The political results of this custom of coronation were all-important for the Carolingians, and later for the first of the Capets. Pippin was hereby invested with new dignity, and when Boniface’s anointing had been confirmed Pippin and the Papacy. by that of the pope, he became the head of the Frankish Church, the equal of the pope. Moreover, he astutely contrived to extend his priestly prestige to his whole family; his royalty was no longer merely a military command or a civil office, but became a Christian priesthood. This sacred character was not, however, conferred gratuitously. On the very day of his coronation Pippin allowed himself to be proclaimed patrician of the Romans by the pope, just as Clovis had been made consul. This title of the imperial court was purely honorary, but it attached him still more closely to Rome, though without lessening his independence. He had besides given a written promise to defend the Church of Rome, and that not against the Lombards only. Qualified by letters of the papal chancery as “liberator and defender of the Church,” his armies twice (754-756) crossed the Alps, despite the opposition of the Frankish aristocracy, and forced Aistulf, king of the Lombards, to cede to him the exarchate of Ravenna and the Pentapolis. Pippin gave them back to Pope Stephen II., and by this famous donation founded that temporal power of the popes which was to endure until 1870. He also dragged the Western clergy into the pope’s quarrel with the emperor at Constantinople, by summoning the council of Gentilly, at which the iconoclastic heresy was condemned (767). Matters being thus settled with Rome, Pippin again took up his wars against the Saxons, against the Arabs (whom he drove from Narbonne in 758), and above all against Waïfer, duke of Aquitaine, and his ally, duke Tassilo of Bavaria. This last war was carried on systematically from 760 to 768, and ended in the death of Waïfer and the definite establishment of the Frankish hold on Aquitaine. When Pippin died, aged fifty-four, on the 24th of September 768, the whole of Gaul had submitted to his authority.
Pippin left two sons, and before he died he had, with the consent of the dignitaries of the realm, divided his kingdom between them, making the elder, Charles (Charlemagne), king of Austrasia, and giving the younger, Carloman, Charlemagne. Burgundy, Provence, Septimania, Alsace and Alamannia, and half of Aquitaine to each. On the 9th of October 768 Charles was enthroned at Noyon in solemn assembly, and Carloman at Soissons. The Carolingian sovereignty was thus neither hereditary nor elective, but was handed down by the will of the reigning king, and by a solemn acceptance of the future king on the part of the nobles. In 771 Carloman, with whom Charles had had disputes, died, leaving sons; but bishops, abbots and counts all declared for Charles, save a few who took refuge in Italy with Desiderius, king of the Lombards. Desiderius, whose daughter Bertha or Desiderata Charles, despite the pope, had married at the instance of his mother Bertrade, supported the rights of Carloman’s sons, and threatened Pope Adrian in Rome itself after he had despoiled him of Pippin’s territorial gift. At the pope’s appeal Charles crossed the Alps, took Verona and Pavia after a long siege, assumed the iron crown of the Lombard kings (June 774), and made a triumphal entry into Rome, which had not formed part of the pope’s desires. Pippin’s donation was restored, but the protectorate was no longer so distant, respectful and intermittent as the pope liked. After the departure of the imperious conqueror, a fresh revolt of the Lombards of Beneventum under Arichis, Desiderius’s son-in-law, supported by a Greek fleet, obliged Pope Adrian to write fresh entreaties to Charlemagne; and in two campaigns (776-777) the latter conquered the whole Lombard kingdom. But another of Desiderius’s daughters, married to the powerful duke Tassilo of Bavaria, urged her husband to avenge her father, now imprisoned in the monastery of Corbie. After endless intrigues, however, the duke, hemmed in by three different armies, had in his turn to submit (788), and all Italy was now subject to Charlemagne. These wars in Italy, even the fall of the Lombard kingdom and the recapture of the duchy of Bavaria, were merely episodes: Charlemagne’s great war was against the Saxons and lasted thirty years (772-804).
The work of organizing the three great Carolingian conquests—Aquitaine, Italy and Saxony—had yet to be done. Charlemagne approached it with a moderation equal to the vigour which he had shown in the war. But by multiplying Organization of the conquests. its advance-posts, the Frankish kingdom came into contact with new peoples, and each new neighbour meant a new enemy. Aquitaine, bordered upon Mussulman Spain; the Avars of Hungary threatened Bavaria with their tireless horsemen; beyond the Elbe and the Saal the Slavs were perpetually at war with the Saxons, and to the north of the Eider were the Danes. All were pagans; all enemies of Charlemagne, defender of Christ’s Church, and hence the appointed conqueror of the world.
Various causes—the weakening of the Arabs by the struggle between the Omayyads and the Abbasids just after the battle of Tours; the alliance of the petty Christian kings of the Spanish peninsula; an appeal from the northern Wars with the Arabs, Slavs and Danes. amirs who had revolted against the new caliphate of Cordova (755)—made Charlemagne resolve to cross the Pyrenees. He penetrated as far as the Ebro, but was defeated before Saragossa; and in their retreat the Franks were attacked by Vascons, losing many men as they came through the passes. This defeat of the rear-guard, famous for the death of the great Roland and the treachery of Ganelo, induced the Arabs to take the offensive once more and to conquer Septimania. Charlemagne had created the kingdom of Aquitaine especially to defend Septimania, and William, duke of Toulouse, from 790 to 806, succeeded in restoring Frankish authority down to the Ebro, thus founding the Spanish March with Barcelona as its capital. For two centuries and a half the Avars, a remnant of the Huns entrenched in the Hungarian Mesopotamia, had made descents alternately upon the Germans and upon the Greeks of the Eastern empire. They had overrun Bavaria in the very year of its subjugation by Charlemagne (788), and it took an eight-years’ struggle to destroy the robber stronghold. The empire thus pushed its frontier-line on from the Elbe to the Oder, ever as it grew menaced by increasing dangers. The sea came to the help of the depopulated land, and Danish pirates, Widukind’s old allies, came in their leathern boats to harry the coasts of the North Sea and the Channel. Permanent armies and walls across isthmuses were alike useless; Charlemagne had to build fleets to repulse his elusive foes (808-810), and even after forty years of war the danger was only postponed.
Meanwhile Pippin’s Frankish kingdom, vast and powerful as it had been, was doubled. All nations from the Oder to the Elbe and from the Danube to the Atlantic were subject or tributary, and Charlemagne’s power even crossed Charlemagne’s empire. these frontiers. At his summons Christian princes and Mussulman amirs flocked to his palaces. The kings of Northumbria and Sussex, the kings of the Basques and of Galicia, Arab amirs of Spain and Fez, and even the caliph of Bagdad came to visit him in person or sent gifts by the hands of ambassadors. A great warrior and an upright ruler, his conquests recalled those of the great Christian emperors, and the Church completed the parallel by training him in her lore. This still barely civilized German literally went to school to the English Alcuin and to Peter of Pisa, who, between two campaigns, taught him history, writing, grammar and astronomy, satisfying also his interest in sacred music, literature (religious literature especially), and the traditions of Rome and Constantinople. Why should he not be the heir of their Caesars? And so, little by little, this man of insatiable energy was possessed by the ambition of restoring the Empire of the West in his own favour.
There were, however, two serious obstacles in the way: first, the supremacy of the emperor of the East, which though nominal rather than real was upheld by peoples, princes, and even by popes; secondly, the rivalry of the bishops Charlemagne emperor (800). of Rome, who since the early years of Adrian’s pontificate had claimed the famous “Donation of Constantine” (q.v.). According to that apocryphal document, the emperor after his baptism had ceded to the sovereign pontiff his imperial power and honours, the purple chlamys, the golden crown, “the town of Rome, the districts and cities of Italy and of all the West.” But in 797 the empress of Constantinople had just deposed her son Constantine VI. after putting out his eyes, and the throne might be considered vacant; while on the other hand, Pope Leo III., who had been driven from Rome by a revolt in 799, and had only been restored by a Frankish army, counted for little beside the Frankish monarch, and could not but submit to the wishes of the Carolingian court. So when next year the king of the Franks went to Rome in person, on Christmas Eve of the year 800 and in the basilica of St Peter the pope placed on his head the imperial crown and did him reverence “after the established custom of the time of the ancient emperors.” The Roman ideal, handed down in tradition through the centuries, was here first revived.
This event, of capital importance for the middle ages, was fertile in results both beneficial and the reverse. It brought about the rupture between the West and Constantinople. Then Charlemagne raised the papacy on the ruins of Lombardy to the position of first political power in Italy; and the universal Church, headed by the pope, made common cause with the Empire, which all the thinkers of that day regarded as the ideal state. Confusion between these powers was inevitable, but at this time neither Charles, the pope, nor the people had a suspicion of the troubles latent in the ceremony that seemed so simple. Thirdly, Charlemagne’s title of emperor strengthened his other title of king of the Franks, as is proved by the fact that at the great assembly of Aix-la-Chapelle in 802 he demanded from all, whether lay or spiritual, a new oath of allegiance to himself as Caesar. His increased power came rather from moral value, from the prestige attaching to one who had given proof of it, than from actual authority over men or centralization; this is shown by the division between the Empire and feudalism. Universal sovereignty claimed as a heritage from Rome had a profound influence upon popular imagination, but in no way modified that tendency to separation of the various nations which was already manifest. Charles himself in his government preferred to restore the ancient Empire by vigorous personal action, rather than to follow old imperial traditions; he introduced cohesion into his “palace,” and perfect centralization into his official administration, inspiring his followers and servants, clerical and lay, with a common and determined zeal. The system was kept in full vigour by the missi dominici, who regularly reported or reformed any abuses of administration, and by the courts, military, judicial or political, which brought to Charlemagne the strength of the wealth of his subjects, carrying his commands and his ideas to the farthest limits of the Empire. Under him there was in fact a kind of early renaissance after centuries of barbarism and ignorance.
This emperor, who assumed so high a tone with his subjects, his bishops and his counts, who undertook to uphold public order in civil life, held himself no less responsible for the eternal salvation of men’s souls The Carolingian Renaissance. in the other world. Thanks to Charlemagne, and through the restoration of order and of the schools, a common civilization was prepared for the varied elements of the Empire. By his means the Church was able to concentrate in the palatine academy all the intellectual culture of the middle ages, having preserved some of the ancient traditions of organization and administration and guarded the imperial ideal. Charlemagne apparently wished, like Theodoric, to use German blood and Christian unity to bring back life to the great body of the Empire. Not the equal of Caesar or Augustus in genius or in the lastingness of his work, he yet recalls them in his capitularies, his periodic courts, his official hierarchy, his royal emissaries, his ministers, his sole right of coinage, his great public works, his campaigns against barbarism and heathenry, his zeal for learning and literature, and his divinity as emperor. Once more there existed a great public entity such as had not been seen for many years; but its duration was not to be a long one.
Charlemagne had for the moment succeeded in uniting western Europe under his sway, but he had not been able to arrest its evolution towards feudal dismemberment. He had, doubtless conscientiously, laboured for the reconstitution Dissolution of the Frankish Empire. of the Empire; but it often happens that individual wills produce results other than those at which they aimed, sometimes results even contrary to their wishes, and this was what happened in Charlemagne’s case. He had restored the superstructure of the imperial monarchy, but he had likewise strengthened and legalized methods and institutions till then private and insecure, and these, passing from custom into law, undermined the foundations of the structure he had thought himself to be repairing. A quarter of a century after his death his Empire was in ruins.
The practice of giving land as a beneficium to a grantee who swore personal allegiance to the grantor had persisted, and by his capitularies Charlemagne had made these personal engagements, these contracts of immunity—hitherto not transferable, nor even for life, but quite conditional—regular, legal, even obligatory and almost indissoluble. The beneficium was to be as practically irrevocable as the oath of fidelity. He submitted to the yoke of the social system and feudal institutions at the very moment when he was attempting to revive royal authority; he was ruler of the state, but ruler of vassals also. The monarchical principle no longer sufficed to ensure social discipline; the fear of forfeiting the grant became the only powerful guarantee of obedience, and as this only applied to his personal vassals, Charlemagne gave up his claim to direct obedience from the rest of the people, accepting the mediation of the counts, lords and bishops, who levied taxes, adjudicated and administered in virtue of the privileges of patronage, not of the right of the state. The very multiplication of offices, so noticeable at this time, furthered this triumph of feudalism by multiplying the links of personal dependence, and neutralizing more and more the direct action of the central authority. The frequent convocations of military assemblies, far from testifying to political liberty, was simply a means of communicating the emperor’s commands to the various feudal groups.