Charles Martel died when only fifty years of age, and his son Pepin succeeded him as mayor of the palace. The fiction of Meroving kingship could no longer be maintained; the stock was hopelessly degenerate; the people demanded an end, the Pope sanctioned it, and so, after a most orderly fashion Childeric III betook himself to a convenient cloister, Pepin was raised on the shields of the Gallic soldiers, then decently crowned in St. Denis, and the dynasty of the Carolings began. For sixteen years he reigned as kings had not been wont to reign for many centuries; Saxony, Brittany, Languedoc were added to the Frankish dominions, Rome twice saved from the Lombard invaders, and the Papacy made the faithful ally and defender of the Frankish kingdom, then the one great power in Europe.
There were more reasons than that of policy for this alliance. Practically abandoned by the Roman Emperors in the east, Italy had been the prey of tribe after tribe of northern savages, and the Papacy was the only centre of order and authority. In spite of this the Popes still shrank from severing themselves wholly from the imperial centre, but the iconoclastic controversy had resulted in what was both heresy and schism on the part of the patriarchate of Constantinople, and communion was no longer possible. Moreover, all the other northern tribes that had accepted Christianity—Goths, Vandals, Lombards—had adopted the Arian heresy and were therefore even more distasteful to Rome than unconverted heathen. This condition of things justified the Papacy in its attitude of intolerance, and when Pepin came to the throne, it was almost at the last gasp, through persecution, spoliation, and outrage at the hands of the Teutonic Arians. The Frankish kingdom alone was Catholic, and enthusiastically Catholic, and it is small wonder that to the Pope the rise of a great and powerful and Catholic nation under the dominating Carolings came as a special mercy from heaven—as, indeed, it was.
With the death of Pepin and the accession of his son Charles—known now for all time as Charlemagne—the curtain rose on one of the most brilliant dramas of history. The Lombards had again revolted; Pope Hadrian called on the Franks in despair; King Charles hurled his armies into Italy like an avalanche, captured and deposed Desiderius, last of the Lombard kings, proclaimed himself King of Lombardy, pressed on to Rome, and was welcomed there by the Supreme Pontiff as the saviour of Christendom.
He would, however, accept no formal honours save that of patrician, and returned to the north to continue the work of his father in consolidating and extending the kingdom. For twenty-four years he was engaged in innumerable wars, in eager efforts to restore education, political order, ecclesiastical righteousness, and even some small measure of genuine culture, with results that seem miraculous in the light of what had been before for so many centuries. Finally, in the year 799, he went again to Rome, where Leo III now sat in the chair of Peter, and at mass on Christmas Day, A. D. 800, the Pope came suddenly behind him as he was kneeling before the altar in St. Peter’s and, placing a crown on his head, cried in a loud voice: “Life and victory to Charles, the great and pacific Emperor of the Romans, crowned by the hand of God!” and after three centuries and more of anarchy, barbarism, and hopeless degeneration, the empire was restored as the Holy Roman Empire, in the person of a Frankish warrior of the lands of the Belgæ, and destined to endure for another thousand years.
Aix-la-Chapelle is the very centre of the land and the people that built up the Christian civilisation of the Middle Ages, and it was here that Charlemagne fixed his chief place of residence. During his lifetime it was the very, and the only, centre of order and of culture in Europe. A great warrior, he was an even greater administrator, while as the restorer of learning and the patron of art and letters he was perhaps greatest of all. When he came to the throne there lay behind him nearly four centuries of absolute anarchy and barbarism, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the marches of the Teutonic savages. What he built he built from the ground upward, and though his was only the “false dawn” that heralds the day, passing utterly, so far as one could see, within a generation after his death, it was the saving of Europe, the preservation of the succession, that, the second Dark Ages overpassed, guaranteed the coming in of the great era that began with the millennial year of Christianity and lasted for five full centuries.
Under his direction a complete administrative system was established over the unwieldy empire; local governments were set up, with a system of regular visitations from the central authority, and in this way the foundations were laid for the counties of Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, into which, together with Vermandois, Valois, Amiens, and Champagne, this territory of our survey was divided during the Middle Ages.
In religion, education, and art Charlemagne went far beyond his predecessors for five centuries, so far as the form and re-creation are concerned. Separated at last from the church in the East, now definitely schismatic, heretical, and Erastian, the Papacy was in a position to go on unhindered in its development, and Charlemagne became not only a defender but a zealous and enthusiastic reformer. Monasticism was universally strengthened and extended, new bishoprics were founded, the state of the Holy See purified, while schools were established in connection with cathedrals and monasteries throughout the Empire. Charles had a great passion for scholars and artists, gathering them from Italy, Spain, England, wherever, indeed, they were to be found, and for a time his court was the nucleus of culture in the West. Architecture was reborn, all the ravelled threads from Rome, Constantinople, Ravenna, Syria were gathered up and knit together, and though few authentic works from among the myriads of the Emperor’s creation still remain, we know from what we have, and chiefly the royal chapel at Aix, that the result was the restoring once more of a line of continuity after the vast vacancy of the Dark Ages, and the initiation of a new vitality that, after the second Dark Ages, was to serve as the energising power that brought Romanesque art into existence and made possible the great glory of Gothic.
Great as he was, Charlemagne had all the weaknesses of his racial tradition, and by yielding to these his era was his alone, nor could it outlast his personal influence. Divided between his successors, the Empire rapidly and naturally fell to pieces during the lifetime of Louis le Debonnaire, who for a brief period had succeeded in uniting it again, and during the second Dark Ages, from 850 to 1000 A. D., there is no more of note to record in this region than in any other part of Europe. The era had culminated under Charlemagne; it was now to sink to its end, as always had happened before, as always, so far as we can see, must continue to happen. Not until the turn of the tide at the year 1000 could a real recovery begin. In the meantime history is little more than a series of personal contests, but out of these certain beginnings are made that are to have issue in great things, and amongst these are the appearance of the first Baldwin of Flanders and the establishing of the first hereditary title, and therefore the oldest in Europe. Baldwin of the Iron Arm successfully fought the Vikings, driving them west until they were forced to content themselves with the land they ultimately made immortal as Normandy. His son married a daughter of Alfred the Great, so establishing a certain connection between England and Flanders, and by fortifying Bruges, Ypres, Ghent, and Courtrai, he did much toward fixing these cities as centres of municipal life and of that fierce independence that marked them for so many generations.
With the opening of the new era, at the beginning of the eleventh century, a new vitality shows itself in the land. William of Normandy had become the son-in-law of Baldwin V, and from Flanders many knights joined the Conqueror for his invasion of England, one becoming first Earl of Northumberland, another first Earl of Chester. Under Baldwin VI complete peace was restored to the distracted provinces, while the Charter of Grammont is a landmark in that development