The world's leading conquerors

Out of the chaos in Western Europe due to the collapse of Roman provincial rule in the fifth century, there came into being various Teutonic states. They all bore the mark of the early tribal organization of the German peoples and took up the work, more or less successfully, of assimilating the orderly elements and traditions of Roman polity. In the Italian peninsula the permanence of these political creations was short-lived, except in the case of the Lombards, who maintained an enduring rule, largely because they adhered to a crude policy of isolation and set well-considered limits to their desire for expansion. In Spain, the Goths, despite the predominance of the Roman provincial element, succeeded, with the help of the Church, in attaining a fairly centralized organization for several centuries until it was swept aside by the irresistible pressure of the Moslem conquest. To the North, in France, which was first of all the seat of various Teutonic peoples, the Franks, under the astute leadership of their tribal monarchs, gradually absorbed all the territory of the old Roman province of Gallia, adding to it the land to the east which had been the home of their ancestors before they had crossed into the Roman province.

Chlodvig, the founder of the Merovingian line of kings, was not a ruler of the type of Theodoric the Ostrogoth. In contrast with the Teutonic kingdoms of Italy and Spain, the Merovingian showed a stubborn conservatism. After Chlodvig’s death there was no man of first-rate ability during the period of Merovingian rule with the dubious exception of Dagobert. These were long years of division, lawlessness, and bloodshed. The Franks kept possession of their conquests, but the royal line produced a succession of weak and helpless rulers who showed themselves incapable of casting aside the traditions of tribal rule. The demand for centralization was recognized and met by the representatives of the noble family of Heristal who, because they were landlords over wide estates, became, as mayors of the palace, de facto possessors of sovereign authority. To them the Frankish chieftains throughout the land looked for leadership, and did not look in vain, for their efficient statesmanship soon arrested the disintegrating tendencies of Merovingian rule, and gave their people such an amount of cohesive strength that they became the foremost representatives of Teutonic power in Western Europe. It was the House of Heristal which saved the Franks from the fate of the Visigoths, for it was Charles the Hammer who met the Moslem host on the field of Poictiers and swept them back across the Pyrenees.

Charles’ son, Pippin, carried on the work of his father; he was strong, courageous, and cautious, a thorough type of the opportunist statesman, willing so far as he was concerned to control his people under the title of Mayor of the Palace, while the titular dignity of king was kept intact in the Merovingian family. The bloodless revolution which made Pippin a monarch de jure from a ruler de facto, was due to outside pressure, and this pressure came from the See of Rome, which appealed to him for help as the representative and most powerful Catholic leader in Western Europe after the Emperors at Constantinople had alienated the population in Italy by the part they played in the Iconoclastic controversy.

The Popes of the eighth century, seeing the inability of the Eastern Empire to protect its Italian possessions, and unwilling to give them support against the aggressions of the Lombards, were face to face with a difficult problem. They did not wish to be absorbed in the Lombard kingdom, and were just as much afraid of seeing any restoration of power to the hands of the Emperor’s representative, the Exarch of Ravenna.

Pope Stephen played a bold stroke of genius when he crossed the Alps to ask the ruler of the Franks to save the religious capital of Western Christianity from capture at the hands of the Lombard kings. Nor was his political sagacity yet exhausted, for he persuaded the Mayor of the Palace to regularize his own position by taking the title of king under the sanction of the Holy See. This was an ambitious design, unprecedented in the earlier pages of Papal history. Even Gregory the Great had no thought of bestowing the royal crown on any Teutonic tribal chieftain. The action was evidently suggested by the plan prepared some years before, when, with the coöperation of the Pope, it was proposed to revive in Italy a native Italian emperor to lead the people of the Peninsula against the church policy of Constantinople. This scheme was from the beginning a forlorn hope, and it had turned out to be a failure. There was not sufficient military strength in Italy, apart from the Lombards, to back up a revived Emperor of the West, and it is clear that the Lombards would have made short work of any such ruler, even if there had not been among the Italians a party who looked up to the Exarch of Ravenna as the natural head of their civil government.

The negotiations with Pippin ended successfully. The Pope’s prestige was enormously increased. Instead of looking forward to becoming the captive of a Lombard king, he became himself the bestower of royal dignity on a man who had at his disposal such vast military power that the passage of his army across the Alps into Lombard territory brought about the reduction of the Lombard kingdom to a status of dependency on a Frankish ruler.

Pippin, as a loyal churchman, followed the Pope’s counsel, but he seems to have done so with distinct reservations. The traditional Frankish policy had been the complete subordination of the Church to the State. It is no wonder then that many of the Frankish nobles disapproved of Pippin’s act, which reduced their monarchy to a gift from the hands of the Pope. Pippin did all he could during the rest of his lifetime to keep clear of further Italian complications. He never crossed the Alps again, and he was very careful not to depress the Lombard power in Northern Italy and so give Stephen an excuse for demanding additional territory. As a temporal ruler the Pope’s authority had been substantially increased by the cession of lands which he had claimed from him on the basis of the so-called Donation of Constantine—a fictitious instrument which Stephen appealed to when there arose the question of the disposition of the territory once belonging to the Exarchate of Ravenna. According to the legend, Pope Sylvester, the contemporary of Constantine, when the capital of the Empire had been removed to Constantinople, had received from the Emperor extensive donations of Italian territory, both on the Peninsula and on the adjacent islands, over which he was to rule with the power of a temporal sovereign. To Pippin, this legendary Donation, because of its presumed sanction at the hands of a revered Emperor and Pope, was sacred. He was willing to be an instrument in carrying out the terms of the sacrosanct compact, but he refused to go farther than this, and for the rest of his life he maintained an attitude of reserve in according additional favors to the Holy See.

Pippin’s reign came to an end as calmly as though the line of descent had been unbroken. Even the evil traditions of the Frankish monarchy with respect to the inheritance of the crown were not cast aside. Just as Cromwell and Napoleon felt the weight of custom in their relations with the members of their families, when they were arranging to perpetuate the power of their own creation, so Pippin, the diplomat, the cautious statesman, could do, or at least did nothing to alter the bad and impracticable tribal custom of division of patrimony. This practice caused the downfall of the Merovingian line, and had started the revolution by which the fortunes of the House of Heristal had been assured. This is only one of many anomalies which followed the breaking up of the administration of the Roman Empire, and which testified to the absence of initiative on the part of the Germanic peoples when they were called upon to solve problems of government, for which they had had no preparation. Rulers who did not hesitate to show their individuality in other ways proved fearful of violating tribal customs on questions of divisions of property and family precedence.

The new line of Frankish rulers had apparently learned nothing from the vicissitudes of the elder house. At the death of Charles Martel, the division of the kingdom between his two sons would have certainly endangered the sovereignty of his family had not the difficulty been averted by the abdication of Carloman the elder. Yet Pippin, on his deathbed, had not scrupled to make the same blunder of dividing the realm between his two sons, Charles and Carloman. Almost immediately after their father’s death the heirs, apparently mutually suspicious, separated from each other, and had themselves separately proclaimed kings by the Frankish nobles, and received anointment at the hands of the bishops, Charles at Noyon, Carloman at Soissons.

The diplomacy of the dead ruler was revealed in the kind of disposal he made of his realm. It was an equal division only on paper; for the arrangement of the shares was such that the elder son was left with such manifest superior advantages as to territory that the younger brother could not venture to compete with him. As his share Charles had the part of his father’s kingdom from which the Frankish hosts derived their chief military strength, viz.: the lands from the Main to the English Channel. Besides this, he received the western portion of Aquitaine, the province whose conquest had cost Pippin a hard struggle of seven years, and which, therefore, might become a dangerous center of warlike enterprise if it were placed entirely in the hands of the younger brother. Carloman had as his share the Suabian lands on both sides of the upper Rhine, and the entire Mediterranean coast from the Maritime Alps to the frontier of Spain. In addition to this there came to him the eastern half of the territory adjacent to such towns as Clermont, Rodez, Albi, and Toulouse.

In geographical extent there was but little advantage on the part of the elder brother, but the territory of the younger from a military point of view was far inferior. Carloman in case of war would have against him, under the command of Charles, the whole military power of the Franks. There was no pretense of friendship between the two new rulers; it seems they had never been friendly. The reason of the alienation may have been because the birth of Charles preceded the formal transfer of the Frankish crown to his father. He was, therefore, the son of a Mayor of the Palace, while Carloman, though younger, was son of the King of the Franks.

The question of the duration of external harmony between the brothers was of especial importance in its effect on the situation in the Italian peninsula. Some of the Frankish nobles had by no means approved of Pippin’s policy of opposition to the Lombard kings, and had criticised his willingness to protect the integrity of the dominions of the Pope, whenever he was appealed to from Rome for aid. The efforts of the Queen Mother Bertrada were evidently intended to promote a better feeling between the Franks and the Lombards, for she personally arranged a marriage between Charles and the daughter of Desiderius, the Lombard king. The protests of the Pope were unavailing when he urged, from a decidedly interested point of view, that Charles should marry a wife from his own people; although he recalled the oaths taken, when the two Frankish rulers were children, that they would have the same friends and the same enemies as the Church.

The whole situation, political as well as personal, was suddenly changed by the death of Carloman in 771, and by domestic difficulties in Charles’ own household which led to an alienation from his mother and caused the repudiation of his Lombard wife. Immediately after his brother’s death Charles was acknowledged as sole king throughout the Frankish territories, and the alliance with the Lombard party in Italy was brought to an end. Gerberga, Carloman’s widow, and her sons betook themselves to the court of Desiderius, which now became a natural refuge for all who were discontented with the new ruler of the Franks.