THE BEGINNING THE MIDDLE AGES THE BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES BY THE LATE R W[ CIHIECH, M.A., D.C.L. SOMETIME DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S, RECTOB OF WHATLEY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1895 All rights reserved This volume is printed in the Eversley Series by the kind permission of Messrs. LONGMANS, GREEN, & Co., to whom the copyright belongs. PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION THE present volume must be considered as an intro- duction or preface to the series of " Epochs of Modern History," rather than as an integral member of the series. The other volumes are narratives, and enter into detail. This one is a mere general sketch, necessarily one of the barest outline, faint and vague where they are full. My aim has been little more than to disengage the leading lines in the history of five most important and most confused centuries, and to mark the influences which most asserted them- selves, and which seem to have most governed the results as we see them in subsequent history. In this summary view I have confined my attention mainly to the West, saying little of the great nations of later times in the North and East Scandinavia, Poland, Hungary, Russia. The reason is, that the course of modern history was determined in the vi BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES West, and what happened in the North and East took its start and course from what had happened and had taken permanent forms in the nations of the West and South. In compiling this slight sketch, in which notes and references are not allowed, I need not say that I am under obligations of the most varied kind to others. Every one who writes of these times finds much of his work done for him in Gibbon, Merivale, Hallam, Milman, Guizot, in the older French books, such as Fleury's great compilation, the Ecclesias- tical History, and in the lively and picturesque narratives of the later ones.* I have been much assisted by the first two volumes of Sir F. Palgrave's prolix but very instructive History of England and Normandy. Hesides these, we have a younger race of English historical scholars, who have amply kept up the reputation of their predecessors for honesty of research and breadth and vigour of thought, and have removed the reproach that though English historians were skilful architects, they were careless of the quarries from which their stones came, and easy in passing slovenly and unsound work. The debt is great which all students of the early times of Europe owe to Mr. Freeman, Professor Stubbs, and Mr. Bryce, whose remarkable Essay on the Roman Empire placed in a clear light an important but PREFACE vii obscure and ill-understood link of connexion between the ancient and modern world. I have tried to remember, as far as I could, that no one can really take in and judge of the meaning of events, without going from even the best secondary authorities to the ultimate, and, if possible, contemporary sources of our information. In doing this, and in all other ways, it would be unpardonable not to say how much I have been helped by the laborious and sagacious works of recent German and French scholars. For everything connected with the early condition and the wanderings of the new races, I have referred to Zeuss, Dahn, and to Pfahler's Handbook of German Antiquities, for the Germans, and to Schefarik and Jirecek for the Slaves. I have found especial assist- ance in a series of works suggested by Leopold Ranke, in which the materials of history for the times of Charles the Great and his followers are collected, compared, and arranged with admirable skill and completeness, by writers of great ability, Bonnell, Abel, Diimmler, and others the Annals of German History (Jahrbiicher der Deiitschen Geschichte). The care, the comprehensiveness, the resolute tenacity of research, the fearlessness of trouble in investi- gating, shown by the distinguished writers who have lately in Germany thrown themselves with char- acteristic interest on the early history of Europe, viii BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES are, besides the value of the results, a perpetual lesson of conscientious faithfulness and industry. We in England owe much to the diligence and sagacity of German investigators of our own history, like Dr. R. Pauli. And the French, who are usually credited with the power of brilliant generalisation, and also with incapacity to resist its temptations, are beginning to tread on the heels of the Germans, and to remember that they are the countrymen of the old Benedictine scholars and critics of St Maur. In a sketch of this kind I have not pretended to be careful as to scholarly accuracy in the forms of names. This is a book in which explanations cannot conveniently be given as to the reasons of change from old-fashioned ways of writing them ; and for the most part I have written them as they are commonly written in our popular histories. Students when they begin to enter into the details of history for themselves will find the reasons in many instances for a change from the traditional form, and also the frequent difficulties of making it. R. W. C CONTENTS PAGE CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE . xiii INTRODUCTION Division between ancient and modern history Destruction of Jerusalem Fall of Rome Barbarian migrations Gradually threaten the Empire Internal decay Divi- sion of East and West Alaric . CHAPTER I Teutonic settlements in the West Vandals Burgundians Franks West Goths East Goths The Huns and Attila The Barbarian Patricians Ricimer nominates Emperors End of the Empire in the West Romulus Augustulus ........ 17 CHAPTER II The new nations Gothic kingdom of Theoderic in Italy Burgundian Vandal West Gothic kingdom in Gaul BEGINNING OF TUB MIDDLE AGES P\GR and Spain Arianism of the Goths Frank kingdom Clovis Frank supremacy Efforts of the Empire Justinian Belisarius Narses Overthrow of Gothic kingdom in Italy and of Vandal kingdom in Africa Lombards in Italy ....... 37 CHAPTER III Condition of the Teutonic settlements Three influences affecting the Teutonic settlers i. Religion: the Christian bishops, the Christian Church and religion 2. Roman law 3. The Latin language Gradual but slow revival of Latin civilisation among the new nations ... 54 CHAPTER IV Conquest of Britain by the Saxons and Angles ; gradual ; complete Conversion of the English Influence on the nation of this conversion ...... 74 CHAPTER V The Franks Their supremacy in the West The Merovin- gian Kings, the line of Clovis Decay of the family The Mayors of the Palace The Pipins Rise of the Carolingian line Alliance of Pipin's house with the Popes Deposition of the last Merovingian with the Pope's sanction ........ 89 CHAPTER VI Roman Empire in the East Preserves civilisation Its strength Justinian Heraclius Rise of the Mahometan CONTENTS XI PACK power Conquests of the Saracens Isaurian and Mace- donian dynasties Prerogatives of the Emperors Re- ligious supremacy . . . . . . .117 CHAPTER VII The Carolingians Charles the Great, King of the Franks and Lombards Emperor of the Romans His wars, legislation, political system Creator of the temporal power of the Popes and of Germany .... 139 CHAPTER VIII The Carolingians Successors of Charles Louis the Pious and his sons Break-up of the Empire The Northmen Fall of the various Carolingian lines End of the Frank dominion ....... 176 CHAPTER IX Consolidation and unity of the English people The Kings of Wessex Danish invasions Egbert, Alfred, Edgar Danish conquest The Anglo-Saxon Church . .210 CHAPTER X Results of break-up of Frank Empire New arrangement of Europe The Papacy New Kingdoms Separation xii BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES MM of France and Germany Italy The Northern King- domsThe Slave nations Hungarians. Poles, Russians 229 CHAPTER XI Retrospect of the times of transition from the Roman Empire to the European States of the Middle Ages . . . 257 INDEX 363 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE The sign \ marks the year of death. A.D. 98-138 138-180 180-193 193 249 250-260 2$O 286 303-304 306 Trajan and Hadrian. The Antonines. Commodus. Severus elected by the Pannonian legions, tan. Decius elected by the Maesian legions. First State persecution of Christianity. Barbarian attacks beginning (pp. 3, 4). East : the Danube. 251 Gothic wars : Decius defeated and slain. . 253-268 Goths ravage the East. 269 Checked by Claudius. 270 Checked by Aurelian : settled in Dacia. West : the Rhine. 256 Franks: ravage Gaul and Spain. 256 Suevi, Alamanni, in Italy. 270 Alamanni in Italy : defeated by Aure- lian. 377 Franks and Bur- gundians defeated by Probus. Diocletian and Maximian (286-305). Two Augusti, with two Caesars (p. 8). Last great State persecution under Diocletian. Constantine. Two Augusti, each with two Caesars (308). XIV BEGINNING OF TIIK MIDDLE AGES A.D. 311-313 Edicts of Nicomedia and Milan in favour of toleration. 323 Constantine, sole emperor, t337- 325 Council of Nicaea. 322 Gothic war. Goths checked by Constantine. 331-332 Second Gothic war : Goths again checked. 334 \ andais and Sannatians defeated. 324-330 Foundation and dedication of NKW ROME, Constanti- nople. 337 Division of Empire between the three sons of Constan- tino. 353 Reunion under Constantius the survivor. 351 Battle of Muna ; victory of East over West. Death of Magnentius. 340-353 Franks and Alamanni defeated by Julian in the battle of Strasburg (357). 360-375 UlfiLis, Gothic bUhop, translates the Bible. 361-363 Julian. 364 Division of Empire, Bast and West. Valens and Valen- tinian. Constantinople and Milan, capitals. 376 Goths driven by the Huns into the Empire. 378 Battle of Hadnanople. Valens slain. Goths checked by Theodosius (379-395); settled on the Danube and in Thrace. 382 Kmpcrar Gratian (375-383) last Pontifex .\faximus, Le. head of the heathen state religion. 392 Reunion of Empire under Theodosius. 395 Final division into East and West : Arcadius 1408, and Honorius t43. Great Barbarian invasion of the West (pp. 10-16). Italy. 395 Revolt of Alaric. 396-397 Alaric in Greece. 398 Alaric, king of Visigotlu. 400 Alaric in Italy. 403 Stilicho beats him at Pollenlia. 405 Stilicho defeats Radagais. 408 tStilicho. Alaric before Rome. 409 Second siege of Rome. 410 Third siege, and sack of Rome ; tAlaric. 411 Vitigotkt, under Athaulf, leave Inly for Gaul. Rhine and Gaul. 405 Great invasion a cross the Rhine. / 'and/lit, .\nn-fi, etc., p. 17. 406 I'tuuials under I undarhar, f>. 18. 409 Sunti in Spain ; Htrmamric. End of Roman rule in Britain. 413 Burfutuiint in I J-t.utf in N. E. Gaul, p. lU. CHEONOLOGICAL TABLE XV H ' T * - ^- O -I O tx < 0) ^-^-Tj-^t-0_^- Tt-Tj- * * 1- * * a I-H fH <0 in _2 a 1 1 d 5 1 5 3 O ^C a s ^ co H^rf. Honoriui [a 1 Ij 73 >; ' 3"g 2 rj u OJ 5 c? > a 1| IE 8 c ^^ ftT . j ( CO v. \f) XT) ts H tx P) co o VO M , o ID IOVO ^O CN ^ tv I < IT? co , t | 1 J 1 3 H .1 . V ,3 "+<. T3 ^J P 1 8 s hJ N o o ? o IN Th * 1 * * * XVI BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES A.D. Empfron. (East.) 474 Zeno. 491 Anastasius I. 518 Justin I. 527 justinian(527-5 pp. 47. 120. 565 Justin II. 578 Tiberius II. 582 Maurice. A. D. Barbarians. 477 fGcnseric. /Ella in Sussex. 481 Clovis, king of the Franks. (Merovingian line 481-751.) 486 Rattle of Soissons. Clovis defeats Syagrius, p. 45. 489 Ostrogoths, under Theoderic, attack and defeat Odoacer. 493 Gothic kingdom of Theoderic in Italy (493-533). P- 40- 495 Cerdic lands ; founds Wessex. 496 Battle of Tolbiac ; Clovis defeats Al.im.inni. Clovis baptized. 500 Clovis defeats Burgundians. 507 Battle of I'oulon near l\>i tiers ; Clovis defeats West Goths, and conquers Aquitainc. 511 fClovis. Fourfold division of Frank kingdom. Bociliius, tS24- Symmaclius, 1525. Theoderic, tsa6. 532 Burgundian kingdom extinguished by the Franks. 533-536 Belisarius destroys Vandal king- dom in Africa. 536-554 (i) Belisarius (2) Narses, destroy Gothic kingdom in Italy, p. 47. 547 Ida, king in Northumbria, p. 77. 560 Ceawlin, the conqueror, king of Wessex ; /Ethelbcrt, king of Kent. 565 fBelisarius. tjustinian. 567 or, 573 fNarses. 568-570 I^ombard kingdom in Italy (568- 774). Alboin. p. 49. Irish Missions : St. Columba, Scotland, 520-597 ; St. Gall. f64O, Alamannia. St. Columban. Burgundy, Italy, 565-615- 590-604 Pope Gregory the Great. 590-615 Agilulf and Theudelinda. Con- version of the Lombards from Arianism, p. 51. 587 Reccared, king of Spain, embrace* Catholic faith : fall of Arianism among the West Goths, p. 95. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE XV11 A. D. Emperors. 602 Phocas. 610 Heraclius (610-641), p. 128. (Line of Heraclius 610-711.) 641 fHeraclius. Constantine III. Constans II. 668 Constantine IV. (Pogonatus. ) 685 Justinian II. (685-711.) 694 Leontius. A. D. Barbarians. 597 Augustine baptizes ^Ethelbert, p. 83. Avars. Persian wars. Power of the Avars. Mohammed preaches at Mecca. Wars of the Empire with Persia, p. 127. Frank kingdoms united under Clothar. Edwin, king of Northumbria. Flight of Mohammed. Hegira. Paulinus, bishop of the North- umbrians, 627, baptizes Edwin. Penda, king of the Mercians, 600-797 609 611-623 613 617-633 622 625 626 631 Dagobert, sole king of Franks. Pipin the Elder, mayor. 635-685 Greatness of Northumbria. Oswald. 638 Division of Frank kingdom, Austrasia and Neustria, pp. 103, 104. 632 fMohammed. Saracen con- quests begin, p. 129. 635 Aidan and K. Oswald of North- umbria. Arabian conquests. 632 Arabian invasions of Persia and Syria. 632-638 Conquest of Syria. 632-651 Conquest of Persia. 640 Alexandria taken. Conquest of Egypt 647-709 Conquest of Africa. 662-678 Asia Minor invaded. 668-677 First siege of Constantinople. 668-690 Theodore of Tarsus, archbishop of Canterbury, p. 84. Ebroin. Neustrian, mayor of palace, 664-681, p. 107. 680-755 St. Boniface, Apostle of Germany. 687 Battle of Testry. Ascendancy of Austrasia. Pipin of Heristal, p. 107. 688 Ina, king of Wessex. 697 Beginning of the Doges of Venice. XV111 HKCIXXISrt OF THE MIDDLE AGES A.D. Emperors. A. D. Barbarians. 697 Tiberius III. Arabian invasions of the West. 705-711 Justinian 11. restored. 711 f End of family of Heraclius, 710 Tank lands in Spain. ^\^ Battle of tktGuadaltte. End of Gothic kingdom, p. 98. 713 Arab conquot of Spain, p. 98. 714 t I'ipin of Hcristal, p. 107. D. I ^ I . 717 Charles Martel, mayor. . * ,5*. 711-716 Philippicus. Anastasius II. Theodosius III. 721 Arab invasion of France, p. no. 716-819 Greatnessof Mercia, Offa, p. an. 726-728 Iconoclastic controversy (729- 718 Leo III. the I saurian 1741, 787). 732 liattle of Tours or Poitiers: Charles defeats the Saracens, p. 131. (/saurian line 718-797), p. no. 741 Pope (Gregory III.) appeals to p. 131. 741 Constantine V. (Copronymus), _. _ ~fL Franks against Lombards, p. 112. fCharles Martel. 741 Pipin the Little, p. 112. P. 136. 742 (?) Birth of Charles the Great 750 Fall of the Ommiad Caliphs at Damascus. 752 Last Merovingian (Childeric III. ) deposed with Pope's sanc- tion. Pi fin crowned, p. 114. Carolingian line, 753 : lasting to 91 1 in Germany; 10987^ Gaul. 754 Pope Stephen (752-756) in France : crowns Pipin and his sons, p. 114. 755 Division of the Caliphate. Abbassides at Bagdad ; Om- miads at Cordova. 755-756 Ixjmhard war : Franks assist the pope. p. 115. 768 fPipin : Charles and Cartoman succeed. 771 fCarloman : Charles, sole king. p. 141. 772 Beginning of Saxon war for 775 Leo IV. thirty-two years, p. 144. 780 Constantine VI. 773-774 Overthrow of Desiderius : end and Irene. of Lombard kingdom, p. 148. 797 ConstantineVI. 786-809 Haroun al Kashid, caliph. deposed by 787 Images restored at seventh Irene. general council of Nice. Da- nish ships first mentioned in 797 Irene alone. A. S. Chronicles. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE H ^ b'fl c "s* a ^ t>. V 00 W 5 c h O t-H oo o R H Events. 1 ft) 8 ** 1 1 10 (^ tx & % P- ISO- Egbert, king of Wessex, king of land ^836, p. 211. Northmen begin to alarm the Fi P. 146. Bulgarian kingdom begins. fCharles the Great. Arab conquest of Crete ; and of Sicily. The "Liigenfeld": depositic Louis by his sons, p. 183. ^Ethelwulf, king of England. fLouis the Pious, p. 179. Danish invasion of Neustria. Battle of Fontenailles. Lotha feated, p. 185. Partition treaty of Verdun, p. I Danes sack Paris, p. 200. Saracens sack Rome. Pope Le< Danes first winter in England. Nicholas /. Pope f867. Count Robert checks the Dam 200. Bulgarians converted, p. <> VO p o H J* CO tx 0) N co co \O O H CO Tj- Tf CO *O *O OO CO Tj- -*J- Tj- \T) i < 00 CO 00 CO 00 CO CO CO CO OO CO 00 CO 00 H oo ^ o *s "^ Pu t^ < S 3 a M i-4 i! ^ m 1 Q ^U 'B '3 o o ^ M J ft o ^ o in . o 00 oo CO \ 1 0) ^ ^ ,g "3 "^ 0. w 2 o Q 1 o in o> rf n 1 Eighth general council. Phi posed. Treaty of Meersen. Part Lotharingia. Danes conquer Mcrcia : attack Alfred, king of England tgoi Rollo in the Seine, p. 202. tCharles the Bald, p. 194. Alfred defeats the Danes. 1 Wedmore, p. 219. Boso, king of Provence or Arle Charles the Fat unites all th realms ; deposed t888. Great Danish siege of Paris, j Count Odo, p. 200. Rodolf, kingofTransjurane Bt Edward, king of England, < P. 223. Degradation of the Papacy hands of Italian nobles. Treaty of St. Clair-sur-Epte; of Normandy, p. 203. tLouisthc Child, king of Genr of the Eastern Carolingians, Rollo baptized, p. 203. Conrad of Franconia, king tx c V "o. 1 . j= a-" H 8 d O M NO txCO ON ^ "1 00 o> M tx fx tx tx fx txoo CO 00 O H M < 00 00 00 00 00 CO 00 00 CO CTN ^ 01 CTN ON 2 "3 (VI /C* o (3 o V S3 A*" .5 -3 - g ,^ \ 1 1 c ^-^ >s C Ti i u ffl O J 5 j Q 10 M W ON ON ON tx CO 00 CO ON OO 00 00 ** 00 ON NO 00 00 ON ON g 00 OO OO 00 f , o *xf PO -JL c = 1 "> 5 ^ o " ro ^ 9 i-* c " ^ g 4> M ^ JL < v " O C ^ . a 2 3 w 5 fc 5 C ^_ *^ o3 i c >, l~c _ o S "^ ^n. D n i h 11 p, cd ON O n "1 > U) "rt U jundy united "o Q COT3 ON t. VO O 3 the Lechfeld Events. e JZ U S p. 245. (Saxon line. ) Revolt against Charles the S Robert, Duke of France, Co crowned King. Robert slain. Rodolf of Bur of France. Charles deposed, restored, di ^Ethelstan +940, p. 223. fRollo succeeded by Will sword. ^ 1 r c Hungarian ravages from 9 Louis d'Outremer recalled t< Hugh the Great of Pari 205. Fall of the Abbassides, Bagdad. Kingdoms of Aries and Bur; under Conrad the Pacific Murder of William Longsi Normandv. Richard the Fearless t996. Lothar, king of France at p. 206. Otto defeats Hungarians at near Augsburg, p. 246. D oo ON "e| d " o,7> 1 o C S e 3 -, ? JP -O M o 3 *O fc * rt *O SvO ^ 2 ci x o c tifJ ?j "** C c M O. Q. * 8 5 -a . . ? -2 g C t Cl*i n 4. n *fl 1 .= ^ - ? g 3 i | -JS |T ^ d E. O o o ^ **V t"* p ^ ** Events. 56 Alliance of Dukes of Ni Paris against Carolingiar Edgar, king of England t9 Otto in Italy : defeats Berenj Otto crowned king of Italy, Otto, Emperor > 4 ^5*3 .11 .* J3 DC c. .. C D - S T? '^./'ocotn -> o c S* <*i fi 1 | ^i 8 .=! U ^ " AS fe & -5 u d ^" C c -s o "1 r- *'.'S^u5'^ Q -I r^T3 * ^ -= -3 * N c tx^ 3 5S ?* * 'i -s 1 'Skills S 8 x^ J -S tov* : J= 'C^-r; -55^s>.uS3 O ti H! m O Danish conquest of Englai fioi4, p. 225. Edmund Ironside, p. 226. Cnut, king of England tic Q ? , \O 00 M (1 vO tx ^J if) *OvO \O vO vO f 00 VQ tx rx ON tX tX QQ 00 O^ &> <* \O tx M MM O O M * 3 9 | tt M '^ 'ft V ^- i 5 =: 2 SIS 5X '' O ^ . c ro ro tx 00 $ ON O O\ 1 = 8 u rt >Oy; | "jj- t> 1 ||1 Cjjllj |E.| iJll*|1 d * S BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES INTRODUCTION MODERN HISTORY is separated from ancient by two great and unparalleled catastrophes; and from the changes occasioned by these catastrophes in the materials and conditions of society in Europe modern history took its beginnings. One was the destruction of the Jewish State and temple. The other was the break-up of the Roman Empire. These two cata- strophes, though divided by a considerable interval of time, and altogether different in their operation, were in various ways closely combined in their effects on the state of the world. They were catastrophes of the same order : the overthrow and passing away of the old, in things most deeply concerning human life, that the new might come. Without' them that new settlement or direction of human affairs, under which the last fifteen centuries have been passed, S> B 2 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES would have been inconceivable and impossible. The fall of Jerusalem was the evident close of a theocracy which, up to that time, had for ages counted on a divine guarantee, and which looked forward, without doubt, to ending only in the consummation of a Messianic triumph. It was the apparent extinction of the visible kingdom of God on earth : the doom pronounced by the course of events on claims and hopes which, to those who lived under them, seemed the most sure of all things. The fall of the Roman Empire was the overthrow of the greatest, the strong- est, and the most firmly-settled State which the world had ever known : the dislocation and reversal of the long-received ideas and assumptions of mankind, of their habits of thinking, of the customs of life, of the conclusions of experience. The one cleared the ground for the Christian religion and the Christian Church, to which ancient Judaism, if it had still subsisted, unhumbled and active, with its wonderful history and uncompromising pretensions, would have been a most formidable rival. The other made room, and prepared materials, not only for new nations, but for new forms of political and social order, then beyond all possibility of being anticipated or understood ; for the new objects and ambitions, the new powers and achievements, which have distin- guished modern times, at their worst, as well as at their best, from those of all ancient civilisations. The world in the West, as known to us in history, was surrounded by a vague and unexplored waste of INTRODUCTION 3 barbarism. During the first three centuries of the empire all in the South seemed settled, all in the North was unstable and in movement. In the eyes of civilised mankind there were in the world two great empires of very unequal force : the eternal empire of Rome, secure as nature itself, and the Asiatic Empire of the East, at one time held by a Parthian, then by Persian dynasties, often trouble- some, but never a real rival to Rome for the allegiance of the nations around the focus of civilisation, the Mediterranean Sea. India was still wrapt in mystery and fable. Outside the Roman and Persian borders, northwards and north-eastwards, there was a vast, dimly-known chaos of numberless barbarous tongues and savage races, from which, from time to time, strange rumours reached the great Italian capital of the world, and unwelcome visitors showed themselves in the distant provinces, on the Rhine and the Danube ; and contemporaneously with the beginning of the empire had begun a shaking of the nations, scarcely perceptible at first, but visibly growing in importance as time went on. But there, in what seemed to the majestic order of Rome a mere seething tumult of confused and unimportant broils, was maturing the fate of the empire, and the begin- nings of a new world. It was the scene of that great movement and displacement of the masses of un- civilised mankind, to which the Germans have given the name of the " Wandering of the Nations " ( Volker- ivanderung). Long before it can be traced in history, 4 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES this perpetual shifting of races, accompanied by the extermination of the weaker and longest-settled by the stronger new-comers, had been the rule of the northern world. The causes which produced it became soon after the beginning of our era unusually active, and it went on for centuries, till the great social and political changes which it produced in the West brought it to a final condition of stable repose. An impulse, apparently, had been given from the heart of Asia, which added force to the natural struggle among the barbarian tribes for better and more convenient abodes. When the movement came to its height, it began to be sensibly felt on the frontiers of the empire. About the middle of the second century it called for serious efforts on the Danube ; towards the end of the third it overleaped the barrier of the Rhine. By that time fresh internal changes had taken place in the Teutonic tribes themselves, first known to the Romans. Their early names become merged and lost in new ones ; smaller bodies are fused together into larger ones. Tribes first heard of on the shores of the Northern Sea and the Baltic, Goths, Vandals, Herules, Burgundians, Lom- bards, next appear, after an interval of obscurity, on the Euxine, the Danube, the Rhine ; instead of the Chauci, the Cherusci of the campaigns of Drusus and Tiberius, or the Marcomanni of M. Aurelius, there appear great confederacies, sometimes with old names like the Suevi, sometimes with new, as the Alamanni of the Upper, and the Franks of the Ix>wcr Rhine. INTRODUCTION 5 In 250, the Goths, who in their migrations had come in contact with the Huns, and had fled before them, were becoming dangerous on the Danube ; a Roman emperor, Decius, was defeated and slain by them. During the whole of the third century the confederacy, then known as that of the Alamanni, was putting to the severest strain the efforts of emperors like Maximin, Claudius, Aurelian, and Probus to keep them from the Upper Rhine ; and they ended by establishing them- selves there, in spite of the victories, in the following century, of Julian and Gratian. In the year 240, the Germans of the Lower Rhine, no more known as the Chatti, Chamavi, Bructeri, and only in rhetoric as Sigambrians, appear for the first time as the Franks, more furious, more enterprising, and more terrible in their ravages in Gaul than even the Alamanni. And the Burgundians, once settled between the Oder and the Vistula, then in their migrations driven westward before the Goths, pushed themselves in between the Alamanni and the Franks. By the fourth century the presence of the barbarians had become recognised in its real proportions as a new and alarming feature in the condition of the world. Constantine, Julian, Valentinian, Theodosius, could defeat them, and attempt to terrify them by bloody punishments, as Constantine exposed two Frank kings to the wild beasts, in the amphitheatre at Treves ; but the Roman victories were in vain. The advance of the bar- barians was as certain and powerful as the rising of the tide. 6 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES The Roman State, which was thus assailed without, was slowly undermined from within. The gloomy pages of Tacitus present the picture of a mighty empire, established apparently on foundations which could not be moved, yet wrung and tortured by evils for which it seemed hopeless to look for end or remedy. The recovery and health of this great but deeply- diseased body seemed inconceivable ; yet its subversion and disappearance seemed equally so amid the then forces of the world. But, as time went on, its fashions of corruption and vice increased in variety and enormity; a general degradation of char- acter and a lowering of level, in thought, in strength of action, and in customary morality, set in ; political decay, ill-success, and disaster grew greater and more familiar to men's minds. And the remarkable thing is, that neither exceptional virtue nor exceptional wisdom from time to time in its chiefs could overtake the increasing degeneracy and danger. There were no better rulers than the Antonines ; there were no abler ones than Trajan and Hadrian. Nothing could be nobler than the integrity and public spirit of soldiers and administrators like Julius Agricola, the type, we cannot doubt, of other great and high-minded Roman governors, the shame and condemnation of the crowd of base and cruel ones. And there is no more majestic monument of human jurisprudence than the system of law which grew up in the Roman law-courts. But the springs and principles which govern society had become so fatally tainted that no INTRODUCTION 7 temporary reaction towards good, and no concurrence of beneficent institutions, availed to turn back the strong tide of evil tendency. Still up to the end of the fourth century nothing gave reason to anticipate the actual overthrow of that last and highest concentration of civilised life con- ceivable at the time, which the genius of Julius Caesar had imagined, and which Augustus had made a reality. It was still looked upon as part of the eternal order of the world. Serious and eventful changes had come about in the course of three centuries. The one visible danger to the empire, the increasing pressure of barbaric tribes on the north and east, was more and more felt. It was becoming certain, not only that Roman armies might meet with ill-success in barbarian wars, but that bar- barians were losing that awe of the empire which had kept them at a distance, and were becoming more audacious in their enterprises. There was an un- doubted loosening of the bands, the customs, the political and civil instincts, the forces of authority, which had kept the empire together. Among the greatest innovations was the division of power between two or three emperors, and, even more serious still, the creation of a new and permanent capital, neces- sarily the rival of the hitherto unique centre of the power and majesty of the empire. But even with two emperors, and two or more seats of government, the constitution and unity of the empire seemed un- impaired and indestructible, whatever trials it might 8 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES have to undergo. While the Roman Empire lasted on its old footing, no idea could have seemed more wild to most men than that it should ever cease to exist, or that society could be possible without it ; and it was still apparently standing on its ancient foundations at the end of the fourth century. But with the fifth no one could mistake the signs of change. It began to be evident that what had up to that time seemed the most incredible of all things was about to happen, and was in fact taking place. The empire, in one portion of it, was giving way. The invaders could no longer be kept from Italy, from Gaul, from Africa, from Rome itself. Where they came and as long as they chose to stay, they became the masters ; they took, they left, they spoiled what they chose. They began to settle permanently in the territories of the western portion of the empire. Finally its political power, especially in the West, began to pass into barbarian hands. Barbarian chiefs accepted or assumed its offices, chose or rejected, set up, deposed, or slew, its shadowy and short-lived emperors, and quarrelled with each other for the right to nominate to the name and title of Augustus. Like an army whose line has been cut, the different portions of the empire found their enemy interposed between them, and the West, detached from the East, and enveloped and pressed upon by its foes, offered a field where the struggle went on with the best chances for the invaders. All that had been done to accom- modate the defensive resources of the empire to new INTKODUCTION 9 and increasing dangers had been in vain. Desperate efforts, and efforts of the most varying and opposite kinds, had been made to uphold the State, by Diocletian, by Constantine, by Julian, by Theodosius. Fresh and elaborate organisation of the public service, civil and military ; adoption of the growing popular religion ; return to the old one ; careful examination and revision of the law ; an elastic policy towards the barbarians, which, according to the emergency, sometimes resisted and beat them back, sometimes tempted them off, sometimes took them into service, sometimes accepted and tried to educate or incorporate them as recognised allies of the empire all these expedients, adopted and carried out by rulers of strong and commanding character, failed to avert what seemed to be the irresistible course of things. All that they succeeded in doing was to attract and divert to the East what was most characteristic of the later empire, and to narrow the area over which its old traditions of government could be maintained. But the original seat and source of Roman greatness was left to its fate, and the phenomenon which the West more and more presented was that of the joint occupation of its lands and many of its cities by Teutonic and Latin, that is, by barbarian and civilised, populations. The barbarians were the masters, with- out as yet taking the trouble or having the knowledge to be rulers. The older civilised inhabitants were neither subjects nor equals, but only in all trials of strength distinctly the weaker. And yet their civilisa- 10 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES tion, maimed and weakened as it was, and naturally suffering loss more and more under such rude and unfavourable conditions, was never finally extinguished. Even in its decay and waste it presented a contrast, felt by both parties, to the coarseness of barbarian manners and the imperfection of barbarian resources, and excited, when the races continued together, the interest, the unconscious or suppressed admiration, and at last the emulation, of those who had done so much to crush and extirpate it. The fifth century opened with an increased activity and spirit of enterprise among the barbarian tribes which had been pressing on the empire, and had even gained a footing within its bounds. Three great waves of invasion may be distinguished : foremost and nearest were the Teutonic races ; behind them came the Slaves; behind them again, and pressing strongly on all in front, were the Turanian hordes from the centre of Asia, having in their front line the Huns. In 395 the great Theodosius died. His death closed a reign of sixteen years, the last reign of the ancient undivided empire, in which its old honour was maintained in arms and legislation. His death marks the real, though not the nominal, date of the fall of the united empire, and of the extinction, from henceforth inevitable, of the Western division of it. As soon as he had passed away the change set in with frightful rapidity. He left two young sons, Arcadius and Honorius, under whose names the empire was governed in the East and West respect- INTRODUCTION 11 ively ; he left a number of generals and ministers, all of provincial or barbarian origin, to dispute among themselves for the real power of the State ; and not only on all the borders of the empire, but within its provinces, there were tribes and leagues of barbarians of many names, often beaten back and terribly chastised, but ever pushing forward again in fresh numbers, and now in some cases under chiefs who had learned war in the Roman service. The name of Alaric, the Visigoth, rises above those of the crowd of barbarian chiefs who tried their fortune in this moment of the weakness of the empire. The Visi- goths, or West Goths, were a Teutonic tribe which had fled for refuge from their implacable enemies, the Huns of the Tartar steppes, into Roman territory. They had received reluctant and doubtful hospitality from the Imperial Government in the lands south of the Danube ; and through vicissitudes of peace and war, friendship and treachery, they had become better acquainted with their Roman neighbours and hosts than any of the barbarian races. First of the Teutonic races, they had in large numbers accepted Christianity ; they had learned it from their Roman captives, or at the Court of Constantinople, and at last from a teacher of their own race, Ulfila, the first founder of Teutonic literature, who in translating the Bible gave the barbarians for the first time a written language, and invented for them an alphabet. The Court religion at the time was Arianism, the doctrine of the Egyptian Presbyter, Arius, which denied the true 12 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES Godhead of Jesus Christ It was an important and formidable departure from the belief of the Christian Church, as to the chief object of its faith and worship ; the first of many which marked these centuries. From Constantinople the Goths adopted it. On the death of Theodosius, Alaric conceived the idea of carving out for himself a kingdom and an independent State from the loosely-connected provinces of the empire. He invaded first Greece, and then Italy. Alaric was a soldier not unworthy of his Roman masters. For a time he was confronted and kept in check by another general of equal genius for war, like himself of Teutonic blood, Stilicho, the Vandal, the trusted soldier of Theodosius, who had left him guardian of Honorius, the Western emperor. Stilicho, after putting forth for the last time the vigour of a Roman general on the German frontier, concentrated the forces of the State for the defence of Italy, leaving the distant provinces to themselves. The garrisons were withdrawn from Britain. Goths and Huns were enlisted and disciplined for the service of the empire which their kinsmen were attacking. Against Stilicho's courage, activity, and coolness, Alaric vainly tried to force his way into Italy and to Rome. At Pollentia, on the Tanaro, south-west of Milan, Stilicho, on Easter Day 403, gained a bloody though incomplete victory. Alaric saved his broken army by a daring and successful retreat, but only to meet with another overthrow at Verona. At Florence (405) Stilicho foiled another and fiercer Gothic or Slavonian INTRODUCTION 13 irruption into Italy under Radagais. But the Western empire was not to be saved. Rightly or wrongly, the victorious and perhaps ambitious soldier awakened the jealousy of rivals and the suspicions of his feeble master. Stilicho, Alaric's most formidable antagonist, had, for whatever reason, more than once allowed his foe to escape, and with the obscure and tortuous policy common to the time kept open nego- tiations with him, even at the moment of his own success. He had even proposed to the Roman Senate to buy off Alaric's hostility by honours or payments of money. Stilicho's enemies persuaded Honorius of his general's designs against the State ; a mutiny was created against Stilicho in the army ; his friends were murdered ; and finally Honorius consented to condemn and to put to death, on the charge of treason, the great chief who within five years had won for him the three greatest of recent Roman victories. Then the invaders sprang in on every side. Alaric, hanging on the north-eastern frontier among the Julian Alps, had been watching the intrigues of the Italian Court, now removed from Rome and Milan to the protection of the marshes of Ravenna. These intrigues were to deliver him from his great enemy. On the 23rd of August 408 the head of Stilicho fell under the executioner's sword. In October Alaric was under the walls of Rome. He came three times in three successive years ; and twice he retired. The first time he spared the city for an enormous ransom. The second time he 14 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES imposed on the city and empire a puppet mock- emperor, whom a few months afterwards he degraded as unceremoniously as he had set him up. Alaric's brief stern words were remembered as well as his deeds. To the hermit who bade him in the name of religion retire from the great city, he replied that it was God's will and call that drove him on. To the Romans who threatened him with the numbers of their popu- lation " the thicker the hay," was his answer, " the easier mown." When, astounded at his enormous demands, the Romans asked him, " what then would he leave them ? " he answered " your lives." But the third year, 410, the imperial city, the sacred, the inviolate, which since the almost mythical visitation of Brennus and his Gauls had only once seen a foreign enemy from her walls, and never within them, beheld the amazing, the inconceivable sight her streets, her palaces, broken into and sacked by barbarians whom of late days she had, indeed, seen among the mercenaries who served her, but whom of old she knew only as the slaves who fought with one another to make her sport in her gladiatorial shows. The end of the world must have seemed at Rome to have come when the city of Caesar and Augustus, with its gold, its marble, its refinement, was given over to the Gothic spoilers. She might have seen her revenge in the death within a few weeks of the assailant who had first dared to break through the vain terror of her presence, and the idle guard of her walls. INTRODUCTION 15 But the blow had been struck, though Alaric had died who struck it. From that day forth the Teutonic nations, whom the Romans classed together under the common name of barbarians, looked upon the lands of the Western portion of the empire as given over to them in possession. From that day forth their chiefs arrived on the scene, not only to play the customary game of war, not merely to ravage and plunder, but to carry out the idea of Alaric to become kings, to win kingdoms, to create nations. For a while the new condition of things seemed incredible to those accustomed to the old Roman central sway. There were fierce, even for a time successful, attempts to dispute and resist the change. The name and the authority of the Roman emperor had too fast a hold even on the Teutonic mind to be more than weakened : the Roman Empire lasted on more than fifty years in the West ; and at Constanti- nople it had always to be reckoned with as a power which in strong hands was a formidable one. How strong was still the idea of the empire, and how obstinate the customary awe and respect for its authority, is shown in two phenomena which are continually appearing in these times of confusion. One is the weight with which the imperial name, even when borne by so weak an emperor as Honorius, was seen to press upon local rebellions on the part of subjects of the empire. In spite of his personal in- significance, in spite of the deep humiliations of his reign, in spite of the destruction of Stilicho, the Gothic 16 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES conquest, the sack of Rome, no rival emperor, and there were seven in the course of five years, could maintain his title against the son of Theodosius. The other is, that the barbarian chiefs who attacked the empire asked for and were proud of its honours and titles. Alaric, King of the Goths, insisted at the same time on being recognised as an officer in the Roman service, the Master-General of Illyricum. His successor, Athaulf, while conquering in Gaul, and Wallia, while conquering in Spain, professed to restore these provinces to the obedience of Honorius. But nevertheless the great revolution, which was to over- ride all resisting forces, and the deeply-planted habits of ages, had come. From Alaric and his victorious policy two things date, which speedily altered the condition of the Latin world. One was the intrusion and interference of the barbarian power as a recog- nised political element in the Roman State. The other was the planting within its borders of new nations, each of them growing in its own way into an independent State, with its own interests, and customs, and policy, and coming less and less to acknowledge, even in the most shadowy form, the authority or even the existence of the empire in the West. CHAPTER I TEUTONIC SETTLEMENTS IN THE WEST. FALL OF THE EMPIRE IN THE WEST. (406-476) THE impulse given by the enterprises and successes of Alaric showed itself in the invasion of the Western provinces by various Teutonic tribes, who henceforth held possession of what they invaded. On the last day of the year in which Stilicho destroyed the Vandal Radagais and his mixed army before Florence (405), another portion of the Vandals, with their con- federate tribes, Sueves, Burgundians, Alans, found their way into Gaul, perhaps, as Gibbon suggests, across the frozen Rhine, partly ravaging, partly settling, partly pushing to further conquest, but seldom returning to their former seats. In the year in which Alaric set up and then degraded his mock- emperor Attalus, after the siege of Rome (409), Sueves and Vandals, a part of this host, under Hermanric, crossed the Pyrenees into the rich and peaceful province of Spain. Three years after the sack of Rome and the death of Alaric, the Bur- c 18 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. gundians (413), who, in company with the Vandals, crossed the Rhine in 406, had occupied the left bank of the middle Rhine ; thence they gradually spread westwards and southwards into Gaul ; and the result, after many vicissitudes, was the foundation of a kingdom of the Burgundians under Gundachar (411- 436), Gundeuch (456-463), and the more famous Gundobad, the lawgiver (472-516). It was the first of the many Burgundies that were to be, fixing a famous name in the new geography of the West, and impressing a distinct character on the population which bore that name. No limits and no political conditions varied so much as those of the " Burgun- dies," kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, provinces, long striving after an independence, which could not be maintained. The first Burgundy of Gundachar and Gundobad comprised the valleys of the Rhone and the Saone, with western Switzerland and Savoy, from the Alps and the Jura as far as the Durance, and even at one time with Avignon and Marseilles. Almost at the same time a confederation, or rather two confederations, of German tribes, whose name was to fill a yet greater place in history, the Franks, who had finally settled from the Main along the lower Rhine, and in what is now Belgium, appear defending the Roman frontier against the invading Vandals. They had long disturbed the empire by their ferocity and spirit of adventure. They had by this time gained room within its borders, and become its allies ; and they even suffered severe losses in fighting for it I VANDALS AND GOTHS 19 But, as the defence of the empire became hopeless, they soon followed the invading movement, and pressed on to the valleys of the Moselle, the Meuse, the Scheldt, and the Somme, and the plains and cities of what is now Champagne. And immediately after the death of Alaric, who had sacked Rome and occupied Italy, the Goths, under their new leader Athaulf, a name which has been softened and Latin- ised into Adolphus, adopted the momentous resolu- tion of relinquishing Italy, and seeking their fortune in the West. Bearing with them the treasures of Alaric, they marched into Gaul ; they occupied step by step, in the course of the century, nearly the whole of the South between the Rhone, the Loire, the Mediterranean, and the ocean ; and they poured into Spain, driving before them or subduing the earlier invaders, Vandals, Sueves, Alans. The Roman city of Toulouse became their capital. Before the middle of the fifth century, the kingdom of the West Goths had become the mightiest among its neighbours. It stretched from the Loire to the mouth of the Tagus and the Columns of Hercules. It possessed the great cities of Aquitaine, Narbonne, Bordeaux, Toulouse. It had absorbed the last fragment of independent Roman Gaul, Auvergne. In Spain it had cooped up the earlier invaders, the Sueves, into the mountains of Asturias and Gallicia. It had driven the Vandals into Africa. It had rapidly assumed an organised shape, with its peculiar polity, its half Roman legislation, its national councils. It 20 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. had replaced the empire in the West, and it seemed as if a State had been founded which was to unite in one Gaul and Spain, and take the lead in the new order of things ; as if a Gothia or Gothland was to supplant the name of Gaul or Rome. This magni- ficent prospect was not to be fulfilled. The lands north and south of the Pyrenees were not to continue united, and the Goths were not to be the leaders of Western Europe. But from the Goths of Toulouse sprang a line of kings which ruled in Spain, and shaped its fortune and history till the Mahometan Conquest (711). It was to be long indeed before the kingdoms, as we know them, of France and Spain began to appear above the confusion ; but the first rude courses of the foundations on which, through such various changes, they were to rise were laid in the Teutonic movement, in which Alaric led the way. Another invasion, more fatal in its consequences to the empire, though itself transient as a conquest, was the consequence of the Gothic invasion of Spain. The Vandals in Spain, the forerunners of the Goths, pressed by the combined power of the Gothic king- dom and the Roman provincials, and tempted by the invitation of a Roman governor, Count Boniface, who had been stung into treason by the intrigues at Ravenna, passed into Africa under Genseric, the most crafty, the most perfidious, the most ruthless of the barbarian kings, and of all of them the most im- placable foe of Rome and its civilisation. The late repentance and the resistance of Count Boniface I VANDALS IN AFRICA 21 could not avert the Vandal conquest and the desola- tion of Africa. The death of St. Augustine during the siege of his city, Hippo, in 430, and the surprise of Carthage in 439, mark the date of the ruin of Roman civilisation on the southern shore of the Mediterranean ; a civilisation that had retained more unalloyed than that of any other province the peculiar Latin type, the roughness and original force of the Latin mind and character. The Vandal conquest, short-lived as it was compared with other barbarian occupations, dealt a far heavier blow than they to the weakened stability of the empire. It was not only the severance from it of a great province, a second home of Latin letters and habits ; but during the long reign of Genseric (429-477) Rome and Italy were made acquainted with two new forms of suffering. To the ordinary plagues of barbarian invasion, were now added starvation and piracy. Africa had been, with Egypt, the great storehouse from which Italy had drawn its usual supplies of corn ; Africa was now in the hands of a deadly enemy, Egypt in those of the rival and unfriendly Eastern emperor. And next, the possession of Carthage suggested to Genseric the ambition of being master, not of Africa only, but of the Mediterranean. The Vandal fleets ravaged and tormented the Mediterranean coasts, like those of Haireddin Barbarossa and the Barbary rovers of later ages. " Whither shall we sail ? " asked Genseric's pilot. " Sail to those, with whom God is angry," was the reply. 22 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. Thus in the first half of the fifth century the em- pire was broken up in the West Everywhere out of Italy, in Gaul, in Spain, in Africa, the new comers were the masters. The separation from the empire, at the beginning of the fifth century, of the island of Britain, and of the Continental province which after- wards bore the same name, neither of which was again to be united to it, rather marked than con- tributed to the decline of Rome. In the anarchy of the West, the soldiery in Britain, or those of them who had not been withdrawn by Stilicho, long accustomed to claim a voice in the choice of em- perors, set up a succession of candidates for the empire, one of whom, with the famous name of Constantine, disputed for a time the imperial title with Honorius, and the possession of Gaul and Spain with the Goths (407-411). The Goths, professing to serve the empire, united with the soldiers of Honorius, and overthrew the last Western Constantine, and, after him, all the other provincial rivals of Honorius, who, in the universal confusion, ventured to strike for power (411-416). But the empire finally retired from the island of Britain. An obscure interval of troubled independence succeeded ; and in the middle of the century Jutes, Saxons, and Angles were beginning their conquests. Yet the empire, as has been said, in the opinion and feeling of men, still lasted under these strange conditions. The Teutonic invaders for the most part professed to acknowledge its existence and I GRADUAL DECAY OF IMPERIAL SYSTEM 23 authority, to respect its laws, though claiming to be themselves exempt from them, to serve it after their owri manner as its officers and soldiers, to call them- selves its "guests," or its "confederates," even in the possessions which they had either seized, or acquired by a forced sale. Its civil administration still went on, at least for the Roman population, side by side with the customs and royal jurisdiction of the military occupiers. The position of the Teutonic conquerors and settlers was analogous to that of the early English conquerors in India, under the Mogul Empire. They were in it, but not of it. Its paramount title and supremacy were supposed, where these did not come into collision with the interests of the con- querors. Its sanctions, when convenient, were sought for, and made useful to give legitimacy to what the sword had won. In stronger hands, and under more favourable circumstances, the empire might have lasted on, as in the East ; and, suiting itself to its altered circumstances, have perhaps recovered its ground, by incorporating and assimilating to itself, according to its old favourite and successful policy, its new subjects, who, with all their fierce vigour, were not unwilling to be civilised. But in the course of the century, two things, a fresh and more tremendous irruption of barbarians, and a fatal innovation in domestic policy, finally shattered for the time the imperial system in the West. The irruption was the invasion of Attila and the Huns. The innovation was the adoption, as a settled custom, of what Alaric 24 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. had thought of as a temporary expedient, perhaps, had only done in mockery. A foreign soldier, master of the military force of the empire, claimed, and was allowed, to make and unmake the emperors of the West The invasion of the Huns was the appearance of entirely new actors in the great tragedy. Between the Roman world and the German invaders there were affinities, though they might be subtle and obscure, of race, of language, of thought, and moral ideas; and there had grown up between them the long familiarity of alternate war and peace. They had even met half-way in religious ideas, and Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, under the form of Arianism, had embraced Christianity with sometimes fanatical zeal But the Huns were not like Goths and Vandals, a Teutonic or even a Slave people. They belonged to that terrible race whose original seats were in the vast central tableland of Asia; who under various names, Huns, Tartars, Mongols, Turks, have made it their boast to devastate for the sake of devastation, and from whom have sprung the most renowned among the destroyers of men, Attila, Genghiz, Timour, the Ottomans. It is a race which long experience has shown to be less than any other in sympathy with Western civilisation, and more obstinately intractable to its influence. The Huns themselves, impelled westwards by the wars which agitated the vast deserts stretching from the Volga to China, had driven before them in frantic terror the many tribes of the German i THE HUNS UNDER ATTILA 25 stock which had shaken the empire; and they had been for some time hovering on its eastern frontier, taking part like other barbarians in its disturbances and alliances. Emperors paid them tribute, and Roman generals kept up a politic or a questionable correspondence with them. Stilicho had detachments of Huns in the armies which fought against Alaric ; the greatest Roman soldier after Stilicho and, like Stilicho, of barbarian parentage Aetius, who was to be their most formidable antagonist, had been a hostage and a messmate in their camps ; and he had followed a common practice of the time when he invited the Huns to the frontiers of Italy to support a candidate for the imperial dignity. About 433, Attila, the son of Mundzukh, like Charles the Great, equally famous in history and legend, became their king. Attila was the exact prototype and forerunner of the Turkish chiefs of the house of Othman. In his profound hatred of civilised men, in his scorn of their knowledge, their arts, their habits and religion, and, in spite of this, in his systematic use of them as his secretaries and officers, in his rapacity combined with personal simplicity of life, in his insatiate and indiscriminate destructiveness, in the cunning which veiled itself under rudeness, in his extravagant arrogance and audacious pretensions, in his sen- suality, in his unscrupulous and far-reaching designs, in his ruthless cruelty joined with capricious displays of generosity, mercy, and good faith, we see the image of the irreclaimable Turkish barbarians who ten cen 26 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. tunes later were to extinguish the civilisation of Eastern Europe. The attraction of Attila's daring character, and his genius for the war which nomadic tribes delight in, gave him absolute ascendancy over his nation, and over the Teutonic and Slavonic tribes near him. Like other conquerors of his race, he imagined and attempted an empire of ravage and desolation, a vast hunting ground and preserve, in which men and their works should supply the objects and zest of the chase. The one power on earth was to be the terror of Attila's name. The one penalty of disobedience and opposition was to be the edge of Attila's sword. He humbled and made subjects of the barbarians round him. He insulted and ravaged the Eastern empire up to the walls of Constantinople. He revived the old feud with the Visigoths. Then he picked a quarrel with Valentinian III. and the Court of Ravenna. He claimed some Church spoils, said to have been stolen. He claimed Honoria, the sister of the emperor, as his betrothed bride. Keen and shrewd in his views of policy, he entered into an alliance with Genseric and the Vandals of Africa, who were to attack Italy. And at last, affecting to be the soldier of the empire against the rebellious Visigoths, at the head of the ferocious horsemen whom for years he had been gathering round him in the plains between the Theyss and the Danube, where his wooden city and wooden palace were built, he burst with the speed and terror of a tempest on central and western Europe. I BATTLE OF CHALONS 27 He passed through Germany into Gaul, sweeping along with him in his course, as confederates or subjects, a mixed multitude of many races, and visit- ing with impartial havoc and slaughter the Roman cities and the Gothic settlements. Romans and Goths forgot their own quarrels in their panic and distress. The ablest of Roman generals, Aetius, and the most powerful of the Gothic kings, Theodoric of Toulouse, joined their forces, and were only just in time to save Orleans, and prevent the host of the Huns from bursting the barrier of the Loire. Attila retired and waited for them in the plains of Chalons, plains made by nature, and used in our own days, for the encampment of great armies. The wild and tremendous battle of Chalons stayed the advance of the Huns into Gaul. But it did not stay the raging torrent from pouring over Italy. There was no one to relieve Aquileia as Orleans had been relieved. Aquileia perished, and many of its sister cities of the north of Italy. This absolute destruction of homes and cities, and the searching and unsparing keenness of the sword of Attila, from which there was neither refuge nor mercy, drove the miserable remnant of the population of the mainland to seek their only escape in the islands and lagoons. The fugitives knew not what they were preparing ; out of this scattered remnant and the lagoons which sheltered them, Venice arose. Attila advanced towards Rome. The conqueror of Chalons, Aetius, hung on his march, but was unable to arrest him. But Attila's army 28 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. was suffering from exhaustion and disease, and he yielded, at least for the time, to the supplications and offers of the Roman ambassadors, one of whom was the great Pope Leo. One of the conditions of peace, and the most shameful one, was that he should add a Roman princess of imperial rank to the crowd of his innumerable wives. But it was not to be. He retired to recruit himself in his wooden village in the open plains between the Theyss and the Danube, and he was cut off by a sudden and mysterious death. His empire had no territorial basis, and fell to pieces at his death. His sons were less able robber chiefs than their father, and they soon disappeared from history. German legends softened him into the King Etzel of the Nibelungen Lied. The Latin traditions of Gaul gave him the name of the Scourge of God> and supposed that he gloried in it. The remains of his horde retired east- wards, to reappear in the sixth century under the name of the Avars, and, perhaps, the Bulgarians. But, in the desolations of Attila, the empire had learned a new experience of its helplessness. Aetius and the victory of Chalons could save a province that in its chiefs and its interests was already more bar- barian than Roman j but they could not avert the humiliation of ransoming Rome by the most igno- minious conditions. And what Attila had left for the time uncompleted, Genseric finished. In the respite gained by Attila's departure, the Court of Ravenna was desolated by domestic outrages, and I SECOND SACK OF ROME 29 fierce quarrels. As Honorius, jealous of Stilicho, had put to death the conqueror of Alaric and Rada- gais, so Valentinian III., as incapable and even more vindictive than Honorius, was provoked by the pre- tensions of Aetius, and murdered with his own hand the vanquisher of Attila (454). The death of Stilicho had been followed by the sack of Rome by Alaric. The death of Aetius was followed not only by the assassination of the emperor and its train of usurpa- tions and murders, but by a second sack of Rome, this time by the Vandals of Genseric. A Roman Count, to avenge his wrongs, had invited Genseric to Africa. A Roman Empress, Eudoxia, to avenge her wrongs, invited the pirate -king of Carthage to assault Rome. In the very year (455) in which the superstitious looked for the completion of the fated twelve centuries of Roman power, a year after the murder of Aetius, the Vandal fleet from Carthage occupied the mouth of the Tiber. Genseric suc- ceeded where Hannibal had failed, and completed Alaric's terrible chastisement of the sacred city, from which Attila himself two years before had shrunk. The intercession of Pope Leo, which had availed with Attila, did not stay Genseric. It availed to prevent slaughter, but the pillage was more unsparing, and the havoc more irremediable, than that under Alaric half a century before. Genseric sailed away with the spoils of Rome, with the Empress Eudoxia and thousands of captives, with trophies of his victory over all that was most venerable in the ancient world ; 30 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. the gilded tiles of the Capitol, the golden table and the golden candlestick brought by Titus from Jeru- salem. Two great armadas were fitted out, one by the Emperor Majorian in the West (458-460), the other by the Emperor Leo in the East (468), to crush the Vandal power, and avenge the sack of Rome. Both were surprised in harbour, and de- stroyed by the fleets and fire ships of Genseric. The genius and more than the fortune of the old Cartha- ginian heroes seemed revived in the barbarian king. For nearly fifty years he insulted and humbled Rome; and he lived to see the extinction of the empire of the West. But this extinction of the Western empire was ultimately determined by fatal changes in the State itself. There, too, finally and irrevocably, though at first under the disguise of ancient forms, the bar- barian had forced his way, and established himself first in the control, and then in the possession, of what political power still remained to Italy and Rome. The emperors had derived their titles either from hereditary claims, or from their own bold enterprise, or from the choice of the senate or army, or from the nomination of an imperial colleague. But in the course of the last twenty years of the Western empire, this power of choosing the emperor passed into the hands of the barbarian " Patricians " in the West, a title of high dignity invented by Constantino, and now given to the chiefs of the foreign troops, mostly recruited from the tribes of Germany and the I BARBARIAN PATRICIANS 31 Danube, who were the strength of the armies of Rome, and had become its real masters. In the last years of Theodosius, Arbogast, the Frank chief of the military levies of the West, after murdering his master, the boy- emperor Valentinian II., had at- tempted to make an emperor of his own creature, Eugenius ; but Theodosius was still alive, and the attempt was signally punished. After the second siege of Rome, Alaric had imposed an emperor, Attalus, on the Roman Senate as the rival of Hono- rius. The step was intended to put a pressure on Honorius ; but Alaric used his nominee as if to make sport for himself; and the majesty of the greatest of earthly names suffered its last and fatal indignity, when the Emperor Attalus, at the caprice and con- venience of a barbarian patron, was, to use Gibbon's words, " promoted, degraded, insulted, restored, again degraded, and again insulted, and finally abandoned to his fate," the contemptuous revenge of his rival. The precedent set by Alaric was not lost. After the death of Valentinian III., the unworthy grandson of the great Theodosius, the first thought of the barbarian chiefs was, not to destroy or usurp the imperial name, but to secure to themselves the nomination of the emperor. Avitus, chosen in Gaul under the influence of the West Gothic King of Toulouse, Theoderic II., was accepted for a time, as the Western emperor, by the Roman Senate, and by the Court of Constantinople. But another barbarian, Ricimer the Sueve, ambitious, successful, and popular, 32 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. had succeeded to the command of the " federated " foreign bands which formed the strength of the im- perial army in Italy. Ricimer would not be a king, but he adopted as a settled policy the expedient, or the insulting jest, of Alaric. What Theoderic the Visigoth had given at a distance in Gaul, Ricimer the Sueve, the master-general of the Italian armies of the empire, claimed to give on the spot, at Rome. He deposed Avitus, and probably murdered him. Under his direction, the Senate chose Majorian. Majorian was too able, too public -spirited, perhaps too independent for the barbarian Patrician; Majorian, at a moment of ill-fortune, was deposed and got rid of. Ricimer's next nominee, Severus, seems to have been too feeble and incapable for his impatient master ; at any rate, he is reported to have been made away with. Then, at a moment of extreme danger, in the hope of assistance from Leo, the Eastern emperor, against the attacks of Genseric, Ricimer accepted an emperor, chosen at Constan- tinople, the Greek Anthemius, whose daughter he married. But Anthemius was not content to be simply the tool and the screen of the Patrician. Coolness and jealousies followed ; Ricimer deter- mined on a quarrel, and all attempts to reconcile them failed. Ricimer set up his fourth emperor, Olybrius, and at the head of a barbarian army attacked and slew Anthemius. For the third time Rome was stormed and delivered over to a foreign soldiery, in this case nominally in her own service. I GUNDOBAD, GLYCERIUS, ETC. 33 Ricimer and Olybrius both died a few months after- wards, and the empire in the West was left without its nominal or real head. A refugee Burgundian king, Ricimer's nephew, Gundobad, whom Ricimer had protected, and who cared little for anything but his lost Burgundian inheritance, found himself suc- cessor to Ricimer as Patrician in Italy. The Patrician Gundobad, following Ricimer's example, conferred the title of Augustus on an officer of the imperial guard, Glycerius. It is hard to imagine anything more grotesque in circumstances, and more tragical in its substance, than the chance of a Burgundian fugitive having, by the accident of the moment, the business thrust upon him of disposing of the majesty of the empire, and of looking out in Ricimer's mixed host for a successor to the honours of the mighty line of men who had ruled from Augustus to Con- stantine. But the extravagance of ignominy was not exhausted. A rival emperor, Julius Nepos, com- pelled Glycerius to exchange the inheritance of the Caesars for the bishopric of Salona ; again, the bishop of Salona in due time found his fallen rival Nepos in his power, and murdered him. In the next turn of fortune, a former secretary of Attila, Orestes, had become Patrician, and general of the barbarian troops ; like Ricimer, not caring or not venturing to become emperor himself, he proclaimed his son emperor, to whom by a strange chance, as if in mockery of his fortune, had been given the names of the first king and the first emperor of Rome, Romulus Augustus, D 34 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. soon turned in derision into the diminutive " Augus- tulus." But Orestes failed to play the part of Ricimer. A younger and more daring barbarian adventurer, Odoacer the Herule, or Rugian, bid higher for the allegiance of the army. Orestes was slain, and the young emperor was left to the mercy of Odoacer. In singular and significant contrast to the common usage when a pretender fell, Romulus Augustulus was spared. He was made to abdicate in legal form ; and the Roman Senate, at the dicta- tion of Odoacer, officially signified to the Eastern emperor, Zeno, their resolution that the separate Western Empire should cease, and their recognition of the one emperor at Constantinople, who should be supreme over West and East. Amid the ruin of the empire and the state, the dethroned emperor passed his days, in such luxurious ease as the times allowed, at the Villa of Lucullus at Misenum ; and Odoacer, taking the Teutonic title of king, sent to the emperor at Constantinople the imperial crown and robe which were to be worn no more at Rome or Ravenna for more than 300 years. Thus in the year 476 ended the Roman Empire, or rather, the line of Roman emperors, in the West. Thus it had become clear that the foundations of human life and society, which had seemed under the first emperors eternal, had given way. The Roman Empire was not the " last word " in the history of the world ; but either the world was in danger of falling into chaos, or else new forms of life were yet to I END OF EMPIRE IN THE WEST 35 appear, new ideas of government and national exist- ence were to struggle with the old for the mastery. The world was not falling into chaos. Europe, which seemed to have lost its guidance and its hope of civilisation in losing the empire, was on the threshold of a history far grander than that of Rome, and was about to start in a career of civilisation to which that of Rome was rude and unprogressive. In the great break-up of the empire in the West, some parts of its system lasted, others disappeared. What lasted was the idea of municipal government, the Christian Church, the obstinate evil of slavery. What disappeared was the central power, the im- perial and universal Roman citizenship, the exclusive rule of the Roman law, the old Roman paganism, the Roman administration, the Roman schools of litera- ture. Part of these revived ; the idea of central power under Charles the Great, and Otto his great successor ; the appreciation of law, though not ex- clusively Roman law ; the schools of learning. And under these conditions the new nations some of mixed races, as in France, Spain, and Italy; others simple and homogeneous, as in Germany, England, and the Scandinavian peninsula began their appren- ticeship of civilisation. But the time of preparation was long. The world had long to wait for the ripening of the seed which was so widely sown, and which was in due season to bear such rich fruit. In the first five centuries after Western Europe had passed from Roman to barbarian rule, two great 36 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. I stages are perceptible in the course of events. In the first stage, we see the confusion and disturbance attending on the new settlement, which everywhere took the shape of invasion ; but the materials were being gathered and made ready to form the new society which was to arise. In the second stage, we see the attempts to organise these materials, to give distinctness to the different forms of national life, to introduce order, law, and fixed constitutional habits in the new nations, attempts which culminated in the revived empire of Charles the Great To trace the course of European history through these two stages is the object of the following sketch. CHAPTER II THE NEW NATIONS THE disappearance of the emperors of the West did not mean the complete and immediate disappearance of the laws, ideas, and political organisation of the Roman Empire in Europe. These went on, for a time, in appearance almost unchanged, and it was only by degrees and by successive shocks, that the old order gave place to the new one, which was now beginning. Odoacer was the most powerful man in Italy, without even a nominal rival. But Odoacer was not emperor. He was only a Teutonic king, without even a special and national, much less a territorial title. He was a "king of nations," of a mixed army, among whom he had divided the third part of the lands of Italy ; while to the Italians he was the Roman " Patrician," appointed by the distant emperor at Constantinople over the "diocese" of Italy. The name and place of emperor were void in the West. But there never was a time, from 476 to 800, when the Roman Empire was supposed not to 38 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. exist. There was . still for some time the Roman Senate, the Roman Consulship, the Roman Pratorian prefect ; the Roman municipal and financial adminis- tration, the Roman law, by which life was ruled, when this law did not come into conflict with the policy, the usages, the will of the new masters. And though there was no longer an emperor in the West, there was still a Roman emperor, the emperor who ruled at Constantinople, the greatest and most majestic personage in the world, who, though far off, and busily occupied with affairs of his own, had not relinquished his claims to recognition and allegiance in the West, and continued to assert them, sometimes with strength and success. But though at the time the greatness of the change was obscured by the stubborn tenacity of many surviving parts of the strong Roman organisation, the old imperial system had really passed away, and the new national system, which was henceforth to prevail in Europe, had come into existence. The empire had begun to give place to a number of new kingdoms, or attempted king- doms, which though they sometimes sought a formal recognition from Constantinople, had no longer to reckon seriously with the central authority, but only with one another, for their limits and power. When they encountered, as they did sometimes with fatal result, the forces of the Eastern Empire, the bar- barians were no longer the invaders but the in- vaded, protecting what had become their own from a foreign foe, not really resisting the authority or ii GOTHIC KINGDOM IN ITALY 39 encroaching on the dominions of the successors of the Caesars. In the hundred years which followed the fall of the empire, years of wild confusion and havoc, amid which are seen the first efforts after reorganisation and order, two great questions emerge and give interest to a scene in which we should otherwise see nothing but the shock of conflicting barbarisms. One was the question which of the two great Teutonic races, the Goths, or their rivals, the Franks, should be the ruling race of the West. The other, depending on the first, was, which should be the creed of Europe, the Catholic faith, or Arianism. In the decision of these two questions, so eventful and so critical, the whole significance of the history centres. Odoacer, the chief of an army composed of several Teutonic races, was, in fact, though not in name, the first king of Italy. But in him the bar- barian chieftain hardly rose above the level of a successful soldier; the qualities of a statesman first showed themselves in his conqueror and successor, the famous Theoderic. Theoderic was the hereditary chieftain of a tribe of the Eastern Goths, whom the easy success and prosperity of Odoacer tempted from their wasted seats by the Danube, to dispute with him the great prize of Italy. The Gothic race had the start of all the barbarians in culture, in apparent aptitude for civil life, in gentleness of manners. They had been longer than any others established in 40 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. portions of the provinces, as allies and subjects of the State ; and it might have seemed that of all they were most adapted to reinvigorate and restore, without destroying, what had become degenerate and en- feebled. Theoderic added to the daring and energy of a Gothic chief the knowledge gained by a civilised education at Constantinople. He was the head, not of a chance army of mixed races, but of a homo- geneous tribe which reverenced in his family, the race of the Amals, a royal line. And he was the first of the Teutonic conquerors who attempted to carry out the idea not merely of administering a conquest, but of founding and governing a state. His distinct policy was to unite Goths and Italians into one people, without breaking down the customs or the special privileges of either. If Goths were his soldiers, Latins were his counsellors and adminis- trators ; and he chose these among the best and ablest of the Latins, men like Boethius, Symmachus, and Cassiodoru.s. Theoderic fixed his royal residence sometimes at Verona, but mainly at Ravenna, the capital of the last Western emperors since Honorius. The first of the Teutonic kings, he caught from the Romans their taste for that great art in which the Teutonic family was in time to become so famous, and which was to preserve the Gothic name when the Gothic nations had disappeared. In the churches which he built at Ravenna, in his palace, in his tomb, he emulated the massive grandeur of the Roman builders. The kingdom of Theoderic, of which the II KINGDOM OF THEODEEIC 41 seat was in Italy, while its more loosely governed borderlands stretched from Gaul to the Danube, exercised a new and commanding influence in the group of Teutonic States which were growing up in the West. In Theoderic we have, perhaps, the first example of a definite policy of domestic alliances for public ends. He connected his house with all the German kings of the West, West Goths, Burgundians, Franks, Vandals, Thuringians. We have a curious and instructive picture of the internal administration of the new Gothic kingdom, in its various depart- ments, preserved in a large collection of the business letters of Cassiodorus, Theoderic's Latin secretary and minister. Theoderic's reign of thirty-three years, stained though it was at its close by strange out- breaks of suspicious cruelty, was the first example of a real effort on a large scale, made by the Teutonic conquerors, to pass from barbarism to civilisation, to create, out of their conquests, " a fatherland, a city, and a state." It was an attempt to give body and form, however rudely and imperfectly, to the new idea of a Christian kingdom and country, which was to supplant the idea which had hitherto held ex- clusive possession of men's minds, that of the Roman Empire. In the other Teutonic kingdoms which had come into existence in the fifth century, though in none of them were seen the statesmanship and large attempts of Theoderic, the same tendency was at work towards distinctness and consolidation. Gundobad (491-5 1 6), 42 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. the Burgundian refugee in Ricimer's camp, whom a strange chance had once invested with the power of giving an emperor to the West, had, after bloody domestic quarrels, returned to introduce some kind of law and order in his kingdom on the Rhone and Saone. The Vandal kingdom in Africa, founded, and so long sustained, by the crafty and relentless policy of Genseric, still retained the impress given to it by its founder, in being the most oppressive to the Roman population of all the barbarian kingdoms, and by being least influenced by their civilisation. The kingdom of the Western Goths, the people of Alaric, settled in Spain and Aquitaine, with Toulouse and Bordeaux for their capitals, had grown in power and extent during the last disasters of the empire. One of the last acts of the imperial government, in the very agony of its dissolution, was to surrender to the Gothic king, Euric, the volcanic highlands of Auvergne, the last refuge in the midst of his dominions of Latin culture and independence. Euric ruled over the greater part of southern Gaul and a part of Spain, and in renown and pretensions, and in a measure, too, in his attempts to adjust, by definite law, the relations of conquerors and conquered, was a counterpart, though an imperfect one, of the great king who was to create the sister kingdom of the East Goths at Ravenna. These were all Gothic kingdoms, or were con- nected with the Gothic migration and settlement ; and to the Gothic race, on the extinction of the n ARIANISM OF THE GOTHS 43 empire, 'the inheritance of its power seemed to have fallen. And besides the tie of race and neighbour- hood, these first founders of the nations of the West and South, who had not only broken up the Roman Empire, but had parcelled it out as colonists and settlers, were also bound together by the tie of religion. Goths, Burgundians, Vandals, were already Christians, when they conquered and divided the lands of the empire. They had mostly been con- verted beyond the limits of the Western Empire; and they carried with them their own bishops, and their Gothic Bible, the translation of Ulfila (310-380), the oldest written literature in any Teutonic tongue. But they had been converted and had received their Christianity on the borders of the Greek provinces of the empire, at a time when the court religion at Constantinople, under Constantius, was Arianism (337-361). The earliest Teutonic kingdoms of Christendom were Arian, either tolerant, as under Theoderic, or systematically and unsparingly per- secuting, as with the Vandals, and sometimes the West Goths. In either case, they were attached to their creed, if only as a national distinction from the Roman population. In these Gothic kingdoms, not only new political powers were forming, but a new religious power, the rival of the Catholic Church, was making its appearance in the West. This new religious power, Arianism, came into conflict with religious beliefs which had already taken the firmest hold on the Latin populations in the West and in 44 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. Africa, and it threatened whatever was deepest and most cherished in their convictions. But this Gothic supremacy was soon challenged. While their Arian creed placed them in permanent opposition to the Catholic bishops, who, in the break-up of the empire, had become the real leaders of the Latin population, other Teutonic tribes, later in the race of conquest, fresh from their old habits of savage war, and still retaining their heathen religion and their untamed ferocity, came into the field to claim their part in the spoils of the empire. In the revolutions which followed, it was no longer simply the Latin race against the Teutonic, but different members of the Teutonic stock against one another. And to the rivalry' and feuds of races, nearly allied, but strongly opposed in interests and habits, was added also the opposition of creeds. A race, not new to the wars and troubles of the later empire, was rising into importance in the north- east of Gaul, which was to dispute, and finally over- throw, the predominance of the Goths, and give a different turn to the course of Western history. This race, the Franks, was also a Teutonic one. Up to the middle of the century, they had made compara- tively but little figure in the events of the time. They had been loyal to the empire, they had furnished some of the best soldiers to the armies of Stilicho and Aetius ; they had suffered in the rush and pressure of the invading Vandals, and still more of the Huns ; but when the empire could no it THE FRANKS. CLOVIS 45 longer defend itself, they had not thought it neces- sary to keep within their earlier limits. The Salian Franks had pushed down from the Batavian and Frisian marshes, to the rivers and valleys of north- eastern Gaul. The Ripuarian Franks advanced to the country of the Meuse and Moselle. The Salian Franks had even associated a Roman or a Romanised Gaul, Aegidius, with their native chief in the leader- ship of the tribe. But in the year 481, the native leadership passed into the hands of a chief who would not endure a Roman colleague, or the narrow limits within which, in the general turmoil of the world, his tribe was cramped. He is known to history by the name of Clovis, or Chlodvig, which, through many transformations, became the later Ludwig and Louis. Clovis soon made himself feared as the most ambitious, the most unscrupulous, and the most energetic of the new Teutonic founders of states. Ten years after the fall of the Western Empire, seven years before the rise of the Gothic kingdom of Theoderic, Clovis challenged the Roman Patrician, Syagrius of Soissons, who had succeeded to Aegidius, defeated him in a pitched field, at Nogent near Soissons (486), and finally crushed Latin rivalry in northern Gaul. Ten years later (496), in another famous battle, Tolbiac (Ziilpich), near Cologne, he also crushed Teutonic rivalry, and established his supremacy over the kindred Alamanni of the Upper Rhine. Then he turned himself with bitter hostility against the Gothic power in Gaul. 46 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. The Franks hated the Goths, as the ruder and fiercer of the same stock hate those who are a degree above them in the arts of peace, and are supposed to be below them in courage and the pursuits of war. There was another cause of antipathy. The Goths were zealous Arians; and Clovis, under the influence of his wife Clotildis, the niece of the Burgundian Gundobad, and in consequence it is said of a vow made in battle at Tolbiac, had received Catholic baptism from St. Remigius of Reims. The Frank king threw his sword into the scale against the Arian cause, and became the champion and hope of the Catholic population all over Gaul. Clovis was victorious. He crippled the Burgundian kingdom (500), which was finally destroyed by his sons (534). In a bloody battle near Poitiers, he broke the power of the West Goths in Gaul ; he drove them out of Aquitaine, leaving them but a narrow slip of coast, to seek their last settlement and resting - place in Spain ; and when he died, he was recognised by all the world, by Theoderic, by the Eastern emperor, who honoured him with the title of the consulship, as the master of Gaul. Nor was his a temporary conquest. The kingdom of the West Goths and the Burgundians had become the kingdom of the Franks. The invaders had at length arrived, who were to remain. It was decided that the Franks, and not the Goths, were to direct the future destinies of Gaul and Germany, and that the Catholic faith, II JUSTINIAN, BELISAKIUS, NAKSES 47 and not Arianism, was to be the religion of these great realms. Burgundy, which was half Teutonic, was united like the Latin Aquitaine and Provence, to the fortunes of the Franks. In Spain only did the Gothic conquest, the Gothic power, the Gothic civilisation, and for a time the Gothic Arianism, maintain themselves. In the middle of the sixth century the Eastern Empire, under one of the greatest of its rulers, Justi- nian, once more put forth its still enormous strength, and maintained its unabated claims by a revival of military enterprise and prowess, not unworthy of the most famous days of Rome. Belisarius showed that Roman generalship was not extinct. By him the Vandal settlement in Africa was broken up and destroyed (534). While Theoderic lived, the Gothic kingdom of Italy was respected by the emperor; but the discord among the Goths themselves which followed his death showed how much the Gothic power in Italy had depended on one man. The empire revived its claim to the allegiance of Italy. The Gothic chiefs were defeated or slain, and the king- dom of Theoderic finally overthrown by another of Justinian's victorious generals, the Armenian Narses (553)- Under these great soldiers it seemed as if the Teutonic settlements in the West were about to be rudely shaken. Roman soldiers taught their old terrible lessons not merely to the Vandals of Africa and the Goths of Italy, but to the invading Alamanni from Germany, and the warlike Franks from Gaul 48 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. (556). In Italy, at least, for fourteen years (553- 567), till after Justinian and Belisarius were dead, the authority of the Roman Empire, exercised by Narses under the name of the Exarch of Italy, or, as it is sometimes called, of Ravenna, was once more established and obeyed. And though neither the limits of the Exarchate, nor the power of the Exarch, were afterwards what they had been under the first Exarch, Narses, the name, which continued for nearly two centuries, designated the last remain- ing territory, with the exception of the great Mediter- ranean islands, and for a time, of some portions of Spain, which the Roman emperors could claim as their own in the West. The conquests of Justinian's generals were brilliant but barren triumphs. They were the last efforts of the empire in the West, and there was not enough in the conditions of its society and government, apart from the accidental and personal qualifications of its rulers and generals, to sustain them. The course of the Teutonic invasions and settlements was inter- rupted and disturbed, diverted, but not arrested. The victories of Belisarius and Narses, and the over- throw of the Goths in Italy, were immediately followed by the irruptions and conquests of the Lombards. The Longobards (softened into the Lombards) were the last of the Teutonic invaders who settled in the western territories of the Roman Empire. They were a German tribe, whom the usual causes of II THE LOMBARDS 49 barbarian migration had brought from the banks of the Elbe to the great stream along which so many barbarian races and federations had halted, and from which they had started on their final conquests. On the Danube they had, like the Goths of Alaric and Theoderic, met other rival barbarians and the powers of the Eastern Empire. Like Alaric and Theoderic, Alboin, the adventurous king of the Lombards, instead of pursuing the course of feuds, alliances, and rivalries with his barbarian neighbours, sought a new field for his ambition in a reconquest of Italy to the Teutonic occupation. The Gothic kingdom had been finally beaten down and destroyed. Beli- sarius was dead (565). Narses, suspected and super- seded, if he did not invite the Lombard invaders, no longer commanded the Roman armies, and died about the time of the invasion (568). Alboin, with associates from many German tribes, attacked, over- ran, and occupied a great portion of Italy. Ravenna, and the maritime cities as far as Ancona, with Rome, Naples, and Venice, were still preserved to the allegiance of the emperor, and acknowledged the authority of the exarch at Ravenna. But the rest of Italy came under the dominion of the Lombard king; his numerous "dukes," almost independent chiefs, seized each his city or large territory; the Teutonic ascendency, overthrown in the overthrow of the Gothic kingdom, was again established in Italy. Lombard kings reigned, legislated, and ad- ministered at Pavia, as Theoderic had done at E 50 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. Ravenna and Verona ; and the kingdom of the Lombards, set up in the very home of the Latin race, took for two hundred years the place which the Gothic kingdom, founded by the genius of Theoderic, had only been able to keep for sixty. But Italy was never completely subdued, like Gaul, Spain, or Britain. To the last, there were three capitals, centres of national feeling and in- fluence. Besides the Lombard capital of Pavia, and the Greek capital of Ravenna, there was the Italian capital of Rome, nominally acknowledging the Greek emperor, but for the most part isolated, and growing under the popes into a sense of exceptional independ- ence. The Latin population of Italy was more obstinate than those of Gaul and Spain, in its aversion to foreigners, and in its national pride. The Lombards are said to have been the harshest and most cruel of the barbarian conquerors of Italy. The Lombards, as long as they were there, always stronger than the Greeks and Italians, were yet never strong enough to get the land and the people into their grasp. They broke up, soon after Alboin's death, into thirty -six independent dukedoms, mostly in single cities ; and though the confusion and anarchy result- ing from this drove them after ten years again to make one of these dukes their king, the Lombards failed to establish a settled kingdom. They were always less closely connected with their subjects, and more loosely united among themselves, than their Teutonic neighbours. With Rome, preserving the II THE LOMBARDS IN ITALY 51 Italian traditions and keeping up Italian memories, they continued to be barbarian and oppressive strangers, as despised as they were hated and feared. Not even their conversion from Arianism, under Agilulf (590-615), begun under the influence of a religious queen like Clotildis and Bertha, the Bavarian Theudelinda, and seconded by Pope Gregory the Great, could reconcile the two races. There was a semblance of organisation ; a division into provinces, an Austria and a Neustria, as among the Franks, a Tuscia, as in Roman times. The Lombard kings collected the " laws of the Lombards," and promul- gated regulations on the relations between Italians and Lombards. But the real masters were the great Lombard dukes, dukes of Spoleto, Benevento, Friuli, who made war among themselves and on the king, and who with the king harried and tormented what- ever was not in their domain. The Lombard history had its romantic adventures, but was void of political interest or success. There is no sign, even to the last, of their hold on Italy. The Lombards gave their name permanently to one of the noblest of Italian provinces, and they left their mark deeply on the laws, the customs, the manners, the familiar names of Italy. And in Italy their line of kings bridged over the interval from the days of Justinian, Belisarius, and Narses, to those of Charles the Great. But the Lombard settlement in Italy, like the Gothic state of Theoderic, fell before a foreign conqueror; and after having lasted longer than the 52 BEGINNING OF TUB MIDDLE AGES CHAP. Gothic and Vandal kingdoms, like them, it ultimately failed. Thus began the newer ages of Western Europe. They began in the ruins of the old state of things. The change was not a gradual passage, such as is always going on in the ordinary course of history. The times from the fifth to the eighth century, ofler an example of a real catastrophe of strange and rare violence in the progress of mankind. On such a scale and with such results it has only happened once. It stands alone, as far as we know, among the revolutions and changes of the world. Islam, which was most like it, though it was the change of a religion, yet left Asiatic civilisation, and, for the most part, the populations of Asia, where it found them. Changes as great have been since, but they have been gradual. Convulsions almost as terrific have also happened ; but they have been partial. But then, for more than three centuries, it seems as if the world and human society had been hopelessly wrecked, without prospect or hope of escape. And what gave to this misery' additional bitterness, was that there was always a considerable number of persons, sufficiently imbued with the ideas and imagi- nation of a happier time, to be alive to the contrast, and to feel more acutely the wretchedness and despair of the present The language of the Psalms alone adequately represents such feelings : " The earth is moved, the hills are carried into the midst of the tea. All the foundations of the earth are out of course." II FROM THE EMPIRE TO MIDDLE AGES 53 Just as the present crust of the earth on which we dwell is built up of the ruins of former ones, as our mountains and plains are the remains and wreck of an elder world, so nations stand on the relics and survivals of older natural and political organisations, broken up and shattered, but not annihilated. We plant our corn and wine on the debris of primeval rocks. Ancient sea bottoms are our fields, and the sites of our cities. The clay of which our bricks are moulded was poured forth in subglacial streams from long melted glaciers. The stones of which our homes are built are cut out of strata deposited in oceans which have vanished, and beds heaved up and down in tremendous jars and shocks, far beyond our experi- ence. So modern Europe has arisen out of three main elements: i. Distintegrated and ruined nations formed under the civilisation of Greece and Rome ; 2. Altered, and, to use a geological term, "meta- morphic," Teutonic races, more or less modified by contact with the Roman world ; 3. The organisation and ideas and usages of the Christian Church. With the older civilisations of the world, India, Persia, Egypt, we have to do only indirectly. With the three elements present after the destruction of the Roman Empire, we are in immediate relation ; we touch them. CHAPTER III CONDITION OF THE TEUTONIC SETTLEMENTS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE THE new settlers brought with them certain outlines of organisation. They came for the most part, not merely as armies, but as tribes ; and the tribal character became prominent in proportion as they settled. They came for the most part under kings, sometimes, apparently, of an ancient line, like the Amals among the Goths, sometimes chosen to con- duct a war or to reward a conquest. The tribe con- sisted of freemen, with their dependents, and in time their slaves, though the course of events gradually caused changes in the power, the wealth, and the rank of individuals ; and freedom of person and of vote was long at the basis of Teutonic usages, though tempered by limiting customs and by accidental differences of strength and influence. They divided the land as they settled, either adopting the old divisions, like the Pagus (Pays), or the Civitas, with other indeterminate subdivisions in Gaul, or creating CHAP, in TEUTONIC ORGANISATIONS 55 new ones of their own in the more purely Teutonic districts, the Gau, and the Mark in Germany. And as soon as they were settled, a hierarchy of chiefs grew up; Ditces, "leaders of the host" (Heerzog), over the larger provinces, Comites (Graf}, over the subordinate ones, leaders in war, magistrates in peace. The king had his special companions and faithful men, out of whom, as well as out of the local chiefs who were not dependent on the king, a nobility arose. The gathering once or twice a year of the freemen, in the divisions of the kingdom and in the kingdom as a whole, brought them continually together, either to make war, or to sanction laws and decisions. And the land was partly public, held in common by the inhabitants of the district, whether great or small ; partly held in special occupation and tenancy from the community, but not as property by individual members ; and partly held by full right of property, subject or not to claims on it, public or private. In each Teutonic settlement, there were the old inhabit- ants and the new comers. Under varying conditions, often in the proportion of two-thirds to one-third of land or produce, the original population shared the soil with the conquering minority. And for the most part conquerors and conquered lived each under their own law. But the Teutonic nations, which, in the fifth century, had not merely invaded the empire, but had made permanent settlements in it, found themselves under new conditions of life. They had exchanged 56 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. their forests and wastes for a land of ancient cities and established cultivation, in which they were still, indeed above all things, warriors, whose trade and pride was fighting, yet no longer mere foes and destroyers, but settlers, or, as it was said, "guests." The Germans, with all their barbarian rudeness and wildness, were not, like the Huns, and the Turks afterwards, hopelessly alien in mind and spirit from the Romans whom they had conquered. They had also become more or less familiar with the more civilised races for whom, in the trial of strength, they had been too strong. Some of the German tribes, especially those of the Gothic stock, had come into constant contact with the Romans, as soldiers in the imperial service, and sometimes in the court ; and further, most of these Gothic tribes had listened to the teachers and missionaries of Christianity, and had, in a partial and imperfect way, received it as their religion. When, therefore, they founded their new kingdoms in Gaul, in Spain, in Italy, the things about them were not absolutely strange to them. Still, when the time of comparative repose succeeded the excitement of conquering and of taking possession, the conquerors found themselves under altered conditions of life. They found themselves continually in the presence of three new sets of circumstances, which were from day to day impressing their minds, forcing on them new ideas, affecting their actions, favouring or inter- fering with their purposes ; and these, whether resisted in INFLUENCE OF CHURCH ON NEW NATIONS 57 or welcomed, were insensibly subjecting them to pro- cesses of change, gradual, prolonged, and sometimes intermitting, but very deep and very eventful. These changes were the beginnings, out of which by long waiting and painful steps, and dreary reactions of anarchy and darkness, the new and progressive civilisation of the European nations was to spring. The first of these influences was, the presence of the Christian Church ; the second, was the presence of Roman law and its . administrative system ; the third, was the atmosphere of Latin language and conversation in which they lived, and its rivalries with their own Teutonic speech. i. At the period of the Teutonic settlement, the Christian religion was rooted in the Latin world, and the Christian Church had insensibly attracted to itself the authority with which men spontaneously invest that which they reverence and trust. The moral and social power, which was slowly but surely slipping out of the hands of the empire, and even some measure of the political power which its officials were abdicating, was passing over to the chiefs of the re- ligious society which the empire had vainly combated, the Christian bishops. Amid the ruins of the greatest pride and the greatest strength that the world had known, the Church alone stood erect and strong. In days when men relied only on force and violence, yet only to discover, time after time, that force alone could not give and secure power, the Church ruled by the word of persuasion, by example, by knowledge, 58 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. by its higher view of life, by its obstinate hopes and visible beneficence, by its confidence in innocence, by its call to peace. The Church had faith in itself and its mission where all other faith had broken down. It might be afflicted and troubled by the disasters of the time, but its work was never arrested by them nor its courage abated. It still offered shelter and relief amid the confusion, even after war had broken into its sanctuaries, and the sword had slaughtered its ministers ; it still persisted in holding out the light from heaven, when the air was filled with storm and darkness. In the Latin cities of Italy and Gaul, while public spirit and the sense of duty were failing, and the civil chiefs of society shrank from the dangerous burdens and troubles of office, the Christian bishops, chosen by their people for qualities which men most respect, were, by virtue of these qualities, ready to accept the responsibilities which others gave up, and were taking informally the first place. It added to their influence that they were permanent in their oflfice, and some of the most remarkable of them held it for a very long period, through rapid changes in the world without. Avitus, Bishop of Vienne for thirty-five years, from 490 to 525, helped to order the Burgundian kingdom, and witnessed its fall. Caesarius of Aries, in his forty years' episcopate (501-542), saw the power of the West pass from the Goths to the Franks, and the Gothic kingdom, built up by Theoderic in Italy, over- thrown by Belisarius ; and both Caesarius and Avitus in CHRISTIAN BISHOPS 59 exercised great influence on the new society and its new masters. Remigius, who, in 496, baptized Clovis and his Franks, in his episcopate of more than seventy years (461-533), saw the last days of the Western Empire, and the victorious beginnings of the Merovin- gian line. In times of strife the bishops were mediators, ambassadors, peace- makers. In times of imminent danger men looked to them to face the peril, to inter- cede for the doomed, to cross, with no protection but their sacred character, the path of the destroyer. With the terrible and inflexible barbarians, who were deaf to Roman envoys and contemptuous of Roman soldiers, with Ricimer, with Alaric, with Attila, with Genseric, the last word, the only word listened to, was that of a fearless bishop, like Pope Leo, asking nothing for himself, but in the name of the Most High that his people should be spared. Representa- tives, not of religion only and the claims of God, but of moral order, of the rights of conscience and the sympathies of men, of the bonds and authority of human society, the Christian bishops were, when the barbarians became settlers in the empire, the only trusted guides of life. Besides these majestic and commanding forms which were continually meeting the new comers, in questions of peace and war, in council, in the inter- course of civil life, as ministers of peace, justice, and self-control, there were also the influence and the results of the religion which they professed. It was a religion which allied the most overwhelming wonders 60 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. and mysteries with the plainest and most uncompro- mising rules of action ; which, to the inquisitive, opened thoughts undreamt of concerning the love, the greatness, the terrors of an unknown God, and which taught men to be daring, heroic, and enduring, in the new way of severity to themselves, and boundless kindness and service to others. The barbarians coveted Roman wealth, they despised Roman strength; but these bold and manly races could not but be awed by what the Christian Church had saved and incor- porated of ancient Roman force and greatness of mind, heightened by the spirit of a Divine teaching and purity, in her charity, her discipline, her self- devotion and public spirit. And this was embodied in a compact and steady organisation, which, while all else was reeling and changing, showed the world the strange spectacle of stability and growth. Barbarian chiefs, like Clovis the Frank, or Gundobad the Burgundian, dimly understood the spectacle before them, and the influences which acted on them ; and, doubtless, the spectacle was a confused one, and the influences were mixed ones. But it was plain to them, in that rude and wild time, that whatever there was on earth stronger than force and greater than kings, was in that Kingdom of Righteousness which the Christian Church proclaimed, and attempted to reflect. Wayward and intractable disciples, they broke without scruple its laws in their moments of passion, and trampled on its most sacred sanctions. Ix>w and high notions were grotesquely intermixed ill BARBARIAN CONQUEST AND THE CHURCH 61 in their efforts at duty. But they saw clearly and truly that in the Christian Church and religion they had encountered a power of a different order from any that they had yet met with ; a power which they must take account of, which was not afraid of them, and would always be in their path ; which they must either accept and make terms with, or else at all hazards resolve to destroy and root out. For the most part they chose the former alternative. The immense influence of Christianity and the Church on the new nations is one of those mixed and complicated facts which it is hard adequately to exhibit, much less to analyse completely. It was the source of good and the guarantee of progress to them ; it carried with it the promise and hope of a nobler future. But the immediate effect of this con- tact of the barbarians with Christianity was to lower and injure Christianity. Christianity raised them, but it suffered itself in the effort. The clergy, and those responsible for the care of religion, in rude and disordered states of society, are often hardly judged by those who live later in calmer and more experienced times. During the worst of the wild days which followed the Teutonic conquest, there were always to be found men deeply impressed with the sense of right, and with the truth and greatness of the Divine government, full of zeal for righteousness, and dis- interested love for their brethren ; men who taught these lessons, and men who received them in sincerity. Socially, the Church, as such, was always on the side 62 BEGINNING OK THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. of peace, on the side of industry, on the side of purity, on the side of liberty for the slave and protection for the oppressed. The monasteries were the only keepers of literary tradition ; they were, still more, great agri- cultural colonies, clearing the wastes, and setting the example of improvement. They were the only seats of human labour which could hope to be spared in those lands of perpetual war. In the religious teach- ing of the clergy, the great outlines and facts of this Christian creed were strongly and firmly drawn, and they were never obliterated, though often confused by lower and meaner admixtures. It was impossible to forget the Cross of Christ ; the appeal to Our Father went up in numberless tongues and dialects all over the West, from the ignorant and the miserable, from the barbarian warrior, and perhaps his victim. But the religious aspect of the West was to be, for many centuries after the conquest, a dark and deplor- able one. From the moment that the barbarians became masters in the West, an immediate deteriora- tion becomes manifest in the clergy, in their teaching, in their standard of conduct. There is a vast change from the generation of Churchmen in Gaul who had felt the influence of the powerful writers and earnest teachers of the fourth and fifth centuries St. Hilary, St. Jerome, St. Leo, above all St. Augustine, and St. Augustine's strong and subtle antagonists, Faustus and Pelagius. Even from men like Prosper of Aquitaine, Avitus of Vienne, Casarius of Aries, the descent is great to the next generation in the sixth century, with in BARBARIANS AND ROMAN LAW 63 their coarse and superficial religion, their readiness to allow sin to buy itself off by prodigal gifts, the connivance by the best men at imposture, its direct encouragement by the average. In the Church in Gaul under the Franks, of which Gregory of Tours (540-595) has left so curious a contemporary picture, the hold of discipline on the people is seen to be of the slightest, the irregularity of all acts among the clergy is of the greatest. And these evils increased as the bishops increased in dignity and wealth. The breadth of land held and tilled by the clergy was a benefit to the country, but not to themselves. Their secularity and wide-spread corruption were the heavy price at which their hold on the barbarians, the only visible hope for the ultimate improvement of society, was purchased. 2. Further, the Teutonic settlers found themselves in the midst of a population long accustomed to the elaborate and fully developed system of Roman law, which had grown up out of the varied experience and the practised forethought of a great people, and which provided naturally and easily for the numberless questions of human life and intercourse. It is clear that Roman law greatly impressed them. They had brought with them their own unwritten customs from the other side of the Rhine, or from the banks of the Danube, according to which the rough justice of a rude and inartificial state of society was administered. Each tribe had its own customs ; and earlier or later after the settlement, in some cases very early, these 64 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. customs, expressed in Latin, were reduced to writing, and became, in contrast to the general Roman law, the peculiar law of each tribe or kingdom the " law " of the Burgundians, Visigoths, Salian and Ripuarian Franks, Alamanni, Bavarians, Lombards. These were at first rude attempts, mainly lists of offences and penalties, the penalties being for the most part money fines or compensations, according to the nationality or social rank of the injured person. But they expressly recognised for the Roman population, that is, for the larger part of the population, the Roman law. Some of the Teutonic kings, as Alaric, the West Goth (506), and Sigismund, the Burgundian (517), republished and resanctioned the Theodosian code, or selections from it, for the guidance of their Roman subjects. The next step was to incorporate in their own laws, as fresh cases arose and new ques- tions had to be adjusted, provisions adopted from the Roman law. The great Theoderic, the East Goth, about 500, drew up, by the help of his Latin coun- sellors, his Edictum, in which, borrowing from Roman principles of law, he laid down rules for barbarians and Romans alike, intended to teach respect for right and order, to protect the weak against the strong, and to guard the civilisation (civilitas) which he so valued. And, finally, as in the law of the West Goths (642-701), after they were confined to Spain, the two elements, Teutonic and Roman, were fused together into one general code of territorial instead of personal law, for a nation in which Goths and Romans had in BARBARIANS AND ROMAN LAW 65 come to be looked upon as one people. Even while the special customs of each tribe were denned and maintained, there was yet always the consciousness of a larger and more universal law all round them the vast system of laws, decrees, and judicial decisions which came down from the republic and the empire, and which, compared with the local laws of Franks or Goths, seemed like the general law of the world, as contrasted with the by-laws of some local associa- tion. This vast scientific apparatus of jurisprudence was in the hands of the Latins, understood by them, still worked and administered by them, accomplishing ends which the rough barbarian rules could not reach. The Teutonic settlers without fully under- standing the great instrument, were able to appreciate its power and advantages. Latin clerks put their Teutonic customs into the universal language. Latin experts interpreted to their kings the Roman codes. In Spain, Latin-speaking bishops, in the councils of Toledo, compiled and arranged the law of the West Goths. In the north, under the Franks, the Roman municipal system, with its magistrates and its forms, continued to act, only adjusted to a state of things in which the Teutonic count or bishop took the place of imperial presidents or consulars ; and the close Latin municipality gradually passed into a more popular body, which was to become the "commune," the " commonalty," of later times. In proportion as the Germans settled down to the conditions of civil life, bought and sold, built and planted, claimed rights or F 66 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. disputed them, made wills and inherited property, they came upon the Roman civil order, waiting for them ready made in all questions, with its strong principles and established rules. They found them- selves, as Guizot expresses it, "caught in its meshes." Its influence varied greatly ; but its traces are seen everywhere. And it was one of the chief means by which, in the union of the two races in the West and South, the Latin element gained more and more the ascendancy. 3. Again, all these Teutonic settlers, Goths, Bur- gundians, Franks, Lombards, found themselves in daily contact in the business of life with a Latin- speaking population, the leaders of which were more cultivated, and the inferior classes more numerous, than themselves. Whether as masters or as fellow- citizens, whether profiting by Latin knowledge, or employing the labour of their new dependents and slaves, they were forced to know something of Latin ; not, of course, the literary Latin which we have in books, even in the books of the time, but the Latin spoken in daily life, as it must have existed even in the days of Cicero and Virgil, the Latin spoken by the humble, coarse, and ignorant ; the Latin of soldiers, husbandmen, mechanics, foreign slaves, with its vulgar idioms and pronunciation varying in different localities, and with its varying admixtures of rude and outlandish expressions. The new masters could not deal with their woodsmen, their carpenters, their masons, on their possessions, without acquaintance in TEUTONIC SETTLERS AND LATIN LANGUAGE 67 with the provincial dialect in which the Latin of common life happened to be spoken on the spot. And whenever they had need of learning political, legal, or ecclesiastical, in the services of the Church, in the courts, or in the lawyer's office they found that learning had not attempted, and was hardly able, to speak in any other than the imperial speech of Rome. There was not yet strength enough in the German dialects, still reputed barbarous even by those who used them, to break the prescription of custom in favour of Latin, in business, in diplomacy, in all solemn and formal transactions. Their ancient speech, among Franks and Goths, remained the cherished sign of a conquering and dominant race. It was the language of the nursery and of the family, as long as the family kept itself Teutonic; it would have the preference in easy and intimate intercourse, as long as the boast of ancestry and blood remained in the court, or in the service of the court. But, besides that Franks and Goths, by degrees, married Latin wives Gallic, Italian, Spanish it was more and more the case that if the imported Teutonic was the language of predilection, the local Latin was the language of necessity or convenience. When one of the conquer- ing race wanted to show temper or inflict insult, he might say that he did not understand Latin ; but he was in reality far too shrewd and too wise to cut himself off from what he knew to be one of his indis- pensable instruments of power. For centuries, in the lands of the Teutonic conquests, two languages went 68 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. on side by side, in proportions varying in different districts and different orders of society. Each acted on the other ; but each remained distinct, borrowing words, or even forms, but keeping its own fundamental structure and elements. Where Goths, Franks, Lom- bards settled, the population must have been, in parts of it at least, more or less, bilingual. Two languages were in use, running a race for the mastery, as now in Wales and in Brittany, in many cantons of Switzer- land, in parts of the United States and Canada, in Hungary and Bohemia, and in India ; till, at last, convenience, policy, accident, gave one or other the victory. So, unperceived at the time and silent, the struggle went on between the Teutonic and Latin languages. The Teutonic had on its side the pride, not merely of rank, but of race and blood. On the other hand, the Latin had three advantages. It had numbers ; it had, what the Teutonic had not yet, a written literature ; and it had the Church, with its services, its schools, its legal forms, and its clerks. And, in a large portion of the Teutonic conquests, these were decisive, though the struggle was long. The end has been that victory has remained with the Latin, and its derivative languages, in the west and south of the continent of Europe. Thus, under influences such as these, helping or checking each other, a new society began to rise out of the ruins and fragments of the old. Germans and Romans each ceased to be what they had been, to become something new and different. The slow and ill LATINISING OF TEUTONIC NATIONS 69 often imperceptible process of change began which was to build up again in many ages the order and stability of life which in the fall of the Roman Empire seemed to have foundered ; the process which, often broken off, often ill -directed, often disappointing in its results, was yet at last to fit the new nations to take the place of the empire, which their fathers had destroyed. And one remarkable feature of the change was the final prevalence of the Latin element, wherever it had originally established itself, over the Teutonic. It was steady and certain, however pro- tracted. There was a reconquest to Roman habits and sympathies, to what a convenient mediaeval word designated as Romanitas or Latinitas of the Latin provinces which the German conquerors had seized and made their own. It is plain that, from the first, no exclusion or principle of separation pre- vailed. The two races early began to work together, in war and in political administration ; and the Ger- mans were willing to employ, even in places of high trust, the services which Latins were willing to render. In Gaul especially, as far as can be judged from names which occur in the history of his times by Gregory of Tours, the proportion of Latins to Germans among the dukes, counts, patricians, and other officers of the Frank kings, especially those connected with the revenue, seems to be something more than two to three ; among the bishops and clergy, the names and the origin are at first almost exclusively Latin, and to the end of Gregory's history barbarian names among 70 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. the high ecclesiastics are the exception. The char- acter of the Franks, as he pourtrays it, lent itself readily to this gradual mixture and fusion with the Latin provincials. As warriors, they were among the most impetuous and formidable of the German in- vaders. But they were eminently vainglorious, light- minded, unsteady, and self- indulgent ; and as they passed from the privations of their barbarian life, to an abundance and luxury unknown before, they would be singularly exposed to the fascinations and flatteries of a new form of society which had opened to them such new enjoyments. Still it was to be a long time before the Franks ceased to be, in spite of all Roman influences, a Teutonic race. In Spain the Goths yielded earlier to these influences. In Italy, the intrusive German element, more completely alien, and more passionately resisted, was vanquished or absorbed after the defeat of the Lombards. In Gaul, in the provinces south of the Loire, studded with great Latin cities, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Lyons, Vienne, Aries, Nismes, with the half Greek and half Latin Massilia, the latinising of the Franks went on faster and more completely than to the north of that river ; and it went on faster between the Loire and the Meuse than between the Meuse and the Rhine. But though the end was a long way off, yet in the end Gaul passed, through many intermediate steps, from the Franks, the most Teutonic of Teutons, to the professed leaders of the Latin race, the chiefs of " the Romance " family of nations, the French. Rome Hi DECAY OF KNOWLEDGE AND CULTUEE 71 which had latinised her conquered provinces, ulti- mately latinised also her German conquerors. But the transformation was a long one, and accom- panied with many disasters and many losses. In the civil as in the religious order of things, the downfall of Latin ascendancy, at the time of the Teutonic conquests, was the beginning of a dreary period of confusion, violence, and ignorance. While the Franks and Goths were learning the rudiments of civilised social life, the Latins were losing it from the contact and predominance of a ruder people; and the Latins were losing much more than at the time the Germans were gaining. In the sixth century, Latin literature, which had recently seen a real poet like Claudian, a philosopher like Boethius, and which scarcely a century before had seemed to be reviving in new power and life under the originality and the eloquence of Augustine, rapidly sank into a darkness which was to last for ages. The generation which saw the fall of the empire saw the sudden extinction of classical culture, and of all strong intellectual efforts. In the wild and turbulent days of the Frank, the Gothic, the Lombard kings, men had neither leisure nor heart for serious thought and study, much less for literary trifling and pastime, such as that which amused a student of the Latin classics, like Sidonius, while Auvergne was quiet under the protection of Rome. What writing there was, was for the immediate calls of the day. It was very abundant ; it was often forcible and genuine ; 72 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CUAI-. but the sense of order and beauty, the care for strength and grace, the power of handling language with a mastery over its resources, the discrimination of the weight and proportion of words, had passed away, along with the interest in all the deeper forms of intellectual inquiry and enterprise. Gregory of Tours laments quaintly and pathetically his bad grammar and unskilfulness in writing his false con- cords and wrong cases. Latin reading and writing were practised by none but those to whom they were the necessity of their profession, or the road to advancement. All but the monastic or cathedral schools seem to have disappeared in the barbarian conquest These guarded the records of literature ; and a great deal of composition proceeded from them. But it was composition which in its subjects was very monotonous, confined in range, and meagre in ideas ; while in execution, it became more and more coarse and rude, and in all but the most direct and primitive forms of expression, childishly helpless. There, in- deed, in telling some terrible story, in recording some memorable words of deep passion or emotion, it pre- served much of strength and sometimes of precision. Hut in the presence of the lawlessness and insecurity of the times, men's interest was absorbed by the actual calamities which they saw, by the vicissitudes and crimes which surrounded and oppressed them. They did not care in such days to cultivate the powers and refinements of language, and they soon lost what they had inherited of these powers and in DECAY OF KNOWLEDGE AND CULTURE 73 refinements ; they lost, too, with this, the generalising and comparing faculties, the value for exactness, for proportion, for adequacy of statement. The Teutonic conquest was followed by centuries in which we see an increasing literary depression, and a universal incapacity for efforts of strong and fruitful thought. But dark as the times were, they were the beginnings of better days ; the preparation for improvement was never intermitted. The ancient culture of the classi- cal days was gone, with its wisdom, its grandeur, its wickedness. It had failed in the trial to lead men to improvement. And the new order had not yet begun to know its strength and power of growth. The men of the new world were, like children in the nursery, in profound unconsciousness of what they were, and of what they were doing. They thought that they were but living from day to day in a world which was growing old and perishing. The monks, with their hard labour, and their fairy tales of saints, knew not, any more than the rough soldiers and lawyers, that they were making their first but neces- sary steps in a great progress. What they did was deformed by all kinds of evil and ignorance. But there were really good and even great men among them ; and the best of them did what they could at a time when in the nature of things it was impossible to do much. And when we watch their attempts, poor and weak as they might be, we are reminded perpetually that, at least, they were " faithful in little." CHAPTER IV CONQUEST OF BRITAIN BY THE ANGLES AND SAXONS IN almost complete contrast with the course of things seen in the Teutonic settlements on the continent, was the Teutonic conquest of Britain. It was more pro- tracted and gradual ; it was more thorough and com- plete ; and it was much less affected by the preceding conditions of life and society in the conquered race. The Teutonic conquerors of Britain came by sea. This of itself distinguished their invasions from the barbarian invasions of Italy, Gaul, and Spain, where whole nations, or armies as great as what were called nations, moved in vast swarms over the plains of Europe, poured across the Danube and the Rhine, or made their way over the Julian and Rhaetian Alps, into the provinces of the empire. To Britain they came only in such numbers as could be carried in a few ships of no great size, across the North Sea, from the fiords of Scandinavia and Denmark, or from the mouths and marshes of the German rivers, the Elbe and the Weser. Instead of a great horde led by CHAP. IV ENGLISH AND CONTINENTAL CONQUESTS 75 Alaric or Theoderic, parties and expeditions of adventurers, unconnected with one another, seeking plunder and the excitement of a freebooter's life rather than new homes, visited continually, as they had done under the empire, different points of the eastern and south-eastern coast of Britain. When favourable circumstances led them to settle, they still only settled in small and isolated bodies. Once settled they were fed from their original seats. Smaller bands coalesced into larger ones, and these again grew into separate kingdoms, separately pushing their boundaries against the Britons, or against one another, sometimes fused together, sometimes united for a time under the supremacy of one of them. But all this took time. The invaders gained a new father- land by a series of sporadic conquests. In the long and bitter struggle between English and " Welsh," no one battle decided the result of the strife ; no one great victory, as so often on the continent, saved the land, or delivered it to a new master. The conquerors of Britain, the founders of the English people, came straight across the sea from one small corner in the wilderness of nations, where three obscure tribes, unheeded at the time when the world was full of the name and terror of Goths and Huns, were loosely united in one of the leagues common at the time among the barbarians. Jutes, Angles, and a tribe of old " Saxons," whose fathers had moved over Europe from east to west, till they were stopped by the broad mouth of the Elbe, and by the bleak 76 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CIIAP. and dreary shores of the North Sea, had learned that the ocean, though very terrible, offered a useful war- l>ath to the warriors who dared to trust it. Accord- ing to our earliest traditions, a band of these rovers, hovering about the coast as many other bands had for many years done before them, was invited, amid the anarchy left in Britain by the retirement of the Roman legions, to help Romanised Britons against their wilder kinsfolk. What followed was on a small scale the same as that which so often happened on a large one in the empire. From allies the new comers became invaders, and the first invaders became masters of Kent. The English settlers in Kent were Jutes. Others from the same region followed. A few years later, a band of Saxons, in three ships, we are told, planted themselves on the coast of what they made Sussex. Another band in five ships land- ing more to the westward, laid the foundation of the great kingdom of Wessex. On the east coast, Angles and Saxons continued to land, to invade, to occupy, from the Thames to the Wash, from the Wash to the Humber, from the Humber to the Tweed. Then, up the rivers and along the Roman roads, the differ- ent bands pushed forward into the interior from the south coast, and from the east, with chequered fortune, but with unabated stubbornness. They encountered equal stubbornness. The native resistance was of that kind which a weaker but tenacious race offers to a stronger one ; unobservant of opportunities, slack and ineffective at critical moments, but obstinate, iv ENGLISH CONQUEST AND SETTLEMENT 77 difficult to extinguish, always ready to revive, and sometimes bursting out into a series of heroic and victorious exploits. The name of King Arthur, what- ever historical obscurity hangs about it, has left its indelible mark in our national traditions. Through continued ill -fortune, 'with intervals of success, but with general failure, this resistance was protracted and fierce. But it was in vain. The advance of the tide was slow but continuous, sometimes arrested but never retreating ; bit by bit the land was covered ; fragment by fragment of British territory broke away, and was swallowed up in the rising flood, which came not in one channel but in many, and from many different sides. The first attempts at occupation by the Jutes in Kent were, according to the English chronicles, about the middle of the fifth century, the years when southern and central Europe were trembling before the terrible king of the Huns. About fifty years later, in the times of Theoderic and Clovis, began the West Saxon advance under the house of Cerdic from the Hampshire harbours. In another half century, while Vandals and Goths were falling before the sword of Belisarius, there was an English kingdom set up in the north, and English settlements on the east coast, and along the rivers which run into the North Sea. We see the British boundary driven inwards, and forming an irregular semi-circle from the Clyde to the Land's End, flanked for a great portion of the line by the English settlements on the east, and broken into and deeply indented by the en 78 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. croachments of English conquest along the course of the Severn. Another fifty years, and the great Eng- lish kingdom of Northumbria emerges under yEthel- frith, and the line of the British territories is again severed and broken up into separate districts. Then began the second stage of the great change. The converging lines of advance met in the central part of the island. The struggle for new ground began between English tribes and kingdoms ; wars for dominion were waged by one kingdom against its neighbours ; supremacy, more or less wide and undis- puted, was won by personal qualities in one king, was lost by the want of them in another, was exercised for a time, extinguished for a time, transferred from one kingdom to another, as each was the more fortunate in its men, its circumstances, and its wars. But this continual alternation of peace and war among the English kingdoms, this perpetual trial of strength and this fluctuation between subordination and independence, was the process by which the tribes which had been a loose confederacy by the banks of the Eyder and the Elbe, were again to be- come one nation in England. The centre of power moved from the north, through the midland, to the south ; from Northumbria to Mercia, from Mercia till it became permanently fixed in Wessex. And by that time, three centuries and a half from the first Kentish inroads, by a progress most irregular and turbulent, but never interrupted, the English nation had grown into permanent form and character out of IV COMPLETENESS OF THE ENGLISH CONQUEST 79 the detached bands and tribal settlements and petty kingdoms, among which the island was at first par- celled out. It had organised institutions, a language, a spirit of its own, which it owed to no foreign source. The new people which had arisen in the West, and changed Caesar's name of Britain to Egbert's Eng- land, was, as has been truly said, " the one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome." But, perhaps, because so slow and gradual, the English conquest was complete, in a sense in which the Teutonic conquests on the mainland were not. It was the complete displacement of one race by another. How this was done, we have but imperfect accounts. We have no such record as we have of the Gothic wars, in the Latin writers, Orosius and Jornandes, in the Greeks, Zosimus, Procopius, and in the valuable fragments of reports made by Byzantine envoys and officials. We have no such almost con- temporary record, confused and unsatisfactory though it be, as we have of the Frankish conquest in Gregory of Tours. But so much is certain, that whereas in the fifth century the language of Britain was Celtic, with an admixture of Latin in the towns where the Romanised population was gathered, in the course of two hundred years, Celtic had disappeared, and Latin had been introduced afresh. From the Tamar, the Severn, and the Tweed, a new language, purely and unmixedly Teutonic, in structure, genius, and for the most part in its vocabulary, had become the speech of the country ; the speech of all freemen ; 80 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. the speech of all but slaves, bondmen, and outlaws ; the speech which gave names, if not to the rivers and the hills, or to the great walled cities remaining from the Roman times, yet to all the present divisions of the land, and to all the new settlements of men. The English conquerors, unlike the Gothic and Frankish ones, had not suffered the old population to subsist around them. Saxons and Angles, it is- the only way in which the result is to be explained, carried their conquests to extermination. They slew, they reduced to slavery, or they drove off the former inhabitants ; they cleared them away, as the Red Indians were cleared away in America. No trace of intermixture appears between the " Saxon " and the " Welsh," who hated one another with the deepest and most irreconcilable hatred. No British names appear among the servants of the English kings. No vestiges survived of British political, or social life. Romanised cities, villas which showed the marbles and mosaics of the south, Welsh hamlets and hill forts, all perished amid sack, fire, and massacre. Some lines of indestructible Roman roads, like Watling Street, some massive Roman walls, such as the fragments in London, Lincoln, and Caer-gwent, some Anglicised Roman names of cities survive, to show who were masters of the land before the English came. The Teutonic conquerors on the continent had long l>cen familiar with the Romans, whose masters they at last became. They admired their civilisation, iv COMPLETENESS OF ENGLISH CONQUEST 81 or, at least, its fruits. The nearer they came to it the more they were fascinated by its splendour, its order, its honours; like Alaric's successor Athaulf, who began with the ambition of substituting a Gothic empire for the Roman, and ended by declaring that this was a dream, and that his highest glory must be to restore the Roman Empire of law by Gothic valour. Moreover, most of them had already received Christianity, and were accustomed to hear its lessons in their mother-tongue, before they settled in Gaul and Italy. The subtle power of civilisation enthralled and transformed them, willing and proud as they were, in spite of all their northern sense of high blood, of strength, and freedom, to yield to its influences. It was not so in Britain. Angles and Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, fresh from the sea and pirate life, or from the bleak flats and sand-hills of the German or Danish coasts, knew nothing of the great civilised empire from which they were separated by the breadth of Europe. They might possibly have seen Roman soldiers in the garrisons of the British shore. They knew nothing of Roman ser- vice, of Roman cities, of Roman policy and law. And they knew nothing of Roman religion, and owned no reverence for it. When, therefore, they settled in their new homes, there was nothing to enter into competition or conflict with the customs, ideas, moral and social rules, which had governed them in their old ones. Of all things Latin, as of all things British, they made a clean sweep ; it was G 82 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. foreign to them, it was "Welsh," and they would have none of it. Other German invaders had bowed before the majesty of Christian bishops, and had often, even in the storm of an assault or the sack of a captured town, respected Christian churches. The English conquerors were fiercely heathen, and hated Christianity as the religion of those whom it was their work to destroy from off the land which was to be the land of the English. Clergy and monks perished with their brethren in the fury of the invasion, and the planting of the English nation was the utter de- struction of the Christian religion within its borders. It was under no indirect influences from a subject population that the English were to unlearn their ancient barbarism. Roman laws, which retained so much of their power on the Continent, did nothing here Out of their own customs, their own strong and broad notions of right, their own spontaneous efforts after a reasonable and suitable order of life, unaffected by foreign schooling or by imitation of foreign ways, losing perhaps some of the benefits of foreign experience, the chiefs of the new English kingdoms worked out principles and institutions which were to be the foundations of a political organisation as solid, as elastic, as enduring as that of Rome. And with respect to their religion, they did not take it by a kind of contagion from a surrounding and conquered race, more instructed and more elevated in its nobler specimens, but more corrupted in its average ones. England was an IV .CONVERSION OF ENGLAND 83 untouched field for the teachers of Christianity ; its religion had to be begun from the very beginning, as in our day among the heathen tribes of Africa and New Zealand. The English were converted, as afterwards the Germans, Scandinavians, and most of the Slave races were converted, entirely from without. A century and a half had passed, and from adven- turers and invaders they had become at home in their several shares of England, before Christianity appealed to them. Its appeal came from many and different quarters. It was the appeal almost entirely, not of force, but of persuasion and example, and it gained its hold on them with singular rapidity and power. Augustine, a missionary ambassador from Gregory the Great, the far-off bishop of Rome, the venerable but dimly known person who, in religion, answered to the Roman emperor in things worldly, won the ear, after hesitation and serious thought, of one of the English kings, Ethelbert of Kent. In the same corner of the island where the heathen invasion had begun, Augustine made good a footing in the court and among the people, and laid the foundation of the great see of Canterbury, destined to be the second see of the West (597-601). Paulinus, another Italian companion of Augustine, preached in the north, and in 627 baptized Edwin, the powerful king of Northumbria, at York. In the north the mission- aries and teachers came also from the wonderful Irish Church, at this time the sixth and seventh centuries keeping up its peculiar traditions, cherish- 84 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. ing learning and a high enthusiasm, in complete isolation from the rest of Christendom, and sending forth its missionaries far afield, with a spirit unknown elsewhere. It sent forth, not only St. Columba (565) to the Picts, and St Aidan to the English North- umbrians (635), but St. Columban (595) to the Bur- gundian Jura, the Helvetian Zurich, and the Italian cloisters of Bobbio, St. Gall (614) to the Alamans of the lake of Constance, and other less known com- rades and friends to the lands of the Franks and Bavarians, to Glarus and Chur, and the highest sources of the Rhine the apostles at once of the gospel, and of settled life, of husbandry and tillage. In the great kingdom of Mercia, with its frequent dependency the land of the East Saxons, it was bishops of the school of lona and their English disciples who founded and built up in the middle of the seventh century the Church. The Burgundian Felix (627) preached to the East Angles. A bishop from Italy, Birinus (635), sent by Pope Honorius, converted the English of Wessex. A teacher from the north, Wilfrid of York (664-709), was the apostle of the South Saxons. In the second half of the seventh century, these separate efforts began to present the aspect of an organised unity under the twenty years' vigorous rule of Archbishop Theodore (668-690), the Greek of Tarsus, who, with his friend Hadrian the African, had been sent from Rome, "the first archbishop," says Bede, "whom all the English Church obeyed." Like the conquest, the IV CAUSES OF THE CONVERSION 85 conversion of England spread from different inde- pendent centres ; the work began from them at different times, and went on in different ways, and with varying rates of progress, till at last boundaries met and became confluent, and the separate king- doms found themselves prepared to be fused into one people. And the unity of religion, attained earlier, though not without difficulties of its own, than the unity of the nation, contributed most powerfully to make Northumbrians and Mercians and West Saxons into Englishmen. With fluctuations of success and reaction, with one great and terrible struggle in the middle, of England against the new religion, under the Mercian king Penda (624-655), the English kingdoms had within a century after the landing of Augustine, become Christian. Of this great change and its incidents, a singularly curious and interesting account is given in Bede's History. The causes of it were of more than one kind ; but in the forefront must, undoubtedly, be placed the breadth and greatness of Christian ideas, and the purity, courage, enthusiasm, and indefatigable self-devotion, though not always innocent of supersti- tion, of the Christian teachers. Supposed miracles, and, alas ! sometimes evidently fraudulent ones, played their part in recommending the divine message. The sanction and authority of chiefs who were trusted and honoured, doubtless went for much with their people. But at bottom it was the teaching itself, with the evident truth of much of it, its noble- 86 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. ness, its high solemnities, its promises, and the con- sistency of its teachers, which conquered to its obedience a people whose customs and whose cir- cumstances were strongly against it. In England, as abroad, Christianity won its way, not merely and not mainly by the support of kings, not merely, though, unhappily, in part, by the worse aid of superstition and fraud, but because it was a gospel for the poor, the slave, the miserable, the ruined, a defiance to the proud, a warning to the great, a bridle to the mighty. And once received it was received with no half a mind, or half-hearted allegiance. The Anglo-Saxon Church had its strange anomalies, its deep blots, its repulsive features. Like other churches, it had to deal in its course both with grave questions and with petty quarrels. It had its rise and prime and its deep decline. But in its best days it had a straight- forward seriousness of conviction and purpose, and a fire and thoroughness of faith among its early converts, which are very much its own. Bede, like Gregory of Tours, reflects a state of society which is wild, uncontrolled, violent, full of battle and death. But the characteristic passages of Bede are passages which are full of genuine religious or moral interest, and which bear the mark of deep feeling and sym- pathy in the writer. The characteristic passages of Gregory's history of the Franks are tragedies of dark and dreadful crime, to which the stories of CEdipus and Lear are tame, and they are told with unmoved calmness and composure. THE MEROVINGIAN KINGS 87 a > O O 5 11 6 rt ti oo m mbards outwitted themselves. The next pope, Gregory III. (731-741), despairing of peace, much less of help from the Lombards against the Greeks, turned to the Franks beyond the Alps. Charles Martel was occupied, and near his end. In 741, Pope Gregory, Charles Martel, and the Emperor Leo died ; in 744, Liutprand followed them, and left a series of weak successors. But the foundation of the Frank alliance had been made ; from that time the Franks came to be looked upon as the natural protectors of the popes, and a well-understood re- ciprocation of benefits began. It was a new position for the Franks to find themselves courted and flattered by the spiritual head of Roman Christianity ; it was a new position for the Roman bishop to find himself leagued by a community of interest and by an interchange of services with the rising power of the West. Without the name of king, Charles Martel was the second founder of the Frank kingdom. He left his power and office to his two sons, one of whom, Carloman, soon voluntarily resigned his rank and retired to a monastic life at Monte Cassino. His brother, the third Pipin, Pipin the Short, or the Little, resumed his father's task of consolidating the Frank power. But he advanced a step beyond his father's policy. He resolved that the Merovingian dynasty should come to an end. Nothing is more remarkable than that at that early period of political forms and organisation, and in an age of such ready V WEAKNESS OF CLOVIS'S DESCENDANTS 113 and unscrupulous force, the name and the reality of power should have been, by a kind of constitutional fiction, not merely in different hands but in different families ; the name uninterruptedly in the family of Clovis, the reality in the hereditary Dukes of Austrasia and Mayors of the Palace. It is still more remarkable that this should have lasted undisturbed for more than half a century. A writer, almost a contemporary, Eginhard, the biographer of Charles the Great, has left a description of the forlorn and silent helplessness of the last descendants of Clovis. All the wealth, he tells us, and all the power of the State belonged to the Mayors of the Palace. " Nothing was left to the king, except the kingly name ; with long hair and flowing beard, he sat on the throne to receive envoys from all quarters, but it was only to give them the answers which he was bidden to give. His kingly title was an empty shadow, and the allowance for his support depended on the pleasure of the Mayor of the Palace. The king possessed nothing of his own but one poor farm, with a house on it, and a scanty number of attendants, to pay him necessary service and respect. He went abroad in a waggon drawn by oxen, and guided by a herdsman in the country fashion ; thus was he brought to the palace or to the annual assemblies of the people for the affairs of the realm ; thus he went home again. But the government of the kingdom, and all business, foreign or domestic, were in the hands of the Mayors of the Palace." That with such a race as the Franks this state of i 114 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. things should at last have come to an end is not surprising. What his father and grandfather had shrunk from, Pipin found himself in a position to undertake. He was sure of the help of the popes with whom his family had already established a firm alliance, and who looked to the Franks as their deliverers in their troubles with the rival Teutonic race which ruled in Italy. Pipin appealed to the pope (Zacharias) to say, whether it was right that he who had no kingly power should have the kingly name. Pope Zacharias gave the answer which it was intended he should give. He sanctioned the deposi- tion of the last Merovingian king. Childeric III., the last of the line of Clovis, passed without a struggle a monk with his hair shorn, and so incapable of any secular dignity from his palace or his farm, to a monastery. In the annual assembly of the bishops and great men at Soissons, Pipin was proclaimed king of the Franks (March, 751, or 752), and he received from the English apostle of Germany, Boniface, arch- bishop of Mainz, the consecration of the Church. Two years later, a pope (Stephen II.) for the first time crossed the Alps, and was seen in the West He came to press again for aid against the Lombards. The help was promised ; and then from his hands, at St Denis, in 754, Pipin and his two sons, Charles, a boy about twelve years old, and his younger brother Carloman, received the anointing which hallowed their kingship, and which, as the pope held, made them true kings. V DEPOSITION OF CHILDERIC III. 115 The deposition of Childeric III., whatever was the form of the pope's sanction to it, was at any rate the first instance of such interference on the part of the popes. The pope's sanction, probably very vague at the time, and very obscurely recorded, was the subject at a later period of fierce debates, as to its authority and real bearing. But the whole transaction was the first exercise, on the part of the popes, of a claim to change the allegiance of subjects, to authorise the removal of one king and the election of another. Pope Zacharias and his successors acted, apparently, in this first instance, as arbiters, the most venerable that could be found, consulted on matters deeply important to the Frank nation ; they exercised a power which in this case they were prompted to claim and were invited to use. Unfortunately they were not disinterested arbiters. Their decision was influenced by their own advantages and hopes; the coronation of the new king was the result of a bargain ; and for the service which they rendered they were paid in cities and provinces. Pipin, having in his company the pope who had crowned him with a solemnity new among Teutonic kings, crossed the Alps, humbled Aistulf the Lombard king, and forced him to give security that he would respect the rights and property of St. Peter. Aistulf evaded his engage- ment, and Pipin compelled him, after a second over- throw, to become tributary to the Frank kingdom, and to cede to his conqueror all that he had recently won of the territory still left to the Greek emperor in 116 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP, v the north of Italy : the exarchate of Ravenna, and the Flaminian " Pentapolis," an expression for the lands and cities between the Apennines and the Adriatic, from Ferrara to Ancona. This territory the Frank king presented as a donation to St. Peter ; it became, with some additions, south of Ancona and west of the Apennines, the Papal State. The real donation of the Prankish king was shortly afterwards supported by the production of what purported to be a still older donation : the famous forged " donation " of Constantine. Thus, from the anointing at St Denis of the second kingly line of the Franks, arose, in the first place, the temporal dominion of the popes, held in the beginning as a temporal lordship under the overlordship of the king or emperor, then claimed by them as independent princes in absolute sove- reignty : and next, their pretensions, broadening out indefinitely from this precedent, to interfere in the political and civil affairs of Christendom, to dispose of kingdoms, to set up and degrade kings. CHAPTER VI THE ROMAN EMPIRE IN THE EAST WHILE in the West civilised order was disturbed and broken up, to be reconstructed on a new basis, in the East it went on continuously from the days of Constantine till its temporary interruption by the crusaders (1203-1261), and its destruction by the Ottomans (1453). Constantine had transplanted the Roman name, the centre of Roman power, and much of what was Roman in ideas and habits, to Byzantium, the New Rome. There, without losing its deeply impressed imperial character, it also became Greek, and it became Christian. The result was that re- markable empire, which, though since its fall it has become a by-word, was, when it was standing, the wonder and the envy of the barbarian world, the mysterious " Micklegarth " " the Great City, the Town of towns " of the northern legends. It inherited and it retained the great Roman traditions of centralisation, of scientific jurisprudence, of elaborate and systematic administration. It worked upon an unbroken experi- 118 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. ence of government, on unbroken habits of organisa- tion, as familiar and easy to it, as it was difficult in the West It improved and perfected the great legacy which it had received of republican and imperial law. It often exhibited what seemed to be hopeless feeble- ness and decay ; but beneath these appearances were the permanent elements of vast and enduring strength. Amid the convulsions and changes of the West, it lasted unchanged for more than ten centuries, almost the same in language, in spirit, and even in its ways and forms, under the last Constantine as under the first For ten centuries, in spite of terrible disasters, bloody revolutions, loss of provinces, domestic misrule, itself maimed, weakened, unprosperous, it yet main- tained itself, the unaided outpost of Christendom, against the fiercest assaults, not only of swarming barbarian hordes, but of the victorious enthusiasts of Islam. It had, indeed, in full measure, the vices of an over -cultivation, which is not braced by a corre- sponding moral force and elevation. Much in it was degenerate, hypocritical, effete, corrupt, degraded ; it had many of the faults of European civilisation in the eighteenth century. But it is idle to talk of mere weakness in an empire which for i ooo years preserved civilised society, laws, institutions, commerce, arts, amid the most tremendous shocks and dangers ; which could bear to be so badly, cruelly, feebly governed, as certainly it often was, without falling to pieces before its enemies. In truth, during all the dark days of trouble in the West, contemporary with VI CIVILISATION IN EASTEEN EMPIRE 119 its rude attempts and beginnings of social order, there was on the Bosporus one of the most magnificent cities that the world has seen. In it, as at Rome and at Venice, was centralised a power, strong in its resources of government, in its experience and skill to use its vast materials and its varied populations, in the great wealth created by an extended and active commerce, in the knowledge how to apply it, in the possession of all the mechanical and scientific experi- ence of those ages. In it ruled a succession of men, most various in character and fortune, many very bad and very incapable, but among them a large proportion who were of the stamp and force of those who save states. In it, the literary tradition, inherited from Antioch, from Athens, from Alexandria, still survived, and though taste and power might decline, they never failed as they did in the West, and they sometimes rose to a respectable standard. And in it, the visitor from the rude West might find a court, with its pomp and luxury, its refinement, its politeness, its etiquette, which, long after the days of Charles, Alfred, and Otto, was to the courts of the Franks and English, what the Court of Versailles and St. James were to the Court of Peter the Great. The Eastern Empire did not at once, either after the partition between the sons of Theodosius (395), or after the deposition or abdication of the last Western emperor (476), lose its connexion with the West. Long after the separation in fact had come, the idea of the unity, the unanimttas, of the empire 120 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. lasted. The Eastern emperor, Zeno (474-491), had received from Odoacer the insignia of the dethroned Augustulus, in token that the world only needed one emperor; and he was acknowledged, in form and courtesy, at least by Goths and Franks, as the head of the Roman world. Further, he was so acknow- ledged by the popes, who were becoming more and more the centres of genuine Roman influence, amid the visible triumph of the new races. And it was long before the hope and purpose of exacting real obedience were abandoned at Constantinople. In one signal instance this purpose was victoriously carried out. This was the reconquest of Italy, Africa, and part of Spain, under Justinian. In the year after the great Theoderic died (526), the most famous in the line of Eastern emperors, since Constantino, began his long and eventful reign (527-565). Justi- nian was born a Slavonian peasant, near what then was Sardica, and is now Sofia ; his original Slave name, (Jfrawda, was latinised into Justinian, when he became an officer in the imperial guard. Since the death of the second Theodosius (450), the Eastern emperors had been, as they were continually to be, men not of Roman or Greek, but of barbarian or half- barbarian origin, whom the imperial city and sen-ice attracted, naturalised, and clothed with civil- ised names and Roman character. Justinian's reign, so great and so unhappy, was marked by magnificent works, the administrative organisation of the empire, the great buildings at Constantinople, the last and VI JUSTINIAN 121 grandest codification of Roman law. But it was also marked by domestic shame, by sanguinary factions, by all the vices and crimes of a rapacious and un- grateful despotism. Yet it seemed for a while like the revival of the power and fortune of Rome. Justinian rose to the highest ideas of imperial ambition ; and he was served by two great masters of war, foreigners in origin like himself, Belisarius the Thracian, and Narses the Armenian, who were able to turn to full account the resources, still enormous, of the empire, its immense riches, its technical and mechanical skill, its supplies of troops, its military traditions, its command of the sea. Africa was wrested from the Vandals (534) ; Italy from the suc- cessors of Theoderic ; much of Spain from the West Goths. The Vandals were absolutely swept away, though Africa never recovered from their century of misrule. Italy was more fiercely disputed (535-553). According as Belisarius was absent or present, the contest swayed backwards and forwards. Rome was more than once taken and retaken. Totila, the Goth, able, brave, and dangerous, at one moment had it in his power, and had actually taken the momentous resolution, to destroy the city of Rome from the face of the earth. But what Belisarius began, Narses finished. Totila was slain ; the Gothic power perished (553). Yet the reconquest was transient. After Narses came the Lombards (568), and then the Saracens. It was not the destiny of Byzantium to rule the world, or to govern alien and 122 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. distant provinces. It retired within its eastern borders. But it long kept a hold on maritime dis- tricts in Italy, Ravenna, the Pentapolis, Calabria, and Naples. For a still longer time it held Sicily. It gave titles to barbarian kings like Clovis, and legalised their conquests. And till the great change in the opening of the ninth century, it kept not merely its Exarch at Ravenna, but its Count at Rome, and claimed and sometimes compelled the allegiance of the popes. The emperor, regarded as invested with an almost divine commission, inherited the despotic powers of the line of Augustus and Constantine ; and according as he used this vast power with ability or weakness, the fortune of the empire rose and fell. Yet the empire itself was held together by great networks and scaffoldings, of long date, and of immense strength and tenacity, which subsisted, independently of what the emperor did or suffered, and which to a certain degree limited his absolute power. There was a great system of local government, and another of civil administration ; and there was a powerful and popular Church, identified with the interests and sympathies of the people, and much mixed up with them, even in its monastic elements. And whatever might be- come of the emperor, there was in the empire itself a stability and solidity, of which there is yet no trace in the West. It had all the vices, the weaknesses, the failures of a despotic government of the modern type ; but it had also the experience, the trained habits of VI POWER OF RESISTANCE 123 order and industry, the enlightenment and the re- sources, which distinguish civilised governments, whether free or absolute, from the unpractised ap- prenticeship of those whose political history is yet beginning, and which, under ordinary circumstances, impart firmness and strength unattainable without them. What is certain is, that the Eastern Empire was able to withstand the continued pressure of its ever- renewed enemies with continued success. It suffered fearfully in the effort. The Avars, the Turkish Bulgarians, the Hungarian Magyars, the many tribes of the Eastern Slaves, the Persians, and at last the Saracens, the Moguls, the Seljuks, and the Ottomans, assaulted, insulted, maimed the empire. Besides them came enemies equally formidable, the rough Prankish and Norman counts and barons who led the first crusade (1096); the more ambitious ones who, with the merchant princes of Venice, led the fourth (1203). The empire passed through the greatest vicissitudes of prosperity and disaster. Province after province was rent away from it. Its population was thinned, its wealth destroyed by ravages which it could not check. It lost Africa, Spain, Egypt, Syria, Asia up to the Bosporus. It was hemmed in by Bulgarians and Slaves in Europe. Yet during these centuries of defensive war and often of misfortune, the empire resisted ; and, in spite of all, it cultivated the arts and industries of peace, as they were cultivated nowhere else in Europe, and showed in Constanti- 124 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. nople a capital which in splendour and magnificence no other realm could rival. This continuation of the old traditions of civilisa- tion amid the turbulence and the uncertainties of Western Europe, is the characteristic feature of interest in the Eastern Empire It had, indeed, as a finished despotism, much that was evil, much that involved ultimate ruin ; but besides its natural coherence and toughness, the mischiefs which en- dangered it were continually arrested by rulers of high and strong character. Time after time, when its fall seemed at hand, when faction, or mutiny, or vile court intrigues had shaken it, when the wicked- ness and folly of some tyrant, or the madness and cruelty of some ambitious woman had coincided with the strength at the moment of some foreign barbarian to threaten its existence, it was redeemed and saved by some great or some able emperor. Fortune, as we call it, doubtless, in its ten centuries, must have counted for much in its wonderful escapes, in its many deliverances. But much was owing to the pre- ponderance, in spite of all drawbacks, of superior civilisation, experience, and intelligence. Terrible and revolting stories are common both to East and West, of bloodshed, treachery, and passion ; but Byzantine vices as well as virtues, unlike those of the West, are those of a society which has inherited a long training and cultivation. No writer of the tenth century in the West, certainly no emperor or king, could possibly have written on politics, history, gco- VI SETTLEMENT OF BARBAEIANS 125 graphy, statistics, military tactics, agriculture, as the Byzantine emperor, " born in the purple," Constantine Porphyrogenitus. The difference between East and West, in all that comes by long familiarity with the resources of cultivated intellect, and by inherited skill, cannot be better measured than by comparing his writings with the vigorous, but rude, compositions of the court of Charles the Great, or the efforts of Alfred, noble as they were, to begin an English literature. Yet the Eastern Empire suffered even more than the West from the neighbourhood of its barbarian enemies. The tribes of the Hunnish or Turkish stock, and the Slave races which had taken the places left vacant by the great Teutonic movement of the Vandals, Goths, and Lombards to the West, pressed continually on the Eastern Empire, as they did on the Franks, Bavarians, and Saxons, and with more disastrous effects. The countries to the south of the Danube, between the Eastern Alps, the Adriatic, the Euxine, and the mountains of Greece, gradually became filled with the Slave races, which, unlike the earlier Gothic tribes, became rooted there, and have kept hold of them till this day. As usual, they began by ravaging, and ended by occupation and settle- ment. But their restless and predatory habits long gave trouble to the empire. Its policy varied between keeping them quiet by annual subsidies, settling them as colonists to hold one another in check, as Heraclius (630-638) brought down the Servians and Croats against the Avars, taking them into pay as 126 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. soldiers, or inflicting chastisement by military ex- peditions. The Slaves, however, were many of them agricultural communities, and they colonised. But behind the Slaves were the more destructive and untamable Turks, in their various forms, Turks proper, first known by that name in the sixth century, with whom, in the heart of central Asia, the Byzan- tine emperors kept up an interchange of ambassadors, and the nearer and more dangerous tribes of the same stock, the Avars and the Bulgarians, who had been conquered and fled before their Eastern kin- dreds. All these tribes, Turkish or Slave, pushed their expeditions sometimes to the walls of Constan- tinople, and no province of the empire was safe from them. Its military power, when fairly brought against them, was in the long run too strong for them. The Huns of Zabergan were driven off in the last victory gained by Belisarius (559). The Avars and their Slavonian allies were humbled by the generals of the Emperor Maurice (589-600). But the control of the empire never became strong enough to enforce peace and order in the countries on the Danube. Barbarian kingdoms, like that of the Avars and then of the Bulgarians, rose and fell. In spite of all the insecurity and ruin, new nations, agricultural as well as pastoral, grew up in a rude fashion, yet with definite traditions, Ad with peculiar institutions, in the rich plains and the highlands between the Adri- atic and the Euxine. Such were the Western agri cultural Slaves, whom Heraclius planted between the vi PEESIAN WAES 127 Danube and the Adriatic, and who became the Croats, Servians, and Bosnians of later history. In time the Slave races, and those which, like the Bul- garians, adopted their language and became fused with them, received Christianity. The German missionaries from the Frank Empire encountered among them the Greek brother apostles of the Slaves, Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica (860-885), the translators of the Scriptures, perhaps the inventors of the Slave alphabet, certainly among the most inde- fatigable missionaries of the Christian Church. Partly in concert, partly in rivalry, the German bishops and the Greek monks laboured to teach and humanise the Slaves. The Latin and Greek Churches strove and often intrigued for the allegiance of the Slave converts. In the Western countries they became obedient to the pope. In the territories of the empire, Bulgarians and Servians, as after them, the Russians, accepted the teaching of the Eastern Church, brought to them in their mother tongue. But the northern border of the empire was a land in which disorder and lawlessness became chronic. And a great state, of which scientific law was one of the characteristic features, was powerless to leave the impression of law on the barbarian settlers within its territories. On its Eastern border, the hereditary war with Persia, under the dynasty of the Sassanian kings, the destroyers (226) of the Parthian kingdom, and the inheritors of its long feud with the Republic and the 128 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. Empire, continued to damage and sometimes to menace the empire, till it gave place to one still more formidable, the long struggle with the Maho- metan invasion, first under the Arabs, then under the different Turkish dynasties. Justinian had been suc- ceeded by a series of emperors, men of unusual excellence but not fortunate. The last of them, the Cappadocian Maurice (582-602), was murdered by a worthless and cruel soldier, the Cappadocian Phocas (602-610); but the hopes of the empire were restored by the accession of a man of Latin nurture and sympathies, the African, Heraclius (610). Under Heraclius, it seemed as if the empire, reformed and reinvigorated, were to retrieve its fortunes. He met his difficult and threatening circumstances with cour- age, judgment, and masterly ability. The stress of war had lately gone heavily against the empire. The Persians, under a famous king, Khosrou, or Chosroes Nushirvan, had broken through the Roman line of fortresses. Khosrou had stormed and ruined Antioch and other cities of Syria, and, in spite of the successes of Belisarius, imposed a tribute on Justinian, as the price of a fifty years' truce (540-562). Under Jus- tinian's successors, with one short interval under Maurice, the Persian ravages had been uninterrupted, and were drawing nearer and nearer to the capital. Heraclius, at his accession, found himself with an empire in disorder, between two formidable enemies, sometimes in alliance the Avars on the north, and the Persians, under a second Khosrou, on the east VI HERACLIUS 129 The Persians were carrying all before them. For ten years (617-627) they were masters of Egypt. For ten years they were encamped within view of the palace of Constantinople. They had plundered Jeru- salem, and carried off the sacred relics and the Christian patriarch to Persia. They were masters from the Black Sea to Cyrene. They would not hear of peace. So dark seemed the prospect that for a time Heraclius meditated the transfer of the seat of empire from Byzantium to Latin Carthage. But the thought was a transient one. He never really lost heart. Without hurry, with undaunted patience, with steady and perfect skill, he spent his first years in re- storing order in the empire and the army. Then con- fident in the strength which he had left in Europe, he sprang forth on the Persians. In a series of brilliant and triumphant campaigns (622-628), he recovered the provinces and the boundaries of the empire, he penetrated into Persia and captured the royal palace, bringing back in triumph the spoils of Jerusalem (627); and from the terrible blows inflicted upon it, the Persian power finally sank. Its next assailants were the Mahometan Saracens, just starting in their career of conquest, and it fell at once before them. But the vanquisher of Persia had also to encounter the Saracens. And, whatever be the explanation, whether from the treachery of his officers, or from political or religious disaffection, Heraclius, who had rescued the eastern provinces from the Persians, was helpless to prevent them from falling a prey to the K 130 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. soldiers of Abubekr and Omar. The end of the reign of Heraclius saw the beginning, the alarming beginning, of that invasion of the Mahometan powers of Asia, which was to become henceforth the standing peril of the Eastern Empire, which was to cripple it and cut short its borders, and which, at last, was to destroy it. Peace was hardly made between Hera- clius and the Persians, before the Arabs appeared in Syria (628-633). With Heraclius, the great captain and conqueror, still on the spot, they took Damascus before his eyes (635). Jerusalem, Emesa, Aleppo, Antioch fell one after another. He had to fly from the scenes of his glory ; and before he died, he heard the portentous tidings of the capitulation of Alex- andria, and of the conquest of Egypt by Amrou and the enthusiasts of the new religion. The reign of Heraclius, which had promised to re-establish the civilisation and majestic peace of Rome, the fame of which was recognised and embellished with fables at the court of the Frank king Dagobert, ended with the sudden appearance of an irresistible power in the East which was to extinguish those hopes for ever. But the final catastrophe was not to be for more than 800 years. The family of the great Heraclius furnished a succession of degenerate emperors, some of them mischievous and cruel tyrants, whose reigns coincided with the later Merovingian times, and the rise of the Mayors of the Palace. It was a time in the East, as well as in the West, of public confusion VI SARACEN CONQUESTS 131 and decline. During the hundred years of the rule of the family of Heraclius, the Saracens extended their conquests round the Mediterranean, and at length into Spain and Gaul, and twice laid siege to Constan- tinople itself. But if they were rending away the provinces of the empire, and even daring to strike at its heart, they learned also how great, even in its time of distress and defeat, were its defensive resources and inherent strength. It could bear, without giving way, the vices and weakness of its government, even in this hour of extreme danger, and before the most formid- able of assailants in the very flush of their triumph. Nothing had yet arrested the Saracens. Before them all the great cities of the East had fallen. Neither the sea nor the deserts had been a barrier to them. They had overthrown the Teutonic Goths of Spain as easily as Persians and Syrians. They were unchecked for a hundred years, from the death of Mohammed till the victory of the Franks and Charles Martel at Poitiers (632-732). Their power was acknowledged from the Oxus and the Indus to the Atlantic. But they twice recoiled from the walls of Constantinople. After the rapid changes of emperors which took place on the extinction of the family of Heraclius, another of those foreign soldiers, who, while the constitution of the empire went on unaltered, made the most vigorous chiefs of the executive power, was proclaimed emperor by the troops of Asia, and he founded an imperial line which lasted till the days of Charles the Great. This was the Isaurian, Leo III., known as 132 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. the Iconoclast the Image-breaker. He, like Hera- clius, received the empire in an hour of great peril. The Saracens, with the fame of their astonishing conquests, were now a second time before Constanti- nople. But Leo deserves with Charles Martel the glory of daring to believe that they were not irresist- ible. He forced them to retire from before Constan- tinople (716-18), and thus checked them definitively in Eastern Europe. Under Leo's vigorous govern- ment, the empire rose from the decline into which it had fallen under the degenerate family of Heraclius. Few imperial lines had more repulsive features than the Isaurian. But it was a line of able and resolute men. The empire under them assumed a narrower compass, and, having lost Africa, Egypt, and Syria, passed into its more distinctive " Byzantine " phase. But if its pretensions were lowered, its power was more concentrated. Greater vigour was thrown into the administration ; population increased, and with it commerce and wealth ; the Slave agricultural settle- ments throve only too well for the older inhabitants ; the cities were thickly peopled; the army was well organised and trained ; the administration of the provinces was systematically carried out, and in spite of frequent arbitrary and cruel acts of power the ordinary rule of the law was maintained. Notwith- standing the incorrigible vices and inconsistencies of the court, an improved moral tone became discernible lx>th in lay and ecclesiastical society ; and, to quote the latest and most careful historian of the Eastern VI ISAURIAN AND MACEDONIAN EMPERORS 133 Empire, Mr. Finlay, "in the times of the Isaurian emperors, and their successors of the Macedonian line " a period which corresponded to the renewed Frank kingdom under Pipin and Charles, and the first Carolingians "a declining empire was saved by moral vigour in society, and the strong efforts of the central power." But every expression of praise in these ages of the world must be comparative. When the ad- ministration was wisest, the law most just, the army most in order, commerce most thriving when the condition of the people was most prosperous, and the public enemy on the north or east most successfully repelled yet, with scarcely a variation, the court was corrupt and vicious, and frequently infested with fashions of hypocritical, or grossly inconsistent, devo- tion. And the ancient and widely-spread vice of cruelty, not yet, and not for many ages subdued by its natural enemy, Christianity, was still, in forms of the most atrocious barbarity, the regular resource not merely of those who feared and hated, and of those who punished, but of those who had to compel obedience, or to anticipate and guard against danger, whether as soldiers, or as civil rulers. Some of the most dreadful incidents of horrible ferocity ever re- corded, mark the history of the Eastern Empire, under the conduct of its ablest and most successful rulers. The political and military events of the East did not much affect things in the West. Embassies passed to and fro; once, in these times, an emperor (Con- stans II. 641-668) appeared at Rome, and even 134 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. exiled a Roman bishop (Pope Martin I. 649-655); and there were a few royal marriages, especially when there came to be emperors in the West But the Eastern Empire was of much importance in its influ- ence on the ideas of kingly power, as they developed themselves in the contemporaneous society of Western Europe. The great emperor, Augustus, Basilfus, at Constantinople, was the type and standard looked up to with admiration and envy by the kings of the Franks and even of the English. His dignity was an example and precedent of boundless power, and of extravagant homage to the person of the prince. In civil matters there was much in the rooted national ideas and habits of the West to tone down these exaggerations ; but his prerogatives suggested great pretensions in regard to religion. At Constantinople, the theory of a divine and sacred supremacy in the sphere of religion, was carried out to mischievous lengths. Constantine's (31 1-337) policy, high-handed as it was, had been really to leave the Church to settle questions itself, to speak its own mind and to define its own belief by its legitimate organs. His successor Constantius (337-361) reversed this. He claimed to be the arbiter and judge of religious controversies. He claimed for the emperor the right of prescribing creeds, and he imposed Arianism on the empire. A belief which was not the real belief of the Church, in due time was shaken off. But the bad and tempting precedent had been set of bringing the secular power, though in conjunction with the recognised organs of VI RELIGIOUS SUPREMACY OF EMPERORS 135 the Church, to interfere in questions of pure theology. These questions at the beginning of Church history excited the profoundest interest, for they related to the object of Christian worship, and to the central truths and real meaning of the facts of the Christian redemption. Instead of leaving them fairly to the only possible authority, the great councils of the Church, and its natural representatives for, if they were not of authority, there was no other the em- perors took on themselves more and more to make their own judgment the law of public belief, to direct the issues of the conflicts of religious opinion, to dictate the terms of comprehension, to enforce unity of con- viction and language by stringent and penal laws. And the usurpation became constitutional by the readiness of the bishops of the Church to accept and authorise the interference of the emperor, when it was on their side and directed against opponents, and by giving a sanction, tacit or express, to the detestable and fatal violence which too often accom- panied controversies so momentous. With the later emperors, such as Justinian and Heraclius, it was less a strength of personal belief, than an impatience of disputes and contradiction, and a fear, sometimes not an unreasonable fear, of political troubles, that directed their policy. Constantius attempted to im- pose a dogma ; his successors, to express and enforce a compromise in which great controversies were to end. The rude barbarian soldier, Zeno, by a formu- lary of his own, attempted vainly to put an end to 136 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. the divisions of the Church arising out of the rival heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches, as to the conse- quences which flow from the idea of the Incarnation. Justinian exercised his imperial supremacy in religion in the most extravagant and the most fruitless manner (527-565). And in the subtle but dangerous contro- versy which followed, on the reality of the moral con- stitution of our Lord's human nature, the Monothelite controversy, Heraclius tried, like Zeno, and like Zeno in vain, to impose terms of his own by the imperial authority on the consciences and convictions of those who felt the interest of the question. Under Leo the Isaurian and his line, the imperial claim was extended from doctrines to the usages of the Church (717-792). Superstition had without doubt gathered round the customary use in worship of devotional pictures and images ; and it is possible that the taunts of the victorious Mahometans may have made them more odious to the rude and impatient soldier. But on the strength of his claims as supreme ruler of religion, he attacked the abuses with an unintelligent and in- temperate violence, which was mischievous in itself and gave the utmost advantage to the defenders of what was indefensible. He, and still more his son Constantine V., arrayed against themselves the self- respect, the good sense, the conscience, the piety, of the time, as well as its prejudiced bigotry and super- stition. After the most abominable cruelties and persecution, they utterly failed in checking the abuses they aimed at ; and they brought about a reaction vi EASTEEN AND WESTEEN CHUECHES 137 which hindered any reasonable settlement of a matter which reason was eminently competent to settle, and which the soberer temper of Charles the Great showed the way to settle with moderation and wisdom. The tyranny with which the emperors enforced their authority and their own personal opinions aggravated the violence and mischief of the disputes. It led in more than one case to great and lasting schisms. It was copied by those who suffered from it. Worse still, it became accepted as part of the royal preroga- tive, when Charles the Great came, though with greater moderation than the Eastern emperors, to carry out his office as guardian, reformer, and over- looker of the religious interests of his kingdom. And it led to confusions between the domain of conscience, and the powers of the State, which have caused infinite harm and misery in civilised society, and which have not yet been got rid of. Not the least of the irre- parable mischiefs which it occasioned under the successors of Leo the Iconoclast was the impulse which it gave to the rising ambition of the popes to claim a rival and universal supremacy, and to the quarrels, accidental and comparatively insignificant in themselves, which ultimately determined the perman- ent separation of the Eastern and Western Churches. Under the tyranny of the emperor, patriarchs and bishops were deposed and replaced at his will. In one of these many transactions, a deposed and ill- used patriarch, Ignatius, hopeless at Constantinople, appealed against his rival Photius, to the pope. It 138 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. VI was an appeal for justice against wrong for protec- tion and countenance abroad, where none could be had at home. Such appeals had been often made ; it was a time when men appealed to whatever power within reach seemed likely to help them. But the judge who was now appealed to as arbiter in this personal quarrel, was the first pope of the type after- wards to be so frequent, the daring and imperious Nicolas I. (858-867). Supporting a just cause against intrigue and despotism, he put his own claims to redress it, and to punish the wrong-doers, on assump- tions of authority as extravagant as those of the emperor. The dispute gradually became compli- cated with doctrinal questions, and got into a shape in which it became irreconcilable. The pope ex- communicated Photius (863), and Photius excom- municated Nicolas (867). It might have seemed but a conflict which would pass away, as more than one such conflict had passed, with those who were parties to it. Nicolas died soon after (867), and Photius, after many falls and restorations, lived to be at last acknowledged by a pope, John VIII. (879). But the wound in fact proved to have been a fatal one, and could not be healed. And the great schism of East and West dates from the high-handed assertion of Roman spiritual superiority, provoked by the wanton insolence of imperial despotism. CHAPTER VII CHARLES THE GREAT, KING OF THE FRANKS, 768-800 EMPEROR OF THE ROMANS, 800-814 THE change in the Frank line of kings in the middle of the eighth century (752) was an event of great and wide importance. Under the race of Clovis, the history of the Franks, though they were the leading nation of the West, was, with the exception of their chronic struggle with the kindred German tribes on the border, and occasional and aimless inroads into Spain and Italy, confined within their own limits. Their dealings with other nations, and even with the pope, the centre of the ecclesiastical system, were few and unimportant. But with Charles Martel and his sons the range of Frank history widens, and it begins to affect the general course of European history. The first care of these able rulers was to consolidate once more the strength of the Franks. Conscious how great it was, they gathered up again under a firm hand the loosely-compacted and fast-dissolving elements of the Frank power. They maintained the 140 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. claim of the Franks to supremacy over their ruder kindred in Alamannia, Bavaria, Thuringia, and even, though with more trouble, over the Saxons. By their vigour and determined perseverance, they beat down at last the obstinate and dangerous revolt of Aquitaine, which, under a line of powerful dukes, Teutonic in name, but southern in feeling, was fast assuming the character of a war of national independence on the part of the Latin South against the Teutonic North. Pipin, at his death (768), had reunited once more under one king all the conquests of Clovis and his successors. And having done this, the Frank kings departed from their former isolation, and entered into new relations with the world outside them. They did three things, i. Carrying on the alliance of Charles Martel with the popes, they founded and built up, as has been already said, the temporal dominion of the papacy, and gave a new importance to the politi- cal influence of the popes in Europe. 2. Next, as a consequence of their close relations with the popes, they revived in their family the name of the Roman Empire and the dignity of the Roman emperor, long suspended in the West, which were to pass, after them, through many hands and many lines, but were never to be extinct again until the beginning of our own century. 3. And lastly, they laid the foundations of modern Germany, and decisively reclaimed it from its primi- tive barbarism to Christendom and to civilisation. What Pipin had begun, and begun with sagacity and force, was carried on by a yet stronger hand, on vii CHAKLES THE GREAT 141 a larger scale, and in the course of a longer reign. Pipin died in 768, and the kingdom of the Franks, according to a Frank rule of inheritance, or an idea of expediency which no one then dared to break through, was, with the consent of all the Franks, shared, or, more properly, governed in partnership, by his two sons, Charles and Carloman, who with their father had received the dignity of kings from Pope Stephen in 754. The risks of dissension between them were averted, and the course of history deter- mined, by the early death of Carloman. In 771 Charles became the sole king of the Franks. In our materials for knowledge, as well as in the character of the events, we pass into a new stage with the appear- ance of Charles, whom his own age, at least after his death, was to name the Great. We at once acquire a mass of contemporary information, meagre, indeed, compared with more recent records and with many older, but in comparison with those of the preceding times, both full and trustworthy. Of Charles we have a contemporary biography, the first instance of a lay or secular biography in Christian times, his life by Eginhard, or Einhard. For public events, a series of annals begins, not improbably originating under Charles's orders, which give details of time and place with a care unknown before. We have a large, though incomplete, collection of his acts of govern- ment and legislation ; and further, a considerable number of important letters, both public such as those of the popes', collected by Charles's command ; 142 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. and private such as those of Charles's friend and adviser, the Englishman, Alcuin or Alcwin. The name " Charlemagne," by which he has been so long known, is one of those popular names which ought to be abandoned ; not from considerations of scholarly accuracy, but because it helps so much to keep up a completely false idea of what he was. We in England ought to hold, at least, to our traditional form " Charlemain," which has Milton's authority. He has been represented by French historians as in some sense a French king, the most illustrious and wide-ruling of the second dynasty, one in the same line of kings as St. Louis and Henry IV. It cannot be too clearly and firmly borne in mind that this, rooted as the conception has become, is absolutely misleading. France, as it was to be and as we know it, had not come into existence in his days. What was to be the France of history was then but one province of the Frank kingdom, and one with which Charles was personally least connected. Modern France, again, is a nation in which the Latin or Latinised races have won the ascendency. But Charles, king of the Franks, was, above all things, a German. He was in language, in ideas, in policy, in tastes, in his favourite dwelling-places, a Teutonic, not a Latin or Latinised king ; and it is entirely to mistake his place and his work to consider him in the light of a specially " French " king, a predecessor of the kings who reigned at Paris and brought glory upon France. Modern France is a fragment, made vn CHAELES AS A WARRIOR 143 up of fragments, split off from the original Frank kingdom long after Charles's death; the kingdom which he inherited and enlarged was as different, in spirit, in constitution, in national characteristics, as it was in boundaries, from that portion of it which ultimately retained the Frank name in the West. Charles did nothing to make modern France. The Frank power on which he rose to the empire was in those days still mainly German ; and his characteristic work was to lay the foundations of modern and civilised Germany, and, indirectly, of the new common- wealth of nations which was to arise in the West of Europe. The necessary condition of a great ruler in those days was that he should be a great warrior. Charles, whose real claim to greatness lies in the clearness with which he discerned the need of order and law, and sought their sources and securities in the deeper springs of human nature, was, first of all things, in the eyes of his own generation, a king who was always at war, and always victorious. In his warlike habits he was not different from the Frank kings before him. Children of invaders, they had perpetually to repel invasion, to cope with rivals, to prove their prowess and strength. The special feature of Charles's wars was the indomitable pertinacity with which he carried them to the end, and the untiring alacrity and rapidity with which he moved from one point to another of his wide frontier of war. Among the turbulent populations which on all sides beset the 144 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. Frank kingdom, two heavy and permanent masses of hostility hung like storm-clouds, never removing and always threatening, on his north-eastern and his southern borders : the heathen Saxons between the Rhine and Elbe, pressed upon by the heathen Slaves beyond the Elbe ; and the Saracens in Spain. The Saracens he pushed back to the Ebro, adding the Spanish " march," or borderland, beyond the Pyrenees to his kingdom, and claiming, though not without continual dispute, the great cities of Saragossa and Barcelona. The Saxon war was far more serious and troublesome. It was chequered by grave disasters, and pursued with undismayed and unrelenting deter- mination, in which he spared neither himself nor others. It lasted continuously, with its stubborn and ever-recurring resistance, its cruel devastations, its winter campaigns, its merciless acts of vengeance, as the effort which called forth all Charles's energy for thirty-two years (7 7 2-804). The subjugation of the Saxons more resembled in its systematic complete- ness the policy followed by the kinsmen of the Saxons in Britain than anything which had been seen on the continent. But it decided, finally and for good, the question in Germany between heathenism and Chris- tianity, between continued barbarism, or the first steps, the only ones then possible, to civilisation. The Saxon lands, so rudely reduced to obedience, so rudely Christianised, were planted not only with castles, but with towns and mission stations Osnabriick, Paderborn, Miinster, Minden, Halberstadt, Bremen vii CHARLES'S WARS 145 bishoprics along the course of the Lippe and the Weser monasteries, like Fulda, which were both agricultural colonies and schools of learning. The tribes of Upper and Middle Germany Bavarians, Alamans, Thuringians, Hessians longer accustomed to the assertion of Frank supremacy, and partially con- verted by the English and other missionaries whom Pipin had encouraged, were fast becoming states, organised, or ready to be organised, into dukedoms of the Frank kingdom ; and any signs of restlessness, as in the frontier dukedom of Bavaria, were vigorously put down (788). But beyond the refractory Saxons, and the more settled German lands, was a second line of barbarism from the Elbe to the Danube, stretching without defined limit far back towards the East, from which it was recruited. There were the Huns or Avars, in the plains between the Danube and the Save ; there were Slave races of many names, from the shores of the Adriatic, the Eastern Alps, and the mountains of Bohemia, to the havens of the Baltic; and there were the yet more threatening Northmen, who had access to the still unsettled Saxon lands by the isthmus which is now Slesvig, and to whose ships the whole sea-board of the Franks, from the mouth of the Weser to the mouths of the Rhone, lay open. With all these Charles carried on persevering and, for the age, scientific war. Military bridges, sometimes double ones, were thrown across rivers like the Elbe and Danube, and their approaches duly protected. An attempt was made, though in 146 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. vain, to facilitate military communications by a navi- gable canal, connecting affluents of the Rhine and Danube. His operations were conducted on mutually supporting lines of march, converging on the threatened point ; definiteness of purpose, great patience, caution, celerity, appear in them. His most brilliant war, in the eyes of his contemporaries, was that in which the power of the Hunnish Avars no longer terrible as of old, but still able to give trouble was broken. Their " Ring," or palace camp, was forced and destroyed ; their " Chagan " or chief acknowledged the supremacy of the Frank king, and was baptized ; and the spoils of the Avars, the collected plunder of their old forays, were said to be so great as to bring down the value of silver by a third. The Slave races, quarrelsome and rapacious, were kept in awe by chastisement, or were involved by his policy in wars among themselves. The Northmen, even to Charles, were the most for- midable of his foes. They fomented Saxon resistance; and its fiercest leader, the Westphalian Witikind, ever had a ready refuge, when hard pressed, in neighbouring Denmark. The Danish king, Godfrid, became, in Charles's later years, more and more daring in his acts of aggression ; and, after obtaining from Charles the honour of a conference on equal terms between Frank and Danish chiefs, was preparing to measure his strength with the great emperor in a pitched battle, when he was assassinated and Denmark was involved in civil war. But the tide of Northern invasion was rising, and before Charles died it was beginning to vii THE LOMBARD WAR 147 break with alarming violence on all the coasts of his realm. He was fully alive to the danger. The northern coasts were visited and inspected by the emperor himself. Fleets were built ; Boulogne and Ghent were made his harbours and arsenals. He died before his fortune at sea was tried. But the growing insults and ravages of the Northern pirates in Friesland, of the Moorish pirates over the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean, and of the Greek fleets in the Adriatic, threw a shade at the close over the splendour of his wars, and disquieted his last years with well-grounded anxiety. All these wars were part of a connected and per- sistent plan to reduce and keep under control the dangerous barbarism which hemmed in and pressed upon his kingdom. But the Lombard war was a political one, waged less even for the conquest of Italy than for its indirect results. The ill-compacted and turbulent kingdom of the Lombards, with its almost independent dukedoms Tuscany, Spoleto, Benevento, Friuli, Trent had usually been, in later times, an inoffensive neighbour to the Franks, but often, though it had ceased to be Arian, a trouble- some one to the popes. We have seen how a pope prevailed on Pipin to undertake the defence, as it was called, of the Church, and how Pipin had answered the appeal, and had transferred some of the fairest provinces of the Lombard kingdom to the popes. But the quarrel still went on. Letter after letter from the popes (Stephen III. 753-757, Hadrian 148 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. I. 772-795) brought the most lamentable complaints of Lombard injustice and oppression. St. Peter was made to speak in his own name, promising heaven to those who should deliver him from wrong, and denouncing divine vengeance on those who should be slack in assisting him. Charles had, indeed, set at nought a threat of excommunication from Pope Stephen IV. (769) to be pronounced if the Frank king dared to marry a daughter of King Desiderius, one of the " foul and horrid " race of the Lombards. But when the serious work of his reign began, he seems to have thought it wise as early as possible to arrange his relations with the pope. In 773, leaving the Saxon war, he crossed the Alps, and by the Mont Cenis and the St. Bernard threw the whole power of the Franks into Italy. The passes were forced, and no stand was made in the field. There was a winter siege of Pavia. It capitulated ; the last Lombard king, Desiderius, was carried captive and placed in a Frank monastery ; and the Lombard power came to an end. The king of the Franks became also king of the Lombards, the lord of all Italy, except the Venetian islands and the south of Calabria, still held by the Greeks. Thus, by German hands, the internal ascendancy of the German race in Italy, which had lasted, first under the Goths, and then under the Ixjmbards, for 281 years, was finally broken. A German was still king over Italy, as for ages Germans were still to be. But Roman and native influence reconquered its supremacy in Italy, under the vii CHARLES EMPEROR OF THE ROMANS 149 management and leadership of the bishops of Rome. The Lombards, already becoming Italianised, melted into provincial Italians. The Teutonic language disappeared, leaving a number of words to Italian dialects, and a number of names to Italian families. The last king of the Lombards bore an Italian name, Desiderius. The latest of Italian national heroes bears the Bavarian and Lombard name of Garibaldi. But the overthrow of the Lombards and the gift of provinces and cities to St. Peter had even more eventful results. The alliance between the king of the Franks and the bishop of Rome had become one of the closest kind. With Pipin and Charles begin the titles, given them by the Roman chancery, of "Most Christian King," and "Defender of the Church." The German king and the Italian pope found themselves together at the head of the modern world of the West. But the fascination of the name of Rome still, as it had done for centuries, held sway over the Teutonic mind. It stood for power, for knowledge, for the perfection of civil life, for the purity of religion. The barbarians despised Romans, but they venerated Rome. It was not unnatural that the idea should recommend itself, both to the king and the pope, of reviving in the West, in close connexion with the Roman primacy, that great name which still filled the imagination of the world, and which, in Roman judgments, Greek Byzantium had wrongfully stolen away the name of Caesar Augustus, the claim to govern the world. There was a longing 150 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CUAP. in the West for the restoration of the name and authority, " lest," as the contemporary writers express it, " the heathen should mock at the Christians if the name of emperor had ceased among them." And, at this moment, the government at Constantinople was in the hands of a woman, the Empress Irene. Charles's services to the pope were recompensed, and his victorious career of more than thirty years crowned, by the restoration at Rome, in his person, of the Roman Empire and the imperial dignity. The same authority, which had made him "patrician," and consecrated him king, now created him Emperor of the Romans. On Christmas Day, 800, when Charles came to pay his devotions before the altar of St. Peter's, Pope Leo III. without Charles's know- ledge or wish, so Charles declared to his biographer, Einhard, and, it may be, prematurely, as regards Charles's own feeling placed a golden crown on his head, while all the people shouted, " To Charles, the most pious Augustus, crowned of God, the great and peace-giving Emperor of the Romans, life and victory." By all round him, the pope and clergy, the Roman chiefs and people, the great men of the Franks, he was chosen and thrice proclaimed emperor, 11 at Rome the mother of empire, where Caesars and emperors were wont to sit." And by the pope him- self, he was " adored " " after the manner of the emperors of old." All saw in his matchless power, and in their own unanimity, the hand of God. Thus a new power arose in Europe, new in reality vii THE TWO EMPIKES : EAST AND WEST 151 and in its relations to society, though old in name. It was formally but the carrying on the line of the successors of Augustus and Constantine. But sub- stantially it was something very different. Its authors could little foresee its destinies ; but it was to last, in some sort the political centre of the world which was to be, for i ooo years. And the Roman Church, which had done such great things, which had conse- crated the new and mighty kings of the Franks, and had created for the mightiest of them the imperial claim to universal dominion, rose with them to a new attitude in the world. Humble as she was in out- ward bearing to the terrible warrior she had crowned, she drew from the act her vast pretensions to be the interpreter of Providence, the giver of kingdoms, the mistress of nations, the arbitress of the allegiance of mankind. What might not that authority bestow or take away, which had renewed and given the Roman Empire ? The coronation of Charles at Rome, in the face of an imperial line at Constantinople, finally determined, though it did not at once accomplish, the separation of East and West, of Greek and Latin Christianity. This separation had long been impending, perhaps, becoming inevitable. The old tradition of the necessary unity both of the Church and the Empire had resisted it. But on the other hand, there were the separating forces of distance, of difference of language and race, of antagonist and irreconcilable claims. There was also diversity of interests and 152 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. dangers, between Rome and Constantinople, between East and West The emperor at Constantinople, while he was the only emperor, kept a nominal but feeble hold on the West. He had a footing, though a precarious one, in Italy. Rome acknowledged or defied him, according to the turn of events, or the balance of strength. He had the pope as his subject, and was sometimes able to make him feel, when refractory, the penalties of resistance. But besides the natural uneasiness of the Romans under the supremacy of Greek and modern Constantinople, there was the growing alienation of East and West in religious thought. The Eastern Church had been the scene of a series of fierce dissensions, and great schisms. The Monophysite controversy in the sixth century, under Justinian, had led on to the Mono- thelite controversy in the seventh, under Heraclius and his family ; and these were followed in the beginning of the eighth by the great strife about the use of images, provoked by the reforming zeal of Leo the Isaurian, and his successors. In all these controversies, the emperors had interfered with a high hand, both as rulers and as theologians, and had imposed their statements of doctrine and their laws, sometimes not without violent resistance, on their bishops and people. In the West, there was far less learning and subtlety, but there was a steadier and less variable tradition of teaching. The popes found themselves in constant conflict with the East. They sometimes submitted, and found them- vii FINAL SEPAKATION 153 selves entangled in heresy for their compliance ; more often they opposed or moderated. But the result was increasing suspicion and jealousy, increas- ing irritation on both sides ; and an increasing desire on the part of the popes, as heads of the Western Church, to shake off all dependence, political,' as well as ecclesiastical, on the East. It was this growing estrangement, as well as the desire to call back authority if not greatness to Rome, which prompted Pope Leo III. to crown the king of the Franks. He accomplished more than probably he intended. He meant to throw off a galling yoke, to free his own hands from inconvenient and mischievous shackles ; but out of the rift which he made grew the greatest and most hopeless schism in the Christian Church. It is possible that Charles may have had designs for uniting East and West under himself, by family alliances or otherwise. He certainly negotiated, and he wished to disarm Eastern jealousy. Ultimately, he was content with a recogni- tion of his title by the Greek emperor. But the rivalry was too distinct and formidable for negotia- tions to disguise. " Have the Frank as a friend, but not as a neighbour," was the Greek saying. One Roman Empire was still the only received theory. But one Roman Empire, with its seat in the West, or one Roman Empire governed in partner- ship by two emperors of East and West, had become impossible in fact. The theory of its unity continued for ages ; but whether the true successor of Augustus 154 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CUAP. and Theodosius sat at Constantinople, or somewhere in the West, remained in dispute, till the dispute was ended by the extinction of the Eastern Empire by the Turks on May 29, 1453. Charles's military successes, his good understand- ing with the Church, and finally his assumption of the place of Roman emperor, strengthened and developed his strong bent towards political organisa- tion and social improvement. In that early stage of political experience and knowledge, the work was very limited which the ablest and strongest man could do in securing order, and giving a better direction to the wild and ungovernable forces round him. But in Charles we see, for the first time since the Goth Theoderic, and in more favourable circum- stances than his, the strong purpose to restrain disorder, and to foster all that seemed healing and hopeful in the state of things round him. If his unresting activity turned out afterwards to be, in many respects, fruitless or even mischievous, this is but what might be expected in times when the wisest measured imperfectly the real facts about them, and the consequences of what they did. Results are at all times apt to fall short of intentions. It is eminently the case, when society is emerging out of the inexperience of barbarism into the efforts of civilisation. Charles was an administrator rather than a legislator, though his laws, and his revisions of former laws, were numerous. His system of govern- Vil CHAKLES'S ADMINISTEATIVE POLICY 155 ment was simple, and he aimed at combining with the exercise of his own authority the sanction of publicity and popular concurrence. The force of his administration consisted in the method and energy which he infused into the public service, the steadiness and activity which he required of his agents, and the patient vigilance with which he watched over the whole; though it is more than probable that in that rough time these agents carried out but inadequately and unequally his attempts, to establish some sort of discipline in the vast and wild world over which he presided. His officers were of two classes. There was the local hierarchy : dukes governing provinces, some of which have since become kingdoms ; bishops with extensive domains, enjoying great immunities ; counts and inferior chiefs, either territorial, or, in the great cities, removable at pleasure, though with the natural tendency to become hereditary. All were bound both to the military and political service of the kingdom. And, next, there was a central system of special commissioners, envoys, delegates, Missi as they were called, deputed with ample powers from the king himself to different parts of his realm, to superintend, and if necessary to take into their hands, the administration of justice, and generally to inspect, examine, reform, report, and thus to bring the whole of the kingdom under the superintendence, and, as it were, within the touch of the central authority. Further, besides that he was incessantly moving about in different parts of his 156 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. kingdom, he brought himself twice every year face to face with his chiefs and people in the general assemblies (Malli, Plarita), which, according to the Teutonic custom of doing all important things in stated gatherings of chiefs and freemen, were held in spring and autumn, for public business. The place of meeting varied, but it seems to have been always in the Eastern and German part of the Frank kingdom. The meeting was sometimes held, as in the Saxon campaigns, in the heart of the enemy's country, and served as the gathering point for the summer's war. But the spring meeting especially brought together all that was most powerful and important in the kingdom round the king; and though his authority was paramount, and his policy was his own, all was done in public, and derived strength from public cognisance and assent Of the mode of holding these assemblies we have a con- temporary account from Adalhard, Charles's relative and minister, which shows how in them Charles came into contact not only with his bishops and great men, but with all classes of his subjects, and how in a rough and informal way their opinions were brought before him, and he learnt from the best information the tempers and conditions of the distant parts of his kingdom. Of the business done in these assemblies, we have records in the collection of public acts, called the " Capitularies " of the Frank kings. They are a vast and most miscellaneous accumulation of laws, regula- viz THE CAPITULAEIES 157 tions, judicial decisions, moral precepts, literary extracts, royal orders, articles of inquiry civil and ecclesiastical, circulars and special letters, down to inventories of farm stock, household furniture, and garden stuff and implements, in the king's residences. All these documents emanated from the king, and were communicated by him to the assemblies. They cover the whole field of life. With scarcely an attempt at order, they show the confusion with which matters of every sort, political, religious, economical, were all thrown together in the attempt to regulate them. But they also show the strong instinct of early days as to the moral and spiritual laws, which underlie and animate the outward frame- work of civil society. Few collections of laws con- tain such curious materials for a picture of the ideas and habits of the time. Charles's efforts had but a partial influence on the disorder of his age. The existence of his laws does not necessarily imply their actual effect. This, which must always be remem- bered in any attempt to illustrate history by legislative records, is specially true of times like his. But his legislation marked where the disorder was ; and it left on men's minds a stronger impression than any of which the trace is to be found before his time, of the public rights of the State, and of the obligations towards it both of its rulers and its members. The Capitularies first exhibit with some distinctness that idea of the public interest, as distinct from the rights and claims of individuals, which is the one germ of 158 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. civilised order, and which gives the measure of its progress. lastly, in the Capitularies are to be found in their earliest form the legalised beginnings of some of the most characteristic institutions belonging to modern Europe. We see the rudiments of that feudal system which so powerfully influenced its political growth, its social ideas, its customs as to the tenure of land, its industry, and the distribution of its wealth. We see, too, the earliest outlines of the manifold relations between Christian kings and the Church ; of the whole system of benefices and endowments, civil and religious ; and of the wide- spread law of tithes. The order which Charles tried to establish in his kingdom, he tried to establish in the Church. He found in it two opposite conditions. On the one hand, in its public character and in its high places, it was lapsing deeper and deeper into that worldliness and license which were the fruits of the favour which it had received from its coarse and brutal Merovin- gian patrons. Its chiefs, the bishops and abbots, had become a privileged and powerful order in the State ; but along with this had come a decline in all learning, in their sense of their real duties, and in public senti- ment about these duties. Bishops, like dukes and counts, rode to battle and fell in the wars, and often lived as carelessly and selfishly as the courtiers and soldiers, from whom they were often taken. Even the sainted bishops of the seventh and eighth cen- turies were often men engaged in the quarrels of the vii COKKUPTIONS IN THE CHURCH 159 Merovingian courts, like St. Arnulf or St. Leger ; or they were pious and skilful craftsmen, devoting their art to religion like St. Eloy, and adding to it earnest but very humble teaching. It was no wonder that Charles Martel invested a good soldier with the two archbishoprics of Reims and Treves, and his nephew with the bishoprics of Paris and Bayeux, and the archbishopric of Rouen, besides two great abbeys. It is no wonder to read of a pope asking Charles's son to punish a faithless Roman envoy by making him a Frank bishop, in order to keep him in exile. The schools of the monasteries barely kept alive the knowledge of Latin, the only access to the inherited wisdom of the world, the only access to Christian teaching. Of all the Christian centuries, the seventh is in the West the most barren of literary effort and spiritual greatness. In that great see which had become the centre of Western Christendom, the bishops of Rome had begun to travel fast along that downward road which was to lead them step by step, from the nobleness and devotion of the first Leo and the first Gregory, through a miserable greed after provinces and cities, to the incredible scandals of the tenth century. At Rome, too, in the pursuit of worldly greatness and power, learning, togetherwith better things than learning, perished. In the letters of the popes to the Frank kings, in the eighth century, adulation and servility, the servility of a beggar who whines and threatens, are sometimes expressed in Latin which defies the most elementary rules of ordinary grammar. 1GO BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. But though much belonging to religion, and every- thing relating to literature, was at the lowest level, there was another side to this. There were, in this age of deep degeneracy, good and earnest men, who could act if they could not write. That very seventh century, which saw the Frank episcopate so widely corrupt, was the age of one of the purest and boldest missionary efforts on record. The seventh century was the age of the conversion of England, the age of Augustine and Theodore of Tarsus, of Aidan, and Chad, and Aldhelm. It was the age of the missions of the Irish monks, Columban and his followers, in Burgundy and in the vast unknown heathendom beyond it, in the plains and forests of Central Europe, in the Alpine valleys,- and on the Danube and the Rhine. A Frank missionary, Emmeran from Poitiers, was the apostle and martyr of the Bavarians. Towards the end of the seventh century, when Christianity had taken root in England, and its firstfruits had appeared in the piety and learning of the Northumbrian Bede of Jarrow, a burst of mis- sionary zeal carried English teachers, emulating their Irish forerunners, to win to the Gospel the lands from which their fathers had come. Willibrord of Ripon preached to the heathen of Friesland, and founded the see of Utrecht. His greater follower, the Devonshire Winfrid, afterwards known by the Latin name of Boniface, the first archbishop of Mainz, devoted his life, in the first half of the eighth century, first as a preacher and then as a martyr, to vii MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE 161 the conversion of the Germans Frisians, Saxons, Hessians, Thuringians, Bavarians. He not only preached but organised. Armed with authority from the two greatest powers in the West, the king of the Franks and the pope of Rome, he mapped out the new missionary conquests into dioceses, he founded sees where the conquest was still to be made, he held the first German councils (about 743). He also founded monastic schools like the famous Fulda families of earnest men devoted to a definite work, the work of evangelising. The effect was great of Teutonic preachers coming to Teutonic populations from lands of Teutonic occupation, and with the tie of a common language. Some of the oldest speci- mens of the languages of continental Germany are the translations made for the use of the German converts ; the baptismal forms, the Lord's prayer, the Creed. Charles, like his father Pipin, was too much of a statesman to be indifferent to the good and evil in the Church, and to the great and increasing place which it occupied in the growing society of the new nations. The Irish and English missionaries were pioneers of Frank influence in central Germany, in some cases, its forlorn hope; and they were instru- ments of keener temper than the sword for the per- manent conquest of barbarism. Both for this reason, and from a genuine sympathy for their dauntless courage, and severe and thoroughgoing religion, they were warmly encouraged by the new Frank kings. M 162 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. On the other hand, the disorder in the Church invited from so strong a ruler as Charles the most uncompro- mising policy of interference and correction. His ecclesiastical administration was unswerving in pur- pose and absolute in its claims. Never in modern Europe has the union of Church and State, exhibited in the supremacy of the king, been carried to so high a point The pope was there recognised, doubtless, as the highest religious authority ; he sanctioned and consecrated Charles's power ; but the pope was too completely dependent for his Italian dominions on his alliance with the Franks, to venture seriously to thwart his protector. In the Capitularies, we find laws on ecclesiastical and spiritual matters placed exactly on the same footing as the strictly political and civil laws. The rebellious Saxons were baptized as a proof of their submission to the king, just as in later times the other sacrament has been used as a test of loyalty to government ; and, in their case, to depart from the religion of their conquerors was punished with death, as if it were treason. Bishops and abbots were peremptorily recalled to their duties. They were forbidden to ride forth to the wars, carry arms, and shed blood, and to live as laymen. The king's interference extended to matters strictly be- longing to their province. By his own authority he altered, corrected, and, as he believed, reformed and improved the offices of the Church. In the contro- versies of the day, he formed his opinion and ruled the conclusions of councils, cautiously, indeed, and VII ECCLESIASTICAL GOVEENMENT 163 with ecclesiastical learning to back him, but by autho- rity of his own. In the question about images, which was so complicated by political difficulties, and had so much to do with finally separating the Greek and Latin Churches, he took his part, the part, it must be said, of moderation and sobriety. He rejected a council claiming to be oecumenical (Nicsea II. 787), and opposed the pope who had accepted it; while he boldly attempted in a Frank council of his own (Frankfort, 794), and by the pen of his scholars and divines, to fix the opinion and usage of the Western Church. The most unceremonious proclamations of strict and unsparing discipline were addressed to the bishops ; and articles of inquiry were sent about, detailed and minute, as to their knowledge of the elements of religion, the morality of their lives, their diligence in preaching, their capacity and that of their clergy to perform the offices of religion. They are to be asked, he says, in one of these visitation circulars and the question is to be driven home " What is the meaning of the apostle's saying (2 Tim. ii. 4), ' No man that warreth, entangleth himself with the affairs of this life'; and to whom do the words apply?" Charles's idea of his office as king was deepened and enlarged when he became emperor. He then rose from being the king of the Franks and Lombards, to what the world of his day, and after it, the middle ages, supposed to be the unique and transcendent supremacy inherited from Caesar Augustus. As em- 164 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. peror of the Romans, he claimed to govern the Roman world, and all persons and things in it. As emperor, he claimed the pope himself as his subject. The pope was his father and guide in religion, and governed the Church by power not derived from man and according to a legislation of its own, yet subject to his own visitatorial control. At the pope's hands he received his own imperial crown and anointing. But the election of the pope required the emperor's confirmation ; the pope like every one else had to take the oath of fidelity to the emperor; the pope went through the ceremony, as it is expressed in un- suspicious contemporary language, of "adoring" him at his coronation, after the custom of the emperors of old. Pope Leo III. pleaded before him ; and Charles, in bidding his envoys exhort the pope to live honestly, to observe the canons, and to avoid simony, used the same force and freedom with which he ex- horted his bishops. Charles's claim to interfere in religious matters, which he had put high as king of the Franks and Lombards, was sensibly raised, both in extent and peremptoriness, when he became em- peror. He conceived, and his age with him, that he had received from God, together with the inheritance of the Caesars, the duty and office of the Jewish kings, not only of protecting the Church of God, but of purifying it from evil, and making every one in it, from the highest to the lowest, do his duty, and submit to the imperial authority and rebuke. This broad claim to superintend and regulate the VII THE CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 165 policy, the government, the practice, and even the belief of the Church, with which the East had been long familiar, was new among the Teutonic rulers of the West. In Charles appeared for the first time, realised and complete, the mediaeval idea of the Roman Empire. According to this idea, " the unity of the Christian empire reflected the unity of the Christian Church," and the empire had its supreme head, Caesar Augustus, as the Church had the suc- cessor and representative of St. Peter. In Charles's interpretation of the idea, the ultimate control of this twofold realm rested with the divinely appointed Caesar ; where there was a conflict of judgment it was for his authority to prevail. The revival of the empire was the pope's doing, and for a long time the popes sought in vain to undo what in a time of need they had too hastily sanctioned. But to undo was beyond their power. Men took different sides in the great question which arose out of the idea of the empire ; but the idea had struck deep root ; it was the idea at once of Frederick II. and Dante, and of Gregory VII. and Boniface VIII. The precedent set by Charles, and the fierce debates arising out of it, affected the whole history of the middle ages, and even of the centuries which followed the Reformation ; nor is its eventful significance exhausted yet. In the great conflicts between Church and State both parties have sought arguments from it. The governments of Europe have found in it an armoury of precedents to limit or to extinguish the liberties of the Church : 166 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. while in the origin and incidents of the revived empire, and in the new place of the papacy which followed on this revival, the champions of the pope have seen proofs of the theory which made him the master of kings and laws. Charles was keenly alive to the depressed state of knowledge and of general cultivation in his age, and to the contrast in regard to literature and theo- logy between his own times and the great days before him. Early in his reign he collected about him in his palace the best scholars he could attract, and made them his familiar friends. The most consider- able of them was like the great German missionary of the previous generation, Boniface an Englishman. Alcwin came over from the school of York in 782, and remained, with a short interval, on the continent till his death in 804. By such help Charles tried to improve his own knowledge, and to raise the standard of acquirement round him. Records of the conversa- tions and discussions which went on between the king and his " palace school " have been preserved in Alcwin's writings. They show the almost childish confusions and affectations of reviving knowledge ; but they also show the manly interest felt in the task of inquiry and self-improvement. The king and his companions furnished themselves with names, partly from the Bible, partly from Latin literature ; Charles was David, and there was a Nathanael and a Bezaleel ; Alcwin was Flaccus Albinus, with a Homer, a Mopsus, a Flavius Damoetas ; and for the ladies of the palace, vn ENCOURAGEMENT OF LEARNING 167 the sister and daughters of Charles, there were the names of Lucia, Columba, Delia, Eulalia. They employed their mother wit and their curiosity on such learning as was within their reach relating to the processes of thought and the powers of speech, the laws of numbers and sound, the motions of the heavenly bodies ; and they called it logic, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, and astronomy. Charles learned to speak Latin with facility, and he understood, better than he spoke, Greek ; in his native Frankish German he was a vigorous and impressive speaker, and the splendour and usefulness of Latin did not shake his allegiance to his mother tongue. He was passionately fond of the old German songs and lays. He attempted a German grammar, which means probably that, like Otfrid, the translator of the Gospels in the next generation, he attempted the then hopeless task of grasping, under rules like those of Latin, the varying spoken dialects of his kingdom. He tried late in life, but without success, to acquire what was then the professional art of writing. He was a severe critic of the reading and singing in his chapel. It was his custom to be read to at meals ; and his favourite book was St. Augustine's City of God, which, with its grand sweeping generalisations, and its religious sense of the presence of God in the history and development of mankind, answered to his own lofty view of the work to which he had been called. In promoting the improvement of learning, Charles 168 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. showed the same eagerness of purpose as he did in politics, or war, or hunting. Utterly disregardful of trouble, and untiring in what he did himself, he called on his bishops and abbots both to learn themselves and to enforce learning among their sub- ordinates. Ordinances were issued calling for schools to be set up in the great sees and monasteries. They arose, or were quickened into activity where already founded ; and they produced their fruits in the next generation, and kept hope alive amid great disasters. Colonies were sent from the schools and monasteries of Gaul into Germany; thus New Corbey in the conquered Saxon land was founded by converted Saxons, who had been trained at Corbey on the Somme. At Osnabriick, in view of greater inter- course with Constantinople, Greek was specially- ordered to be taught. The increasing list of learned names which begin to appear from this century, almost all of them pupils of the new German schools, shows that Charles's efforts were not altogether vain. But it was easier to command and even show the way, than to be obeyed ; and even to be obeyed, than to alter the inherited conditions of his age. Yet Charles was as practical as he was enthusiastic and resolute. In this, as in other things, the wants of men, and the necessity of supplying them, were insisted upon by the master spirit of the time, with such manifest truth and reason, that, though the change was imperceptible and was thwarted by countless adverse influences, a great change had vii CHARLES'S FAULTS 169 really set in. And encouragement was given to those who, in those wild and perplexed times, believed that men were meant for something better and higher than a life of fighting, of personal rivalries, and of coarse enjoyment. Charles's great qualities were alloyed with great faults. With the excellences of a strong nature, he had the failings and self-delusions of the strong. Great as he was, both in what he aimed at and in what he accomplished, he could not be above his age ; he had the rudeness of a barbarian endeavour- ing to rise above barbarism. Rude, as Peter the Great in like circumstances was rude, yet Charles's was the rudeness of a larger and more genial nature, and of a nobler ambition. But Charles was one of those who think that they know enough, and have strength enough, to mould the world at their will. With strong affections and wide sympathies, he was imperious and masterful. He saw no limits to his power to correct and mend, and no limits to his right to exercise it ; and his too ambitious and some- times unscrupulous attempts sowed the seeds of mischief to come. Clement and placable as he was in peace, his wars were ferocious, and his policy after conquest unsparing ; yet it was the ferocity which often since 4 his time has been judged the only weapon to extinguish obstinate and dangerous resistance. He was in earnest in his religion, and there was much in it not only of earnestness but of intelligence. But it was not complete or deep enough to exclude that 170 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. waywardness and inconsistency of moral principle, and that incapacity to control passion, which belonged to the time. We do not hear of the foul murders and treasons of the Merovingian times ; but his court was full of the gross licentiousness of the period. He was not superior to it himself; there were many evil stories about him ; and tenderly attached as he was to his children, he was not happy in their training and fortunes. The Frank kingdom which Charles had received from his father included Gaul from the Loire to the Rhine, with an ill -established sovereignty over the German tribes between the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Upper Danube, and over the impatient Latinised population of Aquitaine. During the forty -seven years of Charles's reign it had grown into a resem- blance of the dominion of the Caesars. When Charles died, its borders were the Ebro in Spain, the Elbe in Germany, or beyond the Elbe, the Eyder, and the Bavarian Enns, if not the Hungarian Theiss, to the south-east. All of what is now Germany west of the Bohemian mountains, not merely acknowledged in him an over-lord, but was really won to his rule. He secured, what his father had only fought to secure, the submission of Latin Aquitaine, and the sub- mission, at last complete and sincere, of the stout- hearted and obstinate Saxons. There had been one independent Christian kingdom on the main land of the West, that of the Lombards at Pavia ; it had disappeared. He had wrested from them all Italy, vil CHAKLES'S EMPIRE 171 which was beginning to be called by their name, from the Alps to Calabria, and the king of the Franks preserved the memory of his conquest by adding to his title that of king of the Lombards. His more indefinite claims to sovereignty or tribute extended beyond these limits to Corsica and perhaps Sardinia, to the lands between the Danube and the head of the Adriatic, to the barbarous tribes of Slaves, eastward of his proper border as far as the Vistula. From the ocean to the mountains of the Bohemians and the plains of Hungary and Poland, from the Baltic till he met the Arabs in Spain, the Greeks in Calabria, Sicily and Dalmatia, the continental Europe of that time owned his sway and formed his empire. He seemed to be the centre of all authority, the bond of union among the nations. Charles was one of those men who, in person and outward bearing, answer to their place. Tall, robust, well-proportioned in body, with great strength and activity, simple in dress, bright and keen-eyed, clear but shrill in voice, commanding in feature, hale in his old age, he lived with unbroken health till his last few years, greatly despising physicians and remedies. He was a great eater, but sparing of wine, and relied on starvation as his only medicine. He was a great rider and swimmer, passionately fond of bathing, and delighting in the hot springs and pools of his favourite Aachen. To the very last he was a mighty and untiring hunter. After an autumn spent in violent exercise, the winter of 813-814 was at length too 172 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. much for him. Fever and pleurisy attacked him, and he would only meet them by starving himself. On the morning of January 28, 814, he died. He was buried the same day in the stately basilica which he had built hard by his palace at Aachen or Aix-la- Chapelle, and adorned with marbles brought from Rome and Ravenna. He was laid in the tomb which he had made for himself. On the gilded arch beneath which he lay, was his effigy and the inscrip- tion : " Under this tomb is laid the body of Charles, great and orthodox Emperor, who nobly enlarged the kingdom of the Franks, and for 47 years reigned prosperously. He died, being seventy years old, in the year of our Lord 814, the yth Indiction, the fifth day before the Kalends of February." There, in the vault below, he was left, sitting as in life on a marble throne, dressed in his imperial robes, with his horn, his sword, and his book of the Gospels on his knee. And there, says the legend, in the last years of the tenth century, he was found by Otto III., who ventured to open the tomb, and who beheld the undecayed form of the great emperor of the Franks. For the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, a king, an emperor, had arisen in the new nations, to rule with glory ; a conqueror, a legislator, a founder of social order, a restorer of religion. His unbroken success, his wide dominion, his consecrated authority, his fame spread to the farthest bounds of the world, recalled the great vn CHARLES'S FAME 173 kings of the Bible, the great Caesars of Rome. What made him so great was, that his aim was not only to conquer, and overthrow, and enjoy, but that he laboured so long and so resolutely with deliberate purpose for the benefit of men. It was all the more wonderful and impressive, from the disorder which had been before, from the disorder which for a long time followed. His reign was a romantic episode, interposed in the midst of what seemed normal and irremediable anarchy. The unique splendour of his reign, which even we with our cooler judgments see to have been so remarkable, naturally dazzled the imaginations of his age. The haze of legend and poetry soon enveloped his image in the memory of the nations. The great German king and Caesar was transformed into a Latin hero of romance, the theme of the Norman Chant de Roland, and of the Italian poets of the court of Ferrara, Bojardo and Ariosto. More strangely still, as the great champion and legis- lator and benefactor of the Church, he grew, though personally so lax in his rules of life, into the reputa- tion of a saint. He was never formally canonised ; but his name and his doings appear in the catalogue of the saints ; his altar was frequent at one time in Germany and the Low Countries ; and to this day, his title to saintship is still acknowledged by altar, and image, and festival, in the churches of the Lower Valais. His glory was the prelude to strange reverses in the fortunes of his posterity. Strong as he was, the 174 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. times were yet stronger ; and the children of Charles proved even less worthy of their origin than the children of Clovis. For they started from a higher point; and they sank at last almost as low as the Merovingians. CHARLES'S WIVES AND DESCENDANTS 175 -II B s ra II E -13 t> _ 5J3T)S "g H2 lJ ^1 ^ u'"'0 -S o- = -II S "3s C ^"^ '?.. (/l C *^ B HH -a-a-so SJj CHAPTER VIII THE CAROLINGIANS I. Louis the Pious and his sons 2. The Northmen 3. Fall of the Carolingian lines IT seemed as if under Charles the Franks were to be to the new world of Christendom what the Romans had been to the old world of heathendom. It seemed so. But before Charles died, he showed that he felt it was hardly to be, and that his image of empire had been but his own personal achievement, and was linked to his character and life. Two forces opposed the continuation of his empire, and he recognised them both : the permanent conditions of nationality, and the accidents of his own family. He saw that his dominion was made up of discordant elements, the German, the Gaul, and the Italian ; the true German Frank of the East, the Frank of the Main and Rhine, the Moselle and Meuse ; and the Roman- ising Frank of the West, the Frank of Paris and Rouen, of Orleans and Tours, with the Romanised Celt of the South, of Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Lyons. OHAP. vill THE CAROLINGIANS 177 Three sons, the sons of one of the earliest of his wives, Hildegard, had grown up in the companionship of his wars, and had shared with him in his enterprises of conquest and rule. That the eldest should succeed to his position, by right of birth or by national choice, was not the assumption of those days among the Franks. The ideas and precedents of the kingdom prescribed a division of the inheritance ; and Charles accepted, as of course, the parting of his empire. His one care was that it should be a peaceable one ; but he never seems to have thought of keeping it together, as he had held it, in one hand. Eight years before his death, in order to avert discord and quarrel between his sons, he made a solemn act of partition (806). Charles, the eldest, was to rule in the North over the old kingdom of the Franks, from the Elbe to the Loire, Neustria and Austrasia, and the German lands beyond the Rhine, with North Burgundy, the Valley of the Rhone, and Aosta, one of the southern keys of the Alps. Pipin, the second, had the East and South-east, Bavaria, and "Italy, which is also Lombard y," with the southern bank of the Danube, and up to the sources of the Rhine. Louis had the South, Aquitaine and Gascony, the Spanish March, Provence, and Southern Burgundy, and the valleys of the Western Alps, Savoy, Maurienne, and Tarentaise. To each that each, it was said, might aid the other, really that each might have his own access to Italy and Rome was assigned his own pass over the Alps ; to Charles by the St. Bernard, to Pipin by Chur and N 178 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. the Septimer, to Louis by the Mont Cenis and Susa. The contingency of the death of any of them was provided for ; and rules were carefully laid down for the questions which, in the existing state of society, were the most usual causes or pretexts of quarrels. In making this arrangement, Charles must have acknowledged to himself that the great achievement of his own life was not likely, except from unforeseen chances, to be repeated, and that he was in truth founding three great and separate kingdoms, for which all that he could do was to try and keep them allied and at peace. Yet he might have thought that the Germans, in the great race of Franks, were hence- forth to lead the world. But none of these things was to be, not even peace in his family. In the few years between the act of partition and his death, two of the three sons among whom he had so carefully divided his realms, had died, and left their claims to be a source of end- less strife, feud, and war to a younger generation. And that leadership which the Germans had held during the last three centuries, and which seemed secured to them by the revived empire, was, by the results of the policy of the greatest of German leaders, finally checked and abolished. By the destruction of the Lombard, which meant a Teutonic, ascendancy in Italy, by the decisive separation of the Western Frank kingdom from the Eastern Franks, and by the crea- tion of a great Italian power in the reconstructed papacy, the independence, and then the preponder- vni THE CAROLINGIANS 179 ance and triumph of Latin influences in southern Europe were made sure. Charles aspired to put his Germans at the head of the rising civilisation of the West. But they were still too rude for the task. And exactly as his own efforts to awaken a desire for order and cultivation were successful, it was felt that not force, but trained and experienced reason, not the gifts which had made the Germans irresistible, but those which were the inheritance of the weaker Latins, were the foundations of power, and the guardians of peace, law, and hope, in society. The wild world which Charles the Great had tried, to tame broke out again into disorder under his son, Louis, named Pius, der fromme, le Debonnaire^ the kindly and religious, as we should perhaps name him, "the Good." Charles's aim had been to create a strong central power, which, leaving each land with its own institutions and laws, should everywhere moderate and control, should enforce justice, should support religion and civilisation, and should encourage learning ; and he thought that he had done so by reviving the Roman Empire in the West, and placing it among the Franks. Still holding the authority of emperor, Charles, as has been already said, towards the end of his reign (806), following both imperial and Merovingian precedents, appointed three of his sons, Charles, Pipin, and Louis, to be kings under him; laying down provisions for maintaining the peace and unity of the one Frank Empire. But his foresight was of no avail. Pipin in 810 and Charles 180 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. in 8 1 1 both died before him. Then he devolved his imperial dignity, by his own authority, in 813, a year before his death, on Louis of Aquitaine, the survivor of his three kingly sons. Thus, at Charles's death (814), Louis came at once into his father's place as emperor, and was welcomed in it by the unanimous consent of the Franks. Two years after he was crowned at Reims by the pope, Stephen V. (816). Louis followed his father's example by associating his eldest son, Lothar, as emperor with himself, and by appointing his other two sons, Pipin and Louis, and his nephew, Bernard, over the outlying portions of the empire Aquitaine, Bavaria, and Italy, or, as it was sometimes called, Lombardy. For sixteen years all went on, as in Charles's times. Louis, popular with his subjects, gentle-minded, for the most part a lover of mercy and justice, but also active and brave, sedulously followed in his father's steps in legislation and government He was busy with reforms both in Church and State. His ordinances swell the Capitularies, From all quarters ambassadors came to him, with presents, proposals for peace, demands for assistance from the Greeks, the Saracens, the Bulgarians, the Danes, the Eastern Slaves, the popes. The old success attended for the most part the military expeditions of the Franks. An attempt to make Italy independent under young Bernard, his nephew, was at once and pitilessly suppressed (817). Bernard's eyes were put out, and he died soon after- wards (8 1 8). More formidable revolts in the border- vni LOUIS THE PIOUS 181 lands beyond the Elbe, in the Slave countries beyond the Inn, on the Drave and the Save, in Brittany, in Gascony, were vigorously met and put down. And yet in the midst of his power and glory Louis was mindful of the frailty of human greatness, and the imperfection of human action. More than once his conscience smote him. At a great meeting at Attigny, near Laon, 822, like the Emperor Theo- dosius, he voluntarily humbled himself before his assembled chiefs and bishops, publicly confessing his offences against those whom, like his nephew Ber- nard, he had treated unjustly and cruelly. Thus, with a milder and purer character, Louis seemed to keep up the vigour of his father's rule, and to have inherited his father's power and fortune. Never had the boundaries of the empire been so extended, or its authority appeared so commanding. Without his father's faults, he had reached to more than even his father's greatness. But it was the illusion of only sixteen years. It was true that he had not his father's faults ; but it was proved at last that he had not his father's strength. The show of prosperity and success during the first half of his reign was in the latter half to end in gloomy and hopeless con- fusion. The explosion came at last. Louis, left a widower in 8 1 8, married, in the following year (819), the fair and ambitious Bavarian Judith, the daughter of Welf, Count of Altorf, on the lake of Lucerne, the ancestor of many famous lines : among them those of Este, of 182 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. the Guelfs of Bavaria and Saxony, of the Plantagenets, of the House of Brunswick. In 823 she bore a son, named after the great emperor, Charles, and to be distinguished from him afterwards as Charles the Bald. This roused at once the jealousy of the emperor's first family, the three sons who shared his government The empire was henceforth filled with their intrigues and revolts. Their counsellors and partisans, the turbulent nobles of their kingdoms, threw themselves into the quarrel with rancour ; and the attacks on the Empress Judith have been com- pared to the insults of the revolutionary parties in Paris against Marie Antoinette. The emperor was bent on carving out a kingdom for his youngest and favourite son ; but the partition between the elder sons was regarded by them as final, and whatever was given to Charles must be given at their expense. In 829 the emperor took from the portion of one of them, Louis, " the German," Alamannia, Rhaetia, and Burgundy beyond the Jura, corresponding roughly to Suabia and Switzerland, and created it into a kingdom for Charles, a child of six years old. From that time the empire of Charles the Great began to break up. In the following year, 830, the elder sons, with Lothar, his father's trusted associate in the empire, at their head, set up in Paris the standard of revolt. Louis was surprised by his sons, and together with the empress was imprisoned, threatened, ill-treated. He was restored as suddenly ; for the brothers distrusted one another, and the feeling was strong for the VIII THE LUGENFELD 183 emperor in the Eastern and German provinces. His rebellious sons were lightly punished, and again they rose up against him. This time they had won over the pope, Gregory IV., to their side ; and he accom- panied their united armies against their father (833). The two hosts for several days faced each other in the plains of Elsass, near Colmar. Neither side would attack ; but communications freely passed be- tween them, the pope offering himself as mediator. The end was that the emperor's adherents were per- suaded to desert him. His army broke up without fighting. Bishops and counts passed over, one after another, to his sons, and he was left with the empress and her son to the mercy of the rebels. The name of this long - remembered scene of treachery was changed from the " Rothfeld " to the " Liigenfeld," Campus Mendacn, the " Field of Lies." The sons endeavoured to force their father to abdicate ; but he was resolute in his refusal. They imprisoned him in the monastery of St. Medard, near Soissons. At length, in an assembly of bishops and nobles, he was formally deposed. But the sentence had scarcely been pronounced before the reaction began. The brothers, as usual, quarrelled. As before, the Ger- mans of the Eastern provinces were ready to support him, though they had deserted him at the Liigenfeld. Once more Louis was released, his deposition can- celled, and he was again emperor; once more he forgave and made peace with his rebellious sons. But confidence and quiet were not restored. Partition 184 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. after partition ten are counted during his reign showed the emperor's unscrupulous eagerness to in- crease the share of his youngest son ; he added to Alamannia, Neustria, and, on Pipin's death, Aquitaine. Father was still in arms against son, and brother against brother. The empire, so prosperous while united, began to suffer from external attacks. North- men and Slaves became more troublesome and audacious. At length, still victorious, but victorious over his own children, with a threatening future, and amid natural calamities and portents, Louis the Pious, the Kindly, died in one of his palaces on the Rhine, and was buried at Metz, leaving discord among his sons, and his great heritage shaken and in confusion. The last ten years of Louis' empire had made it clear that the power to govern its turbulent elements had departed with its founder. And from this time (830-840), the artificial force which had kept it to- gether being removed, the contrast and opposition between its great national divisions became more and more distinct and sharp. The process of disintegra- tion began, and it was probably in the nature of things inevitable. But it was greatly helped forward by violent and incurable dissensions between the brothers and their children, to whom Louis had left his empire. Lothar, the eldest, his associate in the empire, and already crowned at Rome, ambitious, cunning, unscrupulous, claimed for himself the whole imperial inheritance, and the supremacy which his father and grandfather had held. He was the centre VIII BATTLE OF FONTENAILLES 185 of the old Frank interest, the local Frank allegiance, the old Frank claims to rule. He held the north, the Rhine, and Italy ; he was master at once of Aachen or Aix-la-Chapelle, and of Rome, the capitals of the new and the old empire. But in the east and west, German Bavaria and Latin Aquitaine, always impatient of Frank supremacy, had each now their own king, sons, like Lothar, of the late emperor. In Bavaria and the neighbouring lands Louis, named the German, had been able to defy his father ; his power and influence had become strongly rooted. In the west, Charles the Bald, though his claims in Aquitaine were disputed by a cousin, was gradually becoming formidable in the countries between the Loire, the Seine, and the Rhone. The trial of strength, in such conditions, could not fail to come. There was the usual prelude, like as of feints in a game, of treacher- ous negotiations and feeble conflicts. At length, Louis the German and Charles, with the Latinised forces of the West, united in earnest against their elder brother. The bloody battle of Fontenailles, or Fontenoy (Fontanduni) near Auxerre, a year after their father's death (June 25, 841), a battle famous in those days for the fierceness of the fighting, and for the greatness of the slaughter, ended in the over- throw of Lothar, and made it clear that his brothers could hold their own against him. The battle of Fontenailles was the decisive proof that the unity of Frank dominion, shaken under the Emperor Louis, was hopeless under the Emperor Lothar. The two 186 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. brothers, Louis and Charles, with more steadiness than was then usual, maintained their alliance, and confirmed it the following year (842) by the memor- able "oath of Strasburg," taken by themselves and their two armies, by Louis' army in German (Teudisca, Deutsch) by Charles in " Roman " (Romano), a language no longer Latin, but not yet French, The result of their success was at length acknowledged and sanctioned by the Treaty of Verdun (843), the most important and substantially permanent of the numberless partitions which had been and were to be. For it was the starting-point of the new arrangement of Western Europe, following on the dissolution of the fabric which the great Charles had built up. Changes, redistributions, subdivisions, unions of the most varied kinds were still to be attempted. But, henceforth, the broad lines of division were traced, which the subsequent history of Europe, in spite of all attempts to obliterate them, has only deepened. Speaking roughly we may say that by the treaty of Verdun, and by the confirmations of it, at Thion- ville (844), and Meersen (847), Louis the German took the Eastern and German Franks, and Charles the Bald, the Western and Latinised Franks. Lothar, besides the imperial dignity and whatever claims went with it, had the Middle portion of the Frank kingdom, between the Rhine eastwards, the Scheldt, Meuse, and Rhone westwards, with Italy, the emperor's special share. The realm of Lothar, the emperor, was, says Palgrave, " built upon Italy." VIII PAKTITION OF VERDUN 187 The two imperial residences, Rome and Aachen, " the centres of the two great Cis- Alpine and Trans- Alpine crown lands," were conjoined by "an unbroken and continuous territory, including all varieties of soil, climate, and production, the wine and oil of the South, the harvests and pastures of the North." Once, and once only, again, after the disruption of Verdun, the three realms were for a short time under one emperor, Charles the Fat (884-887); but his hand was too feeble to hold them. The inherent tendencies to separate national life were irresistible. The new world grew too fast, and became too large, for any constitutional authority of those days to manage, and for anything but the rarest personal qualities to keep together. Charles the Great's design was more than once attempted, but was never again accomplished. " The history of modern Europe," says Sir F. Palgrave, " is an exposition of the treaty of Verdun." With the breaking up of the West into these great national divisions, occasioned by the family feuds of the Carolingians, the interest of their history is exhausted. For a time they continued at the head of these divisions. They gave their names to some of them ; we hear of a Karlingia, and a more enduring Lotharingia, now narrowed down to Loth- ringen or Lorraine. Each member of the family was for ever endeavouring for his own advantage to undo the partition of Verdun, in whole or in part. But to this their efforts were confined. The political 188 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. and administrative aims of the founders of their house, of Pipin and Charles, disappear. The legis- lative record, the Capitularies, so full under Charles the Great and Louis the Pious, thins out with a few important documents under Charles the Bald, and after him comes to an end, leaving less trace than the legislation of the later Merovingians. Their history becomes a dizzy and unintelligible spectacle of monotonous confusion a scene of unrestrained treachery, of insatiable and blind rapacity. No son is obedient or loyal to his father ; no brother can trust his brother; no uncle spares his nephews. Members of the same family, their greedy envy of each other's possessions kept them in an unvarying round of attempts at unscrupulous spoliation, success- ful or unsuccessful. There were rapid alternations of fortune, rapid changing of sides ; there was universal distrust, and universal reliance on falsehood and crime. But nothing, not even the barbarians of the North and East desolating their cities and provinces, could interrupt the infatuated passion to overreach and encroach. While the Northmen were piercing to the heart of Neustria by the Seine, the Loire, and the Garonne, Charles the Bald, unable with his utmost efforts to check them, never could resist the temptation, when it offered, to filch a province from a neighbouring kinsman, and he in like manner, when his hands were full, became the natural victim of their greediness. Yet the men themselves, some of them at least, vni QUAKKELS AMONG THE CAROLINGIANS 189 such as Louis the German, and even Charles the Bald, were of a higher stamp than the Merovingians ; and, to the last, we find among them men of spirit and vigour, capable of striking a heavy blow and winning a success over a powerful opponent. But their energy was fitful and ill -applied. They had lost sight of all high aims and large purposes. The times were against them, and were too strong for them ; and there were too many of them. Their rival pretensions were extravagant and irreconcilable. The dream of reuniting their great ancestor's empire was ever before their eyes, and their capacity never reached to this. They were but able to balance and check one another. And thus their history became a repetition of the disorder and dislocations of the Merovingian times. Pretenders struck in, carving out new kingdoms or dukedoms from the older divisions. The imperial, and then the kingly title, and at last the family itself, dies out, in one line after another, first in that of the Emperor Lothar (Louis II. 1875), next in that of Louis the German (Louis the Child fgn), at last in that of Charles the Bald (Louis the Lazy 1987); and each line ends in some feeble representative, who passes away, unhonoured, perhaps deposed and imprisoned. The family, more numerous than the Merovingians, con- fined themselves, like the Merovingians, to but a few names. In the house of Clovis, almost every one was a Clovis, a Clothar, a Theoderic, a Childe- bert, a Chilperic, a Sigibert, a Dagobert. In the 190 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. house of Pipin, almost every one was Pipin, or Charles, or Carloman, or, with the altered or modernised forms of the older names, a Ludvig (Louis), or a Lothar. But after the glory of their founder had departed, history can only distinguish them at last by some scornful nickname Charles the Fat, Charles the Simple, Louis the Stammerer, Louis the Child, Louis the Lazy, the " Do-nothing." Of the three sons who survived Louis the Pious, Lothar, the emperor, died first (855), and his family was extinguished within the twenty years that his two brothers outlived him. His kingdom was divided between three sons : Louis II. the Emperor, Lothar, and Charles. The three brothers quarrelled among themselves, and were assailed by their uncles. They all died without male heirs, the elder, the Emperor Louis II., being the survivor ; and at each death, whether of brothers or nephews, and whether children were left or not, the moment was seized by the others to snatch or divide the vacant share, which usually had been contested in life. The middle portion of the Frank dominion, to the northern part of which, along the course of the Meuse and the Moselle as far as the Scheldt, the second Lothar gave the name of Lotharingia, that middle kingdom which the great Charles supposed could arbitrate between East and West, and the idea of which, after repeated vain at- tempts, was revived, again in vain, in the fifteenth century by the French house of Burgundy, was, im- mediately on Lothar's death, torn in two by his uncles, VIII THE THREE LINES OF THE CAROLINGIANS 191 jS h-1 o 3 S n r o >' PQ oo S , II \S s 192 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. Louis the German and Charles the Bald (870). At the death of Louis II. the Emperor (875), Charles the Bald succeeded in anticipating Louis the German, and seized what was specially the imperial portion, Italy, gaining from Pope John VIII. the imperial crown (875), which he received like his great name- sake on Christmas day, at St. Peter's. But he wore it only for a short time. Three successive years (875- 877) saw the extinction of the line of the first Lothar, and the deaths of his two brothers Louis (876), and Charles (877). One of the main lines of the Caro- lingian stock was gone ; two were left. The house of Louis the German, who is said to have been the wisest and most just of the brothers, ruled at last over all the German lands to the eastward of an irregular boundary line, drawn from the mouth of the Scheldt to the Jura. According to the custom of his race, he had to encounter the rebellions of his three sons, who had been invested with the government of different parts of his kingdom ; but he was able to hold his own against them. The survivor of them, Charles the Fat, for a moment raised the hopes of his subjects. For a brief interval he was emperor, and united under his rule all the realms of Charles the Great. But the promise of reviving power was a treacherous one. Health and vigour gave way before the difficulties of the times and the intrigues of younger kinsmen ; eleven years after his father's death he was deposed (887) and he died in prison in the monastery of Reichenau, in an island of the lake of Constance CHARLES THE BALD 193 r*> M in o iij'&j? 3>0 -P S SM 3& < 6 fflW- Al ^ u 4) I e, D. IE? o . I M 3 C -- 1 g-s *> S* -3 D w S 2 ^cS | I _ 194 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES cnxr. (888). The line of Louis the German was continued only by an illegitimate nephew Arnulf, duke of Carinthia, who took from his uncle Charles both the kingdom of Germany and the imperial dignity ; and it finally died out in ArnulPs feeble son, Louis the Child (899-911). Thus within a century from the death of Charles the Great, one main branch alone survived of his house : the line of Charles the Bald, among the Western Franks in Gaul. It dragged out a longer existence, but with no greater glory than the two which had failed. Charles, his father's youngest born and favourite son by his second marriage with the ambitious Welf princess, Judith, was early taught not to trust even his brothers. He had to win his way through great difficulties to the kingdom which at last he secured He was not without some of his famous namesake's gifts. He inherited Charles's literary tastes ; perhaps, some of his ideas of law and government. But all high political aims were sub- ordinated to his restless and unscrupulous eagerness to enlarge his borders. While he could not save them from the ravages of the Northmen, his reign was spent in trying to add to dominions which he could not govern. Like Charles the Fat after him, he seemed for a moment to have succeeded, only to prove the impossibility of success. For two years he bore (875-877), amid humiliation and disaster, the coveted name of emperor. But he left no stronger or more fortunate posterity than his brothers. His vili HOUSE OF CHARLES THE BALD 195 son, Louis the Stammerer, his successor in Gaul, died two years after him (879). The two elder sons of this Louis saw their Western realm broken up, and a new kingdom created in Burgundy and Provence (879), by a stranger Boso, who had married a Caro- lingian princess. They both of them passed away, amid disaster and ill-fortune, within seven years from their grandfather's death ; the kingdom of the West Franks was for a moment transferred to the German, Charles the Fat; and after his death the claims of their younger brother, the posthumous son of Louis the Stammerer, Charles, named the Simple, were set aside by a powerful party among the Franks, in favour of a new man. This was the deliverer of Paris from the Northmen, Count Odo or Eudes, the son of a warrior of unknown origin, Robert the Strong, the ancestor of the line of Capet. On the death of Odo, Charles was again acknowledged (899) ; but the allegiance of the Franks to the Carolingian house was shaken, and the family and realm of Charles the Bald had to bear the brunt of the great revolution in Western Europe, caused by the intrusion of a new barbarian element into the civilisation of Charles the Great. The date of the treaty of Verdun (843) marks also the beginning of a series of events, only second in importance to the empire of Charles the Great, and of lasting influence not only on the history of Gaul and the Franks, but on the history of Europe and the world. This was the second stage of the barbarian 19G BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. VHi invasions, the assaults and settlements of the Norse- men, or, as we call them in England, the Danes, which were coincident with the break-up of Charles's empire. They were not the only barbarian invasions of the time. On the Mediterranean coasts, the Saracens were, and long continued to be, threatening and sometimes dangerous. On the Eastern border, the heathen Saxons, the more numerous Slave tribes, with some tribes of the Turanian or Turkish stock, had long been formidable. The great military achievement of Charles the Great had been to subdue them. The German tribes had been more or less Christianised and assimilated to their more civilised Frank brethren. The Slaves long continued to be refractory and troublesome ; and the irruptions of the Tartar Magyars or Hungarians brought back the terror of Attila's Huns even in the heart of Gaul and Italy. But the Eastern barbarians, though causing terrible misery and loss, and long defying the efforts of the Carolingian kings to bridle them, never accom- plished a settlement in the West. They were kept within their own borders ; and the vast plains north and south of the Danube were finally occupied by the Hungarian and Slave populations which were definitely to inherit them. But in the North and West it was different. The movement in Denmark and Scandinavia towards the beginning of the ninth century had disquieted the mind of Charles the Great. A Danish king had stirred up war and defied him on the Elbe ; and the u i | JJ j 4 t .^ -g 2 ^ Q | P (0 2 P > - | S o o^--i3<; ^^ o - _t: z 1 rtC/2 ^ ^j5iott*flj 2 "a >, ^ S 1 }_ S g 'i ^, i uS'u c'S Id g a 13 S 8 <"'C' : o.5i'3S o .!a't5g t ' ; g o ffi j3 M CJD ^ 'O ^ O C/3 fl] C^ ^j HH "qj ^H U3 ^< D i-i t 1 -H S < ON CN CO VD \s) CO ON ON ON VO tN (A O g VO ^t" ^" INCO CO d CxCO ON CO o\ CO CO 00 ON *-" j-j 0) ^^ 5 "pq E 6 . . E S ^ v> rN 55 S ci j OJ J3 rt '^-. ^ ^ faU fe " d'3 t/3 K^ ^ i i ^-J w c3 r-" K^ 3 *- ^ "" f~{ .w ^ dj3 O ^ o/) i-J ^ U iJ J Jffi LAND. A "0 5 a s d -^ a w & to ^ 0) og i ^ s -a s >; 2 I w 45s fl -3 CxCj *5njQ. ,0 r^ Oi 72 .s . JiJ r 15 -d " l?l 'ORTHMEN IN Appear first Plunder Jan umberlan 53. Ravage: Q,tVi !|{ to J B J i ^piiiiiM S ^ ,"5 ,, 3 S a ^ a 1 S S P c -a & tiwfflilfll2iaII2|ai >QJStaJuJC|OC,55 cd < UP WmH the land of Danish law Essex, IX DANISH INVASIONS 219 and East Anglia, and Northumbria, and half of the midland Mercia. The Danes were kept out of Wessex and the other half of Mercia, including London; and these were knit together the more closely in the presence of their restless foe. In this refuge and core of English feeling, Alfred laid the foundations of a policy of recovery. Danish attacks from within and from abroad did not cease with the peace of Wedmore. The weight of their visitations fell alternately on England and France ; the peace of Wedmore was followed by more systematic and deter- mined war in the north of Gaul, on the Scheldt, the Somme, and the Seine. Two years after (880), the Northmen revenged their defeat in the Ardennes, from the German king Louis, by a great overthrow and slaughter of the Saxon nobles at Luneburg. Four years after (882), in spite of the valour of another Louis, the West Frank king, the hero of the Ludwigslied already mentioned, they were ravaging the north of Gaul, from Amiens and Arras to Soissons and Reims. And while Alfred was comparatively at peace the great siege of Paris was going on, in which Count Odo's heroic defence laid the foundation of the fortunes of the Capetian house. Again, the great defeat of the Danes on the Dyle near Louvain, by Charles's successor, Arnulf (891), threw them once more on England to prove by a harassing and per- plexing warfare, Alfred's great qualities, his prompti- tude, his skill, his vigour, his indefatigable rapidity of movement. But by patient resolution, Alfred's sue- 220 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. cessors up to King Edgar (959-975) were able gradually to bring under subjection, more or less complete, the Danish settlements in England ; while assailants from abroad were kept at bay by vigorous and persistent fighting. The Danish invasions, though mischievous and cruel, disturbed, but did not arrest, the national growth. It is indeed remark- able how readily the Danish new-comers, after a generation or two, became fused with the English stock ; how readily they received the English religion, and accepted the English speech. When once settled down in peace, the adventurous intruders were gradually tamed among the English population round them, and became in England undistinguishable from Englishmen, except as English provinces were dis- tinguished from one another. The great and remarkable feature of English his- tory, when it is contemporaneous with that of the followers of Charles the Great abroad, is the succes- sion and influence of a singularly able line of kings. The kings of the house of Cerdic in Wessex were unlike, in their continuity of policy and energy, to any other series of kings of the time. They were different in their qualities, and even in their fortunes. But they were all men with a distinct purpose, which in different ways they carried out : the purpose to give unity, strength, and elevation to their English people. For the space of nearly a hundred and eighty years (800-975), tne kings of Wessex steadily pursued, in the face of the most adverse circumstances, and even ix THE KINGS OF WESSEX 221 with great sacrifices, their practical object of binding together and consolidating the various divisions of the Saxons and Angles, which left to themselves would have readily grown into the evil habits of internal and local animosities, so common at the time. They did this, doubtless, by the strong hand, yet by no exercise of despotic tyranny, and apparently with the full con- currence of their own chiefs and leaders. Egbert laid the foundation, by establishing a supremacy over the northern and midland kingdoms. For thirty-five years after Egbert, his successors were occupied in the desperate task of protecting the land against the Danish ravages ; their success was chequered, but they never lost heart, and their resistance to the strangers bound the English to one another and to the royal house. The danger and the resistance came to their height under Alfred (871-901); and Alfred was the flower and type of the Wessex kings. Sober, dauntless, resolute, patient, he met his circumstances, dark or bright, as they came, with the same steady temper, the same high public spirit. Receiving his kingdom amid calamity and disaster, overpowered and overmatched, he retired, biding his time, but not losing hope, till his opportunity came, and he was able to win and enforce a peace. By the peace of Wedmore, which allowed the Christian Danes under Guthrum to settle and live by their own law in the east of England the Danelagu, a very faint kind of English Normandy he abated, though he could not entirely check, the pressure of the Northern rovers 222 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. for nearly a hundred years, and thus gained a breath- ing time for the works of peace. Alfred, serious in his religion as in all he did, and in this as in other things full of sympathy with his people, applied him- self to raise and improve them. He set on foot reformation in the Church. He rekindled the lost learning of Bede and Alcwin ; he awakened what was equally precious greater in this than the great Charles the faith, the confidence of Englishmen in the powers and worth of the English tongue. He wrote, he translated, he edited in English. He represents in the highest degree all the humanising tendencies of the time, the efforts to bring out what was excellent and noble in the national spirit, and to cast off what was barbarous. In this he was like Charles the Great ; but in Alfred there was more soberness of aim and purity of life, with more care for justice and mercy. Alfred is the father of the English navy ; he saw, like Edgar after him, that England to be safe, must be powerful on the sea. He was a legislator, reverencing and holding to the past, but owning the changes of the present, and not venturing too much to bind the future. He was sparing of his laws, because, as he writes in the preface to his " Dooms," " I durst not risk of mine own to set down much in writing, seeing that to me it was unknown what part of them would be liked by those who were after us." Alfred set the standard of an English ruler ; one who thought not of himself, but of his charge and duty ; who did nothing for show, and sought not his own IX ALFRED, EDWARD, ATHELSTAN 223 glory, but gave himself, and his credit too when neces- sary, to the interest of his kingdom, and the work of his place. He was followed in the first years of the tenth century (901-925) by his son, Edward the Elder, who followed the same policy of uniting the nation together. He waged war for it with energy and success, quelling revolts and bridling the trouble- s&me Danish settlers with fortresses which were to grow into towns. He incorporated Mercia, govern- ing it by his famous sister Ethelfleda, the " Lady of the Mercians." He received homage from the " Welsh " princes of Scotland, Strathclyde and Wales, who saw in the English king their bulwark against the Danes. Athelstan (925-940), his son, the hero of the earliest surviving English war-ballad, the battle of Brunanburh, followed in his father's steps crushing rebellions, teaching the English by fighting to feel themselves one, beginning to be famous even across the sea. Sisters of Athelstan were the wives of Western kings and princes : of Charles the Simple, and of his antagonist, Duke Hugh of Paris, of Boso, king of Provence, of Otto the Great, king of Germany. The widow and son of Charles the Simple took refuge with Athelstan, and Athelstan's influence counted for much in the restoration of his nephew, Louis d'Outre- mer, who brought some of the vigour of the line of Wessex, but not its ability or its fortune, into the failing race of Charles the Great. Through trouble and hard fighting, not without reverses, his two brothers, Edmund and Edred, and his nephew Edwy, 224 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. carried on the work of amalgamation, defence, and government (940-959); and when another nephew, Edgar (959-975), received the kingdom of the English, he received it compact within itself, a kingdom in which he was really master on each side of Watling Street, over the Danish settlers as well as over his Englishmen, while his supremacy was acknowledged all over the island, in Northumbria, and by the Celtic Scots and Welsh. He was king of the whole of Britain, and of all its kings. The scribes of his Chancery delight to style him by the Western term Impcrator, and the Eastern Basileus. He seemed the island counterpart of the Great Otto, crowned emperor at Rome in 962. The story told by Florence of Worcester, of King Edgar's barge rowed on the Dee by eight vassal British kings, expresses what was thought and remembered about him. "Throughout many nations," chants the old English chronicler, "and over the sea, the 'gannet's bath,' kings honoured him far and wide." "No fleet," he declares, " was so bold, nor host so strong, that could tear away the prey among the English kin, while that noble king held his throne." In Edgar the Peaceful the great political and social work of the kings of Wessex reached its height. His reign of peace for seventeen years, troubled only by insignificant local outbreaks, but by no serious wars, is one of the most remarkable phenomena of the time. Under it the English felt themselves one people, with a destined place among the nations. West Saxons ix EDGAR ETHELRED 225 and Mercians, Northumbrians, East Anglians, and men of Kent and Sussex, were content to be united members of the great English " kin " and realm. They had taken the definite mould and stamp, which they were henceforth to keep. Tremendous disasters awaited them. They were to measure their strength in vain, once and again, against foreign invaders. Their enemies were growing in power and union as well as themselves. Contemporary with the kings of Wessex, from Alfred to Edgar, the successors of Rollo the Norman (876-927), William Longsword (927-943), and Richard the Fearless (943-996), were creating Normandy. Contemporary, too, with them, the Scandinavian tribes, from whom both Danes and Normans came, were growing up, like their kinsfolk, into' nations and kingdoms, under chiefs of strange names Gorm the Old (883-935), Harald Bluetooth (935-985), Sweyn or Swend of the Forked Beard (985-1014), Olaf, the Christian king of Norway (994- 1000?). The English were to be ruled weakly and faithlessly, to be defended by fitful and useless valour, to be betrayed by their chiefs, and preyed upon by strangers. But England was already England; the nation had already become constituted and had " taken its ply," before the storm fell upon it, and its fortunes came into the hands of the weak and the traitors. Edgar the Peaceful was hardly four years in his grave, before its woes began under Ethelred the Unready (979-1016). The Danes came back this Q 226 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. time, not to ravage or to colonise, but to conquer. Ethelred the Unready, the king without counsel, brave and stirring, but wanting his father's good sense and statesmanship, was a king after the kind of the later Carolingians. When he failed to check the Danes by fighting, he adopted the fatal foreign policy of buying them off, and thought to frighten them by the shameful and fatal massacre of St Brice's day (i3th November 1002). But the Danes themselves were no longer what they had been. From a swarm of separate adventurers, like the Ragnars, and Rollos, and Hastings of a hundred years before, they, too, had grown, by their successes, into organisation at home. It was now the king of Denmark, Sweyn, the son of Harald, who brought the strength of the Northmen to avenge St. Brice's day, and further, to add England, as a kingdom, to his kingdoms in the North. He drove out Ethelred from England ; and after the death of Ethelred's nobler son, Edmund Ironside (1016), Cnut, the Dane, became king of the English, and England became a dependency of Den- mark. What the Danes began, their Latinised kinsmen, the Normans, continued. For two hundred years, from Cnut's accession, with one short interval, the reigns of Edward the Confessor and of Harold, foreigners were kings of England Danes, Normans, Angevins. Yet two things are observable during this time of foreign ascendancy. One is, that the kingdom of England, conquered though it be, is the IX ENGLISH UNITY 227 proudest honour and most important portion of the possessions of its foreign king. The other is, that through Danish, Norman, and French rule, the Eng- lish speech, the English usages, the English slow, resolute sturdiness of temper, are absolutely proof against the strong influences of a foreign court and a foreign territorial nobility, and even of foreign tri- bunals and a foreign clergy. The people had reached a toughness and consistency of character, and a strength of common ideas and habits, which enabled it to bear the rough assault. It did not become Danish, it did not become Norman or French. It was strong enough to absorb the genuine Norsemen fresh from the sea and forest ; it was strong enough to absorb the altered and more civilised Northmen of William the Conqueror. For this education of the English nation, incomplete undoubtedly, but so dis- tinctly marked, so deeply rooted, and so enduring, we are indebted mainly to the kings of Wessex, from Egbert to Edgar the Peaceful. The strong personal influence of the West Saxon kings had much to do with uniting the English people. Personal influence, powerful at all times, was indispensable for any great national progress then. But there was another influence continually at work, not so manifest in historical incidents, but diffused through the society of the time, without which the policy of the kings would have had more to contend against. The great agency of fusion and unity was the Church. Its archbishops and bishops 228 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP, ix were in immediate relation with the king and his chiefs, their fellow councillors and authoritative advisers ; its priests and monks were in close contact with the various classes and local subdivisions of the people, sharing their fortunes and their ideas, the one source of instruction to them and of culture. The Church had its fluctuations of vigour and decline ; of efforts after learning and goodness, and of corrupt stagnation ; and, like everything else, it savoured of its age, its rudeness, its incompleteness, its ignorance. But the Anglo-Saxon Church was eminently a popular Church. Its leaders were deeply concerned in the public interests of the State. More dispassionate and better- informed history has recognised in Dunstan, whose name was once the by-word for priestly arro- gance and cruelty, a genuine patriot and reformer to whom amends are due, the chosen friend and coun- cillor of the Wessex kings, especially Edgar. Its saints appealed to popular sympathies, as sufferers at the hands of the heathen foes of England. And it not only spoke, but it wrote in the mother tongue. The Anglo-Saxon New Testament, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Anglo-Saxon homilies of Elfric, are all so many evidences of the way in which, in a manner scarcely known abroad, the English churchmen, acting it may be under the impulse given by Alfred, did honour to their own language, and tried to popularise knowledge, lx>th religious and secular. CHAPTER X RESULTS OF THE BREAK-UP OF THE FRANK EMPIRE ARRANGEMENT OF EUROPE: THE PAPACY; NEW KINGDOMS OF FRANCE AND GERMANY; ITALY; THE SCANDINAVIAN AND SLAVE NATIONS THE effect of the break-up of the empire of the Franks under Charles the Great was twofold. It produced at once immense disasters ; and it led ulti- mately to new and healthy national divisions, adapted to the changed condition of Europe, and fruitful in great results. The disasters were great. For the moment the West relapsed into the confusion and lawlessness from which Charles had partially reclaimed it. Within its borders all was incessant war, a uni- versal scramble for territories and dignities among great and small, kings and dukes, bishops, counts, and abbots. There were vicissitudes of success or overthrow, continual changes of borders and lordship, continual and vain efforts after peace and law. Without, new and formidable forms of barbarian attack appeared. As we have seen, the second great 230 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. tide of barbarian invasion had begun more and more to distress and alarm the West, now entering on the early stages of its civilisation. Besides the Northmen, increasing in numbers and in their enthusiasm for adventure, who were the terror of the sea coasts from the Elbe to the Mediterranean, where the work of ravage and plunder was taken up by the Saracens, a strange and terrible foe had appeared on the Eastern border towards the end of the ninth century. This was the horde of the Magyars, the Ugrians, Ungri, like the Huns, of the Turanian and Turkish stock, and like the Huns, whose name they inherited, or with whom they were confounded, described as frightful and ferocious savages, sweeping like a destroying storm over the lands which they visited. Germany and Italy were most exposed to their deso- lations. They were sometimes called in with reckless and disloyal selfishness to assist one German or Italian duke or count against his rival ; and once tempted into Germany, they rode wasting, burning, slaying through Germany even to the heart of Gaul. The Hungarians, or Magyars, were, after the North- men, the great scourges of the ninth and tenth centuries. The power, the union, and the military capacity of the Carolingian kings were unequal to the work of controlling these savages. The fatal policy was adopted, with the Magyars as with the Northmen, of buying them off for the time, a policy which en- sured their speedy return, more eager and audacious than before. With internal division and anarchy, x ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH 231 and the fury of Northern and Eastern savagery let loose besides, the times were bad. The hopes and comparative order of Charles's days were departed. " In that time," says one of the annalists, " the kingdom of the Franks was very desolate, and the unhappiness of men was multiplied daily. In many ways wretchedness and calamity increased among men." Amid this misery and confusion the internal condition of society fell back. Charles's policy for strengthening the influence of the Church held its ground, but not his plans for reforming and purifying it. Great ecclesiastics were among the most powerful personages in these times, and some of them, like Hincmar of Reims (801-882), were not unworthy of their power. But with power and great place came in worldliness and corruption in increasing proportion as time went on ; and though as statesmen these great bishops were probably not worse councillors, and often were more intelligent ones, with a natural leaning to order and peace, than the rough dukes and counts with whom they acted, yet the meaning and consciousness of their religious office became more and more lost in their secular greatness. They were not only bound to military service for their vast domains, but in spite of the stringent prohibitions found in the " Capitularies," they went to war them- selves. " Within thirty years," we are told, towards the close of the ninth century, " two archbishops and eight bishops died on the field of battle by the side 232 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. of counts and lords." It is no wonder that their offices came to be regarded as temporal dignities which the king had a right to bestow, and by which he rewarded and bound his adherents. And it is no wonder that, as in the days of Charles Martel, only with increasing freedom, the revenues and titles of archbishoprics and great abbeys were accumulated on some great lay potentate, like the duke of Paris; some formidable warrior, like the lay abbot of St Riquier; or some child of a powerful noble, like Herbert of Vermandois. The steps so remarkably gained for culture and for intelligent study of religion under Charles, were not absolutely lost. In the great German schools, founded or encouraged by Charles the Great, Fulda, St. Gall, and Reichenau on the lake of Constance, at Old Corbey on the Somme, and its Saxon colony, New Corbey on the Weser, and in Gaul, at Reims and Orleans, the habits of study and the taste for learning were kept up. German unwritten tradition was rich in legend and songs of war and adventure ; but German litera- ture began in these cloisters, in the ninth and tenth centuries, with Latin and German glossaries, in translations of the Psalms, and paraphrases of the Gospel story, such as the version of Tatian's Har- mony, the metrical harmony called " Heliand," the prose one of Otfrid, and Notker*s Psalter. Nor was there wanting bold and subtle thought, well or ill-directed, on philosophy and theology, in men like John Erigena, Gotteskalk, Paschasius Radbert, and x POWEK AND COKRUPTION OF CHURCH RULERS 233 his antagonist Ratramn ; and the firstfruits of German erudition are seen in Raban Maur, the archbishop of Maintz, and his scholar Walafrid Strabo, all of them men of the ninth century, and most of them pupils of Fulda, Corbey or Reichenau. But no proportionate advance was made. Missionary enthusiasm, which had done such great things under Pipin and Charles, sensibly waned, though it still achieved some new conquests among the Norsemen and the Slaves. And that which was the dark side of Charles's character and times, loose ideas of the sanctity of marriage and the obligations of purity and self-control, grew into increasing lawlessness and disorder, in the times which followed him. Except in the strict discipline of the cloisters, when the cloisters were well governed, license reigned ; and the families of the great bishops were as scandalous as the courts of the kings and dukes. There was a power in the Church which might have been expected to bridle this flagrant laxity ; the more so as its claims to supreme authority were at this very time rising to their full height. The fall of the Carolingian power is marked by a remarkable and coincident expansion of the central power in the Church. The power of the popes, which Charles the Great had done so much to encourage and strengthen, which had depended on his aid and had lent itself in return to his great plans, grew into a hitherto unknown strength, as the imperial system which he had founded broke up in the hands of his successors. From being submissive and obsequious 234 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. under Charles, the popes became imperious and exacting under his children ; and their enormous pretensions, spiritual and temporal, were supported by the appearance and reception of the great forgery known by the name of " False Decretals," a collection of precedents, professing to belong to the early cen- turies, and establishing the uncontrolled power of the popes, not only over the whole organisation of the Church, but over every other earthly authority. In Pope Nicholas I. in the middle of the ninth century (858-867), this idea of the popedom found its deter- mined and energetic exponent ; and though met and resisted with equal boldness, as by Hincmar of Reims, he undoubtedly established the foundations on which by natural sequence the pretensions of Gregory VII. noble in purpose, though extravagant and mis- chievous and those of Boniface VIII. extravagant and mischievous, but not noble were afterwards to be built. The growth of papal interference was aided by the anarchy and license which prevailed in every department of life. That interference might have been more justified, if it had been wisely and righteously exercised. The laxity of the marriage tie, and the monstrous facility of divorce, had long been one of the plague spots of the Frank kingdom. The popes, as Nicholas I., did sometimes interpose their rebukes and their menaces. But their inter- position was rare and partial ; it passed over the strong and dangerous, and fastened on those whom it was not unsafe to attack ; it entangled itself with X CLAIMS AND DEGENERACY OF THE POPES 235 the political hostilities of the time ; and it too readily accepted hollow compromises to save appearances. The quarrel of Nicholas I. with Lothar II. of Lotha- ringia, about the ill-treatment of his wife, was made up under his successor, Hadrian II. (869), by an arrangement of which all parties must have known that its basis was falsehood. But this was not the worst. Much inefficiency and some compromises were not unnatural and almost inevitable in those confused times. But the century which saw the pretensions of the popes growing to their most audacious height saw at its end the popes themselves reduced below the level even of the blood-stained and licentious princes of the time. Rome, the city, the sacred office, had been fought for, had been won and lost, by fraud, by corruption, by violence, by murder, more than once in the recent times. But now for more than half a century the influence of three women of infamous character, in league with ambitious nobles and profligate churchmen, was paramount over the throne of the Vicar of Christ. In the hands of the marquises and dukes of Tuscany, of the two Alberics, lords of Camerino, of the consul Crescentius and the Roman democracy, and at last of the counts of Tusculum, the popedom, bought and sold and rapidly passing from hand to hand by bloody revolutions or political intrigues, was treated as the inheritance or prize of whatever family or adventurer happened at the moment to be strongest in Rome. The wicked- 236 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. ness and vileness which gathered round the Roman see in the ninth and tenth centuries are, with one exception, and that is the repetition of them in a more enlightened time, under Sixtus IV., Alexander VI., and Leo X., one of the most revolting profanations recorded in the history of the world. It seemed as if the popedom would share the fate of the empire of Charles the Great ; that the great office with its venerable traditions and its overweening claims would sink under the weight of its degradation and shame, and that the system of which it was the keystone would break up and perish. Two things saved it at this turning point of its history. One was the revival, under Otto the Great and his successors, of the imperial authority, with claims to chastise and correct abuses, to crush anarchy, and enforce order. At the price of the independence and the political hopes of Rome and Italy, the emperors of the Saxon line, by imposing their yoke on the papacy, prevented it, at last, after a hard struggle, from becoming the heritage of the petty nobles of the neighbourhood of Rome. They did not reform the popes, but they preserved the European character of the popedom. The other cause that saved it was a moral one ; it was the growth and spread of a strong spirit of austere reform of manners in the Church itself. This was specially embodied in the great monastic order or " congregation " of Cluny, at the beginning of the tenth century, which had for its object the revival of purity and strictness in ecclesiastical life, and x GROWTH OF PRIVATE INTEREST 237 which spread with strength and rapidity throughout Europe. It was from men imbued with the spirit and severity of Cluny, Leo IX. and Hildebrand, afterwards Gregory VII., that the internal reform came, which not only saved the papacy from becoming an Italian prince-bishopric, but made it, at once for good and for evil, the great centre of spiritual power in the middle ages of Christendom. The undisguised rapacity and ambition which were turning great Church offices into private possessions were acting equally in the political sphere. The dis- location of the empire extended much farther than merely to its great divisions. The instability and changefulness of the times opened a wide field for the aims and efforts of private and local interests. What the king was doing for his kingdom, what the duke and the count were each doing for his duchy or county, separating it off according to his opportunity and for his own advantage, enlarging, overreaching, stealing at the expense of his neighbours, that the petty lord or the military retainer did according to his humble measure, in his own neighbourhood. There was a general loosening of the public bands which kept men together. There was a strengthening of the separate centres and local seats of authority and power. The pretensions, just or unjust, of the small were of course swept away by the superior claims of the great, when the great were strong enough to enforce them. But on a large scale and on a small one, the tendency at this time to divide 238 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. and dissociate was greater than that to aggregation and union. The times were unhappy and evil ; when no one could feel safe from war with his next neighbour, from opposite and irreconcilable claims on his allegiance, from the hopeless terrors of barbarian invasion ; when religion seemed to have exhausted its power to restrain men from evil and had degenerated in its highest places into the vilest profanation ; when universal distrust reigned, and no man felt secure from his brother's dagger and his wife's poison. Yet, though faint and weak, there were the gleams of a better hope. There had come in with Charles the Great the dim idea of the public interest, the claims of the res fub/ica, the common weal, as distinguished from the pleasure or the ambition of kings and great men. There had passed into the opinions and language of men, though it was over and over again rudely set aside, a notion of the duty of princes to consider the good of their subjects, and in their quarrels to remember the sufferings of the widows and orphans whom they made by their wars. The writers of Charles's own period, Eginhard his friend, and Nithard his grandson who write like men accustomed to affairs and who have not read for nothing their Roman models are indeed more alive to these ideas than those who immediately follow them. But a step had been taken out of barbarism, and a beginning of better things made, when the idea of the public interest had been planted, at whatever X GROWTH OF IDEA OF PUBLIC INTEREST 239 disadvantage, and however feebly, in the growing society of Europe. With Charles the Great, the turn of things had distinctly come. Henceforth, though there was long to be, as much as ever, confusion, mis- rule, and wretchedness, and weary ages of crime and war, a progress is discernible, in some point or other, in each generation. There are steps backward, but the whole movement, though intermittent and slow, is forward. A footing for Christian civilisation was made for good. It was Christian civilisation which was to have Europe French, Italian, German civil- isation; not the uncouth heathendom of the Slave tribes, Wends, Obotrites and Czechs not the deso- lating barbarism of the Magyars not the unfruitful civilisation of Cordova and Bagdad, the seats of the rival Caliphates of the Mahometan Empire. And the same disintegrating tendency which favoured the growth of a multitude of petty local powers, rejoicing in their isolation and independence, had also a larger and more beneficial result. It created a swarm of little counts and lords. But it also helped a wholesome division between the naturally distinct portions of the Carolingian Empire. It made the great nations. On the break-up of the empire, its parts sought, each according to its natural or inherited affinities, to group themselves into larger or smaller aggregations, marked off from one another by history, traditions, interest, and language. To the west of the Rhine we henceforth see the beginnings and the growth of modern France; on the Rhine, 240 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. and to the east of it, the beginnings and growth of modern Germany. A memorable document, known as the bilingual " Oath of Strasburg " (842, a year before the partition of Verdun), preserved to us in Nithard's contempor- ary history, is a measure of the degree in which, in point of language, the Western and Eastern portions of the Frank kingdom had gone asunder. When Ixmis the German and Charles the Bald exchanged solemn promises of mutual aid against their brother Lothar, these promises were confirmed by the oaths of their soldiers ; and that each army might be witness of the transaction, these promises and oaths were pro- nounced in two languages, the languages of each host, German (Teudisca, DeutscK), and Roman (Romana, Romance), a language which has ceased to be Latin, and stands in the relation of an elder sister to the modern languages of the West and South, Pro- vencal, Italian, French, Spanish, which are known, in opposition to the Teutonic languages, by the common name of "Romance" languages. There are older fragments of German ; but of the Romance class of languages the oath of Strasburg is the earliest known example. It indicates that by this time, the middle of the ninth century, the land of the Western Franks was preparing to become Latin " France," and its people, not Franks, but French. The Latin element, always predominant in Southern Aquitaine and the Roman " Province," Provence, and along the valleys of the Saone and Rhone, rapidly recovered its x FKANCE AND THE HOUSE OF CAPET 241 ascendancy north of the Loire, in Neustria, the land of the Seine, the Somme, the Oise, and the Marne. As soon as the strong constraint of the Eastern Franks and their great king was removed, Gaul began steadily and surely to break away from the union with Germany, which Clovis had first forced upon it. It broke into separate and independent, or almost independent, portions kingdoms, dukedoms, countships ; all of them now, deeply and irrevocably, Latin. When the last of the great barbarian con- quests, the settlement of the Northern sea-rovers at Rouen, gave a new province to Gaul, and introduced into it the new name of Normandy, the language which the new-comers at once adopted, in exchange for their ancestral Scandinavian dialect, was not the Teutonic one of the old Franks, but the Romance tongue of Latinised Neustria. Then began the history of modern France ; and the history of France was, for many centuries, the history of the aggregation and union of fragments : their attraction to a central nucleus, and the natural grouping round it of the nearer, the gradual annexation of the more distant. The new nation began with a new dynasty. The long and obstinate struggle between the expiring but gallant Carolingians, the descendants of Charles the Bald, and the dukes of Paris, the sons of its deliverer, Count Odo, ended in the establishment of the new line, which was to hold the royalty of France for 800 years. But it was the new line which made France. In the assembly of the states at Senlis, in May, 987, R 242 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. Hugh Capet, amid intrigues and treachery, and pre- mature and suspected deaths, became king. In May, 1787, the first assembly of the Notables, bringing with it the doom of Hugh Capet's house, met at Versailles. Between these two dates lies the history of the growth of the French nation, the development of French character, and the fusion into one realm of the French provinces. But the kingdom which Hugh Capet and his descendants created out of the ruins of the Carolingian Empire of the Franks, monopolising the Teutonic name of France, while it drove out the Teutonic language before the Roman, and fixed Latin ascendancy in Gaul, was far from being at once what it was to be. It was made up at first merely of the lands lying round its centre, Paris. Hugh was indeed crowned "king of the Gauls, Britons, Danes, Aqui- tanians, Goths, Spaniards, Gascons." When his son Robert was made king with his father, he is described as reigning over the West from the Meuse to the Ocean. And the style of " king of the Franks " was still maintained. But Brittany was unsubdued. Normandy, at the very gates of Paris, was but a nominal dependency, in the hands of the strongest ruling family in Europe. Aquitaine was far off and held its own. The banks of the Saone and Rhone, the slopes of the Jura, and the valleys of the Southern Alps, were occupied by the absolutely independent kingdoms of Burgundy and Aries. The kingdom of France was still to be made when Hugh Capet became king ; it was then only taking its rise in small x STATES OF GERMANY 243 and insecure beginnings. The kingdom of the tenth century was to modern France what Wessex was to England before the days of Egbert. But while in the west of Europe Teutonic language and ascendancy had definitively failed to establish itself, and was retreating before the reanimated Latin and Celtic influences, Germany though the Latin name of Tacitus for the nation hardly appears yet in con- temporary history was, in fact, constituting and shaping itself in the centre of Europe. It claimed both banks of the still Teutonic Rhine from source to mouth, though the west bank, Teutonic as it con- tinued to be in language and character, was long to remain a debateable land, fiercely contended for by the eastern and western divisions of the Franks, and itself often inclining to the west. Three great central dukedoms, Saxony in the north, Alamannia in the south up to the Alps of the St. Gothard and the Bernina range, and between Saxony and Alamannia, the Eastern France, the later Franconia, the land of the Main and Neckar, together with the Thuringian and Swabian lands, formed the nucleus of the great country which was to fill so large a space in history. It was flanked westwards, from the mouths of the Weser and the Scheldt to the sources of the Moselle on the western slopes of the Vosges, by the duke- doms of Friseland, of the Ripuarian Lotharingia between the Rhine and Scheldt, and of Lotharingia proper on the Moselle : that middle portion of the old Frank kingdom, the future Netherlands and 244 BEGINNING OF THK MIDDLE AGES CHAP. Lorraine, which, though Teutonic in language and race, was continually shifting its allegiance and changing its masters. To the south and south-east Germany spread out into the almost royal dukedoms of Bavaria and Carinthia ; and it was fringed east- wards by a chain of borderlands, the "marks" or marches between the Germans and the Slaves, and, behind the Slaves, the Poles, and the Turkish race of the Magyars. On the north of this broad border, between the Elbe and Oder, were the Nordmark and the Ostmark and the marches of Merseburg and Meissen, the lands which were to become Branden- burg and Silesia ; to the south, the Mahrenmark, the Ostmark, and the Steyer mark, the Moravia, Austria, and Stiria of later geography ; between these march- lands was the great dukedom, which was in due time to become the kingdom, of Bohemia. These lands were the later acquisitions of Germany. The process by which the Latinised Franks of Neustria were transforming Danish Northmen into French Normans, was going on equally in the ninth and tenth centuries in these German marchlands. Out of the German- ised Slaves of the north and south, and the infiltration of German settlers in these outlying regions, were formed the races from which were to grow Prussia and Austria. The Germans, as we have seen, first had a sepa- rate king in the grandson of Charles the Great, Ludvig, or Louis the German, " the wise and just " (817-876), appointed, in the early divisions of the X KINGS OF GERMANY 245 empire, king of the Bavarians, who at the partition of Verdun (843) took all the lands and nations east of the Rhine. The kingdom of Germany was united for a moment with the Western kingdom under his son Charles the Fat (884-887); but when the two portions finally broke asunder at his death, the Germans chose for their king another of the Caro- lingian line, Arnulf, who also received the imperial crown at Rome in 896. The direct line of Charles the Great in Germany ended in the grandson of Arnulf, Louis the Child (911). Then by election of chiefs and people, "the people of the Franks and Saxons," the kingdom passed to popular and powerful dukes, first, Conrad of Franconia (911-918), then to his rival, Henry of Saxony (918-936), both of them connected by the female line with the Carolingians. Under them, in disaster, in success, in wars with the Western kings and dukes for the borderlands on the Rhine, in fierce conflicts with Slave Obotrites and Wends on the Eastern marchlands, in common resist- ance to the terrible Hungarian ravages, the Teutonic nations, distracted as they were with internal feuds, yet grew together, and were from time to time united. But the greatness of the kings of the Germans kings of the Franks they were still called began with Henry's son and successor Otto (936). Not un- worthy to share the title of the great ruler in whose steps he trod, Otto the Great was the renewer of the Empire of the West, the deliverer of Christendom from the barbarian scourge, the tamer of the tribes of 246 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. the Eastern border, the reformer, in some measure at least, of the monstrous abuses which had grown up under the ecclesiastical rule of the worst of the popes. Under Otto, king and emperor, Germany may be said to have taken definitely the place which it was to hold in modern Europe in the middle and later ages. Otto, ambitious and imperious, yet noble-minded, generous, and a hater of wrong and disorder, became, like Charles, the type of a new kind of king in Europe. He was unsuccessful in his interference with the affairs of the Western Frank kingdom, happily unsuccessful, for his success would only have hindered the natural course of growth in the Latinised population of Gaul. But he grappled strongly and successfully with internal disloyalty. He put down the mischievous restlessness of the Slaves of the Eastern marches with a firm and stern hand, and sometimes with the pitiless rigour with which civilisa- tion meets the dangers of barbarian faithlessness. And he delivered Europe from the misery and shame of the Magyar desolations by a great victory which may rank with that of Aetius at Chalons over Attila, and that of Charles Martel over the Arabs at Poitiers. In the tremendous battle of the Lechfeld (August 10, 955), near Augsburg, the Magyars learned in a bloody overthrow the strength and determination of the Germans and their king. Otto was saluted on the field by his army as the Father of his land and Emperor. The victory which delivered Germany broke the Magyars of their habits of plundering and x ITALY 247 ravage, and was the first step to make them the Hungarian nation. Christian missionaries penetrated among them. King Geisa became their Ethelbert or Clovis. Fifty years later they had an anointed Christian king, a saint, St. Stephen ; and the sacred crown of St. Stephen, received from Pope Sylvester (1000), became the emblem of one of the most famous of the kingdoms of Christendom. Italy, imperial Italy, within whose borders it was ever held that an emperor must receive his crown, had acquired from the policy of Charles the Great an increased importance among the new nations. It awoke at his death to the desire of independence : a desire never to be extinguished, but which it was to take long ages to fulfil. Italy was still divided, as in the days of the Lombard kings, into a number of lordships, great and small. Each of the three grand- sons of Charles the Great, either personally or in their children, had with the dignity of emperor claimed to hold Italy ; with Charles the Fat (888) it was lost to the Carolingian family. Then it seemed as if the days of the Lombards, whose name had not yet perished from the style of the kings of Italy, were coming back again. The dukes of two of the old Lombard dukedoms, Berengar of Friuli in the north, Guido of Spoleto in the centre, became rival claimants for the kingdom of Italy, such as it had been before Charles overthrew the Lombard Desiderius. For sixty years of turbulence and war the kingdom was fought for by pretenders, Italians, and foreigners 248 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. from Provence and Burgundy. Rome was either in the hands of the popes, or of the people of Rome, or of some daring lords of the neighbourhood, who called themselves Consuls or Patricians. In this dis- order Italy was but in the same condition as Germany or Gaul. But no Hugh Capet or Henry of Saxony was to arise and lay the foundations of a national kingdom in Italy. At Rome lay the spell which drew the invader ; at Rome were the great universal interests which gave him good reason or pretext for coming. Rome was the seat " where emperors were wont to sit," and it was the emperor's first business to protect, to purify, to do right at Rome. And at the end of the Carolingian times, and the beginning of the tenth century, Rome was at the lowest depth of disorder and shame. Charles had come to deliver Rome and the popes from the oppression of the Lombard kings. In the middle of the tenth century, Otto, the greatest of German kings since Charles, claiming Charles's place and title, descended from the Alps to deliver Rome from scandalous popes and tyrannous nobles. More romantic than Charles, he came also to deliver and to marry a distressed and widowed queen, the good and beautiful Adelheid of Provence, whom the Lombard usurper, Berengar, as he is called, wished to force into a distasteful marriage. Otto extinguished again, as Charles had done, the power and claims of the Italian or Lombard king of Pavia and Verona, Adelheid's enemy, the second Berengar. Crowned king of the Italians at x ITALY 249 Milan (961), he was crowned Emperor of the Romans by the pope at Rome (962); he confirmed the rights of the Roman see, but he asserted in large terms those of the empire ; and he had his young son Otto II. also crowned emperor by the pope (967). But his coming, though it brought with it something of restored order, and also prepared the way for a reformed popedom, destroyed the chance of an Italian state. His coming riveted Italy to the empire, and the empire was henceforth to be kept in German hands, as the papacy was for the most part kept in Italian. By the coronation of Otto, the two great powers were finally established, which, as it was supposed then and for ages afterwards, were indis- pensably necessary to govern the temporal and spiritual order of the world : the Holy Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Church. Instead of governing the world between them, as Charles and Otto dreamed, they were soon to meet in irrecon- cilable and fatal conflict. Between them Italy was torn to pieces by domestic strife, and became the natural and accustomed prey of the strangers, coming of their own accord, or invited from within. For a short interval there arose the turbulent and brilliant liberty of the cities. Then came the tyrants, the Scaligers, the Visconti, the Sforzas, the Medici, the Borgias, the Farnesi ; and then the day of the foreign dynasties. But never since Otto clenched the work of Charles, till our own times, has it been possible for Italy to be what her sister nations were. Modern 250 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. nations were consolidated and bound together in their early stages, not always by the power, but by the idea and the presence of the crown. And the crown of Italy, the Iron Crown of Lombardy, the Golden Crown of the Empire, was always in the keeping of a stranger. What the fifth and sixth centuries were to the Teutonic nations, Goths, Franks, Burgundians the period of the beginnings of their settled national life this the ninth and tenth centuries were to the second great line of the barbarian movement, the Scandinavian and Slave nations. It was the time which brought them to rest in the seats which they were henceforth to occupy. From wanderers, marauders, invaders, they did not indeed at once pass into citizens, but they became settlers, finding homes and founding a country in lands which were for the future to be called after their names. They did not, like the Franks and Goths, or even as much as the Anglo-Saxons, come into a heritage prepared for them by an older cultivation a land of farms and vineyards, of cities, and the arts of peace ; and this, doubtless, affected their history, and caused that comparative rudeness which clings still to the east of North Europe. But they felt the influence of a more fixed order in the organised nations beyond them. From mere tribes and hordes they began to shape themselves into dukedoms and kingdoms. Around the great central state, the empire, mainly German, and in German hands, which x SCANDINAVIAN NATIONS 251 represented the power and law of Western Europe, the names and boundaries and rude political efforts of realms afterwards to be famous begin to appear. But, as in the case of Hungary just referred to, they appear only in very obscure forms and dim outlines. The Northmen, not only in what is now Denmark but in what are now Norway and Sweden, were beginning to be welded together into distinct nations, under the strong and fierce discipline of ambitious kings, like Harald Haarfager, the " Fair-haired," and his family, Eric " Bloodaxe," Hacon, and Olaf (863- 1000). The successes of their countrymen, who had won provinces and founded princely houses, the familiarity which their adventures had given them with the state and power of the emperors and kings of Christendom, turned their thoughts from the mere excitement of a rover's life to the desire of founding dominions at home, and bringing under the king's authority not merely the military service but the loose independence and the landed tenure of their wild countrymen. The attempts caused much resistance and great emigrations. But the kings carried their point : they became rulers over subjects. Wars did not cease, but they became more and more national ones, replacing piracy and private adventures. And the three Scandinavian kingdoms, as we know them, were formed frequently united, more or less, under a conqueror like Cnut, but always separate as nations. While the Northmen were shaping themselves into 252 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. organised states among the mountains and on the fiords of Norway, the lakes of Sweden, and the heaths and islands of Denmark, the same thing was taking place in the vast wilderness of pine-forest, marshes, and boundless plains south and east of the Baltic. We begin to see on the historical map of Europe, amid the crowd of ill-understood and forgotten names with which it is studded from the Oder and the Vistula to the Volga, belonging mostly to different branches of the great Slave family, two designations emerging, which were of no more account at the time than those around them, but which announce the beginning of two of the most famous nations of the modern world. Between Slave races of strange names, who were to become Lithuanians, Prussians, Pome- ranians, Letts to the north, Slovaks to the south, Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, another branch begins to change the name of Lechs (Ljdken)^ for that of Polaks, Poles, meaning in their own language " the people of the plains," the great plains of the Vistula. In the middle of the ninth century we begin to hear of Polish chiefs : at the end of the tenth there had arisen a Polish kingdom under a powerful and victorious king (Boleslas, 992-1025). Here its his- tory begins so full of turbulence and incorrigible anarchy within, of aggression and tyrannous insolence without, and, perhaps, of all histories the most pathetic at its close. Again, in the north-east, another name which was to become that of a mighty people, the natural anta- x SIAVE NATIONS RUSSIANS 253 gonist of Poland, first its victim and then its destroyer, began to be distinguished. That famous name first appears in Greek and Latin writers of the ninth cen- tury, in the shape of an indeclinable word, 01 'Pws, T& 'P<3s, " the Russ," as if it stood for some unintelligible abstraction. It soon became familiar at Constanti- nople as the name of sea-rovers, whose fleets from the rivers of the Black Sea insulted and threatened the great capital. The early history of the Russians is dim and vague. But it seems almost certain that the process which created England and Normandy created that which was to become Russia. Scandi- navian pirates and adventurers had become known on the Baltic coast, the "Varangian Sea," for their daring, ferocity, and strength. They were called in, or they conquered; they established them- selves among the Finnish and Slave tribes; they became masters and rulers ; either as a dynasty or a race they gradually adopted, like the Normans, the speech of their Slave subjects. In a corner of that endless plain which stretches from Germany to the steppes of the Tartars and Mongols and thence to China, and of which the natural divisions are not mountains, but the streams, hundreds of miles in length, of deep and broad rivers, we hear of Ruric and his two brothers (about 862). They were North- men, or, as the Slavonians called them, Varangians, the name by which the Northern bodyguard of the Greek emperors was known, who settled at Novgorod, as the Jutes settled in Kent and then Rollo at Rouen. 254 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. The Russian Varangians conquered round about them, like their kindred in England and Gaul ; they pushed southward, driving the Turkish Chazars from Kiev on the Dnieper, and making Kiev and Novgorod their two chief cities. Their northern habits prompted them to use the great rivers for trade and war : by the Dnieper they carried on a brisk commerce with the Greek Empire, and four times (between 865 and 1043) their flotillas sailed to the Bosporus, ravaging its shores, and were beaten off with difficulty and loss. At this time arose the strange prophecy, vouched for at the time, " that, in the last days, the Russians should become masters of Constantinople." The family of Ruric appears in the dim history as the counterpart to that of Rollo. Chief after chief kept up the inherit- ance of strength and the tradition of enterprise, and even ill-fortune did not check them. One of them, Swatoslav(95 5-9 7 3), attempted Constantinople by land. He was outmanoeuvred and driven back to the Danube by the Greek emperor, the Armenian, John Zimisces. Surrounded on all sides, and without hope of escape, he was forced to capitulate and sign a humbling treaty, just as long afterwards Peter the Great, hemmed in on the Pruth by the Ottomans, was com- pelled to buy his release by ignominious conditions (1711). But Swatoslav's defeat did not hinder, any more than that of Peter, the growth of the nation under his successors. After a short interval of bloody domestic war he was followed as " Great Prince " by the great Vladimir (973-1015), the conqueror, the x CONVERSION OF THE NOKTH AND EAST 255 legislator, the builder of cities and founder of schools ; who holds in the traditions of Russia the place held in England by Alfred, and on the Continent by Charles the Great and Otto. And about this time, the ninth and tenth centuries, had come over all these races a change as great as that of their political organisation, and closely con- nected with it. " In these centuries," says Gibbon, "the reign of the Gospel and of the Church was extended over Bulgaria, Hungary, Bohemia, Saxony, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland, and Russia." Their conversion went along with their introduction to civil life and order. Zealous and self -devoted missionaries, usually monks, from the West or East, carrying their lives in their hands, first came preach- ing to men who were becoming ashamed and alarmed at their barbarism, in the face of a civilisation of which they felt the strength. In time the chiefs from conviction, from feeling, or from imitation of the kings of the Franks and the emperor of the Greeks were baptized. They encouraged the preachers of Christianity, and sometimes enforced the profession of it by violence and penalties. But its spread was certain when it once began. It was brought to Den- mark and Sweden by a devoted monk of Corbey on the Weser, Anschar (826-865). The kings alter- nately protected and opposed it, till at length it was firmly planted under Cnut. Introduced into Norway from England, it was imposed upon their people by the two kings, Olaf Tryggvason (955-1000) and Olaf 256 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP, x the Saint (1019-1033). The apostles of the Bulga- rians, Cyril and Methodius (862-885), were also the teachers of the Moravians and Bohemian Czechs. In 966, Micislav, duke of the Poles, was baptized. But among the Slave Wends between the Elbe and Oder, the efforts of the German emperors to Chris- tianise them called forth a fierce revolt (983-1066); and among them the missionaries had met little but martyrdom. Finally, in 988, the powerful Vladimir of Russia, whose grandmother Olga had already brought Christianity from Constantinople to Kiev in 955, was baptized at Cherson, and received as his bride the Greek emperor's daughter. Russia hence- forth became the great conquest and strength of the Eastern Church. The conversion of these last formed of the barbarian nations altered their relation to Europe. " The admission," says Gibbon, " of the bar- barians into the pale of civil and ecclesiastical society, delivered Europe from the depredations by sea and land of the Normans, Hungarians, and Russians. The establishment of law and order was promoted by the influence of the clergy : and the rudiments of art and science were introduced into the savage countries of the globe." CHAPTER XI CONCLUSION RETROSPECT OF THE TRANSITION PERIOD BETWEEN THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE MIDDLE AGES THE history of the five centuries, from the end of the fifth to the end of the tenth, is the history of the efforts of the new nations of the West after organisa- tion, improvement, and power. During this period, the Teutonic races found themselves under entirely new conditions. It had not been new to them to conquer, or to meet other races. They had already, in what we call their barbarous state, definite social usages and a kind of political organisation. But for the first time they found themselves in close and permanent contact with an older and more perfect civil order, and a new religion. They found them- selves, in their ignorance and inexperience, in their eager curiosity and vigorous freshness of life, in contact with Roman learning and Roman art, in some parts with Roman institutions and Roman laws. And they found themselves under the spell s 258 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. of the mightiest, the tenderest, and most wonderful of religions. Thus, all that had been the familiar course of life during centuries of wandering was changed. Wild as they still were, they settled, they became lords of lands and houses, they began to learn and to know, they began to feel themselves becoming a commonwealth and a state. And by the end of the tenth century, the process, in its broad and essential points, was accomplished. The outlines of the new world that was to be, had become distinctly and permanently laid down. It had been doubtful whether it was to be Goths or Franks who were to be at the head of the new state of things, to give it its tone, to direct and control it. It had been the Franks, and not the Goths. It had been doubtful whether Catholicism or Arianism was to be the religion of the West. Arianism had dis- appeared, and had left, perhaps, too easy a victory to the Catholic Church. Again, it had been doubtful whether the new nations could stand the shock of barbarian pressure, outside and behind them ; whether Europe might not be, like Africa and Asia, a prey to the Saracens ; whether the Northmen from the sea, and the Huns and Slaves from the deserts, might not desolate and sweep away the homes which Frank, and Goth, and Anglo-Saxon had made for themselves. The deluge had been stayed, not without loss, but for good and all The Saracen had maimed and wounded Christendom in one of its finest kingdoms ; he had spoilt, though not finally destroyed, the hopes of Spain. xi CONCLUSION 259 He long continued to annoy and threaten the shores of Italy; to penetrate even the passes of the Alps. But the Saracen had been arrested for ever by Charles Martel at Poitiers and Narbonne, by Charles the Great at the Ebro. The Northmen, the Slaves, even the Huns or Magyars, had been drawn into civilisation, which they had disturbed but could not overthrow. The imperfect civilisation of the time had proved itself strong enough not only to check them, but to react upon them. It had been doubtful whether the new world were not to be an extension of Germany, from the Rhine over the whole West and South, to the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Further, it seemed at one time uncertain whether German speech, and German law, were not to prevail in Gaul and Italy, as they had prevailed in Britain, supplanting the older languages and laws, or driving them out into the wastes or the mountains whether a great German reproduction of the Roman Empire, with its twin capitals of Aachen and Rome, were not to be supreme in the world. But this was not to be. The strength of the older society, and of the races in possession, had reasserted itself. Germany was indeed to be a great and mighty nation ; but it was not to absorb the world. The Frank Empire of Charles the Great was too loosely compacted to hold together as he had created it. It broke up, and was reconstituted in a different and very contracted shape, the Holy Roman Empire of the Saxon, Otto the Great; the Empire as it was to continue till the beginning of this 2GO BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. century, often a very important, but an ambiguous and uncertain element in the polity of Christendom. The lands where the Romans had been strong, were once more to show the influence of their imperishable language and thought. Italy was once more Italy, and not Lombardy ; but its destiny to be kingless, except with the mock title of a foreign, and often hostile ruler, had declared itself. It was no longer doubtful that Western France, so long the battle- ground between Latin and German influences, was to be Latin and not German. It had finally shaken itself loose from Germany. It took a king out of its own great chieftains, and rejected the half-Teutonic line of Charles the Great ; it was to grow and become great under the kings of Paris, and not under the kings of Laon, much less of Aachen. The great Norse settlement on the Seine had become thoroughly Latin. The combination of astuteness and practical good sense with the old adventurousness and daring of their blood, which was to make the Normans seek crowns in England, in Italy, and in the East, had already shown itself in the remarkable line of the dukes of Normandy. And by the end of the tenth century, England had taken its shape and established its internal unity. Angles of the east, north, and midland, Saxons of the west and south, even the intrusive Norse settlers of the Danish districts, had become permanently bound together, under the kings of the line of Egbert Alfred, Edward the Elder, Athelstan, Edgar ; they had become that " English xi CONCLUSION 261 folk " and " English kin," who were soon twice to be made subjects of foreign conquest, and to be ruled by lines of foreign kings, but who were to turn their conquerors, even Normans, in a generation or two, into Englishmen. Finally with the year 999, with Gerbert of Auvergne, the austere Cluniac monk, the most learned man of his time mathematician, theologian, supposed wizard, magician, tutor of a Roman emperor and of a king of France, ecclesiastical intriguer and ecclesiastical victim, the stout opponent, the stout asserter of the claims of the Roman see, placed in it as a reforming pope by the title of Sylvester II. through the influence of the emperor, Otto III. a new line of popes begins. We have left behind the popes who cringed to the Caro- lingian princes when they were strong, and threatened them when they were weak. We have left behind the creatures of profligate women, and their associates. There are still some forty years to come of the licen- tious or simoniacal nominees of the Counts of Tus- culum. But the German emperors on the one hand, the monks of Cluny on the other, had already embraced strongly the idea of what the pope ought to be ; and this idea, which was to give to the popedom its modern importance, was on the eve of being realised. Thus the present sketch has been brought down to the middle ages. In 962, Otto the Great was crowned emperor at Rome, and the mediaeval empire began. In 975, was the end of the powerful and peaceful reign of Edgar, who left a united England, 262 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP, xi which his son Ethelred was to lose through misgovern- ment, and the stranger was to conquer and spoil, but which neither could destroy nor disintegrate. In 987, Hugh Capet became king of France. In 995 ended the long reign of fifty years of Richard, duke of Normandy, the reign which had seen such great revolutions, in which Normandy had thrown its sword into the balance between Germany and France, and had determined the victory of the dukes of Paris ; a reign which left Normandy the most vigorous province of Gaul, full of intellectual activity and ambition. We are now not far from the crusades. The seeds of feudalism have been thickly sown, and have taken deep root. We are not far from the strife of investi- tures, the eventful quarrel between pope and emperor, Gregory VII. and Henry IV. We are not far from the beginnings of the scholastic philosophy, from Berengarius and Lanfranc, Anselm and Abelard. We are not far from those massy and solemn churches, in Normandy, Germany, France, and England, in which the architecture of the middle ages took its beginning, and which stand the enduring monuments of what the new nations had grown to be; of the ideas of power, strength, and grandeur which had been developed among them, and to which they sought to give expression. INDEX AACHEN, or Aix-la-Chapelle, 172, 185, 187 jfigidius, 45 Aetius, 25 ; defeats Attila, 27, 28 ; murdered, 29 Africa, 20, 21 Agilulf, Lombard king, 51 Agricultural colonies, 62, 84, 145 Alamanni, 5, 45, 102 Alans invade Gaul, 17 ; Spain, ib. Alaric, the West Goth, n ; invades Greece, 12 ; projects a barbarian state, ib. ; defeated by Stilicho, ib. ', master-general of Illyricum, 16 ; sieges and sack of Rome, 14 ; death, 15 ; his sayings, 14 ; makes an emperor, Attalus, ib., 31 II., W. Goth, at Toulouse, pub- lishes abridgment of Roman law, 64 Alboin, 49 Alcuin, 142, 166 Alfred, 218 ; checks the Danes, 221 ; restores learning, 222 ; greatness, ib, ; creates navy, ib. ; legislation, ib. ; popularises knowledge, 228 Alodial, 213 Angles, 22, 75, 76 Anglo-Saxon, literature, 228; church, ib. conquest, 74 ; different from other barbarian conquests, 75 ; more complete, 79-81 ; heathen conquest, 81 Anschar, 255 Anthemius, 32 Antonines, 6 Aquileia destroyed by Attila, 27 Aquitaine, 19, 42, 46, 101, 242 Arabians, 98 ; v. Saracens Arcadius, 10 Arianism, n, 43; extinguished in Spain, 95 ; among the Lombards, Si Arnulf, emperor, 194, 245 Saint, of Metz, 108 Assemblies, moots, 55 ; malli, 156, 215, 241, 242 Athelstan, 205, 223 ; sisters married to Continental princes, ib, Athaulf, Gothic leader, 16, 19, 81 Attalus, Alaric's mock-emperor, 14, '7> 3i Attila, 23 ; character, 25 ; attacks the west, 26 ; defeated at Chalons, 27 ; invades Italy, ib. ; threatens Rome, ib. ; death, 28 ; named Scourge of God, ib. Augustine of Canterbury, 83 Saint, of Hippo, death of, 21 ; his City of God, 167 Austrasia, or Austria : word among Franks and Lombards, 104 ; Ger- man influences prevailing in, ib. ; superiority over Neustria, 107, 108 Austria (modern), 244 Avars, probably Huns, 28, 125 ; con- quered by Charles the Great, 146 Avitus, bishop of Vienne, 58 Emperor, 31, 32 BARBARIANS, Roman knowledge of them, 3 ; migrations, ib. ; invade empire, 5 ; increasing boldness in fourth century, 7 , invasions in the fifth, 8-22 ; three great divi- sions of invaders, 10 ; power in the Roman State, 8, 16 ; greatness of consequences of the invasion and settlement, 52, 90 ; land tenure, 264 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES 55 ; effect on them of Christianity, 57 - 62 ; Roman law, 63 ; Latin language, 66 Rasiteus, title of Eastern Emperor, 133; taken by Edgar, 224 Basques, 101 Bavaria, 145, 344 Bede, 84, 160 Belisarius, 47, 121 Berengar, king of Italy, 247, 248 Bilingual population, 67 ; oath of Stra-sburg, 186, 240 Bishops, leaders on fall of empire, 57 ; influence on the barbarians, 59 ; secularity among the Franks, 110, 158 Roc land, 213 Boethius, 40, 71 Bohemia, 170, 244, 252 Boniface, apostle of Germany, 114, 160 Count, invites Vandals, 20 Kret-i-alJa, 211 Britain, left by Romans, 22 ; invaded by the Anglo-Saxons, 75 Brittany, 242 Brunihild, 105 Bulgarians, probably of Turanian origin, 28 ; mixed with Slaves, 126 Burgundians, 4 ; cross the Rhine (405). 17 ; kingdom founded, 18, 42 ; the Burgundies, 18 ; Arians, 43 ; defeated by Clovis, 46 ; kingdom conquered by the Franks, if-., 103 ; law, 64 Byzantine, phase of the empire, 132 Byzantium, 117; r. Constantinople S, bishop of Aries, 58, 62 Canterbury, 83 Capet, Hugh, 242 Capitularies, 156, 188 C;i riii thin, 194, 244 Carolingian line, beginning, 139 ; tables of, 109, 175, 191, 193 ; division among sons of Charles the Great, 177 ; quarrels, 182 ; three- fold division of empire, 186 ; decay of, 189 ; fails, 204 ; last, Louis le Faineant, 207 Carthage, 21 Cassiodorus, minister of Theoderic, 4 Cederic, house of, 220 Ctorl, aia Chalons, battle of (451), 27, 28 Charles Martel, 108 ; overthrows Arabs at Tours and Poitiers, no ; appealed to by the pope, ua Charles the Bald, king of West Franks, 182, 185, 186, 194 ; assailed by the Northmen, 194, 202 ; em- peror, 194 the Fat, 192 the Great, crowned as a boy by Pope Stephen II., 114 j sole king, 141 ; biography by Eginhard, it. ; not a "French king," 142; Teutonic character, it. ; his wars : bar- barians, Saracen, Saxon, Slaves, 144 ; Lombard war, 147 ; alliance with the popes, 147-150; crowned emperor, 150; idea of empire, 151; legislation, 154; Church government, 161 ; as emperor, 164; encourages learning, 166; love of German language, 167 ; his great faults. 169 ; extent of empire, 17x1; burial, 172; legends about him, 173; failure of the imperial scheme, 176 the Simple, 195, 204, 205 Childerjc III., last Merovingian, 115 Chilperic of Soissons, 101, 105 Chosroes, or Khosrou Nusnirvan, 128 Church, influence on the barbarians, 57-60 ; mischiefs of barbarian pa- tronage, 61, 102 ; coarseness, 62 ; Anglo-Saxon, 86, 228; corrupt under Merovingians, 158 ; reform by Charles the Great, 161, 162 ; under Otto the (treat, 236, 248 Clair, St., sur-Epte, treaty of, 203 Claudian, 71 Clergy, bond between Franks and Latins, 101 Clotildis, 46 Clovis, Chlodvig= Louis, 45 Cluny, order of, 236 Cnut, 251, 255 Columban, St., 84, 160 Commendation, 211, 214 Conrad of Kranconia, king of Ger- many, 245 Con/eaeralet, barbarian, 23 Constantine, 5, o, 134, 135 ; forged "donation, 116 Porphyrogenitus, 1*5 Pretender in Britain, 29 Constantinople, New Rome, 7, 38, ~" 7 Constantius, 134 Conversions : Goths, 1 1 : their Arian- ism, it., 24, 43, 46; Vandals, 24; Burg^umiian*, it. Franks under Clovis, 46 ; of Lombards from Arianism, 51 ; of the English, 82 ; INDEX 265 of the Slaves, 127 ; of the Saxons, 144 ; of the Germans, 161 ; of the Hungarians, 247 ; of the Scandi- navian and Slave nations, 255, 256 Corbey, 168, 232, 255 Councils, national Spanish, 65, 95 Count Boniface, 20 Counts, Comites, Graf, 55 ' ' Frisian shore, "201 Vermandois, 204, 205 Crown of St. Stephen of Hungary, 247 ; Golden, of Italy, 250 ; Iron, of Lombardy, 250 Cyril and Methodius, apostles of the Slaves, 127, 256 Czechs, 252, 256 Danegeld, 202 Danelagu, 201, 218, 221 Danes, 93 appear in England, 217 ; in Kent, 218 ; drive Alfred into the marshes, ii. ', defeated, peace of Wedmore, it. ; alternate between England and France, 219 Decius, 5 Desiderius, 148, 247 Diocletian, 9 Duchy of Normandy, 204 Dukes, Duces Heerzog, 55 ; Lom- bard, 49, 51 Alamannia, 243 Austrasia, 107, 108 Bavaria, 145, 244 Carinthia, 244 Friseland, 201, 243 Normandy, 203 Paris, 204, 241 Saxony, 243 EASTERN EMPIRE, 9, 117 ; strength, 122 ; losses, 123 ; preserves civil- isation, 124 ; separation from the West, 137, 151 East Goths, 39 ; led by Theoderic into Italy, to. ; kingdom in Italy, 40 ; attempt at fusion with Ita- lians, 41 ; destroyed by Belisarius and Narses, 47 Ebroin, 107 Ecthesis of Heraclius, 136 Edgar, 224 ; called Imperator and Basileus, ib. Edheling, 212 Edward the Elder, 223 Egbert of Wessex, 211, 221 Eginhard, 113, 141, 150, 238 Elbe, 74, 75, 78 Emperor, made by Alaric, 14, 31 ; by Ricimer, 32 ; by Gundobad, 33 ; by Orestes, ib. Emperors, Eastern, despotic powers of, 134 ; religious supremacy, ib. ; effects, 137 England, conversion of, 82 ; unity, 93 united under Egbert, 212 ; social constitution, 213 ; public assem- blies, 215 ; strength under disas- ter, 227 Eorls, 212 Epte, boundary of Normandy, 203 Erigena, 232 Ethel, 213 Ethelbert, 83 Ethelfleda, " Lady of the Mercians," 223 Ethelfrith, 78 Euric, 20, 42 Exarch, Exarchate, 48, 122 Eyder, river, 78, 170 " FALSE DECRETALS," age and in- fluence, 234 Fins, 253 Florence, Stilicho defeats Radagais at (405), 12, 17 F'olcland, 213, 216 Fontenailles, or Fontenoy, battle, 185 France, Francia, 100, 103, 142 ; various senses of the term, 209 ; modern kingdom, 142, 243 Franconia, 243, 245 Franks, first appearance, 5 ; con- federacy in fifth century, 81 ; ri- valry with Goths, 39, 258 ; Catho- lics against Arians, 43 ; prevail over the Goths, 46, 47 ; use Roman law, 65 ; long maintain Teutonic character, 70 ; Franks and French, ib. ; Franks, leaders in the West, 89, 99, 102 ; favour the clergy, 102 ; divisions of Frank kingdom, 103 ; Frank empire under Charles the Great, 170; end of their dominion, 207 ; estimate of themselves, from preface to Salic law, 208 Fredegund, 105 Friseland, Frisia, 201, 243 Frisians, 81, 161 Fulda, monastery, 145, 161, 232, 233 GARIBALDI, Bavarian and Lombard name, 149 Gascony, TOI Gau, 55 266 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES Geisa, king of Hungary, baptized, '47 Genseric, the Vandal, invades and conquers Africa, 20 ; founds Van- dal kingdom, piratical power in the Mediterranean, 21 ; defeats Roman fleets, 30; alliance with Attila, 26 ; sacks Rome, 29 ; dies, 3 Gerbcrt, Pope Sylvester 11., 247, 261 German language, early examples, 161, 167, 232 ; Charles the Great's fondness for. 167 Germany, modern, created by Caro- lingian kings, 140, 243 Glycerius, 33 Goths, 4 ; first of barbarians Chris- tianised, ii ; Arians, ;/., 43 ; Gothic Bible, n ; possibility of a Gothic empire, 19 ; rivalry with Franks, 39, 258 ; Gothic kingdoms, 42 ; driven out of Gaul by the Franks, 46, 47 ; in Roman service, 56 ; literature destroyed in Spain, 95 ; flourishing kingdom in Spain, ,,97 Gotteskalk, 232 Gregory the Great converts the Lombard king, 51 ', sends Augus- tine to England, 83 Gregory of Tours, 63, 69, 72, 86, 100 Guadalete, battle of, 98 Guests, barbarian, 23, 56 Gundeuch, 18 Gundobad, Burgundian king, 18 ; lawgiver, 41 ; nephew of Ricimer, 33 ; succeeds him as Patrician, t'f. ', nominates Russian emperor, it. ; defeated by Clovis, 46 Gundochar, 18 Guntram, too Guthrum, 218 HAMPSHIRE, 77 Harold Haarfager, 151 He fir a, 98 Heliatul, 232 ffeiu>tictm,oeno, 135 Henry of Saxony, 245 Heracliux, 128-130; his line, 131 Herm.inric, 17 Herminigild, 95 Herulcs, 4 Hincmar of Reims, 231 Hippo, 21 Jfomaft, 211, 216 11 jnona, 26 Honorius, 10, 12, 15, aa Hugh Capet, 207; chosen king at Senlis, 242 Hungary, Hungarians or Magyars, 123, 190. 330; ferocious inroads, 330; devastate Germany and Gaul, it. ; defeated by Emperor Otto at the Lechfeld, 246; con- verted. 247 ; King Geisa, it. ; King(St.) Stephen, it. Huns, Turanian or Turkish race, 10, ii ; enemies of the Goths, 11 ; in- vasion of empire under Attila, 24- 26; break up of Attila's empire, 28 ICONOCLAST, 132 emperors, 132, 135, 136, 152 Ida, 77 I- ma, 84 (saurian line of emperors, 131, 135 Italy invaded by W. Goths, under Alaric, 12 ; by Huns, under Attija, 24 ; by E. Goths, under Theoderic, 39 ; reconquered by Belisarius, 47 ; invaded by Lombards 49 ; Rome, Italian capital, 50 ; invaded by Franks, 102 ; invaded by Pipin, 115; by Charles the Great, 147- 153; imperial portion, 177, 186; invaded by Otto the Great, 248, 249 ; independence destroyed by the revived empire of Otto, 248, 249 JERUSALEM, fall of, a lews banished from Spain, 96 Judith, the Bavarian, empress n{ Louis the Pius, 181 Julian, 5, 9 Julius Nepos, 33 Justinian, 47; origin, 120; great- ness, 121 Jutes, 22, 75, 76 KENT, 76 Kiev, 254, 256 [.trt, 212 Laon, 205, 307 Latin language, influence on barba- rians, 66 latinising influences, 68 ; Latins employed by the Franks, 69, lot Law, Roman, 35; Lombard, 51; barbarian laws. 55, 63 ; Spanish, 97 ; fvrsanal law changed into law oftkt land, ib. Ltuii. 212 INDEX 267 Lechfeld, battle of, 246 Lechs, Ljaken, afterwards Poles, 252 Leo, Pope, arrests Attila, 28 ; but not Genseric, 29 the Isaurian, 112-131 Leovigild, Spanish king, 94 Liti, 213 Liutprand, in Loaf-eater, 214 Lombardy, name of Italy, 177 Lombards in Italy, 48 ; fail in unit- ing with the Italians, 50; duke- dom, ib. ; Arians converted, 51 ; laws, ib. ; results of conquest, ib. ; hated by Italians, 92 ; relations to Franks, 102 ; quarrel with the popes, in ; humbled by Pipin, 115 Lorraine, v. Lotharingia Lothar I., failure of line, 192 Lothar : king at Laon, 206 Lotharingia, from Lothar II., 187, 190, 243 Louis the Pius, 179 ; emperor, 180 ; associates his son Lothar, ib. \ pros- perous beginnings, ib. ; marries second wife, 181 ; family quarrels, 182 ; the Lugenfeld, 183 ; parti- tions, ib. ', death, 184 ; his sons, Lothar, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald : quarrel, battle of Fontenailles, 185 ; partition of Verdun, 187 d'Outremer, 204, 205 the Child, 189, 245 the German, 192 ; line ends in Charles the Fat, ib. Ludvigslied, 202, 219 Lugenfeld, 183 MACEDONIAN line of emperors, 133 Magyars, v. Hungary Mahomet, 97, 131 Majorian, 32 Malli, 156, 215 Mark, 55, 244 Mayors of the Palace, 106 Mercia, 84, 211 Merovingians, 100 ; degenerate, 105 ; end of the line, 112-114 Metz, 103, 108 Micklegarth Constantinople, 117 Missi, 155 Missionaries, seventh and eighth centuries, 83, 160 ; in ninth and tenth, 233, 255 Monasteries, keepers of literature, 62. 73 Monophysite controversy, 152 Monothelite controversy, 136, 152 Moot, 215 NARBONNE, 19, no Narses, 47, 49, 121 Netherlands, 243 Neustria, 104, 105, 107, 241, 244 Nicolas I., Pope, 138, 234 Nithard, 238, 240 Nordmark, 244 Normandy, duchy of, founded, 203 Norsemen, or Danes, invasions of, 197 ; in Gaul, 199, 201 Northumbria, 78 ; power, ib. Norway, kingdom, 251 Notker's German Psalter, 232 Novgorod, 253 OBOTRITES, Slave race, 245 Oder, 5 Odoacer, 34 ; king in Italy, 37 ; overthrown by Theoderic, the East Goth, 39 Offa, 2ii Olaf of Norway, 255 Olga, converted, 256 Olybrius, 32 Orleans, Attila's siege of, 27; schools, 232 Ostmark, 244 Otfrid, 167 Otfrid's German harmony of the Gospels, 167, 232 Otto the Great, king of Germany and emperor, 206, 245, 246 ; defeats the Hungarians at the Lechfeld, 246 ; reforms the pope- dom, 236, 245 Otto II., 249 III., opens tomb of Charles the Great, 172 Pagus, 54 Paris, Clovis' capital, 104 ; dukes of, 204, 241 Patricians, barbarian, 30-34, 37 ; Roman, 45, 150 Paulinus at York, 83 Pavia, 49 Pentapolis, Italian, 116 Persia, wars with by empire, 127 ; by Heraclius, 129 ; conquered by the Saracens, ib. Photius, quarrel with Pope Nicolas I., 137, 138 Pipins Pipin of Landen, 107, 108 ; table of family, 109 ; Pipin of Heristal, 107, 108; Pipin the Little, 112 ; king, crowned by Pope Ste- phen II., 114; policy, 140 268 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES Placila, 136 Poitiers, near, Clovis defeats the Goths, 46; Charles Mattel the Arabs, no Poland, beginning of history, 353 Poles (Leeks). 253 ; converted, 256 Pollentia, Stificho defeats Alaric at (403), 13 Popes, growing independence of, 50; Pope Leo I., 28, 29 ; Pope Gregory the Great, 51, 83 1 : Pope Zacharias sanctions deposition of Childeric III., 114; Stephen II. crowns Pipin and his sons, it. ; supported by Franks against Lombards, 115 ; 1'ipin's grant of lands, i/>. ; Nicolas I., 138, 235; Leo III. crowns Charles emperor, 150; Sylvester II., 247, 261 ; power strengthened power, it. ; degenerate, 235 ; re- form of, 236, 237 Prussia, 244 RADAGAIS, 13, 17 Ravenna, 13, 26, 49, jo Keccared, converted from Arianism, 9.5 Reichcnau, 192, 239 Reims, 46, 103, 232 Kenii^ius, bishop of Reims, 59 Rhine, 18, 239, 243 Ricimer makes emperors, 33 Ripuarian Franks, 45, 64 Robert of Paris, 204 Koit Faineants, 106, 113 Rollo, or Rolf, 2p3 ; when first heard of, it. \ occupies Rouen, ifr. ; ob- tains Normandy from Charles the Simple, 203 ; homage, it. ; Duke of Normandy, it. Roman Empire, division of, 8 ; broken into by the barbarians 17-22 ; giving way. 23 ; end in the West (476), 34 ; idea and institu- tions partly survive, 35, 36 (t>. Katcrn Empire); revival in Charles the Great, 150; idea of unity, 119, 153; revived by Otto the Great, 248, 249 law, 6, 35 ; effect on barbarians, 63 ; E. Goths in Italy, 64 ; W. Goths in Spain, it. Komnna, language, 186, 340 Romance, family of languages, 70, 91, 186. 240 Rome, fall of, separating ancient and modern history, 2 j decay of em- pire, 6 ; power leaving it, 8 ; sieges and sack by Alaric, 13, 14 ; threat- ened by Attila, 27 ; second sack by Gensenc, 29 ; third sack by Rici- mer, 32; Italian capital, 50; seat of empire, 150, 185, 248 Romulus Augustulus, 33 ; deposed, 34 Rouen, 302, 241 Ruric, 253 Russians, origin of, 353 SALIAN Franks, 45 ; Salic law, 64, 208 Saracens, invasion of, 98, 129, 131 ; checked at Constantinople, by Leo the Isaurian, 132 ; by Charles Muriel at 1'ni tiers, no ; by Charles the Great, 114 Sassanian lungs of Persia, 137 Saxons, old, 75, 76 ; conquered and converted by Charles, 143, 144 ; in England, 76-81 Saxony, dukes of, 343, 345 Scandinavian nations, 250 ; becom- ing organised kingdoms, 251 Schism of East and West, 138, 151,152 Schools, monastic and cathedral, 72 ; Palatine, of Charles the Great, 166 in Germany, 168 Scourgt of God (Attila), 38 Scnlis, Hugh Capet elected king at, 241 Seventh century, poverty of, 159 Sidonius, Apolfinaris, 71 Sigamhrians, 5 Slave races, 10, 350 { second barba- rian wave of invasion, 10 ; Justin- ian, a Slave, 120; races press on Eastern Empire, 125; gradually settled in empire, 126; converted, 127 .V 'lirt'aks, 252 Soissons, 45, 104, 183 Spain, invaded by Vandal*, 17 ; West Goths, ig ; Gothic kingdom of, 20 ; councils, Toledo, 65, 95 ; tragic course of history, 94 ; con- version of Reccared from Ananism, 05 ; intolerance, 96 ; flourishing kingdom, 97 ; conquered by the Saracens, 98 ; Christian kingdoms, 99 Stllicho, 13, II, 33 Strastturg, nuth of, 186, 340 Sueves invade Spain. 17 ; driven to the highlands by Goth*, 19 ; sub* dued by Leovigild, 94 INDEX 269 Sussex, 76 Swatoslav, 254 Syagrius, defeated by Clovis at Sois- sons, 45 Sylvester II., 247, 261 Symmachus, 40 TACITUS, 6 Tatian, 232 Testry, battle of, 107 Teudisca, language, 186, 240 Teutonic races, 10 ; Goths and Franks, 39 ; earliest kingdoms Arian, 43 ; early Teutonic organi- sation, 54 Theodore, Archbishop of Canter- bury, 84, 160 Theoderic, East Goth, formed king- dom in Italy, 39 ; character, 41 ; lawgiver, builder, ib. ; his Edic- tum, 64 Theoderic I., West Goth, 19; de- feats Attila, 27 Theoderic II., 31 Theodosius I., 10 Theudelinda, queen of Lombards, 51 Thing, 215 Tolbiac, battle of, 45 Totila, Gothic king, 121 Toulouse, Gothic capital, 20 Tours (v. Poitiers), Gregory of, 63 ; St. Martin, 100 Turanian, 10, 24 ; third barbarian wave of invasion, 10 Turks, 24 Type, formulary, 136 ULFILA converts Goths, translates Bible, 11, 43 Ungri, 11. Hungary VALENTINIAN III., 26, 29, 31 Vandals, cross the Rhine into Gaul, 17; Spain, ib.; driven before West Goths, 19 ; cross into Africa under Genseric, 20 ; conquest of Africa, character of, 20, 42 ; naval power, 21, 29 ; sack Rome, 29 Varangians, 253 Venice, origin of, 27 Verdun, treaty of, 187, 195, 240 Vermandois, counts of, 204 Verona, 40, 50 Vistula, 5 Vladimir, 254, 256 Voulon, v. Poitiers, 46 "WANDERING OF THE NATIONS," 3 Watling Street, 80, 218 Wedmore, peace of, 218, 219, 221 "Welsh," 75, 80, 82, 92 Wends, Slave race, 239, 256 Wessex, 76 ; centre of power gradu- ally shifting to, 78, 211, 217-227 Willibrord, preaches to the Frisians, 160 Witan, Witenagemot, 215 ZENO, emperor, 34, 120, 136 Ziilpich, battle of, 45 THE END Printedby R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh. By R. W. CHURCH, D.C.L. Late Dean of St. Pauls. THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION, and other Sermons and Lectures delivered at Oxford and in St. Paul's Cathedral. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 75. 6d. GUARDIAN. "A suggestive and fascinating volume, which, if we mistake not, will make its way in quarters where ordinary sermons are but little read, and tell upon the world by its singular adaptation to the more serious of modern thought." ADVENT SERMONS. 1885. Crown 8vo. 45. 6d. GUARDIAN. "They are worthy of the preacher, and therefore worthy to rank among the great sermons of our Church ; and not only so, but they will be found full of strengthening and consoling power for simple and devout Christians, whose minds are cast down and oppressed by the thought of the unknown future that lies before them." THE DISCIPLINE OF THE CHRISTIAN CHAR- ACTER. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 43. 6d. HUMAN LIFE AND ITS CONDITIONS. Sermons preached before the University of Oxford in 1876-78, with Three Ordination Sermons. Second Edition. 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We do not pretend to have mastered, or anything like mastered, the very fascinating volume of the Life and Letters of Dean Church, which has just been brought out by his daughter. That is not the business of a few days, but rather of weeks, and of weeks not too full of ordinary duties. . . . The very remarkable character which Dr. Pagethas etched so impressively in the preface to Miss Church's delightful volume." GUARDIAN. Is not only a book of varied and delightful reading and of historical and literary interest ; it is all that in an extraordinary degree, but it is something more. It is invaluable for the guidance it affords on con- troversies which have only lately ceased to be present, and which may cisily be revived in the future. . . . We find the problem which perplexes us handled by one in whom a rare combination of qualities found a rare opportunity of exercise. He was emphatically a great man in a great place." ATHENMUM." He was one of those rare characters who, without any need to palter with their own consciences or to depart by a hair's-breadlh from the course which they have marked out for themselves, can yet concili- ate opponents and live in peace with all men. ... As has been said, this book the editor modestly disclaims the title of biography needs no justifi- cation. It is pleasant to know that a man of influence and high ability can even now succeed in leading a retired life ; yet if his influence is not to end with his life, it is right that the world should have a record of him." DAIL Y NEW$."1te Lift atut Letters of Dean Church have been read with keen interest, and are, indeed, among the most highly and gener- ally appreciated productions of the year. ' TIMES. " Miss Church has prudently compressed her material within the reasonable limits of a moderate volume, and she has arranged and selected it so skilfully that nn one will care to skip." IVESTttrifSTER GAZETTE. "\n admirable monument to the great Dean." BRITISH H'EEKL 1' " Written with perfect refinement, with much reserve, and yet with sufficient frankness." MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON. UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY A 000 695 69'