EUROPE
IN THE MIDDLE AGES

IERNE L. PLUNKET
M.A. Oxon.
AUTHOR OF ‘THE FALL OF THE OLD ORDER’, ‘ISABEL OF CASTILE’, ETC.

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1922

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen
New York Toronto Melbourne Cape Town
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HUMPHREY MILFORD
Publisher to the University

Printed in England

PREFACE

The history of Mediaeval Europe is so vast a subject that the attempt to deal with it in a small compass must entail either severe compression or what may appear at first sight reckless omission.

The path of compression has been trodden many times, as in J. H. Robinson’s Introduction to the History of Western Europe, or in such series as the ‘Periods of European History’ published by Messrs. Rivingtons for students, or text-books of European History published by the Clarendon Press and Messrs. Methuen.

To the authors of all these I should like to express my indebtedness both for facts and perspective, as to Mr. H. W. Davis for his admirable summary of the mediaeval outlook in the Home University Library series; but in spite of so many authorities covering the same ground, I venture to claim for the present book a pioneer path of ‘omission’; it may be reckless but yet, I believe, justifiable.

It has been my object not so much to supply students with facts as to make Mediaeval Europe live, for the many who, knowing nothing of her history, would like to know a little, in the lives of her principal heroes and villains, as well as in the tendencies of her classes, and in the beliefs and prejudices of her thinkers. This task I have found even more difficult than I had expected, for limits of space have insisted on the omission of many events and names I would have wished to include. These I have sacrificed to the hope of creating reality and arousing interest, and if I have in any way succeeded I should like to pay my thanks first of all to Mr. Henry Osborn Taylor for his two volumes of The Mediaeval Mind that have been my chief inspiration, and then to the many authors whose names and books I give elsewhere, and whose researches have enabled me to tell my tale.

IERNE L. PLUNKET.

I.	The Greatness of Rome	[1]
II.	The Decline of Rome	[9]
III.	The Dawn of Christianity	[21]
IV.	Constantine the Great	[27]
V.	The Invasions of the Barbarians	[37]
VI.	The Rise of the Franks	[54]
VII.	Mahomet	[66]
VIII.	Charlemagne	[79]
IX.	The Invasions of the Northmen	[101]
X.	Feudalism and Monasticism	[117]
XI.	The Investiture Question	[130]
XII.	The Early Crusades	[143]
XIII.	The Making of France	[159]
XIV.	Empire and Papacy	[176]
XV.	Learning and Ecclesiastical Organization in the Middle Ages	[196]
XVI.	The Faith of the Middle Ages	[207]
XVII.	France under Two Strong Kings	[223]
XVIII.	The Hundred Years’ War	[236]
XIX.	Spain in the Middle Ages	[259]
XX.	Central and Northern Europe in the Later Middle Ages	[276]
XXI.	Italy in the Later Middle Ages	[297]
XXII.	Part I: The Fall of the Greek Empire	[327]
	Part II: Voyage and Discovery	[337]
XXIII.	The Renaissance	[346]
	Some Authorities on Mediaeval History	[365]
	Chronological Summary, 476–1494	[368]
	Mediaeval Genealogies	[375]
	Index	[385]

MAPS

The Roman Empire in the Time of Constantine the Great	[28]
The Empire of Charlemagne	[80]
France in the Reign of Henry II	[161]
The Treaty of Bretigni	[246]
France in 1429	[254]
The Spanish Kingdoms, 1263–1492	[260]
North-East Europe in the Middle Ages	[287]
Italy in the Later Middle Ages	[298]
The Near East in the Middle Ages	[328]

I
THE GREATNESS OF ROME

‘Ave, Roma Immortalis!’, ‘Hail, Immortal Rome!’ This cry, breaking from the lips of a race that had carried the imperial eagles from the northern shores of Europe to Asia and Africa, was no mere patriotic catchword. It was the expression of a belief that, though humanity must die and personal ambitions fade away, yet Rome herself was eternal and unconquerable, and what was wrought in her name would outlast the ages.

In the modern world it is sometimes necessary to remind people of their citizenship, but the Roman never forgot the greatness of his inheritance. When St. Paul, bound with thongs and condemned to be scourged, declared, ‘I am Roman born,’ the Captain of the Guard, who had only gained his citizenship by paying a large sum of money, was afraid of the prisoner on whom he had laid hands without a trial.

To be a Roman, however apparently poor and defenceless, was to walk the earth protected by a shield that none might set aside save at great peril. Not to be a Roman, however rich and of high standing, was to pass in Roman eyes as a ‘barbarian’, a creature of altogether inferior quality and repute.

‘Be it thine, O Roman,’ says Virgil, the greatest of Latin poets, ‘to govern the nations with thy imperial rule’: and such indeed was felt by Romans to be the destiny of their race.

Stretching on the west through Spain and Gaul to the Atlantic, that vast ‘Sea of Darkness’ beyond which according to popular belief the earth dropped suddenly into nothingness, the outposts of the Empire in the east looked across the plains of Mesopotamia towards Persia and the kingdoms of central Asia. Babylon ‘the Wondrous’, Syria, and Palestine with its turbulent Jewish population, Egypt, the Kingdom of the Pharaohs long ere Romulus the City-builder slew his brother, Carthage, the Queen of Mediterranean commerce, all were now Roman provinces, their lustre dimmed by a glory greater than they had ever known.

Roman Trade Routes

The Mediterranean, once the battle-ground of rival Powers, had become an imperial lake, the high road of the grain ships that sailed perpetually from Spain and Egypt to feed the central market of the world; for Rome, like England to-day, was quite unable to satisfy her population from home cornfields. The fleets that brought the necessaries of life convoyed also shiploads of oriental luxuries, silks, jewels, and perfumes, transported from Ceylon and India in trading-sloops to the shores of the Red Sea, and thence by caravans of camels to the port of Alexandria.

Other trade routes than the Mediterranean were the vast network of roads that, like the threads of a spider’s web, kept every part of the Empire, however remote, in touch with the centre from which their common fate was spun. At intervals of six miles were ‘post-houses’, provided each with forty or more horses, that imperial messengers, speeding to or from the capital with important news, might dismount and mount again at the different stages, hastening on their way with undiminished speed.

How firm and well made were their roads we know to-day, when, after the lapse of nearly nineteen centuries of traffic, we use and praise them still. They hold in their strong foundations one secret of their maker’s greatness, that the Roman brought to his handiwork the thoroughness inspired by a vision not merely of something that should last a few years or even his lifetime, but that should endure like the city he believed eternal.

It was the boast of Augustus, 27 B.C.–A.D. 14, the first of the Roman Emperors, that he had found his capital built of brick and had left it marble; and his tradition as an architect passed to his successors. There are few parts of what was once the Roman Empire that possess no trace to-day of massive aqueduct or Forum, of public baths or stately colonnades. In Rome itself, the Colosseum, the scene of many a martyr’s death and gladiator’s struggle; elsewhere, as at Nîmes in southern France, a provincial amphitheatre; the aqueduct of Segovia in Spain, the baths in England that have made and named a town; the walls that mark the outposts of empire—all are the witnesses of a genius that dared to plan greatly, nor spared expense or labour in carrying out its designs.

Those who have visited the Border Country between England and Scotland know the Emperor Hadrian’s wall, twenty feet high by seven feet broad, constructed to keep out the fierce Picts and Scots from this the most northern of his possessions. Those of the enemy that scaled the top would find themselves faced by a ditch and further wall, bristling with spears; while the legions flashed their summons for reinforcements from guardhouse to guardhouse along the seventy miles of massive barrier. All that human labour could do had made the position impregnable.

A scheme of fortifications was also attempted in central Europe along the lines of the Rhine and Danube. These rivers provided the third of the imperial trade routes, and it is well to remember them in this connexion, for their importance as highways lasted right through Roman and mediaeval into modern times. Railways have altered the face of Europe: they have cut through her waste places and turned them into thriving centres of industry: they have looped up her mines and ports and tunnelled her mountains: there is hardly a corner of any land where they have not penetrated; and the change they have made is so vast that it is often difficult to imagine the world before their invention. In Roman times, in neighbourhoods where the sea was remote and road traffic slow and inconvenient, there only remained the earliest of all means of transport, the rivers. The Rhine and Danube, one flowing north-west, the other south-east, both neither too swift nor too sluggish for navigation, were the natural main high roads of central Europe: they were also an obvious barrier between the Empire and barbarian tribes.

To connect the Rhine and Danube at their sources by a massive wall, to establish forts with strong garrisons at every point where these rivers could be easily forded, such were the precautions by which wise Emperors planned to shut in Rome’s civilization, and to keep out all who would lay violent hands upon it.

The Emperor Augustus left a warning to his successors that they should be content with these natural boundaries, lest in pushing forward to increase their territory they should in reality weaken their position. It is easy to agree with his views centuries afterwards, when we know that the defences of the Empire, pushed ever forward, snapped at the finish like an elastic band; but the average Roman of imperial days believed his nation equal to any strain.

It was a boast of the army that ‘Roman banners never retreat’. If then a tribe of barbarians were to succeed in fording the Danube and in surprising some outpost fort, the legions sent to punish them would clamour not merely to exact vengeance and return home, but to conquer and add the territory to the Empire. In the case of swamps or forest land the clamour might be checked; but where there was pasturage or good agricultural soil, it would be almost irresistible. Emigrants from crowded Italy would demand leave to form a colony, traders would hasten in their footsteps, and soon another responsibility of land and lives, perhaps with no natural protection of river, sea, or mountains, would be added to Rome’s burden of government. Such was the fertile province of Dacia, north of the Danube, a notable gain in territory, but yet a future source of weakness.

Government of the Roman Empire

At the head of the Empire stood the Emperor, ‘Caesar Augustus’, the commander-in-chief of the army, the supreme authority in the state, the fountain of justice, a god before whose altar every loyal Roman must burn incense and bow the knee in reverence.

It was a great change from the old days, when Rome was a republic, and her Senate, or council of leading citizens, had been responsible to the rest of the people for their good or bad government. The historian Tacitus, looking back from imperial days with a sigh of regret, says that in that happy age man could speak what was in his mind without fear of his neighbours, and draws the contrast with his own time when the Emperor’s spies wormed their way into house and tavern, paid to betray those about them to prison or death for some chance word or incautious action. Yet Rome by her conquests had brought on herself the tyranny of the Empire.

It is comparatively easy to rule a small city well, where fraud and self-seeking can be quickly detected; but when Rome began to extend her boundaries and to employ more people in the work of government, unscrupulous politicians appeared. These built up private fortunes during their term of office: they became senators, and the Senate ceased to represent the will of the people and began to govern in the interests of a small group of wealthy men. Members of their families became governors of provinces, first in Italy, and then as conquests continued, across the mountains in Gaul and Spain, and beyond the seas in Egypt and Asia Minor. Except in name, senators and governors ceased to be simple citizens and lived as princes, with officials and servants ready to carry out their slightest wish.

Perhaps it may seem odd that the Roman people, once so fond of liberty that they had driven into exile the kings who oppressed them, should afterwards let themselves be bullied or neglected by a hundred petty tyrants; but in truth the people had changed even more than the class of ‘patricians’ to whom they found themselves in bondage.

No longer pure Roman or Latin, but through conquest and intermarriage of every race from the stalwart Teuton to the supple Oriental or swarthy Egyptian, few amongst the men and women crowding the streets of Rome remembered or reverenced the traditions of her early days. Rome stood for military glory, luxury, culture, at her best for even-handed justice, but no longer for an ideal of liberty. If national pride was satisfied, and adequate food and amusement provided, the Roman populace was content to be ruled from above and to hail rival senators as masters, according to the extent of their promises and success. A failure to fulfil such promises, resulting in a lost campaign or a dearth of corn, would throw the military tyrant of the moment from his pedestal, but only to set up another in his place.

It was an easy transition from the rule of a corrupt Senate to that of an autocrat. ‘Better one tyrant than many’ was the attitude of mind of the average citizen towards Octavius Caesar, when under the title of Augustus he gathered to himself the supreme command over army and state and so became the first of the Emperors. Had he been a tactless man and shouted his triumph to the Seven Hills he would probably have fallen a victim to an assassin’s knife; but he skilfully disguised his authority and posed as being only the first magistrate of the state.

Under his guiding hand the Senate was reformed, and its outward dignity rather increased than shorn. Augustus could issue his own ‘edicts’ or commands independently of the Senate’s consent; but he more frequently preferred to lay his measures before it, and to let them reach the public as a senatorial decree. In this he ran no risk, for the senators, impressive figures in the eyes of the ordinary citizen, were really puppets of his creation. At any minute he could cast them away.

His fellow magistrates were equally at his mercy, for in his hands alone rested the supreme military command, the imperium, from which the title of imperator, or ‘emperor’, was derived. At first he accepted the office only for ten years, but at the end of that time, resigning it to a submissive Senate, he received it again amid shouts of popular joy. The tyranny of Augustus had proved a blessing.

Instead of corps of troops raised here and there in different provinces by governors at war with one another, and thus divided in their allegiance, there had begun to develop a disciplined army, whose ‘legions’ were enrolled, paid, and dismissed in the name of the all-powerful Caesar, and who therefore obeyed his commands rather than those of their immediate captains.

The same system of centring all authority in one absolute ruler was followed in the civil government. Governors of provinces, once petty rulers, became merely servants of the state. Caesar sent them from Rome: he appointed the officials under them: he paid them their salaries: and to him they must give an account of their stewardship. ‘If thou let this man go thou art not Caesar’s friend.’ Such was the threat that induced Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judea in the reign of Tiberius, to condemn to death a man he knew to be innocent of crime.

This is but one of many stories that show the dread of the Emperor’s name in Rome’s far-distant provinces. Governors, military commanders, judges, tax-collectors, all the vast army of officials who bore the responsibility of government on their shoulders, had an ultimate appeal from their decisions to Caesar, and were exalted by his smile or trembled at his frown.

It is not a modern notion of good government, this complete power vested in one man, but Rome nearly two thousand years ago was content that a master should rule her, so long as he would guarantee prosperity and peace at home. This under the early Caesars was at least secured.

Two fleets patrolled the Mediterranean, but their vigilance was not needed, save for an occasional brush with pirates. Naught but storms disturbed her waters. The legions on the frontiers, whether in Syria or Egypt, or along the Rhine and Danube, kept the barbarians at bay until Romans ceased to think of war as a trade to which every man might one day be called. It was a profession left to the few, the ‘many’ content to pay the taxes required by the state and to devote themselves to a civilian’s life.

To one would fall the management of a large estate, another would stand for election to a government office, a third would become a lawyer or a judge. Others would keep shops or taverns or work as hired labourers, while below these again would be the class of slaves, whether prisoners of war sold in the market-place or citizens deprived of their freedom for crime or debt.

In Rome itself was a large population, living in uncomfortable lodging-houses very like the slum tenements of a modern city. Some of the inhabitants would be engaged in casual labour, some idle; but when the Empire was at its zenith lavish gifts of corn from the government stood between this otherwise destitute population and starvation. It crowded the streets to see Caesar pass, threw flowers on his chariot, and hailed him as Emperor and God, and in return he bestowed on it food and amusements.

The huge amphitheatres of Rome and her provinces were built to satisfy the public desire for pageantry and sport; and, because life was held cheap, and for all his boasted civilization the Roman was often a savage at heart, he would spend his holidays watching the despised sect of Christians thrown to the lions, or hired gladiators fall in mortal struggle. ‘We, about to die, salute thee.’ With these words the victims of an emperor’s lust of bloodshed bent the knee before the imperial throne, and at Caesar’s nod passed to slay or be slain. The emperor’s sceptre did not bring mercy, but order, justice, and prosperity above the ordinary standard of the age.

II
THE DECLINE OF ROME

The years of Rome’s greatness seemed to her sons an age of gold, but even at the height of her prosperity there were traces of the evils that brought about her downfall. An autocracy, that is, the rule of one man, might be a perfect form of government were the autocrat not a man but a god, thus combining superhuman goodness and understanding with absolute power. Unfortunately, Roman emperors were representatives of human nature in all its phases. Some, like Augustus, were great rulers; others, though good men, incompetent in the management of public affairs; whilst not a few led evil lives and regarded their office as a means of gratifying their own desires.

The Emperor Nero (54–68), for instance, was cruel and profligate, guilty of the murder of his half-brother, mother, and wife, and also of the deaths of numberless senators and citizens whose wealth he coveted. Because he was an absolute ruler his corrupt officials were able to bribe and oppress his subjects as they wished until he was fortunately assassinated. He was the last of his line, the famous House of Julius to which Augustus had belonged, and the period that followed his death was known as ‘the year of the four Emperors’, because during that time no less than four rivals claimed and struggled for the coveted honour.

Nominally, the right of election lay with the Senate, but the final champion, Vespasian (69–79), was not even a Roman nor an aristocrat, but a soldier from the provinces. He had climbed the ladder of fame by sheer endurance and his power of managing others, and his accession was a triumph not for the Senate but the legions who had supported him and who now learned their power. Henceforward it would be the soldier with his naked sword who could make and unmake emperors, and especially the Praetorian Guard whose right it was to maintain order in Rome.

The gradual recognition of this idea had a disastrous effect on the government of the Empire. Too often the successful general of a campaign on the frontier would remember Vespasian and become obsessed with the thought that he also might be a Caesar. Led by ambition he would hold out to his legions hopes of the rewards they would receive were he crowned in Rome, and some sort of bargain would be struck, lowering the tone of the army by corrupting its loyalty and making its soldiers insolent and grasping.

The Senate attempted to deal with this difficulty of the succession by passing a law that every Emperor should, during his lifetime, name his successor, and that the latter should at once be hailed as Caesar, take a secondary share in the government, and have his effigy printed on coins. In this way he would become known to the whole Roman world, and when the Emperor died would at once be acknowledged in his place. Thus the Romans hoped to establish the theory that England expresses to-day in the phrase ‘The King never dies’.

Though to a certain extent successful in their efforts to avoid civil war, they failed to arrest other evils that were undermining the prosperity of the government. One of these was the imperial expenditure. It was only natural that the Emperor should assume a magnificence and liberality in excess of his wealthiest subjects, but in addition he found it necessary to buy the allegiance of the Praetorian Guard and to keep the Roman populace satisfied in its demands for free corn and expensive amusements.

The standard of luxury had grown, and Romans no longer admired, except in books, the simple life of their forefathers. Instead the fashionable ideal was that of the East they had enslaved, and the Emperor was gradually shut off from the mass of his subjects by a host of court officials who thronged his antechambers and exacted heavy bribes for admission. In this unhealthy atmosphere suspicion and plots grew apace like weeds, and money dripped through the imperial fingers as through a sieve, now into the pockets of one favourite, now of another.

‘I have lost a day,’ was said by the Emperor Titus (A.D. 79–81), whenever twenty-four hours had passed without his having made some valuable present to those about him. His courtiers were ready to fall on their knees and hail him for his liberality as ‘Darling of the human race’; but he only reigned for two years. Had he lived to exhaust his treasury it is probable that the greedy throng would have passed a different verdict.

Extravagance is as catching as the plague, and the Roman aristocracy did not fail to copy the imperial example. Just as the Emperor was surrounded by a court, so every noble of importance had his following of ‘clients’ who would wait submissively on his doorstep in the morning and attend him when he walked abroad to the Forum or the Public Baths. Some would be idle gentlemen, the penniless younger sons of noble houses, others professional poets ready to write flattering verses to order, others again famous gladiators whose long death-roll of victims had made them as popular in Rome as a champion tennis-player or footballer in England to-day. All were united in the one hope of gaining something from their patron, perhaps a gift of money, or his influence to secure them a coveted office, at the least an invitation to a banquet or feast.

The Roman Villa

The class of senators to which most of these aristocrats belonged had grown steadily richer as the years of empire increased, building up immense landed properties something like the feudal estates of a later date. These ‘villas’, as they were called, were miniature kingdoms over which their owners had secured absolute power. Their affairs were administered by an agent, probably a favoured slave who had gained his freedom, assisted by a small army of officials. The principal subjects of the landlord would be the small proprietors of farms who paid a rent or did various services in return for their houses, while below these again would be a larger number of actual slaves, employed as household servants, bakers, shoe-makers, shepherds, &c.

The most striking thing about the Roman ‘villa’ was that it was absolutely self-contained. All that was needed for the life of its inhabitants, whether food or clothing, could be grown and manufactured on the estate. The crimes that were committed there would be judged by the master or his agent, and from the former’s decision there would be little hope of appeal. Where the proprietor was harsh or selfish, miserable indeed was the condition of those condemned to live on his ‘villa’.

The income of the average senator in the fourth century A.D. was about £60,000, a very large sum when money was not as plentiful as it is to-day. Aurelius Symmachus, a young senator typical of this time, possessed no less than fifteen country seats, besides large estates in different parts of Italy and three town houses in Rome or her suburbs. It was his object to become Praetor of Rome, one of the highest offices in the city; and in order to gain popularity he and his father organized public games that cost them some £90,000. Lions and crocodiles were fetched from Africa, dogs from Scotland, a special breed of horses from Spain; while captured warriors were brought from Germany, whom he destined to fight with one another in the arena.

The life of this young senator, according to his letters, was controlled by purely selfish considerations. He did not want the praetorship in order to be of use to the Empire, but merely that the Empire might crown his career with a coveted honour. The same narrow outlook and lack of public spirit was common to the majority of the other men and women of his class, and so great was their blindness that they could not even see that they were undermining Rome’s power, far less avail to save her.

More fatal even than the corruption of the aristocracy was the decline of the middle classes, usually called the backbone of a nation’s greatness. ‘The name of Roman citizen,’ says a native of Marseilles in the fifth century, ‘formerly so highly valued and even bought with a great price, is now ... shunned, nay it is regarded with abomination.’

Taxation under the Roman Empire

This change from the days of St. Paul may be traced back long before the time when Symmachus wasted his patrimony in bringing crocodiles from Africa and horses from Spain. Its cause was the gradual but constant increase of taxation required to fill the imperial treasury, and the unequal scale according to which such taxation was levied.

Rome’s main source of revenue was an impost on land, and ought by rights to have been exacted from the senatorial class that owned the majority of the large estates. Unfortunately, it was left to the local municipal councils, the curias, to collect this tax, and if it fell short of the amount required from the locality by the imperial treasury, the curiales, or class compelled as a duty to attend the councils, were held responsible for the deficit.

Here was a problem for Roman citizens of medium wealth, members of their curia by birth, quite unable to divest themselves of this more than doubtful honour, and conscious that their sons at eighteen must also accept the dignity and put their shoulders to the burden. It was one thing to assess the chief landlords of the neighbourhood at a sum that matched their revenues, it was another to obtain the money from them. In England to-day the man who refuses to pay his taxes is punished; in imperial Rome it was the tax-collector.

Possessed of money and influence, it was not hard for a senator to outwit mere curiales, either by obtaining an exemption from the Emperor, or by bribing the occasional inspectors sent by the central government to condone his refusal to pay. The imperial court set an example of corruption, and those who could imitate this example did so.

The curiales, faced by ruin, sought relief in various ways. Those with most wealth tried to raise themselves to senatorial rank: others, unable to achieve this, yet conscious that they must obtain the money required at all costs, demanded the heaviest taxes from those who could not resist them, so that the phrase spread abroad, ‘So many curiales just so many robbers.’

Less important members of the middle classes, unable to pay their share of taxation or to force others to do so instead, tried in every way to divest themselves of an honour grown intolerable, and the legislation of the later Empire shows their efforts to escape out of the net in which the government tried to hold them enmeshed. Some sought the protection of the nearest landowners, and joined the dependants of their ‘villas’: others, though forbidden by law, entered the army: while others again sold themselves into slavery, since a master’s self-interest would at least secure them food and clothing.

More desperate and adventurous spirits saw in brigandage a means both of livelihood and of revenge. Joining themselves to bands of criminals and escaped slaves, they infested the high roads, waylaid and robbed travellers, and carried off their spoils to mountain fastnesses. Thus, through fraud or violence, the ranks of the curiales diminished, and taxation fell with still heavier pressure on those who remained to support its burdens.

This evil state of affairs was intensified by the widespread system of slavery that, besides its bad influence on the character of both master and slave, had other economic defects. When forced labour and free work side by side, the former will nearly always drive the latter out of the market, because it can be provided more cheaply. A master need not pay his slaves wages; he can make them work as many hours as he chooses, and lodge and feed them just as he pleases. From his point of view it is more convenient to employ men who cannot leave his service however much they dislike the work and conditions. For these reasons business and trade tended to fall into the hands of wealthy slave-owners who could undersell the employers of free labour, and as the number of slaves increased the number of free workmen grew less.

In Rome, and the large towns also, free labourers who remained were corrupted like men and women of a higher rank by the general extravagance and love of pleasure. They did not agitate so much for a reform of taxation or the abolition of slavery, but for larger supplies of free corn and more frequent public games and spectacles.

An extravagant court, a corrupt government, slavery, class selfishness, these were some of the principal causes of Rome’s decline; but in recording them it must be remembered that the taint was only gradual, like some corroding acid eating away good metal. Not all curiales, in spite of popular assertions, were robbers, not every taxpayer on the verge of starvation, not every dependant of a ‘villa’ cowed and miserable. In many houses masters would free or help their slaves, slaves be found ready to die for their masters. The canker lay in the indifference of individual Roman citizens to evils that did not touch them personally, in the refusal to cure with radical reform even those that did, in the foolish confidence of the majority in the glory of the past as a safeguard for the present. ‘Faith in Rome killed all faith in a wider future for humanity.’

This lack of vision has ruined many an empire and kingdom, and Rome only half-opened her eyes even when the despised barbarians who were to expose her weakness were already knocking at the imperial gates.

* * * * *

‘Barbarian’, we have noticed, was the epithet used by the Roman of the early Empire to describe and condemn the person not fortunate enough to share his citizenship.

At this time the most formidable of the barbarians were the German tribes who inhabited large stretches of forest and mountain land to the north of the Danube and east of the Rhine—a tall, powerfully built race for the most part with ruddy hair and fierce blue eyes, whose business was warfare, and the occupation of their leisure hours the chase or gambling.

Tacitus’ ‘Germania’

In his book, the Germania, Tacitus, a famous Roman historian of the first century, describes these Teutons, and besides drawing attention to their primitive customs and lack of culture, he made copy of their simplicity to lash the vices of his own countrymen.

The Germans, he said, did not live in walled towns but in straggling villages standing amid fields. These were either shared as common pasturage or tilled in allotments, parcelled out annually amongst the inhabitants. A number of villages would form a pagus or canton, a number of pagi a civitas or state. At the head of the state was more usually a king, but sometimes only a number of important chiefs, or dukes, who would be treated with the utmost reverence.

It was their place to preside over the small councils that dealt with the less important affairs of the state, and to lay before the larger meeting of the tribe measures that seemed to require public discussion. Lying round their camp fire in the moonlight the younger men would listen to the advice of the more experienced and clash their weapons as a sign of approval when some suggestion pleased them.

At the councils were chosen the principes, or magistrates, whose duty it was to administer justice in the various cantons and villages. Tribal law was very primitive in comparison with the Roman code that required highly trained lawyers to interpret it. Had a man betrayed his fellow villagers to their enemies, let him be hung from the nearest tree that all might learn the fitting reward of treachery. Had he turned coward and fled from the battle, let him be buried in a morass out of sight beneath a hurdle, that such shame should be quickly forgotten. Had he in a rage or by accident slain or injured a neighbour, let him pay a fine in compensation, half to his victim’s nearest relations, half to the state. If the decision did not satisfy those concerned, the family of the injured person could itself exact vengeance, but since it would probably meet with opposition in so doing, more bloodshed would almost certainly result, and a feud, like the later Corsican vendetta, be handed down from generation to generation.

Such a state of unrest had no horror for the German tribesman. From his earliest days he looked forward to the moment when, receiving from his kinsmen the gift of a shield and sword, he might leave boyhood behind him and assume a man’s responsibilities and dangers. With his comrades he would at once hasten to offer his services to some great leader of his tribe, and as a member of the latter’s comitatus, or following, go joyfully out to battle.

Like the Spartan of old he went with the cry ringing in his ears, ‘With your shield or on your shield!’

‘It is a disgrace’, says Tacitus, ‘for the chief to be surpassed in battle ... and it is an infamy and a reproach for life to have survived the chief and returned from the field.’

This statement explains the reckless daring with which the scattered groups of Germans would fling themselves time after time against the disciplined Roman phalanxes. The women shared the hardihood of the race, bringing and receiving as wedding-gifts not ornaments or beautiful clothes but a warrior’s horse, a lance, or sword.

‘Lest a woman should think herself to stand apart from aspirations after noble deeds and from the perils of war, she is reminded by the ceremony that inaugurates marriage that she is her husband’s partner in toil and danger, destined to suffer and die with him alike both in peace and war.’

Chaste, industrious, devoted to the interests of husband and children, yet so patriotic that, watching the battle, she would urge them rather to perish than retreat, the barbarian woman struck Tacitus as a living reproach to the many faithless, idle, pleasure-seeking wives and mothers of Rome in his own day. The German tribes might be uncouth, their armies without discipline, even their nobles ignorant of culture, but they were brave, hospitable, and loyal. Above all they held a distinction between right and wrong: they did not ‘laugh at vice’.

It is probable that in the days of Tacitus his views were received throughout the Roman Empire with an amused shrug of the shoulders, for to many the Germans were merely good fighters, whose giant build added considerably to the glory of a triumphal procession, when they walked sullenly in their shackles behind the Victor’s car. With the passing of the years into centuries, however, intercourse changed this attitude, and much of the contempt on one side and hatred on the other vanished.

Germans captured in childhood were brought up in Roman households and grew invaluable to their masters: numbers were freed and remained as citizens in the land of their captivity. The tribes along the borders became more civilized: they exchanged raw produce or furs in the nearest Roman markets for luxuries and comforts, and as their hatred of Rome disappeared admiration took its place. Something of the greatness of the Empire touched their imagination: they realized for the first time the possibilities of peace under an ordered government; and whole tribes offered their allegiance to a power that knew not only how to conquer but to rule.

Emperors, nothing loath, gathered these new forces under their standards as auxiliaries or allies (foederati), and Franks from Flanders, at the imperial bidding, drove back fellow barbarians from the left bank of the Rhine; while fair-haired Alemanni and Saxons fell in Caesar’s service on the plains of Mesopotamia or on the arid sands of Africa. From auxiliary forces to the ranks of the regular army was an easy stage, the more so as the Roman legions were every year in greater need of recruits as the boundaries of the Empire spread.

It is at first sight surprising to find that the military profession was unpopular when we recall that it rested in the hands of the legions to make or dispossess their rulers; but such opportunities of acquiring bribes and plunder did not often fall to the lot of the ordinary soldier, while the disadvantages of his career were many.

A very small proportion of the army was kept in the large towns of the south, save in Rome that had its own Praetorian Guards: the majority of the legions defended the Rhine and Danube frontiers, or still worse were quartered in cold and foggy Britain, shut up in fortress outposts like York or Chester. English regiments to-day think little of service in far-distant countries like Egypt or India, indeed men are often glad to have the experience of seeing other lands; but the Roman soldier as he said farewell to his Italian village knew in his heart that it had practically passed out of his life. The shortest period of military service was sixteen years, the longest twenty-five; and when we remember that, owing to the slow and difficult means of transport, leave was impossible we see the Roman legionary was little more than the serf of his government, bound to spend all the best years of his life defending less warlike countrymen.

Moving with his family from outpost to outpost, the memories of his old home would grow blurred, and the legion to which he belonged would occupy the chief place in his thoughts. As he grew older his sons, bred in the atmosphere of war, would enlist in their turn, and so the military profession would tend to become a caste, handed down from father to son.

The soldier could have little sympathy with fellow citizens whose interests he did not share, but would despise them because they did not know how to use arms. The civilians, on their side, would think the soldier rough and ignorant, and forget how much they were dependent on his protection for their trade and pleasure. Instead of trying to bridge this gulf, the government, in their terror of losing taxpayers, widened it by refusing to let curiales enlist. At the same time they filled up the gaps in the legions with corps of Franks, Germans, or Goths; because they were good fighting material, and others of their tribe had proved brave and loyal.

In the same way, when land in Italy fell out of cultivation, the Emperor would send numbers of barbarians as coloni or settlers to till the fields and build themselves homes. At first they might be looked on with suspicion by their neighbours, but gradually they would intermarry and their sons adopt Roman habits, until in time their descendants would sit in municipal councils, and even rise to become Praetors or Consuls.

Barbarian Invasions

When it is said that the Roman Empire fell because of the inroads of barbarians, the impression sometimes left on people’s minds is that hordes of uncivilized tribes, filled with contempt for Rome’s luxury and corruption, suddenly swept across the Alps in the fifth century, laying waste the whole of North Italy. This is far from the truth. The peaceful invasion of the Empire by barbarians, whether as slaves, traders, soldiers, or colonists, was a continuous movement from early imperial days. There is no doubt that, as it increased, it weakened the Roman power of resistance to the actually hostile raids along the frontiers that began in the second and third centuries and culminated in the collapse of the imperial government in the West in the fifth. An army partly composed of half-civilized barbarian troops could not prove so trustworthy as the well-disciplined and seasoned Romans of an earlier age; for the foreign element was liable in some gust of passion to join forces with those of its own blood against its oath of allegiance.

As to the main cause of the raids, it was rather love of Rome’s wealth than a sturdy contempt of luxury that led these barbarians to assault the dreaded legions. Had it been mere love of fighting, the Alemanni would as soon have slain their Saxon neighbours as the imperial troops; but nowhere save in Spain, or southern Gaul, or on the plains of Italy could they hope to find opulent cities or herds of cattle. Plunder was their earliest rallying cry; but in the third century the pressure of other tribes on their flank forced them to redouble in self-defence efforts begun for very different reasons.

This movement of the barbarians has been called ‘the Wandering of the Nations’. Gradually but surely, like a stream released from some mountain cavern, Goths from the North and Huns and Vandals from the East descended in irresistible numbers on southern Germany, driving the tribes who were already in possession there up against the barriers, first of the Danube and then of the Alps and Rhine.

Italy and Gaul ceased to be merely a paradise for looters, but were sought by barbarians, who had learned something of Rome’s civilization, as a refuge from other barbarians who trod women and children underfoot, leaving a track wherever their cruel hordes passed red with blood and fire. With their coming, Europe passed from the brightness of Rome into the ‘Dark Ages’.

III
THE DAWN OF CHRISTIANITY

When Augustus became Emperor of Rome, Jesus Christ was not yet born. With the exception of the Jews, who believed in the one Almighty ‘Jehovah’, most of the races within the boundaries of the Empire worshipped a number of gods; and these, according to popular tales, were no better than the men and women who burned incense at their altars, but differed from them only in being immortal, and because they could yield to their passions and desires with greater success.

The Roman god ‘Juppiter’, who was the same as the Greek ‘Zeus’, was often described as ‘King of gods and men’; but far from proving himself an impartial judge and ruler, the legends in which he appears show him cruel, faithless, and revengeful. ‘Juno’, the Greek ‘Hera’, ‘Queen of Heaven’, was jealous and implacable in her wrath, as the ‘much-enduring’ hero, Ulysses, found when time after time her spite drove him from his homeward course from Troy. ‘Mercury’, the messenger of the gods, was merely a cunning thief.

Most of the thoughtful Greeks and Romans, it is true, came to regard the old mythology as a series of tales invented by their primitive ancestors to explain mysterious facts of nature like fire, thunder, earthquakes. Because, however, this form of worship had played so great a part in national history, patriotism dictated that it should not be forgotten entirely; and therefore emperors were raised to the number of the gods; and citizens of Rome, whether they believed in their hearts or no, continued to burn incense before the altars of Juppiter, Juno, or Augustus in token of their loyalty to the Empire.

The human race has found it almost impossible to believe in nothing, for man is always seeking theories to explain his higher nature and why it is he recognizes so early the difference between right and wrong. Far back in the third and fourth centuries before Christ, Greek philosophers had discussed the problem of the human soul, and some of them had laid down rules for leading the best life possible.

Epicurus taught that since our present life is the only one, man must make it his object to gain the greatest amount of pleasure that he can. Of course this doctrine gave an opening to people who wished to live only for themselves; but Epicurus himself had been simple, almost ascetic in his habits, and had clearly stated that although pleasure was his object, yet ‘we can not live pleasantly without living wisely, nobly, and righteously’. The self-indulgent man will defeat his own ends by ruining his health and character until he closes his days not in pleasure but in misery.

Another Greek philosopher was Zeno, whose followers were called ‘Stoics’ from the stoa or porch of the house in Athens in which he taught his first disciples. Zeno believed that man’s fortune was settled by destiny, and that he could only find true happiness by hardening himself until he grew indifferent to his fate. Death, pain, loss of friends, defeated ambitions, all these the Stoic must face without yielding to fear, grief, or passion. Brutus, the leader of the conspirators who slew Julius Caesar, was a Stoic, and Shakespeare in his tragedy shows the self-control that Brutus exerted when he learned that his wife Portia whom he loved had killed herself.

The teaching of Epicurus and Zeno did something during the Roman Empire to provide ideals after which men could strive, but neither could hold out hopes of a happiness without end or blemish. The ‘Hades’ of the old mythology was no heaven but a world of shades beyond the river Styx, gloomy alike for good and bad. At the gates stood the three-headed monster Cerberus, ready to prevent souls from escaping once more to light and sunshine.

Paganism was thus a sad religion for all who thought of the future: and this is one of the reasons why the tidings of Christianity were received so joyfully. When St. Paul went to Athens he found an altar set up to ‘the unknown God’, showing that men and women were out of sympathy with their old beliefs and seeking an answer to their doubts and questions. He tried to tell the Greeks that the Christ he preached was the God they sought; but those who heard him ridiculed the idea that a Jewish peasant who had suffered the shameful death of the cross could possibly be divine.

Early Christianity

The earliest followers of Christianity were not as a rule cultured people like the Athenians, but those who were poor and ignorant. To them Christ’s message was one of brotherhood and love overriding all differences between classes and nations. Yet it did not merely attract because it promised immortality and happiness; it also set up a definite standard of right and wrong. The Jewish religion had laid down the Ten Commandments as the rule of life, but the Jews had never tried to persuade other nations to obey them—rather they had jealously guarded their beliefs from the Gentiles. The Christians on the other hand had received the direct command ‘to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature’; and even the slave, when he felt within himself the certainty of his new faith, would be sure to talk about it to others in his household. In time the strange story would reach the ears of his master and mistress, and they would begin to wonder if what this fellow believed so earnestly could possibly be true.

In a brutal age, when the world was largely ruled by physical force, Christianity made a special appeal to women and to the higher type of men who hated violence. One argument in its favour amongst the observant was the life led by the early Christians—their gentleness, their meekness, and their constancy. It is one thing to suffer an insult through cowardice, quite another to bear it patiently and yet be brave enough to face torture and death rather than surrender convictions. Christian martyrs taught the world that their faith had nothing in it mean or spiritless.

Perhaps it may seem strange that men and women whose conduct was so quiet and inoffensive should meet with persecution at all. Christ had told His disciples to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’, and the strength of Christianity lay not in rebellion to the civil government but in submission. This is true, yet the Christian who paid his taxes and took care to avoid breaking the laws of his province would find it hard all the same to live at peace with pagan fellow citizens. Like the Jew he could not pretend to worship gods whom he considered idols: he could not offer incense at the altars of Juppiter and Augustus: he could not go to a pagan feast and pour out a libation of wine to some deity, nor hang laurel branches sacred to the nymph Daphne over his door on occasions of public rejoicing.

Such neglect of ordinary customs made him an object of suspicion and dislike amongst neighbours who did not share his faith. A hint was given here and there by mischief makers, and confirmed with nods and whisperings, that his quietness was only a cloak for evil practices in secret; and this grew into a rumour throughout the Empire that the murder of newborn babies was part of the Christian rites.

Had the Christians proved more pliant the imperial government might have cleared their name from such imputations and given them protection, but it also distrusted their refusal to share in public worship. Lax themselves, the emperors were ready to permit the god of the Jews or Christians a place amongst their own deities; and they could not understand the attitude of mind that objected to a like toleration of Juppiter or Juno. The commandment ‘Thou shalt have none other gods but me’ found no place in their faith, and they therefore accused the Christians and Jews of want of patriotism, and used them as scapegoats for the popular fury when occasion required.

In the reign of Nero a tremendous fire broke out in Rome that reduced more than half the city to ruins. The Emperor, who was already unpopular because of his cruelty and extravagance, fearing that he would be held responsible for the calamity, declared hastily that he had evidence that the fire was planned by Christians; and so the first serious persecution of the new faith began.

Persecution of the Christians

Here is part of an account given by Tacitus, whose history of the German tribes we have already noticed:

‘He, Nero, inflicted the most exquisite tortures on those men who under the vulgar appellation of Christians were already branded with deserved infamy.... They died in torments, and their torments were embittered by insult and derision. Some were nailed on crosses; others sewn up in the skins of wild beasts and exposed to the fury of dogs; others again, smeared over with combustible materials, were used as torches to illuminate the darkness of the night. The gardens of Nero were destined for this melancholy spectacle, which was accompanied with a horse race and honoured with the presence of the Emperor.’

Tacitus was himself a pagan and hostile to the Christians, yet he admits that this cruelty aroused sympathy. Nevertheless the persecutions continued under different emperors, some of them, unlike Nero, wise rulers and good men.

‘These people’, wrote the Spanish Emperor Trajan (98–117), referring to the Christians, ‘should not be searched for, but if they are informed against and convicted they should be punished.’

Marcus Aurelius (161–180) declared that those who acknowledged that they were Christians should be beaten to death; and during his reign men and women were tortured and killed on account of their faith in every part of the Empire. The test required by the magistrates was nearly always the same, that the accused must offer wine and incense before the statue of the Emperor and revile the name of Christ.

The motive that inspired these later emperors was not Nero’s innate love of cruelty or desire of finding a scapegoat, but genuine fear of a sect that grew steadily in numbers and wealth, and that threatened to interfere with the ordinary worship of the temples, so bound up with the national life.

In the reign of Trajan the Governor of Bithynia wrote to the Emperor complaining that on account of the spread of Christian teaching little money was now spent in buying sacrificial beasts. ‘Nor’, he added, ‘are cities alone permeated by the contagion of this superstition, but villages and country parts as well.’

Emperors and magistrates were at first confident that, if only they were severe enough in their punishments, the new religion could be crushed out of existence. Instead it was the imperial government that collapsed while Christianity conquered Europe.

Very early in the history of Christianity the Apostles had found it necessary to introduce some form of government into the Church; and later, as the faith spread from country to country, there arose in each province men who from their goodness, influence, or learning, were chosen by their fellow Christians to control the religious affairs of the neighbourhood. These were called ‘Episcopi’, or bishops, from the Latin word Episcopus, ‘an overseer’. Tradition claims that Peter was the first bishop of the Church in Rome, and that during the reign of Nero he was crucified for loyalty to the Christ he had formerly denied.

To help the bishops a number of ‘presbyters’ or ‘priests’ were appointed, and below these again ‘deacons’ who should undertake the less responsible work. The first deacons had been employed in distributing the alms of the wealthier members of the congregation amongst the poor; and though in early days the sums received were not large, yet as men of every rank accepted Christianity regardless of scorn or danger and made offerings of their goods, the revenues of the Church began to grow. The bishops also became persons of importance in the world around them.

In time emperors and magistrates whose predecessors had believed in persecution came to recognize that it was not an advantage to the government, even a danger, and instead they began to consult and honour the men who were so much trusted by their fellow citizens. At last, in the fourth century, there succeeded to the throne an emperor who looked on Christianity not with hatred or dread, but with friendly eyes as a more valuable ally than the paganism of his fathers. This was the Emperor Constantine the Great.

IV
CONSTANTINE THE GREAT

Constantine the Great was born at a time when the Empire was divided up between different emperors. His father, Constantius Chlorus, ruled over Spain, Gaul, and Britain; and when he died at York in A.D. 306, Constantine his eldest son succeeded to the government of these provinces. The new Emperor, who was thirty-two years old, had been bred in the school of war. He was handsome, brave, and capable, and knew how to make himself popular with the legions under his command without losing his dignity or letting them become undisciplined.

When he had reigned a few years he quarrelled with his brother-in-law Maxentius who was Emperor at Rome, and determined to cross the Alps and drive him from his throne. The task was difficult; for the Roman army, consisting of picked Praetorian Guards, and regiments of Sicilians, Moors, and Carthaginians, was quite four times as large as the invading forces. Yet Constantine, once he had made his decision, did not hesitate. He knew his rival had little military experience, and that the corruption and luxury of the Roman court had not increased either his energy or valour.

It is said also that Constantine believed that the God of the Christians was on his side, for as he prepared for a battle on the plains of Italy against vastly superior forces, he saw before him in the sky a shining cross and underneath the words ‘By this conquer!’ At once he gave orders that his legions should place on their shields the sign of the cross, and with this same sign as his banner he advanced to the attack. It was completely successful, the Roman army fled in confusion, Maxentius was slain, and Constantine entered the capital almost unopposed. The arch in Rome that bears his name celebrates this triumph.

Constantine was now Emperor of the whole of Western Europe, and some years later, after a furious struggle with Licinius the Emperor of the East, he succeeded in uniting all the provinces of the Empire under his rule.

The ROMAN EMPIRE
in the time of
Constantine the Great

This was a joyful day for Christians, for though Constantine was not actually baptized until just before his death, yet, throughout his reign, he showed his sympathy with the Christian religion and did all in his power to help those who professed it. He used his influence to prevent gladiatorial shows, abolished the horrible punishment of crucifixion, and made it easier than ever before for slaves to free themselves. When he could, he avoided pagan rites, though as Emperor he still retained the office of Pontifex Maximus, or ‘High Priest’, and attended services in the temples.

His mother, the Empress Helena, to whom he was devoted, was a Christian; and one of the old legends describes her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and how she found and brought back with her some wood from the cross on which Christ had been crucified.

Growth of Christianity

Soon after Constantine conquered Rome he published the famous ‘Edict of Milan’ that allowed liberty of worship to all inhabitants of the Empire, whether pagans, Jews, or Christians. The latter were no longer to be treated as criminals but as citizens with full civil rights, while the places of worship and lands that had been taken from them were to be restored.

Later, as Constantine’s interest in the Christians deepened, he departed from this impartial attitude and showed them special favours, confiscating some of the treasures of the temples and giving them to the Church, as well as handing over to it sums of money out of the public revenues. He also tried to free the clergy from taxation, and allowed bishops to interfere with the civil law courts.

Many of these measures were unwise. For one thing, Christianity when it was persecuted or placed on a level with other religions only attracted those who really believed in Christ’s teaching. When it received material advantages, on the other hand, the ambitious at once saw a way to royal favour and their own success by professing the new beliefs. A false element was thus introduced into the Church.

For another thing, few even of the sincere Christians could be trusted not to abuse their privileges. The fourth century did not understand toleration; and those who had suffered persecution were quite ready as a rule to use compulsion in their turn towards men and women who disagreed with them, whether pagans or those of their own faith. Quite early in its history the Church was torn by disputes, since much of its teaching had been handed down by ‘tradition’, or word of mouth, and this led to disagreement as to what Christ had really said or meant by many of his words. At length the Church decided that it would gather the principal doctrines of the ‘Catholic’ or ‘universal’ faith into a form of belief that men could learn and recite. Thus the ‘Apostles’ Creed’ came into existence.

In spite of this definition of the faith controversy continued. At the beginning of the fourth century a dispute as to the exact relationship of God the Father to God the Son in the doctrine of the Trinity broke out between Arius, a presbyter of the Church in Egypt, and the Bishop of Alexandria, the latter declaring that Arius had denied the divinity of Christ. Partisans defended either side, and the quarrel grew so embittered that an appeal was made to the Emperor to give his decision.

Constantine was reluctant to interfere. ‘They demand my judgement,’ he said, ‘who myself expect the judgement of Christ. What audacity of madness!’ When he found, however, that some steps must be taken if there was to be any order in the Church at all, he summoned a Council to meet at Nicea and consider the question, and thither came bishops and clergy from all parts of the Christian world. The meetings were prolonged and stormy; but the eloquence of a young Egyptian deacon called Athanasius decided the case against Arius; and the latter, refusing to submit to the decrees of the Council, was proclaimed a heretic, or outlaw. The orthodox Catholics, that is, the majority of bishops who were present, then drew up a new creed to express their exact views, and this took its name from the Council, and was called the ‘Nicene Creed’. In a revised form it is still recited in all the Catholic churches of Christendom.

Arius, though defeated at the Council, succeeded in winning the Emperor over to his views, and Constantine tried to persuade the Catholics to receive him back into the Church. When this suggestion met with refusal the Emperor, who now believed that he had a right to settle ecclesiastical matters, was so angry that he tried to install Arius in one of the churches of his new city of Constantinople by force of arms. The orthodox bishop promptly closed and barred the gates, and riots ensued that were only ended by the death of Arius himself.

The schism, however, continued, and it may be claimed that its bitterness had a considerable influence in deciding the future of Europe by raising barriers between races that might otherwise have become friends. Arianism, like orthodox Catholicism, was full of the missionary spirit, and from its priests the half-civilized tribes of Goths and Vandals learned the new faith. A Gothic bishop was present at the Council of Nicea, while another, Ulfilas, who had studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew at Constantinople, afterwards translated a great part of the Bible into his own tongue. This is the first-known missionary Bible; and, though the original has disappeared, a copy made about a century later is in a museum at Upsala, written in Gothic characters in silver and gold on purple vellum.

The Goths regarded their Bible with deep awe, and carried it with them on their wanderings, consulting it before they went into battle. Like the Vandals, who had also been converted by the Arians, they considered themselves true Christians; but the orthodox Catholics disliked them as heretics almost more than the pagans.

Early Monasticism

Constantine himself imbibed the spirit of fanaticism; and when he became the champion of Arius, persecuted Athanasius, who had been made Bishop of Alexandria, and compelled him to go into exile. Athanasius went to Rome, where it is said that he was at first ridiculed because he was accompanied by two Egyptian monks in hoods and cowls. Western Europe had heard little as yet of monasticism, though the Eastern Church had adopted it for some time.

To the early Christians with their high ideals the world around them seemed a wicked place, in which it was difficult for them to lead a Christ-like life. They thought that by withdrawing from an atmosphere of brutality and material pleasure, and by giving themselves up to fasting and prayer, they would be able more easily to fix their minds on God and so fit themselves for Heaven. Sometimes they would go to desert places and live as hermits in caves, perhaps without talking to a living person for months or even years. Others who could not face such loneliness would join a community of monks, dwelling together under special rules of discipline. At fixed hours of the day and night they would recite the services of the Church, and in between whiles they would work or pray and study the Scriptures.

Many of the austerities they practised sound to us absurd, for it is hard to feel in sympathy with a Simon Stylites who spent the best days of his manhood crouched on a high pillar at the mercy of sun, wind, and rain, until his limbs stiffened and withered away. Yet the hermits and monks were an arresting witness to Christianity in an age that had not fully realized what Christ’s teaching meant. ‘He that will serve me let him take up his cross and follow me.’ This ideal of sacrifice was brought home for the first time to hundreds of thoughtless men and women when they saw some one whom they knew give up his worldly prospects and the joy of a home and children in order to lead a life of perpetual discomfort until death should come to him as a blessing not a curse. The majority of the leading clergy in the early Church, the ‘Fathers of the Church’, as they are usually called, were monks.

The Fathers of the Church

Two of them, St. Gregory and St. Basil, studied together at the University of Athens in the fourth century. St. Basil founded a community of monks in Asia Minor, where his reputation for holiness soon drew together a large number of disciples. He did not try to win them by fair words or the promise of ease and comfort, for his monks were allowed little to eat and spent their days in prayer and manual labour of the hardest kind. The Arians, who hated St. Basil as an orthodox Catholic, once threatened that they would confiscate his belongings, torture him, and put him to death. ‘My sole wealth is a ragged cloak and some books,’ replied the hermit calmly. ‘My days on earth are but a pilgrimage, and my body is so feeble that it will expire at the first torment. Death will be a relief.’ It came when he was only fifty, but not at the hands of his enemies, for he died exhausted by the penances and privations of his customary life. He left many letters and theological works that throw light on the religious questions of his day.

St. Gregory had lived for a time with St. Basil and his monks in Asia Minor but was not strong enough to submit to the same harsh discipline. Indeed he declared that but for the kindness of St. Basil’s mother he would have died of starvation. Afterwards he returned home and was ordained a priest. He was a gentler type of man than St. Basil, a poet of no little merit and an eloquent preacher.

Yet another of the Catholic ‘Fathers of the Church’ was St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. He was elected to this see against his own will by the people of the town, who respected him because he was strong and fearless. St. Ambrose did not hesitate to use the wealth of the Church, even melting down some of the altar-vessels, to ransom Christians who had been carried away captive during one of the barbarian invasions. ‘The Church,’ he declared, ‘possesses gold and silver not to hoard, but to spend on the welfare and happiness of men.’

The impetuosity and vigour that made him a born leader he also employed to express his intolerance of those who disagreed with him. When some Christians in Milan burned a Jewish synagogue and the Emperor Theodosius ordered them to rebuild it, St. Ambrose advised them not to do so. ‘I myself,’ he said, ‘would have burned the synagogue.... What has been done is but a trifling retaliation for acts of plunder and destruction committed by Jews and heretics against the Catholics.’ This was not the spirit of the Founder of Christianity: it was too often the spirit of the mediaeval Church.

A man of even greater influence than St. Ambrose of Milan was St. Jerome, a monk of the fifth century, who is chiefly remembered to-day because of his Latin translation of the Bible, ‘the Vulgate’ as it is called, that is still the recognized edition of the Roman Catholic Church.

St. Jerome was born in Italy, but in his extreme asceticism he followed the practices of the Eastern rather than the Western Church. As a youth he had led a wild life, but, suddenly repenting, he disappeared to live as a hermit in the desert, starving and mortifying himself. So strongly did he believe that this was the only road to Heaven that when he went to Rome he preached continually in favour of celibacy, urging men and women not to marry, as if marriage had been a sin. He was afraid that if they became happy and contented in their home life they would forget God.

Many of the leading families, and especially their women, came under St. Jerome’s influence, but such exaggerated views could never be really popular and, instead of being chosen Bishop of Rome as he had expected, he was forced, by the many enemies he had aroused, to leave the town, and returned once more to the desert. Of his sincerity there can be little doubt, but his outlook on life was warped because, like so many good and earnest contemporary Christians, he believed that human nature and this earth were entirely bad and that only by the suppression of any enjoyment in them could the soul obtain salvation.

Several centuries were to pass before St. Francis of Assisi taught his fellow men the beauty and value of what is human.

* * * * *

Foundation of Constantinople

Constantinople (the Polis or city of Constantine) had been a Greek colony under the name of Byzantium long before Rome existed. Built on the headland of the Golden Horn, its walls were lapped by an inland sea whose depth and smoothness made a splendid harbour from the rougher waters of the Mediterranean. Almost impregnable in its fortifications, it frowned on Asia across the narrow straits of the Hellespont and completely commanded the entrance to the Black Sea, with its rich ports, markets then as now for the corn and grain of southern Russia.

Constantine, when he decided that Byzantium should be his capital, was well aware of these advantages. He had been born in the Balkans, had spent a great part of his life as a soldier in Asia, had assumed the imperial crown in Britain, and ruled Gaul for his first kingdom. This medley of experience left little place in his heart for Italy, and the name of Rome had no power to stir his blood. Rome to him was a corrupt town in one of the outlying limbs of his Empire: it had no harbour nor special military value on land, while the Alps were a barrier preventing news from passing quickly to and fro. Byzantium, on the other hand, near the mouth of the Danube, was easy of access and yet could be rendered almost impregnable to his foes. It had the great military advantage also of serving as an admirable head-quarters for keeping watch over the northern frontier and an outlook towards the East.

The walls of the original town could not embrace the Emperor’s ambitions, and he himself, wand in hand, designed the boundaries. His court, following him, gasped with dismay. ‘It is enough,’ they urged; ‘no imperial city was ever so great before.’ ‘I shall go on,’ replied Constantine, ‘until he, the invisible guide who marches before me, thinks fit to stop.’

Not until the seven hills outside Byzantium were enclosed within his circuit was the Emperor satisfied; and then the great work of building began, and the white marble of Forum and Baths, of Palaces and Colonnades, arose to adorn the Constantinople that has ever since this time played so large a part in the history of Europe. In the new market-place, just beyond the original walls, was placed the ‘Golden Milestone’, a marble column within a small temple, bearing the proud inscription that here was the ‘central point of the world’. Inside were statues of Constantine and Queen Helena his mother, while Rome herself and the cities of Greece were robbed of their masterpieces of sculpture to embellish the buildings of the new capital.

In May A.D. 330 Constantinople was solemnly consecrated, and the Empire kept high festival in honour of an event that few of the revellers recognized would alter the whole course of her destiny. The new capital, through her splendid strategic position, was to preserve the imperial throne with one short lapse for more than a thousand years, but this advantage was obtained at the expense of Rome, and the complete severance of the interests of the Empire in the East and West.

The Romans had never loved the Greeks, even when they most admired their art and subtle intellect, and now in the fourth century this persistent distrust was intensified when Greece usurped the glory that had been her conqueror’s. In the absence of an Emperor and of the many high officials who had gone to swell the triumph of his new court, Rome set up another idol. The symbols of material glory might vanish, but the Christian faith had supplied men with fresh ideals through the teaching of the Apostles and their representatives, the Bishops.

Roman bishops claimed that the gift of grace they received at their consecration had been passed down to them by the successive laying-on of hands from St. Peter himself. ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church ... and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ These words of Christ seemed to grant to his apostle complete authority over the souls of men; and Christians at Rome began to ask if the power of St. Peter to ‘bind and loose’ had not been handed down to his successors? If so Il Papa, that is, ‘their father’, the Pope, was undoubtedly the first bishop in Christendom, for on no other apostle had Christ bestowed a like authority.

It must not be imagined that this reasoning came like a flash of inspiration or was willingly received by all Christians. Many generations of Popes, from the days of St. Peter onwards, were regarded merely as Bishops of Rome, that is, as ‘overseers’ of the Church in the chief city of the Empire. They were loved and esteemed by their flock not on account of special divine authority but because they stood neither for self-interest nor for faction, but for principles of justice, mercy, and brotherhood.

Had a Roman been robbed by a fellow citizen, were there a plague or famine, was the city threatened by enemies without her walls, it was to her bishop Rome turned, demanding help and protection. Afterwards it was only natural that the one power that could and did afford these things when Emperors and Senators were far away should in time take the Emperor’s place, and that the Pope should appear to Rome, and gradually as we shall see to Western Europe, God’s very viceroy on earth.

To the Church in Greece, Egypt, and Asia Minor he never assumed this halo of glory. Byzantium, the great Constantinople, was the pivot on which the eastern world turned, and the Bishop of Rome with his tradition of St. Peter made no authoritative appeal. Thus far back in the fourth century the cleft had already opened between the Churches of the East and West that was to widen into a veritable chasm.

Constantine ‘the Great’ died in 337, and if greatness be measured by achievement he well deserves his title. Where men of higher genius and originality had failed he had succeeded, beating down with calm perseverance every object that threatened his ambitions, until at last the Christian ruler of a united empire, feared and respected by subjects and enemies alike, he passed to his rest.

V
THE INVASIONS OF THE BARBARIANS

Instead of endeavouring to maintain a united empire, Constantine in his will divided up his dominions between three sons and two nephews. Before thirty years were over, however, a series of murders and civil wars had exterminated his family; and two brothers, Valentian and Valens, men of humble birth but capable soldiers, were elected as joint emperors. Valens ruled at Constantinople, his brother at Milan; and it was during this reign that the Empire received one of the worst blows that had ever befallen her.

We have already mentioned the Goths, a race of barbarians half-civilized by Roman influence and converted to Christianity by followers of Arius. One of their tribes, the Visigoths, had settled in large numbers in the country to the north of the Danube. On the whole their relations with the Empire were friendly, and it was hardly their fault that the peace was finally broken, but rather of a strange Tartar race the Huns, that, massing in the plains of Asia, had suddenly swept over Europe. Here is a description given of the Huns by a Gothic writer: ‘Men with faces that can scarcely be called faces, rather shapeless black collops of flesh with tiny points instead of eyes: little in stature but lithe and active, skilful in riding, broad-shouldered, hiding under a barely human form the ferocity of a wild beast.’

Tradition says that these monsters, mounted on their shaggy ponies, rode women and children under foot and feasted on human flesh. Whether this be true or no, their name became a terror to the civilized world, and after a few encounters with them the Visigoths crowded on the edge of the Danube and implored the Emperor to allow them to shelter behind the line of Roman forts.

Valens, to whom the petition was made, hesitated. There was obvious danger to his dominions in this sudden influx of a whole tribe; but on the other hand fear might madden the Visigoths into trying to cross even if he refused, and if so could he withstand them?

‘All the multitude that had escaped from the murderous savagery of the Huns,’ says a writer of the day, ‘no less than 200,000 fighting men besides women and old men and children, were there on the river bank, stretching out their hands with loud lamentations ... and promising that they would ever faithfully adhere to the imperial alliance, if only the boon was granted them.’

Reluctantly Valens yielded; and soon the province of Dacia was crowded with refugees; but here the real trouble began. Food must be found for this multitude, and it was evident that the local crops would not suffice. In vain the Emperor commanded that corn should be imported: the greed of officials who were responsible for carrying out this order led them to hold up large consignments, and to sell what little they allowed to pass at wholly extortionate rates. Their unwelcome guests, half-starved and fleeced of the small savings they had been able to bring with them, complained, plotted, and broke at last into open rebellion.

This treatment of the Visigoths in Dacia is one of the worst pages in the history of the Roman Empire, but it brought its own speedy punishment. The suspicion and hatred engendered by misery spread like a flame, and the barbarian forces were joined by deserters of their own race from the imperial legions and by runaway slaves until they had grown into a formidable army. Valens, forced to take steps to preserve his throne, met them on the battle-field of Adrianople, but only to suffer crushing defeat. He himself was slain, and some 40,000 of those who had served under his banner.

The Emperor Theodosius

Never before had the imperial eagles met with such a reverse at barbarian hands, and the Visigoths after the first moment of triumph were almost alarmed at the extent of their own success. Before the frowning walls of Constantinople their courage faltered, and without attempting a siege they retreated northwards into Thrace. Gladly they came to terms with Theodosius, Valens’s successor, who, not content with regranting them the lands to the south of the Danube that they so much desired, increased his army by taking whole regiments of their best warriors into his pay.

‘Lover of peace and of the Goths’ is the character with which Theodosius has passed down to posterity, and during his reign the Visigoths and other northern tribes received continual marks of his favour.

One of the Gothic kings, the old chief Athanaric, went to visit him at Constantinople, and was overwhelmed by the magnificence and luxury he saw around him. ‘Now do I at last behold,’ he exclaimed, ‘what I have often heard but deemed incredible.... Doubtless the Emperor is a God on earth, and he who raises a hand against him is guilty of his own blood.’

The alliance between Goth and Greek served its purpose at the moment, for by the aid of his new troops Theodosius was able to defeat the rival Emperor of Rome and to conquer Italy. When he died he left Constantinople and the East to his eldest son Arcadius, a youth of eighteen, and Rome and the West to the younger, Honorius, who was only eleven. True to his belief in barbarian ability, Theodosius selected a Vandal chief, Stilicho, to whom he had given his niece in marriage, that he might act as the boy’s adviser and command the imperial forces.

Under a wise regent a nation may wait in patience for their child ruler to mature. Unfortunately, Honorius, as he grew up, belied any promise of manliness he had ever shown, languidly refusing to continue his boyish sports of riding or archery, and taking no interest save in some cocks and hens that it was his daily pleasure to feed himself. He had no affection or reverence for Rome, and finally settled in Ravenna on the Adriatic as the safest fortress in his dominions. From here he consented to sign the orders that dispatched the legions to protect his frontiers, or issued haughty manifestoes to his enemies.

So long as Stilicho lived such feebleness passed comparatively unnoticed; for the Vandal, a man of giant build and strength, possessed to the full the tireless energy and daring that the dangers of the time demanded.

Theodosius had made the Visigoths his friends; but on his death they began to chafe at the restrictions laid upon them by the imperial alliance. Arcadius was nearly as poor a creature as his younger brother, ‘so inactive that he seldom spoke and always looked as though he were about to fall asleep.’ The barbarians bore him no hatred, but on the other hand he could scarcely inspire their affection or fear, and so they chose a king of their own, Alaric, one of their most famous generals, and from this moment they began to think of fresh conquests and pillage.

Visigothic Invasion

The suggestion of sacking Constantinople was put on one side. Those massive walls against their background of sea would make it a difficult task; besides, the Visigoths argued, were there not other towns equally rich and more vulnerable? With an exultant shout that answered this question they set out on their march first towards Illyricum on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, and then to the fertile plains of Italy.

Alaric and Stilicho were well matched as generals, and for years, through arduous campaigns of battles and sieges, the Vandal kept the Goth at bay. When at last death forced him to resign the challenge, it was no enemy’s sword but the weapon of treachery that robbed Rome of her best defender.

Honorius, lacking in gratitude as in other virtues, had been ill pleased at the success of his armies; for wily courtiers, hoping to plant their fortunes amid another’s ruin, told him that Stilicho intended to secure the imperial throne for himself and that in order to do so he would think little of murdering his royal master. Suspicion made the timid Emperor writhe with terror through sleepless nights. It seemed to him that he would never know peace of mind again until he had rid himself of his formidable commander-in-chief; and so by his orders Stilicho was put to death and Italy lay at the mercy of Alaric and his followers.

Sweeping across the Alps, the Visigoths paused at last before the gates of Rome. ‘We are many in number and prepared to fight,’ boldly began the ambassadors sent out from the city. ‘Thick grass is easier to mow than thin,’ replied Alaric.

Dropping their lofty tone, the ambassadors demanded the price of peace, and on the answer, ‘Your gold and silver, your treasures, all that you have,’ they exclaimed in horror, ‘What then do you leave us?’ ‘Your souls,’ was the mocking rejoinder.

After much argument the Visigoths consented to be bought off and retreated northwards, but it was only to return in the summer of the year 410, when Rome after a feeble resistance opened her gates. Her enemies poured in triumph through the streets; but Alaric was no Hun loving slaughter for its own sake, and ordered his troops to respect human life and to spare the churches and the gold and silver vessels that rested on their altars.

He spent only a few days in sacking the city and then marched southwards, intending to invade Africa. While his army was embarking, however, he fell ill and died, and so great was his loss that all thought of the campaign was surrendered. Alaric was mourned by his people as a national hero, and, unable to bear the thought that his enemies might one day desecrate his tomb, they dammed up a river in the neighbourhood, and dug a grave for their general deep in its bed. When they had laid his body there, they released the stream into its old course, and so left their hero safe from insult beneath the waters.

The sack of Rome that moved the civilized world profoundly made little impression upon the young Emperor. He had named one of his favourite hens after the capital; and when a messenger, haggard with the news he had brought, fell on his knees, gasping, ‘Sire, Rome has perished,’ Honorius only frowned, and replied, ‘Impossible! I fed her myself this morning.’

St. Jerome, in his hermit’s cell at Bethlehem, was stupefied at the fate of the ‘Eternal City’. ‘The world crumbles,’ he said. ‘There is no created work that rust or age does not consume: but Rome! Who could have believed that, raised by her victories above the universe, she would one day fall?’

Why had Rome fallen? This was the question on everybody’s lips. We know to-day that the process of her corruption had been working for centuries; but men and women rarely see what is going on around them, and some began to murmur that the old gods of Olympus were angry because their religion had been forsaken. It was affirmed that Christ would save the world, but what had He done to save Rome?

Christianity was not long in finding a champion to defend her cause—an African monk, Augustine, to mediaeval minds the greatest of all the ‘Fathers of the Church’. Augustine was the son of a pagan father and a Christian mother and grew up a wild and undisciplined boy. After some years at the University of Carthage, spent in casual study and habitual dissipation, he determined to go to Rome, and from there passed to Milan, where he went out of curiosity to listen to the preaching of St. Ambrose. It was obvious that he would either hate or be strongly influenced by this fiery old man; and in truth Augustine, who secretly repented of the way he had wasted his life, was in a ripe mood to receive the message that he had refused to hear from the lips of Monica his mother. Soon he was converted and baptized, and later he was made Bishop of Hippo, a place not far from Carthage.

It is difficult to give a picture of Augustine in a few words. Like St. Ambrose and others of the early ‘Fathers’ he was quite intolerant of heresy and believed that ordinary human love and the simplest pleasures of the world were snares set by the devil to catch the unwary; but against these unbalanced views, largely the product of the age in which he lived, must be set his burning enthusiasm for God, and the services that he rendered to Christianity.

A modern writer says of him, ‘As the supreme man of his time he summed up the past as it still lived, remoulded it, added to it from himself, and gave it a new unity and form wherein it was to live on.... The great heart, the great mind, the mind led by the heart’s inspiration, the heart guided by the mind—this is Augustine.’

Superior in intellect to other men of his day, his whole being filled with the love of God and fired by the desire to make the world share his worship, he preached, worked, and wrote only to this end. In his Confessions he describes his youth and repentance; but his most famous work is his Civitas Dei.

Here was the answer to those who declared that Rome had fallen because she neglected her pagan deities. Rome, he maintained, was not and never could be eternal; for the one eternal kingdom was the Civitas Dei, or ‘City of God’, towards whose reign of triumph the human race had been tending since earliest times. Before her glory the kingdoms of this world, and all the culture and civilization of which men boasted, must fade away. Thus God had destined; and St. Augustine exerted all his eloquence and powers of reasoning to prove from history the magnitude and sureness of the divine purpose.

Vandal Invasion

The author of the Civitas Dei was to have his faith severely tested, for he died amid scenes of desolation and horror that held out no hope of happiness for man on earth. Rome stood at the mercy of barbarians, and Christian Africa was also fast falling under their yoke. These new invaders, the Vandals, were also a German tribe, who, as soon as Stilicho withdrew legions from the Rhine to defend Italy from the Visigoths, broke over the weakened frontier into Gaul, and from there crossed the Pyrenees and marched southwards.

Spain had been one of the richest of Rome’s provinces, and besides her minerals and corn had provided the Empire with not a few rulers as well as famous authors and poets. In her commercial prosperity she had grown, like her neighbours, corrupt and unwarlike, so that the Vandals met with little resistance and plundered and pillaged at their will. Instead of settling down amid their conquests they were driven by the promise of further loot and the pressure of other barbarian tribes following hard on their heels to cross the narrow Strait of Gibraltar and to pursue their way due east along the African coast. In Spain they have left the memory of their presence in the name of one of her fairest provinces, Andalusia.

The chief of the Vandals at this time was Genseric, who not only conquered all the coast-line of North Africa, but also built a fleet that became the terror of the Mediterranean. Like the Goths the Vandals were Christians, but they held the views of Arius and there could be little hope that they would tolerate the orthodox Catholics. Though hardly as inhuman and ruthless as their opponents would have had the world believe, they pillaged and laid waste as they passed; and posterity has since applied the word vandal to the man who wilfully destroys.

The name ‘Hun’ is of even more sinister repute. In the first half of the fifth century the Huns in their triumphant march across Europe were led by their king, Attila, ‘the Scourge of God’, whose boast it was that never grass grew again where his horse’s hoofs had once trod. So short and squat as to be almost deformed, flat-nosed, with a swarthy skin and deep-set eyes, that he would roll hideously when angered, the King loved to inspire terror not only amongst his enemies but in the chieftains under his command. Pity, gentleness, civilization, such words were either unknown or abhorrent to him; and in the towns whose walls were stormed by his troops, old men, women, priests, and children fell alike victims to his sword.

It was his ambition that the name of ‘Attila’ should become a terror to the whole earth, but the extent to which he succeeded in realizing this aim brought a serious check to his arms; for when he reached the boundaries of Gaul, he found that fear had gathered into a single hostile force of formidable size races that had warred for centuries amongst themselves. Here were not only ‘Provincials’, descendants of the Romanized inhabitants of Gaul, but Goths, Franks, Burgundians, and other tribes who, like the Vandals, had forced the passage of the Rhine as soon as the imperial garrisons were weakened or withdrawn. They had little in common save hatred of the Hun, a passion so strong that in a desperate battle on the plain of Chalons they hurled back the Tartar hordes for ever from the lands of Western Europe.

Shaken by his defeat, but sullen and vindictive, Attila turned his thoughts to Italy; and he and his warriors swept across the passes of the Alps and descended on the fertile country lying to the north-west of the Adriatic. The Italians made but a feeble resistance, and the palaces, baths, and amphitheatres of once wealthy towns vanished in smoking ruins.

One important work of construction Attila unconsciously assisted, for the inhabitants of Aquileia, seeking a refuge from their cruel foe, fled to the coast, and there amid the desolate lagoons they and their descendants built for themselves in the course of centuries a new city, Venice, the future ‘Queen of the Adriatic’. Aquileia had been a city of repute, but it can be safely guessed that she would never have attained the world-wide glory that Venice, safe behind her barrier of marshes and with every incentive to naval enterprise, was to establish in the Middle Ages.

From the Adriatic provinces Attila passed to Rome, but refrained from sacking the city. It is said that he was uneasy because the armies of Gaul that had defeated him at Chalons still hung on his rear, threatening to cut off his retreat across the Alps. At any rate, he consented to make terms negotiated by the Pope on behalf of the citizens of Rome. Contemporary accounts declare that the Hun was awed by the sight of Leo I in his priestly robes and by the fearlessness of his bearing, and certainly for his mediation he well deserved the title of ‘Great’ that the people in their gratitude bestowed on him.

Attila, when he left Rome, turned northwards, but died quite shortly after some drunken orgy. The kingdom of massacre and fire that he had built on the terror of his name fell rapidly to pieces, and only the remembrance of that terror remained; while Huns merged themselves in the armies of other tribes or fought together in petty rivalry.

Vandal Sack of Rome

Rome had been taken by Alaric the Visigoth and spared by Attila, but her trials were not yet at an end. Genseric, the Vandal king, who had established himself at Carthage, was only awaiting his opportunity to plunder a city that was still a world-famous treasure house. His fleet, that had cut off Italy entirely from the cornfields of Egypt, blockaded the mouth of the Tiber, and the Romans, weakened by famine and the warfare of the past few years, quickly sued for peace.

Once more Pope Leo went as mediator to the camp of his enemies; but the Arian Vandal, unlike the pagan Hun, was adamant. He was willing to forgo a general massacre but nothing further, and for a fortnight the city was ruthlessly pillaged. Then Genseric sailed away, carrying with him thousands of prisoners besides all the treasures of money and art on which he could lay hands. Nearly four hundred years before, the Emperor Titus, when he sacked Jerusalem, brought to Rome the golden altar and candlesticks of the Jewish Temple, and now Rome in her turn was despoiled of these trophies of her former victories.

It was little wonder if the Western emperors, who had systematically failed to save their capital, became discredited at last among their own troops, and Rome, that had begun life according to tradition under a ‘Romulus’, was to end her Empire under another, a handsome boy, nicknamed in derision of his helplessness ‘Augustulus’, or ‘little Augustus’.

The pretext of his deposition was his refusal to grant Italian lands to the German troops who formed the main part of the imperial army, on which their captain, Odoacer, compelled him to abdicate. So low had the imperial dignity sunk in public estimation that Odoacer, instead of claiming the once-coveted honour, sent the diadem and purple robe to the Emperor at Constantinople. ‘We disclaim the necessity or even the wish’, wrote Augustulus, ‘of continuing any longer the imperial succession in Italy.... The majesty of a sole monarch is sufficient to pervade and protect at the same time both East and West.’

The writer, so fortunate in his insignificance that no one wished to assassinate him, spent the rest of his days in a castle by the Mediterranean, supported by a revenue from the state; while Odoacer, with the title of ‘Patrician’, ruled the land with statesmanlike moderation for fourteen years.

Ostrogothic Invasion

Two more waves of invasion were yet to break across the Alps and hinder all attempts at restoration and unity. The first was that of the ‘Ostrogoths’, or ‘Eastern’ Goths, a tribe of the same race as the Visigoths that, meeting the first onslaught of the Huns in their advance from Asia, had only just on the death of Attila freed themselves from this terrible yoke. They sought now an independent kingdom, and under the leadership of their prince, Theodoric, chafed on the boundaries of the Eastern Empire, with which they had formed an alliance.

Theodoric had been educated in Constantinople, and though brave and warlike did not share the reckless love of battle that animated his followers. He realized, however, that he must lead the Ostrogoths to a new land of plenty or incur their hatred and suspicion, so he appealed to the Emperor Zeno for leave to go to Italy as his general and depose Odoacer. ‘Direct me with the soldiers of my nation,’ he wrote, ‘to march against the tyrant. If I fall you will be relieved from an expensive and troublesome friend; if, with divine permission, I succeed, I shall govern in your name and to your glory.’

Zeno had not been sufficiently powerful to prevent Odoacer from taking the title of ‘Patrician’, but he had never liked the ‘barbarian upstart’ who had dared to depose an emperor. He had also begun to dread the presence of the restless Ostrogoths so close to Constantinople, and warmly appreciated Theodoric’s arguments in favour of their exodus. If the two barbarian kings destroyed one another, it would be all the better for the Empire, and so with the imperial blessing Theodoric started on his great adventure.

He took with him not only his warriors but the women and children of his tribe and all their possessions; and after several battles succeeded in defeating and slaying his opponent. Rome, that looked upon him as the Emperor’s representative, joyfully opened her gates, but Theodoric preferred to make Ravenna his capital, and here he settled and planted an orchard with his own hands.

It was his hope that he might win the trust and affection of his new subjects, and, though he ruled exactly as he liked, he remained outwardly submissive to the Emperor, writing him humble letters and marking the coinage with the imperial stamp. He frequently consulted the Senate at Rome that, though it had long ago lost any real power, had never ceased to take a nominal share in the government; and when he gave a third of the Italian lands to his own countrymen he allowed Roman officials to make the division.

Theodoric also maintained the laws and customs of Italy and forced the Ostrogoths to respect them too; but his army remained a national bodyguard, and in spite of his efforts at conciliation the two peoples did not mingle. Between them stood the barrier of religious bitterness, for the Ostrogoths were Arians, and, though their ruler was very tolerant in his attitude, the Catholics were always suspicious of his intentions.

On one occasion there had been a riot against the Jews and several synagogues had been burned. Theodoric ordered a collection of money to be made amongst the orthodox Catholics who were responsible, that the buildings might be restored. This command was disobeyed, and when the ring-leaders of the strike were whipped through the streets, popular anger against the Gothic king grew to white heat. He himself changed in character as he became older and showed himself morose and tyrannical. Towards the end of his reign he put to death Boethius, a Roman senator, who had been one of his favourite advisers, but who had dared to defend openly a man whom he himself had condemned.

Boethius was not only a fearless champion of his friends—he was a great scholar who had kept alight the torch of classical learning amid the darkness and horror of invasion. Besides translating some of the works of Aristotle he wrote treatises on logic, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, and made an able defence of the Nicene Creed against Arian attacks. The last and most famous of his works, that for ten centuries men have remembered and loved, was his Consolations of Philosophy, written when death in a most horrible form was already drawing close. Tortured by a cord drawn closely round his forehead, and then beaten with clubs, the philosopher escaped from a life where fortune had dealt with him cruelly. His master survived him by two years, repenting on his death-bed in an agony of remorse the brutal sentence he had meted out.

It is scarcely fair to judge Theodoric by the tyranny of his last days. It is better to recall the glory of his prime, and how ‘in the Western part of the Empire there was no people who refused him homage’. Allied by family ties with the Burgundians, the Visigoths, the Vandals, and the Franks, he was undoubtedly the greatest of all the barbarians of his age. Had his successors shown a little of his statesmanlike qualities, Ostrogoth and Italian, in spite of their religious differences, might have united to form a single nation, but unfortunately, before twenty years had passed, the kingdom he had founded was destined to disappear.

Theodoric was succeeded by his grandson, a boy who lived only a few years, and then by a worthless nephew, without either royal or statesmanlike qualities. In contrast to this weak dynasty, there ruled at Constantinople an Emperor who possessed in the highest degree the ability and steadfastness of purpose that the times required.

The Emperor Justinian

Justinian was only a peasant by birth, but he had been well educated and took a keen interest not only in questions of law and finance that concerned the government but in theology, music, and architecture. In his manner to his subjects he was friendly though dignified, but there was something unsympathetic in his nature that prevented him from becoming popular. His courtiers regarded his industry with awe, but some professed to believe that he could not spend so many midnight hours at work unless he were an evil spirit not requiring sleep. One writer says that ‘no one ever remembered him young’: yet this serious prince married for love a beautiful actress, Theodora, and dared, in the face of general indignation, to make her his empress. An historian of the time says of Theodora, ‘it were impossible for mere man to describe her comeliness in words or imitate it in art’; yet she was no doll, but took a very definite share in the government, extorting admiration by her dignity even from those who had pretended to despise her.

Justinian’s chief passion was for building, and he spent a great part of his revenue in erecting bridges, baths, forts, and palaces. Most famous of all the architecture of his time was Saint Sophia, ‘the Church of the Holy Wisdom’, that after Constantinople passed into the hands of the Turks became a mosque.

It is not, however, for Saint Sophia that Justinian is chiefly remembered but for the Corpus Juris Civilis, literally ‘the body of Civil Law’, that he published in order that his subjects might know what the Roman law really was. The Corpus Juris Civilis consisted of three parts—the ‘Code’, a collection of decrees made by various emperors; next the ‘Digest’, the decisions of eminent lawyers; and thirdly the ‘Institutes’, an explanation of the principles of Roman law. ‘After thirteen centuries,’ says a modern writer, ‘it stands unsurpassed as a treasury of legal knowledge;’ and all through the Middle Ages men were to look to it for inspiration. Thus it was on the Corpus Juris Civilis that ecclesiastical lawyers based the Canon law that gave to the Pope an emperor’s power over the Church.

Justinian worked for the progress of the world when he codified Roman law. It was unfortunate that military ambition led him to exhaust his treasury and overtax his subjects, in order that he might establish his rule over the whole of Europe like Theodosius and Constantine. Besides carrying on an almost continuous war with the King of Persia, he sent an army and fleet under an able general, Belisarius, to fight against the Vandals in North Africa; and so successful was this campaign that Justinian became master of the whole coast-line, and even of a part of southern Spain. This gave him command of the Mediterranean, and he at once determined to overthrow the feeble descendants of Theodoric, and to restore the imperial dominion over Italy in deed, not as it had been from the time of Odoacer merely in name.

The task was not easy, for the Italians, as we have noticed, did not love the Greeks, while the Goths fought bravely for independence. At length, in the year 555, after nineteen campaigns, Narses, an Armenian who was at the head of Justinian’s forces, succeeded in crushing the Barbarians and established his rule at Ravenna, from which city, under the title of Exarch, he controlled the whole peninsula.

Lombard Invasion

Narses’ triumph had been in a great measure due to a German tribe, ‘The Lombards’, whose hosts he had enrolled under the imperial banner. These Lombards, Longobardi or ‘Long Beards’ as the name originally stood, had migrated from the banks of the Elbe to the basin of the Danube, and there, looking about them for a warlike outlet for their energies, were quite as willing to invade Italy at Justinian’s command as to go on any other campaign that promised to be profitable.

Narses, as soon as he was assured of success, paid them liberally for their services and sent them back to their own people; but the Lombards had learned to love the sunny climate and the vines growing out of doors, and were soon discontented with their bleaker homeland. They waited therefore until Narses, whom they knew and feared, was dead; and then, under the leadership of Alboin, their king, crossed over the Alps and invaded North Italy. They did not come in such tremendous strength as the Ostrogoths in the past, nor were the imperial troops powerless to stand against them: indeed, the two forces were so balanced that, while the Lombards succeeded in establishing themselves in the province of Lombardy, to which they gave their name, with Pavia as its capital, the representatives of the Emperor still held the coast-line on both sides, also Ravenna, Naples, Rome, and other principal towns.

This Lombard inroad, the last of the great Barbarian invasions of Italy, was by far the most important in its effects. For one thing, two hundred years were to pass before the power of the new settlers was seriously shaken; and therefore, even the fact that they were pagans and imposed their own laws ruthlessly on the Italians could not keep the races from gradually intermingling. In time the higher civilization conquered, and the fair-haired Teutons learned to worship the Christian God, forgot their own tongue, and adopted the customs and habits they saw around them. The Italians, on their part, in the course of their struggles with the Lombards became trained in the art of war they had almost forgotten. By the eighth century the fusion was complete.

Another very interesting and important result of the Lombard invasion was that the prolonged duel between Barbarians and Greeks prevented the development of any common form of government. There might in time emerge an Italian race, but there could be no Italian nation so long as towns and provinces were dominated by rulers whose policy and ambitions were utterly opposed. The Exarch of Ravenna claimed, in the name of the Emperor at Constantinople, to collect taxes from and administer the whole peninsula, but in practice he often ruled merely the strip of land round his city cut off from other Greek officials by Lombard dukes. He would be able to communicate by sea with the important towns on or near the coast, such as Naples, but so irregularly that their governments would tend to grow every year more independent of his control. In Rome, for instance, there was not only the Senate with its traditions of government, but the Pope, who even more than the Senate had become the protector and adviser of his fellow citizens.

Pope Gregory ‘the Great’

We have seen how Leo ‘the Great’ persuaded Attila the Hun to withdraw when his armies threatened the very gates of Rome, while later he went on a like though unavailing mission to Genseric the Vandal. It was acts like these that won recognition for the Papacy amongst other rulers; and more than any of the Popes before him, Gregory ‘the Great’, who ascended the chair of Peter in A.D. 590, built up the foundations of this authority.

A Roman of position and wealth, Gregory had become in middle age a poor monk, giving all his money to the poor and disciplining himself by fasting and penance. He is remembered best in England to-day for the interest he showed in the fair-haired Angles in the Roman slave-market. ‘They have Angels’ faces, they should be fellow-heirs of the Angels in Heaven.’ His comment he followed up by a petition that he might sail as a missionary to the northern island from which these slaves came; and, when instead he was sent on an embassy to Constantinople, he did not forget England in the years that passed, but after he became Pope, chose St. Augustine to go and convert the heathen King of Kent. In this way southern England was christianized and brought into touch with the life of Western Europe.

‘A great Pope,’ it has been said, ‘is always a missionary Pope.’ Gregory had the true missionary’s enthusiasm, and his writings, all of them theological, bear the stamp of St. Augustine of Hippo’s ardent spirit enforced with a faith absolutely assured and unbending. Besides being instrumental in converting England, Gregory during his pontificate saw the Arian Church in Spain reconciled to the Catholic, while he succeeded in winning the Lombard king to Christianity and friendship.

It was little wonder that the people of Rome, who had been at war with these invaders for long years, looked up to the peace-maker not only as their spiritual father but also as a temporal ruler. Had he not fed them when they were starving, declaring that it was thus the Church should use her wealth? Had he not raised soldiers to guard the walls and sent out envoys to plead the city’s cause against her enemies? There was no such practical help to be obtained from the Exarchs of Ravenna, talk as they might about the glories of Constantinople. Thus Romans argued, and Gregory, who knew the real weakness of Constantinople, was able to disregard the imperial viceroys when he chose, a policy of independence followed by his successors.

Since the Lombard kingdom had split up into a number of duchies each with its own capital, Italy, in the early Middle Ages, tended to become a group of city states, each jealous of its neighbours and ambitious only for local interests. This provincial influence was so strong that it has lasted into modern times. An Englishman or a Frenchman will claim his country before thinking of the particular part from which he comes, but it is more natural for an Italian to say first ‘I am Roman,’ or ‘Neapolitan,’ or ‘Florentine,’ as the case may be. It is only by remembering this difference that Italian history can be read aright.

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. [368–73].

	A.D.
The Emperors Valentian and Valens	364
Battle of Adrianople	378
The Emperor Theodosius	379–95
Vandal Invasion of Africa	441
Battle of Chalons	451
Huns invade Italy	452
Pope Leo I ‘the Great’	440

VI
THE RISE OF THE FRANKS

The historian Tacitus, whose description of the German tribes we have already quoted, had told the people of Gaul that, unless these same Germans were kept at bay by the Roman armies on the Rhine frontier, they would ‘exchange the solitude of their woods and morasses for the wealth and fertility of Gaul’. ‘The fall of Rome,’ he added, ‘would be fatal to the provinces, and you would be buried in the ruins of that mighty fabric.’

This prophetic warning proved only too true when Vandal and Visigoth, Burgundian, Hun, and Frank forced the passage of the Rhine, and swept in irresistible masses across vineyards and cornfields, setting fire to those towns and fortresses that dared to offer resistance. The Vandal migration was but a meteor flash on the road to Spain and North Africa; while on the battle-field of Chalons the Huns were beaten back and carried their campaign of bloodshed to Italy: but the other three tribes succeeded in establishing formidable kingdoms in Gaul during the fifth and sixth centuries.

At the head of the Visigoths rode Athaulf, brother-in-law of Alaric, unanimously chosen king by the tribe on the death of that mighty warrior.[1] Instead of continuing the campaign in South Italy, Athaulf had made peace with the Emperor Honorius and married his sister, thus gaining a semi-royal position in the eyes of Roman citizens.

‘I once aspired,’ he said frankly, ‘to obliterate the name of Rome and to erect on its ruins the dominion of the Goths, but ... I was gradually convinced that laws are essentially necessary to maintain and regulate a well-constituted state.... From that moment, I proposed to myself a different object of glory and ambition; and it is now my sincere wish that the gratitude of future ages should acknowledge the merits of a stranger, who employed the sword of the Goths, not to subvert, but to restore and maintain the prosperity of the Roman Empire.’

Fortified by such sentiments and the benediction of the Emperor, who was glad to free Italy from his brother-in-law’s presence, Athaulf succeeded, after a short struggle, in establishing a Visigothic kingdom in southern Gaul, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay. This, under his successors, was enlarged until it embraced the whole of the province of Aquitania, with Toulouse as its capital, as well as both slopes of the Pyrenees.

The Burgundians, another German tribe, had, in the meanwhile, built up a middle kingdom along the banks of the Rhone. Years of intercourse with the Romans had done much to civilize both their manners and thoughts, and they were quite prepared to respect the laws and customs that they found in Gaul so long as they met with no serious opposition to their rule. The fact that both Burgundians and Visigoths were Arians raised, however, a fatal barrier between conquerors and conquered, and did more than anything else to determine that ultimate dominion over the whole of Gaul should be the prize of neither of these races, but of a third Teutonic tribe, the Salian Franks, whom good fortune placed beyond the influence of heresy.

The Franks

The Franks were a tall, fair-haired, loose-limbed people, who, emerging from Germany, had settled for a time in the country we now call Belgium. Like their ancestors, they worshipped Woden and other heathen gods of the Teutons, while in their Salic law we see much to recall the German customs described by Tacitus five centuries before.

The king was no longer elected by his people, for his office had become hereditary in the House of Meroveus, one of the heroes of the race. No woman, even of the Merovingian line, might succeed to the throne, nor prince whose hair had been shorn, since with the Franks flowing locks were a sign of royalty. Yet, in spite of the king’s new position, the old spirit of equality had not entirely disappeared. The assembly of freemen, still held once a year, had degenerated into a military review: but the warriors thus collected could demand that the coming campaign should meet with their approval. When a battle was over and victory obtained, the lion’s share of the booty did not fall to the king, but the whole was divided by lot.

A great part of the Salic law was really a tariff of violent acts, with the fine that those who had committed them must pay, so much for shooting a poisoned arrow, even if it missed its mark; so much for wounding another in the head, or for cutting off his nose, or his great toe, or, worst of all, for damaging his second finger, so that he could no longer draw the bowstring.

The underlying principle of this code was different from that of the Roman law, which set up a certain standard of right, inflicting penalties on those who fell short of it. Thus the Roman citizen who murdered or maimed his neighbour would be punished because he had dared to do what the state condemned as a crime. The Frank, in a similar case, would be fined by the judges of his tribe, and the money paid as compensation to the person, or the relations of the person, whom he had wronged: the idea being, not to appease the anger of the state, but to remove the resentment of the injured party.

For this purpose each Frank had his wergeld, literally his ‘worth-gold’ or the sum of money at which, according to his rank, his life was valued, beginning with the nobles of the king’s palace and descending in a scale to the lowest freeman. When the Franks left Belgium and advanced, conquering, into northern Gaul, they also fixed wergelds for their Roman subjects; but rated them at only half the value of their own race. The wergeld of a Frankish freeman was two hundred gold pieces, of a Roman only one hundred.

By the beginning of the sixth century, when the Franks were well established in Gaul, the management of their important tribal affairs had passed entirely into the hands of the nobles surrounding the king. These bore such titles as Major Domus or ‘Mayor of the Palace’, at first only a steward, but later the chief minister of the crown; the ‘Seneschal’ or head of the royal household; the ‘Marshal’ or Master of the Stables; the ‘Chamberlain’ or chief servant of the bedchamber.

Clovis, King of the Franks

The most famous of the Merovingian kings, as the descendants of Merovius were called, was Clovis, who established the Frankish capital at Paris. He and his tribe, though pagans, were on friendly terms with the Roman inhabitants of northern Gaul, and especially with some of the Catholic clergy. When Clovis sacked the town of Soissons he tried to save the church plate, and especially a vase of great beauty that he knew St. Remi, Bishop of Reims, highly valued. ‘Let it be put amongst my booty,’ he said to his soldiers, intending to give it to the bishop later; but one of them answered him insolently, ‘Only that is thine which falls to thy share by lot,’ and with his axe he shivered the vase into a thousand pieces.

Clovis concealed his fury at the moment, but he did not forget, and a year afterwards, when he was reviewing his troops, he noticed the same man who had opposed his will. Stepping forward, he tore the fellow’s weapons from his grasp and threw them on the ground, saying, ‘No arms are worse cared for than thine!’ The soldier stooped to pick them up, and Clovis, raising his battle-axe high in the air, brought it down on the bent head before him with the comment, ‘Thus didst thou to the vase at Soissons!’

Clovis married a Christian princess, Clotilda, a niece of the Burgundian king, and, at her request, he allowed their eldest child to be baptized, but for a long time he refused to become a Christian himself. One day, however, when in the midst of a battle in which his warriors were so hard pressed that they had almost taken to flight, he cried aloud—‘Jesus Christ, thou whom Clotilda doth call the Son of the Living God ... I now devoutly beseech thy aid, and I promise if thou dost give me victory over these my enemies ... that I will believe in thee and be baptized in thy name, for I have called on my own gods and they have failed to help me.’

Shortly afterwards the tide of battle turned, the Franks rallied, and Clovis obtained a complete victory. Remembering his promise, he went to Reims, and there he and three thousand of his warriors were received into the Catholic Church. ‘Bow thy head low,’ said St. Remi who baptized the King, ‘henceforth adore that which thou hast burned and burn that which thou didst formerly adore.’

When he became a Catholic, Clovis had no idea that he had altered the whole future of his race, for to him it seemed merely that he had fulfilled the bargain he had made with the Christian God. He did not change his ways, but pursued his ambitions as before, now by treachery and now by force. It was his determination to make himself supreme ruler over all the Franks, and in the case of another branch, the Ripuarians, he began by secretly persuading their heir to the kingly title, the young prince Chloderic, to kill his father and seize the royal coffers.

Chloderic, fired by the idea of becoming powerful, did so and wrote exultingly to Clovis, ‘My father is dead and his wealth is mine. Let some of thy men come hither, and that of his treasure which pleaseth them I will send thee.’

Ambassadors from the Salians duly arrived, and Chloderic led them secretly apart and showed them his money, running his hand through the pieces of gold that lay on the surface of the coffer. The men begged him to thrust his arm in deep that they might judge how great his wealth really was, and as he bent to do so, one of them struck him a mortal wound from behind. Then they fled. Thus by treachery died both father and son; but Clovis unblushingly denied to the Ripuarian Franks that he had been in any way responsible.

‘Chloderic murdered his father, and he hath been assassinated by I know not whom. I am no partner in such deeds, for it is against the law to take the life of relations. Nevertheless, since it has happened, I offer you this advice, that you should put yourselves under my protection.’

The Ripuarian Franks were without a leader, and like all barbarians they worshipped success; so, believing that Clovis would surely lead them to victory, they raised him on their shields and hailed him as king.

‘Each day God struck down the enemies of Clovis under his hand,’ says Bishop Gregory of Tours, describing these events, ‘and enlarged his kingdom, because he went with an upright heart before the Lord and did the things that were pleasing in His sight.’ It is startling to find a bishop pass such a verdict on a career of treachery and murder, the more that Gregory of Tours was no cringing court-flatterer but a priest with a high sense of duty who dared, when he believed it right, to oppose some of the later Frankish kings even at the risk of his life. Yet it must be remembered that a sense of honour was not understood by barbarians, except in a very crude form. They believed it was clever to outwit their neighbours, while to murder them was so ordinary as to excite little or no comment, save the infliction of a wergeld if the crime could be brought home. Centuries of the civilizing influence of Christianity were needed before the men and women of these fierce tribes could accept the Christian principles of truth, justice, and mercy in anything like their real spirit.

The Romans in Gaul had almost given up expecting anything but brutality from their invaders if they aroused their enmity, and therefore welcomed even the smallest sign of grace. Thus the protection that Clovis afforded to the Catholic Church, after her years of persecution, blinded their eyes to many of his vices.

When Clovis had made himself master of the greater part of northern Gaul, he determined to strike a blow at the Visigoths in the south. ‘It pains me,’ he said to his followers, ‘to see Arians in a part of Gaul. Let us march against these heretics with God’s aid and gain their country for ourselves.’

Probably he was sincere in his dislike of heresy, but it was a politic attitude to adopt, for it meant that wherever he and his warriors marched they would find help against the Burgundians and Visigoths amongst the orthodox Roman population. It seemed to the latter that Clovis brought with him something of the glory of the vanished Roman Empire, kept alive by the Catholic Church and now revived through her in this her latest champion.

In a fierce battle near Poitiers, Clovis defeated the Visigoths and drove them out of Aquitaine, leaving them merely narrow strips of territory along the Mediterranean seaboard and on either slope of the Pyrenees. He also fought against the Burgundians and, though he was not so successful, reduced them temporarily to submission. When he died, at the age of forty-five, he was master of three-quarters of Gaul, and had stamped the name of his race for ever on the land he had invaded.

His work of conquest was continued by his successors and reached its zenith in the time of King Dagobert, who lived at the beginning of the seventh century. Dagobert has been called ‘the French Solomon’, because, like the Jewish king, he was world-famed for his wisdom and riches. Not content with maintaining his power over Gaul to the west of the Rhine, he fought against the Saxon and Frisian tribes in Germany and forced them to pay tribute. At last his Empire stretched from the Atlantic to the mountains of Bohemia; the Duke of Brittany, who had hitherto remained independent of the Franks, came to offer his allegiance, while the Emperor of Constantinople sought a Frankish alliance.

A chronicler of the day, speaking of Dagobert, says, ‘He was a prince terrible in his wrath towards traitors and rebels. He held the royal sceptre firmly in his grasp, and like a lion he sprang upon those who would foment discord.’

Another account describes his journeys through his kingdom, and how he administered justice with an even hand, not altogether to the joy of tyrannical landowners. ‘His judgements struck terror into the hearts of the bishops and of the great men, but it overwhelmed the poor with joy.’

In the troublous years that were to come his reign stood out in people’s minds as an age of prosperity, but already, before the death of the king, this prosperity had begun to wane. Luxury sapped the vigour of a once-powerful mind and body, and the authority that ‘the French Solomon’ relaxed in his later years through self-indulgence was never regained by his successors.

With the contemptuous title ‘The Sluggard Kings’ the last rulers of the Merovingian line have passed down to posterity. Few were endowed with any ability or even ambition to govern, the majority died before they had reached manhood looking already like senile old men; and the power that should have been theirs passed into the hands of the Mayors of the Palace who administered their demesnes. On state occasions, indeed, they were still shown to their subjects, as they jolted to the place of assembly in a rough cart drawn by oxen; but the ceremony over, they returned to their royal villas and insignificance. ‘Nothing was left to the king save the name of king, the flowing locks, the long beard. He sat on his throne and played at government, gave audiences to envoys, and dismissed them with the answers with which he had been schooled.’

The Carolingians

It was a situation that could only last so long as the name ‘Meroveus’ retained its spell over the Franks; but the day came when the spell was broken, and a race of stronger fibre, the Carolingians, usurped the royal title. The heads of this family had for generations held the office of ‘Mayor of the Palace’ in the part of Gaul between the Meuse and the Lower Rhine, then called Austrasia. It was their duty to administer the royal demesnes in this large district, that is, to see that the laws were obeyed, to superintend the cultivation of the soil, and to collect a share of the various harvests as a revenue for the king.

This was more important work than it may sound to modern ears; for in the early Middle Ages the majority of people, unlike men and women to-day, lived in the country. Ever since the decay of the Roman Empire, when the making of roads was neglected and the imperial grain-fleets disappeared from the Mediterranean, the problem of carrying merchandise and food from one part of Europe to another had grown steadily more acute. As commerce and industry languished, towns ceased to be centres of population and became merely strongholds where the neighbourhood could find refuge when attacked by its enemies. People preferred to spend their ordinary life in villages in the midst of fields, where they could grow corn and barley, or keep their own sheep and oxen, and if the crops failed or their beasts were smitten by disease a whole province might suffer starvation.

The Mayor of the Palace must guard the royal demesnes, as far as possible, from the ravages of weather, wolves, or lawless men, for the King of the Franks, as much as any of his subjects, depended on the harvests and herds for his prosperity rather than on commerce or manufactures. By the end of the seventh century the Mayors of Austrasia had ceased to interest themselves merely in local affairs and had begun to extend their authority over the whole of France. Nominally, they acted in the name of the Merovingian kings, but once when the throne fell vacant they did not trouble to fill it for two years. The Franks made no protest: it was to their mayors, not to their kings, that they now turned whether in search of good government or daring national exploits.

The Carolingian Charles ‘Martel’, Charles ‘the Hammer’, was a warrior calculated to arouse their profound admiration. ‘He was a Herculean warrior,’ says an old chronicle, ‘an ever-victorious prince ... who triumphed gloriously over other princes, and kings, and peoples, and barbarous nations: in so much that, from the Slavs to the Frisians and even to the Spaniards and Saracens, there were none who rose up against him that escaped from his hand, without prostrating themselves in the dust before his empire.’

It was Charles Martel who saved France from falling under the yoke of the Saracens, a race of Arabian warriors who, crossing from Africa at the Strait of Gibraltar, subdued in one short campaign three-quarters of Spain. Describing the first great victory over the Gothic King Rodrigo at Guadalete, the Governor of Africa wrote to his master the Caliph, ‘O Commander of the Faithful, these are no common conquests; they are like the meeting of the nations on the Day of Judgement.’

Puffed up with the glory they had gained, the Saracens, who were followers of the Prophet Mahomet, believed that they had only to advance for Christian armies to run away; and over the Pyrenees they swept in large bands, seizing first one stronghold on the Mediterranean coast and then another. Before this invasion Charles Martel had been engaged in a quarrel with the Duke of Aquitaine, but now they hastily made friends and on the field of Poitiers joined their forces to stem the Saracen tide. So terrible was the battle, we are told, that over three hundred thousand Saracens fell before the Frankish warriors ‘inflexible as a block of ice’. The number is almost certainly an exaggeration, and so also is the claim that the victors, by forcing the remnant of the Mahometan army to retreat towards the Pyrenees in hasty flight, saved Europe for Christianity. Even had the decision of the battle been reversed, the Moors would have found the task of holding Spain in the years to come quite sufficient to absorb all their energies. Indeed, their attacks on Gaul were, from the first, more in the nature of gigantic raids than of invasions with a view to settlement, though at the time their ferocity made them seem of world-wide importance.

Thus it was only natural that the Mayor of the Palace, to whom the victory was mainly due, became the hero of Christendom. The Pope, who was at that time trying to defend Rome from the King of the Lombards, sent to implore his aid; but Charles knew that his forces had been weakened by their struggle with the Saracens and dared not undertake so big a campaign.

Pepin, King of the Franks

Some years later his son, Pepin ‘the Short’ (751–68), who had succeeded him, received the suggestion with a different answer. Pepin, as his nickname shows, was short in stature, but he was powerfully built and so strong that with a single blow of his axe he once cut off the head of a lion. Energetic and shrewd, he saw a way of turning the Pope’s need of support against the Lombards to his own advantage. He therefore sent Frankish ambassadors to Rome to inquire whether it was not shameful for a land to be governed by kings who had no authority. The Pope, who was anxious to please Pepin, replied discreetly, ‘He who possesses the authority should doubtless possess the title also.’

This was exactly what the Mayor of the Palace had expected and wished, and the rest of the story may be told in the words of the old Frankish annals for the year 751: ‘In this year Pepin was named king of the Franks with the sanction of the Popes, and in the city of Soissons he was anointed with the holy oil ... and was raised to the throne after the custom of the Franks. But Childeric, who had the name of king, was shorn of his locks and sent into a monastery.’

The last of the Merovingians had vanished into the oblivion of a cloister, and Pepin the Carolingian was ruler of France. With the Pope’s blessing he had achieved his ambition, and fortune soon enabled him to repay his debt, mainly, as it happened, at another’s expense.

In the last chapter we described the effect of the Lombard invasion of Italy, and how that Teutonic race sank its roots deep in the heart of the peninsula, leaving a Greek fringe along the coasts that still considered itself part of the Eastern Empire. Rome in theory belonged to this fringe, but in reality the Popes hated the imperial authority almost as much as the aggressions of Lombard king and dukes, and struggled to free themselves from its yoke.

When Pepin, his own ambition satisfied, turned his attention to the Pope’s affairs, the Lombards had just succeeded in over-running the Exarchate of Ravenna, the seat of the imperial government in Italy. Collecting an army, the King of the Franks crossed the Alps without encountering any opposition, marched on Pavia, the Lombard capital, and struck such terror into his enemies that, almost without fighting, they agreed to the terms that he dictated.

Legally, he should have at once commanded the restoration of the Exarchate to the Empire, but there was no particular reason why Pepin should gratify Constantinople, while he had a very strong inclination to please Rome. He therefore told the Lombards to give the Exarchate to Stephen II, who was Pope at that time, and this they faithfully promised to do; but, as he turned homewards, they began instead to oppress the country round Rome, preventing food from entering the city and pillaging churches.

The Temporal Power of the Papacy

Pepin was very angry when he heard the news. Once more he descended on Italy, and this time the Lombards were compelled to keep their word, and the Papacy received the first of its temporal possessions, ratified by a formal treaty that declared the exact extent of the territory and the Papal rights over it. This was an important event in mediaeval history, for it meant that henceforward the Pope, who claimed to be the spiritual head of Christendom, would be also an Italian prince with recognized lands and revenues, and therefore with private ambitions concerning these. It would be his instinct to distrust any other ruler in the peninsula who might become powerful enough to deprive him of these lands; while he would always be faced, when in difficulties, by the temptation to use his spiritual power to further purely worldly ends. On the way in which Popes dealt with this problem of their temporal and spiritual power, much of the future history of Europe was to depend.

Pepin, in spite of his shrewdness, had no idea of the troubles he had sown by his donation. Well pleased with the generosity he had found so easy, with the title of ‘Patrician’ bestowed on him by the Pope, and perhaps still more by the spoils that he and his Franks had collected in Lombardy, he left Italy, and was soon engaged in other campaigns nearer home against the Saracens and rebellious German tribes. In these he continued until his death in 768.

VII
MAHOMET

Christianity, first preached by humble fishermen in Palestine, had become the foundation of life in mediaeval Europe. Some three hundred years after Constantine the Great had made this possible another religion, ‘Islam’, destined to be the rival of Christianity, was also born in the East, in Arabia, a narrow strip of territory lying between the Red Sea and miles of uninhabitable desert.

On the sea-coast of Arabia were some harbours, inland a few fertile oases, where towns of low, white stone houses and mud hovels had sprung into being; but from the very nature of the soil and climate the Arabs were not drawn to manufacture goods or grow corn. Instead they preferred a wanderer’s life, to tend the herds of horses or sheep that ranged the peninsula in search of water and pasturage, or if more adventurous to guard the caravans of camels that carried the silks and spices of India to Mediterranean seaports. These caravans had their regular routes, and every merchant a band of armed men to protect his goods and drive off robbers along the way. Only in the ‘Sacred Months’, the time of the sowing of seeds in the spring and at the autumn harvest, were such convoys of goods safe from attack; for then, and then only, every Arab believed, according to the traditions of his forefathers, that peace was a duty, and that a curse would fall on him who dared to break it.

The Arab, like all Orientals, was superstitious. He worshipped ‘Allah’, the all supreme God, but he accepted also a variety of other gods, heavenly bodies, spirits and devils, stones and idols. One of the most famous Arabian sanctuaries was a temple at Mecca called the ‘Ka’bah’, where a black stone had been built into the wall that pilgrims would come from long distances to kiss and worship. Amongst the youths of the town who saw this ceremony and himself took part in the religious processions was an orphan lad, Mahomet (576–632), brought up in the house of his uncle, Abu Talib.

The Young Mahomet

Mahomet was handsome and strong: he had looked after sheep on the edge of the desert, taken part in tribal fights, and from the age of twelve wandered with caravans as far as the sea-coast. What distinguished him from his companions was not his education, nor any special skill as a warrior, but his quickness of observation, his tenacious memory, and his gift for bending others to his will. Unable to read, he could only gain knowledge by word of mouth, and wherever he went, amongst the colonies of the Jews who were the chief manufacturers in the towns, or lying beside the camp fires of the caravans at night, he would keep his ears open and store up in his mind all the tales that he heard. In this way he learned of the Jewish religion and a garbled version of Christianity. Soon he knew the stories of Joseph and of Abraham and some of the sayings of Christ, and the more he thought over them the more he grew to hate the idol worship of the Arabs round him.

When he was twenty-five Mahomet married a rich widow, Khadijah, whose caravan he had successfully steered across the desert; and in this way he became a man of independent means, possessing camels and horses of his own. Khadijah was some years older than Mahomet, but she was a very good wife to him, and brought him not only a fortune but a trust and belief in his mission that he was to need sorely in the coming years. To her he confided his hatred of idol-worship, and also to Abu Bakr, the wealthy son of a cloth merchant of Mecca, who had fallen under his influence. Mahomet declared that God, and later the Angel Gabriel, had appeared to him in visions and had given him messages condemning the superstitions of the Arabs.

‘There is but one God, Allah ... and Mahomet is His Prophet.’

This was the chief message, received at first with contempt but destined to be carried triumphant in the centuries to come right to the Pyrenees and the gates of Vienna.

The visions, or trances, during which Mahomet received his messages, afterwards collected in the sacred book, the Koran, are thought by many to have been epileptic fits. His face would turn livid and he would cover himself with a blanket, emerging at last exhausted to deliver some command or exhortation. Later it would seem that he could produce this state of insensibility at will and without much effort, whenever questions were asked, indeed, in answering which he required divine guidance. Much of the teaching in the Koran was based, like Judaism or Christianity, on far higher ideals than the fetish worship of the Arabs: it emphasized such things as the duty of almsgiving, the discipline that comes of fasting, the necessity of personal cleanliness, while it forbade the use of wine, declaring drunkenness a crime.

With regard to the position of women the Koran could show nothing of the chivalry that was to develop in Christendom through the respect felt by Christians for the mother of Christ and for the many women martyrs and saints who suffered during the early persecutions. Moslems were allowed by the Koran to have four wives (Mahomet permitted himself ten), and these might be divorced at their husband’s pleasure without any corresponding right on their part. On the other hand the power of holding property before denied was now secured to women, and the murder of female children that had been a practice in the peninsula was sternly abolished.

As the years passed more and more ‘Surahs’, or chapters, were added to the Koran, but at first the Prophet’s messages were few and appealed only to the poor and humble. When the Meccans, told by Abu Bakr that Mahomet was a prophet, came to demand a miracle as proof, he declared that there could be no greater miracle than the words he uttered; but this to the prosperous merchants seemed merely crazy nonsense. When he went farther, and, acting on what he declared was Allah’s revelation, destroyed some of the local idols, contempt changed to anger; for the inhabitants argued that if ‘Ka’bah’ ceased to be a sanctuary their trade with the pilgrims who usually came to Mecca would cease.

For more than eight years, while the Prophet maintained his unpopular mission, his poorer followers were stoned and beaten, and he himself shunned. Perhaps it seems odd that in such a barbarous community he was not killed; but though Arabia possessed no government in any modern sense, yet a system of tribal law existed that went far towards preventing promiscuous murder. Each man of any importance belonged to a tribe that he was bound to support with his sword, and that in turn was responsible for his life. If he were slain the tribe would exact vengeance or demand ‘blood money’ from the murderer. Now the head of Mahomet’s tribe was Abu Talib, his uncle, and, though the old man refused to accept his nephew as a prophet, he would not allow him to be molested.

In spite of persecution the number of believers in Mahomet’s doctrines grew, and when some of those who had been driven out of the city took refuge with the Christian King of Abyssinia and were treated by him with greater kindness than the pagan Arabs, the Meccans at home became so much alarmed that they adopted a new policy of aggression. Henceforward both Mahomet and his followers, the hated ‘Moslems’, or ‘heathen’ as they were nicknamed in the Syriac tongue, were to be outlaws, and no one might trade with them or give them food.

In an undisciplined community like an Arabian town such an order would not be strictly kept, and for three years Mahomet was able to defy the ban, but every day his position grew more precarious and the sufferings of his followers from hunger and poverty increased. During this time too both Khadijah and Abu Talib died, and the Prophet, almost overwhelmed with his misfortunes, was only kept from doubting his mission by the faith and loyalty of those who would not desert him.

Weary of trying to convert Mecca he sent messengers through Arabia to find if there were any tribe that would welcome a prophet, and at last he received an invitation to go to Yathrib. This was a larger town than Mecca, farther to the north, and was populated mainly by Jewish tribes who hated the Arabian idol-worshippers and welcomed the idea of a teacher whose views were based largely on Jewish traditions.

The Hijrah

In 622, therefore, Mahomet and his followers fled secretly from Mecca to Yathrib, later called Medinah or ‘the city of the Prophet’; and this date of the ‘Hijrah’ or ‘Flight’, when the new religion broke definitely with old Arab traditions, was taken as the first year of the Moslem calendar, just as Christians reckon their time from the birth of Christ. Here in Medinah was built the first mosque, or temple of the new faith, a faith christened by its believers Islam, a word meaning ‘surrender’, for in surrender to Allah and to the will of his Prophet lay the way of salvation to the Moslem Garden of Paradise.

So beautiful to the Arab mind were the very material luxuries and pleasures with which Mahomet entranced the imagination of believers that in later years his soldiers would fling themselves recklessly against their enemies’ spears in order to gain Paradise the quicker. The alternative for the unbeliever was Hell, the everlasting fires of the Old Testament that so terrified the minds of mediaeval Christians; and between Paradise and Hell there was no middle way.

The Jews in Medinah were, like Mahomet, worshippers of one God, but they soon showed that they were not prepared to accept this wandering Arab as Jehovah’s final revelation to man. They demanded miracles, sneered at the Koran, which they declared was a parody of their own Scriptures, and took advantage of the poverty of the refugees to drive hard bargains with them. At length it became obvious that the Moslems must find some means of livelihood or else Medinah, like Mecca, must be left for more friendly soil.

Pressed by circumstances Mahomet evolved a policy that was destined to overthrow the tribal system of government in Arabia. Mention has been made already of the caravans of camels that journeyed regularly from south to north of the peninsula, bearing merchandise. Many of these caravans were owned by wealthy Meccans, whose chief trade route passed quite close by the town of Medinah, and they were protected and guarded by members of the tribe of Abu Talib and of other families whose relations were serving with the Prophet.

At first, when Mahomet commanded that these caravans should be attacked and looted, his followers looked aghast, for the sacredness of tribes from attack by kinsmen was a tradition they had inherited for generations. Their Prophet at once proved to them by a message from Allah that a new relationship had been formed stronger than the ties of blood, namely, the bond of faith, and that to the believer the unbeliever, whether father or son, was accursed. In the same way, when the first marauding expeditions were unsuccessful because the caravans attacked were too well guarded, Mahomet explained away the ‘Sacred Months’ and chose in future that very time for his warriors to descend upon unsuspecting merchants.

Battle of Badr

The Meccans, outraged by what they somewhat naturally considered treachery, soon dispatched some thousand men, determined to make an end of the Prophet and his followers; and at Badr, not very far from the coast on the trade route between the two towns, this large force encountered three hundred Moslems commanded by Mahomet. It is difficult to gain a clear impression of the battle, for romance and legend have rendered real details obscure; but, either by superior generalship, the valour and discipline of the Moslems as compared to the conduct of their forces, or, as was later stated, through the agency of angels sent by Allah from Heaven, the vastly more numerous Meccan force was utterly put to rout.

Moslems refer to the battle of Badr as ‘the Day of Deliverance’, for though, not long afterwards, they in their turn were defeated by the Meccans, yet never again were they to become mere discredited refugees. Success pays, and, with the victory of Badr as a tangible miracle to satisfy would-be converts, Mahomet soon gained a large army of warriors, whom his personality moulded into obedience to his will.

The Jews who had mocked him had soon cause to repent, for Mahomet, remembering their jibes and the petty persecution to which they had subjected his followers, adopted a definitely hostile attitude towards them. Taking advantage of the reluctance with which these Jews had shared in the defence of Medinah and in the throwing-up of earthworks to protect it, when the Meccans came to besiege it in the year 5 of the new calendar, Mahomet as soon as the siege was raised obtained his revenge. Those Jews of the city who still refused to recognize him as a Prophet were slaughtered, their wives and children sold into slavery. The teaching and ritual of the Koran also, once carefully based on the Scriptures of Israel, began to cast off this influence, and where of old Mahomet had commanded his followers to look towards Jerusalem in their prayers, he now bade them kneel with their faces towards Mecca.

In this command may be seen his new policy of conciliation towards his native town; for Mahomet recognized that in the city of Mecca lay the key to the peninsula, and he was determined to establish his power there, if not by force then by diplomacy. After some years of negotiation he persuaded those who had driven him into exile not so much of the truth of his teaching as of the certainty that his presence would bring more pilgrims than ever before to visit the shrine of Ka’bah.

In A.D. 630 he entered Mecca in triumph, and the worship of Islam was established in the heart of Arabia. As a concession to the Meccans, divine revelation announced that the sacred black stone built into the temple wall had been hallowed by Abraham, and was therefore worthy of veneration.

Instead of a general scheme of revenge only two of Mahomet’s enemies were put to death; and it is well to remember that, judged by the standards of his age and race, the Prophet was no lover of cruelty. In his teaching he condemned the use of torture, and throughout his life he was nearly always ready to treat with his foes rather than slay them. Those amongst his enemies who refused him recognition as a Prophet while willing to acknowledge him as a ruler were usually allowed to live in peace on the payment of a yearly ransom divided amongst the believers; but in cases where he had met with an obstinate refusal or persistent treachery, as from the Jews of Medinah, Mahomet would put whole tribes to the sword.

In 632 the Prophet of Islam died, leaving a group of Arabian tribes bound far more securely together by the faith he had taught them than they could have been by the succession of any royal house. ‘Though Mahomet is dead, yet is Mahomet’s God not dead.’

While Mahomet was still an exile at Medinah it is evident that he already contemplated the idea of gaining the world for Islam. ‘Let there be in you a nation summoning unto good,’ says the Koran, and in token of this mission the Prophet, in the years following his Arabian victories, sent letters to foreign rulers to announce his ambition. Here is one to the chief of the Copts, a Christian race living in Egypt:

‘In the name of Allah ... the Merciful.

‘From the Apostle of Allah to ..., Chief of the Copts. Peace be upon him who follows the guidance. Next I summon thee with the appeal to Islam: become a Moslem and thou shalt be safe. God shall give thee thy reward twofold. But if thou decline then on thee is the guilt of the Copts. O ye people of the Book come unto an equal arrangement between us and you that we should serve none save God, associating nothing with Him, and not taking one another for Lords besides God,—and if ye decline, then bear witness that we are Moslems.’

The Kingdom of Persia

Similar letters were sent to Chosroes, King of Persia, and to Heraclius, the Christian Emperor at Constantinople. The former tore the letter in pieces contemptuously, for at that time his kingdom extended over the greater part of Asia; Jerusalem, once the pride of the Eastern Empire, had fallen into his grasp; while his armies were besieging Constantinople itself. A letter that he himself penned to the Christian Emperor shows his overweening pride, and the depths into which Byzantium had fallen in the public regard:

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

Christendom was fortunate in Heraclius. Instead of contemplating either despair or surrender, he called upon the Church to summon all Christians to his aid, and by means of the gold and silver plate presented to him as a war loan by the bishops and clergy, and in command of a large army of volunteers, he beat back the Persians from the very gates of his capital. Not content with a policy of defence, he next invaded Asia, and at the battle of Nineveh utterly destroyed the hosts of Chosroes. The fallen King, deposed by his subjects, was forced to take refuge in the mountains, and later was thrown into a dungeon where he died of cold and starvation.

Had the reign of Heraclius ended at this date, it would be remembered as a glorious era in the history of Constantinople; but unfortunately for his fame another foe was to make more lasting inroads on his Empire, already weakened by the Persian occupation.

When the Emperor (610–41), like Chosroes, received Mahomet’s letter, he is said to have read it with polite interest. It seemed to him that this fanatic Arab, who hated the Jews as much as the Christians did, might turn his successful sword not only against them but against the Persians. In this surmise Heraclius was right, for under Abu Bakr, now Caliph, or ‘successor’, of Mahomet, since the Prophet had left no son, the Moslems invaded Persia.

Unfortunately for Heraclius, they were equally bent on an aggressive campaign against the Christian Empire. ‘There is but one God, Allah!’ With this test, by which they could distinguish friend from foe, the Arab hosts burst through the gate of Syria, and at Yermuk encountered the imperial army sent by Heraclius to oppose them. The Greeks fought so stubbornly that at first it seemed that their disciplined valour must win. ‘Is not Paradise before you?... Are not Hell and Satan behind?’ cried the Arab leader to his fanatical hordes, and in response to his words they rallied, broke the opposing lines by the sudden ferocity of their charge, and finally drove the imperial troops in headlong flight.

Mahometan Victories

After the battle of Yermuk Syria fell and Palestine was invaded. In 637 Jerusalem became a Moslem town, with a mosque standing where once had been the famous temple of Solomon. Mahomet had declared Jerusalem a sanctuary only second in glory to Mecca; and his followers with a toleration strange in that age left under Christian guardianship the Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre and other sacred sites.

After Syria, Palestine; after Palestine, Egypt and the north African coast-line. The dying Heraclius heard nothing but the bitter news of disaster, and after his death the quarrels of his descendants increased the feebleness of Christian resistance. A spirit of unity might have carried the Moslem banners to the limits of the Eastern Empire, but in 656 the Caliph Othman was murdered, and the civil war that ensued enabled the Christian Emperor, Constans II, to negotiate peace. He had lost Tripoli, Syria, Egypt, and the greater part of Armenia to his foes, who had also succeeded in establishing a naval base in the Mediterranean that threatened the islands of Greece herself. In the north his borders were overrun by Bulgar and Slav tribes, while in Italy the Lombards maintained a perpetual struggle against his viceroy, the Exarch of Ravenna.

Constans himself spent six years in Italy, the greater part in campaigns against the Lombards. He even visited Rome, but earned hatred there as elsewhere by his ruthless pillage of the West for the benefit of the East. Thus the Pantheon was stripped of its golden tiles to enrich Constantinople, and the churches of South Italy robbed of their plate to pay for his wars. At last a conspiracy was formed against him, and while enjoying the baths at Syracuse one of his servants struck him on the head with a marble soap-box and fractured his skull. Constans had been a brave and resolute Emperor of considerable military ability. His son, Constantine ‘Pogonatus’, or ‘the bearded’, inherited his gifts and drove back the Mahometans from Constantinople with so great a loss of men and prestige that the Caliph promised to pay a large sum of money as tribute every year in return for peace.

Constantine ‘Pogonatus’ died when a comparatively young man and was succeeded by his son, Justinian II, a lad of seventeen, arrogant, cruel, and restless. Without any reason save ambition he picked a quarrel with the Moslem Caliph, marched a large army across his Eastern border, and, when he met with defeat, proceeded in his rage to execute his generals and soldiers, declaring that they had failed him. At home, in Constantinople, his ministers tortured the inhabitants in order to exact money for his treasury and filled the imperial dungeons with senators and men of rank suspected of disloyalty.

Such a state of affairs could not last; and the Emperor, who treated his friends as badly as his foes, was captured by one of his own generals, and, after having his nose cruelly slit, was exiled to the Crimea. Mutilation was supposed to be a final bar to the right of wearing the imperial crown; but Justinian II was the type of man to be ignored only when dead. After some years of brooding over his wrongs he fled from the Crimea and took refuge with the King of the Bulgars.

On his sea-journey a terrific storm arose that threatened to overwhelm both him and his crew. ‘My Lord,’ exclaimed one of his attendants, ‘I pray you make a vow to God that if He spare you, you also will spare your enemies.’ ‘May God sink this vessel here and now,’ retorted his master, ‘if I spare a single one of them that falls into my hands,’ and the words were an ill omen for his reign, that began once more in 705 when, with the aid of Bulgar troops and of treachery within the capital, Justinian II established himself once more in Constantinople.

During six years the Empire suffered his tyranny anew; and those who had previously helped to dethrone him were hunted down, tortured, and put to death. Like Nero of old he burned alive his political enemies, or he would order the nobles of his court who had offended him to be sewn up in sacks and thrown into the sea. At last another rebellion brought a final end to his reign, and that of the house of Heraclius, for both he and his young son were murdered, and the Eastern Empire given up to anarchy.

Leo the Isaurian

The man who did most to save Constantinople from the next Mahometan invasion was one of the military governors of the Empire called Leo the Isaurian. Conscious of his own ability he took advantage of his first successes to seize the imperial crown; and then, having heard that the Mahometan fleet was moored off the shores of Asia Minor, he secretly sent a squadron of his own vessels that set the enemy’s ships on fire. In the panic that ensued more than half the Arabian ships were sunk. About the same time a Mahometan land force was also defeated by the King of the Bulgars, who had allied himself with the Emperor on account of their mutual dread of an Eastern invasion. The result of these combined Christian victories was that the Caliph Moslemah, whose main forces were encamped beneath the walls of Constantinople, grew alarmed lest he should be cut off from support and provisions. He therefore raised the siege, embarked his army in what remained of his fleet, and retreated to his own kingdom, leaving the Christian capital free from acute danger from the East for another three hundred years.

Elsewhere the Mahometans pursued their triumphant progress with little check. After the fall of Carthage in 697 North Africa lay almost undefended before them; and the half-savage tribes such as the Berbers, who lived on the borders of the desert, welcomed the new faith with its mission of conversion by the sword and prospects of plunder.

It was the Berbers who at the invitation, according to tradition, of a treacherous Spanish Governor, Count Julian, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and descended on the plains of Andalusia.

Spain, when the power of the Roman Empire snapped, had been invaded first by Vandals and then by Visigoths. The Vandals, as we have seen,[2] passed on to Africa, while the Visigoths, like the Lombards in Italy, became converted to Christianity, and, falling under the influence of the civilization and luxury they saw around them, gradually adapted their government, laws, and way of life to the system and ideals of those whom they had conquered. Thus their famous Lex Visigothorum, or ‘Law of the Visigoths’, was in reality the Roman code remodelled to suit the German settlers.

In this new land the descendants of the once warlike Teutons acquired an indifference to the arts of war, and when their King Rodrigo had been killed at the disastrous battle of Guadelete and his army overthrown, they made little further resistance to the Saracen hordes except in the far northern mountains of the Asturias. From France we have seen[3] the Mahometans were beaten back by Charles Martel, and here, established in Spain and on the borders of the Eastern Empire, we must leave their fortunes for the time. If Mahomet’s life is short and can be quickly told the story of how his followers attempted to establish their rule over Christendom is nothing else than the history of the foreign policy of Europe during mediaeval times.

VIII
CHARLEMAGNE

Just before his death Pepin the Short had divided his lands between his two sons, Charles, who was about twenty-six, and Carloman, a youth some years younger. As they had no affection for each other, this division did not work well. Carloman gave little promise of statesmanlike qualities: he was peevish and jealous, and easily persuaded by the nobles who surrounded him that his elder brother was a rival who intended to rob him of his possessions, it might be of his life. There seems to have been no ground for this suspicion; but nevertheless he spent his days in trying to hinder whatever schemes Charles proposed; and when he died, three years later, there was a general breath of relief.

Enumerating the blessings that Heaven had bestowed on Charlemagne, a monk, writing to the King about this time, completed his list with the candid statement: ‘the fifth and not least that God has removed your brother from this earthly kingdom’.

Charlemagne was exactly the kind of person to seize the fancy of the early Middle Ages. Tall and well built, with an eagle nose and eyes that flashed like a lion when he was angry so that none dared to meet their gaze, he excelled all his court in strength, energy, and skill. He could straighten out with his fingers four horseshoes locked together, lift a warrior fully equipped for battle to the level of his shoulder, and fell a horse and its rider with a single blow.

It was his delight to keep up old national customs and to wear the Frankish dress with its linen tunic, cross-gartered leggings, and long mantle reaching to the feet. ‘What is the use of these rags?’ he once inquired contemptuously of his courtiers, pointing to their short cloaks—‘Will they cover me in bed, or shield me from the wind and rain when I ride abroad?’

The EMPIRE of
CHARLEMAGNE

This criticism was characteristic of the King. Intent on a multitude of schemes for the extension or improvement of his lands, and so eager to realize them that he would start on fresh ones when still heavily encumbered with the old, he was yet, for all his enthusiasm, no vague dreamer but a level-headed man looking questions in the face and demanding a practical answer.

The Chanson de Roland

By the irony of fate it is the least practical and important task he undertook that has made his name world-famous; for the story of Charlemagne and his Paladins, told in that greatest of mediaeval epics, the Chanson de Roland, exceeds to-day in popularity even the exploits of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. This much is history—that Charlemagne, invited secretly by some discontented Emirs to invade Spain and attack the Caliph of Cordova, crossed the Pyrenees, and, after reducing several towns successfully, was forced to retreat. On his way back across the mountains his rearguard was cut off by Gascon mountaineers, and slaughtered almost to a man; while he and the rest of his army escaped with difficulty.

On this meagre and rather inglorious foundation poets of the eleventh century based a cycle of romance. Charlemagne is the central figure, but round him are grouped numerous ‘Paladins’, or famous knights, including the inseparable friends Oliver and Roland, Warden of the Breton Marches. After numerous deeds of glory in the land of Spain, the King, it was said, was forced by treachery to turn back towards the French mountains, and had already passed the summits, when Roland, in charge of the rearguard, found himself entrapped in the Pass of Roncesvalles by a large force of Gascons. His horn was slung at his side but he disdained to summon help from those in the van, and drawing his good sword ‘Durenda’ laid about him valiantly.

The Gascons fell back, dismayed by the vigorous resistance of the French; but thirty thousand Saracens came to their aid, and the odds were now overwhelming. Oliver lay dead, and, covered with wounds, Roland fell to the ground also, but first of all he broke ‘Durenda’ in half that none save he might use this peerless blade. Putting his horn to his lips, with his dying breath he sounded a blast that was heard by Charlemagne in his camp more than eight miles away. ‘Surely that is the horn of Roland?’ cried the King uneasily, but treacherous courtiers explained away the sound; and it was not till a breathless messenger came with the news of the reverse that he hastened towards the scene of battle. There in the pass, stretched on the ground amid the heaped-up bodies of their enemies, he found his Paladins—Roland with his arms spread in the form of a cross, his broken sword beside him: and seeing him the King fell on his knees weeping. ‘Oh, right arm of thy Sovereign’s body, Honour of the Franks, Sword of Justice.... Why did I leave thee here to perish? How can I behold thee dead and not die with thee?’ At last, restraining his grief, Charlemagne gathered his forces together; and the very sun, we are told, stood still to watch his terrible vengeance on Gascons and Saracens for the slaughter of Christians at Roncesvalles.

The Chanson de Roland is one of the masterpieces of French literature. It is not history, but in its fiction lies a substantial germ of truth. Charlemagne in the early ninth century was what poets described him more than two hundred years later—the central figure in Christendom, the recognized champion of the Cross whether against Mahometans or pagans. ‘Through your prosperity’, wrote Alcuin, an Anglo-Saxon monk and scholar who lived at his court, ‘Christendom is preserved, the Catholic Faith defended, the law of justice made known to all men.’

Invasion of Lombardy

When the Popes sought help against the Lombards, it was to Charlemagne as to his father Pepin that they naturally turned. Charlemagne had hoped at the beginning of his reign to maintain a friendship with King Didier of Lombardy and had even married his daughter, an alliance that roused the Pope of that date to demand in somewhat violent language: ‘Do you not know that all the children of the Lombards are lepers, that the race is outcast from the family of nations? For these there is neither part nor lot in the Heavenly Kingdom. May they broil with the devil and his angels in everlasting fire!’

Charlemagne went his own way, in spite of papal denunciations; but he soon tired of his bride, who was plain and feeble in health, and divorced her that he might marry a beautiful German princess. This was, of course, a direct insult to King Didier, who henceforth regarded the Frankish king as his enemy; and Rome took care that the gulf once made between the sovereigns should not be bridged.

In papal eyes the Lombards had really become accursed. It is true that they had been since the days of Gregory the Great orthodox Catholics, that their churches were some of the most beautiful in Italy, their monasteries the most famous for learning, and Pavia, their capital, a centre for students and men of letters. Their sin did not lie in heretical views, but in the position of their kingdom that now included not only modern Lombardy in the north, but also the Duchy of Spoletum in South Italy. Between stretched the papal dominions like a broad wall from Ravenna to the Western Mediterranean; and on either side the Lombards chafed, trying to annex a piece of land here or a city there, while the Popes watched them, lynx-eyed, eager on their part to dispossess such dangerous neighbours, but unable to do so without assistance from beyond the Alps.

Soon after the death of his younger brother Charlemagne was persuaded to take up the papal cause and invade Italy. At Geneva, where he held the ‘Mayfield’ or annual military review of his troops, he laid the object of his campaign before them, and was answered by their shouts of approval.

It was a formidable host, for the Franks expected every man who owned land in their dominions to appear at these gatherings prepared for war. The rich would be mounted, protected by mail shirts and iron headpieces, and armed with sword and dagger; the poor would come on foot, some with bows and arrows, others with lance and shield, and the humblest of all with merely scythes or wooden clubs. Tenants on the royal demesnes must bring with them all the free men on their estates; and while it was possible to obtain exemption the fine demanded was so heavy that few could pay it.

When the army set out in battle array, it was accompanied by numerous baggage-carts, lumbering wagons covered with leather awnings, that contained enough food for three months as well as extra clothes and weapons. It was the general hope that on the return journey the wagons would be filled to overflowing with the spoils of the conquered enemy.

The Lombards had ceased, with the growth of luxury and comfortable town life, to be warriors like the Franks; and Charlemagne met with almost as little resistance as Pepin in past campaigns. After a vain attempt to hold the Western passes of the Alps, Didier and his army fled to Pavia, where they fortified themselves, leaving the rest of the country at the mercy of the invaders.

Frankish chroniclers in later years drew a realistic picture of Didier, crouched in one of the high towers of the city, awaiting in trembling suspense the coming of the ‘terrible Charles’. Beside him stood Otger, a Frankish duke, who had been a follower of the dead Carloman and was therefore hostile to his elder brother. ‘Is Charles in that great host?’ demanded the King continually, as first the long line of baggage-wagons came winding across the plain, and then an army of the ‘common-folk’, and after them the bishops with their train of abbots and clerks. Every time his companion answered him, ‘No! not yet!’

‘Then Didier hated the light of day. He stammered and sobbed and said, “Let us go down and hide in the earth from so terrible a foe.” And Otger too was afraid; well he knew the might and the wrath of the peerless Charles; in his better days he had often been at court. And he said, “When you see the plain bristle with a harvest of spears, and rivers of black steel come pouring in upon your city walls, then you may look for the coming of Charles.” While he yet spoke a black cloud arose in the West and the glorious daylight was turned to darkness. The Emperor came on; a dawn of spears darker than night rose on the beleaguered city. King Charles, that man of iron, appeared; iron his helmet, iron his armguards, iron the corselet on his breast and shoulders. His left hand grasped an iron lance ... iron the spirit, iron the hue of his war steed. Before, behind, and at his side rode men arrayed in the same guise. Iron filled the plain and open spaces, iron points flashed back the sunlight. “There is the man whom you would see,” said Otger to the king; and so saying he swooned away, like one dead.’

In spite of this picture of Carolingian might, it took the Franks six months to reduce Pavia; and then Didier, at last surrendering, was sent to a monastery, while Charlemagne proclaimed himself king of the newly acquired territories. During the siege, leaving capable generals to conduct it, he himself had gone to Rome, where he was received with feasting and joy. Crowds of citizens came out to the gates to welcome him, carrying palms and olive-branches, and hailed him as ‘Patrician’ and ‘Defender of the Church’. Dismounting from his horse he passed on foot through the streets of Rome to the cathedral; and there, in the manner of the ordinary pilgrim, climbed the steps on his knees, until the Pope awaiting him at the top, raised and embraced him. From the choir arose the exultant shout, ‘Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.’

A few days later, once more standing in St. Peter’s, Charlemagne affixed his seal to the donation Pepin had given to the Church. The document was entered amongst the papal archives; but it has long since disappeared, and with it exact information as to the territories concerned.

Donation of Constantine

About this time the papal court produced another document, the so-called ‘Donation of Constantine’, in which the first of the Christian emperors apparently granted to the Popes the western half of the Roman Empire. Centuries later this was proved to be a forgery, but for a long while people accepted it as genuine, and the power of the Popes was greatly increased. We do not know how much Charles believed in papal supremacy in temporal matters; but throughout his reign his attitude to the Pope over Italian affairs was rather that of master to servant than the reverse. It was only when spiritual questions were under discussion that he was prepared to yield as if to a higher authority.

When he had reduced Pavia Charlemagne left Lombardy to be ruled by one of his sons and returned to France; but it was not very long before he was called back to Italy, as fresh trouble had arisen there. The cause was the unpopularity of Pope Leo III in Rome and the surrounding country, where turbulent nobles rebelled as often as they could against the papal government. One day, as Leo was riding through the city at the head of a religious procession, a band of armed men rushed out from a side street, separated him from his attendants, dragged him from his horse, and beat him mercilessly, leaving him half dead. It was even said that they put out his eyes and cut off his tongue, but that these were later restored by a miracle.

Leo, at any rate, whole though shaken, succeeded in reaching Charlemagne’s presence, and the King was faced by the problem of going to Rome to restore order. Had it been merely a matter of exacting vengeance, he would have found little difficulty with his army of stalwart Franks behind him; but Leo’s enemies were not slow in bringing forward accusations against their victim that they claimed justified their assault. Charlemagne was thus in an awkward position, for he was too honest a ruler to refuse to hear both sides, and his respect for the papal office could not blind him to the possibility of evil in the acts of the person who held it, especially in the case of an ambitious statesman like Leo III.

He felt that it was his duty to sift the matter to the bottom; and yet by what law could the King of France or even of Italy put Christ’s vice-regent upon his trial and cross-examine him?

One way of dealing with this problem would have been to seek judgement at Constantinople as the seat of Empire, a final ‘appeal unto Caesar’ such as St. Paul had made in classical times: but, ever since Pepin the Short had given the Exarchate of Ravenna to the Pope instead of restoring it to Byzantine Emperors, relations with the East, never cordial, had grown more strained. Now they were at breaking point. The late Emperor, a mere boy, had been thrown into a dungeon and blinded by his mother, the Empress Irene, in order that she might usurp his throne; and the Western Empire recoiled from the idea of accepting such a woman as arbiter of their destinies.

Thus Charlemagne, forced to act on his own responsibility, examined the evidence laid before him and declared Leo innocent of the crimes of which he had been accused. In one sense it was a complete triumph for the Pope; but Leo was a clear-sighted statesman and knew that the power to which he had been restored rested on a weak foundation. The very fact that he had been compelled to appeal for justice to a temporal sovereign lowered the office that he held in the eyes of the world; and he possessed no guarantee that, once the Franks had left Rome, his enemies would not again attack him. Without a recognized champion, always ready to enforce her will, the Papacy remained at the mercy of those who chose to oppose or hinder her.

In the dramatic scene that took place in St. Peter’s Cathedral on Christmas Day, A.D. 800, Leo found a way out of his difficulties. Arrayed in gorgeous vestments, he said Mass before the High Altar, lit by a thousand candles hanging at the arched entrance to the chancel. In the half-gloom beyond knelt Charlemagne and his sons; and at the end of the service Leo, approaching them with a golden crown in his hands, placed it upon the King’s head. Instantly the congregation burst into the cry with which Roman emperors of old had been acclaimed at their accession. ‘To Charles Augustus, crowned of God, the great and pacific Emperor, long life and victory!’ ‘From that time’, says a Frankish chronicle, commenting on this scene, ‘there was no more a Roman Empire at Constantinople.’

Foundation of Western Empire

Leo had found his champion, and in anointing and crowning him had emphasized the dignity of his own office. He had also pleased the citizens of Rome, who rejoiced to have an Emperor again after the lapse of more than three centuries. Charlemagne alone was doubtful of the greatness that had been thrust upon him and accepted it with reluctance. He had troubles enough near home without embroiling himself with Constantinople; but as it turned out the Eastern Empire was too busy deposing the Empress Irene to object actively to its rejection in the West; and Irene’s successors agreed to acknowledge the imperial rank of their rival in return for the cession of certain coveted lands on the Eastern Adriatic.

Other sovereigns hastened to pay their respects to the new Emperor, and Charlemagne received several embassies in search of alliance from Haroun al-Raschid, the Caliph of Bagdad. Haroun al-Raschid ruled over a mighty empire stretching from Persia to Egypt, and thence along the North African coast to the Strait of Gibraltar. On one occasion he sent Charlemagne a present of a wonderful water-clock that, as it struck the hour of twelve, opened as many windows, through which armed horsemen rode forth and back again. Far more exciting in Western eyes was the unhappy elephant that for nine years remained the glory of the imperial court at Aachen. Its death, when they were about to lead it forth on an expedition against the northern tribes of Germany, is noted sadly in the national annals.

Rulers less fortunate than Haroun al-Raschid sought not so much the friendship of the Western Emperor as his protection, and through his influence exiled kings of Wessex and Northumberland were able to recover their thrones. Most significant tribute of all to the honour in which Charlemagne’s name was held was the petition of the Patriarch of Jerusalem that he would come and rescue Christ’s city from the infidel. The message was accompanied by a banner and the keys of the Holy Sepulchre; but Charlemagne, though deeply moved by such a call to the defence of Christendom, knew that the campaign was beyond his power and put it from him. Were there not infidels to be subdued within the boundaries of his own Empire, fierce Saxon tribes that year after year made mock both of the sovereignty of the Franks and their religion?

The Saxons lived amongst the ranges of low hills between the Rhine and the Elbe. By the end of the eighth century, when other Teutonic races such as the Franks and the Bavarians had yielded to the civilizing influence of Christianity, they still cherished their old beliefs in the gods of nature and offered sacrifices to spirits dwelling in groves and fountains. The chief object of their worship was a huge tree trunk that they kept hidden in the heart of a forest, their priests declaring that the whole Heavens rested upon it. This Irminsul, or ‘All-supporting pillar’, was the bond between one group of Saxons and another that led them to rally round their chiefs when any foreign army appeared on their soil; though, if at peace with the rest of the world, they would fight amongst themselves for sheer love of battle.

St. Boniface

A part of the Saxon race had settled in the island of Britain, when the Roman authority weakened at the break-up of the Empire; and amongst the descendants of these settlers were some Christian priests who determined to carry the Gospel to the heathen tribes of Germany, men and women of their own race but still living in spiritual darkness. The most famous of these missionaries was St. Winifrith, or St. Boniface according to the Latin version of his name that means, ‘He who brings peace.’

About the time that Charles Martel was Duke of the Franks Boniface arrived in Germany and began to travel from one part of the country to another, explaining the Gospel of Christ, and persuading those whom he converted to build churches and monasteries. When he went to Rome to give an account of his work the Pope made him a bishop and sent him to preach in the Duchy of Bavaria. Later, as his influence increased and he gathered disciples round him, he was able to found not only parish churches but bishoprics with a central archbishopric at Mainz; thus, long before Germany became a nation she possessed a Church with an organized government that belonged not to one but to all her provinces.

Only in the north and far east of Germany heathenism still held sway; and St. Boniface, after he had gone at the Pope’s wish to help the Franks reform their Church, determined to make one last effort to complete his missionary work in the land he had chosen as his own. He was now sixty-five, but nothing daunted by the hardships and dangers of the task before him he set off with a few disciples to Friesland and began to preach to the wild pagan tribes who lived there. Before he could gain a hearing, however, he was attacked, and, refusing to defend himself, was put to death.

Thus passed away ‘the Apostle of Germany’ and with him much of the kindliness of his message. Christianity was to come indeed to these northern tribes, but through violence and the sword rather than by the influence of a gentle life. Charlemagne had a sincere love of the Catholic Faith, whose champion he believed himself; but he considered that only folly and obstinacy could blind men’s eyes to the truth of Christianity, and he was determined to enforce its doctrines by the sword if necessary.

The Saxons, on the other hand, though if they were beaten in battle they might yield for a time and might promise to pay tribute to the Franks and build churches, remained heathens at heart. When an opportunity occurred, and they learned that the greater part of the Frankish army was in Italy or on the Spanish border, they would sally forth across their boundaries and drive out or kill the missionaries. Charlemagne knew that he could have no peace within his Empire until he had subdued the Saxons; but the task he had set himself was harder than he had imagined, and it was thirty-eight years before he could claim that he had succeeded.

Conquest of Saxon Tribes

‘The final conquest of the Saxons’, says Eginhard, a scholar who lived at Charlemagne’s court and wrote his life, ‘would have been accomplished sooner but for their treachery. It is hard to tell how often they broke faith, surrendering to the King and accepting his terms, and then breaking out into wild rebellion once more.’ Eginhard continues that Charlemagne’s method was never to allow a revolt to remain unpunished but to set out at once with an army and exact vengeance. On one of these campaigns he succeeded in reaching the forest where the sacred trunk Irminsul was kept and set fire to it and destroyed it; but the Saxons, though disheartened for the moment, soon rallied under the banner of a famous chief called Witikind. We know little of the latter except his undaunted courage that made him refuse for many years to submit to a foe so much stronger that he must obviously gain the final victory.

Charlemagne, exasperated by repeated opposition, used every means to forward his aim. Sometimes he would bribe separate chieftains to betray their side; but often he would employ methods of deliberate cruelty in order to strike terror into his foes. Four thousand five hundred Saxons who had started a rebellion were once cut off and captured by the Franks. They pleaded that Witikind, who had escaped into Denmark, had prompted them to act against their better judgement. ‘If Witikind is not here you must pay the penalty in his stead,’ returned the King relentlessly, and the whole number were put to the sword.

At different times he transplanted hundreds of Saxon households into the heart of France, and in the place of ‘this great multitude’, as the chronicle describes them, he established Frankish garrisons. He also sent missionaries to build churches in the conquered territories and compelled the inhabitants to become Christians.

Often the bishops and priests thus sent would have to fly before a sudden raid of heathen Saxons hiding in the neighbouring forests and marshes; and, lacking the courage of St. Boniface, a few would hesitate to return when the danger was suppressed. ‘What ought I to do?’ cried one of the most timid, appealing to Charlemagne. ‘In Christ’s name go back to thy diocese,’ was the stern answer.

While the King expected the same obedience and devotion from church officials as from the captains in his army, he took care that they should not lack his support in the work he had set them to do.

‘If any man among the Saxons, being not yet baptized, shall hide himself and refuse to come to baptism, let him die the death.’

‘If any man despise the Lenten fast for contempt of Christianity, let him die the death.’

‘Let all men, whether nobles, free, or serfs, give to the Churches and the priests the tenth part of their substance and labour.’

These ‘capitularies’, or laws, show that Charlemagne was still half a barbarian at heart and matched pagan savagery with a severity more ruthless because it was more calculating. In the end Witikind himself, in spite of his courage, was forced to surrender and accept baptism, and gradually the whole of Saxony fell under the Frankish yoke.

The Duchy of Bavaria, that had been Christian for many years, did not offer nearly so stubborn a resistance; and after he had reduced both it and Saxony to submission, Charlemagne was ruler not merely in name but in reality of an Empire that included France, the modern Holland and Belgium, Germany, and the greater part of Italy. Some of the conquests he had made were to fall away, but Germany that had suffered most at his hands emerged in the end the greatest achievement of his foreign wars.

He swept away the black deceitful night
And taught our race to know the only light,

wrote a Saxon monk of the ninth century, showing that already some of the bitterness had vanished. ‘In a few generations’, says a modern writer, ‘the Saxons were conspicuous for their loyalty to the Faith.’

No story of Charlemagne would be true to life that omitted his harsh dealings with his Saxon foe; and yet it would be equally unfair to paint him only as a warrior, mercilessly exterminating all who opposed him in barbaric fashion. Far more than a conqueror he was an empire-builder to whom war was not an end in itself, as to his Frankish forefathers, but a means towards the safeguarding of his realm.

The forts and outworks that he planted along his boundaries, the churches that he built in the midst of hostile territory, belonged indeed to his policy of inspiring terror and awe: but Charlemagne had also other designs only in part of a military nature. Roads and bridges that should make a network of communication across the Empire, acting like channels of civilization in assisting transport and encouraging trade and intercourse: royal palaces that should become centres of justice for the surrounding country: monasteries that should shed the light of knowledge and of faith: all these formed part of his dream of a Roman Empire brought back to her old stately life and power.

A canal joining the Rhine and Danube and thus making a continuous waterway between East and West was planned and even begun, but had to wait till modern times for its completion. Charlemagne possessed the vision and enterprise that did not quail before big undertakings, but he lacked the money and labour necessary for carrying them out. Unlike the Roman Emperors of classic times he had no treasury on whose taxes he could draw; but depended, save for certain rents, on the revenues of his private estates that were usually paid ‘in kind’, that is to say, not in coin but at the rate of so many head of cattle, or of so much milk, corn, or barley, according to the means of the tenant. Of these supplies he kept a careful account even to the number of hens on the royal farms and the quantity of eggs that they laid. Yet at their greatest extent revenues ‘in kind’ could do little more than satisfy the daily needs of the palace.

The chief debt that the Frankish nation owed to the state was not financial but military, the obligation of service in the field laid on every freeman. As the Empire increased in size this became so irksome that the system was somewhat modified. In future men who possessed less than a certain quantity of land might join together and pay one or two of their number, according to the size of their joint properties, to represent them in the army abroad, while the rest remained at home to see to the cultivation of the crops.

Court of Charlemagne

Charlemagne was very anxious to raise a body of labourers from each district to assist in his building schemes, but this suggestion awoke a storm of indignation. Landowners maintained that they were only required by law to repair the roads and bridges in their own neighbourhood, not to put their tenants at the disposal of the Emperor that he might send them at his whim from Aquitaine to Bavaria, or from Austria to Lombardy; and in face of this opposition many of his designs ceased abruptly from lack of labour. A royal palace and cathedral, adorned with columns and mosaics from Ravenna, were, however, completed at Aachen; and here Charlemagne established his principal residence and gathered his court round him.

The life of this ‘new Rome’, as he loved to call it, was simple in the extreme; for the Emperor, like a true Frank, hated unnecessary ostentation and ceremony. When the chief nobles and officials assembled twice a year in the spring and autumn to debate on public matters, he would receive them in person, thanking them for the gifts they had brought him, and walking up and down amongst them to jest with one and ask questions of another with an informality that would have scandalized the court at Constantinople.

In this easy intercourse between sovereign and subject lay the secret of Charlemagne’s personal magnetism. To warriors and churchmen as to officials and the ordinary freemen of his demesnes he was not some far-removed authority, who could be approached only through a maze of court intrigue, but a man like themselves with virtues and failings they could understand.

If his temper was hasty and terrible when roused, it would soon melt away into a genial humour that appreciated to the full the rough practical jokes in which the age delighted. The chronicles tell us with much satisfaction how Charlemagne once persuaded a Jew to offer a ‘vainglorious bishop ever fond of vanities’ a painted mouse that he pretended he had brought back straight from Judea. The bishop at first declined to give more than £3 for such a treasure; but, deceived by the Jew’s prompt refusal to part with it for so paltry a sum, consented at length to hand over a bushel of silver in exchange. The Emperor, hearing this, gathered the rest of the bishops at his court together—‘See what one of you has paid for a mouse!’ he exclaimed gleefully; and we may be sure that the story did not stop at the royal presence but spread throughout the country, where haughty ecclesiastics were looked on with little favour.

We are told also that Charlemagne loved to bombard the people he met, from the Pope downwards, with difficult questions; but it was not merely a malicious desire to bring them to confusion that prompted his inquiries. Alert himself, and keenly interested in whatever business he had in hand, he despised slipshod or inefficient knowledge. He expected a bishop to be an authority on theology, an official to be an expert on methods of government, a scholar to be well grounded in the ordinary sciences of his day.

Hard work was the surest road to his favour, and he spared neither himself nor those who entered his service. Even at night he would place writing materials beneath his pillow that if he woke or thought of anything it might be noted down. On one occasion he visited the palace school that he had founded, and discovered that while the boys of humble birth were making the most of their opportunities, the sons of the nobles, despising book-learning, had frittered away their time. Commending those who had done well, the Emperor turned to the others with an angry frown. ‘Relying on your birth and wealth,’ he exclaimed, ‘and caring nothing for our commands and your own improvement, you have neglected the study of letters and have indulged yourselves in pleasures and idleness.... By the King of Heaven I care little for your noble birth.... Know this, unless straightway you make up for your former negligence by earnest study, you need never expect any favour from the hand of Charles.’

Government of Charlemagne

It was with the wealthy nobles and landowners that Charlemagne fought some of his hardest battles, though no sword was drawn or open war declared. Not only were most of the high offices at court in their hands, but it was from their ranks that the counts, and later the viscounts, were chosen who ruled over the districts into which the Empire was divided and subdivided.

The count received a third of the gifts and rents from his province that would have otherwise been paid to the King; and these, if he were unscrupulous, he could increase at the expense of those he governed. He presided in the local law-courts and was responsible for the administration of justice, the exaction of fines, and for the building of roads and bridges. He was in fact a petty king, and would often tyrannize over the people and neglect the royal interests to forward his selfish ambitions.

The Merovingians had tried to limit the authority of the counts and other provincial officials by occasionally sending private agents of their own to inquire into the state of the provinces and to reform the abuses that they found. Charlemagne adopted this practice as a regular system; and at the annual assemblies he appointed Missi, or ‘messengers’, who should make a tour of inspection in the district to which they had been sent at least four times in the year and afterwards report on their progress to the Emperor. Wherever they went the count or viscount must yield up his authority to them for the time being, allowing them to sit in his court and hear all the grievances and complaints that the men and women of the district cared to bring forward. If the Missi insisted on certain reforms the count must carry them out and also make atonement for any charges proved against him.

Here are some of the evils that the men of Istria, a province on the Eastern Adriatic, suffered at the hands of their lord, ‘Johannes’, and that the inquiries of the royal Missi at length brought to light. Johannes had sold the people on his estates as serfs to his sons and daughters: he had forced them to build houses for his family and to go voyages on his business across the sea to Venice and Ravenna: he had seized the common land and used it as his own, bringing in Slavs from across the border to till it for his private use: he had robbed his tenants of their horses and their money on the plea of the Emperor’s service and had given them nothing in exchange. ‘If the Emperor will help us,’ they cried, ‘we may be saved, but if not we had better die than live.’

From this account we can see that Charlemagne appeared to the mass of his subjects as their champion against the tyranny of the nobles, and in this sense his government may be called popular; but the old ‘popular’ assemblies of the Franks at which the laws were made had ceased by this reign to be anything but aristocratic gatherings summoned to approve of the measures laid before them.

The Emperor’s ‘capitularies’ would be based on the advice he had received from his most trusted Missi; and when they had been discussed by the principal nobles, they would be read to the general assembly and ratified by a formal acceptance that meant nothing, because it rarely or never was changed into a refusal.

Besides introducing new legislation in the form of royal edicts or capitularies, Charlemagne commanded that a collection should be made of all the old tribal laws, such as the Salic Law of the Franks, and of the chief codes that had been handed down by tradition, or word of mouth, for generations; and this compilation was revised and brought up to date. It was a very useful and necessary piece of work, yet Charlemagne for all his industry does not deserve to be ranked as a great lawgiver like Justinian. The very earnestness of his desire to secure immediate justice made his capitularies hasty and inadequate. He would not wait to trace some evil to its root and then try to eradicate it, but would pass a number of laws on the matter, only touching the surface of what was wrong and creating confusion by the multiplicity of instructions and the contradictions they contained.

Sometimes the Missi themselves were not a success, but would take bribes from the rich landowners on their tour of inspection, and this would mean more government machinery and fresh laws to bring them under the royal control in their turn. If it was difficult to make wise laws, it was even harder in that rough age to carry them out; for the nobles found it to their interest to defy or at least hinder an authority that struck at their power; while the mass of the people were too ignorant to bear responsibility, and few save those educated in the palace schools could become trustworthy ‘counts’ or royal agents.

Dimly, however, the nation understood that the Emperor held some high ideal of government planned for their prosperity, ‘No one cried out to him’, says the chronicle, ‘but straightway he should have good justice’: and in every church throughout France those who had not been called to follow him to battle prayed for his safety and that God would subdue the barbarians before his triumphant arms.

To Charlemagne there was a higher vision than that of mere victory in battle, a vision born of his favourite book, the Civitas Dei, wherein St. Augustine had described the perfect Emperor, holding his sceptre as a gift God had given and might take away, and conquering his enemies that he might lead them to a greater knowledge and prosperity.

Charlemagne and the Church

Charlemagne believed that to him had been entrusted the guardianship of the Catholic Church, not only from the heathen without its pale, but from false doctrine and evil living within. To the Pope, as Christ’s vice-regent, he bore himself humbly, as on the day when he had climbed St. Peter’s steps on his knees, but to the Pope as a man dealing with other men he spoke as a lord to his vassal, tendering his views and expecting compliance, in return for which he guaranteed the support of his sword.

‘May the ruler of the Church be rightly ruled by thee, O King, and may’st thou be ruled by the right hand of the Almighty!’ In this prayer Alcuin probably expressed the Emperor’s opinion of his own position. Leo III, on the other hand, preferred to talk of his champion as a faithful son of the mother Church of Rome; thereby implying that the Emperor should pay a son’s duty of obedience: but he himself was never in a strong enough position to enforce this point of view, and the clash of Empire and Papacy was left for a later age.

Within his own dominions Charlemagne, like the Frankish kings before him, reigned supreme over the Church, appointing whom he would as bishops, and using them often as Missi to assist him in his government. Yet the Church remained an ‘estate’ apart from the rest of the nation, supported by the revenues of the large sees belonging to the different bishoprics and by the tithe, or tenth part of a layman’s income. When churchmen attended the annual assembly they were allowed to deliberate apart from the nobles and freemen: when a bishop excommunicated some heretic or sinner, the Emperor’s court was bound to enforce the sentence. Thus the privileges and rights were many; but Charlemagne determined that the men who enjoyed them must also fulfil the obligations that they carried with them.

In earlier years Charles Martel and St. Boniface had struggled hard to raise the character of the Frankish Church, and Charlemagne continued their task with his usual energy, insisting on frequent inspections of the monasteries and convents and on the maintenance of a stricter rule of life within their walls.

The ordinary parish clergy were also brought under more vigilant supervision. In accordance with the laws of the Roman Church they were not allowed to marry, nor might they take part in any worldly business, enter a tavern, carry arms, or go hunting or hawking. Above all they were encouraged to educate themselves that they might be able to teach their parishioners and set a good example.

‘Good works are better than knowledge’, wrote Charlemagne to his bishops and abbots in a letter of advice, ‘but without knowledge good works are impossible.’ In accordance with this view he commanded that a school should be established in every diocese, in order that the boys of the neighbourhood might receive a grounding in the ordinary education of their day. His own court became a centre of learning; for he himself was keenly interested in all branches of knowledge, from a close study of the Scriptures to mathematics or tales of distant lands. Histories he liked to have read out to him at meals. Eginhard, his biographer, tells us that he never learned to write, but that he was proficient in Latin and could understand Greek.

It was his desire to emulate Augustus, the first of the Roman Emperors, and gather round him the most literary men of Europe, and he eagerly welcomed foreign scholars and took them into his service. Chief amongst these adopted sons of the Empire was Alcuin the Northumbrian, a ‘wanderer on the face of the earth’ as he called himself, whom Danish invasions had driven from his native land.

Alcuin settled at the Frankish court, organized the ‘palace school’ of which we have already made mention, and himself wrote the primers from which the boys were taught. His influence soon extended beyond this sphere, and he became the Emperor’s chief adviser, inspiring his master with high ideals, while he himself was stirred by the other’s vivid personality to share his passion for hard work.

Character of Charlemagne

It is this almost volcanic energy that gives the force and charm to Charlemagne’s many-sided character. We think of him first, it may be, as the warrior, the hero of romance, or else as a statesman planning his Empire of the West. At another time we see in him the guardian of his people, the king who ‘wills that justice should be done’, but we recall a story such as that of the painted mouse, and instantly his simple, almost schoolboy, side becomes apparent. The ‘Great Charles’ was no saint but a Frank of the rough type of soldiers he led to battle, capable of cruelty as of kindness, hot-tempered, a lover of sport, strong perhaps where his ideals were at stake, but weak towards women, and an over-indulgent father, who let the intrigues of his daughters bring scandal on his court. Yet another contrast to this homely figure is the scholar and theologian, the friend of Alcuin, who believed that without knowledge good works were impossible.

Many famous characters in history have equalled or surpassed Charlemagne as general, statesman, or legislator—there have been better scholars and more refined princes—but few or none have followed such divers aims and achieved by the sheer force of their personality such memorable results. Painters and chroniclers love to depict him in old age still majestic; and in truth up till nearly the end of his long reign he kept the fire and vigour of his youth, swimming like a boy in the baths of Aachen, or hunting the wild boar upon the hills, drawing up capitularies, or dictating advice to his bishops, doing, in fact, whatever came to hand with an intensity that would have exhausted any one less healthy and self-reliant.

Fortunately for Charlemagne he had the sturdy constitution of his race, and when at last he died an old man in 814 people believed that he did not share the common fate of humanity. Nearly two hundred years later, it was said, when the funeral vault was opened, he was found seated in his chair of state, firm of flesh as in life, with his crown on his snowy hair, and his sword clasped in his hand.

‘Our Lord gave this boon to Charlemagne that men should speak of him as long as the world endureth.’ It is a boast that as centuries pass, sweeping away the memory of lesser heroes, time still justifies.

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. [368–73].

Charlemagne, King of the Franks		768–800
Charlemagne, Emperor of the West		800–14
Battle of Roncesvalles		778
Invasion of Lombardy		773
Haroun al-Raschid	died	809
St. Boniface		715

IX
THE INVASIONS OF THE NORTHMEN

At the death of Charlemagne the Empire that he had built up stretched from Denmark to the Pyrenees and the Duchy of Spoletum south of Rome, from the Atlantic on the West to the Baltic, Bohemia, and the Dalmatian coast. It had been a brave attempt to realize the old Roman ideal of all civilized Europe gathered under one ruler; but he himself was well aware that the foundations he had laid were weak, his own personality that must vanish the mortar holding them together. Without his genius and the terror of his name his possessions were only too likely to fall away; and therefore, instead of attempting to leave a united Empire, he nominated one son to be emperor in name, but made a rough division of his territory between three. Only the death of two just before his own defeated his aims and united the inheritance under the survivor, Louis.

The new Emperor was like his father in build, but without his wideness of outlook. His natural geniality was sometimes marred by uncontrollable fits of suspicion and cruelty, as in the case of his nephew, Bernard, King of Italy, whom he believed to be secretly conspiring to bring about his overthrow. Louis ordered the young man to appear at his court, and when Bernard hesitated, fearing treachery, his uncle sent him a special promise of safety by the Empress, whom he trusted. Reluctantly Bernard at last obeyed the summons, whereupon he was seized, thrust into a dungeon, and his eyes put out so cruelly that he died. Shortly afterwards the Empress died also, and Louis who had loved her believed that God was punishing him for his broken word. Overcome by remorse he became so devout in his religious observances that his subjects called him ‘Louis the Pious’.

Louis, like his father, was ever ready to listen to the petitions of those who were oppressed and to pass laws for their security. For the first sixteen years of his reign the Carolingian dominions, put to no test, appeared unshaken, and then of a sudden, just as if a cloud were blotting out the sunlight, prosperity and peace were lost in the horrors of civil war.

Louis the Pious had three sons by his first wife, and following Charlemagne’s example he named the eldest, Lothar, as his successor in the Empire, while he divided his lands between the other two. It was only when he married again and another son, Charles, was born to him that trouble began. This fourth son was the old Emperor’s favourite, and Louis would gladly have left him a large kingdom; but such a gift he could only make now at the expense of the elder brothers, who hated the young boy as an interloper, and were determined that he should receive nothing to which they could lay a claim.

When Charles was six years old Louis insisted that the country now called Switzerland and part of modern Germany (Suabia) should be recognized as his inheritance; and on hearing this all three elder brothers, who had been secretly making disloyal plots, broke into open revolt.

The history of the next ten years is an ignominious chronicle of the Emperor’s weakness. Twice were he and his Empress imprisoned and insulted; and on each occasion, when the quarrels of his sons amongst themselves led to his release, he was induced to grant a weak forgiveness that led to further rebellion.

When Louis died in 840, the seeds of dissension were widely scattered; and those of his House who came after him openly showed that they cared for nothing save personal ambition. Lothar, the eldest, was proclaimed Emperor, and obtained as his share of the dominions a large middle kingdom stretching from the mouth of the Rhine to Italy, and including the two capitals of Aachen and Rome. To the East, in what is now Germany, reigned his brother Louis, to the West, in France, Charles ‘the Bald’, the hated younger brother who had succeeded at the last in obtaining a substantial inheritance.

Oath of Strasbourg

This division is interesting because it shows two of the nationalities of Europe already emerging from the imperial melting-pot. When the brothers Louis and Charles met at Strasbourg in 842 to confirm an alliance they had formed against Lothar, Charles and his followers took the oath in German, Louis and his nobles in the Romance tongue of which modern French is the descendant. This they did that the armies on both sides might clearly understand how their leaders had bound themselves, and the Oath of Strasbourg remains to-day as evidence of this new growth of nationality that had already acquired distinct national tongues.

The Partition of Verdun, signed shortly afterwards by all three brothers, acknowledged the division of the Empire into three parts, France on the West, Germany in the East, and between them the debatable kingdom of Lotharingia, that, dwindled during the Middle Ages and modern times into the province of Lorraine, has remained always a source of war and trouble.

It would be wearisome to trace in detail the history of the years that followed the Partition of Verdun. One historian has described it as ‘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 nephew.... There were rapid alterations in fortune, rapid changing of sides, there was universal distrust and universal reliance on falsehood or crime.’

In 881 Charles ‘the Fat’, son of Louis the German, of Strasbourg Oath fame, succeeded, owing to the deaths of his rival cousins and uncles, in uniting for a few years all the dominions of Charlemagne under his sceptre; but, weak and unhealthy, he was not the man to control so great possessions, and very shortly he was deposed and died in prison on an island in Lake Constance. With him faded away the last reflection of the Carolingian glory that had once dazzled the world. In France the descendants of Charles ‘the Bald’ carried on a precarious existence for several generations, despised and threatened by their own nobles, as the later Merovingians had been, and utterly unable to defend their land from the hostile invasions of Northmen, that, beginning in the eighth century, seemed likely during the ninth and tenth centuries to paralyse the civilization and trade of Europe as the inroads of Goths, Huns, and Vandals had broken up the Roman Empire.

The long ships of the Northmen had been seen off the French coasts even in the days of Charlemagne, and one of the chroniclers records how the wise king seeing them exclaimed, ‘These vessels bear no merchandise but cruel foes,’ and then continued, with prophetic grief, ‘Know ye why I weep? Truly I fear not that these will injure me; but I am deeply grieved that in my lifetime they should be so near a landing on these shores, and I am overwhelmed with sorrow as I look forward and see what evils they will bring upon my offspring and their people.’

The Northmen, we can guess from their name, came from the wild, often snow-bound, coasts of Scandinavia and Denmark. Few weaklings could survive in such a climate; and the race was tall, well built, and hardy, made up of men and women who despised the fireside and loved to feel the fresh sea-wind beating against their faces. Life to them was a perpetual struggle, but a struggle they had glorified into an ideal, until they had ceased to dread either its discomforts or dangers.

Here is a description of the three classes, thrall, churl, and noble, into which these tribes of Northmen, or ‘Vikings’, were divided.

‘Thrall was swarthy of skin, his hands wrinkled, his knuckles bent, his fingers thick, his face ugly, his back broad, his heels long. He began to put forth his strength binding bast, making loads, and bearing home faggots the weary day long. His children busied themselves with building fences, dunging ploughland, tending swine, herding goats, and digging peat.... Carl, or Churl, was red and ruddy, with rolling eyes, and took to breaking oxen, building ploughs, timbering houses, and making carts. Earl, the noble, had yellow hair, his cheeks were rosy, his eyes were keen as a young serpent’s. His occupation was shaping the shield, bending the bow, hurling the javelin, shaking the lance, riding horses, throwing dice, fencing and swimming. He began to wake war, to redden the field, and to fell the doomed.’

‘To wake war.’ This was the object of the Viking’s existence. His gods, ‘Odin’ and ‘Thor’, were battle heroes who struck one another in the flash of lightning and with the rumble of thunder as they moved their shields. Not for the man who lived long and comfortably and died at last in his bed were either the glory of this world or the joys of the next. The Scandinavian ‘Valhalla’ was no such ‘paradise’ as the faithful Moslems conceived, where, in sunlit gardens gay with fruit and flowers, he should rest from his labours, attended by ‘houris’, or maidens of celestial beauty. The Viking asked for no rest, only for unfailing strength and a foe to kill. In the halls of his paradise reigned perpetual battle all the day long, and, in the evening, feasts where the warrior, miraculously cured of his wounds, could boast of his prowess and rise again on the morrow to fresh deeds of heroic slaughter.

Northmen Raids

In their dragon-ships, the huge prows fashioned into the heads of fierce animals or monsters, the Viking ‘Earls’, weary of dicing and throwing the javelin at home, or exiled by their kings for some misdeeds, would sweep in fleets across the North Sea, some to explore Iceland and the far-off shores of Greenland and North America, some to burn the monasteries along the Irish coast, others to raid North Germany, France, or England. At first their only object was plunder, for unlike the Huns they did not despise the luxuries of civilization—only those who allowed its influence to make them ‘soft’. At a later date, when they met with little resistance, they began to build homes, and thus the east coast of England became settled with Danish colonies.

‘In this year’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, writing under the date 855, ‘the heathen men for the first time remained over winter in Sheppey.’

Alfred the Great

During the fifty years that followed it seemed as if the invaders might sweep away the Anglo-Saxons as completely as the ancestors of these Anglo-Saxons had exterminated the original British inhabitants and their Roman conquerors. That they failed was largely due to one of the most famous of English kings, Alfred ‘the Great’, a prince of the royal house of Wessex. Wessex was a province lying mainly to the south of the River Thames, and at Wantage in Berkshire in the year 849 Alfred was born, cradled in an atmosphere of war and danger. From boyhood he fought by the side of his brothers in a long campaign of which the very victories could not hold at bay the restless Danes. When Alfred succeeded to the throne he secured a temporary peace and began to build a fleet and reform his army; but in a few years his enemies broke across his boundaries once more, and he himself, overwhelmed by their numbers, was forced to take refuge in the marshes of Somerset. Here at Athelney he built a fort and, collecting round him the English warriors of the neighbouring counties, organized so strong a resistance that at last he inflicted a decisive defeat upon the Danish army. King Guthrum, his enemy, sued for peace and at the Treaty of Wedmore consented to become a Christian and to recognize Alfred as King of Wessex, while he himself retained the Danelaw to the north of the Thames.

This was the beginning of a new England, for from this time Alfred and his descendants, having secured the freedom of Wessex, set themselves to win back bit by bit the territory held by the Danes. First of all under Edward ‘the Elder’, Alfred’s son, the middle kingdom of Mercia was won back, and the Danes beyond its border agreed to recognize the King of Wessex as their overlord, while later other Wessex rulers overran Northumbria and the South of Scotland, so that by the middle of the tenth century it could be said that ‘England from the Forth to the Channel was under one ruler’.

The winning back of the Danelaw had not been merely a matter of hewing down Northmen, nor did Alfred earn his title of ‘the Great’ because he could wield a sword bravely and lead other men who could do the same. He was a successful general because in an age of wild fighting he recognized the value of discipline and training. In order to obtain the type of men he required he increased the number of ‘Thegns’, that is, of nobles whose duty it was to serve the King as horsemen, while he reorganized the ‘fyrd’ or local militia. Henceforth, instead of a large army of peasants, who must be sent to their homes every autumn to reap the harvest, he arranged for the maintenance of a small force that he could keep in the field as long as required. Its arms were to be supplied by fellow villagers released from the obligation to serve themselves on this condition.

Alfred, besides remodelling his army, set up fortresses along his borders, and constructed a fleet; and, because he believed that no great nation can be built on war alone, he made wise laws and appointed judges, like Charlemagne’s Missi, to see that they were carried out. He also founded schools and tried, by translating books himself and inviting scholars to his court, to teach the men around him the glories and interests of peace. Amongst the books that he chose to set before his people in the Anglo-Saxon tongue was one called Pastoral Care, by the Pope Gregory who had wished to go to England as a missionary, and The Consolations of Philosophy, written by Boethius in prison.[4]

‘I have desired,’ said Alfred the Great, summing up his ideal of life, ‘to leave to the men who come after me my memory in good works’; and English people to-day, descendants of both Anglo-Saxons and their Danish foes, remember with pride and affection this ‘Wise King’, this ‘Truth-teller’, this ‘England’s darling’, as he was called in his own day, who like Charlemagne believed in patriotism, justice, and knowledge. For three-quarters of a century after Alfred’s death his descendants kept alive something at any rate of this spirit of greatness, but in 978 there succeeded to the crown a boy of ten called Ethelred, who as he grew up earned for himself the nickname of ‘rede-less’ or ‘man without advice’.

It is only fair before condemning Ethelred’s conduct to point out the heavy difficulties with which he was faced; both the renewed Danish attacks on his shores, and also the jealousies and feuds of his own nobles, the Earls, or ‘Ealdormen’, who had carved out large estates for themselves that they ruled as petty kings. Even a statesman like Alfred would have needed all his strength and tact to unite these powerful subjects under one banner in order to lead them against the invaders. Ethelred proved himself weak and without any power of leadership. The policy for which he has been chiefly remembered is his levy of a tax called ‘Danegeld’, or Danish gold, the sums of money that he raised from his reluctant subjects to pay the Danes to go away. As a wiser man would have realized, this really meant that he paid them to return in still larger numbers in order to obtain more money. At last, alarmed at the result of this policy, he did something still more short-sighted and less defensible: he ordered a general massacre of all the Danes in the kingdom.

The Massacre of St. Brice’s Day, as this drastic measure is usually called, brought on England a bitter revenge at the hands of the angry Vikings. One well-armed force after another landed on the coasts, combining in an attack on the Anglo-Saxon King that drove him from the country to seek refuge in France. Very shortly afterwards he died, and Cnut, one of the Danish leaders, forced the country to accept him as her ruler.

This accession of a Danish foe might have been expected to undo all the work of Alfred and his sons, but fortunately for England Cnut was no reckless Viking with his heart set on war for war’s sake. On the contrary, he was by nature a statesman who planned the foundation of a northern Empire with England as its central point. He maintained a bodyguard of Danish ‘Hus carls’ supported by a tax levied on his new subjects in order to ensure his personal safety and the fulfilment of his orders, but otherwise he showed himself an Englishman in every way he could. In especial he made large gifts to monasteries and convents, bestowed favour and lands on English nobles, and accepted the laws and customs of the country whose throne he had usurped. King of Denmark, and conqueror of England and Norway, he was anxious to ally his Empire with the nations of the Continent. With this in view he went on a pilgrimage to Rome to win the sympathy of the Pope and took a great deal of trouble to arrange foreign alliances. He himself married Emma, widow of Ethelred ‘the Rede-less’, and a sister of the Duke of Normandy, thus pleasing the English and bringing himself into touch with France.

The mention of Normandy brings us to a second invasion of Northmen, for the Normans, like Cnut himself, were of Scandinavian origin. When some of the Vikings during the ninth century had sailed up the Humber and the Thames in the search of plunder and homes, others, as Charlemagne, according to the chronicler, had foreseen, preferred the harbours of the Seine, the Somme, and the Loire. In their methods they showed the same reckless daring and brutality as the early invaders of England, leaving where they passed smoking ruins of towns and churches.

Charles ‘the Bald’ and the feeble remnant of the Carolingian line who succeeded him were quite unable to deal with this terror, and it was only the creation of a Duchy of Paris, whose forces were commanded by a fighting hero, Odo Capet, that saved the future capital of France.

‘History repeats itself,’ it is sometimes said; and certainly the fate that the Carolingian ‘Mayors of the Palace’ had meted out to their Merovingian kings their own descendants were destined to receive again in full measure.

In 987 died Louis ‘the Good-for-nothing’, the last of the Carolingian kings, leaving as heir to the throne an uncle, Charles, Duke of Lorraine. In his short reign Louis had shown himself feeble and profligate; and the nobles of northern France, weary of a royal House that like Ethelred of England preferred bribing the goodwill of invaders to fighting them, readily agreed to set Charles on one side and to take in his place Hugh Capet, Duke of Paris, descendant of the famous Odo.

‘Our crown goes not by inheritance,’ exclaimed the Archbishop of Reims, when sanctioning the usurper’s claims, ‘but by wisdom and noble blood.’

The House of Capet

The unfortunate Duke of Lorraine, captured after a vain attempt to gain his inheritance, perished in prison, and with him disappeared the Carolingians. The House of Capet, built on their ruin, survived in the direct line until the fourteenth century, and then in a younger branch, the Valois, until France in modern times was declared a republic.

Under the Capets France became not merely a collection of tribes and races as under the Merovingians, nor a section of a European Empire as under the House of Charlemagne, but a nation as we see her to-day, with separate interests and customs to distinguish her from other nations. This process of fusion was slow, and King Hugh and his immediate successors appeared in their own day more as powerful rulers of the small district in which they lived than as overlords of France. When they marched abroad at the head of a large army, achieving victories, outlying provinces hastily recognized them as suzerains, or overlords, but when they turned their backs and went home, the commands they had issued would be ignored and defied.

Amongst the most formidable neighbours of these rulers of Paris were the Dukes of Normandy, descendants of a certain Viking chief, Rollo ‘the Ganger’, so called because on account of his size he could find no horse capable of bearing him and must therefore ‘gang afoot’. This Rollo established himself at Rouen, and because Charles ‘the Simple’, one of the later Carolingians,[5] was unable to defeat him in battle he gave him instead the lands which he had won, and created him Duke, hoping that like a poacher turned gamekeeper he might prove as valuable a subject as he had been a troublesome foe. In return Rollo promised to become a Christian and to acknowledge Charles as his overlord. One of the old chronicles says that when Rollo was asked to ratify this allegiance by kissing his toe, the Viking replied indignantly, ‘Not so, by God!’ and that a Dane who consented to do so in his place was so rough that he tumbled Charles from his throne amid the jeers of his companions.

This is probably only a tale, for in reality Rollo married a daughter of Charles and settled down in his capital at Rouen as the model ruler of a semi-civilized state, supporting the Church, and administering such law and order that it was said when he left a massive bracelet hanging on a tree and forgot he had done so, that the ornament remained for three years without any one daring to steal it.

William the Conqueror

The rulers of the new Duchy were nearly all strong men, hard fighters, shrewd-headed, and ambitious; but the greatest of the line was undoubtedly William, an illegitimate son of Duke Robert ‘the Devil’. William’s ambition was of the restless type of his Scandinavian forefathers, and his duchy in northern France seemed to him too small to match his hopes. When he noted that England was ruled by Edward ‘the Confessor’, a feeble son of Ethelred ‘the Rede-less’, who had gained the throne on the death of Cnut’s two sons, he determined shrewdly that his conquests should lie in this direction. Many things favoured his cause, not the least that Edward the Confessor himself, who had been brought up in Normandy and who had no direct heirs, was quite willing to acknowledge William as his successor.

The national hero of England at the time Edward died, and who promptly proclaimed himself king, was Harold the Saxon, a member of the powerful family of Godwin that had for years controlled and owned the greater part of the land in the south.

Unfortunately for Harold the north and midlands were mainly governed by the House of Morkere and their friends, who hated the family of Godwin as dangerous rivals far more than they dreaded a Norman invasion. Thus any help that they or their tenants proffered was so slow in its rendering and so niggardly in its amount that it proved of very little use.

In addition to jealousies at home, Harold, at the moment that he heard William, Duke of Normandy, had indeed landed on the south coast, was far off in Yorkshire, where he had just succeeded in repelling an invasion of Danes at the battle of Stamford Bridge. At once he started southwards, but as he marched his army melted away, some of the men to enjoy the spoils taken from the Danes, others to attend to their harvests.

The deserters could claim that they were following the advice of the Father of Christendom, since Pope Gregory VII had given William a banner that he had blessed and had denounced Harold as a perjurer.

One of the reasons for Gregory’s anger with the Saxons was that Harold had dared to appoint as Archbishop of Canterbury a bishop of whom he did not approve, while further the crafty William had persuaded him that Harold, who as a young man had been wrecked upon the Norman coast, had sworn on the bones of some holy saint that he would never seize the crown of England. He had been a prisoner in William’s power and only on this condition had he been set free to return to his native land.

The exact truth of events so long ago is hard to reach; but Harold, at any rate, fought under a cloud of suspicion and neglect, and not all his reckless daring, nor the devotion of his brothers and friends, could save his fortunes when on the field of Senlac, standing beneath his dragon-banner, he met the shock of the disciplined Norman forces. Chroniclers relate that the human wall of Saxon archers and foot-soldiers remained unshaken on the hill-side until William, setting a snare, turned in pretended flight. The ruse was successful; for as the Saxons, cheering triumphantly, descended from their position in pursuit, the invaders faced round and charged their disordered ranks. Only Harold and the men of his bodyguard remained firm under the onslaught, until at the last an arrow fired in the air struck the Saxon King in the eye as he looked up, so that he fell down dead. All resistance was now at an end and William, Duke of Normandy, was left master of the field and ruler of England.

Here rose the dragon-banner of our realm:
Here fought, here fell, our Norman-slandered king.
O garden blossoming out of English blood!
O strange hate-healer Time! We stroll and stare
Where might made right eight hundred years ago.

These lines of Tennyson on ‘Battle Abbey’ recall the fact that just as the Danes and Saxons were fused into one race, so would the Norman invaders mingle with their descendants, until to after-generations William as well as Harold should appear a national hero.

Domesday Book

In his own day ‘the Conqueror’ struck terror into the heart of the conquered. In 1069, when the North of England, too late to help Harold, rose in revolt, he laid waste a desert by sword and fire from the Humber to the Tees. When the Norman barons and English earls challenged his rule he threw them alike into dungeons. What seemed to the Saxon mind even more wonderful and horrible than his cruelty was the record of all the wealth of his kingdom that he caused to be compiled. This ‘Domesday Book’ contained a close account not only of the great estates, lay and ecclesiastical, but of every small hamlet, and even of the number of live stock on each farm.

‘So very narrowly did he cause the survey to be made,’ says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘that there was not a single hide nor a rood of land, nor (it is shameful to relate that which he thought no shame to do) was there an ox, or a cow, or a pig, passed by that was not set down in the account.’

William, it can be seen, was thorough in his methods, both in war and peace, and through this very thoroughness he won the respect if not the affection of his new subjects. Ever since the death of Cnut the Dane, England had suffered either from actual civil war or from a weak ruler who allowed his nobles to quarrel and oppress the rest of the nation. As a result of the Norman Conquest the bulk of the population found that they had gained one tyrant instead of many; and how they appreciated the change is shown by the way, all through Norman times, the middle and lower classes would help their foreign king against his turbulent baronage.

This is what a monk, an Anglo-Saxon, and therefore by race an enemy of the Conqueror, wrote about him in his chronicle:

‘If any would know what manner of man King William was ... then will we describe him as we have known him.... This King William ... was a very wise and a great man, and more honoured and more powerful than any of his predecessors. He was mild to those good men who loved God, but severe beyond measure to those who withstood his will.... So also he was a very stern and wrathful man, so that none durst do anything against his will, and he kept in prison those Earls who acted against his pleasure. He removed bishops from their sees ... and at length he spared not his own brother Odo.

‘Amongst other things the good order that William established must not be forgotten; it was such that any man who was himself aught might travel over the kingdom with a bosom full of gold unmolested, and no man durst kill another, however great the injury he might have received from him.’

A few lines farther on the chronicler, having mentioned the peace that William gave, sadly relates the tyranny that was the price he extorted in exchange:

‘Truly there was much trouble in these times and very great distress; he caused castles to be built and oppressed the poor.... He was given to avarice and greedily loved gain. He made large forests for the deer, and enacted laws therewith, so that whoever killed a hart or a hind should be blinded ..., he loved the tall stags as if he were their father. He also appointed concerning the hares that they should go free. The rich complained and the poor murmured, but he was so sturdy that he recked nought of them; they must will all that the king willed if they would live.... Alas that any man should so exalt himself.... May Almighty God show mercy to his soul!’

The monk wrote after September 1087, when the Conqueror lay dead. Not in any Viking glory of battle against a national foe had he passed to his fathers, but in sordid struggle with his eldest son Robert who, aided by the French king, had rebelled against him. His crown was at once seized by his second son William Rufus, and with him the line of Norman kings was firmly established on the English throne.

The adventurous spirit of the Northmen had led them from Denmark and Scandinavia to the coasts of England and France; and from France their descendants, driven by the same roving instincts, had crossed the Channel in search of fresh conquests. Other Normans in the eleventh century sailed south instead of north. Their talk was of a pilgrimage to Rome, perhaps to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; but when they found that the beautiful island of Sicily had been taken by the Moslems, and that South Italy was divided up amongst a number of princes too jealous of one another to unite against any invaders either Christian or pagan, their thoughts turned quite naturally to conquest.

Norman Conquests in Italy

An Italian of this time describes the Normans as ‘cunning and revengeful’, and adds: ‘In their eager search for wealth and dominion they despise whatever they possess and hope whatever they desire.’ Such an impression was to be gained by bitter experience; but not knowing it, Maniaces, the Greek governor of that part of South Italy that still maintained its allegiance to the Eastern Empire, invited these Northern warriors in the eleventh century to help him win back Sicily from the Saracens. They agreed, attacked in force, gained the greater part of the island, but then quarrelled with Maniaces over the spoils. Outraged by what they considered his miserly conduct, they invaded the province of Apulia, made themselves master of it, and established their capital at Melfi.

The head of the new Norman state was a certain William de Hauteville, who with several of his brothers had been leaders in the Italian expedition.

‘No member of the House of Hauteville ever saw a neighbour’s lands without wanting them for himself.’ So says a biographer of that family; and if this was their ideal it was certainly shared by William and his numerous brothers. Since other people’s possessions were not surrendered without a struggle, even in the Middle Ages, it was fortunate for them that they had the genius to win and hold what they coveted.

Pope Leo IX, like his predecessors in the See of Peter ever since Charlemagne had confirmed their right to the lands of the Exarch of Ravenna,[6] looked uneasily on invaders of Italy, and he therefore attempted to form a league with both the Emperors of the East and West that should ruin these presumptuous usurpers. The league came into being, but the Pope’s allies failed him, and at the battle of Civitate he was defeated and all but taken prisoner.

Here was a chance for Norman diplomacy, or, as Italians would have called it, ‘cunning’, and the conquerors promptly declared that it had been with the utmost reluctance that they had made war on the Father of Christendom, and begged his forgiveness. His absolution was obtained, and a few years later, through the mediation of Hildebrand, then Archdeacon of Rome and later as Pope Gregory VII, one of the leading statesmen of Europe, a compact was arranged by which the Normans recognized Pope Nicholas II as their overlord, while he, on his part, acknowledged their right to keep their conquests. Both parties to this bargain were pleased: the Pope because he had gained a vassal state however unruly, the Normans since they felt that they no longer reigned on sufferance, but had a legal status in the eyes of Europe. Neither had any idea of the mine of trouble they were laying for future generations.

The fortunes of the House of Hauteville, thus established, mounted steadily. William died and was succeeded by a younger brother, Robert, nicknamed ‘Guiscard’ or ‘the Wise’. During his reign he forced both the Greek governor and the independent princes who held the rest of South Italy to surrender their possessions, while he even carried his war against the Eastern Empire to Greece itself. Only his death put an end to this daring campaign.

Robert Guiscard, as master of South Italy, had been created Duke of Apulia; his nephew, Roger II, Count of Sicily, who inherited his statecraft and strength, induced the Pope to magnify both mainland and island into a joint kingdom, and thereafter reigned as King of Naples. ‘He was a lover of justice’, says a chronicler of his day, ‘and a most severe avenger of crime. He hated lying ... and never promised what he did not mean to perform. He never persecuted his private enemies, and in war endeavoured on all occasions to gain his point without shedding blood. Justice and peace were universally observed through his dominions.’

Roger II of Naples was evidently a finer and more civilized character than William of England; but in both lay that Norman capacity for establishing and maintaining order that at first seems so strange an inheritance from wild Norse ancestors. Clear-sighted, iron-nerved, an adventurer with an instinct for business, the Norman of the Early Middle Ages was just the leaven that Europe required to raise her out of the indolent depression of the ‘Dark Ages’ that followed the fall of Rome.

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. [368–73].

The Emperor Lothar	840–55
Massacre of St. Brice’s Day	1002
William, Duke of Normandy	1035–87
William, King of England	1066–87
Edward the Confessor	1042–66
Domesday Book	1086
Pope Leo IX	1048–54
Battle of Civitate	1053
Pope Nicholas II	1058–61
Robert, Duke of Apulia	1060–85
Roger II, King of Naples	1130

EUROPE
IN THE MIDDLE AGES

PREFACE

CONTENTS

MAPS

I
THE GREATNESS OF ROME

II
THE DECLINE OF ROME

III
THE DAWN OF CHRISTIANITY

IV
CONSTANTINE THE GREAT

V
THE INVASIONS OF THE BARBARIANS

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. [368–73].

VI
THE RISE OF THE FRANKS

VII
MAHOMET

VIII
CHARLEMAGNE

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. [368–73].

IX
THE INVASIONS OF THE NORTHMEN

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. [368–73].

X
FEUDALISM AND MONASTICISM

EUROPEIN THE MIDDLE AGES

PREFACE

CONTENTS

MAPS

ITHE GREATNESS OF ROME

IITHE DECLINE OF ROME

IIITHE DAWN OF CHRISTIANITY

IVCONSTANTINE THE GREAT

VTHE INVASIONS OF THE BARBARIANS

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. [368–73].

VITHE RISE OF THE FRANKS

VIIMAHOMET

VIIICHARLEMAGNE

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. [368–73].

IXTHE INVASIONS OF THE NORTHMEN

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. [368–73].

XFEUDALISM AND MONASTICISM

EUROPE
IN THE MIDDLE AGES

I
THE GREATNESS OF ROME

II
THE DECLINE OF ROME

III
THE DAWN OF CHRISTIANITY

IV
CONSTANTINE THE GREAT

V
THE INVASIONS OF THE BARBARIANS

VI
THE RISE OF THE FRANKS

VII
MAHOMET

VIII
CHARLEMAGNE

IX
THE INVASIONS OF THE NORTHMEN

X
FEUDALISM AND MONASTICISM