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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.
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