The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 09

by Unknown

CHARLEMAGNE AND HIS SUCCESSORS

[814-1039 A.D.]

As king, and afterwards as emperor, he governed Italy, together with his other vast states, forty years; he pursued with constancy, and with increasing ability, the end he proposed to himself, viz., establishing the reign of the laws, and a flourishing civilisation: but barbarism was too strong for him; and when he died in 814 it was re-established throughout the empire.

Italy had eight kings of the family of Charlemagne, reckoning his son and grandson, who reigned under him, and were, properly speaking, his lieutenants. Charles the Fat, great-grandson of Charlemagne, was deposed in 888; after which ten sovereigns, either Italian or Burgundian, but allied to the race of the Franks, disputed for seventy years more the crown of Italy and the empire. In 951 Otto I of Saxony, king of Germany, forced Berenger II, who then reigned, to acknowledge himself his vassal; in 961 Otto entered Italy a second time with his Germans, was crowned at Rome with the title of emperor, and sent Berenger II to end his days in a fortress in Germany.

Nearly five centuries elapsed from the fall of the ancient Roman Empire to the passing over of the renewed empire to the Germans. For a long space of time Italy had been pillaged and oppressed in turn by barbarians of every denomination, who wantonly overran the country only to plunder, and believed themselves valiant because, though in small numbers, they spread terror over a vast extent, and imagined by bloodshed to give a dignity to their depredations. The country, thus exposed to so many outrages, did not remain such as the Romans had left it. The Goth, Lombard, Frank, and German warriors, who had successively invaded Italy, introduced several of the opinions and sentiments of the barbarian race, particularly the habit of independence and resistance to authority. They divided with their kings the country conquered by their valour. They caused to be ceded to them vast districts, the inhabitants of which they considered their property equally with the land. The Lombard monarchy comprehended thirty dukedoms, or marquisates; their number diminished under Charlemagne and his successors; but at the same time there rose under them a numerous class of counts and vavaseurs, amongst whom every duke divided the province that had been ceded to him, under condition that they should swear fealty and homage, and follow him to the wars. The counts, in their turn, divided among the warriors attached to their colours the land apportioned to them. Thus was the feudal system, which made the possession of land the warrior’s pay, and constituted an hereditary subordination founded on interest and confirmed by oath from the king down to the lowest soldier, established at the same time throughout Europe. The Lombards had carried into Italy the first germs of this system which had been developed by the Franks and invigorated by the civil wars of Charlemagne and his successors; these wars rendered it necessary that every feudatory should fortify his dwelling to preserve his allegiance to his lord; and the country, which till then had been open and without defence, became covered with castles, in which these feudal lords established their residence.

About the same time—that is to say, in the ninth century—cities began to rebuild their ancient walls; for the barbarian kings who had everywhere levelled these walls to the ground no longer opposed their reconstruction, and the danger of being invaded by the rival princes who disputed the throne made them necessary; besides, at this epoch new swarms of barbarians from all parts infested Europe; the inhabitants of Scandinavia, under the name of Danes and Normans, ravaged England and France; the Hungarians devasted Germany and upper Italy; the Saracens, masters of Africa, infested the southern coasts of Italy and the isles: conquest was not the purpose of any of these invaders; plunder and massacre were their only objects. Permission to guard themselves against continual outrages could not be withheld from the inhabitants of towns. Several thousand citizens had often been obliged to pay ransom to little more than a hundred robbers; but, from the time they were permitted by their emperors to rebuild their walls, to purchase or manufacture arms, they felt themselves in a state to make themselves respected. Their long suffering had hardened them, had accustomed them to privations and danger, and had taught them it was better to defend their lives than yield them up to every contemptible aggressor; at the same time, the population of cities, no longer living in idleness at the expense of the provinces of the empire, addicted themselves to industry for their own profit: they had, accordingly, some wealth to defend. The ancient curiæ and municipalities had been retained in all the towns of Italy by their barbarian masters, in order to distribute more equally the burdens imposed by the conquerors, and reach individuals more surely. The magistrates were the chiefs of a people who demanded only bread, arms, and walls.

In the meantime the dukes, marquises, counts, and prelates, who looked on these cities as their property, on the inhabitants as men who belonged to them, and laboured only for their use, soon perceived that these citizens were ill disposed to obey, and would not suffer themselves to be despoiled, since they had arms, and could defend themselves under the protection of their walls: residence in towns thus became disagreeable to the nobles, and they left them to establish themselves in their castles. They became sensible that to defend these castles they had need of men devoted to them; that, notwithstanding the advantage which their heavy armour gave them when fighting on horseback, they were the minority; and they hastened to enfranchise the rural population, to encourage their growth, to give them arms, and to endeavour to gain their affections. The effect of this change of rule was rapid: the rural population in the tenth and eleventh centuries increased, doubled, quadrupled in exact proportion to the land which they had to cultivate.

Otto I, his son Otto II, and his grandson Otto III were successively acknowledged emperors and kings of Italy, from 961 to 1002. When this branch of the house of Saxony became extinct, Henry II of Bavaria and Conrad the Salian of Franconia filled the throne from 1004 to 1039. During this period of nearly eighty years, the German emperors twelve times entered Italy at the head of their armies, which they always drew up in the plains of Roncaglia near Piacenza: there they held the states of Lombardy, received homage from their Italian feudatories, caused the rents due to be paid, and promulgated laws for the government of Italy. A foreign sovereign, however, almost always absent, known only by his incursions at the head of a barbarous army, could not efficaciously govern a country which he hardly knew, and where his yoke was detested. During these five reigns, the social power became more and more weak in Italy. The emperors were too happy to acknowledge the local authorities, whatever they were, whenever they could obtain from them their pecuniary dues: sometimes they were dukes or marquises, whose dignities had survived the disasters of various invasions and of civil wars; sometimes the archbishops and bishops of great cities, whom Charlemagne and his successors had frequently invested with duchies and counties escheated to the crown, reckoning that lords elected for life would remain more dependent than hereditary lords; sometimes, finally, they were the magistrates themselves, who, although elected by the people, received from the monarch the title of imperial vicars, and took part with the nobles and prelates in the plaids (placita), or diets of Roncaglia.

In the time of Conrad the Salian, the prelates almost throughout Lombardy joined the cities against the nobles; and from 1035 to 1039 there was a general war between these two orders of society. Conrad put an end to it, by a constitution which is considered to be the basis of feudal law. By this the inheritance of fiefs was protected from the caprices of the lords and of the crown,—the most oppressive conditions of feudal dependence were suppressed or softened,—and the few remaining slaves of the land were set free.