The Eighteen Christian Centuries

If this great overflow from the desert of Arabia had consisted of nothing but armed warriors or destructive fanatics, its course would have been as transient as it was terrible. The Gothic invaders who had desolated Europe fortunately possessed the flexibility and adaptiveness of mind which fitted them for the reception of the purer faith and more refined manners of the vanquished races. They mixed with the people who submitted to their power, and in a short time adopted their habits and religion. Whatever faith they professed in their original seats, seems to have worn out in the long course of their immigration. The powers they had worshipped in their native wilds were local, and dependent on clime and soil. An easy opening, therefore, was left for Christianity into hearts where no hostile deity guarded the portal of approach. But with the Saracens the case was reversed. Incapable of assimilation with any rival belief—jealously exclusive of the commonest intercourse with the nations they subdued—unbending, contemptuous to others, and carried on by burning enthusiasm in their own cause, and confidence in the Prophet they served, there was no possibility of softening or elevating them from without. The pomps of religious worship, which so awed the wondering tribes of Franks and Lombards, were lost on a people who considered all pomp offensive both to God and man. They saw the sublimity of simple plainness both in word and life. Their caliph lived on rice, and saddled his camel with his own hands. He ordered a palace to be burned, which Seyd, who had conquered for him the capital of Persia, had built for his occupation. Unsocial, bigoted, austere, drinking no wine, accumulating no personal wealth, how was the mind of this warrior of the wilderness to be trained to the habits of civilized society, or turned aside from the rude instincts of destructiveness and domination? But the Arab intellect was subtle and active. Mohammedanism, indeed, armed the multitude in an exciting cause, and sent them forth like a destroying fire; but there was wisdom, policy, refinement, among the chiefs. While they devastated the worn-out territories of the Persian, and laid waste his ostentatious cities, which had been purposely built in useless places to show the power of the king, they founded great towns on sites so adapted for the purposes of trade and protection that they continue to the present time the emporiums and fortresses of their lands. Balsorah, at the top of the Persian Gulf, at the junction of the Tigris and the Euphrates, was as wisely selected for the commercial wants of that period as Constantinople itself. Bagdad was encouraged, Cufa built and peopled in exchange for the gorgeous but unwholesome Madayn, from which Yezdegird was driven. Many other towns rose under the protection of the Crescent; and by the same impulse which made the Saracens anxious to raise new centres of wealth and enterprise in the East, they were excited to the most amazing efforts to make themselves masters of the greatest city in the world, the seat of arts, of literature, and religion; and they pushed forward from river to river, from plain to plain, till, in the year 672, they raised their victorious standard in front of the walls of Constantinople. Here, however, a new enemy came to the encounter, and for the first time scattered dismay among the Moslem ranks. From the towers and turrets came down a shower of fire, burning, scorching, destroying, wherever it touched. Projected to great distances, and wrapping in a moment ship after ship in unextinguishable flames, these discharges appeared to the warriors of the Crescent a supernatural interference against them. This was the famous Greek fire, of which the components are not now known, but it was destructive beyond gunpowder itself. Water could not quench it, nor length of time weaken its power. For five successive years the assault was renewed by fresh battalions of the Saracens, but always with the same result. So, giving up at last their attempts against a place guarded by lightning and by the unmoved courage of the Greek population, they poured their thousands along the northern shores of Africa. Cyrene, the once glorious capital of the Pentapolis, in which Carthage saw her rival and Athens her superior, yielded to their power. Everywhere high-peaked mosques, rising where a short time before the shore had been unoccupied or in cities where the Basilicas of Christian worship had been thrown down, marked the course of conquest. Carthage received its new lords. Hippo, the bishopric of the best of ancient saints, the holy Augustine, saw its church supplanted by the temples of the Arabian impostor. A check was sustained at Tchuda, where their course was interrupted by a combined assault of Christian Greeks and the indigenous Berbers. Internal troubles also arrested their career, for there were disputes for the succession, and court intrigues and open murders, and all the usual accompaniments of a contest for an elective throne. One after another, the Caliphs had been murdered, or had died of broken hearts. The old race—the “Companions,” as they were called, because they had been the contemporaries and friends of Mohammed—had died out. Ali, after three disappointments, had at last been chosen. His sons Hassan and Hossein had been put to death; and it was only in the time of the eighth successor, when Abdelmalek had overcome all competition, that the unity of the Moslem Empire was restored, and the word given for conquest as before. This was in the 77th year of the Hegira, (698 of our era,) and an army was let loose upon the great city of Carthage, at the same time that movements were again ordered across the limits of the Grecian Empire, in Asia, and advances made towards Constantinople. Carthage fell—Tripoli was occupied—and now, with their territories stretching in unbroken line from Syria along the two thousand miles of the southern shore of the great Mediterranean Sea, the conquerors rested from their labours for a while, and prepared themselves for a dash across the narrow channel, from which the hills of Atlas and the summits of Gibraltar are seen at the same time. What has Europe, with its divided peoples, its worn-out kings, its indolent Church, and exhausted fields, to oppose to this compact phalanx of united blood, burning with fanatical faith, submissive to one rule, and supported by all the wealth of Asia and Africa; whose fleets sweep the sea, and whose myriads are every day increased by the accession of fresh nations of Berbers, Mauritanians, and the nameless children of the desert?

This is the hopeless century. Manhood, patriotism, Christianity itself, are all at the lowest ebb. But let us turn to the next, and see how good is worked out of evil, and acknowledge, as in so many instances the historian is obliged to do, that man can form no estimate of the future from the plainest present appearances, but that all things are in the hands of a higher intelligence than ours.

EIGHTH CENTURY

Authors

Alcuin, (735-804,) Bede, (674-735,) Egbert, Clemens, Dungal, Acca, John Damascanus.

THE EIGHTH CENTURY

TEMPORAL POWER OF THE POPES – THE EMPIRE OF CHARLEMAGNE

This is indeed a great century, which has Pepin of Heristhal at its commencement and Charlemagne at its end. In this period we shall see the course of the dissolution of manners and government arrested throughout the greater part of Europe, and a new form given to its ruling powers. We must remember that up to this time the progress of what we now call civilization was very slow; or we may perhaps almost say that the extent of civilized territory was smaller than it had been at the final breaking up of the Roman Empire four hundred years before. England had lost the elevating influences which the residence of Roman generals and the presence of disciplined forces had spread from the seats of their government. Every occupied position had been a centre of life and learning; and we see still, from the discoveries which the antiquaries of the present day are continually making, that the dwellings of the Prætors and military commanders were constructed in a style of luxury and refinement which argues a high state of culture and art. All round the circumference of the Romanized portion of Britain these head-quarters of order and improvement were fixed; outside of it lay the obscure and tumultuous populations of Wales and Scotland; and if we trace the situations of the towns with terminations derived from castra, (a camp,) we shall see, by stretching a line from Winchester in the south to Ilchester, thence up to Gloucester, Worcester, Wroxeter, and Chester, how carefully the Western Gael were prevented from ravaging the peaceful and orderly inhabitants; and, as the same precautions were taken to the North against the Picts and Scots, we shall easily be able to estimate the effect of those numerous schools of life and manners on the country-districts in which they were placed. All these establishments had been removed. Barbarism had reasserted her ancient reign; and at the century we have now reached, the institution which alone could compete in its elevating effect with the old imperial subordination, the Christian Church, had not yet established its authority except for the benefit of ambitious bishops; and the same anarchy reigned in the ecclesiastical body as in the civil orders. The eight or nine kingdoms spread over the land were sufficiently powerful in their separate nationalities to prevent any unity of feeling among the subjects of the different crowns. A prelate of the court of Deiria had no point of union with a prelate protected by the kings of Wessex. And it was this very incapacity of combination at home, from the multiplicity of kings, which led to the astonishing spectacle in this century of the efforts of the Anglo-Saxon clergy in behalf of the Bishop of Rome in distant countries. In this great struggle to extend the power of the Popes, the regular orders particularly distinguished themselves. The fact of submitting to convent-rules, of giving up the stormy pleasures of independence for the safe placidity of unreasoning obedience, is a proof of the desire in many human minds of having something to which they can look up, something to obey, in obeying which their self-respect may be preserved, even in the act of offering up their self-will—a desire which, in civil actions and the atmosphere of a court, leads to slavery and every vice, but in a monastery conducts to the noblest sacrifices, and fills the pages of history with saints and martyrs. The Anglo-Saxon, looking out of his convent, saw nothing round him which could give him hope or comfort. Laws were unsettled, the various little principalities were either hostile or unconnected, there was no great combining authority from which orders could be issued with the certainty of being obeyed; and even the clergy, thinly scattered, and dependent on the capricious favour or exposed to the ignorant animosity of their respective sovereigns, were torn into factions, and practically without a chief. But theoretically there was the noblest chiefship that ever was dreamed of by ambition. The lowly heritage of Peter had expanded into the universal government of the Church. In France this claim had not yet been urged; in the East it had been contemptuously rejected; in Italy the Lombard kings were hostile; in Spain the Visigoths were heretic, and at war among themselves; in Germany the gospel had not yet been heard; in Ireland the Church was a rival bitterly defensive of its independence; but in England, among the earnest, thoughtful Anglo-Saxons, the majestic idea of a great family of all the Christian Churches, wherever placed, presided over by the Vicar of Christ and receiving laws from his hallowed lips, had impressed itself beyond the possibility of being effaced. Rome was to them the residence of God’s vicegerent upon earth; obedience to him was worship, and resistance to his slightest wish presumption and impiety. So at the beginning of this century holy men left their monasteries in Essex, and Warwickshire, and Devon, and knelt at the footstool of the Pope, and swore fealty and submission to the Holy See.

It has often been observed that the Papacy differs from other powers in the continued vitality of its members long after the life has left it at the heart. Rome was weak at the centre, but strong at the extremity of its domain. The Emperor of Constantinople looked on the Pope as his representative in Church-affairs, ratified his election, and exacted tribute on his appointment. The Exarch of Ravenna, representing as he did the civil majesty of the successor of the Cæsars, looked down on him as his subordinate. There was also a duke in Rome whose office it was to superintend the proceedings of the bishop, and another officer resident in the Grecian court to whom the bishop was responsible for the management of his delegated powers. But outside of all this depression and subordination, among tribes of half-barbaric blood, among dreamy enthusiasts contemplating what seemed to them the simple and natural scheme of an earthly judge infallible in wisdom and divinely inspired; among bewildered and trampled ecclesiastics, looking forth into the night, and seeing, far above all the storms and darkness that surrounded them in their own distracted land, a star by which they might steer their course, undimmed and unalterable—the Pope of Rome was the highest and holiest of created men. No thought is worth any thing that continues in barren speculation. Honour, then, to the brave monks of England who went forth the missionaries of the Papal kings! Better the struggles and dangers of a plunge among the untamed savages of Friesland, and the blood-stained forests of the farthest Germany, in fulfilment of the office to which they felt themselves called, than the lazy, slumbering way of life which had already begun to be considered the fulfilment of conventual vows. Soldiers of the Cross were they, though fighting for the advancement of an ambitious commander more than the success of the larger cause; and we may well exult in the virtues which their undoubting faith in the supremacy of the pontiff called forth, since it contrasts so nobly with the apathy and indifference to all high and self-denying co-operation which characterized the rest of the world. We shall see the monk Winifried penetrate, as the Pope’s minister, into the darkness beyond the Rhine, and emerge, with crozier and mitre, as Boniface the Archbishop of Mayence, and converter to the Christian faith of great and populous nations which were long the most earnest supporters of the rights and pre-eminence of Rome. This is one strong characteristic of this century, the increased vigour of the Papacy by the efforts of the Anglo-Saxons on its behalf; and now we are going to another still stronger characteristic, the further increase of its influence by the part it played in the change of dynasty in France.

A strange fortune, which in the old Greek mythologies would have been looked on as a fate, overshadowing the blood-stained house of Clovis, had befallen his descendants through all their generations for more than a hundred years. Feeble in mind, and even degenerated in body, the kings of that royal line had been a sight of grief and humiliation to their nominal subjects. Married at fifteen, they had all sunk into premature old age, or died before they were thirty. Too listless for work, and too ignorant for council, they had accepted the restricted sphere within which their duties were confined, and showed themselves, on solemn occasions, at the festivals of the Church, and other great anniversaries, bearing, like their ancestors, the long flowing locks which were the natural sign of their crowned supremacy, seated in a wagon drawn by oxen, and driven by a wagoner with a goad—a primitive relic of vanished times, and as much out of place in Paris in the eighth century as the state carriage of the Queen or the Lord-Mayor’s coach of the present day among ourselves Strange thoughts must have passed through the minds of the spectators as they saw the successors of the rough leader of the Franks degraded to this condition; but the change had been gradual; the public sentiment had become reconciled to the apparent uselessness of the highest offices of the State; for under another title, and with much inferior rank, there was a man who held the reins of government with a hand of iron, and whose power was perhaps strengthened by the fiction which called him the servant and minister of the fainéant or do-nothing king. A succession of men arose in the family of the mayors of the palace, as remarkable for policy and talent as the representatives of the royal line were for the want of these qualities. The origin of their office was conveniently forgotten, or converted by the flattery of their dependants into an equality with the monarchs. Chosen, they said, by the same elective body which nominated the king, they were as much entitled to the command of the army and the administration of the law as their nominal masters to the possession of the palace and royal name. And when for a long period this claim was allowed, who was there to stand up in opposition, either legal or forcible, to a man who appointed all the judges and commanded all the troops? The office at last became hereditary. The successive mayors left their dignity to their sons by will; and time might have been slow in bringing power and title into harmony with each by giving the name of king to the man who already exercised all the kingly power and fulfilled all the kingly duties, if Charles Martel, the mayor, had not, in 732, established such claims to the gratitude of Europe by his defeat of the Saracens, who were about to overrun the whole of Christendom, that it was impossible to refuse either to himself or his successor the highest dignity which Europe had to bestow. When other rulers and princes were willing to acknowledge his superiority, not only in power, but in rank and dignity, it was necessary that their submission should be offered, not to a mere Major-domo, or chief domestic of a court, but to a free sovereign and anointed king. The two most amazing fictions, therefore, which ever flourished on the contemptuous forbearance of mankind, were both about to expire beneath the breath of reality at this time—the kingship of the descendants of Clovis, and the pretensions of the successors of Constantine. The Saracens appeared upon the scene, and those gibbering and unsubstantial ghosts, as if they scented the morning air, immediately disappeared. The Emperors of the East, by a self-deluding process, which preserved their dignity and flattered their pride, professed still to consider themselves the lords of the Roman Empire, and took particular pains to acknowledge the kings and potentates, who established themselves in the various portions of it, as their representatives and lieutenants. They lost no time in sending the title of Patrician and the ensigns of royal rank to the successful founders of a new dynasty, and had gained their object if they received the new ruler’s thanks in return. At Rome, as we have said, they protected the bishop, and gave him the investiture of his office. They retained also the territories called the Exarchate of Ravenna, but with no power of vindicating their authority if it was disputed, or of exacting revenue, except what the gratitude of the bishop or the Exarch might induce them to present to their patron on their nomination or instalment. A long-haired, sad-countenanced, decrepit young man in a wagon drawn by oxen, and a vain voluptuary, wrapped in Oriental splendour, without influence or wealth, were the representatives at this time of the irresistible power of the Frankish warriors, and the glories of Julius and Augustus. But the present had its representatives as well as the past. Charles Martel had still the Frankish sword at his command; the Roman Pontiff had thousands ready to believe and support his claims to be the spiritual ruler of the world. Something was required to unite them in one vast effort at unity and independence, and this opportunity was afforded them by the common danger to which the Saracenic invasion exposed equally the civil and ecclesiastical power. Africa, we have seen, was fringed along the whole of the Mediterranean border with the followers of the Prophet. In one generation the blood of the Arabian and Mauritanian deserts became so blended, that no distinction whatever existed between the men of Mecca and Medina and the native tribes. Where Carthaginian and Roman civilization had never penetrated, the faith of Mohammed was accepted as an indigenous growth. Fanaticism and ambition sailed across the Channel; and early in this century the hot breath of Mohammedanism had dried up the promise of Spain; countless warriors crossed to Gibraltar; their losses were supplied by the inexhaustible populations from the interior, (the ancestors of the Abd-el Kaders and Ben Muzas of modern times,) and, elate with hopes of universal conquest, the crowded tents of the Moslem army were seen on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees, and presently all the plains of Languedoc, and the central fields of France as far up as the Loire, were inundated by horse and man. Incredible accounts are given of the number and activity of the desert steeds bestrode by these turbaned apostles. A march of a hundred miles—a village set on fire, and all the males extirpated—strange-looking visages, and wild arrays of galloping battalions seen by terrified watchers from the walls of Paris itself; then, in the twinkling of an eye, nothing visible but the distant dust raised up in their almost unperceived retreat,—these were the peculiarities of this new and unheard-of warfare. And while these dashes were made from the centre of the invasion, alarming the inhabitants at the extremities of the kingdom, the host steadily moved on, secured the ground behind it before any fresh advance, and united in this way the steadiness of European settlement with the wild fury of the original mode of attack. Already the provinces abutting on the Pyrenees had owned their power. Gascony up to the Garonne, and the Narbonnais nearly to the Rhine, had submitted to the conquerors; but when the dispossessed proprietors of Novempopulania and Septimania, as those districts were then called, and the powerful Duke of Aquitaine, also fled before the advancing armies; when all the churches were filled with prayer, and all the towns were in momentary expectation of seeing the irresistible horsemen before their walls, patriotism and religion combined to call upon all the Franks and all the Christians to expel the infidel invader. So Charles, the son of Pepin, whose exploits against the Frisons and other barbaric peoples in the North had already acquired for him the complimentary name of Martel, or the Hammer, put himself at the head of the military forces of the land, and encountered the Saracenic myriads on the great plain round Tours. The East and West were brought front to front—Christianity and Mohammedanism stood face to face for the first time; and it is startling to consider for a moment what the result of an Asiatic victory might have been. If ever there was a case in which the intervention of Divine Providence may be claimed without presumption on the conquering side, it must be here, where the truths of revelation and the progress of society were dependent on the issue. The two faiths, according to all human calculation, had rested their supremacy on their respective champions. If Charles and his Franks and Germans were defeated, there was nothing to resist the march of the perpetually-increasing numbers of the Saracens till they had planted their standards on the pinnacles of Rome. The first glow of Christian belief had been exchanged, we have seen, for ambitious disputes, or died off in many of the practices of superstition. The very man in whom the Christian hope was placed was suspected of leaning to the Wodenism of his Northern ancestors, and was scarcely bought over to the defence of the Church’s faith by a permission to pillage the Church’s wealth. Mohammedanism, on the other hand, was fresh and young. Its promises were clear and tempting—its course triumphant, and its doctrines satisfactory equally to the pride and the indolence of the human heart. But in the former, though unperceived by the warriors at Tours and the prelates at Rome, lay the germ of countless blessings—elevating the mind by the discovery of its strength at the same moment in which it is abased by the feeling of its weakness, and gifted above all with the power of expansion and universality; themselves proofs of its divine original, to which no false religion can lay the slightest claim. Cultivate the Christian mind to the highest—fill it with all knowledge—place round it the miracles of science and art—station it in the snows of Iceland or the heats of India—Christianity, like the all-girding horizon of the sky, widens its circle so as to include the loftiest, and contain within its embrace the utmost diversities of human life and speculation. But with the Mohammedan, as with other impostures, the range is limited. When intellect expands, it bursts the cerement in which it has been involved; and with Buddhism, and Mithrism, and Hindooism, it will be as it was with Druidism, and the more elegant heathendom of Greece and Rome: there will be no safety for them but in the ignorance and barbarism of their disciples. On the result of that great day at Tours in the year 732, therefore, depended the intellectual improvement and civil freedom of the human race. Few particulars are preserved of this momentous battle; but the result showed that the light cavalry, in which the Saracens excelled, were no match for the firm line of the Franks. When confusion once began among the swarthy cavaliers of Abderachman, there was no restoration possible. In wild confusion the mêlée was continued; and all that can be said is, that the slaughter of upwards of three hundred thousand of these impulsive pilgrims of the desert so weakened the Saracenic power in Europe, that in no long time their hosts were withdrawn from the soil of Gaul, and guarded with difficulty the conquest they had made behind the barrier of the Pyrenees. Could the gratitude of Church or State be too generous to the man who preserved both from the sword of the destroyer? If Charles pillaged a monastery or seized the revenues of a bishopric, nobody found any fault. It was almost just that he should have the wealth of the cathedral from which he had driven away the mufti and muezzin. But monasteries and bishops were still powerful, and did not look on the proceedings of Charles the Hammer with the equanimity of the unconcerned spectators. They perhaps thought the battle of Tours had only given them a choice of spoilers, instead of protection from spoliation. In a short time, however, the policy of the sagacious leader led him to see the necessity of gaining over the only united body in the State. He became a benefactor of the Church, and a staunch ally of the Roman bishop. Both had an object to obtain. What the phantom king was to Charles, the phantom emperor was to the Pope. If there was unison between the two dependants, it would be easy to get rid of the two superiors. Presents and compliments were interchanged, and moral support trafficked for material aid. Wherever the one sent missionaries with the Cross, the other sent warriors to their support. The Pontiff bestowed on the Mayor the keys of the sepulchre of St. Peter, and the title of Consul and Patrician, and begged him to come to his assistance against Luitprand, the Lombard king. But this was far too great an exploit to be expected by a simple Bishop, and performed by a simple Mayor of the Palace. So the next great thing we meet with in this century is the investiture of the Mayor with the title of king, and of the Bishop with the sovereignty of Rome and Ravenna. This happened in 752. Pepin the Short, as he was unflatteringly called by his subjects, succeeded Charles in the government of the Franks. The king was Childeric the Third, who lived in complete seclusion and cherished his long hair as the only evidence of monarchy left to the sons of Clovis. Wars in various regions established the reputation of Pepin as the worthy successor of Charles; and by a refinement of policy, the crown, the consummation of all his hopes, was reached in a manner which deprived it of the appearance of injustice, for it was given to him by the hands of saints and popes, and ratified by the council of the nation. He had already asked Pope Zachariah, “who had the best right to the name of king?—he who had merely the title, or he who had the power?” And in answer to this, which was rather a puzzling question, our countryman Winifried, in his new character of Boniface and archbishop, placed upon his head the golden round, and Might and Right were restored to their original combination. But St. Boniface was not enough. In two years the Pope himself clambered over the Alps and anointed the new monarch with holy oil; and by the same act stripped the long hair from the head of the Merovingian puppet, and condemned him and his descendants to the privacy of a cloister.