In 735, however, new troubles began in the south. Duke Eudo died, and Charles thought the time was ripe for the complete incorporation of the great southern duchy with the Frankish realm. He rode through the land and forced its inhabitants to do him homage, but their subjection was only the result of fear, and when he had returned home the southerners proclaimed Eudo’s son Hunold as their duke. Hunold would probably have been put down had not the Saracens begun once more to stir. |Wars with Hunold of Aquitaine, 735-40.| Headed by Yussuf-aben-Abderahman, the son of the chief who had fallen at Poictiers four years before, they sallied out of Narbonne, crossed the Rhone, and seized the old Roman city of Arles. The years 736-39 were mainly occupied in driving back three successive Moslem inroads into south-eastern Gaul, and Charles was so engrossed in this strife that he consented to recognise Hunold as duke of Aquitaine, so that he might have his hands entirely free for the greater struggle. Complete success at last crowned his arms: Provence was swept clear of the Arabs; Arles and Avignon, which the Infidels had seized and held for a space, were recovered; Nismes, Agde, and Béziers, which they had possessed since the great invasion of Septimania in 725, were taken, dismantled, and burnt, and a great host was defeated in front of Narbonne. That city, however, did not yet fall into the hands of the Franks; together with the southern half of Septimania it still remained a Saracen outpost, covering the passes of the eastern Pyrenees. For twenty years more it was fated to remain unconquered; not Charles but his son was destined to move forward the Frankish boundary to the foot of the mountains. Meanwhile the Saracens of Spain, cowed by the crushing blows of Charles the Hammer, abandoned their attempt to push northward, and plunged into a weary series of civil wars.
While Charles was engaged in his Saracen war, the puppet-king Theuderich IV., in whose name he had been ruling for the last seventeen years, chanced to die. |Four kingless years, 737-42.| So little had the royal name come to mean, that the great mayor did not seek out the next heir of the childless king and crown him, but ruled for the last four years of his life without any suzerain. He did not himself, however, take the kingly title, but continued to be styled mayor, prince, or duke of the Franks; he cared not for name or style so long as the real power was in his hands.
The reconquest of Provence and northern Septimania was the last of the great mayor’s triumphs. But the four years which he had yet to live were not without their importance. In 738 he compelled the Westphalian Saxons on the Lippe and Ems to do him homage and pay tribute. In 739 the organisation of the south German church was completed by the erection of four bishoprics in Bavaria, which looked to Boniface, now archbishop of all Transrhenane Germany, as their Metropolitan. Thus Bavaria became ecclesiastically an integral part of the Frankish Church, even as politically it had already become an integral part of the Frankish empire. |The Pope asks aid from Charles, 739.| But though Charles was a firm supporter of the Church in his own dominions, he would not interfere in ecclesiastical disputes beyond his frontier. Pope Gregory III. had plunged into a struggle with the Lombard king Liutprand, and invited the pious ruler of the Franks to march against the enemy of the Church. But Charles refused; Liutprand had given him some aid against the Saracens, and he was not minded to attack an old ally merely because the Lombard had fallen out with the Pope concerning the duchy of Spoleto.
In the summer of the next year the great mayor began to feel his health failing, though he had not yet completed his fifty-fourth year. He determined to set his house in order ere yet the hand of death was upon him, and summoned the great council of all the Frankish realms to meet him. With its approval he proceeded to make over the rule of the kingdom to his sons. There was no Merovingian king whose rights needed to be taken into consideration, as Theuderich IV. had died four years back, and had left no successor. |Charles divides his realm.| Accordingly Charles and the council dealt with the land as if it had already become the rightful inheritance of the house of St. Arnulf. The great mayor had three grown-up sons; two, Carloman and Pippin, were the offspring of his wife Rothrudis, the third, Grifo, was the son of Swanhildis, a Bavarian lady whom he had taken as his concubine during his Bavarian campaign of 725. Their ages appear to have been twenty-seven, twenty-six, and seventeen. Charles handed over the rule of Austrasia and Suabia to Carloman, and that of Neustria and Burgundy to Pippin. It is said that he also contemplated leaving a small appanage on the border of Neustria and Austrasia to Grifo. Bavaria and Aquitaine, the two great vassal dukedoms, were not named in the division, though the former fell under the influence of Carloman, and the latter under that of Pippin.
Shortly after he had accomplished this division of his realms, Charles died at Cérisy-on-Oise on the 21st of October 741. He had completed the work which his father, Pippin the Younger, had taken in hand, for the ancient boundaries of the Frankish empire had now been everywhere restored, Aquitaine and Bavaria had been reduced to vassalage, Christianity was now firmly rooted all over Frisia, Thuringia, and Hesse. |Life-work of Charles.| The difficulties he had faced were far greater than those which his father had to encounter. He had rescued the fortunes of the house of St. Arnulf from the lowest depths,—though Austrasia had been divided, though Neustria was hostile, and though an energetic king was for once swaying the Frankish sceptre and endeavouring to recover the lost privileges of his ancestors. Having fought his way to power, Charles had then to face the one serious danger from without which the Franks had yet encountered. He had met it without flinching, and smitten the intrusive Moslem so hard that the blow did not need to be repeated. For the future we hear of Frankish invasions of Spain, not of Saracen invasions of Gaul. Charles then had won peace without and within, he had reorganised the Frankish realm, raised it to a pitch of power and glory which it had never attained before, and made possible the triumphant career of his son and grandson. As the champion of Christianity and the protector of the evangelist of Germany, he had won a yet nobler title to honourable memory, and the complaints of the Gaulish bishops, who murmured that his hand was too hard on the Church, may be lightly disregarded when we add up the sum of his merits, and salute him as the inaugurator of a new and better era in the history of Europe.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE ICONOCLAST EMPERORS—STATE OF THE EASTERN EMPIRE IN THE EIGHTH CENTURY
717-802
Leo and the defence of Constantinople, 718—Importance of his triumph—Social and economical condition of the Empire—Decay of Art and Letters—Superstition and Iconoduly—The Iconoclast movement—Leo’s Crusade against Images—Constantine Copronymus and his persecutions—Successful wars of Constantine V.—Minority of Constantine VI.—Intrigues and triumph of Irene—Restoration of Image-worship—End of the Isaurian dynasty, 802.
In March 717 Leo the Isaurian became master of Constantinople, his predecessor, Theodosius III., having abdicated and refused to continue the civil war which had begun in the previous year. It is probable that his resignation was due as much to fear of the oncoming of the Saracens as to the dread of Leo, for the armies of the caliph Soliman were already ravaging Phrygia and Cappadocia, and slowly making their way towards the Bosphorus. Nothing save the consciousness of his own capacity to stem the rising flood of Moslem invasion could have justified Leo in taking arms against Theodosius in such a time of danger; but fortunately for the empire he had not overvalued his own power, and was destined to show that he was fully competent to face the situation. |Leo the Isaurian, 717-40.| He was still a young man, but his life had already been full of incident and adventure; he was the son of parents of some wealth, who had migrated from the Isaurian regions in the Taurus to Thrace. He had entered the army during the second reign of Justinian Rhinotmetus, and after serving him well had incurred the tyrant’s suspicion, and been sent on a dangerous expedition into the Caucasus, from which he was not intended to return. But he extricated himself from many perils among the Alans and Abasgi of those distant regions, and came back in safety, to be made by Anastasius II. governor of the Anatolic theme. He was an active, enterprising, persevering man, with a talent for organisation, a great power of making himself loved by his soldiery, and an iron hand. His later career shows that he was more than a good soldier, being also one who looked deep into the causes of things, and had formed his own views on politics and religion.
Leo was only granted five months in which to prepare for the long-dreaded advent of the Saracens. He spent this time in accumulating vast stores of provisions, recruiting the garrision of Constantinople, and strengthening its fortifications. On the 15th of August Moslemah with an army of 80,000 Saracens appeared on the Bithynian coast; a few days later a Syrian fleet of over 1000 sail appeared in the Propontis, took the army of Moslemah on board, and transported it into Thrace. The Saracen’s land-troops at once commenced the blockade of the capital by land, while part of the fleet moved into the Bosphorus, to post itself so as to block the mouth of the Golden Horn, in which the Imperial navy had taken refuge. Leo delivered his first blow while the Saracen vessels were passing up the Bosphorus; issuing out of the Golden Horn with many galleys and fireships he attacked the enemy as they were trying to pass up the straits, and burnt twenty ships of war. |Moslemah besieges Constantinople.| The Saracen admiral then dropped down to the southern exit of the Bosphorus, and left the northern exit free to the Romans, so that Leo was able to continue to draw supplies from the Black Sea.