Upon the whole, therefore, it appears a probable conclusion that Charles, though he accepted the imperial crown, accepted it with genuine reluctance, and that he was the passive approver rather than the active and ambitious contriver of the great revolution of 800.

In the summer of 801 Charles recrossed the Alps to his home in Rhine-land. In the thirteen years of life which remained to him he never again entered Italy, but he was, during the greater part of that time, well represented there by his son, the able and courageous Pippin.

A question which doubtless excited much interest in all the Frankish world was, how Charles’s assumption of the imperial title would be viewed at Constantinople. There must have been many among the Byzantine statesmen who bitterly resented it, but Irene’s position was too insecure to permit of her giving utterance to their indignation. It is indeed stated by a Greek chronicler that Charles sent an embassy to Constantinople proposing to unite the two empires by his own marriage with Irene, and that the project was only foiled by the opposition of the eunuch Aetius who was scheming to secure the succession for his brother. Whether this be true or not (and the entire silence of the Frankish authorities on the subject is somewhat suspicious), there is no doubt that a friendly embassy from Irene appeared at Charles’s court in 802, and was replied to by a return embassy, consisting of Bishop Jesse and Count Helmgaud, who were despatched from Aschen in the same year, and that this embassy may have carried a declaration of love from the elderly Frank to the middle-aged Athenian. But not in such romantic fashion was the reconciliation of the two empires to be effected. While the bishop and the count were tarrying at Constantinople they were the unwilling spectators of a palace-revolution, which possibly may have been hastened by their presence and by the fear of a treaty, wounding to the national pride. On the 31st October, 802, Irene was deposed and the Grand Treasurer of the empire, Nicephorus, was raised to the throne. Irene’s life was spared, but she was banished to an island in the Sea of Marmora, and afterwards to the isle of Lesbos, where according to one account she was so meanly supplied with the necessaries of life by her penurious successor, that this proud and brilliant lady had to support herself by spinning. She died on the 9th August, 803.

Again the precariousness of the new ruler’s position compelled him to assume a courteous tone towards the Frankish sovereign. Charles’s ambassadors were accompanied on their return journey by three envoys from Nicephorus, a bishop, an abbot, and a life-guardsman, who were charged with many professions of amity and good-will to the Frankish king. In all this, however, there was no sign of recognition of Charles as Emperor, and for any such recognition Charles apparently waited for eight years in vain.

In 806 there was actual war between the two states, the bone of contention being the little island-state of Venice, which was now rising into commercial importance and in whose obscure and entangled history two parties, a Frankish and a Byzantine, are dimly discernible. After a long time a fleet from Constantinople appeared for a second time in Venetian waters, but was not able to prevent the victory of Pippin, who made a grand attack by land and sea, and subdued apparently the cities of the lagunes, whose capital was at this time shifted to the Rialto. This occurred in 810, but in the same year there appeared at Aachen an ambassador from Nicephorus who probably, amid the usual unmeaning professions of friendship, conveyed a hint that his master might be willing, for a suitable compensation, to recognize Charles as Roman Emperor. On this hint, for which he had waited with statesmanlike patience, the Frankish monarch acted. He expressed his willingness to surrender the Adriatic territories, Venetia, Istria, Liburnia, and Dalmatia to “his brother Nicephorus” and sent Heito, Bishop of Basel, with two colleagues to settle the terms of the new treaty.

Unhappily, when Heito and his colleagues arrived in Constantinople they found a change in the occupant of the palace. Nicephorus had fallen in battle, a most disastrous battle, with Krum, the King of the Bulgarians (25th July, 811); but his brother-in-law and successor, Michael Rhangabé, was abundantly willing to confirm the proposed accommodation with the most powerful sovereign of the west. In truth the suggestion must have come at a most welcome season, for Constantinople was just then as hard pressed by the Bulgarian as she had ever been by the Avar or the Saracen. So it came to pass that yet another embassy from the Byzantine court appeared at Aachen in January 812. A formal document containing the terms of the treaty of peace was handed to them by Charles in the church of the Virgin, and possibly the counterpart was received from the ambassadors. But the essential point was, that they sang a litany in the Greek tongue in which they hailed the Frankish sovereign as Imperator and Basileus. That was a formal recognition of Charles’s equality, and thenceforth no one could doubt that there was an Emperor by the Rhine as well as by the Bosphorus.

CHAPTER XII.
OLD AGE.

The somewhat tedious tale of the wars of the August and Pacific Emperor is happily almost at an end.

We hear of repeated ravages by Scandinavian pirates along the shores of the German and Atlantic oceans: by Moorish pirates along the shore of the Mediterranean: and with neither class of freebooters does Charles appear to have grappled very successfully, for the good reason that he never devoted a sufficient portion of his energies to the establishment of a navy. The well-known story that Charles saw from the windows of his palace at Narbonne the Danish sea-rovers scudding over the waters of the Gulf of Lyons, and foretold with tears the miseries which these freebooters should bring upon his posterity and their realm, comes to us on the late and doubtful authority of the Monk of St. Gall and need not be accepted as authentic history: but that was one of the thunderclouds looming up on the horizon of the ninth century whether Charles was ware of it or no. While the pirate barks of the Scandinavians were spreading terror over the islands of the west, the land forces of the King of Denmark were threatening the north-eastern boundary of Charles’s kingdom. Here the Saxons, at last subdued into loyalty, were, as we have seen, bounded on the east by the Sclavonic nations, the Abodrites, and the Wiltzi, and on the north, in Sleswik, by the Danes. The usual arrangement of parties in the perpetually recurring frontier wars was this: the Saxons (that is the Frankish kingdom) in alliance with the Abodrites on one side, and the Danes with the Wiltzi on the other. The king of the Abodrites was named Drasko; the king of the Danes was Godofrid, a proud, high-soaring king of pirates, who ventured to put himself on an equality with the mighty Frankish Emperor, declaring that Friesland and Saxonland were of right his territories, and that he would appear one day with all his warriors round him at Aachen and would try conclusions with Charles.