CHAPTER IV

THE CENTURIES OF SUBMERGENCE AND OF NATIONALIZATION

Charlemagne, the man typical of Teutonic force and power, a consummator of ancient forces and an initiator of a new progress, stands between the German and the Roman worlds as a gigantic form on the boundary line of two nations and two civilizations. Charlemagne was the first to realize the political unity of western Christendom as spiritually personified in the Papacy. This is the significance of that mighty event, pregnant with tremendous possibilities for good and for evil, when on the Christmas day of A. D. 800, the Pope bestowed upon Charlemagne the political crown of the Christian world with the obligation to support the church in its spiritual and secular supremacy. Only by the imperial crown, as a continuation of the majesty of the Roman Cæsars, could Germany maintain even its ascendancy among the other nations of Europe.

When the German races were organized as a nation and imbued with the Christian faith by Charlemagne, this new political formation became the bearer of a new civilization amalgamated from its various constituents and as complex as was the state itself. Though preeminently papal and clerical, yet it was, also, eminently intellectual and classical. The treasures of a new thought, of culture, of Greco-Roman refinement, and even of material wealth, were opened to the people of Germany. Fruitful as these Roman germs were, they were only a ferment for German strength and characteristics; for the Germans alone made Christianity a living issue. It was impossible for the putrid soil of the decaying Roman Empire to become a fruitful abode for Christianity.

Men and women fled to the desert to worship God in solitary contemplation and far from the temptation of the world. The monks in spite of the faults and the degeneration which will ever cling to things human are, after all, the purveyors of intellectual and moral culture. The cloisters, too, were at first fortresses of civilization, labor, agriculture, artisanship, and, though with monachal limitations, they were yet transmitters of literary and classical antiquity.

We need only recall the life of the disciples of Saint Benedict in the cloister of Saint Gall, so dramatically described by Scheffel in his _Ekkehard_, their activity in letters and missionary work and gardening, in the copying of the classics and in teaching, as _Ekkehard_ taught the Duchess Hadwig the intellectual charms of the great pagan poet Virgil, to realize the debt owed by civilization to these monks. Though they and their classics, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, etc., sunk into the foundations of our civilization, yet, in their fanatic zeal, they destroyed many priceless old German treasures, relics of antiquity, which are, unfortunately, irretrievably lost. Charlemagne, with his deep intuition, recognized the value of these relics, and, assisted by the staff of free-hearted and free-minded scholars with whom he had surrounded himself, tried to save what could yet be saved.

With the advent of the monk came the nun. The great Boniface, the apostle of the Germans, with inflexible will and diplomatic shrewdness, availed himself of the especial gifts of woman to aid in subjecting Germany to the Holy See. Not finding sufficient aid in Germany, he fetched women from England. The Anglo-Saxon abbesses, Lioba of Bischofsheim, Thekla of Kitzingen, and Walpurgis of Heidenheim, were of immense utility in his missionary work, and left a saintly memory in Germany. They raised the female priesthood of the nuns to a lofty height, their cloisters were nurseries of culture. Princesses and royal daughters sought the veil as an honor or as a refuge from the trials of their high station. It is true, however, that the monasteries of the nuns did not always maintain their original purity. Not seldom a nun broke her vow and preferred excommunication to a loveless existence. Sometimes the nuns tried to console themselves in the cloister itself for the dreariness of their existence. The Capitularies of Charlemagne inform us of the manner in which vagrant nuns, amorous dwellers in cloisters, offended against religious laws. Sometimes, indeed, the nuns even carried on amours for money, and the natural consequences of the breach of the vows of chastity were removed by crime, while, on the other hand, the chastisements meted out for such crimes were truly barbarous. There are Capitularies that prescribe that nuns' cloisters be not too conveniently near to the monasteries of monks, and others that accurately define the intercourse between clerics and laymen, that set forth the rule that "no abbess should presume to go outside of the monastery without episcopal permission nor permit her subordinate nuns to do so, that they shall not dare to write or send love-songs (_winileodes_);" but it is not less true that _winileodes_ continued to be realistically played in the nunneries and played in earnest. That luxury and high living must have developed in cloisters appears from a capitulary which forbids abbesses to have packs of hounds, and falcons, and hawks, and jugglers; that they shall live "regularly," and that their cloisters should be "rationally" established.

We prefer, however, to write of the many holy women, the nuns, especially the Anglo-Saxon nuns, who obtained martyrdom by cooperating with Winfrid, the apostle of the Germans and other holy missionaries of the time. The monk Rudolf of Fulda wrote a biography of Saint Lioba after the report of her female disciples. Lioba was educated in an English nunnery which had been founded at Winbrunne (to-day Wimborne Minster, Dorsetshire), together with a monastery. Very naively Rudolf asserts that in spite of the proximity of the institutions no undue intercourse between their inhabitants ever occurred; nay, the abbess was so strict that she forbade entrance to the assemblies of the nuns, not only to clerics and laymen, but also to the bishops. At this holy place did the virgin grow up, soon becoming the star of piety and wisdom in the cloister, and the favorite of the abbess. Thence she was sent by the will of Boniface to Germany and placed at the head of the cloister of Bischofsheim. From all parts of Germany young women went to her cloister to learn virtue and wisdom from the holy woman. When Boniface prepared himself for his last missionary expedition to the pagan Frisians, he commended his pious sister to his successor, exhorted her not to weary in her holy work, and directed that her body after death should be placed with his own in one grave, that they should both await the day of resurrection after they had served Christ in the same endeavor and aspiration during their lives. When Boniface had found the martyr's death in Frisia, Lioba worked on for many years with beneficent activity in the Christianization of Germany. Venerated by all she was an especial favorite of Charlemagne and his consort Hildegard, yet she preferred at all times the atmosphere of her cloister to the luxurious life at the court. She died A. D. 780, sanctified by the Church, and many miracles are related by Rudolf as having happened at her grave.

There are scores of similar legends in the Latin literature of the time, for, from the eighth century on, Germany is filled with holy women and maidens, promoters of the Church, founders of cloisters. The nun's garment is revered everywhere; the veiled, consecrated maids of God owe their high appreciation to their virgin state for which as already especially mentioned the Germans felt a deeply ingrained veneration. The "Maria-cult" had constantly grown in importance since the fifth century. Goethe's "eternal feminine" celebrated its apotheosis in the new faith as it had in the old belief in Freya and the Valkyries. Mary's motherhood was sacred, but sacred only because it was motherhood with virginity, eternal virginity. Yet the ideal of womanly beauty and fascination is not at all lacking. Scherr translates a description given by the Church Father Epiphanius as early as the fourth century of the Holy Virgin as the ideal of pure womanhood. And, though the memory of Olympus is apparent everywhere in the description, Epiphanius from Palestine pictures Mary, the Mother of Christ, as a truly German ideal of beauty: a golden-haired, blue-eyed Madonna. "The most beautiful of women, gloriously formed, neither too short nor too long. Her form was white, finely colored and immaculate; her hair was long, soft, gold-colored. Under a well-shaped forehead and bright brown eyebrows shone her moderately large eyes with the lustre of a sapphire. The white in her eye was milk-colored and brilliant as crystal. The straight and normal nose as well as the mouth were comparable to snow in whiteness. Each of her cheeks was like a lily upon which lies a rose-leaf. Her well-rounded chin bore a dimple, her throat was white and ivory, her neck slender and well-proportioned. Fine was her gait, graceful the play of her features, chaste her entire attitude. Briefly, excepting the Son of God, none ever possessed such a beautiful and pure body as the Holy Virgin Mary." Indeed, the humanizing of the Mother of God was as complete as that of foam-born Aphrodite in Homer. Mary is the leader, the choregetes of saintly womanhood; solemnly enthroned in the heavens, she moves everything, including Christ, her Son. She is the alpha and omega of Christian poetry and art.

No wonder that women of all states of society found high incentives toward dedicating their lives to the service of Christ and the Holy Virgin. The disappointments and trials of womanhood, too, prompted many to seek seclusion from the world. Scheffel, in his _Ekhehard_, describes such a type of holy recluse under the title of _Wiborada Reclusa_. She had once been a proud, unapproachable maiden, he says, well versed in many arts; she had learned from her priestly brother Hitto to repeat all the Psalms in Latin, and had not once been inclined to sweeten the life of a husband; the bloom of her land (_Suabia_) had found no grace before her eyes, and she had made a pilgrimage to Rome. There her soul must have been shaken to its foundation; for three days she was lost sight of, for three days her brother Hitto was running up and down the Forum, and through the halls of the Coliseum and under Constantine's triumphal arch, down to the four-headed Janus on the Tiber, seeking his sister and finding her not. On the morning of the fourth day, she came in through the Salarian gate and carried her head aloft, and her eyes were shining, and she spoke, saying that everything was vain in the world as long as the honor due to Saint Martin was not rendered to him.

When she returned home, she bequeathed her property to the Episcopal church at Constance, on condition that the priests on the eleventh day of every October should celebrate in honor of Saint Martin. She herself entered into a narrow hut, where the recluse Citia had established herself, and led a cloister life. And when this place no longer suited her, she removed to a cell in the valley of Saint Gall. The bishop himself conducted her thither and put the black veil around her, and led her by the hand to the Irish hill (Saint Gall had been an Irish missionary in Germany) and spoke the blessing over her; with the trowel he made the first stroke on the stones with which the entrance was walled up, and pressed four times his seal upon the lead wherewith they closed the cracks, and thus separated her from the world, and the monks sang at that, mournfully and with muffled tones, as if someone were buried. But the people of the neighborhood held the recluse in high honor; they said that she was a "hard-forged mistress of holyness," and on Sunday they stood head to head on the meadow plain, and Wiborada stood at her little window and preached to them, and other women settled in the neighborhood and sought instruction from her in virtue.

The influence of the Church was especially beneficial to the position of woman in married life. The Church insisted upon, and frequently enforced, monogamy and the sanctity of marital vows, and sanctified marriage by making it a sacrament. Dissolution of marriage, according to the law of the Church, was permitted only in case of adultery, of danger to the life of the one or the other party from hate or crime, the exile of one of the couple, impotence on the part of the man, or sterility on the part of the woman, and by common agreement between husband and wife for sacred purposes, e. g., entrance into a monastery or cloister. Yet while the influence of the Church, in theory, was, on the whole, extremely helpful in fashioning the standard of morals, there prevailed, nevertheless, even during the Carlovingian epoch, a terrible demoralization and sexual laxity a legacy from the preceding Merovingian period.

It is historically doubtful whether at Charlemagne's birth his mother was married to his father, Pepin. It was no uncommon practice for the actual consummation of marriage to follow close upon the betrothal, and for the actual marriage, with the consecration of the Church, to follow much later, if at all. The private life of the greatest German emperor, who was canonized by the Church and who thus is a saint, at least in his imperial city, Aachen, or Aix-la-Chapelle, is by no means edifying. Gustav Freytag characterizes Charlemagne from the moral point of view with the greatest psychological truth. He describes him as greatly in need of woman's love. Indeed, even here his tenderness was that of a lion, and was felt by wife and daughters with secret awe, though answered by flattering caresses. When not on warlike expeditions he lived always with his family. He ate with them, and took them with him on all his journeys. This was tedious enough for his successive wives and daughters, since he was almost always on journeys, especially during the first half of his long reign. While his children were small, he had hardly a permanent home. His family life appeared reprehensible, even to his contemporaries, who were accustomed to great digressions from moral law.

The chroniclers of the time, mostly court historians and court poets of the great emperor, naturally express themselves rather cautiously concerning his private life; and yet we can deduce strange facts from their reports, especially from the _Life of Charlemagne_, written by Eginhard, the friend and counsellor of the emperor. The latter's mother, Berthvada, induced him to marry Desiderata, daughter of King Desiderius of the Langobards; but he divorced her at the end of one year, whether for political reasons not to be entangled in the complications between the Langobard dynasty and the Papacy or for private considerations is not known. His next wife was Hildegard, an Alemannian duchess, who bore him three sons, Charles, Pepin, and Louis, and three daughters, Hruodrud, Bertha, and Gisela. By his third wife, Fastrada, a German princess of Eastern-Prankish birth, he had two daughters, Theodorada and Hiltrud, and by a concubine, Ruodhaid. His next wife, Liutgard, bore him no children. After her death he had three concubines, Gerswinda, a Saxon lady, the mother of Adaltrud; Regina, the mother of Drogo and Hugh; and Ethelind (_Adalinde_). It is characteristic, however, that this authentic account does not designate the mothers of all his children. Charlemagne desired that all the children of his mistresses as well as of his legitimate wives should live together at his court and be of equal royal rank. Without distinction of sex, he gave to all of them a liberal education in the sciences; and as soon as their age permitted, his sons were trained in arms, and his daughters instructed in the use of the loom and the spindle. He had so great an affection for his children that he prevented his daughters from marriage, in order not to lose their company. They are reputed to have been very beautiful, and, in spite of their occupation with the spinning-wheel, they found time for love adventures; so that, as Eginhard tells us, "though otherwise happy, the Emperor experienced the malignity of fortune so far as they were concerned; yet he concealed his knowledge of the rumors current in regard to them, and of the suspicions entertained with regard to their honor."

Eginhard himself did not escape suspicion, though his amour with fair Emma, and the romantic story of their nightly meetings and Emma's carrying her learned lover through the freshly fallen snow to conceal his footprint must be assigned to the domain of unauthenticated legend. But it is a historical fact that several of Charlemagne's daughters had illegitimate children. Being debarred from marriage they sought unlawful love adventures. The oldest, Hruodrud, who had been several years betrothed to the Greek emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitos, until her father dissolved the betrothal, left a son by Count Rorich. Bertha's two sons, Hartnid and Nidhard, the latter a brave warrior and a famous chronicler, owed their existence to Angilbert, the court poet and historian who was afterward Abbot of Centulum. Especially after the death of Charlemagne were the lives of his daughters so shameful that King Ludwig, the German, saw himself forced to remove some of the most scandalously behaving lords from the suite of the princely sinners.

In spite of those moral shortcomings, Princess Bertha was especially brilliant as a scholar. She was called Delia, sister of Apollo, in Charlemagne's "Academy." She sang her teacher Alcuin's poems, which she accompanied by string music. Besides the emperor's wife and his daughters, there were two nuns in the academic circle: the elder, Gisela, Charlemagne's sister, surnamed Lucia, Alcuin's best friend, and her intimate, Riktrudis, with the academic name of Columba; also Gundrada, of illustrious nobility and charm, the sole secular lady at the court against whom no word of gossip was ever uttered by courtiers or clerics.

So flagrant are, however, the sins of love at that brilliant court which did so much for classical, Germanic, and sacred learning in Germany, that even the saga, in dim recollection of past events, seized upon Charlemagne's towering figure in respect to his moral side. He is represented by a later legend as having been misled into grievous sins by a mysterious, magic precious stone in a ring which he had presented to his queen. As long as she wore the ring, he could not live away from her. At last the queen fell ill and came to die. But grudging the stone to any other woman and desiring that the king might not love another as he loved her, she concealed the ring under her tongue and died. Charlemagne unable to live without her did not allow her to be buried, but carried her with him day and night on the journey through his vast realm. An inexpressible sin, due to the magic ring in her mouth, ensued. At last, when Charlemagne was absent, the corpse of the dead woman was examined and the ring was found in her mouth. A knight took the ring away and kept it. Charlemagne had the queen buried at once. But all the love which he bore to his dead wife, he now transferred to the knight as long as the latter possessed the stone. The knight, annoyed by this love and the shame thereof, threw away the stone into a morass. Charlemagne conceived such an affection for the place where the ring lay that he built there the Cathedral of Our Lady at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle). And, as a higher irresistible power had brought about the moral sins as well as other sins bearing the character of incest, Saint Ægidius and Saint Theodolin secured for him atonement, expiation, and absolution.

The court life at the time of Charlemagne, loose as it was, had its great redeeming features; it sank, however, under his weak successors into the utmost decay and degradation. The dynasty perished with Ludwig the Child (A. D. 911). Charles the Fat, the unworthy descendant of his great sire Charlemagne, had given the world, during his calamitous reign, the melancholy spectacle of a king publicly accusing his wife, Richardis, of adultery with his own chancellor, Liutward, Bishop of Vercelli. But Richardis asserted that she was a virgin though she had been living with her husband for twelve years. The emperor forced an ordeal (A. D. 887) to free her from the terrible accusation: and an ordeal remained, during the entire Middle Ages, the only means for an accused woman to purify herself and redeem her honor. This special ordeal is minutely described in the so-called _Kaiserchronik_ (Chronicle of Emperors), how Richardis slipped into a garment made for that purpose, which was set on fire at all four ends, at her feet and arms, simultaneously. In a short hour the garment burned from her body; the wax dripped down to the pavement, but the royal lady remained unhurt, and the spectators of the cruel ordeal cried _Deo gratias!_ Richardis, however, retired after this disgrace to a cloister which she had founded.

The same accusation was raised later against Kunigunde, wife of the last Saxon emperor, Henry II. the Pious, but she, too, was exonerated by the ordeal of "the hot iron" upon which she trod with impunity. Kunigunde has been canonized by the Church for having preserved her virginity also in married life, and for having forced the devil to church building.

The moral life of the higher classes was duly reflected in the lower walks of life. The female serfs, who, as we learn from imperial decrees of the time, when they did not work in the fields, carried on their domestic labors in a separate house, called _screona_ (shrine), were practically helpless in the hands of their masters. Those out-houses were frequently used as places for gratifying lust by forcing their inmates to sin, though nominal fines still prevailed for rape or violence: he who "covered" (_belag_) a maid "without her thanks," _i. e._, against her will, paid a fine of three shillings; if she was a head-maid, or a stewardess or skilled laborer, six shillings. Thus it happened that as early as the time of Charlemagne the women's house came to have the flavor of infamy _Frauenhduser_ was the name of houses of prostitution during the Middle Ages. Unfree women could marry only with the permission of their masters; the bridegroom had, in recognition of this fact, to pay a tax (_maritagium_) called by different obscene names in different localities, as a redemption, as it were, of the bride's virginity. Naturally, the female serf was helpless against the lord, who did what he pleased: a shameful abuse, which, in the course of time, crystallized into a right; the infamous _jusprinuz noctis, i. e._, the right of the lord to the body of his unfree female serf during the first night of her married life. The several attempts to relegate this usage to the realm of legends have signally failed. Both Scherr and Freytag expatiate on this gloomy subject, on which a whole legal and cultural literature has sprung up. Passing quickly over this saddest of all the chapters of human subjection to shame, many a beautiful feature of the growth of womanhood among the lower classes may be noted.

With the general improvements of agriculture under Charlemagne, there was a corresponding improvement in the art of building. Instead of the old German block-house, plastered with clay, the crevices filled with reed, and without windows or staircases, in which people and cattle were stalled together, dwellings fit for human beings were gradually evolved. The dwellings of unfree people (_Hdrige_) consisted of house, barn, and stable for cattle, while the estates and houses of landed proprietors comprised mansion (_Herrenhaus_), cellar house (_cellaria_), bath house, grange (_picarium_), stables, and a separate house for women (_genitium_ or _screona_) in which the women handled distaff and spindle, spinning linen and wool, making ornaments, embroidery, figures in cloth, and other feminine work. There they sat, the distaff between their knees, the spindle in their hands, beautiful pictures of noble German womanhood. There they made the linen garments for themselves and their families, including their husbands. Royal ladies worked not less than peasant women or unfree maids. Later on, Luitgardis, daughter of Emperor Otto the Great, was so famed for being an industrious spinner that a golden spindle was hung over her grave. The tailoring needle and scissors were handled with skill, as is certified in many a mediæval song. The Carlovingian period, therefore, furnishes us with much over which to lament, but also with much over which to rejoice. Virtue and vice are there in abundant measure.

The Christian-German civilization founded by Charlemagne was almost destroyed under his successors. Under Charlemagne we could treat his vast realm, at least so far as it covered France and the North, as genuinely Teutonic land; two generations later, under his grandsons, Charles the Bald and Ludwig the German, we must begin the separation of France and Germany, by the Treaty of Verdun, A. D. 843, while the middle land, namely, Burgundy, Alsace, and Lorraine, which fell to Lothaire with the already shadowy imperial crown, becomes the Eris-apple between the two. Germany and France, originally one, are separated by a territorial dispute for more than one thousand years.

Side by side with the heroic figures of Henry I. (919-936), who refounded the shattered empire, and his still greater son, Otto I., who rebuilt it, we find spirited princesses, some of them, like Adelheid of Burgundy, foreigners, with great zeal for culture, who brought an appreciation of refinement and art to the German court. Otto the Great's son and grandson added the Byzantine culture to the Roman-Carlovingian substratum. The women of the tenth century played a remarkably active part in politics and literature. Mathilda and Editha, the pious wives of the first two Saxon emperors, powerfully affected the civilization of their time. The reigns of Otto II. and Otto III. bear most decided traces of the influence of two royal women, Adelheid and Theophano, who exercised a strong influence upon the political and intellectual life of the century.

The period of the Ottos marks the climax of an early renaissance as distinguished from the great classical movement so called five centuries later. In art, this renaissance is expressed by churches and palaces built after late Roman and Byzantine models, partly even with the materials of those times; in literature, the renaissance blossoms in classical studies, Latin historiography and poetry. Indeed, Tietmar of Merseburg, the famous chronicler of the Saxon emperors, could well say: "Proud like Lebanon's cedars the Empire towered, a terror to all nations far and wide;" and again: "Highly blessed was the world when Otto wielded the sceptre."

As regards the moral life of the times, Tietmar's _Chronicon_ presents Henry, the founder of the dynasty, as not faultless. The legend also weaves around Henry the wreath of romance when it reports that Princess Use of the Herz Mountains kissed the cares from his royal brow in her wondrous castle, a favor which, according to the charming Use song, she bestows some nine hundred years later on Heine, the darling of the Muses. When still very young, Henry concluded a marriage with Hatheburch, a distinguished widow at Merseburg, but rejected her after she had borne him a son, Thammo (_Thankmar_). He had fallen in love with Mathilda, a rich and beautiful maiden of the race of Duke Widukind, who had immortalized the Saxon name in the thirty years' struggle with Charlemagne. She became Henry's wife and bore him three sons, Otto, Henry, and Bruno. She seems to have steadied her great husband, though their married life did not remain always cloudless. An episode related by Tietmar, "to deter and warn the pious," may be repeated here because of the flavor of its time: Henry had once on the day before Good Friday of Easter week intoxicated himself, and, driven by the devil, abused his pious wife in the following night. Satan, rejoicing over the deed, could not refrain from telling the story to a respectable matron of Merseburg, adding that the fruit of that unholy embrace would undoubtedly belong to him. The matron betook herself to the queen and exhorted her "to keep constantly priests and bishops ready to wash by holy baptism off the newborn child all that may be pleasing on him to the devil." When the devil learnt of this betrayal of his confidence, he chided the matron violently, but added that, after all, something of the godless deed would ever cling to the race of the king. And the chronicler explains the violent feuds of the sons of King Henry and their fratricidal, internecine strifes by the flagitious transgression of God's commandment: "thou shalt keep the Sabbath holy." Tietmar, continuing, says: "That there is nothing which is not permitted in legal marriage, is proved by the Holy Scriptures. But such lawful married life obtains through the observation of holidays and honorable dignity, and is not disturbed by the storm of threatening danger." Another example of the same sin is quoted: Uffo, a Magdeburg burgher, while violently intoxicated, forced his wife, Gelsusa, to yield to his will. When the woman, having conceived in that night, in due time bore a child, it had bent and crooked toes. Terrified at that sign, she had her husband called and complained to him that this mark of divine displeasure was due to their common sin: "Behold, the wrath of God reveals itself to us and exhorts us that we should not act thus further! Thou hast committed a grievous sin in that thou commanded me what was not right; and I have sinned equally in that I obeyed thee." The fruit of sin, however, the babe, was taken from the exile of this life to the hosts of innocent children in heaven.

Queen Mathilda outlived her consort; and though she favored the succession of her younger son, Henry, she saw her eldest son, Otto (936-973), elevated to the throne of his father. Otto married an English princess, Editha, the pious daughter of King Ethmund. She was to the great emperor a pure and faithful consort. She was endowed with numberless virtues, a fact which became manifest after her death by miracles and heavenly signs. After nineteen years of married life "pleasing to God and men," says the chronicler, "she died, the noblest foreign princess who ever adorned the German Imperial throne." She left but one son, Luidoulf by name, whom Otto married to the only daughter of Hermann, Duke of Suabia, whom he succeeded. Otto married again, his bride being Adelheid, widow of the Italian king Lothaire, who, hard pressed by Berengar, ruler of Ivrea, had called the Emperor to Italy as her protector and liberator. "Otto," says Tietmar, naively, "who had heard of her far-famed beauty, under the pretext of travelling to Rome, marched to Lombardy, wooed the princess, who had escaped from Berengar's cruel prison, and induced her, after he had won her favor by rich presents, to yield to his wishes." We have a life of Empress Adelheid by the abbot Odilo of Cluny, who was an intimate friend and closely connected with her during the last years of her reign. He deprecates his ability to write the life of the empress, to do which either Cicero would have to be recalled from Orcus or the presbyter Hieronymos from heaven. "For she deserves to be revered as the most imperial of all empresses. Not one before or after her was her equal, she so elevated and increased the Empire. She subjected defiant Germania, fruitful Italy and their princes to the sword and sceptre of Rome. Then noble king Otto won through her the imperial crown. Also the son whom she bore him, was the pride and ornament of the Empire."

After the death of Otto I., Adelheid, with her son, Otto II. (973-983), happily conducted the affairs of the empire and firmly established its supremacy. But evil people alienated the heart of her son; she retired to Burgundy, her home. Meanwhile, Germany mourned the absence of the benefactress, but all Burgundy exulted over her return. Seized by repentance, Otto humbly besought his mother to meet him at Pavia. Weeping, he threw himself down before his mother, and from that time the insoluble bond of love remained until Otto's premature death. Otto III. (983-1002) and his Greek mother, Theophano, his guardian, succeeded Otto II. Theophano, incited by the Greek, Philagathus, Archbishop of Piacenza, became hostile to the empress, and, overcome by anger, she uttered these menacing words: "If I shall still reign one year, Adelheid shall not rule over more ground than one can encompass with one hand." Before one month was over, Theophano was overtaken by Nemesis and died (June 15, 991), while Adelheid outlived her in the enjoyment of happiness. "So many realms as she possessed, through the grace of God, first as the consort of the great Otto, then as the guardian of her son and grandson, so many cloisters did she found at her own expense, in honor of the King of kings." Before the year 1000 of Our Lord had ended, longing to be united with the Lord of Hosts, on the 16th of December, she died "and her soul rose to the pure light of the purest ether," says the chronicler, "and to describe all the miracles at her grave, another book would be necessary. But not to cover them entirely with silence at her grave the blind recover their lost sight, the paralyzed the use of their limbs, those sick with fever are cured there. Many ailing with manifold diseases are healed by the grace and the compassion of Our Lord Jesus Christ." Forsooth, A. D. 1000 is yet the blessed time when "faith transported mountains."

The most memorable women of the Ottoman epoch is perhaps the nun Roswitha, or Hrotsuit, of the cloister of Gandersheim, who is regarded as the first German poetess, although her works are exclusively in Latin. Born of a noble Saxon family she came early to Gandersheim, where she was educated by the Carmelite sister Richardis and the highly cultured Abbess Gerberga, Otto's niece. She became steeped in the classics, and was soon able to imitate them to such an extent that her fame as the bright ringing voice of Gandersheim soon spread over the Christian world. She composed in Latin hexameters a eulogy on Saint Mary, legends of saints, and an epic of Otto's great deeds (_Carmen de gestis Oddonis I. Imperatoris_). The last work is rich in valuable information, but a part of it has, unfortunately, been lost. She also wrote the history of her cloister from its foundation until 919. But her fame is founded especially on her Latin comedies, or rather dramatic sketches, six in number, imitating the style of Terentius, but borrowing the material from sacred legends, and chiefly glorifying chastity and virginity. She takes as her themes womanly martyrdom, and the strength of which even the frail woman is capable, if animated by faith and virtue. She writes with a moral ascetic view and preeminently for her sisters in the cloisters. Yet, because of the taste of her time she introduces the reader to situations which are rather delicate. Hence ensues a strange blending of classic sensualism and Christian spiritualism. The fire of sensuality blazes throughout, though the conclusion is always edifying through martyrdom; there is a struggle between vice and virtue, but in the end, the triumph of Christian sacrifices carries the day over the temptations and the sins of this world. Kuno Francke (_Social Forces in German Literature_) thinks that Roswitha, though surrounded by the atmosphere of the nunnery, was carried away by the naturalistic tendencies of her time. Scherr asserts: "Methinks that we may not offend her state as a nun when we suppose that she must have had, before she wrote her comedies, some experience in love, not merely in Terentius." Preferably, she chooses quite equivocal situations. It is true that in her preface she deprecates any such purpose with great ardor: "There are many good Christians who, for the sake of a more refined language, prefer the idle glitter of pagan books to the usefulness of the Holy Scriptures, a fault of which we also cannot acquit ourselves entirely. Then there are industrious Bible readers, who, though they despise the writings of the other pagans, yet read the poems of Terentius too frequently, and, allured by the grace of diction, stain their minds through acquaintance with unchaste objects. In view of this I, the clearly ringing voice of Gandersheim, have not disdained to imitate the much read author in diction, in order to glorify the praiseworthy chastity of pious women according to the measure of my feeble ability in the same way as the vile vices of lascivious women are there represented." It is interesting to see how she executes her plan. Take for example, her play entitled Abraham. In this an old hermit hears that his stepdaughter, who had run away with a seducer, is living in abject misery. He seeks to rescue her from a house of ill repute where she has sought shelter. She does not recognize him in his disguise, but he comes to see all the wretchedness of her life of shame, and melts her heart in a wonderfully poetic conversation which reminds one of Erasmus's colloquy between the youth and the fallen woman. "O my daughter, part of my soul, Maria, do you recognize the old man who with fatherly love brought you up and betrothed you to the Son of the Heavenly Lord?" "Whither has flown that sweet angelic voice which formerly was yours?" "Your maiden purity, your virgin modesty, where are they?" "What reward, unless you repent, is before you? You that plunged wilfully from heavenly heights into the depth of hell!" "Why did you flee from me? Why did you conceal your misery from me from me who would have prayed and done penance for you?" The miserable woman in her agony replies only by exclamations of pain, and confesses: "After I had fallen a victim to sin, I did not dare approach you." Abraham replies to that: "To sin is human, to persist in sin is hellish. He who stumbles is not to be blamed, only he who neglects to rise as quickly as possible."

In the play Dukitius, the Roman general so named, to commit an act of criminal wantonness, enters at night time the prison of three Christian maidens who had been thrown into confinement by order of Diocletian, the persecutor of Christians. But the would-be ravisher is confounded by the Holy Virgin, the protectress of innocence, and takes the pots and kettles and pans for the maidens. The virgins look through the chinks of the wall, and see the fool out of his mind holding the pots caressingly on his lap, and kissing tenderly the pans and kettles. Irene remarks: "His face and his hands and his clothes are soiled and blackened all over by his imaginary sweethearts." "Just as it should be," replies Chiona, "it is the color of Satan who possesses him."

Such was the work of the virtuous Christian singer in a strange foreign garment, the only one possible for her to write in, for a popular written German language did not yet exist. But her work was not lost, or as she said herself in her preface: "If anybody shall find pleasure in this my devotion (_devotio_), I shall be glad; but if it should please no one, on account of my humble station or the rusticity of a faulty diction, I myself at least rejoice over what I have done." Later on, copies of her works were spread beyond her cloister. One copy was dug up some five hundred years later from the dust of the cloister library of Saint Emmeran at Regensburg by Conrad Celtes of Humanist fame, and edited by him in 1,501. Roswitha was greeted by the world of the Renaissance as the "German Muse." Celtes's edition is adorned by the immortal Albrecht Durer with a woodcut representing Roswitha in a kneeling posture, presenting her works to Emperor Otto the Great in the presence of Archbishop Wilhelm of Mainz.

While dealing with the womanhood of the Ottoman era, it is incumbent upon us to mention the history of a true German type of a royal woman, who has been immortalized by Scheffel in the romance _Ekkehard_, already mentioned: Hadwig, Duchess of Suabia, niece of Otto I., sister of Gerberga, the abbess of Germersheim, the famous connoisseur of the classical authors, and the teacher of Roswitha. Early widowed by Burkhard of Suabia, the young, strong-minded princess of Saxon imperial blood with a firm hand continued the administration of the duchy. "The young widow," as Scheffel paints her, "was of royal disposition and uncommon beauty. But she had a short nose, and the sweet mouth was somewhat disdainfully puckered up, and her chin projected boldly so that the dimple which becomes woman so sweetly, was not to be found with her. And whose countenance is thus shaped, he bears with a sharp spirit a hard heart in his bosom and his nature inclines to severity. Therefore the duchess, in spite of the bright roses of her cheeks, inspired many a one in her land with a strange terror." Scheffel describes her steel-gray garment which flowed in light waves over the embroidered sandals; this garment clung close to her body; over it was a black tunic reaching down to the knee; in her girdle that encased her hips, shone a precious beryl; a gold-thread embroidered net held her chestnut-brown hair, yet carefully curled locks played around her bright forehead. The boudoir, too, of the illustrious lady of the tenth century is minutely described. On the marble table near the window stood a fantastically formed, dark green vase of polished metal, in which burned a foreign incense and whirled its fragrant white fumes up to the ceiling of the room. The walls were hung with many colored, embroidered rugs.

On the whole, there is in the wide domain of literature scarcely anywhere such a detailed and absolutely accurate picture of the state of the culture and civilization of the tenth century as in this novel. The description of the characters, Hadwig's chamberlain Spazzo, the abbots and monks and warriors, the home industries, the vintage, the life of all the classes of people, the cloisters, the festivals, the Hunnish terror, the virtues and faults of the time, clerical purity and piety and the little and great shortcomings of celibacy, the German Christmas and Easter and Whitsuntide, the German soul (_Gemuf_), the patriarchal relations between the imperial mistress of Otto's blood and her lowliest maidservants pass before our eyes in a charming, ever-changing kaleidoscopic procession. The young widow, in her lofty castle of the Hohentwiel, whiling away her idle hours in the study of Virgil, with the pure-hearted and scholarly monk Ekkehard, whom she invited from the famed cloister of Saint Gall; Praxedis, the lovely chamber-woman of the duchess, of Greek race, a living souvenir of the time when the son of the Byzantine Emperor Basilius had wooed Hadwig; Hadumoth, the lovely forest flower and the foundling of the lowest stratum of society with her heart of love and truth and beauty, the personification of all that is great and good in the soul of German womanhood of the lower classes; the wood witch, who continues the old beloved custom of worship and loyalty to the old gods, in bitter hate of the new faith that has robbed her of husband, happiness, and child; the servant maid Friderun, tall as a building of several stories, surmounted by a pointed roof, her pear-shaped head, whose heart is now desolate, since her sweetheart was slain in the Hunnish battle, and who turns her attention to the solitary Hunnish prisoner, Cappan, whom she domesticates, Christianizes and marries; all these types of German womanhood are so perfect, so fragrant, so real that the historian of civilization loses heart in attempting to describe other or better types. The love of Hadwig and of Ekkehard, the latter's brief forgetfulness of his and her mission, Ekkehard's trial, his escape and recovery on the snowy Santis mountain in the Alps, the composition of the Walthari saga in the bracing mountain air, close to the blue heavens, inspired by the Alpine shepherd's godly child, Benedicta, are all episodes worthy of King Solomon's Song of Songs.

After the Ottoman dynasty follow the Franconian emperors, descendants, both through the female line and through marriage, from the Carlovingians and the Ottomans, since Konrad II. (1024-1039), the first Franconian, was descended from Otto's daughter and married Gisela of Burgundy, a descendant of Charlemagne. Theirs is a period of transition, of struggle between the Papacy and the empire, the preparation for the crusades, fantastic, impolitic expeditions to the Orient for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, fostering the spirit of aimless adventure, but, at the same time, widening marvellously the narrow horizon of the European world.

In contrast with the Latin poetry of court and cloister, the humble people cultivated in their own way the German popular love song and the tales that stir the popular soul. From those old folk songs we derive a great deal of our knowledge of the life and love of the women of the time. It is undoubtedly this awakening of the people which stimulated the clerics also to the necessity for preaching in German. An interesting spiritual poetess arises, known as the Frau Am, the recluse and sacred singer, who died in Austria in 1127, and who was the first woman known to us who in poetic German language worked out Biblical and evangelical stories. The naïve tone of her poetry is exemplified in her description of the scene where the enemies of Christ lead the adulteress to Him. Before retiring from the wicked world she had been married, and had had two sons who seem to have been theologians. They furnished her with material for three spiritual poems in which she described, with the inartistic hand of a plain woman, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost as they are communicated to man and create his virtues; further, she deals with the Antichrist and the Last Judgment.

We must not leave the Prankish-Salian dynasty without mentioning briefly a few superior royal women. Konrad II. found in his consort, Gisela, a beneficent helpmate and also a coadjutor in the affairs of state. To Konrad attaches the particularly characteristic and touching story of the _Women of Weinsberg_, which has again and again been made the subject of poems exalting the virtues of the faith and love of German womanhood. When the emperor besieged the city of Weinsberg in Suabia he met with such a stout resistance that he swore in his wrath to slay all those who were able to carry arms. At last when hunger forced surrender, the women appeared in Konrad's camp pleading for mercy, but the emperor permitted them only to take as much of their precious possessions from the doomed city as they could carry on their backs. And behold! next morning when the gates opened, every woman tottered along under the burden of her husband on her shoulders. Konrad's magnates maintained that this was not the meaning of the grace offered to the women, but the emperor, touched by so much loyalty and love, exclaimed: "An Imperial word shall not be distorted by interpretation. The pledge as understood by the Women of Weinsberg shall hold good!"

Konrad and Gisela's great son, Henry III. (1039-1056), who was strong enough to bend and break the power of the Papacy during his brief reign, married Agnes, a princess with a manly soul. She would have saved her minor son, Henry IV. (1056-1106), perhaps the most unfortunate prince who ever wore the thorny crown of the empire, if the perfidious, selfish magnates of the empire had not snatched him by force too early from her motherly and royal care. With the loss of his mother Henry lost the direction and control and he seldom regained it during his long and calamitous reign. At the age of sixteen he was married to Bertha of Savoy (A. D. 1066), to whom he conceived a strange and unmerited aversion, which she overcame in the course of time by her faithfulness and loyalty in times of misfortune. She shared all the sorrows and humiliations inflicted upon him by the haughty magnates of the realm and especially by the German Pope Hildebrand, Gregory VII., the overtowering personality of his time. But divine providence tried to compensate her for her life of trial and bitterness: she became the mother of Agnes, wife of Frederic of Hohenstaufen, ancestress of that glorious dynasty under which blossomed up the First Classical Period of Bloom of German Literature and Civilisation.

Of tremendous influence in all states and conditions of women and men is the enforced celibacy of the clergy, an institution due, with all its consequences of good and of evil, to the energy and iron will of Pope Gregory VII. It is true that among the ancient Hebrews the marriage of the high priest, and even of the priests in general, to a divorced woman or to a widow, or, in fact, to any woman not a virgin, had been forbidden. The New Testament, however, knows no such ordinance. Several apostles, especially Saint Peter, were married. The Latin Church, however, since the eighth century, insisted more and more upon the celibacy of the clergy; but, nevertheless, it remained the rule for the clergy in Germany, France, and Upper Italy to be married. During the tenth century the moral decay among the clergy and the fear of its increase, if the ordinances of celibacy were enforced, left priestly marriage undisturbed. But the theory of the greater sanctity of the priestly state, and the mediæval spirit of the mortification of the flesh, as well as the growing conviction that only the sacraments administered by spiritually pure priests without carnal knowledge of woman had a saving grace and force, and prepared the way for the final stroke of entirely abolishing priestly marriage. As the power of the Papacy increased, and as the necessity for an army of instruments severed from the binding ties of family life and consequent dependence upon the secular powers became ever more pressing, the great Gregory VII. ventured the decisive and final decree of 1074, according to which every married priest who administered the sacrament at the altar, and every layman who accepted it from his hand, should be excommunicated, Amid a fearful storm of protest, the order for priestly celibacy was carried out in Germany. But the overwhelming power of Gregory VII. and the weakness of the emperor, which drove the princes and bishops into the arms of the Pope, lessened the resistance, though for centuries the storm did not subside, and in the north of Germany it continued far into the fourteenth century. Celibacy became a strong weapon in the hands of the Papacy; it subjected the priesthood absolutely to the Church, and withdrew its members from subjection to the secular power; but celibacy did not at least during the first centuries redound to a higher morality of the clergy. The complaints of their immorality increased with the firm establishment of celibacy, and after the fourteenth century actually fill the literature of Germany. These complaints are indeed one of the primary forces and agencies in bringing about the great revolution against the Church, known in history as the Reformation. It is no less true, however, that, with the counter reformation within the Ancient Church, a purifying influence was exerted upon the clergy, that the Reformation was to the Church a blessing in disguise, and that no doubt celibacy had its redeeming features, inasmuch as it made the genuine, earnest, and honest part of the priesthood pure and independent and fearless in their uplifting mission to the people of the Catholic faith: a true ecclesia militans. But celibacy, like any other great institution, is a two-edged sword! One needs only to trace the literary and historical sources of those centuries to become convinced that, on the whole, celibacy was a failure so far as the greater part of the clergy was concerned, and a still greater failure in so far as it affected the sphere of womanhood. The priestly farces (_Pfaffenschwanke_), the popular wisdom as expressed in hundreds of proverbs and sententious references, as well as the history of the time in question, prove the truth of this assertion and testify to the low moral status of both the clergy and the laity.