There were indeed some upflickerings of the apparently extinguished fire. The baptized tudun failed to keep his oath of fealty to Charles, and had to be punished for his perfidy. In 799 Gerold, the Frankish governor of Bavaria, brother of Charles’s late queen Hildegard, fell in battle with the insurgent Avars. But this Turanian people made not near so obstinate or long continued a resistance as the Teutonic Saxons. In the year 805 we find the capchan, who was a Christian, and bore the Greek name Theodore, humbly petitioning the Emperor Charles that on account of the needs of his people a place of habitation might be assigned to them between Sabaria and Carnuntum (the country round the Neusiedler See). His request was granted, and he returned to his people enriched by presents from the emperor, but soon after died. The new chagan soon after “sent one of his nobles praying that he might have the ancient honor which the chagan used to have among the Avars. To which prayer the emperor gave his assent, and ordered that the chagan should have the supremacy over the whole kingdom according to the old custom of the Avars.”
After this we practically hear no more of the Avars during the lifetime of Charles. The power of the great Turanian kingdom was utterly broken, and possibly, but for the invasion of the Hungarians, who appeared upon the scene about seventy years after the death of Charlemagne, there would have been a complete reconquest of the lands of the Middle Danube by the Teutonic race. It must not be forgotten, however, that here, as well as further north, Sclavonic tribes were hovering round the eastern border of the Frankish kingdom, and, in fact, it was in a war with one of these tribes, the Croatian inhabitants of Tarsatica, on the Adriatic, that the valiant Eric of Friuli lost his life (709). The news was brought to King Charles at Paderborn at the same time as the tidings of the death of his brother-in-law, Gerold, and saddened him in the midst of his Saxon victories. Bishop Paulinus wrote a Latin elegy on the death of his friend, in which, like David in his lament over Saul, he prayed that neither dew nor rain might fall on the Liburnian shore, nor corn nor wine might gladden the hills on which the noble Eric met his doom.
CHAPTER X.
RELATIONS WITH THE EAST.
Now that we are approaching the most important event in the life of Charlemagne, his assumption of the imperial title, it will be necessary to glance at his relations with the line of sovereigns who alone up to the year 800 wore the title of Emperor, the Cæsars of Constantinople.
It will be hardly needful here to repeat the warning given by many recent historians against considering the State which was governed from Constantinople, between 476 and 800, as anything else than the Roman empire. As its centre of gravity was now on the Bosphorus instead of being on the Tiber, and as its chief possessions were situated on the east of the Gulf of Venice, or even on the east of the Archipelago, it is difficult to avoid speaking of it as the eastern empire; but for all the centuries between the fifth and the ninth we must remember that this is not a strictly accurate expression. It was during all that period “the empire,” “the dominion of the world,” nay, it was still the “Roman republic,” though the man who sat in Julius Cæsar’s seat was practically the uncontrolled despot of the Roman world.
And during all these intermediate centuries, though the empire might be cut very short, by Frank and Goth and Saxon in the west, or by the Saracen in the east, it would be safe to say that it never acquiesced in its limitations. Pre-eminently the wonderful reconquests of Italy, of Africa, of part of Spain, which were wrought in the sixth century by the generals of Justinian, might well keep alive the hope that, after the “little systems” of barbarian and infidel had “had their day,” the true Divinely-appointed world-ruler would emerge from his temporary eclipse and be again supreme all round the shores of the Mediterranean.
Doubtless, though the name “Roman” was still kept and still gloried in, the empire was, with each succeeding century, becoming more thoroughly Greek, or rather Graeco-Asiatic, in its character. From this point of view it has been observed by a modern historian that the great pestilence which raged in 747 (five years after the birth of Charles) was an important factor in the transformation of the empire. “A vast portion of the inhabitants of Byzantium, who maintained Roman character and many Roman traditions amid all their half-Hellenic, half-Oriental ways, had been carried off by the plague, and were replaced by pure Greeks who had not inherited the effect of Roman influence. This was an important step in the direction of becoming a Greek nationality, to which goal the Roman empire was steadily tending” (Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, ii. 456).
But, notwithstanding this, the emperor at Byzantium never forgot that he was Roman, but always looked upon Italy as his lawful, his almost inalienable, possession. Gaul, Spain, Britain—it might be necessary to abandon these to the barbarians—but Italy, but Rome, were rightfully his, and all the shades of all the buried Cæsars would pass in angry procession before the eyes of the degenerate successor who should be so base as formally to abandon his right to hold them. This, or something like this, we may believe to have been the secret underlying thought of the Leos and the Constantines when they heard what the Frank was doing in Italy.
Through the greater part of the eighth century the Iconoclastic controversy was the dominating element in the politics of the empire. We have already seen something of the career of the first great image-breaker, Leo III. On his death, which happened in 740 (two years before the birth of Charlemagne) he was succeeded by his son Constantine V., as able a general, as strong a statesman, and as determined an image-breaker as his father. He was a great enemy also of the monks, and both they and the image-worshippers suffered at his hands a persecution which (at any rate according to their account of it) might seem to recall the days of Decius and Diocletian.