Carolingian dynasty

“ The clergy were to assert their allegiance to a King higher than any earthly monarch, whose commands, as issued and tampered with by His representative on earth, were to be at variance with all the best interests of the emperor. Nationality was to war with universalism, the accepted principles of heredity with the desire for the necessary unity; and with the death of the last Carolingian emperor the empire itself was irretrievably to be cleft and riven. ”

“ We begin in a time of gloom and sorrow. The Carolingian Empire, which had united the vigour of the barbarians with the civilisation of the Roman world, had broken up. The sacred name of Emperor had been assumed so constantly by weaklings that it had ceased to have much hold upon the minds of men. The great kingdoms, into which the Carolingian Empire had resolved itself, seemed destined to undergo the process that had destroyed the parent state. The East Frankish realm—the later Germany—was breaking up into its four national duchies of Saxony, Franconia, Bavaria, and Swabia. ”

“ Throughout the 9th and 10th centuries, as the life-benefices of the later Carolingian kings became gradually transformed into hereditary fiefs, the insecurity of life and property grew greater; for there was no central power to curb the injustice of the petty dukes and counts who warred and pillaged at their will. ”

“ The earliest Carolingians were as selfish and short-sighted as most of their wealthy neighbors — they struggled for land and power, and did not hesitate to oppose the king or to precipitate civil war if it was to their advantage to do so. As they became more prominent in the affairs of the kingdom they gradually developed more sense of responsibility and more interest in religion and learning. Their rise to power was made easier by the existence of a peculiar Frankish institution — the mayorship of the palace. ”

“ Suddenly there came, in 800, his own coronation as emperor, Relations
of the Carolingian to the Eastern empire. an act apparently unpremeditated at the moment, taking him by surprise, as one gathers from Einhard’s Vita Karoli, and interrupting his plans. It left him representative of the Empire for the West only, confronting another representative in the East. Such a position he did not desire: there had been a single Empire vested in a single person since 476, and he desired that there should still continue to be a single Empire, vested only in his own person. ”

“ Amongst the eleven kings who after him ascended the Carlovingian throne, several, such as Louis III. and Carloman, and, especially, Louis the Ultramarine (d’Outremer) and Lothaire, displayed, on several occasions, energy and courage; and the kings elected, at this epoch, without the pale of the Carlovingian dynasty—Eudes in 887 and Raoul in 923—gave proofs of a valor both discreet and effectual. ”

“ After his death the Carolingian Empire, attacked by the Northmen and other invaders and weakened by civil conflicts, broke up into separate kingdoms.
DECLINE OF ROYAL AUTHORITY Charlemagne's successors in France, Germany, and Italy enjoyed little real authority. They reigned, but did not rule. Under the conditions of the age, it was impossible for a king to govern with a strong hand. The absence of good roads or of other easy means of communication made it difficult for him to move troops quickly from one district to another, in order to quell revolts. ”

“ The idea of working for posterity does not naturally occur to half-civilised peoples; they live from hand to mouth, and are continually absorbed in the difficulties of the moment; they believe in the supremacy of chance or fate or providence, and speak of human forethought as presumptuous or merely futile. The imperial programme was cherished and publicly defended by a little clique of clerical statesmen; but they did not succeed in making many converts. When the last of the Carolingian Emperors was deposed (887) , there were cries of lamentation from ecclesiastics. ”

“ P. 189, c. 1.—“Charlemagne.” After the death of Charlemagne, 814, the kingdom fell to his son Louis. In 843 it was divided between the three sons of the latter. The kingdom remained with the Carlovingian house until 911, when the dynasty became extinct. The entire country was divided into many territories or states ruled by dukes, and the election of the king was given to them. After the death of the last of the Carlovingians the electors chose Conrad I., a Franconian, after whom the Saxons held the throne until 1024. ”

“ The importance of the vassal depended entirely on his wealth and his rank in the King's employ. Only in the old age of the Carolingian Empire, when the class of free landowners, acknowledging no lord, had been almost ground out of existence by official oppression and the intolerable burden of military service, was the burden of national defence thrown entirely upon vassals. Then, as the sole military class in the community, they acquired the consideration which, in early stages of social development, is the monopoly of those who are trained to arms. ”

“ The Capetian kings posed as the lawful successors of the Carolingians: they had the same conceptions of sovereignty, and followed the same principles of government. |Its results.| Yet those are not far wrong who regard the accession of Hugh as the starting-point of all later French history. It is easy to exaggerate the nature of the change. It is unsafe to make the change of dynasty a triumph of one race over another. ”

“ The Teuton Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver were as completely forgotten of the poets who met in that memorable combat of the Wartburg, as were the Teuton Sigurd and Dietrich. And if the Carolingian cycle survived, however much altered, I think it must have been thanks to the burghers and artizans of the Netherlands and of Provence, to whom the bluff, matter-of-fact heroism, the simple, gross, but not illegitimate amours of Carolingian heroes, were more satisfactory than any mystic quest of the Grail, any refined adultery of Guenevere or Yseult. ”

“ Charlemagne was the true founder of the Carlovingian dynasty, and was by conquest the ruler over much of what is now Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy. He is one of the colossal figures in early European history. But even his genius, though gifted with the finest traits of the soldier, administrator, and law-maker, could not delay that tremendous revolution of society, which intervened between the collapse of the old Roman system and the establishment of feudalism. ”

“ From the Papacy, then, on the accession of the Carlovingians, came the principal decisions and steps. The reciprocal services rendered one to the other by the two powers, and still more, perhaps, the similarity of their maxims as to the unity of the empire, established between the Papacy and the Carlovingians strong ties of gratitude and policy; and, accordingly, when the Carlovingian dynasty was in danger, the court of Rome was grieved and troubled; it was hard for her to see the fall of a dynasty for which she had done so much and which had done so much for her. ”

“ The Carolingian, like the Merovingian, realm included many different peoples who were destined never to become one nation; and the whole Carolingian system of government virtually had existed in the Merovingian period. Before, as well as after, the dynastic change, the government throughout the realm was administered by Counts. Likewise the famous missi dominici, or royal legates, are found in Merovingian times; but they were employed more effectively by Charles Martell, Pippin, and, finally, by Charlemagne, who enlarged their sphere of action. ”

“ But the maxims by which the Carlovingian scepter had been won were not less necessary in order to defend and to retain it. They afford the key to more than half the history of the great conqueror from whom that dynasty derives its name. The cardinal points to which throughout his long and glorious reign his mind was directed with an inflexible tenacity of purpose, were precisely those toward which his forefathers had bent their attention. They were to conciliate the attachment of his German subjects by studiously maintaining their old German institutions ”

“ When we turn from this noble dream to follow the history of the Carolingian Empire, the contrast between the real and the ideal is almost grotesque. Within a generation the Frankish realm is partitioned after the Merovingian fashion; all that remains as a guarantee of unity is the imperial title attached to one of several kingdoms, and the theory that the kings are linked in fraternal concord for the defence of Church and State against all enemies. Contemporaries laid the blame on the weakness of Lewis the Pious and the ambition of his sons. ”

“ The assumption of the title of emperor was destined to make the German rulers a great deal of trouble. It constantly led them into futile efforts to maintain a supremacy over Italy, which lay without their natural boundaries. Then the circumstances under which Charlemagne was crowned made it possible for the popes to claim, later, that it was they who had transferred the imperial power from the old eastern line of emperors to the Carolingian house, and that this was a proof of their right to dispose of the crown as they pleased. ”

“ Feudalism was not long in undisputed possession of the field. From the revival of the German kingdom by the Saxon kings sprang the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, beginning with the coronation of Otto the Great in 962. Less universal, less ecclesiastical, less truly Roman than the Carolingian Empire, the Empire of the Saxons and Franks was based essentially upon the German kingship, yet was ever trying to outgrow its limitations, and to claim in its completeness the Carolingian heritage. ”

“ In the meanwhile during the Merovingian, and more potently in the Carolingian period, king’s law, as distinguished from people’s law, had been an influence making for legal uniformity throughout that wide conglomerate empire which acknowledged the authority of the Frankish king or emperor. The king’s law might emanate from the delegated authority, and arise from the practices, of royal functionaries; [Pg 248] it was most formally promulgated in Capitularies, which with Charlemagne reach such volume and importance. ”

“ Portrait of Charlemagne, whom the Song of Roland names the King with the Grizzly Beard.--Fac-simile of an Engraving of the End of the Sixteenth Century.
The revolution in society which took place under the Carlovingian dynasty had for its especial object that of rendering territorial what was formerly personal, and, as it were, of destroying personality in matters of government.
The usurpation of lands by the great having been thus limited by the influence of the lesser holders, everybody tried to become the holder of land. ”

“ It was not to be compared with the old Roman empire, it did not at all come up to what the Carolingian had been. But it did give strong and irrevocable expression to the idea of a highest authority in Germany, an authority bound up with religion, yet independent in itself. ... The foundation of the Germanic empire, that is of an organization which, resting on the internal development of the German nations had won a universal position through the extension of the power of the Ottos over Italy, forms the event of world-wide importance of the tenth century. ”

“ The West Frankish realm was 3the prey of the rivalry of the Carolings and the Robertians. The Middle Kingdom was in still worse plight. Italy had fallen away under a line of nominal Italian or Lombard kings, but the south was Greek or Saracen, and the north was in hopeless confusion. The northern parts of the Middle Kingdom, to which alone the name Lotharingia clung, were tending towards their ultimate destiny of becoming a fifth national duchy of the German realm, though their loyalty for the Carolingian house brought them more than once back to the West Frankish kingdom. ”

“ Force had to be used to overcome immediate opposition, but the Carolingians were wise enough to realize that force alone would never give them a secure position. They had to gain the loyalty of their subjects by giving them a common set of ideals, and the only ideals which could be accepted by all the inhabitants of the West were those of Christianity. Therefore, the Carolingians consistently and energetically supported missions to the pagans and reform movements among the nominally Christian inhabitants of their empire. ”

“ In the transition from the Carlovingian, to the Capetian dynasty, we should not forget that the monarchy was not strictly hereditary in any German state, but was for the most part merely elective; and it was only he, who had proved himself a valiant, prudent, and powerful defender of his nation, that became the man of the public choice. Royalty was then considered more in the light of an office, a charge, a peculiar calling, than of an inheritance or patrimony. ”

“ In their eyes, and in the eyes of Charlemagne’s own descendants, the Empire was something appendant to the kingship of the Franks, which made that kingship unique among others, but did not radically alter its character. True, the kingship might be divided among brothers by the old Germanic custom of partition, while the Empire must inhere in one person; but that was the one difference, and the one difficulty, which might easily be solved by attaching the name of emperor to the eldest brother. Such was the conception of the Carolings: such was not, however, the conception of the Church. ”