He is also fond of calling attention to the rôle played by fortune or chance, and so he has been often blamed for the risks he was willing to take because he trusted too much to luck, and it is said that he conducted warfare in the spirit of a gambler. Like Napoleon, he appears to have believed in his star, but the references to fortune in the “Commentaries” are probably a literary device intended to impress a popular audience who, though they had lost belief in the gods of polytheism, were ready to recognize an incalculable and mysterious element in human life.

But there was in his strategy more than a spontaneous brilliancy adequate to rescue him from the difficulties of a position he had not anticipated. In his campaigns we see evidence enough of caution and calculation. Especially in the matter of numerical superiority he was careful not to allow himself any hazards in a decisive engagement. The battle of Pharsalus is the only one in which it is certain that he won a victory with an army inferior in numbers to his opponent. In this case nothing else could have been done, for Pompeius, who was in control of the sea, would have removed his army from Greece if he had been outnumbered. There was but one way of forcing a pitched battle under these circumstances, and it was part of superior strategy to induce an enemy relying on superior numbers to confront troops superior in quality. But such chances Cæsar only took when obliged. There was little of the bravado element in his wars. The situation was outlined beforehand. The almost mathematical result bears witness to the presence of that same type of cool reflection which in the political side of his career makes the founder of the Roman Empire something of an enigma. It is hard to believe that a man can be just as unfeeling and unethical in statesmanship as when he is directing the movements of masses of troops. Cæsar’s genius stands for an abnormal development of intellectual power disciplined to serve the ambitious purposes of a man bent on enjoying personal rule, who, to a unique degree, had measured the capacity of other men and himself.

CHARLES THE GREAT

I
INTRODUCTORY

Out of the chaos in Western Europe due to the collapse of Roman provincial rule in the fifth century, there came into being various Teutonic states. They all bore the mark of the early tribal organization of the German peoples and took up the work, more or less successfully, of assimilating the orderly elements and traditions of Roman polity. In the Italian peninsula the permanence of these political creations was short-lived, except in the case of the Lombards, who maintained an enduring rule, largely because they adhered to a crude policy of isolation and set well-considered limits to their desire for expansion. In Spain, the Goths, despite the predominance of the Roman provincial element, succeeded, with the help of the Church, in attaining a fairly centralized organization for several centuries until it was swept aside by the irresistible pressure of the Moslem conquest. To the North, in France, which was first of all the seat of various Teutonic peoples, the Franks, under the astute leadership of their tribal monarchs, gradually absorbed all the territory of the old Roman province of Gallia, adding to it the land to the east which had been the home of their ancestors before they had crossed into the Roman province.

Chlodvig, the founder of the Merovingian line of kings, was not a ruler of the type of Theodoric the Ostrogoth. In contrast with the Teutonic kingdoms of Italy and Spain, the Merovingian showed a stubborn conservatism. After Chlodvig’s death there was no man of first-rate ability during the period of Merovingian rule with the dubious exception of Dagobert. These were long years of division, lawlessness, and bloodshed. The Franks kept possession of their conquests, but the royal line produced a succession of weak and helpless rulers who showed themselves incapable of casting aside the traditions of tribal rule. The demand for centralization was recognized and met by the representatives of the noble family of Heristal who, because they were landlords over wide estates, became, as mayors of the palace, de facto possessors of sovereign authority. To them the Frankish chieftains throughout the land looked for leadership, and did not look in vain, for their efficient statesmanship soon arrested the disintegrating tendencies of Merovingian rule, and gave their people such an amount of cohesive strength that they became the foremost representatives of Teutonic power in Western Europe. It was the House of Heristal which saved the Franks from the fate of the Visigoths, for it was Charles the Hammer who met the Moslem host on the field of Poictiers and swept them back across the Pyrenees.

Charles’ son, Pippin, carried on the work of his father; he was strong, courageous, and cautious, a thorough type of the opportunist statesman, willing so far as he was concerned to control his people under the title of Mayor of the Palace, while the titular dignity of king was kept intact in the Merovingian family. The bloodless revolution which made Pippin a monarch de jure from a ruler de facto, was due to outside pressure, and this pressure came from the See of Rome, which appealed to him for help as the representative and most powerful Catholic leader in Western Europe after the Emperors at Constantinople had alienated the population in Italy by the part they played in the Iconoclastic controversy.

The Popes of the eighth century, seeing the inability of the Eastern Empire to protect its Italian possessions, and unwilling to give them support against the aggressions of the Lombards, were face to face with a difficult problem. They did not wish to be absorbed in the Lombard kingdom, and were just as much afraid of seeing any restoration of power to the hands of the Emperor’s representative, the Exarch of Ravenna.

Pope Stephen played a bold stroke of genius when he crossed the Alps to ask the ruler of the Franks to save the religious capital of Western Christianity from capture at the hands of the Lombard kings. Nor was his political sagacity yet exhausted, for he persuaded the Mayor of the Palace to regularize his own position by taking the title of king under the sanction of the Holy See. This was an ambitious design, unprecedented in the earlier pages of Papal history. Even Gregory the Great had no thought of bestowing the royal crown on any Teutonic tribal chieftain. The action was evidently suggested by the plan prepared some years before, when, with the coöperation of the Pope, it was proposed to revive in Italy a native Italian emperor to lead the people of the Peninsula against the church policy of Constantinople. This scheme was from the beginning a forlorn hope, and it had turned out to be a failure. There was not sufficient military strength in Italy, apart from the Lombards, to back up a revived Emperor of the West, and it is clear that the Lombards would have made short work of any such ruler, even if there had not been among the Italians a party who looked up to the Exarch of Ravenna as the natural head of their civil government.

The negotiations with Pippin ended successfully. The Pope’s prestige was enormously increased. Instead of looking forward to becoming the captive of a Lombard king, he became himself the bestower of royal dignity on a man who had at his disposal such vast military power that the passage of his army across the Alps into Lombard territory brought about the reduction of the Lombard kingdom to a status of dependency on a Frankish ruler.