No ruler for many centuries so powerfully impressed the imagination of western Europe as the first Frankish Emperor of Rome. The vast cycle of romantic epic poetry which gathered round the name of Charlemagne, the stories of his wars with the Infidels, his expeditions to Constantinople and Jerusalem, his Twelve Peers of France, the friendship of Roland and Oliver and the treachery of Ganelon—all this is of matchless interest in the history of the development of mediÆval literature, but of course adds nothing to our knowledge of the real Charles of history, since these romances were confessedly the work of wandering minstrels and took no definite shape till at least three centuries after the death of Charlemagne.

In this concluding chapter I propose very briefly to enumerate some of the chief traces of the great emperor’s forming hand on the western church, on Literature, on Laws, and on the State-system of Europe. I. Theologically, Charles’s chief performances were the condemnation of the Adoptianist heresy72 of Felix of Urgel by the Council of Frankfurt (794): the condemnation of the adoration of images by the same Council; and the addition to the Nicene Creed of the celebrated words “Filioque,” which asserted that the Holy Spirit “proceedeth from the Father and the Son.” In these two last performances Charles acted more or less in opposition to the advice and judgment of the pope, and the addition to the Creed was one of the causes which led to the schism between the eastern and western churches, and which have hitherto frustrated all schemes for their reunion.

In the government of the church Charles all through his reign took the keenest interest, and a large—as most modern readers would think a disproportionate—part of his Capitularies is dedicated to this subject. Speaking generally, it may be said that he strove, as his father before him had striven, to subdue the anarchy that had disgraced the churches of Gaul under the Merovingian kings. He insisted on the monks and the canonical priests living according to the rules which they professed: he discouraged the manufacture of new saints, the erection of new oratories, the worship of new archangels other than the well-known three, Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael. He earnestly exhorted the bishops to work in harmony with the counts for the maintenance of the public peace. While not slow to condemn the faults of the episcopacy he supported their authority against mutinous priests: and pre-eminently by the example which he set to Gaul in the powerful and well-compacted hierarchy which he established in Germany he strengthened the aristocratic constitution of the church under the rule of its bishops. At the same time there can be no doubt that by his close relations with the Roman Pontiff and by the temporal sovereignty which he bestowed upon him, he contributed, consciously or unconsciously, to the ultimate transformation of the western church into an absolute monarchy under the headship of the pope. That Charles, with all his zeal for the welfare of the church, was not blind to the faults of the churchmen of his day is shown by the remarkable series of questions—possibly drawn up from his dictation by Einhard—which are contained in a Capitulary of 811 written three years before his death:

“We wish to ask the ecclesiastics themselves, and those who have not only to learn but to teach out of the Holy Scriptures, who are they to whom the Apostle says, ‘Be ye imitators of me’; or who is that about whom the same Apostle says, ‘No man that warreth entangleth himself with the business of this world’: in other words, how the Apostle is to be imitated, or how he (the ecclesiastic) wars for God?”

“Further, we must beg of them that they will truly show us what is this ‘renouncing of the world’, which is spoken of by them: or how we can distinguish those who renounce the world from those who still follow it, whether it consists in anything more than this, that they do not bear arms and are not publicly married?”

“We must also inquire if that man has relinquished the world who is daily laboring to increase his possessions in every manner and by every artifice, by sweet persuasions about the blessedness of heaven and by terrible threats about the punishments of hell; who uses the name of God or of some saint to despoil simpler and less learned folk, whether rich or poor, of their property, to deprive the lawful heirs of their inheritance, and thus to drive many through sheer destitution to a life of robbery and crime which they would otherwise never have embraced?”

Several more questions of an equally searching character are contained in this remarkable Capitulary.

II. If doubts may arise in some minds how far Charles’s ecclesiastical policy was of permanent benefit to the human race, no such doubts can be felt as to his patronage of literature and science. Herein he takes a foremost place among the benefactors of humanity, as a man who, himself imperfectly educated, knew how to value education in others; as one who, amid the manifold harassing cares of government and of war, could find leisure for that friendly intercourse with learned men which far more than his generous material gifts cheered them on in their arduous and difficult work; and as the ruler to whom more perhaps than to any other single individual we owe the fact that the precious literary inheritance of Greece and Rome has not been altogether lost to the human race. Every student of the history of the texts of the classical authors knows how many of our best MSS. date from the ninth century, the result unquestionably of the impulse given by Charles and his learned courtiers to classical studies. It is noticeable also that this reign constitutes an important era in Paleography, the clear and beautiful “minuscule”73 of the Irish scribes being generally substituted for the sprawling and uncouth characters which had gone by the name of Langobardic. In one of his Capitularies Charles calls the attention of his clergy to the necessity for careful editing of the Prayer-books; otherwise those who desire to pray rightly will pray amiss. He enjoins them not to suffer boys to corrupt the sacred text either in writing or reading. If they require a new gospel, missal, or psalter, let it be copied with the utmost care by men of full age. In another Capitulary, he expresses his displeasure that some priests, who were poor when they were ordained, have grown rich out of the church’s treasures, acquiring for themselves lands and slaves, but not purchasing books or sacred vessels for the church’s use.

Something has already been said as to the Academy in Charles’s palace, which was apparently founded on the basis of a court-school established in his father’s lifetime but became a much more important institution in his own. Probably it was then transformed from a school for children into an Academy for learned men, in the sense in which the word has been used at Athens, Florence, and Paris. Alcuin, after his departure from court, founded a school at Tours, which acquired great fame; and we hear of schools also at Utrecht, Fulda, WÜrzburg, and elsewhere. Doubtless, most of these schools were primarily theological seminaries, but as we have seen in the case of Alcuin, a good deal of classical literature and mathematical science was, at any rate in some schools, taught alongside of the correct rendering of the church service.

The Monk of St. Gall (who wrote, as we have seen, two generations after Charlemagne, and whose stories we therefore accept with some reserve) gives us an interesting and amusing picture of one of the schools under Charles’s patronage. After giving a legendary and inaccurate account of the arrival of two Irish scholars in Gaul, named Alcuin and Clement, he goes on to say that Charles persuaded Clement to settle in Gaul, and sent him a number of boys, sons of nobles, of middle-class men and of peasants, to be taught by him, while they were lodged and boarded at the king’s charges. After a long time he returned to Gaul, and ordered these lads to be brought into his presence, and to bring before him letters and poems of their own composition. The boys sprung from the middle and lower classes offered compositions which were “beyond all expectation sweetened with the seasoning of wisdom,” but the productions of the young nobility were “tepid, and absolutely idiotic.” Hereupon the king, as it were, anticipating the Last Judgment, set the industrious lads on his right hand and the idlers on his left. He addressed the former with words of encouragement, “I thank you, my sons, for the zeal with which you have attended to my commands. Only go on as you have begun, and I will give you splendid bishoprics and abbacies, and you shall be ever honorable in my eyes.” But to those on his left hand he turned with angry eyes and frowning brow, and addressed them in a voice of thunder, “You young nobles, you dainty and beautiful youths, who have presumed upon your birth and your possessions to despise mine orders, and have taken no care for my renown; you have neglected the study of literature, while you have given yourselves over to luxury and idleness, or to games and foolish athletics.” Then, raising his august head and unconquered right hand towards heaven, he swore a solemn oath, “By the King of Heaven, I care nothing for your noble birth and your handsome faces, let others prize them as they may. Know this for certain, that unless ye give earnest heed to your studies, and recover the ground lost by your negligence, ye shall never receive any favor at the hand of King Charles.”

There was one branch of learning in which Charles was evidently not enough helped by his friends of the classical revival, and in which one cannot help wishing that his judgment had prevailed over theirs. Einhard tells us that he reduced to writing and committed to memory “those most ancient songs of the barbarians in which the actions of the kings of old and their wars were chanted.” Would that these precious relics of the dim Teutonic fore-world had been thought worthy of preservation by Alcuin and his disciples!

He also began to compose a grammar of his native speech; he gave names to the winds blowing from twelve different quarters, whereas previously men had named but four; and he gave Teutonic instead of Latin names to the twelve months of the year. They were—for January, Wintarmanoth; February, Hornung; March, Lentzinmanoth; April, Ostarmanoth; May, Winnemanoth; June, Brachmanoth; July, Hewimanoth; August, Aranmanoth; September, Witumanoth; October, Windumemanoth; November, Herbistmanoth; December, Heilagmanoth.

III. It is of course impossible to deal with more than one or two of the most important products of Charles’s legislative and administrative activity.

1. In the first place, we have to remark that Charles was not in any sense like Justinian or Napoleon, a codifier of laws. On the contrary, the title chosen by him after his capture of Pavia, “Rex Langobardorum,” indicates the general character of his policy, which was to leave the Lombards under Lombard law, the Romans under Roman law; even the Saxons, if they would only accept Christianity, to some extent under Saxon institutions. To turn all the various nationalities over which he ruled into Ripuarian Franks was by no means the object of the conqueror; on the contrary, so long as they loyally obeyed the great central government they might keep their own laws, customs, and language unaltered. As this principle applied not only to tribes and races of men, but also to individuals, we find ourselves in presence of that most peculiar phenomenon of the early Middle Ages which is known as the system of “personal law.” In our modern society, if the citizen of one country goes to reside in the territory of another civilized and well-ordered country, he is bound to conform to the laws of that country. Where this rule does not prevail (as in the case of the rights secured by the “capitulations” to Europeans dwelling in Turkey or Morocco) it is a distinct sign that we are in the presence of a barbarous law to which the more civilized nations will not submit. But quite different from this was the conception of law in the ninth century under Charles the Great and his successors. Then, every man, according to his nationality, or even his profession,—according as he was Frank or Lombard, Alaman or Bavarian, Goth or Roman, layman or ecclesiastic,—carried, so to speak, his own legal atmosphere about with him, and might always claim to be judged secundum legem patriÆ suÆ.74 Thus, according to an often-quoted passage, “so great was the diversity of laws that you would often meet with it, not only in countries or cities, but even in single houses. For it would often happen that five men would be sitting or walking together, not one of whom would have the same law with any other.”

But though Charles made no attempt, and apparently had no desire, to reduce all the laws of his subjects to one common denominator, he had schemes for improving, and even to some extent harmonizing, the several national codes which he found in existence. But these schemes were only imperfectly realized. As Einhard says, “After his assumption of the imperial title, as he perceived that many things were lacking in the laws of his people (for the Franks have two systems of law, in many places very diverse from one another), he thought to add those things which were wanting, to reconcile discrepancies, and to correct what was bad and ill expressed. But of all this naught was accomplished by him, save that he added a few chapters, and those imperfect ones, to the laws [of the Salians, Ripuarians, and Bavarians]. All the legal customs, however, that were not already written, of the various nations under his dominion, he caused to be taken down and committed to writing.”

While Charles’s new legislation was in general of an enlightened and civilized character, a modern reader is surprised and pained by the prominence which he gives, or allows, to those barbarous and superstitious modes of determining doubtful causes—wager of battle, ordeal by the cross, and ordeal by the hot ploughshares. As to the first of these especially, the language of the Capitularies seems to show a retrogression from the wise distrust of that manner of arriving at truth expressed half a century earlier by the Lombard king, Liutprand.

2. A question which we cannot help asking, though it hardly admits of an answer, is “What was Charles’s relation to that feudal system which, so soon after his death, prevailed throughout his empire, and which so quickly destroyed its unity?” The growth of that system was so gradual, and it was due to such various causes, that no one man can be regarded as its author, hardly even to any great extent as its modifier. It was not known to early Merovingian times; its origin appears to be nearly contemporaneous with that of the power of the Arnulfing mayors of the palace; it must certainly have been spreading more widely and striking deeper roots all through the reign of Charlemagne, and yet we can hardly attribute either to him or to his ancestors any distinct share in its establishment. It was, so to speak, “in the air,” even as democracy, trades’ unions, socialism, and similar ideas are in the air of the nineteenth century. Feudalism apparently had to be, and it “sprang and grew up, one knoweth not how.”

One of the clearest allusions to the growing feudalism of society is contained in a Capitulary of Charles issued the year before his death, in which it is ordained that no man shall be allowed to renounce his dependence on a feudal superior after he has received any benefit from him, except in one of four cases—if the lord have sought to slay his vassal, or have struck him with a stick, or have endeavored to dishonor his wife or daughter, or to take away his inheritance. In an expanded version of the same decree a fifth cause of renunciation is admitted—if the lord have failed to give to the vassal that protection which he promised when the vassal put his hands in the lord’s, and “commended” himself to his guardianship. Other allusions to the same system are to be found in the numerous Capitularies in which Charles urges the repeated complaint that the vassals of the Crown are either endeavoring to turn their beneficia into allodia or, if possessing property of both kinds,—a beneficium under the Crown and an allodium by purchase or inheritance from their fathers,—are starving and despoiling the royal beneficium for the benefit of their own allodium.

3. An institution which was intended to check these and similar irregularities, and generally to uphold the imperial authority and the rights of the humbler classes against the encroachments of the territorial aristocracy, was the peculiarly Carolingian institution of missi dominici, or (as we may translate the words) “imperial commissioners.” These men may be likened to the emperor’s staff-officers, bearing his orders to distant regions, and everywhere, as his representatives, carrying on his ceaseless campaign against oppression and anarchy. The pivot of provincial government was still, as it had been in Merovingian times, the Frankish comes or count, who had his headquarters generally in one of the old Roman cities, and governed from thence a district which was of varying extent, but which may be fairly taken as equivalent to an English county. Under him were the centenarii, who, originally rulers of that little tract of country known as the Hundred, now had a somewhat wider scope, and acted probably as vicarii or representatives of the count throughout the district subject to his jurisdiction. These governors, especially the count, were doubtless generally men of wealth and great local influence. They had not yet succeeded in making their offices hereditary and transmitting the countship, as a title of nobility is now transmitted, from father to son. The strong hand of the central government prevented this change from taking place in Charles’s day, but it, too, like so much else that had a feudal tendency, was “in the air”; and it may have been partly in order to guard against this tendency and to keep his counts merely life-governors that Charles devised his institution of missi.

But a nobler and more beneficial object aimed at was to ensure that justice should be “truly and indifferently administered” to both rich and poor, to the strong and to the defenceless. It is interesting in this connection to observe what was the so-called “eight-fold ban” proclaimed by the Frankish legislator. Any one who (1) dishonored Holy Church; (2) or acted unjustly against widows; (3) or against orphans; (4) or against poor men who were unable to defend themselves; (5) or carried off a free-born woman against the will of her parents; (6) or set on fire another man’s house or stable; (7) or who committed harizhut—that is to say, who broke open by violence another man’s house, door, or enclosure; (8) or who when summoned did not go forth against the enemy, came under the king’s ban, and was liable to pay for each offence sixty solidi (£36).75 Here we see that three of the specified offences were precisely those which a powerful local count or centenarius would be tempted to commit against the humbler suitors in his court, and which it would be the business of a missus dominicus to discover and report to his lord.

The missi had, however, a wide range of duties beyond the mere control and correction of unjust judges. It was theirs to enforce the rights of the royal treasury, to administer the oath of allegiance to the inhabitants of a district, to inquire into any cases of wrongful appropriation of church property, to hunt down robbers, to report upon the morals of bishops, to see that monks lived according to the rule of their order. Sometimes they had to command armies (the brave Gerold of Bavaria was such a missus) and to hold placita in the name of the king. Of course the choice of a person to act as missus would largely depend on the nature of the duties that he had to perform: a soldier for the command of armies or an ecclesiastic for the inspection of monasteries. As Charles, in his embassies to foreign courts, was fond of combining the two vocations, and sending a stout layman and a subtle ecclesiastic together to represent him at Cordova or Constantinople, so he may often have duplicated these internal embassies, these roving commissions, to inquire into the abuses of authority in his own domains.

We have, in one of Charles’s later Capitularies, an admirable exhortation which, though put forth in the name of the missi, surely came from the emperor’s own robust intellect:—“Take care,” the missi say to the count whose district they are about to visit, “that neither you nor any of your officers are so evil disposed as to say ‘Hush! hush! say nothing about that matter till those missi have passed by, and afterwards we will settle it quietly among ourselves.’ Do not so deny or even postpone the administration of justice; but rather give diligence that justice may be done in the case before we arrive.”

The institution of missi dominici served its purpose for a time, but proved to be only a temporary expedient. There was an increasing difficulty in finding suitable men for this delicate charge, which required in those who had to execute it both strength and sympathy, an independent position, and willingness to listen to the cry of the humble. Even already in the lifetime of Charles there was a visible danger that the missus might become another oppressor as burdensome to the common people as any of the counts whom he was appointed to superintend. And after all, the missus could only transmit to the distant regions of the empire as much power as he received from its centre. Under the feeble Louis the Pious, his wrangling sons and his inept grandsons, the institution grew ever weaker and weaker. Admirable instructions for the guidance of the missi were drawn up at headquarters, but there was no power to enforce them. With the collapse of the Carolingian dynasty towards the close of the ninth century the missi dominici disappear from view.

4. Another institution was perhaps due to Charles’s own personal initiative; at any rate it was introduced at the outset of his reign, and soon spread widely through his dominions. It was that of the scabini, whose functions recall to us sometimes those of our justices of the peace, sometimes those of our grand-jurors, and sometimes those of our ordinary jurors. Chosen for life, out of the free, but not probably out of the powerful classes, men of respectable character and unstained by crime, they had, besides other functions, pre-eminently that of acting as assessors to the comes or to the centenarius in his court of justice. Seven was the regular number that should be present at a trial, though sometimes fewer were allowed to decide. As in all the earlier stages of the development of the jury system, they were at least as much witnesses as judges—their own knowledge or common report forming the chief ground of their decision. It is not clear whether their verdict was necessarily unanimous, but it seems certain that the decision was considered to be theirs, and not that of the presiding functionary, whether comes, vicarius, or centenarius. It was, moreover, final; for, as one of the Capitularies distinctly says, “After the scabini have condemned a man as a robber, it is not lawful for either the comes or the vicarius to grant him life.”

The scabini were expected to be present at the meetings of the county—probably also, to some extent, at those of the nation, and they joined in the assent which was there given to any new Capitularies that were promulgated by the emperor. It is easy to see how, both in their judicial and in their legislative capacity, the scabini may have acted as a useful check on the lawless encroachments of the counts. There was probably in this institution a germ which, had the emperors remained mighty, would have limited the power of the aristocracy, and have formed in time a democratic basis upon which a strong and stable monarchy might have been erected.

IV. Lastly, a few words must be said as to the permanent results of Charles’s life and work on the state-system of Europe. In endeavoring to appraise them let us keep our minds open to the consideration not only of that which actually was, but also of that which might have been, had the descendants of Charles been as able men as himself and his progenitors.

The three great political events of Charles’s reign were his conquest of Italy, his consolidation of the Frankish kingdom, and his assumption of the imperial title.

1. His conduct towards the vanquished Lombards was, on the whole, generous and statesmanlike. By assuming the title of King of the Lombards he showed that it was not his object to destroy the nationality of the countrymen of Alboin, nor to fuse them into one people with the Franks. Had his son Pippin lived and transmitted his sceptre to his descendants, there might possibly have been founded a kingdom of Italy, strong, patriotic, and enduring. In that event some of the glorious fruits of art and literature which were ripened in the independent Italian republics of the Middle Ages might never have been brought forth, but the Italians, though a less artistic people, would have been spared much bloodshed and many despairs.

But we can only say that this was a possible contingency. By the policy (inherited from his father) which he pursued towards the papal see, Charles called into existence a power which would probably always have been fatal to the unity and freedom of Italy. That wedge of Church-Dominions thrust in between the north and south would always tend to keep Lombardy and Tuscany apart from Spoleto and Benevento; and the endless wrangle between Pope and King would perhaps have been renewed even as in the days of the Lombards. The descendants of the pacific and God-crowned king would then have become “unutterable” and the “not-to-be-mentioned” Franks, and peace and unity would have been as far from the fated land as they have been in very deed for a thousand years.

2. Charles’s greatest work, as has been once or twice hinted in the course of the preceding narrative, was his extension and consolidation of the Frankish kingdom. One cannot see that he did much for what we now call France, but his work east of the Rhine was splendidly successful. Converting the Saxons,—a triumph of civilization, however barbarous were the methods employed,—subduing the rebellious Bavarians, keeping the Danes and the Sclavonic tribes on his eastern border in check, and utterly crushing the Avars, he gave the Teutonic race that position of supremacy in Central Europe which, whatever may have been the ebb and flow of Teutonism in later centuries, it has never been forced to surrender, and which, with all its faults, has been a blessing to Europe.

3. As to the assumption of the imperial title, it is much more difficult to speak with confidence. We have seen reason to think that Charles himself was only half persuaded of its expediency. It was a noble idea, this revival of the old world-wide empire and its conversion into a Civitas Dei, the realized dream of St. Augustine. But none knew better than the monarch himself how far his empire came short of these grand prophetic visions; and profounder scholars than Alcuin could have told him how little it had really in common with the state which was ruled by Augustus or by Trajan. That empire had sprung out of a democratic republic, and retained for centuries something of that resistless energy which the consciousness of self-government gives to a brave and patient people. Charles’s empire was cradled, not in the city but in the forest; its essential principle was the loyalty of henchmen to their chief; it was already permeated by the spirit of feudalism, and between feudalism and any true reproduction of the Imperium Romanum there could be no abiding union.

I need not here allude to the divergence in language, customs and modes of thought between the various nationalities which composed the emperor’s dominions. The mutual antagonism of nations and languages was not so strong in the Middle Ages as it has been in our own day, and possibly a succession of able rulers might have kept the two peoples, who in their utterly different languages swore in 842 the great oath of Strasburg,76 still one. But the spirit of feudalism was more fatal to the unity of the empire than these differences of race and language. The mediÆval emperor was perpetually finding himself overtopped by one or other of his nominal vassals, and history has few more pitiable spectacles than some that were presented by the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire—men bearing the great names of CÆsar and Augustus—tossed helplessly to and fro on the waves of European politics, the laughing-stock of their own barons and marquises, and often unable to provide for the ordinary expenses of their households.

But all this belongs to the story of the Middle Ages, not to the life of the founder of the empire. It would be absurd to say that he could have foreseen all the weak points of the great, and on the whole beneficent, institution which he bestowed on Western Europe. And whatever estimate we may form of the good or the evil which resulted from the great event of the eight hundredth Christmas day, none will deny that the whole history of Europe for at least seven hundred years was profoundly modified by the life and mighty deeds of Charles the Great.