in the next year, and routed the Franks at Véséronce, in
a battle where Chlodomer was slain (524). Before pursuing the Burgundian
war the brothers of the dead man resolved to plunder his realm. The king
of Orleans had only left infant children, so Childebert and Chlothar
found no difficulty in overrunning his lands on the Loire. The three
young boys, to whom the realm should have fallen, were captured and
brought before their uncles. Childebert, the ruffian who was of a milder
mood, proposed to spare their lives, but Chlothar actually dragged them
away while they clung to his brother’s knees, and cut the throats of the
two eldest with his own hands. The youngest was snatched up and hidden
by a faithful servant, and lived to become a monk, and leave his name to
the ‘monastery of Chlodovald’ (St. Cloud).

Footnote 15:

See p. 27.

Of Chlodomer’s realm Childebert took the lands on the upper Loire and
the capital city Orleans, Chlothar the Loire-mouth and the part of
Aquitaine south of it. Hearing a false report that his eldest brother,
Theuderich had fallen in battle with the Thuringians, Childebert now
invaded East Aquitaine, a part of his brother’s heritage. But Theuderich
returned in wrath, and the king of Paris and Orleans resolved to go
instead against the Visigoths, and to drive them from the land between
the Cevennes and the Pyrenees. The great Theodoric was just dead, so no
help from Italy could be expected by the Visigothic king Amalric, the
grandson of the departed hero. Childebert found his pretext in the
complaint that his sister Chrotechildis, the wife of Amalric, had been
debarred from the exercise of the Catholic religion and cruelly ill
treated by her Arian husband. With this holy plea as his _casus belli_
he marched against Narbonne, defeated Amalric in battle, and drove him
over the Pyrenees to the gates of Barcelona. [Sidenote: War with the
Visigoths, 531.] There he was slain, either by the sword of the pursuing
Franks, or by the Visigothic army, enraged at the cowardice which he had
displayed in the struggle. On his death the Goths raised on the shield
and saluted as king the aged count Theudis, the regent who had ruled
Spain for Theodoric the Great during the minority of Amalric. Thus ended
the race of the Baltings as rulers of the Visigoths; their succeeding
kings were not of the old royal house. Theudis, who was suspected of
having had some hand in his late pupil’s murder, soon justified the
choice of the Goths, by recovering Narbonne and the other cities of
Septimania from the Franks. Childebert had turned off to another quest,
and the old Visigothic possessions north of the Pyrenees were retaken
without much trouble (531).

The enterprise which had called away Childebert was a new attempt to
conquer Burgundy, in which his brother Chlothar had promised to join
him. [Sidenote: Burgundy conquered, 532.] In the spring of 532 the kings
of Paris and Soissons united their forces, and marched up the valley of
the Yonne. They laid siege to Autun, and when Gondomar the Burgundian
monarch came to its relief, beat him with such decisive results that he
fled into Italy and abandoned his kingdom. A few sieges put the
victorious Frankish brethren in possession of the whole Burgundian realm
as far as the borders of the Ostrogoths on the Alps and the Drôme.

When Burgundy had been conquered, the Franks began to prepare for a new
campaign against the Visigoths, in which Theuderich intended to share no
less than his brothers. But this scheme was frustrated by the death of
the king of Ripuaria early in the year 533. He left a son, Theudebert,
already a grown man and a good warrior, but in true Merovingian fashion
the uncles of the heir made a vigorous attempt to seize and divide his
realm. It was only the prompt and enthusiastic way in which the
Ripuarians rallied around their young king that saved him from the fate
of his cousins, the princes of Orleans. Not merely, however, did
Theudebert hold his own, but he compelled his uncles to give him a share
of the newly-conquered Burgundy, when the partition of that country was
finally made.

Theudebert was, in fact, well able to take care of himself, and soon
showed that he was as unscrupulous and enterprising, if not quite so
bloodthirsty, as his father and uncles. Yet he was, for a Meroving, not
an unfavourable specimen of a monarch, and the chroniclers tell us that
he ruled his kingdom with justice, venerated the clergy, built churches,
and gave much alms to the poor. That as a politician he was shifty and
treacherous was soon to be shown by his dealings with Italy. [Sidenote:
Theudebert invades Italy, 535.] In 535 the emperor Justinian, on the eve
of his invasion of the Ostrogothic kingdom, bribed the three Frankish
monarchs, by a gift of 50,000 solidi, to attack Italy from the rear.
Uncles and nephew alike were ready to take the money and join in the
plunder of the peninsula. But in the next year the Gothic king Witiges,
eager to free himself from a second war, offered to cede Provence and
Rhaetia to the Franks if they would make peace with him, and grant him
the aid of their arms. The three kings gladly agreed, and lent him an
auxiliary force of 10,000 men, who joined the Goths in recovering Milan.
Theudebert and Childebert are said to have cheated Chlothar of his third
of the gains, the former having got the money and the latter the land
which Witiges made over.

In 539 Witiges and Belisarius were locked in such deadly conflict that
the Franks thought it a good opportunity to endeavour to invade Italy on
their own behalf. Theudebert came over the Alps in person, with an army
of 100,000 men, all footmen armed with lance and axe, save 300 nobles
who rode around the king with shield and spear. First falling on his
friends the Goths, then attacking the East-Romans in turn, Theudebert
drove across the north of Italy, sacking Genoa, and wasting all the
valley of the Po as far as Venetia. All the open country was in his
hands, and the Goths and Romans had to shut themselves up in their
fortresses. But a disease brought on by foul living fell upon the
Franks, and so thinned their ranks that Theudebert had to retire
homeward, relinquishing all he had gained save the possession of the
passes of the Cottian Alps. It was, however, with his Italian plunder
that he struck the first gold money which any barbarian king coined in
his own name. Instead of placing the head of the emperor on his solidi,
as had hitherto been the practice of Goth, Frank, and Burgundian, he
represented his own image with shield and buckler, and the inscription
_Dominus Noster Theudebertus Victor_, without any reference to Justinian
as emperor or over-lord. Some of the pieces make him assume the more
startling title of _Dominus Theudebertus Augustus_, as if he had aimed
at uniting Gaul and Italy, and taking the style of Western Emperor; and,
strange as this design may appear, it receives some countenance from a
chronicler who declares that, after his Italian conquests, Theudebert
was so uplifted in spirit that he designed to march against
Constantinople, and make himself lord of the world (539).

When in the next year the faithless Theudebert planned another
expedition to reconquer north Italy, and had the effrontery to offer his
alliance once more to king Witiges, we need not marvel that the
Ostrogoth refused to listen for a moment to the overture, and chose
rather to open negotiation with his East-Roman foes. The surrender of
Ravenna and the triumph of Belisarius followed, and Theudebert found
that, in invading the peninsula, he would have the emperor as his foe
rather than the king of the Goths. He refrained for the time from
following up his first successes, but it is strange to find that when
the Gothic cause had again triumphed in the hands of king Baduila, and
north Italy was once more torn asunder between Roman and Teuton, the
Frank did not take advantage of the renewed troubles to make a second
expedition. [Sidenote: Conquest of Bavaria.] It is probable that in
these years, 541-45, he was occupied in another conquest, that of the
land between the Danube and the Noric Alps, which now bore the name of
Bavaria. The German tribes in the ancient Noricum, who had been subject
to Theodoric in the great days of the Gothic Empire, the remnant of the
Rugians, Scyrri, Turcilingi, and Herules, had lately formed themselves
into a federation under the name of Bavarians, and had chosen a duke
Garibald as their prince[16]. We have no details of Theudebert’s wars
against them, but merely know that by the end of his reign he had made
the Bavarians tributary to the Franks. Their conquest in all probability
fills the unrecorded time between Theudebert’s expedition to Italy and
his death in 548. For some years at the end of this period we know that
he was sick and bedridden, so that it is fair to put the subjection of
Bavaria somewhere about 543, five years before the death-date of the
Ripuarian king. Theudebert left his kingdom to his young son,
Theudebald, a weak and sickly boy, whose accession, knowing the
character of his great-uncles, we are surprised to hear was not troubled
by any opposition.

Footnote 16:

This seems the best way of accounting for the obscure beginnings of
the Bavarian duchy. The derivation of the word Bavaria is hard to
fathom.

While Theudebert had been busied in Italy, the other two Frankish kings,
Childebert and Chlothar, though now they were both advanced in years,
had made a second expedition against the Visigoths, and in 542 overran
the Gothic province north of the Pyrenees, and then crossed into the
valley of the Ebro. They took Pampeluna, and advanced as far as
Saragossa, to which they laid siege, but in front of that city they
received a crushing defeat from Theudigisel, the general of the old
Gothic king, Theudis, and were driven back into Gaul without retaining
one foot of their conquests. Narbonne and the Mediterranean shore still
remained an appendage of the kingdom of Spain.

A similar fate to that which attended the armies of his great-uncles in
Spain was destined to befall the first expedition which Theudebald of
Ripuaria despatched to Italy. The boy-king was too young to head the
army, but the Eastern Frankish magnates who governed in his name had
resolved to renew the enterprise of king Theudebert. Two dukes of
Alamannian race, Buccelin and Chlothar, who seemed to have possessed the
chief influence at the court of Metz, set out in 551, while King Baduila
was engaged in his last desperate struggle with the East-Romans, and
overran part of Venetia. Holding to the alliance of neither Roman nor
Goth, they threatened to attack both; but Narses, when he marched into
Italy from Illyria, left them alone, and proceeded to assault king
Baduila, without paying attention to the northern invaders. [Sidenote:
Battle of Casilinum, 553.] It was only in the next year, when Baduila
and his successor Teia had both been slain, that the armies of the
Franks broke up from their encampments in northern Italy, and marched
down to challenge the supremacy of the victorious Narses in the
desolated peninsula. How they fared we have had to relate in the
preceding chapter. Chlothar and his division perished of want, or
plague, in Apulia. Buccelin and the main body were defeated and
exterminated by Narses at the battle of Casilinum. By the end of 553 all
the gains of the Franks in Italy were gone, and 75,000 Frankish corpses
had been buried in Italian soil or left to the Italian vultures.

Less than two years after the armies of his generals had been
exterminated by Narses the weakly Theudebald died, and, as he left no
brother or uncle, the East-Frankish realm was heirless. It fell by the
choice of the Ripuarian folk-moot to Theudebald’s great-uncle, the aged
Chlothar, king of Soissons, who thus became possessed of three-fourths
of the Frankish Empire. As his brother, the still older Childebert, king
of Paris, was childless, it was now certain that after fifty years of
division the empire of Chlodovech was about to be once more reunited
(555).

Though verging on his seventieth year, Chlothar was still energetic
enough to go forth to war. When the dominions of Theudebald passed into
his hands, he took up the scheme which his brother Theuderich, now
twenty years dead, had once entertained, of subduing all the nations of
inner Germany. Beyond the vassal Thuringians lay the independent Saxons,
and against them Chlothar led out, in 555, the full force of both the
Ripuarian and the Salian Franks. The Saxons, on the other hand, induced
many of the Thuringians to rise in rebellion, and endeavour to shake off
the Frankish yoke. The fortune of war was at first favourable to
Chlothar, who put down the Thuringian insurrection without much
difficulty, but when, in the next year, he led his host into the
unexplored woods and moors of Saxony, he suffered such a terrible defeat
that he was fain to flee behind the Rhine, and cover himself by the
walls of Köln. The pursuing Saxons devastated the Trans-Rhenane
possessions of the Franks up to the gates of Deutz. They were not
destined to become the vassals of their western neighbours for another
two hundred years.

The news of Chlothar’s disaster in Germany, and the false report of his
death, which rumour added to the news, brought on trouble in Gaul.
Chramn, the eldest son of Chlothar, and Childebert of Paris, his aged
brother, at once took arms to divide his kingdom. Nor when the news came
that he still lived did they desist from their attempt. They sent to
stir up the Saxons, and persisted in the war. But, before they had
actually crossed swords with Chlothar, the old king of Paris died, and
Chramn, reduced to his own resources, was fain to throw himself on his
father’s mercy (558).

[Sidenote: Chlothar sole King, 558.] Thus Chlothar, by Childebert’s
death, gathered in the last independent fragment of his father’s vast
heritage, and reigned for three years (558-561) over the realm of
Chlodovech, swelled by the conquests of Burgundy, Thuringia, Provence,
and Bavaria, made since the division of the Frankish Empire.

Chlothar was the worst of his house. It will be remembered how his
career had begun by the brutal murder of his nephews. It was destined to
end by an even greater atrocity. His undutiful son, Chramn, though
pardoned in 558, rebelled again in 560, with the aid of the Bretons of
Armorica. Chlothar pursued, defeated, and caught the rebellious prince.
Then he bound him, with his wife and his young sons, to pillars of a
wooden house, and burnt them alive by firing the building. This shocking
deed roused even the brutal Franks to horror, and it was noted as the
judgment of heaven that the king died exactly a year after he had given
his heir to the flames. The wicked old man’s body, however, was buried
in great state in the church of St. Medard, as though he had been the
best of sovereigns (561). His kingdom fell to his four sons, destined to
a new division just fifty years after its first partition among the sons
of Chlodovech.

The realm of the Merovings having now attained to its full growth, and
assumed the shape which it was to keep till the fall of the dynasty, we
may proceed to give the chief facts concerning its social and political
organisation.

[Sidenote: Despotic kingship of the Merovings.] Like all the other
Teutonic states which were erected on the ruins of the western provinces
of the Roman Empire, it possessed a political constitution which had
advanced very far beyond the simple state of things described in the
_Germania_ of Tacitus. The conquests of the Franks had resulted in the
increase of the kingly power to a height which it had never reached in
earlier days. As the permanent war-chief, in a time when war was
incessant, the king had gradually extended his power from supreme
command in the field into supreme command in all things. He and his
war-band of sworn followers had borne the brunt of the fighting, and
naturally reaped the greater part of the profit. The check exercised by
popular assemblies on the royal power seems almost to have disappeared
after the first days of the conquest. In the time of Chlodovech himself
we find some traces of them still remaining. Once or twice the army, in
the capacity of public assembly of the manhood of all the Franks, seems
to assert itself against the king, but even this check gradually
disappeared. The Frankish Empire grew too broad for any public folk-moot
of the nation to be able to meet, and the king only took counsel of such
magnates—high officers of the household, bishops, and provincial
governors—as he chose to summon to his presence. Two additional factors
gave increased strength to the monarch. The first was the high respect
paid to the supreme power by the conquered Gallic provincials, men long
habituated to the despotic government of Rome—a respect far greater than
any that the Franks had been accustomed to give their kings. The habit
of obedience of the Gallo-Roman was soon copied by the Frank. The second
factor was the enriching of the king by the vast extent of the old
imperial domain land in Gaul, which was transferred at the conquest to
the Frankish king, and became his private property, placing a vast store
both of land and money at his disposal.

The Merovings, then, were despotic rulers, little controlled by any
constitutional checks, and only liable to be deposed by their subjects
if their conduct became absolutely unbearable. Their worst danger was
always from their ambitious relatives, not from their people.

The Frankish king was distinguished from his followers by the regal
privilege of wearing long hair,—to shear a king’s head was the best
token of deposing him,—by his royal diadem, and kingly spear.
Occasionally he borrowed trappings from the Romans, as when, for
example, Chlodovech was invested with the robes of Patrician after his
Gothic War.[17] But the national dress was generally adhered to.

Footnote 17:

See p. 63.

The government of the realm was managed by two groups of ministers—the
royal household, or _palatium_, and the provincial governors. [Sidenote:
The Royal Household.] The household followed the person of the king in
all his movements. It was mainly composed of personal companions, bound
by the oath of fidelity, the _comites_ of earlier days, who had once
formed the king’s war-band, but now constituted his ministers and
officials. These personal adherents were called by the Franks
_antrustions_. We have already seen that the Goths called the same class
_saiones_, and the English _gesiths_.

The chief of the royal household, or _palatium_, was the official whom
later generations usually called the _Major Palatii_, or ‘Mayor of the
Palace.’ He was the king’s first servant, charged with the overseeing of
the rest of the household officials, and ready to act at need as the
king’s other self in matters of war, justice, or administration. In the
days of the first warlike Frankish kings the Mayor of the Palace was
kept in his place by the activity of his master, and was no more than an
important official. But, as the Merovings decayed in personal vigour,
their mayors grew more and more important, till at last we shall see
them taking the place of regent and practical substitute for the king.
The old English monarchies had no officials who can be compared in
importance to them, but, under the Anglo-Normans, the position of the
Justiciar was much like that occupied by the Frankish _Major Palatii_.

After the Mayor of the Palace, the chief ministers of the royal
household were the Marshall (_comes stabuli_), charged with the
oversight of the royal stables; the _Comes Palatii_, who acted as legal
adviser and assessor to the king; the Treasurer; and the
_Referendarius_, or royal secretary. Though primarily household
officials, all these are occasionally found detached from the court on
external business, commanding armies, or sent on embassies.

At first all the posts were given to Franks, save that of the
Referendarius, to fill which it would have been hard to find an educated
man of Teutonic blood. But, by the end of the sixth century, men of
Gallo-Roman origin were occasionally found in occupation of them, and in
the seventh century this became quite common. In 605 we find even the
office of _Major Palatii_, the most important of them all, in the hands
of the Gallo-Roman Protadius.

The provincial, as distinguished from the central, government of the
Frankish realm was exercised by officers who bore the names of Count and
Duke (_comes_, _dux_, _Graf_, _Herzog_). The whole realm was divided
into countships. In the purely Teutonic half the unit was the old tribal
district, which the Roman called _Pagus_ and the Frank _Gau_. [Sidenote:
The Counts and Dukes.] A count was appointed to each of these tribal
units. In the Romano-Gallic half of the kingdom the countship was
composed of the _civitas_, or city with its dependent district, which
had survived from the times of the Western Empire, and often represented
the original Celtic tribe. The count was both a military and civil
official. He administered justice, led the armed levy of his district,
and saw to the raising of taxes.

Several countships were often united and placed under a single official
of higher rank, the _dux_, which the counts had to follow and obey.
These unions of countships were most common on the frontier, where a
strong and united defence against foreign enemies would be needed, and
where it would have been unsafe to leave the charge of the border to
half a dozen counts, who might or might not co-operate willingly with
each other. In Provence and Burgundy the _dux_ was also known by the
Roman title of Patrician.

The provincial no less than the household officials of the Frankish
kings were originally all of Teutonic birth. But, in the sixth century
Gallo-Romans are found intrusted with both the lesser and the greater
charges. We shall have to make mention of one of these native dukes, the
Burgundian Eunius Mummolus, more than once, when recounting the history
of the last years of the sixth century.

[Sidenote: Local Government.] The provincial governor, count or duke,
was assisted by a deputy, or _vicarius_, whom he nominated to fill his
place during his absence at the court or the wars, or while he was
engaged in some specially absorbing task at home. The minor
administration of the countship was carried out by _centenarii_, or
hundred-men, called also on occasion _tribuni_. The countship was
divided into hundreds, and over each of these there presided a
hundred-man, who was appointed by the count to act as a police
magistrate in time of peace, and to head the men of his district in time
of war. Petty law cases came before him, but at stated periods the count
went round all the hundreds in his countship, and administered justice
at a public assembly of the inhabitants.

The count’s tribunal was called the _Mallus_. He sat in company with a
few assessors, chosen from the chief men of the district. These magnates
were called _Rachimburgi_, or _Boni Homines_. They were summoned by the
count, and had no authority independent of his, but by ancient
custom—both Roman and Teutonic—assessors had always been called in to
aid the chief judge. The system is found alike at the tribunal of the
Roman provincial magistrate presiding in his _conventus_, and in the
primitive German law courts described by Tacitus. The count, sitting in
his _Mallus_, had full power of life and death, and authority in all
cases, save where the persons concerned were so great that the case
might be called before the King’s High Court, and tried by the king
himself and the _Comes Palatinus_.

The Franks not unfrequently enforced the death penalty for murder,
arson, brigandage, and other great crimes. But they used also the system
of _weregeld_, like our own Anglo-Saxon forefathers. With the consent of
the family of the victim, almost every murder could be condoned on the
payment of sums varying from 30 gold solidi for a slave to 1800 for a
freeman of high rank. [Sidenote: Weregeld.] In cases when the proof of a
crime was difficult on the evidence produced, the Franks often made use
of oaths and compurgations. The accused for himself, or a body of his
supporters in his behalf, made a solemn oath that he was innocent, and
this sufficed to acquit him if no further evidence was produced.
Judicial combats were also not unfrequent. They appear among the
Burgundians, however, before they were taken up by the Franks. Nor was
the custom unknown of submitting criminals whose conviction was
difficult to the ordeal: that by boiling water, where the accused
plunged his hand into a caldron, was the one most frequently used.

It will be noticed that there was no trace of popular government in this
Frankish administration. The king chose the count and the count the
hundred-man. The king was not controlled or checked by any popular
assembly of the nation, nor the count or hundred-man by any meeting of
the people of his district. The king promulgated edicts and laws on his
own responsibility, and similarly the count administered his countship
without any thought of rendering account to any one save the king. Such
assemblies as took place were summoned to hear the decisions of king or
count, not to debate upon them, or recommend their modification. The
ancient German freedom had disappeared, to give place to an autocracy as
well defined as that of the vanished Roman empire.

Besides dukes and counts, the king kept other officials in the
provinces. These were the _domestici_ who were charged with the control
of the royal domain-land throughout the kingdom. They were the king’s
private bailiffs for his own possessions, acting much as the
‘Procurators of the Fiscus’ had once acted for the Roman emperors in the
ancient provinces. There were other _domestici_ in the palace, whose
offices were also financial, and who must apparently have served as
underlings to the high-treasurer.

The revenue of the Merovings seems chiefly to have fallen under four
heads. [Sidenote: Revenue.] The first was the profits of the royal
domain, worked by the _domestici_. The second was the produce of custom
dues, levied both on the land and the sea-frontier of the empire. The
third was the produce of fines and compositions in the law courts, of
which one-third always went to the king. But the fourth, and most
important, was the regular annual tribute of the countships. Each
district was assessed in the king’s books for a defined sum, and this
the count had to raise and send in, on his own responsibility. It seems
that at first only the Gallo-Roman districts were charged with tribute.
Theudebert, the grandson of Chlodovech, we are told, first subjected the
native Frankish districts to the impost, a grievance so deeply felt
that, when he died, the Austrasians rose, and slew Parthenius, the
minister who had suggested to the king this method of increasing his
revenue.

From this short sketch of the constitution of the Frankish realm it will
be seen that its organisation lay half-way between the almost purely
Teutonic forms of the government of early England and the almost purely
Roman methods employed by Theodoric the Great in Italy. This is what
might have been expected. The Frankish kingdom was by no means a
primitive Teutonic state, but it was far more so than the Ostrogothic
realm in Italy.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VIII

THE VISIGOTHS IN SPAIN

531-603

Weakness of the Visigothic kingdom—Civil wars and murders of Kings—The
Romans invade Andalusia, 554—Reign of Leovigild—He restores the
power of the Visigoths—His conquests—Rebellion and death of his son
Hermenegild—Reign of Reccared—He converts the Goths to
Catholicism—Consequences of this conversion.

We have already, while dealing with the fortunes of Chlodovech the Frank
and Theodoric the Great, related the story of the expulsion of the
Visigoths from Aquitaine, and of the extinction of their royal house—the
heaven-born Balts—by the deaths of Alaric II. and Amalric, both slain by
the sword of the Franks.

In 531 the Visigoths, deprived of all their dominions north of the
Pyrenees, and followed into the Iberian peninsula by the victorious
Franks, found themselves without any prince of the old royal line who
could be raised to the throne, and deliver them from their enemies.
[Sidenote: Election of Theudis, 531.] The host proceeded, according to
Teutonic custom, to elect a king, and chose the old count Theudis, the
Ostrogothic noble who had acted as regent for Amalric during the long
years of his minority. The veteran justified their choice by recovering
part of the lost lands beyond the Pyrenees—the rich province of
Septimania, with its cities of Narbonne, Nismes, and Carcassonne. Ten
years later Theudis had to face another Frankish invasion, and again
succeeded in repelling his adversaries, after a bloody battle in front
of Saragossa (542).[18]

Footnote 18:

See p. 133.

Preserved from the danger of Frankish conquest, the Visigothic nation
had to face the problem of reorganising its constitution under the new
conditions of its existence. It had previously looked on Gaul rather
than on Spain as its home. Toulouse had been the favourite abode of its
kings, not Barcelona or Toledo. Gaul was now lost, save one province,
and it was in Spain alone that the Visigothic name was to survive. But
even worse than the loss of its ancient home was the loss of its ancient
royal house. Nothing could be more ruinous to a Teutonic tribe in those
days than the extinction of the line of its old heaven-descended kings.
When it had become necessary to choose a ruler from among the ranks of
the nobility, every ambitious count and duke could aspire to the throne.
Each election was bitterly contested, and the candidates who had failed
to win the favour of the host retired to plot and intrigue against their
more fortunate rival. When no one had any prescriptive hereditary right
to the succession on the reigning king’s death, the temptation to make
away with him by violence, and endeavour to seize his heritage, was
irresistible. Hence it came to pass that of the twenty-three Visigothic
kings of Spain—from Theudis to Roderic—no less than nine were deposed,
and of these seven were murdered by their successors. The average length
of their reigns was less than eight years, and only in eight instances
did a son succeed a father on the throne. There was but one single case
of grandfather, father, and son following each other in undisputed
succession.

[Sidenote: Weakness of the Visigoths.] In relating the history of the
Franks in Gaul, we have had occasion to point out the comparative ease
with which the Frank and the Roman provincial coalesced to form a new
nation. We have seen how from the first the Gaulish bishops were
employed as ministers and confidants by the Merovings, and how, in a
short time, Gallo-Roman counts and dukes were preferred to high places
in the Frankish palace and army. In Spain no such easy union between the
Teutonic conquerors and the provincials was possible, because the great
bar of religion lay between them. Unlike the Franks, the Visigoths were
Arians, having preserved the heretical form of Christianity which their
forefathers had learnt beyond the Danube in the fourth century. The
Spanish provincials, on the other hand, were almost to a man fanatically
orthodox. The Goths formed a religious community of their own, quite
apart from the Spaniards, with Arian bishops and priests to minister to
them; and their kings could not acknowledge or utilise the native
bishops as the Merovings had done in Gaul. The provincials hated their
rulers as heretics as well as barbarians, and never acquiesced willingly
in their domination. They were not indisposed to favour the advance of
the orthodox Frank, and welcomed the coming of the troops of the
East-Roman emperors to their shores in the sixth century. While the
Visigoths remained Arian they raised no Spaniard to power or office; it
was not till they became Catholic, in the very end of the sixth century,
that the first Roman names are found among the servants of the king.[19]
For the first seventy years of their rule in Spain the Visigoths were
completely estranged from their subjects (511-587).

Footnote 19:

The earliest notable case is duke Claudius, the general of king
Reccared I., the first orthodox ruler of Spain. He commanded
victoriously against the Franks of Guntram of Burgundy in 589.

The masters of Spain, then, were a not very numerous tribe, scattered
thinly among masses of an oppressed subject population. They were
masters by the power of the sword alone, but their military force was
crippled by the weakness of their elective kings, who were too much
occupied in maintaining their precarious authority over the discontented
chiefs to allow of their making their arms felt abroad. Nearly all the
wars of the Visigoths were either civil broils between rival kings, or
defensive campaigns against the intrusive Frank from beyond the
Pyrenees.

There is yet one more point to add to this picture of the distracted
realm of the Visigoths; they were not even masters of the whole of the
Iberian peninsula, but had to contend with fierce and watchful enemies
within its limits. In the western Pyrenees, and on the shores of the
Gulf of Biscay, the Basques preserved a precarious independence, and
descended from their fastnesses to plunder the valley of the Ebro,
whenever the Goths were engaged in civil discords. Farther to the west
there still subsisted in the ancient Galicia and Lusitania the kingdom
of the Suevi—the original Teutonic conquerors of Spain. The early
Visigothic kings had driven them into the mountains of the West, but had
never followed them into their last retreats, to compel them to make
complete submission. Suevic kings reigned at Braga over the country
north of the Tagus and west of the Esla and Tormes till the last years
of the sixth century. Whenever a favourable opportunity occurred, they
took part in the civil wars of the Visigoths, and harried the valley of
the upper Douro and the lower Tagus.

The inner organisation of the Visigothic realm presents a very different
picture from the centralised despotism, with everything depending on the
king, which we have described as existing among the early Franks in
Gaul. Like the Franks the Visigoths had divided their conquest into
districts, governed by counts or dukes, generally using as the unit of
division the old Roman boundaries of provinces and _civitates_. But the
Visigothic governors were far less under the control of their elective
kings than were the Frankish counts under the hand of the despotic
Merovingians. Each of them kept a body-guard of personal dependants
called—as among the Ostrogoths—_saiones_, or sometimes _bucellarii_,
whom he could trust to follow him even against the king. [Sidenote: The
Saiones.] It was the possession of this armed following among a
helpless, weaponless mass of provincials which enabled any count or duke
who was popular and ambitious to dare an attempt at rebellion, whenever
his master was weak or unfortunate. There seems to have been a
comparatively small body of lesser freeholders—_ceorls_ as they would
have been called in England—among the Visigoths. There is little trace
of any intermediate class between the nobles—whether official nobles,
_palatini_, or nobles of birth—and their sworn followers the _saiones_.
In fact, the kingdom might fairly be called feudal in its organisation,
consisting as it did of a servile population of Hispano-Roman blood,
held down by a sprinkling of Gothic men-at-arms, each bound by oath to
follow some great noble, who considered himself the equal of his king,
and vouchsafed him only the barest homage. As yet the king had no
opportunity of supporting himself by calling in to his aid either the
Church or the subject Roman population; his Arianism prevented him from
having recourse to any such expedient.

The difference between Roman and Goth was indeed accentuated in every
way. There were different codes of law for subject and master, the
former using a local adaptation of the Theodosian code known as the
_Breviarium Alarici_, while the latter was judged by old Gothic
customary law not yet reduced into written form.[20] Even marriage
between the two races was illegal, till about 570 king Leovigild broke
the prohibition by taking to wife Theodosia, the daughter of Severianus.
Spain sadly needed some ruler like Theodoric the Great, to act as a
mediator and redresser of wrongs between the two nations who dwelt
within its borders.

Footnote 20:

The Gothic law was probably written down about 587 by Reccared.

An evil end fell upon all the first three Visigothic kings who ruled in
Spain. The aged Theudis enjoyed seventeen years of power, and, as we
have already related, was successful in beating off three successive
attacks of the Franks on the peninsula. But the end of his reign was
clouded by disaster; frightened by the rapidity with which the armies of
Justinian had crushed Vandal and Goth, he resolved to create a diversion
in favour of his own Italian kinsmen, by attacking the newly-created
imperial province of Africa. But his army was almost annihilated in
front of the fortress of Septa (Ceuta), the westernmost bulwark of the
African province, and he himself returned to Spain with his military
reputation wrecked in his extreme old age. Four years later he was
murdered at Seville by an unknown assassin, who either was, or feigned
to be, insane (548).

The Visigothic chiefs then elected as their king, Theudigisel, the
general who had beaten the Franks at Saragossa in 542, and had ever
since been reckoned the best warrior of their race. But the new king was
brutal and debauched; his excesses provoked the anger of the nobles, and
only seventeen months after his accession he was murdered. ‘While he sat
at supper with his friends, and waxed merry over the wine, the lamps
were extinguished, and he was slain on his couch by the sword of his
enemies.’

The majority of the Visigoths then chose Agila as their ruler, but,
though he was acknowledged as king at Toledo and Barcelona, the counts
of the South refused to recognise him. When he invaded Andalusia he
suffered a fearful defeat in front of Cordova, and saw his son and heir
slain before his eyes. But he still held all Spain north of the Sierra
Morena, and seemed so strong that the chief of the rebels, count
Athanagild, resolved to call in to his aid the arms of the East-Romans.
Justinian embraced with joy this opportunity of getting a footing in
Spain, and by his orders Liberius, governor of Africa, crossed the
Straits, and landed at Cadiz. Many towns at once opened their gates to
the Roman troops, for the oppressed provincials thought that Liberius
would deliver them for ever from the Goths, and restore the imperial
authority in the whole peninsula. [Sidenote: The Romans land in Spain.]
Roused to desperation, Agila summoned up all his forces, crossed the
Sierra Morena for a second time, and engaged the armies of Athanagild
and Liberius in front of Seville. Again he suffered a disastrous defeat,
and was constrained to fly to Merida. Then his soldiery, seeing that the
Gothic race was ruining itself by fratricidal strife, while the Romans
were occupying town after town, suddenly ended the civil war by
murdering their chief, and saluting the rebel Athanagild as king of the
Visigoths. For, as a Frankish chronicler observed, ‘the Goths have long
had the evil custom of slaying with the sword any king who does not
please them, and of choosing in his stead some one who better suits
their inclination.’ The Franks, on the other hand, boasted of their
unshaken fidelity to the house of Chlodovech, outside whose limits they
never looked when a king had to be chosen.

Athanagild was now king of Spain, but he soon found that by calling in
the Romans he had raised up a demon whom he was not strong enough to
control. The generals of Justinian utterly refused to evacuate the towns
they had seized during the civil war. They were in possession of the
majority of the harbours of the south coast of the peninsula, on both
sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, from the promontory of St. Vincent on
the Atlantic to the mouth of the Sucre on the Mediterranean. And not
only were Cadiz, Malaga, and Carthagena in their hands, but also many of
the inland towns of Andalusia, including the great city of Cordova.
Athanagild never succeeded in evicting them from these conquests; for
thirty years the Constantinopolitan Caesars were acknowledged as rulers
at Cordova and Granada, and it was fully sixty years before the
sea-coast towns were all won back by the Goths. Although defeated in the
open field by Athanagild, the generals of Justinian clung successfully
to their walled towns, till at last the Gothic king was forced to make a
truce with them, and leave them unsubdued.

[Sidenote: Athanagild, 555-568.] Although Athanagild maintained himself
on the throne for thirteen years, and died a natural death—unlike his
five predecessors on the Visigothic throne—he does not seem to have been
a very powerful or successful monarch. The scanty annals of the century
preserve few facts about him, and he is best remembered as the father of
the two unhappy sisters, Brunhildis and Galswintha, ‘the pearls of
Spain,’ whom he gave in marriage to the Frankish kings, Sigibert and
Chilperich. These alliances were founded on political needs; the
marriage of Brunhildis—the first wed of the two princesses—was destined
to secure the aid of the king of Austrasia against any attempts of his
brothers of Paris, Soissons, and Burgundy against Spain. The fame of the
beauty and wealth of Brunhildis then led the wicked Chilperich of
Soissons to ask and obtain her sister’s hand, which Athanagild granted
in order to secure another ally. Luckily for himself the old Gothic king
died soon after, before he had time to hear of Galswintha’s troubled
wedlock and miserable end (568).

The death of Athanagild was followed by five months of anarchy; the
Visigothic nobles could not agree to choose any king; each took arms,
assaulted his neighbours, and did all that was right in his own eyes,
for the ‘king’s peace’ died with the king. At last the governors of
Septimania agreed to elect Leova, duke of Narbonne, as their ruler; but
the counts who dwelt south of the Pyrenees refused to accept the nominee
of the Gallic province. After some fighting, however, Leova proposed to
them to take as his colleague his brother Leovigild, who was well known
and popular in the south, and the majority of the nobles of Spain agreed
to accept him. Leova retained his kingly title and his own Septimanian
realm, while Leovigild reigned in the peninsula as king of Spain. The
division of the kingdom, however, only lasted four years, as Leova died
without issue in 572, and his brother then united Septimania to Spain.

Leovigild was the first man of mark who had reigned over the Visigoths
for a hundred years; he may be styled the second founder of the
Visigothic kingdom, for he dragged it out of the depths of anarchy and
weakness, gave it a new organisation, and smote down its enemies to east
and west. Without his strong hand it seems possible that the realm would
have gone to pieces, and become the prey of the Franks and the
East-Romans.

For the first eight years of his reign Leovigild was forced to fight
hard with enemies on all sides, before he could win a moment for repose.
His first blows were struck against the Imperialists, who had gone forth
from Cordova and Cadiz and conquered the whole of Andalusia. [Sidenote:
Wars of Leovigild, 570-80.] After winning several battles in the open
field, and storming Baza and Assidonia, he drove the Romans within the
walls of Cordova. This great city, defended by a strong garrison and a
fanatically Catholic population, kept the king at bay for a whole year;
but in 571 it was betrayed to him by its Gothic inhabitants and fell,
after having been more than twenty years in the hands of the
Imperialists. The East-Roman power now shrank back behind the Sierra
Nevada, and comprised nothing more than the coast-strip from Lagos to
Carthagena.

Leovigild then turned against the Suevi, who had seized the valley of
the middle Douro, and were pushing into the very heart of the peninsula.
They had lately been converted to Catholicism, and were welcomed by the
provincials of central Spain, who hoped to gain an orthodox instead of
an Arian master. But Leovigild beat the Suevic king Theodemir in the
field, stormed his fortress of Senabria, and compelled him to do homage.

For two years more Leovigild was occupied in putting down sporadic
rebellions of the Roman provincials in all the more remote and
mountainous corners of Spain—especially in Cantabria, on the shores of
the Gulf of Biscay, and among the Murcian mountains in the South. He
captured and put to death Aspidius and Abundantius, the chief leaders of
these revolts, and punished their followers by wholesale executions. At
last, after eight years of war, the whole of the ancient Visigothic
dominions, save the towns on the Andalusian coast, were once more
subdued and under control (576).

The hand of Leovigild was no less hard upon the factious nobility of his
own nation than upon the foreign enemies of Spain. He sought out and
executed, one after another, all the more unruly of the Visigothic
chiefs—‘all the race of men who had been wont to slay their kings,’ as a
Frankish chronicler styled them. In their stead he appointed counts and
dukes from among his own _comitatus_, whom he thought that he could
trust. At last the king’s mandate was obeyed through all the realm, from
Nismes to Seville, as it had never been obeyed before, and it seemed
likely that a strong autocratic royalty would prevail among the
Visigoths as it did among the Franks. Leovigild now fixed his court
permanently at Toledo, and assumed all the splendour and state of the
ancient Roman Caesars—the diadem, the sceptre, the purple robe, and
golden throne. Before him the kings of the Visigoths had been
indistinguishable in manners and apparel from their own nobles; they
only differed from them by bearing the royal name, and keeping up a
larger body of oath-bound _saiones_. At the same time that he fixed his
seat at Toledo, Leovigild took another opportunity of asserting his
power and independence. The coinage of the Visigoths had hitherto been a
mere barbarous imitation of the imperial currency of Rome and
Constantinople, but from henceforth the name of the Gothic king was
placed upon all the gold _tremisses_ of Spain. For a few years Leovigild
added the name of Justin II. to his own, but he soon cast away the last
sign of the old dependence on the empire, and the inscription,
LIVIGILDVS INCLITVS REX, was the sign of the disavowal of the last
nominal connection of Spain with the heirs of Constantine.

The troubles of Leovigild, however, had not yet come to an end. His
worst enemies were to be those of his own house. Before his accession to
the throne he had married, contrary to Gothic custom, a noble Roman lady
named Theodosia, daughter of Severianus, sometime governor of
Carthagena. By her he had two sons, Hermenegild and Reccared. When she
died he endeavoured to strengthen his position by marrying Godiswintha,
the widow of his predecessor Athanagild; and some years later, when his
son Hermenegild reached manhood, he determined to seek for him another
bride from the family of Athanagild. Accordingly he asked for, and
obtained the hand of his wife’s granddaughter, Ingunthis, the daughter
of Sigibert of Austrasia and Brunhildis. At the age of thirteen she was
wedded to Hermenegild. This marriage was destined to have the most
unhappy results. The daughter of Brunhildis was fated to be as much the
cause of woe to Spain as her mother had been to Gaul. She had been
reared in Austrasia as a Catholic, and, in spite of her tender age,
refused to conform to the Arian creed of the Visigoths. If the Frankish
chronicles are to be believed, she was subjected to the most violent
treatment by her grandmother Godiswintha, to force her to abandon the
orthodox faith. But though beaten, starved, and flung into a fish-pond,
she still refused to renounce the faith of her childhood. At last
Leovigild, tired of the perpetual disputes between his wife and his
daughter-in-law, which made his palace unbearable, sent off Hermenegild
to Seville to govern part of Andalusia.

This step proved most unfortunate. The young prince fell entirely under
the influence of his wife and of his mother’s brother, Leander bishop of
Seville. Won over by their pleadings, he declared himself a Catholic,
and was rebaptized, and received into the orthodox church. [Sidenote:
Rebellion of Hermenegild, 580.] He knew that his conversion would bring
on him his father’s wrath, and the loss of his prospect of succeeding to
the Visigothic crown, but he was unwilling to suffer degradation meekly,
and promptly proclaimed himself king, allied himself with the Suevi and
the East-Romans, and called the orthodox to arms all over Spain.

Leovigild had never had to face a more dangerous crisis. The rebellion
of his son had called out against him all the elements of disorder in
the peninsula. The Suevi swarmed down the Douro; the Imperialists
reoccupied Cordova; Merida, Seville, and Evora hailed Hermenegild as
king; and the discontented provincials, headed by their bishops, began
to stir all over the country. It is the greatest testimonial to
Leovigild’s abilities that he knew how to deal with all these dangers.
First, he turned against the incipient rebellion in the north, and put
it down by banishing or imprisoning some dozen bishops, and by defeating
in battle the Basques, who had come down from their hills to join in the
struggle. After beating them, he founded on their border the town of
Vittoria as a memorial of his success—a town destined to be better
remembered for the great English victory of 1813 than for this ancient
triumph.

Hermenegild was nearly two years in possession of the valley of the
Guadalquivir, but in 582 his father suddenly descended upon him, and
drove him within the walls of Seville. The Suevi came up to raise the
siege, but Leovigild routed their king Miro, and returned to resume his
leaguer. After many months of blockade he stormed the town, but
Hermenegild and his wife escaped to the Romans. The rebel prince took
refuge in the castle of Osset, whither the king followed him, and, by
the huge bribe of 30,000 solidi, induced the Imperialist Government to
sell the town. Hermenegild was dragged from sanctuary, and brought
before his father, who pardoned his rebellion, but stripped him of his
princely insignia, and sent him to live in honourable confinement at
Valencia as a private person.

Leovigild then turned against the Suevi, overran their whole country,
and captured their last king, Andica, whom he interned in a monastery.
Thus the rebellion of Hermenegild had not only failed to ruin the Gothic
state, but had actually led to the subjection of the troublesome
neighbour-kingdom in the north-west, which had hitherto escaped the
Visigothic sword.

Hermenegild’s fate was destined to be a sad one. His father promised to
restore him to his former place if he would abandon the orthodox faith,
but he steadfastly refused, and was presently cast into prison. But
chains had no more effect on his constancy than prayers and promises.
His father grew angry, and bade him expect the worst if he persisted in
his obstinacy. On Easter Day 585, he sent an Arian bishop to administer
the sacrament to the prisoner. Hermenegild drove the heretical prelate
from his cell with cries and imprecations. [Sidenote: Execution of
Hermenegild, 585.] The news was brought to his father, who, in a moment
of ungovernable rage, like that which induced our own Henry II. to order
the death of Becket, bade his guards seize and behead his inflexible
son. So perished Hermenegild, whom after generations, forgetting his
undutiful rebellion, and remembering only his constancy in the orthodox
faith, saluted as a saint. His wife and infant son were sent to
Constantinople by the Roman governor of Malaga. Ingunthis died on the
voyage, but the boy, Athanagild, lived and died obscurely at the court
of the emperor Maurice.

Leovigild had now to face the wrath of the Franks. Guntram, the uncle,
and Theudebert, the brother of Ingunthis, took arms to avenge her
husband’s execution. They sent a fleet to land a force in Galicia, and
raise the newly-conquered Suevi, while a Burgundian army entered
Septimania, and attacked Nismes and Carcassonne. But Leovigild’s
military skill and constant good fortune in war did not fail him. While
he himself cut to pieces the army which had landed in Galicia, his son,
Reccared, drove the Burgundians out of Septimania, with the loss of
their general and half their army. Father and son met in triumph at
Toledo, but the hardships of a winter campaign had been too much for
Leovigild, who died soon after his return to his capital, on the 13th of
April 586, a year to the very day from the date of his eldest son’s
execution, a coincidence which the orthodox did not fail to point out as
marking the wrath of heaven.

Leovigild, some time before his death, had induced the Visigoths to
elect his second son, Reccared, as his colleague, and to salute him as
king. There was, therefore, no tumultuous election or civil war when the
old king died, and his heir quietly took his place. Reccared was
destined to set his mark on the history of the Visigothic kingdom no
less firmly than his father had done. If Leovigild saved the state from
anarchy by his strong arm, Reccared set it on a new and altered course
of existence, and introduced a new element into its political and
religious life by the great change which is connected with his name—the
conversion of the Visigoths to the orthodox faith. [Sidenote: Reccared,
586-601.] Reccared was the son of a Roman mother, but, unlike his
brother Hermenegild, he never showed any discontent with Arianism in his
father’s lifetime. No sooner, however, was the old man dead than his
successor began to take steps which threw the Arians into a state of
excitement and apprehension. He summoned Catholic and Arian bishops
before him, and many times bade them dispute in his presence on the
mysteries of the Trinity. This he did more to prepare the people for the
coming change than because he was himself in any doubt as to his future
conduct.

Reccared thoroughly grasped the fact that the Visigothic state would
never be established on a really firm basis as long as the governing
caste were separated from the bulk of their subjects by the fatal
barrier of religion. The Goths were too few to amalgamate the
provincials with themselves, and had shown no signs of wishing to do so.
But if no such amalgamation took place, the Gothic monarchy was doomed
to disappear some day in a political convulsion, when the moment should
come that found no strong and capable ruler on the throne. Leovigild had
only staved off such a crisis by prodigies of activity and courage. Now
Reccared had made up his mind that the Arianism of the Goths was more a
matter of conservative adherence to ancestral prejudices and of
race-pride, than of real conviction or fanatical faith. He thought that
if the king led the way, and if mild and cautious changes were made,
without any sudden blow or attempt at enforced conformity, his
countrymen might insensibly be led within the pale of the Catholic
church. The course of events proved that he was entirely right; and the
conversion of the nation was managed all the more surely because it was
carried out by a cautious and unemotional statesman, and not by an
enthusiastic saint.

The completion of Reccared’s scheme occupied the years 586-88. When he
declared himself a Catholic, and accepted the solemn blessing of his
uncle, the Metropolitan of Seville, the greater part of his _comitatus_
followed his example. In quick succession many Gothic counts, and a
large portion of the Arian episcopate conformed to orthodoxy. [Sidenote:
The Goths turn Catholic, 587.]

The Church on its side made the change easy, by not insisting on any new
baptism of the converts. It was enough if they attended a Catholic place
of worship, and received the blessing of an orthodox priest.

It was not to be expected, however, that so momentous a change would
pass over the country without provoking trouble. There were many Goths,
both clergy and laymen, who viewed Arianism as the sacred religion of
their ancestors, and the badge of their conquering race. Three
rebellions broke out in quick succession, in regions as far apart as
Septimania and Lusitania, while the king’s stepmother Godiswintha and
bishop Athaloc, the chief of the Arian clergy, placed themselves at the
head of the rising. But the greater part of the Visigoths looked on in
apathy, and allowed a small body of fanatics to fight out the question
of religion with the king. The Arians were put down, and gave no further
trouble. The whole sect seems to have melted away in a few years, and
ere long the Visigoths were as proud of their Catholicism as they had
once been of their heterodoxy.

While Reccared was busy with the suppression of the Arian rebels, the
Frankish king Guntram of Burgundy thought that a good opportunity had
arisen for conquering Septimania. He sent a great army down the Rhone,
but near Narbonne it was completely defeated by Reccared’s general, duke
Claudius, the first man of Roman blood who had ever been promoted to
high rank by a Visigothic king. This was the last time that a Frankish
conquest of Septimania was ever seriously attempted (589).

Reccared reigned for twelve years more, with great good fortune both at
home and abroad. He subdued the Basques, kept the Imperialists penned in
to their line of harbours along the south coast, and repressed several
minor tumults raised by discontented Gothic nobles. In every crisis he
found the Catholic bishops his best support, and must have constantly
congratulated himself on having turned his most dangerous enemies into
the strongest bulwark of his throne. But by placing himself in their
hands he had begun to expose Gothic royalty to a new danger, that of too
great dependence on the Church. The National Council—the _Witan_ as it
would have been called in England—was completely swamped by the
churchmen. There were more than sixty bishops in Spain, while the number
of dukes and counts who were usually summoned to the Assembly was
considerably less. The bishops—men more clever, more wise, and better
organised than their lay colleagues—soon came to exercise a dominating
influence in the council. The spiritual pressure which they could bring
to bear on the king was too great to be disregarded. Hence it came to
pass that ere the end of his reign Reccared, though peaceful and
tolerant himself, was urged into acts of persecution, not only against
his old co-religionists, the Arians, but against the Jews—a race who had
hitherto prospered in Spain, and who had gathered in a very considerable
portion of its wealth and commerce. Formerly the Visigothic kings, like
the great Theodoric in Italy, had been very tolerant, and had not seldom
employed Jews as collectors of revenue and in minor official posts. All
this came to an end with the conversion of Reccared, though in his day
the discouragement alike of Arian and Jew went no further than making
them incapable of holding any office, and prohibiting the public
exercise of their worship.

After a reign of fifteen years, king Reccared died in 601, leaving the
throne to his son, Leova II., the only instance in Gothic Spain of a
succession of three generations of the same house on the throne. The new
monarch was just twenty. He was a devoted admirer and follower of the
Catholic bishops, and, by all accounts, showed more piety than capacity.
The accession of a weak and inexperienced youth was the opportunity for
which the unruly Visigothic nobles, crushed for thirty years under the
strong hands of Leovigild and Reccared, had been long waiting. In the
second year of his reign Leova was surprised and murdered by
conspirators under the guidance of a certain count Witterich, who had
headed an Arian rising in 588, but had been spared on conforming to
Catholicism. He now repaid Reccared’s clemency by murdering his son
(603).

After thirty-three years of strong government, Spain once more fell back
into the state of civil strife from which it had been rescued by
Leovigild. But the character of the struggle was now changed; for the
future it was a contest between the Catholic hierarchy and the
Visigothic nobles, as to which should appoint and control the king.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER IX

THE SUCCESSORS OF JUSTINIAN

565-610

Justin II. and his unhappy financial policy—His troubles with the
Persians and Avars—Reign of Tiberius Constantinus—Accession of
Maurice—His victory over Persia—His failure against the Slavs and
Avars—Disasters in the Balkan Peninsula—Fall of Maurice—Tyranny of
Phocas—His unfortunate war with Persia—He is dethroned and slain by
Heraclius, 610.

The forty years which followed the death of Justinian were a period of
rapid decline and decay for the East-Roman world. The empire was paying,
by exhaustion within and the loss of provinces without, for the
spasmodic outburst of energy into which it had been galvanised by the
great emperor. He left to his heirs broad and dangerous frontiers in his
newly-acquired provinces, with an army which had got somewhat out of
hand, and a civil population shorn to the skin by the excessive taxation
of the last twenty years.

Justinian’s heirs were, unhappily for the empire, princes who tried to
maintain their great predecessor’s ambitious policy, at a moment when
the less brilliant, but more cautious and economical, rule of a second
Anastasius would have been the best thing for the East-Roman world. The
Emperor’s nephew, Justinus, son of his sister Vigilantia, mounted the
throne on his decease without meeting with any opposition. He had served
his uncle as _Curopalata_, or Master of the Palace, for the last ten
years, and had been able to make things ready for his own peaceful
succession, though Justinian had never consented to allow him to be
crowned as his colleague as long as he lived. [Sidenote: Justin II.,
565-78.] Justin was married to Sophia, the niece of the empress
Theodora, a lady who resembled her aunt in her masterful spirit, but was
far from rivalling her abilities. Justin and his wife had led a somewhat
repressed and constrained existence during the old emperor’s life, and
were set upon asserting their individuality the moment that Justinian
was buried. Justin had high ideas of the dignity of the imperial name
and the majesty of the empire, and had determined to inaugurate a
spirited foreign policy when he seized the helm of affairs. His first
measure was to refuse to continue any of the comparatively trifling
subsidies to barbarian princes on the frontier, which Justinian had been
content to pay in order to keep them from petty raids—much as the Indian
Government to-day subsidises the chiefs of the Khyber Pass. This
involved him in a long and ultimately dangerous war with the Chagan of
the Avars, a Tartar tribe newly established on the north bank of the
lower Danube, whom Justinian had paid to keep off the Huns and other
troublesome neighbours. The Avars, originally a race of no great
importance, obtained at this moment a great extension of power and
territory by allying themselves with the Lombards, in order to destroy
the Gepidae, the Gothic tribe who dwelt north of Sirmium on the middle
Danube. After exterminating their Teutonic neighbours, the Lombards
passed on to invade Italy,[21] and left the Avars in possession of the
whole line of the Danube, from Vienna to its mouth. Thenceforth the
Avars were a scourge to the already half-desolate provinces of Moesia
and Illyricum. They ranged over the whole territory up to the Balkans,
in spite of the innumerable fortresses which Justinian had built and
garrisoned to defend the Danube bank. This trouble was continually
growing worse all through the reign of Justin II., and became an actual
source of danger, as well as of mere annoyance, in the time of his
successors.

Footnote 21:

See p. 181.

Another refusal of Justin to make a payment of money, which he
considered degrading to his majesty, was destined to bring on a struggle
even more ruinous than that with the Avars. It will be remembered that
the peace between Justinian and Chosroes of Persia, concluded in 562,
had stipulated for some payments from the East-Romans to the king. In
571 Justin refused to fulfil his obligations, and plunged the empire
into a wholly unnecessary war with his great Oriental neighbour. Several
causes conspired to induce Justin to undertake this struggle. He was
implored by the Christian population of Persian Armenia to deliver them
from the fire-worshipping Sassanians, and the Turks of the Oxus had sent
an embassy to promise him help from the East if he would assault
Chosroes. Dizabul, their great Khan, engaged to distract the forces of
the enemy by crossing the Oxus and invading northern Persia, while
Justin’s generals were to cross the Tigris and attack Media.

This war, which the emperor undertook with such a light heart, was
destined to last no less than nineteen years (572-591), and to drag on
into the reigns of two of his successors. [Sidenote: Persian War of
Justin.] It was quite as inconclusive, and quite as costly in men and
money, as had been the previous struggle in the reign of Justinian. On
the whole, the Romans lost no territory during its course. Their
farthest frontier stronghold of Daras was the only place of importance
that fell into Persian hands in the earlier years of the war, and the
secondary fortress of Martyropolis, in the Armenian Highlands, the only
loss of its later years. Both were destined to be recovered, and the
second Roman line of defence, based on Edessa and Amida, held good. If
the armies of Chosroes once succeeded in penetrating into Syria, it is
only fair to add that the imperial troops made several incursions into
the Persian border-lands of Arzanene and Corduene. It was not so much by
the loss of fortresses or the ravaging of territory that the war was
harmful to the empire, as by the long, fruitless drain of taxation that
it brought about. Where the tax-gatherer of Justinian’s time had shorn
the population close, the tax-gatherer of Justin’s was obliged to flay
them, in order to wring out the necessary solidi. Having begun the war
at his own pleasure, Justin found that he could not conclude it in a
similar way. The Persians hoped to win by exhausting the empire’s
resources, and were set on protracting the weary game.

In the ninth year after his succession to the throne, Justin was seized
with suicidal mania, and had to be placed in close restraint for all the
rest of his life. On his first lucid interval he nominated as his
colleague, and crowned as Caesar, a respectable military officer, named
Tiberius Constantinus, who, in conjunction with the empress Sophia,
acted as regent for the demented emperor till 578. Sophia, a proud and
restless woman, kept most of the power in her own hands, for Tiberius
was not of a pushing or ambitious disposition. His accession to power
made little or no difference in the policy of the court, which was still
guided by the empress.

While Justin saw the Balkan peninsula ravaged by the Avars, and the
Mesopotamian frontier beset by the Persians, he was destined to suffer a
still more grievous loss in another region of his empire. The Lombards,
emigrating from the middle Danube, followed the track that the
Ostrogoths had taken eighty years before, and threw themselves on the
newly-recovered province of Italy, only fifteen years after it had been
finally secured to the empire by the victories of Narses at Taginae and
Casilinum. Their fortunes will be described in another chapter. Here it
must suffice to say that ere the end of the reign of Justin II. they had
torn two-thirds of the peninsula from the grasp of the East-Roman
governors.

In 578, four years after he had fallen into a state of lunacy, Justin
II. died, and his colleague, Tiberius Constantinus, became sole ruler of
the empire. Tiberius II. was a thoroughly upright and well-intentioned
man, who had been chosen as heir by his predecessor solely on the ground
of his merits, and in spite of the fact that Justin had a son-in-law and
several cousins to whom he might have left the legacy of power.
[Sidenote: Tiberius Constantinus. 578-582.] Like Titus in an earlier
age, Tiberius II. was the darling and hope of the whole population of
the empire, and, like Titus, he was cut off in the flower of his years
after a very short reign. He had time, however, to give some earnest of
his good intentions by cutting down the grinding taxation of Justin II.
by a fourth, and remitting all arrears owed to the state. But he was
unable to do away with the cause which made taxation so heavy, the
wretched lingering Persian war, and, till the empire could obtain peace
within and without, the remission of taxation only meant the inadequate
performance of the duties of the state, and the rapid accumulation of
public debt. Tiberius succeeded, however, in making a truce with the
Avars, though to obtain it he had to give up the great border-fortress
of Sirmium, the central point for the defence of the line of the Danube
and Save, and also to promise to make one of those payments of money
which his predecessor had regarded as degrading the majesty of the
empire. Being free from war in the Balkans, Tiberius concentrated no
less than 200,000 men on the Persian frontier, and his troops, under the
general Maurice, won many successes, and invaded Media. But the
obstinate king Hormisdas, who had now succeeded Chosroes on the throne,
refused to listen to any proposals for peace, and the war dragged on.

In the fourth year of his reign Tiberius was suddenly stricken down by
disease, and died while only on the threshold of middle age. Like his
predecessor, he chose as his heir not any relative, but the best man
that he knew. Eight days before his death he invested with the royal
diadem his general Maurice, who had lately distinguished himself by a
great victory in Mesopotamia, and was universally respected for his
sterling merit and modesty. Maurice immediately married his benefactor’s
daughter, Constantina, and ascended the vacant throne in peace.

Like Tiberius Constantinus, Maurice was an eminently well-meaning ruler,
and a man not destitute of ability, but the times were too hard for him,
and his very virtues often conspired to lead him into unfortunate
actions. [Sidenote: Maurice, 582-602.] His reign of twenty years
(582-602), though not wanting in successes, was still a continuation of
the unhappy period of decline and decay which had set in since the year
of the great plague of 542. The worst of the troubles of Maurice was the
complete exhaustion of the imperial finances. The liberality of Tiberius
II. had drained out the last solidus from the already depleted treasury,
and the new emperor started with a deficit, which remained as a
perpetual nightmare to him all through his reign. Maurice was of a
prudent and economical disposition; the adverse balance cut him to the
heart, and he adopted all sorts of schemes—wise and unwise—to make
receipts and expenditure balance. The war expenses were, of course, the
main disturbing element, and Maurice went so far in his zeal for
retrenchment that while hostilities were still in progress he
endeavoured, on more than one occasion, to cut down the soldiers’ pay,
and economise the expenditure of provisions and military stores. This
policy had the most disastrous results. Several times it led to mutiny,
and at last it cost Maurice his throne and life.

The Persian war continued through the first nine years of Maurice’s
reign, as long as the reckless and obstinate king Hormisdas remained in
power. On the whole it was fortunately conducted. Two able officers,
named Heraclius and Philippicus, obtained the mastery over the Persians,
and won several battles. They would have done even more if Maurice’s
policy of ‘economy at any price’ had not led to mutinies among the
soldiery, who struck work, and retired behind the border when they heard
that their pay was to be reduced. It is hard to conceive how Maurice
could be so unwise; for he had considerable military experience, and
wrote an excellent book on tactics, _The Strategicon_, which served for
three hundred years as the manual of all Byzantine officers. Apparently
the economist prevailed over the soldier in his composition.

Luckily the mutiny of 588 did not ruin the empire; the troops returned
to duty when their grievance was removed, and won more victories over
the Persians. Hormisdas grew unpopular with his subjects, and was
deposed and slain by a usurper named Varahnes. His young son, Chosroes,
fled to the Roman camp, and threw himself on the mercy of his hereditary
foe. This led to the end of the war; Maurice lent the young prince
supplies and auxiliaries to start a rebellion against Varahnes.
[Sidenote: Persian War ended, 591.] The rising succeeded, and the
grateful Chosroes made peace with the empire the moment that he was
restored to his father’s throne (591). The terms, like those of the
peaces of 532 and 562, amounted to little more than the restoration of
the state of things which had preceded hostilities. Maurice recovered
the lost fortresses of Daras and Martyropolis, and gained the Christian
districts of Persarmenia, a new acquisition to the empire, but not one
of much importance.

But the troubles of Maurice, military and financial alike, did not cease
with the end of the Persian war. The faithless Avars, disregarding the
terms of peace which they had sworn to Tiberius II. in 581, were once
more ravaging the Balkan peninsula. In the second year of Maurice’s
reign they burst over the Danube, and seized the fortresses of
Singidunum and Viminacium, whose garrisons had been reduced by the needs
of the Persian war. Unable to raise a new army, Maurice sent them a
subsidy which kept them quiet for two years, but in 585 the Tartar horde
took arms once more, and threw themselves upon Thrace. Nor was it only
with the wild Avars that Maurice had to deal. We now hear of the Slavs
as becoming for the first time a serious danger to the empire. Their
tribes had for some time dwelt in obscurity along the lower Danube and
in the South-Russian plains, having flooded in to occupy the void space
left by the migration of the Goths in the fourth century. At the
accession of Maurice some of them were subject to the Avars, others were
still independent, but all showed a tendency to move southward over the
Danube. The Slavs were individually not very dangerous enemies to the
empire; they were in the very lowest stage of civilisation, hardly yet
accustomed to till the soil, and living the precarious life of fishers
and hunters. They did not fight in the open field, but lurked in forests
and morasses, issuing forth to plunder by night, and only attacking
their foes when they could take them by surprise. It is said that they
practised the curious stratagem of lying hid in shallow pools, showing
nothing above the surface of the water save the point of a hollow reed,
through which they breathed. The story sounds improbable, but Byzantine
authors quote several occasions on which it was actually used.

Many Slav tribes, seeking refuge from the domination of the Avars,
crossed the Danube in their light canoes, and established themselves in
the wooded slopes of the Balkans, or the marshes of the Dobrudscha,
where they found the cover that they loved. The Moesian provincials had
been so thinned by two hundred years of raiding suffered at the hands of
Goth, Hun, and Avar, that the Slavs found the land almost wholly
uninhabited. Outside the great Danube fortresses, and the large towns
like Naissus or Sardica, the population had almost entirely disappeared.
[Sidenote: The Slavs cross the Danube.] Avoiding battles with the
garrisons of the towns, the Slavs slipped between them, and spread over
the face of the deserted land, pitching their rude huts in the most
secluded spots that they could find. They were not only intruders, but
enemies, for they were keenly set on plunder, waylaid every party of
travellers that strove to pass from town to town, and laid ambuscades
for every body of soldiers that was not too numerous for them to cope
with.

From 585 to the very end of his reign Maurice was engaged in a desperate
struggle against Slav and Avar, which raged over the whole of the Balkan
peninsula. The invaders gradually pressed southwards, though they
suffered many defeats, and though whole tribes of Slavs were sometimes
exterminated. The enemy, though individually contemptible, seemed to
draw on endless reserves of strength, as horde after horde slipped
across the Danube, and threw itself into the glens of the Balkans. The
effect of these invasions is well described by a contemporary
chronicler, John of Ephesus: ‘The first years of Maurice were famous for
the invasion of the accursed people called Slavonians, who overran
Greece and all the lands about Thessalonica and Thrace, plundering many
towns, and devastating and burning, and reducing the people to slavery.
They have made themselves masters of the whole country, and settled in
it by main force, and dwell in it as though it were their own. Four
years have now passed, and still they live at their ease in the land,
and spread themselves abroad, as far as God permits them, and ravage and
burn and take captive, and still they encamp and dwell there.’

Ever since the Persian war ended, the reign of Maurice had been one
unbroken series of misfortunes; the only remedy that the emperor could
find for the evil times was an economy that verged on avarice. This
foible at last caused his ruin. In 599 the Chagan of the Avars demanded
of him ransom-money for 12,000 Roman prisoners who had fallen into his
hands; the emperor refused to pay it, though he had the required sum of
solidi ready at hand. The Chagan thereupon massacred the whole body of
prisoners. The Roman world raised a cry of horror, and threw the blame
upon the avarice of Maurice, not the savagery of the Avars. Henceforth
his throne was unsafe; but the crowning blow to his power was given by
another piece of unwise economy. After a successful campaign against the
Slavs in 601, the army of the Balkans had pursued them across the
Danube. Maurice sent orders that the victorious troops should winter in
the open field, upon the bleak townless plains of Wallachia, in order to
save supplies.

Instead of obeying, the soldiery drove away their generals, placed a
Thracian centurion named Phocas at their head, and marched on
Constantinople, loudly proclaiming that they were coming to depose the
emperor. So unpopular had Maurice made himself with the army, that he
found that he could not trust even his household troops, and in despair
armed the Blue and Green factions, and set them to guard the city walls.
[Sidenote: Rebellion of Phocas.] But the factions were a broken reed
when disciplined troops had to be faced, and Maurice soon found himself
deserted by every one. He fled to Chalcedon, hoping to raise aid in the
Asiatic provinces, where he was less unpopular than in Europe.
Meanwhile, the army entered the capital, and proclaimed Phocas as
emperor, though he was but a rough uncultured boor, who had headed the
mutineers simply in virtue of having louder lungs and a heavier hand
than his comrades. The usurper sent officers to seize his unfortunate
predecessor, and caused him to be beheaded, along with his four sons,
the youngest of whom was a mere infant in arms. Maurice met his death
with a courage and dignity that moved the hearts of those who had so
lately reviled him. ‘Just art Thou, O Lord God, and just are Thy
judgments,’ he exclaimed as the executioner raised his sword, and died
with a prayer on his lips.

From the foundation of Constantinople down to the death of Maurice the
Eastern crown had never before been the prize of successful rebellion,
nor had any legitimate emperor fallen by the hands of his subjects.
Revolts there had been, but they had never gained permanent success. It
was an evil day for the empire when the army found that they could make
an emperor, and the orderly succession of elective Caesars, chosen by
their predecessors or by the Senate, came to an end.

The new ruler of Constantinople proved to be a brutal ruffian, beside
whose vices the faults of Maurice seemed shining virtues. Ignorant,
cruel, licentious, and thriftless, he made his lusts his masters, and
soon became the detestation of all his subjects. Phocas showed ability
in one thing only, he was most successful in tracking out and
frustrating the numerous conspiracies which were ere long framed against
his life. All whom he rightly or wrongly suspected were visited with
cruel deaths; among others he slew his predecessor’s widow, Constantina,
and her three little daughters, because he found that their names were
often used as a rallying cry by plotters. On mere suspicion he seized
and burnt alive Narses, the general of the East, the most distinguished
officer in the army. Other objects of his dread were flogged to death,
strangled, or cruelly mutilated.

Meanwhile, the reign of terror at home was accompanied by disaster
without. The decaying military and financial strength of the empire
suddenly collapsed into utter ruin under the rule of the vicious boor
who had replaced the economic Maurice. The Slavs and Avars wrought their
wicked will unhindered on the European provinces, and pushed their
ravages up to the wall of Anastasius. In the East matters fared even
worse. The young and able king of Persia made the murder of his
benefactor Maurice a _casus belli_, and took arms to avenge his ‘friend
and father.’ From the first opening of the war the Romans fared badly;
never had such an unbroken series of disasters met their arms. Early in
the struggle Phocas had provoked the Eastern army by recalling and
burning alive their commander Narses. They fought feebly, were
ill-supplied by the incapable tyrant, and badly led by his creatures who
were placed at their head. [Sidenote: Disastrous Persian War, 603-10.]
In 606 there came a sudden collapse; the great frontier fortress of
Daras fell, and from that moment the Persians pushed on without meeting
a check. They overran all Mesopotamia, ravaged northern Syria, and
pushed their incursions into Asia Minor, where no enemy had been seen
for a century. The armies of Phocas seem to have dispersed, or shut
themselves up within city walls, for we hear of no resistance to the
invader. In 608 matters grew worse still; from their base in Mesopotamia
and north Syria the Persians struck out boldly towards Constantinople.
Overrunning Cappadocia, Galatia, and Bithynia their raiding bands
crossed the whole peninsula, and even penetrated to Chalcedon and eyed
the imperial city across the Bosphorus. Phocas, instead of hastening to
organise new troops, contented himself with ordering a persecution of
the Jews, whom he accused of having betrayed to the Persians some of the
towns of Syria.

In 609 the enemy once more overran Asia Minor, capturing among other
places the great city of Caesarea in Cappadocia. Again they met with
little or no opposition; the emperor’s attention was entirely taken up
with real or imaginary plots in the capital. It seemed that he would
allow the empire to be torn from him piecemeal, without striking a blow.

But relief was at last about to come to the suffering people of New
Rome. In Africa there ruled as exarch Heraclius, the veteran officer
whose victories had closed the old Persian wars of the time of Maurice.
He was capable and much beloved both by the provincials and by his army;
under his able rule Africa, alone among the provinces of the empire,
enjoyed peace and prosperity. In 609 Heraclius received emissaries from
Priscus, the commander of the imperial guard, one of the innumerable
persons who had fallen under the suspicion of Phocas. The messengers
bade Heraclius strike boldly at Constantinople, for Phocas was
universally detested, and no one would raise an arm in his defence. At
the same moment the exarch learnt that his tyrannical master had already
conceived doubts of his loyalty, and had thrown his wife and daughter
into prison.

[Sidenote: Rebellion of Heraclius.] Seeing that he must strike hard or
be crushed, Heraclius determined to rebel. He spent the winter of 609-10
in fitting out a fleet, and launched it against Constantinople before
Phocas had learnt of his revolt. The command was given to his eldest
son, who also bore the name of Heraclius, for the exarch himself was old
and ailing. At the same time, to make a diversion, he sent a body of
cavalry under his nephew, Nicetas, to invade Egypt by land; they were to
follow the line of the long coast-road through Tripoli and Cyrene.

When the fleet of the younger Heraclius reached the Dardanelles it met
with no resistance; on the news of its arrival, Priscus brought the
imperial guard to join the rebels, and the emperor found himself
deserted by all his soldiery. He strove, like his predecessor Maurice,
to arm the factions of the Blues and Greens; but no one would strike a
blow in behalf of such a worthless tyrant. Heraclius sailed unopposed to
the Bosphorus, and as he arrived off the palace he met a boat containing
the wretched Phocas, whom a private enemy had seized and cast into
chains. The prisoner was brought on deck and cast at the feet of his
conqueror. ‘Is it thus,’ cried Heraclius, ‘that you have governed the
empire?’ ‘Will you,’ the fallen tyrant replied, ‘govern it any better?’
Heraclius spurned him with his foot, and promptly consigned him to the
headsman.

Thus perished the first, but by no means the last, military usurper who
sat on the Constantinopolitan throne, overthrown, as he had been
elevated, by an armed rebellion. All the world with singular unanimity
testified to the worthlessness of Phocas, save one single adherent; but
this was no less a person than Pope Gregory the Great. Much to his
discredit the great pontiff had been a supporter, nay, even a flatterer,
of the Thracian boor who wore the eastern diadem with such ill grace.
But Gregory had been an enemy of the unfortunate Maurice, because that
prince—though orthodox in matters of doctrine—had shown scant respect to
the See of Rome. He had called some of Gregory’s epistles ‘fatuous,’ and
had allowed John ‘the Faster,’ patriarch of Constantinople, to assume
the title of ‘œcumenical bishop,’ a style which filled Gregory with
horror, and caused him to exclaim that the times of Antichrist were at
hand. Gregory therefore looked on Maurice’s murderer as the avenger of
the outraged dignity of the See of Rome, and did not shrink from heaping
upon him epithets of unseemly adulation; the choirs of angels, he said,
sang with joy in heaven at the accession of such a worthy Caesar! Truly
this was a painful episode in the life of a man who, in spite of all his
faults, has been justly hailed as a saint.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER X

DECLINE AND DECAY OF THE MEROVINGIANS

561-656.

The sons of Chlothar divide the Frankish realm—Wars of Sigibert and
Chilperich—The fortunes of Brunhildis—Continued wars of Neustria and
Austrasia—Tyranny of Chilperich and Fredegundis—Decay of the Royal
Power among the Franks—The House of St. Arnulf and Pippin—Brunhildis
regent in Austrasia—Wars of her grandsons—Her death—Chlothar II.
sole king—His weakness—His successor Dagobert I. last free king of
the Merovingian line—Rise of the Mayors of the Palace.

After the first eighty years of its existence, the Frankish kingdom,
which under three generations of warlike monarchs had continued to
extend its borders so fast and so far, ceased suddenly to grow, and was
given up for a century and a half to ruinous civil wars, as objectless
as they were tedious and confused. In surrendering their primitive
Teutonic freedom to their royal house, in return for the glory and
aggrandisement which union under a single despotic hand gave to their
hitherto weak and scattered tribes, the Franks had bartered away their
future. As long as the house of Chlodovech were able and active, their
subjects could console themselves for submitting to an autocrat by
sharing in the power and plunder which a century of successful war
brought in to them. But when the Merovings, though still retaining their
despotic authority, grew weak and incapable, showing no trace of their
ancestor’s qualities, save an inveterate tendency to treachery and
fratricide, an evil time came upon the Frankish race. They paid for
their early aggrandisement by being condemned to five generations of
useless civil wars at home, and powerlessness abroad, while their
hereditary monarchs sacrificed everything to their unending family
feuds. Nothing more could be hoped for the Franks till they had rid
themselves of the nightmare-incubus of this wicked house, whose
repulsive annals are, on the whole, the most hopeless and depressing
page in the history of Europe.[22] From generation to generation their
story reeks with blood; there is nothing that can be compared to it for
horror in the records of any nation on this side of the Mediterranean.
We have to search the histories of the courts of Mohammedan Asia to
discover a parallel. The Franks only found salvation in the growth of
checks on the royal power by the development of the great provincial
governors, and by the final deposition of the Merovings in favour of the
great house of the descendants of St. Arnulf, the Mayors of the Palace,
whose strong hand at last stayed the fratricidal wars of the seventh
century. And even when the new dynasty had mounted the throne, the
Frankish realm showed fatal signs of the demoralisation it had suffered
under the old royal house. The tendency of the race to acquiesce in the
unwise habit of heritage-partition, and the unhappy grudge between the
eastern and the western Franks, were direct legacies of the Merovings.

Footnote 22:

In spite of the wickedness of the house of the Merovings, the Franks
were very loyal, even in the days of the decay of the royal race. We
find their chroniclers repeatedly contrasting the fidelity of the
Franks with the fickleness of their Visigothic neighbours, who, having
lost their ancient royal house, were continually making and unmaking
sovereigns from among the ranks of their counts and dukes.

We left the whole[23] Frankish realm concentrated in the hands of the
aged Chlothar, last surviving son of Chlodovech. [Sidenote: Second
partition of the Frankish Realm, 561.] When, however, this hoary
ruffian, fresh from the murder of his eldest son, sank into his grave,
in the year 561, his four surviving children parted the kingdom once
more among themselves, not without a preliminary fight, in which
Chilperich, the youngest of the four, having laid hands on his father’s
treasures, and raised an army with their aid, tried to put down his
kinsmen, but failed. When he had been defeated and brought to
submission, the realm was made into four shares. Charibert, the eldest
son, took Paris and Aquitaine; Guntram the Burgundian kingdom; Sigibert
the Ripuarian land on the Rhine, and the tributary Thuringian and
Bavarian lands beyond it; lastly, the restless Chilperich was given his
father’s original share, the old Salian land between Meuse and Somme,
with certain districts farther south added to it, so that it extended
nearly as far as the gates of Rouen and Rheims.

Footnote 23:

For genealogy of the house of Chlodovech see page 166.

[Illustration:

THE FRANKISH KINGDOMS. 575.
]

Of these four brothers, Charibert died young, in 567. He is only
remembered because his daughter Bertha married Ethelbert, the king of
Kent, and was, twenty years later, the protector of the mission of St.
Augustine. Charibert’s lands on the Seine and Loire were parted among
his three brothers, Guntram and Chilperich each taking the part that lay
nearest to his own frontier, while their distant Ripuarian brother,
Sigibert, had Tours, Poictiers, and Bordeaux, separated from his other
dominions by the whole breadth of Burgundy.

The tale of the wars and tumults which the three surviving sons of
Chlothar I. raised against each other is a long recital of objectless
strife and treachery. The uneasiest spirit of the three was the wicked
Chilperich, ‘the Nero and Herod of his time,’ as Gregory of Tours very
rightly styles him. The usual fraternal hatred of the Merovings was
embittered between him and Sigibert by an additional grievance. While
Sigibert was away beyond the Rhine striving with the wild Avars, who had
pushed their incursions along the Danube into Bavaria and Suabia, his
brother, the king of Soissons, invaded Ripuaria, and tried to seize it
for himself. Sigibert returned in haste, and succeeded in driving
Chilperich back beyond the Meuse, and preserving his eastern border.

This would have been cause enough for revenge, but a worse was to
follow. Chilperich and Sigibert had married two sisters, the daughters
of the Visigothic king, Athanagild. Galswintha was the spouse of
Chilperich, Brunhildis of Sigibert. They were princesses famed all over
the Western world for their beauty and abilities no less than for the
enormous dowries which their father had bestowed upon them. [Sidenote:
Murder of Galswintha, 567.] Before his marriage Chilperich had kept a
perfect harem of concubines, though on the arrival of Galswintha he had
for the moment banished them. But Fredegundis, the chief among his
former favourites, retained such an empire over him that after a few
months he openly brought her back to the palace, and insulted the queen
by her presence. When Galswintha indignantly declared that she should
return to her father, the wicked king had her murdered, and publicly
married Fredegundis within a few days (567).

Brunhildis, the sister of the murdered queen, and the spouse of
Chilperich’s elder brother the king of Ripuaria, devoted the rest of her
life to the task of avenging Galswintha’s death on the king of Soissons
and his paramour. She was a strong-willed, fearless, able woman, and her
influence over her husband was unbounded. For forty years the houses of
Sigibert and Chilperich and their unhappy subjects were destined to shed
their blood on the battle-field that the slaughter of Galswintha might
be atoned for.

It is in these wars that the final partition of the Frankish realm into
its two permanent divisions took shape, and that new names for these
divisions came into use. The Ripuarian realm of king Sigibert, from the
borders of Bavaria and Thuringia as far as the Meuse and Scheldt, is for
the future known as Austrasia—the Eastern kingdom; Chilperich’s less
purely Teutonic realm, from the Meuse and Scheldt as far as the Loire,
gets the name of Neustria, the New kingdom, or the New West kingdom, as
others interpret it.[24]

Footnote 24:

Neustria, Neuster, Neustrasia, Neutrasia, Niwistria are all found as
forms of the name. It is disputed whether it means merely the realm of
the ‘New Franks’ in Gaul as opposed to the ‘Old Franks’ on Meuse and
Rhine, or whether New and West are compressed together in the word.
The _Annals of Metz_ say, ‘Occidentales Franci qui Niwistrii
dicuntur.’ Its boundaries were the Scheldt, the _Silva Carbonaria_
about Namur and Mons, and the Upper Meuse. Verdun is the westernmost
Austrasian town; Langres the northernmost Burgundian town.

The beginning of the wars of Neustria and Austrasia follows immediately
on the death of Galswintha. As the avenger of blood, king Sigibert
entered his brother’s kingdom, and drove him westward. But the
hostilities were suspended by a great Lombard invasion of Gaul. The new
conquerors of Italy had passed the Alps, and thrown themselves upon the
Frankish realm. Guntram of Burgundy, whose kingdom bore the brunt of the
assault, prevailed upon his brothers to cease their struggles and unite
to cast out the Lombards from Provence and the Rhone valley. By his
decision Chilperich gave up as _weregeld_ for his wife’s murder, her
dowry and five Aquitanian cities, which had been bestowed upon her at
the marriage. These were made over to Brunhildis, who took them, but
nevertheless bided her time for a fuller revenge (568).

Four years of Lombard wars kept the Frankish kings engaged on their
southern borders, and they were at last successful in forcing the
invaders beyond the Alps, in a series of campaigns in which the chief
glory was gained by the Romano-Gallic duke, Eunius Mummolus, who led the
armies of Guntram of Burgundy. [Sidenote: Wars of Sigibert and
Chilperich, 573-75.] But in 573 the civil war between Sigibert and
Chilperich burst forth again. It spread at once over the whole of the
Frankish realm; for Chilperich attacked his brother’s dominions in
Aquitaine, while Sigibert pressed on beyond Meuse and Scheldt. There
followed two years of fierce fighting, attended by the most barbarous
wasting of the land. Chilperich’s sons burnt every open town between
Tours and Limoges; Sigibert’s troops from beyond the Rhine devastated
the valley of the Meuse. The Austrasians had the better in the struggle,
and Chilperich sued for peace, offering large territorial concessions.
But it was his life and not his lands that Brunhildis wanted. Her
husband was induced to decline his brother’s proposals, and pushed his
victorious arms into the heart of Neustria, after a battle in which
Chilperich’s son and heir, Theudebert, was slain. The king of the West
abandoned his capital, and fled north to hide himself and his wife
behind the walls of Tournay. Most of the Neustrian counts came to do
homage to Sigibert at Paris, and when he had chased his brother behind
the Scheldt, the Austrasian had himself lifted on the shield, according
to old Frankish custom, and saluted as King of all the Franks at Vitry,
near Arras. [Sidenote: Murder of Sigibert, 575.] He sent for his wife
and children to Paris to share in his triumph, and determined to end the
war by the siege of Tournay. But, when all Gaul seemed at his command,
two murderers, hired by queen Fredegundis, came before him with a
pretended message, and stabbed him while he listened to their words
(575).

The death of Sigibert changed the whole aspect of affairs in Gaul, and
raised his assassin from the depth of despair to the height of fortune.
The Austrasian army dispersed when its commander was slain, and the
Neustrian counts flocked to Tournay to do homage again to Chilperich.
Queen Brunhildis, who lay at Paris with Sigibert’s infant son and heir
Childebert, was seized and imprisoned by the partisans of the Neustrian
king. Her little four-year-old son only escaped from his uncle’s
clutches by being let down in a basket from his mother’s prison window,
and received by a faithful adherent, who rode away with him to Metz. If
Chilperich had laid hands on the boy, the Austrasian royal house would
have been ended in the promptest way.

The East-Frankish counts and dukes, when the news of Sigibert’s death
reached them, resolved not to submit to his murderer, but to take a step
unheard of heretofore in the annals of the Merovings. When they found
that the boy Childebert had escaped, they bound his father’s diadem
about his brows, and saluted him as king. Hitherto the Franks had always
lived under the strong hands of a grown man, and the provincial
governors had been as powerless as the meaner people under the
autocratic sway of the ruler; but in the long minority that would follow
the accession of a four-year-old child, they found their opportunity for
lowering the royal power, and dividing many of its privileges among
themselves. From this point begins the degradation of the kingly office,
which was to be the rule henceforth among them; and the counts and
dukes, as well as the great officers of the palace, were destined to
acquire, in the early years of Childebert, a control over the central
power which they had never hitherto possessed.

Meanwhile the fate of the little king’s mother, Brunhildis, had been a
strange one. Chilperich had seized her treasures, and thrown her into
prison at Rouen. [Sidenote: Adventures of Brunhildis.] There she caught
the eye of Merovech, her captor’s eldest surviving son,[25] who was
charged by his father with the command of an army destined to attack the
Austrasian king’s dominions beyond the Loire. Merovech was so infatuated
by the beauty of the captive queen that, braving his father’s
displeasure, he delivered her from her dungeon, and induced
Praetextatus, bishop of Rouen, to marry them in his cathedral. King
Chilperich immediately flew to Rouen in great wrath, and at his approach
the newly-married pair took sanctuary under the bishop’s protection.
After some hesitation the king of Neustria promised to spare their
lives, but, when his son surrendered himself, he took him away to
Soissons, and shortly afterwards tonsured him, and compelled him to
become a monk. Brunhildis escaped to Austrasia, whither her husband
strove to follow her. He fled from his monastery, and had almost reached
the frontier, when the emissaries of his stepmother, Fredegundis, caught
him, and murdered him (577).

Footnote 25:

Theudebert, the eldest, had fallen in battle in the preceding year.

In Austrasia there now commenced a struggle between the liberated
queen-mother and the great officers of state, for the guardianship of
the little six-year-old king. The struggle was an obstinate one; for if
the Frankish nobles were hampered by the autocratic traditions of the
kingship, Brunhildis, on the other hand, was a foreigner, and met with
little support save among the Gallo-Roman clergy and officials, who
found some protection, under the shield of the king, from the arrogance
and violence of their Frankish fellow-subjects. In Neustria or
Aquitaine, where the Roman elements were stronger, Brunhildis might have
done more, but her lot was cast in Austrasia, where the Germans were
entirely preponderant.

THE MEROVINGIAN KINGS OF THE FRANKS, A.D. 481-752.

CHLODOVECH I., 481-511.
|
+-----------------+----------------+---------------+
| | | |
THEUDERICH I., CHLODOMER, CHILDEBERT, CHLOTHAR,
K. of Austrasia, K. of Orleans, K. of Paris, K. of Soissons, 511.
511-533. 511-524. 511-558. K. of all the Franks,
| 558-561.
THEUDEBERT I., |
K. of Austrasia, |
533-548. |
| |
THEUDEBALD, |
K. of Austrasia, |
548-555. |
+---------+-------------------------------+-----------+--------------+
| | | | |
Chramn, SIGIBERT I., = Brunhildis. CHARIBERT I., GUNTRAM, |
d. 561. K.of Austrasia,| K. of Paris, K. of Burgundy,|
561-575. | 561-567. 561-593. |
| | |
| Bertha = Ethelbert, |
CHILDEBERT II., K. of Kent. |
K. of Austrasia, |
575-596. |
K. of Burgundy, +-----------------------+
593-596. |
| CHILPERICH I., = 1 Audovena.
+--------------------+ K. of Soissons,| 2 Galswintha.
| | 561-584. | 3 Fredegundis.
THEUDEBERT II., THEUDERICH II., |
K. of Austrasia, K. of Burgundy, |
596-612. 596-612. |
K. of Austrasia, |
612-613. |
| |
SIGIBERT II., |
K. of Austrasia and |
Burgundy, 613. |
(1) (1) (1) (3)|
+-----------+-------------+-----------------+
| | | |
Theudebert, Merovech, Chlodovech, CHLOTHAR II.,
d. 575. d. 577. d. 580. K. of Neustria, 584.
K. of all the
Franks,
613-628.
|
+---------------------------+
| |
DAGOBERT I., CHARIBERT II.,
K. of Austrasia, K. of Aquitaine,
623-628. 628-630.
K. of all the Franks, ?
630-638. ?
| Boggis, D. of Aquitaine.
| ?
| ?
| Eudo, D. of Aquitaine.
| This descent is
| uncertain.
| |
| |
_a_ _b_
_a_ _b_
| |
DAGOBERT I., Eudo, D. of Aquitaine,
K. of Austrasia, 717-735.
623-628. |
K. of all the Franks, Hunold, D. of Aquitaine,
630-638. 736-745.
| |
+---------------------+ Waifer, D. of Aquitaine,
| | 745-768.
SIGIBERT III., CHLODOVECH II.,
K. of Austrasia, K. of Neustria and
632-656. Burgundy, 638-56.
| |
| +--+--------------+----------------+
| | | |
DAGOBERT II., CHLOTHAR III., CHILDERICH, THEUDERICH III.,
K. of Austrasia, K. of Neustria, K. of Austrasia, K. of Neustria,
674-678. 656-670. 660-673. 673-698.
? K. of all K. of all K. of all
? the Franks, the Franks, the Franks,
? 656-660. 670-673. 678-691.
? | |
? +------------+ +----------+--------+
? | | |
CHLOTHAR IV., CHILPERICH II., CHLODOVECH III., CHILDEBERT III.,
K. of Austrasia, K. of Neustria, K. of all K. of all
717-719. 715-720. the Franks, the Franks,
This Prince’s K. of all 671-695. 695-711.
descent is the Franks, |
uncertain. 719-720. DAGOBERT III.,
| K. of all
CHILDERICH II., the Franks,
K. of all 711-715.
the Franks, |
742-752. THEUDERICH IV.,
Deposed by Pippin. K. of all
the
Franks,
720-737.

To protect the young Childebert against the attacks of Chilperich, his
mother allied herself with the boy’s uncle, Guntram, king of Burgundy.
Guntram, who had no children of his own, designated Childebert heir to
all his dominions, and took up his cause with vigour. But he was not a
very warlike prince, and it was as much as he could do to protect his
own realm against the active and ruthless king of Neustria. Though
Burgundy and Austrasia were allied, Chilperich succeeded in conquering
their united armies, under the Burgundian general, Mummolus, and seizing
Tours, Poictiers, and all the north of Aquitaine. He would probably have
carried his arms further if internal troubles had not arisen to check
him. The Bretons of Armorica burst into rebellion, and had to be put
down, and other risings were excited by his ruthless and excessive
taxation. [Sidenote: Atrocities of Fredegundis.] But his worst vexations
were those of his own household, caused by the strife of his elder sons
with their stepmother, Fredegundis. All through these years the wicked
queen had been fearfully active. Theudebert and Merovech, the eldest of
her husband’s family, were dead, but their brother, Chlodovech, still
stood between Fredegundis’ children and the throne. In 580 the plague
swept all over Gaul, and two sons of Fredegundis’ were carried off by
it. She accused their step-brother of having caused their death by
witchcraft, and got her husband to permit her to execute him. But when
her last child died, two years later, the wretched woman’s rage and
grief led her into the wildest outbursts of cruelty. She accused numbers
of persons about the court of magic arts practised against her boy, and
burnt them alive, or broke them on the wheel. Many other acts of murder
and treachery are attributed to her, notably the death of Praetextatus,
bishop of Rouen, whom she detested for the part he had taken in the
marriage of Merovech and Brunhildis, and her crimes fill many a page in
the gloomy annals of Gregory of Tours. A legend tells how two holy
bishops once stood before the gate of the palace at Soissons. ‘What
seest thou over this house?’ said one. ‘I see nothing but the red
standard which Chilperich the king has ordered to be set up on its
topmost gable.’ ‘But _I_ see,’ said the first, ‘the sword of God raised
above that wicked house to destroy it altogether.’

Meanwhile, Chilperich’s wars with his brother of Burgundy and his nephew
of Austrasia continued to fill central Gaul with blood and ashes. They
ceased for a moment when the Austrasian nobles, against the will of
Brunhildis, forced their little king to make peace and alliance with his
father’s murderer. But no one could long trust Chilperich, and after
less than a year the old league between Austrasia and Burgundy was
renewed.

[Sidenote: Death of Chilperich I., 584.] In 584 Chilperich, to the great
joy of all Gaul, was murdered by an unknown hand:—‘As he was returning
from the hunt to his royal manor of Chelles, a certain man struck him
with a knife beneath the shoulder, and pierced his belly with a second
stroke, whereupon he fell down and breathed out his foul soul,’ says the
chronicler. He was perhaps the worst of the wicked Merovings—cruel,
unjust, gluttonous, and drunken, vain, boastful, and irreligious, the
worthy son of the ruffian Chlothar, and grandson of the murderer
Chlodovech. But his untiring energy and reckless courage bore him safely
through many an evil day, and he died leaving the kingdom he had
inherited in 561 increased to three times its original bulk.

Queen Fredegundis had borne one more son, named Chlothar, to her husband
just four months before his murder, so that Neustria was not left
altogether without an heir. But Fredegundis feared that Guntram and his
nephew would now seize the whole realm, and slay her with her infant.
She took sanctuary at Paris; but when the king of Burgundy arrived he
showed his superiority to the morals of his family by sparing the life
of the wicked queen, and recognising her son as king of Neustria.
Brunhildis sought in vain to induce Guntram to give over to her the
murderess of her husband; he refused, and Fredegundis took advantage of
his kindness to hire assassins to make attempts on the lives both of
Brunhildis and her son the young king of Austrasia. Luckily the project
failed in both cases.

The civil wars of the Franks now ceased for a moment. Guntram, a mild
and not unamiable character, controlled both his nephews, the
fifteen-year-old Childebert of Austrasia, and the one-year-old Chlothar
II.; and for nine years the three kingdoms had a certain measure of
peace, broken only by wars with the Lombards and Visigoths. [Sidenote:
Wars with Goths and Lombards.] Guntram seems to have hoped that the
fratricidal wars of his family might be staved off for a space by
turning the energy of the Franks against their southern neighbours, and
engaged himself in a war with Reccared, king of Spain, while the
Austrasian nobles were induced by the gifts of the emperor Maurice to
assist the Byzantines in their struggle against the Lombards. Both wars
were long and fruitless. In the West, the repeated attacks of the
Burgundian armies on Septimania were all beaten back. In the East, the
Austrasians twice crossed the Alps, and wasted the valley of the Po, but
in 588 they received such a defeat at the hands of king Authari that
they made peace with him and withdrew across the Alps. In 590
Childebert, who had now attained his twentieth year, and was governing
for himself, renewed the struggle; but his army was thinned by famine
and pestilence before the walls of Verona, and he was finally fain to
renew the peace with Agilulf, the successor of Authari.

Unfortunate foreign wars, however, were better than strife in the heart
of Gaul, and the last years of Guntram were fairly free from this pest.
He was only troubled by one rebellion: a conspiracy between his
illegitimate brother, Gundovald, and two great Romano-Gallic dukes,
Mummolus and Desiderius, who were apparently wishing to become
king-makers, and rule under the name of an obscure and incapable
pretender. But the day of the complete triumph of the great State
officials over the kingship had not yet come, and though he was for a
moment master of all Aquitaine, Gundovald was easily put down, and
executed in company with his chief supporter Mummolus (585).

Guntram died in 593, and his nephew Childebert received his dominions in
Burgundy and Aquitaine, thus becoming ruler of four-fifths of the whole
Frankish kingdom in his twenty-third year. Under his nominal sway
Austrasia had been the theatre of a long struggle between his mother
Brunhildis and the great counts and dukes, whose plots and riots were
secretly abetted by Fredegundis. From her home in Neustria the ruthless
widow of Chilperich did her best to set her nephew’s kingdom in
disorder, and promised lands and titles to the Austrasian chiefs if they
would murder Brunhildis and Childebert, and proclaim her own son,
Chlothar, king of Austrasia. But the stern and able Brunhildis
unravelled and crushed all these conspiracies, and had the triumph of
seeing her son attain his majority, and assume the rule in his own name.

[Sidenote: Brunhildis attacks Neustria.] The moment that the pacific
Guntram was dead, Brunhildis and her son, freed from all restraint, set
out to punish the intrigues of Fredegundis, and by invading Neustria to
make an end of her and her boy Chlothar. But the fortune of war declared
in favour of the Western Franks. At Droisy, near Soissons, the army of
Childebert was defeated with the loss of no less than 30,000 men, and
Neustria was saved from conquest. The war continued without definite
result, for Childebert was prevented from using his full strength by a
rebellion beyond the Rhine, among the Warni in Suabia. Probably his
superior force must in the end have carried the day, but the entire
aspect of affairs was suddenly changed by his unexpected death in 596,
at the early age of twenty-six. He left two infant sons, Theudebert and
Theuderich, to the care of their grandmother, who found herself, though
she was now verging on old age, once more called upon to assume the
regency.

The death of Childebert was to the kingly authority a fatal blow, from
which it never recovered. His own long minority had raised the counts
and dukes to a pitch of power which they had never gained before, and
all the efforts of Brunhildis had not succeeded in fully holding them
down. The equally long minority of his sons was the last blow to the
kingship. Their grandmother struggled with all her might to retain the
power for the kingly race, and to curb her unruly subjects. But though
she worked with untiring energy and zeal, and kept the reins of
government in her own grasp for some time, the treacherous nobles, bent
on their own aggrandisement at the expense of the royal authority, were
at last too much for her.

[Sidenote: Second Regency of Brunhildis.] Of the two sons of Childebert
II. Theudebert, the elder, became king of Austrasia, Theuderich, the
younger, king of Burgundy, the legacy of his uncle Guntram. It was an
uneasy inheritance to which they succeeded, for Fredegundis saw her
opportunity, and urged the Neustrians forward against her great-nephews.
At Lafaux near Laon the Austrasians suffered a great defeat, and all the
lands as far as the Meuse fell into the hands of the queen of Neustria.
But in the moment of triumph, her son’s throne being now firmly
established, and her rival’s power on the decline, the wicked
Fredegundis died at Rouen. Her countless murders and cruelties met no
chastisement on earth, and the son for whom she had risked so much was
destined to carry out to a successful end the schemes in pursuit of
which she had so long striven, and to unite all the Frankish realms
under his sceptre (597).

The death of Fredegundis brought no relief to Brunhildis. For two years
more she struggled on against the intrigues of the Austrasian nobility;
duke Wintrio, who led the opposition against her, was seized and
executed in 598. [Sidenote: Exile of Brunhildis.] But in 599 a final
rising took her by surprise, and she was forced to fly alone and
unaccompanied from Metz to save her life. She escaped to Burgundy, where
she took refuge with her younger grandson Theuderich, and was there
received with all honour. Two successive Mayors of the Palace, Protadius
and Claudius, both of Romano-Gallic blood, lent themselves to her
schemes, and the royal power in Burgundy was still upheld by her strong
hand.

The curse of fratricidal wars was never to depart from the house of the
Merovings. When Theudebert II. and Theuderich II. grew up and reached
early manhood, they united for a moment to attack their cousin Chlothar,
and to recover from him the lands between the Meuse, the Seine, and the
Loire, with Paris, Rouen, and Tours. But soon after they fell to strife,
and it would seem that the old Brunhildis was greatly to blame for its
outbreak. She was burning to revenge herself on the Austrasian nobles
for the banishment she had endured at their hands, and stirred up the
Burgundians to war. She and the Mayor Protadius were far more eager than
the counts and dukes of Burgundy to begin the strife, and when the two
armies came in sight of each other, the soldiers of Theuderich lowered
their weapons, slew Protadius when he strove to force them on, and
compelled their young king to make peace with his brother. [Sidenote:
Wars of Theudebert II. and Theuderich II., 612.] But the curse that
rested on the Merovings was not so easily to be exorcised; Brunhildis
and Theuderich were determined to have their way, and ere very long the
war was renewed. The Austrasians were beaten at Toul, their lands
wasted, and the victorious Theuderich forced his way as far as Zülpich,
in the very heart of his brother’s realm. Here Theudebert withstood him
for a second time, was again beaten, and fell into the hands of the
Burgundians. He was led before his grandmother, who assailed him with
bitter reproaches, and bade him be tonsured and become a monk. But this
did not content the king of Burgundy; a few days later he had his
brother dragged out of his monastery and put to death (612).

The revenge of heaven seemed to be called down by the wicked deed of the
young king of Burgundy. Only five months after his brother’s murder he
was smitten down by an attack of dysentery, and died at Metz in the very
prime of his early manhood (613).

Now for the third time the unhappy Brunhildis was left alone, with a
helpless child as her only stay. Once more she steeled her heart and
faced the situation; she led her great-grandson Sigibert, the eldest son
of Theuderich, before the assembly of the East Franks, and bade them do
homage to him as king of Austrasia and Burgundy. For a moment they bent
before her, and Sigibert II. was acknowledged as ruler of the East
Franks. But the Austrasians were determined to have no more of
Brunhildis’ rule; they sent secretly to Chlothar, king of Neustria, and
bade him arm and invade his cousin’s realm, for no hand should be raised
against him. When the Neustrian king marched into Austrasia, Warnachar,
the mayor of the palace, and most of the nobles of the land took arms
and joined him. Brunhildis with her great-grandson fled to Burgundy, and
raised an army there, with which she faced the Neustrians near the
headwaters of the Aisne. But when Chlothar’s army came in sight, the
Burgundian patrician Aletheus and the dukes Rocco and Sigvald led off
their troops, and joined the invader. In a moment the whole of
Sigibert’s army had deserted or dispersed. [Sidenote: Death of
Brunhildis, 614.] Brunhildis and the little king fled away as far as
Orbe, hard by the lake of Neuchatel, where the emissaries of Chlothar
overtook and captured them. They were led before the king of Neustria,
the worthy son of Fredegundis. ‘Here is the woman,’ he cried, ‘by whose
intrigues and wars ten princes of the Franks have come to their
deaths,’[26] and he bade his soldiers scourge the old queen, and then
bind her by hands and feet to the heels of a wild horse, who dragged her
among stones and rocks till her body was torn limb from limb. The boy
Sigibert and his younger brother Corbo were strangled.

Footnote 26:

We can reckon Theudebert, son of Chilperich, and Theudebert, son of
Childebert, slain in battle; Chilperich, whose murder was sometimes
put down to Brunhildis by her enemies; Sigibert, who was murdered in a
war to which Brunhildis had urged him; Merovech, who was murdered for
marrying her. But who were the other five?

Thus perished Brunhildis, and with her the greatness of the house of the
Merovings. For the future it was the counts and the mayors of the palace
who were to exercise real power among the Franks, and not the kings.
Chlothar, who had conquered only by the treachery of the nobles, was,
with all his descendants, to be their servant, not their master.
Considering that she was a woman and a foreigner, it is wonderful that
Brunhildis continued for so long to sway the councils of Austrasia. Save
her abilities and her force of character, she had no advantage, yet she
not only dominated in succession her husband, her son, and her grandson,
but held down the unruly counts and dukes, who were neither allied to
her by blood nor constantly under her eye and influence. [Sidenote:
Character of Brunhildis.] The tale of her life has sufficiently shown
her qualities and defects. That she was something more than a fury
stirring up war and strife from personal revenge for the blood of her
sister and her husband is clear enough. She was an administrator of
marked ability. Almost alone among the rulers of the Franks, she is
noted as a builder and a founder. Churches, hospitals, and monasteries
she erected in great numbers. The old Roman fortresses and military
roads were also her care. To this day some of the high roads of Belgium
still bear her name, and as the ‘Chaussées de Brunehaute’ preserve her
memory as the first potentate who cared for them after the Franks came
into the land. That she was a sincerely religious woman would seem to be
vouched for by the series of her letters to Gregory the Great, which
moved the good pontiff’s admiration. But sincere piety was not in those
days, any more than in our own, inconsistent with a headstrong
impatience of opposition, and an unscrupulous readiness to sweep
obstacles out of the way. There is no doubt that Brunhildis struck down
the Austrasian counts by the dagger, as well as by the sword, when they
intrigued against her. She never forgave her own grandson Theudebert II.
for allowing her to be driven out of his realm, and was not satisfied
till, ten years after his offence, she caught him, and forced him to
become a monk. Her enmity pursued not only Fredegundis and Chilperich,
the murderers of her sister and husband, but their young son and their
subjects long years after they themselves were dead. Yet, if she was
relentless and unforgiving, we must remember that few rulers in history
have suffered such wrongs and faced such odds. Compared with her
contemporaries, Brunhildis might almost pass for a heroine and a saint.

Chlothar II., though he became king of all the Frankish realms by the
murder of Brunhildis and her great-grandchildren, acquired little real
power thereby. The Austrasians and Burgundians, who had combined with
him to destroy the old queen, wrung terms from him which deprived him of
many undoubted regal rights. The dukes Warnachar and Ratho, who were
made mayors of the palace of the two realms, stipulated that they were
to hold their offices for life, not at the king’s pleasure. [Sidenote:
Decay of Royal power.] For the future the mayorship became an office of
far greater importance than it had yet been. Another step in the
weakening of the kingship is shown by the fact that the legislation of
the Franks from this time forward is always noted as being done by the
king, with the counsel and consent of his bishops, counts, and dukes. A
code of laws which Chlothar II. put forth for the Suabians, somewhere
about the year 620, is indorsed not merely with his own authority, but
with that of thirty-three bishops, thirty-four dukes, and sixty-five
counts. The fact that the reign of Chlothar was exceptionally fertile in
legislation is probably to be accounted for by the fact that he was
compelled to listen to the demands of his nobles, and grant redress to
their grievances, rather than by any particular taste of his own for the
enacting of laws. When, for example, we hear that he ‘met the mayor
Warnachar, and all the bishops, and great men of Burgundy at Bonneuil,
and there assented to all their just petitions,’ we must remember that
he was facing an irremovable mayor of the palace, and a nation who had
freely given themselves into his hands on stated terms, and had no
longer over them the unlimited authority that a Chlodovech or a
Theuderich had owned a hundred years before. [Sidenote: Troubles of
Chlothar II.] Nothing can show more clearly the growing weakness of the
king than an incident which occurred at a great national gathering of
Neustrians and Burgundians, at Clichy, towards the end of his reign. In
the midst of the council a brawl arose, and the followers of a duke
named Ægyna, slew Ermenhar, the steward of the palace of the king’s son.
At once all the Neustrians seized their arms, and drew apart into two
bands. While Ægyna and his friends seized the hill of Montmartre, and
formed their array on its brow, the larger party, headed by Brodulf, a
kinsman of the slain man, started off to storm the position. The king
was only able to keep the peace by inducing the Burgundians, who were
not interested in the quarrel, to follow him, and to promise to attack
whichever of the two sides should strike the first blow. He dismissed
the assembly, and was unable to punish any one, either for the murder or
for the riot which had ensued.

Chlothar, with his diminished royal prerogative, seems to have had
neither the opportunity nor the power to engage in wars of conquest
beyond the bounds of his realm. [Sidenote: Samo and the Slavs.] He had
to look on, without stirring, while a great, if ephemeral, kingdom was
built up beyond his eastern frontier. Behind the Thuringians and
Bavarians, on the Elbe and Oder, there had dwelt for the last two
hundred years, since the German races had migrated westward, a group of
small and disunited Slavonic tribes, calling themselves Wiltzes, Sorbes,
Abotrites, and Czechs. Their dissensions had kept them from being
dangerous neighbours till the time of Chlothar. But about 620 a Frankish
adventurer, named Samo, who had gone eastward, half as trader half as
buccaneer, united many of the Slavonic tribes, and became their king. He
gradually extended his power all down the valley of the Elbe, on both
sides of the Bohemian mountains, and was soon to prove himself a serious
trouble to the realm of the Merovings.

Towards the end of his reign, Chlothar II. made his son Dagobert king of
Austrasia, while he was still a very young man. The chief councillors by
whose aid Dagobert administered his realm were two men whose names form
a landmark in Frankish history—Arnulf, bishop of Metz, and count Pippin
the elder, the ancestors of the great house of the Karlings. [Sidenote:
St. Arnulf and Pippin the elder.] Bishop Arnulf was the wisest and best
of the prelates of Austrasia, and, after a long life of usefulness in
church and state, won the name of saint by laying down his crozier and
ring and retiring to a hermitage, to spend his last fifteen years in the
solitudes of the Vosges. Count Pippin, a noble from the land between
Meuse and Mosel, whose ancestral abodes are said to have been the manors
of Hersthal and Landen, was appointed mayor of the palace, and lived in
the closest concord and amity with Arnulf. They cemented their alliance
by a marriage, Begga, the daughter of Pippin, being wedded to Ansigisel,
the son of the bishop; for Arnulf, like many of the Frankish clergy,
lived in lawful wedlock. From these parents sprang the whole of the line
of mayors, kings, and emperors whose mighty deeds were to make their
comparatively unimportant ancestors famous in history.

King Chlothar II. died in 628, and his son, Dagobert I., became ruler of
all the Frankish realms. He was, for a Meroving, a very creditable
ruler, though he lived with three wives at once, and indulged in
occasional outbursts of wrong-headedness. For the two first years of his
reign he chose to share the sovereign power with his brother Charibert,
whom he made king of Aquitaine out of pure fraternal affection. But when
Charibert died, in 630, he resumed his southern dominions, disregarding
Charibert’s three sons. [Sidenote: Reign of Dagobert I., 628-38.]
Dagobert was the last of the Merovings whose will was of much importance
in the ordering of the Frankish realms; his successors were to be mere
shadows. Even in his own time the royal power was already of little
force in Austrasia, where the king leant entirely upon the support of
Pippin, who, with his son-in-law, Ansigisel, held the post of mayor of
the palace for the whole sixteen years of Dagobert’s reign. His loyalty
to the king concealed the fact that he was far more powerful in the
eastern kingdom than Dagobert himself. The king had several sharp
quarrels with him, but never dared to depose him from his post lest
trouble should ensue. In Neustria no great mayor of the palace had yet
arisen, and there Dagobert was ruler in fact as well as name. Hence it
is not surprising that he always dwelt west of the Meuse, and made Paris
his favourite residence.

Dagobert was the last Meroving who took arms to extend the limits of the
Frankish power. He supported the pretender Sisinand in Spain, by the aid
of a Burgundian army, made an alliance with the emperor Heraclius
against the Lombards, and entered into a protracted war with the
Slavonic tribes of the East. On the Elbe, the kingdom of Samo the Frank
was now at the height of its power. Dagobert took alarm at its rapid
growth, and when the Wends plundered part of Thuringia, in 630, sent
against them three great armies, comprising the whole military force of
Austrasia. Two of these expeditions fared well, but the third suffered
complete annihilation at Wogastisburg, in Bohemia, and the victorious
Slavs ravaged Thuringia and Bavaria, from Saal to Danube, with fire and
sword, till Radulf, duke of Thuringia, at last checked them, in 633.

Dagobert I. died in 638. He left two sons, Sigibert III., aged nine, and
Chlodovech II., aged six. It was the long minority of these two boys
which finally achieved the ruin of the Merovingian house. While Sigibert
and Chlodovech were growing up to manhood, the future of the Frankish
realms was being settled by the sword, the all-important issue at stake
being the question whether the house of Pippin and Arnulf should retain
permanent possession of the Austrasian mayorship of the palace or should
sink out of sight. Pippin the Old died in 639, the second year of
Sigibert’s reign. His son Grimoald at once proclaimed himself heir to
his father’s office. [Sidenote: Grimoald, Mayor of the Palace.] But a
great part of the Austrasian nobles, headed by Otto, the foster-father
of the young king, refused to acknowledge his right to the mayorship,
and a fierce war of three years was required to settle the dispute. At
last the son of Pippin conquered, and for fourteen years (642-56) was
undisputed master of Austrasia. King Sigibert, indeed, grew up to man’s
estate, but he was completely dominated by his servant, and never made
any endeavour to take the power out of his hands. Hence he is known as
the first of the _Rois Fainéants_, or do-nothing kings, who were from
henceforth to be the rule among the house of the Merovings.

In Neustria, meanwhile, the royal power was saved for a time by the
cleverness of queen Nanthildis, a lady of great piety, the widow of
Dagobert, who acted as guardian for her younger son Chlodovech. She
enlisted in her cause the Neustrian mayor of the palace, Erchinoald, who
was akin to the royal house himself,[27] and therefore not unfavourable
to its dominance. Not till these two passed away was the Western realm
to sink into the same state as the Eastern. But the fall of royalty
here, too, was now imminent.

Footnote 27:

He was brother of Dagobert’s mother, it would appear, and therefore
great-uncle to the little king.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XI

THE LOMBARDS IN ITALY, AND THE RISE OF THE PAPACY

568-653

The Wanderings of the Lombards—Alboin conquers Northern Italy—His tragic
end—Anarchy among the Lombard dukes—Reign of Authari, and Frankish
wars—Conquest and conversion of Agilulf—Rothari the Law-giver—State
of Rome and Italy—Career of St. Gregory—He founds the temporal power
of the Papacy.

In the third year of Justin II., and only fifteen years after Narses had
swept the Goth and Frank out of Italy, a new horde of barbarians came
pouring down on that unhappy land. The ravages of eighteen years of war,
and a terrible pestilence which supervened, had left all the northern
parts of the peninsula desolate, and well-nigh uninhabited,—‘the land
seemed to have sunk back into primeval silence and solitude.’[28] The
imperial troops held a few strong places beyond the Po, such as Verona
and Pavia, but had made no effort to restore the military frontier along
the Alps, and the land lay open to the spoiler. Southern Italy had
suffered less, and Ravenna was still strong and well guarded, but the
Transpadane lowlands—destined ere long to change their name to the
‘Lombard plain’—were as destitute of civil population as they were of
military resources.

Footnote 28:

_Paulus Diaconus_, ii. 5.

The new invaders of Italy were the Lombards (Langobardi), a Teutonic
people, who, according to their ancient tribal legends, had once dwelt
in Scandinavia, but had descended ten generations before into northern
Germany, and from thence had slowly worked their way down to the Danube.
They had only come into touch with the frontier of the empire when
Odoacer smote the Rugii, in 487. After that tribe had been scattered,
they moved into its abiding place on the mid-Danube, and became the
neighbours of the Ostrogoths and the Gepidae.

[Sidenote: The Lombards.] The Lombards were the least tinctured with
civilisation of all the Teutonic tribes, even more barbarous, it would
seem, than our own Saxon forefathers. Living far back in the darkness of
the North, they had been kept from any knowledge of Roman culture, and
did not even approach the boundaries of the empire till it had already
been broken up and laid desolate. They were still heathen, and still
living in the stage of primitive tribal life which Tacitus painted in
the Germania. They were divided into many tribal families, or clans,
which they called ‘faras,’ and their subdivisions were ruled by elective
aldermen[29] or dukes, but the whole nation chose its king from among
the royal houses of the Lethings and Gungings, who claimed to descend
from Gambara, the wise queen who had led the race across the Baltic from
Scandinavia ten generations back.

Footnote 29:

The Lombards seem to have called them ‘Aldones’—_cf._ Ealderman in
English antiquity.

During the times of Justinian’s Ostrogothic war the Lombards were under
the rule of Audoin, whom Narses bribed with great gifts to aid him
against Baduila. Five thousand warriors, under the command of their king
himself, joined Narses in the invasion of Italy in 552, and took a
distinguished part in the victory of Taginae. It must have been in this
campaign that the Lombards learnt of the fertility and the weakness of
Italy; but they were still engaged in wars with their neighbours on the
Danube, and their king was an old man, wherefore we need not think it
strange that they waited fifteen years before they turned their
knowledge to account.

The Lombards were the close neighbours and the bitter foes of the
Gepidae, the Gothic tribe who had remained behind in the Hungarian
plains when the other sections of the Goths moved westward to Spain and
Italy. [Sidenote: Wars of Alboin.] The long struggle between Lombard and
Gepid only came to an end in 567, when the Lombards called in to their
aid the Tartar race of the Avars, and by their assistance almost
entirely exterminated the Gepidae, whose scattered remnant only survived
as slaves of the conquering horde. By this time Alboin, the son of
Audoin, was reigning over the Lombards. He it was who slew with his own
hand Cunimund, the king of the Gepidae. The barbarous victor struck off
the head of his enemy, and had the skull mounted in gold, and fashioned
into a drinking-cup, as the supreme token of his triumph. Yet, but a
short time before, ere the last struggle had begun between the Lombards
and the Gepidae, he had taken to wife Rosamund, the daughter of the man
whom he now slew and beheaded.

THE LOMBARD KINGS IN ITALY.

1. ALBOIN
568-72. Garibald, Duke of
----- Bavaria.
2. CLEPHO |
572-73. +----------+---------------+
| | |
3. AUTHARI=Theodelinda=4. AGILULF Gundoald
583-90. | 590-615. |
| |
+-----------+-------+ |
| | |
5. ADALOALD Gundiberga=6. ARIOALD 9. ARIBERT
615-25. 625-36. 653-62.
|
+-----------------+--------------+--------------+
| | |
10. GODEBERT 12. BERTHARI A daughter=11. GRIMOALD
662. 672-88. | 662-71.
| | |
Reginbert, duke 13. CUNIBERT Garibald.
of Turin. 688-700.
| |
15. ARIBERT II. 14. LIUTBERT
701-11. 700-701.

Kings not connected with this House were (7) Rothari, 636-52; (8)
Rodoald, 652-53; (16) Ansprand, 712; (17) Liutprand, 712-43; (18)
Hildebrand, 743-44; (19) Ratchis, 744-49; (20) Aistulf, 749-56; (21)
Desiderius, 756-74.

Having ended this great national feud by the extermination of the
Gepidae, Alboin determined to put into effect a scheme which must have
been long maturing in his brain, the conquest of Italy. The Lombard
historian of a later day asserted that he had been tempted to the
invasion by the treachery of Narses, who, in discontent with Justin II.,
had urged Alboin to invade the peninsula, and sent him as gifts samples
of all the generous fruits and wines that Italy produces. But this is
the mere echo of a Lombard saga. Narses, now over eighty years of age
and on his deathbed, had other matters to think about than the spiting
of his new master. Nor did the Lombards, who had ridden all over Italy
in 552, need to be reminded of its existence or its fertility.

Before leaving Pannonia, Alboin made over his old kingdom to his allies
the Avars, only stipulating that it should be restored to him if ever he
returned from Italy; a rather futile compact to make with such a
faithless race as this Tartar horde. Crossing the Carinthian Alps, in
the summer of 568, the whole Lombard nation—men, women, and children,
with their cattle and slaves—descended into the Venetian plains, and
spread themselves over the deserted lands. There was hardly any
opposition. In cities that had once been great, like Aquileia and Milan,
the scanty population did not even close the gates, but awaited the
invader with apathy. Only the places where there was an Imperial
garrison offered resistance. Verona, protected by the rushing Adige,
Padua in its marshes, and Pavia, the ancient royal city of the Goths,
were among the few towns that refused to admit the Lombards. [Sidenote:
Alboin conquers Northern Italy.] The newcomers spread themselves over
the whole valley of the Po, as far as the Tuscan Apennines and the gates
of Ravenna, and begun to settle down on the fairest spots among the
ruined Roman villages. They divided themselves, like the Franks in Gaul
or the East-Angles in Britain, into two folks, the Neustrian, or
Western, and the Austrian, or Eastern, Lombards. The former stretched
from the Cottian Alps to the Adda, the latter from the Adda to the
Julian Alps. Piedmont formed the bulk of Neustria; Venetia the bulk of
Austria. Many scattered portions of tribes came to join Alboin in his
new conquest. Not only did he grant lands to broken bands of Saxons and
Suabians, but even foreigners, such as Bulgarians and Slavs, found
shelter with him.

While Alboin was founding the new kingdom of Lombardy, the cities which
at first resisted began to drop into his hands. Verona fell early, but
Pavia made a long defence. So desperately did it hold out against the
host left to blockade it that the king swore, in his wrath, to slay
every living thing within its walls. But when, after three years, the
starving citizens threw open their gates, he relented of his hard vow,
‘because there was much Christian folk in that city,’ and made Pavia his
capital and royal stronghold.

In the next year, however, he came to his end. The Lombard chronicler,
Paul the Deacon, repeating some familiar Lombard saga, tells the grim
tale of his death thus:—‘King Alboin sat over long at the wine in his
city of Verona, so that he grew boisterous, and he sent for the cup
which he had made from the skull of king Cunimund, his father-in-law,
and forced his queen, Rosamund, to drink from it, bidding her drink
joyfully with her father. Then the queen conceived a deep grief and
anger in her heart, and questioned with herself how she might avenge her
father by slaying her husband. So she strove to persuade Helmichis, the
king’s armour-bearer, who was also his foster-brother, to slay his lord.
And Helmichis would not, but counselled her to win Peredeo, the
strongest champion of the Lombards, to do the deed. [Sidenote: Murder of
Alboin.] Then Rosamund sold her honour to Peredeo, and became his
mistress, and said to him, “Now hast thou done a thing for which either
thou must kill Alboin, or he thee.” So he unwillingly consented to the
deed, and at mid-day, when all the palace lay asleep, Rosamund bound the
king’s sword so tightly to the bed-head that it could not be drawn, and
then bid Peredeo go in and slay her husband. When Alboin heard an armed
man enter, he sprang from his couch, and strove to draw his sword
without avail. For some space he fought hard for his life with a stool
that he caught up, but what could the best of warriors do without arms
against an armed champion? He was slain like a weakling, and, after
passing unharmed through so many battles, died by the counsel of one
woman, and she his own wife. So the Lombards took up his body, with much
weeping, and buried it beneath the great flight of steps over against
the palace, where it lay till my own days.’ (May 572.)

Helmichis strove in vain to make himself king in his master’s room, but
the Lombards would have none of him, and he was forced to fly with
Rosamund and the murderer Peredeo, to take shelter with the Romans at
Ravenna. There all three of them came to evil ends, ‘for the hand of
Heaven was upon them for doing such a foul deed.’

Meanwhile the Lombards crowned as king, in the room of Alboin, Clepho,
one of the mightiest of their dukes, though not of the royal blood; for
Alboin had no son, and was the last of the Lethings. Clepho completed
the conquest of all northern Italy, as far as the southern limits of
Tuscany and the gates of Ravenna. [Sidenote: Anarchy, 573-83.] But ere
he had reigned a year he was slain by one of his own slaves, whom he had
wronged. After he was dead the Lombards chose no more kings to reign
over them for ten years, but each tribe went forth conquering and
plundering under its own elective duke. It is said that no less than
thirty-five of these chiefs were ranging over Italy at the same time
(573-83). Nothing can show better the survival of primitive Teutonic
ideas among the Lombards than this period of anarchy. They had not yet
learned to look upon the king as a necessary part of the constitution of
the tribe, but, like the Germans of the first century, regarded him as a
war-chief, to be followed in time of peril alone. The Goths or the
Franks, who had advanced to a further stage, could not have borne to
live kingless for ten whole years.

Strangely enough, the loss of their supreme head seems to have detracted
in no wise from the warlike vigour of the Lombards. In the ten kingless
years they went on subduing the land, and pushed their incursions
farther to the west and south. Three dukes of Neustria crossed the Alps
and harried Provence, then in the hands of king Guntram the Frank, the
peaceful brother of the warlike Sigibert and the wicked Chilperich. They
took many cities, and were only driven out of the land, after much
fighting, by Mummolus, the great Gallo-Roman general, who served king
Guntram so well; but for him, Provence might have become part of
Lombardy. Meanwhile other Lombard dukes were pressing southward down the
Italian peninsula. They did not act on any combined plan of invasion,
but each passed on with his war-band, leaving to right and to left many
cities held by Imperialist garrisons, till he found a place of
settlement that pleased his eye. Hence it came to pass that Lombard
duchies and Roman cities were curiously intermixed. In central Italy,
Faroald, the first duke of Spoleto, left Ravenna and Ancona to the
north, and established himself in the central valley of the Tiber, with
Imperialist garrisons all around him. Zotto, the first duke of
Benevento, passed even farther to the south, and founded a realm in the
Samnite valleys, which was almost entirely out of touch with the other
Lombard states. It was hemmed in to east and west by the Roman garrisons
of Rome, Naples, and Calabria. The dukes of Lucca and Chiusi, who held
the bulk of Tuscany, did not push their limits down to the Tiber, but
stopped short at the Ciminian hills, leaving a considerable district
north of Rome in the hands of the Imperialists. Even in northern Italy
the dukes of Neustria left Genoa and the Ligurian coast alone, and those
of Austria did not subdue the marshland of Mantua and Padua, nor follow
the fugitive inhabitants of Venetia into the islands where Venice and
Grado were just beginning to grow up in the security of the lagoons. All
over Italy Lombard and Roman districts were hopelessly confused, and,
save that the Po valley was wholly Lombard, and Bruttium and Calabria
wholly Roman, there was no part of the land that was not shared between
the invader and the old Imperial Government.

Coming into a country already desolate and well-nigh dispeopled, and
bringing with them the customs of primitive Germany, untinctured with
any Roman intermixture, the Lombards established a polity even less
centralised than that of the Visigoths, and infinitely below the
standard of government which Theodoric had once set up in Italy eighty
years before. [Sidenote: The Lombard Monarchy.] When the nation once
more chose a king, his power was hopelessly circumscribed by the
authority of the great hereditary dukes. Spoleto and Benevento hardly
paid even a nominal homage to the king who reigned at Pavia. Only when
he presented himself with a large army in central Italy could he hope to
win attention for his orders. Even in the valley of the Po, and in
Tuscany, his power was very imperfect. The authority of the royal name
had been fatally injured by the extinction, with Alboin, of the ancient
kingly house of the Lethings. The Lombard monarchs, like their
Visigothic contemporaries in Spain, only held their crown when once they
had been elected, by the right of the sword. In a short history of two
hundred years the Lombard kingdom saw nine successive races of kings
mount the throne. All represented old ducal families. The rulers of
Turin, Brescia, Benevento, Friuli, and Istria all, at one time or
another, won the royal crown, besides two or three kings who were not
even Lombards by birth, but strangers from the neighbouring land of
Bavaria.

In the wasted regions of northern Italy, it would seem that the Lombards
formed for some time the large majority of the population. Unlike the
Goths in Spain, or the Franks in central Gaul, they did not merely
consist of a few scattered families lost among the masses of the old
inhabitants. There is a greater breach in the old Roman traditions of
municipal and social life in the valley of the Po than in most of the
other lands of the Western Empire. In the seventh century Lombardy must
have preserved less traces of its ancient imperial organisation than
Spain, Gaul, or Burgundy, and must have presented a much more primitive
and Teutonic aspect. This is as we should expect, from the fact that the
Lombards came from the very back of Germany, and first met with the
influence of the older world of Rome when they moved into Italy.

[Illustration:

ITALY IN A.D. 590.
]

Outside the Po valley, however, Italy was in a very different state;
southern Italy and much of central Italy preserved its ancient
organisation almost undisturbed; the Exarchate of Ravenna, the _Ducatus
Romanus_, and the southern peninsulas of Apulia and Bruttium remained
unchanged down to the ninth century. Records show us in the
neighbourhood of Rome the old social organisation of the land, in
domains inhabited by _coloni_, and owned by Roman church corporations,
or absentee proprietors, at a time when in the northern plains the
feudal system of the semi-independent dukes, each surrounded by their
land-holding _comites_, was in full operation. In organisation, no less
than in blood, northern Italy and southern Italy were fatally sundered,
and two nations differing in all their usages of life and manners of
thought were growing up.

The parts of Italy which remained under the imperial sceptre and
preserved their ancient social and political organisation were strangely
scattered. In the reign of Maurice (582-602) the emperor was still
obeyed in eight regions. First was the Istrian peninsula, and the marsh
and lagoon islands of the Venetian coast, with the strong cities of
Padua and Mantua thrust inland like a wedge into the side of Lombardy.
Second came the Ligurian coast with the city of Genoa, crushed in
between the Apennines and the sea; its rugged valleys and cliffs did not
yet tempt the Lombards out of their smiling plain to court the
neighbourhood of the sea, for the Lombards were essentially unmaritime.
[Sidenote: Imperial possessions in Italy.] Third is found the tract of
land round Ravenna, the Exarchate, as it now became called—a title which
it shared for a space with Africa, where exarchs also reigned. The
Exarchate stretched along the coast of the Adriatic, from the delta of
the Po up to the gates of Rimini, reaching as far inland as the
Apennines, and comprising the whole southern half of the ancient
province of Æmilia. Farther down the coast lay the fourth imperial
district, from Rimini to Ancona, which was often called the Pentapolis
and the Decapolis, from two groups of five and ten cities respectively
which it contained.[30] In Umbria lay a fifth detached district where
the emperor was still acknowledged; it centred around Perugia, and was
much hemmed in by the Lombard duchies of Chiusi and Spoleto, but it
stretched out one horn toward the Pentapolis on the north, and the other
toward Rome on the south. The sixth district was the Roman territory,
now known as the _Ducatus Romanus_, from the _dux_ who acted as civil
governor in the ancient city in subordination to the exarch at Ravenna.
The Roman duchy reached from Civita Vecchia to Terracina, and from the
Apennines to the sea, taking in the southern corner of Etruria, and
well-nigh the whole of Latium. It was cut off by the Lombard town of
Capua from the duchy of Naples, a narrow coast-strip containing the
towns of Naples and Amalfi, and ruled by a duke resident in the larger
place. Lastly, all the toe and heel of Italy, Calabria Bruttium and
southern Lucania, the whole coast line from Brindisi to Policastro,
formed the eighth Roman district. It was evident that the administration
of such a number of fragmentary possessions would be a hard task for the
exarch, cut off as he was from access by land to the greater part of the
regions for which he was responsible. It was not so easy to foresee that
the main result of the scission of Italy by the Lombard conquests was
destined to be the rise of the temporal power of the Papacy, that most
unexpected of the developments of the seventh century.

Footnote 30:

The ‘five cities’ were Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia, Ancona; the
‘ten cities’—Osimo, Umana, Jesi, Fossombrone, Montefeltro, Urbino,
Cagli, Gubbio, Pontericcioli, and the Territorium Valvense. Bury’s
_Later Roman Empire_, vol. ii. p. 146.

After the anarchy under the tribal dukes had lasted ten years, the
Lombards chose them another king. The election seems to have been made
mainly under the pressure of the war with the Franks, which they had
brought upon themselves by their reckless invasion and ravaging of
Provence in 574-75. Guntram of Burgundy induced his Austrasian kinsman
to help him, and the Lombards were attacked by the Austrasians, who
descended the valley of the Adige and attacked Trent, as well as by the
Burgundians. Moreover, Tiberius II. of Constantinople had sent gifts to
the kings of the Franks in order to induce them to aid him in Italy, and
had done what he could, while the Persian and Avaric wars still dragged
on, to send help to the exarch of Ravenna.

The new Lombard king was Authari, the son of that Clepho whose murder
had left the throne vacant in 573. So greatly was the need of providing
for the maintenance of the central power felt, that the dukes not only
did him homage, and ceded him the royal city of Pavia, but promised him
a half of all the lands that were in their hands as a royal domain to
maintain him, his _comitatus_, and his officers. We may doubt if the
promise was very exactly kept. Nor did all the dukes unite in the
election. The first act of king Authari had to be to subdue and expel
duke Droctulf, who had called in the Romans, and fortified himself in
Brescello to defend the middle valley of the Po against the king.
[Sidenote: Wars of Authari, 583-90.] For the whole of his reign Authari
was involved in recurring struggles with the Franks, whose young and
warlike king, Childebert II., the son of Brunhildis, was set on resuming
the schemes of his cousin Theudebert for conquering Italy. The seven
years’ reign of Authari was mainly occupied in warding off Frankish
attacks on Italy; Guntram and Childebert, stirred up by Smaragdus, the
exarch of Ravenna, threatened three or four times to cross the Alps, and
twice actually invaded Lombardy. The more dangerous assault was in 590,
when two great armies advanced simultaneously, the one from Burgundy
over the Cenis against Milan, the other from Austrasia over the Brenner
against Trent and Verona. Both forced their way to their goal, and did
much damage to the Lombards, but they failed to meet with each other, or
with the Roman troops which the exarch had promised to bring to their
aid. Famine and pestilence thinned their ranks, and they could not reach
the Lombard king, who had shut himself up in the impregnable Pavia. At
last they returned each to their own land, without profiting in the
least by their great expedition.[31]

Footnote 31:

See p. 170.

In the intervals between the Frankish invasions Authari had done
something to consolidate the Lombard power in north Italy, by capturing
the great lagoon-fortress of Commacchio, whose seizure cut the
communication between Padua and Ravenna. At about the same time Faroald,
duke of Spoleto, took Classis, the seaport of Ravenna, and completely
destroyed the city, whose only surviving remnant, the solitary church of
St. Apollinare in Classe, stands up in such forlorn grandeur in the
Ravennese marshes. Authari is said to have pushed one plundering
expedition through Benevento into Bruttium, to have ridden to the
extreme south point of the Italian peninsula, and to have touched with
his spear a sea-swept pillar near Reggio, crying, ‘Here shall be the
boundary of the kingdom of the Lombards.’ A vain boast, if it was ever
made, for Bruttium was not destined to fall at any time into Lombard
hands.

Authari married Theodelinda, the daughter of Garibald, duke of Bavaria,
a pious Christian and a Catholic, whose coming seems to have led the
wild Lombards to Christianity, much as the influence of queen Bertha
worked on the Jutes of Kent. She had not been long wedded to him when he
died; the Lombard _witan_, who had formed a high idea of her wisdom and
virtue, consulted her as to the choice of a new king. She recommended to
them Agilulf, duke of Turin, a cousin of Authari. To him she gave her
hand, and he was at the same time raised on the shield at Milan as king
of the Lombards (590).

Agilulf was led by his wife’s persuasion to be baptized, and ere long
the greater part of the nation followed his example. The majority of the
Lombards, like most of the other Teutonic races, adopted Arianism, and
only conformed to orthodoxy in the seventh century. It was Agilulf and
Theodelinda who built the famous Basilica of Monza, where the iron crown
of Lombardy is even now preserved. In its sacristy are still shown many
relics of the pious queen; most curious among them is a hen and chickens
of gold of the most quaint and archaic workmanship, a marvellous example
of the earliest art of a Teutonic people just emerging from barbarism.
With it is preserved the crown of Agilulf, which he dedicated to St.
John, and which bears the inscription: AGILULF GRATIA DEI VIR GLORIOSUS
REX TOTIUS ITALIAE OFFERT SANCTO IOHANNI BAPTISTAE IN ECCLESIA MODICIAE.

The first three kings of the Lombards had been short-lived, but Agilulf
survived for the respectable term of twenty-five years (591-616), and
reigned long enough to see his son grow up and become his colleague on
the throne. More fortunate than his predecessor Authari, he was
delivered from the danger of Frankish invasions by the series of wars
between the sons of Brunhildis and Fredegundis, which broke out in 593,
and afterwards by the home troubles of Austrasia and Burgundy, caused by
the strife between Brunhildis and the great nobles. [Sidenote: Conquests
of Agilulf.] Agilulf was, therefore, enabled to lop away from the empire
several of the detached districts which had hitherto adhered to it. For
the greater part of his reign he was in constant war with the Romans,
and stripped the exarchs of Sutrium, Orte, Tuder, Perugia, and other
south-Tuscan and Umbrian towns (598). By the mediation of Pope Gregory
the Great a treaty was, for the first time, concluded between the
Lombards and the empire in 599, but the exarch Gallicinus broke the
peace, by seizing the person of Agilulf’s daughter as she chanced to be
passing through imperial territory. This second Lombard war, which fell
into the reign of Phocas, proved most disastrous for the Romans. Agilulf
began by capturing Padua, the great fortress of the Venetian marshes
(602). The fall of Padua cut off Mantua from succour, and that city, the
last stronghold of the empire in the interior of Lombardy, also fell in
602. The ministers of Phocas only obtained a final pacification in 605
by promising to pay an annual tribute of 1200 gold solidi, and ceding
the south-Tuscan strongholds of Orvieto and Bagnarea.

There was no more fight left in emperor or exarch for many a year; in
the throes of the disastrous Persian war, Phocas and Heraclius were
unable to send aid to Rome or Ravenna. The opportunity afforded to
Agilulf of completing the conquest of Italy was such as never occurred
again. But contented with his annual tribute, and perhaps tamed down by
approaching old age, the Lombard king remained quiescent. Apparently he
preferred to give his realm peace, and to occupy himself in keeping down
his unruly dukes. In the course of his reign there were three or four
dangerous rebellions of these chiefs, but Agilulf put them all down,
apparently without much difficulty. There was also trouble on the
north-eastern frontier from the Avars and Slavs, the same foes who were
so grievously afflicting the Roman empire at this time. The Slavs made
their way into Istria and Cilly, and became troublesome neighbours to
Italy, though some of their nearest tribes were reduced to pay tribute
by the dukes of Friuli. The Avars were more active and more dangerous;
in spite of repeated treaties with Agilulf, their Chagan burst into
north Italy in 610, slew Gisulf, duke of Friuli, in battle, ravaged all
Venetia, and carried off many captives. Fortunately for the Lombards
these invasions were not continued, as the Avars found better prey and
less fighting in the Balkan peninsula.

In spite of such troubles, the reign of Agilulf was a time of growth,
expansion, and ripening civilisation for the Lombards. They had all, by
the end of his reign, received Christianity, had settled down in their
new home, and were beginning to build churches and palaces, instead of
confining their attention to destroying them. Agilulf had found a _modus
vivendi_ with Gregory the Great and the Papacy, and taught his subjects
to live in some sort of peace with their neighbours, instead of
persisting in the unending war which had filled the first thirty years
of Lombard dominion in Italy.

Agilulf was succeeded by his only son, Adaloald, a boy of fourteen, whom
he had induced the Lombard _witan_ to salute as his colleague, and raise
on the shield some years before. The regency was held by queen
Theodelinda, who was both pious and popular, till the young king came of
age; but soon after he had attained his majority, Adaloald was stricken
with madness, and the nation chose in his stead Arioald, duke of Turin,
who appears to have been no kinsman of the royal house, but had married
the young king’s sister, Gundiberga (626). Little is known of this
king’s reign of twelve years; we hear neither of wars with the Franks,
nor of conquests from the Roman; we only read that he was, unlike his
predecessor, an Arian. When he died, however, he was succeeded by a
ruler of far greater mark, ‘Duke Rothari of Brescia, of the race of
Arod, a strong man, and one who walked in the paths of justice, though
he was not an orthodox Christian, but followed the deceitful heresy of
the Arians.’

[Sidenote: Conquests of Rothari, 636-52.] Rothari finally completed the
conquest of northern Italy, by taking the two districts which had still
remained in the hands of the Imperialists down to his day. He subdued
the whole Ligurian coast from Nice to Luna, with the great city of Genoa
its capital (641). He also took the city of Oderzo, the last mainland
possession of the Romans in Venetia. After this time the lagoon islands
alone acknowledged the eastern Caesar as their suzerain, and their
homage was formal rather than real. Rothari’s conquests were not won
without severe fighting. His greatest victory was won on the Scultenna,
not far from Modena, over the exarch Plato, who had invaded Lombard
territory, but was defeated with a loss of 8000 men, and driven back
into Ravenna. The new activity of the Romans, to which this battle bears
witness, may be attributed to the fact that the Persian and Saracen wars
of Heraclius were at last ended, and under his grandson, Constans II.,
the Eastern empire was beginning to recover some measure of strength
(642).

[Sidenote: Laws of Rothari.] But Rothari is better remembered as the
framer of the Lombard Code of Laws than as the conqueror of Liguria. In
643 he published the compilation of the traditional usages of the
nation, which had hitherto never been committed to writing. It is
noticeable that the code is promulgated, not on the king’s personal
authority, but, like the English laws of Ine, ‘_Pro communi gentis
nostrae utilitate, pari consilio parique consensu cum primatis judicibus
nostris cunctoque felicissimo exercitu nostro_’—that is to say, by the
king, with the counsel of his _witan_, and the assent of the armed
folk-moot of the Lombard nation. The _Edictum Rotharis_ is a very
primitive body of legislation, such as might have been promulgated in
the depths of the German forests, instead of in the heart of Italy. It
is mainly composed of elaborate lists of weregelds, of laws against
armed violence, of rules of inheritance, of statements concerning the
obligation of the follower towards his lord, of provisions for judicial
duels, _per campionem_. There is hardly any mention either of things
ecclesiastical or of city life, merely a provision against breach of
peace in a church, and some rules about _magistri comacenses_, or
skilled Roman artisans. We have from the laws a picture of a people
dwelling apart by families, or _faras_, each in its own farm-clearing,
surrounded by woods or open pasture land. Some are ‘free Lombards,’
called even thus early ‘_barones_,’ others the ‘men’ of a duke or of the
king. Below them are _aldii_, who correspond to mediæval villeins, the
half-free occupiers of the land of the Lombard master. These, no doubt,
are the remains of the old Roman population, _coloni_ who had once
cultivated the _massa_ of a Roman _curialis_. The royal authority is
found relegated to the local dukes in all military matters, while civil
affairs are dealt with by the king’s _schulthais_, or reeve (as the old
English would have called him), or to the _castaldus_, who seems to have
been the king’s representative in the city, as opposed to the
country-side. It is noticeable, as showing the extremely un-Roman
character of the Lombard laws, that they are drawn up by a German
official, the notary Ansoald, not by a Roman bishop or lawyer, as would
certainly have been the case in Gaul or Spain. Their execrable Latin,
which makes light of all concords, or rules of government of
prepositions, could not have been the work of any educated Italian.

With the death of Rothari in 652, began a time of trouble and confusion
for the Lombards, in which they ceased to win ground from the Romans,
and fell into civil strife and anarchy. It commenced by the murder of
Rothari’s son, Rodoald, after he had reigned less than six months. He
was a prince of licentious manners, and fell a victim to the dagger of
an outraged husband (653).

The eighty years of Italian history during which the Lombards were
settling down in the valley of the Po, and along the Umbrian and Samnite
slopes of the Apennines, have won their chief importance in the story of
the world, not from the doings of Agilulf or Rothari, but from the
events that were taking place in Rome. To these years we may ascribe the
foundation of the temporal power of the Papacy, and the development of
the œcumenical position of the bishop of Rome to an extent which had
hitherto been uncontemplated. These movements owe most of their strength
to a single man, Pope Gregory the Great.

After the first shock of the Lombard invasion had rent Italy in twain,
the Imperial governors resolved to take up their residence in Ravenna,
not in Rome—in the capital of the Italy of Theodoric, not that of the
Italy of Augustus. [Sidenote: Rise of the Papacy.] They chose the strong
marsh-fortress close to the Lombard border, not the decayed city of the
Tiber, still scarred by the traces of Baduila’s harrying. The exarch
stationed himself at Ravenna, and delegated his civil and military
authority in the scattered portions of Imperial Italy to minor
officials, of whom the _duces_ of Rome and Naples were the chief. This
removal of the seat of the viceroy from the ancient metropolis was
destined to have the most far-reaching results. Its first was that the
chief lay official in Rome was an individual of far less authority and
prestige than the chief ecclesiastical personage there resident. The
bishops of Rome had always been men of importance; their claim to a
patriarchal primacy over all the Western sees of Europe had already been
formulated. In the ancient civil ‘prefecture’ of Italy—that is, in the
Italian peninsula, Africa, and Illyricum—it had much reality. The
African and Dalmatian churches referred matters of difficulty to Rome
for decision, no less than did the church of Italy. We find Gregory the
Great exercising a real influence in places as distant as Salona,
Larissa, and Carthage. During the existence of the kingdom of the
Ostrogoths, the Popes had obtained a kind of recognition from the
Teutonic kings, as the accredited representatives of the Catholic and
Roman population of Italy. They were certainly the most important
subjects of the realm outside the ranks of the Gothic conquerors, and
were allowed to petition or plead with the king in behalf of all the
Catholic Italians. The reconquest of Italy by Justinian had threatened
to lower the prestige and power of the Popes, by placing them once more
under a master who was both the legitimate ruler of the whole empire and
an orthodox Catholic. Justinian had dealt in a very autocratic manner
with the Roman bishops, as the tales of the woes of Vigilius and
Silverius show. He summoned them to Constantinople, bullied, imprisoned,
or tried them at his good pleasure. The continued survival of the
Imperial power in Italy would have checked the growth of Papal authority
in a great measure.

But the Lombard invasion changed the aspect of affairs. The Imperial
governors and garrisons were swept into corners of the peninsula, and
the Popes left without any master on the spot to curb them. The
unfortunate Eastern wars of Maurice, Phocas, and Heraclius prevented
them from turning any adequate attention to Italy. They sent the exarchs
over to make what fight they could, without giving them adequate
supplies, either of men or money. The exarchs, penned up in Ravenna,
could only communicate with Rome with the greatest difficulty: the
land-route of communication was almost cut by the Lombards of Spoleto;
the sea-route was long and difficult. Hence Rome was left to itself, to
fall or stand by its own strength and its own counsel. The Pope and the
‘Duke’ of Rome were continually thrown upon their own resources, without
the power of asking advice or aid, either from the emperor or the
exarch. For twenty-seven years, as Pope Gregory once wrote, Rome was
continually in imminent peril of Lombard conquest (572-599), and obliged
to provide for itself. In this time of stress and storm the Popes won
their first secular authority over Rome and its vicinity, and reduced
the civil magistrates to a place of quite secondary importance.

[Sidenote: Gregory the Great, 590-604.] The man to whom the increase in
the power of the Papacy was mainly due was Pope Gregory the Great, whose
sway of fourteen years (590-604) covers the second half of the reign of
Maurice and the first two years of Phocas. Gregory was a man of
exceptional capacity, and of exceptional opportunities, at once
administrator, diplomatist, monk, and saint. He was a noble Roman, who
had spent his early manhood in the civil service, and had risen to the
rank of prefect of the city. In early middle age he suddenly cast
secular things aside, employed his wealth to found monasteries, and
entered one himself as a simple monk. He plunged into the most rigid
extremes of asceticism, and almost killed himself by his perpetual
macerations of the flesh. Ere long he became abbot, and signalised
himself by the stringent discipline which he maintained over his monks,
as well as by his fiery zeal and untiring charity. It was at this time
of his life that there occurred the scene so well known to all English
readers. When he found the Northumbrian boys exposed for sale in the
market-place of Rome, he conceived pity in his heart for the uncared-for
heathen of Britain, and determined to cross the northern seas, and bear
the Gospel to the Saxon and Angle. But Pope Pelagius II. interfered to
prevent the most able, as well as the most saintly, of his clergy from
leaving the service of the Roman See, and risking his life among the
Pagans. He forbade Gregory’s departure for England, and sent him instead
to represent the Papacy at the court of Constantinople. A few years
after his return from this mission, which was long enough to enable him
to get a clear view of the weakness of the emperor Maurice, and of his
impotence to interfere in Italian matters, Gregory was chosen bishop of
Rome, when Pelagius died of the plague (590).

Gregory was elected without the Imperial sanction. Rome was so closely
beset by the Lombards that there was neither time nor means for asking
Maurice’s consent, but the emperor afterwards confirmed the elevation of
the saintly abbot. All Italy—nay, even the whole of the Christian
West—knew of him already as the most prominent of the Roman clergy, and
he was able at once to assume a position of great independence and
authority. Gregory’s most striking feature was his extraordinary
self-confidence and conviction in the absolute wisdom and righteousness
of his own ideas. The legend, started by his admirers not long after his
death, to the effect that he was actually inspired by the Holy Ghost,
who visited him in the form of a dove, very adequately represents his
own notion of his infallibility. It was this self-confidence which
enabled him to take up the line of stern and unbending autocracy which
he always adopted. Other men were mute and obedient before the imperious
saint, in whom they recognised their moral superior. Few, save the
emperor Maurice and the fanatical John the Faster, patriarch of
Constantinople, ever ventured to confront or withstand him.
Unquestionably he was the most able, and one of the best-intentioned,
men of his age. He left his mark on all that he touched, from the
conversion of the English and the Lombards down to the official music of
the Western Church—the Gregorian chants that still preserve his name.
Although posterity enshrined him as one of the four great doctors of the
Latin Church, his theological work was the weakest part of his activity.
His writings are full of tropes, far-fetched conceits, misinterpretation
of Scripture (he was ignorant of Hebrew and even of Greek), and pedantic
arguments from analogy.

It was as statesman and administrator, and fosterer of missionary work
that Gregory was truly great. In Rome he ruled as a temporal governor
rather than a bishop. It was he who provided against the attacks of the
Lombards, arrayed soldiers for the defence of the walls, fed the
starving people from the funds of the church, and negotiated with the
chiefs of the enemy in behalf of the people of the _Ducatus Romanus_. In
592 he concluded, on his own authority, a truce with the duke of
Spoleto, while the exarch was set on continuing the war. Maurice
stigmatised this conduct as ‘fatuous;’ but, as the emperor left Rome to
provide for itself, he should hardly have complained. [Sidenote: Secular
activity of Gregory.] In another crisis, Gregory appointed, on his own
authority, a tribune to command the garrison of Naples and a governor
for the Tuscan town of Nepi. Finally, it was he who, in 599, negotiated
the treaty of peace with king Agilulf, which ended the thirty years of
continuous war which had followed the first coming of the Lombards to
Italy. When rebuked by the exarch, he claimed to take precedence of him,
not only in virtue of his priestly office, but also in place and
dignity. In short, for all practical purposes, Gregory made himself the
half-independent governor of Rome.

But Gregory’s progress in asserting his authority as Patriarch of the
West was even more important than his advances toward temporal power. He
it was who recovered Spain and Britain for the Catholic Church—the
former by the conversion of Reccared from Arianism,[32] the latter by
sending the mission of St. Augustine to Kent, and obtaining the baptism
of king Ethelbert. Through the influence of queen Theodelinda, he
obtained control over the Lombard king Agilulf, and induced him to bring
up his son Adaloald as a Catholic.[33] [Sidenote: International
authority of Gregory.] He could claim, in short, that he had reunited
Italy, Spain, and Britain to the body of the Church of Christ. He also
exercised considerable influence in Gaul, mainly through the influence
of the great queen-mother Brunhildis, a favourer of all things Roman,
with whom he maintained a long and friendly correspondence. We have
already shown how the bishops of the Imperial provinces of Africa and
Illyricum deferred to his judgment and decisions. Justly, then, may
Gregory be styled the first Patriarch of the united West.

Footnote 32:

See pp. 141, 142.

Footnote 33:

See p. 195.

His successors were, for many generations, not men of mark. But by his
work he had gained for them a temporal authority and a spiritual
precedence which they were never again to lose. When he died, in 604, he
left the Roman See exalted to a pitch of greatness which it had never
before known, revered by all the Teutonic peoples of Europe, and
half-freed from its allegiance to the rulers of Constantinople.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XII

HERACLIUS AND MOHAMMED

610-641

Distress of the Empire in the early years of Heraclius—The letter of
Chosroes—Treachery of the Avars—Heraclius preaches a Crusade—His six
victorious Campaigns—Great Siege of Constantinople—Persia
vanquished—Triumph of Heraclius—Rise and Character of Mohammed—The
Creed of Islam—Conquests of the Caliphs in Syria and Persia—Troubled
old age of Heraclius.

When the tyrant Phocas had been handed over to the executioner to pay
the penalty for his innumerable misdeeds, the Senate and army joined in
offering the crown to the young Heraclius, the saviour whose advent had
delivered them from such a depth of misery. He was duly crowned by the
patriarch, and acclaimed by the people in the Hippodrome. But when the
first rejoicings were over, and he turned to contemplate the state of
the empire which he had just won, the prospect was not a very reassuring
one. The Slavs were spreading all over the Balkan peninsula, as far as
the gates of Thessalonica and the pass of Thermopylae. The Persian,
securely established in northern Syria and Mesopotamia, was advancing to
permanently reduce the lands of Asia Minor, which he had ravaged so
fiercely in the two preceding years. The treasury was empty, and the
army scattered and disorganised; for some years it had not dared to meet
the Persian in the open field, and the officers whom Phocas had kept in
command had never won its confidence.

The first ten years of the reign of Heraclius seemed little better than
a continuation of the miseries of the time of Phocas. The empire had
gained, indeed, a good man instead of a bad as its ruler, but a change
of fortune had not come with the change of sovereigns. It seemed that
Heraclius would not be able to cope with the legacy of accumulated ills
that had been left him. His predecessor’s dying taunt, ‘Will you rule
the empire any better than I have done?’ must often have rung in his
ears, when the never-ending tidings of battles lost, towns stormed,
revenues decreasing, and starving provinces kept coming in to him. The
imperial etiquette which had prevailed for the last two hundred years
prescribed that the Augustus should never take the field in person, and
this rule seems to have prevented Heraclius from heading his own
armies.[34] The generals to whom he delegated his power were uniformly
unfortunate, and occasionally disloyal. He was obliged to depose
Priscus, the officer who had betrayed Phocas, for arrogant disobedience
to his orders. The absence of the emperor from the field was a grave
misfortune; for he was much less of an administrator than of a fighting
man. His form and face betrayed the warrior. ‘He was of middle stature,
strongly built, and broad-chested, with a fair complexion, grey eyes,
and yellow hair. He wore a bushy beard till he ascended the throne, when
he shaved it, and did not let it grow again till he went to the wars ten
years later.’

Footnote 34:

Since Theodosius I., who died in 395, no reigning emperor had ever led
an army in the field.

[Sidenote: Persian successes, 613-17.] The military disasters of the
first eight years of Heraclius’ reign were terrible. In 613 the armies
of Chosroes began to attack central Syria: Damascus fell, and then the
general Shahrbarz pushed southward into Palestine. In 614 the whole
Christian world was seized with horror at learning that Jerusalem had
been captured. Not only were 90,000 Christians slain in the Holy City,
but—what was reckoned far worse—all the treasures of the church of the
Holy Sepulchre fell into the hands of the fire-worshippers. Chief of
them was the ‘Sacred Wood,’ the ‘True Cross,’ which the empress Helena,
the mother of the great Constantine, had discovered in 327, and placed
in her magnificent church. It was now carried into Persia, to be mocked
by the blasphemous king Chosroes. This was not the end of the disasters
of the empire. In 616 Shahrbarz forced his way across the sands of the
isthmus of Suez, and attacked Egypt, the one Roman province which had
not seen the horrors of war for three centuries. The unwarlike Egyptians
submitted with hardly a blow; many of the heretical sects that swarmed
in the Nile valley even welcomed the Persians as friends and deliverers.
The loss of Egypt seemed a deathblow to the empire. It had been of late
the chief source of revenue to the dwindling treasury of Heraclius, and
on its corn the multitude of Constantinople had been wont to depend for
their free dole of bread. This had now to be cut off, for the State
finances did not permit of the provision being purchased elsewhere. In
617 the invasion of Asia Minor was resumed, and a Persian force seized
Chalcedon, in very sight of the walls of Constantinople.

The darkest hour had arrived. It is a great testimonial to the
popularity of Heraclius that the series of misfortunes which we have
related did not cost him his throne. Any sovereign less
well-intentioned, and less esteemed, would have lost life and crown.
[Sidenote: The Letter of Chosroes.] The direst moment of his humiliation
arrived when, after the loss of Egypt, the overweening Chosroes sent him
a formal letter, inviting him to lay down the sceptre which he could not
wield. In language of arrogant condescension, which almost seems to have
been borrowed from the letter of king Sennacherib in the Book of Kings,
the Persian wrote:—

‘Chosroes, greatest of gods, and master of the whole earth, to
Heraclius, his vile and insensate slave. Why do you still refuse to
submit to our rule, and call yourself a king? Have I not destroyed the
Greeks? You say that you trust in your God. Why has he not delivered out
of my hand Caesarea, Jerusalem, and Alexandria? And shall I not also
destroy Constantinople? But I will pardon your faults if you will submit
to me, and come hither with your wife and children; and I will give you
lands, vineyards, and olive groves, and look upon you with a kindly
aspect. Do not deceive yourself with vain hope in that Christ, who was
not able even to save himself from the Jews, who killed him by nailing
him to a cross. Even if you take refuge in the depths of the seas, I
shall stretch out my hand and take you, so that you shall see me,
whether you will or no.’

For a moment it is said that Heraclius contemplated abandoning
Constantinople, and taking refuge in his father’s old stronghold of
Carthage. But the very desperateness of the state of affairs brought its
own remedy. [Sidenote: Crusade of Heraclius.] Incensed at the arrogance
of Chosroes, smarting under the loss of the Holy Cross, and pinched for
every necessary of life, the East-Romans were ready to strike one wild
blow for existence. The Church took the lead, and declared the war to be
a holy duty for all Christian men, the first of the Crusades. The
patriarch Sergius bound the emperor by an oath not to abandon his
people, and the clergy offered, as a war-loan, all the gold and silver
plate of the churches of Constantinople. Heraclius took heart, and,
casting aside the trammels of imperial etiquette, swore that he would
himself lead his army in the field. Thousands of volunteers were
collected, and the treasures of the Church lavished on their equipment.
By the end of 618 this effort of despair had given the empire once more
a general, an army, and a military chest.

But an attack on the Persian host in Asia Minor did not turn out to be
at once feasible. A sudden danger at home obliged Heraclius to delay his
crusade. The Avars concentrated their ravages on Thrace, and their
hordes rode up almost to the gates of Constantinople. It was necessary
at all costs to free the city from the danger of attack in the rear
before the army crossed over into Asia. [Sidenote: Treachery of the
Avars.] Accordingly the emperor sent to offer a subsidy to the Chagan of
the Avars if he would withdraw beyond the Danube. The Chagan proposed a
conference at Heraclea, forty miles west of Constantinople, the point to
which he had advanced his army. Heraclius consented to the meeting, and
rode out in royal state, with all his court. But the faithless Avar was
meditating treachery. He concealed troops of his horsemen in the hills,
with the object of waylaying Heraclius on his way to Heraclea, and of
holding him to ransom. The emperor was warned just in time to escape
from the ambush. Throwing off his long purple robe, and tucking his
diadem under his arm, he rode hard for Constantinople, with the Avars
close at his heels. Many of his court, and thousands of the Thracian
peasantry, who had turned out to witness the meeting, fell into the
hands of the enemy. Heraclius had just time to order the gates to be
closed before the pursuers swept through the suburbs, and up to the
walls.

In spite of this piece of abominable treachery, the emperor was still
fain to conclude a peace with the Avars, as an absolutely necessary
preliminary before attacking the Persian. In 620 a peace of some sort
was patched up, in return for a payment of money, but even then
Heraclius was not able to start on his projected campaign. Some
desultory Persian attacks on Constantinople, and notably an attempt to
build a fleet at Chalcedon, and cross the strait, had first to be
frustrated.

It was not till 622 that the emperor was finally enabled to take the
offensive. But all preparations being complete, after solemnly keeping
the Lenten Fast, and receiving the benediction of the Church for himself
and his army, he set sail for Asia on Easter Day. He left his young son,
Heraclius Constantinus, regent in his stead, under the charge of the
patriarch Sergius and the patrician Bonus, the commander of the garrison
of Constantinople.

In the six campaigns which followed, Heraclius displayed an energy and
an ability which no one, judging from his quiescence during the last ten
years, would have expected him to possess. Historians only doubt whether
to praise the more his strategical talents or his personal bravery. From
the very first he showed his ascendency over the enemy, taking the
offensive, and turning the course of the war wherever he chose to direct
it. At his first departure from Constantinople he did not attack the
Persian in the front, but boldly sailed round the southern capes of Asia
Minor, and landed his army in Cilicia, on the gulf of Issus, a position
from which he threatened both Asia Minor and northern Syria. Marching up
into Cappadocia, he cut the communications between the Persian army in
Asia Minor and the Euphrates valley. This movement had the result that
he expected. Hastily evacuating Bithynia and Galatia, the Persian
general Shahrbarz drew back eastward, in order to regain touch with his
country. Ere a blow was struck Heraclius had cleared western Asia Minor
of the enemy; but he finished the campaign by inflicting a crushing
defeat on Shahrbarz in Cappadocia, and thus recovered eastern Asia Minor
also (622).

After in vain offering terms of peace to Chosroes, Heraclius took
effective means in the next year to bring the Persian to reason. Syria,
Egypt, and Mesopotamia were still in the hands of the enemy: he resolved
to deliver them in the same manner that he had saved Asia Minor, by
striking so hard at the enemy’s base of operations that he should be
compelled to call in all his outlying troops in order to defend Persia
proper. [Sidenote: Victorious campaigns of Heraclius, 622-27.] In 623
Heraclius, abandoning his communication with the sea, plunged boldly
inland, and fell on Media. For two whole years he is lost to sight in
the regions of the extreme East, subduing lands where no Roman army had
ever been seen before, where, indeed, no European conqueror had ever
penetrated since Alexander the Great. We hear of his winning three
pitched battles, and of his storming two great Median towns, Gandzaca
and Thebarmes, the latter the reputed birthplace of Zoroaster, the
prophet of the Persians. It was some satisfaction to the army to destroy
their magnificent temples in revenge for the sack of Jerusalem. To
defend Media, Chosroes had to draw back his outlying armies from the
West, and so far the purpose of Heraclius was served; but the emperor
was still too weak to attack Persia proper, or besiege Chosroes’ capital
of Ctesiphon.

After wintering at Van, in the Armenian highlands, Heraclius dropped
southward, in 625, and came into regions more within the ken of Western
historians. He recovered the long-lost fortresses of Amida and
Martyropolis, the ancient bulwarks of the empire on the upper Tigris,
which had been for nearly twenty years in Persian hands, and once more
picked up his communication with Constantinople, which had almost lost
sight of him during the two last campaigns. The year ended with a fourth
crushing defeat of Shahrbarz, who had endeavoured to throw himself
between the emperor and his homeward path by defending the passage of
the Sarus, near Germanicia.

But 626 was destined to be the decisive year of the war. Before
acknowledging himself beaten, the obstinate Chosroes was determined to
make one final effort. Drawing every man that he could together, for the
Persian empire was now growing exhausted, the old king made two armies
of them. While the larger was left in Mesopotamia and Armenia, to
endeavour to keep Heraclius employed, a great body under Shahrbarz
slipped southward, round the emperor’s flank, and marched for the
Bosphorus. [Sidenote: Great Siege of Constantinople, 626.] Chosroes had
concerted measures with the treacherous Chagan of the Avars for a
combined attack on Constantinople, from both the European and the
Asiatic side of the strait. When Shahrbarz appeared at Chalcedon, he
found the Avars already masters of Thrace, and preparing to beleaguer
Byzantium. The two armies could see each other across the water, but
they were wholly unable to communicate with each other; for the Roman
fleet kept such excellent guard in the straits that no boat could cross.
The patrician Bonus made a most gallant defence, the garrison was
adequate, and the population kept a good heart, for they knew that the
Persian was striking his last desperate blow. Heraclius himself was so
well satisfied with the impregnability of his capital that he only sent
a few veteran troops by sea to co-operate in the defence, and kept the
greater part of his army in hand for an attack on the heart of the
dominions of Chosroes. Meanwhile, the host of Shahrbarz had to look on
in helpless impotence, while the Avars, on the other side of the
Bosphorus, made their attempt on Constantinople. On the night of the 3d
of August 626 the Chagan gave the signal for the assault. A body of
Slavs, in small boats, attempted to storm the sea-wall from the side of
the Golden Horn, while the main body of the Avars moved against the
land-wall. But the galleys of Bonus rammed and sunk the light vessels of
the Slavs, and the assault of the Avars miscarried entirely. Thereupon
the Chagan hastily broke up his camp, and retired beyond the Balkans.
The siege was practically raised, though the army of Shahrbarz still
remained encamped at Chalcedon. Thus ended the first of the four great
sieges of Constantinople of which we have to tell.

Meanwhile, Heraclius had been retaliating on Persia in the most
effective way. In return for the invasion of Thrace by the Avars, he
called in from beyond the Caucasus the wild Hunnish tribe of the
Khazars, and turned them loose on Media and Assyria. Forty thousand of
their horsemen laid waste the whole land, as far as the gates of
Ctesiphon, and the emperor took possession of the upper valley of the
Tigris, and prepared to strike at his rival’s capital in the coming
year.

[Sidenote: Battle of Nineveh, 627.] The campaign of 627 ended the
triumphs of Heraclius. The last army of Persia, under a general named
Rhazates, faced him near Nineveh. Charging at the head of the mailed
horsemen of his guard, Heraclius slew the Persian chief with his own
hand, and scattered his forces to the winds. The victorious army pressed
on, and captured Dastagerd, the magnificent country-palace of Chosroes,
near Ctesiphon, where they gained such plunder as no Roman army had won
for many ages. They burnt Dastagerd, and four palaces more, while
Chosroes fled eastward to conceal himself in the mountains of Susiana.

The long-suffering Persians were at last growing tired of their arrogant
lord. [Sidenote: Peace with Persia, 628.] His army rebelled against him,
and proclaimed his son Siroes as king. Chosroes himself was thrown into
a dungeon, where he perished of cold and starvation. The new king at
once sent to ask for terms of peace from Heraclius. The emperor, knowing
the exhaustion of his own realm, and its need for instant repose, made
no hard conditions. Siroes restored all the Roman territory still in his
hands, released all Roman captives, paid a war indemnity, and—greatest
of all triumphs in the eyes of the subjects of Heraclius—gave back the
‘True Cross,’ and other spoils of Jerusalem.

In May 628 the emperor was able to return to Constantinople, bringing
peace and plenty with him. He had restored the boundary of the empire,
and inflicted on Persia a blow from which she never recovered. His arms
had penetrated far beyond the limits of the conquests of Trajan and
Severus, and his six years of unbroken victory were a record which no
Roman, save Julius Caesar, could rival. Not unjustly did the inhabitants
of Constantinople receive him with chants and sacred processions, and
hail him by the name of ‘the new Scipio.’ The crowning moment of his
triumph came when the True Cross was uplifted in St. Sophia, and
publicly exposed for the adoration of the faithful. Well might the
emperor have sung his ‘_Nunc dimittis_’ on that day of solemn rejoicing,
and prayed that the hour of his triumph might be the last of his life.

But already there was another tempest gathering, which was destined to
sweep over the Roman empire, with even greater violence than the Persian
storm which had just been weathered. While in the midst of his last
campaign, Heraclius had received a letter from an obscure Arabian
prophet, bidding him accept a new revelation from Heaven, which its
framer called ‘Islam,’ or ‘Submission to God.’ A similar missive was
delivered at the same moment to Chosroes, then on the eve of his fall.
Chosroes tore up the letter, and swore he would, at his leisure, lay the
insolent prophet in a dungeon. Heraclius sent a polite letter of
acknowledgment and a trifling present to the unknown fanatic, being
averse to making enemies of any sort while the Persian war was still on
his hands. Little as it could have been foreseen at the time, the
followers of the writer of these eccentric missives were fated to tear
up the empire of Chosroes by the roots, and to lop off half of its
fairest provinces from the realm of Heraclius.

The Arabian prophet was no less a person than Mohammed the son of
Abdallah, that strange being, half seer and half impostor, whose
preaching was destined to convulse three continents, and turn the stream
of history into new and unexpected channels.

[Sidenote: Mohammed.] The tribes of Arabia had hitherto been of very
little importance: their local feuds absorbed all their superfluous
energy. They were divided from each other, as well by religious
differences as by ancient clan hatreds. Some worshipped stocks and
stones, some the host of heaven, some had partly adopted Christianity,
others Judaism. They were given over to fetich-worship, human
sacrifices, drunkenness, infanticide, bloodshedding, polygamy, and
highway robbery. Among these godless tribes appeared Mohammed, a poor
man, but born of an ancient and powerful clan, who preached to them a
rigid Unitarian creed, accompanied by a reformation in morality. He had
been called by the One true God, he said, in a vision on Mount Hira, to
proclaim a new revelation to his countrymen, to turn them from idolatry
and hatred of each other, to the worship of Allah and the practice of
brotherly love. Mohammed was a being of a poetic and visionary
temperament, given to high ideals and high enterprises. He was afflicted
with long fits, or trances, in which his soul wandered far into the
fields of thought: these trances he took for divine inspirations, and
his imaginings—which were often noble enough—seemed to him the direct
commands of God, though in them good and grand ideas were freely mixed
with baser elements, tainted by the ignorance, cruelty, and lust of a
seventh century Arab. For long the preaching of Mohammed was of no
effect: his own tribe grew weary of his unending exhortations, and
chased him away from Mecca (622). [Sidenote: The Hijrah, 622.] It is
from this flight to Medina—the famous ‘Hijrah,’ that all Moslem
chronology is dated. But in spite of ill-success and persecution the
prophet never swerved from his mission, and at last proselytes began
flocking in to him, and he became the head of a powerful sect. Then came
the fatal moment which turned his teaching from a blessing to Arabia
into a curse for the world. When he grew powerful enough, he bade his
sectaries to take up the sword, and impose Islam on their neighbours by
the force of arms. His first success in the field, the battle of Bedr
(624), was an encouragement to persevere in this evil path, and for the
last eight years of his life he went forth, conquering and to conquer,
among the tribes of Arabia, till he had built up a little theocratic
empire in the peninsula (624-32).

[Sidenote: Mohammed and his Religion.] Mohammed’s successes were won by
unhallowed means, and the desire to extend them at almost any cost
gradually led him into compromises with the habits and superstitions of
his countrymen which were fatal to the purity of his religion. A strain
of cunning, of revenge, of self-indulgence, appeared in a character
which, in his years of poverty and trouble, had been blameless. He
connived at the ancient fetich-worship of the Arabs, by conceding that
the conical black stone of the Kaabah, which they had always worshipped,
had been hallowed by Abraham, and should be the central shrine of his
new faith. He fostered their vanity by proclaiming them the chosen
people of God. He pandered to their craving for lust and bloodshed, by
promising them the goods of their enemies to plunder in this life, and a
heaven of gross sensual enjoyment in the next. He restricted, but he did
not abolish, the evils of polygamy and slavery. In his day of triumph he
consigned whole tribes and towns to death, sometimes under circumstances
of treachery as well as of cruelty. Worst of all, he foisted into his
revelation special mandates of God permitting himself to do things which
his teaching forbade to his followers, such as to exceed his own limit
of polygamy, and even to take his own foster-son’s bride to wife. It is
hard to believe that he can have failed to see the horrible blasphemy
involved in forging the name of God to special warrants approving his
own lust. But this sin he repeatedly committed.

The personal failings of Mohammed seem to have brought into his creed a
blight of cruelty, bigotry, and self-indulgence, which has rendered
half-useless its higher and nobler features. The religion which
legalises the slaughter and plunder of all unbelievers and consigns
woman to the harem may have been a comparative blessing to the wild
Arabs of Mohammed’s own day, or to the Negro of the modern Soudan: to
the civilised world it was a mere curse—the substitution of an inferior
for a higher creed and life. Even to the Arab of the seventh century it
was but half-beneficial: if it stayed him from drunkenness, human
sacrifices, and infanticide, it merely directed his bloodthirstiness
against foreign instead of domestic foes, and gave a divine sanction to
many of his lower instincts. [Sidenote: Failings of Islam.] Wherever
Mohammedanism has taken root, it has led at first to rapid and
enthusiastic outbursts of vigour, but it seems gradually to sap the
energy of the nations which adopt it, and leads, after a few generations
of greatness, to a stagnation and decay, which the Moslem in his
self-satisfied bigotry is too blind to perceive. The creed only thrives
while militant. When it has won its victory, it sinks into dull apathy.
Islam is a good religion to die by, as its fanatics have shown on a
thousand battle-fields, but not a good religion to live by. Good and
evil elements are too hopelessly mixed in it, just as in Mohammed’s
Koran, that miscellaneous receptacle of all his revelations: high
thoughts about the Godhead or the fate of man are mingled with the mere
opportunist orders of the day, or with licences for the personal
gratification of the Prophet.[35]

Footnote 35:

The Koran consists of all Mohammed’s inspired sayings, taken down at
the time on wooden tablets, palm-leaves, or blade-bones, by his
followers, and consigned in confusion to a chest, from which they were
afterwards drawn out at random, and strung together, not according to
their date or their contents, but simply in order of length.

But whatever were the failings of Mohammed and of Mohammed’s creed, they
had one fearful efficiency, the power to turn their sectaries into wild
fanatics, careless of life or death upon the battle-field. Life meant to
them the duty of smiting down the Infidel, and the privilege of spoiling
him: death, the yet greater joys of a paradise of gross sensual
delights. What the first mad rush of a horde of Moslem fanatics, drunk
with religious frenzy, was like, modern Europe had half forgotten,
though our crusading forefathers knew it well enough. But the generation
which has seen the half-armed Arabs of the Soudan face the steadiest
troops in the world equipped with quick-firing rifles and artillery, and
almost carry the day against them, has had good reason to revise its
view about the power of Mohammedan fanaticism.

Before he died, Mohammed had begun to take measures for the spread of
his religion by the sword beyond the limits of Arabia. In 629, the year
after the end of the Persian war, the troops of Heraclius who garrisoned
the fortresses on the desert frontier of Palestine, had been attacked by
wandering bands of Arab zealots. But it was not till the Prophet himself
was dead that the full storm of invasion fell upon the Roman empire and
its Persian neighbours. It was Abu Bekr, the first ‘caliph’ or
‘successor’ of Mohammed, who sent forth in 633 the two armies which were
bidden respectively to convert Syria and Chaldaea to Islam by the edge
of the sword.

Neither the Roman nor the Persian empire was well fitted for resistance
at the moment. The twenty years of war brought about by the ambition of
Chosroes had reduced each of them to the extreme of exhaustion. Since
the end of the war Persia had been a prey to incessant civil strife and
revolution: nine princes had mounted the throne in little more than four
years. In the Roman empire Heraclius had been doing his best to repair
the calamities of the war: his first care had been to repay, by means of
the war indemnity paid by Siroes and the imposition of new taxes, the
great loan which the Church had made him, in order to equip his troops
for the struggle. [Sidenote: Exhaustion of the Roman Empire.] He had
disbanded much of his victorious army in pursuit of the policy of
retrenchment for which the ruined state of his empire called. But he
could not repair the losses which Syria and Asia Minor had suffered in
spending ten years beneath the Persian yoke. The very foundations of
society seemed to have been sapped in the provinces of the East by the
prolonged Persian occupation. The numerous heretical sects which swarmed
in the valleys of the Nile and the Orontes had raised their heads during
the Persian rule, and bore with ill-concealed reluctance the restoration
of the imperial authority. The Jews, who had often sided with the
Persians, were restless and discontented. It was said that half the
population of Syria and Egypt wished ill to the empire. It would have
required two generations of peace and wise administration to restore to
their old condition those Oriental dioceses which had for the last three
centuries been the stay and support of the East-Roman Empire; but less
than four years after Heraclius had solemnly restored the ‘True Cross’
to the custody of the Patriarch of Jerusalem the Arabs burst into the
land.

While Khaled and one fanatical Saracen horde assaulted the Persian
frontier on the lower Euphrates, another, under Abu Obeida, attacked the
eastern or desert front of Syria. Bostra, the first city on the edge of
the waste, fell by treachery, a small army under the patrician Sergius
was defeated, and the governors of Syria and Palestine sent for aid to
the emperor. Hardly yet realising the danger of the crisis, Heraclius
sent some reinforcements under his brother Theodore to join the local
troops. This army checked the Moslems for some months; and it was
considered necessary by the caliph to strengthen the Arab host in Syria
by sending thither half the force which had invaded the Persian empire,
and Khaled, ‘the Sword of God,’ the most terrible and bloodthirsty of
all his fanatical chiefs. In July 634, Theodore was badly defeated by
the Saracens at Adjnadin near Gabatha, beyond the Jordan. This
ill-success roused the emperor: he poured in further reinforcements, and
the enemy were attacked in the late summer of 634 by an army of 80,000
men. [Sidenote: Battle of the Yermuk, 634.] The fate of Syria was
settled by the battle of the Hieromax (Yermuk), where the troops of the
Empire, after a long and bloody fight, in which they at one time forced
the Arabs back to the very gates of their camp, were broken by the
fanatical rush of an enemy who preferred death to defeat. ‘Paradise is
before you,’ cried Abu Obeida to his wavering host, ‘the devil and
hell-fire behind;’ and with their last charge the Arabs broke the line
of the legions, and rolled the wearied troops in wild disorder back over
a line of precipices and ravines, where thousands perished without
stroke of sword, by being cast down the lofty rocks.

The army of the East was almost exterminated at the Hieromax, and ere
another force could be collected Damascus, the greatest city of eastern
Syria, was captured by the enemy, who in spite of accepting its
surrender massacred a great part of the population (635).

Heraclius now determined to lead the Roman army in person, but he was no
longer the same man who had kept the field with harness on his back for
six long campaigns in the old Persian War. He had now long passed his
fiftieth year, and was prematurely broken by the first symptoms of the
dropsy which afterwards caused his death. In his private life, too, he
had had much trouble of late; he had made an unwise and unhallowed
second marriage with his own sister’s daughter Martina, and was harassed
by disputes between her and the rest of his family, caused by the fact
that the young empress wished to induce her husband to leave her own son
Heracleonas joint heir to the empire with his elder brother Heraclius
Constantinus. But such as he was, Heraclius once more put on his armour,
and spent the years 635-6 in Syria endeavouring to keep back the Arabs
with the new levies that he had assembled. His failure was complete;
city after city, Emesa, Hierapolis, Chalcis, Beroea, fell into the hands
of the Moslems, without the emperor being able even to risk a battle in
their defence. In 636, completely broken by disease, he returned to
Constantinople, having first paid a hasty visit to Jerusalem to take up
and remove the ‘True Cross’ which he had replaced there in triumph only
six years before.

[Sidenote: Fall of Jerusalem, 637.] After the departure of Heraclius
things went from bad to worse; Antioch, the stronghold and capital of
northern Syria, and Jerusalem, the centre of the defence of Palestine,
both fell in 637. To receive the surrender of Jerusalem, which Mohammed
had pronounced only second to Mecca among the holy places of the world,
the caliph Omar crossed the desert in person. When the town had yielded,
the Arab compelled the patriarch Sophronius to lead him all round the
shrines of the city; as they stood in the church of the Holy Sepulchre,
the patriarch, torn by grief, could not refrain from exclaiming that now
indeed was the Abomination of Desolation, spoken of by Daniel the
prophet, in the Holy of Holies. The austere Omar showed more moderation
and compassion than his generals had been wont to display, he left the
Christians all their holy places, and contented himself with building a
great mosque on the site of the temple of Solomon.

While Syria was falling before the Saracens, the lot of Persia had been
even worse; after a great battle lasting for three days at Kadesia, the
Sassanian empire had succumbed before the Moslem sword. Its capital
Ctesiphon was sacked and destroyed, and Yezdigerd, the last of its
kings, fled eastward to raise his last army on the banks of Oxus and
Murghab (636). Arab hordes working up the Euphrates began to assail the
Roman province of Mesopotamia from the south, at the same moment that
the conquerors of Syria attacked it from the west. Heraclius made one
last attempt to save north Syria and Mesopotamia by sending an army
under his son and heir Heraclius Constantinus to endeavour to recover
Antioch. After some slight show of success at first, the young Caesar
suffered a fatal defeat in front of Emesa, and retired from the scene,
leaving Mesopotamia with all its time-honoured strongholds, Daras,
Edessa, and Amida, a prey to the irresistible enemy (638-9). With the
fall of the seaport of Caesarea in 640 the Romans lost their last
foothold south of the Taurus, and Asia Minor itself now became exposed
to invasion.

Before he died of the dropsy, which was the bane of his declining years,
the unfortunate Heraclius was destined to see one more disaster to his
realm. [Sidenote: Saracens conquer Egypt, 640.] In 640 the Saracens, now
headed by Amrou, crossed the desert of Suez and fell upon Egypt. They
beat the Roman army in the field, captured Memphis and Babylon, and then
received the homage of all upper and central Egypt. The population was
very largely composed of heretical sects who received the Moslems as
deliverers from orthodox oppression, and Mokawkas the Coptic governor of
the province surrendered long ere the situation had grown desperate. It
was only about Alexandria, where the Greek orthodox element was
strongest, that any serious resistance was made. But the great seaport
capital of Egypt held out very staunchly, and was still in Christian
hands when Heraclius died on Feb. 10th, 641, in the sixty-sixth year of
his age.

Thus ended in misery and failure the man who would have been hailed as
the greatest of all the warrior emperors of Rome if he had died but ten
years sooner. He had saved the empire at its darkest hour, and won back
all the East by feats of arms such as have seldom been paralleled in all
history. But he won it back only to lose again two-thirds of the rescued
lands to a new enemy, and ungrateful after-ages remembered him rather as
the loser of Jerusalem and Antioch than as the saviour of
Constantinople.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XIII

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE VISIGOTHS

A.D. 603-711

Obscurity of Visigothic History—Sisibut and Swinthila expel the
East-Romans—A series of priest-ridden Kings—Chindaswinth restores
the royal power—His legislation—Recceswinth’s long reign—Wamba and
his wars—The rebellion of Paulus—Wamba’s weak and obscure
successors—Approach of the Saracens—Weakness of Spain—Roderic the
Last of the Goths—All Spain subdued by the Saracens.

Few periods of European history are so obscure as the last hundred years
of the Visigothic dominion in Spain. The original sources for its annals
are few and meagre, and little has been accomplished of late in the way
of making the period more comprehensible. The Moorish conquest in 711
seems to have swept away both books and writers, and it was not till
many years after that disaster that the composition of historical works
in Spain was resumed; the later Visigothic times are as dark and little
known as the beginnings of the English heptarchy, and Spain had no Bede
and no _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_ to throw gleams of light across the
obscurity. Hence it comes that many of their kings are mere names, and
that their acts and policy are often incomprehensible. The tale grows
more and more puzzling as the seventh century draws on to its close, and
by the beginning of the eighth we have only untrustworthy legends to
help us.

The house of Leovigild, after forty years of success, ended disastrously
in 603 by the assassination of the young king Leova II. His murderer was
a certain count Witterich, a turbulent noble who had joined in the Arian
rising of 590, and had been unwisely pardoned by Reccared. The accession
of Witterich marked a revulsion against the growth of the kingly power,
which had been making such strides under Leovigild and Reccared, and
probably also a protest against the ecclesiastical policy of Reccared,
who, since his conversion, had given the Catholic bishops such power and
authority in his realm. [Sidenote: Witterich, 603-10.] Witterich reigned
for seven years, with little credit to himself—it is only strange that
he guarded his ill-gotten crown so long. He had some unimportant
struggles with the Franks in Aquitaine and the Byzantine garrisons in
Andalusia, but won no credit in either quarter. The Church was against
him, his counts and dukes paid him little heed, and no one showed much
astonishment or regret when in 610 he was murdered by conspirators at a
feast, like his predecessor the tyrant Theudigisel.

The king chosen by the Goths in his place was a certain count Gundimar,
who appears to have been the head of the orthodox church party, as the
ecclesiastical chronicles are loud in the praises of his piety. Gundimar
determined to take part in the Frankish civil war when Theuderich of
Burgundy and Brunhildis attacked Theudebert of Austrasia. He naturally
sided with the distant Austrasian against his nearer Burgundian brother,
with whom the Goths of Septimania had some frontier disputes. But in the
year that the war broke out Gundimar died, only twenty-one months after
he had been crowned (612).

[Sidenote: Sisibut, 612-20.] His successor was king Sisibut (612-20), a
prince of some mark and character, who like his predecessor was a great
friend of the church party and a foe of the unruly secular nobility. He
was not only a great warrior, but what was more strange in a Gothic
prince, a learned student and even a writer of books. The modern
historian would give much to be able to recover his lost _Chronicle of
the Kings of the Goths_; but the irony of fate has decreed that of his
works only an ecclesiastical biography, _The Life and Passion of St.
Desiderius_, and some bad verses, should survive. We learn from his
admiring clerical friends that he was skilled in grammar, rhetoric, and
dialectic, and that he erected a magnificent cathedral in Toledo.

But Sisibut was no mere crowned _savant_; he took up the task, which had
been abandoned since the death of Reccared, of driving the East-Roman
garrisons out of Andalusia, and was almost completely successful. The
emperor Heraclius, then in the throes of his Persian war, could send no
help to Spain, and one after another all the harbours of south-eastern
Spain from the mouth of the Guadalquivir to the mouth of the Sucre fell
into his hands. Nothing remained to the East-Romans except their most
westerly possession, the extreme south-west angle of Portugal, with the
fortress of Lagos, and the promontory of Cape St. Vincent. After winning
the Andalusian coast it appears that Sisibut built a small fleet and
crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to wrest Ceuta and Tangier from the
exarch of Africa. In 615 Heraclius made peace with him, formally
surrendering all that Sisibut had succeeded in gaining from his
generals. Sisibut was also successful in taming the intractable Basques;
following them into their mountains he compelled them to pay tribute.

A less happy record is preserved of Sisibut in the matter of internal
government. As befitted a hot supporter of the intolerant Spanish
church, he gave himself up to the promptings of his bishops, and
commenced a fierce persecution of the Jews, the first of many
tribulations which the unhappy Hebrews were to suffer at the hands of
the later Gothic kings.

Sisibut reigned only eight years; he had taken the precaution to have
his son Reccared II. elected king by the national council during his own
lifetime, and on his death the youth succeeded to the throne without
molestation. But less than a year after Sisibut’s death Reccared
followed him to the grave, and the crown once more passed into a new
house.

[Sidenote: Swinthila, 620-31.] Count Swinthila, whom the Goths now chose
as king, was a general who had distinguished himself in the war with the
Basques, and had a great military reputation, but, unlike Sisibut, was
not a favourer of the Church party, and had to face its intrigues all
through the ten years of his reign. He was equally disliked by the great
nobles, whose powers he sought to curb by asserting the rights of the
smaller Gothic freeholders, who had for long been lapsing more and more
into feudal dependence on their greater neighbours. His care for their
interests won for him the title of the ‘Father of the Poor,’ and their
loyalty is no doubt the explanation of the fact that he was able to hold
the crown so long when both Church and nobles were against him. Nor was
his reign entirely without military successes. He took Lagos and the
fort on Cape St. Vincent, the two last Byzantine strongholds in Spain,
so that the whole peninsula was at last drawn under a single ruler. He
was equally successful against a rebellion of the Basques, and,
overrunning their mountain valleys in Navarre and Biscay, built the
fortress of Olite, beyond the Ebro and near Pampeluna, to hold them
down.

But Swinthila had too many enemies to be allowed to keep his crown. A
certain count Sisinand, a governor in Septimania, rose against him, and
called in to his aid Dagobert, the king of the Franks. Gaul was now once
more united under a single monarch, and the long civil wars of the
descendants of Brunhildis and Fredegundis were over, so that the Franks
were, after a long interval, able to indulge in foreign invasion. Backed
by troops lent him by Dagobert, Sisinand crossed the Pyrenees, and
advanced against Saragossa, where the king had marched forward to meet
him. No battle took place, for the matter was settled by treachery.
[Sidenote: Rebellion of Sisinand, 631.] The great nobles and bishops,
who had obeyed Swinthila’s summons to war, seized him in his own camp,
threw him into chains, and handed him over to Sisinand. The usurper,
more merciful than many Gothic rebels, contented himself with casting
Swinthila into a monastery, and did not put him to death. Sisinand had
promised his Frankish friend to surrender to him in return for his help
the most splendid treasure in the Gothic royal hoard, a great golden
bowl of Roman workmanship, weighing five hundred pounds, a trophy of the
old wars of the fifth century. He gave up the vessel to Dagobert’s
ambassadors, but, when it was seen departing from Spain, the Gothic
counts swore that such an ancient heirloom of their kings must never
leave the land, and took it back by force. In its lieu Sisinand sent to
Dagobert a sum of 200,000 gold solidi (£140,000).

Sisinand was a weak ruler, the tool and instrument of his bishops. Under
his impotent hands all the power and authority of the royal name melted
away, and the work of Sisibut and Swinthila was undone. The Church and
not he ruled Spain. When synods met, the king was seen on bended knee,
and with streaming eyes, lamenting his sins, and begging the counsel of
the holy fathers. [Sidenote: Priest-ridden kings, 631-41.] He reigned
only for five years (631-36), and was succeeded by Chinthila, another
chosen instrument of the hierarchy, of whom we know little more than
that ‘he held many synods with his bishops, and strengthened himself by
the help of the true faith.’ He reigned only three years, but was
allowed by his clerical partisans to have his son Tulga crowned as his
successor before he died. Tulga, another obedient son of the Church, had
only reigned two years when he was dethroned by a conspiracy of the
great lay nobles, to whom the domination of the clergy in the State
became more and more odious under the twelve years’ rule of three
priest-ridden kings. Tulga was sent to pursue the congenial path of
piety in a monastery, while the National Assembly, convened by the
conspirators, elected as king count Chindaswinth, whose virtues were
recognised by all, while his great age—he was no less than
seventy-nine—promised a free hand to his turbulent subjects (641).

But the nobles had erred greatly in their estimate of Chindaswinth, as
grievously as did the misled cardinals, who, in a later age, elected the
apparently moribund Sixtus V. to the Papacy. The touch of the crown on
his brow seemed to give back his youth and vigour to the old man, and
the Goths found that a king of the type of Leovigild and Swinthila, a
stern repressor of lawlessness and feudal anarchy, was reigning over
them. [Sidenote: Chindaswinth, 641-52.] Chindaswinth set himself at once
to revindicate the royal prerogative, both against the great nobles and
against the ecclesiastical synods. His hand fell heavily upon the
traitors who, twelve years before, had betrayed Swinthila; he began to
seek them out, and to execute them. At once the majority of the nobles
of Spain burst into revolt. Some fled to Africa, and borrowed aid from
the Byzantine exarch, others to the kings of the Franks. But
Chindaswinth beat down all their risings, and quenched the flame of
insurrection in the blood of two hundred nobles, and five hundred men of
lesser rank, whom he handed over to the headsman. ‘He tamed the Goths so
that they dared attempt nothing more against him, as they had so often
done with their kings, for the Goths are a hard-necked folk, and need a
heavy yoke for their shoulders.’ When the revolt was crushed,
Chindaswinth compelled the bishops assembled in synod at Toledo to
pronounce a solemn curse on all rebellious nobles—‘_tyranni_,’ he called
them—and to decree the penalty of deprivation of orders and
excommunication on all members of the clergy who should be found
consenting to the plots of the ‘tyrants’ (646).

Chindaswinth’s heavy hand won Spain seven years of peace in the latter
end of his reign, and he was able to associate with himself on the
throne his son Recceswinth, without any of the Goths daring to murmur.
The father and son reigned together for three years, Recceswinth
discharging the functions of king, while Chindaswinth gave himself up to
works of piety. Their joint rule is marked by one very important
incident, showing the completion of the process of unification, which
had begun by the conversion of Reccared to Catholicism in 589.
[Sidenote: Laws of Chindaswinth.] Goth and Spaniard were now so much
assimilated to each other that the kings thought that they might for the
future be ruled by a single code of laws. The races were beginning to be
completely intermixed. Spanish counts and dukes are as numerous in the
end of the period as Gothic bishops and abbots. The one race had no
longer the monopoly of secular power, nor the other that of
ecclesiastical promotion. Chindaswinth resolved to suspend the use of
the old Roman law in his dominion, and to make all his subjects use
Gothic law, though he introduced into the latter a considerable Roman
element. The advantage of the new code of Chindaswinth was that the
counts and _vicarii_, the king’s immediate representatives, had for the
future full jurisdiction over the whole native Spanish element,
including the clergy; for the Spaniards were deprived of their Roman
law-book, the _Breviarium Alarici_, and of their own courts and judges,
and were subjected for legal, no less than for administrative or
military matters, to the Gothic count. At the same time the prohibition
against marriage between Goths and Provincials, which still nominally
existed, though it was frequently broken since the time of Leovigild,
was removed, and all the king’s subjects became equal in the eye of the
law.

Chindaswinth died in 652, at the great age of ninety, unparalleled among
Teutonic kings of his day. [Sidenote: Recceswinth, 652-72.] His son and
colleague, Recceswinth, already well advanced down the vale of years,
survived for twenty years more. He had the longest, quietest, and, in a
way, the most prosperous reign of any of the Visigothic kings. Unlike
his father, he was a devoted supporter of the Church, and, by the aid of
the bishops, maintained his rule until the day of his death. But he was
gradually letting slip once more all the royal powers which his father
had with such trouble regained and restored. As he grew older the entire
rule of the State dropped once more into the hands of bishops and
synods. Recceswinth was busy all his days in building churches, and
making great offerings to the saints. Chance has preserved to us one
huge gold crown, with a dedicatory inscription, which he presented to
the Virgin; it now forms the pride of the Cluny Museum at Paris, and is
the best monument of the rude Teutonic art of the time, except, perhaps,
the golden offerings of Agilulf and Theodelinda at Monza.[36] Tradition
speaks much of the spiritual blessings that were vouchsafed him. He and
Archbishop Hildefuns were privileged to behold with their own eyes a
miraculous vision of St. Leocadia, in the cathedral of Toledo. But
meanwhile the kingly authority was once more vanishing away, and
Recceswinth, provided that he at least enjoyed peace and pious leisure,
seems to have cared little for the fate of his successors; he had
himself no son to whom he could bequeath the throne. Personally he was
popular—‘so mild and unpretending that he could hardly be told from one
of his own subjects’—and he did not reap the fruit of the seeds of
weakness that he was sowing. One insignificant rebellion alone
interrupted the twenty peaceful years of his reign. But meanwhile the
elements of dissolution were growing in strength. The nobles were once
more reasserting their old claims to feudal independence, and the clergy
were growing more and more domineering.

Footnote 36:

See p. 196.

Recceswinth died in 672, leaving no heir, and there was much disputing
among the nobles as to the election of his successor. Their choice fell
at last upon Wamba, a man of mature age and high reputation, but he
refused to take up the burden, in spite of the acclamations with which
his name was received. At last, we are told, a certain duke drew his
sword, and threatened to slay him, as a traitor to his nation and his
duty, if he hesitated any longer to obey the will of the assembly. Wamba
bowed to this form of persuasion, and accepted the crown.

[Sidenote: Wamba, 672-680.] We have more knowledge of Wamba’s reign than
of those of his predecessors and successors, as his biography, written
by bishop Julian of Toledo, has chanced to survive. We learn that he was
a stern and hard master to the Goths, modelling himself upon the example
of Chindaswinth, and that his reign was spent in a not unsuccessful
attempt to recover the powers of the crown, which the pious Recceswinth
had let slip. Rebellions were naturally rife when the king began to make
his strong hand felt. The untameable Basques took to arms, and, while
Wamba was busy in their mountains, a more dangerous rising took place in
Septimania, where a certain count Hilderic raised the standard of
revolt. [Sidenote: Rebellion of Paulus, 673.] The king sent against them
a large army, under duke Paulus, a trusted officer of Roman blood. But,
instead of attacking the rebels, the treacherous Paulus opened
negotiations with them, debauched the chiefs of his own army, and
suddenly proclaimed himself king. The challenge which he is said to have
sent to Wamba deserves, perhaps, to be recorded for its strange and
high-flown style. ‘In the name of God,’ wrote the usurper, ‘Flavius
Paulus, the mighty king of the East, greets Wamba, the king of the West.
If thou hast traversed the rough, unpeopled waste of the mountains; if
thou hast burst through woods and thickets like some strong lion; if
thou hast tamed the swiftness of the wild goat, and the bounding stag,
and the ravening boar and bear; if thou hast cast out the poison of
snake and adder,—then make thyself known to me, thou man of arms, lord
of the woods, and lover of the rocks, and hasten to meet me, that we may
strive against each other in song, like nightingales. Wherefore, great
king, stir up thy heart to strength, come down to the passes of the
Pyrenees, and there shalt thou find an athlete with whom thou mayest
worthily contend.’

Paulus was taken at his word, the ‘lord of the woods’ flew down in haste
from the Basque mountains, and had thrown himself upon the rebel army
before a single week was out. He forced the passes of the Pyrenees,
driving the troops of Paulus before him, and then threw himself upon
Narbonne, the capital of Septimania. The town was stormed by main force,
after a siege of only three days, and, when it had fallen, Wamba
recovered most of the other towns between the mountains and the Rhone.
Paulus took refuge in the strong town of Nismes, and sent to ask help of
the Franks. But the king was too quick for him. The Goths had grown
skilled in the art of poliorcetics during their long struggle to expel
the Byzantines from Andalusia, and, by means of his siege-machines,
Wamba took Nismes on the second day of its leaguer. Paulus and his
chiefs then shut themselves up in the great Roman amphitheatre, which
they had turned into a citadel. In a few days they were reduced by
famine to throw themselves on the king’s mercy. Wamba swore to spare
their lives, and Paulus, with six-and-twenty counts and chiefs, gave
themselves up to his mercy. The king had their beards and hair plucked
out by the roots, and led them in triumph to Toledo, where they were
marched through the town in chains and barefoot, clothed in shirts of
sackcloth, with Paulus in front, wearing a leather crown, fastened on to
his bare scalp by a pitch-plaster. The names of the six-and-twenty have
survived. They included one bishop (a Goth), one priest of Roman blood,
and twenty-four counts and chiefs, of whom seventeen have Gothic and
seven Roman names.

This blow to the unruly Gothic nobles secured Wamba a quiet reign. He
sat on the throne for seven years more (673-680), in peace and
prosperity, endeavouring to palliate as best he could the diseases of
the Visigothic state. [Sidenote: Laws of Wamba.] Some of his laws show
clearly enough the dangers of the times. So far had the class of small
freeholders, who should have composed the bulk of the royal host, now
disappeared that Wamba ordains that for the future slaves, as well as
freemen, are to obey the royal summons to war. He even ordered that the
bishops were to head their serfs in the field, a command which was
deeply resented by the clergy, though a few generations later we find
the practice common enough both in England, Gaul, and Germany.

Wamba lost his throne by a curious chance or, perhaps, by a still more
curious plot. He fell ill in 680, was given over by the physicians, and
fell into a long stupor. His attendants, in accordance with a frequent
practice of the day, clad him in monkish robes and shore his hair to the
tonsure, that he might die ‘in religion.’ [Sidenote: Erwig, 680-87.]
Then before the breath was out of his body his most trusted officer,
count Erwig, seized the royal hoard and declared himself king. Erwig was
a great-nephew of king Chindaswinth, and looked upon himself as the heir
of his cousin, Recceswinth, Wamba’s predecessor. Yet he was not of pure
Visigothic blood; his father Artavasdes was a refugee from Byzantium,
whom Chindaswinth had taken into favour and honoured with the gift of
his niece’s hand.

To the dismay of the palace the aged Wamba did not die: he recovered
from his long stupor and began to mend. But the new king and the court
clergy joined in assuring him that—even though he knew it not—he had
become a monk, and could not resume his lay attire or his royal
authority. Apparently Wamba was not above the superstitions of his day;
he resigned himself to the idea, and retired to the monastery of
Pampliega, where he lived to a great old age. It was afterwards
rumoured, whether truly or falsely, that his long trance had not been
natural, but that Erwig, seeing him on the bed of sickness, had given
him a strong sleeping-potion, and deliberately enfrocked him by fraud in
order to seize the crown.

[Sidenote: The last Gothic kings.] Wamba was the last of the Visigoths;
the four kings who followed him are mere shadows, crowned phantoms of
whom we know little or nothing, for with Wamba’s death the history of
Spain sinks into the blackest obscurity. Their names were Erwig
(680-87), Egica (687-701), Witiza (701-10), and Roderic (710-11). Of the
last two we know little more than the names, but a few facts are
ascertainable about Erwig and Egica.

The former, though he had nerve enough to seize the throne, had not
courage to defend the royal rights. He let the crown sink back into the
same state of dependence on the church into which it had fallen in the
days of Sisinand and Recceswinth. He was ruled and managed by Julian,
the bishop of Toledo, and appears to have been far less truly king of
Spain than was that prelate. At Julian’s behest he repealed the military
laws of Wamba, because they bore hardly on the church, and recommenced
the cruel persecution of the Jews, which always accompanied the
accession of a priest-ridden king to the Spanish throne.

Apparently because he was tormented by his conscience on account of his
dealings with king Wamba, Erwig chose Wamba’s nephew and heir Egica as
his successor. Having married him to his own daughter Cixilo, and made
him swear to be kind to his wife and her brothers, Erwig laid down his
crown and followed Wamba into a monastery.

Egica did not keep his vow; the moment that the Gothic assembly had
recognised him as king he made the bishops absolve him from his oath,
and then repudiated his wife and seized the property of his
brothers-in-law, the sons of Erwig. Egica’s reign was marked by the last
and fiercest persecution of the Jews, in which the Visigothic king and
clergy ever indulged. They voted at the sixteenth Council of Toledo
(695) that all adult Jews should be seized and sold as slaves, while
their children were to be separated from them and given to Christian
families to rear in the true faith. Under this wicked law many Hebrews
conformed, and still more fled over-sea to Africa. The crime which
brought down this doom upon them is said to have been a plot to betray
Spain to foreign enemies. A new power had just arrived in the
neighbourhood of the Visigothic realm; after fifty years of [Sidenote:
Approach of the Saracens.] fighting, the terrible and fanatical Saracen
had just overcome the Byzantine governors of Africa and stormed Carthage
(695), the last stronghold of the East-Romans. It was to them, it would
seem, that the Jews had sent messages, to beg them to cross the straits
and put an end to the persecuting rule of the Spanish bishops. Nothing
came of the invitation at this time; but the very fact that it was
possible implied the gravest change in the situation of the Visigoths.
For three generations they had been lying between two weak stationary
and unenterprising neighbours, the faction-ridden Franks and the exarchs
of Africa. How would the decaying realm fare when attacked by a new
power in the first bloom of its fanatical youth and vigour?

Egica, however, was not destined to see the day of trial, nor was his
son Witiza (701-710), of whom absolutely nothing is known, save that he
was ‘popular with the people but hated by the clergy.’ The details of
his evil doings are the mere imaginings of the monkish writers of the
tenth century. In his own time they were not written down, for within
two years of his death Spain had fallen under the power of the Moor, and
no native chronicler had the heart to detail the last hours of the old
Visigothic kingdom.

Witiza died young, leaving two sons who were not old enough to wear the
crown. The Goths chose, therefore, as their king a certain count
Roderic, who is a mere name to us—though the later chroniclers say, what
is likely enough, that he was a kinsman of Chindaswinth and Erwig, and
therefore hostile to the house of Wamba and Egica.

He reigned but eighteen months, for in his time came the evil day of
Spain. The Saracen conquerors of Africa had spent the last twenty years
in taming the Moors and Berbers. All the tribes had now bowed to their
yoke and accepted Islam: swelled to vast numbers by the new converts,
and yearning for fresh fields to conquer, the Arab chiefs were preparing
to leap over the narrow strait of Gibraltar, and throw themselves upon
the Spanish peninsula.

The romantic legends of a later generation tell a lurid tale of the
wickedness of king Roderic, how he violated the daughter of count
Julian, the governor of Ceuta, and how the outraged father betrayed his
fortress, the key of the straits, to the Moors, and guided them over to
the shores of Andalusia. All this is purely unhistoric. There is no
reason for believing that Roderic was better or worse than his
predecessors; of his character we know nothing: his very existence is
only vouched for by a name and date in the list of Gothic kings, and by
a few very rare coins.

This much we know, that ere he had been eighteen months on the throne
the Moors landed in force at Calpe, thenceforth to be known as
Jebel-Tarik (Gibraltar), from the name of their leader. They began to
lay waste Andalusia, and Roderic came out against them at the head of
the whole host of Visigothic Spain, which must now have been composed—as
the laws of Wamba show us—of a few wealthy counts and bishops heading a
great multitude of their serfs and dependants. The levy of the Visigoths
proved far less able to resist the Moslems than had been the troops of
Byzantium. [Sidenote: Battle of the Guadelete, 711.] On the banks of the
Guadelete, near Medina Sidonia, Tarik gained a decisive victory. Roderic
was slain or drowned in the pursuit, the Gothic army dispersed, and
without having to fight any second battle the invaders mastered Spain.
In less than two years (711-13) Tarik and his superior officer Musa, the
governor of Africa, subdued the whole country; a few places, such as
Cordova, Merida, and Saragossa, held out for a short space, but the
Goths did not choose a new king or rally for any general effort of
resistance. By 713 the only corner of Spain which had not submitted was
the mountainous coast of the Bay of Biscay, where the untameable Basques
and the inhabitants of the Asturias maintained a precarious liberty,
preserved rather by their obscurity and the ruggedness of their homes
than by the inability of the Moslems to complete their conquest.

[Sidenote: Causes of the fall of the Visigoths.] So fell Visigothic
Spain. The reasons are not far to seek: the kings—chosen from no single
royal stock, but creatures of a chance election—had become powerless,
the mere slaves of their clergy; the great nobles were disloyal and
turbulent; the smaller freeholders had disappeared; the great mass of
serfs had no heart to fight for their tyrannical masters. The State
combined the weakness of a land under ecclesiastical governance with the
turbulence of extreme feudalism. It would have fallen before the first
strong invader in any case; if the Moor had not crossed the straits,
Spain would probably have become an appanage of the Frankish realm under
the mighty Mayors of the Palace, or the still mightier Charles the
Great.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XIV

THE CONTEST OF THE EASTERN EMPIRE AND THE CALIPHATE

641-717

Dynastic troubles after the death of Heraclius—Wars of Constantinus
(Constans II.) with the Caliphate—His publication of the ‘Type’—His
invasion of Italy and war with the Lombards—Reign of Constantine
V.—His successful defence of Constantinople—Tyranny of Justinian
II.—His deposition—Usurpations of Leontius and Tiberius—Justinian
restored—Anarchy follows his murder—Rise of Leo the Isaurian.

At the moment of the death of the unfortunate Heraclius the East-Roman
Empire was left in a most disadvantageous position for resisting the
vigorous attack which the Moslems were pressing against its remaining
provinces. Yielding to the influence of his ambitious wife Martina, the
old emperor had left the imperial power divided between Heraclius
Constantinus, the offspring of his first wife, and Martina’s eldest son
Heracleonas. The elder of the young emperors was twenty-nine, the
younger only sixteen. [Sidenote: Troubles at Constantinople, 641.] Their
joint reign opened ill, for Heraclius Constantinus and his stepmother,
who acted in all things as the representative of her young son, were at
open discord. But before three months had elapsed Heraclius Constantinus
died; it is probable that his decease was due to natural causes, but the
Byzantine public believed otherwise, and Martina was openly accused of
having poisoned her stepson. Her conduct was not such as to render the
charge improbable, for she at once proclaimed her son Heracleonas sole
emperor, although Heraclius Constantinus had left two young boys behind
him.

This was more than the Constantinopolitans would stand. Rioting at once
broke out, and the senate, which about this time assumes an independent
attitude, very different from its usual obedient impotence, made the
most strongly worded representations to Martina and her son, threatening
the worst consequences if the sons of Heraclius Constantinus were
excluded from the succession. In terror of their lives Martina and
Heracleonas bowed to the popular will, and allowed the boy Constantinus
to be crowned as the colleague of his uncle; he was no more than eleven
years old at his coronation.

The joint rule of the two lads, under the regency of Martina, lasted
less than a year. In September 642 the senate executed a _coup d’état_;
Martina and her son were seized and banished to Cherson. On the
accusation that they had poisoned Heraclius Constantinus they were
cruelly mutilated: the tongue of the empress and the nose of Heracleonas
were slit—the first instance of such a treatment of royal personages,
but by no means the last in Byzantine history.

THE HOUSE OF HERACLIUS.

[Sidenote: Constans II., 641-68.] Constantinus IV., or as he was more
usually but less accurately styled Constans II.,[37] thus became the
sole ruler of the East ere he had finished his twelfth year. The real
government was, for some time, carried on by the senate—a fact which
vouches both for the loyalty of the empire to the house of Heraclius and
for the great rise in the power of the senate during the last two or
three generations. In earlier days there is no doubt that some powerful
general would have seized the throne. But Constantinus, though his
minority was not untroubled by revolts, was permitted to grow up to
man’s estate, and to assume in due course the personal control of the
empire.

Footnote 37:

There is no doubt that his real name was Constantinus, or in full
Flavius Heraclius Constantinus. But the Western historians, and some
of those of the East, call him Constans. Probably this was a mere
convenience to distinguish him from his father, Heraclius
Constantinus, and his son, Constantine IV. (or V.).

It is astonishing that more evils did not come upon the State during the
boyhood of Constantinus. The energetic caliph Omar was still urging on
the Arabs to conquest, and with no firm hand at the helm it might have
been expected that the ship of the East-Roman state would have run upon
the breakers. But though the Saracens still continued to make way, the
rate of their progress was checked. Alexandria, the last Christian
stronghold in Egypt, had fallen during the short reign of Heracleonas.
The resources of the empire were drained for an attempt to recover it,
and in the second year of Constantinus a considerable expedition, under
a general named Manuel, fell unexpectedly upon the place and retook it.
The Arab governor of Egypt, the celebrated Amrou, had to besiege the
place for more than a year before it yielded. Irritated by its long
resistance he cast down its walls and massacred many of its inhabitants.
It would seem that the Saracen arms were for the next few years more
engrossed in the final conquest of eastern Persia than in assaulting the
Roman empire. It was not till Yezdigerd, the last of the Sassanian
kings, had been defeated and stripped of the farthest corners of his
dominion that the Arabs turned once more to the West.[38]

Footnote 38:

The final subjection of Persia was not complete till 652, though the
battle of Nehavend, the last which Yezdigerd risked in the open field,
was in 641.

[Sidenote: War in Africa.] The only point of the Roman frontier which
was seriously attacked was Africa. The sandy waste between Egypt and
Barca had less terrors for the Arab than for any other invader.
Encouraged by the fact that Gregory the exarch of Africa had rebelled
and proclaimed himself emperor, so that he could hope for no aid from
Constantinople, the Saracen general, Abdallah Abu-Sahr crossed the
Libyan desert and attacked Barca. Gregory came out against him, but was
defeated and slain: Barca and Tripoli fell to the invaders, but Carthage
and the rest of Africa relapsed into allegiance to Constantinus, when
the usurper was slain. The Saracen frontier stood still at the Syrtes
(646-7), and it took half a century more of fighting before the Romans
were evicted from the western half of their African possessions.

Meanwhile the caliph Omar had died, and his weaker successor, Othman,
proved less dangerous to the Eastern empire. His generals, however,
invaded Cyprus, and overran the island: unable to permanently hold it,
because of the preponderance of the Byzantine fleet, they contented
themselves with exacting a tribute, and retired (642). But encouraged by
the result of this, their first expedition by sea, the Saracens
commenced to build a great war fleet, and in a few years they were in a
condition to dispute the command of the eastern Mediterranean with the
Roman galleys, who since the destruction of the Vandals in 533 had known
no rivals on the sea.

Meanwhile Constantinus had grown up to manhood, and, luckily for the
empire, proved to be the kind of sovereign required in those days of
adversity. He was a stern warlike prince, possessed of no small share of
the military ability of his grandfather Heraclius. He was always in the
field, headed his own forces by sea no less than by land, and deserved
success by his courage and perseverance if he did not always obtain it.
Occasionally he was harsh and cruel, but such faults are more easily
pardoned in an emperor who had to face such a time of peril than are
cowardice and indolence.

[Sidenote: Saracen victories, 652.] In 652 Constantinus sent a second
expedition against Alexandria: it was met at sea off the Canopic mouth
of the Nile by a great Saracen fleet, gathered from the ports of Syria
and Egypt, and defeated with great loss. Three years later the enemy
took the offensive, Muavia, the governor of Syria, gathered a great
armada to attack the southern coast of Asia Minor, while he himself
marched by land to force the passes of the Taurus and invade Cappadocia.
Constantinus put to sea with every ship he could launch, and met the
Saracens at Phoenix, off the Lycian shore. Here the greatest naval
battle which the Mediterranean had seen since the day of Actium was
fought: the two fleets grappled, and the crews struggled desperately
hand to hand for many hours. Constantinus was in the thickest of the
fighting, his imperial galley was boarded, and he only escaped by
throwing off his purple mantle, and springing into another ship when his
own was captured. At last the Saracens won a decisive victory, and it
seemed as if they were about to become the masters of the Ægean (655).
Even before the battle Rhodes had fallen into their hands, and the
long-prostrate Colossus had been sold for old brass to a Jewish dealer,
and exported to Syria to be melted down.

The empire, however, was to be saved from the humiliation of seeing a
hostile fleet approach the Dardanelles for yet twenty years. In 656 the
caliph Othman was murdered, and his death was immediately followed by a
savage civil war among the Saracens. The two claimants for the vacant
dignity of ‘Successor of the Prophet,’ were Muavia, who held Syria, and
Ali, Mohammed’s son-in-law, who held Mesopotamia and the new Arab
capital of Kufa. Engrossed in his struggle with Ali, Muavia was fain to
leave the Roman empire unmolested. In 659 he bought peace from
Constantinus on the curious terms that he should pay for every day that
the peace lasted a horse and a slave. This treaty proved the salvation
of the empire: for the first time for twenty-seven years it was free
from Saracen war, and Constantinus could pause and take thought for the
reorganisation of his much-harassed dominions. In the five years of
peace which were now granted to him, he contrived to make a considerable
improvement in their condition.

[Sidenote: State of the Empire, 659.] When he took stock of his realm,
Constantinus found that in the East five great districts were
irretrievably lost: the nearer half of the exarchate of Africa, from
Tripoli to the Libyan desert, Egypt, Syria, and the greater part of
Roman Armenia had fallen into the power of Saracens. Moreover, in
Europe, the troubled years between 610 and 659 had brought about the
complete loss of the inland parts of the Balkan peninsula. The Slavs,
whose incursions had already grown so dangerous in the reign of Maurice,
had now obtained complete possession of the whole of Moesia, and of the
inland parts of Thrace and Macedon. Their settlements extended to within
a few miles of the gates of Adrianople and Thessalonica, both of which
cities they from time to time besieged without success. They had even
encroached south of Mount Olympus, and thrust forward their colonies
into some parts of Greece. The imperial dominions were restricted to a
coast-slip running all round the peninsula, from Spalato in Dalmatia to
Odessus on the Black Sea. In the West we have seen, while detailing the
history of the Lombards, that the East-Romans now preserved only the
exarchate of Ravenna, the duchies of Rome and Naples, the southern point
of Italy, and the islands of Sicily and Sardinia.

Recognising that he must look to reorganisation rather than to
reconquest for restoring the strength of the empire, Constantinus
devoted himself to securing his borders. The moment that the civil war
of the Arabs broke out, and left him free to move elsewhere, he marched
against the Slavs of the Balkans, defeated them, and reduced them to pay
tribute. It was hopeless to dream of driving them back across the
Danube, and the emperor was contented to accept the existing state of
things, and to secure the coastland of Thrace and Macedonia from further
molestation, by imposing a line of demarcation between the Slavonic
tribes and the much-reduced provinces (657-8).

The emperor’s attention was now drawn to Africa and Italy. His presence
was needed there no less than in the Balkan peninsula, if the Lombard
and the Saracen were to be finally checked from advancing. In 662 he
sailed for the West, and was busy there for the next six years, right
down to the moment of his death. Constantinus hated the capital: he was
sufficiently autocratic in his notions to dislike the control that the
senate had been wont to exercise over him in earlier years, and he
cordially detested the mob of Constantinople. He had fallen out with
them on the same grounds that had once proved fatal to the popularity of
Zeno. [Sidenote: The ‘Type’ of Constans.] The city was torn with the
religious feuds between the Orthodox and the Monothelites, and the
emperor, to calm the storm, had issued an edict of comprehension called
‘the Type,’ in which he forbade all mention of either the single or the
double will as residing in the person of Our Lord. Without satisfying
the heretics, the Type succeeded in irritating the Orthodox to great
fury: they persistently accused Constantinus of being a Monothelite
himself, and made his life miserable by their clamour. There was yet a
third reason for his quitting Byzantium. In 660 he had conceived
suspicions, whether true or false we know not, that his brother
Theodosius was plotting against him. He promptly condemned the young
prince to death, but after the execution his mind had no rest: we are
told that his dreams were always haunted by the spectre of his brother,
and that the palace where the deed was done grew insupportably hateful
to him. If these tales be true, he left Constantinople to seek ease of
spirit, no less than to restore the failing powers of the empire in the
West.

It was probably in the period 657-662, before his departure from the
capital, that Constantinus recast the provincial administration of the
empire in accordance with the needs of the times. It seems that the
institution of the ‘Themes,’ or new provinces, must date from this, the
only space of rest and rearrangement to be found in a long age of wars.
The old provinces, as arranged by Diocletian, and somewhat modified by
Justinian, had been small, and in each of them civil and military powers
were kept separate, the local garrison not being under the control of
the local administrator. The needs of the long Persian and Saracen wars
had led to the practical supersession of the civil governors by the
military commanders, for it was absolutely necessary that the men
trusted with the preservation of the empire should be able to control
its local administration and finance. [Sidenote: Creation of the
Themes.] The new provinces were few and large, and ruled by governors,
who had civil as well as military authority. They were called ‘themes,’
after the name of the military divisions which occupied them, a ‘theme’
being originally a force of some 4000 regular cavalry detailed for the
protection of a district. The names of the original Asiatic themes
easily explain themselves, ‘Anatolikon’ and ‘Armeniakon’ the two
largest, were the regions garrisoned by the ‘army of the East’ and the
‘army of Armenia.’ ‘Thrakesion,’ farther west, shows that the original
‘army of Thrace’ had been brought over into Asia to give aid against the
Saracen. ‘Bucellarion’ was named after the Bucellarii,[39] a corps
originally formed of Teutonic auxiliaries. The theme called Obsequium
(Opsikion) was held by the Imperial Guard. Only the Cibyrhaeote theme,
along the southern coast of Asia Minor, was named from a town, and not
from the troops who garrisoned it. In the West, there seem to have been
originally three themes in the Balkan peninsula, Thrace, Illyricum, and
Hellas, and three beyond it, Ravenna, Sicily, and Africa. Each theme was
governed by a stratêgos, whose military title shows his military
character, and was garrisoned by its own local force of regular troops,
the core of which was in each case a division of 4000 heavy cavalry. The
full force of the twelve themes would give some 48,000 horsemen for the
field, in addition to the less important infantry, the local militia
used for holding fortresses, and the irregular hired bands of barbarian
auxiliaries of many different races.

Footnote 39:

See page 131 for a Visigothic use of the word Bucellarii.

[Illustration:

PROBABLE ARRANGEMENT
OF THE
SIX ASIATIC THEMES
A.D. 660-700
]

Constantinus was the only Eastern emperor who ever paid a large and even
preponderant share of attention to his Western dominions. The long stay
of six years which he made in Italy and Sicily caused his Eastern
subjects to suppose that he had designs of restoring Rome to the
position of capital of the empire, or even, perhaps, of raising Syracuse
to that distinction. Such a project seems so inconvenient from
geographical reasons, that we can hardly credit it; probably
Constantinus’ personal dislike for Constantinople, while sufficing to
keep him away from it, did not make him scheme to transfer the seat of
empire elsewhere.

There is no doubt, however, that Constantinus was determined to reassert
the supremacy of the empire in Italy against the Lombards, and also to
take care that the exarchs and the popes should not grow too strong and
independent. [Sidenote: The fate of Pope Martin.] Even before he sailed
for Italy his jealousy of the power of the papacy had been shown by his
dealings with Pope Martin I. That prelate had dared to hold a synod at
Rome, in which he condemned the ‘Type’ or Edict of Comprehension issued
by the emperor (649). Constantinus never pardoned this: he bided his
time, directed the exarch to seize the person of Martin at a convenient
opportunity, and had him shipped off to Constantinople. There he was
tried for contumacy, thrown into chains, and banished to Cherson, in the
Crimea, where he died in exile (655).

[Sidenote: Campaign in Italy, 663.] Constantinus left the Bosphorus in
662 with a large army, and sailed for Taranto. There he landed, and at
once fell upon the duchy of Benevento, the southernmost of the Lombard
States in Italy. The time of his attack happened to be unfortunate, for
Grimoald, duke of Benevento, had seized the Lombard crown, and his son
Romuald was ruling the duchy under him. For once in a way, therefore,
Pavia and Benevento were united and ready to act together. The Lombard
historian, Paulus Diaconus, has preserved the details of the campaign of
Constantinus—whom he usually styles Constans, as do so many other
writers. The emperor captured, one after another, all the Lombard cities
of south Italy, including Luceria, the chief town of Apulia. He drove
Romuald into Benevento, and held him closely besieged there, till he
gave up his sister Gisa as a hostage, and promised to pay tribute. He
would not have granted such easy terms, but for the fact that he had
learnt that king Grimoald, with the whole force of Lombardy, was
marching against him.

Departing from Benevento, Constantinus moved on Rome, leaving a part of
his army under a Persian exile named Sapor to watch the Lombards. This
division was cut to pieces at Forino, and after he had received the
news, the emperor seems to have given up his idea of re-conquering
central Italy. He contented himself with visiting Rome and receiving the
homage of pope Vitalian, who met him at the sixth milestone, at the head
of the whole Roman people, and escorted him into the city. But Rome took
little profit from the advent of an emperor, a sight it had not seen for
two hundred years. Constantinus plundered it of many ornaments, and in
particular stripped the Pantheon of its tiles of gilded bronze and sent
them to Constantinople (663).

After staying only twelve days in the ancient capital, the emperor
turned on his heel, and instead of proceeding against the northern
Lombards, led his army through Naples into Lucania and Bruttium as far
as Reggio. King Grimoald and his son do not seem to have molested him in
this long march. [Sidenote: Constans in Sicily, 664-8.] Constantinus
then crossed the straits of Messina into Sicily, and established himself
at Syracuse, which he made his residence for more than four years
(664-8). His attention was engrossed by the forward movement of the
Saracens in Africa. Muavia, having secured the sole caliphate by the
death of his rival Ali, had at last recommenced his attacks on the
empire in 663. His troops pushed forward in Africa and seized Carthage,
from which, however, Constantinus succeeded in driving them out, and
once more pushed them back to Tripoli. It must have been in this African
war that he spent the treasures which he is said to have wrung out of
the people of Sicily, Sardinia, and south Italy by ‘exaction such as had
never been heard of before,’ even tearing the sacramental plate from the
churches, and selling as slaves those who refused to pay. These harsh
proceedings did as much to weaken the power of the empire in the West as
the military successes of Constantinus did to strengthen it.

It was at Syracuse that Constantinus met his end. While he was bathing
in the baths that were called Daphne, his attendant Andreas smote him on
the head with his marble soap-box, so that the skull was broken, and
then fled away. [Sidenote: Murder of Constans, 668.] The blow was fatal,
and with this strange death perished that plan of restoring the empire
in the West which had been the favourite scheme of Constantinus. His
murder was probably the result of a conspiracy, for when it was known,
an Armenian officer named Mezecius proclaimed himself emperor in Sicily,
and reigned there for a few months.

For the last five years of Constantinus’ long absence in the West there
had been grievous trouble with the Saracens in Asia Minor, against which
the caliph Muavia had launched his hosts for five successive summers.
The raids of his generals reached as far as Amorium in Phrygia, which
was stormed by the Arabs, and promptly retaken by the Romans in 668. The
nominal control of affairs in Asia had been left to the emperor’s eldest
son Constantine, when his father sailed to the West. [Sidenote:
Constantine Pogonatus, 668-85.] On the news of the murder at Syracuse
and the usurpation of Mezecius, Constantine, now aged eighteen, sailed
in person to Sicily, put down and executed the usurper, and then
promptly returned to Constantinople. He had been beardless when he set
out, but returned next year with his face covered with hair, wherefore
the people of the capital gave him the nickname of ‘Pogonatus,’ the
bearded, by which he is generally known. Curiously enough the name would
have been far better applied to his father whose beard was enormous,
while that of Constantine V. did not exceed a very moderate limit.

Constantine Pogonatus was his father’s true son, a hard-working,
hard-fighting, and somewhat high-handed Caesar, who kept the empire well
together, and spent all his energy in holding the Saracens in check, a
task in which he won great success. He reigned for seventeen years
(668-85), of which the first ten were a time of unbroken war with the
Caliphate. The first beginning of this struggle was not very favourable
for the empire; in 669-70 the generals of Muavia pushed their way as far
as the sea of Marmora, and in 672 the Caliph thought success so nearly
in his grasp that he prepared for a formal siege of Constantinople, the
second that it had undergone in the century. Using the harbour of
Cyzicus as their base, the Saracens, under a general named Abderrha-man,
and the Caliph’s son Yezid, beleaguered the city for six months
(April-September, 673). They were finally forced to retire after a naval
engagement in which the Imperial galleys had the better, largely owing,
it is said, to the newly invented ‘Greek fire,’ by which they burnt many
of the Moslem ships. [Sidenote: Constantine V. saves Constantinople.]
When forced away from the Bosphorus, the Saracens fell back on Cyzicus,
which they succeeded in holding for no less than four years, making
occasional sallies from it towards Constantinople, of which every single
one was repelled with loss by the emperor. At last the Arabs, after
losing their general, and seeing Abu Eyub, one of the last surviving
companions of Mohammed, perish before the walls, raised the siege. Their
fleet was destroyed by a storm off the Lycian Coast: their land-army was
attacked on its retreat by the East-Romans, and defeated with a loss of
30,000 men.

So great was the blow inflicted on the Caliph by the entire failure of
his army before Constantinople, that he was glad to conclude an
ignominious peace with the emperor, by which he engaged to pay 3000
pounds of gold to Constantine, and to send him fifty Arab horses for
every year that the treaty lasted (678).

The fidelity of the East-Romans to the house of Heraclius was thus
justified by the victory of Constantine; it is a pity that only a very
meagre account of his campaign has come down to us, owing to the dearth
of chroniclers in the seventh century. We know, however, that the fame
of his triumph went all over Europe, and that ambassadors came from the
Avars, the Lombards, and even the distant Franks to congratulate him on
beating off an attack which had threatened serious consequences to the
whole of Christendom.

[Sidenote: The Bulgarians.] For the remainder of his reign Constantine
enjoyed a well-earned peace, disturbed only by some slight bickering
with a new enemy, the Bulgarians. This Ugrian tribe, who had dwelt for
the last two centuries beyond the Danube, crossed the river in the end
of Constantine’s reign, and threw themselves upon the Slavonic tribes
who held Moesia. They subdued the Slavs without much difficulty, and
defeated a Roman army which Constantine led by sea to the mouth of the
Danube. Recognising that it was impossible to reconquer the long-lost
Moesia, the emperor made peace with Isperich, the Bulgarian king, and
allowed him to settle without further opposition in the land between the
Danube and the Balkans, where the Slavs had hitherto held possession
(679). A new Bulgarian nation was gradually formed by the intermixture
of the conquering tribe and their subjects: when formed, it displayed a
Slavonic rather than a Ugrian type, and spoke a Slavonic not a Ugrian
tongue.

The later years of Constantine V. were better known to contemporaries as
the time of the holding of the council of Constantinople, than as the
time of the foundation of the new Bulgarian kingdom. To settle the
dispute on the divine and human wills of Christ, the emperor summoned an
œcumenical synod, at which the Western churches were well represented.
It finally condemned the Monothelite heresy, which for the future ceased
to be the great question debated between the churches (680-1). But a new
controversy, that on Iconoclasm, was ere long to break out.

[Sidenote: Character of Constantine V.] To the misfortune of the empire
the able and hard-working Constantine died in 685, at the comparatively
early age of thirty-six. We hear little that is unfavourable to him from
any chronicler: his sole crime seems to have been the cruel act of
slitting the noses of his two brothers Heraclius and Tiberius in 680, to
disqualify them from holding imperial power. They had hitherto been
nominally the colleagues of Constantine, and were honoured with the
title of Caesars, but in the interests of his own son Justinian, now a
growing boy, the emperor determined to make it impossible for them to
aspire to the supreme power. It appears to have been a cruel and
unjustifiable act, and unless the Caesars had given provocation, a fact
of which we have no hint in any chronicler, it was a grievous blot on
the otherwise excellent character of Constantine V.

The young Justinian, second of that name, mounted his father’s throne in
685, when only in his seventeenth year. The accession of this prince was
a fearful misfortune for the empire. He possessed the qualities of his
grandfather Constantinus in an exaggerated form, being arbitrary, cruel,
reckless, and high-handed, yet so brave and capable that his throne was
not easy to shake. [Sidenote: Justinian II., 685-95.] He started on his
career too young, and might have come to better things if his father had
lived for another ten years; but, abandoned to his own devices ere he
was well out of his boyhood, he developed into a bloodthirsty tyrant.
The first few years of his reign, ere he had felt his feet and fully
realised his own desires, were comparatively uneventful. The Saracens
were occupied in civil wars since the death of Muavia, and gave no
trouble: the caliph Abd-el-Melik was only too glad to renew with
Justinian the treaty that his predecessor had made with Constantine V.
Unmolested by the Saracens, Justinian sent armies into Iberia and
Albania, the Christian kingdoms under the Caucasus, and compelled them
to pay him tribute. Soon after he undertook in person a great expedition
against the Bulgarians, designing to push the Roman boundary once more
to the Danube. He was very successful, beating the enemy in the field,
and bringing back more than 30,000 captives, from whom he organised an
auxiliary force for service in Asia.

Justinian’s triumph over the Bulgarians emboldened him to undertake the
greater scheme of winning back Syria from the Saracens. In 693 he picked
a quarrel with the Caliph on the most frivolous grounds: when the annual
payment due under the treaty of 686 was tendered to him, he refused to
receive the money, because the coins were not the old Roman _solidi_,
which had hitherto circulated in Syria and Egypt, and still formed the
bulk of the Saracen currency, but new Arab ‘dirhems’ with Abd-el-Melik’s
name upon them, which the caliph had lately begun to strike. [Sidenote:
Justinian’s Saracen war, 693.] But any pretext was good enough for
Justinian: he declared war with a light heart, and led his armies in
person across the Taurus into Cilicia. At Sebastopolis near Tarsus he
suffered a fearful defeat, mainly caused by the desertion to the
Saracens of the unwilling recruits whom he had enlisted from among the
captives of the Bulgarian War. When he had rallied his army Justinian
was cruel and illogical enough to order those of the corps who had _not_
deserted to be put to death—lest they might follow their comrades’
example in the next battle (693). In the next year the emperor lost
Roman Armenia by the revolt of its Governor, a native Armenian named
Sumpad, who deserted to the Saracens. Other disasters followed, and the
Arabs harried the ‘Anatolic’ and ‘Armeniac’ themes.

Meanwhile the young emperor had been making himself most unpopular at
home by the exactions necessary for the support of his unlucky war, and
still more by persisting in building expensive and unnecessary palaces
in the capital, while the war still raged. His two finance ministers,
Theodotus, a lapsed abbot who had quitted his monastery, and the eunuch
Stephanus, are reported to have gone to the extremes of cruelty in
dealing with the citizens. It is said that Theodotus was wont to torture
defaulting tax-payers by hanging them over smoky fires and half stifling
them. Stephanus preferred the rod: it is said that he even presumed on
one occasion—during Justinian’s absence—to seize and beat the
empress-dowager Anastasia. The emperor only punished him by ordering him
to complete, at his own expense, a building on which he was then
engaged.

It was not only by heaping taxes on his subjects that Justinian made
himself unpopular. He had a mania for seizing and imprisoning on
suspicion senators and other important personages, and he was so
merciless in dealing with military officers who met with any defeat,
that to accept a command under him was considered the shortest way to
the dungeon or the block. Meanwhile his ill-luck in the Saracen war made
him as much detested by the soldiery as he was dreaded by their
officers. In 695 a distinguished general named Leontius, the conqueror
of Iberia and Albania,[40] was ordered by Justinian to take command of
the theme of Hellas. Regarding this charge as a mere preliminary to
disgrace and execution, Leontius in sheer desperation planned a _coup
d’état_. [Sidenote: Fall of Justinian, 695.] At the head of a few dozen
followers he burst open the prisons, and made a dash at the palace.
Justinian was taken completely by surprise; he fell into the hands of
Leontius, who slit his nose, and banished him to the distant fortress of
Cherson, in the Crimea. His two detested ministers, Theodotus and
Stephanus, were torn to pieces and burnt by the populace.

Footnote 40:

See p. 249.

With the fall of Justinian II. began twenty-two years of anarchy and
disaster for the empire. Hitherto Constantinople had been singularly
fortunate in escaping the consequences of military revolts and changes
of dynasty. With the single exception of the usurpation of the tyrant
Phocas, and his deposition by Heraclius, there had been no cases of the
transfer of the imperial crown by violence for more than three hundred
years. All the earlier emperors of the East had been either designated
by their predecessors or peaceably elected by the senate and army. It
was now to be seen how fatal was the breaking up of the rule of orderly
succession: in the next twenty-two years there were no less than five
revolutions at home, and abroad many grave disasters cut the empire
short.

[Sidenote: Carthage lost, 698.] The three-years’ rule of Leontius was
mainly distinguished by the final loss of Carthage and Africa. Already
in Justinian’s time the province had been invaded and partially overrun
by the generals of the Caliph. In 697 Carthage fell: it was recovered
for a moment by an expedition sent out by Leontius, but in 698 it fell
permanently into the hands of the Saracens. The Roman generals, however,
escaped by sea with the main body of their army. Fearing to face the
wrath of Leontius with such a tale of disaster, the returning officers
conspired against him. They sailed to the Bosphorus, where their arrival
was quite unexpected, caught the emperor, slit his nose, and threw him
into a monastery. In his stead they proclaimed the admiral Tiberius
Apsimarus as sovereign (698).

Tiberius II., a very capable man, clung to the throne for seven years.
He was fortunate in his war with the Saracens: his armies defeated those
of the Caliph, recovered Cilicia, and even occupied Antioch. But this
success abroad did not save Tiberius from the wonted end of usurpers. He
was overthrown by the banished and mutilated Justinian II., who now
reappears upon the stage in a most startling fashion.

Justinian had been consigned by Leontius to the remote fortress of
Cherson—the modern Sebastopol—on the north shore of the Black Sea. But
being carelessly guarded, he succeeded in escaping, and reaching the
court of the Chagan of the Khazars, the Tartar tribe who dwelt on the
lower Volga and the shores of the sea of Azoff. [Sidenote: Adventures of
Justinian.] In spite of his mutilated nose he succeeded in gaining the
good graces of the Chagan, and received the hand of his sister in
marriage. Hearing of this Tiberius II. sent a huge bribe to the Tartar,
to persuade him to surrender his guest. The treacherous barbarian
consented, and despatched an officer to arrest Justinian. But the exile
got wind of the plot through a message from his wife, and instead of
allowing himself to be seized, slew the Chagan’s emissary, and escaped
to sea in an open boat, with half-a-dozen attendants. A storm arose, and
the little vessel seemed likely to founder. ‘Make a vow to God that if
you escape you will forgive your enemies,’ said one of Justinian’s
companions to him, as the boat began to fill. ‘No,’ replied the reckless
and inflexible exile, ‘if I spare a single one of them when my time
comes, may God sink me here and now.’ The storm abated, the boat came
safe to land, and Justinian fell into the hands of Terbel, the king of
the Bulgarians. Terbel lent him an army with which to try his fortune,
and with its aid he advanced to the gates of Constantinople. [Sidenote:
Justinian restored, 705-11.] The city was betrayed to him by partisans
within the walls, and he succeeded in getting possession of the palace,
and of the person of Tiberius II. Justinian then dragged out of his
cloister the deposed usurper Leontius, bound him and Tiberius hand and
foot, and laid them before his throne in the Hippodrome. There he sat in
triumph with his feet on the necks of the vanquished Caesars, while his
partisans chanted ‘Thou shalt trample on the Lion and the Asp,’ an
allusion to the names of the two fallen rulers (Leontius and Apsimarus).
The two prisoners were then beheaded (705).

During his first reign Justinian had chastised his subjects with whips,
it was with scorpions that he now afflicted them. He had returned from
exile in a mood of reckless cruelty: the vow he had made was kept with
rigid accuracy. Every one who had been concerned in his deposition ten
years before was sought out, tortured, and put to death. Some of his
doings rose to a monstrous pitch of inhumanity: the chief men of
Cherson, who had offended him during his exile, were bound on spits and
roasted: many patricians were sewed up into sacks and cast into the
Bosphorus.

It is astonishing to find that the second reign of Justinian lasted for
more than five years. His tyranny was such that an instant explosion of
popular wrath might have been expected. But if reckless, he was also
active, suspicious, and strong-handed, and crushed many plots before
they could come to a head. [Sidenote: Justinian slain, 711.] At last he
fell before a military revolt: the army, headed by a general named
Philippicus, disavowed its allegiance, seized the tyrant, and beheaded
him. His little six-year-old son, Tiberius, whom the Chagan’s sister had
borne him, was torn from sanctuary, and murdered. Thus perished the
house of Heraclius, after it had given five rulers to the empire during
a century of rule (610-711). It had done much to save the state from the
Saracens: all its members, even Justinian, had been men of ability, and
Heraclius himself, Constantinus-Constans, and Constantine V. had each
borne his part in the long struggle with credit, if not with complete
success.

[Sidenote: Anarchy, 711-17.] There now followed six years of complete
anarchy (711-17), during which the imperial annals are filled by the
obscure names of Philippicus (711-13), Artemius Anastasius (713-715) and
Theodosius III. (715-17). Each was the creature of a conspiracy, and
each fell by the same means by which he had been uplifted. They were all
feeble and incompetent sovereigns, far below the rank of the two earlier
usurpers, Leontius and Tiberius Apsimarus. The importance of their
reigns lies not in their struggle with each other, but in the general
collapse of the system of defence of the empire against the Saracen, the
natural result of the employment of the whole army in civil war. The
generals of the caliphs Welid and Soliman, the sons of Abd-al-Melik
(705-17) burst through the boundaries of the empire on every point. In
711 Sardinia, the westernmost province of the empire since the loss of
Africa, was subdued by the Arabs. In the same year they crossed the
Taurus, and sacked Tyana in Cappadocia. In 712 they overran Pontus and
captured Amasia, in 713 Antioch in Pisidia fell, and with it much of
southern Asia Minor. It appeared as if with the downfall of the house of
Heraclius the power of self-defence had been taken away from the
East-Romans. Nor was the lowest depth yet reached.

Emboldened by the easy successes of his armies over those of the
ephemeral sovereigns who followed Justinian II., the caliph Soliman at
last resolved to fit out an expedition on the largest scale against
Constantinople. [Sidenote: Saracen invasion, 716.] A hundred thousand
men advanced by land from Tarsus, while a fleet of more than 1000 sail
gathered in the ports of Syria, and sailed round Asia Minor into the
Ægean. The Caliph’s brother Moslemah was to head the whole expedition.
Cappadocia was already in Saracen hands, and the Caliph’s vanguard was
occupied with the siege of Amorium, the chief stronghold of Phrygia.
That town, indeed, was saved from destruction by Leo the Isaurian, the
governor of the Anatolic theme. But soon after, while the Arabs were
still advancing, this same Leo, after concluding a private truce with
the invaders, proclaimed himself emperor, and advanced against
Constantinople, instead of reserving his strength to resist the armies
of Soliman (716).

[Sidenote: Leo the Isaurian, 717.] Once more fortune favoured the newest
rising against the emperor of the day. The troops of Leo beat those of
Theodosius III., and then the latter voluntarily abdicated and sent to
offer his crown to the victor. He was a mild and virtuous man, who had
been raised to the purple against his will by his military partisans,
and longed to return to his obscurity, feeling himself destitute of the
power needed to cope with the insurgents, and still more unable to face
the impending Saracen invasion.

Accordingly the senate and the patriarch formally elected the rebel Leo
as emperor, and set him on the throne which had already changed masters
seven times in the last twenty-two years. At length the empire had found
a master who could defend what he had won, and was fully able to
transmit his power to his heirs. The armament of Moslemah might be
awaited without dismay, for the state was once more in the hands of one
who could be trusted to use its resources aright. Leo was to dissipate
once and for all the Saracen storm-cloud, and to free Constantinople
from all danger from the East for more than three hundred years. But his
achievements demand a chapter to themselves.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XV

THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT MAYORS OF THE PALACE

656-720

The Mayor Grimoald unsuccessfully endeavours to make his son king of
Austrasia—Decadence of the house of the Merovings—Ebroin and his
tyrannical rule in Neustria—Long civil wars—Rise of Pippin the
younger and his victory at Testry—The ascendency of Pippin: his
successes in consolidating the kingdom—Missionary enterprises in
Germany—Civil wars at the death of Pippin—Final triumph of his son
Charles Martel.

In 656 died King Sigibert III., the first Meroving king of Austrasia who
had been but a puppet in the hands of his Mayor of the Palace. At his
death was made, a full century too soon, the first attempt of that great
family which had of late held all real power to add the shadow to the
substance by assuming the royal name. King Sigibert had only reached the
age of twenty-seven when he died: his son and heir, named Dagobert after
his grandfather, was but eight. Taking advantage of the boy’s youth, the
Mayor Grimoald had him stolen away from his country by the hands of a
bishop, and lodged him in an Irish monastery, where his head was shorn,
and he was consecrated as a monk. [Sidenote: Usurpation of Grimoald,
656.] Having got rid of the rightful heir, Grimoald induced his
partisans to raise his own son Childebert on the shield, and salute him
as king of Austrasia. But the times were not yet ripe: Grimoald had many
bitter enemies, and the majority of the people were not yet accustomed
to the idea of dethroning the ancient house of the Merovings. Within a
few days after the usurpation, Grimoald was seized by a band of
Austrasian nobles, cast into fetters, and hurried off to Paris, where
his captors laid him before the feet of king Chlodovech II. of Neustria,
the brother of the deceased Sigibert.

Chlodovech, a cruel and debauched young man, slew Grimoald with horrid
tortures. It appeared as if the greatness of the house of Pippin and
Arnulf was destined to be extinguished with the life of its chief: but
the Fates willed otherwise. Within a few months of the execution of the
great Mayor, king Chlodovech died, leaving the diadem to his little son
Chlothar III. All the Frankish realms were once more under the nominal
rule of a child, and the last chance of the survival of the kingly power
was gone, in Neustria now as well as in the Eastern realm. The house of
the Austrasian mayors was within a few years to raise its head once
more.

Meanwhile the minority of Chlothar III. was destined to be a time of
storm and trouble. Before he had been four years on the throne his
Austrasian subjects determined that they would once more have a king of
their own, and not obey orders from Soissons or Paris. Accordingly they
took Childerich, the younger brother of Chlothar, and crowned him as
king of the Eastern realm. The joint reign of the boys Chlothar III. and
Childerich I. lasted for ten years: at first the kingdoms were kept in a
certain measure of peace by the queen-mother, Bathildis, an Anglo-Saxon
lady of great virtue and ability. But after four years, worn out by the
troublous task of reconciling the opposing factions of the nobility, she
retired into a nunnery, and when her gentle influence was removed,
trouble at once broke out.

[Sidenote: Mayor Ebroin. 660-81.] The man mainly responsible for the
evil time of civil strife that followed was Ebroin, Mayor of the Palace
in Neustria. He was a cruel, ambitious, vindictive noble, who aspired to
much the same position that Pippin the Old and Grimoald had once
occupied in Austrasia. Strong by the power of using the royal name, by
his numerous _comitatus_, and by his unscrupulous readiness to strike
down all who opposed him, he exercised for several years what the
contemporary chroniclers called a ‘tyranny.’ He was, we are told, so
greedy of money, that to him the man with the longer purse always seemed
to have the better cause. Nor was greed his worst fault; however small
the offence, any crime committed by a man that he suspected or envied
brought the invariable penalty of death. His mandates were as capricious
as they were harsh, for example he once issued an order that no Frank of
Burgundy should approach the king’s person without the mayor’s express
permission. This domination of Ebroin lasted until his young master,
Chlothar III., of whose personal influence or character we hear naught,
died on the verge of manhood in 670.

The autocratic Mayor of the Palace at once raised on the shield
Theuderich, Chlothar’s youngest brother. But the majority of the
Neustrians saw their chance of getting rid of their tyrant. Rising under
the leadership of Leodegar, bishop of Aûtun, they proclaimed Childerich
of Austrasia king of the West, as well as of the East Franks, and called
him in to their aid. The personal following of Ebroin was too weak to
resist the Neustrian and Austrasian nobles combined. He and his puppet
king were made captive, and both compelled to take monastic vows—Ebroin
at Luxeuil, Theuderich at St. Denis. It might have been better in the
end for the Franks if Leodegar had been less merciful to the vanquished
Mayor: he was yet to give much trouble.

For three years Childerich reigned over all the Franks: he reached
manhood in this time, but the power of the kingship did not pass into
his own hand. The Mayor Wulfoald ruled in Austrasia, while bishop
Leodegar administered Neustria with some success ‘till the old enemy of
mankind, whose wont it always is to foment discord, began to stir up
against him the envy of the great men whom he had taken as his fellows
at the helm, and to sow the tares of malice between him and the king.’
Leodegar was at last thrust by his envious colleagues into the monastery
of Luxeuil, where he found his old enemy Ebroin awaiting his company.
[Sidenote: Murder of Childerich I.] In the same year king Childerich was
murdered: he had seized a free Frank named Bodolin, and without trial or
judgment, bound him naked to a stake, and flogged him in the palace
court. No sooner was the furious Neustrian freed from his bonds than he
gathered a few friends, and slew the king in his bed.

There followed anarchy all over the Frankish realm, for Childerich had
left only an infant son. One party in Neustria took out of the monastery
of St. Denis prince Theuderich, who had been Ebroin’s candidate for the
Neustrian throne three years before, and proclaimed him king. Wulfoald,
the Mayor of the Palace of Austrasia, sent to Ireland to find Dagobert,
the long-lost prince whom Grimoald had kidnapped and sent over-sea in
656. Sought out by Wilfred, bishop of York, and perhaps guarded by
Northumbrian warriors, Dagobert was brought over to Germany, and raised
to the throne. But another party, mainly composed of Austrasians,
proclaimed a boy named Chlodovech, whom they said was a natural son of
king Chlothar III. Ebroin broke from his monastery-prison, let his hair
grow, and joined the adherents of Chlodovech. In this three-cornered
duel the kings counted for little or naught, the mayors and the nobles
for everything. [Sidenote: Tyranny of Ebroin.] By his superior daring
and persistency Ebroin worked himself once more to the front, and on
consenting to abandon the boy pretender, whose cause he had feigned to
espouse, was made Mayor of Neustria once more by king Theuderich (678).
His first care was to send for his old enemy Leodegar, against whom he
entertained an unforgotten grudge, in spite of their common captivity at
Luxeuil. The good bishop was brought before him, blinded, and afterwards
beheaded. Later generations, remembering his well-meaning government and
cruel end, saluted him as a saint (St. Leger).

For three years the wicked Ebroin went forth conquering and to conquer:
he used the name of king Theuderich to cover his misdeeds, and ordered
everything at his own pleasure. Entering Austrasia he crushed its army,
and Dagobert, the king from over-sea, was slain by traitors after his
defeat. Some of the East Franks, however, refused to lay down their
arms, and placed at their head the heir of the house of Arnulf and
Pippin, as the most popular chief that Austrasia could find. This was
Pippin the Young, nephew of Mayor Grimoald, son of Ansegisel and Begga,
and grandson both of St. Arnulf and Pippin the Old.

THE GREAT MAYORS OF THE PALACE.

St. Arnulf, Bp. of PIPPIN the Elder, Mayor
Metz, died 641. of Austrasia, died 639.
| |
| +----------------+---------------+
| | |
ANSEGISEL, Mayor ===== Begga. GRIMOALD, Mayor of
of Austrasia 632-38. | Austrasia, died 656.
| |
Plectrudis=====PIPPIN the Younger,::::::::Alphaida. Childebert,
Proclaimed
| Mayor of Austrasia, : King of Austrasia 656.
| Neustria, and :
| Burgundy, died 714. :
| :
+-------+-+ CHARLES MARTEL, Mayor
| | of Austrasia 717, of all the
GRIMOALD, Drogo, Kingdoms 719, died 741.
Mayor of died 708. |
Neustria, +--------------++-------------+----------+
died 714. | | | |
| CARLOMAN, PIPPIN the Short, Grifo. Bernhard.
Theudoald. Mayor of Mayor of Neustria |
Austrasia, 741, King of the |
died 754. Franks 752. |
| |
+---------+---+ +---------+-+
| | | |
CHARLES the CARLOMAN. Adalhard. Wala.
Great.

Ebroin, however, was strong enough to overbear the resistance of Pippin:
at Lafaux, near Laon, he defeated the last Austrasian army in the open
field, and compelled all the Franks, from Meuse to Rhine, to acknowledge
his _protégé_ Theuderich as king. He himself became mayor both of
Neustria, Burgundy, and Austrasia, and might well have aspired to assume
the royal title. But a private enemy, whose death he had been plotting,
secretly murdered him in 681, and with his death the ascendency of
Neustria came to an end. [Sidenote: Rise of Pippin II.] The Austrasians
once more took up arms under Pippin the Young, and after seven more
weary years of civil war, a decisive battle at Testry near St. Quentin
settled the fate of the Frankish realms (687). Pippin with the men of
the East was completely victorious, and Theuderich and the Neustrians
were compelled to take what terms he chose to give them. He claimed to
be what Ebroin had been, mayor both in East and West, but he chose to
dwell himself at Metz, the home of his grandfather, and from thence
administered Austrasia almost as an independent ruler; while regents
named by him guided the steps of king Theuderich in Neustria. By the
fight of Testry the question of precedence between Austrasia and
Neustria was finally settled in favour of the former. From this moment
onward, the East-Frankish house of the descendants of Arnulf and Pippin
is of far more importance in Frankish history than the effete royal
family. Warned by the fate of Grimoald, they did not again demand the
crown for a space of eighty years, and were content with a practical
domination without any regal name. Henceforth we shall find the Franks
more Teutonic and less Gallo-Roman than they had hitherto been: the
central point of the realm is for the future to be found about
Austrasian Metz, Aachen and Köln, not around Neustrian Soissons, Paris,
or Laon.

Pippin, the son of Ansegisel, was Mayor of the Palace for twenty-six
years (688-714), a period in which he did much to rescue the Frankish
realm from the dilapidation and evil governance which it had experienced
for the last fifty years. [Sidenote: Dilapidation of the realm.] His
first task was to endeavour to restore the ancient boundaries of the
kingdom; for during the reigns of the sons and grandsons of Dagobert I.,
the old limits of the realm had fallen back on every side. On the
eastern border the homage which the Bavarian dukes owed to the Merovings
had been completely forgotten; for all practical purposes they were now
independent. Farther north, the Thuringians were in much the same
condition; they had been saved from the Slavonic hordes of Samo by their
own chiefs, not by their Frankish suzerain, and since they had repulsed
the Slavs had gone on their own way, caring nought who ruled at Metz or
Köln. The Frisians of the Rhine-mouth, a race whom the Merovings had
never subdued, were pushing their raids into the valleys of the Scheldt
and Meuse. These were all comparatively outlying tribes, whose freedom
is easily explained by their distance from the centre of government. But
it is more surprising to find that even the Suabians or Alamanni, on the
very threshold of Austrasia, along the Rhine and Neckar and in the Black
Forest, had of late refused the homage which for two hundred years they
had been accustomed to render to the Merovings, and paid no obedience to
any one save their own local dukes. In the south also the Gallo-Romans
of Aquitaine had achieved practical independence under a duke named
Eudo, who was said to be descended from Charibert, king of Aquitaine,
the brother of Dagobert I.

For fifty years Pippin and his son Charles were to work at the
restoration of the ancient frontier of the Frankish realm, beating down
by constant hard fighting the various vassal tribes who had slipped away
from beneath the Frankish yoke. Pippin’s chief wars were with the
Frisians and the Suabians, against both of whom he obtained great
successes. [Sidenote: Frisia subdued.] After a long struggle he
compelled Radbod, the duke of the Frisians, to do homage to king
Theuderich, and cede to the Franks West-Frisia, the group of marshy
islands between the Scheldt-mouth and the Zuider Zee, which is now
called Zealand and South Holland. To protect this new conquest Pippin
set up or restored castles at Utrecht and Dorstadt, new towns destined
to become, the one the ecclesiastical, and the other the commercial,
centre of the lands by the Rhine-mouth. Duke Radbod was also compelled
to give his daughter in marriage to Pippin’s eldest son, Grimoald.

Another series of campaigns were directed against the Suabians. Pippin
followed them into the depths of their forests, and compelled their duke
Godfrid to acknowledge himself, as his fathers had done, the vassal of
the Franks.

It is very noticeable that under Pippin’s rule and by his aid the
conversion of Germany to Christianity was begun. The descendants of St.
Arnulf were, as befitted the issue of such a holy man, zealous friends
of the Church and patrons of missionary enterprise. The Merovingian
kings had been, almost without exception, a godless race, Christian in
name alone. They had taken no pains to favour the spread of Christianity
among their vassals: it was sufficient in their eyes if their own
people, the ruling race, conformed to the Catholic faith; for the souls
of Suabians, Frisians, or Bavarians, they had no care. Such missionaries
as had hitherto been seen in the German forests, along the shores of the
Bodensee, or the upper reaches of the Danube and Main, had been, almost
without exception, Irish monks, drawn from the Isle of Saints by their
own fervent zeal for the spread of the Gospel, not by any encouragement
from the Frankish kings. In the sixth and seventh centuries these holy
men overran the whole Continent, seeking for heathen to convert, or
planting their humble monasteries in the wildest recesses of the
mountains or the primeval forest. They wandered as far as Italy and
Switzerland, where two of the greatest of them fixed their homes, St.
Fridian at Lucca, St. Gall in the hills above the Bodensee.

[Sidenote: Conversion of Germany.] But till the time of Pippin no
systematic attempt had been made to convert those among the German races
who still lay in the darkness of Paganism. It was Pippin who first saw
that this duty was incumbent on the Frankish government. He sent to
England for St. Willibrord, the first apostle of the Frisians, who with
his twelve companions wandered over the newly-conquered West Friesland,
preaching to the wild heathen. It was by Pippin’s encouragement also
that the Englishman Suidbert laboured among the Hessians, till he and
his converts were driven away by the invasion of the pagan Saxons. At
the same time St. Rupert, bishop of Worms, completed the conversion of
Bavaria, and founded there the great bishopric of Salzburg (696). Much
about the same date the Irish monk Killian passed up the Main and along
the skirts of the Thüringerwald, to preach to the Thuringians, till he
met with a martyr’s death at Würzburg. Everywhere the ascendency of the
grandson of Arnulf was followed by the arrival of zealous missionary
workers, Franks, Irish or English, who strove to bear the standard of
the Cross into the German woodlands, where Woden and Thunor alone had
hitherto been adored. What Pippin began, his greater son, Charles the
Hammer, and his still mightier great-grandson, Charles the Emperor, were
destined to complete. By this work alone the house of the great
Austrasian mayors did more to justify their existence in three
generations than the wicked Merovings had done in eight.

The years during which Pippin governed the Franks were marked in their
regal annals by four obscure names. Theuderich, the weak king who had
been drawn from the cloister to sit on his brother’s throne,[41] died in
691: he was followed by his two infant sons, Chlodovech III. (691-5),
and Childebert III. (695-711), both of whom were recognised alike in
Neustria and Austrasia, but had no real authority. Chlodovech died while
yet a boy: Childebert survived to early manhood, begat a son, and then
hastened to the grave. Apparently the vices of their ancestors had
sapped the vital energy of the later Merovings; scarce one of them
survived to reach the age of thirty, and each long minority made the
kingly power more and more shadowy, and the authority of the great mayor
more and more real. Childebert III. was followed by one more young boy,
his son Dagobert III. (711-16), the last of the four puppet kings in
whose names the great Pippin swayed the Frankish sceptre.

Footnote 41:

See page 259.

Pippin lived to a great age, and had the misfortune to lose in his
declining years his two legitimate sons, Grimoald and Drogo, whom he had
destined to succeed him. The heirs then remaining to him were Theudoald,
a young boy, the son of Grimoald, and Carl [Charles Martel], an
illegitimate son whom he had by a concubine named Alphaida. The former
was only eight years of age, the latter twenty-five, but the old man
designated the boy Theudoald as his successor, hoping that he might be
spared to see him grow up to manhood. [Sidenote: Death of Pippin, 715.]
He died, however, within a few months, and a strange problem was put
before the Franks, whether they would tolerate a child-mayor ruling in
the name of a child-king. Pippin’s widow Plectrudis tried to seize the
reins of government in behalf of her little grandson, and some of the
Austrasians adhered to her cause. As a precautionary measure she cast
her husband’s natural son Charles into prison, knowing that many men
regarded him as the only possible heir to Pippin’s position, since the
idea of a child-mayor was preposterous.

Plectrudis’ endeavour to rule in the name of her grandson proved, as
might have been expected, a complete failure. The counts and dukes of
Neustria hastened to take the opportunity of shaking off the domination
of the Austrasians. They mustered in arms, chose a certain Raginfred,
one of themselves, as Neustrian Mayor of the Palace, and raised an army
to invade Austrasia in the name of the young Dagobert III. They did not
shrink from allying themselves with the enemies of the state, the
Frisians and Saxons, who attacked Austrasia from the rear, while they
themselves, advancing through the Ardennes, wasted all the lands between
Meuse and Rhine with fire and sword. Plectrudis and her grandson shut
themselves up within the walls of Köln.

[Sidenote: Rise of Charles Martel.] Before the end of the year, however,
two important events occurred to give a new turn to the war. Charles,
the son of Pippin, escaped from his stepmother’s prison, and was at once
saluted as chief by the majority of the Austrasians, who had been driven
to wild rage by the ravages of the Neustrian army, and yearned for a
leader capable of commanding in the field. Shortly after the young king,
whom East and West had both acknowledged, died, as did all his
ancestors, just when he had attained manhood, and immediately after the
birth of his first child. Like the Grand Lamas of Thibet, these wretched
Merovings expired, with hardly an exception, just as they grew old
enough to interfere in politics. As with the Lamas, so with the Franks,
we cannot help suspecting that there was more in these sudden deaths
than appears on the surface: it certainly was not to the interest of
those about the persons of the kings that they should ever live long
enough to assert their regal power.

On the death of Dagobert, the Neustrians drew out from the monastery,
where he had been placed in earliest infancy, the son of Childerich I.,
the king whom Bodolin had slain in 678. [Sidenote: Chilperich II., 716.]
The monk Daniel was saluted by the royal name of Chilperich, and raised
on the shield: he was the first Meroving for eighty years who had
reached manhood at the moment of his accession, being in his
thirty-eighth year. Chilperich, in spite of his monastic rearing—or
perhaps in virtue of it—turned out a far more vigorous personage than
any of his relatives, and cannot be called one of the ‘_rois
fainéants_.’ He continually took the field at the head of his
Neustrians, and did his best to become their national champion.
Unfortunately the times were against him.

In 716 the Neustrian king and mayor marched together into Austrasia to
make an end of the resistance alike of Plectrudis and of Charles. At the
same time Radbod, the Frisian duke, pushed up the Rhine towards Köln.
Charles offered battle to the invaders near that city, but was defeated,
and forced to take refuge in the mountains of the Eifel. Chilperich then
laid siege to Köln, and compelled Plectrudis and her party to
acknowledge him as king, give up the royal treasure-hoard of Austrasia,
and withdraw the boy Theudoald’s claim to the mayoralty. But while the
Neustrian army was returning in triumph to its own land, Charles, who
had assembled a new force, fell upon it near Malmédy, on the skirts of
the Ardennes. At the battle of Amblève all the work of Chilperich’s
vigorous campaign was undone, for his army was routed, and he and his
mayor, Raginfred, barely escaped with their lives (716).

[Sidenote: Battle of Vincy, 717.] This was the first blow of Charles the
Hammer [Martel], as after generations named him. From henceforth his
career was to be one of uninterrupted success against every foe who
dared withstand him. Early in the spring he followed up his first stroke
by invading Neustria, and defeating Chilperich for a second time at
Vincy, near Cambray. Pressing on after his victory he pursued the
Neustrians up to the gates of Paris, and when resistance ceased, turned
back in triumph to Austrasia. There he compelled his stepmother
Plectrudis to give up Köln to him, and dispersed her partisans. Being
now undisputed master of the Eastern kingdom, he proclaimed a certain
Chlothar king, and named himself Mayor of the Palace. Chlothar IV.,
whose descent is not certain, but who was perhaps grandson of the Irish
exile Dagobert II., was of course a mere puppet in his mayor’s hands.
After securing for himself a legitimate position in the state, Charles
started forth to humble all the enemies who had vexed Austrasia in its
time of trouble. He drove the Saxons over the Weser, compelled Radbod
the Frisian to surrender West Friesland for the second time, and then
turned against Neustria. It was in vain that king Chilperich, who fought
hard to maintain his independence, joined forces with Eudo, who in the
late troubles had made himself independent duke of Aquitaine. Charles
beat them both at a battle near Soissons, and chased king and duke
beyond the Loire. This battle of Soissons was the last effort alike of
the Merovingian house and the Neustrian realm. After it had been lost
they both bowed before the Austrasian sword, and humbly took their
orders from the great Mayor of the Palace (718).

At this conjuncture Charles’s puppet, king Chlothar IV. died. The victor
of Soissons might perchance have chosen to proclaim himself king of
Austrasia, but remembering the fate of his grandfather Grimoald,
preferred to offer terms to the exiled king Chilperich. On recognising
Charles as mayor of East and West alike, the vanquished Meroving was
allowed to return to Neustria, and proclaimed King of all the Franks
(719). He had deserved a better fate than to sink into a mere name and
shadow, and if he had been born eighty years earlier might perchance by
his courage and persistence have given a longer lease of power to the
Merovingian house. But the times were now too late for his energy to
avail.

Chilperich II. died only a year after his submission to Charles. There
remain only two more names to chronicle in the ancient royal house,
Theuderich IV. and Childerich II. These obscure persons—so obscure that
the chroniclers do not even give us the date of Theuderich’s death—were
too weak even to be used as tools by the enemies of the great mayor. A
well-known passage in Einhard describes their wretched position:—‘For
many years the house of the Merovings was destitute of vigour and had
nothing illustrious about it save the empty name of king. For the rulers
of their palace possessed both the wealth and the power of the kingdom,
bearing the name of mayor, and had charge of all high matters of state.
There was nothing for the king to do save to content himself with his
title, and sit with his long hair and long beard on the throne, like the
effigy of a ruler, to hear foreign ambassadors harangue him and answer
them in words put into his mouth as if speaking for himself. [Sidenote:
Effeteness of the last Merovings.] His royal name was profitless and his
allowance of revenue was at the discretion of the mayor, nor was there
anything he could really call his own save one royal manor of moderate
value (Montmacq). There he kept his family and his little establishment
of servants. When he had to travel he set out in a covered carriage
drawn by oxen, and driven by a rustic retainer. Thus he used to travel
up to his palace, or to the national gathering, which met once a year to
settle the affairs of the realm, and thus he would return. But the
administration of the kingdom, and everything that had to be done either
at home or abroad was cared for by the Mayor of the Palace.’
Theuderich’s name covers the years 720-737, Childerich’s the years
742-752. Between the one’s death and the other’s accession there was a
period of six years, in which the great mayor did not even trouble to
provide himself with a nominal king, but ruled on his own authority.

The twenty-two years of Charles Martel’s rule as mayor of Neustria and
Austrasia are the turning-point in the history of Western and Central
Europe (719-41). Continuing the policy of his father Pippin the Younger,
both at home and abroad, he devoted all his energies to restoring the
old boundaries of the Frankish realm, taming its heathen neighbours,
spreading Christianity among the more distant German tribes, and
restoring law and order among the unruly counts and dukes within the
empire. His strong hand was as valuable in ending anarchy at home as in
winning victory abroad.

[Sidenote: Rise of the mayoralty.] The six years of civil war which
followed the death of Pippin the Younger had undone most of the work of
that great man, and Charles had to commence once more the task which had
busied his father. He was, however, in a position of greater firmness
and strength than Pippin had enjoyed, and was able to make his will felt
all over the Frankish realms in a much more thorough fashion. It was his
task to make the arm of the central government feared all over the
kingdom, as much as it had been in the days of the earliest Merovingian
kings. The task was hard, because a century and a half of feeble
administration had taught the local counts and dukes all the arts of
insubordination, more especially the trick of utilising the annual
meetings of the great national council—what England would have called
the Witan—for the purpose of overawing their ruler. They appeared at the
‘March-field,’ followed by great hosts of armed followers, and bound
themselves together by family or party confederacies to withstand the
central government. In this they succeeded as long as the feeble
Merovings continued, and were able to elect the officers of state at
their pleasure or to distribute the local governorships among each
other. The great mayors put an end to this. The house of St. Arnulf had
gathered such a great following of faithful partisans in Austrasia that,
by their aid, it could face any combination of discontented counts. The
other great houses of Austrasia seem to have gradually disappeared, and
all the smaller nobility and freemen of the land between Meuse and Rhine
had become the enthusiastic followers of Pippin and Charles. In return
the great mayors planted Austrasians in office all over the kingdom, and
trusted mainly to their aid in all crises. Their system was a domination
of the Austrasians over the Neustrians, Burgundians, Aquitanians, and
East Germans: their empire reposed on the fact that their own countrymen
were loyal, united, and self-confident, while the other races were
jealous, divided, and humbled by recent defeat. Yet the struggle was no
easy one. It needed the repeated blows of Amblève, Vincy, and Soissons
to crush the Neustrian spirit of separatism. Aquitaine was only kept
down by campaign after campaign directed against its disloyal dukes.
Neither south Gaul nor south Germany (Suabia and Bavaria) were really
tamed till they had been deprived of their native dukes, and cut up into
countships or _gaus_, administered by Austrasian chiefs. But the house
of St. Arnulf continued to produce great men for generation after
generation, and the taming was finally accomplished.

The work of the great mayors without was no less arduous than within. To
subdue those indomitable tribes of northern Germany, from whose pathless
woodlands even the iron legions of Augustus had drawn back in despair,
was a great work for the tumultuary armies of Austrasia to accomplish.
But they carried out the struggle to the bitter end, till they had
conquered the very easternmost Teuton, and had looked upon the Baltic
and the unknown boundaries of the Slavs. Bavaria and Frisia took many a
hard blow ere they were incorporated with the Frankish realm; but at
last they relinquished, with a sigh, their heathen independence. Even
the Italian kingdom of the gallant Lombards, protected by the great
Roman fortresses of Pavia, Verona, and Ravenna could not withstand the
Austrasian sword.

[Sidenote: Approach of the Saracens.] But of all the military
achievements of the East Franks under the house of St. Arnulf, the
grandest, as well as the most enduring in effect, was to be won over a
foe unknown to their ancestors, a new enemy who threatened not merely to
ravage the borders of the realm like Frisian or Lombard, but to
dismember it by lopping away Aquitaine from Western Christendom. Great
as were their other feats, the most important of all was the turning
back of the wave of Mussulman fanaticism at the battle of Poictiers. For
that crowning mercy, if for nothing else, Europe owes an eternal debt of
gratitude to the great mayors of the eighth century and the indomitable
hosts of Austrasia.

Three years before the death of Pippin the Younger, king Roderic the
Visigoth had fallen at the battle of the Guadalete, and Spain had been
overrun by the infidel. In 720,—the first year of the complete
domination of Charles over the two Frankish kingdoms,—the Saracens had
pushed beyond the bounds of the Iberian peninsula, crossed the Pyrenees,
and entered Aquitaine, where they laid siege to Toulouse. Their first
blow fell on Eudo, duke of Aquitaine, who had just acknowledged himself
the vassal of the Frankish king, and given up his claim to reign as an
independent prince. The duke obtained aid from the Frankish governors on
his borders, attacked the Saracens in their camp at Toulouse, and put
them to rout with the loss of their leader El-Samah. But though beaten
in battle, the Moslems kept a foothold north of the Pyrenees, by holding
to the old Visigothic capital of Narbonne. The danger from them was but
postponed, not finally warded off. Ere long Charles himself was to be
obliged to take the field, to defend the southern borders of the
Frankish realm against expeditions far more formidable than that which
duke Eudo had turned back in 721.

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CHAPTER XVI

THE LOMBARDS AND THE PAPACY

653-743

Usurpation and successful wars of Grimoald—Reigns of Berthari and
Cunibert—Quarrels of the Papacy and the empire—The exile of Pope
Martin I.—Gradual alienation of Italy from the empire—Civil wars
of Aribert II. and Ansprand—Successful reign of Liutprand—Leo
the Isaurian and Gregory II.—Italy rebels against the
Iconoclasts—Liutprand conquers most of the Exarchate.

After the death of Rothari the law-giver the Lombard kingdom entered
into its second stage: it had now almost reached the full growth of its
territorial extension, and had settled down into its final shape. For
nearly a hundred years the main events of its political history are
civil wars, or defensive campaigns against its two neighbours, the Roman
exarch and the Chagan of the Avars. There is no sustained effort either
to expel the Imperialists from Italy, or to extend the boundary of the
Lombard realm to the north. It was only in the middle of the eighth
century that the estrangement between Constantinople and its Roman
subjects in Italy led to such a weakening of the Imperial authority,
that the Lombard kings were able to seize the long-coveted Exarchate.
The history of the cutting short of the dominions of the eastern Caesar
beyond the Adriatic turns much more on the growth of the Papal power,
and on the quarrel on the subject of Iconoclasm, which sundered the
churches of Rome and Constantinople, than on the ambition or ability of
the rulers of Lombardy.

On the murder of Rothari’s short-lived son in 653, the Lombards elected
as their king Aribert, a nephew of the sainted queen Theodelinda, whose
name was still held in kindly memory all over the land. [Sidenote:
Aribert I. 653-62.] Count Gundoald, Aribert’s father, had long been
settled in Italy: he had crossed the Alps with his pious sister more
than half a century before, so that Aribert himself was counted a
Lombard, and not a Bavarian. The new king reigned obscurely for nine
years (653-62): he waged no wars and was mainly noted as a friend of the
clergy and a builder of churches. He was a fervent Catholic, and did his
best to root out the few traces of Arianism yet remaining in Lombardy.
The land had peace under his sway, but ere he died he sowed the seeds of
future troubles by the unhappy inspiration which led him to induce the
Lombard Witan to elect his two sons, Godebert and Berthari, as joint
heirs to the kingship.

When their father was dead, Godebert, the elder brother, dwelt as king
at Pavia, while Berthari took possession of Milan. Before they had been
reigning a year the inevitable civil war broke out, ‘because evil-minded
men sowed discord and suspicion between them.’ [Sidenote: Grimoald king
of the Lombards, 662-71.] They were mustering their followers for a
decisive campaign, when Godebert was treacherously murdered by the chief
of his own supporters, Grimoald, duke of Benevento, who had left his
duchy in the south, and led his men-at-arms to Pavia, under the pretence
of helping his suzerain against his unruly younger brother. Grimoald
took possession of the crown, and married his victim’s sister, in order
to connect himself with the house of the holy Theodelinda. He chased
Berthari out of Milan, and forced him to take refuge with the Chagan of
the Avars, in the far east, by the shores of the Danube.

The unscrupulous usurper reigned for nine years (662-71) over the whole
Lombard realm, holding his own court at Pavia, while Romuald, the son of
his first marriage, ruled for him at Benevento. This was the only period
in the whole history of the Lombards when the king’s mandate was as well
obeyed in the southern Apennines as in the valley of the Po. It was,
therefore, fortunate for the Lombard race that the attack on Italy of
the vigorous emperor Constantinus (Constans II.) fell within the years
of Grimoald’s reign. Though he overran much of the duchy of Benevento,
the energy of Constantinus failed before the advent of king Grimoald,
and the danger passed away (663).[42]

Footnote 42:

See page 245.

His successes against the emperor were not the only triumphs of king
Grimoald: he repelled an irruption of the Avars into Venetia, and
repulsed a Frankish army which the Mayor Ebroin, who ruled in behalf of
king Chlothar III., sent across the Western Alps. His only territorial
gain, however, was the capture from the Imperialists of the little town
of Forimpopoli, near Rimini, which he stormed by surprise on Easter Day,
and harried most cruelly, ‘slaying the worshippers at the altar, and the
deacons at the baptismal font, while all were engaged in celebrating the
Holy Feast.’ We might have supposed that the Romans in central Italy
would have fared worse after the repulse of Constantinus: but no other
city was lost. In the south, however, Grimoald’s son Romuald captured
Taranto and Brindisi, two of the chief remaining strongholds of the
Imperialists in Apulia. But this was after the death of Constantinus,
during the troubles caused by the rebellion of Mezecius in Sicily
(668-9?).

In spite of the treachery by which he had attained the throne,
Grimoald’s victories made him very popular among the Lombards, and many
tales survive bearing witness to his generosity and clemency, no less
than to his strong hand and cunning. But when he died it was seen that
his power rested purely upon his own personal merit: the Lombards did
not elect as king either his elder son Romuald, the duke of Benevento,
or his younger son, Garibald, whom the daughter of Aribert had borne
him. They recalled from exile king Berthari, the son of Aribert, whom
Grimoald had driven out of Milan ten years before. This prince had spent
an unhappy life in wandering from land to land, from the Danube to the
British seas, and was sailing to England when the news of the usurper’s
death reached him. He returned to Italy, and was received with
submission by the whole Lombard race, and solemnly crowned at Pavia.

Berthari reigned for seventeen years (672-88) in peace and quietness,
for he loved not war. He was ‘a man of religion, a true Catholic,
tenacious of justice, a nourisher of the poor; he built the famous
nunnery of St. Agatha, and the great Church of the Virgin outside the
walls of Pavia.’ The kings of this type, whom the monastic chroniclers
delighted most to honour, were not those who made history. Berthari
never attempted to conquer Rome or the Exarchate, and only took arms
once in his reign, when he was assaulted by a rebellious duke, Alahis of
Trent, whom he subdued and then pardoned,—as a Christian man should—a
pardon which was to cost Lombardy much blood in the next reign.

The reign of his son Cunibert (688-700) was far more disturbed. This
king was a man of mixed qualities, brave, generous, and popular, but
careless, incautious, and given over to the wine-cup. He was caught
unprepared and driven from Pavia by duke Alahis, who now rebelled again,
in spite of the fact that his life had once been spared by Cunibert’s
father. Cunibert was driven for a time from all his realm, save a single
castle in the lake of Como, where he stood a long siege. But Alahis, by
his tyranny, made himself unbearable to the Lombards, and ere many
months had elapsed the lawful king was able to issue from his stronghold
and face the usurper in battle. They met at Coronate on the Adda, not
far from Lodi, Alahis backed by the ‘Austrians’ of Venetia, Cunibert by
the ‘Neustrians’ of Piedmont. The men of the West had the better, Alahis
was slain, and the son of Berthari resumed his kingship over the whole
Lombard realm. This was not the last rebellion that Cunibert had to
crush: all through his reign we hear of risings of the unruly dukes, and
of the punishments which were inflicted on them when they fell into
their master’s hands.

There is nothing of first-rate historical importance to relate of the
doings of the Lombard kings in this last quarter of the seventh century.
But while Berthari was building churches, or Cunibert striving with his
rebels, the course of events in the city of Rome was growing more and
more important. [Sidenote: The Papacy in the seventh century. ] The
papacy and the empire were gradually working up to a pitch of
estrangement and mutual repulsion, which was in the next generation to
lead to open war between them. We have sketched in an earlier chapter
the work of pope Gregory the Great, in raising the papacy to a condition
of unprecedented spiritual importance in the Christian world, and no
less in building up a position of high secular importance for the Pope
in the governance of Rome. For half a century after Gregory’s death this
state of affairs remained unaltered. The Pope was now firmly established
as patriarch of the West, and sent missions to Britain, Gaul, and Spain
without let or hindrance. Nor was his secular authority much interfered
with, either by the exarch or by the home government at Constantinople.
But friction and struggling began under the reign of the stern and
ruthless Constantinus (Constans II.) and the hot-headed pope Martin I.
We have mentioned elsewhere[43] how the emperor published his ‘Type’ or
edict of Comprehension, forbidding further discussions on the question
of the Monothelite heresy. Martin not merely refused to acquiesce in
letting the discussion sleep, but summoned a council which declared the
‘Type’ to be blasphemous and irreverent. Martin wrote to the same effect
to the kings of the Franks, Visigoths, and English, thus calling in
foreign sovereigns to participate in a dispute between himself and his
master. Relying on his remoteness from Byzantium, and on the grandeur of
his position as Patriarch of the West, he attempted to defy
Constantinus. The emperor’s proceedings show that he was determined to
assert his power, but that he was fully conscious of the danger and
difficulty of dealing with such an important personage as the bishop of
Rome had now become. [Sidenote: Fate of Pope Martin, 655.] He had to
wait for a favourable opportunity for punishing Martin, and it was not
by openly arresting him in the face of the people, but by secretly
kidnapping him, that he got him into his power. But when once shipped to
Constantinople the Pope felt his sovereign’s wrath: insulted, loaded
with chains, imprisoned, and banished to the remote Crimea, Martin
learnt that the emperor’s arm was still strong enough to reach out to
Rome (655).

Footnote 43:

See page 244.

But all Italy regarded Martin as a martyr to orthodoxy, and his fate did
much to estrange the Romans from their loyalty to the empire. Nor was
their wrath diminished by the sacrilegious plunder of the Pantheon and
other Roman churches, which Constantinus carried out, when in 663 he
deigned to visit his Western dominions. It would seem that Constantinus
himself was fully conscious that the Roman see was growing too strong,
and deliberately strove to sap its resources, for at this time he
granted to the archbishop of Ravenna a formal exemption from any duty of
spiritual obedience to the Pope as patriarch of the West, and
constituted him an independent authority in the exarchate. For twenty
years this schism of Rome and Ravenna continued, but in the end the old
traditional prestige of the see of St. Peter triumphed over the ambition
of the Ravennese archbishops.

If there had been a strong pontiff at this moment, it is probable that
an open rupture might have taken place between the papacy and the
empire. But pope Vitalian was a weak man, the fate of his predecessor
Martin had cowed him, and the idea of cutting Rome away from the
_respublica Romana_, as the empire was still habitually called, had not
yet entered into the minds of the Italian subjects of Byzantium. To
disown the Imperial supremacy would have been tantamount to throwing
Rome into the hands of king Grimoald the Lombard, and neither Pope nor
people contemplated such a prospect with equanimity.

Accordingly the breach between Rome and Byzantium was deferred for
another generation. After Constantinus was dead, more friendly relations
reigned for a space, for his son Constantine V. was impeccably orthodox.
He held the Council of Constantinople in 681 with the high approval of
pope Agatho, whose representatives duly appeared at it, to join in the
final crushing of the Monothelite heretics. Constantine, in the fulness
of his friendship to the papacy, even granted to the Roman see the
dangerous privilege that when at papal elections the suffrages of the
clergy, the people, and the soldiery,—the garrison of Rome—were
unanimously fixed on any one person, that individual might be at once
consecrated bishop of Rome, without having to wait for an imperial
mandate of approval from Constantinople. As a matter of fact, however,
unanimous elections were very rare, and the exarchs of Ravenna are still
found interfering to decide between the claims of rival candidates.

Signs of a breach became evident once again in the days of the tyrant
Justinian II. When pope Sergius refused obedience to his behests, the
emperor bade the exarch seize him and send him to Constantinople. But
not only the Roman mob, but the soldiers of the imperial garrison took
up arms to resist Justinian’s officials when they tried to lay hands on
Sergius: the ties of military obedience had already come to be weaker
than those of spiritual respect, and the Pope triumphed, for Justinian
was deposed, mutilated, and sent to Cherson by his rebellious subjects,
ere he had time to punish the Romans.

The twenty-two years of anarchy and dissolution at Constantinople which
followed the deposition of Justinian (695-717) were fraught with
important consequences in Italy. The ephemeral emperors of those days
were unable to assert their authority over the West, and we once more
find the popes assuming secular functions, after the fashion of Gregory
the Great in the preceding century. John VI. levied taxes in Rome, made
treaties with the Lombard duke of Benevento, and even protected and
restored the exarch Theophylactus when he had been expelled from Ravenna
by a military revolt. [Sidenote: Quarrel of Gregory II. and
Philippicus.] Gregory II. went so far in his independence as to refuse
to acknowledge the usurping emperor Philippicus; by his advice ‘the
Roman people determined that state-documents should not bear the name of
a heretical Caesar, nor the money be struck with his effigy. So the
portrait of Philippicus was not set up in the Church, nor his name
introduced in the prayers at Mass.’ Gregory only consented to recognise
Philippicus’ successor Anastasius II. when he heard that the new emperor
was a man of unimpeachable orthodoxy. The independent position of the
popes had now grown so marked that the next quarrel with Constantinople
was destined to lead to the final rupture of relations between the
papacy and the empire. It was impossible that things should remain as
they were: the breach was inevitable. Its cause was to be the accession
of the stern Iconoclast, Leo the Isaurian, and his attempt to enforce
his own religious views on the western, no less than the eastern
provinces of his empire. The protagonists in the final struggle are Leo,
pope Gregory II., and the Lombard king Liutprand, whose position and
power we must now proceed to explain.

When king Cunibert died in the year 700, he left his throne to his young
son Liutbert, a mere boy, whose realm was to be administered by a
regent-guardian, count Ansprand, the wisest of the Lombards. A minority
was always fatal to one of the early Teutonic kingdoms. [Sidenote:
Rebellion of Reginbert of Turin.] Only eight months after Liutbert had
been proclaimed king, his nearest adult kinsmen rose in arms against
him, to claim the crown. These were Reginbert, duke of Turin, and his
son Aribert, the child and grandchild of king Godebert, and the cousins
of the boy-king’s father.

Reginbert was followed by all the Neustrian Lombards, and was able to
defeat the regent Ansprand at Novara. He died immediately after his
victory, but his son Aribert followed up the success by winning a second
battle in front of Pavia, and taking prisoner the boy Liutbert.
[Sidenote: Civil wars of the Lombards.] The victor seized the capital,
and was hailed as king by his followers, under the name of Aribert II.
The regent Ansprand, who had escaped from Pavia, tried to keep up the
civil war in the name of his ward: but the new king put an end to this
attempt by ordering the boy Liutbert to be strangled in his bath.
Ansprand then fled over the Alps and took refuge with the duke of
Bavaria.

Aribert II. reigned over the Lombards for ten troubled years (701-11),
fully occupied by the tasks of putting down rebellious dukes, driving
back raids of the Carinthian Slavs from Venetia, and endeavouring to
assert his power over Spoleto and Benevento. The time was opportune for
attacking the imperial possessions in Italy, but Aribert refrained from
making the attempt. He was friendly to the papacy, and made over to pope
John VI. a great gift of estates in the Cottian Alps: nor did he assist
his vassal Faroald, duke of Spoleto, when the latter in 703 made an
attempt on the Exarchate. Aribert preferred to live in peace both with
the Pope and the Emperor.

Aribert II. had gained his kingdom by the sword, and by the sword he was
destined to lose it. In 711 the exile Ansprand, once the regent for the
boy Liutbert, invaded Italy at the head of a Bavarian army, lent to him
by duke Teutbert. Many of the Lombards still loved the house of Berthari
and hated Aribert as a murderer and usurper. The army of Ansprand was
ere long increased by many thousands of the ‘Austrian’ Lombards, and he
was soon able to face the king in the open field near Pavia. The battle
was indecisive, but when it was over Aribert retired within the walls of
the city. His retreat discouraged his army, which began to fall away
from him: thereupon Aribert determined to take with him the royal
treasure, and flee to Gaul to buy aid of the Franks. While endeavouring
to cross the Ticino by night with all his hoard, he was accidentally
drowned, and left the throne vacant for his rival Ansprand (712).

The ex-regent was now proclaimed king, but only survived his triumph a
few months: on his deathbed he prevailed on the Lombards to elect as his
colleague his son Liutprand, who therefore became sole ruler when his
father died a few days later.

[Sidenote: Liutprand, king of the Lombards, 712-43.] Liutprand was the
most able and energetic king who ever ruled the Lombard realm, and his
long reign of thirty-one years (712-43) saw the completion of the
long-delayed process of the eviction of the East-Romans from Central
Italy, and the rise of the Lombards to the highest pitch of success
which they ever knew—a rise which was to be closely followed by the
extinction of their kingdom.

When Leo the Isaurian commenced his crusade against image-worship,
Liutprand had been on the throne for fourteen years. In these earlier
years of his reign he was occupied in strengthening his position, and
made no attack on the Imperial dominions in Italy, though he is found
making war on the Bavarians, and capturing some of their castles on the
upper Adige.

But in 726 things came to a head, when Leo issued his famous edict
against images, forbidding all worship of statues and paintings.
[Sidenote: Quarrel of Gregory II. and Leo the Isaurian.] Pope Gregory
II. was not in a mood to listen to such a command from Constantinople.
He was already in great disfavour with the emperor for having advised
the Italians to resist some extraordinary taxation which Leo had imposed
to maintain the Saracen war. When he received Leo’s rescript, and a
letter addressed to himself requesting him to carry out the imperial
orders, and destroy the images of Rome, he burst out into open
contumacy, and the Romans, with all the other Italians, followed his
lead. Exhilaratus, duke of Naples, who tried to carry out the edict in
his duchy, was slain by a mob, and many other imperial officials were
maltreated or driven off by those whom they governed. The cites elected
new rulers over themselves, and would have chosen and proclaimed an
Emperor of the West, if Gregory II. had not kept them from this final
step. [Sidenote: Liutprand conquers the Exarchate, 727.] Meanwhile, all
the imperial provinces of Italy being in open sedition, and quite cut
off from Constantinople, king Liutprand thought the moment had at last
come for rounding off the Lombard dominions by seizing the long-coveted
Exarchate. He crossed the Po, took Bologna, with most of the other
cities of Æmilia, and then conquered Osimo, Rimini, Ancona, and all the
Pentapolis. Classis, the seaport of Ravenna, fell before him, but the
exarch Paul succeeded in preserving the great City of the Marshes for a
short time longer, till he was murdered by rioters (727). The Lombard
king’s conquests were made with astonishing ease, for in each city the
anti-imperialist faction betrayed the gates to him without fighting.

Soon after, the triumph of Liutprand was completed by the surrender of
Ravenna itself: the exarch Eutychius fled to Venice, already a
semi-independent city, but one which still preserved a nominal
allegiance to the empire. [Sidenote: Gregory II. rebels against Leo II.]
Meanwhile, pope Gregory II. was occupied in writing lengthy manifestos
setting forth the atrocious conduct of Leo, and the intrinsic
rationality of reverencing images. His letters to the emperor were
couched in language of studied insolence. ‘I must use coarse and rude
arguments,’ he wrote, ‘to suit a coarse and rude mind such as yours,’
and then proceeded to say that ‘if you were to go into a boys’ school
and announce yourself as a destroyer of images, the smallest children
would throw their writing tablets at your head, for even babes and
sucklings might teach you, though you refuse to listen to the wise.’
After completely confusing king Uzziah with king Hezekiah in an argument
drawn from the Old Testament, Gregory then proceeded to quote apocryphal
anecdotes from early church history. He wound up by asserting that in
virtue of the power that he inherited from St. Peter, he might consign
the emperor to eternal damnation, but that Leo was so thoroughly damned
by his own crimes that there was no need to inflict any further curse on
him. A more practical threat was that if the emperor sent an army
against Rome, he would retire into Campania and take refuge with the
Lombards (729).

[Sidenote: Position of Gregory II.] As a matter of fact, however, to
throw himself into the hands of the Lombards was the last thing that
pope Gregory desired to do. He had the greatest dread of falling under
the direct authority of Liutprand, for the occupation of Rome by a
powerful and strong-handed Italian king would have been fatal to the
secular power of the papacy. It was easy to disobey a powerless exarch
and a distant emperor, but if Liutprand had become ruler of all Italy,
the popes would have been forced to be his humble subjects. Gregory
wished to rid himself of the domination of Leo, without falling into the
clutches of Liutprand. While disclaiming his allegiance to the emperor,
he pretended to adhere to the empire.

Meanwhile an unexpected turn of events had checked the career of victory
of king Liutprand. While he was absent at Pavia, the exarch Eutychius
had collected some troops at Venice, and aided by the forces of the
semi-independent citizens of the lagoon-city had landed near Ravenna.
The place was betrayed to him by the imperialist party within the walls,
and became once more the seat of imperial power in Italy. At the same
time the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento took arms against their
suzerain, and allied themselves with pope Gregory (729).

Liutprand determined to conquer the Lombard rebels before resuming the
hard task of retaking Ravenna. He even made a truce with the exarch, by
which it was stipulated that they should mutually aid each other, the
one in subduing the revolted dukes, the other in compelling the Pope to
return to his allegiance. Accordingly Eutychius marched against Rome,
and Liutprand against Spoleto. On the king’s approach the two dukes
submitted to him, and swore to be his faithful vassals. [Sidenote:
Liutprand pacifies Italy, 730.] He then moved toward Rome, which the
exarch was already besieging. But he had no wish that the imperial power
should be strengthened by the recovery of Rome, and, encamping his army
in the Field of Nero, outside the city, proceeded to claim to act as
arbitrator between Gregory and Eutychius. They were too weak to resist
him, and the Pope at least gladly acquiesced in the pacification of
Italy which Liutprand proposed. The exarch was to return to Ravenna,
leaving Rome unmolested, and to be content with the possession of
Ravenna only, all his other lost dominions in the Pentapolis and Æmilia
remaining in the hands of the Lombards. Gregory, in consideration of
being left unmolested in Rome, professed to return to his allegiance,
but in reality remained in an independent position. He did not withdraw
his opposition to Iconoclasm, and took advantage of the peace to call
together a great council of Italian bishops, ninety-three in number, who
solemnly anathematised all who refused to reverence images, though they
did not curse the emperor by name (730).

Two months later pope Gregory II. died, and was succeeded by Gregory
III., as great an enemy of Iconoclasm as his namesake. He had no sooner
displayed his views, than the emperor, discontented with the peace which
the exarch had concluded, and much irritated by the anathema of the
Council of Rome, revenged himself on the papacy by issuing an edict
which removed from the jurisdiction of the Pope, as Patriarch of the
West, the Illyrian and south Italian dioceses which had hitherto paid
spiritual obedience to Rome. For the future, not only Epirus and Sicily,
but even Apulia and Calabria, were to look to the Patriarch of
Constantinople as their head and chief (731).

In 732 Leo took a more practical step for reducing the Pope to
obedience. He fitted out a great armament in the ports of Asia Minor,
which was to sail to Italy, to recover by force of arms the lost regions
of the Exarchate, and to arrest Gregory III. and send him in chains to
Constantinople. But the fates were against the restoration of imperial
authority in the West: the fleet was completely wrecked by a storm in
the Adriatic, and the fragments of it which reached Ravenna effected
nothing. This was the last serious attempt of the empire to recover
central Italy. [Sidenote: Last effort of Leo to reconquer Italy, 732.]
Henceforth the Popes went their own way, while the exarch, penned up in
the single fortress of Ravenna, awaited with trembling the outbreak of
the next Lombard war—a war which would certainly sweep away him and his
shrunken Exarchate.

But for eight years after the treaty of 730, king Liutprand maintained
peace over all Italy. He was a pious prince, and a respecter of the
papacy, to which he had even made a grant of territory, ceding the town
of Sutri in Tuscany, which he had captured from the exarch in the war of
728-30. His reign was a time of prosperity for Lombardy: the southern
dukes were compelled to obey orders from Pavia: the Slav and Avar were
kept back from the northern marches, Liutprand also kept up his friendly
relations with Charles Martel, the great Mayor of the Palace in Gaul.
When Charles was looking about for a neighbour sovereign who should,
according to old Teutonic custom, gird with arms and clip the hair of
his son Pippin on his arrival at manhood, he chose Liutprand to
discharge this friendly office. On the invasion of Provence by the
Saracens in 736-7, Charles asked the Lombard for the aid of his host,
and Liutprand crossed the Alps and joined in expelling the infidels from
Aix and Arles.

The peace of Italy was not broken till 738 when Transimund duke of
Spoleto rebelled, not for the first time, against Liutprand. The king
crushed the revolt with his accustomed vigour, and the duke was
compelled to fly: he took refuge at Rome with pope Gregory III.
[Sidenote: Liutprand attacks Rome, 738.] Liutprand promptly demanded his
surrender: Gregory refused, and the Lombard army at once marched into
the duchy of Rome. The king captured Orte, Bomazo, and two other towns
in south Tuscany, and menaced Rome with a siege. Gregory III. could hope
for neither help nor sympathy from his master the emperor Leo, whom he
had so grievously insulted. Accordingly he determined to seek aid from
the one other power which might be able to succour him, the great Mayor
of the Franks. He sent to Charles Martel the golden keys of the tomb of
Saint Peter, and besought him to defend the holy city against the
impious Lombard. [Sidenote: Gregory III. asks aid from the Franks.] He
conferred on the Mayor the high-sounding title of Roman Patrician, which
was not legally his to give, for only the emperor could confer it. He
even offered to transfer to the ruler of the Franks the shadowy
allegiance which Rome still paid to the emperor.

Thus did Gregory III., first of all the Roman pontiffs, endeavour to
bring down upon Italy the curse of foreign invasion. He had drawn upon
himself the wrath of Liutprand by his secular policy: the war arose
purely from the fact that he had favoured the rebellion of the duke of
Spoleto, and sheltered him when he fled. Yet he made the Lombard
invasion a matter of sacrilege, complaining to Charles that Liutprand’s
attack was an impious invasion of the rights of the Church, and a
deliberate insult to the majesty of St. Peter. Considering that the king
had saved him from destruction eight years before, Gregory must be
accused of gross ingratitude, as well as of deliberate misrepresentation
and hypocrisy. But the Pope had imbibed a bitter and quite irrational
hatred for the Lombard race: the danger that he might lose his secular
power, by Rome being annexed to the realm of Liutprand, caused Gregory
to view the pious, peaceable, and orthodox king of the Lombards with as
much dislike as he felt for the heretical Iconoclast at Constantinople.
Considering the amiable character of Liutprand, and the respectable
national record of the Lombards when they are compared with their
contemporaries beyond the Alps, it is astonishing to read of the terms
in which Gregory and his successors spoke of them. No epithet applied to
the heathen in the Scriptures was too severe to heap upon the ‘fetid,
perjured, impious, plundering, murderous race of the Lombards.’ And all
this indignation and abuse was produced by the rational desire of
Liutprand to punish the Pope for harbouring his rebels! It is impossible
not to wish that the great king had succeeded in taking Rome, and
unifying Italy, a contingency which would have spared the peninsula the
curses of the Frankish invasion, of its long and unnatural connection
with the Western Empire, and of that still greater disaster, the
permanent establishment of the temporal power of the papacy.

Charles Martel did not accept Gregory’s offers, or carry out the Pope’s
plans: he would not quarrel with his old friend Liutprand on such
inadequate grounds as the Pope alleged. He chose instead to endeavour to
mediate between Gregory and the Lombard king. He accepted the title of
Patrician, and received the Roman ambassadors with great pomp and
honour, sending them home with many rich presents. But his own delegates
who accompanied them were charged to reconcile the Pope and the king,
not to promise aid to the one against the other. Both Charles and
Gregory, as it happened, were at this moment on the edge of the grave:
both died in the next year (741), and it was some time before the first
active interference of the Franks in behalf of the papacy was destined
to take place.

How uncalled for was the action of pope Gregory is shown by the fact
that in the next year Liutprand came to terms with the Roman See.
[Sidenote: Liutprand grants peace to the Pope, 742.] On the accession of
pope Zachariah, who promised to give no more aid to the rebel duke of
Spoleto, Liutprand restored the cities he had taken from the Roman
duchy, and granted a peace for twenty years. He even presented great
offerings to the Roman Churches and made a present of some valuable
estates to Zachariah. Yet the anger of the popes was in no way appeased:
in their hearts they hated the Lombards as if they were still Arians or
heathen, and only awaited another opportunity for conspiring against
them.

Meanwhile Liutprand died in peace in 743, after a reign of thirty-one
years, in which he had added the greater part of the Exarchate to his
kingdom, had extended the boundaries of Italy to north and east against
the Bavarian and Slav, and had reduced the Beneventan and Spoletan dukes
to an unwonted state of subservience. No one, save his enemies the
popes, ever laid a charge of any sort against his character, and he
appears to have been the best-loved and best-served king of his day. We
read with pleasure that he died in peace, ere the terrible invasion of
the Franks began to afflict the land he had guarded so well. It would
have been better perhaps for Italy if he had been a less virtuous and
pious sovereign: a less temperate ruler would have finished his career
of conquest by taking Rome, and so would have staved off the countless
ills that Rome was about to bring on the whole Italian peninsula.

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CHAPTER XVII

CHARLES MARTEL AND HIS WARS

720-41

Wars with the Saxons and Frisians—Missionary enterprises of St.
Boniface—The Saracens in Septimania and Aquitaine—Charles wins the
battle of Poictiers—Revolt and subjection of duke Hunold of
Aquitaine—Charles and the Papacy.

The name of Charles Martel is generally remembered as that of the victor
of Poictiers, but although the defeat of the invasion of the Saracens of
Spain was destined to be the greatest of his achievements, his struggle
with them was but one of a long series of wars waged against all the
races of infidels who surrounded the Frankish realm. It was not till the
twelfth year of his mayoralty that he himself took the field to face the
invader from the south. Up to that year he had been far more concerned
with the heathen neighbours of his own Austrasia, and must have spared
comparatively few thoughts for the danger of distant Aquitaine, and its
half-independent duke.

Charles had first to deal with the Saxons. To punish them for their
interference in the Frankish civil war of 714-20 he led several
expeditions into the valley of the Weser, and pushed the Frankish
frontier up to the Teutoburgerwald and the head waters of the Lippe and
the Ruhr. The Frisians had already submitted to him, but he had come to
the conclusion that their homage was worth little until they should have
adopted Christianity, and he therefore employed all his influence to
make their duke Aldgisl co-operate in the conversion of his subjects.
[Sidenote: Wars of Charles in Germany, 730.] The duke, a just and
peace-loving prince, was not averse to the scheme, and under his
guarantee missionaries were despatched by bishop Willibrord of Utrecht
over all the Frisian districts. In the course of a generation they had
christianised the greater part of the country, but the East Frisians
were far behind the rest in accepting the gospel, and their conversion
was to be reserved till the reign of Charles’s son.

Frisia and Saxony having been dealt with, it was the next task of the
great mayor to restore the Frankish suzerainty over Bavaria, which had
disappeared for more than eighty years. But before he could complete
this task he was summoned into the West to suppress a Neustrian
rebellion. The nobles of northern Gaul, in spite of their deep
humiliation at Vincy and Soissons, rose once more under Raginfred, the
late mayor of Chilperich II. But the rising collapsed at the first
appearance of Charles, and the enemy laid down their arms, Raginfred
only stipulating that he should retain his countship of Angers on giving
up his sons as hostages (724).

The next three years were occupied in the subjugation of south-eastern
Germany. Marching eastward through Suabia, whose warriors he compelled
to accompany him to the field, Charles advanced against the Bavarians.
After severe fighting, lasting over three campaigns, he returned in
triumph with much plunder, a troop of hostages, and the submission of
duke Hukbert. The allegiance of the Bavarians was still very insecure,
but something had been done to enforce the long-forgotten suzerainty of
the Franks. Alarmed by the subjection of Bavaria, the Suabian duke
Lantfrid rebelled, but Charles slew him in battle, and refused to
appoint any duke in his stead, in order that Suabia might more easily
amalgamate with the neighbouring districts when it had lost the prince
whose title symbolised its separate unity (730).

While Charles worked with the sword against the eastern Germans, he did
not neglect the other great means of binding them to the Frankish realm.
[Sidenote: Mission of Boniface to Germany.] It was during the time of
his Saxon and Bavarian wars that he lent his protection to the zealous
West-Saxon monk Winfrith, the indefatigable preacher and organiser who
won the name of the ‘Apostle of Germany’ by his long life-work among the
Bavarians, Thuringians, and Hessians. After spending some time with
bishop Willibrord at Utrecht, Winfrith had started eastward to find
newer and wilder fields for his activity. He fixed himself first among
the Hessians where no missionary had been seen since the death of St.
Suidbert.[44] Here he met with such success that the whole land was soon
reckoned Christian. Pope Gregory II., hearing of his triumphs, sent for
him to Rome, and consecrated him missionary bishop of all Transrhenane
Germany. After swearing implicit obedience to the Apostolic See for
himself and all his converts, Winfrith—or as he is more often called in
his later years Boniface—returned to the North with a papal letter of
credence recommending him to the Mayor of Austrasia. Charles undertook
the support of the new bishop with the greatest zeal: ‘without the aid
of the prince of the Franks,’ wrote Boniface, ‘I should not be able to
rule my church nor defend the lives of my priests and nuns, nor keep my
converts from lapsing into pagan rites and observances.’ It was the fear
of the wrath of Charles that kept the wild Hessians and Thuringians from
murdering the unarmed missionary, when he came among them with his life
in his hand, and hewed down the holy oak of Woden at Fritzlar in the
presence of thousands of heathen spectators. For the next thirty-one
years (723-54) Boniface went forth conquering and to conquer, churches
and abbeys rising everywhere beneath his hand, in the regions where the
Christian name had never before been known.

Footnote 44:

See p. 263.

While Charles had been busied on the Austrasian frontier a new storm was
rising in the South. The Saracens of Spain were once more crossing the
Rhone and the Cevennes to overrun southern Gaul. Luckily for the Franks
the efforts of the Moslems were most spasmodic; the governors of Spain
were, as a rule, more concerned with preserving their own authority
against revolted lieutenants than with extending the bounds of Islam.
The centre of government at Damascus was so far away that the Caliph’s
authority was only displayed at rare intervals, and as a rule the
various Arab and Berber chiefs who represented the sovereign were busily
engaged in deposing and murdering each other. In the first forty years
of Mussulman rule in Spain there were no less than twenty viceroys, of
whom seven came to violent ends.

We have already related the disastrous issue of the expedition of
El-Samah against Toulouse in 721. [Sidenote: Conquests of the Arabs in
Gaul.] It was not till 725 that the Saracens stirred again; in that year
the Emir Anbasa-ibn-Johim set out from Narbonne with a large army, and
subdued Carcassonne, Nismes, and the rest of northern Septimania as far
as the Rhone. He placed garrisons in the newly-conquered cities, and
then crossed the river and executed a rapid raid through Burgundy as far
as Aûtun in the heat of the summer. After sacking Aûtun he returned with
such speed to Spain that the Franks were totally unable to overtake him.
But Anbasa died before the year was out, and for seven years his
successors were too much engaged in strife with each other to renew the
attack on Christendom. Eudo, duke of Aquitaine, employed the respite in
conciliating the friendship of Othman-ben-abu-Neza, the Moslem governor
of Septimania, whom he won to his side by giving him his daughter in
marriage. It was probably in reliance on the aid of his son-in-law that
Eudo in 731 rebelled against the Franks, and once more declared himself
independent duke of Aquitaine. [Sidenote: Wars with Eudo of Aquitaine.]
Charles crossed the Loire, beat Eudo in the field, and ravaged the
country up to the gates of Bordeaux. The duke, however, persisted in his
resistance, till he learnt that another foe was about to attack him. His
son-in-law Othman had rebelled against Abderahman the viceroy of Spain,
and had been defeated and slain. After subduing the rebel, Abderahman
resolved to march against Othman’s ally and father-in-law. This drove
Eudo into making an abject and instant submission to his Frankish
suzerain.

In 732 the viceroy crossed the western Pyrenees at the head of the
largest Saracen army that Spain had yet seen, strengthened by
reinforcements from Africa and the East. Eudo stood on the defensive
against him and endeavoured to defend the line of the Garonne, but was
routed with the loss of almost the whole of his army. [Sidenote:
Abderahman invades Gaul, 732.] He fled beyond the Loire and threw
himself on the mercy of Charles Martel; meanwhile the Saracens stormed
Bordeaux, and moved slowly forward, ravaging the country on all sides
till they drew near to Poictiers. It was for no mere raid that they had
come on this occasion, but for the permanent conquest of Aquitaine,
perhaps even with the design of attacking Neustria also. Headed by the
strongest and most popular viceroy that Moslem Spain had yet known, and
mustering not less than seventy or eighty thousand men, they set no
limit to their desires.

In the hour of danger the great Mayor of the Palace was not wanting. He
did not rush hastily into the field, but drew together the whole force
of both the Frankish realms, though his firmest reliance was on his own
Austrasians. Leading an army whose like had not been seen since the
earliest days of the monarchy—for never had Neustria and Austrasia
combined for an expedition of such moment—he crossed the Loire near
Tours and advanced to meet Abderahman. It was close to Poictiers ‘_in
suburbio Pictaviensi_’ that the two great hosts faced each other, though
by some freak of the chronicler it is Tours that has given its name to
the battle in the pages of many of our histories. Abderahman and Charles
both felt that they were about to engage in no common contest. The fate
of Aquitaine, possibly of all Gaul, might be largely influenced by the
result of the oncoming battle between Christian and Moslem. For seven
days the two hosts lay opposite each other, each waiting for the enemy
to advance; at last Abderahman took the offensive, and his host poured
out from their camp to assail the Frankish line. Hardly a detail of the
great struggle has survived: we only know that the Saracen horsemen
surged in vain around the impenetrable masses of the Frankish infantry,
whose firm shield-wall ‘was frozen to the earth like a rampart of ice.’
[Sidenote: Battle of Poictiers, 732.] The Austrasians bore the brunt of
the fighting; ‘the men of the East huge in stature and iron-handed hewed
on long and fiercely; it was they who sought out and slew the Saracen
chief.’ The fight endured till night fell, when the invaders withdrew,
leaving Abderahman and many thousands more lying dead in front of the
Frankish line. In the darkness the Arabs had time to count up their
losses, which were so appalling that they hastily fled rather than face
another day’s fighting. Their tents, crammed with all the booty of
Aquitaine, their baggage and military stores, with thousands of horses
and enormous piles of arms, fell into the hands of the victorious
Franks. So ended the danger of western Christendom from the Moslem
invader, a danger which has not unfrequently been exaggerated,
especially by French writers anxious to glorify the Austrasian mayor,
whom they have chosen to make into a French national hero. It is
probable that even if Abderahman had been victorious nothing more than
the duchy of Aquitaine would have fallen into his hands, for this
invasion after leaving Bordeaux was degenerating into an incursion for
plunder, like that which in 725 had ended with the sack of Aûtun. The
Moslems of Spain had proved themselves during the last forty years so
factious and unruly, that we cannot believe that even under a leader of
exceptional ability they would have held together long and loyally
enough to ensure the conquest of central Gaul. Neustria, and still more
Austrasia, were states of a very different degree of vigour from the
decrepit Visigothic monarchy which fell in 711. Even if Poictiers had
fared as Aûtun, there was strength and courage enough in the Franks to
face many such another blow, and we may doubt the judgment of Gibbon
when he draws his gloomy forecast of the probable results of a victory
for Abderahman, ending in a picture of the Muezzin calling the True
Believers to prayer in the Highlands of Scotland, and the Mollahs of
Oxford disputing on the attributes of a Unitarian Godhead.

The remnants of the Saracen host made no attempt to hold Aquitaine, but
fled hastily across the Pyrenees, so that duke Eudo was able to reoccupy
Bordeaux and Toulouse, and rule once more over the whole of his former
dominions as the vassal of the Frank. Meanwhile, Charles returned to
Austrasia laden with booty, and was hailed by all western Christendom as
the greatest conqueror since Constantine. The Frankish poets and
chroniclers continued to celebrate his triumph with such fervour that
ere long the world was told and believed that he had slain 375,000
Saracens, with the loss of no more than 1500 men on his own side! If
only he had been more of a favourite with the Church he would have been
enshrined in history as the equal of his grandson, Charles the Great.
But the zeal with which he forwarded the conversion of Germany, and
smote the infidel, did not atone, in the eyes of the monkish historians,
for the high-handed way in which he had dealt with the Gaulish church.
Because he banished bishops, and forbade synods to be held without his
leave, and occasionally laid military burdens on church-land, he
received a very half-hearted blessing from the annalists of his day.

Charles spent the years that followed his great victory in regulating
the government of Burgundy, where he replaced most of the counts and
dukes by followers of his own, and in completing the subjection of
Frisia. The peaceful duke Aldgisl had been succeeded by a fierce pagan
named Boddo, whom the great mayor was soon forced to attack, when he
commenced to kill or drive away the missionaries of Willibrord and
Boniface. After slaying Boddo in battle, and burning every heathen
shrine in Friesland, Charles left the country so tamed that it did not
revolt again for full twenty years.

In 735, however, new troubles began in the south. Duke Eudo died, and
Charles thought the time was ripe for the complete incorporation of
the great southern duchy with the Frankish realm. He rode through the
land and forced its inhabitants to do him homage, but their subjection
was only the result of fear, and when he had returned home the
southerners proclaimed Eudo’s son Hunold as their duke. Hunold would
probably have been put down had not the Saracens begun once more to
stir. [Sidenote: Wars with Hunold of Aquitaine, 735-40.] Headed by
Yussuf-aben-Abderahman, the son of the chief who had fallen at
Poictiers four years before, they sallied out of Narbonne, crossed the
Rhone, and seized the old Roman city of Arles. The years 736-39 were
mainly occupied in driving back three successive Moslem inroads into
south-eastern Gaul, and Charles was so engrossed in this strife that
he consented to recognise Hunold as duke of Aquitaine, so that he
might have his hands entirely free for the greater struggle. Complete
success at last crowned his arms: Provence was swept clear of the
Arabs; Arles and Avignon, which the Infidels had seized and held for a
space, were recovered; Nismes, Agde, and Béziers, which they had
possessed since the great invasion of Septimania in 725, were taken,
dismantled, and burnt, and a great host was defeated in front of
Narbonne. That city, however, did not yet fall into the hands of the
Franks; together with the southern half of Septimania it still
remained a Saracen outpost, covering the passes of the eastern
Pyrenees. For twenty years more it was fated to remain unconquered;
not Charles but his son was destined to move forward the Frankish
boundary to the foot of the mountains. Meanwhile the Saracens of
Spain, cowed by the crushing blows of Charles the Hammer, abandoned
their attempt to push northward, and plunged into a weary series of
civil wars.

While Charles was engaged in his Saracen war, the puppet-king Theuderich
IV., in whose name he had been ruling for the last seventeen years,
chanced to die. [Sidenote: Four kingless years, 737-42.] So little had
the royal name come to mean, that the great mayor did not seek out the
next heir of the childless king and crown him, but ruled for the last
four years of his life without any suzerain. He did not himself,
however, take the kingly title, but continued to be styled mayor,
prince, or duke of the Franks; he cared not for name or style so long as
the real power was in his hands.

The reconquest of Provence and northern Septimania was the last of the
great mayor’s triumphs. But the four years which he had yet to live were
not without their importance. In 738 he compelled the Westphalian Saxons
on the Lippe and Ems to do him homage and pay tribute. In 739 the
organisation of the south German church was completed by the erection of
four bishoprics in Bavaria, which looked to Boniface, now archbishop of
all Transrhenane Germany, as their Metropolitan. Thus Bavaria became
ecclesiastically an integral part of the Frankish Church, even as
politically it had already become an integral part of the Frankish
empire. [Sidenote: The Pope asks aid from Charles, 739.] But though
Charles was a firm supporter of the Church in his own dominions, he
would not interfere in ecclesiastical disputes beyond his frontier. Pope
Gregory III. had plunged into a struggle with the Lombard king
Liutprand, and invited the pious ruler of the Franks to march against
the enemy of the Church. But Charles refused; Liutprand had given him
some aid against the Saracens, and he was not minded to attack an old
ally merely because the Lombard had fallen out with the Pope concerning
the duchy of Spoleto.

In the summer of the next year the great mayor began to feel his health
failing, though he had not yet completed his fifty-fourth year. He
determined to set his house in order ere yet the hand of death was upon
him, and summoned the great council of all the Frankish realms to meet
him. With its approval he proceeded to make over the rule of the kingdom
to his sons. There was no Merovingian king whose rights needed to be
taken into consideration, as Theuderich IV. had died four years back,
and had left no successor. [Sidenote: Charles divides his realm.]
Accordingly Charles and the council dealt with the land as if it had
already become the rightful inheritance of the house of St. Arnulf. The
great mayor had three grown-up sons; two, Carloman and Pippin, were the
offspring of his wife Rothrudis, the third, Grifo, was the son of
Swanhildis, a Bavarian lady whom he had taken as his concubine during
his Bavarian campaign of 725. Their ages appear to have been
twenty-seven, twenty-six, and seventeen. Charles handed over the rule of
Austrasia and Suabia to Carloman, and that of Neustria and Burgundy to
Pippin. It is said that he also contemplated leaving a small appanage on
the border of Neustria and Austrasia to Grifo. Bavaria and Aquitaine,
the two great vassal dukedoms, were not named in the division, though
the former fell under the influence of Carloman, and the latter under
that of Pippin.

Shortly after he had accomplished this division of his realms, Charles
died at Cérisy-on-Oise on the 21st of October 741. He had completed the
work which his father, Pippin the Younger, had taken in hand, for the
ancient boundaries of the Frankish empire had now been everywhere
restored, Aquitaine and Bavaria had been reduced to vassalage,
Christianity was now firmly rooted all over Frisia, Thuringia, and
Hesse. [Sidenote: Life-work of Charles.] The difficulties he had faced
were far greater than those which his father had to encounter. He had
rescued the fortunes of the house of St. Arnulf from the lowest
depths,—though Austrasia had been divided, though Neustria was hostile,
and though an energetic king was for once swaying the Frankish sceptre
and endeavouring to recover the lost privileges of his ancestors. Having
fought his way to power, Charles had then to face the one serious danger
from without which the Franks had yet encountered. He had met it without
flinching, and smitten the intrusive Moslem so hard that the blow did
not need to be repeated. For the future we hear of Frankish invasions of
Spain, not of Saracen invasions of Gaul. Charles then had won peace
without and within, he had reorganised the Frankish realm, raised it to
a pitch of power and glory which it had never attained before, and made
possible the triumphant career of his son and grandson. As the champion
of Christianity and the protector of the evangelist of Germany, he had
won a yet nobler title to honourable memory, and the complaints of the
Gaulish bishops, who murmured that his hand was too hard on the Church,
may be lightly disregarded when we add up the sum of his merits, and
salute him as the inaugurator of a new and better era in the history of
Europe.

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CHAPTER XVIII

THE ICONOCLAST EMPERORS—STATE OF THE EASTERN EMPIRE IN THE EIGHTH
CENTURY

717-802

Leo and the defence of Constantinople, 718—Importance of his
triumph—Social and economical condition of the Empire—Decay of Art
and Letters—Superstition and Iconoduly—The Iconoclast movement—Leo’s
Crusade against Images—Constantine Copronymus and his
persecutions—Successful wars of Constantine V.—Minority of
Constantine VI.—Intrigues and triumph of Irene—Restoration of
Image-worship—End of the Isaurian dynasty, 802.

In March 717 Leo the Isaurian became master of Constantinople, his
predecessor, Theodosius III., having abdicated and refused to continue
the civil war which had begun in the previous year. It is probable that
his resignation was due as much to fear of the oncoming of the Saracens
as to the dread of Leo, for the armies of the caliph Soliman were
already ravaging Phrygia and Cappadocia, and slowly making their way
towards the Bosphorus. Nothing save the consciousness of his own
capacity to stem the rising flood of Moslem invasion could have
justified Leo in taking arms against Theodosius in such a time of
danger; but fortunately for the empire he had not overvalued his own
power, and was destined to show that he was fully competent to face the
situation. [Sidenote: Leo the Isaurian, 717-40.] He was still a young
man, but his life had already been full of incident and adventure; he
was the son of parents of some wealth, who had migrated from the
Isaurian regions in the Taurus to Thrace. He had entered the army during
the second reign of Justinian Rhinotmetus, and after serving him well
had incurred the tyrant’s suspicion, and been sent on a dangerous
expedition into the Caucasus, from which he was not intended to return.
But he extricated himself from many perils among the Alans and Abasgi of
those distant regions, and came back in safety, to be made by Anastasius
II. governor of the Anatolic theme. He was an active, enterprising,
persevering man, with a talent for organisation, a great power of making
himself loved by his soldiery, and an iron hand. His later career shows
that he was more than a good soldier, being also one who looked deep
into the causes of things, and had formed his own views on politics and
religion.

Leo was only granted five months in which to prepare for the
long-dreaded advent of the Saracens. He spent this time in accumulating
vast stores of provisions, recruiting the garrision of Constantinople,
and strengthening its fortifications. On the 15th of August Moslemah
with an army of 80,000 Saracens appeared on the Bithynian coast; a few
days later a Syrian fleet of over 1000 sail appeared in the Propontis,
took the army of Moslemah on board, and transported it into Thrace. The
Saracen’s land-troops at once commenced the blockade of the capital by
land, while part of the fleet moved into the Bosphorus, to post itself
so as to block the mouth of the Golden Horn, in which the Imperial navy
had taken refuge. Leo delivered his first blow while the Saracen vessels
were passing up the Bosphorus; issuing out of the Golden Horn with many
galleys and fireships he attacked the enemy as they were trying to pass
up the straits, and burnt twenty ships of war. [Sidenote: Moslemah
besieges Constantinople.] The Saracen admiral then dropped down to the
southern exit of the Bosphorus, and left the northern exit free to the
Romans, so that Leo was able to continue to draw supplies from the Black
Sea.

The blockade of Constantinople was, therefore, imperfect, and we learn
without surprise, that while the Saracens in their camp on the Thracian
side of the straits suffered severely from the cold of an unusually
severe autumn and winter, the garrison within the walls was well fed and
also well housed, and continued to grow in self-confidence. Moslemah
sent in haste for reinforcements, and the Caliph supported him with
zeal; a second land-army marched up from Tarsus to Chalcedon in the
spring of 718, and occupied the Bithynian shore of the Bosphorus, while
a great fleet from Africa and Egypt joined the blockading squadron, and
moored at Kalosagros on the eastern side of the Bosphorus, in order to
watch the mouth of the Golden Horn, and stop the communication of the
city with the Black Sea.

The preservation of the free waterway to the north was all-important to
the defence. Accordingly, Leo determined to make a great effort to
destroy the Egyptian fleet. His galleys, many of them fitted with
apparatus for discharging the famous Greek fire, sailed out suddenly,
and fell on the Saracen ships as they lay moored against the Asiatic
shore. Many of the crews of the Egyptian ships were Christians, forced
on board against their will; these men either deserted to the
Imperialists or fled ashore and dispersed. The Moslem sailors on board
made some resistance, but being caught at anchor, and unable to manœuvre
or escape, they were soon overcome. The whole blockading squadron was
burnt or towed back in triumph to Constantinople. The rest of Moslemah’s
fleet made no further attempt to bar the Bosphorus, and allowed the
Roman galleys to dominate its waters. Leo then threw a force on to the
Bithynian shore, and dispersed the Saracen troops who were encamped
there. Thus the army of Moslemah was cut off from Asia, and could draw
no further supplies from thence. It had already exhausted those of the
nearer districts of Thrace, and by the summer of 718 was reduced to the
verge of starvation, living from hand to mouth on what its foragers
could procure. Many had already perished of privation, when Moslemah
heard that a great Bulgarian army had crossed the Balkans, and was
advancing against him. Leo had apparently convinced king Terbel that a
Saracen invasion of Europe was as dangerous to him as to the empire.
Moslemah detached a portion of his army to hold back the Bulgarians, but
near Hadrianople it was completely cut to pieces by the barbarians. The
Arab historians confess that 22,000 men fell in the rout.

This decided Moslemah to raise the siege. His fleet took the remains of
the land-army on board, and put it ashore near Cyzicus. [Sidenote: Siege
of Constantinople raised, 718.] From thence he forced his way back to
Tarsus, but of more than 100,000 men comprised in his original army and
its reinforcements, Moslemah brought back only 30,000. The fleet fared
yet worse; it was caught in a storm off the Lycian coast, and almost
entirely destroyed. The Romans captured many of the surviving ships, and
it is said that only five vessels out of a thousand got back to Syria.

Thus perished the last Saracen armament which ever seriously threatened
the existence of the East-Roman Empire. It was perhaps the most
formidable expedition that the Caliphs ever sent forth, far larger and
better equipped than the predatory bands which had overrun Africa and
Spain with such ease a few years before, or the army which Charles
Martel faced at Poictiers a few years later. It was no mean achievement
of Leo the Isaurian, that, ere yet firmly seated on his throne, and with
all his Asiatic provinces already overrun by the enemy, he should beat
off with ease such a mighty armament. His success must be ascribed
primarily to his own courage, energy, and skill, next to the impregnable
strength of the walls of Constantinople, and lastly, to the inexperience
of the Arabs on the sea, which compelled them to use unwilling Christian
seamen for their galleys, and prevented them from making any adequate
use of their momentary naval predominance. The fleet of Moslemah seems
to have been as useless and unwieldy as the fleet of Xerxes. But,
however much he may have been helped by the faults of his enemy, Leo the
Isaurian deserves the thanks of all future ages for staying the progress
of the Saracen invader at a moment when there was no other power in
eastern Europe which could have for a moment held back the advancing
Moslem. If Constantinople had fallen, it is absolutely certain that the
barbarous pagan tribes who occupied all eastern and central Europe would
have become the subjects of the Caliph, and the votaries of Islam. There
was no capacity for prolonged resistance in the Bulgarian, Avar, or
Slav; and if the East-Roman Empire had fallen, the wave of Saracen
invasion would have swept all before it up to the borders of Austrasia.
Whether the Franks could have stood firm if attacked on the east as well
as on the south is very doubtful. It is, therefore, fair to ascribe to
Leo the Isaurian an even greater share in the salvation of Europe from
the Moslem peril than is given to Charles Martel.

After the failure of Moslemah the victorious Leo had a breathing time
granted him, in which to reorganise the shattered realm that had been
left him by his predecessor. Although the Saracen war still went on, and
border raids never ceased till the very end of his reign, yet there was
no very serious danger in these latter bickerings, and Leo was able to
turn his attention to the internal affairs of the empire, without the
fear of having at any moment a dangerous invasion launched against him
from beyond the Taurus.

Leo was a reformer and an innovator in every branch of administration.
His dealings with the Church are those which caused most stir and are
best remembered, but his activity was as great in secular as in
ecclesiastical matters. It is unfortunate that most of the records of
his reforms have perished, nothing having been preserved except his
_Ecloga_ or new handbook of law. But enough survives to show the
character of his administration, and its effects in the succeeding
century are very marked.

We have already pointed out in an earlier chapter that the East-Roman
Empire had been in a state of rapid decay since the middle of the sixth
century. The downward movement that had begun with the wars and taxes of
Justinian had been accelerated under his successors, and had threatened
the actual destruction of the empire during the reign of Heraclius. That
the State struggled through all its troubles, and emerged bleeding at
every pore, shorn of many of its members, but still alive, was due to
the personal abilities of Heraclius and his descendants
Constantinus-Constans and Constantine V. [Sidenote: Decadence of the
empire.] But though the life still lingered in the body of the State, it
was yet in the most deplorable condition. Its purely Oriental
provinces—Egypt, Syria, and Africa—were gone for ever. Asia Minor was
dreadfully wasted by the repeated invasions of the Saracens. The Balkan
peninsula was, as regards more than half its extent, in the hands of the
Bulgarians and Slavs. In the seventh century Slavonic tribes had made
their way even into Hellas and Peloponnesus, there to occupy all the
more remote and mountainous corners of the land.

The disasters of the seventh century were accompanied by wholesale
displacements of population. In Europe the old Latin-speaking population
of Illyricum, Moesia, and Thrace had almost disappeared. Only a few
scattered fragments, the ancestors of the modern Roumanians and
Dalmatians, still survived, scattered among the Slavs of the Balkans. In
Asia the old provincial population had been grievously thinned by
Saracen wars, but, on the other hand, it had been recruited by great
bands of refugees from all the lands that the Saracen had overrun.
[Sidenote: Changes in population.] Many thousands of Armenians and
Persians had chosen to become subjects of the Emperor rather than the
Caliph, and in particular the Mardaïtes or Christians of the Syrian
mountains had emigrated wholesale into Asia Minor, after maintaining for
many years a struggle in the Lebanon against the power of the Saracens.
The European themes were now Greco-Slav, not Greco-Roman, in their
population: the Asiatic ones were far more Oriental and far less Greek
than in the sixth century. By the time of Leo this change was complete:
the empire was now Roman in nothing but name and administrative
organisation. On the other hand, it had not yet become Greek, as it was
to do in a later age. Its most important element in this and the next
two centuries was the Asiatic. Isauria and Armenia and the other
mountain lands of Asia Minor supplied most of the rulers of the empire.
They were not Orientals of the more effeminate and feeble type—like the
Syrians or Egyptians, whose only show of energy for many years had been
in the hatching of new heresies and the practice of irrational
asceticism—but were a bold vigorous race, hardened by many generations
of Persian and Saracen wars, the men who, ever since the fifth century,
had been supplying the core of the East-Roman armies.

The change in the population of the empire had been accompanied by
equally great changes in its social condition. Of these the most
important was the disappearance of the old Roman system of predial
serfdom, of great estates tilled by _coloni_ or peasants bound to the
soil and unable to leave their farms. This tenure, which lasted on in
the West till it became the basis of the feudal system, had in the East
entirely disappeared between Justinian and Leo the Isaurian. [Sidenote:
Decrease of serfdom.] In the time of Leo we find the soil cultivated
either by free tenants, who worked the estates of great land-owners at a
fixed rent, or by villages of free peasants occupying their own communal
lands. The very healthy outcome of this change was a great growth in the
proportion of freemen to slaves all over the empire: of this the most
important and beneficial result was that the government could reckon on
a much larger and better recruiting ground for the army than in those
earlier times, when the peasant was fixed to the soil and absolutely
prohibited from serving as a soldier. The cause of the vanishing of the
old tenure was, without doubt, the fact that the ravages of Slav,
Persian, and Saracen between 600 and 700 had broken up the old
landmarks, and either swept away or displaced the former servile
population. When many provinces had been, for many years at a time, in
the hands of foreign enemies, as happened to the whole of Asia Minor
during the first years of Heraclius and to great part of it in the
anarchy between 710 and 718, it was not wonderful that old social
arrangements which bore hardly on the bulk of the population tended to
vanish.

The disappearance of predial serfdom was a change for the better within
the empire. But in most other things the changes had been for the worse.
The civilisation of the whole realm had sunk to a very low level
compared with that which prevailed in the fifth century. [Sidenote:
Decay of arts and letters.] Arts and letters had reached the lowest
depth which they ever knew in the East. All literature save the
compiling of polemical religious tracts had disappeared: between 620 and
720 we have not a single contemporary historian: the story of the times
has to be learned entirely from later sources. Poetical, scientific, and
philosophical composition had also died off; except the _Heracliad_—the
wars of Heraclius told as an epic—of George of Pisidia, the seventh
century produced no single poem. The study of Latin had so far died out
that the great legal works of Justinian had become useless to the
inhabitants of the empire. They were a sealed book to all save the
exceptionally learned, so that systematic law had almost disappeared. In
the various themes we find justice being administered according to local
customs and usages, instead of by old Roman precept. Leo had to abridge
and translate Justinian’s Code, in order to render it either useful or
intelligible. When doing this he omitted great sections of it, in order
to bring the book into accordance with the needs and customs of the day,
for both manners and social conditions had been transformed since the
reign of Justinian. The decay of art had been as rapid as that of
letters: very few remains of the unhappy seventh century have come down
to us, but in those which are most numerous, the coins of the emperors,
we find the most barbarous incapacity to express the simplest forms. The
faces of Heraclius or Constantine V. are barely human: the legends
surrounding them are so ill spelt as to be almost unintelligible: the
letters are ill formed and ill cut.

But the most painful feature of the time was that the decay of arts and
letters had been accompanied by the growth of a dense superstition and
ignorance which would have seemed incredible to the ancient Roman of the
fourth, or even the fifth century. Although Constantinople still
preserved all the great literary works of antiquity, the minds of its
rulers were no more influenced by them than were the eyes and hands of
its craftsmen inspired by the great works of Greek sculpture that still
adorned the streets. It was a time of the growth of countless silly
superstitions, of witchcraft and necromancy, of the framing of wild
legends of apocryphal saints, and of strange misconceptions of natural
phenomena.

Among the most prominent tokens of this growth of irrational
superstitions was the great tendency of the seventh century towards
image-worship,—Iconoduly as its opponents called the practice. In direct
opposition to early Christian custom, it became common to ascribe the
most strange and magical powers to representations, whether sculptured
or painted, of Our Lord and the Saints. [Sidenote: Image-worship.] They
were not merely regarded as useful memorials to guide the piety of
believers, but were thought to have a holiness inherent in themselves,
and to be capable of performing the most astonishing miracles. Heraclius
possessed, and carried about with him as a fetich, a picture which he
believed to have been painted in heaven by angelic hands, and thought it
brought him all manner of luck. The crucifix over the door of the
imperial palace was believed to have used human speech. Even patriarchs
and bishops affirmed that the hand of a celebrated picture of the Virgin
in the capital distilled fragrant balsam. Every church and monastery had
its wonder-working image, and drew no small revenue from pious offerings
to it. The freaks to which image-worship led were often most grotesque:
it was, for example, a well-known practice to make a favourite picture
the god-father of a child in baptism, by scraping off a little of its
paint and mixing it with the baptismal water.

The act for which the name of Leo the Isaurian is best remembered is the
issue of his edict against these puerile superstitions, and his attempt
to put down image-worship all through his realm. Leo was not only a man
of strong common sense, but he was sprung from those lands on the
Mohammedan border where Christians had the best opportunity of comparing
the gross and material adoration of their co-religionists for stones and
paint, with the severe spiritual worship of the followers of Islam. The
Moslem was always taunting the Christian with serving idols, and the
taunt found too much justification in many practices of the vulgar.
Thinking men like Leo were moved by the Moslem’s sneer into a horror of
the superstitious follies of their contemporaries. [Sidenote:
Iconoclasm.] They fortified themselves by the view that to make graven
or painted representations of Our Lord savoured of heresy, because it
laid too much stress on His humanity as opposed to His divinity. Such an
idea was no new thing: it had often been mooted among the Eastern
Christians, though more often by schismatics than by Catholics. Of Leo’s
own orthodoxy, however, there was no doubt: even his enemies could not
convict him of swerving in the least from the faith: it was only on this
matter of image-worship that he differed from them. Wherever he plucked
down the crucifix he set up the plain cross—on the standards of his
army, on the gates of his palace, on his money, on his imperial robes.
It was purely to the anthropomorphic representation of Our Lord and to
the over-reverence for images of saints that he objected.

Leo was no mere rough soldier: his parents were people of some wealth,
and he had entered the army as an imperial _aide-de-camp_
(_spathiarius_), not as one of the rank and file.[45] It is probable
therefore that he was sufficiently educated to object to image-worship
on rational and philosophic grounds, not from the mere unthinking
prejudice picked up from Saracens or heretics. This much is certain,
that from the moment that he declared his policy he found the greatest
support among the higher officers of the civil service and the army.
Educated laymen were as a rule favourable to his views: the mass of the
soldiery followed him, and the eastern provinces as a whole acquiesced
in his reformation. On the other hand, he found his chief opponents
among the monks, whose interests were largely bound up with
image-worship, and among the lower classes, who were blindly addicted to
it. The European themes were as a whole opposed to him: the further west
the province the more Iconodulic were its tendencies. Of the whole
empire Italy was the part where Leo’s views found the least footing.

Footnote 45:

The story that he began life as a poor huckster travelling about with
a mule is one of the many inventions of his enemies the monks.

Leo began his crusade against image-worship in 726, eight years after
his great victory over the Saracens. The empire was by this time quieted
down and reorganised; two rebellions had also been crushed, one under a
certain Basil in Italy, the other under the ex-emperor Artemius
Anastasius, who had tried to resume the crown by the aid of the
Bulgarians. The heads of Basil and Artemius had fallen, and no more
trouble from rebellion was expected. Leo’s edict forbade all
image-worship as irreverent and superstitious, and ordered the removal
of all holy statues and the white-washing of all holy pictures on church
walls. [Sidenote: Leo’s Iconoclastic Edict.] From the very first the
emperor’s commands met with a lively resistance. When his officials
began to remove the great crucifix over the palace gate, a mob fell upon
them and beat them to death with clubs. Leo sent out troops to clear the
streets, and many of the rioters were slain. This evil beginning was
followed by an equally disastrous sequel. All over the empire the bulk
of the clergy declared against the emperor: in many provinces they began
to preach open sedition. The Pope, as we have already seen when telling
the fate of Italy, put himself at the head of the movement, and sent
most insulting letters to Constantinople. In 727 Rome refused obedience
to the edict, and what was of more immediate danger, the theme of Hellas
rose in open rebellion. The garrison-troops and the populace, incited by
the preaching of fanatical monks, joined to proclaim a certain Cosmas
emperor. They fitted out a fleet to attack Constantinople, but it was
defeated, and the rebel emperor was taken prisoner and beheaded. It is
acknowledged, however, even by Leo’s enemies, that he treated the bulk
of the prisoners and the rebel theme with great mildness. Indeed, he
seldom punished disobedience to his edict with death: stripes and
imprisonment were the more frequent rewards of those whom the Iconodules
styled heroes and confessors of the true faith. Leo was determined that
his edict should be carried out, but he was not by nature a persecutor:
it was as rioters or rebels, not as image-worshippers, that his enemies
were punished, just as in the reign of Elizabeth of England the Jesuit
suffered, not as a Papist, but as a traitor. Leo deposed the aged
patriarch Germanus for refusing to work with him, but did him no further
harm.[46] In general it was by promoting Iconoclasts, not by maltreating
Iconodules, that he worked.

Footnote 46:

The stories of the sufferings of Germanus are late inventions of
Iconodule writers.

The last thirteen years of Leo’s reign (727-40) were on the whole a time
of success for the emperor. He succeeded in getting his edict enforced
over the greater part of the empire, in spite of some open and more
secret resistance; only Italy defied him. From the reconquest of Rome he
was kept back by the necessity of providing for the defence of the East,
for in 726 the caliph Hisham—hearing no doubt of Leo’s domestic
troubles—commenced once more to invade the Asiatic themes. [Sidenote:
Wars with the Saracen.] In 727 a Saracen host pushed forward as far as
Nicaea, where it was repelled and forced to retire. There were less
formidable invasions in 730, 732, and 737-8, but none led to any serious
loss, and the imperial boundary stood firmly fixed in the passes of the
Taurus. The Saracen war practically ended with a great victory won by
Leo in person at Acroinon, in the Anatolic theme, where an army of
20,000 Arab raiders was cut to pieces with the loss of all its chiefs.
The house of the Ommeyad Caliphs was already verging towards its
decline: it never again prepared any expedition approaching the strength
of the great armament of Moslemah, which Leo had so effectually turned
back in 718, and its later sovereigns were not of the type of those
fanatical conquerors who had cut the boundaries of the empire short in
the preceding century. Leo had effectually staved off any imminent
danger to eastern Christendom from Moslem conquest for three full
centuries.

Leo was succeeded by his son Constantine, fifth of that name according
to the usual reckoning, sixth if the grandson of Heraclius be given his
true name, and not the erroneous title of Constans II. The second of the
Isaurian emperors, however, is less known by the numeral affixed to his
name than by the insulting epithet of Copronymus, which his Iconodulic
enemies bestowed on him—showing thereby their own bad taste rather than
any unworthiness on the part of their sovereign.

Constantine was a young man of twenty-two at the moment of his
accession. He had long acted as his father’s colleague, and was
thoroughly trained in Leo’s methods of administration, and indoctrinated
with his Iconoclastic views. [Sidenote: Constantine Copronymus, 740-75.]
He seems, while possessing a great measure of his father’s energy and
ability, to have been inferior to him in two respects. Leo had combined
caution with courage, and knew how to exercise moderation. Constantine
was bold to excess, did not understand half-measures or toleration, and
carried through every scheme with a high hand. Moreover, while Leo’s
private life had been blameless and even severe, Constantine was a
votary of pleasure, fond of pomp and shows, devoted to musical and
theatrical entertainments, and sometimes lapsing into debauchery. Hence
it is easy to see why he has been dealt with by the chroniclers of the
next century in an even harsher spirit than his father, and is
represented as a monster of cruelty and vice.

Constantine was no sooner seated on the throne than he showed that he
was determined to continue his father’s policy. He was at once assailed
by the rebellion of the Iconodulic faction: they induced his
brother-in-law Artavasdus, general of the Obsequian theme, to seize the
capital, and proclaim himself emperor, while Constantine was absent on
an expedition against the Saracens. All the European themes, where the
image-breakers were hated, did homage to Artavasdus. But the Anatolic
and Thracesian themes, the heart of Asia Minor, remained true to the son
of Leo. He showed his energy and ability by beating the sons of
Artavasdus in two battles, and besieging the rebel in Constantinople.
When the city was well-nigh reduced by famine, Artavasdus fled, but he
was caught and brought before Constantine. The emperor ordered him and
his sons to be blinded, and confined them in a monastery. Their chief
adherents were beheaded (742).

This sanguinary lesson to the Iconodulic party seems to have cowed them
to such an extent that they did not raise another open rebellion in the
long reign of Constantine (740-775). But they adhered as fully as ever
to their faith: nothing is so difficult to eradicate as a well-rooted
superstition, and Constantine’s strong hand was better fitted to cow
than to persuade. As the years of his reign passed by, and he found
image-worship practised in secret by thousands of conscientious
votaries, the emperor grew more and more determined to uproot it. After
a time he resolved to call in the spiritual sanction to aid the secular
arm: in 753 he summoned a general council to meet at Constantinople, but
it was œcumenical only in name. The Pope replied by anathemas of
contumely to the summons to appear; the patriarchs of Antioch,
Jerusalem, and Alexandria, safe under the protection of the caliph,
denied their presence. [Sidenote: Council of Constantinople, 753.] But
there assembled an imposing body of three hundred and thirty-eight
bishops, presided over by the Constantinopolitan patriarch, Constantine
of Sylaeum, and by Theodosius, metropolitan of Ephesus, son of the
emperor Tiberius II. This council committed itself fully to Iconoclastic
doctrine; it proscribed all representations of Our Lord as blasphemous
snares, for endeavouring to express both His human and His divine nature
in the mere likeness of a man, and thereby obscuring His divinity in His
humanity. At the same time it condemned the worship of images of saints,
because all adoration except that paid to the Godhead savoured of
heathenism and anthropolatry. The emperor had other scruples of his own,
on which he did not press the council to deliver a decision; he denied
the intercessory powers of the Virgin, and scrupled to prefix the
epithet ἅγιος, ‘holy,’ to the names of even the greatest saints. He
spoke, for example, of ‘Peter the Apostle,’ not of ‘the holy Peter.’ On
these awful depths of free thought the Iconodules of his own and the
succeeding generation wasted expressions of horror, worthy to be
employed on a Herod or a Judas.

Armed with the decree of the council of Constantinople, the emperor
proceeded, during the remainder of his reign, to indulge in what was a
true religious persecution, for he pursued the image-worshippers as
heretics, not as rebels or rioters. He inflicted the death-penalty in a
few cases, but the majority of his victims were flogged, mutilated,
pilloried, or banished. The most obstinate supporters of Iconoduly were
found among the monks, who not only resisted themselves, but never
ceased to use their vast influence over the mob in order to turn it
against the emperor. After a time Constantine resolved to make an end of
the monastic system, as being the strongest bulwark of superstition.
[Sidenote: Persecution of monks.] To uproot a habit of life founded on
the practice of centuries, and highly revered by the multitude was of
course an impossibility. Monasteries can only be suppressed, as they
were at the Reformation, if the nation sides with the sovereign.
Nevertheless, Constantine drove out and harried a vast number of monks.
He held that they were over-numerous, that they were men who shirked the
ordinary duties of the citizen, and that their profession was a cloak
for selfishness and sloth. He aimed not only at breaking up the
cloisters, but at secularising their inmates. On one occasion he had all
the monks and nuns of the Thracesian theme assembled, and offered them
their choice between marriage or banishment to Cyprus. The majority
chose the latter alternative, and became in the eyes of their
contemporaries confessors of the true faith. On another occasion he
exhibited in the Hippodrome a procession of unfrocked monks, each
holding by the hand an unfrocked nun whom he was to marry—the Iconodule
writers, as might be expected, call the backsliding nuns ‘harlots.’ The
deserted monasteries were either pulled down for building materials or
turned into barracks.

But it must not be supposed that Constantine’s activity was entirely
engrossed in persecuting the worshippers of images. The thirty-five
years of his reign were a period of considerable military glory, and the
emperor, who always headed his own armies, took the field for more than
a dozen campaigns. In Asia the fall of the Ommeyad Caliphs, accompanied
by savage civil wars among the Saracens (750), offered an unrivalled
opportunity for extending the bounds of the empire. [Sidenote: Wars of
Constantine.] Constantine pushed beyond the Anti-Taurus as far as the
Euphrates; in 745 he occupied the district of Commagene, and transported
all its Christian inhabitants to Thrace: in 751 he took Melitene on the
Euphrates, and the great Armenian fortress of Theodosiopolis. Part of
these conquests were afterwards recovered by the first Abbaside Caliph,
Abdallah Al-Saffah, but the rest remained to the empire as a trophy of
Constantine’s wars. Several Saracen attempts to invade Cappadocia and
Cyprus were driven back with great slaughter, and in general it may be
stated that Constantine effectually protected Asia Minor from the
Mohammedan sword, and that the country began to grow again both in
wealth and in population.

Nor was his work less useful in Europe. He completely reduced to order
the Slavonic tribes south of the Balkan, both in Thrace and Macedonia:
they had got out of hand during the troubles of the years 605-718, and
required to be subdued anew. Constantine carefully fortified the defiles
of the Balkans, which communicate with the valley of the Danube,
garrisoning once more the ruined castles which Justinian had built
there. This advance northward brought him into hostile contact with the
Bulgarians, who had long been accustomed to harry both the Slavonic and
the Roman districts of Thrace and Macedon, and could not brook to be
walled in by the new line of forts. Constantine waged three successful
wars with the Bulgarians; the first, lasting from 755 to 762, ended with
a great victory at Anchialus, after which king Baian sued for peace, and
obtained it on promising to keep his subjects from raiding across the
Balkans. The second war occupied the years 764-773. Constantine crossed
the Balkans, wasted Bulgaria, slew the new king Toktu near the Danube,
and was preparing in the next year to complete the conquest of the
country, when his whole fleet and army were destroyed by a storm in the
Black Sea (765). Long and indecisive bickering on the line of the
Balkans followed, and peace was made in 773 on the old terms. The last
Bulgarian war, provoked by an attempt of king Telerig to invade
Macedonia in 774-5, was notable for a great victory at Lithosoria, but
Constantine died while leading his army northward, and his successes had
no permanent result. The Bulgarians were not subdued by him, but they
were kept at bay, and so tamed that they were compelled to leave Thrace
alone, and content themselves with defending their own Danubian plains
from the attacks of the East-Romans.

The Saracen and Bulgarian being driven away from the frontier, we are
not surprised to hear that the empire flourished under Constantine.
[Sidenote: Constantine’s home government.] He planted many colonies on
the waste lands of the borders, settling the emigrant Christians of
Armenia in Thrace, and many Slavonic and Bulgarian refugees in Bithynia.
We are told that agriculture prospered in his time, so much that sixty
measures of wheat sold for a gold solidus. He exterminated brigandage,
and made the roads safe for merchants. He furnished Constantinople with
a new water-supply by restoring the aqueduct of Valens, broken more than
a hundred and fifty years before. When the capital had been devastated
by a great plague in 746-7, he more than replaced the lost thousands of
its population by new settlers from Hellas and the islands, for whom
employment was found by the increasing commerce which followed the
growth of internal prosperity. When he died in 775, aged fifty-seven, he
left a full treasury, a loyal and devoted army, and a well-organised
realm.

Constantine was succeeded by his eldest son Leo IV., often called Leo
the Chazar, because his mother Irene had been a Chazar princess. Leo had
acted as his father’s colleague for many years, and carried on
Constantine’s policy, though with a less harsh hand. [Sidenote: Reign of
Leo IV., 775-80.] In the beginning of his reign he showed toleration to
the Iconodules, but when they commenced to raise their heads again he
resumed his father’s persecuting manner, flogging and banishing many
prominent image-worshippers. He did not, however, object to monks, as
Constantine had done, but allowed them to rebuild their convents, and
even promoted some of them to bishoprics. It is probable that his
resumption of persecution in 777 was connected with the discovery of a
conspiracy against him in which his own brothers Nicephorus and
Christophorus had leagued themselves with the discontented party. The
treacherous Caesars were pardoned by their brother, and their associates
suffered banishment and not death.

Leo continued his father’s war with the Saracens. In 778 his armies
invaded Commagene, defeated a great Saracen host in the open field, and
brought back under their protection a great body of Syrian Christians,
who were settled as colonists in Thrace. The caliph Mehdy replied in the
next year by an invasion of the Anatolic theme: his army forced its way
as far as Dorylaeum, but retired in disorder, and much harassed by the
Romans, after failing to take that place.

Leo was of a sickly habit of body, and died after a short reign of five
years, in 780, before he had attained the age of thirty-two. He left the
throne to his son Constantine VI.,[47] for whom the empress Irene was to
act as regent, as the boy was only nine years of age. Leo’s early death
was a fatal misfortune alike for the Iconoclastic cause and the Isaurian
dynasty. The empress Irene, though she had succeeded in concealing the
fact during her husband’s life, was a fervent worshipper of images, and
the moment that the reins of power fell into her hands, set herself to
reverse the imperial policy of the last sixty years. [Sidenote:
Constantine VI. and Irene.] She began by putting an end to the
repression of the Iconodules, and then gradually displaced the old
ministers of state and governors of the themes by creatures of her own.
This led to a plot against her; the conspirators proposed to crown
Nicephorus, the eldest of her brothers-in-law, but they were discovered
and banished, while all the five brothers of the deceased emperor were
forcibly made priests, to disqualify them from seizing the throne.

Footnote 47:

Or seventh, if Constantinus-Constans is counted.

When the patriarch Paul died in 784, Irene replaced him by Tarasius, a
fervent image-worshipper, and then ventured to call a general council at
Nicaea, to which she invited pope Hadrian at Rome, and the Patriarchs of
the East, to send delegates. Under the influence of the empress the
council, by a large majority, declared the lawfulness of making
representations of Our Lord and the Saints, and bade men pay not divine
worship (λατρεία), but adoration and reverence (προσκύνησις) to them.
The recalcitrant Iconoclastic bishops were excommunicated. [Sidenote:
Restoration of image-worship, 785.] The doings of the council caused a
mutiny of the Imperial guard in Constantinople, for the greater part of
the army still adhered to the views of the Isaurian emperors. But Irene
succeeded in steering through the troubled waters, put down the mutiny,
and retained her power.

Meanwhile the reign of a child and a woman proved disastrous to the
empire. The Slavs of the Balkans burst into revolt, and the Saracens
invaded Asia Minor. The want of an emperor to head the army was
grievously felt, and Haroun-al-Raschid, the son of the caliph Mehdy,
ravaged the whole Anatolic and Obsequian themes as far as the Bosphorus.
Irene felt herself unable to cope with the situation, and bought a peace
by an annual payment of 70,000 solidi (784). Soon after the Bulgarian
king declared war, and ravaged Thrace after slaying the general of the
Thracian theme in battle.

Among these disasters Constantine VI. grew up to manhood, but his
mother, who had acquired a great taste for power, and feared to see her
son reverse her religious policy, long refused to give him any share in
the government. [Sidenote: Constantine seizes power.] She even made the
army swear never to receive her son as sole emperor as long as she
should live. The young emperor, after chafing for some time in his state
of tutelage, took matters into his own hands. In his twenty-first year
he repaired to the camp of the Anatolic troops, and there proclaimed
himself of age, and sole ruler of the State. He banished his mother’s
favourites, and confined her for some months to her own apartments in
the palace.

When he had firmly seized the helm of power, Constantine was weak enough
to take his mother again as his colleague on the throne, and to
associate her name with his in all imperial decrees. The ambitious and
unnatural Irene repaid his confidence by scheming against him. She had
grown so fond of power that she had resolved to win it back at all
costs. Constantine was, like his ancestors, a warlike and energetic
prince. He won several successes over the Saracens, and then engaged in
a Bulgarian war. His popularity was first shaken by a fearful defeat at
the hands of the Bulgarian king Cardam, by which he lost much of his
influence with the army. Shortly afterwards he entered into a fierce
struggle with the Patriarch and the clergy, having divorced, in spite of
their opposition, a wife whom his mother had forced upon him in early
youth, and espoused Theodota, on whom his own affections were set.
[Sidenote: Irene dethrones her son, 797.] Knowing that the Church was
wroth with Constantine for this outbreak of self-will, and that the army
no longer loved him as before, the wicked Irene determined to strike a
blow against her son. She suborned some of the young emperor’s
attendants to seize their master, and, when he fell into her hands, had
his eyes put out. He was then immured in a monastery, where he survived
for more than twenty years.

It was by a mere palace-conspiracy, not by an open rising, that the
unnatural mother had dethroned and blinded her son. It is, therefore,
all the more extraordinary to find that she was able to cling to power
for more than five years, in spite of the horror which her act had
caused. The gratitude of the image-worshippers to her, for having
restored to them the power of practising their superstition, partly
explains, but does not at all excuse the impunity which she enjoyed
after her cruel deed.

Irene’s five years of power (797-802) were disastrous at home and
abroad. Her court was swayed by two greedy eunuchs, Aetius and
Stauracius, on whom she lavished all the highest offices. Their
miserable quarrels with each other are the chief things recorded in the
annals of her internal government. Meanwhile the frontiers were overrun
by the armies of Haroun-al-Raschid. The Saracens harried the Anatolic
and Thracesian themes, and forced their way as far as Ephesus. Peace was
only granted when Irene consented to pay a large annual tribute to the
Caliph.

[Sidenote: Deposition of Irene, 802.] In 802 the cup of Irene’s
iniquities was full. To put an end to anarchy abroad and within, a
number of the chief officers of State, headed by the treasurer
Nicephorus, seized her by night, and shut her up in a nunnery. No one
struck a blow in her defence, for she was loved by no one, not even by
the Iconodules, for whom she had done so much. Nicephorus was proclaimed
as her successor, and ascended the throne without any disturbance.

Thus ended the house of the Isaurians, after eighty-five years of rule.
They had effected much for the empire; for the disasters of Irene’s
short reign had not sufficed to undo the solid work of Leo III. and
Constantine V. The boundaries were safer, the population greater, the
wealth largely increased, the armies more efficient than at the
commencement of the century. Even the Iconoclastic persecutions, though
they had failed to crush superstition, had done some good in rooting out
the grosser vagaries of image-worship. The Iconoclastic party still
subsisted, and was strong in the army and civil service; we shall see it
once more in power during the ninth century.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XIX

PIPPIN THE SHORT—WARS OF THE FRANKS AND LOMBARDS

741-768

Mayoralty of Pippin and Carloman—Their successful wars—Boniface reforms
the Frankish church—Abdication of Carloman—Pippin dethrones
Childebert III. and assumes the royal title—Quarrel of Aistulf and
Pope Stephen—The Pope calls the Franks into Italy—Pippin twice
subdues Aistulf—The Exarchate given to the Papacy—Martyrdom of St.
Boniface—Conquest of Narbonne—Long struggle with the dukes of
Aquitaine—Death of Pippin.

The events which immediately followed the death of Charles Martel showed
clearly enough that the house of St. Arnulf must still depend on the
power of the sword to guard its ascendency, and that it could only
continue to rule by continuing to produce a series of able chiefs. It
was fortunate for the Frankish realm that Pippin and Carloman were both
men of sense and vigour, though perhaps they did not attain to the full
stature of their father’s greatness. Not less fortunate was it that,
unlike the kings of the Merovingian house, they dwelt together in amity
and brotherly love, and undertook every scheme in common.

The moment that Charles was dead troubles broke out on every hand.
Grifo, the younger brother of the two mayors, declared himself wronged
in the partition of the kingdoms, seized Laon, and began to gather an
army of Neustrian malcontents. Theudebald, the brother of the duke of
Suabia, who had been overthrown in 730, raised the Alamanni in revolt in
Elsass and the Black Forest. Hunold, duke of Aquitaine, disclaimed the
suzerainty of the Frankish crown, while the Saxons refused the tribute
which had been laid upon them, and invaded Hesse.

The whole of 742 was spent by Pippin and Carloman in dealing with the
storm which had burst upon them. They began with crushing their unruly
brother, captured him, and sent him captive to a fortress in the
Ardennes. Next they marched against Hunold of Aquitaine, and harried the
southern bank of the Loire, but the duke retreated southward without
fighting, and other duties called away the two mayors before he was
subdued. It was now the dangerous rising in Suabia, in the very midst of
their realm, which demanded their attention. [Sidenote: Early campaigns
of Pippin.] They descended upon the Alamanni with irresistible force,
and soon subdued the whole land as far as the Bavarian frontier. But
there was yet more fighting to be done, and, ere they finished their
task, the two mayors had determined to legalise their somewhat anomalous
position as regents for a non-existent sovereign. They sought out and
crowned Childerich III., the last of the Merovingians, as feeble a
shadow as his long-deceased kinsman, Theuderich IV. So, after an
interregnum of six years, the Franks had once more a king.

It was three years before the authority of Carloman and Pippin had been
vindicated in every corner of the realm, but at last Aquitaine had
acknowledged once more its vassal obligations, the Saxons had been
chastised, and an attempt of Bavaria to make itself independent had been
crushed. The struggle had not been without its difficulties, and the two
mayors had been so hard pressed for resources, that they had followed in
their father’s steps by laying hands on Church property, compelling
bishops and abbeys to devote a certain portion of their landed estates
to the support of the war-expenses of the crown. Other dealings with the
Church had been as unpopular though less unorthodox; the Frankish clergy
were often irregular in their lives, lax in their spiritual duties, and
given over to all manner of secular pursuits. [Sidenote: St. Boniface
reforms the Church.] The mayors set the stern missionary enthusiast
Boniface to reform these evils. At the great synod of 745, to which all
the prelates of both Frankish realms were bidden, the great archbishop
entered into a campaign against clerical abuses of all sorts. At his
behest canons were passed against immoral life, pluralities, the
granting of benefices to unordained persons, the disobedience of bishops
to their metropolitans, the light assumption and rejection of the
monastic habit and vow, and the favouring of heresy. Boniface had also
much trouble with those who, headed by the Irish missionary bishop
Clement, refused obedience to the Roman See, a fault which the great
archbishop regarded as no less heinous than the open profession of
unorthodoxy. In all his doings he received the zealous support of
Carloman and Pippin. Ecclesiastical reform within was not unaccompanied
by ecclesiastical extension without. In these troubled years of the two
mayors, Boniface portioned out the newly-converted lands of central
Germany into the three bishoprics of Würzburg, Erfurt, and Buraburg, to
serve respectively as sees for Franconia, Thuringia, and Hesse. At the
same time was founded his great abbey of Fulda, the centre of piety and
learning in Transrhenane Germany during the succeeding age.

[Sidenote: Carloman abdicates, 747.] To the great surprise of all his
contemporaries, the mayor Carloman, on the completion of his task of
re-establishing order in Austrasia, laid down his sword, and assumed the
monk’s gown, in the year 747. ‘The causes no man knew, but it would seem
that he was truly moved by a desire for the contemplative life and for
the love of God.’ It was certainly no weakness or desire for inglorious
ease that led him to follow the example of his ancestor St. Arnulf, and
seek out a hermitage. He passed into Italy, obtained the blessing of
Pope Zacharias, and built himself a cell on Mount Soracte, in the Sabine
hills. We shall hear of his name but once again, seven years after his
abdication.

By his brother’s retirement Pippin became mayor of Austrasia as well as
of Neustria. He had one more struggle to wage ere all things were fully
beneath his hand. In 747 his brother Grifo escaped from prison, and fled
to Saxony, from whence he tried to stir up trouble. When Odilo duke of
Bavaria died, he seized that duchy, claiming it in right of his mother,
Swanhildis, who was of the ducal stock. Pippin soon drove him out, and
he was constrained to flee to Aquitaine. Bavaria fell to Tassilo, the
son of the late duke.

After the rebellion of Grifo we read in the Frankish annals the unusual
entry, that ‘the whole land had peace for two years’ (749-50). Being now
in complete possession of the Frankish realm, and fearing no foe from
within or from without, Pippin took the step which must always have been
present in the brains of his ancestors, since the day when the
over-hasty Grimoald had endeavoured to seize the royal power in 656.
Warned by Grimoald’s fate, Pippin the Younger and Charles Martel had
scrupulously refrained from claiming the title of king, and had
religiously kept up the series of puppet-princes of the old Merovingian
stock. Their descendant was now determined to bring the farce to its
end, and would not even wait for the death of the imbecile Childerich
III., whose vain name had for the last ten years served to head Frankish
charters and rescripts. Early in 751 the national council of the whole
realm was summoned, and eagerly approved of the removal of Childerich
and the election of Pippin as king. To bestow a still greater show of
legal authority on the change, Pippin then sent an embassy to Rome to
obtain the approval of the Pope. Its leader, Burkhard, bishop of
Würzburg, demanded of pope Zacharias ‘Whether it was well or not to keep
to kings who had no royal power?’ [Sidenote: Pippin dethrones Childerich
III.] The pontiff, whose chief desire was to win aid against the
Lombards by flattering the ambition of Pippin, made the answer that was
expected of him. ‘It is better,’ he said, ‘that the man who has the real
power should also have the title of king, rather than the man who has
the mere title and no real power.’ On the receipt of the Pope’s
encouraging message, which he regarded as freeing him from any religious
obligation resting on oaths sworn to the unfortunate Childerich, Pippin
once more summoned the Great Council of the Franks to meet. It assembled
at Soissons in October or November 751, and, in the ancient royal city
of Neustria, Pippin was first acclaimed as king, and lifted on the
shield, after the ancient Teutonic custom, by the unanimous voice of the
whole nation, and then anointed, as befitted a Christian sovereign, by
the great Austrasian archbishop Boniface. Childerich was shorn of his
regal locks, and sent to spend the remainder of his days in an obscure
monastery, instead of the hardly less obscure royal manor in which he
had hitherto dwelt.

Thus had the house of St. Arnulf at last reached the summit of its
ambition, and the Frankish race once more obtained a king whose busy
brain and strong right hand could make a reality of the title which for
four generations had been but a vain name, while borne by the last
effete Merovings. [Sidenote: Pippin as king, 752-768.] Raised on the
shield by the Austrasian counts and dukes, anointed by the Apostle of
Germany, blessed by the Roman pontiff, Pippin went forth conquering and
to conquer, into lands where the Frankish banner had not been seen for
many generations. Charles Martel vindicated the old frontier of the
realm, his son was destined to extend its bounds into regions where no
Frankish king had ever obtained a permanent footing.

The doings of Pippin the Short during the seventeen years of his kingly
rule fall into three main heads. First and most important are his
dealings with the popes and the kings of the Lombards, leading to his
two great campaigns in Italy. Of secondary moment are his conquests from
the Saracens and the Aquitanian dukes in the south of Gaul. His wars
against the Saxons are of minor importance only.

In giving his blessing to the accession of king Pippin pope Zacharias
had kept in view the aid which the Franks might grant him in his
quarrels with his Lombard neighbours. Zacharias died ere he had time to
demand a return for his complaisance, but his successor Stephen soon
claimed the gratitude of the newly-crowned monarch of the Franks.
[Sidenote: The Lombards and the Papacy.] The old Lombard king Liutprand
had died in 744, and his nephew Hildebrand, who succeeded him, had held
the throne for no more than a few months. The Great Council of the
Lombards deposed him for vicious incompetency, and elected in his place
Ratchis, duke of Friuli. The new king, a man of mild and pious
disposition, kept the peace which Liutprand had made with the Papacy
till 749, when, for reasons to us unknown, he advanced to attack
Perugia, one of the few places in Italy which still adhered to the
empire. Pope Zacharias visited his camp to plead with him in behalf of
peace, with the unexpected result that Ratchis not only raised the
siege, but laid down his crown and retired into a monastery, stricken,
like his contemporary Carloman, with the sudden horror of secular things
which occasionally fell upon the Teutonic monarchs of the seventh and
eighth century.

Ratchis was succeeded by his brother Aistulf, an ambitious and restless
monarch, who raised the Lombard kingdom to its widest territorial extent
by conquering the long-coveted Ravenna. [Sidenote: Aistulf takes
Ravenna, 752.] When he attacked the shrunken Exarchate it received no
help from Constantine Copronymus, who detested his Italian subjects as
obstinate image-worshippers, and was much occupied at the moment by his
Saracen war. Ravenna fell with hardly any resistance, and Eutychius, the
last exarch, fled to Sicily. Aistulf then busied himself in reducing the
independent duchy of Benevento to vassalage. His next project was to
annex the towns of the ‘ducatus Romanus’—the valley of the lower
Tiber—and to make the Pope his liegeman. Although he had concluded a
forty-years’ peace with the Papacy, yet, in 752-53, he was hovering
about the neighbourhood of Rome, and occupying the Umbrian and Sabine
borders of the ‘patrimony of St. Peter.’ At last his ambassadors
appeared before Stephen II. to demand the homage of Rome, and the
payment of an annual tribute. After trying in vain to scare off Aistulf,
first by the terrors of excommunication, and then by empty menaces of
applying for aid to Constantinople, which the Lombard derided, Stephen
bethought himself of the debt of gratitude which the Frankish king owed
to the Holy See. After ascertaining that his presence and demands would
not be unacceptable to king Pippin, he left Rome in October 753, and,
after making one more appeal to the Lombard king to grant him peace and
independence, crossed the Alps, and appeared before the Frankish Court
at Ponthion, near Bar-le-Duc.

His reception was all that he could have wished. [Sidenote: Pope Stephen
invites Pippin to Italy.] Pippin met him three miles from the town,
knelt before him on the roadside, and walked beside his stirrup to the
palace gate, leading his palfrey by the bridle, though the month was
January, and the snow lay on the ground. In the royal chapel, when the
court was assembled, Stephen, ‘with many tears and groans,’ laid before
the king the lamentable state of the Church, and besought him to bring
peace and salvation to the cause of St. Peter and the Roman State.
Whereupon Pippin swore an oath that he would grant him all he asked, and
use every endeavour to put him in possession of the exarchate of
Ravenna, as well as all the cities which belonged by right to the Roman
republic. It was to no purpose that an unexpected guest appeared in Gaul
to beg Pippin to swerve from his purpose. This was his brother Carloman,
who left his Sabine monastery to pray Pippin not to bring down the
horrors of war upon Italy—a request which seemed so strange to the
Church historians of the day, that they could only suppose that his mind
had been overpowered by diabolic delusions, or that he was yielding to
dread of the wrath of Aistulf. Pippin refused to listen to him, and bade
him quit the court, and take up his residence at Vienne, where he soon
afterwards died.

Meanwhile the Great Council of the Frankish realms was summoned to meet
at Cérisy-sur-Oise, and there the king announced to his assembled counts
and dukes that he proposed to make war on the Lombards, in order to
vindicate the rights of the Holy See. Won over by their king’s zeal, and
by the great gifts which Stephen II. distributed among them, the Franks
eagerly clamoured for war. In return for their goodwill the Pope
solemnly crowned Pippin, his wife Bertha, and his young sons, Charles
and Carloman, and pronounced a curse on any one who should ever remove
the house of Pippin from the Frankish throne.

In the summer of 754 the hosts of the Franks choked the Savoyard passes
with their multitudes, and prepared to force their way down into Italy.
Aistulf had mustered his army, and was ready to meet them. In the narrow
gorge of the Dora, hard by Susa, he fell on the Frankish vanguard; but
he suffered such a crushing defeat that he had to fall back on Pavia
without striking a second blow. Pippin followed, wasting Piedmont with
fire and sword, and soon beleaguered Aistulf in his royal stronghold.
[Sidenote: Pippin subdues Aistulf, 754.] Then, with an alacrity which
his conqueror should have found somewhat suspicious, Aistulf offered
terms of peace. He would do personal homage to Pippin, give him
hostages, and engage to restore to the Roman See all that was its due.
So a treaty was signed, Stephen was reconducted in triumph to Rome, and
Pippin returned beyond the Alps, proud that he had added Lombardy to the
list of states dependent on the Frankish crown.

On his homeward journey the king heard of the death of the great
archbishop of Mainz, the apostle of Transrhenane Germany. Zealous even
in extreme old age for the conversion of every subject of the Frankish
realm, Boniface had started on a missionary journey to East Friesland,
where paganism still held sway. As he lay encamped at Dokkum a great
multitude of wild heathen, indignant at the invasion of their last
retreat, fell upon him and slew him with all his companions. [Sidenote:
Martyrdom of St. Boniface.] His death was not long unavenged; the
Christian majority of the Frisians took arms, put down their pagan
brethren, slew many thousands of them and compelled the rest to submit
to baptism. By his martyr-death the great archbishop completed the
conversion of the land for which he had striven so much during his
lifetime. He was buried at Fulda in Hesse, where a great abbey was
reared over his shrine and became the centre of Christian life in the
Hessian lands whose apostle he had been. It would have afforded the
keenest pleasure to Boniface if he could have witnessed the zeal with
which his patron Pippin went forward with the task of reducing the
Frankish clergy to canonical discipline. In the year which followed his
martyrdom the Synod of Verneuil passed the most stringent laws against
evil-living, simony, the practice of secular avocations, and the other
failings of the clergy against which the archbishop had raged in his
lifetime.

The easy promises which king Aistulf had made when he was beleaguered in
Pavia had never been intended for keeping. When the Franks had withdrawn
from Italy the king found pretexts for delay, and did not restore to
Stephen II. a single one of the Sabine or Latin cities which he had
occupied in 753, still less the Exarchate of Ravenna, which the Pope had
impudently asked and fondly hoped to receive. [Sidenote: Aistulf attacks
Rome.] In the winter of 755-6 he took still more unmistakeable steps of
hostility; descending the valley of the Tiber he suddenly laid siege to
Rome. The walls of Aurelian were still too strong to be stormed, but
three months of blockade brought the citizens near to yielding. The news
that king Pippin had once more taken arms restored courage to Pope and
people, and ere long Aistulf was forced to raise the siege and hasten
north to defend Lombardy. Once more the Franks forced the defiles of the
Cenis, and cut to pieces a Lombard force which strove to stop the way.
For the second time Aistulf was forced into Pavia, beleaguered, and
compelled to sue for peace. This time he was given harder terms. Pippin
demanded one-third of the royal hoard of the Lombards, an annual
tribute, a larger body of hostages, and the instant surrender of the
Exarchate. The unwilling Lombard was forced to concede everything;
Frankish envoys received and handed over to the Pope, the cities of
Ravenna, Rimini, Pesaro, Forli, Urbino, and Sinigaglia, with all their
dependencies. [Sidenote: Pippin gives the Exarchate to the Pope.] Their
keys were brought to Rome and laid in triumph on the sepulchre of St.
Peter. Thus did the Pope become an important secular prince, by taking
over the old Byzantine dominions in central Italy. It would seem that
the theory by which he justified this usurpation was that the guard of
the possessions of the ‘Roman Republic’ in Italy was incumbent on the
emperor, but that Constantine Copronymus being an obstinate heretic his
rights fell into abeyance. The Pope then stepped forward as the
representative of the ‘Roman Republic’ in default of a Caesar, and
claimed possession of all that the Lombards had lately usurped.
Apparently he considered himself as ‘Patrician’ in the Exarchate, but as
a Patrician owing no duty or obedience to a heterodox emperor.

King Aistulf died in the next year, killed by a fall from his horse, and
the affairs of Italy troubled Pippin no more, Desiderius, duke of
Istria, the new Lombard king, being occupied with strengthening himself
against an attempt of the ex-king Ratchis to leave his cloister and
resume the crown. The rest of Pippin’s reign was mainly devoted to the
completion of the Frankish dominion in southern Gaul. Soon after his
proclamation as king his officers had recovered for him all the Saracen
towns in Septimania north of Narbonne. In 759 Pippin marched in person
to lay siege to that city, the last bulwark of Islam beyond the
Pyrenees. [Sidenote: Pippin takes Narbonne, 759.] The Christian
inhabitants of the place rose at his approach, slew the Arab garrison,
and opened their gates to the Frank. No help came from Spain, where
civil war was—as usual—raging, and the boundaries of the realm of Pippin
were advanced to the Pyrenees.

Of far greater difficulty was the conquest of Aquitaine, the last
achievement of Pippin. The old duke Hunold, the adversary of Charles
Martel, had retired into a cloister, and had been succeeded by his false
and restless son Waifer. On being summoned to give up some Frankish
refugees, and surrender certain church lands, the new duke took up arms
against his suzerain in 760; when Pippin appeared with all the host of
Austrasia and ravaged Berri and Auvergne, Waifer asked for peace, and
did homage. But the moment that his liege lord had departed home, he
flung his fealty to the winds and began to ravage Burgundy. Next year
the king returned in force and conquered Clermont and the rest of
Auvergne, to which in 762 he added Bourges and the land of Berri. Waifer
held out with the greatest obstinacy, and was confirmed in his
resistance by learning of the revolt of Tassilo, duke of Bavaria, who
judged the time favourable for freeing his duchy from the Franks.
[Sidenote: Conquest of Aquitaine, 767.] This gave Aquitaine a certain
respite, but by 766 Waifer had been driven beyond the Garonne, and saw
all his subjects except the Gascons compelled to do homage to Pippin. In
767 his capital Toulouse fell, and soon after his despairing followers
ended the war by murdering him and laying down their arms. Aquitaine was
now annexed to the Frankish crown, and divided up into counties after
the manner of the rest of the realm.

During the seven years of the war of Aquitaine king Pippin had found
time to put down Tassilo’s rebellion, and to chastise some sporadic
raids of the Saxons against whom he had at an earlier date (755)
undertaken a more serious expedition, which resulted in all the
Westphalian tribes doing homage to him. But the full subjection of this
wild race, whose obstinate paganism and unconquerable courage had
baffled ten generations of Frankish missionaries and kings, was reserved
for Pippin’s greater son.

[Sidenote: Importance of Pippin in Europe.] In the last years of his
reign Pippin occupied a central place in the affairs of Europe such as
no prince had held since the days of Theodoric the Great. Even the
Abbaside Caliph of Bagdad sent to solicit his alliance: troubled by the
revolt of Spain under the Ommeyad prince Abderahman, he endeavoured to
enlist the aid of Pippin for the driving out of the rebel. The Frank
wisely allowed the infidels to tear each other to pieces without helping
either party. The Eastern emperor Constantine Copronymus sent frequent
embassies to Gaul. One was designed to cajole Pippin into restoring the
Exarchate to the Byzantine realm. Another brought a proposal for wedding
Constantine’s eldest son to Gisela, Pippin’s only daughter. On a third
occasion the communication was on religious subjects, the East-Roman
envoys being clerics who were to endeavour to interest the Franks in the
Iconoclastic controversy, and induce them to join in the destruction of
images. The Byzantines held a discussion with some legates of the Pope
in Pippin’s presence, but got no assistance from the great king of the
West, in whose eyes the dispute was far from having the same importance
that it possessed in those of Constantine.

[Sidenote: Death of Pippin, 768.] In the fulness of years and honours
Pippin passed away on September 24th, 768, at St. Denis near Paris,
after a long illness which gave him time to divide the kingdom between
his two sons before he died. His character is somewhat difficult to
fathom: he possessed all the distinguishing traits of the great men of
the house of St. Arnulf, courage, ambition, energy, administrative
skill, but showed few special characteristics of his own. It is not easy
to detect any ruling passion or foible in his character, but his
interference in Italy and his assumption of the royal title show that he
lacked the extreme caution of his father. On the other hand his piety is
praised by contemporaries not in the half-hearted way in which that of
Charles was described, but in the most unqualified terms of laudation.
There are indications that he possessed somewhat of that taste for
literature which we find so well marked in his son Charles the Great.
But it is impossible to draw any complete picture of his personality:
even his nickname ‘the Short’ was given him not by his own
contemporaries but by the chroniclers of the eleventh century, who speak
from tradition and not from knowledge. Our idea of him must be
constructed solely from what we know of his life and actions.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XX

CHARLES THE GREAT—EARLY YEARS 768-785—CONQUEST OF LOMBARDY AND SAXONY.

Charles and Carloman—Final conquest of Aquitaine—Death of
Carloman—Character and habits of Charles—State of the Frankish
Empire—Charles interferes in Italy on behalf of the Pope—He subdues
the Lombard monarchy—His later expeditions into Italy—First conquest
of Saxony—Expedition to Spain—Rebellions of Saxony followed by its
reconquest and permanent subjection.

The moment that king Pippin had been laid beneath his marble slab near
the high altar of St. Denis, his two sons drew apart, and after retiring
a few leagues from the place of their father’s death hastily had
themselves saluted as kings by their counts and dukes, and anointed by
their bishops—Charles at Noyon, Carloman at Soissons (Oct. 9th, 768).

Now for the second time it appeared likely that the greatness of the
house of St. Arnulf might be wrecked by the old and evil Frankish custom
which prescribed the division of the kingdom among the sons of the king.
How that custom had worked under the Merovings we have already seen. At
the death of Charles Martel it had already threatened to break up the
power of his house, a danger which was only averted by the unexpected
abdication of the elder Carloman. Untaught by the experience of his own
youth Pippin the Short had committed the same mistake: old habit was too
much for him. On his deathbed, as we have seen, he divided his realm
between his two sons. He had, however, done his best to leave his
first-born so superior in strength to his brother, that the younger king
should not be able to compete with him. [Sidenote: Joint rule of Charles
and Carloman. 768-72.] Charles was left the warlike half of the kingdom,
all those Frankish lands, both Austrasian and Neustrian, from the Main
to the Channel, which supplied the chief fighting element in the
Frankish armies. In addition he obtained the western half of the
newly-conquered Aquitaine. Carloman’s share consisted of Burgundy, the
Suabian lands on both sides of the upper Rhine, and the whole
Mediterranean coast from the Maritime Alps to the border of Spain—the
old Provincia and Septimania. Moreover, he took the eastern half of
Aquitaine,—the country about Clermont, Rodez, Albi, and Toulouse. Though
well-nigh as large as the share of Charles, his kingdom was not nearly
so powerful, for the king who could command the swords of the Franks was
the one who could give law to the whole realm.

For reasons which we know not, Charles and Carloman had never been
friendly—perhaps the younger son as born after his father’s coronation
may have claimed some precedence over the elder, who was the son merely
of a Mayor of the Palace. We know at any rate that throughout the three
years of their joint reign they were always on the edge of a quarrel.
Nothing but the influence and advice of their worthy mother Bertha kept
them from an open rupture. Luckily for the realm both were good sons,
and listened to the maternal pleadings: still more luckily for the
Franks the life of the younger king was destined to be a short one. If
Carloman had been granted many days on earth, we may be sure that the
history of the last quarter of the ninth century would have repeated the
old fratricidal wars of the Merovings. The historians who wrote the life
of the great Charles are never tired of insisting on the many
provocations which his brother gave him. If Carloman had chanced to find
an apologist we might perhaps have learnt that Charles also gave
subjects for offence.

The commencement of the joint reign of the two kings was followed by the
prompt revolt of the newly subdued Aquitaine. Duke Waifer, the leader of
the Southerners in their long war with Pippin, being dead, his old
father Hunold emerged from his monastery to put himself at the head of
the insurrection. [Sidenote: Charles subdues Aquitaine 769.] The country
as far north as Angoulême—which was kept down by a Frankish garrison—at
once fell away to him, for the Gascons trusted that the two jealous
brothers would be too much occupied with their grievances against each
other to spare time for the reconquest of the south. Charles immediately
marched against the rebels, and invited Carloman to accompany him: the
younger king appeared for a moment, but only to hold an angry colloquy
with his senior and then to return to Burgundy. He did not, however,
take the opportunity to attack Charles, and the latter was able to
pursue, unaided but also unhindered, his campaign against the
Aquitanians. It was completely successful: he forced his way in arms as
far as Bordeaux, built a great fortified camp at Fronsac, which was
destined to remain as the central stronghold of the Garonne for many
generations, and so thoroughly beat Hunold that the old man fled for
refuge to Lupus, duke of the Gascons. But Lupus fearing the wrath of
Charles submitted to the conqueror, surrendered the fugitive, and asked
and obtained peace. Charles went home in triumph, replaced Hunold in a
cloister, and was henceforth undisputably king in Aquitaine. He divided
the country into countships on the usual Frankish system, and placed
these provinces in the hands not of natives, but of men from north of
the Loire whose fidelity he could trust. For the future Aquitaine gave
no trouble.

In spite of Carloman’s denial of help during the war in the south,
Charles was ere long persuaded by his mother to be reconciled to his
brother. But he took measures to keep him in check for the future by
making alliance with the neighbours of Carloman to north and south. He
concluded a treaty with Tassilo, duke of Bavaria, whose dependence on
the Frankish realm had of late grown very loose, and allied himself yet
more closely with Desiderius, the king of the Lombards, by wedding his
daughter Desiderata. This marriage was concluded in spite of the most
undignified shrieks of wrath on the part of the Pope, who besought
Charles ‘not to mix the famous Frankish blood with the perfidious, foul,
and leprous Lombard stock—a truly diabolical coupling, which no true man
could call a marriage.’ The Papacy had learnt so well how to utilise the
distant monarch of the Gauls against the neighbouring lord of Pavia,
that Stephen III. looked upon an alliance between Frank and Lombard as
high treason against the Holy See. The marriage, however, was
consummated in spite of Stephen’s threats, whereupon, with more prudence
than consistency, he suddenly forgot his fundamental objections to the
Lombard race, and made his peace with king Desiderius, lest he should be
left unaided to feel the weight of the Lombard arm.

Within a year, however, Charles suddenly repudiated his wife, alleging
that she was sickly and barren. Whether this was his real motive, or
whether political causes also influenced his action, we cannot tell; but
as Charles wedded immediately after his divorce a fair Suabian lady,
named Hildegarde, we may suspect that his motives were possibly those
which guided Henry VIII. of England in a similar circumstance. Be this
as it may, he won by this divorce the unrelenting and not unjustifiable
hatred of Desiderata’s father, the king of the Lombards. Trouble was
soon in the air. There was again a rumour that war was about to break
out between Charles and Carloman, in which Desiderius would have taken
part. [Sidenote: Death of Carloman.] Just in time to prevent such an
outbreak, king Carloman died (December 771). He left an infant son, but
the nobles and bishops of Burgundy and Alamannia made no attempt to set
the child on his father’s throne. Wisely suppressing any particularist
yearnings, they betook themselves to Charles at Corbeny-sur-Aisne, and
there did homage to him as king of all the Frankish realms. Gerberga,
the widow of Carloman, fled with her child and a handful of followers to
Lombardy, where Desiderius was now in a state of mind which made him
glad to receive any enemy of Charles’s, and more especially one who had
such a plausible claim to a share in the Frankish kingdom.

Once more, then, all the lands between the mouth of the Rhine and the
mouth of the Rhone, and from the Main to the Bay of Biscay, were united
under a single king. [Sidenote: Character of Charles.] And this was a
king such as none of those realms had ever seen before—a heroic figure,
whose like we have not met in all the three centuries with which we have
had to deal. Theodoric the Ostrogoth alone deserves a mention by his
side, and Theodoric had a smaller task and less success than the great
Charles. For the first time since we began to tell the tale of the Dark
Ages we have come upon a man whose form and mind, whose plans and method
of life, have been so well recorded that we can build up for ourselves a
clear and tangible image of him. Charles the Hammer, king Pippin, Leo
the Isaurian, and even the good Theodoric himself, are but shadowy
figures, whose outlines we can but dimly seize, but Charles stands
before us firm and masterful, a living man, whom we can understand and
admire.

[Sidenote: Charles’s person and habits.] ‘He was tall and stoutly
built,’ writes his chronicler, Einhard; ‘his height just seven times the
length of his own foot. His head was round, his eyes large and lively,
his nose somewhat above the common size, his expression bright and
cheerful. Whether he stood or sat his form was full of dignity; for the
good proportion and grace of his body prevented the observer from
noticing that his neck was rather short and his person rather too
fleshy. His tread was firm, his aspect manly; his voice was clear, but
rather high-pitched for so splendid a body. His health was excellent;
only for the last four years of his life he suffered from intermittent
fever. To the very last he consulted his own goodwill rather than the
orders of his doctors, whom he detested, because they bade him give up
the roast meats that his soul loved.’

Charles was always of an active habit of body. He delighted in riding
and hunting, and was skilled in swimming above other men. One of the
chief reasons that induced him to make Aachen his capital was that he
loved to take his sport in the great swimming-bath that was supplied by
its hot springs.

He always used the Frankish costume, and loved not foreign apparel. Next
his skin he wore a linen shirt and drawers, over these a woollen tunic,
with a silk border, and breeches. He wrapped his calves and feet with
the linen bandages that were worn ere stockings were invented, and drew
high boots over them. In winter he wore a coat of the fur of otter or
ermine, and over that a bright blue cloak. A sword with a golden hilt
was always at his side. On great days of state he assumed a tunic and
cloak embroidered with gold and clasped with gold buckles, girt his head
with a jewelled crown, and carried a sword with a jewelled hilt. But for
every-day wear his clothes were not more splendid than those of his
courtiers.

He was temperate in food and drink, more, however, in drink than in
food. No one ever saw him drink more than three cups at his dinner, and
he hated drunkenness, and chastised it among his suite. But eating he
loved in moderation, and would often say that church fasts were bad for
his health. There were never more than four dishes on his table, besides
a roast, which was brought him hot from the kitchen on its spit, and
this was his favourite food.

At dinner he used to listen to a reciter or a reader. He loved histories
and tales of the ancients, and also the works of St. Augustine, whose
_De Civitate Dei_ delighted him especially. He caused to be written out
and committed to memory the ancient Frankish epics about the deeds and
wars of the kings of old. He himself was well skilled in reading aloud
and singing to the harp, and took much pains in instructing others in
those accomplishments. All the liberal arts were dear to him, and he
loved learned men, and summoned them from all quarters of the world. To
study grammar he sent for the deacon Peter of Pisa. In most other arts
he had as his preceptor Alcuin, the Englishman, the most learned of all
men, with whom he studied rhetoric and dialectic, and spent much time in
acquiring a knowledge of astronomy; for he was curious about the times
and motions of the stars. He invented German names for the twelve months
of the year, and the twelve winds. He tried, too, to learn the art of
the scribe,[48] and used to keep paper and notebooks under his pillow in
bed, to practise his fingers at odd moments in forming the characters;
but he began too late in life to get very forward in this undertaking.
Moreover, he loved building, and designed the splendid cathedral of
Aachen, glorious with lamps and candlesticks of gold and silver, and
doors and railings of solid bronze. When he was erecting it, and could
not get marble columns near at hand, he had them brought all the way
from Ravenna and Rome. He was a great churchgoer, and always took care
that the service in his presence should be conducted with decorum. He
used to pray both in Frankish and in Latin, being equally skilled in
both tongues. For he had a great power of acquiring languages, and spoke
Latin excellently. Greek he learnt, but understood it better than he
spoke it. He had a free and fluent power of speech, and always expressed
his meaning in the clearest way.

Footnote 48:

We know that he could at least sign his name.

He slept lightly, and would often rise three or four times in the night.
When he was dressing for the work of the morning he would have not only
his friends in his chamber, but would bid the count of the palace bring
in litigants before him, and give a decision from his chair just as if
he was in a court of law.

Charles had one lamentable failing—he was too careless of the teachings
of Christianity about the relation of the sexes. He divorced his first
wife over-lightly, and when his third wife died he took to himself three
concubines at once, who bore him many bastard children. There were
scandals at his court, and two of his own daughters were known to be
living in open sin with two of his courtiers. Charles treated their
offence lightly, and never visited them with any rebuke. Not so his son,
Lewis the Pious, who regarded his sisters’ shame as so heinous that he
banished them when he came to the throne. It was the shortcomings of the
great king in respect of sexual morality which prevented the Church from
decreeing the beatification of its protector after his death. The spirit
of the times was well shown by the strange vision of the monk Wettin of
Reichenau, who, falling into a trance and wandering through the other
world, saw Charles in Purgatory, kept in purifying flames for a space,
till this sin should be purged from his soul.

So much do the chronicles tell us concerning the person and the manner
of life of Charles the Great; but there are other points which impress
us more than they did the contemporary observer. Considering that he was
so far in advance of his age in the cultivation of literature, art,
science, and architecture, that in administration and organisation of
his realm he so far surpassed all that had lived before him, and that he
rose in most of his conduct to such a high conception, alike of his
kingly office and of his personal responsibility for all his actions, it
is disappointing, though not surprising, to find that in some matters he
was not above the standard of his time. We have already alluded to his
loose living, but a worse failing was his occasional liability to
outbursts of inhumanity. The most savage of them was his massacre of
4500 unarmed prisoners of war at Verden, in 782. If the majority of his
wars were defensive, or at least necessary, there were a few—notably the
Lombard war—in which aggressive ambition was the main operating cause,
but this was a small failing in the unscrupulous eighth century. On the
whole we stand amazed at the magnanimity of the man, and are so much
struck with his splendid qualities, that we are perhaps in danger of
doing him wrong by judging him from our own moral standpoint. He rises
so far above that of the Dark Ages, that it scarcely occurs to the
historian to judge him by their low standard. Yet it is by remembering
what was the spirit of those times that his greatness is most readily
recognised.

We shall have to deal with Charles in three main aspects, as conqueror,
as organiser, and as the introducer of new theories of political life
into the mind of Christendom. It is difficult to keep the three lines of
activity clearly separate; for all through his reign, from first to
last, Charles was equally busy in each of these capacities. To make
clear the logical sequence of his doings it is sometimes necessary to
override their chronological order.

[Sidenote: Conquests of Charles.] At the first glance the most
extraordinary of the achievements of Charles appear to be his huge
additions to the territory of the Frankish realm by the annexation of
the Lombard kingdom, the Spanish march, Saxony, and the Slavonic lands
of the Elbe and the Drave to the inheritance that he had been left by
his father. These conquests represent a plan of operations deliberately
undertaken, carried out with an unswerving hand, and brought to a
successful finish. Charles had inherited from his father and grandfather
the duty, which they had undertaken, of protecting Christian Europe from
the Saracen, the Slav, and the heathen Saxon, the three enemies whom his
ancestors had driven back, but had not crushed. Closely connected with
this duty was the obligation to convert to Christianity the new subjects
whom he might subdue, to deal with Saxon and Slav as Charles Martel had
already dealt with Frisian and Thuringian, and so to push the outer
defences of Christendom into those parts of central Europe which had
hitherto been sunk in savagery and paganism. The Saracen alone it was
impossible to convert. He might be expelled, but then, as now, it was
found easier to exterminate the Moslem than to make him abandon Islam.
To these altogether useful and salutary tasks, which Charles inherited
from the great Mayors of the Palace, another was added, the less happy
plan of cementing a close union with the Papacy by crushing the nation
of the Lombards. Pippin had committed the Franks to this scheme, and
Charles did but carry out his father’s pledges. But by his action he
destroyed a healthy and vigorous Christian state, the possible base for
a strong Italian nationality, and committed the Frankish kingdom to a
profitless union, which was to bring forth seven centuries of discord.
What was worst of all, he firmly established the temporal power of the
Papacy, a curse to blast Italy for a thousand years. The gains which he
received in return,—the religious sanction bestowed on his royal power
by the Pope, and the imperial title, were but doubtful boons. It was to
be seen, ere the ninth century had expired, that the house of St.
Arnulf, like all the dynasties that succeeded it, lost more than it
gained by putting itself under obligations to the Roman See, and
consenting to accept from the Pope’s hands the style of emperor, and the
vague commission to protect the unity of Christendom,—a commission which
to the Roman pontiff meant little more than the duty of giving the
Church all that she chose to crave.

[Sidenote: Limits of Charles’s realm.] Before proceeding to relate the
earlier conquests of Charles the Great, it is necessary to explain the
boundaries of his realm as it stood at the moment of the death of his
brother Carloman. In Germany the border to north and south was held by
the two vassal peoples of Frisia and Bavaria, both now Christian, and
both reduced during the last fifty years to a more strict obedience to
the Franks than they had ever known before, but still possessing their
own native rulers, and not completely united to the monarchy. East of
Frisia lay the Saxons, the race whom the Merovings, and the great mayors
who succeeded them, had alike failed to tame. After three hundred years
of hard fighting the boundary of the Frank and Saxon remained where it
had stood in the year 500. To the east of Saxony lay races hardly yet
known to the Franks, the Slavonic tribes of the Abotrites, Wiltzes, and
Sorbs.

The duchy of Bavaria had as its eastern neighbours another group of
Slavonic peoples, the races who had once formed the ephemeral kingdom of
Samo,[49] Czechs and Moravians on the upper Elbe, Carentanians on the
Drave. Beyond these Slavs lay the realm of the Avar Chagan, now in a
state of decadence owing both to civil wars and to rebellions of its
Slavonic subjects.

Footnote 49:

See p. 177.

Between Frisia and Bavaria the frontier of the realm of Charles was held
by the Thuringians, now no longer under the rule of native princes, but
divided up into Frankish counties, as the adjacent Suabia had also been,
and forming like Suabia an integral part of Charles’s monarchy. The
neighbours of the Thuringians beyond the border were the Slavonic Sorbs.

The south-east frontier of the Frankish empire was formed by the main
chain of the Alps, beyond which lay the Lombard realm of king
Desiderius. Its south-western limit was the main chain of the Pyrenees,
beyond which lay the Saracens of Spain, over whom at this moment
Abderahman the Ommeyad had just succeeded in establishing his power, and
had formed a state independent of the Abbaside caliphate (755).

Of all the neighbours of king Charles, it was Desiderius the Lombard who
was first destined to feel the weight of the Frankish sword. He had not
only received Carloman’s widow Gerberga, when she fled from Burgundy,
but had shown some intention of proclaiming her son king of the Franks.
Yet it was not this machination against Charles that was the actual
cause of war, but the relations of the Papacy with Desiderius. Hadrian
I. had just been raised to the Papal throne. He was a Roman by birth,
and a great hater of the Lombards. [Sidenote: Quarrel of the Pope and
the Lombards.] He refused the friendship and alliance which Desiderius
proffered, and very shortly after he was consecrated began to pick a
quarrel with the unfortunate king. He demanded from him the important
towns of Ferrara and Faenza, as part of the Exarchate of Ravenna. They
had been promised to St. Peter, he said, in 757, while Desiderius was
struggling for the crown with king Ratchis, and must be handed over at
once. Desiderius, thinking that Charles would be too much occupied
beyond the Alps in settling the newly-annexed dominions of his brother
to allow of his appearance in Italy, replied to the Pope’s challenge by
sending a host into the Pentapolis, and seizing Sinigaglia and Urbino.
Shortly afterwards he raised the full force of the Lombard realm, and
marched against Rome. Hadrian had expected this. He fortified and
strongly garrisoned the city, and sent in haste to bid the lord of the
Franks to come to the help of St. Peter, and force the unrighteous
Lombards to carry out in full the treaty that king Pippin had imposed
upon them. The news of the despatch of this embassy seems to have
frightened Desiderius. He drew back to Viterbo, and, instead of pressing
the siege of Rome, sent an embassy to Charles, to explain that the
Pope’s charges were unfounded, as he was not keeping back anything that
really belonged to the Exarchate (772, autumn).

Desiderius, when he first attacked Rome, was not wrong in thinking that
Charles was already occupied in the affairs of his own kingdom. He had
that summer commenced the great undertaking of the conquest of Saxony, a
task which was to tax his energies for the next twenty years. In the
summer of 772 he had entered the land, compelled the Mid-Saxons or
Engrians to give him hostages, and cut down in token of triumph the
Irminsul, a holy tree reverenced by all the Saxon tribes, which stood in
a grove near Paderborn, and was adorned with many rich offerings. On his
return to Austrasia, Charles met the ambassadors of Hadrian and
Desiderius at Thionville. He did not swerve for a moment from his
father’s policy of supporting the Papacy through thick and thin. He sent
off ambassadors to bid Desiderius give up all the cities belonging to
the Holy See that he was unlawfully occupying, and told him to do
justice to St. Peter without delay. [Sidenote: Charles invades Lombardy,
773.] The Lombard king was far too angry at this interference to grant
the Frank’s demands. He swore that he would restore nothing. This drew
down Charles into Italy. Marching from Geneva he crossed Mont Cenis with
one division of his army, while his uncle Bernard with the rest followed
the route of the Great St. Bernard. Desiderius on their approach
fortified the Alpine gorges by Susa and Ivrea, and stood upon the
defensive. But a chosen band of Franks turned his position at Susa by
climbing over the hills, and when he saw himself outflanked, the Lombard
king abandoned his lines, and fell back on Pavia, exactly as his
predecessor Aistulf had done in the war with king Pippin. Charles
followed in haste, and laid siege to Pavia, which held out for many
months. Meanwhile Adelchis, the son of Desiderius, raised a second
Lombard army, and took post in front of Verona. Leaving part of his army
to maintain the blockade of Pavia, Charles marched against Adelchis,
compelled him to fly, and captured Verona, and afterwards Brescia and
Bergamo. The Lombard prince took to the sea, and sought Constantinople,
where he endeavoured to obtain help from Constantine Copronymus, then in
the midst of his Bulgarian war.

[Sidenote: Charles at Rome, 774.] As king Desiderius held out in Pavia
with the greatest obstinacy, and the siege was protracted for many
months, Charles resolved to spend the spring of 774 in visiting Rome,
and coming to a complete understanding with pope Hadrian. He reached the
city in Holy Week, and celebrated the Easter festivities with great
splendour: his communings with Hadrian ended in his confirming his
father’s grant to the Papacy of the whole Exarchate of Ravenna, from
Ferrara and Commachio on the north, to Osimo on the south, including all
the places that had been in dispute between the Pope and the Lombard
king. Later Roman writers pretended that Charles had even increased
Pippin’s liberal gift by adding to it north Tuscany, Parma and Modena,
Venice, and even the island of Corsica. But there is no trace of this in
contemporary authorities: the Frank never made over to the Pope the
sovereignty of Tuscany or Æmilia, much less of Venice—which was not his
to give,—or the distant island of Corsica.

[Sidenote: Fall of Pavia, 774.] On returning from Rome to the valley of
the Po, in the early summer of 774, Charles found Pavia ready to submit:
Desiderius and his men of war were wasted by famine and opened the gates
on condition that their lives should be spared. The king was sent as a
prisoner to Neustria, and died many years after as a monk in the abbey
of Corbey. His royal treasure was divided among the Frankish army.
Adelchis, the heir of the Lombard throne, had, as we have already
mentioned, escaped to the Byzantine court, and died there many years
afterwards as a ‘patrician.’

Instead of following Pippin’s example, and allowing Lombardy to survive
as a vassal state, Charles had himself proclaimed as king in Italy, and
compelled all the Lombard dukes and counts to do homage to him at Pavia.
Only Arichis of Benevento, the son-in-law of Desiderius, persisted in
maintaining his independence. For the future Charles styled himself
‘King of the Franks and Lombards, and Roman Patrician.’ Except that he
left a garrison in the capital, and handed over some of the more
important Italian cities to Frankish counts instead of leaving them in
the hands of their old Lombard governors, he made little change in the
administration of Italy. His rights of conquest were used with such
moderation, that Italy gave him very little trouble for the rest of his
reign. [Sidenote: Later expedition to Italy.] The only serious
disturbance that took place was in 776, when the dukes of Friuli,
Spoleto, and Benevento conspired to send for Adelchis from
Constantinople, and proclaim him as king of the Lombards. Hearing of
their plot, Charles descended upon Italy, slew the duke of Friuli in
battle, and compelled the duke of Spoleto to do him homage. Arichis of
Benevento was not subdued: he maintained his southern duchy intact,
though the Franks sent more than one expedition against him. Apparently
Charles regarded the homage of this distant state as too small a thing
to be worth his attention till 787, when he made another descent into
Italy in person, besieged Arichis in Salerno, and finally compelled him
to become his vassal. But in 792, Arichis being dead, his son Grimoald
shook off the Frankish yoke, and maintained a precarious
semi-independence for the future, though he was several times attacked,
and saw more than one of his chief towns stormed by the armies of
Charles. The great king himself, however, never entered Beneventan
territory again, and it was only his presence that could have sufficed
to subdue the unruly duke.

But we must return to the doings of Charles after his first conquest of
the Lombards in 774. During his absence the Saxons had once more taken
arms, and it was now high time to recommence the campaign against them,
which had been interrupted by the great expedition to Italy. The year
775 saw the first of the many subjections of Saxony which Charles was to
carry out during his long reign.

The Saxons were divided into four great divisions. Nearest the Frankish
frontier were the Westphalians, who dwelt on the Ems and Lippe, and
about the Teutoburger Wald. Beyond them to the east, the Engrians
occupied the valley of the Weser, from its mouth as far as the borders
of Hesse. East of the Engrians again, lay the Eastphalians, on the Aller
and Ocker and Elbe. The latter-named river separated them from the
Slavonic tribes of the Abotrites, who lived in the modern Mecklemburg.
[Sidenote: State of Saxony.] The fourth division of the Saxons were the
Nordalbingians, who dwelt in Holstein, beyond the Elbe, on the borders
of the Danes, and were the least accessible and most savage of their
race. Saxony was a land of wood, heath, and morass: only on its southern
border was there a hilly tract, the spurs of the Harz mountains. The
chief obstacle in the way of conquering the country was the fact that
the Saxons had no towns and very few fortified posts; they took refuge
in woods or swamps when the king’s army appeared, and came forth again
when he was gone. The land was quite roadless, so that the pursuit of
the flying tribes was very difficult. If surrounded and compelled to do
homage to Charles, they gave hostages, and paid great fines in cattle,
but the moment that the Franks had left their neighbourhood took arms
again. Nine times did one or other section of the Saxon race rebel, and
any will less strong than that of the inflexible Charles, would have
yielded before their intractable obstinacy. But he persevered to the end
in leading expedition after expedition against the rebels, punished
their revolts by fire and sword, transplanted incorrigible tribes across
the Rhine, built towns and castles all over the land, erected
bishoprics, and sent forth countless missionaries, till in the last ten
years of his life he had the satisfaction of seeing Saxony both
submissive and Christian.

[Illustration:

SAXONY
in the 9th century.
]

The expedition of 775 began by the invasion of Westphalia; after
dispersing its inhabitants, and storming their great entrenched camp at
Sigiburg, Charles passed on into Engria, defeated the Mid-Saxons and
crossed the Weser. This brought him into Eastphalia, which he ravaged as
far as the river Ocker. The Eastphalians, though the furthest of the
Saxons from the Frankish border, were the first to submit to Charles,
and their chief Hessi eagerly accepted Christianity, and did homage.
Soon after the Engrians also came in to the king’s camp, and gave up
hostages for their fidelity. [Sidenote: First conquest of Saxony. ] The
Westphalians held out last, and only submitted when Charles, on his
return towards Austrasia, ravaged their land from end to end, and made a
great slaughter of their warriors. The king left garrisons in two great
camps at Sigiburg and Eresburg, to hold down the Westphalians and
Engrians respectively. The hostages whom he brought back were mostly
boys of noble family, whom he sent to be brought up as Christians in
various Austrasian monasteries. Three-fourths of Saxony had thus done
homage to Charles, but their adhesion was of the most unstable sort.
They hated the Franks as ancestral enemies, and detested Christianity as
a Frankish device for subduing them body and soul. It was only the
presence of Charles and the fear of his return that kept them in order
for a moment.

No sooner had Charles started in the next year for his second invasion
of Italy, to put down the dukes of Friuli and Benevento, than the
Westphalians and Engrians at once took arms. They stormed the Frankish
camp at Eresburg, and slaughtered the garrison, but failed in a similar
attempt at Sigiburg. The moment that Charles heard of this rebellion, he
hastened back from Italy with such speed that he was already on the
Lippe before the Saxons suspected that he had crossed the Alps. So great
was their fear of him that the whole race at once asked for peace, and
sent their local chiefs to do him homage, ‘promising that they would all
be baptized, and hold their land as true vassals of the king.’
[Sidenote: Second conquest of Saxony, 776.] Only one chief, named
Witikind, refused to submit, and fled northward, to take refuge with the
Danes (776). Charles replaced his garrison in the fort of Eresburg, and
built another entrenched camp at Karlstadt. That winter he remained in
Austrasia, close to the Saxon border, in order to watch these
untrustworthy subjects. In the next spring he summoned the great
national council of the whole Frankish realm to meet at Paderborn, in
the heart of Engria, in order to mark the fact that Saxony had now
become an integral part of his dominions (777). ‘Then were a great
multitude of the Saxons baptized, and following their national custom,
they swore that they would forfeit their freedom and their lands if ever
they revolted again, according to their old habit, and unless they kept
their Christianity and their loyalty to king Charles and his heirs.’

To this great diet at Paderborn came some ambassadors from Spain,
bearing an unexpected offer of homage to the king. Abderahman, the
Ommeyad, had finally succeeded in conquering well-nigh the whole of the
Spanish peninsula from those of the Saracens who refused to accept him
as king. The last survivors of his opponents, in desperate straits, sent
to offer to become the vassals of Charles if he would preserve them from
the conqueror. These chiefs were Soliman Ibn-al-Arabi and Kasmin
Ibn-Yussuf, who were holding the towns of Barcelona, Gerona, and Huesca,
in the extreme north-east of Spain, on the Frankish border. Charles
determined to accept their offer, and so to thrust forward his frontier
beyond the Pyrenees, as to protect Septimania from Saracen raids by
interposing a new line of fortresses between it and the dominion of the
ruler of Cordova. He believed that Saxony was fully subdued, and might
be safely left alone to settle down into loyalty and Christian ways.

[Sidenote: Charles invades Spain, 778.] Accordingly, in 778, Charles led
his first great expedition into Spain. He himself crossed the Western
Pyrenees with the host of Neustria, while the levy of Austrasia,
Burgundy, and Lombardy, passed the Eastern Pyrenees. The two armies met
in front of Saragossa, and Charles there received the homage of the
rebel Saracen chiefs of Barcelona and Gerona. Saragossa, however, did
not fall, in spite of the great army that had been concentrated against
it, and Charles then wheeled about, and returned to Aquitaine by the
same way that he had come. His expedition had not proved a great
success. The Saracen rebels were untrustworthy vassals, nor was the only
other result of the campaign, the homage paid to Charles by the Spanish
Basques and Navarrese, after he had stormed their town of Pampeluna, a
more solid gain. Indeed, while the Frankish army was returning through
the passes of the Pyrenees, the Basques fell upon the king’s rearguard
and waggon-train, in the famous defile of Roncesvalles. They captured
much booty, and slew three great officials—Eggihard, the seneschal;
Anselm, the count of the palace; and Hruotland (Roland), the warden of
the Breton marches. The last-named, of whom history knows nothing save
his untimely fall at Roncesvalles, must have been a great man among the
Franks, for within a short time after his death he had become the hero
of many legends, which ultimately took shape in the famous _Chanson de
Roland_, wherein the Breton Margrave appears as second only to Charles
the Great among the hosts of Christendom (778).

The king had not long reached Aquitaine when the unwelcome news arrived
that the Saxons had broken their oaths, and were once more up in arms.
The exile Witikind had returned from Denmark, and called the turbulent
youth of Saxony into the field. The greater number of the tribes had
risen at his call, and a great Saxon host had stormed the new fort of
Karlstadt, and harried Hesse and the right bank of the Rhine, as far as
Deutz and the mouth of the Moselle, burning churches, and slaying the
peasantry of the country-side in revenge for the destruction of the
Irminsul and the ravages of Charles in 775-76. On receiving this
disturbing news the king made his way to Austrasia, sent out some troops
to clear the Rhine-bank of the Saxon plunderers, but put off the general
muster of the hosts of the Franks for a third conquest of Saxony till
next year. In the summer of 779, however, he again started on his
endless task, and marched through Westphalia with fire and sword. The
Westphalians once more surrendered, after a defeat in the open field;
the Engrians and Eastphalians yielded without fighting. [Sidenote:
Fourth conquest of Saxony.] In the next spring he returned again, held a
great diet at the headwaters of the Lippe, and divided all Saxony into
missionary districts, each to be worked by a colony of monks from
Austrasia, the first step towards the partition of the land into the
later bishoprics. This activity was rewarded by the conversion and
baptism of many thousand pagans. Charles assisted in person on more than
one occasion, when whole thousands of Saxons were simultaneously passed
through the waters of the Ocker and the Elbe (780).

He then turned off towards Italy. For the first time his departure was
not followed by an immediate outbreak of rebellion. The land remained
quiet for more than two years (780-82), and when he next passed that way
Charles thought it had advanced so far in the paths of peace that he
divided it up into countships, after the model of the rest of his
empire, and gave the charge of many of them to native Saxon chiefs, whom
he honoured with the title of count; the rest were placed under officers
of Frankish blood. He also published a code of laws for Saxony, in which
the harshest punishments were denounced against all those who still
clung to paganism. Such offences as sacrificing to Woden, burning
instead of burying the dead, openly deriding church ceremonies, or
robbing a church, were to be punished with instant death. Even those who
obstinately refused baptism, or who after baptism refused to fast in
Lent, and conform to church discipline, were threatened with capital
punishment.

It was perhaps in consequence of the issue of this cruel code that the
Saxons once more flew to arms in the autumn of 782. The rebel Witikind
returned from Denmark to put himself at their head, and most of the
northern tribes rose at his call. The news quickly brought Charles back
into the country. Once more he came in overwhelming force, and many of
the Saxons at once laid down their arms and submitted. But now for the
first time the king showed signs of violent wrath against the unruly
race. He could not pardon them for slaying priests, burning churches,
and washing off in mockery their marks of baptism. He bade each tribe
send to him in bonds those men who had been most prominent in casting
off Christianity and fomenting the last rising. [Sidenote: Massacre of
Verden.] Four thousand five hundred captives were brought before him by
their submissive countrymen in his camp at Verden, on the Aller.
Yielding to an impulse of revenge, Charles had the whole of this great
body of helpless prisoners beheaded. But, instead of cowing the Saxons,
this cruel execution only roused them to wild wrath. Every man in the
nation had lost some friend or relative in the great massacre, and even
the tribes which had hitherto been most submissive flew to arms. There
followed more than two years of unbroken fighting (783-85). Charles
marched twice through the land, burning and slaughtering over the face
of every Saxon _gau_, from the Ems to the Elbe, but the infuriated
rebels closed in behind him after he had passed, and still held out in
the woods and marshes. But the king only hardened his heart. He refused
to quit the land, and wintered, with all his army, near Minden, in the
heart of Saxony. At last, in the spring of 785, the perseverance of the
rebels began to quail; it was impossible to drive off the inflexible
king of the Franks, and they once more bethought them of submission.
[Sidenote: Fifth conquest of Saxony, 785.] The rebel chief Witikind
obtained a promise of his life if he would surrender and be baptized,
and, when he, with his chosen warriors, submitted, the great rising was
at last at an end. Once more the counts received charge of their old
districts, the missionaries returned to rebuild their ruined churches,
and the surviving Saxons submitted in despair to the yoke of the
Frankish warrior and the Frankish priest.

It was seven years before any further trouble arose in Saxony, though
there were to be four more partial risings between 792 and 804. But none
of these threatened seriously to shake Charles’s domination; they were
merely the last throes of Saxon despair, and cannot be compared to the
great struggle of 783-85, in which the fate of Saxon independence and
Saxon heathendom was really settled.

[Sidenote: Annexation of Bavaria.] It was shortly after the final
annexation of the Germans of the Elbe and Weser that Charles fully
incorporated the Germans of the upper Danube with his empire. His
vassal, Tassilo, duke of Bavaria, had been a somewhat unruly and
disobedient subject. He was pardoned for more than one outburst of
disloyalty, but when he was treated with kindness and consideration he
behaved no better than before. At last, in 788, he was deprived of his
duchy, which was cut up into countships and put under Frankish
governors, while he himself was sent to end his days in the Neustrian
monastery of Jumiéges.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XXI

THE LATER WARS AND CONQUESTS OF CHARLES THE GREAT

785-814

Wide scope of the later conquests of Charles—Outlying provinces governed
by his sons—Conquest of the Baltic Slavs—Subjection of Bohemia—Wars
with the Avars and their final subjection—Hostilities with the
Eastern Empire—Conquest of the Spanish March—Later revolts of the
Saxons—Wars with the Danes.

King Charles had now come to the end of the first of the stages of his
conquests, and the nearer enemies of the Frankish kingdom had been
reduced to subjection. With comparatively little trouble the fertile
Lombard plain had been won; after long toil and exertion the pathless
woods and moors of Saxony had been taken within the boundary of his
realm. But his schemes of conquest had a much wider scope than the
annexation of Lombardy and Saxony. Before Christendom could be reckoned
as safe from all foes without, there were more realms to be won, more
marches to be made secure. By pushing his frontier up to the Elbe and
the Julian Alps, Charles had taken up the ancient feuds of the Lombard
and the Saxon with their eastern neighbours, the Avar and the Slav.
Moreover, there was still the Spanish border to be made firm, for the
expedition of 778 had resulted in no permanent gain; the unstable
allegiance of Barcelona and Gerona was once more being paid to the
Ommeyad king at Cordova, not to the lord of the Franks.

The second period, therefore, in the record of the conquests of Charles
the Great includes the history of the making firm of his new eastern and
south-western borders. But this is not, like the first fifteen years of
his reign, a time of complete conquest and incorporation of races who
were near akin to the Franks. All the Teutonic peoples of central Europe
were already gathered beneath the sceptre of Charles; the tribes with
which he had now to do were strangers to the Franks, not only in
religion, but in blood and language. [Sidenote: Wide scope of Charles’s
schemes.] The work of Charles in the East in the second period of his
reign was to make the Slav and Avar harmless, by compelling their
princes to pay homage and tribute, not by occupying their realms with
Frankish garrisons, or carving them up into countships and marches. In
the West, on the other hand, his task was to build up a strong border
against the Moor, by conquering, one by one, the fortresses between the
Pyrenees and the Ebro. The Moslem had to be driven out, since there was
no hope of converting him. In the towns from which he was expelled a new
population grew up, neither purely Spanish nor purely Frank, but the
mixed race of the Catalans, in whose veins Romano-Spanish, Visigothic,
Aquitanian, and Frankish blood was mingled in various proportions, so
that they have always differed very considerably, both in character and
in language, from the inhabitants of the rest of the peninsula. But the
history of the foreign policy of Charles during the second period of his
reign contains much more besides his dealings with the Slav, the Moor,
and the Avar. He had frequent troubles with the East-Roman Empire,
arising from their disputed boundaries in Italy. In the very end of his
reign he met and turned off the first assault of the Danes on the
Frankish realm, an attack insignificant in itself, but portending the
gravest dangers in the future. We find him interfering beyond the
British sea with the affairs of Northumbria, and at the same time
extending his hand far to the south to seize the Balearic Isles. Even to
the distant Abbasside Caliph at Bagdad his fame was known, and Haroun’s
ambassadors sought the court of Aachen to concert an alliance with him.

In the second half of his reign Charles very frequently took the field
in person, but was not so constantly at the head of his armies as during
the period 773-85. [Sidenote: Charles makes his sons kings.] He had now
three growing sons, whom he intrusted with the charge of three important
sections of his realm, and he looked to them to guard each that portion
of the frontier of the Frankish empire which bordered on his own
sub-kingdom. Charles, the eldest of the three, ruled in western Neustria
(Anjou, Maine, Touraine); Pippin, the second, in Lombardy; Lewis, the
youngest, in Aquitaine. Charles would thus be specially concerned with
the unruly Bretons of Armorica, who twice made unsuccessful risings in
his father’s reign (786 and 799). Lewis was in charge of the Saracen
frontier along the Pyrenees. Pippin had to keep watch over the duke of
Benevento, as well as to turn his attention to the Avars on the
north-east of Italy. But the three princes were not strictly confined
each to his own sphere. Charles was occasionally sent against the
Saxons; Lewis conducted at least one campaign in southern Italy; Pippin
more than once took charge of an attack on the Slavs of Bohemia.
Whenever, in short, the great king could not march in person against a
rebel or a foreign enemy, he would send one of his sons to take his
place. He did not allow them to become completely localised and
engrossed with the affairs of their respective governments, but often
kept them with him at Aachen for many months at a time.

In reviewing the later conquests of Charles the Great it will be most
convenient to follow the geographical order from north to south, rather
than the chronological order of each campaign, for his arms were engaged
in so many quarters at once that an attempt to tell his doings in a
purely annalistic form leads to dire confusion.

On the North-East the Frankish border, after 785, was fringed by
Slavonic tribes, all ancient enemies of the Saxon. [Sidenote: Conquest
of the Northern Slavs.] These were the Abotrites in the north—in the
modern Mecklemburg—the Wiltzes beyond them in western Pomerania, and the
Sorbes in Brandenburg, on the Havel and Spree. These tribes, like their
kindred whom we have already met in the Balkan peninsula, were rude
peoples, and not very formidable enemies, owing to their subdivisions
under petty princes, and their incapacity for union. Though numerous and
not unwarlike, all the Slavs between Elbe and Oder were subdued by
Charles in a single campaign. He crossed the Elbe in 789 with an
Austrasian army, strengthened by levies of Frisians and of Saxons, who
served gladly against their ancestral foes. The terror of his name seems
to have stricken the Slavs with dismay. After a very slight resistance,
first the Abotrites and their chief king Witzin, then the Wiltzes and
their chief king Dragovit did homage to Charles, gave him as many
hostages as he chose to demand, and consented to pay him a tribute and
to receive the Christian missionaries whom he prepared to send among
them. The Frankish army marched through moors and woods till it saw the
Baltic at the mouth of the Peene in Pomerania, and then returned with
some booty and no loss to the banks of the Rhine. So thoroughly were the
Slavs subdued that during the next revolt of the Saxons they did not
take the opportunity of disowning their homage to Charles, but came to
help him against the rebels (795). Witzin, prince of the Abotrites, was
actually slain by the Eastphalians while in arms for the Franks, and his
death was well revenged by the king, who harried the lands along the
Elbe with exceptional severity to atone for his ally’s slaughter. In a
later Saxon rising (798) we again find the Abotrites taking arms at the
bidding of Charles. Their new king Thrasuco reconquered the
Nordalbingians without Frankish aid, and brought their chiefs in bonds
to the king’s feet, ‘whereupon Charles honoured him marvellously, and
gave the Slavs great gifts.’ [Sidenote: Wars of Dane and Slav.] Ten
years later the same prince and people fought valiantly against the
Danes when they invaded the northern frontier of Charles’s realm, though
their neighbours the Wiltzes on this occasion deserted to the enemy. The
latter people, however, were subdued again in 812, at the very end of
the great king’s reign, so that he left his eastern boundary
undiminished at his death. On the whole the Slavs of the North were not
by any means the most difficult to rule of the many races with whom
Charles had to deal.

With their fellow Slavs more to the south, the Czechs of [Sidenote:
Subjection of Bohemia.] Bohemia, the Franks had comparatively few
relations. The vast uninhabited tract of forest and mountain called the
Böhmerwald seems to have long kept them apart. But in 805-6 the king
sent against them his son and namesake Charles the Younger, who twice
wasted all the valley of the upper Elbe, and finally compelled the
chiefs of the Czechs to acknowledge their dependence on the Frankish
empire by paying tribute.

South of Bohemia, along the Danube and the Raab and Leithe, the realms
of Charles bordered on the Tartar tribe of the Avars, ancient enemies
both of the Lombards and of the emperors of Constantinople. The Avars
had of late years fallen on evil times. [Sidenote: War with the Avars.]
They were vexed with civil wars so much that none of their princes any
longer ruled the whole race, or could call himself by the title of
Chagan, the old name of their supreme ruler. Yet, though wasted by their
own dissensions, and by the revolts of the Slavonic tribes who were
their vassals, the Avars could not keep from their old habit of making
descents on their neighbours. They drew down their doom on themselves by
invading, in 788, at once the Lombard march of Friuli and the vassal
duchy of Bavaria. When next he had leisure, two years later, Charles
planned an invasion of their land on the largest scale. He himself
marched down the Danube with an Austrasian and Saxon army, burst through
the long line of fortifications with which the Avars had strengthened
their border, and wasted their lands as far as the Raab. At the same
moment a great Lombard host entered the valley of the Drave, pushed into
the heart of Pannonia, beat the Avars in the field, and stormed their
great circular camps. The complete subjection of the whole tribe would
have followed in the next year if Charles had not been called away by a
Saxon revolt, which kept him employed during the two next campaigning
seasons. The king himself never again took the field against the Avars,
but his son Pippin and Eric duke of Friuli continued the war on his
behalf. Twice they captured the great ‘ring,’ or royal camp, between
Danube and Theiss, the central stronghold of the Avar race, and sent its
spoils to Aachen in such quantities that Charles was able to send Avaric
trophies as gifts to all his friends, even to such distant kings as Offa
of Mercia. [Sidenote: The Avars subdued.] At last the spirit of the
Avars was so much broken that their chiefs, or ‘Tuduns,’ came of their
own accord to Aachen to do homage to Charles, and offered to receive
Christianity. Their submission was accepted. The king appointed one of
them to rule the whole race as his vassal, and bade him assume the
ancient title of Chagan (805). This prince was baptized by the name of
Abraham, paid a regular tribute to the Franks, and kept his subjects for
the future from the dangerous temptation of meddling with the Lombard or
Bavarian border. The Avars were, however, in a state of decay at this
time, and their race and kingdom were ere long to be swept away by the
invading Magyars.

The same fate which befell the Tartar Avars fell also upon their
southern neighbours and former vassals, the Slavs of the Save and Drave.
These Carantanians (Carinthians) and Slovenians were subdued by the arms
of Charles’s Bavarian and Lombard subjects, and became dependants of the
Frankish empire, forced to pay tribute and do homage, but not wholly
incorporated with the realm.

We have already spoken in a previous chapter of the dealings of Charles
with Italy. He never succeeded in fully subduing the duchy of Benevento,
though its dukes were several times compelled to do him homage when he
marched in person against them. Italy was finally put under charge of
Pippin, the king’s second son, who was given the royal title and
authority there as his father’s delegate. Pippin, besides the task of
striving to hold down Benevento, had also to cope with the intrigues of
the East-Romans in Italy. The Constantinopolitan emperor had still a
foothold in the peninsula at Naples, Reggio, and Brindisi, and still
enjoyed the homage of the half-independent peoples of Venice and Istria.
Luckily for the Franks the Eastern realm was during the most important
years of Charles’s reign, under the weak hands of the empress Irene
(780-90 and 797-802) and the usurper Nicephorus I. (802-11.) They
bitterly resented the establishment of a new power in Italy, and the
assumption of the imperial title by the Frankish king, which they
regarded as the worst insult that could be put upon the majesty of the
Eastern Empire, which claimed to be the sole and legitimate heir of
Augustus and Constantine. [Sidenote: Wars with the East-Romans.] But
their efforts went little further than endeavouring to stir up trouble
in Italy by means of the Lombard prince Adelchis, the son of king
Desiderius, who had fled to Constantinople and become a Byzantine
patrician. He tried to make more than one descent on Italy, but met with
uniform ill-success. The only serious fighting between Frank and
East-Roman was in the years 804-10, when Nicephorus I. undertook several
expeditions against Italy to avenge the revolt of Venice. In the
first-named year, a party among the Venetians, who were torn by civil
strife, called in the Franks and transferred their allegiance to
Charles. Nicephorus sent out a fleet which harried the coasts of Tuscany
and the Exarchate, but could make no solid impression on the Lombard
kingdom. A little later the East-Roman party in Venice got the upper
hand, and once more handed the city over to the Byzantines. Contented
with the recovery of his vassal-state, Nicephorus then made peace with
Charles. The only net result of the war had been that the Franks got
permanent possession of Pola and the other coast-cities of Istria, which
had hitherto been East-Roman. Michael Rhangabe, the successor of
Nicephorus, went so far in allying himself with Charles, that he
consented to recognise him as Emperor of the West, a concession accepted
with pride by the Franks, and regarded as a lamentable token of weakness
by the Constantinopolitans (812).

One of the consequences of the conquests of Charles in Italy was to
bring the Franks into collision with the Saracen pirates, who infested
the central Mediterranean, making their harbourage in the ports of the
islands which face the western coast of the peninsula. [Sidenote: Wars
with Saracen pirates.] At a date which cannot be accurately fixed, the
Franks took possession of Corsica and Sardinia, hunting out the Saracen
colonists who had conquered the islands from the East-Romans some fifty
or sixty years before. In 799 the Franks also took possession of the
Balearic islands. These distant dependencies were attacked and ravaged
by fleets from Spain on more than one occasion, but they were held down
to the close of the reign of Charles. They were given in charge to the
counts of Genoa and Tuscany, who seem to have been able to raise a
considerable fleet, and more than once gained naval victories over the
plundering Moor.

But the most serious struggle between Charles and the Moslems took place
in Spain, where during the whole of the second period of his reign the
fighting was almost continuous. The permanent advance of the Christians
beyond the Pyrenees began with the capture of Gerona in 785. The conduct
of the war fell mainly into the hands of Lewis, the third son of
Charles, whom his father had named king of Aquitaine, and trusted with
all the affairs of the south-west. He and his chief captain and
councillor William, count of Toulouse—a great hero in the Frankish
romances—had to deal with the two first Ommeyad kings of Cordova,
Abderahman (755-88) and Hisham (788-897), both strong and capable
rulers, from whom it was by no means easy to win territory. [Sidenote:
Conquests in Spain.] Nevertheless the Christian border slowly advanced,
owing to the seditious and turbulent Moslem governors, who were always
rebelling against their masters, and calling in Frankish aid. In 795 the
newly-won land beyond the Pyrenees—around the towns of Gerona, Cardona,
Urgel, and Ausona—was made into a separate government, the March of
Spain, and intrusted to a Margrave of its own, instead of forming a
dependency of the duchy of Septimania. Barcelona, the greatest town of
Catalonia, was added to the March in 797, by the treachery of its
governor Zeid, who, failing in a rebellion against his master at
Cordova, handed the place over to the Franks. The Moors recovered it for
a moment in 799, but king Lewis then came over the Pyrenees with the
whole levy of Aquitaine, and laid siege to the town. It held out for
nearly two years, but fell in 801, conquered by famine, after the Franks
had walled it in with a circumvallation, and sat before it in their huts
for the whole winter of 800-801. The Moorish population departed _en
masse_ after the surrender, and the great city was re-populated with
‘Goths’ from Septimania. The Franks were now firmly established beyond
the Pyrenees, and in the last ten years of Charles’s reign subdued the
whole southern slope of the mountains from Pampeluna as far as the mouth
of the Ebro. Tarragona, the second town of Catalonia, fell in 809, and
Tortosa, the great fortress which commanded the lower course of the
Ebro, in 811. After this the Franks were able to cross the river, and
ravage the wide plains of Valencia; it was probably their advance in
this direction that induced Al-Hakem, the third Ommeyad ruler of
Cordova, to sue for peace in 812, ceding to the Christians all that they
had gained beyond the Pyrenees. The Franks were not destined to hold
permanently the entirety of their conquests, but Barcelona and all the
towns north of it were lost to Islam and won for Christendom: these
strongholds guarded the Aquitanian frontier against Saracen inroads with
success, and were ultimately to form the nucleus of the more important
half of the Christian kingdom of Arragon.

Such were the foreign conquests of Charles the Great. But his offensive
campaigns were not the only wars in which blood was shed during the
later years of his reign. There were also troubles, though of
comparatively insignificant scope, within the interior of his realm. We
have already alluded to two fruitless attempts of the Bretons of
Armorica to resume their ancient independence. These were easily
crushed, but not so the later Saxon rebellions. [Sidenote: Later Saxon
revolts.] It was seven years after the pacification of 785 before the
unruly dwellers by the Elbe and Weser rose again, but in the eighth
summer some of the districts of the extreme north took arms again and
relapsed into their ancestral heathendom, ‘returning like the dog to his
vomit,’ in the words of the contemporary chronicler. The insurrection
spread widely among the Eastphalians and Nordalbingians in the following
year (793), and was not finally put down till 794, though it never
extended over the whole land, as did the great risings of the early part
of the reign of Charles. Ere two years more were passed there were new
troubles among the Engrians and Nordalbingians, which required the
presence of Charles: but it says much for the growing strength of his
power in the country that he was able to suppress them by means of
armies composed partly of Christian Saxons, and partly of the loyal
Slavs of the Abotrite tribe. The last outbreak in the land was as late
as 804: it extended only over the northern tribes, and was suppressed by
the summary transportation to Gaul of the whole of the unruly
Nordalbingian race, the greatest offenders among the rebels. Charles
settled 10,000 of their families in small colonies among the Neustrians,
and gave their vacant lands as a gift to his vassal, the king of the
Abotrites. This was the last Saxon rebellion: henceforth ‘they abandoned
the worship of evil spirits, and gave up the wicked customs of their
fathers, and received the sacrament of Christian baptism, mingling with
the Franks till at last they were reckoned one race with them.’
[Sidenote: Complete subjection of Saxony.] The complete subjection and
conversion of Saxony is marked by the creation of the first bishoprics
in the country at this period. Charles established bishops at Bremen,
Münster, and Paderborn in 804-6, to serve respectively as the religious
centres of northern, western, and southern Saxony. Others were
afterwards added at Hamburg, Osnabruck, Verden, Hildesheim, Minden, and
Magdeburg, but these foundations belong to the next generation. Round
these bishops’ sees grew up the first towns of Saxony, for hitherto its
inhabitants had lived a purely rural life, and never gathered within
walls.

The possession of Saxony brought Charles in the end of his reign into
hostile contact with a race almost unknown to his ancestors, but
destined to be only too well known to his sons—the Danes of the Jutland
peninsula and the Scandinavian isles, who dwelt beyond the Eider on the
Nordalbingian border. The advent of a new and militant Christian power
into the recesses of the unknown North seems to have stirred up the
Danes to unwonted activity. They must have heard from Witikind, and the
other Saxon exiles who took refuge with them, many tales of the untiring
energy and unrelenting severity of the great king of the Franks, and
feared lest his strong hand would be stretched out beyond the Eider to
add them to the list of his tributaries, and force them to accept his
religion. [Sidenote: Wars with the Danes.] To guard against the further
advance of the Franks, king Godfred built in 808 all along his frontier,
at the narrowest point of the isthmus of Schleswig, a great earthwork
from sea to sea, long known as the Dannewerk, and famed in wars down to
the last conflict of German and Dane in 1863. But Godfred did not
confine himself to defensive works; he began to make piratical descents
all along the Frisian and Flemish coasts as far as the mouth of the
Seine, and at the same time attacked the Abotrites and Wiltzes, the
Slavonic vassals of Charles on the Baltic. Godfred did much damage in
Frisia, and actually succeeded for a moment in crushing the Abotrites
and subduing the Wiltzes. He gave the Franks much trouble, since he
ravaged all the coast where it was unguarded, but took to his ships
again when a large army was sent against him. In 810 he penetrated so
far into Frisia, that he spoke, in boasting mood, of paying Charles a
visit at Aachen. But in the same year he was murdered by his own people,
and his nephew and successor Hemming made peace with the Franks. The
peace was ill-kept, for we hear of isolated Danish raids in the last
years of Charles’s reign and a fleet of war-ships, which were built in
the ports of Neustria for the defence of the coast, does not seem to
have protected the Frisian waters very efficiently.

But Charles did not survive to see the serious development of the Danish
attack: he died before his realm had suffered any serious loss from
their ravages, and must have been far from suspecting that ere he was
fifty years dead these half-known and somewhat despised foes would
pierce through the Frankish empire from end to end, and even sack his
own chosen dwelling, the royal palace of Aachen.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XXII

CHARLES THE GREAT AND THE EMPIRE

Survival of the Theory of the Empire in Western Europe, and especially
in Italy—Its influence—Troubles of Pope Leo III.—He crowns Charles
on Christmas Day 800—Consequences, immediate and remote, of the
coronation—The Papacy and the Empire—Charles as administrator and
legislator—His encouragement of Literature, Architecture, and
Science—His later years and death.

While narrating the never-ending wars of the great king of the Franks,
we have barely found time to mention the internal changes which he
wrought in the condition and constitution of his realms. Of these the
first and foremost was his introduction of a new political theory into
the government of Western Christendom, when he caused himself to be
crowned emperor by Pope Leo III. in the memorable year 800.

We have had occasion to remark in an earlier chapter that the theory of
the universal dominion of the Roman Empire had long survived the
extinction of any real power of the emperors in most of the countries of
Western Europe. Theodoric the Ostrogoth and Chlodovech the Frank had
been proud to acknowledge themselves as the first subjects of the
Constantinopolitan Caesar, and to receive from his hands high-sounding
titles and robes of honour. Till the middle of the sixth century Gaul,
Spain, and Italy had all owned a nominal allegiance to the empire, and
their homage had only been denied when Justinian by his bold attempt to
recover the whole of the West had forced the Teutonic kings to take arms
against him in their own defence. Then Baduila, Leovigild, and
Theudebert had disclaimed their allegiance, and banished the imperial
name from their coins and their charters. The last practical traces of
the old Roman connection had been lost in Spain when the soldiers of
Heraclius were driven out by Swinthila (623),[50] and in Gaul when the
encouragement and the subsidies of Maurice had failed to sustain the
pretender Gundovald (585).[51] Yet there still lingered on in the minds
of the educated classes a memory of the ancient empire; curious turns of
expression in chroniclers of the seventh century often show us that they
still remembered the old theory of the world-wide rule of Rome. A
Spanish chronicler writing in the seventh century can still call the
East Roman armies ‘the soldiers of the _respublica_.’ Subjects of the
Frankish kings in Gaul still dated their letters by Constantinopolitan
indictions.

Footnote 50:

See page 224.

Footnote 51:

See page 170.

In Italy, of course, the tradition of the unity of Christendom under the
emperors was in no danger of being forgotten. Appeals to the ancient
temporal and spiritual supremacy of Rome were the most powerful items in
the Pope’s stock of arguments, when a Gregory or a Zacharias stated his
pretensions to patriarchal authority in the West, or denounced the
wickedness of the intrusive Lombard. The personal ambition of the Popes
was always leading them to indulge in fond reminiscences of the ancient
glories of the Empire. The vanity of the degenerate populace of Rome
sometimes found vent in futile claims that they, ‘the Roman senate and
people,’ really were the heirs of Augustus and Constantine, while the
Caesar at Constantinople was nothing more than a mere Greek. [Sidenote:
The Empire and the West.] When, by the rupture between Leo the Isaurian
and Pope Gregory II., Rome practically passed out of the hands of the
Eastern Augustus, it was easy enough for an Italian to maintain that
Constantine Copronymus or Leo the Khazar had no longer any true right to
use the Roman Imperial title. And the Italian malcontent would add, not,
of course, that Rome had ceased to form part of the Roman Empire, but
that the title of emperor had passed away from the heretical Isaurian
house, and fallen into abeyance, while the empire itself still existed,
for its cessation had grown to be inconceivable to the Italian mind.

The Italians, and to a less extent the Franks, were sorely puzzled by
the long continuance of the anomalous condition of affairs, when for
sixty years the titular emperors had remained heretics, and had failed
to maintain their hold on Rome. Nor was the position improved when the
Eastern Empire relapsed into orthodoxy indeed, but at the same time
passed into the hands of an empress-regnant, a thing repugnant to all
those who remembered the ancient Roman horror of a woman’s reign. Irene
herself, too, had obtained the crown by such a series of crimes against
her son, that not merely constitutional jurists, but all right-minded
men shrank, in spite of her extreme orthodoxy, from the idea of
recognising in her the legitimate ruler of Rome.

More than once during the long quarrel between the Popes and the
Isaurian emperors there had been some talk of electing a separate
Augustus to bear rule over Roman Italy,—those districts of the peninsula
which were not in the hands of the Lombards. [Sidenote: Tendencies to
separation in Italy.] The scheme had not been carried out, mainly
because the Popes opposed it, but it had not been forgotten. Now that
the greater part of Italy, both Lombard and Roman, was under the rule of
a single king, and one well liked both by the Pope and by the Roman
people, it would have been strange if the idea of completely repudiating
the ignominious dependence of Rome on Constantinople had not been once
more mooted. For as long as there remained but one person bearing the
Imperial style,—the ruler of the East,—the Pope and his Roman and
Italian contemporaries had an uneasy consciousness that their homage
ought still, perhaps, to be paid to that person, Greek and heretic
though he or she might be.

We may suppose that these doubts hardly troubled the Frankish vassals of
Charles the Great, but to his Italian subjects they were a constant
source of vexation of spirit; while practically they were liegemen of
the Frankish king, they were not quite sure whether in theory they might
not still be considered the liegemen of the hated Caesars at
Constantinople.

Such thoughts must have been running through the heads of all the Popes
who held the Roman See from 773 to 800. But it would seem that it was
Pope Leo III. who first bethought him of the easiest way of settling the
situation—to declare the king of the Franks Roman emperor, and not
merely Roman patrician. A barbarian Augustus would be unprecedented, but
not more so than the female ruler of the Empire who now swayed
Constantinople. It was evidently the sight of a woman—and a very wicked
woman—on the Byzantine throne that gave the final impulse to the desire
of the Italians to cut off the last thread of connection with the
Imperial line in the East. Their desire must have been well known to
Charles himself, but it would seem that he for some time shrank from
granting it. Perhaps he feared the responsibilities of the title; more
probably he did not see how it legally could be conferred upon him:
there was no precedent to settle what person or body in the West could
claim to give it, and it was most certain that the court of
Constantinople would utterly refuse to grant it, and would view its
assumption by a ‘barbarian’ king of the West as a gross piece of
insolence.

[Sidenote: Leo III, and Charles.] It would seem that the fervent
gratitude of Pope Leo III. for his deliverance by the hand of Charles
from certain domestic enemies in Rome, was the active cause of the great
ceremony of Christmas Day 800. Leo had been cruelly maltreated by
personal enemies in Rome, the kinsmen of his predecessor Hadrian I.;
they had seized his person and tried to blind him. But he escaped, fled
over the Alps, and took refuge with the great king at his camp near
Paderborn, in Saxony. Charles investigated the dispute between Leo and
his enemies, and he determined that he would come to Rome and decide the
matter in person; meanwhile he sent Leo home under the protection of
some Frankish ambassadors. Late in the year 800 Charles moved down into
Italy, and held a synod at Rome in which he carefully investigated the
conduct of Leo, and pronounced him blameless, while his enemies were
executed or thrown into prison. The Pope then purged himself by an oath
from all the charges that had been made against him, and was reinstated
in his place with much solemnity.

It was only a few days after Charles had thus restored and commended
Leo, that the Pope paid the debt of gratitude by crowning his saviour as
emperor. The details of this all-important ceremony are curious. The
royal and papal courts were thronging St. Peter’s basilica to celebrate
the festival of Christmas. [Sidenote: Charles crowned Emperor.] When the
service was ended, and while the emperor was still kneeling before the
altar in silent prayer, Leo advanced with a diadem in his hand, and
placed it upon the bowed head of the great king, crying, ‘God grant life
and victory to Charles the Augustus, crowned by God, great and pacific
Emperor of the Romans.’ Frankish warriors and Italian clergy and
citizens joined in the cry, and all present, including the Pope himself,
bent their knees to Charles as he rose, and saluted him with the fashion
of adoration paid to the ancient emperors.

Charles himself was wont to declare that the ceremony took place without
his consent having been obtained, and that he would never have entered
St. Peter’s that day, if he had known of the Pope’s intention. Yet there
is no doubt that he had seriously taken the matter into consideration
long before; it is probable that Leo in his outburst of gratitude for
his restoration did no more than force Charles’s hand, by sweeping away
by his sudden act the king’s lingering objections to the coronation. He
knew that the act would be hailed with joy both by Frank and Roman, and
that Charles himself was rather doubtful as to the proper form for
assuming the title than opposed to its actual adoption. The way in which
the coronation was viewed by the majority of his subjects may be
gathered from an extract from the Frankish chronicle of Lauresheim:—‘The
name of emperor had ceased among the Greeks, for they were enduring the
reign of a woman, wherefore it seemed good both to Leo the apostolic
Pope, and to the holy fathers (bishops) who were in council with him,
and to all Christian men, that they should hail Charles king of the
Franks as emperor. For he held Rome itself, where the ancient Caesars
always dwelt, and all these other possessions of his own in Italy and
Gaul and Germany. Wherefore, as God had granted him all these dominions,
it seemed just to them that he should accept the imperial title also,
when it was offered him by the consent of all Christendom.’

That there was much to be said against the legality of the assumption by
Charles of his new style, cannot be disputed. Certainly the Pope had no
right to give it: nor had there been a precedent for many centuries for
the conferring of the imperial title by the decayed body of nobles and
the miscellaneous gathering of citizens who might still call themselves
‘the senate and people of Rome.’ Apparently the Pope, when he saluted
Charles as ‘crowned by God,’ claimed that the impulse to hail him by the
great name of emperor, descended by a direct inspiration from heaven
upon the multitude gathered in St. Peter’s. [Sidenote: The meaning of
the coronation.] But such a plea would hardly appeal with much force,
either to the Byzantine Court or to the modern historian. In truth,
there was much to be said for the assumption of the imperial style by
Charles, as recognising an accomplished fact, but little for the
particular forms by which it was carried out. Most especially did the
fact that the Pope seemed to confer the title, by his own act and
impulse, prove of incalculable harm in future years. If the coronation
of the great king had taken some other form, it would have been
impossible for the Popes of later generations to bring forward their
preposterous claim to have the power of giving or taking away the
imperial crown. The successors of Charles would have been spared many a
weary journey to Rome, and many a bitter wrangle with the Holy See, if
there had been a formal election-ceremony in which all the nations of
the West could have taken part, or if Charles, like Napoleon in a later
age, could have placed the crown on his own head instead of receiving it
from the pontiff’s hand.

The assumption of the imperial title by the great king had many
practical consequences at the moment, and many and yet more important
influences upon the history of Europe for long centuries to come.

[Sidenote: Charles’s views of the Empire.] The most notable of the
immediate results of the coronation was that Charles and all his
subjects regarded his regal authority as being re-affirmed in a new and
more hallowed shape by the ceremony. Formerly his power rested on his
election as king by the Franks, and afterwards by the Lombards: now he
was ‘crowned by God’ as well as chosen by the people. For the future he
showed an increasing tendency to insist on the omnipotence of his
authority in things ecclesiastical and moral as well as in civil
matters. As Heaven’s anointed he claimed to be the guardian of morality
and the reformer of Christendom, as well as the protector of the Church.
Charles had always shown a deep interest in the spiritual welfare of his
dominions. We have seen already what energy he displayed in enforcing
the conversion of Saxony, of the Slavs, and of the Avars. He had
presided at innumerable councils and synods, stirring up his bishops to
enforce strict discipline and sober life among the clergy, and to root
out heathen survivals and immorality among the laity. Now that he had
become emperor he insisted even more than before on the moral side of
his authority: he thought of himself not only as the successor of
Constantine and Theodosius, but even as inheriting the theocratic powers
of the ancient kings of Israel—of David or of Josiah. When Charles
recrossed the Alps after his coronation and held his next great council
in Austrasia, he took the opportunity of bringing home his views to his
liegemen. He made all his subjects, lay and secular, swear allegiance to
him for a second time under his new name of emperor: every person above
the age of twelve was to have the oath administered to him by the local
clergy, and to be warned ‘that his vow of homage was not merely a
promise to be true to the emperor and to serve him against his enemies,
but a promise to live in obedience to God and His law according to the
best of each man’s strength and understanding. It was a vow to abstain
from theft and oppression and injustice, no less than from heathen
practices and witchcraft: a vow to do no wrong to the Churches of God,
nor to injure widows and orphans, of whom the emperor is the chosen
protector and guardian.’ Much more followed to the same effect: Charles
formally claimed that the defence of all law and morality was involved
in the imperial name, and warned his subjects that any offence against
him and his ordinances was a direct crime against the anointed of God.

It was not only in the mind of Charles that this high and holy view of
the duty and power of the emperor found a place. [Sidenote: The Holy
Roman Empire.] He succeeded in impressing it on his own contemporaries
and on long centuries to come: with him starts the idea of the ‘Holy
Roman Empire,’ which affected so deeply the whole secular and religious
life of the Middle Ages. The Frankish kingship, a mere rule of force,
had no exalted and spiritual meaning: the new empire represented a close
and conscious union of Church and State for the advantage of both. It
started with the conception that the emperor should be the protector and
overseer of the Church: by an unhappy development it ended in making the
Pope the overseer of the State. But the generation which had seen Pope
Leo on his knees ‘adoring’ the majesty of the great Charles, could not
have foreseen the day when the successor of Charles should humbly wait
for hours before the unopened door of the successor of Leo, or beg as a
favour the privilege of holding his stirrup.

A new age then commences in Europe with the coronation of Charles the
Great. The reign of pure barbaric force is ended: there follows a time
when the history of Europe is complicated by the strife of ideas no less
than by the strife of armed nations. For the future we must always be on
the watch to detect the influence on politics of the ideal conception of
Christendom as a great empire, under a single ruler chosen by God to
sway the sword, and the rival conception of it as a great Church under a
single Patriarch at Rome, appointed to hold the keys of heaven and hell,
and to guide kings in the way they should go.

The internal government of the vast realm of Charles was a difficult
problem. [Sidenote: Charles and his sons.] In his own lifetime the great
king provided for it by delegating his authority in certain large
sections of it to his sons: we have already spoken of his nomination of
Charles, Pippin, and Lewis to be kings in Neustria, Italy, and
Aquitaine. Charles contemplated the possibility of a single empire
existing while yet many of its parts should be governed by vassal
sovereigns. In his own time the plan worked well enough: he did not,
perhaps, foresee that the problem would be far harder in the next
generation, when the homage and obedience of the lesser kings would have
to be paid to a brother, an uncle, and at last to a mere distant cousin.

Charles publicly issued in 806 the scheme on which his realm was to be
ruled after his death: the title of emperor and all the Frankish lands,
both Neustrian and Austrasian, were to go to his first-born Charles;
with them went Saxony, Thuringia, and Burgundy. Pippin, the second son,
had Italy, together with Bavaria and eastern Suabia. Lewis, the youngest
child, was to take Aquitaine, Provence, and the Spanish March. This
division, however, was rendered fruitless by the unexpected decease of
the two elder kings: to the great grief of their father, Pippin died in
810, and Charles in 811. This necessitated a new division of the empire:
Lewis was now the only grown man in the family: to him, therefore, was
left the imperial name and all the realm save Italy, which was to be a
vassal-kingdom for Bernard, the young son of Pippin.

Charles, while all his sons yet lived, gave over the charge of large
sections of his realm to them. Beneath their authority the kingdoms were
ruled by the same hierarchy of dukes and counts who had existed in
Merovingian times. When any new land, such as Saxony or Lombardy, was
added to the empire, it was ere long cut up into countships on the same
pattern that already served for Austrasia and Neustria. Thus a regular
ascending scale of grades lay between the count and the emperor. The
count obeyed the duke, the duke the sub-king, the king his father the
suzerain of all. In the conquered lands Franks were, as a rule,
intrusted with the most important provincial governments: but Charles
often gave countships in their own native districts to Lombards,
Aquitanians, or even Saxons who had served him well and truly.

The best security for the unity and peace of the empire was the
never-ceasing activity of Charles himself, who incessantly perambulated
his realm from end to end so long as life was in him. It was his own
frequent visits to Saxony, Italy, or Bavaria, that were the best means
of keeping those outlying provinces in loyalty and obedience. But he had
also a regular system of travelling commissioners who were always moving
round the realm, and reporting to him on the needs and requirements of
the different provinces. [Sidenote: The Missi Dominici.] The circuits of
these _Missi Dominici_, or royal legates, as they were called, were
fully settled by him only in 802, but he had been employing them less
systematically at a far earlier date. His father and grandfather, Pippin
the Short and Charles Martel, had been wont to send out occasionally
travelling commissions (_Missi discurrentes_), but it was Charles the
emperor who multiplied and systematised their activity. By his
arrangements his emissaries, who were sometimes clerics, sometimes
laymen, were appointed for a year’s duty over a certain number of
countships. They visited the assemblies of the inhabitants of the
district, summoned to the count’s _Mallus_,[52] and inquired into the
state of the provinces. Complaints against the count himself or the
local bishop were brought before them, and they would send them up to
the king or take account of them on the spot. We sometimes find _Missi_
charged with other duties, such as the conduct of an embassy or a
warlike expedition, but this terminal inspection of the local governors
was their primary duty. As long as men of probity and strength were
chosen, no better machinery for keeping together the wide empire of the
Franks could have been devised.

Footnote 52:

See page 125.

We have already mentioned in an earlier chapter the interest which
Charles always showed in art and letters, an interest which had been
very rare among the Frankish kings, whether of his own house or of the
Merovings. Of all the two dynasties the ruffian Chilperich I.
is—curiously enough—the only one who is recorded to have shown any
literary tastes. Charles, however, atoned for the neglect of his
predecessors. [Sidenote: Encouragement of learning.] He collected
learned men from all quarters: the Northumbrian Alcuin and the
Lombards Peter of Pisa and Paul the Deacon were the best-known names
among them: at first his scholars were mostly foreigners, but by the
end of his reign he had seen a generation of learned Franks arise in
response to his encouragement. Two of his proclamations, the _Epistola
de litteris colendis_ and the _Encyclica de emendatione librorum_, set
forth his purpose. He complains that the letters addressed to him by
bishops and abbots from all parts of his realm are ‘very correct in
sentiment but very incorrect in grammar,’ so that he has begun to fear
whether his clergy have enough knowledge of Latin to understand the
whole sense of the Scriptures. Wherefore he will have schools
established in every monastery for the perfect teaching of the Latin
tongue, ‘because it is useful that men of God should not only live by
the rule and dwell in holy conversation, but should devote themselves
to literary meditations, each according to his ability, that they may
be able to give themselves to the duty of teaching others.’ [Sidenote:
Multiplication of books.] Under the fostering hand of Charles all the
greater monasteries became centres of learning: we owe to his care the
preservation of many of the classical authors, for he was incessantly
causing the old volumes, ‘almost worn out,’ as he says, ‘by the
carelessness of our ancestors,’ to be fairly copied out and
multiplied. Each monastery was urged to have its own treasures
preserved by several copies, and to interchange them with those of its
neighbours. He paid special attention to the books of the Old and New
Testaments, was shocked at the diverse readings which he found to
exist—due, as he asserts, to the extreme ignorance of copyists—and set
Paul the Deacon to construct a new lectionary, corrected according to
the best texts, and destined to be used in all the Churches in his
realm. It was not only to religious books that he turned his
attention: he had the old heroic epics of the Franks—the prototypes,
we may suppose, of such works as the _Nibelungenlied_—collected and
written out: unfortunately his pious son Lewis destroyed this
invaluable _corpus_ of Frankish poetry, because he deemed it
heathenish. He is also found setting his scholars to work on the
compilation of grammars—both Latin and German—biographies, and even of
works of secular history. It is, no doubt, to his inspiration that we
owe the sudden expansion and multiplication of the Frankish
chronicles. Our historical sources, down to his time, are few, bald,
and jejune; soon after his accession they become full, satisfactory,
and numerous. The ninth century, in spite of all its troublous times,
is far better known to us than the eighth.

Charles kept the best of his scholars about his Court, and treated them
as familiar friends. When he was settled down at Aachen for the winter,
and was at rest from wars, he gathered them about him to discuss all
manners of subjects, from astronomy to logic. The literary circle
assumed old classical names. Alcuin called himself Flaccus, Charles was
addressed as King David, other scholars styled themselves Homer, Mopsus,
and Damætas. Their discussions were often fruitless, and sometimes
childish, but it was something new in Western Christendom to find a
whole group of scholars busied in discussions of any sort whatever.
After looking back at the blank darkness of the seventh century, we find
the court of Charles the Great a very centre of light and wisdom. In it
lay the promise of great things in the future, a promise for which we
have looked in vain in any period of the preceding ages.

It was not only in literature that Charles busied his leisure hours. He
was a great admirer of music, both secular and ecclesiastical. His ear
was charmed by the Gregorian chants which he heard at Rome, and he took
back with him Italian choirmasters to teach the churchmen of the north
the sonorous cadences of the sainted Pope.

[Sidenote: Charles as builder.] He was also a mighty builder. At Aachen
he reared a great palace for himself and a magnificent cathedral. The
former has perished, but enough survives of the latter to show the exact
extent to which Romanesque architecture had developed by his time. So
much was he set on making it the most magnificent basilica to the north
of the Alps, that when he found his own workmen unable to carry out his
ideas, he sent for ancient columns and marbles from distant Rome and
Ravenna. His own coffin was a splendid Roman sarcophagus, probably
procured from Italy. He constructed palaces in two other Austrasian
towns besides Aachen, the old royal seats of Nimuegen and Engelheim, for
he was Austrasian to the core, and always made the land of his ancestors
his favourite dwelling. He built a bridge at Mainz five hundred yards
long, the first effort of Frankish engineering in that class of
structure. Unfortunately it was destroyed by fire in 813, and never
renewed. Another piece of work which testifies to his interest in
engineering was a canal to join the Rhine and Danube, by means of their
tributaries, the Altmühl and the Rednitz.

But to follow Charles into every department of his activity during his
long life and reign would require many volumes. [Sidenote: Death of
Charles, 814.] Here it must suffice to say that after all these
achievements he died at his chosen abode at Aachen, on the 28th of
January 814, carried off at a ripe old age by a pleurisy caught in the
winter cold. He was buried in the cathedral that he himself had built,
and over his tomb was placed a golden shrine, with his image and the
inscription:—‘SUB HOC CONDITORIO SITUM EST CORPUS KAROLI MAGNI ET
ORTHODOXI IMPERATORIS, QUI REGNUM FRANCORUM NOBILITER AMPLIAVIT, ET PER
ANNOS XLVII FELICITER REXIT.’ It was but a short epitaph considering the
mighty deeds of him who lay beneath, but no length of words could have
done justice to his greatness. A far better memorial was left to him in
the hearts of his subjects; his name survived in the mouths of all the
races that had served him, as the type of power, wisdom, and
righteousness. All Western Europe looked back to him for seven hundred
years as the common pride of Christendom, the founder of that ‘Holy
Roman Empire’ which satisfied their ideal of governance. His figure
looms out, though often with outlines blurred and distorted, from dozens
of the legends and romances which shadowed forth the aspirations of the
Middle Ages. Within a hundred years of his death it was currently
believed that he had conquered Spain and Byzantium, and carried his arms
as far as Palestine. So great was the impression he had left behind him,
that the world thought nothing too impossible for him to have achieved.
Perhaps the notion that his reign had been a kind of Golden Age was
partly produced by the contrasting years of trouble and civil strife
that followed his death. But the tendency to look back to his time as a
period of unexampled splendour and righteousness was no delusion, but a
just recognition of the fact that he had given the Western world a
glimpse of new and high ideals, such as it had never known under the
brutal rule of twelve generations of barbarian kings, nor in those
earlier days when it was still held together in the iron grasp of the
Caesars of ancient Rome.

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CHAPTER XXIII

LEWIS THE PIOUS

814-840

Character of Lewis the Pious—He reforms the Frankish court—His
ecclesiastical legislation—After a narrow escape from death he
divides his kingdom among his sons—The partition of Aachen—Rebellion
and death of Bernard of Italy—The second marriage of Lewis and its
consequences—Second partition of the empire followed by rebellion of
Lewis’ elder sons—Their repeated risings—The ‘Lügenfeld’—Lewis twice
deposed and restored—Continued troubles of his later years—He dies
while leading an army against his son Lewis—Disastrous consequences
of his reign.

Charles the Great left his throne and his empire to his only surviving
son born in lawful wedlock, Lewis the Pious, as his own age named him,
though later chroniclers style him Lewis the Débonnair. The heir of the
great emperor was a devout prince, who proved—like our own Edward the
Confessor—‘a sair saint for the crown.’ He was a weak, good-natured man,
no longer in the first flower of his youth, whose meek virtues were far
more suited to adorn a monastery than a palace. Utterly wanting in
self-respect and determination, the slave of his wife, his chaplains,
and bishops, a doting father and husband, and an over-liberal giver, he
had one of those natures which are entirely unfit to bear
responsibility, and are only happy when placed under the rule of a
stronger will than their own. Lewis had before him the problems that had
taxed his father’s iron nerve,—the task of ruling each of the nations
that dwelt beneath the Frankish sceptre in the way that it needed, with
the additional trial of being sorely vexed by the incursions of the
Danes, whose first ravages Charles the Great had hardly lived to see.
Enough was there to occupy his every moment, even had he been a man of
ability. But he chose to add to his troubles the needless trial of a
disputed succession and a spasmodic civil war. The main feature of his
reign of twenty-six years is the weary tale of his unwise dealing with
his undutiful sons, and of the evils that ensued therefrom.

The great realm which now fell to Lewis had been built up in despite of
three main difficulties—the enormous extent of the conquered lands, and
the slowness of communication between them, the national differences
between the various peoples which inhabited them, and the old Teutonic
custom which favoured the partition of a kingdom among all the sons of
its ruler, just as if it were a private heritage. The first two dangers
had not proved fatal. The personal energy and never-ending travels of
Charles the Great had vanquished space and time. Racial divergences were
less formidable than might have been expected, for true national feeling
was not yet fully developed in Western Europe. It was neither the
enormous extent of the Frankish empire nor the heterogeneous character
of its inhabitants that proved the direct cause of its ruin, but the
baleful practice of the partition of heritages among all the heirs of
the reigning sovereign. Hitherto the empire had been fortunate in
escaping the consequences of this evil. Charles the Hammer had broken up
his realm, but the voluntary abdication of the elder Carloman had ere
long reunited the Neustrian and Austrasian lands. Pippin, again, had
divided his kingdom, but the co-heir, whose survival would have thwarted
the life-work of Charles the Great, died young. And in the next
generation, too, death had stripped the king of all his lawful issue
save one, and Lewis the Pious received an undivided heritage.

But Lewis, unhappily for himself and for the empire, had already three
half-grown sons when he succeeded to the empire, and was destined to see
a fourth reach manhood ere he died. The custom of partition was now
destined to have a fair trial and develop to its utmost extent.

Lewis was at Doué, in his kingdom of Aquitaine, when he received the
news of the death of his aged father. Making such speed as he could, he
arrived at Aachen after a journey of thirty days, and took possession of
the reins of power. Without sending for the Pope to assist at his
coronation, he celebrated his accession by taking the imperial crown off
the altar in the cathedral of his capital city, and placing it on his
own head, while the assembled counts and bishops shouted _Vivat
Imperator Ludovicus!_ The magnates also saluted him by the title of ‘the
Pious,’ an appellation which he placed upon his coins, on whose other
side appeared the legend, ‘_Renovatio Regni Francorum_.’ The ‘renewing’
of the kingdom found its first expression in the expulsion from office
of the ministers who had administered affairs during the declining years
of Charles the Great. Lewis came to Aachen with his own trusted servants
at his back, and was determined not to put himself in the hands of his
father’s favourites. There had been much in his father’s life and court
which his own scrupulous conscience could not approve. As a man who led
a singularly virtuous life himself, he could not abide the bishops and
abbots who had connived at his father’s immoralities. [Sidenote:
Accession of Lewis the Pious.] The Frankish court, though teeming with
ecclesiastics, had not been a model of soberness or chastity, and the
old emperor himself had not set the best of examples. Lewis was
determined that this should cease.

The moment that he was firmly seated on the throne the new monarch
dismissed from his court his sisters, whose life had been nothing less
than scandalous during his father’s later years. Their paramours were
banished or imprisoned—one was even deprived of his eyes. His next step
was to send away the three chief ministers of Charles the Great. The
Chancellor Helisachar, Abbot of St. Maximin, was relegated to his
monastery. The two brothers, count Wala and abbot Adalhard,[53] had
harder measure dealt out to them. The emperor sent Adalhard to dwell in
the lonely monastery of Hermoutier, on an island by the Loire-mouth.
Count Wala was stripped of sword and armour, shorn, and immured as a
monk in the cloister of Corbey.

Footnote 53:

They were Carlovingians of illegitimate descent, sons of Bernard, a
bastard of Charles Martel.

These councillors were replaced by men whom Lewis had learnt to know
while he was yet but king of Aquitaine. The chief were Ebbo, his own
foster-brother, abbot Hildwin, and count Bernard of Septimania. Ebbo,
though but the son of a serf, was dear to the emperor from early
association; he had taken orders, and was made archbishop of Rheims by
his patron at the earliest opportunity, amid the murmurs of many
high-born Frankish ecclesiastics, who exclaimed that such preferment was
not the meed of a man of servile extraction. Hildwin, the new
chancellor, was a shameless pluralist, three abbots rolled into one, and
ever seeking more preferment. Bernard, however, a clever, restless,
intriguing Gascon, provoked even greater jealousy and bitterness among
the old courtiers of Charles the Great, and seems to have been the
best-hated man in the realm. But perhaps the most influential of all the
advisers of Lewis was his wife, Hermengarde, the daughter of the count
of the Hesbain, an ambitious and unscrupulous woman, who exercised such
an influence over her uxorious spouse that she was even able to drive
him once and again to deeds of ill-faith and cruelty very foreign to his
mild and righteous disposition.

Charles the Great had left the frontiers of his great realm so well
secured that in the earliest years of Lewis the Pious there was no
foreign war to call the emperor into the field. It was a characteristic
sign of the new _régime_ that things ecclesiastical took precedence of
all others at the first meetings of the magnates of the empire. We hear
of legislation against carnally-minded bishops and abbots, who shocked
the pious by riding with cloak and sword and golden spurs like secular
nobles. A _modus vivendi_ was established between clerics of servile
birth and their former lords, providing that on due compensation being
paid the villein might go free. The emperor took the keenest interest in
this question. Not only his favourite Ebbo, but several others of his
counsellors had been serfs, and he was most anxious to defend them alike
against claims of their ancient masters, and insults at the hands of the
free-born clergy. [Sidenote: Ecclesiastical legislation.] Another decree
of Lewis’ dealt with the tenure of the lands of monasteries. After
stipulating that fourteen great houses owed both military service and
aids in money to the empire, and sixteen more the financial duty alone,
he declared that all the other monastic establishments in his wide
dominion should hold their property on the simple undertaking that they
should ‘pray for the welfare of the emperor and his children and the
empire.’ This threw a vast quantity of estates into tenure by what later
ages called ‘frank almoin,’ and relieved of its natural responsibility
to the State more land than could prudently be suffered to go scot-free.

[Sidenote: Lewis recrowned, 816.] Another sign of Lewis’ extreme regard
for the Church was given at the very commencement of his reign. When
pope Leo III., the aged pontiff, who had crowned Charles the Great, died
in 816 the Romans elected, in great haste, Stephen IV. as his successor.
The new Pope was consecrated without the imperial sanction being sought,
but Lewis made no objection, and showed no wrath at this disregard of
his prerogative. So far was he from resentment that he allowed Stephen
to represent to him that his coronation at Aachen had lacked the
Church’s blessing, inasmuch as he had taken the crown from the altar
with his own hands. To render Lewis’ position more like that of his
great father, the Pope proposed to cross the Alps and recrown his
master. Lewis took no offence at the slur thrown on the form of his
election to the empire, but received Stephen in great state at Rheims,
and was there crowned for the second time (816). Thus he loosened his
own grasp on the Papacy in one year, and allowed the Pope to tighten his
grasp on the empire in the next.

In 817 happened an accident which was to have the gravest consequences
on the emperor’s character and fate. He was passing with all his train
over a wooden gallery which connected the cathedral and the palace at
Aachen, when the whole structure came crashing to the ground. Many of
the courtiers were killed, and the emperor himself received injuries
which confined him to his bed for many weeks. The shock and the narrow
escape from death set Lewis meditating on the instability of life and
the necessity for being always prepared for the grave. He had never been
anything but sober and self-contained, but he now fell into a morbid and
lugubrious frame of mind, which never left him till his dying day. If he
had only hitherto been a daring sinner he might have salved his
conscience by turning to a new manner of life: but being already a man
of blameless and virtuous habits, his conversion only led him into an
exaggerated asceticism. He abandoned the study of profane literature,
which had hitherto soothed his leisure hours, and would for the rest of
his life read nothing but theology. We are even told that he destroyed
the collection of Old Frankish heroic poems which his father had made,
because of the many traces of heathenism which he found in them. It was
with difficulty that his councillors prevented him two years later from
laying down his crown and retiring to a monastery.

One of the first effects of Lewis’ morbid brooding over his latter end
was that he determined to make a settlement of the inheritance of his
wide dominions in view of his own possible death. He was now only
forty-three, and his eldest son was but seventeen, but he resolved to
take the untried boy into partnership and associate him with himself, so
that his succession might be assured at his own death. At the same time
he determined to give his younger sons appanages in the realm which
would be their brother’s. The old German instinct for dividing the
paternal heritage was still too strong to be resisted.

By this _Partition of Aachen_, the first of many partitions that we
shall have to bear in mind, Lothair, the eldest of Lewis’ three sons,
became co-emperor, and was allotted as his special province, during his
father’s life, the kingdom of Italy. Pippin, the second son, was to
inherit Aquitaine, his father’s original portion. Lewis, the third son,
was assigned Bavaria, and the wild marches to its east along the Danube.
Thus it was provided that at the emperor’s death his successor should
hold the great bulk of the realm, containing both its capitals—Aachen
and Rome—and including all the oldest Frankish lands, Neustria and
Austrasia alike. [Sidenote: The Partition of Aachen.] The kings of
Aquitaine and Bavaria would be far too weak, even if united, to trouble
him by rebellions, but Lewis ended his deed of gift by a solemn
exhortation to the younger sons to obey their brother, visit his court
once a year, and be his helpers in peace and war. In spite of the
experience of elder generations of his house he hoped that his children
might dwell together in amity.

There was one clause in the Partition of Aachen which was certain to
cause instant trouble. It named Italy as the special portion of the
young Lothair. Now, Italy was, and had been for seven years, under the
government of the emperor’s nephew Bernard, son of that Pippin of Italy
who died in 810. Charles the Great had placed him there, and while
obeying Lewis as a loyal subject he looked upon the Cisalpine kingdom as
his own appanage, and expected to retain it through all changes in the
imperial succession. Bernard was determined not to be ousted from his
realm; the moment that the news of the Partition of Aachen reached him
he flew into rebellion. His rule had been popular, and the Lombards
gladly took arms in his behalf and seized all the passes of the Alps. He
even tried to stir up trouble in Gaul by the aid of his friend Theodulph
bishop of Orleans.

Having gone so far, Bernard would have done wisely to abide altogether
by the arbitrament of the sword. Instead of doing this he held back and
negotiated. Relying on the emperor’s well-known character for justice
and moderation Bernard left his army and went to a conference at
Chalons-sur-Saône. He soon found that he had made a fatal mistake. He
was treated as a criminal on trial, not as a prince who came to
negotiate terms of peace. The conference adjoined to Aachen, and there
Bernard and his chief adherents were judged and condemned. The council
doomed the accused to death, but Lewis, half-mindful of the safe-conduct
that his ambassadors had promised, commuted the sentence to blinding.
[Sidenote: Death of Bernard of Italy, 818.] The cruel order was
executed, but so clumsily was it carried out, that Bernard died of the
shock. Rumour added that it was the empress Hermengarde who had bribed
the executioners to do their work so badly. The remorse that seized the
emperor for his broken safe-conduct and the death of his nephew never
ceased to vex his soul for all his remaining years. It was the only
grave moral offence that he had ever committed, and his tender
conscience would give him no rest.

Within a few months after Bernard’s death Lewis was visited by a
calamity which he considered the first instalment of the divine
vengeance for the deed. On his return from an expedition to Brittany he
was met by the news of the death of his wife Hermengarde. It was
whispered that she had been largely guilty in the matter of her nephew’s
death, and that she was now paying the penalty. Lewis at any rate seems
to have had this idea. He had been deeply attached to his imperious
wife, and leant much on her guidance. Deprived of her he fell into a
state of morbid melancholy, far worse than any he had yet experienced.
He shut himself up with his grief, neglected state affairs, and talked
of retiring into a cloister. After some months his ministers found the
situation growing so impossible that they took every means to rouse him.
It was, we are told, his bishops who took the strange step of urging on
him that he must marry again as a public duty; his seclusion injured the
realm, and he must remember that man was not meant to live alone. When
the emperor would neither go to seek a wife nor take a princess whom he
had not seen on another’s recommendation, his ministers brought to his
court all the fairest of the daughters of the counts and nobles of his
realm. The same scene was rehearsed that was a few years later to be
seen at Constantinople when the widowed Theophilus took his second wife.
Among the crowd of ladies presented before him, the eye of Lewis fixed
upon Judith, a noble damsel from the Suabian Alps, daughter of Welf,
count of Altdorf. Pressed hard by his courtiers he consented to take her
to wife, and rued it all his remaining years. Judith was fair, wise,
witty, and learned above all the women of her day, and soon acquired an
empire over her melancholy spouse, not less than that which her
predecessor had exercised. [Sidenote: Birth of Charles the Bald.] Two
years later she presented him with a son, whose birth was to cause
unending evils to the empire. The boy was named Charles, after his great
grandsire. (A.D. 822.)

For a space things seemed to be going well with Lewis, but three years
after his second marriage the black shadow closed in again over the
unfortunate emperor. Some cause, to us unknown, suddenly plunged him
once more into a fit of misery and contrition. He remembered first that
he had not pardoned all his enemies as a good Christian should.
Forthwith all whom he had ever injured were recalled from exile. The
brothers Wala and Adalhard were drawn out of their monasteries. The
partisans of Bernard of Italy who had suffered blinding and imprisonment
were sent back to their homes. So anxious was the emperor to atone for
his harshness that he most unwisely proceeded to place the most
important of the exiles in high posts of trust. He made Adalhard master
of his household, and sent Wala to his son Lothair to be his first
councillor. He had forgotten that others might not forgive as he could
himself; these appointments placed in power men who at the bottom of
their hearts could never pardon their years, of weariness and cloistered
seclusion.

After doing what he could to recompense his victims for the indignities
they had suffered, Lewis took another and a more startling step.
[Sidenote: Penance of Attigny.] He summoned a great council at Attigny,
hard by the royal city of Soissons, and proceeded to do penance for his
sins before the face of his magnates. Coming forth crownless and robed
in sackcloth he recapitulated all the faults and misdeeds that had ever
been committed, from the execution of Bernard of Italy down to many
trifling transgressions, which most men counted as harmless failings,
and all had long forgotten. He even rehearsed, with a somewhat
unnecessary scrupulousness, all the crimes and short-comings of his
great father the emperor Charles. Then he besought his bishops to lay on
him such a meed of penance as might fit these many and grievous sins.
Not unwilling to take advantage of their sovereign’s humiliation, the
prelates prescribed to him a course of stripes and fasting and vigils,
of prayer, almsgiving, and building of churches, all of which he
conscientiously carried out. The astonished counts and courtiers saw
their monarch baring his back to the lash, and discharging with
exactitude all the humiliating burdens that the clergy laid upon him. It
was the act of a saint, but not of an emperor.

Nothing could have done Lewis more harm than this outburst of laboured
penitence. While his subjects marvelled at his Christian humility, they
drew from his conduct the conclusion that as a sovereign he was no
longer to be feared or obeyed. The Frankish nobles who remembered the
high-handed Charles the Great, and had loved him in spite of all his
harshness, felt more scorn than admiration for an emperor who wept and
grovelled in public over deeds which few in that age considered sins at
all. They muttered that Lewis was no better than a brain-sick,
self-torturing monk. For the future there was an under-current of
contempt for the emperor passing through the minds of most of his lay
vassals. It needed but some small encouragement to turn this feeling
into active disloyalty.

The year of the council of Attigny was the last year of good fortune for
Lewis. It was followed by premonitory symptoms of evil all over his
realm. The Moors of Spain, quiescent for more than twenty years, sent a
sudden invasion into Septimania. The Danes drove out their king Harald,
a _protégé_ of Lewis and a favourer of Christianity, and began to ravage
the Frisian coast. But there were worse foes than Saracen or Dane
awaiting Lewis in his own household. His eldest son Lothair, under the
tutelage of the unforgiving Wala, had begun to display an alarming
amount of self-will and disregard for his father’s wishes and the common
weal of the empire. He bore himself like an independent king at his
court in Pavia.

In 829 the fatal civil wars of the ninth century began. Charles, the
young son of Lewis and Judith, had now attained his seventh year, and
his future had become the greatest concern of his father and mother. The
emperor, always brooding over his own latter end, was convinced that he
had not long to live: he was filled with fears as to the fate of the
Joseph of his old age when he should fall into the hands of his
brethren. Urged on by his wife he determined to make some provision for
the boy in the event of his own early death. He set aside the duchy of
Alamannia and the Swiss and Burgundian Alpine lands to the south of it,
as a kingdom for his youngest son.

Lewis declared his purpose of erecting the kingdom of Alamannia at a
great council held at Worms, to which no one of his three elder sons
vouchsafed his presence. The moment that the edict was published
murmuring and conspiracy began. The new kingdom was carved out of
territory which would have ultimately fallen to Lothair, but his two
brothers showed themselves quite as resentful at the partition as was
the heir of the empire. Their wrath found vent in slanderous rumours:
they did not shrink from asserting that Charles was no brother of
theirs. Bernard of Septimania, they said, had betrayed their father and
seduced the old man’s wife. The accusation was absolutely without
foundation, but it met with wide belief. The chiefs of the higher clergy
joined themselves to the royal princes; Wala found an opportunity of
revenging himself by aiding the conspiracy; the ministers Ebbo and
Hildwin, who had found themselves superseded in favour by count Bernard,
had the ingratitude to join in the plot against the man who had raised
them from the dust. [Sidenote: First Civil War, 829.] The two chief
prelates of Gaul, Agobard of Lyons and Jesse of Amiens, were also of the
conspirators. A general revolt was planned before the unsuspecting Lewis
had any notion that aught was amiss.

It burst out in the next spring. A new rising of the Bretons had called
the emperor off into a remote corner of his realm. He summoned a small
force to follow him, and was soon lost to sight on the distant western
moors. But the very moment that the emperor was gone his enemies set to
work to stir up rebellion. The implacable Wala harangued the west
Frankish nobles, and sent letters to the chief ecclesiastics of Gaul in
which he accused the emperor of ruining the unity of the Church and the
empire, the one by his interference with things sacred, the other by his
neglect of things secular. Lewis had become a mere tool in the hands of
an adulterous wife and an unfaithful servant, and it was the duty of
good Christians and patriotic Franks to rescue the empire from its
shame. Pippin of Aquitaine soon gave point to the harangues of Wala by
leading a Gascon army to Paris, where all the counts of Neustria joined
him in arms, Lothair sent word from Italy that he was approaching at the
head of a great host of Lombards. Presently Lewis came back from
Brittany to find the land in arms behind him: he penetrated as far as
Compiègne before he was surrounded by the forces of Pippin. Beset by an
overwhelming host of enemies, the army of the emperor dispersed, and he
himself fell into the hands of the rebels. His sons put him in
confinement, pending the meeting of a grand council. The empress Judith
they dragged from sanctuary and forced under the terror of death to take
the veil at Poictiers. But when the great council of the empire
assembled at Nimuegen in the next spring a reaction had followed the
first success of the rebellion. The meeting was in the heart of the old
Frankish land, where the rebels had few sympathisers, and the counts of
the Rhineland and northern Germany came up to it with such a following
of armed men and such a truculent aspect that the Neustrians and
Lombards who accompanied Pippin and Lothair were quite overawed. Without
a sword being drawn or a blow struck the tables were completely turned,
and the old emperor found his rebel sons at his feet. He showed himself
merciful—all too merciful—in the moment of his triumph. Lothair was
despoiled of his imperial title, but permitted to keep his kingdom of
Italy, and sent back unharmed to Pavia. Pippin returned to Aquitaine
pardoned also. The rancorous Wala, the soul of the conspiracy, was sent
back to his cloister at Corbey and bidden to live according to his rule,
till his disloyal murmurings provoked the emperor into banishing him
into a less comfortable seclusion on the shores of the Lake of Geneva.
[Sidenote: Lewis dethroned and restored.] The discomfiture of the rebels
released the empress Judith from her nunnery; but Lewis thought it
necessary to make her clear herself by compurgation from the cruel
charges that had been brought against her, before she was released from
her monastic vows.

Lewis was once more emperor, but the mercy with which he had treated his
conquered enemies was destined to breed him unending troubles. His
undutiful sons had been left as powerful as before, and instead of
feeling grateful for their pardon, were only vexed at the mismanagement
which had ruined their well-planned conspiracy. When they had returned
to their kingdoms they merely took breath for a space, and then
recommenced their intrigues. This time Lothair and Pippin took pains to
enlist their younger brother, Lewis of Bavaria, in the plot. By his
means they hoped to divide Germany, for the young king was very popular
in his own realm, and counted many adherents beyond its bounds. His
brothers promised him the Suabian lands of the boy Charles if he would
join them in a fresh rebellion.

The new troubles broke out in the spring of 832. The first signal was
given by Pippin of Aquitaine, who fled from his father’s court, refused
to attend the Easter great council, and began to arm his Gascon
subjects. The emperor determined to take warning by the events of 830
and not to be caught again unprepared. [Sidenote: Second Civil War.] He
summoned the whole force of the empire to meet for an invasion of
Aquitaine. But next came the news that Lewis of Bavaria had raised an
army, called in the Slavs of the Danube to his aid, and conquered
Suabia. For once provoked to righteous wrath by his sons’ misdoings, the
emperor proclaimed that Pippin and Lewis of Bavaria had forfeited their
kingdoms. He announced that his favourite Charles should be crowned king
of Aquitaine, and that Lothair—who had not yet made any hostile move,
though he was really in secret agreement with Pippin and Lewis—should be
the heir of the whole of the rest of the empire.

This new project of partition only did harm. It did not win the aid of
Lothair; it provoked the Bavarians and Gascons, both of whom were much
attached to their young kings; worst of all, it caused the whole empire
to exclaim that it was the emperor’s unreasonable fondness for his
youngest son that was at the bottom of all the trouble. Why should the
whole empire be upset merely in order that Charles might add Aquitaine
to Suabia?

Matters soon went from bad to worse. Lewis the Pious lay at Worms
gathering the levies of Austrasia and Saxony, when it was announced not
only that Pippin and Lewis of Bavaria were approaching, but that Lothair
had taken the field with the forces of Italy, and had crossed the Alps,
bringing in his train pope Gregory IV., a pontiff whose election he had
confirmed without his father’s leave some years before.

Lewis marched southward to meet his rebellious sons. The hosts faced
each other in the plains of the Rothfeld, and a battle appeared
imminent. But the pious emperor was still loth that blood should be shed
in the quarrel: he held back from the fight and offered to treat with
his sons. The princes knew their father’s weakness, and learnt that his
army was much discouraged and demoralised. They determined to try fraud
rather than force, and assented to the proposal to negotiate. Pope
Gregory lent himself to their plans, and presented himself before the
emperor in the character of an impartial mediator. But he had not been
long in the old man’s camp before the imperial army began to melt away.
To all appearance the Pope had sold himself to his patron king Lothair,
and used his opportunities to persuade the counts and bishops who still
remained loyal that they were adhering to a doomed cause. There soon
were agents of all kinds passing between the two camps, and their
influence was fatal. One after another the chief leaders of the
emperor’s host fled away by night to their homes, or with still greater
baseness took their soldiery over to the hostile encampment. At last a
mere handful mustered under the imperial banner. [Sidenote: The
Lügenfeld, 833.] Looking round on their scanty ranks the emperor
exclaimed, half in sarcasm, half in Christian resignation, ‘Go ye also
to my sons: it would be a pity if any man lost life or limb on my
account.’ The counts wept, but they departed, and Lewis was left
standing alone in the door of his tent, with his wife at his side and
his son Charles clinging to his hand. From that day the plain of the
Rothfeld was called by the Franks the Field of Lies—the Lügenfeld, the
‘_Campus Mendacii ubi plurimorum fidelitas extincta est_.’ (June 833.)

At once the sons of the emperor swooped down on their helpless prey.
They promptly rode over to the empty camp of Lewis, and after saluting
their father with feigned respect set a guard over his tent. Judith was
reinvested with the veil, and sent over the Alps to Lothair’s fortress
of Tortona. The boy Charles was consigned to the monastery of Prüm: his
extreme youth saved him both from blinding and ordination. The old
emperor was forwarded to the abbey of St. Médard at Soissons, and placed
in confinement in its tower. The most strenuous efforts were made to
induce him to abdicate and take the monastic vows. But though he would
have been willing enough to do so if unconstrained, Lewis refused to lay
down his crown when force and threats were employed. Failing to induce
him to resign, Lothair and archbishop Ebbo assembled an ecclesiastical
council of the bishops of Gaul and formally declared the emperor deposed
for incapacity and evil government. The unthinking Lothair was indeed
preparing a rod for the back of all future emperors when he allowed the
clergy to usurp such power!

Though Lewis would not acknowledge that he was legally dethroned, to do
penance he was now, as always, only too ready, and Lothair at last
resolved to be contented with this. His father’s humiliation could not
have been greater if he had formally resigned the crown. The old emperor
came before the altar of St. Médard with his sword and wearing the
jewelled imperial dalmatic. Then laying the weapon and robe upon the
altar he cast round himself a cloak of sackcloth and read a declaration
in eight articles, whereby he accused himself of being, by his sins, the
sole cause of the disorders of the empire. He began with deploring the
death of Bernard of Italy, the sole crime of which he can fairly be held
guilty. [Sidenote: The Penance of St. Médard.] Then he went on to accuse
himself of many futile offences—such as that of summoning an army to
meet during the holy season of Lent. He was even mean enough to own that
he had done evil in permitting his wife to throw off the monastic veil,
and clear herself by compurgation from the charges brought against her:
in so doing, he confessed, he might have abetted perjury.

Having read this humiliating document, the old man laid the parchment on
the altar, and retired again to his prison-tower. But the degrading
scene had not the effect that Lothair had hoped. Men felt more
indignation against the son who could force his father to such
humiliation, than contempt for the father who could submit to it. The
crowd outside the church tried to mob Lothair. The counts of Austrasia
and Saxony began to gather armed bands against him. Scared at their
approach the younger king fled away into Burgundy. [Sidenote: Lewis
again restored, 834.] The German counts at once drew Lewis out of his
confinement, girt him once more with the sword of empire, and proclaimed
him sole ruler of the Frankish realm. A considerable army set out to
pursue Lothair, and though he checked its pursuit at a skirmish near
Chalons-sur-Saône, he none the less withdrew from Gaul, and took refuge
in his own kingdom of Lombardy. This was the first blood actually shed
in battle in the civil war.

The vengeance of Heaven seemed to pursue the undutiful son and his
adherents. Soon after he had reached Italy a pestilence smote his army,
and slew his chief councillors, the aged Wala and Jesse of Amiens
together with Matfrid, count of Orleans, the chief of his men of war.
Lothair himself was stricken down, and lay for many weeks at the gate of
death, but he struggled through to give many more troublous years to the
empire. The two great ecclesiastics who had shared with Wala the guilt
of the illegal deposition of the old emperor, Ebbo of Rheims and Agobard
of Lyons, fell into the hands of the partisans of Lewis. Both were
deposed from their archbishoprics, and Ebbo the ungrateful
foster-brother of the emperor was put into solitary confinement in the
abbey of Fulda in the heart of Germany.

Still untaught by his misfortunes, Lewis now took the one step most
certain to alienate his newly recovered popularity. He summoned a diet
at Crémieux, near Lyons, and proposed in it a new division of his realm.
Lothair was to be punished by being deprived of all his dominions save
Italy. The greater part of the confiscated land—Burgundy, Provence, and
the old Austrasian realm about Metz and Trier—was to go to the
dearly-loved Charles, now a boy of fourteen years of age.

This project pleased nobody. It rendered Lothair desperate, did not
please Lewis and Pippin, and disgusted the whole of the Franks, who
exclaimed that the sole cause of the wars was to be found in the
emperor’s doting affection for his youngest son. It is probable that
another war would have broken out, if a new disaster had not fallen upon
the realm. The first great Viking invasion was just about to descend
upon the empire. The men of the North had seen its forces turned aside
into fratricidal civil war, and took the opportunity to make havoc of
the undefended coastland. In 835 when Lothair was being driven back
towards Italy, they landed in great force in Frisia and sacked Utrecht,
its metropolitan city, and Dorstad, the great harbour and mart of the
province—the predecessor in commercial history of Rotterdam. In 836
while Lewis had been planning the redivision of his empire to the
prejudice of Lothair at the diet of Crémieux, the Danes harried Flanders
and burnt the new city of Antwerp. Now in 837 they fell upon the island
of Walcheren, wasted it, and worked up the Rhine-mouth with fire and
sword as far as Nimuegen. [Sidenote: The Danes on the Rhine, 836.]
Relinquishing his plans against Italy, Lewis the Pious turned against
the heathen of the North, and marched rapidly towards the scene of their
ravages. But the Danes did not yet dare to face the full imperial army
of Frankland, and fled away to their ships leaving nothing in front of
the emperor but ravaged fields and burning villages.

Lewis returned at once to his unwise schemes for endowing his
well-beloved Charles. At a great council at Aachen in 837 he girt the
boy, now aged fifteen, with the royal sword, crowned him with his own
hands, and bestowed on him not only the Suabian and Burgundian lands
that he had been promised at the diet of Crémieux, but a great tract of
German land up to the borders of Saxony, which had been previously
allotted to Lewis of Bavaria. The counts and prelates of the new realm
were bidden to do homage to their young ruler, and become his men.

Lewis of Bavaria, however, was determined not to give up his promised
inheritance in Germany, and found support among all the Teutonic peoples
east of the Rhine, who had no wish to be handed over to the boy Charles.
He mustered an army, sent to beg the help of his brother Lothair, and
stood on the defensive. The old emperor replied by summoning a great
council at Cérisy-sur-Oise, at which he declared Lewis deprived of all
his lands save Bavaria, and conferred them on the young Charles.
Immediately afterwards Pippin of Aquitaine died, and the emperor put the
finishing touches to his unwisdom by handing over the whole of Pippin’s
realms to his darling. If this plan had been carried out, Lewis would
have left all the Frankish empire north of the Alps, save the single
duchy of Bavaria, to his youngest child. The worst point in the project
was that Pippin left sons, and the eldest of them—his father’s
namesake—was a growing boy of about the same age as Charles. The
majority of the people of Aquitaine would have nothing to say to the
transfer of their allegiance, and proclaimed Pippin the younger king in
his father’s room. The emperor, with transparent injustice, declared the
boy too young to reign, and bade the Aquitanians send him to Aachen to
be trained up at his court and learn the art of government—an art which
Lewis was so competent to teach! When the young Pippin did not appear,
Lewis threatened his southern subjects with invasion.

At once the civil war burst out in East and West and South. Lewis of
Bavaria broke into Suabia; the Gascon followers of Pippin the Young
marched on the Loire. At the same time the Danes who had been narrowly
watching their opportunity returned to the Frisian coast, destroyed
Dorstad for the second time and harried all the lands about the Rhine
mouth. (Spring of 839.) At his wit’s end to know which foe he should
first attack, the emperor resolved to seek aid in the only place where
it might still be found. Consigning to oblivion all memories of the
Lügenfeld, and the humiliations before the altar of St. Médard, he
besought the help of his eldest son. Lothair on his side was anxious to
recover his birthright, and to be recognised once more as heir to the
empire. He hurried from Pavia to Worms, to place himself at his father’s
disposition. Kneeling before the old man in full meeting of the great
council, he confessed his ingratitude and repeated treasons, and asked
for pardon. But while ostensibly craving for forgiveness only, he had
secretly stipulated for reward. Accordingly Lewis the Pious now
proclaimed the last of the many partitions of the empire which had been
the bane of his life. The _Placitum_ of Worms stated that Lewis of
Bavaria should retain his original Bavarian duchy alone, that the
younger Pippin should be wholly disinherited, and that Lothair and
Charles should divide the empire. The eldest son and heir took Italy,
Saxony, Suabia, all the Frankish lands on the Meuse and Rhine, and the
Burgundian and Provençal realms along the Rhone. The dearly-loved
Charles was given Neustria and Aquitaine, the two kingdoms whose union
roughly represents the modern land of France.[54]

Footnote 54:

France, that is, minus the lands between Rhone and Alps, and plus
Flanders and Catalonia.

[Sidenote: Third Civil War, 839.] The year 840 saw the commencement of
the civil war, with a new arrangement of combatants. Lewis the elder,
Lothair, and Charles, against Lewis the young, and Pippin. Fortune
favoured the old man for once. He first marched into Aquitaine, drove
the rebels before him, and forced the bishops and counts of the land
beyond the Loire to do homage to Charles at Clermont in Auvergne.
Contrary to his usual custom the emperor did not pardon all his enemies,
but beheaded several of the chief partisans of the young Pippin.

Aquitaine was no sooner overrun, than Lewis, with a vigour which he had
never shown before—it was the dying flash of his life’s energy—wheeled
his army northward and marched against his son the king of Bavaria. So
rapid was the attack that the younger Lewis was driven out of Suabia,
chased along the Bavarian bank of the Danube, and forced to take refuge
in the far Ost-Mark on the Slavonic border. The emperor had now
vindicated by the force of arms the partition of Worms: Pippin was
disinherited, and Lewis driven back into a narrow corner of Germany. A
great council was summoned to meet in July, and the emperor came back by
slow stages towards the Rhine to preside over it. But the double
campaign of the spring had been too much for him. For some years his
lungs had been affected, and the chills of a March and April spent in
arms in the open field brought on a rapid consumption. At
Frankfort-on-Main he dismissed his army and took to his couch. His
strength dwindled as the weeks passed away, and at last he bade his
attendants place him in a boat and row him down to the Rhine, to a spot
which he loved well, the island in mid-stream hard by his palace at
Ingelheim, where the tower of the Pfalz now rises from the rapid rushing
waters. Then it contained only a rough hunting lodge thatched with
reeds, and in that poor shelter the dying emperor lingered out the
midsummer weeks, lying for hours motionless on his couch with a little
cross clasped to his breast. His wife and his son Charles were far away
at Poictiers, in Aquitaine, and did not arrive in time to receive his
dying blessing. But a crowd of bishops and monks mustered around the
emperor’s deathbed, to watch over his edifying end. [Sidenote: Death of
Lewis, 840.] On June 25th the old man’s last agony seized him; he
started up in bed, cried in a loud voice ‘Out! Out!’ and fell back dead,
leaving the clerical throng around to debate whether his last words bade
some evil spirit depart from his presence, or referred to his own
setting out for a better world. So ended king Lewis,

Rex Hludovicus, pietatis tantus amicus,
Qui Pius a populo, dicitur et titulo.

He left the empire which he had done so much to dismember to be fought
for by his three sons and his grandson. He left the imperial dignity
fatally injured by his grovelling penances at Attigny and Soissons. He
had allowed the Danes to spy out the nakedness of the land in the North;
while the Saracens had already landed in Italy to the South. He had
suffered the clerical power again and again to usurp authority over
secular things, as none of his predecessors of the Frankish race,
Meroving or Karling, had ever done. Yet in spite of all, his piety and
conscientious desire to do right—often as it was misled—gave him a
greater claim to the respect of his subjects than did the personal
character of any of his successors. Ere long men came to look back to
the time of Lewis the Pious as to an age of comparative quiet and
prosperity.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XXIV

DISRUPTION OF THE FRANKISH EMPIRE—THE COMING OF THE VIKINGS

840-855

Wars of the sons of Lewis the Pious—Battle of Fontenay and Peace of
Verdun—The Vikings and their ships and methods of warfare—All
Western Europe subject to their incursions—Their invasion of
Neustria and Austrasia—Intermittent civil wars of the Franks—Charles
the Bald and his policy—Death of Lothair.

At the moment of his death Lewis the Pious had been at enmity with his
son Lewis of Bavaria and his grandson Pippin the young of Aquitaine,
while he had by his last partition-statute provided for the division of
the bulk of his realm between his eldest-born Lothair, and his
youngest-born Charles. It seemed natural, therefore, that when, after
the old man’s death, the succession troubles broke out with renewed
vigour the Franks of Neustria and Austrasia and the Lombards would be
ranged in battle against the East Germans and the Aquitanians.

Such, however, was not to be the case; the governing force in the future
course of events was to be, not the dying will of Lewis the Pious, but
the dispositions of his three sons, and still more the unwillingness of
the various kingdoms in their heritages to abide by the unnatural
partition—last among so many—which Lewis had left behind him.

The first question to be settled was whether the empire, in the shape in
which Charles the Great and Lewis in his earlier years had ruled it, was
to continue. There was no doubt as to the succession to the imperial
title. Lothair had been crowned co-regent emperor many years before, and
before his father’s death had been restored to favour, and acknowledged
as heir to the imperial throne. But would he be strong enough to sustain
the burden which had been too much for his father, to combine a strong
hand and a conciliatory policy, and hold the various races of his
subjects together, without driving any one of them to discontent and
revolt? [Sidenote: Character of Lothair.] Lothair was brave,
unscrupulous, active, troubled by none of the morbid scruples and
ill-placed tenderness which had been so fatal to his father. But he was
full of faults of the opposite extreme, as dangerous to a ruler as his
parent’s over-great mildness and long-suffering. He was quite destitute
of natural affection, as his doings at the penance of St. Médard and the
Lügenfeld had shown, and was not merely wanting in tenderness for his
kith and kin, but unable even to pretend to a reasonable regard for
brother, father, or nephew. Even in that rough time his unfilial conduct
had shocked his own subjects and followers. His ambition and pride were
the only sentiments to which an appeal could be made with success. He
was filled with an overweening idea of the greatness of the imperial
position, though he had done so much himself to cause its degradation in
the eyes of all the nations of the empire, by his cruel and offensive
treatment of his father. He had taught the Franks that an emperor could
be imprisoned, preached at, dictated to, publicly chastised, deposed,
and he foolishly supposed that his own imperial dignity would not suffer
from the precedent. The moment his accession was proclaimed it was known
that harsh unbending rigour would reign all over the Frankish realm.

Yet Lothair’s situation in 840 was not disadvantageous; his enemies
Lewis and Pippin had been driven into remote corners of the empire. He
was loyally supported by the Lombards of his old Italian kingdom and by
the Austrasians, the old ruling race, whose imperialist tendencies had
been shown by their constant fidelity to Lewis the Pious throughout all
his troubles. But Lothair wasted his strength by a strange combination
of arbitrary claims and dilatory action. He began by showing the most
reckless disregard for his father’s dying wishes. He made no secret of
his intention of stripping his young brother Charles of the Neustrian
dominions which had been left him, though the child of his father’s
declining years had been specially commended to his protection.
[Sidenote: War of the three brothers.] But he did not follow up his
threats by any prompt action against the young king, but went off to
Germany to conclude the campaign against his brother Lewis of Bavaria,
which his dead father had left half finished. But on arriving in Bavaria
he did not strike down his enemy, but made a six months’ truce with him,
and returned to Neustria. There he made a feeble attempt to put down
Charles, but finally returned to Aachen, where he spent the winter in
pomp and feasting, while his two brothers were repairing their strength
and raising large armies. Lewis and Charles had determined to combine,
for they saw that strict union was needful against their common enemy.

In the spring of 841 the king of Neustria and the king of Germany each
drew towards the Rhine, with the purpose of joining their armies. The
emperor was frightened by the strength which they displayed, and thought
it necessary to add to his own forces by enlisting in his cause his only
possible ally. He hastily promised to confirm the young Pippin in his
kingdom of Aquitaine if he would lead the men of the south to his aid.
Pippin accepted the offer, and brought an army of Gascons across
Burgundy to join his uncle. Meanwhile Charles and Lewis had successfully
united their hosts at Chalons-sur-Saône in such force that Lothair
feared to fight them. He held them off by disloyal negotiation for some
weeks, till he heard that his nephew had arrived with all the forces of
Aquitaine, and then suddenly declared that nothing could be settled
without a battle, and proceeded to attack his brothers. [Sidenote:
Battle of Fontenay.] The armies met in the valley of the Yonne, and
there followed the decisive and disastrous battle of Fontenay, the
greatest fight that Europe had seen since Charles Martel smote the
Saracens at Poictiers. The whole of the nations of the empire were
arrayed against each other. On the hill by Bretignolles Lothair, with
the host of Austrasia, faced the Bavarians and Saxons of king Lewis. In
the plain by Lefay the Neustrians of Charles were drawn up against the
Aquitanians of the young Pippin. After much hard fighting the Neustrians
gave way before the onslaught of their southern countrymen, but on the
other flank the Germans of Lewis won a far more decisive advantage over
the emperor’s Austrasian followers. Lothair was driven down from the
hill with fearful slaughter, the flower of the nobility of the land
between Meuse and Rhine lay dead on the field. It was a blow from which
Austrasia never recovered. Her ancient supremacy over the rest of the
empire, won six generations back at Testry and Amblève, was gone for
ever. The swords of the Teutons of the east had shattered the reputation
of her invincibility, and the balance of power was permanently
transferred eastward (June 25th, 841). The slaughter was long
remembered, and the evils which the empire was to pass through during
the next forty years were often ascribed to the result of this fatal
fight. ‘By that day,’ says the chronicler Regino, ‘the strength of the
Franks was so cut down, and their fame and valour so diminished, that
for the future they were not merely unable to extend the bounds of their
realm, but even incapable of protecting their own frontiers.’

Lothair drew back the wrecks of his army to Aachen, while Pippin fled
southward to Aquitaine. The victorious brothers, Charles and Lewis,
succeeded before the year was out in subduing all the partisans of the
emperor, both in Neustria and in Germany. It was in vain that Lothair
tried to stir up trouble against them by supporting a rebellion in
Saxony, where, in the wilder corners of the land, a rising of the
servile classes, and the few surviving adherents of paganism, was
troubling king Lewis.

In the next spring the kings of Neustria and Germany united their armies
to drive Lothair from Austrasia. [Sidenote: The Oath of Strasburg.] They
met at Strasburg, where they swore to each other the solemn oath, whose
wording is so precious to us as giving the first monument of the new
French and German tongues that were just developing in their realms.
When they marched on Aachen Lothair was compelled to take his wife and
children and the royal treasure-hoard, and fly southward into Burgundy.
It was long remembered how on his retreat he broke up the great silver
globe, which had been the pride of his grandfather Charles the Great,
‘whereon were represented the divisions of the world, and the
constellations of heaven, and the courses of the planets,’ and
distributed its fragments as pay among his discontented soldiery. He
halted at Lyons, and there his proud spirit at last bowed to the
necessity of asking for peace from his brothers. The two kings showed
themselves willing to treat, and the final result of the negotiations
was the famous Partition of Verdun. It was indeed no time for civil
wars. While the brothers were fighting, the Danes had sacked Quentovic,
a great port on the English channel, and the Moors had landed in
Provence and harried Arles, while the Slavs beyond the Elbe had shaken
off the Frankish yoke.

The Partition of Verdun finally broke up the empire. Though Charles and
Lewis restored to Lothair his capital of Aachen, and consented to
recognise him as emperor, and to respect him as elder brother, yet for
the future they were for all practical purposes independent sovereigns.
The scheme which Charles the Great had worked so successfully, and Lewis
the Pious so feebly, for conducting the government of Western
Christendom by an emperor assisted in certain outlying regions by
subject-kings of his kindred, now definitely disappeared. Lothair had no
power or authority outside the district which his brothers consigned to
his direct sovereignty.

[Illustration:

PARTITION-TREATY OF VERDUN
843.
]

[Sidenote: Treaty of Verdun, 843.] Examining the boundaries fixed by the
treaty of Verdun, we find the Frankish empire divided into three long
strips running from north to south. In the east Lewis of Bavaria took
all the Teutonic lands east of the Rhine—Saxony, Thuringia, Bavaria,
Suabia, and the suzerainty over the Slavs of the Elbe and Save. He had
also one small tract of Austrasian territory west of the Rhine, the
_gaus_ of Speier, Worms, and Mainz. Lothair kept his old kingdom of
Italy, together with a long narrow strip of territory reaching from the
mouth of the Rhone to the mouths of the Rhine and Yssel. This strip
consisted of Frisia, the bulk of Austrasia, the most of Burgundy, and
Provence. Charles took the western kingdoms of Neustria and Aquitaine,
with the Spanish March and western Burgundy, for his kinsman Pippin was
abandoned to his mercy by the emperor, and the lands south of the Loire,
as well as those north, were put into his share of the empire.

Two of these realms, those of Charles and Lewis, roughly corresponded to
national unities. The eastern kingdom comprised all the Teutonic
districts of the empire, except Austrasia. The western, formed by the
union of Neustria and Aquitaine, was the first foreshadowing of the
modern kingdom of France, comprising as it did the bulk of the Romance
districts of the empire, where the Teutonic element had always been
small, and was of late growing less and less prominent. But Lothair’s
kingdom was an unnatural and unwieldy aggregation of districts connected
neither by blood, by language, nor by historical ties. Its shape seems
to have been determined merely by the wish to give the emperor both the
imperial cities—Rome and Aachen—together with a strip of soil
conveniently connecting them. The Teutonic Austrasians, the
Romance-speaking Burgundians, and the Italian Lombards were in no wise
fitted for union with each other, and were certain to drift apart, alike
from geographical and from national reasons. They only adhered to each
other for one man’s life, and fell asunder the moment that he died.

For the future we shall find the wide realm of Charles the Great
constantly tending to minute sub-division. The connection between east
and west, north and south, grows constantly less, and ere long we shall
be compelled to tell of the fortunes of the different fractions of the
empire in separate chapters, since the central cord of connection formed
by the kingly power has finally snapped. But as long as the generation
of the sons of Lewis the Pious survives, there is still a certain
interdependence between the history of the Eastern and Western Franks,
and it is not till the deposition of Charles the Fat, in 887, that the
elements of dissolution finally triumph, and all ideas of the reunion of
the empire are finally discredited.

In 843 commences the tripartite government of Lothair the emperor, and
his two brothers, whom we may for the future style by their well-known
names of Lewis the German and Charles the Bald, though the latter style
can hardly yet have been appropriate to the Neustrian king, who had only
just celebrated his twenty-first birthday. His elder brothers were now
much older men, Lothair having attained his forty-fourth and Lewis his
thirty-eighth year. Both of them had now growing sons whom they were ere
long to take as colleagues in part of their realm.

The period from the Peace of Verdun, in 843, down to the deposition of
Charles the Fat, in 887, is the most chaotic and perplexing portion of
the history of Europe with which we have to deal. For the fortunes of
the various fractions of the Frankish empire are bound up with the
fortunes of the members of a much-ramified royal house in which—with a
lamentable want of originality—the same four names are continually
recurring. [Sidenote: The grandsons of Lewis the Pious.] We have
hitherto been confronted only with the three brothers—Lothair, Lewis,
and Charles. Now each of these brothers had three sons, and with a
perversity which the reader and the writer of history must alike
deplore, each christened his boys after their uncles. Lothair’s three
sons were Lewis, Charles, and Lothair; Lewis named his offspring Lewis,
Charles, and Carloman; and Charles, when at a later date he became a
father, followed the evil example by christening his children Lewis,
Charles, and Carloman also. The genealogical table must be kept
carefully before us, lest from the similarity of names we confuse the
imperial, the German, and the Neustrian houses of the Karlings.

THE DESCENDANTS OF CHARLES THE GREAT.

The dates of the reigns of the three contentious brothers were, for
Lothair 843-855, for Lewis 843-876, for Charles 843-877. When they had
settled down after the Peace of Verdun, they found two problems before
them. The first was that of keeping the peace with each other, in spite
of all the grudges which the events of the last fifteen years had raised
between them. The second was that of defending Western Christendom from
the assaults from without, which were daily growing more and more
dangerous. The Danes, whose first ravages we have related under the
reign of Lewis the Pious, were now becoming no longer a mere pest to the
coastland, but a serious danger to the whole empire. The Saracens were
commencing a series of daring piratical descents on Provence and Italy.
The Slavs beyond the Elbe were gradually throwing off their allegiance
to the empire, and recommencing the raids on Germany, from which they
had been stayed by Charles the Great.

For ten years (843-53) the three kings succeeded—contrary to all
expectation—in keeping the peace with each other. But in spite of their
temporary freedom from civil strife, they did not succeed in defending
their realms with success from the outer barbarian. As the chronicler
observed, ‘the slaughter of Fontenay seemed not only to have thinned the
ranks of the Frankish host, but to have robbed them of their ancient
invincibility in war.’ The only one of the three kings who showed the
slightest power to defend his borders was Lewis the German: his two
brothers suffered one continual series of checks and disasters.

[Sidenote: The Vikings.] The main problem which now confronted the
Frankish rulers was the necessity for dealing firmly with the invasion
of the Scandinavian pirates. The peoples on both shores of the Cattegat
had now thrown themselves heart and soul into the occupation of harrying
the lands of their southern neighbours. They were a group of kindred
tribes, some of whom dwelt in Jutland and the Danish isles, others on
the southern and south-eastern shore of the Scandinavian peninsula,
others along the fiords which face the German Ocean. Western Christendom
often styled them indiscriminately by the name of Danes, though in truth
the Danes were only the most southern of the four races which joined in
the invasions. A better common appellation was that of Northmen, which
would include the Swede, the Goth and the Norwegian as well as the
Danish dwellers in Jutland and Zealand.

From time immemorial the dwellers on the Cattegat and the southern
Baltic had been a sea-faring race. Tacitus, in the second century of our
era, speaks of Scandinavia as powerful by its fleets. The Jutes and
Angles who joined in the conquest of Britain had sprung from these seas.
The Danes had been addicted to piracy from the earliest times. Far back
in the sixth century, we have heard of Viking chiefs, like king Hygelac
whom Theudebert the Frank slew,[55] as occasionally descending on the
Austrasian and Frisian shores. But it was not till the end of the eighth
century that western Europe began to be seriously troubled by the
Northmen. The cause of the sudden increase of activity among races who
had so long spared the feeble realm of the later Merovings is difficult
to ascertain. Perhaps their constant wars with the Saxons, tribes as
fierce and untameable as themselves, had kept them quiet. But it is
certain that down to the time of Charles the Great they were mainly
expending their energy on wars with each other, and were seldom heard of
in the North Sea or the British Channel till the Frankish empire with
its wealth, its commerce, and its Christian propaganda came up to meet
them by subduing the Saxon and Frisian, and stretching forth its
boundary to the Eider.

Footnote 55:

See page 113.

[Sidenote: Early Viking raids.] It was just after Charles the Great had
conquered Saxony that the Vikings began to make themselves felt. The
earliest trace of them in western waters was a petty raid on the English
town of Wareham in 789. Within a few years, however, the scope of their
expeditions enlarged; in 793 they sacked the great Northumbrian
monastery of Lindisfarn; in 795 they are heard of in Ireland for the
first time. In 799 they began their assaults on the Frankish empire by a
transient raid on Aquitaine. From this time forward their activity grew
incessantly; every year their fleets discovered some new and rich field
for plunder, till no creek or estuary of western Europe was unknown to
their pilots. We have already told how Charles the Great was so vexed by
their first ravages that he endeavoured to establish a defensive
flotilla in all the ports of Neustria, and how in the last years of his
reign the Danish king Godfred had given him serious trouble both in the
south Baltic and on the Frisian shore.[56] We have mentioned the far
more important descents of the Vikings on the lands about the Rhine
mouth in the days of the feeble government of good king Lewis. But now
the evil was still growing: the emperor Lothair and his brothers were to
find the Northmen no longer a nuisance but a real danger.

Footnote 56:

See page 367.

Nothing could have been more daring than the enterprise of the Northmen
in setting out from their distant homes to undertake the long voyage to
Ireland or Aquitaine. [Sidenote: The ships of the Vikings.] Their
vessels were merely long narrow open boats, generally some seventy-five
feet long by fifteen broad, but drawing only three-and-a-half feet of
water. They relied on rowing more than on sailing, and their one mast
could easily be lowered, and generally was taken down before a naval
engagement. When the wind was favourable they used a single large square
sail, but it was always in the strength and endurance of the oarsmen
that they placed their main confidence. The ordinary Viking vessel seems
to have carried about one hundred and twenty men, so that to transport
any large body an enormous number of ships was required. But even in
small numbers the Vikings were very formidable; they were all
professional warriors, who had taken by choice to the trade of
sea-robbers, and were individually far superior to the forced levies
whom English aldermen or Frankish counts could hurry into the field
against them. They were far better armed than their opponents, almost
every man being well equipped with the shirt of ring-mail and steel
helmet, while among the Franks and English only the nobles and chiefs
were as yet wearing armour. They were also fighting for their lives: the
pirate defeated in a strange country was completely at the mercy of the
people of the land, and always doomed to death; hence he fought with a
far greater fury than his enemies. But at first the Viking came to
pillage rather than to fight: he was better pleased to plunder some rich
undefended port or monastery and then put out to sea, than to win
precarious spoil after hard handstrokes with the levies of an angry
country-side.

By this time the Vikings were operating on every coast in western
Europe. It was not only the Franks who were suffering from their
inroads: the English kingdoms and the Celts of Scotland and Ireland were
faring even worse. The expeditions of the Northmen were now taking two
well-marked courses; one was the voyage past Frisia and the Rhine-mouth
to the Neustrian and south English coasts. The other was a longer and
bolder adventure, the open sea voyage from the western capes of Norway
to Orkney and Shetland, and thence south-west, past the Hebrides, to
Ireland, Wales, and western England. The former line of plunder was
mainly in the hands of the Danes; the latter was more frequented by the
Norwegians. The other two northern peoples, the Swedes and Goths of the
Scandinavian peninsula, were almost entirely engrossed in cruises
eastward, against the Slavs and Finns of the Baltic.

[Sidenote: The Vikings in Ireland.] In the earlier years of the Viking
raids, Ireland suffered more than any other country; its tribal kings
could give no protection to their subjects. There was not a town in the
island defended by a stone wall, and the numerous and wealthy
monasteries, protected by their sanctity alone, lay open to the spoiler.
The Norwegian pirates ranged at their good pleasure over the face of the
land, and ere long commenced to winter in it, instead of returning home
at the end of their summer ravages. It was in Ireland that they first
bethought them of seizing the whole country and turning it into a new
Norse kingdom. It was in the very year of the Partition of Verdun that a
great chief named Thorgisl gained full possession of the northern half
of the island, and established himself as king therein. He reigned for
two years (843-45) with great success, till he fell by chance into the
hands of Malachy, king of Meath, who drowned him in Loch Owel. With his
death, his kingdom fell to pieces, and the Irish recovered much that he
had conquered from his divided followers. But the Norwegians still clung
to all the ports and headlands of Ireland: at Dublin, Wexford,
Waterford, Limerick, they built their towns and waged continual war
against the Irish of the inland parts.

England fared at first better than the sister isle. The great over-king
Ecgbert of Wessex was well able to defend his realm; most of the Viking
attacks were beaten off with loss as long as Ecgbert lived (802-838).
But under his weaker son Ethelwulf the invasions grew more and more
desperate and persistent, till in 850 we find the fatal sign that the
Vikings succeeded for the first time in wintering in the land,
fortifying themselves in the Kentish isle of Thanet, and defying the
fyrd of Wessex to force the narrow waterway that separated it from the
mainland.

The Danes in the Frankish empire had a far harder task than their
Norwegian brethren had found in Ireland, and for a long time they showed
much greater caution in venturing inland, or accepting battle in the
open field. They fled before the face of Lewis the Pious when he marched
against them in force, and it was only when the empire was distracted by
civil war that they began to strike boldly up the great rivers and
plunder the towns of the interior. It was of evil import for the empire
that just before the fight of Fontenay they had sailed up the Seine and
taken Rouen (841), and that just before the pacification of Verdun they
had entered the Loire and burnt the great port of Nantes.

But when at last the Frankish kings had made peace, the Vikings had
grown so bold that they persisted none the less in their attacks on the
empire, and in the years that followed the new partition, their
successes were even greater than before. All the three brothers were
sorely beset by the Northmen, and two of them met with an unbroken
series of disasters. [Sidenote: The Danes in Saxony.] Lewis the German
fared best; the tough Saxon tribes on his frontier always made a good
fight against their hereditary enemies the Danes. But the king saw the
new town of Hamburg burnt in 845, so that its bishop had to fly to
Bremen, and in 851 a great expedition sailed up the Elbe, defeated the
Saxon counts in the open field and returned in triumph to Jutland after
ravaging the eastern half of Saxony.

Lothair and Charles fared far worse. The emperor saw his coastland in
Frisia ravaged every year. It was in vain that he tried to gain peace by
giving the island of Walcheren to Rorik the Dane, on the condition that
he should hold it as a fief and guard the coast from his brethren. Other
greedy adventurers followed Rorik, till the whole Frisian coast was
dotted with their palisaded forts, and their ravages penetrated farther
and farther inland, till Lothair in his palace at Aachen began to
tremble for his own safety.

But the lot of the young king Charles and of the Western Franks was
still less happy. His realm had a far greater length of exposed
coastland than those of his brethren, and he was vexed by a lingering
civil war, for Pippin of Aquitaine had never acquiesced in the Partition
of Verdun, and did his best to maintain himself among his partisans
south of the Loire. After much fighting he was compelled for two years
to do homage to Charles, but he soon rose in arms again, and though his
uncle had the better in the contest he was still able to keep up an
obstinate resistance. [Sidenote: The Vikings in France.] Charles thought
more of subduing Pippin than of warding off the Danes, and while he was
engaged in Aquitaine the northern parts of his realm were fearfully
maltreated. As early as 843 the Vikings found courage to winter in
Neustria, seizing and fortifying the monastery of Noirmoutier on an
island at the Loire-mouth. Next year they were enabled to strike far
inland, for Pippin, overborne by his uncle Charles, madly called in Jarl
Oscar to his aid, and brought the Vikings up the Garonne as far as
Toulouse. Thus introduced into the very heart of the land, they were
able both to spy out its fertility and wealth, and to judge of the
weakness and unwisdom of its rulers. It was not Aquitaine, however, that
first felt their heavy hand. [Sidenote: Sack of Paris.] In 845 they
boldly entered the Seine-mouth, plundered Rouen for the second time, and
then ascended the river far higher than they had ever mounted before, up
to the very walls of the city of Paris. Charles dared not face them, but
fortified himself on the heights of Montmartre and the abbey of St.
Denis, while the Vikings entered Paris and plundered part of the city,
till, stricken by an inexplicable panic, they returned to their boats
and dropped down the river again. It was certainly not the army of
Charles that they need have feared, for he was thinking of paying
tribute rather than of fighting. Indeed he paid 7000 lbs. of gold to
this particular horde to induce them to quit Neustria altogether.

From this time onward things went from bad to worse for king Charles,
largely owing to his own faults as we may guess, for he was a fickle
unsteady prince, always taking new enterprises in hand and dropping them
suddenly for some fresh plan before he had half carried them out. Nor
was his courage beyond suspicion; more than once in his reign he fled
out of danger with an alacrity that savoured more of fear than of
prudence. After the sack of Paris we find the Vikings hovering around
Neustria on every side; one band had established itself at the
Loire-mouth, another under Jarl Oscar watched the Garonne, another
devoted itself to the harrying of Flanders, and got succour when
required from the emperor Lothair’s Danish vassals on the isle of
Walcheren. Spasmodically hurrying about from one scene of Viking
outrages to another, king Charles protected nothing, and always arrived
too late to be of use. In 847 even Bordeaux, the greatest city of
southern Gaul, was beleaguered by the Vikings of the Garonne. [Sidenote:
Sack of Bordeaux.] This drew him for some time into Aquitaine, where he
for once won a success, by subduing his nephew Pippin, who had lost his
former popularity among the Gascons by his drunken and dissolute habits,
and still more by his unwisdom in calling in the Danes to his aid. But
while Charles lay in Aquitaine he suffered a greater disaster than any
he had yet sustained, by the loss of Bordeaux, which was betrayed to
Jarl Oscar by a discontented party among its citizens.[57] It was to be
held for some years by the Vikings.

Footnote 57:

By Jews according to one account; by partisans of Pippin according to
another.

The plunder of such a wealthy place was well calculated to draw more
Danish hordes into Gaul. The condition of the country grew progressively
worse, and we trace every year the advance of the ships of the invaders
farther and farther up the great rivers. In 850 they grew so bold that
they fortified themselves high up the Seine at Givald’s dyke (Jeufosse),
where they abode many months and harried all the country about Beauvais
and Mantes at their leisure. Charles the Bald, engaged in a luckless
campaign against the rebellious duke of the Bretons, brought no succour
to his subjects. Nor was he on the spot when in the following year
Ghent, Térouanne, and all Flanders were wasted. But probably the capture
of his old enemy Pippin of Aquitaine atoned in his eyes for many such
disasters: the pretender was taken prisoner by the count of Gascony, who
handed him over to the king. In accordance with old Frankish custom
Pippin was shorn and thrust into a monastery.

[Sidenote: The Danes at Givald’s dyke.] The year 852 saw the kingdom of
the West Franks sink to a worse degradation than any it had yet known.
When the Danes again came up the Seine and settled down in their former
camp at Givald’s dyke, Charles called out the whole force of Neustria in
such overwhelming strength that the Vikings retired behind their
palisades and stood on the defensive. Presently the emperor Lothair with
his warlike Austrasians marched up to help his brother, and the doom of
the Danes seemed settled. But after a siege which lasted many months,
Charles suddenly made peace with Godfred the Danish chief and granted
him a great sum of money and a tract of land at the Loire-mouth to
settle in. Lothair and the Austrasians went home in wrath, and never
aided the fickle Neustrian king again.

When the Franks were faring so badly, only one more evil was wanted to
make their position unbearable, and this was soon added. In 853 the ten
years’ peace between the brothers, which had lasted since the treaty of
Verdun, was broken. The restless people of Aquitaine, though they had
lost their old leader Pippin, had determined to try a new revolt. They
secretly sent to ask aid of Lewis the German, and he, though much vexed
at home by Danish raids and Slavonic rebellions, was unwise enough to
grant their petition. [Sidenote: Civil War of Lewis and Charles, 854.]
He sent his second son Lewis the Saxon, with a Suabian and Bavarian
army, into Aquitaine, and declared war on his brother Charles. The
emperor Lothair, with more sense than he usually showed, tried to keep
his brothers from the mad struggle. But it was not owing to his efforts
that the Germans finally consented to retire from southern Gaul, but
merely because the younger Lewis met less support than he had expected
from the Gascon rebels, and found himself not strong enough to resist
the full force of Neustria, when his uncle took the field against him.
But while this wholly unjustifiable civil war was in progress, the Danes
had made worse havoc than ever in the midst of the kingdom of Charles.
They burnt Nantes and Tours, harried the districts around Angers and
Blois, and only checked their course before the walls of Orleans, which
made a sturdy and successful resistance (853-4).

[Sidenote: Death of Lothair, 855.] In the next year the last formal link
which still held together the Frankish empire was snapped by the death
of the emperor Lothair. Old before his time, and feeling himself utterly
unable to cope with the evils of the day, he retired into the monastery
of Prüm, and died there only a few weeks after he had taken the cowl.
His heterogeneous empire at once fell to pieces: his eldest son Lewis,
who had already been crowned as his colleague in the empire by pope
Sergius II., was left nothing but the kingdom of Italy with which to
support his imperial title. To Italy he was a good king, but beyond the
Alps he met with neither respect nor obedience. His younger brothers
Lothair and Charles divided between them the northern parts of their
father’s heritage. Lothair took Austrasia, Charles took Provence, and
the intermediate Burgundian territory was parted between them.

Thus the unity of the Empire had already become a mockery, and the realm
of Charles the Great was split into five kingdoms, owing each other
neither love nor homage nor succour in time of need.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XXV

THE DARKEST HOUR—A.D. 855-887

FROM THE DEATH OF LOTHAIR I.
TO THE DEPOSITION OF CHARLES THE FAT

Civil Wars following the death of Lothair I.—King Lewis and his rule in
Germany—Troubles of Lothair II.—The Vikings in Neustria—The Edict of
Pistres—Charles the Bald invades Austrasia—Treaty of Mersen—Charles
made Emperor—Death of Lewis the German—War of his sons with Charles
the Bald—Charles’s successors in Neustria—Disastrous reign of
Charles the Fat—He unites Germany, France, and Italy—The siege of
Paris—Charles the Fat dethroned.

Evil as had been the years which followed the fight of Fontenay and the
Partition of Verdun, there were yet worse to come. It was the miserable
peculiarity of the second half of the ninth century that it saw
Christendom, for the first time since the commencement of the Dark Ages,
begin to sink back towards primitive chaos and barbarism. After four
hundred years of vacillating but permanent progress towards union,
strength, and civilisation, it began to relapse, and to fall back into
disunion, weakness, and ignorance. The reign of Charles the Great was to
be for long years the high-water mark of progress. The succeeding age
rapidly sinks away from it, and it is not till the middle of the tenth
century that a rise is once more perceptible.

But of all the evil years those between 855 and 887 were to be the
worst. The civil wars of the descendants of Lewis the Pious grew yet
more numerous and ruinous; the raids of the Viking and the Saracen
spread wider and wider; the rulers of the Frankish empire were struck by
a blight, dying young or sinking into imbecility long before they
attained middle age, till the race seemed destined to disappear from
history with the fall of the cowardly, unwieldy, incompetent Charles the
Fat in 887.

[Sidenote: Civil war on the death of Lothair I.] The new troubles began
immediately on the death of the emperor Lothair. His three sons could
not agree in the partition scheme which divided their father’s realm.
Lewis thought that his share—the kingdom of Italy—was far too small for
the eldest son and the bearer of the imperial title; Lothair II. grudged
the share of Burgundy which fell to his youngest brother Charles, and
tried to seize the young man, in order to tonsure him and confine him in
a monastery. Before any actual blow had been struck, pope Benedict III.
succeeded in patching up a truce between the brothers, but they drew
apart and sought alliances against each other, Lothair leaguing himself
with his younger uncle Charles the Bald, while Lewis became the friend
of his elder uncle and namesake Lewis of Germany. Two years later the
family grudge led to war under the most disastrous circumstances.
Charles and Lothair II. had united their forces for a decisive campaign
against the Danes, whose main army, under a certain Jarl Biorn, had
concentrated itself in central France, and burnt Paris, Chartres, and
Blois (857). Before the united strength of Neustria and Austrasia the
Vikings drew back, and stockaded themselves in a great camp on the
Seine-island of Oissel.[58] Charles blocked their way down the river by
bringing up a fleet, which he had lately built, to the next reach, and
determined to starve them out. After a siege of three months it seemed
likely that he would achieve his purpose; the Danes could neither beat
him nor escape him. But just as they were about to yield there came to
the king of Neustria the dire news that his brother Lewis with the whole
host of Germany had crossed the Rhine, and was marching against him.
Charles straightway raised the siege of Oissel, allowed the Danes to
burn his fleet and to escape, and turned eastward to resist king Lewis.
Their armies met at Brienne-sur-Aube, but when Charles saw the
overwhelming numbers of the Germans his heart failed him—as it often did
in such a crisis—and he deserted his men and fled away into Burgundy.
Deprived of their leader his vassals laid down their arms, and most of
the Neustrian counts and bishops did homage to king Lewis. The German
monarch was able to take possession of his brother’s realm, and to
proclaim himself king of the West Franks. His nephew Lothair II. sent to
beg for peace from him, and it seemed that Lewis would become the
suzerain of all the realms north of the Alps. [Sidenote: Lewis the
German wins and loses Neustria.] But when he had sent away his German
troops, and prepared to winter near Laon among the Neustrians, the
instability of his power was suddenly shown. Charles the Bald had
secretly raised a new army in Burgundy. He marched on Laon at
mid-winter. The Neustrians refused to take arms against their old king,
and Lewis, with a very small following, had to flee away into Germany,
and abandon his lightly-won dominion over the West Franks. Eighteen
months later the brothers made peace (860), but no treaty could undo the
harm that the reckless ambition of Lewis had brought on all the Frankish
realms. While the war was raging the Danes had swept unresisted across
the land. One army had harried the Rhine-mouth and Flanders, another had
sacked Amiens and Noyon; a third had entered the Mediterranean, sailed
up the Rhone, and devastated the distant kingdom of Charles of Provence,
the younger brother of Lothair II., a weakly youth racked by epileptic
fits, who showed no power to defend his fertile land from the pirates.
The last-named band had even extended their ravages to Italy, and sacked
the flourishing port of Pisa in the realm of the emperor Lewis II.

Footnote 58:

An island or peninsula, enclosed by the Seine and its marshes, near
Bougival, close to Paris, in department Seine-et-Oise.

From the time of his wicked invasion of Neustria onward, king Lewis the
German, who had hitherto been the most fortunate of the Karling kindred,
began to meet with troubles to which he had as yet been a stranger.
While his attention had been directed to the West, his Slavonic vassals
in the East, the Abotrites, rose in rebellion: when he led a host
against them in 862, he encountered defeat and disaster. But a far worse
blow came from the bosom of his own family: his eldest son Carloman,
whom he had made governor in Carinthia and the Bavarian Ostmark, rose in
rebellion against him. [Sidenote: Family troubles of Lewis the German.]
Twice conquered and twice pardoned (861 and 863), the ungrateful prince
took arms for a third time in 864, and compelled his father to grant him
a share in the kingdom. Feeling old age closing in upon him, and hoping
to conciliate all his sons, Lewis the German now took the unwise step of
dividing his realm in his own lifetime, just as his father Lewis the
Pious had done. He made Carloman king of Bavaria and Carinthia,
designated his second son and namesake Lewis to be ruler of Saxony,
Thuringia, and Franconia, and his youngest born Charles the Fat to reign
in Suabia and Rhaetia (865). He must have felt that the hand of Heaven
was laid upon him in punishment for his own unfilial conduct to his
father Lewis the Pious, for his sons dealt with him just as he had dealt
with the old emperor thirty years before. They murmured about the
boundaries of their heritages, and often took arms both against him and
against each other. Four separate rebellions of one or another or all of
the princes are recorded between 865 and 876. But Lewis the German was
made of sterner stuff than his pious father. Time after time he beat
down the risings of his undutiful sons, and after each victory had the
constancy or the feebleness to restore them to their former honours.

In spite of these rebellions, and in spite of the successful revolt,
first of the Abotrites, and then of the Moravians, both of whom
succeeded in shaking off their dependence on the empire, Germany was yet
the most fortunate of the five Frankish realms. The subjects of the
three sons of Lothair I., who were now ruling the fragments of their
father’s ‘middle kingdom,’ all had evil times to endure. Of the troubles
of Lewis the emperor in Italy we shall speak elsewhere. His two younger
brothers fared even worse. The epileptic Charles of Provence was vexed
by Danish and Saracen pirates, as well as by the intrigues of his greedy
uncle Charles the Bald, who tried to add Provence to his own Neustrian
dominions, though he was entirely unable to protect even Neustria from
the Danes. Lothair II. in Austrasia—or Lotharingia, as men now began to
call it, after its ruler’s name—was sore vexed by the Vikings, who
pushed up the Rhine as far as Neuss and Köln. [Sidenote: The Bigamy of
Lothair II.] But he was far more incommoded by a trouble for which he
was himself entirely responsible. He drove from his court his wife
Teutberga, and openly married his concubine Waldrada. Not only did this
bigamy lead to the rebellion of Teutberga’s brother Hukbert,[59] abbot
of St. Maurice and duke of Transjurane Burgundy, but it brought on a
quarrel with the Papacy which embittered all Lothair’s remaining years.
Pope Nicolas I. set his face against the king’s unrighteous dealings
with his wife, and repeatedly summoned him to take her back to his
couch. He induced the nobles of Lotharingia to compel their king to
dismiss Waldrada for a season; but Lothair was passion’s slave, and soon
chased away his wife and again sent for his mistress. This brought on
him fresh thunders of ecclesiastical censure, and for the last ten years
of his life he lived under the ban of the Pope, till in 868 he was so
far humbled that he came in person before Hadrian II. and made a
complete surrender—one of the greatest triumphs that the Papacy had won
since the days of Gregory the Great.

Footnote 59:

Hukbert was one of the most extraordinary characters of the time, a
warlike abbot who maintained a whole harem of concubines at his
fastness of St. Maurice-en-Valais, and kept control of Vaud and Valais
against all comers, including his liege lord the king.

But though the other Frankish kingdoms fared ill, it was, as usual, the
realm of Charles the Bald which bore the brunt of the troubles of
Christendom. There were now permanent hosts of Danes established at the
mouth of each of the great rivers of France, the Somme, Seine, Loire,
and Garonne—the chronicles call them ‘_pagani Sequanenses_’ or ‘_pagani
Ligerenses_’ as a matter of course. Settled on islands or headlands at
the mouths of these rivers, each band devoted itself to the harrying of
the district which lay inland from its camp. Meanwhile, Charles the Bald
left the defence of his realm to the local counts, and busied himself in
futile schemes for seizing the realms of his nephews, Charles of
Provence and Lothair of Austrasia. He was not without his family
troubles; his children—like those of Lewis the German—were very unruly:
his second son Charles, who ruled Aquitaine for him, tried to make
himself an independent king, and his youngest son Carloman was detected
conspiring against his life, for which he was condemned to blinding and
perpetual imprisonment. But neither domestic troubles nor Viking raids
could keep Charles from his unending intrigues against his brother and
his nephews. When he did turn his attention to his own proper business,
his methods of dealing with the problems that lay before him were not
generally wise. No man of real intelligence would have conceived the
plan that Charles invented in 861 for getting rid of the Vikings by
bribing them to fight each other. The wily pirates took the king’s
subsidy, and then all united against him, as might have been expected.

There were, however, two schemes for organising resistance against the
Danes which were broached at Charles’s council board that are worthy of
note, as foreshadowing the methods by which the invaders were ultimately
to be checked. The great difficulty which the Franks had hitherto found
in dealing with the Vikings came mainly from two reasons—the power of
rapid movement which the enemy possessed, and the fact that walled towns
were still very rare, and castles quite unknown in the Frankish realms,
so that the inhabitants of the country-side had no secure shelter to
seek. [Sidenote: The Edict of Pistres, 864.] In the Edict of Pistres
(864) Charles shows some appreciation of these two difficulties, and
endeavours to dispose of them by very well judged measures. To cope with
the swiftly moving Vikings, he determines to make the Frankish army more
mobile also. He endeavours to substitute cavalry for the unwieldy masses
of local levies by ordering that ‘_omnes pagenses Franci qui equos
habent aut habere possunt cum suis comitibus in hostem eant_.’ The day
of feudal cavalry was indeed just beginning, and from the military point
of view this expedient was perfectly correct; unhappily for the
monarchy, the day of the feudal horseman was also to be the day of
feudal separation and disunion. The second measure ordered by the Edict
of Pistres was one for the strengthening of the kingdom by means of
fortifications. The particular plan which Charles most favoured was that
of blocking the great rivers by fortified bridges. Towns lying beside
the water were to throw a bridge across, with a fortified bridgehead on
the opposite bank. Thus the Vikings would find their advance up the
lines of the rivers completely checked, since their boats would not be
able to pass under the bridges till the forts at either end of them were
taken, a long matter in those days, when the art of poliorcetics had
sunk so low. As the first fruits of this edict, a strong bridge was
built at Pistres itself, low down the Seine, where the Eure flows into
the great river. It was at the same time that the island on which old
Paris lay was furnished with two fortified bridges, across the northern
and southern branches of the Seine, joining it to the mainland. It was
mainly owing to these defences that, when next attacked by the Vikings,
Paris, though twice plundered before, held out successfully, and did not
suffer capture and desolation after its third siege.

In 863 died Charles, king of Provence, the youngest son of the emperor
Lothair I., carried off by the epilepsy that had always afflicted him.
His little kingdom was divided between his brothers Lothair II. and
Lewis the Emperor, to the great discontent of Charles the Bald, who
would have liked to have a hand in the partition. But Charles was vexed
for the moment not only by the Danes, but by his nephew Pippin the
Younger, who had escaped from his monastery and raised a new rebellion
in Aquitaine. While the king was dealing with his nephew, the Vikings of
the Loire made the widest sweep round central France that any horde had
yet carried out—burning Poictiers, Angoulême, Perigueux, Limoges,
Clermont, and Bourges in one single incursion. [Sidenote: The end of
Pippin of Aquitaine.] The rebel Pippin joined himself to them, and is
actually said to have cast aside his Christianity and worshipped Woden
in their camp—_ex monacho apostata factus, ritum paganorum servavit_. He
fell into his uncle’s hands before the year was out, and with the
general approval of the Franks was condemned to perpetual solitary
confinement.

For a short time after these events the West Frankish kingdom was
destined to have a time of comparative respite from the inroads of the
Northmen. In 867 all the Vikings of the West massed themselves for an
attack on England, which had hitherto suffered comparatively little at
their hands. From the capture of York in 868 down to Alfred’s great
victory at Ethandune in 878, the main strength of the Danes was spent in
winning a kingdom beyond the channel. The invasion of England was not
for plunder but for conquest, and ‘the Great Army,’ led by two kings and
five jarls, was composed of all the hordes who had been harrying the
Continent for the last ten years. If they did not succeed in subduing
the whole of England, they yet won the great Danelagh, the eastern half
of the island, and settled down in the land they had subdued.

But the comparative immunity from Viking raids which the Franks obtained
between 868 and 878 was not of much profit to them. In 869, Lothair II.
died, as he was journeying home from Italy in a disconsolate mood, after
making his peace with the Pope.[60] From that time there was unending
trouble between his two elderly uncles, as to which of them should
inherit Austrasia, the old Frankish land between Scheldt and Rhine, the
ancestral home of their race. At this moment began the struggle between
France and Germany for the inheritance of the ‘middle kingdom’ which
Lothair had ruled, a struggle which was to last for a thousand years.
Who can say even yet if the final fate of Aachen and Trier and Metz and
Liége and Strasburg has been settled?

Footnote 60:

See page 428.

The moment that Charles the Bald heard of Lothair’s death, he crossed
the Meuse at the head of the levies of Neustria, and had himself crowned
at Metz as king of Lotharingia. The Bretons were in open revolt that
year, and a stray Viking band was levying contributions on Tours and
Angers, but for such minor distractions Charles cared little. Lewis the
German was bedridden at the moment, and his sons were absent on an
expedition against the Slavs. But next spring he took the field with all
Germany at his back, whereupon Charles the Bald, always better at
seizing than at fighting, drew back, and offered to negotiate.
[Sidenote: Partition of Mersen, 870.] Then followed the Partition of
Mersen, by which Lotharingia was divided between the brothers: Charles
took the Burgundian part of his deceased nephew’s realm, and western
Austrasia as far as the Meuse; Lewis had Frisia and eastern Austrasia.
To Charles, therefore, fell Lyons, Vienne, Besançon, Toul, Verdun,
Cambrai, Liége, Tongern, Mecheln; to Lewis, Aachen, Köln, Trier,
Strasburg, Utrecht, Nimuegen, and Maestricht. (870.)

But the Treaty of Mersen was only to patch up matters for a short time.
Five years of comparative rest followed, while the Vikings were still
employed in England against the gallant kings of Wessex. But in 875 died
the emperor Lewis II., the last of the three sons of Lothair I. Like his
two brothers, he left no male heir, and there followed one more struggle
between his aged uncles Lewis the German and Charles the Bald for the
imperial title and the Italian realm. [Sidenote: Charles the Bald in
Italy, 875.] Now, as always, Charles moved with rash and inconsiderate
haste, and was first in the field. Leaving Neustria to shift for itself,
he posted into Italy at the head of a small army, and swooped down on
the diet of the Lombard kingdom, which was sitting at Pavia, and
disputing about the choice of a successor to their late monarch. He was
acclaimed as king by some of the Lombards, and then made ready to march
on Rome, where he knew that the Pope was ready to give him the imperial
crown. But, meanwhile, Lewis the German was preparing to interfere. He
first sent his youngest son Charles of Suabia—better known as Charles
the Fat—to oppose the Neustrian king. But Charles, who always throughout
his life consistently mismanaged everything that was intrusted to him,
was easily scared by his uncle, and fled back into the Alps. Then the
king of Germany sent down into Lombardy his unruly eldest born, Carloman
the king of Bavaria, with an imposing array of Bavarian and Franconian
levies. Charles the Bald feared to face this army, and proposed to
Carloman that both the Neustrian and the German forces should withdraw
from the peninsula, and allow the disputed succession to be settled by
peaceful negotiation. The Bavarian prince was beguiled by his uncle’s
specious offer, and betook himself homeward over the Brenner. But,
instead of making a corresponding retreat towards the Cenis, Charles the
Bald turned southward and made a dash for Rome. He reached it, and was
duly crowned emperor by his friend John VIII. But he did not linger in
Italy to help the Pope against the Saracens, as the latter besought him,
but returned at once to Neustria to exhibit his new imperial crown at
home.

[Sidenote: Death of Lewis the German, 876.] At this moment died Lewis
the German, now an old man of seventy-six; it was sixty years since he
had been appointed king of Bavaria by his father, and thirty-three since
he had obtained sway over the whole of Germany by the award of the
Treaty of Verdun. He had been on the whole a successful ruler, in spite
of the many revolts of his sons, and in spite of the fact that he had
not been able to retain all his Slavonic vassals under his hand. To him
more than to any other king Germany owed her organisation as a unified
national kingdom. His long reign gave Saxon and Franconian, Bavarian and
Suabian, time to grow together and to learn to regard themselves as a
nation apart, not merely as provinces of the Frankish empire. But if to
Germany his reign was one of unqualified good, history can not pardon
him the two occasions in 854 and 858 when he deliberately sacrificed the
general welfare of Christendom to private ambition, and attacked his
Neustrian brother while Charles was in the thick of his Viking wars.
These are the darkest spots on the reputation of the first king of
Germany.

We have already related how Lewis, following the evil custom of his
family, had divided his realm among his three sons Carloman, Lewis, and
Charles, the kings of Bavaria, Saxony, and Suabia. They were not
destined, however, to inherit their father’s realm in peace. No sooner
did Charles the Bald hear that his elder brother was dead, than he made
another vigorous attempt to seize Lotharingia, arguing that as emperor
he was entitled to the imperial city of Aachen, and openly asserting
that the oaths of Mersen had been ‘sworn to the father but not to the
sons.’ At the head of a large army Charles entered Austrasia, and
occupied Aachen and Köln. Of the three young kings of Germany Lewis
alone came out against him. Carloman was away far in the East fighting
with rebellious Slavs, and Charles the Fat was, or purported to be, on a
bed of sickness. [Sidenote: Charles the Bald beaten at Andernach.] The
fate of the lands between Rhine and Scheldt was settled by a battle at
Andernach, in which the Neustrians, though superior in number, were
completely defeated by the Franconians and Saxons of Lewis of Saxony.
Charles the Bald was—as usual—the first to fly, and arrived in safety at
Liége, though the greater part of his army was cut to pieces. He
returned to his home to find a Danish fleet up the Seine, for the
Vikings were just beginning to drift back from England. But such
troubles moved him little, and though his Austrasian expedition had
fared so ill, he started off with hardly a moment’s pause on an equally
rash and ill-judged descent into Italy, where the imperial crown that he
had so lightly gained in 875 was now in jeopardy. He sent the Vikings
5000 lbs. of silver to induce them to transfer their ravages from
Neustria to his German nephew’s land, and hastened to Lombardy with a
small and hastily equipped army, for the best of his men had been slain
or captured at the battle of Andernach. Charles met his friend pope John
VIII. at Pavia, and was about to proceed to Rome when he heard that his
eldest nephew, Carloman of Bavaria, who possessed many supporters among
the eastern Lombards, had crossed the Alps and was marching against him,
eager to revenge the treachery to which he had been subjected in the
preceding year. [Sidenote: Charles dies in Italy, 877.] Charles hastily
fled before the approaching forces of the Bavarian, but as he was
crossing the Cenis he was stricken down by dysentery, and died suddenly
in a miserable hut at the foot of the pass (877).

Charles the Bald was still below the age of sixty, but he had been a
king from his boyhood, and had reigned over the West Frankish realm
which the treaty of Verdun gave him for thirty-four disastrous years. Of
all the Karlings he was the man who wrought the empire the most harm:
his birth had been a misfortune: the endowment of his youth cost the
state a long civil war: his manhood was flighty, unscrupulous, eager,
yet unstable. He started four several wars by reckless snatching at the
heritages of his kinsmen, but when withstood and faced he always slunk
away in rapid retreat. The condition of Neustria was a disgrace to his
name: if half the bribes and subsidies that he had spent to buy the
Danes’ departure, had been used in military preparations against them,
they might easily have been driven off. But Charles was always busied
with fantastic schemes of foreign conquest; and while his eyes were
fixed abroad he allowed his realm to fall to pieces at his feet. History
can find nothing to praise in the first king of France.

In the ten years which followed the death of Charles the Bald, a blight
seemed to fall upon the house of the Karlings. King after king was swept
away by an untimely death, some by accident, more by disease. In France
and in Germany six reigning monarchs died without leaving a single child
of legitimate birth, and by 887 the royal house was represented by one
solitary male heir, and he a boy of only eight years old. Meanwhile the
Danes had returned from England in full force, and the whole empire of
these short-lived kings was enduring the worst crisis that had yet
fallen upon it.

[Sidenote: Reign and death of Lewis the Stammerer, 877-879.] Charles the
Bald was succeeded in Neustria and Aquitaine, or France, as we may now
call the Western realm, by his son Lewis II., better known as Lewis the
Stammerer. The new king was a prudent and circumspect ruler, very unlike
his flighty parent. He at once gave up all pretension to the kingdom of
Italy and the imperial crown, though John VIII. urged him to reassert
his father’s claims. He promptly made peace with his German cousins,
renewing with them the terms of the Treaty of Mersen, by which eastern
Lotharingia fell to Germany and western Lotharingia to France. He then
took the field against the Danes, who had just returned once more to the
mouth of the Loire, but while engaged with them he was stricken down by
disease, and died a few months later, long before he had completed the
second year of his reign (879). He left two sons, Lewis and Carloman,
and a third child was born to him just after his death, and christened
Charles. The counts and bishops of France, following the invariable and
unhappy custom of the times, crowned both Lewis and Carloman as kings.
The two lads—they were but seventeen and sixteen—were not to enjoy a
quiet heritage. Alfred had just expelled from England those of the
Danish ‘Great Army’ who had refused to settle down in the Danelagh and
do him homage. [Sidenote: Accession of Lewis III. and Carloman, 879.]
The swarm of Vikings fell on Flanders, and burnt Ghent and St. Omer
before the young kings’ reign was two months old. At the same time Lewis
of Saxony, on whom the spirit of greed that had possessed Charles the
Bald seemed now to have descended, invaded Neustria—summoned, it would
appear, by some disloyal counts. But the West Franks rallied around
their young masters, and Lewis the Saxon consented to retire on
condition that Western Lotharingia—the lands that Charles the Bald had
acquired by the Treaty of Mersen ten years before—should be ceded to
him. So Liége, Namur, Cambrai, and Tongern became for the moment German
and not French.

In another part of the West Frankish realm an equally serious loss was
at the same time taking place. Since the death of the good emperor Lewis
II. Provence and southern Burgundy had been united to Neustria (875-79).
But Lewis’ only daughter, the princess Hermengarde, had now found a
strong and ambitious husband in Boso, count of Vienne, one of the
governors of Burgundy. Taking advantage of the crisis in Neustria, this
count Boso resolved to assert his wife’s claim to her father’s heritage.
In Italy he failed to win success, though the Pope would gladly have
helped him, but in Provence and Lower Burgundy the nobles rallied to his
standard. [Sidenote: Boso made king of Arles, 879.] He was proclaimed
king in October 879, and afterwards crowned at Lyons. His new realm of
Arles, Provence, or Lower Burgundy—for it is found styled by all these
names—was the first fraction of the empire of Charles the Great to pass
away from the male heirs of the great royal line. Boso’s dominions
nearly coincided in size with the kingdom of Provence as it had been
held by Charles the son of the emperor Lothair I. They included the
whole valley of the Rhone, from Lyons to the sea and the borders of
Italy.

While the West Frankish kingdom was being cut short to north and south,
Germany was on the whole in better condition. The three sons of Lewis
the German, unlike most royal brothers of the time, dwelt together in
harmony. The two elder brothers had come to an agreement that Carloman
should prosecute his fortunes in Italy, while Lewis sought to aggrandise
himself in Lotharingia. But Carloman, after driving Charles the Bald out
of Lombardy, and mastering most of the land north of the Po, was
stricken down with a fever which terminated in a paralytic stroke. He
was carried back to Bavaria, and survived for two years, but never rose
from his couch again. Feeling the hand of death upon him, he handed over
the administration of his realm to his brother Lewis, only stipulating
that the frontier duchy of Carinthia should be given to his own
illegitimate son Arnulf, the child of a Slavonic princess whom he had
taken as his concubine. Carloman lived out another year, and died in 880
before he had passed the limits of middle age.

[Sidenote: Charles the Fat, king of Italy, 879.] Meanwhile, his place in
Italy had been taken by his shiftless younger brother, the king of
Suabia. Charles the Fat entered Italy in the autumn of 879, was
everywhere recognised as king, and solemnly received the Lombard crown
from John VIII. at Ravenna. But his new kingdom saw little of him:
though he was earnestly besought to oppose the Saracen invaders of the
south he did nothing of the kind, but went ingloriously home to Suabia.

The Danes were by this time mustering in greater strength than ever for
an assault on the Frankish empire. They had gathered together from all
the shores of the West, and this time threw themselves on the Eastern
realm, not on their old prey in Neustria. [Sidenote: Great Danish
Invasion, 880.] The year 880 was long remembered by the Germans for the
awful defeat suffered on the Lüneburg Heath near Hamburg by the levies
of Saxony and Thuringia. Bruno, duke of Saxony, two bishops, with no
less than twelve counts, were left dead upon the field, and the
victorious Vikings ravaged the whole valley of the Elbe without further
resistance. Almost at the same moment another Danish army appeared in
Austrasia, fought an indecisive battle with king Lewis, and though they
left him the field were able to establish themselves permanently on the
Scheldt, at a great camp near Courtray, threatening Neustria and
Austrasia alike.

[Sidenote: Battle of Saucourt, 881.] In the spring of 881 they made up
their minds that the Western realm should first be their spoil. Marching
on Beauvais, they met at Saucourt the young king of France and his
levies. To the joy and surprise of all Western Christendom Lewis III.
inflicted a crushing defeat on the invaders, slew 8000 of them, and
chased them as far as Cambrai, beyond the borders of his own kingdom.
This was the only pitched battle of first-rate importance that the
Franks had won over the Vikings, and great hopes were entertained that
in Lewis III. Europe might find a saviour from the sword of the pagans.
But ere a year was out the gallant young king met his death in a foolish
frolic,[61] and left the Neustrian throne to his brother Carloman.

Footnote 61:

Lewis was a sprightly youth and given to affairs of love, ‘and it
chanced one day that in sport he chased a certain damsel, the daughter
of Germund. She fled in at her father’s gate, and the king followed
her, laughing. But he forgot to stoop sufficiently at the portal, and
was crushed between the roof and the high pommel of his saddle, so
that he died within a few days.’

The Danish army which had been defeated at Saucourt retired to Ghent,
where it was strengthened by newly-arrived bands under two famous
sea-kings, Siegfred and Godfred. Then the host threw itself on Austrasia
as the autumn was closing. The levies of the old royal land of the
Franks were beaten: their king, Lewis of Saxony, was far away, and the
winter months of 881-2 saw the whole country-side harried, from the
Scheldt-mouth to the Eifel. [Sidenote: Austrasia harried by the Danes.]
The inland parts of Austrasia had hitherto been exceptionally fortunate
in escaping the Danish sword, but in this fatal winter Liége,
Maestricht, Tongern, Köln, Bonn, Neuss, Zülpich, Malmédy, Nimuegen, and
every other town in the district was pillaged. Most heartrending of all
was the sacking of the royal city of Aachen: the Danes plundered the
palace, stabled their horses in the cathedral, and broke the shrine and
image above the tomb of Charles the Great.

To the despair of all Germany, king Lewis the Saxon, whose task it
should have been to attack the invaders in the next spring, died on
January 20th, 882—the fourth Carolingian monarch who had been carried to
the grave within three years. His subjects found nothing better to do
than to elect his only surviving brother, Charles the Fat, the king of
Suabia and of Italy, as his successor.

[Sidenote: Charles the Fat, king of Germany.] Thus began the unhappy
reign of Charles, the last Carolingian emperor of the full blood. He was
at this moment in Italy, where he had been visiting Rome and receiving
the imperial crown. Making a leisurely journey homeward,—the Danes were
meanwhile sacking Trier and Metz,—he reached the Rhine in July, and
summoned to him the levies of Saxony, Suabia, Bavaria and Franconia: he
had brought a Lombard army in his train. With this great host, the
largest that had been seen since the death of Charles the Great, he
moved against the Danes. Godfred and Siegfred retired before him to a
great camp which they had built at Elsloo on the Meuse. The
faint-hearted emperor faced them for twelve days, and then instead of
ordering his vast army to assault the camp, began to negotiate with the
enemy. A few days later his soldiery heard to their dismay and disgust,
that Charles had consented to allow the Vikings to withdraw with all
their plunder, to pay them 2000 lbs. of silver, and to grant king
Godfred a great duchy by the Rhine-mouth, with the hand of his cousin
Gisela, an illegitimate daughter of king Lothair II. In return the Dane
consented to be baptized and to do homage to the emperor. [Sidenote:
Treaty of Elsloo, 882.] This expedient for buying off Godfred was
probably suggested by the way in which Alfred of England had dealt with
Guthrum four years before at the peace of Wedmore. Unfortunately Charles
forgot that while Alfred was strong enough to compel Guthrum to keep
faith, his own character was hardly likely to have a similar influence
on Godfred.

King Siegfred, with those of the Danes who did not wish to settle down
by the Rhine-mouth, took their way from Elsloo into Neustria. Charles
the Fat had merely stipulated for the evacuation of his own kingdom, and
cared nought for what might happen to his cousin Carloman. The winter of
882-3 was as disastrous for northern France as that of 881-2 had been
for the Rhineland. From Rheims to Amiens and Courtray, the whole
country-side was harried: king Carloman and his nobles, instead of
copying the conduct of Lewis III., and remembering the triumph of
Saucourt, followed the miserable example of Charles the Fat, and paid
the invaders the enormous bribe of 12,000 lbs. of silver to induce them
to transfer themselves to Austrasia, England, Ireland, or any other
realm that they might choose. In the moment of rest obtained by the
temporary departure of the pirates, Carloman died, ere yet he had
reached his twentieth year. He was accidentally slain by one of his
companions, while hunting the boar in a forest near Les Andelys (884).
The Carolingian line was now well-nigh spent: five kings had died in
five years, and the only males surviving were the shiftless emperor
Charles the Fat, and Carloman’s younger brother, a child of five, the
posthumous son of Lewis the Stammerer, the prince whom the next
generation was to know as Charles the Simple.

[Sidenote: Charles the Fat inherits Neustria, 884.] Rather than face the
horrors of a minority, the West Franks sent to the emperor and besought
him to take up the kingship of Neustria. All the empire that had obeyed
Charles the Great was therefore united once more beneath a single
sceptre, save the little realm of king Boso, in Provence. But Charles
the Fat was a sorry substitute for his great namesake. The three years
of his reign over the whole of the Frankish kingdoms (884-7) were fated
to shatter the last remnants of loyalty in the breasts of the subjects
of the empire, and to cause them to cast away the old royal house in
despair, and seek new saviours and new kings.

The history of these three evil years is easily told. Hearing of the
death of Carloman, the Danes flocked back to Neustria: ‘oaths sworn to a
dead man,’ they said, ‘did not count.’ But their return was chiefly
caused by a thorough beating which their main body had suffered at
Rochester from the strong hand of king Alfred. At the same time the
converted Viking Godfred rose in rebellion on the Lower Rhine. He
impudently bade the emperor give him the rich lands about Bonn and
Coblenz, ‘because his duchy had no vineyards to yield him wine.’ Charles
did not take arms against him, but sent ambassadors to lure him to a
conference. When the Dane appeared, the counts Henry and Eberhard
treacherously cut him down, and massacred his retinue. The army of
Godfred broke up; some of his warriors went plundering in Saxony, where
they were cut to pieces, the rest joined king Siegfred, who was just
about to invade Neustria (885).

[Sidenote: Great Siege of Paris.] The great host of the Vikings had once
more united itself under Siegfred, and entered north France, as if
designing to subdue the whole country and settle down therein. But they
met with an unexpected resistance at Paris, where the local count and
bishop, Odo and Gozelin, had gathered together all the best warriors of
Neustria. The defence of Paris was the bravest feat of arms which the
Franks had wrought since the battle of Saucourt. They maintained the
isle of Paris, with its two fortified bridge-heads over the two branches
of the Seine, for more than eleven months, against all the assaults of
the Northmen (Nov. 885-Oct. 886). Seven hundred Viking keels were drawn
ashore on the flat land where the _Champ de Mars_ now lies, and 40,000
Vikings beset the city on all sides. But though shamefully abandoned by
the emperor—who chose the time as suitable for a journey to Italy—Odo
and Gozelin refused to despair, even when the northern bridge-head was
cut off from the city by an inundation, and burnt by the besiegers.

At last, in the summer of 886, Charles the Fat so far bestirred himself
as to raise the national levies of the whole empire, and march to the
relief of Paris with an army not less than that which he had led four
years earlier against the camp of Elsloo. But when his vanguard received
a check, and its leader, Henry, duke of Franconia, was slain, the
emperor refused to risk an attack on the Danes. [Sidenote: Charles the
Fat bribes the Danes.] Once more the disgraceful scene of Elsloo was
renewed: Charles paid the Danes 700 lbs. of silver, and gave them
permission to pass up the Seine into Burgundy, and work their will
there. He was angry with the Burgundians for refusing him obedience and
leaning to the cause of Boso, the king of Arles, and chose this
despicable means of wreaking his vengeance on them.

Paris was saved, and the reputation of its gallant defender, count Odo,
raised to the highest pitch. But the emperor had thrown away his last
chance, and forfeited the respect of even the meanest of his subjects.
His remaining days were few and evil. Attacked by softening of the
brain, and burdened by an ever-increasing corpulence, he retired to
Germany after the disgraceful treaty of Paris. There his doom was
awaiting him: the counts and dukes of the East Frankish realm conspired
against him, headed by his illegitimate nephew Arnulf, duke of
Carinthia, the son of king Carloman. In 887 the young duke took up arms,
openly announcing that he was about to march on Frankfurt and depose his
uncle. [Sidenote: Abdication of Charles the Fat.] Charles tried to raise
an army, but none of his vassals would lend him aid: in sheer despair he
sent his royal crown and robes to Arnulf, abandoning the kingdom, and
craving only five manors in his native Suabia to maintain him for his
few remaining days. This boon the duke granted, and the unwieldy
ex-Caesar dragged himself away to a royal villa at Neidingen, where he
died less than three months after, worn out by the bodily ills which
form the only possible excuse for his shiftless and cowardly conduct
during the last three years.

Meanwhile Arnulf entered Frankfurt, and was there hailed as king by all
the counts and dukes of Germany. He was known as a brave and able young
man, and though he was [Sidenote: Arnulf, king of Germany, 888-899.] but
a Karling of bastard blood, the East Franks gladly intrusted themselves
to the protection of his arm. But the other parts of the empire did not
consider themselves bound to follow the lead of Germany. In each of the
kingdoms a noble of great local note and power stepped forward to claim
the crown of his native land.

[Illustration:

WESTERN EUROPE
in 890.
]

In Neustria there still survived one Karling of the direct line, the boy
Charles the Simple, Carloman’s youngest brother; but he had only reached
the age of eight, and when Paris was but just saved, and the Danes were
still on the Seine, it was no time to give the crown to children.
[Sidenote: Odo, king of France.] Two claimants appeared for the
Neustrian throne, Wido duke of Spoleto, an Italian noble whose mother
had been a daughter of the emperor Lothair, and Odo count of Paris, the
hero who had saved his city from the Danes in the past year. Though he
could boast of no Carolingian blood in his veins, Odo easily carried the
day against his rival; he was crowned king at Compiègne by Walter,
archbishop of Sens, and soon forced Wido to leave France and retire to
Italy.

We shall relate in another chapter how Berengar of Friuli was chosen
king of Italy, and how he was obliged to fight hard for his crown with
Wido, when the latter returned from his unsuccessful expedition to
France.

[Sidenote: Rudolf, king of Upper Burgundy.] A fourth kingdom was
established in the Jura and the western Alps by count Rudolf, one of the
governors of Upper Burgundy. He first got himself crowned at St. Maurice
by the counts and bishops of Helvetia, and then, pushing beyond the
Jura, was again proclaimed king at Toul. But Rudolf never got any firm
footing in Lotharingia: his realm was limited to the lands north of the
Alps, west of the Aar, and east of the Saone. The chief towns of
this—the smallest of the fractions of the Carolingian realm—were
Lausanne, Geneva, St. Maurice, and Besançon.

Boso’s kingdom of Arles or Lower Burgundy was now in the ninth year of
its existence; its founder had died in 887, but his son Lewis—a
Carolingian on the female side through his mother Hermengarde, the
daughter of the emperor Lewis of Italy, had succeeded without trouble to
his father’s throne.

Thus the Frankish empire was cut up into five states, not ephemeral
creations of a heritage-partition, like the many kingdoms which we have
seen rising and falling from the days of the Merovingians onward, but
more permanent divisions, three of which represented real national
differences, while even the other two—the Upper and Lower Burgundy—had a
certain national coherence and individuality of their own, and were
destined to last for several generations. One of the five realms was
ruled by a bastard Carolingian; two by two princes who boasted a
Carolingian descent on the spindle side: only France and Upper Burgundy
were in the hands of monarchs who could lay claim to no drop of the
ancient royal blood.[62]

Footnote 62:

Rudolf of Upper Burgundy was connected by marriage with the Karlings.
He was nephew of the empress Judith, the mother of Charles the Bald,
and therefore cousin to all the Neustrian Karlings.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XXVI

ITALY AND SICILY IN THE NINTH CENTURY

(827-924)

Invasion of Sicily by the Moors: the Western half of the island
conquered—Civil wars in Southern Italy—The Moors invade Italy—Pope
Leo’s victory at Ostia—Quarrels of the Eastern and Western
Churches—The False Decretals—Campaigns of the Emperor Lewis II.
against the Moors—Anarchy in Italy after his death—The Byzantines
reconquer Southern Italy—The Moors in Campania—Civil wars of Wido
and Berengar—King Arnulf’s invasion of Italy—Long period of anarchy
after his departure.

On the fortunes of the kingdom of Italy, that is, of the old Lombard
realm, which had now become a province of the empire of Charles the
Great, we have already had occasion to touch on more than one occasion.
But while northern Italy with its king established at Pavia, and central
Italy with its pontiff and its turbulent Roman mob, have from time to
time claimed our attention, we have had little necessity to mention the
southern third of the peninsula, or the great island which faces it
across the straits of Messina.

[Sidenote: State of Southern Italy.] In the ninth century the bulk of
southern Italy, all those valleys of the Apennines, which had in ancient
days bred the warlike Samnite race, was still in the hands of the dukes
of Benevento. We have mentioned that they had more than once been forced
to pay homage to Charles the Great, but since his day the empire had
left the duchy alone. Two dukes, Sico and Sicard, had held Benevento
during the reign of Lewis the Pious, and had to do with his son Lothair,
the sub-king of Lombardy. Luckily for them the heir of the empire was
more set on maintaining a hold north of the Alps than on completing the
Frankish supremacy in Italy.

But it was not the whole of south Italy that the Beneventan dukes ruled.
The East-Roman emperors had never lost hold of the ‘toe and heel’ of the
peninsula (if we may use the familiar phrase that describes so well the
shape of Italy). In Brindisi dwelt a _strategos_, whose authority
extended over the southern part of the ancient Apulia. In Reggio another
governor ruled the ancient land of Bruttium, now known by the name of
Calabria. Beyond the straits of Messina a third military ruler had the
hard task of preserving from the Saracen the half-lost ‘theme’ of
Sicily, where since 828 an unending struggle with the Moslem invader had
been raging.

Beside the Beneventan duchy and the Byzantine themes, there were yet
more states in south Italy. Naples preserved a precarious independence
under a series of hereditary consuls: it still paid a shadowy allegiance
to the Eastern Empire, as did also the neighbouring Amalfi and Gaëta,
which, like Naples, had never fallen into the hands of the Lombards. But
these cities were rather allies than subjects of the Byzantines, and
paid no obedience to the governors of the neighbouring themes.

The one important element in the politics of southern Italy during the
ninth century must be sought in the approaching peril of conquest by the
Saracen. At first it was only the Byzantine possessions that were
endangered, but very soon the whole of the Christian states were
involved in the same trouble. The storm-cloud from the south, which had
threatened Constantinople in 720 and Gaul in 735, had now shifted its
position. The new attack was in the centre, not on the eastern or the
western flank of the line of defence of Christendom. For twenty years
Italy was to be in deadly peril, and there appeared every prospect that
Naples and Benevento, if not Rome also, would share the fate that had
fallen on Carthage and Toledo a hundred and fifty years before.

The trouble began with the landing of a Mussulman army in Sicily during
the year 827. They had been called in by a a traitor named Euphemius, a
turmarch in the Sicilian theme, who rebelled against the emperor Michael
the Amorian. [Sidenote: Euphemius rebels in Sicily, 827.] Euphemius had
carried off a nun from a convent, and the emperor had ordered the
_strategos_ of Sicily to punish him by cutting off his nose. But the
soldier, instead of submitting, slew the governor, induced his troops to
rebel, and seized Syracuse. His rising was put down by a fleet sent from
Constantinople, but Euphemius himself escaped by sea, and took refuge
with Ziadet-Allah, one of the Aglabite monarchs who ruled in northern
Africa since that land had shaken off its allegiance to the Caliph at
Bagdad.

[Sidenote: Euphemius calls in the Moors.] The Moor consented to lend
Euphemius his aid, not in order to replace him on the Sicilian throne,
but in the hope of winning Sicily for Islam, and adding it to his own
dominions. He proclaimed the holy war, and named as general
Ased-ibn-Forat, an aged doctor of law, who was worshipped as a saint by
all Africa. The preaching of Ased gathered a multitude of fanatical
adventurers—Arabs, Berbers, and Moors—to join the regular troops whom
his master placed under his orders. Taking Euphemius with them, in the
hope that the Sicilians would rise in his behalf, the Saracens landed at
Mazara, on the south coast of the island early in June 827. The natives
execrated the traitor, and refused to join him, but when the _strategos_
Photinus led the army of Sicily against the invaders he was completely
defeated. The fanatical fury of the Mussulmans swept all before it; we
are told that the aged Ased himself charged in the front rank in spite
of his seventy years, and slew so many Christians that the clotted blood
glued his lance to his hand. The army of Sicily was almost exterminated,
and its commander fled to Calabria, and died there.

The Mussulmans then seized Girgenti and marched to besiege Syracuse. But
before its walls, while they camped in the marshes of the Anapo, they
were smitten by the same deadly marsh-fever which has struck down so
many other besiegers of that ancient city. Ased died of the pestilence,
and his army fled from their plague-stricken camp, and fell back on
Castrogiovanni (Enna), to which they laid siege. Here the traitor
Euphemius fell—as he well deserved—himself the victim of treachery. He
was tampering with the officers of the garrison, to induce them to
surrender the place, when two brothers, who pretended to listen to his
offer, enticed him to meet them under the walls, and promptly cut off
his head when he came to the secret interview. [Sidenote: The Moors
repelled from Syracuse.] The siege of Enna was soon afterwards raised by
a force sent from Constantinople, and the Mussulmans fell back on the
fort of Mineo, where they were beleaguered by the Byzantines.

But just as victory seemed about to crown the East-Roman’s banners, the
whole aspect of the war was suddenly changed by the arrival of two new
Saracen hosts. A force despatched by Ziadet-Allah to aid his first army
fell upon Palermo and took it. A second force, composed of Moors of
Spain, a band of exiles driven out of their own land by civil war,
landed on the south coast, relieved their besieged co-religionists at
Mineo, and defeated the _strategos_ of Sicily in the open field.

For some time the emperor Theophilus, who had just succeeded his father
Michael on the Byzantine throne, continued to send succour to Sicily.
But in 832 he became involved in a desperate war with the caliph
Motassem, which distracted all his attention to the East. This war in
Asia proved the ruin of Sicily. The African Moors kept pouring in fresh
fanatical hordes, and gradually subdued all the cities of the western
half of the island. [Sidenote: The Moors conquer East Sicily.] For a
moment it seemed likely that Sicily would be permanently divided between
Greek and African, just as it had been twelve hundred years before, in
the days of Dionysius and Hiero II. But at last the stubborn defence of
the Byzantines was broken down by two fatal blows, the fall of Messina
in 842, and that of Enna, the strongest post in the centre of the
island, seventeen years later, in 859. This drove the East Romans back
to the eastern coast, where they retained no more than the sea-girt city
of Syracuse and the strong towns about the roots of Mount Etna—Taormina,
Catania, and Rametta. The Moslems, masters of the bulk of the island,
were now at leisure to turn their arms farther afield, and to cross the
Straits of Messina to invade the mainland.

In south Italy all the elements of disaster were ready and prepared.
Sicard duke of Benevento, a ruffian and an oppressor, had been
assassinated by his outraged subjects in 839. The Beneventans then
proclaimed a certain count Radelchis as their prince. But the important
towns of Capua and Salerno adhered to Siconulf, the brother of the
deceased tyrant. A civil war broke out between these two pretenders,
which was destined to last, with many variations of fortune, for no less
than twelve years. In the second year of the struggle (840) Radelchis,
hard pressed by his rival, had the unhappy inspiration of asking aid
from the Moslems of Sicily. The chance was too good to be lost, and a
Moorish army was landed at Bari, where it was received by the partisans
of Radelchis, and allowed to take possession of the town. Then Siconulf,
as mad as his enemy, answered evil with evil by sending to Crete to call
in to his aid the Saracen pirates of Candia. [Sidenote: The Dukes of
Benevento call in the Moors, 840.] They came, and the same sight was
seen which occurred six hundred years later, when the rival emperors of
Constantinople called in the Turks. The auxiliaries of each prince
sacked the towns held by his rival, and generally ended by garrisoning
them, and holding them on their own account. Apulia and Lucania were
overrun by the Moors and Cretans, while, at the same moment, the
Sicilian Saracens crossed the straits—Messina had just fallen—and swept
all over the Byzantine possessions in Calabria. Between 843 and 851 the
whole of Italy, from Reggio to the gates of Rome, was overrun by the
Moslem marauders, and it seemed as if Christendom was to lose the
southern part of the peninsula. Half its towns, Bari, Taranto, Reggio,
Brindisi, even the castle of Misenum at the very gates of Naples, had
now become Saracen fortresses. In 846 a great fleet from Africa appeared
at Ostia, and the pirates overran the Roman Campagna, and even sacked
the rich churches of St. Paul outside the Walls and St. Peter on the
Vatican. But for the solid ramparts of Aurelian they would have entered
the eternal city itself, and the town of Romulus and Gregory might have
become a Moslem stronghold.

But already the man to whom, above all others, Italy was to owe her
salvation, had crossed the Alps and taken up his life’s task. Lewis, the
eldest son of the unwise emperor Lothair, was appointed king of Italy by
his father in 844, soon after the Partition of Verdun, and appeared in
the next year before Sergius II., to be solemnly crowned at Rome. The
Pope made the young Frankish prince swear to protect the Church and all
its privileges, but when once crowned Lewis made Sergius and all the
nobles of Rome do him homage, and when in 847 Sergius died, and Leo IV.
followed him, the imperial right of confirmation was duly acknowledged.

Lewis and Leo, who lived in concord and amity, were the first to
discomfit the Saracens, and give some hope of salvation to Italian
Christendom. In 849 the African and Sicilian Moslems sent a second and
larger expedition against Rome. [Sidenote: Pope Leo’s victory at Ostia,
849.] Pope Leo took the field himself with the forces of the Roman and
Latin counts and barons, while the fleets of Naples and Amalfi, under
the consul Caesarius, guarded the harbour of Ostia. When the infidels
appeared battle was joined at sea, but a tempest arose, and drove most
of the African fleet ashore. Caught between the Neapolitan ships and the
Pope’s army, the Moors were crushed: the few who escaped death by the
sea and the sword became the slaves of the Romans, and were set to
labour on the wall which Leo built to protect the Vatican and St.
Peter’s—the new quarter of Rome, which got from him the name of the
Leonine city. The great fresco of Raphael representing this victory has
made pope Leo’s triumph the one ninth century event in Italy which is
well remembered by the world.

[Sidenote: Lewis II. pacifies south Italy.] In the next year the emperor
Lewis compelled the rival Beneventan dukes to come to terms. He marched
into Samnium and threatened to attack Radelchis if he refused to make
peace with his enemy Siconulf. Under this pressure a partition of the
duchy was made: Radelchis kept the capital and the eastern half of the
principality: Siconulf became ‘prince of Salerno,’ and ruled the
Campanian and Lucanian half. The conclusion of peace was celebrated by
the massacre of the Saracen auxiliaries of Radelchis, whom the duke
quietly betrayed to the sword of Lewis, now that he had no further need
for their aid (851).

But though the civil war in south Italy was ended, the situation was
still perilous. The whole coast from Bari to Reggio was still in the
hands of the Moslems, who were coalescing into a single state under
Mofareg-ibn-Salem, the pirate-king who governed Bari. He had taken the
title of Sultan, and the majority of his countrymen had done homage to
him. For eighteen years (853-71) he was the terror of south Italy, and
might have founded a kingdom and a dynasty, if he had not been opposed
by a warrior as active and obstinate as himself in the person of the
emperor Lewis.

The young Frankish Caesar was already making his power felt in Italy as
neither his sire nor his grandsire had done. Unlike most of his race, he
concentrated his mind on one kingdom, and devoted himself to its
defence. It resulted that he was an excellent ruler for Italy, but that
he never gained such a footing beyond the Alps as he might have claimed
in virtue of being the eldest heir of Charles the Great. Though a
crowned emperor he never reigned at Aachen, or held a foot of land
outside the peninsula, except the single county of Provence. But in
Italy his power was very real. He dealt most firmly with the Papacy.
When Benedict III. and Anastasius contested the Papal throne in 855, the
emperor’s legate held a court of inquiry in the Lateran and adjudged the
former to be the true successor of St. Peter. Nicolas I., the next
pontiff, was nominated by Lewis in opposition to the majority of the
Roman clergy; when he ventured to oppose his creator he saw his city
occupied by a Lombard army, and soon had to make his peace.

Hadrian II. who followed Nicolas was no less content to keep on good
terms with the emperor, whom he praised as ‘the sovereign who wars not,
like other kings, against Christians, but only against the sons of
Belial, the enemies of the Christian faith; wherefore the hand of the
Apostolic See will always be strong on the side of this most pious
emperor, and the great Dispenser of battles, through the intercession of
the chief of the apostles, will ensure his triumph.’

[Sidenote: Quarrel of Benedict and Photius.] The success of Lewis in
keeping the Papacy in hand was all the more notable because the three
popes Benedict, Nicolas, and Hadrian were all men of mark, who left
their impress for ever on the history of the Roman See. It was Benedict
who began that quarrel with the patriarch Photius of Constantinople
which brought about the final schism between the Eastern and the Western
Churches. Starting with a mere dispute as to the validity of the
election of Photius, it was soon complicated by wrangles about the
supremacy of the Roman See over the Illyrian and Macedonian bishoprics,
a supremacy which had ceased to be real since Leo the Isaurian had
declared them to owe no obedience save to Constantinople.[63] Benedict
died in 858, but his successor Nicolas kept up the struggle with vigour,
styling Photius an intruder and usurper, because his predecessor had
never legally resigned the patriarchate, and finally declaring him
deposed from his metropolitan throne. That one patriarch should venture
to remove and excommunicate another without the aid of a general
council, and merely in virtue of his power as the successor of Peter,
appeared monstrous to the Byzantine clergy. They paid no attention to
the letters of Nicolas, and the emperor Michael the Drunkard threatened
to make his arm felt in Italy, and to reclaim by the sword the right of
the successor of Justinian over Rome. [Sidenote: Breach between Eastern
and Western Churches.] Nicolas replied by comparing the Byzantine ruler
to Sennacherib, and by taunting him with the loss of Sicily and Calabria
to the Saracens, which had deprived him of any opportunity of exercising
his power west of the Adriatic. After seven years of wrangling the
division between East and West was finally formulated by the Synod of
Constantinople (866), where the patriarch, the emperor, and a thousand
bishops and abbots drew up the eight articles which declared the Roman
Church to have departed from the orthodox faith and discipline. Six of
the articles only dealt with small ritual matters, such as the
observance of Lent and the shaving of the clergy. But the third, which
denounced the enforced celibacy of the priesthood as a snare of Satan,
and the seventh, which condemned the Roman doctrine as to the procession
of the Holy Ghost, were all-important. The Eastern Church now formally
stated that the Western Church, by declaring that the Holy Spirit
proceeded both from the Father and the Son, fell into ‘a heresy so awful
as to deserve a thousand anathemas.’

Footnote 63:

See page 284.

Photius was soon afterwards deposed, but his fall did not heal the
breach between the churches, for the Byzantine emperors and clergy all
adhered to the statements of doctrine contained in the decree of the
Synod of Constantinople. To this day they are held by the Eastern
Church.

Nicolas I. was not only the pontiff who precipitated the quarrel with
the Eastern Church; he will also be remembered as the protector of the
injured queen Teutberga, and the chastiser of the adulterous king
Lothair of Lorraine, whose fortunes we have related in another
chapter.[64] [Sidenote: The False Decretals.] But he has won his
greatest fame from being the first Pope who used the famous ‘Forged
Decretals.’ Up to his time the collection of the letters and edicts of
the bishops of Rome, which all the Church knew and used, extended no
further back than those of Siricius. (A.D. 384.) But there was brought
to Rome about the year 860 a collection of fifty-nine decretals, which
purported to be those of the Popes of the second and third centuries,
and thirty-nine more which were interpolated among the real documents
extending from Siricius down to Gregory II. (384-731.) There was also in
this precious collection the celebrated donation of Constantine and the
acts of several councils. This wonderful series of documents, it was
said, had been discovered in Spain by Riculf, archbishop of Mainz. It
was at once incorporated in the authentic series of Acts of Councils,
edited by the great Isidore of Seville, and the new as well as the old
documents were in future called by his name.

Footnote 64:

See page 428.

To any one with a competent knowledge of early church history, or with a
turn for textual criticism, the False Decretals would have betrayed
their character at once. But these accomplishments were rare in the
ninth century, and the few who could have exposed the new decretals were
precisely the persons most interested in proving them to be authentic.
For, as was natural considering their origin, they were full of
authoritative decisions on the points in which the ninth century clergy
were interested. What could be more delightful than to find St. Clement
or St. Felix giving just such decisions on the questions of church lands
or clerical celibacy as would have been given by the reigning pontiff?
To inquire whether the Church had any lands in the first century, or
whether the idea of clerical celibacy had then been broached, would have
been not only impious but unwise. [Sidenote: Influence of the False
Decretals.] So the False Decretals with all their anachronisms and
confusions of persons and impossibilities of style and form were
greedily swallowed by the Pope and the whole clerical body, and promptly
turned into weapons of war against the civil power, the Eastern church,
and any other enemy for whose discomfiture they were suited. It is
impossible not to suppose that Nicolas I. knew what he was doing in
accepting the Decretals: he had in his own hands the genuine decrees of
the Popes from 384, preserved with care and accuracy; how was it
possible that more should exist in a corner of Spain than in the papal
chancery? Would the most important title-deeds of the Roman See, which
proved that from the days of the apostles downward the Popes had
exercised the power of legislating for the whole Western Church, have
been suffered to pass into oblivion? On such points Nicolas must have
had his own views: but the documents were too tempting to be neglected,
and from henceforward they were freely used as a basis for the monstrous
claims of the mediæval papacy.

Who forged the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals we shall never know. They were
first heard of at Mainz, and it would seem that it was either at Mainz
or at Rheims that they were composed. Rome, though she used them, did
not have the shame of framing them. Indeed they were originally intended
to serve the ends of the local bishops rather than those of the Pope.
The first time that they were used in a case of importance was in 866.
Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, had deposed Rothad, bishop of Soissons,
for incompetence. Rothad appealed to Nicolas I., on the plea that
according to the Decretals the power of deposing a bishop lay with the
Pope alone, and not with the archbishop. Nicolas then restored the
bishop of Soissons to his see to the great wrath of Hincmar, who would
have repudiated the decretals but for the unfortunate fact that he
himself had used them in the previous year. He had to content himself
with the cautious saying that the documents were ‘a mousetrap for
archbishops’—_circumposita omnibus metropolitanis muscipula_—because
they threw all power into the hands of the Roman pontiff.

But we must return to the secular affairs of Italy. In 853 the emperor
Lewis made the first of his attempts to expel the Saracens from the
peninsula; it failed owing to the slackness or treachery of the duke of
Benevento, who bought a private peace for himself from the Sultan of
Bari, and rejoiced to see the worst of the Moslem raids turned off
against his neighbours of Salerno. Naples also long remembered the day
when Mofareg forced his way to its very gates, and sat in triumph on a
heap of corpses by the bank of the Sebeto, while his soldiery laid the
heads of their victims at his feet.

[Sidenote: Success of Lewis II. over the Moors, 867-875.] Some years
later Lewis began a second series of campaigns against the infidel. At
first he met with many checks, but in 867 he forced the dukes of
Benevento and Salerno to do him homage and to join his Lombards in the
field. He took one after another many of the towns of Apulia, and at
last in 868 laid siege to Bari itself. The leaguer lasted no less than
three years, but while it was in progress Lewis was clearing Lucania and
Calabria of the enemy. Yet as long as the sea was open Bari never failed
to obtain provisions and reinforcements, and Lewis was forced to find
some naval power to back him. He asked the aid of the emperor Basil the
Macedonian, who had just succeeded Michael the Drunkard on the Byzantine
throne. Accordingly the admiral Nicetas Oriphas swept the Adriatic with
a hundred ships and drove the Moslems out of its recesses. He then
blockaded Bari for a space, but soon quarrelled with Lewis and withdrew.
The Sultan, however, deprived of the command of the sea, had been driven
to extremity, and in February 871 the emperor succeeded—even without
Byzantine aid—in storming the city. The garrison was put to the sword,
all save the Sultan, whom duke Adelgis of Benevento had captured in the
citadel.

Lewis now turned to seize Taranto, the last Saracen stronghold in
Apulia, and spoke of completing his work by clearing Calabria and
attacking Sicily. But treachery frustrated this grand and salutary
scheme. [Sidenote: Lewis kidnapped by duke Adelgis.] While the emperor
was paying a visit to Benevento, in company with his wife and daughter,
the new duke Adelgis treacherously seized him and threw him into a
dungeon. The traitor is said to have been persuaded by his prisoner the
Sultan of Bari that the further success of Lewis would mean the
annexation of all Italy to the imperial domain and the extinction of all
the southern principalities of the peninsula.

But punishment was at hand. On the news of the fall of Bari the Aglabite
monarch in Africa had resolved that Italy should not be lost to Islam,
and had prepared a vast expedition against southern Christendom. Duke
Adelgis had only kept his suzerain forty days in bonds when he heard to
his dismay that 30,000 Moors under a general named Abdallah, who styled
himself the _Wali_ of Italy, had landed at Taranto. In terror at this
approaching storm the duke liberated his august prisoner, after making
him swear to bear no rancour for his captivity. It was felt that Lewis
alone could save Italy, and the armies of the Lombards would be needed
to drive out the African. Meanwhile the Wali Abdallah laid siege to
Salerno, which its duke Waifer defended with great courage.

The moment that he was released the emperor summoned the hosts of
northern Italy to Rome: they mustered in great strength, eager to avenge
Lewis on the treacherous duke, and pope Hadrian II. at once declared the
oath that had been sworn at Benevento null and void, because extorted by
force. [Sidenote: Lewis routs the Moors, 872.] But before punishing the
traitor, Lewis was magnanimous enough to resolve to drive away the Moors
who lay before Salerno. His vanguard under count Gunther defeated, near
Capua, the covering army with which the besiegers were protecting their
main operation. Then the emperor himself came down on the Moorish camp:
after a short struggle the invaders fled to their ships. A tempest swept
down on them ere they had well got out to sea, and the whole armament
was engulfed. (Aug. 872.)

It was now time to deal with the traitor duke of Benevento. In the
spring of 873 Lewis, supported by the solemn blessing of pope John
VIII., marched into the duchy, overran it, and forced his way to the
gates of the capital. But his successful campaign did not end, as might
have been expected, by the annexation of Adelgis’ dominions. At the
intercession of the Pope the duke was admitted to pardon, and on doing
homage and penance was reinvested with the sovereignty of Benevento.

Lewis had now leisure to undertake his great scheme for expelling the
Moors from Calabria and Sicily. [Sidenote: Death of Lewis, 875.] But to
the grief of all his subjects, and the eternal misfortune of Italy, he
died in 875. To crown the disaster he left no male heir, but only a
daughter, and the princess Hermengarde was not yet married to any
stalwart count who could have championed her claim to her father’s
realm.

Lewis was by far the best of the later Karlings. Just, pious, and
forgiving like his grandfather and namesake, he was no weakling as the
elder Lewis had been, but a mighty man of war from his youth up. If he
had succeeded his father Lothair in all his kingdoms, the fall of the
empire of the Franks would have been stayed for another generation. If
he had lived longer and left male issue, a strong and compact kingdom of
Italy would probably have come into being. But when they bore him to
rest in the old basilica of St. Ambrose at Milan the hope of a united
Italy was buried in his grave, and the ‘Age of Iron,’ as it was
afterwards styled, set in for all the provinces of the peninsula.

We have narrated in another chapter the troubles which were brought upon
Italy and all the other kingdoms of the Frankish empire by the
extinction of the eldest line of the descendants of Charles the Great
and the vacancy of the imperial throne.[65] Charles the Bald became the
nominal successor of Lewis II., but while he was absent in Neustria, the
Saracens recovering from their fearful defeat of 872 began once more to
infest Apulia and Campania. They thrice defeated Adelgis of Benevento in
the open field, and it was in vain that he and pope John joined to beg
Charles the Bald to return and deliver them.

Footnote 65:

See page 432-433.

Deliverance, however, came not from the West but from the East. While
the Frankish emperor failed to appear, Basil the Macedonian had resolved
to take up the task of driving the Moors from Italy. His armies crossed
the Ionian Sea, and seized Bari in 875. They met with unbroken success.
The Apulian towns opened their gates one after another in order to get
succour from the infidel. [Sidenote: The Byzantines conquer south Italy,
875-94.] Two splendid naval victories annihilated for a space the
piratical fleets of the African and Sicilian Moors. Their stronghold of
Taranto was stormed, and then, in three years, the great general
Nicephorus Phocas, grandfather of the emperor of the same name, overran
Calabria, and left not a single Saracen on the eastern side of Italy
(884-87). The Byzantines then went on to attack the duchy of Benevento.
They swept over it with ease, and forced duke Urso to fly into exile.
For four years East-Roman governors ruled at Benevento itself; but in
894 Wido king of Italy drove them out of that city, and reconstituted
the Beneventan state on a smaller scale. Its south-eastern half, the
provinces which got from the Greeks the names of the Basilicata and
Catapanata, remained permanently in the hands of the eastern emperor. It
is strange to find that while the Byzantines were faring so well in
Italy, their fate in Sicily had been disastrous, unless, indeed, it was
success in one quarter that led to the neglect of the other. In 877 a
great horde of African and Sicilian Moslems laid siege to Syracuse, the
main post of the East-Romans in the island. It was defended stubbornly
by two forgotten worthies, John the Patrician and Nicetas of Tarsus, and
held out for ten months. [Sidenote: Syracuse taken by the Moors, 877.]
By May 878 the besieged were reduced to feed on grass, nettles, and
unclean animals, and the fainting troops could no longer man the walls.
The Moors burst in, and massacred the patrician and the remains of the
gallant garrison. Nothing now remained to the empire in Sicily save a
few forts among the roots of Etna and the single town of Catania. These
were held throughout the war, and only fell in the beginning of the next
century.

While the Byzantines were maintaining their struggle in south Italy and
Sicily with the Aglabite monarchs of the Moors, Lombardy and Rome had
troubles of their own. Much vexed by Saracen inroads on Campania, pope
John VIII. summoned Charles the Bald to return to Italy. The king of
Neustria did for once appear to vindicate his imperial claims in 877.
But it was only to fly in haste, and to expire while crossing the pass
of Mont Cenis.

The title of emperor and the kingdom of Lombardy were both now vacant;
several princes stepped forward to claim them. The majority of the North
Italians, headed by the bishop of Milan, chose to rule them Carloman,
the eldest son of Lewis the German, though the Pope tried to support the
claims of count Boso, a Burgundian noble, who had just married the
princess Hermengarde, the heiress of the good emperor Lewis II. But
Carloman never was able to make good his rule over Lombardy; soon after
his election he lost his health, and fell into a lethargy, which obliged
him to abandon all State affairs. Yet till his death in 880 he held the
title of king of Italy.

Meanwhile the peninsula fared very ill without the hand of a ruler to
guide it. While the East-Roman armies were evicting the Moors from the
Adriatic shore, the expelled infidels kept throwing themselves upon
Latium and Campania. Aided by new swarms from Africa they infested the
regions about Naples, Capua, and Gaëta, till, in despair, the Neapolitan
republic made a private peace with them, and bought immunity from their
ravages by allowing its harbour to become a base of operations for the
plunder of the neighbouring lands. [Sidenote: The Moors in Campania.] A
veritable colony of Mohammedans was soon established on the banks of the
Garigliano, and from 882 till 916 the central Italian powers were quite
unable to drive them out. Their ravages extended far and wide into the
Samnite Apennines, and even as far as Tuscany. Yet, strangely enough,
the adventurers never succeeded in capturing Gaëta or Capua or any other
of the strong towns around them. They were purely predatory, and showed
no signs of settling down into an organised state.

In his despairing search for an emperor who should save Rome and Italy,
pope John finally crowned Charles the Fat, the most unpromising
candidate upon whom he could possibly have pitched. But the incapable
and unwieldy monarch soon returned to Germany, and even took with him
for northern wars the Lombard levies which John had fondly hoped to use
for the extirpation of the Campanian Moslems (881).

Next year John VIII. died. He was the last of those able pontiffs of the
ninth century who did their best to defend Italy from the infidel, and
to strengthen and extend the Papal power over the Frankish kings and the
Frankish church. After his decease the same blight which had already
fallen on the house of Charles the Great seemed to descend on the
bearers of the Roman keys. Three Popes died in eight years, and men of
mark ceased to appear on the papal throne. The last fifteen years of the
century saw the first of those scandalous prelates who were for a
century to be the disgrace of Christendom.

The inglorious reign of Charles the Fat was no less fatal to Italy than
to the rest of the Frankish realms. The Moors of Sicily and their
colonists on the Garigliano sent their expeditions farther and farther
afield; their vessels were seen as far north as Pisa and Genoa.
[Sidenote: The Moors of Fraxinet, 888-975.] Another band from Spain
descended on the Provençal coast at the same moment, and seized the
sea-girt fortress of Fraxinet, where they established a strong colony,
which lasted nearly a hundred years (888-975). The raids of the Moors of
Fraxinet reached far inland, in despite of the kings of Arles and Upper
Burgundy. We read, to our surprise, of incursions which devastated the
whole valley of the Rhone, and reached as far as Lausanne and St.
Maurice in Switzerland. On one occasion a band of Provençal Saracens and
a band of Magyars from the Danube met and fought at Orbe in the land of
Vaud. It seemed as if the enemies of Europe had met at her central
point, and that Christendom was doomed to succumb.

After the deposition of Charles the Fat no more Karlings of legitimate
blood survived. Italy, like the other Frankish realms, had to seek a new
royal house. Two princes courted the suffrages of the Lombard Diet and
the blessing of the Pope—Wido, duke of Spoleto, the most powerful and
the most turbulent of the nobles of central Italy, and Berengar,
margrave of the march of Friuli, the Italian borderland toward the Slavs
of Illyria. Both claimed Karling blood on the spindle side. Berengar was
the son of Gisela, a daughter of Lewis the Pious and the empress Judith;
Wido’s mother was a daughter of Lothair I. and a sister of the good
emperor Lewis II. At first there appeared some chance that the two
competitors might not come to blows, for Wido had the bold idea of
crossing the Alps to seize the Lotharingian dominions of his grandfather
Lothair, in the general break-up of the empire which followed the
deposition of Charles the Fat. He agreed to allow Berengar to be crowned
king of Italy if he himself was aided in his Transalpine schemes. The
margrave of Friuli, therefore, was duly elected by the Lombard Diet, and
anointed king by the archbishop of Milan, while duke Wido entered
Burgundy, and got himself crowned at Langres. [Sidenote: Wars of Wido
and Berengar.] But after a short struggle with Odo of France the
Spoletan prince abandoned his hopes beyond the Alps and fell back on
Italy. Then, disregarding the oaths he had sworn to Berengar, he
commenced to intrigue with the counts of central Italy, and soon laid
claim to the crown. There followed four years of bitter war between
Berengar and Wido, the former supported by Lombardy, the latter by
Tuscany and all central Italy and backed by the Pope. Pretending that
the archbishop of Milan ought not to have crowned Berengar, the
privilege belonging to the Papal See alone, Stephen V. anointed Wido,
and proclaimed him Emperor as well as King of Italy (891). The struggle
between the rival kings ended in the victory of Wido, who took Pavia,
drove Berengar back into his own duchy of Friuli, and ruled all the
Lombard realm for three years. He made pope Formosus crown his son
Lambert as co-regent emperor with him, and thought that his dynasty was
firmly established.

[Sidenote: Arnulf invades Italy, 894.] The humbled Berengar sent over
the Alps to ask aid from Arnulf, king of Germany. That prince had always
claimed the primacy among the various rulers who now shared the empire
of Charles the Great between them, and was only too glad of an
opportunity to interfere in Italy. He crossed the Alps in 894, was
joined by Berengar, and laid siege to Bergamo, the strong cliff-built
city which dominates the Lombard plains from the last spur of the Alps.
The Germans stormed the town, and Arnulf hung count Ambrosius, the
governor, in his armour before the gate, after massacring the whole
garrison. The terror of this deed cowed the partisans of Wido, and all
Italy north of the Po did homage to Arnulf. The Spoletan emperor retired
southward to prepare to defend the line of the Apennines. There he died,
leaving his claims to his son Lambert.

Next year Arnulf returned in force, passed triumphantly through Tuscany,
and though disease much thinned the ranks of his army, appeared before
the walls of Rome. Not Lambert of Spoleto, but his mother Engeltrud
defended the Eternal city. [Sidenote: Arnulf takes Rome, 895.]
Inspirited by her the Romans held out for some days, but when Arnulf had
stormed the ‘Leonine City,’ the new quarter beyond the Tiber, the
empress and her warriors fled, and the Pope opened the gates. Formosus,
who had always opposed the Spoletans, looked on Arnulf as a deliverer,
and crowned him emperor with joy; but the violence and rapine of the
conquering soldiery disgusted the populace of Rome, whose confidence had
not been won by Arnulf’s first act—the beheading of thirty citizens who
had favoured the cause of Wido and Lambert.

Attacked by fever and a paralytic stroke, Arnulf returned to Germany
without having conquered Lambert’s hereditary duchy in the Umbrian
Apennines. The moment he was gone all central Italy rose in favour of
the Spoletan. Pope Formosus, Arnulf’s chief supporter, died at this
moment, and the new pope, Stephen VI., a rabid supporter of the faction
of Lambert, violated his predecessor’s sepulchre, declared him an
antipope and usurper, and cast his corpse into the Tiber (896).

Arnulf, stricken down by disease, returned no more to Italy, and in his
absence Berengar of Friuli once more became master of Lombardy, while
Lambert of Spoleto was acknowledged in Rome, Tuscany, and Umbria.
[Sidenote: Berengar sole king of Italy, 900.] Fortunately for Italy,
Lambert died eighteen months later, killed by a fall from his horse, and
his mother Engeltrud sent to Berengar to recognise him as sole king,
making no claim in behalf of her young grandchild, the son of Lambert.
Arnulf died a year later, and thus in the last year of the century (900)
Berengar was left without competitors.

That his reign was not likely to be happy may be gathered from the
preceding pages. The Saracens of Campania were still in the field; a new
scourge, the Magyars from the Danube, appeared for the first time in
Italy in 899, and raided as far as Verona, showing by their brutal
cruelty that Christendom might have even worse foes than the Moslem.
Rome meanwhile was a prey to anarchy; six Popes died in four years, nor
was their loss much to be deplored. Boniface VII. had been twice deposed
from the priesthood for profligacy. For Stephen VI., who showed his
disposition by his horrid treatment of the corpse of Formosus, we need
not much grieve, when we read that his enemies caught him and strangled
him in prison. Of the other Popes, creatures of a few months’ reign, we
know so little that it is hard to take any interest in their fate. They
represented nothing more than parties among the citizens of Rome or the
barons of Latium.

So closed the ninth century, with prospects as black for Italy as for
the other kingdoms which a hundred years before had joined in saluting
Charles the Great as emperor. The only favourable point in the outlook
was the hope that a national Lombard kingship might be once more
restored in the person of Berengar.

It was the unfortunate connection between the Pope, the Italian crown,
and the imperial title that was still to be Berengar’s bane. He had
hardly reigned a year in peace (900) when Pope Benedict IV. and the
remains of the party of Lambert of Spoleto found a new competitor to pit
against him. This was Lewis, king of Provence (or Arles), the son of
king Boso and the Italian princess Hermengarde, and therefore the
grandson of the good emperor Lewis II. Lewis won several successes over
Berengar, was crowned king of Lombardy at Pavia, and then received the
imperial crown at Rome in February 901. But he could not permanently
hold his own. After a year’s fighting Berengar succeeded in chasing him
beyond the Alps. [Sidenote: Berengar conquers the Moors.] He returned in
905, again called in by the rebellious counts of central Italy, and once
more won some fleeting advantages over the native king of the land. But
as he lay in Verona he was suddenly surrounded by an army of Berengar’s
partisans; the citizens of the place threw open the gates at night, and
the young Provençal emperor fell into his rival’s hands. Berengar bade
his servants blind the captive, and sent him back in sorry plight to
abide in his kingdom by the Rhone. ‘And so at last he firmly held the
Italian crown, which had cost so many princes their lives.’ But it was
only a precarious empire over the Lombard plain that Berengar enjoyed.
The Pope and the counts of central Italy, even when they did not raise
up any rival against him, systematically set his commands at nought. The
imperial title he either did not covet or could not obtain from the
Pope, till in 915 John X. bought his support against the Saracens of the
Garigliano by conferring on him the long-withheld dignity. In the
following year Italy was happily relieved from that band of marauders.
The troops of Berengar, of the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento, and of
the Pope were all for once united in the holy war, and when united they
proved invincible. The forts of the Mussulmans were stormed, their
armies beaten in the field, and the whole colony finally rooted out.

But after this triumph Berengar was not fated to die in peace. In his
old age his enemies stirred up against him yet another king from beyond
the Alps, Rudolf II. of Upper Burgundy. Berengar was once more deserted
by many of his followers, and once more saw the greater part of Lombardy
overrun by a Transalpine army. [Sidenote: Death of Berengar, 924.] But
this time he was not destined to survive his troubles. While besieged in
Verona in the year 924, he was murdered by traitors, and lost his life,
as well as the royal and imperial crown, for which he had so often
contended.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XXVII

GERMANY 888-918

Arnulf, king of Germany—His victory at Louvain over the Danes—His
expedition to Italy—His troubles with his son Zwentibold—Approach of
the Magyars—Reign of Lewis the Child—Internal anarchy, and disasters
from Magyar invasions—Reign of Conrad of Franconia—His troubles and
death.

Arnulf of Carinthia was base-born, the son of the Slavonic mistress of
king Carloman, but he possessed a considerable share of the strength and
vigour of his ancestors. For the twelve years of his reign the German
realm made head against its enemies to north and east, and held the
primacy among the states of Christendom. The Frankish empire had now
fallen apart into five states: but the kings who held the other shares
all came to seek out Arnulf and obtain his recognition of their rights.
Odo the ruler of the West Franks was the first to appear before the
German monarch and crave his friendship. [Sidenote: Supremacy of Arnulf
in the Empire.] It would almost appear that he recognised Arnulf as his
superior and liege lord, for on his return to Neustria he had himself
crowned for a second time at Rheims in the presence of German
ambassadors, and with a diadem which Arnulf had given to him. Rudolf the
ruler of Upper Burgundy was the next to visit the German court: he came
to Regensburg, obtained recognition from Arnulf, and returned in peace.
Berengar of Lombardy, already threatened with war by his competitor Wido
of Spoleto, met the king of Germany at Trent, on the border of his
realm, and promised to be his faithful supporter in all things. Lastly
Hermengarde, the widow of Boso of Lower Burgundy (Arles), placed her
young son Lewis under Arnulf’s protection, and besought him to undertake
the regency of the Provençal realm.

Though Arnulf had not obtained the imperial title he was for all
practical purposes far more of a general suzerain and ruler of the whole
Frankish realm than any of his relatives had been for the last fifty
years. The best sign of his strength was that he succeeded in checking
the inroads of the Vikings in a manner which made them for the future
the least dangerous of the many enemies of Germany. In 891 the Danes
came flooding into Austrasia in great force, and harried all the lands
on the Meuse and Moselle. The local levies of Lotharingia were beaten,
and Sunderold archbishop of Mainz, who had led them, fell on the field.
[Sidenote: The Battle of Louvain, 891.] But Arnulf, who had been far
away in Bavaria, came flying westward on the news of this disaster, and
chased the Danes as far as their great fortified camp at Louvain on the
Dyle. There they had entrenched themselves with the river at their back
and a marsh in their front, which rendered it impossible for the
Frankish horsemen to approach them. But Arnulf bade all his warriors
dismount, and taking axe in hand led them through the swamp and up to
the Danish palisades. The Germans hewed down the breastwork, broke into
the camp, and drove the Danes into the river, where most of them
perished. This was the last first-class engagement which the Danes ever
fought in the East Frankish realm. They continued to come on plundering
excursions to Frisia and the lower Rhine, but never attempted again
either to penetrate deep into the land or to set up any independent
principality upon its borders.

[Sidenote: Arnulf in Italy.] After defeating the Danes and putting down
some risings of his eastern Slavonic vassals, the Czechs and Moravians,
Arnulf undertook the unwise enterprise of conquering Italy, whence his
friend and vassal Berengar had of late been expelled by Wido of Spoleto.
Of the details of his two invasions of 894 and 895-6 we have spoken at
length in our Italian chapter.[66] Arnulf returned from Italy wearing
the imperial crown, whose splendour seemed to ratify the primacy that he
already possessed over his brother-kings; but he was broken in health by
the fever that he had caught in the Roman campaign, and he left Italy
behind him in a state of complete disorder, and mainly in the hands of
Lambert of Spoleto.

Footnote 66:

See pages 463-4.

After his Italian expedition Arnulf’s reign was much less fortunate. A
fatal succession-difficulty arose in his own house, and caused endless
trouble. For many years he had no lawful issue born to him: so he
persuaded the national council of the Germans to allow him to designate
his bastard son Zwentibold as his heir (889). Four years later he made
this prince sub-king in Lotharingia. [Sidenote: Dynastic Troubles,
893-99.] But the same year (893) his wedded wife Ota bore him a son,
known in history as Lewis the Child, who was therefore recognised as the
lawful heir to the empire, to the great grief and anger of the new king
of Lotharingia. From this time forward Zwentibold, an unruly and
turbulent young man, was a perpetual thorn in his father’s side. He
grudged his infant brother the heritage of the German kingdom, and
persistently stirred up strife. He fell into a long and bloody feud with
some of the chief nobles of Lotharingia, and notably with
Reginald-with-the-Long-Neck, count of Hainault and the Maasgau. In
revenge for his tyranny Reginald and many others of the Austrasians
called in to their aid Charles the Simple, the monarch of Neustria, and
did homage to him as king of Lotharingia, handing over to him the old
royal towns of Aachen and Nimuegen. The attempt to tear away Austrasia
from Germany failed, not because of Zwentibold’s arms, but because
Charles the Simple feared to face the whole force of the East Frankish
realm, when Arnulf took up his son’s cause (898). He agreed to retire
into his own states, and evacuated Austrasia.

[Sidenote: The Hungarians.] Of even greater import of evil to Germany
than Zwentibold’s unruliness was the arrival on the eastern frontier of
the kingdom of a new race of enemies. These were the Ugrian tribe of the
Magyars or Hungarians who appeared in 896 on the middle Danube and
Theiss, where the decaying remnant of the Avars were now dwelling mixed
among the Slavonic Moravians. The Magyars had been driven westward by
another wild horde, the Tartar Petchenegs, who thrust them out of South
Russia and forced them to find new homes. They were a race of light
horsemen, mighty with the bow, skilful in sudden onsets and feigned
retreats, but wanting the perseverance and steady strength in pitched
battle which would have rendered them invincible. Their raids were even
more rapid and destructive than those of the Northmen, but they were not
such formidable foes to meet as the Vikings, for they never could learn
to besiege a fortified place, or to defend themselves in entrenched
camps, or to fight in regular line of battle. All their attacks were
mere ambushes or sudden surprises, and they seldom allowed the heavy
horsemen of Germany to fight them on equal terms and in the open field.
Their custom was to ride through the open country burning defenceless
monasteries and villages, but avoiding walled towns and always escaping
in haste if the levies of the district came out against them in full
force.

Arnulf himself was responsible for the first visit of the Magyars to the
empire. During his Moravian war he hired some of their warriors to
follow him to the field as auxiliary light horse. Thus they learnt the
way into Moravia and Germany alike: during Arnulf’s own life they do not
seem to have seriously molested his kingdom, for they were mainly
occupied in evicting the Slavs from the plains by the Danube. But no
sooner was the emperor dead than they began to extend their ravages into
Bavaria and Thuringia. At an even earlier date they are found already
harassing north Italy, and vexing the soul of king Berengar by ravaging
his native duchy of Friuli (899).

[Sidenote: Death of Arnulf, 899.] In December 899 Arnulf died, old
before his time, and was buried in his favourite city of Regensburg.
Then the dukes, counts, and bishops of Germany met at Forchheim and
chose as king Lewis the Child, the six-year-old son of their deceased
monarch. The reign of a minor was always dangerous to the old Teutonic
kingdoms, and that of Lewis was no exception to the rule. The eleven
years during which he nominally ruled as king of Germany were almost the
most disastrous ever known in the history of the East Frankish realm.
Hitherto the land had been fortunate in its rulers; of all the
descendants of Charles the Great the German line had been by far the
most able and vigorous; save the unhappy Charles the Fat,—who only
reigned for five years—they had all proved strong and capable rulers.
[Sidenote: Weakness of Lewis the Child.] But now under the nominal sway
of Lewis the Child all the evils that had been kept down by his father’s
strong hand came to a sudden head. Germany was deprived of all central
authority, and exposed to two evils at once, invasion by the enemy from
without and civil war at home.

The first troubles came from Lotharingia, where king Zwentibold had made
himself so hated that many of the Austrasian nobles determined to
disavow their allegiance to him, and to acknowledge his boy-brother as
immediate ruler as well as suzerain. While waging war on his rebellious
subjects Zwentibold fell in battle; as he very happily left no male
issue, his kingdom was at once reunited with the main body of the
Germanic realm.

But worse was to come: in 902 there burst out the first of the great
family feuds which were to be such a curse to Germany. During the last
generation the succession to the posts of duke, count, and margrave
throughout the land had been tending more and more toward hereditary
right. It was growing quite usual to continue the son in the father’s
office, and to give to brothers countships in each other’s close
neighbourhood. Under a strong government this had not led to any danger.
Arnulf had been powerful enough to keep all his vassals in order. But
his son was a mere child without any grown relative at his side to act
as protector, and not even provided with a strong Mayor of the Palace to
vindicate the royal authority. So far as there was any central
government at all, it was worked by two great bishops, Adalbero of
Augsburg and Hatto of Mainz—the wicked prelate of German tales, of whom
posterity persisted in believing that he was devoured alive by rats in
divine punishment for his sins. But Hatto and Adalbero were not even
formally acknowledged as regents by the national diet, and had no
authority to use the royal name save to execute the behests of that
council.

[Sidenote: Civil wars in Franconia.] In the third year of Lewis two
powerful family-groups of counts in Franconia began to wage open war on
each other, not under any pretence of serving the crown but purely to
settle a personal feud. Adalbert of Bamberg and his two kinsmen, who
governed the land of the Saal and upper Main, fell upon Conrad and
Eberhard, two brothers who ruled in Hesse and on the Lahn, and for four
years central Germany was torn by their intermittent struggles. The
meeting of the national council, and the anathemas of the bishops proved
quite unable to bring the feud to an end. Presently the quarrel spread
into western Lotharingia, where two other counts, Gerhard and Matfrid,
espoused the cause of Adalbert and attacked his enemies in Hesse. It was
only after four counts had fallen in battle, and the whole Main valley
had been miserably ravaged, that a diet, summoned by bishop Hatto at
Tribur, finally put its ban on Adalbert of Bamberg, as the fomenter of
the war, and raised a great army against him. He was beleaguered by the
national levy in his castle of Theres, captured and executed, while his
friends Gerhard and Matfrid were exiled. But it had taken four years to
induce the nation to move, and meanwhile other great counts and dukes
had learnt the lesson that they might enjoy a long impunity, whatever
turbulent enterprise they might take in hand. A few years later we find
Burchard margrave of Rhaetia endeavouring to make himself duke of all
Suabia by coercing the small governors in his neighbourhood; when he was
put down and executed, by counsel of the bishops who surrounded the
young king, popular sympathy was decidedly in favour of the feudal
usurper and not of the central government. In Lotharingia too troubles
never ceased; they culminated in a second attempt of count
Reginald-with-the-Long-Neck to make over the Austrasian countries to the
king of Neustria, Charles the Simple.

[Sidenote: Invasions of the Hungarians.] But serious as were these civil
broils, their importance was as nothing compared with the greater
disasters caused by the Hungarians’ ravages on the eastern frontier.
From the first year of king Lewis onward their attacks knew no
intermission. They began by raids on Bavaria and Carinthia; a little
later, while the Franconian civil war was in progress, we find them
penetrating into Suabia and even into the distant Saxony. In 907 they
defeated the whole levy of Bavaria, and slew its duke Luitpold together
with the archbishop of Salzburg and the bishops of Freising and Seben.
The consequence of this disaster was the temporary loss to Germany of
its eastern frontier, the Bavarian ‘Ostmark,’ which we now know as
Austria; the Magyars overran the whole of it as far as the Enns. In the
very next year the victorious horde entered Thuringia and slew its duke
together with the bishop of Wurzburg. In 910 the young king himself, now
sixteen years old, took the field against them for the first time, and
for once Bavarians, Suabians, and Franconians were found united under
him for a common campaign against the invader. But the first fight of
king Lewis was a disaster: his army was caught in an ambush and routed
with great slaughter, only the Bavarian troops escaped the panic and
succeeded in checking the outset of the victorious enemy.

How Lewis might have fared in future warfare against the Magyars we
cannot say, for a year later, ere yet he had attained the threshold of
manhood, he was carried off by disease. With him was extinguished the
German line of the Carolingian house, for he left no male heir of any
kind, whether brother, uncle, or cousin, to take up the heavy heritage
of the Teutonic crown. (911.)

The only alternatives that now lay before the German nobles were either
to elect as king one of the French branch of the Carolingian line, or
else to follow the example of the Burgundians, Italians, and Provençals
and choose one of themselves as the new ruler. [Sidenote: Election of
Conrad I., 911.] After much hesitation the latter course commended
itself to the diet, and at Forchheim the Franconians, Saxons, Suabians,
and Bavarians joined in elevating to the throne Conrad, a count of lower
Franconia, the son of that Conrad who had fallen in the war with
Adalbert of Bamberg five years before. Only the Austrasians, faithful
now as ever to the house of Charles the Great, refused to acknowledge
the new king, and once more did homage to Charles the Simple, the weak
but ambitious monarch of Neustria. Conrad seems to have been remotely
descended in the female line from the house of St. Arnulf, but could not
pretend to represent the old traditions of Frankish royalty. He was
simply the most powerful, or almost the most powerful, man among the
German noble houses, and was chosen purely for his military abilities.

Conrad’s reign of seven years (911-918) was one continuous story of
rebellion and disaster. Under a ruler of a new line, whom they regarded
merely as one of themselves, the local governors became even more
insolent to the central power than before. They made war on each other
at their good pleasure, and each endeavoured to put down his weaker
neighbours and make their possessions his own. Each of the ancient
divisions of the German realm, the original tribal unities of Suabian
and Bavarian, Saxon and Frank, showed a tendency to draw apart from its
fellows. Each sought to reassert its individuality under some new ruler
of its own, to hail its strongest noble as duke and follow him even
against the king. It required a strong and persevering monarch to keep
this separatist tendency under, and to prevent it from splitting up the
realm.

Conrad I. was deficient neither in energy nor in perseverance. His whole
reign was filled with struggles against the usurpations of the greater
nobles, but he was still far from having won a victory when he died.
Except from his fellow-countrymen in Franconia, and from the higher
clergy, he got little assistance in the strife, and his own last words
were a warning to the Germans that they must choose a stronger king than
himself if their kingdom was to survive.

[Sidenote: Rebellions against Conrad I.] It would be wearisome to relate
the many campaigns of Conrad against his too-powerful subjects, to tell
how the Palatine count Erchanger tried to make himself duke in Suabia;
how Arnulf, the son of that Luitpold whom the Hungarians had slain,
claimed the ducal power in Bavaria; how the great Saxon Henry, son of
duke Otto—to be better known a few years later as king Henry the
First—defied his liege lord to drive him out of Saxony. Conrad was
generally unsuccessful in his strife against the rebels; it is true that
he defeated, captured, and executed the would-be duke of Suabia, and
that he drove Arnulf the Bavarian into exile for a time. But he utterly
failed in his attempt to win back Austrasia from Charles the Simple, and
his expedition into Saxony against duke Henry came to a disastrous end,
so that he was compelled to make peace and to recognise Henry’s ducal
power over the whole country. It is said that Hatto, the great
archbishop of Mainz, died of sheer anger and disgust on hearing of the
triumph of the Saxon, against whom he had a personal grudge. Hatto had
been the chief supporter of the central government in the reign of
Conrad, as in the reign of Lewis the Child, and could not bear to see
the forces of disunion finally victorious.

[Sidenote: Further Magyar inroads.] It need hardly be added that while
civil war raged all over the German kingdom, the foreign enemy was more
active than ever. Instead of afflicting only the eastern border of the
land, the Magyars came flooding in over its whole extent. They even
reached the Rhine: in 913 we find them before the walls of Coblenz: in
917 they surprised and burnt Basel, the south-westernmost of all the
cities of the realm. Meanwhile the Suabians and Bavarians were too much
occupied in resisting the king to be able either to unite or defend
themselves.

[Sidenote: Death of Conrad, 918.] In this melancholy position of affairs
Conrad I. died on the 23d of December 918. His last act was to assemble
his brothers and his chief councillors at his bedside, and to warn them
that if Germany was to be saved they must find a stronger man than
himself to crown as king. He advised them not to look within his own
family, but to elect his rival the powerful duke Henry of Saxony. Though
Henry was an obstinate enemy of his own, Conrad considered him the
strongest and most capable statesman in the realm, and putting aside all
personal enmity gave his vote in the Saxon’s favour. His advice was
taken and the happiest results ensued.

Here then we must leave Germany, still in evil plight, but on the eve of
better things. She had yet to solve the question whether the work of
Charles the Great—the blending of Frank, Saxon, Suabian, and Bavarian
into a single nationality—was to endure, or whether the disruptive
tendencies were still too strong. Fortunately for her there were two
great forces at work in favour of unity. The Church owed her rise and
growth in Germany to the protection of the great Frankish kings, and in
gratitude always fought upon the side of royalty and union. But even
more important was the pressure of hostile neighbours from without: it
had become evident since the death of king Arnulf to even the most
turbulent of the Suabian counts and the most unruly of the Saxon tribes,
that if Germany was to survive she must submit herself to a single
ruler. If the reigns of Lewis the Child and Conrad the Franconian had
been disastrous failures, it was because the one was too young and the
other too destitute both of heriditary claims and of personal followers.
When a strong man with one of the great duchies at his back took
Conrad’s place, the problem of saving Germany was found not to be
insoluble.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE EASTERN EMPIRE IN THE NINTH CENTURY

802-912

Nicephorus I. and his wars—He is slain by the Bulgarians—Short reign of
Michael I.—Leo V. defeats the Bulgarians—His ecclesiastical
troubles—Michael the Amorian dethrones him and reigns nine years—His
policy—Reign of Theophilus—His wars with the Caliphs—He persecutes
image-worshippers—Long minority of Michael III.—Restoration of
image-worship—Orgies and end of Michael—Basil I. and the Macedonian
dynasty.

The East-Roman Empire was always at its best when it was subject for
several generations to princes of the same family; it was always at its
worst in the periods between the fall of one dynasty and the rise of
another, when the crown had become for the moment a prize that could be
grasped by every successful general or intriguing statesman. In such
times attempts at usurpation grew so frequent that civil war became an
endemic disease, and while the empire was troubled within, foreign
enemies were always ready to take their opportunity to assail it from
without. We have already noted one of these anarchic and disastrous
intervals, that between 695 and 717, when the house of Heraclius had
fallen, and that of Leo the Isaurian had not yet come to the front. We
have now to record a second period of short reigns, and of troubles both
at home and abroad, between the deposition of the empress Irene and the
establishment on the throne of Michael the Amorian, the founder of the
next dynasty. This period, which filled the years between 802 and 820,
was by no means so disastrous as that which followed the fall of
Justinian II. in the earlier century, but, nevertheless, it was
distinctly a time of decline and decay, from which the empire took many
years to recover.

The wicked empress Irene was dethroned, as we have already had occasion
to relate, by a palace-conspiracy, headed by her high-treasurer,
Nicephorus. The new monarch was a man of mature years, who was known
merely as a capable finance minister, and had never been suspected of
any great ambition. When he had seized the reins of government he proved
that he had more character, more self-will, and more energy than his
contemporaries had credited him with. He put down with success two
rebellions of discontented military chiefs, who thought that they had as
good a right to the throne as he, and established himself so firmly on
his seat that none could shake him. In matters ecclesiastical he
reversed the policy of the superstitious Irene, and showed a perfect
tolerance for the Iconoclasts, as well as for all the other dissident
sects in the empire. He kept a firm hand over the patriarch and clergy,
who would have been glad to persecute these schismatics, a fact which
probably explains the bitterness with which the chroniclers of the
succeeding age write of him,—a bitterness which nothing in his actions
seems to justify. He was neither cruel nor arbitrary in his rule, and
the only accusation against him which seems to have the least
foundation, is that after his accession he still remained too much of
the high-treasurer, caring more for a good balance in the exchequer than
for the welfare of his subjects.

Nicephorus’s reign was not untroubled by wars. Haroun-al-Raschid still
sat on the throne of Bagdad, and the caliphate was still a dangerous
neighbour to the empire. Nicephorus refused to pay the tribute which
Irene had promised to the Saracen, so Haroun renewed the intermittent
war with the East-Romans, which had dragged on, with short intervals,
ever since the days of Constantine Copronymus. [Sidenote: War with the
Caliph.] The emperor was not favoured by fortune in the war; it would
seem that the maladministration of Irene’s eunuch-ministers had caused
the army to deteriorate, and matters went so ill that Nicephorus was
glad to buy a peace when Haroun offered to grant him one. The emperor
was to pay 30,000 _solidi_ annually, beside—a curious detail—six large
gold medals of greater weight for himself, and one for his son and heir,
Stauracius.

In spite of this humiliating treaty it was not the Saracen war that was
to prove Nicephorus’s direst trouble; nor did he fare very badly in his
struggle with Charles the Great. The long and desultory war with the new
western empire terminated in a treaty which left Frank and East-Romans
exactly where they started. Not even Venice, which was now completely
surrounded by the dominions of Charles, and which had been for a time in
his hands, was sacrificed. Nor did Nicephorus find himself compelled to
take what he would have regarded as the degrading step of recognising
Charles as his equal and colleague in the administration of the empire.

It was a war with the comparatively insignificant power of the
Bulgarians which was to be the worst of the disasters of Nicephorus.
Since the failure of the great expedition of Constantine VI. in 796, the
predatory tribe behind the Balkans had been growing more and more
venturesome. Under a new king, the cruel but able Crumn, they were
making raids far into Thrace, which at last drove Nicephorus to take the
field against them in person. At the head of a great army, drawn from
all the European and Asiatic themes, and accompanied by his son
Stauracius, he crossed the Balkans in 811. Victory at first crowned his
arms; he defeated the Bulgarians in the open field, and took and
plundered their king’s palace. [Sidenote: Nicephorus slain by the
Bulgarians, 811.] But a few days later, as his victorious army lay
carelessly encamped and paying no heed to the defeated enemy, it was
beset by a fierce night-attack. In the confusion and panic which
followed the emperor was slain, and his son Stauracius desperately
wounded. Left without a leader the Byzantine army broke up, and retired
in great disorder, leaving the body of the emperor with those of many of
his chief officers upon the field. The Bulgarian king cut off the head
of Nicephorus, and made his skull into a drinking-cup, as Alboin had
done with the skull of king Cunimund three centuries before.

The wrecks of the imperial army rallied at Adrianople, whither the
wounded Stauracius was borne. He was at once proclaimed Augustus in his
father’s room; but he never rose from his couch, for his hurt was
mortal. It was evident that his end was near, and that his crown would
soon be the prize of some usurper. Seeing this, his brother-in-law,
Michael Rhangabe, who had married the only daughter of Nicephorus I.,
bribed the guards of his dying master, and had himself saluted as
emperor before the breath was out of Stauracius’s body (812).

Michael Rhangabe owed his rise purely to the chance that had connected
him with the family of Nicephorus. He was personally insignificant,
superstitious, and cowardly. But his accession had some importance from
the religious point of view; he was a European Greek—the first of his
race that had yet worn the imperial crown—and, like most of his
countrymen, was a strong Iconodule, and wholly opposed to his
father-in-law’s tolerant ecclesiastical policy. He surrounded himself
with fanatical monks, and set to work to reverse the doings of
Nicephorus, and to remove all Iconoclasts from high office in state and
army.

These actions might have been popular if Michael had been a man of
strength and energy; but he was a weak and incapable ruler. He refused
for some time to enter the field against the Bulgarians, who were
ravaging Thrace far and wide, and when he did at last head an army, it
was only to suffer a crushing defeat. He took what his subjects
considered the degrading step of conciliating the Franks, by formally
recognising Charles the Great as a legitimate emperor, and treating with
him as an equal. In everything that he did indecision and want of
courage was to be traced.

The army was fated to be the instrument of Michael’s fall. It was deeply
leavened with Iconoclastic feeling, and highly discontented with a
master who sent it neither encouragement nor orders. At last, when
Michael allowed king Crumn to penetrate so far into Thrace that he
actually approached the walls of the capital, the army concentrated at
Adrianople openly threw off its allegiance, and took the decisive step
of saluting as emperor one of its generals, Leo the Armenian. [Sidenote:
Fall of Michael I. 813.] Priests and courtiers could give Michael
Rhangabe little support when the whole military caste turned against
him; he was deposed with little trouble and sent into a monastery, while
the rough soldier who had headed the revolt became emperor in his stead
(813).

Leo the Armenian was a capable man, not destitute of good qualities, who
might have founded a dynasty had fortune played him fair. He
successfully discharged the task for which he had been chosen
emperor—the ending of the Bulgarian war. Immediately after his accession
the king of Bulgaria marched up to the very walls of Constantinople and
camped over against it. Leo at first strove to get rid of Crumn by the
dishonourable expedient of attempting to seize or slay him at a
conference—much as Charles the Fat dealt with king Godfred. [Sidenote:
Leo V. defeats the Bulgarians, 814.] This attempt failed, but the
Bulgarians, after plundering the suburbs, retired from before the walls,
and in the next year when they again advanced into Thrace, Leo met them
at Mesembria and inflicted on them a bloody defeat. So crushing was the
reverse that the new Bulgarian king instantly asked for peace, and the
empire was not troubled by another Bulgarian invasion till a whole
generation had gone by.

Leo reigned for six years more, unvexed by wars without, and swaying the
sceptre with a very firm hand. He reorganised the army and the finances,
and did much to repair the harm caused by the depredations of Saracen
and Bulgarian in the reigns of Nicephorus I. and Michael Rhangabe. But
unfortunately for himself and the empire, he soon became involved in the
old Iconoclastic controversy, and had no peace thereafter. Leo was, like
most of the inhabitants of the Eastern themes, and most of the higher
officers in the army, strongly imbued with the doctrines of his great
namesake the Isaurian. For the first two years of his reign he kept his
opinions to himself, and endeavoured to maintain a strict neutrality
between the image-worshippers and the image-breakers. But the Iconodule
clergy were too vehement, and Leo himself too conscientious for such a
truce to endure for very long. In 815 the struggle broke out: Leo had
requested the patriarch Nicephorus to order certain images, which were
especial stumbling-blocks to the Iconoclasts, owing to the grovelling
popular devotion which they attracted, to be raised so far from the
ground that devotees should no longer be able to kiss and embrace them.
The patriarch refused, bade all his clergy commence special prayers for
deliverance, because the church was in danger, and excommunicated a
bishop whom he suspected of having counselled the imperial order. Leo
replied by deposing Nicephorus, and substituting for him a successor of
decided Iconoclast views. The new patriarch at once held a council which
declared image-worship superstitious, and re-affirmed all the decrees
against it which had been passed in 754, by the synod held by
Constantine Copronymus. [Sidenote: Leo V. and the Iconodules.] But Leo
did not plunge into persecution as his Isaurian predecessor had done:
beyond removing a few church dignitaries from office, and banishing an
abbot who made an open display of images in the streets of the capital,
he took no repressive measures against the Iconodules. His moderation
profited him little, for the image-worshippers hated a heretic as much
as a persecutor, and his mildness only gave them the better opportunity
of intriguing and conspiring against him. The last years of his reign,
though full of outward prosperity, were a time of discontent and unrest
beneath the surface, and it was felt that he had offended too many of
his subjects for his life to be safe, or his throne secure. Knowing of
this, unquiet spirits among his generals and courtiers began to draw
together and plot against him.

The chief of these malcontents was Michael the Amorian, a turbulent
soldier who had been the emperor’s close friend when both were private
persons, and who had been promoted to high office when Leo gained the
crown. His conspiracy was detected, and he was thrown into prison, but
when his confederates learnt that they were in danger of discovery, they
resolved to strike at once before they were arrested. Leo was attending
matins on Christmas Day in his private chapel, when the conspirators
fell upon him. Snatching the great cross from the altar he fought
desperately with it against his assailants, but before help could arrive
he was cut down, and fell dead in the sanctuary.

The murderers hastened to the cell of Michael the Amorian, and saluted
him as emperor. He was drawn from his dungeon and presented to the
people in the imperial robes, before the fetters had been struck from
his feet, and ere the day was ended the patriarch had crowned him in St.
Sophia (December 25, 820). Michael was very inferior to the man whom he
had dethroned: he had nothing to back him save his military talent and a
certain measure of unscrupulous ability. He was quite uneducated, and
his provincial dialect and ungrammatical expressions were the jest of
the court and capital. But he knew how to strike hard, and his harshness
cowed his enemies more than Leo the Armenian’s mild policy. His
accession was the signal for rebellion all over the empire: a certain
Thomas raised the heretical sects of Asia Minor and the Iconoclast
partisans of the late emperor in rebellion, and for three years made
Michael’s throne insecure. He even beleaguered Constantinople, and might
have taken it, had not his followers alienated public sympathy by their
ravages in its neighbourhood. He was ultimately put down and slain, but
his rebellion caused a serious loss to the empire. While the whole of
the imperial fleet and army was acting against him, a horde of Saracen
pirates descended on the great island of Crete, and overran it from end
to end (825). After peace had been restored, Michael made two attempts
to expel the adventurers, but both failed, and for a hundred and thirty
five years the ‘island of the hundred cities’ remained a Saracen
outpost, and a sad hindrance to the commerce of the Ægean. [Sidenote:
Loss of Crete and Sicily.] Hardly had the expeditions sent against Crete
returned with loss and disgrace, than Michael heard that a new province
was being assailed by the same enemy. In 827 the Moslems of Africa,
summoned by the traitor Euphemius, landed in Sicily, and began the
conquest of that island. We have described its slow but steady progress
in another chapter.[67]

Footnote 67:

See pp. 448 and 449.

The loss of these two outlying provinces does not seem to have troubled
Michael. He was perhaps content that he was preserved from a greater
Saracen war with the whole force of the caliphate, owing to the civil
strife of the descendants of Haroun-al-Raschid. Nor did the peaceful
Lewis the Pious stir up the Franks against him. The conquest of Crete
and Sicily was a vexatious incident, not a pressing danger.

In dealing with the thorny ecclesiastical questions which had proved so
dangerous to his predecessor, Michael the Amorian showed caution rather
than zeal. His accession had been supported by the image-worshippers,
who cordially detested Leo the Armenian. But when safe on the throne he
refused to put himself into their hands, or to commence a persecution of
the Iconoclasts. He was probably at heart a contemner of images himself,
and his son and colleague Theophilus had a fierce hatred for them. His
line of policy was to proclaim complete toleration of both parties, and
to recall and replace the prelates whom Leo had banished. But in public
worship he maintained the condition of things that he found existing,
and refused to restore the images which his predecessor had removed or
mutilated. On the other hand he allowed such figures and pictures as had
escaped Leo’s hand to remain, and permitted the monks to practise as
many superstitions as they pleased within the walls of their
monasteries. Neither party was satisfied; both accused Michael of
time-serving and lukewarm service of God, but they kept fairly quiet,
and the controversy was for a time quiescent.

Michael reigned for nine years only, and at his death in 829 left the
throne to his eldest son Theophilus, a man of much greater mark and
individuality than himself. The new emperor was an active warlike
prince, with a great love of splendour and pomp, and a strong
determination to have his own will in all things. Moreover—and this was
certain to give the empire troublous times—he was a firm and
conscientious Iconoclast: it had been with great difficulty that his
father restrained him from taking harsh measures against image-worship,
while he was still only his junior colleague on the throne. The
chroniclers bear strong witness to his courage, his personal virtues,
and his even-handed justice, but his meddling in things ecclesiastical
has sufficed to blacken his character in their pages.

The greater part of the reign of Theophilus was taken up with a long
struggle with the caliphate. The Abbasside empire had been much weakened
since the death of Haroun-al-Raschid, first by the civil strife between
his sons, and then by the religious wars excited by the heterodox caliph
El-Mamun. Theophilus thought that the ancient enemy was so reduced by
the loss of many outlying provinces, and by long strife at home, that
the empire would be able to win back some of the lands lost two
centuries before by Heraclius. Accordingly he provoked a war with
El-Mamun by sheltering the many refugees from Persia and Syria, who fled
before the persecutions of the caliph. Unfortunately for Theophilus, the
troubles of his adversary were just at an end, and the Saracens had
their hands once more free for a struggle with the empire. The long war
which set in revealed that the forces of the caliph and the emperor were
now so evenly balanced that it was impossible for either to deal the
other any deadly blow, but quite possible for each to harry and molest
the other’s frontiers for an indefinite time. With some trifling
interruptions of truce and armistice, it lasted more than thirty years.
The caliph began the struggle by invading his neighbour’s Cappadocian
borders, and overrunning the land as far as Heraclea (831). His fleets
at the same time made some descents on the Cyclades and the Mysian
coast. El-Mamun led three expeditions in person into Asia Minor, and
after getting possession of the passes of Taurus, took the great town of
Tyana at their northern exit, and fortified it as a base for further
operations. Fortunately for Theophilus the caliph died at this moment,
and his armies retired to Tarsus, abandoning their conquests beyond the
mountains. The emperor was more fortunate against the new Saracen
monarch, El-Motassem, the brother of El-Mamun. Theophilus was able to
invade Syria and Mesopotamia, and to capture the important town of
Samosata, where the Byzantine banners had not been seen since the time
of Constantine Copronymus. But the ravages of Theophilus on the
Euphrates, and especially his sack of Zapetra, a place for which
El-Motassem had a special regard, provoked the Saracens to greater
efforts. In 838 the caliph took the field at the head of a vast army: he
had sworn to sack the emperor’s birthplace, Amorium, in revenge for the
plundering of Zapetra, and it is said that 130,000 men marched out of
Tarsus, each with the word ‘Amorium’ painted on his shield. [Sidenote:
Theophilus beaten by Saracens, 838.] Theophilus hastened forth to defend
his ancestral town: but one division of the Saracen army defeated him
with great slaughter at Dasymon, while another, under the caliph’s
personal orders, stormed Amorium and slew the whole population—men,
women, and children—to the number of not less than 30,000.

Such a disaster, and the sight of the caliph’s troops advancing as far
as the centre of Phrygia, seemed to portend danger to the empire. But
having satiated his wrath and vengeance, El-Motassem retired, and the
generals of Theophilus recovered the whole of the lost lands as far as
the line of Taurus. Intestine troubles kept the caliph busy at home, and
after the East-Romans had recommenced their invasions of Syria and taken
Laodicea, the port of Antioch, a truce was patched up, which lasted,
with some intermissions, down to the death of the emperor and the
caliph, both of whom expired in 842.

[Sidenote: Theophilus persecutes image-worshippers.] When not employed
in the field against the Saracens, Theophilus had been busy at home
against the image-worshippers. In 832 he issued an edict against all
kinds of representations of our Lord and the Saints, whether in the form
of statues, pictures, or mosaics, and had them sought out and destroyed
not only in public places, but in monasteries and private dwellings. His
especial wrath was reserved for the painters whom he found working in
secret to reproduce the prohibited figures; he mutilated their
disobedient hands with hot irons, and branded their foreheads with words
of contumely. The patriarch John the Grammarian aided the emperor by
excommunicating all the clergy who refused to abide by the decrees of
the synod of 754. Theophilus then laid hands on the recalcitrant monks
and bishops, and imprisoned or banished them. His wrath, however, did
not lead him into the extremes that the Isaurian emperors had
countenanced; he did not inflict the penalty of death for disobedience,
nor did he endeavour to suppress the monastic system, like Constantine
Copronymus. Those who bent before the storm met no harsh treatment: it
was only open disobedience that moved Theophilus to anger. His very
palace was full of secret image-worshippers, chief among whom was his
own wife, the empress Theodora.

Like his western contemporary Lewis the Pious, the emperor yielded to
the unhappy inspiration of choosing a second wife by public competition.
When his childless empress died in 830, he summoned all the fairest
daughters of his nobles to his Court, and passed them in review. His eye
was caught by the young Theodora, the child of the high-admiral Marinus,
and he espoused her without taking the trouble to discover that she was
a fervent and bigoted image-worshipper. During her husband’s life she
concealed her views, and contented herself with protecting all the
Iconodules whom she could shelter. But after Theophilus’s death she was
destined to undo all his religious schemes, and to bring up his children
to loathe their father’s creed.

In spite of the Saracen war and the ecclesiastical quarrels which
rendered his life unquiet, the reign of Theophilus—like that of his
father—was not an unprosperous time for the empire. His strict and exact
justice benefited far more of his subjects than his bigotry harmed. The
revenue was in such good condition that even in war-time he was able to
execute many great public works—such as the strengthening and
embellishing of the walls of the capital, and the building of many
palaces and hospitals. His care for the fostering of trade was shown by
the conclusion of commercial treaties, not only with Lewis the Pious,
but even with the distant caliph of Cordova; and Constantinople became
in his day more than ever the centre of the whole trade of Europe,
because the Italian ports, which were her only rivals, were now
suffering greatly from the occupation of the central Mediterranean by
the Moors of Sicily.

To the great loss of the empire, Theophilus died in 842, while still in
the prime of his life, leaving a son and heir of only four years of age.
We have already spoken, more than once, of the dangers of a long
minority in that time, and the youth of Michael III. was not to be an
exception to the rule. For fourteen years a council of regency governed
in his behalf to the small profit of the empire. [Sidenote: Theodora
restores Iconoduly.] The chief place in it was taken by the
empress-dowager, whose interests were mainly religious. Almost before
the breath was out of her husband’s body Theodora set to work to undo
his policy. Calling to her aid the whole image-loving party in the
palace, she deposed the patriarch, drove into exile the chief
Iconoclastic bishops, and summoned a council at Constantinople, which
anathematised the enemies of images, and re-affirmed all the doctrines
which had been condemned in 830 by order of Theophilus. Only thirty days
after the new reign had begun Iconoduly had once more become orthodox,
and Iconoclasm was proscribed. Active persecution against heretics
followed; the Paulicians and other dissidents of Asia Minor were so
maltreated that they migrated _en masse_ to the dominions of the caliph,
and from thence revenged themselves by making incursions into the
empire.

The two men who shared the chief power with Theodora were her worthless
brother Bardas, and the count Theoctistus: they were bitterly jealous of
each other, and Bardas ultimately procured his rival’s death. Each of
these personages believed himself to be a great general, and their
ambitious but ill-managed expeditions against the Saracens ended in
uniform disaster. It was fortunate for the empire that the caliphate had
now passed into the hands of two incapable bigots and debauchees, Wathek
and Motawakkel, who were quite unable to profit by their neighbour’s
weakness (842-861). Indeed the Byzantine arms won some success when
neither Bardas nor Theoctistus were present, and one daring expedition
even seized and held Alexandria for a year. The long, weary war dragged
on, but neither empire nor caliphate got any advantage from it.

In 856 the young Michael attained his eighteenth year, and took the
government into his own hands. He at once sent away his mother, whose
long domination he had secretly resented, and confiscated most of her
treasure and estates. Michael was an ill-disposed youth, but owed much
of his evil character to his uncle Bardas, who had brought him up in the
worst of fashions, and taught him to plunge, while yet a mere boy, into
drinking, gambling, and debauchery. Michael and his uncle were sworn
companions in all kinds of ribaldry and evil-living, and their court was
a scene of perpetual scandals. Bardas was made Caesar in 862, and for
the next four years had as much to do with the government of the empire
as his nephew. But he was unwise enough to take too much upon him, to
treat Michael as a drunken boy, and to assume a superiority over him
which the young emperor could not brook. After they had reigned together
four years Michael caused his uncle to be slain, and took another
associate in the empire (866).

His new colleague was Basil the Macedonian, a young man of Slavonic
descent, who had long been one of his boon-companions. When Michael was
still a boy he had been impressed by the courage and strength of Basil,
who had entered his service as a groom. The young emperor promoted him
from one office to another, till he became _Protostrator_, or Count of
the Stables—Marshal as he would have been called in a western monarchy.
The new favourite was bold, ready-witted, and hard-headed; he could
drink down the emperor himself at their feasts—a power which inspired
Michael with the greatest respect. So trusting to the faith of the
friend of his youth, Michael preferred him to the place of the murdered
Bardas.

When not under the influence of the wine-cup, Michael the Drunkard—as
his subjects named him—was a warlike and energetic sovereign. He often
took the field against the Saracens and the Bulgarians, and sometimes
met with success when courage could take the place of strategy. After a
successful campaign beyond the Balkans he forced the Bulgarian king not
only to do him homage, but to become a Christian, a change which did
much in later years to make relations easier between the empire and its
northern neighbours.

Michael sometimes busied himself about things ecclesiastical: his mother
had brought him up as a fervent image-worshipper, and he distinguished
himself when he came to years of discretion by the disgraceful outrage
of exhuming and burning the bodies of Constantine Copronymus and the
patriarch John, the chief representatives—lay and spiritual—of
Iconoclasm. Another of his doings had a graver consequence: it was he
who, offended by the austere morals of the patriarch Ignatius, deposed
him and nominated Photius in his stead. The preferment of Photius was,
as we have already stated when dealing with the Papacy, the original
cause of that breach between East and West which has never yet been
healed.[68]

Footnote 68:

See pages 453-454.

[Sidenote: Basil I. murders Michael III., 867.] Michael had attained the
age of thirty-one, and seemed destined to rule for many more years, when
he was suddenly cut off. His friend and boon-companion, Basil, whom he
had raised from a groom to be a Caesar, was the murderer. At the end of
one of their debauches the Macedonian rose and bade some of his friends
slay his benefactor. Michael was stabbed as he lay in a drunken sleep,
and the crown passed away from the Amorian house (867). Basil had
already, as colleague in the empire, got the reins of power in his
hands, and the murder of Michael passed unrevenged. No one raised his
voice in behalf of the dead man’s infant sons, and the new dynasty was
inaugurated without a struggle or a civil war.

The Macedonian, though he had shown himself an ungrateful traitor, was a
man of great ability. He held firmly to his ill-gotten crown, and
founded the longest dynasty that ever sat upon the Byzantine throne. It
was not till 1056 that his house was extinguished. As emperor he did all
that he could to make his subjects forget that he had once been the
deep-drinking favourite of Michael III. He proved himself a hard-working
sovereign, economical, prudent, and judicious, and the empire flourished
under his rule. Some of his work was destined to be permanent; his code,
a new revision of the laws of Justinian, superseding Leo the Isaurian’s
_Ecloga_, remained the text-book of the eastern empire down to its last
days. His financial arrangements, which seem to have been excellent,
were also destined to endure for nearly two centuries. In matters
ecclesiastical he did his best to patch up the breach with the Roman
church; he reinstated the deposed patriarch Ignatius, and sent Photius
into private life; but though the cause of offence was removed the
quarrel remained, and the exorbitant claims of the Popes prevented any
reunion of the East and West. Finding this to be the case, Basil
restored Photius when Ignatius died, and allowed things to take their
inevitable course.

Except in Sicily the wars of Basil were generally successful. The empire
of the caliphs was rapidly breaking up; the dynasty of the Saffarides
had lopped off the eastern provinces of their realm, and Egypt had
fallen into the hands of Ahmed-ibn-Tulun. Four caliphs had been murdered
in nine years (861-9), and the incessant civil war which raged at Bagdad
stripped the Saracen frontier of most of its defenders. The Christian
arms, therefore, did not fare badly during the reign of Basil and his
son Leo, and for the first time the East-Roman boundary began to move
eastward, and new themes were carved out of the captured territory. The
Byzantine armies ravaged northern Syria and Mesopotamia as far as Amida
and Aleppo. Cyprus was recovered, though only for a time, and the
rebellion of the Paulician heretics on the Armenian frontier was
suppressed. [Sidenote: Wars of Basil I.] At the same time Basil’s fleets
won victories in the Ægean and the Ionian sea over the corsairs of Crete
and Africa. We have already mentioned, in another place, how the admiral
Oriphas aided Lewis II. to reconquer Bari, and how Nicephorus Phocas
drove out the Saracens from Lucania and Bruttium, and added the southern
peninsula of Italy to his master’s realm. In Sicily alone was disaster
met; the fall of Syracuse in 878 marks the practical extinction of the
East-Roman power in that island. But success elsewhere atoned for this
single loss.

If Basil had been succeeded by a strong and energetic ruler, the
East-Roman empire might have had an opportunity of extending its sway
over almost all the provinces that had obeyed Justinian three centuries
before. The caliphate grew more and more decrepit: Italy was, as we have
already seen, a prey to anarchy for more than half a century, and the
Slavs of Eastern Europe were being crushed by the newly-arrived horde of
the Magyars. None of them could have opposed any strong defence against
a capable commander heading the well-armed and well-disciplined host
that the Eastern empire could send out. But the son and grandson of
Basil, whose long reigns occupied the next eighty years, were a couple
of narrow-minded and pedantic men of letters, equally destitute of taste
and of ability for engaging in schemes of conquest. [Sidenote: Reign of
Leo the Wise, 886-912.] Leo VI., whom after generations called Leo the
Wise, not for his practical cleverness, but because he had a taste for
the occult sciences and wrote obscure prophecies, was the immediate
successor of Basil. By some strange freak of nature the hard-drinking,
unscrupulous, energetic Macedonian usurper was the father of a laborious
compiler of books, the mildest and least stirring of men. Leo’s
prophetic oracles and his ecclesiastical writings are of small profit to
the reader, but posterity must acknowledge that it owes him a
considerable debt for publishing his _Tactica_, a military manual giving
an excellent account of the organisation, strategy, and tactics of the
Byzantine armies, with useful notes as to the habits and manners of the
enemies whom the army was called upon to face. It was probably fortunate
for the empire that he never tried to put his book-knowledge of things
military to practical use in the field.

In spite of Leo’s feeble personality, and of the fact that his
negligence occasionally allowed the foes of the empire to snatch
unexpected advantages, this reign was a time of growth for the imperial
borders. The new themes of ‘Lycandus’ and ‘Mesopotamia’ were won from
the enfeebled caliphate; Apulia was conquered from the dukes of
Benevento and the Italian Saracens, and formed into the theme of
‘Langobardia.’ Benevento itself was for some years in Leo’s hands,[69]
and if he had shown a little more energy he might have pushed his army
up to the gates of Rome, while the counts of central Italy were engaged
in their endless bickerings with king Berengar. But the emperor
neglected to support his generals, and with a tranquil mind let them
fail for want of resources.

Footnote 69:

See page 460.

Leo died in 912, leaving the throne to his only son Constantine VII.,
better known as Constantine Porphyrogenitus, a weak literary man of the
same type as himself. The new emperor was a boy of only five, and his
whole reign was one long minority, for after he reached manhood he
allowed others to govern for him, and remained buried in his books.

But in spite of the feebleness of Leo and Constantine, the empire was
faring well. Its neighbours were too weak to trouble it with serious
wars, though now and then a disaster occurred, such as the surprise of
Thessalonica by the African pirates in 904. Such misfortunes were due to
the misdirection of the empire’s resources, not to their inadequacy for
defence. The realm was never richer nor stronger since the days of
Justinian; Constantinople had become the sole centre of the commerce of
the Christian world, the one place where East and West could freely
exchange their commodities. The revenue was abundant and easily raised,
the army well paid and efficient, and only needed adequate generals to
enable it to set out on a wide career of conquest. But the empire was
not to obtain a capable ruler for many years; the days of John Zimisces
and Basil Bulgaroktonos were still far off, and meanwhile the
East-Romans, under the feeble leadership of Leo and Constantine,
remained in a condition of stationary prosperity, due to the
well-organised administration of the empire. The Byzantine civil service
was well able to carry on the business of government, unless it was
handicapped by the presence on the throne of a strong-handed tyrant, and
whatever were their faults the sovereigns of the Macedonian house never
deserved that name. There are worse things for any realm than a series
of mediocrities on the throne.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XXIX

THE END OF THE NINTH CENTURY IN WESTERN EUROPE. CONCLUSION

Reign of Odo in France—His Danish wars—His civil war with Charles the
Simple—Charles succeeds to the throne—He grants Normandy to
Hrolf—Lotharingia annexed to France—Robert and Rudolf rebel against
Charles the Simple—Murder of Charles at Peronne—Spain and the
Moors—Growth of the kingdom of the Asturias under Pelagius and the
three Alfonsos—Its continued progress—Summary of the
period—Feudalism, its military and political meaning—Conclusion.

We left the much-vexed Neustrian realm handed over to a king whose title
to the crown lay in his strong hand and his good sword, and not in any
hereditary right. Odo count of Paris was not sprung either on the
father’s or the mother’s side from the house of the Karlings. His father
was Robert the Strong, a count of Angers and Blois under Charles the
Bald, one of the few Frankish chiefs who won a reputation in the
struggle with the Vikings. When Robert fell by a Danish arrow, his son
appears a few years later in power by the middle Seine and Loire, and
especially in charge of Paris, where he won his great name and his crown
by the gallant defence of the city in 886-7.

Odo was without doubt the best candidate that could have been chosen for
the West Frankish throne. The sole legitimate heir of the
Karlings—Charles the Simple, the posthumous son of Lewis the
Stammerer—was only eight years of age, and to hand the kingdom over to a
minor would have been a piece of madness. Nevertheless the choice of Odo
was a bad alternative at the best: he was but one among a dozen
personages of equal position, each of whom believed himself to be his
new master’s equal. Between 850 and 887 all the greater counties of
Neustria and Aquitaine were becoming hereditary. [Sidenote: Growth of
the Great Fiefs in France.] Charles the Bald and his short-lived
successors had everywhere bought a temporary freedom from trouble by
appointing the son to fill the father’s place, and in the next
generation the rulers of the counties and duchies looked upon their
title to succeed to their ancestor’s governorship as fixed and absolute.
In every one of these districts, which were afterwards to be known as
the ‘Great Fiefs,’ the first commencement of hereditary rule dates from
the fatal days between the battle of Fontenay and the deposition of
Charles the Fat. The first sovereign in the county of Toulouse who
passed on his dominions to his son dates from 852: in Flanders the date
is 862: in Poitou 867: in Anjou 870: in Gascony 872: in Burgundy 877: in
Auvergne 886. To all these rulers Odo was but a fortunate equal, whom
they had consented to elevate to the throne because of the imminent
danger which the kingdom was suffering from the Viking raids. In spite
of the oaths that they had sworn him they could not in their own minds
look upon him as a king of the same sort as the Karlings had been. In a
time when hereditary right was beginning to count so highly, it was a
fatal weakness in a king to owe his power to the old Teutonic right of
election alone. In reading the chronicles of this period of French
history we are reminded in a striking manner of the troubles of the
kings of the Spanish Visigoths. We find once more the utter confusion
that ensues from the elective system when the nobility is too strong,
and the royal name has been lowered by a series of weak or incapable
rulers.

In Odo’s first year he was comparatively free from troubles within; the
Vikings were spread all over the face of the land, and even the
turbulent counts of Neustria refrained from rebellion in face of the
danger, while Wido of Spoleto, the rival of the new king, had to quit
the realm for want of followers. The election of Odo received its best
justification when in June 888 he smote the great army of the Danes at
Montfaucon in Champagne, and drove them from the valleys of the Meuse
and Marne. The whole realm concurred willingly in his second coronation
at Rheims, where he was invested with a crown, which his neighbour
Arnulf had sent him, in token of friendship as well as of a claim of
suzerainty.

Even the distant and ever-rebellious south bowed for a time before the
sceptre of Odo: when he marched into Aquitaine Ramnulf count of
Poictiers, who had thought for a moment of establishing himself as an
independent duke south of the Loire, struck no blow against him, but did
instant homage. [Sidenote: Wars of Odo with the Danes.] But while Odo
was in Poitou the Vikings had again gathered in great force on the lower
Seine, under chiefs among whom we descry for the first time the name of
Hrolf or Rollo, the future duke of Normandy. They laid siege for the
third time to Paris: the brave town held out for many months, but Odo,
less able to defend his old fief as king than he had been as count,
followed the deplorable precedent of Charles the Fat, and gave them
money to take themselves off to Brittany.

Of course they returned ere long, but when they once more invaded
central France, Odo inflicted a crushing defeat on them at Montpensier:
their chief Oskytel was captured with many of his men. Like Guthrum in
England the vanquished Dane offered to become a Christian, but as he
issued from the baptistery, count Ingo, the standard-bearer of Odo, cut
him down. ‘Never trust a Dane, baptized or unbaptized,’ said the
murderer, and his master left him unpunished, as if he felt that the
cynical plea was sufficient justification (892).

[Sidenote: Civil Wars of Odo and Charles the Simple.] Just when he
appeared to be strongest, Odo was in truth nearing his greatest danger.
The Danes being for a time driven off, the unruly counts of France, free
from the impending terror, began at once to conspire against their king.
He was too much one of themselves for them to regard him as their
absolute master, and too strong-handed for them to feel their new
hereditary fiefs safely their own. In 893 some of the great nobles sent
for the boy Charles the Simple, the heir of the Karlings, from his
refuge in England. Richard, duke of Burgundy, William, count of
Auvergne, Heribert, count of Vermandois, and Fulco, archbishop of
Rheims, were the chief of the rebels. There followed six years of
desperate civil war: Odo was far too strong for the fourteen-year-old
boy whom his treacherous vassals had raised up against him: again and
again he drove Charles from the cities where he had fortified himself,
and chastised the rebels who adhered to him. But some one of the counts
of Neustria or Aquitaine was always rising in favour of the Karling.
Driven from one district he reappeared in another, and the land had no
rest. It was to no purpose that Odo once offered to make his rival king
of Aquitaine and rule himself in Neustria alone: such a compromise would
not have suited his ambitious vassals, who were inspired not by any real
loyalty to the ancient house, but by a wish to gain complete local
independence.

At last Odo, worn out with the struggle, died on the last day of the
year 898. His brother and heir Robert refused to continue the struggle
against the heir of the Karlings, and did homage to Charles the Simple,
receiving from him confirmation as ruler of the ‘Duchy of France’—the
lands of Paris, Orleans, Tours, Chartres, Beauvais, and Le Mans. Thus
the civil war ended, but at the cost of the establishment of one more
great fief, and that one comprehending the whole of the heart of
Neustria, a very kingdom in itself.

[Sidenote: Charles the Simple, King of France, 899-929.] Charles the
Simple was now undisputedly king of the whole realm of the West Franks,
and was recognised as its ruler for thirty-one years, till his untimely
death in 929. He had by this time reached the age of twenty, and had
gained much experience in the uncertainties of war and in the bearing of
adverse fortune (899). He was a man of energy and resource, the worthy
brother of the long-dead Lewis III., and his nickname ‘the Simple,’
given him because he was too prone to trust his treacherous vassals, and
was so often deceived by them, is rather a title of honour than the
reverse. From the very first his position was far weaker than that of
any of his predecessors had been. The great fiefs had now become
definitely hereditary: any endeavour to prevent the reversion of the
father’s land to the son was regarded as a usurpation on the king’s
part, and resented by the whole body of vassals of the realm. In every
part of Neustria and Aquitaine the counts and dukes had now become
semi-independent sovereigns, and it was only in the royal demesne, and
in the lands of the great ecclesiastical fiefs, that the king retained
monarchical power.

Charles was by no means destitute either of ambition or of energy. He
did his best to assert his royal authority over his vassals, and to
cope with the never-ending Danish invasions. He did not forget the
traditional policy of the Neustrian Karlings, their desire to unite
with their own realm the whole or part of Lotharingia, the plan that
had led his grandfather Charles the Bald into so many unhappy wars.
More fortunate than his ancestor, Charles succeeded in laying hands on
a large portion of the disputed realm. The Austrasians had grown weary
of their union with Germany while ruled by the turbulent and
tyrannical Zwentibold, whom Arnulf had set over them. After Arnulf’s
death they cast out and slew his bastard, and adhered for a time to
Lewis the Child. But when the young Lewis followed his father to the
grave, the Lotharingians refused to concur with the other Teutonic
races in setting Conrad the Franconian on the throne. [Sidenote:
Lotharingia joined to France, 912.] Headed by the count of Hainault,
Reginald-with-the-Long-Neck, they declared that they would have none
but a Karling to reign over them, and threw themselves into the arms
of Charles the Simple. From 912 onwards he reigned as their king, and
found his best supporters among their warriors, for Austrasia was not
yet so feudalised as Neustria, and the love of the old royal house was
still strong within its borders.

The Viking raids never ceased during the reign of Charles. The civil war
of 893-8 had given the Danes an opportunity of returning to Neustria,
and they were not slow to take it. When the chroniclers of the time are
not recounting the rebellions of Charles’s undutiful subjects, they are
generally occupied in detailing Danish ravages. But it is now to be
observed that the inroads of the Vikings are not nearly so dangerous to
the realm as they had once been: the spell of the invincibility of the
Northmen had been broken, and whenever they appeared they were fiercely
withstood by the local counts and dukes. The land no longer gave them
such rich prey, for the open towns had now surrounded themselves with
walls, and were not as formerly the defenceless victims of every raider
who could muster a few hundred men at his back. Still the invaders never
ceased to come, for many of their former fields of action were now
closed: in England Alfred and his son were too strong for them, and in
Germany they never had their old good fortune after their great defeat
at Louvain. France, therefore, had now to bear the brunt of their
attacks, and all their hordes concentrated themselves on the coast
between the Scheldt and the Garonne.

[Sidenote: Hrolf on the Seine, 910-11.] It was in 911 that Charles the
Simple took a step which was to change the aspect of the great struggle
with the Danes. Their main army was now lying on the lower Seine, and
their chief camp was at Rouen, a great city which they had sacked and
desolated and made their own. Their war-lord was now the sea-king Hrolf,
or Rollo as the Franks called him, who had asserted his power by right
of superior ability above all the other jarls. Hrolf’s bands ranged far
and wide in the Seine valley, and had fought at Chartres a bloody but
indecisive battle with the host of the Franks, headed by the king’s
greatest vassals, the dukes of France and Burgundy and the count of
Poitou.

Despairing, as Alfred had despaired thirty years before, of ever being
able to drive away the Dane, Charles took the same step that the great
king of Wessex had taken. He determined to offer the Viking leader a
great tract of land as a settlement for his followers, if he would
consent to draw them all together and to conclude a stable peace. The
experiment had been made before by the Frankish monarchs, with no
encouraging results, and the tale of Charles the Fat and king Godfred
must have been fresh in the minds of the Vikings. [Sidenote: Treaty of
Clair-sur-Epte, 911.] Nevertheless the offer was made once more: if
Hrolf would settle down, he should have an ample _Danelagh_—as the
English would have called it—for his men. Charles proffered him Rouen
and the lower valley of the Seine, and with them the hand of his
daughter Gisela. The Northman blustered and affected to despise the
king’s offer, but presently he began to haggle and to speak of terms.
The monarch of the West Franks and the veteran sea-king met at
Clair-sur-Epte, and there the bargain was concluded. Hrolf asked and
received all the lands from the river Epte to the sea, a grant which the
Danes interpreted as giving them all the coastland from the mouth of the
Somme to the borders of Brittany. Charles added to this the easy promise
of the suzerainty of Brittany itself, when Hrolf should succeed in
conquering the unruly princes of that land, who for many years had paid
no allegiance to the Frankish crown.

The Viking therefore received the hand of the king’s daughter, promised
to submit to baptism, and ‘became the man’ of Charles the Simple. A
well-known story tells how Hrolf refused to bow the knee himself to the
Frank, when the oath of homage had to be given, and deputed one of his
chiefs to be his proxy, and how the Dane, with designed clumsiness, when
he bent before the king’s feet, succeeded in upsetting king and throne
together. But Charles overlooked the insult in return for the tangible
benefits that the submission of Hrolf involved, and loaded the Danes
with gifts on their departure.

[Sidenote: The Duchy of Normandy.] The Viking chief therefore settled
down to live as a Frankish duke at Rouen: he had himself baptized,
according to his promise, and the majority of his warriors followed his
example. Contrary to what might have been expected, the experiment of
planting the Northmen on the lower Seine proved a complete success for
the Frankish king. The majority of the Danish war-bands in Gaul drifted,
one after the other, to join Hrolf’s followers, and to receive from him
a fixed settlement in his new duchy. By sacrificing a part of his realm,
Charles the Simple had saved the rest. The duke of Normandy, no longer
_rex piratarum_, but the king’s trusted vassal, was on the whole very
faithful to the oaths that he had sworn at Clair-sur-Epte. He adhered to
king Charles in all his troubles, and sent him a contingent of Danes
whenever he was asked for aid. It was only when Charles had been deposed
by rebels that Hrolf again turned loose his plundering bands upon
France, and became once more the scourge of Neustria.

The summer of 912 saw Charles both freed from his Viking war by the
cession of Normandy, and hailed as king of Lotharingia by the
Austrasians. The next eight years were the most fortunate period of his
reign: he waged no important wars abroad, and had no very serious
troubles at home. But his authority over the greater part of France was
very limited: more especially in the lands south of the Loire nothing
but lip-service was granted him: neither tribute nor military aid could
be expected from the great counts of the South. Yet weak as he was,
Charles the Simple was still stronger than his great vassals cared that
he should be. [Sidenote: Rebellion of Robert of France.] Three of the
greatest magnates of his realm resolved to compass his deposition: their
chief was Robert duke of France, who in his old age began to covet the
crown that he had refused to claim in 899. His confederates were Rudolf,
second duke of Burgundy, and Heribert count of Vermandois. They
commenced their operations by bidding the king dismiss his chief
minister and favourite, count Hagano. When he refused, they sent him a
formal disavowal of their allegiance, and after a space proclaimed
Robert of France king of the West Franks.

Civil war at once began: supported by the Lotharingians and the Normans
king Charles made head against the rebels, though they raised against
him all the warriors of France and Burgundy. The armies met at Soissons
for a decisive engagement: the troops of the Karling were beaten, but in
the moment of victory the rebel king was pierced by a Norman lance, and
by Robert’s death the rising was left without a leader (923).

The great vassals were cowed for a moment by their chief’s fall, and
sorely distracted by a Danish invasion. Rollo had launched against the
territories of the rebel dukes a great horde of Northmen, and the
invaders were joined by a fresh army from England under Regnald, whom
Edward the Elder had just deposed from the kingship of Northumbria.
[Sidenote: Continued civil wars.] But in spite of the ravages of the
Danes, who swarmed into Burgundy, and threatened to establish a second
Danelagh in the valley of the Saone, the rebels resolved not to submit
to their rightful lord. They now proclamed as anti-king Rudolf duke of
Burgundy, for Hugh, son of Robert of France, refused to take up his
father’s claims. Charles might have fought down the insurrection, for a
great Norman army was coming to his aid, if he had not fallen by
treachery. Heribert of Vermandois offered to submit to him, and begged
him to come to a conference at Peronne. The simple king hastened to the
meeting, and was seized and thrown into a dungeon (923). The only drop
of bitterness in the cup of the rebels was that Edgiva, the English wife
of Charles, escaped with her son Lewis to the court of her father king
Edward the Elder. There was still an heir of the Karling house safe
beyond the seas.

For four troubled years Rudolf of Burgundy reigned as king of France,
and Charles the Simple lay in durance at Peronne. Rudolf was but a
phantom king: Aquitaine refused to acknowledge him: the Danes ranged all
over his realm and beset his native duchy of Burgundy with especial
fury. His own confederates in the rebellion paid him scanty homage, and
went each on his own way. After a space Heribert of Vermandois
quarrelled with Rudolf, and to spite the new king drew Charles out of
his dungeon and proclaimed him once more monarch of the West Franks. But
Rudolf bought over the double traitor to rejoin him: and for a second
time Heribert seized the person of his natural lord and master.
[Sidenote: Murder of Charles the Simple, 929.] This time Charles did not
escape with mere imprisonment: the cruel and treacherous count starved
him to death at Peronne. At last Rudolf the Burgundian could call
himself without dispute king of France (929).

Here we must leave the history of the western realm, at a moment when it
had reached much the same wretched condition that Germany attained at
the time of the death of Conrad I. More unhappy than their eastern
neighbours, the Franks of Neustria and Aquitaine were not yet to see any
such great rulers as Henry the First and Otto the Great set over them.
They were destined to drink the cup of feudal anarchy to the dregs, ere
a strong monarchy was once more to arise among them. The fight between
the Karlings and the dukes of France was to drag on for two generations
more, ere Hugh Capet finally gained the crown that his grandfather
Robert and his great-uncle Odo had worn. And when the house of the dukes
of France had seized the throne, they were to be for long ages as
powerless as the Karlings whom they had supplanted.

As yet the only favourable symptom in the condition of France was the
comparative immunity from Viking raids that it was beginning to enjoy.
Thanks to the feudal horseman and the feudal castle, thanks still more
to the narrowing of Danish ambition to the Norman duchy and its
neighbouring lands of Maine and Brittany, the kingdom was beginning to
enjoy a certain measure of peace from the outer enemy. Unfortunately the
great vassals of the crown only used their opportunity to redouble their
wicked feuds, and the nation’s worst foes were to be those of its own
household for many a long day.

[Sidenote: History of Spain, 700-918.] There is still one region of
Europe at which we have cast no glance for a hundred years. But the
fortunes of Spain lie far apart from those of the Frankish empire, and
during the ninth and tenth centuries form no part of the general history
of Christendom. We have had occasion to mention, however, that the
Moslem conquerors of the peninsula paid for forty years a wavering
allegiance to the Ommeyad caliphs, and were ruled for a time by a series
of ephemeral viceroys, most of whom came to violent ends. Of the fate of
those of them who ventured to attack the Frankish empire, we have spoken
while dealing with the annals of Charles Martel and Pippin the Short.

In 756 Spain became separated from the caliphate of Bagdad. After the
massacre of the Ommeyad house by their Abbasside successor, one member
of the older family escaped to Spain. The young Abderahman, after long
struggles, put down all those who opposed him, and became an independent
sovereign. He ruled at Cordova for more than thirty years, and not
unprosperously, though he was vexed all through his life by incessant
rebellions, such as that of the chiefs who in 778 called in Charles the
Great against him, and led the Franks to the gates of Saragossa.

But while Abderahman was ruling in great state at Toledo and Cordova,
and winning the admiration of all the Moslem world by his courage, his
wisdom, and his magnificence, a little cloud was arising in the west,
which was in later days to overshadow all Mohammedan Spain.

After the destruction of the Visigothic kingdom in 711-12, the viceroys
of Spain had overrun well-nigh the whole land, and planted it thickly
with colonists from Arabia, Syria, and Africa. But they had never
completely subdued the extreme north-west of the peninsula. The
Cantabrian and Asturian highlands had always been the last refuge of
broken tribes from the first dawn of Spanish history. There the Galaeci
and Astures had long withstood the Roman legions: there, in a later age,
the Suevi had resisted the Visigoths for more than a century. And now,
in the same rugged hills, the last of the Visigoths took refuge from the
advancing Saracen. [Sidenote: Pelagius in Asturia.] The annals of this
rugged region are very scanty, but we learn that a certain count
Pelagius, a chief with a Roman name, and perhaps, therefore, of native
Spanish rather than Gothic blood, maintained himself with success
against the Moslems. The narrow rocky tract between the Bay of the
Biscay and the Cantabrian mountains presented few attractions to the
Saracens, who preferred to settle in the fertile plains of Andalusia and
Valencia, and they paid no heed to Pelagius when he drove their
scattered garrisons out of the Asturias, and built up for himself a
little kingdom in the hills. He is said to have reigned for eighteen
years (718-36) over the Asturians. On his death his son Favila and his
son-in-law Hildefuns (Aldefonsus, Alfonso) followed him on the throne.
The last-named, whose pure Visigothic name recalls that of the sainted
archbishop of Toledo, was the founder of the greatness of the new
kingdom. Taking advantage of the civil wars of the Saracens, he issued
from his hills, and threw himself upon the neighbouring province of
Galicia, where a few Berber chiefs held down a discontented population
of Christians. The natives rose to aid him, and the Mohammedan settlers
were driven out of the land, and chased down into the plains of northern
Spain (751).

[Sidenote: Conquests of Alfonso I.] Alfonso followed the flying foe, and
made himself a lodgement on the southern slope of the Cantabrian hills,
occupying the towns of Astorga and Leon, and pushing his incursions as
far as the north bank of the Douro. He is said to have driven the
Saracens completely out of the broad _Tierra de Campos_, the plain of
Leon, and to have left it behind him an uninhabited desert, when he drew
back to his fastnesses in the mountains. He laid Oporto, Zamora, and
Salamanca in ruins, but was not strong enough to occupy them and add
them to his kingdom.

Alfonso died in 757, just at the moment when the peninsula was falling
into the hands of Abderahman the Ommeyad. The kings of Cordova proved
more formidable foes to the new Christian state than the old viceroys of
Spain had been, and for some generations its growth was comparatively
slow. For fifty years the kings of Asturias and Galicia are mere names
to us: it would appear that they were often constrained to pay tribute
to the Ommeyad princes, and that they found their chief safety in the
civil wars with which the Moslems were so continually vexed.

Alfonso II. (791-842) successfully repelled the last Moslem attempt to
reconquer Galicia. He appears once in Frankish history as sending
ambassadors to Charles the Great, to say that he considered himself the
‘man’ of the great king, and to offer his homage. But the Franks did not
acquire any real suzerainty over Asturias, or come into any contact with
its borders. [Sidenote: The County of Barcelona.] The reign of Charles,
however, left its mark on Peninsular history in another quarter: it was
he who conquered from the Saracen the ‘march of Spain,’ which, under its
later name of the county of Barcelona, became the second great Christian
state beyond the Pyrenees. At first the ‘Spanish March’ was a dependency
of the duchy of Septimania, but ere long they were separated, and the
count of Barcelona became as free from any active interference on the
part of the Frankish kings as were his neighbours, the counts of
Aquitaine.

The long reign of Alfonso II. was a period of rapid growth and extension
for the kingdom of Asturias. He pushed his arms forward as far as the
Tagus, and in one expedition he took and sacked Lisbon. But he drew the
line of his garrisons at the Douro, which remained for some time the
limit of the occupation of the Asturians. They were engaged for a whole
generation in repeopling the deserted plains of Leon, which had long
been a waste march between the Christian and the Moslem.

[Sidenote: Successes of Alfonso III.] Another Alfonso, third of the
name, who ascended the throne in 866, was the next prince who pushed
forward the Asturian border. To the kingdom that he inherited he added
Old Castille, northern Portugal, and the land beyond the Douro, the
_extrema Durii_, which keeps its name of Estremadura till this day.
Mohammed king of Cordova could make no head against him, for a rising
under a chief named Omar-ben-Hafs had torn his northern dominions from
his grasp, and while endeavouring to subdue the rebel, he had to leave
the king of Asturias to press forward unopposed.

In Alfonso’s time the county of Castille and the kingdom of Navarre took
their rise. The former was a border march against the Moor, intrusted by
the king to the bravest of his vassals. The latter was founded by a
Gascon count Sancho, who though a vassal of the Frankish crown made
conquests on his own account beyond the Pyrenees, and obtained the aid
of the king of Asturias by doing him homage.

Alfonso strengthened his realm by building the great frontier fortresses
of Zamora, Simancas, and Osma, to protect his new acquisitions from the
raids of the Moslems. In 910 his son Garcia removed his residence from
the Asturian town of Oviedo to Leon, south of the hills, as if to mark
the advance of his borders into the plains of northern Spain.

The progress of the Christians southward and eastward was never to be
checked, though it was often delayed for a space when strong rulers sat
on the throne of Cordova. Three centuries before, it was the Goths who
had been a turbulent unruly aristocracy, ruling a nation of serfs, and
the Saracen had swept their monarchy off the face of the earth in two
years. [Sidenote: The Spanish Moors.] Now the Moslem had become even as
his Gothic predecessor, luxurious, proud, untrue to his king, a hard
master to the peasantry who paid him toll and tribute. Religious
persecution was not rare, and Andalusia could count many martyrs; the
accusation of having blasphemed the name of Mohammed always stirred the
Moslem crowd to sudden cruelty, and victims of all ages and conditions,
from an archbishop of Toledo down to obscure monks and trades folk,
suffered on that charge. While the conquerors were losing their ancient
strength, the new Christian kingdom in the north-west was breeding an
iron-handed race of men in its rugged mountains, a race whose life was
one constant crusade against the Infidel. They had lost in their common
danger all memory of the ancient grudges that separated Visigoth and
Roman,[70] and had become a perfectly homogeneous people, welded
completely together by the day of adversity. The stubborn Spanish
nation, poor, proud, warlike, and fanatically orthodox, was the natural
product of the time when Christianity and freedom could only be
preserved by accepting exile in the Cantabrian hills, and a life of
constant struggle against the Saracen. The Mohammedan aristocracy,
cultured, wealthy, luxurious, turbulent, and selfish, could not in the
end resist such enemies. Though brave and numerous, they were divided by
countless local, family and national feuds—the Arab hated the Syrian and
the Berber, while all three despised the Spanish-born Moslem. Their
monarch at Cordova only existed by playing off one faction against
another, and was often deprived for whole years of his control over an
important town or province.

Footnote 70:

It is noteworthy to mark how Roman and Gothic names are found side by
side in the lists of kings of Asturias. Roman names like Pelagius,
Aurelius, Mauricatus, alternate with Gothic names like Hildefuns
(Alfonso), Beremud (Bermudo), and Favila.

It is small wonder then that the Asturian kingdom waxed, while the
caliphate of Cordova waned. Perhaps we ought rather to marvel that the
Moslems ruled in Spain so long and with so much splendour, in spite of
all their feuds and civil wars. It is strange that in the midst of so
much turbulent disorder they should have been able to found a very
nourishing literature, and to leave their mark on the face of the land
in the shape of such triumphs of architecture as the great Mosque of
Cordova, or the Alcazar of Seville. Certainly the Saracen was seen at
his best in Spain; in the other lands that he conquered, decay and
decline came on him much more rapidly. The Abbassides of Bagdad had sunk
into decrepitude some time before the Ommeyads of Cordova met with their
fall. Syria, Egypt, and Persia became the prey of Turk and Mameluke and
Tartar long ere Andalusia yielded to the Christian. Arabia itself sunk
back into torpor with astonishing rapidity and ease. It was certainly in
Spain that the conquering Moslems retained longest all the best and
worthiest characteristics of the days of their early greatness.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Summary.] We leave Europe at the end of our period in a day
of gloom and depression. The picture indeed has its bright points: in
Spain the balance had definitely turned in favour of Christendom, and
the crescent was already beginning to wane. At Constantinople the rule
of the Basilian dynasty promised a period of stationary prosperity, even
if no strong emperor should arise to lead the Byzantine armies once more
to victory. But in those great lands of Central Europe which then, and
always, have formed the heart of Christendom, the outlook was very
black—blacker than it had been at any time since the evil days of the
seventh century. If the attacks of the Vikings were visibly slackening,
and if the Saracens had last been driven out of southern Italy, so that
the invaders from without were for a time checked, yet the state of
affairs within showed no signs of mending. The empire was dead: the
papacy was falling into premature decay and corruption.

In the midst of all the treason and selfishness, the wars, murders, and
rebellions of the dismal age that lies between the battle of Fontenay
and the end of the tenth century, there is one thought only that can
afford the student any consolation. After the break-up of the empire of
Charles the Great, while Dane, Saracen, Hungarian, and Slav were
simultaneously besetting the gates of Christendom, there was a very
serious danger that the fabric of civilised Europe might crumble to
pieces beneath their blows. That it did not do so must be attributed to
the unexpected powers of resistance developed by the disintegrated
fractions of the Frankish empire under the feudal system. Disastrous as
were most of the effects of that system, it at least justified its
existence by saving Christendom from the foe without. What the
successors of Charles the Great had failed to do when all the military
force of the empire was at their backs, was accomplished by the petty
counts and margraves whose power was developed on the ruins of the
central authority. It was the mailed feudal horseman, and the
impregnable walls of the feudal castle, that foiled the attacks of the
Dane, the Saracen, and the Hungarian.

While the emperor or king was expected to protect every corner of the
realm, and as a matter of fact protected none of it, the governors of
the _gaus_ and marks proved, on the whole, to be equal to the task, when
once they had got their hands free and were not fettered by the close
supervision of their master. Europe lapsed, indeed, into utter
decentralisation, and lost for centuries the administrative unity which
the reign of Charles the Great had promised. A heavy blow was dealt at
the slowly developing culture and civilisation which the eighth century
had produced. It was not without justice that the ninth, tenth, and
eleventh centuries have been called ‘the Dark Ages.’ Literature and art
sank back to the level from which Charles the Great had for a time
raised them; history has once more to be reconstructed from the
scantiest materials. Architecture was stagnant, save in the single
department of castle-building—the one development that these centuries
produced. The internal history of continental Europe, when it ceases to
be a series of Danish, Saracen, and Magyar raids, becomes a dismal
record of tiresome local feuds and private wars. The remains of the old
Teutonic liberty, which had survived in slowly dwindling measure,
finally disappear as feudalism is perfected, and the freeman becomes
everywhere the vassal of some greater or smaller lord.

But all the details of this unhappy change must not blind us to the fact
that Christendom was saved from destruction by the men of the feudal
age. In spite of all the faults of their system, its selfishness, its
particularism, its feuds, its degradation of the lower classes, it
served the required end in producing the condition of military
efficiency which was needed to beat off the invading hordes from
without. [Sidenote: The feudal horsemen.] The problem with which Europe
had to deal was that of facing quickly-moving assailants, whose object
was primarily plunder rather than fighting, and who therefore had to be
caught and brought to bay if they were to be checked. The slowly-moving
masses of foot-soldiery which the Frankish empire put into the field
were quite unable to deal with this problem. The light cavalry of the
Magyars and Saracens could ride around or away from them: the Dane took
to his ships and disappeared when they tardily crept up to drive him
from his prey. The local count or duke who could put a few hundred
mailed horsemen of approved valour into the field, men bound to him by
every tie of discipline and obedience, and trained to war from their
youth up, was really a far more formidable foe to the plundering
invader. Even if he could not check the raiders for want of numbers, his
troop of riders hung round the intruders, cut off their stragglers,
intercepted them at every defensible pass or ford where the few can
withstand the many, circumvented them by cross-roads which the native
must know better than the stranger.

[Sidenote: The feudal castle.] No less important than the rise of the
mailed horseman was the rise of the feudal castle. In the Frankish
empire fortified places had hitherto been rare: save the towns that
possessed ancient Roman walls there seem to have been none that could
defend themselves: Frankish ideas of fortification went no further than
heaping up a mound, surrounding it with a ditch, and crowning it with a
palisade. Such temporary strongholds were inadequate, and safety from
the Dane was only found by the use of permanent fortifications of firm
masonry. Every town that had not perished surrounded itself with a
ring-wall: fortified bridge-heads were built to shut up the rivers to
the Viking ships. But most important of all were the castles, which rose
up on every hand, to form safe residences for the chiefs who had once
dwelt in open villas, and to serve as bases for the defence of the
country-side. Few in number at first, they gradually spread over the
breadth of the land, as each lord who was able reared himself a
stronghold. The existence of these castles changed the whole face of
war: when an enemy appeared there were now countless places of refuge to
seek, and the invader, instead of sweeping easily over the district in
search of plunder, found that it could for the future only be procured
at the cost of a series of lengthy sieges. There was hardly any sure
method known of reducing a strong place, save the expedient of starving
it out: but to sit three months before a castle till famine should
reduce it, was not what Dane or Magyar desired. Their booty would be
limited, while the delay would allow the whole military strength of the
country to be mustered against them. Hence it may be truly said that the
rise of the feudal castle was the best remedy that could have been found
against the pressing evils that threatened Christendom in the ninth
century.

[Sidenote: Conclusion.] The military triumph was a political disaster.
At a moment when the kingly power was shaken by the unhappy civil wars
of the descendants of Charles the Great, when almost every province was
disputed by two lords, it was absolutely fatal that the control of the
warlike strength of Europe should pass into the hands of a crowd of
petty magnates, each intent on his own aggrandisement, and caring nought
for the general welfare of the kingdom so long as his own county was
well guarded. The price at which Christendom bought its safety was
enormous: nevertheless no price was too high when the future of Europe
was at stake. Any ransom was worth paying, if thereby Rome was saved
from the Saracen, Mainz from the Magyar, Paris from the heathen of the
North.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

APPENDIX

TABLES OF SOVEREIGNS

(1) For VANDAL KINGS see table on page 12.

(2) For FRANKISH KINGS see tables on pages 166 and 260 and 413.

(3) For LOMBARD KINGS see table on page 183.

(4) EMPERORS AT CONSTANTINOPLE

Zeno, 474-91.
Anastasius I., 491-518.
Justin I., 518-27.
Justinian I., 527-65.
Justin II., 565-78.
Tiberius Constantinus, 578-82.
Maurice, 582-602.
Phocas, 602-10.
Heraclius, 610-41.
Heraclius Constantinus, 641.
Heracleonas, 641-42.
Constantinus (Constans II.), 641-68.
Constantine IV. or V., Pogonatus, 668-85.
Justinian II., 685-95.
Leontius, 695-98.
Tiberius Apsimarus, 698-705.
Justinian II. (restored), 705-11.
Philippicus, 711-13.
Artemius Anastasius, 713-15.
Theodosius III., 715-17.
Leo III., Isaurian, 717-41.
Constantine V. or VI., Copronymus, 741-75.
Leo IV. the Khazar, 775-80.
Constantine VI. or VII., 780-97.
Irene, 797-802.
Nicephorus I., 802-11.
Stauracius, 811-12.
Michael I., Rhangabe, 812-13.
Leo V., the Armenian, 813-20.
Michael II., the Amorian, 820-29.
Theophilus, 829-42.
Michael III., the Drunkard, 842-67.
Basil I., the Macedonian, 867-86.
Leo VI., the Wise, 886-912.
Constantine VII. or VIII., Porphyrogenitus, 912-59.

(5) OSTROGOTHIC KINGS IN ITALY

Theodoric, 493-526.
Athalaric, 526-34.
Theodahat, 534-36.
Witiges, 536-40.
Hildibad, 540-41.
Eraric, 541.
Baduila (Totila), 541-52.
Teia, 552-53.

(6) VISIGOTHIC KINGS IN SPAIN

Euric, 466-83.
Alaric II., 483-506.
Theodoric and Amalric, 506-22.
Amalric alone, 522-31.
Theudis, 531-48.
Theudigisel, 548-49.
Agila, 549-54.
Athanagild, 554-67.
Leova I., 567-72.
Leovigild, 570-86.
Reccared I., 586-601.
Leova II., 601-03.
Witterich, 603-10.
Gundimar, 610-12.
Sisibut, 612-20.
Reccared II., 620-21.
Swinthila, 620-31.
Sisinand, 631-36.
Chinthila, 636-40.
Tulga, 640-41.
Chindaswinth, 641-52.
Recceswinth, 652-72.
Wamba, 672-80.
missing: Erwig, 680-87.
Egica, 687-701.
Witiza, 701-10.
Roderic, 710-11.

(7) POPES

Simplicius, 468-83.
Felix III., 483-92.
Gelasius I., 492-96.
Anastasius II., 496-98.
Symmachus, 498-514.
Hormisdas, 514-23.
John I., 523-26.
Felix IV., 526-530.
Bonifacius II., 530-32.
John II., 532-35.
Agapetus I., 535-36.
Silverius, 536-37.
Vigilius, 537-55
Pelagius I., 555-60.
John III., 560-74.
Benedict I., 574-78.
Pelagius II., 578-90.
Gregory I., 590-604.
Sabinianus, 604-07.
Bonifacius III., 607.
Bonifacius IV., 607-15.
Deusdedit, 615-18.
Bonifacius V., 618-25.
Honorius I., 625-38.
Severinus, 638-40.
John IV., 640-42.
Theodorus I., 642-49.
Martin I., 649-54.
Eugenius I., 654-57.
Vitalian, 657-72.
Adeodatus, 672-76.
Donus I., 676-78.
Agatho, 678-82.
Leo II., 682-83.
Benedict II., 683-85.
John V., 685.
Conon, 685-87.
Sergius I., 687-701.
John VI., 701-05.
John VII., 705-08.
Sisinius, 708.
Constantine, 708-15.
Gregory II., 715-31.
Gregory III., 731-41.
Zacharias, 741-52.
Stephen II., 752-57.
Paul I., 757-68.
Stephen III., 768-772.
Hadrian I., 772-95.
Leo III., 795-816.
Stephen IV., 816-17.
Paschal I., 817-24.
Eugenius II., 824-27.
Valentinus, 827.
Gregory IV., 827-44.
Sergius II., 844-47.
Leo IV., 847-55.
Benedict III., 855-58.
Nicholas I., 858-67.
Hadrian II., 867-72.
John VIII., 872-82.
Martin II., 882-84.
Hadrian III., 884-85.
Stephen V., 885-91.
Formosus, 891-96.
Bonifacius V., 896.
Stephen VI., 896-97.
Romanus, 897.
Theodorus II., 897-98.
John IX., 898-900.
Benedict IV., 900-03.
Leo V., 903.
Christophorus, 903-04.
Sergius II., 904-11.
Anastasius III., 911-13.
Lando, 913-14.
John X., 914-28.

(8) CALIPHS.

Abu Bekr, 632-34.
Omar, 634-43.
Othman, 643-56.
Ali, 656-61.

OMMEYADS.

Muavia I., 661-79.
Yezid I., 679-83.
Muavia II., 683.
Merwan I., 683-84.
Abdelmelik, 684-705.
Welid I., 705-15.
Soliman, 715-17.
Omar II., 717-20.
Yezid II., 720-24.
Hisham, 724-43.
Welid II., 743-44.
Yezid III., 744.
Ibrahim, 744.
Merwan II., 744-50.

ABBASSIDES.

Abul Abbas, 750-54.
El Mansur, 754-75.
El Mehdy, 775-85.
El Hadi, 785-86.
Haroun-el-Raschid, 786-809.
El Amin, 809-13.
El-Mamun, 813-33.
El-Motassem, 833-41.
Wathek, 841-47.
El Motawakkel, 847-61.

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INDEX

Aachen, capital of Charles the Great, 340;
cathedral of, 381;
partition of, 389;
Lothair I. driven from, 409;
seized by Charles the Bald, 434;
sacked by the Danes, 439.

Abbasside caliphs, rise of the, 315.

Abdallah, Moorish chief, invades Italy, 458.

Abdallah-Abu-Sahr, conquers Africa, 238.

Abd-el-Melik, caliph, 249, 250.

Abderahman besieges Constantinople, 247.

—— viceroy of Spain, slain at Poictiers, 292, 294.

—— king of Cordova, 345, 364, 506-507.

Abotrites, Slavonic tribe, 360, 361, 427.

Abu Bekr, first caliph, 216.

Abu Obeida, Saracen chief, 217, 218.

Acroinon, battle of, 311.

Adalbert, stirs up civil wars, 473;
beheaded, 473.

Adalhard dismissed by Louis the Pious, 386;
recalled, 391.

Adaloald, king of the Lombards, 195.

Adelchis, son of Desiderius, 347, 348, 363.

Adelgis, duke of Benevento, imprisons Lewis II., 457.

Africa, kingdom of Vandals in, 8;
conquered by Belisarius, 76-79;
conquered by Saracens, 238, 251.

Agatho, pope, 278.

Agila, Visigothic king, 133.

Agilulf, Lombard king, 170, 193;
his conversion to Christianity, 193;
wars with the empire, 194.

Agobard of Lyons, conspires against Lewis the Pious, 394;
deposed, 399.

Aistulf, Lombard king, 327;
conquers Ravenna and Benevento, 327;
threatens Rome, and is subdued by Pippin, 329;
besieges Rome, 330;
defeated by Pippin and dies, 331.

Alahis, duke of Trent, rebels against Berthari and Cunibert, 275.

Alamanni, ask protection of Theodoric, 25;
subdued by Chlodovech, 60;
by Charles Martel, 290;
by Pippin the Short, 323.

Alaric II. king of Visigoths, slain by Chlodovech, 26, 63.

Alboin, Lombard king, 183;
invades Italy, 184;
murder of, 186.

Alcuin, at court of Charles the Great, 341, 379, 380.

Alexandria taken by Saracens, 220, 237.

Alfonso I., his conquests from the Moors, 507.

—— II., wars of, with the Moors, 508.

—— III., wars of, 509.

Ali, son-in-law of Mohammed, 240.

Amalafrida, sister of Theodoric, wife of Thrasamund, 28;
murdered, 75.

Amalaswintha, daughter of Theodoric, 29;
her regency for Athalaric, 74-79;
Theodahat her colleague, 80;
murdered, 80.

Amalric, Visigothic king, 26, 63;
slain by the Franks, 115.

Amblève, battle of, 266.

Amorium, siege of, 255;
destroyed by Saracens, 487.

Amrou, Saracen leader, 220, 237.

Anastasius I., emperor, 46;
character of, 47;
quells rebellion of Isaurians, 48;
war with Persia, 48;
his heterodoxy, 51;
troubles with Blue and Green factions and with Vitalian, 51;
death, 52.

—— II., dethrones Leontius, 254;
his orthodoxy, 279;
rebels against Leo the Isaurian, 310.

Anatolic theme, 242.

Anbasa-ibn-Johim invades Gaul, 292.

Anchialus, battle of, 316.

Andalusia, conquests of East-Romans in, A.D. 106, 133-134.

Andernach, battle of, 434.

Andreas murders Constantinus-Constans, 246.

Ansegisel, son of St. Arnulf, 178.

Ansprand, regent for king Luitprand, 279, 280;
king of the Lombards, 280.

Antioch taken by Persians, 92, 155;
by Saracens, 219.

Antonina, wife of Belisarius, 70, 94, 95.

Aquitaine conquered by Chlodovech, 62;
invaded by Saracens, 271, 292;
rebellions of, against the Franks, 292, 296, 323, 332, 337, 422.

Arabia before Mohammed, 213.

Ariadne, empress, 37, 46, 47.

Arianism in Africa, 8, 10, 11;
in Spain, 62, 130, 141;
suppressed by Reccared, 142.

Aribert, Lombard king, 272, 273.

—— II., 279, 280.

Arichis of Benevento rebels against Charles the Great, 348.

Arioald, Lombard king, 196.

Arles besieged by Franks, 26, 63;
gained and lost by Saracens, 296;
kingdom of, 437.

Armenia conquered by Saracens, 250.

Arnulf, St., bishop of Metz, 178.

—— duke of Carinthia, rebels against Charles the Fat, 443;
invades Italy, 464;
reign of, 468-471;
defeats the Danes, 469.

Artavasdus, rebellion of, 313.

Artemius Anastasius. _See_ Anastasius II.

Ased-ibn-Forat, Saracen leader, 448.

Asturias, kingdom of, 506-510.

Athalaric, king of Ostrogoths, 74, 79.

Athaloc, bishop, rebellion of, 142.

Athanagild, Visigothic king, 133, 134.

Audoin, Lombard king, 182.

Augustine, St., his mission to Kent, 202.

Austrasia, origin of name, 162.

Authari, Lombard king, 170, 192;
his wars with the Franks, 192, 193.

Auximum taken by Belisarius, 86.

Avars, the, on the Danube, 146, 183;
their wars with the empire, 149, 151, 153;
invade Italy, 195;
threaten Constantinople, 207;
besiege it, 210, 211;
subdued by Charles the Great, 361, 362.

Baduila (Totila), king of the Goths, 97;
conquers North Italy, 99;
takes Rome, 100;
conquers Sardinia and Sicily, 102;
defeated by Narses and slain, 104.

Balearic islands won by the Franks, 364.

Barcelona taken by the Franks, 365;
county of, 508.

Bardas Caesar, regent for Michael III., 490;
murdered by his nephew, 491.

Bari, Moorish kingdom of, 452;
retaken by Lewis II., 457.

Basil I., the Macedonian, favourite of Michael III., 491;
murders his benefactor, 492;
his reign, 493;
his internal administration and wars, 492;
aids Lewis II. against Moors, 457.

Basiliscus rebels against Zeno, 38.

Basques, resist the Goths, 223, 224, 229;
slay Roland the Frank, 353.

Bathildis, mother of Clothar III., 257.

Bavarians, origin of the, 118;
rebel against the Franks, 261;
subdued by Charles Martel, 290;
conversion of, 297;
annexed by Charles the Great, 356.

Begga, daughter of Pippin the Elder, 178.

Belisarius, early history of, 70;
governor of Daras, 69;
defeats Persians, 69;
leads troops against ‘Nika’ rebellion, 73;
conquers Vandals, 76-78;
his triumph and consulship, 79;
conquers Ostrogoths, 81-88;
refuses Gothic crown, 87;
recalled by Justinian, 88;
second Persian war, 93;
disgraced, 95;
commands again in Italy, 99-101;
defeats the Huns, 108;
disgraced and restored, 108.

Benedict III., reconciles the sons of Lothair, 425;
his quarrel with Photius, 453.

Benevento, origin of duchy of, 187;
invaded by Charles the Great, 349;
by Moors, 450;
by Byzantines, 460.

Berengar of Friuli, king of Italy, 445;
his wars with Wido, 463;
deposed, 463;
regains his kingdom, 465;
defeats Lewis of Arles, 466;
defeats the Moors, 466;
murdered, 467.

Bernard, king of Italy, 377;
rebels, 389;
death, 390.

Bernard of Septimania, minister of Lewis the Pious, 386.

Bertha, marries Ethelbert of Kent, 161.

—— wife of Pippin the Short, 329;
reconciles her sons, 336.

Berthari, Lombard king, 273;
deposed and restored, 273, 274;
his reign, 275.

Bessas, governor of Rome, 99, 100.

Biorn, jarl, ravages Neustria, 425.

Blue and Green factions, 50;
in the ‘Nika’ sedition, 71-73;
armed by Maurice, 154;
by Phocas, 157.

Bodolin slays Childerich I., 258.

Boethius, his imprisonment and death, 30.

Bohemia conquered by Charles the Great, 361;
revolts, 434.

Boniface, St. (Winifrith), missionary to Germany, 291;
archbishop of Transrhenane Germany, 297;
reforms the Church, 324;
anoints Pippin, 326;
martyrdom of, 329.

Bonus, patrician, defends Constantinople, 210.

Bordeaux taken by Danes, 421.

Boso, king of Arles, 437.

Bretons, independence of, 5, 59;
rebellions of, 359, 366, 421, 432, 502.

_Breviarium Alarici_, Gothic law book, 132.

Brunhildis marries Sigibert I., 133;
stirs up wars, 163;
imprisoned by Chilperich, 164;
marries Merovech, 165;
her regency, 165-168;
her second regency, 172;
third regency, 174;
murdered, 174;
character, 175.

Buccelin, defeated by Narses, 106, 119.

Buccellarii, 131, 242.

Bulgarians, ravage Moesia, 49;
settle there, 248;
defeated by Justinian II., 249;
wars of with Constantine Copronymus, 316;
with Constantine VI., 319;
with Nicephorus I., 480;
defeated by Leo V., 482.

Burgundy, kingdom of, 5;
attacked by Franks, 26;
subdued by Franks, 115.

—— Lower, kingdom of, founded by Boso, 437.

—— Upper (or Transjurane), kingdom of, founded by Rudolf, 445.

Cardam, king of Bulgaria, 319

Carloman, son of Charles Martel Mayor of Austrasia, 298;
his campaigns, 323;
abdicates, 324;
opposes war with Lombards, 328.

—— son of Pippin the Short, crowned at Soissons, 355;
quarrels with Charles, 337;
death, 338.

—— king of Bavaria, 427;
rebels against Lewis the German, 427;
invades Italy, 433, 461;
illness and death, 437-438.

—— son of Charles the Bald, conspires against his father, 429.

—— king of France, 426;
buys peace from the Danes, 441;
killed hunting, 441.

Carthage, taken by Belisarius, 78;
by Saracens, 232, 251.

Casilinum, battle of, 106, 119.

Castille, county of, 509.

Charibert I., king of Paris, 160.

—— II. king of Aquitaine, 178.

Charles Martel, 264;
leader of Austrasians, 265;
defeats Neustrians, 266, 267;
his rule as mayor, 267-269;
wars with Saxons and Frisians, 289-290;
subdues Aquitaine, 292;
defeats Saracens at Poictiers, 293-294;
conquers Provence and Septimania, 296.

—— the Great, crowned at Noyon, 335;
subdues Aquitaine, 337;
character of, 338-343;
conquers Lombards, 347-348;
expeditions against Saxons, 346-351, 353-355, 366;
invades Spain, 352;
conquers the Slavs, 362;
the Avars, 362-363;
wars with East-Romans, 363;
with Saracens, 365;
with Danes, 368;
his introduction of the theory of the empire, 369;
coronation as emperor, 373;
administration, 375-379;
encouragement of art and learning, 379;
death, 382.

—— son of Charles the Great, king of Neustria, 359;
conquers Bohemia, 361;
dies, 377.

—— the Bald, king of Suabia, 400;
imprisoned by his brothers, 397;
king of Neustria, 402;
wars with Lothair, 407;
subdues Aquitaine, 421;
vexed by Vikings, 419-422;
attacked by Lewis the German, 422, 426;
issues edict of Pistres, 429;
buys peace from the Danes, 420-434;
invades Provence, 428;
invades Austrasia, 432-434;
emperor, 433; death, 435.

Charles, king of Provence, 426;
death, 430.

—— king of Aquitaine, 429.

—— the Fat, king of Suabia, 427;
invades Italy, 433;
emperor, 438;
buys peace from the Danes, 440;
fails to relieve Paris, 442;
dethroned 443;
death, 443.

—— the Simple, 441;
rebels against Odo, king of France, 499;
cedes Normandy to Hrolf, 501;
civil wars of, 504-505;
murdered, 505.

Childebert I., king of Paris, 111;
conquers Burgundy, 114;
wars with Visigoths, 115;
death, 121.

—— II., king of Austrasia, 164;
wars with Lombards, 170-192;
with Neustrians, 171;
death, 171.

—— III., king of the Franks, 264.

—— son of Grimoald, usurper, 256.

Childerich I., king of Austrasia, 257-259.

—— II., last king of the Franks, 268, 323;
dethroned, 325.

Chilperich I., king of Soissons, 160;
murders his wife, 161;
wars with Sigibert, 163;
atrocities of, 168;
death, 169.

—— II., king of Neustria, 266;
invades Austrasia, 266;
defeated by Charles Martel, 266-267;
death, 268.

Chindaswinth, king of Visigoths, 225;
his strong administration, 226.

Chinthila, king of Visigoths, 225.

Chlodomer, king of Orleans, 111;
slain by Burgundians, 114.

Chlodovald (St. Cloud), 114.

Chlodovech I. (Chlodwig), king of the Franks, 25, 26, 58;
conquers Northern Gaul, 59;
marries Chrotehildis, 59;
subdues Alamanni, 60;
his conversion, 61;
wars with Burgundians, 62;
conquers Aquitaine, 63;
king of all the Franks, 64.

—— II., king of Neustria, 179, 256, 257, 264.

Chlothar I., king of Soissons, 111, 112;
murders his nephews, 114;
conquers Burgundy, 115;
wars with Visigoths, 119;
defeated by Saxons, 120;
sole king of the Franks, 121;
death, 122.

Chlothar II., king of Neustria, 169;
wars with Austrasians, 174;
murders Brunhildis, 174;
decline in power of, 178.

Chlothar III., king of Neustria, 257, 258.

—— IV., king of Austrasia, 267.

Chosroes I., king of Persia, 69;
makes peace with Justinian, 69;
receives embassy from Witiges, 86;
war with Justinian, 92-96;
with Justin II., 147.

—— II., placed on throne by Maurice, 151;
war with Phocas, 155;
with Heraclius, 205-211;
death, 212.

Chramn, son of Chlothar I., 120;
burnt alive, 121.

Christophorus, rebellion of, 317.

Chrotehildis (Clotilde) wife of Chlodovech, 59, 60.

Clair-sur-Epte, treaty of, 502.

Claudius, general of Reccared, 142.

Clement, bishop, opposes Boniface, 324.

Clepho, king of the Lombards, 186.

Code of Justinian, 109;
abridged by Leo the Isaurian, 307;
by Basil I. 492.

Colchis won by Justinian, 108.

Conrad of Franconia, king of Germany, 475;
his troubled reign, 476;
defeated by Saxons, 476;
death, 477.

Constans II. _See_ Constantinus.

Constantine IV.. or V.., Pogonatus, emperor, 246;
saves Constantinople from Saracens, 247;
war with Bulgarians, 248.

—— V. or VI., Copronymus, 312;
his iconoclastic zeal, 314-315;
wars with Saracens, 315;
with Bulgarians, 316;
death, 317.

—— VI. or VII., 318;
his minority, 318;
seizes power, 319;
dethroned by Irene, 320.

—— VII. or VIII. Porphyrogenitus, 494.

Constantinople, position and importance of, 35;
siege of by Avars and Persians, 210, 211;
first siege by Saracens, 247;
Council of, 248, 278;
second siege by Saracens, 301-303;
Council of, 314;
Synod of, anathematises the pope, 454.

Constantinus (Constans II.), emperor, 237;
wars with Saracens, 238-239;
with Slavs, 240; his ‘Type,’ 241;
attacks Lombards, 244, 274;
quarrel with Pope Hadrian, 276;
African war, 245;
murdered, 246.

Coronate, battle of, 275.

Cosmas, rebels against Leo III., 311.

Crete conquered by Saracens, 484.

Crumn, Bulgarian king, his victories, 480-482.

Ctesiphon taken by Saracens, 219.

Cunibert, king of Lombards, 275;
crushes rebellion of Alahis, 275.

Cunimund, king of Gepidae, 183.

Cyprus, invaded by Saracens, 237;
recovered by Basil I., 493.

Cyzicus, held by Saracens, 247.

Dagobert I., 178;
his wars, 179;
aids Sisinand, 223.

—— II., sent to Ireland, 259;
restored and crowned, 259;
slain, 259.

—— III., 264.

Damascus, taken by Persians, 205;
by the Saracens, 217.

Danelagh, the, 431.

Danes. _See_ Vikings.

Dannewerk, the, 367.

Daras built by Anastasius, 49;
battle of, 69;
besieged by Chosroes, 93;
taken by Persians, 147.

Dastagerd, sacked by Heraclius, 211.

Decretals, the False, 454-456.

Desiderata, wife of Charles the Great, 338.

Desiderius, Lombard king, 331;
allied to Charles the Great, 338;
quarrels with the Papacy, 346;
dethroned by Charles, 348.

Digest of Justinian, 103.

Dizabul, khan of the Turks, 147.

Droisy, battle of, 171.

_Ducatus Romanus_, the, 189, 191, 287.

Eastphalians, the, resist Charles the Great, 349, 351, 354, 356.

Ebbo, archbishop of Rheims, 386;
conspires against Lewis the Pious, 394;
banished, 399.

Eberhard, feuds of, 473.

Ebermund, surrenders to Belisarius, 82.

Ebroin, Mayor in Neustria, 257;
imprisoned, 258;
tyranny of, 259;
murdered, 260.

_Ecloga_ of Leo the Isaurian, 304.

Edessa taken by Persians, 95.

_Edictum Rotharis_, Lombard code, 197.

Egica, Visigothic king, 231, 232.

Egypt, conquered by Persians, 206;
by Saracens, 220;
revolts from Caliphs, 234.

Einhard, chronicler, 268, 339.

El-Mamun, caliph, wars of, with empire, 486;
takes Tyana, 487.

El-Motassem, caliph, wars of, with empire, 487;
takes Amorium, 487.

El-Samah, Saracen leader, 271.

Elsloo, treaty of, 440.

Empire, the Holy Roman, theory of, 376.

Engeltrud, empress, 354, 366;
defends Rome, 464.

England, Vikings in, 418, 431.

Engrians, the, 349, 351.

Erchinoald, Mayor in Neustria, 180.

Eraric, Ostrogothic king, 97.

Erwig, Visigothic king, 231, 232.

Eudo, duke of Aquitaine, defeated by Charles Martel, 267;
his wars with Saracens, 271, 292-293.

Eudocia, daughter of Valentinian III., married to Hunneric, 10.

Euphemius, rebellion of, 448.

Euric, king of Visigoths, 5, 58.

Eutharic marries Amalaswintha, 29.

Eutychius, exarch, loses and recovers Ravenna, 282-283;
besieges Rome, 283.

Exarchate of Ravenna, 190;
conquered by Lombards, 282, 327;
given to Papacy by Pippin, 331.

Exhilaratus, duke of Naples, 281.

Faenza, battle of, 97.

False Decretals, the, 454-456.

Faroald, duke of Spoleto, 187;
destroys Classis, 193.

Feudalism, merits and defects of, 413-415.

Fiefs, the great, in France, 497.

Fiesole besieged by Belisarius, 86.

Fontenay, battle of, 408.

Forimpopoli, stormed by Grimoald, 274.

Formosus, pope, crowns Arnulf emperor, 464.

Franks in Gaul, 5;
converted to Christianity, 61;
constitution of the, 122.
_See_ under names of kings.

Fraxinet, Moorish colony at, 462.

Fredegundis marries Chilperich, 161;
murders Sigibert, 164;
evil deeds of, 168;
her wars against Austrasia 171;
death, 172.

Fridian, St., 263.

Frisians, ravages of the, 261;
subdued by Pippin II., 262;
by Charles Martel, 267-270;
converted to Christianity, 200, 330.

Fulda Abbey, founded, 324.

Gainas, the Goth, 34.

Gaiseric (Genseric), Vandal king, conquers Africa, 7;
his rule, 8;
his victories, 9.

Gall, St., 263.

Galswintha married to Chilperich, 134;
murdered, 162.

Geilamir dethrones Hilderic, 75;
defeated by Belisarius, 77, 78;
surrenders, 79.

Genoa sacked by Franks, 117.

George of Pisidia, poems of, 307.

Gepidae defeated by Theodoric, 16;
exterminated by Avars and Lombards, 146-183.

Gerberga, wife of Carloman, 339, 345.

Germanus, patriarch, deposed by Leo III., 311.

—— nephew of Justinian, 102.

Gesalic, rebels against Amalric, 26, 63.

Givald’s Dyke, siege of, 421.

Godebert, king of Lombards, 273.

Godfred, Danish king, 367;
invades Frisia, 416.

—— Viking leader, ravages Neustria, 422;
ravages Austrasia, 439;
makes peace with Charles the Fat, 440;
murdered, 442.

Godfrid, duke of Suabia, 262.

Gondomar, king of Burgundy, 114, 115.

Gozelin, bishop, defends Paris, 440.

Gregory I., pope, 198;
character, 200; policy and activity of, 201-202;
treaty with Agilulf, 195, 202;
regard for Phocas, 157;
for Brunhildis, 202.

—— II., pope, refuses to acknowledge Philippicus, 279;
quarrels with Leo the Isaurian, his letters to Leo, 282;
holds synod against Iconoclasm, 284;
consecrates Boniface, 291.

—— III., pope, his disputes with Leo the Isaurian, 284;
with Luitprand, 285;
asks aid of the Franks, 286.

Gregory IV., pope, aids rebellion against Lewis the Pious, 396-397.

—— exarch of Africa, rebels, 238.

Grifo, son of Charles Martel, 298;
rebels, 322;
claims Bavaria, 325.

Grimoald, Mayor in Austrasia, 179;
his usurpation and death, 256-257.

—— duke of Benevento, murders king Godebert, 273;
his wars with East-Romans, 244, 273-274;
his government, 274.

—— son of Pippin II., 262-264.

—— II., duke of Benevento, resists Charles the Great, 349.

Guadalete, battle of, 234.

Gundimar, Visigothic king, 222.

Gundobad, king of Burgundy, 5, 25, 26;
his war with Chlodovech, 62.

Gundovald, rebellion of, 170, 379.

Gunthamund, Vandal king, 11.

Guntram, king of Burgundy, aids Childebert II., 168;
his wars with Visigoths, 140, 142, 170;
with Lombards, 191, 192.

Hadrian I., pope, invited to Council of Nicaea, 318;
quarrels with Lombards, 345.

Hadrian II., pope, humbles Lothair II., 428;
his friendship with Lewis II., 453, 458.

Harald, king of the Danes, 393.

Haroun-al-Raschid, caliph, invades Asia Minor, 319-320;
sends embassy to Charles the Great, 359;
his war with Nicephorus I., 479-480.

Hatto, bishop of Mainz, minister of Lewis the Child, 473-476.

Helisachar, chancellor of Lewis the Pious, 385.

Helmichis conspires against Alboin, 85.

Hemming, Danish king, 368.

_Henoticon_, of Zeno, 46.

Henry, count, slays Godfred, 442;
slain in battle, 442.

—— duke of Saxony, rebellion of, 476;
made king, 477.

Heracleonas, emperor, 234;
deposed, 235.

Heraclius leads fleet against Phocas, 156;
emperor, 203;
disasters of, 204;
victories over Persians, 208;
211; defeated by Saracens, 217;
death, 220.

Heraclius Constantinus, commands against Saracens, 220;
his short reign, 235.

—— exarch of Africa, defeats Persians, 150;
rebels against Phocas, 156.

Heribert, count of Vermandois, 503-505;
rebels against Charles the Simple.

Hermanfrid, Thuringian king, 114.

Hermenegild rebels against his father, 138;
death, 140.

Hermengarde, wife of Lewis the Pious, 386;
death, 390.

—— daughter of Lewis II., 459;
marries Boso, king of Aries, 437.

Hessi, Eastphalian duke, 351.

Hijrah, the, 214.

Hildebrand, Lombard king, 327.

Hildegarde, queen of Charles the Great, 338.

Hilderic, Vandal king, 28;
dethroned by Geilamir, 75;
murdered, 77.

—— count, rebels against Wamba, 229.

Hildibad, Gothic king, wins battle of Treviso, 96;
dies, 97.

Hildwin, chancellor of Lewis the Pious, 386;
conspires against him, 394.

Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, 456.

Hisham, caliph, invades Anatolic themes, 311.

—— king of Cordova, 365.

Hormisdas, Persian king, 149;
deposed, 151.

Hrolf, becomes duke of Normandy, 501;
aids Charles the Simple, 511.

Hruotland (Roland), death of, 353.

Hukbert, duke of Bavaria, 290.

Hunold, duke of Aquitaine, 296;
rebels against Pippin and Carloman, 323;
against Charles the Great, 337.

Hunneric, king of the Vandals, 10, 11.

Hungarians. _See_ Magyars.

Huns, Cotrigur, threaten Constantinople, 108.

Hunwulf, brother of Odoacer, 14.

Hygelac, Danish king, 113, 415.

Hypatius, nephew of Anastasius, 51, 52;
proclaimed emperor in the ‘Nika’ sedition, 71-73.

Iconoclasm, origin of, 308-309;
edict of Leo the Isaurian, 281;
troubles resulting from, 310-312;
condemned by Council of Rome, 284;
affirmed by Council of Constantinople, 314;
condemned by Council of Nicaea, 318;
restored by Leo V., 483;
put down by Theodora, 489.

Iconoduly, extravagancies of, 308;
restored by Irene, 318;
by Theodora, 489.

Illus, minister of Zeno, 38, 43;
his rebellion, 44.

Image-worship. _See_ Iconoclasm.

Ingo murders Oskytel, 498.

Ingunthis, wife of Hermenegild, 137.

Institutes of Justinian, 110.

Ireland, Vikings in, 417-418.

Irene, empress, regency of, 318;
conspires against her son, 319;
blinds him, 319;
dethroned by Nicephorus, 320.

Irminsul, Saxon sanctuary, cast down by Charles the Great, 346.

Isaurians favoured by Leo I., 36;
and Zeno, 38;
rebel under Longinus, 48.

Islam, religion of, 312-315.

Isperich, Bulgarian king, 248.

Italy, Goths in, 19-24;
reconquered by Justinian, 80-104;
Lombard, invasion of, 181;
its divisions, 187-189;
Moors in, 450-466.
_See_ under Lombards and Papacy, 272-288.

Jebel-Tarik (Gibraltar), 234.

Jerusalem taken by Persians, 205;
by Saracens, 219.

Jesse of Amiens conspires against Lewis the Pious, 394;
death, 399.

Jews persecuted by Phocas, 156;
persecuted by Visigoths, 143, 223, 232.

John I., pope, sent by Theodoric to Constantinople, 31.

—— VI., pope, his secular activity, 278;
receives estates from Aribert II., 280.

—— VIII., crowns Charles the Bald, 433;
crowns Charles the Fat, 438, 462.

—— the Patrician, defends Syracuse, 460.

—— of Cappadocia, minister of Justinian, 71;
disgraced, 90.

—— the Bloody, officer of Belisarius, 85.

Judith, wife of Lewis the Pious, 391;
twice forced into a convent, 395-397.

Julian, bishop of Toledo, 228, 231.

Julius Nepos, his kingdom, 6;
murdered, 13.

Justin I., emperor, 53;
persecutes the Arians, 30;
death, 54.

—— II., emperor, 145;
Avaric wars of, 146;
Persian wars of, 147;
his lunacy, 148.

Justinian I., nephew and colleague of Justin, 53;
emperor, 65;
character of, 65;
marries Theodora, 65;
foreign policy of 68;
first Persian war, 69;
‘Nika’ sedition, 71;
subdues the Vandals, 76-79;
Gothic wars of, 81-88;
his buildings, 89-90;
financial oppression, 90;
second Persian war, 93;
theological views of, 107;
legal work of, 109-110.

—— II., emperor, 249;
wars of, 249-250;
dispute with pope Sergius, 278;
dethroned and banished, 251;
escapes, 252;
regains throne, 253;
his tyranny and death, 253.

Karlings, table of the, 413.

Kassim-ibn-Yussuf summons Charles the Great to Spain, 352.

Khaled, Saracen chief, 217, 218.

Khazars invade Persia, 211;
receive Justinian II., 252.

Killian, missionary to Thuringia, 263.

Kobad, king of Persia, wars of with Anastasius, 48;
with Justinian, 68.

Koran, the, 215.

Lafaux, battle of, 172, 260.

Lambert of Spoleto, king of Italy, 464;
war with Arnulf, 461-465;
death, 465.

Lantfrid, duke of Suabia, 290.

Lauresheim, chronicle of, 373.

Leander, bishop of Seville, 138.

Leo I., emperor, 36.

—— III., the Isaurian, emperor, 255;
defends Constantinople, 301, 303;
his edict against images, 281, 310;
quarrels with Gregory II. and III., 282, 284;
victories over Saracens, 311.

—— IV., the Khazar, his reign and wars, 317.

—— V., the Armenian, his usurpation, 482;
his Bulgarian war, 482;
represses image-worship, 483;
murdered, 484.

Leo VI., the Wise, character and reign of, 494;
his literary works, 494.

—— III., pope, delivered by Charles the Great, 372;
crowns Charles emperor, 373;
death, 387.

—— IV., pope, his victory over the Saracens, 451.

Leodegar (St. Leger), his rebellion, 258;
rules Neustria, 259;
murdered by Ebroin, 259.

Leon, the kingdom of, 509.

Leontius, emperor, 251, 253.

Leova I., Visigothic king, 134.

—— II., Visigothic king, 143, 221.

Leovigild, Visigothic king, 132, 135;
his wars, 136-139;
death, 140.

Lewis the Pious (or Débonnair) son of Charles the Great, king of
Aquitaine, 359;
conquers Barcelona, 364;
emperor, 383;
legislation of, 385-387;
peril, 388;
makes Partition of Aachen, 389;
second marriage of, 391;
twice deposed by rebellious sons, 393, 399;
his last war, 401;
death, 403.

—— the German, king of Bavaria, 389;
rebels against his father, 396, 401;
war with Lothair I., 407-408;
with Charles the Bald, 422;
conquers and loses Neustria, 426;
rebellions of his sons, 427;
his influence in Germany, 433;
death, 434.

—— II., emperor, 423;
wars with his brother Lothair, 425;
his dealings with the Papacy, 451-452;
campaigns against the Moors, 457;
imprisoned at Benevento, 457;
further victories over the Moors, 458;
death, 459.

—— the Saxon, rebels against his father, 427;
defeats Charles the Bald, 434;
attacks Neustria, 436;
his wars with the Danes, 438;
death, 439.

—— II. (the Stammerer), king of France, short reign of, 436.

—— III., king of France, 430;
his wars with the Danes, 438;
victory of Saucourt, 439;
death, 439.

—— the Child, king of Germany, 472;
his reign, 472-474.

—— king of Arles, 445;
invades Italy, 466;
blinded by Berengar, 466.

Liberius invades Spain, 133.

Lithosoria, battle of, 316.

Liutprand, Lombard king, 281;
conquers the Exarchate, 282;
arbitrates between pope and exarch, 284;
aids Charles Martel against Saracens, 285;
quarrels with Gregory III., 285;
death, 287.

Logothetes, oppression by the, 90, 96.

Lombards, origin of the, 182;
table of Lombard kings, 183;
converted to Christianity, 193;
dealings of, with the Papacy,;
conquered by Charles the Great, 344-348.

Lothair I., son of Lewis the Pious, 389;
his rebellions against his father, 394-396;
reconciled with Lewis, 402;
emperor, 406;
wars with his brother, 407;
defeated at Fontenay, 408;
troubles with the Vikings, 419;
allied with Charles the Bald, 421;
abdicates, 422.

—— II., quarrels with his brothers, 425;
wars with the Vikings, 428;
allied to Charles the Bald, 425;
matrimonial troubles of, 428;
death, 431.

Lotharingia, name of, 428.

Louvain, battle of, 469.

Lügenfeld, the, 397.

Luitbert, Lombard king, 279-280.

Luitpold, duke of Bavaria, slain by Magyars, 474.

Lüneberg Heath, battle of, 438.

Lupus, Gascon duke, 337.

Lycandus, theme of, 494.

Magyars, appearance of the, 471;
ravage Italy, 465;
their attacks on Germany, 471;
slay Luitpold of Bavaria, 474;
further ravages of, 476.

Mallus, Frankish court, 175, 378.

Mantua, taken by Lombards, 194.

Manuel, takes Alexandria, 237.

March of Spain won by Charles the Great, 365;
development of, 508.

Marchfield, assembly of Franks, 269.

Martin I., pope, disputes with Constans II., 244, 376;
banished, 277.

Martina, wife of Heraclius, 218;
her intrigues, 235;
banished, 236.

Maurice, victories of, 149;
emperor, 150;
Persian war, 150-151;
Avaric war, 151-152;
Slavonic war, 153;
dethroned and murdered, 154.

Mayors of the Palace, their office, 123;
rising power of, 176;
table of, 260;
supersede kings, 259.

Mehdy, caliph, invades empire, 317.

Merovech marries Brunhildis, 165;
murdered by Fredegundis, 166.

Merovings, their government, 121-127;
table of the, 166;
end of the dynasty, 326.

Mersen, partition-treaty of, 432.

Mesopotamia attacked by Persians, 92;
conquered by Persians, 155;
by Saracens, 220;
ravaged by East-Romans, 493.

Mezecius, usurper in Sicily, 246.

Michael I., Rhangabe, emperor, 364, 481;
restores image-worship, 481;
deposed, 482.

—— II., the Amorian, conspires against Leo V., emperor, 484;
civil wars of, 484;
loss of Crete and Sicily, 485;
ecclesiastical policy of, 485.

—— III., the Drunkard, long minority of, 489;
depravity of, 490;
wars of, 491;
murdered by Basil the Macedonian, 492.

_Missi Dominici_, travelling commissioners of Charles the Great, 378.

Missionaries in Germany, 263, 291-330.

Mofareg-ibn-Salem, Moorish king in Italy, 452;
conquered by Lewis II., 457.

Mohammed, his character, 213;
career of, 214-215.

Mohammedanism, its good and evil points, 214-215.

Monophysite heresy, the, 38, 45, 50.

Monothelite heresy, 241, 276;
condemned by Council of Constantinople, 248, 278.

Monza, Basilica of, 193;
relics in, 226.

Moors rebel against Hunneric, II.;
against Hilderic, 75;
conquered by Saracens, 233;
invade Spain, 234;
their rule in Spain, 234, 506-510;
invade Italy, 450;
defeated by Lewis II., 457-458;
expelled by Berengar, 466.

Moslemah besieges Constantinople, 255, 301.

Moslems. _See_ Saracens.

Muavia, governor of Syria, 239;
caliph, 245;
his wars with Constans, 245.

Mummolus, general of Guntram, defeats the Lombards, 163, 187;
rebellion of, 170.

Musa, governor of Africa, 234.

Nanthildis, queen regent, 180.

Naples besieged by Belisarius, 82;
by Baduila, 98;
dealings of, with Moors, 461.

Narbonne held by Saracens, 271;
taken by Pippin the Short, 331.

Narses reinforces Belisarius, 86;
conquers the Goths, 102, 105;
legend of his message to Lombards, 184.

Navarre, kingdom of, 509.

Neustria, origin of name of, 187.
_See_ under names of kings.

Nicaea, Council of, confirms image-worship, 318.

Nicephorus I., emperor, 320;
war with Charles the Great, 363;
his Saracen and Bulgarian wars, 479-480;
his ecclesiastical policy, 479;
slain in battle, 480.

—— Caesar, rebellions of, 317, 318.

—— Phocas, conquers South Italy, 460.

Nicetas of Tarsus defends Syracuse, 460.

—— Oriphas, admiral, defeats the Moors, 457.

Nicolas I., pope, his quarrel with king Lothair, 428;
his quarrel with the patriarch Photius, 453;
uses the False Decretals, 454.

Nineveh, battle of, 211.

Nordalbingians, wars of, with Charles the Great, 349, 360, 366.

Noricum, evacuated by Odoacer, 14.

Norsemen. _See_ Vikings.

Odo, defends Paris, 440;
proclaimed king of France, 444;
Viking wars of, 495-496;
civil wars with Charles the Simple, 498;
death, 499.

Odoacer, Flavius, patrician, in Italy, 1;
his position, 4;
wars of, 13, 14;
defeated by Theodoric, 15;
slain, 18.

Omar, caliph, takes Jerusalem, 219;
conquests of, 237;
murdered, 239.

Ommeyad dynasty, rise of, 245;
fall of, 315.

Oscar, Danish jarl, 420, 421.

Oskytel, Viking chief, 498.

Ostrogoths, wars of, with Zeno, 40;
conquer Italy, 19;
settled in Italy, 22;
wars of, with Justinian, 80-105.

Othman, caliph, 238-239.

Othman-abu-Neza, Moorish chief, 292-293.

Otranto besieged by Baduila, 99.

Paderborn, diet of, 352.

Padua taken by Agilulf, 194.

Palermo taken by Belisarius, 81;
by the Moors, 449.

Pandects of Justinian, 109.

Pantheon plundered by Constans, 277.

Papacy, power of the, 198-199;
growth of importance of, 276;
its struggles with the emperors, 276-279;
relations of, with Charles the Great, 374.

Paris sacked by Danes, 420;
again, 425;
fortified by Charles the Bald, 430;
repels the Danes, 442;
fourth siege of, 498.

Paul the Deacon, 185, 244, 379-380.

Paulus, Visigothic count, rebellion of, 229.

Pavia, Gothic stronghold, 96;
taken by Alboin, 185;
besieged by Pippin, 329, 331;
taken by Charles the Great, 347-348.

Pelagius, king of Asturias, resists the Moors, 507.

Peredeo slays Alboin, 185.

Persian war of Anastasius, 48-49;
of Justinian, 68-69, 92-96, 107;
of Justin and Tiberius, 147-148;
of Maurice, 150;
of Phocas, 153;
of Heraclius, 205-212;
of the Saracens, 219.

Peter of Pisa, 341, 379.

Philippicus, usurper, 253;
his quarrel with Gregory II., 279.

Phocas dethrones and murders Maurice, 153;
disastrous reign of, 154, 155;
slain, 157.

Phœnix, battle of, 159.

Photius, patriarch, his quarrel with the Papacy, 453, 492.

Pippin I., the elder, 174;
Mayor of the Palace, 179.
—— II., the Younger, leads the Austrasians against Ebroin, 260;
his victory at Testry, 260;
his government, 261, 263;
death, 264.

Pippin III., the Short, Mayor of Neustria, 298;
his wars, 323;
ecclesiastical reforms, 324, 330;
king of the Franks, 325;
crowned by the pope, 329;
Lombard wars, 328-330;
his gift of the Exarchate to the pope, 331;
conquers Narbonne and Aquitaine, 331-332;
death, 333.

—— son of Charles the Great, ruler of Lombardy, 359;
conquers the Avars, 362;
death, 377.

—— son of Lewis the Pious, king of Aquitaine, 389;
rebels against Lewis, 394-396;
death, 401.

—— the younger, of Aquitaine, disinherited by Lewis the Pious, 401-402;
fights at Fontenay, 407;
wars of, with Charles the Bald, 419-421;
turns heathen, 431;
imprisoned for life, 431.

Pistres, edict of, 429.

Plague, great, of A.D. 542, 94.

Plectrudis, wife of Pippin II., 265-267.

Poictiers, battle of, 271, 293-294.

Pretextatus, bishop, 165;
murdered by Fredegundis, 168.

Procopius, historian, _Secret History_ of, 67.

Protadius, Mayor of Burgundy, 171-173.

Provence, kingdom of. _See_ Arles, 437.

Radbod, duke of Frisia, 262.

Radelchis, duke of Benevento, calls in the Moors, 450.

Raginfred, mayor of Neustria, 265;
rebels against Charles Martel, 290.

Ramnulf, count of Poictiers, usurpation of, 498, 501.

Ratchis, Lombard king, 327;
abdicates, 327;
rebels against Desiderius, 331.

Ravenna taken by Theodoric, 17;
by Belisarius, 87;
exarchate of, 188, 190, 198;
taken and lost by Luitprand, 282-283;
taken by Aistulf, 327;
given to the Papacy by Pippin, 331.

Reccared I., Visigothic king, 140;
converted to Catholicism, 142;
reign of, 143.

—— II., Visigothic king, 223.

Recceswinth, Visigothic king, 226-267.

Reginald, count of Hainault, rebels against Zwentibold, 470;
leagued with Charles the Simple, 474.

Reginbert, duke of Turin, rebels against Luitbert, 279.

Rhazates, Persian general, 211.

Rhodes captured by Saracens, 239.

Rimini taken by Belisarius, 85;
by Luitprand, 282.

Ripuarian Franks, 56;
subdued by Chlodovech, 59.

Robert the Strong, slain by Vikings, 496.

—— duke of France, submits to Charles the Simple, 499;
fights the Vikings, 501;
usurpation of, 503;
slain in battle, 504.

Roderic, Visigothic king, 231-233.

Rodoald, Lombard king, 198.

Roland (Hruotland), Chanson de, 353.

Rome taken by Belisarius, 82;
besieged by Witiges, 83-84;
taken by Baduila, 99;
recovered by Belisarius, 101;
retaken by Baduila, 102;
taken by Narses, 104;
ruled by Gregory the Great, 201-202;
visited by Constans, 245;
its importance in the 7th century, 276;
Council of, 284;
besieged by Lombards, 346;
threatened by Saracens, 451;
stormed by Arnulf, 464.

Romuald, duke of Benevento, 244, 273;
victories of, 274.

Romulus Augustulus, deposed, 1.

Roncesvalles, battle of, 353.

Rorik, Danish chief, 419.

Rosamund, wife of Alboin, 183;
murders him, 185.

Rothari, Lombard king, 196;
his conquests and laws, 197.

Rothrudis, wife of Charles Martel, 298.

Rudolf, duke, rebels against Charles the Simple, 503;
king, 504.

—— I., king of Transjurane Burgundy, 445;
does homage to Arnulf, 468.

—— II., dethrones Berenger, 467.

Rugians defeated by Odoacer, 14.

Rupert, St., converts the Bavarians, 263.

Saiones, or ‘king’s men,’ 22, 131.

Salerno, duchy of, 452;
overrun by Moors, 457.

Salian Franks, 56.

Samo, leader of Slavs, 177.

Saracens conquer Syria and Egypt, 214, 219;
invade Africa, 238, 245;
take Carthage, 251;
invade Spain, 234;
cross the Pyrenees, 271;
ravage Gaul, 292;
defeated at Poictiers, 293;
besiege Constantinople, 301-303;
wars with Charles the Great, 352, 364, 365. _See also_ under Moors.

Saragossa, Franks defeated at, 129;
Charles the Great at, 352.

Saucourt, battle of, 439.

Saxons, defeat Chlothar I., 120;
invade Austrasia, 265;
defeated by Charles Martel, 267, 289, 297;
rebel against Pippin the Short, 323;
subdued by Pippin, 332;
by Charles the Great, 346, 351;
later rebellions of, 351, 354, 355, 366;
rebel against Lewis the German, 408;
defeated by the Danes, 434;
rebel against Conrad I., 476.

Schism of Eastern and Western Churches, 453.

Sebastopolis, battle of, 250.

_Secret History_, the, 67, 68.

Senate, the Roman, sends embassy to Zeno, 1;
trial of Boethius in, 30;
reorganised by Baduila, 102.

Sergius, patriarch, 207-208.

—— pope, refuses obedience to Justinian II., 278.

—— V., crowns the emperor Lewis II., 423.

Sharbarz, Persian general, 205-210.

Sicard, of Benevento, murdered, 450.

Siconulf, first duke of Salerno, calls in the Moors, 450-452.

Sicily conquered by Belisarius, 81;
Constans in, 245;
attacked by the Moors, 447;
long wars in, 449;
finally reduced by Moors, 460.

Siegfred, Viking chief, 439;
invades Neustria, 441;
besieges Paris, 442.

Sigibert, king of Köln, ally of Chlodovech, 39;
his death, 64.

—— I., 160;
marries Brunhildis, 161;
his war with Lombards, 163;
with Chilperich, 163;
murdered, 164.

—— II., murdered by Chlothar II., 174.

—— III., king of Austrasia, 179, 256.

Sigismund, king of Burgundy, 26-27, 114.

Silverius, pope, and the Senate invite Belisarius to Rome, 83.

Siroes, king of Persia, murders his father, 212.

Sisibut, Visigothic king, 222;
his chronicle, 222;
reign of, 223.

Sisinand rebels against Swinthila, 179, 224;
made king, 225.

Slavs, cross the Danube, 151-152;
wars of, with the Franks, 178;
with Lombards, 195;
settle in Balkan peninsula, 240;
defeated by Constans, 241;
conquered by Bulgarians, 248;
subdued by Constantine V., 315;
rebel against Irene, 318;
on the Baltic, 360;
conquered by Charles the Great, 360-362;
revolt from the Franks, 409-414;
subdued by Arnulf, 470.

Soissons, battle of, 267;
council of, 326;
Robert of France slain at, 504.

Soliman, caliph, 254;
sends expedition against Constantinople, 255, 300.

—— -ibn-al-Arabi invites the Franks to Spain, 352.

Sophia, St., church of, burnt in ‘Nika’ riot, 73;
rebuilt by Justinian, 90.

—— empress, 146;
her regency, 148.

Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, 219.

Spain. _See_ under Visigoths, Saracens, 234.

Spoleto, duchy of, 187.

Stauracius, short reign of, 480-481.

Stephanus, minister of Justinian II., 250-251.

Stephen II., pope, asks aid of Pippin the Short, 328;
receives the Exarchate, 331;
embassy to Charles the Great, 338.

—— IV. crowns Lewis the Pious, 387.

—— V. crowns Wido emperor, 463.

—— VI., pope, 465.

Strasburg, Oaths of, 409.

_Strategicon_ of Maurice, 150.

Strategos, office of the, 243.

Suabians (Alamanni) rebel against the Franks, 262;
subdued by Pippin II., 262;
by Charles Martel, 290;
by Pippin the Short, 223.

Suevi, wars of, with Visigoths, 131-138;
subdued by Leovigild, 139.

Suidbert, missionary to Hesse, 263, 291.

Swinthila, Visigothic king, 223;
his wars, 224, 370.

Syagrius, ruler in Gaul, 5-57;
slain by Chlodovech, 58.

Symmachus, executed by Theodoric, 31.

Syracuse, Constans murdered at, 246;
besieged by the Moors, 448;
taken by the Moors, 460.

Syria, invaded by Kobad, 69;
by Chosroes, 92;
conquered by Saracens, 218.

Taginae, battle of, 104.

Tarasius, patriarch, 318.

Tassilo, duke of Bavaria, rebels against Pippin the Short, 332;
treaty of, with Charles the Great, 337;
deposed, 356.

Teia, Gothic count, 103;
king of the Goths, 104;
slain, 104.

Temporal power of the papacy, its commencement, 197;
established by Charles the Great, 344.

Terbel, Bulgarian king, 302.

Testry, battle of, 260.

Teutberga, wife of Lothair II., 428.

Themes, creation of the, 242;
map of the Asiatic, 243.

Theoctistus, count, minister of Michael III., murdered, 490.

Theodahat, Gothic king, 80;
murders Amalaswintha, 80;
at war with Justinian, 81;
deposed and slain, 82.

Theodelinda, wife of Authari, 193;
of Agilulf, 194-195.

Theodora, wife of Justinian, 66;
her early life, 67;
character, 68;
conduct during ‘Nika’ riot, 73;
death, 106.

—— wife of Theophilus, empress regent, 488;
restores image-worship, 489;
banished, 490.

Theodore, brother of Heraclius, 217, 218.

Theodoric, son of Triarius, rebels against Zeno, 41;
makes terms with him, 42;
death, 43.

—— son of Theodomir, early life of, 42;
takes arms against Theodoric, son of Triarius, 41;
ravages Thrace and Macedon, 43;
makes terms with Zeno, 43;
invades Italy, 16;
defeats Odoacer, 17-18;
king of Italy, 19;
character and administration of, 21, 22;
foreign policy, 24;
wars with Franks and Burgundians, 26, 60;
king of Spain, 27;
troubles of his later years, 29, 30;
death, 32.

Theodosius, brother of Constans, 241.

—— III., emperor, 254;
abdicates, 255.

Theodota, wife of Constantine VI., 319.

Theodotus, minister of Justinian II., 250-251.

Theophilus, emperor, 486;
wars with Saracens, 487;
favours Iconoclasm, 488;
marriage of, 488.

Theudebald, king of Franks, 118;
invades Italy, 106.

—— duke of Suabia, rebels against Pippin, 323.

Theudebert I., king of Ripuaria, 116;
invades Italy, 86, 116-117.

—— II., king of Austrasia, 171;
war with Theuderich, 173.

Theuderich I., king of Austrasia, III;
conquers Thuringia, 113;
death, 116.

—— II., king of Burgundy, 172;
his war with Theudebert, 173.

—— III., king of Austrasia, 258-259, 264.

—— IV., last of the Merovings, 268-297.

Theudis, regent in Spain, 27;
king of the Visigoths, 115, 128;
his defeat in Africa, 132;
slain, 133.

Theudigisel, victory of, at Saragossa, 119, 129;
king of Visigoths, 133;
slain, 133.

Theudoald, grandson of Pippin II., 264, 266.

Thomas, rebels against Michael II., 484.

Thorgisl, raids of, in Ireland, 418.

Thrasamund, Vandal king, 28.

‘Three Chapters’ of Justinian, 107.

Thuringia, conquered by Theuderich I., 113;
recovers its independence, 261;
converted to Christianity, 291, 324.

Tiberius Constantinus, emperor, 148;
makes peace with Avars, 149.

Tiberius Apsimarus, emperor, 252;
executed, 253.

Totila. _See_ Baduila.

Toulouse, Saracens defeated at, 271;
Danes at, 420;
county of, 497.

Transimund, duke of Spoleto, rebels against Luitprand, 285.

Treviso, battle of, 96.

Tribonian, quæstor of Justinian, 71;
aids Justinian’s legal reforms, 109.

True Cross, the, carried off by Persians, 205;
won back by Heraclius, 212;
restored to Jerusalem, 217;
taken to Constantinople, 219.

Tulga, Visigothic king, 225.

‘Type,’ the, of Constans, 241.

Urias, Gothic chief, takes Milan, 86.

Urso, Beneventan duke, 460.

Utrecht, see of, founded, 330;
sacked by Danes, 400, 439.

Vandals in Africa, 8;
table of kings of, 12;
their oppressive government, 28;
destroyed by Belisarius, 79.

Varahnes, Persian usurper, 151.

Verden, massacre of, 342, 355.

Verdun, partition-treaty of, 409.

Verina, empress, 38, 44.

Verona held by Goths, 87;
taken by Lombards, 185;
taken by Charles the Great, 347;
Berengar besieged in, 467.

Véséronce, battle of, 114.

Vigilius, pope, imprisoned by Justinian, 107.

Vikings, first ravages of, 400;
description of the, 414-17;
raids of, in Ireland, 417-418;
in England, 418-431;
in Germany, 419-438;
in Lotharingia, 419-469;
in Neustria, 419-442;
conquer Normandy, 501.

Vincy, battle of, 267.

Visigoths driven from Gaul, 62;
in Spain, 128;
become Catholics, 142;
government of the, 221;
conquered by Moors, 234.

Vitalian, pope, 245-277.

—— count, rebellion of, 51;
slain, 53.

Waifer, duke of Aquitaine, rebels against Pippin the Short, 332;
slain, 337.

—— duke of Salerno, 458.

Wala, count, exiled by Lewis the Pious, 386;
recalled, 391;
conspires against Lewis, 394;
banished to Corbey, 395;
death, 399.

Wamba, Visgothic king, 227-228;
crushes rebellion of Paulus, 229;
his laws, 230;
deposed, 231.

Warnacher, Mayor of Austrasia, 176.

Wathek, caliph, 490.

Welid, caliph, 254.

Wends, their war with Dagobert, 178.

Weregeld among the Franks, 125-126.

Westphalians, wars of, with Charles the Great, 349-354.

Wettin of Reichenau, vision of, 342.

Wido aspires to French throne, 444;
expels Byzantines from Benevento, 460;
wars with Berengar, 463;
with Arnulf, 460;
emperor, 463.

Wilfrid of York, 259.

William, count of Toulouse, 365.

Willibrord, apostle of Frisia, 263;
sends missionaries to Germany, 290-291.

Wiltzes subdued by Charles the Great, 360;
subdued by the Danes, 361-367.

Winfrith. _See_ Boniface.

Wintrio, duke, rebellion of, 172.

Witiges, Ostrogothic king, 82;
besieges Rome, 83;
subdued by Belisarius, 87;
taken captive to Constantinople, 88.

Witikind, Saxon chief, 351;
leads Saxons against Charles the Great, 353-354;
submits to Charles, 355.

Witiza, Visigothic king, 231.

Witterich, rebellion of, 144;
Visigothic king, 221.

Wulfoald, Mayor of Austrasia, 258;
restores Dagobert II., 259.

Yermak, battle of the, 218.

Yesdigerd, last king of Persia, 219, 238.

Yussuf invades Gaul, 296.

Zabergan, khan of the Huns, 108.

Zacharias, pope, makes peace with Lombards, 287;
encourages Pippin to seize Frankish crown, 326;
makes peace with Ratchis, 327.

Zeno, character and administration of, 37;
subdues rebellion of Basiliscus, 38-39;
makes Odoacer Patrician, 1, 39;
wars with the two Theodorics, 42;
sends Theodoric to Italy, 15-45;
his ecclesiastical policy, 45;
death, 45.

Ziadet-Allah, Moorish king, 448;
invades Sicily, 449.

Zotto, first duke of Benevento, 187.

Zwentibold, king of Lotharingia, 470;
rebellions of, 472.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Sidenotes were moved to avoid splitting sentences.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Dark Ages, Period 1, 476-918" ***

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