Great leaders: Historic portraits from the great historians

by Unknown

CHARLEMAGNE.

view to the great prize to which they had so long been subservient. But the maxims by which the Carlovingian scepter had been won were not less necessary in order to defend and to retain it. They afford the key to more than half the history of the great conqueror from whom that dynasty derives its name. The cardinal points to which throughout his long and glorious reign his mind was directed with an inflexible tenacity of purpose, were precisely those toward which his forefathers had bent their attention. They were to conciliate the attachment of his German subjects by studiously maintaining their old German institutions; to anticipate instead of awaiting the invasions of the barbarous nations by whom he was surrounded; to court the alliance and support of all other secular potentates of the East and West; and to strengthen his own power by the most intimate relations with the Church.

I have, however, already observed that Charlemagne had other rules or habits of conduct which were the indigenous growth of his own mind. It was only in a mind of surpassing depth and fertility that such maxims could have been nurtured and made to yield their appropriate fruits; for, first, he firmly believed that the power of his house could have no secure basis except in the religious, moral, intellectual, and social improvement of his subjects; and, secondly, he was no less firmly persuaded that in order to effect that improvement it was necessary to consolidate all temporal authority in Europe by the reconstruction of the Cæsarian empire—that empire beneath the shelter of which religion, law, and learning had so long and so widely flourished throughout the dominions of imperial Rome.

Gibbon has remarked, that of all the heroes to whom the title of “the Great” had been given, Charlemagne alone has retained it as a permanent addition to his name. The reason may, perhaps, be that in no other man were ever united in so large a measure, and in such perfect harmony, the qualities which, in their combination, constitute the heroic character, such as energy, or the love of action; ambition, or the love of power; curiosity, or the love of knowledge; and sensibility, or the love of pleasure—not, indeed, the love of forbidden, of unhallowed, or of enervating pleasure, but the keen relish for those blameless delights by which the burdened mind and jaded spirits recruit and renovate their powers—delights of which none are susceptible in the highest degree but those whose more serious pursuits are sustained by the highest motives and directed toward the highest ends; for the charms of social intercourse, the play of buoyant fancy, the exhilaration of honest mirth, and even the refreshment of athletic exercises, require, for their perfect enjoyment, that robust and absolute health of body and of mind, which none but the noblest natures possess and in the possession of which Charlemagne exceeded all other men.

His lofty stature, his open countenance, his large and brilliant eyes, and the dome-like structure of his head imparted, as we learn from Eginhard, to all his attitudes the dignity which becomes a king, relieved by the graceful activity of a practiced warrior. He was still a stranger to every form of bodily disease when he entered his seventieth year; and although he was thenceforward constrained to pay the usual tribute to sickness and to pain, he maintained to the last a contempt for the whole materia medica, and for the dispensers of it, which Molière himself, in his gayest mood, might have envied. In defiance of the gout, he still followed the chase, and still provoked his comrades to emulate his feats in swimming, as though the iron frame which had endured nearly threescore campaigns had been incapable of lassitude and exempt from decay.

In the monastery of St. Gall, near the Lake of Constance, there was living in the ninth century a monk who relieved the tedium of his monotonous life and got the better, as he tells us, of much constitutional laziness by collecting anecdotes of the mighty monarch, with whose departed glories the world was at that time ringing. In this amusing legend Charlemagne, the conqueror, the legislator, the patron of learning, and the restorer of the empire, makes way for Charlemagne, the joyous companion, amusing himself with the comedy or rather with the farce of life, and contributing to it not a few practical jokes, which stand in most whimsical contrast with the imperial dignity of the jester. Thus, when he commands a whole levy of his blandest courtiers, plumed and furred and silken as they stood, to follow him in the chase through sleet and tempest, mud and brambles; or constrains an unhappy chorister, who had forgotten his responses, to imitate the other members of the choir by a long series of mute grimaces; or concerts with a Jew peddler a scheme for palming off, at an enormous price, on an Episcopal virtuoso, an embalmed rat, as an animal till then unknown to any naturalist—these, and many similar facetiæ, which in any other hands might have seemed mere childish frivolities, reveal to us, in the illustrious author of them, that native alacrity of spirit and child-like glee, which neither age nor cares nor toil could subdue, and which not even the oppressive pomps of royalty were able to suffocate.

Nor was the heart which bounded thus lightly after whim or merriment less apt to yearn with tenderness over the interior circle of his home. While yet a child, he had been borne on men’s shoulders, in a buckler for his cradle, to accompany his father in his wars; and in later life, he had many a strange tale to tell of his father’s achievements. With his mother, Bertha, the long-footed, he lived in affectionate and reverend intimacy, which never knew a pause except on one occasion, which may perhaps apologize for some breach even of filial reverence, for Bertha had insisted on giving him a wife against his own consent. His own parental affections were indulged too fondly and too long, and were fatal both to the immediate objects of them and to his own tranquillity. But with Eginhard and Alcuin and the other associates of his severer labors, he maintained that grave and enduring friendship, which can be created only on the basis of the most profound esteem, and which can be developed only by that free interchange of thought and feeling which implies the temporary forgetfulness of all the conventional distinctions of rank and dignity.

It was a retributive justice which left Gibbon to deform, with such revolting obscenities, the pages in which he waged his disingenuous warfare against the one great purifying influence of human society. It may also have been retributive justice which has left the glory of Charlemagne to be overshadowed by the foul and unmerited reproach on which Gibbon dwells with such offensive levity; for the monarch was habitually regardless of that law, at once so strict and so benignant, which has rendered chastity the very bond of domestic love and happiness and peace. In bursting through the restraints of virtue, Charlemagne was probably the willing victim of a transparent sophistry. From a nature so singularly constituted as his, sweet waters or bitter might flow with equal promptitude. That peculiarity of temperament in which his virtues and his vices found their common root probably confounded the distinctions of good and evil in his self-judgments, and induced him to think lightly of the excesses of a disposition so often conducting him to the most noble and magnanimous enterprises; for such was the revelry of his animal life, so inexhaustible his nervous energies, so intense the vibrations of each successive impulse along the chords of his sensitive nature, so insatiable his thirst for activity, and so uncontrollable his impatience of repose, that, whether he was engaged in a frolic or a chase, composed verses or listened to homilies, fought or negotiated, cast down thrones or built them up, studied, conversed, or legislated, it seemed as if he, and he alone, were the one wakeful and really living agent in the midst of an inert, visionary, and somnolent generation.

The rank held by Charlemagne among great commanders was achieved far more by this strange and almost superhuman activity than by any pre-eminent proficiency in the art or science of war. He was seldom engaged in any general action, and never undertook any considerable siege, excepting that of Pavia, which, in fact, was little more than a protracted blockade; but, during forty-six years of almost unintermitted warfare, he swept over the whole surface of Europe, from the Ebro to the Oder, from Bretagne to Hungary, from Denmark to Capua, with such a velocity of movement and such a decision of purpose that no power, civilized or barbarous, ever provoked his resentment without rapidly sinking beneath his prompt and irresistible blows. And though it be true, as Gibbon has observed, that he seldom if ever encountered in the field a really formidable antagonist, it is not less true that, but for his military skill animated by his sleepless energy, the countless assailants by whom he was encompassed must rapidly have become too formidable for resistance; for to Charlemagne is due the introduction into modern warfare of the art by which a general compensates for the numerical inferiority of his own forces to those of his antagonists—the art of moving detached bodies of men along remote but converging lines with such mutual concert as to throw their united forces at the same moment on any meditated point of attack. Neither the Alpine marches of Hannibal nor those of Napoleon were combined with greater foresight or executed with greater precision than the simultaneous passages of Charlemagne and Count Bernard across the same mountain-ranges, and their ultimate union in the vicinity of their Lombard enemies.