The great ecclesiastics who, under the name of Arch chaplains, held a place similar to that of a modern prime minister, Fulrad, Abbot of St. Denis, who had been chaplain to his father and who died in 784; his successor Angilram, Bishop of Metz, who died while accompanying Charles on his Avar campaign in 791; Hildibald, Archbishop of Cologne, who stood by the emperor’s death-bed: all these men, though highly trusted and able servants, have not left many evidences by which we can judge of their individual characters. Much more interesting is Charles’s relation to the men of letters whom he delighted to gather around him. Chief among these were Alcuin, Peter of Pisa, Paul the Lombard, and Einhard.
Of Alcuin, who might truly be called Charles’s literary prime minister, no more need be said, save that he died at Tours in 804, full of years and in unclouded friendship with the emperor.
It was apparently about the year 780 that Peter of Pisa, a deacon who had once taught in the Lombard capital, Pavia, and had there held a celebrated disputation with a Jew named Lullus, came to Charles’s court. He was then an old man. Grammar was his main subject, and Charles regularly attended his lectures. The date of his death is uncertain, but it was before the year 799.
Paul the Lombard, generally known as Paulus Diaconus, probably made Charles’s acquaintance during his second visit to Italy (780–781). At any rate, somewhere about the year 782 he followed Charles across the Alps, and was for some two or three years in pretty close attendance at the Frankish court. The main object of his journey was to obtain pardon and the restitution of confiscated property for his brother Arichis who, as has been already stated, seems to have been involved in the rebellion of Duke Hrodgaud, and was carried captive into Frankland, leaving his wife and children destitute. There can be little doubt that the pardon of Arichis was granted to the intercession of his brother, for whom Charles seems to have conceived an especial affection. An amusing but fearfully perplexing series of poems exists, in which enigmas, compliments, and good-natured banter are exchanged between the king, Paulus Diaconus, and Petrus Pisanus. At dawn of day a trim young courtier with a hopeful little beard brings to Peter the grammarian a riddle which the king has thought of in the night and desires him to guess it. In despair Peter turns to Paul, begging for his aid. In a hexameter poem of forty-seven lines (all the correspondence is in verse) Paul gives his version of the answer, which, if correct, certainly proves the riddle to have been a very foolish one. At another time the king poetically asks Paul which of three penalties he would prefer—to be crushed under an immense weight of iron, to be doomed to lie in a gloomy dungeon-cave, or to be sent to convert and baptize Sigfrid who “wields the impious sceptre of pestilential Denmark.” Paul replies in a strain of enthusiastic devotion that he will do anything which the king desires him to do, but that as he knows no Danish he will seem like a brute beast when he stands in the presence of the barbarian king. Yet would he have no fear for his own safety if he undertook the journey: for if Sigfrid knew that he was one of Charles’s subjects, so great is his dread of the Frankish king that he would not dare to touch him with his little finger. And so on through many hexameter and pentameter verses. A harsh critic might describe the whole correspondence as “gracious fooling,” but in view of the hard and toilsome life of the slayer and converter of so many Saxons, it is a consolation to find that he had leisure and spare brain-power even for occasional nonsense.
Paulus Diaconus, after a few years’ sojourn at the Frankish court, returned to Italy to the shelter of his beloved convent of Monte Cassino, where he died, probably in one of the closing years of the eighth century. We are indebted to him, not only for his well-known Historia Langobardorum—almost the only record of the history of Italy from 568 to 744—but also for a book on the Gesta Episcoporum Mettensium which gives us valuable information as to the lives of the early Arnulfings.
The last of Charles’s literary courtiers who can be noticed here is Einhard or (as his name is commonly but less correctly written) Eginhard. This man, who was born near the time of Charles’s accession to the kingdom, and who survived him about thirty years, was the son of Einhard and Engilfrita, persons of good birth and station who dwelt in Franconia near the Odenwald. He was educated in the monastery of Fulda, and came as a young man to the Frankish court, where his nimbleness of mind, his learning and his skill in the administration of affairs so recommended him to Charles that for the remaining twenty years or more of his reign the little Franconian—he was a man of conspicuously short stature—was the great king’s inseparable companion. His skill in all manner of metal work earned for him in that name-giving circle of friends the name of Bezaleel, by which he is pleasantly alluded to in one of Alcuin’s letters. He was employed to superintend some of Charles’s great architectural works: notably the palace and basilica at Aachen, the palace at Ingelheim and the great bridge over the Rhine at Mainz. A twelfth-century chronicler connected his name unpleasantly with that of one of the daughters of Charles: but for this scandal there does not seem to be the slightest foundation. None of Charles’s daughters was named Emma, the name attributed to the alleged mistress, afterwards wife, of Einhard. His real wife appears to have been Emma, sister of Bernhard, Bishop of Worms. About the year 826 he and his wife parted by mutual consent and “gave themselves to religion.” He was ordained priest and retired to the monastery of Seligenstadt on the Main where he died about the year 840.
Einhard had a share (how large is a subject of constant discussion), in the composition of the official Annals which are our most trustworthy authority for the history of his master’s reign. But we are far more indebted to him for his short tract De Vita Caroli Magni from which several extracts have already been made. In this life there is an evident ambition on the part of the writer, who calls himself “a barbarian little skilled in Roman speech” to follow the example of the great classical authors. His imitation, especially, of the Life of Augustus by Suetonius, is almost servile, and provokes much laughter on the part of modern scholars; but however he may be derided, the fact remains that almost all our real, vivifying knowledge of Charles the Great is derived from Einhard, and that the Vita Caroli is one of the most precious literary bequests of the early Middle Ages.
Here are some features of the picture of his master by Einhard which have not been copied in the preceding pages:—
“This king, whose prudence and magnanimity surpassed that of all contemporary princes, never shunned on account of toil, nor declined on account of danger, any enterprise which had to be begun or carried through to its end; but having learned to bear every burden as it came, according to its true weight, he would neither yield under adversity, nor in prosperity trust the flattering smiles of fortune.”
“He loved foreigners and took the greatest pains to entertain them, so that their number often seemed a real burden, not only to the palace but even to the realm. But he, on account of his greatness of soul, refused to worry himself over this burden, thinking that even great inconveniences were amply compensated by the praise of his liberality and the reward of his renown.”