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While, on the Eastern frontiers of Christendom, the emperors were
enforcing policies that threatened to weaken still further this remnant
of the old world and to lose to the Church its last cultured people, a
new movement of consolidation was, in the West, laying the foundation
on which all the external activity of the Church for the next five
hundred years was to be built. This was the alliance between the Papacy
and the kingdom of the Franks. The agents of the work were the two
Mayors of the Palace, Charles Martel and his son Pepin the Short, the
Popes Zachary and Stephen II, the Lombard kings, Liutprand and Aistulf
and the English missionary bishop St. Boniface.
Pepin of Heristal, in whom this family emerges as the real ruler of the
Franks, died in 714. Charles Martel was one of his natural children --
then twenty-six years of age -- and, lest he should usurp the heritage,
locked away in a fortress by his father's widow. He escaped, however,
and, in the customary manner, made away with the heirs, his
half-brothers, and seized the position his father had left. He showed
himself, from the first, to be a mighty warrior, the greatest soldier
Gaul had known since the last of the Roman generals. The Frisians, the
Saxons, the Bavarians, the Alemanni -- all these hostile nations of the
eastern frontier, felt his hand in turn. Aquitaine, Burgundy and the
western Frankish kingdom too, he so thoroughly subdued that by the time
of his death (741) all Gaul was once again, after three centuries,
really united under one ruler.
Another enemy against whom his wars never ceased was Islam. In 732 the
Mohammedan armies had penetrated as far as Poitiers. Here Charles met
them, and in one of the really decisive battles of world history, he
defeated them with tremendous slaughter. In 735 there was a new
campaign, the Saracens having seized Arles and Avignon and penetrated
even into Burgundy; and in 737 a further campaign in which, again with
great slaughter of the defeated, Nimes and other strongholds in the
south were restored to Christianity. By the end of his reign, Charles
Martel had established himself as the natural political chief of
Western Christendom. Against the Arabs he had repeated in the West the
success of Leo III in the East; in his own realm he had established a
political leadership it had not known for centuries; and, unlike his
great Eastern contemporary, he had not been so unfortunate as to
involve himself in a quarrel with the Church. So far indeed was he from
enmity that he has a place as one of the chief promoters of its
missionary activities. "Were it not for the King of the Franks," said
St. Boniface, "I could not rule the faithful, nor defend my priests and
clerics, the monks and the servants of God. Nor would I be able,
without the fear his commands inspire, to hinder the paganism and
idolatry of Germany."
The King of the Franks was the mission's protector, but the missionary
was the Englishman Boniface, and in him the apostolic Benedictine
monachism, to which his own country owed so much, now returned to the
continent, in the service of the Roman Church that had first sent it to
England, to be now that Church's instrument for the conversion of
Germany. St. Boniface -- Winfrid was his name until the pope changed it
-- was born in Devonshire about the year 680. He was of noble birth and
he had to fight with his family before he was allowed his heart's
desire to become a monk at Exeter. From Exeter he went to Nursling, in
Hampshire, and here he came, indirectly, under the influence of St.
Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, and Bishop of Sherborne, a gifted,
artistic spirit, poet and musician, whose school was, for the west,
something of what Jarrow and the school of York were for the north. In
all this culture St. Boniface was well versed. He became rector of the
abbey school and the author of a Latin grammar. He was a scholar; as
the time went, a savant; and he was an ascetic too. In 710 he was
ordained priest, and then he began a second siege of authority to
consent to his desires -- this time to go as a missionary into Germany.
Not until 716 did his abbot yield, and in that year Boniface crossed
over to Frisia.
Here a one-time monk of Iona had for many years been labouring. This
was Willibrord, the founder of the see of Utrecht, to which, in 695,
Pope Sergius I had consecrated him, and of the famous abbey of
Echternach in what to-day is Luxembourg. Boniface's first essay was not
successful and he returned to Nursling. The abbot died, and Boniface
had the utmost difficulty in avoiding election as his successor. His
heart was still in Germany, and in 718 he set out for Rome. From Rome
he returned to Frisia, officially commissioned this time, and for three
years he worked with St. Willibrord.
In 722 the pope -- Gregory II -- recalled him, consecrated him bishop
and once more despatched him to Germany, to work this time as the chief
of an independent mission. One feature of this consecration has a great
significance, for it reveals that desire of immediate control over its
subordinates which characterised the policy of the Roman See since the
peace of Constantine first set it free to organise its powers. The
newly-consecrated bishop swore obedience to the pope in the same terms
that the suffragan bishops of the Roman province had used from time
immemorial. The consecration was a sign, also, that the new churches of
Germany were to be the pope's own personal concern. The pope also gave
Boniface letters for Charles Martel, and the Frankish king gave the
missionary the sealed letter of safety which was to be, for thirty
years, the human means of his protection.
For the next twenty years Boniface moved through Hesse and Thuringia
preaching the simplicities of the Gospel, destroying the pagan
sanctuaries and everywhere founding monasteries, for women no less than
for men. Amoeneburg, Ohrdruff, Fritzlar, Bischoffsheim, Kitzingen,
Ochsenfurt, all date from this time. He remained in constant
communication with Rome, which the death of his patron Gregory II did
not interrupt. The new pope, Gregory III, recalled him in 742 to give
him the pallium, and declare him Archbishop, and to commission him to
found other sees. In all there were eight of these -- Salzburg,
Frisingen, Ratisbon, Passau, Buraburg, Erfurt, Wurzburg, and Eichstadt.
Two years after his return from Rome he founded the most celebrated of
all German abbeys at Fulda. In 753 it was made directly subject to the
Roman See -- a rare distinction at that time -- and ten years later its
monks numbered 400. There St. Boniface's body still rests, brought by
the pious hands of his disciples after the martyrdom which came to him,
in 755, in that Frisia where his missionary career had opened.
St. Boniface is the apostle of Germany, as St. Patrick is of Ireland,
and through the co-operation of Frankish king and pope in support of
his mission he is, in a way, a co-founder of the alliance between these
two powers of western Europe. But his relations with the Frankish king,
and with that alliance, were still more intimate. St. Boniface has a
double career. He is a reformer in Gaul as truly as he is a founder in
Germany.
The religious revival of which the Irish foundation at Luxeuil was the
centre had never received any steady support from the Frankish kings.
Wherever the monks of St. Columbanus settled, works of piety
flourished, morals and Christian life revived, the heathens were
converted. But over the great mass of the territory ruled by the Franks
the old disorders still went on unchecked, clerical illiteracy and
immorality, simony, the brutality of the lay nobles degrading the sees
and the monasteries they forcibly appropriated. Despite all the labours
of a century of saints, Frankish Catholicism was in as bad a plight at
the end of the seventh century as it had been at the beginning.
The accession of Charles Martel made matters worse. The ceaseless
effort of defence against Mohammedans in the south and Saxons in the
east which filled the twenty-seven years of his reign, entailed a kind
of universal conscription in the national life. To the needs of the
sovereign everything was ruthlessly subordinated, the Church no less
than the rest. Its property, its prestige, its jurisdiction and
revenues were chiefly valuable to him as a treasury from which to
reward the faithful vassal and to secure the allegiance of the waverer.
Men little better than brigands, ancestors of the robber-baron villains
of the nursery tale, began to fill the sees. Some could not even read.
The luckier among them held several sees at once. Other great sees were
left for years without a bishop. How the spiritual life of the Church
fared under such prelates, drunkards, murderers, debauchees, can be
imagined. Recalling it in years to come, and recalling the man who was
so largely responsible, St. Boniface could assure Pepin, Charles
Martel’s son, that his father was certainly in hell, and Pepin could
believe it. Against thirty years of such a regime, crowning as it did a
century of steady decline, nothing but occasional, isolated, individual
piety was left to survive.
St. Boniface's career in Gaul really begins with the death of the
terrible Charles Martel (741). The two sons who succeeded, Pepin the
Short and Carloman, had received a monastic education at St. Denis, and
it was in the kingdom of Carloman, soon to become a monk himself, that
St. Boniface began his new career. As in his pioneer work in Germany,
so now as reformer in Gaul, he acted as agent of the Roman Church.
Councils were held, the first for nearly a century, in the eastern
kingdom in 741 and 744, in Pepin's kingdom at Soissons, also in 744;
and, in 745, a general council met of the whole of the Frankish Church.
Vacant sees were filled, new sees founded, the grouping of the sees
round a metropolitan see restored. Councils were henceforth to meet
annually, the metropolitan was to make the visitation of the bishops,
the bishops of their clergy. The itinerant clergy were to be
suppressed. The laws forbidding the clergy to marry, to carry arms, to
hunt, and providing that they should wear the special clerical dress,
were renewed. For delinquents appropriate sanctions were provided --
spiritual penalties and others too, imprisonment and floggings. In the
monasteries the rule of St. Benedict was henceforth of obligation.
Other canons dealt with the superstitious rites and survivals of
paganism with which the popular Catholicism was interwoven. Sacrifices
to trees and streams, the custom of honouring the pagan holy days,
magical practices, witchcraft -- all these still flourished in places,
and these councils provided for their extirpation.
A much less usual matter was the appearance of heretics. One of them,
Adalbert, a Frank, gave himself out as a new prophet, to whom angels
had brought relics of an invincible efficacy. He had new prayers,
filled with mysterious names; forgave sins without confession; gave
away his own hair and nails as relics; and in the course of years had
gathered an immense following, and had even found two fools of bishops
to consecrate him. The other heretic Clement, was an Irishman. His
teaching was of a more intellectual kind -- a curious eclectic
rearrangement of orthodoxy and heresy.
The reform council so earnestly desired by St. Gregory had at last been
realised -- a hundred and forty years after his death. But the old
obstacle to any real reform still survived. Pepin was no less attached
to the royal hold on the Church than the Merovingians whom he had
displaced. He was willing enough to see the disorders of clerical life
corrected, and laws made to improve the quality of Frankish
Christianity, but to the canons which, restoring the hierarchy,
provided the only safeguard for the future, he turned a deaf ear. So
long as he reigned none of the proposed metropolitan organisation
passed into practice. Not even St. Boniface himself found recognition
as archbishop of a particular see, for all his reception of the pallium
from Pope Zachary and his extensive authority as papal legate. For all
his sanctity, and the merit of his mighty labours, he was never, for
these princes, anything more than the bishop of the frontier never,
apparently, a force in their councils, never a political power never
personally intimate with any of them. This situation had its
advantages, the greatest of which was the possibility of preaching
Catholicism to the Saxons as a thing not necessarily associated with
their detested Frankish conquerors. The main strength of the English
saint lay not in Frankish sovereigns, for all the value of the
protection they afforded him, but in his constant, uninterrupted
relations with the popes. At every turn he lays before them his plans
and his difficulties, and it is the popes who encourage and console
him. These three popes -- Gregory II, Gregory III, and Zachary -- are
very truly the sources of the new German church's vitality, as they
are, also, of what new life came through Boniface to the Church in
Gaul. Zachary died in 752 and the saint survived him a bare three
years. Before the martyrdom came which crowned his long life of
self-sacrificing exile, political affairs in the Frankish kingdom had
taken a new turn. The new pope, Stephen II (752-757), had inaugurated,
between the Roman See and the one Catholic power in the West, that
alliance which was to be the pivot of papal history for the next five
hundred years, and which was to do much, in the immediate future, to
change the type of character elected as Bishop of Rome. In that
revolution St. Boniface had little more than a place of honour. He was
the greatest bishop of the Frankish empire, and the one in closest
touch with Rome; but it was others whom Pepin chose as his agents when,
in 751, he besought the papal sanction for the coup d’etat he
meditated.
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