Of Haroun, for whose name by blood defiled,
Genius hath wrought salvation.
Common enmities (for they both were hostile to the Ommayad Caliphs and the eastern emperors), drew together these two men whose names for so long were dear to the story-tellers of east and west, Charlemagne and Haroun-al-Raschid. Haroun sent to Charles in 807 some sort of message or letter confirming the act of the Patriarch of Jerusalem which by the surrender of the keys constituted him guardian of the Holy Places. Some years before he had sent, besides other rich and costly presents, one which especially impressed the minds of the Franks, an enormous elephant named Abu-l-Abbas. Under the guidance of its keeper, Isaac the Jew, the elephant safely reached Aachen, where it abode for eight years. In the year 810 it was taken across the Rhine, apparently that its great strength might be made use of in the expected campaign against Godofrid the Dane; and its sudden death at Lippeham in Westphalia is solemnly recorded by the chroniclers among the memorable events of that melancholy year.
It was in this same year, in the month of October, that the emperor saw with pride two embassies, from east and west, meet at his court. The long delayed overtures for reconciliation from the Emperor Nicephorus were brought by the one, and proposals for a treaty of peace with El Hakem the Cruel, Emir of Cordova, were brought by the other embassy and graciously accepted by Charles.
Nor was our own island unrepresented among the embassies which visited the Frankish Court. With Offa of Mercia, most powerful of English kings before the rise of Ecgbert, the relations were not altogether friendly. A treaty for the marriage of the younger Charles with the daughter of Offa broke down (789), it is said, because of Offa’s counter-proposal on behalf of his son for the hand of Charles’s daughter Bertha. Some passages in this abortive “double marriage negotiation” so annoyed the Frankish king that English merchants were forbidden to land on the shores of Gaul. However, though no marriage was brought to pass, friendly relations between the two kings were restored, perhaps through the mediation of Offa’s subject, Alcuin; and in 796 when the great Hring of the Avars had been despoiled by Eric of Friuli, an Avar sword was graciously sent by Charles as a present to the King of Mercia.
It was not at Aachen but at Nimguen on the Rhine that another English king, driven from his realm by revolution, Eardulf of Northumberland, visited Charles’s court in 808 and besought his aid to restore him to his throne. Charles seems to have embraced his cause and sent him on to Rome with a letter of recommendation to Pope Leo whose help was needed, as the Archbishop of York had taken an active part in Eardulf’s deposition. With the help of emperor and pope, Eardulf was restored (809) to a throne which he seems to have justly forfeited by various acts of tyranny; but the reign of the restored king was of short duration.
It may be permitted to conjecture that the happiest period of the life of Charles consisted of the fifteen years which he spent mainly at Aachen between 795 and 810. The Saxon and Avar wars were drawing to a close, his labors for the reform of the Church and for the spread of learning were bearing manifest fruit: the haughty and difficult-tempered Fastrada was dead, and his children, whom he loved with fondness not often found in palaces, were growing up around him. The few words in which Einhard sketches his family life give one an impression of joyous magnificence not unlike that which the poets have feigned concerning the purely imaginary court of King Arthur:—
“He determined so to bring up his children that all, both sons and daughters, should be well grounded in liberal studies, to which he himself also gave earnest attention. Moreover, he caused his sons as soon as they were of the proper age to learn to ride after the manner of the Franks, to be trained to war and the chase: but his daughters he ordered to learn the spinning of wool, to give heed to the spindle and distaff, that they might not grow slothful through ease, but be trained to all kinds of honest industry....
“So great was the attention which he paid to the education of his sons and daughters that when he was at home he would never sup without them; when he journeyed they must accompany him, the sons riding by his side and the daughters following a little behind, while a band of servants appointed for this purpose brought up the rear. As for these daughters, though they were of great beauty and were dearly loved by him, strange to say he never gave one of them in marriage either to a man of his own nation or to a foreigner, but he kept them all with him in his own house till his death, saying that he could not dispense with their company. On this account, prosperous as he was in other ways, he experienced the unkindness of adverse fortune, as to which, however, he so skilfully dissembled that no one would suppose that any suspicion of a stain on their fair fame had ever reached his ears.”
This last sentence of Charles’s usually enthusiastic biographer hints at court scandals which could not be always concealed, and the results of some of which appear in the Carolingian pedigrees. But the previous statement concerning his unwillingness to have his merry family circle broken in upon by the unwelcome claims of a son-in-law, may possibly help to explain what has perplexed us in the rupture of the matrimonial treaty with Byzantium or even with the King of Mercia. Instead of seeking for deep state-reasons of policy for these failures, we ought, perhaps, simply to see in them the pardonable weakness of a father who, when the crisis came, gave more heed to the voice of family affection than to the maxims of state-craft.
A notice of Charles’s home life would be incomplete without some allusion to the circle of friends by whom he was surrounded, and whom he seems to have inspired with a genuine love for himself as a man, apart from their loyalty to him as sovereign.