We may pause for a moment to notice the remarkable share taken by this man and others of our fellow countrymen in bringing about the conversion of large portions of the German nation to Christianity, and indirectly in founding the Teutonic “Holy Roman Empire” of the Middle Ages. Scarcely had the Anglo-Saxon peoples been won over to the Christian Church, when they began with missionary zeal to preach the faith among their still heathen kinsmen on the Continent. The mission of St. Augustine[23] to Britain took place in the year 596. In 634 was born the Northumbrian Wilfrid, and in 658 his countryman Willibrord, both of whom labored with zeal and success for the conversion of the heathens of Friesland. A generation later the young Devonian Winifried, born at Crediton, appeared on the banks of the Lower Rhine, to profit by the experience of the aged Willibrord and to catch his falling mantle. Three times he visited Rome to confer with those great popes, the second and the third Gregory, and to receive their orders for the conversion of fresh tribes in Germany, or for the consolidation of spiritual conquests already achieved. On one of these visits, probably, he received that name of Boniface by which he is best known in history, together with a sort of roving commission as archbishop, and authority to act as legate in the churches of Germany. Armed with this power he set up bishoprics in Bavaria, revived the dying Christianity of Thuringia, and chastised heretics in Gaul. Wherever the armies of Charles Martel marched, in Friesland, in Saxony, in Hesse, Archbishop Boniface followed, smashing idols, felling sacred oaks, and baptizing half-unwilling converts. Towards the end of his life his roving commission was changed into the more stationary office of Archbishop of Mainz, and he sometimes retired for repose to the great monastery of Fulda, which he had founded in the Hessian land near the source of the Weser. But the old warhorse was still stirred by the sound of the trumpet. Three years after his consecration of Pippin, Boniface went forth on a last expedition for the conversion of the Frisians. When he reached Dockum (in the north of the present province of Friesland) he found there, instead of the expected catechumens, a multitude of the heathen, zealous for the honor of their idols which Boniface had so often destroyed, and eager for the spoil of the ecclesiastical invader. From their hands he received the crown of martyrdom for which he longed.
The career of Boniface is of especial importance because of his absolute devotion to the see of Rome. It was observed that the recently converted nations, as is so often the case with new converts, surpassed their older brethren in the fervor of their faith. While the bishops of Gaul were lukewarm, sometimes almost insubordinate, the Anglo-Saxon bishops were the devoted adherents of the papacy. Boniface especially professed the most unbounded reverence for the chair of St. Peter, and took with alacrity an oath of implicit obedience, substantially the same which was exacted from the “suburbicarian” bishops of the sees in the immediate neighborhood of Rome. This was the spirit in which the infant churches were trained, and this no doubt was the tenor of the advice which the zealous Archbishop of Mainz gave to the new King of the Franks on the day of his coronation.
A traveller through the pleasant valleys of Devonshire when he comes to the little town, scarcely more than a village, of Crediton between its two overhanging hills, may reflect with interest that he beholds the birthplace of the man who, more than any other, brought about the entrance of the German nation into the family of Christian Europe.[24]
The coronation of Pippin took place probably about November 751. In four months from that time Pope Zacharias died, doubtless without any presentiment of the abiding importance of the event in which by his answer to the Frankish messengers he had borne a part, but which is not even mentioned by his biographer in the Liber Pontificalis. After a short interval, an ecclesiastic of Roman parentage, who figures in the annals of the papacy as Stephen II., was raised to the papal see. His pontificate was short; it lasted but five years, but they were years full of import for the destinies of Europe.
In order to concentrate our attention on the transformation of the Arnulfing mayors of the palace into Frankish kings, I have hitherto said as little as possible about the affairs of Italy, but this silence can be kept no longer, now that a Roman pope is about to cross the Alps and ask for Frankish aid to enable him to smite down his foes.
The Lombards had invaded Italy in the year 568, and for nearly two centuries from that time there had been waged a kind of triangular contest which, to compare great things with small, was like the litigation which might go on in an English parish between an absentee landlord, a big Nonconformist farmer, and a cultured but acquisitive parson.
The Emperor was the great absentee. Though still always spoken of as Emperor of Rome, he had been in fact for some centuries an absolutely Oriental Sovereign. Since the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476, no Roman Emperor had touched the soil of Italy save for one brief and most unwelcome visit paid by Constance II. in 663. The Imperial dominion in the peninsula was by this time limited to the Venetian islands, two provinces on the Adriatic coast called the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Pentapolis, the city of Hydruntum (Otranto), the province of Bruttii at the very end of the peninsula, Paestum, Naples and the duchy of Rome, which included the city of Rome, the present province of Latium and a little bit of Etruria. This scattered and fragmentary dominion, which as will be seen was almost entirely confined to the sea-coast, and embraced only a part of that, was ruled by an imperial lieutenant who bore the title of Exarch, and whose seat of government was the strong, almost impregnable, city of Ravenna.
Far the largest part of Italy, including all the fertile valley of the Po, all the central chain of the Apennines and the valleys leading from them, the greater part of Tuscany and almost the whole of Apulia, was in the possession of the rough and masterful Lombards, who had been fierce savages when they entered Italy, but who had lost most of their savagery and some of their warlike vigor by long residence in the delightful land and by contact with the vestiges of Roman civilization. Arians for the most part, and even with some heathens among them at the time of their first invasion, they had now embraced the Catholic faith, were generous benefactors of the Church, and desired to be considered her dutiful sons. But still the remembrance of their old heresies continued, and whenever the political interests of the King of the Lombards clashed with those of the Pope of Rome—and they did clash as often and as irreconcilably as do those of pope and king at the present day—the old epithets “unspeakable,” “sacrilegious,” “diabolical,” flowed from the pens of the scribes in the papal chancery as freely as they had flowed when the Lombards were yet idolaters.
As for the pope, how to describe in few words his anomalous and fast-changing position? Undoubted Patriarch of the Western Church, he nevertheless had many a struggle with the Patriarch of Constantinople as to his claim to rule the Church Universal. The missionaries whom he had sent forth to convert the Teutonic tribes of England and Germany were, as has been said, zealous asserters of his spiritual pre-eminence, and, like the Jesuits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the great champions of the rights of Rome. Herein also they were vigorously supported by the monks who had spread widely over all Christian lands, and who at this time were almost without exception followers of the rule of the Italian saint, Benedict. Some of the bishops, however, especially some of the Gaulish bishops, were, as has been said, by no means equally prompt in their obedience to the papal see. The pope’s relation to the distant emperor at Constantinople during these centuries of transition is one of the hardest things to describe with accuracy. A subject, and yet in a certain sense a rival, often severely snubbed by the emperor’s representative at Rome, almost adored on one or two occasions when he set foot in Constantinople; elected by the clergy and people of Old Rome, yet for many generations not venturing to assume the title of pope till he received the imperial confirmation from New Rome; a mere ecclesiastic without as yet any pretension to temporal sovereignty, and yet under the stress of circumstances ordering campaigns against the Lombards, installing dukes and displacing tribunes—such in the time of Gregory the Great[25] and for more than a century afterwards had been the anomalous relation of the beatissimus Papa or sanctissimus Pontifex, to his serenissimus Dominus, Christianissimus principum, the man who at Constantinople wore the diadem of Diocletian.[26] The relation was strained and difficult, and one would have said that it could not long endure; and yet (as anomalies, especially in the relations of Church and State, are apt to do), it lasted long, for at least six generations of mankind. During this time the popes had certainly often to complain of harsh and overbearing treatment on the part of their imperial masters. One pope was dragged from the altar to a dungeon; another was banished to the Crimea, and died in that remote place of exile; the life of another was conspired against by murderers in the pay of the emperor’s Italian representative, and these were only the more striking passages in a long history of estrangement and mutual suspicion. Through all, the hold of the pope on the affections of the Roman people was steadily increasing, since he was looked upon as the representative of Roman nationality and Roman orthodoxy against the often schismatical Greek and the always domineering Lombard.
Of late—that is to say, during the greater part of the mayoralty of Charles Martel—the antagonism between pope and emperor had been increased by the dispute about the worship of images. In 726 Leo III. the great Isaurian emperor who had successfully repelled the Saracens from the walls of Constantinople, put forth his edicts for the destruction of the sacred images throughout the empire. These decrees, which roused some of the Greeks to actual insurrection, were met by sullen disobedience on the part of the Italians. The authority of the Exarch of Ravenna was set at naught; the local government was vested in dukes chosen by the enraged image-worshippers; it seemed as though the empire would utterly lose even the vestiges of its dominion in Italy. But at this crisis the pope (Gregory II.), though he had been in strong opposition to the emperor, and had sharply denounced his iconoclastic edicts, restrained the Italians from actual revolt and from the election of a counter-emperor, “hoping for the conversion of the sovereign.” It is difficult to say how the matter ended. Apparently the decrees were not enforced in Italy, nor did the movement of insurrection gather head. The exarch still ruled in Ravenna; the pope still considered himself the subject of the eastern emperor; but there was no cordiality between them, and more and more the popes looked across the Alps to the new Austrasian potentate, rather than to the old Augustus by the Bosphorus, for defence, patronage, and endowment.