| ### CHAPTER 5: THE SIEGE OF CHRISTENDOM, 814-1046 ###  |

| #### 1. THE BREAK-UP OF CHARLEMAGNE'S EMPIRE, 814-888 |

| #### #### CHARLEMAGNE'S mighty administrative achievement was fated soon to perish. It could indeed hardly have been otherwise. In the very heart of the empire he established, forces violently hostile to the new political unity wrestled from the beginning. The social change by which the great landowners attracted to themselves the domains of their smaller neighbours, and with the domains their service and loyalty; the political change which, next, made these great men the lords of their dependants, and the system by which the domains of these lords were exempted from the authority Or the king's officers; -- all these had continued to develop through the fifty years of Charlemagne's reign. They were now developed deliberately and systematically, as the natural and traditional way of government. The care and the expense of government was transferred from the central authority, king or emperor, to the local lord. The day was fast approaching when the king would have no subjects directly obedient to him but the handful of great men -- counts, bishops, abbots -- and in that day all would depend on the power of the king to compel these great men to obey. #### Another tradition that lived on through Charlemagne's great reign was the idea of the kingdom as the king's personal possession something to be divided and bequeathed like any other estate. Charlemagne so divided the empire among his sons in 806; Louis the Pious, his surviving son and successor, did the same in 817, in 829 and in 835. From all these partitions flowed a series of hitter family feuds and civil wars. #### The empire was artificial in another respect. Its peoples were too varied and too different and, as yet, too little catholicised- despite the conversions and the work of the missionary monks -- to form a real unity. It is too early perhaps to speak of French and Germans and Italians, but the ancestors of these modern nations were, in Charlemagne's time, by no means a single united people. The empire was a mosaic of a thousand motley pieces. One thing alone kept it together -- the genius of the first emperor. #### The really violent troubles began in 829, when Louis the Pious, in order to give the son of his second marriage -- Charles, afterwards called the Bald -- a share in the empire, revised the partition of 817. There followed ten years of civil war. The sons of the first marriage revolted, and were crushed. They revolted a second time and, the great churchmen assisting them, who stood by the old unitary traditions of their master Charlemagne, Louis was defeated and forced to resign. A little later he came back; there were new partitions, new wars; and finally, in 840, he died, leaving the imperial title to his eldest son and the empire divided among all three. #### The fighting still went on, this time between the brothers -- the new emperor, Lothair, showing himself weaker even than his father. Finally, in 843, the unity of the empire was once and for all definitely broken by the treaty of Verdun. One brother took the west -- roughly France; another the German lands east of the Rhine; and Lothair took Italy and the middle lands between France and Germany, from the North Sea to the Alps, called henceforth, from his name, Lotharingia (Lorraine). Twelve years later (855) Lothair died, prematurely; and Lotharingia was itself divided to make kingdoms for his three sons. By 870 two of these had died, and though the eldest brother, Louis II, managed to retain, with the title of emperor, the kingdom of Italy, the greater part of the lands of his brothers was seized by his uncles, the two surviving sons of Louis the Pious -- Louis the German and Charles the Bald. The Treaty of Mersen, made in that year between these three princes, marks the beginning of France and Germany as separate and consciously different kingdoms. #### The main feature of the history of Charlemagne's family in the twenty years following this important treaty (870-888) is the rapid disappearance of all its leading members. By 885 three only were left of all the army of Carolingian princes: Charles the Fat (a son of Louis the German), Charles the Simple (a grandson of the same prince), and Arnulf, a third grandson who, but for his own illegitimacy should have been the heir, since he was the son of the eldest son, Carloman. When Charles the Fat died in 888, Charles the Simple was little more than a baby and chaos complete and entire descended on what remained of Charlemagne's tradition. It was just seventy-four years since his death. #### During these seventy-four years the frontier wars which the Franks had waged for centuries went on unceasingly: with the Slavs, in furthest Germany, with the Avars and, in southern Gaul, with the Mohammedans from Spain. And this century of political dislocation brought with it new enemies, more ferocious and destructive than any western Europe had known since the Vandals. these were the pirates from the fiords of Norway and from Denmark. It was in the last years of Charlemagne's reign that the flotillas of their long, light boats, drawing little water. easily able to sail up the rivers, began to harry the coasts of the empire. The hope of plunder, animal lust, and elementary bloodthirstiness seem to have chiefly inspired these first descents. The Northmen were also savagely anti-Christian, the monasteries and churches the especial objects of their ferocity. In 793 they sacked Lindisfarne, and in 795 made their first raids on Ireland. Gradually their policy changed. They began to winter in fortified camps, off the coasts where they operated, or on islands in the rivers. Soon no river from the Elbe to the Guadalquivir was safe from these pests. England was especially their prey. They took possession of Sheppey in 835, they made themselves masters of East Anglia, destroying monasteries and massacring the monks. Amongst others they put to death for the faith was the King of East Anglia, St. Edmund. They next turned to Wessex, and they ravaged Mercia, and finally, by the Treaty of Wedmore (878), Alfred, the greatest of the English kings, was compelled to recognise them as the rulers of all the north and east of the island. #### In the empire of the Franks the Northmen established three great centres: on the Scheldt, the Seine and the Loire. Antwerp, Utrecht, Tongres, Cologne, Mainz, Metz and even Aix itself, the capital, felt their power until, after fifty years of this reign of terror, Arnulf, the last fighting man of Charlemagne's family, destroyed their camp at Louvain in the great battle of 891. Just five years before this, the pirates of the Seine had met their great check at Paris, the siege of which they had been forced to abandon after a stubborn twelve months of fighting. The emperor essayed to buy them off with money and an annual tribute, but vainly. As in Germany, town after town fell to them. The west of France suffered even more than the north. From their settlements at the mouth of the Loire, Nantes, Blois, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and as far as Tarbes, were burnt out time and again, the countrysides ravaged, and monasteries sacked until the country was little more than a desert. In Spain they had less success, thanks to the military organisation both of the tiny Catholic kingdoms and of the Arab States. But they penetrated and vexed the Mediterranean even as far as Pisa and Lucca. #### A century of such savage destruction, added to the desolation of civil war and the absence of organised government, was enough to reduce Charlemagne's reign of order to a chaos such as Europe had never before known. Christendom was fast becoming a waste with, here and there, little islets where a handful of scared and terrified survivors strove to maintain the tradition of ordered life. #### There remains to be noted yet a second external scourge which, in this same century, menaced the existence of what had once been the Roman Empire and was again to he European civilisation. This was the maritime empire of the Mohammedans of Africa. Here, towards the end of Charlemagne's reign, the internal rivalries which, for half a century, had occupied all the fierce energy of the State, yielded before the family of the Aghlabites. Soon the new order was visible in the appearance of a fleet, the conquest of Sicily and an endless harrying of the coasts of Italy and southern Gaul. Like the northern invaders, the Saracens made settlements and even, through their occupation of the passes of the Alps, they for years made communication between Italy and France a matter of the greatest difficulty and peril. #### The century that followed Charlemagne's death was thus a century in which his empire -- Latin Catholicism -- was continuously besieged, and, under the stress of the siege, was steadily broken and wasted. ####  |