The ablest monarchs of Europe, both in the Middle Ages and in modern times, from Otto III to Napoleon, including Frederic Barbarossa and Louis XIV, all have felt the power of his personality. Napoleon speaks of him as his illustrious predecessor. Yet, as a politician, Charles was inferior to his father, Pippin, whose shrewdness in arranging momentous political combinations he did not inherit, and on the field of battle he was not the equal of his grandfather, Charles Martel. He never won a battle such as Poictiers, and with one or two exceptions the narrative of his campaigns shows nothing of the skilful and spectacular generalship of Belisarius.

In his wars no unusual gifts of strategy were required; no great mastery of tactics was necessary. But he was what one of his contemporaries declared, “the powerful fighter who smote the Saxons and humbled the hearts of the Franks and Barbarians, who had been able to resist the might of the Romans.” His campaigns attest energy and obstinacy, a clear-sighted ability to see when and where a decisive blow must be delivered. He never lost his head in a dangerous position, and so he was able to take in a military problem in its various aspects, and while resting at one stage of a conflict, he could quietly prepare to overcome his adversaries in a second move.

His mind was well balanced, it worked logically and with a large vision, and he aimed at acting in such a way that the innumerable details of his work as ruler would be explicable and could harmonize as parts of a well-considered whole. He was general-in-chief, and he also realized as we have seen, Constantine’s description of himself in relation to the Church, as “chief bishop for its external affairs.” As a judge, Charles was the supreme court of appeal, and was in this capacity remarkable for his severity and unsparing attitude to the guilty. Though he was not a genius as an administrator, he showed industry and judgment in using and in improving such organs of government as were known in his day in Western Europe. As we have pointed out, his capitularies show him to us as a great landlord, familiar with agricultural methods, able to measure the economic needs of a large estate, and to act accordingly, possessing an extraordinary amount of practical energy and versatility.

There was no limit to his interests, and he brought in a high conception of duty. Up to the close of his life nothing was too small to escape his personal supervision; he kept count of the chickens on his personal estates, dictated his capitularies, and learned the art of writing, a rare accomplishment, and deemed among the Teutonic races the special work of a cleric. He presided over assemblies and councils, ordered the system of chanting in his private chapel, and hardly a year passed by that he did not visit one of the frontiers of the Empire. His mental capacity was characterized by something of the mobility which belonged to the Renaissance period, a trait not seen among medieval rulers, and perhaps paralleled only in the case of Frederick II. His talents were not employed towards futile ends; he economized them, and while he was open to impressions, he kept with scrupulousness his store of energy under control. He was free from Napoleon’s defect of fitting all things as parts of a rigid system, and he knew when to keep his hands from disarranging a firmly established social order.

It may be that a larger measure of interference from him would have prevented the growth of feudal privileges which the land system of Western Europe was already producing. This evolution he did not oppose; in some cases his own acts furthered it. The court and “missi” under his direction became, as it were, observers and directors of a naturally developing type of local administration which the general ordinances of the Empire did nothing to repress. Feudal customs, still, of course, in their germ, were pressed into the service of the state, as for example when the lord was required to appear accompanied by his dependents at the general military assembly of the King. The Emperor was quick in reconciling local divergencies, and in discerning some easily practicable method of making seemingly irreconcilable factors contribute mutually to his ends. When a governmental order failed, he was fertile in discerning an immediate remedy, careless whether the innovation of a reform could be theoretically accommodated to the administration as it before existed. Wherever the structure he planned turned out faulty, he went to work with the spirit of an artist who thinks more of the safety of the whole building than of the harmony of its parts. His ideal of rule was always before him, yet there was none of the stage effect of which Napoleon was so fond. He did not try to impress upon others principles that did not attract his own sympathies. He believed in what he did and believed the way he was doing it was consistent with his own ideals of right, personal and social. The empire was to be a community guided by Christian standards, a visible embodiment of the City of God, as understood in his day.

The dream was a mighty one, and proved inspiring largely because it was impersonal. The Emperor stood as the champion, unselfish and devoted, of progress, so far as his age appreciated that much abused term. It was, at least, a reality in respect to the conscious effort on his part to moralize government, and by doing so to contribute to an ideal solidarity of men and races. Yet the task he had assigned himself was too great; and his work remained but an unfinished sketch, soon to be demolished in the troublous and hopeless reigns of his descendants.

THE OTTOMANS

I
OSMAN

The empire of the Seldjoukian Turks by which the crusading conquests were destroyed, showed no greater powers of endurance than the other creations of Moslem rule; it did not escape the tendency to dismemberment due to the transfer of personal and autocratic control into the hands of rulers of mediocre ability. By the beginning of the fourteenth century the effect of disintegration showed itself plainly and definitely in Western Asia throughout the territory which had been won from the Emperors of Eastern Rome. One of the results of the expansion of the Mongol conquests towards the West was to hasten not only the division among the Seldjouks, but their speedy downfall. Their Sultans found no safety against the pressure of the Mongols on their territories, even though they combined with their Christian neighbors, with whom they had kept up for so long incessant warfare, against a danger which threatened annihilation to all races and peoples in the path of the Mongol hordes from the East. The Turks made peace with the Greeks at Nicæa, and even engaged the help of Frankish mercenary troops, but these counsels of despair did not save them from becoming tributaries to the Mongol rulers of Asia.

As early as 1243 the fatal course of the decadence was marked by constant defeat, and from this time on they were not able to defend their position. The Sultanate came practically to an end with the death of Masud II of Iconium, who was murdered by one of his emirs, though the Mongols continued the office, ruling under the name of Alaed-Din II, 1297-1307. Of the ten fragments which represented the former empire of the Seldjouks, one was controlled by Osman, from whose name the latest and most enduring effort to establish a Moslem world power takes its origin. Within the restricted bounds of a small emirate, whose most important point was the ancient city of Dorlæum, now called Sultan-Oeni, was trained and developed the people who were destined to make great European conquests lasting down to our own day, to threaten for many centuries Christian powers at their most vulnerable centers, and, finally, when their own ability to conquer and devastate had come to an end, to stir up such constant jealousies among the states which claimed the succession to their dominions in Europe, that some of the most disastrous and hardly contested wars in the nineteenth century have been due to their presence on European soil.