| #### 5. CHARLEMAGNE, 768-814 |

| #### #### Stephen III's short reign (768-772) ran out in shame and ignominy. The very worst might have been anticipated of the election which followed his death. That election, however, had a far different result. It set on the throne one of the most capable popes the Church had known since St. Gregory the Great. This was Adrian I. By birth he came of the military aristocracy; by all his life and training he was a cleric; at the moment one of the seven deacons. He was experienced, capable, honest, and in this Roman there re-appeared all the native genius for government and administration. He was to rule for twenty-three years, a length of days not equalled for another thousand years. [ ] His first act was to enquire into the scandals which had disgraced the last years of his predecessor, and to mete out appropriate punishment to the guilty. Next he turned to the Lombard king who, with his vassal of Spoleto, was harrying the papal State as of old. Negotiations had little effect, and the new pope appealed yet once again to the Franks. Meanwhile the Lombards marched on Rome. The Franks followed their usual policy. They strove to reconcile the Lombards with the pope, to induce them to abandon their conquests -- but in vain; and in the early summer of 773, led by their new king, Charles, the Franks invaded the Lombard kingdom. The usual rout followed, but this time the Frankish victory was definitive. The Lombard king was despatched to France, where he remained to the end of his life; the King of the Franks was, henceforth, King of the Lombards too. #### While the siege of the Lombard capital, Pavia, was still in progress Charles (Easter, 774) made a solemn visit to Rome. He was received with the honours traditionally used for the emperor's representative, and he renewed with Adrian the pact sworn twenty years before between his father and Stephen II. According to this agreement Spoleto, Benevento, Tuscany, Venetia, Istria and Corsica were also promised to the pope. Had it ever been carried out, the popes would have been rulers of the greater part of central and northern Italy; the Lombard kingdom would have shrunk to a mere province. Commachio, Ferrara, Faenza, and Bologna were indeed made over once Pavia had fallen, but before the magnificent promise had been further fulfilled Charlemagne's consciousness of his new role of King of the Lombards intervened. He turned a deaf ear now to the discreet papal reminders and when, in 780, he had his son, Pepin, consecrated by the pope as King of Italy, the act was a clear declaration that the Frankish kingdom of Lombardy would remain in extent pretty much what the Lombard kingdom had been. The prospect of territorial magnificence which had haunted the popes for thirty years was at an end. Occasional and important additions Charles did indeed make to the papal States, but from 780 the convention of 754 and 774 was a dead letter. #### To the burden of this quite legitimate grievance, events soon added another, for Pope Adrian and his successors. This was the relation of their new State to the power which created it for them. #### In the time of Pepin (754-768) the papal State had been certainly free from any Frankish interference, and of the title Patrician of the Romans, with which the grateful pope had decorated him, Pepin made no use at all. Nor did Charlemagne act differently until, after the victory of 774, he began to have permanent personal interests in Italy. Then, slowly, there began to gather round the distinction certain concrete attributes of lordship. The nobles whom, for one reason or another, the papal government deprived of rank or office, began to appeal against the pope to the Frankish king and, despite protests from Rome, the king listened to the appeals; occasionally he made recommendations thereupon to the pope. Adrian was a wise ruler, as tactful as he was strong, and in his time, for all that this new practice began slowly to establish itself, he so managed things that the papal independence did not suffer and that, on the other hand, the Frankish king remained a friend. Adrian died, however, in 795 and under his successor Leo III -- a very different type of personage indeed -- the difficulties began to show immediately. #### It was a first innovation that the new pope officially notified the King of the Franks of his election, sending him, along with the keys of St. Peter's shrine, the standard of the city, and praying for a deputation of nobles to receive the Romans' oath of fidelity. Much had happened, evidently, since the last election twenty-three years before, to develop Charlemagne's importance in Roman affairs in the eyes of the Roman Church. Charles, too, has a share in the loyalty of the Romans, since they now swear an oath to him, and he has therefore a very definite -- if not well defined -- right of government. Pope and king, in some way, are together the rulers of Rome. And in his letters to the pope the king recommended him to lead a good life, to govern wisely, to put down abuses, to show himself a good pope and ruler. #### Four years later (799) an attempted revolution in Rome showed how far Charles' overlordship was admitted in practice. Leo III, for good or bad, was as unpopular as Paul I had been thirty years earlier. He was not himself a noble, and it was from the family of his predecessor that the leaders of the trouble came. Trouble of a very grave kind was already preparing in 798, and it came to a head in an attempt to murder the pope on St. Mark’s Day, 799. He was set upon as he made his way to the stational church for the litanies, beaten, his eyes half torn out and his tongue as well, and he was carried off to a monastery in one of the less frequented districts of the city. Thence he was rescued, and recovering, miraculously it is said, from his injuries, fled to the Frankish court. He found Charles at Paderborn and besought his protection. #### From Paderborn towards the close of the year (November, 799) he returned, with a strong escort of nobles and bishops charged by the king to enquire into the business. The conspirators had no other resource than to try to turn the enquiry into a trial of the pope. The details of the proceedings are lost, but no definite findings were published and the matter dragged on until Charlemagne himself arrived in Rome a year later. On December 1, 800, there was a great assembly in St. Peter's. The king presided and spoke of his desire to end the scandal. Accusations had been made which no one could prove, and since the pope could not be tried he could not be acquitted. It was the dilemma of 501 all over again [ ] and Leo III took the same way out of it that Symmachus had chosen. He made a solemn declaration, on oath, that he was innocent, in a second assembly called for the purpose on December 23. It was perhaps hardly a satisfactory conclusion to the affair and the circumstances of the king's presence gave it quite possibly the appearance of being done at the bidding of the all powerful lord of the Western world. For that, by this time, Charles indeed was. #### Two days later was Christmas Day, and as the king knelt before the shrine of the Apostle at mass, the pope placed a crown on his head while the choir acclaimed him emperor of the Romans. The deed had been done which was to haunt the imagination of the next five hundred years; the pope, so it came to be considered, had made the King of the Franks into the Roman Emperor. This it was -- whatever the realities which, in the mind of Leo III and Charlemagne, underlay that astonishing gesture -- which never left the popular imagination, the pope creating the new power and bestowing it upon the Frankish kings, the all powerful king kneeling before the pope to receive it. That Charles was not well pleased at the manner in which there came to him whatever the ceremony was meant to convey, that he had already had it in mind to acquire it through marriage with the Empress Irene-in whom, at the moment, the line of Augustus and Constantine and Justinian was represented -- may well be. What was done was done and, from the very lack of definition in the doing, it acquired all the more easily the name of being what it appeared to be. Two questions suggest themselves. Whom was it that the pope crowned, and what affect had the ceremony on the relations between the Frankish kings and the papal monarchy which, already, were developing so rapidly in the direction of patronage and subordination. #### Charlemagne was the greatest figure the West had seen since Julius Caesar himself. He is of the line of Alexander and Napoleon, and the memory of what he was and what he achieved never faded from the memory of the Middle Ages, but remained to be always, in some respects, its most powerful inspiration. He was, to begin with, the mightiest warrior of his warlike family. He completed his father's work in Aquitaine; and, beyond the Pyrenees, after years of fighting, made himself master of Spain as far as the Ebro. In Italy, to his conquests of 774 he added those of the southernmost Lombard duchy of Benevento and for a time Venice and Dalmatia too acknowledged his suzerainty. His most permanent work was, however, in Germany. Bavaria now lost its semi-independent status, and after several failures he finally penetrated into the heart of Hungary, breaking the power of the Avars, a savage Hun-like people, nomads and plunderers, who for centuries had been the terror of their western neighbours. Finally, after thirty years of endless war, he mastered once and for all the Saxons, a trouble to the Franks since early Merovingian times. For thirteen years (772-785) the history of the eastern frontier is a monotonous alternation of Frankish conquest, with the establishment of churches and abbeys in its wake, and Saxon risings in which all the civilising work of Charlemagne goes up in flame while priests and monks are murdered. The Frank's revenge was as brutal as its provocation. On one occasion as many as four thousand Saxons were beheaded in a single execution while he looked on. In the end he was master, and within a generation the Saxons, dragooned into Catholicism, compelled by force to receive baptism, were a Catholic people. When Charlemagne died, in 814, the whole of Western Europe that was Christian was again united under a single ruler, save for the British Isles and the remnants of Byzantine Italy. #### This vast domain was not a mere congeries of widely differing peoples. Charlemagne was not the mere brutal soldier Charles Martel had been. He was a political idealist, and his empire was an ordered attempt to realise his ideals. He was educated, and his personal enthusiasm for learning never slackened throughout his long life. One of his favourite books was St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei, and the State Charlemagne created was a very real attempt to organise the City of God on earth. For the first time in its history the Church had found a political genius wholly devoted to the task of realising the ideals of the Gospel. The State was to be the means of gaining the world for Christ, Charlemagne the immediate successor of St. Boniface. Never before, and certainly never since, has Catholicism been so identified with a political regime, and this not in order to serve the political ends of the regime but to be its inspiration and to direct it. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Charlemagne, in the last thirty years of his life, is the Catholic Church. He is the one human being on whose energy and good-will and loyalty the well-being of all depends. #### In 779 he reorganised the hierarchy and, reversing his father's policy, adopted the system of metropolitans planned years before by St. Boniface -- a conversion to ecclesiastical tradition due to Pope Adrian's gift of the collection of canons made by Denis the Short. The ancient sees were restored; and upon Mainz, and Salzburg, too, the pope now conferred metropolitan rights. The boundaries of the sees were strictly defined, and all monasteries subjected to the local bishop. At every turn the civil law came to the bishop's assistance, strengthening his hand for the correction of evildoers, whether clerics who lived unseemly lives or hunted, or laity who ignored say, the laws of fasting or who neglected to receive the sacraments. The same law, however, admonished and corrected the bishop, also; and it was the king, source of the law, who continued to name, absolutely, bishops and metropolitans alike. For all that the State was at the service of the Gospel, the ministers of the Gospel were by no means independent in their mission. The ideal of St. Amhrose [ ] was, even now, only partly realised. The decisions of synods and ecclesiastical councils had indeed the force of law, but the emperor too, when he chose, would legislate in ecclesiastical matters. Fortunately, from the point of view of the entente between Charles and the two popes with whom he had to deal (Adrian I and Leo III) the ecclesiastical affairs of his day were almost entirely matters of administration. How Catholicism would have fared had some great dispute on doctrine flared, and had Charles determined to decide it in the fashion traditional at Constantinople, is matter for speculation, but no more. For centuries before his time, in all the lands he now governed, the different kings had laid hands on ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the protests of the Church had gone unheeded. Much might be forgiven to Charlemagne, continuing the practice, since Charlemagne's ideals were those of the best of bishops and since -- despite occasional bad failures in his own life -- he was so whole-hearted in his loyalty to his ideals. #### The clergy now played a greater part than ever before in the civil life of the empire. They provided all the chief officials of the highly organised civil service and the imperial diplomacy. These clerical ministers and officials were by no means always priests, though benefices were liberally showered on them, nor were they necessarily clerical in their way of life. Thus one of the king's chief ministers, Angilbert, was the Abbot of St. Riquier. He did much for the abbey, extending its buildings, enriching its library. He was one of the band of the court's literary men, as celebrated for his poems as for his success in the diplomatic missions on which the emperor employed him. He was also the lover of Charles' daughter Bertha and had two children by her. But this made no difference to his position, nor even to his relations with the emperor, who knew all. So firmly rooted, still, were the abuses to combat which St. Boniface and St. Columbanus had given their lives. Charlemagne's own private life presented an equally grotesque combination, with its tangle of wives that needs skill to unravel, to say nothing of ladies who were not even nominally wives. #### Away from the court, there were, in all the chief towns of the empire, the local bishops. The civil law obliged them to live in their sees, to make regular visitations of the diocese, to hold annual synods. The bishop was obliged by law to see that all his clergy could explain the Pater Noster and the Creed, that they were conversant with the prescriptions of ecclesiastical law and the penitential codes, that they could administer the sacraments and preach. Preaching above all was, for Charlemagne, the most important duty of the priest, and his laws and admonitions to the bishops return to this subject time and again. To assist the priest whose own ability in this respect was small, Paul the Deacon, at the emperor's own command, compiled a book of sermons drawn from St. Augustine, St. Caesarius of Arles, St. Gregory and St. Bede, while St. Gregory's Regula Pastoralis was extensively circulated to serve as a general guide for the tasks of bishops and parochial clergy alike. #### A further evidence of the emperor's concern for the promotion of virtue and learning in the clergy charged with the cure of souls, was his encouragement of the new way of life instituted by the Bishop of Metz, St. Chrodegang (767), one of the disciples of St. Boniface. St. Chrodegang had been, in his time, a high official of Charles Martel’s chancery. As Bishop of Metz he had, later, been one of Pepin's envoys in the famous embassy of 754 to Pope Stephen II, through whose good offices he had, on the martyrdom of St. Boniface, succeeded to that saint's effectual primacy in Germany. He was one of the pioneers of liturgical reforms, introducing the Roman rite and the Cantilena Romana which later ages called the Gregorian Chant. But his most striking innovation was the establishment of the custom that, in the larger churches, which were served by a number of priests, the clergy should live a life in common under a rule. They gave up their private property, but retained the use of it personally. They kept also their hierarchical rank, priest, deacon, minor cleric. They assisted as a body at the daily church offices, were bound to receive Holy Communion on Sundays and feasts, to confess their sins twice annually. The rule made provision for systematic study, and it provided for a public correction of faults. the association took in all that vast personnel of clerics who made up the household of the Carolingian bishop, and also the boys and youths who were destined for the ecclesiastical state. It provided for grammar schools, seminary and chapter. Such an institution could not but appeal to Charlemagne, and he did much to encourage other bishops to adopt it. #### For monks as monks the emperor had less favour. What monks there were, he strove to unite into a single system and one of his laws imposes the Benedictine rule on all monasteries, the emperor, with characteristic care, sending in 787 to Monte Cassino for an authentic copy of the rule. #### It was piety informed by doctrine that was the quality dearest to Charlemagne's heart in ecclesiastics; the emperor, inevitably, once more the patron and protector of the clergy who were its agents. From the beginning of his reign he realised the degree to which Frankish Gaul was intellectually barbarous, and setting himself to attract the best minds of the day to the work of educating his clergy he turned to the country whence St. Boniface had come. One of St. Bede's pupils, Egbert, promoted to be Archbishop of York, had founded there the school which, at the time of Charlemagne's accession, was the intellectual centre of Europe. It was Egbert's pupil Alcuin, head of the school of York and the greatest scholar of his time, whom Charlemagne now persuaded to settle in Gaul. From Italy he brought Peter of Pisa and Paul Warnefrid, the historian of the Lombards. Spain was represented by Theodulf, whom Charles made Bishop of Orleans, a poet whose memory has outlasted much else if only because of the place of one of his hymns, Gloria laus et honor, in the liturgy of Holy Week. #### The first of the schools through which these carefully gathered men of letters worked upon the new Christendom, was the imperial court itself. Set lectures, conversation classes, intellectual games in which Charlemagne's own determined enthusiasm led unflaggingly, were some of the means. And wherever the emperor went, there, too, went the imperial school. Moreover, each see, each monastery, each parish was commanded to have its school. Of the monastic schools Tours, where Alcuin himself was abbot, was the greatest. It developed into a kind of training school, whence teachers went out to revive the intellectual life of other abbeys and sees. Fulda too, the foundation of St. Boniface, bore testimony in its new intellectual strength to the scholarship which was its own founder's first title to recognition, and to the zeal for learning which he never lost and which the continual stream of missionary monks from England kept continuously alive in the heart of Germany. From Fulda came the leading intellectuals of the first quarter of the ninth century, Eginhard who was Charlemagne's biographer, Walafrid Strabo, and Rabanus Maurus. #### Charles, as part of his great scheme of Christian restoration, gave force of law to all the reforms which St. Boniface had so desiderated. He showed himself equally the heir of the saint in his zeal to capture for the Gospel the still heathen tribes of the north and east. Under his patronage, protected by his power, the work of the mission went steadily forward. The Slavs then settled in central Germany, the Frisians at whose hands St. Boniface had met his death, the Saxons as far as the Elbe, the Slavs of Carinthia, and even the Avars, turn by turn submitted, often to the none too happy combination of Frankish political necessity and the disinterested zeal of the children of St. Boniface. By the time Charlemagne died, the frontier of the advance of Catholicism lay many miles ahead of the political frontier of his empire. #### Against this policy which made loyalty to the empire and to Catholicism one thing, with its practical sequel of forcible baptism, all that was best in the life of the time protested. The Patriarch of Aquileia was able to induce the emperor's eldest son Pepin, the King of Italy, to put no compulsion of this sort upon the Avars whom he had recently conquered (796). They were, in the mass, ready to embrace Catholicism, and from the Danube to the Adriatic a vast campaign of instruction now opened in preparation for their baptism. Alcuin lent all his prestige to second the efforts of these frontier bishops in the delicate task of preserving the purity of faith from the taint of political policy. Tithes, he had heard, were destroying the faith of the Saxons. A bishop should not be chiefly famous for his severity in exacting such dues. And though baptism might be forcibly performed on the unwilling, faith was another matter. Such gifts of God came through prayer. Nor should the rigour of the Church's penitential code be applied to the letter, in the case of newly-converted peoples. #### In what measure the spirit of Alcuin and Paulinus of Aquileia prevailed, in general, over the barbarian ruthlessness of Charles it is not possible to say. The incidents serve to illustrate, yet once again, the mortal danger to the Faith whenever zeal for its propaganda is inspired by any spirit less pure than that of the Faith itself. It was not the only way in which the magnificent protectorship of Charles, and the incredible scale of his success, threatened the life of the Church. Like his grandfather before him, he treated all Church property as his own. The abbeys, which the policy of St. Boniface had tended to save from the terrible episcopate of his day by exempting them from the jurisdiction of the local bishop, Charlemagne riveted to that jurisdiction more closely than ever. Again, like his grandfather, he used abbatial nominations -- for the custom that the monks elected their abbot had disappeared entirely -- to reward faithful service to the State. Abbeys were given to clerics who were not monks, and even to laymen. The abbot -- and the bishop too -- had to bear his share of the imperial burden. St. Boniface had fought against the abuse that clerics bore arms. Now the emperor ordained the use of arms as a duty. In time of war the abbot or bishop was to join the army at the head of the fully equipped troop that was his quota to the forces. The abbeys of Charlemagne's time were no longer merely convents of monks, whose lives were given over to prayer and mortification. They were the great centres of national life, functioning in the social organism as the cities had functioned in the Roman Empire. Prayer there was undoubtedly, and much means of sanctification, but around the abbey, attracted thither by the abbey, was all the life of the immense domain which depended, ultimately, upon the monks for the intelligent direction which had first created its economic life and which, alone, maintained it in being. That in the abbey, by the side of church, school, farm, workshops and market, courts and prison there was also now the barracks, was a new development in no wise revolutionary. #### Christendom and the Carolingian state were for a century practically coterminous, and for half of that time the Carolingian state was Charlemagne. Over the whole vast edifice he presided, as a tradition after his death, but in his life, as a very concrete reality, appointing the innumerable counts and bishops who were the permanent local agents of his policies and the missi who periodically issued forth from the centre of government to inspect the working of the machine and to correct abuses. He was in many respects the greatest political force the Church had yet possessed. As his resources were so much less than those of the three great Christian emperors who preceded him -- Constantine, Theodosius and Justinian -- so does his use of them deservedly set him higher. He was an immediate social force of a magnitude they never equalled; and this by reason of his Catholicism and of his close unity with the popes, whom he dwarfed in every respect, who were very much his subjects, and yet to whose spiritual hegemony he was, in a matter-of-course way, always subordinate. How great his achievement -- in the matter of the extension and development of Catholicism, for example -- can readily be seen if the state of Catholicism, as he left it behind him at death, be compared with its state a hundred years earlier, at the accession of his grandfather, Charles Martel. Of that great restoration Charlemagne was not the principal agent. St. Boniface, and the multitude of disinterested monastic apostles whom he inspired and led, the Roman popes to whom at every turn St. Boniface looked, and not in vain, for guidance and support, hold here an unshakable primacy. Yet had it not been for Charlemagne, all that great work would never have survived to bear even its first fruits. The immense machine he set up was, however, for all its maker's sincerity, inspired by a spirit that had in it too little of St. Boniface, too little of the Gospel. Its successful working called, also, for a Charlemagne simultaneously present throughout its vast whole, and he strove to achieve this through his legates, the missi. Its permanence called for a succession of Charlemagne’s through time -- and this, fortunately for the religion of the Church, no man could secure. Fortunately: for, with the creation in the West of yet such another system as that which, for now some centuries, had been slowly choking Catholicism to death in the Roman empire of the East, the ultimate fate of the Church must have been worse than even the terrible things which the next century held in store. |