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 
 
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 I Visigothic kingdom in Spain and 
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 Aquitaine, 412-507. Spain, 412 
 Vandals land in Africa, p. 20. 
 Siege of Hippo. Death of S. Augv 
 Huns in Pannonia. Attila, p. 2. 
 Carthage taken by the Vandals. 
 : [Pope Leo the Great]. 
 Ravages of the \Huns ; in the Eas 
 in Germany p.nd Gaul, 450. 
 Hengist and Horsa in Britain, p. 
 Battle of Chalons : repulse of Att 
 28. 
 
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 Third sack of Rome ; Rici 
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 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.
 
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 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. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 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 
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 realms ; deposed t888. 
 
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 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. 
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 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE xxi 
 
 
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 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.
 
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 CHAPTER V 
 
 SUPREMACY OF THE FRANKS IN THE WEST THE 
 
 MEROVINGIAN KINGS, DESCENDANTS OF CLOVIS 
 
 THE MAYORS OF THE PALACE RISE OF THE 
 
 CAROLINGIAN FAMILY 
 
 AT the end of the sixth century, somewhat more 
 than a hundred years from the abdication of the last 
 Western emperor (476-600), the great change had 
 been accomplished, by which, in all the western lands 
 occupied by the empire, the public prerogatives, and 
 the indirect powers of a ruling people, were transferred 
 from the Latin to the German race. The Romans in 
 the time of the empire had, in a degree unknown in 
 the world before, moulded the subject populations to 
 their own likeness and model. They Romanised the 
 whole West, more or less. Everywhere as time went 
 on, in increasing measure, from York to the Columns 
 of Hercules, on the Rhone, on the Seine, on the 
 Rhine, even in the valleys of the Alps, their insti- 
 tutions, their laws, their education, their language, 
 their buildings, their monuments, at last when they
 
 90 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 adopted it their Christianity, were the silent and 
 continuous influences which assimilated life and 
 thought and habits to the Italian type, as it had been 
 developed by the marvellous history of Rome. It 
 is scarcely possible to express the greatness of the 
 change produced by the interruption of this process. 
 It was interrupted by what is called the invasion of 
 the barbarians. Barbarians they certainly were, who 
 broke in upon the Roman Empire, and destroyed it 
 in the West But it was not because they were bar- 
 barians that their victory was so fruitful in conse- 
 quences. It was because they were conquerors of a 
 new and special race. It was because it was the 
 substitution, temporary in one land, permanent in 
 another, of the Teutonic race, one and the same race 
 in all its manifold varieties Goths, Franks, Saxons, 
 Angles, Lombards for the preceding Latin rule and 
 supremacy. No greater and more decisive crisis has 
 ever happened in the history of the world than the 
 settlement of the Teutonic peoples in the lands which 
 the Latins had filled with their ideas and their lan- 
 guage, their manners, their spirit, their names, their 
 customs. Nor is the importance of this change 
 diminished, because in so many parts the German 
 conquerors were greatly influenced and at last ab- 
 sorbed by the Romanised population amid which 
 they settled. We cannot tell what the course of 
 history would have been if the Latins had kept the 
 Germans out, in Gaul, in Italy, in Spain, in Britain ; 
 but, assuredly, it would have been very different.
 
 v DIFFERENCES AMONG THE NEW NATIONS 91 
 
 The transfer of power in the West, from the Latin 
 race to the German, in the fifth and sixth centuries, 
 constitutes the first act of modern history. 
 
 But it was only the first act of a long and troubled 
 drama, not even yet played out. The German settle- 
 ment took many shapes. In England it was exclusive 
 and homogeneous. In Gaul it was greatly affected 
 by the circumstances round it, and it allowed its own 
 distinctive features to be by degrees impaired and 
 obliterated by foreign influences. In Spain it directly 
 aimed at a policy of fusion between the two races, 
 under the direction of the Church. In Italy, under 
 the Lombards, it was throughout uneasy, oppressive, 
 antagonistic, too strong not to leave deep impressions, 
 but not strong enough to master and assimilate the 
 obstinate counter element of Latin character in its 
 native home. Teutonic institutions and feelings 
 grew more and more vigorous in England. In Gaul, 
 after efforts of resistance, German France gradually 
 melted into Latin and " Romance " France. In 
 Spain, under a " Romance " and Latin language, the 
 old feeling and temper of the Goths largely survived ; 
 the basis of Spanish character was Teutonic, and 
 under the long strain of the national and Christian 
 war against the Moors, it issued in that singular 
 mixture of strength and weakness, of loftiness and 
 baseness, which has so often shown itself in Spanish 
 history. In Italy, the Lombard power, though not 
 the Lombard element, after lasting for two centuries, 
 was thrown off as the Gothic power had been, but, as
 
 92 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 in the case of the Gothic power, only by foreign aid 
 In Italy, throughout the middle ages, and down to 
 our own time, the Germans were never, in the judg- 
 ment and feeling of the Italians, other than what they 
 were at the first barbarians, whom the Italians were 
 not strong enough to keep out ; while to the Germans, 
 the Italians never ceased to be "Welsh," the Teu- 
 tonic equivalent for " barbarian " or " foreigner." 
 
 Thus, at the beginning of the seventh century, the 
 new Teutonic settlement appears everywhere estab- 
 lished. From the empire, as it existed in the East, 
 it had little to fear. The emperor at Constantinople 
 was still, in moments of convenience or in moods of 
 courtesy, acknowledged by the Teutonic kings as 
 invested with a majesty without rival or peer on 
 earth, the source of honours, of legitimate titles, of 
 high dignities, who might still be dangerous on the 
 fringe of their dominions, but who was too far off, 
 and too busy with troubles of his own, to cause dis- 
 quietude in the West. There was still a certain 
 amount of intercourse with Constantinople. The 
 Lombards, hated by the Franks, the Greeks, and the 
 popes, were assailed by occasional alliances, in which 
 the Frank kings intrigued with the emperor, and 
 sometimes overreached him. The real dangers of the 
 new races arose, first, from their own intestine dis- 
 cords, and their intractableness to order and law ; and, 
 next, from the habits of aggression and pillage lingering 
 in the tribes of their own blood, who remained in 
 their old seats in Germany and on the Danube.
 
 V DANGER TO THE NEW NATIONS 93 
 
 In England, in the following century, this last 
 danger appeared in a most formidable shape. The 
 British race had been exterminated or crushed into 
 insignificance in England. Through fierce wars 
 among themselves the separate kingdoms learnt 
 one another's strength. The smaller ones became 
 attached to the larger, and a tendency to union 
 began, strengthened by the strengthening influence 
 of the Church. First, and partially, under North- 
 umbria, then under Mercia, and at last more com- 
 pletely under Wessex, a single kingly supremacy 
 embodied the growing fact of the unity, in its laws 
 and its fortunes, of the English nation. But then the 
 new nation began to suffer from the repetition of the 
 process by which it had itself come into being. Just 
 as the fathers of the English had come first with 
 a few pirate ships, then with more, first only for a 
 summer ravage, then to winter in the island ; first 
 only to carry back plunder to their eastern homes on 
 the Weser or the Elbe, then to settle and gain a new 
 home in England, as they began by making swift 
 inroads into an enemy's country, pushing up the 
 rivers with the tide, or scouring the land far and wide 
 with troops of horsemen, and ended by besieging 
 towns, subduing kingdoms, challenging the sub- 
 mission of the Britons, so came the Danish rovers, 
 "vikings," upon England. But the Danish settle- 
 ment never became what the earlier Anglo-Saxon one 
 had been. It did not create a new people. The 
 Danes won a footing in England, a large and lasting
 
 94 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 one For a time, they became the masters there, 
 and their princes wore the English crown ; but they 
 were too late to found a nation. In spite of the 
 tremendous miseries and losses of the Danish inva- 
 sion, the English people had become too strongly 
 constituted to be broken up by it, or even to be 
 greatly altered in character and policy. 
 
 In Spain the national history was more tragic. 
 The policy of the great Theoderic, of which scarcely 
 a trace appears in the sons of Clovis, seems to have 
 been continued among the Gothic kings of Spain. 
 There also, though in a very different way from the 
 English, the Goths through all the disturbances of the 
 time, were on their way, apparently with a deliberate 
 aim, to political unity and constitutional order. 
 After the death of Euric, the conqueror and legis- 
 lator (484), the Gothic power in Gaul fell before the 
 Franks, and its main seat was transferred to Spain, 
 under a constitutionally elective kingly rule, which, 
 as with the Lombards, the chiefs always tried to keep 
 elective, and the kings usually but not always tried 
 to make hereditary. But, in contrast with the Lom- 
 bards in Italy, the Gothic kings, in spite of bloody 
 changes and fierce opposition from their nobility, 
 succeeded in identifying themselves with the land and 
 the people whom they had conquered. They guided 
 the fortunes of the country with a distinct purpose 
 and vigorous hand. By Leovigild (572-586), the 
 power of the rebellious nobility was broken, and the 
 independence and name of the Sueves of Gallicia
 
 V CHUECH COUNCILS OF TOLEDO 95 
 
 extinguished. The still more dangerous religious 
 conflict between the Catholic population and the 
 inherited Arianism of the Goths was put down, but 
 at the cost of the life of his son, Herminigild, who 
 had married a Frank and Catholic princess, and who 
 placed himself at the head of the Catholics. But 
 Leovigild was the last Arian king. This cause of 
 dissension was taken away by his son Reccared (586- 
 601), who solemnly abandoned Arianism, and em- 
 braced with zeal the popular Catholic creed. He 
 was followed by the greater part of his Arian subjects, 
 but the change throughout the land was not accom- 
 plished without some fierce resistance. It led among 
 other things to the disappearance of the Gothic lan- 
 guage, and of all that recalled the Arian days, and to 
 the destruction in Spain of what there was of Gothic 
 literature, such as the translation of the Bible, sup- 
 posed to be tainted with Arianism. But it deter- 
 mined the complete fusion of the Gothic and Latin 
 population. After Reccared, two marked features of 
 the later Spanish character began to show themselves. 
 One was the great prominence in the State of the 
 ecclesiastical element. The Spanish kings sought in 
 the clergy a counterpoise to their turbulent nobility. 
 The, great Church councils of Toledo became the 
 legislative assemblies of the nation; the bishops in 
 them took precedence of the nobles ; laws were made 
 there as well as canons; and seventeen of these 
 councils are recorded between the end of the fourth 
 century and the end of the seventh. The other
 
 96 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 feature was that stern and systematic intolerance, 
 which became characteristic of Spain. Under Sise- 
 but (612-620), took place the first expulsion of the 
 Jews. The Jews of Spain, whose settlements were 
 numerous, rich, and of old date, had to choose 
 between baptism, or else exile with the loss of their 
 possessions. This legislation was renewed with con- 
 tinued severity, and the kings took a special oath 
 to enforce it. The Spanish nation, meanwhile, was 
 being knit together; the garrisons of the Greek 
 Empire were gradually driven to the coast, and, under 
 Suinthila (620-631), finally expelled from the penin- 
 sula. The Gothic kings, mostly elected, men, for 
 the most part, of energy and purpose, sometimes 
 of relentless purpose, who still retained amid Latin 
 influences their peculiar Teutonic names, governed 
 with a statesmanship unknown among the Franks. 
 To break the restless and rebellious spirit of the 
 nobles, which Gregory of Tours thought peculiar to 
 the Goths, Chindasuintha (642-652), an old man of 
 eighty, banished at a stroke from Spain two hundred 
 nobles and seven hundred freemen, confiscating their 
 estates, and reducing their families to serfdom. It 
 produced profound peace, while the Franks under 
 their feeble kings were distracted by the fierce rivalry 
 of Brunihild and Fredegund, and the rising Mayors 
 of the Palace. Equally resolute in encountering the 
 natural turbulence of their warriors and attentive to 
 the political condition of the kingdom, the kings, for 
 the most part, till the last showed themselves a match
 
 V THE GOTHIC KINGDOM OF SPAIN 97 
 
 for their formidable nobility; and, under their care, 
 the legislation of the West Goths attained a methodi- 
 cal form and a comparatively judicious and equitable 
 character peculiar to it. Under Chindasuintha (642- 
 652), the laws of the two races were fused into one, and 
 for the first time among the Teutonic nations, personal 
 law was changed into a law of the land. Under the 
 kings who succeeded him down to Egika (687-701), 
 and from the councils of Toledo, grew up the Forum 
 Judicum, the Gothic Code, "the first law-book in 
 which the Roman and German law was attempted to 
 be harmonised into a systematic whole " : the first 
 Western legislation which aims at exhibiting the 
 philosophical idea of law. The Gothic realm of 
 Spain was the most flourishing and the most 
 advanced of the new Teutonic kingdoms. It was 
 rich and powerful, and though there was still much 
 that was barbarous, ungovernable, corrupt, and 
 dangerous, the powers of the country were in strong 
 hands ; and the kings, the nobles, and the clergy, all 
 who could represent the nation, were learning to 
 work together in their public assemblies. 
 
 But however the Goths in Spain might have 
 worked out their political career, their course was 
 rudely arrested. The little cloud, which, in the 
 beginning of the seventh century, had risen in Arabia, 
 had, by the beginning of the eighth, swelled and 
 spread into a devastating storm, sweeping round all 
 the coasts of the Mediterranean. In 622, the flight 
 of Mahomet from Mecca to Medina had fixed a new
 
 98 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 era in history the Hegira. In the ten years which 
 intervened between it and his death (632), he had 
 established a new religion in Arabia, and converted 
 the tribes of Arabia, or the Saracens, into its armed 
 and enthusiastic apostles. While the Goths had been 
 settling their laws, while their kings had been marshal- 
 ling their court after the order of Byzantium, the 
 Saracens had been drawing nearer and nearer. At 
 the time that Chintila (636-640) was driving out the 
 Jews, the Saracens were taking Damascus and Alex- 
 andria ; while the fierce old man Chindasuintha was 
 crushing rebel nobles and reforming the law, they 
 were making their next step and invading Africa. 
 While his son was ordering the offices of the court of 
 Toledo after the imperial model, they were beginning 
 their first nine years' siege of Constantinople (668- 
 677). Their fleets had begun to attack the Spanish 
 coast, though they had always been repulsed. But 
 in Spain they had two allies : the Jewish race, there 
 and in Africa smarting under their persecutions ; and 
 the factions, the ambitions, and the corruption of the 
 high clergy and nobles. A traitor, it is said, Count 
 Julian, invited the Saracens, and they came, burning 
 their ships behind them. The tremendous battle of 
 the Guadalete, near Cadiz, lasting a whole summer 
 week, from Sunday to Sunday, decided the fate of 
 the kingdom and the course of its history. It was to 
 Spain what the battle of Hastings was to England. 
 The Gothic nobility perished in large numbers. King 
 Roderick, the last Gothic king, was never seen again.
 
 V OVERTHROW OF THE GOTHIC KINGDOM 99 
 
 In ten years' time the Saracen invasion had over- 
 whelmed almost the whole country, and there was 
 nothing left in Spain to Christianity and the European 
 races, but the mountains of the Asturias and Old 
 Castile. Spain was the only one of the new Teutonic 
 nations which was beaten down by an entirely alien 
 power. It did not finally succumb. In the northern 
 provinces, the Christians not only rallied, but from 
 their mountain fastnesses began a series of uninter- 
 mitted attacks on the Mahometans. Behind the 
 screen of the Spanish highlands new kingdoms were 
 organised: Asturias (718); Oviedo (737); Leon 
 (914); Navarre (905); Aragon, Castile (1035). At 
 length the tide of invasion began to roll southward 
 till the Moors were swept away ; but several centuries 
 of the early national life of Spain were consumed 
 in that most terrible and demoralising discipline, in 
 which unsparing hatred is elevated to a heroic virtue 
 the discipline of a religious warfare. 
 
 Of all the new nations, the Franks alone, though 
 perpetually troubled with intestine quarrels, maintained 
 their comparative exemption from the external shocks 
 and disasters which fell on their neighbours. Strong 
 enough to keep together and to hold their own, they 
 deepened the foundations of their power over Gaul 
 and the lands of the Rhine, enjoying their own rich 
 and magnificent heritage, asserting their supremacy 
 over the heathen tribes of the German border. For 
 more than three centuries after the Teutonic conquest, 
 the Franks held the foremost place among the new
 
 100 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 nations. " When Rome fell," says Otto of Frisingen, a 
 German chronicler of the twelfth century, " Francia " 
 the Frank race and kingdom, for we must not yet 
 begin to translate by the later and narrower France 
 "arose to take the crown." The phrase is of 
 course exaggerated : but it expresses with truth the 
 comparative prominence of the Franks. It is the 
 more remarkable, because the kingdom of Clovis, 
 instead of continuing in the hands of a single ruler, 
 was immediately broken up under his descendants 
 into separate kingdoms, acknowledging a loose tie of 
 unity, and from time to time brought together, but 
 always ready to fly apart again. And, further, in the 
 family of Clovis, the Mervings or Merovingians, there 
 is no sign, with one inconsiderable exception, the 
 Austrasian king Dagobert (628-638), of the political 
 aims, or of the military capacity, which appear among 
 the Goths of Spain, and the English in Britain. The 
 history of the Frank kings, in Gregory of Tours, is a 
 sickening story of lawless and unbridled self-indulgence, 
 of domestic hatreds, treachery, and cruelty. Brother 
 was ever ready to assail and conspire against brother, 
 to take him at advantage, to exterminate his children. 
 Their attempts at enlarging their domains at one 
 another's expense were usually as feeble and stupid 
 as they were unscrupulous. Their prevailing and 
 monotonous brutality was only checked by super- 
 stitious fears of the wrath of St Martin of Tours. It 
 was only varied by good-natured licentiousness and 
 perfidy such as that of King Guntram of Orleans, or
 
 V POWER OF THE FRANKS 101 
 
 by pedantry like that of King Chilperic of Soissons, 
 " the Nero and Herod of our time," as Gregory calls 
 him, but who also dabbled in heresy, tried to add 
 new letters to the Latin alphabet, and wrote Latin 
 verses which would not scan. But the Frank race 
 with their territorial chiefs, still Teutonic in the main, 
 though in the west and south becoming less so in 
 each successive generation, preserved the vigour, the 
 audacity, the fighting qualities of their blood. They 
 occupied a land of great natural wealth, and great 
 geographical advantages, which had been prepared 
 for them by Latin culture ; they inherited great cities 
 which they had not built, and fields and vineyards 
 which they had not planted ; and they had the 
 wisdom, not to destroy, but to use their conquest. 
 They were able with singular ease and confidence to 
 employ and trust the services, civil and military, of 
 the Latin population. There is no appearance of any 
 native rising to take advantage of their internal dis- 
 cords, till late in the decline of the family of Clovis. 
 Then, at last, and too late, the great south-western 
 province of Aquitaine, with its natural riches and its 
 flourishing cities, its Roman and Gothic memories, 
 its turbulent and warlike native tribes the tribes 
 which have left their names in portions of it, 
 Vascones, Gascony, Basques struck boldly and 
 obstinately for independence, and gave much trouble 
 to the successors of the Merovingians, the mighty 
 founders of the Carolingian dynasty. The bond 
 between the Franks and the native races was the
 
 102 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 clergy. From the time of Clovis their kings had 
 deliberately favoured the Latin clergy. Their patron- 
 age was deeply mischievous to the purity of the 
 Church, but it helped forward the alliance and the 
 fusion between Germans and Latins. The forces 
 of the whole nation were at the disposal of the ruling 
 race ; and under Frank chiefs, the Latins and Gauls 
 learned once more to be warriors. Thus strengthened, 
 the Franks not only repelled any pressure from beyond 
 the Rhine or the Alps, but they kept invasion at a 
 distance by being themselves assailants. They were 
 the one race whom the spirit of invasion carried 
 backwards over their old steps and to their old seats : 
 the one nation which after settling in the West flowed 
 back across the Rhine, and attempted again and again 
 from Gaul the conquest of Italy, first from Narses, 
 and then from the Lombards. Narses defeated them ; 
 the Lombards for a long time held their own. While 
 the family of Clovis ruled, the Franks ravaged Italy, 
 but never subdued it. But over the German nations, 
 Frisians and Saxons, Thuringians, Bavarians, and 
 Alamans, the Frank kings asserted an imperfect and 
 contested but persistent supremacy. Frank kings, 
 allied in blood though perpetually quarrelling, were 
 felt to be the heads of the Teutonic nations, from the 
 Frisian marshes between the mouths of the Rhine 
 and Weser, to the valleys and lakes of the Alamans, 
 in what is now Switzerland. 
 
 But among the Franks, as among the other nations, 
 two opposite tendencies were continually at work ; the
 
 V FEANK UNITY AND FEANK DIVISIONS 103 
 
 tendency to aggregation and national unity, and the 
 tendency to dispersion and independence. There 
 were further, among the Franks, though they were 
 so friendly to Latin culture, conflicting dispositions 
 to gravitate in the Eastern lands towards what was 
 German, and in the Western lands towards what was 
 Latin. One of these conflicts was represented by the 
 continual division and reunion of the kingdom of 
 Clovis. Divided at first among his four sons, the 
 different portions were merged or shared, as death 
 removed one or more of the partners, till all the 
 shares came into the hands of a survivor, Clothar of 
 Soissons (558), who again began the division among 
 his children, with the same result. Eight times in 
 the course of a century and a half, East and West 
 Franks, Burgundy and Aquitaine, had been divided ; 
 three times, but only for a few years, they had been 
 reunited under one king. But further, in these 
 divisions, with great fluctuations of boundaries and 
 possessions, two distinct centres of different national 
 influences gradually disclose themselves. The Francia 
 Romano, and the Francia Teutonica, the " Frankland," 
 surrounded by a Latin population, and the original 
 "Frankland," bordering on the Rhine, and recruited 
 from beyond it, came by natural and necessary causes 
 to be more and more contrasted with one another. 
 From the middle of the sixth century, the Teutonic 
 or Eastern division became more distinctly defined; 
 it became known as Auster, Austrasia y with Reims, 
 and then with Metz for its capitals ; in speech and
 
 104 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 feeling it was thoroughly German, and there was the 
 focus of German influence. The land of the Western 
 Franks acquired, in opposition to Austrasia, the name 
 of Neuster, Neustria, a name the origin of which is 
 not clear, the Nnv, or Younger, or Western kingdom, 
 and which is also found with a corresponding Austria, 
 a western and eastern division, among the Lombards 
 of the north of Italy. Clevis's old capital, Paris, was 
 its natural centre ; but Paris was sometimes claimed 
 as a joint possession by his descendants, and then 
 Soissons or Tournay were the residences of its kings. 
 Burgundy, still a separate province, and sometimes a 
 separate kingdom, with Orleans or Chalons-sur-Saone 
 for capitals, gradually became joined to Neustria. 
 Aquitaine, with its wealth and its Latin cities, was at 
 first shared by the different brother kings, and then 
 became the prize of the strongest. But while Austrasia 
 continued German, the Franks of the West were 
 acquiring more and more a Latin character. Still, 
 with wide and increasing differences, these great 
 divisions formed one and the same Frank kingdom, 
 Frank, in opposition to Roman, as well as to 
 Gothic, Lombard, Saxon, or Slave. For a long time 
 it seemed uncertain whether what Clovis had con- 
 quered was to be one realm or many ; it seemed 
 equally doubtful whether German influences and 
 German languages were not to prevail to the Atlantic, 
 the Pyrenees, and the Mediterranean. Three centuries 
 passed before this great question was settled. But 
 very slowly and by an insensible change, not easy to
 
 V FAILUKE OF THE MERVINGS 105 
 
 trace in detail, the two great countries, which the 
 Frank settlement had for a time partially united, 
 were again finally divided ; and Gaul, though under 
 a new name, derived from the German occupation, 
 drifted back into its Latin sympathies, and its opposi- 
 tion to Germany. 
 
 The family of Clovis, the Mervings or Mero- 
 vingians, fast degenerated. They lost their father's 
 strength; they retained, almost to the last, their 
 father's cruelty and unscrupulous perfidy. They 
 became unequal to the contest for power, not with 
 the conquered people, but with the great men of 
 their palace and retinue, their own companions and 
 warriors ; the men whom they created dukes of pro- 
 vinces, and counts of great cities, who, though as 
 yet hereditary only through the accident of personal 
 qualities, were growing up round them into a power- 
 ful nobility. They were governed during the last 
 part of the sixth century by terrible queens, two 
 rivals, equally famous for their beauty, their audacity, 
 and their crimes, Fredegund, the low-born Neustrian 
 Frank, the wife of Chilperic of Soissons (561-584); 
 and Brunihild, the Gothic princess, the wife of his 
 brother, Sigibert of Metz (561-575), the daughter of 
 the Gothic king of Spain, Athanagild. Brunihild's 
 sister, the Gothic wife of Chilperic, had been 
 murdered to make way for Fredegund; and the 
 hatred and ambition of the Prankish and Gothic 
 sisters-in-law rilled the royal houses with intrigue 
 and murder. Chilperic and Sigibert, Fredegund's
 
 106 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 husband and brother-in-law, both perished by her 
 plots; Brunihild, as ruthless in her crimes, but 
 leaving a more royal memory in the local traditions 
 of France, was torn to pieces by a wild horse, in 
 her old age, by Fredegund's vindictive son, the 
 second Clothar (613) : she had been the murderess, 
 he said, of ten Frank kings. Then there appear at 
 the side of the king, and at the head of their 
 administration, officers who are known in history 
 as the "Mayors of the Palace" (Majores Donttis), 
 elected by the great men, or appointed by the king, 
 according as each happened to be the stronger. 
 Under their feeble masters, they rose into a position, 
 new among Germans, but analogous to that of the 
 barbarian Patricians, such as Stilicho and Ricimer, 
 in the last days of the Western Empire, and perhaps 
 imitated from the usages of the imperial court. 
 Their office has contributed to the vocabulary of 
 politics a new phrase for indirect or illegitimate 
 power, just as a phrase for political nullity derives 
 its origin from the decayed and helpless family of 
 the fierce Clovis, the Rois Faineants. The Mayors 
 of the Palace make their appearance amid the 
 ferocious quarrels kept alive by Fredegund and 
 Brunihild, of whose purposes and crimes they are 
 the instruments or the victims ; but after the 
 sacrifice of Brunihild to family vengeance and to 
 the fears and hatred of the Frank nobles, the 
 Mayors of the Palace assume a new importance, as 
 representing the rival interests of the Austrasian and
 
 V MAYOKS OF THE PALACE 107 
 
 Neustrian kingdoms. After a number of insignificant 
 names, men at length appear who concentrate in 
 their hands the whole power of each state, and play 
 with the last Chilperics and Childeberts like the 
 pieces in a game of chess. In the beginning of the 
 seventh century, the eastern Mayors of the Palace, 
 the dukes of Austrasia, all of them united by kindred 
 or family ties, Arnulf, afterwards Bishop of Metz, 
 Pipin of Landen, Pipin of Heristal, established a 
 character for wisdom and virtue which gave them 
 a popularity and influence new in Frank history. 
 Their natural antagonists were the Neustrian mayors, 
 one of whom, Ebroin (656-681), was a formidable 
 and dangerous opponent. For more than twenty 
 years the struggle for supremacy went on. Each 
 side was supported not merely by the lay chiefs of 
 each kingdom, but by great bishops, some of them 
 since canonised, who threw themselves into the 
 quarrels and intrigues of the contest, and sometimes, 
 like St. Didier of Vienne and St. Leger of Autun, 
 perished in it. After various turns of fortune, 
 Ebroin, bold, resolute, and cruel, had at last broken 
 the Austrasian power, and established the superiority 
 of Neustria. But in 68 1 he was murdered; and 
 six years later Pipin of Heristal won the battle of 
 Testry, between Peronne and St. Quentin, -over the 
 Neustrians (687). The result of the contest was 
 the decisive victory of Austrasia, the victory for two 
 centuries of the German element among the Franks 
 over the Latin, a revival and restoration of the
 
 108 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 original Teutonic character in the Frank kingdom, 
 for the next period of its existence. 
 
 The line of Clovis lingered ingloriously after the 
 battle of Testry, reigning but not ruling, for more 
 than sixty years. The new masters of the Frank 
 kingdom were the dukes of Austrasia, Pipin of 
 Heristal, and his sons, a vigorous family, German 
 in blood, ecclesiastical in their relationships, with 
 strong and clear political purposes. The founders 
 of the race were the elder Pipin of Landen (1639), 
 and St. Arnulf (1641), who, like so many of the 
 bishops of the time, had been first a soldier and 
 statesman, and who, before he was bishop of Metz, 
 was Duke of Austrasia and Mayor of the Palace. 
 One of Arnulf 's sons became, like his father, bishop 
 of Metz; another married a daughter of Arnulf 's 
 friend, Pipin of Landen, also Mayor of the Palace. 
 The grandson of St. Arnulf and of Pipin was Pipin 
 of Heristal (1714). To reunite under one strong 
 hand the dominions which the sons of Clovis had 
 allowed to be broken up, was the policy of the long 
 rule of Pipin of Heristal; and, like Clovis, he 
 cultivated and used the friendship and good offices 
 of the Church, but on a larger scale allying himself 
 with the pope as Clovis had allied himself with the 
 bishops of Reims and Tours. Pipin's policy was 
 carried out with success by his famous son, Charles 
 Martel, "the Hammer." The German nations 
 beyond the Rhine were more and more compelled 
 to admit the supremacy of the Franks; and Pipin
 
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 110 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 warmly encouraged the missionaries from England, 
 St. Boniface (68o-t755), and his companions, who 
 about this time were beginning to penetrate among 
 the heathen tribes, and were laying the foundations 
 of some of the most famous German sees on the 
 Rhine Utrecht, Mainz, Worms, Spire. His son, 
 Charles Martel (716-741), after a decisive struggle 
 with domestic anarchy, encountered and beat back 
 the greatest danger that ever threatened Western 
 Europe. At the great battle, named of Tours, not 
 far from the fields near Poitiers, where Clovis 
 vanquished the West Goths, Charles Martel routed 
 the invading Arab host, and slew their formidable 
 leader, Abderahman (732). This great overthrow, 
 followed by the expulsion of the Arabs from Narbonne 
 five years later, was the final and decisive check to 
 the Saracen invasions of the West. Aquitaine, which 
 had began to aspire to independence, was once more 
 recovered to Frank supremacy. Charles Martel 
 shrank not from incurring the displeasure of the 
 Church by using its property for political ends, and 
 to maintain in efficiency the armies which he needed. 
 Its increasing secularity and wealth invited spoliation. 
 Bishops had degenerated into courtiers and soldiers ; 
 and Charles Martel had no scruple in giving even 
 such bishoprics as Reims and Treves, Paris and 
 Rouen, to be held by his warriors and dependants. 
 But if he dealt roughly with the Church at home, 
 he was its patron abroad. By the novel relations 
 which he was the first to establish between the
 
 v CHAKLES M ARTEL 111 
 
 Franks and the Pope, he laid the foundations 
 of that central power of the Church in Western 
 Christendom, which in the middle ages grew to such 
 vast proportions. Charles Martel was the first of 
 the new princes beyond the Alps who was invited 
 by the bishop of Rome to interfere in the affairs 
 of Italy. There had been a long and increasing 
 wrangle between the Lombards and the Italians, in 
 which the popes usually represented at once the 
 national spirit and pride of the Italians, the traditions 
 of the Catholic faith, and their own high pretensions 
 to stand in the very place of St. Peter. The 
 Lombards, probably faithless, certainly oppressive 
 and encroaching, had, without any great coherence 
 among themselves, made themselves the torment and 
 the terror of Italy. They seemed unable to grow 
 into a nation; they still, after 200 years, were as far 
 as ever from peace with the Italians. At length, 
 under Liutprand (712-744), the ablest of the Lom- 
 bard kings, there first appeared a chance of con- 
 solidation for the kingdom, and friendliness with the 
 Italians. For once he allied himself with a vigorous 
 pope, Gregory II. (715-731), against the Greeks of 
 Ravenna; and he is said to have been the first 
 donor of a city and territory (Sutri) to the pope. 
 But the Iconoclastic controversy, on the use of 
 images and pictures in worship, raised by Leo the 
 Isaurian, had begun to divide Greeks and Latins. 
 Liutprand shifted about from one side to the other, 
 seeking only his own advantage in the quarrel. The
 
 112 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 Ix>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 
 
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 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 
 
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 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 
 
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 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
 
 
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 198 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 barks of the Northmen were beginning to scare the 
 coasts of Gaul, as they had already begun to burn 
 churches and plunder monasteries, on the English 
 coasts. They were the forerunners of a tremendous 
 tempest of a descent of the barbarians, which in its 
 wide-spread havoc, in its obstinate continuance, in 
 its aims and consequences, was as eventful as the 
 invasions of the Goths and Franks, or the conquests 
 of the Angles and Saxons. It caused the last great 
 change in the population of Western Europe, till the 
 expulsion of the Moors from Spain. We are familiar 
 with the Danes in England ; and we know that the 
 Northmen created the great province of Normandy. 
 But the Danes and the Northmen were the same; 
 and what they did in England and in Gaul were but 
 parts, simultaneously carried on, of one great system 
 of adventurous exploring, of plunder, and attempted 
 conquest. The havoc that they made in Gaul was as 
 wide, as terrible, and as unintermitted as their havoc 
 in England. In Gaul they had a yet wider field, and 
 they ravaged wherever rivers could float their ships, 
 from the Rhine to the Seine, the Loire and the 
 Garonne; and up the Rhine and Moselle as far 
 as Coblentz and Treves, up the French rivers far 
 into the interior, to Paris, Orleans, Bourges. The 
 attempts of the Frank kings to arrest or limit the 
 mischief, even on the Rhine, and much more in 
 Gaul, were unavailing. Summer after summer, as 
 the ninth century wore on, and as the next began, 
 the Northern adventurers came with increased force,
 
 vni THE NORSEMEN IN GAUL 199 
 
 with more daring leaders, with larger designs, with 
 more clear superiority. Even if defeated, they only 
 changed their object of attack. Discomfited and 
 beaten off in England, they crossed over to Gaul. 
 If the local resistance was too strong for them in 
 Gaul, they tried their fortune on the opposite shores. 
 The deepest discouragement and terror took pos- 
 session of the populations of Gaul, who seemed for 
 the most part helpless. We are hardly accustomed 
 to the thought that it was within but a little that half 
 France should become a Normandy, and that Danish 
 kings should rule in the land of the Franks, as they 
 did in the land of the English. Things pointed in 
 that direction towards the end of the- ninth century, 
 under Charles the Bald and his children. Perhaps 
 what prevented it was the comparative smallness of 
 the numbers of the invaders, consequent on their 
 mode of access. The largest of their fleets could not 
 transport the barbarian hosts who marched by land. 
 
 The first serious danger from the Northmen in 
 Gaul coincided with the outbreak of intestine dis- 
 sensions in the family of Louis the Pious. Just after 
 the catastrophe of the Liigenfeld (833) they appear 
 burning churches and plundering monasteries at the 
 mouth of the Scheldt, and even threatening the cities 
 of the Rhine. In May, 841, amid the civil broils 
 between the Carolingian brothers, a month before the 
 fight of Fontenailles, Osker the Northman entered 
 the Seine, which was soon to be specially the Norman 
 river, plundered and burned Rouen, and retired, ran-
 
 200 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CIIAP. 
 
 soming or destroying towns and monasteries, on his 
 way back to the sea. From this time the Northmen 
 learned that the broad rivers of Gaul were more 
 worth exploring than the coasts. The Seine, because 
 it was nearest, and led up to Paris, now becoming a 
 place of great importance in the new West Prankish 
 realm the Loire and the Garonne, because they led, 
 through corn lands and vineyards and the richest 
 cities, deepest into the heart of the country, became 
 the scenes of periodic visitations from the Danish 
 adventurers and pirates. Before the eyes of Charles 
 the Bald, who was powerless to hinder them, the 
 Danes (at Easter, 845) pillaged the monasteries of 
 Paris, and then extorted the Danegeld, the tribute 
 paid for peace, or rather respite. They came again, 
 twelve years later (857), this time burning the 
 monasteries, and scattering the bones of Clovis and 
 Clotildis. Their third Easter visit (86 1) was followed 
 by a partial settlement under a leader who, like 
 Guthrum in England, received baptism, and by the 
 creation of a barrier and bulwark against them, a 
 frontier duchy, of which the chief seat was Paris, 
 and the holder a valiant soldier, Robert the Strong. 
 From the duchy of Paris and from the house of 
 Robert the Strong, proceeded the line which was to 
 displace the Carolingians, and to become the kings of 
 France. Paris was fortified ; the great siege of 885, 
 in which kings and emperors did so little to relieve 
 the city, and Duke Odo, Robert's son, kept the 
 Northmen so gallantly at Ixiy, was the turning point
 
 vin DANISH ATTACKS ON FKANK KINGDOMS 201 
 
 of deliverance and hope to the Franks, and the title, 
 in due time, of Odo, to supplant the Carolingian 
 king. But the Northmen still prevailed. The 
 county of Flanders, created like Paris as a frontier 
 defence (862), could not prevent an invasion of the 
 Frankish rivers (88 1, 882), in which the Danes 
 pillaged and burnt the most famous cities, Maestricht, 
 Cologne, Coblentz, Liege, Antwerp, even Aachen, 
 Soissons, and Reims. But in Germany they were at 
 length checked. Gaul was an easier prey, and they 
 began to occupy their conquests. Three times had 
 the Frank kings granted to Danish chiefs the Count- 
 ship of the Frisian shore, from the mouth of the 
 Meuse to the Weser. The lands where they settled 
 began to receive their name, in France Normandy, 
 the " land of the Northmen " (terra Normannorutri), 
 answering to what in England was called the 
 Danelagu, the land of Danish law. Besides the 
 Normandy which they founded on the Seine, other 
 Normandies were attempted on the Loire, round 
 Amiens, in Burgundy and in Auvergne, round Char- 
 tres, in Brittany. Even in Germany, on the western 
 bank of the Rhine, as far as Coblentz, Godfrey, the 
 Danish count of Friseland, would have created a 
 Danishry, if he had not been murdered by Charles 
 the Fat (885), who had himself made a grant of the 
 territory. It was in vain that they were beaten, and 
 that songs of triumph were made over some rare 
 victory of the Franks. One of these songs has sur- 
 vived, in the German tongue of the Franks of that
 
 202 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 time, the Ludwigslied, in honour of a victory won by 
 Louis III., king of the West Franks. But the 
 Danes reappeared, and the continual Danegeld was 
 the proof of their success. 
 
 At length, amid a crowd of chiefs, some of the 
 same name, we hear of Rolf, or Rollo. At first he is 
 hard to distinguish. But he is, apparently, to be dis- 
 cerned in those disastrous days, when Charles the 
 Bald, unable to restrain the Northmen, yet found 
 leisure to attack his brother's children, and attempt 
 the imperial crown (876). Charles was defeated 
 ignominiously at Andernach by his nephew, Louis the 
 Saxon (October 8) ; and a month before the battle 
 (September 16), Rollo sailed up the Seine, just as 
 Osker had first led the Danes to Rouen, a month before 
 the murderous battle of Fontenailles, between the grand- 
 sons of Charles the Great. Charles, humbled on the 
 Rhine, thinking now only of Italy, and on the eve of 
 a miserable end, confirmed a treaty by which Rollo, 
 besides having his Danegeld, was to occupy Rouen. 
 Rollo was henceforth, under Charles's successors, 
 master of Rouen and the Seine. This did not pre- 
 vent him from joining his countrymen in their 
 ravages ; but his name is not prominent till, amid the 
 strife between Charles the Simple, the grandson of 
 Charles the Bald, and the Dukes of Paris, he re- 
 appears. He had then become strong enough to 
 l)e worth bargaining with as an ally. Charles the 
 Simple, and Duke Robert of Paris, joined in giving 
 Rollo a legal position in the lands which he occupied.
 
 vin TREATY OF ST. CLAIR-SUR-EPTE 203 
 
 A formal conference took place between the North- 
 man with his chieftains, and the Frank king, on the 
 banks of the Epte, afterwards the boundary stream of 
 Normandy. Rollo demanded, and after some bar- 
 gaining obtained, all from the Epte to the sea west- 
 wards, including Brittany. A doubtful story says 
 that he also received King Charles's daughter. For 
 this territory he performed homage ; "he placed his 
 hands between the king's hands, and became the 
 king's man " ; and the next year he was baptized at 
 Rouen. The " land of the Normans " had become 
 a part of the Frank kingdom; the "Duke of the 
 Normans," though long sneered at as a " Duke of the 
 Pirates," took rank with Dukes of Paris and Counts 
 of Flanders, and was in time to be the premier duke 
 of France. The treaty or agreement of St. Clair-sur- 
 Epte was probably at the time not different from 
 many transactions of the same kind. But it was the 
 starting-point of great changes. It formally intro- 
 duced into the Latin world a new Germanic race 
 which rapidly unlearned its old habits and language, 
 becoming more Latin than the Latins round it. And 
 it added to western France a state which was to be 
 its most powerful element ; a people of singular 
 strength, versatility, and ambition, who were to exer- 
 cise an influence without example on the fortunes of 
 all their neighbours. 
 
 When the settlement of Normandy had been 
 finally recognised, and had attained, as it did in 
 another generation, its full limits, northwards and
 
 204 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 westwards, the Danish attempts to settle elsewhere 
 in Gaul gradually slackened, though their ravages 
 continued for some time longer. The Northmen 
 received some severe lessons. Twice in their efforts 
 to penetrate to the central highlands of Auvergne 
 and Burgundy they were defeated with great slaughter. 
 In time the Danishry on the Loire and the Somme 
 melted into the surrounding population. But the great 
 result of their invasion, Rollo's almost royal dukedom, 
 grew and prospered. It held the balance between 
 Frank parties and kings. Vainly, by force or intrigue, 
 the king of the Franks, Louis d'Outremer, son of 
 Charles the Simple, endeavoured to undo his own and 
 his father's work. Ignominious failure was the result. 
 And twice, within two years (943-945), the Normans 
 held the king of the Franks a prisoner in their hands. 
 From the time of Charles the Simple and the 
 establishment of the Norman duchy, the Carolingians 
 played a varied but a losing game against the rising 
 house the counts and dukes of Paris, the descend- 
 ants of Duke Robert. The royal authority was 
 undermined by the growth of great local potentates ; 
 and among them the lords of Paris and the adjoin- 
 ing territory were the most formidable, from the re- 
 membrance of their exploits against the Northmen, 
 from their ambition, and from their ability. They 
 had their rivals on the North and East; the new 
 Danish masters of the valley of the Seine ; the counts 
 of Vermandois, descendants of the great Charles. 
 These rivalries, though at times they gave advantages
 
 vin FAILURE OF LINE OF CHARLES THE BALD 205 
 
 to the king, also marked his weakness and shattered 
 the unity of the realm. The Carolingians had hence- 
 forth to fight for their kingdom with their great nobles. 
 They were overthrown, driven into exile, supplanted 
 by strangers, restored. They were not without 
 gallantry and spirit, but they owed their crown, when 
 they held it, less to their own power than to the 
 jealousies of the great territorial princes round them, 
 whom a few more turns of tightening custom and 
 stiffening precedent were to change into the great 
 feudatories of the later ages. Charles the Simple, 
 after a life of vicissitude and fruitless conflict, perished 
 miserably in prison, by the treachery of one of the 
 great rival nobles, Herbert of Vermandois (928). 
 His infant son, nephew of the English Athelstan, 
 saved with difficulty, and brought up in England, 
 Louis the Stranger, Louis " d'Outremer," "from over 
 sea" owed his recall from exile (936) to the mutual 
 suspicions of his father's enemies, Herbert of Ver- 
 mandois and Hugh of Paris, who both counted on 
 being able to use him for their own purposes. He 
 came back to waste a gallant spirit and a reign of 
 eighteen years (936-954) in fruitless efforts, fruitless 
 even when he was victorious, to shake off the crush- 
 ing pressure of the great dukes and counts, who in 
 Paris, Normandy, Flanders, Vermandois, Lotharingia, 
 Burgundy, Poitou, Aquitaine, hemmed in the king 
 of the Franks in his fortress of Laon and its narrow 
 surrounding district all that remained besides the 
 name of king to the family of Charles the Great
 
 206 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 Nothing proves more certainly the failing powers of 
 the Carolingian house, than the contrast between 
 Louis, and the German king of the new Saxon line, 
 Otto or Otho (951-973). Both were equally sur- 
 rounded by the formidable rivalry of powerful local 
 chiefs, by confusion, selfishness, treason, by terrible 
 outbreaks of barbarian invasion. But what the 
 Carolingians could not do, Otto did. He asserted 
 his mastery over the turbulence round him ; he 
 conceived and carried out worthy political aims ; he 
 attempted and partly accomplished the reform of 
 abuses in government and in the Church ; and with 
 no more advantages than Louis, he left a great name 
 as a king and a ruler, the founder, a second time, 
 of the new Roman Empire. Louis' son, Lothar, in- 
 herited the kingdom on the same terms as his father 
 (954-986). The great duke of Paris claimed, as in 
 his father's case, to be the protector of the king. 
 He still preferred to make, control, despoil, torment 
 the kings of the Franks, than to be king himself. 
 Lothar's reign was wasted, like his father's, in ignoble 
 and unprofitable trials of strength. There was much 
 fighting, much crime, much intrigue, much vicissitude 
 of fortune ; but everything contributed to the growing 
 strength and the independence of the duke of the 
 Normans, and of his ordinary ally the duke of Paris. 
 Louis and Lothar between them reigned for fifty 
 years, but in vain. At length the time of the 
 Carolingians was exhausted. Hugh the Great (t956) 
 who would not be a king himself, left a son, Hugh
 
 viii LAST STRUGGLE OF THE CAEOLINGIANS 207 
 
 Capet, for whom he prepared a kingdom, and who 
 was ready when the last Carolingian became king 
 to follow the example of the founder of the Caro- 
 lingian line. The last Carolingian, boyish, profligate, 
 restless, reigned but a year (1987). He died, prob- 
 ably poisoned. The great line ended in a Louis, 
 whom the historians have nicknamed, " le Faineant," 
 "der Faul," "the Good-for-nothing." His death was 
 followed by the election of Hugh Capet. In vain 
 did Charles, Louis' brother, from the impregnable 
 rock of Laon, the last refuge of the Carolingians, 
 strike desperately for his inheritance. The great 
 interests round him, the political and ecclesiastical 
 treachery of the time, were against him. After an 
 obstinate struggle he was at last entrapped by the 
 Bishop of Laon, betrayed, and delivered into the 
 hands of Hugh Capet. He died in prison ; and the 
 Carolingians disappear from history. 
 
 With the end of the Carolingian line, and indeed 
 long before it was extinct, came the end of that 
 Frank power which, after the fall of Rome, had for 
 four centuries played the foremost part in the West, 
 and which had culminated in Charles's empire. The 
 Franks had outstripped and defeated all their great 
 rivals, the Gothic and then the Lombard race, in the 
 competition for the leadership of the new world. 
 They had been the conquerors and tamers of their 
 kindred barbarians Alamans, Bavarians, Frisians, 
 Saxons. Their manifest superiority, their brilliant 
 successes, seemed to themselves and to their con-
 
 208 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 temporaries to raise them to the greatness of the 
 ancient Romans. The popes are never tired of 
 celebrating their glory ; and their own feeling about 
 it breaks out with a kind of lyrical enthusiasm, in 
 the barbarous Latin of the prologue to the collection 
 called the "Salic law." "The illustrious race of 
 the Franks, created by the hand of God, mighty in 
 arms, deep in counsel, stable in the bond of peace, 
 in body noble and stalwart, in fairness and beauty 
 matchless, daring and swift and stern, newly come 
 to the Catholic faith, free from heresy ! While it 
 was still in the barbarian state, yet by God's inspira- 
 tion, it sought the key of knowledge, and according 
 to the bent of its own qualities, desiring righteousness 
 and holding fast piety, its chiefs dictated the Salic 
 law. . . . Long live (vivaf) whoever loves the 
 Franks. May Christ keep their realm, and fill their 
 rulers with the light of His grace ; may He protect 
 their host ; may He grant them the memorials of 
 the faith, the joys and the felicity of peace. May 
 Jesus Christ the Lord of lords, by His mercy guide 
 their times. For this is that race which, when it 
 was little in number, yet being mighty in valour and 
 strength, broke off, by fighting, the tyrannous yoke 
 of the Romans from its neck ; and after it had made 
 the confession of baptism, by it the bodies of the 
 holy martyrs, which the Romans had burned with 
 fire or slain with the sword, or cast forth to be torn 
 by wild beasts, were magnificently enshrined with 
 gold and precious stones."
 
 VIII END OF THE CAKOLINGIANS 209 
 
 But their day, as a race, was over. As that single 
 and foremost nation which had controlled and directed 
 the fortunes of all around them, they were to dissolve 
 and disappear. They were merged and lost in the 
 two great rival peoples which arose after them, and 
 partly from them, and who divided their heritage. It 
 was long before they learned that they were no longer 
 one, that they were to be divided. Long after the 
 treaty of Verdun (843), and the death of the last 
 legitimate Carolingian emperor (888), even the Saxon 
 kings of Germany claimed to interfere in the affairs 
 of Gaul as representing the old kingdom and leader- 
 ship of the Franks. But their claim no longer 
 answered to the realities of the case. There was still 
 to be a great Francia, appropriating the name and 
 fame of the Franks of Clovis and the great Charles ; 
 but it was to be no longer German, but Latin. There 
 were still to be Franks who were Germans, from 
 whose dukes and kings were to come emperors of the 
 Romans ; a Francia in the heart of Germany, and on 
 both sides of the Rhine, retaining the name when it 
 shrank up to the " Circle of Franconia " of later times. 
 But the Franks who had ruled in Europe and estab- 
 lished the power of the popes, the Franks who pre- 
 pared the way for the middle ages, the Franks on 
 whom for a time seemed to devolve the Roman 
 Empire, the united Franks of Charles the Great, 
 broken up and separated, are known no more in 
 history after the failure and extinction of the family 
 of their greatest man. 
 
 p
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 CONSOLIDATION AND UNITY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 
 
 UNDER THE KINGS, CHIEFLY OF WESSEX THE 
 
 NORTHMEN IN ENGLAND 
 
 DURING the years which saw these great changes on 
 the Continent the establishment, the glory, and the 
 break-up of the Frank Empire the English nation, 
 through a history outwardly as turbulent and confused 
 as that of the Continent, was slowly but distinctly 
 becoming one, and preparing to endure one of the 
 severest trials which can come upon a people that 
 of foreign conquest, and foreign conquest twice re- 
 peated within half a century. 
 
 The progress of consolidation which was going on 
 from the eighth to the tenth century, in what were to 
 be separate states on the Continent, in the Scandi- 
 navian and Slavonic countries and in Hungary, as well 
 as in Gaul and Germany, was going on steadily and 
 visibly, though with frequent interruptions, in Eng- 
 land ; and the process is not difficult to trace. The 
 bands, or tribes, or leagues, or settlements, which in
 
 CHAP, ix CONSOLIDATION OF ENGLAND 211 
 
 the preceding centuries had gradually become con- 
 fluent, first in larger or smaller districts, and then 
 in separate kingdoms, the so-called Heptarchy, had 
 come, through war or agreement, to acknowledge the 
 superiority of one or other of the kingdoms, and the 
 overlordship, temporary or hereditary, of its king. 
 This overlordship, which was sometimes but not 
 always expressed by the term Bretwalda, after being 
 won and held by Oswald of Northumbria, and still 
 more strongly by Offa of the great English midland, 
 Mercia, finally passed to the kings of the line of 
 Cerdic, the kings of south-western Wessex. Roughly 
 speaking, the end of the seventh century, the time of 
 the first Frank Mayors of the Palaqe, is the time of 
 the predominance of Northumberland; the eighth, 
 the age of Charles Martel, Pipin, and Pipin's great 
 son, is that of the superiority of Mercia ; the ninth, 
 the age of the Carolingians, is that of the superiority 
 of Wessex. And with Wessex and Cerdic's house it 
 remained. Egbert of Wessex, during the days of 
 Offa's power, had, like other English princes, found 
 refuge for thirteen years from the dangerous king of 
 Mercia at the court of Charles the Great. In that 
 school of statesmanship, of war, and of awakening 
 intellectual activity, he saw and probably learned 
 much ; and he forms an important link between 
 England and the Continent. On the death of Offa 
 he returned to England, and was chosen king of 
 Wessex. Egbert became king in England a year or 
 two after the great Frank Emperor had been crowned
 
 212 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 at Rome. Egbert represents the beginning in England 
 of that new state of things, the advance from the old- 
 fashioned barbarism of the Merovingian and early 
 Anglo-Saxon times, which on the Continent is repre- 
 sented by the ideas, the aims, and the achievements 
 of the great Frank king and emperor. In the course 
 of his long reign of nearly forty years (802-39), 
 Egbert established his supremacy over the other 
 English kingdoms, which in the case of Mercia and 
 Northumbria retained their subject kings. He was not 
 only king of the West Saxons, but king of the English, 
 as Charles was king of the Franks, having kings as 
 well as dukes under him ; and the idea of the unity of 
 the English nation and the English kingdom, .to which 
 Egbert first gave expression, was never again to be lost. 
 Thus, left to itself, unaffected by the political 
 shocks and rearrangements of the Continent, and 
 but partially influenced by the developments there of 
 social ideas and forms, the nation which had now 
 become English, gradually worked out its own union, 
 its own institutions, and its own character. Its society 
 rested on the class distinctions, in one shape or another 
 common to all the Teutonic races, except, perhaps, the 
 Franks : the nobles, the freemen free but not noble 
 and the large and vaguely-determined class of the 
 half-free, or unfree, whether farmer, tenant, dependant, 
 labourer, serf, or slave, bound to the land, or bound to 
 the household ; the Eorls, Ccorh, and Lats of the laws 
 of Kent; the Edhelingi, Frilin^ and Lazzi of the 
 Saxons of the Continent ; the Mobiles, the Ingenui,
 
 ix ENGLISH SOCIAL ARRANGEMENTS 213 
 
 and Lift of the Capitularies. These classes are dis- 
 tinctly marked, as in all the Teutonic laws, by the 
 difference of their "wergild," or the fixed compensa- 
 tion payable for personal injury or death. Its land 
 tenure grew out of the old Teutonic system, in which 
 a community, usually allied in kinship, had its defined 
 territory, its Mark, or, afterwards in the German lands, 
 its Gau, in which the land, in the first instance the 
 public land of the community, and in larger or smaller 
 portions of it long remaining so, became in other 
 portions more or less absolutely appropriated to 
 persons, and then to families ; appropriated by early 
 occupation, by clearing and building, by grant, by 
 custom, by violence. The tendency to absolute 
 ownership is a natural and strong one, and it would 
 be increased when a tribe became part of an army, 
 conquering and settling. Among the English the 
 traces of the old Mark system were seen in the 
 Folcland, the public land of the township, used in 
 common, or rented by individuals, but not alienated. 
 But besides this there was the estate of private and 
 inherited property, held by public witness, the Ethel, 
 afterwards called the Alodial land ; and there was also 
 the land, carved originally out of the public estate, 
 and held by written charter, the Bocland, but soon 
 confused with, or becoming equivalent to, the Alodial 
 portion, the patrimony and heritage. The political 
 centre was the king; the necessity, in the first in- 
 stance, of war and conquest, in each original division 
 of the new settlers, but a necessity heartily and readily
 
 214 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 adopted in peace, the uncertain and fitful peace of 
 those days, as thoroughly congenial to the Teutonic 
 spirit ; the king of the men, the folk, to whom as 
 a community the land belonged. The king had 
 his special " companions," his " friends," " thegns," 
 " ministers," " loaf-eaters," bound to his person by 
 benefits and privileges, and growing by degrees into 
 a formally recognised class of nobility, which at 
 length overshadowed the older nobles who were 
 noble by race and blood. The larger divisions of the 
 land had their governors, " ealdormen," taken from 
 local potentates, or from the king's " companions " 
 or his kinsmen. Besides these, another class of 
 persons gradually grew up, bound to the king or to 
 other chiefs, by a voluntary and formal tie of personal 
 allegiance : those who had, according to the usage of 
 the time, commended themselves to a lord as his " men" 
 and to whom the lord gave protection in return for 
 service. With these high persons, according to their 
 personal qualities, more than by any definite rules, 
 lay the power of government and the impulse to 
 action. But, as in all the German nations of the 
 time, power was habitually exercised very much in 
 public. The king or ruler was continually and 
 periodically face to face with assemblies, more or less 
 large, of his people, to whose approval he appealed in 
 legislation and policy, and whose concurrence and 
 support he really needed. The public assembly, in- 
 cluding all freemen, if not also some portion of the 
 only half-free class below them, and having at its head
 
 ix PUBLIC ASSEMBLIES 215 
 
 the chief and most venerable persons of the com- 
 munity, whether kingdom, shire, or township, was the 
 place where public matters were heard, and opinion, 
 however rudely and imperfectly, was yet expressed. 
 This institution of the public assembly, under differ- 
 ent names (Mall, Thing, Moot, in Latin, Pladtuni), 
 accompanies everywhere the advance and settlement 
 of the tribes of the German stock, whether the Goths 
 in Spain, the Franks in Gaul, the Lombards in Italy, 
 or the Saxons and Angles in Britain. As the king- 
 dom enlarged in compass, the character of the central 
 assembly necessarily altered ; even if all freemen 
 might come to it, all could not ; it became, without 
 purpose or rule, a more selected and representative 
 body ; representative not by design or election, but 
 the nature of the case. In addition to this, perhaps 
 growing out of it, there was the " assembly of the 
 wise," a king's council of those whose place made 
 them his natural councillors, and the people's spokes- 
 men bishops, ealdormen, king's thanes attended, 
 it might be, on great occasions by larger gatherings 
 of freemen or warriors on the spot. Meanwhile, the 
 local assemblies remained. " The fot&moot was left 
 to the shire ; the witena-gemot was gathered round 
 the king." All great public transactions, such as the 
 election or acceptance of a king, made in the first 
 instance by the select witan, were also witnessed and 
 approved by some kind of general assembly of the 
 nation. The legislation and charters of the king, 
 ostensibly, often really, the personal acts of the king,
 
 216 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 bear on their face the concurrence of the witan ; and 
 our documentary evidence exhibits the chief men of 
 the nation in general as parties, more or less really, 
 according to the infinite variations of character and 
 circumstances, to all the acts of government, adminis- 
 tration, and policy. 
 
 In indistinct and ill-defined forms, the elements 
 of the various constitutional arrangements which were 
 to be feudalism, or popular government, monarchy 
 personal or parliamentary were all present; but 
 none, in that age of confused and uncertain begin- 
 nings, had assumed a full-grown and consistent shape. 
 The power of the king was great and increasing ; yet 
 it grew side by side with great personal freedom and 
 strongly marked personal rights all round him, and 
 with great weight and great power supposed to exist 
 in high bodies and assemblies, with which he had to 
 deal. The relation of lord and " man," or vassal, 
 was increasing ; the king could add to it gifts of land, 
 " benefices " ; but the king was still thought of as the 
 king of the people, and not as the owner of the land, 
 though the disposer of the public part of it, the/<?/f- 
 land. It lay in the course of events, what these 
 elements were to work out, and how they were to 
 affect, and be affected by, the character of the nation. 
 For a long time two counter processes went on : the 
 amalgamation of distinct national divisions, with their 
 various forms of power and rule, under strong kings ; 
 and then the loosening of the new fabric under weak 
 ones. It was what went on under the Frank kings
 
 ix DANISH INVASIONS 217 
 
 on the Continent : and Milton compares these tribal 
 strifes, to the wars "between kites and crows." But 
 in these strifes and trials of strength, lay the process 
 and discipline by which, in those rude conditions of 
 society, a nation learned the necessity of becoming 
 one. 
 
 But just as the Anglo-Saxon settlements were 
 beginning to coalesce into one kingdom, a new form 
 of trial was coming on them. A terrible enemy 
 broke in from without. In common with the rest of 
 Western Europe, England was assailed on all sides 
 by the fleets of the Norse sea-rovers. Their first 
 appearance in England is chronicled in the year 787, 
 when the crews of three strange pirate barks, rovers 
 from the North, slew a king's officer who tried to 
 seize them. It was the threatening thunder shower, 
 which announced the most fearful and prolonged 
 storm : a storm which tried to the utmost the force 
 and endurance of the English race. It burst at once 
 on the Continent and on England. The Northmen, 
 who, in the weakness and divisions of the Frank 
 empire, had learned to use the great rivers of 
 Germany and Gaul as highways, and who in the 
 middle of the ninth century were burning or pillaging 
 their most flourishing cities, had also learned the way 
 to England, had vexed the last years of Egbert, and 
 under his son JEthelwulf had stormed and plundered 
 Canterbury and London. In the year 855, the year 
 in which Biorn Ironsides is said to have established 
 a permanent military post on the Seine, the Danes,
 
 218 BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES CHAP. 
 
 who had hitherto landed, plundered, and sailed away, 
 now for the first time wintered in Kent. They began 
 to settle, and from their settlements to co-operate 
 with their countrymen from the sea. It was the 
 Anglo-Saxon invasion over again, with its stages of 
 wide and desolating rapine, and then of occupation 
 and encroachment by heathen barbarians in a 
 Christian land. The resistance was obstinate and 
 persevering. Yet at one time it appeared as if 
 resistance would be in vain. Within a hundred years 
 after their first appearance, the Danes seemed masters 
 in the north and east. The bulwark of English power 
 had fallen before them when the young king of 
 Wessex, Alfred (871-901), was driven into the 
 marshes, the "water fastnesses," of Somerset. It 
 seemed as if the civilisation and Christianity of 
 England were to perish. The heathen advance was 
 stayed, and the fortunes of the English race were 
 saved, by Alfred's victory on the edge of the Wiltshire 
 downs at Edington. But though the Danes were for 
 the moment checked and humbled, Alfred had to 
 submit to the hard condition of allowing them to 
 settle in the largest half of England. By the agree- 
 ment and partition of Wedmore (878), Guthrum, their 
 leader, acknowledged Alfred's supremacy, and he and 
 his chiefs received baptism. But the land was 
 divided by the line of Watling Street, running with 
 an outward curve from the Thames and the sea to 
 Shrewsbury ; and all outside of it to the north-east 
 became the Danelagu> 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 
 
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