Part 460

As a crowned dynasty, the Carlovingians or Carolingians or Carlings begin their history with Pepin the Short. As an established sovereign house, they find their founder in 'King Pepin's father, the great palace mayor, Carl, or Charles Martel, if not in his grandfather, Pepin Heristal. But the imperial splendor of the house came to it from the second of its kings, whom the French call 'Charlemagne,' but whom English readers ought to know as Charles the Great. The French form of the name has been always tending to represent 'Charlemagne' as a king of France, and modern historians object to it for that reason. "France, as it was to be and as we know it, had not come into existence in his [Charlemagne's] days. What was to be the France of history was then but one province of the Frank kingdom, and one with which Charles was personally least connected. … Charles, king of the Franks, was, above all things, a German. … It is entirely to mistake his place and his work to consider him in the light of a specially 'French' king, a predecessor of the kings who reigned at Paris and brought glory upon France. … Charles did nothing to make modern France. The Frank power on which he rose to the empire was in those days still mainly German; and his characteristic work was to lay the foundations of modern and civilized Germany, and, indirectly, of the new commonwealth of nations, which was to arise in the West of Europe."

_R. W. Church, The Beginnings of the Middle Ages, chapter 7._

"At the death of King Pippin the kingdom of the Franks was divided into two parts, or rather … the government over the kingdom was divided, for some large parts of the territory seem to have been in the hands of the two brothers together. The fact is, that we know next to nothing about this division, and hardly more about the joint reign of the brothers. The only thing really clear is, that they did not get along very well together, that Karl was distinctly the more active and capable of the two, and that after four years the younger brother, Karlmann, died, leaving two sons. Here was a chance for the old miseries of division to begin again; but fortunately the Franks seem by this time to have had enough of that, and to have seen that their greatest hope for the future lay in a united government. The widow and children of Karlmann went to the court of the Lombard king Desiderius and were cared for by him. The whole Frankish people acknowledged Charlemagne as their king. Of course he was not yet called Charlemagne, but simply Karl, and he was yet to show himself worthy of the addition 'Magnus.' … The settlement of Saxony went on, with occasional military episodes, by the slower, but more certain, processes of education and religious conversion. It appears to us to be anything but wise to force a religion upon a people at the point of the sword; but the singular fact is, that in two generations there was no more truly devout Christian people, according to the standards of the time, than just these same Saxons. A little more than a hundred years from the time when Charlemagne had thrashed the nation into unwilling acceptance of Frankish control, the crown of the Empire he founded was set upon the head of a Saxon prince. The progress in friendly relations between the two peoples is seen in the second of the great ordinances by which Saxon affairs were regulated. This edict, called the 'Capitulum Saxonicum,' was published after a great diet at Aachen, in 797, at which, we are told, there came together not only Franks, but also Saxon leaders from all parts of their country, who gave their approval to the new legislation. The general drift of these new laws is in the direction of moderation. … The object of this legislation was, now that the armed resistance seemed to be broken, to give the Saxons a government which should be as nearly as possible like that of the Franks. The absolute respect and subjection to the Christian Church is here, as it was formerly, kept always in sight. The churches and monasteries are still to be the centres from which every effort at civilization is to go out. There can be no doubt that the real agency in this whole process was the organized Church. The fruit of the great alliance between Frankish kingdom and Roman papacy was beginning to be seen. The papacy was ready to sanction any act of her ally for the fair promise of winning the great territory of North Germany to its spiritual allegiance. The most solid result of the campaigns of Charlemagne was the founding of the great bishoprics of Minden, Paderborn, Verden, Bremen, Osnabrück, and Halberstadt. … About these bishoprics, as, on the whole, the safest places, men came to settle. Roads were built to connect them; markets sprang up in their neighborhood; and thus gradually, during a development of centuries, great cities grew up, which came to be the homes of powerful and wealthy traders, and gave shape to the whole politics of the North. Saxony was become a part of the Frankish Empire, and all the more thoroughly so, because there was no royal or ducal line there which had to be kept in place."

_E. Emerton, Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages, chapter 13._

Between 768 and 800 Charlemagne extinguished the Lombard kingdom and made himself master of Italy, as the ally and patron of the Pope, bearing the old Roman title of Patrician; he crossed the Pyrenees, drove the Saracens southward to the Ebro, and added a "Spanish March" to his empire (see SPAIN: A. D. 778); he broke the obstinate turbulence of the Saxons, in a series of bloody campaigns which (see SAXONS: A. D. 772-804) consumed a generation; he extirpated the troublesome Avars, still entrenched along the Danube, and he held with an always firm hand the whole dominion that came to him by inheritance from his father. "He had won his victories with Frankish arms, and he had taken possession of the conquered countries in the name of the Frankish people. Every step which he had taken had been with the advice and consent of the nation assembled in the great meetings of the springtime, and his public documents carefully express the share of the nation in his great achievements. Saxony, Bavaria, Lombardy, Aquitaine, the Spanish Mark, all these great countries, lying outside the territory of Frankland proper, had been made a part of its possession by the might of his arm and the wisdom of his counsel. But when this had all been done, the question arose, by what right he should hold all this power, and secure it so that it should not fall apart as soon as he should be gone. {1402} As king of the Franks it was impossible that he should not seem to the conquered peoples, however mild and beneficent his rule might be, a foreign prince; and though he might be able to force them to follow his banner in war, and submit to his judgment in peace, there was still wanting the one common interest which should bind all these peoples, strangers to the Franks and to each other, into one united nation. About the year 800 this problem seems to have been very much before the mind of Charlemagne. If we look at the boundaries of his kingdom, reaching from the Eider in the north to the Ebro and the Garigliano in the south, and from the ocean in the west to the Elbe and the Enns in the east, we shall say as the people of his own time did, 'this power is Imperial.' That word may mean little to us, but in fact it has often in history been used to describe just the kind of power which Charlemagne in the year 800 really had. … The idea of empire includes under this one term, kingdoms, duchies, or whatever powers might be in existence; all, however, subject to some one higher force, which they feel to be necessary for their support. … But where was the model upon which Charlemagne might build his new empire? Surely nowhere but in that great Roman Empire whose western representative had been finally allowed to disappear by Odoacer the Herulian in the year 476. … After Odoacer the Eastern Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, still lived on, and claimed for itself all the rights which had belonged to both parts. That Eastern Empire was still alive at the time of Charlemagne. We have met with it once or twice in our study of the Franks. Even Clovis had been tickled with the present of the title of Consul, sent him by the Eastern Emperor; and from time to time, as the Franks had meddled with the affairs of Italy, they had been reminded that Italy was in name still a part of the Imperial lands. … But now, when Charlemagne himself was thinking of taking the title of Emperor, he found himself forced to meet squarely the question, whether there could be two independent Christian Emperors at the same time. … On Christmas Day, in the year 800, Charlemagne was at Rome. He had gone thither at the request of the Pope Leo, who had been accused of dreadful crimes by his enemies in the city, and had been for a time deprived of his office. Charlemagne had acted as judge in the case, and had decided in favor of Leo. According to good Teutonic custom, the pope had purified himself of his charges by a tremendous oath on the Holy Trinity, and had again assumed the duties of the papacy. The Christmas service was held in great state at St. Peter's. While Charlemagne was kneeling in prayer at the grave of the Apostle, the pope suddenly approached him, and, in the presence of all the people, placed upon his head a golden crown. As he did so, the people cried out with one voice, 'Long life and victory to Charles Augustus, the mighty Emperor, the Peace-bringer, crowned by God!' Einhard, who ought to have known, assures us that Charles was totally surprised by the coronation, and often said afterward that if he had known of the plan he would not have gone into the church, even upon so high a festival. It is altogether probable that the king had not meant to be crowned at just that moment and in just that way; but that he had never thought of such a possibility seems utterly incredible. By this act Charlemagne was presented to the world as the successor of the ancient Roman Emperors of the West, and so far as power was concerned, he was that. But he was more. His power rested, not upon any inherited ideas, but upon two great facts: first, he was the head of the Germanic Race; and second, he was the temporal head of the Christian Church. The new empire which he founded rested on these two foundations."

_E. Emerton, Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages, chapter 14._

The great empire which Charles labored, during all the remainder of his life, to organize in this Roman imperial character, was vast in its extent. "As an organized mass of provinces, regularly governed by imperial officers, it seems to have been nearly bounded, in Germany, by the Elbe, the Saale, the Bohemian mountains, and a line drawn from thence crossing the Danube above Vienna, and prolonged to the Gulf of Istria. Part of Dalmatia was comprised in the duchy of Friuli. In Italy the empire extended not much beyond the modern frontier of Naples, if we exclude, as was the fact, the duchy of Benevento from anything more than a titular subjection. The Spanish boundary … was the Ebro."

_H. Hallam, The Middle Ages, chapter 1, part 1._

"The centre of his realm was the Rhine; his capitals Aachen [or Aix-la-Chapelle] and Engilenheim [or Ingelheim]; his army Frankish; his sympathies as they are shewn in the gathering of the old hero-lays, the composition of a German grammar, … were all for the race from which he sprang. … There were in his Empire, as in his own mind, two 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 Carpathian mountains, from the Eyder to the Liris, were all the conquests of the Frankish sword, and were still governed almost exclusively by viceroys and officers of Frankish blood. But the conception of the Empire, that which made it a State and not a mere mass of subject tribes, … was inherited from an older and a grander system, was not Teutonic but Roman—Roman in its ordered rule, in its uniformity and precision, in its endeavour to subject the individual to the system—Roman in its effort to realize a certain limited and human perfection, whose very completeness shall exclude the hope of further progress." With the death of Charles in 814 the territorial disruption of his great empire began. "The returning wave of anarchy and barbarism swept up violent as ever, yet it could not wholly obliterate the past: the Empire, maimed and shattered though it was, had struck its roots too deep to be overthrown by force." The Teutonic part and the Romanized or Latinized part of the empire were broken in two, never to unite again; but, in another century, it was on the German and not the Gallo-Latin side of the line of its disruption that the imperial ideas and the imperial titles of Charlemagne came to life again, and his Teutonic Roman Empire—the "Holy Roman Empire," as it came to be called—was resurrected by Otto the Great, and established for eight centuries and a half of enduring influence in the politics of the world.

_J. Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, chapter 5._

{1403}

"Gibbon has remarked, that of all the heroes to whom the title of 'The Great' has been given, Charlemagne alone has retained it as a permanent addition to his name. The reason may perhaps be, that in no other man were ever united, in so large a measure, and in such perfect harmony, the qualities which, in their combination, constitute the heroic character, such as energy, or the love of action; ambition, or the love of power; curiosity, or the love of knowledge; and sensibility, or the love of pleasure—not, indeed, the love of forbidden, of unhallowed, or of enervating pleasure, but the keen relish for those blameless delights by which the burdened mind and jaded spirits recruit and renovate their powers. … For the charms of social intercourse, the play of a buoyant fancy, the exhilaration of honest mirth, and even the refreshment of athletic exercises, require for their perfect enjoyment that robust and absolute health of body and of mind which none but the noblest natures possess, and in the possession of which Charlemagne exceeded all other men. His lofty stature, his open countenance, his large and brilliant eyes, and the dome-like structure of his head, imparted, as we learn from Eginhard, to all his attitudes the dignity which becomes a king, relieved by the graceful activity of a practiced warrior. … Whether he was engaged in a frolic or a chase— composed verses or listened to homilies—fought or negotiated—cast down thrones or built them up—studied, conversed, or legislated, it seemed as if he, and he alone, were the one wakeful and really living agent in the midst of an inert, visionary, and somnolent generation. The rank held by Charlemagne among great commanders was achieved far more by this strange and almost superhuman activity than by any pre-eminent proficiency in the art or science of war. He was seldom engaged in any general action, and never undertook any considerable siege, excepting that of Pavia, which, in fact, was little more than a protracted blockade. But, during forty-six years of almost unintermitted warfare, he swept over the whole surface of Europe, from the Ebro to the Oder, from Bretagne to Hungary, from Denmark to Capua, with such a velocity of movement, and such a decision of purpose, that no power, civilized or barbarous, ever provoked his resentment without rapidly sinking beneath his prompt and irresistible blows. And though it be true, as Gibbon has observed, that he seldom, if ever, encountered in the field a really formidable antagonist, it is not less true that, but for his military skill, animated by his sleepless energy, the countless assailants by whom he was encompassed must rapidly have become too formidable for resistance. For to Charlemagne is due the introduction into modern warfare of the art by which a general compensates for the numerical inferiority of his own forces to that of his antagonists—the art of moving detached bodies of men along remote but converging lines with such mutual concert as to throw their united forces at the same moment on any meditated point of attack. Neither the Alpine marches of Hannibal nor those of Napoleon were combined with greater foresight, or executed with greater precision, than the simultaneous passages of Charlemagne and Count Bernard across the same mountain ranges, and their ultimate union in the vicinity of their Lombard enemies."

_Sir J. Stephen, Lectures on the History of France, lecture 3._

ALSO IN: _E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 49._

See, also, GERMANY: A. D. 800.

FRANKS: A. D. 814-962. Dissolution of the Carolingian Empire.

Charlemagne, at his death, was succeeded by his son Ludwig, or Louis the Pious—the single survivor of three sons among whom he had intended that his great empire should be shared. Mild in temper, conscientious in character, Louis reigned with success for sixteen years, and then lost all power of control, through the turbulence of his family and the disorders of his times. He "tried in vain to satisfy his sons (Lothar, Lewis, and Charles) by dividing and redividing: they rebelled; he was deposed, and forced by the bishops to do penance, again restored, but without power, a tool in the hands of contending factions. On his death the sons flew to arms, and the first of the dynastic quarrels of modern Europe was fought out on the field of Fontenay. In the partition treaty of Verdun [A. D. 843] which followed, the Teutonic principle of equal division among heirs triumphed over the Roman one of the transmission of an indivisible Empire: the practical sovereignty of all three brothers was admitted in their respective territories, a barren precedence only reserved to Lothar, with the imperial title which he, as the eldest, already enjoyed. A more important result was the separation of the Gaulish and German nationalities. … Modern Germany proclaims the era of A. D. 843 the beginning of her national existence and celebrated its thousandth anniversary [in 1843]. To Charles the Bald was given Francia Occidentalis; that is to say, Neustria and Aquitaine; to Lothar, who as Emperor must possess the two capitals, Rome and Aachen, a long and narrow kingdom stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and including the northern half of Italy; Lewis (surnamed, from his kingdom, the German) received all east of the Rhine, Franks, Saxons, Bavarians, Austria, Carinthia, with possible supremacies over Czechs and Moravians beyond. Throughout these regions German was spoken; through Charles's kingdom a corrupt tongue, equally removed from Latin and from modern French. Lothar's, being mixed and having no national basis, was the weakest of the three, and soon dissolved into the separate sovereignties of Italy, Burgundy and Lotharingia, or, as we call it, Lorraine. On the tangled history of the period that follows it is not possible to do more than touch. After passing from one branch of the Carolingian line to another, the imperial sceptre was at last possessed and disgraced by Charles the Fat, who united all the dominions of his great-grandfather. This unworthy heir could not avail himself of recovered territory to strengthen or defend the expiring monarchy. He was driven out of Italy in A. D. 887 and his death in 888 has been usually taken as the date of the extinction of the Carolingian Empire of the West. … From all sides the torrent of barbarism which Charles the Great had stemmed was rushing down upon his empire. … Under such strokes the already loosened fabric swiftly dissolved. No one thought of common defence or wide organization: the strong built castles, the weak became their bondsmen, or took shelter under the cowl: the governor—count, abbot, or bishop—tightened his grasp, turned a delegated into an independent, a personal into a territorial authority, and hardly owned a distant and feeble suzerain. … In Germany, the greatness of the evil worked at last its cure.

[1404 moved to end of FRANKS.] {1405}

When the male line of the eastern branch of the Carolingians had ended in Lewis (surnamed the Child), son of Arnulf [A. D. 911], the chieftains chose and the people accepted Conrad the Franconian, and after him Henry the Saxon duke, both representing the female line of Charles. Henry laid the foundations of a firm monarchy, driving back the Magyars and Wends, recovering Lotharingia, founding towns to be centres of orderly life and strongholds against Hungarian irruptions. He had meant to claim at Rome his kingdom's rights, rights which Conrad's weakness had at least asserted by the demand of tribute; but death overtook him, and the plan was left to be fulfilled by Otto his son."

_J. Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, chapter 6._

"The division of 888 was really the beginning of the modern states and the modern divisions of Europe. The Carolingian Empire was broken up into four separate kingdoms: the Western Kingdom, answering roughly to France, the Eastern Kingdom or Germany, Italy, and Burgundy. Of these, the three first remain as the greatest nations of the Continent: Burgundy, by that name, has vanished; but its place as a European power is occupied, far more worthily than by any King or Cæsar, by the noble confederation of Switzerland."

_E. A. Freeman, The Franks and the Gauls. (Historical Essays, 1st series, number 7.)_

ALSO IN: _E. F. Henderson, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, book 2, numbers 3._

_P. Godwin, History of France: Ancient Gaul, chapter 18._

_R. W. Church, The Beginning of the Middle Ages, chapter 8._

_F. Guizot, History of Civilization, lecture 24._

_Sir F. Palgrave, History of Normandy and France, volumes 1-2._

See, also, GERMANY: A. D. 843-962; and FRANCE: A. D. 843, and after.

FRANKS: A. D. 843-962. Kingdom of the East Franks.

See GERMANY: A. D. 843-962.

End: FRANKS ----------

[Image: Central Europe (page 1404)]

CENTRAL EUROPE AT THE PEACE OF VERDUN 843 A. D.

CENTRAL EUROPE 888 A. D.

FRATRES MINORES.

See MENDICANT ORDERS.

FRATRICELLI, The.

See BEGUINES, ETC.

FRAZIER'S FARM, OR GLENDALE, Battle of.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1862 (JUNE-JULY: VIRGINIA).

FREDERICIA, Battle of (1849).

See SCANDINAVIAN STATES (DENMARK): A. D. 1848-1862.

FREDERICIA, Siege of (1864).

See GERMANY: A. D. 1861-1866.

FREDERICK I. (called Barbarossa), Emperor, A. D. 1155-1190; King of Germany, 1152-1190; King of Italy, 1155-1190.

Frederick I., King of Denmark and Norway, 1523-1533.