The Eighteen Christian Centuries

But Louis was as unfortunate in his testamentary arrangement as in all the other regulations of his life. Lothaire was to retain the eastern portion of the empire; Charles, his favourite, had France as far as the Rhine; while Louis was limited to the distant region of Bavaria. |A.D. 840.|And having made this disposition of his power, the meek and useless Louis descended into the tomb—a striking example, the French historians tell us, of the great historic truth renewed at such distant dates, that the villanies and cruelties of a race of kings bring misery on the most virtuous of their descendants. All the crimes of the three preceding reigns—the violence and disregard of life exhibited by Charlemagne himself—found their victim and expiation in his meek and gentle-minded son. The harshness of Henry VIII. of England, they add, and the despotic claims of James, were visited on the personally just and amiable Charles; and they point to the parallel case of their own Louis XVI., and see in the sad fortune of that mild and guileless sovereign the final doom of the murderous Charles IX., and the voluptuous and hypocritical Louis XIV. But these kings are still far off in the darkness of the coming centuries. It is a strange sight, in the middle of the ninth century, to see the successor of the great Emperor stealing through the confused and chaotic events of that wretched period, stripped as it were of sword and crown, but everywhere displaying the beauty of pure and simple goodness. He refused to condemn his enemies to death. He was only inexorable towards his own offences, and sometimes humbled himself for imaginary sins. A protector of the Church, a zealous supporter of Rome, it would give additional dignity to the act of canonization if the name of Louis the Debonnaire were added to the list of Saints.

But we have left the empire which it had taken so long to consolidate, now legally divided into three. There is a Charles in possession of the western division; a Louis in the farther Germany; and Lothaire, the unfilial triumpher at Aix-la-Chapelle, invested with the remainder of the Roman world. But Lothaire was not to be satisfied with remainders. Once in power, he was determined to recover the empire in its undivided state. He was King of Italy; master of Rome and of the Pope; he was eldest grandson of Charlemagne, and defied the opposition of his brothers. |A.D. 842.|A Battle was fought at Fontenay in 842, in which these pretensions were overthrown; and the final severance took place in the following year between the French and German populations. The treaty between the brothers still remains. It is written in duplicate—one in a tongue still intelligible to German ears, and the other in a Romanized speech, which is nearer the French of the present day than the English of Alfred, or even of Edward the Confessor, is to ours.

|A.D. 843.|

France, which had hitherto attained that title in right of its predominant race, held it henceforth on the double ground of language and territory. But there is a curious circumstance connected with the partition of the empire, which it may be interesting to remember. France, in gaining its name and language, lost its natural boundary of the Rhine. Up to this time, the limit of ancient Gaul had continued to define the territory of the Western Franks. In rude times, indeed, there can be no other divisions than those supplied by nature; but now that a tongue was considered a bond of nationality, the French were contented to surrender to Lothaire the Emperor a long strip of territory, running the whole way up from Italy to the North Sea, including both banks of the Rhine, and acting as a wall of partition between them and the German-speaking people on the other side,—a great price to pay, even for the easiest and most widely-spread language in Europe. Yet the most ambitious of Frenchmen would pause before he undid the bargain and reacquired the “exulting and abounding river” at the sacrifice of his inimitable tongue.

Very confused and uncertain are all the events for a long time after this date. We see perpetual attempts made to restore the reality as well as the name of the Empire. These battles and competitions of the line of Charlemagne are the subject of chronicles and treaties, and might impose upon us by the grandeur of their appearance, if we did not see, from the incidental facts which come to the surface, how unavailing all efforts must be to arrest the dissociation of state from state. The principle of dissolution was at work everywhere. Kingship itself had fallen into contempt, for the great proprietors had been encouraged to exert a kind of personal power in the reign of Charlemagne, which contributed to the strength of his well-consolidated crown; but when the same individual influence was exercised under the nominal supremacy of Louis the Debonnaire or Charles the Bald, it proved a humiliating and dangerous contrast to the weakness of the throne. A combination of provincial dignitaries could at any time outweigh the authority of the king, and sometimes, even singly, the owners of extensive estates threw off the very name of subject. They claimed their lands as not only hereditary possessions, but endowed with all the rights and privileges which their personal offices had bestowed. If their commission from the emperor had given them authority to judge causes, to raise taxes, or to collect troops, they maintained from henceforth that those high powers were inherent in their lands. The dukes, therefore, invested their estates with ducal rights, independent of the Crown, and left to the holder of the kingly name no real authority except in his own domains. Brittany, and Aquitaine, and Septimania, withdrew their allegiance from the poor King of France. He could not compel the ambitious owners of those duchies to recognise his power, and condescended even to treat them as rival and acknowledged kings. Then there were other magnates who were not to be left mere subjects when dukes had risen to such rank. So the Marquises of Toulouse and Gothia, a district of Languedoc, and Auvergne, were treated more as equals than as appointed deputies recallable at pleasure. But worse enemies of kingly dignity than duke or marquis were the ambitious bishops, who looked with uneasy eyes on the rapid rise of their rivals the lay nobility. Already the hereditary title of those territorial potentates was an accomplished fact; the son of the count inherited his father’s county. But the general celibacy of the clergy fortunately prevented the hereditary transmission of bishopric and abbey. To make up for the want of this advantage, they boldly determined to assert far higher claims as inherent in their rank than marquis or count could aim at. Starting from the universally-conceded ground of their right to reprimand and punish any Christian who committed sin, they logically carried their pretension to the right of deposing kings if they offended the Church. More than fifty years had passed since Charlemagne had received the imperial crown from the hands of the Pope of Rome. Dates are liable to fall into confusion in ignorant times and places, and it was easy to spread a belief that the popes had always exercised the power of bestowing the diadem upon kings. To support these astounding claims with some certain guarantee, and give them the advantage of prescriptive right by a long and legitimate possession, certain documents were spread abroad at this time, purporting to be a collection by Isidore, a saint of the sixth century, of the decretals or judicial sentences of the popes from a very early period, asserting the unquestioned spiritual supremacy of the Roman See at a date when it was in reality but one of many feeble seats of Christian authority; and to equalize its earthly grandeur with its religious pretension, the new edition of Isidore contained a donation by Constantine himself, in the beginning of the fourth century, of the city of Rome and enormous territories in Italy, to be held in sovereignty by the successors of St. Peter. These are now universally acknowledged to be forgeries and impostures of the grossest kind, but at the time they appeared they served the purpose for which they were intended, and gave a sanction to the Papal assumptions far superior to the rights of any existing crown.

|A.D. 859.|

Charles the Bald was a true son of Louis the Debonnaire in his devotion to the Church. When the bishops of his own kingdom, with Wenilon of Sens as their leader, offended with some remissness he had temporarily shown in advancing their worldly interests, determined to depose him from the throne, and called Louis the German to take his place, Charles fled and threw himself on the protection of the Pope. And when by submission and promises he had been permitted to re-enter France, he complained of the conduct of the prelates in language which ratified all their claims. “Elected by Wenilon and the other bishops, as well as by the lieges of our kingdom, who expressed their consent by their acclamations, Wenilon consecrated me king according to ecclesiastic tradition, in his own diocese, in the Church of the Holy Cross at Orleans. He anointed me with the holy oil; he gave me the diadem and royal sceptre, and seated me on the throne. After that consecration I could not be removed from the throne, or supplanted by any one, at least without being heard and judged by the bishops, by whose ministry I was consecrated king. It is they who are as the thrones of the Divinity. God reposes upon them, and by them he gives forth his judgments. At all times I have been ready to submit to their fatherly corrections, to their just castigations, and am ready to do so still.” What more could the Church require? Its wealth was the least of its advantages, though the abbacies and bishoprics were richer than dukedoms all over the land. Their temporal power was supported by the terrors of their spiritual authority; and kings, princes, and people appeared so prone to the grossest excesses of credulity and superstition, that it needed little to throw Europe itself at the feet of the priesthood, and place sword and sceptre permanently in subordination to the crozier. Blindly secure of their position, rioting in the riches of the subject land, the bishops probably disregarded, as below their notice, the two antagonistic principles which were at work at this time in the midst of their own body—the principle of absolute submission to authority in articles of faith, and the principle of free inquiry into all religious doctrine. The first gave birth to the great mystery of transubstantiation, which now first made its appearance as an indispensable belief, and was hailed by the laity and inferior clergy as a crowning proof of the miraculous powers inherent in the Church. The second was equally busy, but was not productive of such permanent effects. At the court of Charles the Bald there was a society of learned and ingenious men, presided over by the celebrated John Scot Erigena, (or native of Ireland,) who had studied the early Fathers and the Platonic philosophy, and were inclined to admit human reason to some participation in the reception of Christian truths. There were therefore discussions on the real presence, and free-will, and predestination, which had the usual unsatisfactory termination of all questions transcending man’s understanding, and only embittered their respective adherents without advancing the settlement on either side. While these exercitations of talent and dialectic quickness were carried on, filling the different dioceses with wonder and perplexity, the great body of the people in various countries of Europe were recalled to the practical business of life by disputes of a far more serious character than the wordy wars of Scotus and his foes. Michelet, the most picturesque of the recent historians of France, has given us an amazing view of the state of affairs at this time. It is the darkest period of the human mind; it is also the most unsettled period of human society. Outside of the narrowing limits of peopled Christendom, enemies are pressing upon every side. Saxons on the East are laying their hands in reverence on the manes of horses, and swearing in the name of Odin; Saracens, in the South and West, are gathering once more for the triumph of the Prophet; and suddenly France, Germany, Italy, and England, are awakened to the presence and possible supremacy of a more dreaded invader than either, for the Vikinger, or Norsemen, were abroad upon the sea, and all Christendom was exposed to their ravages. Wherever a river poured its waters into the ocean, on the coast of Narbonne, or Yorkshire, or Calabria, or Friesland, boats, small in size, but countless in number, penetrated into the inland towns, and disembarked wild and fearless warriors, who seemed inspired by the mad fanaticism of some inhuman faith, which made charity and mercy a sin. Starting from the islands and rugged mainland of the present Denmark and Norway, they swept across the stormy North Sea, shouting their hideous songs of glory and defiance, and springing to land when they reached their destination with the agility and bloodthirstiness of famished wolves. Their business was to carry slaughter and destruction wherever they went. They looked with contempt on the lazy occupations of the inhabitants of town or farm, and, above all, were filled with hatred and disdain of the monks and priests Their leaders were warriors and poets. Gliding up noiseless streams, they intoned their battle-cry and shouted the great deeds of their ancestors when they reached the walls of some secluded monastery, and rejoiced in wrapping all its terrified inmates in flames. Bards, soldiers, pirates, buccaneers, and heathens, destitute of fear, or pity, or remorse, amorous of danger, and skilful in management of ship and weapon, these were the most ferocious visitants which Southern Europe had ever seen. No storm was sufficient to be a protection against their approach. On the crest of the highest waves those frail barks were seen by the affrighted dwellers on the shore, careering with all sail set, and steering right into their port. All the people on the coast, from the Rhine to Bayonne, and from Toulouse to the Grecian Isles, fled for protection to the great proprietors of the lands. But the great proprietors of the lands were the peaceful priors of stately abbeys, and bishops of wealthy sees. Their pretensions had been submitted to by kings and nobles; they were the real rulers of France; and even in England their authority was very great. Excommunications had been their arms against recusant baron and refractory count; but the Danish Northmen did not care for bell, book, and candle. The courtly circle of scholars and divines could give no aid to the dishoused villagers and trembling cities, however ingenious the logic might be which reconciled Plato to St. Paul; and Charles the Bald, surprised, no doubt, at the inefficacy of prayers and processions, was forced to replace the influence in the hands, not which carried the crozier and cross, but which curbed the horse and couched the spear. The invasion of the Danes was, in fact, the resuscitation of the courage and manliness of the nationalities they attacked. Dreadful as the suffering was at the time, it was not given to any man then alive to see the future benefits contained in the present woe. We, with a calmer view, look back upon the whole series of those events, and in the intermixture of the new race perceive the elements of greatness and power. Priest-ridden, down-trodden populations received a fresh impulse from those untamed children of the North; and in the forcible relegation of ecclesiastics to the more peaceable offices of their calling, we see the first beginning of the gradation of ranks, and separation of employments, which gave honourable occupation to the respective leaders in Church and State; which limited the clergyman to the unostentatious discharge of his professional duties, and left the baron to command his warriors and give armed protection to all the dwellers in the land. For feudalism, as understood in the Middle Ages, was the inevitable result of the relative positions of priest and noble at the time of the Norsemen’s forays. It was found that the possession of great domains had its duties as well as its rights, and the duty of defence was the most imperative of all. Men held their grounds, therefore, on the obligation of keeping their vassals uninjured by the pirates; the bishops were found unable to perform this work, and the territory passed away from their keeping. Vast estates, no doubt, still remained in their possession, but they were placed in the guardianship of the neighbouring chateaux; and though at intervals, in the succeeding centuries, we shall see the prelate dressing himself in a coat of mail, and rendering in person the military service entailed upon his lands, the public feeling rapidly revolted against the incongruity of the deed. The steel-clad bishop was looked on with slender respect, and was soon found to do more damage to his order, by the contrast between his conduct and his profession, than he could possibly gain for it by his prowess or skill in war. Feudalism, indeed, or the reciprocal obligation of protection and submission, reached its full development by the formal deposition of a descendant of Charlemagne, on the express ground of his inability to defend his people from the enemies by which they were surrounded. |A.D. 879.|A congress of six archbishops, and seventeen bishops, was held in the town of Mantela, near Vienne; and after consultation with the nobility, they came to the following resolution:—“That whereas the great qualities of the old mayors of the palace were their only rights to the throne, and Charlemagne, whom all willingly obeyed, did not transmit his talents, along with his crown, to his posterity, it was right to leave that house.” They therefore sent an offer of the throne of Burgundy to Boso, Count of the Ardennes, with the conditions “that he should be a true patron and defender of high and low, accessible and friendly to all, humble before God, liberal to the Church, and true to his word.”

By this abnegation of temporal weapons, and dependence on the armed warrior for their defence, the prelates put themselves at the head of the unarmed peoples at the same moment that they exercised their spiritual authority over all classes alike. It was useless for them to draw the sword themselves, when they regulated every motion of the hand by which the sword was held.

While this is the state of affairs on the Continent—while the great Empire of Charlemagne is falling to pieces, and the kingly office is practically reduced to a mere equality with the other dignities of the land—while this disunion in nations and weakness in sovereigns is exposing the fairest lands in Europe to the aggressions of enemies on every side—let us cast our eyes for a moment on England, and see in what condition our ancestors are placed at the middle of this century. A most dreadful and alarming condition as ever Old England was in. For many years before this, a pirate’s boat or two from the North would run upon the sand, and send the crews to burn and rob a village on the coast of Berwick or Northumberland. Pirates we superciliously call them, but that is from a misconception of their point of honour, and of the very different estimate they themselves formed of their pursuits and character. They were gentleman, perhaps, “of small estate” in some outlying district of Denmark or Norway, but endowed with stout arms and a great wish to distinguish themselves—if the distinction could be accompanied with an increase of their worldly goods. They considered the sea their own domain, and whatever was found on it as theirs by right of possession. They were, therefore, lords of the manor, looking after their rights, their waifs and strays, their flotsams and jetsams. They were also persons of a strong religious turn, and united the spirit of the missionary to the courage of the warrior and the avidity of the conqueror. Odin was still their god, the doors of the Walhalla were still open to them after death, and the skulls of their enemies were foaming with intoxicating mead. The English were renegades from the true faith, a set of drivelling wretches who believed in a heaven where there was no beer, and worshipped a god who bade them pray for their enemies and bless the very people who used them ill. The remaining similarity in the language of the two peoples must have added a bitterness to the contemptuous feelings of the unreclaimed rovers of the deep; and probably, on their return, these enterprising warriors were as proud of the number of priests they had slain, as of the more valuable trophies they carried home. Denmark itself, up to this time, had been distracted with internal wars. It was only the more active spirits who had rushed across from the Sound, and solaced themselves, in the intervals of their own campaigns, with an onslaught upon an English town. But now the scene was to change. The inroads of separate crews were to be exchanged for national invasions. |A.D. 838.|Harold of the Fair Hair was seated on an undisputed throne, and repressed the outrages of these adventurous warriors by a strong and determined will. He stretched his sceptre over all the Scandinavian world, and neither the North Sea nor the Baltic were safe places for piracy and spoil. One of his countrymen had founded the royal line of Russia, and from his capital of Kieff or Novgorod was civilizing, with whip and battle-axe, the original hordes which now form the Empire of the Czars. Already, from their lurking-places on the shores of the Black Sea, the Norwegian predecessors of the men of Odessa and Sebastopol were threatening a dash upon Constantinople; while sea-kings and jarls, compelled to be quiet and peaceable at home, but backed by all the wild populations of the North, anxious for glory, and greedy of gold and corn, resolved to reduce England to their obedience, and collected an enormous fleet in the quiet recesses of the Baltic, withdrawn from the observation of Harold. It seems fated that France is always, in some sort or other, to set the fashion to her neighbours. We have seen, at the beginning of this century, how England followed the example of the Frankish peoples in consolidating itself into one dominion. Charlemagne was recognised chief potentate of many states, and Egbert was sovereign of all the Saxon lands, from Cornwall to the gates of Edinburgh. But the model was copied no less closely in the splitting-up of the central authority than in its consolidation. While Louis the Debonnaire and Charles the Bald were weakening the throne of Charlemagne, the states of Egbert became parcelled out in the same way between the descendants of the English king. Ethelwolf was the counterpart of Louis, and carried the sceptre in too gentle a hand. He still further diminished his authority by yielding to the dissensions of his court. Like the Frankish ruler, also, he left portions of his territory to his four sons; of whom it will be sufficient for us to remember that the youngest was the great Alfred—the foremost name in all mediæval history; and by an injudicious marriage with the daughter of Charles the Bald, and his unjust divorce of the mother of all his sons, he offended the feelings of the nation, and raised the animosity of his children. Ethelbald his son completed the popular discontent by marrying his father’s widow, the French princess, who had been the cause of so much disagreement; and while the people were thus alienated, and the guiding hand of a true ruler of men was withdrawn, the terrible invasion of Danes and Jutlanders went on. |A.D. 839.|They sailed up the Thames and pillaged London. Winchester was given to the flames. The whole isle of Thanet was seized and permanently occupied. The magic standard, a raven, embroidered by the daughters of the famous Regner Lodbrog, (who had been stung to death by serpents in a dungeon into which he was thrown by Ella, King of Northumberland,) was carried from point to point, and was thought to be the symbol of victory and revenge. The offending Northumbrian now felt the wrath of the sons of Lodbrog. They landed with a great army, and after a battle, in which the chiefs of the English were slain, took the Northumbrian kingdom. Nottingham was soon after captured and destroyed. It was no longer a mere incursion. The nobles and great families of Denmark came over to their new conquest, and stationed themselves in strong fortresses, commanding large circles of country, and lived under their Danish regulations. The land, to be sure, was not populous at that time, and probably the Danish settlements were accomplished without the removal of any original occupiers. |A.D. 860.|But the castles they built, and the towns which rapidly grew around them, acted as outposts against the remaining British kingdoms; and at last, when fleet after fleet disembarked their thousands of warlike colonists—when Leicester, Lincoln, Stamford, York, and Chester, were all in Danish hands, and stretched a line of intrenchments round the lands they considered their own—the divided Anglo-Saxons were glad to purchase a cessation of hostilities by guaranteeing to them forever the places and territories they had secured. And there was now a Danish kingdom enclosed by the fragments of the English empire; there were Danish laws and customs, a Danish mode of pronunciation, and for a good while a still broader gulf of demarcation established between the peoples by their diversity in religious faith. |A.D. 872.|But when Alfred attained the supreme power—and although respecting the treaties between the Danes and English, yet evidently able to defend his countrymen from the aggressions of their foreign neighbour—the pacified pirate, tired of the sea, and softened by the richer soil and milder climate of his new home, began to perceive the very unsatisfactory nature of his ancient belief, and rapidly gave his adhesion to the lessons of the gospel. Guthrum, the Danish chieftain, became a zealous Christian according to his lights, and was baptized with all his subjects. Alfred acted as godfather to the neophyte, and restrained the wildest of his followers within due bounds. Perhaps, even, he was assisted by his Christianized allies in the great and final struggle against Hastings and a new swarm of Scandinavian rovers, whose defeat is the concluding act of this tumultuous century. Alfred drew up near London, and met the advancing hosts on the banks of the river Lea, about twenty miles from town. The patient angler in that suburban river seldom thinks what great events occurred upon its shore. Great ships—all things are comparative—were floating upon its waters, filled with armed Danes. Alfred cut certain openings in the banks and lowered the stream, so that the hostile navy stranded. Out sprang the Danes, astonished at the interruption to their course, and retreated across the country, nor stopped till they had placed themselves in inaccessible positions on the Severn. But the century came to a close. Opening with the great days of Charlemagne, it is right that it should close with the far more glorious reign of Alfred the patriot and sage;–a century illuminated at its two extremes, but in its middle period dark with disunion and ignorance, and not unlikely, unless controlled to higher uses, to give birth to a state of more hopeless barbarism than that from which the nations of Europe had so recently emerged.