Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

With the contemptuous title ‘The Sluggard Kings’ the last rulers of the Merovingian line have passed down to posterity. Few were endowed with any ability or even ambition to govern, the majority died before they had reached manhood looking already like senile old men; and the power that should have been theirs passed into the hands of the Mayors of the Palace who administered their demesnes. On state occasions, indeed, they were still shown to their subjects, as they jolted to the place of assembly in a rough cart drawn by oxen; but the ceremony over, they returned to their royal villas and insignificance. ‘Nothing was left to the king save the name of king, the flowing locks, the long beard. He sat on his throne and played at government, gave audiences to envoys, and dismissed them with the answers with which he had been schooled.’

The Carolingians

It was a situation that could only last so long as the name ‘Meroveus’ retained its spell over the Franks; but the day came when the spell was broken, and a race of stronger fibre, the Carolingians, usurped the royal title. The heads of this family had for generations held the office of ‘Mayor of the Palace’ in the part of Gaul between the Meuse and the Lower Rhine, then called Austrasia. It was their duty to administer the royal demesnes in this large district, that is, to see that the laws were obeyed, to superintend the cultivation of the soil, and to collect a share of the various harvests as a revenue for the king.

This was more important work than it may sound to modern ears; for in the early Middle Ages the majority of people, unlike men and women to-day, lived in the country. Ever since the decay of the Roman Empire, when the making of roads was neglected and the imperial grain-fleets disappeared from the Mediterranean, the problem of carrying merchandise and food from one part of Europe to another had grown steadily more acute. As commerce and industry languished, towns ceased to be centres of population and became merely strongholds where the neighbourhood could find refuge when attacked by its enemies. People preferred to spend their ordinary life in villages in the midst of fields, where they could grow corn and barley, or keep their own sheep and oxen, and if the crops failed or their beasts were smitten by disease a whole province might suffer starvation.

The Mayor of the Palace must guard the royal demesnes, as far as possible, from the ravages of weather, wolves, or lawless men, for the King of the Franks, as much as any of his subjects, depended on the harvests and herds for his prosperity rather than on commerce or manufactures. By the end of the seventh century the Mayors of Austrasia had ceased to interest themselves merely in local affairs and had begun to extend their authority over the whole of France. Nominally, they acted in the name of the Merovingian kings, but once when the throne fell vacant they did not trouble to fill it for two years. The Franks made no protest: it was to their mayors, not to their kings, that they now turned whether in search of good government or daring national exploits.

The Carolingian Charles ‘Martel’, Charles ‘the Hammer’, was a warrior calculated to arouse their profound admiration. ‘He was a Herculean warrior,’ says an old chronicle, ‘an ever-victorious prince ... who triumphed gloriously over other princes, and kings, and peoples, and barbarous nations: in so much that, from the Slavs to the Frisians and even to the Spaniards and Saracens, there were none who rose up against him that escaped from his hand, without prostrating themselves in the dust before his empire.’

It was Charles Martel who saved France from falling under the yoke of the Saracens, a race of Arabian warriors who, crossing from Africa at the Strait of Gibraltar, subdued in one short campaign three-quarters of Spain. Describing the first great victory over the Gothic King Rodrigo at Guadalete, the Governor of Africa wrote to his master the Caliph, ‘O Commander of the Faithful, these are no common conquests; they are like the meeting of the nations on the Day of Judgement.’

Puffed up with the glory they had gained, the Saracens, who were followers of the Prophet Mahomet, believed that they had only to advance for Christian armies to run away; and over the Pyrenees they swept in large bands, seizing first one stronghold on the Mediterranean coast and then another. Before this invasion Charles Martel had been engaged in a quarrel with the Duke of Aquitaine, but now they hastily made friends and on the field of Poitiers joined their forces to stem the Saracen tide. So terrible was the battle, we are told, that over three hundred thousand Saracens fell before the Frankish warriors ‘inflexible as a block of ice’. The number is almost certainly an exaggeration, and so also is the claim that the victors, by forcing the remnant of the Mahometan army to retreat towards the Pyrenees in hasty flight, saved Europe for Christianity. Even had the decision of the battle been reversed, the Moors would have found the task of holding Spain in the years to come quite sufficient to absorb all their energies. Indeed, their attacks on Gaul were, from the first, more in the nature of gigantic raids than of invasions with a view to settlement, though at the time their ferocity made them seem of world-wide importance.

Thus it was only natural that the Mayor of the Palace, to whom the victory was mainly due, became the hero of Christendom. The Pope, who was at that time trying to defend Rome from the King of the Lombards, sent to implore his aid; but Charles knew that his forces had been weakened by their struggle with the Saracens and dared not undertake so big a campaign.

Pepin, King of the Franks