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Epochs of Modern History 
 
 EDITED BY 
 EDWARD E. MORRIS, M.A., J. SURTEES PHILLPOTTS, B.C.L. 
 
 AND 
 
 C. COLBECK, M.A. 
 
 THE BEGINNING of the MIDDLE AGES 
 
 DEAN CHURCH. 
 
Epochs of Modern History '^ 
 
 THE BEGINNING 
 
 OF 
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 /^0 BY 
 
 /\^ R. W. CHURCH 
 
 DfiAN OF ST. PAUL S : HONORARY FELLCW OF ORIEL. 
 
 WITH THREE MAPS 
 
 NEW YOKK: 
 CHAKLES SCKIBNEE'S SONS. 
 
 1887. 
 
\« 
 
 \ 
 
 ^"^^1 
 
 Hj Tfsnsfet 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The present volume must be considered as an intro- 
 duction or preface to the series of ' Epochs of Modern 
 History/ rather than as an integral member of the series. 
 The other volumes are narratives, and enter into detail. 
 This one is a mere general ske'tch, necessarily one of 
 the barest outline, faint anH vague where they are full. 
 My aim has been little more than to disengage the 
 leading lines in the history of five most important and 
 most confused centuries, and to mark the influences 
 which most asserted themselves, and which seem to 
 have most governed the results as we see them in sub- 
 sequent history. In this summary view I have con- 
 fined my attention mainly to the West, saying little of 
 the great nations of later times in the North and East — • 
 Scandinavia, Poland, Hungary, Russia. The reason 
 is, that the course of modern history was determined 
 in the West, and what happened in the North and 
 East took its start and course from what had happened 
 and had taken permanent forms in the nations of the 
 West and South. 
 
 In compiling this slight sketch, in which notes and re- 
 ferences are not allowed, I need not say that I am under 
 
vi Preface. 
 
 obligations of the most varied kind to others. Every- 
 one who writes of these times finds much of his work 
 done for him in Gibbon, Merivale, Hallam, Milman, 
 Guizot, in the older French Books, such as Fleury's 
 great compilation, the ** Ecclesiastical History," and 
 in the lively and picturesque narratives of the later 
 ones. I have been much assisted by the first two 
 volumes of Sir F. Palgrave's prolix but very instruc- 
 tive History of England and Normandy. Besides 
 these, we have a younger race of English historical 
 scholars, who have amply kept up the reputation 
 of their predecessors for honesty of research and 
 breadth and vigour of thought, and have removed the 
 reproach that though English historians were skilful 
 architects, they were careless of the quarries from 
 which their stones came, and easy in passing slovenly 
 and unsound work. The debt is great which all students 
 of the early times of Europe owe to Mr. Freeman, Pro- 
 fessor Stubbs, and Mr. Bryce, whose remarkable Essay 
 on the Roman Empire placed in a clear light an im- 
 portant but obscure and ill-understood link of con- 
 nection between the ancient and modern world. I 
 have tried to remember, as far as I could, that no one 
 can really take in and judge of the meaning of events, 
 without going from even the best secondary authorities 
 to the ultimate, and if possible, contemporary sources 
 of our information. In doing this, and in all other 
 ways, it would be unpardonable not to say how 
 much I have been helped by the laborious and saga- 
 cious works of recent German and French scholars. For 
 
Preface. vii 
 
 everything connected with the early condition and the 
 wanderings of the new races, I have referred to Zeuss, 
 Dahn, and to Pfahler's Handbook of German An- 
 tiquities, for the Germans,and to Schefarik andjirecek 
 for the Slaves. I have found especial assistance in a 
 series of works suggested by Leopold Ranke, in 
 which the materials of history for the times of Charles 
 the Great and his followers are collected, compared,' 
 and arranged with admirable skill and completeness, 
 by writers of great ability, Bonnell, Abell, Diimmler, 
 and others—the ^'Annals of German History," {_Jahr- 
 bucher der Deutschen Geschichte). The care, the 
 comprehensiveness, the resolute tenacity of research, 
 the fearlessness of trouble in investigating, shown 
 by the distinguished writers who have lately in Ger- 
 many thrown themselves with characteristic interest 
 on the early history of Europe, are, besides the value 
 of the results, a perpetual lesson of conscientious 
 faithfulness and industry. We in England owe much 
 to the diligence and sagacity of German investigators 
 of our own history, like Dr. R. Pauli. And the 
 French, who are usually credited with the power of 
 brilliant generalization, and also with incapacity to 
 resist its temptations, are beginning to tread on the 
 heels of the Germans, and to remember that they are 
 the countrymen of the old Benedictine scholars and 
 critics of St. Maur. 
 
 In a sketch of this kind I have not pretended to 
 be careful as to scholarly accuracy in the forms of 
 names. This is a book in which explanations cannot 
 
viii Preface. 
 
 conveniently be given as to the reasons of change 
 from old-fashioned ways of writing them ; and for the 
 most part I have written them as they are commonly 
 written in our popular histories. Students when they 
 begin to enter into the details of history for them- 
 selves will find the reasons in many Instances for a 
 change from the traditional form, and also the frequent 
 difficulties of making it. 
 
 Three small maps are added. But it cannot be too 
 strongly impressed on students from the first, not only 
 that they ought always to read with a map at their 
 side, but that they need a special map for each period 
 which they are studying. They cannot be too early 
 made familiar with the truth that a map is a historical 
 as well as a geographical picture, and represents on 
 the background of unchanging nature the changing 
 seats and fortunes of men. Such works as Spruner's 
 Historical Atlas, or its improved form by Menke, 
 now in course of publication, ought to be within 
 reach of every reader of history; and no other maps 
 can well make up for the want of them. 
 
 R. W. C. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chronological Table xiii 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Division between ancient and modern history — Destruction 
 of Jerusalem — Fall of Rome — Barbarian migrations — 
 Gradually threaten the Empire — Internal decay — Division 
 of East and West — ^Alaric I 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Teutonic settlements in the West — Vandals — Burgundians— 
 Franks— West Goths— East Goths — The Huns and Attila 
 —The Barbarian Patricians — Ricimer nominates Emperors 
 — End of the Empire in the West — Romulus Augustulus 14 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The new nations — Gothic kingdom of Theoderic in Italy — 
 Burgundian — Vandal — West Gothic kingdom in Gaul and 
 Spain — Arianism of the Goths — Frank kingdom — Clovis — 
 Frank Supremacy — Efforts of the Empire — Justinian — Beli- 
 sarius — Narses — Overthrow of Gothic kingdom in Italy and 
 of Vandal kingdom in Africa — Lombards in Italy . . 30 
 
Contents, 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Condition of the Teutonic settlements — Three influences 
 affecting the Teutonic settlers — i. Religion: the Christian 
 bishops, the Christian Church and religion — 2. Roman 
 law — 3. The Latin language — Gradual but slow revival of 
 Latin civilization among the new nations .... 45 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Conquest of Britain by the Saxons and Angles ; gradual ; 
 complete — Conversion of the English — Influence on the 
 nation of this conversion 62 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 The Franks — Their supremacy in the West — The Merovin- 
 gian Kings, the line of Clovis — Decay of the family — The 
 Mayors of the Palace — The Pipins — Rise of the Carolingian 
 line — Alliance of Pipin's house with the Popes — Deposition 
 of the last Merovingian with the Pope's sanction . . 75 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Roman Empire in the East — Preserves civilization — Its strength 
 — Justinian — Heraclius — Rise of the Mahometan power — 
 Conquests of the Saracens — Isaurian and Macedonian 
 dynasties — Prerogatives of the Emperors — Religious su- 
 premacy 98 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 The Carolingians — Charles the Great, King of the Franks and 
 Lombards — Emperor of the Romans — His wars, legisla- 
 tion, political system — Creator of the temporal power of 
 the Popes — and of Germany 117 
 
Contents. xi 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Carolingians — Successors of Charles — Louis the Pious 
 and his sons — Break up of the Empire — The Northmen — 
 Fall of the various Carolingian lines — End of the Frank 
 dominion 147 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Consolidation and unity of the English people — The Kings 
 of Wessex — Danish invasions — Egbert, Alfred, Edgar — 
 Danish conquest — The Anglo-Saxon Church . , , 176 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Results of break-up of Frank Empire — New arrangement 
 of Europe — The Papacy — New Kingdoms — Separation 
 of France and Germany — Italy — The Northern King- 
 doms — The Slave nations — Hungarians, Poles, Russians . 192 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Retrospect of the times of transition from the Roman Empire 
 to the European States of the Middle Ages . . . 215 
 
 Index , . . . . 220 
 
 MAPS. 
 
 Roman Empire (Eastern and Western) in the 
 Fourth Century, shewing the Positions of the j,^,..^- 
 NORTHERN Barbarians . . to face Title-page 
 
 Europe in the time of Odoacer, and 
 South-Western Europe a.d. 525 . " /. 31 , 
 
 Europe, time of Charles the Great . " 149 t^ 
 
Chronological Table. 
 
 XV. 
 
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XVI 
 
 Chronological Table. 
 
 A.D. Emperors, 
 474 Zeno. 
 
 (East). 
 
 491 Anastasius I. 
 
 518 Justin I. 
 
 527 Justinian (527- 
 
 565). pp. 39; loi- 
 
 565 Justin II. 
 
 578 
 532 
 
 Tiberius II. 
 Maurice. 
 
 A. D. Barbarians. 
 
 477 f Genseric. ^lla in Sussex. 
 
 481 Clovis, king of the Franks. 
 (Merovingian line 481-751). 
 
 486 Battle of Soissons. Clovis de- 
 feats Syagrius, p. 38. 
 
 489 Ostrogoths, under Theoderic, 
 attack and defeat Odoacer. 
 
 493 Gothic kingdom of Theoderic in 
 //a// (493-533), p. 33. 
 
 495 Cerdic lands ; founds Wessex. 
 
 496 Battle of Tolbiac ; Clovis de- 
 
 feats Alamanni. Clovis bap- 
 tized. 
 500 Clovis defeats Burgundians. 
 507 Battle of Voulo7i near Poitiers ; 
 Clovis defeats West Goths, and 
 conquers Aquitaine. 
 511 f Clovis. Fourfold division of 
 Frank kingdom. 
 Boethius, t525. Symmachus, 
 f526. Theoderic. t526, 
 532 Bjirgundian kingdom extin- 
 guished by the Franks, 
 533-536 Belisarius destroys Vandal 
 
 kingdom in Africa. 
 536-554 (i) Belisarius (2) Narses, de- 
 destroy Gothic kingdom in 
 Italy, p. 39. 
 547 Ida, king in Northumbria, p. 65. 
 560 Ceawlin, the conqueror, king of 
 Wessex ; ^thelbert, king of 
 Kent. 
 565 •f-Belisarius. f Justinian. 
 567 or, 573 fNarses. 
 568-70 Lombard kingdom iti Italy. 
 (568-774). Alboin, p. 41. 
 Irish Missions ; St, Columba, 
 Scotland, 520-597; St. Gall. 
 — 1^40, Alamannia. 
 St, Columba7i, Burgundy, 
 Italy, 565-615- 
 590-604 Pope Gregory the Great. 
 590-615 Agilulf and Theudelinda. Con- 
 version of the Lombards from 
 Arianism, p. 42. 
 587 Reccared, king of Spain, em- 
 braces Catholic faith : fall of 
 Arianism among the West 
 Goths, p. 79. 
 
Chronological Table. 
 
 xvii 
 
 A.D. J^mperors. 
 
 A.D. 
 
 Barbarians. 
 
 
 597 
 
 Augustine baptizes uEthelbert, 
 
 p. 91. 
 Avars. Persian wars. 
 
 602 Pliocas. 
 
 600-797 
 
 Power of the Avars. 
 
 
 609 
 
 Mohammed preaches at Mecca. 
 
 610 Heraclius. 
 
 611-623 
 
 Wars of the Empire with Persia. 
 
 (610. 641). 
 
 
 p. 108. 
 
 p. 108. 
 
 613 
 
 Frank kingdoms united under 
 
 (Line of HeracJiuj 
 
 
 Clothar. 
 
 610-711.) 
 
 617-633 
 
 Edwin, king of Northumbria. 
 
 
 622 
 
 Flight 0/ Alo hammed. Hegira, 
 
 
 626 
 
 Paulinus, bishop of the North- 
 umbrians, 627, baptizes Edv/in. 
 
 
 626 
 
 Penda, king of the Mercians, 
 t65S. 
 
 
 631 
 
 Dagobert, sole king of Franks. 
 Pipin the Elder, mayor. 
 
 
 635-68S 
 
 Greatness of Northumbria. 
 Oswald. 
 
 
 638 
 
 Division of Frank kingdom, 
 Austrasia a?id Neustria, p. 87. 
 
 
 632 
 
 fMohammed, Saracen con- 
 quests begin, p. 109. 
 
 
 635 
 
 Aidan and K. Oswald of North- 
 umbria. Arabian coitqutsts. 
 
 
 632 Arabian invasions of Persia | 
 
 
 
 and Syria. 
 
 
 632 
 
 -638 Conquest of Syria. 
 
 
 er- 
 
 -651 Conquest of Persia. 
 
 
 640 Alexandria taken. Conquest 1 
 
 641 fHeraclius. 
 
 
 of Egypt. 
 
 Constantine III. 
 
 
 
 Constans II. 
 
 
 
 
 647 
 
 -7og Conquest of Africa. 
 
 
 662 
 
 -678 Asia Minor invaded. 
 
 
 668 
 
 -677 First siege of Constantinople. 
 
 668 Constantine IV. 
 
 668-690 
 
 Theodore of Tarsus, archbishop 
 
 (Pogouatus.) 
 
 
 of Canterbury, p. 71. 
 Ebroin, Neustrian mayor of 
 palace, 664-681, p. 91. 
 
 
 680-775 
 
 St. Boniface, Apostle of Ger- 
 many. 
 
 685 Justinian II. 
 
 
 
 (68S-711.) 
 
 687 
 
 Battle of Testry, Ascendency 
 of Austrasia. Pepin of Heristal, 
 p. 91. 
 
 
 688 
 
 Ina, king of Wessex. 
 
 694 Leontius. 
 
 697 
 
 Beginning of the Doges of 
 Venice, 
 
xviii 
 
 Chronological Table. 
 
 A.D. 
 
 Emperors. 
 
 A.D. Barbarians. 
 
 697 
 
 Tiberius III, 
 
 Arabian invasions of the West. 
 
 705-711 Justinian II. 
 
 
 
 restored. 
 
 
 711 
 
 f End of family 
 
 710 Tarik lands in Spain. 
 
 
 of Heraclius. 
 
 711 Battle of the Guadalete. End 
 
 
 p. no. 
 
 cf Gothic kingdom, p. 83. 
 
 711-71 
 
 6 Philippicus. 
 
 713 Arab conquest of Spain, p. 83. 
 
 
 Anastasius II. 
 
 714 fPipin of Heristal, p. 90. 
 
 
 TlieodosiusIII. 
 
 717 Charles Martel, mayor. 
 
 721 Arab invasion of trance, p. 91. 
 
 713 
 
 Leo III. the 
 
 716-817 Greatness of Mercia. Of fa, p. 177 
 
 
 Isaurianf74i. 
 
 726-728 Iconoclastic controversy (729- 
 
 
 p. no. 
 
 1^1)' 
 
 {Isaurian line 718-797.) 
 
 732 Battle of Tours or Poitiers : 
 
 
 p. no. 
 
 Charles defeats the Saracens, 
 p. 91. 
 741 Pope (Gregory III.) appeals to 
 
 741 
 
 Constantino V. 
 
 Franks against Lombards, p. 95 
 
 
 (Copronymus). 
 
 f Chades Martel. 
 
 
 p. 115- 
 
 741 Pipin the Little, p. 95. 
 742 (?) Birth of Charles the Great. 
 
 756 Fall of the Ommiad Caliphs 
 at Damascus, 
 
 752 Last Alcrovingian {Childeric 
 III.) deposed with Pope's sanc- 
 tion. Pipin crowned, p. 96. 
 Carolingian line, 752; lasting to 
 911 in Germany; to 987 in 
 Gaul. 
 
 754 Pope Stephen (752-756) in 
 
 France ; crowns Pipin and 
 his sons, p. 96. 
 
 755 Division of the Caliphate. 
 
 Abbassides at Bagdad ; Om- 
 miads at Cordova. 
 755-756 Lombard war ; Franks assist the 
 pope, p. 97. 
 768 f Pipin : Charles and Carloman 
 succeed. 
 
 771 f Carloman : Charles, sole king, 
 
 p. 119. 
 
 772 Beginning of Saxon war for 
 
 7ZS 
 
 Leo IV. 
 
 thirty years, p. 121. 
 
 780 
 
 ConstantineVI. 
 
 773-4 Overthrow of Desiderius : end 
 
 
 and Irene. 
 
 of Lombard kingdom, p. 125. 
 
 797 
 
 ConstantineVI. 
 
 786-809 Haroun al Rashid, caliph. 
 
 
 deposed by 
 
 7S7 Images restored at seventh 
 
 \ 
 
 Irene. 
 
 general council at Nice. Da- 
 nish ships first mentioned in 
 
 797 
 
 Irene alone. 
 
 A. S. Chronicles. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. 
 
 The sign f marks the year of death. 
 
 A.D. 
 
 98-138 
 
 138-180 
 
 180-193 
 
 193 
 
 249 
 
 250-260 
 
 250 
 
 286 
 
 303-4 
 306 
 
 Trajan and Hadrian. 
 
 The Antonines. 
 
 Commodus. 
 
 Severus elected by the Pannonian legions, ")'2ii. 
 
 Decius elected by the Msesian legions. 
 
 First State persecution of Christianity. 
 
 Barbarian attacks beginning, (pp. 3,4.) 
 
 East : the Danube. 
 251 Gothic wars : Decius defeated 
 
 and slain. 
 253-268 Goths ravage the East. 
 
 269 Checked by Claudius, 
 
 270 Checked by Aurelian : set- 
 
 tled in Dacia. 
 
 West : the Rhine. 
 
 256 Franks : ravage 
 Gaul and Spain. 
 
 256 Sucvi, Alantanni^ 
 in Italy. 
 
 270 Alamanni\xi Italy : 
 defeated by Aure- 
 lian. 
 
 277 Franks and Bur- 
 gundians defeated 
 by Probus. 
 
 Diocletian and Maximian (286-305). Two Augusti, 
 
 with two Caesars (pp. 6, 7). 
 Last great State persecution under Diocletian. 
 Constantine. Two Augusti, each with two Caesars (308). 
 
XIV. 
 
 Chronological Table. 
 
 A.D. 
 
 311-313 
 323 
 325 
 
 324-334 
 
 337 
 
 Edicts of Nicomedia and Milan in favor of toleration. 
 Co7ista?ttine, sole emperor, t337' 
 Coicneil of Nlccea, 
 322 Gothic war. Goths checked by Constantine. 
 331-2 Second Gothic war : Goths again checked. 
 334 Vandals and Sarmatians defeated. 
 Fotmdation and dedication of New Rome, Constanti- 
 nople. 
 Division of Empire between the three sons of Constan- 
 tine. 
 353 Reunion under Constantius the survivor. 
 
 351 Battle of Mursa; victory of East over West. 
 
 Death of Magnentius. 
 340-353 Franks and Alamanni defeated by Julian in the 
 
 battle of Strasburg (357). 
 360-375 Ulfilas, Gothic bishop, translates the Bible. 
 361-363 Julian. 
 
 364 Division 0/ Empire, East and West. Valens and Valen- 
 
 tinian. Constantinople and Milan, capitals. 
 375 Goths driven by the Huns into the Empire. 
 378 Battle of Hadrianople. Valens slain. 
 
 Goths checked by Theodosius (379-395) ; settled on the 
 Danube and in Thrace. 
 382 Emperor Gratian (375-383) last Ponti/ex Maximus, I e., 
 
 head of the heathen state religion. 
 392 Reujtion of Empire under Theodosius. 
 
 395 Fi7ial division i?tto East and West : 
 
 Arcadius t4o8, and Honorius t423. 
 
 Great barbarian invasion of the West. (pp. 8-11). 
 
 Italy. 
 395 Revolt of Alaric. 
 396-7 Alaric in Greece. 
 398 Alaric, king of Visigoths. 
 400 Alaric in Italy. 
 403 Stilicho beats him at Pollentia. 
 405 Stilicho defeats Radagais. 
 
 408 f Stilicho. Alaric before Rome. 
 
 409 Second siege of Rome. 
 
 410 Third siege, and sack of 
 
 Rome : f Alaric. 
 412 Visigoths, under Athaulf, 
 leave Italy for Gaul. 
 
 Rhine and Gaul. 
 
 405 Great invasion 
 across the Rhine. 
 Vandals, Sueves, 
 &c., p. 14. 
 
 406 Vandals under 
 
 Gundachar, p. 14. 
 409 Sueves in Spain ; 
 
 Hermanric. End 
 
 of Roman rule in 
 
 Britain. 
 413 Burgundians in 
 
 Elsass. 
 
 Franks in N. E. 
 
 Gaul, p. 15. 
 
Chronolos:ical Table. 
 
 XIX 
 
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Chronological Table. 
 
 
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XXll 
 
 Chronological Tabic. 
 
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BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Modern History is separated from ancient by two 
 great and unparalleled catastrophes; and from the 
 changes occasioned by these catastrophes in the ma- 
 terials and conditions of society in Europe modern his- 
 tory took its beginnings. One was the destruction of the 
 Jewish State and temple. The other was the break-up 
 of the Roman Empire. These two catastrophes, though 
 divided by a considerable interval of time, and altogether 
 different in their operation, were in various ways closely 
 combined in their effects on the state of the world. They 
 were catastrophes of the same order: the overthrow and 
 passing away of the old, in things most deeply concern- 
 ing human life, that the new might come. Without 
 them that new settlement or direction of human affairs, 
 under which the last fifteen centuries have been passed, 
 would have been inconceivable and impossible. The 
 fall of Jerusalem was the evident close of a theocracy 
 which, up to that time, had for ages counted on a divine 
 guarantee, and which looked forward, without doubt, to 
 ending only in the consummation of a Messianic triumph. 
 It was the apparent extinction of the visible kingdom of 
 God on earth : the doom pronounced by the course of 
 
2 Beginning of the Middle Ages. 
 
 events on claims and hopes which, to those who lived 
 under them, seemed the most sure of all things. The 
 fall of the Roman empire was the overthrow of the 
 greatest, the strongest, and the most firmly-settled State 
 which the world had ever known : the dislocation and 
 reversal of the long-received ideas and assumptions of 
 mankind, of their habits of thinking, of the customs of 
 life, of the conclusions of experience. The one cleared 
 the ground for the Christian religion and the Christian 
 Church, to which ancient Judaism, if it had still sub- 
 sisted, unhumbled and active, with its wonderful 
 history and uncompromising pretensions, would have 
 been a most formidable rival. The other made room, 
 and prepared materials, not only for new nations, but 
 for new forms of political and social order, then beyond 
 all possibility of being anticipated or understood ; for 
 the new objects and ambitions, the new powers and 
 achievements, which have distinguished modern times, 
 at their worst, as well as at their best, from those of all 
 ancient civilizations. 
 
 The world in the West, as known to us in history, 
 was surrounded by a vague and unexplored waste of 
 barbarism. During the first three centuries of the empire 
 all in the South seemed settled, all in the North was 
 unstable and in movement. In the eyes of civilized man- 
 kind there were in the world two great empires of very 
 unequal force : the eternal empire of Rome, secure as 
 nature itself, and the Asiatic empire of the East, at one 
 time held by a Parthian, then by Persian dynasties, 
 often troublesome, but never a real rival to Rome for the 
 allegiance of the nations around the focus of civilization, 
 the Mediterranean Sea. India was still wrapt in mystery 
 and fable. Outside the Roman and Persian borders, 
 northwards and north-eastwards, there was a vast. 
 
Introduction. 3 
 
 dimly-known chaos of numberless barbarous tongues 
 and savage races, from which, from time to time, strange 
 rumours reached the great Italian capital of the world, 
 and unwelcome visitors showed themselves in the dis- 
 tant provinces, on the Rhine and the Danube ; and 
 contemporaneously with the beginning of the empire 
 had begun a shaking of the nations, scarcely perceptible 
 at first, but visibly growing in importance as time went 
 on. But there, in what seemed to the majestic order of 
 Rome a mere seething tumult of confused and unimpor- 
 tant broils, was maturing the fate of the empire, and the 
 beginnings of a new world. It was the scene of that 
 great movement and displacement of the masses of un- 
 civilized mankind, to which the Germans have given the 
 name of the " Wandering of the Nations " ( Volkerivan- 
 derung). Long before it can be traced in history, this 
 perpetual shifting of races, accompanied by the extermi- 
 nation of the weaker and longest-settled by the stronger 
 new-comers, had been the rule of the northern world. 
 The causes which produced it became soon after the 
 beginning of our era unusually active, and it went on for 
 centuries, till the great social and political changes 
 which it produced in the West brought it to a final con- 
 dition of stable repose. An impulse, apparently, had 
 been given from the heart of Asia, which added force to 
 the natural struggle among the barbarian tribes for 
 better and more convenient abodes. When the move- 
 ment came to its height, it began to be sensibly felt on 
 the frontiers of the empire. About the middle of the 
 second century it called for serious efforts on the Dan- 
 ube ; towards the end of the third it overleaped the 
 barrier of the Rhine. By that time fresh internal changes 
 had taken place in the Teutonic tribes themselves, first 
 known to the Romans Their early names become 
 
4 Beginning of the Middle Ages. 
 
 merged and lost in new ones ; smaller bodies are fused 
 together into larger ones. Tribes first heard of on the 
 shores of the Northern Sea and the Baltic, Goths, Van- 
 dals, Herules, Burgundians, Lombards, next appear, 
 after an interval of obscurity, on the Euxine, the Danube, 
 the Rhine; instead of the Chauci, the Cherusci of the 
 campaigns of Drusus and Tiberius, or the Marcomanni 
 of M, Aurelius, there appear great confederacies, some- 
 times with old names like the Suevi, sometimes with 
 new, as the Alamanni of the Upper, and the Franks of 
 the Lower Rhine. In 250, the Goths, who in their mi- 
 grations had come in contact with the Huns, and had fled 
 before them, were becoming dangerous on the Danube ; 
 a Roman emperor, Decius, was defeated and slain by 
 them. During the whole of the third century the con- 
 federacy, then known as that of the Alamanni, was 
 putting to the severest strain the efforts of emperors like 
 Maximin, Claudius, Aurelian, and Probus to keep them 
 from the Upper Rhine ; and they ended by establishing 
 themselves there, in spite of the victories, in the follow- 
 ing century, of Julian and Gratian. In the year 240, the 
 Germans of the Lower Rhine, no more known as the 
 Chatti, Chamavi, Bructeri, and only in rhetoric as Sigam- 
 brians, appear for the first time as the Franks, more 
 furious, more enterprising, and more terrible in their 
 ravages in Gaul than even the Alamanni. And the 
 Burgundians, once settled between the Oder and the 
 Vistula, then in their migrations driven eastward before 
 the Goths, pushed themselves in between the Alamanni 
 and the Franks. By the fourth century the presence of 
 the barbarians had become recognised in its real propor- 
 tions as a new and alarming feature in the condition of 
 the world Constantine, Julian, Valentinian, Theodo- 
 ^ius, could defeat them, and attempt to terrify them by 
 
Intro duciion. 5 
 
 bloody punishments, as Constantine exposed two Frank 
 kings to the wild beasts, in the amphitheatre at Treves ; 
 but the Roman victories were in vain. The advance of 
 the barbarians was as certain and powerful as the rising 
 of the tide. 
 
 The Roman state, which was thus assailed without, 
 was slowly undermined from within. The gloomy pages 
 of Tacitus present the picture of a mighty empire, esta- 
 blished apparently on the foundations which could not 
 be moved, yet wrung and tortured by evils for which it 
 seemed hopeless to look for end or remedy. The re- 
 covery and health of this great but deeply-diseased body 
 seemed inconceivable ; yet its subversion and disap- 
 pearance seemed equally so amid the then forces of the 
 world. But, as time went on, its fashions of corruption 
 and vice increased in variety and enormity ; a general 
 degradation of character and a lowering of level, in 
 thought, in strength of action, and in customary mo- 
 rality, set in; political decay, ill-success, and disaster 
 grew greater and more familiar to men's minds. And 
 the remarkable thing is, that neither exceptional virtue 
 nor exceptional wisdom from time to time in its chiefs 
 could overtake the increasing degeneracy and danger. 
 There were no better rulers than the Antonines ; there 
 were no abler ones than Trajan and Hadrian. Nothing 
 could be nobler than the integrity and public spirit of 
 soldiers and administrators like Julius Agricola, the type, 
 v/e cannot doubt, of other great and high-minded Roman 
 governors, the shame and condemnation of the crowd 
 of base and cruel ones. And there is no more majestic 
 monument of human jurisprudence than the system of 
 law which grew up in the Roman law-courts. But the 
 springs and principles which govern society had become 
 «o fatally tainted that no temporary reaction towards 
 
6 Beginning of the Middle Ages. 
 
 good, and no concurrence of beneficent institutions, 
 availed to turn back tlie strong tide of evil tendency. 
 
 Still up to the end of the fourth century nothing gave 
 reason to anticipate the actpal overthrow of that last 
 and highest concentration of civilized life conceivable 
 at the time, which the genius of Julius Caesar had 
 imagined, and which Augustus had made a reality. It 
 was still looked upon as part of the eternal order of the 
 world. Serious and eventful changes had come about 
 in the course of three centuries. The one visible danger 
 to the empire, the increasing pressure of barbaric tribes 
 on the north and the east, was more and more felt. It 
 was becoming certain, not only that Roman armies 
 might meet with ill-success in barbarian wars, but that 
 barbarians were losing that awe of the empire which had 
 kept them at a distance, and were becoming more au- 
 dacious in their enterprises. There was an undoubted 
 loosening of the bands, the customs, the political and 
 civil instincts, the forces of authority, v^hich had kept 
 the empire together. Among the greatest innovations 
 was the division of power between two or three emperors, 
 and, even more serious still, the creation of a new and 
 permanent capital, necessarily the rival of the hitherto 
 unique centre of the power and majesty of the empire. 
 But even with two emperors, and two or more seats of 
 government, the constitution and unity of the empire 
 seemed unimpaired and indestructible, whatever trials 
 it might have to undergo. While the Roman Empire 
 lasted on its old footing, no idea could have seemed 
 more wild to most men than that it should ever cease to 
 exist, or that society could be possible without it ; and it 
 was still apparently standing on its ancient foundations 
 at the end of the fourth century. 
 
 But with the fifth no one could mistake the signs of 
 
Introduction. 7 
 
 change. It began to be evident that what had up to that 
 time seemed the most incredible of all things was about 
 to happen, and was in fact taking place. The empire, in 
 one portion of it, was giving way. The invaders could no 
 longer be kept from Italy, from Gaul, from Africa, from 
 Rome itself. Where they came and as long as they chose 
 to stay, they became the masters ; they took, they left, 
 they spoiled what they chose. They began to settle per- 
 manently in the territories of the western portion of the 
 empire. Finally its political power, especially in the 
 West, began to pass into barbarian hands. Barbarian 
 chiefs accepted or assumed its offices, chose or rejected, 
 set up, deposed, or slew, its shadowy and short-lived 
 emperors, and quarrelled with each other for the right to 
 nominate to the name and title of Augustus. Like an 
 army whose line has been cut, the different portions of 
 the empire found their enemy interposed between them, 
 and the West, detached from the East, and enveloped 
 and pressed upon by its foes, offered a field where the 
 struggle went on with the best chances for the invaders. 
 All that had been done to accommodate the defensive 
 resources of the empire to new and increasing dangers 
 had been in vain. Desperate efforts, and efforts of the 
 most varying and opposite kinds, had been made to up- 
 hold the State, by Diocletian, by Constantine, by Julian, 
 by Theodosius. Fresh and elaborate organization of the 
 public service, civil and military ; adoption of the grow- 
 ing popular religion ; return to the old one ; careful exa- 
 mination and revision of the law; an elastic policy to- 
 wards the barbarians, which according to the emergency, 
 sometimes resisted and beat them back, sometimes 
 tempted them ofif, sometimes took them into service, 
 sometimes accepted and tried to educate or incorporate 
 them as recognized allies of the empire — all these expe- 
 
8 Beginnwg of ike Middle Ages. 
 
 dients, adopted and carried out by rulers of strong and 
 commanding character, failed to avert what seemed to be 
 the irresistible course of things. All that they succeeded 
 in doing was to attract and divert to the East what was 
 most characteristic of the later empire, and to narrow 
 the area over which its old traditions of government 
 could be maintained. But the original seat and source 
 of Roman greatness was left to its fate, and the pheno- 
 menon which the West more and more presented was 
 that of the joint occupation of its lands and many of its 
 cities by Teutonic and Latin, that is, by barbarian and 
 civilized, populations. The barbarians were the masters, 
 without as yet taking the trouble or having the know- 
 ledge to be rulers. The older civilized inhabitants were 
 neither subjects nor equals, but only in all trials of 
 strength distinctly the weaker. And yet their civiliza- 
 tion, maimed and weakened as it was, and naturally suf- 
 fering loss more and more under such rude and unfavour- 
 able conditions, was never finally extinguished. Even 
 in its decay and waste it presented a contrast, felt by 
 both parties, to the coarseness of barbarian manners 
 and the imperfection of barbarian resources, and excited, 
 when the races continued together, the interest, the un- 
 conscious or suppressed admiration, and at last the 
 emulation, of those who had done so much to crush and 
 extirpate it. 
 
 The fifth century opened with an increased activity 
 and spirit of enterprise among the barbarian tribes which 
 had been pressing on the empire, and had even gained 
 a footing within its bounds. Three great waves of inva- 
 sion may be distinguished : foremost and nearest were 
 the Teutonic races; behind them came the Slaves ; be> 
 hind them again, and pressing strongly on all in front, 
 were the Turanian hordes from the centre of Asia 
 
Intt oductioji. 9- 
 
 having in their front line the Huns. In 395 the great 
 Theodosius died. His death closed a reign of sixteen 
 years, the last reign of the ancient undivided empire, in 
 which its old honour was maintained in arms and legis- 
 lation. His death marks the real, though not the 
 nominal, date of the fall of the united empire, and of 
 the extinction, from henceforth inevitable, of the West- 
 ern division of it. 
 
 As soon as he had passed away the change set in with 
 frightful rapidity. He left two young sons, Arcadius 
 and Honorius, under whose names the empire was 
 governed in the East and West respectively ; he left a 
 number of generals and ministers, all of provincial or 
 barbarian origin, to dispute among themselves for the 
 real power of the State ; and not only on all the borders 
 of the empire, but within its provinces, there were tribes 
 and leagues of barbarians of many names, often beaten 
 back and terribly chastised, but ever pushing forward 
 again in fresh numbers, and now in some cases under 
 chiefs who had learned war in the Roman service. The 
 name of Alaric, the Visigoth, rises above those of the 
 crowd of barbarian chiefs who tried their fortune in this 
 moment of the weakness of the empire. The Visigoths, 
 or West Goths, were a Teutonic tribe which had fled for 
 refuge from their implacable enemies, the Huns of the 
 Tartar steppes, into Roman territory. They had re- 
 ceived reluctant and doubtful hospitality from the Impe- 
 rial Government in the lands south of the Danube ; and 
 through vicissitudes of peace and war, friendship and 
 treachery, they had become better acquainted with their 
 Roman neighbours and hosts than any of the barbarian 
 races. First of the Teutonic races, they had in large 
 numbers accepted Christianity ; they had learned it 
 from their Roman captives, or at the Court of Constan- 
 
lo Reglmii.ig of the Middle Ages. 
 
 tinople, and at last from a teacher of their own race, 
 Ulfila, the first founder of Teutonic literature, who in 
 translating the Bible gave the barbarians for the first 
 time a written language, and invented for them an 
 alphabet. The court religion at the time was Arianism, 
 the doctrine of the Egyptian Presbyter, Arius, which 
 denied the true Godhead of Jesus Christ. It was an 
 important and formidable departure from the belief of 
 the Christian Church, as to the chief object of its faith 
 and worship ; the first of many which marked these 
 centuries. From Constantinople the Goths adopted it. 
 On the death of Theodosius, Alaric conceived the idea 
 of carving out for himself a kingdom and an indepen- 
 dent State from the loosely-connected provinces of the 
 empire. He invaded first Greece, and then Italy. Ala- 
 ric was a soldier not unworthy of his Roman masters. 
 For a time he was confronted and kept in check by 
 another general of equal genius for war, like himself 
 of Teutonic blood, Stilicho, the Vandal, the trusted 
 soldier of Theodosius, who had left him guardian of 
 Honorius, the Western emperor. Stilicho, after putting 
 forth for the last time the vigour of a Roman general on 
 the German frontier, concentrated the forces of the State 
 for the defence of Italy, leaving the distant provinces to 
 themselves. The garrisons were withdrawn from Britain. 
 Goths and Huns were enlisted and disciplined for the 
 service of the empire which their kinsmen were attack- 
 ing. Against Stilicho's courage, activity, and coolness, 
 Alaric vainly tried to force his way into Italy and to 
 Rome. At Pollentia, on the Tanaro, south-west of Milan, 
 Stilicho, on Easter Day, 403, gained a bloody though in- 
 complete victory. Alaric saved his broken army by a 
 daring and successful retreat, but only to meet with an- 
 other overthrow at Verona. At Florence (405) Stilicho 
 
Introduction. 1 1 
 
 foiled another and fiercer Gothic or Slavonian irruption 
 into Italy under Radagais. But the Western empire was 
 not to be saved. Rightly or wrongly, the victorious and 
 perhaps ambitious soldier awakened the jealousy of 
 rivals and the suspicions of his feeble master. Stilicho, 
 Alaric's most formidable antagonist, had, for whatever 
 reason, more than once allowed his foe to escape, and 
 with the obscure and tortuous policy common to the 
 time kept open negotiations with him, even at the mo- 
 ment of his own success. He had even proposed to the 
 Roman Senate to buy off Alaric's hostility by honours 
 or payments of money. Stilicho' s enemies persuaded 
 Honorius of his general's designs against the State ; a 
 mutiny was created against Stilicho in the army ; his 
 friends were murdered ; and finally Honorius consented 
 to condemn and to put to death, on the charge of trea- 
 son, the great chief who within five years had won for 
 him the three greatest of recent Roman victories. Then 
 the invaders sprang in on every side. Alaric, hanging 
 on the north-eastern frontier, among the Julian Alps, 
 had been watching the intrigues of the Italian Court, 
 now removed from Rome and Milan to the protection 
 of the marshes of Ravenna. These intrigues were to 
 deliver him from his great enemy. On the 23d of 
 August 408 the head of Stilicho fell under the execu- 
 tioner's sword. In October Alaric was under the walls 
 of Rome. 
 
 He came three times in three successive years; and 
 twice he retired. The first time he spared the city for 
 an enormous ransom. The second time he imposed on 
 the city and empire a puppet mock-emperor, whom a 
 few months afterwards he degraded as unceremoniously 
 as he had set him up. Alaric's brief stern words were 
 remembered as well as his deeds. To the hermit who 
 
 c 
 
12 Beginning of the Middle Ages. 
 
 bade him in the name of religion retire from the great 
 city, he replied that it was God's will and call that drove 
 him on. To the Romans who threatened him with the 
 numbers of their population — "the thicker the hay," 
 was his answer, '*the easier mown." When, astounded 
 at his enormous demands, the Romans asked him, 
 "what then would he leave them?" he answered "your 
 lives." But the third year, 410, the imperial city, the 
 sacred, the inviolate, which since the almost mythical 
 visitation of Brennus and his Gauls had only once seen 
 a foreign enemy from her walls, and never within them, 
 beheld the amazing, the inconceivable sight — her streets, 
 her palaces, broken into and sacked by barbarians 
 whom of late days she had, indeed, seen among the 
 mercenaries who served her, but whom of old she knew 
 only as the slaves who fought with one another to make 
 her sport in her gladiatorial shows. The end of the 
 world must have seemed at Rome to have come when 
 the city of Caesar and Augustus, with its gold, its mar- 
 ble, its refinement, was given over to the Gothic spoilers. 
 She might have seen her revenge in the death within a 
 few weeks of the assailant who at first dared to break 
 through the vain terror of her presence, and the idle 
 guard of her walls. 
 
 But the blow had been struck, though Alaric had 
 died who struck it. From that day forth the Teutonic 
 nations, whom the Romans classed together under the 
 common name of barbarians, looked upon the lands of 
 the Western portion of the empire as given over to them 
 in possession. From that day forth their chiefs arrived 
 on the scene, not only to play the customary game of 
 war, not merely to ravage and plunder, but to carry out 
 the idea of Alaric - to become kings, to win kingdoms, 
 to create nations. For a while the new condition of 
 
Ifitroduction, 13 
 
 things seemed incredible to those accustomed to the old 
 Roman central sway. There were fierce, even for a 
 time successful, attempts to dispute and resist the change. 
 The name and the authority of the Roman emperor had 
 too fast a hold even on the Teutonic mind to be more 
 than weakened : the Roman empire lasted on more than 
 fifty years in the West ; and at Constantinople it had 
 always to be reckoned with as a power which in strong 
 hands was a formidable one. How strong was still the 
 idea of the empire, and how obstinate the customary awe 
 and respect for its authority, is shown in two phenomena 
 which are continually appearing in these times of con- 
 fusion. One is the weight with which the imperial name, 
 even when borne by so weak an emperor as Honorius, 
 was seen to press upon local rebellions on the part of 
 subjects of the empire. In spite of his personal insig- 
 nificance, in spite of the deep humiliations of his reign, 
 in spite of the destruction of Stilicho, the Gothic con- 
 quest, the sack of Rome, no rival emperor, and there 
 were seven in the course of five years, could maintain his 
 title against the son of Theodosius. The other is, that 
 the barbarian chiefs who attacked the empire asked for 
 and were proud of its honours and titles. Alaric, King 
 of the Goths, insisted at the same time on being recog- 
 nized as an officer in the Roman service, the Master- 
 General of Illyricum. His successor, Athaulf, while 
 conquering in Gaul, and Wallia, while conquering in 
 Spain, professed to restore these provinces to the obe- 
 dience of Honorius. But nevertheless the great revo- 
 lution, which was to override all resisting forces, and the 
 deeply-planted habits of ages, had come. From Alaric 
 and his victorious policy two things date, which 
 speedily altered the condition of the Latin world. One 
 was the intrusion and interference of the barbarian 
 
14 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 
 
 power as a recognized political element in the Roman 
 State. The other was the planting within its borders of 
 new nations, each of them growing in its own way into 
 an independent State, with its own interests, and cus- 
 toms, and policy, and coming less and less to acknow- 
 ledge, even in the most shadowy form, the authority or 
 even the existence of the empire in the West. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 TEUTONIC SETTLEMENTS IN THE WEST. FALL OF THE 
 EMPIRE IN THE WEST. (406-476). 
 
 The impulse given by the enterprises and successes of 
 Alaric showed itself in the invasion of the Western pro- 
 vinces by various Teutonic tribes, who henceforth held 
 possession of what they invaded. On the last day of 
 the year in which Stilicho destroyed the Van- 
 Vandals m ^g^j Radagais and his mixed army before 
 
 Gaul, 406. ° •' 
 
 Florence (405), another portion of the Van- 
 dals, with their confederate tribes, Sueves, Burgundians, 
 Alans, found their way into Gaul, perhaps, as Gibbon 
 suggests, across the frozen Rhine, partly ravaging, 
 partly settling, partly pushing to further conquest, but 
 seldom returnin<g to their former seats. In the year in 
 
 which Alaric set up and then degraded his 
 In Spain, mock-emperor Attalus, after the siege of 
 
 Rome (409), Sueves and Vandals, a part of 
 this host, under Hermanric, crossed the Pyrenees into 
 the rich and peaceful province of Spain. Three years 
 
 after the sack of Rome and the death of Ala- 
 Burgundians, j.j^ (413), the Burgundians, who, in company 
 
 with the Vandals, crossed the Rhine in 406, 
 
406-476. Vandals f Burgundians, Franks, Goths. 15 
 
 had occupied the left bank of the middle Rhine ; thence 
 they gradually spread westwards and southwards into 
 Gaul ; and the result, after many vicissitudes, was the 
 foundation of a kingdom of the Burgundians under Gun- 
 dachar (416-436), Gundeuch (456-463), and the more 
 famous Gundobad, the lawgiver (472-510). It was the 
 first of the many Burgundies that were to be, fixing a 
 famous name in the new geography of the West, and 
 impressing a distinct character on the population which 
 bore that name. No limits and no political conditions 
 varied so much as those of the " Burgundies," kingdoms, 
 dukedoms, counties, provinces, long striving after an in- 
 dependence, which could not be maintained. The first 
 Burgundy of Gundachar and Gundobad comprised the 
 valleys of the Rhone and the Saone, with western Swit- 
 zerland and Savoy, from the Alps and the Jura as far as 
 the Durance, and even at one time to Avignon and 
 Marseilles. Almost at the same time a confederation, or 
 rather two confederations, or German tribes, „ , 
 
 Franks. 
 
 whose name was to fill a yet greater place 
 in history, the Franks, who had finally settled from the 
 Main along the lower Rhine, and what is now Belgium^ 
 appear defending the Roman frontier against the invad- 
 ing Vandals. They had long disturbed the empire by 
 their ferocity and spirit of adventure. They had by this 
 time gained room within its borders, and become it? 
 allies; and they even suffered severe losses in fighting 
 for it. But, as the defence of the empire became hope 
 less, they soon followed the invading movement, and 
 pressed on to the valleys of the Moselle, the Meuse, thf 
 Scheldt, and the Somme, and the plains and 
 cities of what is now Champagne. And im- Goths ^412. 
 mediately after the death of Alaric, who had 
 sacked Rome and occupied Italy, the Goths, under thei) 
 
i6 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 
 
 new leader Athaulf, a name which has been softened 
 and Latinized into Adolphus, adopted the momentous 
 resolution of relinquishing Italy, and seeking their for- 
 tune in the West. Bearing with them the treasures of 
 Alaric, they marched into Gaul ; they occupied step by 
 step, in the course of the century, nearly the whole of 
 the South between the Rhone, the Loire, the Mediterra- 
 nean, and the ocean ; and then poured into 
 414-419- Spain, driving before them or subduing the 
 
 earlier invaders, Vandals, Sueves, Alans. The Roman 
 city of Toulouse became their capital. Before the mid- 
 dle of the fifth century, the kingdom of the 
 
 Theoderic I. ^^^^ Goths had bccome the mightiest among 
 419-451. •-' *-' 
 
 its neighbours. It stretched from the Loire 
 to the mouth of the Tagus and the Columns of Hercules. 
 It possessed the great cities of Aquitaine, Narbonne, 
 Bordeaux, Toulouse. It had absorbed the last fragment 
 of independent Roman Gaul, Auvergne. In Spain it 
 had cooped up the earlier invaders, the Sueves, into the 
 mountains of Asturias and Gallicia. It had driven the 
 Vandals into Africa, It had rapidly assumed an organized 
 shape, with its peculiar polity, its half Roman legislation, 
 its national councils. It had replaced the empire in the 
 West, and it seemed as if a State had been founded 
 which was to unite in one Gaul and Spain, and take the 
 lead in the new order of things ; as if a Gothia or Goth- 
 land was to supplant the name of Gaul or Rome. 
 
 This magnificent prospect was not to be ful- 
 ^66^485. filled. The lands north and south of the 
 
 Pyrenees were not to continue united, and 
 the Goths were not to be the leaders of Western Europe. 
 But from the Goths of Toulouse sprang a line of kings 
 which ruled in Spain, and shaped its fortune and history 
 till the Mahometan Conquest (711). It was to be long 
 
429- Vandals in Spain, 17 
 
 indeed before the kingdoms, as we know them, of France 
 and Spain began to appear above the confusion ; but 
 the first rude courses of the foundations on which, 
 through such various changes, they were to rise were 
 laid in the Teutonic movement, in which Alaric led the 
 way. 
 
 Another invasion, more fatal in its consequences to 
 the empire, though itself transient as a conquest, was 
 the consequence of the Gothic invasion of 
 Spain. The Vandals in Spain, the fore- J^j^ ^^"* 
 
 runners of the Goths, pressed by the com- 
 bined power of the Gothic kingdom and the Roman pro- 
 vincials, and tempted by the invitation of a tloman 
 governor, Count Boniface, who had been stung into 
 treason by the intrigues at Ravenna, passed into Africa 
 under Genseric, the most crafty, the most perfidious, the 
 most ruthless of the barbarian kings, and of all of them 
 the most implacable foe of Rome and its civilization. The 
 late repentance and the resistance of Count Boniface 
 could not avert the Vandal conquest and the desolation 
 of Africa. The death of St. Augustine during the siege 
 of his city, Hippo, in 430, and the surprise of Carthage 
 in 439, mark the date of the ruin of Roman civiliza- 
 tion on the southern shore of the Mediterranean ; a civi- 
 lization that had retained more unalloyed than that of 
 any other province the peculiar Latin type, the rough- 
 ness and original force of the Latin mind and character. 
 The Vandal conquest, short-lived as it was compared 
 with other barbarian occupations, dealt a far heavier 
 blow than they to the weakened stability of the empire. 
 It was not only the severance from it of a great province, 
 a second home of Latin letters and habits ; but during 
 the long reign of Genseric (429-477) Rome and Italy 
 w«re made acquainted with two new forms of suffering. 
 
1 8 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. d. 
 
 To the ordinary plagues of barbarian invasion, were now 
 added starvation and piracy. Africa had been, with 
 Egypt, the great store-house from which Italy had drawn 
 its usual supplies of corn ; Africa was now in the hands 
 of a deadly enemy, Egypt in those of the rival and 
 unfriendly Eastern emperor. And next, the possession 
 of Carthage suggested to Genseric the ambition of being 
 master, not of Africa only, but of the Mediterranean. 
 The Vandal fleets ravaged and tormented the Mediter- 
 ranean, coasts, like those of Haireddin Barbarossa and 
 the Barbary rovers of later ages. "Whither shall we 
 sail?" asked Genseric's pilot. "Sail to those, with whom 
 God is angry," was the reply. 
 
 Thus in the first half of the fifth century the empire 
 was broken up in the West. Everywhere out of Italy, 
 in Gaul, in Spain, in Africa, the new comers were the 
 masters. The separation from the empire, at the begin- 
 ning of the fifth century, of the island of Bri- 
 Britain. tain, and of the Continental province which 
 
 afterwards bore the same name, neither of 
 which were again to be united to it, rather marked than 
 contributed to the decline of Rome. In the anarchy of 
 the West, the soldiery in Britain, or those of them who 
 had not been withdrawn by Stihcho, long accustomed to 
 claim a voice in the choice of emperors, set up a succes- 
 sion of candidates for the empire, one of whom, with the 
 famous name of Constantine, disputed for a time the im- 
 perial title with Honorius, and the possession of Gaul 
 and Spain with the Goths (407-411). The Goths, pro- 
 fessing to serve the empire, united with the soldiers of 
 Honorius, and overthrew the last Western Constantine, 
 and, after him, all the other provincial rivals of Hono- 
 rius, who, in the universal confusion, ventured to strike 
 for power (41 1 -41 6). But the empire finally retired from 
 
400-450- Vandals in Africa — Britain. 19 
 
 the island of Britain. An obscure interval of troubled 
 independence succeeded ; and in the middle of the cen- 
 tury Jutes, Saxons and Angles were beginning their 
 conquests. 
 
 Yet the empire, as has been said, in the opinion and 
 feeling of men, still lasted under these strange conditions. 
 The Teutonic invaders for the most part 
 professed to acknowledge its existence and Gradual 
 
 *^ * giving way 
 
 authority, to respect its laws, though claim- of the impe- 
 
 . rial system. 
 
 mg to be themselves exempt from them, to 
 serve it after their own manner as its officers and sol- 
 diers, to call themselves its "guests," or its " confede- 
 rates," even in the possessions which they had either 
 seized, or acquired by a forced sale. Its civil adminis- 
 tration still went on, at least, for the Roman population, 
 side by side with the customs and royal jurisdiction of 
 the military occupiers. The position of the Teutonic 
 conquerors and settlers was analogous to that of the 
 early English conquerors in India, under the Mogul 
 empire. They were in it, but not of it. Its paramount 
 title and supremacy were supposed, where these did not 
 come into collision with the interests of the conquerors. 
 Its sanctions, when convenient, were sought for, and 
 made useful to give legitimacy to what the sword had 
 won. In stronger hands, and under more favourable 
 circumstances, the empire might have lasted on, as in 
 the East; and, suiting itself to its altered circumstances, 
 have perhaps recovered its ground, by incorporating and 
 assimilating to itself, according to its old favourite and 
 successful policy, its new subjects, who, with all their 
 fierce vigour, were not unwilling to be civilized. But in 
 the course of the century, two things, a fresh and more 
 tremendous irruption of barbarians, and a fatal innova- 
 tion in domestic policy, finally shattered for the time 
 
20 Begin?iing of the Middle Ages. A. D. 
 
 the imperial system in the West. The irruption was 
 the invasion of Attila and the Huns. The innovation 
 was the adoption, as a settled custom, of what Alaric had 
 thought of as a temporary expedient, — perhaps, had only 
 done in mockery. A foreign soldier, master of the mili- 
 tary force of the empire, claimed, and was allowed, to 
 make and unmake the emperors of the West. 
 
 The invasion of the Huns was the appearance of en- 
 tirely new actors in the great tragedy. Between the 
 ^, ^^ Roman world and the German invaders 
 
 The Huns - . . , 
 
 and Attila, there were affinities, though they might be 
 433-453- subtle and obscure, of race, of language, of 
 
 thought, and moral ideas ; and there had grown up be- 
 tween them the long familiarity of alternate war and 
 peace. They had even met half-way in religious ideas, 
 and Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, under the form of 
 Arianism, had embraced Christianity with sometimes 
 fanatical zeal. But the Huns were not like Goths and 
 Vandals, a Teutonic or even a Slave people. They be- 
 longed to that terrible race whose original seats were in 
 the vast central table-land of Asia ; who under various 
 names, Huns, Tartars, Mongols, Turks, have made it 
 their boast to devastate for the sake of devastation, and 
 from whom sprung the most renowned among the de- 
 stroyers of men, Attila, Genghiz, Timour, the Ottomans. 
 It is a race which long experience has shown to be less 
 than any other in sympathy with Western civilization, 
 and more obstinately intractable to its influ- 
 About A. i). ence. The Huns themselves, impelled 
 ^°°* westwards by the wars which agitated the 
 
 vast deserts stretching from the Volga to China, had 
 driven before them in frantic terror the many tribes of 
 the German stock which had shaken the empire ; and 
 they had been for some time hovering on its eastern 
 
433~453' ^^^ Huns under Attila. 21 
 
 frontier, taking part like other barbarians in its distur- 
 bances and alliances. Emperors paid them tribute, 
 and Roman generals kept up a politic or a questionable 
 correspondence with them. Stilicho had detachments 
 of Huns in the armies which fought against Alaric ; the 
 greatest Roman soldier after Stilicho, — and, like Stilicho, 
 of barbarian parentage — Aetius, who was to be their 
 most formidable antagonist, had been a hostage and a 
 messmate in their camps ; he had followed a common 
 practice of the time when he invited the Huns to the 
 frontiers of Italy to support a candidate for the imperial 
 dignity. About 433, Attila, the son of Mundzukh, like 
 Charles the Great, equally famous in history and legend, 
 became their king. Attila was the exact prototype and 
 forerunner of the Turkish chiefs of the house of Othman. 
 In his profound hatred of civilized men, in his scorn of 
 their knowledge, their arts, their habits and religion, 
 and, in spite of this, in his systematic use of them as his 
 secretaries and officers, in his rapacity combined with 
 personal simplicity of life, in his insatiate and indiscri- 
 minate destructiveness, in the cunning which veiled 
 itself under rudeness, in his extravagant arrogance and 
 audacious pretensions, in his sensuality, in his unscrupu- 
 lous and far-reaching designs, in his ruthless cruelty 
 joined with capricious displays of generosity, mercy, 
 and good faith, we see the image of the irreclaimable 
 Turkish barbarians who ten centuries later were to ex- 
 tinguish the civilization of Europe. The attraction of 
 Attila's daring character, and his genius for the war 
 which nomadic tribes delight in, gave him absolute 
 ascendency over his nation, and over the Teutonic and 
 Slavonic tribes near him. Like other conquerors of 
 his race, he imagined and attempted an empire of ra- 
 vage and desolation, a vast hunting ground and preserve, 
 
22 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. d. 
 
 in which men and their works should supply the ob- 
 jects and zest of the chase. The one power on earth 
 was to be the terror of Attila's name. The one pe- 
 nalty of disobedience and opposition was to be the 
 edge of Attila's sword. He humbled and made subjects 
 of the barbarians round him. He insulted and ravaged 
 the Eastern empire up to the walls of Constantinople. He 
 
 revived the old feud with the Visigoths. 
 433-441- Then he picked a quarrel with Valentinian 
 
 in. and the Court of Ravenna. He claimed some 
 Church spoils, said to have been stolen. He claimed 
 Honoria, the sister of the Emperor, as his betrothed 
 bride. Keen and shrewd in his views of policy, he en-« 
 tered into an alliance with Genseric and the Vandals of 
 Africa, who were to attack Italy. And at last affecting 
 to be the soldier of the empire against the rebellious 
 Visigoths, at the head of the ferocious horsemen whom 
 for years he had been gathering round him in the plains 
 between the Theyss and the Danube, where his wooden 
 city and wooden palace were built, he burst with the 
 speed and terror of a tempest on central and western 
 Europe. 
 
 He passed through Germany into Gaul, sweeping 
 along with him in his course, as confederates or subjects, 
 a mixed multitude of many races, and visiting with im- 
 partial havoc and slaughter, the Roman cities and the 
 Gothic settlements. Romans and Goths forgot their 
 own quarrels in their panic and distress. The ablest of 
 Roman generals, Aetius, and the most powerful of the 
 
 Gothic kings, Theodoric of Toulouse, joined 
 
 June 23, 451. , . - , . . . 
 
 their forces, and were only just m time to save 
 Orleans, and prevent the host of the Huns from burst- 
 ing the barrier of the Loire. Attila retired and waited 
 for them in the plains of Chalons, plains made by nature, 
 
453- Attila — Battle of Chalons. 23 
 
 and used in our own days, for the encampment of great 
 armies. The wild and tremendous battle of 
 Chalons stayed the advance of the Huns Oz^\^l. 
 
 into Gaul. But it did not stay the raging 
 torrent from pouring over Italy. There was no one to 
 relieve Aquileia as Orleans had been relieved. Aquileia 
 perished, and many of its sister cities of the north of 
 Italy. This absolute destruction of homes and cities, 
 and the searching and unsparing keenness of the sword 
 of Attila, from which there was neither refuge or mercy, 
 drove the miserable remnant of the population of the 
 mainland to seek their only escape in the islands and 
 lagoons. The fugitives knew not what they were pre- 
 paring ; out of this scattered remnant and the lagoons 
 which sheltered them, Venice arose. Attila advanced 
 towards Rome. The conqueror of Chalons, Aetius, hung 
 on his march, but was unable to arrest him. But Attila' s 
 army was suffering from exhaustion and disease, and he 
 yielded, at least, for the time, to the supplications and 
 offers of the Roman ambassadors, one of whom was the 
 great Pope Leo. One of the conditions of peace, and 
 the most shameful one, was that he should add a Roman 
 princess of imperial rank to the crowd of his innumera- 
 ble wives. But it was not to be. He retired to recruit 
 himself in his wooden village in the open plains between 
 the Theyss and the Danube, and he was cut 
 
 . 453* 
 
 off by a sudden and mysterious death. His 
 empire had no territorial basis, and fell to pieces at his 
 death. His sons were less able robber chiefs than their 
 father, and they soon disappeared from his- 
 tory. German legends softened him into 
 the King Etzel of the Nibelungen Lied. The Latin tra- 
 ditions of Gaul gave him the name of the Scourge of 
 God, and supposed that he gloried in it. The remains 
 
24 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 453, 
 
 of his horde retired eastwards, to reappear in the sixth 
 century under the name of the Avars and, perhaps, the 
 Bulgarians, 
 
 But, in the desolations of Attiia, the empire had 
 learned a new experience of its helplessness. Aetius 
 and the victory of Chalons could save a province that in 
 its chiefs and its interests was already more barbarian 
 than Roman ; but they could not avert the humihation 
 of ransoming Rome by the most ignominious conditions. 
 And what Attiia had left for the time uncompleted, Gen- 
 seric finished. In the respite gained by Attila's depar- 
 ture, the Court of Ravenna was desolated by domestic 
 outrages, and fierce quarrels. As Honorius, jealous of 
 Stilicho, had put to death the conqueror of Alaric and 
 Radagais, so Valentinian III., as incapable and even 
 more vindictive than Honorius, was provoked by the 
 pretensions of Aetius, and murdered with his own hand 
 the vanquisher of Attiia (454), The death of Stilicho 
 
 had been followed by the sack of Rome by 
 , 455- Alaric. The death of Aetius was followed 
 not only by the assassination of the emperor and its train 
 of usurpations and murders, but by a second sack of 
 Rome, this time by the Vandals of Genseric. A Roman 
 Count to avenge his wrongs had invited Genseric to 
 
 Africa. A Roman Empress, Eudoxia, to 
 
 Second sack . . , , 
 
 of Rome, avenge her wrongs, mvited the pirate-kmg 
 
 June, 455. ^^ Carthage to assault Rome. In the very 
 year f455) in which the superstitious looked for the com- 
 pletion of the fated twelve centuries of Roman power, a 
 year after the murder of Aetius, the Vandal fleet from 
 Carthage occupied the mouth of the Tiber. Genseric 
 succeeded where Hannibal had failed, and completed 
 Alaric's terrible chastisement of the sacred city, from 
 which Attiia himself two years before had shrunk. The 
 
A. D. 455. Second Sack of Rome by Genseric, 25 
 
 intercession of Pope Leo, which had availed with At- 
 tila, did not stay Genseric. It availed to prevent slaugh- 
 ter, but the pillage was more unsparing, and the havoc 
 more irremediable, than that under Alaric half a cen- 
 tury before. Genseric sailed away with the spoils of 
 Rome, with the Empress Eudoxia and thousands of cap- 
 tives, with trophies of his victory over all that was most 
 venerable in the ancient world ; the gilded tides of the 
 Capitol, the golden table and the golden candlestick 
 brought by Titus from Jerusalem. Two great arma- 
 das were fitted out, one by the Emperor Majorian in the 
 West (458-460), the other by the Emperor Leo in the 
 East (468), to crush the Vandal power, and avenge the 
 sack of Rome. Both were surprised in harbour, and 
 destroyed by the fleets and fire ships of Genseric. 
 The genius and more than the fortune of the 
 old Carthaginian heroes seemed revived in 
 the barbarian king. For nearly fifty years he insulted 
 and humbled Rome ; and he lived to see the extinction 
 of the empire of the West 
 
 But this extinction of the Western empire was ulti- 
 mately determined by fatal changes in the state itself. 
 There, too, finally and irrevocably, though 
 at first under the disguise of ancient forms, "Patricians." 
 the barbarian had forced his way, and es- 
 tablished himself first in the control, and then in the 
 possession, of what political power still remained to Italy 
 and Rome. The emperors had derived their titles either 
 from hereditary claims, or from their own bold enter- 
 prise, or from the choice of the senate or army, or from 
 the nomination of an imperial colleague. From Avi- 
 But in the course of the last ♦"wenty years Romulus'^" 
 of the Western empire, this power of Augustuius, 
 choosing the emperor passed into the 
 
26 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 455-476. 
 
 hands of the barbarian "Patricians" in the West, a 
 title of higli dignity invented by Constantine, and now 
 given to the chiefs of the foreign troops, mostly recruited 
 from the tribes of Germany and the Danube, who were 
 the strength of the armies of Rome, and had become its 
 real masters. In the last years of Theodosius, Arbogast, 
 
 the Frank chief of the military levies of the 
 392-394. West, after murdering his master, the boy- 
 
 emperor Valentinian II., had attempted to make an em- 
 peror of his own creature, Eugenius ; but Theodosius 
 was still alive, and the attempt was signally punished. 
 After the second siege of Rome, Alaric had imposed an 
 emperor. Attains, on the Roman Senate as the rival of 
 Honorius. The step was intended to put a pressure on 
 Honorius; but Alaric used his nominee as if to make 
 sport for himself; and the majesty of the greatest of 
 earthly names suffered its last and fatal indignity, when 
 the Emperor Attains, at the caprice and convenience of 
 
 a barbarian patron, was, to use Gibbon's 
 '^^ • words, *' promoted, degraded, insulted, re- 
 
 stored, again degraded, and again insulted, and finally 
 abandoned to his fate," the contemptuous revenge of his 
 rival. 
 
 The precedent set by Alaric was not lost. After the 
 death of Valentinian III., the unworthy grandson of the 
 great Theodosius, the first thought of the barbarian 
 chiefs was, not to destroy or usurp the Imperial name, 
 but to secure to themselves the nomination of the em- 
 peror. Avitus, chosen in Gaul under the influence of 
 
 the West Gothic King of Toulouse, Theo- 
 *^^' deric II., was accepted for a time, as the 
 
 Western emperor, by the Roman Senate, and by the 
 Court of Constantinople. But another barbarian, Rici- 
 mer the Sueve, ambitious, successful, and popular, had 
 
A.D.472- Third Sack of Rome. 27 
 
 succeeded to the command of the "federated" foreign 
 bands which formed the strength of the imperial army 
 in Italy. Ricimer would not be a king, but he adopted 
 as a settled policy the expedient, or the insulting jest, of 
 Alaric. What Theoderic the Visi-Goth had given at a 
 distance in Gaul, Ricimer the Sueve, the master-general 
 of the Italian armies of the empire, claimed to give on 
 the spot, at Rome. He deposed Avitus, and probably 
 murdered him. Under his direction, the Senate chose 
 Majorian. Majorian was too able, too public-spirited, 
 perhaps too independent for the barbarian Patrician; 
 Majorian, at a moment of ill-fortune, was deposed and 
 got rid of. Ricimer' s next nominee, Severus, 
 seems to have been too feeble and incapa- 457-461. 
 
 ble for his impatient master ; at any rate, he is reported 
 to have been made away with. Then, at a moment of 
 extreme danger, in the hope of assistance from Leo, the 
 Eastern emperor, against the attacks of Genseric, Rici- 
 mer accepted an emperor, chosen at Constantinople, the 
 Greek Anthemius, whose daughter he married. But 
 Anthemius was not content to be simply the 
 tool and the screen of the Patrician. Cool- '^ ^* 
 
 ness and jealousies followed ; Ricimer determined on a 
 quarrel, and all attempts to reconcile them failed. Rici- 
 mer set up his fourth emperor, Olybrius, and at the head 
 of a barbarian army attacked and slew Anthemius. For 
 the third time Rome was stormed and de- _, . , 
 
 Inirdsack 
 
 livered over to a foreign soldiery, m this of Rome, 
 case nominally in her own service. Rici- ^'^^' 
 mer and Olybrius both died a few months afterwards, 
 and the empire in the West was left without its nominal 
 or real head. A refugee Burgundian king, Ricimer's 
 nephew, Gundobad, whom Ricimer had protected, and 
 who cared little for anything but his lost Burgundian in- 
 
28 Beginning of the Middle Ages, A. D. 476. 
 
 heritance, found himself successor to Ricimer as Patri- 
 cian in Italy. The Patrician Gundobad, following Rici- 
 mer's example, conferred the title of Augustus on an 
 officer of the imperial guard, Glycerius. It is hard to 
 imagine anything more grotesque in circumstances, and 
 more tragical in its substance, than the chance of a Bur- 
 gundian fugitive having, by the accident of the moment, 
 the business thrust upon him of disposing of the majesty 
 of the empire, and of looking out in Ricimer's mixed 
 host for a successor to the honours of the mighty hne of 
 men who had ruled from Augustus to Constantine. But 
 the extravagance of ignominy was not exhausted. A 
 
 rival emperor, Julius Nepos, compelled Gly- 
 473-474- cerius to exchange the inheritance of the 
 
 Caesars for the bishopric of Salona ; again, the bishop of 
 Salona in due time found his fallen rival Nepos in his 
 power, and murdered him. In the next turn of fortune, 
 a form.er secretary of Attila, Orestes, had become Patri- 
 cian, and general of the barbarian troops ; like Ricimer, 
 not caring or not venturing to become emperor himself, 
 
 he proclaimed his son emperor, to whom by 
 
 a strange chance, as if in mockery of his for- 
 tune, had been given the names of the first king and the 
 first emperor of Rome, Romulus Augustus, soon turned 
 in derision into the diminutive " Augustulus." But Ores- 
 tes failed to play the part of Ricimer. A younger and 
 more daring barbarian adventurer, Odoacer the Herule, 
 or Rugian, bid higher for the allegiance of the army. 
 Orestes was slain, and the young emperor was left to the 
 
 mercy of Odoacer. In singular and signifi- 
 *^ ■ cant contrast to the common usage when a 
 
 pretender fell, Romulus Augustulus was spared. He was 
 made to abdicate in legal form ; and the Roman Senate 
 at the dictation of Odoacer, officially signified to the 
 
A. D. 476. Augustu/us, Last Western Emperor. 29 
 
 Eastern emperor, Zeno, their resolution that the separate 
 Western Empire should cease, and their recognition of 
 the one emperor at Constantinople, who should be su- 
 preme over West and East. Amid the ruin of the em- 
 pire and the state, the dethroned emperor passed his 
 days, in such luxurious ease as the times allowed, at the 
 Villa of LucuUus at Misenum ; and Odoacer, taking the 
 Teutonic title of king, sent to the emperor at Constanti- 
 nople the imperial crown and robe which were to be 
 worn no more at Rome or Ravenna for more than three 
 hundred years. 
 
 Thus in the year 476 ended the Roman empire, or 
 rather, the line of Roman emperors, in the West. Thus 
 
 it had become clear that the foundations of ^ ^ , 
 
 End of Em- 
 human life and society, which had seemed pire in the 
 
 West 
 
 under the first emperors eternal, had given 
 way. The Roman empire was not the 'last word' in the 
 history of the world ; but either the world was in danger 
 of falling into chaos, or else new forms of life were yet to 
 appear, new ideas of government and national existence 
 were to struggle with the old for the mastery. 
 
 The world was not falling into chaos. Europe, which 
 seemed to have lost its guidance and its hope of civiliza- 
 tion in losing the empire, was on the threshold of a his- 
 tory far grander than that of Rome, and was about to 
 start in a career of civilization to which that of Rome 
 was rude and unprogressive. In the great break-up of 
 the empire in the West, some parts of its system lasted, 
 others disappeared. What lasted was the idea of muni- 
 cipal government, the Christian Church, the obstinate 
 evil of slavery. What disappeared was the central pow- 
 er, the imperial and universal Roman citizenship, the 
 exclusive rule of the Roman law, the old Roman pagan- 
 ism, the Roman administration, the Roman schools of 
 
30 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 476. 
 
 literature. Part of these revived; the idea of central 
 power under Charles the Great, and Otto his great succes- 
 sor ; the appreciation of law, though not exclusively Ro- 
 man law ; the schools of learning. And under these 
 conditions the new nations — some of mixed races, as in 
 France, Spain, and Italy ; others simple and homoge- 
 neous, as in Germany, England, and the Scandinavian 
 peninsula — began their apprenticeship of civilization. 
 But the time of preparation was long. The world had 
 long to wait for the ripening of the seed which was so 
 widely sown, and which was in due season to bear such 
 rich fruit. In the first five centuries after Western Eu- 
 rope had passed from Roman to barbarian rule, two 
 great stages are perceptible in the course of events. In 
 the first stage, we see the confusion and disturbance at- 
 tending on the new settlement, which everywhere took 
 the shape of invasion ; but the materials were being 
 gathered and made ready to form the new society which 
 was to arise. In the second stage, we see the attempts 
 to organize these materials, to give distinctness to the 
 different forms of national life, to introduce order, law, 
 and fixed constitutional habits in the new nations, at- 
 tempts which culminated in the revived empire of 
 Charles the Great. To trace the course of European his- 
 tory through these two stages is the object of the follow- 
 ing sketch . 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE TWO NATIONS. 
 
 The disappearance of the emperors of the West did not 
 mean the complete and immediate disappearance of the 
 laws, ideas, and political organization of the Roman 
 
Russell & Struthera.N.T. 
 
A. D. 476. The New Nations, 31 
 
 empire in Europe. These went on, for a time, in ap- 
 pearance almost unchanged, and it was only by degrees 
 and by successive shocks, that the old order gave place 
 to the new one, which was now beginning. 
 Odoacer was the most powerful man in kingdom In 
 Italy, without even a nominal rival. But nSl^'JJhe''^'" 
 
 Odoacer was not emperor. He was only a empire. 
 
 . 476—493. 
 
 Teutonic king, without even a special and 
 
 national, much less a territorial title. He was a " king 
 of nations," of a mixed army, among whom he had 
 divided the third part of the lands of Italy ; while to the 
 Itahans he was the Roman "Patrician," appointed by 
 the distant emperor at Constantinople over the "dio- 
 cese " of Italy. The name and place of emperor were 
 void in the West, But there never was a time, from 476 
 to 800, when the Roman empire was supposed not to 
 exist. There was still for some time the Roman Senate, 
 the Roman Consulship, the Roman Praetorian prefect ; 
 the Roman municipal and financial administration, the 
 Roman law, by which life was ruled, when this law did 
 not come into conflict with the policy, the usages, the 
 will of the new masters. And though there was no 
 longer an emperor in the West, there was still a Roman 
 emperor, the emperor who ruled at Constantinople, the 
 greatest and most majestic personage in the world, who, 
 though far off, and busily occupied with affairs of his 
 own, had not relinquished his claims to recognition and 
 allegiance in the West, and continued to assert them, 
 sometimes with strength and success. But though at 
 the time the greatness of the change was obscured by 
 the stubborn tenacity of many surviving parts of the 
 strong Roman organization, the old imperial system had 
 really passed away, and the new national system, which 
 was henceforth to prevail in Europe, had come into ex- 
 
32 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 476. 
 
 istence. The empire had begun to give place to a num- 
 ber of new kingdoms, or attempted kingdoms, which, 
 though they sometimes sought a formal recognition from 
 Constantinople, had no longer to reckon seriously with 
 the central authority, but only with one another, for 
 their limits and power. When they encountered, as 
 they did sometimes with fatal result, the forces of the 
 Eastern empire, the barbarians were no longer the inva- 
 ders but the invaded, protecting what had become their 
 own from a foreign foe, not really resisting the authority 
 or encroaching on the dominions of the successors of 
 the Caesars. 
 
 In the hundred years which followed the fall of the 
 empire, years of wild confusion and havoc, amid which 
 ^ are seen the first efforts after reorganization 
 
 1 wo great . ° 
 
 questions, and Order, two great questions emerge and 
 
 after fall of the . . ^ ^ ^ . ,., iij 
 
 Western em- give mtcrcst to a sccne m which we should 
 I'^RWairy be- Otherwise see nothing but the shock of con- 
 tween Gothic flicting barbarisms. One was the question 
 
 and Frank . ° . ^ 
 
 races, which of the two great Teutonic races, the 
 
 Catholic creed Goths, or their rivals, the Franks, should be 
 and Ariaiusm. ^^^ ruling race of the West. The other, de- 
 pendent on the first, was, which should be the creed 
 of Europe, the Catholic faith, or Arianism. In the deci- 
 sion of these two questions so eventful and so critical, 
 the whole significance of the history centres. 
 
 Odoacer, the chief of an army composed of several 
 Teutonic races, was, in fact, though not in name, the 
 first king of Italy. But in him the barbarian chieftain 
 hardly rose above the level of a successful soldier; the 
 qualities of a statesman first showed themselves in his 
 conqueror and successor, the famous Theoderic. Theo- 
 deric was the hereditary chieftain of a tribe of the 
 Eastern Goths, whom the easy success and prosperity 
 
A. D. 493-526. Gothic Kingdom in Italy. t^t^ 
 
 of Odoacer tempted from their wasted seats ^, 
 
 Theoderic 
 
 by the Danube, to dispute with him the the East 
 great prize of Italy. The Gothic race had founder ^of a 
 the start of all the barbarians in culture, in Teutonic 
 
 ' state in 
 
 apparent aptitude for civil life, in gentleness Italy, 
 of manners. They had been longer than any 
 others established in portions of the provinces, as allies 
 and subjects of the state ; and it might have seemed that 
 of all they were most adapted to reinvigorate and restore, 
 without destroying, what had become degenerate and 
 enfeebled. Theoderic added to the daring and energy 
 of a Gothic chief the knowledge gained by a civilized 
 education at Constantinople^, He was the head, not of a 
 chance army of mixe9l races, but of a homogeneous tribe 
 which reverenced in his family, the race of the Amals, a 
 royal line. And he was the first of the Teutonic conque- 
 rors who attempted to carry out the idea not merely of 
 administering a conquest, but of founding and governing 
 a state. His distinct policy was to unite Goths and Ital- 
 ians into one people, without breaking down the customs 
 or the special privileges of either. If Goths were his 
 soldiers, Latins were his counsellors and 
 administrators; and he chose these among -j-gTe. '"^' 
 the best and ablest of the Latins, men like SymmachuB, 
 
 1520. 
 
 Boethius, Symmachus, and Cassiodorus. Cassiodoms 
 Theoderic fixed his royal residence some- 
 times at Verona, but mainly at Ravenna, the capital of 
 the last Western emperors since Hbnorius. The first of 
 the Teutonic kings, he caught from the Romans their 
 taste for that great art in which the Teutonic family was 
 in time to become so famous, and which was to preserve 
 the Gothic name when the Gothic nations had disap- 
 peared. In the churches which he built at Ravenna, in 
 his palace, in his tomb, he emulated the massive gran- 
 
34 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 413-534. 
 
 deur of the Roman builders. The kingdom of Theode- 
 ric, of which the seat was in Italy, while its more loosely 
 governed borderlands stretched from Gaul to the Dan- 
 ube, exercised a new and commanding influence in the 
 group of Teutonic States which were growing up in the 
 West. In Theoderic we have, perhaps, the first exam- 
 ple of a definite policy of domestic alliances for public 
 ends. He connected his house with all the German 
 kings of the West, West Goths, Burgundians, Franks, 
 Vandals, Thuringians. We have a curious and instruc- 
 tive picture of the internal administration of the new 
 Gothic kingdom, in its various departments, preserved 
 in a large collection of the business letters of Cassiodo- 
 rus, Theoderic's Latin secretary and minister. Theode- 
 ric's reign of thirty-three years, stained though it was at 
 its close by strange outbreaks of suspicious cruelty, was 
 the first example of a real effort on a large scale, made 
 by the Teutonic conquerors, to pass from barbarism to 
 civilization, to create, out of their conquests, " a father- 
 land, a city, and a state.'' It v/as an attempt to give 
 body and form, however rudely and imperfectly, to the 
 new idea of a Christian kingdom and country, which 
 was to supplant the idea which had hitherto held ex- 
 clusive possession of men's minds, that of the Roman 
 empire. 
 
 In the other Teutonic kingdoms which had come into 
 existence in the fifth century, though in none of them 
 was seen the statesmanship and large attempts of Theo- 
 deric, the same tendency was at work towards distinct- 
 ness and consolidation. Gundobad (491-516), the Bur- 
 gundian refugee in Ricimer's camp, whom a strange 
 Burgiindian chancc had oncc invested with the power of 
 kingdom. giving an emperor to the West, had, after 
 
 bloody domestic quarrels, returned to intro- 
 
A. D. 400-500. JVes^ Gothic Kingdom in Gaul. 35 
 
 duce some kind of law and order in his kingdom on the 
 Rhone and Saone. The Vandal kingdom in Africa, 
 founded, and so long sustained, by the craf- 
 
 . Vandal 
 
 ty and relentless policy of Gensenc, still kingdom, 
 retained the impress given to it by its found- 429-534- 
 er, in being the most oppressive to the Roman population 
 of all the barbarian kingdoms, and by being least influ- 
 enced by their civilization. The kingdom of the West- 
 ern Goths, the people of Alaric, settled in 
 Spain and Aquitaine, with Toulouse and West Gothic 
 
 ^ . . kingdom 
 
 Bordeaux for their capitals, had grown in in Gaul. 
 power and extent during the last disasters of 
 the empire. One of the last acts of the imperial govern- 
 ment, in the very agony of its dissolution, was to sur- 
 render to the Gothic king, Euric,the volcanic 
 
 hio^hlands of Auvergne, the last refuge in ?y Nepos, 
 
 . ? . "^ 474- 
 
 the midst of his dominions of Latin culture 
 
 and independence. Euric ruled over the greater part of 
 southern Gaul and a part of Spain, and in 
 renown and pretensions, and in a measure, ^ ^ ^ 
 
 too, in his attempts to adjust, by definite law, the rela- 
 tions of conquerors and conquered, was a counterpart, 
 though an imperfect one, of the great king who was to 
 create the sister kingdom of the East Goths at Ravenna. 
 These were all Gothic kingdoms, or were connected 
 with the Gothic migration and settlement; and to the 
 Gothic race, on the extinction of the empire, the inheri- 
 tance of its power seemed to have fallen. And besides 
 the tie of race and neighbourhood, these first founders 
 of the nations of the West and South, who had not only 
 broken up the Roman empire, but had parcelled it out 
 as colonists and settlers, were also bound together by 
 the tie of religion. Goths, Burgundians, Vandals, were 
 already Christians, when they conquered and divided the 
 
36 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 400-500. 
 
 lands of the empire. They had mostly been converted 
 beyond the limits of the Western empire ; and they car- 
 ried with them their own bishops, and their Gothic Bible, 
 ^jj^j the translation of Ulfila (310-380), the oldest 
 
 written literature in any Teutonic tongue. 
 But they had been converted and had received their 
 Christianity on the borders of the Greek provinces of 
 
 the empire, at a time when the court religion 
 riie^Goths*^ at Constantinople, under Constantius, was 
 
 Arianism (337-361). The earliest Teutonic 
 kingdoms of Christendom were Arian, either tolerant, as 
 under Theoderic, or systematically and unsparingly per- 
 secuting, as with the Vandals, and sometimes the West 
 Goths. In either case, they were attached to their creed, 
 if only as a national distinction from the Roman popula- 
 tion. In these Gothic kingdoms, not only new political 
 powers were forming, but a new religious power, the ri- 
 val of the Catholic Church, was making its appearance 
 in the West. This new religious power, Arianism, came 
 into conflict with religious beliefs which had already 
 taken the firmest hold on the Latin population in the 
 West and in Africa, and it threatened whatever was 
 deepest and most cherished in their convictions. But 
 this Gothic supremacy was soon challenged. While 
 their Arian creed placed them in permanent opposition 
 to the Catholic bishops, who, in the break up of the 
 empire, had become the real leaders of the Latin popula- 
 tion, other Teutonic tribes, later in the race of conquest, 
 fresh from their old habits of savage war, and still re- 
 taining their heathen religion and their untamed ferocity, 
 came into the field to claim their part in the spoils of the 
 empire. In the revolutions which followed, it was no 
 longer simply the Latin race against the Teutonic, but 
 different members of the Teutonic stock against one 
 
A. D. 481-5 1 1. The Franks. Clovis. 37 
 
 another. And to the rivalry and feuds of races, nearly 
 allied, but strongly opposed in interests and habits, was 
 added also the opposition of creeds. 
 
 A race, not new to the wars and troubles of the later 
 empire, was rising into importance in the north-east of 
 Gaul, which was to dispute, and finally overthrow, the 
 predominance of the Goths, and give a different turn to 
 the course of Western history. This race, 
 the Franks, was also a Teutonic one. Up 
 to the middle of the century, they had made com- 
 paratively but little figure in the events of the time. 
 They had been loyal to the empire, they had furnished 
 some of the best soldiers to the armies of Stilicho and 
 Aetius ; they had suffered in the rush and pressure of 
 the invading Vandals, and still more of the Huns ; but 
 when the empire could no longer defend itself, they had 
 not thought it necessary to keep within their earlier 
 limits. The Salian Franks had pushed down from the 
 Batavian and Frisian marshes, to the rivers and valleys 
 of north-eastern Gaul. The Ripuarian Franks advanced 
 to the country of the Meuse and Moselle. The Salian 
 Franks had even associated a Roman or a Romanized 
 Gaul, Aegidius, with their native chief in the leadership 
 of the tribe. But in the year 481, the native 
 leadership passed into the hands of a chief °^*^' ^ ^' 
 
 who would not endure a Roman colleague, or the nar- 
 row limits within which, in the general turmoil of the 
 world, his tribe w-as cramped. He is known to history 
 by the name of Clovis, or Chlodvig, which through many 
 transformations, became the later Ludwig and Louis. 
 Clovis soon made himself feared as the most ambitious, 
 the most unscrupulous, and the most energetic of the 
 new Teutonic founders of states. Ten years after the 
 fall of the Western empire, seven years before the rise 
 
38 Begitining of the Middle Ages. a. d. 481-5 ii. 
 
 of the Gothic kingdom of Theoderic, Clovis challenged 
 the Roman Patrician, Syagrius of Soissons, who had 
 „ , ,^ . succeeded to Aegidius, defeated him in a 
 
 Battle of Soia- ,^ ,, r^ . 
 
 sons, 486. pitched field, at Nogent near Soissons (486), 
 
 Battle of and finally crushed Latin rivalry in northern 
 
 Tolbiac,496. Q^ul. Ten years later (496), in another 
 famous battle, Tolbiac (Ziilpich), near Cologne, he also 
 crushed Teutonic rivalry, and established his supremacy 
 over the kindred Alamanni of the Upper Rhine. Then 
 he turned himself with bitter hostility against the Gothic 
 power in Gaul. The Franks hated the Goths, as the 
 ruder and fiercer of the same stock hate those who are a 
 degree above them in the arts of peace, and are sup- 
 posed to be below them in courage and the pursuits of 
 war. There was another cause of antipathy. The Goths 
 were zealous Arians ; and Clovis, under the influence of 
 his wife Clotildis, the niece of the Burgundian Gundo- 
 bad, and in consequence, it is said of a vow made in 
 battle at Tolbiac, had received Catholic baptism from St. 
 Remigius of Rheims. The Frank king threw his sword 
 into the scale against the Arian cause, and became the 
 champion and hope of the Catholic population all over 
 Gaul. Clovis was victorious. He crippled 
 defeated by the Burgundian kingdom (500), which was 
 Clovis. 500. finally destroyed by his sons (534). In a 
 battle near Poitiers, he broke the power of the West 
 Goths in Gaul ; he drove them out of Aqui- 
 lon, near Poi- taine, leaving 'them but a narrow slip of 
 tieis, 597. coast, to seek their last settlement and rest- 
 
 ing-place in Spain ; and when he died, he was recog- 
 nized by all the world, by Theoderic, by the Eastern em- 
 peror, who honoured him with the title of 
 the consulship, as the master of Gaul. Nor 
 W9*= his a temporary conquest. The kingdom of the 
 
A. D. 527-565. Justinian, Belisarius, Narses. 39 
 
 West Goths and the Burgundians had become the king- 
 dom of the Franks. The invaders had at length ar- 
 rived, who were to remain. It was decided that the 
 Franks, and not the Goths, were to direct the future des- 
 tinies of Gaul and Germany, and that the Catholic faith, 
 and not Arianism, was to be the religion of these great 
 realms. Burgundy, which was half Teutonic, was united 
 like the Latin Aquitaine and Provence, to the fortunes 
 of the Franks. In Spain only did the Gothic conquest, 
 the Gothic power, the Gothic civilization, and for a time, 
 the Gothic Arianism, maintain themselves. 
 
 In the middle of the sixth century the Eastern empire, 
 under one of the greatest of its rulers, Justi- 
 nian, once more put forth its still enormous Justinian, 
 
 ^ . . . • 527-565- 
 
 strength, and maintained its unabated 
 
 claims by a revival of military enterprise and prowess, 
 not unworthy of the most famous days of Rome. Beli- 
 sarius showed that Roman generalship was not extinct. 
 By him the Vandal settlement in Africa was broken up 
 and destroyed ( 534). While Theoderic lived, the Gothic 
 kingdom of Italy was respected by the emperor ; but 
 the discord among the Goths themselves which followed 
 his death showed how much the Gothic powei* in Italy 
 had depended on one man. The empire revived its 
 claim to the allegiance of Italy. The Gothic chiefs were 
 defeated or slain, and the kingdom of Theoderic finally 
 overthrown by another of Justinian's victorious generals, 
 the Armenian Narses (553). Under these great sol- 
 diers it seemed as if the Teutonic settlements in the 
 West were about to be rudely shaken. Roman soldiers 
 taught their old terrible lessons not merely to the Van- 
 dals of Africa and the Goths of Italy, but to the invading 
 Alamanni from Germany, and the warlike Franks from 
 Gaul (556). In Italy, at least, for fourteen years (553- 
 
40 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 567. 
 
 567), till after Justinian and Belisarius were dead, the 
 authority of the Roman empire exercised by Narses 
 under the name of the Exarch of Italy, or, as it is some- 
 times called, of Ravenna, was once more established 
 and obeyed. And though neither the limits of the Ex- 
 archate, nor the power of the Exarch, were afterwards 
 what they had been under the first Exarch, Narses, the 
 name, which continued for nearly two centuries, desig- 
 nated the last remaining territory, with the exception of 
 the great Mediterranean islands, and for a time, of some 
 portions of Spain, which the Roman emperors could 
 claim as their own in the West. 
 
 The conquests of Justinian's generals were brilliant 
 but barren triumphs. They were the last efforts of the 
 empire in the West, and there was not enough in the 
 conditions of its society and government, apart from the 
 accidental and personal qualifications of its rulers and 
 generals, to sustain them. The course of the Teutonic 
 invasions and settlements was interrupted and disturbed, 
 — diverted, but not arrested. The victories of Belisa- 
 rius and Narses, and the overthrow of the Goths in Italy, 
 were immediately followed by the irruptions and con- 
 quests of the Lombards. 
 
 The Longobards (softened into the Lombards) were 
 the last of the Teutonic invaders who settled in the 
 western territories of the Roman Empire. 
 Sr^^'"" They were a German tribe, whom the usual 
 causes of barbarian migration had brought 
 from the banks of the Oder to the great stream along 
 which so many barbarian races and federations had 
 halted, and from which they had started on their final 
 conquests. On the Danube they had, like the Goths of 
 Alaric and Theoderic, met other rival barbarians and 
 the powers of the Eastern empire. Like Alaric and 
 
A. D. 567-775. The Lombards. 41 
 
 Theoderic, Alboin, the adventurous king of the Lom- 
 bards, instead of pursuing the course of the feuds, allian- 
 ces, and rivalries with his barbarian neighbours, sought 
 a new field for his ambition in a reconquest of 
 Italy to the Teutonic occupation. The Gothic ^ ^^^" 
 kingdom had been finally beaten down and destroyed. 
 Belisarius was dead (565). Narses, suspected and super- 
 seded, if he did not invite the Lombard invaders, no 
 longer commanded the Roman armies, and died about 
 the time of the invasion (568). Alboin, with associates 
 from many German tribes, attacked, overran, and occu- 
 pied a great portion of Italy. Ravenna, and the mari- 
 time cities as far as Ancona, with Rome, Naples, and 
 Venice, were still preserved to the allegiance of the em- 
 peror, and acknowledged the authority of the exarch at 
 Ravenna. But the rest of Italy came under the domi- 
 nion of the Lombard king; his numerous "dukes," 
 almost independent chiefs, seized each his city or large 
 territory; the Teutonic ascendency, overthrown in the 
 overthrow of the Gothic kingdom, was again established 
 in Italy. Lombard kings reigned, legislated, and ad- 
 ministered at Pavia, as Theoderic had done at Ravenna 
 and Verona; and the kingdom of the Lombards, set up 
 in the very home of the Latin race, took for 
 two hundred years the place which the ^68^^^' 
 
 Gothic kingdom, founded by the genius of 
 Theoderic, had only been able to keep for sixty. 
 
 But Italy was never completely subdued, like Gaul, 
 Spain, or Britain. To the last, there were three capitals, 
 centres of national feeling and influence. Besides the 
 Lombard capital of Pavia, and the Greek capital of Ra- 
 venna, there was the Italian capital of Rome, nominally 
 acknowledging the Greek emperor, but for the most 
 part, isolated, and growing under the popes into a sense 
 
42 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 567-774. 
 
 of exceptional independence. The Latin population of 
 Italy was more obstinate than those of Gaul and Spain, 
 in its aversion to foreigners, and in its national pride. 
 The Lombards are said to have been harshest and most 
 cruel of the barbarian conquerors of Italy. The Lom- 
 bards, as long as they were there, always stronger than 
 the Greeks and Italians, were yet never strong enough 
 to get the land and the people into their grasp. They 
 broke up, soon after Alboin's death, into thirty-six inde- 
 pendent dukedoms, mostly in single cities ; and though 
 the confusion and anarchy resulting from this drove 
 them after ten years again to make one of these dukes 
 their king, the Lombards failed to establish a settled 
 kingdom. They were always less closely connected 
 with their subjects, and more loosely united among 
 themselves, than their Teutonic neighbours. With Rome, 
 preserving the Italian traditions and keeping up Italian 
 memories, they continued to be barbarian and oppres- 
 sive strangers, as despised as they were hated and feared. 
 Not even their conversion from Arianism, under Agilulf 
 (590-615), begun under the influence of a religious 
 queen like Clotildis and Bertha, the Bavarian Theude- 
 linda, and seconded by Pope Gregory the Great, could 
 reconcile the two races. There was a semblance of or- 
 ganization ; a division into provinces, an Austria and a 
 Neustria, as among the Franks, a Tuscia, as in Roman 
 times. The Lombard kings collected the " laws of the 
 Lombards," and promulgated regulations on the rela- 
 tions between Italians and Lombards But the real 
 masters were the great Lombard dukes, dukes of Spoleto, 
 Benevento, Friuli, who made war among themselves and 
 on the king, and who with the kingharried and torment- 
 ed whatever was not in their domain. The Lombard 
 history had its romantic adventures, but was void of 
 
A. D. 400-800. From the Empire to Middle Ages, 43 
 
 political interest or success. There is no sign, even to 
 the last, of their hold on Italy. The Lombards gave 
 their name permanently to one of the noblest of Italian 
 provinces, and they left their mark deeply on the laws, 
 the customs, the manners, the famihar names of Italy. 
 And in Italy their line of kings bridged over the interval 
 from the days of Justinian, Behsarius, and Narses, to 
 those of Charles the Great. But the Lombard settle- 
 ment in Italy, like the Gothic state of Theoderic, fell 
 before a foreign conqueror ; and after having lasted 
 longer than the Gothic and Vandal kingdoms, like them, 
 it ultimately failed. 
 
 Thus began the newer ages of Western Europe. They 
 began in the ruins of the old state of things. The 
 change was not a gradual passage, such as is always 
 going on in the ordinary course of history. The times 
 from the fifth to the eighth century, offer an example of 
 a real catastrophe of strange and rare violence in the 
 progress of mankind. On such a scale and with siich 
 results it has only happened once. It stands alone, as 
 far as we know, among the revolutions and changes, of 
 the world. Islam, which was most like it, though it was 
 the change of a religion, yet left Asiatic civilization, and, 
 for the most part, the populations of Asia, where it 
 found them. Changes as great have been since, but 
 they have been gradual. Convulsions almost as terrific 
 have also happened ; but they have been partial. But 
 then, for more than three centuries, it seems as if the 
 world and human society had been hopelessly wrecked, 
 without prospect or hope of escape. And what gave to 
 this misery additional bitterness, was that there was al- 
 ways a considerable number of persons, sufficiently im- 
 bued with the ideas and imagination. of a happier time, 
 to be ahve to the contrast, and to feel more acutely the 
 
44 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 400-800. 
 
 wretchedness and despair of the present. The language 
 of the Psalms alone adequately represents such feelings: 
 " The earth is moved, the hills are carried into the midst 
 of the sea. All the foundations of the earth are out of 
 course." Just as the present crust of the earth on which 
 we dwell is built of the ruins of former ones, as our 
 mountains and plains are the remains and wreck of an 
 elder world, so nations stand on the relics and survivals 
 of older natural and poHtical organizations, broken up 
 and shattered, but not annihilated. We plant our corn 
 and wine on the debris of primeval rocks. Ancient sea 
 bottoms are our fields, and the sites of our cities. The 
 clay of which our bricks are moulded was poured forth 
 in subglacial streams from long melted glaciers. The 
 stones of which our homes are built are cut out of strata 
 deposited in oceans which have vanished, and beds 
 heaved up and down in tremendous jars and shocks, far 
 beyond our experience. So modern Europe has arisen 
 out of three main elements : i. Disintegrated and ruined 
 nations formed under the civilization of Greece and 
 Rome ; 2. Altered, and, to use a geological term, "meta- 
 morphic," Teutonic races, more or less modified by con- 
 tact with the Roman world ; 3. The organization and 
 ideas and usages of the Christian Church. With the 
 older civilizations of the world, India, Persia, Egypt, we 
 have to do only indirectly. With the three elements 
 present after the destruction of the Roman empire, we 
 are in immediate relation ; we touch them. 
 
A* D. 400-800. Teutonic Organization. 4^ 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 CONDITION OF THE TEUTONIC SETTLEMENTS IN THE 
 ROMAN EMPIRE. 
 
 The new settlers brought with them certain outhnes of 
 organization. They came for the most part, not merely 
 as armies but as tribes ; and the tribal cha- 
 racter became prominent in proportion as Teutonic or- 
 
 *■ r r ganizatxon. 
 
 they settled. They came for the most part 
 under kings, sometimes, apparently, of an ancient line, 
 like the Amals among the Goths, sometimes chosen to 
 conduct a war or to reward a conquest. The tribe con- 
 sisted of freemen, with their dependents, and in time 
 their slaves, though the course of events gradually caused 
 changes in the power, the wealth, and the rank of indi- 
 viduals; and freedom of person and of vote was long at 
 the basis of Teutonic usages, though tempered by limit- 
 ing customs and by accidental differences of strength 
 and influence. They divided the land as they settled, 
 either adopting the old divisions, like the Pagus {Pays), 
 or the Civitas, with other indeterminate subdivisions in 
 Gaul, or creating new ones of their own in the more 
 purely Teutonic districts, the Gau, and the Mark in Ger- 
 many. And as soon as they were settled, a hierarchy 
 of chiefs grew up ; Duces, "leaders of the host" [Heer- 
 zog), over the larger provinces, Cotnites {Graf), over the 
 subordinate ones, leaders in war, magistrates in peace. 
 The king had his special companions and faithful men. 
 
45 B^gimii?ig of the Middle Ages, A. D. 400-800. 
 
 out of whom, as well as out of the local chiefs who were 
 not dependent on the king, a nobility arose. The gath- 
 ering once or twice a year of the free men, in the divi- 
 sions of the kingdom and in the kingdom as a whole, 
 brought them continually together, either to make war, 
 or to sanction laws and decisions. And the land was 
 partly public, held in common by the inhabitants of the 
 district, whether great or small ; partly held in special 
 occupation and tenancy from the community, but not 
 as property by individual members ; and partly held by 
 full right of property, subject or not to claims on it, pub- 
 lic or private. In each Teutonic settlement, there were 
 the old inhabitants and the new comers. Under varying 
 conditions, often in the proportion of two-thirds to one- 
 third of land or produce, the original population shared 
 the soil with the conquering minority. And for the most 
 part conquerors and conquered lived each under their 
 own law. 
 
 But the Teutonic nations, which, in the fifth century, 
 had not merely invaded the empire, but had made per- 
 manent settlements in it, found themselves under new 
 conditions of life. They had exchanged their forests 
 and wastes for a land of ancient cities and established 
 cultivation, in which they were still, indeed above all 
 things, warriors, whose trade and pride was fighting, yet 
 no longer mere foes and destroyers, but settlers, or, as 
 it was said, "guests." The Germans, with all their bar- 
 barian rudeness and wildness, were not, like the Huns, 
 and the Turks afterwards, hopelessly alien in mind and 
 spirit from the Romans whom they had conquered. 
 They had also become more or less familiar with the 
 more civilized races for whom, in the trial of strength, 
 they had been too strong. Some of the German tribes, 
 especially those of the Gothic stock, had come into con- 
 
A.D. 400-800. Influence of Church on New Nations. 47 
 
 stant contact with the Romans, as soldiers in the impe- 
 rial service, and sometimes in the court ; and further, 
 most of these Gothic tribes had listened to the teachers 
 and missionaries of Christianity, and had, in a partial 
 and imperfect way, received it as their religion. 
 
 When, therefore, they founded their new kingdoms 
 in Gaul, in Spain, in Italy, the things about them were 
 not absolutely strange to them. Still, when 
 the time of comparative repose succeeded settlements af- 
 the excitement of conquering and of taking fected by three 
 
 >■ '^ o new conditions 
 
 possession, the conquerors found themselves in the life of 
 under altered conditions of life. They found nations, 
 themselves continually in the presence of 
 three new sets of circumstances, which were from day to 
 day impressing their minds, forcing on them new ideas, 
 affecting their actions, favouring or interfering with their 
 purposes; and these, whether resisted or welcomed, were 
 insensibly subjecting them to processes of change, gra- 
 dual, prolonged, and sometimes intermitting, but very 
 deep and very eventful. These changes were the be- 
 ginnings, out of which by long waiting and painful steps 
 and dreary reactions of anarchy and darkness, the new 
 and progressive civilization of the European nations was 
 to spring. 
 
 The first of these influences was, the presence of the 
 Christian Church ; the second, was the pre- 
 sence of Roman law and its administrative religion!"*^^ ° 
 system : the third, was the atmosphere of ^- \'^^' 
 
 ■' ' ' ... 3- l->a.nguage. 
 
 Latin language and conversation in which 
 
 they lived, and its rivalries with their own Teutonic 
 
 speech. 
 
 I. At the period of the Teutonic settlement, the Chris- 
 tion religion was rooted in the Latin world, and the 
 Christian Church had insensibly attracted to itself the 
 
48 Beginning of the Middle Ages, A. D. 400-800. 
 
 p . . . authority with which men spontaneously in- 
 the Church vest that which they reverence and trust. 
 
 at the time rr-i i j • i i • i 
 
 of the settle- ihe moral and social power, which was 
 '"^"'^' slowly but surely slipping out of the hands 
 
 of the empire, and even some measure of the political 
 power which its officials were abdicating, was passing 
 over to the chiefs of the religious society 
 The Chris- which the empire had vainly combated, the 
 
 tian bishops. , ^ •' 
 
 Christian bishops. Amid the ruins of the 
 greatest pride and the greatest strength that the world 
 had known, the Church alone stood erect and strong. In 
 days when men relied only on force and violence, yet 
 only to discover, time after time, that force alone could 
 not give and secure power, the Church ruled by the 
 word of persuasion, by example, by knowledge, by its 
 higher view of life, by its obstinate hopes and visible 
 beneficence, by its confidence in innocence, by its call 
 to peace. The Church had faith in itself and its mission 
 where all other faith had broken down. It might be 
 afflicted and troubled by the disasters of the time, but its 
 work was never arrested by them nor its courage abated. 
 It still offered shelter and relief among the confusion, 
 even after war had broken into its sanctuaries, and the 
 sword had slaughtered its ministers ; it still persisted in 
 holding out the light from heaven, when the air was 
 filled with storm and darkness. In the Latin cities of 
 Italy and Gaul, while public spirit and the sense of duty 
 were failing, and the civil chiefs of society shrank from 
 the dangerous burdens and troubles of office, the Chris- 
 tian bishops, chosen by their people for qualities which 
 men most respect, were, by virtue of these qualities, 
 ready to accept the responsibilities which others gave up, 
 and were taking informally the first place. It added to 
 their influence that they were permanent in their office, 
 
A. D. 400-800. Christian Bishops. 49 
 
 and some of the most remarkable of them held it for a 
 very long period, through rapid changes in the world 
 without, Avitus, Bishop of Vienne for thirty-five years, 
 from 490 to 525, helped to order the Burgundian king- 
 dom, and witnessed its fall. Csesarius of Aries, in his 
 forty years* episcopate (501-542), saw the power of 
 the West pass from the Goths to the Franks, and 
 the Gothic kingdom built up by Theoderic in Italy, 
 overthrown by Belisarius ; and both Csesarius and Avitus 
 exercised great influence on the new society and its new 
 masters. Remigius, who in 496, baptized Clovis and his 
 Franks, in his episcopate of more than seventy years 
 (461-533), saw the last days of the Western empire, and 
 the victorious beginnings of the Merovingian line. In 
 times of strife the bishops were mediators, ambassadors, 
 peace-makers. In times of imminent danger men looked 
 to them to face the peril, to intercede for the doomed, to 
 cross, with no protection but their sacred character, the 
 path of the destroyer. With the terrible and inflexible 
 barbarians, who were deaf to Roman envoys and con- 
 temptuous of Roman soldiers, with Ricimer, with Alaric, 
 with Attila, with Genseric, the last word, the only word 
 listened to, was that of a fearless bishop, like Pope Leo, 
 asking nothing for himself, but in the name of the Most 
 High that his people should be spared. Representatives, 
 not of religion only and the claims of God, but of moral 
 order, of the rights of conscience and the sympathies 
 of men, of the bonds and authority of human society, 
 the Christian bishops were, when the barbarians be- 
 came settlers in the empire, the only trusted guides of 
 life. 
 
 Besides these majestic and commanding forms which 
 were continually meeting the new comers, in questions 
 of peace and war, in council, in the intercourse of civit 
 
5© Begtnfiing of the Middle Ages. A. d. 400-800. 
 
 life, as ministers of peace, justice, and self- 
 The religion control, there were also the influence and 
 
 Itself. ' 
 
 the results of the religion which they pro- 
 fessed. It was a religion which allied the most over- 
 whelming wonders and mysteries with the plainest and 
 most uncompromising rules of action ; which, to the in- 
 quisitive, opened thoughts undreamt of concerning the 
 love, the greatness, the terrors of an unknown God, and 
 which taught men to be daring, heroic, and enduring, 
 in the new way of severity to themselves, and boundless 
 kindness and service to others. The barbarians coveted 
 Roman wealth, they despised Roman strength ; but 
 these bold and manly race? could not be awed by what 
 the Christian Church had saved and incorporated of 
 ancient Roman force and greatness of mind, heightened 
 by the spirit of a Divine teaching and purity, in her 
 charity, her discipline, her self-devotion and public spirit. 
 And this was embodied in a compact and steady organ- 
 ization, which, while all else was reeling and changing, 
 showed the world the strange spectacle of stability ana 
 growth. Barbarian chiefs, like Clovis the Frank, or 
 Gundobad the Burgundian, dimly understood the spec- 
 tacle before them, and the influences which acted on 
 them ; and, doubtless, the spectacle was a confused one, 
 and the influences were mixed ones. But it was plain to 
 them, in that rude and wild time, that whatever there 
 was on earth stronger than force and greater than kings, 
 was in that Kingdom of Righteousness which the Chris- 
 tian Church proclaimed, and attempted to reflect. Way- 
 ward and intractable disciples, they broke without scru- 
 ple its laws in their moments of passion, and trampled on 
 its most sacred sanctions. Low and high notions were 
 grotesquely intermixed in their efforts at duty. But they 
 saw clearly and truly that in the Christian Church and 
 
A. D. 400-800. Effect &n the Church itself. 51 
 
 religion they had encountered a power of a different 
 order from any that they had yet met with ; a power 
 which they must take account of, which .was not afraid 
 of them, and would always be in their path ; which they 
 must either accept and make terms with, or else at all 
 hazards resolve to destroy and root out. For the most 
 part they chose the former alternative. 
 
 The immense influence of Christianity andthe Church 
 on the new nations is one of those mixed and complica- 
 ted facts which it is hard adequately to ex- 
 hibit, much less to analyze completely. It S^pkture^f 
 was the source of good and the guarantee deteriora- 
 
 ° ^ ° ting effect on 
 
 of progress to them ; it carried with it the the Church 
 promise and hope of a nobler future. But 
 the immediate effect of this contact of the barbarians 
 with Christianity was to lower ar^d injure Christianity. 
 Christianity raised them, but it suffered itself in the effort. 
 The clergy, and those responsible for the care of religion, 
 in rude and disordered states of society, are often hardly 
 judged by those who live later in calmer and more ex- 
 perienced times. During the worst of the wild days 
 which followed the Teutonic conquest, there were always 
 to be found men deeply impressed with the sense of 
 right, and with the truth and greatness of the Divine 
 government, full of zeal for righteousness, and disinter- 
 ested love for their brethren ; men who taught these 
 lessons, and men who received them in sincerity. So- 
 cially, the Church, as such, was always on the side of 
 peace, on the side of industry, on the side of purity, on 
 the side of liberty for the slave and protection for the 
 oppressed. The monasteries were the only keepers of 
 literary tradition ; they were, still more, great agricul- 
 tural colonies, clearing the wastes, and setting the ex- 
 ample of improvement. They were the only seats of 
 
52 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 400-800. 
 
 human labor which could hope to be spared in those 
 lands of perpetual war. In the religious teaching of the 
 clergy, the great outlines and facts of this Christian 
 creed were strongly and firmly drawn, and they were 
 never obliterated, though often confused by lower and 
 meaner admixtures. It was impossible to forget the 
 Cross of Christ ; the appeal to Our Father went up in 
 numberless tongues and dialects all over the West, from 
 the ignorant and the miserable, from the barbarian war- 
 rior, and perhaps his victim. But the religious aspect 
 of the West was to be, for many centuries after the con- 
 quest, a dark and deplorable one. From the moment 
 that the barbarians became masters in the West, an im- 
 mediate deterioration becomes manifest in the clergy, in 
 their teaching, in their standard of conduct. There is a 
 vast change from the generation of Churchmen in Gaul 
 who had felt the influence of the powerful writers and 
 earnest teachers of the fourth and fifth centuries — St. 
 Hilary, St. Jerome, St. Leo, above all St. Augustine, and 
 St. Augustine's strong and subtle antagonists, Faustus 
 and Pelagius. Even from men like Prosper 
 Avitus,t535. of Aquitaine, Avitus of Vienne, Csesarius of 
 sesanus,t 542. ArJes^ ^^e desccnt is great to the next gene- 
 ration in the sixth century, with their coarse and superfi- 
 cial religion, their readiness to allow sin to buy itself ofif 
 by prodigal gifts, the connivance by the best men at im- 
 posture, its direct encouragement by the average. In the 
 Church in Gaul under the Franks, of which Gregory of 
 Tours (540-595) has left so curious a contemporary pic- 
 ture, the hold of discipline on the people is seen to be 
 of the slightest, the irregularity of all acts among the 
 clergy is of the greatest. And these evils increased as 
 the bishops increased in dignity and wealth. The 
 breadth of land held and tilled by the clergy was a ben- 
 
A. D. 400-800. Contact with Roman Law. 53 
 
 efit to the country, but not to themselves. Their secu- 
 larity and wide-spread corruption were the heavy price 
 at which their hold on the barbarians, the only visible 
 hope for the ultimate improvement of society, was pur- 
 chased. 
 
 2. Further, the Teutonic settlers found themselves in 
 the midst of a population long accustomed to the elabo- 
 rate and fully developed system of Roman 
 law, which had grown up out of the varied of°the*'' 
 experience and the practised forethought of barbarians 
 
 ^ . . with Konan 
 
 a great people, and which provided natu- law and ad- 
 rally and easily for the numberless ques- 
 tions of human life and intercourse. It is clear that 
 Roman law greatly impressed them. They had brought 
 with them their own unwritten customs from the other 
 side of the Rhine, or from the banks of the Danube, 
 according to which the rough justice of a rude and 
 inartificial state of society was administered. Each tribe 
 had its own customs ; and earlier or later after the settle- 
 ment, in some cases very early, these customs, ex- 
 pressed in Latin, were reduced to writing, and became, 
 in contrast to the general Roman law, the peculiar law 
 of each tribe or kingdom — the "law" of the Burgun- 
 dians, Visigoths, Salian and Ripuarian Franks, Ala- 
 manni, Bavarians, Lombards. These were at first rude 
 attempts, mainly lists of offences and penalties, the 
 penalties being for the most part money fines or com- 
 pensations, according to the nationality or social rank 
 of the injured person. But they expressly recognized 
 for the Roman population, that is, for the larger part of 
 the population, the Roman law. Some of the Teutonic 
 kings, as Alaric, the West Goth (506), and Sigismund, 
 the Burgundian (517), republished and resanctioned the 
 Theodosian code, or selections from it, for the guidance 
 
54 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. d. 400-800. 
 
 of their Roman subjects. The next step was to incorpo- 
 rate in their own laws, as fresh cases arose and new 
 questions had to be adjusted, provisions adopted from 
 the Roman law. The great Theoderic, the East Goth, 
 about 500, drew up, by the help of his Latin counsellors, 
 his Edicium, in which, borrowing from Roman princi- 
 ples of law, he laid down rules for barbarians and Ro- 
 mans alike, intended to teach respect for right and order, 
 to protect the weak against the strong, and to guard the 
 civiHzation {civilitas) which he so valued. And, finally, 
 as in the law of the West Goths, (642-701), after they 
 were confined to Spain, the two elements, Teutonic and 
 Roman, were fused together into one general code of 
 territorial instead of personal law, for a nation in which 
 Goths and Romans had come to be looked upon as one 
 people. Even while the special customs of each tribe 
 were defined and maintained, there was yet always the 
 consciousness of a larger and more universal law all 
 round them — the vast system of laws, decrees, and judi- 
 cial decisions which came down from the republic and 
 the empire, and which, compared with the local laws 
 of Franks or Goths, seemed like the general law of the 
 world, as contrasted with the by-laws of some local 
 association. This vast scientific apparatus of jurispru- 
 dence was in the hands of the Latins, understood by 
 them, still worked and administered by them, accom- 
 plishing ends which the rough barbarian rules could 
 not reach. The Teutonic settlers without fully under- 
 standing the great instrument, were able to appreciate 
 its power and advantages. Latin clerks put their Teu- 
 tonic customs into the universal language. Latin ex- 
 perts interpreted to their kings the Roman codes. In 
 Spain Latin-speaking bishops, in the councils of Toledo, 
 compiled and arranged the law of the West Goths. 
 
A.D. 400-800. The Barbarians aftd Roman Law. 55 
 
 In the north, under the Franks, the Roman municipal 
 system, with its magistrates and its forms, continued 
 to act, only adjusted to a state of things in which the 
 Teutonic count or bishop took the place of imperial 
 presidents or consulars ; and the close Latin muni- 
 cipality gradually passed into a more popular body, 
 which was to become the "commune," the "common- 
 alty," of later times. In proportion as the Germans 
 settled down to the conditions of civil life, bought and sold, 
 built and planted, claimed rights or disputed them, 
 made wills and inherited property, they came upon the 
 Roman civil order, waiting for them ready made in all 
 questions, with its strong principles and established 
 rules. They found themselves, as Guizot expresses it, 
 "caught in its meshes." Its influence varied greatly; 
 but its traces are seen everywhere. And it was one of 
 the chief means by which, in the union of the two races 
 in the West and South, the Latin element gained more 
 and more the ascendency. 
 
 3. Again, all these Teutonic settlers, Goths, Burgun- 
 dians, Franks, Lombards, found themselves in daily 
 contact in the business of life with a Latin- 
 speaking population, the leaders of which STe" Teutonic 
 were more cultivated, and the inferior nations with 
 
 ' l^tm popu- 
 
 classes more numerous than themselves. Nation, more 
 Whether as masters or as fellow-citizens, and more 
 whether profiting by Latin knowledge, or '^"'^'^^*^^- 
 employing the labour of their new dependents and 
 slaves, they were forced to know something of Latin ; 
 not, of course, the literary Latin which we have in 
 books, even in the books of the time, but the Latin 
 spoken in daily life, as it must have existed even in the 
 days of Cicero and Virgil, — the Latin spoken by the 
 humble, coarse, and ignorant ; the Latin of soldiers, hus- 
 
56 Begimiing of the Middle Ages. A. D. 400-800. 
 
 bandmen, mechanics, foreign slaves, with its vulgat 
 idioms and pronunciation varying in different locahties, 
 and with its varying admixtures of rude and outlandish 
 expressions. The new masters could not deal with their 
 woodsmen, their carpenters, their masons, on their posses- 
 sions, without acquaintance with the provincial dialect in 
 which the Latin of common life happened to be spoken 
 on the spot. And whenever they had need of learning, — 
 political, legal, or ecclesiastical, in the services of the 
 Church, in the courts, or in the lawyer's office — they found 
 that learning had not attempted, and was hardly able, to 
 speak in any other than the imperial speech of Rome. 
 There was not yet strength enough in the German dia- 
 lects, still reputed barbarous even by those who used 
 them, to break the prescription of custom in favour of 
 Latin, in business, in diplomacy, in all solemn and for- 
 mal transactions. Their ancient speech, among Franks 
 and Goths, remained the cherished sign of a conquering 
 and dominant race. It was the language of the nursery 
 and of the family, as long as the family kept itself Teu- 
 tonic; it would have the preference in easy and intimate 
 intercourse, as long as the boast of ancestry and blood 
 remained in the court, or in the service of the court. 
 But, besides that Franks and Goths, by degrees, mar- 
 ried Latin wives — Gallic, Italian, Spanish — it was more 
 and more the case that if the imported Teutonic was the 
 language of predilection, the local Latin was the lan- 
 guage of necessity and convenience. When one of the 
 conquering race wanted to show temper or inflict insult, 
 he might say that he did not understand Latin ; but he 
 was in reality far too shrewd and too wise to cut himself 
 off from what he knew to be one of his indispensable in- 
 struments of power. For centuries, in the lands of the 
 Teutonic conquests, two languages went on side by side, 
 
A. D. 400-800. Latinizing of Teutonic Nations. 57 
 
 in proportions varying in different districts and different 
 orders of society. Each acted on the other ; but each 
 remained distinct, borrowing words, or even forms, but 
 keeping its own fundamental structure and elements. 
 Where Goths, Franks, Lombards settled, the population 
 must have been, in parts of it at least, more or less, bi- 
 lingual. Two languages were in use, running a race for 
 the mastery, as now in Wales and in Brittany, in many 
 cantons of Switzerland, in parts of the United States and 
 Canada, in Hungary and Bohemia, and in India ; till, at 
 last, convenience, policy, accident, gavo one or other 
 the victory. So, unperceived at the time and silent, the 
 struggle went on between the Teutonic and Latin lan- 
 guages. The Teutonic had on its side the pride, not 
 merely of rank, but of race and blood. On the other 
 hand, the Latin had three advantages. It had numbers ; 
 it had, what the Teutonic had not yet, a written litera- 
 ture ; and it had the Church, with its services, its schools, 
 its legal forms, and its clerks. And, in a large portion 
 of the Teutonic conquests, these were decisive, though 
 the struggle was long. The end has been that victory has 
 remained with the Latin, and its derivative languages, 
 in the west and south of the continent of Europe. 
 
 Thus, under influences such as these, helping or check- 
 ing each other, a new society began to rise out of the 
 ruins and fragments of the old. Germans 
 and Romans each ceased to be what they Refip'ocai 
 
 •' actions of all 
 
 had been, to become something new and these influ- 
 
 j • rr ^ .T«i 1 t r • • ences ; issuing 
 
 different. The slow and often impercepti- in the revival 
 ble process of change began which was to j^odlfied forms 
 build up again in many a?es the order and °^ ^.^"'l 
 
 , ... ° .. . civilization. 
 
 stability of life which in the fall of the Ro- 
 man empire seemed to have foundered ; the process 
 which, often broken off, often ill-directed, often disap- 
 
58 Beginning of the Middle Ages, A. D. 400-800. 
 
 pointing in its results, was yet at last to fit the new na- 
 tions to take the place of the empire, which their fathers 
 had destroyed. And one remarkable feature of the 
 change was the final prevalence of the Latin element, 
 wherever it had originally established itself, over the 
 Teutonic. It was steady and certain, however protracted. 
 There was a reconquest to Roman habits and sympa- 
 thies, — to what a convenient mediaeval word designated 
 as Romanitas or Latinitas — of the Latin provinces which 
 the German conquerors had seized and made their own. 
 It is plain that, from the first, no exclusion or principle 
 of separation prevailed. The two races early began to 
 work together, in war and in political administration ; 
 and the Germans were willing to employ, even in places 
 of high trust, the services which Latins were willing to 
 render. In Gaul especially, as far as can be judged 
 from names which occur in the history of his times by 
 Gregory of Tours, the proportion of Latins to Germans 
 among the dukes, counts, patricians, and other officers 
 of the Frank kings, especially those connected with the 
 revenue, seems to be something more than two to three ; 
 among the bishops and clergy, the names and the origin 
 are at first almost exclusively Latin, and to the end of 
 Gregory's history barbarian names among the high eccle- 
 siastics are the exception. The character of the Franks 
 as he pourtrays it, lent itself readily to this gradual mix- 
 ture and fusion with the Latin provincials. As warriors, 
 they were among the most impetuous and formidable of 
 the German invaders. But they were eminently vain- 
 glorious, light-minded, unsteady, and self-indulgent; and 
 as they passed from the privations of their barbarian life, 
 to an abundance and luxury unknown before, they would 
 be singularly exposed to the fascinations and flatteries of 
 a new form of society which had opened to them such 
 
A. D. 400-800. Decay of Knowledge and Culture. 59 
 
 new enjoyments. Still it was to be a long time before 
 the Franks ceased to be, in spite of Roman influences, a 
 Teutonic race. In Spain, the Goths yielded earlier to 
 these influences. In Italy, the intrusive German ele- 
 ment, more completely alien, and more passionately re- 
 sisted, was vanquished or absorbed after the defeat of 
 the Lombards. In Gaul, in the provinces south of the 
 Loire, studded with great Latin cities, Bordeaux, Tou- 
 louse, Lyons, Vienna, Aries, Nismes, with the half Greek 
 and half Latin Massilia, the latinizing of the Franks 
 went on faster and more completely than to the north of 
 that river ; and it went on faster between the Loire and 
 the Meuse, than between the Meuse and the Rhine. But 
 though the end was a long way off, yet in the end, Gaul 
 passed, through many intermediate steps from the 
 Franks, the most Teutonic of Teutons, to the professed 
 leaders of the Latin race, the chiefs of the " Romance " 
 family of nations, the French. Rome, which had latin- 
 ized her conquered provinces, ultimately latinized also 
 her German conquerors. 
 
 But the transformation was a long one, and accom- 
 panied with many disasters and many losses. In the 
 civil as in the religious order of things, the downfall of 
 Latin ascendancy, at the time of the Teutonic conquests, 
 was the beginning of a dreary period of confusion, vio- 
 lence, and ignorance. While the Franks and Goths 
 were learning the rudiments of civilized social life, the 
 Latins were losing it from the contact and predominance 
 of a ruder people ; and the Latins were losing much 
 more than at the time the Germans were gaining. In 
 the sixth century, Latin literature, which had recently 
 seen a real poet like Claudian, a philosopher hke Boe- 
 thius, and which scarcely a century before had seemed to 
 be reviving in new power and life under the originality 
 
 F 
 
6o Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 
 
 and the eloquence of Augustine, rapidly sank into a dark- 
 ness which was to last for ages. The generation which 
 saw the fall of the empire saw the sudden extinction of 
 classical culture, and of all strong intellectual efforts. In 
 the wild and turbulent days of the Frank, the Gothic, 
 the Lombard kings, men had neither leisure nor heart 
 fo'r serious thought and study, much less for 
 C. Soilius literary trifling and pastime, such as that 
 
 Siiionius which amuscd a student of the Latin class- 
 
 ' ics, like Sidonius, while Auvergne was quiet 
 
 under the protection of Rome. What writing there was, 
 was for the immediate calls of the day. It was very 
 abundant; it was often forcible and genuine; but the 
 sense of order and beauty, the care for strength and 
 grace, the power of handling language with a mastery 
 over its resources, the discrimination of the weight and 
 proportion of words, had passed away, along with the 
 interest in all the deeper forms of intellectual inquiry 
 and enterprise. Gregory of Tours laments quaintly and 
 pathetically hi^ bad grammar and unskilfulness in writ- 
 ing — his false concords and wrong cases. Latin reading 
 and writing were practised by none but those to whom 
 they were the necessity of their profession, or the road 
 to advancement. All but the monastic or cathedral 
 schools seem to have disappeared in the barbarian con- 
 quest. These guarded the records of literature ; and a 
 great deal of composition proceeded from them. But it 
 was composition which in its subjects was very mono- 
 tonous, confined in range, and meagre in ideas ; while 
 in execution, it became more and more coarse and rude, 
 and in all but the most direct and primitive forms of 
 expression, childishly helpless. There, indeed, in tell- 
 ing some terrible story, in recording some memorable 
 words of deep passion or emotion, it preserved much of 
 
400-8oo. Decay of Knowledge and Culture, 6i 
 
 strength and sometimes precision. But in the presence 
 of the lawlessness and insecurity of the times, men's 
 interest was absorbed by the actual calamities which they 
 saw, by the vicissitudes and crimes which surrounded 
 and oppressed them. They did not care in such days 
 to cultivate the powers and refinements of language, 
 and they soon lost what they had inherited of these 
 powers and refinements ; they lost, too, with this, the 
 generalizing and comparing faculties, the value for ex- 
 actness, for proportion, for adequacy of statement. The 
 Teutonic conquest was followed by centuries in which 
 we see an increasing literary depression, and a universal 
 incapacity for efforts of strong and fruitful thought. But 
 dark as the times were, they were the beginnings of 
 better days ; the preparation for improvement was never 
 intermitted. The ancient culture of the classical days 
 was gone, with its wisdom, its grandeur, its wickedness. 
 It had failed in the trial to lead men to improvement. 
 And the new order had not yet begun to know its 
 strength and power of growth. The men of the new 
 world were, like children in the nursery, in profound 
 unconsciousness of what they were, and of what they 
 were doing. They thought that they were but living 
 from day to day in a world which was growing old and 
 perishing. The monks, with their hard labor, and their 
 fairy tales of saints, knew not, any more than the rough 
 soldiers and lawyers, that they were making their first 
 but necessary steps in a great progress. What they did 
 was deformed by all kinds of evil and ignorance. But 
 there were really good and even great men among them ; 
 and the best of them did what they could at a time when 
 in the nature of things it was impossible to do much. 
 And when we watch their attempts, poor and weak as 
 they might be, we are reminded perpetually that, at 
 least, they were " faithful in little." 
 
62 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 CONQUEST OF BRITAIN BY THE ANGLES AND SAXONS. 
 
 In almost complete contrast with the course of things 
 seen in the Teutonic settlements on the continent, was 
 the Teutonic conquest of Britain. It was more protract- 
 ed and gradual ; it was more thorough and complete ; 
 and it was much less affected by the preceding condi- 
 tions of life and society in the conquered race. 
 
 The Teutonic conquerors of Britain came by sea. 
 
 This of itself distinguished their invasions 
 
 of^T^entonic from the barbarian invasions of Italy, Gaul, 
 
 settlements a.nd Spain, where whole nations, or armies 
 
 on the Con- ^ ' 
 
 tinent, and as great as what were called nations, moved 
 
 in Britain. . , , , - ^ 
 
 m vast swarms over the plams of Europe, 
 poured across the Danube and the Rhine, or made their 
 way over the Julian and Rhaetian Alps, into the provinces 
 of the empire. To Britain they came only in such num- 
 bers as could be carried in a few ships of no great size, 
 across the North Sea, from the fiords of Scandinavia and 
 Denmark, or from the mouths and marshes of the Ger- 
 man rivers, the Elbe and the Weser. Instead of a great 
 horde led by Alaric orTheoderic, parties and expeditions 
 of adventurers, unconnected with one another, seeking 
 plunder and the excitement of a freebooter's life rather 
 than new homes, visited continually, as they had done 
 under the empire, different points of the eastern and 
 south-eastern coast of Britain. When favourable cir- 
 
4oo-8oo. English and Continental Cofiquests. d-^t 
 
 cumstances led them to settle, they still only settled in 
 small and isolated bodies. Once settled they were fed 
 from their original seats. Smaller bands coalesced into 
 larger ones, and these again grew into separate king- 
 doms, separately pushing their boundaries against the 
 Britons, or against one another, sometimes fused together 
 sometimes united for a time under the supremacy of one 
 of them. But all this took time. The invaders gained 
 a new fatherland by a series of sporadic conquests. In 
 the long and bitter struggle between English and 
 " Welsh," no one battle decided the result of the strife ; 
 no one great victory, as so often on the continent, saved 
 the land, or delivered it to a new master. 
 
 The conquerors of Britain, the founders of the Eng- 
 lish people, came straight across the sea from one small 
 
 corner in the wilderness of nations, where » , 
 
 Anglo- 
 three obscure tribes, unheeded at the time Saxon inva- 
 
 when the world was full of the name and s^o^g""^ "^• 
 terror of Goths and Huns, were loosely united in one of 
 the leagues common at the time among the barbarians. 
 Jutes, Angles, and a tribe of old "Saxons," whose fa- 
 thers had moved over Europe from east to west, till they 
 were stopped by the broad mouth of the Elbe, and by 
 the bleak and dreary shores of the North Sea, had 
 learned that the ocean though very terrible, offered a 
 useful war-path to the warriors who dared to trust it. Ac- 
 cording to our earliest traditions, a band of these rovers, 
 hovering about the coast as many other 
 bands had for many years done before them, (A^~s'*^hr ) 
 was invited, amid the anarchy left in Britain 
 by the retirement of the Roman legions, to help Roman- 
 ized Britons against their wilder kinsfolk. What fol- 
 lowed was on a small scale the same as that which so often 
 happened on a large one in the empire. From allies 
 
64 Beginning of the Middle Ages, a. d. 
 
 the new comers became invaders, and the first invaders 
 became masters of Kent. The English settlers in Kent 
 were Jutes. Others from the same region followed. A 
 
 few years later a band of Saxons, in three 
 *77- ships, we are told, planted themselves on 
 
 the coast of what they made Sussex. Another band in 
 
 five ships landing more to the westward, laid 
 ^^' the foundation of the great kingdom of 
 
 Wessex. On the east coast, Angles and Saxons contin- 
 ued to land, to invade, to occupy, from the Thames to 
 the Wash, from the Wash to the Humber, from the 
 Humber to the Tweed. Then, up the rivers and along 
 the Roman roads, the different bands pushed forward into 
 the interior from the south coast, and from the east, with 
 chequered fortune but with unbated stubbornness. They 
 encountered equal stubbornness. The native resistance 
 was of that kind which a weaker but tenacious race offers 
 to a stronger one ; unobservant of opportunities, slack and 
 ineffective at critical moments, but obstinate, difficult to 
 extinguish, always ready to revive, and sometimes burst- 
 ing out into a series of heroic and victorious exploits. The 
 name of king Arthur, whatever historical obscurity hangs 
 about it, has left its indelible marks in our national tra- 
 ditions. Through continued ill-fortune, with intervals of 
 success, but with general failure, this resistance was pro- 
 tracted and fierce. But it was in vain. The advance of 
 the tide was low but continuous ; sometimes arrested but 
 never retreating ; bit by bit the land was covered ; frag- 
 ment by fragment of British territory broke away, and 
 was swallowed up in the rising flood, which came not in 
 one channel but in many, and from many different sides. 
 The first attempts at occupation by the Jutes in Kent 
 were, according to the English chronicles, about the 
 middle of the fifth century, the years when southern and 
 
400-800. English Conquest and Settlement. 65 
 
 central Europe were trembling before the terrible king 
 of the Huns. About fifty years later, in the time of The- 
 oderic and Clovis, began the West Saxon advance under 
 the house of Cerdic from the Hampshire 
 harbours. In another half century while ^^7-. 
 Vandals and Goths were falling before the Northum- 
 sword of Belisarius, there was an English 
 kingdom set up in the north, and English settlements 
 on the east coast, and along the rivers which run into 
 the North Sea. We see the British boundary driven 
 inwards, and forming an irregular semi-circle from the 
 Clyde to the Land's End, flanked for a great portion of 
 the line by the English settlements on the east, and 
 broken into and deeply indented by the encroachments 
 of English conquest along the course of the Severn. 
 Another fifty years, and the great English kingdom of 
 Northumbria emerges under ^thelfrith, 
 and the line of the British territories is '^^' 
 
 again severed and broken up into separate districts. 
 Then began the second stage of the great change. 
 The converging lines of advance met in the central 
 part of the island. The struggle for new ground began 
 between the English tribes and kingdoms ; wars for 
 dominion were waged by one kingdom against its 
 neighbours; supremacy, more or less wide and undis- 
 puted, was won by personal qualities in one king, was 
 lost by the want of them in another, was exercised for a 
 time, extinguished for a time, transferred from one king- 
 dom to another, as each was the more fortunate in its 
 men, its circumstances, and its wars. But this continual 
 alternation of peace and war among the English king- 
 doms, this perpetual trial of strength and this fluctuation 
 between subordination and independence, was the pro- 
 cess by which the tribes which had been a loose confe- 
 
66 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 
 
 deracy by the banks of the Eyder and the Elbe, were 
 again to become one nation in England. The centre of 
 power moved from the north, through the midland, to 
 the south ; from Northumbria to Mercia, from Mercia 
 till it became permanently fixed in Wessex. And by 
 that time, three centuries and a half from the first Kent- 
 ish inroads, by a progress most irregular and turbulent, 
 but never interrupted, the English nation had grown 
 into permanent form and character out of the detached 
 bands and tribal settlements and petty kingdoms, among 
 which the island was parcelled out. It had organized 
 institutions, a language, a spirit of its own, which it 
 owed to no foreign source. The new people which had 
 arisen in the West, and changed Caesar's name of 
 Britain to Egbert's England, was, as has been truly 
 said, "the one purely German nation that rose upon the 
 wreck of Rome." 
 
 But, perhaps, because so slow and gradual, the Eng- 
 lish conquest was complete, in a sense in which the 
 ^ , Teutonic conquests on the mainland were 
 
 Complete- / , ,. . . 
 
 nessofthe not. It was the Complete displacement of 
 Saxon'con- orie racc by another. How this was done, 
 quest. ^g have but imperfect accounts. We have 
 
 no such record as we have of the Gothic wars, in the 
 Latin writers, Orosius and Jornandes, in the Greeks, Zo- 
 simus, Procopius, and the valuable fragments of reports 
 made by Byzantine envoys and officials. We have no 
 such almost contemporary record, confused and unsatis- 
 factory though it be, as we have of the Frankish conquest 
 in Gregory of Tours. But so much is certain that whereas 
 in the fifth century the language of Britain was Celtic, 
 with an admixture of Latin in the towns where the Ro- 
 manized population was gathered, in the course of two 
 hundred years, Celtic had disappeared, and Latin had 
 
400-800. Cofnpleteness of the English Co7iquest, 67 
 
 been introduced afresh. From the Tamar, the Severn, 
 and the Tweed, a new language, purely and unmixedly 
 Teutonic, in structure, genius, and for the most part in 
 its vocabulary, had become the speech of the country ; 
 the speech of all freemen ; the speech of all but slaves, 
 bondmen, and outlaws ; the speech which gave names, 
 if not to the rivers and the hills, or to the great walled 
 cities remaining from the Roman times, yet to all the 
 present divisions of the land, and to all the new settle- 
 ments of men. The English conquerors, unlike the 
 Gothic and Frankish ones, had not suffered the old pop- 
 ulation to subsist around them. Saxons and Angles, — 
 it is the only way in which the result is to be explained — 
 carried their conquests to extermination. They slew, 
 they reduced to slavery, or they drove off the former in- 
 habitants ; they cleared them away, as the Red Indians 
 were cleared away in America. No trace of intermixture 
 appears between the "Saxon" and the "Welsh,'' who 
 hated one another with the deepest and most irreconcila- 
 ble hatred. No British names appear among the ser- 
 vants of the English kings. No vestiges survived of 
 British political or social life. Romanized cities, villas 
 which showed the marbles and mosaics of the south, 
 Welsh hamlets and hill forts, all perished amid sack, 
 fire, and massacre. Some lines of indestructible Roman 
 roads, like Watling Street, some massive Roman walls, 
 such as the fragments in London, Lincoln, and Caer- 
 gwent, some Anglicized Roman names of cities survive, 
 to show who were masters of the land before the English 
 came. 
 
 The Teutonic conquerors on the continent had long 
 been familiar with the Romans whose masters they at 
 last became. They admired their civilization, or, at least, 
 its fruits. The nearer they came to it the more they 
 
6S Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 
 
 were fascinated by its splendour, its orders, its honours; 
 like Alaric's successor, Athaulf, who began 
 
 Anglo-Saxon, . , , , . . ^ , . . ^ . . 
 
 a heathen With the ambition of substituting a Gothic 
 
 oHques . empire for the Roman, and ended by declar- 
 
 ing that this v/as a dream, and that his highest glory must 
 be to restore the Roman empire of law by Gothic valour. 
 Moreover, most of them had already received Chris- 
 tianity, and were accustomed to hear its lessons in their 
 mother-tongue, before they settled in Gaul and Italy. 
 The subtle power of civilization enthralled and trans- 
 formed them, willing and proud as they were, in spite of 
 all their northern sense of high blood, of strength, and 
 freedom, to yield to its influences. It was not so in Bri- 
 tain. Angles and Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, fresh from 
 the sea and pirate life, or from the bleak flats and sand- 
 hills of the German or Danish coasts, knew nothing of 
 the great civilized empire from which they were sepa- 
 rated by the breadth of Europe. They might possibly 
 have seen Roman soldiers in the garrisons of the British 
 shore. They knew nothing of Roman service, of Roman 
 cities, of Roman policy and law. And they knew noth- 
 ing of Roman religion and owned no reverence for it. 
 When, therefore, they settled in their new homes, there 
 was nothing to enter into competition or conflict with the 
 customs, ideas, moral and social rules, which had gov- 
 erned them in their old ones. Of all things Latin, as of 
 all things British, they made a clean sweep ; it was for- 
 eign to them, it was " Welsh," and they would have 
 none of it. Other German invaders had bowed before 
 the majesty of Christian bishops, and had often, even in 
 the storm of an assault or the sack of a captured town, 
 respected Christian churches. The English conquerors 
 were fiercely heathen, and hated Christianity as the re- 
 ligion of those whom it was their work to destroy from 
 
Political and Religious Training of English. 69 
 
 off the land which was to be the land of the English. 
 Clergy and monks perished with their brethren in the 
 fury of the invasion, and the planting of the English na- 
 tion was the utter destruction of the Christian religion 
 within its borders. 
 
 It was under no indirect influences from a subject 
 population that the English were to unlearn their ancient 
 barbarism. Roman laws, which retained so ^ 
 
 Conversion 
 
 much of their power on the Continent, did and civ.iiza- 
 nothing here. Out of their own customs, English. 
 their own strong and broad notions of right, 
 their own spontaneous efforts after a reasonable and 
 suitable order of life, unaffected by foreign schooling or 
 by imitation of foreign ways, losing perhaps some of the 
 benefits of foreign experience, the chiefs of the new Eng- 
 lish kingdoms worked out principles and institutions 
 which were to be the foundations of a political organiza- 
 tion as solid, as elastic, as enduring as that of Rome. 
 And with respect to their religion, they did not take it by 
 a kind of contagion from a surrounding and conquered 
 race, more instructed and more elevated in its nobler 
 specimens, but more corrupted in its average ones. 
 England was an untouched field for the teachers of 
 Christianity ; its religion had to be begun from the very 
 beginning, as in our day among the heathen tribes of 
 Africa and New Zealand. The English were converted 
 as afterwards the Germans, Scandinavians, and most of 
 the Slave races were converted, entirely from without. 
 A century and a half had passed, and from adventurers 
 and invaders they had become at home in their several 
 shares of England, before Christianity appealed to them. 
 Its appeal came from many and different quarters. It 
 was the appeal almost entirely, not of force, but of per- 
 suasion and example, and it gained its hold on them 
 
70 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 
 
 with singular rapidity and power. Augustine, a mission- 
 ary ambassador from Gregory the Great, the far-off 
 bishop of Rome, the venerable but dimly known person 
 who, in religion, answered to the Roman emperor in 
 things worldly, won the ear, after hesitation and serious 
 thought, of one of the English kings, Ethel- 
 bert of Kent. In the same corner of the 
 island where the heathen invasion had begun, Augustine 
 made good a footing in the court and among the people, 
 and laid the foundation of the great see of Canterbury, 
 destined to be the second see of the West (597-601). 
 Paulinus, another Italian companion of Augustine, 
 preached in the north, and in 627 baptized Edwin, the 
 powerful king of Northumbria, at York. In the north 
 tlie missionaries and teachers came also from the won- 
 derful Irish Church, at this time — the sixth and seventh 
 centuries — keeping up its peculiar traditions, cherishing 
 learning and a high enthusiasm, in complete isolation 
 from the rest of Christendom, and sending forth its mis- 
 sionaries far afield, with a spirit unknown elsewhere. It 
 sent forth, not only St. Columba (565) to the Picts, and 
 St. Aidan to the English Northumbrians (635), but St. 
 Columban (595) to the Burgundian Jura, the Helvetian 
 Zurich, and the Italian cloisters of Bobbio, St. Gall (614) 
 to the Alamans of the lake of Constance, and other less 
 known comrades and friends to the lands of the Franks 
 and Bavarians, to Glarus and Chur, and the highest 
 sources of the Rhine — the apostles at once of the gospel, 
 and of settled life, of husbandry and tillage. In the 
 great kmgdom of Mercia, with its frequent dependency 
 the land of the East Saxons, it was bishops of the school 
 of lona and their English disciples who founded and 
 built up in the middle of the seventh century the Church. 
 The Burgundian Felix (627) preached to the East An- 
 
565-655. Conversion of England. 71 
 
 gles. A bishop from Italy, Birinus (635), sent by Pope 
 Honorius, converted the Enghsh ofWessex. A teacher 
 from the north, Wilfrid of York (664-709), was the apos- 
 tle of the South Saxons. In the second half of the sev- 
 enth century, these separate efforts began to present the 
 aspect of an organized unity under the twenty years* 
 vigorous rule of Archbishop Theodore (668-690), the 
 Greek of Tarsus, who, with his friend Hadrian the Afri- 
 can, had been sent from Rome, " the first archbishop," 
 says Bede, "whom all the English Church obeyed." 
 Like the conquest, the conversion of England spread 
 from different independent centres ; the work began 
 from them at different times, and went on in different 
 ways, and with varying rates of progress, till at last 
 boundaries met and became confluent, and the separate 
 kingdoms found themselves prepared to be fused into 
 one people. And the unity of religion, attained earlier, 
 though not without difficulties of its own, than the unity 
 of the nation, contributed most powerfully to make 
 Northumbrians and Mercians and West Saxons into 
 Englishmen. With fluctuations of success and reaction, 
 with one great and terrible struggle in the middle of 
 England against the new religion, under the Mercian 
 king Penda (624-655), the English kingdoms had with- 
 in a century after the landing of Augustine, become 
 Christian. 
 
 Of this great change and its incidents, a singularly 
 curious and interesting account is given in Bede's His- 
 tory. The causes of it were of more than 
 one kind ; but in the forefront must, un- the conver- 
 doubtedly, be placed the breadth and great- 
 ness of Christian ideas, and the purity, courage, enthusi- 
 asm, and indefatigable self-devotion, though not always 
 innocent of superstition, of the Christian teachers. Sup- 
 
72 Beginning of the Middle Ages, 
 
 posed miracles, and, alas ! sometimes evidently fraudu- 
 lent ones, played their part in recommending the divine 
 message. The sanction and authority of chiefs who 
 were trusted and honored, doubtless went for much with 
 their people. But at bottom it was the teaching itself, 
 with the evident truth of much of it, its nobleness, its high 
 solemnities, its promises, and the consistency of its teach- 
 ers, which conquered to its obedience a people whose 
 customs and whose circumstances were strongly against 
 it. In England, as abroad, Christianity won its way, not 
 merely and not mainly by the support of kings, not 
 merely, though, unhappily, in part, by the worse aid of 
 superstition and fraud, but because it was a gospel for 
 the poor, the slave, the miserable, the ruined, a defiance to 
 the proud, a warning to the great, a bridle to the mighty. 
 And once received it was received with no half a mind, 
 or half-hearted allegiance. The Anglo-Saxon Church 
 had its strange anomalies, its deep blots, its repulsive 
 features. Like other churches, it had to deal in its course 
 both with grave questions and with petty quarrels. It 
 had its rise and prime and its deep decline. But in its 
 best days it had a straightforward seriousness of convic- 
 tion and purpose, and a fire and thoroughness of faith 
 among its early converts, which are very much its own. 
 Bede, like Gregory of Tours, reflects a state of society 
 which is wild, uncontrolled, violent, full of battle and 
 death. But the characteristic passages of Bede are pas- 
 sages which are full of genuine religious or moral inter- 
 est, and which bear the mark of deep feeling and sym- 
 pathy in the writer. The characteristic passages of 
 Gregory's history of the Franks are tragedies of dark 
 and dreadful crime, to which the stories of CEdipus and 
 Lear are tame, and they are told with unmoved calmness 
 and composure. 
 
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Stipremacy of the Frajiks i?t the. West. 75 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 SUPREMACY OF THE FRANKS IN THE WEST — THE ME- 
 ROVINGIAN KINGS, DESCENDANTS OF CLOVIS — THE 
 MAYORS OF THE PALACE — RISE OF THE CAROLINGIAN 
 FAMILY. 
 
 At the end of the sixth century, somewhat more than 
 a hundred years from the abdication of the last Western 
 emperor (476-600), the great change had been accom- 
 phshed, by which, in all the western lands occupied by 
 the empire, the public prerogatives, and the indirect 
 powers of a ruling people, were transferred from the 
 Latin to the German race. The Romans in the time of 
 the empire had, in a degree unknown in the world be- 
 fore, moulded the subject populations to their own like- 
 ness and model. They Romanized the whole West, 
 more or less. Everywhere as time went on, in increas- 
 ing measure, from York to the Columns of Hercules, on 
 the Rhone, on the Seine, on the Rhine, even in the val- 
 leys of the Alps, their institutions, their laws, their edu- 
 cation, their language, their buildings, their monuments, 
 at last — when they adopted it — their Christianity, were 
 the silent and continuous influences which assimilated 
 life and thought and habits to the Italian type, as it had 
 been developed by the marvellous history of Rome. It 
 is scarcely possible to express the greatness of the change 
 produced by the interruption of this process. It was in- 
 terrupted by what is called the invasion of the barbarians. 
 Barbarians they certainly were, who broke in upon the 
 
'J 6 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. d. 476-600. 
 
 Roman empire, and destroyed it in the West. But it was 
 not because they were barbarians that their victory was 
 so fruitful in consequences. It was because they were 
 conquerors of a new and special race. It was because it 
 was the substitution, temporary in one land, permanent 
 in another, of the Teutonic race, one and the same race 
 in all its manifold varieties — Goths, Franks, Saxons, 
 Angles, Lombards — for the preceding Latin rule and 
 supremacy. No greater and more decisive crisis has 
 ever happened in the history of the world than the settle- 
 ment of the Teutonic peoples in the lands which the 
 Latins had filled with their ideas and their language, their 
 manners, their spirit, their names, their customs. Nor is 
 the importance of this change diminished, because in so 
 many parts the German conquerors were greatly influ- 
 enced and at last absorbed by the Romanized population 
 amid which they settled. We cannot tell what the course 
 of history would have been if the Latins had kept the 
 Germans out, in Gaul, in Italy, in Spain, in Britain ; but, 
 assuredly, it would have been very different. The trans- 
 fer of power in the West, from the Latin race to the Ger- 
 man, in the fifth and sixth centuries, constitutes the first 
 act of modern history. 
 
 But it was only the first act of a long and troubled 
 drama, not even yet played out. The German settle^ 
 ment took many shapes. In England it was exclusiv^i 
 and homogeneous. In Gaul it was greatly affected by 
 the circumstances round it, and it allowed its own dis- 
 tinctive features to be by degrees impaired and obliter- 
 ated by foreign influences. In Spain it directly aimed at 
 a policy of fusion between the two races, under the direc- 
 tion of the Church. In Italy, under t!.e Lombards, it 
 was throughout uneasy, oppressive, antagonistic, too 
 strong not to leave deep impressions, but not strong 
 
A. D 600-700. Differ e7ices among the New Nations. 7 7 
 
 enough to master and assimilate the obstinate counter 
 element of Latin character in its native home. Teutonic 
 institutions and feelings grew more and more vigorous in 
 England. In Gaul, after efforts of resistance, German 
 France gradually melted into Latin and "Romance" 
 France. In Spain, under a " Romance " and Latin lan- 
 guage the old feeling and temper of the Goths largely 
 survived ; the basis of Spanish character was Teutonic, 
 and under the long strain of the national and Christian 
 war against the Moors, it issued in that singular mixture 
 of strength and weakness, of loftiness and baseness, 
 which has so often shown itself in Spanish history. In 
 Italy, the Lombard power, though not the Lombard ele- 
 ment, after lasting for two centuries, was thrown off as 
 the Gothic power had been, but, as in the case of the 
 Gothic power, only by foreign aid. In Italy, throughout 
 the middle ages, and down to our own time, the Ger- 
 mans were never, in the judgment and feeling of the 
 Italians, other than what they were at the first — barba- 
 rians, whom the Italians were not strong enough to keep 
 out ; while to the Germans, the Italians never ceased to 
 be "Welsh," the Teutonic equivalent for "barbarian" 
 or "foreigner." 
 
 Thus at the beginning of the seventh century, the new 
 Teutonic settlement appears everywhere established. 
 From the empire, as it existed in the East, it had little to 
 fear. The emperor at Constantinople was still, in mo- 
 ments of convenience or in moods of courtesy, acknow- 
 ledged by the Teutonic kings as invested with a majesty 
 without rival or peer on earth, the source of honours, 
 of legitimate titles, of high dignities, who might still be 
 dangerous on the fringe of their dominions, but who was 
 too far off, and too busy with troubles of his own, to 
 cause disquietude in the West. There was still a certain 
 
78 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. d. 700. 
 
 amount of intercourse with Constantinople. The Lom- 
 bards, hated by the Franks, the Greeks, and the popes, 
 were assailed by occasional alliances, in which the Frank 
 kings intrigued with the emperor, and sometimes over- 
 reached him. The real dangers of the new races arose, 
 first, from their own intestine discords, and their intracta- 
 bleness to order and law ; and, next, from the habits of 
 aggression and pillage lingering in the tribes of their 
 own blood, who remained in their old seats in Germany 
 and on the Danube. 
 
 In England, in the following century, this last danger 
 appeared in a most formidable shape. The British race 
 England : ^^^ been exterminated or crushed into in- 
 
 partial repe- significance in England. Through fierce 
 process of wars among themselves the separate king- 
 quest : the doms learnt one another's strength. The 
 Danes. Smaller ones became attached to the larger, 
 
 and a tendency to union began, strengthened by the 
 strengthening influence of the Church. First, and par- 
 tially, under Northumbria, then under Mercia, and at 
 last more completely under Wessex, a single kingly 
 supremacy embodied the growing fact of the unity, in its 
 laws and its fortunes, of the English nation. But then 
 the new nation began to suffer from the repetition of the 
 process by which it had itself come into being. Just as 
 the fathers of the English had come first with a few pirate 
 ships, then with more, first only for a summer ravage, 
 then to winter in the island ; first only to carry back 
 plunder to their eastern homes on the Weser or the Elbe, 
 then to settle and gain a new home in England, — as they 
 began by making swift inroads into an enemy's country, 
 pushing up the rivers with the tide, or scouring the land 
 far and wide with troops of horsemen, and ended by be- 
 sieging towns, subduing kingdoms, challenging the sub- 
 
A. D. 484-589. Danger to the New Nations. 79 
 
 mission of the Britons, — so came the Danish rovers, 
 " vikings," upon England. But the Danish settlement 
 never became what the earlier Anglo-Saxon one had 
 been. It did not create a new people. The Danes wen 
 a footing in England, a large and lasting one. For a 
 time they became the masters there, and their princes 
 wore the English crown ; but they were too late to found 
 a nation. In spite of the tremendous miseries and losses 
 of the Danish invasion, the English people had become 
 too strongly constituted to be broken up by it, or even to 
 be greatly altered in character and policy. 
 
 In Spain the national history was more tragic. The 
 policy of the great Theoderic, of which scarcely a trace 
 appears in the sons of Clovis, seems to have 
 been continued among the Gothic kings of g^e^^of^the 
 Spain. There also, though in a very differ- ^''^^i*^ 
 ent way from the English, the Goths through 
 all the disturbances of the time, were on their way, appar- 
 ently with a deliberate aim, to political unity and consti- 
 tutional order. After the death of Euric, the conqueror 
 and legislator (484), the Gothic power in Gaul fell before 
 the Franks, and its main seat was transferred to Spain, 
 under a constitutionally elective kingly rule, which, as 
 with the Lombards, the chiefs always tried to keep elec- 
 tive, and the kings usually but not always, tried to make 
 hereditary. But, in contrast with the Lombards in Italy, 
 the Gothic kings, in spite of bloody changes and fierce 
 opposition from their nobility, succeeded in identifying 
 themselves with the land and the people whom they had 
 conquered. They guided the fortunes of the country 
 with a distinct purpose and vigorous hand. By Leovi- 
 gild (572-586), the power of the rebelhous nobility was 
 broken, and the independence and name of the Sueves 
 of Gallicia extinguished. The still more dangerous reli- 
 
So Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 589-642, 
 
 gious conflict between the Catholic population and the 
 inherited Arianism of the Goths was put down, but at 
 the cost of the hfe of his son, Herminigild, who had 
 married a Frank and Catholic princess, and who placed 
 himself at the head of the Catholics. But Leovigild was 
 the last Arian king. This cause of dissen- 
 council of sion was taken away by his son Reccared 
 
 Toledo. (586-601), who solemnly abandoned Arian- 
 
 ism, and embraced with zeal the popular 
 Catholic creed. He was followed by the greater part of 
 his Arian subjects, but the change throughout the land 
 was not accomplished without some fierce resistance. It 
 led among other things to the disappearance of the 
 Gothic language, and of all that recalled the Arian days, 
 and to the destruction in Spain of what there was of 
 Gothic literature, such as the translation of the Bible, 
 supposed to be tainted with Arianism. But it determined 
 the complete fusion of the Gothic and Latin population. 
 After Reccared, two marked features of the later Spanish 
 character began to show themselves. One was the great 
 prominence in the state of the ecclesiastical element. 
 The Spanish kings sought in the clergy a counterpoise 
 to their turbulent nobility. The great Church councils 
 of Toledo became the legislative assemblies of the na- 
 tion ; the bishops in them took precedence of the nobles ; 
 laws were made there as well as canons ; and seventeen 
 of these councils are recorded between the 
 ^^ " ^'** end of the fourth century and the end of 
 
 the sev-iftth. The other feature was that stern and sys- 
 temati'' intolerance, which became characteristic of 
 Spain Under Sisebut (612-620), took place the first 
 expu-ion of the Jews. The Jews of Spain, whose 
 settlements were numerous, rich, and of old date, had to 
 choose between baptism, or else exile with the loss of 
 
A. D. 642-7 ^°- Tfie Gothic Kingdo7n of Spain. '81 
 
 their possessions. This legislation was renewed with 
 continued severity, and the kings took a special oath to 
 enforce it. The Spanish nation, meanwhile, was being 
 knit together ; the garrisons of the Greek empire were 
 gradually driven to the coast, and, under Suinthila (620- 
 631), finally expelled from the peninsula. The Gothic 
 kings, mostly elected, men for the most part of energy 
 and purpose, sometimes of relentless purpose, who still 
 retained amid Latin influences their peculiar Teutonic 
 names, governed with a statesmanship unknown among 
 the Franks. To break the restless and rebellious 
 spirit of the nobles, which Gregory of Tours thought 
 peculiar to the Goths, Chindasuintha (642-652), an old 
 man of eighty, banished at a stroke from Spain two 
 hundred nobles and seven hundred freemen, confiscat- 
 ing their estates, and reducing their families to serfdom. 
 It produced profound peace, while the Franks under 
 their feeble kings were distracted by the fierce rivalry of 
 Bruinhild and Fredegund, and the rising Mayors of the 
 Palace. Equally resolute in encountering the natural 
 turbulence of their warriors and attentive to the political 
 condition of the kingdom, the kings, for the most part, 
 till the last showed themselves a match for their for- 
 midable nobility ; and, under their care, the legislation 
 of the West Goths attained a methodical form and a 
 comparatively judicious and equitable character peculiar 
 to it. Under Chindasuintha (642-652), the laws of the 
 two races were fused into one, and for the first time 
 among the Teutonic nations, personal law was changed 
 into a law of the land. Under the kings who succeeded 
 him down to Egika (687-701), and from the councils of 
 Toledo, grew up the Forum fudicum, the Gothic Code, 
 " the first law-book in which the Roman and German 
 law was attempted to be harmonized into a systematic 
 
82 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 622-711. 
 
 whole : " the first Western legislation which aims at ex- 
 hibiting the philosophical idea of law. The Gothic 
 realm of Spain was the most flourishing, and the most 
 advanced of the new Teutonic kingdoms. It was rich 
 and powerful, and though there was still much that was 
 barbarous, ungovernable, corrupt, and dangerous, the 
 powers of the country were in strong hands ; and the 
 kings, the nobles, and the clergy, all who could repre- 
 sent the nation, were learning to work together in their 
 public assemblies. 
 
 But however the Goths in Spain might have worked 
 out their political career, their course was rudely ar- 
 rested. The little cloud, which in the beginning of the 
 seventh century, had arisen in Arabia, had by the begin- 
 ning of the eighth, swelled and spread into a devastating 
 storm, sweeping round all the coasts of the 
 Saracen Mediterranean. In 622, the flight of Ma- 
 
 conques . homet from Mecca to Medina had fixed a 
 
 new era in history — the Hegira. In the ten years which 
 intervened between it and his death (632), he had es- 
 tablished a new religion in Arabia, and converted the 
 tribes of Arabia, or the Saracens, into its armed and en- 
 thusiastic apostles. While the Goths had been setthng 
 their laws, while their kings had been marshalling their 
 court after the order of Byzantium, the Saracens had 
 been drawing nearer and nearer. At the time that Chin- 
 tila (636-640), was driving out the Jews, the Saracens 
 were taking Damascus and Alexandria; while the fierce 
 old man Chindasuintha was crushing rebel nobles and 
 reforming the law, they were making their next step and 
 invading Africa. While his son was ordering the oflices 
 of the court of Toledo after the imperial model, they 
 were beginning their first nine years' siege of Constanti- 
 nople (668-677). Their fleets had begun to attack the 
 
Overthrow of the Gothic Kingdom in Spain. Z^^ 
 
 Spanish coast, though they had always been repulsed. 
 But in Spain they had two allies : the Jewish race, 
 there and in Africa smarting under their persecu- 
 tions; and the factions, the ambitions, and the cor- 
 ruption of the high clergy and nobles. A traitor, it 
 is said, Count Julian, invited the Saracens, and they 
 came, burning their ships behind them. The tremen- 
 dous battle of the Guadalete, near Cadiz, lasting a whole 
 summer week, from Sunday to Sunday, decided the fate 
 of the kingdom and the course of its history. It was to 
 Spain what the battle of Hastings was to England. The 
 Gothic nobility perished in large numbers. 
 King Roderick, the last Gothic king, was ''"^^^^ ,711- 
 never seen again. In ten years' time the Saracen inva- 
 sion had overwhelmed almost the whole country, and 
 there was nothing left in Spain to Christianity and the 
 European races, but the mountains of the Asturias and 
 Old Castile. Spain was the only one of the new Teu- 
 tonic nations which was beaten down by an entirely alien 
 power. It did not finally succun^b. '^ In the northern 
 provinces, the Christians not only rallied, but from their 
 mountain fastnesses began a series «f unintermitted at- 
 tacks on the Mahometans. Behind the screen of the 
 Spanish highlands new kingdoms were organized ; As- 
 turias (718) ; Oviedo (737) ; Leon (914^ Navarre (905); 
 Aragon, Castile (1035), At length the t?de of invasion 
 began to roll southward till the Moors wero swept away ; 
 but several centuries of the early national l«fe of Spain 
 were consumed in that most terrible and demoralizing 
 discipline, in which unsparing hatred is elev^^ted to a 
 heroic virtue — the discipline of a religious warfare. 
 
 Of all the new nations, the Franks alone, though per- 
 petually troubled with intestine quarrels, ProiMnen 
 maintained their comparative exemption of the 
 from the external shocks and disasters which 
 
84 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. v. 
 
 fell on their neighbours. Strong enough to keep together 
 and to hold their own, they deepened the foundations 
 of their power over Gaul and the lands of the Rhine, en- 
 joying their own rich and magnificent heritage, asserting 
 their supremacy over the heathen tribes of the German 
 border. For more than three centuries after the Teu- 
 tonic conquest, the Franks held the foremost place 
 among the new nations. " When Rome fell," says Otto 
 of Frisingen, a German chronicler of the 12th century, 
 " ' Francia * — the Frank race and kingdom, for we must 
 not yet begin to translate by the later and narrower 
 France — ' arose to take the crown.' " The phrase is of 
 course exaggerated ; but it expresses with truth the com- 
 parative prominence of the Franks. It is the more re- 
 markable, because the kingdom of Clovis, instead of 
 continuing in the hands of a single ruler, was imme- 
 diately broken up under his descendants into separate 
 kingdoms, acknowledging a loose tie of unity, and from 
 time to time brought together, but always ready to fly 
 apart again. And, further, in the family of Clovis, the 
 Mervings or Merovingians, there is no sign, with one in- 
 considerable exception, the Austrasian king Dagobert 
 (628-638), of the political aims, or of the military capa- 
 city, which appear among the Goths of Spain, and the 
 English in Britain. The history of the Frank kings, in 
 Gregory of Tours, is a sickening story of lawless and 
 unbridled self-indulgence, of domestic hatreds, treach- 
 ery, and cruelty. Brother was ever ready to assail and 
 conspire against brother, to take him at advantage, to 
 exterminate his children. Their attempts at enlarging 
 their domains at one another's expense were usually as 
 feeble and stupid as they were unscrupulous. Their 
 prevailing and monotonous brutality was only checked 
 by superstitious fears of the wrath of St. Martin of 
 
CHAP. V. Power of the Franks. 85 
 
 Tours. It was only varied by good-natured licentious- 
 ness and perfidy such as that of King Guntram of Or- 
 leans, or by pedantry like that of King Chilperic of Sois- 
 sons, "the Nero and Herod of our time," as Gregory 
 calls him, but who also dabbled in heresy, tried to add 
 new letters to the Latin alphabet, and wrote Latin verses 
 which would not scan. But the Frank race with their 
 territorial chiefs, still Teutonic in the main, though in 
 the west and south becoming less so in each successive 
 generation, preserved the vigour, the audacity, the fight- 
 ing qualities of their blood. They occupied a land of 
 great natural wealth, and great geographical advan- 
 tages, which had been prepared for them by Latin 
 culture ; they inherited great cities which they had 
 not built, and fields and vineyards which they had 
 not planted ; and they had the wisdom, not to destroy, 
 but to use their conquest. They were able with sin- 
 gular ease and confidence to employ and trust the 
 services, civil and military, of the Latin population. 
 There is no appearance of any native rising to take ad- 
 vantage of their internal discords, till late in the decline 
 of the family of Clovis. Then, at last, and too late, the 
 great south-western province of Aquitaine, with its natu- 
 ral riches and its flourishing cities, its Roman and Gothic 
 memories, its turbulent and warlike native tribes — the 
 tribes which have left their names in portions of it, Vas- 
 cones, Gascony, Basques, — struck boldly and obstinately 
 for independence, and gave much trouble to the succes- 
 sors of the Merovingians, the mighty founders of the 
 Carolingian dynasty. The bond between the Franks and 
 the native races was the clergy. From the time of Clovis 
 their kings had deliberately favoured the Latin clergy. 
 Their patronage was deeply mischievous to the purity 
 of the Church, but it helped forward the alliance and the 
 
86 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. v. 
 
 fusion between Germans and Latins. The forces of the 
 whole nation were at the disposal of the ruling race ; and 
 under Frank chiefs, the Latins and Gauls learned once 
 more to be warriors. Thus strengthened, the Franks not 
 only repelled any pressure from beyond the Rhine or 
 the Alps, but they kept invasion at a distance by being 
 themselves assailants. They were the one race whom 
 the spirit of invasion carried backwards over their old 
 steps and to their old seats ; the one nation which after 
 settling in the West flowed back across the Rhine, and 
 attempted again and again from Gaul the conquest of 
 Italy, first from Narses, and then from the Lombards. 
 Narses defeated them ; the Lombards for a long time 
 held their own. While the family of Clovis ruled, the 
 Franks ravaged Italy, but never subdued it. But over 
 the German nations, Frisians and Saxons, Thuringians, 
 Bavarians, and Alamans, the Frank kings asserted an 
 imperfect and contested but persistent supremacy. 
 Frank kings, allied in blood though perpetually quar- 
 relling, were felt to be the heads of the Teutonic nations, 
 from the Frisian marshes between the mouths of the 
 Rhine and Weser, to the valleys and lakes of the Ala- 
 mans, in what is now Switzerland. 
 
 But among the Franks, as among other nations, two 
 opposite tendencies were continually at work ; the ten- 
 dency to aggregation and national unity, and the ten- 
 dency to dispersion and independence. There were 
 „ , , further, among the Franks, though they were 
 
 Frank unity ^ . * . . 
 
 and divi- SO friendly to Latin culture, conflicting dis- 
 
 trasia and positions to gravitate, in the Eastern lands 
 Neustria. towards what was German, and in the 
 
 Western lands towards what was Latin. One of these 
 conflicts was represented by the continual division and 
 reunion of the kingdom of Clovis. Divided at first 
 
CHAP. V. Frank Unity and Frank Divisions. 87 
 
 among his four sons, the different portions were merged 
 or shared, as death removed one or more of the part- 
 ners, till all the shares came into the hands of a sur- 
 vivor, Clothar of Soissons (558), who again began the 
 division among his children, with the same result. Eight 
 times in the course of a century and a half, East and 
 West Franks, Burgundy and Aquitaine, had been divi- 
 ded ; three times, but only for a few years, they had been 
 reunited under one king. But further, in these divisions, 
 with great fluctuations of boundaries and possessions, two 
 distinct centres of different national influences gradually 
 disclose themselves. The Francia Romana and the 
 Francia Teutonica, the " Frankland," surrounded by a 
 Latin population, and the original " Frankland " border- 
 ing on the Rhine, and recruited from beyond it, came by 
 natural and necessary causes, to be more and more 
 contrasted with one another. From the middle of the 
 sixth century, the Teutonic or Eastern division be- 
 came more distinctly defined; it became known as 
 Auster, Austrasia, with Reims, and then with Metz for 
 its capitals ; in speech and feeling it was thoroughly Ger- 
 man, and there was the focus of German influence. The 
 land of the Western Franks acquired, in opposition to 
 Austrasia, the name of Neuster, Neustria, a name the 
 origin of which is not clear, the New, or Younger ^ or West- 
 ern kingdom and which is also found with a correspon- 
 ding Austria, a western and eastern division, among the 
 Lombards of the north of Italy. Clovis's old capital, 
 Paris, was its natural centre ; but Paris was sometimes 
 claimed as a joint possession by his descendants, and 
 then Soissons or Tournay were the residences of its 
 kings. Burgundy, still a separate province, and some- 
 times a separate kingdom, with Orleans or Chalons-sur- 
 Saone for capitals, gradually became joined to Neustria. 
 
88 Begin7iing of the Middle Ages. chap. v. 
 
 Aquitaine, with its wealth and its Latin cities, was at first 
 shared by the different brother kings, and then became 
 the prize of the strongest. But while Austrasia continued 
 German, the Franks of the West were acquiring more 
 and more a Latin character. Still, with wide and in- 
 creasing differences, these great divisions formed one 
 and the same Frank kingdom, — Frank, in opposhion to 
 Roman, as well as to Gothic, Lombard, Saxon, or Slave. 
 For a long time it seemed uncertain whether what Clovis 
 had conquered was to be one realm or many ; it seemed 
 equally doubtful whether German influences and Ger- 
 man languages were not to prevail to the Atlantic, the 
 Pyrenees, and the Mediterranean. Three centuries 
 passed before this great question was settled. But very 
 slowly and by an insensible change, not easy to trace in 
 detail, the two great countries which the Frank settlement 
 had for a time partially united, were again finally divid- 
 ed ; and Gaul, though under a new name, derived from 
 the German occupation, drifted back into its Latin sym- 
 pathies, and its opposition to Germany. 
 
 The family of Clovis, the Mervings or Merovingians, 
 „ ., , fast degenerated. They lost their father's 
 
 Failure of ° ■' 
 
 the Mer- Strength ; they retained, almost to the last, 
 
 Mayors of their father's cruelty and unscrupulous per- 
 the palace. f^^y._ They became unequal to the contest 
 for power, not with the conquered people, but with the 
 great men of their palace and retinue, their own com- 
 panions and warriors ; the men whom they created 
 dukes of provinces, and counts of great cities, who, 
 though as yet hereditary only through the accident of 
 personal qualities, were growing up round them into a 
 powerful nobility. They were governed during the last 
 part of the sixth century by terrible queens, — two rivals, 
 equally famous for their beauty, their audacity and their 
 
The Mayors of the Palace. The Pipin family . 89 
 
 crimes, — Fredegund, the low-born Neustrian Frank, the 
 wife of Chilperic of Soissons (561-584) ; and Brunihild, 
 the Gothic princess, the wife of his brother, Sigibert of 
 Metz (561-575), the daughter of the Gothic king of 
 Spain, a thanagild. Brunihild's sister, the Gothic wife 
 of Chilperic, had been murdered to make way for Frede- 
 gund ; and the hatred and ambition of the Frankish and 
 Gothic sisters-in-law filled the royal houses with intrigue 
 and murder. Chilperic and Sigibert, Fredegund's hus- 
 band and brother-in-law, both perished by her plots ; 
 Brunihild, as ruthless in her crimes, but leaving a more 
 royal memory in the local traditions of France, was torn 
 to pieces by a wild horse, in her old age, by Fredegund's 
 ■vindictive son, the second Clothar (613) ; she had been 
 the murderess, he said, often Frank kings. Then there 
 appear at the side of the king, and at the head of their 
 administration, officers who are known in history as the 
 " Mayors of the Palace" [Majores Domus), elected by the 
 great men, or appointed by the king, according as each 
 happened to be the stronger. Under their feeble mas- 
 ters, they rose into a position, new among Germans, but 
 analogous to that of the barbarian Patricians, such as 
 Stilicho and Ricimer, in the last days of the Western 
 empire, and perhaps imitated from the usages of the im- 
 perial court. Their office has contributed to the vocab- 
 ulary of politics a new phrase for indirect or illegitimate 
 power, just as a phrase for political nullity derives its origin 
 from the decayed and helpless family of the fierce Clovis, 
 the Rois Faineants. The Mayors of the Palace make 
 their appearance amid the ferocious quarrels kept alive 
 by Fredegund and Brunihild, of whose purposes and 
 crimes they are the instruments or the victims ; but after 
 the sacrifice of Brunihild to family vengeance and to 
 the fears and hatred of the Frank nobles, the Mayors of 
 
90 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. v. 
 
 the Palace assume a new importance, as representing 
 the rival interests of the Austrasian and Neustrian king- 
 doms. After a number of insignificant names, men at 
 length appear who concentrate in their hands the whole 
 power of each state, and play with the last Chilperics 
 and Childeberts like the pieces in a game of chess. In 
 the beginning of the seventh century, the eastern Mayors 
 of the Palace, the dukes of Austrasia, all of them united 
 by kindred or family ties, Arnulf, afterwards Bishop of 
 Metz, Pipin of Landen, Pipin of Heristal, established a 
 character for wisdom and virtue which gave them a 
 popularity and influence new in Frank history. Their 
 natural antagonists were the Neustrian mayors, one of 
 whom, Ebroin (656-681), was a formidable and danger- 
 ous opponent. For more than twenty years the struggle 
 for supremacy went on. Each side was supported not 
 merely by the lay chiefs of each kingdom, but by great 
 bishops, some of them since canonized, who threw 
 themselves into the quarrels and intrigues of the contest, 
 and sometimes, like St. Didier of Vienne and St. Leger 
 of Autun, perished in it. After various turns of fortune, 
 Ebroin, bold, resolute and cruel, had at last broken the 
 Austrasian power, and established the supremacy of 
 Neustria. But in 681 he was murdered ; and six years 
 later Pipin of Heristal won the battle of Testry, between 
 Peronne and St. Quentin, over the Neustrians (687)- 
 The result of the contest was the decisive victory of 
 Austrasia, the victory for two centuries of the German 
 element among the Franks over the Latin, a revival and 
 restoration of the original Teutonic character in the 
 Frank kingdom, for the next period of its existence. 
 The hne of Clevis lingered ingloriously after the battle 
 ^^ „. . of Testry, reigning but not ruling, for more 
 
 The Pipins. ^ » o o o 
 
 than sixty years. The new masters of the 
 
CHAP. V. The Fipins. oi 
 
 Frank kingdom were the dukes of Austrasia, Pipin 
 of Heristal, and his sons, a vigorous family, German in 
 blood, ecclesiastical in their relationships, with strong 
 and clear political purposes. The founders of the race 
 were the elder Pipin of Landen (1639), and St, Arnulf), 
 (1641), who, like so many of the bishops of the time, 
 had been first a soldier and a statesman, and who, 
 before he was bishop of Metz, was Duke of Austrasia 
 and Mayor of the Palace. One of Arnulf's sons became, 
 like his father, bishop of Metz ; another married a 
 daughter of Arnulf s friend, Pipin of Landen, also Mayor 
 of the Palace. The grandson of St. Arnulf and of Pipin 
 was Pipin of Heristal (1714). To reunite under one 
 strong hand the dominions which the sons of Clovis had 
 allowed to be broken up, was the policy of the long rule 
 of Pipin of Heristal ; and like Clovis, he cultivated and 
 used the friendship and good offices of the Church, but 
 on a larger scale — allying himself with the pope as 
 Clovis had allied himself with the bishops of Reims and 
 Tours. Pipin's policy was carried out with success by 
 his famous son, Charles Martel, "the Hammer." The 
 German nations beyond the Rhine were more and more 
 compelled to admit the supremacy of the Franks ; and 
 Pipin warmly encouraged the missionaries from England, 
 St. Boniface (68a-t755), and his companions, who about 
 this time were beginning to penetrate among the heathen 
 tribes, and were laying the foundations of some of the 
 most famous German sees on the Rhine — Utrecht, Mainz, 
 Worms, Spire. His son, Charles Martel 
 (716-741), after a decisive struggle with do- m^^"^'? 
 
 mestic anarchy, encountered and beat back 
 the greatest danger that ever threatened Western Europe. 
 At the great battle, named of Tours, not far from the 
 fields near Poitiers, where Clovis vanquished the West 
 
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CH. V. The Franks, the Popes , and the Lombards. 93 
 
 Goths, Charles Martel routed the invading Aiab host, 
 and slew their formidable leader, Abderahman (732). 
 This great overthrow, followed by the expulsion of the 
 Arabs from Narbonne five years later, was the final and 
 decisive check to the Saracen invasions of the West. 
 Aquitaine, which had began to aspire to independence, 
 was once more recovered to Frank supremacy. Charles 
 Martel shrank not from incurring the displeasure of the 
 Church by using its property for political ends, and to 
 maintain in efficiency the armies which he needed. Its 
 increasing secularity and wealth invited spoliation. 
 Bishops had degenerated into courtiers and soldiers ; 
 and Charles Martel had no scruple in giving even such 
 bishoprics as Reims and Treves, Paris and Rouen, to be 
 held by his warriors and dependents. But if he dealt 
 roughly with the Church at home, he was its patron 
 abroad. By the novel relations which he was the first 
 to establish between the Franks and the pope, he laid 
 the foundations of that central power of the Church in 
 Western Christendom, which in the middle ages grew to 
 such vast proportions. Charles Martel was the first of 
 the new princes beyond the Alps who was invited by the 
 bishop of Rome to interfere in the affairs of Italy. There 
 had been a long and increasing wrangle between the 
 Lombards and the Italians, in which the popes usually 
 represented at once the national spirit and pride of the 
 Itahans, the traditions of the Cathohc faith, and their own 
 high pretensions to stand in the very place of St. Peter. 
 The Lombards, probably faithless, certainly oppressive 
 and encroaching, had, without any great coherence among 
 themselves, made themselves the torment and the terror 
 of Italy. They seemed unable to grow into a nation ; they 
 still, after 200 years, were as far as ever from peace with the 
 Italians. At length, under Liutprand (712-744), the ablest 
 
94 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. v. 
 
 of the Lombard kings, there first appeared a chance of 
 consolidation for the kingdom, and friendliness with the 
 Italians. For once he allied himself with a vigorous 
 pope, Gregory II. (715-731), against the Greeks of Ra- 
 venna : and he is said to have been the first donor of a 
 city and territory (Sutri) to the pope. But the Iconoclas- 
 tic controversy, on the use of images and pictures in 
 worship, raised by Leo thelsaurian, had begun to divide 
 Greeks and Latins. Liutprand shifted about from one 
 side to the other, seeking only his own advantage in the 
 quarrel. The Lombards outwitted themselves. The next 
 pope, Gregory III. (713-743), despairing of peace, much 
 less help from the Lombards against the Greeks, turned 
 to the Franks beyond the Alps. Charles Martel was 
 occupied, and near his end. In 741, Pope Gregory, 
 Charles Martel, and the Emperor Leo died; in 744, 
 Liutprand followed them, and left a series of weak suc- 
 cessors. But the foundation of the Frank alliance had 
 been made ; from that time the Franks came to be looked 
 upon as the natural protectors of the popes, and a well- 
 understood reciprocation of benefits began. It was a 
 new position for the Franks to find themselves courted 
 and flattered by the spiritual head of Roman Christian- 
 ity ; it was a new position for the Roman bishop to find 
 himself leagued by a community of interest and by an 
 interchange of services with the rising power of the 
 West. 
 
 Without the name of king, Charles Martel was the 
 second founder of the Frank kingdom. He left his 
 power and office to his two sons, one of whom. Carlo- 
 man, soon voluntarily resigned his rank and retired to a 
 Pipin the monastic life at Monte Cassino. His brother, 
 
 Little, 747. the third Pipin, Pipin the Short, or the Little, 
 resumed his father's task of consolidating the Frank 
 
A. D. 752. Deposition of Child eric III. 95 
 
 power. But he advanced a step beyond his father's pol- 
 icy. He resolved that the Merovingian dynasty should 
 come to an end. Nothing is more remarkable than that 
 at that early period of political forms and organization, 
 and in an age of such ready and unscrupulous force, the 
 name and the reality of power should have been, by a 
 kind of constitutional fiction, not merely in different 
 hands but in different families ; the name uninterrupted- 
 ly in the family of Clovis, the reality in the hereditary 
 dukes of Austrasia and Mayors of the Palace. It is still 
 more remarkable that this should have lasted undisturbed 
 for more than half a century. A writer, almost a con- 
 temporary, Eginhard, the biographer of Charles the 
 Great, has left a description of the forlorn and silent 
 helplessness of the last descendants of Clovis. All the 
 wealth, he tells us, and all the power of the state be- 
 longed to the mayors of the palace. " Nothing was left 
 to the king, except the kingly name ; with long hair and 
 flowing beard, he sat on the throne to receive envoys 
 from all quarters, but it was only to give them the an- 
 swers which he was bidden to give. His kingly title 
 was an empty shadow, and the allowance for his sup- 
 port depended on the pleasure of the mayor of the pal- 
 ace. The king possessed nothing of his own but one 
 poor farm, with a house on it, and a scanty number of 
 attendants, to pay him necessary service and respect. 
 He went abroad in a waggon drawn by oxen, and guided 
 by a herdsman in the country fashion ; thus was he 
 brought to the palace or to the annual assemblies of the 
 people for the affairs of the realm ; thus he went home 
 again. But the government of the kingdom, and all 
 business, foreign or domestic, were in the hands of the 
 mayors of the palace." 
 
 That with such a race as the Franks this state of things 
 
g6 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. v. 
 
 should at last have come to an end is not surprising. 
 ^ , , , What his father and^andfather had shrunk 
 
 End of the , ....... 
 
 Mero- from, Pipm found himself m a position to 
 
 line^'752- Undertake. He was sure of the help of the 
 
 ^rowned b popcs with v/hom his family had already es- 
 
 thepope. tablished a firm alliance, and who looked to 
 
 Beginning •• -r-. ■. i • i t • -i • 
 
 of the Caro- the Franks as their deliverers in their trou- 
 lingian line. ^-^^^ ^-^^ ^j^^ ^.j^^j Teutonic race which ruled 
 
 in Italy. Pipin appealed to the pope (Zacharias) to say, 
 
 whether it was right that he who had no kingly power 
 
 should have the kingly name. Pope Zacha- 
 741-752. . . . . 
 
 rias gave the answer which it was intended 
 
 he should give. He sanctioned the deposition of the last 
 Merovingian king. Childeric HI., the last of the line of 
 Clovis, passed without a struggle — a monk with his hair 
 shorn, and so incapable of any secular dignity — from 
 his palace or his farm, to a monastery. In the annual 
 assembly of the bishops and great men at Soissons, Pipin 
 was proclaimed king of the Franks (March, 752), and he 
 received from the English apostle of Ger- 
 many, Boniface, archbishop of Mainz, the 
 consecration of the Church. Two years later a pope, 
 (Stephen II.) for the first time crossed the Alps, and was 
 seen in the West. He came to press again for aid 
 against the Lombards. The help was promised ; and 
 then from his hands, at St. Denis, in 754, 
 Pipin and his two sons, Charles, a boy 
 about twelve years old, and his younger brother Carlo- 
 man, received the anointing which hallowed their king- 
 ship, and which, as the pope held, made them true 
 kings. 
 
 The deposition of Childeric III. whatever was 
 the form of the pope's sanction to it, was at any 
 rate the first instance of such interference on the part of 
 
A.. D. 752. Deposition of Childeric III. 97 
 
 the popes. The pope's sanction, probably very vague at 
 the time, and very obscurely recorded, was the subject 
 at a later period of fierce debates, as to its authority and 
 real bearing. But the whole transaction was _. 
 
 ° First ex- 
 
 the first exercise, on the part of the popes, ample of the 
 of a claim to change the allegiance of sub- pSg 
 jects, to authorize the removal of one king- P^^^'- 
 and the election of another. Pope Zacharias and his 
 successors acted, apparently, in this first instance, as 
 arbiters, the most venerable that could be found, consult- 
 ed on matters deeply important to the Frank nation ; 
 they exercised a power which in this case they were 
 prompted to claim and were invited to use. Unfortu- 
 nately they were not disinterested arbiters. Their deci- 
 sion was influenced by their own advantages and hopes ; 
 the coronation of the new king was the result of a bar- 
 gain ; and for the service which they rendered they 
 were paid in cities and provinces. Pipin, having in his 
 company the pope who had crowned him with a solemn- 
 ity new among Teutonic kings, crossed the Alps, hum- 
 bled Aistulf the Lombard king, and forced 
 him to give security that he would respect ^^'*' 
 
 the rights and property of St. Peter. Aistulf evaded his 
 engagement, and Pipin compelled him, after 
 a second overthrow, to become tributary to ^^ * 
 
 the Frank kingdom, and to cede to his conqueror all 
 that he had recently won of the territory still left to the 
 Greek emperor in the north of Italy ; the exarchate of 
 Ravenna, and the Fleminian " Pentapolis," an expres- 
 sion for the lands and cities between the Apennines and 
 the Adriatic, from Ferrara to Ancona. This territory the 
 Frank king presented as a donation to St. Peter ; it be- 
 came, with some additions, south of Ancona and west of 
 the Apennines, the Papal State. The real donation of 
 
98 Beginfiing of the Middle Ages. chap. vi. 
 
 the Frankish king was shortly afterwards supported by 
 the production of what purported to be a still older dona- 
 tion ; the famous forged " donation" of Constantine. 
 Thus, from the annointing at St. Denis of the second 
 kingly line of the Franks, arose, in the first place, the 
 temporal dominion of the popes, held in the beginning 
 as a temporal lordship under the overlordship of "the king 
 or emperor, then claimed by them as independent 
 princes in absolute sovereignty; and next, the pretension, 
 broadening out indefinitely from this precedent, to inter- 
 fere in the political and civil affairs of Christendom, to 
 dispose of kingdoms, to set up and degrade kings. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE ROMAN EMPIRE IN THE EAST. 
 
 While in the West civilized order was disturbed and 
 broken up, to be reconstructed on a new basis, in the 
 East it went on continuously from the days 
 ^reserved°" °^ Constantine till its temporary interruption 
 the Eastern by the crusaders (1203-1 261), and its de- 
 struction by the Ottomans (1453). Constan- 
 tine had transplanted the Roman name, the centre of 
 Roman power, and much of what was Roman in ideas 
 and habits, to Byzantium, the New Rome. There, with- 
 out losing its deeply impressed imperial character, it also 
 became Greek, and it became Christian. The result was 
 that remarkable empire, which, though since its fall it 
 has become a by-word, was, when it was standing, the 
 wonder and the envy of the barbarian world, the mys- 
 terious " Micklegarth " "the Great City, the Town of 
 
CHAP. VI. Civilization in the Eastern Empire. 99 
 
 towns " of the northern legends. It inherited and it re- 
 tained the great Roman traditions of centralization, of 
 scientific jurisprudence, of elaborate and systematic ad- 
 ministration. It worked upon an unbroken experience 
 of government, on unbroken habits of organization, as 
 familiar and easy to it, as it was difficult in the West. It 
 improved and perfected the great legacy which it had 
 received of republican and imperial law. It often ex- 
 hibited what seemed to be hopeless feebleness and de- 
 cay ; but beneath these appearances were the permanent 
 elements of vast and enduring strength. Amid the con- 
 vulsions and changes of the West, it lasted unchanged 
 for more than ten centuries, almost the same in lan- 
 guage, in spirit, and even in its ways and forms, under 
 the last Constantine as under the first. For ten centuries, 
 in spite of terrible disasters, bloody revolutions, loss of 
 provinces, domestic misrule, itself maimed, weakened, 
 unprosperous, it yet maintained itself, the unaided out- 
 post of Christendom, against the fiercest assaults, not 
 only of swarming barbarian hordes, but of the victorious 
 enthusiasts of Islam. It had, indeed, in full measure, 
 the vices of an over-cultivation, which is not braced by 
 a corresponding moral force and elevation. Much in it 
 was degenerate, hypocritical, effete, corrupt, degraded ; 
 it had many of the faults of European civilization in the 
 eighteenth century. But it is idle to talk of mere weak- 
 ness in an empire, which for 1,000 years preserved ci- 
 vilized society, laws, institutions, commerce, arts, amid 
 the most tremendous shocks and dangers ; which could 
 bear to be so badly, cruelly, feebly governed, as certainly 
 it often was, without falling to pieces before its enemies. 
 In truth, during all the dark days of trouble in the West, 
 contemporary with its rude attempts and beginnings of 
 social order, there was on the Bosphorus one of the most 
 
loo Beginjting of the Middle Ages. chap. vi. 
 
 magnificent cities that the world has seen. In it, as at 
 Rome and at Venice, was centralized a power, strong 
 in its resources of government, in its experience and 
 skill to use its vast materials and its varied populations, 
 in the great wealth created by an extended and active 
 commerce, in the knowledge how to apply it, in the pos- 
 session of all the mechanical and scientific experience 
 of those ages. In it ruled a succession of men, most 
 various in character and fortune, many very bad and 
 very incapable, but among them a large proportion who 
 were of the stamp and force of those who save states. In 
 it, the literary tradition, inherited from Antioch, from 
 Athens, from Alexandria, still survived, and though taste 
 and power might decline, they never failed as they did 
 in the West, and they sometimes rose to a respectable 
 standard. And in it, the visitor from the rude West 
 might find a court, with its pomp and luxury, its refine- 
 ment, its politeness, its etiquette, which, long after the 
 days of Charles, Alfred, and Otto, was to the courts of 
 the Franks and English, what the Courts of Versailles 
 und St. James were to the Court of Peter the Great. 
 
 The Eastern empire did not at once, either after the 
 partition between the sons of Theodosius (395), or after 
 the deposition or abdication of the last Western emperor 
 (476), lose its connexion with the West. Long after the 
 separation in fact had come, the idea of the unity, the 
 unani7nitas, of the empire lasted. The Eastern emperor, 
 Zeno (474-491), had received from Odoacer the insignia 
 of the dethroned Augustulus, in token that the world 
 only needed one emperor; and he was acknowledged, 
 in form and courtesy, at least, by Goths and Franks, as 
 the head of the Roman world. Further, he was so ac- 
 knowledged by the popes, who were becoming more and 
 more the centres of genuine Roman influence, amid the 
 
Civilization ifi Eastern Ejupii'e — -Justinian. loi 
 
 visible triumph of the new races. And it was long before 
 the hope and purpose of exacting real obedience were 
 abandoned at Constantinople. 
 
 In one signal instance this purpose was victoriously 
 carried out. This was the reconquest of Italy, Africa, 
 and part of Spain, under Justinian. In the 
 
 /• t mt 1 ■ T 1 / y\ Just nian. 
 
 year after the great Theoderic died (526), 
 the most famous in the line of Eastern emperors, since 
 Constantinople, began his long and eventful reign (527- 
 567). Justinian was born a Slavonian peasant, near 
 what then was Sardica, and is now Sofia ; his original 
 Slave name, Uprawda, was latinized into Justinian, when 
 he became an officer in the imperial guard. Since the 
 death of the second Theodosius (450), the Eastern em- 
 perors had been, as they were continually to be, men 
 not of Roman or Greek, but of barbarian or half barba- 
 rian origin, whom the imperial city and service attracted, 
 naturalized, and clothed with civilized names and 
 Roman character. Justinian's reign, so great and so un- 
 happy, was marked by magnificent works, the adminis- 
 trative organization of the empire, the great buildings at 
 Constantinople, the last and grandest codification of 
 Roman law. But it was also marked by domestic shame, 
 by sanguinary factions, by all the vices and crimes of a 
 rapacious and ungrateful despotism. Yet it seemed for 
 a while like the revival of the power and fortune of 
 Rome. Justinian rose to the highest ideas of imperial 
 ambition ; and he was served by two great masters of 
 war, foreigners in origin like himself, Belisarius the 
 Thracian, and Narses the Armenian, who were able to 
 turn to full account the resources, still enormous, of the 
 empire, its immense riches, its technical and mechanical 
 skill, its supplies of troops, its military traditions, its 
 command of the sea. Africa was wrested from the 
 
102 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. vi. 
 
 Vandals (534); Italy from the successors of Theoderic; 
 much of Spain from the West Goths. The Vandals were 
 absolutely swept away, though Africa never recovered 
 from their century of misrule. Italy was more fiercely 
 disputed (535-553)- According as Belisarius was absent 
 or present, the contest swayed backwards and forwards. 
 Rome was more than once taken and retaken. Totila, 
 the Goth, able, brave, and dangerous, at one moment 
 had it in his power, and had actually taken the momen- 
 tous resolution, to destroy the city of Rome from the 
 face of the earth. But what Belisarius began, Narses 
 finished. Totila was slain ; the Gothic power perished 
 (553). Yet the reconquest was transient. After Narses 
 came the Lombards (568), and then the Saracens It 
 was not the destiny of Byzantium to rule the world, or to 
 govern alien and distant provinces. It retired within 
 its eastern borders. But it long kept a hold on maritime 
 districts in Italy, Ravenna, the Pentapolis, Calabria, and 
 Naples. For a still longer time it held Sicily. It gave 
 titles to barbarian kings like Clovis, and legalized their 
 conquests. And till the great change in the opening of 
 the ninth century, it kept not merely its Exarch at Ra- 
 venna, but its Count at Rome, and claimed and some- 
 times compelled the allegiance of the popes. 
 
 The emperor, regarded as invested with an almost di- 
 vine commission, inherited the despotic powers of the 
 , , line of Augustus and Constantine ; and ac- 
 
 Strengthof ° .-,,-. 
 
 tbe Eastern cordmg as he used this vast power with abil- 
 empire. .^^ ^^ weakness, the fortune of the empire 
 
 rose and fell. Yet the empire itself was held together by 
 great networks and scaffoldings, of long date, and of 
 immense strength and tenacity, which subsisted, inde- 
 pendently of what the emperor did or suffered, and which 
 to a certain degree limited his absolute power. There 
 
CHAP. VI. Strength of the Eastern Empire. 103 
 
 was a great system of local government, and another of 
 civil administration ; and there was a powerful and popu- 
 lar Church, identified with the interests and sympathies 
 of the people, and much mixed up with them, even in its 
 monastic elements. And whatever might become of the 
 emperor, there was in the empire itself a stability and 
 solidity, of which there is yet no trace in the West. It 
 had all the vices, the weaknesses, the failures of a des- 
 potic government of the modern type ; but it had also 
 the experience, the trained habits of order and industry, 
 the enlightenment and the resources, which distinguish 
 civilized governments, whether free or absolute, from the 
 unpractised apprenticeship of those whose political his- 
 tory is yet beginning, and which, under ordinary circum- 
 stances, impart firmness and strength unattainable with- 
 out them. 
 
 What is certain is, that the Eastern empire was able 
 to withstand the continued pressure of its ever-renewed 
 enemies with continued success. It suffered 
 fearfully in the effort. The Avars, the Turk- Its power of 
 
 •^ ' resistance. 
 
 ish Bulgarians, the Hungarian Magyars, the 
 many tribes of the Eastern Slaves, the Persians, and at 
 last the Saracens, the Moguls, the Seljuks, and the Otto- 
 mans, assaulted, insulted, maimed the empire Besides 
 them came enemies equally formidable, the rough 
 Frankish and Norman counts and barons who led the 
 first crusade (1096) ; the more ambitious ones who, with 
 the merchant princes of Venice, led the fourth (1203). 
 The empire passed through the greatest vicissitudes of 
 prosperity and disaster. Province after province was 
 rent away from it. Its population was thinned, its wealth 
 destroyed by ravages which it could not check. It lost 
 Africa, Spain, Egypt, Syria, Asia up to the Bosporus. It 
 was hemmed in by Bulgarians and Slaves in Europe. 
 
I04 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. vi. 
 
 Yet during these centuries of defensive war and often 
 of misfortune, the empire resisted ; and, in spite of all, it 
 cultivated the arts and industries of peace, as they were 
 cultivated nowhere else in Europe, and showed in Con- 
 stantinople a capital which in splendour and magnifi- 
 cence no other realm could rival. 
 
 This continuation of the old traditions of civilization 
 
 amid the turbulence and the uncertainties of Western 
 
 Europe, is the characteristic feature of inter- 
 
 Preserving gg^- jj^ ^j^g Eastern empire. It had, indeed, 
 
 civilization. ^ ' ' 
 
 as a finished despotism, much that was evil, 
 much that involved ultimate ruin ; but besides its natural 
 coherence and toughness, the mischiefs which endan- 
 gered it were continually arrested by rulers of high 
 and strong character. Time after time, when its fall 
 seemed at hand, when faction, or mutiny, or vile court 
 intrigues had shaken it, when the wickedness and folly 
 of some tyrant, or the madness and cruelty of some am- 
 bitious woman had coincided with the strength at the 
 moment of some foreign barbarian to threaten its 
 existence, it was redeemed and saved by some great 
 or some able emperor. Fortune, as we call it, doubt- 
 less, in its ten centuries, must have counted for much 
 in its wonderful escapes, in its many deliverances. 
 But much was owing to the preponderance, in spite 
 of all drawbacks, of superior civilization, experience, 
 and intelligence. Terrible and revolting stories are 
 common both to East and West, of bloodshed, treach- 
 ery, and passion ; but Byzantine vices as well as 
 virtues, unlike those of the West, are those of a society 
 which has inherited a long training and cultivation. No 
 writer of the tenth century in the West, certainly no 
 emperor or king, could possibly have written on politics, 
 history, geography, statistics, military tactics, agriculture, 
 
Eastern Empire preserved Civilized Order. 105 
 
 as the Byzantine emperor, " born in the pur- 
 ple," Constantine Porphyrogenitus. The dif- 9"-959- 
 ference between East and West, in all that comes by long 
 familiarity with the resources of cultivated intellect, and 
 by inherited skill, cannot be better measured than by 
 comparing his writings with the vigorous, but rude, 
 compositions of the court of Charles the Great, or the 
 efforts of Alfred, noble as they were, to begin an English 
 literature. 
 
 Yet the Eastern empire suffered even more than the 
 West from the neighbourhood of its barbarian enemies. 
 The tribes of the Hunnish or Turkish stock, „ , 
 
 Settlement 
 
 and the Slave races which had taken the ofbar- 
 places left vacant by the great Teutonic Avats^Bul- 
 movement of the Vandals, Goths, and Lom- ganans; 
 
 ' ' blavs. 
 
 bards to the West, pressed continually on the 
 Eastern empire, as they did on the Franks, Bavarians, 
 and Saxons, and with more disastrous effects. The 
 countries to the south of the Danube, between the 
 Eastern Alps, the Adriatic, the Euxine, and the moun- 
 tains of Greece, gradually became filled with the Slave 
 races, which unlike the earlier Gothic tribes, became 
 rooted there, and have kept hold of them till this day. 
 As usual, they began by ravaging, and ended by occu- 
 pation and settlement. But their restless and predatory 
 habits long gave trouble to the empire. Its policy varied 
 between keeping them quiet by annual subsidies, — set- 
 tling them as colonists to hold one another in check, as 
 Heraclius (630-638) brought down the Servians and 
 Croats against the Avars, — taking them into pay as 
 soldiers, — or inflicting chastisement by military expedi- 
 tions. The Slaves, however, were many of them agri- 
 cultural communities, and they colonized. But behind 
 the Slaves were the more destructive Turks, in their 
 
io6 Beginni?ig of the Middle Ages. chap. vi. 
 
 various forms, — Turks proper, first known by that name 
 in the sixth century, with whom, in the heart of central 
 Asia, the Byzantine emperors kept up an interchange of 
 ambassadors, — and the nearer and more dangerous 
 tribes of the same stock, the Avars and the Bulgarians, 
 who had been conquered and fled before their Eastern 
 kindreds. All these tribes, Turkish or Slave, pushed 
 their expeditions sometimes to the walls of Constantino- 
 ple, and no province of the empire was safe from them. 
 Its military power, when fairly brought against them, 
 was in the long run too strong for them. The Huns of 
 Zabergan were driven off in the last victory gained by 
 Belisarius (559). The Avars and their Slavonian allies 
 were humbled by the generals of the Emperor Maurice 
 (589-600). But the control of the empire never became 
 strong enough to enforce peace and order in the coun- 
 tries on the Danube. Barbarian kingdoms, like that of 
 the Avars and then of the Bulgarians, rose and fell. In 
 spite of all the insecurity and ruin, new nations, agricul- 
 tural as well as pastoral, grew up in a rude fashion, yet 
 with definite traditions, and with peculiar institutions, in 
 the rich plains and the highlands between the Adriatic 
 and the Euxine. Such were the Western agricultural 
 Slaves, whom Heraclius planted between the Danube 
 and the Adriatic, and who became the Croats, Ser- 
 vians, and Bosnians of later history. In time the 
 Slave races, and those which like the Bulgarians, 
 adopted their language and became fused with them 
 received Christianity. The German missionaries from 
 the Frank empire encountered among them the Greek 
 brother apostles of the Slaves, Cyril and Methodius of 
 Thessalonica (860-885), the translators of the Scriptures, 
 perhaps the inventors of the Slave alphabet, certainly 
 ^mong the most indefatigable missionaries of the Chris- 
 
CHAP. VI. Persian Wars. Heraclius. 107 
 
 tian Church. Partly in concert, partly in rivalry, the 
 German bishops and the Greek monks laboured to teach 
 and humanize the Slaves. The Latin and Greek Churches 
 strove and often intrigued for the allegiance of the 
 Slave converts. In the Western countries they became 
 obedient to the pope. In the territories of the empire, 
 Bulgarians and Servians, as after them, the Russians, 
 accepted the teaching of the Eastern Church, brought 
 to them in their mother tongue. But the northern bor- 
 der of the empire was a land in which disorder and law- 
 lessness became chronic. And a great state, of which 
 scientific law was one of the characteristic features, was 
 powerless to leave the impression of law on the barbarian 
 settlers within its territories. 
 
 On its Eastern border, the hereditary war with Persia, 
 under the dynasty of the Sassanian kings, the destroyers 
 ( 226) of the Parthian kingdom, and the inhe- 
 
 ^ ' -1 ^zx% with 
 
 ritors of its long feud with the Republic and Persia, 
 the Empire, continued to damage and some- 
 times to menace the empire, till it gave place to one still 
 more formidable, the long struggle with the Mahometan 
 invasion, first under the Arabs, then under the different 
 Turkish dynasties. Justinian had been succeeded by a 
 series of emperors, men of unusual excellence but not 
 fortunate. The last of them, the Cappadocian Maurice 
 (582-602), was murdered by a worthless and cruel soldier, 
 the Cappadocian Phocas (602-610) ; but the hopes of the 
 empire were restored by the accession of a man of Latin 
 nurture and sympathies, the African, Heraclius (610). 
 Under Heraclius, it seemed as if the empire, reformed 
 and reinvigorated, were to retrieve its fortunes. He met 
 his difficult and threatening circumstances with courage, 
 judgment, and masterly ability. The stress of war had 
 lately gone heavily against the empire. The Persians, 
 
io8 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. d. 610-627. 
 
 under a famous king, Khosrou, or Chosroes Nushirvan, 
 had broken through the Roman hne of fortresses. Khos- 
 rou had stormed and ruined Antioch and other cities of 
 Syria, and, in spite of the successes of Behsarius, imposed 
 a tribute on Justinian, as the price of a fifty years' truce 
 (540-562). Under Justinian's successors, with one short 
 interval under Maurice, the Persian ravages had been 
 uninterrupted, and were drawing nearer and nearer to 
 the capital. Heraclius, at his accession, found himself 
 with an empire in disorder, between two formidable ene- 
 mies, sometimes in alliance — the Avars on the north, 
 and the Persians, under a second Khosrou, on the east. 
 The Persians were carrying all before them. For ten 
 years (617-627) they were masters of Egypt. For ten 
 years they were encamped within view of the palace of 
 Constantinople. They had plundered Jerusalem, and 
 carried off the sacred relics and the Christian patriarch 
 to Persia. They were masters from the Black Sea to 
 Cyrene. They would not hear of peace. So dark 
 seemed the prospect that for a time Heraclius meditated 
 the transfer of the seat of empire from Byzantium to 
 Latin Carthage. But the thought was a transient one. 
 He never really lost heart. Without hurry, with un- 
 daunted patience, with steady and perfect skill, he spent 
 his first years in restoring order in the empire and the 
 army. Then confident in the strength which he had left 
 in Europe, he sprang forth on the Persians. In a series 
 of brilliant and triumphant campa.igns (622-628), he re- 
 covered the provinces and the boundaries of the empire, 
 he penetrated into Persia and captured the royal palace, 
 bringing back in triumph the spoils of Jerusalem (627) ; 
 and from the terrible blows inflicted upon it, the Persian 
 power finally sank. Its next assailants were the Ma- 
 hometan Saracens, just starting in their career of con- 
 
A. D. 627-641. Saracen Conquests. 109 
 
 quest, and it fell at once before them. But the vanquisher 
 of Persia had also to encounter the Saracens. And, 
 whatever be the explanation, whether from 
 the treachery of his officers, or from political sISce'i? 
 or rehgious disaffection, Herachus, who had 
 rescued the eastern provinces from the Persians, was 
 helpless to prevent them from falling a prey to the sol- 
 diers of Abubekr and Omar. The end of the reign of 
 Herachus saw the beginning, the alarming beginning, of 
 that invasion of the Mahometan powers of Asia, which 
 was to become henceforth the standing peril of the 
 Eastern empire, which was to cripple it and cut short its 
 borders, and which, at last, was to destroy it. Peace 
 was hardly made between Heraclius and the Persians, 
 before the Arabs appeared in Syria {628-633). With 
 Heraclius, the great captain and conqueror, still on the 
 spot, they took Damascus before his eyes (635). Jerusa- 
 lem, Emesa, Aleppo. Antioch fell one after another. He 
 had to fly from the scenes of his glory ; and before he 
 died, he heard the portentous tidings of the capitulation 
 of Alexandria, and of the conquest of Egypt 
 by Amrou and the enthusiasts of the new 
 religion. The reign of Heraclius, which had promised 
 to re-establish the civilization and majestic peace of 
 Rome, the fame of which was recognized and embel- 
 lished with fables at the court of the Frank king Dago- 
 bert, ended with the sudden appearance of an irresistible 
 power in the East which was to extinguish those hopes 
 for ever. 
 
 But the final catastrophe was not to be for more than 
 800 years. The family of the great Heraclius furnished 
 a succession of degenerate emperors, some of them mis- 
 chievous and cruel tyrants, whose reigns coincided with 
 the later Merovingian times, and the rise of the May- 
 
no Beginiiing of the Middle Ages. A. D. 641-711. 
 
 ors of the Palace. It was a time in the East, as well as 
 in the West, of public confusion and decline. During 
 the hundred years of the rule of the family 
 sio°nof^^"^' of Heraclius, the Saracens extended their 
 Heraciins. conquests round the Mediterranean, and at 
 
 711. Murder ^ , ' 
 
 of Justinian length into Spain and Gaul, and twice laid 
 siege to Constantinople itself. But if they 
 were rending away the provinces of the empire, and 
 even daring to strike at its heart, they learned also how 
 great, even in its time of distress and defeat, were its de- 
 fensive resources and inherent strength. It could bear, 
 without giving way, the vices and weakness of its gov- 
 ernment, even in this hour of extreme danger, and be- 
 fore the most formidable of assailants in the very flush 
 of their triumph. Nothing had yet arrested the Saracens. 
 Before them all the great cities of the East had fallen. 
 Neither the sea nor the deserts had been a barrier to 
 them. They had overthrown the Teutonic Goths of 
 Spain as easily as Persians and Syrians. They were 
 unchecked for a hundred years, from the death of Mo- 
 hammed till the victory of the Franks and Charles Mar- 
 tel at Poitiers (632-732). Their power was acknowledged 
 from the Oxus and the Indus to the Atlantic. But 
 they twice recoiled from the walls of Constantinople. 
 After the rapid changes of emperors which took place 
 on the extinction of the family of Heraclius, another of 
 those foreign soldiers, who, while the constitution of the 
 empire went on unaltered, made the most vigorous chiefs 
 of the executive power, was proclaimed em- 
 lin*""*^ peror by the troops of Asia, and he founded 
 
 717-802. ^j^ imperial line which lasted till the days of 
 
 Charles the Great. This was the Isaurian, Leo III., 
 known as the Iconoclast — the Image-breaker. He, 
 like Heraclius, received the empire in an hour of 
 
7 1 7-802. Isaurian and Macedonian Emperors. in 
 
 great peril. The Saracens, with the fame of their 
 astonishing conquests, were now a second time before 
 Constantinople. But, Leo deserves with Charles Martel 
 the glory of daring to believe that they were not irresisti- 
 ble. He forced them to retire from before Constantinople 
 (716-18), and thus checked them definitively in Eastern 
 Europe. Under Leo's vigorous government, the empire 
 rose from the dechne into which it had fallen under the 
 degenerate family of Heraclius. Few imperial lines had 
 more repulsive features than the Isaurian. But it was a 
 line of able and resolute men. The empire under them 
 assumed a narrower compass, and, having lost Africa, 
 Egypt, and Syria, passed into its more distinctive " By- 
 zantine " phase. But if its pretensions were lowered, its 
 power was more concentrated. Greater vigour was 
 thrown into the administration ; population increased, 
 and with it commerce and wealth ; the Slave agricultural 
 settlements throve only too well for the older inhabitants ; 
 the cities were thickly peopled ; the army was well or- 
 ganized and trained ; the administration of the provinces 
 was systematically carried out, and in spite of frequent 
 arbitrary and cruel acts of power the ordinary rule of the 
 law was maintained. Notwithstanding the incorrigible 
 vices and inconsistencies of the court, an improved 
 moral tone became discernible both in lay and eccle- 
 siastical society ; and, to quote the latest and most careful 
 historian of the Eastern empire, Mr. Finlay, " in the 
 times of the Isaurian emperors, and their successors 
 of the Macedonian line " — a period which corresponded 
 to the renewed Frank kingdom under Pipin and Charles, 
 and the first Carolingians — " a declining empire was 
 saved by moral vigour in society, and the strong efforts 
 of the central power." But every expression of praise 
 in these ages of the world must be comparative. When 
 
112 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 867-1054. 
 
 the administration was wisest, the law most just, the 
 army most in order, commerce most thriving — when the 
 condition of the people was most prosperous, and the 
 public enemy on the north or east most successfully re- 
 pelled — yet, with scarcely a variation, the court was 
 corrupt and vicious, and frequently infested with fashions 
 of hypocritical, or grossly inconsistent, devotion. And 
 the ancient and widely-spread vice of cruelty, not yet, 
 and not for many ages subdued by its natural enemy, 
 Christianity, was still, in forms of the most atrocious 
 barbarity, the regular resource not merely of those who 
 feared and hated, and of those who punished, but of 
 those who had to compel obedience, or to anticipate and 
 guard against danger, whether as soldiers, or as civil 
 rulers. Some of the most dreadful incidents of horrible 
 ferocity ever recorded, mark the history of the Eastern 
 empire, under the conduct of its ablest and most success- 
 ful rulers. 
 
 The political and military events of the East did not 
 
 much affect things in the West. Embassies passed to 
 
 and fro ; once, in these times, an emperor 
 
 Preroga- ,_, tt /■ /■/r.s 
 
 lives of the (Lonstans II. 641-668) appeared at Rome, 
 emperors. ^^^ ^^^^ exiled a Roman bishop (Pope 
 
 Martin I. 649-655) ; and there were a few royal mar- 
 riages, especially when there came to be emperors in the 
 West, But the Eastern empire was of much importance 
 in its influence on the ideas of kingly power, as they 
 developed themselves in the contemporaneous society 
 of Western Europe. The great emperor, AugnstuSy 
 Basileus, at Constantinople, was the type and standard 
 looked up to with admiration and envy by the kings of 
 the Franks and even of the English. His dignity was an 
 example and precedent of boundless power, and of ex- 
 travagant homage to the person of the prince. In civil 
 
CHAP. VI. Religious Supremacy of the Emperors. 113 
 
 matters there was much in the rooted national ideas and 
 habits of the West to tone down these exaggerations ; 
 but his prerogatives suggested great pretensions in 
 regard to religion. At Constantinople, the theory of 
 a divine and sacred supremacy in the sphere of re- 
 ligion, was carried out to mischievous lengths. Con- 
 stantine's (311-337) policy, high-handed as it was, had 
 been really to leave the Church to settle questions itself, 
 to speak its own mind and to define its own belief by its 
 legitimate organs. His successor Constantius (337-361) 
 reversed this. He claimed to be the arbiter and judge 
 of religious controversies. He claimed for the emperor 
 the right of prescribing creeds, and he imposed Arianism 
 on the empire. A belief which was not the real belief of 
 the Church, in due time was shaken off. But the bad 
 and tempting precedent had been set of bringing the 
 secular power, though in conjunction with the recognized 
 organs of the Church, to interfere in questions of pure 
 theology. These questions at the beginning of Church 
 history excited the profoundest interest, for they related 
 to the object of Christian worship, and to the central 
 truths and real meaning of the facts of the Christian re- 
 demption. Instead of leaving them fairly to the only 
 possible authority, the great councils of the Church, and 
 its natural representatives, — for, if they were not of au- 
 thority, there was no other — the emperors took on them- 
 selves more and more to make their own judgment the 
 law of public belief, to direct the issues of the conflicts 
 of religious opinion, to dictate the terms of comprehen- 
 sion, to enforce unity of conviction and language by 
 stringent and penal laws. And the usurpation became 
 constitutional by the readiness of the bishops of the 
 Church to accept and authorize the interference of the 
 emperor, when it was on their side and directed against 
 
114 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. vi. 
 
 opponents, and by giving a sanction, tacit or express, to 
 the detestable and fatal violence which too often accom- 
 panied controversies so momentous. With the later 
 emperors, such as Justinian and Heraclius, it was less a 
 strength of personal belief, than an impatience of dis- 
 putes and contradiction, and a fear, sometimes not an 
 unreasonable fear, of political troubles, that directed their 
 policy. Constantius attempted to impose a dogma ; his 
 successors, to express and enforce a compromise in 
 which great controversies were to end. The rude bar- 
 ^,_ .. rr barian soldier, Zeno, by a formulary of his 
 
 The "Heno- ^ • \ 
 
 tieon,'' or, own, attempted vamly to put an end to the 
 of Unbn/''^ divisions of the Church arising out of the 
 ^^'^' rival heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches, 
 
 as to the consequences which flow from the idea of the 
 Incarnation. Justinian exercised his imperial supremacy 
 in religion in the most extravagant and the most fruitless 
 manner (519-565). And in the subtle but dangerous 
 , . „ controversy which followed, on the reality 
 
 or " Exposi- of the moral constitution of our Lord's hu- 
 Heracliu's, man nature, the Monothelite controversy, 
 "rW"or Heraclius tried, like Zeno, and like Zeno in 
 "J^rmu- vain, to impose terms of his own by the im- 
 
 lary," of . , , . , . , 
 
 Consuns II. penal authority on the consciences and con- 
 victions of those who felt the interest of the 
 question. Under Leo the Isaurian and his line, the im- 
 perial claim was extended from doctrines to the usages 
 of the Church (717-792). Superstition had without doubt 
 gathered round the customary use in worship of devo- 
 tional pictures and images ; and it is possible that the 
 taunts of the victorious Mahometans may have made 
 them more odious to the rude and impatient soldier. 
 But on the strength of his claims as supreme ruler of 
 religion, he attacked the abuses with an unintelligent 
 
CHAP. VI. Eastern and Western Churches, 115 
 
 and intemperate violence, which was mischievous in it- 
 self and gave the utmost advantage to the defenders of 
 what was indefensible. He, and still more 
 
 . , . Leo, 
 
 his son Constantme v., arrayed agamst 717-741. 
 
 themselves the self-respect, the good sense, -j^i-^zb. '°^' 
 
 the conscience, the piety, of the time, as gecond 
 
 well as its prejudiced bigotry and supersti- coundi of 
 
 A r / 1 . •■ 1 ^ ' Nice, 787. 
 
 tion. After the most abommable cruelties 
 and persecution, they utterly failed in checking the 
 abuses they aimed at; and they brought about a reaction 
 which hindered any reasonable settlement of a matter 
 which reason was eminently competent to r 'i f 
 settle, and which the soberer temper of Frankfort 
 Charles the Great showed the way to settle "^^"^ 
 with moderation and wisdom. 
 
 The tyranny with which the emperors enforced their 
 authority and their own personal opinions aggravated 
 the violence and mischief of the disputes. It led in 
 more than one case to great and lasting schisms. It was 
 copied by those who suffered from it. Worse still, it be- 
 came accepted as part of the royal prerogative, when 
 Charles the Great came, though with greater moderation 
 than the Eastern emperors, to carry out his office as 
 guardian, reformer, and over-looker of the religious in- 
 terests of his kingdom. And it led to confusions between 
 the domain of conscience, and the powers 
 
 ' ^ Effects of 
 
 of the state, which have caused infinite the imperial 
 harm and misery in civilized society, and supremacy, 
 which have not yet been got rid of. Not the least of the 
 irreparable mischiefs which it occasioned under the suc- 
 cessors of Leo the Iconoclast was the impulse which it 
 gave to the rising ambition of the popes to claim a rival 
 and universal supremacy, and to the quarrels, accidental 
 and comparatively insignificant in themselves, which ul- 
 
1 1 6 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. vi. 
 
 timately determined the permanent separation of the 
 Eastern and Western Churches. Under the tyranny of 
 the emperor, patriarchs and bishops were deposed and 
 replaced at his will. In one of these many transactions, 
 a deposed and ill-used patriarch, Ignatius, 
 hopeless at Constantinople, appealed against 
 his rival Photius, to the Pope. It was an appeal for jus- 
 tice against wrong — for protection and countenance 
 abroad, where none could be had at home. Such ap- 
 peals had been often made ; it was a time when men 
 appealed to whatever power within reach seemed likely 
 to help them. But the judge who was now appealed to 
 as arbiter in this personal quarrel, was the first pope of 
 the type afterwards to be so frequent, the daring and im- 
 perious Nicolas I. (858-867). Supporting a just cause 
 against intrigue and despotism, he put his own claims to 
 redress it, and to punish the wrong-doers, on assump- 
 tions of authority as extravagant as those of the emperor. 
 The dispute gradually became complicated with doctri- 
 nal questions, and got into a shape in which it became 
 irreconcilable. The pope excommunicated Photius 
 (863), and Photius excommunicated Nicolas (867). It 
 might have seemed but a conflict which would pass 
 away, as more than one such conflict had passed, with 
 those who were parties to it. Nicolas died soon after 
 (867), and Photius, after many falls and restorations, 
 lived to be at last acknowledged by a pope, John VIII. 
 (879). But the wound in fact proved to have been a fa- 
 tal one, and could not be healed. And the great schism 
 of East and West dates from the high-handed assertion 
 of Roman spiritual superiority, provoked by the wanton 
 insolence of imperial despotism. 
 
CHAP. VII. The Carolingian Kings of the Franks. 117 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 CHARLES THE GREAT, KING OF THE FRANKS, 768-80O — 
 EMPEROR OF THE ROMANS, 80O-814. 
 
 The change in the Frank line of kings in the middle 
 of the eighth century (752) was an event of great 
 and wide importance. Under the race of Clovis, the 
 history of the Franks, though they were the leading 
 nation of the West, was, with the exception of their 
 chronic struggle with the kindred German tribes on 
 the border, and occasional and aimless in- ^ 
 
 , /-,. 1T1 ri-i- Interest of 
 
 roads mto Spam and Italy, confined withm Frank history 
 their own limits. Their dealings with other the secTond liiTe'! 
 nations, and even with the pope, the centre ^^t^^l_ ^^^' 
 of the ecclesiastical system, were few and Pip'". Carlo- 
 unimportant. But with Charles Martel and pipin alone, ' 
 his sons the range of Frank history widens, ^'^^'^ ' 
 and it begins to affect the general course of European 
 history. The first care of these able rulers was to con- 
 solidate once more the strength of the Franks. Con^ 
 scious how great it was, they gathered up again under a 
 firm hand the loosely compacted and fast-dissolving 
 elements of the Frank power. They maintained the 
 claim of the Franks to supremacy over their ruder kin- 
 dred in Alamannia, Bavaria, Thuringia, and even, 
 though with more trouble, over the Saxons. By their 
 vigour and determined perseverance, they beat down 
 at last the obstinate and dangerous revolt of Aquitaine, 
 
ii8 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. d. 771. 
 
 which, under a line of powerful dukes, Teutonic in 
 name, but southern in feeling, was fast assuming the 
 character of a war of national independence on the part 
 of the Latin South against the Teutonic North. Pipin 
 at his death (768), had reunited once more under one 
 king all the conquests of Clovis and his successors. 
 And having done this, the Frank kings departed from 
 their former isolation, and entered into new relations 
 with the world outside them. They did .three things 
 I. Carrying on the alliance of Charles Martel with the 
 popes, they founded and built up, as has been already 
 said, the temporal dominion of the papacy, and gave a 
 new importance to the political influence of the popes in 
 Europe. 2. Next, as a consequence of their close rela- 
 tions with the popes they revived in their family the 
 name of the Roman empire and the dignity of the 
 Roman emperor, long suspended in the West, which 
 were to pass, after them, through many hands and many 
 lines, but were never to be extinct again till the begin- 
 ning of our own century. 3. And lastly, they laid the 
 foundations of modern Germany, and decisively re- 
 claimed it from its primitive barbarism to Christendom 
 and to civilization. 
 
 What Pipin had begun, and begun with sagacity and 
 force, was carried on by a yet stronger hand, on a 
 larger scale, and in the course of a longer 
 S'^Grlat. reign. Pipin died in 768, and the king- 
 dom of the Franks, according to a Frank 
 rule of inheritance, or an idea of expediency which no 
 one then dared to break through, was, with the con- 
 sent of all the Franks, shared, or more properly, gov- 
 erned in partnership, by his two sons, Charles and 
 Carloman, who with their father had received the dig- 
 nity of kings from Pope Stephen in 754. The risks of 
 
771-814- Charles the Great. 119 
 
 dissension between them were averted, and the course 
 of history determined, by the early death of Carloman. 
 In 771 Charles became the sole king of the Franks. In 
 our materials for knowledge, as well as in the character 
 of the events, we pass into a new stage with the appear- 
 ance of Charles, whom his own age, at least after his 
 death, was to name the Great. We at once acquire a 
 mass of contemporary information, meagre, indeed, 
 compared with more recent records and with many 
 older, but in comparison with those of the preceding 
 times, both full and trustworthy. Of Charles we have a 
 contemporary biography, the first instance of a lay or 
 secular biography in Christian times, his life by Egin- 
 hard, or Einhard. For public events, a series of annals 
 begins, not improbably originating under Charles's 
 orders, which give details of time and place with a care 
 unknown before. We have a large, though incomplete, 
 collection of his acts of government and legislation ; 
 and further, a considerable number of important letters, 
 both public — such as those of the popes', collected by 
 Charles's command ; and private — such as those of 
 Charles's friend and adviser, the Englishman, Alcuin, 
 or Alcwin. 
 
 The name " Charlemagne," by which he has been so 
 long known, is one of those popular names which ought 
 to be abandoned ; not from considerations of scholarly 
 accuracy, but because it helps so much to keep up a 
 completely false idea of what he was. We in England 
 ought to hold, at least, to our traditional form " Charle- 
 main," which was Milton's authority. He has been re- 
 presented by French historians as in some sense a 
 French king, the most illustrious and wide-ruling of the 
 second dynasty, one in the same line of kings as St. 
 Louis and Henry IV. It cannot be too clearly and firmly 
 
120 Beginning of the Middle Ages, A. d. 
 
 ^, , borne in mind that this, rooted as the con- 
 
 Charles not 11 -11, 
 
 a '-king of ccptioR has bccome, IS absolutely mislead- 
 ing. France, as it was to be and as we 
 know it, had not come into existence in his days. What 
 was to be the France of history was then but one pro- 
 vince of the Frank kingdom, and one with which Charles 
 was personally least connected. Modern France, again, 
 is a nation in which the Latin or Latinized races have 
 won the ascendancy. But Charles, king of the Franks, 
 was, above all things, a German. He was in language, 
 in ideas, in policy, in tastes, in his favourite dwelling- 
 places, a Teutonic, not a Latin or Latinized king ; and it 
 is entirely to mistake his place and his work to consider 
 him in the light of a specially " French " king, a prede- 
 cessor of the kings who reigned at Paris and brought 
 glory upon France. Modern France is a fragment, 
 made up of fragments, split off from the original Frank 
 kingdom long after Charles's death ; the kingdom which 
 he inherited and enlarged was as different, in spirit, in 
 constitution, in national characteristics, as it was in 
 boundaries, from that portion of it which ultimately re- 
 tained the Frank name in the West. Charles did noth- 
 ing to make modern France. The Frank power on 
 which he rose to the empire was in those days still 
 mainly German ; and his characteristic work was to lay 
 the foundations of modern and civilized Germany, and 
 indirectly, of the new commonwealth of nations, which 
 was to arise in the West of Europe. 
 
 The necessary condition of a great ruler in those days 
 was that he should be a great warrior. Charles, whose 
 real claim to greatness lies in the clearness 
 warrior: with which he discerned the need of order 
 
 of liU^wars. ^^1^ law, and sought their sources and secu- 
 rities in the deeper springs of human nature, 
 
771-8 14- Charleses Wars. 121 
 
 was, first of all things, in the eyes of his own generation, 
 a king who was always at war, and always victorious. 
 In his warlike habits he was not different from the Frank 
 kings before him. Children of invaders, they had per- 
 petually to repel invasion, to cope with rivals, to prove 
 their prowess and strength. The special feature of 
 Charles's wars was the indomitable pertinacity with which 
 he carried them to the end, and the untiring alacrity and 
 rapidity with which he moved from one point to another 
 of his wide frontier of war. Among the turbulent popu- 
 lations which on all sides beset the Frank kingdom, two 
 heavy and permanent masses of hostility hung lik& 
 storm-clouds, never removing and always threatening, 
 on his north-eastern and his southern borders ; the 
 heathen Saxons between the Rhine and ,„ 
 
 -r-11 1 1 1 1 1 /-., Wars -with 
 
 LIbe, pressed upon by the heathen Slaves barbarians: 
 beyond the Elbe ; and the Saracens in cens°'Avars^' 
 Spain. The Saracens he pushed back to Northmen, 
 the Ebro, adding the Spanish "march," or borderland, 
 beyond the Pyrenees to his kingdom, and claiming, 
 though not without continual dispute, the great cities of 
 Saragossa and Barcelona. The Saxon war was far 
 more serious and troublesome. It was chequered by 
 grave disasters, and pursued with undismayed and 
 unrelenting determination, on which he spared neither 
 himself nor others. It lasted continuously — with its 
 stubborn and ever-recurring resistance, its cruel devas- 
 tations, its winter campaigns, its merciless acts of ven- 
 geance, — as the effort which called forth all Charles's 
 energy for thirty-two years (772-804). The subjugation 
 of the Saxons more resembled in its systematic com- 
 pleteness the policy followed by the kinsmen of the 
 Saxons in Britain than anything which had been seen 
 on the continent. But it decided, finally and for good, 
 
122 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 
 
 the question in Germany between heathenism and Chris- 
 tianity, between continued barbarism, or the first steps, 
 the only ones then possible, to civilization. The Saxon 
 lands, so rudely reduced to obedience, so rudely Chris- 
 tianized, were planted not only with castles, but with 
 towns and mission stations — Osnabriick, Paderborn, 
 Miinster, Minden, Halberstadt, Bremen — bishoprics 
 along the course of the Lippe and the Weser — monas- 
 teries, like Fulda, which were both agricultural colonies 
 and schools of learning. The tribes of Upper and Mid- 
 dle Germany — Bavarians, Alamans, Thuringians, Hes- 
 sians — longer accustomed to the assertion of Frank 
 supremacy, and partially converted by the English and 
 other missionaries whom Pipin had encouraged, were 
 fast becoming states organized, or ready to be organized 
 into dukedoms of the Frank kingdom ; and any signs of 
 restlessness, as in the frontier dukedom of Bavaria, were 
 vigorously put down (788). But beyond the refractory 
 Saxons, and the more settled German lands, was a sec- 
 ond line of barbarism from the Elbe to the Danube, 
 stretching without defined limit far back towards the 
 East, from which it was recruited. There were the Huns 
 or Avars, in the plains between the Danube and the 
 Save ; there were Slave races of many names, from the 
 shores of the Adriatic, the Eastern Alps, and the moun- 
 tains of Bohemia, to the havens of the Baltic ; and there 
 were yetthemore threatening Northmen, who had access 
 to the still unsettled Saxon lands by the isthmus which 
 is now Slesvig, and to whose ships the whole sea-board 
 of the Franks, from the mouth of the Weser to the 
 mouths of the Rhone, lay open. With all these Charles 
 carried on persevering and, for the age, scientific 
 war. Military bridges, sometimes double ones, were 
 thrown across rivers like the Elbe and Danube, and their 
 
77i-8i4- He destroys the Lombard Kingdom. 123 
 
 approaches duly protected. An attempt was made, 
 though in vain, to facilitate military communications 
 by a navigable canal, connecting affluents of the Rhine 
 and Danube. His operations were conducted on mutu- 
 ally supporting lines of march, converging on the threat- 
 ened point ; definiteness of purpose, great patience, 
 caution, celerity, appear in them. His most brilliant 
 war, in the eyes of his contemporaries, was that in 
 which the power of the Hunnish Avars — no longer terri- 
 ble as of old, but still able to give trouble — was broken. 
 Their " Ring," or palace camp, was forced and de- 
 stroyed ; their " Chagan " or chief acknowledged the su- 
 premacy of the Frank king, and was baptized ; and the 
 spoils of the Avars, the collected plunder of their old 
 forays, were said to be so great as to bring down the 
 value of silver by a third. The Slave races, quarrel- 
 some and rapacious, were kept in awe by chastisement, 
 or were involved by his policy in wars among themselves. 
 The Northmen, even to Charles, were the most formida- 
 ble of his foes. They fomented Saxon resistance ; and its 
 fiercest leader, the Westphalian Witikind, ever had a 
 ready refuge, when hard pressed, in neighbouring Den- 
 mark. The Danish king, Godfrid, became, in Charles's 
 later years, more and more daring in his acts of aggress- 
 ion ; and after obtaining from Charles the honour of a 
 conference on equal terms between Frank and Danish 
 chiefs, was preparing to measure his strength with the 
 great emperor in a pitched battle, when he was assassin- 
 ated and Denmark was involved in civil war. But the 
 tide of Northern invasion was rising, and before Charles 
 died it was beginning to break with alarming violence 
 on all the coasts of his realm. He was fully alive to 
 the danger. The northern coasts were visited and 
 inspected by the emperor himself. Fleets were built ; 
 
 K 
 
124 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. d. 
 
 Boulog^ne and Ghent were made his harbours and arse- 
 nals. He died before his fortune at sea was tried. But 
 the growing insults and ravages of the Northern pirates 
 in Friesland, of the Moorish pirates over the coasts and 
 islands of the Mediterranean, and of the Greek fleets in 
 the Adriatic, threw a shade at the close over the splen- 
 dour of his wars, and disquieted his last years with well- 
 grounded anxiety. 
 
 All these wars were part of a concentrated and per- 
 sistent plan to reduce and keep under control the 
 dangerous barbarism which hemmed in and 
 The Lombard pressed upon his kingdom. But the Lom- 
 bard war was a political one, waged less 
 even for the conquest of Italy than for its indirect results. 
 The ill-compacted and turbulent kingdom of the Lom- 
 bards, with its almost independent dukedoms — Tuscany, 
 Spoleto, Benevento, Friuli, Trent — had usually been, in 
 later times, an inoffensive neighbour to the Franks, but 
 often, though it had ceased to be Arian, a troublesome 
 one to the popes. We have seen how a pope prevailed 
 on Pipin to undertake the defence, as it was called, of 
 the Church, and how Pipin had answered the appeal, and 
 had transferred some of the fairest provinces of the Lom- 
 bard kingdoms to the popes. But the quarrel still went 
 on. Letter after letter from the popes (Stephen IH. 
 753-757, Hadrian L 772-795) brought the most lamentable 
 complaints of Lombard injustice and oppression. St. 
 Peter was made to speak in his own name, promising 
 heaven to those who should deliver him from wrong, and 
 denouncing divine vengeance on those who should be 
 slack in assisting him. Charles had, indeed, set at nought 
 a threat of excommunication from Pope Stephen IV. 
 (769) to be pronounced if the king dared to marry a 
 daughter of King Desiderius, one of the " foul and horrid " 
 
8oo. Charles Etnperor of 'the Romans. 1 25 
 
 race of the Lombards. But when the serious work of his 
 reign began, he seems to have thought it wise as early as 
 possible to arrange his relations with the pope. In 772, 
 leaving the Saxon war, he crossed the Alps, and by the 
 Mont Cenis and the St. Bernard threw the whole power of 
 the Franks into Italy. The passes were forced, and no 
 stand was made in the field. There was a winter siege 
 of Pavia. It capitulated; the last Lombard king, Desi- 
 derius, was carried captive and placed in a Frank 
 monastery; and the Lombard power came to an end. 
 The king of the Franks became also king of the Lom- 
 bards, the lord of all Italy, except the Venetian islands 
 and the south of Calabria, still held by the Greeks. Thus, 
 by German hands, the internal ascendancy of the Ger- 
 man race in Italy, which had had lasted, first under the 
 Goths, and then under the Lombards, for 281 years, was 
 finally broken* A German was still king over Italy, as 
 for ages Germans were still to be. But Roman and na- 
 tive influence reconquered its supremacy in Italy, under 
 the management and leadership of the bishops of Rome. 
 The Lombards, already becoming Italianized, melted 
 into provincial Italians, The Teutonic language dis- 
 appeared, leaving a number of words to Italian dialects, 
 and a number of names to Italian families. The last 
 king of the Lombards bore an Italian name, Desiderius. 
 The latest of Italian national heroes bears the Bavarian 
 and Lombard name of Garibaldi. 
 
 But the overthrow of the Lombards, and the gift of 
 provinces and cities to St. Peter had even more eventful 
 results. The alliance between the king of ^, 
 
 ° Close 
 
 the Franks and the bishop of Rome had alliance be- 
 become one of the closest kind. WithPipin Franks and 
 and Charles begin the titles, given them by ^^ popes. 
 the Roman chancery, of "Most Christian King," and 
 
126 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 
 
 " Defender of the Church." The German king and the 
 Itahan pope found themselves together at the head of the 
 modern world of the West. But the fascination of the 
 name of Rome still, as it had done for centuries, held 
 sway over the Teutonic mind. It stood for power, for 
 knowledge, for the perfection of civil life, for the purity 
 of religion. The barbarians despised Romans, but they 
 venerated Rome. It was not unnatural that the idea 
 should recommend itself, both to the king and the pope, 
 of reviving in the West, in close connexion with the 
 Roman primacy, that great name which still filled the 
 imagination of the world, and which in Roman judg- 
 ments, Greek Byzantium had wrongfully stolen away — 
 the name of Csesar Augustus, the claim to govern the 
 world. There was a longing in the West for the resto- 
 ration of the name and authority, "lest," as the contempo- 
 rary writers express it, "the heathen should mock at the 
 Christian if the name of Emperor had ceased among 
 them." And at this moment, the government at Con- 
 stantinople was in the hands of a woman, the Empress 
 Irene. Charles's services to the pope were 
 emperOTof recompensed, and his victorious career of 
 the Romans. niore than thirty years crowned, by the res- 
 toration at Rome, in his person, of the Roman empire 
 and the imperial dignity. The same authority, which 
 had made him "patrician," and consecrated him king, 
 now created him Emperor of the Romans. On Christ- 
 mas day, 800, when Charles came to pay his devotions 
 before the altar of St. Peter's, Pope Leo III. — without 
 Charles's knowledge or wish, so Charles declared to his 
 biographer, Einhard, and, it may be, prematurely, as 
 regards Charles's own feeling — placed a golden crown 
 on his head, while all the people shouted, " to Charles, 
 the most pious Augustus, crowned of God, the great and 
 
8oo. The Two Efnpires : East and West 127 
 
 peace-giving Emperor of the Romans, life and victory." 
 By all round him, the pope and clergy, the Roman chiefs 
 and people, the great men of the Franks, he was chosen 
 and thrice proclaimed emperor, " at Rome the mother 
 of empire, where Caesars and emperors were wont to sit." 
 And by the pope himself, he was "adored" "after the 
 manner of the emperors of old." All saw in his match- 
 less power, and in their own unanimity, the hand of God. 
 
 Thus a new power arose in Europe, new in reality and 
 in its relations to society, though old in name. It was 
 formally but the carrying on the line of the successors 
 of Augustus and Constantine. But substantially it was 
 something very different. Its authors could little foresee 
 its destinies ; but it was to last, in some sort the political 
 centre of the world which was to be, for 1,000 years. 
 And the Roman Church, which had done such great 
 things, which had consecrated the new and mighty kings 
 of the Franks, and had created for the mightiest of them 
 the imperial claim to universal dominion, rose with them 
 to a new attitude in the world. Humble as she was in 
 outward bearing to the terrible warrior she had crowned, 
 she drew from the act her vast pretensions to be the in- 
 terpreter of Providence, the giver of kingdoms, the mis- 
 tress of nations, the arbitress of the allegiance of man- 
 kind. What might not that authority bestow or take 
 away, which had renewed and given the Roman empire ? 
 
 The coronation of Charles at Rome, in the face of 
 an imperial line at Constantinople, finally determined, 
 though it did not at once accomplish, the separation of 
 East and West, of Greek and Latin Chris- ^. , 
 
 n-'-i • •fill • Final 
 
 tianity. This separation had long been im- separation 
 pending, perhaps, becoming inevitable. The Wes^.^*^^ 
 old tradition cf the necessary unity both of 
 
 the Church and the Empire had resisted it. But on the 
 
1 28 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 
 
 other hand, there were the separating forces of distance, 
 of difference of language and race, of antagonist and 
 irreconcilable claims. There was also diversity of inter- 
 ests and dangers, between Rome and Constantinople, 
 between East and West. The emperor at Constanti- 
 nople, while he was the only emperor, kept a nominal 
 but feeble hold on the West. He had a footing, though 
 a precarious one, in Italy. Rome acknowledged or de- 
 fied him, according to the turn of events, or the balance 
 of strength. He had the pope as his subject, and was 
 sometimes able to make him feel, when refractory, the 
 penalties of resistance. But besides the natural uneasi- 
 ness of the Romans under the supremacy of Greek and 
 modern Constantinople, there was the growing aliena- 
 tion of East and West in religious thought. The Eastern 
 Church had been the scene of a series of fierce dissen- 
 sions, and great schisms. The Monophysite controversy in 
 the seventh, under Justinian had led on to the Monothelite 
 controversy in the seventh, under Heraclius and his family; 
 and these were followed in the beginaing of the eighth, by 
 the great strife about the use of images, provoked by the 
 reforming zeal of Leo the Isaurian, and his successors. 
 Tn all these controversies, the emperors had interfered 
 with a high hand, both as rulers and as theologians, and 
 had imposed their statements of doctrine and their laws, 
 sometimes not without violent resistance, on their bishops 
 and people. In the West, there was far less learning 
 and subtlety, but there was a steadier and less variable 
 tradition of teaching. The popes found themselves in 
 constant conflict with the East. They sometimes sub- 
 mitted, and found themselves entangled in heresy for 
 their compliance ; more often they opposed or moder- 
 ated. But the result was increasing suspicion and jeal- 
 ousy, increasing irritation on both sides ; and an increas- 
 
7 7 1-8 1 4- Charles* s Administrative Policy. 129 
 
 ing desire on the part of the popes, as heads of the 
 Western Church, to shake off all dependence, political, 
 as well as ecclesiastical, on the East. It was this grow- 
 ing estrangement, as well as the desire to call back 
 authority if not greatness to Rome, which prompted 
 Pope Leo III. to crown the king of the Franks. He 
 accomplished more than probably he intended. He 
 meant to throw off a galling yoke, to free his own hands 
 from inconvenient and mischievous shackles ; but out 
 of the rift which he made grew the greatest and most 
 hopeless schism in the Christian Church. It is possible 
 that Charles may have had designs for uniting East and 
 West under himself, by family alliances or otherwise. 
 He certainly negotiated, and he wished to di'^arm 
 Eastern jealousy. Ultimately, he was content with a 
 recognition of his title by the Greek emperor. But the 
 rivalry was too distinct and formidable for negotiations 
 to disguise. " Have the Frank as a friend, but not as a 
 neighbour," was the Greek saying. One Roman empire 
 was still the only received theory. But one Roman em- 
 pire, with its seat" in the West, or one Roman empire 
 governed in partnership by two emperors of East and 
 West, had become impossible in fact. The theory of its 
 unity continued for ages ; but whether the true successor 
 of Augustus and Theodosius sat at Constantinople, or 
 somewhere in the West, remained in dispute, till the 
 dispute was ended by the extinction of the Eastern em- 
 pire by the Turks on May 29, 1453. 
 
 Charles's military successes, his good understanding 
 with the Church, and finally his assumption of the place 
 of Roman emperor, strengthened and de- Charles's 
 veloped his strong bent towards political ^'uticai 
 organization and social improvement. In organiza- 
 that early stage of political experience and 
 
130 Begiiining of the Middle Ages. a. d. 
 
 knowledge, the work was very limited which the ablest and 
 strongest man could do in securing order, and giving a 
 better direction to the wild and ungovernable forces 
 round him. But in Charles we see, for the first time 
 since the Goth Theoderic and in more favourable circum- 
 stances than his, the strong purpose to restrain disorder, 
 and to foster all that seemed healing and hopeful in the 
 state of things round him. If his unresting activity 
 turned out afterwards to be, in many respects, fruitless 
 or even mischievous, this is but what might be expected 
 in times when the wisest measured imperfectly the real 
 facts about them, and the consequences of what they 
 did. Results are at all times apt to fall short of inten- 
 tions. It is eminently the case, when society is emerging 
 out of the inexperience of barbarism into the efforts 
 of civilization. 
 
 Charles was an administrator rather than a legislator, 
 though his laws, and his revisions of former laws, were 
 numerous. His system of government was 
 istrative " simple, and he aimed at combining with the 
 system. exercise of his own authority the sanction 
 
 of publicity and popular concurrence. The force of his 
 administration coQsisted in the method and energy 
 which he infused into the public service, the steadiness 
 and activity which he required of his agents, and the 
 patient vigilance with which he watched over the whole ; 
 though it is more than probable that in that rough time, 
 these agents carried out but inadequately and unequally 
 his attempts to establish some sort of discipline in the 
 vast and wild world over which he presided. His 
 officers were of two classes. There was the local hier- 
 archy : dukes governing provinces, some of which have 
 since become kingdoms ; bishops with extensive do- 
 mains, enjoying great immunities ; counts and inferior 
 
77i-8i4- Charles'* s Administrative Policy. 131 
 
 chiefs, either territorial, or in the great cities, removable 
 at pleasure, though with the natural tendency to become 
 hereditary. All were bound both to the military and 
 political service of the kingdom. And, next, there was 
 a central system of special commissioners, envoys, dele- 
 gates, Missi as they were called, deputed with ample 
 powers from the king himself to different parts of his 
 realm, to superintend, and if necessary to take into their 
 hands the administration of justice, and generally to in- 
 spect, examine, reform, report, and thus to bring the 
 whole of the kingdom under the superintendence, and, 
 as it were, within the touch of the central authority. 
 Further, besides that he was incessantly moving about 
 in different parts of his kingdom, he brought himself 
 twice every year face to face with his chiefs and people 
 in the general assemblies [Malli, Placita), which, ac- 
 cording to the Teutonic custom of doing all important 
 things in stated gatherings of chiefs and freemen, wer^ 
 held in spring and autumn, for pubhc business. The 
 place of meeting varied, but it seems to have been always 
 in the Eastern and German part of the Frank kingdom. 
 The meeting was sometimes held, as in the Saxon cam- 
 paigns, in the heart of the enemy's country, and served 
 as the gathering point for the summer's war. But the 
 spring meeting especially brought together all that was 
 most powerful and important in the kingdom round the 
 king ; and though his authority was paramount, and his 
 policy was his own, all was done in public, and derived 
 strength from public cognizance and assent. Of the 
 mode of holding these assemblies we have a contem- 
 porary account from Adalhard, Charles's relative and 
 minister, which shows how in them Charles came into 
 contact not only with his bishops and great men, but 
 with all classes of his subjects, and how in a rough and 
 
132 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 
 
 informal way their opinions were brought before him, 
 and he learnt from the best information the tempers and 
 conditions of the distant parts of his kingdom. 
 
 Of the business done in these assemblies, we have re- 
 cords in the collection of public acts, called the " Capitu- 
 , ., . laries " of the Frank kings. They are a vast 
 
 Legislation, ^ • n 1 .. r 
 
 civil and and most miscellaneous accumulation of 
 
 ThTcapi- laws, regulations, judicial decisions, moral 
 '^^^^"*^' precepts, literary extracts, royal orders, arti- 
 
 cles of inquiry civil and ecclesiastical, circulars and spe- 
 cial letters, down to inventories of farm stock, household 
 furniture, and garden stuff and implements, in the king's 
 residences. All these documents emanated from the 
 king, and were communicated by him to the assemblies. 
 They cover the whole field of life. With scarcely an at- 
 tempt at order, they show the confusion with which mat- 
 ters of every sort, political, religious, economical, were all 
 thrown together in the attempt to regulate them. But 
 they also show the strong instinct of early days as to the 
 moral and spiritual laws, which underlie and animate 
 the outward framework of civil society. Few collections 
 of laws contain such curious materials for a picture of the 
 ideas and habits of the time. Charles's efforts had but a 
 partial influence on the disorder of his age. The exis- 
 tence of his laws does not necessarily imply their actual 
 effect. This, which must always be remembered in any 
 attempt to illustrate history by legislative records, is spe- 
 cially true of times like his. But his legislation marked 
 where the disorder was ; and it left on men's minds a 
 stronger impression than any of which the trace is to be 
 found before his time, of the public rights of the state, 
 and of the obligations towards it both of its rulers and 
 members. The Capitularies first exhibit with some dis- 
 tinctness that idea of the public interest, as distinct from 
 
600-750. The Church. 133 
 
 the rights and claims of individuals, which is the one 
 germ of civilized order, and w^hich gives the measure of 
 its progress. Lastly, in the Capitularies are to be found 
 in their earliest form, the legalized beginnings of some 
 of the most characteristic institutions belonging to modern 
 Europe. We see the rudiments of that feudal system 
 v^^hich so powerfully influenced its political growth, its so- 
 cial ideas, its customs as to the tenure of land, its indus- 
 try and the distribution of its wealth. We see, too, the 
 earliest outlines of the manifold relations between Chris- 
 tian kings and the Church ; of the whole system of ben- 
 efices and endowments, civil and religious ; and of the 
 wide-spread law of tithes. 
 
 The order which Charles tried to establish in his king- 
 dom, he tried to establish in the Church, He found in it 
 two opposite conditions. On the one hand, 
 inits public character and in its high places, church: 
 
 it was lapsing deeper and deeper into that corruption 
 worldliness and license which were the higher 
 fruits of the favour which it had received 
 from its coarse and brutal Merovingian patrons. Its 
 chiefs, the bishops and abbots, had become a privileged 
 and powerful order in the state ; but along with this had 
 come a decline in all learning, in their sense of their real 
 duties, and in public sentiment about these duties. Bish- 
 ops, like dukes and counts, rode to battle and fell in the 
 wars, and often lived as carelessly and selfishly as the 
 courtiers and soldiers, from whom they were often taken. 
 Even the sainted bishops of the seventh and eighth cen- 
 turies were often men engaged in the quarrels of the 
 Merovingian courts, like St. Arnulf or St. Leger ; or they 
 were pious and skilful craftsmen, devoting their art to 
 religion like St. Eloy, and adding to it earnest but very 
 humble teaching. It was no wonder that Charles Mar- 
 
134 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 
 
 tel invested a good soldier with the two archbishoprics 
 of Reims and Treves, and his nephew with the bishoprics 
 of Paris and Bayeux, and the archbishopric of Rouen, 
 besides two great abbeys. It is no wonder to read of a 
 pope asking Charles's son to punish a faithless Roman 
 envoy by making him a Frank bishop, in order to keep 
 him in exile. The schools of the monasteries barely 
 kept alive the knowledge of Latin, the only access to the 
 inherited wisdom of the world, the only access to Christian 
 teaching. Of all the Christian centuries, the seventh is 
 in the West the most barren of literary effort and spiritual 
 greatness. In that great see which had become the 
 centre of Western Christendom, the bishops of Rome 
 had begun to travel fast along that downward road which 
 was to lead them step by step, from the nobleness and 
 devotion of the first Leo and the first Gregory, through a 
 miserable greed after provinces and cities, to the in- 
 credible scandals of the tenth century. At Rome, too, 
 in the pursuit of worldly greatness and power, learning, 
 together with better things than learning, perished. In 
 the letters of the popes to the Frank kings, in the eighth 
 century, adulation and servility, the servility of a beggar 
 who whines and threatens, are sometimes expressed in 
 Latin which defies the most elementary rules of ordinary 
 grammar. 
 
 But though much belonging to religion, and everything 
 relating to literature, was at the lowest level, there was 
 another side to this. There were, in this age of deep 
 degeneracy, good and earnest men, who could act if 
 they could not write. That very seventh century, which 
 Mission r ^^^ ^^ Frank episcopate so widely corrupt, 
 zeal in the was the age of one of the purest and boldest 
 missionary efforts on record. The seventh 
 century was the age of the conversion of England, the 
 
600-750- Missionary Enterprise. 135 
 
 age of Augustine and Theodore of Tarsus, of Aidan, 
 and Chad, and Aldhelm. It was the age of the missions 
 of the Irish monks, Columban and his followers, in Bur- 
 gundy and in the vast unknown heathendom beyond it, 
 in the plains and forests of Central Europe, in the 
 Alpine valleys and on the Danube and the Rhine. A 
 Frank missionary, Emmeran from Poitiers, was the 
 apostle and martyr of the Bavarians. Towards the end 
 of the seventh century, when Christianity had taken root 
 in England, and its first-fruits had appeared in the piety 
 and learning of the Northumbrian Bede of Jarrow, a 
 burst of missionary zeal carried English teachers, emu- 
 lating their Irish forerunners, to win to the Gospel the 
 lands from which their fathers had come. Willibrord of 
 Ripon preached to the heathen of Friesland, and founded 
 the see of Utrecht. His greater follower, the Devonshire 
 Winfrid, afterwards known by the Latin name of Boni- 
 face, the first archbishop of Mainz, devoted his life, in 
 the first half of the eighth century, first as a preacher 
 and then as a martyr, to the conversion of the Germans 
 — Frisians, Saxons, Hessians, Thuringians, Bavarians. 
 He not only preached but organized. Armed with au- 
 thority from the two greatest powers in the West, the 
 king of the Franks and the pope of Rome, he mapped 
 out the new missionary conquests into dioceses, he 
 founded sees where the conquest was still to be made, 
 he held the first German councils (about 743). He 
 also founded monastic schools like the famous Fulda — 
 families of earnest men devoted to a definite work, the 
 work of evangelizing. The effect was great of Teutonic 
 preachers coming to Teutonic populations from lands of 
 Teutonic occupation, and with the tie of a common 
 language. Some of the oldest specimens of the languages 
 of continental Germany are the translations made for 
 
T36 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 
 
 the use of the German converts ; the baptismal forms, 
 the Lord's prayer, the Creed. 
 
 Charles, like his father Pipin, was too much of a 
 statesman to be indifferent to the good and evil in the 
 Church, and to the great and increasing place which it 
 occupied in the growing society of the new 
 Church nations. The Irish and English missiona-- 
 
 government. ^j^^ were pionecrs of Frank influence in 
 central Germany, in some cases, its forlorn hope ; and 
 they were instruments of keener temper than the sword 
 for the permanent conquest of barbarism. Both for this 
 reason, and from a genuine sympathy for their dauntless 
 courage, and severe and thorough-going religion, they 
 were warmly encouraged by the new Frank kings. On 
 the other hand, the disorder in the Church invited from 
 so strong a ruler as Charles the most uncompromising 
 policy of interference and correction. His ecclesiastical 
 administration was unswerving in purpose and absolute 
 in its claims. Never in modern Europe has the union 
 of Church and State, exhibited in the supremacy of the 
 king, been carried to so high a point. The pope was 
 there recognized, doubtless, as the highest religious 
 authority ; he sanctioned and consecrated Charles's 
 power ; but the pope was too completely dependent for 
 his Italian dominions on his alliance with the Franks, to 
 venture seriously to thwart his protector. In the Capitu- 
 laries, we find laws on ecclesiastical and spiritual matters 
 placed exactly on the same footing as the strictly politi- 
 cal and civil laws. The rebellious Saxons were baptized 
 as a proof of their submission to the king, just as in later 
 times, the other sacrament has been used as a test of 
 loyalty to government ; and, in their case, to depart from 
 the religion of their conquerors was punished with death, 
 as if it were treason. Bishops and abbots were peremp* 
 
771-814- Ecclesiastical Government, 
 
 *?o 
 
 torily recalled to their duties. They were forbidden to 
 ride forth to the wars, carry arms, and shed blood, and 
 to live as laymen. The king's interference extended to 
 matters strictly belonging to their province. By his own 
 authority he altered, corrected, and, as he believed, re- 
 formed and improved the offices of the Church. In the 
 controversies of the day, he formed his opinion and ruled 
 the conclusions of councils, cautiously, indeed, and with 
 ecclesiastical learning to back him, but by authority of 
 his own. In the question about images, which was so 
 compHcated by political difficulties, and had so much to 
 do with finally separating the Greek and Latin Churches, 
 he took his part, the part, it must be said, of moderation 
 and sobriety. He rejected a council claiming to be 
 oecumenical (Nicasa II. 787), and opposed the pope who 
 had accepted it ; while he boldly attempted in a Frank 
 council of his own (Frankfort, 792), and by the pen of 
 his scholars and divines, to fix the opinion and usage of 
 the Western Church. The most unceremonious pro- 
 clamations of strict and unsparing discipline were ad- 
 dressed to the bishops ; and articles of inquiry were sent 
 about, detailed and minute, as to their knowledge of the 
 elements of religion, the morality of their lives, their 
 diligence in preaching, their capacity and that of their 
 clergy to perform the offices of religion. They are to be 
 asked, he says, in one of these visitation circulars — and 
 the question is to be driven home — " What is the mean- 
 ing of the Apostle's saying (2 Tim. ii. 4), ' No man that 
 warreth, entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; ' 
 and to whom do the words apply?" 
 
 Charles's idea of his office as king was deepened and 
 enlarsred when he became emperor. He then rose from 
 being the king of the Franks and Lombards, to what the 
 world of this day, and after it the middle ages, supposed 
 
1.^6 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. d. 
 
 to be the unique and transcendent supremacy 
 ecclesiastical inherited from Caesar Augustus. As empe- 
 liIYm^ eror^ ror of the Romans, he claimed to govern the 
 
 Roman world, and all persons and things 
 in it. As emperor, he claimed the pope himself as his 
 subject. The pope was his father and guide in religion, 
 and governed the Church by power not derived from 
 man and according to a legislation of its own, yet sub- 
 ject to his own visitatorial control. At the pope's hands 
 he received his own imperial crown and anointing. But 
 the election of the pope required the emperor's con- 
 firmation ; the pope like every one else, had to take the 
 oath of fidelity to the emperor ; the pope went through 
 the ceremony, as it is expressed in unsuspicious con- 
 temporary language, of " adoring" him at his corona- 
 tion, after the custom of the emperors of old. Pope Leo 
 III. pleaded before him ; and Charles, in bidding his 
 envoys exhort the pope to live honestly, to observe the 
 canons, and to avoid simony, used the same force and 
 freedom with which he exhorted his bishops. Charles's 
 claim to interfere in religious matters, which he had put 
 high as king of the Franks and Lombards, was sensibly 
 raised, both in extent and peremptoriness, when he be- 
 came emperor. He conceived, and his age with him, 
 that he had received from God, together with the in- 
 heritance of the Csesars, the duty and office of the Jew- 
 ish kings, not only of protecting the Church of God, 
 but of purifying it from evil, and making everyone in it, 
 from the highest to the lowest, do his duty, and submit 
 to the imperial authority and rebuke. 
 
 This broad claim to superintend and regulate the 
 policy, the government, the practice, and even the be- 
 lief of the Church, with which the East had been long 
 familiar, was new among the Teutonic rulers of the 
 
7 7 1-8 1 4^ ^^^ Christian Empire. 139 
 
 West. In Charles appeared for the first time, realized 
 and complete, the mediaeval idea of the Roman empire. 
 According to this idea, "the unity of the Christian em- 
 pire reflected the unity of the Christian Church," and the 
 empire had its supreme head, Caesar Augustus, as the 
 Church had the successor and representative of St. 
 Peter. In Charles's interpretation of the idea, the ulti- 
 mate control of this twofold realm rested with the di- 
 vinely appointed Caesar ; where there was a conflict of 
 judgment it was for his authority to prevail. The re- 
 vival of the empire was the pope's doing, and for a long 
 time the popes sought in vain to undo what in a time of 
 need they had too hastily sanctioned. But to undo was 
 beyond their power. Men took difl"erent sides in the 
 great question which arose out of the idea of the empire ; 
 but the idea had struck deep root ; it was the idea at 
 once of Frederick II, and Dante, and of Gregory VII. 
 and Boniface VIII. The precedent set by Charles, and 
 the fierce debates arising out of it, affected the whole 
 history of the middle ages, and even of the centuries 
 which followed the Reformation ; nor is its eventful 
 significance exhausted yet. In the great conflicts between 
 Church and State both parties have sought arguments 
 from it. The governments of Europe have found in it 
 an armory of precedents to limit or to extinguish the 
 liberties of the Church : while in the origin and incident^! 
 of the revived empire, and in the new place of the pa- 
 pacy which followed on this revival, the champions of 
 the pope have seen proofs of the theory which made him 
 the master of kings and laws. 
 
 Charles was keenly alive to the depressed 
 state of knowledge and of general cultiva encourage- 
 
 tion in his age, and to the contrast in regard learning 
 to literature and theology between his own 
 
I40 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a/d. 
 
 times and the great days before him. Early in his reign 
 he collected about him in his palace the best scholars he 
 could attract, and made them his familiar friends. The 
 most considerable of them was — like the great German 
 missionary of the previous generation, Boniface — an Eng- 
 lishman. Alcwin came over from the school of York in 
 782, and remained, with a short interval, on the continent 
 till his death in 804. By such help Charles tried to im- 
 prove his own knowledge, and to raise the standard 
 of acquirement round him. Records of the conversa- 
 tions and discussions which went on between the king 
 and his " palace school" have been preserved in Alcwin's 
 writings. They show the almost childish confusions 
 and affectations of reviving knowledge ; but they also 
 show the manly interest felt in the task of inquiry and 
 self-improvement. The king and his companions fur- 
 nished themselves with names, partly from the Bible^ 
 partly from Latin literature ; Charles was David, and 
 there was a Nathanael and a Bezaleel ; Alcwin was 
 Flaccus Albinus, with a Homer, a Mcpsus, a Flavius 
 Damoetas ; and for the ladies of the palace, the sisters 
 and daughters of Charles, there were the names of Lucia, 
 Columba, Delia, Eulalia. They employed their mother 
 wit and their curiosity on such learning as was within 
 their reach relating to the processes of thought and the 
 powers of speech, the laws of numbers and sound, the 
 motions of the heavenly bodies ; and they called it logic, 
 grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, music and astronomy, 
 Charles learned to speak Latin with facility, and he 
 understood better than he spoke, Greek ; in his native 
 Frankish German he was a vigorous and impressive 
 speaker, and the splendour and usefulness of Latin did 
 not shake his allegiance to his mother tongue. He was 
 passionately fond of the old German songs and lays. 
 
• 77i~8i4- Encourageme7it of Learnijtg. 141 
 
 He attempted a German grammar, which means proba- 
 bly that, Hke Otfrid, the translator of the Gospels in the 
 next generation, he attempted the then hopeless task of 
 grasping, under rules like those of Latin, the varying 
 spoken dialects of his kingdom. He tried late in life, 
 but without success, to acquire what was then the pro- 
 fessional art of writing. He was a severe critic of the 
 reading and singing in his chapel. It was his custom to 
 be read to at meals ; and his favourite book was St. 
 Augustine's " City of God," which, with its grand sweep- 
 ing generalizations, and its religious sense of the presence 
 of God in the history and development of mankind, 
 answered to his own lofty view of the work to which he 
 had been called. 
 
 In promoting the improvement of learning, Charles 
 showed the same eagerness of person as he did in 
 politics, or war, or hunting. Utterly dis- 
 regardful of trouble, and untiring in what he Moasures 
 did himself, he called on his bishops and motmg 
 abbots both to learn themselves and to 
 enforce learning among their subordinates. Ordinances 
 were issued calling for schools to be set up in the great 
 sees and monasteries. They arose, or were quickened 
 into activity where already founded ; and they produced 
 their fruits in the next generation, and kept hope alive 
 amid great disasters. Colonies were sent from the 
 schools and monasteries of Gaul into Germany ; thus 
 New Corbey in the conquered Saxon land was founded 
 by converted Saxons, who had been trained at Corbey 
 on the Somme. At Osnabriick, in view of greater inter- 
 course with Constantinople, Greek was specially ordered 
 to be taught. The increasing list of learned names 
 which begin to appear from this century, almost all of 
 them pupils of the new German schools, shows that 
 
142 Beginning of the Middle Ages, a. d. 
 
 Charles's efforts were not altogether in vain. But it was 
 easier to command and even show the way, than to be 
 obeyed ; and even to be obeyed, than to alter the inher- 
 ited conditions of his age. Yet Charles was as practical 
 as he was enthusiastic and resolute. In this, as in other 
 things, the wants of men, and the necessity of supplying 
 them, were insisted upon by the master spirit of the 
 time, with such manifest truth and reason, that though 
 the change was imperceptible and was thwarted by 
 countless adverse influences, a great change had really 
 set in. And encouragement was given to those who, in 
 those wild and perplexed times, believed that men were 
 meant for something better and higher than a life of 
 fighting, of personal rivalries, and of coarse enjoyment. 
 
 Charles's great qualities were alloyed with great faults. 
 With the excellences of a strong nature, he had the fail- 
 ings and self-delusions of the strong. Great 
 Charles's g^g \^q yf^^js,. both in what he aimed at, and in 
 
 great taults. ' , 
 
 what he accomplished, he could not be 
 above his age ; he had the rudeness of a barbarian en- 
 deavouring to rise above barbarism. Rude, as Peter the 
 Great in like circumstances was rude, yet Charles's was 
 the rudeness of a larger and more genial nature, and of 
 a nobler ambition. But Charles was one of those who 
 think they know enough, and have strength enough to 
 mould the world at their will. With strong affections 
 and wide sympathies, he was imperious and masterful. 
 He saw no limits to his power to correct and mend, and 
 no limits to his right to exercise it ; and his too ambitious 
 and sometimes unscrupulous attempts sowed the seeds 
 of mischief to come. Clement and placable as he was 
 in peace, his wars were ferocious, and his policy after 
 conquest unsparing ; yet it was the ferocity which often 
 since his time has been judged the only weapon to ex- 
 
7 7 1-8 1 4^ Extent of Charles* s Kingdom. 143 
 
 tinguish obstinate and dangerous resistance. He was in 
 earnest in his religion, and there was much in it not only 
 of earnestness but of intelligence. But it was not com- 
 plete or deep enough to exclude that waywardness and 
 inconsistency of moral principle, and that incapacity to 
 control passion, which belonged to the time. We do not 
 hear of the foul murders and treasons of the Merovingian 
 times ; but his court was full of the gross licentiousness 
 of the period. He was not superior to it himself; there 
 were many evil stories about him ; and tenderly attached 
 as he was to his children, he was not happy in their 
 training and fortunes. 
 
 The Frank kingdom which Charles had received from 
 his father included Gaul from the Loire to the Rhine, 
 with an ill-established sovereignty over the 
 
 ° ■' Extent of 
 
 German tribes between the Rhine, the Elbe Charles's 
 
 and the Upper Danube, and over the impa- "^ °™" 
 
 tient Latinized population of Aquitaine. During the 
 forty -seven years of Charles's reign it had grown into a 
 resemblance of the dominion of the Caesars. When 
 Charles died, its borders were the Ebro in Spain, the 
 Elbe in Germany, or beyond the Elbe, the Eyder, and 
 the Bavarian Enns, if not the Hungarian Theiss, to the 
 south-east. All of what is now Germany west of the 
 Bohemian mountains, not merely acknowledged in him 
 an over-lord, but was really won to his rule. He secured, 
 what his father had only fought to secure, the submission 
 of Latin Aquitaine, and the submission, at last complete 
 and sincere, of the stout-hearted and obstinate Saxons. 
 There had been one independent Christian kingdom on 
 the mainland of the West, that of the Lombards at Pavia ; 
 it had disappeared. He had wrested from them all Italy, 
 which was beginning to be called by their name, from 
 the Alps to Calabria, and the king of The Franks pre- 
 
144 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 
 
 served the memory of his conquest by adding to his title 
 that of king of the Lombards. His more indefinite claims 
 to sovereignty or tribute extended beyond these limits — 
 to Corsica and perhaps Sardinia, to the lands between 
 the Danube and the head of the Adriatic, to the barbar- 
 ous tribes of Slaves, eastward of his proper border as far 
 as the Vistula. From the ocean to the mountains of the 
 Bohemians and the plains of Hungary and Poland, from 
 the Baltic till he met the Arabs in Spain, the Greeks in 
 Calabria, Sicily and Dalmatia, the continental Europe of 
 that time owned his sway and formed his empire. It 
 seemed to be the centre of all authority, the bond of 
 union among the nations. 
 
 Charles was one of those men, who in person and out- 
 ward bearing answer to their place. Tall, robust, well- 
 proportioned in body, with great strength and activity, 
 simple in dress, bright and keen-eyed, clear but shrill in 
 voice, commanding in feature, hale in his old age, he 
 lived with unbroken health till his last few years, greatly 
 despising physicians and remedies. He was a great 
 eater, but sparing of wine, and relied on starvation as 
 his only medicine. He was a great rider and swimmer, 
 passionately fond of bathing, and delighting in the hot 
 springs and pools of his favourite Aachen. To the very 
 last he was a mighty and untiring hunter. After an 
 autumn spent in violent exercise, the winter of 813-814 
 was at length too much for him. Fever and pleurisy 
 attacked him, and he would only meet them by starving 
 himself. On the morning of January 28, 814, he died. 
 He was buried the same day in the stately basihca which 
 he had built hard by his palace at Aachen or Aix-la- 
 Chapelle.and adorned with marbles brought from Rome 
 and Ravenna. He was laid in the tomb which he had 
 made for himself. On the gilded arch beneath which 
 
8 1 4. Death of Charles. I4S 
 
 he lay, was his effigy and the inscription : "Under this 
 tomb is laid the body of Charles, great and orthodox 
 Emperor, who nobly enlarged the kingdom of the Franks, 
 and for 47 years reigned prosperously. He died, being 
 seventy years old, in the year of our Lord 814, the 7th 
 Indictioa, the fifth day before the Kalends of February." 
 There, in the vault below, he was left, sitting as in life 
 on a marble throne, dressed in his imperial robes, with 
 his horn, his sword, and his book of the Gospels on his 
 knee. And there, says the legend, in the last years of 
 the tenth century, he was found by Otto III., who ven- 
 tured to open the tomb, and who beheld the undecayed 
 form of the great emperor of the Franks. 
 
 For the first time since the fall of the Roman empire 
 in the West, a king, an emperor, had arisen in the new 
 nations, to rule with glory; a conqueror, a legislator, a 
 founder of social order, a restorer of religion. His un- 
 broken success, his wide dominion, his consecrated au- 
 thority, his fame spread to the farthest bounds of the 
 world, recalled the great kings of the Bible, the great 
 Caesars of Rome. What made him so great was, that 
 his aim was not only to conquer, and overthrow, and 
 enjoy, but that he laboured so long and so resolutely 
 with deliberate purpose for the benefit of men. It was 
 all the more wonderful and impressive, from the disorder 
 which had been before, from the disorder which for a 
 long time followed. His reign was a romantic episode, 
 interposed in the midst of what seemed normal and irre- 
 mediable anarchy. The unique splendour of his reign, 
 which even we with our cooler judgments see to have 
 been so remarkable, naturally dazzled the imaginations 
 of his age. The haze of legend and poetry soon enve- 
 loped his image in the memory of the nations. The 
 great German king and Caesar was transformed into a 
 
146 
 
 Beginning of the Middle Ages. 
 
 A. D. 
 
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The CaroU7igians. 147 
 
 Latin hero of romance, the theme of the Norman "Chant 
 de Roland," and of the Itahan poets of the court of Fer- 
 rara, Bojardo and Ariosto. More strangely still, as the 
 great champion and legislator and benefactor of the 
 Church, he grew, though personally so lax in his rules of 
 life, into the reputation of a saint. He was never for- 
 mally canonized; but his name and his doings appear 
 in the catalogue of the Saints ; his altar was frequent at 
 one time in Germany and the Low Countries ; and to 
 this day, his title to saintship is still acknowledged by 
 altar, and image, and festival, in the churches of the 
 Lower Valais. 
 
 His glory was the prelude to strange reverses in the 
 fortunes of his posterity. Strong as he was, the times 
 were yet stronger; and the children of Charles proved 
 even less worthy of their origin than the children of 
 Clevis. For they started from a higher point; and they 
 sank at last almost as low as the Merovingians. 
 
 CHAPTER Vin. 
 
 THE CAROLINGI ANS. 
 
 1. Louis the Pious and his sons. — 2. The Northmen. 
 3. Fall of the Carolingian lines. 
 
 It seemed as if under Charles the Franks were to be to 
 the new world of Christendom what the Romans had 
 been to the old world of heathendom. It seemed so. 
 But before Charles died, he showed that he felt it was 
 hardly to be, and that his image of empire had been but 
 his own personal achievement, and was linked to his 
 own character and life. Two forces opposed the conti- 
 
148 Begtnmng of the Middle Ages. 
 
 nuation of his empire, and he recognized them both: 
 the permanent conditions of nationality, and the acci- 
 dents of his own family. He saw that his dominion was 
 made up of discordant elements, the German, the Gaul, 
 and the Italian ; the true German Frank of the East, 
 the Frank of the Main and the Rhine, the Moselle and 
 Meuse; and the Romanizing Frank of the West, the 
 Frank of Paris and Rouen, of Orleans and Tours, with 
 the Romanized Celt of the South, of Bordeaux, Tou- 
 louse, and Lyons. Three sons, the sons of one of the 
 earliest of his wives, Hildegard, had grown up in 
 the companionship of his wars, and had shared with 
 him in his enterprizes of conquest and rule. The 
 eldest should succeed to his position, by right of birth 
 or by national choice, was not the assumption of 
 those days among the Franks. The ideas and pre- 
 cedents of the kingdom prescribed a division of the 
 inheritance ; and Charles accepted, as of course, the 
 parting of his empire. His one care was that it should 
 be a peaceable one ; but he never seems to have 
 thought of keeping it together, as he had held it, in one 
 hand. Eight years before his death, in order to avert 
 discord and quarrel between his sons, he made a solemn 
 act of partition (806). Charles, the eldest, was to rule 
 in the North over the old kingdom of the Franks, from 
 the Elbe to the Loire, Neustria and Austrasia, and the 
 German lands beyond the Rhine, with North Burgundy, 
 the Valley of the Rhone, and Aosta, one of the southern 
 keys of the Alps. Pipin, the second, had the East and 
 South-east, Bavaria, and " Italy, which is also Lom- 
 bardy," with the southern bank of the Danube, and up to 
 the sources of the Rhine. Louis had the south, Aquitaine 
 and Gascony, the Spanish March, Provence, and South- 
 ern Burgundy, and the valleys of the Western Alps, 
 
The Carolinians. 149 
 
 Savoy, Maurienne, and Tarentaise. To each — that each, 
 it was said, might aid the other, really that each might 
 have his own access to Italy and Rome — was assigned 
 his own pass over the Alps; to Charles by the St. Ber- 
 nard, to Pipin by Chur and the Septimer, to Louis by the 
 Mont Cenis and Susa. The contingency of the death 
 of any of them was provided for ; and rules were care- 
 fully laid down for the questions which, in the existing 
 state of society, were the most usual causes or pretexts 
 of quarrels. In making this arrangement, Charles must 
 have acknowledged to himself that the great achieve^ 
 ment of his own life was not likely, except from unfore- 
 seen chances, to be repeated, and that he was in truth 
 founding three great and separate kingdoms, for which 
 all that he could do was to try and keep them allied and 
 at peace. Yet he might have thought that the Germans, 
 in the great race of Franks, were henceforth to lead the 
 world. 
 
 But none of these things were to be, not even peace 
 in his family. In the few years between the act of par- 
 tition and his death, two of the three sons among whom 
 he had so carefully divided his realms, had died, and left 
 their claims to be a source of endless strife, feud, and 
 war to a younger generation. And that leadership of the 
 Germans during the last three centuries, which seemed 
 secured to them by the revived empire was, by the re- 
 sults of the policy of the greatest of German leaders, 
 finally checked and abolished. By the destruction of 
 the Lombard, which meant a Teutonic, ascendancy in 
 Italy, by the decisive separation of the Western Frank 
 kingdom from the Eastern Franks, and by the creation 
 of a great Italian power in the reconstructed papacy, the 
 independence, and then the preponderance and triumph 
 of Latin influences in southern Europe were made sure^ 
 
150 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 806. 
 
 Charles aspired to put his Germans at the head of the 
 rising civilization of the West. But they were still too 
 rude for the task. And exactly as his own efforts to 
 awaken a desire for order and cultivation were success- 
 ful, it was felt that not force, but trained and experienced 
 reason, not the gifts which had made the Germans irre- 
 sistible, but those which were the inheritance of the 
 weaker Latins, were the foundations of power, and the 
 guardians of peace, law, and hope, in society. 
 
 The wild world which Charles the Great had tried to 
 tame broke out again into disorder under his son, Louis, 
 nzxix^^ Pious , der Fromme , le Debonnaire, the kindly and 
 religious, as we should perhaps name him, "the Good." 
 Charles's aim had been to create a strong central power, 
 which, leaving each land with its own institutions and 
 laws, should everywhere moderate and control, should en- 
 force justice, should support religion and civilization, and 
 should encourage learning ; and he thought that he had 
 done so by reviving the Roman empire in the West, and 
 placing it among the Franks. Still holding the authority 
 of emperor, Charles, as has been already said, towards 
 the end of his reign (806), following both imperial and 
 Merovingian precedents, appointed three of his sons, 
 Charles, Pipin, and Louis, to be kings under him ; laying 
 down provisions for maintaining the peace and unity of 
 the one Frank empire. But his foresight was of no avaiL 
 Pipin in 810 and Charles in 811 both died before him. 
 Then he devolved his imperial dignity, by his own 
 authority, in 813, a year before his death, on Louis of 
 Aquitaine, the survivor of his three kingly sons. Thus, 
 at Charles's death (814), Louis came at once into his 
 father's place as emperor, and was welcomed in it by 
 the unanimous consent of the Franks. Two years after 
 he was crowned at Reims by the pope, Stephen V. (816). 
 
A. D. 814-840. Louis the Fious. * 151 
 
 Louis followed his father's example by associating his 
 eldest son Lothar, as emperor with himself, and by ap- 
 pointing his other two sons, Pepin and Louis, 
 and his nephew, Bernard, over the outlying l^tel hts^ 
 portions of the empire — Aquitaine, Bavaria, sons in his 
 
 • 11 J govern- 
 
 and Italy, or as it was sometimes called, ment. 
 Lombardy. For sixteen years all went on, beg^^in^. 
 as in Charles's times. Louis, popular with 
 his subjects, gentle-minded, for the most part a lover of 
 mercy and justice, but also active and brave, sedulously 
 followed in his father's steps in legislation and govern- 
 ment. He was busy with reforms both in Church and 
 State. His ordinances swell the Capitularies. From all 
 quarters ambassadors came to him, with presents, pro- 
 posals for peace, demands for assistance — from the 
 Greeks, the Saracens, the Bulgarians, the Danes, the 
 Eastern Slaves, the popes. The old success attended 
 for the most part the military expeditions of the Franks. 
 An attempt to make Italy independent under young 
 Bernard, his nephew, was at once and pitilessly sup- 
 pressed (817). Bernard's eyes were put out, and he died 
 soon afterwards (818). More formidable revolts in the 
 border-lands beyond the Elbe, in the Slave countries 
 beyond the Inn, on the Drave and the Save, in Brittany, 
 in Gascony, were vigorously met and put down. And 
 yet in the midst of his power and glory Louis was mind- 
 ful of the frailty of human greatness, and the imperfec- 
 tion of human action. More than once his conscience 
 smote him. At a great meeting at Attigny, near Laon, 
 822, like the Emperor Theodosius, he voluntarily hum- 
 bled himself before his assembled chiefs and bishops, 
 publicly confessing his offences against those whom, like 
 his nephew Bernard, he had treated unjustly and cruelly. 
 Thus, with a milder and purer character, Louis seemed 
 
152 Beginning of the Middle Ages, a. d. 
 
 to keep up the vigour of his father's rule, and to have 
 inherited his father's power and fortune. Never had the 
 boundaries of the empire been so extended, or its au- 
 thority appeared so commanding. Without his father's 
 faults, he had reached to more than even his father's 
 greatness. But it was the illusion of only sixteen years. 
 It was true that he had not his father's faults ; but it was 
 proved at last that he had not his father's strength. The 
 show of prosperity and success during the first half of 
 his reign was in the latter half to end in gloomy and 
 hopeless confusion. 
 
 The explosion came at last. Louis, left a widower in 
 818, married, in the following year (819), the fair and am- 
 bitious Bavarian Judith, the daughter of Welf, 
 second Count of Altorf, on the Lake of Lucerne, the 
 
 hTs young- anccstor of many famous lines : among them 
 est son those of Este, of the Guelfs of Bavaria and 
 
 Charles. 
 
 Quarrels in Saxony, of the Plantagcncts, of the House of 
 a-i^iy- Brunswick. In 823 she bore a son, named 
 after the great emperor, Charles, and to be distinguished 
 from him afterwards as Charles the Bald. This roused at 
 once the jealousy of the emperor's first family, the 
 three sons who shared his government. The empire 
 was henceforth filled with their intrigues and revolts. 
 Their counsellors and partizans, the turbulent nobles of 
 their kingdoms, threw themselves into the quarrel with 
 rancour ; and the attacks on the Empress Judith have 
 been compared to the insults of the revolutionary parties 
 in Paris against Marie Antoinette. The emperor was 
 bent on carving out a kingdom for his youngest and fa- 
 vourite son ; but the partition betwen the elder sons was 
 regarded by them as final, and whatever was given to 
 Charles must be given at their expense. In 829 the em- 
 peror took from the portion of one of them, Louis "the 
 
823-833- Louis the Pious. The Lugenfeld. 153 
 
 German," Alamannia.Rhaetia, and Burgundy beyond the 
 Jura, corresponding roughly to Suabia and Switzerland, 
 and created it into a kingdom for Charles, a child of six 
 years old. From that time the empire of Charles the 
 Great began to break up. In the following ^ 
 
 , , ^ . Empire 
 
 year, 830, the elder sons, with Lothar, his begins to 
 father's trusted associate in the empire, at ^^ "^* 
 
 their head, set up in Paris the standard of revolt. Louis 
 was surprised by his sons, and together with the empress 
 was imprisoned, threatened, ill-treated. He was restored 
 as suddenly ; for the brothers distrusted one another, 
 and the feeling was strong for the emperor in the Eastern 
 and German provinces. His rebellious sons were lightly 
 punished, and again they rose up against him. This 
 time they had won over the pope, Gregory IV. to their 
 side ; and he accompanied their united armies against 
 their father (833). The two hosts for several days faced 
 each other on the plains of Elsass, near Colmar. Neither 
 side would attack ; but communications freely passed 
 between them, the pope offering himself as mediator. 
 The end was that the emperor's adherents were persuad- 
 ed to desert him. His army broke up without fighting. 
 Bishops and counts passed over, one after another, to 
 his sons, and he was left with the empress and her son 
 to the mercy of the rebels. The name of r^YiQ " Field 
 this long-remembered scene of treachery °^ Lies," 833. 
 was changed from the "Rothfeld," to the " Liigen- 
 feld," Campus Alendacii, the " Field of Lies.'' The sons 
 endeavoured to force their father to abdicate ; but he 
 was resolute in his refusal. They imprisoned him in 
 the monastery of St. Medard, near Soissons. At length, 
 in an assembly of bishops and nobles, he was formally 
 deposed. But the sentence had scarcely been pro- 
 nounced before the reaction began. The brothers, as 
 
154 Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 833-840. 
 
 usual, quarrelled. As before, the Germans of the East- 
 ern provinces were ready to support him, though they 
 had deserted him at the Liigenfeld. Once more Louis 
 was released, his deposition cancelled, and he was again 
 emperor ; once more he forgave and made peace with 
 his rebellious sons. But confidence and quiet were not 
 restored. Partition after partition — ten are counted dur- 
 ing his reign — showed the emperor's unscrupulous eager- 
 ness to increase the share of his youngest son ; he added 
 to Alamannia, Neustria, and, on Pipin's death, Aqui- 
 taine. Father was still in arms against son, and brother 
 against brother. The empire, so prosperous while united, 
 began to suffer from external attacks. Northmen and 
 Slaves became more troublesome and audacious. At 
 length, still victorious, but victorious over his own chil- 
 dren, with a threatening future, and amid natural calam- 
 ities and portents, Louis the Pious, the 
 Louis, June Kindly, died in one of his palaces on the 
 30i 40- Rhine, and was buried at Metz, leaving dis- 
 
 cord among his sons, and his great heritage shaken and 
 in confusion. 
 
 The last ten years of Louis' empire had made it clear 
 that the power to govern its turbulent elements had de- 
 parted with its founder. And from this time (830-840), 
 the artificial force which had kept it together being 
 removed, the contrast and opposition between its great 
 national divisions became more and more distinct and 
 sharp. The process of disintegration began, and it was 
 probably in the nature of things inevitable. But it was 
 greatly helped forward by violent and incurable dis- 
 sensions between the brothers and their children, to 
 whom Louis had left his empire. Lothar, the eldest, 
 his associate in the empire, and already crowned at 
 Rome, ambitious, cunning, unscrupulous, claimed for 
 
A. D. 841. Battle of Fontcnailles. 155 
 
 himself the whole imperial inheritance, and the supre- 
 macy which his father and grandfather had held. He 
 was the centre of the old Frank interest, the local Frank 
 allegiance, the old Frank claims to rule. He held the 
 north, the Rhine, and Italy ; he was master at once of 
 Aachen or Aix-la-Chapelle, and of Rome, the capitals of 
 the new and the old empire. But in the east and west, 
 German Bavaria and Latin Aquitaine, always impatient 
 of Frank supremacy, had each now their own king, 
 sons, like Lothar, of the late emperor. In Bavaria and 
 the neighbouring lands, Louis, named the German, 
 had been able to defy his father ; his power and influence 
 had become strongly rooted. In the west, Charles the 
 Bald, though his claims in Aquitaine were disputed by 
 a cousin, was gradually becoming formidable in the 
 countries between the Loire, the Seine, and the Rhone. 
 The trial of strength, in such conditions, could not fail 
 to come. There was the usual prelude, like as of feints 
 in a game, of treacherous negotiations and feeble con- 
 flicts. At length, Louis the German and Charles, with 
 the Latinized forces of the West, united in earnest 
 against their elder brother. The bloody battle of Fonte- 
 nailles, or Fontenoy [Fontanetum) near Auxerre, a year 
 after their father's death (June 25, 841), a battle famous 
 in those days for the fierceness of the fighting, and for the 
 greatness of the slaughter, ended in the overthrow of 
 Lothar, and made it clear that his brothers could hold 
 their own against him. The battle of Fontcnailles was 
 the decisive proof that the unity of Frank dominion, 
 shaken under the Emperor Louis, was hopeless under 
 the Emperor Lothar. The two brothers, Louis and 
 Charles, with more steadiness than was then usual, main- 
 tained their alliance, and confirmed it the following year 
 (844) by the memorable " oath of Strasburg," taken by 
 
 M 
 
156 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 841-843. 
 
 themselves and their two armies, by Louis' army in 
 German [Teudisca, DeutscK) by Charles in "Roman," 
 [^Romano), a language no longer Latin, but not yet 
 French. The result of their success was at length 
 acknowledged and sanctioned by the treaty of Verdun 
 (843), the most important and substantially permanent 
 of the numberless partitions which had been and were 
 to be. For it was the starting point of the new arrange- 
 ment of Western Europe, following on the dissolution 
 of the fabric which the great Charles had built up. 
 Changes, redistributions, subdivisions, unions of the 
 most varied kinds were still to be attempted. But, hence- 
 forth, the broad lines of division were traced, which the 
 subsequent history of Europe, in spite of all attempts to 
 obliterate them, have only deepened. 
 
 Speaking roughly we may say that by the treaty of 
 Vendun, and by the confirmation of it, at Thionville 
 Treaty of (^44)» and Meersen (847), Louis the German 
 
 Verdun, took the Eastern and German Franks, and 
 
 843 
 
 Charles the Bald, the Western and Latinized 
 Franks. Lothar, besides the imperial dignity and what- 
 ever claims went with it, had the Middle portion of the 
 Frank kingdom, between the Rhine eastwards, the 
 Scheldt, Meuse, and Rhone westwards, with Italy, the 
 emperor's special share. The realm of Lothar, the 
 emperor, was, says Palgrave, "built upon Italy." The 
 two imperial residences, Rome and Aachen, "the 
 centres of the two great Cis-Alpine and Trans- Alpine 
 crown lands, were conjoined by " an unbroken and 
 continuous territory, including all varieties of soil, 
 climate, and production, the wine and oil of the South, 
 the harvests and pastures of the North.'' Once, and 
 once only, again, after the disruption of Verdun, the 
 three realms were for a short time under one emperor, 
 
A. D. 843. Partition of Verdun. 157 
 
 Charles the Fat, (884-887) ; but his hand was too feeble 
 to hold them. The inherent tendencies to separate 
 national life were irresistible. The new world grew too 
 fast, and became too large, for any constitutional author- 
 ity of those days to manage, and for anything but the 
 rarest personal qualities to keep together. Charles the 
 Great's design was more than once attempted, but was 
 never again accomplished. " The history of modern 
 Europe," says Sir F. Palgrave, "is an exposition of the 
 treaty of Verdun." 
 
 With the breaking up of the West into these great 
 national divisions, occasioned by the family feuds of the 
 Carolingians, the interest of their history is 
 extinguished. For a time they continued ^^??''y. , 
 
 ° ^ strifes of the 
 
 at the head of these divisions. They gave Caroiin- 
 their names to some of them ; we hear of a 
 Karli?igia, and a more enduring Lotharingia, now nar- 
 rowed down to Lothringen or Lorraine. Each member 
 of the family was for ever endeavouring for his own ad- 
 vantage to undo the partition of Verdun, in whole or in 
 part. But to this their efforts were confined. The po- 
 litical and administrative aims of the founders of their 
 house, of Pipin and Charles, disappear. The legisla- 
 tive record, the Capitularies, so full under Charles the 
 Great and Louis the Pious, thins out with a few import- 
 ant documents under Charles the Bald, and after him 
 comes to an end, leaving less trace than the legislation 
 of the later Merovingians. Their history becomes a 
 dfzzy and unintelligible spectacle of monotonous confu- 
 sion — a scene of unrestrained treachery, of insatiable 
 and blind rapacity. No son is obedient or loyal to his 
 father; no brother can trust his brother; no uncle spares 
 his nephews. Members of the same family, their greedy 
 envy of each other's possessions kept them in an unva- 
 
158 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. viii. 
 
 lying round of attempts at unscrupulous spoliation, suc- 
 cessful or unsuccessful. There were rapid alternations 
 of fortune, rapid changing of sides ; there was universal 
 distrust, and universal reliance on falsehood and crime. 
 But nothing, not even the barbarians of the North and 
 East desolating their cities and provinces, could inter- 
 rupt the infatuated passion to overreach and encroach. 
 While the Northmen were piercing to the heart of Neu- 
 stria by the Seine, the Loire, and the Garonne, Charles 
 the Bald, unable with his utmost efforts to check them, 
 never could resist the temptation, when it offered, to 
 filch a province from a neighbouring kinsman, and he 
 in like manner, when his hands were full, became the 
 natural victim of their greediness. 
 
 Yet the men themselves, some of them at least, such 
 as Louis the German, and even Charles the Bald, were 
 of a higher stamp than the Merovingians ; and, to the 
 last, we find among them men of spirit and vigour, 
 capable of striking a heavy blow and winning a success 
 over a powerful ^opponent, But their energy was fitful 
 and ill-applied. They had lost sight of all high aims 
 and large purposes. The times were against them, and 
 were too strong for them; and there were too many of 
 them. Their rival pretensions were extravagant and 
 irreconcilable. The dream of re-uniting their great 
 ancestor's empire was ever before their eyes, and their 
 capacity never reached to this. They were but able to 
 balance and check one another. And thus their his- 
 tory became a repetition of the disorder and dislocations 
 of the Merovingian times. Pretenders struck in, carv- 
 ing out new kingdoms or dukedoms from the older di- 
 visions. The imperial, and then the kingly title, and at 
 last the family itself, dies out, in one line after another, 
 first, in that of the Emperor Lothar (Louis IL f 875), 
 
CHAP. VIII. Quarrels a7nong the Carolingians, 159 
 
 next in that of Louis the German (Louis the Child f 911 ), 
 and last in that of Charles the Bald (Louis the Lazy f 987) ; 
 and each line ends in some feeble representative, who 
 passes away, unhonoured, perhaps deposed and impri- 
 soned. The family, more numerous than the Merovin- 
 gians, confined themselves, like the Merovingians, to 
 but few names. In the house of Clovis, almost every 
 one was a Clovis, a Clothar, a Theoderic, a Childebert, 
 a Chilperic, a Sigibert, a Dagobert. In the house of 
 Pipin, almost every one was a Pipin, or Charles, or Car- 
 loman, or, with the altered or modernized forms of the 
 older names, a Ludvig (Louis), or a Lothar. But after 
 the glory of their founder had departed, history can only 
 distinguish them at last by some scornful nickname — 
 Charles the Fat, Charles the Simple, Louis the Stam- 
 merer, Louis the Child, Louis the Lazy, the "Do- 
 nothing." 
 
 Of the three sons who survived Louis the Pious, Lo- 
 thar, the emperor, died first (855), and his family was 
 extinguished within the twenty years that 
 his two brothers outlived him. His king- LoIlts°the 
 dom was divided between three sons : Louis I'iop- 
 
 I. Lothar, 
 
 II. the Emperor, Lothar, and Charles. The Emperor ; 
 threebrothers quarrelled among themselves, German; 
 and were assailed by their uncles. They theB^'d" 
 all died without male heirs, the elder, the 
 Emperor Louis II., being the survivor; and at each 
 death, whether of brothers or nephews, and whether 
 children were left or not, the moment was seized by the 
 others to snatch or divide the vacant share, which usual- 
 ly had been contested in life. The middle portion of 
 the Frank dominion, to the northern part of which, 
 along the course of the Meuse and the Moselle as far as 
 the Scheldt, the second Lothar gave the name of Lotha- 
 
i6o Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. viii. 
 
 ringia, — that middle kingdom which the great Charles 
 supposed could arbitrate between East and West, and 
 the idea of which, after repeated vain attempts, was 
 revived, again in vain, in the 15th century by the French 
 house of Burgundy, — was, immediately on Lothar's 
 death, torn in two by his uncles, Louis the German and 
 Charles the Bald {870). At the death of Louis II. the 
 Emperor (875), Charles the Bald succeeded 
 
 I. Failure . . . \ . , ^ , . - 
 
 of Lothar's m anticipatmg Louis the German, and seized 
 peror Louis what was Specially the imperial portion, 
 
 II. 1 875. Italy, gaining from Pope John VIII. the 
 imperial crown (875), which he received like his great 
 namesake on Christmas day, at St. Peter's. But he wore 
 it only for a short time. Three successive years (875- 
 877) saw the extinction of the line of the first Lothar, and 
 the death of his two brothers — Louis (876), and Charles 
 (877). One of the main lines of the Carolingian stock 
 
 was gone ; two were left. The house of Louis 
 Louis the the German, who is said to have been the 
 
 s'o'^Qi^"* wisest and most just of the brothers, ruled 
 
 Charies at last ovcr all the German lands to the 
 
 Emperor, eastward of an irregular boundary line, 
 
 '^~' * drawn from the mouth of the Scheldt to the 
 
 Jura. According to the custom of his race, he had to 
 encounter the rebellions of his three sons, who had been 
 invested with the government of different parts of his 
 kingdom ; but he was able to hold his own against them. 
 The survivor of them, Charles the Fat, for a moment 
 raised the hopes of his subjects. For a brief interval he 
 was Emperor, and united under his rule all the realms 
 of Charles the Great. But the promise of reviving power 
 was a treacherous one. Health and vigour gave way 
 before the difficulties of the times and the intrigues of 
 younger kinsmen ; eleven years after his father's death 
 
TJie Three Lines of the Carolingians, 
 
 i6i 
 
 < 
 
 OS 
 
 H 
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 O 
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 c rt CO w J t^ 
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 J3 
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 PQ 
 
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1 62 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. viii. 
 
 he was deposed (887) and he died m prison in the mon- 
 _ ., - astery of Reichenau in an island of the lake 
 
 Failure of -- /^ 
 
 line of Louis of Constancc (888). The line of Louis the 
 
 the German. ^ ^' i i i -n • • 
 
 Louis the German was continued only by an illegiti- 
 
 Chiid, t 911. mate nephew Arnulf, duke of Carinthia, who 
 took from his uncle Charles both the kingdom of Ger- 
 many and the imperial dignity ; and it finally died out 
 in Arnulf s feeble son, Louis the Child (899-911). 
 
 Thus within a century from the death of Charles the 
 Great, one main branch alone survived of his house : 
 
 the line of Charles the Bald, among the 
 \h^es the Western Franks, in Gaul. It dragged out a 
 BaitL, longer existence, but with no greater glory 
 
 than the two which had failed. Charles, 
 his father's youngest born and favourite son by his 
 second marriage with the ambitious Welf princess, 
 Judith, was early taught not to trust even his brothers. 
 He had to win his way through great difficulties to the 
 kingdom which at last he secured. He was not without 
 some of his famous namesake's gifts. He inherited 
 Charles's literary tastes ; perhaps, some of his ideas of 
 law and government. But all high political aims were 
 subordinated to his restless and unscrupulous eagerness 
 to enlarge his borders. While he could not save them 
 from the ravages of the Northmen, his reign was spent 
 in trying to add to dominions which he could not govern. 
 Like Charles the Fat after him, he seemed for a moment 
 to have succeeded, only to prove the impossibility of suc- 
 cess. For two years he bore (875-877), amid humiliation 
 and disaster, the coveted name of emperor. But he 
 left no stronger or more fortunate posterity than his 
 brothers. His son, Louis the Stammerer, his successor 
 in Gaul, died two years after him (879). The two elder 
 sons of this Louis saw their Western realm broken up, 
 
CHAP. VIII. 
 
 Charles the Bald. 
 
 163 
 
 6^ 
 
 
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 nl ii 
 
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 r^fs* 
 
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1 64 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. viii. 
 
 and a new kingdom created in Burgundy and Provence 
 
 (879), by a stranger Boso, who had married a CaroHn- 
 
 gian princess. They both of them passed away, 
 
 amid disaster and ill-fortune, within seven years from 
 
 their grandfather's death ; the kingdom of the West 
 
 Franks was for a moment transferred to the German, 
 
 Charles the Fat ; and after his death, the claims of their 
 
 younger brother, the posthumous son of Louis the 
 
 Stammerer, Charles, named the Simple, were set aside 
 
 Charles the ^Y ^ powerful party among the Franks, in 
 
 Simple, favour of a new man. This was the deliv- 
 
 879-928. 
 
 Rival Kings ercr of Paris from the Northmen, Count Odo 
 
 ^' '" ' or Eudes, the son of a warrior of unknown 
 origin, Robert the Strong, the ancestor of the line of 
 Capet. On the death of Odo, Charles was again ac- 
 knowledged (899) ; but the allegiance of the Franks to 
 the Carolinginian house was shaken, and the family and 
 realm of Charles the Bald had to bear the brunt of the 
 great revolution in Western Europe, caused by the in- 
 trusion of a new barbarian element into the civihzation 
 of Charles the Great. 
 
 The date of the treaty of Verdun (843) marks also the 
 beginning of a series of events, only second in import- 
 ance to the empire of Charles the Great, and 
 
 Invasions of . . , i i • 
 
 the Norsemen of lastmg mflucnce not only on the history 
 Lnflh^"'^ ofGaul and the Franks, but on the history 
 Continent. q£ Europe and the world. This was the 
 second stage of the barbarian invasions the assaults and 
 settlements of the Norsemen, or, as we call them in Eng- 
 land, the Danes, which were coincident with the break- 
 ing up of Charles's empire. They were not the only bar- 
 barian invasions of the time. On the Mediterranean 
 coasts, the Saracens were, and long continued to be, 
 threatening and sometimes dangerous. On the Eastern 
 

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1 66 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 800-900. 
 
 border, the heathen Saxons, the more numerous Slave 
 tribes, with some tribes of the Turanian or Turkish stock, 
 had long been formidable. The great military achieve- 
 ment of Charles the Great had been to subdue them. 
 The German tribes had been more or less Christianized 
 and assimilated to their more civilized Frank brethren. 
 The Slaves long continued to be refractory and trouble- 
 some ; and the irruptions of the Tartar Magyars or Hun- 
 garians, brought back the terror of Attila's Huns even in 
 the heart of Gaul and Italy. But the Eastern barbarians, 
 though causing terrible misery and loss, and long defy- 
 ing the efforts of the Carolingian kings to bridle them, 
 never accomplishing a settlement in the West. They 
 were kept within their own borders ; and the vast plains 
 north and south of the Danube were finally occupied by 
 the Hungarian and Slave populations which were defi- 
 nitely to inherit them. 
 
 But in the North and West it was different. The 
 movement in Denmark and Scandinavia towards the 
 _, _ , beginning of the ninth century had dis- 
 
 The North- 7,, .,.^, , ,^ . 
 
 men in quictcd the mmd of Charles the Great. A 
 
 Danish king had stirred up war and defied 
 him on the Elbe ; and the barks of the Northmen were 
 beginning to scare the coasts of Gaul, as they had already 
 begun to burn churches and plunder mon- 
 Fa's (?hron 1 ^^steries, on the English coasts. They were 
 the forerunners of a tremendous tempest — of 
 a descent of the barbarians, which in its wide-spread 
 havoc, in its obstinate continuance, in its aims and con- 
 sequences, was as eventful as the invasions of the Goths 
 and Franks, or the conquests of the Angles and Saxons. 
 It caused the last great change in the population of 
 Western Europe, till the expulsion of the Moors from 
 Spain. We are familiar with the Danes in England ; 
 
A. D. 800-900. The Norsemen in Gaul. 167 
 
 and we know that the Northmen created the great pro- 
 vince of Normandy. But the Danes and the Northmen 
 were the same; and what they did in England and in 
 Gaul were but parts, simultaneously carried on, of one 
 great system of adventurous exploring, of plunder, and 
 attempted conquest. The havoc that they made in 
 Gaul was as wide, as terrible, and as unintermitted as 
 their havoc in England. In Gaul they had a yet wider 
 field, and they ravaged wherever rivers could float their 
 ships, from -the Rhine to the Seine, the Loire and the 
 Garonne; and up the Rhine and Moselle as far as Cob- 
 lentz and Treves, up the French rivers far into the inte- 
 rior, to Paris, Orleans, Bourges. The attempts of the 
 Frank kings to arrest or limit the mischief, even on the 
 Rhine, and much more in Gaul, were unavaihng. Sum- 
 mer after summer, as the ninth century wore on, and as 
 the next began, the Northern adventurers came with in- 
 creased force, with more daring leaders, with larger de- 
 signs, with more clear superiority. Even if defeated, 
 they only changed their object of attack. Discomfited 
 and beaten off in England, they crossed over to Gaul. 
 If the local resistance was too strong for them in Gaul, 
 they tried their fortune on the opposite shores. The 
 deepest discouragement and terror took possession of 
 the populations of Gaul, who seemed for the most part 
 helpless. We are hardly accustomed to the thought that 
 it was within but a little that half France should become 
 a Normandy, and that Danish kings should rule in the 
 land of the Franks, as they did in the land of the Eng- 
 lish. Things pointed in that direction towards the end 
 of the ninth century, under Charles the Bald and his 
 children. Perhaps what prevented it was the compara- 
 tive smallness of the numoers of the invaders, conse- 
 quent on their mode of access. The largest of their fleets 
 
1 68 Begirtfttng of the Middle Ages. A. d. 845-882. 
 
 could not transport the barbarian hosts who marched 
 by land. 
 
 The first serious danger from the Northmen in Gaul 
 coincided with the outbreak of intestine dissensions in 
 the family of Louis the Pious. Just after the catastrophe 
 of the Liigenfeld (833) they appear burning churches and 
 plundering monasteries at the mouth of the Scheldt, and 
 even threatening the cities of the Rhine. In May, 841, 
 amid the civil broils between the Carolingian brothers, 
 a month before the fight of Fontenailles, Osker the 
 Northman entered the Seine, which was soon 
 
 Coincidence . ,, i -kt • i i i 
 
 of Danish to be Specially the Norman river, plundered 
 
 attacks with , , •, ,-, j i.* j 
 
 internal ^.nd burned Rouen, and retired, ransoming 
 
 quarrels. ^j. destroying towns and monasteries, on his 
 
 way back to the sea. From this time the Northmen 
 learned that the broad rivers of Gaul were more worth 
 exploring than the coasts. The Seine, because it was 
 nearest, and led up to Paris, now becoming a place of 
 great importance in the new West Frankish realm — the 
 Loire and the Garonne, because they led, through corn 
 lands and vineyards and the richest cities, deepest into 
 the heart of the country, became the scenes of periodic 
 visitations from the Danish adventurers and pirates. 
 Before the eyes of Charles the Bald, who was powerless 
 to hinder them, the Danes (at Easter, 845) pillaged the 
 monasteries of Paris, and then extorted the Danegeld, 
 the tribute paid for peace, or rather respite. They came 
 again, twelve years later (857), this time burning the 
 monasteries, and scattering the bones of Clovis and 
 Clotildis. Their third Easter visit (861) was followed by 
 a partial settlement under a leader who, like Guthrum 
 in England, received baptism, and by the creation of a 
 barrier and bulwark against them, a frontier duchy, of 
 which the chief seat was Paris, and the holder a vahant 
 
876. Danish Attack on the French Kingdoms. 169 
 
 soldier, Robert the Strong. From the duchy of Paris 
 and from the house of Robert the Strong, proceeded the 
 line which was to displace the Carohngians, and to be- 
 come the kings of France. Paris was fortified ; the great 
 siege of 885, in which kings and emperors did so little to 
 relieve the city, and Duke Odo, Robert's son, kept the 
 Northmen so gallantly at bay, was the turning point of 
 deliverance and hope to the Franks, and the title, in due 
 time, of Odo, to supplant the Carolingian king. But 
 the Northmen still prevailed. The county of Flanders, 
 created hke Paris, as a frontier defence (862), could not 
 prevent an invasion of the Frankish rivers (881, 882), in 
 which the Danes pillaged and burnt the most famous 
 cities, Maestricht, Cologne, Coblentz, Liege, Antwerp, 
 even Aachen, Soissons, and Reims. But in Germany 
 they were at length checked. Gaul was an easier prey, 
 and they began to occupy their conquests. Three times 
 had the Frank kings granted to Danish chiefs the Count- 
 ship of the Frisian shore, from the mouth of the Meuse 
 to the Weser. The lands where they settled began to 
 receive their name, in France Normandy, the "land of 
 the Northern " {terra Normannorum) , answering to what 
 in England was called the Danelagu, the land of Danish 
 law. Besides the Normandy which they founded on the 
 Seine, other Normandies were attempted on the Loire, 
 round Amiens, in Burgundy and in Auvergne, round 
 Chartres, in Brittany. Even in Germany, on the western 
 bank of the Rhine, as far as Coblentz, Godfrey, the Da- 
 nish count of Friseland, would have created a Danishry, 
 if he had not been murdered by Charles the Fat (885), 
 who had himself made a grant of the territory. It was 
 in vain that they were beaten, and that songs of triumph 
 were made over some rare victory of the Franks. One 
 of these songs has survived, in the German tongue of the 
 
lyo Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 876-911. 
 
 Franks of that time, the Ludwigslied, in honour of a 
 victory won by Louis III., King of the West Franks. But 
 the Danes reappeared, and the continual Danegeld was 
 the proof of their success. 
 
 At length, amid a crowd of chiefs, some of the same 
 name, we hear of Rolf, or Rollo. At first he is hard to 
 distinguish. But he is, apparently, to be discerned in 
 those disastrous days, when Charles the 
 NonhSL'ii. B^l^' unable to restrain the Northmen, yet 
 found leisure to attack his brother's children, 
 and attempt the imperial crown (876). Charles was de- 
 feated ignominiously at Andernach by his nephew, Louis 
 the Saxon (Oct. 8) ; and a month before the battle (Sept. 
 16), Rollo sailed up the Seine, just asOsker had first led 
 the Danes to Rouen, a month before the murderous bat- 
 tle of Fontenailles between the grandsons of Charles the 
 Great. Charles, humbled on the Rhine, thinking now 
 only of Italy, and on the eve of a miserable end, con- 
 firmed a treaty by which Rollo, besides having his Dane- 
 geld, was to occupy Rouen. Rollo was henceforth, 
 under Charles's successors, master of Rouen and the 
 Seine. This did not prevent him from joining his coun- 
 trymen in their ravages; but his name is not prominent 
 till, amid the strife between Charles the Simple, the 
 grandson of Charles the Bald, and the Dukes of Paris, 
 he reappears. He had then become strong enough to 
 be worth bargaining with as an ally. Charles the Simple, 
 and Duke Robert of Paris, joined in giving Rollo a legal 
 position in the lands which he occupied- A formal con- 
 ference took place between the Northman with his chief- 
 tains, and the Frank king, on the banks of the Epte, 
 afterwards the boundary stream of Normandy. Rollo 
 demanded, after some bargaining obtained, all from the 
 Epte to the sea westwards, including Brittany. A doubt- 
 
A. D . 911-954. Growth of Normandy. 171 
 
 ful story says that he also received King Charles's 
 daughter. For this territory he performed homage; "he 
 placed his hands between the king's hands, and became 
 the king's man ;'' and the next year he was baptized at 
 Rouen, The "land of the Normans" had become a 
 part of the Frank kingdom ; the " Duke of the Normans," 
 though long sneered at as a " Duke of the Pirates," took 
 rank with Dukes of Paris and Counts of Flanders, and 
 was in time to be the premier duke of France. The 
 treaty or agreement of St. Clair-sur-Epte was probably 
 at the time not different from many trans- Treaty of St. 
 actions of the same kind. But it was the Ci^''"'^"''" 
 
 Epte: 911. 
 
 staiting-point of great changes. It formally 
 introduced into the Latin world a new German race 
 which rapidly unlearned its old habits and language, 
 becoming more Latin than the Latins round it. And it 
 added to western France a state which was to be its 
 most powerful element ; a people of singular strength, 
 versatility, and ambition, who were to exercise an influ- 
 ence without example on the fortunes of all their neigh- 
 bours. 
 
 When the settlement of Normandy had been finally 
 recognized, and had attained, as it did in another gene- 
 ration, its full limits, northward, and west- pom,dation 
 wards, the Danish attempts to settle else- of Duchy of 
 
 Normandy. 
 
 where in Gaul gradually slackened, though 
 their ravages continued for some time longer. The 
 Northmen received some severe lessons. Twice in their 
 efforts to penetrate to the central highlands of Auvergne 
 and Bungundy they were defeated with great slaughter. 
 In time the Danishry on the Loire and the Somme 
 melted into the surrounding population. But the great 
 result of their invasion, Rollo's almost royal dukedom, 
 grew and prospered. It held the balance between 
 
 N 
 
172 Beginning of the Middle Ages. a. d. 928-936. 
 
 Frank parties and kings. Vainly, by force or intrigue, 
 the king of the Franks, Louis d'Outremer, son of Charles 
 the Simple, endeavoured to undo his own and his 
 father's work. Ignominious failure was the result. And 
 twice, within two years (943-945), the Normans held the 
 king of the Franks a prisoner in their hands. 
 
 From the time of Charles the Simple and the estab- 
 lishment of the Norman duchy, the Carolingians played 
 Failure of ^ Varied but losing game against the rising 
 
 Charks the house — the counts and dukes of Paris, the 
 Bald. descendants of Duke Robert. The royal 
 
 authority was undetermined by the growth of great local 
 potentates, and among them the lords of Paris and the 
 adjoining territory were the most formidable, from the 
 remembrance of their exploits against the Northmen, 
 from their ambition, and from their ability. They had 
 their rivals on the North and East ; the new Danish mas- 
 ters of the valley of the Seine ; the counts of Vermandois, 
 descendants of the great Charles. These rivalries, 
 though at times they gave great advantages to the king, 
 also marked his weakness and shattered the unity of the 
 realm. The Carolingians had henceforth to fight for 
 their kingdom with their great nobles. They were over- 
 thrown, driven into exile, supplanted by strangers, 
 restored. They were not without gallantry and spirit, 
 but they owed their crown, when they held it, less to 
 their own power than to the jealousies of the great terri- 
 torial princes round them, whom a few more turns of 
 tightening custom and stiffening precedent were to 
 change into the great feudatories of the later ages. 
 Charles the Simple, after a life of vicissitude and fruitless 
 conflict, perished miserably in prison, by the treachery 
 of one of the great rival nobles, Herbert of Vermandois 
 (928), His infant son, nephew of the English Athelstan, 
 
936-954- Last Struggles of the Car olingians. 173 
 
 saved with difficulty, and brought up in England — Louis 
 the Stranger, Louis " d'Outremer," "from over sea" — 
 owed his recall from exile (936) to the mutual suspicions 
 of his father's enemies, Herbert of Vermandois and 
 Hugh of Paris, who both counted on being able to use 
 him for their own purposes. He came back to waste a 
 gallant spirit and a reign of eighteen years (936-954), in 
 fruitless efforts, fruitless even when he was victorious, to 
 shake off the crushing pressure of the great dukes and 
 counts, who in Paris, Normandy, Flanders, Vermandois, 
 Lotharingia, Burgundy, Poitou, Aquitaine, hemmed in 
 the king of the Franks in his fortress of Laon and its 
 narrow surrounding district — all that remained besides 
 the name of king to the family of Charles the Great. 
 Nothing proves more certainly the failing powers of the 
 Carolingian house, than the contrast between Louis, and 
 the German king of the new Saxon line, Otto or Otho 
 (951-973). Both were equally surrounded by the form- 
 idable rivalry of powerful local chiefs, by confusion, 
 selfishness, treason, by terrible outbreaks of barbarian 
 invasion. But what the Carolingians could not do, Otto 
 did. He asserted his mastery over the turbulence round 
 him ; he conceived and carried out worthy political aims ; 
 he attempted and partly accomplished the reform of abuses 
 in government and in the Church ; and with no more ad- 
 vantages than Louis, he left a great name as a king and 
 a ruler, the founder, a second time, of the new Roman 
 empire. Louis' son, Lothar, inherited the kingdom on 
 the same terms as his father (954-986). The great duke 
 of Paris claimed, as in his father's case, to be the pro- 
 tector of the king. He still preferred to make, control, 
 despoil, torment the kings of the Franks, than to be king 
 himself. Lothar's reign was wasted, like his father's, in 
 ignoble and unprofitable tiials of strength. There was 
 
174 \ Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 
 
 much fighting, much crime, much intrigue, much vicissi- 
 tude of fortune ; but everything contributed to the grow- 
 ing strength and the independence of the duke of the 
 Normans, and of his ordinary ally the duke of Paris. 
 Louis and Lothar between them reigned for 50 years, 
 but in vain. At length the time of the Carolingians was 
 exhausted. Hugh the Great (1956) who would not be 
 a king himself, left a son, Hugh Capet, for 
 Carolin- whom he prepared a kingdom, and who was 
 
 gians give jr r- o ' 
 
 place 10 the ready when the last Carolingian became 
 king, to follow the example of the founder 
 of the Carolingian line. The last Carolingian, boyish, 
 profligate, restless, reigned but a year (1987). He died, 
 probably poisoned. The great line ended in a Louis, 
 whom the historians have nicknamed, "le Faineant," 
 "der Faul," "the Good-for-nothing." His death was 
 followed by the election of Hugh Capet. In vain did 
 Charles, Louis' brother, from the impregnable rock of 
 Laon, the last refuge of the Carolingians, strike des- 
 perately for his inheritance. The great interests round 
 him, the political and ecclesiastical treachery of the time, 
 were against him. After an obstinate struggle he was at 
 last entrapped by the Bishop of Laon, betrayed, and de- 
 livered into the hands of Hugh Capet. He died in 
 prison ; and the Carolingians disappear from history. 
 
 With the end of the Carolingian line, and indeed long 
 ^ , , before it was extinct, came the end of that 
 
 End of 
 
 Frank do- Frank power which, after the fall of Rome, 
 
 had for four centuries played the foremost 
 part in the West, and which had culminated in Charles's 
 empire. The Franks had outstripped and defeated all 
 their great rivals, the Gothic and then the Lombard race, 
 in the competition for the leadership of the new world. 
 They had been the conquerors and tamers of their 
 
pis 7 End of the Carolingians. 175 
 
 kindred barbarians — Alamans, Bavarians, Frisians, 
 Saxons. Their manifest superiority, their brilliant suc- 
 cesses, seemed to themselves and to their contemporaries 
 to raise them to the greatness of the ancient Romans. 
 The popes are never tired of celebrating their glory ; and 
 their own feeling about it breaks out with a kind of 
 lyrical enthusiasm, in the barbarous Latin of the prologue 
 to the collection called the "Salic law." "The illus- 
 trious race of the Franks, created by the hand of God, 
 mighty in arms, deep in counsel, stable in the bond of 
 peace, in body noble and stalwart, in fairness and beauty 
 matchless, daring and swift and stern, newly come to the 
 Catholic faith, free from heresy ! While it was still in 
 the barbarian state, yet by God's inspiration, it sought 
 the key of knowledge, and according to the bent of its 
 own qualities, desiring righteousness and holding fast 
 
 piety, its chiefs dictated the Salic law Long live 
 
 [vivat] whoever loves the Franks. May Christ keep their 
 realm, and fill their rulers with the light of His grace ; 
 m'ay He protect their host; may He grant them the 
 memorials of the faith, the joys and the felicity of peace. 
 May Jesus Christ the Lord of lords, by His mercy guide 
 their times. For this is that race which, when it was little 
 in number, yet being mighty in valour and strength, 
 broke off, by fighting, the tyrannous yoke of the Romans 
 from its neck ; and after it had made the confession of 
 baptism, by it the bodies of the holy martyrs, which the 
 Romans had burned with fire or slain with the sword, or 
 cast forth to be torn by wild beasts, were magnificently 
 enshrined with gold and precious stones." • 
 
 But their day as a race was over. As that single and 
 foremost nation which had controlled and directed the 
 fortunes of all around them, they were to dissolve and 
 disappear. They were merged and lost in the two great 
 
1 76 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. ix. 
 
 rival peoples which arose after them, and partly from 
 them, and who divided their heritage. It was long be- 
 fore they learned that they were no longer one, that they 
 were to be divided. Long after the treaty of Verdun 
 (843), and the death of the last legitimate Carolingian 
 emperor, (888), even the Saxon kings of Germany 
 claimed to interfere in the affairs of Gaul as representing 
 the old kingdom and leadership of the Franks. But 
 their claim no longer answered to the realities of the case. 
 There was still to be a great Francia, appropriating the 
 name and fame of the Franks of Clovis and the great 
 Charles ; but it was to be no longer German, but Latin. 
 There were still to be Franks who were Germans, from 
 whose dukes and kings were to come emperors of the 
 Romans ; a Frajtcia in the heart of Germany, and on 
 both sides of the Rhine, retaining the name when it 
 shrank up to the " Circle of Franconia" of later times. 
 But the Franks who had ruled in Europe and established 
 the power of the popes, the Franks who prepared the 
 way for the middle ages, the Franks on whom for a time 
 seemed to devolve the Roman empire, the united Franks 
 of Charles the Great, broken up and separated, are known 
 no more in history after the failure and extinction of the 
 family of their greatest man. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 CONSOLIDATION AND UNITY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 
 
 UNDER THE KINGS, CHIEFLY OF WESSEX — THE 
 
 NORTHMEN IN ENGLAND. 
 
 During the years which saw these great changes on the 
 Continent — the establishment, the glory, and the break- 
 up of the Frank empire — the English nation, through a 
 
CHAP. IX. Consolidation of England, 177 
 
 history outwardly as turbulent and confused as that of 
 the Continent, was slowly but distinctly becoming one, 
 and preparing to endure one of the severest trials which 
 can come upon a people — that of foreign conquest, and 
 foreign conquest twice repeated within half a century. 
 
 The progress of consolidation which was going on 
 from the eighth to the tenth century, in what were to be 
 separate states on the Continent, in the Scandinavian 
 and Slavonic countries and in Hungary, as well as in 
 Gaul and Germany, was going on steadily and visibly, 
 though with frequent interruptions, in England ; and the 
 process is not difficult to trace. The bands, or tribes, or 
 leagues, or settlements, which in the preceding centur- 
 ies had gradually become confluent, first in larger or 
 smaller districts, and then in separate kingdoms, the so- 
 called Heptarchy, had come, through war oi^agreement, 
 to acknowledge the superiority of one or other of the 
 kingdoms, and the over-lordship, temporary or heredi- 
 tary, of its king. This over-lordship, which was some- 
 times but not always expressed by the term Bretwalda, 
 after being won and held by Oswald of Northumbria, 
 and still more strongly by Offa of the great English mid- 
 land, Mercia, finally passed to the kings of the line of 
 Cerdic, the kings of south-western Wessex. Roughly 
 speaking, the end of the seventh century, the time of the 
 first Frank mayors, of the palace, is the time of the pre- 
 dominance of Northumberland; the eighth, the age of 
 Charles Martel, Pipin, and Pipin's great son, is that of 
 the superiority of Mercia; the ninth, the age of the Car- 
 olingians, is that of the superiority of Wessex. And 
 with Wessex and Cerdic's house it remained. Egbert 
 of Wessex, during the days of Offa's power, had, like 
 other English princes, found refuge for thirteen years 
 from the dangerous king of Mercia at the court of 
 
1 78 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. ix. 
 
 Charles the Great. In that school of statesmanship, of 
 war, and of awakening intellectual activity, he saw and 
 probably learned much ; and he forms an important link 
 betv/een England and the Continent. On the death of 
 Offa he returned to England, and was chosen king of 
 Wessex. Egbert became king in England a year or two 
 after the great Frank emperor had been crowned at 
 Rome. Egbert represents the beginning in England of 
 that new state of things, the advance from the old-fash- 
 ioned barbarism of the Merovingian and early Anglo- 
 Saxon times, which on the Continent is represented by 
 the ideas, the aims, and the achievements of the great 
 Frank emperor. In the course of his long reign of nearly 
 forty years (802-39), Egbert established his supremacy 
 over the other English kingdoms, which in the case of 
 Mercia and Northumbria retained their subject kings. 
 He was not only king of the West Saxons, but king of 
 the English, as Charles was king of the Franks, having 
 kings as well as dukes under him ; and the idea of the 
 unity of the English nation and the English kingdom, to 
 which Egbert first gave expression, was never again to 
 be lost. 
 
 Thus left to itself, unaffected by the political shocks 
 and rearrangements of the Continent, and but partially 
 influenced by the developments there of social ideas and 
 forms, the nation which had now become English, grad- 
 ually worked out its own union, its own institutions, and 
 its own character. Its society rested on the class distinc- 
 tions, in one shape or another common to all the Teu- 
 tonic races, except, perhaps, the Franks ; the nobles, the 
 freemen — free but not noble, — and the large and vague- 
 ly-determined class of the half-free, or unfree, whether 
 farmer, tenant, dependent, labourer, serf, or slave, 
 bound to the land or bound to the household ; the Eorh^ 
 
CHAP. IX. Efiglish Social Arrangements. 1 79 
 
 Ceorls, and LcPts, of the laws of Kent ; the Edhelingi^ 
 Frili7igx,2J!\dL Lazzi of the Saxons of the Continent; the 
 Nobiles, the Ingc7tzd, and Liti of the Capitularies. 
 These classes are distinctly marked, as in all the Teu- 
 tonic laws, by the difference of their "wergild," or the 
 fixed compensation payable for personal injuiy or 
 death. Its land tenure grew out of the old Teutonic 
 system, in which a community, usually allied in kinship, 
 had its defined territory, its Mark, or. afterwards in the 
 German lands, its Gau, in which the land, in the first in- 
 stance the public land of the community, and in larger or 
 smaller portions of it long remaining so, became in other 
 portions more or less absolutely appropriated to persons, 
 and then to families ; appropriated by early occupation, 
 by clearing and building, by grant, by custom, by vio- 
 lence. The tendency to absolute ownership is a natural 
 and strong one, and it would be increased when a tribe 
 became part of an army, conquering and settling. 
 Among the English the traces of the old Mark system 
 were seen in the Folcland, the public land of the town- 
 ship, used in common, or rented by individuals, but not 
 alienated. But besides this there was the estate of 
 private and inherited property, held by public witness, 
 the Ethel, afterwards called the Alodial\2.r\^\ and there 
 was also the land, carved originally out of the public es- 
 tate, and held by written charter, the Bocland, but soon 
 confused with, or becoming equivalent to the Alodial por- 
 tion, the patrimony and heritage. The political centre 
 was the king; the necessity, in the first instance, of war 
 and conquest, in each original division of the new settlers, 
 but a necessity heartily and readily adopted in peace, the 
 uncertain and fitful peace of those days, as thoroughly 
 congenial to the Teutonic spirit ; the king of the men, 
 the folk, to whom as a community the land belonged. 
 
i8o Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. ix. 
 
 The king had his special " companions," his " friends,'* 
 "thegns," "ministers," "loaf-eaters," bound to his per- 
 son by benefits and privileges, and growing by degrees 
 into a formally recognized class of nobility, which at 
 length overshadowed the older nobles who were noble 
 by race and blood. The larger divisions of the land had 
 their governors, " earldormen," taken from local poten- 
 tates, or from the king's " companions" or his kinsmen. 
 Besides these, another class of persons gradually grew 
 up, bound to the king or to other chiefs, by a voluntary 
 and formal tie of personal allegiance : those who had, 
 according to the usage of the time, commended them- 
 selves to a lord as his " ?nen,'" and to whom the lord gave 
 protection in return for service. With these high per- 
 sons, according to their personal qualities, more than by 
 any definite rules, lay the power of government and the 
 impulse to action. But, as in all the German nations of 
 the time, power was habitually exercised very much in 
 public. The king or ruler was continually and periodi- 
 cally face to face with assemblies, more or less large, of 
 his people, to whose approval he appealed in legislation 
 and policy, and whose concurrence and support he really 
 needed. The public assembly, including all freemen, if 
 not also some portion of the only half-free class below 
 them, and having at its head the chief and most venera- 
 ble persons of the community, whether kingdom, shire, 
 or township, was the place where public matters were 
 heard, and opinion, however rudely and imperfectly, 
 was yet expressed. This institution of the public assem- 
 bly, under different names {Mall, Thing, Moot, in Latin, 
 Placituin), accompanies everywhere the advance and 
 settlement of the tribes of the German stock, whether 
 the Goths in Spain, the Franks in Gaul, the Lombards 
 in Italy, or the Saxons and Angles in Britain. As the 
 
CHAP. IX. Public Assemblies. i8l 
 
 kingdom enlarged in compass, the character of the cen- 
 tral assembly necessarily altered ; even if all freemen 
 might come to it, all could not ; it became, without pur- 
 pose or rule, a more selected and representative body ; 
 representative not by design or election, but the nature 
 of the case. In addition to this, perhaps growing out of 
 it, there was the *' assembly of the wise," a king's coun- 
 cil of those whose place made them his natural council- 
 lors, and the people's spokesmen — bishops, earldormen, 
 king's thanes — attended, it might be, on great occasions 
 by larger gatherings of freemen or warriors on the spot. 
 Meanwhile, the local assemblies remained. " The folk- 
 moot was left to the shire ; the witena-gemot was gath- 
 ered round the king." All great public transactions 
 such as the election or acceptance of a king, made in 
 the first instance by the select witan, were also witnessed 
 and approved by some kind of general assembly of the 
 nation. The legislation and charters of the king, osten* 
 sibly, often really, the personal acts of the king, bear on 
 their face the concurrence of the witan ; and our docu- 
 mentary evidence exhibits the chief men of the nation in 
 general as parties, more or less really, according to the 
 infinite variations of character and circumstances, to all 
 the acts of government, administration, and policy. 
 
 In indistinct and ill-defined forms, the elements of the 
 various constitutional arrangements which were to be — • 
 feudalism, or popular government, monarchy personal 
 or parliamentary — were all present ; but none, in that 
 age of confused and uncertain beginnings, had assumed 
 a full-grown and consistent shape. The power of the king 
 was great and increasing ; yet it grew side by side with 
 great personal freedom and strongly marked personal 
 rights all round him, and with great weight and great pow- 
 er supposed to exist in high bodies and assemblies, with 
 
1 82 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. ix. 
 
 which he had to deal. The relation of lord and " man," 
 or vassal, was increasing ; the king could add to it gifts 
 of land, "benefices" ; but the king was still thought of 
 as the king of the people, and not as the owner of the 
 land, though the disposer of the public part of it, the 
 folkland. It lay in the course of events, what these ele- 
 ments were to work out, and how they were to affect, 
 and be affected by, the character of the nation. For a 
 long time two counter processes went on ; the amalga- 
 mation of distinct national divisions, with their various 
 forms of power and rule, under strong kings ; and then the 
 loosening of the new fabric under weak ones. It was 
 what went on under the Frank kings on the Continent: 
 and Milton compares these tribal strifes, to the wars 
 "between kites and crows." But in these strifes and 
 trials of strength, lay the process and discipline by 
 which, in those rude conditions of society, a nation 
 learned the necessity of becoming one. 
 
 But just as the Anglo-Saxon settlements were begin- 
 ning to coalesce into one kingdom, a new form of trial 
 was coming on them. A terrible enemy broke in from, 
 without. In common with the rest of Western Europe, 
 England was assailed on all sides by the fleets of the 
 Norse sea-rovers. Their first appearance in England is 
 chronicled in the year 787, when the crews of three 
 strange pirate barks, rovers from the North, slew a 
 king's officer who tried to seize them. It was the threat- 
 ening thunder shower, which announced the most fear- 
 ful and prolonged storm : a storm which tried to the ut- 
 most the force and endurance of the English race. It 
 burst at once on the Continent and on England. The 
 Northmen, who, in the weakness and divisions of the 
 Frank empire, had learned to use the great rivers of 
 Germany and Gaul as highways, and who in the middle 
 
CHAP. IX. Danish Invasions. 183 
 
 of the ninth century were burning or pillaging their most 
 flourishing cities, had also learned the way to England, 
 had vexed the last years of Egbert, and under his son 
 ^thelwulf had stormed and plundered Canterbury and 
 London. In the year 855, the year in which Biorn 
 Ironsides is said to have established a permanent 
 military post on the Seine, the Danes, who had hitherto 
 landed, plundered, and sailed away, now for the first 
 time wintered in Kent. They began to settle, and from 
 their settlements to co-operate with their countrymen 
 from the sea. It was the Anglo-Saxon invasion over 
 again, with its stages of wide and desolating rapine, and 
 then of occupation and encroachment by heathen barba- 
 rians in a Christian land. The resistance was obstinate and 
 persevering. Yet at one time it appeared as if resistance 
 would be in vain. Within a hundred years after their 
 first appearance, the Danes seemed master in the north 
 and east. The bulwark of English power had fallen 
 before them when the young king of Wessex, Alfred, 
 (871-901), was driven into the marshes, the "water 
 fastnesses," of Somerset. It seemed as if the civilization 
 and Christianity of England were to perish. The heathen 
 advance was stayed, and the fortunes of the English race 
 were saved, by Alfred's victory on the edge of the Wilt- 
 shire downs at Edington, But though the Danes were 
 for the moment checked and humbled, Alfred had to 
 submit to the hard condition of allowing them to settle 
 in the largest half of England. By the agreement and 
 partition of Wedmore (878), Guthrum, their leader, ac- 
 knowledged Alfred's supremacy, and he and his chiefs 
 received baptism. But the land was divided by the line 
 of Watling Street, running with an outward curve from 
 the Thames and the sea to Shrewsbury ; and all outside 
 of it to the north-east became the Danelagu, the land of 
 
1 84 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. iiH- 
 
 Danish law— Essex, and East Anglia, and Northumbria, 
 and half of the midland Mercia. The Danes were kept 
 out of Wessex and the other half of Mercia, including 
 London ; and these were knit together the more closely 
 in the presence of their restless foe. In this refuge and 
 core of English feeling, Alfred laid the foundations of a 
 policy of recovery. Danish attacks from within and 
 from abroad did not cease with the peace of Wedmore. 
 The weight of their visitations fell alternately on Eng- 
 land and France ; the peace of Wedmore was followed 
 by more systematic and determined war in the north of 
 Gaul, on the Scheldt, the Somme, and the Seine. Two 
 years after, (880), the Northmen revenged their defeat 
 in the Ardennes, from the German king Louis, by a 
 great overthrow and slaughter of the Saxon nobles at 
 Luneburg. Four years after (882), in spite of the valour 
 of another Louis, the West Frank king, the hero of the 
 Ludwigslied already mentioned, they were ravaging 
 the north of Gaul, from Amiens and Arras to Soissons 
 and Reims. And while Alfred was comparatively at 
 peace the great siege of Paris was going on, in which 
 Count Odo's heroic defence laid the foundation of the 
 fortunes of the Capetian house. Again, the great defeat 
 of the Danes on the Dyle near Louvain, by Charles's 
 successor, Arnulf (891), threw them once more on Eng- 
 land, to prove by a harassing and perplexing warfare, 
 Alfred's great qualities, his promptitude, his skill, his 
 vigour, his indefatigable rapidity of movement. But by 
 patient resolution, Alfred's successors up to King Edgar 
 (959-975) were able gradually to bring under subjection, 
 more or less complete, the Danish settlements in Eng- 
 land ; while assailants from abroad were kept at bay by 
 vigorous and persistent fighting. The Danish invasions, 
 though mischievous and cruel, disturbed, but did not 
 
A. D. 800-975. The Kings of Wessex, 185 
 
 arrest, the national growth. It is indeed remarkable, 
 how readily the Danish new-comers, after a generation 
 or two, became fused with the English stock ; how 
 readily they received the English religion, and accepted 
 the English speech. When once settled down in peace, 
 the adventurous intruders were gradually tamed among 
 the English population round them, and became in Eng- 
 land undistinguishable from Englishmen, except as 
 English provinces were distinguished from one another. 
 The great and remarkable feature of English history, 
 when it is contemporaneous with that of the followers of 
 Charles the Great abroad, is the succession and influence 
 of a singularly able line of kings. The kings of the house 
 of Cerdic in Wessex were unlike, in their continuity of 
 policy and energy, to any other series of kings of the 
 time. They were different in their qualities, and even 
 in their fortunes. But they were all men with a distinct 
 purpose, which in different ways they carried out ; the 
 purpose to give unity, strength, and elevation to their 
 English people. For the space of nearly a hundred and 
 eighty years (800-975), the kings of Wessex steadily pur- 
 sued, in the face of the most adverse circumstances, and 
 even with great sacrifices, their practical object of bind- 
 ing together and consolidating the various divisions of 
 the Saxons and Angles, which left to themselves would 
 have readily grown into the evil habits of internal and 
 local animosities, so common at the time. They did 
 this, doubtless, by the strong hand, yet by no exercise 
 of despotic tyranny, and apparently with the full concur- 
 rence of their own chiefs and leaders. Egbert laid the 
 foundation, by establishing a supremacy over the north- 
 ern and midland kingdoms. For thirty-five years after 
 Egbert, his successors were occupied in the desperate 
 task of protecting the land against the Danish ravages ; 
 
1 86 Beginning of the Middle Ages, chap. ix. 
 
 their success was chequered, but they never lost heart, 
 and their resistance to the strangers bound the English 
 to one another and to the royal house. The danger 
 and the resistance came to their height under Alfred 
 (871-901); and Alfred was the flower and type of the 
 Wessex kings. Sober, dauntless, resolute, patient, he 
 met his circumstances, dark or bright, as they came, with 
 the same steady temper, the same high public spirit. 
 Receiving his kingdom amid calamity and disaster, over- 
 powered and overmatched, he retired, biding his time, 
 but not losing hope, till his opportunity came, and he 
 was able to win and enforce a peace. By the peace of 
 Wedmore, which allowed the Christian Danes under 
 Guthrum to settle and live by their own law in the east 
 of England — the Danelagu, a very faint kind of English 
 Normandy — he abated, though he could not entirely 
 check, the pressure of the Northern rovers for nearly a 
 hundred years, and thus gained a breathing time for the 
 works of peace. Alfred, serious in his rehgion as in all 
 he did, and in this as in other things full of sympathy 
 with his people, applied himself to raise and improve 
 them. He set on foot reformation in the Church. He 
 rekindled the lost learning of Bede and Alcwin ; he 
 awakened what was equally precious — greater in this 
 than the great Charles— the faith, the confidence of Eng- 
 lishmen in the powers and worth of the English tongue. 
 He wrote, he translated, he edited in English. He 
 represents in the highest degree all the humanizing ten- 
 dencies of the time, the efforts to bring out what was ex- 
 cellent and noble in the national spirit, and to cast off 
 what was barbarous. In this he was like Charles the 
 Great; but in Alfred there was more soberness of aim 
 and purity of life, with more care forjustice and mercy. 
 Alfred is the father of the English navy; he saw, like 
 
A.. D. 800-975. The Kings of Wessex, 187 
 
 Edgar after him, that England to be safe, must be 
 powerful on the sea. He was a legislator, reverencing 
 and holding to the past, but owning the changes of the 
 present, and not venturing too much to bind the future. 
 He was sparing of his laws, because, as he writes in the 
 preface to his " Dooms," " I durst not risk of mine own 
 to set down much in writing, seeing that to me it was 
 unknown what part of them would be liked by those who 
 were after us." Alfred set the standard of an English 
 ruler; one who thought not of himself, but of his charge 
 and duty ; who did nothing for show, and sought not his 
 own glory, but gave himself, and his credit too when 
 necessary, to the interest of his kingdom, and the work 
 of his place. He was followed in the first years of the 
 tenth century (901-925) by his son, Edward the Elder, 
 who followed the same policy of uniting the nation to- 
 gether. He waged war for it with energy and success, 
 quelling revolts and bridling the troublesome Danish 
 settlers with fortresses which were to grow into towns. 
 He incorporated Mercia, governing it by his famous 
 sister Ethelfleda, the "Lady of the Mercians." He re- 
 ceived homage from the "Welsh*' princes of Scotland, 
 Strathclyde and Wales, who saw in the English king 
 their bulwark against the Danes. Athelstan, (925-940), 
 his son, the hero of the earliest surviving English war- 
 ballad, the battle of Brunanburh, followed in his father's 
 steps — crushing rebellions, teaching the English by 
 fighting to feel themselves one, beginning to be famous 
 even across the sea. Sisters of Athelstan were the wives 
 of Western kings and princes : of Charles the Simple, 
 and of his antagonist, Duke Hugh of Paris, of Boso, king 
 of Provence, of Otto the Great, king of Germany. The 
 widow and son of Charles the Simple took refuge with 
 Athelstan, and Athelstan's influence counted for much 
 
 o 
 
1 88 JBeglmimg of the Middle Ages. A. D. 901-940. 
 
 in the restoration of his nephew, Louis d'Outremer, who 
 brought some of the vigour of the line of Wessex, but 
 not its abihty or its fortune, into the failing race of Charles 
 the Great. Through trouble and hard fighting, not 
 without reverses, his two brothers, Edmund and Edred, 
 and his nephew Edwy, carried on the work of amalga- 
 mation, defence, and government (940-959) ; and when 
 another nephew, Edgar (959-975), received the kingdom 
 of the English, he received it compact within itself, a 
 kingdom in which he was really master on each side of 
 Watling Street, over the Danish settlers as well as over 
 his Englishmen, while his supremacy was acknowledged 
 all over the island, in Northumbria, and by the Celtic 
 Scots and Welsh. He was king of the whole of Britain, 
 and of all its kings. The scribes of his Chancery delight 
 to style him by the Western term Lnperator^ and the 
 Eastern Basileus. He seemed the Island counterpart of 
 the Great Otto, crowned emperor at Rome in 962. The 
 story told by Florence of Worcester, of King Edgar's 
 barge rowed on the Dee by eight vassal British kings, 
 expresses what was thought and remembered about him. 
 "Throughout many nations," chants the old English 
 chronicler, " and over the sea, the 'gannet's bath,' kings 
 honoured him far and wide." "No fleet," he declares, 
 "was so bold, nor host so strong, that could tear away 
 the prey among the English kin, while that noble king 
 held his throne." 
 
 In Edgar the Peaceful the great political and social 
 work of the kings of Wessex reached its height. His 
 reign of peace for seventeen years, troubled only by in- 
 significant local outbreaks, but by no serious wars, is one 
 of the most remarkable phenomena of the time. Under 
 it the English felt themselves one people, with a destined 
 plaee among the nations. West Saxons and Mercians, 
 
A. D, 94o~975' Edgar — Ethelred, 189 
 
 Northumbrians, East Anglians, and men of Kent and 
 Sussex, were content to be united members of the great 
 Enghsh " kin " and realm. They had taken the definite 
 mould and stamp, which they were henceforth to keep. 
 Tremendous disasters awaited them. They were to 
 measure their strength in vain, once and again, against 
 foreign invaders. Their enemies were growing in power 
 and union as well as themselves. Contemporary with 
 the kings of Wessex, from Alfred to Edgar, the succes- 
 sors of RoUo the Norman (876-927), William Longsword 
 (927-943), and Richard the Fearless (943-996), were cre- 
 ating Normandy. Contemporary, too, with them, the 
 Scandinavian tribes, from whom both Danes and Nor- 
 mans came, were growing up, like their kinsfolk, into 
 nations and kingdoms, under chiefs of strange names — 
 Gorm the Old (883-935), Harald Bluetooth (935-985), 
 Sweyn or Swend of the Forked Beard (985-1014), Olaf, 
 the Christian king of Norway (994-1000?). The Eng- 
 lish were to be ruled weakly and faithlessly, to be de- 
 fended by fitful and useless valour, to be betrayed by their 
 chiefs and played upon by strangers. But England was 
 already England ; the nation had already become con- 
 stituted and had "taken its ply," before the storm fell 
 upon it, and its fortunes came into the hands of the 
 weak and the traitors. 
 
 Edgar the Peaceful was hardly four years in his grave, 
 before its woes began under Ethelred the Unready (979- 
 1016). The Danes came back this time, not to ravage 
 or to colonize, but to conquer. Ethelred the Unreadj, 
 the king without counsel, brave and stirring, but want- 
 ing his father's good sense and statesmanship, was a 
 king after the kind of the later Carolingians. When he 
 failed to check the Danes by fighting, he adopted the 
 fatal foreign policy of buying them off, and thought to 
 
1 9© Beginning of the Middle Ages. A. D. 959-1002. 
 
 frighten them by the shameful and fatal massacre of 
 St. Brice's day (Nov. 13, 1002). But the Danes them- 
 selves were no longer what they had been. From a 
 swarm of separate adventurers, like the Ragnars, and 
 Rollos, and Hastings of a hundred years before, they, 
 too, had grown, by their successes, into organization at 
 home. It was now the king of Denmark, Sweyn the 
 son of Harold, who brought the strength of the North- 
 men to avenge St. Brice's day, and further, to add Eng- 
 land, as a kingdom, to his kingdoms in the North. He 
 drove out Ethelred from England ; and after the death 
 of Ethelred's nobler son, Edmund Ironside (1016), Cnut, 
 the Dane, became king of the English, and England 
 became a dependency of Denmark. 
 
 What the Danes began, their Latinized kinsmen, the 
 Normans, continued. For two hundred years from Cnut's 
 accession, with one short interval, the reign of Edward 
 the Confessor and of Harold, foreigners were kings of 
 England — Danes, Normans, Angevins. Yet two things 
 are observable during this time of foreign ascendancy. 
 One is, that the kingdom of England, conquered though 
 it be, is the proudest honour and most important portion 
 of the possessions of its foreign king. The other is, that 
 through Danish, Norman, and French rule, the English 
 speech, the English usages, the English slow, resolute 
 sturdiness of temper, are absolutely proof against the 
 strong influences of a foreign court and a foreign territorial 
 nobility, and even of foreign tribunals and of foreign 
 clergy. The people had reached a toughness and consis- 
 tency of character, and a strength of common ideas and 
 habits, which enabled it to bear the rough assault. It did 
 not become Danish, it did not become Norman or French. 
 It was strong enough to absorb the genuine Norsemen 
 fresh from the sea and forest ; it was strong enough to 
 
Anglo-Saxon Church, 191 
 
 absorb the altered and more civilized Northmen of Wil- 
 liam the Conqueror. For this education of the English na- 
 tion, incomplete undoubtedly, but so distinctly marked, 
 so deeply rooted, and so enduring, we are indebted mainly 
 to the kings of Wessex, from Egbert to Edgar the 
 Peaceful. 
 
 The strong personal influence of the West Saxon 
 kings had much to do with uniting the English people. 
 Personal influence, powerful at all times, was indispen- 
 sable for a great national progress then. But there was 
 another influence continually at work, not so manifest in 
 historical incidents, but diffused through the society of 
 the time, without which the policy of the kings would 
 have had more to contend against. The great agency 
 of fusion and unity was the Church. Its archbishops 
 and bishops were in immediate relation with the king 
 and his chiefs, their fellow counsellors and authoritative 
 advisers; its priests and monks were in close contact 
 with the various classes and local subdivisions of the 
 people, sharing their fortunes and their ideas, the one 
 source of instruction to them and of culture. The 
 Church had its fluctuations of vigour and decline ; of 
 efforts after learning and goodness, and of corrupt stag- 
 nation ; and, like everything else, it savoured of its age, 
 of its rudeness, its incompleteness, its ignorance. But 
 the Anglo-Saxon Church was eminently a popular 
 Church. Its leaders were deeply concerned in the pub- 
 lic interests of the state. More dispassionate and better- 
 informed history has recognized in Dunstan, once the 
 byword for priestly arrogance and cruelty, a genuine 
 patriot and reformer to whom amends are due, the 
 chosen friend and counsellor of the Wessex kings, espe- 
 cially Edgar. Its saints appealed to popular sympathies, 
 as sufferers at the hands of the heathen foes of England. 
 
192 Beginning of the Middle Ages. 
 
 And it not only spoke, but it wrote in the mother tongue. 
 The Anglo-Saxon New Testament, the Anglo-Saxon 
 Chronicle, the Anglo-Saxon homilies of Elfric, are all so 
 many evidences of the way in which, in a manner 
 scarcely known abroad, the English churchmen, acting 
 it may be under the impulse given by Alfred, did honour 
 to their own language, and tried to popularize knowledge, 
 both religious and secular. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 RESULTS OF THE BREAK-UP OF THE FRANK EMPIRE — 
 ARRANGEMENT OF EUROPE : THE PAPACY ; NEW 
 KINGDOMS OF FRANCE AND GERMANY; ITALY; THE 
 SCANDINAVIAN AND SLAVE NATIONS. 
 
 The effect of the break-up of the empire of the Franks 
 under Charles the Great was twofold. It produced at 
 once immense disasters ; and it led ultimately to new 
 and healthy national divisions, adapted to the changed 
 condition of Europe, and fruitful in great results. The 
 disasters were great. For the moment the West relapsed 
 into the confusion and lawlessness from which Charles 
 had partially reclaimed it. Within its borders all was 
 incessant war, a universal scramble for territories and 
 dignities among great and small, kings and dukes, 
 bishops, counts, and abbots. There were vicissitudes of 
 success or overthrow, continual changes of borders and 
 lordship, continual and vain efforts after peace and law. 
 Without, new and formidable forms of barbarian attack 
 appeared. As we have seen, the second great tide of 
 barbarian invasion had begun more and more to distress 
 
CHAP. X. Break-Up of Frank Empire. 193 
 
 and alarm the West, now entering on the early stages of 
 its civilization. Besides the Northmen, increasing in 
 numbers and in their enthusiasm for adventure, who 
 were the terror of the sea coasts from the Elbe to the 
 Mediterranean, where the work of ravage and plunder 
 was taken up by the Saracens, a strange and terrible foe 
 had appeared on the Eastern border towards the end 
 of the ninth century. This was the horde of the Magy- 
 ars, the Ungrians.W^^rz', hke the Huns, of the Turanian 
 and Turkish stock, and like the Huns, whose name they 
 inherited, or with whom they were confounded, described 
 as frightful and ferocious savages, sweeping like a de- 
 stroying storm over the lands which they visited. Ger- 
 many and Italy were most exposed to their desolations. 
 They were sometimes called in with reckless and dis- 
 loyal selfishness to assist one German or Italian duke or 
 count against his rival ; and once tempted into Germany, 
 they rode — wasting, burning, slaying, through Germany 
 even to the heart of Gaul. The Hungarians, or Magyars, 
 ■were, after the Northmen, the great scourges of the ninth 
 and tenth centuries. The power, the union, and the 
 military capacity of the Carolingian kings were unequal 
 to the work of controlling these savages. The fatal po- 
 licy was adopted, with the Magyars as with the North- 
 men, of buying them off for the time, a policy which 
 ensured their speedy return, more eager and audacious 
 than before. With internal division and anarchy, and 
 the fury of Northern and Eastern savagery let loose be- 
 sides, the times were bad. The hopes and comparative 
 order of Charles's days were departed. " In that time," 
 says one of the annahsts, "the kingdom of the Franks 
 was very desolate, and the unhappiness of men was 
 multiplied daily. In many ways wretchedness and 
 calamity increased among men." 
 
194 Beginning of the Middle Ages, chap. x. 
 
 Amid this misery and confusion the internal condition 
 of society fell back. Charles's policy for strengthening 
 the influence of the Church held its ground, but not his 
 plans for reforming and purifying it. Great ecclesiastics 
 were among the most powerful personages in these times, 
 and some of them, like Hincmar of Reims (801-882), 
 were not unworthy of their power. But with power 
 and great place came in worldliness and corruption 
 in increasing proportion as time went on ; and though 
 as statesmen these great bishops were probably not 
 worse counsellors, and often were more intelligent ones, 
 with a natural leaning to order and peace, than the 
 rough dukes and counts with whom they acted, yet the 
 meaning and consciousness of their religious office be- 
 came more and more lost in their secular greatness. 
 They were not only bound to military service for their 
 vast domains, but in spite of the stringent prohibitions 
 found in the " Capitularies," they went to war them- 
 selves. " Within thirty years," we are told, towards the 
 close of the ninth century, "two archbishops and eight 
 bishops died on the field of battle by the side of counts 
 and lords." It is no wonder that their offices came to 
 be regarded as temporal dignities which the king had a 
 right to bestow, and by which he rewarded and bound 
 his adherents. And it is no wonder that, as in the days 
 of Charles Martel, only with increasing freedom, the rev- 
 enues and titles of archbishoprics and great abbeys were 
 accumulated on some great lay potentate, like the duke 
 of Paris; some formidable warrior, like the lay abbot of 
 St. Riquier ; or some child of a powerful noble, like Her- 
 bet of Vermandois. The steps so remarkably gained 
 for culture and for intelligent study of religion under 
 Charles, were not absolutely lost. In the great German 
 schools, founded or encouraged by Charles the Great, 
 
CHAP. X. Break-Up of Frank Empire. 195 
 
 Fulda, St. Gall, and Reichenau on the lake of Constance, 
 at Old Corbey on the Somme, and its Saxon colony, New 
 Corbey on the Weser, and in Gaul, at Reims and Or- 
 leans, the habits of study and the taste for learning were 
 kept up. German unwritten tradition was rich in legend 
 and songs of war and adventure ; but German literature 
 began in these cloisters, in the ninth and tenth centuries, 
 with Latin and German glossaries, in translations of the 
 Psalms, and paraphrases of the Gospel story, such as the 
 version of Tatian's Harmony, the metrical harmony 
 called " Heliand," the prose one of Otfrid, and Notker's 
 Psalter. Nor was there wanting bold and subtle thought, 
 well or ill-directed, on philosophy and theology, in men 
 like John Erigena, Gotteskalk, Paschasius, Radbert, and 
 his antagonist Ratramn ; and the first-fruits of German 
 erudition are seen in Raban Maur, the archbishop of 
 Maintz, and his scholar Walafrid Strabo, all of them men 
 of the ninth century, and most of them pupils of Fulda, 
 Corbey or Reichenau. But no appropriate advance was 
 made. Missionary enthusiasm, which had done such 
 great things under Pipin and Charles, sensibly waned, 
 though it still achieved some new conquests among the 
 Norsemen and the Slaves, And that which was the dark 
 side of Charles's character and times, loose ideas of the 
 sancity of marriage and the obligations of purity and 
 self-control, grew into increasing lawlessness and disor- 
 der, in the times which followed him. Except in the 
 strict discipline of the cloisters, when the cloisters were 
 well governed, license reigned ; and the families of the 
 great bishops were as scandalous as the courts of the 
 kings and dukes. 
 
 There was a power in the Church which might have 
 been expected to bridle this flagrant laxity ; the more so 
 as its claims to supreme authority were at this very time 
 
196 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. x. 
 
 rising to their full height. The fall of the CaroHngian 
 power is marked by a remarkable and coincident ex- 
 pansion of the central power in the Church. The power 
 of the popes, which Charles the Great had done so much 
 to encourage and strengthen, which had depended on his 
 aid and had lent itself in return to his great plans, grew 
 into a hitherto unknown strength, as the imperial system 
 which he had founded broke up in the hands of his suc- 
 cessors. From being submissive and obsequious under 
 Charles, the popes became imperious and exacting under 
 his children ; and their enormous pretensions, spiritual 
 and temporal, were supported by the appearance and 
 reception of the great forgery known by the name of 
 " False Decretals," a collection of precedents, professing 
 to belong to the early centuries, and establishing the un- 
 controlled power of the popes, not only over the whole 
 organization of the Church, but over every other earthly 
 authority. In Pope Nicholas I. in the middle of the 
 ninth century (858-867), this idea of the popedom found 
 its determined and energetic exponent ; and though met 
 and resisted with equal boldness, as by Hincmar of 
 Reims, he undoubtedly established the foundations on 
 which by natural sequence the pretensions of Gregory 
 VII. — noble in purpose, though extravagant and mis- 
 chievous, — and those of Boniface VIII. — extravagant and 
 mischievous, but not noble, — were afterwards to be built. 
 The growth of papal interference was to be aided by the 
 anarchy and license which prevailed in every depart- 
 ment of life. That interference might have been more 
 justified, if it had been wisely and righteously exercised. 
 The laxity of the marriage tie, and the monstrous facility 
 of divorce, had long been one of the plague spots of the 
 Frank kingdom. The popes, as Nicholas I., did some- 
 times interpose their rebukes and their menaces. But 
 
QYiKY.yi. Power and Corruption of Church Rulers. 197 
 
 their interposition was rare and partial ; it passed over 
 the strong and dangerous, and fastened on those whom 
 it was not unsafe to attack; it entangled itself with the 
 pohtical hostilities of the time ; and it too readily accept- 
 ed hollow compromises to save appearances. The quar- 
 rel of Nicholas I. with Lothar II. of Lotharingia, about 
 the ill-treatment of his wife, was made up under his suc- 
 cessor, Hadrian II. (869) by an arrangement of which 
 all parties must have known that its basis was false- 
 hood. 
 
 But this was not the worst. Much inefficiency and 
 some compromises were not unnatural and almost in- 
 evitable in those confused times. But the century which 
 saw the pretensions of the popes growing to their most 
 audacious height saw at its end the popes themselves 
 reduced below the level even of the blood-stained and 
 licentious princes of the time. Eome, the city^ the 
 sacred office, had been fought for, had been won and 
 lost, by fraud, by corruption, by violence, by murder, 
 more than once in the recent times. But now for more 
 than half a century the influence of three women of 
 infamous character, in league with ambitious nobles and 
 profligate churchmen, was paramount over the throne of 
 the Vicar of Christ. In the hands of the marquises and 
 dukes of Tuscany, of the two Alberics, lords of Came- 
 rino, of the consul Crescentius and the Roman demo- 
 cracy, and at last of the counts of Tusculum, the pope- 
 dom, bought and sold and rapidly passing from hand to 
 hand by bloody revolutions or political intrigues, was 
 treated as the inheritance or prize of whatever family or 
 adventurer happened at the moment to be strongest in 
 Rome. The wickedness and vileness which gathered 
 round the Roman see in the ninth and tenth centuries 
 are, with one exception, and that is the repetition of 
 
198 Beginjiing of the Middle Ages. chap. x. 
 
 them in a more enlightened time, under Sixtus IV. Alex- 
 ander VI. and Leo X. one of the most revolting profa- 
 nations recorded in the history of the world. 
 
 It seemed as if the popedom would share the fate of the 
 empire of Charles the Great ; that the great office with 
 its venerable traditions and its overweening claims would 
 sink under the weight of its degradation and shame, 
 and that the system of which it was the keystone would 
 break up and perish. Two things saved it at this 
 turning point of its history. One was the revival, under 
 Otto the Great and his successors, of the imperial au- 
 thority, with claims to chastise and correct abuses, to crush 
 anarchy, and enforce order. At the price of the indepen- 
 dence and the political hopes of Rome and Italy, the em- 
 perors of the Saxon line, by imposing their yoke on the 
 papacy, prevented it, at last, after a hard struggle, from 
 becoming the heritage of the petty nobles of the neigh- 
 bourhood of Rome. They did not reform the popes, 
 but they preserved the European character of the pope- 
 dom. The other cause that saved it was a moral one ; 
 it was the growth and spread of a strong spirit of austere 
 reform of manners in the Church itself. This was 
 specially embodied in the great monastic order or " con- 
 gregation " of Cluny, at the beginning of the tenth cen- 
 tury, which had for its object the revival of purity and 
 strictness in ecclesiastical life, and which spread with 
 strength and rapidity throughout Europe. It was from 
 men imbued with the spirit and severity of Cluny, Leo 
 IX. and Hildebrand, afterwards Gregory VII., that the 
 internal reform came which not only saved the papacy 
 from becoming an Italian prince-bishopric, but made it, 
 at once for good and evil, the great centre of spiritual 
 power in the middle ages of Christendom. 
 
 The undisguised rapacity and ambition which were 
 
CHAP. X. Claims and Degeneracy of the Popes. 199 
 
 turning great Church offices into private possessions 
 were acting equally in the political sphere. The dislo- 
 cation of the empire extended much farther than merely 
 to its great divisions. The instability and changefulness 
 of the times opened a wide field for the aims and eft'orts 
 of private and local interests. What the king was doing 
 for his kingdom, what the duke and the count were each 
 doing for his duchy or county, — separating it off accord- 
 ing to his opportunity and for his own advantage, en- 
 larging, overreaching, stealing at the expense of his 
 neighbours, — that the petty lord or the military retainer 
 did according to his humble measure, in his own neigh- 
 bourhood. There was a general loosening of the public 
 bands which kept men together. There was a strength- 
 ening of the separate centres and local seats of authority 
 and power. The pretensions, just or unjust, of the small 
 were of course swept away by the superior claims of the 
 great, when the great were strong enough to enforce 
 them. But on a large scale and on a small one, the ten- 
 dency at this time to divide and dissociate was greater 
 than that to aggregation and union. 
 
 The times were unhappy and evil ; when no one could 
 feel safe from war with his next neighbour, from oppo- 
 site and irreconcilable claims on his allegiance, from the 
 hopeless terrors of barbarian invasion; when religion 
 seemed to have exhausted its power to restrain men 
 from evil, and had degenerated in its highest places into 
 the vilest profanation ; when universal distrust reigned^ 
 and no man felt secure from his brother's dagger and 
 his wife's poison. Yet, though faint and weak, there 
 were the gleams of a better hope. There had come in 
 with Charles the Great the dim idea of the public inter- 
 est, the claims of the res publica, the common weal, as 
 distinguished from the pleasure or the ambition of kings 
 
200 Beginning, of the Middle Ages. chap. x. 
 
 and great men. There had passed into the opinions and 
 language of men, though it was over and over again 
 rudely set aside, a notion of the duty of princes to con- 
 sider the good of their subjects, and in their quarrels to 
 remember the sufferings of the widows and orphans 
 whom they made by their wars. The writers of Charles's 
 own period, Eginhard his friend, and Nithard his grand- 
 son — who write like men accustomed to affairs and who 
 have not read for nothing their Roman models, — are in- 
 deed more alive to these ideas than those who imme- 
 diately follow them. But a step had been taken out of 
 barbarism, and a beginning of better things made, when 
 the idea of the public interest had been planted, at what- 
 ever disadvantage, and however feebly, in the growing 
 society of Europe. With Charles the Great, the turn of 
 things had distinctly come. Henceforth, though there 
 was long to be, as much as ever, confusion, misrule, and 
 wretchedness, and weary ages of crime and war, a pro- 
 gress is discernible, in some point or other, in each gen- 
 eration. There are steps backward, but the whole 
 movement, though intermittent and slow, is forward. A 
 footing for Christian civilization was made for good. It 
 was Christian civilization which was to have Europe — 
 French, Italian, German civilization ; not the uncouth 
 heathendom of the Slave tribes. Wends, Obotrites and 
 Czechs — not tlie desolating barbarism of the Magyrs — 
 not the unfruitful civilization of Cordova and Bagdad, 
 the seats of the rival Caliphates of the Mahometan Em- 
 pire. 
 
 And the same disintegrating tendency which favoured 
 the growth of a multitude of petty local powers, rejoicing 
 in their isolation and independence, had also a larger 
 and more beneficial result. It created a swarm of little 
 counts and lords. But it also helped a wholesome divi- 
 
CHAP. X. Growth of Idea of Public Interest. 201 
 
 sion between the naturally distinct portions of the Caro- 
 lingian empire. It made the great nations. On the 
 break-up of the empire, its parts sought, each according 
 to its natural or inherited affinities, to group themselves 
 into larger or smaller aggregations, marked off from one 
 another by history, traditions, interest, and language. 
 To the west of the Rhine we henceforth see the begin- 
 nings and the growth of modern France ; on the Rhine, 
 and to the east of it, the beginnings and growth of 
 modern Germany. 
 
 A memorable document, known as the bilingual "Oath 
 of Strasburg," (842, a year before the partition of Verdun), 
 preserved to us in Nithard's contemporary history, is a 
 measure of the degree in which, in point of language, 
 the Western and Eastern portions of the Frank kingdom 
 had gone asunder. When Louis the German and Charles 
 the Bald exchanged solemn promises of mutual aid 
 against their brother Lothar, these promises were con- 
 firmed by the oaths of their soldiers ; and that each army 
 might be witness of the transaction, these promises and 
 oaths were pronounced in two languages, the languages 
 of each host, German ( Teudisca, Deutsck), and Roman 
 {Romana, Romance), a language which has ceased to be 
 Latin, and stands in the relation of an elder sister, to 
 the modern languages of the West and South, — Proven- 
 gal, Italian, French, Spanish, — which are known, in op- 
 position to the Teutonic languages, by the common name 
 of "Romance" languages. There are older fragments 
 of German; but of the Romance class of languages 
 the oath of Strasburg is the earliest known example. 
 It indicates that by this time, the middle of the ninth 
 century, the land of the Western Franks was preparing 
 to become Latin " France," and its people, not Franks, 
 but French. The Latin element, always predominant 
 
202 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. x. 
 
 in Southern Aquitaine and the Roman *' Province," Pro- 
 vence, and along the valleys of the Saone and Rhone, 
 rapidly recovered its ascendancy north of the Loire, in 
 Neustria, the land of the Seine, the Somme, the Oise, 
 and the Marne. As soon as the strong constraint of the 
 Eastern Franks and their great king was removed, Gaul 
 began steadily and surely to break away from the union 
 with Germany, which Clovis had first forced upon it. It 
 broke into separate and independent, or almost inde- 
 pendent, portions — kingdoms, dukedoms, countships ; 
 all of them now, deeply and irrevocably, Latin. When 
 the last of the great barbarian conquests, the settlement 
 of the Northern sea-rovers at Rouen, gave a new pro- 
 vince to Gaul, and introduced into it the new name of 
 Normandy, the language which the new comers at once 
 adopted, in ejcchange for their ancestral Scandinavian 
 dialect, was not the Teutonic one of the old Franks, but 
 the Romance tongue of Latinized Neustria. Then began 
 the history of modern France; and the history of 
 France was, for many centuries, the history of the 
 aggregation and union of fragments : their attraction to 
 a central nucleus, and the natural grouping round it 
 of the nearer, the gradual annexation of the more dis- 
 tant. The new nation began with a new dynasty. The 
 long and obstinate struggle between the expiring but 
 gallant Carolingians, the descendants of Charles the 
 Bald, and the dukes of Paris, the sons of its deliverer. 
 Count Odo, ended in the establishment of the new line, 
 which was to hold the royalty of France for 800 years. 
 But it was the new line which made France. In the as- 
 sembly of the States at Senlis, in May, 9S7, Hugh Capet, 
 amid intrigues and treachery, and premature and sus- 
 pected deaths, became king. In May, 1787, the first 
 assembly of the Notables, bringing with it the doom of 
 
A. D. 987. France and the House of Capet. 203 
 
 Hugh Capet's house, met at Versailles. Between these 
 two dates lies the history of the growth of the French 
 nation, the development of French character, and the 
 fusion into one realm of the French provinces. But the 
 kingdom which Hugh Capet and his descendants created 
 out of the ruins of the Carolingian empire of the Franks, 
 monopolizing the Teutonic name of France, while it 
 drove out the Teutonic language before the Roman, and 
 fixed Latin ascendancy in Gaul, was far from being at 
 once what it was to be. It was made up at first merely 
 of the lands lying round its centre, Paris. Hugh was 
 indeed crowned " king of the Gauls, Britons, Danes, 
 Aquitanians, Goths, Spaniards, Gascons." When his 
 son Robert was made king with his father, he is described 
 as reigning over the West from the Meuse to the Ocean. 
 And the style of "king of the Franks" was still main- 
 tained. But Brittany was unsubdued. Normandy, at 
 the very gates of Paris, was but a nominal dependency, 
 in the hands of the strongest ruling family in Europe. 
 Aquitaine was far off and held its own. The banks of 
 the Saone and Rhone, the slopes of the Jura, and the 
 valleys of the Southern Alps, were occupied by the ab- 
 solutely independent kingdoms of Burgundy and Aries. 
 The kingdom of France was still to be made when Hugh 
 Capet became king ; it was then only taking its rise in 
 small and insecure beginnings. The kingdom of the 
 tenth century was to modern France what Wessex was 
 to England before the days of Egbert. 
 
 But while in the west of Europe Teutonic language 
 and ascendancy had definitively failed to establish itself, 
 and was retreating before the reanimated Latin and Keltic 
 influences, Germany — though the Latin name of Tacitus 
 for the nation hardly appears yet in contemporary history 
 — was, in fact, constituting and shaping itself in the 
 
204 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. x. 
 
 centre of Europe. It claimed both banks of the still 
 Teutonic Rhine from source to mouth, though the west 
 bank, Teutonic as it continued to be in language and 
 character, was long to remain a debateable land, fiercely- 
 contended for by the eastern and western divisions of 
 the Franks, and itself often inclining to the west. Three 
 great central dukedoms. Saxony in the north, — Alaman- 
 nia in the south up to the Alps of the St. Gothard and the 
 Bernina range, — and between Saxony and Alamannia, 
 the Eastern France, the later Franconia, the land of the 
 Main and Neckar, together with the Thuringian and 
 Swabian lands, — formed the nucleus of the great country 
 which was to fill so large a space in history. It was 
 flanked westwards, from the mouths of the Weserandthe 
 Scheldt to the sources of the Moselle on the western slopes 
 of the Vosges, by the dukedoms of Friseland, of the Ripua- 
 rian Lotharingia between the Rhine and Scheldt, and of 
 Lotharingia proper on the Moselle : that middle portion 
 of the old Frank kingdom, the future Netherlands and 
 Lorraine, which, though Teutonic in language and race, 
 was continually shifting its allegiance and changing its 
 masters. To the south and south-east Germany spread 
 out into the almost royal dukedoms of Bavaria and 
 Carinthia; and it was fringed eastwards by a chain 
 of border-lands, the ''marks,'' or marches between the 
 Germans and the Slaves, and, behind the Slaves, the 
 Poles, and the Turkish race of the Magyars. On the 
 north of this broad border, between the Elbe and 
 Oder, where the Nordmark and the Ostmark and the 
 marches of Merseburg and Meissen, the lands which 
 were to become Brandenburg and Silesia ; to the south, 
 the Mahrenmark, the Ostmark, and the Steyer m.ark, the 
 Moravia, Austria, and Stiria of later geography ; between 
 these marchlands was the great dukedom, which was in 
 
CHAP. X. States and Kitigs of Germany. 205 
 
 due time to become the kingdom of Bohemia. These 
 lands were the later acquisitions of Germany. The 
 process by which the Latinized Franks of Neustria were 
 transforming Danish Northinett into French Normans, 
 was going on equally in the ninth and tenth century vn 
 these German marchlands. Out of the Germanized 
 Slaves of the north and south, and the infiltration of 
 German settlers in these outlying regions, were formed 
 the races from which were to grow Prussia and Austria. 
 The Germans, as we have seen, first had a separate 
 king in the grandson of Charles the Great, Ludvig, or 
 Louis the German, "the wise and just," (817-876) 
 appointed, in the early divisions of the empire, kmg of 
 the Bavarians, who at the partition of Verdun (843) took 
 all the lands and nations east of the Rhine. The king- 
 dom of Germany was united for a moment with the 
 Western kingdom under his son Charles the Fat 
 (8S4-8S7) ; but when the two portions finally broke 
 asunder at his death, the Germans chose for their king 
 another of the Carolingian line, Arnulf, who also 
 received the imperial crown at Rome in 896. The direct 
 line of Charles the Great in Germany ended in the 
 grandson of Arnulf, Louis the Child (911). Then by 
 election of chiefs and people, " the people of the Franks 
 and Saxons," the kingdom passed to popular and pow- 
 erful dukes, first, Conrad of Franconia (911-918), then 
 to his rival, Henry of Saxony (918-936), both of them 
 connected by the female line with the Carolingians. 
 Under them, in disaster, in success, in wars with the 
 Western kings and dukes for the borderlands on the 
 Rhine, in fierce conflicts with Slave Obotrites and 
 Wends on the eastern marchlands, in common resist- 
 ance to the terrible Hungarian ravages, the Teutonic 
 nations, distracted as they were with internal feuds, yet 
 
2o6 Beginning of ihe Middle Ages. a. d. 936-973. 
 
 grew together, and were from time to time united. But 
 the greatness of the kings of the Germans — kings of the 
 Franks they were still called — began with Henry's 
 son and successor Otto (936). Not unworthy to share 
 the title of the great ruler in whose steps he trod, Otto 
 the Great was the renewer of the Empire of the West, 
 the deliver of Christiandom from the barbarian scourge, 
 the tamer of the tribes of the Eastern border, the 
 reformer, in some measure at least, of the monstrous 
 abuses which had grown up under the ecclesiastical 
 rule of the worst of the popes. Under Otto, king and 
 emperor, Germany may be said to have taken definitely 
 the place which it was to hold in modern Europe in the 
 middle and later ages. Otto, ambitious and imperious, 
 yet noble-minded, generous, and a hater of wrong and 
 disorder, became, like Charles, the type of a new kind 
 of king in Europe. He was unsuccessful in his interfer- 
 ence with the affairs of the Western Frank kingdom, — 
 happily unsuccessful, for his success would have hin- 
 dered the natural course of growth in the Latinized 
 population of Gaul. But he grappled strongly and suc- 
 cessfully with internal disloyalty. He put down the 
 mischievous restlessness of the Slaves of the Eastern 
 marches with a firm and stern hand, and sometimes with 
 the pitiless rigour with which civilization meets the dangers 
 of barbarian faithlessness. And he delivered Europe from 
 the misery and shame of the Magyar desolations by a 
 great victory which may rank with that of Aetius at 
 Chalons over Attila, and that of Charles Martel over the 
 Arabs at Poitiers. In the tremendous battle of the 
 Lechfeld (August 10, 955) near Augsburg, the Magyars 
 learned in a bloody overthrow the strength and deter- 
 mination of the Germans and their king. Otto was 
 saluted on the field by his army as the Father of his land 
 
CHAP. X. Italy. 207 
 
 and Emperor. The victory which delivered Germany 
 broke the Magyars of their habits of plundering and 
 ravage, and was the first step to make them the Hunga- 
 rian nation. Christian missionaries penetrated among 
 them. King Geisa became their Ethelbert or Clovis. 
 Fifty years later they had an anointed Christian king, a 
 saint, St. Stephen ; and the sacred crown of St. Stephen, 
 received from Pope Sylvester (1000), became the emblem 
 of one of the most famous of the kingdoms of Chris- 
 tendom. 
 
 Italy, imperial Italy, within whose borders it was ever 
 held that an emperor must receive his crown, had ac- 
 quired from the policy of Charles the Great an increased 
 importance among the new nations. It awoke at his 
 death to the desire of independence : a desire never to 
 be extinguished, but which it was to take long ages to 
 fulfil. Italy was still divided, as in the days of the Lom- 
 bard kings, into a number of lordships, great and small. 
 Each of the three grandsons of Charles the Great, either 
 personally or in their children, had with the dignity of 
 emperor claimed to hold Italy ; with Charles the Fat, 
 (808) it was lost to the Carolingian family. Then it 
 seemed as if the days of the Lombards, whose name had 
 not yet perished from the style of the kings of Italy, 
 were coming back again. The dukes of two of the old 
 Lombard dukedoms, Berengar of Friuli in the north, 
 Guido of Spoleto in the centre, became rival claimants 
 for the kingdom of Italy, such as it had been before 
 Charles overthrew the Lombard Desiderius. For sixty 
 years of turbulence and war the kingdom was fought for 
 by pretenders, Italians, and foreigners from Provence 
 and Burgundy. Rome was either in the hands of the 
 popes, or of the people of Rome, or of some daring lords 
 of the neighbourhood, who called themselves Consuls or 
 
2o8 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. x. 
 
 Patricians. In this disorder Italy was but in the same 
 condition as Germany or Gaul. But no Hugh Capet or 
 Henry of Saxony was to arise and lay the foundations 
 of a national kingdom in Italy. At Rome lay the spell 
 which drew the invader ; at Rome were the great uni- 
 versal interests which gave him good reason or pretext 
 for coming. Rome was the seat "where emperors were 
 wont to sit," and it was the emperor's first business to 
 protect, to purify, to do right at Rome. And at the end 
 of the Carolingian times, and the beginning of the tenth 
 century, Rome was at the lowest depth of disorder and 
 shame. Charles had come to deliver Rome and the 
 popes from the oppression of the Lombard kings. In the 
 middle of the tenth century. Otto, the greatest of German 
 kings since Charles, claiming Charles's place and title, 
 descended from the Alps to deliver Rome from scan- 
 dalous popes and tyrannous nobles. More romantic than 
 Charles, he came also to deliver and to marry a distressed 
 and widowed queen, the good and beautiful Adelheid of 
 Provence, whom the Lombard usurper, Berengar, as he 
 is called, wished to force into a distasteful marriage. Otto 
 extinguished again, as Charles had done, the power and 
 claims of the Italian or Lombard king of Pavia and Ve- 
 rona, Adelheid's enemy, the second Berengar. Crowned 
 king of the Italians at Milan (951), he was crowned Em- 
 peror of the Romans by the pope at Rome (962) ; he 
 confirmed the rights of the Roman see, but he asserted 
 in large terms those of the empire ; and he had his young 
 son Otto II. also crowned emperor by the pope (967). 
 But his coming, though it brought with it something of 
 restored order, and also prepared the way for a reformed 
 popedom, destroyed the chance of an Italian state. His 
 coming riveted Italy to the empire, and the empire was 
 henceforth to be kept in German hands, as the papacy 
 
CHAP. X. Italy — Scandinavian Nations. 209 
 
 was iox the most part kept in Italian. By the coronation 
 of Otto, the two great powers were finally established, 
 which, as it was supposed then and for ages afterwards, 
 were indispensably necessary to govern the temporal 
 and spiritual order of the world: the Holy Roman Em- 
 pire, the Holy Roman Church. Instead of governing 
 the world between them, as Charles and Otto dreamed, 
 they were soon to meet in irreconcilable and fatal con- 
 flict. Between them Italy was torn to pieces by domestic 
 strife, and became the natural and accustomed prey of 
 the strangers, coming of their own accord, or invited 
 from within. For a short interval there arose the tur- 
 bulent and brilliant liberty of the cities. Then came the 
 tyrants, the Scaligers, the Visconti, the Sforzas, the Me- 
 dici, the Borgias, the Farnesi ; and then the day* of the 
 foreign dynasties. But never since Otto clenched the 
 work of Charles, till our own times, has it been possible 
 for Italy to be what her sister nations were. Modern 
 nations were consolidated and bound together in their 
 early stages, not always by the power, but by the idea 
 and the presence of the crown. And the crown of 
 Italy, the Iron Crown of Lombardy, the Golden Crown 
 of the Empire, was always in the keeping of a stranger. 
 What the fifth and sixth centuries were to the Teuto* 
 nic nations, Goths, Franks, Burgundians — ^the period of 
 the beginnings of their settled national life, 
 — this the ninth and tenth centuries were to Sc.mciina- 
 
 vian and 
 
 the second great line of the barbarian move- Slave na- 
 
 ment, the Scandinavian and Slave nations. 
 It was the time which brought them to rest in the seats 
 which they were henceforth to occupy. From wanderers, 
 marauders, invaders, they did not indeed at once pass into 
 citizens, but they became settlers, finding homes and 
 founding a country in lands which were for the future to 
 
2IO Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. x. 
 
 be called after their names. They did not, like the 
 Franks and Goths, or even as much as the Anglo-Sax- 
 ons, come into a heritage prepared for them by an older 
 cultivation — a land of farms and vineyards, of cities, and 
 the arts of peace ; and this, doubtless, affected their his- 
 tory, and caused that comparative rudeness which clings 
 still to the east of North Europe. But they felt the in- 
 fluence of a more fixed order in the organized nations 
 beyond them. From mere tribes and hordes they began 
 to shape themselves into dukedoms and kingdoms. 
 Around the great central state, the empire, mainly Ger- 
 man, and in German hands, which represented the 
 power and law of Western Europe, the names and boun- 
 daries and rude political efforts of realms afterwards to 
 be famous begin to appear. But, as in the case of Hun- 
 gary just referred to, they appear only in very obscure 
 
 forms and dim outlines. The Northmen, 
 navlan^na-" ^^t Only in what is now Denmark but in 
 *'°"k* N*^"' what are now Norway and Sweden, were 
 way, Swe- beginning to be welded together into dis* 
 
 tinct nations, under the strong and fierce 
 discipline of ambitious kings, like Harold Haarfager, 
 the "Fair-haired," and his family, Eric "Blood-axe,*' 
 Hacon, and Olaf (863-1000). The successes of their 
 countrymen, who had won provinces and founded 
 princely houses, the familiarity which their adventures 
 had given them with the state and power of the empe- 
 rors and kings of Christendom, turned their thoughts 
 from the mere excitement of a rover's life to the desire 
 of founding dominions at home, and bringing under the 
 king's authority not merely the military service but the 
 loose independence and the landed tenure of their wild 
 countrymen. The attempts caused much resistance 
 and great emigrations. But the kings carried their 
 
CHAP. X. Slave Nations. Poles. Russians. 2 » i 
 
 point: they became rulers over subjects. Wars did not 
 cease, but they became more and more national ones, 
 replacing piracy and private adventures. And the 
 three Scandinavian kingdoms, as we know them, were 
 formed — frequently united, more or less, under a con- 
 queror like Cnut, but always separate as nations. 
 
 While the Northmen were shaping themselves into 
 organized states among the mountains and on the fiords 
 of Norway, the lakes of Sweden, and the heaths and 
 islands of Denmark, the same thing was ^. 
 
 . ^ Slave nations. 
 
 takmg place m the vast wilderness of pine- 
 forest, marshes, and boundless plains south and east of 
 the Baltic. We begin to see on the historical map of 
 Europe, amid the crowd of ill-understood and forgotten 
 names with which it is studded from the Oder and the 
 Vistula to the Volga, belonging mostly to different 
 branches of the great Slave family, two designations 
 emerging, which were of no more account at the time 
 than those around them, but which announce the begin- 
 ning of two of the most famous nations of the modern 
 world. Between Slave races of strange names, who were 
 to become Lithuanians, Prussians, Pomeranians, — Letts 
 to the north, Slovaks to the south, Czechs in 
 Bohemia and Moravia, — another branch 
 begins to change the name of Lechs [Ljaken], for that 
 of Polaks, Poles, meaning in their own language, " the 
 people of the plains," — the great plains of the Vistula. 
 In the middle of the ninth century we begin to hear of 
 Polish chiefs: at the end of the tenth there had arisen 
 a Polish kingdom under a powerful and victorious king 
 (Boleslas, 992-1025). Here its history begins — so full of 
 turbulence and incorrigible anarchy within, of aggres- 
 sion and tyrannous insolence without, and, perhaps, of 
 all histories the most pathetic at its close. 
 
212 Beginning of the Middle Ages, chap, x. 
 
 Again, in the north-east, another name which was to 
 become that of a mighty people, the natural antagonist 
 of Poland, first its victim and then its de- 
 stroyer, began to be distinguished. That 
 famous name first appears in Greek and Latin writers of 
 the ninth century, in the shape of an indeclinable word, 
 ol Tof, TO Twf "the Russ," as if it stood for some unin- 
 telligible abstraction. It soon became familiar at Constan- 
 tinople as the name of sea-rovers, whose fleets from the 
 rivers of the Black Sea insulted and threatened the great 
 capital. The early history of the Russians is dim and 
 vague. But it seems almost certain that the process 
 which created England and Normandy created that 
 which was to become Russia. Scandinavian pirates and 
 adventurers had become known on the Baltic coast, the 
 " Varangian Sea," for their daring, ferocity, and strength. 
 They were called in, or they conquered; they established 
 themselves among the Finnish and Slave tribes ; they 
 becarfie masters and rulers; either as a dynasty or a 
 race they gradually adopted, like the Normans, the speech 
 of their Slave subjects. In a corner of that endless plain 
 which stretches from Germany to the steppes of the 
 Tartars and Mongols and thence to China, and of which 
 the natural divisions are not mountains, but the streams, 
 hundreds of miles in length, of deep and broad rivers, we 
 hear of Ruric and his two brothers (about 862). They were 
 Northmen, or, as the Slavonians called them, Varangians, 
 the name by which the Nowhern bodyguard of the Greek 
 emperors was known, who settled at Novgorod, as the 
 Jutes settled in Kent and then Rollo at Rouen. The 
 Russian Varangians conquered round about them, like 
 their kindred in England and Gaul ; they pushed south- 
 ward, driving the Turkish Chazars from Kiev on the Dnie- 
 per, and making Kiev and Novgorod their two chief cities. 
 
CHAP. X. Conversion of the North and East, 213 
 
 Their northern habits prompted them to use the great 
 rivers for trade and war : by the Dnieper they carried on a 
 brisk commerce with the Greek empire, and four times 
 (between 865 and 1043) their flotillas sailed to the Bospo- 
 rus, ravaging its shores, and were beaten off with difficulty 
 and loss. At this time arose the strange prophecy, 
 vouched for at the time, "that, in the last days, the Rus- 
 sians should become masters of Constantinople." The 
 family of Ruric appears in the dim history as the counter- 
 part to that of Rollo. Chief after chief kept up the 
 inheritance of strength and the tradition of enterprise, 
 and even ill-fortune did not check them. One of them, 
 Swatoslav (955-973)» attempted Constantinople by land. 
 He was outmanoeuvred and driven back to the Danube 
 by the Greek emperor, the Armenian, John Zimisces. 
 Surrounded on all sides, and without hope of escape, he 
 was forced to capitulate and sign a humbling treaty, just 
 as long afterwards, Peter the Great, hemmed in on the 
 Pruth by the Ottomans, was compelled to buy his release 
 by ignominious conditions (171 1). But Swatoslav's 
 defeat did not hinder, any more than that of Peter, the 
 growth of the nation under his successors. After a short 
 interval of bloody domestic war he was followed as 
 "Great Prince" by the great Vladimir (973-1015), the 
 conqueror, the legislator, the builder of cities and founder 
 of schools ; who holds in the traditions of Russia the 
 place held in England by Alfred, and on the Continent 
 by Charles the Great and Otto. 
 
 And about this time, the ninth and tenth centuries, 
 had come over all these races a change as great as that 
 of their political organization, and closely connected with 
 it. "In these centuries," says Gibbon, "the reign of the 
 Gospel and of the Church was extended over Bulgaria, 
 Hungaria, Bohemia, Saxony, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, 
 
214 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. x. 
 
 Poland, and Russia.'* Their conversion went along with 
 their introduction to civil life and order. Zealous and 
 self-devoted missionaries, usually monks, from the West 
 or East, carrying their lives in their hands, first came 
 preaching to men who were becoming ashamed and 
 alarmed at their barbarism, in the face of a civilization 
 of which they felt the strength. In time the chiefs — from 
 conviction, from^ feeling, or from imitation of the kings of 
 the Franks and the emperor of the Greeks, were baptized. 
 They encouraged the preachers of Christianity, and some- 
 times enforced the profession of it by violence and penal- 
 ties. But its spread was certain when it once began. It 
 was brought to Denmark and Sweden by a devoted monk 
 of Corbey on the Weser, Anschar (826-865). The kings 
 alternately protected and opposed it, till at length it was 
 firmly planted under Cnut. Introduced into Norway 
 from England, it was imposed upon their people by the 
 two kings, Olaf Tryggvason (955-1000) and Olaf the 
 Saint (1019-1033). The apostles of the Bulgarians, Cyril 
 and Methodius (862-885), were also the teachers of the 
 Moravians and Bohemian Czechs. In 966, Micislav, duke 
 of the Poles, was baptized. But among the Slave Wends 
 between the Elbe and Oder, the efforts of the German 
 emperors to Christianize them called forth a fierce revolt 
 983-1066) ; and among them the missionaries had met 
 Httle but martyrdom. Finally, in 988, the powerful 
 Vladimir of Russia, whose grandmother Olga had al- 
 ready brought Christianity from Constantinople to Kiev 
 in 955, was baptized at Cherson, and received as his 
 bride the Greek emperor's daughter. Russia henceforth 
 became the great conquest and strength of the Eastern 
 Church. The conversion of these last formed of the 
 barbarian nations altered their relation to Europe. "The 
 admission," says Gibbon, "of the barbarians into the 
 
CHAP. XI. Conclusion. 215 
 
 pale of civil and ecclesiastical society, delivered Europe 
 from the depredations by sea and land of the Normans, 
 Hungarians, and Russians. The estabhshment of law 
 and order was promoted by the influence of the clergy ; 
 and the rudiments of art and science were introduced 
 into the savage countries of the globe." 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 CONCLUSION — RETROSPECT OF THE TRANSITION PERIOD 
 BETWEEN THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 The history of the five centuries, from the end of the 
 fifth to the end of the tenth, is the history of the efforts 
 of the new nations of the West after organization, im- 
 provement, and power. During this period, the Teu- 
 tonic races found themselves under entirely new condi- 
 tions. It had not been new to them to conquer, or to 
 meet other races. They had already, in what we call 
 their barbarous state, definite social usages and a kind 
 of political organization. But for the first time they 
 found themselves in close and permanent contact with 
 an older and more perfect civil order, and a new religion. 
 They found themselves, in their ignorance and inexperi- 
 ence, in their eager curiosity and vigorous freshness of 
 life, in contact with Roman learning and Roman art, in 
 some parts with Roman institutions and Roman laws. 
 And they found themselves under the spell of the 
 mightiest, the tenderest, and most wonderful of religions. 
 Thus, all that had been the familiar course of life during 
 centuries of wandering, was changed. Wild as they still 
 were,they settled, they became lords of lands and houses, 
 
2i6 Begmning of the Middle Ages, chap. xi. 
 
 they began to learn and to know, they began to feel 
 themselves becoming a commonwealth and a state. 
 
 And by the end of the tenth century, the process, in 
 its broad and essential points, was accomplished. The 
 oudines of the new world that was to be, had become 
 distinctly and permanently laid down. It had been 
 doubtful whether it was to be Goths or Franks who were 
 to be at the head of the new state of things, to give it its 
 tone, to direct and control it. It had been the Franks, 
 and not the Goths. It had been doubtful whether 
 Catholicism or Arianism was to be the religion of the 
 West. Arianism had disappeared, and had left, perhaps, 
 too easy a victory to the Catholic Church. Again, it had 
 been doubtful whether the new nations could stand the 
 shock of barbarian pressure, outside and behind them ; 
 whether Europe might not be, like Africa and Asia, a 
 prey to the Saracens; whether the Northmen from the 
 sea, and the Huns and Slaves from the deserts, might 
 not desolate and sweep away the homes which Frank, 
 and Goth, and Anglo-Saxon had made for themselves. 
 The deluge had been stayed, not without loss, but for 
 good and all. The Saracen had maimed wounded Chris- 
 tendom in one of its finest kingdoms; he had spoilt, 
 though not finally destroyed, the hopes of Spain. He 
 long continued to annoy and threaten the shores of Italy; 
 to penetrate even the passes of the Alps. But the Sara- 
 cen had been arrested for ever by Charles M artel at 
 Poitiers and Narbonne, by Charles the Great at the Ebro. 
 The Northmen, the Slaves, even the Huns or Magyars, 
 had been drawn into civilization, which they had dis- 
 turbed but could not overthrow. The imperfect civiliza- 
 tion of the time had proved itself strong enough not 
 only to check them, but to react upon them. It had 
 been doubtful whether the new world were not to be an 
 
CHAP. XI. Conclusion. 217 
 
 extension of Germany, from the Rhine over the whole 
 West and South, to the Atlantic and Mediterranean. 
 Further, it seemed at one time uncertain whether Ger- 
 man speech, and German law, were not to prevail in 
 Gaul and Italy, as they had prevailed in Britain, sup- 
 planting the older languages and laws, or driving them 
 out into the wastes or the mountains — whether a great 
 German reproduction of the Roman empire, with its twin 
 capitals of Aachen and Rome, were not to be supreme in 
 the world. But this was not to be. The strength of the 
 older society, and of the races in possession, had reasserted 
 itself. Germany was indeed to be a great and mighty 
 nation ; but it was not to absorb the world. The Frank 
 empire of Charles the Great was too loosely compacted 
 to hold together as he had created it. It broke xip, and 
 was reconstituted in a different and very contracted 
 shape, the Holy Roman Empire of the Saxon, Otto the 
 Great ; the Empire as it was to continue until the begin- 
 ning of this century, often a very important, but ambig- 
 uous and uncertain element in the polity of Christendom. 
 The lands where the Romans had been strong, were 
 once more to show the influence of their imperishable 
 language and thought. Italy was once more Italy, and 
 not Lombardy ; but its destiny to be kingless, except 
 with the mock title of a foreign, and often hostile ruler, 
 had declared itself. It was no longer doubtful that West- 
 ern France, so long the battle-ground between Latin 
 and German influences, was to be Latin and not Ger- 
 man. It had finally shaken itself loose from Germany. 
 Ittook a king out of its own great chieftains, and rejected 
 the half-Teutonic line of Charles the Great ; it was to 
 grow and become great under the kings of Paris, and not 
 under the kings of Laon, much less of Aachen. The 
 great Norse settlement on the Seine had become tho- 
 
2i8 Beginning of the Middle Ages. chap. xi. 
 
 roughly Latin. The combination of astuteness and prac- 
 tical good sense with the old adventurousness and dar- 
 ing of their blood, which was to make the Normans seek 
 crowns in England, in Italy, and in the East, had already 
 shown itself in the remarkable line of the dukes of Nor- 
 mandy. And by the end of the tenth century, England 
 had taken its shape and established its internal unity. 
 Angles of the east, north, and midland, Saxons of the 
 west and south, even the intrusive Norse settlers of the 
 Danish districts, had become permanently bound to- 
 gether, under the kings of the line of Egbert — Alfred, 
 Edward the Elder, Athelstan, Edgar ; they had become 
 that "English folk" and " English kin," who were soon 
 twice to be made subjects of foreign conquest, and to be 
 ruled by lines of foreign kings, but who were to turn their 
 conquerors, even Normans, in a generation or two, into 
 Englishmen. 
 
 Finally with the year 999, with Gerbert of Auvergne, the 
 austere Cluniac monk, the most learned man of his time 
 — mathematician, theologian, supposed wizard, magician, 
 tutor of a Roman emperor and of a king of France, ec- 
 clesiastical intriguer and ecclesiastical victim, the stout 
 opponent, the stout asserter of the claims of the Roman 
 see, placed in it as a reforming pope by the title of Syl- 
 vester II. through the influence of the Roman emperor, 
 Otto III. — a new line of popes begins. We have left be- 
 hind the popes who cringed to the Carolingian princes 
 when they were strong, and threatened them when they 
 were weak. We have left behind the creatures of pro- 
 fligate women, and their associates. There 
 003-1044. ^j.^ gj.-jj gQj^g forty years to come of the li- 
 
 centious or simoniacal nominees of the Counts of Tuscu- 
 lum. But the German emperors on the one hand, the 
 monks of Cluny on the other, had already embraced 
 
CHAP. XI. Conclusion. 219 
 
 strongly the idea of what the pope ought to be ; and 
 this idea, which was to give to the popedom its modern 
 importance, was on the eve of being reahzed. 
 
 Thus the present sketch has been brought down to the 
 middle ages. In 962, Otto the Great was crowned em- 
 peror at Rome, and the mediaeval empire began. In 975, 
 was the end of the powerful and peaceful reign of Edgar, 
 who left a united England, which his son Ethelred was 
 to lose through misgovernment, and the stranger was to 
 conquer and spoil, but which neither could destroy or 
 disintegrate. In 987, Hugh Capet became king of 
 France. In 995 ended the long reign of fifty years of 
 Richard, duke of Normandy, the reign which had seen 
 such great revolutions, in which Normandy had thrown 
 its sword into the balance between Germany and France, 
 and had determined the victory of the dukes of Paris ; a 
 reign which left Normandy the most vigorous province 
 of Gaul, full of intellectual activity and ambition. We 
 are not far from the crusades. The seeds of feudalism 
 have been thickly sown, and have taken deep root. We 
 are not far from the strife of investitures, the eventful 
 quarrel between pope and emperor, Geogory VII. and 
 Henry IV. We are not far from from the beginning of 
 the scholastic philosophy, from Berengarius and Lan- 
 franc, Anselm and Abelard We are not far from those 
 massy and solemn churches, in Normandy, Germany, 
 France and England, in which the architecture of the 
 middle ages took its beginning, and which stand the 
 enduring monuments of what the new nations had 
 grown to be ; of the ideas of power, strength and 
 grandeur which had been developed among them, and 
 to which they sought to give expression. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 ARA 
 
 AACHEN, or Aix-la-Chapelle, 
 144, 155, 156 
 iEgidius, 37 
 Aetius, 22 ; defeats Attila, 23, 24 ; 
 
 murdered, 25 
 Africa, 18, 19 
 Agilulf, Lombard king, 42 
 Agricultural colonies, 51, 69, 117 
 Alamanni, 4, 38, 86 
 Alans invade Gaul, 14; Spain 15 
 Alaric, the West Goth, 10 ; invades 
 
 Greece, ib. ; projects a barbarian 
 
 state, ib.: defeated by Stilicho, 11; 
 
 master-general of lUyricum, 13; 
 
 sieges and sack of Rome, 12 ; 
 
 death, 12 ; his sayings, 12 ; makes 
 
 an emperor, Attalus, ib., 26 
 
 — II., W. Goth, at Toulouse, pub- 
 lishes abridgment of Roman Law, 
 
 54 
 
 Alboin. 41 
 
 Alcuin, 119, 140 
 
 Alfred, 183 ; checks the Danes, 186 ; 
 restores learning, ib.; greatness, 
 ib. ; creates navy, ib.; legislation, 
 186 ; popularizes knowledge, 192 
 
 Alodial, 179 
 
 Angles, 19, 63, 64 
 
 Anglo-Saxon, literature, 192; church, 
 tb. 
 
 — conquest 63; different from other 
 barbarian conquests, 64 ; more 
 complete, 66-67; heatlien conquest, 
 68 
 
 Anschar, 214 
 
 Anthemius, 27 
 
 Antonines, 5 
 
 Aquileia destroyed by Attila, 23 
 
 Aquitaine, 16, 35, 39, 85, 203 
 
 Arabians, 82 ; v. Saracens 
 
 220 
 
 BAR 
 
 Arcadius, g 
 
 Arianism, 10, 36; extinguished in 
 
 Spain, 80; among the Lombards, 
 
 42 
 Arnulf, Emperor, 162, 205 
 
 — Saint, of Metz, 91 
 Assemblies, tnoots, 46; malli, 131, 
 
 181, 203 
 Athelstan, 172,186; sisters married 
 
 to Continental princes, ib. 
 Athaulf, Gothic leader, 13, 16, 68 
 Attalus, Alaric's mock-emperor, 11, 
 
 14, 26 
 Attila, 20; character, 21; attacks 
 
 the west, 22 ; defeated at Chalons, 
 
 ib. : invades Italy, 23 ; threatens 
 
 Rome, 23 ; death, ib. ; named 
 
 Scourge of God, ib. 
 Augustine of Canterbury, 70 
 
 — Saint, of Hippo, death of 17; 
 his ' city of God,' 141 
 
 Austrasia, or Austria ; word among 
 Franks and Lombards, 88 ; Ger- 
 man influences prevailing in, 88 J 
 superiority over Neustria, 90, 91 
 
 Austria (modern), 205 
 
 Avars, probably Huns, 24, 105 ; con- 
 quered by Charles the Great, 12a 
 
 Avitus, Bp. of Vienne, 49 
 
 — Emperor, 27 
 
 BARBARIANS, Roman, know, 
 ledge of them, 2 ; migrations, 
 3 ; invade Empire, 4 ; increasing 
 boldness in fourth century, 6 ; iui 
 vasions in the fifth, 7-19 ; three 
 great divisions of invaders, 8; 
 power in the Roman State, 7, 13; 
 greatness of ^consequences of the 
 
Index. 
 
 221 
 
 CER 
 
 invasion and settlement, 43, land 
 tenure, 45; effect on them of 
 Christianity, 51-55 ; Roman law, 
 54 ; Latin language, 57 
 
 Basiieus, title of Eastern Emperor, 
 112 ; taken by Edgar, 188 
 
 Basques, 85 
 
 Bavaria, 122, 204, 208 
 
 Bede, 71, 135 
 
 Belisarius, 38, loi 
 
 Berengar, King of Italy, 207, 208 
 
 Bilingual population, 56; oath of 
 Strasburg, 156, 201 
 
 Bishops, leaders on fall of Empire, 
 48 ; influence on the barbarians, 
 49 ; secularity among the Franks, 
 
 94. 132 
 Bocland, 179 
 Boethius, 35, 59 
 Bohemia, 144, 204, 211 
 Boniface, apostle of Germany, 96, 
 
 — Count, invites vandals, 17 
 
 Bretwalda, 177 
 
 Britain, left byRomans, 18; invaded 
 by the Anglo-Saxons, 62 
 
 Brittany, 18, 203 
 
 Brunihild, 89 
 
 Bulgarians, probably of Turanian 
 origm, 23 ; mixed with Slaves, 105 
 
 Burgundians, 3 ; cross the Rhine, 
 13 ; kingdom founded, 14, 34; the 
 Burgundies, 14 ; Anans, 35 ; de- 
 feated by Clovis, 37 ; kingdom 
 conquered by the Franks, 39, 87 ; 
 law, 55 
 
 Byzantine, phase of the Empire, 106 
 
 Byzantium, 108 ; v. Constantinople 
 
 CiESARIUS, Bp. of Aries, 49, 52 
 Canterbury, 70 
 Capet, Hugh, 203 
 Capitularies, 132, 156 
 Carinthia, 162, 204 
 Carolingian line, beginning, 117^ 
 
 tables of, 92, 146, 161, 163; 
 
 division among sons of Charles 
 
 the Great, 147; quarrels, 157; 
 
 threefold division of empire, 156 ; 
 
 decay of, 158; fails, 172; last, 
 
 Louis le Faineant, 174 
 Carthage, 17, 18 
 Cassiodorus, minister of Theoderic, 
 
 33 
 Cerdic, house of, 186 
 
 CON 
 
 Ceorl, 179 
 
 Chalons, battle of, 22, 23 
 
 Charles Martel, 91 ; overthrows 
 Arabs at Tours and Poitiers, ib.\ 
 appealed to by the pope, 94 
 
 — the Bald, K. of West Franks, 
 148, 150, 151, 158 ; assailed by the 
 Northmen, 158, 164; emperor, 158 
 
 — the Fat, 169 
 
 — the Great, crowned as a boy by 
 Pope Stephen II., 96 ; sole king, 
 118 ; biography by Eginhard, 119 ; 
 not a " French king," 120 ; 
 Teutonic character, ib. ; his 
 wars : barbarians, Saracen, Saxon, 
 Slaves, 121; Lombard war, 124 ; 
 alliance with, the popes, 125-127 ; 
 crowned emperor, 127 ; idea oif 
 empire, 130; legislation, 132; 
 Church government, 136 ; as em- 
 peror, 138 ; encourages learning, 
 139 ; love of German language, 140; 
 his great faults, 142 ; extent of 
 empire, 142 ; burial, 144; legends 
 about him, 145 ; failure of the 
 imperial scheme, 147 
 
 — the Simple, 164, 170, 171 
 Childeric III., last Merovingian, 96 
 Chilperic of Soissons, 85, 90 
 ChosroeSjOr Khosrou Nushirvan, 108 
 Church, influence on the barbarians, 
 
 47-49 ; mischiefs of barbarian pa- 
 tronage, 56, 86 ; coarseness, 52 : 
 Angio-Saxon, 72, 192 ; corrupt 
 under Merovingians, 133 ; reform 
 by Charles the Great, 136, 137; 
 under Otto the Great, 198, 199 
 
 Clair, St., sur-Epte, treaty of, 171 
 
 Claudian, 59 
 
 Clergy, bond between Franks and 
 Latins, 84 
 
 Clotilda, 38 
 
 Clovis, Chlodvig-Louis, 37 
 
 Cluny, order of, 198 
 
 Cnut, 211, 214 
 
 Columban. St., 70, 135 
 
 Commendation, 177, 180 
 
 Conrad of Franconia, King of Ger- 
 many, 205 
 
 Confederates, barbarian, 19 
 
 Constantine, 4, 7, 113, 114 ; forged 
 "Donation," 98 
 
 — Porphyrogenitus, 105 
 
 — Pretender in Britain, 18, 19 
 Constantinople, New Rome, 6, 26, 
 
 ^32,98 
 Constantius, 114 
 
222 
 
 Index. 
 
 EAS 
 
 Conversions, Goths, 9 ; their Arian- 
 ism, ib., 20, 36, 38 ; Vandals, 19 ; 
 Burgundians, ib. ; Franks under 
 Clevis, 38 ; ©f Lombards from 
 Arianism, 42 ; of the English, 69 ; 
 of the Slaves, 105 ; of the Saxons, 
 121 ; of the Germans, 13s ; of the 
 Hungarians, 207; of the Scandi- 
 navian and Slave nations, 213, 214 
 
 Corbey, 141, 207, 214 
 
 Councils, national Spanish, 54, 81 
 
 Count Boni.acc, 17 
 
 Counts, Comites, Graf, 45 
 
 — " Frisian shore" 170 
 
 — Verraandois, 172, 173 
 
 Crown of St. Stephen of Hungary, 
 207 ; Golden, of Italy, 209 ; Iron, 
 of Lombardy, 209 
 
 Cyril and Methodius, apostles of 
 the Slaves, 106, 214 
 
 Czechs, 211, 214 
 
 J~\ANEGELD, 169, 170 
 
 ''-^ Danelagu, 169, 183, 184, 186 
 
 Danes, 79 
 
 — appear in England, 183 ; in Kent, 
 1S3 ; drive Alfred into the 
 marshes, 183; defeated, peace of 
 Wedmore, ib.; alternate between 
 England and France, 184 
 
 Decius, 4 
 
 Desiderius, 124, 207 
 
 Diocletian, 7 
 
 Duchy of Normandy, 171 
 
 Dukes, Duces, He&rzog, 48; Lom- 
 bard, 40, 42 
 
 — Alamannia, 204 
 
 — Austrasia, 87, 88 
 
 — Bavaria, 122, 204 
 
 ■ — Carinthia, 204 
 
 — Friseland, 169, 204 
 
 . — Normandy, 171 
 
 .—Paris, 172, 202 
 
 .—Saxony, 204 
 
 EASTERN EMPIRE, 7, loi; 
 strength, 102 ; losses, 103 ; pre- 
 serves civilization, 104 ; separation 
 from the West, 115, 127 
 East Goths, 33 ; led by Theoderic 
 into Italy, ib.; kingdom in Italy, 
 ib.: attempt at fusion with Ita- 
 lians, 34; destroyed by Belisarius 
 and Narses, 39 
 
 FRA 
 
 Ebroin, 90 
 
 Ecihesis of Heraclius, 208 
 
 Edgar, 179 ; called Imperator and 
 Basileus, ib. 
 
 Edheling, 179 
 
 Edward the Elder, 188 
 
 Egbert of Wessex, 178, 188 
 
 Eginhard. 95, 119, 126, 200 
 
 Elbe, 62,66 
 
 Emperor, made by Alaric, 11, 26; 
 by Ricimer, 27, 28 ; by Gundobad, 
 28 ; by Orestes, 28 
 
 Emperors, Eastern, despotic powers 
 of, 112 ; religious supremacy, 114 ; 
 effects, 115 
 
 England, conversion of, 69 ; unity, 79 
 
 — united under Egbert, 178; social 
 constitution, 179; public as<;em- 
 blies, 181 ; strength imder disas- 
 ter, 191 
 
 Eorls, 1 78 
 
 Epte, boundary of Normandy, 171 
 
 Erigena, 195 
 
 Ethel, 179 
 
 Ethelbert, 70 
 
 Ethelfleda, Lady of the Mercians, 
 188 
 
 Ethelfrith, 65 
 
 Euric, 16, 33 
 
 Exarch, Exarchate, 40, 102 
 
 Eyder, river, 76, 143 
 
 u T^ALSE DECRETALS," age 
 X? and influence, 196 
 
 Fins, 212 
 
 Florence, Stilicho, defeats Rada- 
 gais at, 10, 13 
 
 Folcland, t.j^, 182 
 
 Fontenailles, or Fontenoy, battle,i55 
 
 France, Francia, 84, 87, 118 ; vari- 
 ous senses of the term, 176 ; mo- 
 dem kingdom, 203 
 
 Franconia, 204, 205 
 
 Franks, first appearance, 4 ; con. 
 federacy in fifth century, 15; ri- 
 valry with Goths 32, 216; Catho- 
 lics against Arians, 36 ; prevail 
 over the Goths, 38, 39 ; use Roman 
 law, 53 ; long maintain Teutonic 
 character, ^■];Franks2LXiA French, 
 58 ; Franks, leaders in the West, 
 75, 83, 85 ; favour the clergy, 85 ; 
 divisions of Frank kingdom, 86; 
 Frank empire under Charles the 
 Great, 143 ; end of their dominion, 
 122 ; estimate of themselves, from 
 preface to Salic law, ib. 
 
Index. 
 
 223 
 
 HEL 
 
 Fredegund, 89 
 
 Friseland, Frisia, 169, 204 
 
 Frisians, 68, 135 
 
 Fulda, monastery, 122, 135, 195, 196 
 
 GARIBALDI, Bavarian and 
 Lombard name, 125 
 
 Gascony, 85 
 
 Gau, 45 
 
 Geisa, king of Hungary, baptized, 
 207 
 
 Genseric, the Vandal, invades and 
 conquers Africa, 17; founds Van- 
 dal kingdom, piratical power in 
 the Mediterranean, 18 ; defeats 
 Roman fleets, 25 ; alliance with 
 Attila, 22 ; sacks Rome, 24 ; dies, 
 
 25 
 
 Gerbert, Pope Sylvester II., 207, 218 
 
 German language, early examples, 
 135, 140, 195; Charles the Great's 
 fondness for, 141 
 
 Germany, modern, created by Caro- 
 lingian kings, 117, 204 
 
 Glycerius, 28 
 
 Goths, 3 ; first of barbarians Christ- 
 ianized, 9; Arians, ib., 36; Gothic 
 Bible, 9 ; possibility of a Gothic 
 empire, 16; rivalry with Franks, 32, 
 2i6 ; Gothic kingdoms, 35 ; driven 
 out of Gaul by the Franks, 38, 39 ; 
 in Roman service, 47; literature 
 destroyed in Spain, 80; flourish- 
 ing kingdom in Spain, 81 
 
 Gotteskalk, 195 
 
 Gregory the Great converts the 
 Lombard king, 42 ; sends Augus- 
 tine to England, 70 
 
 Gregory, of Tours, 52, 58, 60, 72,84 
 
 Guadalete, battle of 83 
 
 Quests, barbarian, 19, 46 
 
 Gundeuch, 15 
 
 Gundobad, Burgundian king, 15 ; 
 lawgiver, 35 ; nephew of Ricimer, 
 27 ; succeeds him as Patrician, 
 ib. : nominates Roman emperor, 
 ib. ; defeated by Clovis, 38 
 
 Gundochar, 15 
 
 Guntram, 85 
 
 Guthrum, 186 
 
 HAMPSHIRE, 65 
 Harold Haarfager, 210 
 Hegira, 82 
 Heliand, 195 
 
 KIE 
 
 Uenoticon, of Zeno, 114 
 
 Henry, of Saxouy, 208 
 
 Heraclius, 105-106; his line, 108 
 
 Hermanri ;, 14 
 
 Hcrminigild, 80 
 
 Herules, 3 , 
 
 Hincmar of Reims, 196 
 
 Hippo, 17 
 
 Homage, 178, 183 
 
 Honoria, 22 
 
 Honorius, 9, 10, 13, 18 
 
 Hugh Capet, 174; chos-n king at 
 Senlis, 203 
 
 Hungary, Hungarians or Magyars, 
 103, 166, 193; ferocious inroads, 
 193; devastate Germany and Gaul, 
 ib. : defeated by emperor Otto at 
 the Lechfeld, 208 ; converted, 209; 
 King Geisa, ib.; King (St.) Ste- 
 phen, ih. 
 
 Huns, Turanian or Turkish race, 
 8, 9 ; enemies of the Goths, 9 ; in, 
 vasion of empire under Attila, 20- 
 
 22 ; break up of Attila's empire, 23 
 
 TCONOCLAST, no 
 
 J. — emperors, no, 115, 116, 128 
 
 Ida, 65 
 
 lona, 70 
 
 Isaurian line of emperors, 111,112,113 
 
 Italy invaded by W. Goths, under 
 Alarie, 9 ; by Huns, under Attila, 
 20; by E. Goths, under Theoderic, 
 33; reconquered by Belisarius, 39 ; 
 invaded by Lombards, 40; Rome, 
 Italian cap tal, 41 ; invaded by 
 Franks, 84; invaded by Pipin, 96 ; 
 by Charles the Great, 117-122; 
 imperial portion, 147, 155 ; invaded 
 by Otto the Great, 208, 209 , inde- 
 pendence destroyed by the revived 
 fempire of Otto, 208, 209. 
 
 TERUSALEM,fallof, 1 
 
 J Jews banished from Spain, 80 
 
 Judith, the Bavarian, empress ol 
 
 Louis the Pious, 152 
 Jul' an, 4, 7 
 Julius Nepos, 28 
 Justinian, 40 ; origin, loi; greatness, 
 
 102 
 Jutes, 19, 63, 64 
 
 KENT, 64 
 Kiev, 214, 216 
 
224 
 
 Index. 
 
 MAG 
 
 T MT, 179 
 J-^ Laon, 173, 174 
 Latin language, influence on baiba- 
 
 rians, 55 
 jLatinizing influences, 56; Latins 
 
 employed by the Franks, 56, 85 
 La-JV, Roman, 29; Lombard, 42; 
 
 barbarian laws, 46, 53 ; Spanish, 
 
 80; personalXzvf changed into laiv 
 
 of the land, ib. 
 XM.zzi^ 179 
 
 Lechfeld, battle of, 206 
 Lechs, LjiXketty afterwards Poles, 
 
 211 
 Leo, Pope, arrests Attila, 23 ; but 
 
 not Genseric, 24 
 «— the Isaurian, 94-110 
 Leovigild, Spanish king, 80 
 
 Liti., 179 
 
 Liutprand, 93 
 
 Loaf-eater, 180 
 
 I ombardy, name of Italy, 148 
 
 Lombards in Italy, 40 ; fail in 
 uniting with the Italians, 41 ; 
 dukedom, 42 ; Arians converted, 
 ib.; laws, ib.; results of con- 
 quest, ib : hated by Italians, 77 ; 
 relations to Franks, 86 ; quarrel 
 with the Popes, 93 ; humbled by 
 Pipin, 97 . 
 
 Lorraine, v. Lotharingia 
 
 Lo'har I., failure of line, 157 
 
 Lothar king at Laon 173 
 
 Lotharingia, from Lclhar II., 157, 
 159, 204 
 
 Louis the Pious, 150; emper"r, 
 151 ; associates his son Lothar, 
 ib. : prosperous beginnings, 152 ; 
 marries second wife, family quar- 
 rels, 152; the Liigenfeld, 154; 
 partitions, 154; death, ib. ; his 
 sons, Lothar, Louis the German, 
 and Charles the Bald ; quarrel, 
 battle of Fontenailles, 155 ; par- 
 tition of Verdun, 157 
 
 — d'Outremer, 172, 173 
 
 — the Child, 159, 208 
 
 — the German, 160 ; line ends in 
 Charles the Fat, 160 
 
 Lndvigslied, 170, 184 
 Liigenield, 153 
 
 MACEDONIAN line of empe- 
 rors, 1T4 
 Magyars, v. Hungary 
 
 OTT 
 
 Mahomet, 82, no 
 
 Majorian, 26 
 
 Main, 131, 180, 183 
 
 Mark, 45, 204 
 
 Mayors of the Palace, 89 
 
 Mercia, 70, 176 
 
 Merovingians, 84; degenerate, 88; 
 
 end of the line, 95-98 
 Metz, 86, 91 
 
 Micklegarth-Const3int\noY>l^, 99 
 Mis si, 131 
 Missionaries, seventh and eighth 
 
 centuries, 20, 134; in ninth and 
 
 tenth, 196, 213 
 Monasteries, keepers of literature, 
 
 51, 62 
 Monophysite controversy, 127 
 Monothelite controveisy, 114, 127 
 Moot, 180, i8i 
 
 NARBONNE, 16, 92 
 Narses, 39, 41, 101 
 Netherlands, 204 
 Neustria, 87, 89, 91, 202, 205 
 Nicolas I., Pope, 117, 197 
 Nithard, 200, 201 
 Nordmark, 204 
 
 Normandy, duchy of, founded, 171 
 Norsemen, or Danes, invasions of, 
 
 165 ; in Gaul, 168, 170 
 Northumbia, 65 ; power, 67 
 Norway, kingdom, 210 
 Notker's German Psalter, 195 
 Novgorod, 212 
 
 OBOTRITES, Slave race, 106 
 Oder, 4 
 Odocer, 28; king in Italy, 30; 
 
 overthrown by Theoderic,the East 
 
 Goth, 31 
 Off"a, 176 
 
 Olaf of Norway 214 
 Olga, converted, 214 
 Olybrius, 27 
 OrleanSjAttila's siege of, 22; schools, 
 
 Ostmark, 204, 205 
 
 Otfrid, 141 
 
 Otfrid's German harmony of the 
 
 Gospels, 141, 195 
 Otto the Great, King of Germany 
 
 and Emperor, 17^. 206 ; defeats the 
 
 Hungarians at the Lechfeld, ib. ; 
 
 reforms the popedom, 198, 206 
 
Index. 
 
 225 
 
 RHI 
 
 Otto II., 19S 
 
 > — III , opens tomb of Charles the 
 Great, 145 
 
 pAGUS, 45 
 
 -^ Paris, Clovis' capital, 83; 
 
 Dukes of, 171, 202 
 
 Patricians, barbarian, 25-28, 30; 
 Roman, 38, 126 
 
 Pauliuus at York, 70 
 
 Pavia, 41 
 
 Pentapolis, Italian, 97 
 
 Persia, wars with by Empire, 107; 
 by Heraclius, 108; conquered by 
 the Saracens, 109 
 
 Photius, quarrel with Pope Nicolas 
 I., 116, 117 
 
 Pipins — Pipin of Landen, 90, 91 ; 
 table of family, 92 ; Pipin of 
 Heristal,9o, 91 ; Pipin the Little, 
 94; king, crowned by Pope Ste- 
 phen II., 96; policy, 117 
 
 Placita, 131 
 
 Poitiers, near, Clovis defeats the 
 Goths, 38; Charles Martel the 
 Arabs, 91 
 
 Poland, beginning of history, 211 
 
 Poles {Lecks), 7.1.1 ; converted, 214 
 
 Pollentia, Stilicho defeats Alaric at, 
 10 
 
 Popes, growing independence of, 41; 
 Pope Leo I., 23,24; Pope Gregory 
 the Great, 42, 69 ; Pope Zacharias 
 sanctions depositon of Childeric 
 III., 96; Stephen II. crowns 
 Pipin and his sons, ib. ; supported 
 by Franks against Lombards, 97 ; 
 Pipin'sgrant of lands, z7'.; Nicolas 
 I., 116, 196; Leo III. crowns 
 Charles emperor, 126 ; Sylvester 
 II., 207, 218 ; power strengthened 
 by Charles the Great, 196 ; sup- 
 ported by the forged " False 
 Decretals," ib. ; growth of their 
 power, 196 ; degenerate, 198 ; re- 
 form of, 198, 199 
 
 Prussia, 205 
 
 RADAGAIS, 10, 13 
 Ravenna, 11, 22, 41 
 Reccared, converted from Arianism, 
 
 80 
 Reichenau, 160, 195 
 Reims, 38, 87, 196 
 Remigius, Bp. of Reims, 4S 
 Rhine, 15, 201, 204 
 
 SCO 
 
 Ricimer makes emperors, 26, 27 
 
 Ripuarian Franks, 37, 53 
 
 Rob;rt of Paris, 170 
 
 Rois Faineants, 89, 95 
 
 RolIOjOrRolf, 170; when first heard 
 of, ib. ; occupies Rouen, 171 ; ob- 
 tains Normandy from Charles the 
 Simple, ib. ; homage, ib. ; DuKe 
 of Normandy, ib. 
 
 Roman Empire, division of, 6; 
 broken into by the barbarians, 
 14-19 ; giving way, 19 ; end iu the 
 West (476), 29; idea and institu- 
 tions partly survive, 30, 31 {v. 
 Eastern Empire); revival in 
 Charles the Great, 126; idea of 
 unity, ICO, 129; levived by Otto 
 the Great, 208, 209 
 
 — law, 5, 30 ; effect on barbarians, 
 53 ; E. Goths in Italy, 53 ; W. 
 Goths in Spam, ib. 
 
 Romana, language, 156, 201 
 
 Romance, family of languages, 60, 
 76, 77, 156, 201 
 
 Rome, fall of, separating ancient and 
 modern history, 2 ; decay of em- 
 pire, 5 ; power leaving it. 7 ; sieges 
 and sack by Alaric, 11; threatened 
 by Attila, 23 ; second sack by 
 Genseric, 24 ; third sack by Rici- 
 mer, 26; Italian capital, 41 ; seat 
 of empire, 127, 156, 208 
 
 Romulus Augustulus, 17; deposed, 
 ib. 
 
 Rouen, 170, 202 
 
 Ruric, 212 
 
 Russians, origin of, 202 
 
 SALIAN Franks, 37 ; Salic law, 
 53, 175 „ . 
 
 Sassanian kings of Persia, 107 
 Saracens, invasions of, 82, 108, log; 
 
 checked at Constantinople, by 
 
 Leo the Isaurian, no ; by Charles 
 
 Martel at Poitiers, 91 ; by Charles 
 
 the Great, 121 
 Saxons, old, 63, 64 ; conquered and 
 
 converted by Charles, 121, 122 ; 
 
 in England, 64-68 
 Sa.xony, Dukes of, 204, 205 
 Scandinavian nations,209; becoming 
 
 organized kingdoms, 210 
 Schism of East and West, 117, 128 
 Schools, monastic and cathedral, 59; 
 
 Palatine, of Charles the Great, 139 
 Schools in Germany, 141 
 Scourge of God (Attila), 23 
 
226 
 
 Index, 
 
 THE 
 
 Senlis, Hugh Capet elected king at, 
 203 
 
 Seventh century, poverty of, 134 
 
 Sidonius, ApoUinaris, 60 
 
 S:gambrians, 4 
 
 Slave races, 8, 209 ; second barba- 
 rian wave of invasion,8; Justinian, 
 a Slave,ioo; races press on Eastern 
 Empire, 105; gradually settled in 
 Empire, 106 ; converted, 107 
 
 Slovaks, 211 
 
 Soissons, 38, 87, 154 
 
 Spain, invaded by Vandals, 15; 
 West Goths, 16 ; Gothic kingdom 
 of, 17; councils, Toledo, 54, 80; 
 tragic course of history, 79 ; con- 
 version of Reccared from Arian- 
 ism, 80; intolerance, 81; flourishing 
 kingdom, 82 ; conquered by the 
 Saracens,83; Christian Kingdoms, 
 84 
 
 Stilicho, 10, II, 18 
 
 Strasburg, oath of, 156, 201 
 
 Sueves invade Spain, 14; driven 
 to the highlands by Goths, 16; 
 subdued by Leovigild, 184 
 
 Sussex, 64 
 
 Swatoslav, 213 
 
 Syagrius, defeated by Clovis at Sois- 
 sons, 38 
 
 Sylvester II., 207, 218 
 
 Symmachus, 33 
 
 TACITUS, 5 
 Tatian, 195 
 
 Testry, battle of, 90 
 
 Tcudisca, language, 156, 201 
 
 Teutonic races, 8 ; Goths and Franks, 
 32 ; earliest kingdoms Arian, 36 ; 
 early Teutonic organization, 46 
 
 Theodore, Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, 71, 134 
 
 Theodoric, East Goth, formed king- 
 dom in Italy, 32 ; character, 33 ; 
 lawgiver, builder, ib. ; his ^di'c- 
 titm, 54 
 
 Theoderic I., West Goth, 16; de- 
 feats Attila, 22 
 
 Theoderic II., 26 
 
 2UL 
 
 Theodosius I., 8 
 
 Theudelinda, Queen of Lombards, 42 
 
 Thing, 180 
 
 Tolbiac, battle of, 38 
 
 Totila, Gothic king, 102 
 
 Toulouse, Gothic capital, 17 
 
 Tours, [v. Poitiers), Gregory of, 52 ; 
 
 St. Martin, 84 
 Turanian, 8, 20; third barbarian 
 
 wave of invasion, 8 
 Turks, 20 
 Type, formulary, 114 
 
 ULFILA converts Goths, trans- 
 lates Bible, 9, 36 
 Ungri, V. Hungary 
 
 ALENTINIAN III., 22, 24, 26 
 
 V 
 
 Vandals, cross the Rhine into Gaul, 
 14; Spain, 15; driven before 
 West Goths, 15 ; cross into Africa 
 under Genseric, 17; conquest of 
 Africa, character of, 17, 35 ; naval 
 power, 18, 24 ; sack Rome, 24 
 
 Varangians, 212 
 
 Venice, origin of, 23 
 
 Verdun, treaty of, 157, 164, 201 
 
 Vermandois, Counts of, 173 
 
 Verona, 33, 41 
 
 Vistula, 4 
 
 Vladimir, 213, 214 
 
 Voulon, V. Poitiers, 38 
 
 "TITANDERING of the Na- 
 
 VV tions," 3 
 Watling Street, 67 
 Wedmore, peace of, 183, 187, 186 
 "Welsh," 63, 67,68,77 
 Wends, Slave race, 201, 214 
 Wessex, 66, 67 ; centre of power 
 gradually shifting to, 68, 177, 182- 
 
 IQI 
 
 Willibrord, preaches to the Frisians, 
 Witan, Witenagemot, 181 
 
 ZENO, Emperor, 29, 100, 114 
 Ziilpich, battle of, 38 
 
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