Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III

by T. W. Allies

Chapter IX. The Making Of Christendom.

Among the events of history, as the historic mind would ponder them, or the judgments of God, as the Christian mind would interpret them, there are none greater than the two which for some time past I have been attempting to narrate or to contemplate. One is the wandering of the nations on the north of the great inland sea: the other is, the wandering of the nations on its south. Having reached the last year of the eighth century, we may cast a glance back upon both, and unite, if it may be, in a single picture the action upon both of a power which owed its institution only to the greatest fact of all facts concerning our race, the assumption of human nature, the soul and body of man, in His own Person, by the Creator of all things, the Son of God. That power existed only in virtue of certain words uttered and a certain will exercised, during His life upon earth. As the last of His thirty-three years was beginning, He had said to a man: Thou art the Rock, and upon this Rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. How far did the gates of hell advance upon the Church of God in [pg 470] the four hundred years which elapsed from the death of the great Theodosius?

When he closed his eyes in the year 395, the great empire of Augustus in the East and West was still intact. The fifth and the sixth centuries may be said to be filled by the fall of that empire in the West. I have required ten chapters to give even a slight account of the effects produced upon the Christian Church by the wandering of the northern nations to the time of St. Gregory the Great. But the seventh and eighth centuries are filled with the pouring out of the Mohammedan flood upon the Christian people, which had more or less remained after the wandering of the northern nations ended in their settlement. It is another convulsion equal in its range and perhaps still greater in its effects than that which made Teuton tribes the masters of Gaul and Spain and Britain, of Germany, of Italy, and Illyricum. The peoples of the north had struggled for hundreds of years to break the barriers of the Rhine and the Danube, and in their savage ferocity and tameless independence wrest the South, so long coveted, from the civilised but degenerate Roman. The prize, which they had almost reached in the third century, was saved from their grasp until the fifth by a succession of brave and able generals invested with imperial power. But the Teuton could both admire and receive the law and the religion of the empire which he overthrew. Far otherwise was it, when a savage tribe of Arabia, kindled to white heat by a fanatic and false belief, burst upon a despotic empire in which Christian faith and morality were [pg 471] deeply impaired. It needed but the third decade of one emperor's reign to abrogate the Roman sovereignty held during seven hundred years over Syria and Egypt, and to establish the sway of a false prophet, the bitterest enemy of the Christian faith, over the very city which contained the sepulchre of Christ. “The law had gone forth from Sion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,” and thither all Christian nations sent a host of pilgrims to kindle anew their faith and love before the shrine which had held for a day the source of all that life, the Body of the God-man. Now that shrine, with all the memorial places of the Divine Life upon earth, fell into hands whose work it was to set up instead of the Christ, a man of turbulent passions and unmeasured ambition: instead of the Christian home, the denial of all Christian morality: instead of a Virgin Mother placed at the head of her sex, and unfolding from age to age the worth and dignity of woman, the dishonoured captives of a brigand warfare. All this took place within ten years after the death of Mohammed, and by the end of the reign of Heraclius, when the greatest triumph ever won by a Roman emperor over the rival Persian monarchy was followed by the most ignominious defeat from a troop of Arabian robbers, and the permanent abandonment of Roman territory. During the sixty following years, not only had Antioch and Alexandria, as well as Jerusalem, become Mohammedan, but the last fortress of Christian power in the East, the impregnable city of Constantine, trembled repeatedly at the approach of Saracen hosts, being rescued rather by its matchless [pg 472] position, its strong walls, and the invention of the Greek fire, than by the superior valour of its defenders. At the end of that seventh century, the whole northern coast of Africa had passed away from Roman to Saracenic rule: from the Christian faith to its Mohammedan antagonist. In ten years more, the Saracen banner crossed over the straits of Gibraltar, and the Church of Spain fell under its domination. At this time the eastern empire, diminished as it had been, passed through severe revolutions. It seemed that from intestine dissension and the despotism of one crowned adventurer after another, the remnant of the eastern realm, which during seventy years could hardly maintain itself against Saracen aggression, was coming of itself to an end. In this uttermost extremity at Constantinople, a soldier had risen from the ranks to be a trusted general, and when the empire received him for its chief, a long prepared attack by the chalif on his capital was beaten back successfully by Leo III. In the time of the chalif Walid, who reigned from 705 to 715, the Arabian flag floated over the walls of Samarcand: its conquest had stretched to the foot of the Himalayas. His governor in Africa, Musa, had carried the bounds of his empire to the Atlantic ocean. The single city of Ceuta owned still the Byzantine sway. And the Christian count, Julian, for a private wrong, betrayed to the Saracen the city entrusted to his charge. Musa added almost all Spain to the Saracen domain. Constantinople had been besieged in 668, and saved under Constantine the Bearded; it was saved again in 718, under Leo III. [pg 473] These two deliverances, with the fact that it had not been taken in all the interval from the time of Heraclius, may be termed the only checks received from Christians by the Mohammedan conquest in the whole period from the death of Mohammed. Had it succeeded in gaining Constantinople when it gained Toledo, it is difficult to see how the universal enthralment of the Christian faith under the almost insufferable tyranny of the Arabian false prophet could have been prevented.

Thus when St. Gregory II. succeeded to the throne of Peter in 715, and Leo III. to the throne of Constantine in 717, the position of the Christian Faith before Islam seemed to stand in terrible danger.[253] The sons of Mohammed, lords of Asia, Egypt, Africa, and Spain, were besetting, with long prepared fleet and army, the last remains of the Greek power in Constantinople on the East, and on the West had only to look to the conquest of France. If they became masters of France, there was no strength left to resist them, neither Italy divided between Lombards, Greeks, and the old inhabitants, subjects of one or the other, nor Germany divided among various peoples. The whole world seemed to be reserved for the anti-Christian kingdom of Mohammed: all nations about to pass under the hard servitude of a conquering Arabian tribe, instinct with hatred to the Christian life; all women to become slaves of man's passion: all reason to endure subjection to a lie imposed by the scimitar. What we have since seen of Mohammedan rule in Asia and in Africa during [pg 474] twelve hundred years, seemed then on the point of becoming the general doom.

That was the time chosen by the eastern emperor, after a reign of ten years, to attempt the imposition of a fresh heresy upon Pope Gregory II. The man who was formally bound by his position as Roman emperor, and by the oath taken at his coronation to defend the Church as it had come down to him from the seven preceding centuries, was filled with a desire to remodel the practice of that Church in all its worship. He advanced claims which were not only an invasion of its independence by the civil power, but in themselves rested only upon the practice and the sentiments of the Church's two great enemies, the Jew and the Saracen. The Jew abhorred the relative worship paid to the images and pictures of our Lord, of His Mother, and of the saints, because he utterly denied the fact of the Incarnation, which these images and pictures were ever presenting in the daily worship of the faithful. The Mohammedan shared this abhorrence, because he denounced the Christian as an idolater for his belief in our Lord, as Son of God. Leo III. took up the mind of the Jew and the Saracen into his own rude and unformed nature, and bent the whole force of the imperial power to subdue the Pope to his will. Spain had just fallen into Mohammedan hands: and the lord at Damascus ruled from the Atlantic to Samarcand. Under his rule, which was the bitterest ignominy to every Christian, lay more than half the empire which Justinian had left. Then, in 726, a contest, the most unequal [pg 475] which can be conceived, began between Pope Gregory II. and the emperor Leo III. It continued fifty years under Leo and his son, Kopronymus, who died in 776. In the course of it, Leo sent a great fleet against the coast of Italy, whose commander was instructed to take and plunder Ravenna, to proceed to Rome, to put down all opposition to the imperial heresy, and to carry Pope Gregory captive to Constantinople, after the fashion used in the preceding century to Pope St. Martin. Pope Gregory II. endured to his death the joint heresy and tyranny of the eastern lord, and induced the irritated populations of Italy still to keep allegiance to him. His successor, Pope Gregory III., used the same forbearance. Pope Zacharias for ten years went on enduring, while the Frank nation accepted, on his judgment, a new dynasty. For twenty-eight years, from 726 to 754, no amount of wrong could induce four successive Popes to throw off the allegiance which had pressed upon Italy as a servile province since the conquest of Justinian. At length, the fourth Pope, Stephen II., was deserted in his utmost need by the emperor himself: was threatened with a Lombard poll tax laid upon Rome, and the position of vassal to an Aistulf in the city of St. Peter. Then the eastern servitude at last dropped, and the issue of the most unequal combat, begun in 726, was terminated by the compact ratified at Quiersy in 754, and carried out at Pavia in 756. This compact secured to Pope Stephen and his successors the position of sovereign princes in Rome, and the territory attached to it. In [pg 476] 756 Pope Stephen II. re-entered Rome as its acknowledged civil sovereign. Yet, in the eighteen years following this event, the last king of the Lombards renewed the ambition of Liutprand and Aistulf, to become the lord of Rome, and the renewal of Pipin's gift by Charlemagne, in 774, alone closed the momentous contest which, beginning in 726 with an attack on the unarmed Pope, ended in the deliverance of Italy from the most cruel of thraldoms, and made the Pope, who had long been Rome's only support and benefactor, its temporal as well as its spiritual head.

At the time of that event, more than four centuries had passed since Constantine, in 330, consecrated his city on the Bosphorus to be Nova Roma, pursuing his idea to found a capital which should be Christian from its birth, and the centre of a great Christian empire. Five years before the Church had met for the first time in General Council. The object of its meeting was to refute and censure an attack upon the Godhead of its Founder, and the place at which it met was a city immediately on the Asiatic side of the strait, on which what was then Byzantium stood. The position taken by Constantine was to guard with the imperial sword the chamber in which the Church's bishops sat, to accept their decrees as the utterance of Christ himself, and to add the force of imperial law to the spiritual authority which he acknowledged them of themselves to possess.

From the baptism of Byzantium as Nova Roma in 330, fifty years succeed to 380, in which Constantinople [pg 477] becomes the chief seat of the very heresy condemned by the Church at the Council of 325. Its see is sought after immediately as the prize of worldly ecclesiastics in the East. Eusebius, the man who presently became its bishop, deceives Constantine into fostering the heresy which he abhorred: its bishop, Macedonius, was the docile servant of the emperor Constantius in his attempt to change the faith of the Church: its bishop, Eudoxius, nurtured the emperor Valens in the same heresy. But the succession of Popes in Julius, Liberius, and Damasus, frustrated these efforts of the bishops of Nova Roma in the first half century of its promotion: and when Theodosius sat on the throne of Constantine, with his colleagues, Gratian and Valentinian, their law of 380 called upon their peoples “to hold the religion which is proved to have been delivered to the Romans by the divine apostle, Peter, since it has been maintained there from his time to our own”.[254]

But the terrible effects wrought upon the eastern episcopate by the Arian assault had not been finally overcome. The next attack upon the Person of our Lord proceeded from the eloquent Syrian, Nestorius, who had been put in the see of Constantinople. It required all the energy of Pope Celestine and the patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, to overcome that heresy which still attacked the Incarnation, and was supported by court favour at the eastern capital, and the jealousy of its emperor for his bishop. It is remarkable that the First Council at Ephesus, in 431, should have been followed by [pg 478] a Second Council at the same place in 447. This second Council was, so far as its convocation and its constitution went, regularly entitled to be a General Council. Its decree was in favour of an opposite heresy to that of Nestorius, on the same subject of our Lord's Person, and its originator was the monk Eutyches, in high repute at the head of a monastery at Constantinople. The Council after its completion was rejected, and the heresy overthrown, by the single arm of St. Leo the Great. The whole Church at Chalcedon accepted his act and acknowledged his Primacy. But this Monophysite heresy had driven its roots deep into the Greek mind. During two hundred years, to the time of Mohammed himself, its effects may be traced, corrupting the unity of belief in the eastern patriarchates, encouraging perpetual party spirit, breaking constantly the succession of bishops in the hierarchy. In the time of St. Leo, the patriarch Proterius, who succeeded the deposed Dioscorus, was murdered by the Monophysite faction. A few years later the bishop of Constantinople used this heresy for the purpose of exalting his see against Rome, which had just been deprived of its emperor, and its government left in the hand of barbarians, who were also heretics. Thus supported by imperial power, Acacius brought about a schism which lasted for thirty-five years. The resistance of seven Popes, the last of whom, Hormisdas, obtained the full result which his predecessors had sought for, frustrated this second century of Byzantine aggression upon the faith and government of the Church.

Indeed, so striking and unquestionable was the submission [pg 479] of the Byzantine sovereign, and the recognition by the Byzantine bishop of the Papal authority, that from this time forth a somewhat new course was pursued by the eastern emperor and patriarch in regard to that authority. The purpose of Justinian in his subsequent reign was, while he acknowledged in very ample terms the papal primacy, to subject it in its practical execution to his own civil power. Thus when he had become by conquest immediate lord of Rome, he summoned Pope Vigilius to attend him at Constantinople. During eight years he subjected him to perpetual mortifications. He issued doctrinal decrees and required the Pope to accept them. His laws fully admitted the Pope's rank; he never denied his succession from St. Peter: but his pretension was to make the five patriarchs use their great authority in submission to himself; and he included the first of the patriarchs in this overweening claim, as his namesake Justinian II. signed his council in Trullo at the head of all, and left a line between himself and the patriarch of Constantinople for the signature of Pope Sergius, which was never given.

The result of Justinian's oppression of Pope Vigilius was to create temporary schisms in some parts of the West, through dread of the bishops that something had been conceded to the usurpation of the civil power. Not until the time of Gregory the Great could the Apostolic See recover the injury thus inflicted. But Justinian did much more than persecute a particular Pope. I think it may be said with truth, that from the conquest of Italy under his generals, Belisarius and Narses, it was the [pg 480] continual effort of the Byzantine emperors to subject the Papacy to the civil power in the exercise of its spiritual supremacy. From Justinian to Constantine Kopronymus—a period of more than two hundred years—that is the relation between the Two Powers which the eastern emperors carried in their minds and executed as far as they were able.

The fourth century of Nova Roma's exaltation opened with the strongest assertion of this claim which had yet been seen. The able and unscrupulous Sergius had become patriarch of Constantinople, and was prime minister of the emperor Heraclius. The whole East was teeming with Monophysite opinions, and every city, in proportion to its size and dignity, torn with party conflicts arising out of dissension respecting the Person of our Lord. Sergius thought he had devised a remedy by that Monothelite statement which, as he imagined, enabled him to present in a more conciliating form the old heresy put down by St. Leo and the Council of Chalcedon. He led the emperor Heraclius to publish this heresy in the imperial name. Then four successive patriarchs of Constantinople were found to put all their spiritual rank at the service of two emperors, Heraclius and Constans II., to formulate the heresy, and force it, if possible, on the Popes. Ten successive Popes resisted—one to martyrdom itself—and after a struggle of fifty years, Popes Agatho and Leo II. at the Sixth Council—when the eastern emperor for the moment became orthodox, and his patriarch and bishops followed him—condemned and expelled the heresy. But this [pg 481] fatal attempt of Sergius and Heraclius had been exactly coincident with the rise of Mohammed. The Greek contention respecting the Person of Christ had lasted three hundred years, from the Nicene Council, when the success of the false prophet led vast countries, once the most flourishing of Christian provinces, to yield to the human authority of a robber, and to put him in the place of the God-man whom by their works they had so often denied. And so the fourth century from the exaltation of Nova Roma had been completed.

Yet still it was reserved for the fifth century to Constantinople, at a time of its extreme humiliation, when for ninety years it had only just obtained from a new and undisclosed invention the power to keep the all-conquering Saracen outside its walls—to make its final and most absolute attack upon the elder sister whom it acknowledged as the leader of the Christian faith. Syria and Egypt and Africa and Spain were gone, and the Persian monarchy, for so many hundred years the rival of the Roman, equally was absorbed in the enormous Saracen dominion, and the cities of Asia Minor were in daily dread of the same foe prevailing over their religion and desecrating their homes. Such was the condition of things when the yet remaining Christian emperor assumed over the Christian Church the power of Mohammed's chalifs in the territory which they ruled in Mohammed's name. Another fifty years occur in which, when after the orthodox patriarch Germanus had been forced to lay the insignia of his rank on the altar of Sancta Sophia and depart, three Iconoclast patriarchs [pg 482] in succession, Anastasius from 730 to 753, Constantine from 753 to 766, and Nicetas I. from 766 to 780, placed themselves at the disposal of their emperors to corrupt the faith and subject the government of the Church, until at the Seventh Council once again an eastern emperor became orthodox: and an eastern orthodox patriarch followed again in Tarasius; and Adrian I. was received as Pope, being no longer a vassal of Constantinople, but a sovereign prince.

Upon these antecedents ensued the temporal sovereignty of the Pope. What is the witness of history to the spiritual action of the Popes during this long period of 426 years, from 330, when Byzantium became Constantinople, to 756, when the people of Rome welcomed with universal jubilee the return of their Pope, Stephen II., as sovereign?—when again in 774 Charles at the beginning of his great career approached St. Peter as a pilgrim, and renewed to him his father Pipin's act of munificent piety.

Let us follow the course of the heresies which, during four centuries and a half from the Nicene Council in 325, to the defeat of the Iconoclasts at the Seventh Council, attacked the faith of the Church. They turn upon the Person of our Lord: upon that mighty fact of the Incarnation which filled all men's minds. The Arian denied that He was God; the Nestorian and Monophysite sought in opposite methods to deal with His two natures. The Monothelite pursued the question to its inmost point as it touched the two natures in the operation of the Will; his error in its root was especially [pg 483] Eutychean. When the question began the original eastern patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch were in their primal state and glory. They held their descent from Peter, like the See of Rome. Like the Apostolic See their chairs were at the head of a great mass of bishops, Antioch in particular having a crowd of metropolitans governing important provinces, who looked up to the great see of the East, who, when the patriarchate was vacant, voted for the election, as they received from him the confirmation of their own election. Alexander in the mother see of Egypt had been the first to condemn his own insurgent priest, Arius, and at the Nicene Council he was attended by his deacon, Athanasius, who was soon to succeed to his place, and raise during his episcopate of forty-six years the See of St. Mark to its loftiest renown. Eustathius, at the same Council, the twenty-fourth bishop of Antioch, was a noted confessor, and with Alexander contributed to its decision; while Pope Silvester threw the whole weight of the West, which had no doubt as to the Godhead of Christ, in favour of the same result. As yet Constantinople was not; and the See of Jerusalem, though highly honoured, was in the hierarchy a simple bishopric suffragan to the metropolitan of Cesarea. There could be no controversy more reaching to the inmost heart of faith in the Church than that which concerned the Person of the Lord. Taking the four centuries and a half as a whole we find that the eastern patriarchates failed under the trial. The first of them, Alexandria, had for its two greatest teachers Athanasius and Cyril, both doctors of [pg 484] the Church, both renowned in their defence and illustration of the doctrine that God became man. But no sooner had Cyril died than his see became the centre of the Monophysite error. Almost the whole Christian people of Egypt followed its bad lead, and when the Saracen chief took Egypt and Alexandria in the name of Mohammed he found support rather than opposition in the mass of the Christians, who, in their bitter party hatred, called the remnant of Catholics still remaining Melchites or Royalists as the most opprobrious epithet they could devise. And in process of time, under Omar and his successors, the country of Athanasius has become the heart of Mohammedan learning and zeal.

Scarcely less melancholy is the history of Antioch and its twelve provinces of metropolitans, with their 163 bishops.[255] Eustathius was speedily deposed by the Arian faction, even before Athanasius, and during ninety years a perpetual schism preyed upon the dignity of the great eastern see. In the fifth century it was unable to prevent the advance of Constantinople. It fell a speedy prey to the Mohammed's chalif, and from that time the man who bore the name of its patriarch was often a dependent and pensioner at the eastern capital. Jerusalem had succeeded in obtaining the patriarchal dignity at the Council of Chalcedon. But in less than two hundred years Omar polluted its holy place by his presence, and the most stirring voice uttered by its patriarchs is that cry of its noble Sophronius, bidding his chief bishop go to the throne of Peter, “where the [pg 485] foundations of holy doctrine are laid,” and invite the sitter on that throne, who was Honorius, to rescue the faith imperilled by his brother patriarchs, Sergius at Constantinople, and Cyrus at Alexandria, leaders of the Monothelite heresy.

When therefore the emperor Constantine Kopronymus, in 754, took by the hand Constantine whom he had chosen to be ecumenical patriarch, and presented him as the elect of the emperor to the Council of more than three hundred bishops, whom he had convoked to sanction his own heresy, while twelve years afterwards, as the sequel of many torments, he executed him and had his body dissected; we may say that the eastern patriarchs had utterly failed to defend either the faith or the hierarchy of the Church. Mohammed did not appear to complete the work of Arius, until the descendants of those who condemned Arius in 325 had obscured by interminable disputes during three hundred years what their spiritual ancestors had declared to be the faith of the Church. The causes of this failure had been internal. There had been great bishops in the East during this period. Chrysostom had sat in Constantinople, suffered, confessed, and been exiled before Nestorius, who sat there also, and was exiled for his heresy. Germanus, in the same see, did not yield to Leo III., and in that worst time confessed, and his place was forthwith taken by Anastasius, who subscribed all Leo's evil will. Kopronymus strove to exterminate the monks, who suffered every extremity for their maintenance of the faith. But as the main result the Byzantine despotism had overcome [pg 486] the eastern episcopate. I do not know how more telling proofs of that evil victory could be shown than that Philippicus Bardanes, in 711, during his ephemeral reign, should be able to assemble a council at Constantinople, which he required to restore the Monothelite heresy, condemned at the Sixth Council, and scarcely met with an episcopal opponent; and again that Kopronymus could assemble another large council in 754, to establish his Iconoclast aggression, which was received without dissent.

How then was the faith preserved during these four hundred and sixty years?

From Pope Sylvester to Pope Stephen II. we count sixty-one Popes. In that long period of time the doctrine of the Godhead and the Person of Christ with all its manifold consequences was fully drawn out. The variation which had been seen in the patriarchal and episcopal sees of the East was never found at Rome. All political and external help may be said to have failed the Popes. They lost their own western emperor, and the sole remaining eastern emperor turned against them. More also, he set up against them a new bishop who at the beginning of the time did not exist, the bishop of the eastern capital. The eastern lord added from generation to generation rank and influence to this bishop. He made him his own intermediate instrument of communication with all the bishops of his eastern realm, to whom it had been the continual policy of Justinian and his successors to grant great political privileges, making them in large degree partakers of civil authority. [pg 487] They sought to rule the East throughout its manifold divided interests by the authority of the local bishops; and they sought to rule the bishops themselves by their own patriarch. Rome, from being the head of the Roman monarchy at the beginning of the period, ceased to be the capital even of a “servile” Italy, the captive of Belisarius. The Popes passed through Odoacer, Theodorich, Theodatus, also Vitiges and Totila, also Liutprand, Aistulf, and Desiderius. Their elections, when made, were delayed in their recognition, or even controlled in their choice. They saw a crowd of northern raiders take possession of the whole West, and at one time the very heresy which at the beginning of the period had been condemned by the Church, was in possession of all the governments of the West but that of the Franks, and had for the chief ruler of its councils and the head of the regal league against the faith of Rome the greatest man whom the northern tribes can show during their time of immigration, and he had made Italy powerful and respected, and cultivated Rome with extreme solicitude. When St. Silvester sat in St. Peter's chair, Rome was the single capital of the whole empire; when St. Leo sat there he witnessed the fall of the West, but stood imperturbable before Attila and Genseric; when St. Gregory sat there, he divined from the temporal ruin and desolation of Rome, which he saw perishing piecemeal around him, that the world's last time was coming. When St. Martin sat there, he was torn from his sick bed by the eastern master to die in the Crimea; when St. Gregory II. sat there, the same eastern [pg 488] master threatened to break in pieces the statue of St. Peter in his Basilica. But in all the four hundred and sixty years from the first to the second Nicene Council, the witness of Rome to the Divine Person of her Lord was clear and distinct. Neither the greatest nor the worst of her opponents had subdued that witness, or rendered it faltering or indistinct. For this reason it was that the Pope, whose life the Iconoclast soldier, when clothed with the imperial purple, five times attempted, could reply to his threat, that all the West looked upon St. Peter as a God upon earth; that the one Teuton king before whose victorious reign that of Theodorich is pale and colourless, ascended on his knees the steps before St. Peter's tomb, laid upon the altar over his body the gift of temporal sovereignty, and went forth from that moment the predestined civil head of that new Christendom which St. Peter had made out of the northern adventurers.

Taking in all this time the simple witness of history, I ask if in it the words of our Lord to Peter were not palpably fulfilled: “Thou art the Rock, and upon this Rock I will build My Church”. If the Rock had not been, each one in this long line of heresies would have destroyed the Church. The line of St. Athanasius was not infallible; the line of St. Ignatius of Antioch was annulled after frequent falls by the Mohammedan captivity; the line of Byzantium had some saints, but was prolific in heretics, and the last utterance of Jerusalem before it fell, when the Saracen ascetic voluptuary trod its courts, was uttered by its patriarch [pg 489] from Calvary itself, when he adjured his messenger: “Go swiftly from end to end of the earth, until thou reach the Apostolic See, in which the foundations of our holy doctrine rest”.

The state of the eastern Church from the Council of Chalcedon to the final assault of the emperor Leo III. upon the whole fabric of Church government is one continual descent. It has certain recoveries, as the cessation of the Acacian schism, in 518; as the reversal of the Monothelite tyranny, under Constantine Pogonatus, in 680; as the repudiation of the still greater Iconoclast tyranny a century later, at the Seventh Council in 787, under Pope Adrian and the patriarch Tarasius. But even General Councils were attacked by eastern emperors in the last excesses of their overgrown domination. As Philippicus Bardanes got together a great Council in 711 to denounce the Sixth Council, so the Emperor Leo the Armenian had deposed an unbending patriarch, Nicephorus, in 815, supplied his place with the yielding Theodotus, and found another council in the same year to anathematise the work of the Seventh Council. Three more Iconoclast patriarchs—Theodotus from 815 to 821, Antonius I. from 821 to 832, John VII. from 831 to 841—close this evil list of heretical bishops. The feast of orthodoxy was established in 842. The incessant attempts of the Greek emperors to meddle with the faith took presently another development. They could no longer oppress as their subject a sovereign Pope. When they could not oppress him, they learnt to deny him. In less than another generation the schism of Photius began.

Such was the first century running from the time that Leo the Isaurian made, in 733, his creature Anastasius ecumenical in the sense that all the remaining Greek empire was put under his patriarchal jurisdiction. But it is plain that long before this, the Greek empire, so far as its own episcopate was concerned, had ceased to possess any inflexible rule of doctrine. The most venerable of its authorities, the original patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, had yielded before the Nestorian and Monothelite storms; had perpetual interruptions in their succession, sometimes had a double succession—one Catholic, another Monophysite—had submitted to the State-patriarch set over them at Constantinople; and being found in this condition by the Mohammedan flood, had seen their former dignity all but overwhelmed in its swelling waves. The western Church, which from the time of the northern wandering of the nations had been visited by unnumbered catastrophes, had, on the contrary, possessed in its bosom exactly that inflexible rule of doctrine which the East wanted: a rule of doctrine not imposed by civil despotism, but the very root as well as the bond of its episcopate. The Ostrogoth had made his kingdom in Italy, and the Visigoth his kingdom in Spain; the Frank, the Burgundian, and many more set up realms in France and Germany, whose limits were in perpetual fluctuation; seven or eight little Saxon kingdoms were dividing in Britain the old Roman unity. These Teuton tribes had two qualities in common—great personal valour and the most persisting spirit of division. Endless were the intestine quarrels and separations [pg 491] between those of the same northern race, who in political condition had hardly passed the tribal state. Every invading army whose commander became a king in the conquered territory had its own local interests, but none of that great political sense which had nurtured the empire of the Cæsars. The one Ostrogoth who had such a sense had grown up a hostage at Constantinople, and though it is said that he could not read, had certainly divined and carried off with him into the Italy which he captured the imperial secret of government: that is, the force of unity, justice, and subordination of the part to the whole; and Theodorich had come to the conclusion that he could not make Italian mind and Gothic manners coalesce in the structure of a kingdom. His device to rule them equally and separately scarcely lasted for his life. After ruling with equity, he died in remorse. No stronger instance of this great defeat can be found than the custom of the Merovingian race to the end. Their monarchy was in their eyes a family property. When their father died they took the throne as a part of the paternal inheritance. It was not delivered down in whole as a mighty trust of the nation itself. If there were several children, their swords cut the patrimony into slices, and each carried off his bit, like a wild beast. No political sense presided here. The sole solicitude of each was that his lot might not be of less value than his brother's.[256]

There exists no history giving in detail the most wonderful event of these troubled centuries—that is, the [pg 492] process by which the Arian heresy, which, in the time of Theodorich, had possession of all these peoples—except the Franks, and the Saxons, who were pagans—finally became Catholic: a conquest of the northern warriors which one of the greatest enemies of the Christian faith seems to consider a more wonderful deed than the conquest of the former Roman world, so far as it was achieved at the time of Constantine's conversion.

At Rome the Pope sat through all these centuries, the visible representative of all that was good in the Roman empire, of law, justice, order, besides holding in himself the inflexible rule of faith. The Chair of Peter had no rival in the West, the eldest of its bishops looked up with reverence to his single and immemorial pre-eminence. Their local influence had in each of them its weight with their own people. For instance, St. Gregory of Tours was of an old senatorian Gallic family: all the interests of the population around him, whether Frank or Gallic, known to him as a native of the soil. In this double position much nearer and dearer to him was the Petrine descent, by consecration of which he maintained as bishop the Christian faith. Thus in the see of Tours he protected the temporal rights of his people, and resisted in particular the violent acts of king Chilperic. The faith itself was to him the strong exemplar of political sense: the one family of Christ bore in its very bosom the society of nations. He could not say the creed without feeling that the centre of faith was the natural centre of all humanising influence. The Saxon bishop in Northumberland would recognise the Saxon bishop in Kent in [pg 493] spite of intervening Mercia. The episcopate set up among the German tribes by St. Boniface in the name of the Popes, was the form of such unity as afterwards led these separate tribes to coalesce in an empire. And they coalesced with such difficulty as to show that without the spiritual bond they would have remained in their original antagonism.

In the last century of Merovingian rule the inapt government and private vices—if a king's vices can ever be called private—had inflicted a very great injury both on the civil and the ecclesiastical administration of the great Frank empire. The intercourse in writing between the Popes of the sixth century with the Frank rulers had been greatly interrupted in the seventh. While perpetual domestic murders and sensual crimes polluted the royal family, the nobility had become disordered; national councils were suspended, and in too many sees the bishops no longer answered in character to those who, in the time of Gregory the Great, had built up Gaul. At that moment there sprung from two great nobles of Austrasian Gaul, Arnulf, afterwards bishop of Metz, and Pipin of Landen, a family whose saintly virtues as well as their nobility raised it to great power. In 673 Pipin d'Herstal, who by his father descended in the second degree from Arnulf, and by his mother from Pipin of Landen, was mayor of the palace, and the degenerate blood of Chilperic and Fredegonde was put to shame by the chief minister of the kingdom. The race of Clovis was dying out in sensual cruelty: the family of Arnulf was raised up to take its place. In forty years, Pipin [pg 494] d'Herstal, as mayor of the palace, used the royal power with such effect as greatly to restore the unity of the kingdom. After his death and an interval of trouble his son Charles, in 707, united in his hands all the power of the Franks. It was just a hundred years from the death of Mohammed, when, in 732, the Saracen army having under his chalifs conquered all the East and the South, and over-run Spain, had only one more battle to fight with the bravest nation of the West, in order to trample the cross under their feet. The flood had passed the Pyrenees, and advanced over prostrate Aquitaine to Poitiers, which it had taken. As it issued from that city, the bastard son of Pipin d'Herstal, still mayor of the palace in name, but sovereign of the Franks in fact, met it with the rapidly collected warriors whom he had so often led to victory. Then, it is said, the Saracen and the Christian hosts for seven days watched each other; the Arabs on their light horses and in their white mantles, the Franks with their heavy iron-clad masses. On the eighth day, a Saturday at the end of October, the Arabs left their camp at the call of the Muezin to prayer, and drew out their order of battle. Their strength was in their horsemen, and twenty times they charged the Frankish squares, and were unable to break them. An Arab writer says: “Abd Errahman, trusting to his fortune, made a fierce attack. The Christians returned it with as much firmness. Then the fight became general and continued with great loss on both sides. Assault followed upon assault until four o'clock in the afternoon. The Frankish line stood like a wall of iron.” Then a [pg 495] cry for succour was heard from the Arab camp. Duke Eudo with his Aquitains and Basques had surprised those left to guard it. Disorder and panic arose among the Saracens. Charles saw and ordered the whole line to advance. The wall of iron moved and all fell before it. Abd Errahman passed from rank to rank to check the flight, and did wonders. But when, struck by many lances, he fell from his horse, disorder and flight prevailed. They burst into the camp and expelled Eudo. Night came on, and Charles kept his army in its ranks on the plain, expecting a fresh battle on the morrow. On that morrow the Franks saw the white tents, but the Arabs had fled under cover of the night. The booty was great. The Franks report that there was no pursuit; the Arabs, that the Christians pursued their victory for many days, and compelled the fugitives to many battles, in which the loss was great, until the Moslem host threw itself into Narbonne.[257]

In that battle Charles merited his title of “the Hammer”. Had he or his Franks blenched upon that day, Europe would have become Mohammedan, as three hundred years before in the battle of the nations by Macon it would have been the prey of the Mongol, had Attila prevailed. Carcassonne and Nimes and all southern France had yielded. But the hammer of Charles descended on the Saracen anvil. His son, king Pipin, carried on his work in southern France, and his grandson Charles, before his death, had become lord of an united realm from the Ebro to the Eyder. Islam never [pg 496] advanced further in the West. As France in the fifteenth century owed its deliverance to the maiden of Arc, so in the eighth, not Gaul only, but all the West would seem to have owed its inheritance of the Christian name to the four great men whom Providence raised up in the family of Arnulf of Metz, and Pipin of Landen. Pipin, the mayor of the palace, Charles the Hammer, Pipin the king, and Charlemagne, are four continuous generations from grandfather to greatgrandson the like of which I know not that any other family can produce.

An old man so feeble that he had hardly strength to cross the Alps, and was almost killed by the exertion, laid his hand on the head of Pipin, and the mayor of the palace became king of the Franks. The hand was the hand of St. Peter. Forty-six years later the same hand will be laid upon the head of his son; and the king of the Franks will become emperor of the Romans; and the Saracens who felt the arm of one Charles in the battle by Tours, will feel another Charles rise up before them to meet the Moslem lord of the southern and eastern world on equal terms.

After Charles left Rome,[258] at Easter, 774, as above narrated, attempts were made against him by the Lombard dukes, and Adelchis, the son of Desiderius. In spite of the Saxon wars he was in upper Italy at the end of the winter of 776: he prevailed over his opponents, sent his counts to the various cities, and protected the State of the Church. At the end of 780 he was again at Pavia, and he celebrated the feast of Easter on April [pg 497] 15, 781, at Rome. Here Pope Adrian crowned his son Pipin king of Lombardy, and the youngest, Louis, king of Aquitania. All seemed to go well. Greek messengers from the regent Irene, widow of Leo IV., brought proposals of agreement and treaty. During this longer sojourn the new arrangement of the Lombard kingdom would be completed. Frankish counts took the place of the old dukes, whose relation to the central power had been far looser than that of their successors was made.

The introduction of the royal missi and their action upon the administration of law likened subject Italy much more to the other states of Charles. The position of the native population was not essentially altered, but the improvement of the laws helped them. Charles all the while was carrying on war after war with the resisting Saxons, enlarging the Christian domain by founding bishoprics as far as the Weser and the Elbe, taking the Spanish marches from the Arab, and the eastern marches from the Avars, uniting the dukedom of Bavaria with his kingdom, and carrying out that mighty work of civilisation which has made his name immortal for its religious institutions, its legislation, and the encouragement which he gave to literature.

Early in the year 787 Charles was again with Pope Adrian at Rome. In a rapid campaign he reduced to his obedience Arichis, duke of Benevento, who was married to a daughter of Desiderius; and returning once more spent Easter with Adrian. It was the last meeting between those two fast friends. On Christmas day, 795, Adrian closed a pontificate of nearly twenty-four [pg 498] years. Three years before Rome had been desolated by one of its most fearful inundations, and the Pope had gone about in a boat succouring the needy. This pontificate was both in its spiritual and temporal consequences most brilliant.[259] Adrian possessed every quality which should adorn a great Pope, a tender and active piety, a zeal the ardour of which was tempered by wisdom: a union of goodness and resolution, so that in the exercise of his charge he combined the affection of a father with the authority of a teacher, and the vigilance of a Pope. Charles mourned for him both as a friend and father. He had an inscription of thirty-eight verses engraved in golden letters on the black marble stone which covered his tomb. He had Masses said for his soul in all churches; and dispensed great alms in distant lands, especially to England. In his letter to Offa, king of Mercia, he wrote:—“We have sent you these alms begging intercession for the Apostolic Lord Adrian, not that we doubt, that that blessed soul is at peace, but to show our faith and affection for a most dear friend”. It cannot be doubted that Adrian's influence upon the great king, since he first came to Rome in 774, had prepared him for the future exaltation which he was to receive in that same church of St. Peter, the steps of which he had ascended on his knees twenty-six years before. The day after Adrian's death, Leo III. was chosen his successor. He was by birth a Roman, and brought up in the patriarchal palace, and is described by contemporaries as learned, eloquent, and beneficent.

From the gift of king Pipin to Pope Stephen II., when the keys of the cities surrendered to him were laid upon the altar over the body of St. Peter, to the repetition of that gift by Charles in 774, and again from that most solemn action of Charles to the year 800, no difference in the relation of the Pope to the king of the Franks took place. In the first instance, in the year 754, Charles had been made Patricius of the Roman Church together with his father, and had as such taken on himself its protection and defence. Therefore the Popes took pains, in particular Leo III., that the Romans acknowledged under oath this relation, binding themselves to observe the rules which their Patricius should make for the security of the Church. No conclusion can be drawn from this, as to an overlordship of the king of the Franks in the territories assigned to the Pope. Pope Adrian and Leo III. sent to Charles a standard together with the keys of St. Peter's tomb.[260] The jurisdiction which the king of the Franks exercised in Rome as Patricius was not an overlordship; it was necessary for his office as Protector. But now an extraordinary event took place. In the year 799, three years after the accession of Leo III., a tumult broke out which in its savage violence surpassed that under Stephen III. On April 25, St. Mark's day, the Pope was conducting the solemn procession ordered by St. Gregory the Great, from the Lateran to St. Lorenzo in Lucina. A band of conspirators broke out of the Flaminian way, not far from the Church of St. Silvester. At their head were two [pg 500] nephews of the late Pope Adrian: Paschalis, the Primicerius, that is, the first of the seven Palatine judges, and Campulus, the treasurer, another of them, both in immediate attendance on the Pope. Leo III. was thrown to the ground, and an attempt made to tear out his eyes and his tongue. He was dragged into the Church of St. Silvester, and thence taken to the monastery of St. Erasmus on the Cælian.

The conspirators had not succeeded, as they hoped, in blinding the Pope. His wounds were wonderfully healed. His friends rescued him on a dark night from his confinement in the monastery, and brought him safely to St Peter's. A large number of the people and clergy surrounded him. The Frank duke came from Spoleto with a hurriedly collected troop, took him from St. Peter's, and carried him to Spoleto, where again bishops, priests, and laity surrounded him with congratulations.

When Charles heard of these events in Rome he caused the Pope to come into his kingdom. He was in the act of marching against the Saxons. At Paderborn he learnt of the Pope's approach. He sent to him[261] archbishop Hildebald, his chaplain; the Count Anochar and his son Pipin, with many counts, and a considerable force to escort him, while he set in order the whole army for his reception. When the head of the Church appeared all fell on their knees to receive his blessing. Charles dismounted, tenderly embraced the oppressed fugitive before his army, and accompanied him to the cathedral.

Leo remained several days in the camp at Paderborn to consult with the king about the state of things at Rome, and what measures should be taken to meet them. No doubt it was felt that the powers of the Patricius at Rome must be increased, to give security in the future to the Pope.

The conspirators had acted with great violence at Rome, and sent to the king a list of accusations against the Pope.

The Pope returned to Rome accompanied by the archbishops of Cologne and Salzburg, and a large escort of Frank bishops and nobles. All the clergy, senate, people, soldiers, the schools of foreigners, Franks, Friesons, Saxons, and Lombards, also the chief matrons of Rome came out to Ponte Molle to meet him, with standards and crosses, attended him to St. Peter's, where he sang High Mass, and the next day he re-entered the city, and took again possession of the Lateran.

In the summer of the following year, 800, Charles left his capital, Aix-la-Chapelle. At Mainz he announced his intention to go to Rome, that he might punish those guilty of the ill-treatment of the Pope. It was his fifth campaign in Italy. He stayed seven days in Ravenna, which was now in the Pope's possession. At Mentana, twelve miles from Rome, the Pope went out to receive him. The next day, the 24th November, he came to St. Peter's, where the people waited for him in the usual order.

The king-protector declared that the chief object of his coming was to clear the Pope from the accusations [pg 502] brought against him, and for this purpose there was held on 1st December a great assembly at St. Peter's of archbishops and bishops, Frank and Roman nobility, before the king and the Pope. “Then all the archbishops, bishops, and abbots said with one voice:[262] ‘We dare not judge the Apostolic See, which is the head of all the churches of God, for by it and by its successor we all are judged. But itself is judged by no man, as from of old has been the custom, but we will obey, as the canons require, according to the sentence of the supreme pontiff.’ Then the Pope said: ‘I follow the example of my predecessors, and am ready to clear myself of such false accusations’. And on another day, before the same presence, ascending the ambo, and holding the gospels in his hands, he said, under oath, with a loud voice: ‘I have no knowledge of these false crimes which Romans, my unjust persecutors, have imputed to me, and I never committed them. Whereupon they gave thanks to God in a litany, and to our Lady the Mother of God and ever Virgin Mary, and to St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and to all the saints of God.’ ”

After these things, on the birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ, all were again assembled in the same church of St. Peter's.[263] Charles, at the request of the Pope, wore his Roman dress as Patricius of the Roman Church and Commonwealth. That majestic figure, seven of his own feet in stature, was vested in an inner robe of pure white, hearing over it the purple mantle which betokened his Frank monarchy. Pope Leo III. [pg 503] celebrated High Mass in person; Charles knelt on the steps before the altar, his head bowed in prayer. Then the Pope took the crown which lay on the altar, and placed it on the head of the king of the Franks, and cried with a loud voice: “Life and victory to Charles Augustus, crowned of God, great and peace-bearing Emperor of the Romans!”

And from the Frank and the Roman nobles throughout the church the cry was echoed back: “To Charles Augustus, crowned of God, great and peace-bearing emperor of the Romans, life and victory!”

The title was thrice proclaimed before the Confession of St. Peter. And all the faithful of Rome seeing the great guardianship and affection which Charles bore to the Roman Church, and its ruler, assented with one accord. And the same day the Pope anointed with the holy oil Charles and the king his son.

Three hundred and twenty-four years had passed since at the bidding of Odoacer the Herule and Ariun, the Roman senate had sent a message to the eastern emperor Zeno, declaring that no western emperor was needed. During the whole of that intervening period Rome had survived in virtue of St. Peter's primacy seated in her. She had subdued the Acacian schism. She had lived through the Gothic war and the five captures by friends and foes. During two centuries of Lombard invasion and of Byzantine oppression she had remained unbroken. Upon the judgment of Pope Zacharias, the most powerful nation of the West dethroned the unworthy race of Clovis, and placed a nobler [pg 504] and more religious house on the throne of the Franks. Another Pope, Stephen II., by his own authority had made the newly anointed monarch Patricius of the Romans, and he first, and then his son, during forty years, had in that character protected the sovereignty which he had partly recovered, so far as regarded Rome and its own territory, and partly bestowed, so far as regarded the exarchate as a gift to St. Peter. The external protection had proved to be inadequate to guard the papal succession in one case, the person of the Pope in another, from domestic treason. And now the word of the Pope alone summoned up from the past not only the title but the power of the emperor, and invested with it the greatest man of all those northern races, who since the time of Theodosius had subjugated the Roman western empire. Leo III. alone set the crown on the head of Charles; not the crown which belonged to him as king of the northern immigrants who had conquered Gaul, but the crown of Augustus, given by Christ. “To Charles Augustus, crowned of God,” the word ran. This was the crown which Charles received, and which all the nations subject to his sway acknowledged, as the gift of St. Peter, seated in his see of Rome. The first and chief duty of the sovereign so created was to guard the Church of God. The four hundred years of Teuton immigration passed by that act into the definitive recognition of a new Christian people. Thereupon there became a family of nations, whose common life and law were the one Church of God, whose common territory was named from its master, Christendom. The eastern [pg 505] emperor in his ardour to impose heresy, had shown his impotence to protect what Justinian had once acquired, and Rome which created anew a western emperor was definitively free from any civil subjection to the eastern.

Three chief aspects of this great act are to be considered: how it regarded the West; how it regarded the East; how it regarded the enormous Mohammedan power which stretched from farthest West to farthest East, from the Tagus to the Indus.

First it is to be noted that the Pope alone made the empire. As Stephen II. had conferred upon the newly made king of the Franks the office of Roman Patricius, and with it the jurisdiction in his own State requisite for the fulfilment of that office, so, where the jurisdiction of the Patricius had been proved to be insufficient, both by the intrusion of the anti-pope Constantine into the Papal See itself, and by the ferocious attack upon Leo III., a reigning pontiff, during a solemn procession in the streets of Rome, Leo III. created an emperor, who should have a jurisdiction in Rome over all persons. He did not make himself a vassal, but in making the emperor he gave judicial rights in the State of the Church for the carrying out the most important part of the emperor's charge, to be Protector of the Roman Church. That Protector was to be guardian of the whole Catholic Church: and so he bore the name and title, of all other civil titles the most respected, emperor of the Romans; Rome alone, re-entering into the right lost in 476, and exercised now by the voice of her sovereign, gave the title, not drawn from the Franks or Germans, nor dependent on the [pg 506] Byzantine, rather in itself a speaking sign that the Byzantine subjection had passed away. The Roman, and the Frank, and all the subjects of his vast domain accepted Charles as “crowned of God”. That is, the Successor of St. Peter named him emperor of the Romans. As he had exalted a mayor of the palace to be king of the Franks, and Patricius of the Romans, so he had exalted the Patricius to be emperor; and because he was himself in spiritual things the head of the whole Church, he had made a particular king to be the advocate and defender of the whole Church. No one else could do what Leo III. did.

The annalists[264] of that age universally agree that it was Leo III. who devised and executed the exaltation of Charles to be emperor. The Pope in a deed granting certain privileges to a monastery, dated on the very day of his coronation, marks that his grant was made “in presence of our glorious and most excellent son Charles, whom by God's authority we have this day consecrated to be emperor for the defence and advancement of the universal Church”. Charles himself everywhere said that he was “crowned by the divine will,” “crowned by God”. Most wise was the intention of Leo, that the supreme pontiff, the pastor and ruler of all the faithful, should institute this sacred empire by crowning and proclaiming Charles. It was thus that the Church and the supreme pontiff determined the peculiar and essential character, nature, and dignity of this empire. The purpose was that among the kings there should be one, already most [pg 507] powerful by the extent of his dominions, to whom besides a special charge and dignity should be given. This consisted in being the protector and defender of the Church and the Roman pontiff, and of the whole Christian society, to promote and spread abroad the Christian faith with all its blessings. The Church on her side, gave to this prince a pre-eminence over all other princes. That intimate union, which ought to subsist between the Two Powers, Spiritual and Temporal, preserving to each its own dignity and honour, found its practical and supreme expression in that mutual respect of Pontiff and emperor to each other. Five centuries of the Europe that was to be born came out of that act of Leo III. on Christmas Day, 800. Legitimate order and fixed possession were added to the innate courage and the love for self-government of the Teuton tribes, which thus grew into nations.

Divide into its chief parts the union thus consecrated before the eyes of all men, by an authority which all men admitted.

First of all we find the nature of civil government in general acknowledged by it. During five hundred years from the time of Constantine this had been upheld with unwavering steadfastness by the Popes. Never had they acknowledged a rule of despotism. One of the most marked characters of the Arian heresy was its disposition to exaggerate the civil sovereignty, admitting in it an absolute rule rather than a divine delegation, and, extending that absolute rule into the spiritual order of things. So far already had Arius [pg 508] anticipated Mohammed. Against this confusion of the Two Powers, and their absorption into one, Athanasius, Hilary, and Basil, Popes Julius, Liberius, and Damasus had struggled. A hundred years later Pope Gelasius under Arian thraldom had maintained to the emperor Anastasius the essential independence of the spiritual power, and the defence in spiritual things due to it from emperors. When another emperor, Leo the Isaurian, had intruded, if possible, further into the fabric of the Church than Anastasius, he was met, as has been seen above, by St. Gregory II. Now, seventy years later, in the last days of the eighth century, the Iconoclast storm having broken in vain on the head of four successive Popes, Leo III. set his seal upon all these acts of his predecessors. He restored the empire, and in restoring set it forth once again in its character of the supreme earthly right consecrated to the defence of the divine right and Christian faith. The marvel was that he made the head of the Teutonic tribes the guardian of Christ's religion, and invested him with the privileges involved in that guardianship which a succession of degenerate Constantines on the eastern throne had abused. The chalifs had shaken to its centre the Christian structure in the East; had stripped the Christian empire of its fairest provinces; had set up against it a religion of internecine hatred to its faith, of perpetual pollution to its morals; and the Pope, when the loss of Italy was added to all its other losses, had established, in the person of Charles, Christian monarchy in the West. It was no longer an attempt to veneer [pg 509] with Christian name an empire, all whose bureaucratic despotism was founded in the heathen subjection of all power to the State, but the establishment in a great conqueror of an empire whose basis was essentially Christian. Charles was “Augustus crowned of God, great and peace-bearing emperor of the Romans,” not an Augustus made by the senate and people of Rome, who had become in Diocletian the representative of armies, and in Byzantium continued a succession of dissolute adventurers.

Again, Charlemagne received from the Pope a complete code of Christian legislation, and as emperor he made it his own, and made it the centre of civil right. The act which constituted him emperor made Rome itself the point of a vast circumference of nations. It became for Christian contemplation what it had been for heathen: Christian voices united with the heathen. The imperial statute book spoke it out:[265] Rome is our common country. Already Charles, as Patricius, had received from Adrian I. a book of the councils and canons accepted by the Holy See. With it beside him he had restored order and law in the Frankish Church, which the last century of Merovingian misrule had so greatly impaired. He now added the imperial dignity and power to that peculiar combination of moderation and perseverance which marked his character. The harmonious equilibrium of qualities,[266] excelling equally in the arts of war and the arts of peace, and united with fidelity to the Church of God, made him the greatest of [pg 510] Christian sovereigns. Whatever he undertook he pursued with unfailing ardour. What he began, he finished; carrying on a multitude of things at once, he gave to each his full attention. In a reign of forty-seven years he made fifty-three military expeditions, most of which he led himself; eight years he fought the Avars; and thirty-three the Saxons. He enacted more laws than all his predecessors united, as well the Merovingians as the princes of his own family. Age, which brings fatigue and relaxation to other workers, saw his energies increase, for the fourteen years from 800 to his death showed his greatest legislative activity. The man in armour never laid aside his breastplate; his eye retained its penetration and his hand its vigour till he went down standing to his tomb, and there the great Christian emperor was found seated on his throne, with sackcloth under his imperial mantle, hundreds of years after his death.

To put the laws and customs of the Church in the hands of such a man as Augustus, crowned of God in St. Peter's Basilica, was of itself to change the wandering of the nations into an abode of settled peoples, capable of growing into the brotherhood of a Christian bond. So Leo III. completed the work of St. Gregory the Great. In Gregory's time the Visigothic kingdom of Spain had been already established on these same principles; now that it had been overthrown by the Moslem occupation, they were established on a vaster scale by the central empire of Charlemagne. So the Church carried her legislative wisdom, gained in the exercise of 800 years, into the civil counsels of princes.

Pipin le Bref,[267] great grandfather of Charles, had restored in France the great assembly of the Field of May. These assemblies were carefully held by Charles. Like his predecessors he took no measure and promulgated no law in opposition to the public wish. At Byzantium the practice which had triumphed was “the will of the prince has the force of law,” but the emperor Louis II., in 862, expressed the practice of Charles: “Law is made by the consent of the people, and the sanction of the king”. Every year at the Champs de Mai that principle became a reality. The king of the Franks appeared there the soul and centre of the assembly. He convoked it when and where he pleased. He proposed the subjects for its consideration, he gave his sanction to what it passed. He dissolved it at his pleasure. But it was consulted on all important acts of his government. It gave its advice with unlimited freedom; it had full right to amend the projects proposed. Often special commissions composed of the most competent persons considered what was brought before them; the bishops, ecclesiastical affairs; the lords, political. The government considered the interests of the Church with the most constant care. More than one Champ de Mai held by Charles bears the aspect at once of a council and a parliament. The king presided, listened, advised. The law which sprang from that familiar intercourse between king and nation perfectly expressed the harmony which reigned between an authority which was loved, and an obedience which was free. There was no written constitution, [pg 512] but it was one power exercised by sovereign and people. The Capitularies remain the monument of this immense activity.

The royal commissioners, Missi Dominici, an institution perfected by Charles, carried everywhere throughout his vast empire a knowledge of the laws thus passed, and reported to the sovereign how they were kept. By them the king touched each member of his political body. It was a class of removable functionaries, entirely under the order of the central power. It was composed chiefly, but not always, of bishops and counts. They went four times a year, usually two and two, an ecclesiastic and a layman, to inspect the district entrusted to them. All authorities were subject to this inspection. They reported to the sovereign upon all, and conveyed to him the popular feeling, as well as informed him as to the popular needs. This institution, together with the Champs de Mai, contributed to the empire's unity by maintaining its peace. It checked excesses of power in the great proprietors.

An account is extant how these commissioners acted in one of the remotest provinces, that of Istria. They consisted of two counts and a simple priest. At their arrival they held a public enquiry upon the conduct of the religious and civil authorities. The patriarch of Grado was obliged to appear in person, together with all the bishops and counts of the province. After that they considered the conduct of the duke John. The patriarch and the duke were alike compelled to give pledges to amend what had been wrongly done. All felt that [pg 513] Charlemagne himself was behind his commissioners; and when they departed it was with the full assurance that their visit had not been in vain. It will be right to take this instance as representing the government of Charles everywhere, and at all times. For the first time since the origin of Frank society a power existed, each of whose acts indicated a resolution to maintain the general good and to impregnate the whole nation with the spirit of the sovereign.

In all this government the model of the Christian hierarchy was before the mind of Charles, and in the strength of union with it he worked. What is so singularly civilising in his power is the extinction in his personal character as ruler of anything local, bounded, and particular, together with the maintenance of every right in every place. The Pope was the head of the Church, and he looked upon himself as the head of the State; the Pope was surrounded in every province by bishops, his colleagues and coadjutors; they worked together in one mass. So Charles willed that his dukes and counts should work with him in one mass for one end, the pacific unity of his great empire. The act of the Pope[268] in making him Roman emperor helped him greatly to conceive of himself as the secular head of a Christian brotherhood of peoples, as the Pope was its spiritual head. But the act which made him emperor did not give him secular dominion over any people not already subject to him. For instance, it did not subject to him the Saxon kingdoms in Britain. He was not territorial, but [pg 514] moral leader and president in the council of kings; their chief in the defence of the Church. He did not take from the Greek empress or her successors any temporal lordship; though the Greek pride long refused to acknowledge him as an equal. The Pope remained what he had been from the time of Stephen II., an independent sovereign in the Papal State: he had not given himself a master in erecting a new empire. In fact we see Leo III. retain the exercise of his secular sovereignty, and the emperor appear only as defender of St. Peter's landed inheritance. Leo III. maintained the right of his own officers against the interference of some imperial commissioners, and distinguished accurately the limits of the State of the Church, from the imperial realm. He took measures against Arab inroads, to secure his State in full independence. What he needed was the emperor's support against the violent party spirit of the time; against such deeds as the intrusion of a Pope upon the Apostolic See by armed force; against the assault upon a Pope by conspirators. This the authority of the emperor in Rome secured. For that he had a jurisdiction, as the Patricius had before. For this the Romans took an oath to the emperor as well as to the Pope; to the one as protector and advocate, to the other as temporal lord.

If in all this action Charlemagne had before him the model of the Christian hierarchy, not only his own vast kingdom, but all the nations of the West had spread out before them in the forty-six years of his reign, but especially in the last fourteen, when he had become, by the Pope's act, emperor of the Romans, the cordiality [pg 515] of union between the two great powers of human life, the spiritual and the temporal. The positive and intrinsic effect of the Holy See as the inflexible rule of doctrine and of justice on the Teuton features of the several northern tribes was seen when a man of immense natural capacity wielded so great a power in close conjunction and amity with it. What can be further than the action of Charles in the Champs de Mai, in the Missi Dominici, in a legislation which considered all the needs and desires of the subject, while it was supreme and final in its authority, from the condition of the northern tribes when they broke into the empire. The Vandals howled around the walls of Hippo when St. Augustine was repeating the penitential psalms on his death-bed; while Charles kept under his pillow St. Augustine's City of God, and strove to rule his empire for the maintenance of the Christian faith. He was accomplishing that union of many nations in one political bond as members of the same religion which Augustine himself, the most clear-sighted of saintly historians, was unable to contemplate. The mixture of earth with iron in the feet of the great heathen statue had wrought its dissolution; but the Teuton monarch, who mounted on his knees the steps of St. Peter's, kissing each separately, at the beginning of his career pledged his faith to the Pope over the tomb of the chief apostle, and before it ended he had given a final check to the intestine struggles of disunion. He had more than equalled the work of Constantine. The great Roman was indeed personally, though imperfectly, Christian. How much there was of [pg 516] policy, how much of faith in his conversion is a problem too hard to solve; but he was baptised on his death-bed, and the delay was probably of disastrous import to his inward life; and his empire was, in a great degree, still unconverted and heathen. His latter years were especially faulty in his practical execution of the relation between the Two Powers. From his time forward his own special foundation at Byzantium declined more and more, until the emperor who represented him became, in Leo, the Isaurian, and his son Kopronymus, the greatest enemy of the Church. But Charlemagne by his real union with St. Peter's successor, imparted Roman order, Christian civilisation, and civil constitution to that mass of seething peoples. If in the five hundred years succeeding Constantine his work deteriorated more and more, until the city which he wished to be the head of Christian empire yielded half of it to the Saracen, and then became the very seat of schism, the West, in the five hundred years which followed Charlemagne, saw a family of Christian and Catholic nations surround the throne of the chief apostle, nations which his Primacy had called into existence when he placed the imperial diadem on the head of “Charles Augustus, crowned of God”.

If from the West we extend our view to Charlemagne's effect on the East, we find the new order of things which his empire introduced, present him as the temporal head of the Christian faith in union with its spiritual head over against the powerless Byzantine emperor. The Pope had ceased to be a subject, and his word had set [pg 517] a Teuton sovereign on full equality with the power which had so grievously maltreated Italy during two hundred years. Never could he have taken such a step had he been still a vassal of the Greek court, which had not only tyrannised itself, but left the Apostolic See defenceless to the Lombard aggression for many generations. The emperor Zeno had made Odoacer Roman Patricius for the subjugation of Italy and of Rome itself. Stephen II. had made Pipin Patricius for its delivery and defence of the Holy See. Leo III. had exalted the Patricius to be emperor for fuller defence. No Roman noble or bandit could resist the power thus created. The Greek influence in Italy was all but extinguished; the Roman Church was protected from that violation of its rights, that plundering of its property, which Cæsar and Exarch had so often inflicted. For the patrimonies which the Isaurian had confiscated, the Roman See was thus in another form compensated. The Pope had received a domain in central Italy, and was in the possession of full independence. Over against that free life and mounting sap of the West, the East presented but an image of decay and stagnation.

Harun al Raschid was reigning as chalif at Bagdad when Charles was made emperor at Rome. His troops advanced to Ephesus and compelled the empress Irene to pay tribute during a four years' suspension of hostilities. Again and again had Moslem armies polluted the Christian cities from Antioch to the Bosphorus with every iniquity. In 726, they took possession of St. [pg 518] Basil's Cæsarea, in the year when the Isaurian was trying to force his Mohammedan hatred of images on Pope St. Gregory II., and seven years before he was stripping the Roman Church of its patrimony, and transferring ten provinces of the Papal patriarchate to the bishop of the eastern capital. From the death of Mohammed in 632 to the creation of Charles as emperor of the Romans in 800, was a time of scarcely interrupted disaster inflicted by the Saracen on the Christian through the East and the South. The outburst began as we have seen, by the betrayal of the faith on the part of Heraclius, the sole Roman emperor: Constans II., Leo III., and Kopronymus continued this betrayal. Mohammed waxed greater and greater through this whole period. The Christian successes consisted in not losing Constantinople, and in saving the south of France after the loss of Spain. In the reign of Harun al Raschid, that most terrible of destructions was at its greatest expansion and intensity. Then an emperor of the Romans was created by the Pope for the special defence of the Church. Exactly as Harun in his character of chalif was bound to lay waste and destroy the Christian Church and Faith, Charles was bound to watch over it. This was the tenure by which he held the empire, and his successors after him.[269] It was given, not for the glory and distinction of the wearer, but its true and proper significance lay in the fulfilment of the duties which the emperor was to discharge as protector of the Church. [pg 519] All imperial grandeur was an attribute of this duty. Exactly because the Greek emperor had not fulfilled this duty, the Pope undertook the renovation of the western Roman empire. It would be an entirely erroneous view of Leo's act to suppose that he could have done nothing else, that he must have made Charlemagne emperor, and by this single crowning bound himself and his successors to accept every succeeding emperor. Things in the East had come to that pass, but in the West the whole empire, in conception and in fact, was the Pope's work. The office thus created was a spiritual office, to which the spiritual head of Christendom should consecrate, anoint, and crown its temporal head. When there was a new king of the Franks, he was to come to Rome for consecration as emperor of the Romans: the Pope did not elect the new king, neither of the Franks then, nor of the Germans afterwards, but he, and he alone, invested the man chosen king with the title and power of the Roman emperor.

The chalifate, set up in the false pretension of succeeding a man whose whole claim to rule was founded on a falsehood, had become the most terrible despotism which human history had witnessed. It had taken possession of a very large part of what was Christian territory when it appeared in the world. Heraclius and his line trembled before it. At the time when a soldier of fortune closed seven revolutions at Byzantium Christian Spain was overwhelmed by it. And presently the Isaurian line helped its onward march [pg 520] by arrogating to itself that intrusion into spiritual government, which was the very basis of the chalifate. Then the action of Leo III., on Christmas Day, 800, created in the West a power adequate to resist the further advance of Mohammedan rule. As long continued dissension in the faith, decline in Christian morals, and an ever advancing despotism had given entrance to Saracen conquest, so from the very tomb of St. Peter, and at the voice of his Successor, arose that Christian king and Roman prince whom Pope Felix and his successors sought in vain from the heirs of Constantine. The vileness of oriental despotism was to meet in conflict Christian monarchy: the union of nations in the faith to give one spirit to the West: the flood which had almost overflowed the earth to stop before the Rock of Peter.

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