Heart of Europe

by Ralph Adams Cram

During the fifteenth century the magnificent efforts of the dukes of Burgundy to create for themselves an independent state between France and the Empire, and reaching from the Rhine to the Aisne, from the Alps to the sea, resulted in a partial and temporary unification of the old Belgian lands, but with the death of Mary of Burgundy in 1482, the whole territory became more and more closely knit into the Empire, France losing even her claim to suzerainty over Flanders; all the lands west of the Meuse and over the Rhine as far as the Ems became the Netherlands, comprising roughly what is now Holland and Belgium. The duchies of Luxembourg, Bar, and Lorraine, with the Palatinate, shared all that lay between the Meuse and the Rhine, save what the great bishoprics had assumed to themselves, while Burgundy (except the Franche-Comté) and Lorraine were definitively merged in France.

Then came the Spanish dominion over the whole territory, barring the duchy of Julich along the Rhine; the revolt of Holland and the severing of the United Netherlands north of the Rhine from the Spanish territories; finally, in 1715, after 160 years of ruinous domination, Spain was driven out and Austria succeeded in Flanders, Brabant, and Luxembourg, maintaining herself there until the time of Napoleon a century later, when for a few years everything as far as the Rhine, together with the Netherlands on the other side, was incorporated in France. With the fading of the splendid dream of a Napoleonic empire, Holland and Belgium, as we know them now, came into existence, the lands of the duchy of Julich went to Prussia, the Palatinate to Bavaria. Luxembourg was reduced to its existing area and the French frontier delimited as it is now, except for Alsace and Lorraine, which were lost in 1870.

Between the upper and nether millstones of France and the Empire, the Heart of Europe for fifteen centuries has been ground into fragments of ever-changing form, never able to coalesce into unity, but producing ever in spite of political chaos and dynastic oppression great ideals of piety, righteousness, liberty; great art-manifestations of the vigour and nobility of race, great figures to uphold and enforce the lofty principles that have made so much of the brilliant history of mediæval Europe, and all centring around the lands of the many tribes who from earliest times were known as the Belgæ.

They enter well into history, these Belgæ, in the fifty-seventh year before the birth of Christ, Nervii, Veromandri, Atrobates, from the valleys of the Meuse and the Sambre, as Cæsar found and declared, “that day against the Nervii,” when the battle for the winning of this new land was his by hardly more than a chance. The tribes were hard and free, and they died in the end almost to a man, five hundred remaining out of fifty thousand warriors. But Cæsar was magnanimous, as always, and by no means without appreciation of his adversaries, so Allies of Rome, with full claim on her protection, they became, with the rank and title of a free people, as they have remained at heart ever since. In seven years the last of the tribes had surrendered and Belgium became a flourishing colony as well as the advance-guard of Roman civilisation in its progress against the savage Germans of the Rhine. By the fall of the Empire a great and united people had come into being between Gaul and Germania, divided into four great sections with their several capitols at Trèves, Reims, Mainz, and Cologne.

Meanwhile the Franks had come on the scene, though their name is rather a rallying-cry than a mark of race, meaning only that certain of the tribes of Gaul, with others of the Belgæ, were determined to be free—as they became shortly and as they have generally remained ever since. Now the Salian Franks were the dwellers in Flanders and Brabant and under their Duke Clodion had extended their borders as far as Soissons. Clodion’s successor, Merovæus, was grandfather of Clovis, the first Christian king of the north. The Merovings, then, are neither strictly of Gaul nor of Germany, but of the Heart of Europe itself, and their blood, like that of their followers, a mingling of Germanic and Celtic and Roman strains.

Châlons saw them allied with the Romans and driving back the fierce tide of the earlier Huns that threatened to beat out the last flicker of light in Europe: Tolbiac saw them hurl back the savage Allemanni, in the year 496, again preserving the European tradition from submergence under barbarian hordes, nor was this the last time they were to perform this service. Already Clovis had married Clotilde, niece of the Duke of Burgundy, so bringing another region into close contact with his own, and now, after the successful issue of the battle of Tolbiac, when he had first called on the God of Christians, he presented himself before the Archbishop of Reims, St. Remi, for baptism, where he heard the significant words: “Bow thy proud head, Sicambrian! destroy what thou hast worshipped, worship what thou hast destroyed.”

Whatever the motive, and however inadequate the performance of his new obligations by Clovis, his baptism is one of the crucial events in history, marking the end of paganism as a controlling force, and with the conquest of Italy by Theodoric and the promulgation of the Holy Rule of St. Benedict, the beginning of the great Christian era of culture and civilisation that was to endure, unimpaired, for a thousand years.

The dominion of Clovis comprised all that is now France south to the Loire and Burgundy, with Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Bavaria, but his capital was at Tournai, and he was in fact even more a Belgian than a French sovereign. Under him all the Franks were united and his power was such that the Emperor at Constantinople made him patrician, consul, and Augustus. With his death in 511 began a long era of division and reunion, of internecine warfare and the plotting of jealous women, two of whom, Fredegonde personifying the Gallic influence, Brunhilde the Germanic, fostered a conflict that hardly came to an end before the fall of the dynasty.

Little by little the Merovings broke away from their racial Belgic affiliations, Soissons became the capital rather than Tournai, and at last by a dramatic turn of fate another Belgian race brought the decrepit line to its term and founded a new and a nobler house. Pepin of Landen, in the province of Liége, became mayor of the palace and the active influence in royal affairs, somewhere about the year 620, and it was a son of his daughter, Pepin of Herstel (a town also in the province of Liége) who was father of Charles Martel, who in his turn was the grandfather of Charlemagne.

As the Huns and the Allemanni had been rolled back from their savage incursions by the aid of men of Belgic nationality, so now the greater threat of an onrushing Mohammedanism was to be dispelled by another and a greater personality, Charles the Hammer, a soldier of consummate ability, the real ruler of all the Franks, and the victor at the battle of Tours when final decision was reached as to whether Europe was for the future to be Moslem or Christian.