General re

sults of his

Empire.

despotism: each nation retains its laws, its hereditary CHAP. V. chiefs, its free popular assemblies. The conditions granted to the Saxons after long and cruel warfare, conditions so favourable that in the next century their dukes hold the foremost place in Germany, shew how little he sought to make the Franks a dominant caste. One may think of him as a second Theodorich, trying to maintain the traditions of Rome and to breathe a new spirit into the ancient forms. The conception was magnificent; and it fitted the time better than it had done in the hands of Theodorich, not only because Charles was himself orthodox and pious, but also because the name and dominion of Rome were now more closely associated with Christianity than they had been in days when the recollection of heathen Emperors was still fresh in the memory of men. But two obstacles forbade success. The one was the ecclesiastical, especially the papal power, apparently subject to the temporal, but with a strong and undefined prerogative which only waited the occasion to trample on what it had helped to raise. The Pope might take away the crown he had bestowed, and turn against the Emperor the Church which now obeyed him. The other was to be found in the discordance of the component parts of the Empire. The nations were not ripe for settled life or extensive schemes of polity; the differences of race, language, manners, over vast and thinly-peopled lands baffled every attempt to maintain their cohesion: and when once the spell of the great mind was withdrawn, the mutually repellent forces began to work, and the mass dissolved into that chaos out of which it had been formed. Nevertheless, the parts separated not as they met, but having all of them undergone influences which continued to act when political connection had ceased. For the work of Charles - a genius pre-eminently

CHAP. V.

Personal

habits and sympathies.

creative was not lost in the anarchy that followed : rather are we to regard his reign as the beginning of a new era, or as laying the foundations whereon men continued for many generations to build.

It is no longer necessary to shew how little the modern French, children of the Latinized Celt, have to do with the Teutonic Charles. At Rome he might assume the chlamys and the sandals, but at the head of his Frankish host he strictly adhered to the customs of his country, and was beloved by his people as the very ideal of their own character and habits. Of strength and stature almost superhuman, in swimming and hunting unsurpassed, steadfast and terrible in fight, to his friends gentle and condescending, he was a Roman, much less a Gaul,' in nothing but his culture and his schemes of government, otherwise a German. The centre of his realm was the Rhine; his favourite residences Aachen and Engilenheim; his sympathies as they are shewn in the gathering of the old hero-lays, the composition of a German grammar, the ordinance against confining prayer to the three languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, were all for the race from which he sprang, and whose advance, represented by the victory of Austrasia, the true Frankish fatherland along the

b

a

y He could, however, speak Latin as easily as German, but understood Greek better than he spoke it. He tried to learn to write, but, says Eginhard: 'parum successit labor praeposterus et sero inchoatus.'

Aix-la-Chapelle (called by English writers of the seventeenth century Aken). It is commemorated in the lines (to be found in Pertz's edition of Eginhard) beginning

a

'Urbs Aquensis, urbs regalis,

Sedes regni principalis,

Prima regum curia.'

Engilenheim, or Ingelheim, lies near the left shore of the Rhine between Mentz and Bingen.

b Barbara et antiquissima carmina quibus veterum regum actus et bella canebantur scripsit memoriaeque mandavit.'- Vita Karoli, cap. 29.

lower Rhine, over Neustria (central Gaul) and Aquitaine, CHAP. V. spread a second Germanic wave over the conquered countries.

and character

generally.

There were in his Empire, as in his own mind, two His Empire elements, those two from the union and mutual action and reaction of which modern civilization has arisen. These vast domains, reaching from the Ebro to the mountains of Hungary, from the Eyder to the Liris, were the conquests of the Frankish sword, and, although the army was drawn from all the more warlike races, the imperial governors and officers were mostly of Frankish blood. But the conception of the Empire, that which made it a State and not a mere mass of subject tribes like those great Eastern dominions which rise and perish in a lifetime, the realms of Sesostris, or Attila, or Timur, was inherited from an older and a grander polity, and had in it an element which was Roman rather than Teutonic Roman in its striving after the uniformity and precision of a well-ordered administration, which should subject the individual to the system and realize perfection through the rule of law. And the bond, too, by which the Empire was chiefly held together was Roman in its origin, although Roman in a sense which would have surprised Trajan or Severus, could it have been foretold them. The ecclesiastical body was already organized and beginning to be centralized, and it was in his control of the ecclesiastical body that the secret of Charles's power lay. Every Christian-Frank, Gaul, or Italian — owed loyalty to the head and defender of his religion: the unity of the Empire was a reflection of the unity of the Church.

These things were not in fact done, but the idea of doing them was involved in the imperial tradition. So he reduced to writing the laws of the various tribes subject to him (probably the Germanic tribes), 'Omnium nationum quae sub eius dominatu erant iura quae scripta non erant describere et literis mandari fecit.' – Vita Karoli, cap. 29.

CHAP. V.

Into a general view of the government and policy of Charles it is not possible here to enter. Yet his legislation, his assemblies, his administrative schemes, his magnificent works, recalling the projects of Alexander and Caesar, the zeal for education and literature, which he shewed in the collection of manuscripts, the founding of schools, the gathering of eminent men from all quarters around him, cannot be appreciated apart from his position as restorer of the Roman Empire. Like most of those who have led the world, Charles was many great things in one, and was so great just because the workings of his genius were so harmonious. He was more than a barbarian warrior, more than an astute negotiator; there is none of his qualities which would not be forced out of its place were we to characterize him chiefly by it. Comparisons between famous men of different ages are generally as unprofitable as they are easy: the circumstances among which Charles lived do not permit us to institute a minute parallel between his greatness and that of those two to whom it was once the fashion to compare him, nor to say whether he was as profound a statesman as Julius Caesar, as skilful a commander as Napoleon. But scarcely either to the Roman or to the Corsican was he inferior in that quality by which both he and they chiefly impress our imagination the vivid and unresting energy which swept him over Europe in campaign after campaign, which sought a field for its workings in theology and science, in law and literature, no less than in politics and war. As it was this amazing activity that made him the conqueror of Europe, so was it by the variety of his culture that he became her civilizer. From him, in whose wide deep mind the whole mediaeval theory of the world and human life mirrored itself, did mediaeval society take the form and impress which it retained for centuries, and the