CHARLEMAGNE'S SWORD.
(From the Imperial Treasury, Vienna.)
And as for the rest of the map, all that matters, all that does not belong to the north-eastern barbarians, falls into the Empire of Charlemagne. Pepin, King of the Franks before Charlemagne, had all that we call France and further had our Switzerland, Bavaria and, in the north, the present Holland and Belgium. He also was king of considerable territory east of the Rhine. But under Charlemagne those large possessions were very largely increased, eastward, and northward, and southward. Southward he held Italy right down to Naples. Eastward he had all the old Roman province of Illyricum; that is to say that his sovereignty extended to the Danube. Northward of the Danube, where that great river makes its southward bend, he held Bohemia. He had the land of the Saxons up to and beyond the Elbe. He ruled over Denmark and the south of Scandinavia.
The whole of the centre of the picture, in fact, is included in this Carolingian Empire, as it was called, from Carolus, the Latin form of Charles. And Charlemagne had been consecrated Emperor by the Pope at Rome. The Visigoths had been Christians, but they had not been orthodox Christians according to the opinion of the Church of Rome. They had been Arians; that is, followers of what the Roman Church considered the wrong and heretical opinion of a certain bishop called Arius. The Roman Church and the Pope of Rome could not have used the clergy of the Visigoths as their agents; the Pope could not have acted through such agents or worked with them. But he did, and he could, act through the Frankish clergy: and you see over how large a space of the world he could thus act and make his power felt.
In the Eastern Empire the Patriarch at Constantinople was the head of the Christian power. The Pope's authority did not extend there. Neither had it authority in Spain under the Mahommedan Moors. Indeed a large number of the Romans and Goths in Spain became Mahommedans, in order to enjoy the privileges and the lighter taxes which the Moslems imposed on Mahommedans. But the Pope had this very strong position as the head of the Church all over Charlemagne's Empire and beyond—for he was obeyed in Britain and in Ireland.
The great Empire of the great Charlemagne was not fated to last very long, as you will see; but it had served to help in establishing over all the central part of Europe the authority of the Church at Rome; and when it broke up, that authority was still maintained over the broken pieces of the Empire, no matter under what king they fell. Charlemagne repaid the Pope well for his consecration at Rome on Christmas Day of the year 800.
CHAPTER XI
THE FRANKS AND THE FEUDAL SYSTEM
Now, since the Franks occupied, for a while, so large an Empire, and were the principal people to establish the Pope's power, let us see what they did over this extent of Empire, what they made of it, what it became under them.