Society no less than the state was falling asunder by a gradual process of decay. Under the Merovingians it was a hierarchy wherein grades were marked by the varied scale of the wergild, a man being worth anything from thirty to six Disruption of the social framework. hundred gold pieces. The different degrees were those of slave, freedman, tenant-farmer and great landowner. As in every social scheme where the government is without real power, the weakest sought protection of the strongest; and the system of patron, client and journeyman, which had existed among the Romans, the Gauls and the Germans, spread rapidly in the 6th and 7th centuries, owing to public disorder and the inadequate protection afforded by the government. The Church’s patronage provided some with a refuge from violence; others ingratiated themselves with the rich for the sake of shelter and security; others again sought place and honour from men of power; while women, churchmen and warriors alike claimed the king’s direct and personal protection.
This hierarchy of persons, these private relations of man to man, were recognized by custom in default of the law, and were soon strengthened by another and territorial hierarchy. The large estate, especially if it belonged to the Church, The beneficium. very soon absorbed the few fields of the freeman. In order to farm these, the Church and the rich landowners granted back the holdings on the temporary and conditional terms of tenancy-at-will or of the beneficium, thus multiplying endlessly the land subject to their overlordship and the men who were dependent upon them as tenants. The kings, like private individuals and ecclesiastical establishments, made use of the beneficium to reward their servants; till finally their demesne was so reduced by these perpetual grants that they took to distributing among their champions land owning the overlordship of the Church, or granted their own lands for single lives only. These various “benefactions” were, as a rule, merely the indirect methods which the great landowners employed in order to absorb the small proprietor. And so well did they succeed, that in the 6th and 7th centuries the provincial hierarchy consisted of the cultivator, the holder of the beneficium and the owner; while this dependence of one man upon another affected the personal liberty of a large section of the community, as well as the condition of the land. The great landowner tended to become not only lord over his tenants, but also himself a vassal of the king.
Thus by means of immunities, of the beneficium and of patronage, society gradually organized itself independently of the state, since it required further security. Such extra security was first provided by the conqueror of Pippin of Heristal. Tertry; for Pippin II. represented the two great families of Pippin and of Arnulf, and consequently the two interests then paramount, i.e. land and religion, while he had at his back a great company of followers and vast landed estates. For forty years (615-655) the office of mayor of Austrasia had gone down in his family almost continuously in direct descent from father to son. The death of Grimoald had caused the loss of this post, yet Ansegisus (Ansegisel), Arnulf’s son and Pippin’s son-in-law, had continued to hold high office in the Austrasian palace; and about 680 his son, Pippin II., became master of Austrasia, although he had held no previous office in the palace. His dynasty was destined to supplant that of the Merovingian house.
Pippin of Heristal was a pioneer; he it was who began all that his descendants were afterwards to carry through. Thus he gathered the nobles about him not by virtue of his position, but because of his own personal prowess, and because he could assure them of justice and protection; instead of being merely the head of the royal palace he was the absolute lord of his own followers. Moreover, he no longer bore the title of mayor, but that of duke or prince of the Franks; and the mayoralty, like the royal power now reduced to a shadow, became an hereditary possession which Pippin could bestow upon his sons. The reigns of Theuderich III., Clovis III. or Childebert III. are of no significance except as serving to date charters and diplomas. Pippin it was who administered justice in Austrasia, appointed officials and distributed dukedoms; and it was Pippin, the military leader, who defended the frontiers threatened by Frisians, Alamanni and Bavarians. Descended as he was from Arnulf, bishop of Metz, he was before all things a churchman, and behind his armies marched the missionaries to whom the Carolingian dynasty, of which he was the founder, were to subject all Christendom. Pippin it was, in short, who governed, who set in order the social confusions of Neustria, who, after long wars, put a stop to the malpractices of the dukes and counts, and summoned councils of bishops to make good regulations. But at his death in 714 the child-king Dagobert III. found himself subordinated to Pippin’s two grandsons, who, being minors, were under the wardship of their grandmother Plectrude.
Pippin’s work was almost undone—a party among the Neustrians under Raginfrid, mayor of the palace, revolted against Pippin II.’s adherents, and Radbod, duke of the Frisians, joined them. But the Austrasians Charles Martel (715-741). appealed to an illegitimate son of Pippin, Charles Martel, who had escaped from the prison to which Plectrude, alarmed at his prowess, had consigned him, and took him for their leader. With Charles Martel begins the great period of Austrasian history. Faithful to the traditions of the Austrasian mayors, he chose kings for himself—Clotaire IV., then Chilperic II. and lastly Theuderich IV. After Theuderich’s death (737) he left the throne vacant until 742, but he himself was king in all but name; he presided over the royal tribunals, appointed the royal officers, issued edicts, disposed of the funds of the treasury and the churches, conferred immunities upon adherents, who were no longer the king’s nobles but his own, and even appointed the bishops, though there was nothing of the ecclesiastic about himself. He decided questions of war and peace, and re-established unity in Gaul by defeating the Neustrians and the Aquitanian followers of Duke Odo (Eudes) at Vincy in 717. When Odo, brought to bay, appealed for help to the Arab troops of Abd-ar-Rahman, who after conquering Spain had crossed the Pyrenees, Charles, like a second Clovis, saved Catholic Christendom in its peril by crushing the Arabs at Tours (732). The retreat of the Arabs, who were further weakened by religious disputes, enabled him to restore Frankish rule in Aquitaine in spite of Hunald, son of Odo. But Charles’s longest expeditions were made into Germany, and in these he sought the support of the Church, then the greatest of all powers since it was the depositary of the Roman imperial tradition.
No less unconscious of his mission than Clovis had been, Charles Martel also was a soldier of Christ. He protected the missionaries who paved the way for his militant invasions. Without him the apostle of Germany, the English monk Boniface, Charles Martel and the Church. would never have succeeded in preserving the purity of the faith and keeping the bishops submissive to the Holy See. The help given by Charles had two very far-reaching results. Boniface was the instrument of the union of Rome and Germany, of which union the Holy Roman Empire in Germany was in the 10th century to become the most perfect expression, continuing up to the time of Luther. And Boniface also helped on the alliance between the papacy and the Carolingian dynasty, which, more momentous even than that between Clovis and the bishops of Gaul, was to sanctify might by right.
This union was imperative for the bishops of Rome if they wished to establish their supremacy, and their care for orthodoxy by no means excluded all desire of domination. Mere religious authority did not secure to them the obedience Charles Martel and Gregory III. of either the faithful or the clergy; moreover, they had to consider the great secular powers, and in this respect their temporal position in Italy was growing unbearable. Their relations with the East Roman emperor (sole lord of the world after the Roman Senate had sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople in 476) were confined to receiving insults from him or suspecting him of heresy. Even in northern Italy there was no longer any opposition to the progress of the Lombards, the last great nation to be established towards the end of the 6th century within the ancient Roman empire—their king Liudprand clearly intended to seize Italy and even Rome itself. Meanwhile from the south attacks were being made by the rebel dukes of Spoleto and Beneventum. Pope Gregory III. cherished dreams of an alliance with the powerful duke of the Franks, as St Remigius before him had thought of uniting with Clovis against the Goths. Charles Martel had protected Boniface on his German missions: he would perhaps lend Gregory the support of his armies. But the warrior, like Clovis aforetime, hesitated to put himself at the disposal of the priest. When it was a question of winning followers or keeping them, he had not scrupled to lay hands on ecclesiastical property, nor to fill the Church with his friends and kinsfolk, and this alliance might embarrass him. So if he loaded the Roman ambassadors with gifts in 739, he none the less remembered that the Lombards had just helped him to drive the Saracens from Provence. However, he died soon after this, on the 22nd of October 741, and Gregory III. followed him almost immediately.
Feeling his end near, Charles, before an assembly of nobles, had divided his power between his two sons, Carloman and Pippin III. The royal line seemed to have been forgotten for six years, but in 742 Pippin brought a The Carolingian dynasty. son of Chilperic II. out of a monastery and made him king. This Childeric III. was but a shadow—and knew it. He made a phantom appearance once every spring at the opening of the great annual national convention known as the Campus Martius (Champ de Mars): a dumb idol, his chariot drawn in leisurely fashion by oxen, he disappeared again into his palace or monastery. An unexpected event re-established unity in the Carolingian family. Pippin’s brother, the pious Carloman, became a monk in 747, and Pippin, now sole ruler of the kingdom, ordered Childeric also to cut off his royal locks; after which, being king in all but name, he adopted that title in 752. Thus ended the revolution which had been going on for two centuries. The disappearance of Grippo, Pippin’s Pippin the Short, 752-768. illegitimate brother, who, with the help of all the enemies of the Franks—Alamanni, Aquitanians and Bavarians—had disputed his power, now completed the work of centralization, and Pippin had only to maintain it. For this the support of the Church was indispensable, and Pippin understood the advantages of such an alliance better than Charles Martel. A son of the Church, a protector of bishops, a president of councils, a collector of relics, devoted to Boniface (whom he invited, as papal legate, to reform the clergy of Austrasia), he astutely accepted the new claims of the vicar of St Peter to the headship of the Church, perceiving the value of an alliance with this rising power.
Prudent enough to fear resistance if he usurped the Merovingian crown, Pippin the Short made careful preparations for his accession, and discussed the question of the dynasty with Pope Zacharias. Receiving a favourable opinion, Sacred character of the new monarchy. he had himself anointed and crowned by Boniface in the name of the bishops, and was then proclaimed king in an assembly of nobles, counts and bishops at Soissons in November 751. Still, certain disturbances made him see that aristocratic approval of his kingship might be strengthened if it could claim a divine sanction which no Merovingian had ever received. Two years later, therefore, he demanded a consecration of his usurpation from the pope, and in St Denis on the 28th of July 754 Stephen II. crowned and anointed not only Pippin, but his wife and his two sons as well.