The world's leading conquerors

by Wilson Lloyd Bevan

There was no steam roller set to work to equalize, if not to pulverize, the component parts of his realm. The divisions were not destroyed, but were rather combined in a higher political unity. The kingdom of the West Goths was at least preserved, though it had less of a definite character than the Lombard kingdom, which the Emperor took special pains to preserve in its integrity. Even the traditions of the Ostrogoths were allowed a value in so far as they stood for a strenuous opposition to the imperial policy of uniformity of administration and to the economic sacrifice of the local centers to the purposes of world politics. Lombard influence had overcome both Ostrogothic and Roman rule; it was irreconcilable, and stood for the stubborn and conservative standpoint that made the first Germanic invaders difficult to assimilate in the provinces of the Roman Empire, where by force of arms they became the ruling class. A similar obstinacy, with its preservation of the original political type, marked the Lombard kingdom and duchies which Charles had conquered. A picturesque example of local initiative was not crowded out by the Frankish overlordship in Venice; the seafaring community came into being in a favored spot, on the confines of the two empires, too remote to be crushed from Constantinople, and protected from the Western ruler by a few leagues of shallow sea.

The same centrifugal tendencies are seen in Southern Italy; and what is more important, in Northern and Central Italy, there was no attempt to stifle the germs of municipal activity which produced, later on, such marvelous fruitage in the Italian town life of the Middle Ages. The contrast between the Germanic and Roman elements in the Empire faded away gradually under the Emperor’s administration, but Roman civilization could not be eclipsed, while the laws of Justinian continued to be quoted as a model, and while the Church with its general use of the Latin language was regarded as the chief adjunct and support of continuity in imperial rule.

The union of the Empire and the Papacy kept up that tradition of civilization by which the isolation of Germanic tribal life was swept aside, and the Germans learned that there were other governmental principles than custom, and began to see that might was not the only right. The institutions of the Church did more than preserve the ideal element for the individual and for society. They stood for continuity in securing the best achievements of classic culture in government and in learning, and prevented just that kind of social cataclysm which marked the progress of Islam, when it attempted to handle mankind in the mass. Reverence for the Holy Scriptures, however imperfect may have been the acquaintance with them, had a powerful influence in maintaining the connection of Church and State, and acted constantly against the divisive tendencies of racial rule.

The Celts of Western France, the remnant of the people who had once dominated the whole of Occidental Europe, were brought into the sphere of general European life, and the same opportunities were given to the Germanic peoples. Allied with the population of Latin origin, they extended their sway over a territory which before had never felt the influence of centralization. The union of the two elements was of momentous importance, and this achievement stands out as the abiding result of the Emperor’s conquest. France and Germany made up a whole, in which the Teutonic element had a superior position, but without tyrannizing over the peoples of the Romance stock. In Burgundy and Neustria the elements of Latin blood were strongest, and the contrast gave a peculiar character to Austrasia.

The most significant factor of the Emperor’s rule was that it offered a center of unity to the Teutonic tribes, consolidating them, where the Merovingian kingdoms, which also stood for the old Germanic tribal traditions, had shown complete incapacity. But under the Carolingian rule, neither the Alemanni, nor the Bavarians, nor the Saxons, could claim predominance, for the sovereign’s authority was exercised apart from all these tribal influences, and yet at the same time the characteristics of the tribe, local sentiment, and customary law, were not broken up by the central government. The Teutonic local division, the “Gau,” was no more interfered with than the Gallic “Civitas.” The power at the top of all, formed by the armed hosts of the component parts of the Empire and by the clergy, was expressed in institutions that kept the body politic together. In the assemblies, all the different nationalities took part, and acted under the guidance of the single will of a single ruler, who was kept from the capricious action of a tyrant by his firm hold on the ideal of a Christian commonwealth. The principles of the whole imperial system harmonized with popular governmental traditions, and both in their social and in their religious aspects answered to the popular conceptions of membership in a world-wide church.

Charles, in his plans for the succession, looked forward to a ruling family controlling by descent a singularly heterogeneous collection of races. It is unthinkable, as an historical principle, that the traditions and customs of race and tribe could be long suppressed. Since the time of Germanic invasions they had been the most potent factor in the evolution of Western Europe; and, though they were kept in the background by the energy and character of the Emperor, it only needed a few crises to call them forth into activity. Out of the interplay of these tribal interests and racial divergencies has grown modern Europe.

A further weakness in the Carolingian structure was due to the relation of the secular and the ecclesiastical authority. The grounds of conflict, even in Charles’ own time, were never far distant. The Emperor’s diplomacy and personality smoothed the acerbities away, and his attitude of compromise found ready imitators in such Popes as Hadrian I and Leo III. There would have been a different outcome if, on his visits to Rome, he had been faced by a Pope of the temperament of Nicholas I. The possible independence of the spiritual power the Emperor did little to prevent by legislation. There was no way of avoiding such disputes, and the struggles for supremacy between Empire and Papacy attained their full development in the thirteenth century.

Charles, too, showed no willingness to deal radically with the customary laws of succession of the Frankish people, and in this sphere he was far more conservative than the Lombards or the Ostrogoths. The principle of division among the heirs rather than unity of territory, meant in itself a great danger. It would have caused trouble to Charles himself had not his brother been removed by death early in the reign. Yet the Emperor set a strong precedent for its recognition in his own disposition of the Empire among his three sons. The position of Louis was due to an accident, and the old question was bound to emerge again when the rights of his various children, as his heirs, came to be considered. Nothing was done to prescribe how the exercise of sole rule as Emperor was to be carried out when the subordinate rulers of his own house proved reluctant to obey their head.

The Empire plainly was only secure if its various rulers could consent to work harmoniously together; a division among them, a break between the Church and the State, the exaltation of the idea of nationality and race, were all possibilities which would surely destroy the integrity of Charles’ imperial construction. The history of the century after his death shows the weak sides of the Emperor’s benevolent optimism. He contemplated a great Christian republic directed by a family united in its members and guided by patriarchal instinct. In working out this program, Charles was an opportunist as well as an optimist; he took the component political factors as he found them, and introduced them as the stones of a mosaic, thinking more of the whole than of the parts, seemingly oblivious of the disparity of the elements he was introducing into the fabric. The distinctions of race were certain to become accentuated the moment the central power showed weakness and proved itself unable to be an effectual protection against anarchy within or attacks from the outside.

In its political creativeness the Emperor’s work was framed on a smaller scale than he contemplated. He proposed an Empire, but he really founded kingdoms—the historic kingdoms of Western Europe. The inheritors of his system were the territorial monarchs, who took from him the conception of a supreme secular power closely united with the Church. The actual central authority established by Charles soon passed away, but the peoples included within it, endowed with the energy proceeding from him, as a source, survived and developed. The ground prepared by him was the foundation for the national kingdoms with whose vicissitudes and progress the course of civilization has been unalterably connected. He has been well named, therefore, the Patriarch of Europe, the Abraham in whose seed the political world has been blessed.