Ebroin, hearing that his intended victim had reached a place of safety, despatched Agilbert bishop of Paris, and Probus bishop of Rheims, to persuade Martin to repair to the Neustrian camp. In order to dispel the apprehensions with which he listened to them, these holy men went through the not unusual ceremony of swearing, upon a receptacle containing sacred relics, that he should suffer no injury by following their advice. The bishops, however, to save themselves from the guilt of perjury, had taken care that the vessels, which were covered, should be left empty. Martin, whom they omitted to inform of this important fact, was satisfied with their oaths, and accompanied them to Ecri, where he and his followers were immediately assassinated, without, as was thought, any detriment to the faith of the envoys! Pepin, however, was neither to be cajoled nor frightened into submission, and soon found himself at the head of a powerful force, consisting in part of Neustrian exiles, whom the tyranny of Ebroin had ruined or offended. A collision seemed inevitable, when the position of affairs was suddenly changed by the death of Ebroin, who was assassinated in 681 A.D. by Hermenfrid, a distinguished Neustrian Frank. Waratto followed him in the mayoralty of Neustria, and seemed inclined to live on friendly terms with Pepin: but Ghislemar, his son, who headed the party most hostile to Pepin, succeeded in getting possession of the government for a time, and renewed the war against the Austrasians. Ghislemar’s death (in 684 A.D.), which the annalists[p] attributed to the divine anger, restored Waratto to his former power; and hostilities ceased for a time. When Waratto also died, about two years after his undutiful son, he was succeeded by Berchar, his son-in-law, whom the annalist pithily describes as statura parvus, intellectu modicus.
A Lombard King
The insolent disregard which this man showed for the feelings and wishes of the most powerful Neustrians, induced many of them to make common cause with Pepin, to whom they are said to have bound themselves by hostages. In 687 A.D. Pepin was strong enough to assume the offensive; and, yielding to the entreaties of the Neustrian refugees, he sent an embassy to Thierry III to demand the restoration of the exiles to their confiscated lands. The king of Neustria, prompted by Berchar, his major-domus, haughtily replied that he would come himself and fetch his runaway slaves. Pepin then prepared for war, with the unanimous consent of the Austrasian seigneurs, whose wishes he scrupulously consulted. Marching through the Silva Carbonaria he entered the Neustrian territory, and took post at Textri (Testry) on the river Somme. Thierry and Berchar also collected a large army and marched to meet the invaders. The two armies encamped in sight of each other near the village of Textri, on opposite sides of the little river Daumignon, the Neustrians on the southern and the Austrasians on the northern bank. Whether from policy or a higher motive, Pepin displayed great unwillingness, even then, to bring the matter to extremities; and, sending emissaries into the camp of Thierry, he once more endeavoured to negotiate; demanding, amongst other things, that the property of which the churches had been “despoiled by wicked tyrants” should be restored to them. He promised that, if his conditions of peace were accepted and the effusion of kindred blood prevented, he would give the king a large amount of silver and gold.
[687-717 A.D.]
The wise and humane reluctance of Pepin was naturally construed by Thierry and his “little-minded” mayor into fear, and distrust of his army, which was inferior to their own in numbers; a haughty answer was returned, and all negotiations were broken off. Both sides then prepared for the morrow’s battle. Pepin, having passed the night in forming his plans, crossed the river before daybreak and drew up his army to the east of Thierry’s position, that the rising sun might blind the enemy. The spies of Thierry reported that the Austrasian camp was deserted, on which the Neustrians were led out to pursue the flying foe. The mistake of the scouts was soon made clear by the vigorous onset of Pepin; and after a fierce but brief combat the Neustrians were totally defeated, and Thierry and Berchar fled from the field. The latter was slain by his own followers; the king was taken prisoner, but his life was mercifully spared.
The battle of Textri is notable in Frankish history as that in which the death-stroke was given to the Merovingian dynasty, by an ancestor of a far more glorious race of monarchs. “From this time forward,” says the chronicler Erchanbertus,[y] “the kings began to have only the royal name, and not the royal dignity.” A very striking picture of the Rois Fainéants has been handed down to us by Einhard[u] (Eginhard), in his famous biography of Charlemagne which we quote in Chapter V. “The race of the Merovingians,” he says, “from which the Franks were formerly accustomed to choose their kings, is generally considered to have ended with Chilperic; who, at the command of the Roman pontiff Stephen, was deposed, shorn of his locks, and sent into a monastery. But although the stock died out with him, it had long been entirely without life and vigour, and had no distinction beyond the empty title of king; for the authority and government were in the hands of the highest officers of the palace, who were called majores-domus, and had the entire administration of affairs. Nothing was left to the king, except that, contenting himself with the mere royal name, he was allowed to sit on the throne with long hair and unshorn beard, to play the part of a ruler, to hear the ambassadors from whatever part they might come, and at their departure to communicate to them the answers which he had been taught or even commanded to make, as if by his own authority. Besides the worthless title of king and a scanty maintenance, which the major-domus meted out according to his pleasure, the king possessed only one farm, and that by no means a lucrative one, on which he had a dwelling-house and a few servants, just sufficient to supply his most urgent necessities. Wherever he had to go, he travelled in a carriage drawn by a yoke of oxen and driven by a cowherd in rustic fashion. It was thus that he went to the palace, to the public assembly of the people, which met every year for the good of the kingdom; after which he returned home. But the whole administration of the state, and everything which had to be regulated or executed, either at home or abroad, was carried on by the mayors.”
The whole power of the three kingdoms was thus suddenly thrown into the hands of Pepin, who showed in his subsequent career that he was equal to the far more difficult task of keeping, by his wisdom and moderation, what he had gained by the vigour of his intellect and his undaunted valour. He, too, was happily free from the little vanity which takes more delight in the pomp than in the realities of power, and, provided he possessed the substantial authority, was contented to leave the royal name to others. He must have felt himself strong enough to do what his uncle Grimwald had vainly attempted, and his grandson happily accomplished; but he saw that by grasping at the shadow he might lose the substance. He was surrounded by proud and suspicious seigneurs, whose jealousy would have been more excited by his taking the title than by his exercising the powers of a king; and, strange though it may seem, the reverence for the ancient race, and the notion of their exclusive and inalienable rights, were far from being extinguished in the breasts of the common people. By keeping Thierry upon the throne and ruling in his name, he united both reason and prejudice in support of his government. Yet some approach was made, though probably not by his own desire, towards acknowledged sovereignty in the case of Pepin. He was called dux et princeps Francorum, and the years of his office were reckoned, as well as those of the king, in all public documents.
Having fixed the seat of his government in Austrasia, as the more German and warlike portion of his dominions, he named dependents of his own, and subsequently his two sons, Drogo and Grimwald, to rule as mayors in the two other divisions of the empire. He gave the greatest proof of his power and popularity by restoring the assemblies of the Campus Martius, a purely German institution, which under the romanising Merovingian monarchs had gradually declined. At these annual meetings, which were held on the 1st of March, the whole nation assembled for the purpose of discussing measures for the ensuing year. None but a ruler who was conscious of his own strength, and of an honest desire for the welfare of his people, would have voluntarily submitted himself and his actions to the chances of such an ordeal.
As soon as he had firmly fixed himself in his seat, and secured the submission of the envious seigneurs, and the love of the people, who looked to him as the only man who could save them from the evils of anarchy, he turned his attention to the re-establishment of the Frankish Empire in its full extent. The neighbouring tribes, which had with difficulty, and for the most part imperfectly, been subdued by Clovis and his successors, were ready to seize upon every favourable occasion of ridding themselves of the hated yoke. Nor were the poor imbecile boys who bore the name of kings, nor the turbulent mayors and seigneurs who were wholly occupied with plotting and counterplotting, railing and fighting against one another, at all in a position to call the subject states to account, or to excite in them the desire of being incorporated with an empire harassed and torn by intestine dissensions. The Frankish Empire was in process of dissolution, and all the more distant tribes, as the Bavarians, the Alamanni, Frisians, Bretons, and Gascons, had virtually recovered their independence. But this partial decline of the Frankish power was simply the result of misgovernment, and the domestic feuds which absorbed the martial vigour of the nation; and by no means indicated the decline of a military spirit in the Frankish people. They only needed a centre of union and a leader worthy of them, both of which they found in Pepin, to give them once more the hegemony over all the German tribes, and prepare them for the conquest of Europe. The Frisians were subdued, or rather repressed for a time, in 697 A.D., after a gallant resistance under their king Ratbod; and about twelve years afterwards we find the son of Pepin, Grimwald, forming a matrimonial alliance with Theudelinda, daughter of the Frisian monarch; a fact which plainly implies that Pepin desired to cultivate the friendship of his warlike neighbours. The Swabians, or Alamanni, were also attacked and defeated by Pepin on their own territories; but their final subjection was completed by his son Charles Martel.