by Will Durant
On December 26, 795, Leo III was chosen Pope. The Roman populace did not like him; it accused him of various misdeeds; and on April 25, 799, it attacked him, maltreated him, and imprisoned him in a monastery. He escaped, and fled for protection to Charlemagne at Paderborn. The King received him kindly, and sent him back to Rome under armed escort, and ordered the Pope and his accusers to appear before him there in the following year. On November 24, 800, Charlemagne entered the ancient capital in state; on December I an assembly of Franks and Romans agreed to drop the charges against Leo if he would deny them on solemn oath; he did; and the way was cleared for a magnificent celebration of the Nativity. On Christmas Day, as Charlemagne, in the chlamys and sandals of a patricius Romanus, knelt before St. Peter’s altar in prayer, Leo suddenly produced a jeweled crown, and set it upon the King’s head. The congregation, perhaps instructed beforehand to act according to ancient ritual as the senatus populusque Romanus confirming a coronation, thrice cried out: “Hail to Charles the Augustus, crowned by God the great and peace-bringing Emperor of the Romans!” The royal head was anointed with holy oil, the Pope saluted Charlemagne as Emperor and Augustus, and offered him the act of homage reserved since 476 for the Eastern emperor.
If we may believe Eginhard, Charlemagne told him that had he known Leo’s intention to crown him he would not have entered the church. Perhaps he had learned of the general plan, but regretted the haste and circumstances of its execution; it may not have pleased him to receive the crown from a pope, opening the door to centuries of dispute as to the relative dignity and power of donor and recipient; and presumably he anticipated difficulties with Byzantium. He now sent frequent embassies and letters to Constantinople, seeking to heal the breach; and for a long time he made no use of his new title. In 802 he offered marriage to Irene as a means of mutually legitimizing their dubious titles;39 but Irene’s fall from power shattered this elegant plan. To discourage any martial attack by Byzantium he arranged an entente with Harun al-Rashid, who sealed their understanding by sending him some elephants and the keys to the Christian holy places in Jerusalem. The Eastern emperor, in retaliation, encouraged the emir of Cordova to renounce allegiance to Baghdad. Finally, in 812, the Greek basileus recognized Charlemagne as coemperor, in return for Charlemagne’s acknowledgment of Venice and southern Italy as belonging to Byzantium.
The coronation had results for a thousand years. It strengthened the papacy and the bishops by making civil authority derive from ecclesiastical conferment; Gregory VII and Innocent III would build a mightier Church on the events of 800 in Rome. It strengthened Charlemagne against baronial and other disaffection by making him a very vicar of God; it vastly advanced the theory of the divine right of kings. It contributed to the schism of Greek from Latin Christianity; the Greek Church did not relish subordination to a Roman Church allied with an empire rival to Byzantium. The fact that Charlemagne (as the Pope desired) continued to make Aachen, not Rome, his capital, underlined the passage of political power from the Mediterranean to northern Europe, from the Latin peoples to the Teutons. Above all, the coronation established the Holy Roman Empire in fact, though not in theory. Charlemagne and his advisers conceived of his new authority as a revival of the old imperial power; only with Otto I was the distinctively new character of the regime recognized; and it became “holy” only when Frederick Barbarossa introduced the word sacrum into his title in 1155. All in all, despite its threat to the liberty of the mind and the citizen, the Holy Roman Empire was a noble conception, a dream of security and peace, order and civilization restored in a world heroically won from barbarism, violence, and ignorance.
Imperial formalities now hedged in the Emperor on occasions of state. Then he had to wear embroidered robes, a golden buckle, jeweled shoes, and a crown of gold and gems, and visitors prostrated themselves to kiss his foot or knee; so much had Charlemagne learned from Byzantium, and Byzantium from Ctesiphon. But in other days, Eginhard assures us, his dress varied little from the common garb of the Franks—linen shirt and breeches next to the skin, and over these a woolen tunic perhaps fringed with silk; hose fastened by bands covered his legs, leather shoes his feet; in winter he added a close-fitting coat of otter or marten skins; and always a sword at his side. He was six feet four inches tall, and built to scale. He had blond hair, animated eyes, a powerful nose, a mustache but no beard, a presence “always stately and dignified.”40 He was temperate in eating and drinking, abominated drunkenness, and kept in good health despite every exposure and hardship. He often hunted, or took vigorous exercise on horseback. He was a good swimmer, and liked to bathe in the warm springs of Aachen. He rarely entertained, preferring to hear music or the reading of a book while he ate. Like every great man he valued time; he gave audiences and heard cases in the morning while dressing and putting on his shoes.
Behind his poise and majesty were passion and energy, but harnessed to his aims by a clairvoyant intelligence. His vital force was not consumed by half a hundred campaigns; he gave himself also, with never aging enthusiasm, to science, law, literature, and theology; he fretted at leaving any part of the earth, or any section of knowledge, unmastered or unexplored. In some ways he was mentally ingenuous; he scorned superstition and proscribed diviners and soothsayers, but he accepted many mythical marvels, and exaggerated the power of legislation to induce goodness or intelligence. This simplicity of soul had its fair side: there was in his thought and speech a directness and honesty seldom permitted to statesmanship.
He could be ruthless when policy required, and was especially cruel in his efforts to spread Christianity. Yet he was a man of great kindness, many charities, warm friendships, and varied loves. He wept at the death of his sons, his daughter, and Pope Hadrian. In a poem Ad Carolum regem Theo-dulf draws a pleasant picture of the Emperor at home. On his arrival from labors his children gather about him; son Charles takes off the father’s cloak, son Louis his sword; his six daughters embrace him, bring him bread, wine, apples, flowers; the bishop comes in to bless the King’s food; Alcuin is near to discuss letters with him; the diminutive Eginhard runs to and fro like an ant, bringing in enormous books.41 He was so fond of his daughters that he dissuaded them from marriage, saying that he could not bear to be without them. They consoled themselves with unlicensed amours, and bore several illegitimate children.42 Charlemagne accepted these accidents with good humor, since he himself, following the custom of his predecessors, had four successive wives and five mistresses or concubines. His abounding vitality made him extremely sensitive to feminine charms; and his women preferred a share in him to the monopoly of any other man. His harem bore him some eighteen children, of whom eight were legitimate.43 The ecclesiastics of the court and of Rome winked leniently at the Moslem morals of so Christian a king.
He was now head of an empire far greater than the Byzantine, surpassed, in the white man’s world, only by the realm of the Abbasid caliphate. But every extended frontier of empire or knowledge opens up new problems. Western Europe had tried to protect itself from the Germans by taking them into its civilization; but now Germany had to be protected against the Norse and the Slavs. The Vikings had by 800 established a kingdom in Jutland, and were raiding the Frisian coast. Charles hastened up from Rome, built fleets and forts on shores and rivers, and stationed garrisons at danger points. In 810 the king of Jutland invaded Frisia and was repulsed; but shortly thereafter, if we may follow the chronicle of the Monk of St. Gall, Charlemagne, from his palace at Narbonne, was shocked to see Danish pirate vessels in the Gulf of Lyons.
Perhaps because he foresaw, like Diocletian, that his overreaching empire needed quick defense at many points at once, he divided it in 806 among his three sons—Pepin, Louis, and Charles. But Pepin died in 810, Charles in 811; only Louis remained, so absorbed in piety as to seem unfit to govern a rough and treacherous world. Nevertheless, in 813, at a solemn ceremony, Louis was elevated from the rank of king to that of emperor, and the old monarch uttered his nunc dimittis: “Blessed be Thou, O
Lord God, Who hast granted me the grace to see with my own eyes my son seated on my throne!”44 Four months later, wintering at Aachen, he was seized with a high fever, and developed pleurisy. He tried to cure himself by taking only liquids; but after an illness of seven days he died, in the forty-seventh year of his reign and the seventy-second year of his life (814). He was buried under the dome of the cathedral at Aachen, dressed in his imperial robes. Soon all the world called him Carolus Magnus, Karl der Grosse, Charlemagne; and in 1165, when time had washed away all memory of his mistresses, the Church which he had served so well enrolled him among the blessed.
3. The Carolingian Decline
The Carolingian renaissance was one of several heroic interludes in the Dark Ages. It might have ended the darkness three centuries before Abélard had it not been for the quarrels and incompetence of Charlemagne’s successors, the feudal anarchy of the barons, the disruptive struggle between Church and state, and the Norman, Magyar, and Saracen invasions invited by these ineptitudes. One man, one lifetime, had not availed to establish a new civilization. The short-lived revival was too narrowly clerical; the common citizen had no part in it; few of the nobles cared a fig for it, few of them even bothered to learn how to read. Charles himself must bear some blame for the collapse of his empire. He had so enriched the clergy that the power of the bishops, now that his strong hand was lifted, outweighed that of the emperor; and he had been compelled, for military and administrative reasons, to yield a dangerous degree of independence to the courts and barons in the provinces. He had left the finances of an imperially burdened government dependent upon the loyalty and integrity of these rude aristocrats, and upon the modest income of his own lands and mines. He had not been able, like the Byzantine emperors, to build up a bureaucracy of civil servants responsible only to the central power, or capable of carrying on the government through all vicissitudes of imperial personnel. Within a generation after his death the missi dominici, who had spread his authority through the counties, were disbanded or ignored, and the local lords slipped out of central control. Charlemagne’s reign was a feat of genius; it represented political advancement in an age and region of economic decline.
The cognomens given to his successors by their contemporaries tell the story: Louis the Pious, Charles the Bald, Louis the Stammerer, Charles the Fat, Charles the Simple. Louis the “Pious” * (814-40) was as tall and handsome as his father; modest, gentle, and gracious, and as incorrigibly lenient as Caesar. Brought up by priests, he took to heart the moral precepts that Charlemagne had practiced with such moderation. He had one wife, and no concubines; he expelled from the court his father’s mistresses and his sisters’ paramours, and when the sisters protested, he immured them in nunneries. He took the priests at their word, and bade the monks live up to their Benedictine rule. Wherever he found injustice or exploitation he tried to stop it, and to right what wrong had been done. The people marveled to find him always taking the side of the weak or poor.
Feeling bound by Frank custom, he divided his empire into kingdoms ruled by his sons—Pepin, Lothaire, and Louis “the German” (whom we shall call Ludwig). By his second wife, Judith, Louis had a fourth son, known to history as Charles the Bald; Louis loved him with almost grandparental infatuation, and wished to give him a share of the empire, annulling the division of 817; the three older sons objected, and began eight years of civil war against their father. The majority of the nobles and the clergy supported the rebellion; the few who seemed loyal deserted Louis in a crisis at Roth feld (near Colmar), which thereafter was known as the Lügenfeld, the Field of Lies. Louis bade his remaining supporters leave him for their own protection, and surrendered to his sons (833). They jailed and tonsured Judith, confined young Charles in a convent, and ordered their father to abdicate and do public penance. In a church at Soissons Louis, surrounded by thirty bishops, and in the presence of his son and successor Lothaire, was compelled to bare himself to the waist, prostrate himself upon a haircloth, and read aloud a confession of crime. He took the gray garb of a penitent, and for a year was imprisoned in a monastery. From this moment a united episcopate ruled France amid the disintegration of the Carolingian house.
Popular sentiment revolted against Lothaire’s treatment of Louis. Many nobles and some prelates responded to the appeals of Judith to annul the deposition; a quarrel among the sons ensued; Pepin and Ludwig released their father, restored him to his throne, and returned Judith and Charles to his arms (834). Louis took no revenge, but forgave all. When Pepin died (838) a new partition was made; Ludwig did not like it, and invaded Saxony. The old Emperor again took the field, and repelled the invasion; but he fell ill of exposure on the way back, and died near Ingelheim (840). Among his last words were a message of forgiveness to Ludwig, and an appeal to Lothaire, now Emperor, to protect Judith and Charles.
Lothaire tried to reduce Charles and Ludwig to the rank of vassals; they defeated him at Fonteney (841), and took at Strasbourg an oath of mutual loyalty famous as our oldest document in French. In 843, however, they signed with Lothaire the Treaty of Verdun, and partitioned the empire of Charlemagne into approximately the modern states of Italy, Germany, and France. Ludwig received the lands between the Rhine and the Elbe, Charles received most of France and the Spanish March. Lothaire received Italy, and the lands between the Rhine on the east and the Scheldt, Saône, and Rhone on the west; this heterogeneous terrain, stretching from Holland to Provence, took his name as Lothari regnum, Lotharingia, Lothringar, Lorraine. It had no ethnic or linguistic unity, and inevitably became the battleground between Germany and France, repeatedly changing masters in the bloody fluctuations of victory and defeat.
During these costly civil wars, weakening the government, man power, wealth, and morale of Western Europe, the expanding tribes of Scandinavia invaded France in a barbarian wave that resumed and completed the havoc and terror of the German migrations of four centuries before. While the Swedes were infiltrating Russia, and the Norwegians were getting a foothold in Ireland, and the Danes were conquering England, a mixture of Scandinavians whom we may call Norse or Northmen raided the coastal and river cities of France. After the death of Louis the Pious these raids became great expeditions, with fleets of over a hundred vessels fully manned with oarsmenwarriors. In the ninth and tenth centuries France endured forty-seven Norse attacks. In 840 the raiders sacked Rouen, beginning a century of assaults upon Normandy; in 843 they entered Nantes and slew the bishop at his altar; in 844 they sailed up the Garonne to Toulouse; in 845 they mounted the Seine to Paris, but spared the city on receiving a tribute of 7000 pounds of silver. In 846—while the Saracens were attacking Rome—the Northmen conquered Frisia, burned Dordrecht, and sacked Limoges. In 847 they besieged Bordeaux, but were repulsed; in 848 they tried again, captured it, plundered it, massacred its population, and burned it to the ground. In the following years they dealt a like fate to Beauvais, Bayeux, St.-Lô, Meaux, Évreux, Tours; we may surmise something of the terror by noting that Tours was pillaged in 853, 856, 862, 872, 886, 903, and 919.45 Paris was pillaged in 856, again in 861, and burned in 865. At Orléans and Chartres the bishops organized armies and drove back the invaders (855); but in 856 Danish pirates sacked Orléans. In 859 a Norse fleet sailed through Gibraltar into the Mediterranean; raided towns along the Rhone as far north as Valence; crossed the Gulf of Genoa, and plundered Pisa and other Italian cities. Baffled here and there by the fortified castles of the nobles, the invaders rifled or destroyed the treasures of the unprotected churches and monasteries, often burning them and their libraries, and sometimes killing the priests and monks. In the litanies of those dark days men prayed, Libera nos a furore Normanorum—“Deliver us from the Norse fury!”46 As if in a conspiracy with the Northmen, the Saracens took Corsica and Sardinia in 810, ravaged the French Riviera in 820, sacked Arles in 842, and held most of the French Mediterranean coast till 972.
What were the kings and barons doing in all this half century of destruction? The barons, themselves harassed,
were loath to go to the aid of other regions, and responded weakly to appeals for united action. The kings were busy with their wars for territory or the Imperial throne, and sometimes encouraged the Norse to raid a rival’s shores. In 859 Archbishop Hincmar of Reims directly accused Charles the Bald of negligence in the defense of France. Charles was succeeded (877-88) by worse weaklings—Louis II the Stammerer, Louis III, Carloman, and Charles the Fat. By the accidents of time and death all the realm of Charlemagne was again united under Charles the Fat, and the dying empire had another chance to fight for its life. But in 880 the Norse captured and burned Nijmegen, and turned Courtrai and Ghent into Norman strongholds; in 881 they burned Liege, Cologne, Bonn, Prüm, and Aachen; in 882 they captured Trier, killing the archbishop who led its defense; in the same year they took Reims, forcing Hincmar to flight and death. In 883 they seized Amiens, but retired on receiving 12,000 pounds of silver from King Carloman. In 885 they took Rouen, and sailed up to Paris in 700 ships with 30,000 men. The governor of the city, Count Odo or Eudes, and its Bishop Gozlin led a valiant resistance; for thirteen months Paris stood siege, and made a dozen sorties; finally Charles the Fat, instead of coming to the rescue, paid the Northmen 700 pounds of silver, and gave them permission to go up the Seine and winter in Burgundy, which they pillaged to their hearts’ content. Charles was deposed, and died in 888. Odo was chosen king of France, and Paris, its strategic value now proved, became the seat of government.