Again; Leo the Iconoclast Emperor destroyed the holy images in the East, and sent commands to the Exarch of Ravenna to destroy them in western Italy. Pope Gregory II. replied by renouncing allegiance to the Emperor of Constantinople; and by two famous letters which are still preserved; in which he tells the Iconoclast Emperor, that, ‘if he went round the grammar-schools at Rome, the children would throw their horn-books at his head . . . that he implored Christ to send the Emperor a devil, for the destruction of his body and the salvation of his soul . . . that if he attempted to destroy the images in Rome, the pontiff would take refuge with the Lombards, and then he might as well chase the wind that the Popes were the mediators of peace between East and West, and that the eyes of the nations were fixed on the Pope’s humility, and adored as a God on earth the apostle St. Peter. And that the pious Barbarians, kindled into rage, thirsted to avenge the persecution of the East.’ Then Luitprand took up the cause of the Pope and his images, and of the mob, who were furious at the loss of their idols; and marched on Ravenna, which opened her gates to him, so that he became master of the whole Pentapolis; and image-worship, to which some plainspoken people give a harsher name, was saved for ever and a day in Italy. Why did Gregory II. in return, call in Orso, the first Venetian Doge, to expel from Ravenna the very Luitprand who had fought his battles for him, and to restore that Exarchate of Ravenna, of which it was confessed, that its civil quarrels, misrule, and extortions, made it the most miserable government in Italy? And why did he enter into secret negotiations with the Franks to come and invade Italy?
Again, when Luitprand wanted to reduce the duchies of Beneventum and Spoleto, which he considered as rebels against him, their feudal suzerain; why did the next Pope, Gregory III., again send over the Alps to Charles Martel to come and invade Italy, and deliver the Church and Christ’s people from ruin?
And who were these Franks, the ancestors of that magnificent, but profligate aristocracy whose destruction our grandfathers beheld in 1793? I have purposely abstained from describing them, till they appear upon the stage of Italy, and take part in her fortunes—which were then the fortunes of the world.
They appear first on the Roman frontier in A.D. 241, and from that time are never at rest till they have conquered the north of Gaul. They are supposed (with reason) not to have been a race or tribe at all; but a confederation of warriors, who were simply ‘Franken,’ ‘free;’ ‘free companions,’ or ‘free lances,’ as they would have been called a few centuries later; who recruited themselves from any and every tribe who would join them in war and plunder. If this was the case; if they had thrown away, as adventurers, much of the old Teutonic respect for law, for the royal races, for family life, for the sacred bonds of kindred, many of their peculiarities are explained. Falsehood, brutality, lawlessness, ignorance, and cruelty to the conquered Romans, were their special sins; while their special, and indeed only virtue, was that indomitable daring which they transmitted to their descendants for so many hundred years. The buccaneers of the young world, they were insensible to all influences save that of superstition. They had become, under Clovis, orthodox Christians: but their conversion, to judge from the notorious facts of history, worked little improvement on their morals. The pages of Gregory of Tours are comparable, for dreary monotony of horrors, only to those of Johnson’s History of the Pyrates.
But, as M. Sismondi well remarks, their very ignorance and brutality made them the more easily the tools of the Roman clergy: ‘Cette haute vénération pour l’Église, et leur sévère orthodoxie, d’autant plus facile à conserver que, ne faisant aucune étude, et ne disputant jamais sur la foi, ils ne connaissaient pas même les questions controversées, leur donnèrent dans le clergé de puissants auxiliaires. Les Francs se montrèrent disposés à haïr les Ariens, à les combattres, et les dépouiller sans les entendre; les évêques, en retour, ne se montrèrent pas scrupuleux sur le reste des enseignements moraux de la religion: ils fermèrent les yeux sur les violences, le meurtre, le déréglement des moeurs; ils autorisèrent en quelque sorte publiquement la poligamie, et ils prêchèrent le droit divin des rois et le devoir le l’obéissance pour les peuples [279].’
A painful picture of the alliance: but, I fear, too true.
The history of these Franks you must read for yourselves. You will find it well told in the pages of Sismondi, and in Mr. Perry’s excellent book, ‘The Franks.’ It suffices now to say, that in the days of Luitprand these Franks, after centuries of confusion and bloodshed, have been united into one great nation, stretching from the Rhine to the Loire and the sea, and encroaching continually to the southward and eastward. The government has long passed out of the hands of their fainéant Meerwing kings into that of the semi-hereditary Majores Domûs, or Mayors of the Palace; and Charles Martel, perhaps the greatest of that race of great men, has just made himself mayor of Austrasia (the real Teutonic centre of Frank life and power), Neustria and Burgundy. He has crushed Eudo, the duke of Romanized Aquitaine, and has finally delivered France and Christendom from the invading Saracens. On his Franks, and on the Lombards of Italy, rest, for the moment, the destinies of Europe.
For meanwhile another portent has appeared, this time out of the far East. Another swarm of destroyers has swept over the earth. The wild Arabs of the desert, awakening into sudden life and civilization under the influence of a new creed, have overwhelmed the whole East, the whole north of Africa, destroying the last relics of Roman and Greek civilization, and with them the effete and semi-idolatrous Christianity of the Empire. All the work of Narses and Belisarius is undone. Arab Emirs rule in the old kingdom of the Vandals. The new human deluge has crossed the Straits into Europe. The Visigoths, enervated by the luxurious climate of Spain, have recoiled before the Mussulman invaders. Roderick, the last king of the Goths, is wandering as an unknown penitent in expiation of his sin against the fair Cava, which brought down (so legends and ballads tell) the scourge of God upon the hapless land; and the remnants of the old Visigoths and Sueves are crushed together into the mountain fastnesses of Asturias and Gallicia, thence to reissue, after long centuries, as the noble Spanish nation, wrought in the forges of adversity into the likeness of tempered steel; and destined to reconquer, foot by foot, their native land from the Moslem invader.
But at present the Crescent was master of the Cross; and beyond the Pyrenees all was slavery and ‘miscreance.’ The Arabs, invading France in 732, in countless thousands, had been driven back at the great fight of Tours, with a slaughter so great, that the excited imagination of Paulus Diaconus sees 375,000 miscreants dead upon the field, while only 1500 Franks had perished. But home troubles had prevented ‘the Hammer of the Moors’ from following up his victory. The Saracens had returned in force in 737, and again in 739. They still held Narbonne. The danger was imminent. There was no reason why they should not attempt a third invasion. Why should they not spread along the shores of the Mediterranean, establishing themselves there, as they were already doing in Sicily, and menacing Rome from north as well as south? To unite, therefore, the two great Catholic Teutonic powers, the Frank and the Lombard, for the defence of Christendom, should have been the policy of him who called himself the Chief Pontiff in Christendom. Yet the Pope preferred, in the face of that great danger, to set the Teutonic nations on destroying each other, rather than to unite them against the Moslem.
The bribe offered to the Frank was significant—the title of Roman Consul; beside which he was to have filings of St. Peter’s chains, and the key of his tomb, to preserve him body and soul from all evil.